Infected

37.

Dew smelled it right off.

Unmistakable. Unforgettable.

The smell of death.

Faint, just a touch coming on the wind. It was still early, but he knew from hard-won experience that in a few hours that smell would grow until the neighbors caught a whiff or two.

“Control, this is Phillips. Clear odor of decomposing human body coming from Nguyen’s house. I need to move in right now.”

“Understood, Phillips. Move in. Support teams are in position.”

Dew walked up the unshoveled sidewalk, feet crunching on a combination of snow and salt crystals. Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home to forty thousand college kids, many crowded into big, old, beat-up homes like this one. A single-family dwelling that in 1950 was a hallmark of middle-class success, housing Mom and Dad and a passel of kids, now held a half dozen students, usually more, packed in two to a stinky, beer-stained room.

There wasn’t a sound coming from the house. The university had just let out on break, the fall semester closing only two days earlier. Still, even with the break, he could hear a basketball game blasting from the house on his left and on his right. TV blaring, drunken kids singing fight songs and screaming at the television. But the one in the middle? Nothing.

He tried the handle. Locked. He peeked in a window, but it was boarded up from the inside with plywood. A quick check showed that all the windows were boarded up.

Dew was tired of fucking around. Just plain tired of it. He stood in front of the door, drew his. 45, reared back and gave it a solid kick. It took two more, but the door finally swung open.

And the smell rolled out like Satan’s breath.

Dew swallowed, then stepped inside.

“Jesus,” he said. He wasn’t a religious man, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Phillips, Control here. Are you okay?”

“I’m pretty fucking far from okay,” Dew said quietly, his microphone picking up every sound. “Send in all three teams, right now. Come in quiet and hot. Three civvies dead by small-arms fire, perp probably still inside. And call the body wagons, we got a big haul here.”

In the living room alone, Dew counted three bloated bodies. Despite their greenish skin, swollen stomachs and the flies swirling around them, he recognized that each had a gunshot wound to the head. All of them had their hands and feet tied. They had been executed. Probably three or four days earlier, maybe a day or two before the end of the semester-with classes over, and more than half the students heading home, the kids in this house wouldn’t have been missed.

“Where are you, you little fucking gook?” Dew said. He knew it was a bad thing to think, a bad thing to say, but the kid who did this was Vietnamese, and he was right about the age of the ones Dew used to kill back in the jungle. Well this one was getting his ticket punched, and right fucking now.

Four men in Racal suits and carrying P90s entered the house behind him, silent despite the bulky material. Dew used hand signals, telling them to spread out through the first floor. He sent a second four-man team into the basement, and took the final team with him upstairs. The house remained deathly quiet. He could hear the game, faintly, from both of the houses next door. The cheer-to-roar told him the Wolverines had just thrown down a serious dunk.

Dew led the walk up the creaky stairs. Up there, somewhere, was an infected jibbering madman. Like Brewbaker, but this one had a gun.

“This is Cooper,” the voice said in Dew’s earpiece. “Downstairs, one more body.”

Yep, going to get his ticket punched.

Dew reached the top of the stairs. He checked in each room, ready to fire instantly if he saw a weapon. Every room was messy, the casual decor of college kids. This wasn’t one of the houses for the rich kids. This one was full-correction, had been full-of kids that actually worked to get through school. Even so, every room had a computer. Every computer had a neat bullet hole through the screen.

The last room, of course, held the answers. And the answers were some shit Dew Phillips really didn’t want to see.

A bloated body tied to a chair. A body missing both feet. Both hands. Half the head gone, a fucking hammer sticking out of the skull like a handle. Flies swarming, showing a real preference for the brains.

And on the floor, a pitted black skeleton sitting in a giant black stain on the green carpet.

Gonna need a steam cleaner for that, Dew thought, then instantly wondered if he was going just a little bit crazy.

The skeleton lay on top of a. 22 rifle. The back of the skull had a neat little hole in it. Fucking gook had shot himself in the eye.

Dew quickly looked around the room. What he saw on the back wall made him shake his head in near exhaustion. These infected victims, if you could manage to call the murdering assholes that, were some seriously crazy fuckers.

“This is Phillips. Primary objective found, deceased. Let’s get this scene locked down tight, and as soon as we do, get Doctor Montoya over here. Squad One, lose the Racal suits and take up positions at the entrances, two at the front door, two at the back. No one gets in unless I let ’em in. Squad Two, start cataloging the crime scene. Get a shitload of pictures, and bring in the photo printer. Montoya is only going to be here long enough to see the scene firsthand, then I want her out and I want pictures ready for her to take with. And get into the university’s database and get me pictures of these kids when they were alive, she’ll need that for comparison. Let’s move, people. The locals aren’t going to be happy when they hear about the body count.”

Another miss. He wondered if Otto and Margaret would fare any better with the other lead from Cheng’s files. Couldn’t be worse-mass-murdering art student versus a seven-year-old girl with one of those strange fiber things, which itself had been removed six days ago.

Hopefully, they could find something important.

At least they didn’t have to look at a scene like this.

The SARS story wouldn’t cover six bodies. People might make a sad face when they hear about a seventy-year-old woman killing her son, or some random guy going nutso and whacking his family, but six dead college kids…that was another matter. A mass murder like this would be on every station in the country if Dew didn’t lock this shit down tight, and right now.

Fortunately, even in a game of big swingers, Dew had the president of the United States of America hitting cleanup. And the president carried a damn big bat.

Dew knew exactly what he needed even before he pulled out his cell phone and dialed Murray Longworth.