Contagious (9 page)

“Gitsh, get a sample in the microscope right away—I want to see the level of decomposition—then prepare the injections. Marcus, bring me the swab-test prototype.”
“Yes ma’am,” Marcus said.
“Recorder on,” Margaret said. A green light flashed in the upper right-hand corner of her HUD, signaling that everything she said and saw was being recorded in the control room.
“I’m online, Margaret,” Clarence said, his voice in her earpiece. “I have the other bodies in the second trailer. Amos is checking out the baby, but he looks fine. Did you run the test prototype yet?”
“Hold tight, I’m doing it now.” She held out her hand and Marcus gave her a small white electronic device the size of two packs of cigarettes joined end to end. He then opened a thin foil packet and pulled out a four-inch plastic stick, the last half inch coated with damp fabric. She slid the fabric end along the boy’s gum line and against the inside of his cheek.
The triangles harvested sugars common in the human body and used them to make cellulose, a material found only in plants. The cellulose formed a construction material that allowed the triangles to grow into hatchlings. Her theory was that some of the cellulose would leak into the bloodstream and eventually permeate bodily fluids, including saliva.
The prototype had few controls. The primary feature was a row of three square lights near the top: orange, green and red. She slid the plastic swab into a matching slot in the handheld device, and the orange light flashed, indicating a test in progress. The next indicator would be the green light, showing no trace of cellulose, or the red if the material was present in concentrations greater than one might find in a random grass stain.
The light flashed red.
“It works,” Margaret said. “Clarence, the test
works
.”
“Fantastic,” he said. “I’ll let Murray know immediately. He can rush the testers into production. Great job, Margaret. That finally gives us what we need.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said. She had grown rather fond of Clarence’s voice in her ear as she worked. He stayed in the computer control room, managing any requests she had, listening in to her and Amos theorizing as they cut up infected bodies.
Gitsh tapped her on the shoulder. “The sample’s up on the screen, Margo.”
She turned to look at the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. She hadn’t designed the trailer, but the monitor was her idea. Looking into microscopes was kind of annoying—routing them to a big plasma screen let everyone see what was going on.
The screen showed what she expected—the red, pink and white of highly magnified flesh and blood vessels, along with the gray of decomposing matter and the black of cells that were already long since destroyed by the apoptosis chain reaction. Only about 25 percent decomposed: the best sample she’d had yet. Even so, she didn’t have long.
“Okay, boys,” Margaret said, turning back to the table. “We need to work quickly.”
Anthony used scissors to cut away the boy’s yellow pajama bottoms and the T-shirt, leaving his bent body naked on the table.
“Caucasian male, approximately six years old,” Margaret said. “Severed spinal column, massive blunt-force trauma.”
Even before cutting into him, she could see that the boy’s internal organs were smashed to hell.
“One triangle on the stomach,” Margaret said. “Heavily damaged, lowest priority. One on the front upper-right thigh. Intact. Highest priority. Turn him over, please.”
The assistants flipped the little corpse. Now his broken body angled to Margaret’s left instead of to her right.
“One on the lower back, just above the eighth thoracic. Completely destroyed. Lowest priority. No other triangles visible on the body. Flip him back and let’s give him the injection series. Maximum dosage. I’ll take the right thigh.”
They gently put the corpse on its broken back again. Marcus laid out six large syringes, each with a long needle sheathed in hard plastic. Margaret carefully unsheathed the first syringe and went to work in the area around the triangle.
As soon as the triangles died, they caused a chain reaction of apoptosis. Apoptosis is a normal part of human health: sometimes cells outlive their usefulness and become a drag on the body, so they self-destruct. The triangles did something to that chemical code, however, turned it into a cascading event that dissolved all the tissue of an adult male in less than two days.
Margaret had tackled that problem in working to save Perry’s life. She’d performed immediate surgery on him to remove any trace of the dead triangles rotting inside his body. That hadn’t stopped the apoptosis, but it slowed it, giving her enough time to find a solution.
Apoptosis is driven by proteins called
caspases,
also known as the “executioner” proteins. Caspases exist in every cell in an inactive form, but when cells are damaged or old, the caspases activate and kill the cell. In a normal person, other proteins known as
inhibitor of apoptosis proteins,
or IAPs, shut down the process as soon as the intended cell dies. The triangles corrupted this normal process by neutralizing the IAPs’ suppressive abilities, allowing the caspases to spread the deadly chain reaction to surrounding cells, which then released
their
caspases, which then destroyed
more
cells, and so on.
