Pandemic

The Situation Room was starting to stink. Too many meals eaten at the long table, too many people, not enough showers. Murray had left only to go to the bathroom and to sleep a few hours at a time. For once, the burden of age — not being able to sleep for more than four hours at a time — produced fringe benefits.

The rest of the world’s infected estimate had surpassed the USA’s and was expected to skyrocket in the next few days. While 65 percent of Americans were now immunized, there was no measuring how many people across the globe had received the Feely yeast strain. The best estimate was just 15 percent of the world’s population.

That left six billion potential hosts.

Blackmon slept. While she did, everyone looked to Murray for answers. The disease was the thing, and he knew more about it than anyone else in the room. That meant when Cheng reported in from Black Manitou Island, it was up to Murray to ask the hard questions.

The man whose face stared out from the Situation Room’s monitor was a far cry from the smug, arrogant ass that Cheng had once been. Gone were his illusions of glamour and importance. He wasn’t looked upon as a genius that would save the country. The administration saw it a different way: instead of Cheng getting the credit for every life saved, he got the implied blame for every American death.

“Our models predict that one percent of the Chinese population is actually converted,” he said. “Only ten percent is currently infected.”

“Only ten percent,” Murray echoed. “Doctor Cheng, China has one-point-four billion people. You’re telling me you think a hundred and forty million Chinese people are infected?”

Cheng looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on this call. “That’s our best estimate. In two more days, it could go as high as four hundred million infected, but by then at least a hundred million of those would be fully converted.”

Admiral Porter shook his head. Somehow, the man never looked creased or sweaty. Maybe he changed his uniform every time he left to take a leak.

“Four hundred million,” he said. “That’s more than the entire population of the United States and Canada, combined.”

Porter was thinking in terms of an enemy force, which was exactly the right way to think about it. A thousand had destroyed Paris — what could hundreds of millions do?

“Cities will be overrun,” the admiral said. “If the numbers get that high, there’s no way to get China back under control.”

Cheng licked his fat lips, rubbed nervously at his jaw. “I’m afraid it gets worse.”

His image shrank down to the bottom right corner. The screen now showed a map of China. The west side of the country was colored mostly in light blue with some swatches of dark blue and a few spots of green. The east side was mostly dark blue with larger areas of that same green. The middle was all a very pale blue, or white.

“This is a population map of China,” Cheng said. “The majority of people live on the East Coast. The areas in green are more densely populated. Dark blue is still heavily populated but not as densely as the green. If the Chinese government focuses all or most of its efforts on saving the cities, the sparsely populated area in the middle could provide free range to millions of Converted. They could survive for months, if not years.”

Murray shook his head. “The Converted won’t last that long. They’d starve. It’s not like they can go out and farm or something, not without being seen.”

Cheng seemed uncomfortable, like he was holding something back.

André Vogel stood.

“The Converted don’t need to farm,” he said. “We just received a firsthand account from a field agent in Baltimore, uploaded before he died. I have images. They are… disturbing.”

Murray waved toward the monitor. “We’re all big boys and girls, Vogel. Put the damn pictures on the screen already.”

The map of China faded, replaced by a picture of a dead woman. Murray heard people hiss in a shocked breath, heard one man gag.

The woman lay face-up, staring at the sky. She would have been staring, that is, if she had any eyes. Most of her face had been ripped away, leaving a skeleton smile streaked with rusty red and crusty black. Arms and legs all showed patches of exposed bone.

“Another dead body,” Murray said. “So what?”

Vogel pulled out his handkerchief. “The agent said he saw Converted consuming this woman.”

Consuming. Eating.

Porter sagged in his chair. “The ultimate infantry. God dammit. They don’t need to grow food or forage — they eat what they kill.”

Deathly silences had become a regular occurrence in the Situation Room. Now Murray sat through another one, taking a moment to think.

Even if as much as 25 percent of the Chinese population became converted, that still left nine hundred million bodies’ worth of edible human-on-the-hoof.

Murray had harbored no illusions about the overwhelming magnitude of this situation, but now an even harsher truth started to hit home.

“Immunity alone isn’t going to do it,” he said quietly. “We have to find a way to kill these fucking things, all of them, or we’re facing an extinction event — we’ll be gone. Someone wake up the president. And get Margaret Montoya on this screen, right now.”

BREAKFAST

As impossible as it seemed, Cooper Mitchell slept like the dead — right up until the smell of roasting meat brought him out of it. His mouth watered for a few seconds, then filled with bile when he realized exactly what that smell was.

Sofia.

He opened his eyes. The people sleeping just a few feet away: why did they think he was one of them? If they figured out he was not, then he would be the one sizzling over the fire.

He was in the small lobby of the Park Tower hotel. Before everything went to shit, this must have been an opulent place: marble floor, black-stone columns supporting a tastefully lit ceiling, art on the teak walls and glass display cases full of large, expensive fossils. Now it looked like he’d slipped back in time to when the Neanderthals lived in caves.

Wind blew in through the broken glass of the main entrance. It had been a revolving door once, but most of it had been torn away; Cooper guessed someone had rammed a truck through it, then driven off. As you came in that open space, feet crunching on broken glass, to the left were the trashed display cases and waist-high windows — shattered, of course — that opened up onto snow-covered Chicago Avenue.

He was as far away from those windows as he could get, maybe forty feet straight back, lying on the hard floor with his shoulder pressed up against the lobby’s far wall. His new “friends” had built a fire here. A layer of smoke floated near the ceiling, swirling slightly from the wind that came in off the street. To his right were the remains of the reception counter, much of which had been torn away to keep the fire going.

He didn’t want to be anywhere near the crackling flames, but the cold wouldn’t let him stray far. That meant he had to stay close to the thick pile of hot coals, and to the makeshift spit the others had crafted from street signs.

On that spit, a naked, sizzling, blackened Sofia, a signpost shoved through her mouth, down her throat and out her ass.

The Tall Man slowly rotated her. He stopped for a second, raised a fist to his mouth as his body contracted in a wheezing cough. The skin at Sofia’s right shoulder split. Juices bubbled out, dripped down to hiss against the coals, sending up a ribbon of steam that rose past her cooking body.

She counted on you. You told her you’d save her and you shot her you shot her you coward you murderer but I had to I don’t want to die…

The skin on Sofia’s head had shrunken, cracked, showed some of the white skull beneath. Someone had already eaten her eyes; empty sockets gazed out. And yet for all the damage, he still recognized her face.

Cooper sensed someone coming up from behind. He closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep. If he flinched, if he lost it and started running, they would know he wasn’t one of them.

A hand patting his back, a friendly thump-thump that felt like being smacked with a heavy mallet. Each connection filled Cooper with an eruption of fear. His heart threatened to blast right out of his chest. He kept his eyes closed.

Stay still stay still don’t flinch don’t panic don’t run…

Another thump-thump. Cooper couldn’t fake sleep any longer. He opened his eyes — it was the Monstrosity Formerly Known as Jeff, crouching down on his heels. Jeff’s pale-yellow face broke into a long-toothed smile.

“COOOOPERRRR.”

Cooper came very close to shitting himself.

“Hey, Jeff,” he said. What else could he say?

Jeff’s horrid smile widened. A gnarled hand reached up — Cooper flinched, knew the bone-blade sticking out of Jeff’s forearm would punch right through him, but then the pale, white scythe pointed to the ceiling. Jeff’s gnarled fingers slid across his own scalp, lifted imaginary hair away from his swollen, yellow forehead. It was an instinctive motion, one he had made hundreds of thousands of times in his life, but his light-brown locks were no more. The fingers barely moved the few strands of hair that clung wetly to his scalp.

“COOOOOPERRRR… YOU HURT?” Monster Jeff rubbed his chest, then his stomach. “HURT INSIDE?”

Cooper glanced around the room, at all the others who had yet to rise. Were they sick? If so, should Cooper pretend to be the same way?

Jesus Christ save me get me out of this I swear I’ll lead a better life Jesus please please please…

The Tall Man coughed again, worse this time, the convulsion making him double over.

Fake it be like them whatever it takes be like them…

“Yeah,” Cooper said. “I hurt, Jeff. Inside.”

He looked around at the band of murderous cannibals. Two were asleep. The other three sat near the fire, one sneezing, the last two coughing, just like the Tall Man was.

And those coughs… wet… powerful… familiar.

They sound just like Chavo did.

Monster Jeff stood. He turned toward the spit, his thick body blocking the firelight and casting a shadow across the marble floor. His left hand reached out; the bone-blade stabbed into Sofia’s blackened butt cheek. He used the right-hand blade to slice at the charred corpse, then lifted his left arm — stuck on the point of his scythe was a chunk of whitish meat, still steaming and sizzling and popping.

Jeff turned, extended his left arm toward Cooper.

The hunk of meat dangled inches from Cooper’s face. Juice dribbled down to the floor.

“EAT,” Monster Jeff said. “FORRRR, STRENGTH.”

Cooper gagged. In the same moment, he brought his fist to his mouth, hid the gag with a forced follow-up cough. He coughed again, made it as loud as he could, let everyone see it and hear it.

Fake it be like them whatever it takes be like them…

He looked over at the Tall Man, who was biting into a greasy handful of flesh. Chewing.

Be like them…

Cooper reached out and gripped the handful of hot meat, slid it off Jeff’s hideous, pointy bone-blade — Sofia’s flesh came free with a slight squelching sound and another bomb-run pattern of juice.

Jeff smiled his long-toothed smile.

Cooper Mitchell was going crazy. He knew it, he could feel it, because only a crazy murderer-coward would do this unforgivable thing to stay alive. If he had to choose between sanity and death, he’d wear the straitjacket well. That was the price of life.

Cooper raised the piece of Sofia to his mouth. He hoped no one could see the tears that stung the corners of his eyes, or, if they could, that they’d think it was from the coughing.

He bit down, and tasted her.

BAT TWELVE

“Factories?” Blackmon said. “They’re destroying our factories?”

Nancy Whittaker was the latest bearer of bad news, and her news was a doozy. If Murray hadn’t been so bone-tired, he would have felt sympathy for the woman.

“No question, Madam President,” Whittaker said. “Four hours ago, CNN covered an attack on a brewery in Bakersfield. After that, the Converted started attacking breweries, bakeries and transportation centers all over the country. The methods are different in each city, so it doesn’t look like a coordinated attack. The news coverage must have given them the idea.”

Blackmon slapped the table. “But we protected those facilities! We assigned police, National Guard, even what regular army we could spare.”

“From what we can gather, the Converted know enough to attack in large numbers,” Whittaker said. “In some places, they overwhelmed defense forces. In others…” Whittaker cleared her throat, tried to work out the final words. “In others, it appears that some Guard members and police were Converted themselves.”

Blackmon’s face reddened slightly. “How much production capacity have we lost?”

“Around sixty percent, so far,” Whittaker said. “But the attacks are still under way. We assume we’ll lose at least another twenty percent.”

Blackmon fell back into her chair, as if an invisible hand had gently pushed her. She stared off.

Everyone waited. Murray didn’t know what she would decide next. She’d pinned America’s hopes on high levels of inoculation. The Converted were taking that option away.

“Director Longworth,” she said. “How bad does this hurt us?”

Murray wanted to give her something positive, but there was no way to put a happy face on the facts.

“If our production is cut by eighty percent, our strategy isn’t sustainable,” he said. “We won’t be able to produce enough of Feely’s yeast. In a week, maybe two, even the people we’ve already immunized will again be susceptible.”

Blackmon sighed. She had moved heaven and earth to do the impossible. With one simple, strategic shift, the Converted all but wiped out the gains she had made.

“Director Vogel,” she said. “What is the status of finding other patients who had the same stem cell procedure as Candice Walker?”

“There were ten patients in the trial,” Vogel said. “Eight — including Candice Walker — were from the western Michigan area, which is completely overrun by the Converted. One other was from New York, and one from Germany. We haven’t found any of them. We’re doing the best we can, but I’m not hopeful. We’ve put the word out to news organizations. Our best chance is that one of the patients will see the story and contact us.”

The president nodded, just a little, as if to say that’s less than helpful, idiot.

She turned to Murray “Is Montoya on the line?”

“Yes, Madam President.”

“Put her on the screen.”

Murray did. Margaret appeared, sitting at the Coronado’s small conference table. She looked better than the last time Murray had seen her. Margaret seemed sharp, intelligent, with a serious stare that rivaled Blackmon’s best.

“Hello, Doctor Montoya,” the president said. “It’s good to see you well.”

“Thank you,” Margaret said. “Truth be told, I’ve never felt better.”

Blackmon put her hands palms down on the table, made slow circles as she talked.

“Our inoculation strategy has suffered a setback,” she said. “We might not be able to sustain repeated dosing of those who have had a first round of treatment.”

Margaret nodded. “I’m not surprised. It was too big of a project to work. I told you to pursue the hydra solution. You, Murray, Cheng — you didn’t listen to me.”

“We didn’t,” Blackmon said. “And we’re doing everything we can to track down the other HAC stem cell patients. I ignored your advice once, Doctor Montoya, I won’t do so again. If we can’t find those patients, what else can be done?”

Margaret stayed still, showed little reaction, but Murray had known this woman for years. Her eyes squinted a little, wrinkled at the corners. That only happened when she laughed. Was Margaret trying to hold back a smile at all this?

“What else can be done,” she said, mimicking Blackmon’s words. “I gave you a solution, you didn’t use it. Now it’s too late. There are no other options. It’s over.”

Blackmon’s demeanor darkened. “So you’ve given up? You, the undefeatable Doctor Margaret Montoya, you want us to just roll over and die?”

Margaret shrugged. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all the species that ever lived on this planet were extinct before our ancestors even discovered fire. Extinction is the rule of life, not the exception. Humankind doesn’t get a special exemption, Madam President.”

Blackmon’s lips tightened into a thin line.

“Doctor Montoya, I find it hard to believe God would let his greatest creation be snuffed out.”

“You religious types have a saying, I believe,” Margaret said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. Extinction occurs because a species gets outcompeted for territory and resources — or just gets eaten. From observations and the reports we have so far, the Converted are faster, stronger and more ruthless than normal humans.”

Murray noticed that Margaret had avoided the phrases evolution and survival of the fittest. Maybe she didn’t want her message to get lost in the details.

The rest of the Situation Room seemed to fade into the shadows. Somehow this had become a battle of wills between Montoya and Blackmon.

“The Converted can’t win,” the president said. “We’ve got the weapons and the technology.”

