Pandemic by Scott Sigler Read Free Book Online

Unfortunately, she died before divers could get her to medical attention. She was just as crazy as Dawsey — cut off her own arm with a reciprocal saw just below the right elbow. She used her belt for a tourniquet and cauterized the wound, but it wasn’t enough. She escaped the sub by wearing an SEIE suit, a bulky thing that lets submariners rise up without suffering pressure effects. We think her tourniquet came off when she was exiting the sub, or maybe while she ascended. Since she was in the suit, she had no way of tying the belt off again. Her picture is next.”
    Margaret flipped to the next page, then hissed in a breath. A dead girl wearing battered, blood-streaked dark-blue coveralls. A lieutenant in the navy, based on her insignia — a highly trained adult, although her face looked all of eighteen. The girl’s right arm was a horrid sight: seared flesh and protruding, blackened bone. Extensive blood loss made her skin extremely pale. She had a bruise under her right eye and a long cut on her left temple.
    Margaret thought of the first time she met Perry Dawsey.
    He had been a walking nightmare. A massive, naked man, covered in third-degree burns from a fire that had also melted away his hair, leaving his scalp covered with fresh, swelling blisters. His own blood had baked flaky-dry on his skin. A softball-sized pustule on his left collarbone streamed black rot down his wide chest. His knee had been shredded by a bullet fired from the gun of Dew Phillips. And worst of all — even more disturbing than the fact that Perry clutched his own severed penis in a tight fist — the look on his face, those lips caught between a smile and a scream, curled back to show well-cared-for teeth that reflected the winter sun in a wet-white blaze.
    Perry, mangled almost beyond recognition. This girl — correction, this
naval officer
— much the same.
    Margaret shuddered, imagining a saw-toothed blade as a buzzing blur, jagged points scraping free a shred of skin or a curl of bone with each pass …
    “Did the autopsy confirm she died from blood loss?”
    Murray frowned. “You’ve been out of the game longer than I thought, Doc. We didn’t do an autopsy yet. The
Los Angeles
had a mission to recover pieces of the Orbital. You remember the Orbital, right? The thing that made the most infectious disease we’ve ever seen, a disease that turned people into psychopaths? The thing that made little monsters that tried to open a goddamn gate to another goddamn world? The thing that forced us to nuke the Motor City to stop that gate from opening?”
    Margaret felt her own lip curl into a sneer. “Yes, Murray, I
so
need you to fucking remind me about the
fucking
Orbital.”
    She felt a hand on her arm. Clarence, quietly telling her to ease down.
    Murray leaned forward. He spoke quietly, trying to control his rage. “Apparently, you
do
need a reminder,” he said. “Before Lieutenant Walker died, she admitted to sabotaging the engine room of the
Los Angeles
. She also admitted to shooting and killing two men. Her corpse and the second body, that of Petty Officer Charles Petrovsky, are in a Biosafety Level Four facility inside the
Carl Brashear
. They are infected with the same goddamn disease that could have wiped us all out five years ago, that made the crew of the
Los Angeles
fire on U.S. ships. So no, genius, we haven’t done an autopsy yet. For that, we need the best. We need
you
.”
    Margaret cleared her throat. She’d asked a stupid question and been properly slapped down for it. “You said the
Los Angeles
found something?”
    “Look at the last photo.”
    It was a photo of an object she didn’t recognize, some kind of beat-up cylinder sitting on the gray, lifeless lake bottom. The diver or photographer had rested a ruler close by: the cylinder was about five inches long, two and a half inches wide. It was
frayed
in places, as if it were woven from a synthetic material; like fiberglass, maybe. Detritus and some kind of