by Scott Sigler
Tim felt for the man. Cooper had been through so much. Forget the capital C and Z, this guy was all-caps CRAZY, with some exclamation points to boot.
But Tim also sensed Cooper was leaving out a few bits of information — rather disturbing bits, based on what he was willing to share — but his babbling tale provided a quick overview on the hydra contagion’s morphology. It was everything Margaret had hoped for and more: the ultimate weapon against the Converted.
Cooper’s story ended with him lying under a decomposing body, which explained the slime. Tim felt suddenly grateful for the CBRN suit, which filtered out most of Cooper’s rather pungent stench of death.
“That’s everything that happened,” Cooper said. “I told you what I saw, so now you can get me out of this city.”
“Soon,” Tim said. “We have a little bit of work to do here first.”
Cooper’s hands shot out, fingers clutching Tim’s thick suit. He pulled hard, his face mashing into Tim’s gas mask, their foreheads touching, the mask’s lenses the only thing separating their eyes.
“Get me the FUCK out of here!”
Clarence stepped in fast and grabbed Cooper’s wrists. An instant later, the man lay facedown with Clarence straddling his back.
Tim just stood there, not knowing what to do as Cooper thrashed and screamed.
“Get me out of here you assholes get me out of here please please I don’t wanna die!”
“Calm down,” Clarence said. “You’re not going to die.” He pulled zip strips out of a pocket in his webbing, and in a flash had Cooper’s hands bound tightly behind him.
Clarence picked the man up off the floor and set him in the swivel chair.
Cooper Mitchell stared out for a second, then began to giggle.
“Die-die-die,” he said. “Am I tasty? Death is die-die-dielicious!”
The man’s screams echoed through the ruined lobby, seemed to make the Rangers skittish.
Clarence gave Tim’s shoulder a light smack. “Would you shut this guy up?”
Tim reached into the medkit and found a vial of etomidate. He quickly prepped a syringe, then injected it into the IV line.
Cooper continued to struggle for a few seconds, but quickly lost energy. He babbled a bit more, then his head drooped.
Tim could agree with Cooper on one thing, at least: he also wanted to get the fuck out of Chicago
“Don’t drug him too much,” Clarence said. “We might still need to move on short notice. Now get to work and find out if he’s got our magic bug.”
Tim again looked across the lobby — there was Margaret, still watching, not making any movement toward them. If she moved any farther away, she’d be out on the sidewalk.
“Clarence, get Margo over here,” Tim said. “This is supposed to be her show, man. We still have to thaw out the bodies from the lobby so we can get blood and tissue samples.”
Clarence shook his head. “I’ll get some Rangers to help you. Margaret told me she needs to examine the room where we found Mitchell. She said that’s the best place to start for environmentals.”
“What? But that doesn’t—”
“Stop talking, start working,” Clarence said. “I don’t want to stay here a second longer than we have to.”
Clarence walked to the elevator. Margaret joined him, as did the SEAL named Bogdana, who carried a limp CBRN suit under one arm. Just before the doors shut, she looked at Tim for a moment, then stared at Cooper Mitchell. Even through her mask, Tim saw Margaret’s eyes narrow into slits of pure hate.
The elevator doors slid shut, and they were gone.
What was she doing? If she wanted to look for environmental factors, she should be starting in the lobby, where Mitchell had videotaped the bodies, where the Converted had died.
Tim shook it off. Margaret knew what she was doing. He turned back to the unconscious Mitchell.
“Well, Mister Mostly Unconscious, let’s find that magic bug so we can get the hell out of here,” Tim said. “I really don’t want to be here long enough to find out if I’m die-die-dielicious.”
Cooper Mitchell didn’t say anything.
Tim got to work.
FLASH MOB
Steve Stanton shivered despite his thick jacket, snowpants, gloves and hat. The wind and the cold had both intensified when the sun went down.
