by Scott Sigler
Cantrell’s eyes narrowed. Was that a look of… anger?
“That is not accurate,” he said. “Maybe I typed it wrong.”
“So you didn’t smell bleach when you and Clark were submerged in the decon tank?”
Cantrell shook his head. “Not that I recall.”
Clarence reached out into air, called up Clark’s report on his HUD.
“Clark also reported smelling bleach,” Clarence said. “He was worried the suit would fill up with it.”
Cantrell clapped his hands together once, spread them out. “There you go, Agent Otto. Clark told me that right after we finished. I was exhausted. I must have put his words down as mine.”
Clarence studied the man. That explanation sounded perfectly logical. A battle, a high-risk recovery of infected bodies… that kind of stress could lead to significant fatigue, the blurring of memories. But Cantrell seemed to have a near-photographic memory of the event, all except for that one detail.
Had the vector somehow got inside Clark’s suit through a broken seal or a tiny tear that also allowed in a small amount of bleach? If Cantrell was now lying about smelling bleach, he was doing so because he knew evidence of a tear would lengthen his time in the cell. Or could he actually be infected and trying to protect himself? So far, though, Cantrell had tested negative.
Clarence felt he was missing something… but what?
“Let’s go over the entire day again,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? Like you said, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”
PHOTO BOMBING
Margaret had thought diving back into this world would be hell. She’d thought working on the bodies of infection victims would further stir up the ever-present memories of Amos Braun, of Perry Dawsey, of Dew Phillips, of Detroit and everything else that had turned her life to shit.
But she didn’t think about any of those things.
In fact, almost as soon as she began the examination, those thoughts faded away. She didn’t think about anything but the work. And, most important, she didn’t think about Clarence.
In that way, at least, donning a BSL-4 suit and standing next to a body that had the potential to wipe out the human race was kind of… well, it was kind of nice.
She slowly ran her gloved hand over Candice Walker’s body. A meticulous search. She had Tim’s report up on the right side of her visor. She was getting the hang of the eye-track navigation; as she found torn pustules and other marks on Candice’s body, she checked to see if Tim had logged them. Maybe he’d missed something. Or, maybe something had grown after he’d completed his initial exam.
Margaret heard a rattle: the heavy, compact Stryker bone saw moving against a prep tray. Tim was cleaning Petrovsky’s powdered bone and that thick rot from the blade, preparing to use the device on the skull of Candice Walker. Petrovsky’s rot was accelerating now. Most of his skin looked black and wet, and it was already sloughing off at his left shoulder to show the sagging, decomposing muscles beneath.
Tim stopped, looked up. “Uh, Doctor Montoya? What are you looking for?”
“Triangles,” she said, turning her attention back to Walker. “I’m looking for any skin growths that would show triangle infection.”
“I checked for that. She doesn’t have the triangles or any Morgellons fibers indicative of a fizzle.”
A fizzle, Amos’s name for an infection that didn’t quite take hold, resulting in red, blue or black fibers growing out of the host’s skin.
Margaret stopped and stared at Tim. “You don’t mind if I look again, do you?” She wasn’t going to have Feely second-guessing her. She already knew his report showed no growths on Candice, but something didn’t add up. Triangle victims often cut into themselves, but Candice didn’t have triangles. She had crawlers; crawler hosts didn’t mutilate themselves. So why had Walker cut off her own arm?
Tim met Margaret’s gaze. He slowly raised a gore-slimed, gloved hand in front of his visor, making a monotone noise as he did. When his hand moved in front of his eyes, he made a crashing sound, held the hand still.
The world is in danger, and this asshole is playing games?
“Tim, what are you doing?”
“Raising my blast shields,” he said. “Your death stare will not take me down, Vader.”
For the second time that day, she laughed. There were two dead bodies on the table, both infected with a potentially world-killing pathogen, and Tim Feely made her laugh.
He lowered the hand just enough for his eyes to peek over. “Am I safe?”
“For now,” Margaret said. “Stop playing.” She pointed to the ravaged stub of Walker’s severed arm. “Your initial report said she did this to herself?”
He nodded.
“How do you know?”
Tim started tapping at the air. He was calling something up on his HUD, but the action still seemed odd; it made him look crazy.
“Here’s how,” he said. He grabbed the air in front of his face, made a tossing gesture in Margaret’s direction. Inside her visor, Tim’s report shrank down to a tiny icon at the lower left. Her vision filled with a series of images.
A reciprocal saw, the long device so ubiquitous in the construction field: red, industrial-plastic handle, just big enough to hold with one fist; the same plastic on the saw’s thick body, where the other hand would cup it from underneath; the blade guard and finally the blade itself, eight inches long, designed to slide back and forth so fast you couldn’t even see its jagged points.
Margaret reached out into the air, swiped left to right. The next picture showed Candice Walker’s left fingers wrapped around the saw’s handle. The saw lay across her chest, the blade against the severed stump of her right arm. Margaret looked through her visor, down at the real thing, then refocused on the image — if Candice had cut herself, the angle of the wound was exactly right.
The third picture showed a close-up of gouges in Candice’s ulna — a failed cut, one that hadn’t gone through. The saw blade sat neatly in the groove, a perfect fit.
