“Shoot the heart,” Moore cried out, and when the screamer leaped at Andrew, hands outstretched, it left its upper torso a wide-open, vulnerably exposed target. Andrew’s index finger flexed inward, and again, the pistol bucked against his palm. This time, when the bullet dropped the creature, it stayed down.
“Jesus,” Andrew whispered, shuddering as he stumbled back into the wall for support. He couldn’t bring himself to lower the gun and stood there, arms outstretched, shaking like a leaf.
“Daddy!” Alice flew down the hallway into Moore’s arms.
He scooped her up, letting her legs lock around his waist, her arms around his neck as he hoisted her to his chest. Looking past the tangled mess of her hair, he said to Andrew, “Did you get it this time?”
Limping forward, cautious, Andrew prodded the fallen screamer with his foot, turning it onto its back. He could see the bullet’s point of impact left of the sternum, the putty-colored flesh puckered in and peeled back around the sunken, bloody crater.
“Yeah.” At last, his arms drooped and he turned, meeting Moore’s gaze. “I got it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“We need to keep moving,” Moore said grimly. Obviously not trusting Andrew at his word this time, he’d checked out the dead screamer personally, satisfying himself that the nine-millimeter slug had indeed punctured its heart. Standing, he wiped his hands on his pant legs, then reached for Alice.
“What the hell was that?” Andrew asked. “You know, don’t you?”
Moore didn’t answer, but when he tried to brush past Andrew, hauling Alice in tow, Andrew caught him by the shoulder and shoved him back against the nearest wall. “What was that thing?” he demanded again. “Was it one of the soldiers like O’Malley?”
Moore tried unsuccessfully to shrug away. “It’s part of what’s left of Alpha squadron.”
It took Andrew a moment to remember. “The ones Prendick sent home? The ones with Rocky Mountain spotted fever?”
Moore nodded. “They weren’t sent anywhere. They were the first test subjects.”
At these words, test subjects, Andrew felt his skin crawl uneasily. “For what?”
Moore didn’t respond, his brows narrowing stubbornly, and Andrew pushed him into the wall again. “Answer me,” he snapped. “Whatever happened to O’Malley, is that what happened to those poor sons of bitches, too? What did you do to them?”
“It’s complicated,” Moore said.
Andrew shoved the gun into his face. “Try me.”
“Do you know anything about bioengineering?”
“No. Try me anyway.”
Moore sighed. “They were infected with a retrovirus, a specific, synthesized microorganism that can imprint its own genetic sequencing into a foreign cell, transforming that cell into one that’s like the virus. It’s a complete transformation, erasing whatever genetic code it’s replacing and proliferating until the entire host organism is overrun.”
“You mean a germ did that?” Andrew asked, pointing with the barrel of the nine-millimeter at the dead screamer.
Moore awarded him a glance that suggested he felt like he was trying to teach one of his chimps or Siamangs to play Candyland. “A highly specialized, man-made germ,” he replied. “One that affects only a specifically targeted segment of susceptible hosts.”
Between you and me, this is the strangest assignment I’ve ever had.
Dani had told Andrew this and her words came to his mind now.
We’re all a hodge-podge of different units, different companies, different regiments. I didn’t know any of these guys up until two months ago when we all got here.
“The soldiers,” he said. “That’s why they all came from different units, why there are so few of them. You’re saying they were hand-picked to be here.”
“From their medical records, yes.” Moore nodded. “They were each identified as a potential host.”
A host. The term was cold, brittle, callous. Expendable, Andrew thought. It sounds like something expendable.
“Why them?” Unspoken but even more desperate, from inside his mind: Why Dani?
“Because,” Moore said. “According to their medical records, none of them have ever been exposed to human-specific varicella zoster virus. Chickenpox.”
Andrew blinked, surprised and bewildered. “You’re kidding, right? You made some kind of mutant form of chickenpox?” This sounded as asinine and preposterous as Suzette’s assertion O’Malley had been stricken by some kind of side effect from strep throat.
“No,” Moore said. “But what I made shares similar enough properties that if introduced into a subject who has been exposed to varicella or its vaccine, they won’t be infected. Which, for the record, does not include you.”
Startled, Andrew blinked. “What? How do you know if I’ve had chickenpox or not?”
Moore smirked. “Because Prendick let you live. You can’t be naïve enough to believe that he’d have let you survive even a night at this compound if there wasn’t some reason for it, something in it for him. There’s a fairly simple blood test that shows whether or not your body has the varicella antigens, a type of immunological memory cell, you could say, that helps prevent future infections. And if you’d tested positive for those antigens, Prendick would have shot you himself.”
Suzette had drawn a blood sample from him on his first night at the facility. He hadn’t understood why at the time but it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask.
Then he remembered something, a flash of childhood memory, his mother taking him to a neighbor’s house for a party.
“Whose birthday is it?” he’d asked his sister.
“No one’s,” Beth had answered. “It’s a chickenpox party. Billy Cramer’s got it and they think you’ll catch it, too. Then you won’t have to worry about it later.”
But although Andrew had spent the afternoon playing with Billy and the rest of his friends, he hadn’t caught chickenpox. In fact, he’d made it through at least two such parties in his youth unscathed and had never been infected.
Which means I could still get it. Horrified, he looked down at his shirt, splattered with virus-laden gore. Chickenpox spreads through contact.
“Don’t worry.” Moore made a chuffing sound, dismissive and derisive. As if reading Andrew’s mind, or at least, the stricken expression on his face, he said, “I specifically engineered the strain to control its communicability. You can only be infected when it’s directly injected into the cerebrospinal fluid or cranial sinuses.”
“You were going to do that to me?” Andrew asked. “Make me one of those things, too?”
“Do you have any idea how rare it is for an adult in this day and age to have had no exposure to either the varicella virus or its vaccine?” Moore asked, again with a smug sort of glance that suggested he thought Andrew wouldn’t have much of an idea about anything. “You, Mister Braddock, are among a very select tier of the American population, one of only five percent in the entire country.”
And of all the backwoods in all the world where I could’ve run my damn Jeep off the road, I wind up in this one, Andrew thought. Lucky me.
“If I’m so rare, why would the government want a weapons-grade chickenpox virus?” he asked. “You said if someone’s had it or been vaccinated, they can’t catch your bug.”