Margaret held up her hands, wiggled her fingers. “The Converted have these, just like we do. They can use the same weapons we use. And our high-tech tanks and planes give us an advantage only as long as there is gas to run them, places to repair them. Once the fuel and bullets run out, Madam President, this fight will come down to knives and spears and rocks. If that happens, humanity will lose.”

The president’s hands curled into fists, fists that pressed down on the table. The predator’s gaze tightened — at that moment, she hated Margaret Montoya.

“You are wrong,” Blackmon said. “I have faith that we will find a way.”

“The wonderful thing about science, Madam President, is that it doesn’t ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes. In a week, you’ll be looking at three-quarters of a billion psychopaths spread out across the world. Even the most powerful army on the planet can’t handle…”

Margaret’s words trailed off. She blinked, raised her eyebrows, shook her head a little. Murray had seen her do that before, too — Margaret did that when she’d been lost in a train of thought and wanted to come back to the present.

“Sorry,” she said. “Listen to me, Madam President. Please. You need me there with you. I know we can find a way to beat this thing. I’m clean. I’m immunized. Fly me to D.C., today, and I’ll be by your side.”

That was the best idea Murray had heard all day. Cheng’s fat ass could stay on Black Manitou. Margaret was right — the real brains of the operation belonged here, in the Situation Room.

André Vogel suddenly stood up, fingers pressed to his earpiece.

“Madam President, we just received actual footage of one of the larger forms.”

Blackmon nodded quickly. “Doctor Montoya, we’ll get back to you shortly.”

Margaret started to say something, but Vogel cut her off. The monitor flashed with low-resolution video, black and oversaturated white — typical output from the cameras on combat aircraft.

“This is from Manhattan,” Vogel said. “Seventy-Second and Columbus.”

“Manhattan is cut off,” Blackmon said. “Didn’t we blow all the bridges?”

Vogel nodded. “Yes, Madam President, we did. A Pave Hawk helicopter was collecting reconnaissance footage and captured this.”

The image on the screen looked slightly fuzzy, the signature of a camera pushed beyond its range. Still, Murray could easily make out a mixture of five- to ten-story buildings, the redbrick and tan concrete so common in New York.

Two people ran down the middle of the street, cutting in and out of the burned-out vehicles that littered the pavement. Farther back, a dozen others gave chase.

It was recorded, Murray knew that, but he silently willed the two front-runners to move faster.

More people poured out of doorways, alleys, some even from the interior of vehicles. They all joined the pursuers. The pack swelled to two dozen, then three, then four.

The distance between the hunted and the hunters shrank.

Vogel paused the playback. “The next voice you hear is the Pave Hawk pilot.” He let the video continue.

The pilot keyed his mic, filling the Situation Room with the scratchy sound of the helicopter’s engines and rotor.

“Command, Bat Twelve, I have two civilians being pursued by hostiles, request immediate permission to engage.”

“Negative, Bat Twelve,” came back an even scratchier voice. “You don’t know who is healthy.”

“I can fucking see it,” said the pilot. “There are these… things… in the pack, chasing them, things that aren’t human.”

The image zoomed in on the pursuers. In the cluster of blurry, sprinting people, Murray saw something that was bigger than the rest. Much bigger.

Vogel paused the playback. On the screen, a hideous, out-of-focus creature was hurdling a Toyota. Shredded clothes, sickly yellow skin, a head and neck so big they made its face look disproportionately tiny. It carried some kind of long blade in each hand.

A wide-eyed Blackmon slid a hand into a pocket. It came out holding a gold chain, swinging slightly from the weight of a dangling gold cross.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Satan walks among us. Let it play.”

Vogel did.

The picture whipped back to the hunted. Murray saw that the woman had something clutched to her chest.

A baby.

The pilot spoke again. “Command, the woman appears to be carrying a child. Moving to engage.”

“Negative, Bat Twelve,” said the second voice. “Do not engage!”

Bat Twelve, apparently, wasn’t interested in listening to orders.

“Right and left guns, engage the targets chasing the woman and child. You’re cleared hot!”

The image vibrated slightly as the Pave Hawk’s guns opened up. Long streaks of white shot out, slammed into pursuers, cars and pavement alike. Some of the pursuers stopped moving, some scattered sideways, but most continued the chase. Among the crowd, Murray saw tiny flashes of light.

“Hostiles are returning fire,” the pilot said calmly. “Where they hell did they get all those guns?”

The helicopter kept firing, but there were too many pursuers. Others came pouring out of doorways, cutting off any escape for the two — no, the three — hunted people. There was nowhere left to run.

The mob closed in from all sides. The man, woman and child vanished beneath a quickly growing pile of killers.

Vogel switched it off. The ever-increasing numbers of infected, Converted and dead took their normal place on the screen.

Blackmon stared. She scratched her right eyebrow. The Situation Room filled with another, familiar long silence.

“All those guns,” she said. “Where did the Converted get all those guns?”

Murray laughed. He choked it down instantly, but he was so tired he couldn’t help the reaction.

“Sorry,” he said. “Madam President, we are the most well-armed nation in the world. There are a quarter-billion guns in the United States — the Converted didn’t have to look far.”

Millions of guns. Millions of Converted. Millions of armed insurgents. Could it get any worse?

As if on cue, Admiral Porter leaned forward again, a phone still pressed to his ear.

“Madam President, I regret to inform you that we have word from Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia. They each suffered coordinated attacks by a large number of Converted, and” — he paused, swallowed — “and significant numbers of soldiers stationed at those facilities assisted in the assault.”

Blackmon’s gold cross dangled.

“Reinforcements,” she said. “Let’s get them help. What do we have in the area?”

Porter shook his head. “Fort Stewart has fallen, Madam President. So has Hunter. Both facilities are now in enemy hands. The Third Infantry Division was stationed at Fort Stewart — that division has been destroyed. And we’ve also got word that Andrews AFB is under organized attack.”

Murray’s body sagged. Third Infantry, the Rock of the Marne, a unit that had fought in both World Wars, in Korea and Iraq, over fifteen thousand soldiers… completely wiped out. And Andrews AFB, where Air Force One resided, under attack. The base also housed the 121st Fighter Squadron, an irreplaceable asset.

But far more important than the base’s aircraft was its geographical location.

Andrews AFB was just twelve short miles from Washington, D.C.

THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY

“COOOOPERRRR. SICK?”

Cooper wasn’t sick. At least not physically; he’d eaten human flesh — what could be sicker than that?

Do what you have to so you can stay alive. Whatever it takes.

He sat cross-legged on a pile of clothes, probably gathered from one of the hotel rooms on the floors above. The fire warmed his face and chest. He held his gun in both hands. The barrel rested on his calves.

The Monster Formerly Known as Jeff sat next to him. It could almost have been a campfire scene, maybe a hunting trip to the Upper Peninsula, the two of them drinking Labatt, staring at the stars and talking about women.

Cooper wished the transformation had been more severe, that Jeff’s face didn’t look like Jeff, but the eyes, the nose… no mistaking his lifelong friend.

Jeff wanted to know if Cooper was ill. Cooper was trying to decide if he could put the barrel of his pistol to Jeff’s ear and pull the trigger.

Shoot him shoot him but if you miss or don’t kill him he’ll kill you he’ll eat you…

“COOOOPERRRR?”

“Yeah, Jeff,” Cooper said. “I’m sick.”

Other than Jeff, the cannibals were out of commission. They were sick, obviously hurting pretty bad. Even the Tall Man was down for the count.

Jeff reached a hand behind Cooper. Cooper froze… he tried to lift the gun, but he couldn’t move a muscle.

Please God make this stop make him go away make him go away I want to live I want to live I—

Something touched his head. Something hard. Something pointy. The bone-blade. Jeff was going to carve him up, rip him to shreds.

Get up and run and fight shoot him shoot him no-no-no you’ll miss you can’t win play dead please God please don’t let him kill me please.

Cooper started to tremble.

The thing touched his head again, only it wasn’t the bone-blade at all… it was Jeff’s fingers, brushing from Cooper’s temple to the top of his head. He felt the same thing a third time, and a fourth.

He’s petting me. He thinks I’m sick and he’s petting my head.

“EVERRRRYONE… HURTS. WILLLL GO FIND… HELP.”

The fingers stroked Cooper’s hair one last time, then Jeff stood. He lumbered to the front of the hotel lobby. He walked out the ruined rotating door and vanished into the night.

Cooper slowly stood. He scanned the ravaged, smoky lobby to see if any of the killers were looking at him.

They weren’t. They were too busy dying.

The Tall Man’s eyes leaked yellow fluid, not all that different in color and consistency from the phlegm coating his nose and mouth. He was still coughing, still sneezing, but was too weak to wipe the goo away.

Cooper walked closer. The man’s rheumy eyes opened and closed, the stringers of yellow mucus that ran between his eyelids bouncing in time. His throat made a wet sound.

This was the man who ate Sofia.

You ate her too, you ate her too…

“I only had one serving, you fuck!”

Cooper took a step back: he’d just yelled at himself.

You are so fucking crazy you’re going off the deep end man get control…

“Shut up, shut up!”

He scrunched his eyes tight. He rubbed the pistol barrel against his right temple.

You’ve got the gun use it use it…

Use it on the Tall Man? No need. The Tall Man didn’t have much time left. None of these assholes did.

Or… maybe it was better if Cooper used it on himself.

He shook his head, shook it hard. No, he couldn’t think like that. He could make it out alive. He could. But if he couldn’t, if people like the Tall Man got him, if they were going to shove a stop sign up his ass and out his mouth, roast him over a fire…

Was eating a bullet better than just being eaten?

The Tall Man coughed again. Phlegm came up, but this time so did blood. A thick, dark-red glob clung to his chin.

He’s coughing blood. Chavo was coughing blood…

Cooper heard yelling from the street. He held the gun against his thigh as he slowly walked to a broken window. He crouched, peeking just over the sill’s jagged glass.

Outside, he saw two women sprinting for their lives. Behind them, seven or eight screaming people carrying knives, hatchets, one carrying a shotgun by the barrel as if it were a club. Running alongside the hunters were two hulking, pale-yellow creatures with tiny faces and rippling muscles. Were either of them Jeff? No, they weren’t — Cooper would have recognized his friend, monstrous or not.

He couldn’t help those two women. He hadn’t saved Sofia, so he sure as fuck wasn’t going to get himself killed over a pair of strangers.

He watched the pursuers, the ones who still looked like normal people. Why weren’t they sick like the Tall Man and his crew? Why weren’t they sick like Chavo?

Wind blew through the ruined window, scattering snow in Cooper’s face. He walked back to the fire. No one had tended it for a while, nor tended to Sofia. Curls of orange heat wavered through the bed of coals, the flickering light playing off her blackened, burned, half-eaten corpse.

Cooper looked away. He had to get out of there, but he wasn’t setting foot on those streets. No fucking way. Someone had to rescue him, someone with lots of guns, but who? Were news stations telling people how to get help? He hadn’t seen a working TV since he and Sofia fled the Trump Tower. If he still had his cell phone, he could have tried reaching cops in other cities, maybe the army or the National Guard.

Then it hit him — he didn’t have a phone, but his “group leader” did.

He walked back to the Tall Man.

“Your phone,” Cooper said. “Give it to me.”

The Tall Man stared up. His eyes narrowed in confusion — he was trying to focus, trying to see.

Cooper held out his hand. “Your phone.”

The Tall Man blinked a few times. His eyes seemed to clear. He nodded. With great effort, he reached his right hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a flip-phone. He flipped it open with his right thumb. His left hand reached up to wrap around the top.

He twisted his hands and the phone cracked sickeningly, breaking into two pieces.

The Tall Man coughed, then laughed weakly. “I know now,” he said. “I know you’re not a friend.”

Cooper wanted to stomp his face in. He wouldn’t, though, at least not yet — the Tall Man was in great pain, and Cooper wanted him to suffer.

Cooper looked up at the ceiling. Most of the lights were out, broken by random psychos throwing random things for random reasons, but two of them shone bright.

The electricity… it was still on. Maybe he could find a hotel phone. If the power was on, maybe land lines still worked.

He looked at the registration desk, or what was left of it. The remains of three computers lay scattered on the broken wood. Computers… if he could get on the Internet, he could probably find out what was happening. He could find help. There had to be more computers around somewhere.

On the wall behind the registration desk, he saw a door.

A manager’s office?

He walked to the door. He tried the handle: locked. Maybe the psychos hadn’t been in there.

Cooper took another look around the lobby to make sure no one had gotten up, that no one was watching him.

No one was.

He set off to find something heavy.

WAITING…

Margaret Montoya sat on the bunk of her mission module. She had the lights off. The others thought she was sleeping, so they left her alone.

She’d handled that videoconference all wrong. She’d confronted the president with the harsh realities of life, had been unable to ignore Blackmon’s superstitious, primitive tripe. Margaret should have pandered from the get-go, told Blackmon what the woman wanted to hear — anything to get an invitation to the White House. Margaret’s rage had got the better of her, made her lose focus.

She could have gotten close enough to murder the president of the United States. Yes, Margaret would be killed in the process, but the act would further cripple America’s ability to respond. A missed opportunity. Hopefully another of her kind, another leader, would figure out a way to get next to the president.

America would fall.

Then, the world.

If the opportunity came again, Margaret would seize it. For now, she worked on understanding God’s plan, understanding the role of each caste.

The large, yellowish bipeds: that’s what came out of the cocoons. The complete restructuring of an adult human body, creating a caste made to terrify, to destroy, to kill — a soldier joining the ranks of the hatchlings, puff-balls, kissyfaces and leaders.

But without the Orbital, how would all these strains find each other? How could they work together?

The answer could be some kind of quorum sensing, the method hive insects, bacteria, and other nonintelligent life forms used to make what appeared to be conscious, intelligent choices: a bee colony “deciding” when to split into two smaller colonies and where to build the new nests; ants “deciding” how to best react to a threat; bacteria “deciding” to turn genes on or off based on population density. Chemical and physical cues led many individual organisms to act as a larger whole. The Converted clearly had a way of detecting one another and quickly forming cohesive units.

Maybe the crawlers provided a capacity to identify friend from foe. The best scientists in the world still hadn’t figured out how the Orbital had communicated in real time to hundreds of infected individuals. That ability defied physics, yet she had seen it with her own eyes. If the Orbital could do that, it was reasonable it could also make a “Spidey sense” that let the infected know when they were near their kind.

Scent — could the explanation be that simple? A chemical on the host’s breath, or exuded through his skin. Crawlers modified the host’s brain: perhaps they adjusted the olfactory response, letting the Converted identify one another by smell alone. Maybe that was how Candice Walker had survived as long as she did. If this scent was a by-product of the cellulose, the Converted on the Los Angeles might have thought she was one of them, giving her more time to react, to plan.

