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  Some motorists possessed medical or biological backgrounds. They’d been afforded long stretches of time by these traffic jams in which to muse about the situation. They tapped their steering wheels and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Something about these last, crazy few days nagged at them, and it wasn’t the government’s palsied attempts to bring the crisis under control. The people in whom this disquiet was the most pronounced kept mulling over rumors that the baby monsters, upon childbirth, immediately started chowing down on their own mothers. These were the same babies who allegedly came to term in just one week instead of the normal forty. These children—or animals, take your pick—must have had incredible metabolisms to gestate so quickly. They grew at the expense of their mothers’ bodies, sucking the flesh from their bones until the women were emaciated bags of skin. This image inevitably led to a brand new riddle.

  The first person to solve this new riddle turned out not to be in the medical field at all. It was forty-two-year-old Michael Nicholl, a freelance website designer from Alexandria, Virginia. Michael, being single, homosexual, and reclusive, didn’t consider himself to be much at risk for a bigfoot attack. Tonight was in fact the first time he’d been outside in over a week. He was now on Interstate 95, just south of the Springfield Mixing Bowl, en route to his brother’s home in Miami. He planned to hide out there until DC was declared safe.

  At two-thirty—God, he almost never stayed up this late—he was groggy and fed-up with the unmoving traffic. He considered doing something he never did, which was drive down the shoulder so he could reach an exit. Maybe he could find a motel to hole up in, even though the thought of checking into one so close to home felt ridiculous. He was in the slow lane, so it wouldn’t be too hard. He contemplated the open shoulder through his right side-view mirror.

  In the back of his mind, he continued to chew on the riddle of the bigfoots, particularly the premature ones. At James Madison University, he’d minored in biology. He had always wanted to be a biologist, but website design proved too lucrative and too conducive to sheltering him from social situations. He preferred to avoid other people, a problem he blamed on his sexual orientation, the direction of which he acknowledged only to himself. Babies always fascinated him, however, partly because he knew he would never have one of his own, at least not one he sired himself. The bigfoot epidemic was particularly intriguing.

  So, let’s see, he thought. The babies gestate quickly and eat their mothers upon birth.

  Gazing into his right side-view mirror, he determined that no cars were coming and that no one would care what he did. He flicked on his turn signal.

  They’re still growing quickly after they’re born, I would assume. What do they eat next?

  At that moment, his reflected view of the adjacent lane was blocked by a hairy body. His passenger door separated loudly from the frame of his old Jeep a second later.

  Michael screamed as a full-grown bigfoot ducked its head inside to check him out. It sniffed once and growled before withdrawing. A much younger creature took its place. Michael’s first thought was that it had the head of a house cat.

  He didn’t have a second thought.

  No one else in traffic paid much attention to what happened to Michael Nicholl. They had their own problems. Up and down the long column of vehicles, this scene was being repeated. Waves of immature bigfoots—people would call them swarms—swept through the unmoving lines of hopeful evacuees. They tore through doors and windows to get at the soft meat inside like the cars were nothing more than clam shells to be cracked open.

  What little TV footage that was allowed to be aired before networks censored it as too gruesome showed creatures the size of house pets cooperating to drag screaming motorists from their cars. Adult creatures helped by tearing off the car doors or by clawing open victims’ abdomens so the youngsters could more easily reach the meat. Sometimes, a couple of young bigfoots got into a tug-of-war with long ropes of intestines. To observers, the activity seemed playful.

  Motorists ahead of the disturbances panicked and tried to ram through the military roadblocks. These people were summarily gunned down.

  By the next morning, there wasn’t a person left alive on the major routes out of the city. Those not devoured had abandoned their vehicles to run for cover. Along the way, many were tackled and eviscerated by young and old bigfoots alike. The luckiest victims suffered broken necks and were hauled away to be impregnated.

