Contagious (48 page)

Dew kept running forward.
Perry stayed on his heels.
Dew raised his M4 and fired. Perry pointed his .45 at one of the windows and emptied the magazine. Plywood splintered where he shot. Behind him, to the right, he heard a
whuff,
then a second later a heavy crunch as something ripped through the plywood window right before a concussive
bang
blasted it outward in a fiery cloud of pulverized brick and wooden splinters. Perry reloaded, debris raining down on him and Dew as they followed soldiers beneath the roll-up garage door.
Once they were inside the long open space of the Globe building, there was no subtle strategy, no effort to capture a hatchling alive, only the brute force of twenty-five pissed-off soldiers, one old CIA agent with a bad hip and one former all-American linebacker with two bum knees.
The fight didn’t last long. Only a few of Ogden’s men remained alive, and most of them were already wounded. The hatchlings attacked, of course, but they had no cover and were quickly mowed down by concentrated fire.
Perry killed three of the little fuckers himself.
Each shot felt better than the last, a tingling trip of adrenaline ripping through his body. He’d killed the infected because they needed to die—killing hatchlings was just plain fun.
All eyes had been focused on the soldiers, their guns, the hatchlings. When the last hatchling fell, shivering in its sickening death throes, Perry and the others took in the massive brown and green construct arching to an apex some twenty feet high. Strands of the brown material ran from the arches up to the roof’s metal framework forty feet above, supporting some of the construct’s weight.
And past the gate, a white and brown Winnebago. From inside, even through the jamming, he sensed the infected.
“She’s in there,” Perry said, and pointed.
Dew shouldered his M4 and opened up on the Winnebago. Within seconds, four other men unloaded on it as well. Shiny dots appeared as bullets tore through the thin walls. One tire popped, then another.
Dew stopped firing and put in a fresh magazine.
“Secure the building!” Nails called. “No prisoners, make sure they’re dead, and
do not
touch the bodies. And find Ogden! I want to piss on his fucking corpse.”
The men spread out.
Perry walked right under the gate toward the Winnebago. Behind him he heard Dew.
“Murray, we have the building, abort bomb run,” Dew said. “Repeat, abort bomb run, keep the F-15s on-station, just in case. We’ll rig the gate to blow manually.”
Perry kept walking. He held his .45 tight but was careful to keep his finger off the trigger. The Winnebago had so many holes it looked darkly comical. He stepped toward the small side door.
Blood leaked from it.
Dew kept shouting. “Nails! I want C-4 at the base of every arch, and don’t be stingy with it on those other parts.”
Perry stared at the blood dripping from the bottom of the RV’s door, lightly pattering onto the dirty, cracked concrete below.
More commotion behind him, Nails screaming, men yelling back and forth, but little of it registered in Perry’s thoughts.
He still sensed that other presence, but barely—the jamming had grown during the firefight, so bad now that it was almost all gray again.
This was it. It
had
to be.
He opened the bullet-ridden door and looked inside.
A body, but not Chelsea. A man in a postal worker’s uniform, dead and still oozing blood onto crinkled plastic that partially covered the narrow floor.
Perry leaned over the body and quickly looked around.
Chelsea wasn’t there.
No,
no-no-no
. . . Chelsea had been the moving signal. She was gone.
“Perry!” Dew yelled. “Get your ass out here!”
Perry shut the door and turned back to the others.
The gate was glowing, like white frosted glass illuminated by countless tiny, slow-moving, high-powered bulbs. It lit up the warehouse interior, filling it with a beautiful glow.
Perry walked up to the gate. He could already feel the heat. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. A biological jewel glowing with light drawn from a million stars. Texture like a rough tree trunk. A smell like leftover barbecue. Emotions of love, admiration, even awe, they rolled through him, too strong to deny.
Perry saw it, felt it and sensed it all at the same time. The vibration. The
opening
. The spongy green door from his dreams of six weeks ago, an
eternity
ago. A connection from infinite distance, the threads of the universe binding, entwining, coalescing into something that blended all existence.
Purity
.
“Nails, how much longer?” Dew said. “It’s one-fourteen. This thing opens up in sixty seconds.”
“Almost there,
sir
!”
Perry stroked the gate one last time. It wouldn’t be long now. He left his hand there, feeling the growing heat.
“Okay, it’s ready!” Nails screamed. “
Moooove
out!
