But no matter the path of the theory, no matter what ghostly images swam into focus on the blank cellulose acetate of his mind, the utterly banal, inevitable fate waiting at the end of every train of thought was that the universe did not revolve around his problems. It was indifferent. It simply did not care.
The undeniable truth that lay in the darkest depths of his despair was the knowledge that he was going to die. Soon. And when he was gone, he understood now how little it would take, how a tiny ripple in the chaos of the world could hurt his little girl. There were so many ways to snap the life out of a four-year-old girl. Grace could die so easily.
Or maybe even something worse than death.
What would happen if Lee got his hands on her? Tommy kept seeing her in pain, hearing the anguish in her voice, watching those innocent, uncomprehending eyes as strangers touched her. . . .
A guttural cry escaped his clenched teeth.
Either he escaped or Grace died.
PHASE 6
CHAPTER 66
8:36 PM
August 14
Lee had promised her that they would be perfectly safe, but watching all the soldiers rush around all the sandbags and tanks, and listening to the distant shooting, Kimmy wasn’t so sure. The men in the hazmat suits had made Grace cry, so Kimmy now had to keep the girl on her lap. Grace kept burying her head in her mother’s shoulder, and Kimmy just knew that she was getting tears and snot all over her evening dress. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the dust getting blown around from all the helicopters landing and taking off across the street, in Daley Plaza. The wind was wreaking havoc with her hair and the dirt was sticking to her makeup.
By the time the press conference started, she would be lucky to look like one of those insulting Bratz dolls that had been buried at the bottom of a trash heap for a few weeks. And with all these reporters standing around, with all their crews, not to mention the big trailers full of generators to run the lights, you’d think that somebody would have a makeup kit around. But no, all the reporters, even the women, seemed to be shedding the air of glamour and embracing the rough-and-tumble effect, as if to remind their viewers that being in the quarantine zone was serious business.
Kimmy wanted to shake them and say, Puh-leeze. You’re on TV, for god’s sake. And those stupid clothes—you’re not on safari here. Try not to look like you’ve been sleeping outside for the last two nights. She shifted Grace to the other shoulder and was thankful that she could at least sit down. Around fifty folding chairs had been set up in orderly rows, facing the stage. Whoever had set them up had been either misled or optimistic; most of the chairs were empty.
The stage itself had been erected in the very middle of Clark Street, between City Hall and Daley Plaza. Two flags bookended the stage, the light blue horizontal bars and four red stars of the City of Chicago flag, and the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag. The solemn walnut podium stood empty in the center.
Kimmy tried to relax. She reminded herself that she was just being catty to the reporters because she was jealous that they finally got to look cool, like those foreign correspondents who were always broadcasting while bombs and bullets burst over their heads.
But not her. Oh, no. Lee had instructed her to look as flawless as possible. So she’d pulled out her best black strapless evening dress. Diamond studded choker. One-carat diamond earrings. Hair upswept, precariously held together with a few hidden hairpins, strong hairspray, and a lot of prayers. Even Grace was wearing her best Sunday dress and the stiff shoes that she hated, because they hurt her feet.
Lee had on one of his most expensive suits. His tie was the color of the red stripes in the American flag, with a matching silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. His hair was slicked back and gleamed in the media lights.
The fear was making her impatient. The press conference was supposed to have finished over an hour ago. She’d overheard some of the reporters talking, and they were apparently all waiting for one of the main guys from the CDC to show up. The CDC could give an assessment of the situation, and then Lee could step forward and take all the credit, offering up Kimmy and Grace as proof that the city was quite safe.
Apart from that, she didn’t know anything else about the press conference. While she certainly didn’t expect Lee to stand at her side the entire time, it would have been nice if he’d come over once in a while to check with her.
Instead, he was too busy huddling next to the stage with his slimy uncle. Phil seemed to be angrier than usual; Kimmy watched him yelling into his phone, a finger stuck in his other ear to muffle all the chaos from the soldiers and helicopters. While his uncle was on the phone, Lee went over his speech. As she watched him move his lips as he read, practice his gestures, she realized she didn’t know how she felt about him anymore.
She didn’t really want to know, frankly.
At first, it had all been so gosh darn exciting. Lee was incredibly handsome, powerful, and rich. He was a man who would not just provide for his family, he would take care of everything. He was the kind of man who didn’t blink at spending over six hundred dollars on a four-hour meal for just the two of them. Back when she and Tommy were still together, she would try and explain that she wanted him to take her out, to make her feel special, and all he’d do was stare at her and blink uncertainly while he tried to figure out what she meant, as if it were some impenetrable calculus mystery that couldn’t be solved.
Now Tommy was gone and although she felt bad sometimes, she didn’t really want to see him again. He reminded her of a part of her life that she wanted to forget. She had closed the door on that chapter, and only wished to look forward. Like this quarantine thing. Soon it would be over, Lee would be seen as a hero, and their lives would only get better, filled with state dinners and long trips and getting her picture in the paper at charity functions.
