Contagious Read Free Page B

for Nealson that was a whisper. His regular speaking voice was three or four times that of a normal man’s, and his shout would make you look for a place to hide.

“Nails,” Ogden said, “the only way Whiskey’s involved is if we’re overrun and I drop bombs on our own position, then you guys come in to clean up whatever is left. So let’s hope you get to take the night off. Lodge, I want you and Nails back with your men twenty minutes before the attack begins.”

Nealson returned to an at-ease stance. He looked disappointed. Lodge tried not to look relieved, but he clearly was. Lodge was an exceptional pencil pusher, but perhaps not a true warrior soul.

Only one question remained—what new tricks did the little bastards have in store?

Ogden looked through night-vision binoculars, taking in all the details of their objective, two hundred yards due north. He stared at the glowing, now-familiar shape. It consisted of two twenty-foot-long parallel objects that resembled big logs lying side by side. The log structures led into a set of four curving arches, the first about ten feet high, the next three successively larger with the final arch topping out at around twenty feet. All of the objects, both logs and arches, had an irregular, organic surface.

But something was different this time.

The last two times he’d seen such a structure, all the pieces had been much thicker: thicker logs, thicker arches. This one looked kind of . . .anorexic.

Mud surrounded the thing, the result of snow melted by the structure’s heat. The first two constructs had put off a huge heat bloom. Satellite readouts had measured them both at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This one held a steady 110 degrees. And one other key difference: the first construct, in Wahjamega, Michigan, had shown action, something going on inside the cone, only an hour after heating up. This one had been hot for almost three hours.

But there was still no movement.

At Wahjamega they’d seemed to catch the hatchlings off guard. The creatures had been crawling all over the construct, and when they’d detected Ogden’s men, they’d attacked. The battle had been something out of a nightmare—pyramid-shaped monsters sprinting forward on black tentacle-legs, rushing right into automatic-weapons fire. Some of the monsters made it past the bullets, forcing his men into brutal, close-quarters fighting.

Eight men died.

Three weeks after Wahjamega, Perry Dawsey had discovered another construct in the deep woods near Mather, Wisconsin. Ogden’s primary objective was to capture or destroy the Mather construct before it could activate, but the brass had given him a secondary objective: capture a living hatchling. But that time it was the hatchlings that caught the Exterminators off guard. The creatures had actually set up a perimeter about a hundred yards around the construct. They’d been hiding up in the damn trees; his men literally walked right under the things. When the Exterminators closed to about seventy-five yards from the construct, the hatchlings had dropped down and attacked from behind.

As soon as they dropped, the construct activated. In the confusion of hand-to-hand, Ogden had no idea of the enemy’s numbers. The whole unit might have been overrun, so he didn’t hesitate—he called in air support to make sure he completed the primary objective. Apache rockets tore the thing to pieces.

That hadn’t left much to study, not that it mattered; just like at Wahjamega, the broken pieces of construct dissolved into pools of black goo within hours of the Apache strike. His men also failed to capture a hatchling, but Ogden wasn’t about to lecture them—it was a little much to expect men ambushed by monsters to worry about anything other than survival.

Twelve men died in that fight.

From a purely tactical perspective, casualties weren’t a problem. Charlie Ogden’s unit was so far into a secret black budget that even light probably couldn’t escape. He needed