Contagious (35 page)

First the # sign, then 5, then 4, then 5, then—
Strong hands grabbed her wrists and pulled her away.
Clarence’s hands.
“Margaret, stop it!”
She struggled against him, but it was useless. He was too strong.
“Let me go, you
monster
!” How could she have been so wrong about him?
Dew leaned forward to look at the touch screen, then at Dan. “What was she doing?”
Dan looked away.
“Dan,” Dew said. “Answer me, now.”
“She was trying to do an emergency decontamination,” Dan said. “If she hits another five, every decontam nozzle in both trailers starts spraying. It would kill everything not wearing a hazmat suit, including the patient.”
Dew turned to look at Margaret. “You spell out the word
kill
to do that? Cute. Otto, don’t let her go. We have to finish this.”
Dew turned back to the horror show inside the containment cell. Margaret did the same—she didn’t want to watch, but she had to.
The triangles bounced out almost a foot before their tails and Bernadette’s ravaged skin pulled them back. The one on her chest jumped up and down like the heart of a cartoon boy who’s just seen the cartoon girl of his dreams.
The one on her hip tore free first, shooting across the tiny room to hit the wall. Barely an inch high, it wiggled on the floor, black tentacles writhing in a soupy combination of human blood and purple slime.
Her arm went next. The hatchling severed the artery as it launched free, spraying blood all over the clear containment-cell wall. The heartbeat monitor beeped out an erratic, panicked pace without rhythm.
The chest triangle finally broke its fleshy tether, shooting upward on a geyser of blood that splashed against the ceiling.
Margaret heard the droning monotone of the EKG machine sounding out a flatline.
“Shut that fucking thing off,” Dew said.
Dan lowered the camera and quickly punched a button on the panel. The flatline sound vanished, leaving only silence.
Margaret put her gloved hands against the transparent wall. Blood drops trickled down the inside of the glass, rolling toward the floor. They left little see-through streaks of red.
The three hatchlings tried to stand on weak tentacle-legs. They managed a few wobbly steps, filling the air with strange clicking sounds. Gradually they slowed. Their black, vertical eyes blinked slower and slower, heavy-lidded, sleepy, until they closed and the little creatures stopped moving.
Margaret rested her helmeted head against the glass. She checked the red clock on the far wall.
“Time of death, nine forty-four A.M.,” she said weakly. “I hope it was worth it, Dew. I really hope it’s worth it.”
Dew still hadn’t moved. He stared into the cell, stared at the body. “It’s not, Margaret. It never is.”
EYES ON THE PRIZE
It was only a matter of time now.
The Orbital had long since mapped all human satellites capable of detecting its presence. It had also identified a few ground-based observatories that might be able to see it. In all, the Orbital tracked eleven devices that could spot it, if only they looked in the right direction.
And now five of them were.
One was unfortunate, but not a cause for concern. Just random chance. Two was pushing the boundaries of coincidence and meant it had possibly been spotted. As the day progressed, the Orbital saw a third, then a fourth, then a
fifth
device point its way.
There was no question: the humans knew.
It was only a matter of time before they attacked. The probability tables rated this at 100 percent. The same tables predicted a 74 percent chance that the first attack would destroy the Orbital.
It had some defenses, but it was small and designed for stealth and reliability, not combat. It could not fight an entire world.
The Orbital had prepared Chelsea as best it could. It would probably be up to her to finish the doorway. Chance of success? Incalculable—the Orbital simply did not have enough data.
The Orbital ran through the tables and arrived at the final entry in its extensive decision tree. If a planet could resist colonization, detect the Orbital and attack it, then that planet qualified as a long-term threat.
A threat that had to be eliminated.
The Orbital began to modify its final probe.
PEEKABOO, WE SEE YOU
Gutierrez walked into the smaller Situation Room like a suit-wearing cage fighter rushing to the ring, aggressive and excited to get it on. Tom Maskill and Vanessa Colburn trailed in his wake, the boxer’s entourage shining with their own intense auras.
Ah,
Murray thought,
the energy of youth
.
Gutierrez, Maskill and Colburn slid into their seats. Donald Martin and all the Joint Chiefs were already present. A full house once again.
Murray was thrilled that Vanessa had made it—he wanted her to see this.
