Pandemic

  Cooper felt a pull of emotions. The fever was making Jeff delirious, maybe even dangerous enough to do something violent, but he was also afraid and in pain. For Jeff to actually ask Cooper to stick around? That man never asked for help. That meant he was in bad shape.

  “It’s okay,” Cooper said. He quietly returned to his bed, feeling his way through the darkness. He lay down. “It’s okay, Jeff. I’ll be here. Just go to sleep.”

  “You won’t bail on me?”

  Cooper felt a rush of love for his friend. They’d known each other their whole lives — like he could ever bail on Jeff Brockman.

  “Hell no,” Cooper said. “I got your back. Just sleep. I’ll be here.”

  Moments later, Jeff started snoring.

  Cooper adjusted in his bed, but felt a pain on his right shoulder. He quietly sat up, craned his neck to get a look. In the faint light, he saw he had a blister of some kind. Small, reddish, straining the skin like it had liquid inside. Liquid, or … air?

  He pressed a finger against it, slowly at first, then harder. It squished in, but didn’t pop.

  Cooper rubbed at the area, then lay down. If it was still there tomorrow, he’d deal with it then.

  For now, however, the more sleep, the better.

  BECOMING MORE

  Steve hurt.

  He didn’t mind the pain. Something was happening … something wonderful. He wasn’t afraid of Bo Pan anymore. He wasn’t afraid of anyone, or anything.

  He lay in his dark hotel room. He heard noises outside — sirens, faint screams, something that might be a gunshot — but he didn’t care. None of those things concerned him.

  He wasn’t going back to Benton Harbor. He’d never see his parents again, but that, too, was okay, because — somehow — his parents were no longer his.

  They weren’t his parents any more than some chimpanzees were his parents. Related? Sure, but vastly separated by different states of intelligence, different states of awareness.

  Steve closed his eyes. He would sleep a little more. And he knew, he knew, that when he awoke, he would be a new man.

  DAY NINE

  THE FRONT DESK

  Yelling from outside the room.

  Cooper yawned. He sat up in bed. The room was pitch-black. He was still coming out of sleep, but damn, he felt a hundred percent better. Just not being sick made him instantly happy, giddy at feeling normal once again.

  Another yell from the hall.

  Then, silence.

  Cooper thought of the scene on the street: one cop burning, another cop shooting a man then making out with him, a woman crawling across the sidewalk, leaving a trail of blood.

  He sat very still, listening for anything, hearing nothing.

  What time was it?

  That question made him remember Jeff throwing the clock against the wall. Sick Jeff. Angry Jeff.

  Cooper quietly felt around the nightstand, searching for his cell phone. He found it, turned away from Jeff so the light wouldn’t cause problems, then checked the time — 8:45 A.M. He’d slept through the night.

  Had Jeff slept, too?

  Cooper slowly moved his phone so the display’s illumination lit up the bed next to him.

  It was empty.

  He turned on the nightstand lamp. He blinked at the sudden light. On the floor below the TV, Jeff’s AC/DC shirt and his jeans: gone.

  Cooper quietly stood, walked to the closed bathroom door.

  “Jeff,” he said in a whisper. “There’s some shit going down in the hall.”

  No answer.

  Cooper opened the door — the bathroom was empty.

  Where the hell was Jeff?

  He quietly walked to the room’s main door, careful not to make any noise. He leaned into the peephole and looked out.

  There was a teenager lying there, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. The kid moved weakly, unfocused eyes staring up at nothing.

  Cooper automatically reached for the door handle, but stopped when he saw a flicker of motion. Through the peephole’s fisheye lens, another teenager stepped into view. Then another.

  One grabbed the fallen one’s feet, the other reached under his shoulders. They lifted.

  Cooper again started to open the door, to see if he could help, but one of the teenagers turned his head sharply.

  Wild eyes stared right at Cooper.

  He felt a blast of fear, something that rooted him to the spot — he dare not move, not even to step away from the peephole.

