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a tiny, hissing gurgle.

THE MARGOMOBILE™

Margaret Montoya, Clarence Otto and Amos Braun sat in comfortable seats in the customized sleeper cabin of a semi tractor-trailer. The massive eighteen-wheeler rolled north along Highway 13, followed closely by a second, outwardly identical rig. The two trailers, designed to work together as one unit, were worth about $25 million and had come to be known collectively as the “MargoMobile.”

The three sat biggest to smallest, a cross section of cultures—Clarence’s chocolate skin and tall, muscular bulk on the left; Margaret with her long black hair and Hispanic complexion in the middle; and the diminutive, oh-so-Caucasian Amos on the right. Those two men constituted one half of Margaret’s team. The other half drove the rigs. Anthony Gitsham handled this one, Marcus Thompson drove the other. Murray’s single-minded mission to keep “those in the know” to the absolute minimum had landed Gitsh and Marcus this choice assignment, thanks to their rather unique set of skills.

Both men had logged at least a hundred hours driving a semi, had medical-assistant training, combat experience and—the big one—hands-on experience with biohazard procedures and gear. Gitsh had driven army rigs in the Mideast and traded small-arms fire a few times, but Clint Eastwood he was not. Clint wasn’t as pale, wasn’t as skinny and didn’t have a ’fro that made him look like a white Black Panthers wannabe from 1974. Marcus was something of a study in contrast to Anthony, with his deep black skin, shaved head and enough wiry muscle for both men. Marcus’s combat experience, apparently, was rather extensive. He didn’t talk about it, and no one asked. From what Margaret could gather, being assigned to drive a truck and lug around rotting corpses that might or might not be fatally infectious . . . well, that was like a vacation for Marcus. Maybe it was why he whistled all the damn time.

Her whole team was already dressed in black biohazard suits, completely covering them in airtight PVC material save for their exposed heads and hands. She was so used to the suit that she didn’t give it a second thought anymore. A silly, uncontrollable part of her liked the the fact that it hid the extra weight on her hips.

When it came time to go in, they’d all don the gloves clipped to their belts and the helmets sitting at their feet, pressurize the suits, and they’d be ready to face the latest horrors in an endless, gruesome parade.

Horrors that always seemed to involve one “Scary” Perry Dawsey.

Margaret didn’t know how or why Perry could still hear the triangles. CAT scans showed a network of very thin lines spreading through the center of his brain, like a 3-D spiderweb or a spongy mesh. While she was fighting to keep him alive, she hadn’t dared risk trying to get a sample of the material. Any additional trauma on his ravaged body could have been the final straw. Since he’d regained consciousness, Perry wouldn’t even talk about the incident—it was no surprise he wouldn’t let anyone slide a drill into his skull.

Even if they could get a sample, it probably wouldn’t do them any good—the National Security Agency, the group that handled signal intelligence and cryptography for the government, detected no signals of any kind. The triangles and hatchlings communicated, yet no one knew how. The NSA’s prevailing theory involved some form of communication via quantum tunneling, but that was guesswork at best without a shred of data to back it up.

Whatever the science behind it, Perry’s homing instinct had been the only thing keeping them in the game. Unfortunately, when he found infected hosts, he killed them. First Kevin Mest, who had butchered three friends with a fireplace poker. Perry claimed self-defense for that one, and everyone bought it. His self-defense claim for burning three eighty-year-old women alive? Well, that was a little harder to swallow.

But whatever he had done, however ugly, he