Pandemic

“Hey, Margo,” Perry said. “Aren’t you going to say hello? That’s what you’re supposed to say at this point — hello.”

Her mouth moved.

“Hello, Perry.”

Perry Dawsey smiled.

The bomb screamed its war cry of descent. Margaret tried to take a step forward, but couldn’t move her foot. She looked down. What little blacktop remained atop the decades-old brick street had melted, all shiny and black, a stinking, gravel-strewn mess that trapped her like an ancient animal in a tar pit.

Hot wind whipped madly, making roofs sag and smolder. Her blue hazmat suit slowly dripped off her, running down her body to puddle along with the liquid tar.

Perry drew in a deep breath through his nose, seeming to soak up the hot wind and the fetid air. He looked around.

“This is where I caught Chelsea,” he said. “The voices stopped, but you know what? It didn’t matter. Those things were already inside of me. Nothing I did made any difference. I shouldn’t have fought them, Margo — I should have welcomed them.”

Her suit melted away, leaving her naked. Stabbing pains rippled across her skin, the hard sensation of long needles sliding into her muscles, her organs.

Perry frowned. “Margo, what’s wrong?”

“It hurts,” she said. “Bad.”

He nodded knowingly. “I think they’re moving to your brain. I know you don’t want to lose control, but it will be okay.”

The pains grew worse, driving to her bones, through her bones and into the marrow inside.

“I… I’m not infected,” she said. “The tests… I took the tests…”

Perry reached out his right hand, cupped her naked breast. His skin felt icy cold, a knife-sharp contrast to the blast furnace that roiled around them.

“The Orbital traveled across the stars,” he said. “It could rewrite our DNA. It could turn our bodies into factories that made the things it needed. Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo?”

Her skin bubbled like the street’s boiling tar. She fell to her knees.

Perry stood over her, gently stroking her head. Her scalp came away in bloody, wet-hair-covered clumps that clung to his huge hand.

He squatted in front of her, put a finger under her chin, lifted it until she looked into his blue eyes. Then, he gave his finger the smallest flick — her jaw tore off, spiraled away.

Perry smiled. “Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?”

A shudder brought her awake. She sat up, pulled the blankets and sheets tight around her. She was alone in the tiny bunk room.

She was on the Coronado. She was here with Tim, with Clarence, with Paulius and his SEALs.

She was safe.

Or was she?

Outside that door stood a man with a gun — a man who would murder her if her next test blinked red.

And Clarence… she couldn’t trust him. He’d worked with Cheng to keep her out of the project until it was too late, until Cheng got all the credit. Tim Feely had also helped Cheng, gone behind Margaret’s back, sabotaged her work. She had put her life on the line and the three of them — three men — had conspired to push the only woman out, to make sure she got no credit. No, not three, four, because Murray had to be part of it.

Now that breweries were kicking out millions of bottles of Feely’s yeast — and how convenient the strain was named after him and not her — did Murray even need her anymore? Maybe that man outside with the gun wouldn’t stay outside for long. Maybe he was already planning on how to put a bullet in Margaret’s brain, maybe he was…

Her thoughts trailed off. Her paranoid thoughts. Perry had been paranoid. All the infection victims had been.

Paranoia.

A sore throat.

A headache… body pains.

She had all the symptoms.

The incubation period was around forty-eight hours. Her suit had been ripped during the battle, but that was just twenty hours ago — even if she had contracted the infection, she wouldn’t be showing symptoms yet. She couldn’t be infected… could she?

No, she couldn’t, because she’d ingested Tim’s inoculant and introduced his modified yeast into her system. That should have killed the crawlers long before they could reach her brain.

A knock at the door.

“Margaret?”

Klimas. Coming with another test.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak.

The door opened. Klimas stepped inside, a smiling assassin with a black eye.

No preliminaries; he just offered the box. And why not? The drill was old hat. Klimas knew she wasn’t infected. She’d tested negative so many times already.

But how could that be?

Her hand reached out on its own, took the box. She didn’t want to die, not like this, not with a bullet to the head…

She ripped open the foil, used the cool, wet cotton to clean her finger. She pressed the tester against her fingertip, felt the tiny sting of the needle punching home.

Yellow… blinking yellow… slowing… slowing… slowing…

Green.

Klimas nodded. “Good to go. Thanks.”

He took the blinking test and the empty box from her, then walked out. He shut the door behind him.

Margaret’s body shuddered with both relief and terror — she was alive, but she was infected. Had to be. But why hadn’t it turned red…

Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo? Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?

She shook her head.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh God, no.”

Cantrell… he’d tested negative over and over again, but when he’d escaped his cell he’d come after her, tried to kill her. Cantrell… the one with the genius IQ, just like her. He’d been infected the whole time, right under their nose.

The Orbital had created a new organism — an organism that the test didn’t detect.

And she had it.

She had to tell someone, warn everyone. She had to tell Klimas… but if she did, he’d kill her on the spot. If she didn’t, she’d convert, become one of them. But maybe she wouldn’t… this new organism, it was untested, un-proven. Maybe she wouldn’t convert.

And, maybe she was just being crazy… the test turned green, not red, GREEN.

She was okay. She wasn’t infected.

She wasn’t.

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING

Murray sat on a couch in the Oval Office. In front of him was a table loaded with neat folders. Beyond that, a chair that held President Blackmon. They were alone.

They had spent the last hour in the Situation Room — along with Admiral Porter, the secretary of defense and a few other big hitters — debriefing about the second naval disaster to occur on Lake Michigan in the last six days. At the end of that meeting, Blackmon had asked Murray to join her.

For the first thirty minutes of that second meeting, her personal staff had been present, helping plan and explain the logistics of the immunization effort. It was the largest public health effort in the nation’s history, so there were a lot of logistics.

Then, Blackmon had asked everyone to leave. Everyone except Murray.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been alone with a president. Going on four decades, now, Murray had been summoned to this office to discuss things that could have no record of being discussed.

Blackmon had her left leg crossed over her right, the hem of her stiff dress suit perfectly positioned over her left knee. In her lap, she had an open folder. Blackmon preferred paper over electronics whenever it was convenient — one of the few things about her that Murray found admirable.

She shut the folder and looked up at him. “The first delivery of inoculant will be here tomorrow afternoon. Deliveries to military facilities will start arriving tomorrow night, and it will take a week before we reach them all. The first civilian deliveries are scheduled to arrive in major cities two days from now. I’m burning every last scrap of political capital I have on this, Director Longworth, so I have to put you on the spot — I want to know what Cheng saw when he tested it on his crawlers.”

Now Murray understood the reason for the one-on-one meeting. In the wake of the Los Angeles’s attack, Murray had given Captain Yasaka a clear order — send Tim Feely down to the lab to process the bodies and have him package tissue samples to be sent to Black Manitou. Feely had been in such a rush that he’d only prepared samples from Petrovsky; an unfortunate choice, considering Margaret’s insistence that Walker’s hydras might be humanity’s final solution.

The end result: crawlers had escaped the task force, because Murray had orchestrated it.

The transport had been risky, of course, but had gone off without a hitch. Cheng’s team had a brain-dead woman on Black Manitou Island, which they were using to cultivate the crawlers for research and testing. Crawlers and test subjects alike were locked down in conditions that made BSL-4 precautions look about as difficult to pass through as airport security. Cheng and his team were just as sequestered on their island as Margaret, Clarence and Feely were on the Coronado.

Murray could count the people who knew about the Black Manitou crawlers on two hands — and leave three fingers to spare. And that number included the president and himself. Murray hadn’t even told Margaret. Apparently, neither had Feely: something the man seemed to think was a favor to Murray. Feely had called in that imaginary marker during the argument with Cheng over who got to name the yeast. Murray could give a wet shit about the name of the damn stuff, so Feely got what he wanted. Besides, that had pissed off Cheng, and Murray hated Cheng.

“Doctor Cheng tested the inoculant directly on the crawlers harvested from Charles Petrovsky’s corpse,” Murray said. “The substance dissolved the crawlers with one hundred percent efficiency. However, his team euthanized the subject and performed an autopsy — the inoculant had no effect on removing the infection from her brain. As Montoya and Feely predicted, once the infection reaches the brain, it’s too late.”

“So it’s not a cure, and we still don’t know if it prevents infection,” Blackmon said. “Can we test it on lab animals? See if it really does inoculate them?”

Murray shook his head. “The crawlers only survive in humans, Madam President. We don’t know why. They don’t even survive in primates.”

Blackmon nodded. She fell silent, stared off.

Murray waited. He already knew what she was going to ask.

She looked at him. “The SEALs on the Coronado took the inoculant yesterday, did they not?”

Murray nodded.

Blackmon sighed. Murray had seen that before, too — a leader’s reluctant acceptance that he or she had to put someone directly in the line of fire.

“We need a volunteer,” she said. “Get one of those SEALs to Black Manitou, inject him with the crawlers. We have to know for sure if this actually works.”

She wasn’t fucking around. But to directly expose a serviceman to that risk… the soldier Murray had once been bristled at the thought.

“Madam President, we have a little time to keep testing the—”

“Now, Director Longworth. We’ve already turned a huge sector of our economy over to making the inoculant. If it doesn’t work, then we have to put all resources behind Doctor Montoya’s hydra theory.”

Murray nodded again. The president was right, of course — protecting a single soldier wasn’t worth the wait. Four sunken navy ships and over a thousand dead sailors were ample enough evidence for that.

“I’ll take care of it, Madam President.”

“Thank you, Director Longworth.”

He’d been dismissed. He left the Oval Office.

The president had given him an order. Maybe one of Klimas’s men would actually volunteer. Knowing those crazy-ass SEALs, they probably all would.

Murray hoped the inoculation worked.

Hell, for once, he’d even pray.

THE HANGOVER

Steve Stanton threw up. Again. At least this time he’d made it to the toilet.

When his stomach finally relaxed, he slumped down on his butt. He wondered how much dried urine from hotel residents past he was now sitting in.

It wasn’t the first time he’d gone drinking, but he’d never partied that hard before. Now, he was paying the price.

His head pounded so bad it hurt to move. His throat felt sore. His body ached.

Becky had left a few hours earlier. Sometime around noon, if he remembered correctly. What a night.

He, Steve Stanton, had gone out to a bar, met a girl and got laid. He could hardly believe it.

But now, oh, man… his head.

He had to stand up, then make his way back to bed. He’d sleep the day away, or at least try to.

Tomorrow, maybe, he’d feel better.

THE HANGOVER, PART II

Cooper took the wet washcloth off his forehead, flipped it, then gently set it back in place, sighing as he felt the fabric’s coolness against his skin.

He was getting too old for this shit. He was certainly old enough, experienced enough, to know what awaited him at the business end of ten beers and six shots.

Cooper glanced at the room’s other bed. It held one occupant: the waitress from Monk’s. He didn’t remember Jeff bringing her back with them, nor did he remember hearing anything during the night. He didn’t remember seeing her when he’d stumbled to the bathroom for the washcloth. How far gone did he have to be to not know his best friend was tagging a hot waitress just a few feet away?

A loud, sawing snoring sound came from the foot of the beds, by the TV on the dresser. Cooper slowly lifted himself up on his elbows. There was Jeff, buck naked, lying on the floor on top of his jeans and AC/DC shirt.

“Strong work,” Cooper said.

He lay back and closed his eyes, tried to manage his throbbing head. It hurt to swallow. Had he been screaming all night? He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t really remember anything after that sixth beer.

Yes, he was old enough to know better. After he slept this one off, he’d make changes. Sure, he’d promised himself the same thing a hundred times before, but this time would be different.

THE COOL KIDS

Maybe Tim wasn’t so unlucky after all.

He’d worked on Black Manitou long before it had been a government-owned facility. That had been his first job out of college, working for a civilian biotech company engaged in questionable research. That research had gone south: people had died in horrible ways. He’d almost died himself.

After that, he’d taken the job with the Operation Wolf Head task force, preferring the isolation of a military ship on the water to the memories of what he’d seen on land. He hadn’t actually thought the infection could return. He’d felt protected, safe.

But that hadn’t lasted.

The infection’s reemergence and all the death that came with it made him think he was some kind of doomed soul. And yet, that math didn’t add up.

How many people had died during his time on Black Manitou? He wasn’t sure, but that number paled in comparison to the task force disaster, to five ships and over a thousand corpses resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Yet he had survived… again. He was one of only three people to make it out alive. On top of that, he was now one of the few people in the world immune to that alien bullshit.

Probably immune, anyway.

For now he was as safe as safe could be, sitting at a table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, sipping Lagavulin with three SEALs who had taken quite a shine to him.

“Let me get this straight,” said D’Shawn Bosh. “You’re saying you can tell if people are infected by how fast Tylenol sells?”

Tim nodded. “Basically, yeah. I can even do it from here on the Coronado. Klimas set me up with a laptop that ties into the TSCE.”

The total ship computing environment gave him ridiculously high-speed Internet access, even though they were floating in the middle of an inland sea.

Bosh smiled. “Well, look at my man, here — TSCE — like he’s been in the navy all his life.”

A day ago, a comment like that would have embarrassed Tim, made him wonder if these big, dangerous guys were mocking him, but not now. They loved him. He’d helped save one of their own. He’d done it under fire. It shocked him as much as it did anyone else, but when the shit had hit the fan he’d actually been brave.

Whatever bravery Tim had, however, paled in comparison to the man he’d helped save. A few hours earlier, a helicopter had taken Roger Levinson off the Coronado. Tim knew there was only one reason to do that: a human trial to test the inoculant against direct exposure to the crawlers kept on Black Manitou. No one else knew that, except for Levinson and probably Klimas, Levinson’s commanding officer. Their fellow SEALs didn’t know the mission, they only knew that Levinson had volunteered for some secret duty. Volun-fucking-TEERED. The courage and self-sacrifice needed to do that… Tim couldn’t quite process it.

Saccharomyces feely would soon be put to the ultimate test. If Tim’s solution didn’t work, Roger Levinson would become infected. If that happened, Tim knew, everyone and everything was screwed.

Calvin Roth, the big one, drained his shot glass, set it down on the table. “What I don’t get are all the little critters floating through people’s bodies. We drank your nasty-ass yeast to protect us from crawlers, which are part plant, part us, but then there are also hydras, which maybe aren’t part plant, but are part us…”

He shook his head, pushed his glass over to Ramierez. “Fill me up, Ram. I need another shot to understand this shit.”

Ramierez dutifully filled the glass. Tim had to concentrate to not stare at the man’s patchy, pencil-thin mustache.

“You’re not that far off,” Tim said. “You drank the inoculant, which—”

“Camel-taint pus,” Roth said, raising his glass.

Ramierez raised his own. “I’ll drink to that. Knock ’em down, boys!”

Tim drained his glass, felt his throat burning. He set his glass on the table and made an educated guess that these men would drink to just about anything.

“Like I was saying, you guys drank the inoculant. That means even if you did get exposed to the infection when you rescued us, you’re fine, because the inoculant wipes out the infection if you take it within twenty-four hours of exposure. And if you weren’t exposed, now you’re safe as long as you keep taking the inoculant doses every couple of weeks. If you get exposed from here on out, you technically still get infected, and the infection will modify your cells to make crawlers or other things, but those things will dissolve before they can do any damage because of the catalyst that’s in your blood.”

Bosh nodded. “It’s like if we had to dive into a vat of acid to assemble a bomb. All the parts of the bomb are there, but we don’t last long enough to put them together.”

Tim clapped and leaned back, almost fell over his chair. He was drunker than he thought.

“D-Day, you nailed it!”

The men had insisted Tim call them by their first names, or their nicknames: D-Day, Ram and plain-old Cal.

Ramierez shook his head. “I don’t get it. The hydras kill the infection. Why are we fucking around with this yeast when we could just, I don’t know, pre-infect ourselves with the hydras?”

Tim raised a finger. “Ah, a good point, my man. Two reasons. First, we don’t have any hydras — they went down with the Brashear. Second, even if we did have them we wouldn’t use them. Once the hydras get into your body, they start reproducing. We don’t know if they’ll stop at a certain point, or if they will keep on reproducing until there are so many of them they damage you, maybe even kill you.”

“Reproducing,” Roth said. “Little animal things in your blood, fucking away. Like a microscopic orgy?”

Tim laughed. “While I admire that analogy more than you will ever know, my extralarge friend, the hydras reproduce asexually. That means they don’t have to mate to produce offspring.”

Roth shook his head in disgust. “That’s as fucked-up as a football bat.”

Ramierez leaned in, the half-full bottle in his hand. “They do it with themselves because they can’t get laid, just like Cal.”

Roth drained his scotch, set the glass down. “For that, little man, you get to fill my glass. And I do it with myself because I’m just that damn good.”

“Hear hear,” Ramierez said, and poured another round of shots.

None of the fun seemed to have sunk into Bosh. To him, this was obviously serious business.

“It’s all so fucked,” he said. “I’d rather have an enemy I can see. Alien microbes? Modified yeast? Just give me something I can shoot.”

Ramierez nodded sagely. “Wiser words were never spoken, D-Day. Come on, boys, around the horn again. Let’s see those glasses.”

Everyone pushed their shot glasses toward Ramierez. He filled all four. The SEALs raised theirs and Tim followed suit. The men let out a loud hooyah, and they drank. Half of Tim’s shot slid down the side of his face. The glass slid out of his hand. Shoddy workmanship, apparently — go home, shot glass, you’re drunk.

That, or he was drunk. Drunk, and safe, isolated from everything, surrounded by trained killers who thought he was the bee’s knees.

Tim was lucky, after all. If that luck held, he could just stay right here, in this very safe place, until Cheng’s grand plan ran its course.

A HUSBAND’S ROLE

Clarence Otto stood on the Coronado’s rear deck. No wind for a change, just the oppressive cold. He stared out at the setting sun, wondering what might happen next.

He’d survived. Margaret had survived. Tim Feely had survived. Black Manitou was leading the effort for mass production of inoculant. By any measure, Clarence had succeeded in his assigned mission. Murray would probably try to give him a medal for the effort.

But Clarence didn’t want a medal… he wanted Margaret.

Onboard the Carl Brashear, the woman he’d fallen in love with had returned. She’d been decisive, insightful, tireless and brilliant. She’d been her old self, her fighting self.

And now? Now she wouldn’t see him.

All day long she’d stayed locked up in her mission module. He’d tried to get in to talk to her, but through the closed door she’d told him to go away. She sounded scared. She sounded alone.

