by Scott Sigler
“Based on what we’ve seen so far, they could not,” Murray said. “However, Doctor Montoya reported there were major changes in the way the disease behaved. I can’t rule out the possibility that the Chinese government is now under control of the Converted.”
Blackmon put both hands flat on the table. “Admiral, take us to DEFCON 3.”
FEET
A gunshot woke him up.
Cooper Mitchell knew enough not to move, not to make a sound. All he did was open his eyes. The boiler room was even darker than when he’d entered. Another bulb had been broken.
How the fuck had he fallen asleep? Had he heard the shot, or dreamed it? It had been so faint, probably from somewhere out in the hall.
There were more noises now, noises he definitely wasn’t imagining, coming from inside the boiler room. Soft sounds of surprise, perhaps of pain.
Cooper didn’t move. Jeff (and his blanket-buddies) remained on top of him, still breathing, everyone covered by the ripped, tattered brown membrane. Cooper could only see a foot or so above the floor; his view consisted of the dead bald man and some of the far wall. The boiler blocked any view to his left.
Jeff’s body still felt hot.
Coop had to pee. Real bad.
The sound of shuffling feet. More groans of pain. A noise like a yawn, if that yawn came from a gravel-voice demon.
Something moved across Cooper’s limited field of vision: feet. Walking near the dead bald man. Feet that were too large for their loafers, so big the leather seams had split. What little light there was showed a glimpse of skin inside those splits… not white skin, not black or brown or tan, but… yellow… the color of bile mixed with sour milk.
I am so fucked, so utterly fucked.
And then, something spoke.
“WHERRRRRRE…?”
The deep, drawn-out word eased through the boiler room, an audible shadow of blackness. Something about the sound resonated deep in Cooper’s chest and stomach — he felt a fear so primitive it shut down everything, left room for only one thought: to move is to die. He recognized the word, but that voice… it wasn’t human.
A second voice answered.
“BASE… MENT?”
An even deeper tone, somehow more terrifying than the first.
Cooper’s bladder let go. He was barely aware of the wet heat that spread through his crotch down his right hip, along the part of his right thigh that pressed against the concrete floor.
“COME,” said the first voice. “FIIIND… SOMEONE.”
The yellow feet shuffled away. Cooper couldn’t see where.
He was shaking. His body trembled so bad it made Jeff’s body tremble as well.
The boiler room door opened, closed.
Cooper listened as the door’s echo faded to nothing.
A long-held breath slid out of his lungs. He tried to move, but he could not. He lay there, in his own urine, shaking so badly he could barely think.
What was happening? What had made those people yellow? Gutierrez’s PSAs about “T.E.A.M.S.” had never said anything about that.
Triangles, excessive anger and massive swelling.
Cooper stuck his tongue out and felt it, checking for hard bumps, then yanked his fingers away — those fingers had touched the membrane covering Jeff. He swallowed automatically, before he thought to stop himself from doing so.
Was some of that shit now inside of him?
He had to find a place to wash up. He was in a boiler room… there had to be a sink down here somewhere. He could wash his hands, clean up the piss. Cooper slowly slid out from under Jeff. He listened carefully for any sound coming from the hallway, for any hint of sliding yellow feet.
Nothing.
He crept to the edge of the boiler, peeked around the curved edge: he saw no one, just the closed, white doors that led out into the hall.
In the hall, the yellow people could be waiting…
Cooper quietly walked deeper into the boiler room’s shadows. His eyes continued to adjust. He froze when he saw another unmoving, membrane-covered man. This one was standing, wedged against a vertical pipe. So tall… six-six? Six-seven? Tall, and thick, like an NFL lineman, but also lumpy, just like the cocooned Jeff.
Next to the encased man, Cooper saw a metal sink, the industrial kind.
What faint light there was reflected off something on the floor, something wet… water from the sink? A puddle, a thick puddle, running up to the shoes of the cocooned man.
Shoes… four of them.
Cooper looked closer. Near the head, a flap of membrane hung down. It was brown, but only on the outside — the inside looked wet-black. Behind the torn membrane, something white.
Cooper’s eyes finally adjusted to the limited light. He was staring at a skull smeared with globs of rancid black. The white bone beneath the rotted flesh looked pitted and pockmarked, like someone had sprayed it with acid.
The membrane-covered man had a lump on his left side, below the chest. The lump, it was the shape of a person… a shriveled person, as tall as Cooper but thinner than a death-camp victim.
This can’t be happening… none of it…
Cooper moved to the sink. He watched the membrane-covered man out of the corner of his eye as he turned on the hot water. He saw soap on the sink’s edge, used it to scrub his hands until they stung. He pulled handfuls of paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and used them to clean the piss from his pants.
He finished and turned off the water. He was dabbing himself dry when he heard a metallic click — the sound of the boiler room door, closing.
Cooper turned quickly, expecting to see something coming down the aisle toward him, but all he saw was the closed door. Had another of the creatures left?
Jeff.
Cooper looked left, to the base of the wall, to his friend……
the membrane, disgusting and tattered and torn, lay in a rumpled heap on the concrete floor.
