Infected

The door to the black communications van flew open. A man ran out, a printout clutched in his fist. He slid on the frozen dirt road, regained his balance and slammed the printout down on the Humvee’s hood.

"That thing just heated up in a hurry," the squint said. "Here’s an updated infrared."

The picture looked almost the same, except the squint hadn’t outlined the strange symbol. He didn’t have to. Its lines blurred into a smudgy mess of reds, yellows and oranges.

"It just turned on," Dew said. "Move your men out, Ogden, right now. Move containment squads one and two into position as planned. We’re not waiting for the artillery or the third containment squad. We attack right now."

Perry moaned softly in his sleep. A dozen electrodes taped to his head and chest measured his every movement. Heavy canvas straps pinned his wrists to the hospital bed. His arms flexed and twitched every few seconds, pulling at the straps. An electrical beep echoed his pulse. The hum of medical equipment hung in the room.

A man in a Racal suit stood on either side of him. Each held a Taser stunner, but neither had any firearms or knives — or anything sharp, for that matter. Couldn’t be too careful. If Dawsey broke the straps, a feat that really wouldn’t have surprised anyone staring at his huge musculature, they would stun him into submission with fifty thousand volts from the Tasers.

They’d stopped the bleeding, but he was still touch and go; the bullets in each shoulder had been removed; his burns, including most of his head, were packed in wet bandages; they’d pulled the Triangle carca.s.ses from his arm and back; the visible rot had been sc.r.a.ped from his collarbone and his leg, but the damage continued to slowly spread — that one the doctors didn’t know how to cure. His knee was slated for surgery the next day.

And his p.e.n.i.s was packed in ice.

He moaned again. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his teeth bared in a wolflike predator’s warning. He was dreaming a dream that was both familiar and worse than ever.

He was in the living-room hallway again. The doors were closing in on him. The doors were hot; his skin blistered and bubbled, growing first red, then charring black, smoking with a putrid stench.

"You beat ’em, boy."

In the dream, Perry opened his eyes. Daddy was there. No longer skeletal, but st.u.r.dy and solid and as full of life as he’d been before Captain Cancer came a-courtin’.

"Daddy," Perry said weakly. He tried to take a breath, but the broiling air scorched his lungs. Every fiber of his being hurt. When would the pain end?

"You did good, boy," Jacob Dawsey said. "You did real good. You showed them all. You beat ’em."

The doors moved closer. Perry looked at his hands. The flesh seemed to sag, then melt into a flaming pudding. It fell from his bones and sizzled when it hit the ground. He refused to cry out. After you cut off your own c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s, all pain is relative.

The doors moved closer. Perry heard the creak of old wood and ancient iron, the low moan of hinges frozen shut with centuries of rust.

"It was hard, Daddy," Perry croaked.

"Yes, it was hard. But you did what no one else could’ve done. I never told you this before, but I’m proud of you. I’m proud to call you my son."

Perry closed his eyes as he felt the flesh of his body sag and start to fall away. The tunnel filled with an emerald-green light. He opened his eyes — Daddy was gone, and the doors were opening. There was something moving in there.

Perry looked inside... and started to scream.

They were almost here.

Dew and Charles Ogden lay flat on the snow-covered forest floor. It was cold as a b.i.t.c.h. Dew stared through night-vision binoculars, the green-tinted picture sending goose b.u.mps racing under his heavy winter fatigues.

"I don’t know what the f.u.c.k that thing is, but it can’t be good," he said. "Got any more wise-a.s.s cracks about Star Trek, Charlie?"

"Nope," Ogden said. "I’m good."

"We getting any radiation readings?"

Ogden shook his head. "No, at least not this far away. Geiger counters show nothing. Dew, what the h.e.l.l is that thing?"

"I got an idea, like I told you before, but I hope to all that’s holy I’m wrong." He couldn’t shake Dawsey’s mad ravings about a "door."

Dew glanced behind him. Two soldiers worked compact digital cameras, sweeping the lenses across the nightmarish scene. There were two such cameramen with each platoon.

"You getting all this?" Dew asked.

"Yes, sir," the men answered in unison, both their voices small and filled with awe.

The hatchlings were bustling around a pair of monstrous oak trees that dripped with melted snow. The trees’ dead branches formed a skeletal awning reaching out and over perhaps as many as fifty hatchlings of various sizes, some as small as the one he’d seen jump from the third-story apartment, some almost four feet tall with tentacle-legs as big around as baseball bats.

Jesus Christ. Fifty. And we thought we’d got them all. How many hosts to make fifty of these things? How many hosts went totally undetected until they hatched?

The hatchlings had built something strange. Something organic, maybe even alive. Thick, fibrous green strands — some the size of ropes, some the size of I-beams — ran in all directions, from the trunks to the ground to the branches and back again. There had to be thousands of them, like some monstrous three-dimensional spiderweb, or a modern artist’s jungle gym. At the center of all these strands, between the towering, sprawling oaks, was the construct that had generated the colored pattern on the infrared picture.