Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Intelligent eyes.

She was sitting on a stone bench in a little grove of foxtail palms and oversized succulents. A small water feature burbled quietly and I think there was even a butterfly. You could have sold a photo of that moment to any calendar company.

All around the grove was a geometric pattern of white rectangular four-by-seven foot stones. They fanned out from where she sat like playing cards. Four or five of them, covering several acres of cool green grass

The girl was wearing a white dress with a pale blue gardening apron. White gloves tucked into the apron tie. Her head was covered with the requisite blue scarf that every woman in the Church wore. The men all wore blue baseball caps with circles embroidered on them. Symbolic of the nomad world, I supposed.

I’d come dressed for the part. White painter’s pants, white shirt, blue cap.

Stun gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, hidden by the shirt. Syringe with a strong but safe tranquilizer. A lead-weighted sap if things got weird. A cell phone with booster chip so I could talk to Rosie, Lee or, at need, my backup. Three guys in a van parked around the corner. Three very tough guys who have done this before. Guys who are not as nice as I am, and I’m not that nice.

As I approached she set down the water bottle she’d been drinking from and watched with quiet grace as I approached.

She smiled at me. “You’re here to take me back, aren’t you?”

–4-

I slowed my approach and stopped at the edge of the little grove.

“What do you mean, sister?” I asked, pitching my voice so it was soft. The smile I wore was full of lots of white teeth. Very wholesome.

She shook her head.

“You’re not one of us,” she said.

“I’m new.”

“No, you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“

How

do you know?”

The girl looked at me with eyes that were a lot older than eighteen. Very bright lights in those eyes. It made me want to smile for real.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“No, I mean… what’s your name?”

“Oh. John Poe.”

“Poe? Like the writer.”

“Like that.”

“Nice. I read some of his stuff in school. The one about the cat, and the one about the guy’s heart under the floorboards.”

“Scary stuff.”

“I thought they were sad. Those poor people were so lost.”

I said nothing.

She nodded to the empty end of the bench. “It’s okay for you to sit down.”

I sat, making sure that I didn’t sit too close. Invading her little envelope of subjective distance was not a good opening move. But I also didn’t sit too far away. I didn’t want to give her a wall of distance either. You have to know how to play it.

We watched a couple of mourning doves waddle around poking at the grass.

“My parents sent you,” she said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“They care about you.”

Her reply to that was a small, thin smile.

“They want to know you’re okay,” I said.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Of course. They’re your parents.”

She studied my face. “You don’t look that naïve, Mr. Poe.”

And you don’t sound like an eighteen-year-old

, I thought.

Aloud I said, “If that’s something you’d like to talk about, we can. But is here the best place?”

“It’s safer.”

“Safer for whom?”

“For me,” she said. “Look, I understand how this is supposed to work. You come on very passive and friendly and helpful and you find a way to talk me into leaving the grounds with you. To have a chat at a diner or something like that. Then once we’re off the church grounds, you grab me and take me to my parents.”

“You make it sound like an abduction. All I want to do is bring you home.”

“No. You want to

take

me to where my parents live.” She patted the bench. “

This

is home, Mr. Poe.” She gestured to the lush foliage around us. “And this.” And finally she touched her chest over her heart. “And this.”

“Okay, I get that. Our home is where we are. Our home is our skin and our perceptions. That’s nice in the abstract, but it isn’t where your family is. They’re at your

family

home, and they’re waiting for you.”

Her smile was constant and patient. I wanted to break through that level of calm control because that’s where the levers are. Fear is one level. Insecurity, which is a specific kind of fear, is another. There are a lot of them.

“Mr. Poe,” she said before I could reach for one of those levers, “do we have to do this? I mean, I understand that you’re being paid to be here, and maybe there’s a bonus for you to bring me back. I know how Daddy works, and he likes his incentives. I think it’s easier if we can just be honest. You want to earn your paycheck. Daddy and Mommy want me back so they can put me in a hospital, which would make them legal guardians of me

and

my money. They think I’m nuts and you think I’ve been brainwashed. Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”

I had to smile. “You’re a sharp kid.”

“I’m almost nineteen, Mr. Poe. I stopped being a kid a while ago.”

“Nineteen is pretty young.”

She shook her head. “Nineteen is as old as I’m ever going to get.”

We sat with that for a moment.

