Contagious

TAD TAKES A LEAP

They were going to get him.

Tad wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he had to kill himself.

The window slid open.

Curtains blew back, thrown by the same nighttime wind that splashed cold rain and bits of ice into the face of Thadeus “Tad” McMillian Jr.

He hoped his little brother wouldn’t wake up. When Sam woke up, he cried loud. Real, real loud. His cries always brought Mom and Dad.

Mom and Dad, who wanted to get Tad.

Tad got down off of his toy box. He picked up the box and lugged it over to his brother’s crib. Carrying it hurt the blisters on his hands, but he had to stand on the toy box to reach inside the crib, just like he needed it to reach the sliding window’s latch. Tad set the box down next to the crib, stood on top and reached in to pull the blankets up tight under the baby’s chin. That would keep Sam warm. Tad gently brushed his brother’s hair, then leaned in and kissed the baby on the forehead.

“Good-bye,” Tad whispered.

He got down and lugged the box to the window one last time.

“Good luck, Sam,” Tad said quietly, looking back at his brother. “I really hope you don’t wind up like Sara.”

Tad held on to the window frame as he put his feet up on the metal sash. Freezing rain instantly soaked his shirt. Bits of wet ice stung his face. A gust of wind almost blew him back, but he adjusted his balance and held on.

It was better this way. Anything was better than staying here.

Tad McMillian jumped into the night.

OGDEN GETS READY TO RUMBLE

Not too far outside of South Bloomingville, Ohio, in the hushed darkness of winter woods, Colonel Charlie Ogden stood tall behind a loose line of nine men. The men were his personal squad, Fifth Platoon, X-Ray Company, Domestic Reaction Battalion. X-Ray Company was the unit’s official name, but in the usual testosterone-stoked spirit of the military the men called themselves something else.

They called themselves the Exterminators.

The boys had even come up with unit insignia: a lightning bolt hitting an upside-down cockroach. They wore it on the right shoulder. Under it they added small black triangle patches for each combat mission, and decorated the triangle with a white X for each monster killed.

Ogden’s sleeve had two black triangles. The first triangle bore two white X’s. That was because Colonel Charlie Ogden didn’t sit in a Hummer miles from the action. He led from the front. And when you led from the front, sometimes you had to fight.

But that didn’t mean he was stupid—his personal squad was the best of the Exterminators, men who could chew rusty Buicks and shit stainless-steel nails. The fifth platoon of any company usually consisted of support staff, drivers, armorers—mostly noncombat troops—but since Ogden could do just about whatever he wanted, he’d given himself a personal guard that could jump into any fight at any time.

On Ogden’s left stood Corporal Jeff Cope, his ten-pounds-too-heavy communications man. On his right, the swarthy Sergeant Major Lucas Mazagatti, his top NCO. Behind him, observing, stood the overly tanned Captain David Lodge, commander of Whiskey Company, and Lodge’s massive, intense sergeant major, Devon “Nails” Nealson.

“Give me an update, Corporal,” Ogden said.

“Third Platoon will be in position, due west of the target, in ten minutes,” Cope said. “Fourth will take up security posture to the northwest of target in twenty minutes. First and Second platoons in position just ahead of us, sir.”

The 120 men of X-Ray Company were almost ready.

“Excellent,” Ogden said. “Air support?”

“Predator drones to northeast of target,” Cope said. “Four Apaches on station one mile out. Target is painted, the Apaches can destroy it at any time. Two F-15Es with GBU-31s on station five miles out. Two more F-15Es in reserve, seven miles out.”

“Very well.”

He turned to face Captain Lodge. “How about you, David?”

“Whiskey Company is a mile due west, Colonel,” Lodge said. “We’re ready to go.”

Nealson leaned forward to speak, or more accurately for his six-foot-three frame, he leaned down. “Any chance we’ll get in on this one, sir?” He said it a bit loudly for Ogden’s taste, but for Nealson that was a whisper. His regular speaking voice was three or four times that of a normal man’s, and his shout would make you look for a place to hide.

“Nails,” Ogden said, “the only way Whiskey’s involved is if we’re overrun and I drop bombs on our own position, then you guys come in to clean up whatever is left. So let’s hope you get to take the night off. Lodge, I want you and Nails back with your men twenty minutes before the attack begins.”

Nealson returned to an at-ease stance. He looked disappointed. Lodge tried not to look relieved, but he clearly was. Lodge was an exceptional pencil pusher, but perhaps not a true warrior soul.

Only one question remained—what new tricks did the little bastards have in store?

Ogden looked through night-vision binoculars, taking in all the details of their objective, two hundred yards due north. He stared at the glowing, now-familiar shape. It consisted of two twenty-foot-long parallel objects that resembled big logs lying side by side. The log structures led into a set of four curving arches, the first about ten feet high, the next three successively larger with the final arch topping out at around twenty feet. All of the objects, both logs and arches, had an irregular, organic surface.

But something was different this time.

The last two times he’d seen such a structure, all the pieces had been much thicker: thicker logs, thicker arches. This one looked kind of…anorexic.

Mud surrounded the thing, the result of snow melted by the structure’s heat. The first two constructs had put off a huge heat bloom. Satellite readouts had measured them both at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This one held a steady 110 degrees. And one other key difference: the first construct, in Wahjamega, Michigan, had shown action, something going on inside the cone, only an hour after heating up. This one had been hot for almost three hours.

But there was still no movement.

At Wahjamega they’d seemed to catch the hatchlings off guard. The creatures had been crawling all over the construct, and when they’d detected Ogden’s men, they’d attacked. The battle had been something out of a nightmare—pyramid-shaped monsters sprinting forward on black tentacle-legs, rushing right into automatic-weapons fire. Some of the monsters made it past the bullets, forcing his men into brutal, close-quarters fighting.

Eight men died.

Three weeks after Wahjamega, Perry Dawsey had discovered another construct in the deep woods near Mather, Wisconsin. Ogden’s primary objective was to capture or destroy the Mather construct before it could activate, but the brass had given him a secondary objective: capture a living hatchling. But that time it was the hatchlings that caught the Exterminators off guard. The creatures had actually set up a perimeter about a hundred yards around the construct. They’d been hiding up in the damn trees; his men literally walked right under the things. When the Exterminators closed to about seventy-five yards from the construct, the hatchlings had dropped down and attacked from behind.

As soon as they dropped, the construct activated. In the confusion of hand-to-hand, Ogden had no idea of the enemy’s numbers. The whole unit might have been overrun, so he didn’t hesitate—he called in air support to make sure he completed the primary objective. Apache rockets tore the thing to pieces.

That hadn’t left much to study, not that it mattered; just like at Wahjamega, the broken pieces of construct dissolved into pools of black goo within hours of the Apache strike. His men also failed to capture a hatchling, but Ogden wasn’t about to lecture them—it was a little much to expect men ambushed by monsters to worry about anything other than survival.

Twelve men died in that fight.

From a purely tactical perspective, casualties weren’t a problem. Charlie Ogden’s unit was so far into a secret black budget that even light probably couldn’t escape. He needed replacements? He got them. He needed equipment? Whatever he wanted, including experimental weapons, even ten Stinger surface-to-air missiles just in case some flying thing came out of those gates. Resupply? Transport? Air support? Same deal. Ogden took orders from Murray Longworth. Murray interfaced directly with the Joint Chiefs and the president. It was a heady bit of power, truth be told—no requisition, no approval, just tell Corporal Cope to place a request and things showed up as if by magic.

The blank check for men and equipment was key to mission success. So was an open-ended flexibility that let him move instantly, without orders, without approval, to wherever the danger might lie. He had to be flexible and fast, because the Mather engagement showed a clear change in hatchling tactics. They had expected an infantry assault. They had learned from the first encounter, learned and adapted.

That chewed at Ogden’s soul. His men had killed all the hatchlings in Wahjamega, and they hadn’t found anything that might be communication equipment. How had the Wahjamega hatchlings communicated with the Mather hatchlings?

Despite the change in tactics, the hatchlings still lost at Mather, which meant they’d likely change tactics again—so what was Ogden facing this time? His men had scanned the trees. Scanned everything. Normal vision, night vision, infrared, advance scouts. Nothing other than the hatchlings on the construct. No picket line, no perimeter. Odgen couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to be waiting for his men to come in.

He had his objectives, his attack options. The first option, use infantry to take the construct intact. Should that fail, hit it with the second option—Apache rockets. If needed, the Strike Eagles would deliver the third option: dropping enough two-thousand-pound bombs to turn a one-square-mile patch of Ohio into a burning crater. That would kill all his men and Ogden himself, but if it came to that, they’d have already been overrun.

Should that third option fail, the president would have no choice but to authorize what had been dubbed simply Option Number Four.

And Charlie Ogden really didn’t want to think about that.

He checked his watch again. Fifty minutes. Normally he’d attack as soon as the men were in position. He could still do that if he saw the need, but this time things were going to be a little different.

This time he’d have an audience. A career-making audience, the kind that could move him from a colonel’s eagle to a general’s star.

Charlie raised the night-vision goggles again and stared at the glowing construct. He hoped Murray could keep things on schedule at his end, because in fifty minutes, president or no president, Charlie Ogden was going in.

TAD, MEET MR. DAWSEY

Tad’s shivering brought him out of it.

He rolled on the grass, wondering if he was already dead. His shoulder hurt real bad. He didn’t feel dead—he was still moving. When people jumped out of windows on TV, they hit the ground and didn’t move. He rolled to his butt. Cold water seeped into the seat of his jeans.

Tad slowly stood. His legs hurt real bad, too. He took a deep breath, the rain and bits of ice splashing inside his wide-open mouth. He looked up, at the second-story window open to the night sky. Weird—it seemed like such a big drop from up in his room, but from down here it was about as high as a basketball hoop.

It didn’t matter how high it was or it wasn’t. He was out. Out of the house.

Okay, so he wasn’t dead… but he wasn’t going back in there, either.

Tad ran. His legs hurt, but they worked, and that was enough. He sprinted out to the side of the road and turned left. He pounded down a sidewalk cracked by tree roots and slick with slush.

He sprinted hard. He looked up just before running headlong into a man.

A huge man.

Tad stopped, frozen on the spot. The man was so big that Tad momentarily forgot about the house, his mom, his dad, his sister, even little Sam.

The man stood there, lit by a streetlamp that formed a cone of mist and light and wind-whipped, streaking rain. He looked down out of glowering blue eyes. He wore jeans and a wet short-sleeved, gray T-shirt that clung to his enormous muscles like a superhero costume. Long blond hair matted his head and face like a mask. A big, baseball-size twisted scar marred the skin of his left forearm.

The giant man spoke. “Are you…?” His voice trailed off. His eyes narrowed for a moment. Then they opened, like he’d just remembered something very cool. “Are you… Tad?”

Tad nodded.

“Tad,” the man said. “Do you feel itchy?”

Tad shook his head. The man turned his right ear toward Tad, tilted his head down a bit, as he might have done if Tad was whispering and he was trying to hear.

“This is important,” the man said. “Are you sure? Are you really, really sure you’re not itchy? Not even a little?”

Tad thought about this carefully, then nodded again.

The man knelt on one knee. Even kneeling, he still had to bend his head to look Tad in the eye. The man slowly reached out with a giant’s hand, placing his palm gently on Tad’s head. Thick fingers curled down around Tad’s left temple, while a thumb as big as Tad’s whole fist locked down on his right cheek.

Tad kept very, very still.

The man turned Tad’s head back and to the right.

“Tad, what happened to your eye?”

Tad said nothing.

“Tad, don’t piss me off,” the man said. “What happened to your eye?”

“Daddy hit me.”

The man’s eyes narrowed again.

“Your daddy hit you?”

Tad nodded. Or tried to—he couldn’t move his head.

The man stood. Tad barely came up to his belt.

The man let go of Tad’s head and pointed back the way Tad had come. “Is that your house?”

Tad didn’t need to look. He just nodded.

“How did you leave?”

“Jumped out the window,” Tad said.

“Run along, Tad,” the man said. He reached behind his back and pulled out a long piece of black metal, bent at one end. Tad recognized it from when he and his family were on that trip to Cedar Point last summer, when Dad had to fix a flat.

It was a tire iron.

The man walked down the road, heading for Tad’s house.

Tad watched him for a few seconds. Then he remembered that he was running away, and what he was running away from. He sprinted down the sidewalk.

He made it one block before he stopped again. Who knew that running away would have so many distractions? First that great big superhero man, now a car accident. A fancy red and white Mustang and a little white hatchback, smashed head-on. The Mustang’s trunk was open. The little white car’s driver’s-side door was also open. The inside light of the hatchback lit up a man lying motionless, his feet still next to the gas pedal, his back on the wet pavement.

The man had blood all over his face.

And he was holding a gun.

There was another man in the passenger’s seat, not moving, leaned forward, face resting on a deflated air bag.

Over the pouring rain and the strong wind, Tad heard a small voice.

“Report!” the voice said. “Goddamit, Claude, report!”

Tad knew he should just keep running. But what if his parents came after him? Maybe he needed that gun.

Tad walked up to the man lying on the pavement. Rain steadily washed the blood off the man’s face and onto the wet-black concrete.

“Baum! Where are you?”

