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Chelsea felt something. More accurately, she stopped feeling something. It was as if shed had a ringing in her ears, a steady, low noise that had been there so long she didnt even notice it until it vanished.
Chauncey?
No response.
Chelsea felt weak. She sagged to the floor of the Winnebago. What was happening? She couldnt hold the connections. The network flickered in and out, fading.
Blackness replaced her vision.
Chelsea Jewell pa.s.sed out.
Out on the warehouse floor, Ogdens soldiers sagged and lowered themselves to the ground. He felt a blankness, a twofold void, the second one far more powerful than the first.
He sat. A chunk of brick dug into his b.u.t.t. One by one, his men pa.s.sed out as if theyd been ga.s.sed.
The hatchlings didnt seem to notice. They kept building.
Ogden watched them for the final few seconds he remained conscious, hoping they could complete the gate on their own.
Margaret stared at the autopsy rooms flat-panel screen and smiled in grim satisfaction. There were twenty-five squares up there, but only one square held her attention. It showed a side-by-side picture of a crawler and one of the pollen pieces that looked like a fluffy dandelion seed.
A caption at the top of that square read LATRUNCULIN A. A toxin produced by a group of sponges found in the Red Sea that disrupted filaments of the cytoskeleton. Amazing to think that might make the difference in this battle, that one word, latrunculin.
She loved that word.
Because below that word she watched both alien structures dissolve into smaller and smaller bits. The crawlers long, firm, musclelike strands twitched, then seemed to morph into slack, lifeless little sacks of fluid.
The dandelion seed was even more entertainingthe latrunculin made the stiff structure break apart, crumble and liquefy.
Ive got you, motherf.u.c.ker, Margaret whispered.
She had never really wanted to kill anything before. She stopped disease because that was how you saved lives. This was different. She wanted the disease dead, all of itcrawlers, dandelion seeds, triangles and hatchlings. She wanted to kill every last bit of it, in as painful a way as possible. Watching those things break apart on the screen filled her soul with a dark satisfaction.
She wondered if this was what Perry felt when he killed an infected host.
Hey Margaret, Dan called. Did you do something to the samples?
Yeah, Margaret said without looking away from the sheer beauty of a dead crawler. I gave them a nice latrunculin bath and killed them.
No, not that one, Dan said. I mean all of them.
She stepped back and took in the whole screen. In all twenty-five side-by-side samples, nothing moved. Theyd successfully killed many of the crawlers, but until a few seconds ago over half the boxes had still shown activity. Now, no movement at all.