Contagious

He reached down and grabbed the man’s wallet. It was thick with cash. Rome put the wallet in his pocket. He looked up and down the street. Cops wouldn’t come, not unless someone drove along this street and saw two bodies on the ground. Cops would be out fast then, real fast. Rome looked at the waist-high fence. It was torn open just a few feet away.

Run, or cover it up?

He put his.38 in his pants, grabbed the fat man’s arm and dragged him to the fence. Dude must have weighed 250. Rome pulled the cut fence aside and ducked under the cross-post, dragging the man’s body through. He ducked back out under the fence, then saw the trail of blood on the snow.

f.u.c.k. Someone would see that as soon as the sun came up. Still, that gave him plenty of time.

But there was one body left.

Rome looked at his dead friend. He’d known Jamall since they’d both been ten years old. Rome had seen people die before, but not his friend.

He felt a tear slide down his left cheek.

“I’m sorry, man,” Rome said as he grabbed Jamall’s wrist and started to drag. “I promise I’ll look out for your moms. I hate to leave you here, but I gotta get out. I’d expect you to do the same, man, you know this.”

Jamall didn’t say anything. He just stared up at the sky as he slid along.

Rome dragged Jamall’s body under the fence. He didn’t put Jamall right next to the fat man, but rather about five feet away. He could do at least that much for his friend. Rome slipped under the fence one last time, grabbed both McDonald’s bags and hurled them over. Finally, he grabbed the guns and ran back to the car. He could ditch them in the river.

Less than five minutes after they’d first approached the man, Rome drove his car down the empty street.

LIKE LEGOS

Chelsea made Mommy and Mr. Burkle leave the Winnebago. She sat very still, very quiet, and focused all her attention on Mr. Jenkins.

She could sense his location. She could send Mommy to him... but it was too late.

Chelsea felt his life slip away.

Death.

She’d felt the deaths of Daddy, Mr. Beckett and Ryan Roznowski, but this was different. They were vessels, their only purpose

She took a deep breath and tried to deal with the amount of information flowing through her mind. It wasn’t easy. The infection had spread to many of General Ogden’s men. She constantly drew knowledge from them, searching their brains for new information.

Now she knew words that most seven-year-olds would probably never have heard, and definitely not understood.

Words like collective organism.

Mr. Jenkins had been part of that collective.

Chauncey, what will happen to Mister Jenkins now?

He will decompose quickly, so that no one can study him and use him against us.

But what will happen to his... to his interface? To all the little parts of you inside of him?

They are designed to destroy themselves as his body shuts down.

But we can use them.

No, Chelsea, they must decompose. Do not go near him. Stay hidden.

Chelsea thought. She reached out with her mind, connected with the little things inside Mr. Jenkins’s body. Could she? Yes... yes, she could.

Chauncey, I can change them. I can put them in different orders, like Legos.

Chelsea, I command you to stop this.

Chelsea ignored Chauncey. She loved G.o.d, but maybe G.o.d up in Heaven didn’t know how things worked down here on Earth. She sent a strong signal to the bits and pieces inside Mr. Jenkins, a signal in the form of two images.

One image of Mr. Jenkins, fat cheeks smiling, as he looked when he was alive. He was to stay that way. They were not to make him decompose.

The other image was of her favorite flower.

ICE CREAM WITH A G.o.d

At 0315, General Charlie Ogden’s Humvee rolled up to a battered plywood wall in a formerly abandoned building on At.w.a.ter Street in Detroit, Michigan. The plywood wall moved aside, the Hummer rolled in, and the plywood wall was put back in place.

The other vehicles would arrive soon. Ogden had ordered them to split up, come at the building from different routes, arrive at different times. A convoy would have drawn too much attention, but one green Humvee here, another there... at this hour no one would give a s.h.i.+t. As long as his men were under cover by 0500, they’d be fine.

The Hummer rolled deeper into the large, decrepit old warehouse, solid tires crunching on debris of wood, gla.s.s, trash and broken masonry. Two vehicles over by the far wall—a white and brown Winnebago and a filthy Harley Night Rod Special.

Standing in front of the Winnebago, a little blond-haired angel.

The motion of dozens of knee-high hatchlings, scurrying about on black tentacle-legs.

And the most important thing of all.

Eight curving columns in two parallel lines—four on the right, four on the left. The parallel opposites leaned toward each other. When they were finished, they would form four beautiful arches. Fat hatchlings sat on top of the columns. Each hatchling grabbed the top of a column with its tentacle-legs, then squeezed out a foamy brown material that hardened almost instantly. Each squeeze seemed to grow the column by six inches, maybe as much as a foot. If it hadn’t been blasphemous to think of such a thing, Ogden might have said it looked like the hatchlings were building the arches with their own s.h.i.+t.

When the hatchlings finished excreting, they looked thinner, triangular sides sunken in. The newly skinny hatchlings scurried down, instantly replaced by other fat ones. The skinny ones ran to piles of wood or to trash or to half-eaten, b.l.o.o.d.y corpses. They lowered themselves onto these things. Sharp, cutting parts slid out of their triangular bases and they started eating, pulling material up inside themselves with frightening speed.