The voice was coming from a little piece of white plastic lying next to the man’s head. It was one of those ear receivers, just like they used on Frankie Anvil, his favorite TV show. Maybe this man was a cop, like Frankie.

Cops would take him away, protect him from Mom and Dad.

Tad looked at the earpiece for a second, then picked it up. “Hello?”

“Baum? Is that you?”

“No,” Tad said. “My name is Tad.”

A pause.

“Tad, my name is Dew Phillips. Do you know where Mister Baumgartner is?”

“Um… no,” Tad said. “Wait, does Mister Baumgartner have a big black mustache?”

“Yes! That’s him, is he there?”

“Oh,” Tad said. “Well, he’s lying on the ground here, bleeding and stuff.”

“Shit,” Mr. Phillips said. “Tad, how old are you?”

“I’m seven. Are you the police?”

A pause. “Yeah, sure, I’m a policeman.”

Tad let out a long sigh. The police. He was almost safe.

“Tad, is there another man around, a man named Mister Milner?”

“I don’t know,” Tad said. “Is Mister Milner like, really, really big?

“No,” Mr. Phillips said. “That’s someone else.”

“Oh,” Tad said. “Mister Milner might be the short guy in the passenger seat, but he looks dead. Can you send someone to get me? I’m not going back home.”

Mr. Phillips spoke again. This time his voice was calm and slow. “We’ll send someone to get you right away. Tad, listen carefully, that really big man you talked about… is he there with you now?”

“No, he’s gone,” Tad said. “I think he’s going into my house.”

“Your house?”

“Yes sir. I live right down the street.”

“Okay, hold on to that earpiece. We’ll use it to find you. Give me your address, and then whatever direction you saw that big man walking, you run the opposite way. And run fast.”

THE SITUATION ROOM

The elevator opened at the bottom level of the West Wing. Tom Maskill and Murray Longworth walked out. Murray had made many trips to the White House in the past thirty years, of course, but none this significant, and none with this caliber of an audience: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, the chief of staff and, of course, the president.

There were actually two Situation Rooms under the White house. The first one could handle about three dozen people. That was the one seen on TV shows, in movies and in newscasts.

They walked right by it.

Tom led him through mahogany doors into the smaller of the two Situation Rooms. Like its more famous counterpart, this room sported mahogany paneling and nearly wall-to-wall video screens. This one, however, was more discreet. One mahogany conference table ran down the middle of the room, six chairs on either side. Very few people even knew that this room existed—it was mostly for situations unfit for public consumption.

Military men filled the chairs on the table’s left side (the president’s left, of course). Next to the president sat Donald Martin, secretary of defense, then General Hamilton Barnes, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, army general Peter Franco, air force general Luis Monroe, Admiral Nathan Begeley, head of the navy, and finally the highly opinionated, buzz-cut-wearing General Monty Cooper, marines.

Vanessa sat on the other side of the table, first chair to the right of the president. Then Tom’s chair, then the space for Murray. Empty chairs lined the walls. These were usually occupied by junior officials, assistants, but today everyone was flying solo. They couldn’t afford a leak. Maybe Gutierrez still wanted to reveal everything to the public, but at least he understood that until such a time came, they couldn’t afford extraneous eyes and ears.

“Mister President,” Murray said. “The attack is scheduled to begin in forty-five minutes. If I may, sir, I’d like to take advantage of the time to bring you up to date on another development.”

Gutierrez sighed and sagged back into his chair. Murray couldn’t blame him for showing frustration—what with the Iranians, increased hostility between India and Pakistan, the Palestinian complications, Russian troops rattling sabers over Arctic oil and, of course, Project Tangram, it had to be the longest first eight days in office any president had ever faced.

Gutierrez stayed slouched for a second, then sat up again and straightened his coat. It seemed a clear effort to look more presidential. He nodded at Murray.

“We’ve detected another possible host location,” Murray said. “Near Glidden, Wisconsin.”

“Is that anywhere near Bloomingville, where Ogden is going to attack?” Gutierrez asked.

“South Bloomingville, sir,” Murray said. “And no, it’s about seven hundred miles away. Glidden is near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”

“Is there a another construct?” Vanessa asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Murray said. “Dew Phillips is in Glidden, trying to find parasite hosts who could identify the construct’s location. He’s using Perry Dawsey to track down the hosts.”

“Dawsey?” Vanessa said.

“He’s under control,” Murray said.

“Under control,” Vanessa said coolly. “I did a little fact-finding. When infected, Dawsey killed his friend Bill Miller. He killed Kevin Mest, the person who gave him the Mather location, and then it seems you forgot to tell us he burned three little old ladies to death to get the South Bloomingville location.”

Murray blinked. How had she found out about that?

“That was self-defense,” Murray said.

Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Three women in their eighties, Murray? Self-defense?”

The president’s eyes narrowed. “Murray, is this true?”

She’d saved this up and sprung it on him, right in front of the president.

“Yes, Mister President, but I’m not kidding about self-defense. Those ladies were infected. They tried to fire-bomb Dawsey with a Molotov cocktail. Apparently, he caught it and threw it back.”

“That’s five deaths,” Vanessa said. “Tell us, Murray, why are you still using him?”

“We don’t really have a choice, ma’am,” Murray said. “As I’ve explained, the only reason we’ve found any of the gates is because Dawsey can track these hosts.”

“I understand that,” Vanessa said, her voice dripping with contempt. “Your bloodhound picked up the scent. Now send in professional soldiers, not Phillips and his pet psycho.”

Donald cleared his throat. “Vanessa, Ogden’s men are already deployed. I don’t think Murray has a choice here.”

She shot Donald a glare that spoke volumes. “Ogden has four hundred eighty men in the DOMREC,” she said, using the military acronym for Domestic Reaction Battalion. “Four companies of a hundred twenty men each. Ogden is going in with X-Ray Company and he’s got Whiskey Company on reserve there, right?”

Donald nodded.

“That leaves Companies Yankee and Zulu on the ground at Fort Bragg,” Vanessa said. “So why the hell aren’t we using them instead of Dawsey and Phillips?”

“We need to be subtle,” Murray said. “Glidden is a town, not the deep woods. If we drop two companies on Main Street, USA, that might attract a little attention.”

“And a rampaging psychopath won’t?” she said.

“That’s enough,” Gutierrez said. “Murray, I’m sure you took steps to keep Dawsey in check, am I correct?”

“Yes, Mister President,” Murray said. “We have two seasoned agents following Dawsey at all times. Dawsey will locate the hosts, then these men will move in, take Dawsey down if necessary and secure the hosts.”

General Cooper knocked twice on the table. “This is all good and fine, but we have an attack to monitor here,” he said in a voice so gruff it almost sounded like a caricature of how a marine general should talk. “Not to speak out of turn, Mister President, but there’s information we need to share so you know what you’re seeing when the attack begins.”

Gutierrez nodded. “Thank you, General Cooper. Murray, before we focus on Ogden’s attack, I want to make something clear. We know that this is a crisis situation and Americans may get hurt, but we don’t need them getting hurt by the people who are supposed to be solving the problem. Understand?”

“Yes sir,” Murray said. “I do.”

Murray did understand the need to control Dawsey—he just hoped Dew Phillips understood it as well. Vanessa Colburn wasn’t playing around. She clearly wanted Murray gone. And as much as he disliked that woman, she was right about one thing…

That kid was a fucking psycho.

YOU SHOULDN’T HIT YOUR KIDS

Dew Phillips ran a red light at the intersection of Grant and Broadway. He’d even put the port-a-bubble on top of his Lincoln, its circling light playing off the sheets of pouring rain. Fuck secrecy. He had two men down. That murdering kid was going after hosts again.

Dew wondered if any of the infected would be alive by the time Margaret arrived.

Thadeus McMillian Sr. sat at his kitchen table, bouncing his five-year-old son, Stephen, on his knee. Stephen wore his favorite fuzzy yellow pajama bottoms and a little Milwaukee Bucks T-shirt. Looked so damn cute. Stephen was the good child. Tad Jr.? Not a good child. Sara? Not a good child.

Thadeus pushed the thoughts away. He didn’t want to think about his daughter.

A dozen empty beer bottles stood on the table, leaving wet ring-stains on the map spread across the table’s surface. There were more beer bottles on the floor, along with a half-empty fifth of gin. He didn’t drink gin. His wife, Jenny, guzzled the stuff.

The fucking alcoholic bitch.

She’d been a three-martini-a-day girl up until Junior started acting up. Since then she’d skipped the martini glasses altogether and started pouring gin right into her favorite Hello Kitty coffee cup. Every time she took a sip, that stupid cartoon cat seemed to stare at him.

Limping along on one crutch, Jenny hobbled into the kitchen. She couldn’t put weight on the foot, which was understandable if you saw the thing (and Thad had no desire to ever see it again). Jenny’s insistence on keeping Ginny Kitty in hand at all times complicated the crutch-walk even more.

She stopped just past the open doorway between the kitchen and the stairway that led up to the kids’ rooms.

She stared at him. So did that fucking cat.

“What are we gonna do about that boy of yours?” she asked.

Thadeus shrugged. “Dunno.”

“He’s a bad influence on Stephen and Sammy,” she said. “I don’t know why you let him run wild.”

“Look, I grounded him,” Thadeus said. “What else can we do?”

“You can discipline him,” she said. Thadeus looked away, ashamed. He had disciplined the boy… maybe a little too much. He’d hit his own son. Right in the face. Not slapped, but punched. How could he do that to his own flesh and blood? And yet the boy was acting so crazy. Something had to be done.

“Thadeus,” Jenny said, “we have to go, you know we do. They’re almost done, and we haven’t even left yet. We can’t take Junior, and we can’t leave him behind, either.”

He nodded slowly. Maybe Jenny was right. For fourteen years, ever since their first date, he’d been able to count on her for sound advice. Maybe she could see the obvious when he couldn’t, he didn’t know. Maybe she just cared for him enough to give tough love.

He hung his head, stared absently at the back of little Stephen’s head. Junior had always been his favorite. You weren’t supposed to have a favorite child, he knew, yet he couldn’t change the fact that Junior lit up his heart just a little more than the others. Maybe that was why he’d been so lenient.

“All right, Jenny,” Thadeus said. “Get him in here.”

Jenny leaned back so she could shout up the steps to the second floor.

“Junior! Come into the kitchen! Your father and I want to talk to you.”

She leaned forward again, resting heavily on her crutch. They heard Tad’s bedroom door open. It always squeaked. Thadeus kept meaning to oil the hinges, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

“You’ve got to have a firm hand,” Jenny said flatly. “You must not waver. You must be strong, just like you were with Sara.”

Sara. He didn’t want to think about Sara.

Tad stomped down the stairs, stomped fast.

But how could a little boy sound so heavy?

Thadeus watched Jenny lean back into the hall again.

An arm, a huge arm, lashing down, a hissing sound like a golf club swinging just before it hits the ball.

Then a dull, wet thonk, like the sound of a watermelon dropped on the floor.

Jenny’s head snapped down, then limply bounced back up but only halfway. The very top of her head wobbled like shaking Jell-O. She managed one staggering step, then dropped to the floor. Her Ginny Kitty cup landed with a ceramic clank, spilling four shots’ worth of liquor onto the kitchen’s linoleum.

Thadeus’s grip on little Stephen tightened as he stood. He started to come around the table, heading to the kitchen counter to grab a knife, a frying pan, something, when the monstrous man turned the corner.

Thadeus McMillian Sr. froze in his tracks.

“Holy fuck,” he said.

The huge, wet, blond nightmare stood in his kitchen doorway. Thadeus had seen a man that big once. Almost that big. He’d met Detroit Lions’ defensive tackle Dusty Smith in a bar. Dusty was six-foot-four, 270 pounds. More like a refrigerator with legs than a human being.

This guy was bigger than Dusty Smith.

And Dusty Smith hadn’t been holding a tire iron.

In one hand the man held the tire iron that had just killed Jenny. In the other massive hand, he held Thadeus’s baby, Sam. He wasn’t cradling Sam; he was holding the tiny baby the way you might pick up a toy doll that’s been left on the floor. Thumb and forefinger circled Sammy’s little neck, the three remaining fingers wrapped around Sammy’s yellow-pajama-clad body.

Sammy’s eyes were closed.

Oh no it’s him!

The voices in Thad’s head. They had been quiet most of the evening.

It’s the sonofabitch!

“I’m here to help you,” the sonofabitch said.

Little Stephen raised an arm and pointed at the man. He spoke in his baby-boy voice.

“Da-dee,” he said “Kill dis moderfucker.”

Stephen suddenly squirmed and kicked. Thad dropped him. The little boy fell clumsily, but scrambled to his feet. Stephen’s little Milwaukee Bucks T-shirt slid up when he stood, exposing a light blue triangle on the skin at the small of his back. The boy screamed a murderous, gravelly battle cry that sounded almost comical from such a tiny voice, then charged the giant man.

The sonofabitch took a step forward and kicked, swinging his hips into the blow. Stephen made a little staccato sound when the foot connected, a half-cough, half-squeal. His small body shot across the room like it had been fired from a cannon. With a sickening snap, Stephen’s right side slammed into the edge of the kitchen table. The impact tilted the table back, spilling beer bottles onto the linoleum before it rocked back to level. Stephen’s body, still bent at an odd angle to the right, hit the floor.

