Pandemic

  Afterward, she could figure out how to defuse humanity’s last weapon. She had discovered the hydras; she could also find a way to destroy them. Chicago had universities, hospitals — she could cobble together a working lab. She’d saved humanity three times over, so why couldn’t she do the same for her new tribe?

  But first, Cooper had to die.

  Margaret started down the steps.

  THE EVIDENCE

  Clarence sprinted down the hallway of the eighteenth floor, Glock 19 in hand, heading for the room where they’d found Cooper Mitchell. He leaned left to turn the corner without slowing, booted feet digging into the hallway carpet. He came around to the sight of a pair of M4s pointed his way. He tried to stop suddenly, knew in that moment bullets would rip him to shreds, but he was moving too fast — his forward momentum slammed him into the far wall.

  He fell to the floor.

  “Drop the weapon!” Ramierez screamed.

  Clarence let the Glock fall from his hand to thump on the hallway’s carpet.

  Ramierez stayed in place, black M4 tight to his shoulder and aimed at Clarence’s chest.

  D’Shawn Bosh ran up, grabbed Clarence’s sidearm, took two steps back.

  “Montoya,” Bosh said. “Where is she? She killed Bogdana.”

  That couldn’t be true, couldn’t be; there had to be hostiles in the building.

  “You guys got it all wrong,” Clarence said. “Margaret didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Get your ass up,” Bosh said.

  Clarence stood.

  Ramierez’s aim didn’t waver. He seethed with visible fury — if Clarence gave him a reason, he knew Ramierez would put him down.

  Bosh pushed Clarence down the hall.

  “Move,” Bosh said. “See for yourself.”

  Clarence felt so lost, so disoriented. He didn’t resist.

  Another push on his back as he stumbled into Room 1812.

  Clarence saw two bodies: the bloated thing that Cooper had hid beneath and, sprawled on top of it, Bogdana. A small hole in his CBRN suit, right at the back of his head, told the story.

  “Point blank,” Bosh said. “Bogdana’s a SEAL, asshole — you think one of those gibbering idiots could have gotten that close to him?”

  Clarence shook his head. No … not Margaret … she was immune, Clarence had seen her take the tests.

  “We have to find her,” he said. “She … she’s in danger.”

  The words rang hollow, even to him.

  Bosh tossed Clarence’s pistol onto the bed.

  “Ram and I are going to the fifth floor,” he said. “Setting up a sniper position. Look for her if you want. But when you see her, if you don’t shoot first, it was real nice knowing you.”

  The two SEALs ran off down the hall.

  Clarence thumbed his “talk” button.

  “Margaret, answer me.”

  He waited. No response.

  “Margaret, please, please answer me!”

  Nothing.

  Clarence stared at Bogdana.

  Bosh was right. Tim was right.

  Margaret had done this.

  She was infected.

  The brutal reality hit home. He leaned against the wall. His wife, his love, the mother of his child … she was one of them.

  The noise of the battle seemed to hit him all at once, the sounds of gunfire filtering up from the street. And not that far off, the pounding of helicopter rotors.

  Why had she revealed herself now? Had she known this attack was coming, somehow? More of that infected telepathy, their hive-mind making them all move as one? Or was it simply because she realized that Tim had discovered her secret, that he was about to out her? But if that was the case, Margaret could have denied it — she tested negative, Tim would have had no proof.

  Clarence looked at Bogdana. Had Margaret killed the man so she could slip away and join her kind?

  The mission … the package … he had to focus on that. If he didn’t concentrate on saving Cooper Mitchell, on making all of this worthwhile, he knew he’d go insane.

  Clarence grabbed his weapon, turned, and ran for the elevator.

  COCKTAIL PARTY

  Flames soared from cars, trucks, delivery vans and buses, destroying any night-vision capability. Heat from a dozen fires chased away the winter night’s chill. This wasn’t a couple of indigs hucking a bottle to pretend they could fight back against the oppressors: this was a concentrated, planned, sustained attack.

  From the north, south, east and west, men called for backup.

