Contagious (2 page)

TAD TAKES A LEAP
They were going to get him.
Tad wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he had to kill himself.
The window slid open.
Curtains blew back, thrown by the same nighttime wind that splashed cold rain and bits of ice into the face of Thadeus “Tad” McMillian Jr.
He hoped his little brother wouldn’t wake up. When Sam woke up, he cried loud. Real,
real
loud. His cries always brought Mom and Dad.
Mom and Dad, who wanted to
get
Tad.
Tad got down off of his toy box. He picked up the box and lugged it over to his brother’s crib. Carrying it hurt the blisters on his hands, but he had to stand on the toy box to reach inside the crib, just like he needed it to reach the sliding window’s latch. Tad set the box down next to the crib, stood on top and reached in to pull the blankets up tight under the baby’s chin. That would keep Sam warm. Tad gently brushed his brother’s hair, then leaned in and kissed the baby on the forehead.
“Good-bye,” Tad whispered.
He got down and lugged the box to the window one last time.
“Good luck, Sam,” Tad said quietly, looking back at his brother. “I really hope you don’t wind up like Sara.”
Tad held on to the window frame as he put his feet up on the metal sash. Freezing rain instantly soaked his shirt. Bits of wet ice stung his face. A gust of wind almost blew him back, but he adjusted his balance and held on.
It was better this way.
Anything
was better than staying here.
Tad McMillian jumped into the night.
OGDEN GETS READY TO RUMBLE
Not too far outside of South Bloomingville, Ohio, in the hushed darkness of winter woods, Colonel Charlie Ogden stood tall behind a loose line of nine men. The men were his personal squad, Fifth Platoon, X-Ray Company, Domestic Reaction Battalion. X-Ray Company was the unit’s official name, but in the usual testosterone-stoked spirit of the military the men called themselves something else.
They called themselves the Exterminators.
The boys had even come up with unit insignia: a lightning bolt hitting an upside-down cockroach. They wore it on the right shoulder. Under it they added small black triangle patches for each combat mission, and decorated the triangle with a white
X
for each monster killed.
Ogden’s sleeve had two black triangles. The first triangle bore two white
X
’s. That was because Colonel Charlie Ogden didn’t sit in a Hummer miles from the action. He led from the front. And when you led from the front, sometimes you had to fight.
But that didn’t mean he was stupid—his personal squad was the best of the Exterminators, men who could chew rusty Buicks and shit stainless-steel nails. The fifth platoon of any company usually consisted of support staff, drivers, armorers—mostly noncombat troops—but since Ogden could do just about whatever he wanted, he’d given himself a personal guard that could jump into any fight at any time.
On Ogden’s left stood Corporal Jeff Cope, his ten-pounds-too-heavy communications man. On his right, the swarthy Sergeant Major Lucas Mazagatti, his top NCO. Behind him, observing, stood the overly tanned Captain David Lodge, commander of Whiskey Company, and Lodge’s massive, intense sergeant major, Devon “Nails” Nealson.
“Give me an update, Corporal,” Ogden said.
“Third Platoon will be in position, due west of the target, in ten minutes,” Cope said. “Fourth will take up security posture to the northwest of target in twenty minutes. First and Second platoons in position just ahead of us, sir.”
The 120 men of X-Ray Company were almost ready.
“Excellent,” Ogden said. “Air support?”
“Predator drones to northeast of target,” Cope said. “Four Apaches on station one mile out. Target is painted, the Apaches can destroy it at any time. Two F-15Es with GBU-31s on station five miles out. Two more F-15Es in reserve, seven miles out.”
“Very well.”
He turned to face Captain Lodge. “How about you, David?”
“Whiskey Company is a mile due west, Colonel,” Lodge said. “We’re ready to go.”
Nealson leaned forward to speak, or more accurately for his six-foot-three frame, he leaned down. “Any chance we’ll get in on this one, sir?” He said it a bit loudly for Ogden’s taste, but for Nealson that was a whisper. His regular speaking voice was three or four times that of a normal man’s, and his shout would make you look for a place to hide.
“Nails,” Ogden said, “the only way Whiskey’s involved is if we’re overrun and I drop bombs on our own position, then you guys come in to clean up whatever is left. So let’s hope you get to take the night off. Lodge, I want you and Nails back with your men twenty minutes before the attack begins.”
