Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Cooper heard the now-familiar, distant snap of a gunshot, but he couldn’t see where it came from.

  Chaos down on the street. Bloody teenagers in the hall. The front desk lady didn’t sound like she was dealing with a full deck. Jeff, gone. And Steve Stanton… was Steve okay? Cooper vaguely remembered Steve was on another floor, but he had no idea what the room number was.

  He couldn’t worry about Steve right now. Finding his best friend was all that mattered.

  Cooper looked at the nightstand, seeing if Jeff had left his cell phone — it was gone. He looked to the room’s lone chair: Jeff’s coat was there, Cooper’s piled on top. It was freezing outside… maybe Jeff was still in the building.

  He dialed Jeff’s number.

  On the other end, Jeff’s cell rang. And rang.

  “Shit, bro, pick up.”

  On the seventh ring, Jeff answered.

  “Coop?”

  A surge of relief at hearing his voice.

  “Jeff, dude, where are you? Shit is going off outside. I don’t know what’s happening but we need to bail the hell out of Chicago. We have to get to the Mary Ellen and get out of here.”

  Jeff said nothing.

  “Jeff, talk to me — where are you, man?”

  “Not… sure.”

  His voice sounded so deep, racked with pain and confusion.

  “Jeff, just tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. Are you in the hotel?”

  “Hotel?”

  “Yes, the Trump Tower, where we’re staying? Are you in the building?”

  Cooper waited for an answer. Jeff sounded like he was on the edge of passing out.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “Uh… basement.”

  “Basement? Good, Jeff. Where in the basement? Focus, brother, focus. I’ll come get you. Look around and tell me what you see.”

  “It hurts,” Jeff said. “Coop, it hurts.”

  “Okay, I hear you, but tell me where you are, buddy. You—”

  The phone went silent, the connection broken.

  Cooper immediately dialed again. The phone rang and kept ringing until voice mail answered.

  “This is Jeff Brockman of Jeff Brockman Salvage, and if you’ve got the bills, we’ve got the skills. Leave a message and we’ll get back at ya, pronto.”

  The message beeped.

  “You stupid dickhead! Call me back the second you get this, and tell me where you are.”

  Cooper hung up, then immediately called again, only to get voice mail for the second time.

  The basement. That narrowed things down, at least.

  Cooper got dressed. As he did, he caught a reflection of himself in the room’s mirror. That blister on his shoulder was gone, just a red spot now. He took a closer look; no, not gone, broken open. A shred of weak, torn skin dangled from the edge. No wetness, though… it looked like something had puffed it up like a balloon, then the balloon popped.

  He quickly examined himself in the mirror. He had more of the blisters: on his chest, his hip, below his right knee. Something leftover from whatever had made him sick? An allergic reaction to detergents in the hotel’s sheets?

  The blisters didn’t hurt, and he didn’t have time to worry about them. He dressed. He grabbed his coat and also Jeff’s for good measure — if they had to go outside in the bitter Chicago cold, they’d both need to stay warm.

  Cooper walked to the door, reached down to open it, then stopped. He looked out the peephole again, half expecting the teenage kid to be staring right back at him.

  Nothing there.

  Nothing except for a little red streak on the far wall, where the first teenage kid had fallen.

  A streak of blood.

  Cooper took a deep breath, steeled himself.

  He opened the door and stepped into the empty hall. He had to find Jeff. Jeff first, then maybe the two of them could track down Steve. Until then, Cooper hoped Steve Stanton could fend for himself.

  FOLLOW ME

  Steve Stanton strapped on his two laptop bags stuffed with three laptops. He stepped out of his room on the Trump Tower’s seventeenth floor.

  Anger coursed through his body, set every muscle cell on edge. He felt an almost overpowering urge to smash a human’s head in, find a brick and crack the skull open so he could get at the brains, pull them out, stomp them and…

  His own thought played back in his head: smash a HUMAN’S head in.

  Why had he thought of it like that? Why hadn’t he thought of the word person, or man or even woman?

  Why? Because Steve Stanton was no longer human, not at all — humans were the enemy.