For the last five years, whenever she’d felt those emotions she had come to him. He had comforted her, or at least he’d tried. She was his wife. His job was to protect her, help her through any problem no matter how great. At the end of the day, no matter how he sliced it, that was a mission he’d failed.

The sun finally ducked below the water, leaving only the residual glow of pink clouds to reflect against Lake Michigan’s tall waves.

Maybe tomorrow he could talk to her. Maybe he could make it all up to her.

If he worked hard enough at it, if he apologized enough, then maybe… maybe… they could repair the damage they had done to each other.

Maybe they could be together again.

Clarence Otto had to die.

They all had to die.

All of them… all the humans.

Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so obvious. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.

She got it now. She understood. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do…

…to do…

…to do God’s work.

Not the God she had thought she’d known in the naiveté of childhood, or any of the thousands of randomly invented supernatural beings that caused people to slaughter each other throughout history. No, a real god. A god with the power to send ships across space. The power to change human beings into something else, something new.

Something powerful.

Humanity had shit all over this planet.

It was time to remove humanity, time to let the world start over.

Margaret hated them. She wanted to walk out of her little cabin and stab the first person she saw. Maybe find a wrench, bash them in the head again and again until bone cracked, until she saw the bloody mess that was their brains.

She wanted to kill Clarence.

She wanted to kill Tim.

She wanted to kill the sailors, the SEALs, sink this fucking ship and put them all on the bottom so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

Margaret stood. The thought of taking life thrilled her, infused her with excitement, made her vibrate and bubble with pure energy.

Who would be first?

She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

They outnumbered her. If she killed one of them, maybe even two or three, the rest would certainly get her. She couldn’t let that happen, because she was meant for something greater.

Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.

An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted leaders.

Leaders who could pass undetected among the humans. Leaders who could infiltrate human organizations. Leaders who could gather the troops of God together, make them operate as an organized unit.

Margaret could do all of those things. She had been chosen for it.

How ironic that Clarence turned out to be right after all: Margaret Montoya wasn’t a soldier — she was a general.

All she had to do was bide her time and wait for her army.

She wasn’t contagious. Her infection gave her that knowledge. No tongue triangles, no blisters with dandelion seeds, nothing that could reveal her true nature. That made perfect sense: if she showed those telltale symptoms, the humans would kill her. Not being contagious was actually a form of camouflage.

For now, while trapped on this ship, she had to blend in. She couldn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She had to wait. She had to be… calm. Like Cantrell had been back on the Brashear. Not at first, no; he’d been jittery, paranoid. He must have been very close to finally realizing his role, just as Margaret now realized hers.

The Orbital must have engineered new crawlers that could penetrate BSL-4 suits. That was the only logical answer. It wouldn’t take much, just a microscopic hole, barely detectable if it was even detectable at all. Was that how Clark and Cantrell had become infected? Yes, that made sense, and when they were submerged in bleach, maybe the pressure change caused a tiny bit to leak through… that explained why they both reported smelling it.

But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?

Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day… at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.

What a difference a day makes.

Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how arrogant, to think she could outsmart such a power.

But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.

Margaret reached for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.

If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.

Then the carnage would begin.

STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT

The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.

On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.

“Doctor Feely, the latest results of your data-mining algorithm are coming in,” Kimber said. She had big, dark eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.

“Kimber, I have to wonder about your life choices.”

She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean with a face like that, why aren’t you in Hollywood making movies?”

She shook her head, but also blushed a little. “Doctor Feely, can we just go over the results?”

“Sure. Let’s hope there aren’t any.”

“Let’s hope.”

A pattern of medication consumption had revealed the Pinckney’s advanced level of infection. If the vector had somehow escaped the flotilla and made it to the mainland, the same consumption patterns would likely hold true. Through Kimber, Tim had programmed the CDC’s database to track spikes in the purchase of cough suppressant, pain medication and fever reducer.

Kimber typed with her mouth open. Damn, that girl had pretty lips.

“Here we are,” she said. “They just came in. Let’s see…”

She stopped talking. She just sat there.

“Kimber, what is it?”

She blinked, looked up at the camera, those dark eyes widening with fright.

“There’s a geospecific spike,” she said. Her words rattled with tension. “I read a nine hundred percent increase in cough suppressant, eleven hundred in pain meds, and a two thousand percent jump in fever reducer.”

Tim said nothing. He didn’t have to, because the numbers said it all — the infection had escaped quarantine. Could Cheng’s team on Black Manitou have fucked something up? That seemed impossible; Tim had seen the facilities there, knew how foolproof they were. Then how? Had something floated away from the Los Angeles, drifted for miles until it was picked up by some random boater?

He swallowed. There was still hope; maybe this was an isolated outbreak. A small town in Wisconsin, perhaps, something that Longworth’s semi-illegal DST soldiers could isolate and quarantine.

Tim closed his eyes. Before he spoke, he gave in to superstition.

God, please don’t let it be a major city…

“Where?”

She didn’t want to say it any more than he wanted to hear it.

“The one I just read you, that’s the biggest one… it’s from Chicago.”

Tim’s balls felt like they wanted to shrivel up and hide somewhere in his belly. Chicago — the third-largest city in America, the very heart of the Midwest.

“The biggest one? There are others?”

She nodded. “Statistically significant spikes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and” — she looked straight into the camera, dead into Tim’s eyes — “New York City.”

Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? It was already too late: nothing could stop it from spreading.

“Send me the data.”

He looked at the numbers himself, hoping Kimber had suddenly contracted a case of the stupids, hoping she was wrong.

She wasn’t.

Forty-odd hours had passed since the Pinckney and the Brashear went to the bottom. The statistical spikes indicated the Chicago infection had begun shortly after that battle.

The second-largest spike came from Benton Harbor, a town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. That infection looked to have started just a few hours after Chicago’s began, New York’s and Minneapolis’s three to four hours after that.

It had begun in Chicago. Benton Harbor was only two hours away… based on what Tim knew of incubation periods, someone could have driven there from Chicago. That matched what he saw in the data. But New York? A twelve-hour drive. The level of spikes indicated New York was only six to eight hours behind Chicago in the level of infection.

That meant one thing and one thing only: a carrier had been in an airport.

MURDER

Steve Stanton sat up and turned on the light. He squinted, blinked. Was it still night? The heavy curtains shut out all traces of the outside. He looked at the alarm clock on the little nightstand next to his hotel bed: 11:52.

He squinted, saw a little red light at the bottom left of the time, next to white letters that read “AM.”

Eleven fifty-two in the morning. He’d slept all day, all night, and into the next day. Were hangovers supposed to last this long?

He reached to the nightstand and grabbed the bottle of Chloraseptic he’d paid a bellboy to bring him. He opened his mouth, sprayed the cooling, numbing mist against the back of his throat.

It helped a little.

Steve wondered how Cooper and Jeff were doing. Maybe they’d already checked out of the hotel and were headed back to Michigan.

He’d wanted to tell Cooper what had really happened, maybe get some help in case Bo Pan came back. Steve had worked it all out in his head the night before, thought he was safe… but maybe he wasn’t. Should he call the police? If he did, would that put his family in jeopardy? And for that matter, would the police turn him over to the CIA? Maybe even send him to China?

But… what if Cooper had contacted Bo Pan? What if Cooper and Jeff had given Bo Pan Steve’s room number… what if all three of them were on their way to kill Steve right now?

He sucked in a big breath. That was a crazy thought. It didn’t even make sense. How could Cooper reach Bo Pan? Steve didn’t need to make up illogical fears about Cooper and Jeff, not when there were plenty of very real things to worry about.

Like the small matter of a dead navy diver. Murder. An act of war.

Some “hero” Steve had turned out to be.

What was he going to do? Maybe he was missing something, not thinking it through because he felt so awful.

He sprayed again, letting the cool feeling spread through his throat. That was enough for now. He needed rest.

Steve put his head back down on the pillow. He closed his eyes.

The hero slept.

LEADERSHIP

Murray had never heard the Situation Room this quiet. The only sound came from a few monitors that played newscasts at low volume. He couldn’t hear anyone typing. No one talked. No one cleared their throats. No one even moved.

Blackmon folded her hands together, rested her forearms on the tabletop.

“How did it get off the flotilla?”

When she got mad, when the cameras weren’t around, her stare burned with intensity. She looked predatory.

“We don’t know, Madam President,” Murray said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.

The predator’s stare bore into him.

“Three cities,” she said. “Chicago, Minneapolis, New York. Is that all?”

“And western Michigan,” Murray said. “Doctor Feely thinks there will be more. He thinks a carrier went through one of the Chicago airports.”

She still had that presidential look about her, but how long would that visage stay at the fore? The disease had broken quarantine, spread to three areas of very dense population. Things were about to get bad in a hurry, and on her watch — she couldn’t blame Gutierrez for this one.

“Do we know who the carrier is? Can we trace the travel pattern?”

Murray shook his head. “No, Madam President. At this point we have no idea who the carrier is, or where the carrier went.”

Hands still folded, Blackmon tapped her left pointer finger against the back of her right hand.

“What do Doctor Cheng and Doctor Montoya think?”

Murray felt a little embarrassed.

“Doctor Montoya is still on the Coronado, so she can’t help us much right now.” Margaret was there, and mad as hell. She had predicted the infection would escape, said they needed to be preparing a “hydra strategy,” and Murray hadn’t backed her play. After all the times she’d been right, he’d doubted her: now he was paying the price.

Margaret was out of the picture, which meant he had to rely on the man who, frankly, wasn’t in her league.

“Doctor Cheng thinks we’re now in a race against time,” Murray said. “The vector is in the wild. He said the patterns show it’s highly contagious, on a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The only thing we can do to mitigate exposure is to inoculate as many people as possible, as fast as possible.”

Blackmon stared at Murray like she wanted to pin the blame on him. But she knew as well as he did that she couldn’t politic her way out of this one. Americans were going to die: what remained to be seen was how many.

The president turned to Admiral Porter. “What’s the status of inoculating our troops?”

The first batches of inoculant had come to Washington, of course. Murray had drank a bottle of the nasty stuff himself. The military was next in line. If the people with guns became converted, that would create another level of problems.

Admiral Palmer rattled off a litany of bases. The biggest of them — Fort Hood, Norfolk, Fort Bragg, and a few others — were inoculating their own troops and already creating starter cultures for other bases. Within three days, five at the most, every soldier, sailor and airman on U.S. soil would be protected. That was, of course, if the infection wasn’t already spreading through some of those garrisons.

“We’ve also ordered all bases on foreign soil to lock up tight,” Porter said. “No one in and no one out. They’re already constructing their own culturing plants. As soon as starter cultures are available, we’ll ship them. We project eight to ten days until all foreign bases are fully inoculated.”

Blackmon turned to Nancy Whittaker, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Nancy, what’s the status of our domestic inoculation production?”

The military took care of its own logistics. For everything else, inoculation management fell to Whittaker. So far, she had been unflappable — it didn’t seem to faze her that the health and safety of an entire nation had somehow fallen into her lap.

“Trucks are already shipping finished product on the East Coast and in the Midwest,” Whittaker said. The former Georgia governor had never bothered to train away her drawl. “Seattle started brewing almost immediately — fifty thousand doses have already been delivered to final FEMA distribution points. In the next twenty-four hours, Madam President, we believe all participating breweries will at least be at fifty percent production capacity, and full distribution will be under way in all major cities.” Blackmon’s deadly gaze swept the room.

“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “How many Americans will already be infected by then?”

No one had an answer. Murray couldn’t even guess, so he stayed quiet.

Blackmon stared down at the table, stared so hard Murray had to wonder if the table could feel as intimidated as he did.

“We have to slow the disease’s spread,” she said. “Shut down air travel.”

All heads turned to a short, fat, bald man who stood in the corner of the packed Situation Room. As secretary of transportation, Dennis Shaneworth needed to be present but wasn’t important enough to merit a seat at the table.

“Right away, Madam President,” he said. “Chicago, Minneapolis and New York?”

Blackmon looked at him. “Shut it down everywhere. Cancel all civilian passenger flights immediately. Allow cargo flights only if they are needed to distribute the inoculant. Do it now.”

The room’s silence vanished as hands flew to phones and people scrambled to carry out her orders.

Murray felt a spark of hope. So far the only data they had was a run on drugstores for cough drops and pain reliever. Some politicians would have waited a half-day, maybe more, just to be sure a shutdown was necessary. He hadn’t expected Blackmon to move so decisively.

She again looked at Murray. She curled a finger at him, calling him over. Murray stood and walked to his commander in chief.

“Chicago,” she said quietly. “That’s the start of this?”

Murray nodded. “The word is epicenter, Madam President.”

She let out a slow breath. Up this close, he saw the fear in her eyes.

“Chicago is the epicenter,” she said. “Should I have Whittaker prioritize inoculant shipments there?”

“Yes,” Murray said. “As much as she can spare. Doctor Feely figures we’re in day two of the exposure. But” — he leaned closer, so only she could hear him — “Madam President, may I be frank?”

“You mean there’s a time you show restraint?” She closed her eyes, as if that might protect her from more bad news. “Yes, tell me.”

“According to Feely’s statistical models, the majority of Chicago’s population is either already infected, or will be before we can help. My honest opinion is that the city is fucked.”

Her eyes opened. The predator’s stare faded away, at least as much as it could for her.

“Find ways to increase production, Murray,” she said. “I want a list of any factory in the United States, Canada or Mexico that cultivates yeast, for any purpose. We’ll find a way. I won’t give up on Chicago.”

Blackmon sat straight, faced the room. That brief moment of genuine empathy vanished.

“I’m declaring a federal emergency under the Stafford Act,” she said. “I want SecHHS and FEMA to put together a task force to run this inoculation. Let’s get Congress and SCOTUS notified. Director Longworth” — she again turned to face him — “is Montoya safe to travel?”

He shook his head. “Cheng quarantined the Coronado for two weeks, to make absolutely sure no one onboard is infected. Margaret needs to stay there.”

The president silently mouthed the word dammit. “Then get me Cheng. I want him here.”

She turned to Porter. “Admiral, I want the Joint Chiefs and the National Security staff to notify Congress of my intent and desire for a total mobilization of reserve forces.”

Blackmon took in a breath as if to make a grand statement, then seemed to remember something. She again turned to her chief of staff and spoke quietly, but Murray was close enough to hear.

“Get the speechwriters. In two hours I want to address Congress, and I want every network carrying it live. Prepare that footage Montoya sent of the sailors from the Brashear — people need to see what this plague does to the human body. Go.”

The chief of staff scurried off.

Blackmon put her shoulders back and her chest out — more true leader than pure politician.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t act now, we are quite possibly facing a worst-case scenario. The nation is counting on us.”

Murray started dialing: he had much do and little time in which to do it.

ALL CHANNELS

Jeff lifted his head from the pillow. “Dude, is that the president? Get that Republicunt off the TV, will you?”

Cooper nodded. His head felt heavy, full of the same goop that he blew out of his nose every five minutes.

He used the remote to change the hotel TV’s channel, from Channel 3 to Channel 4 — and there, again, was President Blackmon. Channel 5: Blackmon. Channel 6: Blackmon.

“She’s on all the big networks,” Cooper said. He tried ESPN, only to find the same thing. “Holy shit, dude — she’s on all the channels.”

“She’s a stinky, hate-filled, nasty—”

“Hold on a sec,” Cooper said. “This has to be something big.”

Jeff propped himself up on one elbow to watch.

“I already feel like a bag of assholes,” he said. “And now this? I hope it’s not another Detroit. Hey, Coop, you feel sick?”

Cooper gestured to the pile of Kleenex on the little lampstand next to his bed. “Yeah. I do.” He pressed the “volume” button.

“…an unprecedented threat upon our great nation, and one that requires unprecedented action. My fellow Americans, we are mobilizing a swift and thorough response. I am in constant contact with the world’s leaders. Every nation on earth is working together to win this battle.”

The camera angle shifted, panning across a half-bowl of applauding politicians. Was that Congress? Cooper could never remember if that was the House, the Senate, or if they all met in some special room for things like this. What he did know was all the politicians looked the same: rich fuckers who raped the system, the only differences between them being ties and dresses of red or blue.

A news ticker ran across the bottom of the screen:

…INFECTIOUS AGENT THAT RESULTED IN THE DETROIT DISASTER IDENTIFIED… SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED WAY TO INOCULATE AGAINST THE INFECTION… PRESIDENT BLACKMON CLAIMS “DISEASE WILL BE WIPED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH”…

“Holy shit,” Cooper said. “It is another Detroit.”

Jeff flopped his head back into the pillow. “Told ya. Holler if they say Chicago — otherwise, I don’t give a shit. I’m going back to sleep. I feel like I got face-fucked by a rabid buffalo.”

The applause died down. Blackmon continued.

“Even as I speak to you now, factories all over America are collaborating in the largest unified manufacturing initiative since World War II. Distributors, shipping companies and grocery store chains are all cooperating with FEMA to bring you the medicine that will keep you safe. Over five hundred corporate sponsors have signed up to fund this initiative. More join the cause every hour. We are faced with a challenge to not only our country, but to every person on our planet. With God’s help, America is taking the lead to protect the human race.”

The audience cheered again, louder this time. At least some of them did. Cooper didn’t follow politics, but it looked like only the Republicans were standing. The still-seated Democrats applauded politely.

Cooper looked at Jeff. “Protect the human race? Is this even bigger than Detroit?”

Jeff shrugged. He didn’t seem to notice the yellow bit of snot dangling from his nose.

The applause faded. Politicians sat back down. Blackmon continued.

“I can’t stress this enough,” she said. “The surgeon general and the Centers for Disease Control urge you to cooperate with local distribution centers to get the treatment. The emergency broadcast system will be transmitting delivery days and locations. There will be enough for everyone. Until you receive your medication, limit contact with others and stay indoors as much as possible.”

Blackmon made a fist and banged it once on the podium. “All the naysayers who claimed that American manufacturing was dead are about to see how wrong they were. Other nations are following our lead, producing their own medicine, and what they are producing began here. American ingenuity is gone? I… don’t… think so.”

The Republicans stood. They roared their approval. Some of the Democrats begrudgingly stood as well.

Jeff let out a huff. “So the world is in danger, and she turns it into a campaign speech. This from a woman who doesn’t want universal health care? Whatever.”

Blackmon held up both hands, gave the crowd her trademark half-smile. She looked confident and excited, but not too much of either. The applause died down again.

