by Scott Sigler
The thin voice came from the floor, from Sofia. She weakly tried to roll to her stomach, but she didn’t have the energy to even lift her legs. Blood coursed down her face, made a puddle on the floor.
Six people, one thing, five bullets …
And then another memory rushed up: Chavo, back in the hotel … Chavo, trying to sniff, asking if Cooper was a friend … asking Cooper why he didn’t kill Sofia …
Seven of them, five bullets … I don’t want to die …
Cooper’s breath stopped. One thought overwhelmed him, one hope consuming every ounce of who he was.
He aimed his gun at Sofia’s face.
She saw it. She didn’t look dazed anymore. She lay inverted on top of a ruined rack of toothpaste and mouthwash. Her trembling lips formed the word please, but no sound came out.
I want to live … Sofia … I’m so sorry …
Cooper squeezed the trigger.
The gun leaped in his hand, rising up so fast it almost flew away. He blinked rapidly, the muzzle flash a strobe of green then red then white each time his eyes opened anew.
His vision mostly cleared. Glowing afterimages danced at the edges of his sight.
Sofia’s left leg trembled sickeningly. Her left hand made clutching motions, half closing, then half opening.
The bullet had punched a hole in the right cheekbone, spraying blood across the white tile floor behind her head.
She blinked … her eyes locked on him, narrowed with recognition and realization, then relaxed. Her head lolled back.
She stopped trembling.
The six people looked at him.
You had to do it you had to do it you coward you murderer say something or they’ll tear you apart you know what you have to say so say it say it now.
Cooper looked at each of them in turn, then he spoke: “She wasn’t a friend.”
The Tall Man nodded. The others smiled.
Seven of them and now only FOUR bullets …
Cooper fought the urge to turn and run. He knew he wouldn’t make it far. He didn’t know where the back door was, or if there was even a back door at all.
“She almost got me,” he said.
The Tall Man looked down at Sofia, then back. “Then why were you carrying her?”
Cooper held up the gun. “She had this against my neck. She was hurt. I knew if I could keep her from shooting me long enough, I’d have a chance. She was going to come out of the office and shoot you guys, so I had to make my move.”
The bulky man by the front door — the thing that was human and not human at the same time — walked forward. Seven feet tall, at least. In each hand it held some kind of long, white blade.
Do not run, they will kill you if you run …
It wore no shirt, leaving its pale yellow skin exposed — yellow, the color of pus, of coagulated grease. Whitish, black-rimmed rashes dotted its wide chest and bulging, bare arms. Thick fingers flexed, thin blood oozing from cracks and splits where fingernails had fallen off.
The white blades …
The thing wasn’t holding them at all. The blades protruded from behind each wrist, jutted out from torn yellow flesh … and they weren’t blades, they were bones: jagged, pale, as long as its forearm, wicked scythes tapering to hard, sharp points.
Its jeans had shredded at the thighs to make room for rippling muscle, turning the denim into dangling strips of fabric. Its shoulders were broader than any man’s had a right to be, its neck easily thick enough to support the huge head. Long, thin patches of brown hair clung wetly to its scalp, a few more hung in front of its eyes.
It reached up a thick hand, bone-blade pointing to the ceiling, and its fingers pulled down the blue scarf.
… the face …
Cooper’s reality warped and cracked.
“Jeff?”
The monster smiled, showing teeth that had grown wider at the base, and also grown longer, like fangs with the points chipped off.
“COOOO-PERRRR.”
The Tall Man in the red jacket looked at the thing that used to be Jeff. “You know this guy?”
The monster nodded, a motion that made his massive shoulders dip up and down as if the thick neck couldn’t quite bend all the way.
The Tall Man seemed pleasantly surprised.
“Well, that’s just fucking titties and beer,” he said. He smiled at Cooper. “You can join us. We’re supposed to lie low. Stanton said to find the uninfected and get rid of them, but we’re not supposed to burn or wreck anything.”
That name again. Could it be a coincidence?
“Stanton? Steve Stanton?”
