Contagious

BIG SAMMY’S BAR

Margaret hadn’t given the computer-room chairs a second thought until Perry sat in one. He’d opted to stand at first, but his little grimaces made it obvious his knees were killing him. Margaret pulled the I am your doctor trump card and ordered him to sit. Put an ironing board in front of him with a plate of turkey on top, and he would have looked like a grownup forced to sit in one of the kiddie chairs at Thanksgiving.

She sat in the chair to Perry’s right, Dew in the chair to his left. Clarence stood behind Margaret, his body radiating tension. Everyone noticed Clarence’s vibe except Clarence himself.

Amos, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

“I really don’t like to talk about this,” Perry said.

Dew grabbed Perry’s left shoulder and gave it a supportive shake. “All the more reason to get this done quick and get it done right,” he said. “Besides, what else are you gonna do with your time? Go lift some weights?”

Perry nodded. “Push-ups and sit-ups, actually.”

“I think you’re studly enough for the moment,” Margaret said. “We have access to a lot of data about the individual triangle hosts. I’m hoping that adding details of your experience can help us locate the source of the infection.”

Perry shrugged. “I’ll do what I can.”

Margaret tapped at the keyboard, calling up a map on the flat-panel monitor in front of him.

“This is a map of the homes of the seven known triangle hosts from the Ann Arbor area,” she said.

She moved the mouse and hit a selection on the screen. Seven house icons appeared on the map.

Perry saw that two icons, one stacked on the other, sat over his apartment complex between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Those two formed the point of a triangle, with the second point almost in downtown Ann Arbor, and the third point south of Ann Arbor in Pittsfield.

The other three house icons looked more random: one in Whittaker, about five miles south and a little east of Perry’s apartment complex, then two very close together in the farmland just south of Ford Lake and Rawsonville.

“What’s the pattern?” Perry asked.

“There isn’t one,” Margaret said. “These are just the home addresses of the victims. We can also add work or school addresses.” She clicked the mouse again, and seven blue dots appeared. “We can also add any known locations of the hosts for the two weeks prior to the day you started itching, but the map gets kind of crazy if we do that.

“The problem is, we can’t find any correlation in these locations. We still have no idea exactly when or where people were infected. We need to use your memory of the days before you started itching, and compare that to the information we have. Hopefully, we can make a connection that points us to the time and source of infection.”

Perry nodded.

“Okay,” Margaret said. “For starters, you and Patricia DuMond both lived in the same apartment complex.”

“Who is Patricia DuMond?” Perry asked.

“I believe you called her Fatty Patty,” Margaret said.

Perry had fled his own apartment shortly after killing his friend Bill, just before the police arrived. He’d had only moments to hide and nowhere to run. Fatty Patty lived one building over—her triangles had called to Perry, promising refuge. He’d turned out to be a less-than-pleasant guest, even roughed her up a little. He hadn’t killed her, she’d died when her triangles ripped out of her body, but he sure as hell hadn’t done anything to help her. Patty’s ordeal was a major reason Perry killed every host he found—dying at his hands, no matter how brutal, was far, far better than death from a hatching.

“Oh,” Perry said quietly. “Yeah, her. Okay.”

“So that’s two hosts living in the same apartment complex,” Margaret said. “But only two. If the vector was in the complex, or went through the complex, we would assume there would be more hosts.”

“Unless you were banging her,” Dew said. “Which means you could have been infected at the same time.”

Perry shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but I hadn’t been laid in weeks. I might have seen her around from time to time, but I’m not sure. The apartment complex was pretty big. I can say for certain I never spoke to her, though.”

“She worked in Royal Oak, you worked in Ann Arbor,” Margaret said. “So you traveled in opposite directions for work.”

Margaret tapped the keyboard, and two of the blue dots started pulsing, one on the location of American Computer Solutions, where Perry had worked as a support rep.

“We’re trying to figure out where you and Patty might have crossed paths,” Margaret said. “We know roughly where she was in the days before the Monday you started itching, because this database has her cell-phone records and credit-card receipts.”

“Is that legal?” Perry asked.

Dew laughed. “Don’t worry about it, kid.”

“I wondered the same thing,” Margaret said. “But stopping this thing from killing people takes priority, wouldn’t you say?”

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” Perry said. “The Fourth Amendment; you guys ever heard of it?”

Margaret stared at the big, beat-up man crammed into the tiny chair. He only looked like a dumb jock. Dew was equally speechless.

“Don’t be so shocked,” Perry said. “I went to college, remember?”

“Tell you what, college boy,” Dew said. “You find the history book that talks about Thomas Jefferson having blue triangles growing on his nut-sack, then you can quote the founding fathers all you want.”

Perry leaned back in the chair and sighed. “All right, fine, whatever. Let’s get on with it.”

Margaret continued. “Your records aren’t as detailed as Patricia’s. The only person you seemed to call was Bill Miller. We show you made ATM withdrawals every week in the same amount, from a machine near your apartment, but you have almost no credit-card purchases.”

“I only use credit cards at the bar,” Perry said. “When I’ve had a few, I tip too much on each round. With the credit card I only tip once and I don’t overspend on my drinks. I use cash for everything else. That’s how I stayed on budget. When my weekly cash ran out, I stopped spending.”

Margaret nodded, feeling a flutter of hope. If Perry had shopped somewhere and come into contact with another triangle host, Cheng might have missed it simply because Perry had used cash.

“Since we don’t know what causes the infection, we don’t know the length of the gestation period,” Margaret said. “Maybe the vector hit you the day before, the week before or the month before, so let’s take it one day at a time. You told us you started itching on a Monday, so try and remember—what did you do that Sunday?”

Perry touched the stitches on his lip as he thought. “Me and Bill probably watched football all day.”

“Where?”

Perry shrugged. “Probably just my apartment.”

“Naw, we know you were at a bar that night,” Dew said. His finger traced a line on his flat-panel screen. “Here we go. Where is Big Sammy’s Bar?”

“Westland,” Perry said. “Just about halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit. Big screens, lots of hot girls.”

“That Sunday night you spent forty-six dollars even,” Dew said. “It’s on your credit-card history.”

Perry thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. I do that with the tip, put in the right amount of change so it comes out even. Bill and I went to Big Sammy’s to watch the Lions play the Colts. The late game. They lost.”

“There’s a surprise,” Dew said.

“Come on,” Perry said. “Cut ’em some slack. They only lost by two touchdowns that time.”

“Then what happened?” Margaret said. “Game ended, what did you do?”

As he thought, Perry moved his finger from his stitched lip to his black eye. “I went home. I think I was a little drunk, so I was driving real careful. No, wait, I got hungry so I stopped at a store to grab some munchies.”

“Where did you stop?”

Perry shrugged. “Man, I can’t say. That was like six weeks ago, and I was drunk.”

Dew leaned closer to the flat-panel. “Could it have been the Meijer grocery store, in Belleville?”

“Could be,” Perry said. “That’s on the way home.”

Margaret stood and walked over to stand behind Dew. “Why?” she said. “What’s significant about that particular store?”

Dew pointed to another line. His fingertip left a little smudge on the screen.

“Credit-card history shows Patricia DuMond bought over a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries at Meijer in Belleville,” Dew said. “At ten thirty-one P.M.”

Margaret sat back down in her chair and started pounding on the keys, excitement bleeding through to her fingertips. “That might give us something.”

Now Dew got up from his chair and stood behind Margaret. “So the vector is a grocery store?”

Margaret shook her head. “No, it’s probably not the store itself, or the food it sold. Otherwise we’d have certainly traced other hosts back to it.

But for the first time, we may have two hosts in the same location at the same time.”

She typed a few keys, and the icon denoting Perry and Patricia’s infection slid west to hover over the Meijer store. The icon’s new location instantly created a visual curve, one that started in Whittaker, then moved gradually northeast through the two house icons near Rawsonville, then sharper east toward the Meijer in Belleville.

Perry had been there around 10:30 P.M. So had Patricia. If the hosts that lived in Rawsonville had been home at that time, which was likely…

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “can this thing call up historical weather patterns?”

“Probably,” he said. “Let me drive.”

Margaret stood and Clarence sat down.

Perry leaned over to watch Clarence’s hunt-and-peck typing. “You need a hand with that, champ?”

Clarence kept his eyes on the keyboard and the screen in front of him.

“I think I can swing it, chief, but thanks for being such a helper.”

“So it’s not the grocery store,” Dew said. “You think maybe something blowing through the air, right? Something airborne?”

