Infected

  He had ground forces. He had air support en route. The Michigan State Police were throwing a cordon over the area, evacuating residents and keeping everyone else out.

  Ogden picked up a satellite photo. It showed the warm colors of an infrared shot. Most of the photo consisted of the blues and greens typical of a nighttime forest, but in the middle was a bright cluster of reds with a strange pattern the squints had outlined in white.

  The squints had also marked what measurements they knew: width approx 135 feet, length approx 180 feet, height unknown. Dew looked at those measurements and thought of Nguyen’s painting—would it be made out of people parts? Was the painting symbolic or literal?

  Ogden tapped the photo. “And that’s what we’re going after?”

  Dew nodded.

  “So what is it?” Ogden asked.

  Dew shrugged and tapped another photo, showing a different angle of the strange construct. “We don’t know. We think it might be some kind of doorway. The victim was raving about a ‘doorway’ in Wahjamega, and we found this.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Ogden asked in his ever-calm voice.

  “A doorway? Like a portal or something? Are we talking Star Trek shit here, Dew?”

  Dew shrugged. “Don’t ask me. All I know is that if you’d seen what I’d seen, you’d know why we’re here. You have a problem with that?”

  “No, sir,” Ogden said. “A mission is a mission.” He carefully examined the picture. “Those four crossbeams, whatever they are, run directly east-west. Is that significant?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Dew asked. “All I know is we’ve got to blow it up.”

  Ogden leaned closer to the picture. “No telling how tall it is. You got a normal shot?”

  Dew produced a detailed picture of the same area, the resolution so fine it revealed individual branches of the bigger trees. The strange design was visible, but barely, its green and black shading blending into the natural ground colors. This one had been taken by aerial recon, not even an hour earlier. Intel guys had highlighted the construct. The area around it was a patch of exposed forest floor surrounded by the whiteness of the winter woods. Five yellow circles marked vehicles spread across the map—three cars, a pickup and an RV.

  “That construct, or whatever it is, melted the snow,” Ogden said. “It’s hot all right. Damn thing blends in so much it almost looks camouflaged. What are those marked vehicles?”

  “Abandoned cars,” Dew said. “Local police found them, nobody home. We think that the triangle hosts drove them here, ditched them, then walked to the construct.”

  “What about all these little red dots on the infrared shot?”

  “Those are the hostiles,” Dew said. He produced a sheaf of papers. Each held a composite artist’s rendering based on Dew’s brief glimpse of the burning creature that fell from the third-story window. He didn’t know it yet, but the picture was a passable representation of the hatchlings. He passed the sheets out to the squad leaders.

  “The red dots are individual heat signatures, either human hosts or something that looks like these critters.”

  A soldier saw the sketch and laughed out loud. Dew fixed him with a death stare; his voice took on a new and dominant tone. He’d commanded boys just like these, and seen them die by the truckloads.

  “You think this is funny?” Dew said. “These things are responsible for the death of at least fifteen people, and if you don’t get your shit straight, you’ll probably be dead within the hour.”

  The soldier fell silent. The only sound came from wind hissing through the barren branches.

  Ogden pushed the satellite photos out of the way and smoothed the map. “If I may suggest, sir, we should break into a primary assault group of eight squads, which will attack from the west, and two containment groups of two squads each, one north and one southeast of the target.”

  Ogden tapped three spots on the map. “Here, here and here. The woods are too thick to get the vehicles in, so it’s all on foot. We have enough men in place for containment groups one and two. Containment group three is at the airport. They will move out shortly and can be in position in fifteen minutes. Artillery will be guns-up in thirty minutes.

  “The Apaches will be here before the infantry sets up the full perimeter, so they’ll stay on-station about a mile out. Once artillery is ready, we send in recon to take a shitload of pictures, then paint the target with a laser and have the Apaches blow the living piss out of it. After that the west containment group moves in and we clean up.”

