Clarence shook his head. “You know we can’t say that for sure, Margaret. How many times have you told me that the disease might shift, might become contagious? You said it’s mutated, right?”
Margaret didn’t know what to say — he was using her own words against her.
Amos jabbed a finger at the monitor. “That is an American citizen in that cage. Yes, cage. She’s got rights, goddamit.”
Clarence again shook his head. “Not right now she doesn’t. We contact the mother and the next thing you know, the press is all over it.”

I have really waited to read the sequel for Infected and now I had the chance. The team is back in action – we got Margo – the scientist who put the pieces together that the violent murders and the associated disease symptoms were actually an alien virus spreading (the triangles). We also got Perry back – this time working as a bloodhound for the government, trying to sniff out any other infected pockets and taking them out. While he was left psychologically shattered by his own struggles with this terrible enemy, he possesses an unexplainable ability to locate the disease’s hosts.

We got new faces in the science world working together as the disease becomes … more. Hardened CIA veteran Dew Phillips must somehow forge a connection with him if they’re going to stand a chance against this maddeningly adaptable opponent.

The Orbital virus is making some changes to its viral load and the disease can now spread and infect and the hosts can get together under one leader (or more).

One of the new contagion leaders is a young girl called Chelsea who thinks that the Orbital is God when she gets infected and starts to hear a voice telling her what to do. And there’s nothing worse than a child with no ethical sense of right and wrong as she subsequently infects her parents and then her neighbours.

The City of Gaylord becomes the new center of infection as cases spread and without them realising – a few escape and head towards Detroit where they begin a new infection spree.

Margo and the team are fighting in a mobile unit (one of many) to try to isolate the viral load and kill it before it reaches the brain and takes over the host.

Chlorine killed them, and in far lower concentrations than the MargoMobile’s decontamination mist. In fact, basic bleach killed them instantly. That was great for sterilization but didn’t do much for a living victim. Antibiotics, unfortunately, had no effect, and Sanchez’s immune system completely ignored the things.
Reducing the temperature did nothing — freezing them might work, but that would also kill the host. Heat at two hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher killed them, but that wasn’t a solution either, as those temperatures would also kill the host. Heat did, however, provide another way to decontaminate any area exposed to the dandelion-seed spores.

The problem is – the humans they are testing on are just that – humans. Real people, someone’s daughter, a soldier, a police person. They didn’t volunteer to be infected and they were left to be prodded and poked in the name of national security. No more freedom, no more liberties. The disease would either be left to run its course so it could be studied more or different treatments would be administered to see what would stick and what wouldn’t.

All the country is at the edge of collapse if this disease becomes airborne and the president’s (Gutierrez) critical team has an option to either inform the public or let Murray – the head of the secret agency dealing with biological terrorist threats – hide everything under the cover. Exposing the alien viral infection could cause mass panic – especially when no treatment is available and hiding it would make it worse as the infected citizens would be fodder for the testing facilities until a cure would be found. The good of the many outweigh the wellbeing of a few it looks like.

“Vanessa,” Gutierrez said, “do me a favor and shut the fuck up.”
The look on her face might be the same one she’d have if Murray whipped out his cock and asked for a blow job with whip cream and ice cubes.

The book evolves in a crescendo of firepower, camps of infected vs clean and an infestation of Detroit which brings Margo to make a fated call to Murray asking for the “final” cure. An atomic bomb.

The seven-hundred-pound B61 dropped toward the city. The guidance computer tracked a signal emitting from near the corner of Franklin and Riopelle. The B61 wouldn’t actually hit the ground, but if it had, it would have landed only twenty feet away from the satphone in Perry Dawsey’s hand.
At twelve hundred feet, a gas generator fired, ejecting a twenty-four-foot nylon/Kevlar-29 ribbon parachute. In just three seconds, the B61 slowed from 750 miles an hour to 35.
It drifted down until it hit eleven hundred feet, where barometric pressure activated a firing mechanism that began a nuclear chain reaction.
Detonation.
In a millionth of a second, a fireball formed and heated the air to 18,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly twice as hot as the surface of the sun. This heat radiated outward at the speed of light, expanding and dissipating. Dissipating being a relative term, however, as the heat caused instant first-degree burns as far as two miles away. The closer to the detonation, the worse the burns. Inside a quarter mile of the blast, flesh simply vaporized.
Every spore within a mile of the detonation point died instantly. Those between one and two miles out lived for as long as two seconds before they burned up in infinitesimally small puffs of smoke. The five-mile-per-hour wind had carried some lucky spores as far as two and a half miles away — those took almost five seconds to cook, but they cooked just the same.
The plasma ball was really the whole point of the nuke, to create instant, scorching temperatures that would kill every spore, and it worked like a charm.
The rest of the nuke’s effects were a bit of unavoidable overkill.
The Renaissance Center stood less than a mile from the detonation point. Star-hot heat radiated down, turning metal, glass and plastic into boiling liquid. Some of these liquids evaporated instantly, but the building didn’t have time to completely melt and burn.
The shock wave came next.
The explosion’s power pushed the air around it outward in a pressure wave moving at 780 miles an hour, just a touch over the speed of sound and twice the speed of an F-5 tornado, the most powerful wind force on Earth. The wave smashed into the melting glass, metal and plastic of the RenCen, thirty-five pounds per square inch of overpressure splashing the molten liquid away in a giant wave and shattering the still-solid parts like a sledgehammer slamming through a toothpick house.
The RenCen’s main tower had seventy-three stories, the four surrounding towers thirty-nine stories each. Less than three seconds after detonation, all of it was gone.

Holy hell – this book was brutal. And not just the military aspect, but the biology and the in-depth study of contagious viral spreads, all waaaay before Covid happened. Loved the horror in this book, the body shattering, mind bending, synapse twisting horror. And the Chelsea scenes – where she so casually pits people against each other or transforms her own mother into a … puff ball of an incubator … absolutely horrifying.

There’s some brief respite as the Otto and Montoya scenes show the tenderness between the two and how well they work together despite their different backgrounds. Would really want this made into a TV series.