“Airborne is a term for one host passing the disease to another through sneezes, coughs or even breath,” Margaret said. “Look at the range on this curve. We’re talking miles here, not feet. The more accurate term is wind-borne, where wind is the mechanical vector driving the spore.”

“But wouldn’t Cheng have checked weather patterns?” Dew asked.

“Of course,” Margaret said. “But the wind can change direction from minute to minute. We now potentially have an exact time of infection. Cheng never had that. Perry, what did you do after you got your food?”

“Ate it on the way home,” Perry said. “Got home, got undressed and went right to bed. I had work the next day.”

“The vector must have been on your hands,” Margaret said. “Or maybe on your clothes, and when you got undressed you spread it around. You must have touched… uh… some private places.”

“A guy scratching his balls in the privacy of his own home,” Dew said. “Imagine that.”

“Okay,” Clarence said. “I have historical weather. What do you want, Margo?”

“Give us wind direction at ten thirty P.M. Sunday,” she said. “Focus in on Belleville if you can.”

Otto tapped away. Blue arrows appeared, pointing mostly east and a little bit north. A green line of text at the bottom read.5 MPH, 260 DEGREES.

“That doesn’t work,” Dew said. “The wind direction doesn’t line up the Rawsonville hosts with the store.”

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “show me a time-lapse projection of wind patterns from ten P.M. to ten thirty P.M.”

Otto looked at the keys for a second but didn’t type. “Uh… I don’t think this computer can do that.”

“Jesus H,” Perry said. “Give me that.”

He grabbed the keyboard and pulled it onto his lap. His big fingers flew across the keys. Data fields popped up on the screen and filled with strings of text faster than Margaret could even read them.

“You people remind me of the idiots I used to support at my job,” Perry said. “It’s like you’ve never read a software manual in your life. This is basic stuff, guys.”

He hit one last key, and the blue arrows on the screen changed. Instead of a west-to-east orientation, they started pointing north, then curved northeast, and finally wound up pointing due east.

Perry clacked a few more keys. The blue arrows vanished save for one—an arrow that started at the Whittaker house’s icon, curved to the right to cross over both the Rawsonville icons, and then farther to the right to cross over Meijer’s.

“Holy shit,” Dew said. “That’s it. It’s fucking airborne.”

“Wind-borne,” Margaret said.

“Wind-borne, right,” Dew said. “So what about the other hosts that are outside of this pattern?”

“Could be a number of things,” Margaret said. “They could have passed through the wind curve at just the right time, could have been another… I don’t know… another gust that carried the spores to other areas. This curve doesn’t account for everyone, but it accounts for half of them. It’s statistically significant, no question.”

Clarence turned in his chair to face her. “But what does this really tell us? I mean, wind can blow all over.”

Perry spoke before Margaret could. “It gives us a projection based on wind speed and the distance between infection points. From there we can potentially extrapolate a vector path and possibly even a range for potential release-point locations. Combine this data with hosts from the other infection locations, maybe you can reduce the search area for the release point. What Margaret is saying is that Colonel Ogden was right, it’s a satellite. This weather analysis might tell us where to look for it.”

Margaret smiled and nodded at Perry. He winked at her.

“College?” Dew said.

Perry nodded. “College.”

“Perry,” Margaret said, “can we do that here?”

Perry shook his head. “That takes way more computational power. You have simple wind-direction history, sure, but you need to extrapolate that against the distance between infection points, air temperature, humidity… and probably a bunch of other shit I don’t even know. It’s a whole different ball game from what I just showed you.”

“Let’s kick this back to Murray,” Clarence said. “See if he can put it in front of some of his most brilliant minds the nation has to offer.”

“Fuck yes he can,” Dew said. “He’ll have the National Weather Service and climatologists and God knows what on this faster than you can hum ‘Oh! Susanna.’”

Clarence kept staring at Perry. “I might have been wrong about the dumb-jock stereotype,” he said. “You’re pretty goddamn smart.”

Perry didn’t look away from his monitor. “Naw, you were right about the stereotype. It just doesn’t apply to football. You have to be smart to be good at football, because it’s complicated.”

He turned and smiled at Clarence. “The dumb jocks play basketball.”

Perry turned back to face the monitor.

Clarence shook his head, and Margaret just laughed.

CHELSEA IN CHARGE

Chelsea Jewell slowly woke. Her head hurt real bad. She wanted her mommy.

No, that wasn’t right. She had to watch out for Mommy. Mommy might want to hurt her. Chelsea wanted her daddy. Daddy was still okay.

And yet that wasn’t right, either. She didn’t want her daddy… she wanted to protect her daddy.

She wanted to protect what was inside of Daddy.

Are you awake?

She looked around the room. Where had that voice come from? She couldn’t see anybody.

Are you awake?

“Yeah,” Chelsea said. “Where are you?”

I am very far away.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Then why can I hear you?”

Because you are special. You are the only one there who can hear me.

“Mommy and Daddy can’t hear you?”

Not yet.

“My daddy is sick,” Chelsea said. “So am I. I feel a little better now, but my head hurts real bad, and now my tongue feels all thick and stuff. Mommy scares me real bad. I think she wants to hurt me.”

You don’t need to be afraid of your mommy.

“Are you sure?”

Yes.

Chelsea felt the fear of her mother vanish as if a breeze had blown it away.

Your daddy is not sick. He’s very important.

Chelsea saw visions of something triangular, something that resembled one of her yellow wooden blocks, the one that looked like a little pyramid, except in her vision it was black and moved on strange legs. It was beautiful. It was special. Just like Mommy always called her special.

“Daddy has pretty dollies inside of him,” Chelsea said. “Is that why he’s important?”

That’s right. Daddy has dollies inside of him.

Mommy called Chelsea special, and Mommy had always protected Chelsea.

And now Chelsea would protect Daddy. Daddy, and the dollies.

The closet door opened, spilling light inside.

“Honey,” Mommy said, “what the heck are you doing in here?”

Chelsea blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light. She waited for the fear, but it didn’t come. The voice said she didn’t need to be afraid, and she wasn’t.

“Sleeping,” Chelsea said.

“But why in the closet?”

Chelsea shrugged. “I dunno.”

“That’s what your father said. I found him sleeping behind the couch, of all things. Are you guys playing some joke on me?”

Chelsea shook her head.

“Riiiight,” Mommy said. “You both hide somewhere to sleep, and it’s not a joke on me? We’ll just see about that. But enough playing around.

How are you feeling?”

“No so good,” Chelsea said.

Mommy picked Chelsea up and laid her back down on the bed. She put her hand on Chelsea’s forehead. Mommy’s hand felt cool and nice.

“You’re not as hot as you were,” she said. “Do you feel worse or better than before?”

“A little better,” Chelsea said.

Mommy’s brow wrinkled up, and her eyes narrowed.

“Honey, open your mouth,” she said. “Stick out your tongue.”

Chelsea did. Mommy got that worried look on her face.

“Honey, you’ve got blue spots on your tongue. Does your tongue hurt?”

“A little,” Chelsea said.

“Stick it out again. I’ve never seen that before. I don’t like it. I think tomorrow we’re all going to the doctor.”

Chelsea felt a shiver ripple across her skin. The doctor. The doctor that always hurt her with needles and stuff. The voice was wrong—she should be afraid of Mommy.

“But I don’t like the doctor,” Chelsea said.

“And I don’t care if you like him or not, young lady, you’re going. You and your father both. He’s itching like crazy, and he’s getting these orange welts on his skin.”

“Daddy has dollies inside of him,” Chelsea said. “My special friend said so.”

“Oh, you have a special friend now? How nice, honey. What’s his name?”

Chelsea thought for a second, but she didn’t know his name. She shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Well, you can’t have a special friend and not give him a name,” Mommy said. She gently pushed Chelsea back down in the bed and started tucking the covers around her. “What would you like to call him?”

“How about… Chauncey?” Chelsea asked.

Mommy smiled. “Ahhh, Chauncey, like Uncle Donald’s favorite basketball player?”

Chelsea nodded. “Yeah. And his name sounds like mine. Chelsea and Chauncey.”

“Well, that’s a fine name,” Mommy said. She stroked Chelsea’s hair, and that felt really nice. “You get some more sleep, okay?”

“I’m not that tired anymore,” Chelsea said. “I want to get up.”

“Just lie here for a little bit longer, honey. Then you can get up if you want, but stay here and play with your toys, okay? I don’t want you running around. I’ll check on you later, and we’ll see the doctor tomorrow.”

