by Duncan, Ian
“Regrettably,” Trubilinski answered, without the slightest indication that any such emotion was actually likely.
He gave them another moment to think, then added: “There is one more detail. Before I lost my asset, I learned that the ventilation system of the bunker is monolithic. A single filtration system serves the entire underground complex, meaning if the air is tainted at any given point, all the air in the complex will be compromised, understood? This is why our plan will work. Once the outbreak within the bunker begins, they won’t be able to effectively quarantine any single area.”
“Hot damn,” Sam said, grinning.
“Here are your marching orders, then,” Trubilinski said. “We’ll pose as armed robbers taking advantage of the chaos in the district, selecting high-profile targets. We’ll need two vehicles capable of some light ramming and cornering, and we’ll need protective equipment for handling the spores. Respirators will serve to conceal our faces, and won’t be unusual given the circumstances. In the process of rifling through their possessions, suitcases, purses, or what have you, we’ll leave behind a significant number of spores. A bulb duster of the type used by exterminators should do the job nicely. After the robbery, the principals will think they’ve escaped with their lives, but really they’ll be serving as a carrier—all the way into the bunker. The time delay from exposure to manifestation should serve us well.
“Sam, you’re in charge of obtaining the vehicles.”
Sam nodded.
“Wes, since you have a history of faith I’ll put you in charge of obtaining the spores.”
Wes smiled thinly and nodded.
“Cuban, any additional costume, protective gear, or weapons we need.”
“You got it, sir.”
“I’ll do my part to call in what favors I have left and get a triangulation on as many of these names as possible.” Trubilinski looked at his watch. “Meet back here in no more than three hours.”
The three operators rose as one from the table.
Thirty-One
COLE FOUND EMILY wrapped in her Marmot jacket, sitting against the parapet wall on the far side of the hatch, her hands on her belly and a ball cap pulled low over her face. He tried squatting on his heels beside her, but an immediate and overwhelming pain in his knees forced him to sit. He laid his rifle on the rubber membrane and stood his backpack beside it.
He sighed as though it might be the prelude to something. Helluva day, huh? How’re you holding up? Baby good? What on earth could he say?
Emily sat perfectly motionless and for a moment Cole thought she might have fallen asleep. He leaned closer, straining to see her eyes in the near darkness. They were open but nearly black. At last he whispered, “Hey, Emily, you awake?”
Her hand seized his.
Cole tried to pull away.
“Here, feel this,” Emily said, looking at him and a little laugh echoing in her respirator. “Oh my god, I’m not going to bite you. Come here. Give me your other hand.”
When, at last, Cole relaxed and scooted closer, she opened her jacket and placed his hand low on the curve of her belly. She pressed his fingertips firmly into her flesh and held them there.
Seldom in his life had Cole felt such a rush of sensations. His wrist was bent at an uncomfortable angle, his fingertips already beginning to tingle. His face was only inches from Emily’s, and at first he barely breathed, strangely both embarrassed and aroused by that sudden proximity.
“Did you feel that?”
Cole looked up and realized her gaze was intent on her belly. He became aware, finally, of a feeling under his fingers: a tremoring slight enough that he might have doubted whether the source was his own hand or in the surface he felt, much as the throbbing of blood pressure in one’s own thumb might be mistaken for another’s pulse. And then, quite unmistakably, he felt two sharp jabs in succession, the way someone might box a heavy punching bag.
“Good grief!” Cole said, withdrawing his hand.
Emily’s eyes went wide over her mask. “He’s a fighter, isn’t he? Almost as worked up as we were today.”
“There’s really a little person—I mean—” Cole caught himself, realizing how ridiculous it sounded. “I mean, of course, there’s a person in there, it’s just—”
“Crazy, right?”
Cole shook his head. “What’s it like?”
Emily laughed inside the respirator. “Being pregnant? It’s hard to describe. I’ve been nine months nearly and I can’t tell you how strange it is.”