“Let me say I do not fault my predecessor, or his party, for allowing things to come to this point,” she said. “These are exceptional times not only in the history of our nation, but also of the world. Together, we will forever end the greatest threat the planet Earth has ever faced.”

“Man, she’s good,” Cooper said. “Something new is happening and she still manages to imply that Gutierrez opened up Pandora’s box in the first place.”

“She’s been president for two years,” Jeff said. “Whatever happens now is on her.”

“Yeah, right. Four years into Gutierrez’s term, you were still blaming his Republican predecessor for the crappy economy. Give me a break, Jeff — with you, the Republicans are always at fault and the Democrats never do anything wrong.”

Jeff raised a hand, gave a thumbs-up. “Now you’re understanding how things work, bro. Turn that thing off.”

Turn it off? There was some kind of world-shaking shit going down, and Jeff wanted to nap?

On the TV, Blackmon grew more serious. More solemn. “Now, I must show you some very disturbing footage. This footage underscores the reason we must all work together in this inoculation effort. This is footage from—”

“Coop!”

Cooper jumped; Jeff had screamed the word. Cooper turned.

Jeff propped himself up on one elbow. “I told you to turn it off. You trying to fuck with me or something?”

His lip curled up, like it was all he could do to not stand up and smash Cooper’s head into the TV. Cooper didn’t know what to say.

Blackmon continued to babble, but Cooper wasn’t paying any attention. He used the remote to turn the TV off. “Dude, just take it easy, okay?”

Jeff’s lip returned to normal. He blinked a few times. The hate left his eyes.

“Oh, wow, man,” he said. “Sorry about that. This bug has me in a shit-ass mood, I guess.”

Cooper shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.” He felt a wave of relief — for a second, he’d thought his best friend was going to get out of that bed and come at him.

Jeff rubbed at his face. “No, it’s not okay. I can’t talk to you like that. Sorry.” He looked up and forced a smile. “So that shit they were talking about on TV, that medicine. When do we have to take whatever it is they’re passing out?”

“I don’t know,” Cooper said. “You want me to turn the TV back on?”

“No. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be here in the next six hours. I’m going to get some more sleep. Really awesome vacation in the Windy City, eh?”

“My kind of town. Old Blue Eyes was full of shit, if you ask me.”

Jeff laughed, which quickly turned into a heavy, ripping cough that curled his body into a fetal position. Cooper plucked a pair of Kleenex from the box and offered them. Jeff had his left hand over his mouth, but reached out with his right to take the tissues. He pressed them to his mouth as the cough racked him again. He rolled to his back.

“Aw, fuck, Coop — that shit hurts.”

Jeff pulled the Kleenex away from his mouth and looked at it. Amid a glob of greenish-yellow were bright streaks of red.

“Dude,” Cooper said, “that’s not good.”

Jeff balled up the Kleenex and tossed it away. He waved a hand as if brushing away Cooper’s thoughts.

“Ain’t the first time I’ve coughed up a little blood, bro. Don’t worry about it.” He rolled to his side, rested his head on the pillow. “I’m going back to sleep. Turn off the lights, man. If you make any more noise, I’m going to hurt you.”

Cooper froze. Was Jeff joking, or threatening? It didn’t sound like a joke. Cooper stared for a moment, once again suddenly aware of the size difference between them. Jeff was bigger, stronger… and Jeff knew how to fight.

Cooper slowly reclined on the bed, careful not to make too much noise. Maybe he didn’t feel like he’d been face-fucked by a rabid buffalo, but he sure as hell didn’t feel like singing and dancing, either. He was exhausted; sleep would be good.

And maybe when he woke up, Jeff would be back to normal.

GUINEA PIG

Paulius Klimas sat at the SPA’s conference table. He stared at a blank screen, waiting for a call. Once the call began, he’d get one minute. Even that much was a blessing, a courtesy done for him by Murray Longworth.

Paulius had lost men before. Five so far, all on missions that had never been announced, never been recorded. Every one of those deaths had been hard. Each time he’d questioned his leadership abilities, wondered if he could have done something different to bring that man home alive.

But this was the hardest of all.

Longworth had needed a volunteer. Since Levinson couldn’t fight, Paulius gave the man first dibs. Levinson understood that if he didn’t go, another SEAL would go in his place.

So Levinson had accepted.

Now, Paulius was about to hear the results.

The screen flared to life. He found himself looking at Levinson: in a hospital bed surrounded by clear glass walls, but bright-eyed and smiling.

“Commander,” Levinson said. He saluted.

Paulius returned the salute. Some of his pent-up stress bled away.

“You look good for a lab animal,” Paulius said. “What have they told you?”

“Looks like that awful crap Doctor Feelygood brewed actually works. I’m eighteen hours in. If I was infected, I’d probably have a sore throat, fever and aches, but I feel fine. Other than where I was shot, I mean. That still hurts like a bitch. They said painkillers could mask infection symptoms, so this little piggy gets none.”

More of the stress eased. Paulius hadn’t realized he’d carried the pressure in his chest — it suddenly felt much easier to breathe. Levinson seemed fine. More than that, the mission to recover Feely, Montoya and their research had turned out to be critical after all.

Even though the infection had somehow escaped the task force, he and his men had made a difference.

The screen beeped: time was up.

Paulius saluted. “Your courage is immeasurable, Roger. If you don’t turn into a plant, drinks are on me.”

The wounded man returned the salute. “As long as it’s something besides what Feelygood makes, I’ll take you up on that offer.”

The image blinked out.

Paulius stared at the blank screen. He and his men had twelve more days of quarantine, as did Feely, Otto, Montoya and the Coronado’s crew. He’d given his men a few hard-earned days off, but no more — it was time to start combat drills.

He and his SEALs were immune. If the shit hit the fan, they might be called upon once again.

They would be ready.

@DrDurakMerc

@ARealGirl

@TwistahSistahBB5

@BadAstronomer

@BootyHooty912

MANIPULATION

She had to find a way to control the men.

Margaret sat with her back against the mission module’s thin, metal wall, her thighs parallel to the ground, her feet on the floor — the chair position. Her thighs burned. A fight was coming: she needed to be strong.

At the count of one hundred, she bent forward, extended her body and started doing push-ups.

One… two… three… four…

Math. The most basic language of the galaxy. The language created by God. Not the human god, or gods, but the real god.

Sixteen… seventeen… eighteen…

If the men on this ship had converted, she knew she would have been able to control them. They would have followed her, did whatever she said; God had made it that way. But the men weren’t converted — they were merely human.

Human, yes, but trained killers. Dangerous.

Thirty-four… thirty-five… thirty-six…

She was smarter than they were. She could find a way to make them do what she wanted. If she started now, when the right time came she could play them against each other. Or, at least, she could stay alive long enough to find her own kind.

Fifty-nine… sixty… sixty-one…

Her arms and chest burned. She ignored the pain. Years spent hiding away had made her soft. She needed to make her body hard.

Clarence would be the easiest to manipulate. She knew what motivated him — the simple sentiment of a soon-to-be extinct species: he loved.

One hundred two… one hundred three… one hundred four…

BIG PHARMA

EXCERPT FROM THE WEBSITE “BEYOND TOP SECRET”

By SmrtEnough2See

For decades the government has been the pawn of Big Pharma, funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to companies that produce improperly tested drugs and vaccines. And now that same government is telling you that you must take this new “inoculant” drug for the mysterious “alien infection”? An infection that has not been proven to exist? And a drug that has not been properly tested, even by the rubber-stamping Big Pharma pawn known as the FDA?

The government “tested” the drugs and vaccines that gave our children autism. Our friendly overlords aren’t even bothering to pretend to test things anymore.

And now our government says we must take this untested “medicine.” If we don’t, why, we’ll become murderers! We’ll kill our own families!

How frightening, and how convenient.

Until the government publishes the science behind this claim, do not believe the lies.

Demand information. Demand proof.

THE WEST COAST

The Situation Room was getting crowded.

Murray tried not to stare across the table at the latest person to join the party. Dr. Frank Cheng looked like the cat that ate the canary: smug, self-satisfied and quite impressed with his new place of importance.

You don’t even realize you’re choice number two, jackass — if Margo wasn’t stuck on that ship, she’d be here instead.

Murray, Cheng, Admiral Porter, André Vogel, the president and a standing-room-only crowd of other directors, assistants and important people listened to Nancy Whittaker, secretary of homeland security, describe the massive inoculation project.

“The West Coast response was phenomenal,” Whittaker said. “All major breweries and ninety percent of independents have cultures and are either in full production or close to it. Bakeries all over the country have joined in. They’re collaborating with any bottling facility they can find. We estimate that eighty-five percent of the populations of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and San Diego are inoculated. The Los Angeles basin is lagging behind at around sixty-five percent.”

The speed of the national response boggled Murray’s mind. In all his years of service he had never seen the nation unify for one cause like this. Not for 9/11, not for oil spills or tornadoes, not for hurricanes or superstorms.

Maybe it was because most disasters were regional — a flooded Long Island had little impact on Arizona or California, didn’t affect the farmers in the Midwest and the plains states, didn’t bother anyone in the Great State of Texas. The news covered such tragedies, people donated to the Red Cross, then everyone who wasn’t in the disaster zone went on about their daily lives.

The infection outbreak, on the other hand, affected everyone.

Some people remained oblivious, as people often do, but the majority of Americans understood the situation’s stark reality: this was the potential death of their nation. Americans were banding together to fight it tooth and nail.

Banding together thanks to the leadership of President Sandra Blackmon.

Murray had thought her an idiot, a Bible-thumping figurehead, but her ideology and personality seemed tailor-made for just this situation. Demons were at the door; Americans wanted a defender armored up in good old-fashioned religion.

Whittaker finished her report, but she didn’t sit down. She shifted uncomfortably, like a high schooler who had to tell her strict parents she’d been caught screwing in the parking lot.

“Spit it out, Nancy,” Blackmon said. “I heard your good news, now give me the rest.”

Whittaker cleared her throat. “Madam President, while the distribution is going well, there is a growing problem. On multiple websites and in social media, people are broadcasting a message to not take the inoculant.”

Blackmon’s face wrinkled in doubtful confusion. “Is this a religious reaction? I know the Muslim community isn’t thrilled we’re using breweries, but my people are in direct contact with Islamic leaders and we’re overcoming that.”

Whittaker shook her head. She cleared her throat again, giving Murray a moment to wonder who could be so bug-shit crazy they wouldn’t take the inoculant.

“The objections are anchored by the antivaccine crowd and the alternative medicine movement,” she said. “Almost without exception, both groups are using every communication vehicle they have — websites, blogs, email lists, social media — to tell people that this is, quote, a Big Pharma trick. I have some sites to show you.”

Whittaker called up websites on the Situation Room’s main monitor. Murray saw page after page with headlines that painted the inoculation effort in terms of government abuse, a capitalist power grab, grand Illuminati conspiracy, even mind control. Who could be so bug-shit crazy? These people, that’s who.

Blackmon stared blankly.

“People are actually listening to this? These are just fringe movements. How many people are we talking about?”

Whittaker shrugged. “It’s impossible to say at this time.”

Blackmon threw up her hands. “But this doesn’t make any sense! We broadcast video of those brave sailors, the cocooning, that horror show of the triangles. We showed that!”

“The most common reaction is that the videos are fake,” Whittaker said. “Hollywood special effects, CGI… they say all the data is fabricated.”

Blackmon shook her head. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, she had never looked less presidential.

“But that isn’t even sane,” she said. “What possible motivation could we have for tricking three hundred and thirty million people into drinking the inoculant?”

“To create dependence,” Whittaker said. “That’s the most common claim. Other theories involve nanotech that will let the government target people who oppose official policy, or that the inoculant will let the shadow governments control politicians and the military, or just to make everyone dumber and more docile. All of these are variations on ideas that have been around for years and applied to everything from agriculture to chemtrails to broadcast television. Our urgent message that everyone has to take the inoculant plays right into the conspiracy theorists’ existing structures.”

Blackmon sat quietly for a moment as she thought it over.

She looked at Cheng. “The people who refuse to take the inoculant… what are their chances of contracting the disease?”

Cheng leaned back, stroked his chin. The little fuck was actually milking the moment, pausing for drama’s sake. Murray cursed the misfortune that kept Margaret away.

“We estimate that the infection rate will be around ninety percent for anyone who isn’t immunized,” Cheng said.

Blackmon straightened in her chair. She nodded, accepting the difficult news.

“I see,” she said. “All right, let’s face reality — Doctor Cheng, if some people refuse to take the inoculant, and the infection spreads to these people, won’t they just die off?”

Cheng sat forward, eager. “If only it were that simple, Madam President. This disease doesn’t kill people, it turns them into killers.”

The fat man stood, addressed the room as if he were an actor on a grand stage.

“This denial will create pockets of people susceptible to the disease, true, but keep in mind that even if we had one hundred percent acceptance from the populace, there is no way to inoculate everyone. We’ve seen it time and time again with pending natural disasters, where people don’t get the warning message despite our best communication efforts. If we inoculate, say, ninety percent of the population, ten percent of the population can still become infected — that’s up to thirty-three million Americans behaving like the infected victims we’ve already documented. It would create untold havoc.”

Murray remembered the rampages of Perry Dawsey and Martin Brewbaker. Colonel Charlie Ogden had led a company of converted soldiers into Detroit, cut off all roads, shot down commercial jets, brought that city to its knees. Every infected person became a mass murderer — if millions of people became infected…

Blackmon looked around the room. “Can we force the inoculation on those who won’t take it voluntarily?”

Whittaker nodded. “Legally, yes. Local and state public health organizations have the right to require vaccination via the precedent of Jacobsen versus Massachusetts — sometimes individual freedoms lose out to the greater need — but it’s doubtful we can do that on a national scale. Even if we had every police force working with us, we can’t organize a door-to-door campaign for the entire country.”

Blackmon’s predator gaze swept the room, looking for prey.

“I must not be hearing this right,” she said. “Are all of you telling me that we just have to wait and see if American citizens get infected, then suffer whatever damage they inflict until we can kill them?” She slapped the table. “Unacceptable! I want alternative plans, and I want them in four hours. Cheng, what about Montoya’s hydra strategy?”

Cheng froze. He looked left and right, saw that everyone was waiting for his answer. He licked his lips.

“Um, we’re working on it.”

Blackmon slapped the table again. “How long?”

Murray was just as much at fault as Cheng for this, but he couldn’t help take a tiny bit of satisfaction at watching the attention whore suffer. You wanted the big time, hot shot? This is what it’s really like.

Cheng had no choice but to meet the president’s burning gaze.

“We have to locate the individuals who had that experimental stem cell therapy,” he said.

Blackmon’s nostrils flared, her lips pressed into a thin line. The most powerful human being on the planet had eyes only for Cheng.

“I’m gathering you’ve found none so far,” she said. “And the only way that could happen is if you haven’t actually looked.”

She turned on Murray, pointed at him. “This is on you, too, Longworth.”

“It is,” he said. “I’ll take charge of the search personally.”

“Director Vogel,” Blackmon said. “You’re now in charge of that search. I don’t care what you have to do to find those people. Get the details from Murray and make it happen.”

Vogel nodded. “Yes, Madam President.”

She turned her attention back to Cheng. “From what you’ve told me, the hydra strain could be just as bad as what we’re already dealing with. But if this spins out of control and my choices are hydras or the destruction of the United States of America, you know goddamn well which one I’ll pick.”

Blackmon sat still for a moment, gathering herself. Murray wanted to crawl across the table and kiss her. He looked around the room, saw similar sentiments etched on the faces of America’s elite; at that moment, no one gave a rat’s ass if Sandra Blackmon was Republican or Democrat, civilian or a vet, male or female. She was the right person in the right place at the right time. Everyone believed in her.

She took a breath, visibly calmed herself. “The hydra strain is one contingency plan, but that’s not enough. I want everyone working on worst-case scenarios. I want to know just how bad it can get, and I want to know what we’re going to do if it gets that way.”

In the face of an utter catastrophe, it defied logic that Murray felt optimistic — and yet, he did. It wouldn’t be easy, and he knew many would die, but they were going to beat this thing.

They were going to win.

MISTER BLISTER

Cooper took another bite of his egg-white omelette. Room-service breakfast, and it tasted damn good. He wasn’t sure if it was thirty-seven dollars good, but this was on Steve’s tab so he didn’t really care.

He still felt crappy — exhausted, weak, like his whole body was rebelling against him — but at least his appetite had returned. He was turning the corner. One more good, long sleep, and he’d be right as rain.

Jeff, on the other hand, had gotten worse.

“Buddy-guy, you got to eat something,” Cooper said. He pointed his fork at the hamburger sitting on the tray in front of Jeff’s bed. “Feed a cold, starve a fever, bro.”

“Got a fever, too,” Jeff said. “Dude, I hurt so goddamn bad.”

His eyes were swollen, almost crusted shut.

“Jeff, I know you don’t want to see a doctor while you’re on vacation, but—”

A loud thump-whoof came from outside the curtain-covered window, followed by the faint, constant cry of a car alarm.

Cooper put his fork down and walked to the window. He opened the heavy curtains, looked down to wintry Wabash Avenue far below.

“Jeff, come take a look at this.”

Jeff did, groaning as he pushed himself out of bed and joined Cooper at the window.

Fifteen floors down, flames billowed out of a black-and-white cop car. One cop lay on the pavement, unmoving, his heavy winter jacket on fire and billowing up greasy black smoke. Another cop stood near the car, aiming his pistol at running pedestrians.

“Holy shit,” Jeff said again. “I think he’s—”

Filtered by the distance and by a thick window that wouldn’t open, the cop’s firing gun sounded like the tiny snap of bubble wrap.

A woman fell face-first onto the slushy sidewalk. She rolled to her back, holding her shoulder.

The cop turned, aimed at a running man: snap. The man kept running, angling for a brown delivery van parked half up on the sidewalk. Snap. The man stumbled, slammed into the van’s side. He slid to the ground.

The cop strode toward him with a steady, measured pace.

“Jesus,” Jeff said. “That cop… he’s killing people.”

Cooper heard sirens approaching; thick, long echoes bounced through downtown Chicago’s city canyons.

The cop reached the fallen man, pointed his gun at the man’s head. Cooper couldn’t breathe — fifteen stories up, there wasn’t anything he could do but watch.

Then, the cop put the gun away. He knelt down and put his face on the fallen man’s, held his head in what looked like a passionate kiss. The man kicked and struggled, but the cop kept at it, ignoring the feeble punches that landed on his shoulders and back.

