Sleep Tight

by Jeffrey Jacobson

  Sam tried to wipe some of the blood off the hazmat suit. “Quit your bitchin’. I took care of it.”

  A minute and a half later, Ed and Sam helped each other zip up their suits and kicked their sport coats under the Stryker. They had left their own handguns back inside their shoulder holsters, and took the assault rifles from the dead soldiers. Sam pushed the bodies of the soldiers under the Stryker. Ed stuck his head inside the vehicle and found a couple of helmets, along with a backpack, on the front seat. He opened it and found it was full of foreign MREs, with no less than seven languages labeling the contents. Plastic water bottles. A map.

  “Grab all the cool shit,” Sam said. He squinted. Found his glasses. Used them to determine what he was seeing. He waved to one of the guards on the other side of the broken glass. The guard held a shotgun and two fingers up.

  Sam got it. One gun. Two shells. He shrugged, and gestured at the Stryker, wordlessly telling the guard that if they could get outside, the Stryker was all theirs.

  Ed found a pair of night vision goggles. More ammo. He dumped it into the backpack. Ed slipped it over his shoulder and handed a helmet to Sam. He said, “We supposed to just waltz right past ’em?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

  They pulled the helmets over their heads and left the Stryker, heading north. At Van Buren, they turned west, leaving the sporadic shooting behind. They passed through rows of sandbags, moving quickly. A group of soldiers came jogging along, heading for the firefight, and never looked twice at the two figures in military hazmat suits.

  Ed and Sam faded into the shadows.

  CHAPTER 63

  5:21 PM

  August 14

  “You sure about this?” Qween asked.

  Dr. Menard nodded. “It’s the fastest way to get out of the city. Once I’m on the other side, I can get this”—he clutched the jump drive in his fist—“to somebody. Somebody not connected to the CDC. Somebody with some authority. Somebody with some power.”

  He pushed out of the front doors of Cook County General before he could change his mind. Qween followed him at a distance. It was clear to him that she didn’t like the plan. He turned back to her as they headed for the street, knowing the answer, but asking anyway. “You want to come with me?”

  Qween snorted. “Naw. I leave this town, it’ll be on my own two legs. ’Sides, I gotta pick up my cart.” She’d stashed her shopping cart the day before in an alley a block from the post office and was anxious to make sure it was still there.

  Dr. Menard said, “There’s nobody left on the streets, just the soldiers. They’re gonna see you.”

  “Shit. They see me, then I deserve to get caught and hauled away. Don’t worry, Doc. Gonna be night soon.”

  Dr. Menard stuck out his hand. “Thank you.”

  Qween shook it. “You just make sure you let folks know.” She jerked her head back at the hospital.

  Dr. Menard started off north along Upper Wacker. He didn’t want to look back, didn’t want to watch and see which direction Qween was headed. If things went wrong, and they wanted information, he didn’t want to know where Qween had disappeared.

  It wasn’t long before a couple of soldiers noticed the lanky doctor shambling along. They shouted at him and he waved back, content to play the clueless scientist. They jogged over and demanded to know where he had been.

  Dr. Menard acted confused. “I’ve been . . . working. What’s happening? Where is everybody?”

  “Where, exactly, have you been working?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Dr. Menard turned back the way he had come, and pointed. “The hospital.” He was glad that Qween was gone. There was nothing but an empty street behind him.

  Both soldiers took a step backward. “The hospital,” the first soldier confirmed.

  Dr. Menard nodded.

  The other soldier pressed the button on his throat mike and said, “We have a survivor from the hospital. Repeat, we have a survivor from the hospital, waiting for pickup, Wacker and Washington.” He listened a moment. “Copy that.” He released the mike and looked up at Dr. Menard. His smile was as hollow as an alderman’s promise. “They’re sending someone around now, sir.”

  “What is going on?” Dr. Menard tried again.

  “Some problems in the city, sir. They’re evacuating everyone.”

