Pandemic

  “Asshole,” said the second. “Hold my gun.”

  Cooper felt the dead body on top of him start to slide off. He raised Sofia’s pistol and squeezed the trigger.

  Clarence heard the roar of four quick gunshots — a pistol, sounded like a .40-cal.

  Klimas’s calm voice in the headset: “Go-go-go.”

  Bosh and Roth sprinted around the corner.

  Cooper was still on his back, still covered in dead-person sludge, pointing his pistol up at the bearded face of a very surprised man. Cooper had fired four times — and missed all four times. His hands shook so bad that the gun looked like some poorly made stop-action movie.

  “That’s him.”

  The words didn’t come from the bearded man, but from closer to the door. Cooper looked over — a man wearing a red-and-black knit Blackhawks hat cradled two weapons against his chest, a shotgun and a rifle. “Holy shit,” the man said. “That’s him.”

  He fumbled with the weapons. He dropped the rifle, started to bring the shotgun up.

  The rectangle of light from the hallway wavered as someone stepped into it.

  Cooper heard a click-click-click: the man with the shotgun dropped. The bearded man turned to face the door. Click-click-click: he twitched, then fell to his back.

  He lay side by side with Cooper. The man’s chest heaved. His eyes blinked in surprise, but only for a few seconds — then they stared out at nothing.

  “Clear!” a voice called out.

  Another answered the same.

  Cooper looked at his hand, saw the empty pistol was still in it, then shook his hand to let it drop. To come through all this and then to be shot … what if it was too late, what if they were going to shoot him anyway, and—

  “Cooper Mitchell?”

  He looked up, saw a man in a gas mask, covered head to toe in a heavy chem suit. Through the eye lenses, Cooper saw the man inside was black.

  “Cooper Mitchell,” the black man said again. “You’re Cooper Mitchell?”

  Cooper nodded.

  The man reached down a gloved hand. “I’m Agent Clarence Otto. We’re here to rescue you.”

  Cooper couldn’t speak. His vision blurred as the tears started to flow. He reached out and let Agent Clarence Otto take his hand.

  DR. FEELY’S BEDSIDE MANNER

  Tim Feely had just finished setting up a centrifuge when the elevator opened. Two men stepped out: Clarence in his CBRN suit with combat webbing strapped to his chest and a pistol holster strapped to his thigh, and none other than the guest of honor himself — Cooper Mitchell.

  Mitchell wore a tattered, filthy winter coat. Gray slime smeared his face, making the whites of his wide eyes seem all the whiter. The man looked crazy with a capital C. Hell, probably even a capital Z to boot.

  Clarence guided Mitchell by an elbow, escorted him to Tim’s impromptu examination area. It wasn’t much: basic medical equipment set up on the reception desk’s remains, a portable table stacked with the centrifuge, a microscope and some other lab gear … just things that could be carried in by hand. The Rangers had thrown in a cushy swivel chair they’d found in the office behind the reception desk.

  Tim pointed to the chair. “Put him there, please.”

  Might as well make the crazy carrier of what could be humanity’s salvation as comfy as possible.

  Clarence eased Mitchell into the chair. Mitchell’s eyes flicked everywhere: left, right, up, down. Yep, definitely a capital Z.

  Tim also looked around. Where the hell was Margaret? She’d insisted on this mission. He saw her, over on the far side of the lobby — just standing there in a CBRN suit that was too big for her, staring at Mitchell, doing absolutely nothing.

  Why wasn’t she helping?

  Tim felt a hand on his shoulder: Clarence.

  “Feely, you want to get started, or what?”

  Tim turned to look at the shell-shocked Mitchell. The man had been through hell. He’d worry about Margaret later. This man needed help.

  “Yeah, I’m on it,” Tim said. He moved to stand in front of Mitchell. “Mister Mitchell. I’m Doctor Feely. Don’t mind this wacky suit, I assure you there is one damn-handsome man behind this mask. I’m going to examine you, okay?”

  Mitchell suddenly stood up, his fists clenched, his body shaking with intensity. Tim took a step back.

  “Examine me on the boat,” Mitchell said. “Or in the helicopter, or plane or whatever the fuck you’re using to get me the hell out of here.”