Nealson returned to an at-ease stance. He looked disappointed. Lodge tried not to look relieved, but he clearly was. Lodge was an exceptional pencil pusher, but perhaps not a true warrior soul.
Only one question remained—what new tricks did the little bastards have in store?
Ogden looked through night-vision binoculars, taking in all the details of their objective, two hundred yards due north. He stared at the glowing, now-familiar shape. It consisted of two twenty-foot-long parallel objects that resembled big logs lying side by side. The log structures led into a set of four curving arches, the first about ten feet high, the next three successively larger with the final arch topping out at around twenty feet. All of the objects, both logs and arches, had an irregular, organic surface.
But something was different this time.
The last two times he’d seen such a structure, all the pieces had been much thicker: thicker logs, thicker arches. This one looked kind of . . .anorexic.
Mud surrounded the thing, the result of snow melted by the structure’s heat. The first two constructs had put off a huge heat bloom. Satellite readouts had measured them both at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This one held a steady 110 degrees. And one other key difference: the first construct, in Wahjamega, Michigan, had shown action, something going on
inside
the cone, only an hour after heating up. This one had been hot for almost three hours.
But there was still no movement.
At Wahjamega they’d seemed to catch the hatchlings off guard. The creatures had been crawling all over the construct, and when they’d detected Ogden’s men, they’d attacked. The battle had been something out of a nightmare—pyramid-shaped monsters sprinting forward on black tentacle-legs, rushing right into automatic-weapons fire. Some of the monsters made it past the bullets, forcing his men into brutal, close-quarters fighting.
Eight men died.
Three weeks after Wahjamega, Perry Dawsey had discovered another construct in the deep woods near Mather, Wisconsin. Ogden’s primary objective was to capture or destroy the Mather construct before it could activate, but the brass had given him a secondary objective: capture a living hatchling. But that time it was the hatchlings that caught the Exterminators off guard. The creatures had actually set up a perimeter about a hundred yards around the construct. They’d been hiding up in the damn trees; his men literally walked right under the things. When the Exterminators closed to about seventy-five yards from the construct, the hatchlings had dropped down and attacked from behind.
As soon as they dropped, the construct activated. In the confusion of hand-to-hand, Ogden had no idea of the enemy’s numbers. The whole unit might have been overrun, so he didn’t hesitate—he called in air support to make sure he completed the primary objective. Apache rockets tore the thing to pieces.
That hadn’t left much to study, not that it mattered; just like at Wahjamega, the broken pieces of construct dissolved into pools of black goo within hours of the Apache strike. His men also failed to capture a hatchling, but Ogden wasn’t about to lecture them—it was a little much to expect men ambushed by monsters to worry about anything other than survival.
Twelve men died in that fight.
From a purely tactical perspective, casualties weren’t a problem. Charlie Ogden’s unit was so far into a secret black budget that even light probably couldn’t escape. He needed replacements? He got them. He needed equipment? Whatever he wanted, including experimental weapons, even ten Stinger surface-to-air missiles just in case some flying thing came out of those gates. Resupply? Transport? Air support? Same deal. Ogden took orders from Murray Longworth. Murray interfaced directly with the Joint Chiefs and the president. It was a heady bit of power, truth be told—no requisition, no approval, just tell Corporal Cope to place a request and things showed up as if by magic.
The blank check for men and equipment was key to mission success. So was an open-ended flexibility that let him move instantly, without orders, without approval, to wherever the danger might lie. He had to be flexible and fast, because the Mather engagement showed a clear change in hatchling tactics. They had
expected
an infantry assault. They had
learned
from the first encounter, learned and adapted.
That chewed at Ogden’s soul. His men had killed all the hatchlings in Wahjamega, and they hadn’t found anything that might be communication equipment. How had the Wahjamega hatchlings communicated with the Mather hatchlings?
Despite the change in tactics, the hatchlings still lost at Mather, which meant they’d likely change tactics again—so what was Ogden facing this time? His men had scanned the trees. Scanned
everything.
Normal vision, night vision, infrared, advance scouts. Nothing other than the hatchlings on the construct. No picket line, no perimeter. Odgen couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to be waiting for his men to come in.
