Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  “Get me in touch with someone who can make decisions in China,” she said. “And get Morozov on the line. Right now.”

  Bodies scurried into motion, hands picked up phones — at least four people jumped on the task of trying to reach Stepan Morozov, the president of Russia.

  Paris, a cinder. London in chaos. Gun battles in the streets of Berlin. Reports of Converted wreaking havoc in South America, Northern Africa, India and Pakistan. Every continent felt the effects. All except for Australia, the leaders of which had been smart enough to shut down all travel three days earlier.

  Blackmon turned to Porter. “Admiral, what’s the condition of the Seventh Fleet?”

  Maybe Murray wasn’t up on his Russian geography, but he — like everyone else in the room — knew exactly what Blackmon was asking. The Seventh Fleet operated as a forward force near Japan, a constant presence of power some sixty ships and three hundred aircraft strong. The Seventh was America’s sheathed saber in that region.

  “Seventh fleet is at REDCON-1,” Porter said. “They are prepared to defend any hostile action and are available for offensive operations.”

  Blackmon nodded her approval. “Make sure fleet command knows they have clearance to shoot down anything that comes near them. From here on out, we err on the side of an international incident as opposed to losing even a single ship.”

  “Yes, Madam President,” the admiral said. He turned to his assistants, setting in motion another miniflurry of activity.

  Vogel looked off, put his hand to his earpiece. He turned to Blackmon.

  “Madam President, we have President Morozov on the line. He called us.”

  An assistant placed a red phone on the table in front of Blackmon. It was an old-fashioned thing, a handset connected to the main phone by a curly cable: the “hotline,” a piece of equipment that for five decades had served as a last resort to stop nuclear war.

  Blackmon took a deep breath. She picked up the handset.

  “President Morozov, America expresses its deepest condolences at this tragedy.”

  She paused, listening. Her eyes widened.

  “Stepan, don’t do this,” she said. “That attack probably wasn’t ordered by the government. China is dealing with the same problems you are — you know they wouldn’t risk a war with Russia. If you retaliate, all you’ll do is kill innocent people.”

  She listened. Her eyes closed. That was it, just her eyelids closing, and everyone in the room knew Morozov’s answer.

  Blackmon opened her eyes. They burned with anger and frustration.

  “The United States objects in the strongest possible terms,” she said. “The world is on the edge of collapse. This will push us even closer.”

  There was a pause, then she hung up the phone.

  Blackmon took a moment. The room waited for her. She squared her shoulders and spoke.

  “President Morozov feels compelled to retaliate. What will Russia’s likely target be?”

  Vogel rubbed at his bald scalp, rubbed hard. “Probably a city comparable in size to Novosibirsk,” he said. He tapped at his keyboard, glanced at the main monitor as he did. “The closest Chinese city would probably be … Ürümqi.”

  The image on the screen shifted, showing a city nested between three snowcapped mountain ranges. At the center, the word Ürümqi. If Murray hadn’t heard Vogel say it, he would have had no idea how to pronounce it.

  Blackmon nodded once, as if she knew the city of Ürümqi was the only obvious answer. “And that city has one-point-five million people?”

  “Closer to two-point-five million,” Vogel said. “Three-point-five in the prefecture, so the death toll would depend on what weapon the Russians use.”

  Murray shook his head in amazement. Three-point-five million: about the size of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city.

  Blackmon’s hands clenched together again. The world’s most-powerful human being had no power at all to stop a massive slaughter.

  “Admiral Porter, how would Russia strike that city?”

  “Tupolev bomber,” Porter said. “Likely a Tu-160 flying out of the Engels-2 air base near Saratov. You can bet it’s already in the air. It will launch a Kh-55 cruise missile, probable warhead yield of 200 kilotons.”

