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  She blinked at the message, wondering why they hadn’t heard any alarms. In a moment it occurred to her. They would only hear alarms on the affected floors and those adjacent. No sense in evacuating the whole hospital until absolutely necessary. The sirens they heard outside were probably fire trucks. But that wouldn’t explain why Nurse Kimball was missing. She wouldn’t have abandoned her post.

  Someone yelled down the hall, too faint to be understood.

  Margaret glanced at the floor plan and decided it was the Giddes patient. Maybe that victim was also reacting to the press conference.

  FIRE: FLOOR G, FLOOR 3 continued to flash. As she watched, FLOOR 1 appeared on the list.

  She sniffed deeply, smelling for smoke. Nothing.

  Screw it. She would escort these girls out of here herself if she had to—then maybe straight to the CalPark clinic, where they could get some decent medical care.

  The patient down the hall yelled again. This time, Margaret made out a word: “Help.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “I’ll be right back, Daniella,” she called, then hurried down the hallway without waiting for an answer. She shouldn’t have to be doing this.

  The Giddes patient didn’t yell anymore, but Margaret heard other noises as she neared: the whoosh of outside air, the approaching sirens. The sound quality was all wrong—too clear and unmuffled.

  She saw why when she entered the room.

  The window was blown out—or rather, blown in. It lay in shards on the floor. It’s what Jan Lee’s boyfriend must have heard and mistook for a vase shattering.

  In the middle of this, Nurse Kimball lay in a pool of her own blood. She was pressing one hand against the side of her throat. Blood covered her arm down to her elbow.

  “Help,” she rasped.

  Margaret froze—but only long enough to scan the room. The privacy curtains were pushed back, and she saw there was no danger. The Giddes woman’s bed lay rumpled and unmade. The patient was gone.

  Margaret knelt beside the nurse. She thrust her hands against the neck wound to apply pressure and control the bleeding, much as she did with Officer Heager that morning. Was the creature here?

  Faint sounds of shattering glass. Screaming.

  “Daniella?”

  More screaming.

  Margaret turned to the nurse. Kimball’s eyes were closed, but she was still breathing. I have to go, she thought. I’m sorry, but I’m a mother first.

  She pulled the blanket off the Giddes patient’s bed and jammed it into the gushing throat wound, then pressed the woman’s hand there to hold it in place.

  “Press that there, hard,” she said, but knew Kimball was unconscious.

  Another shatter of glass, more screaming.

  Margaret ran out of the room.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She entered the hallway in time to see Daniella fleeing toward the elevators. A brown form, moving so fast it was a blur, launched from her doorway and tackled the girl. Jan Lee’s screams echoed behind it.

  Margaret charged at top speed. “Daniella!”

  It was the same monster from the Gensler house: head-to-toe brown fur with a patch of white on its chest. When Daniella resisted, it smashed her head against the floor.

  Margaret was almost there.

  But as she passed a hospital room, a furry arm lashed out of the doorway. Its wrist clotheslined her under the chin. Her head snapped back as her feet continued forward and her glasses flew off her face. She landed flat on her back.

  The impact knocked the wind out of her.

  Her attacker stepped out of the room. It was the second creature the police had warned about. This one had solid black fur. Purple and blue crust caked its face. As it stepped over her on its weird backward-bending knees, she saw more of the substance on its huge, flaccid penis. The monster knelt. Up this close, she could smell the dried crust on its face. Nail polish?

  It sniffed the left shoulder where its partner had bitten her earlier. She tried to bat it away, but it just grabbed her hand and held it down.

  Growling, it sliced open her shirt with sharp claws, then tore off the bandage the paramedics had taped there. It sniffed the wound again, then licked. Its rough tongue tore away the scabs.

  It grimaced, then leapt away.

  It landed on its hands and feet. Swinging its tail, it pivoted ninety degrees and disappeared into Daniella’s room.

