Pandemic (59 page)

Two Apache helicopters flew high overhead, the roar of their engines echoing off skyscraper walls. On the ground, four SEAL fire teams were way out front, running recon. Behind them, the first Ranger platoon, then the civilians and their SEAL escorts, flanked on either side by the second Ranger platoon. The third Ranger platoon brought up the rear.

If the Rangers had objected to wearing the CBRN gear, they had lost that battle. With their urban-camouflage-pattern suits and hoods, their black rubber gasmasks and their rifles — mostly SCAR-FNs and Mk46s, with a few bulky M240B machine guns thrown in for good measure — the Rangers looked like extras from an apocalypse movie. That meant they fit right in with the surroundings.

Clarence could barely believe this was Chicago. Most of the lights were out, bathing the city in darkness. The place looked … 
dead
. Soot-streaked snow covered the street, the sidewalks, abandoned vehicles and hundreds of frozen bodies. Footprints and well-worn paths through the snow were the only indication that anyone remained.

So many footprints, so many paths. There were people here, but where were they? The SEAL recon teams had reported zero contact. They had yet to even see a single soul.

Ramierez and Bogdana stopped behind a flipped-over BMW. Clarence crouched between them. So did Margaret, but she stepped on something under the snow and started to fall. Clarence reached out fast, softly caught her shoulders to keep her from hitting the pavement.

She slapped his arms away.

“I don’t need your help,” she hissed. “I’m not yours to protect anymore.”

Before Clarence could answer, Ramierez leaned in from the right and held a finger to his lips. His eyes sent a message:
shut up before you get us killed
.

Margaret nodded. She looked back down the wide street, all but ignoring Clarence.

His wife, the mother of his child, she
despised
him.

Just get her through this alive, then you’ve got a lifetime to make things right
.

He rose a little, peeked over the bottom of the overturned car. They were about to cross Mies van der Rohe Way, which would put them within a half mile of the Park Tower Hotel.

Ramierez slid down into a crouch behind the car’s cover.

“Ramierez here, go,” he said, not to Clarence but rather into the tiny microphone that extended down from an earpiece. “Yes sir. I’m ready.”

The short SEAL looked at Bogdana.

“Frank, keep the package right here until I call for you,” Ramierez said.

Then Klimas moved silently past. Ramierez slid around the front of the overturned car and followed his commander into the shadows.

Paulius and Ramierez approached a small firehouse. The building looked medieval — two stories of grayish-tan granite with small, faux turrets on the second-story corners. Its red roll-up door looked just large enough for one fire engine to enter or exit, but nothing was going in or out thanks to the long, white public transit bus that had smashed into it at an angle.

At the bus’s rear end, almost to the sidewalk, stood two cops — one black, one white — both dressed in heavy blue coats, their fingers laced behind their heads. Their breath billowed out in expanding clouds that glowed thanks to a nearby streetlight. The men looked both hopeful and afraid. A black XDM automatic pistol lay on the snow in front of each of them.

They had their hands on their heads because two SEALs — Bosh and Roth — had M4s at their shoulders, barrels aimed at the cops’ chests.

Paulius slung his own M4. He drew his sidearm, a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 already fitted with a suppressor. He aimed it at the two cops as he came up on Bosh’s right.

“Bosh, report.”

“I saw these two exit the bus’s rear door,” Bosh said. “Thing is, advance recon looked through the bus to make sure there weren’t any bad guys hiding there that could fire on the column. When they checked it, the bus was empty. Five minutes later, Rangers march through, these guys come out of it.”

Paulius glanced at the bus. “There a hole in the front of it that leads into the firehouse?”

“I checked,” Bosh said. “Didn’t see any openings. I also did a walk around the firehouse, couldn’t find a way in or out. The place is locked up tight, Commander.”

Paulius glanced at the building’s red-framed windows. In every one, behind broken glass he saw the dull glint of metal. The cops had fortified the
place. Paulius had to keep his men moving — every second they spent here was a second wasted.

He looked at the cops. “What do you two want?”

The cops looked at each other, then back at Paulius.

