Contagious

ICE CREAM WITH A GOD

At 0315, General Charlie Ogden’s Humvee rolled up to a battered plywood wall in a formerly abandoned building on Atwater Street in Detroit, Michigan. The plywood wall moved aside, the Hummer rolled in, and the plywood wall was put back in place.

The other vehicles would arrive soon. Ogden had ordered them to split up, come at the building from different routes, arrive at different times. A convoy would have drawn too much attention, but one green Humvee here, another there… at this hour no one would give a shit. As long as his men were under cover by 0500, they’d be fine.

The Hummer rolled deeper into the large, decrepit old warehouse, solid tires crunching on debris of wood, glass, trash and broken masonry. Two vehicles over by the far wall—a white and brown Winnebago and a filthy Harley Night Rod Special.

Standing in front of the Winnebago, a little blond-haired angel.

The motion of dozens of knee-high hatchlings, scurrying about on black tentacle-legs.

And the most important thing of all.

Eight curving columns in two parallel lines—four on the right, four on the left. The parallel opposites leaned toward each other. When they were finished, they would form four beautiful arches. Fat hatchlings sat on top of the columns. Each hatchling grabbed the top of a column with its tentacle-legs, then squeezed out a foamy brown material that hardened almost instantly. Each squeeze seemed to grow the column by six inches, maybe as much as a foot. If it hadn’t been blasphemous to think of such a thing, Ogden might have said it looked like the hatchlings were building the arches with their own shit.

When the hatchlings finished excreting, they looked thinner, triangular sides sunken in. The newly skinny hatchlings scurried down, instantly replaced by other fat ones. The skinny ones ran to piles of wood or to trash or to half-eaten, bloody corpses. They lowered themselves onto these things. Sharp, cutting parts slid out of their triangular bases and they started eating, pulling material up inside themselves with frightening speed.

The gate: never had the world seen something as perfect, as beautiful.

The sound of small feet crunching on broken glass drew Ogden’s attention away from the hatchling flurry. It was the little angel, her blond curls bouncing with each step. She held an ice cream bar in each hand.

“Hello, General Ogden,” the girl said. “I’m Chelsea.”

He knew this, because hers was the voice he’d heard in his head when he converted, when he’d been planning, driving. Just looking at her filled his heart with love.

We’ve been waiting for you.

She spoke right into his mind, spoke with that voice of love and wisdom.

“Hello, Chelsea. I like your motorcycle.”

Then it’s yours. Mister Korves doesn’t need it anymore.

She was love incarnate. She was everything.

We’ve been waiting for our protectors, General. Are you ready to protect us?

She handed him an ice cream bar.

“Yes, Chelsea,” Ogden said. “I’m ready.”

COPS, STARRING SANCHEZ AND RIDDER

Officer Carmen Sanchez had a bad feeling about this one. A report of bloody snow and two bodies. He felt grateful for the subzero temperature. Morbid, sure, but dealing with a frozen body was preferable to finding one that had cooked in Detroit’s summer humidity for a few days. Sometimes these calls were crap, but after ten years on the force you got a hunch for which ones were the real deal. Sanchez had that hunch now.

The cruiser’s bubble lights flashed as his partner, Marcellus Ridder, pulled off to the side of Orleans Street. Headlights illuminated chewed-up snow.

Snow streaked with frozen red. Streaks that led toward a fence and the trees beyond. And just past the torn fence, two bodies—one black, one white.

Neither of them moving.

Ridder put the cruiser in park and grabbed the radio handset. “This is Adam-Twelve, responding to reports of bodies on Orleans Street,” he said. “We have two men down. Send ambulance and backup immediately. We’re examining the scene.”

A ten-year-old boy had seen the bloody snow, found the bodies, then walked to a gas station and called the police. What a ten-year-old boy was doing up at four in the morning, Sanchez didn’t want to know. Strict parenting didn’t always happen in these parts.

Ridder put the handset back in its cradle. They both got out of the car, guns drawn and pointed at the ground. Ridder knelt behind the cruiser’s open driver’s-side door, while Sanchez did the same with the passenger door.

“Police! Do not move!” Sanchez screamed in his loudest cop voice. “Stay where you are! If you can hear me, kick your right foot!”

Their caution probably seemed silly to most people, because both men looked very, very dead, but this much blood meant weapons, probably guns, and Detroit police do not fuck around with something like that. Either one of the men might rise up at any second and start shooting.

“I said move your right foot!” Sanchez screamed. That’s the way it usually went—Ridder did the driving, Sanchez did the yelling. To each his own special skills.

“We gotta check them out,” Sanchez said. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Ridder said.

“I’ll take the white guy on the left. Go!”

Sanchez scooted around his door and moved toward the prone white man. He kept his gun pointed at the ground but angled forward, so he would only have to raise it a couple of inches should the man pop up with a weapon.

The Caucasian corpse was overweight, with a frost-lined red beard and brown eyes that stared blankly into nothing. The eyes had frozen open. A small bloody hole dotted the right side of his throat. His shirt, especially the collar, looked stiff with frozen blood.

Still-wrapped Big Macs littered the area.

Ridder knelt next to the black guy.

“This guy’s dead,” Ridder said. “No pulse, cold to the touch.”

Sanchez reached down to feel for a pulse, fingers probing under the beard, feeling the fat man’s neck. The skin was cold and firm, but not stiff—the man hadn’t frozen solid yet. Sanchez felt the jawline, reached under it and pressed.

Then a sound like a soft cough.

The sensation that his fingers had popped something, a small bubble.

A thin cloud of gray lifted up and away from the man’s beard.

Only then did Sanchez see it—little blisters on the corpse’s neck, hands, even some on the forehead. He’d popped one, and this gray powder shot out and drifted through the air like fine pollen.

“Aw, fuck,” he said. “What the fuck is this?”

He backed away from the corpse, left arm bent, left hand held away from his body. He flung his hand, snapping his fingers outward. The powdery substance flew from his skin and floated in the air.

Ridder looked at him. “What the fuck happened, Chez?”

“This guy has blisters,” Sanchez said. “I think I touched one. It popped like a puffball or something. Fucking gross!”

He holstered his pistol “Get the first-aid kit. Oh man, this is so fucking nasty. Fucking asshole probably has AIDS or something. It’s a fucking AIDS blister. I should have been wearing gloves.”

Ridder ran to the cruiser and opened the trunk. He pulled out the first-aid kit.

Sanchez stopped and looked at the hand for a second, wondering if he actually felt what he thought he was feeling. He was. It wasn’t his imagination, his hand felt hot. Real hot.

“AIDS doesn’t have blisters,” Ridder said as he took a clear plastic alcohol bottle out of the kit.

“Yeah? Then why does this fucking burn? Hurry up!”

Ridder doused the hand with alcohol, then handed Sanchez some gauze.