Down the street, in the wash of the TV lights, she watched a rat crawl out of a storm drain. The animal was filthy, emaciated. She wondered if she should say something, let someone know, but hesitated because she didn’t want to interrupt Lee’s big moment. The rat scurried off into the shadows and she stopped worrying about it and wondered instead if they would be staying at a hotel tonight outside of the city or end up back at Lee’s condo.
Kimmy turned her head away from yet another helicopter landing, shifted Grace again, and didn’t see the second rat emerge.
Or the third.
Or the fourth.
Even with his right foot free, Tommy could not pull any of his other limbs loose or tear any of the other straps, all them each a full three inches of leather. He flailed even harder, kicking out with his bare right foot, and only managed to stub his little toe on the bench opposite. The pain almost made him cry.
It wasn’t fair.
One leg. Nothing else. Just enough to tease him.
One goddamn leg.
The paramedics had left the windows cracked so he didn’t die of a heat stroke. Still, it was terribly hot. Sweat streamed down his face, his chest, his arms. The moisture made the leather straps swell, which made things worse as they grabbed hold even tighter. The paramedics had kept him hydrated, but hadn’t given him any food. He hadn’t taken a piss in over nine hours. He was hoping that night would cool things off a little.
He caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye, and turned his head to look through the back windows of the ambulance. At first, he thought it might be some kind of sticker on the window, maybe a dead leaf or something, because the image looked so out of place. After growing up next to Lake Michigan, he’d grown so accustomed to the flat, featureless expanse of water that seeing something large out there was like finding a tree growing out of the middle of the Dan Ryan Expressway.
There was a warship out there.
It wasn’t one of the giant behemoths, of course, not like those huge aircraft carriers that lumber around the ocean, floating cities in their own right. Still, spotting it suddenly just offshore made it seem even b
igger. It must have been five to six hundred feet long. It looked like it had one large cannon mounted on the forward decks, but that wasn’t what took his attention. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes. It looked like there were not one, but two helicopters waiting on two separate landing pads on two levels at the stern.
Something Dr. Reischtal had said bubbled up in the back of his mind: “A proper laboratory is en route.”
It all clicked into place. That warship must have some kind of lab on it, and now that it was here, Dr. Reischtal would be showing up at any minute to drag Tommy out there. He didn’t want to think about what might happen to him once Dr. Reischtal laid him out on an operating table. He focused instead on the unyielding fact that he was out of time and out of luck.
In frustration, he kicked at the bench opposite, this time driving out with his heel, and drove his wheelchair back against the wall of the ambulance. The force of the kick was enough to push the back wheels off the floor an inch or so. He abruptly released the tension, and the wheelchair hit the floor with a creaking thud. He tried it again, extending his leg all the way, pushing the back wheels up the wall. This time, he guessed he must be five or six inches off the floor.
He relaxed his leg and crashed into the floor once again. The impact made the metal shriek. He rolled it forward. He couldn’t tell if it was his imagination or if the chair actually felt wobblier. He tried it again, this time leaning slightly to his left, trying to put more pressure on a single wheel.
Again. And again.
He lost count after twentieth crash. The wheelchair started rattling and shaking loose every time he positioned himself for another drop. Somewhere around the fiftieth or sixtieth fall, the left wheel snapped off abruptly, dumping Tommy sideways on the floor.
He went berserk, kicking and arching his back, flopping around in one last burst of energy. Once unlocked, some of the metal bars simply slid apart, and he was able to bend the rest of it enough to break free. He still had both armrests strapped to his arms and a strip of metal along his left leg, but he was loose.
The first thing he did was to pull the catheter out. The second was to pull the needles connected to the IV units out of the back of his hand.
The third thing he tried was the back door.
It was unlocked.
CHAPTER 67
8:39 PM
August 14
Qween’s cart was gone.
She’d left it here countless times back when the city was normal, filled to the brim with asshole businessmen, women in expensive suits and jogging shoes, bike messenger punks, bored cops, and other homeless scum who wouldn’t blink at stealing a shopping cart. Back then, it had been the perfect place, tucked securely away behind a cluster of foul-smelling Dumpsters in a narrow alley perpetually shrouded in shadows a block from the post office. Nobody had ever messed with it.
Now, all of the Dumpsters had been pushed out in the center of Adams for no reason she could decipher. She poked around in them for a minute, making sure her cart wasn’t still somehow stuck in the middle. It wasn’t. It was gone.
She drew a hitching breath, let it out slow, rubbed her face. She hadn’t cried in damn near twenty years, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to start now. She tried not to think about some of the things that had been inside. Things she couldn’t replace.
Faint laughter. She turned east, and saw two soldiers in the intersection of Adams and Clark. The streetlights had started buzzing, automatically switching on. In the spill of yellow light, Qween saw the soldiers kicking around a bundle of loose rags. Off to the side, lying sideways in the gutter, was a shopping cart.
Ice cold rage crackled up her back, coating her spine with frost. Her fingers drew back into fists. Fury fogged her brain, overpowering any sense of caution. She started down the street.
One of the soldiers bent over and picked up the rags daintily, using only his gloved forefinger like a hook. “Jesus. Makes you wonder how anybody could live like this.” He wore a big, shit-eating grin that did little to hide his buckteeth. Like the boys in Tommy’s neighborhood used to say, this guy could eat corn on the cob through a chain-link fence.