  Dr. Menard tried to go blank. “No kidding? I mean, I know things weren’t good, but Jesus, I didn’t think they’d evacuate the city.”

  “Please stand still, sir.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that? What’s really going on here?”

  “Just basic precautions, sir. Nothing to worry about.”

  Dr. Menard was getting nervous and finding it harder and harder to play dumb. “Look, I’m fine. Really. I’m not sick.”

  “I’m sure you’re not, sir. We need to get you on a bus, sir.”

  Dr. Menard wanted to say, Stop calling me sir, you little bastard. Instead, he said, “Okay. Where am I going?”

  “They’re taking everyone to Soldier Field. For decontamination.”

  The second soldier shot the first a tight look, and the first soldier shut up. Something cold crawled up Dr. Menard’s testicles. Soldier Field. For some reason, the idea of gathering all of the evacuees in one place scared the hell out of him. “Why?” he asked.

  “That’s our orders,” the second soldier said. He didn’t bother with the “sir.”

  “There it is,” the first soldier said, sounding relieved. He pointed at an oncoming white bus in the wrong lane. With a sinking feeling, Dr. Menard realized it wasn’t a CTA bus. It was a Cook County sheriff’s prisoner transport bus. He swallowed. This was going from bad to worse. “Listen,” he said. “I can walk. Really. It’s no big deal.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Orders.” The two soldiers stepped apart, blocking both directions down the sidewalk. The bus got closer.

  Dr. Menard stopped pretending. “You two have no idea what’s really happening, do you? This virus, it isn’t going to be stopped by an evacuation, do you understand? It is going to spread, unless we study it. We have to unlock it, don’t you get it?”

  The two soldiers stared at him but didn’t say anything.

  The bus pulled up behind him in a cloud of diesel exhaust. The driver, buried behind a layer of bulletproof plastic, opened the doors. Dr. Menard turned back and found the soldiers aiming their rifles at him. Mindful of the jump drive in his front pocket, he climbed aboard. The doors snapped shut behind him.

  CHAPTER 64

  5:22 PM

  August 14

  Dr. Menard didn’t think anything was wrong with the people on the bus at first. Sure, some of them appeared to be sleeping. Well, maybe most of them. And a guy in the back was weeping. Loudly. The rest of the passengers, the few that were awake, looked just like him, confused and scared and trying not to lose hope that the soldiers were there to help.

  He moved through the bus, and the reality started to sink in.

  The sleepers weren’t just taking a power nap. They were out cold. These people had curled up into a fetal position across two seats, or had ended up on the floor. A few of them had been written on with permanent marker. Someone had scrawled, KICK ME across some businessman’s face. Another guy, just a kid really, with long hair, dirty glasses, and a Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt, had HAVE FUN KILLIN PEOPLE, DUDE written in blocky letters from one cheek, across his nose, to the other cheek. Still another had a target circled on his forehead.

  A tight, choking feeling enveloped Dr. Menard. He couldn’t help but notice the heavy-gauge wire that covered the windows. He wanted to turn around and bang on the driver’s plastic barrier and demand to be released. This bus was full of people infected with nearly every stage of the virus. But he knew that wouldn’t work. It might get him shot.

  No. The soldiers knew damn well this bus was full of the infected.

  So D
r. Menard kept moving toward the back of the bus. Nearly all of the seats had been taken. He didn’t know where to sit. At least none of the passengers had slipped into the final, violent phase. Yet. Almost at the very back, he spotted an Asian woman in surgical scrubs, staring morosely at her lap. Sensing a kindred spirit, he sat carefully next to her, trying not to let his elbow touch her arm.

  The bus turned onto Upper Wacker and they drove past the hospital. He craned his head around, but he couldn’t see any sign of Qween. He glanced at the woman next to him, but she still hadn’t looked up. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked quietly.

  She looked at him, eyes hollow and wet with tears. The prisoner bus passed an empty CTA bus, and the glass reflected a glare from the setting sun back into the interior of the passenger bus. Nearly everyone flinched at the sudden flash of light, including the woman wearing medical scrubs. She turned her head away from him, and he finally saw them.