  Clarence stepped forward, put himself between Tim and the crazy man covered with rotten goo. Clarence had his gloved hands up, palm out.

  “Mister Mitchell, please calm down,” he said. “Doctor Feely just has to run a couple of tests.”

  Tim moved to the side, used his best soothing voice. “It won’t take long, Mister Mitchell,” he said. “You look very dehydrated. I’m going to put in an IV and get you some fluids, okay? While I’m doing that, I need you to tell me your recent history — when you came to the city, what happened after that.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes, shook his head so hard his cheeks wobbled.

  “No-no-no,” he said. “All you need to see is this.”

  He pulled at his jacket sleeve, slid it up until half his forearm was exposed. He pointed at a puffy red spot a few inches above his wrist.

  “That,” he said. “These things pop, and a day later, those motherfuckers die.”

  Tim tried to control his excitement. A pustule, the same thing he’d seen on Candice Walker … was that little blister full of hydras?

  Slow down, Timmy Boy, do this right. Take care of the patient first, then go from there.

  “I see,” Tim said. “Mister Mitchell, do you mind if I call you Cooper?” The man shrugged. “Uh, sure. I guess.”

  “Good, Cooper. Now just let me get that IV into you, okay? Your body needs fluids.”

  Cooper stared off, nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, but I’m not crazy. I’m not.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” Tim lied.

  As Tim ran an IV needle into the back of Cooper’s wrist, the man started talking rapidly. His story began with a man named Steve Stanton and a trip out to Lake Michigan to find plane wreckage. Cooper’s best friend Jeff. Some guy named Bo Pan. A high-tech fish-bot. Arrival in Chicago. A night of drinking. A few days so sick he could barely move. Jeff, gone. The incident in the boiler room, where Jeff became something other than human. Fleeing the Trump Tower. Meeting a woman named Sofia, whom the bad guys murdered. The bad guys getting sick and dying. Making the video and waiting for help.

  Tim felt for the man. Cooper had been through so much. Forget the capital C and Z, this guy was all-caps CRAZY, with some exclamation points to boot.

  But Tim also sensed Cooper was leaving out a few bits of information — rather disturbing bits, based on what he was willing to share — but his babbling tale provided a quick overview on the hydra contagion’s morphology. It was everything Margaret had hoped for and more: the ultimate weapon against the Converted.

  Cooper’s story ended with him lying under a decomposing body, which explained the slime. Tim felt suddenly grateful for the CBRN suit, which filtered out most of Cooper’s rather pungent stench of death.

  “That’s everything that happened,” Cooper said. “I told you what I saw, so now you can get me out of this city.”

  “Soon,” Tim said. “We have a little bit of work to do here first.”

  Cooper’s hands shot out, fingers clutching Tim’s thick suit. He pulled hard, his face mashing into Tim’s gas mask, their foreheads touching, the mask’s lenses the only thing separating their eyes.

  “Get me the FUCK out of here!”

  Clarence stepped in fast and grabbed Cooper’s wrists. An instant later, the man lay facedown with Clarence straddling his back.

  Tim just stood there, not knowing what to do as Cooper thrashed and screamed.

  “Get me out of here you assholes get me out of here please please I don??
?t wanna die!”

  “Calm down,” Clarence said. “You’re not going to die.” He pulled zip strips out of a pocket in his webbing, and in a flash had Cooper’s hands bound tightly behind him.

  Clarence picked the man up off the floor and set him in the swivel chair.

  Cooper Mitchell stared out for a second, then began to giggle.

  “Die-die-die,” he said. “Am I tasty? Death is die-die-dielicious!”

  The man’s screams echoed through the ruined lobby, seemed to make the Rangers skittish.

  Clarence gave Tim’s shoulder a light smack. “Would you shut this guy up?”

  Tim reached into the medkit and found a vial of etomidate. He quickly prepped a syringe, then injected it into the IV line.

  Cooper continued to struggle for a few seconds, but quickly lost energy. He babbled a bit more, then his head drooped.

  Tim could agree with Cooper on one thing, at least: he also wanted to get the fuck out of Chicago

  “Don’t drug him too much,” Clarence said. “We might still need to move on short notice. Now get to work and find out if he’s got our magic bug.”

