Contagious

“Dawsey, gonna stay in your room tonight, or are you going to find some more kids to kill?” Dew asked.

“I thought killing babies was your gig.”

Dew shook his head. A G.o.dd.a.m.n baby-killer reference. He’d walked right into it, sure, but even drunk, that kid really knew how to push his b.u.t.tons.

“You know what?” Dew said. “I’m too old and too tired for this. I’m going to bed. You go drink yourself into a coma. Just don’t die on me, or I’ll get into trouble.”

He walked to his room, keyed in, then shut and locked the door behind him, leaving Dawsey standing in the snow.

• • •

Perry nodded. Don’t die on me. That’s all he was to these people, an a.s.set. A freak. He keyed into his room, shut the door, then fell on the bed. He dropped his beer. It spilled on the carpet. That was okay, he had two more. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. It was spinning pretty good. Without looking away from the ceiling, he felt for another bottle, found it and twisted off the top. He upended it. Most of the beer splashed on his face or landed on the bed, but some of it went into his mouth, so it wasn’t all bad.

“I got some more, Bill,” Perry said. “I killed those motherf.u.c.kers.”

Bill didn’t answer. He never answered direct questions. He just piped up unexpectedly from time to time, told Perry to get a gun, to kill himself.

Bill. Why the f.u.c.k did Margo have to bring him up? Perry drank to forget Bill. Well, it didn’t work. Nothing Perry ever did worked. Except when he wanted to hurt someone. To kill someone. That worked every time.

What the f.u.c.k was Dew’s problem, anyway? Pretending to get all p.i.s.sed about that family. Why didn’t Dew and the others understand? Those people weren’t human anymore. They were weak. They didn’t have discipline. That meant they needed to die. If one of them, any of them, was even trying to cut out the triangles, then Perry would let them live. Maybe. But it didn’t matter, because so far no one had fought.

No one but him.

Why? Why was he special? He knew why: because his drunken, f.u.c.ked-up, wife-and child-beating father had toughened him up with a strap.

Perry set the beer bottle on the bed to the right side

He didn’t feel a thing for the infected. Not a thing. That freakin’ toddler had rushed him, for crying out loud. They weren’t just infected, they were stupid.

That was the last thought to go through Perry’s mind before he pa.s.sed out for the second time that night.

THE BACKYARD OF CHUY RODRIGUEZ

Chuy Rodriguez lived at the corner of Hammerschmidt and Sarah streets in South Bend, Indiana. Chuy had a wife, Kiki, and two kids: John, sixteen, and Lola, fourteen.

In their backyard stood a spa.r.s.ely leaved oak tree suffering from some kind of bark rot. The tree had another three years, maybe five, and Chuy was already dreading how barren his backyard would look when he had to cut it down.

Chuy’s tree, however, wasn’t really the point of concern. For that you had to look directly above the tree.

Some forty miles directly above it.

If you could look up there, even with a very high-powered telescope, you might not notice a little blur, like a tiny heat s.h.i.+mmer. That s.h.i.+mmer came from visible-light wavelengths..h.i.tting an object, sliding along its surface, then continuing on their way with almost their exact original trajectory.

This object wasn’t truly invisible. Were it some ma.s.sive thing taking up half the horizon, everyone would have spotted it by now.

Since it was just a bit bigger than a beer keg, however, no one noticed.

This object was inanimate. Cold. Calculating. It had no emotions. If it did, when it felt the Marinesco gate vanish in a ground-rending explosion, it probably would have said, Awww f.u.c.k, not again.

The object’s shape had once been quite smooth and polished, like a teardrop with a point on both ends instead of just one. But that had been at launch, before the long journey that brought it into a geostationary orbit above Chuy Rodriguez’s diseased oak tree.

s.p.a.ce isn’t really empty. It’s got stuff in it. Stuff like dirt, rocks, ice, various bits and pieces—only those pieces are spread really, really far apart. If you travel far enough through that not-so-empty s.p.a.ce, you’re going to run into that stuff. Depending on how fast you’re going, hitting even a teeny speck of dust can cause quite a bit of damage. The double-teardrop rock had been engineered to take that damage and keep on flying. The engineering worked, mostly, but the object’s pitted and cracked exterior bore witness to a design adage true anywhere in the universe—you can’t test for everything.

It had come so close to completing the mission. Once again, however, stopped before the gate could open... once again, stopped by the rogue host.

Stopped by the sonofab.i.t.c.h.

Its mission was simple in concept. Travel straight out from the home planet and search for signals that indicated sentient life. s.p.a.ce, as mentioned before, is big. Searching s.p.a.ce for a suitable planet would require an investment far greater even than the economy-breaking project that had launched this object so long ago. There was one way, however, to narrow the search for planets that sustain life—find planets that already have it.

It did that by tracking broadcast signals.

Broadcast signals meant several things. First, they meant a planet that could support advanced biological life—predictable ranges of gravity, density, temperature, gases and liquids. Second, broadcasts meant a predictable range of resources—odds were, a planet of nothing but silica and sulfur could not create technology capable of sending signals into s.p.a.ce. Finally, and perhaps most important, broadcasts indicated a large population capable of performing technically advanced tasks.