Pandemic Page 51

Rear fins undulated slowly, pus.h.i.+ng the Platypus toward the crack in the dry deck shelter. Small internal motors activated, pulling the machine’s sides in tighter. As it slid through the crack, it hit something soft — the severed leg that had once belonged to Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

From the black shoe, which was still tied, up to midthigh, the leg looked normal. Wet, but normal. From the midthigh up, however, it was a study in damage. A jagged shard of bone stuck up from streamers of pale, bloodless muscle. The impact with the Platypus made Charlie’s leg spin in a slow-motion circle, shreds of tissue marking the curve like morbid little comet tails.

Just as the Platypus moved past, the fleshy ma.s.s of Charlie’s thigh spun into the sonar-eating foam, kicking up a small cloud of Charlie meat that danced in the robot’s wake.

The leg bounced away.

The Platypus moved to the open hatch that Bo Pan had spotted several hours earlier. In it went. It swam past motionless bodies, moved around wreckage, squeezed through doors that had been bent and torn by a torpedo’s lethal shock wave.

Steve Stanton’s creation quickly found the submarine’s nose. It entered. It located the locker that stored its objective. Recent programming told the Platypus to wait here, wait for someone or something to come and open that locker.

It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.

The Platypus flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.

A threat, or, an opportunity.

For the second time, the Platypus shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.

It watched.

SCARY PERRY

She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.

“h.e.l.lo, Perry.”

Perry Dawsey smiled.

They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.

They had touched Perry.

He was going to die. He knew that.

“Hey, Margo,” he said.

“Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.

“I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but … I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

I’ve got those things inside of me, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was: again. What he hadn’t said was: It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway.

His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.

“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”

They: the crawlers that were already working their way up his nervous system, heading for his head. There, they would spread their interweaving tendrils. They would take him over, change him, and destroy who he was in the process.

“You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”

And now her gift to him, his reward for standing tall in the face of absolute destruction, for being the one person willing to fight no matter what the odds.

She heard a growing whistle — the sound of an incoming artillery sh.e.l.l. A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.

Perry stared at her. His smile returned, a smile of exhausted disbelief.

“Holy s.h.i.+t,” he said. “Are you nuking me?”

“Yes,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.

The shadow-circle grew larger, engulfing their feet, then spreading until they were both standing in its shade.

A wet laugh joined Perry’s corpse smile. “Dew said I’m like a c.o.c.kroach, that nothing can kill me. I don’t think physics is on my side this time, though.”

He was dead twice over, yet still he cracked jokes, for her, a last effort to lift some of the blame from her shoulders.

Perry coughed. Little hatchlings shot out of his mouth, fell to the ground. They righted themselves and sprinted away, out of the shadow and into the light.

They wouldn’t escape. Nothing would.

Perry wiped his mouth. His blue eyes bore into her.

“How long do I have?”

“About fifteen seconds,” she said.

Then she started to float away, leaving Perry behind.

He looked up. “No s.h.i.+t? That’s kind of f.u.c.ked up.”

The bomb’s shadow spread faster, throwing the buildings on either side of the street into deep blackness. Perry stood in the shadow’s center, his blond hair and blue eyes still as bright as if the sun reached down and set them alight.

Margaret floated higher. Perry looked smaller and smaller.

He cupped his hands to his face and shouted: “Margo?”

Shooting up into the sky, she shouted back: “Yes?”

She saw the bomb now — as big as the city itself, a cartoony thing that would crush Detroit by impact alone even if it didn’t detonate.