“Wipe it off,” Ridder said.

“Oh, ya fucking think?” Sanchez wiped at the hand.

Ridder opened a belt pocket and pulled out surgical gloves.

Sanchez looked at the gloves in Ridder’s hand as he continued to wipe his skin. “That’s not going to fucking help me now, you asshole.”

Ridder took a step back. “Well, I don’t want AIDS.”

“You said AIDS doesn’t have blisters!”

“I don’t fucking know, okay?”

The burning sensation grew. Sanchez had vacationed in Jamaica once, with his second wife, and while swimming had put his left hand through a jellyfish. That’s what this felt like, a persistent stinging/burning pain that steadily increased.

“Oh man,” Sanchez said. “That was so goddamn sick. Shit, this burns.”

Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s

Ridder stared at the hand. “Uh, Chez,” he said. “Remember this morning’s briefing? About that shit in Gaylord?”

Sanchez stopped wiping. His eyes widened in fear.

“Flesh-eating shit? You think I got that flesh-eating shit?”

“I don’t know, man,” Ridder said. “Just relax.”

“You fucking relax!”

“Look,” Ridder said. “We’ve got that test kit, that swab thing. Go use it on that guy.”

“Me? I think I’m fucked up enough here.”

“Well, if he’s got it, then you already got it,” Ridder said. “Why the fuck should I get it?”

Flesh-eating disease… was that supposed to burn? If not, what did burn? This came out of a dead man’s skin, for God’s sake.

“Dude, this hurts,” Sanchez said. “You’ve got gloves on, just check him!”

“No fucking way. Let the paramedics do it, they’re trained for that stuff.”

Sanchez could already hear the sirens. The ambulance would be here within minutes, but he couldn’t wait. He had to know now. “Come on, man,” he said. “Just do the test.”

He took a step toward Ridder. In the blink of an eye, Ridder was backpedaling, drawing his weapon and pointing it at Sanchez.

“You stay the fuck away from me,” Ridder said. “Stay right there!”

Sanchez did just that. His own partner, drawing down on him. This was messed up. This was how people got shot. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not moving. Just relax, Ridder, and stop pointing that gun at me.”

Ridder didn’t stop, not until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics took over.

PUTTIN’ ON HER WALKIN’ SHOES…

Margaret and Dew sat in the computer room, watching the flat-panel screens. Note to self, Dew thought. Never let the sentence “How can it get worse?” enter your mind again.

Murray had just sent the live feed from Detroit’s Channel 7 News Eye in the Sky. The screen showed a road that ran parallel to a strip of snow-covered trees. Looked like an abandoned railroad track that had long since grown in. Near an area where the old track ran under an overpass, Dew saw a pair of unmarked blue semi trailers.

Another MargoMobile. Parked in the open. In a major city. Shit on a saltine wouldn’t have tasted this bad.

The caption at the bottom of the screen said, POSSIBLE CASE OF FLESHEATING DISEASE IN DETROIT.

Dew put Murray on speakerphone.

“Okay, Murray,” Dew said, “we’ve got the picture. What’s going on?”

“Be quiet and listen up,” Murray said. “I’ve got something else going on over here, something big, so I don’t have much time. We have a positive cellulose test in Detroit, but it is not—I repeat, not —a triangle infection. This might be similar to the Donald and Betty Jewell case. No ID on the man, fingerprints came up negative. Right now he’s a John Doe. As you can see, the story has already leaked, so we’re in damage-control mode. I’m sending a chopper for Margaret and her team.”

“But I can’t leave now,” Margaret said. “We killed that woman to get hatchlings, and now we’ve got them.”

“I don’t have time for your opinion,” Murray said. “Just listen. The man didn’t die from the disease. He was shot in the throat sometime last night. He has not—I repeat, has not —decomposed. The cop who found the body was checking for a pulse when some kind of blister popped. Paramedics didn’t go near the body, but they tested the cop a few hours later, and he was positive.”

“It’s contagious,” Margaret said quietly. “It finally happened.”

“That’s why I need you there ASAP,” Murray said. “The math is simple. We have triangle hosts killing people in Gaylord, so Ogden stays. Dawsey is the only one who can talk to the captive hatchlings, and since I’m not about to move those things across the state or let Dawsey out of Dew’s sight, they both stay. This Detroit case doesn’t have a triangle infection that we know of. No triangles means no gate, so we need to evaluate before we take any drastic action.”

“I agree,” Dew said.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, either,” Murray said. “Margaret, it will attract too much attention to drop you right on the site, so we’re landing you at Henry Ford Hospital a few miles away. You’ll drive in. The Margo-Mobile crew already has the John Doe and the cop loaded in. They will move the rigs someplace secure.”

“You can’t move them,” she said. “At least not far. We need to check the area, see if the contagion vector is still there.”

“Margaret,” Murray said, “you’re looking at feed from a news helicopter. We have to get the trailers out of sight.”

“Then move them someplace close,” Margaret said. “If there’s one case, others could be in the same area.”

“Fine,” Murray said. “I’ll get someone on it. Dew, get Dawsey to talk to those hatchlings again. I don’t care what it takes. Cut off his finger if you have to. I need to address something else, so neither of you call me unless you have actionable information.”

Murray hung up.

“Wow,” Margaret said. “I’ve never heard him like that before.”

“I have,” Dew said. “It means he’s been up all night working on something big. What you just heard was the normally calm, cool and collected Murray Longworth stressed out to the max.”

The computer room door opened, and Otto rushed inside. “Margaret, there’s a chopper coming in. Pilot radioed down, says he’s here to take us to Detroit. He’s landing now.”

“Get Gitsh and Marcus,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Otto vanished.

Margaret turned to Dew. Her eyes burned with anger, intensity.

“If this thing is really contagious,” she said, “we’re in a whole different world of shit. The country needs to know. The world needs to know.”

Christ on a crutch. As if Dew didn’t have enough problems. The New & Improved Margaret Montoya wanted to go public. Trouble was, if it actually was contagious, she was 100 percent right. Murray’s skulduggery had its place, but the time for that was almost up.

“Examine it first,” Dew said. “Before you do something silly, can you give it twenty-four hours?”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“Just do your job,” Dew said. “Evaluate, like Murray says. This time tomorrow, you still think going public is the right thing to do, I’ll do it with you.”

She stared at him, her expression a mixture of hatred and disbelief. “Why would you throw away your career like that?”

“Because Murray has more people like me,” Dew said. “And if you try to go public against Murray’s will, one of them might just pay you a visit.”

EXPENDABLE

Chelsea’s knowledge grew and grew.

She now understood why Chauncey had been sent. He wasn’t a person. Organic material, like people or plants or puppies, couldn’t survive the trip, not the way Chauncey had traveled.

