"Are you Marco," Will asked.
"That's me." The big guy had his eyes on the computer screen next to him. A news site was open, where the typically alarmist media were calling the mysterious virus the zombie apocalypse. Another headline said the Governor of Illinois had declared a state of emergency.
Will pulled out his badge, thinking it might have some pull. "Do you still hang around with Stanley Sharpe?"
Marco looked over. He saw the badge, sighed, and looked Will in the eye. "Can't you leave him alone?"
"My name is Will. I'm his brother."
"I know who you are," Marco said. "You really don't remember me?"
Will squinted at him.
"Of course the football player doesn't remember the computer nerd."
I played hockey, actually, and I'm betting you didn't have a beard back then."
"Same name, though."
Will shifted on his feet. "Are you going to help me find Stan, or am I just wasting my time?"
Marco leaned over the counter. "I get that he has to answer for his crimes, same as any one of us. But to be honest, I'm a little worried about him."
"What do you mean?"
Marco sniffed, clearly uncomfortable with talking about Stan behind his back. Will could tell he really cared about Stan. That made one friend.
"Listen. Marco. If you're so concerned, tell me where to find him."
The big guy scoffed. "That's what people say right before they throw you in a cage."
"Sometimes that's where we put people so they don't hurt themselves."
The big guy nodded. "He went north."
"Anything more specific than that?"
"He didn't tell me. But he was packing a lot of warm clothes. I know he has a cabin in the Forest County area, but I never saw it."
"He bought a cabin?"
"It's where he goes when things need to cool down."
Will smirked. "A hideout."
"I guess you can call it that."
"That's a good start. Do you have his cell number?"
"Sure, but it won't do you any good," Marco said. Will shot him a confused look. "Do you even know your brother? He's got three cell phones, which by now are all burning in an alley somewhere. Stanley doesn't take risks without having a strategy. He's got a back-up plan for his back-up plan."
"And yet he still went to jail. How am I supposed to find a random cabin in the middle of Pennsylvania?"
"I don't know, man, you're the bounty hunter."
Will frowned at him. He knew the guy was holding out. "Do you want Stan to get help or not?"
Marco scratched his beard. "He's a man of many names, if you know what I mean. In Forest County, he sometimes goes by Steve Agudo."
"Thank you, Marco."
Will zipped up his coat and stepped out onto the street. He would have to pack something a little heavier when he got home- it looked like he was heading north.
Calvin stared at the hospital. His car was already parked in the public lot behind him, lit by the ghostly stare of the tall lamps overhead. He hadn't been able to take a single step in the last ten minutes. Every time he tried, that same image came back to him.
Pinkman-thing's wild slit-eyes. Broken teeth on broken skin.
The hospital had a lot of activity going on outside. A police car here, a bored film crew there. The attack at the airport had drummed up the usual interest, from the protectors and helpers to the rats and parasites.
The parasites were the very people Calvin wanted to hack. He was tired of being a part of the problem and not the solution. He needed to know how to do the things GhostBot could do. More than ever, he wanted to stop being the victim. The tools to do so were just within his grasp.
A cab pulled up to the building near the emergency entrance. A tired-looking guy got out of the back, holding a backpack. He tipped the driver, who appeared to hesitate before taking the money, and headed inside. It seemed easy enough for him to go in, so Calvin followed his lead. He took the first step, then the next, and so on.
The hospital was surprisingly calm on the inside. It hadn't occurred to him that the media wasn't allowed in, and more importantly that no one wanted to go in anyway. When words like 'infectious' and 'disease' get thrown around, people aren't too quick to visit.
The tired guy from the cab was up ahead, near the emergency room entrance. He was talking to a very official-looking bald man with a well-kept mustache. After a moment, the two men turned and walked down a hallway.
Calvin followed far behind. He pulled his hair back and tried to look like he belonged, like he was visiting someone, but he didn't go to hospitals enough to know what that meant. He ended up just looking sad.
The two men talked at first, and Calvin strained to make out their conversation. He sped his gait slightly, weaving up the hallways after them, but by the time he got close enough to hear them they'd already fallen quiet.
He turned a final corner. The two men disappeared behind a door with a red-and-white sign. Calvin almost ran to catch up until he read the sign.
Quarantine.
His heart started beating rapidly. His skin broke into a cold sweat. Calvin ran into a nearby men's room and went to the sink. He blasted the cold water and splashed it on his face. Click. Click. Click. The sound of that thing's joints as it ran. He looked around in a panic. The bathroom door was still swinging shut, making a noise every time it swung past the frame. Click. Click. Click. Was this what people meant when they talked about Post-traumatic stress? Could he get on with this life after this?
Would he ever be the same?
That was bullshit, he decided. There was no way he was letting one minute of his life define the rest of it. He turned off the faucet and dried his face with a handful of scratchy paper towels, psyching himself up for the mission ahead. GhostBot's orders were simple. Step one: go to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Step two: gather intel.
It was time for step two.
Calvin left the bathroom, and with it all doubt. He power-walked to the door the two men had disappeared through and placed his hand directly on the quarantine sign, just to show how much he wasn't afraid.
