Infected (42 page)

He slid up his sweatshirt sleeve and held it up to the lamp.

“He hatched right onto a lightbulb. It was an accident.” In his voice he heard that servile tone, the tone of Fatty Patty trying to placate him, the tone of his mother trying to avoid a beating. “It fried him on the spot.”

His answer appeared to satisfy the Triangles. They said no more. The steady clicking slowed considerably. The baby Triangles were crouched down on their tentacles, resting their pyramid bodies against the carpet. Their eyes closed, they stopped moving—they appeared to be asleep. Only an occasional click escaped their still bodies.

The strange aroma of burned Triangle flesh filled the room, slightly overpowering the odors of Perry’s own rotting shoulder, the vomit and the smells of birthing that floated in the still apartment air. He felt his own Triangles fall asleep—their constant mental buzzing slowly fading away into near nothingness, like a barely audible car radio tuned to AM static.

He was alone, left to gaze upon the facedown, dead Fatty Patty. He knew he didn’t have much time. In addition to the three Triangles in his own body, he had five hatchlings to deal with, creatures that he knew nothing about. How long would they sleep? What would they do when they awoke?

Apart from the questions that raged through his mind, he knew one thing for certain—he wasn’t going to end up like the weakling lying on the living-room floor, giant fist-size holes left in her corpse. If he had to die, it wouldn’t be like a victim, waiting nicely for the Three Stooges to rip out of his rotting body.

If he was going out, it would be on his feet, fighting every step of the way—like a Dawsey. His shoulder throbbed, his back itched and his mind spun feverishly, thinking of a way to kill them all.

FLASHBACK

On Dew’s twenty-second birthday, he’d been getting piss-faced drunk at a small bar in Saigon with his three closest friends, all members of his platoon. The bar had white walls, Christmas lights across the ceiling and plenty of working girls. Hell of a party that turned out to be. Dew had stumbled to the bathroom to take a piss, and in midstream heard a bone-thumping explosion followed by a scream or two. He wasn’t
quite
sobered up by the blast, but what he saw when he came out of the bathroom obliterated his buzz completely.

The white walls were streaked with chunks of bone, bits of hair and bright-red trails slowly dripping down the wall like living Rorschach blots. The blood and bits belonged to his buddies and the seven-year-old suicide girl who’d entered the bar wearing the latest fashion in homemade explosive backpacks.

That incident, that hated memory, was the first thing to enter his mind when he walked into Perry Dawsey’s apartment. So much blood—on the walls, on the floor, on the furniture. The kitchen floor looked like a pattern of brown and red rather than the original white. There was even blood on the kitchen table, some of which had slowly spilled over the edge and dried in a thin, brittle-brown stalactite. The apartment crawled with Ann Arbor cops, state troopers and men from the Washtenaw County coroner’s office.

“It’s really something, huh?”

Dew looked at Matt Mitchell, the local coroner who’d escorted him to the crime scene. Mitchell had a crooked smile and a glass eye that never seemed to look the right way. His face held a small smirk, almost an expectant look, as if he were waiting to see if the gore would make Dew blow chow.

Dew nodded toward the body. “You got an ID on the couch-potato Jesus over there?”

“Couch-potato Jesus?” Mitchell looked at the body, smiled, then looked back to Dew. “Hey, that’s pretty frickin’ funny.”

“Thanks,” Dew said. “I’ve got a million of ’em.”

Mitchell flipped through a small notepad. “The victim is William Miller, a coworker of Dawsey’s and apparently a friend—they went to college together.”

“Isn’t this an awful lot of blood to come from one victim?”

Mitchell gave Dew another quizzical look, but this time it held a bit of surprised respect. “That’s pretty observant, Agent Phillips. Not many people would have noticed that. You seen stuff this intense before?”

“Oh, maybe once or twice.”

“We’re still typing all the spills. There’s more in the bathroom and even some in the bedroom. I’ll tell you right now it’s not all from the victim. You hit that nail right on the head.”

