I checked my watch. Eleven minutes since the shot was fired. I took some pictures from the window and some inside the plant. Then I went back down the stairs. My best chance would be to walk the neighborhood. Maybe my shooter was hanging around. Waiting to see if he needed to finish the job.
In an alley behind the plant, I stripped off the NBC gear and stuffed it into my pack. I was still in an infected zone but didn’t give a damn. Besides, it was hard to get at my gun, and that could be a health hazard with more immediate consequences.
I started down an adjacent street that ran parallel to the highway. The houses here were built cheek to jowl. Four thin walls covered over by a tar-paper roof. Cracked stoops and crabgrass. Everything drenched in the grimy haze of Eisenhower exhale.
I counted four homes burning. Three others in various states of smolder. The street was filled with broken glass and garbage. Sheets of paper blew in sudden drafts of wind and random pieces of furniture lay in pieces everywhere.
I turned a corner and stopped. A woman sat in a recliner in the middle of an intersection. I pulled close and took a look. The woman looked back, a puckered hole in the middle of her forehead. A handful of small dark birds appeared overhead, wheeling suddenly and flicking away. The trees were naked and black in the wind.
At the very end of the block, two kids slipped past. One carried a paint can and a brush. He splashed his friend with a smear of red and ran. The second followed the first, their laughter tumbling through canyons of quiet. Somewhere behind me, a support beam popped from the heat and buckled.
I ducked off the street and leaned up against a two-story bungalow that was still intact. A blind flickered and a set of eyes appeared. I waved, asking whoever was inside to open the window. The eyes disappeared and were replaced by the barrel of a large-caliber handgun.
I took that as a hint and walked back down the street. One of the burned-out shacks had a large red X painted on what was left of the door. I kicked my way through some loose timber and stepped inside. The smell of gasoline was heavy in the cramped hallway, and there were two bodies lying underneath a set of windows. One looked like he might have died of smoke inhalation. The other had taken the better part of a shotgun in the face. I tried the windows. They were nailed shut.
I took pictures of the door, windows, and bodies. Then I walked to the back of the building, into what had once been a kitchen. The windows here were also nailed shut. As was the back door. I had just forced it open when I heard the scrape of a boot outside.
The first thing I saw was the church, the cross on its pitched roof set ablaze by the morning sun. On the church’s front steps stood Ray Sampson, maybe thirty feet away. He had what looked like an NBC mask sticking out of his jacket pocket. On his knees, in front of Ray Ray, was Marcus Robinson. Behind him, bald head gleaming, Jace. Marcus had his hands clasped over his head. Jace had a pistol idling near the back of the kid’s skull. I looked around for any sort of sniper rifle between the three of them, but only saw a cut-down pump lying on the ground. The gang leader squatted on his heels and touched Marcus’s shoulder. I couldn’t hear what was said. The kid’s face never registered a tick of emotion. Ray Ray stood and stepped back. Jace braced his feet and gripped his gun with both hands. Marcus Robinson didn’t know it yet, but he had maybe five seconds to live.
CHAPTER 40
“Why you do it, Little Man?”
“Do what?”
Ray Ray’s eyes wandered to the shotgun that lay between them. “You gonna hit me with that?”
“That’s your gun, Ray Ray. You gave ’em to us.”
“And you were doing my business?”
Marcus should have said, Yes, of course I was. Maybe even begged for his life. Instead, he kept his eyes on the tops of his boss’s boots.
“I couldn’t trust you after the Korean,” Ray Ray said. “You know that?”
Marcus let his mind chill. Ray Ray’s mouth moved, and more words came out.
“That’s why I had Jace follow you.” Ray Ray touched Marcus at the shoulder and pointed. The boy didn’t bother to turn.
“My Little Man.” There was a ghetto smile in Ray’s voice now. Like the thing was done, and there was never any avoiding it anyway. “Could have made some cake with you.”