  Was the teenager looking at him? No … no one could see through a peephole, not from that far away. Maybe Cooper had made a noise.

  Not knowing why the teenager scared him so bad, Cooper stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even breathe.

  The boy said something to his friend. They carried the fallen one down the hall, out of sight.

  Cooper ran to the hotel phone. He stabbed the button marked “front desk.” The phone on the other end rang ten times before a woman answered.

  “Hello, this is Carmella.”

  “I need security,” Cooper said. “No, just call the cops. There was a hurt kid up here. Maybe there was a fight. They took him.”

  “And I give a shit, why?”

  Cooper blinked. “Uh … didn’t you hear me? I think that kid was hurt. He had a head wound.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” the woman said. “Fuck you very much.”

  She hung up.

  Cooper stared at the handset for a moment, then felt stupid for doing so and put it back in the cradle.

  He looked at his cell, dialed 9, then 1, then paused: those cops in the street, shooting people. Were more cops like that? Maybe all of them? Maybe calling 911 wasn’t such a good idea.

  He heard sirens coming up from the street. He walked to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. For the second time in a handful of seconds, what he saw stunned him.

  Chicago burned.

  He saw flames rising high from the windows of two skyscrapers. Down on the street, people scrambled in all directions. There were four fire engines, but only one had a crew that was trying to fight the fires. The other three trucks seemed to be abandoned. And no, people weren’t scrambling down there, they were … chasing … they were fighting.

  A black car turned the corner, completely out of control. It skidded across cold pavement and skipped up onto the sidewalk, where it plowed into an old man. The man flew back a few feet, then vanished below the still-moving black car.

  Cooper heard the now-familiar, distant snap of a gunshot, but he couldn’t see where it came from.

  Chaos down on the street. Bloody teenagers in the hall. The front desk lady didn’t sound like she was dealing with a full deck. Jeff, gone. And Steve Stanton … was Steve okay? Cooper vaguely remembered Steve was on another floor, but he had no idea what the room number was.

  He couldn’t worry about Steve right now. Finding his best friend was all that mattered.

  Cooper looked at the nightstand, seeing if Jeff had left his cell phone — it was gone. He looked to the room’s lone chair: Jeff’s coat was there, Cooper’s piled on top. It was freezing outside … maybe Jeff was still in the building.

  He dialed Jeff’s number.

  On the other end, Jeff’s cell rang. And rang.

  “Shit, bro, pick up.”

  On the seventh ring, Jeff answered.

  “Coop?”

  A surge of relief at hearing his voice.

  “Jeff, dude, where are you? Shit is going off outside. I don’t know what’s happening but we need to bail the hell out of Chicago. We have to get to the Mary Ellen and get out of here.”

  Jeff said nothing.

  “Jeff, talk to me — where are you, man?”

  “Not … sure.”

  His voice sounded so deep, racked with pain and confusion.

  “Jeff, just tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. Are you in the hotel?”

  “Hotel?”

  “Yes, the Trump Tower, where we
’re staying? Are you in the building?”

  Cooper waited for an answer. Jeff sounded like he was on the edge of passing out.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “Uh … basement.”

  “Basement? Good, Jeff. Where in the basement? Focus, brother, focus. I’ll come get you. Look around and tell me what you see.”

  “It hurts,” Jeff said. “Coop, it hurts.”

  “Okay, I hear you, but tell me where you are, buddy. You—”

  The phone went silent, the connection broken.

  Cooper immediately dialed again. The phone rang and kept ringing until voice mail answered.

  “This is Jeff Brockman of Jeff Brockman Salvage, and if you’ve got the bills, we’ve got the skills. Leave a message and we’ll get back at ya, pronto.”

  The message beeped.

  “You stupid dickhead! Call me back the second you get this, and tell me where you are.”

  Cooper hung up, then immediately called again, only to get voice mail for the second time.

  The basement. That narrowed things down, at least.

  Cooper got dressed. As he did, he caught a reflection of himself in the room’s mirror. That blister on his shoulder was gone, just a red spot now. He took a closer look; no, not gone, broken open. A shred of weak, torn skin dangled from the edge. No wetness, though … it looked like something had puffed it up like a balloon, then the balloon popped.

  He quickly examined himself in the mirror. He had more of the blisters: on his chest, his hip, below his right knee. Something leftover from whatever had made him sick? An allergic reaction to detergents in the hotel’s sheets?

  The blisters didn’t hurt, and he didn’t have time to worry about them. He dressed. He grabbed his coat and also Jeff’s for good measure — if they had to go outside in the bitter Chicago cold, they’d both need to stay warm.

  Cooper walked to the door, reached down to open it, then stopped. He looked out the peephole again, half expecting the teenage kid to be staring right back at him.

  Nothing there.

  Nothing except for a little red streak on the far wall, where the first teenage kid had fallen.

  A streak of blood.

  Cooper took a deep breath, steeled himself.

  He opened the door and stepped into the empty hall. He had to find Jeff. Jeff first, then maybe the two of them could track down Steve. Until then, Cooper hoped Steve Stanton could fend for himself.

  FOLLOW ME

  Steve Stanton strapped on his two laptop bags stuffed with three laptops. He stepped out of his room on the Trump Tower’s seventeenth floor.

  Anger coursed through his body, set every muscle cell on edge. He felt an almost overpowering urge to smash a human’s head in, find a brick and crack the skull open so he could get at the brains, pull them out, stomp them and …

  His own thought played back in his head: smash a HUMAN’S head in.

  Why had he thought of it like that? Why hadn’t he thought of the word person, or man or even woman?

  Why? Because Steve Stanton was no longer human, not at all — humans were the enemy.

  He heard a scream coming from the right, around a corner and farther down the hall. He walked toward that scream.

  Steve turned the corner. He saw a shirtless, middle-aged man dressed in tan slacks. The man’s belly hung over his belt. He wore no shoes. He stood above a woman in a torn, red dress. Steve assumed the two red sandals scattered nearby belonged to her. She was on her butt, one hand behind her, the other raised up, palm out.

  “Morris! Stop hitting me, for God’s sake!”

  In response, the man — Morris, Steve assumed — reared back and kicked the woman in the thigh. The woman let out another scream. She rolled to her hands and knees and tried to crawl away. Morris reached down and grabbed her right ankle, yanked her back. The woman fell flat on her stomach, arms out in front of her.

  Morris grabbed her hip and flipped her over. Before she could say another word, he pressed his bare foot hard against her neck. His face scrunched into a confused mask of rage. She twisted, turned her lower body, tried to kick. She grabbed at Morris’s foot, clawed at it, her purple fingernails leaving crisscross streaks of ragged red on his skin — but the foot did not move.

  The man leaned lower, rested his forearms on the knee of the leg pressing down on her neck.

  “How about that toilet seat now, Cybil? How about that fucking goddamn cunty toilet seat now, you ball-busting, dried-up-pussy bitch? I guess you shouldn’t have nagged me about putting it down, huh? Huh?”

  Steve walked closer. The man seemed entirely focused on the struggling woman. There was a bluish triangular growth on the man’s chest, under his skin just left of the sternum. And another on the right side of his belly.

  Steve stopped cold: something in the air …

  A smell.

  He breathed deep into his nose; he recognized that scent even though he’d never smelled it before. He sniffed again … the man had the scent, but not the woman.

  The triangles, that smell … he is my kind, he is me.

  The man — Morris — was staring at Steve.

  “Hi,” Morris said. “You, uh … you want to help with this?”

  In that instant, so many things became clear. Morris was nothing but an ugly husk meant to carry infinite beauty, beauty that would soon break free of his body, leaving him a dead shell.

  Morris was stupid.

  Steve was smart.

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do,” Steve said.

  Morris didn’t take his foot off the squirming woman’s neck, but his eyes narrowed as he tried to understand.

  He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll do what you tell me to do.”

