Contagious Page 75

Bernadette reached into her purse and pulled out the butcher knife. That would show them. It had worked on her daughters, made them shut up, and it had sure as h.e.l.l taught Shawn an important lesson about not f.u.c.king around on his wife. It worked on them, it would work on the troopers.

She rushed at the trooper who had been leaning into her car.

Everything blurred, her body twitched and trembled, she dropped the knife and fell to the cold, slushy pavement. Such agony . The pain stopped as suddenly as it started, leaving an echo effect rolling through her body. She shook her head and tried to stand, but suddenly there were hands all over her. She felt her face pushed into the wet pavement, something heavy on her spine. Her hands were pulled behind her back, and she felt handcuffs snap into place.

ROADBLOCK

About six miles east of the I-75 on-ramp, Private First Cla.s.s Dustin Climer looked to the sky and watched a Black Hawk helicopter head west. For the past thirty minutes, the helicopter had been cruising around slowly, watching the roads below. Something was up. Dustin wondered if they’d got one.

“Dustin?” Neil Illing called out. “The swab?”

“Sorry,” Dustin said, then slid the swab into the white detector. He’d been holding both, swab and detector, but the helicopter’s sudden movement had distracted him. After just a couple of seconds, the detector let out two short beeps and the green square lit up, indicating a negative result.

“She’s fine,” he said to Neil.

Neil bent down just a bit to look in the car window.

“You’re all set, ma’am,” Neil said.

The woman let out a huge sigh of relief. Dustin wasn’t sure if her relief came from a negative result on the flesh-eating-bacteria test, or because the four heavily armed men surrounding her car finally seemed to relax.

“When can I come back home?” the woman asked. “This is just so crazy.”

Neil nodded. “Yes ma’am. You should be able to come back tomorrow, or the next day at the latest. Just watch the news.”

“Thank you, Officer.”

Neil laughed. “I’m a soldier, not a cop, ma’am.”

The woman gave an exaggerated nod, as if to say, Yes, of course. Neil smiled again and stood back from the car. The woman put it in gear and drove past the checkpoint, continuing down the snow-covered dirt road.

Dustin and Neil stood there in the early-morning cold, waiting for the next car. Joel Brauer was at the side of the road, manning the M249 machine gun, so he had to endure the cold as well. James Eager, the fourth member of their team, slid back into their Hummer’s heated interior. He only had to come out when a car drove up, which meant Dustin was d.a.m.n jealous of him at that moment. Fifteen more minutes, and then he and Neil would switch positions with James and Joel.

With the helicopter gone, they could hear the faint sound of snowmobiles again. Local boys whipping through the woods, probably.

James opened the door and leaned out. “They got one,” he called. “Triangle host trying to get on the I-75 on-ramp. Cope said to stay sharp. They’re sending the backup units to reinforce the on-ramp in case there’s more, so we’re on our own for a bit.”

“Got it,” Dustin said.

James slid back inside the heated Hummer, and Dustin hated him a little more.

“This is kind of trippy,” Neil said.

“What is?” Dustin said. “Fighting little monsters and s.h.i.t?”

“Well, sure, but what I mean is, even though we’re fighting little monsters and s.h.i.t, we’re still pulling checkpoint duty. I mean, I’m staying sharp and all, but this is boring, you know? We’ve seen three cars in the past two hours.”

Dustin shrugged. “What are you gonna do? We have to check everyone. They just got one, didn’t you hear James?”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard,” Neil said. “It’s just . . . I mean, five days ago we shot the bejesus out of that construct thing, and now here we are checking IDs and swabbing civvies. Five days ago we’re shooting friggin’ electric bullets at monsters, and today our primary weapons are these.”

Neil pulled a zip-tie out of his pocket and waved the long, thin piece of plastic. The plastic restraints let them detain large numbers of people, if necessary, and were much lighter than handcuffs.

“I might beat a hatchling to death with this,” Neil said, whipping the zip-tie like a flacid sword.

“Oh relax,” Dustin said. “Colonel Ogden isn’t telling you not to defend yourself. If we’re in danger, we shoot.”

Neil spun 180 degrees and landed in an overly dramatic, wide-legged stance. He pulled out another zip-tie and waved one in each hand like nunchucks.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I bet I can stop bullets with these b.i.t.c.hes.”

Joel was cracking up. The laughter made Neil ham it up some more.

Dustin shook his head. f.u.c.king idiots. These were the morons he got to work with?

The sound of the snowmobiles seemed to draw closer for a bit, then stopped. Climer and Neil looked to the trees but couldn’t spot the sleds.

“Joyride?” Neil asked.

“Maybe,” Dustin said. “Doesn’t sound like they’re trying to slip past the roadblocks. If they were, we wouldn’t have heard them all morning. They would have just gone through in the woods.”

“How the f.u.c.k can people be joyriding at a time like this?”

Dustin shrugged. “You can’t reach everyone, I guess. Although that one dude turning all black and s.h.i.t, that has people falling all over themselves to get this test. f.u.c.k, man, I should charge five bucks a head.”

The sound of another vehicle drew Dustin’s attention. A U. S. Postal Service van drove toward the checkpoint, pristine white near the top, s.p.a.ckled with thick arcs of frozen brown slush down on the bottom, particularly behind the tires.

“Mail must go through,” Dustin said. “You want to run the detector this time?”