Cole found himself gazing at her belly with newfound appreciation, aware now of a third, almost spiritual presence; a presence that had been there all along, though Cole had just now come to believe in it.
Emily must have realized what he was thinking, because she lifted her shirt, baring the taut globe of her belly. “Lately I’ve been able to see his fingers when he swipes them across,” she said.
For a while they both watched. Several times Cole saw her skin bulge in a most alien way, and then, unpredictably as lightning that happens to appear in the exact quadrant of the sky where one is looking, he saw, undeniably, the shape of a little hand pressing outward, testing, as it were, the confines of its fleshly prison.
“Did you see that?” Cole said excitedly.
Emily nodded, studying Cole’s face as though every bit of this exchange had surprised her.
“What is its—his—name?” Cole asked.
Emily covered her belly and zipped up her jacket. “Tad and I never did decide. I liked Cecil, you know, but I never was entirely right by it, and he wanted something manly, a Viking name Magnus, or the like.”
“Magnus,” Cole said, trying it out.
“Can you really imagine,” Emily said, “yelling that across a crowded room? ‘MAGNUS stop eating the crayon!’ Or, ‘MAGNUS, stop torturing the cat!’?”
“It is pretty intense,” Cole admitted.
“And now,” Emily said, stopping midsentence and blinking hard, “now I don’t really even care if he has a name.” She turned to look at Cole, her pale eyes reflecting what little light there was on the rooftop, and the earnestness of her gaze bearing with it a kind of pleading, he thought.
“Now I just want him to be born,” Emily said, her eyes filling. “Born safe.”
Cole stared at her, unflinching in the intensity of her gaze, knowing, in that moment, that it was the most passionate and sincere look he’d ever received from a woman, and knowing, too, that she was communicating something to him. Not love, but a mandate. A mandate that might be a thing even more sincere than love. One thing was certain: no words were sacred enough to corroborate a gaze like that.
Emily looked away and closed her eyes, but Cole stared at the profile of her face long after, feeling as though she had ignited something within him, a burning at his core. The sensation bore an energy more intense than mere determination. It was like anger, but purer. Like an insatiable thirst for revenge, only righteous.
Cole pulled his backpack closer and began taking stock. From the bottom of the pack he dug out all the ammunition he had left, three twenty-round boxes of 5.56 for the AR and a half-empty box of nine-millimeter. He ejected the empty magazine from his AR, ripped open the cartridge boxes, and began snapping rounds into the magazine against the spring-loaded follower. When the first magazine was full and heavy, he locked the AR’s bolt back, slid the mag into the well, slapped it home, dropped the bolt, and checked the safety.
“Let me top off your magazine,” Cole offered.
Emily looked at him. “I’m afraid it might be empty. I sort of went berserk.”
“Sexiest thing I ever saw, I swear,” Cole said.
Emily huffed into her respirator and drew her Sig Sauer from the holster beneath her jacket. “Anything a woman with size F breasts does is probably the sexiest thing you ever saw.”
Cole could only laugh
and accept the magazine she handed him. It was light. Only two rounds left. He had enough nine-millimeter to reload her mag and top off the Glock in his chest rig. He loaded another AR mag, giving him two total—one for himself and one to give Miguel. That was it.
A wave of heat rushed over him. They didn’t have enough ammo to survive another day—another onslaught of coughers. They had enough bullets to do one thing. One maneuver, one action. They’d better put them to damn good use.
Cole dug into the backpack again, almost irrationally hoping he might have overlooked even one more box of ammunition. He found several spare batteries for the dead officer’s flashlight, and then, deep in a pocket he had quite forgotten, his hand closed around the little knit cap he had taken from Emily’s bedroom.
“I almost forgot,” Cole said, unfolding it gingerly and holding it out to her. “I took this from your bedroom thinking you might be sorry you forgot it.”
Emily face contorted and she choked trying to say something, only the first syllable of which escaped. Tears spilled from her eyes and she nodded thankfully, taking it in her fingers.