Mitchell walked into the kitchen, being careful not to disturb the cluster of evidence for technicians gathering samples from the floor and the table. “I think there’s another victim we haven’t seen yet,” he said.

“Another victim? You mean Dawsey had another victim and he took the body with him?”

Mitchell gave the apartment a sweeping gesture. “How else could you explain all this?”

“Ever think it might have come from Dawsey himself?”

Mitchell laughed. “Yeah, right, from the perp himself. I’d like to see someone lose this much blood and keep on kicking.”

“Find anything else?”

Mitchell nodded and pointed to the kitchen counter. An evidence bag held a wrongly folded map. “Maybe something, maybe nothing. That map was on the kitchen counter. There were some tacky, bloody fingerprints, not dry yet, so he was looking at it not very long ago. He’d circled Wahjamega.”

“That a town?” Dew asked as he picked up the evidence bag holding the map. The bloody fingerprints were still wet enough to smear the plastic. The words
This is the place
were scrawled on the map in handwriting so bad it was barely legible.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said. “About, oh, ninety minutes or so from here.”

“You notify Wahjamega police to be on the lookout?”

“They don’t have any—town is too small—but we let the Tuscola County Sheriff ’s department know, yeah. Hell, every cop in the state is on the lookout anyway.”

Dew nodded approvingly. Maybe something, maybe nothing, as Mitchell had said. Dew leaned more toward the “something” side—it didn’t take a genius to figure out Dawsey hadn’t circled Wahjamega on a whim. The map didn’t show much in the way of civilization around the town. In fact, it looked like there might be a shitload of trees.

Trees.

Deep woods, even.

As soon as he got out of this apartment, he’d have Murray’s boys focus the satellite coverage on Wahjamega instead of Ann Arbor.

The brown-polyester-wearing Bob Zimmer wove through the crowded apartment, dodging the photographer and another cop before stopping in front of Dew and Mitchell.

“This just gets better and better, Phillips,” Zimmer said. “I just talked to the governor. Again. FBI says Dawsey and the Vietnamese kid were working together—they found a bunch of emails. Homeland Security raised the alert level to fucking red, to ‘severe.’ Dawsey has knowledge of a bomb.”

Dew nodded. “I told you someone else might be involved in those murders. We figure it was Dawsey.”

“To think there’s a cell right here in our midst,” Zimmer said. “And why didn’t someone bother to pick up a fucking phone and let us know there’s terrorists in town?” His eyes showed doubt, as if his bullshit meter was going off, but they also showed he’d follow through. Bullshit or no bullshit, Bob Zimmer wasn’t taking any chances with the safety of his men or his town.

“Nguyen was what we call a sleeper, Bob,” Dew said. “He’s just another foreign college student. He stays quiet until he’s needed, then boom. Only we don’t think he’s operating under directions, we think he just snapped. Somewhere along the line, he or his buddies recruited Dawsey.”

“Why the hell would a white-collar American fall in with terrorists?” Mitchell asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Dew said. “Maybe he was bitter at ‘the man’ because he worked some shit computer job and didn’t pull in millions in the NFL. It doesn’t fucking matter. Dawsey might know about a bomb—we don’t know where it is, we don’t know what it is. We have to get to him and fast.”

Zimmer stared at Dew. “I’ll tell you right now, I don’t like this,” he said. “We’ve got nine people dead, at least one killer is on the loose, and there’s a goddamn bomb out there somewhere. I can’t help but think we could have prevented this if you’d let us know you were watching this Vietnamese kid.”

“We had to see who would contact him, who would supply him,” Dew said. “It was a sting, Bob, but it went bust. The key thing to remember is we don’t want anyone else getting killed. And if you want to save lives, just make sure your men know exactly what they’re dealing with. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make some calls.”

Dew walked out of the blood-splattered apartment, leaving Bob Zimmer to grind his teeth in frustration.

DEAR OLD DAD

His shoulder pulsed with a deep, steady, low-frequency throb. His ass echoed the beat. This internal-rotting thing was getting serious.

