by Scott Sigler
She waved her hand inward: go ahead.
“We think the Chinese nuke was launched by a rogue element,” Porter said. “However, it is also very possible that the government was testing Russia, seeing if the infection had impacted Russia’s ability to respond to attack.”
“Russia’s ability has not been affected,” Blackmon said. “Which the Chinese are about to find out firsthand.”
Admiral Porter nodded. “Of course. But, if China actually was testing Russian resolve, their next test could be against us. We need to prepare our own retaliatory response. The Chinese — or whoever is running things there — will see us preparing for launch. They’ll know the United States is ready to hit back.”
Three nuclear powers at play, inches away from an all-out exchange. If Murray had wondered how things could get any worse, now he knew.
Vogel knocked twice on the table. “Porter is right,” he said. “The Chinese will see us preparing. So will the Russians, just in case they get any bright ideas while they’re lobbing nukes into China.”
Murray shook his head. “Are you warmongering assholes really this obtuse? You want to make things worse by spinning up our birds?”
The admiral glared at him. Vogel chose to look elsewhere.
The president raised a finger. “Director Longworth, let’s keep this civil.”
“Sorry, Madam President.”
She turned back to Porter.
“Admiral, you’re sure about this? You really think prepping for launch will be interpreted as a warning and not a threat?”
There was a gleam in the admiral’s eye. Maybe Murray was imagining that, but this man — all the Joint Chiefs, for that matter — had spent a lifetime training and preparing for a situation this severe.
“China has already used a nuclear weapon,” Porter said. “Russia is about to do the same. The seal is broken, Madam President. It’s a lot easier to justify the second strike than it is the first.”
Russia would launch at China, maybe one of them would launch at America, and then America would launch at both — just to be sure — and then…
Murray stood up. The action seemed to surprise the other people at the table. It even surprised him.
“This is what it wants,” he said, the words rushing out. “These people, the Converted, they aren’t monsters. They aren’t zombies. The destruction of Paris made that clear. The bomb that hit Novosibirsk — if it wasn’t the Chinese government, it wasn’t truly rogue, either. That was a calculated attack, because this disease wants to kill us all. Vogel, put our disease tracking numbers back on the screen.”
Vogel did so. Murray pointed at the top number.
“Sixty percent immunized,” he said. “Soon to be seventy, then eighty. We’re in the lead, and the other industrialized nations are close behind. Don’t you see? We’ve stopped the spread. We’ll have millions of infected to deal with, sure, but we’ve stopped the spread. The Converted… they can watch the news just like we can. They know the score. We’ve checked the contagion, so now they’re looking for other ways to take us out. We just so happen to have tens of thousands of other ways in the form of nuclear missiles. Don’t you get it? We’re beating them now because we’re organized, because we have communication — if a nuclear shooting match starts, all that goes away. They want to destroy us. If they start a nuclear war, then we do their work for them.”
Vogel turned sharply, his hand shot to his earpiece: new information. The room hushed, waited for him.
“Seismic readings indicate a one-hundred-kiloton detonation in China,” he said. “Probable epicenter… Ürümqi. Returning to satellite coverage.”
The main monitor switched back to the image of Ürümqi, only now the city couldn’t be seen — a billowing mushroom cloud roiled up, blocking any view of the city center. The shock wave expanded out, a ring of dirt and debris widening at supersonic speed.
Blackmon stood up, rested her hands on the table. She leaned forward, her predator’s stare locked on the scene of mass destruction.
“Admiral Porter is right,” she said. “We need to send a clear signal. We need to make sure the Russians and the Chinese know what will happen if they attack. Take us to DEFCON 2.”
THE STREETS OF CHICAGO
It could have been an Old West ghost town, complete with howling wind. Skyscrapers in place of beat-up wooden shacks, snowdrifts instead of rolling tumbleweed, but it was just as desolate, just as empty.
Some of the traffic lights were on, some were off. Most buildings sat dark. A few random windows glowed against the darkening sky.
Vehicles littered Michigan Avenue’s six snow-swept lanes. Some of the cars, trucks and buses looked fine, save for smashed-in windows and dented doors, while others were crumpled, knocked on their sides or even resting upside down with snow accumulating on their upturned tires and dark underbellies. Many were burned-out husks, blackened and misshapen from long-dead fires.
Light from the setting sun slipped through the packed, gray clouds, reflected off the tall skyscrapers. Broken windows looked like missing teeth, black spots marring the smooth glass faces.
Winter wind ate at Cooper and Sofia, cut into jeans and slacks, drove through coats to chill their bones and bellies. The snow kept falling, met in the sky by whirling bits of burned, blackened paper. Everything smelled like a day-old campfire. Icy flakes melted against skin, stuck to hair, clung on Cooper’s four-day stubble.
So many dead. Blackened corpses sat inside of blackened cars. A cindered bus sagged from the heat that had scorched it. A scattering of five corpses spread out from its twisted door — people who made it out of the vehicle, but still succumbed to the flames. Bloated and frozen bodies lined the sidewalks, lay between the ruined cars that filled and blocked the streets. It was as if God had picked up a graveyard, turned it upside down and rattled it, scattering the dead like a child dumping out a box of toys.