“Go on,” she encouraged, “say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say anything. I just said that I wasn’t going to get any older. That probably sounds suicidal to you. Or fatalistic. Maybe it’s a sign of deep-seated depression. Go on. Make a comment.”

What I said was, “You’re an interesting girl.”

“Person. If you don’t want to call me a ‘woman,’ then call me a person. I’m not a girl.”

“Sorry. But, yes, you’re a very interesting person.”

“Which goes against the ‘type,’ doesn’t it?”

“Which type?”

“Well, if I was political, or if this was some kind of radical militant group, then you’d expect me to be more educated. You’d expect me to rattle off a lot of Marxist or pseudo-Marxist tripe. But the Church isn’t radical. Not in that way. We don’t care at all about politics. I know I don’t. We’re what people like you would call a ‘doomsday cult.’”

“If that’s the wrong phrase, tell me which one to use.”

She laughed. “No, it’s fine. It’s pretty much true.”

“What’s true?”

“The world’s going to end.”

“Because of Nibiru?”

“Sure.”

“And—what is it, exactly? People can’t seem to agree.”

“Well,” she said with a laugh, “it’s not a dwarf brown star.”

“It’s not?”

“You think I don’t know about this. You think I’m a confused little girl in a weirdo cult thinking we’re all going to hitch a ride on a passing planet. You think this is Heaven’s Gate and Nibiru is another Hale-Bopp. That’s what you think.”

Again, she wasn’t framing it as a question.

“Well, let me tell you,” she continued, “what they tell us here in the church. One of the first things they did was to explain how it couldn’t possibly be a brown dwarf because that would mean it was an object bigger than Jupiter. Even in the most extreme orbit, it would have been spotted, and its gravitational pull would have affected every other planet in our solar system.”

I said, “Okay.”

“And if it was a giant planet four times larger than the Earth, which is what a lot of people are saying on the news and on the Net, then if it was coming toward the Earth it would be visible to the naked eye. And that would also warp the orbits of the outer planets. And it can’t have been a planet concealed behind the sun all this time because that would be geometrically impossible.”

“You know your science.”

“They

teach

us the science here.”

“Oh.”

“That surprises you, doesn’t it.”

“I suppose it does. Why do you think they do that?”

“No,” she said, “why do

you

think they do it? Why teach us about the science?”

“If you want me to be straight with you, then it’s because using the truth is the easiest way to sell a lie. It’s a conman’s trick. It’s no different than a magician letting you look in his hat and up his sleeve before he pulls a rabbit out. They don’t let you look at where he’s keeping the rabbit.”

“That might be true if the church was trying to sell us something. Or sell us on something.”

“You’re saying they’re not?”

“They’re not.”

“So, they have no interest at all in your trust fund?”

“A year ago, maybe,” she said offhand. “Two years ago, definitely. Not anymore.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“Because Nibiru is coming.”

“You said that it wasn’t.”

“No,” she said, “I said that it wasn’t a brown dwarf or a rogue planet.”

“You’re group’s called the Church of the Nomad World. Emphasis on ‘world.’”

“I know. When they started, they were using the rogue world thing in exactly the way you think they still are.”

“Uh huh. And there are YouTube videos of your deacons talking about how the gravity of Nibiru is going to cause the Earth to stop spinning, and that after it leaves the Earth’s rotation will somehow restart.”

“Those videos are old.”

“Six years isn’t that old.”

“Old enough,” she said. “Nobody says that anymore. Not here. Besides, if the world were to somehow stop rotating the core heat would make the oceans boil. And you couldn’t restart rotation again at the same rate of spin. The law of the conservation of angular momentum says it’s impossible.”

“You understand the physics?”

“We all do,” she said, indicating the others who walked or sat in the garden. “We study it.”

Her tone was conversational and calm, her demeanor serene.

“Then what do your people believe?” I asked.

“Nibiru is coming.”

“But—”

“You look confused,” she said.

“I am confused. If it’s not a brown dwarf and it’s not a rogue planet, then what

is

Nibiru?”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That’s the right question.”

“What?”

“That’s the question you should have been asking.”

“Okay, fine, I’m asking it now. What is—?”

“It’s an asteroid,” she said.

“An asteroid.”

“Yes.”

“That you think is going to hit the Earth?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“It’s going to hit the Moon,” she said. “And the Moon will hit the Earth.”

“An asteroid that big and no one’s seen it?”