The Tall Man nodded. “Yeah. I actually got to meet him. The others haven’t.”
He said got to meet him as if it was the highest honor anyone could ever hope for.
It all fell into place. It all clicked. Stanton’s machine had grabbed something from the bottom of Lake Michigan. The Detroit incident of five years earlier … the conspiracy theories that some alien ship had been shot down … Blackmon on TV, talking about the medicine … bringing the Platypus aboard the Mary Ellen, and everyone feeling ill shortly afterward … coming to Chicago … the city becoming a living hell …
Jeff, getting sick, and now he was … that.
Cooper didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it had started when Steve Stanton walked into JBS Salvage.
So many people dead. A city in ruins. Stanton’s work had killed hundreds, thousands.
But not Sofia … YOU killed her, didn’t you?
Cooper shook away the thought. He had to think, had to get out of this alive. Knowing Jeff had earned respect from the Tall Man. Maybe knowing Steve would bring even more.
“I brought Steve Stanton to Chicago. Five days ago.” Cooper nodded at Jeff. “He was with us.”
The Tall Man took a step back. He looked at the others in an unspoken message of disbelief, then he looked at Jeff.
“You met Stanton?” The Tall Man said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
Jeff nodded again, almost bowed, a motion that made the muscles under his sickly yellow skin ripple and twitch.
“COOOO-PERRRR, MY FRIEND.”
Jeff smiled his shark-toothed smile. Cooper couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. He stared down at Sofia’s body.
You shot her you coward you murderer Jeff is a monster what the fuck what the FUCK you killed her and that’s your fault but it would have never happened if not for Stanton … Sofia would still be alive … Jeff would still be Jeff.
Fear stabbed through him, made his breath rattle, filled his head with fuzz. He wanted to curl up, shut down, hide and pray these killers would just go away. But far more than that, he wanted to live.
Cooper slid the pistol barrel into the front of his pants. He left the handle out so they could all see it. He had watched them tear a human being apart. If they realized he was lying, he’d suffer the same fate — he didn’t want them to forget he had a gun.
A gun with just four bullets.
He forced himself to look at the freakish thing that had been his best friend. Cooper would save one bullet for Jeff; he wouldn’t let his friend suffer this horror.
The Tall Man brushed his hands together, as if he was dusting them off, done with the whole scenario. He knelt, patted down Sofia’s corpse. He reached into her pocket, pulled out Cooper’s cell phone.
“That’s mine,” Cooper said. “Give it to me.”
The Tall Man stood. He shook his head. “Only group leaders get cell phones, and I’m the group leader.”
He dropped the phone on the floor, then stomped down on it with his heel, smashing it.
“There,” he said. He smiled at Cooper. “You’ll come with us.”
“Where?”
“To a hotel,” the Tall Man said. “It’s real close. This is pretty goddamn kick-ass, if you ask me. It will be great to have someone who knows Mister Stanton as part of our group.”
Cooper didn’t know what to do — if he tried to go off on
his own, would they know he was lying? Would they know he wasn’t a “friend”?
The Tall Man turned to Jeff. “Bring the woman.”
Jeff, or the thing that used to be Jeff, walked forward, shreds of his jeans swaying with each step. He reached out with his right hand, slid the jagged, pointed bone-blade into Sofia’s neck, drove it deep into her chest until his knuckles pressed against her shoulder. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing more than a bag of chips. Her arms and legs dangled limply. Her remaining blood slowly pattered down to the red-smeared floor.
Cooper stared at the woman he’d just killed. “Why are we bringing her?”
The Tall Man smiled. “It’s going to be a long night. Fresh is way better than frozen. Don’t worry — she has enough meat on her bones that we’ll all get to eat our fill. Come on.”
The Tall Man turned and walked toward the front door.
Cooper followed.
