Contagious

. . . then she was gone.

And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he’d never get her back, not unless she wanted it to happen. She had become too powerful.

“I lost her,” Perry said. “I lost Chelsea.”

1:16 P.M.: Bravo Positions, Part Two

Margaret crouched at the base of a small abandoned building, watching dust roil through the air around her. A block away, the Globe building had just exploded and collapsed, sending a thick dust cloud rolling through the abandoned lots. She wondered if the cloud carried the contagion—but she and Clarence were safe in their suits. The sticky tape on her hands would keep the glove cuts sealed. A white-trash version of BSL-4 safety, but it worked nonetheless.

Clarence moved along the sidewalk. His right shoulder stayed close to the graffiti-covered brick wall, but he didn’t touch it—she had warned him about sliding across anything, even leaning on things for cover should he wind up in a shoot-out. The tough hazmat suit could still tear if dragged across any jagged metal.

Helicopters soared overhead, guns fired, explosions made the ground vibrate—war had come to Detroit.

Clarence peeked around the corner. He watched for a few seconds, then reached back and gently pulled her hand, urging her forward until she could see for herself. Down the block, on the other side of the intersection, stood yet another abandoned building. A corner unit, battered front door opening out at an angle toward the intersection of Franklin and Riopelle. Light gray, two stories, boarded-up windows; it looked like an old restaurant or bar, maybe a corner store from decades past when this area had more buildings than abandoned lots.

“That’s where the gunmen took the hostages,” he said.

“What’s in there?”

“I don’t know. If the gate is gone, Ogden has to know it’s over, that he lost. He filled the building with hostages so we can’t drop a big f.u.c.king bomb on his a.s.s.”

“Or maybe they’re trying to convert those people? Infect them?”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. “Maybe some of them, but it makes more sense to have regular people as hostages. Otherwise they have no negotiating power.”

“What do we do now?”

“We’ve got to get help. Listen, you watch where those soldiers went in, and don’t move. Ogden’s headquarters blew; our guys had to cause that. I’ll slide around to the other side of this building—the gunmen can’t spot me from there—see if I can flag down our guys and get them over here.”

Clarence slowly ducked away from the corner. Margaret knelt and watched. Every twenty seconds or so, a car drove through the settling dust, full of people hunting for a place to hide. When they saw her or Clarence, saw their biohazard suits, the cars instantly sped up to get away. The faces inside looked terrified, sh.e.l.l-shocked. Nothing she could do for these people, not without making a scene, making herself visible to the gunmen in the building across the street. She silently prayed that all the cars would just keep driving.

Then, coming up Riopelle from the direction of the river, a motorcycle. A squat one, American and loud, kicking up a low cloud of the still-falling dust. A man driving, someone behind him, someone small.

“Keep going,” Margaret whispered. “Don’t stop here, keep driving.”

The motorcycle stopped right in front of the hostage building.

Margaret tensed. She couldn’t let those people go inside. They got off the bike, and Margaret saw the small person was a little girl with curly hair.

Blond.

Chelsea Jewell.

And the man—Colonel Charlie Ogden in street clothes.

They ran into the building.

Margaret whipped behind the corner, out of sight.

Clarence was already coming back from the other side. He wore a wide smile, an expression of near disbelief.

She grabbed his arm. “I just saw Chelsea Jewell.”

His smile widened. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure! It’s her. Why are you smiling?”

He actually laughed. “I don’t know. Too much death, stress, something good finally happens, and now I can’t stop grinning. Go take a look—you won’t believe who’s coming this way.”

Margaret traded places with him. Still moving slowly, cautiously, she walked to the other side of the building and looked around the corner.

And understood Clarence’s joy.

Because she felt it, too.

Coming across an empty, abandoned city block, running through the settling dust, she saw Dew Phillips, Perry Dawsey and soldiers carrying machine guns.

THE CAVALRY

If you went back in time, say, six weeks, to a point when Margaret Montoya stood in an apartment parking lot in Ypsilanti, Michigan, scared for her life because a gigantic, burned and brutally wounded infected man named Perry Dawsey was trying to tear through her biohazard suit, his wild eyes staring, his spit and blood smearing her visor, his cracked lips screaming open that f.u.c.king door and let ’em in . . . if you could go back to that moment and tell her there would come a time where she would feel infinitely happy and relieved to see his face, she wouldn’t have believed you. You could have bet her on that. Bet her with the same bill that traded hands so frequently between Clarence and Amos.

And you’d have won twenty bucks.

Perry, Dew and maybe twenty-five heavily armed and grim-faced soldiers came running down Woodbridge Street. The cavalry to the rescue. The men fanned out, working like the fingers of a hand, some pointing guns across the street at the boarded-up windows of Chelsea’s building, some darting across that same street to the building next to hers, backs against brick walls, slowly inching to the corner, some continuing down the street, probably to surround the place. Dew and Perry ran right up to her.

“Margaret!” Perry said. “We got the gate. Are you okay?” He hugged her, suit and all, picking her right up off the ground.