Jeff shook his head. “What the fuck? Johnny Badge shoots him down, now he’s performing mouth-to-mouth?”

Cooper didn’t say anything. The burning cop car continued to pour black smoke into the sky, the greasy column rising up right in front of their window. The woman was crawling across the sidewalk, a trail of blood marking her path.

“That’s some pretty fucked-up shit,” Cooper said.

Jeff coughed again, even harder than before. Half bent over, he walked to the bed and flopped down.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I gotta sleep. Turn out the lights, bro.”

Seeing Jeff on the bed made Cooper’s own crippling fatigue hit home. The excitement had made him briefly forget how bad he hurt, but there was no escaping it.

“It’ll be on the news soon,” Cooper said. “Got to be, bro. We’ll find out what happened then.”

He looked out the window again. The cop was still bent over the fallen man. Two other people had come up to help, but Cooper couldn’t make out what they were doing from so far away. Across the street, two women clashed in a hair-pulling chick-fight. Friday night in downtown Chicago. That toddlin’ town.

Cooper jumped as something smashed into the wall next to him, shattered in flying pieces of black and clear plastic — the alarm clock.

“Coop, I told you to turn out the fucking lights!”

Jeff stared hatefully at him through swollen, red eyes, his mouth open, the tips of his wet, white teeth visible behind cracked lips. His face looked… different, somehow. If Cooper had bumped into this Jeff on the street, he would have barely recognized him.

Angry Jeff was back. And just like before, Cooper’s instincts screamed at him to do nothing that might set his friend off.

“Calm down, dude,” Cooper said softly. “I’ll get the lights.”

Cooper pulled the curtains tight. He moved slowly to the light switch, flicked it off. Darkness engulfed the room — even the alarm clock’s red glow was gone. A tiny bit of light filtered through the top of the curtains.

“I can hear you,” Jeff said from the darkness. “Your loud-ass breathing, Cooper, I can hear you.”

Now he was breathing too loud? Cooper wasn’t about to go to sleep if Jeff might wake up at any moment and beat the living hell out of him. Cooper wanted out, and he wanted out now.

“Jeff, brother, maybe I’ll just go downstairs and let you sleep.”

He started to edge toward the door.

“Coop?”

Cooper stopped cold. Jeff’s voice, but normal again. Normal, and scared.

“Don’t go,” Jeff said. “Just… just stay here, okay? I hurt awful bad.”

Cooper felt a pull of emotions. The fever was making Jeff delirious, maybe even dangerous enough to do something violent, but he was also afraid and in pain. For Jeff to actually ask Cooper to stick around? That man never asked for help. That meant he was in bad shape.

“It’s okay,” Cooper said. He quietly returned to his bed, feeling his way through the darkness. He lay down. “It’s okay, Jeff. I’ll be here. Just go to sleep.”

“You won’t bail on me?”

Cooper felt a rush of love for his friend. They’d known each other their whole lives — like he could ever bail on Jeff Brockman.

“Hell no,” Cooper said. “I got your back. Just sleep. I’ll be here.”

Moments later, Jeff started snoring.

Cooper adjusted in his bed, but felt a pain on his right shoulder. He quietly sat up, craned his neck to get a look. In the faint light, he saw he had a blister of some kind. Small, reddish, straining the skin like it had liquid inside. Liquid, or… air?

He pressed a finger against it, slowly at first, then harder. It squished in, but didn’t pop.

Cooper rubbed at the area, then lay down. If it was still there tomorrow, he’d deal with it then.

For now, however, the more sleep, the better.

BECOMING MORE

Steve hurt.

He didn’t mind the pain. Something was happening… something wonderful. He wasn’t afraid of Bo Pan anymore. He wasn’t afraid of anyone, or anything.

He lay in his dark hotel room. He heard noises outside — sirens, faint screams, something that might be a gunshot — but he didn’t care. None of those things concerned him.

He wasn’t going back to Benton Harbor. He’d never see his parents again, but that, too, was okay, because — somehow — his parents were no longer his.

They weren’t his parents any more than some chimpanzees were his parents. Related? Sure, but vastly separated by different states of intelligence, different states of awareness.

Steve closed his eyes. He would sleep a little more. And he knew, he knew, that when he awoke, he would be a new man.

Yelling from outside the room.

Cooper yawned. He sat up in bed. The room was pitch-black. He was still coming out of sleep, but damn, he felt a hundred percent better. Just not being sick made him instantly happy, giddy at feeling normal once again.

Another yell from the hall.

Then, silence.

Cooper thought of the scene on the street: one cop burning, another cop shooting a man then making out with him, a woman crawling across the sidewalk, leaving a trail of blood.

He sat very still, listening for anything, hearing nothing.

What time was it?

That question made him remember Jeff throwing the clock against the wall. Sick Jeff. Angry Jeff.

Cooper quietly felt around the nightstand, searching for his cell phone. He found it, turned away from Jeff so the light wouldn’t cause problems, then checked the time — 8:45 A.M. He’d slept through the night.

Had Jeff slept, too?

Cooper slowly moved his phone so the display’s illumination lit up the bed next to him.

It was empty.

He turned on the nightstand lamp. He blinked at the sudden light. On the floor below the TV, Jeff’s AC/DC shirt and his jeans: gone.

Cooper quietly stood, walked to the closed bathroom door.

“Jeff,” he said in a whisper. “There’s some shit going down in the hall.”

No answer.

Cooper opened the door — the bathroom was empty.

Where the hell was Jeff?

He quietly walked to the room’s main door, careful not to make any noise. He leaned into the peephole and looked out.

There was a teenager lying there, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. The kid moved weakly, unfocused eyes staring up at nothing.

Cooper automatically reached for the door handle, but stopped when he saw a flicker of motion. Through the peephole’s fisheye lens, another teenager stepped into view. Then another.

One grabbed the fallen one’s feet, the other reached under his shoulders. They lifted.

Cooper again started to open the door, to see if he could help, but one of the teenagers turned his head sharply.

Wild eyes stared right at Cooper.

He felt a blast of fear, something that rooted him to the spot — he dare not move, not even to step away from the peephole.

Was the teenager looking at him? No… no one could see through a peephole, not from that far away. Maybe Cooper had made a noise.

Not knowing why the teenager scared him so bad, Cooper stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even breathe.

The boy said something to his friend. They carried the fallen one down the hall, out of sight.

Cooper ran to the hotel phone. He stabbed the button marked “front desk.” The phone on the other end rang ten times before a woman answered.

“Hello, this is Carmella.”

“I need security,” Cooper said. “No, just call the cops. There was a hurt kid up here. Maybe there was a fight. They took him.”

“And I give a shit, why?”

Cooper blinked. “Uh… didn’t you hear me? I think that kid was hurt. He had a head wound.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” the woman said. “Fuck you very much.”

She hung up.

Cooper stared at the handset for a moment, then felt stupid for doing so and put it back in the cradle.

He looked at his cell, dialed 9, then 1, then paused: those cops in the street, shooting people. Were more cops like that? Maybe all of them? Maybe calling 911 wasn’t such a good idea.

He heard sirens coming up from the street. He walked to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. For the second time in a handful of seconds, what he saw stunned him.

Chicago burned.

He saw flames rising high from the windows of two skyscrapers. Down on the street, people scrambled in all directions. There were four fire engines, but only one had a crew that was trying to fight the fires. The other three trucks seemed to be abandoned. And no, people weren’t scrambling down there, they were… chasing… they were fighting.

A black car turned the corner, completely out of control. It skidded across cold pavement and skipped up onto the sidewalk, where it plowed into an old man. The man flew back a few feet, then vanished below the still-moving black car.

Cooper heard the now-familiar, distant snap of a gunshot, but he couldn’t see where it came from.

Chaos down on the street. Bloody teenagers in the hall. The front desk lady didn’t sound like she was dealing with a full deck. Jeff, gone. And Steve Stanton… was Steve okay? Cooper vaguely remembered Steve was on another floor, but he had no idea what the room number was.

He couldn’t worry about Steve right now. Finding his best friend was all that mattered.

Cooper looked at the nightstand, seeing if Jeff had left his cell phone — it was gone. He looked to the room’s lone chair: Jeff’s coat was there, Cooper’s piled on top. It was freezing outside… maybe Jeff was still in the building.

He dialed Jeff’s number.

On the other end, Jeff’s cell rang. And rang.

“Shit, bro, pick up.”

On the seventh ring, Jeff answered.

“Coop?”

A surge of relief at hearing his voice.

“Jeff, dude, where are you? Shit is going off outside. I don’t know what’s happening but we need to bail the hell out of Chicago. We have to get to the Mary Ellen and get out of here.”

Jeff said nothing.

“Jeff, talk to me — where are you, man?”

“Not… sure.”

His voice sounded so deep, racked with pain and confusion.

“Jeff, just tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. Are you in the hotel?”

“Hotel?”

“Yes, the Trump Tower, where we’re staying? Are you in the building?”

Cooper waited for an answer. Jeff sounded like he was on the edge of passing out.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Uh… basement.”

“Basement? Good, Jeff. Where in the basement? Focus, brother, focus. I’ll come get you. Look around and tell me what you see.”

“It hurts,” Jeff said. “Coop, it hurts.”

“Okay, I hear you, but tell me where you are, buddy. You—”

The phone went silent, the connection broken.

Cooper immediately dialed again. The phone rang and kept ringing until voice mail answered.

“This is Jeff Brockman of Jeff Brockman Salvage, and if you’ve got the bills, we’ve got the skills. Leave a message and we’ll get back at ya, pronto.”

The message beeped.

“You stupid dickhead! Call me back the second you get this, and tell me where you are.”

Cooper hung up, then immediately called again, only to get voice mail for the second time.

The basement. That narrowed things down, at least.

Cooper got dressed. As he did, he caught a reflection of himself in the room’s mirror. That blister on his shoulder was gone, just a red spot now. He took a closer look; no, not gone, broken open. A shred of weak, torn skin dangled from the edge. No wetness, though… it looked like something had puffed it up like a balloon, then the balloon popped.

He quickly examined himself in the mirror. He had more of the blisters: on his chest, his hip, below his right knee. Something leftover from whatever had made him sick? An allergic reaction to detergents in the hotel’s sheets?

The blisters didn’t hurt, and he didn’t have time to worry about them. He dressed. He grabbed his coat and also Jeff’s for good measure — if they had to go outside in the bitter Chicago cold, they’d both need to stay warm.

Cooper walked to the door, reached down to open it, then stopped. He looked out the peephole again, half expecting the teenage kid to be staring right back at him.

Nothing there.

Nothing except for a little red streak on the far wall, where the first teenage kid had fallen.

A streak of blood.

Cooper took a deep breath, steeled himself.

He opened the door and stepped into the empty hall. He had to find Jeff. Jeff first, then maybe the two of them could track down Steve. Until then, Cooper hoped Steve Stanton could fend for himself.

FOLLOW ME

Steve Stanton strapped on his two laptop bags stuffed with three laptops. He stepped out of his room on the Trump Tower’s seventeenth floor.

Anger coursed through his body, set every muscle cell on edge. He felt an almost overpowering urge to smash a human’s head in, find a brick and crack the skull open so he could get at the brains, pull them out, stomp them and…

His own thought played back in his head: smash a HUMAN’S head in.

Why had he thought of it like that? Why hadn’t he thought of the word person, or man or even woman?

Why? Because Steve Stanton was no longer human, not at all — humans were the enemy.

He heard a scream coming from the right, around a corner and farther down the hall. He walked toward that scream.

Steve turned the corner. He saw a shirtless, middle-aged man dressed in tan slacks. The man’s belly hung over his belt. He wore no shoes. He stood above a woman in a torn, red dress. Steve assumed the two red sandals scattered nearby belonged to her. She was on her butt, one hand behind her, the other raised up, palm out.

“Morris! Stop hitting me, for God’s sake!”

In response, the man — Morris, Steve assumed — reared back and kicked the woman in the thigh. The woman let out another scream. She rolled to her hands and knees and tried to crawl away. Morris reached down and grabbed her right ankle, yanked her back. The woman fell flat on her stomach, arms out in front of her.

Morris grabbed her hip and flipped her over. Before she could say another word, he pressed his bare foot hard against her neck. His face scrunched into a confused mask of rage. She twisted, turned her lower body, tried to kick. She grabbed at Morris’s foot, clawed at it, her purple fingernails leaving crisscross streaks of ragged red on his skin — but the foot did not move.

The man leaned lower, rested his forearms on the knee of the leg pressing down on her neck.

“How about that toilet seat now, Cybil? How about that fucking goddamn cunty toilet seat now, you ball-busting, dried-up-pussy bitch? I guess you shouldn’t have nagged me about putting it down, huh? Huh?”

Steve walked closer. The man seemed entirely focused on the struggling woman. There was a bluish triangular growth on the man’s chest, under his skin just left of the sternum. And another on the right side of his belly.

Steve stopped cold: something in the air…

A smell.

He breathed deep into his nose; he recognized that scent even though he’d never smelled it before. He sniffed again… the man had the scent, but not the woman.

The triangles, that smell… he is my kind, he is me.

The man — Morris — was staring at Steve.

“Hi,” Morris said. “You, uh… you want to help with this?”

In that instant, so many things became clear. Morris was nothing but an ugly husk meant to carry infinite beauty, beauty that would soon break free of his body, leaving him a dead shell.

Morris was stupid.

Steve was smart.

“You’ll do what I tell you to do,” Steve said.

Morris didn’t take his foot off the squirming woman’s neck, but his eyes narrowed as he tried to understand.

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll do what you tell me to do.”

The woman yelled, fought with renewed energy. She clawed and ripped. Her fingernails turned Morris’s foot into a ragged mess that splashed blood on her face and chest.

This man would do what Steve said. Steve felt it.

So much happening all at once. Steve thought back on a lifetime of not standing up for himself, of staying quiet, of avoiding conflict or embarrassment. His circumstances had denied him his birthright. He was brilliant. He was a genius. His destiny was more than wrapping knives and forks in fucking napkins.

Steve Stanton had been born to rule.

He nodded toward the woman. The human woman.

“Morris,” Steve said, “do something about her.”

Morris looked down at his bloody mess of a foot. He pressed it down harder — the woman stopped fighting. She drew in wet, broken hisses of air.

The man looked back to Steve, hope blazing in his wide eyes. “Can I kill her? She was always bitching about everything. Like the goddamn toilet seat. Like she’s such a helpless princess she can’t reach a finger out and tip the goddamn thing forward? Can I kill her? Can I?”

Steve stepped closer and looked down at the woman. Her wide eyes pleaded for help. In those eyes, Steve saw fear. She was afraid, because she wasn’t him, and he wasn’t her. She was human.

“Kill her,” Steve said.

Morris pumped a fist like he’d just scored a goal in hockey.

“Fuck yeah!” He screamed down at his wife. “You shoulda been nicer to me, you nagging bitch! You shoulda been nicer!”

He raised the bloody foot, then slammed it back down again heel-first into her throat. She grunted. She stiffened. Her arms and legs twitched.

Morris stomped again and again. Steve watched.

The woman stopped moving. Wide, dead eyes stared out. Her throat was a real mess.

Steve took off his laptop bags, set them on the floor.

“Carry those,” he said. “We have to find more friends. And after that, I think we need to find a place for you to lie down.” Steve reached out, his fingertips tracing the firm outline of the hard, bluish triangle on the man’s chest.

“Tomorrow, I think,” Steve said. “Tomorrow, something wonderful happens to you.”

THE BOILER ROOM

Cooper moved down the concrete-and-metal stairwell. He kept one hand on the rough, unfinished walls. In the other, he carried Jeff’s coat.

He moved slowly. He didn’t want to make any noise, because every time he passed a landing he heard plenty of noise coming from beyond the heavy, reddish-brown metal doors.

Yelling. Shouting. Screams of rage. Screams of pain. And laughter: the kind of laughter only insane people made.

Three times he’d heard another kind of sound, a sound that damn near made him piss his pants. Twice from below and once from above, he’d heard the sound of a metal door opening and slamming against a landing wall, the echoing of a laughing/​screaming/​giggling/​yelling man or woman running into the stairwell. Cooper had held his breath, waiting for them to come his way, but all three times he’d been lucky and they’d gone in the opposite direction.

He reached the first floor. Past the heavy fire door, he heard more noise than he’d heard on any floor before it. He briefly thought about opening the door and taking a peek, but a line from some old book popped into his head — when you look into the void, the void looks back into you, or something like that.

All that mattered right now was tracking down his friend. Together, they would find a place to hide until the cops or the National Guard or whatever came to make everything safe again.

Cooper moved down another flight to what had to be the basement level, then down again until the steps ended on a flat, concrete floor. He’d reached the subbasement. Might as well start here and work his way up. Cooper put his ear to the landing door’s cool metal — he heard nothing.

He thumbed the door’s lever, quietly pulled the door open.

The empty hallway looked like a service area: more concrete floor, but here it was smoother, slightly polished. White walls with bumpers on the bottom, black marks on the walls where carts had scraped against them.

He stepped into the hallway, slowed the automatic door’s closing until it clicked shut with the tiniest snick of metal on metal.

Cooper looked at his cell phone. Still one bar. He dialed Jeff’s number. He held the phone to his ear only long enough to make sure it was ringing, then lowered it, pressed it against his thigh to mute that sound.

For all the commotion going on upstairs, it was very still down here. Still and quiet, like a tomb.

He listened. He held his breath.

Come on, dude, where are you?

And then, very faint, a sound so thin he wondered if he was imagining it: the crunching guitar chords of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” — Jeff’s ringtone.

Cooper turned in place, trying to nail down the direction. There, halfway down the hall, a pair of white, windowless metal doors. He walked to them, looking left, looking right, listening for any sound that might warn him of company.

Somewhere around a corner, a door smashed open, echoing through the concrete hallways. Cooper heard a man screaming in anger.

“… cut you… cut you up… run, motherfucker!”

The yelling grew louder. Shit, the man was coming his way. Cooper thumbed the left-hand door’s latch and yanked it open. He quickly stepped inside a poorly lit area, quietly pulled the door closed behind him.

He turned, letting his eyes adjust to the low light — and when they did, he found himself facing a smiling, bald man sitting on a folding metal chair.