  He heard a scream coming from the right, around a corner and farther down the hall. He walked toward that scream.

  Steve turned the corner. He saw a shirtless, middle-aged man dressed in tan slacks. The man’s belly hung over his belt. He wore no shoes. He stood above a woman in a torn, red dress. Steve assumed the two red sandals scattered nearby belonged to her. She was on her butt, one hand behind her, the other raised up, palm out.

  “Morris! Stop hitting me, for God’s sake!”

  In response, the man — Morris, Steve assumed — reared back and kicked the woman in the thigh. The woman let out another scream. She rolled to her hands and knees and tried to crawl away. Morris reached down and grabbed her right ankle, yanked her back. The woman fell flat on her stomach, arms out in front of her.

  Morris grabbed her hip and flipped her over. Before she could say another word, he pressed his bare foot hard against her neck. His face scrunched into a confused mask of rage. She twisted, turned her lower body, tried to kick. She grabbed at Morris’s foot, clawed at it, her purple fingernails leaving crisscross streaks of ragged red on his skin — but the foot did not move.

  The man leaned lower, rested his forearms on the knee of the leg pressing down on her neck.

  “How about that toilet seat now, Cybil? How about that fucking goddamn cunty toilet seat now, you ball-busting, dried-up-pussy bitch? I guess you shouldn’t have nagged me about putting it down, huh? Huh?”

  Steve walked closer. The man seemed entirely focused on the struggling woman. There was a bluish triangular growth on the man’s chest, under his skin just left of the sternum. And another on the right side of his belly.

  Steve stopped cold: something in the air…

  A smell.

  He breathed deep into his nose; he recognized that scent even though he’d never smelled it before. He sniffed again… the man had the scent, but not the woman.

  The triangles, that smell… he is my kind, he is me.

  The man — Morris — was staring at Steve.

  “Hi,” Morris said. “You, uh… you want to help with this?”

  In that instant, so many things became clear. Morris was nothing but an ugly husk meant to carry infinite beauty, beauty that would soon break free of his body, leaving him a dead shell.

  Morris was stupid.

  Steve was smart.

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do,” Steve said.

  Morris didn’t take his foot off the squirming woman’s neck, but his eyes narrowed as he tried to understand.

  He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll do what you tell me to do.”

  The woman yelled, fought with renewed energy. She clawed and ripped. Her fingernails turned Morris’s foot into a ragged mess that splashed blood on her face and chest.

  This man would do what Steve said. Steve felt it.

  So much happening all at once. Steve thought back on a lifetime of not standing up for himself, of staying quiet, of avoiding conflict or embarrassment. His circumstances had denied him his birthright. He was brilliant. He was a genius. His destiny was more than wrapping knives and forks in fucking napkins.

  Steve Stanton had been born to rule.

  He nodded toward the woman. The human woman.

  “Morris,” Steve said, “do something about her.”

  Morris looked down at his bloody mess of a foot. H
e pressed it down harder — the woman stopped fighting. She drew in wet, broken hisses of air.

  The man looked back to Steve, hope blazing in his wide eyes. “Can I kill her? She was always bitching about everything. Like the goddamn toilet seat. Like she’s such a helpless princess she can’t reach a finger out and tip the goddamn thing forward? Can I kill her? Can I?”

  Steve stepped closer and looked down at the woman. Her wide eyes pleaded for help. In those eyes, Steve saw fear. She was afraid, because she wasn’t him, and he wasn’t her. She was human.

  “Kill her,” Steve said.

  Morris pumped a fist like he’d just scored a goal in hockey.

  “Fuck yeah!” He screamed down at his wife. “You shoulda been nicer to me, you nagging bitch! You shoulda been nicer!”

  He raised the bloody foot, then slammed it back down again heel-first into her throat. She grunted. She stiffened. Her arms and legs twitched.

  Morris stomped again and again. Steve watched.

  The woman stopped moving. Wide, dead eyes stared out. Her throat was a real mess.

  Steve took off his laptop bags, set them on the floor.

