Pandemic

  “Forget it,” Paulius said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Just forget it. He died doing his job.”

  Roth looked cashed out, mentally, physically and emotionally.

  Paulius tugged the letterman jacket’s faux leather sleeve.

  “Thought you were a Bengals fan.”

  Roth patted the embroidered orange “C” on his left breast. “This thing kept me alive, sir. From now on, go Bears. Ramierez had the right idea — the bad guys were hunting us based on our uniforms. First store I found after I got away from that office was a fan shop. These clothes made it easier to blend in a little. From a distance, none of them gave me a second glance.”

  Paulius slapped the bigger man on the shoulder. “Grab some sack time. We might have to move quick.”

  Roth didn’t need to be told twice. He nodded and walked to a rack of sweaters. He didn’t even bother taking the sweaters down for padding, just crawled beneath them, lay on his back, and was out in seconds.

  Margaret Montoya coughed, a lung-rattling sound that echoed through the cold store.

  Clarence turned and walked toward her.

  Paulius wondered what it was like to love a woman so much that you’d abandon reason and logic, let your heart blind you to what your eyes could plainly see. For the first time, he found himself feeling sorry for Clarence Otto.

  Tim came at a fast hobble, his face lit up with excitement.

  “Klimas, holy shit,” he said. “Remember that firehouse we saw on the way in?”

  Where I shot two brave men in cold blood?

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “I saw those cops,” Tim said. “I’m not passing judgment, okay? Whatever had to be done had to be done, but I gathered they were guarding the firehouse. Were they?”

  Feely seemed far too amped up. And in the fur coat, he did look a little like a pimp.

  “Doc, what’s your point?”

  Tim tilted his head toward Margaret, did a bad job of trying not to make the motion obvious.

  “Argaret-May is inected-fay with eydra-hays,” he said. “She’s oughing-kay. You get me?”

  Paulius sighed. “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

  “She’s infected. If Cooper’s story is accurate, she’ll be dead in … wait, how long have we been here?”

  “About five hours.”

  “Then she’ll be dead in nineteen hours,” Tim said. “But that’s not what matters. What matters is the hydras are replicating inside of her right now.”

  He looked off. His lips moved like he was counting something, or speaking to himself in a language only he knew.

  “I think I have a way to save Ramierez,” he said. “A way that not only gets us north in a hurry, but lets us infect hundreds of those motherfuckers along the way. If any of them radiate out to other areas, it’s very possible that the hydras will spread all over the Midwest. Klimas, if you can pull this off, we might even start a chain reaction that could kill them all.”

  Paulius stared down at the man. “If I can pull what off?”

  Tim’s eyes shone with a combination of intensity, hope and the dread of a nasty job that had to be done.

  “The firehouse,” he said. “And what’s inside … the fire truck.” He nodded toward Margaret. “We’re going to put her in it, so to speak. Margaret Montoya gets to save the world one more time.”

  THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

  A hand on his shoulder, shaking him lightly.

  “Mister Mitchell, wake up.”

  Cooper opened his eyes. Tim Feely, standing over him.

  Tim smiled. “How are you doing?”

  Was he wearing a fur coat?

  “Leg hurts,” Cooper said. The understatement of the year. His right thigh throbbed, stung. “I cut it on something climbing over that poopwall.”

  “Poop-wall? You mean that street barricade?”

  Cooper nodded. “Yeah. That.”

  “Well, whatever caused it, the cut required fifteen stitches. You might have ligament damage as well, so walk carefully. Unfortunately, it was Klimas who did the sewing, as my deft digits are a bit dinged up.”

  Tim held up his hands. They were bandaged in a dozen places. Some of the white strips had spots of red.

  Cooper remembered the half-face man with the axe. Tim could have kept running, but he’d come back.

  He’s not like you, Coop ol’ dawg … Doc Feely doesn’t leave anyone behind …

  “Uh, what you did back there … thanks.”

  Tim’s smile faded. “I don’t want to think about that. Not ever again.”

