A terrifying thriller that will crawl beneath your skin . . . and leave fresh blood on every page. 'Fraught with tension . . . Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Hot Zone.'--Rocky Mountain News Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government's shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common--they've been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science. Meanwhile Perry Dawsey--a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey--awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts