Pandemic

  Then Klimas moved silently past. Ramierez slid around the front of the overturned car and followed his commander into the shadows.

  KNOW YOUR ENEMY

  Paulius and Ramierez approached a small firehouse. The building looked medieval — two stories of grayish-tan granite with small, faux turrets on the second-story corners. Its red roll-up door looked just large enough for one fire engine to enter or exit, but nothing was going in or out thanks to the long, white public transit bus that had smashed into it at an angle.

  At the bus’s rear end, almost to the sidewalk, stood two cops — one black, one white — both dressed in heavy blue coats, their fingers laced behind their heads. Their breath billowed out in expanding clouds that glowed thanks to a nearby streetlight. The men looked both hopeful and afraid. A black XDM automatic pistol lay on the snow in front of each of them.

  They had their hands on their heads because two SEALs — Bosh and Roth — had M4s at their shoulders, barrels aimed at the cops’ chests.

  Paulius slung his own M4. He drew his sidearm, a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 already fitted with a suppressor. He aimed it at the two cops as he came up on Bosh’s right.

  “Bosh, report.”

  “I saw these two exit the bus’s rear door,” Bosh said. “Thing is, advance recon looked through the bus to make sure there weren’t any bad guys hiding there that could fire on the column. When they checked it, the bus was empty. Five minutes later, Rangers march through, these guys come out of it.”

  Paulius glanced at the bus. “There a hole in the front of it that leads into the firehouse?”

  “I checked,” Bosh said. “Didn’t see any openings. I also did a walk around the firehouse, couldn’t find a way in or out. The place is locked up tight, Commander.”

  Paulius glanced at the building’s red-framed windows. In every one, behind broken glass he saw the dull glint of metal. The cops had fortified the place. Paulius had to keep his men moving — every second they spent here was a second wasted.

  He looked at the cops. “What do you two want?”

  The cops looked at each other, then back at Paulius.

  The black cop spoke. “We want you to get us the fuck out of here. We’ve been in there” — he tilted his head toward the firehouse behind him — “for two freakin’ days.”

  They looked normal, but the mission was here to rescue one man and one man only.

  “We haven’t seen anyone but you,” Paulius said. “Why didn’t you come out sooner?”

  The white cop answered. “Right after Paris burned, we were ordered to protect the engine. We were inside the firehouse when things really went to hell. There were psychos everywhere, hundreds of them — they were eating people. We called for backup, for someone to come and get us, but no one’s answering anymore. We didn’t think we’d make it on the streets, so we kept quiet, boarded the place up.”

  “Then we saw you guys, you soldiers,” the black cop said. “You came to rescue us, right? So how about you stop aiming that goddamn gun at my face and get us out of here?”

  Paulius could imagine what it had been like to hide in that building, cut off from communication, while cannibals roamed the street. These guys were cops, public servants. Probably as brave as any soldier.

  But he couldn’t let them go. They had seen his entire force. If they were captured, they might talk. And, of course, they might already be infected. He could test them, but what was the point? The stakes were too high to take even the smallest of chances.

  Paulius knew what he had to do.

  God forgive me.

  He pulled the trigger four times in just over a second. The suppressor made each shot sound like a snapping mousetrap. The first two shots hit the white cop in the face. The black cop had barely enough time to raise his eyebrows in shock and surprise before the next two rounds tore through his skull.

  Both men dropped instantly. Blood mist hung in the air, slowly drifted down on top of them.

  Paulius switched his mic to the “all units” frequency.

  “Commander Klimas to detachment. No more delays. If anyone approaches the detachment, assume they are hostiles and put them down at a distance. Quietly. Make as little noise as possible. Repeat, as little noise as possible.”

  He turned to Bosh. “Let’s move out.”

  THE PARK TOWER

  I am going to kill you all, every one of you, I will wipe you off the face of the earth.

  Margaret ran through the dark streets, doing her best to stay close to the nasty little soldier in front of her. Ramierez, his name was. What a fool — if she got the chance she’d slit his throat from ear to ear and bathe in his blood while he tried to draw air. And yet here he was, guarding her, clearly ready to risk his own life to protect hers.

