Contagious (17 page)

dare
wake me up or let the kids out of their rooms. Do you hear me, Shawn? Shawn did hear her. She didn’t use the paddle on him, but she could control him just the same.
Chris “Cheffie” Jones was a little more off-kilter than the others. Cheffie had hardwood floors covered with a big roll-up carpet. For reasons known only to him, he crawled under said carpet. Confident that this made him effectively invisible, Cheffie went to sleep.
The Orbital had estimated fifteen to twenty infections. Ten was below those projections, but still within acceptable parameters for success. And it broke down evenly, five with the triangle strain, five with the new strain. That part, at least, was on par with the statistical projections.
All of these hosts slept.
The only question was . . . how many would wake up?
DON’T CALL DR. CHENG
Margaret, Amos and Clarence sat in the MargoMobile’s computer room, waiting for a scheduled all-hands call with Murray Longworth. Right on time his face appeared on the center flat-panel screen. Murray was watching them on a similar monitor back in Washington.
“Where’s Dew?” he asked.
“Talking to Perry.”
“Can’t you guys talk on the road?” Murray said. “I want you out of there.”
Clarence leaned forward. “Perry had a little accident. Margaret wants to let him rest a bit more before we head out.”
“An accident?” Murray said. “What kind of accident?”
“He fell down some stairs,” Clarence said. “Then bumped into a doorway. He’s happy to cooperate with us now.”
Murray smiled thinly. “I guess the good news just keeps on rolling in. We finished the first batch of your testers, Margaret. Ten thousand are being distributed to police, paramedics and hospitals all over the Midwest.”
“Wow,” Margaret said. “How did you get them made so fast?”
“Money, how else?” Murray said. “We’ll have another fifty thousand ready by late tomorrow.”
“Fantastic,” Margaret said. “But we’re still at square one when it comes to the vector.”
“You know we’ve got people on that, Doctor,” Murray said. “Some of the most brilliant minds the nation has to offer.”
“Such as?”
“You’re not cleared for that information,” Murray said. He sounded annoyed, and Margaret couldn’t really blame him—she’d lost count of the number of times they’d had this conversation. She prayed President Gutierrez would loosen the noose of secrecy around this project, but so far Hutchins’s policies were still in force.
“Fine,” Margaret said. “I’m not cleared. Let me ask this another way. Do these brilliant minds know
exactly
what they are looking for? Do they have the whole story?”
“You just keep feeding us whatever biological information you discover,” Murray said. “We have to keep this compartmentalized.”
Margaret rolled her eyes. “Murray, we had to drop a
bomb
this time. Your compartmentalization isn’t working.”
“Look, I’m not a complete idiot,” Murray said. “Doctor Cheng is using the full resources of the CDC to find a vector.”
“Right,” Margaret said. “And how can he do that if he can’t say what the disease is?”
“He’s using flesh-eating bacteria as a cover story, entering in additional symptoms like blue triangles, skin necrosis, paranoia, et cetera. He’s using all the CDC’s disease-tracking databases looking for such symptoms, and he’s also working with data that FBI investigators have collected on each of the hosts and the hosts’ families.”
Margaret sat back. Actually, modifying the symptoms of flesh-eating bacteria to include the triangle symptoms was a brilliant idea. Everyone in the medical profession took necrotizing fasciitis very seriously and would pay close attention to any updates and requests for information.
“Okay, I can see that strategy,” Margaret said. “So what angles is Cheng pursuing?”
“Everything from mechanical and biological vectors to doomsday cults intentionally targeting specific victims,” Murray said. “He’s focusing on the rural nature of the constructs, hoping for a correlation to deer or other animals that flourish in remote areas.”
“The Bambi vector,” Amos said. “Well, that’s just plain brilliant. I’m so glad one of the nation’s
most brilliant minds
is on this.”
Margaret gently put a hand on Amos’s arm to silence him. “Murray,” she said, “deer are not the vector, and this isn’t a doomsday cult. Cheng is grasping at straws. We need access to the same data he has.”
Murray smiled. “Margaret, Doctor Cheng’s track record is impeccable, and he’s been working on Morgellons for years. He also has CDC’s computer system, the most advanced disease-tracking database on the planet. What makes you think you can do any better from a damn autopsy trailer?”
