Contagious (38 page)

“Why the fuck should I?”
“Just do your job,” Dew said. “Evaluate, like Murray says. This time tomorrow, you still think going public is the right thing to do, I’ll do it with you.”
She stared at him, her expression a mixture of hatred and disbelief. “Why would you throw away your career like that?”
“Because Murray has more people like me,” Dew said. “And if you try to go public against Murray’s will, one of them might just pay you a visit.”
EXPENDABLE
Chelsea’s knowledge grew and grew.
She now understood why Chauncey had been sent. He wasn’t a person.
Organic
material, like people or plants or puppies, couldn’t survive the trip, not the way Chauncey had traveled.
Organic material could survive a trip through a gate, but there was a catch—the
gate
was biological. Like a plant. That meant they couldn’t send a gate the same way they’d sent Chauncey.
Such a funny problem, and it grew more complicated from there. Each of the hatchlings had a . . . a . . . a
template.
What a neat word, although she still didn’t understand what that meant, exactly. Some kind of a
template
to make material for the gate. The templates had been shipped with Chauncey. They were a part of each triangle seed. Their number was
finite
(another neat word!), which meant that the hatchlings could not replicate themselves like the crawlers could.
And the little crawlers that spread through people’s bodies, converting them? What wonderful creatures! But they weren’t creatures at all, not like snails or bugs or kitties. They were just collections of pieces. Like Legos. You could put the pieces together in different ways. You could make the pieces do different things. Way cooler toys than Legos, actually.
She wandered through the minds of the people in her . . . her
network
. So many interesting things! Many naughty things, too. She would address that later. One mind stood out above the rest, a mind that combined logic and creativity—General Ogden’s. She found herself spending more and more time in there as she waited for the gate to open. She learned much. General Ogden seemed obsessed with something called
contingency plans.
Most of her network consisted of soldiers. General Ogden thought that most of those soldiers, including himself, would die defending the gate. He thought of his soldiers as
expendable.
If they all died, though, or even if the numbers of converted dropped just a little, what would happen to Chelsea’s mind? To her knowledge?
She did not know. And therefore she needed a contingency plan of her own.
The soldiers were very, very important, with training and experience at shooting things. There were only two people left in her network who were not soldiers.
Mommy and Mr. Burkle the Postman.
Mr. Burkle was a man. He was stronger than Mommy. That made Mommy the weakest person in the network.
Which meant Mommy was the most
expendable.
Chelsea breathed slowly and reached out with her thoughts. It wouldn’t be that hard, really, to modify Mommy’s purpose. It had worked with Mr. Jenkins.
Chelsea concentrated, connected with Mommy’s crawlers and began to move the pieces around.
MARGARET ARRIVES
The trip to Detroit felt like an eternity, even though it took just over an hour.
She had spent so much time cooped up in the MargoMobiles, or out in the middle of nowhere, that she’d almost forgotten what a city looked like. Detroit wasn’t much of a skyline city, not a lot of tall buildings, although coming in you couldn’t miss the five towers of the Renaissance Center and a few other downtown skyscrapers she couldn’t name. The city seemed to radiate from there, spreading north and west from the Detroit River, suburbs stretching out for miles and miles.
Margaret, Clarence, Dr. Dan, Marcus and Gitsh landed at the Henry Ford Hospital helipad. From there, two agents whisked them to an unmarked van, and ten minutes later they drove down East Lafayette Street.
“We’re coming up on the intersection of Lafayette and Orleans,” the driver said. “The crime scene is on your left. CDC has it locked down nice and tight.”
Big concrete dividers, the kind used in highway construction, completely blocked the entrance onto Orleans. About a half block farther, she saw the biohazard tent that had been erected over the murder location. That tent would stop any breeze from spreading the contagion, if it hadn’t blown around already. It also blocked curious eyes. A few people in biohazard suits moved in and out of the tent. The site was as secure as it could be.
