Infected

  But it was the dead of winter—why hide in a snow-covered bush when you could hide in a nice warm apartment? That’s what Dawsey had seen. He had just committed a brutal murder, then watched two cops enter his building. Dew reminded himself of the raging paranoia exhibited by all the victims. Dawsey had watched the cops go in, known they were coming for him, known they’d find the body. He’d wanted to find a hiding place and find one fast.

  Dew came out from the hiding spot, grunting as he stood, his knees complaining against the unkind treatment. He walked toward Building G. Despite the fact that his pulse raced like a high-octane engine, he moved with deliberate slowness, examining the ground with a renewed focus.

  73.

  BURN, BURN, YES YA GONNA BURN

  The one on his back was going to be the toughest. Perry had explored Fatty Patty’s cabinets and found a cigarette lighter, two bottles of wine, three bottles of Bacardi 151, and half a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. He’d already knocked back a whole bottle of wine; a buzz rolled thickly through his head. It wasn’t a Wild Turkey buzz, but he’d chugged the entire bottle, so the real kick was probably still brewing in his gut.

  Three left: his back, his left forearm, and his balls.

  For what he was about to try, he wanted to be very, very drunk.

  There was no clever way to remove the Triangles, and the risk seemed greater than ever. The Triangle on his forearm might be close to the artery. The one on his back was right over his backbone—its barbed tail could be wrapped around his vertebrae. Pulling that one out might injure or even sever his spinal cord. The one on his nuts, the one he’d managed to not think about for days…well, he’d just have to get a lot drunker first.

  He wasn’t certain he could pull any of them out, but he could kill them where they grew. They’d rot, sure, but if his plan worked, he would dial 911 and head straight for an emergency room. Let the doctors figure it out. The Soldiers wanted to whack him and stop the Triangles from hatching; maybe if there were no more Triangles, the Soldiers wouldn’t kill him. Maybe maybe maybe. They might kill him anyway, but they might keep him alive so they could interrogate him. Even if they took him prisoner so they could probe his mind with their secret machines and TVs that could read thoughts, he’d still be alive.

  And, most important of all, he would have killed those motherfucking Triangles. Then, even if the Soldiers brought him down, no one could ever doubt that he died like a Dawsey.

  He wasn’t going out as a human incubator. He wouldn’t let them win. A painful fever seemed to grip his muscles. His joints ached with the dull kick of a bass drum. The rot. The rot from his shoulder, his ass, spreading to other parts. He could fight the Triangles, maybe, but how could he fight black bile rot flowing through his blood?

  The gig was up. Time to shit or get off the pot.

  The sleeping hatchlings filled the apartment with clicks and pops. A Garth Brooks song filtered faintly through the floor from the apartment below. In his own mind, all was quiet, not a peep from his own Triangles.

  Perry stuffed the lighter into his front pocket, grabbed the liquor bottles and his butcher’s block that held his knives and his Chicken Scissors. He hopped clumsily for the bathroom.

  Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn.

  74.

  THE FED

  Dew knelt, staring at the spot in the snow. He thought he’d imagined it at first, the frenzied creation of a tired mind and tired eyes. As he stooped down to look closer, he knew it was real.

  A tiny, dark pink streak on the pavement’s thin snow. It was small, only about a half inch long and less than an eighth of an inch wide. Wisps of fine powder almost covered the mark.

  Dawsey had fallen, right here. Dew looked back to Dawsey’s car; if you drew a straight line from the rusty Ford through the blood spot, that line pointed directly to the door of Building G.

  Dew stood and moved toward the door, pulse racing, adrenaline pumping. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, looking for another blood spot, just to be sure.

  His sleepiness vanished, possibly from the thrill of the hunt, or more likely from a well-honed instinct for self-preservation.

  It was party time.

  The first real action since Martin Brewbaker, the infected psycho who’d killed his partner. Brewbaker hadn’t been a big man, nor had he been an athlete, but he’d proved something Dew had known since he’d been eighteen—being a killer isn’t about being strong or fast or well trained, it’s about being the first to pull the trigger, it’s about attacking before the other guy is ready, it’s about the willingness to go for the throat right off the bat. The growths had made Martin Brewbaker that kind of man. Dawsey had those same growths, but Dawsey was a big man, he was an athlete, and he was violent and vicious even before he was ever infected.

  Dew felt a flash of déjà vu, the sense that he was again entering Martin Brewbaker’s house, walking down the hall just before the crazy fuck lit the place on fire and buried a hatchet in Malcolm’s guts. The old Sinatra tune rang in his head.

  I’ve got you…under my skin.

  75.

  BACARDI 151

  Perry shut the bathroom door behind him and spread his goodies out on the sink counter.

  Bottle of Jack Daniel’s: check.

  Two bottles of Bacardi 151: check.

  Butcher’s block with knives and Chicken Scissors: check.

  Lighter: check.

  Towels: check.

  Fatigue clutched at his body. He started the tub and flipped the lever on the stopper, allowing the basin to fill up with cold water.

