Pandemic Page 66

Although all the captives were unconscious, their bodies continued to change. Austin’s metamorphosis had kicked into high gear. Even worse, Clark’s triangles were hatching.

Tim had bailed, said he had other things to do. She was done arguing with him. Clarence, however, was there, right by her side.

“Margaret,” he said, “are you sure you have to watch this?”

She nodded. “I do.”

Someone had to be there with Clark, even if he was so doped up he had no idea what was going on. She’d exposed him to Edmund’s hydra-filled blood, naively hoping for a miracle. The hydras had begun to reproduce almost immediately. She didn’t know what, if anything, would happen next.

“Clarence, if you don’t want to watch, I understand.”

He shook his head. “If you’re going to endure it, then I’ll endure it with you.”

A noble gesture coming from a man who had left her. That was his nature, though — he’d have done the same for anyone he was assigned to.

Her heart raced. Maybe that was from the Adderall, not the situation, but the situation was enough to give anyone a coronary.

Austin lay on the floor of his cell. Brown fibers were sprouting from all over his young body, slowly crawling across his skin, sticking to both the metal grate deck and the clear glass walls. If she stood still and watched carefully, she could see those fibers moving, see new fibers pushing out of his body. It was like looking at time-lapse footage of a growing plant. At this rate, he’d be covered in a matter of hours. She was uploading a live feed of that to Black Manitou, making sure the information would survive even if things got really bad.

She was also sending live video of Clark. His triangles had started moving a few minutes ago. Blinking, twitching and jiggling as the tentacle-legs hidden inside him started to flex, to push, trying to drive the creatures out of the man’s body.

Margaret had seen a hatching once before, when three of the monsters had torn out of a woman named Bernadette Smith. Clark’s hatching seemed different … like something was wrong. The black eyes that had stared out with visible hate, visible intelligence, now widened, shut tight, widened again.

Almost as if the creatures were in pain.

The triangles started to lurch, to push against Clark’s pale skin. Out and back, out and back, a little farther each time, stretching his skin so taut it reflected the lights from above.

He lay there, unconscious thanks to the anesthesia — a mercy for his final moments.

Clarence shook his head. “This is awful.” His voice cracked with the strain. The horror show had gotten even to him. She reached her left hand out to the side, slowly, until it brushed against his. Without hesitation, he held her hand tight, their gloved fingers linking together.

The triangles jumped harder, so hard the man’s prone body shook, made his straps snap, made the solid metal table rattle like a snare drum.

This was the reason Perry Dawsey had cut into himself, over and over. He’d sensed this was coming and done what no man could do, what Clark hadn’t had the chance to do.

One of the triangles stopped jumping. It was on Clark’s left abdomen. The man’s skin sagged like a sock with a tennis ball inside. The hatchling wasn’t moving. Its eyes looked … lifeless.

The one on his shoulder started to vibrate.

Her fingers clamped down tighter on Clarence’s.

The shoulder triangle’s eyes widened, bulged … then one eye popped in a tiny splash of black and green. The triangle kept twitching but no longer pulled against the stretched and torn skin. It spasmed like a moth caught in a spider’s web.

She looked at a third, this one on his muscular thigh … it was swelling.

“It works,” she said, barely able to believe the words herself. “It’s the hydras, has to be … they’re killing the hatchlings.”

The sound of fists pounding against glass startled her, made her jump away. Clarence didn’t let go of her hand.

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy, the man who’d killed two people with a pipe-wrench, stared out. Madness wrinkled his face into a twisted mask. He’d been gassed and should have been under for at least another two hours — how the hell had he woken up?

He pointed at her.

“Your little trick won’t work on me, bitch! I know you put something in my belly, but you know what? I’m fucking fine, thanks for asking!”

Had his crawlers overcome the anesthesia? Counteracted it, somehow?

A slight pull on her hand — Clarence, pointing into Clark’s cell. The hatchling on Clark’s thigh had swollen to water-balloon proportions, triangular sides bowed outward against taut skin.

Skin and triangle alike ruptured, spurting purple and black and red a foot into the air before it splashed down on top of his thigh, sticking like thick mucus.

Then another pop, and another.

Then, nothing. No motion at all, not from Clark, not from his triangles … just the slow, oozing drip of blood and viscous fluids pattering down to the floor of his cage.

“Jesus,” Clarence said. “What do we do now?”

She had failed to save Clark, but his death wasn’t in vain — now she had a weapon, even if she did not yet understand how to use it. His death had served a greater purpose.

Margaret turned, met the crazed stare of Nagy. His death would also serve a purpose. And in truth, the man he’d once been had died days before.

“I’ll tell you what we do now,” she said. “We find something that will put Nagy under, and we dissect his brain so we can see if Tim’s yeast did anything to him.”

Chapter end