“Where did it come from?” Sam asked. “Why did it show up in the rats?”

Dr. Menard shook his head and shrugged again. “It is believed that an infected bat escaped from an animal smuggler at O’Hare and somehow passed the virus along to the rats.”

Sam and Ed exchanged a look.

“All we know is that it appears to move slower in rats. They can survive for a month or two, sometimes three. We don’t know why it takes more time with them. Humans . . . it takes only three, four days.”

Ed whipped through streets, unusually quiet in the night hours, heading north. Dr. Menard, still anxious and unable to stop talking, said, “I can’t get the beginning from Poe’s story out of my head.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. “I don’t know about you two,” Sam said, nodding at Ed and Qween, “but I’m a proud product of the American public school system and I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about.”

Dr. Menard said, “Poe. Edgar Allan. You know him. The Tell-Tale Heart. Surely you read it in high school.”

Sam shrugged.

Dr. Menard cleared his throat. “‘True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’” He quoted haltingly from his memory. “‘The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?’”

For a long time, nobody said anything else.

Eventually, Sam stared out the window, chewing on a new piece of gum, said, “I still say sooner or later it all comes down to the lizard part.”

CHAPTER 49

10:33 PM

August 13

Dr. Reischtal held his phone up, listening to it ring, as he double-checked his suit for any rips or tears. He had a roll of duct tape ready, in case.

A click. “Yeah?” The voice was dry as smoke.

Dr. Reischtal said, “Good evening, Mr. Evans. I have a job for you.”

The voice at the other end was quiet for a moment.

Dr. Reischtal was patient. He understood his call was not good news. “I need you to gather a team of drivers and pick up a special cargo from our mutual friends out in Denver, and arrange transportation to Chicago.”

“How large is the cargo?”

“You will need at least thirty rigs.”

“Where the hell am I gonna get thirty drivers right now?”

Dr. Reischtal said, “That, Mr. Evans, is your problem. I will expect the entirety of this cargo on its way to Chicago within six hours.”

Tommy sat in his wheelchair, facing the corpse, and waited. Waited for someone to notice that Don was dead. Waited for someone to come get him. Waited to get sick. The fluorescents hummed and flickered almost imperceptibly, casting a twitching glare throughout the room. Air hissed from the filters. Blood dripped from Don’s bed.

Tommy watched the puddle on the right side grow larger. He winced at the spatter when each drop hit the puddle. He couldn’t stop imagining what happened when the drops hit the plastic, sending microscopic slivers of voracious organisms, tiny explosions of death, naked to the human eye, as it scattered the virus into the air of the room.

Maybe he was already infected. Maybe that was why the drops of blood splashing against the plastic sounded so loud in the stillness of the room.

The other side of Don’s bed started to leak, creating a new puddle.

A speck of movement, down near Don’s bare feet. Tommy squinted, but saw nothing else. Maybe it was simply the maddening stuttering of the fluorescent tubes, creating buzzing, shadowy static among the tufts of hair along the top of Don’s feet.

Tommy wondered if the virus was already in his system, wondering if he was about to face the long sleep, followed by the horrible itching, until finally the rage rocketed through his system, and he had to endure the agony of spending his last days, screaming hoarsely, pathetic, weak, strapped to a goddamn hospital bed.

Something definitely moved on Don’s skin. Tommy blinked, squinted again. There. It was a bug. Something reddish-brown, creeping along like a crab, although it wasn’t any bigger than one of the spatters of blood on the floor. He wondered if Don had lice. The bug scurried across the mattress and disappeared behind the rails.

A thought struck him, and he forgot about the bug. This thought was something that he deeply understood to be true, but had never dived deep to examine. Now, faced with the icy, stark recognition, Tommy knew he was going to die. This was something most people held off at a distance. It fades into the background. Nobody but the suicidal and teenage goths linger intentionally in that part of the mind.

There was no pushing it away. He was going to die. One way or another, sooner or later, he was going to die. It might be the virus now, it might be some organ or another falling apart when he was an old man, seventy or eighty. He would’ve preferred to live to old age, but he started to understand that either way, quick or painful, he wanted to die having lived his life as best he could, taking care of himself and his family.

He remembered the tune, and a couple of words, to an old Monty Python song that his old man used to listen to once in a while. He couldn’t remember much of the words so much as the intent, to remind you that you live in a universe hell bent on reaching for infinity, and you were but a speck of nothing.... However, the simple fact of your birth amid such vastness told the math to go to hell.

He understood the universe was entirely indifferent to his existence. He could not look to anyone for help. His parents? God bless ’em, but they couldn’t make it to Dominick’s for the weekly groceries without getting lost. Kimmy had stopped caring where he was at least four years ago.

His partner was dead.

And his boss wanted him here.

There was no one else. No one but Grace.

Tommy slumped in the wheelchair, fighting to slow his galloping heart. The panic fed at his consciousness like a fast-moving fungus, crawling underneath his sanity, tugging gently, looking for weak spots.

He tested the straps again, listening for that elusive sound of leather or thread ripping. Nothing. The restraints might as well have been made of steel. He pulled harder, harder. There was no give, no tearing noise, no nothing. Had he imagined the sound earlier?

He struggled to slow his breathing. Tried to refocus. Tried to think of anything except the fact that he was strapped to a wheelchair and locked in a room with a corpse. He found himself staring at the figure on the bed.

There should have been some sort of peace, now that Don was dead. His partner wasn’t screaming anymore. He wasn’t thrashing around, he was simply motionless.

Tommy decided the silence was worse. The stillness was worse. He tried to remind himself of how tortured Don had sounded, but already the memory was beginning to fade, that sound of utter hopelessness was gone, and all that was left was complete fucking silence and so all Tommy could focus on was his own hope, his own faith, that somehow it would all somehow work out in the end, and that the universe or God or whatever would recognize that he had been a decent, caring human being.

There wasn’t much left of that feeling.

God did not care.

The universe did not care.

There was nothing left inside.

It was either fight or die.

And fighting was futile.

PHASE 5

CHAPTER 50

7:43 AM

August 14

OMG. Mr. Ullman could be such a bitch.