Scott Sigler - Contagious

Margaret shook her head. “No, it’s probably not the store itself, or the food it sold. Otherwise we’d have certainly traced other hosts back to it.

But for the first time, we may have two hosts in the same location at the same time .”

She typed a few keys, and the icon denoting Perry and Patricia’s infection slid west to hover over the Meijer store. The icon’s new location instantly created a visual curve, one that started in Whittaker, then moved gradually northeast through the two house icons near Rawsonville, then sharper east toward the Meijer in Belleville.

Perry had been there around 10:30 P.M. So had Patricia. If the hosts that lived in Rawsonville had been home at that time, which was likely…

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “can this thing call up historical weather patterns?”

“Probably,” he said. “Let me drive.”

Margaret stood and Clarence sat down.

Perry leaned over to watch Clarence’s hunt-and-peck typing. “You need a hand with that, champ?”

Clarence kept his eyes on the keyboard and the screen in front of him.

“I think I can swing it, chief, but thanks for being such a helper.”

“So it’s not the grocery store,” Dew said. “You think maybe something blowing through the air, right? Something airborne?”

“ Airborne is a term for one host passing the disease to another through sneezes, coughs or even breath,” Margaret said. “Look at the range on this curve. We’re talking miles here, not feet. The more accurate term is wind-borne, where wind is the mechanical vector driving the spore.”

“But wouldn’t Cheng have checked weather patterns?” Dew asked.

“Of course,” Margaret said. “But the wind can change direction from minute to minute. We now potentially have an exact time of infection. Cheng never had that. Perry, what did you do after you got your food?”

“Ate it on the way home,” Perry said. “Got home, got undressed and went right to bed. I had work the next day.”

“The vector must have been on your hands,” Margaret said. “Or maybe on your clothes, and when you got undressed you spread it around. You must have touched… uh… some private places.”

“A guy scratching his balls in the privacy of his own home,” Dew said. “Imagine that.”

“Okay,” Clarence said. “I have historical weather. What do you want, Margo?”

“Give us wind direction at ten thirty P.M. Sunday,” she said. “Focus in on Belleville if you can.”

Otto tapped away. Blue arrows appeared, pointing mostly east and a little bit north. A green line of text at the bottom read.5 MPH, 260 DEGREES.

“That doesn’t work,” Dew said. “The wind direction doesn’t line up the Rawsonville hosts with the store.”

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “show me a time-lapse projection of wind patterns from ten P.M. to ten thirty P.M.”

Otto looked at the keys for a second but didn’t type. “Uh… I don’t think this computer can do that.”

“Jesus H,” Perry said. “Give me that.”

He grabbed the keyboard and pulled it onto his lap. His big fingers flew across the keys. Data fields popped up on the screen and filled with strings of text faster than Margaret could even read them.

“You people remind me of the idiots I used to support at my job,” Perry said. “It’s like you’ve never read a software manual in your life. This is basic stuff, guys.”

He hit one last key, and the blue arrows on the screen changed. Instead of a west-to-east orientation, they started pointing north, then curved northeast, and finally wound up pointing due east.

Perry clacked a few more keys. The blue arrows vanished save for one—an arrow that started at the Whittaker house’s icon, curved to the right to cross over both the Rawsonville icons, and then farther to the right to cross over Meijer’s.

“Holy shit,” Dew said. “That’s it. It’s fucking airborne.”

“Wind-borne,” Margaret said.

“Wind-borne, right,” Dew said. “So what about the other hosts that are outside of this pattern?”

“Could be a number of things,” Margaret said. “They could have passed through the wind curve at just the right time, could have been another… I don’t know… another gust that carried the spores to other areas. This curve doesn’t account for everyone, but it accounts for half of them. It’s statistically significant, no question.”

Clarence turned in his chair to face her. “But what does this really tell us? I mean, wind can blow all over.”

Perry spoke before Margaret could. “It gives us a projection based on wind speed and the distance between infection points. From there we can potentially extrapolate a vector path and possibly even a range for potential release-point locations. Combine this data with hosts from the other infection locations, maybe you can reduce the search area for the release point. What Margaret is saying is that Colonel Ogden was right, it’s a satellite. This weather analysis might tell us where to look for it.”

Margaret smiled and nodded at Perry. He winked at her.

“College?” Dew said.

Perry nodded. “College.”

“Perry,” Margaret said, “can we do that here?”

Perry shook his head. “That takes way more computational power. You have simple wind-direction history, sure, but you need to extrapolate that against the distance between infection points, air temperature, humidity… and probably a bunch of other shit I don’t even know. It’s a whole different ball game from what I just showed you.”

“Let’s kick this back to Murray,” Clarence said. “See if he can put it in front of some of his most brilliant minds the nation has to offer.”

“Fuck yes he can,” Dew said. “He’ll have the National Weather Service and climatologists and God knows what on this faster than you can hum ‘Oh! Susanna.’”

Clarence kept staring at Perry. “I might have been wrong about the dumb-jock stereotype,” he said. “You’re pretty goddamn smart.”

Perry didn’t look away from his monitor. “Naw, you were right about the stereotype. It just doesn’t apply to football. You have to be smart to be good at football, because it’s complicated.”

He turned and smiled at Clarence. “The dumb jocks play basketball.”

Perry turned back to face the monitor.

Clarence shook his head, and Margaret just laughed.

Chelsea Jewell slowly woke. Her head hurt real bad. She wanted her mommy.

No, that wasn’t right. She had to watch out for Mommy. Mommy might want to hurt her. Chelsea wanted her daddy. Daddy was still okay.

And yet that wasn’t right, either. She didn’t want her daddy… she wanted to protect her daddy.

She wanted to protect what was inside of Daddy.

Are you awake?

She looked around the room. Where had that voice come from? She couldn’t see anybody.

Are you awake?

“Yeah,” Chelsea said. “Where are you?”

I am very far away.

“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Then why can I hear you?”

Because you are special. You are the only one there who can hear me.

“Mommy and Daddy can’t hear you?”

Not yet.

“My daddy is sick,” Chelsea said. “So am I. I feel a little better now, but my head hurts real bad, and now my tongue feels all thick and stuff. Mommy scares me real bad. I think she wants to hurt me.”

You don’t need to be afraid of your mommy.

“Are you sure?”

Yes.

Chelsea felt the fear of her mother vanish as if a breeze had blown it away.

Your daddy is not sick. He’s very important.

Chelsea saw visions of something triangular, something that resembled one of her yellow wooden blocks, the one that looked like a little pyramid, except in her vision it was black and moved on strange legs. It was beautiful. It was special . Just like Mommy always called her special .