Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  “You have been chosen,” he said. “Every one of you feels this in your heart, just as I do. You used to be workers and bosses, teachers or policemen. You used to be shopkeepers and soldiers. You served in a hundred other roles. What you were before no longer matters, because now we are one.”

  The smiles, the nods, the wide-eyed stares of bliss. They knew. They believed.

  “Everyone here understands that humans are the enemy, that they must be destroyed,” Steve said. “We will accomplish that, but we can’t act like animals. The American military will strike back, and soon. They will start with the cities where the violence is out of control, where it is clear our people have taken over. We can’t help those other cities. We can only help ourselves. Therefore, as we accomplish our goals, we have to draw as little attention as possible.”

  Heads nodded. Some put hands over hearts. Some even cried. The power of God flowed through Steve Stanton.

  He had seen the news coverage of Paris. He had to make sure his followers didn’t do anything stupid like that. Cities mattered.

  “Spread the word — do not destroy power facilities. Leave all power lines and transformers alone. Do not destroy any communication. Telephone lines, utility poles, cell-phone towers, leave them all be. And no more fires. If any of you see a Chosen One setting a fire, kill that person and make an example of them. Am I understood?”

  A thousand heads nodded.

  “We will use their own communication systems against them,” he said. He pointed to his ear. “The humans are listening. Only the heads of individual groups may have a cell phone. Do not talk about being Chosen on phones, on the Internet, or in emails. I will distribute code words that you will pass on to others by face-to-face meetings only. If I need to make everyone act at once, we’ll broadcast those code words. We must be careful so that the outside world doesn’t suspect our numbers.”

  The heads nodded faster, more intently. They understood.

  “As you spread through the city, find others of our kind. Tell them about me, tell them I am in charge. If you find humans who are not converting, kill them. Who here has served in the military?”

  Along the descending stairs and down on the main floor, forty-odd hands rose.

  “Excellent,” Steve said. “All of you, come up and meet with me when I dismiss the rest. Everyone else, when you leave here, find me more soldiers. Ask for military experience, and ask specifically for anyone who served in a reserve unit in this area. If there are weapons in or around Chicago, we need them.”

  Steve again put his hands on the cool, stone railing. He leaned forward, letting the motions come naturally, letting the intensity build. His past, the shy, awkward thing he’d once been, it all seemed a bad dream. Power coursed through him. He could control the Chosen Ones as easily as he’d controlled the Platypus.

  “The world is about to change, forever,” he said. “We will make this city ours. Soon after that, the entire country.” He stood straight. He raised his arms, spread them wide. “When the Chosen in other cities are tearing themselves apart, tearing their cities apart, Chicago will stand tall. From here, we will rule. The time of humanity is over, Chosen Ones — your time has come!”

  Their roaring cheer filled the open space, echoed off the marble walls, made Steve’s skin ripple with goose bumps.

  This thousand would spread through the streets, gathering others of their kind, killing any who were not. In a day, this city would be under his control.

  Chicago was only the beginning.

  THE TRUMP TOWER

  The fire stairs had seen him safely down. Cooper prayed they would see him safely up. It was smarter than taking the elevator, anyway: who knew what those doors might open up to?

  Sofia couldn’t climb the steps on her own. That burst of strength she’d used to kill Chavo was already a distant memory. Cooper kept his left arm around her waist, helping her along. His right hand stayed locked on the cool, comforting feel of the pistol.

  Two switchback flights led from the subbasement to the basement level. Another pair would lead to the ground floor. He’d helped her up six steps to the first landing, halfway to the basement level, and his legs were already burning.

  “Cooper … I’m not doing so great.”

  “You have a fever,” he said. “Maybe your wound is infected.”

  “That fast?”

  He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I think we have to find a drugstore or a hospital, get you antibiotics.”

