Pandemic (46 page)

She sounded a little guilty, as if she should have gone all Rambo on two trigger-happy psycho cops.

“You’re alive,” Cooper said. “You did what you had to do.”

He felt her shrug again. “I guess. One of them shot me just as I reached the stairs. He followed me down. He cornered me. He … I think he was going to rape me or something.”

Cooper remembered the bald man … 
give us a smooch
.

“He tried to kiss you? That why you wanted to see my tongue?”

He felt Sofia nod.

“Asshole was crazy,” she said. “He tried to pull me close … he had both hands on my shoulders. He was so strong. I kicked him in the balls and it didn’t do anything. I think he laughed, like it was a fun game or something. He came at me again … he stuck his tongue in my mouth. I felt those fucking bumps. They stung.”

Cooper tried not to flinch, to jerk away. He realized he’d made a huge mistake. Just because her tongue looked normal didn’t mean she wasn’t infected.
She claimed to have taken the inoculant, but how did he know she was telling the truth? Was she going to change? Was she changing that very second? Would she attack him the way the bald man had?

He looked down at her, a dark, warm shape in his lap. She was a danger … he had a gun. All he had to do was put a bullet in her, then he’d be safe for certain.

But Sofia seemed normal. He
needed
normal. Maybe she wasn’t lying about drinking the stuff from the government. Maybe she was fine.

Maybe.

“I think your bleeding is slowing down,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“You mean aside from being shot?”

He nodded. “Aside from that.”

“Fine, I guess,” she said. “If you don’t count the fact that you’re jamming your fist into my bullet wound.”

He wanted to hear the rest of her story. “So how did you get away from the cop?”

She paused. He felt her arm slide around his back, felt her pull herself tighter to him. She was tough, no question, but there was still a frightened woman in there, a frightened woman who wanted comfort.

“He was forcing me to kiss him. He had his hands on my shoulders. His gun was in his holster. I grabbed it.”

For the first time, Cooper actually looked at the flat-black pistol in his hand. The faint, red light of the Exit sign played off the black barrel, enough for him to read the engraving on the side:
SPRINGFIELD ARMORY U.S.A.
, along with the stylized letters
XDM
.

Cooper had never owned a gun. He’d been to a firing range three times in his life, all three times with Jeff, all three times just for fun. He hadn’t totally forgotten how to work a pistol. He pushed the release lever, slid the magazine out. On the back of the magazine, he saw two vertical rows — tiny dots that looked gold if a bullet was in there, black if there wasn’t. He counted seven spots of gold.

“Holds sixteen rounds,” Sofia said. “After the cop, other men tried to get me. I only missed twice. One in the chamber, so you’ve got eight left.”

He turned the weapon this way and that, looking for an orange dot.

“Where’s the safety?”

“Trigger and back-strap safeties,” she said. “Don’t worry about them. Just hold the gun tight, give the trigger a smooth pull.” Her voice dropped to barely a hiss. He heard anguish in her words. “It will shoot, trust me on that.”

The gunshots he’d heard while in the boiler room … how many of those had been hers? He’d killed the bald man with his bare hands. She’d killed people with this gun.

“It’s okay,” Cooper said, unsure if he was consoling her, or himself. “You did what you had to do. So did I.”

And in that moment, he knew he was in this with Sofia all the way — whatever the fuck was going on, they would face it together.

He kept pressing the tablecloth against her side, even though his arm was starting to tire. It had to hurt her, hurt her bad, but in seconds she started to snore.

Cooper Mitchell sat in the darkness, this brave stranger’s head in his lap, wondering what the hell they should do next.

@Ticonderagga:

OMG, my neighbor just went ape-shit and attacked his wife! Pittsburgh PD shot him dead. Can’t believe this is happening.

@PickleThruster10:

15-car pileup on I-80 South. Looks like a guy cut in front of a tanker truck. Traffic at a dead stop — not going anywhere. #FuckingTraffic #AsianDrivers

@LongIslandIcy-T:

If anyone gets this, we’re trapped on roof at W139th & Amsterdam. Cops aren’t responding to 911. This guy is trying to kill us! Please send help!