Cooper began to hear occasional sounds through the wind — a clank of metal, distant tinkles of breaking glass, the screams of the hunted and gleeful cheers of the hunters. He stayed close to the buildings on the west side of the street, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Nothing came out to stop him, but he and Sofia weren’t entirely alone. Here and there, Cooper saw the little pyramid-shaped monsters, sometimes scurrying across the street from one building to another, sometimes through ground-floor windows where they built their walls of solidified shit.
He also saw flashes of movement from deep inside buildings, through smashed storefronts and from behind windows higher up the towering buildings. He was being watched, watched by something bigger than the hatchlings.
Cooper had carried Sofia north on Wabash and cut east on Hubbard. At Michigan Avenue, he looked south. The snow-covered Michigan Avenue Bridge led over the Chicago River. He wondered if they should go that way instead, but Sofia tugged on his jacket to get his attention.
She raised a shaking hand, pointed at a twenty-story building a half block up on the left.
Fire had raged through the smooth glass tower, covering what windows remained with waving patterns of soot. At the bottom of the building, he saw a broken overhang that once had shielded Chicagoans from rain or snow. It, too, was twisted and blackened by the fire. A warped script W and one e were all that remained of brass letters that had spelled out “Walgreens.”
Cooper’s heart sank. He kept walking, kept carrying Sofia. Maybe the fire damage was only superficial.
It wasn’t.
Nothing remained of the drugstore. Through broken and blackened glass, Cooper saw melted metal shelves and powdery paper ash. The smell of burned plastic poured out of the place as though it was still actively ablaze.
Sofia shivered in his arms.
“Shit,” she said.
Cooper nodded. “I guess we go to the hospital next. Let me take a little rest.”
He looked around, saw a nearby car that had smashed into a bus. The car’s windows remained unbroken, intact. He
carried Sofia over to it. He used the hand under her knees to open the driver’s door, then bent, his back straining as he carefully set her on the driver’s seat.
His whole body seemed to sigh in relief. Sofia weighed all of a buck-ten — not much to hold for a few moments, but an awful lot to carry across the city.
“I’m slowing you down,” she said, her weak voice barely audible over the wind. “Why are you doing this for me?”
He thought for a moment, searching for an answer.
“Because of my mom,” he said finally. “She’d want me to help you.”
A not-so-distant scream from behind, a woman’s scream, echoing through the empty streets. Cooper looked back the way they had come, his hand moving on its own, reaching for the cold handle of the gun stuffed into his pants.
Two long blocks away, he saw a woman at the base of the bridge. Her hands clutched to her shoulders as if she was trying to compress herself, make herself too small to see. Chicago’s skyscrapers rose up into the gray evening sky around her. She stood in the middle of the street, looking to her right, then turning right, then looking right again, then turning again, spinning in place in a stop-start motion. The wind blew snow at her, probably cutting right through her thin blouse.
For a moment, Cooper wondered why she hadn’t worn a coat (didn’t she know it was freezing outside?) before he realized she had probably fled some hiding spot, had run just to stay alive.
He saw movement: two other people approaching the woman. A tall man, wearing a red down jacket, and a woman wearing a blue snowsuit. They must have come out of the surrounding buildings. They closed in, and suddenly there were four more people — sliding out of ruined cars, walking through doorways.
They had the woman surrounded.
She kept turning, first her head, then her body.
“Don’t just stand there,” Cooper said quietly. “Run.”
The woman didn’t move. The six closed in on her.
And then, on the bridge, coming from the south, through the falling snow and scattering bits of paper, Cooper saw something else.
Something… huge.
He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words hit his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.
“What the fuck is that? Cooper, what the fuck is that?”
Cooper didn’t know, didn’t want to know. It was a man… maybe. Sickly yellow skin, no jacket, an upper body that was far too wide for legs that would be gigantic on anyone save for an NFL lineman. And the head — Cooper couldn’t make out much other than a neck that was as wide as impossibly wide shoulders, a neck that led up to a face hidden behind a blue scarf wrapped around the mouth and nose.
The woman let go of her own shoulders, finally turned to run, but it was too late; six people grabbed her. She screamed and jerked, tried to fight, but the others held her fast.
The man in the red jacket stood in front of her, reached into his coat, pulled out a long butcher knife.
Cooper thought about drawing his gun, taking a shot, maybe he could get lucky from this far out—
—and then it was too late. The man in the red jacket drove the knife into the woman’s belly, slid it up, like a butcher slaughtering a pig. The woman didn’t even scream, she just stared. Stared, and twitched.
Her attackers tore into her. Cooper saw hands driving down, yanking, ripping, saw those hands come back bloody and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.
The five people started to eat.
I am not seeing this… I am not fucking seeing this…
A tug on his coat.
“Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the hell out of here.”
He realized the gun was in his hand. He didn’t remember actually drawing it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He stuffed it once again into the back of his pants, then reached into the car for Sofia.
TIPPING POINT
From his little table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, Tim Feely studied the numbers. New York City, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids and Chicago were no longer providing consumer data. They were too far gone for that.