The boy’s little fingers twitched a bit, but other than that he didn’t move.

Thadeus reached the counter, yanked open a drawer and pulled out a butcher knife.

Yessss kill him KILL HIM!

He turned to face the man murdering his family, but as he did, he saw a flash of spinning black, then his head filled with a sudden darkness and pain. He fell to the floor, blinking, thoughts slipping in and out. He tried to spit. A chunk of tooth barely escaped his lips and hung on his right cheek, plastered there by blood and saliva.

Get up, get up!

A hand around his neck, lifting him.

His feet, dangling.

Kill him, KILL HIM!

His breath… non ex is tent.

Thadeus opened his eyes. The man-monster’s face was only an inch away. Two days’ growth of reddish beard. A snarl. Thadeus stared into blue eyes wide with madness.

“You shouldn’t hit your kids,” the man said.

Thadeus heard an approaching siren, but it was too late. The hand around his neck might as well have been an iron vise. It squeezed, slow and steady.

“It’s okay,” the man said. He smiled. “I’m here to help you.”

Breathe! said the voice in his head, the same voice that had made him kill his only daughter. Fight! You have to breathe!

Thadeus felt his bladder let go, felt the heat of piss filling his underwear and jeans, then felt his sphincter offer up the same betrayal. Even in the act of dying, he somehow had a flash of embarrassment.

He would’ve liked to have said one last thing. He would’ve liked to tell the voices in his head to stick it where the sun don’t shine, but he couldn’t make any noise at all save for a tiny, hissing gurgle.

THE MARGOMOBILE

Margaret Montoya, Clarence Otto and Amos Braun sat in comfortable seats in the customized sleeper cabin of a semi tractor-trailer. The massive eighteen-wheeler rolled north along Highway 13, followed closely by a second, outwardly identical rig. The two trailers, designed to work together as one unit, were worth about $25 million and had come to be known collectively as the “MargoMobile.”

The three sat biggest to smallest, a cross section of cultures—Clarence’s chocolate skin and tall, muscular bulk on the left; Margaret with her long black hair and Hispanic complexion in the middle; and the diminutive, oh-so-Caucasian Amos on the right. Those two men constituted one half of Margaret’s team. The other half drove the rigs. Anthony Gitsham handled this one, Marcus Thompson drove the other. Murray’s single-minded mission to keep “those in the know” to the absolute minimum had landed Gitsh and Marcus this choice assignment, thanks to their rather unique set of skills.

Both men had logged at least a hundred hours driving a semi, had medical-assistant training, combat experience and—the big one—hands-on experience with biohazard procedures and gear. Gitsh had driven army rigs in the Mideast and traded small-arms fire a few times, but Clint Eastwood he was not. Clint wasn’t as pale, wasn’t as skinny and didn’t have a ’fro that made him look like a white Black Panthers wannabe from 1974. Marcus was something of a study in contrast to Anthony, with his deep black skin, shaved head and enough wiry muscle for both men. Marcus’s combat experience, apparently, was rather extensive. He didn’t talk about it, and no one asked. From what Margaret could gather, being assigned to drive a truck and lug around rotting corpses that might or might not be fatally infectious… well, that was like a vacation for Marcus. Maybe it was why he whistled all the damn time.

Her whole team was already dressed in black biohazard suits, completely covering them in airtight PVC material save for their exposed heads and hands. She was so used to the suit that she didn’t give it a second thought anymore. A silly, uncontrollable part of her liked the the fact that it hid the extra weight on her hips.

When it came time to go in, they’d all don the gloves clipped to their belts and the helmets sitting at their feet, pressurize the suits, and they’d be ready to face the latest horrors in an endless, gruesome parade.

Horrors that always seemed to involve one “Scary” Perry Dawsey.

Margaret didn’t know how or why Perry could still hear the triangles. CAT scans showed a network of very thin lines spreading through the center of his brain, like a 3-D spiderweb or a spongy mesh. While she was fighting to keep him alive, she hadn’t dared risk trying to get a sample of the material. Any additional trauma on his ravaged body could have been the final straw. Since he’d regained consciousness, Perry wouldn’t even talk about the incident—it was no surprise he wouldn’t let anyone slide a drill into his skull.

Even if they could get a sample, it probably wouldn’t do them any good—the National Security Agency, the group that handled signal intelligence and cryptography for the government, detected no signals of any kind. The triangles and hatchlings communicated, yet no one knew how. The NSA’s prevailing theory involved some form of communication via quantum tunneling, but that was guesswork at best without a shred of data to back it up.

Whatever the science behind it, Perry’s homing instinct had been the only thing keeping them in the game. Unfortunately, when he found infected hosts, he killed them. First Kevin Mest, who had butchered three friends with a fireplace poker. Perry claimed self-defense for that one, and everyone bought it. His self-defense claim for burning three eighty-year-old women alive? Well, that was a little harder to swallow.

But whatever he had done, however ugly, he found the constructs. Kevin Mest’s death resulted in Ogden destroying the one at Mather. The three elderly ladies Perry had burned to death? Because of them, Ogden was in South Bloomingville right now, hopefully taking that construct out as well.

Glidden would be different. Dew had said so. His men, Claude Baumgartner and Jens Milner, were watching Perry at all times. They would deliver live hosts. When they did, she knew she could operate on the infected and successfully remove the parasites.

Murray wanted live hosts for other reasons, reasons that created a bit of a catch-22. He wanted to interrogate the triangles. Good in theory, but Margaret would operate to remove any growths she found. If that killed the triangle but saved a host, too bad for Murray. Her job was to save lives, not keep someone chained up as a parasite interpreter.

Clarence studied a map resting on his knees. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, then let out an exasperated sigh.

“Come on, Margo, this suit is annoying,” he said. “I’m taking it off.”

“Clarence, give it a rest,” Margaret said. “I don’t want to go over this again.”

“But there’s no purpose for this thing,” Clarence said. “Dew has been around dozens of corpses—he hasn’t contracted anything.”

“Yet.”

Amos smiled. “You look like a black Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s not a good look for you.”

“And you look like a short KKK grand dragon who washed his whites with his darks,” Clarence said. He looked at Margaret again. “And what about Dawsey? You fixed him up, you didn’t start growing triangles. This suit is making me sweat, and sweaty is definitely not a good look for me.”

Margaret would beg to differ on that. She’d seen CIA agent Clarence Otto all sweaty, seen him that way up close and personal, been all sweaty herself at the same time, and she couldn’t imagine a better look for him.

Amos laughed. “You serve up a softball about being all sweaty? I’m not even touching that one. Seriously, Otto, you have to make it a little harder to make fun of you two boinking whenever you think no one is looking.”

“That suit will stop microbes,” Clarence said. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t offer much protection against a pistol-whipping.”

Amos laughed again and held up his hands palms out: okay, okay, take it easy.

Clarence talked tough, intimidating gravel voice and all, but over the past three months he and Amos had become fast friends. Clarence Otto was just flat-out likable. Witty, helpful, respectful and with a major streak of deductive common sense, he often put a strategic perspective on Margaret and Amos’s scientific discoveries. As for Amos, his multidisciplinary expertise and sheer brilliance had helped the team stay one step ahead of the infection. More like a half step, maybe, but at least they were still ahead.

At some point in the past three months, both men had revealed a love for basketball. Otto, a former Division III point guard and a lifelong fan of the Boston Celtics, discovered that short, frail little Amos Braun had a wicked outside jumper. Well, calling it a “jumper” was a stretch—he came off the ground maybe three inches when he shot. Amos couldn’t play one-on-one to save his life. At a game of H-O-R-S-E, however, he could beat Otto six times out of ten. Amos was also a lifelong hoops fan, although he preferred the Detroit Pistons, giving the two men plenty to argue about in the many hours when there wasn’t a corpse on the autopsy table.

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “no one has been infected by contact, but that doesn’t mean the disease isn’t contagious. There could also be toxins we haven’t seen yet, or something else that could hurt you. That suit will keep you safe, so it stays on.”

Otto sighed. “Yes sir.”

“You made her this way,” Amos said. “I remember when Margaret was a total pushover. You’re the one that got her on the Gloria Steinem express, all women-libbed and everything.”

“I know, I know,” Otto said. “I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Keep her barefoot and in the kitchen.”

“Don’t forget pregnant,” Amos said. “But you’re working on that.”

Margaret felt her face flush red. “Amos! Knock it off!”

“Amos, my diminutive white friend,” Otto said, “you’re just mad that a fine-looking black man is getting all the action.”

“Fine-looking until you put on that suit and get all sweaty,” Amos said. “Then you look like a half-chewed Tootsie Roll.”

Margaret sighed. The juvenile name-calling never ceased. She just didn’t get men.

Otto smiled and nodded, which meant he had a killer comeback, but his cell phone chirped before he could speak. There was only one person who would be calling. Clarence answered.

“Otto here.” He listened. His smile faded into an expression that was all business. He pinched the cell phone between his shoulder and ear, then looked at the map.

“We’ll be there in three minutes.” He hung up.

“What’s the matter?” Margaret asked.

“Baum and Milner are down,” Otto said. “A kid named Tad found them, said Dawsey was going to his house.”

Otto leaned forward to give Gitsh directions.

Margaret cursed under her breath. If Perry got to the hosts first…

LESS LETHAL

Staccato gunfire echoed through the woods as Third Platoon opened the engagement, making the dark western tree line sparkle with bright muzzle flashes. First Platoon waited exactly three minutes, then pushed due north, straight toward the construct. Second Platoon swept east and curved north, ready to flank the hatchlings should they flee directly away from Third Platoon’s fire.

Fourth Platoon held their position. If the hatchlings fled northwest, they’d run directly into the Fourth. If they ran due north, the Fourth would strafe their flank the whole way.

Predator drones circled low to the northeast, ready to launch Hellfire missiles that would either herd the hatchlings back into the action or kill them outright.

There was nowhere for the creatures to run.

Ogden watched through night-vision goggles, ready to adapt his strategy if something unexpected popped up.

But nothing did.

“Corporal Cope, status of air support?”

“Apaches, Predators and Strike Eagles still on station, sir,” Cope said. “Ready if you need them.”

“Very well.” Ogden watched as First Platoon moved in, methodically marching forward in a squad-after-squad leapfrog style that allowed a steady advance with constant fire on the enemy position. As First Platoon closed in, Third Platoon ceased fire to avoid any friendly casualties.

Two soldiers in each nine-man squad carried a less-lethal weapon. Like all the platoons, First had three squads, putting six less-lethal weapons into the initial infantry assault.

Such weapons had once been called nonlethal, but in combat there was never a guarantee of preserving life. If you killed half the people you fought instead of all the people… well, then that wasn’t actually nonlethal, now was it?

They didn’t know what would work against the hatchlings, so they’d brought two less-lethals: the sticky gun and ShockRounds.

The sticky gun fired jets of foam that would, theoretically, tangle the hatchlings’ tentacle-legs. The guns had been used with mixed success against people in Somalia—the “mixed” part was that the foam sometimes got in the targets’ eyes, blinding them, or clogged up their mouths. Put a clogged mouth together with hands immobilized by that same foam, and within minutes you had a dead target. Somewhat unacceptable against human targets, but hatchlings were a different story—it was worth the risk.

Compared to sticky guns, the ShockRounds seemed almost normal—5.56-millimeter bullets that delivered a concentrated electric charge. These were untested, but his men didn’t have to do anything different from what they were trained to do—point their weapons and fire.

He’d avoided Tasers. Their range was just too short for his comfort. If electricity even worked on the hatchlings, he had that covered with the ShockRounds.

He’d brought the less-lethals assuming that the hatchlings would behave the way they had in the last two engagements—once the fighting began, they would rush the ground troops and force hand-to-hand fighting. He hoped the lead hatchlings could be taken down with a less-lethal, then the rest could be slaughtered with concentrated conventional fire.

But this time the hatchlings didn’t attack.

Ogden watched the construct. The little monsters moved around the structure itself, scuttled across the ground surrounding it, but they didn’t come out to engage. One by one they shuddered as bullets tore through their plasticine skins. Gouts of their purple blood looked gray through the night-vision goggles, spraying on the ground in stringy strands before the hatchlings collapsed into twitching heaps. If any of those bullets were ShockRounds, they punched through the hatchlings just like normal ammo.

Why the hell weren’t they fighting back?

He had a bad feeling he knew why—another trap. Something new. He had no choice but to push forward and hope his attack plan allowed enough flexibility to react when that trap was sprung.

Corporal Cope lowered the handset and held it against his chest.

“Colonel, First and Second platoons report no resistance. Nothing is coming out to attack. They estimate enemy forces are down to maybe five or six individuals.”

“Order immediate cease-fire of lethal weaponry,” Ogden barked. “Less-lethals move in slowly. Sticky guns first, but tell them to also try the Shock-Rounds and see if they have any effect. All squads are to try and take one alive. Tell the squad leaders no lethal fire unless they specifically order it.”

The last shots echoed through the woods as soldiers stopped firing the M4 carbines and M249 squad automatic weapons.

Ogden turned to face Mazagatti. “Sergeant Major, let’s move in. I want to see this thing up close.”

