Scott Sigler: Contagious

“This man checked in to the hospital, then hours later set his hospital bed on fire. He burned alive.”

click

Martin Brewbaker: A corpse on a morgue table, covered with blackened third-degree burns, legs cut off below the knees.

“This man killed three people: his wife, his six-year-old daughter and, when we tried to apprehend him, a CIA agent named Malcolm Johnson.”

click

Blaine Tanarive: A charred, rotted corpse, little more than a skeleton coated with gossamer green fibers.

“This one also killed his family,” Murray said. “We found him after he’d died.”

John wasn’t smiling anymore. He stared at the last picture. “What happened to him?”

Murray looked at the picture for a moment, then turned back to face John and his staff.

“Once the hosts die, their bodies decompose at an extremely advanced rate. Corpses break down to nothing but a blackened skeleton in less than two days.”

John watched Donald, Vanessa and Tom. That had always been his strength, the ability to watch people, to understand them from facial expressions, posture, movement.

Tom looked like he wanted to vomit. Donald clearly believed. Vanessa was starting to. And in believing, Vanessa grew more and more angry. Most people wouldn’t have seen it, but John knew her better than most. A secret like this, kept from the American people… she would want someone’s head. Unfortunately for Murray Longworth, that head would likely be his.

click

Perry Dawsey: A giant of a man lying on a hospital bed, eyes closed, chest exposed, arms and legs locked down with heavy canvas straps. A black, oozing sore on his right collarbone, white bandages covering his right forearm, tubes going into his nose and arms.

“Perry Dawsey,” Donald said. “I know that name. Isn’t he that football player who went crazy and murdered his friend? ‘Scary’ Perry Dawsey?”

Murray nodded. “Dawsey is the only known survivor. He had seven parasites, which he cut out of himself, removing the final one five weeks ago.”

“Jesus Christ,” Vanessa said. “Look at this body count, and you kept it secret? What are you, some kind of monster?”

Now it was Murray’s turn to smile a little. John immediately disliked that expression—it was the smile of a hunter. Murray Longworth clearly loved the game, and he was used to winning, no matter what the cost.

“Funny you should mention monsters,” Murray said. “We put together a team to investigate the situation, led by CIA operative Dew Phillips. Through Phillips’s work we discovered that the parasites leave the human host and became free-moving organisms.”

If the Oval Office hadn’t had such nice rug, you could have heard a pin drop.

“Murray,” John said, talking slowly, choosing his words carefully. “Are you telling us that these triangular growths… hatch out of people ?”

“That’s correct, Mister President,” Murray said. “We even refer to them as hatchlings.”

“And then what?” Donald said. “Do they walk on their own or something?”

“That’s correct, Mister Secretary,” Murray said. “Not only do they walk, they operate as a unit. Hatchlings tried to build and activate a construct that we believe is either some kind of gateway or a weapon. This is footage shot by army soldiers in Wahjamega, Michigan.”

Murray cued the video. The quality was fairly good. John saw soldiers, trees and then something deeper in the winter woods… something glowing . It looked like a big archway, maybe twenty feet high at the apex, an illuminated wedding band half-buried in the muddy forest floor. Inside of that he could see three more arches, each smaller, each farther back. It was like looking into a glowing cone.

And creatures, scurrying over the arches like termites on a rotten log. A strange skin growth was one thing, but this… this wasn’t even remotely possible. John felt a cold tingle wash over his skin. If this was real, than it had to be… what? Aliens? Demons? This just couldn’t be happening.

“No way,” Vanessa said. “There’s no way that’s real. Why are you wasting the president’s time with special effects?”

“It’s real, ma’am,” Murray said.

John leaned forward for a closer look, his ass barely on the edge of his chair. “Just what the hell are those supposed to be?”

“Hatchlings,” Murray said. “You get a better look, right about… now.”

The video grew shaky as the hatchlings suddenly rushed forward to attack. The shot angled sharply before the first creature reached the troops, probably as the soldier shooting the footage dropped the camera. Murray paused it there. John stared at a tilted close-up of a pyramid-shaped creature with angry, vertical black eyes and tentacles for legs.

Again, total silence.

John Gutierrez had made a career out of sizing people up. That innate skill had taken him from mayor to state senator. It had been key in adding Vanessa to his staff. When he met her, he knew. Her skill and ruthlessness had guided him from state senate into Congress, and now the White House. An amazing feat, considering that John was forty-six years old and the nation’s first Hispanic president. John Gutierrez trusted his eyes, his instincts—and those tools now told him that Murray Longworth wasn’t bullshitting anyone.

This was real.

“What the hell are we dealing with, Murray?” John asked. “You’re not going to tell me these are aliens, are you?”

“That’s our best guess, sir,” Murray said. “The technology is way beyond anything we know. We suspect that the hatchlings are a form of biological machine, designed to build the glowing structure.”

John wanted to kill Hutchins. The former president might as well have left a giant, steaming pile of shit on the Oval Office rug. Now the problem rested squarely in John’s lap, and no matter what happened, the public would associate this with his presidency, not Hutchins’s.

“Wahjamega,” Donald said. “Wait a minute, that’s where the Osprey helicopter crashed back in December. Eight soldiers died.”

“A cover story,” Murray said. “There was no crash. The eight soldiers died when we attacked and destroyed the gate.”

Donald looked around the room in disbelief, as if he were waiting for Vanessa or John or Tom to say gotcha .

But no one said gotcha .

“Simply amazing,” Vanessa said. She sounded sarcastic, but also quite shaken, and John couldn’t blame her. “The families of these brave men may never know the truth. They died in battle, and we list it as a helicopter crash. How patriotic of us. So what’s happened since then?”

“Dawsey needed serious medical care,” Murray said. “We had him in a VA hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Seems he recovered faster than expected, got access to a computer, hacked into the facility’s database and altered his security status. It’s a bit embarrassing to say, but on January eighth he just walked out.

“The parasites built something in his brain, some kind of mesh structure that lets him track down infected hosts. He found one that had just murdered three people. Dawsey killed the man in self-defense. Before the man died, however, Dawsey discovered the location of another gate, in—”

“Mather, Wisconsin,” Donald interrupted. “The Osprey crash in Mather. Twelve men dead.”

Murray nodded.

“Who knows about this?” John asked. “The whole story, who knows?”

“The Joint Chiefs,” Murray said. “They had to implement President Hutchins’s decision to sequester the soldiers involved and reassign them to a new unit. The soldiers themselves know they fought something unusual, but very few people know the whole story: Phillips, Montoya, Braun, Agent Clarence Otto—who’s Montoya’s CIA liaison—the CIA director, Hutchins and a few members of his staff.”