The black cop spoke. “We want you to get us the fuck out of here. We’ve been in there” — he tilted his head toward the firehouse behind him — “for two freakin’ days.”

They looked normal, but the mission was here to rescue one man and one man only.

“We haven’t seen anyone but you,” Paulius said. “Why didn’t you come out sooner?”

The white cop answered. “Right after Paris burned, we were ordered to protect the engine. We were inside the firehouse when things really went to hell. There were psychos everywhere, hundreds of them — they were
eating
people. We called for backup, for someone to come and get us, but no one’s answering anymore. We didn’t think we’d make it on the streets, so we kept quiet, boarded the place up.”

“Then we saw you guys, you
soldiers
,” the black cop said. “You came to rescue us, right? So how about you stop aiming that goddamn gun at my face and get us out of here?”

Paulius could imagine what it had been like to hide in that building, cut off from communication, while cannibals roamed the street. These guys were cops, public servants. Probably as brave as any soldier.

But he couldn’t let them go. They had seen his entire force. If they were captured, they might talk. And, of course, they might already be infected. He could test them, but what was the point? The stakes were too high to take even the smallest of chances.

Paulius knew what he had to do.

God forgive me
.

He pulled the trigger four times in just over a second. The suppressor made each shot sound like a snapping mousetrap. The first two shots hit the white cop in the face. The black cop had barely enough time to raise his eyebrows in shock and surprise before the next two rounds tore through his skull.

Both men dropped instantly. Blood mist hung in the air, slowly drifted down on top of them.

Paulius switched his mic to the “all units” frequency.

“Commander Klimas to detachment. No more delays. If anyone approaches the detachment, assume they are hostiles and put them down at a distance. Quietly. Make as little noise as possible. Repeat, as little noise as possible.”

He turned to Bosh. “Let’s move out.”

I am going to kill you all, every one of you, I will wipe you off the face of the earth
.

Margaret ran through the dark streets, doing her best to stay close to the nasty little soldier in front of her. Ramierez, his name was. What a fool — if she got the chance she’d slit his throat from ear to ear and bathe in his blood while he tried to draw air. And yet here he was, guarding her, clearly ready to risk his own life to protect hers.

The CBRN gear made it hard to move, but it would protect her from Cooper Mitchell’s disease. Hopefully. The crawlers had found a way through her BSL-4 suit. The hydras might have that same ability. She would stay as far away from Mitchell as possible. She didn’t know how she would kill him, not yet, but as a last resort she had the holstered Sig Sauer P226 strapped to her right thigh. She would just have to watch for her chance. Take out Mitchell, then slip away into the city.

She heard a short bark of gunfire, then another. She and Ramierez followed Clarence and Bogdana. They jogged past a car where CBRN-suited Rangers were setting up a tripod-supported machine gun, pointed back the way they had come. Other Rangers were manually pushing cars into a loose line. They were setting up a perimeter. She saw two soldiers running wires to small, green boxes that were labeled
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
.

The Rangers’ gas masks made them all look the same, made them look like the identical insects that they were.

Past the perimeter rose the seventy-story Park Tower Hotel, a pale tan spire reaching up to the black sky. Ramierez led her to the front of the building. She saw an arced glass awning that had once sheltered guests from the rain as they entered and exited. It wasn’t sheltering anyone anymore — the only glass that remained stuck out in jagged shards. The body of a man dangled from a support beam. Icicles of blood pointed down from the ends of his fingers like stubby red claws.

Once upon a time, a rotating glass door had kept out the Chicago winds. That, too, was nothing but shattered glass and twisted metal.

Clarence approached and stood next to her. The mask hid most of his face, but not his eyes. He looked at her with a pathetic expression of hurt and confusion.

It would be nice if she could kill Ramierez. But to murder Clarence? That wasn’t just a luxury — more and more, Margaret needed that as much as she needed to breathe.

Maybe her kind would descend upon this hotel and slaughter these soldiers. She would have them string Clarence up by his feet, cut him apart a piece at a time. She’d slice off his eyelids so he wouldn’t be able to look away as people smiled at him and ate those pieces.