“I’m sorry if I overstepped,” Cole said.
She shook her head vigorously and wiped her eyes for a minute. “No,” she managed. “It was my husband’s when he was a baby. His mum sent it to me when she found out. Thank you.”
Emily clenched the knit cap to her eyes and sobbed into it, the respirator echoing in an inhuman way, and Cole began to feel as miserable as if he’d caused her the grief himself. He started to get up, but Emily caught him by the arm and pulled him back. She circled his arm with hers, holding it tight, and laid her cheek against his shoulder.
“Please stay,” she whispered.
Thirty-Two
“HEADLIGHTS IN SIGHT,” Sam said, adjusting the bone mike at the corner of his mouth. He and Trubilinski wore discreet com units fitted into their ears that connected them on a secure channel to Wes and Cuban.
Trubilinski turned over the engine and shifted the big Excursion into drive, leaving the headlights off. Cuban had acquired—by means none of them had questioned—the SUV with oversized off-roading tires and a welded steel grille guard that would suit their purposes well.
Sam held a short-barreled shotgun muzzle-down between his knees in the passenger seat. He looked at the tablet PC on his lap, where a blinking white dot moved slowly through a gridwork of intersecting streets.
“That’s them,” he said under his breath to Trubilinski. “Target acquired,” he said into the mike. “Team One is ready.”
“It is they,” Trubilinski corrected.
Sam turned his head to look quizzically at Trubilinski.
“Team Two is a block away, in-position, and standing by,” came Wes’s voice through the earpieces.
Trubilinski raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want to go your whole life sounding like a damn frogman, do you?”
Sam grinned. “Fucking A, sir,” he said, bringing up his HEPA respirator and clamping it over his mouth, as did Trubilinski. The microphone was now inside the respirator. “It is they,” his voice said clearly over the coms.
Trubilinski rolled forward and waited in the shadow of an abandoned city bus that hid them from the target car’s approach. Sam watched the screen.
“A thousand feet,” he said, watching the blinking dot advance.
“Five hundred and closing,”
Trubilinski brought the RPMs up but kept his foot on the brake.
Sam pointed forward. “Go.”
The big Triton V8 roared and the Excursion leapt forward, a battering ram in the dark. The headlights of the target car belonged to a Cadillac Escalade that passed in a blur before them. The Excursion’s steel grille smashed into the rear quarter panel of the Cadillac and knocked it off course, tires screeching, its headlights jerked wildly as the front end spun around, only to be stopped cold by a steel light post.
“Go, go, go,” Sam said calmly into the mike.
Trubilinski wheeled the Excursion around and struck the Cadillac again from behind, pinning it securely against the light post. Sam bailed out and brought the shotgun up to his shoulder, firing immediately on the Cadillac, blowing out the tinted windows with less-than-lethal frangible rounds. Trubilinski set the brake and swung out his own door with an MP5 submachine gun in hand.
Adding to the choreographed chaos was Team Two, roaring down a side street in an H3 Hummer, stopping suddenly with their high-beams shining directly into the driver’s window.
“Driver has a weapon!” said Cuban’s voice, just as the pop pop pop of a pistol firing came from inside the Cadillac, blowing holes out the rear window and sparking across the hood of the Excursion.
The H3 revved and rammed the Cadillac at short distance, knocking the occupants senseless long enough for Sam to reach in, open the passenger side door, and drag a woman from her seat, pointing a pistol at the driver, who, stunned and terrified, offered his hands in the air over the steering wheel. Wes ripped open his door and pulled the man to the ground.
Trubilinski watched the perimeter while Wes and Sam zip-tied the two occupants of the Cadillac, apparently a husband and wife, both in their mid-fifties and dressed in a tux and formal evening gown as though they’d just been to a wedding, apparently only abandoning their social life at the last possible instant to flee for the safety of the Cicada Project.
The woman blubbered and the man blustered outrage as Wes sat atop him with the muzzle of a pistol pressed against the back of his head, his nose bent against the pavement.
