Infected (30 page)

He was out within seconds.

MARGARET SETS UP SHOP

Margaret called the shots. They commandeered a med/surg floor at the University of Michigan Medical Center.
Med/surg
is fancy-pants hospital slang for
medical/surgical.
Without Murray’s approval she’d ordered not just one, but two portable BSL-4 labs installed in the wing. That SARS was a nasty sucker, couldn’t be too careful, right? The hospital administration put up a fight, demanding to know the risks, the health status of the community and a bunch of other nicey-nice shit that Margaret simply did
not
have time to deal with.

She had an executive order. She had the deputy director of the CIA in her back pocket. These people were going to give her what she wanted, and that was that.

They had to be ready. Two cases in Ann Arbor, and they’d been so damn close to catching a live one. If they got another chance, she might get her shot to see just what the hell these triangles were.

Agent Otto came through the door, carrying a five-foot-long cardboard tube.

Margaret’s pulse jumped up a notch—she wasn’t sure if it was from seeing Otto, the portfolio, or both.

“Did you get the printout, Clarence?”

He flashed his wide, easy smile. “No problem, Doc. I think I made some Kinko’s employees happy. I’m guessing it’s not every day they get sworn to secrecy at midnight and use their large color printer for national security.”

She helped him pull the rolled-up printouts from the tube, and they started taping the final artistic works of Kiet Nguyen up on the wall.

PROGRAMMING

Perry would never know how close he came to getting real help. The NarusInsight STA 7800, the machine that scanned all the calls, picked up the word
triangle
from his call to Triangle Mobile Home Sales but did not find any of the context words that would alert the CIA’s watcher. Had Perry changed a few words, possibly even just one word, if he’d said, “I had seven to start with, but I
killed
three,” instead of, “I had seven to start with, but I
got
three,” help would have already been on the way.

But Perry didn’t use the right words. The system didn’t forward the call to the watcher. Still alone in his fight for survival, Perry slept.

He slept like the dead.

The Triangles did not.

The subconscious mind is a powerful device. Repeating things over and over to yourself, visualizing a success again and again, virtually programs your brain to go out and make those images a reality. The opposite also holds true—if you’re convinced you’re a loser, that you always seem to lose your job, that you can’t save money, that you can’t lose weight, you tell yourself
these
things over and over, and guess what? They come true as well. The subconscious mind takes the things it hears over and over and makes them reality. The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between success and failure. The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what helps you and what hurts you.

The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between good and evil.

All night long, Triangles repeated the phrase in Perry’s head. More than a hundred times. Definitely thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand. Over and over.

kill him

kill him

kill him

It was a short phrase, and they didn’t even really have to “say” it—all they had to do was send it to his auditory nerve, a high-speed data dump into Perry’s programmable subconscious.

There were others close by, others of their kind. Sometimes they heard voices, like their own, but not coming from within the host’s body. Some hosts were far away. One was very, very close.

They knew nothing of where they came from or what they were, but the stronger they became, the more they knew
why
they were here.

They were here to
build
.

And soon the Triangles would join with those of the nearby host, become one group, one tribe, then move to join even more of their kind. The glorious construction would begin. But first they had to keep the host alive, keep him out of danger, keep him away from the Soldiers.

kill him

kill him

kill him

Mental and physical exhaustion held Perry in a deep, deep sleep. He was stone-cold out for just under fourteen hours. The Triangles incessantly repeated the phrase until the Tylenol kicked in, they caught a solid buzz, and drifted off with visions of the glorious construction that would soon become a reality.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

Bill Miller stared at the TV.
Columbo
was on the
Sunday-Morning Mystery Movie,
but he wasn’t really watching. His fingers drummed against the remote control.

What the hell was Perry doing? Didn’t answer his phone. Didn’t answer instant messages. Didn’t answer his door. Bill hadn’t gone this long without talking to Perry since they’d first roomed together in college. Something was wrong. Really wrong, like “Oh,
fuck,
my parachute won’t open” wrong.

Bill had called a dozen times so far, leaving a message every time but never getting a response. He’d watched his IM client, seeing if Perry would log on: nothing. He’d even left a friggin’ note, like some psycho girl.

Perry was obviously home, and he wanted to be left alone. But man, this was Sunday. Fucking
football Sunday
. Their tradition dated back almost a decade, through tertiary friends that came and went, through seven girlfriends (five on Bill’s side, two on Perry’s—the only game that Bill had a chance of winning against the super-athlete).

Well screw this. Perry didn’t get to hide in that tiny apartment, not when football Sunday was on. Bill needed to see him, needed to know everything was all right. Perry was capable of such violent outbursts—one incident might put him in jail. Bill had to reach him, just to make sure his friend wasn’t about to fuck up his life yet again.

Bill picked up the phone and called his best friend one more time.

COOKING UP A STORM

“Somebody knockin’ at the duh-or, somebody ringin’ the bell.”

He recognized the voice. Paul McCartney. Must be some Beatles tune, from when they were all whacked out on drugs and spouting that Peace and Love shit.

