Sleep Tight

by Jeffrey Jacobson

  So Arturo had promised Ed and Sam four patrol cars, with two officers in each car, and a couple of wild-eyed cops on motorcycles who weren’t part of the main force that surrounded the Loop. Everybody else was spread out across the rest of the city to maintain the illusion that the Chicago PD still had everything under control.

  Once down at Cook County Jail, they would orchestrate the unloading of the prisoners, then head back with the empty buses for another load.

  Ed boarded the third bus and scanned the faces, which ranged from wide-eyed and panicked to openly hostile. He called Sam. They were as ready as they would ever be. “Let’s get going.”

  “Good. Sooner we start this shit, sooner we’re done.”

  Ed hung up and nodded to the driver. The driver folded his newspaper and put the bus in gear. Ed turned to watch through the windshield. He could see Sam’s lead bus roll up to the intersection of Clark and Van Buren and start to turn right. Ed felt a sense of calmness settle throughout his body; he almost felt as if he could breathe easily again. They had a long ways to go, but at least they were on the move.

  Then the first bus stopped. One of the soldiers was waving his arms over his head, pointing north, to where the lines of CTA buses were trickling down Jackson. Sam hopped out of the bus and walked over to the soldier. Sam pointed east down Van Buren. The soldier shook his head. Sam pulled out his phone.

  Ed answered the call. “Christ, what now?”

  “Believe the old-timers called it a failure to communicate,” Sam said. “Seems that nobody told these boys where we’re headed, and it doesn’t fit their plans.” Ed could hear the soldier yell something at Sam. Sam yelled back, “And I don’t give two shits about what you want, so go fuck yourself, pal.”

  Ed hung up and locked eyes with the driver. “You stay here, keep the engine running, and you don’t move for anybody, until you hear from me. Got it?”

  The driver shrugged, put the bus in park, and whipped open his newspaper yet again. Ed went down the steps and out into the heat and humidity. He was surprised he’d gotten used to the air-conditioning on the bus that fast. He quickly joined Sam at the front of the first bus.

  Sam was still yelling at the soldier, “—tin star jackass wannabe hero. You ever pull that lump on your neck there out of your ass, you might try thinking for yourself for once.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ed said. He shot Sam a look that said to keep his mouth shut.

  Sam shrugged, put his hands on his hips, and turned his back on everything, watching the El tracks, missing the rumbling and sparks of the trains.

  Ed approached the soldier. “What’s the problem?”

  The man wore a hazmat suit without the helmet. An assault rifle was strapped across his back. Extra clips sagged from webbing down the front of his chest. A throat mike wrapped around his neck. “You’ve been misinformed. I’m afraid there is no way these prisoners can be transported anywhere but Soldier Field for decontamination procedures, no exceptions, by order of the president of the United States.”

  Ed considered this, then spoke softly. “Do you have any idea who is on board these buses? Take a hard look at this building here. This is a maximum-security federal penitentiary, understand? We are currently transporting over sixty inmates down to the facilities at the Cook County Jail. To put them through some kind of decontamination process, along with regular citizens, this is out of the question. We don’t have the man power. Are you following any of this? The president wasn’t thinking about this when he signed that order.”

  “No exceptions,” the soldier repeated.

  Ed felt his blood pressure spike. He said, “I don’t know who the fuck you work for. I don’t care.” He pulled out his star. “You see this? This gives me the right to do whatever the hell I deem necessary within the city of Chicago. And that, pal, is a fact.”

  The soldier permitted himself a crooked, faint smile. “Look around. We’re in charge. And that, pal, is a fact.”

  Three Strykers came roaring down Clark, each of them taking a position across from each bus. The rear door of the closest one opened with a rough hiss, and two more soldiers got out. Neither one wore any kind of insignia on his hazmat suit, but it was clear from the behavior of the other soldiers that these two were superior officers.

  One stomped over. He had close-cropped, iron-gray hair and goggle-like sunglasses that clung to his skull as if they’d been surgically attached. He asked the younger soldier, “What’s the holdup?”