“Okay, Murray,” Gutierrez said. “I just cut short a meeting with the Russian ambassador about this Finland crisis to hear your urgent news, so let’s go.”
“Mister President,” Murray said, “Montoya’s weather theory panned out. We think we’ve located the source of the infection.”
Murray called up a map of the Midwest on the Situation Room’s big screen.
“This is the location of the first construct,” he said. A red dot appeared at Wahjamega, Michigan. “These blue dots represent approximate locations of the hosts seven days before we attacked that construct, and the green lines represent wind direction.”
Gutierrez studied the map briefly, then nodded. “And here is the same information for the hosts associated with Mather, South Bloomingville, Glidden and Gaylord, Michigan.” As Murray spoke each city’s name, he added a yellow dot to the map. “This information provided enough data to triangulate a specific search zone.”
Murray tapped some more keys. The map zoomed in on a grid that included southwest Michigan, northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana. “But that’s still a huge area,” Gutierrez said.
“Yes sir,” Murray said. “But it helped us focus the hunt. It took our image-processing computers three days to identify visual anomalies, but by doing so, we found this . . .”
Murray clicked the keys again. The map vanished, replaced by a grainy photo of what looked like a translucent, teardrop-shaped rock pointed at both ends.
All of them, including Vanessa, sat back in their chairs. Murray felt like a conductor reaching the emotional apex of a symphony. The room filled with excitement and relief. They finally had a target; they could finally
hit back
.
“Son of a bitch,” Gutierrez said.
“NASA is convinced it’s artificial,” Murray said. “It’s very small, about the size of a beer keg.”
“How could we not have seen this?”
“There’s a lot here we don’t understand, sir,” Murray said. “The thing is stationary, hovering forty miles above South Bend, Indiana. The object seems to bend light around it—which makes it basically invisible, but the image analysts identified a visual fluctuation. They had to write a program that combined images from five different sources, then create this computer-generated model.”
“So this isn’t a real picture?”
“No sir,” Murray said. “They explained it to me with an analogy. Imagine a contact lens dropped in a swimming pool. It’s not actually invisible, but if you don’t know the contact lens is there, you’re never going to see it. If I tell you to look in one corner at the shallow end, forget the rest of the pool, look for something that might stand out just a little, and you had a dozen people helping you, eventually you’d see the lens and figure out what it is. NASA doesn’t know how the thing can just hover there. It doesn’t drift. It should take a ton of energy to keep something stationary like that, yet it doesn’t give off an energy signature. That’s supposed to be impossible.”
“How impossible?”
“As in contrary-to-the-laws-of-physics impossible,” Murray said. “But it’s there all the same.”
Gutierrez stared at the fuzzy double teardrop up on the screen. “Are there more of these objects?”
“Now that they know exactly what anomalies to look for, they’re doing global searches. This object appears to be the only one of its kind.”
“Why us?” Gutierrez asked. “Why not Russia? Or China? What does NASA say about that?”
“They think it was just bad luck, Mister President. If this really is an alien craft, it probably locked in over the first landmass it found. We’ll probably never know, unless you want to try to communicate with it.”
“Communicate?” Gutierrez laughed. “It’s already
communicated
. Its message is loud and clear. This is amazing. Murray, your team is just
amazing.
And no, I don’t want to try to communicate with this thing. I want to blow it out of the goddamn sky.”
“We thought you might choose that option,” Murray said. “General Monroe?”
Murray sat as the air force general rose to discuss his attack plan. Murray looked across the table, and saw that Vanessa was watching him, not the screen. She wore her normally cold expression, but Murray was learning how to read her. On her best day, she couldn’t hope to ever match the show he had just put on, and she knew it. Did the corners of her mouth reveal just a touch of envy?
He turned his attention back to the screen and watched General Monroe outline his strategy.
GENERAL CHARLIE OGDEN
No point in calling himself a colonel anymore. As Chelsea’s top military leader, now he was truly a
general.
He could promote Cope while he was at it, but why bother?
Corporal Cope
had such a nice ring to it.
“What’s the latest from Whiskey Company, Corporal?”
“Captain Lodge reports zero traffic at all checkpoints,” Cope said. “He suspects that your readiness drill is actually a way for you to get X-Ray Company in heated tents while his men stand out in the cold. Sergeant Major Nealson also called, wanted me to tell him on the sly if you had an op planned and if he could get in on it.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him this was just a boring drill, sir,” Cope said. “And I took the liberty of suggesting that if he snooped around for more information, you’d have him on the first transfer back to Fort Bragg.”
