Pandemic (54 page)

Get up and run and fight shoot him shoot him no-no-no you’ll miss you can’t win play dead please God please don’t let him kill me please
.

Cooper started to tremble.

The thing touched his head again, only it wasn’t the bone-blade at all … 
it was Jeff’s fingers, brushing from Cooper’s temple to the top of his head. He felt the same thing a third time, and a fourth.

He’s petting me. He thinks I’m sick and he’s petting my head
.

“EVERRRRYONE … HURTS. WILLLL GO FIND … HELP.”

The fingers stroked Cooper’s hair one last time, then Jeff stood. He lumbered to the front of the hotel lobby. He walked out the ruined rotating door and vanished into the night.

Cooper slowly stood. He scanned the ravaged, smoky lobby to see if any of the killers were looking at him.

They weren’t. They were too busy dying.

The Tall Man’s eyes leaked yellow fluid, not all that different in color and consistency from the phlegm coating his nose and mouth. He was still coughing, still sneezing, but was too weak to wipe the goo away.

Cooper walked closer. The man’s rheumy eyes opened and closed, the stringers of yellow mucus that ran between his eyelids bouncing in time. His throat made a wet sound.

This was the man who ate Sofia.

You ate her too, you ate her too …

“I only had one serving, you
fuck
!”

Cooper took a step back: he’d just yelled at himself.

You are so fucking crazy you’re going off the deep end man get control …

“Shut up, shut
up
!”

He scrunched his eyes tight. He rubbed the pistol barrel against his right temple.

You’ve got the gun use it use it …

Use it on the Tall Man? No need. The Tall Man didn’t have much time left. None of these assholes did.

Or … maybe it was better if Cooper used it on himself.

He shook his head, shook it hard. No, he couldn’t think like that. He could make it out alive. He
could
. But if he couldn’t, if people like the Tall Man got him, if they were going to shove a stop sign up his ass and out his mouth, roast him over a fire …

Was eating a bullet better than just being eaten?

The Tall Man coughed again. Phlegm came up, but this time so did blood. A thick, dark-red glob clung to his chin.

He’s coughing blood. Chavo was coughing blood …

Cooper heard yelling from the street. He held the gun against his thigh as he slowly walked to a broken window. He crouched, peeking just over the sill’s jagged glass.

Outside, he saw two women sprinting for their lives. Behind them, seven or eight screaming people carrying knives, hatchets, one carrying a shotgun by the barrel as if it were a club. Running alongside the hunters were two hulking, pale-yellow creatures with tiny faces and rippling muscles. Were either of them Jeff? No, they weren’t — Cooper would have recognized his friend, monstrous or not.

He couldn’t help those two women. He hadn’t saved Sofia, so he sure as
fuck
wasn’t going to get himself killed over a pair of strangers.

He watched the pursuers, the ones who still looked like normal people. Why weren’t they sick like the Tall Man and his crew? Why weren’t they sick like Chavo?

Wind blew through the ruined window, scattering snow in Cooper’s face. He walked back to the fire. No one had tended it for a while, nor tended to Sofia. Curls of orange heat wavered through the bed of coals, the flickering light playing off her blackened, burned, half-eaten corpse.

Cooper looked away. He had to get out of there, but he wasn’t setting foot on those streets. No fucking way. Someone had to rescue him, someone with lots of guns, but who? Were news stations telling people how to get help? He hadn’t seen a working TV since he and Sofia fled the Trump Tower. If he still had his cell phone, he could have tried reaching cops in other cities, maybe the army or the National Guard.

Then it hit him — he didn’t have a phone, but his “group leader” did.

He walked back to the Tall Man.

“Your phone,” Cooper said. “Give it to me.”

The Tall Man stared up. His eyes narrowed in confusion — he was trying to focus, trying to see.

Cooper held out his hand. “Your phone.”

The Tall Man blinked a few times. His eyes seemed to clear. He nodded. With great effort, he reached his right hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a flip-phone. He flipped it open with his right thumb. His left hand reached up to wrap around the top.