A single overhead light lit up that man’s white shirt, played off his pink head. He wore a patterned tie loosened at the neck. Black slacks, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The clothes and his beer gut screamed conventioneer from Wisconsin.

“Hello,” the man said.

“Uh,” Cooper said. “Hi.”

Cooper quickly looked around, got his bearings. He was in a boiler room. On his right, two big metal tanks on concrete footings. The tanks needed a fresh coat of paint — gray enamel bubbled here and there, had been scraped away in others. The size of the tanks held his attention for a moment: it figured a large hotel like this would need a ton of hot water, but that wasn’t something you thought of when you checked into the Trump’s swank lobby.

Farther back in the room, just one other light glowed. There were dozens of dangling light fixtures, but none of them were on; most of the bulbs looked broken.

The man stood. His chair slid back an inch, the scraping sound echoing off the boiler room’s concrete walls. He took in a long, slow breath through his nose, then exhaled out his mouth in a cheek-puffing expression of relief.

“Can I help you?” he said.

His eyes… there was something off in them. The man radiated excitement, like he wanted to jump and dance and scream, yet he stood stock-still.

“Uh, no, thanks,” Cooper said. “I’m just looking for my friend.”

The bald man smiled. He nodded. “A friend of yours is a friend of mine. We’re all friends now, right?”

Cooper didn’t know what to say. What was this man’s deal? Something about his eyes, how they glowed with intensity, with… joy. Joy, yes, but something else as well — this man looked more than a little crazy.

The dangerous kind of crazy.

“Sure, buddy,” Cooper said. “We’re all besties, whatever you want. My friend is six-two, about two hundred pounds, looks like he’s forty.” Cooper tapped his own left shoulder. “Brown hair about to here?”

The smiling man smiled some more. His front right tooth looked chipped. There was a fresh cut on his lip, the flesh torn and exposed. Cooper wondered if the two wounds happened with the same punch.

“I’ve seen a lot of people,” the man said. “A lot of people came down to the basement. Some left. Some stayed.”

Cooper quickly looked left, right — were there others down here? He’d been scared in the stairwell, but he’d been alone. Now his stomach pinched and twirled. His hands shook. This was a bad scene, as bad as bad got. He had to get out of there, but he wasn’t leaving without Jeff.

He lifted his phone to dial Jeff’s cell again but saw that he had zero bars — no connection in the boiler room.

Cooper put the phone in his pocket. “See anyone wearing an AC/DC T-shirt? A black one?”

The bald man nodded. “Oh, sure! That guy’s here. He’s resting.”

Cooper’s heart raced. He could get his friend and get the hell out of there, leave this two-cards-shy-of-a-full-deck Wisconsinite behind.

Cooper forced a smile. “Can you show me? I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” the bald man said. “We’re all friends now, right?”

“All friends,” Cooper echoed. “Total BFFs.”

“Huh? Bee-eff-eff?”

“We’re friends, I mean,” Cooper said. “Show me?”

The man walked deeper into the poorly lit basement, past the gray boilers. Cooper hesitated. This was a mistake. He was going to follow a strange, whacked-out man into Freddy Krueger’s home turf?

You fucking owe me, Jeff. I hope you’re okay, so I can kill you myself.

Cooper followed the bald man in the blood-speckled white shirt.

As he walked, he scanned left and right again… and he saw shapes. Shapes back in the shadows, where the floor met the wall, around and even underneath the boilers. The shapes were… people? Sleeping people covered in dark blankets, maybe?

There were two more smaller boilers beyond the first pair. After the last boiler, the white-shirted man stopped and turned. He smiled that something-is-wrong-with-me smile, then gestured toward a bulky shape, covered in a blanket, resting at the base of the cinder-block wall.

It took Cooper a moment to see something in that shape, to see a person’s face.

Jeff’s face.

His best friend in all the world, his business partner, his brother, and yet the sight of him suddenly repulsed Cooper. Jeff’s face looked… bigger. Swollen, sweaty, with big threads from that blanket clinging to his jaw, his cheeks. And the body beneath that blanket… bloated, misshapen… too large.

Something deep inside of Cooper told him to stay the fuck away from Jeff. No, not just stay away, more like turn and haul ass out of there.

No. He would not leave. That was his friend. Jeff was sick. Really sick, obviously, something way beyond drinking himself halfway into a coma and finding a quiet place to pass out.

Cooper took a step closer, leaving the strange man facing his back.

Those threads on Jeff’s face… they weren’t threads.

Because it wasn’t a blanket.

Jeff was encrusted in some kind of dark-brown clay, or maybe a stiff foam. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open. The material curved up over his left cheek, split into tendrils that threaded up into his hair: a twisted delta of that strange mud cupped Jeff’s head like a mother cradling a child.

Then, Cooper saw something that took his mind a moment to register. Half covered by that material, there were two left hands. No… three of them. There were two people in there with Jeff, two small people. Cooper saw a shoeless, skinless foot sticking out, a foot with black, shriveled skin… almost like the foot of a mummy.

Cooper’s chest tightened and tingled. Was Jeff dead?

No, his lips were moving, just slightly — he was still breathing.

“Jeff,” Cooper said. “Bro, can you hear me?”

“Of course he can’t,” said the bald man. His words faded away into the boiler room’s shadows.

The situation hit Cooper with a sudden, gripping clarity — a city going crazy and he was in a dark basement, a strange man with a psycho grin standing right behind him. Had this man put Jeff here? Had he covered Jeff and those other people with this brown goop?

Cooper turned, looked at the chipped-tooth smile. He pointed down at Jeff.

“What is that stuff all over him?”

The man shrugged. “I dunno. That’s how it’s done, I guess. I’m just supposed to watch and make sure they’re safe.”

“Safe from what?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. He sniffed again. Twice, like a dog checking something out. “Safe from people who are not our friends.”

Friends. Out of the bald man’s mouth, the word sounded heavy, important. It sounded… religious.

Cooper squatted in front of Jeff, forced himself to reach for his friend — then he pulled his hand back. What if that brown shit was some kind of disease? What if it was contagious? Could it be part of what Blackmon had been babbling about on TV? He had to call an ambulance. But if he did, would one come? The world outside had melted down. Cooper couldn’t count on help from anyone; Jeff needed him, and needed him right now.

Cooper reached out with his index finger, pointed it, poked the tip into the brown material. It felt like a crunchy sponge.

“Hey,” said the man behind him. “You’re not supposed to touch that. Never supposed to touch that!”

Cooper stood and turned. “You said you didn’t know what this crap is.”

The man’s smile faded. “Maybe I was wrong.”

The hair stood up on Cooper’s neck. To his left, the bulky, hot boiler. To his right, heavy shadows that hid the rest of the basement. This crazy fuck blocked his path to the door.

“Uh, wrong about what?”

“About you being my friend.”

The man’s hands shot out, reaching for Cooper’s neck. Cooper flinched away — his heels hit Jeff. Cooper fell backward against the cinder-block wall, slid down it until his ass landed on the pile of bodies. He tried to scramble up, but the bald man’s hands slammed into his throat, wrapped around his neck.

Strong thumbs pushed hard into Cooper’s windpipe. He couldn’t breathe. The man leaned in hard, his weight keeping Cooper pressed down on Jeff, the other bodies and the crunchy material that covered them.

“Just give us a smooch,” the man said. “It’ll be okay.”

He opened his mouth and bent closer.

The overhead lights cast the man’s face in shadow, but not so much that Cooper couldn’t see the wide eyes, pupils so big they looked like dimes, the strand of spit stringing from the upper lip to the lower, and the man’s tongue — pink, dotted with tiny, blue triangles.

What the fuck oh God oh God!

Cooper’s hands shot up and grabbed the man’s face. Thumb tips drove deep into the man’s eyes with a pop and a squelch and a burst of hot wetness.

The man released Cooper’s throat, flailed at Cooper’s hands. Cooper shoved him away. The man fell back into the aisle, his ass landing on concrete, his hands covering ruined eyes that spilled blood onto his white shirt. The sound he made… it was like an obese cat crying for food.

Cooper coughed, drew in air, pushed himself to his feet. His wet thumbs were already cooling in the basement air. He quickly wiped them off against his pants legs, horrified at what was on his skin.

He had to get out of there.

Cooper turned to face his friend. Jeff hadn’t moved a muscle. Neither had the other two people hidden beneath the brown material.

“Jeff! Dude, wake the fuck up!”

Cooper went to grab Jeff’s shirt to shake him, actually touched the brown stuff before his hands retreated on their own as if they’d touched a man-size spider.

Gloves, he needed gloves, something to cover his hands. No, too late for that — he already had flecks and chunks of the brown stuff on his fingers, and he could feel pieces of it on his neck and face.

Cooper fought back revulsion as he grabbed at the brown material and tried to pull it off his friend. It was some kind of membrane, a thick sheet that didn’t want to be ripped free. Little tendrils were anchored tight to the cinder block like roots of crawling ivy. It felt like touching wet wood, so black and rotted that it squished more than crunched. Cooper pushed his fingers through it, down around Jeff’s shoulder, and yanked — Jeff remained covered in the membrane, but at least Cooper had pulled him free of the wall.

Cooper felt two strong hands lock down on his right ankle. He started to turn, to kick out, but before he could, he felt the hard sting of something biting his calf through his jeans.

He looked down to see the bald man: hollow holes for eyes, white teeth locked on dark denim that was already growing darker with spreading blood.

Cooper raised his right fist high, twisted as he brought it down on top of the man’s head. The man quivered, but didn’t let go. Cooper reached down with both hands and gripped hard on the back of the man’s neck. He yanked, felt a deeper pain as the man’s teeth tore free.

Cooper flung the man onto his back, straddled him, then wrapped his hands around the man’s throat and squeezed and how do you like it motherfucker squeeze just keep squeezing and never stop and never stop until you die motherfucker until you DIE!

The man’s blue-dotted tongue stuck out. He made noises that might have been a desperate effort to draw air. The bloody mess of two ruptured eyes still managed to squint in agony, eyelids sagging in against the negative space.

Cooper felt the man’s life slip away.

So he squeezed some more.

He didn’t know how long it was until he felt his hands weaken, the muscles exhausted, until they could no longer keep up the crushing pressure. Cooper stood, chest heaving. He heard the sound of his own ragged breaths.

Had he just killed someone?

No-no-no, the man couldn’t be dead, this couldn’t be happening, it wasn’t real it wasn’t real.

What was going on? The craziness out in the streets, in the hotel, and now this? And Jeff…

Cooper stumbled back to his friend. Jeff still hadn’t moved. He lay there, covered in that blasphemous rot.

The sounds of metal doors slamming open echoed through the room. The boiler blocked a view of the door, but the sound of shoe soles slapping against concrete told Cooper people were coming, fast.

He had to hide. There was only one place to hide. Cooper quickly and quietly slid between Jeff Brockman and the wall.

Jeff’s body felt hot, as if his fever had magnified a hundred times. Cooper slid down on his right side, pulled on Jeff so his friend’s back once again rested against the cinder-block wall.

Cooper tried not to think about the other two people under the membrane…

Rushing footsteps coming closer.

It was a shit hiding place it wouldn’t work they were going to kill him and strangle him but it was all he had.

Through a small rip in the membrane, he could see part of the concrete floor, could see the foot and leg of the dead bald man.

Maybe it’s dark enough, maybe they won’t touch Jeff because they’re not supposed to touch NEVER supposed to touch, maybe—

Three sets of feet stepped into view: red sneakers; a pair of shiny, polished shoes; a pair of brown loafers. The heels of the polished shoes rose up — someone was kneeling over the bald man’s body.

“He’s dead,” a voice said.

“Where’s the killer?” said another.

The feet moved. Shoes pointed in new directions as people looked around the boiler room

“I don’t see anyone,” the first man said.

“Should we check the cocoons?” said another.

“Check them for what? We don’t even know what’s happening in there. We’re not supposed to touch.”

“Never supposed to touch,” a woman said.

The first voice spoke again. “Someone who is not a friend is around here somewhere. Let’s go tell Stanton.”

Stanton? Had Cooper heard that right?

The shoes moved away, slowly, but it only took a couple of steps before they were gone from Cooper’s view.

He lay there, under his best friend and the two people packed in with his best friend, all of them covered in God knew what, trying not to make the slightest noise that would bring men who wanted to kill him, kill him because he wasn’t a friend.

Cocoon.

That’s what they called the membrane, a fucking cocoon? What did that mean?

A cocoon… a caterpillar turning into a butterfly… was Jeff changing into something else?

Cooper closed his eyes, tried to breathe as quietly as he could. If Jeff was changing, what would he become?

And how long did Cooper have before it happened?

THE INTERNET

Murray bit into a chicken sandwich, his mouth filling with the punchy taste of aioli and Gouda. Things were going to hell in a handbasket, but he could say one thing for the White House — someone here sure knew how to cook.

They all ate. The chief of staff had insisted, making sure everyone got what they wanted, making doubly sure that Blackmon didn’t skip her meal of a BLT and fries.

As Murray chewed, he watched the big monitor at the end of the Situation Room, the one mounted opposite the president’s seat at the head of the table. The left half of the monitor condensed the developing situation into a handful of ever-changing estimates:

The right half of the monitor showed a map of the United States. Each state was a shade of gray. The more doses delivered, the darker the state became.

The same map used colors to denote outbreaks. Philadelphia, Boston and several other cities glowed yellow, indicating high numbers of early-stage cases. That meant people were infected but had not yet turned violent.

Other cities glowed orange, showing areas with spiking cases of assault, murder, property damage, et cetera. Those cities — Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Columbus — were just beginning to tip over to the worst color of all: red.

Four red areas glowed ominously: Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, New York City and Chicago.

And at the bottom of the monitor, white letters on a black bar that stretched across the bottom of the display:

Those numbers were estimates, a best guess compiled from city reports, the CDC, FEMA and other organizations responsible for tracking the disaster.

Things were bad. Things would get much worse, but the important numbers were on top: 26% immunized, 133 million doses en route or in production. America was rallying to the cause. When it was said and done, this would rate as the worst disaster in American history, by far, but the tide was already turning.

Murray actually let himself believe that, right up until André Vogel rushed into the room. The normally calm, cool and collected Vogel looked anything but. He had a cell phone held against his left shoulder, using his suit jacket to mute it.

Murray put down the sandwich.

“Madam President, I have bad news,” Vogel said. “Our embassy in China was just attacked. Ambassador Jane Locker is reported dead, along with seven other staffers.”

Blackmon’s mouth pressed into a tight circle. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure,” Vogel said. “A staffer got a call out that they were under attack and that the ambassador was dead, then the signal cut off. We’re unable to reach anyone at the embassy.”

Blackmon stood. “Attacked by who?”

“A mob of civilians,” Vogel said. “Enough to overpower the Chinese guards and our embassy security forces. That’s all the intel we have at the moment.”

Blackmon spread her hands, palms up: are you kidding me?

“Then get me more intel, Director Vogel,” she said. “I have to know what happened.”

Vogel took the cell phone off his shoulder, pressed it to his ear. He held up a finger to Blackmon — one moment — then spoke quietly. He nodded, put the cell phone in his pocket.

“I wanted to confirm it before I told you,” he said. “We can’t reach representatives of the Chinese government. And I mean we can’t reach anyone. China’s communications grid is offline. Broadcast, telecom, satellite — nothing is going in or coming out. They’ve even shut down their part of the Internet.”

Murray had lost his appetite. The world’s only other nuclear-armed superpower had just gone dark. He waited for the president’s response.

“There has to be something,” Blackmon said. “I need to speak with them.”

Vogel nodded. “Of course, Madam President. The NSA is working on it, highest priority, but as of this moment, we have no way of communicating with the Chinese government.”

Blackmon sat back down. She picked up a french fry, stared at it. She took a bite. Everyone waited as she chewed and thought.

“Director Longworth,” she said, “tell me again where you think our patient zero traveled to when he left Chicago.”

Murray pushed his sandwich away. “Analysis shows the carrier was likely in O’Hare four days ago. London is reporting an outbreak, which means the carrier probably stopped there. The itinerary that best fits the outbreak pattern is Delta Flight 305, which flew from O’Hare to LaGuardia, then to Heathrow, then to Beijing.”

Blackmon turned in her chair, stared at Vogel.

“You said no foreign power could get to the Los Angeles, Director. Yet here we are with an infection pattern that points straight to Beijing, and that government has just shut off all communication. If an operative got the artifact and took it back to China, and if he showed his new prize to high-level officials, then we could be looking at infected government leaders.”

Vogel started to sweat.

“Madam President, as I said, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to reach that artifact, let alone take it out of the country. A more likely scenario is that Chinese leadership sees a spreading, global infection and they’re nailing their windows shut. They want to stop any other carriers from getting in, or make sure the world can’t watch how they choose to handle any localized infection. Probably both.”

Admiral Porter politely cleared his throat.

Blackmon spoke to him without taking her eyes off Vogel. “What is it, Admiral?”

“Madam President, if the infection has somehow taken over the Chinese leadership, we obviously have to prepare for that. However, if Director Vogel is right and the Chinese are isolating themselves for their own protection, they may decide to take preemptive measures.”

Blackmon spun her chair back around: the admiral had her full attention.

“What kind of preemptive measures?”

Porter pointed to the monitor showing the map of America, with its red and yellow major cities.

“We’re already significantly infected,” he said. “If I were the Chinese, I’m not sure I’d wait for the infection to rage across Europe and America until it eventually reaches my borders. I’d consider surgical strikes to eliminate infected populations while I still could, before the disease spread so far it can’t be stopped.”

The way Porter delivered it, it made perfect sense. Murray felt a chill in his chest — with the fate of the world on the line, Porter’s take actually sounded like a logical strategy, an almost inevitable one.

Blackmon laced her fingers together. “Admiral, do you really think the Chinese would nuke us to mitigate this disease?”

Porter nodded. “I do, Madam President. After all, we nuked ourselves to accomplish the same goal.”

The chill spread to Murray’s stomach, to his throat.

Porter stood. “Madam President, we have to assume this is a genuine threat. Whether we’re facing an isolationist China or one now controlled by rogue elements, we have to show that we’re ready to defend ourselves. I recommend we immediately move to DEFCON 3.”

DEFCON stood for Defense Readiness Condition. The system had been in place since 1959, implemented as America adjusted to the threat of nuclear war.

DEFCON 5 was the normal level, the lowest state of war readiness.

With a change to DEFCON 3, the mobilization and response times for select air force units were shortened, often quite significantly. Some combat missions could be launched on fifteen minutes’ notice. Since the end of the Cold War, America had only reached that level on September 11, 2001.

