Pandemic

  He tossed the grenade behind him, heard the handle flip away and bounce off the wall with a hollow, metallic ting.

  Four seconds …

  He kept driving upward, two steps at a time.

  Two seconds …

  He made it up a flight and a half before the bang rattled the stairwell, shaking the air and the concrete alike. Farther back, he heard a scream of pain, a scream just as inhuman as the roar had been.

  Push, push, push … don’t think about how your legs burn, and don’t you dare think about Margaret …

  Chest heaving, he reached the eighth floor. He heard yells from farther down the stairwell, but they weren’t as close as before. He opened the door and carried Margaret into the hallway.

  He turned the first corner he saw, getting out of sight of the stairwell door. Chest heaving, he set Margaret down. The right side of her jaw was already swelling. Blood ribbons coated her hand. She blinked slowly, tried to sit up. He gently pushed her back to the floor, needing only a tiny amount of pressure to do so.

  “Margo, hold on. Just hold on.”

  He had to check her weapon, see if Klimas was right.

  Margaret clutched weakly at his forearm. “Get … off … me.” She looked at him with nothing but hate in her eyes.

  This isn’t my wife … this isn’t Margaret …

  Clarence drew her ruined pistol from his thigh holster, looked at it.

  She couldn’t be infected. Couldn’t be.

  He pushed the release and slid the magazine free. There wasn’t time for it, but he couldn’t help himself. He counted off the rounds. Eleven.

  The weapon held twelve.

  Just one round missing.

  Margaret pushed at him, pushed hard. “Get off me! Give me the gun, honey, they’re coming to get us! Save the baby!”

  The baby.

  Was she pregnant? Or was that another lie, created to manipulate him? She had played him for a fool.

  He pocketed her magazine, then pulled out the zip strips.

  She saw them and started to scream — not a scream of fear, but the guttural, throat-ripping sound of an enraged, trapped animal.

  “Don’t you tie me up you needle-dick motherfucker! Get your fucking hands off me!”

  Clarence grabbed her arms, flipped her onto her stomach.

  “I’ll cut off your balls and feed them to you, you stupid nigger! Let me go, let me go!”

  She squirmed, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight him. He wrenched her wrists back. Her still-bleeding stump flicked blood across the hallway carpet.

  With one hand, Clarence held her wrists together. With his other, he looped the zip strip around them, then yanked it tight.

  “I hate you fucking insects we’re going to kill you all kill you all!”

  Clarence stood, lifted her and again threw her over his shoulder. His exhausted legs burned instantly. He ignored his body’s complaints, thumbed the “talk” button.

  “Klimas! I’m on the eighth floor, where the fuck are you?”

  A WAY OUT

  Clarence stumbled toward Room 829. He recognized the two SEALs crouched by the door: Bosh and Ramierez. Inside, he saw the big one, Roth, using a combat knife to saw through the drywall.

  Farther in, Klimas was peeking through heavy curtains. Tim Feely and Cooper Mitchell sat in the middle of a king-size bed, trying to stay out of the way. Two more SEALs stood near Klimas. Their name patches read HARRISON and KATANSKI.

  Clarence smelled smoke … the fire from the first floor, spreading. The room felt hot.

  Klimas turned, saw Clarence and Margaret. His gun came up fast. Harrison and Katanski also brought up their rifles. Roth remained focused on the wall.

  Margaret kicked and thrashed. “Please don’t shoot me! I didn’t do anything, please!”

  Her hatred and anger had vanished. Now she sounded like a normal woman, a terrified woman. There had to be a way to save her, save the baby. Feely could do something, he could beat the infection. He just needed the right equipment and time to do the research, that was all.

  “I’ve got her,” Clarence said. “She’s my responsibility.”

  Klimas took a step closer. “You tied her up. You checked the magazine, didn’t you.”

  Clarence said nothing.

  Klimas nodded. “She shot Bogdana. Put her down, Otto.”

  Clarence knew that Margaret had to die. His brain told him that, but his heart shouted a different message.