Go-go-go-go-go
!”
Men sprinted out of the ware house. Perry marveled at their energy, their intensity. Someone hit him on the shoulder.
“Stop staring at their asses, kid,” Dew said. “Let’s go.”
Dew hobble-sprinted toward the door. Perry followed, barely needing to jog to keep up. They ran out and across the field. He tried to concentrate as he ran, concentrate on the fading sensation that had to be Chelsea Jewell. What direction? He couldn’t tell.
Nails’s men squatted in a wide, loose circle, each man facing out, guns at the ready. Nails pulled a small black plastic clicker from his breast pocket.
“Fire in the hole,” he said, then clicked the clicker three times.
The walls of 1801 Atwater blasted outward at the base. The last surviving bits of glass shattered, along with the plywood that covered most of the windows. Pieces of the roof shot into the sky, trailed by thick tendrils of expanding black smoke. The building collapsed upon itself, hundred-year-old brick walls falling in and down. A second later, rolling smoke and dust billowed out, obscuring everything.
“Holy shit,” one of the men said, laughing. “That’s awesome.”
“Crap,” Dew said. “I sure hope there’s nothing contagious in this dust.”
He pulled out his satphone. “We got it, Murray.”
Perry felt her, just a bit, the last trailing of sensation. Chelsea. Moving, still blocking him . . .
. . . then she was gone.
And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he’d never get her back, not unless she wanted it to happen. She had become too powerful.
“I lost her,” Perry said. “I lost Chelsea.”
1:16 P.M.: Bravo Positions, Part Two
Margaret crouched at the base of a small abandoned building, watching dust roil through the air around her. A block away, the Globe building had just exploded and collapsed, sending a thick dust cloud rolling through the abandoned lots. She wondered if the cloud carried the contagion—but she and Clarence were safe in their suits. The sticky tape on her hands would keep the glove cuts sealed. A white-trash version of BSL-4 safety, but it worked nonetheless.
Clarence moved along the sidewalk. His right shoulder stayed close to the graffiti-covered brick wall, but he didn’t touch it—she had warned him about sliding across anything, even leaning on things for cover should he wind up in a shoot-out. The tough hazmat suit could still tear if dragged across any jagged metal.
Helicopters soared overhead, guns fired, explosions made the ground vibrate—war had come to Detroit.
Clarence peeked around the corner. He watched for a few seconds, then reached back and gently pulled her hand, urging her forward until she could see for herself. Down the block, on the other side of the intersection, stood yet another abandoned building. A corner unit, battered front door opening out at an angle toward the intersection of Franklin and Riopelle. Light gray, two stories, boarded-up windows; it looked like an old restaurant or bar, maybe a corner store from decades past when this area had more buildings than abandoned lots.
“That’s where the gunmen took the hostages,” he said.
“What’s in there?”
“I don’t know. If the gate is gone, Ogden has to know it’s over, that he lost. He filled the building with hostages so we can’t drop a big fucking bomb on his ass.”
“Or maybe they’re trying to convert those people? Infect them?”
“Maybe,” Clarence said. “Maybe some of them, but it makes more sense to have regular people as hostages. Otherwise they have no negotiating power.”
“What do we do now?”
“We’ve got to get help. Listen, you watch where those soldiers went in, and
don’t move
. Ogden’s headquarters blew; our guys had to cause that. I’ll slide around to the other side of this building—the gunmen can’t spot me from there—see if I can flag down our guys and get them over here.”
Clarence slowly ducked away from the corner. Margaret knelt and watched. Every twenty seconds or so, a car drove through the settling dust, full of people hunting for a place to hide. When they saw her or Clarence, saw their biohazard suits, the cars instantly sped up to get away. The faces inside looked terrified, shell-shocked. Nothing she could do for these people, not without making a scene, making herself visible to the gunmen in the building across the street. She silently prayed that all the cars would just keep driving.
Then, coming up Riopelle from the direction of the river, a motorcycle. A squat one, American and loud, kicking up a low cloud of the still-falling dust. A man driving, someone behind him, someone small.
“Keep going,” Margaret whispered. “Don’t stop here,
keep driving
.”
The motorcycle stopped right in front of the hostage building.
Margaret tensed. She couldn’t let those people go inside. They got off the bike, and Margaret saw the small person was a little girl with curly hair.
Blond.
Chelsea Jewell.