She’d fought this process by testing multiple drugs that inhibited caspases. The magic formula turned out to be a trial drug called WDE-4-11, which successfully shut down the apoptosis chain reaction. That saved human tissue, although the triangle corpses still decomposed within hours.
That meant she could operate on a live hosts, remove the triangles, then use WDE-4-11 to stop the apoptosis. Despite Perry’s naive, violent beliefs, she
could
save them. When she did, however, saving the tissue was only one step—she also had to deal with the mental effects. For that she had a battery of mood-controlling drugs at her disposal, including drugs that had tackled the chemical imbalances in Perry’s brain and returned him to a semblance of sanity.
Or so she’d thought at the time.
She focused her attention on cutting the triangle free from the dead boy’s leg. The human tissue would keep, but the triangle would be black ooze in only a few hours, and she needed to move fast.
MEAN DRUNK
Dew parked the Lincoln in front of Perry’s motel room. Fluffy snowflake clusters had replaced the rain and hail. As the saying went, if you don’t like the weather in Wisconsin, just wait ten minutes. Dew had heard the same kinds of jokes about Michigan, Ohio and Indiana—and they were all true.
Perry sat in the passenger seat. He’d passed out with a beer in his left hand, his right still wrapped around a tattered six-pack that had only two bottles left. Dew didn’t want to act as a chauffeur for this psycho piece of shit, but he wasn’t about to put someone else at risk.
“Wake up,” Dew said.
Perry didn’t move.
Dew put the Lincoln in reverse, backed up about five feet, put it in gear, then gunned it and jammed on the brakes. Perry’s big body lurched forward against the seat belt.
His head snapped up, and he blinked in confusion.
“Home sweet home,” Dew said.
Perry turned and looked at him with drunken eyes. “Thanks, Pops,” he said.
Dew said nothing. Perry stared and smiled for a few more seconds, seeming to wait for a response. He didn’t get one. When he got out, the Lincoln rose up at least six inches. God
damn
, but that kid was big.
Dew shut off the car and got out. His room was right next to Dawsey’s. Just like always.
“Dawsey, gonna stay in your room tonight, or are you going to find some more kids to kill?” Dew asked.
“I thought killing babies was your gig.”
Dew shook his head. A goddamn baby-killer reference. He’d walked right into it, sure, but even drunk, that kid really knew how to push his buttons.
“You know what?” Dew said. “I’m too old and too tired for this. I’m going to bed. You go drink yourself into a coma. Just don’t die on me, or I’ll get into trouble.”
He walked to his room, keyed in, then shut and locked the door behind him, leaving Dawsey standing in the snow.

•  •  •

Perry nodded.
Don’t
die on me.
That’s all he was to these people, an asset. A freak. He keyed into his room, shut the door, then fell on the bed. He dropped his beer. It spilled on the carpet. That was okay, he had two more. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. It was spinning pretty good. Without looking away from the ceiling, he felt for another bottle, found it and twisted off the top. He upended it. Most of the beer splashed on his face or landed on the bed, but some of it went into his mouth, so it wasn’t all bad.
“I got some more, Bill,” Perry said. “I killed those motherfuckers.”
Bill didn’t answer. He never answered direct questions. He just piped up unexpectedly from time to time, told Perry to get a gun, to kill himself.
Bill
. Why the fuck did Margo have to bring him up? Perry drank to
forget
Bill. Well, it didn’t work. Nothing Perry ever did worked. Except when he wanted to hurt someone. To kill someone. That worked every time.
What the fuck was Dew’s problem, anyway? Pretending to get all pissed about that family. Why didn’t Dew and the others understand? Those people weren’t human anymore. They were
weak
. They didn’t have
discipline.
That meant they needed to die. If one of them, any of them, was even
trying
to cut out the triangles, then Perry would let them live. Maybe. But it didn’t matter, because so far no one had fought.
No one but him.
Why? Why was he special? He knew why: because his drunken, fucked-up, wife-and child-beating father had toughened him up with a strap.
Perry set the beer bottle on the bed to the right side of his face. He tipped it—this time more made it into his mouth than onto the bed. His face was all wet and sticky.
He didn’t feel a thing for the infected. Not a thing. That freakin’ toddler had rushed him, for crying out loud. They weren’t just infected, they were
stupid
.
That was the last thought to go through Perry’s mind before he passed out for the second time that night.
