She walked toward the bodies.
Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made bumpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.
The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.
Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.
Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.
Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.
Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.
Amos… his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery… Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her bloody hand slid free…
“Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”
Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”
Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing. Half a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.
“You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”
“Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”
Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.
“Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”
“Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”
AWAKENING
Motion.
Vibrations from a bone saw, the regular probing of fingers and hands, these things resonated through the body.
These vibrations, these movements, triggered an ingrained, automatic response inside the cyst-encased neutrophils. They turned on. They secreted a new chemical, one that dissolved the shells protecting them against the forces of decomposition.
Newly exposed to the apoptosis chemicals, the neutrophils didn’t have much time. Some of them didn’t make it: caught in blobs of caustic rot, they died almost immediately. Others pushed up, pushed out, crawling through Charlie’s muscle, through his subcutaneous layer, through his dermis, then his epidermis and finally gathered just beneath the squamous epithelium — the skin’s outermost layer.
There they would wait, wait until they felt the pressure of another surface coming into contact.
When that happened, the neutrophils would cling to that new surface.
Then they would simply follow their programming, and do what they were made to do.
THE FULL RIDE
Clarence hated the suit. It made him feel clumsy, awkward. He’d strapped a holster to the outside of his thigh, but if things went south he wasn’t even sure if his gloved fingers could fit through his weapon’s trigger guard. Far more significant, though, was the fact that he might be just one tiny rip away from suffering the same fate as Diego Clark.
He hated the suit, true, but the heads-up display thing was amazing. He had Cantrell’s service record right in front of him, at the left edge of his vision. All he had to do was turn his head and read.
Clarence exited the airlock and walked to Clark’s cell. He stood in front of the clear door, staring in.
The mattress had been removed. Incinerated, probably. Clark lay on his back on the bed’s metal surface. Metal-mesh straps across his chest, hips and thighs held him tight to the bed’s metal surface, as did thick restraints around his wrists and ankles. All that was overkill at the moment — an IV ran into Clark’s right arm, a steady flow of drugs keeping him unconscious.
A voice from behind: “Makes me want to enlist all over again.”
Clarence turned to look at Kevin Cantrell. He was leaning against the wall of his cage, forearm and forehead pressed against the glass. The front of his clear cell looked directly into the front of Clark’s.
“Look at that poor bastard,” Cantrell said. “Years of service, and he’ll die horribly.” The diver tilted his head to the right, toward Edmund, who lay in his bed and would never wake again.
“Or him,” Cantrell said. “Good to know that the fucking navy can heap disgrace upon misery and use our bodies like we’re laboratory mice. I mean, doesn’t all this just make you want to sign up?”
“Already did,” Clarence said.
Cantrell raised his eyebrows, nodded. “Oh, that’s right, your little spat with Doc Feely. You enlisted. You’re one of us, right? Let me guess… Marines?”
“Rangers,” Clarence said. “Then Special Forces. Got shot at plenty, but no one strapped me to a table. I need to talk to you.”
Cantrell shrugged. “It’s not like my calendar is all that full at the moment.”
The man seemed different than he had just a little while earlier. He was calmer. Relaxed. He hadn’t exactly been freaking out earlier, nothing like that, but he’d seemed tense, jittery.
Clarence tilted his head toward Clark. “Sorry about your friend.”
“A real shame,” Cantrell said. “Seems inevitable, though. The pathogen obviously had some kind of reservoir that allowed it to maintain viability all these years. The Los Angeles likely found that reservoir. Clarkie drew the short straw.”
Clarence raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on. At least I think you do, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what you just said.”
Cantrell shrugged. “I know me some biology. I was premed at Duke.”
“Jesus. Not the typical life story of a serviceman. How the hell did you wind up in the navy?”
“Fighting, I’m afraid,” Cantrell said. “I was an angry young black man raging against the inequities of life, even though I’d grown up in the suburbs and had a full ride.”
“You had a full ride to Duke? You must have been one hell of a baller. Point guard?”