  Three bedbugs were feeding on the back of her ear.

  Dr. Menard jerked away and stood up in the aisle. Down at the front, the driver’s eyes met Dr. Menard’s eyes in the mirror, then flicked back to the street. Dr. Menard did his best to stand while the bus turned left on Jackson and sped up. He brushed imaginary flecks off his clothes and couldn’t stop. His hands shook.

  He pressed his hand against the jump drive in his front pocket, just to reassure himself. It was still there; of course it was still there. He told himself that they would be unloaded at Soldier Field, and all he would have to do was make it through the decontamination process. It wouldn’t be much fun, but he could handle it.

  He knew he would have to say good-bye to his clothes. That would be first. He figured that he would either slip the jump drive in his mouth or, if push came to shove, so to speak, he could hide it in his ass. Then they’d be hit by some kind of powder? Hard to say. Showers were guaranteed, probably a number of them. God only knew the chemicals that would be sprayed on them. Heat definitely. Lots of heat, to kill any bugs. From there, he imagined they would turn people loose inside the stadium itself. He’d join everybody else, and they would wait.

  Everything would be put on hold until the SWAT teams in the subways came up for air. Once the rats had been destroyed and the pesticides had been sprayed from one end of the city to the other, then the government would want to declare the evacuation had been a success. They’d have to let everybody go at that point. They couldn’t rightly declare a victory without turning the survivors loose. It wouldn’t suit their version of the truth. Hell, if the CDC or the president wanted, they could claim they’d saved everybody in Soldier Field.

  Be patient, Dr. Menard told himself. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. He would live to see the end of this.

  The bus turned onto Lake Shore Drive, and he marveled at the wall of tanks and trucks that had been arranged to form a barricade across both Lake Shore Drive and Roosevelt. Dr. Menard glanced through the back windows. There were no more buses behind them. In fact, as far as he could see, nothing else moved on the streets.

  The prisoner bus barely slowed down as it slipped through the barricade. For Dr. Menard, this was not a good sign. It meant that they didn’t want to stop and inspect the bus. It meant that they already knew who was on board, and wanted them through as fast as possible.

  Soldier Field loomed ahead, the new gleaming steel and glass addition dwarfing the original dignified columns and solemn structure. Dr. Menard was confident they would pull around to wherever they had set up the decontamination staging area, probably outside in a parking lot somewhere. The bus headed down into the underground parking lot.

  Of course, Dr. Menard reassured himself. They must have a huge lot under the stadium, easily accessible by the buses, and easy to control. It made sense that they would set up the decontamination tents down here. But instead of going deeper into the parking lot, the bus rolled up a ramp, and before he fully understood what was happening, the bus emerged out from under the northern seats of the stadium, past the goal post, and across the end zone.

  Some of passengers moaned at the sudden reappearance of light as the bus left the darkness of the underground parking lot. Dr. Menard ignored them and peered through the wires at the stadium as the bus rolled arrogantly over the grass, passing the ten-yard line. The twenty. The thirty. Until finally, it slowed and stopped around the forty-yard line, joining dozens of other buses, all lined up in neat rows on the field.

  Dr. Menard stormed up the aisle to the driver’s cubicle. He pounded on the plastic. “Where are the decon showers? What’s the protocol here? You cannot just dump these people in here. We need to be screened, do you understand? You have infected onboard! Get us out of here.” He pointed at the driver with one hand and clutched the jump drive with his other.

  Something tickled the back of his neck and he slapped at it but he never took his stare off the driver.

  The driver’s expression was unreadable behind the hazmat faceplate. All Dr. Menard knew was that the driver was facing his direction. The gloved hand hit a button and the door behind Dr. Menard opened. Dr. Menard refused to turn around.

  The driver opened his own door and stepped outside. And walked away.