He and General Dana Brownstone stood in the front of a public transit bus, looking through binoculars at the soldiers around the Park Tower Hotel. Just ahead of the bus, dozens of Chosen Ones stayed low behind a barrier made of cars, trash bins, doors and general refuse.
Hatchlings scurried in and around the objects, secreting a brown fluid that was quickly transforming the barrier into a solid wall. Steve’s people had tested that material in several places through the city — it stopped all small-arms fire, probably stopped everything shy of a tank cannon.
Fortunately, the humans didn’t have a tank.
General Brownstone lowered her binoculars. “The sun will be coming up in a few hours, Emperor. I recommend we attack before dawn.”
Steve lowered his binoculars as well. He stared out at his people, and beyond them to the towering tan hotel rising high into the night sky.
“Maybe we should wait for morning,” he said. “We have a mob, not a trained army. I don’t want our people accidentally wasting bullets on each other.”
Brownstone smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Emperor. The humans were kind enough to put on uniforms.”
Steve gave Brownstone an admiring look — he should have thought of that. Just shoot at the people in the uniforms and bulky suits. How much easier could it be?
He lifted the binoculars again. He could make out the heads and shoulders of a few masked soldiers peeking out from behind the line of ruined cars. To the right of an overturned VW Beetle, the few remaining streetlights played off the black barrel of a nasty-looking, tripod-mounted weapon. The human soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but they were special forces, well armed and clearly disciplined. They would kill Steve’s Chosen People by the thousands.
Good thing he had hundreds of thousands.
And it wasn’t like the Chosen Ones were some barbarian army armed with spears and knives: his people had guns, too — and he had special soldiers of his own.
He lowered the binocs, let them dangle against his sternum.
“How many fighting-capable followers have smartphones?”
“One thousand, two hundred and twelve,” Brownstone said instantly. “Each phone is held by the head of a primary cell, and each primary cell has visual or foot-messenger connections to three secondary cells. We can quickly coordinate an infantry force of thirty thousand.”
Steve held out his hand, palm up. Brownstone handed him a phone. He looked at the time: 3:33 A.M. Most of those thirty thousand Chosen Ones could reach this location within forty-five minutes or less. He called up Twitter, logged on to his @MonstaMush account. He typed in his message:
Bottle poppin’ 4am, party 4:10. #ChicagoFlashMob. Hug & hold #ChicagoVIP if u find him! Please RT!
He hit “send.”
Brownstone looked at the message. “Aren’t you concerned the human signal intelligence analysts will see that?”
Steve shrugged. “Nationwide, there’s probably still a thousand tweets a second. If anyone sees it, they won’t know what it means, and even if they somehow figure it out they won’t be able to react soon enough.”
Brownstone nodded. “If the humans have overhead surveillance, they’ll spot our coordinated movement. We can expect air support to arrive quickly — predator drones, Apaches, possibly other aircraft we haven’t seen yet.”
“Let them come,” Steve said. “Get word to the rooftops. From here on out, destroy whatever flies in.”
Brownstone saluted. “Yes, Emperor.” She exited the bus. She would carry Steve’s orders to the masses.
He looked out the bus’s door to the yellow-skinned bull hiding alone behind a burned-out Mercedes thirty feet away. T
he day before, that bull had come looking for Steve. It had made contact with dozens of Chosen Ones along the way, and not one of them had fallen ill. Jeremy Ellis had taken the bull straight to his biology lab, yet found no trace of disease. Ellis thought the bulls were not only immune to Cooper Mitchell’s disease, they also weren’t carriers of it.
“Yo!” Steve yelled to the bull. “Are you ready to find your old friend?”
Like a puppy called by its master, the massive creature took two hurried steps toward the bus before it stopped, remembering it wasn’t supposed to get close.
“COOOOOPERRRRRR,” the bull said. “FIND… COOOPERRRRR.”
Steve smiled. God willing, Cooper Mitchell would die at the hands of his lifelong friend. The mutated hands, with those awesome bone-blades.