THE BACKYARD OF CHUY RODRIGUEZ
Chuy Rodriguez lived at the corner of Hammerschmidt and Sarah streets in South Bend, Indiana. Chuy had a wife, Kiki, and two kids: John, sixteen, and Lola, fourteen.
In their backyard stood a sparsely leaved oak tree suffering from some kind of bark rot. The tree had another three years, maybe five, and Chuy was already dreading how barren his backyard would look when he had to cut it down.
Chuy’s tree, however, wasn’t really the point of concern. For that you had to look directly above the tree.
Some
forty miles
directly above it.
If you could look up there, even with a very high-powered telescope, you might not notice a little blur, like a tiny heat shimmer. That shimmer came from visible-light wavelengths hitting an object, sliding along its surface, then continuing on their way with almost their exact original trajectory.
This object wasn’t
truly
invisible. Were it some massive thing taking up half the horizon, everyone would have spotted it by now.
Since it was just a bit bigger than a beer keg, however, no one noticed.
This object was inanimate. Cold. Calculating. It had no emotions. If it did, when it felt the Marinesco gate vanish in a ground-rending explosion, it probably would have said,
Awww FUCK, not again
.
The object’s shape had once been quite smooth and polished, like a teardrop with a point on both ends instead of just one. But that had been at launch, before the long journey that brought it into a geostationary orbit above Chuy Rodriguez’s diseased oak tree.
Space isn’t really empty. It’s got stuff in it. Stuff like dirt, rocks, ice, various bits and pieces—only those pieces are spread really,
really
far apart. If you travel far enough through that not-so-empty space, you’re going to run into that stuff. Depending on how fast you’re going, hitting even a teeny
speck
of dust can cause quite a bit of damage. The double-teardrop rock had been engineered to take that damage and keep on flying. The engineering worked, mostly, but the object’s pitted and cracked exterior bore witness to a design adage true anywhere in the universe—you can’t test for everything.
It had come so close to completing the mission. Once again, however, stopped before the gate could open . . . once again, stopped by the rogue host.
Stopped by the
sonofabitch
.
Its mission was simple in concept. Travel straight out from the home planet and search for signals that indicated sentient life. Space, as mentioned before, is big. Searching space for a suitable planet would require an investment far greater even than the economy-breaking project that had launched this object so long ago. There was one way, however, to narrow the search for planets that sustain life—find planets that already have it.
It did that by tracking broadcast signals.
Broadcast signals meant several things. First, they meant a planet that could support advanced biological life—predictable ranges of gravity, density, temperature, gases and liquids. Second, broadcasts meant a predictable range of resources—odds were, a planet of nothing but silica and sulfur could not create technology capable of sending signals into space. Finally, and perhaps most important, broadcasts indicated a large population capable of performing technically advanced tasks.
And that was important when you wanted slave labor to build your colonies for you.
Colonies, like exploration, are prohibitively expensive operations. Enslaving a native population provides a low-cost solution. It also helps cut off a potential interstellar rival.
If all went well, if the planet had suitable gravity and atmosphere, the object could get cracking. It would seed the planet with machines that could build a portal, a portal that connected two places so far apart that no living thing, nor the children of that living thing, nor the great-greMargaret, Amos and Clarence sat in the MargoMobile’s at-great-grandchildren of that living thing, could survive the trip by any other means. With the portal, however, such a trip took place instantly. Hundreds of light-years traversed in the blink of an eye.
This object, this
Orbital,
had arrived in Earth’s solar system some twenty years ago after detecting multiple signals: radio, television, microwaves. It approached slowly, cautiously, because there was always the possibility sentient life was
too
advanced and would see it coming. So the Orbital watched for a few years. It analyzed, eventually reaching the conclusion it could move into a low, stationary orbit without being detected.
Once the Orbital drew to the operating range, it spent more years watching. While there were multiple shapes and forms in the signals, the dominant species was almost always present. Suffice it to say that thanks to repeated image analysis, the Orbital knew a human when it saw one.
After seven years the Orbital knew humanity’s technological capabilities. It could identify major population centers and, more significantly, areas of little or no population. It could not understand any languages, but it didn’t need to—it would accumulate language once the probes were successfully deployed.