@AlabamaCramma:

Explosions in downtown MLPS. News coverage spotty, says 30-40 dead, many more injured.

@Boston_Police:

Emergency notice: 24-hour curfew in effect. Stay in your homes. Do not let anyone in. Do not go into public areas. Do not approach police officers.

@WhiteSoxChum:

Where the FUCK is the nat guard? Riot in street. I see dead bodies. Where are the cops? This is insane.

@BACOemergency:

Power is out throughout Baltimore. No ETA on recovery. Conserve cell phone power. Fill all available pots with water. Do not drink tap water after 5pm.

Murray watched it unfold on the Situation Room’s big monitor. The estimates were changing: some for the better, some for anything but:

And, at the bottom:

They’d added parentheses to the bottom numbers, representing global totals. The outbreaks of America and England were already producing cataclysmic numbers. China remained silent; that nation’s numbers could only be estimated based on limited satellite data and the stories of the refugees trickling into Myanmar and Vietnam. No refugees were hitting Japan, however — the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force sank anything that came near the coast. Murray didn’t know if those casualties were counted in the tally.

As for France, well … the number of
deaths
in parentheses would need to be updated.

Paris burned.

The screens showed different angles of a city ablaze. Fire raged, consuming buildings both classic and new. The dancing orange demons cast tall, flickering spires up to the night sky, spewing pillars of smoke into the blackness above.

Motherfucking
Paris
.

Some of the shots were from helicopters, some from the ground well outside the city proper, and two came from satellites. The scenes reminded Murray of watching the
shock and awe
of Desert Storm, but it was even worse than that — this level of destruction hadn’t been seen since World War II, since Dresden: he was watching a firestorm.

The unthinkable scenario had begun just a few hours earlier. There was no chance of controlling it. The French government had stopped giving death toll updates. The president, his cabinet, and much of the legislature had fled the city, hoping to set up somewhere else, to maintain government, to keep the head attached to the snake. Everyone who
could
get out of Paris probably already had.

Those who remained in the city were either dead or about to die. Black, white, Arab. Native sons and daughters. Immigrants. Today there was no confusion about French identity — burned bodies all look the same.

“This can’t be happening,” André Vogel said. When China shut off communications, Vogel’s veneer of confidence had shattered and hadn’t returned. “The fire crews … where are the fire crews?”

“They’re dead.”

All eyes turned to Pierce Fallon, the director of national intelligence. Fallon always had a seat at the table — he just didn’t say much unless he was asked, or unless he knew exactly what was happening. He was as unassuming as he was quiet, the kind of man who could effortlessly fade into the background.

“Those flames will rage until there’s nothing left to burn,” Fallon said. “We have multiple reports of firehouses being attacked at noon, Paris time. Assault and murder of fire department personnel, destruction of vehicles and equipment, fires set to the stations themselves. This drew an immediate police response, but armed gangs were waiting to ambush the police.”

He paused as something exploded on-screen. Another building collapsed.

“At twelve-thirty
P.M.
, Paris time, there were reports of attacks on petrol stations, stores, anything that would burn fast and spread the fire to neighboring buildings,” Fallon said. “With the city’s fire response crippled, the results” — he gestured to the screen, where the Eiffel Tower looked like a black spike jutting up from the flames of hell — “were quite predictable.”

Blackmon looked shocked, a rare crack in her emotional armor. “You’re telling me this was a coordinated attack?”

Fallon nodded. “No question, Madam President. We estimate about a thousand insurgents were involved.”

A single word instantly changed the tone of the room: not
infected
, or
converted
, but
insurgents —
an organized force.

“One thousand,” Blackmon said. Her shoulders drooped. “The city stood for centuries. Just
one thousand
people destroyed it.”

Murray’s soul sagged with the hopelessness of it all. No invading force. No trained army. Paris had been destroyed by people who knew the city’s streets, the routes, knew how the police acted, knew where all the fire stations were — Paris had been destroyed by Parisians.