“Listen to me!” Sam shook the woman by the shoulders and shouted through his respirator, his voice unmuffled only to the rest of the team. “Calm the fuck down! We want your money, not your life. Cooperate and this will go well. Refuse to cooperate and you’ll wind up dead. Understand?”
Cuban had already crawled inside the Escalade, and began tossing several expensive-looking leather bags out onto the pavement.
“What’s this?” Sam said, making a show of unzipping the bag and looking through it. “Where’s the money?”
“Thirty seconds,” came Trubilinski’s voice over the coms.
“Where’s the fucking money!” Sam screamed theatrically.
Cuban’s laughter came over the comes. “Dude,” he said, “you make a shitty pirate. The interior is prepped. We’re good to go.”
“Search him!” Sam commanded, pointing at the husband.
Keeping the pistol pressed to the man’s head, Wes rifled through his tuxedo jacket until he came out with a thick bundle of hundred-dollar bills, still banded from the bank’s vault. “BOO-YAH!” he said, tossing it to Sam, then reaching back to remove a gold Rolex from the man’s wrist.
“We got what we came for,” Sam said. “Team One, falling out.”
“Team two, falling out,” echoed Cuban.
Wes flicked a switchblade open and cut the pair’s zip ties. “Don’t stay on the street,” he advised, backing toward the Hummer, still covering them with his pistol. “It’s not safe out here.”
The husband pushed himself off the pavement, straightening with difficulty. He checked his wife and pushed her toward the open door of the Cadillac, looking over his shoulder at the two SUVs accelerating into the night before he scooped up the leather bags, slung them angrily into the backseat, and climbed behind the wheel. The engine had never stopped running. Many of the windows were shot out, the wind whipping god-knows-what through the interior of the car, and the entire front bumper assembly falling off when he backed away from the pole, a huge plastic grin rocking on the pavement.
“They’re gonna make it,” Sam said, watching through the rear window of the Excursion. “By the way, I’m calling dibs on that Rolex, Wes.”
“Get your own bling, brother,” Wes teased over the coms.
“Bling bling bang bang,” Sam said wearily.
Thirty-Three
COLE AWOKE to the sound of coughing. No mere loosening of phlegm, but the persistent attempt to dislodge some solid object from the depths of a lung, desperate and choking.
He opened his eyes. The gray haze of urban night still prevailed.
Emily was curled beside him on the rooftop, her eyes closed and the rest of her face hidden behind the respirator, the Marmot Jacket pulled tight around her neck.
Cole struggled to right himself. Under any other circumstance he might have actually laughed out loud at the screaming soreness that rose in protest, seemingly from every muscle and joint in his body. Susceptible to the Cord or not, his body was already assured of his place among the dead.
He blinked away the bleariness of his eyes, the softly gleaming rooftop stretching away before him into darkness, enhancing the ambient light enough to make out the hulking shapes of the air handlers. Brandon lay in a contorted heap perhaps ten feet away, hardly breathing by all appearances—another concern.
A figure appeared from behind one of the air handlers. Trudy, her mask off, bent over, hands on knees, her mouth a hole even darker than the night, coughing.
Cole’s hand instinctively went to the AR lying on the rooftop beside him, his fingers closing around the grip.
Trudy’s whole body seemed to shake with the effort of clearing her lungs, each new breath bringing another bout, no sooner drawn than it was forcibly expelled, beginning on a high pitch, as loud as a shout, and winding down, with each successive cough, to the level of a breathless gag before it began again.
Emily was stirring now, blinking. Even Brandon lifted his head.
Cole drew the weapon into his lap and transitioned to his knees, rising painfully and watching Trudy all the while. She wiped ropy drool from her mouth and looked at it, gleaming in that dim light like liquid silver on her hand.
Cole took several steps toward her, the AR gripped tightly in his hand but the barrel pointing at the rooftop. He needed to get close enough to look her in the eye. It was a distinctive cast the eyes took; Cole knew the look well enough.