Free Infected by Scott Sigler

hours. Every second counted.
    Her hands grew steady; they had to be for such delicate work. The piece of material, barely a quarter inch across, looked to be part of the growth. It was black, the same color as the decomposed gore around it, but reflected the light almost like plastic. That reflective quality was the only reason she’d spotted it.
    Her left hand maneuvered the camera, pushing it closer to the black piece. Her right hand controlled a trocar, a hollow tube through which specialized surgical instruments could access a patient’s body cavities without cutting him or her open. Her trocar carried a tiny pair of pincers. Like a kid with a hundred-thousand-dollar video game, she moved the pincers closer to the black plastic fleck. Her finger rested on a trigger that, when pressed, would close the pincers.
    Margaret tweaked the camera controls. The image, slightly distorted from high magnification, focused in on the mysterious shiny fleck. The pincers looked like metallic monster claws about to pluck a lone swimmer from a sea of black.
    She gently squeezed the trigger. The pincers gripped firmly on the strange material, squishing out thick bubbles of rancid goo as they closed.
    “Nice job,” Amos said. “First try. Give the lady a cee-gar.”
    She smiled and pulled back on the pincers. The material resisted the pull. She looked closely at the monitor, then gently moved the pincers from side to side, wiggling the clamped object. The reason for the resistance became clear—the object appeared to be embedded in a rib. She pulled back gently, slowly increasing the pressure. The object bent slightly, then popped free. They heard a wet squelch as the tiny pincers—smeared with black slime—pulled free from the wound.
    Amos held a petri dish under the pincers. Margaret released the trigger, but the little fleck clung to the goop on the bottom pincer. He grabbed a scalpel, then gently used the point to push the object into the petri dish.
    She took the dish and held it close to her faceplate. The fleck had a shape to it, and she could see why it had stayed so firmly planted in the bone. It looked just like a black rose thorn.
    She felt a rush of satisfaction. They were still a hundred miles from figuring out the key to this horrific puzzle, but thanks to Charlotte Wilson she knew better what to look for and how much time she had to work with. The black fleck was something new, and it brought them one step closer to an answer.
    “Hey,” Amos said, “what do you make of this?” He stood next to Brewbaker’s hip, one of the places least damaged from the flames. His finger rested beside a small lesion, sort of like a gnarled zit.
    A gnarled zit with a tiny blue fiber sticking out of it.
    “So he had some acne,” Margaret said. “Do you think it’s significant?”
    “I think everything is significant. Should we excise it and send it out?”
    She thought for a moment. “Not yet. It doesn’t look like there’s any decomposition on that spot, and I want to examine it for myself. Let’s focus on the areas that are rotting, as we know we won’t have much longer to work with those, then come back to it, okay?”
    “Sounds good,” Amos said. He grabbed the camera from the prep table. He leaned in close to the zit, snapped a picture, then put the camera back on the prep table. “Right, we’ll come back to it.”
    “How much longer until we get the results from the tissue analysis of the growth?”
    “We’ll have info tomorrow. I’m sure they’re working through the night. DNA analysis, protein sequencing and anything else that might pop up.”
    She checked her watch—10:07 P.M . She and Amos would also be up all night and well into the next day. Had to be. They knew from hard-earned experience that they had only a few days before Brewbaker’s body rotted away.
     

13.

    TWO-FER TUESDAY

    “Good God, Perry,” Bill said. “Two days in a row. I’ve seen flea-ridden dogs scratch like that, but never a