  The CBRN gear made it hard to move, but it would protect her from Cooper Mitchell’s disease. Hopefully. The crawlers had found a way through her BSL-4 suit. The hydras might have that same ability. She would stay as far away from Mitchell as possible. She didn’t know how she would kill him, not yet, but as a last resort she had the holstered Sig Sauer P226 strapped to her right thigh. She would just have to watch for her chance. Take out Mitchell, then slip away into the city.

  She heard a short bark of gunfire, then another. She and Ramierez followed Clarence and Bogdana. They jogged past a car where CBRN-suited Rangers were setting up a tripod-supported machine gun, pointed back the way they had come. Other Rangers were manually pushing cars into a loose line. They were setting up a perimeter. She saw two soldiers running wires to small, green boxes that were labeled FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

  The Rangers’ gas masks made them all look the same, made them look like the identical insects that they were.

  Past the perimeter rose the seventy-story Park Tower Hotel, a pale tan spire reaching up to the black sky. Ramierez led her to the front of the building. She saw an arced glass awning that had once sheltered guests from the rain as they entered and exited. It wasn’t sheltering anyone anymore — the only glass that remained stuck out in jagged shards. The body of a man dangled from a support beam. Icicles of blood pointed down from the ends of his fingers like stubby red claws.

  Once upon a time, a rotating glass door had kept out the Chicago winds. That, too, was nothing but shattered glass and twisted metal.

  Clarence approached and stood next to her. The mask hid most of his face, but not his eyes. He looked at her with a pathetic expression of hurt and confusion.

  It would be nice if she could kill Ramierez. But to murder Clarence? That wasn’t just a luxury — more and more, Margaret needed that as much as she needed to breathe.

  Maybe her kind would descend upon this hotel and slaughter these soldiers. She would have them string Clarence up by his feet, cut him apart a piece at a time. She’d slice off his eyelids so he wouldn’t be able to look away as people smiled at him and ate those pieces.

  She stared back at him, not wanting to give him any satisfaction at all, not wanting him to think that things were okay between them. Until she had a chance to kill him, she wanted him to hurt.

  He turned away, walked into the hotel. Margaret smiled a little, then forced that down. She was still surrounded by the enemy. She had to be careful.

  She heard gunshots from inside the hotel. She heard men yelling but couldn’t make out the words. Those sounds were lost as one of the helicopters roared overhead.

  A bullet plinked into a car to her right. Then something hit her, knocked her face-first to the glass-strewn entryway, pinned her there — the soldiers realized she wasn’t one of them anymore, they were going to kill her, slide a knife into her back, they—

  “Sniper,” Ramierez said. “Stay down, Doc.”

  From high above, the helicopter let out a new noise, a short-but-intense demon’s roar. The faraway sound of tinkling glass smashing against concrete joined the cacophony.

  Ramierez rolled off her, lifted her to her feet. He looked her up and down. “You okay, Doc?”

 
She nodded. “I think so.”

  Broken glass, I was rolling on broken glass …

  “Ramierez, do you see any cuts in my suit?”

  He gave her a cursory glance. “The suits are thicker than that, Doc, you—”

  “Just look!”

  Ramierez nodded, then checked her all over — placatingly, but also thoroughly.

  She was entering a building crawling with the hydra strain. This place was death. Any cut, no matter how small, could spell the end.

  “Looks clear,” Ramierez said. “You’re fine, Doc. And this lobby is secured, so you can relax.”

  She let out a genuine sigh of relief.

  Ramierez led her deeper into the lobby, which looked even more like a war zone than the streets outside. She recognized details from the YouTube video: the fire pit, now spotted white with windblown snow; corpses that had frozen solid and still wore jeans and winter coats; the soot-blackened ceiling; the shredded reception desk. The only thing missing was the body on the spit — maybe some of her kind had come in here, decided not to let good food go to waste.

