Pandemic Page 64

“To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the Los Angeles’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”

Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.

“We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”

“Don’t look at the cocoon,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”

Clarence leaned in. “The what?”

“His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But … something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.

Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy shit. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re massive — they look too damn big for his head. And the masseter … it’s at least four times normal size.”

The man’s entire skull looked distorted, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.

Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”

“Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly bigger if he’s not ingesting massive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”

“He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does … he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.

Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was absorbing the other?

“Fuck this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”

Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently, did want to know.

“Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffballs are for mass infection. What role would could this new thing play?”

Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”

Margaret sneered. “Then guess, goddamit. You’re the soldier, remember?”

Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word soldier it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.

Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said you got me there.

“Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the hell out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they can’t build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”

Tim focused on the image of the two left hands. Did one of them look … shriveled?

“So you think whatever is forming under that membrane might act as a new communication device,” he said. “A walking cell-phone tower or something?”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. “Or, possibly, the Orbital thought like a general. The units it had on the battlefield didn’t get the job done, so maybe it wanted something new.”

Margaret closed her eyes, hung her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We have three doses of the yeast, we give one each to Nagy, Austin and Chappas. Then we see what happens.”

It was time to fess up, and Tim knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

“We have two doses,” he said. “Not three.”

Margaret’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then widened in understanding.

“You took a dose?”

Tim shrugged. “If it’s any consolation, it tasted like a baboon’s ass speckled with hot bat guano.”

Clarence’s gloved hands noisily curled into fists. “You disobeyed orders.”

“Oh, whatever,” Tim said. “I’m not military, you goon, and what are you gonna do, cut it out of me? We can’t waste all of it on those guys when we don’t even know if it will help them. We need to know if it works on the uninfected, and that’s me.”

They were angry, sure, but Tim knew he had done the right thing. Not just the right thing, the smart thing. He wasn’t going to take any shit for it. He was ready to stand his ground, argue his case.

What he wasn’t ready for, however, was Margaret’s reaction.

She started to cry softly. Tears glistened on her cheeks — she couldn’t reach inside her helmet to wipe them away, so on her cheeks they stayed.

“Fine,” she said. “Since we don’t have the resources to treat them all, we choose two for the yeast.”

She looked up at Tim, her wet eyes screaming of hopelessness and anguish.

He felt small, insignificant.

“Nagy and Chappas,” she said. “Edmund’s blood is packed with hydras — we’ll try that on Clark since Clark is already so far gone. We’ll apply Edmund’s blood to Clark’s skin. We already know the hydras can replicate if they’re injected directly into the body. This method will let us test if they can also spread by exposure to blood, and, if that works, what impact they have on someone who has triangles.”

Chapter end