  Paulius had no backup to send.

  The Converted stayed behind their cover of burned-out cars and trucks, providing few targets to hit. When heads did pop up, the SEALs and the Rangers took them out. His overwatch had mowed down most of the enemy’s high positions and were now picking off anything that moved.

  The Molotov barrage had slowed since the attack began five minutes earlier, but still the bombs poured in, a constant symphony of breaking glass and billowing flame. The Converted had to be using a sling of some kind, something to hurl the gas-filled bottles farther than any man could possibly throw.

  He clicked his “talk” button.

  “This is Klimas, can anyone up top see what they’re using to launch those Molotovs?”

  “Negative, Commander,” came back Roth’s voice. “The bad guys put burning tires in front of their perimeter wall, too much smoke to see what’s going on.”

  Through the flames and the constant gunfire, Paulius heard the roar of approaching helicopters. Apaches, lining up an attack run — these local yokels were about to get a rude awakening courtesy of chain-gun music.

  He peeked out under the bumper of a delivery truck, looked east along Chicago Avenue. Many Molotovs had fallen short and crashed into the pavement. The flickering flames made the air waver and warp. Through that, Paulius saw bits of movement about thirty meters out, heads peeking above cars, shadows sliding from vehicle to vehicle.

  Heads … and something else, something smaller, lower to the ground.

  Roth’s deep voice again: “This is East Overlook, we have large numbers of enemy infantry advancing on us from the east, on Chicago Avenue. Holy shit, boys, looks like thousands of them. Mixed units, people and those hatchling things.”

  Klimas switched to the Ranger channel. “SEAL commander to Captain Dundee. SEAL commander to Captain Dundee.”

  The Ranger commander answered instantly. “Dundee here, go.”

  “We have a battalion-sized force of infantry attacking from the east.”

  “Same from the north, south and west,” Dundee said. “Drone video confirms.”

  “Weapons free,” Paulius said. “Shoot anything that isn’t us and maintain our perimeter.”

  “Roger that, Dundee, out.”

  Paulius switched back to the SEAL channel as a nearby Ranger opened up with a long burst from a 240.

  “Weapons free, I repeat, weapons free. All but squad weapons use single fire. Make your shots count, boys — I don’t think we brought enough bullets.”

  He clicked off, then leaned out past the front fender, just enough for the barrel of his M4 to aim down the street.

  Three black hatchlings rushed toward him, running through the pools of fire rather than around them. Flames clung to their black pyramid bodies, curled around their tentacle-legs.

  So fast … I’ve never seen anything that fast …

  Paulius pulled the trigger twice, pop-pop; the middle hatchling went down hard. Another one dropped, either from a Ranger’s bullet or from one of his overwatch men up on the fifth floor. The creature’s forward momentum rolled it awkwardly beneath a burning car.

  The third hatchling closed to within five meters.

  Don’t fire till you see the blacks of their eyes flashed through Paulius’s mind right before he dropped it with another two-bullet burst.

  The thunder of the Apaches’ rotors echoed through the city canyons. The tone suddenly became more raw, more real as the first
helicopter came around a building into plain sight, just behind the oncoming wave of attackers. Paulius heard the sharp snare-drum sound of M230 chain guns opening up.

  A Molotov landed ten feet to his left, forcing him away from the front fender. He scrambled to the rear fender, looked around it. Through the flickering flames and the shimmering air he saw the enemy rushing forward.

  Hundreds of hatchlings, and behind them, an endless wave of people.

  As fast as he could, Paulius yanked grenades from his webbing and threw them at the oncoming mob.

  STREETS OF FIRE

  Frank Sokolovsky wondered if there could be anywhere colder than where he stood. Besides the roof of the John Hancock Building, sixty stories up, in the dead of night, with a Chicago winter wind whipping in at twenty miles an hour? That was some cold shit right there.

  He had worked his way through college on the GI Bill. He’d served most of one tour in Afghanistan before an IED blew his left foot clean off. Frank had considered himself lucky — not only had he lived, he’d been given a medical discharge and gone home to Hyde Park, to his job as a shipping manager, to his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Shelly.