  “No,” he said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  Feely slid off the bed, his hands out in front of him, palms up.

  “Everyone just take it easy,” he said. “Klimas, I told you, we need her.”

  Klimas didn’t look away from his stare-down. “Why?”

  “Because she’s infected,” Tim said. “She’ll contract Cooper’s hydras, the thing that kills the Converted.”

  Margaret stopped squirming.

  Clarence forgot about the gun. He looked at Tim.

  “You want to use my wife as a weapon?”

  Tim started to talk, but coughed instead. Clarence felt a sting in his eyes. He smelled burning wood, melting carpet, odors filtering up from the fire below. Wisps of smoke curled near the ceiling.

  Tim thumped a fist against his chest, coughed again, then continued. “Otto, if you’re right and she’s not infected, then she’s got nothing to worry about.” He looked at her, spoke sweetly: “Isn’t that right, Margopolis?”

  Clarence felt her shaking her head. “Our baby,” she said, her words choked with deep sobs. “We don’t know how it will affect the baby. Keep Cooper away from me, honey, keep him away.”

  Roth walked over, spoke to Klimas. “Commander, it’s ready.”

  Klimas’s eyes narrowed. He lowered his weapon.

  “Otto, I’m getting Cooper and Tim out of here,” he said. “If Margaret moves funny, I’m wasting her, and if you do anything to stop me, I’ll waste you. Got it?”

  Clarence nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Klimas tilted his head toward the man-size hole Roth had cut into the drywall. Through it, Clarence saw concrete.

  “That’s the exterior wall of the hotel,” Klimas said. “It abuts another building that’s only a foot away. We’re blowing through both and entering that building. Then we’re descending to a tea shop that’s on the ground floor, at the corner of Pearson and Rush. I’m hoping the building is empty, and we can make it down without much of a fight. From there, we’re going to figure out a way through the enemy lines.”

  “Enemy lines?” Clarence said. “They’re just a mob.”

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Klimas said. “Everyone, into the hall.”

  Bosh and Ramierez were still at their posts, guarding the hallway in both directions. Smoke curled thickly at the ceiling; the place was going up fast.

  Roth pulled the door shut. He held a small detonator in his hand.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said, then pushed the button.

  It didn’t sound like much of an explosion, more of a whump than a bang. Roth opened the door. A cloud of dust billowed out. Clarence looked in: the blast had punched clean through — he felt cold air pouring in, saw a brick wall beyond.

  “First wall down,” Roth said. “Now to blast our way into the other building. Sixty seconds.”

  He started placing small charges of C-4.

  On his shoulder, Clarence felt Margaret start to shake. He turned, saw that Cooper Mitchell was standing right next to them.

  He was holding his exposed wrist near Margaret’s bloody hand. On that wrist, a red spot, a small patch of sagging skin: it looked like he’d just popped a huge blister, but Clarence saw no fluid. Tiny motes of floating white hung in the air for a moment, then dissipated into nothingness.

  Cooper smiled wide. “Enjoy that, lady. You enjoy the fuck out of it.”

  He stepped away.

  Clarence set Margaret down on her own feet. With her hands still zip-stripped behind her back, she lean
ed against the wall. She shook violently.

  She stared at Cooper Mitchell, her eyes wide with terror.

  HIT THE LIGHTS

  Paulius lay on a tile floor, mostly hidden behind the low, brick wall of the dark tea shop’s broken window.

  Outside in the cold, windy night, the few remaining lights lit up hundreds of Converted running through the streets: yelling in victory, screaming in psychotic rage, sometimes shooting guns into the air. Most of the time they moved south, toward the Park Tower.

  But sometimes, they seemed to get confused — they ran north on Rush, or west on Pearson, and when they did, their own kind shot them down.

  Thirty meters along either of those roads, a line of cars, trucks and other debris ran from sidewalk to sidewalk, completely blocking any way through. Barrel fires burned in front of these bulwarks, blurring any sight of the forces that hid behind them.

  Paulius had to figure out how to cross those lines.