  A series of concentric circles appeared on the screen, overlaying the city. The center circle was a bright red, surrounded by one in red-orange, which in turn was surrounded by orange, and finally a ring of yellow. More words appeared on the screen, showing districts or suburbs, Murray wasn’t sure: Qidaowanxiang, Ergongxiang, Xinshi, Tianshan, Shayibak and more. The names all fell within the bands of color. Murray didn’t know those names, probably couldn’t even pronounce them, but the names made everything more real.

  People lived in Xinshi, people lived in Qidaowanxiang … people who were probably going to die.

  Vogel turned to Admiral Porter, looked at all the Joint Chiefs.

  “We have to do something,” Vogel said. “Do we have any resources in the area? A carrier, anything?”

  The air force admiral started to speak, but Blackmon cut him off.

  “We do nothing,” she said. Her voice was cold, unforgiving. If her heart felt anything, she refused to let those emotions reach her brain.

  Vogel looked shocked. “But Madam President, a strike could kill millions of people! We have to try to stop it!”

  Blackmon stared straight ahead. “Russia has been attacked and will retaliate. If we try to intervene, we …”

  Her voice trailed off. She closed her mouth, licked her lips. She gathered herself, continued.

  “If we intervene, Russia could interpret that as an act of war. America is in dire straits — we can’t risk doing anything that would put our troops in conflict, and we cannot risk nuclear weapons being launched at our shores. Russia has the right to defend herself.”

  Vogel slumped back into his chair. He was stunned, just like most of the people in the room, just like Murray. Wasn’t the president of the United States supposed to be able to reach out and stop injustice?

  And yet, Murray knew Blackmon was making the right call. If the USA stuck her nose in the middle of this fight, the next mushroom cloud might rise over Miami, Seattle, Phoenix … any number of American treasures. Blackmon had no choice other than to make sure Russia didn’t see the United States as an enemy.

  Admiral Porter cleared his throat. “Madam President, if I may offer a suggestion?”

  She waved her hand inward: go ahead.

  “We think the Chinese nuke was launched by a rogue element,” Porter said. “However, it is also very possible that the government was testing Russia, seeing if the infection had impacted Russia’s ability to respond to attack.”

  “Russia’s ability has not been affected,” Blackmon said. “Which the Chinese are about to find out firsthand.”

  Admiral Porter nodded. “Of course. But, if China actually was testing Russian resolve, their next test could be against us. We need to prepare our own retaliatory response. The Chinese — or whoever is running things there — will see us preparing for launch. They’ll know the United States is ready to hit back.”

  Three nuclear powers at play, inches away from an all-out exchange. If Murray had wondered how things could get any worse, now he knew.

  Vogel knocked twice on the table. “Porter is right,” he said. “The Chinese will see us preparing. So will the Russians, just in case they get any bright ideas while they’re lobbing nukes into China.”

  Murray shook his head. “Are you warmongering assholes really this obtuse? You want to make things worse by spinning up our birds?”

  The admiral glared at him. Vogel chose to look elsewhere.

  The president raised a finger. “Director Longworth, let’s keep this civil.”

  “Sorry, Madam President.”

  She turned back to Porter.

  “Admiral, you’re sure about this? You really think prepping for launch will be interpreted as a warning and not a threat?”<
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  There was a gleam in the admiral’s eye. Maybe Murray was imagining that, but this man — all the Joint Chiefs, for that matter — had spent a lifetime training and preparing for a situation this severe.

  “China has already used a nuclear weapon,” Porter said. “Russia is about to do the same. The seal is broken, Madam President. It’s a lot easier to justify the second strike than it is the first.”

  Russia would launch at China, maybe one of them would launch at America, and then America would launch at both — just to be sure — and then …

  Murray stood up. The action seemed to surprise the other people at the table. It even surprised him.

  “This is what it wants,” he said, the words rushing out. “These people, the Converted, they aren’t monsters. They aren’t zombies. The destruction of Paris made that clear. The bomb that hit Novosibirsk — if it wasn’t the Chinese government, it wasn’t truly rogue, either. That was a calculated attack, because this disease wants to kill us all. Vogel, put our disease tracking numbers back on the screen.”

