A frantic search, now involving nearly a hundred people flushed from classified agencies to cover an expanded four-state area, ended suddenly with an intercepted radio transmission over the police net. An abandoned car had been found, sitting two hundred yards off Interstate 40 near tiny Manuelito, New Mexico. With a body in the trunk.
In less than an hour, the state police became onlookers as others arrived to take over their crime scene. People in white suits and masks.
They were there to hide an unfortunate mistake, to erase the evidence.
To keep a secret, a secret.
The car was quickly taken to a salvage yard in another state — ironically, the same state where it’d been built — and the paper trail of its history thoroughly expunged. The Chevy would meet its fate in a glowing smelter of molten steel, the last bit of evidence turned into a shiny set of stainless flatware.
But the car wasn’t immediately destroyed as planned. A ’63 Nova had taken its place in the smelter, similar enough in appearance to the ’62 it just happened to be sitting next to that the crane operator selected it instead, an honest mistake, which condemned his two grandchildren — not yet born — to a horrific death at the hands of something he couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
For twenty years, the Nova sat in a far corner of the yard, useable parts stripped away occasionally until only a shell remained. But within the shell, within the empty trunk, an echo of the body it once held still lingered. It was an echo of the damned, hiding in the crevices, between plates of rusty steel. Waiting. Living. And now, with the rain adding a special twist to the mix, mutating.
Nature had been fucked with. And Mother was pissed.
CHAPTER 3
Rats prowled the salvage yard, scurrying from junk heap to junk heap, searching for anything to quell their endless hunger or add to their nests of assorted garbage. Underneath the Chevy, a single rat crept toward the left rear wheel, having spied a shiny piece of foil sticking out of the mud. For the rat, the piece of trash was a treasure; for humanity, however, it represented an end of things, for at the same instant, the Nova’s trunk began to leak, the pool of muck inside having finally eaten a hole in the rusted steel large enough to pass through. Just one drop at a time.
The rat sat on its haunches, holding the silvery gum wrapper in its forepaws, small, beady eyes examining the find. A moment before it scurried away with its booty, a single drop from the trunk landed on its back. Just one drop. The effect was nearly instantaneous. The other rats scattered, spooked by the sudden commotion.
A large Rottweiler tied to a fencepost at the far end of the salvage yard pricked its ears up and growled, but only for a second. The sound, the terrible screeching, caused the dog to cower against the yard’s security fence and whimper like a scared pup.
Beneath the car, the rat lay on its back, legs kicking furiously, clawing at the air, a high-pitched squeal escaping its open maw, much too loud to be produced by its tiny lungs. Its head lolled from side to side and its tongue flapped about like a meaty whip. Beneath the rat’s coarse hair, bones were snapping, rearranging, fusing. Muscles were flexing, ripping, building. Cells ruptured and then re-formed. DNA strands resequenced, and resequenced again. Something was being born, at the same time something else was dying.
The rodent’s violent struggles suddenly ceased, and it lay deathly still.
All that could be heard in the salvage yard was the staccato tap-tapping of the rain against rusty steel, the broken snare drum thuds of water droplets hitting the mud.
Quiet. For a time.
Just the sound of rain.
Other rats crept from their hiding places, sure that whatever had startled them was gone, and it was safe to forage once again. Moving slowly, a rat crept toward its fallen comrade, which would make a fine meal for it and a few others. Sniffing the air, it sensed no danger and drew closer. Perching itself against the soft underbelly of its meal, it lowered its head for the first bite.
In a ravenous flurry of newly formed claws and teeth, the unsuspecting rat was torn to shreds, pieces of its body powerfully flung from underneath the Chevy and splashing into the mud, small crimson pools gathering around the shredded strands of brownish-red meat.
The other rats scattered, startled, but only for a moment. The smell of blood drew them closer.
A pair of bright yellow eyes peered out from under the old car. It could see them gathering, creeping nearer. Thick blood dripped from its new set of oversized fangs. Its rippling musculature quivered in anticipation, the restructured body tensed to strike.
Fifteen feet away, one of the rats gulped down a strand of bloody muscle from its shredded comrade, still warm and twitching in the mud.
At once, more unearthly screeching shattered the night.
And then, there were two. The pair moved quickly, biting, tearing, eating. Infecting.
Soon, there were six.
Then, fifty.
The wailing of the changeling rats filled the air with an eerie sound, a shrill screeching building in intensity with each new addition to the fold.
And then, all at once, as if triggered by an internal clock, each of the infected creatures began to convulse violently, snarling and wailing as they were seized by the next stage of their evolution.
Hides split. New legs burst forth from where there’d been none just moments before. Single heads became two.
The first furious doubling — one of many to occur in the next hour — had begun.
The Rottweiler clawed at the chain-link security fence, trying to scratch his way through the metal, as hundreds of pairs of glowing yellow eyes moved closer, bouncing across the darkness toward him.
The dog’s whining abruptly ceased as the things covered him, tearing him to shreds with hundreds of razor-sharp fangs and claws, slicing and cutting in a feeding frenzy as quick and violent as a school of piranhas devouring a careless river animal.
The new things quickly escaped the confines of the salvage yard and began to spread, the killing sound building in intensity. Neighborhood dogs slung their tails between their legs and cowered in the corners of their yards, instinctively aware that something they couldn’t possibly escape was coming.
Yard by yard, the frantic yelping of terrified pets was replaced with the muffled thunder of hundreds of tiny, powerful legs, and then by the sickening sound of flesh being ripped and torn. Outside the houses and inside.
The creatures moved as an unstoppable wave, killing and feeding, but in some cases simply biting, an infectious, vampire-like bite ensuring the growth of their new species, adding others to their numbers, both animal and human.
The killing wave grew in intensity as the things continued to double, again and again. Their numbers increased exponentially as they spread in a circular pattern from their point of origin in the salvage yard… five miles, ten, then fifteen, leaving nothing but death and an eerie silence in their wake.
The onslaught slowed as a blush to the east heralded the rising sun. The creatures flooded into the sewers, into Dumpsters, basements, into the dark places — any place to hide from the coming light of day.
As the first blazing arc of the sun broke the horizon, all grew quiet. In a nearly thirty-mile radius from the salvage yard in Kansas City, life had virtually been extinguished. But there was other life, new life, cowering silently in the shadows.
At the beginning of this night, thousands of people had crawled into their warm, snug beds, having no inkling whatsoever that by morning, they’d have fallen from being the ruling species of the planet to a step lower on the food chain. Some of them never woke up. Some did and realized, painfully, new kings of the jungle were on the prowl.