  After this first orgy of feeding was over, most of the baby bigfoots returned to their hiding places in the woods or in drainage ditches and abandoned houses. Along the way, a few managed to run down some stray dogs and deer, which they also devoured. Their stomachs had expanded to almost four times their normal size to accommodate the huge quantities of raw meat, which their bodies digested with the speed of incinerators. Presently, they resumed their hibernation, during which they suffered new growth spurts, their bodies lengthening and strengthening at the same fantastic rates as in the womb. By the end of their second night in the world, most had molted their baby fur in favor of their adult coats.

  They had their first orgasms soon after, commonly as nocturnal emissions that coated their thighs and the ground under them. Some of the animals upon waking massaged their gigantic penises and debated with themselves—insofar as they were capable of reasoning—which appetite needed satisfying first: hunger or libido.

  Most sought out one more meal before their metabolism slowed to the adult rate, a comparative crawl that virtually eliminated the need for food. The loss of appetite freed them up to concentrate more fully on breeding. And by the time they were three days old, most bigfoots were ready to devote themselves to that activity full time.

  Chapter 16

  The morning after the attacks on the traffic jams, Margaret Connolly sat in her breakfast nook with a steaming cup of green tea and a bottle of ibuprofen. She tried to ignore her still-screaming back and neck muscles as she watched the news. Good God, was she living in Baghdad or Beirut instead of Northern Virginia? A news helicopter panned over what used to be an I-66 traffic jam. Although the network never showed up-close footage of what used to be people’s bodies, the severed limbs visible from the air provided more than enough detail. One commentator called these scenes “smorgasbord alleys.”

  She shuddered as she wondered if the walls of her house were thick enough to protect her. How can I just sit here, having breakfast and watching TV like nothing’s wrong when this place is a war zone?

  And to think she’d actually gone out on her own to search for Daniella. Yesterday, shortly after pulling her late husband’s handgun from the coat closet, she lurched into her Isuzu and returned to the area just south of Fairfax Hospital. The journey was only a few miles, but it still took almost a half hour on account of the backed-up traffic waiting to enter the Beltway.

  This time, she traveled with an ADC map so she wouldn’t get lost. She found the neighborhoods she’d marked in pink highlighter as her search area. She gaped at the signs of destruction as she slowly rolled past single-family homes and townhouses. Shattered windows and blood-stained sidewalks were the most obvious. She even saw one front door ripped off its hinges and lying in a yard. She realized she had no way of knowing if any of these houses were birthing nests unless she went inside and looked for herself.

  Daniella’s not just going to come running out to the car, you silly old girl. She’s suffering inside of one of those places, if she’s anywhere.

  She parked in front of the house with its door ripped off. With a final, vain look in both directions for a cop or a National Guardsman who could do this for her, she readied her gun and got out.

  The street was as quiet as a graveyard—and probably was a graveyard. She glanced down at the house’s address number painted neatly on the curb but failed to remember what it said as she continued inside. Her head was too full of terror at what she might encounter.

  . . . Which turned out to be exactly nothing. Oh, there were signs of
foul play. A family’s half-eaten meal of lasagna lay cold and hard on a kitchen table while a serving spoon waited in a full casserole dish for someone to return for seconds. But there were no people, no blood, and no Daniella. A rear exit, still hanging open, told the story of sitting down to eat when a creature suddenly tore off the front door. They’d slipped out the back.

  Margaret returned to her car.

  The next house she explored did have blood and did have a body. A middle-aged white man in an Army dress uniform lay half in and out of his doorway. His key ring still hung from the knob. He still clasped his briefcase in one hand. The other hand was clenched in rigor mortis around a gaping, bloody hole in his throat—the remains of which were splattered in a fine spray across one wall of his foyer. The house was otherwise empty. A broken window and another set of blood stains and knocked over furniture in what was obviously a teenaged girl’s room showed where the Army officer’s daughter had been raped. She’d apparently been dragged over her father’s body on the way to someplace to gestate. But to where? Margaret avoided looking at pictures of the girl as she left. Too much like Daniella.

