The boat shot forward, smashing against the tall waves, rolling her against black-booted feet. She sat up, knees to her chest, pulling the blanket close to try to fight off the cold that rattled her body.
“Where is Clarence?” She screamed to no one, to everyone. One of these men had to know. “Agent Otto, where is he?”
The unmistakable plunk-plunk-plunk of bullets smacking into the boat.
Something hammered into her right thigh, made the muscles numb — she was trying to get her bearings when the numbness quickly faded, replaced by a branding-iron pain that seemed to singe her femur.
Wincing, fearing the worst, she opened the blanket to look at her leg. Blood poured from the wound, hot against her ice-cold skin, matting her scrubs to her thigh. She grabbed the thin fabric of her pants and ripped — a long gash ran from a few inches below her hip down to midthigh. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, only grazed her.
A man landed hard in front of her, black face tight in a grimace of agony, left arm across his chest, left hand clutching at the back of his neck. Blood poured out from between his fingers, looking just as black as everything else.
She forgot about her leg, lurched forward to help the soldier.
“Tim! Come here!”
Tim stuffed the yeast canister into his scrub top, then leaned over the wounded man, trying to keep his balance as the boat rose up and smashed down again and again and again. Tim’s hands probed the back of the man’s neck.
Margaret wiped her cold, bloody fingers against her soaked scrub top, then slid them along the man’s throat, looking for additional wounds.
“Clear and breathing,” she said. “How bad is the wound?”
“The bullet took out most of the posterior musculature on the right,” Tim said. “The jugular and carotid were spared, but he has significant hemorrhaging from the wound. I think the brachial nerve plexus is gone.” Tim sounded calm, of all things. Margaret briefly wondered why he’d gone into research — the man had been born for this.
Gunfire roared around her. She sat up higher, hands searching the man’s combat webbing for something that felt like a flashlight.
Again a hand came down from above, grabbed the back of her neck, tried to force her flat. Her palms pressed against the bottom of the boat.
“Stay down!”
The boat hit hard against a wave: it felt like driving a car into a wall. The hand came off her for a second. She pushed up and swung her right elbow back as hard as she could, felt it clonk into something both hard and soft.
“I’m a doctor, goddamit, let me work! And give me a fucking light!”
Plunk-plunk-plunk, another string of bullets stitched across the small boat.
She felt the hand reach down again, but this time it pressed something against her chest: a small flashlight. Margaret flicked it on and scanned the man’s body; he might have other wounds that were even worse.
The boat hammered across the waves, repeatedly rising up hard then dropping to smash against the concrete surface.
She found nothing.
“No additional wounds,” she said, then handed the light to Tim.
That strong hand on her yet again, on her shoulder this time. Klimas, the SEAL who had pulled her in, knelt next to her.
“Agent Otto is in the other zodiac,” he said. “He’s okay.”
She felt a burst of relief, albeit a brief one — she had her hands full trying to save a life.
Tim adjusted his grip on the wounded soldier. “He’s still breathing, he’s moving his legs, and I think the major vessels are intact. He can survive this if we can control the bleeding.”
“Cease fire,” another voice called out. “Cease fire!”
The gunfire stopped, leaving only the driving snow and the howling of the wind.
Klimas stood. “Recovery complete,” he said. “We’re clear.”
From high above, she heard the loudest sound yet. She looked up in time to see a flicker of flame heading behind them, toward the Pinckney and the Brashear.
A missile.
She looked away just before it hit and became a deafening, temporary sun that lit up the surface of Lake Michigan.
The task force was done for. Captain Yasaka, Cantrell, Austin, Chappas, Edmund, all the crew from both ships and the Truxtun as well — all gone.
So, too, were the last of the hydras.
A black-gloved hand dropped a black canvas pouch in front of her. It was about twice the size of a paperback. She looked up, saw the black-faced Klimas looking down.
“Trauma kit,” he said. “Save him.”
She nodded.
Thoughts of Clarence, the battle, the dead, the hydras, even the awareness of her shivering body and her own wound faded away as she and Tim Feely went to work.
THE SELECTION PROCESS
In the deepest points of Lake Michigan, the water temperature remains steady at just a few degrees above the freezing point.
The intense cold hadn’t stopped the apoptosis chain reaction from affecting the Los Angeles’s dead crew, but it had slowed the process enough so that plenty of rotting meat remained on their bones. Meat, for example, that was on the severed leg of one Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.
When the Platypus ground its way past that leg, slimy flesh sloughed off onto the machine’s acoustic foam covering. This coating of partially rotted tissue contained thousands of cyst-encased neutrophils.
As the Platypus returned from its mission, the regular, mechanical vibrations of its fins and inner workings caused the neutrophils to come out of hibernation. The microscopic organisms shed their cyst coats and prepared for the touch that might give them a host. When Cooper Mitchell, Jeff Brockman, José Lucero, Steve Stanton and Bo Pan worked to secure the Platypus to the deck, Charlie-slime smeared onto exposed skin — the neutrophils found their new homes.
The five men had no idea what had happened. They had no idea what was coming next.
The neutrophils secreted chemicals to make microscopic fissures in the hosts’ skin, then slid through those fissures, penetrating deep inside. The little bits of crawling infection sought out stem cells, tore them open and read the DNA within.
It was there, at that initial point of analysis, that the neutrophils chose the role of each host.
One host had a genetic disposition for increased size — significant height, heavy bone density, above-normal muscle mass — so the crawlers in that host programmed stem cells for one of the two new designs.
Another host’s genes showed significant indicators for high intelligence. Extremely high intelligence. For this host, the neutrophils chose the other new design, a design that would be the true masterpiece of the long-lost Orbital’s bioengineering efforts. The neutrophils rapidly changed their form, shedding cellulose to become a microorganism made from normal human proteins. Then, they converted stem cells to produce millions of copies of themselves. From there, all would head straight for the host’s brain.
The genetic makeups of the final three men were unremarkable. They were normal. For those three, the crawlers chose between three random options — these men would become a kissyface, turn into a hatchling factory or swell up with gas, soon to pop and spread the infection wherever their spores would reach.
In twenty-four hours, one of the hosts would become contagious. In forty-eight hours or so, all of the hosts’ brains would start to change. Sometime past seventy-two hours of incubation, they would start to recognize each other, realize that they were all members of a new species, a species above and beyond humanity.