Infected

There, the cellulose slowly dissolved, the cells slowly destroyed themselves, and the liquefaction began.

And so did the rotting...

IMPRESSIONISM

"Come on, Doctor," Clarence Otto said, his voice tinny in her Racal suit’s headphones. "Suck it up. Now isn’t the time for you to go weak on me."

Margaret made it out of the living room, but only with the help of Agent Clarence Otto’s strong arm. He also wore a Racal, the plastics zipzipping against each other as he helped her walk. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but the three bloated college kids in the living room, tied to those chairs, their faces swollen, bluish-green skin — all of it was getting to be too much. And right after that little boy — that infested, crazy, sad little boy — burning himself alive. The only "good" news was that Dew’s men had been able to cover that one up. Just a gas leak, nothing to see here except for two dead bodies, move along, please.

Amos had taken the little girl to the temp biohazard lab at the University Hospital. Margaret could only imagine the child’s fear — they were trying to reach the father, but no luck yet. Amos would interview her and get what information they could, but at the end of the day she was just a little girl who didn’t even understand that her mother had been dead for two days.

Margaret clumsily shuffled through six photos, pictures of faces blown up from college ID shots. Six smiling faces, faces that would never smile again. One of the photos made her pause. The others had a posed smile, but this one showed a genuine laugh. It was a rarity, an excellent ID picture that captured someone’s real personality. The name on the bottom read "Kiet Nguyen."

The killer.

A tap on her shoulder. She turned to look at Dew Phillips. Once again he wasn’t wearing a suit — the sole unprotected person in a house full of Racal-covered soldiers and agents.

"I’ve already got pictures of all this s.h.i.+t," Dew said. "Come on upstairs. I figure you’ll want to see

Otto and Margaret walked up the creaking stairs and followed Dew into a bedroom. Inside, a Racal-wearing photographer took endless shots of a body tied to the chair. This one wasn’t as bloated as the others, clearly

a more recent kill. But the missing hands, the missing feet, the hammer sticking out of the skull, the pitted black skeleton lying on the floor... When would this end? Would it end at all?

"I’m not talking about that," Dew said, pointing to the skeleton. "I’m talking about those." He jerked his thumb to the other side of the room, to the wall.

Sketches and paintings covered the wall. She turned quickly, taking in the whole room in a new light — paintings, sketches, everywhere. This was the room of an artist. She turned back to the far wall. Three canvas paintings dominated the wall, all two feet by three feet.

The first, a close-up of that pyramid thing from the back of an American one-dollar bill. The highly detailed painting showed the circle, all done in shades of green. Someone had tacked a dollar bill to the wall, backside facing, obviously for comparison. Two things immediately stood out — the first was the glowing eye atop the pyramid. There wasn’t one triangular eye, but three, lined up corner to corner, so that the three glowing eyes made for one larger triangle. Their bases made yet another triangle of negative s.p.a.ce. The other change was the Latin phrase in the banner below the pyramid. What should have read Novus ordo seclorum, or "new order of the ages," instead read E unum pluribus. The cla.s.sic motto of the Founding Fathers: "From many, one."

The second painting looked more rushed, not as detailed. Black paint on the white canvas. Two stylized trees, maybe oaks or maples, reaching their branches toward each other. Between them on the ground, a single blue triangle.

The third painting, right in the center of the wall — that one stunned her.

Bodies twisted together. Well, no, not all bodies, some body parts. Here, a hand severed at the elbow, there, a thigh torn free from both hip and knee, strands of ragged flesh dripping half-coagulated blood streamers toward the ground. Horrid, twisted bodies, bound together with coils of razor wire that sliced b.l.o.o.d.y notches in tan skin. Triangles adorned all the bodies and the body parts, blue-black, more like textured tattoos than something that was part of the skin, or under the skin. A few faces looked out — some dead, some living and screaming. A strand of razor wire pulled tightly against the open mouth of a man, his eyes scrunched tight in agony.

The bodies acted like some kind of building material, creating an arch made of agony, fear and death. The arch rose up and gently curved to the right, off the canvas. Margaret found herself looking beyond the canvas, her mind subconsciously trying to fill in the curve’s path. In the background of the scene, she made out the descending leg of another arch — multiple arches, at least two, but there might be many more outside the frame’s reference.

She suddenly realized that two of the faces — and, judging by the skin tone, many of the body parts — were Kiet Nguyen himself.

"This is your self-portrait," Margaret said. "This is what you did with your time, before you killed all those kids."

"That’s Nguyen?" Otto asked. "You’re sure?"

Margaret handed him the photo.

"Sonofab.i.t.c.h," Otto said as he looked from the painting to the photo and back again. "d.a.m.n, Doctor, you’ve got sharp eyes. Okay, so if that’s Nguyen, who are the other people?"