Pandemic (69 page)

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 Joseph’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.

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
.

Clarence walked closer.

Her eyes narrowed. She screamed, a sound of desperate rage. The gag muffled some of it, but only some.

No. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t.

Clarence turned to leave, but stopped short — Klimas was standing just a few feet away. Had he been there the whole time? The SEAL nodded in man-to-man understanding. He extended his hand, palm up.

“Give me the knife,” he said. “Take a walk. No shame in it — she’s your wife.”

Clarence looked at the extended hand. Then he looked at the knife. No, it had to be him.

“Was,” he said. “
Was
my wife.”

He turned again, faced her, forced his feet to move.

Margaret’s body shook, this time from sobs. Tears filled her eyes, ran down her forehead to vanish in her dark hair. She drew a ragged breath in through her nose, paused, then screamed again.

Reality slurred for a moment. Everything shifted. He’d met her five years ago, fallen in love with her almost immediately. So brilliant, so hardworking, so utterly committed to doing whatever it took to get the job done. And what a job that had been.

She’d fallen for him almost as fast. For a while, things had been perfect. They had been so happy together. They thought they had all the time in the world.

They didn’t. No one did. Ever.

No matter how much time you have, that time always runs out.

Clarence stepped forward.

Her screams grew more ragged as vocal cords gave way. She thrashed harder, so hard the whole ladder rattled, but the SEALS knew their business when it came to tying knots.

He reached out with the knife. The blade shook madly, so much so that it looked like a prop made out of rubber.

He was Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his own son. Only God wasn’t here, and no one was going to appear in a cloud of holy light and tell him it had just been a test of his devotion.

Clarence started to talk, but his throat tightened and he choked on the words. He swallowed hard and tried again.

“Good-bye, my love.”

He pressed the edge of the blade against her throat. She screamed and screamed, she chewed madly on the gag, she jerked and kicked and fought for life.

Clarence closed his eyes.

He pushed up as hard as he could and slid the knife forward, felt the blade
slice deep. The ladder rattled harder than ever. Still pressing up, he pulled the blade back, felt it bite into tendons and ligaments. Hers wasn’t the first throat he’d cut. It wasn’t like the movies — one slash didn’t do it, you had to
saw
a bit to get at those arteries.

He pressed up even harder and slid forward again, then pulled back again. Hot wetness splashed onto his hand.

Her screams ceased.

Eyes still locked tight, he sawed forward one more time, back one more time.

The ladder stopped rattling.

He heard the sound of his wife’s blood splattering into a plastic mop bucket.

From behind him, Klimas’s command voice boomed.

“Feely! Get this blood ready to go!”

Clarence realized he was still holding the knife. He let it drop, heard it clatter, then covered his face with his hands.

He slowly sank to the floor.

All the time in the world …

All the time in the world …

Paulius Klimas wasn’t a religious man. His lack of faith, however, didn’t stop him from a small prayer of thanks:

Thank God it’s winter
.

The Windy City was living up to its name. Snow, ash and dirt swirled, rose and fell as gusts curled off buildings and rolled down the streets. Paulius guessed the temperature was hovering in the single digits, but the windchill dropped it far below zero. The weather numbed him, made it hard to move, but he was thankful because it produced a much-desired side effect: the streets were mostly empty.

Even monsters and psychopaths hated the cold, it seemed.

He and D’Shawn Bosh moved quickly. Roth’s sporting goods store had been stop number one. Bosh had gone for Cubs gear, while Paulius opted for a black, knee-length Bears coat and matching hat. They both wore gray Chicago Fire sweats over their fatigue pants.

Paulius also looked a little pregnant. He had a one-gallon milk jug of Margaret’s blood strapped to his belly. Feely had said his body heat would keep it from freezing solid.

They were headed east on Oak. Dust from the JDAMs had billowed out even this far, some four and five blocks from impact, turning the standing snow from white to gray.