Walker… now that Margaret understood a true God existed and guided its followers, she could only think of Walker in terms of another kind of religious figure.

Candice Walker had been the Antichrist.

The other patients from the HAC trial could also be Antichrists, the bringers of a plague that would wipe out Margaret’s kind.

That was humanity’s only hope, because without the hydras it was already over. The math didn’t lie. She’d seen the numbers: millions of infected, millions of Converted. The exponential shift was already underway. In two weeks — three at the most — humans would be reduced to isolated groups, groups that couldn’t trust one another because any one of them might be the enemy.

In four weeks, humans would be outnumbered.

In five weeks, maybe six, the only human survivors would be individuals hiding in the woods and mountains, living off the land.

And to think she’d been upset that she’d lost the hydra samples when evacuating the Carl Brashear.

Yes, God did work in mysterious ways…

She was more than willing to sacrifice herself if it sped up the change, if it brought the Converted to power. But if she was still alive when that change happened? Then she could start taking control. She would gather the most brilliant of her kind — the engineers, the physicists, the astronomers — organize them, figure out how to rebuild industry, how to create a civilization with one, unified goal:

Building more Orbitals, and sending them out into the galaxy.

THE EMPEROR

Steve Stanton’s pencil was a blur as he finished writing his message. He handed the piece of paper to General Brownstone.

“Get that to the people.”

She saluted. “Right away, Emperor!”

Dana Brownstone was a retired four-star general who had once run the U.S. Army Materiel Command. She was smart: a leader, just like him. Steve had big plans for her. She had already organized distribution of cell phones and weapons, created a detailed message-flow structure that improved Steve’s ability to control over two hundred thousand Converted spread throughout the greater Chicago area.

Brownstone handed the paper to a runner.

“Make a hundred copies of that,” she said. “Pass ten copies each to the primary level of cell leaders, have them pass it down to their sub-tens. Go.”

The runner took off down the Institute of Art’s wide steps. Steve would have to change locations soon. Too long in one spot made him a potential target for bombers, helicopters, or even inoculated commandos that might drop in.

Elsewhere in America, other leaders — who didn’t seem to have Steve’s special brand of foresight — were organizing large groups that destroyed everything they could find. The leaders who used the Internet for these “activist” calls to action were opening themselves up to the government’s sniffer programs and computer analysts. Might as well put up a big, neon sign that said ENEMY OF THE STATE! DROP BOMBS HERE.

Steve knew too much to let that happen.

He still used phones and the Internet, of course, but only for messages coded to sound like the natural language of people panicking while the world collapsed around them. By using instant messaging, online forums, social media sites, texts, tweets, blog posts and comments — as well as the “sneaker net” of human feet — he could communicate with all his people while staying well under the government’s radar.

Steve walked to a table where he’d set up his information lab. A follower sat at each of his three laptops, calling up websites, blogs, newscasts, anything that would give him the big picture.

The U.S. government had written off Manhattan. Minneapolis, too, by the looks of things, and — just a few hours earlier — Chicago. Paris was a memory. The British had barricaded London: no one in, no one out. That strategy hadn’t worked in Chicago, and wasn’t going to work there, either.

No info out of China. None at all. That was fine, because Steve could give a shit about China. He’d been born in America, and that was where he’d be crowned emperor.

The U.S. government had yet to pull the plug on the Internet. With several of the major networks down and more soon to follow — CNN showed nothing but color bars, ABC’s feed was a constant hiss of static — the government needed the Internet to spread information to the uninfected: go here to be safe; stay away from these areas; here is your testing center; this place has inoculations available.

And, of course, monitoring the Internet was the government’s main way to track down those large groups of Converted. Steve didn’t mind that at all — anyone who could organize such a group was an eventual rival for power. If someone removed Steve’s rivals for him? All the better.

He heard a cell phone buzz. Brownstone answered it, then held it out to him.

“Your uncle Sven,” she said.

Uncle Sven was one of her names for the scouts who were hunting for higher-powered weapons. Pistols and shotguns just weren’t enough.

Steve took the phone. “What is it?”

“It’s Sven,” said the voice on the other end — a bad attempt to sound panicked, but close enough. “I found out where Nate Grissom is, he’s in town.”

The scouts had found an armory. The “N.G.” of “Nate Grissom” stood for “National Guard.” A simple code, but with the country in a tailspin, no government analyst was going to figure it out — if anyone was even listening at all.

“Awesomesauce,” Steve said. “Do you think you can take my cousins and go get him?”

“Yeah,” the voice said. “I got inside info.”

Inside info: that meant the scout’s group included someone who had served at that facility.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Then go get Nate.”

Steve hung up. It was the third such call he’d received in the last hour. By morning, General Brownstone would be overseeing the distribution of military weapons.

THERE’S BAD NEWS, AND BAD NEWS

The wind had picked up, the fire had died down. The hotel lobby was colder than ever.

Cooper Mitchell lined up the bottom of the fire extinguisher, then jammed it down on the door handle. The metal clinked but didn’t break.

He looked around, seeing if anyone or anything reacted. He remained alone except for the sick people lying around the fire.

He waited a few more seconds, just to be sure, then lifted the extinguisher again.

Clink, the door handle bent.

He drove the fire extinguisher down a third time: the handle ripped free and clattered against the floor. He slid his cold fingers into the hole, found the latch mechanism and pulled it sideways — he pushed the door open.

Inside was a tiny office, various calendars and work regulation posters tacked to the walls, just one overstuffed desk with a chair tucked under it. On that desk, various family pictures…

…and one black laptop, flipped open and waiting.

The screen was dark.

Cooper pushed the door shut behind him. The tiny room was much like the space behind the Walgreens counter. He thought of his last few moments with Sofia.

But she’ll be with you forever now won’t she because you ate her and you’re digesting her and she’ll be part of your muscles and part of your bones forever and ever and ever…

Cooper shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts.

A phone on the desk: he grabbed the handset, heard nothing. The line was dead.

He sat down in the desk chair. He was almost afraid to touch the computer. If it didn’t turn on, he was out of options — he’d have to risk leaving on foot, all by himself against a city of cannibals.

Cooper tapped the space bar. The computer screen remained black for a moment, then flared to life.

Oh shit, it’s working it’s working…

He searched for a web browser icon. He found one, clicked it. The computer made small whirring noises. The Google home page flared to life. News, he needed news.

He called up cnn.com. The website’s familiar red banner and white-lettered logo appeared. Below that, pictures of horror, of death, of a country on fire. Glowing headlines showed city names that read like a list of tourist attractions if you didn’t count the words next to them, words like ablaze, destruction, thousands dead…

New York City.

London.

Minneapolis.

Berlin.

Philadelphia.

Boston.

Paris.

Miami.

Baltimore.

And, of course, Chicago.

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “Everywhere.”

He clicked for additional news on Chicago. More stories appeared. All roads and highways had been blocked off, sometimes by trenches or collapsed overpasses, more often by miles of burned-out cars.

Cooper finally understood why the military hadn’t come in to save Chicago… because the military had instead blockaded Chicago. At least that’s what the news said. The military wasn’t letting anyone in or out. The story said troops were preparing to reenter the city and take it by force: until then, all citizens were warned to remain inside, to not answer the door for anyone, not even family. Stay off the phones, don’t overwhelm the cellular networks.

He nodded rapidly, yes, yes they were coming in, he just had to stay alive a little while longer…

And then he noticed the story’s date. It was from yesterday. He started clicking through links, found that the entire site hadn’t been updated in the last twenty hours.

Could CNN actually be down? The whole thing?

Cooper tried the Yahoo home page; it came up instantly with a huge, red headline:

“No,” he said. He read the story, each word a crushing blow to his soul. “This can’t be fucking happening.”

The U.S. government had written off Chicago. No troops were coming in. Troops weren’t even surrounding the city anymore… too much territory to cover. Those forces had been moved to protect cities that had not yet been overrun.

He couldn’t be alone here, trapped with madmen and monsters.

Cooper kept searching, kept clicking, hitting the track pad so hard the desk vibrated. After five minutes of panicked reading, a story caught his eye:

Cooper couldn’t breathe. He stared at the screen until the words blurred, until they moved on their own, jiggling on the screen like wiggly black cartoon worms.

Everything connected.

His stem cell therapy… no way, no way.

This disease began with whatever Steve Stanton pulled up from the bottom of Lake Michigan. Stanton apparently became some kind of Grand Dragon leader or something. Jeff got sick, turned into that thing.

Cooper got sick, too, but then he got better.

He thought back to the hotel, that first night with Sofia. Chavo had come in while they slept. Had Chavo already been sick, or did he get sick because he was in the room with Cooper?

When the Tall Man and his friends first caught Cooper and Sofia at the Walgreens, they’d seemed healthy. Then they’d spent the night in the hotel lobby with Cooper, breathing the same air as Cooper… and now those people were all sick, just like Chavo had been.

Cooper felt at the back of his neck. A shred of hanging skin, still there, left over from the blister Sofia had pointed out the day before. It had popped like a little puffball, squirted out a tiny cloud of white…

He forgot about the icy temperature, tore off his coat and shirt. He examined his body, found a dozen small, puffy spots filled with air, and at least another dozen that had already torn open.

It’s me… I’m the reason…

Cooper rushed out of the office and back into the ruined lobby. He looked at the Tall Man, who was clearly dying. Two of the others were already dead, lifeless eyes staring out at nothing.

“I’m contagious,” Cooper said. “I’m the reason they’re dead.” He looked to the blackened corpse above the dying fire.

“You hear that, Sofia? I got them for you. I got ’em good. I’m real sorry I had to eat you, real sorry. I just have to find a better place to hide, maybe a room upstairs, wait for the government to send people to save me, and then…”

His voice trailed off. Someone would come for him, sure, but what then? Would they lock him up and study him? The government barely gave a shit about civil rights when everything was fine; with the world going straight to hell, they would do anything they wanted with him.

Contacting the government, telling them he’d had the HAC therapy, that was his only chance to live. But he also had to find a way to make sure regular people knew about him, knew what he had inside of him — otherwise, he might vanish at the hands of the good guys just as easily as he could at the hands of the psychotic fuck-stains who had taken over Chicago.

The laptop… at the top of the screen, there had been a tiny, reddish dot…

…a camera.

Cooper rushed back into the office.

The Converted were coming.

Blackmon’s people were trying to hurry her out of the Situation Room, but she was still the president and no one could make her go any faster than she wanted to. The time had long passed for her to be airborne, safely away from the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.

The army had reported contact with at least five large mobs of Converted in and around the city of Washington, D.C. The mobs seemed poorly organized, poorly armed, but they all had one thing in common: they had been heading for the White House.

Air Force One — known as Air Force Two just yesterday — had landed at Ronald Reagan National Airport, delivering Vice President Kenneth Albertson. The military maintained firm control of that airport. After Fort Benning and Andrews AFB had fallen, the Joint Chiefs had issued “kill zone” orders for all critical facilities. No matter who you were, infected or not, if you came within a hundred yards of a protected area, you got shot.

Blackmon was heading to the airport. Albertson was on his way to the White House to take her place. The American people knew him. With his face broadcasting from the nation’s capital, it would remain clear that America had not fallen.

Not yet.

But Blackmon was a realist, and knew that worst-case scenario might come to pass. Elena Turgenson, the Speaker of the House, was third in the presidential line of succession. Blackmon had ordered her to Sacramento, to set up the next governmental seat in the eventuality that the Converted overran D.C.

Blackmon’s aides were all ready to follow her out. They held stacks of paper, briefcases, and laptops. She had cleaned up for the trip: hair done up right and a freshly pressed red pantsuit gave her that hallmark presidential look once again. She was waiting for Vogel to finish talking on the phone. Someone had submitted info to the HAC site, and apparently linked to a video.

Vogel whispered something, nodded, then hung up.

“Identity confirmed,” he said. “The subject is Cooper Mitchell. SSN and address are accurate. Facial analysis software registers a one-hundred percent match with DMV records. There is no question that this man was part of the HAC study.”

Blackmon let out a little puffed-cheek whuff of air.

“We have a chance,” she said. “Play the video.”

A paused YouTube page appeared on the main monitor. The frozen image was a blur of blacks and grays. Murray couldn’t make anything out.

“YouTube?” Blackmon said. “This video is public?”

Vogel nodded. “Yes, Madam President. It seems Mister Mitchell didn’t fully trust our HAC form. He wanted to make sure everyone saw him, so he couldn’t — I’m quoting from his submission form — just vanish into a secret lab, you goddamn government shiteaters. End quote. The video’s play counter only shows three hundred and one views so far, which isn’t much. We’re still in control of this information.”

Blackmon nodded. “Play it.”

The image twitched and jumped, jostled by rapid movement. The face in the video belonged to the man holding the camera — Cooper Mitchell. He looked panicked, had the sunken eyes of someone who had flat-out gone over the edge. A week’s worth of stubble. Skin red and cracked from exposure to wind and cold.

“It’s me,” Mitchell said. “They come around me and they die. It takes, uh, maybe like twelve hours or so, but they die.”

He started laughing.

The sound of that laugh made Murray’s blood run cold. He’d laughed like that once, back in Vietnam, when he, Dew Phillips and six other men had heard the choppers coming to save them. Eight soldiers — all that remained from an entire company. They’d been overrun, covered in mud, fighting for their lives through the night in dark, sandbagged trenches. Murray had known his time was up, known he was going to die, right up until he’d heard those rotor blades slicing through the air. That sliver of sound had given him the strength to fight on.

The image jostled as Mitchell walked, but stayed centered on his face. The background moved madly around him.

“Just look at this,” he said. “How fucked-up is this?”

The image skewed as he turned the camera around. Murray saw a fire pit topped with a pig mounted on a spit. At first, he thought the scene was somewhere outdoors — because that’s the only place one saw fire pits — but then he realized it was inside the lobby of a trashed building.

Then, he realized it wasn’t a pig.

“Jesus Christ,” President Blackmon said. Her hand went to the cross hanging from her neck.

The image whirled to show a man in a red jacket, lying on his back. At first Murray thought this man was also dead, had to be dead from the tacky phlegm that coated his mouth and nose, but the man’s eyes cracked opened. The eyelids looked nearly glued shut by strands of viscous yellow.

The man looked at the camera for a moment, then coughed hard. Blood bubbled out of his mouth.

“See that?” Cooper Mitchell said from off-screen. “Fucker is dying, man! Dying!”

The camera spun again, stopping on a prone woman. Her blank eyes stared out. Dried, bloody spittle flaked from the lips of an open mouth. On the woman’s neck, peeking out from the jacket, Murray saw the shape that had marked the beginning of this horror show…

A triangle.