Mommy leaned down and kissed her forehead, then left the room and shut the door behind her. Chelsea sat in the darkness, wondering if Chauncey would talk to her again.

He did.

You must not go to the doctor. You have to stop her.

Chelsea whispered so Mommy wouldn’t hear her. “How can I stop her, Chauncey? Mommy’s in charge. I have to do what she says.”

She ’s not in charge of you.

“She’s not?”

No. You’re in charge of her.

“I am?”

You are.

“Well… she’s still lots bigger than me. What if she makes me go to the doctor’s?”

You can stop her tonight. After she goes to sleep.

A picture flashed in Chelsea’s thoughts.

Yes, she could do that to Mommy.

THE SHOOTER

Dew could only take so much hemming and hawing.

His Colt M1911 .45-caliber pistol lay on the shooter’s table. It was loaded, hammer back, safety engaged. Perry Dawsey stood there, in ear protectors and goggles, staring down at the weapon.

“Look, Dew, this is cool and all, but I just don’t want to shoot, okay?”

“Pick up the gun, kid,” Dew said. “I have a mean piss of a hangover thanks to you, and I’m really not in the mood for this. You’re embarrassing me in front of an entire shooting range.”

The range was empty, of course. Dew had rented the whole thing.

Perry stared down at the .45. “But what if I pick it up and… you know… I get the urge to shoot you.”

Dew pulled up his pant leg and drew his .38. “I’ll stand behind you, with this aimed at your back. If you even turn around funny, I’ll kill you.

Does that make you feel better?”

“A little,” Perry said. Dew would have laughed if the kid hadn’t looked so damn serious.

Perry kept staring at the .45.

Dew sighed. “Now what?”

“What if I… what if I listen to Bill?”

“What if you kill yourself, you mean?”

Perry nodded.

“Look kid, you gotta grab this thing by the balls.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Shit, sorry,” Dew said. “Just a figure of speech. Listen. Ronald Reagan, the greatest president that ever lived, he had a quote that sums this up nicely: If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. So if you’re going to kill yourself, let’s stop fucking around and get it done.”

“You’re one of those sensitive hippie types, I see.”

“I have a flower garden at home,” Dew said. “And I’m wicked good with a crochet hook. Seriously, you can’t go through life afraid of this shit. Stop being a fucking pussy and pick up the goddamn gun already.”

Perry slowly reached for the .45, then drew his hand back.

“If you shoot yourself in the head, that only hurts for a second,” Dew said. “If I shoot you in the foot, it’s going to hurt for a long time. So pick it up or say good-bye to a little piggy.”

Perry reached out again and picked up the .45. His hand shook violently at first, so badly that Dew wondered if the gun might actually go off. He was playing a dangerous game here. Dew kept the .38 pointed at Perry’s back, just in case.

“Just breath easy,” Dew said. “Point the gun and squeeze the trigger slow. You should be a little surprised when it goes off. And remember, after you shoot, remove the magazine and lock the slide to the rear. That will eject a round, so don’t be surprised by that. Inspect the chamber and magazine, then lay it on the table and move your hands away. Just like you did when we practiced.”

“Yeah, but then the gun wasn’t loaded.”

“Just do it like I told you, and you’ll be safe, okay?”

“Okay,” Perry said.

Dawsey pointed the .45 down the range and let out a breath. The pistol looked like a toy in his big hand. Dew would have given Perry the .38, but he wasn’t sure if the kid’s finger could fit through the trigger guard.

Dew waited, then bang, the gun fired. A little smoke curled up from the barrel as both men looked down the firing range. The target was at thirty feet. Perry had hit the center ring, just to the left of the X.

“Nice shot,” Dew said.

“I thought this thing was supposed to have a kick.”

“Remove the magazine, lock the slide to the rear…,” Dew said, letting his voice trail off.

Perry nodded quickly and energetically. He carefully followed all of Dew’s instructions, then set the weapon on the table in front of him. He raised both hands slowly off the gun to show he wasn’t holding it. He looked… relieved. Like all the pressure was off, like he’d just lost his virginity.

“Okay,” Dew said. “So you didn’t feel the gun jump in your hand?”

Perry shook his head.

“When I shoot it, I can feel it kick, but it’s not so bad,” Dew said.

“Strong as you are I shouldn’t be surprised you can’t feel it at all.”

“Uh… Dew?” Perry had a look on his face like he was afraid to ask a question. For fuck’s sake—he had cut monsters out of his own body, had taken two bullets and kept on fighting, and he was afraid to ask a question.

He doesn’t want to look stupid, Dew thought. He doesn’t want to look stupid in front of YOU.

“Spit it out,” Dew said. “You can ask me whatever.”

“Um… squeezing real slow is cool and all, I guess, but if I have to use this for real, don’t I want to fire faster than that?”

Dew smiled. “Sure, that’s a logical thing to ask. Not that you’ll have to use one of these for real, but just in case, reload the magazine and fire off the whole thing, fast as you can, okay? We’ll look at the target and you can compare accuracy. Then we’ll talk about how to fire in different situations. Sometimes you want one accurate shot, sometimes you want to lay down as much lead as you can as fast as you can. Okay?”

Perry smiled and nodded. A real smile for a change.

Still looked hideous with the stitches, but at least it was genuine.

Dew took three steps back. He casually pointed the .38 at the floor, but he wasn’t about to put it back in the holster. Not yet.

Perry loaded two more bullets into the magazine, inserted it, then thumbed the slide release so it clicked home. He pointed the weapon and fired off seven shots in less than two seconds. It sounded like a machine gun. Dew watched the kid’s hand move, or rather he watched it not move. It might as well have been chiseled out of granite and bolted to the wall.

Perry ejected the magazine, checked the chamber, set the gun and the magazine down, then raised both hands off it again in seeming slow motion. Dew stared downrange. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He flipped the switch that brought the target back to the firing station for a closer look.

Perry had put all six shots in the center ring. The center X wasn’t even there anymore, just a big hole with ragged paper edges.

Perry smiled and looked down at Dew. “That’s pretty good, right?”

“Kid, are you fucking with me? Are you sure you’ve never shot before?”

The big man shook his head. “No sir. Dad wouldn’t let me touch any of the guns. But, I mean, it’s only hand-eye coordination stuff, right? Like a video game. I’ve always been good at anything like that.”

Dew stared at the target. It made sense. Dawsey had been an elite athlete. Would have gone first round in the NFL draft, probably first overall, had it not been for the knee injury that ended his career. He was so strong he didn’t even feel the .45 kick—he could just point the barrel accurately and keep it perfectly still while he emptied the clip.

Dew suddenly wondered if teaching Perry to shoot was such a good idea after all. If Perry could kill people with his bare hands, imagine what he could do with a weapon and plenty of ammo.

UGLY BETTY

Betty Jewell’s body faced a dire situation. Half-formed crawlers disintegrated, spreading apoptotic death. She was guilty of nothing more than being just old enough for her telomeres to shorten and suffer the minor damage that faces us all. Her telomeric breakdown wasn’t as bad as her father’s, of course, as he had been twenty-six years her senior.

Had she been younger, maybe as little as five years younger, it would have gone better for her.

Of course, “better” meant that more crawlers would have already reached her brain. Her brain-mesh was thin, emaciated—it needed additional crawlers to fully complete the change and send the signal. More struggled to reach her brain, either dragging half-rotted bodies along her nerves or trying to move past the dissolving corpses of crawlers that had already shut down. These survivors reached out their pseudodendrites, grabbing, pulling, sending their pain signals to gauge the response.

If Betty died, the crawlers’ mission failed, so they fought the rot with counterchemicals designed to neutralize the chain reaction. Her original infection spots were already a lost cause—there was too much apoptosis there to stop the process. The crawlers sent some of their number to stay at the edges, secreting the neutralizing chemical, trying to localize the damage and stop it from spreading. Inside these perimeters the rot dissolved flesh and scored bone.

That meant bad news for Betty Jewell’s face.

The crawlers didn’t consider the face a priority. Eyes to see, yes, mouth to breathe, of course. Those were important, as were her hands.

Hands could use tools.

Hands could use weapons.

The crawlers used their collective logic to split into several groups.

Some moved to the hands to try and save them, some moved to the brain to try and achieve the critical mass needed for the neural net, some to the eyes and ears and mouth to protect sensory input. A Betty who could not see, hear or talk could not defend, and that wasn’t a very useful Betty at all.