“Sir,” Mazagatti said, “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say that it’s a stupid idea for you to get that close. Again. Sir.”

“Understood,” Ogden said. “I’m feeling lucky. Again. Proceed.”

Mazagatti flashed hand signals to Ogden’s personal squad. Ogden drew his sidearm and followed. Corporal Cope trailed a step behind and to the right, radio at the ready.

With the gunfire gone, Ogden heard the nonlethals: the whoosh of the foam guns and the normal-sounding reports of ShockRounds. He followed the platoon to within seventy-five yards of the construct before he ordered all platoons to halt. First Platoon was only forty yards away now; a quick sprint would take them right into the construct.

Ogden saw the hatchlings scurrying around inside the glowing arches. Triangular bodies, three tentacle-legs that looked like muscular black pythons. The point of the shortest hatchling would come up just to his knee, the tallest one to his chin.

The sticky foam seemed to be working, reducing two hatchlings to weakly wiggling lumps on the muddy ground, unable to pull those tentacle-legs loose. He counted another five hatchlings moving freely, but they didn’t engage. Did they fear the weapons? Were they aware that the less-lethals might isolate them? If so, why didn’t they at least run north? Why didn’t they try something?

Ogden again sensed a trap—the enemy wasn’t behaving rationally or consistently with the previous two encounters. But trap or no trap, he had his orders.

“Corporal Cope, tell First Platoon to move in. Capture the enemy by hand.”

Cope spoke into his handset and relayed the orders.

Thirty-five yards ahead, Ogden watched a line of men rise up and silently walk forward. The three foam-gunners led the charge, each flanked on the immediate left and right by comrades carrying M4s. The rest of each respective squad fanned out on either side of this lead element.

Ogden watched. The hatchlings seemed to sense the advance. They clustered tighter around the base of the smallest arch.

First Platoon closed to thirty yards. Then twenty. The line of men rushed forward through the snow, moving in….

A spark flashed somewhere beneath the hatchlings, at the base of the arch. Was this it? Was it opening up?

Another flash, then a steady glow backlit the hatchlings. This new illumination showed only at the base of one arch. It flickered, jumped, then Ogden recognized it for what it was—fire.

Blue-flamed, not orange, but fire nonetheless. The flames crawled up the arch as if it were made of tinder, shooting along the curve almost like a flamethrower.

All five of the free-moving hatchlings jumped into the flames, igniting themselves. They scampered toward the stuck hatchlings, setting them aflame before running into the other arches and the loglike things, spreading the blaze. Within seconds the whole construct danced with crackling blue flames.

Heat pushed his soldiers back, stopping their advance as surely as a wall.

“Tell the men to fall back and set up a perimeter at fifty yards,” Ogden said. “And don gas masks—we don’t know what kind of fumes that thing might put out.”

It wasn’t an ambush. He had a feeling it was something worse.

Not a trap… a decoy.

STIMULATING CONVERSATION

Dew arrived at Tad’s house only a few seconds behind two unmarked gray vans. The vans parked on the street while he drove his Lincoln onto the wet lawn just before the vans unloaded hazmat-suited gunmen. No one parked in the driveway; they needed to keep that open for the Margo-Mobile.

Dew got out and instantly felt cold rain splattering the bald top of his head. He hadn’t made it fifteen steps before his suit jacket was soaked through. He walked briskly but didn’t run—the two young bucks in full black hazmat suits took care of that. Each toted a compact FN P90 submachine gun, as did their two hazmat-suited comrades who took up positions on the lawn.

One of the young bucks hit the front door with a hard kick, smashing it open. He went in, followed by his partner.

Dew slowly counted to ten, giving the young men time to secure the house. Hearing no gunfire, he walked inside.

The two men were in a living room that stood between the front door and the kitchen. Neither of them moved—they had their P90s pointed at a huge, wet man sitting at the kitchen table.

A man drinking a Budweiser with his right hand and holding a blinking baby with his left.

A tire iron sat on the table. Where it bent ninety degrees, it shone with wetness. A clump of scalp and long brown hair clung to the black metal.

A dead woman lay in the open doorway that led out of the kitchen. Dead, Dew knew, because living people’s heads just didn’t look like that, living people’s eyes didn’t hang open with a blank expression, and living people usually weren’t lying in a big puddle of their own blood.

A dead toddler lay on the ground at the edge of the table, only a few feet from Perry’s canoe of a foot. The kid’s back was broken, his spine bent in the middle at a forty-five-degree angle.

The place smelled like someone had shit their pants.

Dew drew his Colt M1911 pistol. He held it at his side, pointed to the ground. “How did you get in here?”

“Back window,” Perry said. “Only about ten feet up. I can still jump pretty good for a guy who once got shot in the knee.”

Dew ignored the dig. “You crazy fuck. We needed these people.”

“I helped them,” Perry said.

“I wish I could just shoot you and put you out of your misery.”

“Gosh, I am awful miserable,” Perry said. “So go ahead.” He took a swig.

“You gonna kill that baby?” Dew asked, as calmly as you might ask someone to please pass the salt.

“No, the baby is clean,” Perry said. He casually tossed the baby toward one of the soldiers. Dew twitched reactively as the child softly arced through the air. The soldier dropped his P90 and awkwardly caught the kid, who started crying immediately.

Crying loud.

The baby hadn’t cried when he was sitting with the psycho who had just butchered his family, but as soon as he was safe, he fired up the air-raid siren. There’s just no figuring kids.

“Both of you, get that baby out of here,” Dew said to the soldiers. “Get him in a van and keep him there. I’ll send a guy to check him out. Doc Braun, real short, you’ll know him when you see him.”

The men left, leaving Dew alone with Perry.

Dew started to shiver from his wet suit and shirt. The weather in Wisconsin was much like the weather in Michigan—both fucking sucked, and both made his bum hip ache.

“Any others?” Dew asked.

Perry pointed to a place inside the kitchen. Dew carefully walked to the living room’s edge, leaned in a little and looked around the corner.

Another corpse, a man, lying on the floor in front of the refrigerator. A big dark spot covered the crotch and legs of his jeans. He was the source of the shit smell.

Three more hosts, dead. Murray Longworth was going to crap a canary when he found out. Three murders. Just like that. And Dawsey sat at the table, sipping a Bud.

It would be so easy to just put a bullet in the psycho’s head.

Perry pulled a second beer from the six-pack and tilted it toward Dew. Want one? the gesture said.

“Drink up while you can,” Dew said. “If Baumgartner and Milner are dead, I don’t care how important Murray thinks you are.”

“Were those the dumb-shits following me in the little white car?”

Dew nodded.

Perry shrugged, drained his beer, then opened the one he’d offered Dew.

“Control, this is Phillips,” Dew said. The microphone in his earpiece picked up the words and transmitted them to a control van some five or six blocks away.

“Copy, Phillips,” the tinny voice said.

“Status on Baum and Milner? Anyone find them yet?”

“Let me check,” the voice said.

Dew waited.

Dawsey took a long swig. “I bet you want to shoot me. I bet you want to kill me.” He tossed the gold Budweiser cap up and down in his free hand.

“Maybe I just want to help you,” Dew said quietly.

Perry grinned and nodded. “That’s pretty good.”

The tinny voice returned. “Baumgartner and Milner are alive. Agent Revel says they’re roughed up a little but will be okay. Ambulance en route. Their car and Dawsey’s Mustang are totaled, by the way.”

Dew put his .45 back in its shoulder holster.

Dawsey smiled. “I told you not to have anyone follow me, Dew. I could have killed them if I wanted do.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Dawsey? We’ve told you a million times we need a live host.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Perry said. “Your orders don’t mean dick to me.”

“We need information, you murdering piece of shit. These people had information.”

“I have all the information you need,” Perry said. He cleared away the beer bottles, revealing a ring-stained map spread across the table. His sweeping hand also brushed aside a clump of hair that had fallen off the tire iron, leaving a long, bloody arc on the paper. He wiped his hand on his pant leg.

“The next doorway is northeast of here,” Perry said. “Across the border into Michigan. Nearest town is called Marinesco. That’s where these people were going. If anyone else around here is infected, that’s where they’re headed, too, or they’re already there. That’s the information you really need, and now you have it, so why would you need these losers alive?”

“Losers? That one you snapped in half couldn’t be more than five years old.”

“Sure,” Perry said. “And any knife he could pick up, he’d put it right in your belly. Why do you need him alive?”

Dew ground his teeth. “Because the eggheads say so, that’s why.”

Perry nodded. “Right. They need to watch someone suffer. They need to watch someone go crazy. They need to watch someone go through what I went through, right?”

Dew said nothing.

“You’re stuck with me, old man,” Perry said. “I’m the only one who can hear them. I’m the only one who can find them. My ass is made of gold.”

Dawsey was completely out of control. Dew understood the kid being messed up, sure. Only five weeks ago, Dawsey had snipped off his own jumblies for fuck’s sake. Dew could sympathize with some anger, some depression, even post-traumatic stress disorder, but this?

Still, part of Dew couldn’t shake the thought that if he treated the infected the same way Perry did, his partner, Malcolm Johnson, would still be alive.

“Perry, you have to stop this,” Dew said. “Margaret thinks she can save these people. How can she do that if you keep going apeshit?”

“She can’t save them,” Perry said. He drained the bottle in one pull and opened a third. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. I’m all the help these people need.”

Dew stared at the gigantic man for a few more moments. For the third time—and the second in the past three days—Dawsey had located a construct.

Dew remembered the horror of that first construct. So hot it melted the snow around it. Watching it light up, the whole thing glowing brightly, then the vision of thousands of creatures coming through the gate, almost pouring into the woods before a dozen HEAT missiles launched from Apache attack helicopters blasted the thing to bits.

“That’s two new doorways in a pretty short time,” Dew said. “You think there’s more?”

Perry shrugged. “I dunno. I can’t really explain it. I hear—what’s the word you spy guys use? I hear chatter. More might be coming. I can’t say. But you better get it in gear, old man, instead of sitting here with your thumb up your ass—I think the Marinesco one is well under way.”

Dew pointed at Dawsey. “You stay right here. I’m going to call this in, then I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

“Thanks, Pops,” Perry said. “Oh, and have your peons get my bag out of the Mustang’s trunk. And speaking of Mustangs, I’m going to need another one. Make sure it’s a GT. I’d prefer blue with a silver strip this time, but I’ll take whatever color you can get. I wouldn’t want to be difficult.”

Not only was Dawsey a freak, a killer, he was a smart-ass as well. Dew stared at him, wondering if maybe he should just pull the gun out again and end it.

The gun… that brought up an interesting question.

“You had Baumgartner and Milner down,” Dew said. “They’re both packing. Why didn’t you take their weapons?”

He saw something flicker in Perry’s eyes, a flicker that only appeared in the rare, brief instances when he talked about triangles or hatchlings—was it fear?

“Guns are for pussies,” Perry said. “I find a tire iron has more of a Charles Bronson flair.”

Dew stared for a few more seconds, then picked up the map and walked out of the house. As he left, he saw the first of the two Margo-Mobiles pulling up into the drive. When Margaret found out she had nothing to work with, she would not be happy.

WHIPPED

The semi’s air brakes hissed as the tractor slowed and stopped.

The McMillian house wasn’t much to look at, a typical boxy three-bedroom, two-story affair, once-white paint now cracked, peeling and speckled with dark spots of exposed and well-weathered wood. Big yard, old trees devoid of leaves. Two gray vans were parked on the street, and she guessed that the nondescript black Lincoln in the lawn belonged to Dew.

The downpour was actually a welcome break—icy rain would keep curious neighbors inside. A few might peek outside at the commotion, but as long as they didn’t try to cross the perimeter, that was fine.

Gitsh craned around the driver’s seat to look at Margaret, his ’fro bouncing a bit with each movement. “Should Marcus and I go ahead and connect the trailers, prep the examination room, ma’am?”

“Yes, Gitsh,” Margaret said. “Thank you.”

He got out and closed the driver’s-side door. Examination room was a funny phrase. That’s what they all called it, of course, but so far they hadn’t done any examinations—only autopsies. Not exactly ironic, considering that this two-trailer setup had originally been designed for on-site postmortems of infectious-disease victims. If you had an unknown, lethal contagion, it made more sense to analyze the corpses where they died rather than haul them to a Biohazard Safety Level-4 lab. No matter how secure the transportation, you were still at risk of spreading the contagion somewhere along the route. A portable BSL-4 autopsy facility, on the other hand, let you not only analyze the body on the spot but incinerate it as well.

A few seconds after Gitsh shut the driver’s door, the passenger-side door opened and a soaking Dew Phillips climbed in. Bits of ice clung to his bald scalp and the ring of red hair that circled around the back of his head from temple to temple. He looked tired, wet and pissed off.

“One survivor,” Dew said. “An infant boy, in the van on the right. Doc Braun, can you check him out? He’s not infected.”

“How do you know?” Margaret asked.

“Because if he was, Perry would have killed him. Just like he did the three people that were.”

Margaret sagged back into her chair. They were too late. Again.

“I’ll check out the child, Dew,” Amos said. “But I have to wonder why you government types can’t control Mister It Puts the Lotion in the Basket.”

