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Not that Charlie felt it. He would never feel anything ever again.
The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned.
Its first infection vector had been rather simple in concept: spores that floated on the air, released by the Orbital from its position some forty miles above the earth. Those spores hijacked the host’s stem cells, reprogrammed them, turned them into microscopic factories. The factories punched out parts that self-a.s.sembled into triangles. Left unchecked, those triangles grew into hatchlings.
The shotgun approach of a high-alt.i.tude release meant that most spores were wasted. They blew into areas of low population, got stuck on the ground, or simply fell into wet areas where they crumbled into bits of nothing. When spores did land on a host, they worked well, but a hatchling couldn’t make more hatchlings. Nor could a hatchling spread the contagion by infecting additional human hosts.
So the Orbital had changed strategy.
It created a new design: the microscopic crawlers. Crawlers didn’t hatch out of a host. Instead, they migrated into the host’s brain, reshaped it, modified the host’s instincts and behaviors. A crawler-infected host could make new crawlers to infect other hosts. Unlike the hatchlings, crawlers could reproduce. They could spread.
The crawler method of contagion worked on a one-to-one basis, something a blond-haired little girl named Chelsea Jewel had once referred to as “smoochies.” Smoochies created the capacity for an ever-expanding army of infected, but the method was slow. It didn’t allow for continued, ma.s.s infections to occur.
It was Chelsea — not the Orbital — who solved that problem.
She created a third mode of transmission: turning her own mother into an obscenely bloated gas-filled bag containing millions of spores. At some point this swollen host would burst, scattering spores onto the wind like dandelion seeds carried by a summer breeze. The method was similar to the Orbital’s original infection strategy, but the swelling host was already on the ground — that meant better odds for a higher rate of transmission. Each spore could infect a host with triangles, or with crawlers, or it could turn that host into yet another gasbag that would burst and continue the cycle.
Before the Orbital was shot down, its logic processes determined it needed yet another mode of transmission, something that allowed for infection by touch alone, or — more important — by a vector that lingered in areas of high contact where multiple potential hosts could be exposed. As part of that strategy, the Orbital also wanted one additional key element: that this new vector could continue to infect long after the host died …
The swirling, churning, angry water spun Wicked Charlie like an insect dropped into a boiling pot, sucked him out of the submarine and into the cold, silent black.
His body seemed to hang for a moment, motionless, as if he were that same insect trapped in dark amber. Then, the life vest began to rise, bringing Charlie along with it.
His body floated toward the surface.
Charlie’s flame of life finally flickered out. His systems shut down, a cascading effect that should have ended all activity in his body.
Should have.