Infected (48 page)

“It just turned on,” Dew said. “Move your men out, Ogden, right now. Move containment squads one and two into position as planned. We’re not waiting for the artillery or the third containment squad. We attack right now.”

Perry moaned softly
in his sleep. A dozen electrodes taped to his head and chest measured his every movement. Heavy canvas straps pinned his wrists to the hospital bed. His arms flexed and twitched every few seconds, pulling at the straps. An electrical beep echoed his pulse. The hum of medical equipment hung in the room.

A man in a Racal suit stood on either side of him. Each held a Taser stunner, but neither had any firearms or knives—or anything sharp, for that matter. Couldn’t be too careful. If Dawsey broke the straps, a feat that really wouldn’t have surprised anyone staring at his huge musculature, they would stun him into submission with fifty thousand volts from the Tasers.

They’d stopped the bleeding, but he was still touch and go; the bullets in each shoulder had been removed; his burns, including most of his head, were packed in wet bandages; they’d pulled the Triangle carcasses from his arm and back; the visible rot had been scraped from his collarbone and his leg, but the damage continued to slowly spread—that one the doctors didn’t know how to cure. His knee was slated for surgery the next day.

And his penis was packed in ice.

He moaned again. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his teeth bared in a wolflike predator’s warning. He was dreaming a dream that was both familiar and worse than ever.

He was in the living-room hallway again. The doors were closing in on him. The doors were hot; his skin blistered and bubbled, growing first red, then charring black, smoking with a putrid stench. But he didn’t cry out in pain. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Fuck ’em…fuck ’em all. He’d go out like a Dawsey. The cancerous doors closed in, marching on their tiny tentacles, and Perry slowly roasted to death.

“You beat ’em, boy.”

In the dream, Perry opened his eyes. Daddy was there. No longer skeletal, but sturdy and solid and as full of life as he’d been before Captain Cancer came a-courtin’.

“Daddy,” Perry said weakly. He tried to take a breath, but the broiling air scorched his lungs. Every fiber of his being hurt. When would the pain end?

“You did good, boy,” Jacob Dawsey said. “You did real good. You showed them all. You beat ’em.”

The doors moved closer. Perry looked at his hands. The flesh seemed to sag, then melt into a flaming pudding. It fell from his bones and sizzled when it hit the ground. He refused to cry out. After you cut off your own cock and balls, all pain is relative.

The doors moved closer. Perry heard the creak of old wood and ancient iron, the low moan of hinges frozen shut with centuries of rust.

“It was hard, Daddy,” Perry croaked.

“Yes, it was hard. But you did what no one else could’ve done. I never told you this before, but I’m proud of you. I’m proud to call you my son.”

Perry closed his eyes as he felt the flesh of his body sag and start to fall away. The tunnel filled with an emerald-green light. He opened his eyes—Daddy was gone, and the doors were opening. There was something moving in there.

Perry looked inside…and started to scream.

They were almost here.

Dew and Charles
Ogden lay flat on the snow-covered forest floor. It was cold as a bitch. Dew stared through night-vision binoculars, the green-tinted picture sending goose bumps racing under his heavy winter fatigues.

“I don’t know what the fuck that thing is, but it can’t be good,” he said. “Got any more wise-ass cracks about
Star Trek,
Charlie?”

“Nope,” Ogden said. “I’m good.”

“We getting any radiation readings?”

Ogden shook his head. “No, at least not this far away. Geiger counters show nothing. Dew, what the hell is that thing?”

“I got an idea, like I told you before, but I hope to all that’s holy I’m wrong.” He couldn’t shake Dawsey’s mad ravings about a “door.”

Dew glanced behind him. Two soldiers worked compact digital cameras, sweeping the lenses across the nightmarish scene. There were two such cameramen with each platoon.

“You getting all this?” Dew asked.

“Yes, sir,” the men answered in unison, both their voices small and filled with awe.