He twisted his hands and the phone
cracked
sickeningly, breaking into two pieces.

The Tall Man coughed, then laughed weakly. “I know now,” he said. “I know you’re not a friend.”

Cooper wanted to stomp his face in. He wouldn’t, though, at least not yet — the Tall Man was in great pain, and Cooper wanted him to suffer.

Cooper looked up at the ceiling. Most of the lights were out, broken by random psychos throwing random things for random reasons, but two of them shone bright.

The electricity … it was still on. Maybe he could find a hotel phone. If the power was on, maybe land lines still worked.

He looked at the registration desk, or what was left of it. The remains of three computers lay scattered on the broken wood. Computers … if he could get on the Internet, he could probably find out what was happening. He could find help. There had to be more computers around somewhere.

On the wall behind the registration desk, he saw a door.

A manager’s office?

He walked to the door. He tried the handle: locked. Maybe the psychos hadn’t been in there.

Cooper took another look around the lobby to make sure no one had gotten up, that no one was watching him.

No one was.

He set off to find something heavy.

Margaret Montoya sat on the bunk of her mission module. She had the lights off. The others thought she was sleeping, so they left her alone.

She’d handled that videoconference all wrong. She’d confronted the president with the harsh realities of life, had been unable to ignore Blackmon’s superstitious, primitive tripe. Margaret should have pandered from the get-go, told Blackmon what the woman wanted to hear — anything to get an invitation to the White House. Margaret’s rage had got the better of her, made her lose focus.

She could have gotten close enough to murder the president of the United States. Yes, Margaret would be killed in the process, but the act would further cripple America’s ability to respond. A missed opportunity. Hopefully another of her kind, another
leader
, would figure out a way to get next to the president.

America would fall.

Then, the world.

If the opportunity came again, Margaret would seize it. For now, she worked on understanding God’s plan, understanding the role of each caste.

The large, yellowish bipeds: that’s what came out of the cocoons. The complete restructuring of an adult human body, creating a caste made to terrify, to destroy, to kill — a
soldier
joining the ranks of the hatchlings, puff-balls, kissyfaces and leaders.

But without the Orbital, how would all these strains find each other? How could they work together?

The answer could be some kind of quorum sensing, the method hive insects, bacteria, and other nonintelligent life forms used to make what appeared to be conscious, intelligent choices: a bee colony “deciding” when to split into two smaller colonies and where to build the new nests; ants “deciding” how to best react to a threat; bacteria “deciding” to turn genes on or off based on population density. Chemical and physical cues led many individual
organisms to act as a larger whole. The Converted clearly had a way of detecting one another and quickly forming cohesive units.

Maybe the crawlers provided a capacity to identify friend from foe. The best scientists in the world still hadn’t figured out how the Orbital had communicated in real time to hundreds of infected individuals. That ability defied physics, yet she had seen it with her own eyes. If the Orbital could do that, it was reasonable it could also make a “Spidey sense” that let the infected know when they were near their kind.

Scent —
could the explanation be that simple? A chemical on the host’s breath, or exuded through his skin. Crawlers modified the host’s brain: perhaps they adjusted the olfactory response, letting the Converted identify one another by smell alone. Maybe that was how Candice Walker had survived as long as she did. If this scent was a by-product of the cellulose, the Converted on the
Los Angeles
might have thought she was one of them, giving her more time to react, to plan.

Walker … now that Margaret understood a true God existed and guided its followers, she could only think of Walker in terms of another kind of religious figure.

Candice Walker had been the Antichrist.

The other patients from the HAC trial could also be Antichrists, the bringers of a plague that would wipe out Margaret’s kind.

That was humanity’s only hope, because without the hydras it was already over. The math didn’t lie. She’d seen the numbers:
millions
of infected,
millions
of Converted. The exponential shift was already underway. In two weeks — three at the most — humans would be reduced to isolated groups, groups that couldn’t trust one another because any one of them might be the enemy.