The next street was St. Aubin, and they turned south. That put the tree-packed old railroad track on the van’s right side. More trees and apartment buildings ran along the left side of the road. Apartments, cars everywhere—so many people moving about, a recipe for disaster if this contagion was wind-borne, like the strain that had infected Perry. A left on Jefferson, six lanes of major traffic rolling through Detroit, then a quick right (which was, curiously, still St. Aubin). Abandoned factory buildings stood oppressive and desolate. A right on Woodbridge, and then a right after another abandoned factory, and the van turned into a wide dirt lot. The overpass directly in front of her was Jefferson again, she realized, and they drove under it into a long ditch. Steep, tree-packed slopes rose up on either side, ending in black chain-link fences. Margaret realized that now they were
in
the old railroad track that ran parallel to Orleans. Under the next overpass, wedged in past the thin trees, Margaret saw two blue semis parked side by side.
“Nice work,” Clarence said to the driver. “You can’t see this from up top.”
The driver nodded. “Yes sir, and it’s only a thousand feet from the crime scene.”
“What about the news helicopters?” Margaret asked. “Anyone see the trailers pull in down here?”
“No ma’am,” the driver said. “We called an air-security alert, forced the news choppers to clear out. And your two semis took a pretty roundabout route to get here. We made sure they weren’t followed.”
They parked beneath the deep shade of the overpass. Snow-speckled trash littered the area. Graffiti-covered walls sloped up either side to support the road above.
“Nice little vacation spot,” Dr. Dan said. “I should bring my girlfriend here. Impress her with my metropolitan style.”
“Not the time for humor,” Margaret said. “Let’s get in there and get samples from Officer Sanchez and the John Doe, ASAP. We need to see if they have crawlers, and if they do, how we can kill the things.”
She hoped her hunch was right, that she could disrupt the cytoskeleton of the crawlers and stop this new infection. She hadn’t been able to save Betty Jewell. She’d lost Amos. She’d stood by while Bernadette Smith screamed for help.
Even though she had yet to see him, she’d be damned if she had to lose Officer Sanchez as well.
CLIMER SPREADS THE FAITH
Private Dustin Climer peeked out of the tent that held Second Platoon. Some of those Whiskey Company guys were lurking around out there. Maybe they knew. Maybe they were spying.
They’d get theirs soon enough.
Climer turned back to look at his handiwork. He was behind schedule, but in a few hours the last of the Exterminators would be ready to roll. Most of them had already been converted. Those who hadn’t were sleeping, sweating, trying to twitch, but they couldn’t move much with their hands and feet zip-tied to their cots.
He turned to look at Private Pickens and Private Abbas. They’d been out on a patrol, filling in for a couple of sick Whiskey Company guys. Climer had had to wait for them to get back. As soon as they did, he ordered them in here, where ten soldiers jumped them, gagged them, tied them down.
Pickens was squinting and blinking, shaking his head, trying to scream through the sock stuffed in his mouth. Looked like he’d just received the smoochies.
Abbas was fighting his ass off. Even with his arms and legs tied down, it took two men sitting on his chest and thighs to control him. A smiling, one-eyed Nurse Brad bent over Abbas’s head. Brad leaned closer for the kiss. Abbas fought even harder. Two sets of hands grabbed his head, pried his mouth open. Brad pulled the sock out of Abbas’s mouth—the bound man made a strange kind of coughing noise, maybe meant to be a scream, and then Brad gave him God’s love.
That was the last of them. Another five to seven hours and all of X-Ray Company would be ready and able to serve General Ogden and Chelsea.
JOHN DOE
Margaret Montoya had her hands full.
A naked, overweight, red-bearded John Doe lay on her autopsy trolley. Golf-ball-size pustules dotted his body. When she’d entered the trailer three hours ago, the pustules had only been the size of big marbles—even though he was dead as dead can be, the shiny, thin, air-filled growths had continued to slowly expand.
While they’d been preparing him for examination, many of the pustules had popped or torn open, leaving gaping pink sores all over his skin. Each burst spread a pollenlike substance that drifted in the air, coating the walls and counters and equipment with thin layers of gray dust.
When she looked at that dust, she saw her worst fears. This dust, this
contagious
dust . . . it might very well be the end of the world. It was nothing but pure luck that Officer Sanchez had found the body when the pustules were still small, the size of pencil erasers. Pustules that size didn’t contain as many spores. The longer the corpse sat, the more the pustules grew, the more dust they contained. They might grow so large they could infect multiple people in one shot. And if some of those people moved to other parts of the city, or beyond into the state, to other cities . . . then there would be no stopping it. Gitsh mopped the floor while Marcus sprayed the other surfaces down with concentrated bleach. Dr. Dan had already taken samples from the unconscious Officer Sanchez and was now gathering them from the John Doe’s body. Dan leaned in close, trying to cut free one of the air-filled pustules without breaking it. This was his third try, as evidenced by the two thin spots of gray powder already dotting his face shield.