  Outside, she searched the perfectly mowed lawn for signs of where the girl was taken—blood stains or grass impressions that might point the way—but she was no tracker. Goddammit, this was pissing her off. Where was Daniella?

  It was while she was returning to her car that she heard a low growl.

  Something slammed into her from behind. Her gun flew out of her hand as she landed on the grass and rolled onto her back.

  She screamed when she saw a bigfoot peering down at her. This one had all-white fur from head to foot. Its erect penis was so large that she knew it would kill her if the animal tried to shove it inside. The creature held her down with two heavy paws and prepared to bite her neck with sharp, blackened teeth.

  “No, no—wait!” Margaret said—and in a moment of self-possession she marveled at later, reached up and tore open the neck of her blouse. This exposed her bite wound from last time. The puncture marks were red and swollen and seeping a little, and she hadn’t put on any Band-Aids that morning.

  The all-white bigfoot paused short of biting her again. It sniffed, then drew a sandpaper tongue across the wound. Margaret felt the tiny scabs rip off. Still holding her down, it licked once more.

  It made a disapproving grunt before leaping away. It disappeared around the corner of the house.

  Margaret sobbed and held her stinging shoulder as she got back into her car.

  But afterward, she was more confident. The bigfoots weren’t interested in her because she wasn’t fertile. That was like having diplomatic immunity, wasn’t it?

  I’m going to find Daniella. I’m going to find her if it’s the last thing I ever do.

  She searched until nightfall, until the point when she wondered if this would indeed be her final act. Despite surviving that attack—or maybe because of surviving the attack—her fear mounted with the night’s darkness. The longer she spent out of her car, tromping through woods and neighborhoods and entering people’s houses, the more she felt she was tempting fate. Creatures who were less scrupulous about whom they assaulted could be stalking her. She spent more and more time inside her vehicle, keeping it moving, and less time actually searching for clues as to Daniella’s whereabouts. Finally, as she chanced upon the remains of an old, boarded-up Catholic school that she thought was worth investigating—but which she had no hope of entering because she didn’t have the tools to break in—she decided to call it a day.

  I’ll come back tomorrow, and I’ll start with that school. I’ll bring a toolbox this time to help me break into places.

  Except that was last night, before this apocalypse reached a whole new level of madness. As Margaret flipped channels among news reports about the smorgasbord alleys, she realized she was damned lucky she hadn’t been eaten the previous day.

  I can’t go out there again. I can’t go anywhere, not even out of the county. Oh, I’m going to die, and Daniella’s going to die. We don’t deserve this . . .

  She gasped as her kitchen went gray around her. Stars appeared before her eyes. Her hand started shaking, and she was afraid she would drop her teacup. She set it down with a clatter, splashing liquid across the table.

  Deep breaths. Hold your knees. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to find her.

  Except it wouldn’t be okay. This thing was over, the endgame for her and her daughter. It was Tuesday now, and in three days it would be exactly one week after Daniella was raped behind that movie theater. If the news was right, Daniella’s insanely fast gestation would finish on Friday, and she would give birth. Even now, Margaret’s medical experience insisted that was impossible, that it must be a trick and people were lying.

  She looked away from the TV to the bag of cat food she’d spilled over in the corner. Gemini had been missing since yesterday morning. She’d searched high and low for him, even poking her head outside and calling for the pet, which she now knew had been an incredibly dangerous thing to do. But that old, walking lint factory was gone, out through the cat door in the back—perhaps eaten by now.

  Her gaze shifted to her answering machine. There were no more messages, unlike yesterday. The first two had been hangups, probably returns from that spate of calls she made to everyone in her and Daniella’s address books. The third was an automated message from a computer calling itself the Washington Area Warning System, advising that a “bio-engineered threat” was affecting the city and suburbs. Residents were urged to stay indoors and out of sight until their area could be secured.