One of the triangle’s slitted eyelids was slightly open — but instead of the glistening black Murray expected to see, there was a sagging, puckered, grayish membrane, like a party balloon that had almost fully deflated.

The shaking camera whipped around to once again focus on Mitchell. He leaned in close, until the screen showed only his wide, bloodshot eyes.

“Dead! Dead as fuck! Because of me! Someone come and get me, please come and get me, I make these assholes die! You want to save the world? Then you better fucking save me!”

The movie ended, leaving a blurred image of the too-close face up on the screen.

Blackmon looked shaken. Seeing an American citizen being cooked on a spit would do that to a person. She sat on the edge of the table, maybe to keep herself from collapsing. The polished surface reflected the bright red of her pantsuit.

“So this man could have Montoya’s hydras,” the president said. “Where is he?”

“Chicago,” Vogel said. “Park Tower Hotel, downtown area.”

Blackmon slid off the table, stood straight. She gave her pantsuit jacket a sharp tug downward, as if she were just about to go on camera.

“Admiral Porter, I want this man. What kind of resources do we have around Chicago?”

Porter shook his head. “We have nothing in that area, Madam President. All of Illinois is a mess. Converted have been spreading out from the Chicagoland area. We’ve got troops positioned at the nuke plants near Rockford and Wilmington, killing anything that comes close. Davenport and Champaign are part of that chain, trying to slow the spread from the suburbs. We could pull some of those forces, but doing so is going to widen the gaps the Converted can get through. Indianapolis is holding strong and I highly recommend we don’t pull troops from there. Once we beat this thing, Madam President, we’ll need those power plants and the industrial base of cities that weren’t overrun.”

“Screw the power plants,” Blackmon said. “If we don’t get this man, there won’t be anyone left to use power.”

The idea hit Murray fast, took him over and charged him up.

“The SEAL team that rescued Montoya,” he said in a rush. “They’re in quarantine on the Coronado. That ship could be off the shore of Chicago in hours, and it has two SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. The SEALs could go in, get Mitchell and bring him back out again.”

Blackmon considered this. “Admiral? Will that work?”

Porter nodded. “Maybe. It’s a damn good idea, but the city is overrun — a partial SEAL team probably isn’t enough.”

“Then get me something to back them up,” Blackmon said. “Admiral, if we have any reserves at all, this is the time to use them.”

Porter drew in a deep breath. Even at this late stage of the game, he wasn’t going to rush things.

“We do have a few air-support assets on standby. The crews have been isolated from day one, so we know they’re reliable. As for ground forces, I’ve got a Ranger company at Fort Benning. I was saving them for your security, Madam President. If Air Force One can’t refuel in midair, or you have to land for whatever reason, that company will go to where you are, give you adequate protection.”

She huffed. “My protection matters even less than those power plants, Admiral. Send the SEALs. Send the Rangers. Will that be enough?”

“It has to be,” Porter said. “It’s all we have left. We haven’t seen the same organized forces in Chicago we’ve seen in Minneapolis or the New York boroughs, so this could work.”

“God guide and defend our soldiers,” Blackmon said. She addressed the entire room. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have to get to Air Force One. I have the utmost respect for your dedication and your bravery. The fate of our nation, of the entire world, hangs on us continuing to do our jobs. May the good Lord protect you all.”

She finally let her handlers hustle her out.

Murray was sad to see her go. Not long ago he’d hated that woman, but when things were at their worst, President Blackmon was at her best. Now he’d get to see the VP in action — Murray didn’t have high hopes. Albertson had been on the ticket because he could carry California. That, and probably only that, had put him in such a high place of power.

For now, however, Albertson didn’t matter. Cooper Mitchell did. Murray had one card left, and now was the time to play it.

“Admiral, Clarence Otto is on the Coronado,” he said. “He’s Department of Special Threats. I think he should go in with the SEALs, manage the biological aspect.”

Porter nodded. “That’s fine. People, contact the Coronado and have it steam full speed for Chicago. Let’s get the SEALs briefed.” He turned to Vogel. “Show me that video again.”

Vogel nodded, tapped some keys. The screen refreshed. It started to play, then he paused it. He pointed to view-counter in the video’s bottom right-hand corner. In the time it had taken Blackmon to watch the video and approve the mission to Chicago, the view-count had jumped from 301 to 15,236.

“Oh, shit,” Vogel said. “I think it’s gone viral.”

VIRAL

Steve Stanton played the video for a third time. To think he’d actually saved Cooper Mitchell’s life?

Now, he wanted to kill Cooper. Cut his belly open, pull out his intestines and make the man eat them. Have one of the bulls break his bones, one by one, while Steve danced to the music of his screams.

Four of Steve’s high-ranking followers — three men and Dana Brownstone — stood before him. They all had the smart strain, like him. None of the four had challenged his leadership; those who had were already dead.

Although not at Dana’s level, the men were all quite brilliant: Robert McMasters, the president and CEO of the energy company Exelon; Cody Hassan, who had apparently been an up-and-coming jazz musician; and Jeremy Ellis, a young geneticist who held multiple Ph.D.s. McMasters was hard at work on preserving the power grid. Hassan helped craft the messages to send through Brownstone’s network. Ellis was already modifying facilities at the University of Chicago so he could study both the biology of the Chosen Ones, and how to defeat the humans’ inoculation formula.

All four of them were afraid to make a noise. They all sensed Steve’s fury. That, and their eyes kept flicking to the two huge bulls that stood behind him.

Three workers sat in front of his three laptops. All three screens showed the same YouTube video. Steve pointed to the middle screen.

“Cooper Mitchell shot this inside a building. Which building? What floor?”

Brownstone and the men said nothing.

Steve drew a black pistol from a thigh holster. The weapon had belonged to a cop. The cop didn’t need it anymore; he had tasted delicious.

Steve aimed it at Hassan’s face and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked in his hand. Hassan’s head snapped backward. He dropped, probably dead even before his limp body hit the floor.

Steve holstered the pistol. “I said… what building?”

Brownstone shook her head. “We don’t know, Emperor! The video quality is terrible. We can’t identify any key structural elements. We think it’s a hotel or an office building, but there’s over a hundred and thirty million square feet of office space in the central business district alone. He could be anywhere.”

Steve looked down at the man running the middle laptop.

“Refresh,” he said. “And play it again.”

The man did as he was told. As the window came up, Steve looked at the number of plays: 132,512. The views were climbing, fast. He didn’t know if that was from uninfected watching it with a final sense of hope, his own kind watching it with a feeling of horrific dread, or a combination of both.

The video played. Steve wondered what Cooper would taste like. He’d never find out, of course, because Cooper was a walking plague.

If only he’d just let Bo Pan kill the man…

“Isolate his face from this video,” Steve said. “Then print pictures. Thousands of pictures.”

He turned to his four — correction, his three — top followers.

“Spread the word that everyone is to look for this man. Search every building, every office, every basement. If someone finds him, kill him on the spot, whatever it takes.”

Ellis raised his hand. “Emperor, the people who kill him might very well contract the disease he carries and transmit it to the rest of us. If it’s as contagious as it appears to be in the video, it could spread like wildfire through the Chosen Ones — it could eventually reach us.”

That was a good point. Steve was glad he hadn’t shot the scientist.

“Whatever group takes out Cooper Mitchell is to kill themselves immediately,” Steve said. “They will go straight to heaven. They will be heroes. Now move. And send someone in here to clean up this body. Tell them to bring a mop.”

ALL THE MARBLES

It made Margaret’s skin crawl to be so close to them.

She, Clarence, Tim and Commander Klimas were packed into the same mission module where they had teleconferenced with Murray and Dr. Cheng. Margaret and Clarence sat on one side of the table, Tim on the other. Klimas stood in front of a screen that showed a map of Chicago.

He pointed out the landing area on the city’s coast. “My team will OTB to Lake Shore Park on the city’s east side and secure it as a landing zone.”

Tim raised a hand. “OTB?”

“Over the beach,” Klimas said. “The phrase covers the various methods we use. Sorry, I’ll try to make the rest of this more civilian-friendly. We also have air support from two Apaches, three Predator drones, and — believe it or not — a B2 bomber.”

“A B2?” Clarence said. “That’s kind of overkill, isn’t it?”

“Not if we find the Converted gathering en masse,” Klimas said. “It’s loaded with five-hundred-pound JDAM bombs, could take out a lot of them at once.” He paused, cleared his throat. “It’s also got, ah… well, it has a nuke.”

They would never learn. Margaret knew the nuke had delayed things in Detroit, but the current situation showed that her kind could not be stopped. When the Converted rebuilt, they would just steer clear of any radioactive craters.

Klimas again pointed to the map.

“Once my team secures the LZ, Chinook helicopters will deliver the Ranger company, which is under the command of Captain Percy Dundee. We will then move about a half mile west to the Park Tower Hotel. SEALs lead and Rangers support by leapfrogging blocking positions at major intersections. If Cooper Mitchell is at the Park Tower, we grab him and get him out. We’ll have close air support for the entire operation. Apaches will fly low and loud to intimidate the bad guys, and take out any organized force that might come to meet us. Easy as pie.”

The video from Cooper Mitchell had changed the game. Margaret knew it was the real thing from the moment she’d seen it. He had the hydras — and from the looks of that video, they were far more contagious than she had thought. The Antichrist had risen again.

She had to find a way to kill him. If Klimas was successful, if he brought Cooper Mitchell out alive, then Margaret had no doubts of what would come next: in a few weeks, she and all her kind would be dead.

Clarence squirmed in his chair. “Why come in from the water and cross all that territory on foot? Why not take a Seahawk and drop in right on the hotel? I’ve moved through a half mile of urban terrain while under fire — it’s risky, we’ll lose people.”

Klimas touched icons on the screen, zoomed the view in to a forty-five-degree angle that showed towering buildings. Margaret instantly saw the problem with Clarence’s plan.

“Skyscrapers make for a lot of places the enemy can hide,” Klimas said. “If the enemy is armed with something big enough, they can hit the Seahawk on the way in or on the way out. Lake Shore Park is a more secure place to land. Trust me, Agent Otto, SEALs and Rangers can get to that hotel in a hurry.”

Margaret had seen those SEALs in action. Brave, smart, deadly, they moved without hesitation. She didn’t know what type of resistance her kind would put up. Were the Converted in Chicago unified at all? Reports had come in from cities all over the world about organized bands, some the size of small armies, but there had been no such sightings in Chicago. As far as anyone knew, the city was in total chaos. If that were true, the SEALs might very well walk in, grab Cooper Mitchell and walk out.

She couldn’t let them succeed. She needed to make sure Mitchell died. And while she was at it, she had an opportunity to eliminate another major threat: Tim Feely.

He was the brain behind the inoculation effort. If not for his work, her kind might already have taken over. Feely was too smart, too creative, and had too much knowledge of her former research. This trip would be the perfect opportunity to get rid of him.

Margaret stood. “I have to go with you. So does Tim.”

Tim sat straight upright, looked at Margaret as if she was pointing a gun at his head.

Clarence stared at her in disbelief. “This is a high-risk operation. We can’t be ferrying civilians.”

Tim nodded. “Yeah, what he said. Oh, and also? Like fuck I have to go with you. Why would you and I go in, anyway? The SEALs grab this guy, bring him out, we draw the hydras from his blood, replicate them, and boom — we win.”

“There are environmental factors to consider,” Margaret said. “Mitchell’s video indicates that the infected are dying, but we don’t know that he’s responsible for that. The sickness could be caused by something in that building’s water supply, or in the air. If we bring Mitchell out only to discover that he’s not the vector, we’ll have wasted time and risked lives for nothing.”

The three men in the tiny room looked at one another. Klimas didn’t seem surprised; he was ready to back almost anything she asked for. Clarence, however, wasn’t buying it.

“We can’t risk you,” he said. “We’ll keep you in constant visual communication. The SEALs get Mitchell, they get samples from the dead bodies in the video, from the water and air, whatever else you want. Then they get the hell out.”

She slapped the table. “Don’t be stupid, Clarence. There’s no guarantee Mitchell will be there. If he’s not, we’re left with those bodies. If the cause of death is something other than the hydra strain, tissue samples collected by untrained soldiers might not show us what did the damage. We need to examine the bodies where they died.”

Clarence shook his head. He looked like he was losing control. “There’s no way I’m letting a pregnant woman go on this mission.”

Klimas and Tim stared at her. Their expressions changed instantly — with one word, she was suddenly fragile, a thing to be protected. Her strategy to hook Clarence had backfired.

She couldn’t let him win.

“My body,” she said quietly. “My choice.”

Clarence crossed his arms. “Our child.”

Margaret gathered herself, tried to remember what her weak, altruistic former self might have said. She concentrated hard, held her eyes open until they started to sting… she forced out a single tear.

“Wake up, my love. This isn’t some men’s rights debate. If this mission doesn’t give us a weapon, we’ll all be dead long before I could give birth. Don’t you get it? This is the end of the world.”

Klimas nodded. “She’s right. This is for all the marbles. We need her expertise. If she wants in, she’s in. Margo, how much time would you need on-site?”

Good question. If they found Mitchell, she needed enough time to kill him while not drawing attention to herself or exposing herself to his disease. She also needed enough time to kill Tim and not get caught doing it. She was willing to sacrifice herself to murder the president, but not to take out Tim Feely.

“At least overnight,” she said. “Once we locate Mitchell, we test what we can while he’s still in the same environment. We have to be sure.”

Klimas’s jaw muscles twitched. “Then we’re no longer looking at a grab-and-go. We have to change the entire operation.”

She nodded solemnly. “Then change it, Paulius. Whatever it takes.”

Clarence stood. His body vibrated with anger.

“Klimas, are you kidding me? You think you’ll last overnight in that place? As far as we know there’s a hundred thousand Converted in the downtown area alone!”

Three quick knocks at the door, then it opened. The little SEAL with the horrible mustache peeked in.

“Commander, we’re approaching the disembarkation point.”

“Understood,” Klimas said. He faced Clarence. “My decision is made. Margaret is coming.”

Clarence slowly sat back down. He had lost and now had to contemplate his wife — whom he had abandoned — and his nonexistent unborn child going into hostile territory where the hostiles in question ate people. Margaret hoped he felt as miserable as he looked.

Klimas turned back to the screen. “The SEALs will still secure a landing area, as planned. The Ranger company will come in next. Once the LZ is secure, a Seahawk will bring in Doctor Montoya, Agent Otto and Doctor Feely.”

