Contagious

“Yes, Chelsea,” Daddy said.

Chelsea, Mr. Roznowski and Old Sam Collins got their coats and walked out the front door, while Daddy got the box of matches.

BETTY’S AUTOPSY

Betty Jewell’s autopsy was a disaster.

Margaret could barely think after Amos’s horrifying death, let alone focus on the job. By the time she’d dragged herself into the biohazard suit and started working on Betty, the girl’s body had mostly dissolved.

Margaret approached the trolley, Clarence beside her in his suit. Gitsh, Marcus and Dr. Dan stood next to Betty’s blackened corpse. It made for tight quarters, but Clarence refused to leave her side. Gitsh and Marcus had done an amazing job cleaning up. The autopsy room looked spotless. The trolley carried a steady, slow, thick stream of black goo down the runners and into the white sink.

Margaret wanted a look at those crawling things. They were the key to everything now, but she’d waited too long. Any crawlers in Betty’s body had already dissolved. Even the samples that Amos had taken were now nothing but chunky black liquid.

She’d let her grief get in the way of her work.

Margaret felt weak. She put a hand on the autopsy trolley to steady herself—when she looked at the table, her mind’s eye saw Betty Jewell’s skinless hands stabbing the scalpel at Amos. When Margaret looked down, she saw Amos clawing at the throat of his biohazard suit, unable to get his hands at the cut, unable to stop the blood from sheeting the inside of his visor. When she saw the drainage sink, she saw Betty’s brains splattering against the white epoxy and dripping toward the drain.

Clarence’s hand on her shoulder. “Margo, you okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

A lie anyone could see through.

“Dan,” Margaret said, “have you watched the video from my helmet? The video of the autopsy?”

“Yes ma’am,” Dr. Dan said. “Several times.”

“And what did you see?”

“Something crawling in her face. Doctor Braun thought it was crawling along the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

“Do you agree?”

“It certainly looked that way,” Dan said.

Too bad they didn’t have a brain to look at. No chance of that, thanks to Clarence’s bullet and rapid decomposition. When that crawler reached the brain, then what?

Then it would come apart.

It would split up into those muscle fibers Amos saw, split apart . . .reorganize . . . come together again.

In a mesh. Just like in Perry Dawsey’s brain.

“The crawlers,” Margaret said. “They want to replicate what we’ve seen in Dawsey’s CAT scans.”

Dr. Dan stared at her. “That’s a pretty big leap. We haven’t seen anything like these crawlers before. I read your reports on the hosts found in Glidden; the father, mother and little boy. You had fresh bodies, yet they didn’t have these crawling things.”

“It’s something new, obviously,” Margaret said. “I don’t care if its a leap. It’s right. These things infect a human body, maybe replicate somehow, then crawl toward the brain. If we can stop them from crawling, we just plain stop them.”

“It’s got a structure,” Dan said. “A shape. It can move. For that it needs a cytoskeleton.”

“The little things have skeletons?” Clarence asked.

“Cytoskeleton,” Dan said. “It’s like microscopic scaffolding that lets a cell hold a shape.”

“Without it, a cell would just be a membrane holding fluid,” Margaret said. “Without a cytoskeleton to hold structure, it would be like a water balloon. Amos thought the crawlers looked like human muscle fibers. If these things are some kind of modified muscle cell, and we disrupted their cell structure, then the cells couldn’t contract. They couldn’t move. They couldn’t crawl.”

“So you dissolve this cytoskeleton,” Clarence said, “and that stops it? That’s it?”

“It’s not that easy,” Dan said. “Our normal cells also have cytoskeletons. Anything that would kill the crawlers would also kill our cells.”

“But it’s something,” Margaret said. “A human body can regrow lost cells, eventually repair damage, but these crawlers are so small, just a few cells. If we disrupt their cytoskeleton, they might just die. At any rate, we can stop them before they reach the brain.”

“I can order a screen,” Dan said. “We can get all the drugs that might work and have them ready when we get another host.”

“If we get another host,” Clarence said. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more.”

“Oh grow up, Clarence,” Margaret said. “You know G.o.dd.a.m.n well there will be more. There’s always more.”

Silence filled the trailer. Margaret rewound the moment in her head, realized how nasty she had just sounded.

“Sorry,” she said.

Clarence shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, Doc. Can we test these cytoskeleton wreckers on Betty’s remains?”

“There’s nothing left,” Margaret said. “We’re too late for that. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with this body. We’re going to burn it.”

She stared at Betty’s remains, the blackened, rotting, murderous remains.

“Uh, Margo,” Clarence said. “Don’t we want to . . . I don’t know . . .study it?”

She turned on him. “What, exactly, are we going to find? Huh? It’s another blackened corpse, Clarence. Apoptosis chain reaction. Boom, dead, done. That’s it. She has whatever the father had, so we’ll run chemical a.n.a.lysis on his remains. We don’t need this . . . this thing.”

She turned back to Gitsh and Marcus. They looked at her with pity in their eyes. They were saddened by Amos’s death, she knew that, but they just didn’t understand.

“Incinerate this b.i.t.c.h,” Margaret said. “I don’t want a single ounce of her left, you understand me?”

Gitsh and Marcus both nodded slowly.

She turned and walked out of the autopsy room.