He had no idea how close his own Triangles were to hatching. The areas where he still had them—middle of his back just below the shoulder blades, left forearm, his left testicle—had stopped itching or hurting. A brief glimmer of hope flashed in his head that they might be dead, that they had just passed on in their sleep like some beloved grandpa. But that was bullshit.

He’d rather have the itching back than what he felt right now. The spots felt numb. Completely numb. Something in his mind flashed “localized anesthetic.” He wondered if they were doing so much damage that the pain would have incapacitated him, shut him down, so they had to block the pain, letting him continue normally, letting him pursue those all-important duties of
eating,
of
avoiding the Soldiers.

He shuddered, remembering the black tentacles snaking underneath Fatty Patty’s skin minutes before the hatching. She hadn’t looked as if she were in pain or any discomfort at all. Perhaps she’d felt this same numbness. Perhaps she’d been numb for days. The real problem was he had no concept of the timetable.

When his slumbering Triangles awoke, how long before they started screaming in his head? How long before their final death-song?

He didn’t have the luxury of waiting. He had to assume that when they awoke, he’d lose his last chance to purge them from his body. On top of that, the Columbos were outside, and it would only be a matter of time before they figured out where he was. Dawn was about to break. They’d see him when he made a run for it. They probably had bugs in every apartment anyway, listening, doing their Big Brother gig. Spy satellites could be searching for him right now, X-ray vision peering through the walls and ceiling, seeking him out.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, Daddy, but I know you’re right,” Perry said. “Time to shit or get off the pot. Time to show them who’s the strong one—time to show them all.”

CHEAP BUZZ

Her bathroom layout was identical to his, but there the similarity ended. Hers was decorated in seashell colors, everything matching perfectly, from the pale yellow towels to the porcelain clamshell soap dish. Every surface sparkled.

It wasn’t until Perry swallowed six Tylenol from a bottle he found in the immaculate medicine cabinet that it clicked. The pills slid down his throat, and it all fell into place.

At times the Triangles had acted weird, showing emotions instead of talking in their monotone robotic voice. Not just when they were mindscreaming incoherently, but when they were talking to him in a singsong voice, a lilting mental speech that sounded almost silly compared to their normal businesslike vocal patterns.

They acted like that right after he took Tylenol. And
silly
wasn’t the right word for it—the right word was
stoned
. Stoned out of their collective little gourds. Something in the Tylenol got them higher than a kite. He’d accidentally discovered a weapon to wield in the final battle.

Perry smiled.

“Put on a good buzz, boys,” he said, then swallowed back six more Tylenol. “You’re going to need it where you’re going.”

The Tylenol-buzz was the final piece in his puzzle to outsmart them all: the Triangles, the hatchlings, the Columbos…everybody. Perry would show them who was King Crap. No bout-a-doubt-it.

He had a
plan,
kiddies, a big-brained plan that would expose the stupidity of his conspiring enemies.

Be a hot time in the old town tonight. Don’t fuck with a Dawsey.

He quietly hopped back into the living room. The hatchlings were still asleep, their slumbering clicks punctuating the silence of the apartment.

Perry hummed a tune, the words rolling through his mind.

Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn.

TOP

Dew’s vision felt fuzzy. He pulled off his leather gloves and rubbed his eyes. The cold clung to his clammy fingers. His breath streaming out in billowing cones, Dew put the gloves back on and refocused his attention on the apartment complex’s snow-covered roads.

The cops hadn’t found a damn thing during the night—the giant-size All-American psychopath was still running around like a rolling land mine waiting to bump into something and explode. Not a word from Wahjamega, either. Murray had dispatched several agents to the town. There were extra state police patrolling the area, the local police force was alerted to the danger, and NSA signal-intelligence agents scanned almost every line of communication in and out of the town. That, and the fact that Perry’s face was plastered on every TV screen in the Great Lakes area, made it unlikely he’d slipped into Wahjamega unnoticed. The public was alert and looking; at least in the Great Lakes region, the hunt for Perry Dawsey had already taken on the mythical proportions of the O.J. Simpson chase. Another murdering football player on the lam.