Tim waved his hands. “Whoa, tough guy. Margaret wants in, that’s fine, but I’m out. You get me? O-u-t, out!”

Feely was the final piece of the puzzle. Margaret had to get him to come along. What would push his buttons?

“Don’t be a coward, Feely,” she said. “I need you with me.”

Tim shook his head, hard. “Fuck that. I’ve done my part!”

Margaret leaned across the table and slapped Tim’s left cheek as hard as she could. The sharp crack sound filled the mission module. Tim stared, mouth open, eyes wide.

“You’ve done your part? The world is crumbling around us. We have one last opportunity to kill this thing.”

He stood, hand still on his cheek. “I get paid to work in a lab. I don’t get paid to ride a helicopter into the goddamn apocalypse. I’ve been shot at, almost drowned, and the last ship I was on got blown up by a missile. I’m not keen to add cannibalism to the list of threats on my résumé, understand?”

He turned toward the door.

Margaret was trying to think of another angle when Klimas gently put his hand on Tim’s chest, stopping the smaller man from leaving.

“Hold on, Doctor Feelygood,” Klimas said. “I know you’re scared. So am I.”

Tim huffed. “Ha. In this category, it’s a safe bet that mine is bigger than yours.”

Klimas smiled. “You’ve got me there. The SEALS get paid to do things like this, but we don’t get paid to fail. If your presence increases our chances of succeeding, that’s more important than your fear. That’s more important than you. Everyone dreams of being a hero, Tim — this is your shot.”

Tim shook his head. “I don’t want to be a hero. I want to live. Margaret had it right — I’m a coward. It’s what I’ve always been and what I’ll always be.”

“I’ll get you out,” Klimas said. “You have my word that I’ll get you out safe. I know how much you respect Margaret. She wouldn’t put you in danger on a whim.”

Tim’s resolve seemed to waver. He glanced at her.

Margaret looked down, did her best to appear contrite. “Sorry I slapped you,” she said. His ego, the same ego that made him demand the yeast be named after him… that was his hot-button, she had to play to that.

“Tim, we’ve become a great team,” she said. “If I had all the options in the world, I’d still pick you, but I don’t have any other options. I can’t do this without you.”

Tim chewed at his lower lip, forgiveness already visible in his eyes. She almost had him.

He turned back to Klimas. “You gave your word. Does that mean the same thing it does when guys in war movies say it?”

“It means far more,” Klimas said. “If anything comes near you, I’ll kill it. I’m taking you in, I’m bringing you out.”

Tim stared at him for a few more seconds, then looked down. “Shit,” he said. “Okay, I’ll go.”

Margaret smiled.

In just a few hours, she could remove Cooper Mitchell, Tim Feely, then slip away to join her kind.

“Two more things,” she said. “First, we still don’t know the full impact of a hydra infection. Cooper Mitchell has them, but as far as we know they’ll eventually kill him. Therefore, no one approaches Mitchell — and I mean no one — unless they are wearing full biological protection.”

Going in was risky to start with. If she couldn’t find a way to murder Tim and Clarence, she didn’t want them coming back infected with a vector that could kill her.

She looked hard at all the men in the room. “Agreed?”

They all nodded.

“I’ll make sure of it,” Klimas said, his voice thick with that sickening you can count on me tone. “And the other thing?”

“I’m not going in there unarmed,” Margaret said. “Would someone give me a crash course on how to shoot a gun?”

CASCADING FAILURE

Murray didn’t remember the first time he’d seen the image of a mushroom cloud. He’d been two years old when a bomb named “Little Boy” had struck Hiroshima: at the time, he’d been far more concerned with his Lincoln Logs than with world-changing events.

Sixty-five years later, he’d seen his second, this one over Detroit.

Two days ago, he’d seen his third, then his fourth.

And now here he was in the Situation Room — the air thick with the scent of unwashed bodies, food and fear — watching his fifth and his sixth.

Vice President Kenneth Albertson sat in Blackmon’s chair, his hand gripped white-knuckle tight around a steaming cup of coffee. He had all the trappings of a career politician: white, male, six-two, a full head of dark-blond hair (stylishly graying at the temples), perfect charcoal suit, red tie. Every time Murray looked at him, he thought that the right lipstick could make any pig seem competent.

The vice president said nothing. He wasn’t alone in that reaction; a room full of people stared at the split-screen image of two mushroom clouds billowing up over dying cities. Movers and shakers, heads of shadowy departments and bit players alike, they all appealed to the irrational, illogical parts of their brains, hoping or even praying that their eyes deceived them.

Had Novosibirsk been the opening act? Was Murray watching World War III unfold?

“Xining, on the left,” said some nameless assistant, there to stand in for one of the Joint Chiefs. “The right side is Lanzhou.”

Murray didn’t know those places. They looked big.

“How many?” he said. “How many people?”

“Uh, checking,” the assistant said. “Xining has, or had, before all of this… two-point-two million.”

The size of Houston, a little bigger.

“The other one,” Murray said. “Lanzhou? How many?”

“Lanzhou has… Jesus.” The assistant looked up, face ashen, drenched with despair. “It had three-point-six million.”

Another Los Angeles, or maybe Chicago if you include enough suburbs.

Albertson’s shaking hand raised the shaking mug to his lips. He took a sip. Only a little coffee spilled onto the table.

“Was it the Russians?” he said. “Why didn’t we see these missiles when they launched?”

Admiral Porter rested his elbows on the table, hands pressed against the sides of his head. Even he, the stoic one, was worn down by the nonstop horror show.

“There wasn’t a launch of any kind,” he said. “That means the bombs had to be driven in. It wasn’t the Russians this time — the Chinese nuked themselves.”

Murray knew what those words meant. If the Chinese were desperate enough to bomb themselves, they wouldn’t think twice about launching missiles against another nation.

The screen suddenly switched to an image of Blackmon. She had been sleeping aboard Air Force One. She wore red pajamas. Her hair was a tangled mess. Eyes narrowed by fatigue-fueled rage, she stared out, locking eyes with several people in that spooky, I-see-you-and-you-see-me connection enabled by the screen’s telepresence.

“Tell me,” she said.

Albertson stood. “Madam President, we—”

“Not you,” she said sharply. The face on the screen turned, locked eyes with Murray. “You, Longworth. I want to hear it from you.”

Murray felt all the eyes of the Situation Room upon him. Blackmon should have heard from her next in line, Albertson, or at least from Admiral Porter.

“Uh, sure,” Murray said. “I mean, yes, Madam President.”

“I want straight, simple language,” Blackmon said. “Out of everyone there, you do that best. And if you need to curse to get the point across, I don’t really care anymore.”

Murray nodded. He recognized the look in her eyes, the anxiety at not being front and center, the desperate need for accurate intel. He again flashed back to his days in Vietnam, when he had been the one forced to make every decision and give every order. Men had lived and died based on what he told them to do. Back then, he’d relied on Dew Phillips, his top sergeant, to provide no-bullshit information, to help make those impossible choices.

Now Murray was playing that role to the president of the United States.

He quickly gave her the bad news, using the comparisons to Houston and Los Angeles so she understood the scope.

When Murray finished, Blackmon closed her eyes. Her lip quivered slightly. Murray hoped the president of the United States wasn’t going to cry, because that would just be too goddamn much for him to take.

“Why, Murray? Why would the Chinese do this?”

“Those cities must have been overrun,” he said. “Far beyond any hope of saving them. If this was an act of the Chinese government, I assume the goal was to kill as many of the Converted as possible before they could radiate to surrounding areas. If the government has fallen and the Converted detonated the nukes, then… well, I’m not sure those motherfuckers really need a reason.”

Blackmon nodded. The lip quivered a little more.

“Any word from Beijing?”

“None, Madam President,” Murray said. “If anyone is in charge, we don’t know who it is.”

Blackmon sat up straighter. She sniffed in sharply, regained her composure.

“All right,” she said. “If anyone there is still watching us, waiting to see how we’ll respond, we have to let them know that the United States of America is still ready to defend herself by any means necessary.”

She looked away from Murray, took in the whole room.

“Admiral Porter, take us to DEFCON 1.”

A GOOD DAY FOR A SWIM

Paulius Klimas’s head broke the surface of Lake Michigan. His goggled eyes looked out at the empty sidewalk and eight lanes of Lakeshore Drive. A few streetlights were still working, enough to illuminate the burned-out cars blocking the entire road. Beyond, dark buildings rose high against a darker sky; only a few panes glowed with light.

Frank Bogdana surfaced off to Klimas’s right, D’Shawn Bosh off to his left. Not far behind him, Luke Ramierez did the same.

Even if there had been anyone standing on that sidewalk, on the road, or in Lake Shore Park beyond, the four SEALs would have been all but invisible; just tiny, moving bumps of wetness in an infinite inland sea.

Paulius slid beneath the waves. He swam forward a good fifteen meters, pushing his M4 carbine in its shoot-through dry bag before him, then held his position underwater for another minute before rising up enough to peek above the surface. He again looked at Lakeshore Drive, the sidewalk, the park. Bosh and Bogdana did the same, searching for anything that might be a threat.

They saw nothing.

Paulius and his men moved forward. They would leave their rebreather gear below the water, fixed to the metal-and-concrete seawall. Whether they would need that gear again remained to be seen. If all went well, he and his men would fly back to the Coronado instead of swim.

Paulius reached the seawall. He removed his fins, slid his arm through them and gripped the handle of his still-bagged weapon. He shrugged off his gear, bundled it and left it clamped to the wall.

He and his fire team silently climbed over the seawall and onto the paved bike path that ran alongside Lake Shore Drive. They donned night-vision goggles and took up covering positions, protecting the other three fire teams as those men exited the water.

Paulius ordered squad two south and squad three north, to enter the buildings nearest to Lake Shore Park. Those units would climb six or seven stories and set up overwatch positions.

After those men were in place, squads one and four would make their way to the park. First, they would secure the park administration building. Then, they would secure the landing area for the arrival of four CH-47 Chinooks and an SH-60 Seahawk. The Chinooks carried the Ranger company — 150 men complete with mortars, heavy weapons and supplies, as well as some scientific equipment Margaret had requested. She, Otto and Dr. Feelygood would come in on the Seahawk.

Paulius took another minute to search for danger. He saw no movement. He knew he and his men were about to roll into a mission unlike any they could have prepared for, a mission where they would probably have to fire on Americans.

From here on out, however, they weren’t “Americans.”

They were the enemy.

INFORMATION IS A WEAPON

Steve Stanton stood alone in a twentieth-floor office, looking out at the mostly dark streets of Chicago. How to find Cooper Mitchell… that was really all that mattered at the moment. If Cooper infected any of the Chosen Ones, all Steve’s careful planning could fall apart.

A knock at his door.

“Enter.”

General Brownstone walked in, trailed by a teenage girl who was breathing so hard she could barely stand up straight. The girl had obviously sprinted hard to deliver a message.

“Speak,” Steve said.

The girl stood, laced her fingers above her head, fought to draw enough air to get out her sentences.

“Helicopters,” she said. “At Lake Shore Park. Five landed, soldiers got out. Two helicopters kept hovering the whole time. They looked mean.”

Steve felt a flush of excitement. Maybe he wouldn’t have to find Cooper after all — maybe the American soldiers would lead Steve right to him. Over half a million people had watched Cooper’s video. That number obviously included people in the U.S. government who wanted to use Cooper as a weapon.

General Brownstone gently patted the girl on the back. “Good work, dear. Did you count how many soldiers got out of the helicopter?”

The girl nodded, blinked. “Yeah, about a hundred and fifty.”

“A full company,” Brownstone said. “Emperor, that’s a serious force. And I’m certain the helicopters are Apaches. Considering what we know of the state of the country, this is a major allocation by the high command. Do you want me to arrange an attack?”

The Americans didn’t have troops to burn, not if the ongoing coverage by Al Jazeera was to be believed (how that network kept reporting while the others had been wiped out, Steve didn’t know: it was one of the few remaining sources for national news).

“No,” he said. “They came for Cooper. We need to see where they go. Leave the soldiers alone for now, but watch them.”

“And the Apaches?” Brownstone asked. “The Stinger missiles we acquired from the army reserve bases can destroy them.”

“Where do you have those positioned?”

“Downtown. On the tallest buildings.”

Steve thought it over. If he took out the Apaches, that would reveal too much about his strength. And, he didn’t have many Stingers to start with.

“Leave the missiles where they are for now,” he said. “Spread the word — I want everyone to stay well clear. I want these soldiers to think no one is opposing them. Once they reveal Cooper’s location, we’ll need to strike fast and strike hard. No mercy for them.”

Brownstone saluted. She led the girl out of the office.

Steve returned to his view.

Now all he had to do was wait.

THE HIGHWAYS

Murray had to admire the Converted’s tactics.

There was no known general, no command structure to unify actions across the United States, but the Converted understood where they needed to attack in order to bring the nation to its knees. Like any good guerrilla force, their primary target seemed to be infrastructure.

Admiral Porter flipped from map to map, reading off a list of bad news.

“Highway 5 in California has severe damage north of Redding,” he said. “It’s been completely severed in several places.”

André Vogel groaned in exasperation, leaned back in his chair. “I thought we had the West Coast under control. What, exactly, are they cutting the roads with?”

“Based on intel, anything and everything,” Porter said. “Backhoes, bulldozers, piles of cars set on fire, logs, rocks, even teams of people with shovels. And Highway 5 is just the start.”

Porter changed the image on the main screen. The ticking death toll faded, replaced by a highway map of the United States. Hundreds of flashing red Xs showed where the highways were severed.

“We’ve lost communication with Reno,” he said. “Flyovers show that all highway bridges have been destroyed. It’s impassable. South of Lake Tahoe, Highways 50, 88, 4, 108 and 120 have all been cut. Highway 1 south of Carmel, 101 south of Salinas, 5 near Mendota and 99 south of both Madera and Fresno, too.”

Murray looked at the pattern of Xs. It wasn’t hard to see what was going on.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “They’re trying to isolate the San Francisco Bay Area. They’re cutting it off from the east and the south. How are the roads to the north?”

“The 101 at Eureka is out,” Porter said. “North of there, air force sorties out of Fairchild and McChord AFBs, in conjunction with infantry from Fort Lewis, have wiped out any major efforts to cut the highways in Washington State.”

There were some Xs in Washington and Oregon, but not as many. Something about that image bothered Murray.

Porter hit the remote control again, bringing a map of the entire United States. Red Xs dotted the Midwest on Highways 80, 70, 40 and 20, blocked various roads into major cities.

