Contagious (19 page)

other
child might be. He wasn’t as well devolped as Chelsea, but he was coming along fast. Both of them together would provide all the ground-based brain power the Orbital needed to direct the protectors.
Unless, of course, the sonofabitch found them, as he had found the rest.
Biofeedback from the new strain showed the Orbital that cultivating muscle fibers from each host was too risky. Too much potential of harvesting damaged stem cells.
A problem with a simple solution—the children would become the vector. The children had successfully developed modified muscle fibers, fibers that could split on their own, reproduce. Introduce those fibers into new hosts, and the infection would spread.
That solved one problem—creating protectors—but a second, equally significant problem remained: how to stop the sonofabitch. The Orbital hadn’t been built for situations like this. The creators hadn’t programmed specific instructions on how to handle a host-turned-hunter.
Killing him was the obvious strategy, but that hadn’t worked yet. Hosts from each of the last three batches had tried and failed. Not only failed, they had died in the process, removing their potential hatchlings from the build phase. Sonofabitch was human, he
could
die, but targeting him was too risky.
The simulations rolled on, and one strategy continued to show the highest probability of success—just keep the sonofabitch away.
Could the Orbital block just one host from the communication mesh? Yes, it decided it could. It would be difficult, taking up much of the Orbital’s ability to process communication for the rest. The female child host could be modified. She could act as the central communication bridge, freeing up enough of the Orbital’s processing power to locate and block the sonofabitch.
If he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t find the new gate.

BIG SAMMY’S BAR
Margaret hadn’t given the computer-room chairs a second thought until Perry sat in one. He’d opted to stand at first, but his little grimaces made it obvious his knees were killing him. Margaret pulled the
I am your doctor
trump card and ordered him to sit. Put an ironing board in front of him with a plate of turkey on top, and he would have looked like a grownup forced to sit in one of the kiddie chairs at Thanksgiving.
She sat in the chair to Perry’s right, Dew in the chair to his left. Clarence stood behind Margaret, his body radiating tension. Everyone noticed Clarence’s vibe except Clarence himself.
Amos, of course, was nowhere to be seen.
“I really don’t like to talk about this,” Perry said.
Dew grabbed Perry’s left shoulder and gave it a supportive shake. “All the more reason to get this done quick and get it done right,” he said. “Besides, what else are you gonna do with your time? Go lift some weights?”
Perry nodded. “Push-ups and sit-ups, actually.”
“I think you’re studly enough for the moment,” Margaret said. “We have access to a lot of data about the individual triangle hosts. I’m hoping that adding details of your experience can help us locate the source of the infection.”
Perry shrugged. “I’ll do what I can.”
Margaret tapped at the keyboard, calling up a map on the flat-panel monitor in front of him.
“This is a map of the homes of the seven known triangle hosts from the Ann Arbor area,” she said.
She moved the mouse and hit a selection on the screen. Seven house icons appeared on the map.
Perry saw that two icons, one stacked on the other, sat over his apartment complex between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Those two formed the point of a triangle, with the second point almost in downtown Ann Arbor, and the third point south of Ann Arbor in Pittsfield.
The other three house icons looked more random: one in Whittaker, about five miles south and a little east of Perry’s apartment complex, then two very close together in the farmland just south of Ford Lake and Rawsonville.
“What’s the pattern?” Perry asked.
“There isn’t one,” Margaret said. “These are just the home addresses of the victims. We can also add work or school addresses.” She clicked the mouse again, and seven blue dots appeared. “We can also add any known locations of the hosts for the two weeks prior to the day you started itching, but the map gets kind of crazy if we do that.
“The problem is, we can’t find any correlation in these locations. We still have no idea exactly
when
or
where
people were infected. We need to use your memory of the days before you started itching, and compare that to the information we have. Hopefully, we can make a connection that points us to the time and source of infection.”
Perry nodded.
“Okay,” Margaret said. “For starters, you and Patricia DuMond both lived in the same apartment complex.”
“Who is Patricia DuMond?” Perry asked.
“I believe you called her
Fatty Patty
,” Margaret said.
Perry had fled his own apartment shortly after killing his friend Bill, just before the police arrived. He’d had only moments to hide and nowhere to run. Fatty Patty lived one building over—her triangles had called to Perry, promising refuge. He’d turned out to be a less-than-pleasant guest, even roughed her up a little. He hadn’t killed her, she’d died when her triangles ripped out of her body, but he sure as hell hadn’t done anything to help her. Patty’s ordeal was a major reason Perry killed every host he found—dying at his hands, no matter how brutal, was far,
far
better than death from a hatching.
“Oh,” Perry said quietly. “Yeah, her. Okay.”
