Scott Sigler - Contagious

Yet no fire came his way.

Perry saw only one enemy gunman. Didn’t actually see him , really, just four or five muzzle flashes from behind a cracked piece of plywood covering a third-floor window. About two seconds after that shot, the plywood disintegrated thanks to a massive concentration of fire that kicked out a rain of splinters and paint chips. The gunman didn’t fire again.

Dew followed a dozen soldiers toward a rusted roll-up garage door that was closed only a quarter of the way. A battered plywood wall blocked the rest of the opening. Perry heard a whoosh from behind and instinctively ducked. A rocket shot past, at least twenty feet to his right. It hit the plywood wall and erupted in a cloud of fire and wooden shrapnel.

Nail’s voice in his helmet speakers. “ Take that building! ”

Perry moved forward, still right behind Dew. Whiskey Company soldiers were thirty yards ahead of them, rushing toward the now-gaping door. For what must have been the hundredth time in the past hour, Perry tried to comprehend the bravery of a soldier, someone who chose to rush headlong into enemy fire.

The first soldiers reached the open door. One tossed in a grenade. Like an optical illusion, someone from inside the building tossed out a grenade at the same time. The two devices actually passed by each other, going opposite ways. The charging Whiskey Company men scattered and dove for cover. Two didn’t make it far enough. The grenade exploded. No fireball like in the movies, just a hellacious bang, an instant cloud of smoke and a fist-hard hit of air. The two men were standing one second, falling the next. One hit the ground face-first and didn’t move. The other turned as he fell, landing on his right side, hands reaching behind his back and grabbing madly as if his clothes were on fire.

Automatic gunfire erupted from the boarded-up second-floor windows, one gunman on either side of the roll-up garage door. Another Whiskey Company soldier went down, screaming, grabbing at a thigh instantly soaked with blood.

Dew kept running forward.

Perry stayed on his heels.

Dew raised his M4 and fired. Perry pointed his .45 at one of the windows and emptied the magazine. Plywood splintered where he shot. Behind him, to the right, he heard a whuff, then a second later a heavy crunch as something ripped through the plywood window right before a concussive bang blasted it outward in a fiery cloud of pulverized brick and wooden splinters. Perry reloaded, debris raining down on him and Dew as they followed soldiers beneath the roll-up garage door.

Once they were inside the long open space of the Globe building, there was no subtle strategy, no effort to capture a hatchling alive, only the brute force of twenty-five pissed-off soldiers, one old CIA agent with a bad hip and one former all-American linebacker with two bum knees.

The fight didn’t last long. Only a few of Ogden’s men remained alive, and most of them were already wounded. The hatchlings attacked, of course, but they had no cover and were quickly mowed down by concentrated fire.

Perry killed three of the little fuckers himself.

Each shot felt better than the last, a tingling trip of adrenaline ripping through his body. He’d killed the infected because they needed to die—killing hatchlings was just plain fun.

All eyes had been focused on the soldiers, their guns, the hatchlings. When the last hatchling fell, shivering in its sickening death throes, Perry and the others took in the massive brown and green construct arching to an apex some twenty feet high. Strands of the brown material ran from the arches up to the roof’s metal framework forty feet above, supporting some of the construct’s weight.

And past the gate, a white and brown Winnebago. From inside, even through the jamming, he sensed the infected.

“She’s in there,” Perry said, and pointed.

Dew shouldered his M4 and opened up on the Winnebago. Within seconds, four other men unloaded on it as well. Shiny dots appeared as bullets tore through the thin walls. One tire popped, then another.

Dew stopped firing and put in a fresh magazine.

“Secure the building!” Nails called. “No prisoners, make sure they’re dead, and do not touch the bodies. And find Ogden! I want to piss on his fucking corpse.”

The men spread out.

Perry walked right under the gate toward the Winnebago. Behind him he heard Dew.

“Murray, we have the building, abort bomb run,” Dew said. “Repeat, abort bomb run, keep the F-15s on-station, just in case. We’ll rig the gate to blow manually.”

Perry kept walking. He held his .45 tight but was careful to keep his finger off the trigger. The Winnebago had so many holes it looked darkly comical. He stepped toward the small side door.

Blood leaked from it.

Dew kept shouting. “Nails! I want C-4 at the base of every arch, and don’t be stingy with it on those other parts.”

Perry stared at the blood dripping from the bottom of the RV’s door, lightly pattering onto the dirty, cracked concrete below.

More commotion behind him, Nails screaming, men yelling back and forth, but little of it registered in Perry’s thoughts.

He still sensed that other presence, but barely—the jamming had grown during the firefight, so bad now that it was almost all gray again.

This was it. It had to be.

He opened the bullet-ridden door and looked inside.

A body, but not Chelsea. A man in a postal worker’s uniform, dead and still oozing blood onto crinkled plastic that partially covered the narrow floor.

Perry leaned over the body and quickly looked around.

Chelsea wasn’t there.

No, no-no-no …Chelsea had been the moving signal. She was gone.

“Perry!” Dew yelled. “Get your ass out here!”

Perry shut the door and turned back to the others.

The gate was glowing, like white frosted glass illuminated by countless tiny, slow-moving, high-powered bulbs. It lit up the warehouse interior, filling it with a beautiful glow.

Perry walked up to the gate. He could already feel the heat. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. A biological jewel glowing with light drawn from a million stars. Texture like a rough tree trunk. A smell like leftover barbecue. Emotions of love, admiration, even awe, they rolled through him, too strong to deny.

Perry saw it, felt it and sensed it all at the same time. The vibration. The opening . The spongy green door from his dreams of six weeks ago, an eternity ago. A connection from infinite distance, the threads of the universe binding, entwining, coalescing into something that blended all existence. Purity .

“Nails, how much longer?” Dew said. “It’s one-fourteen. This thing opens up in sixty seconds.”

“Almost there, sir !”

Perry stroked the gate one last time. It wouldn’t be long now. He left his hand there, feeling the growing heat.

“Okay, it’s ready!” Nails screamed. “ Moooove out! Go-go-go-go-go !”

Men sprinted out of the ware house. Perry marveled at their energy, their intensity. Someone hit him on the shoulder.

“Stop staring at their asses, kid,” Dew said. “Let’s go.”

Dew hobble-sprinted toward the door. Perry followed, barely needing to jog to keep up. They ran out and across the field. He tried to concentrate as he ran, concentrate on the fading sensation that had to be Chelsea Jewell. What direction? He couldn’t tell.

Nails’s men squatted in a wide, loose circle, each man facing out, guns at the ready. Nails pulled a small black plastic clicker from his breast pocket.

“Fire in the hole,” he said, then clicked the clicker three times.