  To the left of the fire pit, Rangers were unfolding portable tables and unpacking the equipment she’d asked for. Tim stood there, directing them, using what was left of the reception desk as the lab’s main area.

  Margaret looked around. The CBRN-suited Rangers seemed to be everywhere. They were setting up more of the tripod-supported weapons by the ruined door and also in the lobby’s broken windows, creating a field of fire out onto Chicago Avenue. More Rangers were undoubtedly setting up similar positions all around the hotel. If her kind attacked, these soldiers would mow them down by the hundreds.

  Other Rangers carried large weapons to the elevator, which, surprisingly, seemed to still be working. She saw Klimas conferring with the Ranger commander — Dundee was his name — at what looked to be a hastily constructed command center, complete with laptops and soldiers already working away on them.

  She saw Klimas reach up to the small earpiece at his right ear. He stared off, listening, then said something she couldn’t hear. He jogged to a stairwell door, calling out as he went.

  “Ramierez, Bosh, Roth, with me! You too, Otto. We’ve got reports of hostiles in the building, so we’re going straight for the package. Elevator gets us there the quickest, so let’s move!”

  On the way in, she had been “the package.” Now that they had reached the hotel, that term referred to someone else: Cooper Mitchell. Klimas and the others were headed to the eighteenth floor. On the form he’d submitted online, that’s where Mitchell had said he would be waiting.

  In room 1812.

  UNDER THE BED

  Cooper heard a helicopter. It sounded big, loud, like military helicopters did in the movies. He also heard occasional blasts of gunfire. It had worked: someone was coming to save him. He just had to stay alive a little bit longer, and hope the rescuers got to him before the cannibals did.

  The hotel still had heat. Anywhere but downstairs, where winter winds swirled snow through the lobby, the Park Tower remained well above freezing. At first, that had been a welcome discovery. Now, not so much.

  If it were below freezing, the dead bodies up here wouldn’t have rotted, bloated, and the corpse he hid beneath might have been frozen solid instead of turning into the wet, reeking mess that sagged down around him. The smell was enough to make him vomit, but to do that would be to make noise — to make noise was to die.

  Die, or worse.

  You ain’t gonna eat me, motherfuckers, you ain’t gonna eat me …

  The motherfuckers in question were close. They were searching every room in the hotel. Earlier he’d risked moving down a few floors, just to keep checking his surroundings. On the fifteenth floor, he’d heard two men talking; talking about his YouTube video, talking about their search — for him.

  It had seemed like such a good idea to upload that video, to make sure people knew who he was so the government couldn’t just make him disappear. He felt so, so stupid now, but it had never crossed his mind that the video would make all the murderers in Chicago want to waste him.

  Cooper had thought about running to a higher floor, but he’d waited too long and now he didn’t dare. They were on the eighteenth floor. He’d barely had enough time to implement his next bright idea: dragging a sloughing corpse into room 1812 and hiding beneath it. His brain didn’t seem to work right anymore. Too much stress, too much horror, he didn’t know. He was smarter than this. He knew he was. If only—

  Noises, coming from the next room. He moved slowly, adjusted the weight of the body on top of him, pressed his ear against the wall. He could hear muffled voices.

  “Check under the bed,” one said.

  “Stop telling me that,” said another. “There’s no space under these beds.”

  Cooper started to shake. He slowly shouldered the corpse a little higher, so he could reach down to his back. Quietly, so quietly, he drew Sofia’s pistol.

  Ain’t gonna eat me, Sofia, not like I ate you, no fucking way, I got four bullets left …

  THE PACKAGE

  It seemed so odd that the hotel still had power. Clarence was grateful for working elevators, though — climbing seventeen flights of stairs would have done him in. He was the only one wearing CBRN gear, which made him feel oddly out of place among Klimas, Bosh, Ramierez and Roth.

  Beep … they passed the fifteenth floor.

  “We’re almost there,” Klimas said. He reached to his chest webbing, pressed a black button. “Radio check, do you read?”

