Spiral Read Online Free PDF

Once it is in your lungs, the spores spread from your breath. No known cure. The mycotoxins attack your sanity, producing mania, hallucinations, then suicidal and homicidal urges. Later, they attack your organs, causing internal hemorrhaging. Within a day, you are mad. Within a week, you are dead. You live only long enough to infect those around you, a walking biological time bomb.
    He had told them about confronting Kitano after the explosion, finding him wounded, having bitten off his own finger, trying to kill himself, trying to bleed to death.
    They had fought. Liam had subdued him and then gone for help.
    That was the story he’d told.
    He hadn’t told them about the small brass cylinder in his hand.
    Throw it overboard , he thought. Toss it over. To the bottom of the sea with it .
    Toss it, you dumb Irish bastard .
    WHEN KITANO AWOKE, HE WAS IN THE INFIRMARY. HE WAS strapped down. He was alone. His finger was bandaged, missing the top two joints.
    The cylinder was gone. He expected the MPs to come, interrogate him, torture him. Tear at his body until he’d told them everything about the Uzumaki.
    But it never happened.
    They questioned him about the penicillin for hours. But nothing more. Nothing about the cylinder that had been in his finger.
    Over the next hours, his certainty grew until it was rock-solid. They did not know . They did not know what he had possessed. Liam Connor had not told them.
    A few days after, he saw Connor briefly. They had brought him up for a few minutes of sunlight. Connor stood by the railing. Their eyes met. Connor shook his head almost imperceptibly. He glanced toward the sea. To say I threw it overboard .
    Kitano nodded back, then turned and looked away, saying with his countenance that he understood, that it was over. That the Uzumaki was now at the bottom of the ocean.
    But what Kitano thought was: He still has it .

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER

DAY 1
MONDAY, OCTOBER 25
    THE CRAWLERS IN THE GARDEN

1
    LIAM CONNOR LOVED CORNELL. HE HAD TAUGHT AT THE university for more than half a century and expected full well to die shuffling between the Arts Quad and the Big Red Barn. Cornell was a chimera, both a member of the Ivy League and the New York state agricultural school. Nabokov wrote Lolita here, and Feynman started his scribbling about quantum electrodynamics, but Cornell was also a place where you could get your wheat checked for smut or your cow autopsied.
    The campus was perched on a hill overlooking the city of Ithaca, population twenty-nine thousand, tucked between a pair of glacier-carved gorges. It was founded in 1865 by the millionaire and philanthropist Ezra Cornell, founder of Western Union and a freethinker who believed that the practical sciences should be taught with the same zeal as the classics. Cornell had made his money on the telegraph, the new communication technology that had remade society as fundamentally as would the Internet one hundred and fifty years later. He used his fortune to create a new kind of university, utterly different from the religion- and tradition-bound schools of the era: “An institution where any person could find instruction in any study,” a quote that would become the school’s motto. Coed and nondenominational from the day it opened, the university graduated its first female student in 1873 and its first African American in 1897. Liam was proud of the university’s heritage—he had a deep appreciation and respect for the underdog. A person’s value, he believed, was set by who they were, not by how others treated them. For eight centuries, the Irish had been treated as little more than apes by the British, and Liam never forgot it.
    LIAM’S LABORATORIES WERE TUCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT of the Physical Sciences Building, a new glass, steel, and stone structure in the center of campus wedged between the old façades of Rockefeller and Baker halls. This evening he stood in the middle of his lab, a pair of silver, sharp-point #5 tweezers in