Infected Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE THIS IS THE PLACE…

  1. CAPTAIN JINKY

  2. THE RAW AND THE COOKED

  3. ONE SMALL STEP…

  4. A CASE OF THE MONDAYS

  5. ARCHITECTURE

  6. THE DAILY GRIND

  7. THE BIG SNAFU

  8. WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?

  9. PAYIN’ THE COST TO BE THE BOSS

  10. HALF AN AUTOPSY IS BETTER THAN NONE

  11. RUMBLIN’, STUMBLIN’, BUMBLIN’

  12. CLUES

  13. TWO-FER TUESDAY

  14. DIRTY FINGERNAILS

  15. ONE MAN’S HOME…

  16. VEINS

  17. CAT SCRATCH FEVER

  18. NERVES

  19. HUMP DAY

  20. SHORTHANDED

  21. THE FIZZLE

  22. DON’T WAIT, EXFOLIATE

  23. PARASITOLOGY

  24. THE BATHROOM FLOOR

  25. “DELUSIONAL PARASITOSIS”

  26. THE POISON PILL

  27. GOOD-BYE

  28. THE BATHROOM FLOOR—AGAIN

  29. MOTIVATION

  30. MR. CONGENIALITY

  31. WASH THAT THING RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HAIR

  32. CALLING DR. CHENG, CALLING DR. CHENG

  33. DRIVIN’ & DRINKIN’

  34. TURKEY SHOOT

  35. COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

  36. WAKE UP WE HUNGRY

  37. GONNA NEED A STEAM CLEANER FOR THAT

  38. COUCH-POTATO BUG

  39. MOMMY’S LITTLE GIRL

  40. DINNER IS SERVED

  41. HOWDY, NEIGHBOR

  42. THE LOCAL YOKELS

  43. THE POISON PILL (PART TWO)

  44. IMPRESSIONISM

  45. THE LIVING-ROOM FLOOR

  46. HOWDY, NEIGHBOR (PART TWO)

  47. MARGARET SETS UP SHOP

  48. PROGRAMMING

  49. REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

  50. COOKING UP A STORM

  51. THE ARCHES

  52. INTERNET

  53. MARGARET TALKS TO DEW

  54. SPAM?

  55. THE TRUTH

  56. COMPANY

  57. DEW ON THE MOVE

  58. BEST FRIENDS FOREVER (BFF)

  59. THE CALL

  60. STEPPIN’ OUT

  61. THE CALL (PART TWO)

  62. PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN

  63. HOWDY, NEIGHBOR (PART THREE)

  64. HOT PROSPECT

  65. THE GREAT ESCAPE

  66. OVERTIME

  67. THE COUCH DANCE

  68. THE HATCHING

  69. FLASHBACK

  70. DEAR OLD DAD

  71. CHEAP BUZZ

  72. TOP

  73. BURN, BURN, YES YA GONNA BURN

  74. THE FED

  75. BACARDI 151

  76. CLOSING IN

  77. CONJECTURES

  78. A NICE HOT BATH

  79. APARTMENT 104

  80. THE CHICKEN SCISSORS

  81. APARTMENT 202

  82. YA GONNA BURN…

  83. APARTMENT 304

  84. HIPPITY HOPPITY

  85. ONE SHOT, ONE KILL

  86. FREE RIDE

  87. THE JUMPER

  88. PARTY TIME

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  To my mom and dad, the best people I have ever known.

  To my wife, for the endless patience.

  To my O.J.’s—you know who you are.

  I’ve got you under my skin,

  I’ve got you deep in the heart of me,

  So deep in my heart, you’re really a part of me,

  I’ve got you under my skin.

  I tried so not to give in,

  I said to myself, “This affair never will go so well.”

  But why should I try to resist, when, darling, I know so well

  I’ve got you under my skin.

  I’d sacrifice anything come what might,

  For the sake of having you near,

  In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night,

  And repeats and repeats in my ear,

  “Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win,

  Use your mentality,

  Wake up to reality.”