BOOK III
DEFCON 1
DAY ELEVEN
IT GETS WORSE
IMMUNIZED: 65%
NOT IMMUNIZED: 29%
UNKNOWN: 6%
FINISHED DOSES EN ROUTE: 56,503,000
DOSES IN PRODUCTION: 38,913,000
INFECTED: 1,488,650 (10,350,000)
CONVERTED: 1,300,000 (1,689,000)
DEATHS: 86,493 (12,250,000)
The Situation Room was starting to stink. Too many meals eaten at the long table, too many people, not enough showers. Murray had left only to go to the bathroom and to sleep a few hours at a time. For once, the burden of age — not being able to sleep for more than four hours at a time — produced fringe benefits.
The rest of the world’s infected estimate had surpassed the USA’s and was expected to skyrocket in the next few days. While 65 percent of Americans were now immunized, there was no measuring how many people across the globe had received the Feely yeast strain. The best estimate was just 15 percent of the world’s population.
That left six billion potential hosts.
Blackmon slept. While she did, everyone looked to Murray for answers. The disease was the thing, and he knew more about it than anyone else in the room. That meant when Cheng reported in from Black Manitou Island, it was up to Murray to ask the hard questions.
The man whose face stared out from the Situation Room’s monitor was a far cry from the smug, arrogant ass that Cheng had once been. Gone were his illusions of glamour and importance. He wasn’t looked upon as a genius that would save the country. The administration saw it a different way: instead of Cheng getting the credit for every life saved, he got the implied blame for every American death.
“Our models predict that one percent of the Chinese population is actually converted,” he said. “Only ten percent is currently infected.”
“Only ten percent,” Murray echoed. “Doctor Cheng, China has one-point-four billion people. You’re telling me you think a hundred and forty million Chinese people are infected?”
Cheng looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on this call. “That’s our best estimate. In two more days, it could go as high as four hundred million infected, but by then at least a hundred million of those would be fully converted.”
Admiral Porter shook his head. Somehow, the man never looked creased or sweaty. Maybe he changed his uniform every time he left to take a leak.
“Four hundred million,” he said. “That’s more than the entire population of the United States and Canada, combined.”
Porter was thinking in terms of an enemy force, which was exactly the right way to think about it. A thousand had destroyed Paris — what could hundreds of millions do?
“Cities will be overrun,” the admiral said. “If the numbers get that high, there’s no way to get China back under control.”
Cheng licked his fat lips, rubbed nervously at his jaw. “I’m afraid it gets worse.”
His image shrank down to the bottom right corner. The screen now showed a map of China. The west side of the country was colored mostly in light blue with some swatches of dark blue and a few spots of green. The east side was mostly dark blue with larger areas of that same green. The middle was all a very pale blue, or white.
“This is a population map of China,” Cheng said. “The majority of people live on the East Coast. The areas in green are more densely populated. Dark blue is still heavily populated but not as densely as the green. If the Chinese government focuses all or most of its efforts on saving the cities, the sparsely populated area in the middle could provide free range to millions of Converted. They could survive for months, if not years.”
Murray shook his head. “The Converted won’t last that long. They’d starve. It’s not like they can go out and farm or something, not without being seen.”
Cheng seemed uncomfortable, like he was holding something back.
André Vogel stood.
“The Converted don’t need to farm,” he said. “We just received a firsthand account from a field agent in Baltimore, uploaded before he died. I have images. They are … disturbing.”
Murray waved toward the monitor. “We’re all big boys and girls, Vogel. Put the damn pictures on the screen already.”
The map of China faded, replaced by a picture of a dead woman. Murray heard people hiss in a shocked breath, heard one man gag.
The woman lay face-up, staring at the sky. She would have been staring, that is, if she had any eyes. Most of her face had been ripped away, leaving a skeleton smile streaked with rusty red and crusty black. Arms and legs all showed patches of exposed bone.
“Another dead body,” Murray said. “So what?”
Vogel pulled out his handkerchief. “The agent said he saw Converted consuming this woman.”
Consuming. Eating.
Porter sagged in his chair. “The ultimate infantry. God dammit. They don’t need to grow food or forage — they eat what they kill.”
