Contagious (49 page)

“You’ll go
now,
Dawsey, and that’s an order.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, old man?” Perry said. “I’m not a soldier, and your orders don’t mean dick to me. I’m getting that girl. The only way you can stop me is to shoot me, and this time I’ll shoot back. With your own gun.”
Perry raised his eyebrows and lifted a pistol, not pointing it at Dew, more of a show-and-tell gesture.
“Sir!” A big black man, almost as big as Perry, ran up to Dew. “Sir, someone is sticking a white flag out the front door.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dew said. “Let’s see if we can close this out. Nails, have half your men target the second-floor windows, the other half the ground floor. I don’t want to kill any hostages, but I’m not in the mood to be shot at, either.”
“Got it,” Nails said, then started barking orders. Margaret had never heard a human being that loud.
Dew looked at Perry again. “I suppose if I tell you to stay here, you’ll just ignore me?”
Perry nodded.
Dew sighed. “Fine, fuck it. Let’s go.”
Perry’s slow breaths
steamed in the cold air, carried away by the breeze coming off the river. The helmet felt cold on his head, but his flak jacket trapped his body heat and made him sweat despite the freezing temperature. He gripped the .45 tightly and followed Dew around the corner. Dew carried an M4, barrel angled toward the ground. Jets still screamed overhead, their engine roars echoing across the cityscape. Far up ahead, the RenCen continued to burn like a tall, smoldering black torch, a column of greasy smoke angling up and trailing across downtown Detroit. Helicopters hovered all over the place, probably waiting for more of Ogden’s men to show themselves.
Perry and Dew walked toward the building on the corner. The front door was open just a little, enough room for a stick with a white shirt tied to it to wave back and forth.
He saw Whiskey Company men all over the place, guns trained on the open door and the windows. If someone opened fire from inside the building, an instant bloodbath would ensue.
Dew stopped twenty feet in front of the door. Perry did the same, a step behind Dew, a step to his left.
“We’re listening,” Dew said.
The door opened, and Chelsea Jewell walked out, carrying the flag.
Had it been anyone else, a soldier, a grown-up, some twitchy finger might have opened fire, white flag or no. But the image of a seven-year-old girl with beautiful blond curls and an innocent face instantly made fingers ease off triggers, if only a little.
To anyone else she looked innocent, but Perry saw deeper. He saw a nightmare, something dark and self-serving, something happy to destroy anything that didn’t give her what she wanted. He didn’t care what he had to do, how far he had to go—Chelsea Jewell would never leave this place alive.
She walked ten feet from the door, far enough to stand in the debris-strewn, potholed street.
Perry stepped forward. Time to end this. A hand on his chest—Dew pushing him back. Perry wanted to shoot her, but he would back Dew’s play.
“We wanna negotiate,” Chelsea said. “My mommy needs help.”
“Tell all your men to throw out their weapons,” Dew shouted, loud enough so the men in the building could hear him.
Chelsea stood there, motionless save for the white flag still twitching in her little hand. Guns flew out of the building’s broken windows and clattered on the sidewalk. Two came from the ground floor, just one from the second. Was that all Ogden had left?
Three
gunmen?
More silence.
“Where’s Col o nel Ogden?” Dew asked.
“He will come out now, with my mommy,” Chelsea said. “She’s hurt, she needs help.”
Perry heard Nails’s bellowing voice. “Squad One, move up!”
Soldiers of Whiskey Company stepped out from cover and moved forward, forming a wide half circle around Chelsea.
She turned and walked back through the door. Perry started to follow her inside, but Dew’s hand on his chest stopped him again. She slipped inside, out of sight. Only a few seconds of tense waiting later, a man walked out. Ogden. He reached back and pulled something through the door. Something big, like a two-legged hippo. Gray. Wearing . . . pants?
Wait.
The man wasn’t pulling that thing.
That thing . . . was
walking.
Margaret watched an
obscenity walk out of the building.
“What the fuck?” Clarence said. “What is that?”
It was a woman. A woman horribly bloated to insane proportions. Her arms were swollen to the point where the skin stretched out thin and semitransparent like a balloon, or like the casing of a sausage sizzling away on a grill. Her stomach distended like a cartoon-character. Her breasts looked massive, misshapen, like beach balls. Her
face
was puffed up to the point that her eyes were nothing more than stretched, squinting slits. The woman couldn’t see—that’s why Ogden led her forward.