She swiped again to see the fourth and final picture: a smiling, biosafety-suited Tim Feely holding the saw and leaning down by Walker’s face. He was giving a thumbs-up.
“Feely, you really are an asshole,” Margaret said. “You play with the dead?”
He shrugged. “There was no one else to play with. But now you’re here.” He waggled his eyebrows.
Another crass innuendo. Maybe that was his way of dealing with the pressure of the situation. Or… or maybe he was actually interested. Either way, she didn’t have time for it.
Thoughts of Tim Feely’s advances faded away. The missing arm still didn’t add up. If Candice had the crawlers, and crawlers that took over her brain, then why did she mutilate herself when no other known crawler host ever had?
“There’s something different about Walker,” Margaret said. “Are you finished processing Petrovsky’s brain?”
Tim nodded. “I am. It’s turning into black goop, but there was enough to see that it was riddled with the crawler mesh. If that ever happens to me, hopefully your hubby will put me down like the dog that I am.”
She didn’t know if Tim was serious about that request or just talking to deal with the stress. He had no way of knowing Clarence had done exactly that to infection victims in the past, and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.
Margaret stroked Candice Walker’s hair one more time. In a few moments, Tim would slide a scalpel across the back of her scalp, then flip the scalp down over her face so he could use the Stryker saw to open her skull.
She heard a click in her helmet speakers, then, Clarence’s voice.
“Margaret, can you and Doctor Feely hear me?”
“I can,” she said. She looked at Tim, who gave a thumbs-up. “So can Tim.”
“Good,” Clarence said. “Listen, I’m finished with Cantrell’s interview. There’s some things I want to talk about.”
“So get in here,” Margaret said.
“Uh, can
I report from the control room? This suit, I’ve been in it for two hours.”
Tim rolled his eyes.
“Yes, but make it fast,” Margaret said. “We’ll keep working until you’re ready. Tim, call up the images of crawlers from both Petrovsky and Walker. Let’s take a look while we wait.”
RED HOT MOMMA
For most of the last five years, Tim Feely had enjoyed collecting a huge paycheck and not doing a whole lot to earn it. He worked hard at whatever anyone asked him to do — well, at least he made it look like he was working hard — but he had harbored a hope that this infection crap was over forever, and that his black-budget gravy train would last for decades.
Obviously, he’d been wrong. This shit was real. If the infection got out, it could literally end the world. Like it or not, he was smack-dab in the middle of it.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: he got to work with Margaret Montoya. The Margaret Montoya. She didn’t understand what a legend she had become in scientific circles. For reasons Tim couldn’t fathom, she seemed to be concerned with what regular people thought, people who knew nothing about science, nothing about how her genius had saved their uneducated asses.
Plus, she was fine. Margaret wanted to pretend that she and Clarence were solid, but Tim sensed friction. A marriage cracking at the seams, if it hadn’t already shattered. Tim liked his women older, smart and powerful: Margaret was all three. He was helping save the world, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep the game afoot. Pursuing a sexy woman gave him an edge, helped distract him from worrying about the fact that he’d probably never leave this ship alive.
While that pansy Agent Otto got out of his suit, Tim made good use of the time.
“Okay, Doctor Montoya,” Tim said, “I’ve queued up the images of dead crawlers from Petrovsky and Walker. Ready for the side-by-side comparison?”
“I am. And please, call me Margaret.”
“Can I call you Red Hot Momma?”
“You may not,” she said. “The crawlers, please?”
Tim eye-tracked through his HUD menus, called up the prepared video, then grabbed and tossed it at Margaret so that both of their visor displays showed the same thing: a side-by-side progression of dead crawler images. Walker’s were on the left, Petrovsky’s on the right.
Margaret made a clucking sound with her tongue as she thought. “Walker’s crawlers, they’re in an odd state of decay. Almost like they were… melted.”
At first glance, the crawlers all looked similar to oversized nerve cells: each consisted of a large, roundish end with dendrites that extended, split, and split again like tree branches; a long, thin central body, or axon; and finally a tail end that spread out in thin axon terminals. Closer examination, however, revealed that the crawlers were actually made up of modified muscle cells that could reach, that could grab and then crawl toward the brain.
Tim had been far too busy to do any comparative analysis. Lives had been at stake. As he looked at the images side-by-side for the first time, he saw immediate differences.
“Walker’s aren’t decomposing the same way as Petrovsky’s,” he said. “Petrovsky’s crawlers have spreading clusters of black spots, starting small and expanding, like a banana that’s just starting to go bad. With Walker’s, the cell damage looks uniform, like something is affecting them all at once. You hit the nail on the head — they look like they’re melting. You didn’t see anything like that in your prior work?”
Margaret shook her head. “No, we didn’t. We studied Carmen Sanchez through the whole crawler-infection process. Nothing like this in him, or in Betty Jewell, and she was in an advanced state of the apoptosis chain reaction. This… this is new.”
She reached out, manipulating her images. Tim eye-tracked through his menu, altering his display so he saw exactly what she saw. Margaret had zoomed in on Walker’s crawler.
