Free Operation Honshu Wolf by Addison Gunn Page A

and two security guards and a janitor had been killed—beaten to death. Others had been injured, many had been bitten. And the one thing missing from the supplies were anti-parasitic drugs.
    The infection spread rapidly after that—the cramped conditions, the lack of hygiene, the necessity of letting infected people handle foraged food. The parasite spread with most kinds of body-fluid contact. Saliva, sweat. Sex. The Infected’s natural inclination to get along, to like one another, to think like each other, to be affectionate , had brought the mild cases in close contact with those so far gone they were starting to forget what language was for. Soon there weren’t any mild cases left, thanks to the repeated reinfections.
    “It’s not so bad if they keep apart from each other,” one of the last uninfected, Opal, a woman with an anti-parasitic drug implant, said. “They’re still... people?” She said the word uncertainly. “When there’s more than a few together, they... they get mob-minded.”
    Right now, in a dingy office, there was George and a teenaged girl, watching, swaying more or less in time with one another. “It’s confusing,” George said, gently.
    “Can’t stop thinking about what other people are doing, too many things to think about,” the girl said. “It’s easier if you shut—” “—shut your eyes, less to—” “—less to think about,” they said, almost murmuring over each other’s voices.
    “But you’re not like them?” Miller asked, hand resting against the stock of his slung M27. “You don’t want to go and join their communes?”
    “We’re employees,” George said, almost desperately. “They kill employees.”
    Early on, Opal explained, some of the newly infected—uncomfortable with their uninfected former co-workers—had tried to escape, to join the mobs. They’d all promised to return if it was safe, but none had. Foraging parties sometimes disappeared, never just one or two, but entire groups. The remaining infected employees had convinced themselves that the communes had killed them—there was a strong strain of paranoia running through the group after the earlier attack.
    Privately Miller suspected, and he could see that Opal shared his suspicion, that the Infected had run along with the communes and forgotten all about their fellow employees the moment mob-mindedness took over.
    “It wasn’t too bad, while more of us were still uninfected. Right now Alphonse and I aren’t very popular,” Opal said. “Apparently we don’t smell right, but they know us and we’re employees. That seems to matter more than what we smell like.”
    “We’re the same, we’re employees, we’re the same, we work for the company...” George was rocking back and forth, the girl beside him similarly agitated.
    “Alphonse? Alphonse Baxter? ”
    “That’s right. He has the chip too—you know him?”
    Miller looked back at his squad, then nodded fractionally. “We’re here to take him and his family to safety.”
    Opal tugged at her chin nervously. “The rest won’t like that.”
     
     
    “P LEASE, BABY, PLEASE, let me take it out...” Linda Baxter, considerably worse-for-wear after a week of exile, started to rock nervously in front of her husband.
    Alphonse looked tired, defeated. The broken arm had something to do with that, but so did the way his children sat rooted beside their mother, joining her pleading with half-burbled whines more suited to toddlers.
    Du Trieux was trying to guard the door, but failing. Curious employees were drifting after them, the news of Cobalt-2’s arrival spreading rapidly up- and downstairs—the stairwells were only barricaded at the bottom floors, and were the only means of getting around with the elevators on lockdown.
    Alphonse looked up first, surprised to see someone with a gun, and Linda’s half-conscious rocking grew worse as she spotted George, his nervousness joining hers in a confused muddle.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Baxter?