Sins of the Father (26 page)

The woman’s breathing was becoming rapid and irregular.

Peter didn’t have any idea if this virus was airborne or not, but the room suddenly felt stagnant, thick, almost claustrophobic. It was as if he could
feel
the infection floating in the air like ash. His skin went tight all over, and he had to fight the urge to cut and run.

He started to move again, careful not to attract her attention.

Just focus on the gun.

“You’re already showing symptoms of infection,”

Julia said, her voice as steady and calm as ever. The man was staring now, too. “Different metabolisms circulate the viral load through the bloodstream at differing speeds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you begin to experience seizure activity within the next…”

She glanced at her watch, but before she could finish her sentence, the blond woman let out a strangled gasp, went rigid, and dropped as if she’d been hit with a cattle prod. The man backed away from her, eyes saucer wide as bloody pink foam started to ooze from between the woman’s tightly clenched teeth.

“Well, about now,” Julia said, pulling the antidote from her purse and filling the syringe. “You’d better step back. She may become violent.”

As she moved toward the prone figure, the man lunged forward to block her. Stretching to the side, he reached into the pocket of a jacket that had been slung over the back of a chair, and pulled out a .45 automatic.

With shaking hands, he drew a bead between Julia’s eyes.

“Stay away from her,” he rasped.

The woman on the floor began to writhe, mewling sounds coming from between her lips. The man glanced down in terror.

Peter saw his chance and lunged for the gun on the dresser. Grabbing it, he swung it up in a smooth arc.

“Drop it,” he said, pointing the weapon at the terrified man. For a moment, everyone was frozen in place. Everyone except for the woman, who was flopping around on the carpet like a gaffed bass. The flesh of her throat continued mutating, delicate red fans of flesh like gills multiplying beneath her chin as her neck became grotesquely elongated. The egg-sized lumps grew stalks, stretching away from her body like a snail’s eyes.

Suddenly the air on the other side of the bed rippled like water, and for a fraction of a second, Peter glimpsed a choppy, almost lenticular image of a
different room
, as if he was viewing it through thick, old-fashioned horizontal blinds. The other room was identical in layout, but shabby and sad, with peeling wallpaper and stained plaster. The dim, dingy light sifting through those impossible slashes in the air was the color of nicotine-stained teeth, and the atmosphere was suddenly thick with a distinct new odor.

Roach spray and cheap paint, mixed with sour sweat and urine.

Julia saw it, too, and stared.

Before Peter could reconcile what he was seeing, the woman on the floor let out a shriek like a pig in a slaughterhouse, and arched her back so high off the carpet that Peter thought her spine was about to snap in two. He watched in amazement and horror as her ribs started elongating and punching through her skin like ivory knives. As if an angry velociraptor was trapped inside her chest, and was trying to claw its way out.

That was too much for the man—with a gargled cry, he bolted for the door. Caught entirely flat-footed, Peter just watched as his intended target slipped out of sight.

“
Dammit
,” Julia said, glancing over her shoulder at the closing door, and then back at the woman on the floor. “Hold her.”

Peter took a step back.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “I’m not touching her.”

“Don’t be childish,” Julia snapped. “She’s not infectious… not yet. See those nodes?” She used her foot to pin down the flailing woman’s chest and gestured to the egg-sized ovoids dangling from her rapidly mutating neck. “When they reach the size of my fist, they’ll burst, and that’s when the virus will go airborne. At that point, there will be nothing we can do to stop it.”

He looked down at the woman, unconsciously rubbing the hand that wasn’t holding the gun against his pant leg, feeling like it was dirty.

“Can’t we just shoot her?” he asked. As soon as he said it, it sounded wrong, but he continued. “There’s no way she can survive this. It would put her out of her misery, and might—”

“It would be a spectacularly bad idea,” Julia replied. “If the host dies, the virus will go into emergency survival mode and eject itself forcibly through every orifice of the body, in a desperate bid to find a new host. That would be us.”

“But what about the guy?” he asked, looking back at the door. “We have to stop him before he gets anywhere near the banquet.”

“He won’t get far in his condition,” she said. “But our first priority has to be to inject this one with the antidote. So do you want to talk about it some more, or do you want to do it?”

Peter took a cautious step toward the woman, sticking the gun into his belt.

Without warning, she curled all of her limbs into a tight ball, and then lurched to a shuddering crouch.

He put both hands out, palms forward. Half placating, and half ready to grab her.

“Okay, now,” he said. “Let’s just take it easy.”

The blond woman’s eyes rolled and widened, blood leaking from the corners like gory tears. Her eyeballs seemed to pulse, swelling and shrinking like beating hearts. He had no idea if she could even see him.

Julia began to approach from Peter’s right, holding the loaded syringe at the ready.

The woman’s body started to tic, and then spasm on the left side, so Peter shifted his weight to his left foot, ready to shoot in and grab her if she made a break in that direction. To his shock and surprise, her head whipped around toward Julia. She shrieked, her lower jaw splitting open in the center like that of a feeding snake.

She lunged, faster than he thought she could.

Julia flinched and stumbled backward, catching herself against the desk and throwing her free arm up in front of her face. She dropped the syringe, and it bounced off the carpet and rolled away.

Peter grabbed the back of the woman’s half-shredded camisole and tried to haul her toward him, but he could feel the fabric stretching and tearing and threatening to give out completely as she twisted and flailed.

