“If you can’t tell the difference, then you’re too stupid for this business. And that’s exactly what this is, a fucking business. You can’t get any more blood from a stone. Thought you understood that.” Phil was silent for a moment. “Get your boys back to work. Tonight.”
“Soon as your pals see things my way. You tell them that I will see those extra zeroes in the budget, or everybody is going to be up to their eyeballs in rats. You tell them that, and you tell them that I’m serious as a fucking heart attack. I’m not kidding. You tell them—”
Lee stopped, just to make sure Phil understood, but Phil was gone.
CHAPTER 17
8:59 PM
April 18
Friday night in Tommy’s house. “Sox game or Svengoolie?”
“S’gooleeee!”
Tommy laughed. “It’s not too scary?” He knew the answer though; Svengoolie was never too scary. Occasionally he might show a classic from the thirties, but most of the time it was grade-D dreck from the fifties and sixties. Tonight it was Beginning of the End, in which Peter Graves squared off against giant grasshoppers that crawled over photos of buildings. Grace barely followed the plots anyway, and waited instead for the moments when crew members threw rubber chickens at Svengoolie. The jokes were so corny and so bad that Grace usually understood them, and she would gleefully zero in on one and ask Tommy the setup question all night, then endlessly repeat the punch line in a flurry of giggles.
Tommy loved being with her so much he didn’t even mind missing the game. “All right then. You go set up the tent, and I’ll get the popcorn.” Grace ran down the hall to the living room to arrange the couch cushions and a blanket so they could lie on the floor, safely ensconced in their “tent.”
In the easy chairs behind the “tent,” Tommy’s parents, Sidney and Francine, snored away.
Tommy hadn’t been able to afford the mortgage payments on their house, so he’d sold that. All of the profits had gone to Kimmy. Now he lived with his parents. It wasn’t so bad. They understood his predicament, and gave him as much time as he needed. He slept in his old room, and since he slept during the day, the constant, thrumming rush of the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway blocked out most of the noise. It was reassuring, like a mother’s heartbeat to a baby.
The divorce had settled into a dull ache that he could ignore most of the time, like a cavity in a back molar. It didn’t bother him much, unless he pushed on it. Things were easier if he just focused on what was right in front of him. He still got to be with Grace on the weekends.
Tommy was enough of a realist to know that this peace couldn’t last forever. Some other shoe would drop eventually. And when it did, life had taught him that it would most likely be in the form of a steel-toed boot, aimed squarely at his head.
Before the movie started, he asked, “How’s Uncle Lee?”
“Good,” Grace said through a mouthful of popcorn.
“Do you see him a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
Sometimes. That could mean anything. Sometimes trying to get an answer with some kind of useful information out of a four-year-old was like trying to track down an honest alderman. Every once in a while, though, they might surprise you.
“Mommy says we’re going to see a lot more of him, ’cause we’re moving downtown. Mommy says he might be my new daddy. You’ll still be my old daddy though.”
Tommy managed to get out, “Sure, honey. Sure.” He swallowed, and said carefully, “Always, okay? I’ll always be your daddy. No matter what.”
CHAPTER 18
6:03 AM
April 19
Martin knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. Since he’d gotten home last night, he hadn’t been able to sleep because of the itching and pain. He’d been in the bathroom for an hour, standing under warm water, but that made the itching moan in hunger. The heat had unfurled a wave of skeletal fingers that went tickling up across his back. He turned and cranked the handle to cold, hoping to stun the itch, to numb his skin, to shock his system. As the brilliantly cold water hit his skull, agony seethed inside his brainpan. He fell out of the tub and curled into a fetal position on a dirty towel dropped on the filthy tiles.
His wife had knocked on the door. “Hon, I could use you downstairs, like now.” Somewhere in the haze, he heard his oldest screaming about watching SpongeBob. The youngest cried nearby. Of course. The youngest couldn’t go five minutes without crying unless he was in his mother’s arms.
And his wife. She was always picking up the baby. Soothing it. Never teaching him a lesson. Never teaching him anything and saving him from everything. She’d rattled the door. “Martin! Martin! What the hell is wrong with you?”
Martin croaked, “Be there in a minute,” and didn’t know why. Maybe to make her go away.
She said, “You better not have been drinking again, buster. I’m coming back up in five minutes, and you better be out of there. If you’ve been drinking, so help me God . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stomped down the stairs.
Martin clasped his hands between his legs and squeezed as he rode out the waves of torment. Eventually he managed to rise to a kneeling position, then used the sink to prop himself up. He pawed through the medicine cabinet, spilling children’s cough syrup and tampons into the sink. He found nothing that might help.
Nothing stronger than Tylenol or Advil and the symptoms were getting worse.
The next thing he knew, he was waking up on the floor next to the bed, but all he really noticed for the briefest dreamlike moment was the way everything glowed in the early morning sunlight. He tried to raise his head.
The sunlight started to burn.
He blinked.
He felt, or rather sensed the presence of his wife above him, yelling at him, bouncing a baby boy wearing soiled diapers. His other son was wailing from his room down the hall. None of this really concerned him as much as the way the sunlight cut into the room.
