She’d fought this process by testing multiple drugs that inhibited caspases. The magic formula turned out to be a trial drug called WDE-4-11, which successfully shut down the apoptosis chain reaction. That saved human tissue, although the triangle corpses still decomposed within hours.
That meant she could operate on a live hosts, remove the triangles, then use WDE-4-11 to stop the apoptosis. Despite Perry’s naive, violent beliefs, she could save them. When she did, however, saving the tissue was only one step—she also had to deal with the mental effects. For that she had a battery of mood-controlling drugs at her disposal, including drugs that had tackled the chemical imbalances in Perry’s brain and returned him to a semblance of sanity.
Or so she’d thought at the time.
She focused her attention on cutting the triangle free from the dead boy’s leg. The human tissue would keep, but the triangle would be black ooze in only a few hours, and she needed to move fast.
MEAN DRUNK
Dew parked the Lincoln in front of Perry’s motel room. Fluffy snowflake clusters had replaced the rain and hail. As the saying went, if you don’t like the weather in Wisconsin, just wait ten minutes. Dew had heard the same kinds of jokes about Michigan, Ohio and Indiana—and they were all true.
Perry sat in the passenger seat. He’d passed out with a beer in his left hand, his right still wrapped around a tattered six-pack that had only two bottles left. Dew didn’t want to act as a chauffeur for this psycho piece of shit, but he wasn’t about to put someone else at risk.
“Wake up,” Dew said.
Perry didn’t move.
Dew put the Lincoln in reverse, backed up about five feet, put it in gear, then gunned it and jammed on the brakes. Perry’s big body lurched forward against the seat belt.
His head snapped up, and he blinked in confusion.
“Home sweet home,” Dew said.
Perry turned and looked at him with drunken eyes. “Thanks, Pops,” he said.
Dew said nothing. Perry stared and smiled for a few more seconds, seeming to wait for a response. He didn’t get one. When he got out, the Lincoln rose up at least six inches. Goddamn, but that kid was big.
Dew shut off the car and got out. His room was right next to Dawsey’s. Just like always.
“Dawsey, gonna stay in your room tonight, or are you going to find some more kids to kill?” Dew asked.
“I thought killing babies was your gig.”
Dew shook his head. A goddamn baby-killer reference. He’d walked right into it, sure, but even drunk, that kid really knew how to push his buttons.
“You know what?” Dew said. “I’m too old and too tired for this. I’m going to bed. You go drink yourself into a coma. Just don’t die on me, or I’ll get into trouble.”
He walked to his room, keyed in, then shut and locked the door behind him, leaving Dawsey standing in the snow.
Perry nodded. Don’t die on me. That’s all he was to these people, an asset. A freak. He keyed into his room, shut the door, then fell on the bed. He dropped his beer. It spilled on the carpet. That was okay, he had two more. He rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. It was spinning pretty good. Without looking away from the ceiling, he felt for another bottle, found it and twisted off the top. He upended it. Most of the beer splashed on his face or landed on the bed, but some of it went into his mouth, so it wasn’t all bad.
“I got some more, Bill,” Perry said. “I killed those motherfuckers.”
Bill didn’t answer. He never answered direct questions. He just piped up unexpectedly from time to time, told Perry to get a gun, to kill himself.
Bill. Why the fuck did Margo have to bring him up? Perry drank to forget Bill. Well, it didn’t work. Nothing Perry ever did worked. Except when he wanted to hurt someone. To kill someone. That worked every time.
What the fuck was Dew’s problem, anyway? Pretending to get all pissed about that family. Why didn’t Dew and the others understand? Those people weren’t human anymore. They were weak. They didn’t have discipline. That meant they needed to die. If one of them, any of them, was even trying to cut out the triangles, then Perry would let them live. Maybe. But it didn’t matter, because so far no one had fought.
No one but him.
Why? Why was he special? He knew why: because his drunken, fucked-up, wife-and child-beating father had toughened him up with a strap.
Perry set the beer bottle on the bed to the right side of his face. He tipped it—this time more made it into his mouth than onto the bed. His face was all wet and sticky.
He didn’t feel a thing for the infected. Not a thing. That freakin’ toddler had rushed him, for crying out loud. They weren’t just infected, they were stupid.
That was the last thought to go through Perry’s mind before he passed out for the second time that night.
THE BACKYARD OF CHUY RODRIGUEZ
Chuy Rodriguez lived at the corner of Hammerschmidt and Sarah streets in South Bend, Indiana. Chuy had a wife, Kiki, and two kids: John, sixteen, and Lola, fourteen.
In their backyard stood a sparsely leaved oak tree suffering from some kind of bark rot. The tree had another three years, maybe five, and Chuy was already dreading how barren his backyard would look when he had to cut it down.
Chuy’s tree, however, wasn’t really the point of concern. For that you had to look directly above the tree.
Some forty miles directly above it.
If you could look up there, even with a very high-powered telescope, you might not notice a little blur, like a tiny heat shimmer. That shimmer came from visible-light wavelengths hitting an object, sliding along its surface, then continuing on their way with almost their exact original trajectory.
This object wasn’t truly invisible. Were it some massive thing taking up half the horizon, everyone would have spotted it by now.
Since it was just a bit bigger than a beer keg, however, no one noticed.
This object was inanimate. Cold. Calculating. It had no emotions. If it did, when it felt the Marinesco gate vanish in a ground-rending explosion, it probably would have said, Awww FUCK, not again.
The object’s shape had once been quite smooth and polished, like a teardrop with a point on both ends instead of just one. But that had been at launch, before the long journey that brought it into a geostationary orbit above Chuy Rodriguez’s diseased oak tree.
Space isn’t really empty. It’s got stuff in it. Stuff like dirt, rocks, ice, various bits and pieces—only those pieces are spread really, really far apart. If you travel far enough through that not-so-empty space, you’re going to run into that stuff. Depending on how fast you’re going, hitting even a teeny speck of dust can cause quite a bit of damage. The double-teardrop rock had been engineered to take that damage and keep on flying. The engineering worked, mostly, but the object’s pitted and cracked exterior bore witness to a design adage true anywhere in the universe—you can’t test for everything.
It had come so close to completing the mission. Once again, however, stopped before the gate could open… once again, stopped by the rogue host.
Stopped by the sonofabitch.
Its mission was simple in concept. Travel straight out from the home planet and search for signals that indicated sentient life. Space, as mentioned before, is big. Searching space for a suitable planet would require an investment far greater even than the economy-breaking project that had launched this object so long ago. There was one way, however, to narrow the search for planets that sustain life—find planets that already have it.