It was that fucking door again. Still rotting and spongy soft, although this time Perry wasn’t walking down the dark hall. He was standing still, yet the door kept getting closer.

The door was coming for him.

A hundred tiny tentacles jutted from the door’s bottom like the arms of a black anemone, wiggling, pulling, always moving forward. The door came toward him, slowly but steadily, the spongy green wood hungry for a meal.

Perry turned and ran, but at the other end of the hall stood another green door, this one also moving closer, this one also hungry.

Nowhere to go. One door or the other…or both. No matter what he did, what waited behind those doors would take him. In the dream, Perry started to scream…

Perry awoke, his
eyelids flickering against the early morning light that sifted harshly through his window. He’d fallen asleep sitting up, head resting on the back of the couch. The position had made his neck stiff and tight. He rubbed at it with his good arm, trying to loosen up the muscles. He scraped his tongue against the roof of his mouth in an automatic effort to relieve the pasty feeling that comes from bad sleep. It wouldn’t go away until he could get some water.

His cell phone rang loudly. Barely awake, he answered it before he could think of the consequences.

“Hello?”

hello hello sonofabitch

“Perry! You’re home! Where the hell have you been, man?”

“I’ve been here…” Perry blinked his eyes against the rude sunlight. He slowly pushed his lethargic body upright. His voice still carried the grogginess of the morning, the sound of words that came out automatically without the guidance of an attentive brain. “Been in my apartment.”

we know we’ve been here too

“You’ve been gone for days!” The voice on the other end rang with anxiety and excitement. “We thought you’d skipped town or something. You’ve been home all this time?”

It was almost like a split personality, a sprint between intelligence and stupidity. Half of his mind raced in a dead panic (
the pain is coming!
), rushing to wrest control from the other half, the I-just-woke-up-and-I’m-damn-stupid half that was currently talking on the phone, oblivious to the disastrous situation rapidly surging to the boiling-over point.

“Perry, you there?”

Perry gave his head a little shake, still trying to clear the cobwebs. “Who is this?”

who is who,

what are you talking about

“It’s Bill, stupid. You know, Bill? Your best friend? Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

The intelligent, panicked part of Perry’s mind slammed into control with the force of a missile hitting a passenger jet. He flung the phone away as if it were a tarantula. It landed on the floor only a few feet from him.

“Hello?” The word came faint, thin and tinny from the receiver.

who is here,

who are you talking to,

who is here

Bill’s voice sounded impossibly distant and small. Like an abused dog cowering at the sound of its master’s angry call, Perry flinched with each word that trickled from the phone.

“Hello? Perry?”

He reached down and flipped the phone shut.

who is there, who is

there, who who who is

it columbo

Perry’s breath still came in shallow, quiet bursts. Like a kid caught doing something very wrong, his mind raced for an excuse, a lie, anything that would keep him out of trouble.

who is there, who is

there, who is there

“No one is here,” Perry said quietly.

columbo is here

isn’t he

“No!” Perry fought back panic, tried to keep his voice low—he didn’t want another visit from Big Al upstairs. “No one is here. It was just the telephone. It’s nothing to worry about.” High-pitched noise ripped through his thoughts as the Triangles rooted around in his brain. Perry sat very, very still, wondering if a blast of angry shouting would hammer the inside of his head.

Low-pitched noise followed as the Four Horsemen added new words and phrases to their growing vocabulary.

telephone so you can

talk to ones who aren’t

here right

Perry worked his way through the Triangle sentence. They put
right
at the end of the sentence. They were asking a question.

“Yes, that’s right, so we can talk to ones that aren’t here.” He remained frozen on the couch like a hunted rabbit, waiting for the pain to sear through his head, a weed whacker trimming up his brain.

we do that without

telephones talk to Triangles

“Are you talking to some of them now?” Perry carefully led the conversation away from the telephone call, still wary of the mindscreaming although he sensed no anxious emotions from the Triangles. It seemed that they understood the concept of a phone and realized that no one was in the room. There was a bit of high-pitched fuzzy noise before the Horsemen’s response.

calling one up now,

we are talking to them

“Are they nearby?” High-pitch sounded in his head.

how far is nearby

“You’re familiar with the concept of distance?” He felt them looking up the word
distance
. Unbidden, images flashed through his mind—maps, a hundred-yard dash, third-grade story problems.

yes. how far is nearby.

show us

He’d have to start them out on inches and feet. “Nearby” was a relative concept and he wasn’t sure how he’d explain it. He hopped toward the junk drawer to get a ruler. As he moved, the faint wisps of a foul smell drifted across his nose, and then it was gone. He sniffed again but caught no further traces of the scent. He brushed aside a roll of duct tape and pulled the ruler from the drawer.

He steeled himself. What he was about to do—educate them—made it even more real, even more hopeless. It was like admitting that they were just as normal as the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day or Saturday-morning cartoons.

He slid up the sleeve on his left arm.

There sat the Triangle, bright blue under his skin. But the eye slits were still closed.

show us.

“I can’t. His…his eyes aren’t open yet.”