She stared back at him, not wanting to give him any satisfaction at all, not wanting him to think that things were okay between them. Until she had a chance to kill him, she wanted him to
hurt
.

He turned away, walked into the hotel. Margaret smiled a little, then forced that down. She was still surrounded by the enemy. She had to be careful.

She heard gunshots from inside the hotel. She heard men yelling but couldn’t make out the words. Those sounds were lost as one of the helicopters roared overhead.

A bullet plinked into a car to her right. Then something hit her, knocked her face-first to the glass-strewn entryway, pinned her there — the soldiers realized she wasn’t one of them anymore, they were going to kill her, slide a knife into her back, they—

“Sniper,” Ramierez said. “Stay down, Doc.”

From high above, the helicopter let out a new noise, a short-but-intense demon’s roar. The faraway sound of tinkling glass smashing against concrete joined the cacophony.

Ramierez rolled off her, lifted her to her feet. He looked her up and down. “You okay, Doc?”

She nodded. “I think so.”

Broken glass, I was rolling on broken glass …

“Ramierez, do you see any cuts in my suit?”

He gave her a cursory glance. “The suits are thicker than that, Doc, you—”

“Just look!”

Ramierez nodded, then checked her all over — placatingly, but also thoroughly.

She was entering a building crawling with the hydra strain. This place was death. Any cut, no matter how small, could spell the end.

“Looks clear,” Ramierez said. “You’re fine, Doc. And this lobby is secured, so you can relax.”

She let out a genuine sigh of relief.

Ramierez led her deeper into the lobby, which looked even more like a war zone than the streets outside. She recognized details from the YouTube video: the fire pit, now spotted white with windblown snow; corpses that had frozen solid and still wore jeans and winter coats; the soot-blackened ceiling; the shredded reception desk. The only thing missing was the body on the spit — maybe some of her kind had come in here, decided not to let good food go to waste.

To the left of the fire pit, Rangers were unfolding portable tables and unpacking the equipment she’d asked for. Tim stood there, directing them, using what was left of the reception desk as the lab’s main area.

Margaret looked around. The CBRN-suited Rangers seemed to be everywhere. They were setting up more of the tripod-supported weapons by the ruined door and also in the lobby’s broken windows, creating a field of fire out onto Chicago Avenue. More Rangers were undoubtedly setting up similar positions all around the hotel. If her kind attacked, these soldiers would mow them down by the hundreds.

Other Rangers carried large weapons to the elevator, which, surprisingly, seemed to still be working. She saw Klimas conferring with the Ranger commander — Dundee was his name — at what looked to be a hastily constructed command center, complete with laptops and soldiers already working away on them.

She saw Klimas reach up to the small earpiece at his right ear. He stared off, listening, then said something she couldn’t hear. He jogged to a stairwell door, calling out as he went.

“Ramierez, Bosh, Roth, with me! You too, Otto. We’ve got reports of hostiles in the building, so we’re going straight for the package. Elevator gets us there the quickest, so let’s move!”

On the way in,
she
had been “the package.” Now that they had reached the hotel, that term referred to someone else: Cooper Mitchell. Klimas and the others were headed to the eighteenth floor. On the form he’d submitted online, that’s where Mitchell had said he would be waiting.

In room 1812.

Cooper heard a helicopter. It sounded big,
loud
, like military helicopters did in the movies. He also heard occasional blasts of gunfire. It had worked: someone was coming to save him. He just had to stay alive a little bit longer, and hope the rescuers got to him before the cannibals did.

The hotel still had heat. Anywhere but downstairs, where winter winds swirled snow through the lobby, the Park Tower remained well above freezing. At first, that had been a welcome discovery. Now, not so much.

If it were below freezing, the dead bodies up here wouldn’t have rotted,
bloated
, and the corpse he hid beneath might have been frozen solid instead of turning into the wet, reeking mess that sagged down around him. The smell was enough to make him vomit, but to do that would be to make noise — to make noise was to die.

Die, or worse.