“Sure they have, Mr. Poe. A lot of people have seen it. Why do you think everyone’s so upset? It’s all over the news, and it’s getting worse. There are all those books about it. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Talking, sure, but there’s no evidence.”

“There are lots of pictures,” she said, her manner still calm. “But I guess you think they’re all doctored. Solar flares causing images on cameras, that sort of thing.”

“And they disprove those things as fast as they go up.”

“I know. Some of them. Like the one of Nibiru that was on YouTube a few years ago that they said was a Hubble image of the expanding light echo around the star V838 Mon. Yes, most of the images have been discredited. Most, not all. There are a bunch that still get out there, and NASA and the other groups say they’re faked.”

“They

are

fakes.”

“You say that, but you don’t actually know that, do you?”

I dug my cell phone out of my pocket. “I pretty much do. I have one of the top observational astrophysicists on speed dial. She’s been my information source for this ever since I began looking for you.”

Sister Light nodded. “Okay. Was she at the conference in Toronto?”

I grinned. “You keep up with the news. Yes, she was there.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rose Blum.”

She nodded. “She’s good. I read a couple of her books.”

“You

understood

her books?”

“Some of it. Not all the math, but enough. She’s right about almost everything.”

“Except Nibiru, is that right?”

“If she says it doesn’t exist, then no. If she told you that there was no dwarf sun or giant planet about to hit the Earth, then she was telling you at least some of the truth. But have you actually asked her if she knows anything about the asteroid heading toward the dark side of the moon?”

“I’m pretty sure she’d have said something,” I said, chuckling.

Sister Light shook her head. “I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.”

“I could call her.”

She stood up and walked over to one of the stone rectangles set into the grass. I joined her, standing a polite distance to one side. There was writing on the stones which I hadn’t taken note of before. I stepped onto the grass and read what was carved into the closest one.

Myron Alan Freeman.

It took me a moment, but I found the name amid the jumble of information I’d studied about the Church.

Freeman was a deacon, one of forty men and women who helped run the organization.

Below his name was the word: Peace.

I stiffened and cut a look at Sister Light. She nodded to the other stones, and I walked out into the field. Each of them had a name. Some I recognized, others I didn’t. All of them had the word ‘peace’ on them.

My throat went totally dry and I wheeled to face her. My heart was racing. I raised my shirt and gripped the butt of the stun gun.

“What the fuck is this?” I demanded.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like a fucking cemetery.”

She nodded. “That’s what it is.”

I drew my weapon but held it down at my side. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Every stone here?”

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“Yes?”

“Who killed them?”

Her face was sad. “Not everyone wants to wait for it to happen, Mr. Poe.”

“You’re saying they killed

themselves

?”

“Nobody here commits murder. It’s against our beliefs. Only God has the right to take a human life.”

“God… ?”

“The one true God, Mr. Poe. The one who has sent his angel, Nibiru, to end the suffering of all mankind.”

I looked for the crazy. I looked for that spark of madness in her eyes. The religious zeal. The disconnect.

I looked.

And looked.

“We believe,” she said. “We don’t require anyone else to. We don’t proselytize. We’re not looking for new members. We get a lot of them, though. People see the truth, they read through the lies in the media, the lies told by NASA and Homeland and everyone else. They see what’s coming and they know what it means. And they come to us.”

“For

what

?”

“Some of them want to be loved before it all ends. That’s why I’m here. My parents are so cold, so dismissive. I didn’t leave because I was acting out. I wasn’t going through teenage angst. I came looking for a place to belong so I could wait out the time that we have left among those who don’t judge, don’t hate, don’t want anything from me except whatever love I want to share. I’m only eighteen, Mr. Poe. I’ll be dead within a few months of my nineteenth birthday. I won’t have a future. I won’t have a husband or kids or any of that. I have this. This is the only chance I’ll ever have to

give

love. Here in the Church… I have love. I have peace. I have prayer.”

She turned away from the stone markers.

The grave markers.

“I want to live all the way to the end. I don’t want to commit suicide.”

“Why? What do you think is going to happen if this asteroid is real? Will you be transported off to a new world? Will you be elevated to a higher consciousness?”

I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“No,” she said simply. “When Nibiru hits the moon and the moon hits the Earth, I’ll die. It’ll probably hurt. I’ll be scared. Of course I will. But I’ll die here, among my friends, content with the will of God.”

