Page 53 (2/2)

Dew stared at the target. It made sense. Dawsey had been an elite athlete. Would have gone first round in the NFL draft, probably first overall, had it not been for the knee injury that ended his career. He was so strong he didn’t even feel the .45 kick—he could just point the barrel accurately and keep it perfectly still while he emptied the clip.

Dew suddenly wondered if teaching Perry to shoot was such a good idea after all. If Perry could kill people with his bare hands, imagine what he could do with a weapon and plenty of ammo.

UGLY BETTY

Betty Jewell’s body faced a dire situation. Half-formed crawlers disintegrated, spreading apoptotic death. She was guilty of nothing more than being just old enough for her telomeres to shorten and suffer the minor damage that faces us all. Her telomeric breakdown wasn’t as bad as her father’s, of course, as he had been twenty-six years her senior.

Had she been younger, maybe as little as five years younger, it would have gone better for her.

Of course, “better” meant that more crawlers would have already reached her brain. Her brain-mesh was thin, emaciated—it needed additional crawlers to fully complete the change and send the signal. More struggled to reach her brain, either dragging half-rotted bodies along her nerves or trying to move past the dissolving corpses of crawlers that had already shut down. These survivors reached out their pseudodendrites, grabbing, pulling, sending their pain signals to gauge the response.

If Betty died, the crawlers’ mission failed, so they fought the rot with counterchemicals designed to neutralize the chain reaction. Her original infection spots were already a lost cause—there was too much apoptosis there to stop the process. The crawlers sent some of their number to stay at the edges, secreting the neutralizing chemical, trying to localize the damage and stop it from spreading. Inside these perimeters the rot dissolved flesh and scored bone.

That meant bad news for Betty Jewell’s face.

The crawlers didn’t consider the face a priority. Eyes to see, yes, mouth to breathe, of course. Those were important, as were her hands.

Hands could use tools.

Hands could use weapons.

The crawlers used their collective logic to split into several groups.

Some moved to the hands to try and save them, some moved to the brain to try and achieve the critical ma.s.s needed for the neural net, some to the eyes and ears and mouth to protect sensory input. A Betty who could not see, hear or talk could not defend, and that wasn’t a very useful Betty at all.

INTERFERENCE

Chatter.

That really was the best name for it. Perry heard chatter again. Coming from the south. South and . . . east? Yes, the east.

Somewhere out there, triangles were waking up.

So far he’d heard only snippets of thoughts, just a few syllables. The triangles didn’t know how to talk yet. They had to learn that from their hosts’ memories.

<script>