Organic material could survive a trip through a gate, but there was a catch—the gate was biological. Like a plant. That meant they couldn’t send a gate the same way they’d sent Chauncey.

Such a funny problem, and it grew more complicated from there. Each of the hatchlings had a… a… a template. What a neat word, although she still didn’t understand what that meant, exactly. Some kind of a template to make material for the gate. The templates had been shipped with Chauncey. They were a part of each triangle seed. Their number was finite (another neat word!), which meant that the hatchlings could not replicate themselves like the crawlers could.

And the little crawlers that spread through people’s bodies, converting them? What wonderful creatures! But they weren’t creatures at all, not like snails or bugs or kitties. They were just collections of pieces. Like Legos. You could put the pieces together in different ways. You could make the pieces do different things. Way cooler toys than Legos, actually.

She wandered through the minds of the people in her… her network. So many interesting things! Many naughty things, too. She would address that later. One mind stood out above the rest, a mind that combined logic and creativity—General Ogden’s. She found herself spending more and more time in there as she waited for the gate to open. She learned much. General Ogden seemed obsessed with something called contingency plans.

Most of her network consisted of soldiers. General Ogden thought that most of those soldiers, including himself, would die defending the gate. He thought of his soldiers as expendable. If they all died, though, or even if the numbers of converted dropped just a little, what would happen to Chelsea’s mind? To her knowledge?

She did not know. And therefore she needed a contingency plan of her own.

The soldiers were very, very important, with training and experience at shooting things. There were only two people left in her network who were not soldiers.

Mommy and Mr. Burkle the Postman.

Mr. Burkle was a man. He was stronger than Mommy. That made Mommy the weakest person in the network.

Which meant Mommy was the most expendable.

Chelsea breathed slowly and reached out with her thoughts. It wouldn’t be that hard, really, to modify Mommy’s purpose. It had worked with Mr. Jenkins.

Chelsea concentrated, connected with Mommy’s crawlers and began to move the pieces around.

MARGARET ARRIVES

The trip to Detroit felt like an eternity, even though it took just over an hour.

She had spent so much time cooped up in the MargoMobiles, or out in the middle of nowhere, that she’d almost forgotten what a city looked like. Detroit wasn’t much of a skyline city, not a lot of tall buildings, although coming in you couldn’t miss the five towers of the Renaissance Center and a few other downtown skyscrapers she couldn’t name. The city seemed to radiate from there, spreading north and west from the Detroit River, suburbs stretching out for miles and miles.

Margaret, Clarence, Dr. Dan, Marcus and Gitsh landed at the Henry Ford Hospital helipad. From there, two agents whisked them to an unmarked van, and ten minutes later they drove down East Lafayette Street.

“We’re coming up on the intersection of Lafayette and Orleans,” the driver said. “The crime scene is on your left. CDC has it locked down nice and tight.”

Big concrete dividers, the kind used in highway construction, completely blocked the entrance onto Orleans. About a half block farther, she saw the biohazard tent that had been erected over the murder location. That tent would stop any breeze from spreading the contagion, if it hadn’t blown around already. It also blocked curious eyes. A few people in biohazard suits moved in and out of the tent. The site was as secure as it could be.

The next street was St. Aubin, and they turned south. That put the tree-packed old railroad track on the van’s right side. More trees and apartment buildings ran along the left side of the road. Apartments, cars everywhere—so many people moving about, a recipe for disaster if this contagion was wind-borne, like the strain that had infected Perry. A left on Jefferson, six lanes of major traffic rolling through Detroit, then a quick right (which was, curiously, still St. Aubin). Abandoned factory buildings stood oppressive and desolate. A right on Woodbridge, and then a right after another abandoned factory, and the van turned into a wide dirt lot. The overpass directly in front of her was Jefferson again, she realized, and they drove under it into a long ditch. Steep, tree-packed slopes rose up on either side, ending in black chain-link fences. Margaret realized that now they were in the old railroad track that ran parallel to Orleans. Under the next overpass, wedged in past the thin trees, Margaret saw two blue semis parked side by side.

“Nice work,” Clarence said to the driver. “You can’t see this from up top.”

The driver nodded. “Yes sir, and it’s only a thousand feet from the crime scene.”

“What about the news helicopters?” Margaret asked. “Anyone see the trailers pull in down here?”

“No ma’am,” the driver said. “We called an air-security alert, forced the news choppers to clear out. And your two semis took a pretty roundabout route to get here. We made sure they weren’t followed.”

They parked beneath the deep shade of the overpass. Snow-speckled trash littered the area. Graffiti-covered walls sloped up either side to support the road above.

“Nice little vacation spot,” Dr. Dan said. “I should bring my girlfriend here. Impress her with my metropolitan style.”

“Not the time for humor,” Margaret said. “Let’s get in there and get samples from Officer Sanchez and the John Doe, ASAP. We need to see if they have crawlers, and if they do, how we can kill the things.”

She hoped her hunch was right, that she could disrupt the cytoskeleton of the crawlers and stop this new infection. She hadn’t been able to save Betty Jewell. She’d lost Amos. She’d stood by while Bernadette Smith screamed for help.

Even though she had yet to see him, she’d be damned if she had to lose Officer Sanchez as well.

CLIMER SPREADS THE FAITH

Private Dustin Climer peeked out of the tent that held Second Platoon. Some of those Whiskey Company guys were lurking around out there. Maybe they knew. Maybe they were spying.

They’d get theirs soon enough.

Climer turned back to look at his handiwork. He was behind schedule, but in a few hours the last of the Exterminators would be ready to roll. Most of them had already been converted. Those who hadn’t were sleeping, sweating, trying to twitch, but they couldn’t move much with their hands and feet zip-tied to their cots.

He turned to look at Private Pickens and Private Abbas. They’d been out on a patrol, filling in for a couple of sick Whiskey Company guys. Climer had had to wait for them to get back. As soon as they did, he ordered them in here, where ten soldiers jumped them, gagged them, tied them down.

Pickens was squinting and blinking, shaking his head, trying to scream through the sock stuffed in his mouth. Looked like he’d just received the smoochies.

Abbas was fighting his ass off. Even with his arms and legs tied down, it took two men sitting on his chest and thighs to control him. A smiling, one-eyed Nurse Brad bent over Abbas’s head. Brad leaned closer for the kiss. Abbas fought even harder. Two sets of hands grabbed his head, pried his mouth open. Brad pulled the sock out of Abbas’s mouth—the bound man made a strange kind of coughing noise, maybe meant to be a scream, and then Brad gave him God’s love.

That was the last of them. Another five to seven hours and all of X-Ray Company would be ready and able to serve General Ogden and Chelsea.

JOHN DOE

Margaret Montoya had her hands full.

A naked, overweight, red-bearded John Doe lay on her autopsy trolley. Golf-ball-size pustules dotted his body. When she’d entered the trailer three hours ago, the pustules had only been the size of big marbles—even though he was dead as dead can be, the shiny, thin, air-filled growths had continued to slowly expand.

