by Scott Sigler
“That’s funny,” she said, “I don’t feel all that sexy right now.”
The noises outside the room grew louder. Whoever it was, they were coming close. It wasn’t just the sound of people talking loudly — Cooper heard doors opening.
Sofia lifted the gun again, but this time butt-first. She offered him the handle.
He took it. His hand slid around the grip, his finger felt the cool reassurance of the trigger.
The room’s lights went out — the sensor that detected motion didn’t pick up their movements from behind the tables.
Cooper made himself as small as he could. Gun in hand, he waited.
The room door flew open, letting in dim light from the hall. Cooper gripped the gun tighter… should he pop up and fire? No, no he would wait just a moment more, maybe the person would leave.
On the other side of the overturned table, just fifteen feet away, someone was standing in the doorway.
Cooper waited.
Seconds later, that angular swath of light narrowed, narrowed, blinked out accompanied by the door latch’s soft click.
Cooper leaned to the side, peeked out under the edge of the round tabletop.
It was too dark. He couldn’t see anything.
His right hand held the gun out in front of him. With his left, he reached up above his head and waved.
The lights blinked on: the room was empty.
“They’re gone,” he whispered.
She leaned against him. “Thank God.”
Sofia slid down to her side, rested her head in his lap. He started to stroke her hair, an automatic movement. Then he realized that while she had checked him for triangles, he had never checked her.
“Your tongue,” he said. “Let me see it.”
She didn’t complain. She looked up at him, opened her mouth wide and stuck out her tongue.
Normal.
“Thanks,” he said.
She put her head back in his lap. He resumed stroking her hair. They were two strangers trying to deal with the incomprehensible, finding small comfort in physical contact.
“Cooper, you got a phone?”
He nodded. “You?”
“Battery’s dead,” she said. “I called 911 about a hundred times. No one answered. I called all my people, same thing. Think maybe I could use yours to call my son?”
Cooper pulled his phone out of his pocket: his battery icon showed one bar out of five. Not much power left. He handed it to her.
She took it, gratitude in her eyes. She slowly dialed a number, put the phone to her ear.
Cooper watched, waited. Sofia’s face held only a shred of hope, a shred that didn’t last long. Cooper heard the mumbled words of someone’s voice mail, then the beep.
“Baby, it’s Momma,” Sofia said. “I’m still alive. If you get this, call me at this number, okay? Please, baby. I love you.”
She disconnected but held the phone to her chest. “I’m sorry to ask this, but do you mind if I hold on to it? I… I just wouldn’t want to miss the call, if it comes in.”
Cooper started to say no, but who was he going to call? Jeff wasn’t answering. Neither was 911. Cooper didn’t know a soul in Chicago. If it gave this woman some comfort to hold on to the phone, that was fine, as long as they stuck together.
“Sure,” he said. “Listen, I’m not a doctor, but maybe I should look at your wound.”
She nodded. She reached down to pull up her bloody shirt. He helped her.
Cooper had never seen a gunshot wound before. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, what he was looking for, but despite the blood it didn’t seem that bad. The bullet hadn’t gone through her as much as it had ripped off a chunk of her side.
He gently put a finger near the wound, not on it, and pressed.
She hissed in pain. “How’s it look, Mister I’m Not a Doctor?”
He shrugged. “Don’t really know. Don’t think you’re going to die, but we need to stop the bleeding.”
Cooper looked around, saw the piled-up tablecloth. He grabbed a handful and dragged it over.
“Sofia, this is going to hurt.”
“Can’t hurt any worse than it already does. Go for it.”
He gently laid the tablecloth on her side, then pressed down. Her body stiffened. She hissed in an angry breath.
“Shit,” she said. “Guess I was wrong.”
“Direct pressure,” Cooper said. “I have to—”
“I know, I know. Just talk about something else, okay? You from around here?”
“No,” he said. “Michigan.”
“Lions fan?”
“Unfortunately, yes. All my life.”
“Sucks to be you,” she said. “Go Bears. I work here. Front desk, hospitality.”
Cooper remembered calling for security after seeing the wounded teenage kid outside his room.
“Did you work with a woman named Carmella?”
He felt Sofia nod.
“I think she’s infected,” Cooper said. “I called down earlier, she said some awful things.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Sofia said. “Even before this started, Carmella was a real bitch.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The lights clicked out, once again drenching them in darkness.
“So,” she said, “what brings you to town?”
“Work. I mean, a postwork celebration kind of thing. We work on a boat and just finished up a big job.”
“We?”
“My partner and me.”
“You gay?”
“The other kind of partner.” Cooper thought of telling her about the cocoons, but if he did, she might think Jeff was something to be shot, not someone to be saved. “He was gone when I woke up this morning. I can’t find him.”
They fell silent for a moment. He stroked her hair, felt her relax a little more.
“This shit is insane,” Sofia said. “I heard the president was saying something about it a couple of days ago, but I have two jobs — who has time to follow politics, right? Yesterday morning we got a delivery of that inoculant gunk she was talking about. It was meant for the rich guests. I sneaked a bottle, drank it. Maybe that’s why I’m not sick.”