“He put Baum and Milner in the hospital,” Dew snapped. “Maybe you’d like to try and control a six-foot-five murderer who can probably bench-press this whole rig?”

Amos shook his head. “No way. That alkie scares the fu-schnickens out of me. Make sure that psycho is gone from the house before I go in, or I’m not even getting out of this vehicle.”

“Tiny white man makes a good point,” Clarence said. “Dew, can your guys get the eunuch out of here?”

Dew nodded, tiredly. Margaret sat forward.

“No,” she said. “I want to talk to him first.”

“Forget it, Margo,” Clarence said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“First of all, the man’s name is Perry, not the eunuch, not Mister It Puts the Lotion in the Basket and not that psycho. Second, nothing is wrong with me.”

“Something is wrong with you,” Dew said. “Didn’t you hear me say he just killed three people?”

“Yes, and I also heard you say he didn’t kill the baby because the baby isn’t infected. He didn’t kill the boy who found Baum and Milner, and, I might add, he didn’t kill them, either. I’m not infected, so I’ll be fine.”

“No way,” Clarence said. “He’s probably drunk again. Dew, is he drunk?”

“If not, he’s on his way.”

“See?” Clarence said. “That’s it, Margo, you’re not going in there.”

“He’s right,” Dew said. “Forget it.”

“Quorum carries,” Amos said. “Moving on to new business, the chair recognizes Senator Gonzales from Topeka.”

“All of you just shut up,” Margaret said. “We can’t have Perry killing the hosts. Someone has to get that through to him.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Dew said. “You can bet the next time he gets a sniff, he’ll be in handcuffs and leg irons before we track it down.”

Amos laughed. “Handcuffs? He’ll probably just eat them.”

“Handcuffs?” Margaret said. “Leg irons? After the tortures that man has faced, you think you can get through to him by putting him in chains?”

“He just killed three people,” Clarence said. “Someone please tell me I’m not hearing this bleeding-heart-liberal bullshit.”

“Margaret,” Dew said, “you need to pull your head out of your ass.”

“Stop it!” Margaret shouted. “All of you, just stop it! We need to figure out why Perry is doing this, and we need to figure it out now. He’s my patient, did you guys forget that? I’m the one who kept that rot from killing him.”

“Hey, I helped,” Amos said.

Margaret waved her hands dismissively. “Yes, of course you did. That’s not what I meant. I know that Perry is extremely dangerous—I’m not an idiot. But since we discovered he can find hosts, he’s run loose. He could have taken off anytime he wanted to, but he hasn’t. And yet you keep him isolated from everyone.”

“You’re goddamn right I keep him isolated,” Dew said. “That’s what you do with a psycho. Forget it, Margaret. You’re not going in there.”

“The action is over,” she said quietly. “There’s nothing but bodies in that house, so now it’s my call.”

“Whoa, Nellie,” Amos said. “I hear a glass ceiling shattering somewhere.”

“I’m not kidding,” Margaret said. “This is now an analysis situation, which means that you”—she pointed at Dew—“and you”—she pointed at Clarence—“have to do what I say. Am I right?”

The two men said nothing.

Amos leaned forward. “I’m afraid that’s what Murray ordered, gents.” He pointed to his head. “Photographic memory and all. Not as cool as carrying a gun, but being smart does have its uses.”

Dew threw up his hands. “You know what? Fuck this. I have to go contact Colonel Ogden. Making sure nothing happens to Margaret is your job, Otto. Good fucking luck.”

Dew got out of the truck, slamming the door behind him as hard as he could.

“This is bullshit,” Clarence said.

“I’m going to the back to get body bags,” Margaret said. “Amos, you come help me. Clarence, if you’re so worried about my safety, get in there and tell Perry to stay put. Feel free to threaten him, because that’s what you men do and it seems to work so well. But put on your hood and gloves before you go in!”

Margaret crossed in front of Amos to go out the sleeper cabin’s passenger-side door. Like Dew, she slammed it shut behind her.

Clarence sat in silence, shaking his head.

Amos unsuccessfully tried to choke back laughter.

“Something funny?” Clarence asked.

“Put on your hood and gloves,” Amos said. “If you weren’t so pissed already, I’d probably make fun of you.”

“Now is not the time, Amos.”

“I said I would make fun of you. I’m not actually making fun of you. Big difference. Man, I can only imagine what that woman is like in the sack.”

“In the bedroom I’m in charge,” Otto said sullenly. “Unfortunately, that seems to be the only place I’m in charge.”

“You’re whipped.”

“I don’t see you backing her down.”

“Everyone knows I’m whipped,” Amos said. “My wife, my daughters, Margaret—not exactly a news flash. But you, Mister Alpha Male? You go ahead and carry the illusion that someday you’ll be able to change the situation.”

“Fuck you, midget. And help me with these gloves.”

Amos held the gloves so Otto could slide his hands inside. Amos made sure the connecting rings snapped home, then ran sticky tape around them.

“Hey,” Amos said. “Twenty bucks says Dawsey kills you.”

“You’re on.”

“I’ll take it out of your locker if he does,” Amos said. “Wouldn’t look right me rifling through the pockets of a corpse.”

“Whatever. If you win, I guess I won’t really be worried about appearances.”

Both men fitted slim earpiece wires around their right ears. Each wire frame contained a small speaker that fit into the ear canal, a microphone and a transmitter that routed into the MargoMobile’s communication center. The sets were on a predefined frequency, same as Dew and the other agents used. They let the scientific team communicate with one another as well as monitor any communication between Dew and his team.

Otto pulled on his black helmet. Amos helped him seal it, then ran a line of sticky tape around the metal collar. Otto held out his right hand, exposing the suit controls mounted in the inner wrist. Amos simply pressed the “on” button, and the compressor mounted on Otto’s belt started up with a nearly silent hum. His suit’s heavy PVC fabric billowed up slightly, the result of higher pressure inside. Should the suit suffer a tear, air would flow outward, theoretically keeping any contagions or toxins away from his skin until the suit could be repaired and decontaminated.

“I’m off to make twenty bucks,” Clarence said.

“Been nice knowing ya,” Amos said. “See you on the other side.”

Otto nodded, then opened the wide sleeper-compartment door and hopped down. The icy rain bounced off his black suit as he walked toward the house.

GETTIN’ HIS DRINK ON

Perry finished his fifth beer. A blessed buzz started to work its way through his brain. He stood up and walked to the fridge. The door wouldn’t open all the way. It was partially blocked by the body of the man who had shit all over himself. Perry put a foot on the man’s hip and slid him to the right.

Inside the fridge he found another six-pack of Budwesier. Okay, so maybe the dead guy hadn’t had any discipline, but at least he hadn’t been one of those microbrew pussies.

Holding the fresh six-pack, Perry stepped over the body and sat back down behind the table just as another black-suited man came into the kitchen. This one carried only a pistol. Through the suit’s clear visor, Perry saw the oh-so-serious face of Agent Otto.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said. “You look like a fat ninja.”

“Thanks,” Otto said. “That means so much coming from a source of wisdom like you.”

Perry opened the bottle and drank it in one pull. Six down. Five more and he’d be nice and hammered. Everyone has to have goals in life, right?

Otto slowly looked around the room, surveying the damage. “Were you drunk when you killed these people?”

“They’re not people,” Perry said. “And no, I was not drunk, but I mean to correct that situation.” He opened the second bottle and drained half of it before putting it down.

“I guess so,” Otto said. “Listen, man, you know you scare the crap out of me, right?”

Perry shrugged. That was the way of things. Didn’t matter what he did, what he said, they looked at him like he was a monster. So why not live up to the billing?

“Margaret is coming in here,” Otto said.

“Sure she is,” Perry said. “Look at all the new toys she has to play with. See this one?” He nudged the dead little boy with his foot. “I call him Slinky.”

“Save me your psycho jokes,” Otto said. “Just understand that when she’s in this room, you make any sudden moves and I’ll put you down.”

“Oh, come on, Clarence! A gun? Don’t be that guy! How about you and I settle this the old-fashioned way?”

“Forget it.”

“What’s the matter, Clarence? Massa Dew say you can’t play with the white kids?”

Behind the helmet visor, he saw Clarence’s eyes narrow.

“Go ahead, boy,” Perry said. “Take a swing. I won’t tell on you.”

Perry hoped he would do it. Otto was big enough to count as a challenge. Not much of a challenge, but something. It would feel good to smash in his face.

He had nothing against Otto, really. Except that Otto was fucking Dr. Montoya, which meant he was getting laid, which was something Perry figured he’d never do again. If that wasn’t a good enough reason to hand out a beat-down, he didn’t know what was.

“I’ll pass,” Otto said. “You can save all that macho bullshit. Only one way you and I are going to dance, and that’s if a bullet takes the lead.”

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Perry said. “Did you write that shit yourself?”

Perry thought he saw Otto smile, just a little bit, but then the stone face slipped back into place.

Margaret came into the room carrying a double armful of green bags. She dropped them in a pile. In her black suit, she looked identical to Otto except that she was a foot shorter. Standing side by side, they looked like the adult and child versions of an alien from a bad sci-fi flick.

“Hey, Otto, your other massa is here,” Perry said. “Wake up, white people. The Jew is using the black as muscle.”

“I’m not Jewish, Perry, I’m Hispanic,” Margaret said. “And I’ve got The Blues Brothers on DVD, seen it about fifty times, so I know that line. Next are you going to tell me you hate Illinois Nazis?”

Good God. She knew The Blues Brothers?

“I also know you’re not racist,” she said. “So stop trying to push everyone’s buttons. You’re not good at it.”

Perry wondered if Clarence Otto really had any idea just how cool this chick was. He hated everyone in this fucked-up project, but he had to admit he hated Margaret a little less than the others. He tilted a fresh beer toward her.

“You want a beer, chica? I tried to offer your boy Toby one, but he told me the only good whitey was a dead whitey.”

Margaret sat down at the table, opposite the little body on the floor. She did it so casually it could have been a normal scene in any kitchen, save for her black biohazard suit and the corpses.

“No, Perry, Clarence didn’t say that. And no, I don’t want a beer, but thank you. You’ve got to stop this.”

“Stop drinking? Why, what a great idea. Sobriety has done so much for me.” He finished the beer and grabbed another. The buzz was really kicking into gear now. He wanted it, needed it to take over so he could forget. If he got drunk enough, maybe he could sleep.

“Perry,” Margaret said, “look around you. Look what you’ve done. You killed these people.”

“Why do you all keep saying they’re people? They were the walking dead.”

“No they weren’t, damn it. I saved you, didn’t I?”

“And what a delightful experience that was.”

“I know it was painful,” she said.

Perry laughed. “Yeah. Painful. By the way, you sure your last name isn’t Mengele, not Montoya?”

“Oh, you can just kiss my ass, Perry,” Margaret said. “I saved your life. Amos and I figured out how all by ourselves, because trust me, your disease wasn’t exactly listed in Wikipedia. I know it hurt, but I saved your life—and you compare me to Josef Mengele? How about instead you just say thank you for saving my life, Margaret.”

“And you said I wasn’t good at pushing buttons.”

It was funny how clearly you could see emotions through one of those visors. Margaret’s eyes narrowed, and her upper lip wrinkled up just a bit. Frickin’ adorable.

“Don’t forget, Doc, I gave you quite a head start,” Perry said. “I didn’t have any triangles when you got to me, remember? And you can look around all you want, but you won’t see any Chicken Scissors laying around. These people didn’t even try.”

She looked away. Everyone did when he mentioned the scissors. She took a slow breath, then looked at him dead-on again.

“Perry, I learned so much from helping you recover. I can save these people. Why do you think Dew is trying so hard to bring them in alive?”

Perry looked at Margaret, looked into her brown eyes. She had saved his life, that was true. Most of the time he wished she hadn’t.

It was so hard to believe there was a person as good as Margaret left in the world. It was also hard to believe there was a person this naive.

“You’re kidding yourself, lady,” Perry said. “You can’t save them.”

“I can, Perry, and I will. We need your help, more than just finding the hosts. You still won’t tell us anything about your experience. Do you know how frustrating it is when the one person who survived won’t tell you the most basic information?”

Perry shook his head. “I don’t talk about that.”

“I’ve noticed,” Margaret said. “Look, everyone understands it’s traumatic. Believe me. You have to overcome this. I know you don’t want to think about what happened with Bill, but—”

“Don’t talk about him!” Before the words were even out of his mouth, Perry leaned toward her and banged the table hard with his fist. Margaret flinched, eyes wide in surprise and fear. Clarence’s gun came up, leveled right at Perry’s chest.

Perry quickly leaned back. Goddamit. He’d lost it. Scared Margaret. That was the last thing he wanted to do.

Margaret looked back at Clarence. “Put that damn thing down.”

Clarence lowered the gun.

“My bad,” Perry said.

She put her gloved hand on his forearm. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry to bring up awful memories, but you’ve got to start doing the right thing.”

“The right thing?” He stood and set a fresh beer bottle on the table in front of her. A gift. She wouldn’t drink it, but it’s the thought that counts.

“You’re a smart cupcake, Margo,” Perry said. “But you don’t know the right thing here. Trust me, the right thing is to let me help them.”

“Like you helped these people?”

Perry nodded. “Exactly.”