Elsewhere in the country, people were stocking up on whatever they could before it was too late. That panic skewed the consumer pattern information, but there was still enough data from which to draw conclusions.
Philadelphia: 9,000% increase in cough suppressants
Lexington: huge spikes in purchases of fever reducer
Fayetteville: All stores sold out of pain relievers
The list went on and on. Most of Baltimore had lost power the day before, so there was no additional data to be had there. Indianapolis, Huntsville and Birmingham were in the same boat.
As near as Tim could tell, most cities on the Eastern Seaboard had significant outbreaks. The Midwest was even worse. The West Coast showed some signs of infected activity, but the overall stats indicated those populations were mostly normal; they’d brewed the inoculant faster there, distributed it better, done a superior job at overcoming local objections. Although murder rates had skyrocketed, police departments remained in control of the West Coast and the Southwest — except for Los Angeles.
Riots and looting had cast LA into chaos. There was no information to discern if the violence came from the Converted, or if it had blown up due to the deaths that occurred because of the mayor’s shoot-on-sight after-dark curfew.
Canada was also in bad shape. Montreal was ablaze, just like Paris. Tim didn’t have consumer data on Europe, but news reports of burning cities and corpses littering the streets told the story just fine.
Pandora’s box had opened. Just like the myth, evil things had flown out to infect the world. In that myth, the last thing to escape had been hope.
This time, Tim wondered if there was any hope at all.
COOPER’S CHOICE
Shadows moved within the darkness of a wintry Chicago night. Cooper stumbled more than he ran, the girl in his arms a heaviness that threatened to pull him down.
Just drop her… just leave her, she’s going to die anyway…
They’d found the hospital to be a burned-out husk. When they’d come in for a closer look, something had found them, followed them.
Cooper had carried Sofia away, but that something had picked up their trail. They fled north. The storm that threatened to kill them also provided some cover: blowing snow helped them hide, masked their tracks and their sounds.
His arms burned, screamed for oxygen. Sofia hung low, near his thighs, his left arm under her knees, his right around her back. He stopped only long enough to heft her high again, up to his chest, then he continued up Michigan Avenue.
He felt her fingers clutch his jacket, pulling it tighter across his chest.
“They’re coming,” she said. “I can hear them. Run faster, goddamit!”
Cooper could barely run at all, let alone faster, but he heard them, too, heard their yells, heard the roaring of some misshapen thing.
He’d walked seven excruciating blocks — careful not to step on frozen body parts or broken glass — with the cold making his hands numb, making his fingers tingle, with Sofia’s weight dragging at him, and now he was only a block shy of Chicago Avenue.
So he ignored the icy cold air that sucked deep into his heaving lungs, ignored the wind that made his face sting and burn. He moved faster.
Up ahead, on the other side of Chicago Avenue on both the left and the right, he saw gothic buildings made of white stone. They looked like castles, especially the one on the left with its octagonal tower that stretched thirty feet above. It was old, so old it had probably once towered over the surrounding buildings back when “tall” meant four or five stories. Now it was just a lost footnote in the city’s sprawling skyline. A little castle… a little fortress…
Leave her and go hide. Go in the fortress, block the door, you can hold them off…
A tug at his collar.
“
There,” Sofia said. She pointed right: he saw the white WALGREENS lettering on a black overhang. Below it, a revolving door of glass in a curved metal housing. The store sat at the base of a tall, tan building. This place wasn’t burned out. Cooper didn’t see any activity in front of the store, or inside it. Maybe they could hide in there, killing two birds with one stone.
He reached the door: it was still intact, as were the glass windows on either side.
Cooper carefully carried Sofia into the rotating door, careful not to stumble and drop her or smack her head against anything. He pushed. It turned with a deep swishhh. Three steps later, he stepped into a miracle.
The lights were on.
There was no wind.
No heat, either, but without the windchill the place felt comparatively warm.
The doors might be intact, but this place hadn’t escaped the disaster. Ten feet in lay a headless body. Ice crystals formed a strangely beautiful pattern in the blood that had spilled from the man’s neck and spread across the hard stone floor.
Farther up the first aisle, between scattered bags of chips on one side and candy bars on the other, lay a second body, a woman. A look of disbelief had frozen on her face, maybe when her attackers had torn her right arm from her body, leaving the ripped sleeve of her blue jacket ragged and stiff with icy blood. That jacket remained buttoned under her chin, but open at the belly to show an empty cavity — her internal organs were gone.
“My God,” Sofia said. “Coop, we gotta hide.”
He nodded. He hefted her higher, or tried to, but his arms wouldn’t lift her. He was damn near done. “Is the pharmacy in the back?”
“Yeah,” Sofia said. “Straight back.”
Cooper stepped over the bodies.
All through the aisles, products had been ripped off the metal shelves and tossed onto the floor. It didn’t look like much had been taken, though — more a store-trashing rampage rather than people scrambling for supplies.
He stumbled on a box of candy, causing him to hit the shelves on his left, rocking them a little before they settled back down with a bang.
