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Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made b.u.mpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.

The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.

Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.

Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.

Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.

Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.

Amos … his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery … Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her b.l.o.o.d.y hand slid free …

“Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”

Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”

Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing. Half a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.

“You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”

“Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”

Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.

“Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”

“Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”