Infected (22 page)

Perry fought back tears, tears that welled up in response to an emotion he couldn’t define. His chest felt tight. His one good leg felt weak. He leaned heavily on the kitchen counter, head hanging down, eyes staring at the floor but seeing nothing.

feed us we hungry

The voice in his head grew louder, as did the grumbling in his stomach. Sudden stabbing pains in his belly snapped him out of his grim reverie. He hadn’t eaten properly in days. Grinding hunger combined with a slight echo of sickly pink nausea.

sonofabitch feed

us we hungry

The voice in his head (it felt funny to use that term in all seriousness, for it was a term reserved for comedy or bad horror novels, but now it was simply accurate) gave up all attempts at sentence structure and moved toward steady chanting.

feed us feedus

feedusfeedusfeedus

Perry hobbled a bit to open the fridge and survey the contents. Some leftover tuna fish; a mostly empty tub of Country Crock; a mostly full jar of Hershey’s chocolate syrup; an old, slightly gamey jar of Smucker’s strawberry preserves; and—stop the presses—an unopened jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce.

Perry removed the jar from the fridge and explored the cupboard, looking for noodles. True to his current run of luck, he had none, only some Rice-A-Roni and a half-empty bag of Cost Cutter plain white rice. He also found one can of Campbell’s Pork & Beans, half a loaf of bread and a three-pound can of butter-flavor Crisco. What a time to realize that he’d let his shopping duties slip.

It was enough to get started, anyway—he felt so hungry he wouldn’t have turned down chocolate-covered cockroaches. He crammed two slices of bread into the toaster and another into his salivating mouth. He opened the pork and beans and took a big sniff,

yesyesyesyesyesyesyes

then dumped them into a bowl and tossed them in the microwave. He finished chewing the bread and stuffed another piece into his mouth before the toast came up. He immediately put in two more slices.

The microwave timer beeped insistently. Perry removed the scalding-hot bowl, grabbed his toast and hopped to the table. It was covered with blood. His blood. He decided to eat standing at the counter. He leaned over to the silverware drawer, grabbed a fork and dug in even though the beans were still hot enough to burn his tongue.

Aside from a piece of toast and some egg yolk, he’d gone
days
without food. His body rejoiced in the meal. The pork and beans tasted better than anything he’d ever eaten before—better than shrimp, better than steak, better than fresh lake trout.

By the time he polished off the beans and all the bread, he felt much more himself. His hunger satiated for the moment, his thoughts centered on the rather unique problem at hand. He realized that the Starting Five hadn’t made a peep since he’d started eating.

“Hey,” Perry said. He doubted anything could feel as surreal as talking to Triangles embedded in his body, which apparently talked back to him via his own nervous system.

“Hey, are you there?”

yes we here

They sounded calmer, far more relaxed than when they’d complained of hunger.

“Why aren’t you talking?” He wanted to hear them talk, both because he wanted to know more about these bizarre horrors and because they had been quiet for days, and when they’d been quiet, they had
grown.

wait to eat food

comes now

That phrase sent a shiver through his chest. He immediately understood the situation. The Triangles were like a tapeworm or something, absorbing the food he digested. Even though he had huge triangular organisms living in his body, he found the internal vampirism even more horrifying.

These critters were anchored into his muscles, tendons and skeleton, and tapped into his bloodstream like a baby cow nursing off a mother’s teat. Anger swelled up inside him, hot and tumultuous and lava-red. But as the anger brewed, so did a realization.

They couldn’t eat unless he did, which meant they weren’t feeding
on
him. The good news?
They’re not eating you from within.
The bad news?
They’re growing inside you even faster thanks to a highly nutritious pork-n-beans buffet.
He felt violated, like the victim of some horrible, biological rape.

He grew more aware of the pain in his body. His head hurt. His leg hurt. His stomach felt a little queasy. His eyes kept closing. He wanted to crawl into bed and give up, forget about the whole thing and let fate run its sadistic course.

He made it as far as the couch, hopping carefully on his one leg before easing himself onto the welcome and waiting cushions. The couch seemed to caress his body, sucking away his stress, taking it, perhaps, under the cushions with the dirt and loose change. Maybe he’d die in his sleep, but he couldn’t stop sleep from coming.

GONNA NEED A STEAM CLEANER FOR THAT

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.

COUCH-POTATO BUG

The throbbing of the leg brought him out of his dead-man sleep. It was a double-pulse thump, just a hair off time with the rhythm of his heart.

Perry wasn’t medically inclined enough to know what had happened, to know the disaster that lurked in his left leg just beneath the surface of his skin. He had no way of knowing that his Achilles tendon floated in two useless pieces, torn to shreds by the sharp hooks of the Triangle’s tail.

What he did know was that it hurt. Hurt like a bitch. Throbbed. Thumped. Thump-thumped. He had to take something for the pain. He groaned as he sat up on the couch and gingerly slid his legs over the edge, resting his feet on the floor. Despite the pulsating body aches, his head felt a bit better. But how much better could he feel knowing what twisted and grew and wormed about inside his body? They were killing him, of that there was no doubt—but why? What did they want?

Where had these things come from? Perry had never heard of any parasite like this, one that somehow “talked” in his head, capable of…
intelligence.
No, this was definitely something new. Maybe it was some government experiment. Maybe he was a guinea pig for some sinister plot. Possibilities began to flood his mind. He wanted some answers.

“Hey,” Perry hissed. “Hey, you fuckers.”

yes we are here

“What do you want with me?” There was a pause, then a…scratching sound in his head. Or maybe it sounded like static. He concentrated on the sensation—it reminded him of turning a radio tuning knob very fast, so that static, music and voices all blended together into one indiscernible mass of sound.