DEFCON 2 was the step just below nuclear war. All armed forces were ready to deploy and engage on six hours’ notice. The nation had reached DEFCON 2 just one time: during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

And then the real troublemaker: DEFCON 1, also known as “Cocked Pistol.” It meant nuclear war was imminent, that the end of the world was just a presidential order away.

The room waited. Blackmon took her time, but she didn’t flinch, didn’t show any sign of the stress overtaking her.

She turned to face Murray.

“Director Longworth, everything I’ve been told indicates the infected are mindless killers. Could they do more? Could the Converted actually take over a government?”

He wanted to say no because he didn’t want to believe any of this was happening, but his job was to tell the ugly truth.

“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.

“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.

@Ticonderagga:

@PickleThruster10:

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@AlabamaCramma:

@Boston_Police:

@WhiteSoxChum:

@BACOemergency:

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:

And, at the bottom:

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.”

She put her hands on the table, leaned heavily. She looked at the image of a burning Paris.

“Not here,” she said. “Not on my watch.”

THE COOK

Cooper Mitchell awoke to darkness. Darkness, and the sound of a cough.

A cough that wasn’t his — and wasn’t Sofia’s, either.

He was on his back. He’d bunched up his coat as a pillow. Sofia lay next to him, her head on Jeff’s folded coat. Cooper could feel her breathing.

The cough again… a man’s cough, coming from inside the dark room.

Cooper had a moment of panic — where was the gun? His right hand slid out snake-strike fast, feeling for the weapon, found it almost immediately. He flexed his fingers on the pistol grip, then sat up.

Another sound: a light snore. Like the cough, it came from the other side of the overturned table.

Was it a man? Was it one of the yellow things?

The conference room’s door remained closed; no light from the hall, just the red glow of the Exit sign.

Cooper swallowed. He drummed up what courage remained in his quivering chest.

He stood.

The room lights flickered on, illuminated the familiar white-tableclothed tables, chairs, the dead man in the suit — and a new body. A man, facedown, wearing a cook’s uniform.

The cook’s chest rose with a breath, then spasmed with another cough. Sleeping. Maybe he and Sofia could slip out of the room without waking him up.

Cooper knelt back down. He slid the pistol’s barrel into the waist of his pants. He reached down slowly, then simultaneously slid his left hand behind Sofia’s head and cupped his right over her mouth.

She feels so hot…

Her eyes opened wide. Her hands shot to his, grabbed and scratched. Her legs kicked and she let out a muffled scream. Cooper fell to the floor next to her, put his mouth to her ear, spoke so quietly his words were nothing but breaths.

“It’s me, Cooper! Be quiet — one of them is in the room.”

Sofia went rigid. Her unblinking eyes stared at him.

She was burning up. A fever. Not as bad as Jeff’s had been in the boiler room, but still, a bad one.

Cooper let go of her head. He helped her to her feet. She winced as she stood. He pointed to the man in the cook’s uniform.

She leaned in close, spoke in a hissing whisper. “Is he asleep?”

“I think so.”

“Shoot him.”

“What? No, we need to get out of here. If we shoot him, it’ll make noise, maybe bring others.”

The sleeping man coughed again, this time much harder, the lung-ripping sound pulling his body into a fetal position.

Cooper thought about throwing Sofia over his shoulder, making a run for the door. He thought about it a moment too long: the cook sat up.

Cooper drew the pistol and pointed it at the man’s chest.

Just shoot him, just shoot him now — but what if he’s not one of them?

The man had reddish-brown spots all over his white uniform. Cooper knew those stains weren’t from preparing some dish in the kitchen.

The man looked at the gun. Then at Cooper. Then at Sofia.

“Are you guys friends?”

That word again. Friends. When the bald man had thought Cooper was his friend, everything had been fine. Maybe Cooper could bullshit his way through this — maybe he wouldn’t have to murder this man.

“We’re friends,” Cooper said. “We’re all friends here.”

The man wiped his white sleeve across his nose; the fabric came away streaked with red. Sweat gleamed on the cook’s face and forehead. He sniffed deeply, the sound choked by snot clogging his sinuses.

“I’m all stuffed up,” he said. “Can’t smell a thing. If you’re a friend, why you pointing that gun at me?”

The man had obviously come in here looking for a place to sleep. He hadn’t bothered to look behind the tables — Cooper and Sofia had been lucky.

“My name is Chavo,” the cook said. “What’s yours?”

Chavo. Cooper hadn’t wanted to know the man’s name, hadn’t wanted to think about him as a person.

“Don’t worry about our names,” Cooper said. “How long have you been in here?”

Chavo shrugged. “Since sometime last night. We were taking care of business.” He smiled when he said it. Taking care of business meant killing people.

He stuck out his tongue, showing the blue triangles that dotted the pink surface. The man’s smile widened as his tongue slid back into his mouth.

“See? I can prove I’m a friend.”

Cooper felt Sofia squeeze his arm.

“Shoot this fucker,” she said.

Chavo started coughing again, his fist at his mouth, his body nearly convulsing, yet his eyes never left Sofia.

He pointed at her. “She’s not a friend.”

The man lifted his right knee and planted his foot as if to stand.

Cooper leveled the pistol at Chavo’s face.

“Don’t you fucking move.”

Sofia’s fingers dug into his left bicep, so hard they felt like dull metal needles that couldn’t quite penetrate the skin.

“Shoot this fuck,” she said. “Waste him before he calls for help!”

Her hands let go of his bicep; Cooper felt them grabbing for the gun.

He used his free arm to keep her away. “Sofia, stop!”

Chavo stood and ran for the door. His hands reached for the horizontal bar, hit it, knocked the door open.

He made it one step out before the gun fired twice, bam-bam, the second shot surprising Cooper even more than the first.

The man lurched forward, landed hard on his face and chest.

Cooper felt stunned… he’d just shot a man in the back. He hadn’t thought, he’d just done it.

Chavo wasn’t dead. His arms came up, hands pressed against the floor — he started to crawl. Two spots of red spread across the back of his white uniform.

Cooper saw Chavo’s chest fill with a big breath, saw the man’s head tilt back…

“Killlll them! They’re in here!”

He shouldn’t be able to scream, I shot him in the back, he should be dead…

Sofia yanked the gun from his hand.

She limped toward the door, one hand pressed to her side, the other holding the pistol.

Chavo crawled a little farther. His belly left smears of blood on the carpet.

Sofia reached him. She put the gun to the back of his head and fired. Chavo’s face flopped onto the carpet. He stopped moving.

Cooper ran to Sofia, stood next to her. Blood soaked into the carpet beneath Chavo’s face — or what was left of his face — a thick stain that slowly spread outward.

Sofia sagged against Cooper, weakly held the gun up for him to take. “You’ve got five bullets left,” she said. “Try not to be… be such a pussy… okay?”

She started to fall; he slid an arm around her waist, held her up. He could feel her heat even through her clothes. He had to get her to a hospital, find a doctor or something.

Cooper took the gun from her hand. He stared down at the dead man.

Then, he heard the roar.

It was a sound both human and not, a sound that carried through the hall. It came from somewhere off to the right. Then, from the left, a man answering with a guttural shout.

Cooper again looked at Chavo’s body. The blood streaks pointed back to the door, like an arrow that said the people you want to kill are in here.

He pulled Sofia tighter. “Come on, we have to move.”

She seemed to gather the last of her strength. She gently pushed away, stood on her own two feet. “Move where?”

Where? Good question. Whatever was coming would check this room, check the nearby rooms as well. If he and Sofia were going to survive, they had to find something better… maybe find a car and get the hell out of Chicago, maybe reach the Mary Ellen.

“Hold on a second,” he said, then ran back into the conference room and grabbed the two coats. He shrugged his on, offered Jeff’s to Sofia.

“Outside,” he said. “We have to go outside.”

Sofia rubbed her face. She nodded. “Well… shit. Had to happen sooner or later, I guess.”

She put on Jeff’s coat. Cooper slid under her shoulder and helped her forward. He held the gun tight as the roars grew louder.

SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Steve Stanton stood tall, his hands resting lightly on the balcony’s marble railing. Wide stairwells descended on the left and the right, but his followers were packed in so tight Steve couldn’t see a single step. Below, a sea of reverent faces gazed up at him. Skylights above shone a pale yellow, letting in the scant late-morning sunlight that managed to penetrate the winter storm blowing outside.

He was in the Art Institute of Chicago, a place dedicated to the beauty of the human race. With the help of the people packed in to hear him, to follow him, he would destroy that beauty, and that race as well. This place was a fitting cathedral for the newly born flock to hear his message.

The Converted murmured in anticipation, in excitement. They waited for him to speak.

Until just a few days ago, Steve hadn’t believed in a higher power. Now he knew one existed, and knew that this divine being had chosen him to lead — when God stands with you, no man can stand against you.

The people on the stairs, the faces down below, they were all God’s children, but they were not all the same. Some had the mark of the triangle on foreheads or cheeks. Others of that type had no visible marks, because clothes hid their blessings.

Even if the signs were hidden, Steve could just look at a person and know their caste.

Those marked with the triangles were hatchling hosts, walking incubators who were soon to give up their lives for the glory of God’s very first creation.

Then there were the mothers- and fathers-to-be, people already swelling with God’s love. Soon they would be moved away from the city center to areas where humans huddled in offices and stores and apartment buildings. When these parents blossomed, the winter wind would carry spores to places that the Chosen could not reach.

The triangle-tongues made up the main body of Steve’s growing army. Stable and reliable, but also vicious, hungry and smart. Not as intelligent as he was, of course, but capable of thinking for themselves, able to follow orders to the letter or problem-solve when those orders no longer made any sense.

A scant few of the faces below belonged to leaders, people closer to Steve’s own intelligence. Like him, these individuals showed no outward sign of any kind. Yet, they had something inside of them, something that called to the other castes, made the hatchling hosts and triangle-tongues and parents-to-be want to follow, made them need to please and obey.

And God’s final creation: the bulls. Steve didn’t know who had first used that nickname, but it fit perfectly. Something to do with local sports teams, apparently. There were very few bulls so far; many had perished during the conversion process, either in their cocoons or shortly after hatching. Whole-scale restructuring of the human body carried a high risk of failure.

Steve had ordered his few “finished” bulls to stay out of sight for now. Bulls were harder to control. They were more violent than even the triangle-tongues. The last thing Steve needed was fighting among the people.

Soon, however, he’d let his bulls run.

All of these castes would do anything he said. They would obey. They would kill. If he asked them to, they would die.

He raised his hands; they fell silent.

“My friends,” he said. “This is the start of something wonderful.”

His words echoed slightly off the stone walls, making him feel far more grand, far more powerful. His speech carried the will of God.

“You have been chosen,” he said. “Every one of you feels this in your heart, just as I do. You used to be workers and bosses, teachers or policemen. You used to be shopkeepers and soldiers. You served in a hundred other roles. What you were before no longer matters, because now we are one.”

The smiles, the nods, the wide-eyed stares of bliss. They knew. They believed.

“Everyone here understands that humans are the enemy, that they must be destroyed,” Steve said. “We will accomplish that, but we can’t act like animals. The American military will strike back, and soon. They will start with the cities where the violence is out of control, where it is clear our people have taken over. We can’t help those other cities. We can only help ourselves. Therefore, as we accomplish our goals, we have to draw as little attention as possible.”

Heads nodded. Some put hands over hearts. Some even cried. The power of God flowed through Steve Stanton.

He had seen the news coverage of Paris. He had to make sure his followers didn’t do anything stupid like that. Cities mattered.

“Spread the word — do not destroy power facilities. Leave all power lines and transformers alone. Do not destroy any communication. Telephone lines, utility poles, cell-phone towers, leave them all be. And no more fires. If any of you see a Chosen One setting a fire, kill that person and make an example of them. Am I understood?”

A thousand heads nodded.

“We will use their own communication systems against them,” he said. He pointed to his ear. “The humans are listening. Only the heads of individual groups may have a cell phone. Do not talk about being Chosen on phones, on the Internet, or in emails. I will distribute code words that you will pass on to others by face-to-face meetings only. If I need to make everyone act at once, we’ll broadcast those code words. We must be careful so that the outside world doesn’t suspect our numbers.”

The heads nodded faster, more intently. They understood.

“As you spread through the city, find others of our kind. Tell them about me, tell them I am in charge. If you find humans who are not converting, kill them. Who here has served in the military?”

Along the descending stairs and down on the main floor, forty-odd hands rose.

“Excellent,” Steve said. “All of you, come up and meet with me when I dismiss the rest. Everyone else, when you leave here, find me more soldiers. Ask for military experience, and ask specifically for anyone who served in a reserve unit in this area. If there are weapons in or around Chicago, we need them.”

Steve again put his hands on the cool, stone railing. He leaned forward, letting the motions come naturally, letting the intensity build. His past, the shy, awkward thing he’d once been, it all seemed a bad dream. Power coursed through him. He could control the Chosen Ones as easily as he’d controlled the Platypus.

“The world is about to change, forever,” he said. “We will make this city ours. Soon after that, the entire country.” He stood straight. He raised his arms, spread them wide. “When the Chosen in other cities are tearing themselves apart, tearing their cities apart, Chicago will stand tall. From here, we will rule. The time of humanity is over, Chosen Ones — your time has come!”

Their roaring cheer filled the open space, echoed off the marble walls, made Steve’s skin ripple with goose bumps.

This thousand would spread through the streets, gathering others of their kind, killing any who were not. In a day, this city would be under his control.

Chicago was only the beginning.

THE TRUMP TOWER

The fire stairs had seen him safely down. Cooper prayed they would see him safely up. It was smarter than taking the elevator, anyway: who knew what those doors might open up to?

Sofia couldn’t climb the steps on her own. That burst of strength she’d used to kill Chavo was already a distant memory. Cooper kept his left arm around her waist, helping her along. His right hand stayed locked on the cool, comforting feel of the pistol.

Two switchback flights led from the subbasement to the basement level. Another pair would lead to the ground floor. He’d helped her up six steps to the first landing, halfway to the basement level, and his legs were already burning.

“Cooper… I’m not doing so great.”

“You have a fever,” he said. “Maybe your wound is infected.”

“That fast?”

He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I think we have to find a drugstore or a hospital, get you antibiotics.”

There had to be drugstores close by. He could find her some medicine, then maybe they could make their way to the Mary Ellen. Jeff was nowhere to be found, and — Cooper hated to admit it — after seeing that empty cocoon membrane, he was no longer sure he wanted to find Jeff.

He helped Sofia up another step.

“Just a little more,” Cooper said. “Make it to the ground floor, then we’ll peek into the lobby and see if the coast is clear.”

Two heads peered around a white stone corner. Cooper stared into the Trump Tower’s long lobby. On his right was the forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high glass wall that looked out onto Wabash Avenue. Outside, big clumps of snow whirled down from a sky that was almost the same yellow as the feet he’d seen in the boiler room.

Directly in front of him stretched the modern, white marble floor that led to the registration desk… or at least what was left of it. Body parts littered the lobby. Puddles of tacky blood pooled around corpses, bloody footprints leading away in various directions.

He took all that in at a glance, because he could really focus on only one thing.

Hatchlings.

Twenty of them, maybe thirty. Cooper had seen shaky footage of hatchlings before, part of Gutierrez’s T.E.A.M.S. program. The video had been taken by soldiers in the woods just before the creatures attacked. But to see the things in person…

They stood around two feet tall. Three thick, twitching tentacle-legs made up half of that height, legs that attached to the bottom points of a three-sided pyramid covered in gnarled, glossy-black skin. And in the middle of each triangular side, a vertical, black eye. Purplish lids blinked rapidly, pushing in from the left and the right sides, keeping the eyes wet and clean.

The hatchlings crawled on everything: furniture, body parts, the splintered wood of the shredded front desk, even chipped and cracked white stone walls that four days earlier had been a spotless, polished marvel. The monsters lowered their bodies to these various surfaces. They jittered and shook perversely, like misshapen dogs humping wood and glass and marble. As they shook, Cooper heard crunching sounds, grinding noises.

He watched one of the hatchlings rise up on its three tentacle-legs. It climbed on top of a hard, knee-high, uneven mound that ran the inner length of the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The creature vibrated: clumpy damp material squirted from its bottom.

It was shitting. That mound… it was all solidified shit. The thing vibrated one more time, squeezing out the last bits, then the graceful tentacle-legs carried it to the torn reception desk.

No, not torn… half-eaten.

Sofia’s hands clutched at Cooper’s arm. She stood half behind him, using him as both protection and support.

“Fuck me,” she said. “I never believed they were real. I thought that news footage was special effects bullshit.”

Cooper nodded, neither knowing nor caring if he’d ever believed or not. The past didn’t matter, because he could see just how real they were.

Sofia tugged at his coat. “What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re making a bulwark or something.”

“A bulwark? What the fuck is a bulwark?”

“Like a wall,” Cooper said. “Something to stay behind during a gunfight.”

“You a soldier or something?”

“History Channel. Watch enough World War Two documentaries and things sink in.”

The sound of roars suddenly echoed through the lobby, filtering in from somewhere deeper in the hotel. Cooper couldn’t be sure where the roars were coming from — if he and Sofia were going to get out of the hotel alive, they had to go right through the little poop-making monsters.

His hands felt sweaty. He raised the pistol, started to aim at the closest creature.

Sofia’s hand rested on his forearm.

“Don’t,” she said. “Five bullets. We have to conserve” — she ran out of breath in midsentence; she was farther gone than Cooper had hoped — “our ammo.”

If he fired off a round, would the hatchlings scatter? Maybe… or maybe they’d attack, like they had in the video, swarm in, chew him up alive and then shit him out to make more of their little fortress.

He looked at Sofia. “I can shoot one, see if they run. What else can we do?”

“We could… just walk out,” she said. She closed her eyes, tried to deal with the heat washing through her body. “We don’t fuck with them, maybe they don’t fuck with us. Chavo didn’t attack you… maybe these things won’t, either.”

Cooper’s throat felt tight. A pinching feeling churned in his guts.

Sofia raised a weak hand, pointed to the glass wall.

“The street is right there,” she said. “If we stay any longer, we’ll… we’ll run into something worse than those little monsters.”

Another roar — the closest yet — seemed to punctuate her words.

She was right. They didn’t have time to find another way out.