  There had to be drugstores close by. He could find her some medicine, then maybe they could make their way to the Mary Ellen. Jeff was nowhere to be found, and — Cooper hated to admit it — after seeing that empty cocoon membrane, he was no longer sure he wanted to find Jeff.

  He helped Sofia up another step.

  “Just a little more,” Cooper said. “Make it to the ground floor, then we’ll peek into the lobby and see if the coast is clear.”

  Two heads peered around a white stone corner. Cooper stared into the Trump Tower’s long lobby. On his right was the forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high glass wall that looked out onto Wabash Avenue. Outside, big clumps of snow whirled down from a sky that was almost the same yellow as the feet he’d seen in the boiler room.

  Directly in front of him stretched the modern, white marble floor that led to the registration desk … or at least what was left of it. Body parts littered the lobby. Puddles of tacky blood pooled around corpses, bloody footprints leading away in various directions.

  He took all that in at a glance, because he could really focus on only one thing.

  Hatchlings.

  Twenty of them, maybe thirty. Cooper had seen shaky footage of hatchlings before, part of Gutierrez’s T.E.A.M.S. program. The video had been taken by soldiers in the woods just before the creatures attacked. But to see the things in person …

  They stood around two feet tall. Three thick, twitching tentacle-legs made up half of that height, legs that attached to the bottom points of a three-sided pyramid covered in gnarled, glossy-black skin. And in the middle of each triangular side, a vertical, black eye. Purplish lids blinked rapidly, pushing in from the left and the right sides, keeping the eyes wet and clean.

  The hatchlings crawled on everything: furniture, body parts, the splintered wood of the shredded front desk, even chipped and cracked white stone walls that four days earlier had been a spotless, polished marvel. The monsters lowered their bodies to these various surfaces. They jittered and shook perversely, like misshapen dogs humping wood and glass and marble. As they shook, Cooper heard crunching sounds, grinding noises.

  He watched one of the hatchlings rise up on its three tentacle-legs. It climbed on top of a hard, knee-high, uneven mound that ran the inner length of the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The creature vibrated: clumpy damp material squirted from its bottom.

  It was shitting. That mound … it was all solidified shit. The thing vibrated one more time, squeezing out the last bits, then the graceful tentacle-legs carried it to the torn reception desk.

  No, not torn … half-eaten.

  Sofia’s hands clutched at Cooper’s arm. She stood half behind him, using him as both protection and support.

  “Fuck me,” she said. “I never believed they were real. I thought that news footage was special effects bullshit.”

  Cooper nodded, neither knowing nor caring if he’d ever believed or not. The past didn’t matter, because he could see just how real they were.

  Sofia tugged at his coat. “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re making a bulwark or something.”

  “A bulwark? What the fuck is a bulwark?”

  “Like a wall,” Cooper said. “Something to stay behind during a gunfight.”

  “You a soldier or something?”

  “History Channel. Watch enough World War Two documentaries and things sink in.”

  The sound of roars suddenly echoed through the lobby, filtering in from somewhere deeper
in the hotel. Cooper couldn’t be sure where the roars were coming from — if he and Sofia were going to get out of the hotel alive, they had to go right through the little poop-making monsters.

  His hands felt sweaty. He raised the pistol, started to aim at the closest creature.

  Sofia’s hand rested on his forearm.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Five bullets. We have to conserve” — she ran out of breath in midsentence; she was farther gone than Cooper had hoped — “our ammo.”

  If he fired off a round, would the hatchlings scatter? Maybe … or maybe they’d attack, like they had in the video, swarm in, chew him up alive and then shit him out to make more of their little fortress.

  He looked at Sofia. “I can shoot one, see if they run. What else can we do?”

  “We could … just walk out,” she said. She closed her eyes, tried to deal with the heat washing through her body. “We don’t fuck with them, maybe they don’t fuck with us. Chavo didn’t attack you … maybe these things won’t, either.”

  Cooper’s throat felt tight. A pinching feeling churned in his guts.