  But each time I do, just the thought of you

  Makes me stop, before I begin,

  ’Cause I’ve got you under my skin.

  Cole Porter, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”

  Let the skies turn black

  Let the infection burn

  This is a new beginning

  Killswitch Engage, “World Ablaze”

  Prologue

  THIS IS THE PLACE…

  Alida Garcia stumbled through the dense winter woods, blood marking her long path, a bright red comet trail against the blazing white snow.

  Her hands shook violently. She could barely make a fist out of her talonlike fingers, nearly numb, wet from the big clumps of snow that fell thick and fast all around her, melting almost as soon as they hit her skin. When the time came, could she even pull the trigger on Luis’s old revolver?

  A searing pain in her stomach brought her thoughts back to the mission, the divine mission.

  Something was wrong. Well, fuck, it was all wrong, and had been from the first moment she started scratching at her belly and her elbow. But something was even more wrong, something inside. It wasn’t supposed to be like this…somehow, she knew that.

  She looked behind her, along the bloody path through the snow, eyes searching for pursuit. She saw nothing. She’d spent years in fear of the INS, but it was different now. They didn’t want to deport her—now they wanted her dead.

  Her hands and legs oozed blood drawn by scratching branches. Her left foot bled thanks to the shoe she’d lost some time ago; the snow’s thin, jagged crust made every step a cutting crunch. She didn’t know why her nose bled, it just did, but all those things were trivial compared to the blood she vomited every few minutes.

  She had to go on, had to go on, find the place…the place where it would all begin.

  Alida saw two massive oak trees, reaching out to each other like centuries-old lovers, a freeze-frame of perpetually denied longing. She thought of her husband, Luis, again, and thought of the baby. Then she pushed those thoughts away. She could think about that no more than she could think of the nasty thing on her belly.

  She’d done what she had to do.

  Three bullets for Luis.

  One for the baby.

  One for the man with the car.

  That left one bullet.

  She stumbled, then tripped. She reached out to try and stop her fall, but her bloody hands punched through the knee-deep snow. Her frigid hand hit an unseen rock, bringing more flaring, cold-numb pain, and she dropped headfirst through the white crust. She came up, wet snow and ice sticking to her exhausted face. Then she threw up—again—blood gushing from her mouth to splash bright red against the white snow.

  Blood, and a few wet chunks of something black.

  Inside, it hurt. It hurt so bad.

  She started to get up, then stopped and stared at the twin oak trees. They dominated a natural clearing, bare branches a sprawling, skeletal canopy at least fifty meters across. A few stubborn, dead leaves clung to the branches, fluttering slightly in the winter wind. She hadn’t known what she’d been looking for, just that she had to walk into the woods, deep into the woods, where people didn’t go.

  This was it, this was the place.

  Such a long journey to wind up here. She’d taken the man’s car back in Jackson. The man had said he wasn’t la migra, wasn’t the immigration police, but those people had chased her all her life and she knew better. He had stared at the gun, said he was
n’t la migra, said he was just looking for a liquor store. Alida knew he was lying. She had seen it in his eyes. She had left him there, taken his car and driven through the night, then abandoned the car in Saginaw. There she hopped a freight train and just started watching for big woods. As long as she kept moving mostly north, it didn’t matter.

  Moving north, really, was the story of her life. The farther north you went, the fewer questions people asked. Childhood in Monclova, Mexico. Teenage years in Piedras Negras, then at nineteen she snuck across the border and started moving through Texas and beyond. Seven years of working, hiding, lying, always moving north. She’d met Luis in Chickasha, Oklahoma, then together they worked their way through America: St. Louis, Chicago, joining her mother in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A brief change, heading east when Luis found regular construction work in Jackson.

  Then the itching started. And not long after, the urge to move north again. No, not just an urge, as it had been before.

  The itching made it a mission.

  But finally, after twenty-seven years of life, she could stop moving. She stared at the oak trees, the way they reached out to each other. Like lovers. Like husband and wife. She couldn’t stop thinking of him anymore, couldn’t stop thinking of her Luis. But it was okay now, because she could join him.