I wanted to slap her.

I really did.

I wanted to hit her until she didn’t believe this bullshit anymore. We stood there in a churchyard surrounded by the graves of five hundred suicides.

“You need help,” I said. “Everyone here does.”

“No we don’t. We’ve found what we need. We don’t require anything else but to be left alone to pray, to love each other, and to die.”

She nodded to the stun gun I held.

“You can use that on me. You can take me by force. No one here is going to try and stop you, and you probably have help somewhere close. So… sure, you can take me against my will. If you do, and if they manage to lock me away somewhere where I can’t escape or can’t take my life, it won’t change anything. I’ll still die. We all will. However you’ll die knowing that you robbed me of being happy before I died.” She stepped close to me and looked up into my eyes. “Is that what you want, Mr. Poe? Is that what you really think is best for me? Will taking me out of here actually keep me ‘safe’?”

–5-

I got home around eight that night.

Last night.

I let the other guys go. Told him that we’d drawn a blank. Told them I’d call when I had a fresh lead. It was all the same to them. They were day players.

At my apartment, I cracked a fresh beer and took it out to the deck to watch the sky.

The moon was up. Three-quarter moon.

I drank the beer. Got another. Drank that.

Sat with the moon until it was down.

I tried fifteen times to get Rosie Blum on the phone.

Fifteen.

Cell. Office. Home answering machine.

Finally someone picked up.

Not Rosie, though.

It was her roommate. Rachael Somethingorother. A junior astrophysicist.

“Hello—?”

There was something about the way she said it. Tentative and a little weary. Like she was afraid of a call. Or of another call.

“Rachael? It’s John Poe,” I said. “Is Rosie there? I’ve been trying to get her for days and she’s not picking up. I really need to talk to her. Is she there?”

She took too long to reply.

Too long.

“John… I’m so sorry,” she said.

So sorry

.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It… it’s going to be in the papers. God, I’m sorry. I thought someone would have called you.”

“What’s going to be in the papers? What’s wrong? Where’s Rosie?”

“She’s gone… ,” she said. “I didn’t even know she

had

a gun. Oh god, there was so much blood… oh god, John… ”

I stared at the night. Listened to the voice on the phone.

“When… ?” I asked softly.

“Last night,” said Rachael. “When she and Dr. Marcus got back from Toronto. They came back from the airport and they went straight into her room without saying anything. I thought… well, I thought that maybe they were together now. That they’d hooked up in Toronto and, well, you know… ”

“What happened?”

“Like I said, I didn’t even know she had a gun until I heard the shots.”

“Shots?”

“Yes. Oh god, John… she shot him in the head and then put the gun in her… in her… ”

She may have said more. There must have been more to the story, but I didn’t hear it.

I dropped my hand into my lap, then let it fall down beside my deck chair. The phone landed hard and bounced away. Maybe it went over the rail. I don’t know. I haven’t looked for it.

I’m sitting here now, and I don’t know why I’m recording this. I mean… who the fuck am I leaving a record for?

I watched the news this morning.

Sixteen suicides. Eight of the speakers at the Toronto conference.

Eight others who were there.

Not counting Rosie and Dr. Marcus.

Eighteen.

All of them there to talk about Nibiru. To work out what kind of message to tell the world.

Eighteen.

I guess the message is pretty clear.

I’m going to leave this recorder here on the dashboard. Not sure what good it would do for someone else to find it.

Across the street I can see the wrought iron gates and the granite pillars. And beyond that the white stones in the green grass.

I can see Sister Light standing there, watching my car.

Watching me.

Waiting for me.

Smiling at me.

She lifts her hand.

A welcome gesture.

Okay, I tell myself.

Okay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Maberry is a

New York Times

bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He’s the author of many novels including

Code Zero

,

Fire & Ash

,

The Nightsiders

,

Dead of Night

, and

Rot & Ruin

; and the editor of the

V-Wars

shared-world anthologies. His nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Jonathan writes

V-Wars

and

Rot & Ruin

for IDW Comics, and

Bad Blood

for Dark Horse, as well as multiple projects for Marvel. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club; and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. He lives in Del Mar, California. Find him online at jonathanmaberry.com.