“The three people in this room already know
everything,
” Margaret said. “If there’s a connection to be made, we’re the ones most likely to make it. Hey, if you’re happy with your
Option Number Four
fighters flying around America, then by all means keep the status quo—just make sure we’re
very
far away from the
eighteen-million-degree
fireball, okay?”
Murray considered this for a moment. “All right, fine, I’ll give you access.”
“What about signals intelligence?” Clarence asked. “Ogden thinks there has to be a satellite involved. Anything on that?”
Murray shook his head. “Nothing. The NSA still isn’t detecting any kind of signal. NASA is looking for indications of anything weird in orbit, but so far nada.”
“It could be a stealth satellite,” Clarence said.
“They’re telling me the physics doesn’t add up,” Murray said. “It’s way beyond me.”
“The enemy is doing things with biotechnology that we can’t even
fathom
yet, let alone replicate,” Margaret said. “Maybe hiding something from NASA isn’t as hard as we’d like to think.”
“Maybe,” Murray said. “You’ll get your access, but
do not
contact Cheng directly, understood? Apparently he’s not fond of you, Margaret.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Margaret said.
Murray broke the connection.
“That’s great we have the data,” Amos said. “But seriously, Margo, the CDC has that software, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to run it and systems analysts to tweak it. I know the three of us are a clever bunch of monkeys, but what do we have that they don’t?”
“That’s simple,” Margaret said. “We have a newly cooperative Perry Dawsey.”
THE YOUTH OF A NATION
A child’s cells haven’t divided as many times as an adult’s. Hence children’s telomeres have suffered less damage, mutation and shortening. They’re just plain healthier.
So when the reader-balls converted Chelsea’s stem cells into hacked-muscle factories, most of those factories produced exactly what they were supposed to produce: healthy, modified muscle fibers.
The fibers sought each other out, then turned into crawlers that slinked up her nerves.
Pains shot up the little girl’s body, making her twitch in her sleep, making her whimper, making tears leak from her closed eyes. Like the rest of the newly infected, she slept through the pain.
Unhindered by bad production or spreading apoptosis, her crawlers made excellent time. The army of slowly moving microorganisms followed the afferent nerves from her hands to her arms, her shoulders, and soon found themselves sliding inside her backbone and into the spinal column.
The journey to this spot hadn’t been easy. Nerves run through and/or around muscles, veins, bones, tendons, ligaments and cartilage. The crawlers forced their way through these dense areas like explorers fighting through thick jungle underbrush. Reaching the spinal column, however, was like stepping out of that jungle onto the smooth asphalt of a superhighway.
The crawlers poured into her spinal column by the thousands.
From there it was a hop, a skip and a jump into Chelsea Jewell’s brain.
DRUNKEN CONVERSATION
Dew hadn’t been this drunk in a long, long time.
The last time had been with Malcolm, his partner. Malcolm, who had been killed by a hatchet to the stomach courtesy of Martin Brewbaker. One of the infected. And now, Dew was getting drunk with another of Brewbaker’s kind.
But Dawsey wasn’t infected anymore.
“I’ll tell you something, hoss,” Dew said. “I’ll tell you. I have met a lot of tough bastards in my day. I have to say, in some ways, you might be the toughest.”
Perry smiled his split-lip smile and raised the bottle in salute. There was only a swig or two left
“Thanks, Mister Phillips,” Perry said, then tipped back the bottle. He left a little bit, perhaps half a shot’s worth, and offered the bottle to Dew.
Dew took it and drained it.
“For all the good it does me,” Perry said. His smile faded, and it had been fake to begin with. He looked haunted. Dew had seen expressions like that before, many years ago. He’d seen them on the kids in his platoon. Not all the kids, and not all the time. Usually after losing a friend, or hunkering down against a mortar attack that lasted for days, or killing a little boy who was holding a hand grenade and running right at their buddies, or the first time they put a knife into a man’s belly and held a hand over his mouth while he died.
“So I’m
tough,
” Perry said. “Whoop-de-fuckin’-doo. What did being
tough
get me? My cock is ruined, man. They sewed it back on, but they don’t know if I’ll ever get a boner again. They said I might be impotent for the rest of my life. For sure I can never have kids.”
“So you don’t get to have kids, so what? I’ll never have a son.”
“You have a daughter,” Perry said.