“Get the syringe, dammit!” Peter hissed between gritted teeth.

Julia ducked down, reaching for the antidote, and the infected woman suddenly seemed to realize that Peter was behind her. She tried to twist her body backward to grab at him, crooked jaw scissoring and snapping, but he shoved her away as hard as he could. She slammed into the wall, and before she could rebound, Peter grabbed a chair and used it to keep her at bay.

He felt like some kind of demented lion tamer, but it worked, holding her off until Julia was able to grab the syringe.

“Pin her against the wall,” she said. “Use the legs.”

He did what she suggested, using the legs of the chair to trap the infected woman in place with her arms at her sides as he leaned into it with his full weight. Being so close to her, he could smell a strange, sharp ammonia-like odor wafting out of her howling maw. The swollen nodes dangling from the chaotic mess that used to be her throat were getting bigger with every adrenaline-fueled heartbeat.

“Hurry,” Peter said. “I think she’s getting ready to pop here.”

“I need a vein,” she said. “Sub-q won’t work fast enough. Grab her hair and pull her head away from me.”

He grabbed a handful of her short blond hair and it came out in his fingers with a small wet rag of scalp attached. In place of the patch of hair, a dozen tiny red cilia sprouted from her exposed skull, each moving independently, like the tentacles of a curious mollusk.

It was all he could do not to vomit. But he kept the chair in place.

“My God,” Julia said. “This new strain is even more potent than my most optimistic projections.” She sounded more impressed than horrified.

Peter shoved the heel of his hand into the infected woman’s slippery cheek, cranking her head to one side and exposing the throbbing carotid artery beneath her ear.

“We’re gonna find out just how potent any minute now,” he said. “Stick her, willya?”

Peter didn’t have to tell her twice. Julia nodded, pulled the cap off of the syringe with her teeth, and slid it expertly into the woman’s vein. As soon as she depressed the plunger, the woman let out one last spasm, then sagged against the wall, tense and twitching muscles going soft and loose.

“That was fast,” Peter said, cautiously taking his weight off the chair. As soon as it ceased holding her up, she sagged to the floor and curled on her side.

“I included 20 milligrams of diazepam in addition to the antiviral agent, to quell seizure activity in the brain and decrease violent agitation.”

“Good thinking,” Peter said. He looked down at the shivering, bloody mess—all that was left of the woman. “Is she going to be okay?”

Julia frowned at Peter as if he’d lost his mind.

“It’s not like you’re some kind of patriot,” Julia said, “but she’s a crazy terrorist who was planning to assassinate a presidential candidate, and take God knows how many innocent bystanders with him. What do you care if she’s going to be okay?” Then she paused, and seemed to calm down. “It’s not out of the question that she might survive, but I think the world will be a better place if she doesn’t.”

“Right,” he said, trying not to look back at the crumpled woman. He glanced at the doorway. “We’d better go find the other guy.”

Out in the narrow hotel hallway, Peter started to ask Julia which way she thought the other terrorist might have gone—but he stopped even before he began.

It couldn’t have been clearer if their quarry had left a trail of breadcrumbs.

To the right, the hallway was normal, its plush carpet, gold-framed mirrors, and fancy crown molding exactly the way they had been when they entered the hotel room. But to the left was a distorted fun-house nightmare that looked as if rags of flickering shadow and light had been sewn together into a crazy quilt of conflicting and unstable realities. Shapes shifted and jumped so that nothing—not the furniture, not even the walls, floor, and ceiling—seemed able to hold a consistent shape.

“What
is
this?” Peter asked, clutching the doorjamb as a sudden wave of vertigo washed over him.

“There’s no time to explain,” Julia said, recapping the used syringe and slipping it into her pocket, along with the vial of antidote. “Come on.”

She strode purposefully down the fluctuating hallway as if to her it was all perfectly normal, and Peter had no choice but to follow. As he moved down the hall toward the fire stairs at the far end, he realized that what his eye had first interpreted as light and shadows were actually fragments—the same kind of grungy, variant version of the hotel that had appeared inside the room.

One moment the wall was clean and covered in creamy, gilded wallpaper, then, only a few feet further along, it was water damaged and grimy, patched and marked with graffiti. The floor beneath his feet would be luxuriously carpeted for one step, and cigarette-burned linoleum the next.

He was so mesmerized by this curious anomaly that he walked right into a man he could have sworn wasn’t there, just a moment earlier.

Peter jumped back, a ripple of fear running through him. But it wasn’t the infected terrorist—it was a man in his sixties with long, lank white hair and a dirty beard. It was a toss-up as to whether he had more teeth than he’d had recent showers, but it was clear to Peter that he didn’t have many of either.

His breath was 150 proof.

“What the hell’s the matter with the wall?” the man asked, rheumy eyes fixed on Peter. He lunged forward, gripping the front of Peter’s shirt. “What’s the matter with
everything
?”

“I…” Peter began, but before he could finish, the man grabbed the pistol that was tucked in Peter’s waistband.

He lurched backward.

“Stay back!” the man said, pointing the gun at Peter. “I don’t know you!”

Peter racked his brain for some smooth, clever response that would cool the old drunk and diffuse this inexplicable situation. Then there was a strange flicker in the air between them, like smoke in the beam of a movie projector, and the man was gone just as suddenly as he’d appeared.