While they’d been preparing him for examination, many of the pustules had popped or torn open, leaving gaping pink sores all over his skin. Each burst spread a pollenlike substance that drifted in the air, coating the walls and counters and equipment with thin layers of gray dust.

When she looked at that dust, she saw her worst fears. This dust, this contagious dust… it might very well be the end of the world. It was nothing but pure luck that Officer Sanchez had found the body when the pustules were still small, the size of pencil erasers. Pustules that size didn’t contain as many spores. The longer the corpse sat, the more the pustules grew, the more dust they contained. They might grow so large they could infect multiple people in one shot. And if some of those people moved to other parts of the city, or beyond into the state, to other cities… then there would be no stopping it. Gitsh mopped the floor while Marcus sprayed the other surfaces down with concentrated bleach. Dr. Dan had already taken samples from the unconscious Officer Sanchez and was now gathering them from the John Doe’s body. Dan leaned in close, trying to cut free one of the air-filled pustules without breaking it. This was his third try, as evidenced by the two thin spots of gray powder already dotting his face shield.

The John Doe had tested positive for cellulose, yet he wasn’t rotting. No apoptosis. Why? The disease knew. It knew it had found another way to spread. Rapid decomposition no longer served a purpose.

Margaret dragged her gloved finger across the surface of the autopsy trolley. She held the fingertip in front of her, examining the gray powder.

Correction, the gray spores.

“Dan,” she said, still staring at the powder on her fingertip. “Keep gathering samples. I’m going to run the battery of tests to see what can kill the crawlers you got from Officer Sanchez.”

“You better take a look at this first,” Dan said. He was standing now, no longer hunched over. He had one hand on John Doe’s jaw and was peering into the dead man’s open mouth.

Margaret walked to the other side of the trolley and looked in. The man’s tongue was swollen and covered in small blue triangles.

“Smurf tongue,” Dan said. “Nothing else on his body looks like this. What do you think it is?”

Margaret grabbed a scalpel and a sample container.

“I think,” she said as she sliced out a little chunk of tongue, “that we’re looking at a contagion vector.”

“But what about the pustules?”

“The pustules form after death,” Margaret said. “The tongue must spread the disease while the host is still alive.”

“Ewww,” Dan said. “You’re thinking they lick you?”

She shrugged. “No way of knowing. We’ll have to see if the same sores develop in Officer Sanchez. If they do, we know we have a continuing vector, one host to the next. Marcus, assist Dan. Gitsh, keep mopping and wiping everything down. Clarence, are you suited up?”

“Yes ma’am,” she heard in her earpiece. “I’m in Trailer B right now, with Officer Sanchez.”

“How is he?”

“Conscious now, but still kind of out of it. Complaining of a fever and body aches. He doesn’t want to be strapped down, but he understands. I think as long as I’m here with him, he’ll be okay. I can do that unless you need me to do something else.”

“I don’t need anything from you,” Margaret said. “Just stay there and stay out of my way.”

She hadn’t forgiven him for Bernadette. She wasn’t going to. Clarence Otto was just like the rest of these heartless butchers.

Dew, Murray, even Perry. Their business was death, and Clarence was one of them. Margaret’s business was life.

And that’s what she would give to Officer Carmen Sanchez.

PERRY GETS HIS GUN

Perry did pull-ups on the branch of a fat oak tree in the Jewells’ front yard.

One after another, pull, lower, pull, lower. He didn’t cheat, either, didn’t let his body just drop—the let-downs took twice as long as the actual pull-ups. His breath crystalized in front of him each time he reached the top. Everyone kept bitching about the cold, but he loved it. He wasn’t far from where he’d grown up. Hell, he’d played against this town back in high school, the Cheboygan Chiefs against the Gaylord Blue Devils. This weather wasn’t cold, it was home.

Pull, lower.

He looked at the rope swing farther down the branch. Snow covered the little wooden seat. He wondered if Chelsea had sat on that.

Maybe her dad had pushed her.

Maybe she’d laughed.

Pull, lower.

He had to find her. He knew that, but at the same time he didn’t want to go anywhere near her. He’d felt her power, exponentially higher than that of the hatchlings that tried to tell him what to do. They were merely a nuisance, but she… she pulled at something deep in his soul.

He didn’t know why her commands felt different. They just did. If she grew more powerful, he really didn’t know if he could stand against her.

The sound of footsteps in the snow. He recognized the heavy-footed rhythm of a man with a limp.

“Dawsey,” Dew said. “I have something for you.”

“You missed Christmas,” Perry said. “Trying to make up for lost time?”

“Something like that. You know why I’m here.”

Pull, lower.

“I’m not fucking going in there, Dew, so forget it.”

“It’s contagious now.”

Perry stopped in mid-pull. He looked at Dew, then dropped to the ground. He stumbled a little from the pain in his knee, then stood tall and crossed his arms.

Dew nodded. “They found some John Doe in Detroit. Cop found his body. Cop touched him, then tested positive for cellulose. Things just got even worse. You have to go in there and talk to the hatchlings, maybe see if you can reach Chelsea again—Perry, you have to find the gate.”

“I… I can’t, Dew. I can’t face them.”

“You can,” Dew said. “I’m not much for emotional stuff, kid. But I got to tell you, I think you’re the toughest bastard I’ve ever met. The shit you’ve fought through would have broken guys like Baum and Milner, probably even guys like me. You have a warrior’s soul, Perry. You’ve got my respect. I will fight with you against this shit, and I will die before I let anything get you. Do you understand that?”

Dew’s eyes burned with intensity. Perry wasn’t much for emotional stuff, either, but Dew’s words kicked up a knot in the back of his throat. Bill Miller was the only guy who’d ever stood by him like that. So had Perry’s father, in his own fucked-up way. But Bill was dead. So was Daddy.

“I can see you’re about to sob like a little girl,” Dew said, “so let’s get this conversation out of borderline-gay land and move it back to practicality. You’re scared of what these things might make you do, but I know you can beat them. In fact, I’m willing to bet my life on that. So here’s your present.”

Dew reached into his shoulder holster, pulled out his .45 and handed it to Perry butt-first.

Perry looked at it. “You want me to shoot my present?”

“No, college boy, this is your present.”

Perry stared at the scratched weapon. It seemed to glow with well-oiled love. Dew had shot Perry in the shoulder with that gun. And in the knee.

Dew had carried that .45 in Vietnam, and every day since.

This wasn’t just a present. Perry was a worthless psycho, a failure. He didn’t deserve something this significant.

“I can’t take it,” Perry said. “You’ve had that for like thirty years.”