He started to walk out, then stopped and turned to face her. “And that suit, Margaret. That’s the worst suit I ever saw. You buy a suit like that, I bet you get a free bowl of soup.”

“But it looks good on you,” Margaret said. “Caddyshack. I own that one, too.”

Perry smiled and gestured toward Otto, who looked horribly uncomfortable at the whole situation. “Margie, you’re too cool for Mister Funbags over there. Enjoy your new playmates.”

He walked out of the kitchen, hoping that one beer he’d left Margo wasn’t the that would have pushed him over the top.

He needed to sleep. Sleep, without hearing Bill’s voice.

NOTHING IN THIS HAND

Dew waited in his car while Anthony Gitsham and Marcus Thompson connected the two semi trailers to make the MargoMobile fully operational. The two trailers weren’t really trailers, they were flatbeds, each carrying a container that was eight feet wide by ten feet high by forty feet long. As standard-size cargo containers, the things could easily be transported by rail, by ship or even by air with a cargo helicopter. Once combined, the two containers made for a highly portable BSL-4 autopsy facility.

Painted blue and scuffed up a bit to make them look rusty and well used, they didn’t rate a second glance on the highway. But it was only the outsides that looked beat up—the inside areas gleamed with the pristine whiteness of a high-tech hospital.

Three months ago there’d been no such thing as a mobile lab rated for BSL-4. That was as bad as it got—ebola, Marburg, superflu, shit like that. Some company had had the trailer on the drawing board. Margaret found out and insisted it was just the thing for the crazy, secret work of Project Tangram. Dew had agreed. So had Murray, who’d funded the rush job on a prototype and then ordered two more. At a this-week-only sale price of $25 million each.

Fuck it, Murray had said, it’s only taxpayers’ money.

The things you could do with a black budget. When the trailers were delivered and the team checked them out, Amos had called them the MargoMobile, and the name just stuck.

Big dollars or no, Dew couldn’t argue with Margaret—the trailer combo was a bargain at any price. The BSL-4 tents Margaret had used at various hospitals worked, but you needed to set them up, you had to deal with a concerned hospital staff, local media, et cetera. The MargoMobile solved that. You could take the full BSL-4 lab right to the bodies and do what had to be done. The thing even had a microwave incinerator, for fuck’s sake—one-stop shopping from body acquisition to disposal.

The two trailers set up in parallel. From the rear, the right trailer, Trailer A, had normal cargo doors. Opening those up revealed two more doors—the cargo doors were just a front. The door on the left led into a small computer center, ten feet long by five feet wide. One thin desktop ran the length of the room. It supported three keyboard-and-mouse combinations that rested in front of three flat-panel monitors mounted on the walls. Add three office chairs and you were in business. Other equipment provided secure encrypted transmission to anyone on the trailer’s frequency or could plug into a full NSA-caliber satellite uplink. Voice, video, data, whatever you needed. The communication equipment was originally meant to provide a secure connection to the CDC or the WHO, but it worked just as well for an old CIA spook.

The right-side door led into a claustrophobic, three-foot-wide airlock that ran ten feet into the trailer before it reached a second airtight door. That door opened into the eight-by-ten-foot decontamination center. In there, dozens of nozzles shot out a high-pressure combination of chlorine gas and concentrated liquid bleach. Lethal to anything from a microbe to a man. Once you got through decon, a final airtight door let into the main area: an eight-foot-wide, twenty-foot-long autopsy room. An area about the size of a typical living room to deal with the deadliest pathogens the world had to offer.

The left-hand trailer, Trailer B, held a narrow dressing room with lockers for the hazmat suits and gear. That room wasn’t part of the airtight area—you had to walk into the dressing room, get suited up, then walk back outside and go through the Trailer A airlock to reach the autopsy room. Trailer B also held air compressors, refrigeration units, filters, generators, a nine-slot cadaver rack like you’d find in any morgue, and a clear-walled containment chamber designed for living hosts. That cell held two autopsy trolleys, side by side, with just enough room between them for someone to walk in, turn around and walk out. If they did have to use this cell, the host (or hosts) would likely be strapped down to the trolley: safety and secrecy, not comfort, were the rules of the day.

A collapsible covered walkway extended from Trailer B and connected directly into the autopsy room of Trailer A. That way they only needed one decontamination area to access the airtight areas of both trailers. Gitsh and Marcus were in the process of connecting the accordion-like walkway.

Dew liked those guys. Marcus was the kind you’d want by your side in a firefight. Gitsh not so much, but he always had a smile and a laugh, and on a long, isolated assignment that was just as important as being able to shoot straight. Dew checked his watch—the connection process usually took them ten minutes. Now it was eleven and counting. He’d give them some shit about that later.

Gitsh opened the door to the computer center. Dew got out of his Lincoln, braving the rain once more to dart inside. He sat down at one of the computers, typed in his user name and password, then spread out the blood-smeared map on top of the keyboard. He grabbed the secure phone and punched in a memorized number. He still found it odd that he could dial Colonel Charlie Ogden in the middle of a field engagement and get him every time. The wonders of a high-tech army.

“Company X, this is Corporal Cope.”

“Dew Phillips. Get me Ogden.”

“Right away, sir.”

Dew waited. He held the phone with his right hand while the fingertips of his left traced an as-the-crow-flies line from South Bloomingville, Ohio, to Glidden, Wisconsin. About six hundred miles. Project Tangram had several V-22 Ospreys at their disposal. The Ospreys were perfect for their needs. They could take off and land anywhere, no runway required, courtesy of a helicopter engine on each wing. Once in the air, those engines slowly tilted forward, and the helicopter became a twin-turboprop plane. Seeing as each Osprey could carry up to twenty-four soldiers and do about three hundred miles an hour, they were invaluable for moving Ogden’s troops from Point A to Point B. In a real logistical pinch, the Ospreys could even haul the MargoMobile trailers, one trailer per bird.

“Ogden here,” said the familiar voice. “What have you got for me?”

“You first,” Dew said. “Did you take out the construct?”

“Would I be talking to you if I hadn’t?”

Dew shook his head. Charlie Ogden wasn’t much for pleasantries.

“We’ve got something else,” Dew said. “Punch in Marinesco, Michigan, on whatever fancy map computer you’ve got there.”

Ogden barked an order to his staff.

“Got it,” Ogden said.

“We found another construct there.”

There was a brief pause. “Okay, things make more sense now.”

“How long till you can be there, Charlie?”

“We’ve got our Ospreys close by. With midair refueling… maybe two and a half hours.”

“What about the two companies still at Fort Bragg?”

“I can send them now, but they don’t have Ospreys and they’re too far away for helicopters. We could get them on C-17s and drop them right in near the zone. Say thirty minutes to get wheels up, ninety minutes to fly and jump, fifteen minutes for them to gather and move in. Either way we’re looking at two and a half hours best case, three hours more likely. You got pictures of this thing?”

“We’re bringing satellites online now,” Dew said. “We should have something any moment. I told the squints to send you pictures as soon as we get them.”

“Understood. Listen, I think South Bloomingville was a feint. Designed to draw our attention while they set up at Marinesco.”

“What are you saying, Charlie?” Dew asked. “These little bastards are using high-level tactics?”

“They didn’t defend themselves. When we closed in, they destroyed the construct, killing themselves in the process. And I think it was a prop.”

“A prop?”

“Yeah, like fake planes on a fake airstrip designed to fool satellite intel. It heated up like the other gates, but it was thinner. Just enough material to have the right shape and the right behaviors, not enough to be functional.”

Dew felt a helpless feeling spreading through his guts. “So if this Marinesco gate is already hot,” Dew said, “if you can’t get there in time, then what?”

Ogden’s voice dropped a little as he spoke to someone near him. “Cope, order the FAC to this location.”

Dew heard a distant “Yes sir.”

“Charlie,” Dew said, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“I just deployed the FAC, the forward air controller. It’s an F-22 Raptor fighter, fast as hell. It will acquire the target and transmit coordinates to the Strike Eagle squadron.”

“The F-15s? You’re dropping fucking two-thousand-pound bombs on it? It’s Michigan, not fucking Fallujah, Charlie. Why can’t we use the Apaches like we did in Wahjamega and Mather?”

“Depends on if we can get them there in time,” Ogden said. “If I send the Apaches now, it’s a two-hour straight flight. The Eagles do Mach 2.5—they’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.”

Dew’s cell phone buzzed—he checked it to find a text message that was nothing but a sixteen-character code.

“I’ve got sat pictures, Charlie.”

“We just got them, too. Cope, up on the screen.”

Dew shoved the map aside and carefully typed in the code. A series of thumbnail images appeared, some in color, some in black and white. Dew clicked on the first black-and-white image, blowing it up to fill the screen. Most of the picture showed the black, irregular patterns of dense trees. The center of the image, however, showed a fuzzy white symbol that had come to represent the unknown terror of the infection.

White meant that the gate was already hot.

“I’m ordering a full strike,” Ogden said. “Taking that damn thing out of the game.”

“Hold on, Charlie,” Dew said. “The area looks pretty unpopulated, but we don’t have any intel on the residents. Can we get some planes to make a pass? See if any people are around?”

“Phillips, I don’t give a fuck if the gate is built right on top of a compound full of orphans and nuns. I’m taking it out.”

“Charlie, come on. You’re talking about two-thousand-pound bombs on U. S. soil. We have to get approval from Murray on this.”

“No we don’t,” Ogden said. “I have authority from the president to make any necessary battlefield decisions up to Option Number Four. That one has to come from the big man himself. Other than that, it’s my call.”

“But that order was from President Hutchins. Gutierrez probably doesn’t even know about it.”

“I have my orders,” Ogden said. “We have to strike immediately, and with force. Nice work uncovering this location, Dew. All I can say is thank God we’ve got Dawsey. He’s the only thing keeping us in this game. Ogden out.”

Charlie broke the connection.

Dew put the handset back in its cradle.

Thank God we’ve got Dawsey. Imagine that. The kid was twelve doughnuts shy of a baker’s dozen, and he was their ace in the hole. What would ol’ Charlie have thought if he knew that Dew had almost shot Dawsey in the mouth with the .45? Sorry, Charlie, our ace in the hole has a hole in his head.

Dew rubbed his face with both hands, then picked up the handset again. The explosion caused by the Strike Eagles’ bomb run would be huge, probably even register on seismographs. Covering up such a thing would require spin, obfuscation and lies. And for something like that, there was no one in the world better than Murray Longworth.

YOU DROPPED A BOMB ON ME

The Situation Room buzzed with conversation. Images of the Marinesco gate lit up most of the flat-panel monitors.

To Murray there was something inherently defeating about that image. Via satellite, drone and surveillance planes, they had watched Ogden’s men attack the gate in South Bloomingville. They had watched it catch fire, watched it burn and crumble, and yet here was a second gate that looked almost exactly the same.

Other monitors showed digital maps of Michigan; a green circle in the Upper Peninsula marking the gate, F-15 icons marking the position of Ogden’s Strike Eagles. Those planes were just edging over Lake Michigan—they had already covered half the distance from South Bloomingville to Marinesco.

One large monitor showed nothing but a countdown: fifteen minutes, twenty-three seconds and counting. When that hit zero, the Strike Eagles would drop their payloads… unless the president called off the attack.

Gutierrez had given up on trying to look presidential. Small beads of sweat dotted his forehead. Despite appearances, though, he hadn’t given in to the stress. He asked intelligent questions, he demanded intelligent answers and he had the Joint Chiefs jumping at his commands.

“Goddamit, gentlemen,” Gutierrez said. “You cannot tell me we have no other forces that can reach Marinesco and attack that gate in the next fifteen minutes.”

“That’s exactly what we’re telling you,” said General Hamilton Barnes. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, delivery of most military-related bad news fell to him, although Monty Cooper, the marines’ top man, wasn’t afraid to enter into the conversation uninvited.

“Mister President, sir,” Cooper said. “We are in the middle of fighting two wars and a police action on foreign soil. Even if our troops were not badly depleted because of that, there is no way we could put a company-size element into play in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in less than an hour. The fastest-responding unit is the Division Ready Force, from the Eighty-second Airborne. First-response elements of the DRF can be anywhere in the world in eighteen hours, anywhere in the United States in probably seven, and you have no idea how fast that is in military terms. With all due respect, sir, we can’t just wave a fucking magic wand and make troops appear.”

Barnes turned toward Cooper, obviously to lay down a fast rebuke.

“Save it, General Barnes,” Gutierrez said. “It takes more than a little language to offend me. But don’t do it a second time, General Cooper.”

“Sir,” Cooper said.

Gutierrez’s eyes flicked up to the clock. Murray looked as well. Thirteen minutes, fifty-four seconds.

“How long until Company X reaches the gate?” Gutierrez asked.

“Their Ospreys just took off from South Bloomingville,” Barnes said. “A little under two hours until they can attack. The Apaches are over an hour away.”

Gutierrez gave the table one quick, frustrated fist-pound.

“I don’t understand,” Vanessa said. “How can a colonel have the authority to launch a bombing attack like this? Doesn’t he need to clear it with at least the Joint Chiefs?”

General Barnes answered. “Ogden is the battlefield commander. He has the authority to use any elements at his disposal to achieve the objectives set before him. He doesn’t need approval to deploy resources already under his command.”

