Beck nodded. For now.
“We have to get out of Gaylord,” Chelsea said. “Daddy thinks they will come for us.”
“That’s just stupid,” Beck said. “How would they know to come to your house?”
The adults seemed to freeze in place, as if they were afraid to breathe. They all had wide eyes.
“Don’t you call me stupid,” Chelsea said. “You’re in my house.”
“It’s not your house,” Beck said. “It’s God’s house. We should stay right here until the hatching.”
“We’re leaving,” Chelsea said. “You do what you’re told.”
Beck Beckett was going to get such a spanking.
Mr. Beckett took a step forward. “Maybe… maybe we should listen to Beck, Chelsea. He is older, after all.”
Mr. Beckett would have to be spanked, too. That was okay. She’d planned for that all along, but it made her feel better to know that Mr. Beckett deserved it.
“Mister Beckett is a spy,” Chelsea hissed. “So is Beck.”
Mr. Beckett’s face blanched. “No! No, Chelsea, we’re not spies.”
“Shut up, Dad,” Beck said.
Mr. Beckett looked at his son, then took a step back.
Beck smiled again. “God doesn’t want us to argue, little Chelsea,” he said. “We’re not spies, and we’re going to stay here.”
Chelsea smiled her sweetest smile. “You want to stay here? Okay, Beck. You can stay as long as you like.”
She took a quick, deep breath, then thought as hard as she could. Get them!
It was Beck’s turn to widen his eyes. Chelsea knew why. She was much, much stronger than he was. He hadn’t realized how much stronger, and now it was too late.
Daddy stepped up and kneed Mr. Beckett where it counts. Mr. Beckett let out a painful groaning noise and fell to the floor. Old Sam Collins ran up and kicked Mr. Beckett in the face over and over again as Daddy pulled a knife out of the knife drawer and fell on Mr. Beckett.
Kick, stab, kick, stab, kick, stab.
Mr. Beckett screamed, but that was okay.
Beck shook his head, as if he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. He turned to run, but Mr. Roznowski tackled him from behind.
Chelsea heard Beck’s mental scream. Stop it! God, save me!
Chelsea, what are you doing?
Mr. Roznowski held Beck’s head on the linoleum floor and started kneeing him in the face. It made a weird crunching sound.
He was dangerous, Chauncey.
We need him. Stop this right now.
“You’re not the boss of me, Chauncey,” Chelsea said.
Beck still kicked a little after the third knee in his face. He twitched after the fourth. He stopped altogether after the fifth. Mr. Roznowski stood up. Beck’s face looked very funny.
Then Daddy stood, covered in Mr. Beckett’s blood. Old Sam Collins was limping. Looked like he’d hurt his foot kicking Mr. Beckett in the face.
Chelsea, I am God, you must obey me.
She shook her head. I’m a big girl now, Chauncey. Beck was dangerous. It’s for the best. Someday, you’ll understand.
That was a lie, of course. Beck wasn’t dangerous, but Chauncey might have loved Beck more than her. Chauncey was Chelsea’s special friend. With Beck gone it would stay that way forever and ever.
“Okay, everybody,” Chelsea said. “Time to go play at Mister Jenkins’s house. Someone make two trips so we can get rid of Mister Beckett’s car.
Mommy, you can take me in a snowmobile. Daddy, you clean up here and then come over on a snowmobile, too, okay?”
“Yes, Chelsea,” Daddy said.
Chelsea, Mr. Roznowski and Old Sam Collins got their coats and walked out the front door, while Daddy got the box of matches.
BETTY’S AUTOPSY
Betty Jewell’s autopsy was a disaster.
Margaret could barely think after Amos’s horrifying death, let alone focus on the job. By the time she’d dragged herself into the biohazard suit and started working on Betty, the girl’s body had mostly dissolved.
Margaret approached the trolley, Clarence beside her in his suit. Gitsh, Marcus and Dr. Dan stood next to Betty’s blackened corpse. It made for tight quarters, but Clarence refused to leave her side. Gitsh and Marcus had done an amazing job cleaning up. The autopsy room looked spotless. The trolley carried a steady, slow, thick stream of black goo down the runners and into the white sink.
Margaret wanted a look at those crawling things. They were the key to everything now, but she’d waited too long. Any crawlers in Betty’s body had already dissolved. Even the samples that Amos had taken were now nothing but chunky black liquid.
She’d let her grief get in the way of her work.
Margaret felt weak. She put a hand on the autopsy trolley to steady herself—when she looked at the table, her mind’s eye saw Betty Jewell’s skinless hands stabbing the scalpel at Amos. When Margaret looked down, she saw Amos clawing at the throat of his biohazard suit, unable to get his hands at the cut, unable to stop the blood from sheeting the inside of his visor. When she saw the drainage sink, she saw Betty’s brains splattering against the white epoxy and dripping toward the drain.
Clarence’s hand on her shoulder. “Margo, you okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
A lie anyone could see through.
“Dan,” Margaret said, “have you watched the video from my helmet? The video of the autopsy?”
“Yes ma’am,” Dr. Dan said. “Several times.”
“And what did you see?”
“Something crawling in her face. Doctor Braun thought it was crawling along the V3 nerve toward the brain.”
“Do you agree?”
“It certainly looked that way,” Dan said.
Too bad they didn’t have a brain to look at. No chance of that, thanks to Clarence’s bullet and rapid decomposition. When that crawler reached the brain, then what?
Then it would come apart.
It would split up into those muscle fibers Amos saw, split apart…reorganize… come together again.
In a mesh. Just like in Perry Dawsey’s brain.
“The crawlers,” Margaret said. “They want to replicate what we’ve seen in Dawsey’s CAT scans.”
Dr. Dan stared at her. “That’s a pretty big leap. We haven’t seen anything like these crawlers before. I read your reports on the hosts found in Glidden; the father, mother and little boy. You had fresh bodies, yet they didn’t have these crawling things.”
“It’s something new, obviously,” Margaret said. “I don’t care if its a leap. It’s right. These things infect a human body, maybe replicate somehow, then crawl toward the brain. If we can stop them from crawling, we just plain stop them.”
“It’s got a structure,” Dan said. “A shape. It can move. For that it needs a cytoskeleton.”
“The little things have skeletons?” Clarence asked.
“Cytoskeleton,” Dan said. “It’s like microscopic scaffolding that lets a cell hold a shape.”
“Without it, a cell would just be a membrane holding fluid,” Margaret said. “Without a cytoskeleton to hold structure, it would be like a water balloon. Amos thought the crawlers looked like human muscle fibers. If these things are some kind of modified muscle cell, and we disrupted their cell structure, then the cells couldn’t contract. They couldn’t move. They couldn’t crawl.”
“So you dissolve this cytoskeleton,” Clarence said, “and that stops it? That’s it?”