Dew nodded. “That’s long enough, I think. It’s yours now. It’s fired thousands of rounds without a problem. Guaranteed to work. So you take this gun. You go in there, and you sack up. You do what you have to do, no matter how scared you are. And if you can’t take them jabbering in your head, you’ve got my permission to send them back to whatever hell they come from.”

Perry reached out and took the gun. The grip felt cold, worn and smooth.

“Yeah, it’s loaded,” Dew said. He extended one finger and gently moved the barrel away from his chest. “So how about trying not to kill me by fucking accident, okay?”

Perry laughed. It sounded strange to him. He looked at the gun, then looked at Dew.

“Let me spell it out for you,” Dew said. “The Jewell family has been at large for at least thirty-six hours. They could be in any of two dozen states, even Canada. Maybe they already popped and their hatchlings are building a gate as we speak. We also have a second strain of infection that’s contagious. We’re out of time. We need to find the Jewells. We need to find that gate. So I’m only going to ask you one more time—do you want to go in that trailer and face these things that have fucked you right in the ass, or do you want to go hide your head for the rest of your life? My respect you’ve got, but my time? I don’t have any left. You either step up, right now, or you just leave and let me do what needs to be done.”

Dew was on his side, but Dew also had a job to do. Perry understood—he was either part of that job, or Dew wanted him gone.

Perry felt like maybe, just maybe, he actually did deserve some respect. He felt human again, and there was only one person responsible for that.

His friend, Dew Phillips.

“Whatever you need,” Perry said. “I’ve got your back, whatever it takes.

Let’s get this over with.”

PERRY PULLS THE TRIGGER

Before they went in, Dew gave Perry a side holster for the .45. He also gave him four full magazines, which fit into little canvas pouches fixed to the holster’s straps. At seven rounds a magazine, that gave him a total of thirty-five rounds. Not that any amount of bullets could make him feel safe.

Perry walked into Trailer B, Dew right behind him. They both wore biohazard suits. Perry’s felt even more suffocating than before. This was it, his dramatic showdown with the monsters—he felt as if the trailer should have been poorly lit, half dark, maybe a bulb or two flickering sci-fi movie style, but everything was bright-white as fuck. The first thing he saw was the empty containment cell. Gitsh and Marcus must have hosed it down or something, as all of Bernadette’s blood was gone.

Perry turned left, toward the back, toward the body lockers. On the floor in front of those lockers sat three small glass cages, each a two-foot cube.

Inside those cages, he saw them.

They saw him.

Sonofabitch.

Things just like this would have ripped out of his body if he hadn’t destroyed them first, if he hadn’t cut up the Magnificent Seven. They would have killed him just like Fatty Patty’s triangles killed her. That’s how close he’d come to death. His body shook. He forced himself to look at the .45, to make sure the safety was on—he was trembling so bad he might squeeze the trigger without even knowing it.

“Easy, kid,” Dew said as he came around to stand on Perry’s left, close to the gun hand. “Just breathe. They can’t get out of those cages. You’re in control.”

We will kill you.

The hatchlings had grown massively since tearing out of Bernadette Smith’s body the day before. Then their triangular bodies had been maybe an inch from top to bottom—now they were a foot high or more. Each tentacle-leg looked as thick as a fat baby’s arm, long and flexible, full of speed and strength.

Kill you kill you killyoukillyou.

Their eyes stared at him, all black and shiny and full of hate, one vertical eye on each of their three pyramid sides.

His hand tightened on the gun.

Yessss, use the gun. Kill the man.

“Perry, are you hearing them?”

Perry nodded.

Shoot him. Shoot him, shoot him shoothimshoothim.

Their words meant nothing, the delusional jibber-jabber of pure evil. The hatchlings were just worker ants—Chelsea was the queen.

“Where is she?” Perry said.

Silence.

“Tell Chelsea I’m coming for her,” Perry said. “Tell her I’m going to help her.”

He still felt that grayness, that fuzziness, although he could hear these hatchlings clear as day. But just them. Beyond them, nothing. Maybe he could antagonize them, get them to connect to Chelsea. They were like antennae into the larger network, a way to punch through the jamming if only Chelsea would do her part.

He is the Columbo, kill him kill him now killllhimmmmm.

“Dew, they want me to kill you,” Perry said. “Why don’t you say hi?”

“My name is Dew Phillips. I have the authority to speak on behalf of the president of the United States of America. Cease your hostile actions, and we can negotiate. What is it you want?”

The hatchlings stopped staring at Perry. Instead, they stared at Dew.

Kill him.

“What did they say?”

“They still want me to kill you,” Perry said. “They don’t have much of a vocabulary, I’m afraid.”

Dew nodded. “First of all, you nasty bastards are the ugliest pieces of shit I have ever seen.” His voice built in intensity, a hoarse gravel coloring his words. “I don’t know if you little fuck-stains can think for yourselves, but I will tell you that my patience is already gone. Now, last chance… what do you want?”

We want to kill you. We want to kill you all. Kill Columbo, kill him nowwww!

“More of the same?” Dew asked.

Perry nodded.

“Shoot one,” Dew said.

Perry turned to look at Dew. “What?”

“Shoot one of these fucking things.”

No! Shoot him shoothimshoothim shoot yourself do it doitdoit

“Perry, you need to show these things who’s boss,” Dew said. “You’ve got to show them some discipline.”

Yes. Discipline. These things had fucked with a Dawsey, and you did not fuck with a Dawsey. Perry raised the gun. He noticed that his hand wasn’t shaking anymore.

Nonononononono

He emptied the clip into the middle cage. Bullets punched through the thick glass in spiderweb-crack splashes and shredded the hatchling’s plasticine body. Seven .45-caliber bullets, all direct hits. The creature twitched a little, spasming amid splatters of purple fluid before it slumped, motionless.

Perry felt the adrenaline gush through his chest, felt a tingle in his fingers and toes. It felt like crushing a quarterback. Oh, God, did that ever feel good.

The two remaining hatchlings flailed inside their cages, trying to get away. They slammed themselves against the glass over and over, tentacle-legs whipping so fast he could barely make them out.

“What do you think, kid?” Dew said. “How did that feel?”

“My freshman year we were at Notre Dome,” Perry said. “I blindsided Tommy Pillson, knocked him out cold, caused a fumble that I ran back for a touchdown. The whole stadium booed me. Pillson had a concussion. I ended his season. They showed the hit over and over again on ESPN. Chris Berman said I was made of mean. On national TV, said I was made of mean. And that feeling was nothing compared to this.”

Dew smiled and nodded. “Now you’re getting it. Let them ponder what just happened. We’ll come back later and see if we can make any progress.”

“Do we have to kill another one?”

Dew shrugged. “One can always dream. I imagine that’s enough personal growth for one day. Come on, made of mean, you need a beer.”