  Ed said, “We seem to be getting off on the wrong foot here. These prisoners need to be taken down to the Cook County Jail.”

  The soldier with the sunglasses turned to Ed. “Who are you?”

  “Detective Jones. Chicago PD.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’ve been told, but our orders are quite clear. Every single man, woman, and child inside the perimeter will be evacuated and complete the decontamination process. After that, there is a medical evaluation, and then, and only then, will they be released. No exceptions. If we do not follow proper protocol, we risk breaching our containment system, which could lead to an outbreak. Then it isn’t simply Chicago that is in danger, it is the entire continent. We will not allow that to happen.”

  “So tell me, what measures have been put in place to minimize the possibility of a prison break? If you planned this out, you surely recognized the fact that over five hundred inmates from a maximum-security federal prison would have to be evacuated. How do you intend to deal with these violent, dangerous individuals who will happily seize this opportunity to kill anyone in their way and escape?”

  “That is your responsibility.”

  Ed started to ask the hypothetical question of whether or not the man was fucking serious when his phone rang again. Shaking his head, he pulled it out to check the number. With any luck, it would be Arturo with a solution to this mess.

  It was the warden. Ed answered it. “What?”

  “We have a problem.... Something is happening. . . .”

  Ed could hear chaos in the background. “Gonna have to be more specific.”

  “We’ve lost contact with several floors.”

  “Please clarify ‘lost contact.’ ”

  That got the military officer’s attention.

  The warden sounded frantic. “Guards were, uh, making a final sweep of the laundry facilities, I believe. There were guards lost . . .” More shouting in the background. Ed stuck his finger in his ear, straining to hear. “. . . floors thirteen through sixteen are not responding . . .” Gunfire, sudden and close.

  Ed jerked the phone from his ear, turning to look up at the wedge-shaped building.

  The officer stepped back, speaking low and fast into his throat mike. Hatches popped open on the three Strykers and soldiers appeared behind the .50 caliber machine guns like heavily armed jack-in-the-boxes. Another dozen soldiers ran along Van Buren and lined up on the sidewalk, their rifles unslung and ready.

  The officer said, “I suggest you gentlemen step back and allow us to assess the situation.”

  Ed ignored him, concentrating on his phone. The warden had stopped talking altogether. For all Ed knew, the warden may have dropped the phone. One lone gunshot, more screaming. Then silence.

  Another dozen soldiers lined up along the El tracks over Van Buren.

  Sam tapped Ed’s shoulder and pointed.

  Ed turned and saw all the soldiers, the firepower. He lowered his phone.

  The glass visitor doors opened and a man staggered out into the sunlight. He moved as if he couldn’t see very well, taking conservative, hesitant steps, holding his hands up over his eyes, to protect them from the light. He wobbled, confused for a moment, then struck out, almost at random, in a direction that headed straight for the building’s massive northern pillar.

  Ed walked over, followed closely by Sam. A warning shout went up behind them. They glanced at each other, then at the figure that was stumbling along, trying to get as far as possible from the door. As they got closer, the
y could see that the man was wearing a guard’s uniform, although that did not necessarily mean he was actually a prison guard.

  They got within ten feet. The man stopped. He was white, mid-thirties, a little overweight, with red blotches across his skin. Ed couldn’t get a fix on whether he was actually a guard, and eventually believed it because of how the clothes fit.

  So far the man hadn’t said anything.

  “You okay?” Ed asked, watching the doorway. Sam had his Glock out.

  A bug crawled out of the man’s hairline and made its way down his puffy face to his nose, and disappeared under a nostril. He didn’t appear to notice or mind. He scratched at his armpit, made eye contact for the briefest glimmer, and said, “It itches. Oh God, it itches.”

  “Why don’t we get you some help?” Ed said.

  Another bug crawled out of the guard’s collar, over his jaw, braving the sun, and disappeared up the other nostril. A third came out of his hair and crawled across his open eye.

  The eye imploded, and the back of his head crumpled into a pink mist.