As he swung the door open, practically ready to announce his arrival, the sound of glass shattering stopped him in his tracks.
Screams followed, mixed with glass tinkling to the floor. The two men Calvin had followed were twenty feet ahead, in front of a glass wall. Their bodies were tense. Beyond the glass, a man in a blue biohazard suit stood among a bunch of gurneys that held dead bodies. One of them had the blanket pulled back, displaying an all-too-familiar man with half his head blown off.
And yet, all of that wasn't what had Calvin's full attention. Further down the hall, a woman in a hospital gown was slowly rising as two shouting police officers aimed their guns at her. The way she tilted her head to the side, he could see her face was dripping with dark blood.
"Screw this," Calvin said. He turned tail and ran.
-9-
April 20th, 2015
DAY 3
4 A.M.
Stanley could feel the claws around his neck, starting to cut off his air. He groped in the blackness until he found his phone next to him on the cold, Nylon ground. He unlocked it and held it out like a torch.
The screen just barely lit up his face and a circle around him. The supplies were piled up on all sides. As he caught his breath, he remembered setting up the sleeping bag in the back and lying down to sleep.
The claws. The suffocating. It was a dream. A nightmare.
It only should have been a six or seven hour drive from D.C. to the cabin, but he'd stopped more times than he could count. He needed to log in and see what was happening in the world. The radio had been alive with rising reports of contagion and violence, but he didn't trust the news media's coverage of the weather, let alone something as important as this. All the stress and the lack of sleep from the last few days had started to catch up to him. The third time he nodded off, he decided to pull over into a p
arking lot and get some sleep. He was no use to anyone dead, wrapped around a tree and bleeding out.
The air was frigid. It was so cold he could see his breath in the light of his phone. He got up and moved to the front, where he found he couldn't see out of the windshield. The side windows were blocked, too. As he got closer, he realized they were covered in snow.
"See? The news didn't say it was supposed to snow."
A few hours later, he sat in the corner booth at a tiny diner he'd been to a few times before, while outside the snow continued to cover the ground in a blanket of white. It fell in clumps with hardly any wind to move it around. Back in Washington D.C., April brought rising temperatures up into the seventies, and it almost never snowed. Pennsylvania was a different beast altogether. Snow was still a normal occurrence during the month, usually light but sometimes more. The truth was, some of the largest snowfalls ever recorded in Pennsylvania had occurred during the month of April.
Stanley adjusted the backpack next to him on the bench, pressing it against his side. He wasn't letting his laptop out of his sight any time soon, and possibly ever again. A dark-haired waitress came up to his table as he attempted to focus on something other than the newspaper someone had left on the next table. Zombie Apocalypse Grips Chicago, the headline read.
"Hey. You're Steve, right?"
He looked up at her, barely containing his panic. "Uh, no."
She laughed softly, hazel eyes twinkling. "Yeah, you are. I remember you."
"You must be confusing me with someone else."
"No, it's you. You made a pass at me if I remember right."
He glanced at her name tag. Elaine. "That doesn't even sound like me," he lied, remembering her very well.
"Don't worry, I'm used to much creepier guys trying to get my number. We get lots of folks from the city through here. For some reason they think us country girls are like fish in a barrel."
What an idiot he'd been, frequenting the same place more than once, making an impression on the locals. He was supposed to be invisible, untraceable, unreachable. Instead he'd been thinking with something other than his brain the last time he came through here.
"I'm sorry, but I have to go," he said, gathering up his laptop as she watched him with a confused expression. He started to leave, got halfway to the door, turned around and came back to throw a few twenties on the table.
"That's way too much," Elaine noted.
"Sorry. How much was it?"
She smiled. "You didn't order anything."
"Sorry. Keep it. Sorry," he said and hurried out the door, cursing under his breath the whole way.
The truck sped up I-270 with a full tank of gas, traveling the speed limit and not a bit more. There was no reason to stop and no use risking a ticket. Will wanted to get this job over with as quickly and safely as possible.
The I-270 left the city and became the I-70, weaving through rural country. Some time after he crossed the Pennsylvania border, where a simple, blue sign welcomed him to the state of independence, the I-70 gave way to the I-76, where it had apparently been snowing a while. Then the I-99. Then the I-80. Small town after small town formed and fell away, bordered on all sides by farmland.
He didn't stop once. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't even listen to the radio. He drove in silence, focused on the road ahead.
Once he hit the 36, where the snowstorm was really in full swing, he started asking around at every rest stop he came across. Even though he knew his brother wasn't a fan of them- too many cameras for starters- there was always the chance someone had spotted him. A few small leads sent him up Route 62. He spoke to at least three people who thought they'd seen a poorly kept green van heading that direction, two of which he actually believed. It was enough to reassure him that he was on the right trail- a trail that was becoming snowier by the minute.
Route 62 was where he started to get a little road crazy. For the first time on the journey, he turned on the radio.
"Governor Paxton declares a state of emergency and activates the National Guard to help with evacuations," the woman reporter said. "Anyone in the following counties, please make your way out of the city in a calm and orderly fashion. Be-"
He turned the radio off. That was enough of that.