DANDELIONS

Margaret stared at the flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall of the narrow autopsy room. The picture showed a split screen of two microscopes, the right side containing the powder from one of John Doe’s pustules, the left containing a tissue sample from Officer Sanchez’s hand.

“Oh man,” Dan said. “That is so totally fucked up.”

The sample from Officer Sanchez’s hand showed motion similar to what she’d seen in Betty Jewell’s blackened facial sore before the girl killed Amos. It looked like a moving, crawling nerve cell. Who knew how many of those things were in Sanchez’s system, creeping toward his brain. Maybe they were already there.

The samples from John Doe’s pustules looked similar, but different in one key way. Where the crawling nerve cell looked flexible and streamlined, John Doe’s pollen looked fuzzy. It moved only when it landed on something, and then with an awkward stiffness that spoke of an internal rigidity.

Under high magnification she saw the cause of that fuzziness—hundreds of tiny cilia-like hairs sticking out from the stiff dendrites. It reminded Margaret of a fluffy white dandelion seed.

“So this is how it spreads,” she said. “It rides air currents until it lands on a host.”

“Then it burrows in somehow,” Dan said. “And once under the skin, it becomes a crawler just like the one on the left. Good God, what would the range be on this thing?”

Margaret didn’t want to consider the answer, but she already knew it. “Depends on the winds,” she said. To think that the difference between a localized infection and a pandemic might be nothing more than a good, strong breeze…

She wished Amos were with her. He was the parasitologist. He would have quickly created working theories on range and contagion mechanics. But Amos was gone, gone because of the very things that moved up there on the screen.

“Let’s run the tests now,” she said. “Give me all the samples.”

Dan went to the wall screen and typed in commands. The flat-panel’s image changed from one set of side-by-side pictures to twenty-five sets, five rows of five spreading a checkerboard across the screen.

They had identified twenty-five possible cures to kill the crawlers. Now they could try all of them on crawlers and dandelion seeds at the same time.

Multiple caustic solutions, heat, cold, antibiotics, Sanchez’s own white blood cells and six kinds of chemicals that might damage the cytoskeletal structures.

Somewhere in those twenty-five options was a way to save Officer Sanchez and stop this whole thing in its tracks.

There had to be.

“All right,” Margaret said. “Let’s find out what kills these little bastards.”

OGDEN SEES TRAILERS

Charlie Ogden watched the Winnebago’s little TV. Every word the newscaster said seemed to increase his anger, his desire to kill the enemies of God. If only he’d arrived sooner, stopped Jenkins from making that McDonald’s run.

“This is footage from this morning,” the newscaster said. “Police were investigating two bodies found on Orleans Street. We have unconfirmed reports that one or both of these bodies had the flesh-eating bacteria that has been found in several places in Michigan, including Gaylord, where it caused at least two deaths. Homeland Security has elevated the alert status to orange, although they say there is no evidence of terrorist involvement. The no-fly zone over Detroit is still in effect, and we will bring you live aerial pictures as soon as that ban is lifted.”

Ogden turned off the volume. He just stared at the image of Orleans Street, dozens of police, white CDC vans, and two semi trailers.

Chelsea’s lovely voice in his head: Why does this make you so angry?

He pointed to the screen, his fingertip tracing an oily mark on the glass.

“These two trailers,” Ogden said. “It means they found Jenkins. The people in those trailers, Chelsea… they work for the devil.”

Are they coming for us?

Not yet. They couldn’t. Sending troops to a town like Gaylord was one thing; a major city was a different story.

“I think we have enough time,” Ogden said. “We just have to make sure we stick to the timeline. You’re sure the gate will open exactly when you say it will?”

When Mickey’s big hand is on three and his little hand is on one.

Thirteen-fifteen. Just eighteen hours away.

That spot is only a few blocks from here. If the trailers make you angry, destroy them.

“They moved them,” Ogden nodded. “I sent Sergeant Major Mazagatti out in street clothes, and the trailers are gone. They have to be around here somewhere, but we can’t send people out to search. It’s too risky.

The longer we stay quiet and unnoticed, the better.”

You’re so smart, General.

He felt his face flush red. “Thank you, Chelsea.”

But tomorrow, once things begin, we should find the trailers and kill the people inside.

Ogden nodded. “Absolutely, Chelsea. I’ll send Mazagatti and my personal guard to make sure it happens. We just have to find them first.”

MACH 10

Captain Patrick “P. J.” Lindeman felt ridiculous G-forces smash him into his seat, and he wondered if his ass would explode.

Well, not his ass per se, but the HTV-6Xb hypersonic fighter in which his ass was currently sitting, the same fighter that had that same ass hurtling through the night sky at Mach 10.

Mach motherfucking 10.

Seven thousand miles per hour.

That shattered the official record for manned flight that had stood since 1967, when Major William J. “Pete” Knight took his X-15A-2 to Mach 6.7. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Pete.

Knight’s flight had been very different. For starters, Knight’s X-15 dropped from the bottom of a B-52 bomber, while Lindeman’s HTV-6Xb took off under its own power from a military airbase at Groom Lake, Nevada. Knight’s X-15 was basically a rocket with wings and a cockpit.

Lindeman’s plane used fairly standard turbojets for takeoff and landing, combined with scramjets to hit such obscene speeds. The most important difference? Knight’s plane was built for speed only. It couldn’t fight.

The HTV-6Xb was a bona fide war machine.

Known by its nickname, “the Wasp,” the HTV-6Xb was the world’s premier air-superiority weapon. The world didn’t know of its existence, of course, but that didn’t change the fact it could eat a couple of M16s for breakfast, wash them down with the best Mirage the French had to offer and then casually pick its teeth with an F-22 Raptor. The Wasp could reach any target zone faster than anything on the planet and outfly anything it found in that airspace.

This particular combat mission didn’t require a great deal of skill. Lindeman had taken off on a northwest heading, flown to ten thousand feet, then came around in a slow turn that pointed his nose toward South Bend, Indiana. The conventional jet-turbine engines drove the Wasp to Mach 2. At that speed, the turbines’ air inlets closed off, forcing that same air intake into the scramjet engines. The turbines had to shut off, because once the plane reached Mach 3 or so, air friction would melt the spinning intake fans. The scramjet portion, however, acted more like a funnel—it had no moving parts. Air shot in at supersonic speeds, compressed, mixed with a gaseous fuel and ignited in a highly controlled reaction that drove the plane to Mach 10.

Lindeman’s record-breaking flight would take him from Groom Lake to South Bend in fifteen minutes. Almost seventeen hundred miles. In fifteen minutes.

Twelve minutes into the flight, Lindeman released an ASM-157 antisatellite missile. His speed of Mach 10 wasn’t even half that of the ASM-157, which would max out at Mach 22.7—fifteen thousand miles per hour.

Aircraft normally come nowhere near Mach 5, let alone Mach 10. As a result, anyone or anything watching the skies for unusual flight patterns would notice the Wasp. Hard to miss something like that.