“Stay where you are!” Dew screamed. “Ogden, stop or we shoot!”
Guns rattled as soldiers took aim. Ogden stopped. So did the woman. With a smooth, confident motion, Ogden reached into his pocket, drew out a grenade and pulled the pin. He jammed the grenade into the woman’s bloated folds.
Dew fired. Ogden’s head jerked to the side, and he dropped, lifeless.
Next came two long seconds, a pregnant pause. Margaret and the soldiers stared at the obscenely bloated woman standing next to Colonel Charlie Ogden’s fallen body.
Someone started firing.
A dozen M4s suddenly erupted, bullets punching into the monstrosity that had once been the beautiful Candice Jewell. Each bullet kicked out a gray jet like the spray of a miniature fire extinguisher. She stumbled back a step, arms comically pinwheeling as she fought for balance.
And then the grenade went off.
A bang, no flash. A cloud of gray peppered with red, fleshy shrapnel.
The cloud expanded, billowing past Dew and the men who had surrounded Chelsea. It thinned as it spread, a translucent sphere growing more and more transparent. The soldiers turned to run, but the cloud engulfed them before they made it three steps. It blew past them, seemingly hungry for the next man in line, and the next.
The soldiers slowed, then stopped. Hands went to throats, to eyes, to ears. They scratched at themselves. They
clawed.
They screamed. They fell. They writhed and kicked.
The cloud billowed past Margaret, tiny spores covering her airtight suit.
Tears rolled down her face. This was it, this was the final stage. There had to be millions of the spores. Sanchez had caught the disease from a tiny puffball, maybe a thousand spores landing on his hand, and even though he’d washed the hand immediately, it hadn’t mattered—the stuff penetrated almost on contact.
Every one of these men, including Dew, including Perry, was already infected with a dose at least a thousand times more concentrated.
She looked away from the men, looked at the air around her. The pollenlike dust drifted away, a grayish cloud carried by the wind. The spores were already starting to fall, but only slightly—they might travel a mile or more before they finally came to rest.
A mile would carry them into downtown Detroit, even beyond, spreading them across the tens of thousands of panicked citizens trying to hide from gunfire. Spores were far smaller than bullets, far more dangerous, and from those spores there
was
no place to hide.
People stumbled out of the house. The hostages. Clawing at their eyes and throats and ears, running in any direction, every direction. It wasn’t just the wind that could spread the contagion—these people would take it much farther.
How many of them would leave the city in a panic? Find a car, a way out, and just start driving? How many would travel three or four hours before they fell asleep?
And how many of those would change into another gasbag, like Chelsea’s mother?
She saw other civilians, stumbling out of buildings where they had hidden, hands rubbing desperately at eyes, digging at exposed skin. They ran in a panic, aimlessly scattering in all directions.
“Clarence, does your HUD say anything about suit integrity?”
He said nothing. He just stared at the carnage.
“Clarence!”
“Uh . . . no, nothing about suit integrity.”
Thank God. He was safe.
“We have to get out of here,” she said. “We have to get to the decon trailer at the football field. Can you drive that motorcycle parked in front of the building?”
“Yeah, but what about Dew? Perry? We have to help them.”
Margaret swallowed. Dew writhed on the ground. Perry just lay on his back, barely moving. She wanted to go to them, but the cold, mathematical part of her brain knew the score.
“We can’t help them,” she said. “Do what I say, and do it now. If you don’t, the world is fucked.”
Clarence looked at her, then looked back at the men crawling across the ground, at the people running into the city. It seemed to click home for him. He closed his eyes tight. Tears dripped down his cheeks. He opened his eyes, grabbed her hand and ran for the motorcycle.
PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE
Get up, Perry. I need you.
Coughing.
Dust, the taste of smoke, the taste of dirt, the taste of . . .
(don’t think about it)
. . . of scorched flesh. In his
mouth.
More coughing.
But not just from the brick and dirt and smoke and wood and the (don’t think about it) scorched flesh, coughing from something deeper, way down in his lungs.
Something that
burned.
Perry knew. He felt stabbing pains all through his skin, his face, in his muscles and eyes. They were
inside
him.
It’s time for you to join me.
It was her again. In his head. He’d thought the gate was the most beautiful thing he would ever experience. He was wrong. As rapturous as that gate was, it paled in comparison to the voice.