  Dew stared at the map for a moment. Ogden had the west group moving in from a hill, giving them the high ground. If the hatchlings ran, they would probably follow the easiest path, a narrow valley that ran north to southeast—and that would take them directly into a killing zone of dug-in squads.

  “That’s an excellent plan. You tell your men to kill anything that moves.”

  “What about the hosts that drove here?” Ogden asked. “They’re civilians.”

  Dew looked hard at Ogden. “Like I said, anything that moves.”

  Dew turned to face the men again. “You’ve all seen the picture. Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. We don’t know how dangerous these things are, so assume they are dangerous in the extreme.”

  The looks on the soldiers’ faces said it all. Half of them simply didn’t believe they were about to go up against some movie monster; the other half did believe it, and those men had wide-eyed expressions of fear.

  “Keep your lines tight,” Ogden said. “Know where your man is on your right and left. Shoot anything in front of you. It doesn’t matter if it looks like a critter or your Aunt Jenny, it’s the enemy and you shoot it just like you would an enemy soldier. Now get your squads ready. We move out immediately.”

  The grim-faced young men hurried away, leaving only Ogden and Dew.

  “You know what’s fucked up here, Dew?”

  Dew nodded. “Yeah. Just about every last bit of this thing.”

  “Besides that, of course,” Ogden said. “If this is some kind of a gateway, like they’re going to bring troops in through that crazy thing or what have you, why the hell would they build it two miles from a landing strip?”

  Dew grunted once. He’d been so thrilled at the easy access, that question hadn’t crossed his mind.

  “Maybe it’s above their pay grade,” Dew said. “The only thing that makes sense is they just didn’t know. Whoever they had run recon on this, that party either just plain missed the airport or didn’t know what it was.”

  Ogden nodded. “That’s got to be it. Kind of weird, though—they are obviously high-tech as hell, and they screwed themselves with location, location, location. I don’t know what these things are, but looks like we’re kicking their ass on intel.”

  Dew nodded. The satellite images gave him total command of the area, images he wouldn’t have had if not for Margaret Montoya’s hunch. Without her demands they would still be trying to bring a satellite online, and might not know the exact location of the construct for several hours—and Dew Phillips had a feeling that every second mattered.

  The door to the black communications van flew open. A man ran out, a printout clutched in his fist. He slid on the frozen dirt road, regained his balance and slammed the printout down on the Humvee’s hood.

  “That thing just heated up in a hurry,” the squint said. “Here’s an updated infrared.”

  The picture looked almost the same, except the squint hadn’t outlined the strange symbol. He didn’t have to. Its lines blurred into a smudgy mess of reds, yellows and oranges.

  “It just turned on,” Dew said. “Move your men out, Ogden, right now. Move containment squads one and two into position as planned. We’re not waiting for the artillery or the third containment squad. We attack right now.”

  Perry moaned softly in his sleep. A dozen electrodes taped to his head and chest measured his every movement. Heavy canvas straps pinned his wrists to the hospita
l bed. His arms flexed and twitched every few seconds, pulling at the straps. An electrical beep echoed his pulse. The hum of medical equipment hung in the room.

  A man in a Racal suit stood on either side of him. Each held a Taser stunner, but neither had any firearms or knives—or anything sharp, for that matter. Couldn’t be too careful. If Dawsey broke the straps, a feat that really wouldn’t have surprised anyone staring at his huge musculature, they would stun him into submission with fifty thousand volts from the Tasers.

  They’d stopped the bleeding, but he was still touch and go; the bullets in each shoulder had been removed; his burns, including most of his head, were packed in wet bandages; they’d pulled the Triangle carcasses from his arm and back; the visible rot had been scraped from his collarbone and his leg, but the damage continued to slowly spread—that one the doctors didn’t know how to cure. His knee was slated for surgery the next day.

  And his penis was packed in ice.

  He moaned again. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his teeth bared in a wolflike predator’s warning. He was dreaming a dream that was both familiar and worse than ever.