All things in due time. Steve checked the cell phone: forty minutes to go…
GAME CHANGE
Jackpot.
Tim lifted his head from the microscope. He wanted to drink scotch and screw and watch cartoons… maybe in that order, maybe not. He wanted to party.
Cooper Mitchell’s blood contained thousands of hydras.
Tim had also found dead hydras in the frozen bodies that had been in the hotel lobby. Correlation wasn’t causation, true, but the results pointed to one motherfucker of a correlation: Cooper Mitchell was Patient Zero. The good kind of Patient Zero.
I’ve got you Norman Bates bitches by the short and curlies… you’re all gonna die.
“Cooper, you lovely, lovely bastion of microbial awesomeness, you might have just saved the world.”
The man’s story indicated he infected those around him almost immediately. The hydras debilitated individuals within just eight to twelve hours of initial exposure, killed them within twenty-four. What was more, Cooper said he hadn’t touched any of the people who had found him in the Walgreens, yet at least five of the six had contracted the fatal pathogen. That meant the hydras were airborne, and were highly contagious; just being in the same room was enough.
It didn’t matter what Margaret found up on the eighteenth floor, or anywhere else for that matter. The mission became one simple objective: get Cooper Mitchell out of Chicago and into a lab.
According to Cooper, only the “Jeff Monster” had survived the twenty-four-hour lethality. Tim had seen images of the big creatures, so different they looked more akin to gorillas than humans. That kind of large-scale physical alteration required large-scale genetic change: perhaps hydras took longer to affect them, or possibly didn’t affect them at all.
But that wasn’t Tim’s problem. The hydras killed the other known forms — the dead in the Park Tower’s lobby included two triangle hosts, two kissyfaces and one that had no marks of any kind yet died all the same.
He couldn’t wait to tell Margaret. She’d want to double-check Tim’s results, see for herself if he’d gotten it right. Of course, she’d actually have to come to the lab area to do that, actually have to stand next to Cooper Mitchell.
Which she wasn’t doing… she hadn’t even come near Cooper…
Margaret had been hands-on with Walker and Petrovsky. Years earlier, she’d personally done the work on Martin Brewbaker, Perry Dawsey, Betty Jewel and Carmen Sanchez. She’d been up-close and personal with infected both living and dead. Why would she go out of her way to avoid Cooper?
Because she knew that Cooper’s hydras killed the Converted.
She knew, and she didn’t want to die.
Tim slapped himself lightly on the sides of his masked head, left-right-left-right. Margaret couldn’t be infected. She’d tested negative. She’d taken the inoculant, then tested negative some more. And besides that, she was Margaret Montoya, grand defender of the human race.
She tested negative…
But so had that diver, Cantrell, who had tried to kill Margaret during the escape from the Brashear. Tim had written Cantrell’s behavior off to panic and confusion from the attack, the explosion that had blown his cell open, from breathing in a near-lethal dose of bleach. Why? Because Cantrell had shown no signs of infection.
That corpse in the Park Tower lobby, the tall one in the red coat, he had no signs of infection, either, yet his blood had been full of hydras all the same…
Tim lunged for the med kit. He tore it open, throwing things aside until he found what he needed: a cellulose tester. The unit would work on a dead body just as well as on a live one.
OBEY
Clarence stood in the doorway of Room 1812, waiting for a chance to be useful. Margaret wouldn’t even let him help with little things like gathering samples or moving that nasty body. She was happy to let the SEAL, Bogdana, handle all of that.
Margaret was acting odd, even stranger than she’d acted on the Coronado. She had always wanted to be hands-on, yet now she was letting Tim do the dirty work? The most important work?
She said it was because of the baby: she wasn’t taking any chances. Clarence wasn’t about to argue with that. She shouldn’t have come in the first place.
Margaret didn’t touch anything in Room 1812. She insisted Bogdana wear the CBRN suit for this particular bit of work. Being unprotected on the streets was one thing, while handling a corpse was another. She directed his actions: move the rotting body; fill this vial; scoop up that slime; and on and on.