Which was precisely the point.

There was no way the Orbital could track every plane in North America. It couldn’t even track all the military planes in that area—far too much traffic to monitor. It did, however, try to keep tabs on particular military bases. So when the HTV-6Xb took off from Groom Lake, the Orbital noted the flight and marked a subroutine to watch its direction.

When the HTV-6Xb turned and accelerated to Mach 1, that didn’t merit the Orbital’s primary attention. At Mach 2 the Orbital changed the marking status to potential threat. By the time it hit Mach 5 and was flying straight for South Bend, the Orbital knew it was under attack. When the jet launched a missile, it was only 350 miles away.

At Mach 22, traveling 350 miles—the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles—takes just under a minute and a half.

The Orbital ran through protocols, checking the decision tree for responses. As it did, it picked up another inbound threat.

Military engineers built the NFIRE satellite to do two things. The first was the difficult task of tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was even more complex—shooting those missiles out of the sky.

The NFIRE orbited at an altitude of 240 miles. It targeted an ICBM’s apex, typically about sixty miles above the Earth. The part of the NFIRE that actually shot down an ICBM was known as a kill vehicle, a small missile that got close to a target, then launched a high-speed spray of dense shrapnel. In basic terms, the kill vehicle was a high-tech, $560 million exoatmospheric hand grenade.

Certain senators, however, objected to putting a kill vehicle in the NFIRE. Such an act would open up a new arms race, they said. It would begin the “weaponization of space,” and that was something the world could do without.

Defenders of the project said Congress was a bunch of myopic, tree-hugging hippies who deserved to die the radioactive death they would surely bring upon all freedom-loving Americans. The defenders said that only to themselves, of course. What they said publicly was that the kill vehicle had a range of only four miles, a minuscule distance compared to the vast ranges of space, so the kill vehicle could really only be used to shoot down a rocket aimed directly at the NFIRE. It was strictly for self-defense, and how could that be a bad thing?

Congress didn’t care. Senators insisted the kill vehicle would cross a line. So to secure funding, NASA and MDA (the Missile Defense Agency) had agreed to remove the kill vehicle and instead include a laser communications terminal, also known as an LCT.

The thing was, military engineers are pretty sharp cats, and they quietly figured out how to fit both the kill vehicle and the LCT into the NFIRE. So Congress, and the public, was told that the NFIRE did not include the kill vehicle.

That was the first lie.

The second lie was the four-mile killing range. Of the two whoppers, this might have been the big one because the NFIRE’s killing range was actually thousands of miles. Thanks to triangulation data piped up from NASA, the NFIRE could both target and hit the Orbital.

Exactly ten seconds after P. J. Lindeman released his ASM-157, the NFIRE launched its kill vehicle.

Primary threat: the missile launched from the Mach 10 jet. The Orbital tracked the missile’s trajectory, then fired a supersonic stream of pellets made from an iridium alloy. The pellets spread out like a tight cloud, a cloud traveling at several thousand miles per hour. Air friction melted the pellets. By the time they intersected the missile’s path, they were globs of dense, molten metal that tore through the ASM-157 like twelve-gauge shot through rice paper. The missile shattered into dozens of useless pieces.

The Orbital switched its targeting solution to the NFIRE kill vehicle. As it did, temperature sensors suddenly registered a spot on its beer-keg-size surface that almost instantly shot from normal to five hundred degrees, then a thousand, and kept climbing….

Four hours earlier a heavily modified Boeing 747-400F cargo plane had taken off from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The flight plan called for a normal trip from Edwards to Langley Air Force Base near Hampton, Virginia. Unlike the HTV-6Xb, this 747 flew at normal speeds. It attracted exactly zero attention from the Orbital. Just another big cargo jet, just another cross-country flight.

This particular 747, known as the YAL-1, carried the YAL-1A airborne laser. The YAL-1A was designed to shoot down incoming missiles, including nuclear-tipped ICBMs or any other kind of ballistic missile. This chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, could also theoretically be used against hostile bombers, fighters, cruise missiles—or even against low-Earth-orbit satellites.

Thirty seconds before P. J. Lindeman released his antisatellite missile, the crew of the YAL-1 had activated the COIL by combining chlorine gas, hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide to create highly energetic oxygen molecules. Pressurized nitrogen then pushed the oxygen molecules through a mist of iodine, transferring the oxygen’s energy to the iodine molecules. These fired-up iodine molecules shed the excess energy in the form of intense light.

Intense light that created an infrared laser.

This light bounced between mirrors, forcing more iodine molecules to give up their energy as photons, further increasing the laser beam’s intensity. From there the beam traveled into a chamber where mirrors instantly adjusted to compensate for movement of the airplane and for atmospheric conditions. Finally the beam moved into a swiveling pod on the YAL-1’s nose. The pod focused the laser to hit the Orbital as a tiny, concentrated pinpoint of immense energy.

Within three seconds a spot on the Orbital’s hull superheated to almost three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The Orbital abandoned all calculations and just moved, gaining altitude as it shot due north. At fifty miles above the surface, the YAL-1A beam tracked on-target again, this time hitting a different spot on the Orbital’s hull. A four-second cat-and-mouse game ensued as the Orbital changed headings five times and climbed to an altitude of sixty miles. After each turn the YAL-1A’s targeting system instantly compensated and reacquired, but only for a second each time, and always in a different spot as the Orbital rotated to mitigate heat buildup.

The NFIRE satellite’s kill vehicle tracked the Orbital’s evasive action. With a nice three-thousand-degree hot spot on its hull, the Orbital could bend all the light it wanted and still stand out plain as day to an infra red sensor. The kill vehicle marked the Orbital’s sudden acceleration and climb, course-corrected, then detonated a warhead that released an expanding cloud of shrapnel traveling at thirty-three thousand feet per second.

The Orbital was still accelerating when the kill vehicle landed the technological equivalent of a money shot.

Dozens of depleted uranium ball bearings punched through the Orbital, shredding its fragile interior, including the computer system that had caused humanity so much trouble. The multiple impacts instantly rendered the Orbital inoperative. The YAL-1A laser reacquired and started heating up another hot spot, but the Orbital performed no further evasive maneuvers.

The Orbital’s desperate actions had taken it out well over Lake Michigan. Cracked and shattered, a hollowed-out husk, the Orbital started to descend. As it reached terminal velocity, the surface heated to over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Air friction dug at the cracks, ripping free small bits and pieces of the once-pristine hull.

It didn’t melt. While a few pieces trailed behind, there was no comet-like flame trail. The Orbital just fell.

Three hundred pounds of broken machine hit the surface of Lake Michigan at well over two thousand miles an hour.

It made a pretty big splash.

