He’d held on to those words for a while. But now he knew they were a lie.
He was aware, dimly, of movements around him, the comings and goings, the pokings and prickings of the men in the space suits. He wanted water, just a sip of water, to slake his thirst, but when he asked for this, he heard no sound from his lips, nothing except the roaring and ringing in his ears. They’d taken a lot of his blood. It felt like whole gallons of it. The man named Anthony had sold his blood from time to time; he’d squeeze the ball and watch the bag fill up with it, amazed at its density, its rich red color, how alive it looked. Never more than a pint before they gave him the cookies and the folded bills and sent him on his way. But now the men in the suits filled bag after bag, and the blood was different, though he couldn’t say just how. The blood in his body was alive but he didn’t think it was only his own anymore; it belonged to someone, something, else.
It would have been good to die about now.
Mrs. Wood, she’d known that. And not just about herself but about Anthony too, and when he thought this, for a second he was Anthony again. It was good to die. There was a lightness in it, a letting go, like love.
He tried to hold on to this thought, the thought that made him still Anthony, but bit by bit it slipped away, a rope pulled slowly through his hands. How many days had passed he couldn’t tell; something was happening to him, but it wasn’t happening quick enough for the men in the suits. They were talking and talking about it, poking and prodding and taking more of his blood. And he was hearing something else now, too: a soft murmur, like voices, but it wasn’t coming from the men in the suits. The sounds seemed to come from far away and from inside him all at once. Not words he knew but words nonetheless; it was a language he was hearing, it had order and sense and a mind, and not just one mind: twelve. Yet one was more than the others, not louder but more. The one voice and then behind it the others, twelve in sum. And they were speaking to him, calling to him; they knew he was there. They were in his blood and they were forever, too.
He wanted to say something back.
He opened his eyes.
“Drop the gate!” a voice cried out. “He’s flipping!”
The restraints were nothing, like paper. The rivets popped from the table and shot across the room. First his arms and then his legs. The room was dark but hid nothing from his eyes, because the darkness was part of him now. And inside him, far down, a great, devouring hunger uncoiled itself. To eat the very world. To take it all inside him and be filled by it, made whole. To make the world eternal, as he was.
A man was running for the door.
Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above. A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor. The beautiful warmth of blood! He drank and drank.
The one who’d told him he’d be feeling better soon: he wasn’t wrong, after all.
Anthony Carter had never felt better in his life.
Pujol, that dumb fuck, was dead.
Thirty-six days: that was how long it had taken Carter to flip, the longest since they’d begun. But Carter was supposed to be the meanest of the lot, the last stage before the virus reached its final form. The one the girl had gotten.
Richards personally didn’t care one way or another about the girl. She would survive or she wouldn’t. She would live forever or die in the next five minutes. Somewhere along the way, the girl had become beside the point, as far as Special Weapons was concerned. They had Wolgast in there with her now, talking to her, trying to bring her around. So far he was fine, but if the girl died, this wouldn’t make a lick of difference.
What the hell had Pujol been thinking? They should have dropped the gate days ago. But at least now they knew what these things could do. The report from Bolivia had indicated as much, but it was another thing to see it with your own eyes, to watch the video feed of Carter, this