Scott Sigler - Contagious

“Okay, baby,” Mommy said. “Let’s get you out of this cold air and back to bed.”

“Me too,” Daddy said. “I feel wrecked. Let’s hit the sack.”

The Jewell family walked inside the house.

Dew Phillips knocked on Perry’s door.

“Come on in.”

Dew did so and shut the door behind him. Perry Dawsey looked like hell. A red and black scalp line ran through his blond hair. Another such line ran down his forehead in an angle from above his left eye almost down to the bridge of his nose. His lips were horribly swollen. The left eye was pure red dotted with a blue iris.

Dawsey was sitting on his bare mattress, elbows resting on his thighs, head hung low. He held a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey American Spirit.

“Where the fuck did you get that bottle?”

“You get your per diem, I get mine,” Perry said. “Had another bottle in the trunk of the ’Stang, but it broke.”

Dew casually pressed his right arm against his right side, feeling the comforting bulge of the .45 under his jacket. He’d gotten lucky fighting Dawsey, and he wasn’t about to push that luck—if Dawsey attacked, Dew was going to shoot him.

“How you feeling?” Dew asked.

Perry raised his head. The blond hair hung in his face.

“I feel like someone hit me in the head with a table leg,” Perry said. “And the mouth. And back. And thigh. And look at you—I can tell by that little Band-Aid that I really fucked up your world.”

Dew’s hand went to the small Band-Aid on his forehead. The cut from hitting the table hadn’t even required a stitch.

“If it’s any consolation,” Dew said, “I can still barely move my arm.”

“Why, do you have arthritis? I didn’t even land a punch.”

“You grazed me,” Dew said. “That’s all it took. Look, I’m not going to lie to you—my patience is at its end. You hurt any more of my men, I’m going to shoot you. If you come at me again, I’m going to shoot you. In the leg if I have time, in the face if I don’t. We need you real bad, but I’m not about to take one for the team, if you catch my drift.”

“I’ll… I’ll behave,” Perry said. “You whipped me fair and square.”

Dew marveled at the phrase. It sounded like something Dew would have said in his childhood after a fight. But that had been over fifty years ago. Kids today weren’t like that: they didn’t trade punches, then shake hands and call it good. Nowadays they talked shit and found a gun. Dew felt a surprise spike of admiration for Perry.

“I’d hardly call beating you with a table leg fair,” Dew said.

Perry shrugged. “I outweigh you by like sixty pounds. If I’d got my hands on you, I think I would have killed you. Besides, it doesn’t matter how you win, as long as you win.”

Silence filled the room for a few moments.

“So,” Dew said, “you’re not looking for a rematch?”

Perry stared at the wall for a few seconds, then spoke slowly, thoughtfully.

“Not very many people can take me out. There’s you, and… there was one other person that’s ever done that. I don’t want a rematch. I’ll play ball.”

Dew nodded. He let himself hope that maybe he’d finally gotten through. “Okay, kid. Let’s start from the top. You told me that something had changed. What changed?”

“The voice.”

“The voice. You said they hadn’t said any words yet. Can you hear any now?”

Perry shook his head. “No. If I’m close enough to an infected, I can hear words, but when I’m far away, it’s more like a sensation. Images, emotions, stuff like that. Sometimes I can get a grip on it, sometimes it’s like a half-whisper in a crowded room. The more infected there are in one place, the stronger the sensation. You can only pick out little bits and pieces, maybe enough to get the gist of a conversation, you know what I mean?”

Dew nodded.

“Now there’s the same bits and pieces, but there’s a different… intensity. I don’t know how to describe it. Sort of feels like… like you were down by twenty-one at the end of the half but you adjusted your blitzing strategy, you shut them down, and your offense scored twice to cut it to seven, and there’s three minutes left, and you’re so excited, because if you get just one more stop, your offense can tie it up or even win it. And that’s hard to do, right? But you feel like it’s destiny, it’s going to happen for sure. You’ve got the momentum. You think you’ve got them figured out, and the win is… is…”

“Inevitable?” Dew asked.

Perry snapped his fingers, pointed at Dew and smiled. The smile looked ghastly on his stitched, swollen lips.

“That’s it,” Perry said. “It’s inevitable. That’s what it feels like.”

“So this voice of God says, or feels like, it’s… uh, mounting a fourth-quarter comeback?”

Perry nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty close.”

“So what happens next?”

“I don’t know,” Perry said. “Maybe it actually is the voice of God, and if we get to heaven, he’s going to kick us in the Jimmy and send us packing.”

“There ain’t no heaven,” Dew said. “And there ain’t no God. ’Cause if there is some all-powerful deity, he sure is one mean fucker. He likes to let good people die and bad people live. And, apparently, he likes to infect former football stars with things that eat them up from the inside.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Perry said, and took a long swig of Wild Turkey.

“We’re in a bit of a pickle here, boy,” Dew said. “Maybe you should stop drinking.”

“Maybe you should start, ” Perry said. “I killed my best friend, cut off my own junk, and I’m some kind of psychic call-in line for these things. And you ? Dude, you’re dropping bombs on America. You’re in charge of fighting honest-to-God aliens . Ask me, that’s a pretty good reason for a snort or three.”

Perry held out the bottle. Dew looked at the nasty scar on Perry’s left forearm. War scars, that’s what Perry had.

Dew accepted the bottle. The kid was right. Dew took a long swig. The bourbon tang was a welcome sensation, a friendly memory of distant times when he could just have a drink and relax. He knocked back another long pull, then handed the bottle to Perry.

Perry drank. “You got something you got to do?”

“I’m doing it,” Dew said. “Margaret asked that we stay here a little longer, give you a chance to rest. So until we leave, getting you to be more cooperative is kind of my main job.”

Perry looked at the chair. Dew wasn’t sure, but he thought the kid turned a little red. Like he was embarrassed or something.

“You, uh…,” Perry said. “You want to… sit down and… shoot the shit?”

Perry offered the bottle again. Dew took it, sat down and had another long swig.

Donald Jewell, or “Unkie Donny,” as Chelsea liked to call him, did not feel good. Perhaps it was more accurate to say that he felt like a tainted can of boiled elephant ass.

The fever had picked up steam. It came nicely packaged with an overall ache, as well as annoying shooting pains in his left arm. Far worse was that Betty seemed just as sick. She was slumped in the passenger seat, head against the window, eyes closed. And she was sweating.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Someone was following him.

He couldn’t be sure who it was; there were so many cars on the highway. But he’d seen cars behind him, the same cars, several times. Who was it? What did they want?

He’d been on the road for over two hours. He had at least six to go, more like eight or nine if the weather didn’t let up. Freezing rain made driving a royal bitch. All the traffic on I-75 moved along at forty-five miles an hour. At least up north, people knew how to drive in winter: it was a safe bet that the cars in the ditch belonged to downstaters or people from Ohio.