  Sofia raised a weak hand, pointed to the glass wall.

  “The street is right there,” she said. “If we stay any longer, we’ll … we’ll run into something worse than those little monsters.”

  Another roar — the closest yet — seemed to punctuate her words.

  She was right. They didn’t have time to find another way out.

  Gun in his right hand, his left arm around Sofia’s waist, Cooper stepped out from behind the corner and walked toward the front door some forty feet ahead.

  The twenty hatchlings stopped moving. Cooper paused. They all turned their bodies so two of their eyes looked his way, focused on him.

  Sofia slipped, just a little. He caught her, held her up.

  Now or never …

  He started walking again. Sofia did her best to carry her own weight and keep pace.

  The pyramid creatures watched.

  The long, glass wall passed by on Cooper’s right. At the end of it, past the reception desk on the left, was the revolving door that opened onto the street.

  He was halfway to it when, as a unit, the hatchlings suddenly went back to their work of humping, grinding and shitting.

  Cooper and Sofia reached the revolving door. They stepped inside, pushed, walked with it until it opened onto the sidewalk of the Trump Tower’s curved entry drive.

  A strong, icy wind clawed him, ripped at his coat. Sofia’s hand came up to shield her eyes and face. He and Sofia stepped forward.

  The two of them stared out at a war zone.

  Burned-out cars lined Wabash Avenue, including the cop car he’d seen on fire just a few days ago. Or was it hours? He wasn’t sure. Powdery snow swirled along the pavement, in places stopping and sticking, turning into long, thin, white fingers that stretched over the blacktop.

  Across the street to the left, a black-glass skyscraper towered high above. Cooper didn’t know the name of it. It had caught fire at some point. The building look like a tall, sparkling cinder.

  And everywhere … bodies.

  Some were bloated, their swollen bellies stretching shirts and popping buttons. Some were missing arms or legs. Some had their stomachs ripped open or their heads smashed in. The clothing of the corpses rippled and snapped in time with the unforgiving wind. Pools of blood had frozen into snow-speckled red glass.

  Pillars of smoke rose across the city skyline, abstract streaks of wavering grayish-black brushstrokes on a canvas of glowing yellow and orange.

  Five days ago, Chicago had been … well … Chicago. Now it was a slaughterhouse.

  Beneath the wind’s undulating howl, he heard no car engines, no honks, no tires squishing across slushy concrete. No talking, no yelling … no people. The lack of city sounds jarred him almost as much as the hatchlings had.

  “Fuck,” Sofia said.

  “I know,” Cooper said. “Oh man oh man, this is so messed up.”

  “Not that. I mean it’s cold.”

  Cooper nodded. The wind stung his face. Wind like this could burn you, make your skin crack and peel worse than eight hours in the sun. He started shivering. Had to be five or ten below out here, way worse with the windchill. He was lucky he’d brought Jeff’s jacket, or there was no way Sofia would have lasted more than fifteen minutes out here.

  The coat meant that her wound and infection might kill her before the cold did. He had to help her.

  “You know of any drugstores in the area?”

  Sofia nodded. “There’s a Walgreens up on Michigan Ave, by Pioneer Court.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Two blocks east, a block north.”

  Not far. He squeezed Sofia a little tighter, trying to reassure her. “And if we can’t get into that Walgreens, what else can you think of?”

  She thought for a moment. “Northwestern Memorial Hospital is a little farther north, on Huron. If we can’t get in, we keep going right up Michigan Ave. There’s another Walgreens at East Chicago, I think … seven blocks north from here. Can we find a car?”

  “No use right now,” Cooper said. “Even if we found one that worked, the street is too clogged with wrecks. For now, we walk.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. Cooper, I’m cold.”

  He stuffed the pistol into the back of his pants. He bent, scooped Sofia up, held her in his arms as if they were about to walk across the threshold.

  “Romantic,” she said, her voice barely audible over the winter wind. “You … you know we’re gonna die, right?”