  Tim again looked across the lobby — there was Margaret, still watching, not making any movement toward them. If she moved any farther away, she’d be out on the sidewalk.

  “Clarence, get Margo over here,” Tim said. “This is supposed to be her show, man. We still have to thaw out the bodies from the lobby so we can get blood and tissue samples.”

  Clarence shook his head. “I’ll get some Rangers to help you. Margaret told me she needs to examine the room where we found Mitchell. She said that’s the best place to start for environmentals.”

  “What? But that doesn’t—”

  “Stop talking, start working,” Clarence said. “I don’t want to stay here a second longer than we have to.”

  Clarence walked to the elevator. Margaret joined him, as did the SEAL named Bogdana, who carried a limp CBRN suit under one arm. Just before the doors shut, she looked at Tim for a moment, then stared at Cooper Mitchell. Even through her mask, Tim saw Margaret’s eyes narrow into slits of pure hate.

  The elevator doors slid shut, and they were gone.

  What was she doing? If she wanted to look for environmental factors, she should be starting in the lobby, where Mitchell had videotaped the bodies, where the Converted had died.

  Tim shook it off. Margaret knew what she was doing. He turned back to the unconscious Mitchell.

  “Well, Mister Mostly Unconscious, let’s find that magic bug so we can get the hell out of here,” Tim said. “I really don’t want to be here long enough to find out if I’m die-die-dielicious.”

  Cooper Mitchell didn’t say anything.

  Tim got to work.

  FLASH MOB

  Steve Stanton shivered despite his thick jacket, snowpants, gloves and hat. The wind and the cold had both intensified when the sun went down.

  He and General Dana Brownstone stood in the front of a public transit bus, looking through binoculars at the soldiers around the Park Tower Hotel. Just ahead of the bus, dozens of Chosen Ones stayed low behind a barrier made of cars, trash bins, doors and general refuse.

  Hatchlings scurried in and around the objects, secreting a brown fluid that was quickly transforming the barrier into a solid wall. Steve’s people had tested that material in several places through the city — it stopped all small-arms fire, probably stopped everything shy of a tank cannon.

  Fortunately, the humans didn’t have a tank.

  General Brownstone lowered her binoculars. “The sun will be coming up in a few hours, Emperor. I recommend we attack before dawn.”

  Steve lowered his binoculars as well. He stared out at his people, and beyond them to the towering tan hotel rising high into the night sky.

  “Maybe we should wait for morning,” he said. “We have a mob, not a trained army. I don’t want our people accidentally wasting bullets on each other.”

  Brownstone smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Emperor. The humans were kind enough to put on uniforms.”

  Steve gave Brownstone an admiring look — he should have thought of that. Just shoot at the people in the uniforms and bulky suits. How much easier could it be?

  He lifted the binoculars again. He could make out the heads and shoulders of a few masked soldiers peeking out from behind the line of ruined cars. To the right of an overturned VW Beetle, the few remaining streetlights played off the black barrel of a nasty-looking, tripod-mounted weapon. The human soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but they were special forces, well armed and clearly disciplined. They would kill Steve’s Chosen People by the thousands.

  Good thing he had hundreds of thousands.

  And it wasn’t like the Chosen Ones were some barbarian army armed with spears and knives: his people had guns, too — and he had special soldiers of his own.

  He lowered the binocs, let them dangle against his sternum.

  “How many fighting-capable followers have smartphones?”

  “One thousand, two hundred and twelve,” Brownstone said instantly. “Each phone is held by the head of a primary cell, and each primary cell has visual or foot-messenger connections to three secondary cells. We can quickly coordinate an infantry force of thirty thousand.”

  Steve held out his hand, palm up. Brownstone handed him a phone. He looked at the time: 3:33 A.M. Most of those thirty thousand Chosen Ones could reach this location within forty-five minutes or less. He called up Twitter, logged on to his @MonstaMush account. He typed in his message:

  Bottle poppin’ 4am, party 4:10. #ChicagoFlashMob. Hug & hold #ChicagoVIP if u find him! Please RT!

  He hit “send.”

  Brownstone looked at the message. “Aren’t you concerned the human signal intelligence analysts will see that?”