Dew nodded. “True, and I love her to death. You’ve got me there. But you know what? She hates fishing. Wouldn’t go even one time just to try it. She saw fish on TV and thought they
looked
slimy. I never went fishing with my kid. Won’t be able to do it with grandkids, either, because she’s not having children. My line gets snuffed out just like yours.”
“Why won’t she have kids?”
“She’s a dyke.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Dew said. “I don’t see her and her
partner
kicking out a passel of little ones, if you know what I’m sayin’. And I love her for who she is, by the fucking way, so if you use the word
dyke
again, I’m going to kick you right in the nuts.”
“I didn’t say dyke, Mister Phillips. You did.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.
“Oh,” Dew said. “Well, then stop calling me Mister Phillips, goddamit.”
“Yes sir.”
“And can that
sir
shit. I work for a living. You call me Dew. But not
Dewie
. I hate that.”
“Okay, Dew,” Perry said. His voice sounded deeper than normal. Elbows on his thighs, his head hung low again, uneven hair drooping down like a blond curtain hiding the stage of his face.
Dew realized he’d just threatened to kick Perry in the nuts. Probably not the most sensitive thing to say to someone who had taken a pair of poultry shears to Big Jim and the Twins. Dew took a deep breath—he’d have to remember to think before he talked.
“You know what, hoss?” Dew said.
Perry managed to shrug without lifting his head.
“I’m kind of sick of your whining.”
This time Perry looked up. Not all the way, but enough for the blue eyes to stare out from behind the blond curtain.
“Whining?” Perry said in a hiss. “How about you cut off
your
junk, get shot twice, then go through two weeks of an experimental treatment that feels like little men made of fire walking around under your skin and pissing flames on all the important stuff, stuff like your brain. And while you’re visiting my slice of paradise, bring in a team of specialists to sew your Jimmy back on,
minus
your nuts, of course, ’cause they had tentacles growing through them, and
then
listen to the motherfucking specialists tell you your cock has maybe a ten percent chance of ever functioning again. How about you do that,
Dew,
and tell me I’m whining.”
“You poooooor fucking baby.”
Perry’s eyes showed another emotion—shame. Or maybe it was just pain. The pain of hearing someone you respect tell you you’re worthless.
“Look, hoss, that sucks,” Dew said. “But the thing is, you need to quit feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I think I’ve got a golden ticket to feel sorry for myself,” Perry said. “I think I pass ‘go’ and collect two hundred bucks on the way, because if
I
don’t have the right to feel sorry for myself, who the fuck
would
?”
“How about Marty Hernandez?”
Perry’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Who the hell is that?”
“A kid I served with back in ’Nam.”
“Oh, come on,” Perry said. “War stories?”
“Yes, war stories. Just listen, okay?”
Dew let it hang in the air. Perry gave that narrow-eyed look again, but nodded.
“We were on patrol in the foothills of Binh Thuan. We came under fire, caught off guard. Couple guys went down right away. Marty and I jumped off the trail into a nice little depression that gave some cover, only Marty took a round just as he jumped. Hit his leg below the knee, man.
Severed
it, except for a little string of meat and skin. So he starts screaming. I get to the edge and return fire, because they might have been right behind us, you know?”
Perry nodded as if he knew.
“Marty is in real bad shape. But I can’t help him, because I’ve got Charlie coming at us. I can see them charging, so I’m shooting. Marty is bleeding all over; he has leaves and sticks and shit stuck to the stump of his leg. He stops screaming. I’m still firing. I know I killed two, maybe a third, then Marty, he says real calm,
Dew, let’s get out of here
. I sneak a look at him. He’d used his knife to finish the job on the leg, and he’s holding his foot and leg to his chest like it’s a fucking baby. Bullets are hitting all around me, so I turn back and start firing again. Then you know what Marty does?”
Perry shook his head.
“He starts talking to me about the Raiders.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Perry said. “The Oakland Raiders?”
Dew nodded. “Yeah, he loved them. Had that logo with the shield and the swords tattooed on his shoulder, man. Bad tat, too. Another guy in the platoon did the work, but that doesn’t matter, right?”
“Right.”
“Right. So he’s in shock, he’s sitting there, holding his leg like you’d hold a baby, and he says,
They gotta get Flores back
. You know about Tom Flores?”
“Sure, he won two Super Bowls as a coach.”
“He was a quarterback first.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Perry was leaning forward now, his eyes wide with interest.