The hatchlings were bustling around a pair of monstrous oak trees that dripped with melted snow. The trees’ dead branches formed a skeletal awning reaching out and over perhaps as many as fifty hatchlings of various sizes, some as small as the one he’d seen jump from the third-story apartment, some almost four feet tall with tentacle-legs as big around as baseball bats.

Jesus Christ. Fifty. And we thought we’d got them all. How many hosts to make fifty of these things? How many hosts went totally undetected until they hatched?

The hatchlings had built something strange. Something organic, maybe even alive. Thick, fibrous green strands—some the size of ropes, some the size of I-beams—ran in all directions, from the trunks to the ground to the branches and back again. There had to be thousands of them, like some monstrous three-dimensional spiderweb, or a modern artist’s jungle gym. At the center of all these strands, between the towering, sprawling oaks, was the construct that had generated the colored pattern on the infrared picture.

Made from the same strange fibrous material, the construct had the primitive, ominous aura of a Stonehenge or an Aztec temple. The four crossing lines, the ones that ran east-west, were high arches, the apex of the smallest one near the construct’s center reaching just over ten feet. The tallest arch, the one at the open end, rose a good twenty feet into the night sky. The four arches looked like a framework cone half buried in the frozen forest ground.

He didn’t know what the freakish thing was made of, but at least it wasn’t people.

The two parallel pieces of the tail—for lack of a better word—stretched back some thirty yards from the arches. They were each as thick as a log and had a line of thin, spiky growths running down their lengths.

The hatchlings crawled about the massive construct, clinging with their tentacle legs, a moving mass scampering across the strand-maze with the ease of darting wolf spiders. They splashed through the suddenly muddy forest floor—the heat from the construct had melted all the snow around the two oak trees.

Dew and Ogden were about fifty yards from the construct, staring straight into the cavern created by the arches.

“How far out are the Apaches?” Dew asked Ogden. Ogden waved to his radioman, who quietly moved over and handed Ogden a handset. Ogden whispered for a few seconds, then said, “ETA two minutes.”

The seconds ticked by. Dew heard the faint approach of the Apaches’ rotors. The hatchlings suddenly scattered from the skeletal green construct, some taking refuge in the sprawling oak trees, others staying on the ground.

“What’s happening?” Ogden asked. “Did they hear the choppers?”

“Maybe so. Let your men know it’s go time. We might have to…” Dew’s voice trailed off; the construct started to glow.

The fibrous arches illuminated the oak branches and the forest floor with a suffused white light. Faint at first, barely discernible, the glow quickly grew so bright that Dew couldn’t look through the night-vision binoculars.

“Dew, what the
hell
is going on in there?”

Dew shook his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Let’s take two squads forward. We have to get a better look.”

Ogden softly called out orders. Dew rose to a crouch and quickly moved forward, ignoring his popping knees. The snow crunched and dry branches snapped underfoot. He was painfully aware of how quiet the Airborne soldiers were in comparison, almost silent despite the noisy footing. Once upon a time, Dew would have moved through the woods without a sound—getting old was a bitch-and-a-half.

He stopped after advancing thirty yards. The cover of night was gone. The construct’s glow lit up the two oaks as bright as day. Long shadows radiated away into the forest. The very ground itself seemed to vibrate with an ominous rhythm, a rapidly pulsing heartbeat of some monstrous evil. Dew felt a sense of trepidation, of
wrongness
, like he’d never known before.

This shit’s going south in a damn hurry.

“Give me some normal binoculars,” Dew snapped. Someone handed him a pair that were, of course, army-green. He stared into the depths of the archway, where the light was brighter than anywhere else, so bright it hurt his eyes and he had to squint to see anything at all.

“Ogden, ETA on the Apaches?”

“Sixty seconds.”

A blast of anxiety ripped through Dew’s body. He’d never felt fear like this, never felt
anything
like this. Even in the midst of the hand-to-hand fighting that had wiped out his platoon back in ’Nam, even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t been this scared; he couldn’t say why.

