• • • •

Chicago, IL

“Keep it moving, don’t let them get up if you can,” Whitman called through the door. Inside the room, a dozen cops were squeezed in with the subjects, outnumbered but at least they had all the advantages he could give them. They’d waited for proper gear to come in—riot armor, face shields, heavy bite-proof gloves. One by one they got the subjects ready for transport. In contrast with the cops’ high-tech gear, they’d gone primitive for the restraints—plastic self-locking loops for handcuffs and thick canvas bags to put over the subjects’ heads. A fleet of ambulances stood outside, waiting to take the subjects away.

Whitman turned to the woman who had been caring for the subjects all this time. She was weeping openly, now. “You said you cleaned them—I assume that means you hosed them off once a week. Did you or your staff have any direct contact with them?”

The woman stared at him through her tears. “Of course,” she said. “We didn’t treat them like animals.”

Whitman lifted one hand in perfunctory apology. It didn’t give him pleasure to be mean to people. He just didn’t have time for bullshit. “Were any of you bitten?”

“It… happens,” the woman said, with a shrug.

Crap

. Whitman had a feeling he was going to have to bring the church staff in as well, if just for observation.

“No one ever got sick from a bite, so we assumed it wasn’t contagious,” the woman explained.

Inside the room someone shouted. Whitman couldn’t make out the words. He stepped toward the doorway, just in time to see a cop smash a subject’s teeth out with his baton. Another cop waded through the subjects to try to help, but three of the infected grabbed him and pulled him off his feet.

One of them started tearing the cop’s face shield off.

“Out now!” Whitman shouted, but it was too late. The cops all drew their batons and started laying into the subjects around them. But there was no order to it, no discipline. They were just scared.

Whitman reached for the nearest cop and grabbed his shoulder. The man whirled around and smacked Whitman right in the gut with his baton. Whitman fell backwards, out of the doorway, clutching his stomach.

That was when everything went to shit.

• • • •

Atlanta, GA

Philips adjusted the focus on the microscope. It didn’t help. The tiny holes were there and couldn’t be ignored. It was exactly what he’d expected to see.

“Give me sample 39a,” he said, and a technician changed the slide. Philips didn’t even lift his head from the eyepieces. Pink and white ovals filled the view, looking a great deal like a close-up of a slice of salami. That was normal, it was what healthy brain tissue looked like. But subject 13 hadn’t been healthy. This slice of her brain, like all the others, was riddled with thousands of microscopic holes. Like it had been eaten away by tiny mice working at random.

“Sample 40a,” Philips said.

• • • •

Chicago, IL

A man in a black suit ran screaming from the church, his face torn open and blood soaking into his collar. The stained glass windows lit up from inside with the bright flashes of gunshots. Whitman stumbled out of the church, one arm wrapped around the screaming woman who had run the hospice program. She was unhurt but inconsolable. He pushed her away from him and turned around to look back inside. A subject in a torn sweatshirt was stomping up the pews, blood slicking the front of his jaw. A cop was down by the pulpit, not moving.

Whitman grabbed his Taser from inside his jacket. He fired it into the subject’s chest and the subject went down, at least momentarily. Whitman ran over to the cop and checked his pulse. The cop was alive and breathing but he wasn’t getting up. Shock, Whitman thought. The man had succumbed to shock after getting three of his fingers bitten off.

Whitman had enough medical training to know what to do. He took off his belt and wrapped it around the cop’s wrist, pulling it as tight as he could to make a tourniquet.

Behind him the subject pulled himself back onto his feet, using the side of a pew for leverage. He didn’t make a sound.

Whitman grabbed for his Taser again, but that was useless—it was a one-shot weapon. He’d never needed more than one shot before.

The subject took a halting step toward him. It was still shrugging off the effects of the Taser.

Another step.

Behind Whitman, more subjects were coming up the stairs.

• • • •

Washington, DC

There were other people in the room, but Philips barely noticed them. He forced himself to make eye contact with the President. He forced himself to speak.

“Our finding is that this is a prion disease,” he said.

The President must have been given a pre-briefing, because he said, “Like Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or Kuru? I’m not entirely sure what a prion is.”

Philips nodded. “Those two diseases are prion diseases, yes. A prion is a kind of pathogen that is not technically alive. A protein that has gotten folded the wrong way. Prions are normally only spread by exposure to brain tissue from an infected individual. But this one is different. It has… well, mutated is the wrong word. But it has changed. This one is spread by fluid contact.”

“Like a virus.”

“Yes. But unlike viruses even the slightest exposure is enough to infect someone. The prion enters the brain and once there it cannot be ejected. Our bodies’ immune systems do not react to its presence at all. Safe inside its host, it begins to replicate. It makes more copies of itself. Over time these copies have a destructive effect on the brain tissue.”

“How destructive?”

Philips cleared his throat. “Over time they lead to complete failure of the cerebrum. This particular prion leaves a victim essentially brain dead. The subjects we observed have no higher brain function at all—no thoughts. Their inner lives are replaced completely with animal drives. Hunger. The need for sleep. Fight or flight reflexes.”

“That’s why they attack anyone they see?”

“Yes,” Philips answered. “Yes, that’s… that’s why.”

“How do we cure this? Or even treat it?”

“We can’t,” Philips said. “There’s nothing we can do for them. Once the prion has replicated enough, the brain shuts down and we can’t stop it.”

The president shook his head. “What about detection? If we catch it early enough, can we help these poor people?”

“There’s no way to detect it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There’s no test for prion infection. Nor are there any symptoms, until it’s far too late. The only way to tell if someone has this disease is to dissect their brain.” Philips tried a weak smile. “Post-mortem, of course.”

The President whispered something to one of his advisers. Then he turned to face Philips again. “How long does it take, from exposure to mental breakdown?”

“That… may be the worst part. Assuming this pathogen is similar to known prions, it could have an incubation phase of as long as twenty years.”

The President leaned forward. “You’re saying these… these subjects of yours might have gotten infected twenty years ago? That they could have been infecting other people the whole time? And we didn’t know about it until now?”

“I’m afraid so.”

• • • •

Chicago, IL

Whitman fumbled with the leather strap on the cop’s belt. He was so scared his fingers barely worked.

The subject took another step closer. Its eyes glowed like red lamps.

It bent over, its jaws snapping at Whitman’s face. Fell to its knees and crawled toward him.