  Margaret tried to yell but coughed instead. She tried to sit up. Sharp pain in her neck and back stopped her. Screaming in pain, she tried once more and managed to lift herself this time. Her glasses lay within reach. She put them on one-handed as she pulled herself up on the wall and regained her feet.

  Daniella Daniella Daniella, chanted her nerves.

  Precious seconds ticked by.

  She knew the true pain hadn’t hit her yet—she might have slipped a disk or fractured a vertebra—and she now risked injuring herself further. But as long as she could still move, she had to fight for her daughter. She stumbled into Daniella’s room, her torn blouse hanging down to her bra.

  Daniella Daniella Daniella . . .

  Oh, God.

  Same scene as before: shattered window, pieces on the floor. Daniella, Jan Lee, and the monsters were gone. Greg the boyfriend lay unmoving on the floor, his throat a red gash.

  A clawed hand clung to the windowsill from outside. It let go and disappeared. Margaret ran forward, glass crunching underfoot. She reached the opening and looked down.

  Impossible.

  They were descending the exterior of the building like spiders. She watched, unbelieving, as the blackhaired one used the claws of its hands and feet to balance on nearly invisible ledges between the bricks. Below it, almost down to the roof of an adjoining building, the other one performed the same feat—but with both girls slung over its shoulders.

  She tried again to yell but could only cough.

  The sirens—firetrucks or police, she didn’t know which—came from everywhere, but she couldn’t see any of them. They were on the wrong side of the building.

  Daniella. . . . Oh God, my baby, oh God. . . .

  Margaret took off for the elevators.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She slapped the call buttons and waited for all of two seconds before bolting for the stairwell.

  Except descending the stairs proved harder than expected. Her back was already aching from being thrown into Randall that morning. Now her choked and battered throat was so swollen that she could hardly breathe. She tried unsuccessfully to swallow and wondered if the creature had damaged her windpipe.

  She didn’t care. All that mattered was Daniella.

  She was dizzy, stumbling every few steps. The handrails thrummed with each smack of her palm. As she hurried, she felt bad about leaving Nurse Kimball and Jan Lee’s boyfriend. Kimball might have had a chance.

  It’s my daughter. I have no choice.

  And yet despair welled within her like the tears now gushing from her eyes. She smacked the handrails in frustration now. Grief. Panic.

  Daniella Daniella Daniella . . .

  As she passed the door to the third floor, she heard the monotone buzz of a fire alarm. Still no smoke. And screaming.

  She sped up, wishing she had the strength to take two steps at a time. She was breathing so hard that she saw stars. Fainting was a danger, but she was more afraid of slowing down—the monsters were escaping with Daniella.

  Finally, she emerged into a ground floor hallway. The fire alarm was buzzing here as well. Strobes flashed from sconces near the ceiling. Still no smoke, so she guessed someone had pulled the firm alarm to summon help. She heard people screaming and furniture breaking.

  Directly across from her, a man sat on the floor against a Kinko’s Fedex drop box. As if looking at the ceiling, his head was arched back—too far back. His throat had been torn out.

  Above him, a right-hand arrow pointed the way to the Rehabilitation Center, a left one to the lobby and exit. Margaret turned left.
>
  Ahead, she saw the lobby entrance to the Women’s Center and Hospital for Children. Beyond were the windows of the children’s play area—and on the other side of those windows, a vision of hope. Police cruisers with flashing visibars clogged the driveway. They could help her find Daniella.

  Too late, she realized the screams were ahead of her. She entered the lobby going too fast to slow down. From the corner of her eye, she saw a creature—a third creature?—charge her from the direction of the gift shop. Mauled bodies and overturned chairs littered the space between them. Cops took aim from behind ceiling support pillars.

  “Lady, get down!”

  Margaret dove behind a planter bristling with ferns. She landed heavily on her hands and stomach. Her glasses fell to the tip of her nose. The air smashed with gunfire. The monster roared and landed beside her.