  The final messages had been from Detective Randall. “This isn’t about Daniella, but I need you to call me as soon as you get this,” the second message said and left a cell phone number. Margaret had written down the number and stuffed it into her pocket, but she hadn’t called back.

  If it’s not about Daniella, then I don’t give a shit. Why isn’t that woman searching for my daughter?

  She burst into tears.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Randall didn’t bother returning to her apartment at the end of her shift at dawn Tuesday morning. It wasn’t safe. God, if anything had shown that being by herself was unsafe, it was the massacre scene on I-66. Instead, she slept on one of the emergency cots set up in the roll call room—or tried to. Her mind wouldn’t stop replaying images of dismembered bodies. Other officers, mostly men, also slept there. Most were fully clothed in the dirty, sometimes bloody uniforms they’d been wearing all day. Seeing their scratches and bruises and fatigue-slackened faces made her feel guilty—as if she were lazy—although she had worked at the disaster scenes last night as hard as they had.

  After a restless five hours of sleep full of nightmares, Randall brunched on one of the Meals Ready to Eat packages stacked in the break room. It felt strange to be eating military food in her own police headquarters, but as she jostled past stressed-out men in fatigues going every which way in the halls, she realized this wasn’t her station anymore. She just hoped all these intruders would leave when the crisis was over.

  A police station was a little more prepared for disasters than most average office buildings, however. There was a women’s locker room with a shower that she used after her meal, even a small supply of panty liners stowed in the first aid kit on the wall. She availed herself of one of these, too, and tried not to wonder why she was spotting so soon after her last period.

  God, I feel like shit.

  There was some Advil in there as well. She took three capsules and went to her cubicle to wash them down with stale coffee.

  I swear, when this is all over, first thing I’ll do is track down a doctor and find out what’s wrong with me. Probably my fucking thyroid.

  She was a wreck, and the world was going to hell. She doubted anyone even cared where she was. She could be killed by the bigfoots right now, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anybody except her mother. No friends would miss her because she didn’t have any. The feds
would go right on steamrolling over everybody, and her colleagues would just say, “I wonder what happened to that fine piece of ass?” The only one of them who would’ve mourned her loss was Sergeant Tucker, and he was gone now.

  Don’t cry. Stop it!

  The detective who used her cubicle during the day wasn’t in, so Randall woke up the computer and got to work. She first closed the applications she’d been using to find information on Nick Schaefer—or rather, not find information. It was as if the man didn’t exist. Like her.

  Just stop it. Your emotions aren’t what’s important right now. You’re the only one who has a prayer of figuring out what’s going on, so stop feeling sorry for yourself.

  God, I feel so alone . . .

  She sighed and rubbed her face. Just stop it. From a desk drawer, she pulled out a scrunchy and tied back her hair into a ponytail.

  There weren’t any messages waiting from Mr. Limp Moustache, her new dickless wonder of a supervisor, concerning a search warrant for the CalPark lab. That didn’t surprise her. She went ahead anyway and wrote up a general affidavit for one. Maybe she could still find a magistrate. The affidavit described what she would look for: computer equipment containing simulations of creature gestation (that Schaefer had made reference to), records of genetic modification of human embryos and of Frederica Wolford’s embryo in particular, equipment that would be used to effect such modifications, plus any records and correspondence that might indicate the whereabouts of one Nicolae C. Schaefer, fugitive at large.

  When she was done, she left a copy of it in the mailbox for Mr. Limp Moustache—not by that name, of course, although she was tempted. She then strapped on both of her guns—Heager’s on the hip and her own on the shoulder—and reported for duty at the dispatch center.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  By eleven o’clock, Margaret knew it was time to shit or get off the pot. The sun perched high in the sky. No one had called, and, dangerous or not, she knew she’d have to take responsibility for finding her daughter. Nobody else was stepping up to the plate.