“This is ridiculous,” Vanessa said. “He doesn’t need approval for anything?”

“President Hutchins set it up this way for a reason,” Murray said. “In the time it’s taken us to get the information and begin a discussion about what to do, the jets are already halfway to the target. Ogden can order Options One through Three without oversight. Only Option Number Four requires presidential approval.”

“And what, exactly, is Option Number Four?”

“The big whammy,” General Cooper said. “Option Four is a tactical nuke.”

“A nuke?” Vanessa said. “On American soil? Are you kidding me?”

“A tactical nuke, ma’am,” Murray said. “We have three B61 warheads available. They’re variable-yield warheads. We can dial the blast for anything from point-three megatons to one hundred and seventy.”

“Murray,” Gutierrez said, “how could Hutchins even consider dropping a nuke?”

“We have to acknowledge the possibility that we won’t see a construct in time,” Murray said. “If that happens, it will open up and deliver that initial beachhead force. We don’t know what kind of weaponry or technology we’ll be dealing with at that point. We have to have this level of response in order to take out both the construct and the enemy force.”

“This is insane,” Vanessa said.

“It was approved by President Hutchins,” Murray said.

“Hutchins isn’t the president anymore,” Vanessa said. “John Gutierrez is.”

Murray nodded. “And the orders of a former president stand until the current president gives new orders.”

Vanessa turned to face Gutierrez. “So give a new order, Mister President,” she said. “Call this whole thing off.”

Gutierrez sat back in his chair. “These conventional bombs Ogden ordered, what kind of hardware are we talking about?”

General Luis Monroe, the air force’s top man, spoke for the first time. “The GBU-31, version three, is a two-thousand-pound bomb. It’s a bunker-buster, biggest thing we’ve got short of a nuke. The blast will kill everything within a hundred and ten feet of the point of impact and will cause casualties at over a hundred yards. Total blast radius is about four thousand feet.”

“A radius of four thousand feet?” Vanessa said. “But… that’s a diameter of a mile and a half.”

Monroe nodded. “They’ve worked very well in Iraq and Iran. If it was daylight, the smoke cloud would be visible from twenty miles. All the surrounding towns will feel the impact, probably think it’s a minor tremor.”

“How the hell are we going to keep that secret?” Vanessa asked.

“I have a prepared cover story,” Murray said. “This is a very rural area, remote, so it’s feasible a terrorist cell set up a bomb-building facility. We learned about it, determined it was possible they were building a dirty bomb, so we sent in the F-15Es to take it out. A dirty bomb is a radiation threat, so we can lock down a large area while we investigate. Everyone wins—intelligence got the info, executive branch reacted definitively, military took out the terrorists.”

All eyes watched Murray. The Joint Chiefs weren’t surprised; they’d seen him do things like this before. Donald Martin didn’t look surprised, either. Working his way up to secretary of defense, he’d undoubtedly seen such lies. Gutierrez, Vanessa and Tom Maskill, however, looked astonished.

“Domestic or international terrorists?” Gutierrez asked.

Murray shrugged. “Whichever you prefer, Mister President. I have an extensive background developed for a white supremacist group, if you want to go that route. Or we can go Al-Qaeda. Your call.”

Gutierrez rubbed his hands together slowly as he thought.

“Let’s do the white supremacists,” he said. “I can’t have foreigners building a bomb on U. S. soil.”

“Yes, Mister President,” Murray said. “I can make that work.”

“John,” Vanessa said, astonished. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re going to let those jets drop bombs and lie to the American people about it?”

All around the table, eyebrows raised at her use of the president’s first name. She didn’t seem to notice. Neither did Gutierrez.

“I just don’t know what choice we have,” he said.

“We have the choice of telling the truth and trusting the people,” Vanessa said.

General Cooper laughed at her. “Ma’am, with all due respect, where did you learn about the world, from a game of Candy Land? We’re talking aliens and intergalactic gates, caused by an infection that starts as a goddamn skin rash. We tell the people about this and the country will disentegrate in total chaos.”

“I disagree,” Vanessa said. “The people will come together for this.”

Cooper laughed again and started to say something back, but Murray interrupted.

“We need a decision,” he said. The screen behind the president changed from a static picture of the gate to a high-altitude cockpit-cam shot. The cool blacks and blues of a frozen Wisconsin forest raced by. A few spots glowed white as the plane passed over houses.

“The Strike Eagles will commence their bomb run in two minutes, Mister President,” Murray said. “If you want to call this off, you have to say so right now.”

Gutierrez sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. He let out a heavy sigh and looked at the ceiling. Murray could sympathize. Carrying out an executive order that could result in civilian deaths was one thing; being the guy to give that order, that was another.

The main flat-panel monitor flared with a new light—the construct had just started to glow.

“Damn,” Gutierrez said. “How long do we have, Murray?”

“Based on Wahjamega, maybe fifteen minutes. We’re just not sure, Mister President.”

Gutierrez nodded. “If we drop these bombs, how many people do you think could die? Off the record. Just give it to me straight.”

Murray shrugged. “If we’re lucky, none that aren’t already infected. It’s a very remote area, so if we’re unlucky, ten at the very most.”

Gutierrez nodded. “Proceed with the bombing. Get Tom a briefing paper that covers the high points of your cover story. Call a press conference for eight A.M. Donald, General Barnes, you’ll be with me for that conference.” He turned in his chair to watch the bomb run.

Vanessa wasn’t watching the screens. She was watching Murray. All the values Gutierrez had espoused while running for office had just taken a backseat to reality. In her idealistic mind, she probably blamed Murray for that. Too bad, so sad—the president was making the right choice for the country, and she’d just have to deal with it.

Within seconds the screen’s cool blacks and blues revealed a white dot. That dot quickly grew in size. It was a little shaky, a little grainy, but there was no mistaking the construct’s definitive fishbone shape.

A slash entered the screen from the top right. A split second later, the screen lit up in blinding white. That white quickly vanished, revealing a rising plume of smoke that started out hot-white but soon faded to a flickering light gray.

Everyone sat and silently watched. Donald finally broke the silence.

“I sure as hell hope they didn’t build a third.”

AUTOPSY NUMBER ONE

Margaret watched Gitsh and Marcus push the sturdy autopsy trolley up the ramp and through the right-side door in the back of Trailer A. There was a lot of room in the body bag on that gurney, the little boy’s body inside like a single pea in a pod made for three. She followed the trolley into the white airlock room, then shut the gas-tight outer door behind her. The three of them waited in the narrow airlock as the pressure inside equalized, which had to happen before the gas-tight inner door would open. Smooth white epoxy covered every surface, just as it did in all of the trailer’s biohazard areas. The entire trailer, including the computer room, had a double seal—a continuous epoxy coat, then all wiring and ductwork, then a second epoxy wall. As in any BSL lab, the goal was to remove as many nooks, crannies and edges as possible.

Above the inner door, a light changed from red to green. Margaret opened the door, then followed the trolley into the decontamination chamber. Gitsh closed the inner door behind them. She stood back as the men worked controls that brought forth the high-powered spray of liquid bleach and chlorine gas from nozzles mounted on the walls, floor and ceiling. Gitsh and Marcus moved the body bag around, making sure the nozzles hit every last square inch.

Margaret spread her arms and turned slowly, letting the lethal spray cover her biohazard suit. She checked her heads-up display for breathable air—her suit tank had twenty minutes left. The decon chamber was really the only place they used the oxygen tanks. The rest of the time they connected the helmets to the trailers’ air supply via built-in hoses or just relied on the filter system. The suit’s filters could handle anything a half micron or larger, but chlorine gas would seep right through, burn the lungs and bring a painful death in a few short minutes.

After Marcus and Gitsh finished rinsing themselves in the chlorine spray, Margaret opened the final gas-tight door and stepped into the autopsy room. At eight feet wide by twenty feet long, this was the largest area in the MargoMobile.

Gitsh pushed the trolley all the way to the room’s far end, where it locked in place at the front of an epoxy-coated sink. The two-foot-wide trolley left three feet of space on either side, plenty of room to work. He turned a knob at the foot of the trolley, raising the end one inch. The shallow angle ensured that any fluids would run down the ridges on the trolley’s sides and spill into the sink, which drained into the waste-treatment system.

“Okay, guys, let’s get connected,” Margaret said. Four curled yellow hoses hung from the ceiling. She reached up, pulled one down and handed it to Marcus. He connected the hose to the back of her helmet. She felt a quick hiss as pressurized air slid into her suit, making it puff up a little bit more. In her HUD the internal air-supply timer faded to a thin, ghostly illumination while the circular logo that marked an external oxygen supply glowed to life. The wireless communication icon also faded as the network connection light lit up.

“Let’s get him out of the bag,” Margaret said.

After connecting their own helmets, Gitsham and Marcus unzipped the outer body bag and pulled it off. Marcus put it in a red disposal chute marked with a bright orange biohazard logo. They repeated the process for the second bag and put the child’s body on the table.

Margaret couldn’t suppress a shudder. His Milwaukee Bucks shirt had slid up around his armpits. Dawsey’s kick had smashed at least eight of the boy’s ribs, caving them inward like so much broken pottery. The child’s spine was snapped on the right side of the eighth thoracic vertebra, bending him at nearly a ninety-degree angle to his right. A mask of pure rage had frozen on the boy’s face, a wide-eyed, teeth-bared snarl that broadcast absolute hate even in death. She had seen faces like that too many times. The faces of the infected.

“Gitsh, get a sample in the microscope right away—I want to see the level of decomposition—then prepare the injections. Marcus, bring me the swab-test prototype.”

“Yes ma’am,” Marcus said.

“Recorder on,” Margaret said. A green light flashed in the upper right-hand corner of her HUD, signaling that everything she said and saw was being recorded in the control room.

“I’m online, Margaret,” Clarence said, his voice in her earpiece. “I have the other bodies in the second trailer. Amos is checking out the baby, but he looks fine. Did you run the test prototype yet?”

“Hold tight, I’m doing it now.” She held out her hand and Marcus gave her a small white electronic device the size of two packs of cigarettes joined end to end. He then opened a thin foil packet and pulled out a four-inch plastic stick, the last half inch coated with damp fabric. She slid the fabric end along the boy’s gum line and against the inside of his cheek.

The triangles harvested sugars common in the human body and used them to make cellulose, a material found only in plants. The cellulose formed a construction material that allowed the triangles to grow into hatchlings. Her theory was that some of the cellulose would leak into the bloodstream and eventually permeate bodily fluids, including saliva.

The prototype had few controls. The primary feature was a row of three square lights near the top: orange, green and red. She slid the plastic swab into a matching slot in the handheld device, and the orange light flashed, indicating a test in progress. The next indicator would be the green light, showing no trace of cellulose, or the red if the material was present in concentrations greater than one might find in a random grass stain.

The light flashed red.

“It works,” Margaret said. “Clarence, the test works.”

“Fantastic,” he said. “I’ll let Murray know immediately. He can rush the testers into production. Great job, Margaret. That finally gives us what we need.”

“Thank you,” Margaret said. She had grown rather fond of Clarence’s voice in her ear as she worked. He stayed in the computer control room, managing any requests she had, listening in to her and Amos theorizing as they cut up infected bodies.

Gitsh tapped her on the shoulder. “The sample’s up on the screen, Margo.”

She turned to look at the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. She hadn’t designed the trailer, but the monitor was her idea. Looking into microscopes was kind of annoying—routing them to a big plasma screen let everyone see what was going on.

The screen showed what she expected—the red, pink and white of highly magnified flesh and blood vessels, along with the gray of decomposing matter and the black of cells that were already long since destroyed by the apoptosis chain reaction. Only about 25 percent decomposed: the best sample she’d had yet. Even so, she didn’t have long.

“Okay, boys,” Margaret said, turning back to the table. “We need to work quickly.”

Anthony used scissors to cut away the boy’s yellow pajama bottoms and the T-shirt, leaving his bent body naked on the table.

“Caucasian male, approximately six years old,” Margaret said. “Severed spinal column, massive blunt-force trauma.”

Even before cutting into him, she could see that the boy’s internal organs were smashed to hell.

“One triangle on the stomach,” Margaret said. “Heavily damaged, lowest priority. One on the front upper-right thigh. Intact. Highest priority. Turn him over, please.”

The assistants flipped the little corpse. Now his broken body angled to Margaret’s left instead of to her right.

“One on the lower back, just above the eighth thoracic. Completely destroyed. Lowest priority. No other triangles visible on the body. Flip him back and let’s give him the injection series. Maximum dosage. I’ll take the right thigh.”

They gently put the corpse on its broken back again. Marcus laid out six large syringes, each with a long needle sheathed in hard plastic. Margaret carefully unsheathed the first syringe and went to work in the area around the triangle.

As soon as the triangles died, they caused a chain reaction of apoptosis. Apoptosis is a normal part of human health: sometimes cells outlive their usefulness and become a drag on the body, so they self-destruct. The triangles did something to that chemical code, however, turned it into a cascading event that dissolved all the tissue of an adult male in less than two days.

Margaret had tackled that problem in working to save Perry’s life. She’d performed immediate surgery on him to remove any trace of the dead triangles rotting inside his body. That hadn’t stopped the apoptosis, but it slowed it, giving her enough time to find a solution.