  “Carry those,” he said. “We have to find more friends. And after that, I think we need to find a place for you to lie down.” Steve reached out, his fingertips tracing the firm outline of the hard, bluish triangle on the man’s chest.

  “Tomorrow, I think,” Steve said. “Tomorrow, something wonderful happens to you.”

  THE BOILER ROOM

  Cooper moved down the concrete-and-metal stairwell. He kept one hand on the rough, unfinished walls. In the other, he carried Jeff’s coat.

  He moved slowly. He didn’t want to make any noise, because every time he passed a landing he heard plenty of noise coming from beyond the heavy, reddish-brown metal doors.

  Yelling. Shouting. Screams of rage. Screams of pain. And laughter: the kind of laughter only insane people made.

  Three times he’d heard another kind of sound, a sound that damn near made him piss his pants. Twice from below and once from above, he’d heard the sound of a metal door opening and slamming against a landing wall, the echoing of a laughing/​screaming/​giggling/​yelling man or woman running into the stairwell. Cooper had held his breath, waiting for them to come his way, but all three times he’d been lucky and they’d gone in the opposite direction.

  He reached the first floor. Past the heavy fire door, he heard more noise than he’d heard on any floor before it. He briefly thought about opening the door and taking a peek, but a line from some old book popped into his head — when you look into the void, the void looks back into you, or something like that.

  All that mattered right now was tracking down his friend. Together, they would find a place to hide until the cops or the National Guard or whatever came to make everything safe again.

  Cooper moved down another flight to what had to be the basement level, then down again until the steps ended on a flat, concrete floor. He’d reached the subbasement. Might as well start here and work his way up. Cooper put his ear to the landing door’s cool metal — he heard nothing.

  He thumbed the door’s lever, quietly pulled the door open.

  The empty hallway looked like a service area: more concrete floor, but here it was smoother, slightly polished. White walls with bumpers on the bottom, black marks on the walls where carts had scraped against them.

  He stepped into the hallway, slowed the automatic door’s closing until it clicked shut with the tiniest snick of metal on metal.

  Cooper looked at his cell phone. Still one bar. He dialed Jeff’s number. He held the phone to his ear only long enough to make sure it was ringing, then lowered it, pressed it against his thigh to mute that sound.

  For all the commotion going on upstairs, it was very still down here. Still and quiet, like a tomb.

  He listened. He held his breath.

  Come on, dude, where are you?

  And then, very faint, a sound so thin he wondered if he was imagining it: the crunching guitar chords of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” — Jeff’s ringtone.

  Cooper turned in place, trying to nail down the direction. There, halfway down the hall, a pair of white, windowless metal doors. He walked to them, looking left, looking right, listening for any sound that might warn him of company.

  Somewhere around a corner, a door smashed open, echoing through the concrete hallways. Cooper heard a man screaming in anger.

  “… cut you… cut you up… run, motherfucker!”

  The yelling grew louder. Shit, the man was coming his way. Cooper thumbed the left-hand door’s latch and yanked it open. He quickly stepped inside a poorly lit area, quietly pulled the door closed behind him.

  He turned, letting his eyes adjust to the low light — and when they did, he found himself facing a smiling, bald man sitting on a folding metal chair.

  A single overhead light lit up that man’s white shirt, played off his pink head. He wore a patterned tie loosened at the neck. Black slacks, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The clothes and his beer gut screamed conventioneer from Wisconsin.

  “Hello,” the man said.

  “Uh,” Cooper said. “Hi.”

  Cooper quickly looked around, got his bearings. He was in a boiler room. On his right, two big metal tanks on concrete footings. The tanks needed a fresh coat of paint — gray enamel bubbled here and there, had been scraped away in others. The size of the tanks held his attention for a moment: it figured a large hotel like this would need a ton of hot water, but that wasn’t something you thought of when you checked into the Trump’s swank lobby.

  Farther back in the room, just one other light glowed. There were dozens of dangling light fixtures, but none of them were on; most of the bulbs looked broken.

