Scott Sigler - Contagious

Another MargoMobile. Parked in the open. In a major city. Shit on a saltine wouldn’t have tasted this bad.

The caption at the bottom of the screen said, POSSIBLE CASE OF FLESHEATING DISEASE IN DETROIT.

Dew put Murray on speakerphone.

“Okay, Murray,” Dew said, “we’ve got the picture. What’s going on?”

“Be quiet and listen up,” Murray said. “I’ve got something else going on over here, something big, so I don’t have much time. We have a positive cellulose test in Detroit, but it is not—I repeat, not —a triangle infection. This might be similar to the Donald and Betty Jewell case. No ID on the man, fingerprints came up negative. Right now he’s a John Doe. As you can see, the story has already leaked, so we’re in damage-control mode. I’m sending a chopper for Margaret and her team.”

“But I can’t leave now,” Margaret said. “We killed that woman to get hatchlings, and now we’ve got them.”

“I don’t have time for your opinion,” Murray said. “Just listen. The man didn’t die from the disease. He was shot in the throat sometime last night. He has not—I repeat, has not —decomposed. The cop who found the body was checking for a pulse when some kind of blister popped. Paramedics didn’t go near the body, but they tested the cop a few hours later, and he was positive.”

“It’s contagious,” Margaret said quietly. “It finally happened.”

“That’s why I need you there ASAP,” Murray said. “The math is simple. We have triangle hosts killing people in Gaylord, so Ogden stays. Dawsey is the only one who can talk to the captive hatchlings, and since I’m not about to move those things across the state or let Dawsey out of Dew’s sight, they both stay. This Detroit case doesn’t have a triangle infection that we know of. No triangles means no gate, so we need to evaluate before we take any drastic action.”

“I agree,” Dew said.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, either,” Murray said. “Margaret, it will attract too much attention to drop you right on the site, so we’re landing you at Henry Ford Hospital a few miles away. You’ll drive in. The Margo-Mobile crew already has the John Doe and the cop loaded in. They will move the rigs someplace secure.”

“You can’t move them,” she said. “At least not far. We need to check the area, see if the contagion vector is still there.”

“Margaret,” Murray said, “you’re looking at feed from a news helicopter. We have to get the trailers out of sight.”

“Then move them someplace close,” Margaret said. “If there’s one case, others could be in the same area.”

“Fine,” Murray said. “I’ll get someone on it. Dew, get Dawsey to talk to those hatchlings again. I don’t care what it takes. Cut off his finger if you have to. I need to address something else, so neither of you call me unless you have actionable information.”

Murray hung up.

“Wow,” Margaret said. “I’ve never heard him like that before.”

“I have,” Dew said. “It means he’s been up all night working on something big. What you just heard was the normally calm, cool and collected Murray Longworth stressed out to the max.”

The computer room door opened, and Otto rushed inside. “Margaret, there’s a chopper coming in. Pilot radioed down, says he’s here to take us to Detroit. He’s landing now.”

“Get Gitsh and Marcus,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Otto vanished.

Margaret turned to Dew. Her eyes burned with anger, intensity.

“If this thing is really contagious,” she said, “we’re in a whole different world of shit. The country needs to know. The world needs to know.”

Christ on a crutch. As if Dew didn’t have enough problems. The New & Improved Margaret Montoya wanted to go public. Trouble was, if it actually was contagious, she was 100 percent right. Murray’s skulduggery had its place, but the time for that was almost up.

“Examine it first,” Dew said. “Before you do something silly, can you give it twenty-four hours?”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“Just do your job,” Dew said. “Evaluate, like Murray says. This time tomorrow, you still think going public is the right thing to do, I’ll do it with you.”

She stared at him, her expression a mixture of hatred and disbelief. “Why would you throw away your career like that?”

“Because Murray has more people like me,” Dew said. “And if you try to go public against Murray’s will, one of them might just pay you a visit.”

Chelsea’s knowledge grew and grew.

She now understood why Chauncey had been sent. He wasn’t a person. Organic material, like people or plants or puppies, couldn’t survive the trip, not the way Chauncey had traveled.

Organic material could survive a trip through a gate, but there was a catch—the gate was biological. Like a plant. That meant they couldn’t send a gate the same way they’d sent Chauncey.

Such a funny problem, and it grew more complicated from there. Each of the hatchlings had a… a… a template. What a neat word, although she still didn’t understand what that meant, exactly. Some kind of a template to make material for the gate. The templates had been shipped with Chauncey. They were a part of each triangle seed. Their number was finite (another neat word!), which meant that the hatchlings could not replicate themselves like the crawlers could.

And the little crawlers that spread through people’s bodies, converting them? What wonderful creatures! But they weren’t creatures at all, not like snails or bugs or kitties. They were just collections of pieces. Like Legos. You could put the pieces together in different ways. You could make the pieces do different things. Way cooler toys than Legos, actually.

She wandered through the minds of the people in her… her network . So many interesting things! Many naughty things, too. She would address that later. One mind stood out above the rest, a mind that combined logic and creativity—General Ogden’s. She found herself spending more and more time in there as she waited for the gate to open. She learned much. General Ogden seemed obsessed with something called contingency plans.

Most of her network consisted of soldiers. General Ogden thought that most of those soldiers, including himself, would die defending the gate. He thought of his soldiers as expendable. If they all died, though, or even if the numbers of converted dropped just a little, what would happen to Chelsea’s mind? To her knowledge?

She did not know. And therefore she needed a contingency plan of her own.

The soldiers were very, very important, with training and experience at shooting things. There were only two people left in her network who were not soldiers.

Mommy and Mr. Burkle the Postman.

Mr. Burkle was a man. He was stronger than Mommy. That made Mommy the weakest person in the network.

Which meant Mommy was the most expendable.

Chelsea breathed slowly and reached out with her thoughts. It wouldn’t be that hard, really, to modify Mommy’s purpose. It had worked with Mr. Jenkins.

Chelsea concentrated, connected with Mommy’s crawlers and began to move the pieces around.

The trip to Detroit felt like an eternity, even though it took just over an hour.

She had spent so much time cooped up in the MargoMobiles, or out in the middle of nowhere, that she’d almost forgotten what a city looked like. Detroit wasn’t much of a skyline city, not a lot of tall buildings, although coming in you couldn’t miss the five towers of the Renaissance Center and a few other downtown skyscrapers she couldn’t name. The city seemed to radiate from there, spreading north and west from the Detroit River, suburbs stretching out for miles and miles.