INTERFERENCE

Chatter.

That really was the best name for it. Perry heard chatter again. Coming from the south. South and… east? Yes, the east.

Somewhere out there, triangles were waking up.

So far he’d heard only snippets of thoughts, just a few syllables. The triangles didn’t know how to talk yet. They had to learn that from their hosts’ memories.

How many were out there? Perry couldn’t tell. He could never tell for sure.

He’d picked up a few wisps that morning. Like smelling something in your apartment, something you smelled only if you turned a certain way, and then it was gone. And you know that smell, because you’ve smelled it before. You just can’t remember what it is. It was that kind of familiarity.

Familiar, yet different. There was something else in those wisps. Something less random. More powerful, maybe?

Perry knocked on the door to Room 207. Dew answered.

“Hey Perry,” he said, and smiled, almost as if Dew were happy to see him. “Come on in.”

Perry followed him into the room. Baum and Milner were there, as was Amos, who had a bagel in one hand, a stack of papers in the other and a laptop sitting on his legs. Baum and Milner stiffened. Amos’s eyes immediately shot to the door. As soon as Perry moved into the room, Amos dropped the bagel, shut the computer and ran out.

“Damn, that little guy is twitchy,” Dew said.

“Yeah,” Milner said. “Can’t imagine why.”

Perry stared at the smaller man. “Milner, I’m standing right here if you’ve got something on your mind.”

Baum laughed. “You sure you want some? You look a little roughed up from your last go-around.”

“Baum, shut the fuck up,” Dew said. “If you think you can take Dawsey, I’ll be happy to move all this stuff out of the way and you two can have at it.”

Baum stared at Perry and said nothing.

Perry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was Dew sticking up for him? Well, not sticking up, exactly, but calling Baum out to back up his mouth.

“Well?” Dew said to Baum.

Baum shook his head. “I’m good.”

“Then keep your pie-hole shut,” Dew said. “Milner, you too. Now, Perry, what have you got for us?”

“I’m hearing chatter,” Perry said quietly.

All three men perked up.

“Where?” Dew asked.

Perry shrugged. “Not sure yet. Southeast is as close as I can get.”

“Michigan again?” Dew asked. “Maybe Ohio?”

Perry shrugged once more.

“So why haven’t you gone after it?” Milner asked. “Got in your fancy car and headed out.”

“Because he and I have come to an understanding,” Dew said. “Perry’s part of the team now.”

Milner laughed. Dew shot him a you’re already on thin ice glare, and Milner’s smile faded.

“What’s it sound like?” Baum asked, his disdain for Perry suddenly gone.

“Can you pick out any names? Places?”

Perry shook his head. “Not yet, but it’s getting stronger.”

“Just have a seat, kid,” Dew said. “And relax, it will come like before.

We’ll get everyone loaded up and head in that general direction.”

Perry limped to a chair and sat.

And right then, the chatter… changed.

“Something’s wrong,” Perry said. “It’s getting… quieter all of a sudden.”

“Concentrate,” Dew said. “Maybe you have to focus?”

“Doesn’t work like that,” Perry said. “It’s always on. I don’t have any control over it. It’s fading. I can’t hear the chatter. What I hear now sounds… well, it sounds kind of gray.”

He looked at Dew. “It’s gone. I can’t hear them anymore.”

DR. DAN COSTS AMOS TWENTY BUCKS

The V-22 Osprey helicopter passed over the highway at a high altitude, then turned 180 degrees. It dropped closer to the ground and came in for a landing in the parking lot, putting the rest-stop building between it and the road.

As the chopper set down, Margaret saw the familiar sight of two nondescript semi trailers parked in parallel. They had a different paint job from the ones she’d left behind in Glidden—brown and dented, another flavor of faux–shabby industrial. Aside from the plastic extension connecting the two trailers, no one would have given them a second glance.

“I wonder if they got last year’s model,” Amos said. “The MargoMobile lot must be jumping this time of year.”

The trip here had been a whirlwind. Once word came down that two bodies had tested positive for cellulose, Dew kicked the operation into high gear. Margaret, Amos, Clarence, Gitsh and Marcus were in the air within fifteen minutes. Murray ordered radio silence for the trip—he wasn’t taking any chances. An hour and a half later, their Osprey was touching down at this rest area in Bay City, Michigan.

Margaret hadn’t known there were more MargoMobiles. Even with his inner circle, Murray still had secrets inside of secrets. In fact, now she wondered just how many MargoMobiles existed. Certainly made sense to use multiple units—driving the first set from Glidden would have taken ten hours. Even moving them using cargo helicopters would have cost valuable time. With multiple units and multiple crews, Murray could lock down infection sites much faster.

Margaret and her team hopped out and headed straight for the brown trailers. A man stood outside, wearing an air force uniform covered with a heavy blue jacket and a hat that flopped warm-looking flaps down over his ears. The man snapped a taut salute.

“Captain Daniel Chapman,” he said.

“I’m not military,” Margaret said. “Neither is anyone else here.”

The salute vanished. “Good. I hate saluting.” He stuck out his hand.

“Doctor Chapman. Call me Dan. Nice to meet you.”

Margaret returned the shake. “Doctor Margaret Montoya. This is Doctor Amos Braun and Agent Clarence Otto.”

“Agent of what?” Dan asked as he shook the men’s hands.

“Agent to the stars,” Clarence said with a smile. “It’s really not important, don’t you think?”

Dan nodded and held up one hand, as if to say, Sorry I asked, I should have known.

He led them into the MargoMobile’s computer room. It looked exactly the same as the one she’d left back in Glidden, save for air force logos on the flat-panels and a coffee-mug ring or two on the counter. Dan waited until Margaret sat, then stood behind her. Amos sat in the chair next to her, while Otto seemed to fade away into the background. How he could manage to do that in a five-by-ten-foot room, Margaret couldn’t say, yet he did it just the same.

“We have two cases of infection,” Dan said. “Donald Jewell, age forty-two, from Pittsburgh, and his daughter, Betty, age sixteen. Of course, I’m not allowed to know exactly what they’re infected with. I just follow the procedures assigned to me. I’m happy to play along, but please don’t feed me the company line about necrotizing fasciitis. If, however, you should choose to let me know what the hell is going on, I won’t complain.”

“What if that knowledge means you’ll be sequestered for months?” Amos asked. “That, or shot because you know too much?”

“Then I might complain a little,” Dan said. “But I’ve always been a bit of a whiner.” He pointed a small remote at the computer and clicked a button.

Up on the screen, the air force logo disappeared, replaced by a picture of a man lying on icy pavement. He was in front of the rest-stop building right outside the trailer. The man’s clothes hung on his skeletal frame. A black skull stuck out from a loose collar, and something black had stained the pavement around him.

“This is Donald Jewell,” Dan said. “Security-camera recordings show he pulled in to this rest area yesterday at approximately thirteen hundred hours. There was a pretty solid storm at the time, freezing rain, so no one reported seeing him get out of his car. Not sure how long the body sat there before someone came across it. Best guess, ten minutes. The guy who found the body called 9-1-1. State troopers were on the scene within fifteen minutes.

“Did they touch anything?” Margaret asked.

“Trooper Michael Adams used surgical gloves to check for a pulse,” Dan said. “Finding none, he removed the gloves, left them on the spot, and had no further contact with the body. The daughter was still in the car. She refused to let Adams in. He saw sores on her face, so he called for an ambulance. She wouldn’t allow paramedics inside the car, either. At that time, the paramedics performed the swab test on the corpse. My team was stationed in Detroit, so the CDC called us. We were actually the ones to remove the girl from the car.”

“How long have you been in charge of this rig?” Amos asked.

“Three weeks,” Chapman said. “We haven’t had much to do, to tell you the truth.” He put his shoulders back, puffed up his chest and spoke in a deep voice. “Just play with the equipment and wait for a call. If you don’t get that call, it’s good news. If you get it, just be ready do do whatever it takes.”

Margaret had to stifle a laugh. Dan was doing a dead-on impression of Murray Longworth.

“That’s uncanny,” Amos said.

“Thanks,” Dan said. “You should hear my Gutierrez; it slays. Anyway, after the paramedics called the CDC, Trooper Adams and his partner evacuated the rest area and shut it down. They followed all the instructions, line by line. Sharp guys; they were pretty impressive. They took pictures.”

He reached over Margaret’s shoulder and clicked the computer keyboard.

