Infected

What happened?

Where did he go?

Why doesn’t he answer?

His Triangles still couldn’t see, he remembered, because he remained fully dressed. They only sensed that the newborn was gone. He felt their random anger coursing through his body — he had to choose his words carefully.

He slid up his sweats.h.i.+rt sleeve and held it up to the lamp. "He hatched right onto a lightbulb. It was an accident." In his voice he heard that servile tone, the tone of Fatty Patty trying to placate him, the tone of his mother trying to avoid a beating. "It fried him on the spot."

His answer appeared to satisfy the Triangles. They said no more. The steady clicking slowed considerably. The baby Triangles were crouched down on their tentacles, resting their pyramid bodies against the carpet. Their eyes closed, they stopped moving — they appeared to be asleep. Only an occasional click escaped their still bodies.

The strange aroma of burned Triangle flesh filled the room, slightly overpowering the odors of Perry’s own rotting shoulder, the vomit and the smells of birthing that floated in the still apartment air. He felt his own Triangles fall asleep — their constant mental buzzing slowly fading away into near nothingness, like a barely audible car radio tuned to AM static.

He was alone, left to gaze upon the facedown, dead Fatty Patty. He knew he didn’t have much time. In addition to the three Triangles in his own body, he had five hatchlings to deal with, creatures that he knew nothing about. How long would they sleep? What would they do when they awoke?

Apart from the questions that raged through his mind, he knew one thing for certain — he wasn’t going to end up like the weakling lying on

the living-room floor, giant fist-size holes left in her corpse. If he had to die, it wouldn’t be like a victim, waiting nicely for the Three Stooges to rip out of his rotting body.

If he was going out, it would be on his feet, fighting every step of the way — like a Dawsey. His shoulder throbbed, his back itched and his mind spun feverishly, thinking of a way to kill them all.

69.

FLASHBACK

On Dew’s twenty-second birthday, he’d been getting p.i.s.s-faced drunk at

The white walls were streaked with chunks of bone, bits of hair and bright-red trails slowly dripping down the wall like living Rorschach blots. The blood and bits belonged to his buddies and the seven-year-old suicide girl who’d entered the bar wearing the latest fas.h.i.+on in homemade explosive backpacks.

That incident, that hated memory, was the first thing to enter his mind when he walked into Perry Dawsey’s apartment. So much blood — on the walls, on the floor, on the furniture. The kitchen floor looked like a pattern of brown and red rather than the original white. There was even blood on the kitchen table, some of which had slowly spilled over the edge and dried in a thin, brittle-brown stalact.i.te. The apartment crawled with Ann Arbor cops, state troopers and men from the Washtenaw County coroner’s office.

"It’s really something, huh?"

Dew looked at Matt Mitch.e.l.l, the local coroner who’d escorted him to the crime scene. Mitch.e.l.l had a crooked smile and a gla.s.s eye that never seemed to look the right way. His face held a small smirk, almost an expectant look, as if he were waiting to see if the gore would make Dew blow chow.

Dew nodded toward the body. "You got an ID on the couch-potato Jesus over there?"

"Couch-potato Jesus?" Mitch.e.l.l looked at the body, smiled, then looked back to Dew. "Hey, that’s pretty frickin’ funny."

"Thanks," Dew said. "I’ve got a million of ’em."

Mitch.e.l.l flipped through a small notepad. "The victim is William Miller, a coworker of Dawsey’s and apparently a friend — they went to college together."

"Isn’t this an awful lot of blood to come from one victim?"

Mitch.e.l.l gave Dew another quizzical look, but this time it held a bit of surprised respect. "That’s pretty observant, Agent Phillips. Not many people would have noticed that. You seen stuff this intense before?"

"Oh, maybe once or twice."

"We’re still typing all the spills. There’s more in the bathroom and even some in the bedroom. I’ll tell you right now it’s not all from the victim. You hit that nail right on the head."

Mitch.e.l.l walked into the kitchen, being careful not to disturb the cl.u.s.ter of evidence for technicians gathering samples from the floor and the table. "I think there’s another victim we haven’t seen yet," he said.

"Another victim? You mean Dawsey had another victim and he took the body with him?"

Mitch.e.l.l gave the apartment a sweeping gesture. "How else could you explain all this?"

"Ever think it might have come from Dawsey himself?"

Mitch.e.l.l laughed. "Yeah, right, from the perp himself. I’d like to see someone lose this much blood and keep on kicking."

"Find anything else?"

Mitch.e.l.l nodded and pointed to the kitchen counter. An evidence bag held a wrongly folded map. "Maybe something, maybe nothing. That map was on the kitchen counter. There were some tacky, b.l.o.o.d.y fingerprints, not dry yet, so he was looking at it not very long ago. He’d circled Wahjamega."