The construct grew still brighter. One of the soldiers suddenly dropped his M4 rifle and ran, screaming, back into the forest. Several of the others slowly stepped backward, fear wrapped up in their young faces.

“Hold your positions!” Ogden shouted. “Next man to run gets shot in the back! Now get down!”

The bounce of long shadows betrayed the motion of the hatchlings sprinting toward the platoon. Their strange, pyramid bodies slid through the woods. Like swarming insects, they’d detected a threat and were rushing out to meet it, to protect the hive.

“Ogden, we’ve got company!”

“Squads Four and Five, hold this position!” Ogden shouted. “All other squads move forward to support! Fire at will!” Gunfire erupted before he finished the last sentence.

Dew didn’t move. The construct’s glow didn’t fade, but it
changed,
sliding from the blinding white to a deep emerald-green glow. Suddenly Dew realized he was looking not just
into
the arch, but
beyond
it—the field of green reached far off into the distance.

Stunned, he glanced up from the binoculars. The construct hadn’t moved; neither had the woods behind it. He again peered through the binoculars. The field of green was
inside
the arch but stretched back for what must have been miles. But that was impossible, simply
impossible
.

M4 carbines and M249 machine guns roared all around him, but Dew remained steadfast. A man’s scream filled the night as one of the hatchlings made it past the hail of bullets. Dew didn’t flinch, or even notice, because he saw something in that field of green.

He saw movement.

Not the movement of a single hatchling, but movement so massive that it
was
the field of green. His eyes picked out individual creatures a fraction of a second at a time, like seeing a single ant in the midst of a swarming, angry hill. It was an
ocean
of creatures, reaching for the archway, pouring forward from some impossible distance.

“There must be millions of them,” Dew muttered, the horror creeping across his skin like a coat of millipedes.

A gun erupted only a few feet from his ear, shattering his trancelike focus. A hatchling rolled almost to his feet, flopping and twitching. Ogden had shot it dead just as it leaped to attack. The surrounding gunfire slackened but was replaced by more screams—the hatchlings swarmed in.

“We’re being overrun,” Ogden said calmly, his voice raised only enough to be heard over the shrieks and battle cries of his own men.

“Ogden, call a full strike now!” Dew roared. “Tell the Apaches to fire everything they’ve got—
everything they’ve got!
”

Ogden grabbed the handset from the radioman. Dew drew his .45. A four-foot-high hatchling ripped through a patch of underbrush, its black eyes fixed with fury, its tentacles whipping forward as it closed for the attack.

Dew fired five times at point-blank range. The black, pyramid-shaped body shredded like soft plastic, spilling great gouts of viscous purple liquid on the snowy ground.

Sounds came from all directions: gunfire, pounding feet, branches breaking, howls of pain, desperate pleas for help, and the horrific clicking and chittering noises of the hatchlings. He turned to see a hatchling closing in on a fallen and bleeding soldier. Dew double-tapped, firing twice, dropping the hatchling. As Dew ejected his empty magazine and loaded another, the wounded soldier drew his knife and threw himself on the hatchling, driving the blade in again and again until purple streamers arced across the white snow.

Eyes scanning for the next target, Dew backed up to Ogden, trying to protect him long enough to call in the air strike.

“Leader Six to Pigeon One, Leader Six to Pigeon One,” Ogden said into the handset. “Full strike, repeat,
full strike
on the main target. Hit it with everything you’ve got.”

As if on cue, the gunfire suddenly stopped. Dew looked for an enemy and found none standing. A few hatchlings twitched on the ground, but their struggles were soon ended by shots from the angry soldiers. Men lay bleeding and moaning on the forest floor; the skirmish was over.

Dew raised the binoculars just as he heard the rapid-fire roar of the Apaches launching their missiles. The sea of green had reached the archway. For one brief millisecond, Dew saw something he’d never forget, never be able to block out, for as long as he lived.