Contagious

Perry nodded quickly and energetically. He carefully followed all of Dew’s instructions, then set the weapon on the table in front of him. He raised both hands slowly off the gun to show he wasn’t holding it. He looked... relieved. Like all the pressure was off, like he’d just lost his virginity.

“Okay,” Dew said. “So you didn’t feel the gun jump in your hand?”

Perry shook his head.

“When I shoot it, I can feel it kick, but it’s not so bad,” Dew said.

“Strong as you are I shouldn’t be surprised you can’t feel it at all.”

“Uh... Dew?” Perry had a look on his face like he was afraid to ask a question. For f.u.c.k’s sake—he had cut monsters out of his own body, had taken two bullets and kept on fighting, and he was afraid to ask a question.

He doesn’t want to look stupid, Dew thought. He doesn’t want to look stupid in front of YOU.

“Spit it out,” Dew said. “You can ask me whatever.”

“Um... squeezing real slow is cool and all, I guess, but if I have to use this for real, don’t I want to fire faster than that?”

Dew smiled. “Sure, that’s a logical thing to ask. Not that you’ll have to use one of these for real, but just in case, reload the magazine and fire off the whole thing, fast as you can, okay? We’ll look at the target and you can compare accuracy. Then we’ll talk about how to fire in different situations. Sometimes you want one accurate shot, sometimes you want to lay down as much lead as you can as fast as you can. Okay?”

Perry smiled and nodded. A real smile for a change.

Still looked hideous with the st.i.tches, but at least it was genuine.

Dew took three steps back. He casually pointed the.38 at the floor, but he wasn’t about to put it back in the holster. Not yet.

Perry loaded two more bullets into the magazine, inserted it, then thumbed the slide release so it clicked home. He pointed the weapon and fired off seven shots in less than two seconds. It sounded like a machine gun. Dew watched the kid’s hand move, or rather he watched it not move. It might as well have been chiseled out

Perry ejected the magazine, checked the chamber, set the gun and the magazine down, then raised both hands off it again in seeming slow motion. Dew stared downrange. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He flipped the switch that brought the target back to the firing station for a closer look.

Perry had put all six shots in the center ring. The center X wasn’t even there anymore, just a big hole with ragged paper edges.

Perry smiled and looked down at Dew. “That’s pretty good, right?”

“Kid, are you f.u.c.king with me? Are you sure you’ve never shot before?”

The big man shook his head. “No sir. Dad wouldn’t let me touch any of the guns. But, I mean, it’s only hand-eye coordination stuff, right? Like a video game. I’ve always been good at anything like that.”

Dew stared at the target. It made sense. Dawsey had been an elite athlete. Would have gone first round in the NFL draft, probably first overall, had it not been for the knee injury that ended his career. He was so strong he didn’t even feel the.45 kick—he could just point the barrel accurately and keep it perfectly still while he emptied the clip.

Dew suddenly wondered if teaching Perry to shoot was such a good idea after all. If Perry could kill people with his bare hands, imagine what he could do with a weapon and plenty of ammo.

UGLY BETTY

Betty Jewell’s body faced a dire situation. Half-formed crawlers disintegrated, spreading apoptotic death. She was guilty of nothing more than being just old enough for her telomeres to shorten and suffer the minor damage that faces us all. Her telomeric breakdown wasn’t as bad as her father’s, of course, as he had been twenty-six years her senior.

Had she been younger, maybe as little as five years younger, it would have gone better for her.

Of course, “better” meant that more crawlers would have already reached her brain. Her brain-mesh was thin, emaciated—it needed additional crawlers to fully complete the change and send the signal. More struggled to reach her brain, either dragging half-rotted bodies along her nerves or trying to move past the dissolving corpses of crawlers that had already shut down. These survivors reached out their pseudodendrites, grabbing, pulling, sending their pain signals to gauge the response.

If Betty died, the crawlers’ mission failed, so they fought the rot with counterchemicals designed to neutralize the chain reaction. Her original infection spots were already a lost cause—there was too much apoptosis there to stop the process. The crawlers sent some of their number to stay at the edges, secreting the neutralizing chemical, trying to localize the damage and stop it from spreading. Inside these perimeters the rot dissolved flesh and scored bone.

That meant bad news for Betty Jewell’s face.

The crawlers didn’t consider the face a priority. Eyes to see, yes, mouth to breathe, of course. Those were important, as were her hands.

Hands could use tools.

Hands could use weapons.

The crawlers used their collective logic to split into several groups.

Some moved to the hands to try and save them, some moved to the brain to try and achieve the critical ma.s.s needed for the neural net, some to the eyes and ears and mouth to protect sensory input. A Betty who could not see, hear or talk could not defend, and that wasn’t a very useful Betty at all.

INTERFERENCE

Chatter.

That really was the best name for it. Perry heard chatter again. Coming from the south. South and... east? Yes, the east.

Somewhere out there, triangles were waking up.

So far he’d heard only snippets of thoughts, just a few syllables. The triangles didn’t know how to talk yet. They had to learn that from their hosts’ memories.