  She looked back one more time. The thick, falling snow was already covering the comet path, turning the red to a fuzzy pink, soon to be all white again. La migra was looking for her, they wanted to kill her…but unless they were only fifteen or twenty minutes behind, her trail would soon be gone forever.

  Alida turned again to stare at the trees one more time, the image a glorious sculpture in her brain.

  This is the place.

  She pulled the old .38 revolver out of her pocket and pressed the barrel against her temple.

  When she pulled the trigger, her cold fingers worked just fine.

  1.

  CAPTAIN JINKY

  “FM 92.5 morning call-in line, what’s on your mind?”

  “I killed them all.”

  Marsha Stubbins groaned. Another “I’m so funny” asshole trying to take the weird route to get on the air.

  “Did you now? That’s nice, sir.”

  “I have to get on with Captain Jinky. The world has to know.”

  Marsha nodded. It was 6:15 A.M., just about time for the loonies and the jerks to roll out of bed, hear Captain Jinky & the Morning Zoolanders goofing off on the air, and feel they had to be part of the show. This happened every morning. Every…single…morning.

  “Captain Jinky has to know what, sir?”

  “Has to know about the Triangles.” The voice was soft. The words came between big breaths, like someone trying to talk just after an intense workout.

  “Right, the triangles. Sounds more like a personal problem, sir.”

  “Don’t patronize me, you stupid cunt!”

  “Hey, you don’t get to scream at me like that just because I’m a phone screener, okay?”

  “It’s the Triangles! We have to do something. Put me on with Jinky or I’ll come down there and stick a fucking knife in your eye!”

  “Uh-huh,” Marsha said. “A knife in my eye. Right.”

  “I just killed my whole family, don’t you get it? I have their blood all over me! I had to! Because they told me to!”

  “This isn’t funny, you idiot, and by the way, you’re the third mass murderer that’s called here this morning. If you call back, I’m calling the cops.”

  The man hung up. She sensed he was getting ready to say something, to scream at her again, right until she said the word cops. Then he hung up and hung up fast.

  Marsha rubbed her face. She’d wanted this internship, and who didn’t? Captain Jinky had one of Ohio’s highest-rated morning shows. But man, this phone-screening gig, with the crazy calls day after day…so many retards out there who thought they were funny.

  She rolled her shoulders and looked at the phone. All the lines were lit up. Seemed everyone in the city wanted to get on the air. Marsha sighed and punched line two.

  In Cleveland, Ohio, there is a room on the seventeenth floor of the AT&T Huron Road Building, formerly known as the Ohio Bell Building.

  This room does not exist.

  At least, what’s in the room does not exist. On maps, building records, and to most people who work on the seventeenth floor, Room 1712-B is just a file-storage room.

  A file-storage room that is always locked. People are busy, no one asks, no one cares—it’s like millions of other locked rooms in office buildings all over the United States.

  But, of course, it’s not a file-storage room.

  Room 1712-B doesn’t exist, because it’s a “Black Room.” And “Black Rooms” don’t exist—the government tells us so.

  To get inside this Black Room, you have to run a gamut of security screens. First, talk to the seventeenth-floor guard. His desk happens to be just fifteen feet from 1712-B. He’s got security clearance from the NSA, by the way, and is perfectly willing to cap your ass. Second, slide your key card through the slot next to the door. The card has a built-in code that changes every ten seconds, matching an algorithm based on the time of day—this one makes sure only the right people can enter at the right times. Third, type your personal code into the keypad. Fourth, press your thumbprint onto a small gray plate just above the door handle so a fancy little device can check your thumbprint and your pulse. Truth be told, the fingerprint scanner isn’t worth a crap and it can be easily fooled, but the pulse check is handy—just in case you’re just a tad overly excited because someone has a gun to your head, a gun that was probably used to kill the aforementioned security guard.