Gun in his right hand, his left arm around Sofia’s waist, Cooper stepped out from behind the corner and walked toward the front door some forty feet ahead.

The twenty hatchlings stopped moving. Cooper paused. They all turned their bodies so two of their eyes looked his way, focused on him.

Sofia slipped, just a little. He caught her, held her up.

Now or never…

He started walking again. Sofia did her best to carry her own weight and keep pace.

The pyramid creatures watched.

The long, glass wall passed by on Cooper’s right. At the end of it, past the reception desk on the left, was the revolving door that opened onto the street.

He was halfway to it when, as a unit, the hatchlings suddenly went back to their work of humping, grinding and shitting.

Cooper and Sofia reached the revolving door. They stepped inside, pushed, walked with it until it opened onto the sidewalk of the Trump Tower’s curved entry drive.

A strong, icy wind clawed him, ripped at his coat. Sofia’s hand came up to shield her eyes and face. He and Sofia stepped forward.

The two of them stared out at a war zone.

Burned-out cars lined Wabash Avenue, including the cop car he’d seen on fire just a few days ago. Or was it hours? He wasn’t sure. Powdery snow swirled along the pavement, in places stopping and sticking, turning into long, thin, white fingers that stretched over the blacktop.

Across the street to the left, a black-glass skyscraper towered high above. Cooper didn’t know the name of it. It had caught fire at some point. The building look like a tall, sparkling cinder.

And everywhere… bodies.

Some were bloated, their swollen bellies stretching shirts and popping buttons. Some were missing arms or legs. Some had their stomachs ripped open or their heads smashed in. The clothing of the corpses rippled and snapped in time with the unforgiving wind. Pools of blood had frozen into snow-speckled red glass.

Pillars of smoke rose across the city skyline, abstract streaks of wavering grayish-black brushstrokes on a canvas of glowing yellow and orange.

Five days ago, Chicago had been… well… Chicago. Now it was a slaughterhouse.

Beneath the wind’s undulating howl, he heard no car engines, no honks, no tires squishing across slushy concrete. No talking, no yelling… no people. The lack of city sounds jarred him almost as much as the hatchlings had.

“Fuck,” Sofia said.

“I know,” Cooper said. “Oh man oh man, this is so messed up.”

“Not that. I mean it’s cold.”

Cooper nodded. The wind stung his face. Wind like this could burn you, make your skin crack and peel worse than eight hours in the sun. He started shivering. Had to be five or ten below out here, way worse with the windchill. He was lucky he’d brought Jeff’s jacket, or there was no way Sofia would have lasted more than fifteen minutes out here.

The coat meant that her wound and infection might kill her before the cold did. He had to help her.

“You know of any drugstores in the area?”

Sofia nodded. “There’s a Walgreens up on Michigan Ave, by Pioneer Court.”

“How far is that?”

“Two blocks east, a block north.”

Not far. He squeezed Sofia a little tighter, trying to reassure her. “And if we can’t get into that Walgreens, what else can you think of?”

She thought for a moment. “Northwestern Memorial Hospital is a little farther north, on Huron. If we can’t get in, we keep going right up Michigan Ave. There’s another Walgreens at East Chicago, I think… seven blocks north from here. Can we find a car?”

“No use right now,” Cooper said. “Even if we found one that worked, the street is too clogged with wrecks. For now, we walk.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Cooper, I’m cold.”

He stuffed the pistol into the back of his pants. He bent, scooped Sofia up, held her in his arms as if they were about to walk across the threshold.

“Romantic,” she said, her voice barely audible over the winter wind. “You… you know we’re gonna die, right?”

Cooper pulled her close, kissed her forehead: even that felt scorchingly hot.

“We’ll make it,” he said. “Just give me directions.”

She pointed to the right. “North on Wabash.”

Sofia leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, then rested her head on his shoulder. She was shivering even worse than he was.

Cooper adjusted her in his arms. He headed north.

A GAME OF TAG

Admiral Porter relayed the news, somehow keeping his voice as emotionless as that of a traffic reporter.

“Seismic readings indicate a nuclear detonation in south-central Russia,” he said. “Approximately twenty megatons, believed to be of Chinese origin.”

Murray’s stomach did flip-flops. A nuke. A goddamn nuke. It changed the game in every possible way. Not only was the world up against a disease that turned humanity against itself, the disease had apparently learned how to push the button.

The staff of the Situation Room looked as sick as Murray felt. Everyone except for the Joint Chiefs and the president. Porter and the other generals exuded grim determination — like it or not, this was their moment. Blackmon just looked pissed.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “This came out of nowhere. If it was an ICBM, we should have seen the launch.”

Porter nodded, took his customary pause before answering. “That’s because it wasn’t an ICBM. Our guess is a Type 631 missile fired from a truck just south of the Russian border, between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Truck-fired missile range is over four hundred kilometers, enough to reach Omsk, Novosibirsk or possibly Krasnoyarsk.”

Murray didn’t know any of those cities. How big were they? Which one had been hit?

André Vogel pressed a finger to an earpiece in his right ear. He dabbed at his now constantly sweaty, bald head with a handkerchief.

“We’ve got a bird bringing up visuals on the region,” he said. “We should have satellite imagery on the big screen in a few seconds.”

The Situation Room fell silent. All heads turned to the monitor that showed fifteen American cities lit up in yellow, another eight in red. Smaller red and yellow spots dotted the country — violence was radiating from the big cities, spilling out across the nation.

The map of America blinked out, replaced by a high-angle view of a mushroom cloud billowing up over a glowing landscape. Murray saw the hallmarks of a major metroplex: a river cutting through the middle, clusters of tall buildings, roads snaking out to suburbs, then to forest and farmland.

A single word at the bottom identified the city.

“Novosibirsk,” Blackmon said slowly and carefully, as if she wanted to respect the newly dead by properly pronouncing the name of their now-destroyed home. “How many people?”

Admiral Porter answered her. “Third-largest city in Russia, behind Moscow and St. Petersburg. Population, one-point-five million.”

On the screen, the mushroom cloud continued to rise. Murray found himself wishing that this was a joke, the prank of some sick, twisted fuck.

It wasn’t.

“My God,” Blackmon said. “This is really happening.” She did her hands-rubbing-the-face thing, then blinked rapidly, worked her jaw as if trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth. “Do we detect any other launches from the Chinese?”

“Negative,” Porter said. “All ICBMs are still. The Chinese aren’t warming anything up that we know of. It could have been a rogue element. Possibly the truck crew was converted — they could have launched on their own.”

Vogel dabbed at his sweaty face with a sweat-soaked handkerchief.

“We’ve got full satellite coverage now,” he said. “If there’s another truck launch, we’ll see it happen.”

Blackmon laced her fingers together. She was trying to stay calm, to show confidence, but the fingers gripped too tightly, made the skin on the back of her hands wrinkle and pucker.

“Director Vogel,” she said, “I need you to find a way for me to talk to Beijing.”

Vogel leaned on the table. “We’re trying everything we can, Madam President. We’re starting to get satellite images from China’s largest cities. Several of them show major fires. Communication seems to be down all across the country. They can’t talk to us, and far as we can tell it looks like they can’t even talk to each other.”

Blackmon seemed to realize her hands were strangling each other. She extended her fingers, moved her hands apart, dropped them to her lap.

“Get me in touch with someone who can make decisions in China,” she said. “And get Morozov on the line. Right now.”

Bodies scurried into motion, hands picked up phones — at least four people jumped on the task of trying to reach Stepan Morozov, the president of Russia.

Paris, a cinder. London in chaos. Gun battles in the streets of Berlin. Reports of Converted wreaking havoc in South America, Northern Africa, India and Pakistan. Every continent felt the effects. All except for Australia, the leaders of which had been smart enough to shut down all travel three days earlier.

Blackmon turned to Porter. “Admiral, what’s the condition of the Seventh Fleet?”

Maybe Murray wasn’t up on his Russian geography, but he — like everyone else in the room — knew exactly what Blackmon was asking. The Seventh Fleet operated as a forward force near Japan, a constant presence of power some sixty ships and three hundred aircraft strong. The Seventh was America’s sheathed saber in that region.

“Seventh fleet is at REDCON-1,” Porter said. “They are prepared to defend any hostile action and are available for offensive operations.”

Blackmon nodded her approval. “Make sure fleet command knows they have clearance to shoot down anything that comes near them. From here on out, we err on the side of an international incident as opposed to losing even a single ship.”

“Yes, Madam President,” the admiral said. He turned to his assistants, setting in motion another miniflurry of activity.

Vogel looked off, put his hand to his earpiece. He turned to Blackmon.

“Madam President, we have President Morozov on the line. He called us.”

An assistant placed a red phone on the table in front of Blackmon. It was an old-fashioned thing, a handset connected to the main phone by a curly cable: the “hotline,” a piece of equipment that for five decades had served as a last resort to stop nuclear war.

Blackmon took a deep breath. She picked up the handset.

“President Morozov, America expresses its deepest condolences at this tragedy.”

She paused, listening. Her eyes widened.

“Stepan, don’t do this,” she said. “That attack probably wasn’t ordered by the government. China is dealing with the same problems you are — you know they wouldn’t risk a war with Russia. If you retaliate, all you’ll do is kill innocent people.”

She listened. Her eyes closed. That was it, just her eyelids closing, and everyone in the room knew Morozov’s answer.

Blackmon opened her eyes. They burned with anger and frustration.

“The United States objects in the strongest possible terms,” she said. “The world is on the edge of collapse. This will push us even closer.”

There was a pause, then she hung up the phone.

Blackmon took a moment. The room waited for her. She squared her shoulders and spoke.

“President Morozov feels compelled to retaliate. What will Russia’s likely target be?”

Vogel rubbed at his bald scalp, rubbed hard. “Probably a city comparable in size to Novosibirsk,” he said. He tapped at his keyboard, glanced at the main monitor as he did. “The closest Chinese city would probably be… Ürümqi.”

The image on the screen shifted, showing a city nested between three snowcapped mountain ranges. At the center, the word Ürümqi. If Murray hadn’t heard Vogel say it, he would have had no idea how to pronounce it.

Blackmon nodded once, as if she knew the city of Ürümqi was the only obvious answer. “And that city has one-point-five million people?”

“Closer to two-point-five million,” Vogel said. “Three-point-five in the prefecture, so the death toll would depend on what weapon the Russians use.”

Murray shook his head in amazement. Three-point-five million: about the size of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city.

Blackmon’s hands clenched together again. The world’s most-powerful human being had no power at all to stop a massive slaughter.

“Admiral Porter, how would Russia strike that city?”

“Tupolev bomber,” Porter said. “Likely a Tu-160 flying out of the Engels-2 air base near Saratov. You can bet it’s already in the air. It will launch a Kh-55 cruise missile, probable warhead yield of 200 kilotons.”

A series of concentric circles appeared on the screen, overlaying the city. The center circle was a bright red, surrounded by one in red-orange, which in turn was surrounded by orange, and finally a ring of yellow. More words appeared on the screen, showing districts or suburbs, Murray wasn’t sure: Qidaowanxiang, Ergongxiang, Xinshi, Tianshan, Shayibak and more. The names all fell within the bands of color. Murray didn’t know those names, probably couldn’t even pronounce them, but the names made everything more real.

People lived in Xinshi, people lived in Qidaowanxiang… people who were probably going to die.

Vogel turned to Admiral Porter, looked at all the Joint Chiefs.

“We have to do something,” Vogel said. “Do we have any resources in the area? A carrier, anything?”

The air force admiral started to speak, but Blackmon cut him off.

“We do nothing,” she said. Her voice was cold, unforgiving. If her heart felt anything, she refused to let those emotions reach her brain.

Vogel looked shocked. “But Madam President, a strike could kill millions of people! We have to try to stop it!”

Blackmon stared straight ahead. “Russia has been attacked and will retaliate. If we try to intervene, we…”

Her voice trailed off. She closed her mouth, licked her lips. She gathered herself, continued.

“If we intervene, Russia could interpret that as an act of war. America is in dire straits — we can’t risk doing anything that would put our troops in conflict, and we cannot risk nuclear weapons being launched at our shores. Russia has the right to defend herself.”

Vogel slumped back into his chair. He was stunned, just like most of the people in the room, just like Murray. Wasn’t the president of the United States supposed to be able to reach out and stop injustice?

And yet, Murray knew Blackmon was making the right call. If the USA stuck her nose in the middle of this fight, the next mushroom cloud might rise over Miami, Seattle, Phoenix… any number of American treasures. Blackmon had no choice other than to make sure Russia didn’t see the United States as an enemy.

Admiral Porter cleared his throat. “Madam President, if I may offer a suggestion?”

She waved her hand inward: go ahead.

“We think the Chinese nuke was launched by a rogue element,” Porter said. “However, it is also very possible that the government was testing Russia, seeing if the infection had impacted Russia’s ability to respond to attack.”

“Russia’s ability has not been affected,” Blackmon said. “Which the Chinese are about to find out firsthand.”

Admiral Porter nodded. “Of course. But, if China actually was testing Russian resolve, their next test could be against us. We need to prepare our own retaliatory response. The Chinese — or whoever is running things there — will see us preparing for launch. They’ll know the United States is ready to hit back.”

Three nuclear powers at play, inches away from an all-out exchange. If Murray had wondered how things could get any worse, now he knew.

Vogel knocked twice on the table. “Porter is right,” he said. “The Chinese will see us preparing. So will the Russians, just in case they get any bright ideas while they’re lobbing nukes into China.”

Murray shook his head. “Are you warmongering assholes really this obtuse? You want to make things worse by spinning up our birds?”

The admiral glared at him. Vogel chose to look elsewhere.

The president raised a finger. “Director Longworth, let’s keep this civil.”

“Sorry, Madam President.”

She turned back to Porter.

“Admiral, you’re sure about this? You really think prepping for launch will be interpreted as a warning and not a threat?”

There was a gleam in the admiral’s eye. Maybe Murray was imagining that, but this man — all the Joint Chiefs, for that matter — had spent a lifetime training and preparing for a situation this severe.

“China has already used a nuclear weapon,” Porter said. “Russia is about to do the same. The seal is broken, Madam President. It’s a lot easier to justify the second strike than it is the first.”

Russia would launch at China, maybe one of them would launch at America, and then America would launch at both — just to be sure — and then…

Murray stood up. The action seemed to surprise the other people at the table. It even surprised him.

“This is what it wants,” he said, the words rushing out. “These people, the Converted, they aren’t monsters. They aren’t zombies. The destruction of Paris made that clear. The bomb that hit Novosibirsk — if it wasn’t the Chinese government, it wasn’t truly rogue, either. That was a calculated attack, because this disease wants to kill us all. Vogel, put our disease tracking numbers back on the screen.”

Vogel did so. Murray pointed at the top number.

“Sixty percent immunized,” he said. “Soon to be seventy, then eighty. We’re in the lead, and the other industrialized nations are close behind. Don’t you see? We’ve stopped the spread. We’ll have millions of infected to deal with, sure, but we’ve stopped the spread. The Converted… they can watch the news just like we can. They know the score. We’ve checked the contagion, so now they’re looking for other ways to take us out. We just so happen to have tens of thousands of other ways in the form of nuclear missiles. Don’t you get it? We’re beating them now because we’re organized, because we have communication — if a nuclear shooting match starts, all that goes away. They want to destroy us. If they start a nuclear war, then we do their work for them.”

Vogel turned sharply, his hand shot to his earpiece: new information. The room hushed, waited for him.

“Seismic readings indicate a one-hundred-kiloton detonation in China,” he said. “Probable epicenter… Ürümqi. Returning to satellite coverage.”

The main monitor switched back to the image of Ürümqi, only now the city couldn’t be seen — a billowing mushroom cloud roiled up, blocking any view of the city center. The shock wave expanded out, a ring of dirt and debris widening at supersonic speed.

Blackmon stood up, rested her hands on the table. She leaned forward, her predator’s stare locked on the scene of mass destruction.

“Admiral Porter is right,” she said. “We need to send a clear signal. We need to make sure the Russians and the Chinese know what will happen if they attack. Take us to DEFCON 2.”

THE STREETS OF CHICAGO

It could have been an Old West ghost town, complete with howling wind. Skyscrapers in place of beat-up wooden shacks, snowdrifts instead of rolling tumbleweed, but it was just as desolate, just as empty.

Some of the traffic lights were on, some were off. Most buildings sat dark. A few random windows glowed against the darkening sky.

Vehicles littered Michigan Avenue’s six snow-swept lanes. Some of the cars, trucks and buses looked fine, save for smashed-in windows and dented doors, while others were crumpled, knocked on their sides or even resting upside down with snow accumulating on their upturned tires and dark underbellies. Many were burned-out husks, blackened and misshapen from long-dead fires.

Light from the setting sun slipped through the packed, gray clouds, reflected off the tall skyscrapers. Broken windows looked like missing teeth, black spots marring the smooth glass faces.

Winter wind ate at Cooper and Sofia, cut into jeans and slacks, drove through coats to chill their bones and bellies. The snow kept falling, met in the sky by whirling bits of burned, blackened paper. Everything smelled like a day-old campfire. Icy flakes melted against skin, stuck to hair, clung on Cooper’s four-day stubble.

So many dead. Blackened corpses sat inside of blackened cars. A cindered bus sagged from the heat that had scorched it. A scattering of five corpses spread out from its twisted door — people who made it out of the vehicle, but still succumbed to the flames. Bloated and frozen bodies lined the sidewalks, lay between the ruined cars that filled and blocked the streets. It was as if God had picked up a graveyard, turned it upside down and rattled it, scattering the dead like a child dumping out a box of toys.

Cooper began to hear occasional sounds through the wind — a clank of metal, distant tinkles of breaking glass, the screams of the hunted and gleeful cheers of the hunters. He stayed close to the buildings on the west side of the street, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

Nothing came out to stop him, but he and Sofia weren’t entirely alone. Here and there, Cooper saw the little pyramid-shaped monsters, sometimes scurrying across the street from one building to another, sometimes through ground-floor windows where they built their walls of solidified shit.

He also saw flashes of movement from deep inside buildings, through smashed storefronts and from behind windows higher up the towering buildings. He was being watched, watched by something bigger than the hatchlings.

Cooper had carried Sofia north on Wabash and cut east on Hubbard. At Michigan Avenue, he looked south. The snow-covered Michigan Avenue Bridge led over the Chicago River. He wondered if they should go that way instead, but Sofia tugged on his jacket to get his attention.

