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“COOOOOPERRRRRR,” the bull said. “FIND … COOOPERRRRR.”

Steve smiled. G.o.d willing, Cooper Mitch.e.l.l would die at the hands of his lifelong friend. The mutated hands, with those awesome bone-blades.

All things in due time. Steve checked the cell phone: forty minutes to go …

GAME CHANGE

Jackpot.

Tim lifted his head from the microscope. He wanted to drink scotch and screw and watch cartoons … maybe in that order, maybe not. He wanted to party.

Cooper Mitch.e.l.l’s blood contained thousands of hydras.

Tim had also found dead hydras in the frozen bodies that had been in the hotel lobby. Correlation wasn’t causation, true, but the results pointed to one motherf.u.c.ker of a correlation: Cooper Mitch.e.l.l was Patient Zero. The good kind of Patient Zero.

I’ve got you Norman Bates b.i.t.c.hes by the short and curlies … you’re all gonna die.

“Cooper, you lovely, lovely bastion of microbial awesomeness, you might have just saved the world.”

The man’s story indicated he infected those around him almost immediately. The hydras debilitated individuals within just eight to twelve hours of initial exposure, killed them within twenty-four. What was more, Cooper said he hadn’t touched any of the people who had found him in the Walgreens, yet at least five of the six had contracted the fatal pathogen. That meant the hydras were airborne, and were highly contagious; just being in the same room was enough.

It didn’t matter what Margaret found up on the eighteenth floor, or anywhere else for that matter. The mission became one simple objective: get Cooper Mitch.e.l.l out of Chicago and into a lab.

According to Cooper, only the “Jeff Monster” had survived the twenty-four-hour lethality. Tim had seen images of the big creatures, so different they looked more akin to gorillas than humans. That kind of large-scale physical alteration required large-scale genetic change: perhaps hydras took longer to affect them, or possibly didn’t affect them at all.

But that wasn’t Tim’s problem. The hydras killed the other known forms — the dead in the Park Tower’s lobby included two triangle hosts, two kissyfaces and one that had no marks of any kind yet died all the same.

He couldn’t wait to tell Margaret. She’d want to double-check Tim’s results, see for herself if he’d gotten it right. Of course, she’d actually have to come to the lab area to do that, actually have to stand next to Cooper Mitch.e.l.l.

Which she wasn’t doing … she hadn’t even come near Cooper …

Margaret had been hands-on with Walker and Petrovsky. Years earlier, she’d personally done the work on Martin Brewbaker, Perry Dawsey, Betty Jewel and Carmen Sanchez. She’d been up-close and personal with infected both living and dead. Why would she go out of her way to avoid Cooper?

Because she knew that Cooper’s hydras killed the Converted.

She knew, and she didn’t want to die.

Tim slapped himself lightly on the sides of his masked head, left-right-left-right. Margaret couldn’t be infected. She’d tested negative. She’d taken the inoculant, then tested negative some more. And besides that, she was Margaret Montoya, grand defender of the human race.