  Vogel did so. Murray pointed at the top number.

  “Sixty percent immunized,” he said. “Soon to be seventy, then eighty. We’re in the lead, and the other industrialized nations are close behind. Don’t you see? We’ve stopped the spread. We’ll have millions of infected to deal with, sure, but we’ve stopped the spread. The Converted … they can watch the news just like we can. They know the score. We’ve checked the contagion, so now they’re looking for other ways to take us out. We just so happen to have tens of thousands of other ways in the form of nuclear missiles. Don’t you get it? We’re beating them now because we’re organized, because we have communication — if a nuclear shooting match starts, all that goes away. They want to destroy us. If they start a nuclear war, then we do their work for them.”

  Vogel turned sharply, his hand shot to his earpiece: new information. The room hushed, waited for him.

  “Seismic readings indicate a one-hundred-kiloton detonation in China,” he said. “Probable epicenter … Ürümqi. Returning to satellite coverage.”

  The main monitor switched back to the image of Ürümqi, only now the city couldn’t be seen — a billowing mushroom cloud roiled up, blocking any view of the city center. The shock wave expanded out, a ring of dirt and debris widening at supersonic speed.

  Blackmon stood up, rested her hands on the table. She leaned forward, her predator’s stare locked on the scene of mass destruction.

  “Admiral Porter is right,” she said. “We need to send a clear signal. We need to make sure the Russians and the Chinese know what will happen if they attack. Take us to DEFCON 2.”

  THE STREETS OF CHICAGO

  It could have been an Old West ghost town, complete with howling wind. Skyscrapers in place of beat-up wooden shacks, snowdrifts instead of rolling tumbleweed, but it was just as desolate, just as empty.

  Some of the traffic lights were on, some were off. Most buildings sat dark. A few random windows glowed against the darkening sky.

  Vehicles littered Michigan Avenue’s six snow-swept lanes. Some of the cars, trucks and buses looked fine, save for smashed-in windows and dented doors, while others were crumpled, knocked on their sides or even resting upside down with snow accumulating on their upturned tires and dark underbellies. Many were burned-out husks, blackened and misshapen from long-dead fires.

  Light from the setting sun slipped through the packed, gray clouds, reflected off the tall skyscrapers. Broken windows looked like missing teeth, black spots marring the smooth glass faces.

  Winter wind ate at Cooper and Sofia, cut into jeans and slacks, drove through coats to chill their bones and bellies. The snow kept falling, met in the sky by whirling bits of burned, blackened paper. Everything smelled like a day-old campfire. Icy flakes melted against skin, stuck to hair, clung on Cooper’s four-day stubble.

  So many dead. Blackened corpses sat inside of blackened cars. A cindered bus sagged from the heat that had scorched it. A scattering of five corpses spread out from its twisted door — people who made it out of the vehicle, but still succumbed to the flames. Bloated and frozen bodies lined the sidewalks, lay between the ruined cars that filled and blocked the streets. It was as if God had picked up a graveyard, turned it upside down and rattled it, scattering the dead like a child dumping out a box of toys.

  Cooper began to hear occasional sounds through the wind — a clank of metal, distant tinkles of breaking glass, the screams of the hunted and gleeful cheers of the hunters. He stayed close to the buildings on the west side of the street, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  Nothing came out to stop him, but he and Sofia weren’t entirely alone. Here and there, Cooper saw the little pyramid-shaped monsters, sometimes scurrying across the street from one building to another, sometimes through ground-floor windows where they built their walls of solidified shit.

  He also saw flashes of movement from deep inside buildings, through smashed storefronts and from behind windows higher up the towering buildings. He was being watched, watched by something bigger than the hatchlings.

  Cooper had carried Sofia north on Wabash and cut east on Hubbard. At Michigan Avenue, he looked south. The snow-covered Michigan Avenue Bridge led over the Chicago River. He wondered if they should go that way instead, but Sofia tugged on his jacket to get his attention.