  Dr. Menard looked back at the passengers. Everyone was asleep now. He came to a decision and went purposefully down the stairs. He put his foot on the badly wounded turf and moved swiftly. As he rounded the front of the bus, the thing that surprised him was the quiet of such a huge structure. Apart from some asshole yelling garbled directions through a megaphone down around the southern food court, the silence that hung over everything was unnatural, this calmness.

  He turned in a slow circle and realized the main reason that such a huge place was so quiet was because most of the people were sleeping. Down on the field, people had crawled under the buses to escape the light. All those people under the buses made him think that they’d created some kind of horrible nest or burrow.

  He put one foot on the top of the front tire and pulled himself onto the bus’s hood. From there he crawled up the windshield and stood on the roof, getting his first good look at the immense stadium. It looked empty. Then he saw the shapes wedged behind the seats, the rumpled seams of backbones and elbows and hair that skulked behind every row. Very few had fallen asleep sitting up. It looked like everyone had sought out the tightest, darkest, most secure spots as they drifted off, as if it was some kind of primeval ritual.

  The few people he saw actually walking, or at least moving, all seemed unaware of each other. They stumbled through the rows of buses, looking for a quiet place to rest. For whatever reason, they seemed content to curl up next to someone else who was already sleeping. He couldn’t quite tell, but from the buses nearby, it looked like the front doors were all wide open, and full of sleeping figures. The only vigorous movement Dr. Menard could see was inside the back of the CTA bus directly in front of him. It looked like a group of men were gang raping a young woman. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or not. He hoped she was.

  There was not one soldier, not one police officer, not one doctor, no one from the government on the field itself. After scanning the seats for a while, he finally saw a few soldiers patrolling the upper decks. There was movement behind the windows of the exclusive club levels, the expensive private rooms on the east side of the stadium. But that was all.

  They had been abandoned.

  He quickly slid down to the hood and climbed back to the grass. He got into the cab of the bus and closed the door firmly behind him. Of course the keys were gone. He slid his shaking fingers along the rubber molding that provided a tight seal against the elements. He kneeled on the driver’s seat, following the seam where the stiff plastic shell had been bolted into the floor. It looked like it was tight enough to keep the bugs out, but he couldn’t be sure. He explored under the dashboard and worried about the gaps between the dash and the steering column.

  Hopefully the bugs wouldn’t crawl up into the engine block. And if he was still in
there when people started waking up and going berserk, it should hold. It had been designed to withstand potential prisoner hijackings after all. He allowed himself to sit back and look around the stadium once again.

  He didn’t understand how tens of thousands of people had been herded into Soldier Field. Why were they keeping everyone here? These people needed doctors. They needed to be decontaminated. They needed help.

  The back of his collar rubbed at his neck at again and he pulled at it with irritation. His index finger brushed against something tiny, a speck of gravel or scab-like crust or something. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he brought it around and held the squirming bedbug up to his face.

  He watched the legs twist, felt the tiny shell undulate under his fingers, saw how the proboscis reached for his breath, and when it couldn’t have that, it curled around to bite at the strip of soft flesh right up under the thumbnail.

  He drove it into the center of the steering wheel. The horn echoed throughout the stadium.

  CHAPTER 65

  7:27 PM

  August 14

  As the sun sank behind the Loop skyline, Tommy waited in the darkness of the back of the ambulance.

  Ideas, each worse than the last, swam through his head like dying fish trapped in a half-filled aquarium. Some, when he knew he was absolutely positive he was awake, seemed almost plausible. They had forgotten him when the virus had swept through the city, and they had abandoned everything. They were still watching him for any of the symptoms to appear. Or they were simply watching and waiting for his sanity to finally crack and for him to start screaming or drooling on himself.

  Some of the worst ideas seemed to uncoil from the cold tendrils of his nightmares. Grace was strapped to an identical wheelchair, watching him on one of the monitors while Dr. Reischtal slid needles full of the virus into her veins. Or Tommy was trapped in a coma, only thinking he was awake, while the world withered away in dust and ashes outside.