  Frank had felt God’s touch earlier than most. It came with pain, as did all things truly worth having. Carol knew something had changed. She knew even before Frank did, to be honest. He’d made some comment about disciplining Shelly. He still couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but when he woke up the next morning, Carol and Shelly were both gone. That was too bad, because from that morning on he’d known exactly what he would have done to them both.

  Frank had left his house and just wandered. His first kill had been a mouthy old lady. Leave me alone, the bitch had said. Can you imagine? Please, no, she had said. The nerve of some people.

  He discovered new friends. Together, they found humans, killed them. Then word came of a true leader, a leader asking for everyone with military experience. Emperor Stanton and General Brownstone gave him a wonderful responsibility — a Stinger missile.

  For two days, Frank Sokolovsky had frozen his ass off atop the Hancock. People brought him food. Once they’d brought him a whole arm, already cooked. There was probably half of that left.

  Finally, though, the waiting was over.

  He stood still, mostly hidden from sight, the Stinger on his right shoulder, watching the Apache fly down Michigan Avenue about thirty feet below his rooftop elevation. The helicopter’s nose was tipped down, its 30-millimeter chain gun transforming the street below into a sparkling river of death.

  The screaming war machine flew past.

  Just before Frank pressed the “fire” button, he understood — without a doubt — that everything happened for a reason. He had needed money for college, so he joined the army. He’d served in Afghanistan, where he’d learned to fire this kind of weapon, where he’d suffered the injury that brought him home so he could become enlightened at just the right time. Anyone who considered that a coincidence was a fool. Frank knew the hand of God when he saw it, and for that guidance he whispered a fast prayer of thanks.

  He pressed the button.

  A Stinger launcher fires a FIM-92B missile: sixty inches long, twenty-two pounds. It is supersonic capable and can reach speeds of Mach 2.2. Frank’s missile didn’t attain that speed, because it was only in the air for three seconds — one second of flight powered by the launcher’s ejection motor, which hurled the missile out into the predawn sky, and two seconds of flight powered by the missile’s solid fuel rocket engine.

  The FIM-92B penetrated right between the Apache’s twin turboshaft engines. The warhead erupted, blowing both engines off the machine with such force that one flew three hundred feet to hammer into the glass and steel of Water Tower Place. The other engine clipped a building roof before comet-streaking into Chestnut Street, disintegrating into a cloud of tumbling, red-hot shards that shredded everything in their path.

  In an Apache, the gunner sits in front, the pilot above and behind him, an armored wall between them. The explosion killed the pilot instantly. The armor kept the gunner alive long enough for the flaming helicopter to fall seven hundred feet to the street below, where he died on impact.

  The wreckage smashed into the Converted running down Michigan Avenue, a rolling fireball that pounded flesh into paste. Pieces of the Apache broke off and crashed into stores, shattering glass, breaking walls and starting several fires.

  Frank Sokolovsky stared down at his handiwork. He felt bad about where the helicopter had hit — how many of his kind had died? That was part of God’s plan, though, and who was he to question God?

  To the south, he saw another Apache start to climb. Maybe it had seen Frank’s target go down and wanted to get some altitude, but it was already too late; a chasing flicker betrayed a Stinger fired from the roof of the Marriott on North Rush Street. Coincidentally, Frank and Carol had stayed in that very hotel on their honeymoon.

  He laughed when the fireball engulfed the Apache. The Fourth of July was nothing compared to this. The flaming Apache banked and flew into another skyscraper, impacting at about the thirtieth floor. Frank didn’t know the name of that building.

  He shivered and set down his launcher. Unless someone brought him another missile, his work was done. He looked around. He’d fully expected that as soon as he fired, another helicopter would have swept in and killed him.

  Maybe God had bigger plans for him. He’d head back inside, build a little fire and see if he could thaw out some of that arm.

  Frank heard the Hellfire missile but he never saw it. By the time he turned around, the Predator-fired weapon detonated within fifteen feet of him, tearing him into three good-sized pieces that all sailed over the side of the John Hancock Building.