A series of shots flashed on the wall monitors, showing Donald Jewell’s initial stage of decomposition, then gradually shifting to his current state.

“Wow,” Clarence said. “Those guys saw a lot. Any worry about them talking?”

Dan threw his shoulders back and puffed up his chest again. “It’s taken care of. They understand the gravity of the situation and the importance of secrecy.”

“Seriously,” Amos said. “That’s creeping me out.”

“I’d laugh,” Clarence said, “only I’m sure Murray has a camera in here somewhere and he’s watching.”

Dan started nervously looking around the room. “Oh man, for real?”

Margaret reached back and tugged Dan’s sleeve. “Relax, he’s kidding.”

At least she hoped he was kidding.

“Run the pictures again,” she said.

Dan did.

“How often did they take these?”

“Every fifteen minutes,” Dan said. “Just like your instructions specify.”

Amos and Margaret exchanged a glance.

“What is it?” Clarence asked.

“This guy decomposed more rapidly than anyone we’ve encountered,” Amos said. “Twice as fast as before, maybe even faster.”

Clarence grimaced. “How about the others? We have names and addresses of everyone who was here at the time or came after?”

Dan nodded. “The troopers got everyone’s ID, license plates, registrations, the works.”

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “we need to have Murray get agents to every one of those people and run the swab test.”

“Yes ma’am.” Clarence moved to the third computer chair and grabbed the phone.

“But Margo,” Amos said, “it’s not contagious.”

“Not from host to host,” Margaret said. “But the McMillians were infected later, remember? Whatever the vector is, it might be persistent, lying on clothes or hair. And looking at these pictures, the disease has mutated, at least to some extent—as far as we know, now it could be contagious.”

Amos nodded. “Better safe than sorry, I suppose.”

“Everyone followed precise biohazard procedures,” Dan said. “We treated it like it was a strain of ebola that could do a stutter-step, fake you out, then jump in your pants if you weren’t careful. Mister Jewell’s remains are in the Trailer B body locker. Each piece of clothing is in a separate biohazard container, in case you want them.”

Otto put the phone on his shoulder and looked back at Amos. “Twenty bucks says Doctor Dan put each sock in a separate bag.”

“You’re on,” Amos said.

Dan smiled. “I even labeled the sock bags left and right. Sorry, Doctor Braun.”

“Call me Amos, you incredibly diligent and overwhelmingly anal-retentive young man.” Amos pulled the folded twenty from his pants pocket and handed it over to Otto without looking away from the screen.

The young doctor impressed Margaret. “For someone who has no idea what’s really going on, you did a hell of a job, Dan,” she said. “Looks like we’re ready to rock. Let me see pictures of the girl’s remains.”

Dan seemed surprised. “Didn’t you get the reports on your way in?”

Margaret shook her head. “No, radio silence the whole way. Why? What’s with the daughter’s corpse?”

“She’s not a corpse, she’s alive,” Dan said. “She’s in the containment chamber.”

ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME CHELSEA

A conversation was taking place.

One half of this conversation hovered forty miles above the Earth, straight up from the diseased oak tree in Chuy Rodriguez’s backyard.

The other half sat on the floor of Chelsea’s bedroom. On her left rested a pile of Barbies, Bratz and other dolls. On her right sat a similar but smaller pile. As she talked, she would pick up a doll from the pile on the left, take off all its clothes, hold the doll in her lap, then draw on it with a blue Sharpie.

She drew little triangles.

They were very pretty.

She finished with a doll, put it on the pile on the right, then grabbed another with her left hand.

“Chauncey, do you like ice cream Crunch bars?”

I have never had one. I could not eat them.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Then what do you eat?”

The Orbital directed some processing power to answering this. Being inanimate, it had endless patience for her questions, which was fortunate, because the questions indeed seemed endless. Most often it simply didn’t know the answer. It had accumulated a good bit of knowledge from the triangles’ interfacing with dozens of human hosts, but it still took time to make associations between language and fact.

I eat gravity.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Is it good?”

The Orbital worked to associate her use of the word good. Good meant many things to humans. It could mean a self-profession of capability. It could mean the socially acceptable course of action. It could mean a field goal. The Orbital searched to compare it with food consumption. Many stored host images came up, things like barbecued chicken, chocolate, cake, mashed potatoes. That is what she meant. Without the gravity processors, the Orbital would plummet to the Earth, so it applied the correct definition and answered.

Yes, it is very good.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Chauncey, who is your favorite Detroit Piston?”

I do not know.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Chauncey, are you God?”

The Orbital accessed images. An elderly human with a big white beard. A younger human with long hair and a short brown beard. Glowing heads. Love. Hatred. Divine intervention into human lives. Punishment. Wrath. Destruction. The Orbital cross-referenced these images against cataloged emotional responses, and determined that this was something it could potentially use to motivate hosts.

Why do you think I am God?

“You know, because you can talk in my head and stuff. People can’t do that, mostly.”

What do you think of God, Chelsea?

Chelsea sang. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. We go to church most Sundays, except during football season sometimes we don’t. I love God because God loves me.”

The Orbital called up more images. He examined the signals coming from Chelsea’s brain as she talked of God and Jesus. Yes, this was a powerful motivator.

Chelsea, if God told you to do something bad, would you do it?

Chelsea stopped drawing on her Barbie. She looked at the wall, just kind of staring out, tilting her head to the right as she thought.

“Daddy says sometimes God tests us, but God loves us and he wouldn’t ask us to do anything bad. So if God asked me to do something, then it couldn’t be bad, so I would do it.”

Yes.

“Yes what?”

Yes, I am God.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Okay. Can I still call you Chauncey?”

Yes.

Chelsea picked up her doll and started drawing blue triangles.

“Chauncey, do you like Snickers or Twix better?”

The Orbital continued to answer questions.

The door to her room opened slowly, and Mommy peeked her head inside.

“Chelsea, baby, how are you feeling?”

“Okay,” Chelsea said. She picked up another doll and took off its clothes.

“Chelsea, what are you doing in here?”

“Just drawing triangles on my dolls and talking to Chauncey.”

“Ohhh,” Mommy said. “Your special friend Chauncey?”

“Uh-huh,” Chelsea said. She drew a blue triangle on this doll’s forehead. Very pretty.

“What are you talking to him about?”

“Oh, you know,” Chelsea said. “Flowers, and my pink dress, and what’s the best cartoons, and basketball and gravity and ice cream and God and dollies and—”

“Okay, honey,” Mommy said, cutting Chelsea off. Mommy was laughing a little. Chelsea didn’t know what was so funny.

“You keep talking to Chauncey,” Mommy said. “Are you drawing on all your dolls? Is that a permanent marker? Don’t ruin them, honey.”

“I’m not ruining them, Mommy,” Chelsea said. She picked up a blond Barbie with blue triangles on her arms, legs and face. She held it up so Mommy could see. “They’re not ruined. I’m making them better. I’m making them pretty.”

“Okay, honey,” Mommy said. “You come get me if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay, Mommy.”

Mommy closed the door. Chelsea set the Barbie on the right-hand pile, then grabbed another doll from the pile on the left.

TEEN ANGST

Margaret refused to cry.

She had a job to do. But looking at the flat-panel monitor, looking at that poor girl’s face…

“Let me go!” the girl screamed. She pulled weakly against her restraints, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Even if she got out of the restraints, she couldn’t escape the tiny containment chamber’s clear, reinforced walls.

Cameras mounted outside her chamber provided an excellent view. white epoxy walls blazed under the ceiling’s embedded neon lights. Leather cuffs held Betty Jewell’s wrists and ankles tight to the autopsy trolley. A disposable roll of thin foam on top of the cart gave it a little bit of padding, but it was still a steel cart and wasn’t designed with comfort in mind. She wore a blue hospital gown spotted with purple where her oozing sores leaked blood.

“We injected her with the WDE-4-11 formula,” Dan said. “That slowed the apoptosis reaction, but she’s still breaking down, particularly around her facial lesions.”

“We have to operate immediately,” Amos said. “We have to get rid of that compromised tissue, see if we can stop the chain reaction entirely.”

Margaret turned to Dan. “Has she given any indication of when she started showing symptoms? What has she said so far?”

“She just won’t talk to us,” he said. “She believes we’re here to kill her. She keeps asking for her father, but I think she knows her father is dead. She’s asking for her mother, too.”

“Did you contact the mother?” Margaret asked.

Dan shook his head. “We haven’t tried.”