Ogden smiled. Cope showed initiative, and Ogden needed that kind of person around. Better a clever corporal than a stupid lieutenant.
“Pack up my things, Corporal. I’ll be leaving tonight.”
Cope moved off to pack Ogden’s clothes and effects.
General Charlie Ogden couldn’t wait for nightfall. He couldn’t wait to drive down to Detroit, to actually meet Chelsea. But it was only 1430, and he couldn’t make the sun move faster across the sky. He needed the time to plan, anyway.
Forty-six hours to go.
If the gate opened up undetected, everything would work out fine. General Ogden’s job, however, was to assume that the gate would not go undetected.
The primary threat remained the Division Ready Force from the Eighty-second Airborne. Six hundred soldiers probably eight hours away from parachuting in on top of any trouble spot. He had at best 120 men—no matter what strategy he created, he couldn’t hold out for long against five-to-one odds.
That meant he had to make sure any battle ended before the DRF could fully respond. An eight-hour window.
Far inside that eight-hour window, however, sat the other two DOM-REC companies waiting at Fort Bragg. Two hundred and forty men he’d led himself. If alerted, they could deploy in Detroit potentially within
two
hours. How could he keep them out of the game entirely?
And even that didn’t account for the forces already in the area—Detroit police, cops from surrounding suburbs, SWAT teams and Michigan State Police. Not as heavily armed, not as well trained, but a lot of guns was still a lot of guns. He’d also have to find a way to tie up all of those.
If conflict came, Ogden would have no air support. His men would face Apaches, Ospreys, F-15s and probably even a squadron of A-10 tank-killer fighters stationed at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base thirty minutes north of Detroit.
So that was the scenario. Do everything possible to keep things quiet, to keep a fight from breaking out. If a fight
did
break out, he had to choose the battlefield, delay the troops from Fort Bragg, tie up the Detroit police, keep the gate hidden from air support
and
make sure the gate was wide open and pumping in angels well inside of the eight-hour DRF window.
A general’s stars certainly didn’t come easy.
“Corporal Cope,” Ogden said, “when you’re finished packing, get on the line with the companies at Fort Bragg. I want to arrange an immediate transfer. The Exterminators have been fighting hard. It’s time to rotate out some troops.”
MCDONALD’S RUN
So many dollies! Chelsea sat in the back of the Winnebago, hatchlings crawling all over her. Their black tentacles tickled. It felt like little kisses, like she was covered head to toe in smoochies. They would walk on her, then jump around, maybe cling to a curtain or go eat a piece of the daddies. Mr. Jenkins had put some daddy parts on plastic so his Winnebago carpet wouldn’t get messy, but the triangles’ tentacle-legs were still tracking spots of blood all over the place.
Chelsea stood, carefully, so as not to startle the dollies, and walked to the Winnebago’s small fridge. There was a portable TV on top, black and white with a tiny screen playing the seven o’clock news. She’d watched some cartoons on it, but cartoons didn’t really interest her that much anymore. The grown-ups watched the news, and Chelsea was surprised to find that she liked it.
There were only three ice cream bars left in the little fridge. Those, half a jar of mayonnaise, and a wrinkled hot dog that might have been older than Chelsea herself. She pulled out an ice cream bar, tore off the paper and started eating, but her stomach rumbled for something other than dessert.
Mister Jenkins and Mommy, come here
.
Seconds later they ran through the door and shut it behind them to keep out the cold. They were both shivering.
“Whoa,” Mommy said. “They’re bigger already.”
“The dollies are growing fast,” Chelsea said. “Pretty soon they will start building the gate. Are you getting enough stuff?”
Mr. Jenkins nodded. “There’s a lot of wood in this building. I spent the whole night dragging in sticks and bushes, stuff like that.”
“And I found a lot of trash,” Mommy said. “Mister Burkle is out collecting as well.”
Chelsea smiled. Mommy and Mr. Jenkins sounded like they knew what to do.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Chelsea said. “I want McDonald’s.”
“I don’t know if there’s one around here,” Mommy said. “Besides, it’s dark out.”