Jeff was gone.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
“I’m pregnant.”
The words stunned him. Clarence Otto stared at Margaret, but he wasn’t really seeing her. He wasn’t really seeing anything.
His lungs didn’t work. The little air he still had in them came out in a single syllable:
“What?”
Margaret hadn’t talked to him for almost four days, not since the videoconference with Cheng and Murray. She’d hidden in her private mission module. She hadn’t even come out for meals. The SEALs waited on her hand and foot, bringing her whatever she needed.
And then, not even fifteen minutes ago, that tall black SEAL, Bosh, had found Clarence up on the helicopter deck, told him Margaret was waiting to speak with him in the conferencing module.
Clarence had entered. She had pointed to a chair, told him to sit. He had. Before he could even say how are you, she’d hit him with that mind-numbing news.
“I said, I’m pregnant.” Margaret stared at him. She wasn’t smiling, wasn’t frowning.
Pregnant. His wife, the woman he still loved, pregnant with his child.
“That… Margo, that’s fantastic.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Is it? Is it really fantastic, Clarence? Then I wonder why being a single mother isn’t at the top of every little girl’s lifelong wish list.”
Single mother? What was she talking about?
“I’m right here,” he said. “This is great. I mean, it’s a shock, but it’s great.”
She pointed at him. “You’re not right here, Clarence. You left me, remember? And irony of ironies, you left me because I wouldn’t have a kid.”
Everything he’d ever wanted — the woman he’d fallen in love with, a child, a family — right there in front of him. He’d waited so long for her, then made an agonizing decision. Would he lose his dream because he hadn’t been able to wait just a little bit longer?
“I know,” he said. “I did leave you, you’re right. But that was before.”
She smiled. �
��Oh, before? You mean when I was a total mess? Now that your old Margo has returned, you want a do-over on abandoning your wife?”
No, that wasn’t what he… well, yes, he did want that. He never would have left this Margaret.
“Things have changed,” he said. “Think about it — we can be a family.”
She crossed her arms again. “If I decide to keep it.”
Clarence sagged in his chair. If I decide to keep it: those six words carved a deep chasm, with her on one side and him on the other. And that decision, the fate of his unborn child… that lay on her side of the line.
“Margaret, you can’t even think that.” He tried to sound authoritative and conciliatory at the same time. All he managed to do was sound small, weak.
“Don’t tell me what to think,” she said. “This isn’t exactly an ideal world for a newborn, now is it?”
Margaret had always been pro-choice. So had Clarence. But now he had no choice. He had never felt so powerless.
He couldn’t read anything in her eyes.
“We can make it work,” he said. “We’ll stay together. That’s what you wanted.”
She nodded. “Right. What I wanted — past tense. It’s only been a few days, Clarence, but maybe me coming back to my normal self happened because you weren’t there to smother me, stifle me.” Her eyes narrowed. “You weren’t there to trap me in that house, to leave me alone all goddamn day, to…”
Her words trailed off. She closed her eyes, gave her head a tiny shake. Then she looked at him. Her expression softened a little, but there was still a hardness in there, and also something… vacant.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But it goes without saying that you better take good care of me, Clarence. You’ve got a lot of making up to do.”
She was going to make him grovel? The proud man inside wanted to turn around and walk out; the father-to-be inside, the husband inside, made him keep his ass right in that chair, made him nod.
“Whatever it takes,” he said. “Anything you need, Margo — anything.”
SOFIA
Cooper Mitchell stared down the barrel of a gun.
A woman held it. She was twentysomething, young enough to still be called a girl. She’d tied her black hair back in a loose ponytail. A look of anger and pain swirled in her dark eyes.
The girl’s right hand clutched her right side, where blood turned her yellow shirt a disturbing reddish-orange. She looked pale and weak. She held the black pistol in her shaking left hand.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t you fucking move.”
Cooper’s hands came up. He stayed as still as he could. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before.
He’d waited in the boiler room, hoping Jeff might return, but not for long — not after he found other cocoons in the shadows. Cooper had gathered up Jeff’s coat, then wandered the basement, looking for his friend, looking for a weapon.
When he’d turned a corner, he’d almost walked right into this gun-slinging girl.
Cooper bent a little, lowered his shoulders, tried to look as unthreatening as he could.
“Don’t shoot,” he said. “Please, put that down. I’m not one of them.”
Assuming she would know what them was, that he hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing, that he hadn’t dreamed about his best friend wrapped up in a membrane, hadn’t imagined strangling a triangle-tongued man to death, hadn’t made up the people with inhuman voices and swollen, yellow feet.
Her trembling aim stayed fixed on his face.
“Mister, if you think I’m going to put this down, you’re fucking retarded.”
“Fine, just try to not aim it right at me, okay? The way your hand is twitching, you might kill me by accident.”
Her eyes shifted to the gun. Her eyebrows raised — she hadn’t realized she was shaking.
She lowered the gun, rested it against her thigh. She sagged a little to the left; her foot slid over quickly to maintain her balance. She was exhausted. How much blood had she lost?
The girl jutted her chin at him.
“Stick out your tongue,” she said.
