Scott Sigler - Contagious

Mommy, you can take me in a snowmobile. Daddy, you clean up here and then come over on a snowmobile, too, okay?”

“Yes, Chelsea,” Daddy said.

Chelsea, Mr. Roznowski and Old Sam Collins got their coats and walked out the front door, while Daddy got the box of matches.

Betty Jewell’s autopsy was a disaster.

Margaret could barely think after Amos’s horrifying death, let alone focus on the job. By the time she’d dragged herself into the biohazard suit and started working on Betty, the girl’s body had mostly dissolved.

Margaret approached the trolley, Clarence beside her in his suit. Gitsh, Marcus and Dr. Dan stood next to Betty’s blackened corpse. It made for tight quarters, but Clarence refused to leave her side. Gitsh and Marcus had done an amazing job cleaning up. The autopsy room looked spotless. The trolley carried a steady, slow, thick stream of black goo down the runners and into the white sink.

Margaret wanted a look at those crawling things. They were the key to everything now, but she’d waited too long. Any crawlers in Betty’s body had already dissolved. Even the samples that Amos had taken were now nothing but chunky black liquid.

She’d let her grief get in the way of her work.

Margaret felt weak. She put a hand on the autopsy trolley to steady herself—when she looked at the table, her mind’s eye saw Betty Jewell’s skinless hands stabbing the scalpel at Amos. When Margaret looked down, she saw Amos clawing at the throat of his biohazard suit, unable to get his hands at the cut, unable to stop the blood from sheeting the inside of his visor. When she saw the drainage sink, she saw Betty’s brains splattering against the white epoxy and dripping toward the drain.

Clarence’s hand on her shoulder. “Margo, you okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

A lie anyone could see through.

“Dan,” Margaret said, “have you watched the video from my helmet? The video of the autopsy?”

“Yes ma’am,” Dr. Dan said. “Several times.”

“And what did you see?”

“Something crawling in her face. Doctor Braun thought it was crawling along the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

“Do you agree?”

“It certainly looked that way,” Dan said.

Too bad they didn’t have a brain to look at. No chance of that, thanks to Clarence’s bullet and rapid decomposition. When that crawler reached the brain, then what?

Then it would come apart.

It would split up into those muscle fibers Amos saw, split apart…reorganize… come together again.

In a mesh. Just like in Perry Dawsey’s brain.

“The crawlers,” Margaret said. “They want to replicate what we’ve seen in Dawsey’s CAT scans.”

Dr. Dan stared at her. “That’s a pretty big leap. We haven’t seen anything like these crawlers before. I read your reports on the hosts found in Glidden; the father, mother and little boy. You had fresh bodies, yet they didn’t have these crawling things.”

“It’s something new, obviously,” Margaret said. “I don’t care if its a leap. It’s right . These things infect a human body, maybe replicate somehow, then crawl toward the brain. If we can stop them from crawling, we just plain stop them.”

“It’s got a structure,” Dan said. “A shape. It can move. For that it needs a cytoskeleton.”

“The little things have skeletons?” Clarence asked.

“Cytoskeleton,” Dan said. “It’s like microscopic scaffolding that lets a cell hold a shape.”

“Without it, a cell would just be a membrane holding fluid,” Margaret said. “Without a cytoskeleton to hold structure, it would be like a water balloon. Amos thought the crawlers looked like human muscle fibers. If these things are some kind of modified muscle cell, and we disrupted their cell structure, then the cells couldn’t contract. They couldn’t move. They couldn’t crawl. ”

“So you dissolve this cytoskeleton,” Clarence said, “and that stops it? That’s it?”

“It’s not that easy,” Dan said. “Our normal cells also have cytoskeletons. Anything that would kill the crawlers would also kill our cells.”

“But it’s something,” Margaret said. “A human body can regrow lost cells, eventually repair damage, but these crawlers are so small, just a few cells. If we disrupt their cytoskeleton, they might just die. At any rate, we can stop them before they reach the brain.”

“I can order a screen,” Dan said. “We can get all the drugs that might work and have them ready when we get another host.”

“ If we get another host,” Clarence said. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more.”

“Oh grow up, Clarence,” Margaret said. “You know goddamn well there will be more. There’s always more.”

Silence filled the trailer. Margaret rewound the moment in her head, realized how nasty she had just sounded.

“Sorry,” she said.

Clarence shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, Doc. Can we test these cytoskeleton wreckers on Betty’s remains?”

“There’s nothing left,” Margaret said. “We’re too late for that. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with this body. We’re going to burn it.”

She stared at Betty’s remains, the blackened, rotting, murderous remains.

“Uh, Margo,” Clarence said. “Don’t we want to… I don’t know…study it?”

She turned on him. “What, exactly, are we going to find? Huh? It’s another blackened corpse, Clarence. Apoptosis chain reaction. Boom, dead, done. That’s it. She has whatever the father had, so we’ll run chemical analysis on his remains. We don’t need this… this thing .”

She turned back to Gitsh and Marcus. They looked at her with pity in their eyes. They were saddened by Amos’s death, she knew that, but they just didn’t understand.

“Incinerate this bitch,” Margaret said. “I don’t want a single ounce of her left, you understand me?”

Gitsh and Marcus both nodded slowly.

She turned and walked out of the autopsy room.

Even though most of the Jewell house was already gone, flames still shot into the dark sky. Flashing fire-truck lights added to the visuals, the mixed illumination coloring snowflakes that dropped straight down like slow-motion rain. In the dark isolation of the Jewell property, the place felt like an island of light surrounded by an infinite black ocean.

Hoses from the trucks poured water onto the burning house, turning the yard into a slushy mess filled with cinders and mud. A lead on a triangle case taking him to a house on fire? Gosh, Dew thought, what a surprise . If he’d come as soon as they reached Gaylord, he’d probably have the Jewells in custody right now. Instead, Dew had a feeling all he’d get would be more corpses for Margaret’s collection.

Margaret. She was a mess. Amos had gone out hard. The longer she stayed in this business, in the secret land of the Murray Longworths and the Dew Phillipses, the more she’d understand shit like that was inevitable. He wondered if she’d block it out, or if someday in the future she’d be telling her own war stories.

Dew looked at Perry, who stood expressionless, watching the fire. What was going on in that big melon of his? Three days since they’d tussled, and Perry really seemed to have come around. Looked like Margaret was right again. Dew hoped it was a genuine change. As fucked up as it sounded, and it sounded damn fucked up, he was starting to like the kid.

Dew nudged Perry. “You feel anything?”

Perry shook his head. “Just that gray feeling. Something else is there, but I can’t lock onto it.”