Contagious (27 page)

pure
. He hadn’t experienced anything like that since . . . since he was a little boy.
A little boy so afraid of the shadows under the bed that he couldn’t move, couldn’t look, sure that whatever was under there would grab him and pull him down forever and ever.
But now he wasn’t
afraid
of the thing under the bed.
He
was
the thing under the bed.
BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
Corporal Cope drove Charlie Ogden’s Humvee out the back of the C-17 Globemaster and into the winter night. It didn’t have to go far. Just off the end of the runway, a black Lincoln waited. Four men stood outside it. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking the size of Perry Dawsey.
Ogden tapped Cope on the shoulder and pointed to the Lincoln. Seconds later, Ogden hopped out in front of Dew, Perry and two other men Ogden didn’t know.
“Colonel,” Dew said, shaking hands. Dawsey didn’t offer his hand, and if he had, Ogden probably wouldn’t have shaken it. The other two men just stood there, respectfully silent.
“A damn shame about Amos,” Ogden said. “Please convey my condolences to Margaret.”
“I will,” Dew said.
“Status report?”
“No problems so far,” Dew said. “State troopers have shut down all off-ramps to Gaylord from highways I-75 and 32. They have a dozen troopers at each on-ramp administering the swab test. Traffic is backing up a bit, but it’s not that bad.”
“Any positive tests?”
Dew shook his head. “So far, so good. The cops have people waiting to go over area maps with you, suggest the best places for roadblocks.”
“What about reports of violence?” Ogden asked. “Any of these bastards fighting?”
Dew again shook his head. “Nothing reported. Gaylord police can’t believe how smoothly it’s going, but I guess the small-town rumor mill has been spreading stories of the body the postman found. Tack on the news coverage talking about what necrotizing fasciitis can do and people are only too happy to cooperate, get the test and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Ogden nodded. He’d come to expect smooth sailing out of a Murray Longworth cover story. The slimy bastard knew his shit.
“I understand that you need men,” Ogden said. “How many and for what?”
“Eight should cover it,” Dew said. “Those bodies they found in Bay City? The guy’s name was Donald Jewell. He was probably here visiting his brother, Bobby Jewell, age thirty-three. We have to go bring Bobby in.”
“Bobby have family in the house?”
“Wife Candice, also thirty-three, daughter Chelsea, seven. That’s it.”
“Stay right here,” Ogden said. “I’ll send a full squad, nine men instead of eight. Acceptable?”
Dew nodded.
Ogden walked closer to Dew and talked quietly so that only Dew could hear.
“Murray said we need to watch out for Dawsey going apeshit,” Ogden said. “My men have orders to stop him from doing anything stupid. I’ll load them up with Tasers, but if push comes to shove they
will
take Dawsey down by any means possible.”
“You going to shoot him, Colonel?”
“If I have to,” Ogden said. “So make sure it doesn’t come to that.”
BECK BECKETT, THIRD-GRADER
Chelsea watched the last car drive down her long, winding dirt driveway. She watched that car very carefully, just as she had the last three. She pushed her thoughts out, wondering if this car might bring the boogeyman.
She could tell that the boogeyman was
very
close, maybe even in Gaylord. And he would kill her . . . unless she could kill him first.
Chelsea
hated
the boogeyman.
She let out a long, slow breath as she connected—he wasn’t in that car. The car stopped behind the others. Two people got out, a man and a boy.
It was a good thing she’d called everyone here. Mr. Beckett had a blue triangle on his cheek. Another one peeked out from beneath his collar, just the point visible past the neckline of his sweater.
Beck Beckett looked fine.
He was a third-grader at South Maple Elementary, the same place where Chelsea was a second-grader. Beck was older. People might listen to him.
She couldn’t have that.
Daddy went out and shook hands with Mr. Beckett, then led him into the house. Beck followed along. The front door led into the kitchen, where Daddy and the Becketts joined Old Sam Collins, Ryan Roznowski and Ryan’s wife, Marie.
Marie was dead, but that was okay.
Mr. Beckett waved his hand in front of his face. “Whoa,” he said. “Someone leave the stove on?”
“Hello, Mister Beckett,” Chelsea said. “Welcome.”
Mr. Beckett stopped waving his hand when he saw her. “Hello, Chelsea. It’s an honor.” The change in his voice was so funny. Grown-ups used to talk to her like a kid. Now they sounded like
they
were the kids, and
she
was the grown-up.
“Thank you, Mister Beckett. Sorry about the smell. We had to get some things ready for God.”
Why are you using your mouth?