“The national situation is becoming untenable,” Porter said. “Roads are heavily damaged, bridges are impassable if not outright destroyed. Rails are being cut. Military and off-road vehicles can easily get around these cutouts, but standard transportation — semis and other transport trucks — cannot.”

Murray wondered if it would ever end, how it could ever end. Unless Margaret came through and recovered that bug from Cooper Mitchell, all the military could do was slow down the inevitable.

Vice President Albertson cleared his throat, surprising Murray — he’d forgotten the man was even there.

“We have to push them back,” Albertson said. “What are we doing to secure the remaining infrastructure?”

Porter looked annoyed. “We can’t push them back, sir. Even if we weren’t at less than half our normal military strength, this country is so big we can’t cover it all. We have to concentrate on defending specific transportation corridors. Outside of those and the main cities, the Converted will control everything else.”

Albertson looked around the room, perhaps searching for someone to tell him what he wanted to hear.

“But that’s giving up,” he said. “We have to develop new tactics to defeat the insurgents.”

Murray couldn’t listen to the fool any longer.

“Mister Vice President, you’re not hearing the admiral correctly,” Murray said. “America is too… damn… big. The highway system consists of one hundred and seventeen thousand miles of road. These insurgents you’re talking about were Americans. Many of them grew up in the very places they are attacking. They know the terrain, they know exactly what to hit. Now, would you please stop asking for things that are fucking impossible?”

It was only when Murray finished talking that he realized he’d just yelled at the vice president. He sat still and waited to be thrown out.

But Albertson didn’t seem angry. Instead, he seemed to shrink in his chair.

He’s such a pussy he’ll let me yell at him — not exactly a prime candidate for the most powerful person in the free world.

Now it was Porter who cleared his throat. Murray sensed the man was about to drop something big.

“Mister Vice President,” the admiral said, “at this time, it is the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we withdraw all remaining troops from Europe and the Middle East. We need those troops here at home. We also recommend moving all U.S. troops in South America to defend the Panama Canal and to cut off any and all access from that continent into North America.”

Albertson stared. He sniffed once, scratched his nose.

“You want to coordinate with the Panamanians on that?”

Porter shook his head. “Sir, we recommend that our troops seize control of the canal. The Mexican border is too big to cover, but we can create a choke point at the canal. Then, when we start to regain superiority, we only have to contend with clearing out Mexico — South America will have to fend for itself.”

Everyone looked to Albertson. He seemed lost.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Abandoning our allies… seizing the Canal… we need President Blackmon to make those decisions.” He again looked around the room. “I asked someone to get her on the line for me twenty minutes ago. What the hell is wrong with you people?”

André Vogel pinched his ever-present phone between his ear and shoulder.

“We’re still trying,” he said. He put the phone back to his ear.

For the first time, Murray heard Samuel Porter raise his voice.

“Mister Vice President,” the admiral said, demanding the attention of Albertson and everyone in the room. “A decision must be made. We need to withdraw our troops from overseas, and we need to do it now.”

Albertson’s left eye started to twitch. He stared down at the table. “I’m sorry, only the president can make that call.”

Vogel suddenly rose, stood up board-straight as if someone had connected his chair to a car battery. He looked like he might throw up.

“Air Force One… it’s gone down.”

All conversation ceased. The room seemed to dim, to go nearly dark save for a score of spotlights that lit up Vice President Albertson.

He placed his hands on the table. They were shaking.

“I see,” he said. “When did this happen?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” Vogel said. “The pilot got a message out that there was some kind of commotion on the plane. He thought there was a Converted onboard, someone who dodged a cellulose test, maybe. He reported gunshots. Then fighter escort saw Air Force One go down. No survivors. President Blackmon is dead.”

Those imaginary spotlights picked up in intensity. Their glare burned hot enough to make Albertson break out into a sweat.

Murray sagged back into his chair. He’d believed in Blackmon’s ability to lead the nation out of this. Now she was dead, and with the nation at DEFCON 1, Albertson was the commander in chief.

Admiral Porter broke the silence.

“Mister President,” he said, putting emphasis on the second word, making it clear that the word Vice no longer applied. “From this moment on, you’re in charge, sir. What is your decision about our overseas troops?”

Albertson’s eyes looked hollow. The burden of leadership had fallen to a man who clearly couldn’t handle it. Shaking hands lifted to tired eyes, rubbed them lightly.

“If you say so, Admiral,” he said quietly. “Withdraw the troops.”

Murray stared at Albertson. The man’s very first command of his presidency? A confidence-building if you say so.

Maybe the Converted had already won.

URBAN TERRAIN

Oddly, Clarence thought of Dew Phillips.

Before Dew died, he had been at the tail end of his career. Truth be told, he’d been well past that. In his late sixties, Dew had been forced into intense physical action while managing, protecting — and occasionally even beating the crap out of — one “Scary” Perry Dawsey.

Clarence thought of Dew because five years ago Clarence had been the young buck on the team: fit, well trained and ready to rock. Now, Clarence was the one showing the wear and tear of age. Not that he was ready to retire, not even close, but being surrounded by twenty-five-year-olds in world-class shape made it obvious his best years were behind him.

Of course, the bulky CBRN suit didn’t help at all. It was far less bulky than the full BSL-4 rig he’d worn on the Brashear, granted, but the fully enclosed suit still made it cumbersome to move around wrecked cars and through ankle-deep snow. His face felt hot inside the suit’s built-in gas mask. The lenses over each eye cut off much of his peripheral vision; he found himself turning his head rapidly to make sure the Converted weren’t sneaking up from the sides.

Clarence stayed close to Margaret. Two SEALs — the little one, Ramierez, and a swarthy man named Bogdana — shadowed them every step of the way. They and the other SEALs weren’t wearing the CBRN gear. Speed, silence and agility were as much a part of the SEAL arsenal as their M4 carbines, Mark 23 pistols and Barrett M107 rifles. Margaret had argued with Klimas about it. She wanted everyone in the suits, but the commander had ended the discussion quickly. His support of Margaret only went so far, it seemed, and didn’t include debates regarding his gear and the gear of his men.

Tim was currently twenty or thirty feet back, Klimas and Bosh constantly at his side. As soon as Clarence and Margaret stopped, Tim and Klimas would leapfrog ahead. That was how all the troops moved: one group stayed still, ready to provide covering fire, while another group advanced forward to take up covering positions of their own.

Two Apache helicopters flew high overhead, the roar of their engines echoing off skyscraper walls. On the ground, four SEAL fire teams were way out front, running recon. Behind them, the first Ranger platoon, then the civilians and their SEAL escorts, flanked on either side by the second Ranger platoon. The third Ranger platoon brought up the rear.

If the Rangers had objected to wearing the CBRN gear, they had lost that battle. With their urban-camouflage-pattern suits and hoods, their black rubber gasmasks and their rifles — mostly SCAR-FNs and Mk46s, with a few bulky M240B machine guns thrown in for good measure — the Rangers looked like extras from an apocalypse movie. That meant they fit right in with the surroundings.

Clarence could barely believe this was Chicago. Most of the lights were out, bathing the city in darkness. The place looked… dead. Soot-streaked snow covered the street, the sidewalks, abandoned vehicles and hundreds of frozen bodies. Footprints and well-worn paths through the snow were the only indication that anyone remained.

So many footprints, so many paths. There were people here, but where were they? The SEAL recon teams had reported zero contact. They had yet to even see a single soul.

Ramierez and Bogdana stopped behind a flipped-over BMW. Clarence crouched between them. So did Margaret, but she stepped on something under the snow and started to fall. Clarence reached out fast, softly caught her shoulders to keep her from hitting the pavement.

She slapped his arms away.

“I don’t need your help,” she hissed. “I’m not yours to protect anymore.”

Before Clarence could answer, Ramierez leaned in from the right and held a finger to his lips. His eyes sent a message: shut up before you get us killed.

Margaret nodded. She looked back down the wide street, all but ignoring Clarence.

His wife, the mother of his child, she despised him.

Just get her through this alive, then you’ve got a lifetime to make things right.

He rose a little, peeked over the bottom of the overturned car. They were about to cross Mies van der Rohe Way, which would put them within a half mile of the Park Tower Hotel.

Ramierez slid down into a crouch behind the car’s cover.

“Ramierez here, go,” he said, not to Clarence but rather into the tiny microphone that extended down from an earpiece. “Yes sir. I’m ready.”

The short SEAL looked at Bogdana.

“Frank, keep the package right here until I call for you,” Ramierez said.

Then Klimas moved silently past. Ramierez slid around the front of the overturned car and followed his commander into the shadows.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Paulius and Ramierez approached a small firehouse. The building looked medieval — two stories of grayish-tan granite with small, faux turrets on the second-story corners. Its red roll-up door looked just large enough for one fire engine to enter or exit, but nothing was going in or out thanks to the long, white public transit bus that had smashed into it at an angle.

At the bus’s rear end, almost to the sidewalk, stood two cops — one black, one white — both dressed in heavy blue coats, their fingers laced behind their heads. Their breath billowed out in expanding clouds that glowed thanks to a nearby streetlight. The men looked both hopeful and afraid. A black XDM automatic pistol lay on the snow in front of each of them.

They had their hands on their heads because two SEALs — Bosh and Roth — had M4s at their shoulders, barrels aimed at the cops’ chests.

Paulius slung his own M4. He drew his sidearm, a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 already fitted with a suppressor. He aimed it at the two cops as he came up on Bosh’s right.

“Bosh, report.”

“I saw these two exit the bus’s rear door,” Bosh said. “Thing is, advance recon looked through the bus to make sure there weren’t any bad guys hiding there that could fire on the column. When they checked it, the bus was empty. Five minutes later, Rangers march through, these guys come out of it.”

Paulius glanced at the bus. “There a hole in the front of it that leads into the firehouse?”

“I checked,” Bosh said. “Didn’t see any openings. I also did a walk around the firehouse, couldn’t find a way in or out. The place is locked up tight, Commander.”

Paulius glanced at the building’s red-framed windows. In every one, behind broken glass he saw the dull glint of metal. The cops had fortified the place. Paulius had to keep his men moving — every second they spent here was a second wasted.

He looked at the cops. “What do you two want?”

The cops looked at each other, then back at Paulius.

The black cop spoke. “We want you to get us the fuck out of here. We’ve been in there” — he tilted his head toward the firehouse behind him — “for two freakin’ days.”

They looked normal, but the mission was here to rescue one man and one man only.

“We haven’t seen anyone but you,” Paulius said. “Why didn’t you come out sooner?”

The white cop answered. “Right after Paris burned, we were ordered to protect the engine. We were inside the firehouse when things really went to hell. There were psychos everywhere, hundreds of them — they were eating people. We called for backup, for someone to come and get us, but no one’s answering anymore. We didn’t think we’d make it on the streets, so we kept quiet, boarded the place up.”

“Then we saw you guys, you soldiers,” the black cop said. “You came to rescue us, right? So how about you stop aiming that goddamn gun at my face and get us out of here?”

Paulius could imagine what it had been like to hide in that building, cut off from communication, while cannibals roamed the street. These guys were cops, public servants. Probably as brave as any soldier.

But he couldn’t let them go. They had seen his entire force. If they were captured, they might talk. And, of course, they might already be infected. He could test them, but what was the point? The stakes were too high to take even the smallest of chances.

Paulius knew what he had to do.

God forgive me.

He pulled the trigger four times in just over a second. The suppressor made each shot sound like a snapping mousetrap. The first two shots hit the white cop in the face. The black cop had barely enough time to raise his eyebrows in shock and surprise before the next two rounds tore through his skull.

Both men dropped instantly. Blood mist hung in the air, slowly drifted down on top of them.

Paulius switched his mic to the “all units” frequency.

“Commander Klimas to detachment. No more delays. If anyone approaches the detachment, assume they are hostiles and put them down at a distance. Quietly. Make as little noise as possible. Repeat, as little noise as possible.”

He turned to Bosh. “Let’s move out.”

THE PARK TOWER

I am going to kill you all, every one of you, I will wipe you off the face of the earth.

Margaret ran through the dark streets, doing her best to stay close to the nasty little soldier in front of her. Ramierez, his name was. What a fool — if she got the chance she’d slit his throat from ear to ear and bathe in his blood while he tried to draw air. And yet here he was, guarding her, clearly ready to risk his own life to protect hers.

The CBRN gear made it hard to move, but it would protect her from Cooper Mitchell’s disease. Hopefully. The crawlers had found a way through her BSL-4 suit. The hydras might have that same ability. She would stay as far away from Mitchell as possible. She didn’t know how she would kill him, not yet, but as a last resort she had the holstered Sig Sauer P226 strapped to her right thigh. She would just have to watch for her chance. Take out Mitchell, then slip away into the city.

She heard a short bark of gunfire, then another. She and Ramierez followed Clarence and Bogdana. They jogged past a car where CBRN-suited Rangers were setting up a tripod-supported machine gun, pointed back the way they had come. Other Rangers were manually pushing cars into a loose line. They were setting up a perimeter. She saw two soldiers running wires to small, green boxes that were labeled FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

The Rangers’ gas masks made them all look the same, made them look like the identical insects that they were.

Past the perimeter rose the seventy-story Park Tower Hotel, a pale tan spire reaching up to the black sky. Ramierez led her to the front of the building. She saw an arced glass awning that had once sheltered guests from the rain as they entered and exited. It wasn’t sheltering anyone anymore — the only glass that remained stuck out in jagged shards. The body of a man dangled from a support beam. Icicles of blood pointed down from the ends of his fingers like stubby red claws.

Once upon a time, a rotating glass door had kept out the Chicago winds. That, too, was nothing but shattered glass and twisted metal.

Clarence approached and stood next to her. The mask hid most of his face, but not his eyes. He looked at her with a pathetic expression of hurt and confusion.

It would be nice if she could kill Ramierez. But to murder Clarence? That wasn’t just a luxury — more and more, Margaret needed that as much as she needed to breathe.

Maybe her kind would descend upon this hotel and slaughter these soldiers. She would have them string Clarence up by his feet, cut him apart a piece at a time. She’d slice off his eyelids so he wouldn’t be able to look away as people smiled at him and ate those pieces.

She stared back at him, not wanting to give him any satisfaction at all, not wanting him to think that things were okay between them. Until she had a chance to kill him, she wanted him to hurt.

He turned away, walked into the hotel. Margaret smiled a little, then forced that down. She was still surrounded by the enemy. She had to be careful.

She heard gunshots from inside the hotel. She heard men yelling but couldn’t make out the words. Those sounds were lost as one of the helicopters roared overhead.