  He pointed across the store to where Otto and Klimas stood along with two other men. Cooper recognized Bosh, and also that big SEAL — Roth, was it? — who for some reason was decked out in Bears gear. Ramierez sat by himself against a wall. Sleeping, maybe. And that infected lady, watching everything. She had a gag in her mouth and was practically buried in a pile of women’s coats.

  “Come join us,” Tim said. “Time to talk about how we’re getting you out of here.”

  • • •

  Cooper listened to Klimas lay out the idea. Tim’s idea, maybe, but Klimas was in charge so it was his no-bullshit voice that outlined what would happen next.

  Whoever came up with it, the idea sounded insane.

  Everyone looked at Clarence Otto, waited for his response.

  The man stayed silent for a moment. His jaw muscles twitched. There was murder in his eyes.

  Otto raised a hand, pointed a finger — right at Cooper.

  “He’s got the hydras, too,” Otto said. “Why don’t we use him?”

  Oh, fuck that. This lovesick idiot wanted to save that diseased whore?

  “Because I’m not one of them,” Cooper said. “Your wife is. Deal with it.”

  He stared at Otto until the bigger man looked away.

  Tim sniffed. “Margaret’s already lost. We can’t save her.”

  Otto stared at the floor. “She’ll get those blisters, right? Isn’t that enough? Between her and Cooper, isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s not,” Tim said. “Based on what we learned from Candice Walker, it will be another day, maybe two, before the pustules form on Margaret’s skin — if they form at all, because she’ll be dead by then. We just don’t know. What we do know is she already has the hydras in her blood. I know this is hard, but you … we don’t …”

  Tim ran out of words. He looked at Klimas, maybe trying to get help. Cooper noticed that the SEAL had his pistol in his hand, down low against his thigh — subtle, but ready to go if Clarence got crazy.

  “Using Cooper isn’t an option,” Klimas said. “We’re not putting him at risk so he can pop his zits on the bad guys. The weapon we need is inside of Margaret. We need her blood. All of it.”

  Otto looked up. He was a man destroyed, a man gutted.

  “Can’t you all hear how insane this sounds? This is barbaric. You want to put my wife’s blood into a fire truck? What the fuck are we, vampires?”

  Tim pulled his fur coat tighter.

  “Call it what you will,” he said. “If we do this, then even if we don’t get Cooper out alive, we can still start a plague that might kill them all.”

  “And you know that how?” Otto said. “You’re going to butcher a woman who saved everyone in this room … to test out a theory?”

  Klimas’s hand flexed on the pistol. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  Otto looked from man to man, searching for support, finding none. His fists tightened until his hands shook.

  Cooper almost felt bad for the dude. Almost. At least he didn’t have to watch his wife transform into a monster.

  Tears formed in Otto’s eyes, spilled over, left thin trails of clean, wet brown through the dust that coated his skin.

  “This isn’t just about Margaret,” he said. “She’s pregnant. Just take some of her blood. A couple of pints — that won’t kill her.”

  Pregnant? Cooper looked back at the woma
n tied to the chair. Didn’t matter if she was. Why should she get to live when Jeff turned into a thing, and Sofia turned into dinner?

  Cooper hadn’t wanted to kill Sofia, he hadn’t, but killing her had kept him alive. He could still taste her … still taste her charred skin … still taste the juice that had dribbled from her steaming flesh …

  I had to do it had to do it I had no choice no choice at all.

  Feely started to speak, then paused. He was trying to find the right words.

  “She’s lying,” he said finally. “And even if she’s not, if she actually is pregnant, then the baby is also one of them.”

  The last bit of fight slid out of Agent Otto, as clearly as if someone had pulled a hidden plug and let it drain away.

  Klimas spoke again, softer this time.

  “If you want to say your good-byes, Otto, you need to do it now.”

  Clarence sniffed back snot, hissed in a breath. More tears formed.

  “Okay,” he said. He nodded, slowly at first, then with exaggerated motion. “Okay, I … I see it. That’s the way it has to be.”

  “Go for a walk,” Klimas said. “You don’t need to be here for this.”