And the man—Colonel Charlie Ogden in street clothes.
They ran into the building.
Margaret whipped behind the corner, out of sight.
Clarence was already coming back from the other side. He wore a wide smile, an expression of near disbelief.
She grabbed his arm. “I just saw Chelsea Jewell.”
His smile widened. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! It’s her. Why are you smiling?”
He actually laughed. “I don’t know. Too much death, stress, something good finally happens, and now I can’t stop grinning. Go take a look—you won’t believe who’s coming this way.”
Margaret traded places with him. Still moving slowly, cautiously, she walked to the other side of the building and looked around the corner.
And understood Clarence’s joy.
Because she felt it, too.
Coming across an empty, abandoned city block, running through the settling dust, she saw Dew Phillips, Perry Dawsey and soldiers carrying machine guns.
THE CAVALRY
If you went back in time, say, six weeks, to a point when Margaret Montoya stood in an apartment parking lot in Ypsilanti, Michigan, scared for her life because a gigantic, burned and brutally wounded infected man named Perry Dawsey was trying to tear through her biohazard suit, his wild eyes staring, his spit and blood smearing her visor, his cracked lips screaming
open that fucking door and let ’em in
. . . if you could go back to that moment and tell her there would come a time where she would feel infinitely happy and relieved to see his face, she wouldn’t have believed you. You could have bet her on that. Bet her with the same bill that traded hands so frequently between Clarence and Amos.
And you’d have won twenty bucks.
Perry, Dew and maybe twenty-five heavily armed and grim-faced soldiers came running down Woodbridge Street. The cavalry to the rescue. The men fanned out, working like the fingers of a hand, some pointing guns across the street at the boarded-up windows of Chelsea’s building, some darting across that same street to the building next to hers, backs against brick walls, slowly inching to the corner, some continuing down the street, probably to surround the place. Dew and Perry ran right up to her.
“Margaret!” Perry said. “We got the gate. Are you okay?” He hugged her, suit and all, picking her right up off the ground.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She hugged him back. She couldn’t believe how good it was to see him.
Dew scooted to the corner, peeked around, then ducked back.
“Clarence said you saw Ogden?”
“And Chelsea Jewell,” Margaret said.
Perry’s smile faded. A look of hatred filled his eyes. Margaret instantly thought of the dead, angry stares of the infected victims she’d had on her autopsy table.
“And hostages,” Clarence said. “About fifteen of them. And at least three gunmen armed with body armor, M4s, sidearms and grenades. There could be more already inside.”
Dew looked Clarence up and down. “Human condom, eh?”
Clarence nodded at Margaret. “Blame her.”
“Hell, I wish I had one right about now,” Dew said. “Margaret, what happened with Sanchez? You figure this thing out yet?”
The sensation of relief vanished, replaced once again by feelings of failure.
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Try not to get infected, because there’s still no cure.”
Dew and Perry nodded.
“How about Gitsh and Marcus?” Dew asked. “Doctor Dan?”
Clarence shook his head.
“So we’ve got losses,” Dew said. “Let’s make them count. Clarence, take Margaret and go to the football field at Martin Luther King High School, about a mile up Jefferson, you can’t miss it. Murray dropped a Margo-Mobile there to set up an infection triage. There are also two Ospreys on the ground. If things turn dicey, you get her out of here.”
“I’m standing right here, Dew,” Margaret said. “Clarence isn’t my keeper.”
“Yes he is,” Dew said. “And he’s getting you out.”
“Have some of your men take her,” Clarence sad. “I’m staying to finish this.”
Why couldn’t Clarence just shut up and leave? Hadn’t he done his job? Hadn’t they sacrificed enough? She wanted out, and she wanted him with her.
“Otto, you
will
get the fuck out of here,” Dew said. “Your mission is to protect Margaret, and I want her gone.”
Clarence shook his head. “But Dew—”
“Shut your broken-toothed mouth. You’ve got your orders. Do you mind if we go ahead and save the fucking world? Perry, you go with them.”
Perry Dawsey actually laughed. A dark laugh, something he might have let slip back in a kitchen filled with three dead bodies.
“Fuck you, Dewie,” he said. “Chelsea and I need to talk.”
Dew turned to look at Perry, tilted his head up to make eye contact. Perry’s filthy blond hair hung in front of a face smeared with grime and reddish dust.