  He stripped down, taking off everything but his socks and his underwear. He grabbed the longest towel he could find, twisted it into a rope, then poured some Bacardi on it. It soaked into the terry cloth, filling the small bathroom with the strong smell of rum. He flipped the long towel over his back, feeling the cold, wet, rum-soaked spot send chills up his spine. He positioned that cold spot right over the Triangle. One end of the towel went over his left shoulder, the other under his right arm. He tied the ends together, making the towel hang like a bandito’s bullet strap.

  Sí, señor. El Scary Perry is a baaad man.

  He soaked the end of a smaller hand towel with Bacardi, then laid it on the toilet. With the preparation finished, he took four long, uninterrupted swallows of Jack Daniel’s.

  Perry sat on the tub, the cold porcelain sending another wave of chills through his body. He held the knife and the lighter with his left hand. In his right he held the rum-soaked towel.

  It was time.

  Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn.

  Perry flicked the lighter. He watched the tiny orange flame shift and turn.

  Yes, ya gonna burn.

  76.

  CLOSING IN

  Dew stood just inside the front door to Building G. He shivered slightly, but not from the winter’s cold. Like every other building in the sprawling complex, Building G had twelve apartments, four each on three floors.

  Perry Dawsey, the one-legged killer, was in one of those apartments.

  Dew pulled his notebook from a jacket pocket. He quietly flipped through the pages, eyes looking down at the book one second, flicking back to look up the stairs and down the hall the next. He half expected to see the hulking nutcase tearing down the hall or the stairs, hopping madly, ready to do an encore presentation of the Bill Miller Crucifixion.

  Dew reviewed the notes he’d collected from the cops. Building G had been checked by a pair of state troopers. There had been no answer at apartments 104 and 202. Dew put the pad back into his coat pocket, hand brushing against the .45 just to make sure it was there. If his hunch was right, he had a chance to kill Dawsey and do it with no press, no interference from the local cops.

  Going in alone was dangerous, probably stupid. But Dawsey probably had a hostage right now. If the rapid-response teams closed too quickly and Dawsey saw them, he might drag that hostage out into the open where the cops could intervene. That would complicate things. br />
  Dew pulled out the big cellular and dialed. It rang only once—they were waiting for his call.

  “Otto here.”

  “Get the squads in position,” Dew whispered. “I’m in Building G. Do not—I repeat, do not—approach until I say so. I’ll stay on the line. If the connection is cut off, move in immediately, understand?”

  “Yes sir. Margaret and Amos are with me. They’re ready.”

  Dew pulled his .45. Adrenaline surged through his veins. His pulse raced so fast he wondered if a heart attack would take him down before Dawsey could.

  77.

  CONJECTURES

  Racal suits were not built with comfort in mind. Margaret Montoya sat in the back of gray van number two, along with Amos and Clarence Otto. Both men also wore the bulky suits. All they had to do was put on the helmets, pressurize and they were ready to battle with whatever bacterium, virus or airborne poison Perry Dawsey might spew forth.

  Only Margaret knew it wasn’t a bacterium, and it wasn’t a virus. It was something different altogether. Something…new. She still couldn’t put her finger on it, and it was damn near driving her mad.

  “So this couldn’t be natural,” Margaret said. “We’d have seen it somewhere.”

  Amos sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Margaret, we’ve had this conversation already. Several times.”

  He sounded exasperated, and she couldn’t blame him—scientific curiosity or no, her mouth had run nonstop for hours. There was an answer here, if she could only get a handle on it, somehow talk it out.

  “We don’t know it hasn’t been seen before,” Amos said. “Just because it hasn’t been recorded, that doesn’t mean it’s not known somewhere in the world.”

  “Maybe that holds true with a regular disease, something that makes people sick. One sickness is much like the next. But this is different. These are triangles under people’s skin—there would have been something. A myth, a legend, something.”

  “You obviously don’t think it’s natural,” Otto said. “So you agree with Murray? That it’s a weapon?”

  “I don’t know about a weapon, but it’s not natural. Someone made this.”

  “And leaped decades ahead of any known level of biotech,” Amos said patiently. “This isn’t cobbling together a virus. This is creating a brand-new species, genetic engineering at a level that people haven’t even theorized yet. The meshing of new organic systems to human systems is perfect, seamless. That would take years of experimentation.”

  “But what if it’s not designed to build those systems, the nerves and the veins?”

  “Of course it’s designed to do it,” Amos said. “It built them, right?”

  Margaret felt a spike of excitement, a brief flicker of insight. There was something here, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  “Yes, it built the nerves and vein siphons, but we don’t know if it was designed to build those specifically.”

  Otto shook his head. “I just don’t follow.”

  “Blueprints,” Margaret said. “What if the initial seed, or spore, or whatever, is designed to read blueprints, like the instructions built into our DNA?”

  Amos stared at her with a mixture of two expressions—one said, I hadn’t thought of that, and the other said, you’re taking the fuck-nut bus to Looneyville.

  “Go on,” Amos said.

  “What if this thing reads an organism? Figures out how to tap into it, grow with it?”

  “Then it doesn’t need people,” Otto said. “Why wouldn’t we have seen this in animals?”

  “We don’t know it hasn’t infected animals,” Margaret said. “But maybe there’s something else going on here, more than pure biology. Maybe it needs…intelligence.”