He clutched the blanket on the bed, pulled himself to his feet, and tottered out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen. All he knew at that moment was that he was very thirsty. He grabbed a glass and stuck it under the faucet. Water hit the bottom of the glass and for some reason, the image and sound revolted him. Martin gave a surprised urking sound as thin, yellowish bile jumped out of his mouth and into the sink. He backed away, still dry-heaving.
Pushing past his wife, he moved in a hunched shuffle down the hall.
She was on the phone with her sister. “I don’t know what to do, that’s what I’m telling you. No, no. He promised me. He promised. Yeah, no more drinking. That’s the problem. He’s acting, I don’t even know anymore.... He’s never been this hungover. What?” A quick pause, then, “No. No. No. He’s not like that. I told you. He’s not like that.”
Martin shut the basement door and locked it.
He found his Marlboros sealed in a sandwich baggie with a lighter hidden away in the ceiling tiles. Just one cigarette. He’d given up drinking for his wife and the boys, and really, just one cigarette wasn’t hurting anybody. He couldn’t think of anything else that might offer some kind of relief, no matter how slight, from the convulsions that were wracking his body.
He inhaled, and the taste made him gag. The cigarette fell from his fingers and smoldered on the floor. He coughed and hacked. He could swear the smoke made his lungs themselves itch. The sensation spread throughout his chest, as if something had cracked inside and was now leaking. The dreadful sensation seeped out to his skin, and the prickling feeling became unbearable.
Martin cried out and frantically raked his fingernails across his scalp, down his neck, his shoulders. He might as well have been trying to extinguish a volcano with a Slurpee. He clawed deep furrows in his skin. It didn’t help.
He reached up to the shelf of old sponges, toothbrushes, and household chemicals, desperate to find something abrasive like steel wool, something that could match the intensity of the itching, something that didn’t screw around
. His gaze slipped past the Lysol spray, the cold-water washing machine detergent, landing on the industrial jug of Drano Max Gel. He knew it was full, because he’d bought it just last week.
His wife pounded on the basement door. “Martin! Martin! If you don’t open this goddamn door right now, I’m taking the boys and leaving for good! I promised you a divorce if you started drinking again and I mean it!”
He unscrewed the cap from the Drano and popped the foil seal with his thumb. The itching grew worse, as if a thousand bees were vibrating under his skin, and they were excited at the sight of the drain cleaner. He upended the jug and held it over his head.
Soothing fire dripped from his skull.
He fell to his knees. Lighting flashed through the bloody furrows in his skin, but it wasn’t enough. The Drano sizzled into his eyes and he gasped in sweet torture. He sank against the cool linoleum and put his palm on the lit cigarette. The burning finally got his attention.
His wife started kicking at the door. The boys kept screaming.
Fire. That was the answer. So elegant. So simple. He dragged the can of Raid from under the sink and crawled over to one of the plastic bins, piled haphazardly with a ton of other cardboard boxes. The bin was stuffed with old baby clothes his wife refused to throw out. He ripped off the lid and soaked the clothes with the insecticide. One click of his lighter and the fabric ignited with a solid pop.
He felt the heat lick his face and almost smiled.
Then he thrust his hands into the fire.
His wife kept kicking the door. The boys howling became even louder.
The sounds drilled into his head and within seconds, they blotted out everything else. It filled him with fury. He scrabbled to his feet, grabbing at the cardboard boxes full of old photos and tax returns and other useless crap his wife had insisted on hanging on to for God knows what reason, spilling them down over the fire.
He shook his head as if to clear the shrieking. The sudden movement made the noise even worse, so he staggered back, searching for something to quiet the sounds from upstairs so he could find some peace and return to the bliss in the flames.
He kicked over a children’s toy box, spilling Tonka trucks, rubber balls, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains across the floor. He spotted a Cubby blue toy souvenir bat, three feet long and solid wood. It felt good in his hand. It felt right.
He carried it up the stairs and unlocked the door.
His wife had enough time to say, “What is wrong—” before the bat came down. She shrieked, “My baby!” as the infant’s wail was silenced with a sudden crunch. He stopped her screaming next, then went upstairs to find his oldest son, stomping and complaining in his room.
In the basement, the flames melted the plastic bin and spread to the discarded can of Raid. It exploded, spreading burning shrapnel into the stacked cardboard boxes. Within minutes, the entire basement was on fire, and the flames rushed up the walls and across the ceiling.
Upstairs, the cries and screaming stopped.
CHAPTER 19
10:41 PM
April 19
Dr. Reischtal found that he was unable to pray. He peered out at the night through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the top floor of the Cook County General Hospital. From dusk until dawn, the stars and sky were extinguished, blown out by the lights of the city, revealing nothing but a dull orange haze and the occasional landing lights of aircraft preparing to land as they approached O’Hare from the east. Light pollution. What an innocuous name for something so subtly sinister.
Without stars, he found the words to his Lord fell uselessly back to earth, unable to bridge the vastness of the universe. He felt trapped, smothered with the sick light. The idea that this may be a sign, that this shroud of false light could herald the end of days had occurred to him more than once.