David Wellington – AGENT UNKNOWN

Wilmington, DE

“Fucking animals,” Whitman hissed, as a gray hand reached for the cuff of his pant leg. He kicked it away. For a second he looked down into the man’s slack face. Nothing there. He looked lower and saw the hypodermic still plunged into the man’s arm. He tried to tell himself the junkie was just sick, a victim of a disease, but that metaphor had never really held water for him.

A field agent for the CDC, Whitman knew what diseases really were and knew that addiction was a very different kind of disorder.

He waved his flashlight around the room, looking for anyone conscious enough to tell him why he’d come here. He saw three people lounging on pieces of broken furniture or just slumped on the floor, all of them as wasted as the one who’d tried to grab him. Someone in this house had called the police to report violent behavior. The caller had reported that the violent individual was non-communicative and had bloodshot eyes. That had been enough of a red flag for the local cops to send for Whitman.

He’d been in Philadelphia two hours ago. The latest situation report said the cops had contained the suspect and would wait until he arrived before making an arrest. So far, so good—there might be a chance to get a live subject here, and that might make all the difference.

Whitman hadn’t known what he was getting into, though, when he hit the ground with his sampling gear. He’d had no idea he was walking into a shooting gallery.

He heard the crackle of a police radio and looked up. A uniformed cop waved him over, a big guy with a bristly mustache and dead eyes. “Sergeant Crispen,” he said, and shook Whitman’s hand.

“How many people are in this house?” Whitman asked.

Crispen shrugged. “Maybe a dozen. Normally we would’ve moved ’em out of here but your people said to sit on ’em instead, keep ’em here.”

Whitman nodded. “They’ll need to be quarantined, just in case. Where’s the subject?”

“Through here,” Crispen said. He flicked on his own flashlight—the house had no working lights—and gestured down a short hallway. Two more cops stood at its end, flanking a closed door.

“Do you know who called this in?” Whitman asked.

“One of the other junkies—he’s pretty messed up. We have him in the kitchen. Bites and scrapes all over him; though with this sort… who knows—could be completely unrelated. We, uh, haven’t been able to get a statement yet.”

Whitman could well imagine. If the symptoms were bloodshot eyes and aphasia, probably everyone in the house was a potential subject. “Alright,” he said. “I’d better go in and take a look.”

“The one in there’s pretty psycho. I’m not sure it’s safe—”

Whitman cut him off by pulling the Taser out of his jacket. “I’ll be okay.”

The cop looked at the weapon in Whitman’s hand and just shrugged.

The door wasn’t locked. It looked like someone had kicked it open at one point and it had never been repaired. Whitman stepped inside the dark room and moved his flashlight carefully across the furniture. He saw a dresser with no drawers, a broken television set. On the far side of the room a pile of blankets had been heaped on the floor. It was moving. Just rising and falling slowly, as if someone was under there, breathing.

“What’s your name?” Whitman called out, in case this was a false lead. “I’m Whitman. I’m here to help. Can you speak to me? Can you tell me your name?”

There was no response. The pile of blankets kept breathing. Whitman took a step closer. “I need you to say something,” Whitman announced. “Can you come out of there? Are you sick?”

The idea of reaching into those blankets with his hands made Whitman’s blood run cold. Somebody had to make an assessment, though, and he’d drawn the short stick. He looked around for a piece of wood, for anything he could use to push the blankets back. For a second or two he moved the flashlight away from the blanket pile.

When he looked back the subject was up and running across the room, straight at him. In the flashlight beam the subject’s eyes were so red they glowed.

Whitman had a moment to register what was happening. Most of that time he spent thinking to himself,

teeth, nails, open sores

–the things you had to stay away from, the things that could get you contaminated.

He saw the teeth all right. They were yellow and broken and they snapped at the air and they were coming right for his throat.

He brought the Taser up but never had a chance to fire it. The subject lashed out with both arms, knocking Whitman’s hands away. His flashlight spun free of his grip and Whitman felt a hundred and twenty pounds of stinking flesh collide with his chest, knocking him down, spinning him sideways.

He felt those teeth meet around his gloved hand. Felt them press down.

There was a gunshot, incredibly loud and bright in the dark room, and then people were running and shouting and Whitman’s heart beat so loud in his ears he was sure it would burst. He recovered himself and scrambled to his feet, raced out the door, down the hall, following the back of one cop who was running away from him, running toward the front door of the house, and then they were outside in the blinding sunlight. He threw one arm over his eyes but kept running. Ahead of him the street sloped down a hill, cheap houses and check cashing stores on either side, high tension wires strung overhead. He saw the cops, all three of them, and then he saw the subject, for the first time getting a clear look.