  The sound of the gunshot bounced around the plaza, echoing between the El tracks and the building. Ed and Sam dropped to their knees, spinning, as Ed yanked his .357 out of his shoulder holster and Sam brought his pistol up with both hands. They faced over twenty soldiers, lined up along the sidewalk and the El tracks.

  The body of the guard collapsed.

  Ed yelled at the officer, “You said this was our responsibility.”

  “Until we visually confirm presence of either bugs or the virus. Then our authority supersedes everything.”

  Ed never got a chance to argue. Another man bounced out of the front door, but wasn’t slow and hesitant like the first one, this guy was running for all he was worth. He wore a prisoner’s jumpsuit and tried to slip around the corner to Clark. A three-round burst from one of the soldiers took him down in a tangled heap of orange cotton and splashes of blood.

  Then a third. A fourth. More prisoners poured out of the visitor entrance, heading in all directions. It was almost like the bugs crawling out from the guard’s collar, using their overwhelming numbers to escape. The prisoners, like the bugs, flinched at the sudden sun and heat but kept running.

  Gunfire erupted around the small plaza in a sudden storm. The prisoners were literally blown apart, their heads folding messily into themselves, causing the sudden lurching expressions of astonishment, as their lungs popped and their legs split open horizontally across the kneecap. At twenty to thirty yards, it wasn’t a challenge; it was more like shooting fish in a barrel.

  The three machine gunners on the Strykers took that as a cue and unloaded on the buses. The ridiculously heavy bullets smashed through the windows, the side of the bus, through the seats, through the prisoners closest to the side, then more seats and the second set of prisoners across the aisle. Collisions with the seats and some of the major ligaments changed the original trajectory of the bullets, but they continued on, into the seats across the bus, smashing through more prisoners and seats, and out through the other side. They killed everyone onboard, including the drivers. The feather-like remnants of the newspapers floated serenely around the steering wheels and corpses.

  When the third prisoner had bolted from the entrance, Ed and Sam dove to the side, rolling into shelter behind the north pillar. Gunfire came from Van Buren, then the deep, booming crackling from the Strykers’ .50 caliber guns opened up from the west, on Clark. They crouched, heads down, elbows up, arms wrapped over their heads to protect themselves from the exploding glass wall that encased the first floor.

  The gunfire trickled away as the flood of prisoners slowed and stopped. Several unnaturally quiet seconds ticked past. The soldiers started reloading. Then, new gunshots, somehow different. Ed risked a glance at the shattered remains of the first floor. More men were now fleeing the prison, both prisoners and guards, but this second wave was armed. That was why the gunfire sounded different—it was coming from behind Ed and Sam.

  The soldiers fell back into defensive positions and resumed shooting. The prisoners and guards dropped to the sidewalk and wriggled up behind the piles of corpses, using the bodies for cover. They stuck their shotguns and handguns over all the dead flesh and fired blindly.

  Ed saw one soldier fall from the El tracks and land like a bag of loose laundry, sprawling over a low sandbag wall. But that was the only soldier he witnessed get hit. A few shotguns, with shortened barrels for close-range defense, and a handful of Smith and Wessons were no match against thirty or forty state-of-the-art fully automatic assault rifles, and the slaughter continued.

  However, the prison had the advantage of a seemingly endless supply of prisoners and even a couple of guards. Whenever one of them went down, someone behind them would pick up the fallen weapon and continue shooting. They kept coming, streaming out of the MCC.

  At first, Ed couldn’t figure out why the prisoners would face almost certain death, running face-first into a blizzard of bullets. Then he remembered the bug crawling across the first guard’s face and realized the bugs must be infesting the prison, and they were driving the prisoners out of the prison, despite the gunfire.

  He tapped Sam on the shoulder, and nodded toward the shattered buses. They needed to take advantage of the new distraction and at least get clear of the damn cross fire. They scuttled across the sidewalk on the Clark Street side, keeping the buses between them and those .50 caliber machine guns. They rolled through the shattered glass in the gutter and scooted under the middle bus. Gunshots continued to pop and crackle around them.