The boots creaked as Ray Ray stepped back. Marcus could feel each moment, one linking up with the next. Teeth catching, locking, and levering forward.
There was Jace, standing just behind. Tall, dark. Never a whisper in his walk. Forearms extending. One hand on the gun grip. The second coming across and covering it.
The gun itself. A single smooth pan up. Steady pressure on the trigger. Black hammer pulling back.
The boy, head bent, waiting.
He focused on a crooked line of dirt running through the cracked cobbles. Saw every particle. Each its own mountain, with contoured peaks and crumbling valleys. Worlds within worlds.
His head would be there. In a matter of moments. Seconds. Lifetimes. A great meteor from the heavens. Destroying the line of dirt. Destroying the world of dirt. Changing everything.
He saw his temple, fragile bone splintered. A mass of tissue and blood, mixing with the earth until it all ran dark.
He saw it all in the slipstream of his consciousness. His body somewhere else. Him looking down. Still alone in the street.
His breath grew calm. He counted off the last three exhales. Then the shot came. The boy felt it blow a hole in his ear and waited for the bang of stone against the side of his head. Instead, he heard a groan and thump in the dust. Marcus turned to see Jace, facedown in the spot the boy had reserved for himself. Fair enough. The boy turned back, just in time to see Ray Ray, hands up, gun dangling from his fingers. Beyond him was the white dude. Fucking white dude Cecil was supposed to kill. He was a step or two into the street, fat-barreled piece in his hand, features watery in the smoke and the heat. He fired twice more without saying a word. The first shot finished off Jace, who was still alive and reaching for his gat. The second caught a banger named Breeze, who had been invisible in a doorway to Marcus’s left. The white dude walked toward them, eyes fixed on Ray Ray, who laid his piece on the ground.
The white dude was saying something, but Marcus wasn’t hearing. He had the pump back in his hands. Ray Ray turned just as Marcus raised up. The white dude was moving faster, but not fast enough. Now it was Ray Ray counting exhales. But he wouldn’t get to three. Marcus unloaded into his boss’s chest. Left the face alone. It was just business.
CHAPTER 41
I held the gun steady on the boy. When he looked at me, I felt my life turn to ash. Marcus had another shell chambered, and I wasn’t going to shoot him. And he knew it.
“Drop it,” he said.
“Maybe you’re gonna have to shoot me.”
Marcus shrugged. Instead of firing he picked up the gun they were going to kill him with and put it in his belt. Then he turned the shotgun around and offered it to me.
“Take it,” Marcus said.
“Why?”
“ ’Cuz if you don’t, I’m gonna pop you in the knee and call the brothers over here to show ’em how you killed Ray Ray.”
“And if I do?”
“You take the gun and split.”
“It looks like I killed the three of them. And you’re the hero who fought me off.”
“You getting it. And this time it’ll work. Now take the pump.”
“Why don’t I just shoot you?”
“Ain’t got the grit, old man.” Marcus paused. Then pulled a purple notebook from his back pocket. “Take this, too. Now get your ass moving. They gonna be here soon.”
He was right. I was out of conversation and time. I took a last look at Ray Sampson, sprawled and crooked in the church’s sainted shadow, life leaked out of his eyes. Marcus had picked up the gang leader’s NBC mask. He’d also taken one off Jace. Now he stood over them both, counting bullets. The King was dead. Long live the King.
I left the street of cobbles and di
dn’t look back.
