Infected

Zimmer’s eyes narrowed. "You best quit your joking, Phillips."

Dew smiled. "Gallows humor, forgive me. If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry, or something like that. So you’ve made some calls, you’ve talked to some people, and you understand that I have authority here, right?"

Zimmer nodded. "Yeah, but tell me what’s happening in this house. We’ve heard multiple fatalities. College kids. What the f.u.c.k happened here?"

"You don’t need to know that."

The detective took a step forward until he was almost nose to nose with Dew. The sudden move took Dew by surprise, but he stood his ground.

"f.u.c.k you, Phillips," Zimmer whispered, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be heard by the local cops standing only fifteen feet away. "I don’t care who called me. The chief, he’s a nice guy and would cooperate, do whatever you tell him to do, but me? I’m stupid and I like to pick fights I can’t win."

"That saying must look great on your Christmas cards," Dew said. "How about this one: my name is Bob Zimmer and I dream of getting fired?"

Zimmer just smiled.

"I’m old, I own my house, and I invested wisely. You have me fired and I get to go fis.h.i.+ng every d.a.m.n day. This may be a shock to you, on account of my obvious cosmopolitan nature, but I don’t exactly get a

daily how-ya-do call from the attorney general. I wanna know the danger level to my boys, and to this town, and I want to know now."

As if anything else could go wrong, here it was. A man Dew couldn’t bully. The guy wanted to protect his men first, worry about his career second. Dew knew he didn’t have to say jack to Zimmer, shouldn’t say jack to Zimmer, but they already had two cases in Ann Arbor: if this was the place the s.h.i.+t would hit the fan, Dew wanted allies who knew the terrain.

Dew took a half step back to end the face-to-face stalemate. "It’s bad, Bob. Real bad. You’ve got six dead kids in that house."

Zimmer’s lip curled up in a snarl. He also kept his voice low, a quid pro quo that instantly showed he’d keep most of the information to himself. "Six? If this is another little joke, now’s the

Dew shook his head. "Six. Four by gunshot, possibly tortured first. One other tortured for sure, probably killed with a hammer to the head."

"Jesus H. Christ. That’s five. The sixth?"

"The gunman, did himself," Dew said, then felt a surge of inspiration. "But we don’t know if he acted alone."

"Are you telling me there’s someone else out here? That why your men were at the other house?"

"We don’t know for sure. As soon as we get more information on that, we’ll let you know."

"And why?" Zimmer said. "Why are the feds involved?"

"The dead gunman inside may have connections to a terrorist cell. We think he was building a bomb. Maybe the other kids in the house found out, maybe they were part of it."

"And what did this terrorist cell want with a soccer mom and her son?"

"We don’t know," Dew said.

"You’ve got to give me more than that."

"No, Bob, I sure as f.u.c.k don’t. I’ve already stuck my neck out giving you this much. So stop pus.h.i.+ng me."

Zimmer looked away, then nodded. "Okay. So what do you need from us?"

"We need another hour. Then the scene is all yours. There will be another car here shortly, an agent and two science types to make sure there’s no biocontaminants inside the house."

"Biocontaminants? Like anthrax and s.h.i.+t?"

Dew shook his head. "We don’t know. We’re setting up a temp biohazard lab at the University Hospital. We’re taking at least one of the bodies there. Once the eggheads are done with their sweep, you can ID the kids and call the parents."

The muscles in Zimmer’s ma.s.sive jaw twitched. "We’ll provide whatever support you need. And if you find the motherf.u.c.ker who’s responsible for this... well, we’d be just plain happy to take care of him."

THE POISON PILL (PART TWO)

The Triangle on the collarbone no longer functioned. The fork had done too much damage, and the seedling simply shut down. When it died, it stopped making the chemical that maintained the crusty cap atop the reader-b.a.l.l.s. The deadly catalyst inside each ball kept eating at the cap—but now there was nothing to replace the material that dissolved away.

One by one the reader-b.a.l.l.s burst, spilling the catalyst into the Triangle’s body.

The catalyst caused two reactions: first, it dissolved cellulose; second, it caused apoptosis.

Apoptosis means that the cells of the body self-destruct. Normally this is a good thing. Billions of cells "choose" to self-destruct every day, because they are damaged, infected or their usefulness is at an end. The process can also be triggered by forces outside the cell, such as the immune system. Every cell in the body carries this self-destruct code.

The catalyst turned on that code in every cell it touched.

When those cells dissolved and released their cytoplasm into the surrounding area, they pa.s.sed on this self-destruct signal.

The result? Liquefaction. It started slowly, a few cells here and there, but each dead cell compromised the cells around it, creating an exponential increase that within forty-eight hours would dissolve an entire human body.

Fortunately for the host, the remaining Triangles kept producing the chemical that not only replenished their individual reader-ball caps, it also counteracted most of the apoptosis chain reaction in his body. Unfortunately for the host, however, the concentration of the catalyst in his collarbone was too strong to be stopped.