  Ed fought to control his breathing, to slow his heart. His ears rang from all the shooting. His eyes watered from the stinging smoke and glass. The air smelled of harsh gunpowder and metallic taste of blood.

  “When these boys finish cutting down the prisoners, they’re gonna come looking for us, you know that, right?” Sam asked, half-whispering, half-yelling into Ed’s ear to be heard.

  Ed nodded. Still, he hesitated, watching the prisoners struggle forward, only to be blown apart. He hated to cut and run, leaving the inmates to their doom, but there was nothing the detectives could do. If the bugs had gotten into the prison, then the prisoners were as good as dead anyway.

  “Any suggestions?”

  Sam twisted around, getting a fix on the Strykers. “We try to just walk out of here, they’re just gonna shoot us in the back and forget about it.”

  Ed nodded. He knew better than to think the soldiers were on their side.

  Sam asked, “How bad you want to get out of here?”

  Ed thought about Carolina and her son. “Bad enough to shoot my way out if that’s what it takes.”

  Sam grinned. “Atta boy. You remember that.” He crawled to the other side of the bus and surveyed the street. He called back to Ed, “Gimme thirty seconds, then come around to the other side of that tank down there or whatever the fuck they call it.” He pointed at the Stryker farthest south on Clark.

  Ed gave him the thumbs-up. Sam rolled out, got to his feet, and scrambled across to the far side of Clark. Ed took one last look back at the prison, noting how the shooting was slowing down. There weren’t many prisoners left to fire back. He tried to ignore the shards of safety glass strewn across the asphalt as he used his elbows to pull himself along under the bus to the back.

  He scurried across the gap to the third bus in the line and dove underneath it as well. He crawled the length of that bus, then figured at least thirty seconds had passed. He rose stiffly, knees cracking like frozen power lines in a high wind, and peered back at the plaza.

  The soldiers were moving in now, finishing off the last of the prisoners. At least two or three guards had seen the writing on the wall, and while they couldn’t go back upstairs, they weren’t in any rush to stick their heads outside and get their brains blown out, so they’d holed up inside, behind the visitor desk. They’d pop up once in a while and fire a volley through the shattered glass, just to make the soldiers keep their
distance.

  Ed knew the attempt was futile, and those guards were finished. It was just a matter of time. He tried not to think about the poor bastards stuck inside the lobby, still shooting it out with the soldiers, and hurried over to the last Stryker. Like he had promised Sam, his only responsibility now was to get out of the city alive. He ducked down under the nose to avoid being detected by the periscope and the driver’s video image sensor.

  The guy on top running the .50 caliber was too preoccupied with punching holes the size of softballs in the concrete above the guards inside to keep an eye on anything closer. Ed didn’t think the soldier had enough of an angle to see where the guards were hiding, and seemed to be blasting away for the hell of it.

  The unholy volume of the machine gun made it hard to think, so Ed just kept his head down and hustled around to the other side of the vehicle. The shock waves from each shell pummeled him with invisible fists and made him dizzy. He didn’t even hear the shot from a handgun, only saw that suddenly the machine gunner stopped and slumped to the side. Blood poured out of his mouth and nose.

  The rear door flopped open, and two soldiers jumped out, guns ready. They spotted Ed immediately. One of them screamed, “Freeze!”

  The other one said, “Shoot him. Shoot the fucker.”

  Ed didn’t even have time to raise his arms before Sam somehow materialized behind the soldiers. Two shots, so close together they sounded almost like one solid report. Blood spattered across Ed’s sport coat. Both soldiers collapsed.

  Sam slipped his pistol back into his holster and rolled the closest soldier over. “You take that one. Hurry.” He felt around for the Velcro straps that protected the zipper. “We got a minute, maybe two tops, before they figure out they’ve lost these guys.”

  Ed finally figured out what Sam was doing. He got to work on the other soldier. As they struggled with the hazmat suits, Ed tried to process what had just happened. It left him feeling cold. Sam had just killed three men inside of ten, maybe fifteen, seconds. It scared Ed a little. “You sonofabitch. You use me as bait again, I’m liable to bust you in the chops.”