A bullet plinked into a car to her right. Then something hit her, knocked her face-first to the glass-strewn entryway, pinned her there — the soldiers realized she wasn’t one of them anymore, they were going to kill her, slide a knife into her back, they—

“Sniper,” Ramierez said. “Stay down, Doc.”

From high above, the helicopter let out a new noise, a short-but-intense demon’s roar. The faraway sound of tinkling glass smashing against concrete joined the cacophony.

Ramierez rolled off her, lifted her to her feet. He looked her up and down. “You okay, Doc?”

She nodded. “I think so.”

Broken glass, I was rolling on broken glass…

“Ramierez, do you see any cuts in my suit?”

He gave her a cursory glance. “The suits are thicker than that, Doc, you—”

“Just look!”

Ramierez nodded, then checked her all over — placatingly, but also thoroughly.

She was entering a building crawling with the hydra strain. This place was death. Any cut, no matter how small, could spell the end.

“Looks clear,” Ramierez said. “You’re fine, Doc. And this lobby is secured, so you can relax.”

She let out a genuine sigh of relief.

Ramierez led her deeper into the lobby, which looked even more like a war zone than the streets outside. She recognized details from the YouTube video: the fire pit, now spotted white with windblown snow; corpses that had frozen solid and still wore jeans and winter coats; the soot-blackened ceiling; the shredded reception desk. The only thing missing was the body on the spit — maybe some of her kind had come in here, decided not to let good food go to waste.

To the left of the fire pit, Rangers were unfolding portable tables and unpacking the equipment she’d asked for. Tim stood there, directing them, using what was left of the reception desk as the lab’s main area.

Margaret looked around. The CBRN-suited Rangers seemed to be everywhere. They were setting up more of the tripod-supported weapons by the ruined door and also in the lobby’s broken windows, creating a field of fire out onto Chicago Avenue. More Rangers were undoubtedly setting up similar positions all around the hotel. If her kind attacked, these soldiers would mow them down by the hundreds.

Other Rangers carried large weapons to the elevator, which, surprisingly, seemed to still be working. She saw Klimas conferring with the Ranger commander — Dundee was his name — at what looked to be a hastily constructed command center, complete with laptops and soldiers already working away on them.

She saw Klimas reach up to the small earpiece at his right ear. He stared off, listening, then said something she couldn’t hear. He jogged to a stairwell door, calling out as he went.

“Ramierez, Bosh, Roth, with me! You too, Otto. We’ve got reports of hostiles in the building, so we’re going straight for the package. Elevator gets us there the quickest, so let’s move!”

On the way in, she had been “the package.” Now that they had reached the hotel, that term referred to someone else: Cooper Mitchell. Klimas and the others were headed to the eighteenth floor. On the form he’d submitted online, that’s where Mitchell had said he would be waiting.

In room 1812.

UNDER THE BED

Cooper heard a helicopter. It sounded big, loud, like military helicopters did in the movies. He also heard occasional blasts of gunfire. It had worked: someone was coming to save him. He just had to stay alive a little bit longer, and hope the rescuers got to him before the cannibals did.

The hotel still had heat. Anywhere but downstairs, where winter winds swirled snow through the lobby, the Park Tower remained well above freezing. At first, that had been a welcome discovery. Now, not so much.

If it were below freezing, the dead bodies up here wouldn’t have rotted, bloated, and the corpse he hid beneath might have been frozen solid instead of turning into the wet, reeking mess that sagged down around him. The smell was enough to make him vomit, but to do that would be to make noise — to make noise was to die.

Die, or worse.

You ain’t gonna eat me, motherfuckers, you ain’t gonna eat me…

The motherfuckers in question were close. They were searching every room in the hotel. Earlier he’d risked moving down a few floors, just to keep checking his surroundings. On the fifteenth floor, he’d heard two men talking; talking about his YouTube video, talking about their search — for him.

It had seemed like such a good idea to upload that video, to make sure people knew who he was so the government couldn’t just make him disappear. He felt so, so stupid now, but it had never crossed his mind that the video would make all the murderers in Chicago want to waste him.

Cooper had thought about running to a higher floor, but he’d waited too long and now he didn’t dare. They were on the eighteenth floor. He’d barely had enough time to implement his next bright idea: dragging a sloughing corpse into room 1812 and hiding beneath it. His brain didn’t seem to work right anymore. Too much stress, too much horror, he didn’t know. He was smarter than this. He knew he was. If only—

Noises, coming from the next room. He moved slowly, adjusted the weight of the body on top of him, pressed his ear against the wall. He could hear muffled voices.

“Check under the bed,” one said.

“Stop telling me that,” said another. “There’s no space under these beds.”

Cooper started to shake. He slowly shouldered the corpse a little higher, so he could reach down to his back. Quietly, so quietly, he drew Sofia’s pistol.

Ain’t gonna eat me, Sofia, not like I ate you, no fucking way, I got four bullets left…

THE PACKAGE

It seemed so odd that the hotel still had power. Clarence was grateful for working elevators, though — climbing seventeen flights of stairs would have done him in. He was the only one wearing CBRN gear, which made him feel oddly out of place among Klimas, Bosh, Ramierez and Roth.

Beep… they passed the fifteenth floor.

“We’re almost there,” Klimas said. He reached to his chest webbing, pressed a black button. “Radio check, do you read?”

The three SEALs — Bosh, little Ramierez and the big fella, Roth — all nodded. Clarence nodded as well.

Beep… they passed the sixteenth floor.

“Bosh, cover the right,” Klimas said. “Ramierez, the left. Roth, out and left. I’ll go out and right.”

Bosh and Ramierez knelt by their assigned corners, M4s pointed straight up. Noise suppressors attached to the barrels made the weapons look long and mean.

Clarence drew his Glock 19 from the thigh holster strapped to the outside of his suit.

“Where do you want me?”

Klimas raised an eyebrow. “You? I want you to stay out of our way and move when we tell you to move.”

Maybe it was the impossible stress of the situation, or maybe his frustration with Margaret sitting squarely in harm’s way, he wasn’t sure, but Clarence felt a wave of annoyance.

“I know what I’m doing in a fight, Klimas,” he said. “I was Special Forces.”

Ramierez laughed and shook his head.

Klimas grinned. “Special Forces, huh? How nice. Know what you’re not? A member of this team. You’re here because Margaret doesn’t want anyone exposed to Mitchell’s hydras. You’ve got the CBRN suit so you can handle him. Other than that, kindly stay out of our way.”

Beep… they passed the seventeenth floor.

Cooper heard the door open. A rectangle of hallway light filled the dark room, lit up the face of the bloated corpse on top of him.

“Gross,” one voice said. “It stinks in here.”

“Dead body,” said the other. “Damn, it smells too far gone to eat.”

Cooper couldn’t see them. He heard their feet shuffling across the carpet… coming closer…

“Check under the bed,” one voice said.

“Chuck,” said the other, “if you ask me to look under the bed just one more time I will shoot you in your stupid face.”

Something in the dead body popped softly, bringing with it an even more rancid stench. A trickle of fluid leaked out, ran down Cooper’s forehead and onto the bridge of his nose. His left eye closed automatically as the foul liquid trickled across his eyelids.

Just go away just go away I don’t want to be eaten…

The elevator doors opened onto the eighteenth floor. Bosh and Ramierez, both still kneeling, leaned out and aimed their weapons down the hallway. Bosh’s weapon let out three snaps, click-click-click.

Klimas stepped out with his weapon pointed to the right, stock tight to his shoulder. Roth moved out at the same time, his weapon pointing left. Klimas fired his M4 once, another snapping click.

“Clear left,” Roth said.

“Clear right,” Klimas said. “Otto, with me.”

Clarence stepped out. One body lay down the hall to the right. A woman, face up, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

Klimas spoke quietly, firmly. “Bosh, take point. Let’s move.”

The SEALs did just that, moving without a sound, moving faster than Clarence would have expected; he found himself jogging to keep up.

As they passed the woman, Clarence looked down: three red spots were spreading across her chest. A fourth bullet had blown off the top of her head, splattering her brains across the carpet in a rough oblong. A black .38 revolver lay near her right hand.

Clarence checked off the room numbers as he passed them by — 1804, 1805, 1806… Room 1812 would be down the hall, just past a left-hand turn. Coming from that direction, he heard the faint sound of men’s voices…

“The lights don’t work,” said the first voice. “All the bulbs is broke.”

“You can see fine enough,” said the second voice. “Man, look at that nasty body.”

“That is sooo gross,” said the first voice. “Move it so we can see if anything else is under that desk.”

“No, you move it,” said the second.

Cooper felt numb, like he wasn’t even there, and maybe he wasn’t… maybe this was all a fucked-up dream and he wasn’t hiding under an oozing, rancid, bloated body, maybe he wasn’t hiding from two men who would shove a signpost up his ass and slow-roast him over a bed of coals.

“Flip you for it,” said the first voice.

“Okay,” said the second. “Call it.”

Go away just go away just go away kill myself kill myself now Jesus please help me please

“Heads,” said the first voice.

“Asshole,” said the second. “Hold my gun.”

Cooper felt the dead body on top of him start to slide off. He raised Sofia’s pistol and squeezed the trigger.

Clarence heard the roar of four quick gunshots — a pistol, sounded like a .40-cal.

Klimas’s calm voice in the headset: “Go-go-go.”

Bosh and Roth sprinted around the corner.

Cooper was still on his back, still covered in dead-person sludge, pointing his pistol up at the bearded face of a very surprised man. Cooper had fired four times — and missed all four times. His hands shook so bad that the gun looked like some poorly made stop-action movie.

“That’s him.”

The words didn’t come from the bearded man, but from closer to the door. Cooper looked over — a man wearing a red-and-black knit Blackhawks hat cradled two weapons against his chest, a shotgun and a rifle. “Holy shit,” the man said. “That’s him.”

He fumbled with the weapons. He dropped the rifle, started to bring the shotgun up.

The rectangle of light from the hallway wavered as someone stepped into it.

Cooper heard a click-click-click: the man with the shotgun dropped. The bearded man turned to face the door. Click-click-click: he twitched, then fell to his back.

He lay side by side with Cooper. The man’s chest heaved. His eyes blinked in surprise, but only for a few seconds — then they stared out at nothing.

“Clear!” a voice called out.

Another answered the same.

Cooper looked at his hand, saw the empty pistol was still in it, then shook his hand to let it drop. To come through all this and then to be shot… what if it was too late, what if they were going to shoot him anyway, and—

“Cooper Mitchell?”

He looked up, saw a man in a gas mask, covered head to toe in a heavy chem suit. Through the eye lenses, Cooper saw the man inside was black.

“Cooper Mitchell,” the black man said again. “You’re Cooper Mitchell?”

Cooper nodded.

The man reached down a gloved hand. “I’m Agent Clarence Otto. We’re here to rescue you.”

Cooper couldn’t speak. His vision blurred as the tears started to flow. He reached out and let Agent Clarence Otto take his hand.

DR. FEELY’S BEDSIDE MANNER

Tim Feely had just finished setting up a centrifuge when the elevator opened. Two men stepped out: Clarence in his CBRN suit with combat webbing strapped to his chest and a pistol holster strapped to his thigh, and none other than the guest of honor himself — Cooper Mitchell.

Mitchell wore a tattered, filthy winter coat. Gray slime smeared his face, making the whites of his wide eyes seem all the whiter. The man looked crazy with a capital C. Hell, probably even a capital Z to boot.

Clarence guided Mitchell by an elbow, escorted him to Tim’s impromptu examination area. It wasn’t much: basic medical equipment set up on the reception desk’s remains, a portable table stacked with the centrifuge, a microscope and some other lab gear… just things that could be carried in by hand. The Rangers had thrown in a cushy swivel chair they’d found in the office behind the reception desk.

Tim pointed to the chair. “Put him there, please.”

Might as well make the crazy carrier of what could be humanity’s salvation as comfy as possible.

Clarence eased Mitchell into the chair. Mitchell’s eyes flicked everywhere: left, right, up, down. Yep, definitely a capital Z.

Tim also looked around. Where the hell was Margaret? She’d insisted on this mission. He saw her, over on the far side of the lobby — just standing there in a CBRN suit that was too big for her, staring at Mitchell, doing absolutely nothing.

Why wasn’t she helping?

Tim felt a hand on his shoulder: Clarence.

“Feely, you want to get started, or what?”

Tim turned to look at the shell-shocked Mitchell. The man had been through hell. He’d worry about Margaret later. This man needed help.

“Yeah, I’m on it,” Tim said. He moved to stand in front of Mitchell. “Mister Mitchell. I’m Doctor Feely. Don’t mind this wacky suit, I assure you there is one damn-handsome man behind this mask. I’m going to examine you, okay?”

Mitchell suddenly stood up, his fists clenched, his body shaking with intensity. Tim took a step back.

“Examine me on the boat,” Mitchell said. “Or in the helicopter, or plane or whatever the fuck you’re using to get me the hell out of here.”

Clarence stepped forward, put himself between Tim and the crazy man covered with rotten goo. Clarence had his gloved hands up, palm out.

“Mister Mitchell, please calm down,” he said. “Doctor Feely just has to run a couple of tests.”

Tim moved to the side, used his best soothing voice. “It won’t take long, Mister Mitchell,” he said. “You look very dehydrated. I’m going to put in an IV and get you some fluids, okay? While I’m doing that, I need you to tell me your recent history — when you came to the city, what happened after that.”

Mitchell closed his eyes, shook his head so hard his cheeks wobbled.

“No-no-no,” he said. “All you need to see is this.”

He pulled at his jacket sleeve, slid it up until half his forearm was exposed. He pointed at a puffy red spot a few inches above his wrist.

“That,” he said. “These things pop, and a day later, those motherfuckers die.”

Tim tried to control his excitement. A pustule, the same thing he’d seen on Candice Walker… was that little blister full of hydras?

Slow down, Timmy Boy, do this right. Take care of the patient first, then go from there.

“I see,” Tim said. “Mister Mitchell, do you mind if I call you Cooper?” The man shrugged. “Uh, sure. I guess.”

“Good, Cooper. Now just let me get that IV into you, okay? Your body needs fluids.”

Cooper stared off, nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, but I’m not crazy. I’m not.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Tim lied.

As Tim ran an IV needle into the back of Cooper’s wrist, the man started talking rapidly. His story began with a man named Steve Stanton and a trip out to Lake Michigan to find plane wreckage. Cooper’s best friend Jeff. Some guy named Bo Pan. A high-tech fish-bot. Arrival in Chicago. A night of drinking. A few days so sick he could barely move. Jeff, gone. The incident in the boiler room, where Jeff became something other than human. Fleeing the Trump Tower. Meeting a woman named Sofia, whom the bad guys murdered. The bad guys getting sick and dying. Making the video and waiting for help.

