Hosts

"Shit!" the guy says. "They don't know when to quit, do they. They know we've got the vaccine. Why do they keep trying?"

"Just because they've got lots of brains doesn't mean they're smart."

The guy doesn't think this is fu

"Guess I'll just go down to the store and wait outside till they clean things up."

Jack waves good-bye and watches him go. Once he's sure the guy's not going to do a spin and jump him from behind, he resumes his walk home. Knows he's always been a bit paranoid, but six months ago he'd have kept the Glock holstered and wouldn't be worried about being jumped for his food. As the saying goes, you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. And they are. Oh yes, they are.

As Jack walks along he can feel the threads of the social fabric tearing, parting one by one.

Trust is gone, because anyone, your best and oldest friend, your dearest, closest relative, could be carrying the virus. Bad enough they're infected—that's not their fault—but less than a week after their inoculation they become someone else, someone dead set on infecting you.

Compassion is a memory. Sure, feel sorry for the victims of the virus—after they're dead.

Jack doesn't know about the rest of the country, but the tenuous sense of community that existed around the Upper West Side is atrophying. You'd think it would be the other way around, a community of the uninfected linking arms and closing ranks against the contaminated. But not when yesterday's uninfected ally could be today's infected enemy.

Jack figures he can extrapolate the local to the national, even to the international, and that means the whole world's going in the toilet—old social orders fragmenting while a new world order expands, relentlessly, irresistibly, geometrically, a rolling snowball of humanity with an unquestioned singleness of purpose.

Strange mix of feelings roiling through him these days. He's spent most of his adult life hiding from the social order, rejecting it, damning it. But despite its toxicity, now that it's on the brink of ruin he finds himself rooting for it, hoping it will find a way to hang on. Because the Hive is even more toxic than the world order it hopes to replace.

Not so much worried about himself—being a ghost in the Hive machine will be more of a challenge than his existence in the American social engine, but he'll manage it. His piercing concern is for Gia and Vicky and the jeopardy they face. They're not cut out to live in the cracks, and the Hive is too vast and pervasive for Jack ever to defeat on his own. Hates to admit it, but he needs help to protect the two people he cherishes. He knows he can't expect it from Democrats and Republicans, but maybe some genius in the medical establishment will come up with a killer app.

And most daunting is that deterioration to the current state has taken a mere five months.

First the virus mutated into an airborne form, then the original tiny nucleus of the Hive fa

By the time most people began to appreciate the enormity of the threat, it was too late.

The CDC's initial approach to containment was an influenza model, which proved ineffective. First off, folks with influenza know they're sick and so do the people around them; secondly, flu victims feel lousy and just want to get better. For Hive folk the infection's a party and the more the merrier.

And they were everywhere, contaminating water supplies, infiltrating food processing plants and dairy farms. People became afraid to eat anything they hadn't heated to a boil or prepared themselves.

As he pushes along the sidewalks, Jack wonders as he often does about his sister. Kate exited his life as quickly as she'd entered it. He searched for her but she stayed on the move, spreading the virus with the rest of the Hive vanguard, and he never caught up with her. But just last week he tried calling her office in Trenton and learned she was back in practice. She'd refused to take his call and he'd hung up sick at heart. He thinks of Kate as a pediatrician, with trusting parents, fearing their children might become infected, bringing them to her to be vaccinated against the virus. And Kate making sure if they aren't infected when they enter her office they damn sure are when they leave. All it takes is plain saline in the vaccine syringes and a little of the virus on the tongue depressors…

The thought of Kate betraying those children, breaking her oath to do no harm, negating the decent caring person she once was fills Jack with impotent rage. He wants to hurt, maim, kill, make someone pay, but how do you even a score with a virus?

He wonders if he should take a ride down to Trenton and… do something. But what? Put down the fouled thing that used to be his sister? The old Kate, the real Kate would want him to do that. Beg him to.

But can he? Take a bead on his own sister—even if she's not really his sister anymore—and pull the trigger? Can't imagine that.

Jack picks up his pace as he nears his block. Two old cars are parked nose to nose, blocking the near end of the street; he knows two more junkers are similarly situated at the far end—knows because the whole setup was his idea. Sometime last month he went door to brown-stone door talking—usually at a safe distance through windows or from the sidewalk—to neighbors he'd never bothered to meet despite years on the block, planting the idea of the block sealing itself off. Someone with better people skills picked up the ball and organized the residents, breaking the watch into shifts. Now no outsider enters the block unless accompanied by a resident.

Jack nods to a guy he knows only as George, standing behind one of the cars with a sawed off twelve gauge resting against a thigh. As George waves him through, an NYPD blue-and-white goes by, two cops in the front. Passenger cop's gaze lingers on Jack and George, then slides by. Can't miss the Glock or the sawed-off, but he doesn't react. The tattered remnants of officialdom are no longer worried about armed citizenry—the unseen danger of the virus is a far greater threat to the city. And besides, not enough police to go around as it is. They were the Hive's first target: call the cops out to a domestic dispute, infect them, then form a fifth column within the ranks to infect the rest. Uninfected cops stayed home until the blood tests were developed.

The vaccine and the blood tests—cheap little home kits, like pregnancy tests—are the final fingers in the dam against rising tide of the Hive. If they should fail…

Jack drag-bounces the cart to his third-floor apartment—his fortress islet within the atoll of his closed-off block—and knocks on the door; he has a key but Gia's so edgy these days he figures it'll go easier on her nerves if he doesn't just barge in.

"Oh, Jack!" he hears her say through the door, and he knows she's got her eye to the peep lens, but he detects a strange note in her voice. Something's up.

And when she opens the door and he sees her red eyes and tear-streaked face, he knows it.

"What's wrong?"