  The man stood. His chair slid back an inch, the scraping sound echoing off the boiler room’s concrete walls. He took in a long, slow breath through his nose, then exhaled out his mouth in a cheek-puffing expression of relief.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  His eyes… there was something off in them. The man radiated excitement, like he wanted to jump and dance and scream, yet he stood stock-still.

  “Uh, no, thanks,” Cooper said. “I’m just looking for my friend.”

  The bald man smiled. He nodded. “A friend of yours is a friend of mine. We’re all friends now, right?”

  Cooper didn’t know what to say. What was this man’s deal? Something about his eyes, how they glowed with intensity, with… joy. Joy, yes, but something else as well — this man looked more than a little crazy.

  The dangerous kind of crazy.

  “Sure, buddy,” Cooper said. “We’re all besties, whatever you want. My friend is six-two, about two hundred pounds, looks like he’s forty.” Cooper tapped his own left shoulder. “Brown hair about to here?”

  The smiling man smiled some more. His front right tooth looked chipped. There was a fresh cut on his lip, the flesh torn and exposed. Cooper wondered if the two wounds happened with the same punch.

  “I’ve seen a lot of people,” the man said. “A lot of people came down to the basement. Some left. Some stayed.”

  Cooper quickly looked left, right — were there others down here? He’d been scared in the stairwell, but he’d been alone. Now his stomach pinched and twirled. His hands shook. This was a bad scene, as bad as bad got. He had to get out of there, but he wasn’t leaving without Jeff.

  He lifted his phone to dial Jeff’s cell again but saw that he had zero bars — no connection in the boiler room.

  Cooper put the phone in his pocket. “See anyone wearing an AC/DC T-shirt? A black one?”

  The bald man nodded. “Oh, sure! That guy’s here. He’s resting.”

  Cooper’s heart raced. He could get his friend and get the hell out of there, leave this two-cards-shy-of-a-full-deck Wisconsinite behind.

  Cooper forced a smile. “Can you show me? I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” the bald man said. “We�
�re all friends now, right?”

  “All friends,” Cooper echoed. “Total BFFs.”

  “Huh? Bee-eff-eff?”

  “We’re friends, I mean,” Cooper said. “Show me?”

  The man walked deeper into the poorly lit basement, past the gray boilers. Cooper hesitated. This was a mistake. He was going to follow a strange, whacked-out man into Freddy Krueger’s home turf?

  You fucking owe me, Jeff. I hope you’re okay, so I can kill you myself.

  Cooper followed the bald man in the blood-speckled white shirt.

  As he walked, he scanned left and right again… and he saw shapes. Shapes back in the shadows, where the floor met the wall, around and even underneath the boilers. The shapes were… people? Sleeping people covered in dark blankets, maybe?

  There were two more smaller boilers beyond the first pair. After the last boiler, the white-shirted man stopped and turned. He smiled that something-is-wrong-with-me smile, then gestured toward a bulky shape, covered in a blanket, resting at the base of the cinder-block wall.

  It took Cooper a moment to see something in that shape, to see a person’s face.

  Jeff’s face.

  His best friend in all the world, his business partner, his brother, and yet the sight of him suddenly repulsed Cooper. Jeff’s face looked… bigger. Swollen, sweaty, with big threads from that blanket clinging to his jaw, his cheeks. And the body beneath that blanket… bloated, misshapen… too large.

  Something deep inside of Cooper told him to stay the fuck away from Jeff. No, not just stay away, more like turn and haul ass out of there.

  No. He would not leave. That was his friend. Jeff was sick. Really sick, obviously, something way beyond drinking himself halfway into a coma and finding a quiet place to pass out.

  Cooper took a step closer, leaving the strange man facing his back.

  Those threads on Jeff’s face… they weren’t threads.

  Because it wasn’t a blanket.

  Jeff was encrusted in some kind of dark-brown clay, or maybe a stiff foam. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open. The material curved up over his left cheek, split into tendrils that threaded up into his hair: a twisted delta of that strange mud cupped Jeff’s head like a mother cradling a child.