He had his objectives, his attack options. The first option, use infantry to take the construct intact. Should that fail, hit it with the second option—Apache rockets. If needed, the Strike Eagles would deliver the third option: dropping enough two-thousand-pound bombs to turn a one-square-mile patch of Ohio into a burning crater. That would kill all his men and Ogden himself, but if it came to that, they’d have already been overrun.
Should that
third
option fail, the president would have no choice but to authorize what had been dubbed simply
Option Number Four
.
And Charlie Ogden really didn’t want to think about that.
He checked his watch again. Fifty minutes. Normally he’d attack as soon as the men were in position. He could still do that if he saw the need, but this time things were going to be a little different.
This time he’d have an audience. A career-making audience, the kind that could move him from a colonel’s eagle to a general’s star.
Charlie raised the night-vision goggles again and stared at the glowing construct. He hoped Murray could keep things on schedule at his end, because in fifty minutes, president or no president, Charlie Ogden was going in.
TAD, MEET MR. DAWSEY
Tad’s shivering brought him out of it.
He rolled on the grass, wondering if he was already dead. His shoulder hurt real bad. He didn’t
feel
dead—he was still moving. When people jumped out of windows on TV, they hit the ground and didn’t move. He rolled to his butt. Cold water seeped into the seat of his jeans.
Tad slowly stood. His legs hurt real bad, too. He took a deep breath, the rain and bits of ice splashing inside his wide-open mouth. He looked up, at the second-story window open to the night sky. Weird—it seemed like such a big drop from up in his room, but from down here it was about as high as a basketball hoop.
It didn’t matter how high it was or it wasn’t. He was out. Out of the house.
Okay, so he wasn’t dead . . . but he wasn’t going back in there, either.
Tad ran. His legs hurt, but they worked, and that was enough. He sprinted out to the side of the road and turned left. He pounded down a sidewalk cracked by tree roots and slick with slush.
He sprinted hard. He looked up just before running headlong into a man.
A
huge
man.
Tad stopped, frozen on the spot. The man was so big that Tad momentarily forgot about the house, his mom, his dad, his sister, even little Sam.
The man stood there, lit by a streetlamp that formed a cone of mist and light and wind-whipped, streaking rain. He looked down out of glowering blue eyes. He wore jeans and a wet short-sleeved, gray T-shirt that clung to his enormous muscles like a superhero costume. Long blond hair matted his head and face like a mask. A big, baseball-size twisted scar marred the skin of his left forearm.
The giant man spoke. “Are you . . . ?” His voice trailed off. His eyes narrowed for a moment. Then they opened, like he’d just remembered something very cool. “Are you . . . Tad?”
Tad nodded.
“Tad,” the man said. “Do you feel
itchy
?”
Tad shook his head. The man turned his right ear toward Tad, tilted his head down a bit, as he might have done if Tad was whispering and he was trying to hear.
“This is important,” the man said. “Are you
sure
? Are you really,
really
sure you’re not itchy? Not even a little?”
Tad thought about this carefully, then nodded again.
The man knelt on one knee. Even kneeling, he still had to bend his head to look Tad in the eye. The man slowly reached out with a giant’s hand, placing his palm gently on Tad’s head. Thick fingers curled down around Tad’s left temple, while a thumb as big as Tad’s whole fist locked down on his right cheek.
Tad kept very, very still.
The man turned Tad’s head back and to the right.
“Tad, what happened to your eye?”
Tad said nothing.
“Tad, don’t piss me off,” the man said. “What happened to your eye?”
“Daddy hit me.”
The man’s eyes narrowed again.
“Your daddy hit you?”
Tad nodded. Or tried to—he couldn’t move his head.
The man stood. Tad barely came up to his belt.
The man let go of Tad’s head and pointed back the way Tad had come. “Is that your house?”
Tad didn’t need to look. He just nodded.
“How did you leave?”
“Jumped out the window,” Tad said.
“Run along, Tad,” the man said. He reached behind his back and pulled out a long piece of black metal, bent at one end. Tad recognized it from when he and his family were on that trip to Cedar Point last summer, when Dad had to fix a flat.
It was a tire iron.
The man walked down the road, heading for Tad’s house.
Tad watched him for a few seconds. Then he remembered that he was running away, and what he was running away from. He sprinted down the sidewalk.