Apoptosis is driven by proteins called caspases, also known as the “executioner” proteins. Caspases exist in every cell in an inactive form, but when cells are damaged or old, the caspases activate and kill the cell. In a normal person, other proteins known as inhibitor of apoptosis proteins, or IAPs, shut down the process as soon as the intended cell dies. The triangles corrupted this normal process by neutralizing the IAPs’ suppressive abilities, allowing the caspases to spread the deadly chain reaction to surrounding cells, which then released their caspases, which then destroyed more cells, and so on.

She’d fought this process by testing multiple drugs that inhibited caspases. The magic formula turned out to be a trial drug called WDE-4-11, which successfully shut down the apoptosis chain reaction. That saved human tissue, although the triangle corpses still decomposed within hours.

That meant she could operate on a live hosts, remove the triangles, then use WDE-4-11 to stop the apoptosis. Despite Perry’s naive, violent beliefs, she could save them. When she did, however, saving the tissue was only one step—she also had to deal with the mental effects. For that she had a battery of mood-controlling drugs at her disposal, including drugs that had tackled the chemical imbalances in Perry’s brain and returned him to a semblance of sanity.

Or so she’d thought at the time.

She focused her attention on cutting the triangle free from the dead boy’s leg. The human tissue would keep, but the triangle would be black ooze in only a few hours, and she needed to move fast.

MEAN DRUNK

Dew parked the Lincoln in front of Perry’s motel room. Fluffy snowflake clusters had replaced the rain and hail. As the saying went, if you don’t like the weather in Wisconsin, just wait ten minutes. Dew had heard the same kinds of jokes about Michigan, Ohio and Indiana—and they were all true.

Perry sat in the passenger seat. He’d passed out with a beer in his left hand, his right still wrapped around a tattered six-pack that had only two bottles left. Dew didn’t want to act as a chauffeur for this psycho piece of shit, but he wasn’t about to put someone else at risk.

“Wake up,” Dew said.

Perry didn’t move.

Dew put the Lincoln in reverse, backed up about five feet, put it in gear, then gunned it and jammed on the brakes. Perry’s big body lurched forward against the seat belt.

His head snapped up, and he blinked in confusion.

“Home sweet home,” Dew said.

Perry turned and looked at him with drunken eyes. “Thanks, Pops,” he said.

Dew said nothing. Perry stared and smiled for a few more seconds, seeming to wait for a response. He didn’t get one. When he got out, the Lincoln rose up at least six inches. Goddamn, but that kid was big.

Dew shut off the car and got out. His room was right next to Dawsey’s. Just like always.

“Dawsey, gonna stay in your room tonight, or are you going to find some more kids to kill?” Dew asked.

“I thought killing babies was your gig.”

Dew shook his head. A goddamn baby-killer reference. He’d walked right into it, sure, but even drunk, that kid really knew how to push his buttons.

“You know what?” Dew said. “I’m too old and too tired for this. I’m going to bed. You go drink yourself into a coma. Just don’t die on me, or I’ll get into trouble.”

He walked to his room, keyed in, then shut and locked the door behind him, leaving Dawsey standing in the snow.

Perry nodded. Don’t die on me. That’s all he was to these people, an asset. A freak. He keyed into his room, shut the door, then fell on the bed. He dropped his beer. It spilled on the carpet. That was okay, he had two more. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. It was spinning pretty good. Without looking away from the ceiling, he felt for another bottle, found it and twisted off the top. He upended it. Most of the beer splashed on his face or landed on the bed, but some of it went into his mouth, so it wasn’t all bad.

“I got some more, Bill,” Perry said. “I killed those motherfuckers.”

Bill didn’t answer. He never answered direct questions. He just piped up unexpectedly from time to time, told Perry to get a gun, to kill himself.

Bill. Why the fuck did Margo have to bring him up? Perry drank to forget Bill. Well, it didn’t work. Nothing Perry ever did worked. Except when he wanted to hurt someone. To kill someone. That worked every time.

What the fuck was Dew’s problem, anyway? Pretending to get all pissed about that family. Why didn’t Dew and the others understand? Those people weren’t human anymore. They were weak. They didn’t have discipline. That meant they needed to die. If one of them, any of them, was even trying to cut out the triangles, then Perry would let them live. Maybe. But it didn’t matter, because so far no one had fought.

No one but him.

Why? Why was he special? He knew why: because his drunken, fucked-up, wife-and child-beating father had toughened him up with a strap.

Perry set the beer bottle on the bed to the right side of his face. He tipped it—this time more made it into his mouth than onto the bed. His face was all wet and sticky.

He didn’t feel a thing for the infected. Not a thing. That freakin’ toddler had rushed him, for crying out loud. They weren’t just infected, they were stupid.

That was the last thought to go through Perry’s mind before he passed out for the second time that night.

THE BACKYARD OF CHUY RODRIGUEZ

Chuy Rodriguez lived at the corner of Hammerschmidt and Sarah streets in South Bend, Indiana. Chuy had a wife, Kiki, and two kids: John, sixteen, and Lola, fourteen.

In their backyard stood a sparsely leaved oak tree suffering from some kind of bark rot. The tree had another three years, maybe five, and Chuy was already dreading how barren his backyard would look when he had to cut it down.

Chuy’s tree, however, wasn’t really the point of concern. For that you had to look directly above the tree.

Some forty miles directly above it.

If you could look up there, even with a very high-powered telescope, you might not notice a little blur, like a tiny heat shimmer. That shimmer came from visible-light wavelengths hitting an object, sliding along its surface, then continuing on their way with almost their exact original trajectory.

This object wasn’t truly invisible. Were it some massive thing taking up half the horizon, everyone would have spotted it by now.

Since it was just a bit bigger than a beer keg, however, no one noticed.

This object was inanimate. Cold. Calculating. It had no emotions. If it did, when it felt the Marinesco gate vanish in a ground-rending explosion, it probably would have said, Awww FUCK, not again.

The object’s shape had once been quite smooth and polished, like a teardrop with a point on both ends instead of just one. But that had been at launch, before the long journey that brought it into a geostationary orbit above Chuy Rodriguez’s diseased oak tree.

Space isn’t really empty. It’s got stuff in it. Stuff like dirt, rocks, ice, various bits and pieces—only those pieces are spread really, really far apart. If you travel far enough through that not-so-empty space, you’re going to run into that stuff. Depending on how fast you’re going, hitting even a teeny speck of dust can cause quite a bit of damage. The double-teardrop rock had been engineered to take that damage and keep on flying. The engineering worked, mostly, but the object’s pitted and cracked exterior bore witness to a design adage true anywhere in the universe—you can’t test for everything.

It had come so close to completing the mission. Once again, however, stopped before the gate could open… once again, stopped by the rogue host.

Stopped by the sonofabitch.

Its mission was simple in concept. Travel straight out from the home planet and search for signals that indicated sentient life. Space, as mentioned before, is big. Searching space for a suitable planet would require an investment far greater even than the economy-breaking project that had launched this object so long ago. There was one way, however, to narrow the search for planets that sustain life—find planets that already have it.

It did that by tracking broadcast signals.

Broadcast signals meant several things. First, they meant a planet that could support advanced biological life—predictable ranges of gravity, density, temperature, gases and liquids. Second, broadcasts meant a predictable range of resources—odds were, a planet of nothing but silica and sulfur could not create technology capable of sending signals into space. Finally, and perhaps most important, broadcasts indicated a large population capable of performing technically advanced tasks.

And that was important when you wanted slave labor to build your colonies for you.

Colonies, like exploration, are prohibitively expensive operations. Enslaving a native population provides a low-cost solution. It also helps cut off a potential interstellar rival.

If all went well, if the planet had suitable gravity and atmosphere, the object could get cracking. It would seed the planet with machines that could build a portal, a portal that connected two places so far apart that no living thing, nor the children of that living thing, nor the great-greMargaret, Amos and Clarence sat in the MargoMobile’s at-great-grandchildren of that living thing, could survive the trip by any other means. With the portal, however, such a trip took place instantly. Hundreds of light-years traversed in the blink of an eye.

This object, this Orbital, had arrived in Earth’s solar system some twenty years ago after detecting multiple signals: radio, television, microwaves. It approached slowly, cautiously, because there was always the possibility sentient life was too advanced and would see it coming. So the Orbital watched for a few years. It analyzed, eventually reaching the conclusion it could move into a low, stationary orbit without being detected.

Once the Orbital drew to the operating range, it spent more years watching. While there were multiple shapes and forms in the signals, the dominant species was almost always present. Suffice it to say that thanks to repeated image analysis, the Orbital knew a human when it saw one.

After seven years the Orbital knew humanity’s technological capabilities. It could identify major population centers and, more significantly, areas of little or no population. It could not understand any languages, but it didn’t need to—it would accumulate language once the probes were successfully deployed.

The Orbital carried eighteen of the small, soda-can-size probes, each of which could cast over a billion tiny seeds adrift on the winds. Each seed contained two main elements. The first was the microscopic machinery needed to analyze potential hosts and hijack their biological processes. The second was a tiny, submicroscopic chunk of crystal. This chunk matched exactly with one in the center of every other seed and, more important, inside the Orbital. This irreplaceable, unreproducible chunk was the template, the device that reshaped the molecular structure of biomass so that it became the material needed to build a gate.

The first probe had been a total failure. Bad luck with the weather. The second probe actually produced several connections, but, unfortunately, they were all with nonsentient animals. When that happened, the seeds simply shut off—a half-formed triangle on a caged or penned domesticated animal could potentially alert humanity to the hovering threat. The seeds also needed sentient hosts to develop workers that could communicate and work together, could use tools and vehicles, could learn about the area and potential dangers.

It wasn’t until the sixth probe that seeds latched onto a sentient being. Although those seeds died early, the Orbital was able to gather some biofeedback. It analyzed the data, identified key problems, then modified the next batch accordingly.

The seventh probe proved closer still. More development, including successful creation of the biological material needed for worker construction. These were the strange red, blue and black fibers that would come to be associated with Morgellons disease.

Batches eight through ten were each more successful than the last, creating firm connections that flooded the Orbital with valuable biofeedback. It learned much about the structure of host-species DNA, refining the self-assembly process to a highly functional level. It gathered data about brain composition and chemical structure, enough to manipulate host behaviors, to steer them away from associating with noninfected hosts.

Batch eleven was a landmark achievement—access to the higher levels of a host’s brain, including memory and language processing. The Orbital began to build a vocabulary of images, concepts and words. One host even found a suitable portal location. This host, Alida Garcia, died soon after, but the primary obstacles had been overcome.

That should have made batch twelve the one.

Batch twelve produced five hosts. A change in the language, from some Spanish to English. The Orbital’s vocabulary grew. It understood more and more of the broadcast signals pouring off the planet. The workers incubated well and almost made it to the hatching phase before unexpected complications resulted in the deaths of the hosts—including Blaine Tanarive, Gary Leeland, Charlotte Wilson and Judy Washington. Martin Brewbaker’s triangles activated a few days after the others, but he died just the same.

More data. More modifications.

Probability tables indicated that batch thirteen had an 82 percent chance of success. Multiple seeds implanted in eleven hosts for a total of seventy-two potential workers. Fifty-six of those actually hatched and made it to the location identified by Alida Garcia.

The workers started to build the gate. Success seemed inevitable.

But then the rogue host appeared. A host that fought back, that killed embryonic workers and brought the human military. The workers had a name for this host. They called it the sonofabitch.

The Orbital tried again. Aside from some minor biological upgrades, batch fourteen used the same strategy as batch thirteen. Probes went out, seeds landed, embryos germinated, workers hatched. Everything went fine, until the Orbital learned of yet another unanticipated fact.

The rogue host could still hear.

Structures grown in host brains acted like antennae, connecting embryos and hosts, allowing the Orbital to direct them, to guide them, helping them find each other so they could work together to reach the gate locations. The rogue host remained tapped into this communication grid.

It heard.

It found the Mather gate location.

It brought the military… again.

So close.

Successful worker design in itself wasn’t enough to get the job done. The Orbital changed tactics.

Batch fifteen worked perfectly. It dispersed near Parkersburgh, West Virginia, and produced six hosts—all of which made it to the woods near South Bloomingville before hatching.

Batch sixteen fired only a few hours later, spreading over Glidden, Wisconsin.

Fifteen and sixteen hatched in record time, built their gates in record time. The Orbital activated the South Bloomingville gate as a decoy, drawing the human military.

The sonofabitch found both gates.

After all of these near hits, the Orbital had only two probes left. If those did not work, the entire mission was a failure.

It had to change strategy again.

The large explosion that destroyed the Marinesco gate demonstrated that humans could react quickly and with overwhelming force. Placing the gates in secluded areas had seemed like the best strategy at first, but it also allowed for massive ordnance without much risk to local populations.

The workers also needed protection. They were designed to hatch out of hosts and then build, not fight. They could kill, but were far outmatched by the human forces responding to each gate. The workers needed defenders, something to occupy the human forces, fight them long enough for workers to activate the gates.

Since defenders would not build the gate, they did not need the template. That was good. That opened a new strategy. Because the new defender design didn’t need a template, it could do something that the template-carrying embryos could not—the new design could reproduce.

The Orbital began modifying the next batch of seeds.