Clarence’s headset crackled, followed by Tim’s voice on the open channel.
“This is Doctor Feely.” He sounded upset. “Clarence, are you out there? Talk to me, man.”
Margaret’s head snapped up.
Clarence reached to thumb the “talk” button, paused when Margaret held up a hand palm out: stop right there.
“Don’t answer him,” she said. “I need your help, right now.”
He’d stood there for fifteen minutes with his thumb up his ass and now she needed him?
He held up a finger, asking her to be quiet as he thumbed the “talk” button.
“Feely, this is Clarence, go ahead.”
“I found… uh, is Margaret with you by chance?”
“She is.”
“Ah,” Tim said. “Well… I found something. Can you come down here? Now? It’s really important.”
Margaret shook her gas-mask-covered head. Was she playing some kind of mind game? Was she craving protection, perhaps because of the baby, or was this another punishment for him leaving her? Whatever her reason, Clarence didn’t have time to play along.
He thumbed the “talk” button again. “I’ll be right down, Tim.”
Margaret pointed to the floor. “I need you here. Do not go down there, Clarence, you hear me?”
Bogdana watched them both, the eyes behind his gas mask showing an expression of annoyed disbelief.
Maybe Margaret had good reason to be mad, but that didn’t change the fact that Clarence had a job to do.
“Bogdana,” Clarence said to the SEAL, “stay with Doctor Montoya until I check this out. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
Bogdana nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take care of the doc.”
Clarence hesitated a moment, looked at Margaret’s angry stare one more time, then jogged toward the elevator.
BALLS
Tim knew.
Margaret could tell from the sound of his voice. She didn’t know how he’d figured it out, but there was no question — he knew.
She had to act now.
“Sorry about this, Bogdana, but I really need a skin sample from the genitalia.”
The man’s shoulders dropped. “Please tell me you’re kidding.” Margaret shook her head. Her suit’s gas mask wobbled just a little, despite the fact that she had it on so tight it partially cut off the circulation in her face.
“Sorry, but it has to be done.”
She forced herself closer to the bloated corpse. A puddle of fluid stained the carpet beneath it — liquid from decomposition rather than blood. The man’s penis and testicles looked black and shriveled, like a rotten avocado spotted with moisture.
“I need a sample�
�� — she pointed to the decomposing member — “from right below his scrotum.”
Bogdana shook his head, sighed. “My mother will be so proud that her only son is the military’s highest-paid collector of fromunda cheese.”
He knelt on both knees, then reached a gloved hand under the corpse’s genitalia. He lifted gently, bent his head for a closer look.
Margaret quietly drew the Sig Sauer P226 from her thigh holster. She pointed it at the back of Bogdana’s head and pulled the trigger.
SHOTS FIRED
Clarence exited the elevator and strode toward Tim’s lab area. The little scientist jogged to meet him halfway, feet crunching on the broken glass and bits of charred wood scattered about the lobby.
“It’s Margaret,” Tim said. “I think she’s infected.”
Clarence stopped. What kind of bullshit was Tim trying to pull? Was the little coward looking for a way out?
Tim grabbed Clarence’s arm, pulled him toward Cooper Mitchell. The man was moving again, head lolling as he struggled to wake up.
Tim looked back to the elevator, then around the lobby. He leaned in close.
“You heard me,” he said. “Margaret is infected.”
Clarence yanked his arm free of Tim’s anxious grip.
“She’s not. She’s been with us the whole time. She drank the inoculant. So did I. So did you.”
Tim nodded rapidly, continued to glance at the elevator. Clarence understood why — he was afraid Margaret might come down. He was afraid of Margaret.
“I know she did,” Tim said. “The only thing that makes sense is she was exposed before we left the Brashear. By the time she drank the yeast, she’d already been infected for more than twenty-four hours, so it was too late to save her. Come on, man, she wouldn’t come anywhere near Cooper. Does that sound like Margaret to you?”