The John Doe had tested positive for cellulose, yet he wasn’t rotting. No apoptosis. Why? The disease
knew.
It knew it had found another way to spread. Rapid decomposition no longer served a purpose.
Margaret dragged her gloved finger across the surface of the autopsy trolley. She held the fingertip in front of her, examining the gray powder.
Correction, the gray
spores.
“Dan,” she said, still staring at the powder on her fingertip. “Keep gathering samples. I’m going to run the battery of tests to see what can kill the crawlers you got from Officer Sanchez.”
“You better take a look at this first,” Dan said. He was standing now, no longer hunched over. He had one hand on John Doe’s jaw and was peering into the dead man’s open mouth.
Margaret walked to the other side of the trolley and looked in. The man’s tongue was swollen and covered in small blue triangles.
“Smurf tongue,” Dan said. “Nothing else on his body looks like this. What do you think it is?”
Margaret grabbed a scalpel and a sample container.
“I think,” she said as she sliced out a little chunk of tongue, “that we’re looking at a contagion vector.”
“But what about the pustules?”
“The pustules form after death,” Margaret said. “The tongue must spread the disease while the host is still alive.”
“Ewww,” Dan said. “You’re thinking they
lick
you?”
She shrugged. “No way of knowing. We’ll have to see if the same sores develop in Officer Sanchez. If they do, we know we have a continuing vector, one host to the next. Marcus, assist Dan. Gitsh, keep mopping and wiping everything down. Clarence, are you suited up?”
“Yes ma’am,” she heard in her earpiece. “I’m in Trailer B right now, with Officer Sanchez.”
“How is he?”
“Conscious now, but still kind of out of it. Complaining of a fever and body aches. He doesn’t want to be strapped down, but he understands. I think as long as I’m here with him, he’ll be okay. I can do that unless you need me to do something else.”
“I don’t need anything from you,” Margaret said. “Just stay there and stay out of my way.”
She hadn’t forgiven him for Bernadette. She wasn’t going to. Clarence Otto was just like the rest of these heartless butchers.
Dew, Murray, even Perry. Their business was death, and Clarence was one of them. Margaret’s business was life.
And that’s what she would give to Officer Carmen Sanchez.
PERRY GETS HIS GUN
Perry did pull-ups on the branch of a fat oak tree in the Jewells’ front yard.
One after another, pull, lower, pull, lower. He didn’t cheat, either, didn’t let his body just drop—the let-downs took twice as long as the actual pull-ups. His breath crystalized in front of him each time he reached the top. Everyone kept bitching about the cold, but he loved it. He wasn’t far from where he’d grown up. Hell, he’d played against this town back in high school, the Cheboygan Chiefs against the Gaylord Blue Devils. This weather wasn’t
cold,
it was
home.
Pull, lower.
He looked at the rope swing farther down the branch. Snow covered the little wooden seat. He wondered if Chelsea had sat on that.
Maybe her dad had pushed her.
Maybe she’d laughed.
Pull, lower.
He had to find her. He knew that, but at the same time he didn’t want to go anywhere near her. He’d felt her power, exponentially higher than that of the hatchlings that tried to tell him what to do. They were merely a nuisance, but she . . . she pulled at something deep in his soul.
He didn’t know why her commands felt different. They just did. If she grew more powerful, he really didn’t know if he could stand against her.
The sound of footsteps in the snow. He recognized the heavy-footed rhythm of a man with a limp.
“Dawsey,” Dew said. “I have something for you.”
“You missed Christmas,” Perry said. “Trying to make up for lost time?”
“Something like that. You know why I’m here.”
Pull, lower.
“I’m not fucking going in there, Dew, so forget it.”
“It’s contagious now.”
Perry stopped in mid-pull. He looked at Dew, then dropped to the ground. He stumbled a little from the pain in his knee, then stood tall and crossed his arms.
Dew nodded. “They found some John Doe in Detroit. Cop found his body. Cop touched him, then tested positive for cellulose. Things just got even worse. You have to go in there and talk to the hatchlings, maybe see if you can reach Chelsea again—Perry, you have to find the gate.”