In four weeks, humans would be outnumbered.

In five weeks,
maybe
six, the only human survivors would be individuals hiding in the woods and mountains, living off the land.

And to think she’d been upset that she’d lost the hydra samples when evacuating the
Carl Brashear
.

Yes, God
did
work in mysterious ways …

She was more than willing to sacrifice herself if it sped up the change, if it brought the Converted to power. But if she was still alive when that
change happened? Then she could start taking control. She would gather the most brilliant of her kind — the engineers, the physicists, the astronomers — organize them, figure out how to rebuild industry, how to create a civilization with one, unified goal:

Building more Orbitals, and sending them out into the galaxy.

Steve Stanton’s pencil was a blur as he finished writing his message. He handed the piece of paper to General Brownstone.

“Get that to the people.”

She saluted. “Right away, Emperor!”

Dana Brownstone was a retired four-star general who had once run the U.S. Army Materiel Command. She was smart: a leader, just like him. Steve had big plans for her. She had already organized distribution of cell phones and weapons, created a detailed message-flow structure that improved Steve’s ability to control over two hundred thousand Converted spread throughout the greater Chicago area.

Brownstone handed the paper to a runner.

“Make a hundred copies of that,” she said. “Pass ten copies each to the primary level of cell leaders, have them pass it down to their sub-tens. Go.”

The runner took off down the Institute of Art’s wide steps. Steve would have to change locations soon. Too long in one spot made him a potential target for bombers, helicopters, or even inoculated commandos that might drop in.

Elsewhere in America, other leaders — who didn’t seem to have Steve’s special brand of foresight — were organizing large groups that destroyed everything they could find. The leaders who used the Internet for these “activist” calls to action were opening themselves up to the government’s sniffer programs and computer analysts. Might as well put up a big, neon sign that said
ENEMY OF THE STATE! DROP BOMBS HERE
.

Steve knew too much to let that happen.

He still used phones and the Internet, of course, but only for messages coded to sound like the natural language of people panicking while the world collapsed around them. By using instant messaging, online forums, social media sites, texts, tweets, blog posts and comments — as well as the “sneaker net” of human feet — he could communicate with all his people while staying well under the government’s radar.

Steve walked to a table where he’d set up his information lab. A follower sat at each of his three laptops, calling up websites, blogs, newscasts, anything that would give him the big picture.

The U.S. government had written off Manhattan. Minneapolis, too, by the looks of things, and — just a few hours earlier — Chicago. Paris was a memory. The British had barricaded London: no one in, no one out. That strategy hadn’t worked in Chicago, and wasn’t going to work there, either.

No info out of China. None at all. That was fine, because Steve could give a shit about China. He’d been born in America, and that was where he’d be crowned emperor.

The U.S. government had yet to pull the plug on the Internet. With several of the major networks down and more soon to follow — CNN showed nothing but color bars, ABC’s feed was a constant hiss of static — the government needed the Internet to spread information to the uninfected: go here to be safe; stay away from these areas; here is your testing center; this place has inoculations available.

And, of course, monitoring the Internet was the government’s main way to track down those large groups of Converted. Steve didn’t mind that at all — anyone who could organize such a group was an eventual rival for power. If someone removed Steve’s rivals for him? All the better.

He heard a cell phone buzz. Brownstone answered it, then held it out to him.

“Your uncle Sven,” she said.

Uncle Sven
was one of her names for the scouts who were hunting for higher-powered weapons. Pistols and shotguns just weren’t enough.

Steve took the phone. “What is it?”

“It’s Sven,” said the voice on the other end — a bad attempt to sound panicked, but close enough. “I found out where Nate Grissom is, he’s in town.”

The scouts had found an armory. The “N.G.” of “Nate Grissom” stood for “National Guard.” A simple code, but with the country in a tailspin, no government analyst was going to figure it out — if anyone was even listening at all.