Come to me, Perry. Get me out of here.
So beautiful. He’d heard her before, but he’d been hundreds of miles away. Now there was no distance, no jamming, no grayness—her pure, raw power raged through his soul.
Perry stood and stumbled down the street. Men were all around, the brave guys of Whiskey Company, rolling on the ground, coughing, spitting up blood. They were all totally fucked.
Just like Perry.
And there, lying in the middle of the street . . . Dew Phillips.
Just relax and let it happen. You’ll be stronger now. You’ll be like me. Come to me, Perry. Protect me.
Perry shuffled toward Dew. The man was on his back, mouth opening and closing. He saw Perry and managed to smile, then shrug.
Dew knew the deal.
“Sorry . . . kid,” he said, his voice a hoarse croak. “Looks like . . . we’re not going fishing after all.”
Kill him.
Dew’s face screwed into a pinched mask of agony. Perry knew what Dew was feeling, because he felt that same pain himself. The difference was, Perry and pain were long-lost buddies.
Dew’s wave of pain seemed to fade for a second. He blinked rapidly, then coughed, bloody foam splattering onto his lips.
“Kid . . . get my radio. See if Margaret got out.”
Perry nodded. “I will.”
Kill him. Do it now.
“I’m proud of you, Perry,” Dew said. “Maybe you don’t . . . have testicles . . . but you sure got balls.”
Dew Phillips actually laughed. Or started to, then he coughed up a little blood.
Perry saw his .45 lying on the ground. The one that had belonged to Dew for thirty-some years.
Kill him!
“Thank you, for everything,” Perry said. “And I’m sorry about this, but I have to.”
Perry put the .45 against Dew’s forehead.
“Kid? What . . .”
Perry closed his eyes, kept his hand perfectly still and pulled the trigger.
Then he turned away and walked toward the building.
Chelsea had called for him,
God
had called for him, and he had to obey.
RIDE TO LIVE
The black Harley Night Rod Special roared down the sidewalk of East Jefferson Avenue. Shell-shocked people ran out of the way, only too eager to flee from yet another potential threat—a loud-as-hell motorcycle carrying two people in black hazmat suits.
Bodies lined the sidewalk and the street, the corpses of people who had resisted the hostage roundup of Ogden’s men. Clarence wove around those bodies, around cars that had driven onto the sidewalk and crashed into buildings, and around a few people wandering aimlessly, clawing at their eyes, their faces, their arms. Margaret saw traces of gray dust everywhere. As they drove, the dust thinned until she saw no more of it. They’d driven out of the puffball’s expansive blast radius.
Now the only spores would be on their hazmat suits.
Even with the parking-lot-like traffic jam, the Harley moved along at a brisk pace, its obscenely loud engine a long-distance warning to anything that might stand in its way. Within minutes they saw the high-school football field on the left. Sitting on it, a MargoMobile and two Ospreys.
An icon illuminated on her heads-up display—wireless connection. Her suit computer had picked up the communication net from the new MargoMobile.
“This is Doctor Margaret Montoya!” she shouted as Clarence turned sharply on Mount Elliot. “Prepare for immediate evacuation. Patch me through to Murray Longworth on this frequency
right now
, open the airlock door, then everyone
out
of the trailers and onto the Osprey. Get it warmed up. We’re out of here in three minutes.
Do not approach me,
I am contagious.”
A block later they reached the football field’s main gate. A guard had been there, but she saw only his back as he sprinted for the Osprey. Clarence drove the roaring motorcycle through the gate onto the field and stopped at the MargoMobile’s airlock door.
As soon as the bike’s engine died out, Margaret heard Murray’s voice in her helmet speakers. “Margaret, what’s going on?”
She and Clarence sprinted for the airlock. She’d been running forever, it seemed, and every last muscle screamed in protest. She entered, and he shut the door behind them. The instant the air pressure equalized, she opened the door to the decontamination chamber.
“Margaret,” Murray said, “answer me!”
“It’s contagious,” she said through heavy breaths. She ran to the controls as Clarence shut the second airlock door. She hit the controls and the room filled with the bleach/chlorine spray.
“We know it’s contagious,” Murray said.
“No, you don’t get it.” She raised her arms and slowly turned, letting the mist wash over her. “It’s
airborne.
It replicates inside people, fills them up like a puffball till they burst.”