The Orbital carried eighteen of the small, soda-can-size probes, each of which could cast over a billion tiny seeds adrift on the winds. Each seed contained two main elements. The first was the microscopic machinery needed to analyze potential hosts and hijack their biological processes. The second was a tiny, submicroscopic chunk of crystal. This chunk matched exactly with one in the center of every other seed and, more important, inside the Orbital. This irreplaceable, unreproducible chunk was the
template,
the device that reshaped the molecular structure of biomass so that it became the material needed to build a gate.
The first probe had been a total failure. Bad luck with the weather. The second probe actually produced several connections, but, unfortunately, they were all with nonsentient animals. When that happened, the seeds simply shut off—a half-formed triangle on a caged or penned domesticated animal could potentially alert humanity to the hovering threat. The seeds also needed sentient hosts to develop workers that could communicate and work together, could use tools and vehicles, could learn about the area and potential dangers.
It wasn’t until the sixth probe that seeds latched onto a sentient being. Although those seeds died early, the Orbital was able to gather some biofeedback. It analyzed the data, identified key problems, then modified the next batch accordingly.
The seventh probe proved closer still. More development, including successful creation of the biological material needed for worker construction. These were the strange red, blue and black fibers that would come to be associated with Morgellons disease.
Batches eight through ten were each more successful than the last, creating firm connections that flooded the Orbital with valuable biofeedback. It learned much about the structure of host-species DNA, refining the self-assembly process to a highly functional level. It gathered data about brain composition and chemical structure, enough to manipulate host behaviors, to steer them away from associating with noninfected hosts.
Batch eleven was a landmark achievement—access to the higher levels of a host’s brain, including memory and language processing. The Orbital began to build a vocabulary of images, concepts and words. One host even found a suitable portal location. This host, Alida Garcia, died soon after, but the primary obstacles had been overcome.
That should have made batch twelve the one.
Batch twelve produced five hosts. A change in the language, from some Spanish to English. The Orbital’s vocabulary grew. It understood more and more of the broadcast signals pouring off the planet. The workers incubated well and almost made it to the hatching phase before unexpected complications resulted in the deaths of the hosts—including Blaine Tanarive, Gary Leeland, Charlotte Wilson and Judy Washington. Martin Brewbaker’s triangles activated a few days after the others, but he died just the same.
More data. More modifications.
Probability tables indicated that batch thirteen had an 82 percent chance of success. Multiple seeds implanted in eleven hosts for a total of seventy-two potential workers. Fifty-six of those actually hatched and made it to the location identified by Alida Garcia.
The workers started to build the gate. Success seemed inevitable.
But then the rogue host appeared. A host that fought back, that killed embryonic workers and brought the human military. The workers had a name for this host. They called it the
sonofabitch.
The Orbital tried again. Aside from some minor biological upgrades, batch fourteen used the same strategy as batch thirteen. Probes went out, seeds landed, embryos germinated, workers hatched. Everything went fine, until the Orbital learned of yet another unanticipated fact.
The rogue host could still
hear
.
Structures grown in host brains acted like antennae, connecting embryos and hosts, allowing the Orbital to direct them, to guide them, helping them find each other so they could work together to reach the gate locations. The rogue host remained tapped into this communication grid.
It heard.
It found the Mather gate location.
It brought the military . . . again.
So
close
.
Successful worker design in itself wasn’t enough to get the job done. The Orbital changed tactics.
Batch fifteen worked perfectly. It dispersed near Parkersburgh, West Virginia, and produced six hosts—all of which made it to the woods near South Bloomingville before hatching.
Batch sixteen fired only a few hours later, spreading over Glidden, Wisconsin.
Fifteen and sixteen hatched in record time, built their gates in record time. The Orbital activated the South Bloomingville gate as a decoy, drawing the human military.
The sonofabitch found
both
gates.
After all of these near hits, the Orbital had only two probes left. If those did not work, the entire mission was a failure.
It had to change strategy again.
The large explosion that destroyed the Marinesco gate demonstrated that humans could react quickly and with overwhelming force. Placing the gates in secluded areas had seemed like the best strategy at first, but it also allowed for massive ordnance without much risk to local populations.
The workers also needed protection. They were designed to hatch out of hosts and then
build,
not
fight
. They could kill, but were far outmatched by the human forces responding to each gate. The workers needed
defenders
, something to occupy the human forces, fight them long enough for workers to activate the gates.
Since defenders would not build the gate, they did not need the template. That was good. That opened a new strategy. Because the new defender design didn’t need a template, it could do something that the template-carrying embryos could not—the new design could
reproduce.
The Orbital began modifying the next batch of seeds.