  The gothic Archdiocese of Chicago was directly to the north, across Pearson. Paulius saw troops and guns lurking in the church’s broken stained-glass windows. He could lead his people into that building, search for an exit that would come out behind the Converted’s street-blocking wall, but he had no idea how many enemy troops waited inside.

  Kitty-corner to the tea shop — across the intersection of Pearson and Rush — was a ten-story brick building, but going for that would expose him to fire from the troops behind the bulwarks of both streets. Plus, there was no guarantee the place wasn’t full of snipers just waiting for him to show his hand.

  And due west, across Rush, a round skyscraper some forty stories tall. Same problems as the other buildings.

  Every route seemed blocked, heavily defended.

  There had to be a way.

  He couldn’t count on help from anyone else, because no one answered his calls. As far as he knew, all the Rangers were dead. He’d lost most of his own men: just six out of twenty left, including himself. But if he could get Cooper Mitchell to safety, his SEALs would not have died in vain.

  The move from the Park Tower to the tea shop had bought a few minutes’ reprieve, at best. The hotel was on fire, but if enemy troops were still in there, still searching, they’d soon find the hole Roth had blown through the wall. After that, Paulius had only minutes before the Converted swarmed in.

  There was only one option: he had to punch an opening in one of the enemy lines. That opening wouldn’t come cheap, and they had very little ammo left with which to make it.

  He turned and crawled across the cold floor, his fatigues scraping against broken glass. He moved behind the shop’s main counter to join the others: Feely, Cooper Mitchell, Bosh, Harrison, Katanski and Ramierez. Clarence and Margaret were tucked into an alcove near the bathrooms, out of sight of the windows. Margaret had a gag in her mouth, which Clarence had put there on Paulius’s insistence.

  If she made any noise, she died; Clarence and Margaret both knew that.

  Feelygood was the only reason Paulius had let Margaret live. If they could turn that murdering bitch into a weapon against her own kind, that held a certain poetic justice.

  Paulius waved his men close. Such brave soldiers, all that remained of SEAL Team Two. Clarence joined them, as did Tim and Cooper.

  “We need to figure out a way past their lines,” Paulius said. “We’re outgunned. They’ve got excellent coverage on our positions. As soon as we show our heads, they’ll start firing and it won’t last long.”

  Ramierez tugged at his fatigues, drawing attention to them. “How about we lose these? Try to look like the enemy, get close enough to make something happen?”

  “They’re killing anything that comes close, including their own,” Paulius said. He looked at the surrounding faces. “I need other ideas.”

  Bosh shrugged. “It sucks, but we’re going to have to make a distraction. Shoot out the streetlights. We hit them up with grenades from here, then me and another guy head west on Pearson, try to draw their fire. Few minutes later, Commander, you and the others take the package north on Rush.”

  A suicide mission, but D-Day was perfectly willing to do it.

  “Too many of them for that,” Paulius said. He looked at Roth. “Any luck raising the Coronado, see if they have any ideas?”

  Roth shook his head. “Negative, Commander. Short-range communication still works — not that there’s anyone answering — but we lost all long-range communication in the assault. I’m trying to get through on the MBITR, but I need to find a line of sight to a satellite. That’s hard to do from in here. I might be able to reach the Coronado from the roof of this building. If I can, we could request air support.”

  Tim raised a hand. “MBITR?”

  “Satellite radio,” Paulius said. “And our air support is gone — we saw both of the Apaches destroyed. We can’t risk bringing in the Coronado’s Seahawks, not when the Converted might have more Stingers. That means the only way out of here is on foot, so we can get Mitchell to a place the Seahawks can land safely. We need something to blow a hole in those lines.”

  Ramierez shook his head. “Too bad we can’t just drop some big-ass bombs on them. Not just on the blockade, but on all those fuckers packed in nice and tight around here. We’d kill a shitload of them.”

  A big-ass bomb … Paulius had forgotten about the mission’s last element of air support.

  “The B2 might still be up there,” he said. “If we can contact it, maybe it can drop a JDAM on the north line, let us escape, then hammer all around the hotel.”

