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“Yes, Chelsea,” Daddy said.

Chelsea, Mr. Roznowski and Old Sam Collins got their coats and walked out the front door, while Daddy got the box of matches.

BETTY’S AUTOPSY

Betty Jewell’s autopsy was a disaster.

Margaret could barely think after Amos’s horrifying death, let alone focus on the job. By the time she’d dragged herself into the biohazard suit and started working on Betty, the girl’s body had mostly dissolved.

Margaret approached the trolley, Clarence beside her in his suit. Gitsh, Marcus and Dr. Dan stood next to Betty’s blackened corpse. It made for tight quarters, but Clarence refused to leave her side. Gitsh and Marcus had done an amazing job cleaning up. The autopsy room looked spotless. The trolley carried a steady, slow, thick stream of black goo down the runners and into the white sink.

Margaret wanted a look at those crawling things. They were the key to everything now, but she’d waited too long. Any crawlers in Betty’s body had already dissolved. Even the samples that Amos had taken were now nothing but chunky black liquid.

She’d let her grief get in the way of her work.

Margaret felt weak. She put a hand on the autopsy trolley to steady herself—when she looked at the table, her mind’s eye saw Betty Jewell’s skinless hands stabbing the scalpel at Amos. When Margaret looked down, she saw Amos clawing at the throat of his biohazard suit, unable to get his hands at the cut, unable to stop the blood from sheeting the inside of his visor. When she saw the drainage sink, she saw Betty’s brains splattering against the white epoxy and dripping toward the drain.

Clarence’s hand on her shoulder. “Margo, you okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

A lie anyone could see through.

“Dan,” Margaret said, “have you watched the video from my helmet? The video of the autopsy?”

“Yes ma’am,” Dr. Dan said. “Several times.”

“And what did you see?”

“Something crawling in her face. Doctor Braun thought it was crawling along the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

“Do you agree?”

“It certainly looked that way,” Dan said.

Too bad they didn’t have a brain to look at. No chance of that, thanks to Clarence’s bullet and rapid decomposition. When that crawler reached the brain, then what?

Then it would come apart.

It would split up into those muscle fibers Amos saw, split apart . . .reorganize . . . come together again.

In a mesh. Just like in Perry Dawsey’s brain.

“The crawlers,” Margaret said. “They want to replicate what we’ve seen in Dawsey’s CAT scans.”

Dr. Dan stared at her. “That’s a pretty big leap. We haven’t seen anything like these crawlers before. I read your reports on the hosts found in Glidden; the father, mother and little boy. You had fresh bodies, yet they didn’t have these crawling things.”