Though the bad guys clearly didn’t like the cold, a few of them remained outside. Paulius saw several bundled-up people, heads covered in hats and faces wrapped in scarves. They all carried weapons of one kind or another: hunting rifles, pistols, knives, axes, even carbines. One fat guy lugged a chain saw. The dirt, the streets filled with ruined cars, an armed militia walking free — Chicago reminded Paulius of a subzero Mogadishu.

The monsters, however, didn’t seem to mind the conditions. Three-legged hatchlings scurried everywhere. As for the huge, yellow behemoths with the wicked bone-blades sticking out of their arms, Paulius saw at least one on
every block. It was all he and Bosh could do to keep walking, to try to pretend the creatures were nothing unusual.

Roth’s experience held true: without uniforms, Paulius and Bosh drew little attention. They reached Michigan Avenue, looked out onto a park covered in gray snow. At the park’s far edge lay U.S. Route 41, and beyond that, Lake Michigan.

“Damn,” Bosh said. “We ain’t getting out that way.”

Paulius nodded. There were even more cars blocking the road than when he and his men had swum in the day before. He pulled out his binoculars, steel-cold fingers complaining at even that small motion. Through them, he saw the reason for the growing and already-impassable roadblock: two of the sickle-armed, muscle-bound creatures were rolling a burned-out Toyota pickup down the road. They pushed it near several other cars, then bent, lifted, and flipped the vehicle on its side as if it were nothing more than a toy.

He stowed the binoculars. “After we pick up the others, we’ll have to use surface streets to drive north. Let’s go.”

They moved south on Michigan Avenue. On the far side of the street, a Converted woman was using a hacksaw to cut away at the arm of a frozen corpse. As Paulius and Bosh moved past, the woman didn’t even look up.

The firehouse wasn’t much farther.

The president of Russia glared out from the Situation Room’s large screen. President Albertson glared back. At least, that’s what Murray
thought
Albertson was going for — in truth, it looked like he was trying hard not to soil himself.

Stepan Morozov’s face sagged with prolonged anger and extreme exhaustion. He wore a suit coat, but no tie. His sweat-stained shirt was unbuttoned down to the sternum, showing graying chest hair.

“President Albertson, the time to act is
now
,” Morozov said. “China is going to launch her missiles. Our intelligence confirms this. If Russia and America combine for a first strike, together we will
eliminate
China’s nuclear capability.”

Albertson opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. Murray saw beads of sweat break out on the man’s forehead.

On the screen, Morozov’s eyes narrowed. “Mister President? Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” Albertson said quickly. “Yes, I heard you.”

When Albertson didn’t offer anything else, Morozov’s face started to redden.

“The Chinese have already struck us,” he said. “A million Russians are dead. The Chinese leadership says nothing — no apology, no explanation. We
must
assume that they are infected. If we strike while they are disorganized and silent, we might hit them
before
they can launch at all.”

“And we might not,” Albertson said. “They could launch in retaliation, get their missiles away before ours hit. I’ll consider your proposal … I’ll talk it over with my staff. Thank you for the call.”

Murray couldn’t believe what he was watching. The Russian president was asking the United States to join him in a large-scale nuclear attack on the world’s most populous nation, and Albertson just wanted to get off the line. The man was overwhelmed, completely unprepared for something like this.

Morozov snarled. A string of spit ran from his top lip to his bottom, vibrating with each word.

“There is no time to
consider
,” he said. The string of spit popped free, landed on his chin. “Maybe there is a reason
you
don’t want to strike! Maybe
you
are infected, and you are already talking to the Chinese about first-striking us!”

Albertson shook his head. “I … we … of course we’re not infected! We … we …”

Morozov shook his fist. “Then prove it! Strike now, before it is too late!”

“I …” Albertson said. “We …”

Murray stood up. “President Morozov, we are close to finishing a weapon that will wipe out the infected, all of them,
worldwide
.”