She raised a shaking hand, pointed at a twenty-story building a half block up on the left.

Fire had raged through the smooth glass tower, covering what windows remained with waving patterns of soot. At the bottom of the building, he saw a broken overhang that once had shielded Chicagoans from rain or snow. It, too, was twisted and blackened by the fire. A warped script W and one e were all that remained of brass letters that had spelled out “Walgreens.”

Cooper’s heart sank. He kept walking, kept carrying Sofia. Maybe the fire damage was only superficial.

It wasn’t.

Nothing remained of the drugstore. Through broken and blackened glass, Cooper saw melted metal shelves and powdery paper ash. The smell of burned plastic poured out of the place as though it was still actively ablaze.

Sofia shivered in his arms.

“Shit,” she said.

Cooper nodded. “I guess we go to the hospital next. Let me take a little rest.”

He looked around, saw a nearby car that had smashed into a bus. The car’s windows remained unbroken, intact. He carried Sofia over to it. He used the hand under her knees to open the driver’s door, then bent, his back straining as he carefully set her on the driver’s seat.

His whole body seemed to sigh in relief. Sofia weighed all of a buck-ten — not much to hold for a few moments, but an awful lot to carry across the city.

“I’m slowing you down,” she said, her weak voice barely audible over the wind. “Why are you doing this for me?”

He thought for a moment, searching for an answer.

“Because of my mom,” he said finally. “She’d want me to help you.”

A not-so-distant scream from behind, a woman’s scream, echoing through the empty streets. Cooper looked back the way they had come, his hand moving on its own, reaching for the cold handle of the gun stuffed into his pants.

Two long blocks away, he saw a woman at the base of the bridge. Her hands clutched to her shoulders as if she was trying to compress herself, make herself too small to see. Chicago’s skyscrapers rose up into the gray evening sky around her. She stood in the middle of the street, looking to her right, then turning right, then looking right again, then turning again, spinning in place in a stop-start motion. The wind blew snow at her, probably cutting right through her thin blouse.

For a moment, Cooper wondered why she hadn’t worn a coat (didn’t she know it was freezing outside?) before he realized she had probably fled some hiding spot, had run just to stay alive.

He saw movement: two other people approaching the woman. A tall man, wearing a red down jacket, and a woman wearing a blue snowsuit. They must have come out of the surrounding buildings. They closed in, and suddenly there were four more people — sliding out of ruined cars, walking through doorways.

They had the woman surrounded.

She kept turning, first her head, then her body.

“Don’t just stand there,” Cooper said quietly. “Run.”

The woman didn’t move. The six closed in on her.

And then, on the bridge, coming from the south, through the falling snow and scattering bits of paper, Cooper saw something else.

Something… huge.

He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words hit his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.

“What the fuck is that? Cooper, what the fuck is that?”

Cooper didn’t know, didn’t want to know. It was a man… maybe. Sickly yellow skin, no jacket, an upper body that was far too wide for legs that would be gigantic on anyone save for an NFL lineman. And the head — Cooper couldn’t make out much other than a neck that was as wide as impossibly wide shoulders, a neck that led up to a face hidden behind a blue scarf wrapped around the mouth and nose.

The woman let go of her own shoulders, finally turned to run, but it was too late; six people grabbed her. She screamed and jerked, tried to fight, but the others held her fast.

The man in the red jacket stood in front of her, reached into his coat, pulled out a long butcher knife.

Cooper thought about drawing his gun, taking a shot, maybe he could get lucky from this far out—

—and then it was too late. The man in the red jacket drove the knife into the woman’s belly, slid it up, like a butcher slaughtering a pig. The woman didn’t even scream, she just stared. Stared, and twitched.

Her attackers tore into her. Cooper saw hands driving down, yanking, ripping, saw those hands come back bloody and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.

The five people started to eat.

I am not seeing this… I am not fucking seeing this…

A tug on his coat.

“Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the hell out of here.”

He realized the gun was in his hand. He didn’t remember actually drawing it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He stuffed it once again into the back of his pants, then reached into the car for Sofia.

TIPPING POINT

From his little table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, Tim Feely studied the numbers. New York City, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids and Chicago were no longer providing consumer data. They were too far gone for that.

Elsewhere in the country, people were stocking up on whatever they could before it was too late. That panic skewed the consumer pattern information, but there was still enough data from which to draw conclusions.

The list went on and on. Most of Baltimore had lost power the day before, so there was no additional data to be had there. Indianapolis, Huntsville and Birmingham were in the same boat.

As near as Tim could tell, most cities on the Eastern Seaboard had significant outbreaks. The Midwest was even worse. The West Coast showed some signs of infected activity, but the overall stats indicated those populations were mostly normal; they’d brewed the inoculant faster there, distributed it better, done a superior job at overcoming local objections. Although murder rates had skyrocketed, police departments remained in control of the West Coast and the Southwest — except for Los Angeles.

Riots and looting had cast LA into chaos. There was no information to discern if the violence came from the Converted, or if it had blown up due to the deaths that occurred because of the mayor’s shoot-on-sight after-dark curfew.

Canada was also in bad shape. Montreal was ablaze, just like Paris. Tim didn’t have consumer data on Europe, but news reports of burning cities and corpses littering the streets told the story just fine.

Pandora’s box had opened. Just like the myth, evil things had flown out to infect the world. In that myth, the last thing to escape had been hope.

This time, Tim wondered if there was any hope at all.

COOPER’S CHOICE

Shadows moved within the darkness of a wintry Chicago night. Cooper stumbled more than he ran, the girl in his arms a heaviness that threatened to pull him down.

Just drop her… just leave her, she’s going to die anyway…

They’d found the hospital to be a burned-out husk. When they’d come in for a closer look, something had found them, followed them.

Cooper had carried Sofia away, but that something had picked up their trail. They fled north. The storm that threatened to kill them also provided some cover: blowing snow helped them hide, masked their tracks and their sounds.

His arms burned, screamed for oxygen. Sofia hung low, near his thighs, his left arm under her knees, his right around her back. He stopped only long enough to heft her high again, up to his chest, then he continued up Michigan Avenue.

He felt her fingers clutch his jacket, pulling it tighter across his chest.

“They’re coming,” she said. “I can hear them. Run faster, goddamit!”

Cooper could barely run at all, let alone faster, but he heard them, too, heard their yells, heard the roaring of some misshapen thing.

He’d walked seven excruciating blocks — careful not to step on frozen body parts or broken glass — with the cold making his hands numb, making his fingers tingle, with Sofia’s weight dragging at him, and now he was only a block shy of Chicago Avenue.

So he ignored the icy cold air that sucked deep into his heaving lungs, ignored the wind that made his face sting and burn. He moved faster.

Up ahead, on the other side of Chicago Avenue on both the left and the right, he saw gothic buildings made of white stone. They looked like castles, especially the one on the left with its octagonal tower that stretched thirty feet above. It was old, so old it had probably once towered over the surrounding buildings back when “tall” meant four or five stories. Now it was just a lost footnote in the city’s sprawling skyline. A little castle… a little fortress…

Leave her and go hide. Go in the fortress, block the door, you can hold them off…

A tug at his collar.

“There,” Sofia said. She pointed right: he saw the white WALGREENS lettering on a black overhang. Below it, a revolving door of glass in a curved metal housing. The store sat at the base of a tall, tan building. This place wasn’t burned out. Cooper didn’t see any activity in front of the store, or inside it. Maybe they could hide in there, killing two birds with one stone.

He reached the door: it was still intact, as were the glass windows on either side.

Cooper carefully carried Sofia into the rotating door, careful not to stumble and drop her or smack her head against anything. He pushed. It turned with a deep swishhh. Three steps later, he stepped into a miracle.

The lights were on.

There was no wind.

No heat, either, but without the windchill the place felt comparatively warm.

The doors might be intact, but this place hadn’t escaped the disaster. Ten feet in lay a headless body. Ice crystals formed a strangely beautiful pattern in the blood that had spilled from the man’s neck and spread across the hard stone floor.

Farther up the first aisle, between scattered bags of chips on one side and candy bars on the other, lay a second body, a woman. A look of disbelief had frozen on her face, maybe when her attackers had torn her right arm from her body, leaving the ripped sleeve of her blue jacket ragged and stiff with icy blood. That jacket remained buttoned under her chin, but open at the belly to show an empty cavity — her internal organs were gone.

“My God,” Sofia said. “Coop, we gotta hide.”

He nodded. He hefted her higher, or tried to, but his arms wouldn’t lift her. He was damn near done. “Is the pharmacy in the back?”

“Yeah,” Sofia said. “Straight back.”

Cooper stepped over the bodies.

All through the aisles, products had been ripped off the metal shelves and tossed onto the floor. It didn’t look like much had been taken, though — more a store-trashing rampage rather than people scrambling for supplies.

He stumbled on a box of candy, causing him to hit the shelves on his left, rocking them a little before they settled back down with a bang.

Sofia’s face wrinkled in pain. She’d taken the brunt of that blow.

“Sorry,” he said.

She said nothing.

Cooper kept moving. The fluorescent lights created the strange sensation that — aside from the bodies, of course — this place was still open for business, that the horrors outside had passed it by.

He reached the pharmacy counter. Instead of looking for the door, he set Sofia on the counter, then hopped over. When his feet hit the floor, his exhausted legs gave out beneath him. He fell in a heap on the tile, banging the top of his head against the corner of a rack that held hundreds of little plastic pull-out bins.

“Owww.” Cooper rolled to his back, hands pressed to his new injury.

“Graceful,” Sofia said. “Just… let me catch my breath, then I’ll… start carrying you.”

He lifted his head to look at her. She’d pushed herself up on one elbow to stare down at him. Jeff’s big coat made her seem so small, so feminine. She looked like death warmed over — face gaunt, black hair stringy and frozen in clumps, eyes half lidded — but the left corner of her mouth curled into a shit-eating grin.

Back flat on the floor, muscles burning, chest heaving and head stinging, Cooper started laughing.

“Sofia, you’re kind of a dick.”

She nodded weakly. “I’ve been told that once or twice in my day. You mind getting me down from here?”

The brief moment of humor vanished. He fought his aching body and stood, gently lifted her from the counter, then set her down with her butt on the floor and her back against the inside of the counter. If anyone else came in the store, Cooper and Sofia wouldn’t be seen unless the intruder came all the way to the rear.

She reached up and caressed his face. “Thanks, Cooper. I mean it. I’d be dead already if it weren’t for you.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. He turned to the pull-out bins, started filing through the paper envelopes inside of them.

“Amoxicillin, maybe? You allergic to that?”

“No idea,” Sofia said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

He nodded. “I guess we will.” He dug through the envelopes.

“Hey, Cooper… you feel okay?”

“You mean other than cold and exhaustion? Sure, I guess. Why?”

“You got some kind of big blister on the back of your neck.”

He stopped flipping through the envelopes. He remembered the puffy, air-filled spot he’d seen on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s some kind of allergic reaction, I think. Hives or something. I haven’t checked in a while, but I had them all over my body.”

He reached to his neck, felt what she was talking about: a puffy blister the size of a small marble. He pressed on it, heard a soft pop, saw a tiny mist of slowly floating white. Sofia’s breath scattered it away.

“Gross,” she said. “Like a puffball.”

Cooper nodded. “Yeah. That is kind of gross.”

She gave a halfhearted shrug. “The least of my worries right now. Can you get me some water? I’m really thirsty.”

He noticed her breath crystallizing when she talked. The store gave them shelter, but he’d have to find a way to get heat, fast.

He pulled out six of the plastic bins, slid them over to her.

“Look through those envelopes,” he said. “We want amoxicillin, penicillin, shit like that. I’ll get you that water.”

He stood, looked over the counter and out into the store — still empty. The pharmacy door was off to his left. It opened into store’s horizontal rear aisle. Most of the end-cap displays were untouched. If he’d needed a new mop head or a four-for-three bargain on Tampax, it would have been his lucky day.

He saw the refrigerators off to the left, still lit from within. He skipped the soft drinks, grabbed three bottles of water and an orange juice instead. One refrigerator contained sandwiches. He grabbed three.

The lights are on… the refrigerators are working.

In all the apocalyptic movies, the power was one of the first things to go. But not here in Chicago. With the city all but destroyed, wouldn’t the psychos have hit a power plant? A transformer? Power lines, maybe? Apparently not.

He looked up and down the line of refrigerators. There was enough food and water to last him and Sofia for several days. And if they ate through all that, the shelves were still filled with dry goods, canned tuna, crackers… enough to last them weeks.

Long enough for the National Guard to arrive, to take control of the city.

An idea struck him. He jogged through the aisles, careful not to step on anything, looking for small appliances. In Aisle Six, he found what he wanted: an electric heater.

He juggled his loot as he walked back to the pharmacy door. If he could find a way to board up that front entrance, maybe board up whatever rear entrance the place had, they could stay here at least long enough for Sofia to get better.

Just to the right of the pharmacy door he found a waist-high wall of bandages and disinfectants.

He walked into the pharmacy and set the food and water next to her. She held up a white paper bag: amoxicillin.

“Good girl,” he said. He opened a bottle for her and put it in her hands. He then opened the medicine, put two pills in her mouth. She lifted the water bottle — weakly, but on her own — and took a drink. Her eyes closed in relief.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Thank you. I never thought water could taste so good.”

He grabbed the box with the heater, slid it in front of her. “Unless you object, I’ll just go ahead and plug this in for you.”

Her eyes widened. She shivered. “Heat? Oh, Coop, if I wasn’t so messed up, you’d totally get a blow job.”

“Yeah? Well, then get ready for your panties to evaporate.”

Cooper walked out, gathered an armful of peroxide, cotton balls and gauze wrap. He walked back to her and set the pile of medical supplies next to the pile of food.

She weakly lifted her water bottle, took another drink. “I’ve had better dates, but not many,” she said. “Turn the heater on before I change my mind about fucking the living hell out of you.”

“Yeah, all your bleeding and shivering is such a turn-on.” Cooper ripped open the heater box. He looked at the cash register on the counter, followed the power cord down to an outlet. He plugged in the heater, turned it as high as it would go and pointed it at her.

The heater’s fan spun up. The air came out, warm at first, then it quickly turned hot.

Sofia closed her eyes, leaned her head against the wall. “Oh, hell yes. Thank you.”

Cooper gently opened Jeff’s coat and pulled up Sofia’s shirt to look at the wound. The edges were gray, almost black. It looked horrible. He had no idea what to do next.

He opened the bottle of peroxide, then a box of gauze strips. He poured peroxide onto the wound. Sofia hissed as the liquid fizzed into whiteness. He used the gauze to dab at the wound. He cleaned as gently as he could, wiping away blood both dry and wet. He used more gauze to cover the wound, then ran tape around her stomach and back.

“That’s all I know to do,” he said.

He smiled at her. She took a drink of water, smiled back.

Swishhhh.

They froze: the front door had just turned.

They heard footsteps.

A man’s voice called out, and it was all Cooper could do to not piss his pants for the second time.

“Where are you, motherfucker? Are you in there?”

The voice sounded confident, aggressive; the voice of a man in a bar challenging another man to a fight.

Swishhh… swishhh… swishhh.

More noises. Feet moving, cellophane rattling, boxes falling. More than one man; maybe three, maybe four. Then, the sound of a low, deep growl.

Too deep to be human.

Sofia’s hands snapped out: she grabbed Cooper’s jacket, surprising him. He started to lean back, but she pulled him close.

“They’re going to find us,” she hissed. Her face was only inches from his, her skin red, the edges of her nose cracked and raw. “They’re going to find us. They’re going to kill us.”

“Be quiet,” he whispered back, trying to push her away. She was losing it. She was making too much noise. He had to get her out of there, had to get himself out of there.

“Sofia, let go of me!”

Out in the store, something hit hard against a shelf. The shelf must have tipped over, because it crashed onto the floor with a sound like a broken gong. Cooper heard people moving around, yelling at each other.

Sofia’s puffy eyes filled with tears. She mouthed two words, over and over:

Shoot them!

The noises in the store grew closer.

Cooper grabbed Sofia’s wrists, pulled at them, tried to tear her grip from his coat.

He mouthed back to her: Stop it! She resisted for a second, even sneered at him, but he got his feet under him, then leaned away until her hands finally snapped free.

Out in the store, another rack fell over, the sound punching through him, shaking his atoms, letting him know the cannibals were coming and this panicking woman was going to get him killed.

He leaned in again, pressed his lips against her ear.

“Calm the fuck down. Just stay quiet, they’ll leave, they’ll—”

He felt Sofia’s right hand on his hip, sliding around to his back…

The gun.

He leaned away hard, lost his balance. His ass hit the floor and he skidded into the heater, sending it clattering loudly into a wall.

Sofia scrambled to her feet. She tore off Jeff’s coat and reached for the door handle, her open, bloody shirt flaring out behind her.

Cooper pushed himself to his knees and dove — his fingertips closed on the shirttail, then slipped free. He landed on his stomach as she opened the door and hobbled out into the store.

He jumped to his feet, drew the pistol as he rushed after her, just in time to see Sofia trip over an overturned rack. Her face bounced hard off the metal shelves. Blood poured instantly from a long gash across her forehead.

The blow staggered her, took away whatever adrenaline-fueled energy reserve she’d found. She flopped to her back, the tilted rack beneath her, the top of her head on the tile floor, her legs dangling off what used to be the rack’s bottom.

She looked at him with glazed eyes.

But Cooper Mitchell didn’t really see Sofia. What he saw were the six people standing there, three on either side of her, all staring at him, all hunched forward in clear aggression.

The same people who had killed that woman in the street.

Killed her, and eaten her.

Six people… and by the revolving door, mostly hidden by the racks of merchandise, that hulking form Cooper had seen coming across the bridge, head still wrapped in the blue scarf.

Five bullets; he couldn’t get them all.

He was going to die.

They all held weapons: long knives, a fire axe, a machete, a tire iron. The woman in the blue snowsuit had a chrome-plated revolver in her left hand.

Cooper was too afraid to move. His pistol was pointed down… he had to raise it, had to do something…

The tall man in the red jacket took a small step forward, then stopped. The knife he’d used to kill the woman in the blouse caught the store’s fluorescent lights.

Clean. The blade is clean. He took the time to clean it…

The man stared at Cooper. He lowered the knife. The others stood still. They weren’t attacking.

Cooper looked at them. They looked at him, but they also looked at the gun in his hand.

“Help… me…”

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.