  It turned and looked at her, then shrieked its strange mountain lion cry. This one had tabby-gray fur with tufts of black around its pointed ears. Margaret screamed and crawled away from it.

  She looked up as one, two, three more of the creatures leapt out of the hallway she just came from. They tackled the cops as the gunshots went wild. Margaret heard a growl behind her and felt something slice her calf. Her leg ignited with pain. She ran into the hallway behind the registration desk.

  There, she tripped over two forms grappling on the floor. Her forehead collided with an office’s glass wall, and the world plunged into darkness.

  Perhaps no more than a second later, she found herself lying on her side. The people she’d tripped over still wrestled a few feet away from her. Her glasses lay askew on her face, so she straightened them and looked past the new crack in her right lens.

  “Hrah hrah hrah . . .”

  Yet another creature—this time with fur as green as fungus.

  It was straddling a woman lying on her stomach, and it was jamming its billy club of a penis into her. With each thrust, the monster made its guttural hrah hrah sound and pounded the woman so hard that her head actually lifted from the floor. More screams and growls and gunshots echoed in the lobby beyond, but the reception desk blocked the view. A long-stemmed rose in a vase sat upon it, somehow unaffected by the chaos.

  Margaret took one glance at the woman’s distorted, bloody pulp of a face before consciousness again slipped away.

  “Daniella . . .”

  Part III: Afterbirth

  The thorns which I have reap’d are of the tree

  I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.

  I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

  —Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 10.

  Chapter 11

  At 0555 hours the next morning, an Outlook pop-up window appeared on the fastidious computer desktop of the chief of detectives, McLean District Station. It chirruped a five-minute warning that read, Meeting with Dets. Baker & Randall, re: 110702SC49-54 and 110707H14-15.

  The notice included screen buttons for Open Item, Dismiss, and Snooze. As the minutes passed without the chief depressing one, the computer counted down to the event and then tracked how long it was overdue.

  None of the relevant parties were in the building, but nobody especially minded the missed appointment. In fact, no one even remembered it, least of all the chief of detectives, who at 0600 was staring at the inside of a bodybag in a freezer, the blood on his collar now a fuzz of red frost.

  Detective Charles Baker didn’t remember it because at 0600 he lay on a gurney in a hospital hallway, sleeping off the morphine administered to him because there hadn’t been time to set his broken ankle. Next time, he would think twice before volunteering to help search a rugged terrain at night.

  Detective Christina Randall didn’t remember it because at 0600 she lay fully clothed and asleep upon her plaid couch in her tiny second-floor apartment over JF Carry-Out Pizza, where once upon a time a young man named Paul wept as he kissed her goodbye. Despite her extreme exhaustion, she dreamt of him, remembering his promise to stay in touch and return as soon as possible although the tears and kiss said otherwise.

  Later that day, Randall did remember the appointment, but by then it didn’t matter because the attack on the hospital, which had claimed the chief and Detective Baker as casualties, had repeated itself three more times at other DC-area hospitals—one public, one military, and one private. All of them had been treating rape victims suffering from abnormally accelerated pregnancies.

  Appointments such as these—like lunch dates and walks in the park—would soon become artifacts of a bygone era, at least in the region of the nation’s capital. Like that pivotal date in September 2001, time was again cloven in two, dividing all that came before from all that came after.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Within an hour of the Channel Four News’s first broadcast of a “bigfoot” leaping onto the Orange Line Metrorail tracks the previous night, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Strategic Information and Operations Center (FBI SIOC) at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, began monitoring the situation. This was routine in instances of possible domestic terrorism since the FBI SIOC coordinated all federal law enforcement activities. Throughout the day, it transmitted reports through encrypted channels to the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Operations Center (DHS HSOC).