Cooper remembered the speech, remembered Blackmon talking about some kind of medicine.
“Is there any more of that stuff here?”
He felt her shrug. “I don’t think so. Most of it got delivered to the top floors, the suites.”
Blackmon’s medicine had arrived in time to help make a difference, and the one-percenters got priority? It infuriated him, but he knew he shouldn’t be surprised: some things never change.
He felt Sofia’s blood cooling in the damp tablecloth.
“How’d you wind up getting shot?”
She paused, seemed to gather herself.
“This morning, all this shit was going on outside,” she said. “Explosions, fires. These two pigs came in. We thought they were there to take care of things, you know? But they just started shooting people. Peter, a guy who was working with me, they shot him in the head. They got a couple others too, I think. I don’t know for sure, because I ran.”
She sounded a little guilty, as if she should have gone all Rambo on two trigger-happy psycho cops.
“You’re alive,” Cooper said. “You did what you had to do.”
He felt her shrug again. “I guess. One of them shot me just as I reached the stairs. He followed me down. He cornered me. He… I think he was going to rape me or something.”
Cooper remembered the bald man… give us a smooch.
“He tried to kiss you? That why you wanted to see my tongue?”
He felt Sofia nod.
“Asshole was crazy,” she said. “He tried to pull me close… he had both hands on my shoulders. He was so strong. I kicked him in the balls and it didn’t do anything. I think he laughed, like it was a fun game or something. He came at me again… he stuck his tongue in my mouth. I felt those fucking bumps. They stung.”
Cooper tried not to flinch, to jerk away. He realized he’d made a huge mistake. Just because her tongue looked normal didn’t mean she wasn’t infected. She claimed to have taken the inoculant, but how did he know she was telling the truth? Was she going to change? Was she changing that very second? Would she attack him the way the bald man had?
He looked down at her, a dark, warm shape in his lap. She was a danger… he had a gun. All he had to do was put a bullet in her, then he’d be safe for certain.
But Sofia seemed normal. He needed normal. Maybe she wasn’t lying about drinking the stuff from the government. Maybe she was fine.
Maybe.
“I think your bleeding is slowing down,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“You mean aside from being shot?”
He nodded. “Aside from that.”
“Fine, I guess,” she said. “If you don’t count the fact that you’re jamming your fist into my bullet wound.”
He wanted to hear the rest of her story. “So how did you get away from the cop?”
She paused. He felt her arm slide around his back, felt her pull herself tighter to him. She was tough, no question, but there was still a frightened woman in there, a frightened woman who wanted comfort.
“He was forcing me to kiss him. He had his hands on my shoulders. His gun was in his holster. I grabbed it.”
For the first time, Cooper actually looked at the flat-black pistol in his hand. The faint, red light of the Exit sign played off the black barrel, enough for him to read the engraving on the side: SPRINGFIELD ARMORY U.S.A., along with the stylized letters XDM.
Cooper had never owned a gun. He’d been to a firing range three times in his life, all three times with Jeff, all three times just for fun. He hadn’t totally forgotten how to work a pistol. He pushed the release lever, slid the magazine out. On the back of the magazine, he saw two vertical rows — tiny dots that looked gold if a bullet was in there, black if there wasn’t. He counted seven spots of gold.
“Holds sixteen rounds,” Sofia said. “After the cop, other men tried to get me. I only missed twice. One in the chamber, so you’ve got eight left.”
He turned the weapon this way and that, looking for an orange dot.
“Where’s the safety?”
“Trigger and back-strap safeties,” she said. “Don’t worry about them. Just hold the gun tight, give the trigger a smooth pull.” Her voice dropped to barely a hiss. He heard anguish in her words. “It will shoot, trust me on that.”
The gunshots he’d heard while in the boiler room… how many of those had been hers? He’d killed the bald man with his bare hands. She’d killed people with this gun.
“It’s okay,” Cooper said, unsure if he was consoling her, or himself. “You did what you had to do. So did I.”
And in that moment, he knew he was in this with Sofia all the way — whatever the fuck was going on, they would face it together.
He kept pressing the tablecloth against her side, even though his arm was starting to tire. It had to hurt her, hurt her bad, but in seconds she started to snore.
Cooper Mitchell sat in the darkness, this brave stranger’s head in his lap, wondering what the hell they should do next.
DAY TEN
#APOCALYPSE
@Ticonderagga:
OMG, my neighbor just went ape-shit and attacked his wife! Pittsburgh PD shot him dead. Can’t believe this is happening.
@PickleThruster10:
15-car pileup on I-80 South. Looks like a guy cut in front of a tanker truck. Traffic at a dead stop — not going anywhere. #FuckingTraffic #AsianDrivers
@LongIslandIcy-T:
If anyone gets this, we’re trapped on roof at W139th & Amsterdam. Cops aren’t responding to 911. This guy is trying to kill us! Please send help!
@AlabamaCramma:
Explosions in downtown MLPS. News coverage spotty, says 30-40 dead, many more injured.