The man in the boiler room, with the triangles on his tongue… she’d seen the same thing and was guarding against it. That meant she was normal.
“Thank God,” Cooper said. “Lady, you don’t know what I’ve—”
The gun snapped up again, the barrel’s tiny, black hole a window into death.
“Your tongue, asshole.”
And then Cooper realized that he had no idea if he had triangles on his tongue or not. He rubbed it against the roof of his mouth, trying to feel bumps… he couldn’t feel anything, but did that mean they weren’t there? And if he had them, was he going to wind up like the bald guy?
Give us a smooch…
She moved her right foot back, widening her stance. She straightened her arm. She moved with confidence, like she’d done it before — this girl knew how to use a gun.
Her hand stopped trembling. “Last chance, mister.”
Cooper closed his eyes. He stuck out his tongue.
“Open your mouth wider,” she said. “Stick it out farther.”
He did. He wondered if he’d hear the bang, or if everything would just end.
The girl let out a sigh of relief.
“Okay,” she said. “I guess you’re okay. Just don’t come near me. And if you try for the gun, I’ll put you down.”
Cooper’s heart thudded fast and loud, each pump-pump raging through his ears and temples. He opened his eyes.
“Sure,” he said. “We need to get out of this hallway, find a place to hide.”
She nodded. Her gunfighter’s stance had sagged. Her eyes fluttered. She took a step back, then stumbled.
He rushed forward without thinking, his right arm sliding around the small of her back, supporting her.
“I got you,” he said. “I got you.”
For a moment, her strength gave out completely; he was the only thing holding her up. Then she stood, pushed him away. She didn’t point the gun at him, but it was close enough.
“I told you to stay away.”
His hands returned to the palms-up position. “Sorry. You were going to fall.”
She started to say something, but somewhere in the basement a door opened, slammed open — the sound echoed through the hall. He couldn’t wait for her anymore.
“Lady, I’m finding a place to hide. Come with me if you want.”
He walked away from the noises, down the concrete hallway. They were still in a service area — laundry, storage, linens, maybe a kitchen. At the end of the hall he saw double doors, a rectangular window in each.
Cooper walked to the doors, looked through the glass… a carpeted hallway. He didn’t see any movement.
The noises from behind grew louder.
He pressed the metal latch that ran horizontally along the door — unlocked. He pushed the door open and stepped through.
His feet fell silently on the carpet. Little brass plaques hung to the right of the closed, wooden doors lining both sides of the wide hall.
He turned to call for her and almost knocked her over.
“Hey, chick with the gun, mind not sneaking up on me, for fuck’s sake?”
“Sorry,” she said. Then her hand was on his back, half urging him forward, half leaning against him for support. “Hurry, someone is coming.”
Cooper walked to the first door on his left. He pushed it open — inside, darkness, save for the light from the hall flooding in, illuminating a dozen tables covered with white tablecloths and surrounded by folding chairs.
He forced himself to enter.
Three steps in, he heard a soft click and the room lights suddenly flickered on. His eyes adjusted instantly, ready and expecting to see something coming for him, but nothing moved. A carpeted wall on the left, one of those sliding dividers on the right. The room was about twenty feet wide and forty feet deep.
Some of the tables had open laptops
on them, along with pens and pads of paper embossed with the Trump Tower logo. Open bottles of water, half-full cups of coffee…
… and a body.
A bloody mess of a body, a man, still wearing a black suit, facedown, arms spread out across blood-streaked carpet. His head looked dented, smashed and cracked beneath a wet mop of black hair. In front of him lay a folded metal chair, the side of the seat streaked with blood and matted with bits of that same hair.
Cooper heard the door quietly close behind him.
“We have to hide,” the girl said. “Fast, they’re coming.”
He heard noises outside the door, had images of a horde of villagers storming down some gothic German street, torches raised high as they came to kill the monster — except he was the monster they wanted dead.
Hide? There wasn’t any place to hide. He was in a hotel conference room.
“Please,” the girl said. “I… can’t stand. Help me.”
He turned to look at her. So pale. The pistol hung heavy in her grip, as if it was all she could do to keep it from falling to the floor.
So easy to take it from her…
He pushed the thought away, moved to the back of the room. He tipped two of the round tables on their edges, tops facing the door. Tablecloths fell into wrinkled piles. The tables’ metal legs kept the round tops from rolling.
The end of the world had come, and his defense against the boogeymen was a child’s fort.
He rushed back to the woman. “Come on,” he whispered. “We can lie back here. If they do open the door, maybe they won’t see us and they’ll move on.”
He helped her walk behind the tables.
She stared down at them doubtfully. “This is the best you can do?”
“I left my army tank in my other pants.”
He helped ease her down gently. As soon as she sat, he saw her relax, the last of her fight slipping away.
The girl looked at him through half-lidded eyes. She whispered: “What’s your name?”
“Cooper,” he whispered back. “Yours?”
“Sofia.”
“That’s a sexy name.”
He gave his head a sharp shake. What the hell was he doing? Was he hitting on this girl? Now? Or maybe it was a nervous thing, an impulse to make this insanity feel at least a tiny bit normal.