Contagious

The computer room door opened, and Otto rushed inside. “Margaret, there’s a chopper coming in. Pilot radioed down, says he’s here to take us to Detroit. He’s landing now.”

“Get Gitsh and Marcus,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Otto vanished.

Margaret turned to Dew. Her eyes burned with anger, intensity.

“If this thing is really contagious,” she said, “we’re in a whole different world of s.h.i.t. The country needs to know. The world needs to know.”

Christ on a crutch. As if Dew didn’t have enough problems. The New & Improved Margaret Montoya wanted to go public. Trouble was, if it actually was contagious, she was 100 percent right. Murray’s skulduggery had its place, but the time for that was almost up.

“Examine it first,” Dew said. “Before you do something silly, can you give it twenty-four hours?”

“Why the f.u.c.k should I?”

“Just do your job,” Dew said. “Evaluate, like Murray says. This time tomorrow, you still think going public is the right thing to do, I’ll do it with you.”

She stared at him, her expression a mixture of hatred and disbelief. “Why would you throw away your career like that?”

“Because Murray has more people like me,” Dew said. “And if you try to go public against Murray’s will, one of them might just pay you a visit.”

EXPENDABLE

Chelsea’s knowledge grew and grew.

She now understood why Chauncey had been sent. He wasn’t a person. Organic material, like people or plants or puppies, couldn’t survive the trip, not the way Chauncey had traveled.

Organic material could survive a trip through a gate, but there was a catch—the gate was biological. Like a plant. That meant they couldn’t send a gate the same way they’d sent Chauncey.

Such a funny problem, and it grew more complicated from there. Each of the hatchlings had a . . . a . . . a template. What a neat word, although she still didn’t understand what that meant, exactly. Some kind of a template to make material for the gate. The templates had been shipped with Chauncey. They were a part of each triangle seed. Their number was finite (another neat word!), which meant that the hatchlings could not replicate themselves like the crawlers could.

And the little crawlers that spread through people’s bodies, converting them? What wonderful creatures! But they weren’t creatures at all, not like snails or bugs or kitties. They were just collections of pieces. Like Legos. You could put the pieces together in different ways. You could make the pieces do different things. Way cooler toys than Legos, actually.

She wandered through the minds of the people in her . . . her network. So many interesting things! Many naughty things, too. She would address that later. One mind stood out above the rest, a mind that combined logic and creativity—General Ogden’s. She found herself spending more and more time in there as she waited for the gate to open. She learned much. General Ogden seemed obsessed with something called contingency plans.

Most of her network consisted of soldiers. General Ogden thought that most of those soldiers, including himself, would die defending the gate. He thought of his soldiers as expendable. If they all died, though, or even if the numbers of converted dropped just a little, what would happen to Chelsea’s mind? To her knowledge?

She did not know. And therefore she needed a contingency plan of her own.

The soldiers were very, very important, with training and experience at shooting things. There were only two people left in her network who were not soldiers.

Mommy and Mr. Burkle the Postman.

Mr. Burkle was a man. He was stronger than Mommy. That made Mommy the weakest person in the network.

Which meant Mommy was the most expendable.

Chelsea breathed slowly and reached out with her thoughts. It wouldn’t be that hard, really, to modify Mommy’s purpose. It had worked with Mr. Jenkins.

Chelsea concentrated, connected with Mommy’s crawlers and began to move the pieces around.

MARGARET ARRIVES

The trip to Detroit felt like an eternity, even though it took just over an hour.

She had spent so much time cooped up in the MargoMobiles, or out in the middle of nowhere, that she’d almost forgotten what a city looked like. Detroit wasn’t much of a skyline city, not a lot of tall buildings, although coming in you couldn’t miss the five towers of the Renaissance Center and a few other downtown skysc.r.a.pers she couldn’t name. The city seemed to radiate from there, spreading north and west from the Detroit River, suburbs stretching out for miles and miles.

Margaret, Clarence, Dr. Dan, Marcus and Gitsh landed at the Henry Ford Hospital helipad. From there, two agents whisked them to an unmarked van, and ten minutes later they drove down East Lafayette Street.

“We’re coming up on the intersection of Lafayette and Orleans,” the driver said. “The crime scene is on your left. CDC has it locked down nice and tight.”

Big concrete dividers, the kind used in highway construction, completely blocked the entrance onto Orleans. About a half block farther, she saw the biohazard tent that had been erected over the murder location. That tent would stop any breeze from spreading the contagion, if it hadn’t blown around already. It also blocked curious eyes. A few people in biohazard suits moved in and out of the tent. The site was as secure as it could be.

The next street was St. Aubin, and they turned south. That put the tree-packed old railroad track on the van’s right side. More trees and apartment buildings ran along the left side of the road. Apartments, cars everywhere—so many people moving about, a recipe for disaster if this contagion was wind-borne, like the strain that had infected Perry. A left on Jefferson, six lanes of major traffic rolling through Detroit, then a quick right (which was, curiously, still St. Aubin). Abandoned factory buildings stood oppressive and desolate. A right on Woodbridge, and then a right after another abandoned factory, and the van turned into a wide dirt lot. The overpa.s.s directly in front of her was Jefferson again, she realized, and they drove under it into a long ditch. Steep, tree-packed slopes rose up on either side, ending in black chain-link fences. Margaret realized that now they were in the old railroad track that ran parallel to Orleans. Under the next overpa.s.s, wedged in past the thin trees, Margaret saw two blue semis parked side by side.