  Bosh laughed, a sound of frustration. He shook his head. “A JDAM to break us out? I’ve seen one of those take the top off a fucking mountain. The B2 crew would need pinpoint accuracy, Commander. If they’re off-target to the south by even a few hundred feet, it’ll kill us.”

  Bosh was right. A B2 strike was risky, damn near suicidal, but they were out of options and almost out of time.

  “Roth, you’re on,” Paulius said. “You and Ram head up to the roof. Try to reach the Coronado, have them task the B2 to strike a hundred meters north of our location.”

  Roth let out a low whistle. “In bomb-speak, Commander, that’s right on top of us.”

  “It is, and it’s going to work. There might be enemy units on the roof of this building, so kill anything you see. Stay alive long enough to contact the Coronado.”

  “Wait,” Clarence said.

  Paulius glared at the man. He was the last person he wanted to hear from right now.

  Clarence dug into his pocket. He pulled out a cell phone, held it up like a kid at show and tell.

  “This gives me a direct line to DST director Murray Longworth. I’m pretty sure he’s at the White House, sitting in the Situation Room with the Joint Chiefs.”

  Paulius stared at the bulky phone, then started laughing. The guy who refused to see reality had a direct line to the Joint Chiefs? Like this night needed to get any stranger.

  “Well then, Agent Otto,” Paulius said, “why don’t you just go ahead and give the White House a call?”

  REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

  Murray Longworth watched the world burn.

  The Park Tower mission had ended in disaster. SEAL Team Two and the Ranger company, wiped out. Clarence, Margaret and Feely, undoubtedly dead.

  And if all of those people were gone, then Cooper Mitchell was gone as well.

  Vogel hadn’t found any other survivors of the HAC trial. Mitchell had been the last hope of cultivating hydras.

  The Situation Room’s main monitor showed the next step in mankind’s downward spiral: nuclear first-strike options against China. Porter wanted to launch. Albertson wasn’t putting up much resistance. No hydras, nuclear war about to erupt — Murray realized it was all over.

  The Converted had won.

  He jumped a little when his cell phone buzzed. That was the one on his inside left pocket … the direct line to Clarence Otto.

  He answered. “Otto?”

  “Yes sir,
Director,” Otto said. “We’ve got Cooper Mitchell. He’s alive.”

  Murray felt a slight pain in his chest.

  “How the fuck did you get out of there? I saw Predator footage, they were all over you.”

  “Never mind that,” Otto said. “We have Cooper and we can still get him out of the city. To do that, we need to call in an air strike from the B2. We need it right now. Can you make that happen?”

  “You bet your ass I can. Hold on.”

  He lowered the phone.

  “Porter! Put those nukes back in your pants for a minute, we’ve still got a chance.”

  ANTICIPATION

  Cooper Mitchell knew he was going to die.

  No way this would work. But it wasn’t like he had a choice, and maybe he’d get to see some of those bastards die before he found out if there was an afterlife.

  The SEALs all crouched down low behind the tea shop’s counter, waiting for the boom.

  “It’s going to be a powerful explosion,” Klimas said. “It’ll probably knock us silly for a bit, but you have to get up fast and be ready to go.”

  Klimas was pretty badass. Cooper knew that all SEALs were badass, but this guy didn’t seem fazed that his unit had been hacked to pieces and — probably — eaten.

  “We go straight through their lines, and we stay together,” Klimas said. “If you get separated, the rally point is First St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, at LaSalle Boulevard and Goethe, seven blocks north. Everyone clear?”

  Cooper saw the SEALs take cover behind anything solid that stood between them and the impending bomb.

  Feely was trembling. Dude looked scared as hell. Cooper was scared, too, had been for days, but better a bomb or a bullet than a barbecue.

  They ain’t gonna eat me, Sofia.

  Klimas looked at Cooper, and at Feely.

  “You two boys stay with me,” the SEAL said. “Visibility is going to be shit. Whatever it takes, do not fall behind. This is our one chance. Don’t fuck it up.”