  Steve shrugged. “Nationwide, there’s probably still a thousand tweets a second. If anyone sees it, they won’t know what it means, and even if they somehow figure it out they won’t be able to react soon enough.”

  Brownstone nodded. “If the humans have overhead surveillance, they’ll spot our coordinated movement. We can expect air support to arrive quickly — predator drones, Apaches, possibly other aircraft we haven’t seen yet.”

  “Let them come,” Steve said. “Get word to the rooftops. From here on out, destroy whatever flies in.”

  Brownstone saluted. “Yes, Emperor.” She exited the bus. She would carry Steve’s orders to the masses.

  He looked out the bus’s door to the yellow-skinned bull hiding alone behind a burned-out Mercedes thirty feet away. The day before, that bull had come looking for Steve. It had made contact with dozens of Chosen Ones along the way, and not one of them had fallen ill. Jeremy Ellis had taken the bull straight to his biology lab, yet found no trace of disease. Ellis thought the bulls were not only immune to Cooper Mitchell’s disease, they also weren’t carriers of it.

  “Yo!” Steve yelled to the bull. “Are you ready to find your old friend?”

  Like a puppy called by its master, the massive creature took two hurried steps toward the bus before it stopped, remembering it wasn’t supposed to get close.

  “COOOOOPERRRRRR,” the bull said. “FIND … COOOPERRRRR.”

  Steve smiled. God willing, Cooper Mitchell would die at the hands of his lifelong friend. The mutated hands, with those awesome bone-blades.

  All things in due time. Steve checked the cell phone: forty minutes to go …

  GAME CHANGE

  Jackpot.

  Tim lifted his head from the microscope. He wanted to drink scotch and screw and watch cartoons … maybe in that order, maybe not. He wanted to party.

  Cooper Mitchell’s blood contained thousands of hydras.

  Tim had also found dead hydras in the frozen bodies that had been in the hotel lobby. Correlation wasn’t causation, true, but the results pointed to one motherfucker of a correlation: Cooper Mitchell was Patient Zero. The good kind of Patient Zero.

  I’ve got you Nor
man Bates bitches by the short and curlies … you’re all gonna die.

  “Cooper, you lovely, lovely bastion of microbial awesomeness, you might have just saved the world.”

  The man’s story indicated he infected those around him almost immediately. The hydras debilitated individuals within just eight to twelve hours of initial exposure, killed them within twenty-four. What was more, Cooper said he hadn’t touched any of the people who had found him in the Walgreens, yet at least five of the six had contracted the fatal pathogen. That meant the hydras were airborne, and were highly contagious; just being in the same room was enough.

  It didn’t matter what Margaret found up on the eighteenth floor, or anywhere else for that matter. The mission became one simple objective: get Cooper Mitchell out of Chicago and into a lab.

  According to Cooper, only the “Jeff Monster” had survived the twenty-four-hour lethality. Tim had seen images of the big creatures, so different they looked more akin to gorillas than humans. That kind of large-scale physical alteration required large-scale genetic change: perhaps hydras took longer to affect them, or possibly didn’t affect them at all.

  But that wasn’t Tim’s problem. The hydras killed the other known forms — the dead in the Park Tower’s lobby included two triangle hosts, two kissyfaces and one that had no marks of any kind yet died all the same.

  He couldn’t wait to tell Margaret. She’d want to double-check Tim’s results, see for herself if he’d gotten it right. Of course, she’d actually have to come to the lab area to do that, actually have to stand next to Cooper Mitchell.

  Which she wasn’t doing … she hadn’t even come near Cooper …

  Margaret had been hands-on with Walker and Petrovsky. Years earlier, she’d personally done the work on Martin Brewbaker, Perry Dawsey, Betty Jewel and Carmen Sanchez. She’d been up-close and personal with infected both living and dead. Why would she go out of her way to avoid Cooper?

  Because she knew that Cooper’s hydras killed the Converted.

  She knew, and she didn’t want to die.

  Tim slapped himself lightly on the sides of his masked head, left-right-left-right. Margaret couldn’t be infected. She’d tested negative. She’d taken the inoculant, then tested negative some more. And besides that, she was Margaret Montoya, grand defender of the human race.