CHAPTER 42
I walked six blocks without seeing a soul. In the middle of a burned-out strip mall on West Madison, I found what I was looking for: Rosehill’s Wine and Liquors. Its front door had been reduced to a smoking hole. I racked a round into the shotgun Marcus had given me and blew out the remnants of what had once been the front window. Three kids jumped out a side door and streaked down an alley. Inside, the floor was sticky and littered with broken bottles. The cash register had been emptied, three lottery machines and an ATM cracked open. I found a pint of Early Times wrapped in brown paper and stuck on a shelf under the front counter. I drank some of the raw whiskey and sat on the floor, Marcus’s shotgun across my knees. Ray Sampson ran through my head, along with the two I’d killed-the one called Jace and the one I knew was in the doorway without understanding exactly how. I let the faces filter into my bloodstream, where they mixed with the liquor and washed downstream. The pint bottle danced a jig in my left hand. I reached over with my right and covered it. In the back of the place was a bathroom with a mirror. My reflection was clouded and looked like every other killer I’d ever met. I washed my hands and ducked my head under the cold tap. Outside, I broke the shotgun into pieces and threw them into a Dumpster. Cook County Hospital lay on the other side of the Ike, a mile and a half due east. I took out my handgun, chambered a round, and began to walk.
Some of the blocks I walked had already been torched. Others stood silent, more red eyes watching through drawn shades as I passed. A half block from Cook, I came up on a temporary fence that cordoned off the hospital. There was an uneasy crowd massing near a gate. Women pressed to the front, holding children over their heads, hoping it might gain them admittance. Someone on a loudspeaker was telling people to go home, turn on their TVs, and wait for instructions. A second announcement directed anyone who might be sick to proceed to a red zone, wherever that might be.
Molly told me the NBC suit and tinted faceplate would serve as both protection and my ID. I slipped into a doorway and put the suit back on. There were two guards inside a booth, manning one of the checkpoints. Each wore a mask with a clear faceplate and carried a rifle. I hit the audio button on my suit and told them I was a scientist from CDA. I threw in Molly’s name. Then Ellen’s. One guard gave me a quick up and down and waved me in. The other never took his eyes off the crowd behind me.
I passed through two lines of fences and into Cook County’s ER. The first thing that struck me was the smell. Just inside the front door, I saw the reason why. They’d bagged the dead and laid them out in two rows. I followed the trail, winding down a twisting green hallway and into the bowels of the hospital. A couple of people in NBC suits hustled past, stepping over body bags like so much furniture. I read the ID tags on the bags as I walked. Three bodies from the end, one of the tags caught my eye.
THERESA JACKSON AFRICAN AMERICAN, FEMALE 32 YEARS OLD 2302 WEST ADAMS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
I touched the bag with a gloved hand and thought about the woman inside it. Two nights earlier she’d smiled and laughed while she patched up my ribs in the ER. Now she was cannon fodder for the guns of the pathogen.
I walked the rest of the way down the hallway. At the very end I found Ellen Brazile, staring through a window into an isolation room. Three bodies lay inside, each on a gurney, in various states of postmortem undress.
“Did you draw more blood?” Her voice was muffled by a clear faceplate and hood. A technician looked up and nodded.
“Get it to the lab as soon as you can.” She turned away from the makeshift morgue and saw me standing there.
“Can I help you?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Kelly.”
Ellen moved closer. “How did you get in?”
“Took a walk through the hot zone.” I glanced toward the bodies on the tables. Two were men. One looked like he was asleep. The other’s face was covered in a sweat of blood. The body in the middle was that of a young woman. She had skin like chilled cream and long black hair.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” I said.
“Who told you?”
“Molly.”
She nodded toward the window. “That’s Anna. We’re taking some samples.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I heard you the first time. Come on.”
Ellen led me down a short hallway, through two sets of doors, to an empty room.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” she said, gesturing to an examining table. “Did your suit suffer any ruptures while you were outside?”
“I was exposed if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s what I’m asking. For how long?”
“Pretty much the whole time. A couple of hours at least.”
“Were you inside any buildings?”
“Yeah, but everyone I met was dead.”
She began to pull supplies out of a cabinet. “This area of the hospital is sealed off and scrubbed-that means the air is constantly monitored, so people don’t have to wear their protective gear. Until you’re tested, however, you’ll have to remain in this room.”
“Tested?”
“We have a preliminary antigen test that screens for exposure. Takes about twenty minutes.”
“You need blood?”