Hearing the news report made him think of Tanya. She'd been nervous about him going away with the mystery virus spreading through Chicago. He told her not to worry, that it was impossible for the outbreak to reach them, which he knew wasn't true. It was possible for the illness to reach D.C., just highly unlikely, especially by the time he got back home.
The night before, after nailing down the first, solid clues to where Stan was heading, he'd made the tough decision to wait until morning to leave. The day had gotten away from him, and wherever Stan was going, he was planning to stay put there for a while.
In the morning he got a late start when his phone alarm didn't go off, because he hadn't set it properly. He always kicked himself when that happened, but at least it gave him a chance to eat with his family before he headed out. It made it easier for him to go without seeing them for a little while.
Plus, it was Tanya's turn to make breakfast.
Ryan stared at a movie trailer on his phone while he waited for the food to be served. He was already wearing the hoodie he wore out of the house. "No phones at the table," Will said as he sat. Ryan glanced up at him over the phone. Sensing a losing battle, he put it down. "Thank you," Will said.
"When you get back, can you take me to see the new Schwarzenegger movie?"
Will took a sip of coffee. "I didn't know he made movies anymore."
"A few. This one's about him protecting his daughter after she starts turning into a zombie."
"You know I don't really enjoy those. None of your friends wants to go with you, maybe someone who would appreciate it more?"
"Yeah, I guess."
Tanya shook her head at Will from the stove. He shrugged, not understanding what she meant.
After Ryan left for the school bus, Tanya gathered the plates. "Oh, sweet, naive husband. I was joking at first but you are a bit dense, aren't you?"
Will's eyes widened. "What did I do?"
"Of course his friends will go with him to see the movie. Teenage boys will see any stupid movie you put in front of their faces. That's not the point."
Will thought for a moment. "He wants to go with me."
"Bingo."
"But I hate zombie movies."
She motioned to the chair Ryan had sat in. "And he hates eggs, but sometimes we make sacrifices to spend time with people we care about."
Will was quiet again. "I see," he said.
"Good." She gave him a kiss. "Good luck today, mighty oak."
Will smiled at the memory of her kiss. After a white farmhouse, and just before a small bridge, he turned right onto the next road. He double-checked the name on the GPS.
Route 666.
"You've got to be kidding," he said.
There wasn't much to stop for on Route 666, other than a scattering of houses and a diner or two. He could only hope that his brother eventually needed to use a restroom or grab some coffee at one of them.
In the first diner, no one there was of any help. They barely looked at the picture he showed them on his phone, and they answered his questions in monosyllabic responses at best.
In the second diner, the manager gave him much the same response, but then he added: "We have one girl who just got off a double shift. If he was here anytime today she might have helped him."
"It's worth a shot," Will replied. He waited while the manager fetched her, watching the snow through the front windows. He nearly left after a few minutes, but eventually the girl came out from the back.
"Sorry," she said, "I was just changing." Sure enough, her coffee-stained uniform was in her hands.
The name tag on it read Elaine.
Stanley reached the cabin just before sunset. The deepening snow had made the drive up the private roa
d a rough one, fishtailing his rear tires more than once. There had to be at least three inches of accumulation on the unplowed road already. If it wasn't for the van, and the extra weight he was hauling in the back, he might not have made it up the final incline and onto the property.
He pulled up in front of the cabin and turned off the van, taking a second to check it out from a distance. He was proud of the place, even if it did border on being a shack. It had taken a few side-jobs and way too much eating out of a can to afford it, but it was his to call his own. Or Steve Agudo's, as it were.
After a quick perimeter check, he unlocked the front door and took a look around inside. The lamp turned on, which meant the electricity was still working. So far so good. He checked the tripwires to see if anyone had been snooping around, but was happy to find they were all intact. He stomped on the floor for good measure.
Everything was exactly as he'd left it.
He turned on the two floor heaters and headed back outside to start unpacking the van. On his fifth or sixth trip back, he caught some movement in the tree line.
Stanley stopped what he was doing and focused on the trees. The contrast of the snow helped him see the movement between their trunks, but whatever the snow added was taken away by the failing sunlight. He held his breath and strained to see.
There. A man in the woods. Stanley could make out the outline of a big guy in a heavy coat and hat. The man trudged through the snow some two-hundred feet from where the cabin stood. And he had something in his hands, a long branch or a plank of wood or a-
A rifle.
It was obvious now the man was a hunter, from the gun to the clothes to the way he stalked through the trees. Hunters were a common sight out in the woods. Stanley had come to put aside his feelings on killing animals once he'd seen how they did it humanely, and always ate what they took. There was just one problem with the scenario.
It wasn't hunting season.
He decided to leave the rest of the supplies in the van. There was enough food and water inside to last a while, plus his laptop and any other electronics that shouldn't spend the night in the freezing cold. After he'd shut and locked the door behind him, Stanley switched on the door stopper alarm and placed it just behind the door. If anyone tried to get in, its 120 decibel alarm would have something to say about it.
Extinction Cycle (Kindle Worlds): Extinction [Isolation] Page 6