Deathly silences had become a regular occurrence in the Situation Room. Now Murray sat through another one, taking a moment to think.
Even if as much as 25 percent of the Chinese population became converted, that still left nine hundred million bodies’ worth of edible human-on-the-hoof.
Murray had harbored no illusions about the overwhelming magnitude of this situation, but now an even harsher truth started to hit home.
“Immunity alone isn’t going to do it,” he said quietly. “We have to find a way to kill these fucking things, all of them, or we’re facing an extinction event — we’ll be gone. Someone wake up the president. And get Margaret Montoya on this screen, right now.”
BREAKFAST
As impossible as it seemed, Cooper Mitchell slept like the dead — right up until the smell of roasting meat brought him out of it. His mouth watered for a few seconds, then filled with bile when he realized exactly what that smell was.
Sofia.
He opened his eyes. The people sleeping just a few feet away: why did they think he was one of them? If they figured out he was not, then he would be the one sizzling over the fire.
He was in the small lobby of the Park Tower hotel. Before everything went to shit, this must have been an opulent place: marble floor, black-stone columns supporting a tastefully lit ceiling, art on the teak walls and glass display cases full of large, expensive fossils. Now it looked like he’d slipped back in time to when the Neanderthals lived in caves.
Wind blew in through the broken glass of the main entrance. It had been a revolving door once, but most of it had been torn away; Cooper guessed someone had rammed a truck through it, then driven off. As you came in that open space, feet crunching on broken glass, to the left were the trashed display cases and waist-high windows — shattered, of course — that opened up onto snow-covered Chicago Avenue.
He was as far away from those windows as he could get, maybe forty feet straight back, lying on the hard floor with his shoulder pressed up against the lobby’s far wall. His new “friends” had built a fire here. A layer of smoke floated near the ceiling, swirl
ing slightly from the wind that came in off the street. To his right were the remains of the reception counter, much of which had been torn away to keep the fire going.
He didn’t want to be anywhere near the crackling flames, but the cold wouldn’t let him stray far. That meant he had to stay close to the thick pile of hot coals, and to the makeshift spit the others had crafted from street signs.
On that spit, a naked, sizzling, blackened Sofia, a signpost shoved through her mouth, down her throat and out her ass.
The Tall Man slowly rotated her. He stopped for a second, raised a fist to his mouth as his body contracted in a wheezing cough. The skin at Sofia’s right shoulder split. Juices bubbled out, dripped down to hiss against the coals, sending up a ribbon of steam that rose past her cooking body.
She counted on you. You told her you’d save her and you shot her you shot her you coward you murderer but I had to I don’t want to die …
The skin on Sofia’s head had shrunken, cracked, showed some of the white skull beneath. Someone had already eaten her eyes; empty sockets gazed out. And yet for all the damage, he still recognized her face.
Cooper sensed someone coming up from behind. He closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep. If he flinched, if he lost it and started running, they would know he wasn’t one of them.
A hand patting his back, a friendly thump-thump that felt like being smacked with a heavy mallet. Each connection filled Cooper with an eruption of fear. His heart threatened to blast right out of his chest. He kept his eyes closed.
Stay still stay still don’t flinch don’t panic don’t run …
Another thump-thump. Cooper couldn’t fake sleep any longer. He opened his eyes — it was the Monstrosity Formerly Known as Jeff, crouching down on his heels. Jeff’s pale-yellow face broke into a long-toothed smile.
“COOOOPERRRR.”
Cooper came very close to shitting himself.
“Hey, Jeff,” he said. What else could he say?
Jeff’s horrid smile widened. A gnarled hand reached up — Cooper flinched, knew the bone-blade sticking out of Jeff’s forearm would punch right through him, but then the pale, white scythe pointed to the ceiling. Jeff’s gnarled fingers slid across his own scalp, lifted imaginary hair away from his swollen, yellow forehead. It was an instinctive motion, one he had made hundreds of thousands of times in his life, but his light-brown locks were no more. The fingers barely moved the few strands of hair that clung wetly to his scalp.