  There, in the DHS HSOC’s bunkered All-Emergency Room, officials at twenty-six workstations tracked developments on ten large plasma screens on a twenty-four-foot-long wall. As epidemical revelations emerged of rape victims suffering accelerated pregnancies, other data feeds joined the FBI SIOC’s such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. The broadcast of Sergeant Weston Lively’s press briefing at approximately 1730 hours also appeared there.

  When the first reports surfaced of the attack on the Inova Fairfax Women’s Center, the DHS HSOC officer of the watch hesitated only a moment before touching a button to marshal data streams from local and state police computer networks. The information appeared on the center bank of monitors and was rendered in real time on a three-dimensional map. Besides tracking the positions of units equipped with global positioning system transponders, the map showed data overlays of the relative levels of regional emergency preparedness.

  The officer soon judged the totality of events as having the potential to overwhelm local resources and therefore rise to the level of an Incident of National Significance as described in the DHS National Response Plan and Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief And Emergency Assistance Act. He consulted his protocol book and phoned the DHS Office of the Secretary.

  The DHS Secretary responded by activating several DHS subunits, including the Interagency Incident Management Group, Regional Response Coordination Center, and Joint Field Office, and by placing the Washington Area Warning System on standby/alert status. The Joint Field Office thereafter deployed an Emergency Response Team advance element (ERT-A) to assess the situation and initiate coordination of state and federal resources as necessary.

  It all went to hell anyway.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “They know where their children are. They’re coming to get them.”

  Detective Randall’s pronouncement echoed off the men’s room tiling with the finality of a benediction in a cathedral. Sergeant Lively stared at her for a long moment with his jaw hanging open. “No, that’s ridiculous.” Still, he hurried past her into the hallway.

  They arrived at the dispatch center to see deputies typing at machinegun speed on computers and barking code-3 alerts into radio headsets. One of them paused to report that the 911 center was overwhelmed with calls from Fairfax Hospital. “They’re saying there’s dozens of those things!”

  Randall and Lively dashed for their cars.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Gun drawn, Randall tiptoed down a corpse-littered hallway. She’d been there all of five minutes and had already become separated from Lively, having chased two bigfoots through t
he hospital. Now, they were playing cat-and-mouse—and she had no illusions about who was the cat and who the mouse.

  Glass shattered down the hall.

  She ran toward the sound, hurtling an overturned cart of diagnostic equipment. She entered an office and saw a green and a white bigfoot jumping through a busted-out ground-level window.

  No clear shot—and they were already too far away. Once outside, the creatures moved with the blurred speed of cheetahs. One ran on all fours, and the other ran upright like the one last night. They hurtled over parked police vehicles toward the main road. A moment later, Randall heard squealing brakes, crunching metal, and car horns.

  The radio on her hip squawked. Someone said, “I think they’re all leaving the building. I don’t believe it.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  As her adrenaline rush dissipated into shakes, Randall’s sinuses clogged back up. Her stomach convulsed like a dying animal. She doubled over in the hallway and puked up the bagel she’d had for breakfast . . . or dinner; she never knew what the hell to call the evening meal anymore.

  Blood and bodies filled every hallway, so she didn’t feel bad about simply stepping over her own mess and continuing back to the lobby.

  Jesus, what a clusterfuck.

  The only sign of order was that someone—probably one of the firefighters passing her going the other way—had finally silenced the damn fire alarm. Everywhere she looked, people treated the wounded. She gaped at two nurses performing chest compressions on a pregnant woman.

  Another victim sat on the lobby’s floor and leaned against the reception desk, holding an ice pack to her head. Randall did a doubletake when she recognized Margaret Connolly.

  “Did you drop any of them?”

  The question came from Sergeant Lively. He leaned against a Starbucks kiosk in the corner. Beside him stood a muscular man wearing an FBI T-shirt and a goateed geriatric in a dark suit—probably another fed. Through the shattered windows behind them, a veritable fleet of rescue and police vehicles flashed their visibars.

  “Did I drop I any of whom?” she said.