“Uniform damage,” she said quietly. “These crawlers started out alive, moving, then something made them start to dissolve.” She reached out again, wiped away the images from Petrovsky. Only Walker’s remained. “You said you also extracted live crawlers from Walker. Can I see them?”
Tim menued through to the video he’d recorded. “Let me get one on visual.”
The image came up. Still moving, still twitching, still reaching. He placed it side by side with the dead, melted crawler.
Margaret stared at the two images for a moment. “Walker’s crawlers are significantly different. I’ve never seen this form before.”
Tim felt his face flush with embarrassment that he hadn’t spotted it himself. Unlike all the other crawler images, this one didn’t have the spreading axon terminals at the tail end, just a long, thin body and the dendrite arms on what he presumed to be the top — and even that part was unusual. Where a normal crawler’s dendrite arms looked like a stubby tree with many branches, the living sample only had five arms of varying lengths.
Margaret’s eyes changed focus. Instead of seeing the images inside her visor, she looked through them to stare at Tim.
“Feely, why the hell didn’t you tell me they looked different?”
His face flushed deeper, but this time with anger. “I didn’t notice. There wasn’t time to do any in-depth work.”
She put her hands on her hips, a gesture that looked oddly out of place for someone wearing a bulky biosafety suit.
“Didn’t have time? Are you kidding me?”
Tim stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, Montoya, but there was a goddamn battle up top!”
Her hands slid off her hips. She looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to her that he could blow up at someone. Well, he had, and he couldn’t stop the volcano of frustration and grief that came blasting out.
“I did what I could,” he said. “There weren’t enough hands to go around. I had to make snap decisions. If I took too much time to save one man, three others would die.”
The ship’s doctors, overwhelmed. Bodies all over the deck. He’d been covered in blood… the smell of burned flesh, the screams, people begging for help… all the drugs in the world weren’t going to erase those two days. His anger faded. He saw the faces of men who had looked at him, looked right at him when he was already writing them off because they were too far gone.
And then there was Murray’s order to collect some crawlers and seal them up for shipment to Black Manitou. Tim had done that the day of the battle, grabbing a few samples from Petrovsky and sending them on. He knew he should have fought that order, but all he wanted to do was satisfy Murray’s request so he could get back to the wounded. Murray had sworn Tim to secrecy on that — Tim couldn’t tell anyone, and in truth, he was ashamed of caving in and didn’t want to tell anyone.
“I worked two days straight to save as many as I could. The only time I stopped was when Yasaka had two men drag me — literally drag me — down here to do some basic sample gathering on Walker and Petrovsky. And when I came down, I made sure not to touch the bodies, at all, just on the off chance I might bring contagion up with me when I returned to the wounded. I only used needles to gather samples, and I gathered those samples as quickly as I could. Know why? I had more important things to do than play with corpses. So no, Margaret, I didn’t pay that much attention to the motherfucking crawlers.”
Margaret sighed. She looked sad.
“I apologize,” she said. “I should know better. We have so little time to get this work done. I’m sure I’m missing things, and there are tests we should be running that just have to wait because we don’t have the resources. Everything is hurried, rushed, and you had it even worse with all the wounded. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
He could see she meant it. The sincerity of her response made his anger fade away as quickly as it had erupted.
Tim shrugged, feeling the bulk of his suit on his shoulders when he did.
“You’re really sorry?”
She nodded.
“Sorry enough for ap
ology sex?”
“Not that sorry, no.”
“Oh well, worth a try.”
Margaret shook her head, a sad dismissal of his feeble attempt. She focused on the images in her HUD.
“These new crawlers from Walker… where exactly were they inside her body?”
“The pustules,” Tim said. “That was the fastest and easiest place to get a sample, so I started there. I collected crawlers from other areas as well, but all of those were dead. And, come to think of it, all of the dead ones look the same as those I collected from Petrovsky.”
Margaret frowned. She reached out, turning the image of the living crawler, looking at it from multiple angles. “Sanchez had pustules, but what was in them didn’t look like these. So we know that Walker definitely had the old kind of crawlers, the ones we saw back in Detroit, the same that are in Petrovsky, but she also had this new kind.”
Tim studied the images on his own HUD. The new crawlers reminded him of a microorganism he’d seen way back in his undergrad days.
“They kind of look like hydras,” he said.
Margaret nodded. “Yeah, a little bit. As good a name as any for the variant.” She stared. The tip of her tongue traced her upper lip. “So the hydras and the crawlers were in Walker at the same time, but only the crawlers were melted.”
Tim watched the real-time image of the hydra, watched it reach and move, searching for something to grab onto. Walker’s crawlers had melted; Petrovsky’s, Sanchez’s and Jewell’s had not. Her hydras were the only known variable.
“Maybe the hydras killed the crawlers,” he said. “Something they secreted, perhaps.”
Margaret thought about that for a moment. “Possibly. But… why? Crawlers and hydras are on the same side, so to speak.”
“Maybe it’s a new design,” Tim said. “The first round of infections — with Perry Dawsey and the other early victims — they only had the triangular growths. But later on, when Detroit got crazy, you saw the crawler-based infections, and even that woman you said blew up like a puffball.”
