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“Mr. Matthias,” said Sam, “were you bitten?”
“Huh? Me? No. Not that they didn’t try. Christ, Fez chewed on my boot trying to bite my ankle, and that was after I busted his knees and broke his damn back. How’s that make sense?”
Dez quickly explained the situation, compressing it into a few terse lines. Lucifer, Homer Gibbon, the outbreak, the parasites. When
she got to that last part, Charlie bolted and ran for the men’s room. They followed and stood in the doorway while Charlie stripped out of his bloody clothes and scrubbed his skin with hot water and soap, and then rubbed himself down with nearly a full bottle of Purell. Charlie was almost an albino, but he had some splotches of color. He rinsed his jeans and put them back on. The shirt was a total loss.
“Clock’s ticking,” said Sam. “We need to—”
And then Shortstop cut in via the team microphone. Sam held up a hand and used the other to touch his earbud.
“What’ve you got?”
“We got incoming, boss.”
“How many?”
“Too many.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR
COLDWATER CANYON DRIVE
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Albert Godown tied his running shoes, stood, and stretched slowly, feeling the muscles come undone, the cramps from the long flight gradually releasing their hold on him. His wife, Mary, was by the park, holding a deep lunge. She coughed a few times, but she controlled her reaction to it, keeping it small.
“You okay?” he asked.
Mary nodded, then shrugged. “It’s good.”
He waited for more, but that was all she said. So he nudged it a bit. “You still sick to your stomach?”
“Not really.”
Albert walked over to her. “C’mon,” he said, “you were sick as a dog last night.”
“Just airsickness. It was like a rodeo up there.”
“Are you sure? They’re still talking about some kind of flu on the news.”
She shook her head. “It’s better than it was. Might have been allergies. Did you smell the air on the plane? Until they closed the doors it smelled like we were parked right next to an open sewer. Burned my eyes.”
He nodded, though it hadn’t bothered him as much. “It was worse by that hotel.”
Because of the first wave of Superstorm Zelda, the flights the day before had been canceled and the airline had put them up at a hotel near the Pittsburgh airport. The kind of hotel you only ever stay in if your flight is canceled and it’s that or sleep in the terminal. They’d worked out in the little gym and when the rain let up for an hour they jogged around the property for an estimated five miles. That, at least, had been the plan, but halfway through it the humidity turned the air into a cold soup more conducive to swimming than running, so they bagged it and went inside. That humid air stank, too, and that’s when Mary’s cough started. A tickle, at first, and then worse as the evening went on. It came and went, and didn’t really settle down until this morning, when they got a 6:45 flight out of there. They changed planes in Chicago after a three-hour layover, and Mary’s cough sparked up again, but settled down once they were on the plane. Now it was back to being an infrequent thing. Still there, though, and he thought she should have it checked out. He told her so.
“It’s just allergies,” she said. “Or whatever. I bet if we get a good run now it’ll just go away. It’s so nice and dry here.” To prove her point she took a deep breath and let it out. “See? No cough.”
He shrugged and they set off.
They each wore headphones. Mary had her iPod set to one of her playlists. Albert could never imagine jogging to classical music. It seemed so counterintuitive to cardio. He usually listened to classic rock or, as with today’s run, the BBC news station. Better and less biased coverage than any of the domestic stations.
But before they’d gone half a mile he began frowning, and soon his run slowed to a walk and then he stopped, touching an earbud to make sure he could hear everything. Mary ran on for half a block before she realized she was alone, then she circled back.
“What is it?”
He pulled one earbud and gave it to her. They listened together as the BBC reporter talked about an outbreak of a disease that was so dangerous that the military was using force to stop those infected from leaving the quarantine zone. Albert saw Mary mouth the word “military.”
