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Perry thought for a second, then nodded. He held up the bottle, gave it a single shake as kind of a salute, then limped toward his room.

She did want him asleep, but she also didn’t want to risk a second round of fighting. Perry acted different, defeated, but Dew probably hadn’t calmed down yet, and any number of insignificant words might set the two men off again.

The only reason Perry Dawsey was still alive was that Dew Phillips wanted him to be.

Margaret needed to make sure Dew didn’t change his mind.

THAT CAN’ T BE GOOD

As the Jewell family slept, the changes began.

The new seed strain behaved much like the one that had infected Perry Dawsey. At first, anyway. Demodex folliculorum —tiny mites that live on every human being on the planet—found the seeds. Since the seeds looked and smelled like the pieces of dead skin that made up Demodex’s only food, the mites ate them. Protein-digesting enzymes in the microscopic arachnids’ stomachs hammered away at the seed coats, breaking them down, allowing oxygen to penetrate and germination to occur.

And also like Perry’s infection, this round began in many microscopic piles of bug s.h.i.+t.

Each activated seed pushed a filament into the skin, penetrating all the way down to the subcutaneous layers. At the bottom of the filament, receptor cells measured specific chemical levels and density, identifying the perfect spot for second-stage growth.

Unlike Perry’s strain and those that came before it, these filaments released one of two chemicals into the bloodstream:

Chemical A if it was a hatchling seed, similar to the ones that infected Perry Dawsey and Martin Brewbaker.

Chemical B if it was the new strain.

The chemicals filtered through the host’s circulatory system. After a short time, the filament measured the levels of both A and B. This produced a simple majority decision: if there was more Chemical A, the hatchling seeds continued their growth and the new strain seeds shut down. If there was more Chemical B, the inverse occurred.

As it turned out, Bobby Jewell was the only one with more standard hatchling seeds. Five of his seven infections, in fact, were the same thing that had infected Perry.

Betty, Donald and Chelsea Jewell would have the honor of incubating the new strain.

From this point the two strains followed almost identical growth patterns. Second-stage roots reached out to draw material from the subcutaneous environment: proteins, oxygen, amino acids and, especially, sugars. Both strains harnessed the host’s natural biological processes to create new microorganisms. There were the reader-b.a.l.l.s—cilia-covered, saw-toothed, free-moving things designed to tear open cells and examine the DNA inside, a.n.a.lyzing the host’s biological blueprint like a computer reading lines of software code. There were the builders —they created the flexible cellulose framework that in the original strain would become triangles. There were the herders —microorganisms that swam out into the body to find stem cells, cut them free and drag them back to that framework where the reader-b.a.l.l.s would slice into them and modify the DNA.