She nodded. I stripped off my suit and rolled up my sleeve. Ellen tied a rubber band around my arm and prepared a syringe. She drew one vial of blood. Then a second.
“How’s Molly?” I said.
“What about her?”
“I was on the train with her when she got shot.”
Ellen marked both vials and left without another word. She returned a few minutes later with a stack of pages tacked to a clipboard. “I’m going to need you to fill out a couple of consent forms while I begin the run on your blood.”
I took the clipboard from her. The first page had three lines scrawled in ballpoint pen:
MOLLY’S FINE. FEDS STILL LOOKING FOR YOU. MIGHT BE WATCHING. BEHIND ME.
I glanced up at Ellen, then past her shoulder to a seam in the wall. I followed it up to the ceiling. There was a small hole there, and the pinhole lens of a camera, smiling back at me. I wrote down a single question, along with a name and phone number. Ellen took back the clipboard and nodded. The two of us talked about nothing for another five minutes. Then she left to run her tests.
I sat in the room and waited. Just me and Candid Camera. The purple notebook Marcus had given me was still in my pocket. I took it out and opened it. A blue van crouched at the bottom of one page, rear doors thrown open, red cans of gasoline stacked inside. On the next page, men with no faces and broad backs smoked and pointed at blank maps. Ray Ray stood in a long corridor of unapproachable light. Up front, I found pictures of the Korean. Smiling and pulling money from his sock. Lying dead on the narrow floor of his grocery store. Staring at a crooked clock on the wall. I flipped the notebook shut. Marcus’s name was on the cover. No address. No phone. I jammed the thing back in my pocket and wondered why he’d given it to me.
Forty-five minutes after Ellen left, the door opened again. I half expected James Doll, with a couple of Homeland goons and a pair of cuffs. Instead, it was Rachel Swenson, carrying a tight smile and a set of car keys.
CAMP CHICAGO
CHAPTER 43
They called it Camp Chicago. Much like the quarantine fences, it had sprung up literally overnight. Two square blocks cordoned off by Chicago’s finest, with Daley Plaza at its center. Ringing the camp’s perimeter was an armored shell of satellite trucks, thick hunks of cable sprouting from their cavernous bellies, a bristle of dish antennas tethered at the other end. Closer in, a skeleton of steel scaffolding ringed the plaza itself and stretched into the sky. Atop it, huge blue broadcast booths, enclosed in Plexiglas and bathed in banks of television lights.
The government had done its best to shut down the media, withholding any semblance of content from the blinking, ravenous beast. It didn’t matter. Once the fences went up, more than a th
ousand journalists sought credentials to cover whatever was unfolding on the West Side. Most of them knew next to nothing that wasn’t handed to them in a press release. That didn’t matter either. In fact, it only made things better.
A city terrified. A nation paralyzed. A world horrified. All of it, 24/7. Ratings went through the roof.
James Doll sat in the basement of City Hall, holed up in an airless room, watching the coverage on a bank of monitors. A parade of images streamed past. A reporter standing near the Water Tower, Michigan Avenue empty behind her. The Dan Ryan, jammed with cars going nowhere. People walking past soldiers into the Loop, belongings in shopping carts and strapped to their backs. Doll himself at a podium, mouth moving but no sound coming out. The mayor, even more so.
The man from Homeland hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last forty-eight, and the on-screen pictures held him in a sudden trance. The black phone on the table barked, and he jumped. Fuck. Doll scrubbed his face with his hands and shook his head. The phone rang again. Then a third time. Only a few people would have been routed in, and Doll wasn’t looking forward to speaking with any of them.
“Yes?” Doll listened for a moment. “Put it up on five.”
One of the monitors flickered. The news coverage was replaced by a silent feed of Michael Kelly and Rachel Swenson in a Cook County examining room. Kelly moved close and ran his hand through her hair. The woman gave what Doll imagined to be a sigh. Their bodies mingled. Kelly backed her against a wall. She spread her arms and let him in.
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