The body in the freezer two floors down made this idea a frightening possibility.
Viktor’s trail, as far as the bats were concerned, had gone cold in Yekaterinburg. They knew he was a poor student and his father was an unemployed laborer, crippled with debts. The motive for smuggling animals was easy enough to understand. Whether he would have returned to Russia or simply stayed in the U.S. was unclear.
The bats had come from all over the world. The bodies of the bats, including the parasites, had been dissected in the laboratories at Quantico. They had recovered eleven bats, nearly all from the critically endangered list, and thirty-seven internal and external parasites that ranged over four different species, including three from Viktor’s own body.
All showed the beginning stages of the disease.
Eleven bats. One empty pouch.
And so, despite protests from his colleagues in the CDC who were more interested in saving a few pennies for their precious budgets, Dr. Reischtal had convinced the board that Viktor was just the beginning.
The virus would reappear.
And when it did, it would explode with a vengeance.
The special pathogens branch had quietly moved into the top three floors of the Cook County General Hospital, displacing patients and staff alike. It wasn’t difficult. Cook County General had one of the worst reputations of not only Chicago but the country. The big joke in Chicago was that if you were taken to General, you were lucky to leave with all your organs. A few years back, there had been a huge scandal. Several top administrators had been convicted on providing kickback bribes to ambulance companies in return for bringing accident victims to the General, even if other hospitals were closer. The place was crowded, understaffed, and most of all, underfunded.
Other hospitals may have been better suited to Dr. Reischtal’s requirements, but despite better facilities and more specialized doctors, Cook County General had one element that the others did not. Location. The only hospital located near the absolute center of the city, it filled an entire city block between Madison to the north, Wacker to the east, and Monroe to the south. To the west was the Chicago River; it had been built next to the river in the aftermath of the Great Fire in 1871.
The original building had been torn down in the late sixties, and in the same spirit that would echo some of the progressive architecture designed to serve the public throughout Chicago, the building was designed as a squat, segmented cylinder, twelve stories tall. The floors were staggered, spinning out from a central radius, providing decks shaped like stingy slices of pie, like a tight circular staircase, outlined in flowers shrubs, and small trees when the building was young. The trees died within two years, and ivy had taken over. Leafy strings hung from every surface in the summer and fall, as if the pie slices had gone rancid and mold had crept over every surface.
At first, the administrators were reluctant to simply hand over control of their hospital to the CDC. However, a large donation from the federal government had bought enthusiastic cooperation. The top floor consisted primarily of conference rooms and offices. The next two floors contained various oncology wards. The patients had been moved without explanation or warning to either Northwestern Memorial or Rush University Medical Center on the West Side.
Most of the equipment had been moved to other parts of the hospital, leaving empty, sterile rooms. Dr. Reischtal’s precise footsteps echoed though the bare halls and rooms as he paced, waiting. He could not sleep because he could not pray.
So he paced.
And waited.
The walk to the CTA Red Line subway station at Balboa only took six minutes for LaRissa Devine, from leaving her classroom seat to thrumming down the subway steps. If she was lucky, and the train was running late, she could catch the 10:37 and get home to her mom, grandmom, and three siblings and be in bed by 11:30. She needed all the sleep she could get. The manager at the El Taco Loco branch knew damn well that she was one of the few employees he could trust completely, and needed her to get there early to start the prep work.
When she wasn’t selling tacos and burritos that made a mockery out of Mexican cuisine, LaRissa was a student at Harold Washington City College, a
nd her night class had just finished. She carried a heavy backpack; she always took every assigned book to every class. Her notebooks were filled with nearly every word out of her teachers’ mouths, and color-coded with neon highlighters. Post-it notes stuck out of the pages like some kind of medieval defensive castle architecture. She never missed a class.
She knew that some of her classmates whispered among themselves, wondering if she had some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She didn’t care.
She slipped her card through the automated gate in the subway station and pushed on through. It was late, and no one was in the booth. She went down another flight of stairs. The escalator that rolled upstairs was frozen. It had been broken for almost two weeks.
She walked to the center of the station and sat on a bench, taking off her backpack and sinking gratefully against the wall. She was exhausted, but kept her eyes open. This time of night, it was better to sit where you could see anyone approaching you. The Balbo and Roosevelt subway stations were the end of the line for the whites, and the beginning of the line for a lot of blacks. This borderland effect could sometimes lead to trouble.
Anybody who said that Chicago wasn’t segregated wasn’t paying attention, or they were full of horse manure. They’d never ridden the Red Line south of Jackson, that was for sure.
Another reason her backpack was so heavy was because LaRissa carried her cousin’s U-shaped bike lock in the outside pouch. And it wasn’t just for looks. She had no problem jerking it out and using it if any fool was dumb enough to try and mess with a studious black girl. Tonight, though, was quiet. She thought for a moment about whether she could take out her biology homework, and thought tonight it might be okay. Sometimes she worried if she looked vulnerable if someone saw her with her face in a book. Since most of the shooting and problems took place when the weather turned much hotter, she thought it would be okay. She wanted to get a head start on her homework.
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