  Otto’s eyes squeezed tight. He pinched hard on the bridge of his nose.

  “No,” he said, his voice hollow and hoarse. “If she has to be set free, I’ll do it.”

  The big SEAL wearing the ridiculous Chicago Bears jacket sniffed sharply, then turned and walked away. The other one, Bosh, just stared at the ground.

  Klimas held his pistol in his right hand. With his left, he reached to his side and drew a wicked-looking Ka-Bar knife. He flipped it, held it by the seven-inch blade, and offered it handle-first to Otto.

  “I’ll honor your request,” Klimas said. “But if you try anything, I’ll put you down, and then she dies anyway.”

  Otto started crying all over again. His big shoulders shook as he reached out and took the knife.

  BESIEGED

  IMMUNIZED: 89%

  NOT IMMUNIZED: 6%

  UNKNOWN: 5%

  FINISHED DOSES EN ROUTE: 10,134

  DOSES IN PRODUCTION: 98,000

  INFECTED: 6,000,000 (40,000,000)

  CONVERTED: 5,125,000 (23,500,000)

  DEATHS: 6,000,000+ (40,000,000)

  It was all over but the crying, really. Thankfully, Murray wasn’t much of a crier.

  The tipping point had been reached. Twenty-three million Converted, worldwide. No army, no matter how well equipped or organized, could stop that many people. And Cheng’s best guess was another forty million were infected — in the next three days, statisticians projected the total number of Converted to reach sixty million.

  Industrial production of the inoculant had collapsed. So, too, had America’s transportation network. It was now impossible to drive from New York City to the West Coast. Converted occupied the Rocky Mountains, making the range impassable. The last reliable form of transportation — airplanes — was in danger of falling; every remaining airport, both military and civilian, was under constant attack by hordes of monsters and screaming psychopaths.

  Battles raged in the streets of D.C. The army manned a solid perimeter fourteen blocks square, with the White House dead-center. Admiral Porter’s people estimated that thirty thousand Converted were pressing in on two thousand U.S. military defenders. And every now and then, one of those defenders would turn out to be Converted himself, slaughtering those around him in an effort to open up a hole in the lines.

  Air support wouldn’t last much longer. Fewer people to repair and rearm planes, fewer bases, and on three separate occasions — one F-22, one F-35, and one Apache — an aircraft had turned from defender to attacker. The burning hole in the West Wing came courtesy of the F-22 pilot’s kamikaze effort.

  At every level of the military, paranoia ran rampant. No one could say for sure if the man or woman next to them might be the enemy, the kind that didn’t test positive.

  Ronald Reagan Airport and Bolling AFB had fallen. There was no airport close enough that they could risk driving President Albertson to it, even with the five Ml-Abrams tanks parked on the White House lawn. Three times the military had tried to bring in evac helicopters, and all three times the Converted had shot those aircraft down. The enemy had SAMs, and plenty of them.

  The bottom line: no one was leaving the White House. Not even Albertson. Admiral Porter’s best estimate was that loyal troops could defend the White House for another six days, seven at the most.

  Murray had once dreamed of the Situation Room burning to the ground. Now it looked like that might actually happen, only with him still in it.

  AFTERMATH

  Emperor Steve Stanton, Minister of Science Doctor-General Jeremy Ellis, and Supreme Master of Logistics Robert McMasters stood on a tall pile of rubble, all shivering against the biting wind. They looked down at the ten-foot-deep crater that had once been bustling Michigan Avenue. Shattered vehicles, broken concrete, jutting metal and shredded bodies lay in and around it, all victims of the powerful detonation.

  Those had been some seriously big bombs.

  The once bright and gleaming Park Tower was a blackened finger pointing to the sky. Fire had consumed much of the building, gutting it, leaving hundreds of charred corpses inside like it was some oversized piñata of death.

  A small army of hatchlings worked through the rubble, all with one specific task: find the body of Cooper Mitchell. Only then would Steve know he was truly safe.