  Fire danced around the Park Tower’s ruined entrance. Icy, driving wind fed the flames. Clarence felt simultaneously hot and cold, and yet he also felt neither of those things: his mind focused on the battle, on the details that would keep him alive, let him find Margaret.

  “Apaches are down,” said a voice in his headset. “Bad guys have SAMs.”

  “Tell the Chinooks to abort pickup,” said another voice. “If we lose them, the only way out is on foot.”

  Clarence had a Ranger on his left, two on his right, all firing at the attackers scrambling over the perimeter cars.

  If only they’d extracted Cooper Mitchell as soon as they found him, then they wouldn’t be facing this army of Converted. But Margaret had insisted staying was critical, and Clarence had believed her.

  A voice on the open channel screamed for help. A burst of gunfire cut the scream short.

  So much panicked chatter. Men shouted for help. It sounded like the Rush Street perimeter was about to be overrun.

  Something whizzed past his ear. He instinctively jerked backward, so fast he fell onto his ass. He’d come within inches of taking a round in the face.

  There weren’t any reinforcements coming in. Air support was gone. The Rangers wouldn’t be able to hold.

  Clarence had to keep Cooper Mitchell alive.

  He turned and ran into the lobby. “Feely! Get Cooper on his feet, we have to move!”

  A maskless Tim shook his head hard so his spiky blond hair flopped back and forth. “No way! Klimas said to stay right here!”

  Clarence ignored him. Cooper was sitting on the floor, looking around. Still groggy, but his eyes seemed normal, alert. Clarence knelt in front of him.

  “Mister Mitchell, you with us?”

  The man’s eyes widened and blinked rapidly at the same time. Then they focused, locked on Clarence’s.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just a little fuzzy, maybe. And call me Cooper.”

  “Can you walk, Cooper?”

  He nodded.

  Tim leaned in. “Otto, we have to stay here!”

  Clarence heard a hissing roar. His body reacted; he grabbed Tim and pulled him on top of a surprised Cooper, covering them both with his own body a moment before a crushing blast dr
ove them all against the shaking floor.

  FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

  Paulius kept firing and reloading, his hands acting on autopilot while his brain tried to work out the rapidly deteriorating situation. They’d lost air superiority. Even with a significant advantage in firepower, they were outnumbered at least a hundred to one.

  The snipers on the fifth floor were the only thing keeping the hostiles from overrunning Klimas’s position. At their rate of fire, they’d run out of ammo in mere minutes.

  Ranger-fired mortars thoomped every few seconds, followed by popping explosions out beyond the perimeter. The firing arcs were short enough that Paulius felt the concussion wave of each detonation.

  The constant roar of the 240s, the pops of M4s and the barks of Benelli shotguns told him the perimeter remained intact. M23 grenade launchers countered the endless barrage of Molotov cocktails, filling Chicago Avenue with shrapnel.

  And still the Converted came on, hatchlings and armed militants stepping over the shattered and still-twitching bodies of their comrades. Twenty meters and closing.

  He thumbed his “talk” button.

  “Claymores, now! Light ’em up!”

  He’d barely finished his sentence before the powerful mines started detonating, each one a horizontal storm of seven hundred one-eighth-inch steel balls shooting out horizontally at a speed of twelve hundred meters per second. The enemy soldiers were packed in so tight Paulius could see the Claymores’ blast patterns in the expanding cones of shredded bodies.

  The advance slowed. The enemy suddenly broke, turned and ran, leaving behind hundreds of dead and dying. The little snow that remained on the street had turned into red slush, soaking up the blood that flowed down the sidewalk gutters.

  I AM THE LAW

  Steve Stanton lowered his binoculars.

  “Chickenshits,” he said. “They’re running.”

  General Brownstone nodded. “Too much enemy firepower. Looks like we inflicted some casualties, though. If I may suggest, Emperor, we should use the M72 light antitank weapons to target their snipers, and all our launched grenades to cover the second wave’s advance.”