  He was in the living-room hallway again. The doors were closing in on him. The doors were hot; his skin blistered and bubbled, growing first red, then charring black, smoking with a putrid stench. But he didn’t cry out in pain. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Fuck ’em…fuck ’em all. He’d go out like a Dawsey. The cancerous doors closed in, marching on their tiny tentacles, and Perry slowly roasted to death.

  “You beat ’em, boy.”

  In the dream, Perry opened his eyes. Daddy was there. No longer skeletal, but sturdy and solid and as full of life as he’d been before Captain Cancer came a-courtin’.

  “Daddy,” Perry said weakly. He tried to take a breath, but the broiling air scorched his lungs. Every fiber of his being hurt. When would the pain end?

  “You did good, boy,” Jacob Dawsey said. “You did real good. You showed them all. You beat ’em.”

  The doors moved closer. Perry looked at his hands. The flesh seemed to sag, then melt into a flaming pudding. It fell from his bones and sizzled when it hit the ground. He refused to cry out. After you cut off your own cock and balls, all pain is relative.

  The doors moved closer. Perry heard the creak of old wood and ancient iron, the low moan of hinges frozen shut with centuries of rust.

  “It was hard, Daddy,” Perry croaked.

  “Yes, it was hard. But you did what no one else could’ve done. I never told you this before, but I’m proud of you. I’m proud to call you my son.”

  Perry closed his eyes as he felt the flesh of his body sag and start to fall away. The tunnel filled with an emerald-green light. He opened his eyes—Daddy was gone, and the doors were opening. There was something moving in there.

  Perry looked inside…and started to scream.

  They were almost here.

  Dew and Charles Ogden lay flat on the snow-covered forest floor. It was cold as a bitch. Dew stared through night-vision binoculars, the green-tinted picture sending goose bumps racing under his heavy winter fatigues.

  “I don’t know what the fuck that thing is, but it can’t be good,” he said. “Got any more wise-ass cracks about Star Trek, Charlie?”

  “Nope,” Ogden said. “I’m good.”

  “We getting any radiation readings?”

  Ogden shook his head. “No, at least not this far away. Geiger counters show nothing. Dew, what the hell is that thing?”

  “I got an idea, like I told you before, but I hope to all that’s holy I’m wrong.” He couldn’t shake Dawsey’s mad ravings about a “door.”

  Dew glanced behind him. Two soldiers worked compact digital cameras, sweeping the lenses across the nightmarish scene. There were two such cameramen with each platoon.

  “You getting all this?” Dew asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the men answered in unison, both their voices small and filled with awe.

  The hatchlings were bustling around a pair of monstrous oak trees that dripped with melted snow. The trees’ dead branches formed a skeletal awning reaching out and over perhaps as many as fifty hatchlings of various sizes, some as small as the one he’d seen jump from the third-story apartment, some almost four feet tall with tentacle-legs as big around as baseball bats.

  Jesus Christ. Fifty. And we thought we’d got them all. How many hosts to make fifty of these things? How many hosts went totally undetected until they hatched?

  The hatchlings had built something strange. Something organic, maybe even alive. Thick, fibrous green strands—some the size of ropes, some the size of I-beams—ran in all directions, from the trunks to the ground to the branches and back again. There had to be thousands of them, like some monstrous three-dimensional spiderweb, or a modern artist’s jungle gym. At the center of all these strands, between the towering, sprawling oaks, was the construct that had generated the colored pattern on the infrared picture.

  Made from the same strange fibrous material, the construct had the primitive, ominous aura of a Stonehenge or an Aztec temple. The four crossing lines, the ones that ran east-west, were high arches, the apex of the smallest one near the construct’s center reaching just over ten feet. The tallest arch, the one at the open end, rose a good twenty feet into the night sky. The four arches looked like a framework cone half buried in the frozen forest ground.

  He didn’t know what the freakish thing was made of, but at least it wasn’t people.

  The two parallel pieces of the tail—for lack of a better word—stretched back some thirty yards from the arches. They were each as thick as a log and had a line of thin, spiky growths running down their lengths.

