Spiral

Dylan was asleep now, finally. They let Jake talk to him by telephone about two hours ago. They were only a few feet apart, but they might as well have been across the country.

Dylan and he had talked quite a while, mostly about Maggie. Dylan was so worried about her. Jake tried to keep some distance from that. He was already thinking too much about her, more than was good for him. There was nothing he could do about Maggie right now but try to help her son.

Dr. Roscoe told Jake what symptoms to watch for, what the Uzumaki would do to a human being. They had the records from what had happened on the USS Vanguard, as well as from the files recovered from Unit 731. Apparently there had also been some tests run on American prisoners in the late fifties, lifers willing to trade risk for a shot at a bigger cell and better food. The symptoms would show up inside of a day, the low temperatures, the sweats, the nervous energy, the itchy skin. From there, the visual hallucinations would start, the general deconstruction of the personality, leaving a raving, dangerous maniac.

Jake felt fine. No hint of a symptom. But Jake had a terrible feeling in his chest. Dr. Roscoe had Dylan’s medical records retrieved from his GP in Ithaca. Dylan had been on penicillin antibiotics twice in the last six months, most recently five weeks before. Just before Dylan went to sleep, he had said that he was feeling light-headed. And that he was sweating.

A RUCKUS IN THE HALL. JAKE WAS ON HIS FEET, WATCHING the action in the main hallway through two sets of windows. They ushered in a man in an isolation suit identical to the ones Jake and Dylan had worn. Jake caught a glimpse of his face: good-looking, middle-American boy, scared half to death, looked like he couldn’t be more than thirty.

Roscoe showed up in the observation room soon after. He picked up the phone, motioning for Jake to do the same.

“What happened?” Jake asked.

“He found one of your Crawlers in a children’s park in Rochester. It bit him. They think it had the Uzumaki inside it.”

“She’s using them as vectors.”

Roscoe nodded. “We’re proceeding worst-case, even though we got to the guy within ten minutes of contact with the vector. We’ve also quarantined the team that picked him up.”

“Wait. Ten minutes? How did you get there so fast?”

“I don’t know. Look. Let us worry about him. I have news. Your tests are back. The DNA arrays and the cultures are negative. No signs of the Uzumaki in your lungs, in your stomach. You’re completely clean so far. We’ll keep you in quarantine the next few days, just to be sure. But the odds are you’re clean.”

“What about Dylan?”

Roscoe hesitated. “We’re not finished with his.”

“Why? Why are mine finished and not his?”

“There was an issue with contamination with Dylan’s lung sample. We have to run it again.”

“Contamination? In a BSL-4 lab?” Roscoe was hiding the truth. “You know something, tell me.”

“There are people here to see you.”

“Goddamn it. Tell me.”

“Let us finish the tests, Jake. We’ll know for sure soon. There are people here to see you.”

JAKE’S VISITORS WERE IN UNIFORM, A MAN AND A WOMAN.

“I’m Colonel Daniel Wheeler, USAMRIID. This is Major Melissa Larkspur.”

“I’m an electronics expert out of Wright-Patterson in Dayton. I’ve been studying your Crawlers, exploring ways to stop them. Orchid,” Larkspur said, “programmed the Crawler at Rochester to respond to a thermal signal and strike. We checked the registers on the flash drive. The last program she entered was there.”

“Orchid appears to know a great deal about your Crawlers,” Wheeler said. “We’re looking to see if she hacked into your computer system.”

“She wouldn’t have to. We had a kind of owner’s manual on a Wiki. Open access. My student made it. Joe Xu.”

“Xinjian Xu?” Wheeler said. “The FBI has him in custody.”

“Custody? Why?”

He brushed off the question.

Larkspur asked, “How sensitive are your Crawlers to electromagnetic pulses? Do you ever blow out the electronics?”

“On occasion. Why?”

“We’re trying to figure out if we can knock them out with an electromagnetic pulse.”

“An EMP weapon? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re contemplating setting off a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere? It would knock out a decent fraction of the nation’s communications infrastructure.”

“We have smaller versions. Non-nuclear. Ones that can take out all the electronics in a fixed area. Anything from a single building to an entire city.”

“You really think you can disable the Crawlers with an EMP?”

“That’s what we hoped to find out from you.”

“This Wiki,” Wheeler said. “It had the plans to build the Crawlers?”

“Sure. It had everything. The CAD files for all the mask levels. Detailed procedures.”

Larkspur looked pained. “That’s where she got them,” she said to Wheeler.

“Got what? We’re a federally funded academic research lab. Everything is open access. There’s nothing illegal about that. Now. Why is Joe Xu in custody?”

“He’s a Chinese national.”

“So?”

“He could have shared the designs with-”