Blackmon turned to Murray. “A coordinated strategy,” she said. “Can that happen here?”

Once again, he was out on a limb, giving his best guess at something not even the smartest people he’d ever met could understand.

He gestured to the monitor. “Right now, we’re looking at a feed from CNN. The entire world is watching the same images we are. These Converted are obviously more organized than we’ve seen in the past. We have to assume some of them are watching this, and are seeing a strategy that works. If their goal is to destroy, now they know how.”

Blackmon put her hands on her face, rubbed vigorously. She lowered them, blinked and raised her eyebrows.

“Get the word out to law enforcement in the major cities — and
especially
Chicago, New York, the places most heavily infected — that they need to protect fire stations.”

People started to talk, to protest, but the president held up her hands for silence.

“I know every police force is already spread thin,” she said. “But if a city can’t fight fire, then we lose that city. Even if it’s a couple of cops in each firehouse, at least that gives us a chance.”

She put her hands on the table, leaned heavily. She looked at the image of a burning Paris.

“Not here,” she said. “Not on my watch.”

Cooper Mitchell awoke to darkness. Darkness, and the sound of a cough.

A cough that wasn’t his — and wasn’t Sofia’s, either.

He was on his back. He’d bunched up his coat as a pillow. Sofia lay next to him, her head on Jeff’s folded coat. Cooper could feel her breathing.

The cough again … a
man’s
cough, coming from inside the dark room.

Cooper had a moment of panic — where was the gun? His right hand slid out snake-strike fast, feeling for the weapon, found it almost immediately. He flexed his fingers on the pistol grip, then sat up.

Another sound: a light snore. Like the cough, it came from the other side of the overturned table.

Was it a man? Was it one of the yellow things?

The conference room’s door remained closed; no light from the hall, just the red glow of the Exit sign.

Cooper swallowed. He drummed up what courage remained in his quivering chest.

He stood.

The room lights flickered on, illuminated the familiar white-tableclothed tables, chairs, the dead man in the suit — and a new body. A man, facedown, wearing a cook’s uniform.

The cook’s chest rose with a breath, then spasmed with another cough.
Sleeping
. Maybe he and Sofia could slip out of the room without waking him up.

Cooper knelt back down. He slid the pistol’s barrel into the waist of his pants. He reached down slowly, then simultaneously slid his left hand behind Sofia’s head and cupped his right over her mouth.

She feels so hot …

Her eyes opened wide. Her hands shot to his, grabbed and scratched. Her legs kicked and she let out a muffled scream. Cooper fell to the floor next to her, put his mouth to her ear, spoke so quietly his words were nothing but breaths.

“It’s me, Cooper! Be quiet — one of them is in the room.”

Sofia went rigid. Her unblinking eyes stared at him.

She was burning up. A fever. Not as bad as Jeff’s had been in the boiler room, but still, a bad one.

Cooper let go of her head. He helped her to her feet. She winced as she stood. He pointed to the man in the cook’s uniform.

She leaned in close, spoke in a hissing whisper. “Is he asleep?”

“I think so.”

“Shoot him.”

“What? No, we need to get out of here. If we shoot him, it’ll make noise, maybe bring others.”

The sleeping man coughed again, this time much harder, the lung-ripping sound pulling his body into a fetal position.

Cooper thought about throwing Sofia over his shoulder, making a run for the door. He thought about it a moment too long: the cook sat up.

Cooper drew the pistol and pointed it at the man’s chest.

Just shoot him, just shoot him now — but what if he’s not one of them?

The man had reddish-brown spots all over his white uniform. Cooper knew those stains weren’t from preparing some dish in the kitchen.

The man looked at the gun. Then at Cooper. Then at Sofia.

“Are you guys friends?”

That word again.
Friends
. When the bald man had thought Cooper was his friend, everything had been fine. Maybe Cooper could bullshit his way through this — maybe he wouldn’t have to murder this man.