The impact shattered what was left of the Orbital, breaking it into hundreds of pieces that spread and sank and sizzled as the water rapidly cooled them off.

The Orbital was truly dead.

Not that it had ever really been alive.

Perry stopped drinking in mid-sip.

The grayness vanished.

For the first time since his triangles had started talking to him months before, his brain felt… clear.

He was so focused on this new sensation, or rather the absence of a sensation, that he didn’t notice the beer spilling out the corner of his mouth and down his chin.

“Kid,” Dew said. “Should I get you a sippy cup?”

Perry put the beer down on the computer-room console. He absently wiped his chin with the back of his hand.

“The jamming is gone,” he said. “Whatever was blocking me, it’s gone.”

Dew clapped once. “Fan-fucking-tastic! So where’s the next host? What direction?”

Perry closed his eyes, trying to hear, trying to sense. Trouble was, he didn’t sense jack squat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not picking up anything. Nothing at all.”

Dew’s satphone buzzed. He pulled it out of his coat and answered, then just listened.

“Yeah?” he said after a few seconds. “No shit? Dawsey said the jamming is gone. We’ll keep you informed.”

Dew hung up.

“That was Murray,” he said. “Tight-lipped bastard has been up to all kinds of antics without filling me in. They found the mystery satellite and took it out. Just now, so gotta be the satellite that was blocking you.”

Perry smiled and grabbed Dew’s shoulder. “I’m not getting anything, man! Dew, I think that’s it. I think the whole thing is over! Guess what? Fuck their fourth-quarter comeback, because we won!”

Chelsea felt something. More accurately, she stopped feeling something. It was as if she’d had a ringing in her ears, a steady, low noise that had been there so long she didn’t even notice it until it vanished.

Chauncey?

No response.

Chelsea felt weak. She sagged to the floor of the Winnebago. What was happening? She couldn’t hold the connections. The network flickered in and out, fading.

Blackness replaced her vision.

Chelsea Jewell passed out.

Out on the warehouse floor, Ogden’s soldiers sagged and lowered themselves to the ground. He felt a blankness, a twofold void, the second one far more powerful than the first.

He sat. A chunk of brick dug into his butt. One by one, his men passed out as if they’d been gassed.

The hatchlings didn’t seem to notice. They kept building.

Ogden watched them for the final few seconds he remained conscious, hoping they could complete the gate on their own.

Margaret stared at the autopsy room’s flat-panel screen and smiled in grim satisfaction. There were twenty-five squares up there, but only one square held her attention. It showed a side-by-side picture of a crawler and one of the pollen pieces that looked like a fluffy dandelion seed.

A caption at the top of that square read LATRUNCULIN A. A toxin produced by a group of sponges found in the Red Sea that disrupted filaments of the cytoskeleton. Amazing to think that might make the difference in this battle, that one word, latrunculin.

She loved that word.

Because below that word she watched both alien structures dissolve into smaller and smaller bits. The crawler’s long, firm, musclelike strands twitched, then seemed to morph into slack, lifeless little sacks of fluid.

The dandelion seed was even more entertaining—the latrunculin made the stiff structure break apart, crumble and liquefy.

“I’ve got you, motherfucker,” Margaret whispered.

She had never really wanted to kill anything before. She stopped disease because that was how you saved lives. This was different. She wanted the disease dead, all of it—crawlers, dandelion seeds, triangles and hatchlings. She wanted to kill every last bit of it, in as painful a way as possible. Watching those things break apart on the screen filled her soul with a dark satisfaction.

She wondered if this was what Perry felt when he killed an infected host.

“Hey Margaret,” Dan called. “Did you do something to the samples?”

“Yeah,” Margaret said without looking away from the sheer beauty of a dead crawler. “I gave them a nice latrunculin bath and killed them.”

“No, not that one,” Dan said. “I mean all of them.”

She stepped back and took in the whole screen. In all twenty-five side-by-side samples, nothing moved. They’d successfully killed many of the crawlers, but until a few seconds ago over half the boxes had still shown activity. Now, no movement at all.

“Gitsh,” Margaret said, “check this monitor. Is it frozen or something?”

Gitsh looked at the screen, then moved to the computer that fed the images. As he checked it, Margaret’s eyes slid over the twenty-five test pairs. Each had a word across the top. Words in red indicated no effect on the crawlers. Words in green showed successful kills.

Chlorine killed them, and in far lower concentrations than the Margo-Mobile’s decontamination mist. In fact, basic bleach killed them instantly.

That was great for sterilization but didn’t do much for a living victim. Antibiotics, unfortunately, had no effect, and Sanchez’s immune system completely ignored the things.

Reducing the temperature did nothing—freezing them might work, but that would also kill the host. Heat at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher killed them, but that wasn’t a solution either, as those temperatures would also kill the host. Heat did, however, provide another way to decontaminate any area exposed to the dandelion-seed spores.

“The picture is live,” Gitsh said. To punctuate the point, he changed the screen from twenty-five small squares to one big square containing a nerve crawler. He slid a needle into the sample. Up on the screen, she saw the needle magnified thousands of times. It looked like a giant sword poking into a hydra.

“Huh,” Margaret said. “It’s like they just shut off.”

“They quit,” Dan said. “They have seen the new Mightily Pissed-Off Margaret, and they threw in the towel.”

Suddenly, Clarence’s voice crackled in her earpiece, anxious and rushed. “Margo! Murray found the satellite! They just launched an attack, and they think they got it.”

“Oh my,” Margaret said. So that’s why Murray had been in such a hurry.

“When? Like two minutes ago?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“The samples, they shut down,” Margaret said. “Even at the smallest level, they must have been controlled by the thing. Is there any effect on Sanchez?”

“He’s out cold,” Clarence said. “He was babbling incoherently, then started getting groggy and just dropped off. He’s snoring.”

Margaret didn’t know what to think. The crawlers’ sudden shutdown, Sanchez falling asleep, both things coinciding with the satellite’s destruction. Could it all be over?

No. It wasn’t all over. She knew that.

“Dan, how much latrunculin do we have?”

“Plenty, if it’s just Sanchez,” Dan said. “If we need more, the supplier could medevac it right to us.”

“Let’s see if it works first. Start an IV drip of latrunculin on Officer Sanchez. I’m not going to get caught with my pants down. These things might reactivate at any second.”

“But latrunculin is toxic as hell,” Dan said. “We give Sanchez too much, he could lose the ability to breath, his heart could stop. Shouldn’t we wait to see if these things are really dead?”

“No. We’ll watch Sanchez carefully, but get him on it right now.”

“But Margaret, he—”

“That’s a fucking order, Dan,” Margaret said. “Now start the goddamn drip.”

Dan looked at her for a second, then snapped a smart salute and walked out of the autopsy room.

Were his little feelings hurt? Margaret didn’t care. She finally had a potential weapon, and she was going to use it.