Pandemic Page 92

But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?

Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day … at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.

What a difference a day makes.

Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how arrogant, to think she could outsmart such a power.

But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.

Margaret reached for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.

If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.

Then the carnage would begin.

STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT

The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.

On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.

“Doctor Feely, the latest results of your data-mining algorithm are coming in,” Kimber said. She had big, dark eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.

“Kimber, I have to wonder about your life choices.”

She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean with a face like that, why aren’t you in Hollywood making movies?”

She shook her head, but also blushed a little. “Doctor Feely, can we just go over the results?”

“Sure. Let’s hope there aren’t any.”

“Let’s hope.”

A pattern of medication consumption had revealed the Pinckney’s advanced level of infection. If the vector had somehow escaped the flotilla and made it to the mainland, the same consumption patterns would likely hold true. Through Kimber, Tim had programmed the CDC’s database to track spikes in the purchase of cough suppressant, pain medication and fever reducer.

Kimber typed with her mouth open. Damn, that girl had pretty lips.

“Here we are,” she said. “They just came in. Let’s see …”

She stopped talking. She just sat there.

“Kimber, what is it?”

She blinked, looked up at the camera, those dark eyes widening with fright.

“There’s a geospecific spike,” she said. Her words rattled with tension. “I read a nine hundred percent increase in cough suppressant, eleven hundred in pain meds, and a two thousand percent jump in fever reducer.”

Tim said nothing. He didn’t have to, because the numbers said it all — the infection had escaped quarantine. Could Cheng’s team on Black Manitou have fucked something up? That seemed impossible; Tim had seen the facilities there, knew how foolproof they were. Then how? Had something floated away from the Los Angeles, drifted for miles until it was picked up by some random boater?

He swallowed. There was still hope; maybe this was an isolated outbreak. A small town in Wisconsin, perhaps, something that Longworth’s semi-illegal DST soldiers could isolate and quarantine.

Tim closed his eyes. Before he spoke, he gave in to superstition.

God, please don’t let it be a major city …

“Where?”

She didn’t want to say it any more than he wanted to hear it.

“The one I just read you, that’s the biggest one … it’s from Chicago.”

Tim’s balls felt like they wanted to shrivel up and hide somewhere in his belly. Chicago — the third-largest city in America, the very heart of the Midwest.

“The biggest one? There are others?”

She nodded. “Statistically significant spikes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and” — she looked straight into the camera, dead into Tim’s eyes — “New York City.”

Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? It was already too late: nothing could stop it from spreading.

“Send me the data.”

He looked at the numbers himself, hoping Kimber had suddenly contracted a case of the stupids, hoping she was wrong.

She wasn’t.

Forty-odd hours had passed since the Pinckney and the Brashear went to the bottom. The statistical spikes indicated the Chicago infection had begun shortly after that battle.

The second-largest spike came from Benton Harbor, a town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. That infection looked to have started just a few hours after Chicago’s began, New York’s and Minneapolis’s three to four hours after that.

It had begun in Chicago. Benton Harbor was only two hours away … based on what Tim knew of incubation periods, someone could have driven there from Chicago. That matched what he saw in the data. But New York? A twelve-hour drive. The level of spikes indicated New York was only six to eight hours behind Chicago in the level of infection.

That meant one thing and one thing only: a carrier had been in an airport.

Chapter end