  “Doctor-General Ellis,” Steve said. “Do you really think we’ll recover Cooper’s body?”

  Ellis’s eyes flicked to the pistol strapped to Steve’s thigh. For some reason, the man always seemed to think he was moments from being shot.

  “If Cooper is in there, he’s probably too burned to be recognizable,” Ellis said. “But we do have to try, Emperor. If I can get him to my labs, maybe I can find a cure.”

  If the good doctor-general didn’t get infected himself and die in the process, of course.

  Steve again stared into the crater. Unseen planes had dropped the bombs. One second everything had been fine, the next, all crazy explosions and total chaos. Steve wasn’t sure how many of his people had died. Maybe the late General Brownstone should have spread them out a little bit more. Live and learn.

  Poor General Brownstone. She’d been close to the hotel, directing the third wave when the bombs hit. At least someone had found her head.

  That left Steve with no option but to make Ellis head of the army. Ellis didn’t have the mind for the job, but he’d do until Steve found a soldier with command experience who had actually lived through the night. Steve had thought of giving McMasters the job, but he didn’t trust the man — maybe McMasters was thinking of taking over.

  Actually, when it came to the power structure, it was better to be safe than sorry. Steve made a mental note to kill McMasters later.

  The bombs had been a brilliant stroke, he had to admit; they had wiped out most of his organized army. He was still the emperor, but now what he ruled was little more than a mob.

  He had to start over. Start over somewhere else. He was lucky the humans hadn’t used a nuke. That luck wouldn’t last long.

  “Master of Logistics, it’s time we looked at moving on. I don’t care for big cities anymore.”

  McMasters slipped a little on the concrete, regained his balance. “Yes, Emperor. General Brownstone’s evacuation plan hasn’t been affected. She organized caches of working vehicles. We could start clearing out a road, have the trucks and buses moving out in about four or five hours?”

  Damn, but that was a big crater. Whatever had dropped the bomb that made it might still be up there, looking down, waiting for the next target.

  “Make it so,” Steve said. “But Doctor-General Ellis and I won’t be with that group. General Brownstone had motorcycles as well, did she not?”

  McMasters nodded. “She had a few caches of those as well. I know some are at the parking garage at Saint Jo
seph’s Hospital, up north in the Boystown neighborhood.”

  Perfect. That location was five miles from where Steve stood, far enough to survive the worst effects of a large nuke if the humans decided to drop one on downtown Chicago.

  “Start the exodus,” he said. “I want hundreds of vehicles leaving at the same time, heading south, east and west.”

  Steve had wanted to rule from Chicago, but clearly that was not God’s will. In a few hours, the Chosen Ones would radiate outward, drawing attention while he and a few others slipped away to the north, using motorcycles to navigate through the congested roads. He would find a place to hide for a while, and let things run their course.

  Humanity couldn’t last that much longer. And when they were gone, Emperor Steve Stanton would begin again.

  A LAST KISS

  His fingers flexed around the knife’s handle. So light in his hand, so heavy on his soul.

  This had to be done. Clarence knew that.

  Roth and Bosh had found a ladder. They’d used pantyhose to strap Margaret to it, her back against the rungs, then tied each end of the ladder to a clothing rack. Her face was about two feet closer to the ground than her feet. Below her head, they’d put a scuffed, yellow plastic mop bucket.

  Margaret saw him coming. She was still gagged. Her eyes flicked to the knife in his hand, then widened with both fear and anger. She chewed on the gag, made noises that were pleas, or curses, or probably both. Her body lurched against the restraints. The ladder and clothing racks rattled, but didn’t budge.

  What, had he thought that Margaret would go easy? Had he thought that at the last moment, she might accept this fate, look at him lovingly, forgive him for what must be done? Maybe in that Candyland vision, he’d remove her gag and she would whisper how she loved him, how she was sorry it had to be this way but she was so grateful he was taking away her pain.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  This would not be nice.

  This would not be easy.

  Margaret Montoya, or whatever had taken her over, didn’t want to die. Just like any person, any animal, she wanted to live.