Contagious Page 102

“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 overpa.s.s. 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.s 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 G.o.d’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 s.h.i.+ny, 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 s.h.i.+eld.

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?”