  The woman yelled, fought with renewed energy. She clawed and ripped. Her fingernails turned Morris’s foot into a ragged mess that splashed blood on her face and chest.

  This man would do what Steve said. Steve felt it.

  So much happening all at once. Steve thought back on a lifetime of not standing up for himself, of staying quiet, of avoiding conflict or embarrassment. His circumstances had denied him his birthright. He was brilliant. He was a genius. His destiny was more than wrapping knives and forks in fucking napkins.

  Steve Stanton had been born to rule.

  He nodded toward the woman. The human woman.

  “Morris,” Steve said, “do something about her.”

  Morris looked down at his bloody mess of a foot. He pressed it down harder — the woman stopped fighting. She drew in wet, broken hisses of air.

  The man looked back to Steve, hope blazing in his wide eyes. “Can I kill her? She was always bitching about everything. Like the goddamn toilet seat. Like she’s such a helpless princess she can’t reach a finger out and tip the goddamn thing forward? Can I kill her? Can I?”

  Steve stepped closer and looked down at the woman. Her wide eyes pleaded for help. In those eyes, Steve saw fear. She was afraid, because she wasn’t him, and he wasn’t her. She was human.

  “Kill her,” Steve said.

  Morris pumped a fist like he’d just scored a goal in hockey.

  “Fuck yeah!” He screamed down at his wife. “You shoulda been nicer to me, you nagging bitch! You shoulda been nicer!”

  He raised the bloody foot, then slammed it back down again heel-first into her throat. She grunted. She stiffened. Her arms and legs twitched.

  Morris stomped again and again. Steve watched.

  The woman stopped moving. Wide, dead eyes stared out. Her throat was a real mess.

  Steve took off his laptop bags, set them on the floor.

  “Carry those,” he said. “We have to find more friends. And after that, I think we need to find a place for you to lie down.” Steve reached out, his fingertips tracing the firm outline of the hard, bluish triangle on the man’s chest.

  “Tomorrow, I think,” Steve said. “Tomorrow, something wonderful happens to you.”

  THE BOILER ROOM


  Cooper moved down the concrete-and-metal stairwell. He kept one hand on the rough, unfinished walls. In the other, he carried Jeff’s coat.

  He moved slowly. He didn’t want to make any noise, because every time he passed a landing he heard plenty of noise coming from beyond the heavy, reddish-brown metal doors.

  Yelling. Shouting. Screams of rage. Screams of pain. And laughter: the kind of laughter only insane people made.

  Three times he’d heard another kind of sound, a sound that damn near made him piss his pants. Twice from below and once from above, he’d heard the sound of a metal door opening and slamming against a landing wall, the echoing of a laughing/​screaming/​giggling/​yelling man or woman running into the stairwell. Cooper had held his breath, waiting for them to come his way, but all three times he’d been lucky and they’d gone in the opposite direction.

  He reached the first floor. Past the heavy fire door, he heard more noise than he’d heard on any floor before it. He briefly thought about opening the door and taking a peek, but a line from some old book popped into his head — when you look into the void, the void looks back into you, or something like that.

  All that mattered right now was tracking down his friend. Together, they would find a place to hide until the cops or the National Guard or whatever came to make everything safe again.

  Cooper moved down another flight to what had to be the basement level, then down again until the steps ended on a flat, concrete floor. He’d reached the subbasement. Might as well start here and work his way up. Cooper put his ear to the landing door’s cool metal — he heard nothing.

  He thumbed the door’s lever, quietly pulled the door open.

  The empty hallway looked like a service area: more concrete floor, but here it was smoother, slightly polished. White walls with bumpers on the bottom, black marks on the walls where carts had scraped against them.

  He stepped into the hallway, slowed the automatic door’s closing until it clicked shut with the tiniest snick of metal on metal.

  Cooper looked at his cell phone. Still one bar. He dialed Jeff’s number. He held the phone to his ear only long enough to make sure it was ringing, then lowered it, pressed it against his thigh to mute that sound.