“So that’s two hosts living in the same apartment complex,” Margaret said. “But
only
two. If the vector was in the complex, or went
through
the complex, we would assume there would be more hosts.”
“Unless you were banging her,” Dew said. “Which means you could have been infected at the same time.”
Perry shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but I hadn’t been laid in weeks. I might have seen her around from time to time, but I’m not sure. The apartment complex was pretty big. I can say for certain I never spoke to her, though.”
“She worked in Royal Oak, you worked in Ann Arbor,” Margaret said. “So you traveled in opposite directions for work.”
Margaret tapped the keyboard, and two of the blue dots started pulsing, one on the location of American Computer Solutions, where Perry had worked as a support rep.
“We’re trying to figure out where you and Patty might have crossed paths,” Margaret said. “We know roughly where she was in the days before the Monday you started itching, because this database has her cell-phone records and credit-card receipts.”
“Is that legal?” Perry asked.
Dew laughed. “Don’t worry about it, kid.”
“I wondered the same thing,” Margaret said. “But stopping this thing from killing people takes priority, wouldn’t you say?”
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” Perry said. “The Fourth Amendment; you guys ever heard of it?”
Margaret stared at the big, beat-up man crammed into the tiny chair. He only
looked
like a dumb jock. Dew was equally speechless.
“Don’t be so shocked,” Perry said. “I went to college, remember?”
“Tell you what, college boy,” Dew said. “You find the history book that talks about Thomas Jefferson having blue triangles growing on his nut-sack, then you can quote the founding fathers all you want.”
Perry leaned back in the chair and sighed. “All right, fine, whatever. Let’s get on with it.”
Margaret continued. “Your records aren’t as detailed as Patricia’s. The only person you seemed to call was Bill Miller. We show you made ATM withdrawals every week in the same amount, from a machine near your apartment, but you have almost no credit-card purchases.”
“I only use credit cards at the bar,” Perry said. “When I’ve had a few, I tip too much on each round. With the credit card I only tip once and I don’t overspend on my drinks. I use cash for everything else. That’s how I stayed on budget. When my weekly cash ran out, I stopped spending.”
Margaret nodded, feeling a flutter of hope. If Perry had shopped somewhere and come into contact with another triangle host, Cheng might have missed it simply because Perry had used cash.
“Since we don’t know what causes the infection, we don’t know the length of the gestation period,” Margaret said. “Maybe the vector hit you the day before, the week before or the month before, so let’s take it one day at a time. You told us you started itching on a Monday, so try and remember—what did you do that Sunday?”
Perry touched the stitches on his lip as he thought. “Me and Bill probably watched football all day.”
“Where?”
Perry shrugged. “Probably just my apartment.”
“Naw, we know you were at a bar that night,” Dew said. His finger traced a line on his flat-panel screen. “Here we go. Where is Big Sammy’s Bar?”
“Westland,” Perry said. “Just about halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit. Big screens, lots of hot girls.”
“That Sunday night you spent forty-six dollars even,” Dew said. “It’s on your credit-card history.”
Perry thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. I do that with the tip, put in the right amount of change so it comes out even. Bill and I went to Big Sammy’s to watch the Lions play the Colts. The late game. They lost.”
“There’s a surprise,” Dew said.
“Come on,” Perry said. “Cut ’em some slack. They only lost by two touchdowns that time.”
“Then what happened?” Margaret said. “Game ended, what did you do?”
As he thought, Perry moved his finger from his stitched lip to his black eye. “I went home. I think I was a little drunk, so I was driving real careful. No, wait, I got hungry so I stopped at a store to grab some munchies.”
“Where did you stop?”
Perry shrugged. “Man, I can’t say. That was like six weeks ago, and I was drunk.”
Dew leaned closer to the flat-panel. “Could it have been the Meijer grocery store, in Belleville?”
“Could be,” Perry said. “That’s on the way home.”
Margaret stood and walked over to stand behind Dew. “Why?” she said. “What’s significant about that particular store?”
Dew pointed to another line. His fingertip left a little smudge on the screen.
“Credit-card history shows Patricia DuMond bought over a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries at Meijer in Belleville,” Dew said. “At ten thirty-one P.M.”
Margaret sat back down in her chair and started pounding on the keys, excitement bleeding through to her fingertips. “That might give us something.”
Now Dew got up from his chair and stood behind Margaret. “So the vector is a grocery store?”
Margaret shook her head. “No, it’s probably not the store itself, or the food it sold. Otherwise we’d have certainly traced other hosts back to it.
But for the first time, we may have two hosts in the same location at the same
time
.”
She typed a few keys, and the icon denoting Perry and Patricia’s infection slid west to hover over the Meijer store. The icon’s new location instantly created a visual curve, one that started in Whittaker, then moved gradually northeast through the two house icons near Rawsonville, then sharper east toward the Meijer in Belleville.