Amos turned on him. “What the hell do you mean, you haven’t tried? The girl just lost her father. She needs her family.”

“I have orders to keep any infected victims in isolation,” Dan said. “No contact of any kind until I’ve relinquished custody, which I’m doing now to you, Doctor Montoya.”

“Well, fine,” Margaret said. “We’ve got custody now. Clarence, please call the girl’s mother.”

“No,” Clarence said.

Margaret stared at him, dumbfounded. Dan she could understand, he was military, but Clarence? “We are calling this girl’s family, and right now.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Doc,” Clarence said.

“But she doesn’t have triangles,” Margaret said. “She’s got something, sure, but nothing is going to hatch out of her. She’s not a threat.”

Clarence shook his head. “You know we can’t say that for sure, Margaret. How many times have you told me that the disease might shift, might become contagious? You said it’s mutated, right?”

Margaret didn’t know what to say—he was using her own words against her.

Amos jabbed a finger at the monitor. “That is an American citizen in that cage. Yes, cage. She’s got rights, goddamit.”

Clarence again shook his head. “Not right now she doesn’t. We contact the mother and the next thing you know, the press is all over it.”

“The press?” Amos shouted. “You’re worried about the press? Listen up, you goose-stepping assho—”

“Amos, stop,” Margaret said. “He’s right. She could be contagious.”

Amos looked at her like she was crazy. “Well, sure she could be contagious,” he said. “That’s why we have her in a fucking BSL-4 containment cell. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s a scared teenage girl. She needs her family. We can bring in the mother, keep her under surveillance or whatever.”

“He’s right about the media, too,” Margaret said.

“Margaret, what the hell is wrong with you?” Amos said. “You’re a doctor. Remember the phrase primum non nocere?”

Margaret swallowed. The phrase was Latin for first, do no harm. It wasn’t actually part of the Hippocratic Oath, but the words were still drilled into every med student’s head.

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “I also remember another Latin phrase, the one we found painted in Kiet Nguyen’s bedroom. The house with all the dead kids. E pluribus unum. You remember that?”

Amos said nothing. He looked away.

“What’s that mean, Amos? Say it.”

“It means ‘out of one, many,’” he said quietly.

“So we follow the orders,” Margaret said. “We don’t call the girl’s family. Get suited up. We’re going to go in there and talk to her.”

Fully suited, Margaret and Amos walked into the autopsy room. An airtight door led into the collapsible walkway that connected Trailer B. Margaret watched the light above that door turn from red to green. Amos pulled up on the latch and swung the door outward to reveal a four-foot-long corridor and a matching door on the other side. They had to close their door to open the other, both because it was an airlock and because there wasn’t enough room in the corridor to open both.

When it came time to move the MargoMobile, built-in nozzles would douse the walkway’s interior with the chlorine/bleach. Gitsh and Marcus would then fold the walkway into its bracket inside Trailer B, shut the seamless outer door, and the MargoMobile would make like Willie Nelson—on the road again.

She stepped into the walkway. Amos shut the door behind her. Above the door to Trailer B, the light turned from red to green. Amos opened that door, and they stepped through. Only four feet away sat Betty’s containment cell.

The girl lifted her head to see them, and Margaret’s heart nearly broke in two.

Three giant black sores soiled the left side of her face. One centered on her cheekbone, one on her jaw where it met the neck, and one up on her temple. The last one undercut dark hair that must have been beautiful once. Now, wet strands clung to her face, her forehead and the table around her.

The decomposing black spots on her face were by far the worst, but they weren’t the only trouble areas. At least two dozen dime-size circles spotted her body. Her hands looked terrible; half the skin there was wrinkled, black and oozing, her fingers like a modern-art sculpture made from wet raisins. Several IV needles ran into veins on her feet—two of the few unblemished areas left on her body.

The girl shook with sobs. Even though she’d been strapped down for something like sixteen hours, she had no shortage of tears.

Margaret and Amos walked up to the clear glass cell. A flat-panel touch-screen controller mounted on the door served as a wireless interface for all systems in the containment cell. It could even be used to trigger a last-ditch emergency sterilization. All someone had to do was type in #-5-4-5-5, and every inch of both trailers would fill with the deadly chlorine/bleach combination.

Margaret hit a button to turn on the intercom system—they would be able to hear Betty on their earpieces, and their voices would be pumped into speakers inside the cell.

“Hello, Betty,” Margaret said.

Betty stopped whimpering for a second, just long enough to draw in a huge, ragged lungful of air.

“Let me go!”

“We can’t,” Margaret said. “You’re very ill.”

“No fucking shit I’m ill, you fucking assholes! Did you do this to me? Please, get my dad. Get my mom. Please!”

“Your father is dead,” Amos said.

Margaret quickly pressed a button on the touch screen to turn off the intercom.

“Amos, what are you doing?”

“Telling her the truth.”

Margaret wanted to smack him right in the mouth. “Amos, we need to get this girl to talk, not put her further into hysterics.”

“Margaret, I’ve got a teenage daughter,” he said. “You do not. So shut the fuck up.”

He had a cold look on his face, an expression Margaret hadn’t seen on him before. Amos was personalizing this, projecting Betty’s situation onto his own child. He reached for the button and turned on the chamber’s speakers. “It’s true, Betty,” Amos said. “You father is dead. I’m very sorry.”

Margaret realized that Betty wasn’t screaming anymore. The girl still had tears streaming down her ruined face, but there was also a hard lucidity in those eyes.

“Daddy’s… dead? You killed him?”

“He died in the parking lot before anyone could get to him,” Amos said. “Before anyone could help him.”

A single sob hit her body like a big cough, and then she lay still.

“But I’ve been here for like hours,” Betty said, fighting back sobs. “Why didn’t anyone just fucking tell me?”

“Because they didn’t think you could handle it,” Amos said. “They treated you like a child. I’m sorry about that, but Doctor Montoya and I are in charge now. My name is Doctor Amos Braun.”

“What’s… what’s happening to me?”

“You are very sick,” Amos said. “You have whatever killed your father. We don’t know why it’s developing more slowly in you.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“We’re trying to save you,” Amos said. “We need to ask some important questions first. Where were you and your father coming from?”

“Just let me go,” Betty said in a low voice. “I’m not one of the ones you want, I swear. Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.”

“Betty, we’re not trying to ki—”

“I will fucking slash your throat, you needle-dick motherfucker!” She yanked at her restraints so hard the heavy trolley wobbled. “Lemmego-lemmegolemmego!”

“Amos, we need to put her under,” Margaret said. “She’s paranoid.”

Amos ignored Margaret. His face showed anguish, his deep need to see Betty calm down and cooperate. Was it Betty Jewell he saw in there or his own daughter—rotting, terrified and strapped to an autopsy trolley?

“Where were you coming from?” he asked. “We need to know where you were.”

Betty stared at them, wide eyes full of hate and terror. She screamed, one long, ragged note. She stopped only to draw a deep breath, then hit the ragged note again.

“Please,” Amos said. “Stop this. We’re trying to help you.”

“Amos, that’s enough,” Margaret said. She reached to the control panel and hit a button, sending fifty milligrams of propofol through one of the IV needles taped to Betty’s feet. Amos put both of his gloved hands on the glass. He and Margaret silently watched as Betty’s screams slowed, faded and stopped.

“She’s out,” Margaret said.

“Then let’s get her wheeled into Trailer A,” Amos said. “I want to operate immediately.”

MIXED MESSAGES

The neural net stretched through Betty’s frontal lobe, but it was still very thin. Too thin to send the signal. It needed more connections.

For hours Betty’s crawlers had fought the dissolving chain reaction, struggling to reach her brain. The WDE-4-11 injection turned out to be a lifeline for the crawlers—combined with their own apoptosis antidote secretions, it stalled the chain reaction before it grew so bad that they couldn’t even move.

As Margaret and Amos wheeled Betty through the collapsible walkway and into the autopsy room, some of the muscle fibers coalesced at the center of her brain, tore themselves to bits and formed a ball. Where Chelsea’s ball of fibers was a thousand microns wide, Betty’s was closer to six hundred, just over half the size.

It was enough to send a weak signal.

And enough to receive a response.

That response signal wasn’t for the crawlers. It was meant for the host.

The remaining crawlers stopped producing the apoptosis antidote and started flooding Betty’s brain with neurotransmitters.

They had to wake her up, wake her up so she could receive the signal.

