Scott Sigler - Contagious

Blackness replaced her vision.

Chelsea Jewell passed out.

Out on thewarehouse floor, Ogden’s soldiers sagged and lowered themselves to the ground. He felt a blankness, a twofold void, the second one far more powerful than the first.

He sat. A chunk of brick dug into his butt. One by one, his men passed out as if they’d been gassed.

The hatchlings didn’t seem to notice. They kept building.

Ogden watched them for the final few seconds he remained conscious, hoping they could complete the gate on their own.

Margaret stared atthe autopsy room’s flat-panel screen and smiled in grim satisfaction. There were twenty-five squares up there, but only one square held her attention. It showed a side-by-side picture of a crawler and one of the pollen pieces that looked like a fluffy dandelion seed.

A caption at the top of that square read LATRUNCULIN A. A toxin produced by a group of sponges found in the Red Sea that disrupted filaments of the cytoskeleton. Amazing to think that might make the difference in this battle, that one word, latrunculin.

She loved that word.

Because below that word she watched both alien structures dissolve into smaller and smaller bits. The crawler’s long, firm, musclelike strands twitched, then seemed to morph into slack, lifeless little sacks of fluid.

The dandelion seed was even more entertaining—the latrunculin made the stiff structure break apart, crumble and liquefy.

“I’ve got you, motherfucker,” Margaret whispered.

She had never really wanted to kill anything before. She stopped disease because that was how you saved lives. This was different. She wanted the disease dead, all of it—crawlers, dandelion seeds, triangles and hatchlings. She wanted to kill every last bit of it, in as painful a way as possible. Watching those things break apart on the screen filled her soul with a dark satisfaction.

She wondered if this was what Perry felt when he killed an infected host.

“Hey Margaret,” Dan called. “Did you do something to the samples?”

“Yeah,” Margaret said without looking away from the sheer beauty of a dead crawler. “I gave them a nice latrunculin bath and killed them.”

“No, not that one,” Dan said. “I mean all of them.”

She stepped back and took in the whole screen. In all twenty-five side-by-side samples, nothing moved. They’d successfully killed many of the crawlers, but until a few seconds ago over half the boxes had still shown activity. Now, no movement at all.

“Gitsh,” Margaret said, “check this monitor. Is it frozen or something?”

Gitsh looked at the screen, then moved to the computer that fed the images. As he checked it, Margaret’s eyes slid over the twenty-five test pairs. Each had a word across the top. Words in red indicated no effect on the crawlers. Words in green showed successful kills.

Chlorine killed them, and in far lower concentrations than the Margo-Mobile’s decontamination mist. In fact, basic bleach killed them instantly.

That was great for sterilization but didn’t do much for a living victim. Antibiotics, unfortunately, had no effect, and Sanchez’s immune system completely ignored the things.

Reducing the temperature did nothing—freezing them might work, but that would also kill the host. Heat at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher killed them, but that wasn’t a solution either, as those temperatures would also kill the host. Heat did, however, provide another way to decontaminate any area exposed to the dandelion-seed spores.

“The picture is live,” Gitsh said. To punctuate the point, he changed the screen from twenty-five small squares to one big square containing a nerve crawler. He slid a needle into the sample. Up on the screen, she saw the needle magnified thousands of times. It looked like a giant sword poking into a hydra.

“Huh,” Margaret said. “It’s like they just shut off.”

“They quit,” Dan said. “They have seen the new Mightily Pissed-Off Margaret, and they threw in the towel.”

Suddenly, Clarence’s voice crackled in her earpiece, anxious and rushed. “Margo! Murray found the satellite! They just launched an attack, and they think they got it.”

“Oh my,” Margaret said. So that’s why Murray had been in such a hurry.

“When? Like two minutes ago?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“The samples, they shut down,” Margaret said. “Even at the smallest level, they must have been controlled by the thing. Is there any effect on Sanchez?”

“He’s out cold,” Clarence said. “He was babbling incoherently, then started getting groggy and just dropped off. He’s snoring.”

Margaret didn’t know what to think. The crawlers’ sudden shutdown, Sanchez falling asleep, both things coinciding with the satellite’s destruction. Could it all be over?

No. It wasn’t all over. She knew that.

“Dan, how much latrunculin do we have?”

“Plenty, if it’s just Sanchez,” Dan said. “If we need more, the supplier could medevac it right to us.”

“Let’s see if it works first. Start an IV drip of latrunculin on Officer Sanchez. I’m not going to get caught with my pants down. These things might reactivate at any second.”

“But latrunculin is toxic as hell,” Dan said. “We give Sanchez too much, he could lose the ability to breath, his heart could stop. Shouldn’t we wait to see if these things are really dead?”

“No. We’ll watch Sanchez carefully, but get him on it right now.”

“But Margaret, he—”

“That’s a fucking order, Dan,” Margaret said. “Now start the goddamn drip.”

Dan looked at her for a second, then snapped a smart salute and walked out of the autopsy room.

Were his little feelings hurt? Margaret didn’t care. She finally had a potential weapon, and she was going to use it.

Margaret sat down at the computer desk, utterly relieved to finally be out of the hazmat suit she’d worn for fifteen hours straight. She typed commands to call up the new Sanchez samples.

What was that smell ? Had someone left food in here? She looked under the desktop, then under the chair before she realized what it was.

The smell was her.

Damn, she needed a shower something fierce. Nothing she could do about that now, though.

She looked at the readout. The latrunculin was working—Sanchez’s crawler counts had fallen. The chemical’s side effects were taking their toll, but he wasn’t in any serious danger. Not yet. She called up a feed from one of the latest samples. It showed three crawlers, still motionless, just as they had been since Murray’s people shot down the satellite. As she watched, one of the crawlers slowly dissolved into little bits, courtesy of the latrunculin.

The second crawler started to disintegrate. Margaret had never seen anything so beautiful in her entire life.

And then…

…then the last crawler twitched.

She stared, wondering if she’d imagined it, hoping she had. It twitched again, kept twitching. It reached out, looking for something to grab. A dendrite arm locked onto the surrounding muscle tissue and pulled.

The crawler was crawling again.

The intercom buzzed.

“Margaret, you there?” Dan’s voice, urgent.

“I’m here.”

“Something’s up,” he said. “I’m looking at the side-by-side samples. Everything that wasn’t already dead is moving again. They just woke up, all of them.”