Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  “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.

  WAITING …

  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.

  THE EMPEROR

  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.

  “Awesomesauce,” Steve said. “Do you think you can take my cousins and go get him?”

  “Yeah,” the voice said. “I got inside info.”

  Inside info: that meant the scout’s group included someone who had served at that facility.

  “Okay,” Steve said. “Then go get Nate.”

  Steve hung up. It was the third such call he’d received in the last hour. By morning, General Brownstone would be overseeing the distribution of military weapons.

  THERE’S BAD NEWS, AND BAD NEWS

  The wind had picked up, the fire had died down. The hotel lobby was colder than ever.

  Cooper Mitchell lined up the bottom of the fire extinguisher, then jammed it down on the door handle. The metal clinked but didn’t break.

  He looked around, seeing if anyone or anything reacted. He remained alone except for the sick people lying around the fire.

  He waited a few more seconds, just to be sure, then lifted the extinguisher again.

  Clink, the door handle bent.

  He drove the fire extinguisher down a third time: the handle ripped free and clattered against the floor. He slid his cold fingers into the hole, found the latch mechanism and pulled it sideways — he pushed the door open.

  Inside was a tiny office, various calendars and work regulation posters tacked to the walls, just one overstuffed desk with a chair tucked under it. On that desk, various family pictures …

  … and one black laptop, flipped open and waiting.

  The screen was dark.

  Cooper pushed the door shut behind him. The tiny room was much like the space behind the Walgreens counter. He thought of his last few moments with Sofia.

  But she’ll be with you forever now won’t she because you ate her and you’re digesting her and she’ll be part of your muscles and part of your bones forever and ever and ever …

  Cooper shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts.

  A phone on the desk: he grabbed the handset, heard nothing. The line was dead.

  He sat down in the desk chair. He was almost afraid to touch the computer. If it didn’t turn on, he was out of options — he’d have to risk leaving on foot, all by himself against a city of cannibals.

  Cooper tapped the space bar. The computer screen remained black for a moment, then flared to life.

  Oh shit, it’s working it’s working …

  He searched for a web browser icon. He found one, clicked it. The computer made small whir
ring noises. The Google home page flared to life. News, he needed news.

  He called up cnn.com. The website’s familiar red banner and white-lettered logo appeared. Below that, pictures of horror, of death, of a country on fire. Glowing headlines showed city names that read like a list of tourist attractions if you didn’t count the words next to them, words like ablaze, destruction, thousands dead …

  New York City.

  London.

  Minneapolis.

  Berlin.

  Philadelphia.

  Boston.

  Paris.

  Miami.

  Baltimore.

  And, of course, Chicago.

  “It’s everywhere,” he said. “Everywhere.”

  He clicked for additional news on Chicago. More stories appeared. All roads and highways had been blocked off, sometimes by trenches or collapsed overpasses, more often by miles of burned-out cars.

  Cooper finally understood why the military hadn’t come in to save Chicago … because the military had instead blockaded Chicago. At least that’s what the news said. The military wasn’t letting anyone in or out. The story said troops were preparing to reenter the city and take it by force: until then, all citizens were warned to remain inside, to not answer the door for anyone, not even family. Stay off the phones, don’t overwhelm the cellular networks.

  He nodded rapidly, yes, yes they were coming in, he just had to stay alive a little while longer …

  And then he noticed the story’s date. It was from yesterday. He started clicking through links, found that the entire site hadn’t been updated in the last twenty hours.

  Could CNN actually be down? The whole thing?

  Cooper tried the Yahoo home page; it came up instantly with a huge, red headline:

  CHICAGO: ABANDONED

  “No,” he said. He read the story, each word a crushing blow to his soul. “This can’t be fucking happening.”

  The U.S. government had written off Chicago. No troops were coming in. Troops weren’t even surrounding the city anymore … too much territory to cover. Those forces had been moved to protect cities that had not yet been overrun.