CHEFFIE’S OPEN DOOR

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

The phrase is attributed to Herodotus and refers to the courier service of the ancient Persian Empire. Many people incorrectly think this is the motto of the United States Postal Service. The phrase is inscribed over the James A. Farley post office in New York City, but it’s not an official slogan.

Official or not, John Burkle figured it was a pretty dead-nuts on-target description for driving a white postal truck in weather fifteen goddamn degrees below freezing, complemented by goddamn thirty-mile-per-hour winds that were blowing thin sheets of snow right across the goddamn back roads. Who drives in this weather?

Postal workers. That’s who.

He drove the truck’s right wheel into a frozen rut in front of the Franklin place. Yesterday this had been a mud puddle filled with chunks of brown ice. That was because it had been fifty degrees for two straight days. If you don’t like the weather in Michigan…

John stuffed the Franklins’ mail into their metal mailbox, then drove to the next house. Houses were pretty spaced out around here, at least a couple of acres apart. The next house belonged to Cheffie Jones. Cheffie had always been a little off. Hit in the head in an industrial accident or something. Pretty much kept to himself. Plenty of time to buy shit on eBay, though—John put four small boxes into Cheffie’s supersize mailbox. Sometimes Cheffie came out to get his mail and say hello. John looked toward the house, but didn’t see any movement. He started to drive on, then stopped short and looked back.

Was the front door open?

It was. He was a good hundred feet away, and it was a little hard to see, but it looked as if something covered in snow was blocking the door.

Fifteen below zero, and the front door was open.

John put the postal van in park. He reached into his bag and pulled out his Taser. Could be a burglar in there. Did Cheffie have a dog? John couldn’t remember. He had a schedule to keep, but he didn’t feel right ignoring an open door in weather like this. He cautiously approached the house.

“Cheffie?” he called. Out here you really didn’t want to approach a house quietly. People took gun rights seriously in northern Michigan. You made a lot of noise and let them know you were coming, so as not to be mistaken for a robber if the home owner was sober, or for a deer if he was exceedingly drunk.

The door was open about eight inches. Underneath a light coating of snow, something long and thin and black blocked the door. John walked up on the porch for a closer look.

It was a hand.

A black, skeletal hand.

Despite a thick layer of blue post-office winter wear, John Burkle sprinted back to the van in near-Olympic-qualifying time.

BETTY JEWELL’S FACE

Betty Jewell picked the worst possible time in the history of mankind to wake up.

Eyes still closed, she wondered how many flavors of pain there were. Baskin-Robbins didn’t have shit on her.

Stay still.

She didn’t know where those words came from. Not her ears. With her ears she heard the clinking of instruments and the muffled voices of a man and a woman. Those voices were connected with one of the new flavors.

They were cutting into her face, for fuck’s sake. Agony, pure hell, but was it any worse than the fire rippling through her entire body? Shit, did it even matter which was worse? Either one was enough to make her put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger if it meant the pain would stop.

Betty, you have to save your soul.

Her soul? Couldn’t she just save her face? You don’t need a soul for senior pictures.

Oh, gawd, did it hurt. So much pain.

Kill them, Betty. Kill the people who are hurting you. Then all your pain will go away.

That voice. So beautiful. Was it the voice of God? If not, how else could she hear it? But really, it didn’t matter who was speaking, because the voice promised her that the pain would stop.

For that, Betty would do anything.

Her right cheek rested on a hard pillow. They had put her on her right side, left arm still behind her in the cuff. The man and the woman hovered over her, fucking with her face, her once-beautiful face. She felt them cutting.

Which one was hurting her this bad? Dr. Braun? That Mexican bitch? It didn’t matter, they were in it together. They would pay together.

She slowly opened just her right eye. She saw nothing but blue. They had covered her face with a napkin or something. It felt as though the napkin also covered her left eye. Could she open it? She decided not to—she had an advantage only as long as they thought she was out. Whatever the napkin was, it didn’t quite reach to the table. If she looked down the table with only her right eye, she could see just under the napkin all the way down her right arm, all the way down to the leather cuff that held her fast.

She moved her left foot very slowly—they had uncuffed her feet to turn her on her side.

With all her weight on her right shoulder, she couldn’t pull her right hand without making her whole body lurch. But she could pull the left hand if she did it very, very slowly.

Just a little bit at a time, real slow, a steady, gradual increase of pressure.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the man said. The rubber suit muffled his voice, but she could make out his words. He sounded very close, like he was leaning down right over the top of her covered face.

“She doesn’t have triangles,” the man said. “She doesn’t have the colored fibers of Morgellons. So what’s causing this excessive cell death?”

Betty kept pulling. It hurt. A new flavor added to the dessert bar. She felt a tearing sensation. Without a sound, she kept pulling, kept applying constant pressure. Skin slowly sloughed off her hand, allowing her to pull the hand through the cuff, like sliding off a bloody black glove. She felt chunks of ruined skin bunching up on the cuff’s far side. She knew she should have been horrified, but it was too late for that.

God helps those who help themselves.

She needed to act.

Without her skin, things would be slippery. She’d have to get it exactly right.

“Margaret, look at this!” the man said. “I… oh my God, I see something. There’s something moving in here, something really tiny. Put the magnifiers on, look.”

He took the Lord’s name in vain. Sinner. Betty heard the zip-zip of a rubber suit as the woman moved to stand next to the man.

“What the hell is that, Amos?” The woman’s voice. Also right in front of her, also hovering right over her face. “It looks like… it looks like a nerve cell.”

“This is amazing,” the man said. “You can see it moving. It’s hard to tell with all the damage, but I think it’s following the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

Betty felt her left hand slide all the way inside the cuff. She didn’t pull it out, not yet, but now she could anytime she chose.

“Cut it out of there,” the woman said. “Maybe these things are what’s causing the rot. If we can get them out, maybe we can stabilize her.”

“Sample tray, please,” the man said. “Crawling organelle isolated and removed. Examining. Object tears into smaller pieces…. Margaret, look! These pieces look sort of like… muscle fibers. They’re… they’re moving on their own.”

“Get another one out of her face,” the woman said. “Let’s get some side-by-side video of these.”

Betty waited. She waited until she felt the scalpel slide in again, waited until she was sure she felt it hit her cheekbone.

She waited for that, so she knew exactly where it was.

Keeping her head and body as still as she could, Betty Jewell slid her hand out of the cuff.

Margaret watched Amos’s deft, delicate technique as he cut away the rotting flesh, searching for another crawling nerve.

The high-powered magnifying goggles mounted in front of her visor showed Betty’s open wound with amazing detail, a super-closeup landscape of blood vessels, muscle, veins, bone and black rot. And amid all that, something moving. So tiny. Dendrite-like arms seemed to stretch out like an amoeba’s pseudopods. The arms contracted, pulling the body forward, the tail dragging behind.

Just like the camera mounted in Margaret’s helmet, the magnifying goggles would record their own feed. Judging by the rapid rate of rot, watching that video might be the only way she could study these things because they wouldn’t be around for long.

And neither would Betty, unless they could do something drastic.

“This isn’t like Dawsey at all,” Margaret said. “Unless this is some larval stage, something that was already over before we examined him.”

“You’ve got me,” Amos said. “Wait, here’s another one. Look at that, crawling along the afferent nerve. Let me get it out of there.”

Margaret watched closely. Amos’s scalpel danced around a second patch of black rot, cutting it out in a neat circle.

Then a flash of red. A blur, something that looked huge through the high-magnification glasses. That sudden movement, like it was flying at her face, made Margaret rear back.

She heard a snap and a gurgling sound.

Margaret whipped her right hand up and under the magnifying goggles, knocking them off her head.

Betty Jewell sat up.

Not all the way up—her right hand remained locked in the cuff, but her bloody, skinless left hand waved free, holding a scalpel.

Amos’s gloved hands clutched frantically at his suit-covered throat, grabbing, trying to claw through the black PVC. Blood sprayed against the inside of his visor. Drips of it leaked down the black suit’s outer surface, leaked from the small hole in his suit.

He took a half step back. Betty lunged forward again with the scalpel, her restrained right arm making the movement awkward and off balance. The scalpel’s tip sliced through his suit, just above his left pectoral.

Betty gathered her strength for another strike.

Margaret grabbed Amos’s shoulders and yanked him away from the trolley. She pulled far too hard for the confined space—they smashed into the trailer wall and fell to the floor. Amos landed on top. He kicked and kept grabbing at his throat, gloved fingers trying to reach inside the hole and tear it open, but the blood-slick PVC fabric wouldn’t give him purchase.

