Charlie Ogden reached for his sidearm.
Nurse Brad and Doc Harper rushed forward.
Dustin Climer whipped his M4 in a horizontal arc, catching the slow-reacting Corporal Cope in the throat. Cope fell off his stool, coughing.
Ogden fired two shots. The first one went wide. The second one hit Doc Harper right in the forehead just as Brad connected with a flying tackle. Nurse Brad was a big, strong, young soldier, and the hit rattled Ogden’s middle-aged body. As they crashed to the ground, Ogden heard Climer rushing toward them. Ogden tried to bring the gun around, but Brad grabbed his wrist with both hands. With his free hand, Ogden jammed his thumb into Brad’s right eye. The eyeball popped, spilling clear fluid onto Ogden’s hand.
Nurse Brad didn’t let go.
He didn’t stop drooling.
He didn’t even stop smiling.
Another hand tore the gun free and pinned Ogden’s arm to the ground. Something slammed into his stomach, and he suddenly found himself unable to draw a breath. Ogden tried to kick, tried to pull, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fight against the two young soldiers pinning him down.
Climer’s face seemed to float over his own, backlit by the tent’s lights.
“Sir, yes sir!” Climer said. “I want you to get your mind right, sir!”
Ogden felt hands on the sides of his head, holding it so he couldn’t turn in either direction. Climer straddled his chest. His right hand held Ogden’s forehead, pinning his head to the ground. Climer’s other hand grabbed his chin—hard—and pulled his mouth open.
Then Climer leaned forward, leaned close.
Ogden would have said, What the fuck are you doing? if he could have breathed, if he could have moved his mouth, but he couldn’t do either. All he could do was growl from deep in his throat.
Colonel Charlie Ogden saw Climer’s tongue. Swollen. Covered in blue sores.
Triangular blue sores.
Climer’s lips closed around his own, and Climer’s tongue dove into his mouth. Wide-eyed in shock and confusion, Ogden tried again to get away. He tried to bite down but could not—Climer’s strong hand held his lower jaw open.
Ogden felt the hot wetness of Climer’s tongue fishing around inside his mouth. He felt the sting of a hundred needles.
Then he felt the burning.
Climer sat up, looked down at him, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and smiled.
Ogden’s mouth was on fire.
“It won’t be long now, sir,” Climer said. “Not long at all.”
WELCOME TO DETROIT
“Mister Jenkins, are we there yet?”
“I think we’re close, Chelsea,” Mr. Jenkins said.
Chelsea was tired of driving. She followed along on the map. The long trip from Gaylord, then driving all over the city, looking for just the right place. The Winnebago rolled down an empty St. Aubin Street. Headlights played off abandoned buildings and lit up broken pavement. A light wind blew wisps of snow, invisible until they crossed in front of the headlights, then invisible again as they swept past. Even with a couple of inches of snow, they saw trash everywhere: newspapers, Doritos bags, chunks of broken wood, piles of broken bricks speckled with bits of mortar like ocean rocks dotted with barnacles.
“You wanted a secret place,” Mr. Jenkins said. “I think this area will do. This is the kind of Detroit we’ve been looking for.”
“There’s no one down here,” Mommy said. “It’s like a ghost town. You’d think there would at least be homeless, squatters.”
“Winter is hard on them,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Looks like these buildings don’t have electricity, so no heat unless they build a fire.”
“What about gangs?” Mommy asked. “Will we be safe here?”
Mr. Jenkins shrugged. “Pretty much. Look around you. What are the gangs going to do here? Freeze their asses off, that’s what. If we get out of sight and stay out of sight, we should be okay. It’s like most cities, I bet—you don’t fuck with people, people don’t fuck with you.”
“There’s that naughty word again, Mister Jenkins,” Chelsea said.
Mr. Jenkins hung his head. “I’m sorry, Chelsea.”
The Winnebago turned right on Atwater Street. On their left was a small, mostly empty marina opening onto the Detroit River. Ahead on the right, they saw a lone three-story brick building surrounded by vacant lots filled with rubble, broken fences and tall grass weighed down by snow. A faded blue band ringed the top of the building, flecked with reddish-tan where spots of original brick showed through. The words GLOBE TRADING COMPANY were painted on the blue in faded white letters.
Chelsea liked this building. She liked it a lot.
“What about this place, Mister Jenkins?”
“Looks like no one’s here,” he said. “It’s all boarded up. Could be some bums inside, but if so, we can take care of them.”
“Is there…” Chelsea searched for the words that Chauncey had given her. “Is there a lot of concrete? Is there… rebar? Metal? Those things will make it hard to see us from space.”
“Oh sure,” Mr. Jenkins said. “There will be lots of that.”
“Good,” Chelsea said. “I think the dollies will like it here. Let’s go inside and look.”
“Okay,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Let’s drive around the building and look for a door we can open up. We need to pull the Winnebago inside, or the police will see it in the morning.”
The Winnebago turned right on Orleans, and its headlights lit a man in the middle of the street. He was dressed in only a T-shirt and jeans, shivering like mad. Even in the dim headlights, they could see that his fingers were swollen and raw. Behind the man they saw the rear of a squat, jet-black motorcycle caked with frozen sludge, dirt and even some ice.
“Holy shit,” Mr. Jenkins said. “It’s freezing outside. That guy was riding a Harley? Is that an Ohio plate on that thing? Look at his fucking fingers.”
“Language,” Chelsea said.
“Sorry, Chelsea,” Mr. Jenkins said.
She reached out. The man’s name was Danny Korves. He had lived in a town called Parkersburgh. That was a long ways away, and he was cold to the point where he would soon die.
“Mister Jenkins,” Chelsea said, “go get that man and bring him inside. We need to warm him up.”
She didn’t want Mr. Korves to be cold.
After all, if he felt cold, so would the nine dollies growing inside him.
Now that she had enough of them, she knew how long it would take to build the gate. Construction would begin almost as soon as the dollies hatched.
And that moment was only a few hours away, sometime around dawn.
DAY SEVEN
LEAD FROM THE FRONT
Agony. Heat. Brutal, shooting pain, his whole body on fire, his brain on fire.
Was he in hell? Charlie Ogden had caused enough death to qualify. Both the enemy and his own men. How many enemy soldiers? His best guess was over a thousand—the kill ratio in Somalia and Iraq had been so ridiculously high that it was hard to keep track.
The exact number didn’t matter, did it? Thou shalt not kill. One death was the price of admission to hell; everything else was just overachieving.
A snippet of a picture flashed through his mind. Something black, wiggling. A snake? A centipede?
The heat in his brain grew even higher, which was impossible, because it couldn’t get any higher. Ogden heard himself screaming, or at least trying to, but something in his mouth muffled his sounds.