  The three SEALs — Bosh, little Ramierez and the big fella, Roth — all nodded. Clarence nodded as well.

  Beep … they passed the sixteenth floor.

  “Bosh, cover the right,” Klimas said. “Ramierez, the left. Roth, out and left. I’ll go out and right.”

  Bosh and Ramierez knelt by their assigned corners, M4s pointed straight up. Noise suppressors attached to the barrels made the weapons look long and mean.

  Clarence drew his Glock 19 from the thigh holster strapped to the outside of his suit.

  “Where do you want me?”

  Klimas raised an eyebrow. “You? I want you to stay out of our way and move when we tell you to move.”

  Maybe it was the impossible stress of the situation, or maybe his frustration with Margaret sitting squarely in harm’s way, he wasn’t sure, but Clarence felt a wave of annoyance.

  “I know what I’m doing in a fight, Klimas,” he said. “I was Special Forces.”

  Ramierez laughed and shook his head.

  Klimas grinned. “Special Forces, huh? How nice. Know what you’re not? A member of this team. You’re here because Margaret doesn’t want anyone exposed to Mitchell’s hydras. You’ve got the CBRN suit so you can handle him. Other than that, kindly stay out of our way.”

  Beep … they passed the seventeenth floor.

  • • •

  Cooper heard the door open. A rectangle of hallway light filled the dark room, lit up the face of the bloated corpse on top of him.

  “Gross,” one voice said. “It stinks in here.”

  “Dead body,” said the other. “Damn, it smells too far gone to eat.”

  Cooper couldn’t see them. He heard their feet shuffling across the carpet … coming closer …

  “Check under the bed,” one voice said.

  “Chuck,” said the other, “if you ask me to look under the bed just one more time I will shoot you in your stupid face.”

  Something in the dead body popped softly, bringing with it an even more rancid stench. A trickle of fluid leaked out, ran down Cooper’s forehead and onto the bridge of his nose. His left eye closed automatically as the foul liquid trickled across his eyelids.

  Just go away just go away I don’t want to be eaten …

  The elevator doors opened onto the eighteenth floor. Bosh and Ramierez, both still kneeling, leaned out and aimed their weapons down the hallway. Bosh’s weapon let out three snaps, click-click-click.

&nb
sp; Klimas stepped out with his weapon pointed to the right, stock tight to his shoulder. Roth moved out at the same time, his weapon pointing left. Klimas fired his M4 once, another snapping click.

  “Clear left,” Roth said.

  “Clear right,” Klimas said. “Otto, with me.”

  Clarence stepped out. One body lay down the hall to the right. A woman, face up, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

  Klimas spoke quietly, firmly. “Bosh, take point. Let’s move.”

  The SEALs did just that, moving without a sound, moving faster than Clarence would have expected; he found himself jogging to keep up.

  As they passed the woman, Clarence looked down: three red spots were spreading across her chest. A fourth bullet had blown off the top of her head, splattering her brains across the carpet in a rough oblong. A black .38 revolver lay near her right hand.

  Clarence checked off the room numbers as he passed them by — 1804, 1805, 1806 … Room 1812 would be down the hall, just past a left-hand turn. Coming from that direction, he heard the faint sound of men’s voices …

  “The lights don’t work,” said the first voice. “All the bulbs is broke.”

  “You can see fine enough,” said the second voice. “Man, look at that nasty body.”

  “That is sooo gross,” said the first voice. “Move it so we can see if anything else is under that desk.”

  “No, you move it,” said the second.

  Cooper felt numb, like he wasn’t even there, and maybe he wasn’t … maybe this was all a fucked-up dream and he wasn’t hiding under an oozing, rancid, bloated body, maybe he wasn’t hiding from two men who would shove a signpost up his ass and slow-roast him over a bed of coals.

  “Flip you for it,” said the first voice.

  “Okay,” said the second. “Call it.”

  Go away just go away just go away kill myself kill myself now Jesus please help me please

  “Heads,” said the first voice.