Contagious

Perry thought for a second, then nodded. He held up the bottle, gave it a single shake as kind of a salute, then limped toward his room.

She did want him asleep, but she also didn’t want to risk a second round of fighting. Perry acted different, defeated, but Dew probably hadn’t calmed down yet, and any number of insignificant words might set the two men off again.

The only reason Perry Dawsey was still alive was that Dew Phillips wanted him to be.

Margaret needed to make sure Dew didn’t change his mind.

THAT CAN’ T BE GOOD

As the Jewell family slept, the changes began.

The new seed strain behaved much like the one that had infected Perry Dawsey. At first, anyway. Demodex folliculorum —tiny mites that live on every human being on the planet—found the seeds. Since the seeds looked and smelled like the pieces of dead skin that made up Demodex’s only food, the mites ate them. Protein-digesting enzymes in the microscopic arachnids’ stomachs hammered away at the seed coats, breaking them down, allowing oxygen to penetrate and germination to occur.

And also like Perry’s infection, this round began in many microscopic piles of bug s.h.i.+t.

Each activated seed pushed a filament into the skin, penetrating all the way down to the subcutaneous layers. At the bottom of the filament, receptor cells measured specific chemical levels and density, identifying the perfect spot for second-stage growth.

Unlike Perry’s strain and those that came before it, these filaments released one of two chemicals into the bloodstream:

Chemical A if it was a hatchling seed, similar to the ones that infected Perry Dawsey and Martin Brewbaker.

Chemical B if it was the new strain.

The chemicals filtered through the host’s circulatory system. After a short time, the filament measured the levels of both A and B. This produced a simple majority decision: if there was more Chemical A, the hatchling seeds continued their growth and the new strain seeds shut down. If there was more Chemical B, the inverse occurred.

As it turned out, Bobby Jewell was the only one with more standard hatchling seeds. Five of his seven infections, in fact, were the

Betty, Donald and Chelsea Jewell would have the honor of incubating the new strain.

From this point the two strains followed almost identical growth patterns. Second-stage roots reached out to draw material from the subcutaneous environment: proteins, oxygen, amino acids and, especially, sugars. Both strains harnessed the host’s natural biological processes to create new microorganisms. There were the reader-b.a.l.l.s—cilia-covered, saw-toothed, free-moving things designed to tear open cells and examine the DNA inside, a.n.a.lyzing the host’s biological blueprint like a computer reading lines of software code. There were the builders —they created the flexible cellulose framework that in the original strain would become triangles. There were the herders —microorganisms that swam out into the body to find stem cells, cut them free and drag them back to that framework where the reader-b.a.l.l.s would slice into them and modify the DNA.

The new strain added to this list. It modified stem cells to produce tiny, free-floating strands of a strong, flexible micro–muscle fiber. These fibers would self-a.s.semble, binding together in specific, collective patterns. While Bobby Jewell’s body dealt with the activities of reader-b.a.l.l.s, builders and herders, his daughter, brother and niece would have to deal with the newest microorganism.

Chelsea, Donald and Betty would feel the effects of the crawlers.

CRAWL

Perry Dawsey’s seeds had come from batch thirteen. His triangles hatched in seven days. Due to constant design improvements, the seeds of batch seventeen needed only five.

Five days is an engineering marvel of self-organization, a testament to some seriously advanced technology. Consider it an upgrade to the old strain.

For the new strain, however, five days seemed like an eternity. Whereas Perry’s structures had to build many complex parts, the new structures produced only one thing.

Microscopic strands of modified human muscle.

Hacked muscle.

Each strand contained muscle cells, of course, but also tiny neurotransmitter secretors and a complex crystalline set of molecules capable of both sending and receiving rudimentary signals.

A hacked strand by itself was worthless. It could wiggle... and that’s about it. It could also send and receive “I am here” signals, which was key because the strands weren’t designed to work by themselves.

The “I am here” signals drew them together, almost like the last individual bits of cereal floating on top of your milk. The bits just float there, until they get close, and then surface tension yanks them together. When a strand detected an “I am here” signal from another strand, it wiggled toward it. The wiggling strands reached out to each other, touched and intertwined. Now their signal was twice as strong, drawing more strands, and so on.

A normal human muscle cell by itself is useless. Many cells working in unison, however, produce complex movement. The hacked strands followed a similar logic—the whole proved greater than the sum of the parts. When the hacked-strand collections reached a certain size, about five hundred microns wide, the “I am here” signal shut off.

A micron is one one-millionth of a meter. Five hundred microns is five ten-thousandths of a meter, or about two-hundredths of an inch. d.a.m.n small, but you can still see something like that with the naked eye.

If you could have looked inside the bodies of Chelsea Jewell, Donald Jewell and Betty Jewell, you would have seen something rather disturbing, something that looked very much like a human nerve cell. On one end, a long, thin axon. On the other end, branching dendrites spreading out like the tributaries of a river.