Infected (27 page)

STOP STOP STOP

STOP

Perry tried opening his eyes, but vision came only in strobelike bursts. The klaxon scream in his head was too much to bear. He’d lost again, he knew it, but he couldn’t even mutter a single word. Couldn’t

STOP STOP

tell them he was so sorry

STOP STOP

couldn’t tell Daddy he would behave

STOP STOP

couldn’t beg Daddy to
please God
STOP ripping into my brain!

STOP STOP

STOP STOP

STOP

He fell to the ground, motionless, not hearing the angry, irritated stomping coming from the ceiling above.

HOWDY, NEIGHBOR

Al Turner pounded his heel into the floor. He’d had just about enough of this shit. He pounded again, and the yelling stopped.

He absently scratched his ample, hairy gut, then slid a hand into his boxers to scratch his sweaty ass. Frigging hemorrhoids were killing him. They could put a man on the moon, but they couldn’t make your asshole stop burning. Figures.

What the hell had gotten into that kid? Screaming his head off like that. The guy had always been so quiet, Al rarely gave him a second thought. Well, not since the kid had moved in, anyway, and Al had found out that “Scary” Perry Dawsey lived right below him. Al introduced himself, had Dawsey sign a football for his nephew and a couple of U of M shirts for himself. Dawsey had smiled, as if he were surprised that someone would want his autograph. The smile had faded when Al asked him to sign the Rose Bowl shirt. That had probably been a little crude, but then again Al didn’t exactly subscribe to the Miss Manners school of thinking, right?

He’d never expected Dawsey to be so
huge.
Sure, football players all looked big on TV, but to stand next to them was another thing entirely. The kid was a fucking monster. Al had briefly entertained the thought that he and Perry could hit the bar every Saturday during football season, maybe hang out on Sundays to watch the games. Wouldn’t Jerry at work be jealous of
that,
Al Turner hanging out just as casual as you please with one of—if not
the
—greatest linebacker to ever wear the maize and blue. But that had changed when he met the kid. Just standing next to Dawsey made Al feel like a seven-year-old. He didn’t want to drink beers with that freak of nature. It was like those science shows on big cats—fine to watch on TV, as long as you didn’t have to meet one face-to-face in the fucking jungle.

Al twitched as his asshole flared with another round of burning. Felt like a goddamn red-hot poker was jammed in there. He grimaced and scratched. This shit could piss off the Pope, and Dawsey’s screaming fits weren’t helping his mood.

THE LOCAL YOKELS

In Dew’s experience, local cops rarely looked like happy campers. These particular local cops? Well, they looked downright pissed. Three Ann Arbor police cars were parked in front of Nguyen’s house. They’d pulled right up on the lawn and sidewalk, passing the three gray vans that had parked on the curb. The former occupants of those cars stood on the sidewalk and on the snow-trampled yard, staring up at a pair of men dressed in urban camouflage and holding P90s. Dew had told the four men in Squad One to lose the Racal suits and take positions at the entrances, two at the front door, two at the back. Pissed-off local cops always looked like genuine bad-asses, but Dew’s boys looked like they’d kill a man just as casually as they’d squeeze out a fart.

The six Ann Arbor locals were ticked because they couldn’t enter the house. They’d been told jack shit. All they knew was that there were definite fatalities on their turf, and some government guy wouldn’t let them do their job. Five cars had responded already; the three parked in front plus one at each end of Cherry Street, rerouting all traffic.

A blue Ford slipped slowly past the east roadblock and pulled up to the house. A thick-chested man wearing a brown polyester sport jacket got out and stomped toward Dew. Maybe fifty, maybe fifty-five. This guy didn’t look like a happy camper, either. He had a jaw so pronounced and rounded that he could have passed as a cartoon character.

“Are you Agent Dew Phillips?”

Dew nodded.

“I’m Detective Bob Zimmer, Ann Arbor Police.”

Drew shook Zimmer’s hand.

“Where’s the chief, Bob?”

“He’s out of town at a terrorism training conference,” Zimmer said.

“I’m in charge.”

“A terrorist-training conference? Damn, talk about your irony.”

“Look, Phillips,” Zimmer said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, and I’m having a donkey shit of a day. I just got called to a house that had a gas explosion—mother and son are dead. On the way there, I get calls from the chief, then the mayor, telling me some feds are running the show, that some government asshole named Dew Phillips is in charge.”

“The mayor called me an asshole?” Dew said. “The governor I can understand, but the mayor? I’m hurt.”

Zimmer blinked a few times. “Are you making a joke?”

“Just a little one.”

“Now’s
not
the time, mister,” Zimmer said. “Then I get to this lady’s house, there’s four of those feds in chemical suits, saying they have to wait for the fire to die down so they can go through it. Then I get a call from the motherfucking attorney general of the fucking United States of fucking America, and
then
I hear you’ve locked down another house and won’t let my men in.”

“That’s a lot of phone time,” Dew said. “I hope you didn’t use up your minutes.”

Zimmer’s eyes narrowed. “You best quit your joking, Phillips.”

Dew smiled. “Gallows humor, forgive me. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry, or something like that. So you’ve made some calls, you’ve talked to some people, and you understand that I have authority here, right?”

Zimmer nodded. “Yeah, but tell me what’s happening in this house. We’ve heard multiple fatalities. College kids. What the fuck happened here?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

The detective took a step forward until he was almost nose to nose with Dew. The sudden move took Dew by surprise, but he stood his ground.

“Fuck
you,
Phillips,” Zimmer whispered, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be heard by the local cops standing only fifteen feet away. “I don’t care
who
called me. The chief, he’s a nice guy and would cooperate, do whatever you tell him to do, but me? I’m stupid and I like to pick fights I can’t win.”