“Amos! Get off me!” Margaret pushed and pulled at the small man, trying to free her legs.

She looked up to see Betty slide her knees underneath her body. The girl rose up, kneeling on the autopsy trolley, right arm still trapped by the cuff. She leaned toward the cuff, then crossed her skinless left hand over the inside of her right elbow.

“Oh, God…,” Margaret hissed.

Betty yanked backward, twisting to the right, throwing all her weight against the cuff.

Her right hand slid free. Chunks of sloughed skin fell to the floor with a wet slap. Momentum carried her over the trolley’s left side. She hit the white floor, droplets of blood splattering across the autopsy chamber.

Amos’s movements slowed.

Margaret managed to kick her legs free. She pushed Amos off, then stood, her back against the trailer wall.

Betty leaned her right shoulder against the sink and pushed herself up with wobbling legs. Blood streaked her blue gown, the only clothing on an otherwise-naked body. The right side of her face was mostly cut away, black-and-white cheekbone blazing under red smears, bits of jellyish rot still clinging to what little skin remained.

Margaret just stared. She couldn’t move a muscle. She wanted to run, to scream, but she couldn’t even draw a breath.

Blood dripped from Betty’s skinless fingers. She still held the scalpel in her left hand, cradled it more than gripped it, trying to keep the stainless steel steady against exposed, blood-slick muscles.

Betty smiled. Only with the left half of her face, of course, because the muscles on the right side were mostly gone.

“You bish,” she slurred. “Lesh shee how you like it.”

She shuffled forward, trying to keep her balance, bare feet leaving bloody streaks on the white floor.

The autopsy trolley was the only thing separating her from Margaret.

Betty reached down with her right hand and rolled it out of the way. She pulled her hand back, but her right pointer finger stayed behind, stuck to the trolley in a red and black mess of rotted meat and jutting bone.

Betty half-smiled again.

She stood only three feet away.

She took a small shuffle-step forward

Margaret still couldn’t will her muscles to move, not even a bit. Her breath returned in a sucking gasp, then shot out in a ragged scream that sounded impossibly loud inside her suit helmet.

But not so loud that she didn’t hear the gunshot.

The right side of Betty’s head, the undamaged side, exploded outward in a fist-size hole that sprayed blood, brains and bone on the back wall and into the sink. She dropped like a cloth puppet.

“Margaret!”

Clarence’s voice, muffled.

“Margaret, are you okay? Did she cut you?”

She turned to his voice. He wore his black biohazard suit. Gitsh and Marcus, also wearing suits, were right behind him. Clarence’s gloved hand held a pistol, still smoking. He knelt by her side, the gun pointed down and away from her.

Gitsh’s gloved right hand held a knife, much larger than Betty’s scalpel. He cut away at Amos’s suit, slicing it open at the chest and neck. Blood sloshed out of the cut suit as if someone had wrung out a soaked towel. It splattered on the floor and on Gitsh’s feet as he reached in to apply pressure. Marcus grabbed Amos’s legs.

“Clarence, get him on the table,” Marcus said. “His jugular is cut. Gitsh, keep pressure there. Margaret, get his helmet off!”

The men lifted Amos and set him on the already bloody trolley.

Margaret found herself standing, pulling off Amos’s helmet. Gitsh’s gloved hands stayed pressed down on Amos’s neck. Blood covered Amos’s face, matted his hair, pooled in his eyes.

His wide-open eyes.

She looked at Gitsh’s gloves. There was no blood oozing up from beneath the fingers.

Amos. Margaret’s thoughts snapped back into place.

“Do exactly what I say,” she ordered. “Remove your hands on a count of three, then be ready to reapply pressure as soon as I say go. One… two… three.”

Gitsh pulled his hands back a few inches, where they hovered, ready to be put back into use.

No blood flowed.

The scalpel had punched in just to the right of Amos’s windpipe, then slid outward, slicing open the whole right side of his neck.

She couldn’t check his pulse without taking off her gloves, but she didn’t need to.

Amos Braun was dead.

SMOOCHIES!

Chelsea turned the knob ever so slowly. It didn’t make a sound. Neither did the door when she opened it. She crept into her parents’ room. Daddy was snoring. He always snored. Sometimes Mommy would go sleep on the couch, but not tonight. She must have been tired.

When Daddy snored, his mouth was always wide open. He looked silly. Mommy slept with her mouth closed.

Chelsea would have to fix that.

She tiptoed up to the bed, her pajama feet barely a whisper on the carpeting. Mommy wanted to make her go to the doctor? The doctor who poked her with stuff? The doctor who had the needles? Well, now Chelsea was in charge. Chauncey had said so. And Mommy wasn’t going to make her do anything anymore.

Chelsea stood at the edge of the bed, looking down at Mommy. Mommy had such a pretty face.

Chelsea reached out with her finger and thumb and slowly, tenderly, pinched Mommy’s nose shut. Not enough to hurt her, just enough to stop the air from going in. There were a few seconds where nothing happened, then Mommy’s mouth opened and she took in a sharp breath. Chelsea let go of Mommy’s nose and dropped to the floor, lying flat against the edge of the bed. If Mommy woke up, she’d have to look over the edge to see Chelsea down there.

Chelsea waited, but Mommy didn’t seem to move. It was so hard not to giggle.

Chelsea slowly got to her knees, then to her feet, real quiet, like it was slow motion in the movies. Her head rose up until her eyes peeked over the edge of the bed.

Mommy’s mouth was still open.

Her eyes were still closed.

She was breathing real slow.

Mommy was asleep.

Make her obey.

Chelsea nodded. She moved her head forward slowly. Chelsea waited three more seconds to see if Mommy would wake up.

One-one-thousand… two-one-thousand… three-one-thousand… Ready or not, Mommy, here I come.

Chelsea put her lips over Mommy’s lips. Her tongue caressed Mommy’s tongue. There was a fizzing sound and a feeling like putting a bunch of Pop Rocks in your mouth. Chelsea fell to the floor again, this time rolling under the bed, trying so hard not to giggle.

“Eaungh,” Mommy said. Chelsea felt the bed move as Mommy awoke and sat up fast. She made a noise that was like coughing and spitting at the same time. The bed twitched with Mommy’s sharp movements.

“Unh!” Mommy said. “My mouf!”

“Hon?” Daddy said in a sleepy voice. “Hon-bun… you okay?”

“No, my mouf is on fiah!”

“Did you just eat something?”

“No, ah wah sleepin’!”

Even with a burning mouth, Mommy could still do that thing with her voice where she made it sound like Daddy was really stupid.

“Just relax. You must have had a bile burp or something. A little acid came up.”

“Unh!” Mommy said. “Un-huh.”

“Go rinse out with mouthwash,” Daddy said. “Take a Rolaids.”

Chelsea felt the bed move again. She kept herself very still. Mommy’s feet hit the floor, than she walked to the bathroom. The bathroom light came on for a second before the door shut behind her, leaving just an illuminated outline of the door.

Chelsea felt the bed thump again. Then, only two seconds later, Daddy snored. Wow, was he good at that! She bit down on her hand to choke back some major giggles. Daddy sounded so funny!

Chelsea Jewell slid out from under the bed and quietly ran to the bedroom door. She eased out into the hallway, carefully shutting the door behind her, and in seconds was back in her own bed.

“I did it, Chauncey!” she whispered. “I did it!”

She will not make you go to the doctor now. Tomorrow, you will be in charge.

“For real?”

You don’t have to speak out loud to talk to me. If you think really hard, I can hear you.

Chelsea squealed and hid her face in her pillow. Chauncey was special.

“For real?”

Try it. Tell me your favorite color.

Chelsea controlled her giggles and tried to think hard, whatever that meant. She liked pink. But blue was real nice, too, and she had those light-blue socks with the brown stripes that Daddy bought her on his last trip, and then—

Focus. Your mind is full of thoughts.

Concentrate.

Chelsea took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and thought.

Pink.

She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. Could Chauncey really hear her thoughts? If he could, then he had to be God.

“That’s a lucky guess, Chauncey.”

Then pick your favorite number.

She nodded and closed her eyes. When she thought of the number, she smiled to herself, then concentrated really hard.

Number one.

Chelsea threw her face into the pillow and squealed with delight.

It will get easier them ore you doit.

Now go to sleep. Tomorrow is an important day.

Good night, Chauncey, Chelsea thought, as loud as she could. She rolled over and closed her eyes.

It was so cool to have a special friend.