  Amos shook his head. “Needs intelligence for what? This is all conjecture, and besides the fact that you are obviously one crazy bitch, who would make an organism like that?”

  The pieces started to fall into place for Margaret. “It’s not an organism,” she said. “I think it’s a kind of machine.”

  Amos closed his eyes, shook his head and rubbed the bridge of his nose all at the same time. “When they commit you, Margaret, can I have your office?”

  “I’m serious, Amos. Think about it. What if you had to travel great distances, so great that no living organism could survive the trip?”

  “So you’re talking even longer than a plane trip to Hawaii with my mother-in-law.”

  “Yes, much longer.”

  Otto leaned forward. “Are you talking space travel?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe you can’t send a living creature across space for as long as it takes to get from Point A to Point B. But you can send a machine. An unliving machine that consumes no resources, and has no biological process that could wear out over time. It’s just dead.”

  “Right up until it turns on,” Amos said. “Or hatches or whatever.”

  “The perfect infantry,” Otto said. “An army that doesn’t need to be fed or trained. You just mass-produce them, ship them out and when they land they build themselves and gather intel from their local host.”

  Amos and Margaret stared at Otto.

  “Okay,” Amos said. “For the sake of a crazy science bitch and a gungho junior spy that’s watched too many movies, let’s say you’ve got this ‘weapon.’ What good does that do you? You send these things across the universe, stopping on Vulcan for a couple of brews, of course. But why?”

  “Two reasons,” Otto said. “The first is recon. Gather intel on the environment, the people, the opposition. Maybe that’s why it’s not in animals, because…” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Because if it can read DNA, maybe it can read memories,” Margaret finished. “It needs the cultural context to know the threats, to know what can stop it.”

  Agent Clarence Otto beamed at her. He nodded slowly. That smile of his was almost enough to take her away from this insanity, and she found herself smiling back.

  “Why don’t you two just fuck and get it over with already?” Amos said. “If we can lose the flirting for a moment, I’m still not convinced. Your ideas don’t really make sense. In Margaret’s fantasy land, these things are here because Alf can’t make the trip himself. So why are their little machines gathering intel?”

  “Intel is the first reason,” Otto said. “The second is to use that intel to create a beachhead. Establish control of a defensible area so you safely receive reinforcements.”

  The van fell quiet for a few moments. A sense of dread filled the air. Finally, Amos spoke, fear ringing clear through his sarcastic tone.

  “Otto, if you don’t mind, I like you better when I think you’re just a dumb-ass CIA agent,” he said. “How about you leave the science to us and have a nice cup of shut the fuck up?”

  Otto nodded, then sat back.

  They quietly waited.

  78.

  A NICE HOT BATH

  Perry raised the tiny flame to the rum-soaked hand towel. It caught instantly, bursting into flame with a loud whoof, singeing his hand. He whipped the flaming towel behind him like a horse flicking its tail to ward off a swarm of flies. The flames slapped against the bandolier towel’s wet spot.

  It, too, ignited instantly, scorching the thin flesh above the Triangle. The flames caught Perry’s hair, which disintegrated in a scalp-searing whoosh. The smell of rum, burned flesh and singed hair filled the bathroom.

  Scalding pain raged against his back as flames scampered up the towel. He started to stand, his instincts screaming to MOVE, to RUN, to STOP, DROP and ROLL. His skin bubbled and blistered—he let out a small scream but forced himself to sit back down on the tub. He switched the knife from his left hand to his right.

  Letting loose a roar mixed of equal parts pain, fury and defiance, Perry stabbed the blade into his left forearm, right through one of the Triangle’s closed eyes. He knew it went all the way through, because he felt the blade tip dig into his own flesh on the other side.
Blood and purple gushed onto his hand, almost making him lose his grip on the knife. With a primitive growl and a sick smile of insane satisfaction, he punched the knife tip in again and again, like a pointed pick into a bowl of ice.

  His back continued to burn.

  Face contorted with pain, he fell backward into the tub.

  There was a quick hiss as he landed in the cold water. The fire ceased, but the burning sensation continued. A wave of joy washed over him even as he writhed in agony.

  “How do you like that? How the fuck do you Howdy Doody like that?”

  His ravaged arm filled the tub with diluted blood, making the water look like cherry Kool-Aid.

  Not done yet, kids, Perry thought. No bout-a-doubt-it, got one more round to go.

  With his right hand, he squeezed down on his left forearm. He thrashed in the shallow red water, his face twisting into a gnarled mask of agony.

  79.

  APARTMENT 104

  Dew ignored his aching knees and crouched in front of the door to Apartment G-104. His thick fingers worked lock-picking tools with the delicate grace of a ballerina pirouetting across the stage.

  The lock clicked with a tiny sound, and Dew silently turned the deadbolt back. He stood, pulled his .45, and took a deep breath.

  They’re gonna pay, Malcolm.

  He opened the door and slid into an empty living room, devoid of any furniture. He did a fast check to make sure there was nothing in any of the rooms—they were empty as well. He ran out the door into the hall, headed for the next apartment.