@Boston_Police:
Emergency notice: 24-hour curfew in effect. Stay in your homes. Do not let anyone in. Do not go into public areas. Do not approach police officers.
@WhiteSoxChum:
Where the FUCK is the nat guard? Riot in street. I see dead bodies. Where are the cops? This is insane.
@BACOemergency:
Power is out throughout Baltimore. No ETA on recovery. Conserve cell phone power. Fill all available pots with water. Do not drink tap water after 5pm.
THE CITY OF LIGHTS
Murray watched it unfold on the Situation Room’s big monitor. The estimates were changing: some for the better, some for anything but:
IMMUNIZED: 43%
NOT IMMUNIZED: 50%
UNKNOWN: 7%
FINISHED DOSES EN ROUTE: 70,115,000
DOSES IN PRODUCTION: 58,653,000
And, at the bottom:
INFECTED: 976,500 (1,800,000)
CONVERTED: 250,250 (187,000)
DEATHS: 13,457 (30,000)
They’d added parentheses to the bottom numbers, representing global totals. The outbreaks of America and England were already producing cataclysmic numbers. China remained silent; that nation’s numbers could only be estimated based on limited satellite data and the stories of the refugees trickling into Myanmar and Vietnam. No refugees were hitting Japan, however — the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force sank anything that came near the coast. Murray didn’t know if those casualties were counted in the tally.
As for France, well… the number of deaths in parentheses would need to be updated.
Paris burned.
The screens showed different angles of a city ablaze. Fire raged, consuming buildings both classic and new. The dancing orange demons cast tall, flickering spires up to the night sky, spewing pillars of smoke into the blackness above.
Motherfucking Paris.
Some of the shots were from helicopters, some from the ground well outside the city proper, and two came from satellites. The scenes reminded Murray of watching the shock and awe of Desert Storm, but it was even worse than that — this level of destruction hadn’t been seen since World War II, since Dresden: he was watching a firestorm.
The unthinkable scenario had begun just a few hours earlier. There was no chance of controlling it. The French government had stopped giving death toll updates. The president, his cabinet, and much of the legislature had fled the city, hoping to set up somewhere else, to maintain government, to keep the head attached to the snake. Everyone who could get out of Paris probably already had.
Those who remained in the city were either dead or about to die. Black, white, Arab. Native sons and daughters. Immigrants. Today there was no confusion about French identity — burned bodies all look the same.
“This can’t be happening,” André Vogel said. When China shut off communications, Vogel’s veneer of confidence had shattered and hadn’t returned. “The fire crews… where are the fire crews?”
“They’re dead.”
All eyes turned to Pierce Fallon, the director of national intelligence. Fallon always had a seat at the table — he just didn’t say much unless he was asked, or unless he knew exactly what was happening. He was as unassuming as he was quiet, the kind of man who could effortlessly fade into the background.
“Those flames will rage until there’s nothing left to burn,” Fallon said. “We have multiple reports of firehouses being attacked at noon, Paris time. Assault and murder of fire department personnel, destruction of vehicles and equipment, fires set to the stations themselves. This drew an immediate police response, but armed gangs were waiting to ambush the police.”
He paused as something exploded on-screen. Another building collapsed.
“At twelve-thirty P.M., Paris time, there were reports of attacks on petrol stations, stores, anything that would burn fast and spread the fire to neighboring buildings,” Fallon said. “With the city’s fire response crippled, the results” — he gestured to the screen, where the Eiffel Tower looked like a black spike jutting up from the flames of hell —
“were quite predictable.”
Blackmon looked shocked, a rare crack in her emotional armor. “You’re telling me this was a coordinated attack?”
Fallon nodded. “No question, Madam President. We estimate about a thousand insurgents were involved.”
A single word instantly changed the tone of the room: not infected, or converted, but insurgents — an organized force.
“One thousand,” Blackmon said. Her shoulders drooped. “The city stood for centuries. Just one thousand people destroyed it.”
Murray’s soul sagged with the hopelessness of it all. No invading force. No trained army. Paris had been destroyed by people who knew the city’s streets, the routes, knew how the police acted, knew where all the fire stations were — Paris had been destroyed by Parisians.
Blackmon turned to Murray. “A coordinated strategy,” she said. “Can that happen here?”
Once again, he was out on a limb, giving his best guess at something not even the smartest people he’d ever met could understand.
He gestured to the monitor. “Right now, we’re looking at a feed from CNN. The entire world is watching the same images we are. These Converted are obviously more organized than we’ve seen in the past. We have to assume some of them are watching this, and are seeing a strategy that works. If their goal is to destroy, now they know how.”
Blackmon put her hands on her face, rubbed vigorously. She lowered them, blinked and raised her eyebrows.
“Get the word out to law enforcement in the major cities — and especially Chicago, New York, the places most heavily infected — that they need to protect fire stations.”
People started to talk, to protest, but the president held up her hands for silence.
“I know every police force is already spread thin,” she said. “But if a city can’t fight fire, then we lose that city. Even if it’s a couple of cops in each firehouse, at least that gives us a chance.”