  If you successfully navigate these challenges, 1712-B opens to reveal the Black Room—and the things inside that also do not exist.

  Among those goodies is a NarusInsight STA 7800, a supercomputer designed to perform mass surveillance on a mind-boggling scale. The NarusInsight is fed by fiber-optic lines from beam splitters, which are installed in fiber-optic trunks carrying telephone calls and Internet data into and out of Ohio. This technojargon means that those lines carry all digital communication in Ohio, including just about every phone call made in and out of the Midwest. Oh, you’re not from the Midwest? Don’t worry, there are fifteen Black Rooms spread around America. Plenty for everyone.

  This machine monitors key phrases, like nuclear bomb, cocaine shipment, or the ever-popular kill the president. The system automatically records every call, tens of thousands at a time, using voice-recognition software to turn each conversation into a text file. The system then scans the text file for those potentially naughty terms. If none are found, the system dumps the audio. If they are found, however, the audio file (and the voice-to-text transcript) is instantly sent to the person tasked with monitoring communication containing those terms.

  So yeah, every call is monitored. Every. Single. Call. For terrorism words, drug words, corruption words, all the stuff you’d expect. But due to some rather violent cases that had popped up in recent weeks, a secret presidential order added a new word to the national-security watch list.

  And in this case “secret” wasn’t some document that people discussed in hushed tones with Beltway reporters. This time, “secret” meant that nothing was written down, no record of any kind, anywhere.

  What was that new word?

  Triangles.

  The system listened for the word triangles in association with words like murder, killing, and burn. Two of those words happened to be used in a certain call to a certain guest line for Captain Jinky & the Morning Zoolander’s radio show.

  The system translated that call to text, and in analyzing that text found the words triangles and killed in close proximity. “Stick a fucking knife in your eye” didn’t hurt, either. The system marked the call, encrypted it, and shipped it off to its preassigned analyst location.

  That location happened to be yet another secret room, this one located at the CIA headqua
rters in Langley, Virginia. When a room at the CIA headquarters is secret, a secret from people who spend their lives creating and breaking secrets, that’s some pretty serious black-ops shit.

  The preassigned analyst listened to the call three times. She knew after the first listening this was the real deal, but she listened twice more anyway, just to be sure. Then she placed a call of her own, to Murray Longworth, deputy director of the CIA.

  She didn’t know, exactly, what it meant to have murder and triangles in close proximity, but she knew how to spot a bogus call, and this one seemed authentic.

  The call’s origin? The home of one Martin Brewbaker, of Toledo, Ohio.

  It wasn’t the kind of music you’d expect to hear at that volume.

  Heavy metal, sure, or some angry kid pissing off the neighborhood with raw punk rock. Or that rap stuff, which Dew Phillips just didn’t get.

  But not Sinatra.

  You didn’t crank Sinatra so loud it rattled the windows.

  I’ve got you…under my skin.

  Dew Phillips and Malcolm Johnson sat in an unmarked black Buick, watching the house that produced the obscenely loud music. The house’s windows literally shook, the glass vibrating in time with the slow bass beat and shuddering each time Sinatra’s resonant voice hit a long, clean note.

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Malcolm said, “but I’m going to throw out an educated guess that there’s one crazy Caucasian in that house.”

  Dew nodded, then pulled out his Colt .45 and checked the magazine. It was full, of course, it was always full, but he checked it anyway—forty years of habit died hard. Malcolm did the same with his Beretta. Even though Malcolm was just under half Dew’s age, that habit had been instilled in both men courtesy of same behavioral factory: service in the U.S. Army, reinforced by CIA training. Malcolm was a good kid, a sharp kid, and he knew how to listen, unlike most of the brat agents these days.

  “Crazy, sure, but at least he’s alive.” Dew slid the .45 into his shoulder holster.

  “Hopefully he’s alive, you mean,” Malcolm said. “He made that call about four hours ago. He could be gone already.”

  “I’m crossing my fingers,” Dew said. “If I have to look at one more moldy corpse, I’m going to puke.”