The other said, “No shit.” He was smaller, with a face so narrow it could have passed for the triangular blade of a butcher knife. His sunglasses hung around his neck from a neoprene strap, no doubt necessary so the glasses wouldn’t just slip right off the slim hatchet of a nose. “What gets me is why the fuck would anybody choose to be homeless in Chicago. I been here in the winter. It’s fucking cold, man! You’re homeless, why don’t you just leave, you know? Head down to Florida or someplace warm.”
Qween stomped into the light. “You dog dicks having fun?”
It scared them. They definitely weren’t expecting to see anyone on the streets, much less a pissed-off homeless woman. Buck-teeth dropped the rags and went for his assault rifle. The rags hit the ground and split open, spilling yellowed envelopes. Most were full of handwritten letters, but one envelope contained a stack of twenty or thirty black and white photographs.
“Fuck’s your problem, bitch?” he said.
The other one, the one that looked like the obstetrician had been a little too enthusiastic with the forceps during his birth, slipped his own machine gun off his shoulder. “Where’d you come from?” His eyes flickered to the darkness of Adams behind Qween.
“Y’all having fun with my stuff?” She glared at them.
They actually took a step backwards. Two armed men, and this old woman made them take a step back. It shook them, and once the fear had dissipated, once they realized there was no one behind her, their own anger took center stage.
Buck-teeth took three steps forward, as if to make up for his involuntary step backward. “My partner asked you a question, you dumb bitch. Where’d you come from?”
“Nobody’s supposed to be left downtown,” his partner said.
“That’s mine,” Qween said simply, hands on her hips.
“What? This pile of shit?” Buck-teeth ground his boot into the photographs.
Qween couldn’t help herself. She stepped towards the soldier, reaching out in helpless despair to her photos. The soldier with the blade-like face stepped around behind her, brought the butt of his rifle around and drove it into the base of her skull. Qween went down to her knees.
“Teach you to scare me, you stupid cunt,” he said.
“This is a fucking quarantine zone!” Buck-teeth yelled.
Qween struggled to stay erect, even on her knees. She knew that if she fell on her side, stomach, or back, these soldiers would stomp her to death. Their fear would demand nothing less. She forced her hands to grip the front of her thighs, anything to hold her upright.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Buck-teeth said. “This is a restricted area. You know what that means? Huh? It means we can shoot you on sight, if we want to.”
Qween exhaled, trying to clear her spinning head. “You got the balls, asswipe, then go ahead.” Later, she would admit that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but at the time, she was too pissed off to think straight.
“Fuck you say?” Buck-teeth demanded, jamming the barrel of his assault rifle into her temple, driving her head over to her left shoulder.
“I said”—Qween eye’s found his face—“that your big, flapping, wet pussy puts mine to shame.”
For a second, Buck-teeth wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. His eyes met his partner’s face, and those eyes, sunk into that blade-like face, looked everywhere but back at him. Buck-teeth finally realized the depth of the insult. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You think you’re funny, bitch?”
“You fellas catch this prisoner all on your own?” came a voice behind him.
Two hazmat suits walked out of the darkness of Adams. One was skinny, but the second looked way too chubby to be some kind of hard-ass mercenary. Both carried assault rifles. Unlike Buck-teeth and his buddy, these two wore their helmets. It was impossible to see their faces.
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Buck-teeth blinked uncertainly and smiled. It was a fearsome sight. Those teeth looked like they might just escape at any moment and go rampaging through the streets. “No problem here. Just interrogating a prisoner that got left behind.”
“Yeah,” his partner said. “She came outta nowhere.”
“I see.” The heavyset hazmat figure stopped ten feet away. “So you two thought it was okay to beat up some old woman.”
“Hey.” Buck-teeth shrugged. “She was asking for it. Stupid bitch must’ve been hiding.”
“Well, shit.” The thin hazmat figure strode forward, unslinging his own assault rifle. “Why didn’t you say so?”
He settled his sights on the back of Qween’s head, and without any warning, slid the barrel over and shot Buck-teeth in the throat in a short burst of gunfire. Before Buck-teeth’s partner, could move, protest, anything, the thin figure shot him at point-blank range in the chest with another quick four-or-five-round eruption.
Sam pulled off his helmet and admired his assault rifle. “Goddamn. I’m gonna get me one of these.”
The bodies of Buck-teeth and his partner folded in half, collapsing into the street.
Qween risked a look. She recognized the voices.
Sam looked up. “Hiya, Qween.”
Ed shook his head, then slipped off his own helmet. He looked at the dead mercenaries and asked Qween, “You always go out of your way to piss people off?”
CHAPTER 68
8:43 PM
August 14
Tommy’s first instinct was to bolt from the ambulance and simply run, just pump his arms and legs and haul ass in any direction. He knew that wouldn’t work, but maybe he could drop down by the shore, maybe slip into the water and try to escape that way. The urge to run was so strong he had the back door open and one bare foot on the ground before he realized he’d been spending so much time just trying to escape, he hadn’t considered what he would do if he actually got loose.
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