Then he didn’t show up at all. Ray checked on him, making sure he hadn’t been bitten. The things had made it to New York, but so far no reports of attacks in New England. Doctors had discovered parasites in people’s spines. Surgery was their first step, but it turned out opening up a patient’s neck caused the parasites to burrow deeper. The patients they tried it on were dead within hours. At least they were able to collect the parasites, keeping them alive in blood baths so they could study them. Dan had hope for that. They’d figure it out. Meanwhile, for the infected, they were moving on to radiation, chemo drugs. Anyone who was attacked—by anything, even if they woke up with a spider bite—was told to report to their nearest hospital, where they were then being transferred to Virginia, to the same hospital that had received the six-year-old girls, one infected, the other just brutally attacked. The infected one was dead now. That news crawled over Dan’s skin. That could have been him.