  She raised a shaking hand, pointed at a twenty-story building a half block up on the left.

  Fire had raged through the smooth glass tower, covering what windows remained with waving patterns of soot. At the bottom of the building, he saw a broken overhang that once had shielded Chicagoans from rain or snow. It, too, was twisted and blackened by the fire. A warped script W and one e were all that remained of brass letters that had spelled out “Walgreens.”

  Cooper’s heart sank. He kept walking, kept carrying Sofia. Maybe the fire damage was only superficial.

  It wasn’t.

  Nothing remained of the drugstore. Through broken and blackened glass, Cooper saw melted metal shelves and powdery paper ash. The smell of burned plastic poured out of the place as though it was still actively ablaze.

  Sofia shivered in his arms.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Cooper nodded. “I guess we go to the hospital next. Let me take a little rest.”

  He looked around, saw a nearby car that had smashed into a bus. The car’s windows remained unbroken, intact. He carried Sofia over to it. He used the hand under her knees to open the driver’s door, then bent, his back straining as he carefully set her on the driver’s seat.

  His whole body seemed to sigh in relief. Sofia weighed all of a buck-ten — not much to hold for a few moments, but an awful lot to carry across the city.

  “I’m slowing you down,” she said, her weak voice barely audible over the wind. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  He thought for a moment, searching for an answer.

  “Because of my mom,” he said finally. “She’d want me to help you.”

  A not-so-distant scream from behind, a woman’s scream, echoing through the empty streets. Cooper looked back the way they had come, his hand moving on its own, reaching for the cold handle of the gun stuffed into his pants.

  Two long blocks away, he saw a woman at the base of the bridge. Her hands clutched to her shoulders as if she was trying to compress herself, make herself too small to see. Chicago’s skyscrapers rose up into the gray evening sky around her. She stood in the middle of the street, looking to her right, then turning right, then looking right again, then turning again, spinning in place in a stop-start motion. The wind blew snow at her, probably cutting right through her thin blouse.

  For a moment, Cooper wondered why she hadn’t worn a coat (didn’t she know it was freezing outside?) before he realized she had probably fled some hiding spot, had run just to stay alive.

  He saw movement: two other people approaching the woman. A tall man, wearing a red down jacket, and a woman wearing a bl
ue snowsuit. They must have come out of the surrounding buildings. They closed in, and suddenly there were four more people — sliding out of ruined cars, walking through doorways.

  They had the woman surrounded.

  She kept turning, first her head, then her body.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Cooper said quietly. “Run.”

  The woman didn’t move. The six closed in on her.

  And then, on the bridge, coming from the south, through the falling snow and scattering bits of paper, Cooper saw something else.

  Something … huge.

  He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words hit his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.

  “What the fuck is that? Cooper, what the fuck is that?”

  Cooper didn’t know, didn’t want to know. It was a man … maybe. Sickly yellow skin, no jacket, an upper body that was far too wide for legs that would be gigantic on anyone save for an NFL lineman. And the head — Cooper couldn’t make out much other than a neck that was as wide as impossibly wide shoulders, a neck that led up to a face hidden behind a blue scarf wrapped around the mouth and nose.

  The woman let go of her own shoulders, finally turned to run, but it was too late; six people grabbed her. She screamed and jerked, tried to fight, but the others held her fast.

  The man in the red jacket stood in front of her, reached into his coat, pulled out a long butcher knife.

  Cooper thought about drawing his gun, taking a shot, maybe he could get lucky from this far out—

  —and then it was too late. The man in the red jacket drove the knife into the woman’s belly, slid it up, like a butcher slaughtering a pig. The woman didn’t even scream, she just stared. Stared, and twitched.

  Her attackers tore into her. Cooper saw hands driving down, yanking, ripping, saw those hands come back bloody and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.

  The five people started to eat.

  I am not seeing this … I am not fucking seeing this …

  A tug on his coat.

  “Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the hell out of here.”