  Cooper pulled her close, kissed her forehead: even that felt scorchingly hot.

  “We’ll make it,” he said. “Just give me directions.”

  She pointed to the right. “North on Wabash.”

  Sofia leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, then rested her head on his shoulder. She was shivering even worse than he was.

  Cooper adjusted her in his arms. He headed north.

  A GAME OF TAG

  Admiral Porter relayed the news, somehow keeping his voice as emotionless as that of a traffic reporter.

  “Seismic readings indicate a nuclear detonation in south-central Russia,” he said. “Approximately twenty megatons, believed to be of Chinese origin.”

  Murray’s stomach did flip-flops. A nuke. A goddamn nuke. It changed the game in every possible way. Not only was the world up against a disease that turned humanity against itself, the disease had apparently learned how to push the button.

  The staff of the Situation Room looked as sick as Murray felt. Everyone except for the Joint Chiefs and the president. Porter and the other generals exuded grim determination — like it or not, this was their moment. Blackmon just looked pissed.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “This came out of nowhere. If it was an ICBM, we should have seen the launch.”

  Porter nodded, took his customary pause before answering. “That’s because it wasn’t an ICBM. Our guess is a Type 631 missile fired from a truck just south of the Russian border, between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Truck-fired missile range is over four hundred kilometers, enough to reach Omsk, Novosibirsk or possibly Krasnoyarsk.”

  Murray didn’t know any of those cities. How big were they? Which one had been hit?

  André Vogel pressed a finger to an earpiece in his right ear. He dabbed at his now constantly sweaty, bald head with a handkerchief.

  “We’ve got a bird bringing up visuals on the region,” he said. “We should have satellite imagery on the big screen in a few seconds.”

  The Situation Room fell silent. All heads turned to the monitor that showed fifteen American cities lit up in yellow, another eight in red. Smaller red and yellow spots dotted the country — violence was radiating from the big cities, spilling out across the nation.

  The map of America blinked out, replaced by a high-angle view of a mushroom cloud billowing up over a glowing landscape. Murray saw the hallmarks of a major metroplex: a
river cutting through the middle, clusters of tall buildings, roads snaking out to suburbs, then to forest and farmland.

  A single word at the bottom identified the city.

  “Novosibirsk,” Blackmon said slowly and carefully, as if she wanted to respect the newly dead by properly pronouncing the name of their now-destroyed home. “How many people?”

  Admiral Porter answered her. “Third-largest city in Russia, behind Moscow and St. Petersburg. Population, one-point-five million.”

  On the screen, the mushroom cloud continued to rise. Murray found himself wishing that this was a joke, the prank of some sick, twisted fuck.

  It wasn’t.

  “My God,” Blackmon said. “This is really happening.” She did her hands-rubbing-the-face thing, then blinked rapidly, worked her jaw as if trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth. “Do we detect any other launches from the Chinese?”

  “Negative,” Porter said. “All ICBMs are still. The Chinese aren’t warming anything up that we know of. It could have been a rogue element. Possibly the truck crew was converted — they could have launched on their own.”

  Vogel dabbed at his sweaty face with a sweat-soaked handkerchief.

  “We’ve got full satellite coverage now,” he said. “If there’s another truck launch, we’ll see it happen.”

  Blackmon laced her fingers together. She was trying to stay calm, to show confidence, but the fingers gripped too tightly, made the skin on the back of her hands wrinkle and pucker.

  “Director Vogel,” she said, “I need you to find a way for me to talk to Beijing.”

  Vogel leaned on the table. “We’re trying everything we can, Madam President. We’re starting to get satellite images from China’s largest cities. Several of them show major fires. Communication seems to be down all across the country. They can’t talk to us, and far as we can tell it looks like they can’t even talk to each other.”

  Blackmon seemed to realize her hands were strangling each other. She extended her fingers, moved her hands apart, dropped them to her lap.