  The hatchlings crawled about the massive construct, clinging with their tentacle legs, a moving mass scampering across the strand-maze with the ease of darting wolf spiders. They splashed through the suddenly muddy forest floor—the heat from the construct had melted all the snow around the two oak trees.

  Dew and Ogden were about fifty yards from the construct, staring straight into the cavern created by the arches.

  “How far out are the Apaches?” Dew asked Ogden. Ogden waved to his radioman, who quietly moved over and handed Ogden a handset. Ogden whispered for a few seconds, then said, “ETA two minutes.”

  The seconds ticked by. Dew heard the faint approach of the Apaches’ rotors. The hatchlings suddenly scattered from the skeletal green construct, some taking refuge in the sprawling oak trees, others staying on the ground.

  “What’s happening?” Ogden asked. “Did they hear the choppers?”

  “Maybe so. Let your men know it’s go time. We might have to…” Dew’s voice trailed off; the construct started to glow.

  The fibrous arches illuminated the oak branches and the forest floor with a suffused white light. Faint at first, barely discernible, the glow quickly grew so bright that Dew couldn’t look through the night-vision binoculars.

  “Dew, what the hell is going on in there?”

  Dew shook his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Let’s take two squads forward. We have to get a better look.”

  Ogden softly called out orders. Dew rose to a crouch and quickly moved forward, ignoring his popping knees. The snow crunched and dry branches snapped underfoot. He was painfully aware of how quiet the Airborne soldiers were in comparison, almost silent despite the noisy footing. Once upon a time, Dew would have moved through the woods without a sound—getting old was a bitch-and-a-half.

  He stopped after advancing thirty yards. The cover of night was gone. The construct’s glow lit up the two oaks as bright as day. Long shadows radiated away into the forest. The very ground itself seemed to vibrate with an ominous rhythm, a rapidly pulsing heartbeat of some monstrous evil. Dew felt a sense of trepidation, of wrongness, like he’d never known before.

  This shit’s going south in a damn hurry.

  “Give me some normal binoculars,” Dew snapped. Someone handed him a pair that were, of course, ar
my-green. He stared into the depths of the archway, where the light was brighter than anywhere else, so bright it hurt his eyes and he had to squint to see anything at all.

  “Ogden, ETA on the Apaches?”

  “Sixty seconds.”

  A blast of anxiety ripped through Dew’s body. He’d never felt fear like this, never felt anything like this. Even in the midst of the hand-to-hand fighting that had wiped out his platoon back in ’Nam, even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t been this scared; he couldn’t say why.

  The construct grew still brighter. One of the soldiers suddenly dropped his M4 rifle and ran, screaming, back into the forest. Several of the others slowly stepped backward, fear wrapped up in their young faces.

  “Hold your positions!” Ogden shouted. “Next man to run gets shot in the back! Now get down!”

  The bounce of long shadows betrayed the motion of the hatchlings sprinting toward the platoon. Their strange, pyramid bodies slid through the woods. Like swarming insects, they’d detected a threat and were rushing out to meet it, to protect the hive.

  “Ogden, we’ve got company!”

  “Squads Four and Five, hold this position!” Ogden shouted. “All other squads move forward to support! Fire at will!” Gunfire erupted before he finished the last sentence.

  Dew didn’t move. The construct’s glow didn’t fade, but it changed, sliding from the blinding white to a deep emerald-green glow. Suddenly Dew realized he was looking not just into the arch, but beyond it—the field of green reached far off into the distance.

  Stunned, he glanced up from the binoculars. The construct hadn’t moved; neither had the woods behind it. He again peered through the binoculars. The field of green was inside the arch but stretched back for what must have been miles. But that was impossible, simply impossible.

  M4 carbines and M249 machine guns roared all around him, but Dew remained steadfast. A man’s scream filled the night as one of the hatchlings made it past the hail of bullets. Dew didn’t flinch, or even notice, because he saw something in that field of green.