She looked at Beck. He was smiling at her. It wasn’t a nice smile, either.
You think you’re so smart,
Chelsea thought back.
You better realize God loves me the most.
Beck nodded.
For now.
“We have to get out of Gaylord,” Chelsea said. “Daddy thinks they will come for us.”
“That’s just stupid,” Beck said. “How would they know to come to your house?”
The adults seemed to freeze in place, as if they were afraid to breathe. They all had wide eyes.
“Don’t you call me stupid,” Chelsea said. “You’re in
my
house.”
“It’s not your house,” Beck said. “It’s
God’s
house. We should stay right here until the hatching.”
“We’re leaving,” Chelsea said. “You do what you’re told.”
Beck Beckett was going to get
such
a spanking.
Mr. Beckett took a step forward. “Maybe . . . maybe we should listen to Beck, Chelsea. He is older, after all.”
Mr. Beckett would have to be spanked, too. That was okay. She’d planned for that all along, but it made her feel better to know that Mr. Beckett
deserved
it.
“Mister Beckett is a
spy,
” Chelsea hissed. “So is Beck.”
Mr. Beckett’s face blanched. “No! No, Chelsea, we’re not spies.”
“Shut up, Dad,” Beck said.
Mr. Beckett looked at his son, then took a step back.
Beck smiled again. “God doesn’t want us to argue, little Chelsea,” he said. “We’re not spies, and we’re going to stay here.”
Chelsea smiled her sweetest smile. “You want to stay here? Okay, Beck. You can stay as long as you like.”
She took a quick, deep breath, then thought as hard as she could.
Get them!
It was Beck’s turn to widen his eyes. Chelsea knew why. She was much,
much
stronger than he was. He hadn’t realized how much stronger, and now it was too late.
Daddy stepped up and kneed Mr. Beckett where it counts. Mr. Beckett let out a painful groaning noise and fell to the floor. Old Sam Collins ran up and kicked Mr. Beckett in the face over and over again as Daddy pulled a knife out of the knife drawer and fell on Mr. Beckett.
Kick, stab, kick, stab, kick, stab.
Mr. Beckett screamed, but that was okay.
Beck shook his head, as if he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. He turned to run, but Mr. Roznowski tackled him from behind.
Chelsea heard Beck’s mental scream.
Stop it! God, save me!
Chelsea, what are you doing?
Mr. Roznowski held Beck’s head on the linoleum floor and started kneeing him in the face. It made a weird crunching sound.
He was dangerous, Chauncey.
We need him. Stop this right now.
“You’re not the boss of me, Chauncey,” Chelsea said.
Beck still kicked a little after the third knee in his face. He twitched after the fourth. He stopped altogether after the fifth. Mr. Roznowski stood up. Beck’s face looked very funny.
Then Daddy stood, covered in Mr. Beckett’s blood. Old Sam Collins was limping. Looked like he’d hurt his foot kicking Mr. Beckett in the face.
Chelsea, I am God, you must obey me.
She shook her head.
I’m a big girl now, Chauncey. Beck was dangerous. It’s for the best. Someday, you’ll understand.
That was a lie, of course. Beck wasn’t dangerous, but Chauncey might have loved Beck more than her. Chauncey was
Chelsea’s
special friend. With Beck gone it would stay that way forever and ever.
“Okay, everybody,” Chelsea said. “Time to go play at Mister Jenkins’s house. Someone make two trips so we can get rid of Mister Beckett’s car.
Mommy, you can take me in a snowmobile. Daddy, you clean up here and then come over on a snowmobile, too, okay?”
“Yes, Chelsea,” Daddy said.
Chelsea, Mr. Roznowski and Old Sam Collins got their coats and walked out the front door, while Daddy got the box of matches.
BETTY’S AUTOPSY
Betty Jewell’s autopsy was a disaster.
Margaret could barely think after Amos’s horrifying death, let alone focus on the job. By the time she’d dragged herself into the biohazard suit and started working on Betty, the girl’s body had mostly dissolved.
Margaret approached the trolley, Clarence beside her in his suit. Gitsh, Marcus and Dr. Dan stood next to Betty’s blackened corpse. It made for tight quarters, but Clarence refused to leave her side. Gitsh and Marcus had done an amazing job cleaning up. The autopsy room looked spotless. The trolley carried a steady, slow, thick stream of black goo down the runners and into the white sink.
Margaret wanted a look at those crawling things. They were the key to everything now, but she’d waited too long. Any crawlers in Betty’s body had already dissolved. Even the samples that Amos had taken were now nothing but chunky black liquid.
She’d let her grief get in the way of her work.