Perry had been there around 10:30 P.M. So had Patricia. If the hosts that lived in Rawsonville had been home at that time, which was likely . . .
“Clarence,” Margaret said, “can this thing call up historical weather patterns?”
“Probably,” he said. “Let me drive.”
Margaret stood and Clarence sat down.
Perry leaned over to watch Clarence’s hunt-and-peck typing. “You need a hand with that, champ?”
Clarence kept his eyes on the keyboard and the screen in front of him.
“I think I can swing it,
chief,
but thanks for being such a helper.”
“So it’s not the grocery store,” Dew said. “You think maybe something blowing through the air, right? Something airborne?”
“
Airborne
is a term for one host passing the disease to another through sneezes, coughs or even breath,” Margaret said. “Look at the range on this curve. We’re talking
miles
here, not feet. The more accurate term is
wind-borne,
where wind is the mechanical vector driving the spore.”
“But wouldn’t Cheng have checked weather patterns?” Dew asked.
“Of course,” Margaret said. “But the wind can change direction from minute to minute. We now potentially have an exact time of infection. Cheng never had that. Perry, what did you do after you got your food?”
“Ate it on the way home,” Perry said. “Got home, got undressed and went right to bed. I had work the next day.”
“The vector must have been on your hands,” Margaret said. “Or maybe on your clothes, and when you got undressed you spread it around. You must have touched . . . uh . . . some private places.”
“A guy scratching his balls in the privacy of his own home,” Dew said. “Imagine that.”
“Okay,” Clarence said. “I have historical weather. What do you want, Margo?”
“Give us wind direction at ten thirty P.M. Sunday,” she said. “Focus in on Belleville if you can.”
Otto tapped away. Blue arrows appeared, pointing mostly east and a little bit north. A green line of text at the bottom read .5 MPH, 260 DEGREES.
“That doesn’t work,” Dew said. “The wind direction doesn’t line up the Rawsonville hosts with the store.”
“Clarence,” Margaret said, “show me a time-lapse projection of wind patterns from ten P.M. to ten thirty P.M.”
Otto looked at the keys for a second but didn’t type. “Uh . . . I don’t think this computer can do that.”
“Jesus H,” Perry said. “Give me that.”
He grabbed the keyboard and pulled it onto his lap. His big fingers flew across the keys. Data fields popped up on the screen and filled with strings of text faster than Margaret could even read them.
“You people remind me of the idiots I used to support at my job,” Perry said. “It’s like you’ve never read a software manual in your life. This is basic stuff, guys.”
He hit one last key, and the blue arrows on the screen changed. Instead of a west-to-east orientation, they started pointing north, then curved northeast, and finally wound up pointing due east.
Perry clacked a few more keys. The blue arrows vanished save for one—an arrow that started at the Whittaker house’s icon, curved to the right to cross over both the Rawsonville icons, and then farther to the right to cross over Meijer’s.
“Holy shit,” Dew said. “That’s it. It’s fucking airborne.”
“Wind-borne,” Margaret said.
“Wind-borne, right,” Dew said. “So what about the other hosts that are outside of this pattern?”
“Could be a number of things,” Margaret said. “They could have passed through the wind curve at just the right time, could have been another . . . I don’t know . . . another
gust
that carried the spores to other areas. This curve doesn’t account for everyone, but it accounts for half of them. It’s statistically significant, no question.”
Clarence turned in his chair to face her. “But what does this really tell us? I mean, wind can blow all over.”
Perry spoke before Margaret could. “It gives us a projection based on wind speed and the distance between infection points. From there we can potentially extrapolate a vector path and possibly even a range for potential release-point locations. Combine this data with hosts from the other infection locations, maybe you can reduce the search area for the release point. What Margaret is saying is that Colonel Ogden was right, it’s a satellite. This weather analysis might tell us where to look for it.”
Margaret smiled and nodded at Perry. He winked at her.
“College?” Dew said.
Perry nodded. “College.”
“Perry,” Margaret said, “can we do that here?”
Perry shook his head. “That takes way more computational power. You have simple wind-direction history, sure, but you need to extrapolate that against the distance between infection points, air temperature, humidity . . . and probably a bunch of other shit I don’t even know. It’s a whole different ball game from what I just showed you.”
“Let’s kick this back to Murray,” Clarence said. “See if he can put it in front of some of his
most brilliant minds the nation has to offer.”
“Fuck yes he can,” Dew said. “He’ll have the National Weather Service and climatologists and God knows what on this faster than you can hum ‘Oh! Susanna.’ ”
Clarence kept staring at Perry. “I might have been wrong about the dumb-jock stereotype,” he said. “You’re pretty goddamn smart.”