It was a woman, no, a girl of no more than twenty, dressed in nothing but an open flannel shirt and a stained pair of panties. In the sunlight her eyes just looked bloodshot. She staggered down the hill, her legs not quite working properly, her face turning in one direction, then the other. Her hair was a dark thicket of tangles that barely moved as it swung around.

Crispen and his men had drawn their guns and were shouting for her to stop. Whitman cursed as he dashed past them. If she got away—if she ducked into an alley—they might never find her again. He didn’t waste his breath shouting at her. What was left of her brain wouldn’t be able to make sense of words. He got as close as he dared and lifted the Taser, pointed it at her back.

She started to turn, to look at him, and she was hissing. Ready to fight.

He pulled the trigger. The two tiny barbs went right through her shirt, and the Taser made its horrible clacking sound. She dropped to the pavement, twitching and kicking, but she didn’t scream. She didn’t make any sound at all.

Behind Whitman, Crispen came running up, his weapon held in both hands. “You got her,” he said, over and over again, “you got her,” and Whitman could hear the relief in the cop’s voice.

“This time,” Whitman said. “Yeah.”

• • • •

Atlanta, GA

Dan Philips watched from an observation suite as they brought Subject 13 in. She was alive—that was good. It was crucial.

Twelve bodies lay in a morgue deep inside the CDC complex that was Philips’ headquarters. Twelve bodies, or what was left of them. Bit by bit, organ by organ, they were being dismantled, their cells broken down in centrifuges, their bacterial and viral load analyzed by legions of technicians with scanning electron microscopes. But dead bodies could only tell you so much.

On his television screens Philips watched his field agent sign the new subject in. Nobody bothered to read her any rights or even give her any comforting words as she was shoved into a negative pressure room. Nobody touched her if they could help it. They’d bound her hands behind her back and put a plastic mask over her mouth. She was a known biter and the CDC didn’t mess around with those.

The room was kept at a slightly lower atmospheric pressure than the corridor outside, so that when the door was opened air flowed in rather than out—hopefully making sure any pathogens she carried stayed inside with her. No one was allowed into the room without wearing a level two biohazard suit. Cameras on the walls tracked her at all times, and other instruments monitored her body temperature, her heart rate, and her blood oxygen levels.

Director Philips had been a neurosurgeon, once, a long time ago. Now he had the perfect hair and twinkling eyes of a politician. He didn’t smile as Whitman stepped into the observation suite. For a long while they just watched the subject together.

Not that there was much to see. Once the suited technicians left the room, she seemed to simply collapse. With no one to bite or attack, she just crouched on the floor—ignoring the bed they’d provided for her—and rocked back and forth in what was obviously a self-comforting gesture.

Eventually, Philips cleared his throat. “You must have made record time.”

Whitman nodded. Of the twelve bodies in the morgue, not a single one had died of natural causes. Ever since they’d alerted the police networks to the new disease, Whitman was called in every time the cops found a potential subject. But it could take him hours, even days, to arrive after he got the call. The subjects were so violent the police usually had to shoot them to keep them from hurting anybody. Cops didn’t mess around with biters, either. “I was close by, and we had a helicopter ready to lift off. Everything kind of came together.”

“This is what we need,” Philips said, sighing in relief. “This is what we need to beat this thing, I know it.”

The disease that afflicted Subject 13 was definitely some kind of brain fever, they were sure of that. But that was almost the only thing they knew. When the cops had killed the previous twelve they’d ruined the best chance the CDC had to study this thing as it progressed. Subject 13 could be a very important catch.

Bringing her in alive also meant they could get some epidemiological data, too. They couldn’t question her—like all of the subjects, she was completely incapable of speech—but they could study her clothing for any trace of environmental toxins, look at her teeth to get an idea of her diet. The clue to identifying the pathogen could come from anywhere.

They definitely needed some kind of clue. 13, and the twelve bodies in the morgue, were just the tip of the iceberg, they were sure. There was no way to know how many other people had been infected with the pathogen, how many people they’d missed. Early cases might have been dismissed as PCP overdoses or just psychotic breaks. Subjects might have wandered out into traffic and gotten themselves killed before they were diagnosed.