“That saying must look great on your Christmas cards,” Dew said.

“How about this one: my name is Bob Zimmer and I dream of getting fired?”

Zimmer just smiled.

“I’m old, I own my house, and I invested wisely. You have me fired and I get to go fishing every damn day. This may be a shock to you, on account of my obvious cosmopolitan nature, but I don’t exactly get a daily how-ya-do call from the attorney general. I wanna know the danger level to my boys, and to this town, and I want to know
now.
”

As if anything else could go wrong, here it was. A man Dew couldn’t bully. The guy wanted to protect his men first, worry about his career second. Dew knew he didn’t have to say jack to Zimmer,
shouldn’t
say jack to Zimmer, but they already had two cases in Ann Arbor: if this was the place the shit would hit the fan, Dew wanted allies who knew the terrain.

Dew took a half step back to end the face-to-face stalemate. “It’s bad, Bob. Real bad. You’ve got six dead kids in that house.”

Zimmer’s lip curled up in a snarl. He also kept his voice low, a quid pro quo that instantly showed he’d keep most of the information to himself. “Six? If this is another little joke, now’s the time to say
gotcha
.”

Dew shook his head. “Six. Four by gunshot, possibly tortured first. One other tortured for sure, probably killed with a hammer to the head.”

“Jesus H. Christ. That’s five. The sixth?”

“The gunman, did himself,” Dew said, then felt a surge of inspiration. “But we don’t know if he acted alone.”

“Are you telling me there’s someone else out here? That why your men were at the other house?”

“We don’t know for sure. As soon as we get more information on that, we’ll let you know.”

“And why?” Zimmer said. “Why are the feds involved?”

“The dead gunman inside may have connections to a terrorist cell. We think he was building a bomb. Maybe the other kids in the house found out, maybe they were part of it.”

“And what did this terrorist cell want with a soccer mom and her son?”

“We don’t know,” Dew said.

“You’ve got to give me more than that.”

“No, Bob, I sure as fuck don’t. I’ve already stuck my neck out giving you this much. So stop pushing me.”

Zimmer looked away, then nodded. “Okay. So what do you need from us?”

“We need another hour. Then the scene is all yours. There will be another car here shortly, an agent and two science types to make sure there’s no biocontaminants inside the house.”

“Biocontaminants? Like anthrax and shit?”

Dew shook his head. “We don’t know. We’re setting up a temp biohazard lab at the University Hospital. We’re taking at least one of the bodies there. Once the eggheads are done with their sweep, you can ID the kids and call the parents.”

The muscles in Zimmer’s massive jaw twitched. “We’ll provide whatever support you need. And if you find the motherfucker who’s responsible for this…well, we’d be just plain happy to take care of him.”

THE POISON PILL (PART TWO)

The Triangle on the collarbone no longer functioned. The fork had done too much damage, and the seedling simply shut down. When it died, it stopped making the chemical that maintained the crusty cap atop the reader-balls. The deadly catalyst inside each ball kept eating at the cap—but now there was nothing to replace the material that dissolved away.

One by one the reader-balls burst, spilling the catalyst into the Triangle’s body.

The catalyst caused two reactions: first, it dissolved cellulose; second, it caused apoptosis.

Apoptosis means that the cells of the body self-destruct. Normally this is a good thing. Billions of cells “choose” to self-destruct every day, because they are damaged, infected or their usefulness is at an end. The process can also be triggered by forces outside the cell, such as the immune system. Every cell in the body carries this self-destruct code.

The catalyst turned on that code in every cell it touched.

When those cells dissolved and released their cytoplasm into the surrounding area, they passed on this self-destruct signal.

The result? Liquefaction. It started slowly, a few cells here and there, but each dead cell compromised the cells around it, creating an exponential increase that within forty-eight hours would dissolve an entire human body.

Fortunately for the host, the remaining Triangles kept producing the chemical that not only replenished their individual reader-ball caps, it also counteracted most of the apoptosis chain reaction in his body. Unfortunately for the host, however, the concentration of the catalyst in his collarbone was too strong to be stopped.

There, the cellulose slowly dissolved, the cells slowly destroyed themselves, and the liquefaction began.

And so did the rotting…

IMPRESSIONISM

“Come on, Doctor,” Clarence Otto said, his voice tinny in her Racal suit’s headphones. “Suck it up. Now isn’t the time for you to go weak on me.”

Margaret made it out of the living room, but only with the help of Agent Clarence Otto’s strong arm. He also wore a Racal, the plastics
zipzipping
against each other as he helped her walk. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but the three bloated college kids in the living room, tied to those chairs, their faces swollen, bluish-green skin—all of it was getting to be too much. And right after that little boy—that infested, crazy, sad little boy—burning himself alive. The only “good” news was that Dew’s men had been able to cover that one up. Just a gas leak, nothing to see here except for two dead bodies, move along, please.

Amos had taken the little girl to the temp biohazard lab at the University Hospital. Margaret could only imagine the child’s fear—they were trying to reach the father, but no luck yet. Amos would interview her and get what information they could, but at the end of the day she was just a little girl who didn’t even understand that her mother had been dead for two days.

Margaret clumsily shuffled through six photos, pictures of faces blown up from college ID shots. Six smiling faces, faces that would never smile again. One of the photos made her pause. The others had a posed smile, but this one showed a genuine laugh. It was a rarity, an excellent ID picture that captured someone’s real personality. The name on the bottom read “Kiet Nguyen.”

The killer.

A tap on her shoulder. She turned to look at Dew Phillips. Once again he wasn’t wearing a suit—the sole unprotected person in a house full of Racal-covered soldiers and agents.