Margaret felt weak. She put a hand on the autopsy trolley to steady herself—when she looked at the table, her mind’s eye saw Betty Jewell’s skinless hands stabbing the scalpel at Amos. When Margaret looked down, she saw Amos clawing at the throat of his biohazard suit, unable to get his hands at the cut, unable to stop the blood from sheeting the inside of his visor. When she saw the drainage sink, she saw Betty’s brains splattering against the white epoxy and dripping toward the drain.
Clarence’s hand on her shoulder. “Margo, you okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
A lie anyone could see through.
“Dan,” Margaret said, “have you watched the video from my helmet? The video of the autopsy?”
“Yes ma’am,” Dr. Dan said. “Several times.”
“And what did you see?”
“Something crawling in her face. Doctor Braun thought it was crawling along the V3 nerve toward the brain.”
“Do you agree?”
“It certainly looked that way,” Dan said.
Too bad they didn’t have a brain to look at. No chance of that, thanks to Clarence’s bullet and rapid decomposition. When that crawler reached the brain, then what?
Then it would come apart.
It would split up into those muscle fibers Amos saw, split apart . . .reorganize . . . come together again.
In a mesh. Just like in Perry Dawsey’s brain.
“The crawlers,” Margaret said. “They want to replicate what we’ve seen in Dawsey’s CAT scans.”
Dr. Dan stared at her. “That’s a pretty big leap. We haven’t seen anything like these crawlers before. I read your reports on the hosts found in Glidden; the father, mother and little boy. You had fresh bodies, yet they didn’t have these crawling things.”
“It’s something new, obviously,” Margaret said. “I don’t care if its a leap. It’s
right
. These things infect a human body, maybe replicate somehow, then crawl toward the brain. If we can stop them from crawling, we just plain stop them.”
“It’s got a structure,” Dan said. “A shape. It can move. For that it needs a cytoskeleton.”
“The little things have skeletons?” Clarence asked.
“Cytoskeleton,” Dan said. “It’s like microscopic scaffolding that lets a cell hold a shape.”
“Without it, a cell would just be a membrane holding fluid,” Margaret said. “Without a cytoskeleton to hold structure, it would be like a water balloon. Amos thought the crawlers looked like human muscle fibers. If these things are some kind of modified muscle cell, and we disrupted their cell structure, then the cells couldn’t contract. They couldn’t move. They couldn’t
crawl.
”
“So you dissolve this cytoskeleton,” Clarence said, “and that stops it? That’s it?”
“It’s not that easy,” Dan said. “Our normal cells also have cytoskeletons. Anything that would kill the crawlers would also kill our cells.”
“But it’s something,” Margaret said. “A human body can regrow lost cells, eventually repair damage, but these crawlers are so small, just a few cells. If we disrupt their cytoskeleton, they might just die. At any rate, we can stop them before they reach the brain.”
“I can order a screen,” Dan said. “We can get all the drugs that might work and have them ready when we get another host.”
“
If
we get another host,” Clarence said. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more.”
“Oh grow up, Clarence,” Margaret said. “You know goddamn well there will be more. There’s
always
more.”
Silence filled the trailer. Margaret rewound the moment in her head, realized how nasty she had just sounded.
“Sorry,” she said.
Clarence shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, Doc. Can we test these cytoskeleton wreckers on Betty’s remains?”
“There’s nothing left,” Margaret said. “We’re too late for that. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with this body. We’re going to burn it.”
She stared at Betty’s remains, the blackened, rotting, murderous remains.
“Uh, Margo,” Clarence said. “Don’t we want to . . . I don’t know . . .study it?”
She turned on him. “What, exactly, are we going to find? Huh? It’s another blackened corpse, Clarence. Apoptosis chain reaction. Boom, dead, done. That’s it. She has whatever the father had, so we’ll run chemical analysis on
his
remains. We don’t need this . . . this
thing
.”
She turned back to Gitsh and Marcus. They looked at her with pity in their eyes. They were saddened by Amos’s death, she knew that, but they just didn’t understand.
“Incinerate this bitch,” Margaret said. “I don’t want a single ounce of her left, you understand me?”
Gitsh and Marcus both nodded slowly.
She turned and walked out of the autopsy room.
BURN, BURN, YES YA GONNA BURN (REDUX)
Even though most of the Jewell house was already gone, flames still shot into the dark sky. Flashing fire-truck lights added to the visuals, the mixed illumination coloring snowflakes that dropped straight down like slow-motion rain. In the dark isolation of the Jewell property, the place felt like an island of light surrounded by an infinite black ocean.