Tim felt for the man. Cooper had been through so much. Forget the capital C and Z, this guy was all-caps CRAZY, with some exclamation points to boot.

But Tim also sensed Cooper was leaving out a few bits of information — rather disturbing bits, based on what he was willing to share — but his babbling tale provided a quick overview on the hydra contagion’s morphology. It was everything Margaret had hoped for and more: the ultimate weapon against the Converted.

Cooper’s story ended with him lying under a decomposing body, which explained the slime. Tim felt suddenly grateful for the CBRN suit, which filtered out most of Cooper’s rather pungent stench of death.

“That’s everything that happened,” Cooper said. “I told you what I saw, so now you can get me out of this city.”

“Soon,” Tim said. “We have a little bit of work to do here first.”

Cooper’s hands shot out, fingers clutching Tim’s thick suit. He pulled hard, his face mashing into Tim’s gas mask, their foreheads touching, the mask’s lenses the only thing separating their eyes.

“Get me the FUCK out of here!”

Clarence stepped in fast and grabbed Cooper’s wrists. An instant later, the man lay facedown with Clarence straddling his back.

Tim just stood there, not knowing what to do as Cooper thrashed and screamed.

“Get me out of here you assholes get me out of here please please I don’t wanna die!”

“Calm down,” Clarence said. “You’re not going to die.” He pulled zip strips out of a pocket in his webbing, and in a flash had Cooper’s hands bound tightly behind him.

Clarence picked the man up off the floor and set him in the swivel chair.

Cooper Mitchell stared out for a second, then began to giggle.

“Die-die-die,” he said. “Am I tasty? Death is die-die-dielicious!”

The man’s screams echoed through the ruined lobby, seemed to make the Rangers skittish.

Clarence gave Tim’s shoulder a light smack. “Would you shut this guy up?”

Tim reached into the medkit and found a vial of etomidate. He quickly prepped a syringe, then injected it into the IV line.

Cooper continued to struggle for a few seconds, but quickly lost energy. He babbled a bit more, then his head drooped.

Tim could agree with Cooper on one thing, at least: he also wanted to get the fuck out of Chicago

“Don’t drug him too much,” Clarence said. “We might still need to move on short notice. Now get to work and find out if he’s got our magic bug.”

Tim again looked across the lobby — there was Margaret, still watching, not making any movement toward them. If she moved any farther away, she’d be out on the sidewalk.

“Clarence, get Margo over here,” Tim said. “This is supposed to be her show, man. We still have to thaw out the bodies from the lobby so we can get blood and tissue samples.”

Clarence shook his head. “I’ll get some Rangers to help you. Margaret told me she needs to examine the room where we found Mitchell. She said that’s the best place to start for environmentals.”

“What? But that doesn’t—”

“Stop talking, start working,” Clarence said. “I don’t want to stay here a second longer than we have to.”

Clarence walked to the elevator. Margaret joined him, as did the SEAL named Bogdana, who carried a limp CBRN suit under one arm. Just before the doors shut, she looked at Tim for a moment, then stared at Cooper Mitchell. Even through her mask, Tim saw Margaret’s eyes narrow into slits of pure hate.

The elevator doors slid shut, and they were gone.

What was she doing? If she wanted to look for environmental factors, she should be starting in the lobby, where Mitchell had videotaped the bodies, where the Converted had died.

Tim shook it off. Margaret knew what she was doing. He turned back to the unconscious Mitchell.

“Well, Mister Mostly Unconscious, let’s find that magic bug so we can get the hell out of here,” Tim said. “I really don’t want to be here long enough to find out if I’m die-die-dielicious.”

Cooper Mitchell didn’t say anything.

Tim got to work.

FLASH MOB

Steve Stanton shivered despite his thick jacket, snowpants, gloves and hat. The wind and the cold had both intensified when the sun went down.

He and General Dana Brownstone stood in the front of a public transit bus, looking through binoculars at the soldiers around the Park Tower Hotel. Just ahead of the bus, dozens of Chosen Ones stayed low behind a barrier made of cars, trash bins, doors and general refuse.

Hatchlings scurried in and around the objects, secreting a brown fluid that was quickly transforming the barrier into a solid wall. Steve’s people had tested that material in several places through the city — it stopped all small-arms fire, probably stopped everything shy of a tank cannon.

Fortunately, the humans didn’t have a tank.

General Brownstone lowered her binoculars. “The sun will be coming up in a few hours, Emperor. I recommend we attack before dawn.”

Steve lowered his binoculars as well. He stared out at his people, and beyond them to the towering tan hotel rising high into the night sky.

“Maybe we should wait for morning,” he said. “We have a mob, not a trained army. I don’t want our people accidentally wasting bullets on each other.”

Brownstone smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Emperor. The humans were kind enough to put on uniforms.”

Steve gave Brownstone an admiring look — he should have thought of that. Just shoot at the people in the uniforms and bulky suits. How much easier could it be?

He lifted the binoculars again. He could make out the heads and shoulders of a few masked soldiers peeking out from behind the line of ruined cars. To the right of an overturned VW Beetle, the few remaining streetlights played off the black barrel of a nasty-looking, tripod-mounted weapon. The human soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but they were special forces, well armed and clearly disciplined. They would kill Steve’s Chosen People by the thousands.

Good thing he had hundreds of thousands.

And it wasn’t like the Chosen Ones were some barbarian army armed with spears and knives: his people had guns, too — and he had special soldiers of his own.

He lowered the binocs, let them dangle against his sternum.

“How many fighting-capable followers have smartphones?”

“One thousand, two hundred and twelve,” Brownstone said instantly. “Each phone is held by the head of a primary cell, and each primary cell has visual or foot-messenger connections to three secondary cells. We can quickly coordinate an infantry force of thirty thousand.”

Steve held out his hand, palm up. Brownstone handed him a phone. He looked at the time: 3:33 A.M. Most of those thirty thousand Chosen Ones could reach this location within forty-five minutes or less. He called up Twitter, logged on to his @MonstaMush account. He typed in his message:

He hit “send.”

Brownstone looked at the message. “Aren’t you concerned the human signal intelligence analysts will see that?”

Steve shrugged. “Nationwide, there’s probably still a thousand tweets a second. If anyone sees it, they won’t know what it means, and even if they somehow figure it out they won’t be able to react soon enough.”

Brownstone nodded. “If the humans have overhead surveillance, they’ll spot our coordinated movement. We can expect air support to arrive quickly — predator drones, Apaches, possibly other aircraft we haven’t seen yet.”

“Let them come,” Steve said. “Get word to the rooftops. From here on out, destroy whatever flies in.”

Brownstone saluted. “Yes, Emperor.” She exited the bus. She would carry Steve’s orders to the masses.

He looked out the bus’s door to the yellow-skinned bull hiding alone behind a burned-out Mercedes thirty feet away. The day before, that bull had come looking for Steve. It had made contact with dozens of Chosen Ones along the way, and not one of them had fallen ill. Jeremy Ellis had taken the bull straight to his biology lab, yet found no trace of disease. Ellis thought the bulls were not only immune to Cooper Mitchell’s disease, they also weren’t carriers of it.

“Yo!” Steve yelled to the bull. “Are you ready to find your old friend?”

Like a puppy called by its master, the massive creature took two hurried steps toward the bus before it stopped, remembering it wasn’t supposed to get close.

“COOOOOPERRRRRR,” the bull said. “FIND… COOOPERRRRR.”

Steve smiled. God willing, Cooper Mitchell would die at the hands of his lifelong friend. The mutated hands, with those awesome bone-blades.

All things in due time. Steve checked the cell phone: forty minutes to go…

GAME CHANGE

Jackpot.

Tim lifted his head from the microscope. He wanted to drink scotch and screw and watch cartoons… maybe in that order, maybe not. He wanted to party.

Cooper Mitchell’s blood contained thousands of hydras.

Tim had also found dead hydras in the frozen bodies that had been in the hotel lobby. Correlation wasn’t causation, true, but the results pointed to one motherfucker of a correlation: Cooper Mitchell was Patient Zero. The good kind of Patient Zero.

I’ve got you Norman Bates bitches by the short and curlies… you’re all gonna die.

“Cooper, you lovely, lovely bastion of microbial awesomeness, you might have just saved the world.”

The man’s story indicated he infected those around him almost immediately. The hydras debilitated individuals within just eight to twelve hours of initial exposure, killed them within twenty-four. What was more, Cooper said he hadn’t touched any of the people who had found him in the Walgreens, yet at least five of the six had contracted the fatal pathogen. That meant the hydras were airborne, and were highly contagious; just being in the same room was enough.

It didn’t matter what Margaret found up on the eighteenth floor, or anywhere else for that matter. The mission became one simple objective: get Cooper Mitchell out of Chicago and into a lab.

According to Cooper, only the “Jeff Monster” had survived the twenty-four-hour lethality. Tim had seen images of the big creatures, so different they looked more akin to gorillas than humans. That kind of large-scale physical alteration required large-scale genetic change: perhaps hydras took longer to affect them, or possibly didn’t affect them at all.

But that wasn’t Tim’s problem. The hydras killed the other known forms — the dead in the Park Tower’s lobby included two triangle hosts, two kissyfaces and one that had no marks of any kind yet died all the same.

He couldn’t wait to tell Margaret. She’d want to double-check Tim’s results, see for herself if he’d gotten it right. Of course, she’d actually have to come to the lab area to do that, actually have to stand next to Cooper Mitchell.

Which she wasn’t doing… she hadn’t even come near Cooper…

Margaret had been hands-on with Walker and Petrovsky. Years earlier, she’d personally done the work on Martin Brewbaker, Perry Dawsey, Betty Jewel and Carmen Sanchez. She’d been up-close and personal with infected both living and dead. Why would she go out of her way to avoid Cooper?

Because she knew that Cooper’s hydras killed the Converted.

She knew, and she didn’t want to die.

Tim slapped himself lightly on the sides of his masked head, left-right-left-right. Margaret couldn’t be infected. She’d tested negative. She’d taken the inoculant, then tested negative some more. And besides that, she was Margaret Montoya, grand defender of the human race.

She tested negative…

But so had that diver, Cantrell, who had tried to kill Margaret during the escape from the Brashear. Tim had written Cantrell’s behavior off to panic and confusion from the attack, the explosion that had blown his cell open, from breathing in a near-lethal dose of bleach. Why? Because Cantrell had shown no signs of infection.

That corpse in the Park Tower lobby, the tall one in the red coat, he had no signs of infection, either, yet his blood had been full of hydras all the same…

Tim lunged for the med kit. He tore it open, throwing things aside until he found what he needed: a cellulose tester. The unit would work on a dead body just as well as on a live one.

OBEY

Clarence stood in the doorway of Room 1812, waiting for a chance to be useful. Margaret wouldn’t even let him help with little things like gathering samples or moving that nasty body. She was happy to let the SEAL, Bogdana, handle all of that.

Margaret was acting odd, even stranger than she’d acted on the Coronado. She had always wanted to be hands-on, yet now she was letting Tim do the dirty work? The most important work?

She said it was because of the baby: she wasn’t taking any chances. Clarence wasn’t about to argue with that. She shouldn’t have come in the first place.

Margaret didn’t touch anything in Room 1812. She insisted Bogdana wear the CBRN suit for this particular bit of work. Being unprotected on the streets was one thing, while handling a corpse was another. She directed his actions: move the rotting body; fill this vial; scoop up that slime; and on and on.

Clarence’s headset crackled, followed by Tim’s voice on the open channel.

“This is Doctor Feely.” He sounded upset. “Clarence, are you out there? Talk to me, man.”

Margaret’s head snapped up.

Clarence reached to thumb the “talk” button, paused when Margaret held up a hand palm out: stop right there.

“Don’t answer him,” she said. “I need your help, right now.”

He’d stood there for fifteen minutes with his thumb up his ass and now she needed him?

He held up a finger, asking her to be quiet as he thumbed the “talk” button.

“Feely, this is Clarence, go ahead.”

“I found… uh, is Margaret with you by chance?”

“She is.”

“Ah,” Tim said. “Well… I found something. Can you come down here? Now? It’s really important.”

Margaret shook her gas-mask-covered head. Was she playing some kind of mind game? Was she craving protection, perhaps because of the baby, or was this another punishment for him leaving her? Whatever her reason, Clarence didn’t have time to play along.

He thumbed the “talk” button again. “I’ll be right down, Tim.”

Margaret pointed to the floor. “I need you here. Do not go down there, Clarence, you hear me?”

Bogdana watched them both, the eyes behind his gas mask showing an expression of annoyed disbelief.

Maybe Margaret had good reason to be mad, but that didn’t change the fact that Clarence had a job to do.

“Bogdana,” Clarence said to the SEAL, “stay with Doctor Montoya until I check this out. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

Bogdana nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take care of the doc.”

Clarence hesitated a moment, looked at Margaret’s angry stare one more time, then jogged toward the elevator.

BALLS

Tim knew.

Margaret could tell from the sound of his voice. She didn’t know how he’d figured it out, but there was no question — he knew.

She had to act now.

“Sorry about this, Bogdana, but I really need a skin sample from the genitalia.”

The man’s shoulders dropped. “Please tell me you’re kidding.” Margaret shook her head. Her suit’s gas mask wobbled just a little, despite the fact that she had it on so tight it partially cut off the circulation in her face.

“Sorry, but it has to be done.”

She forced herself closer to the bloated corpse. A puddle of fluid stained the carpet beneath it — liquid from decomposition rather than blood. The man’s penis and testicles looked black and shriveled, like a rotten avocado spotted with moisture.

“I need a sample” — she pointed to the decomposing member — “from right below his scrotum.”

Bogdana shook his head, sighed. “My mother will be so proud that her only son is the military’s highest-paid collector of fromunda cheese.”

He knelt on both knees, then reached a gloved hand under the corpse’s genitalia. He lifted gently, bent his head for a closer look.

Margaret quietly drew the Sig Sauer P226 from her thigh holster. She pointed it at the back of Bogdana’s head and pulled the trigger.

SHOTS FIRED

Clarence exited the elevator and strode toward Tim’s lab area. The little scientist jogged to meet him halfway, feet crunching on the broken glass and bits of charred wood scattered about the lobby.

“It’s Margaret,” Tim said. “I think she’s infected.”

Clarence stopped. What kind of bullshit was Tim trying to pull? Was the little coward looking for a way out?

Tim grabbed Clarence’s arm, pulled him toward Cooper Mitchell. The man was moving again, head lolling as he struggled to wake up.

Tim looked back to the elevator, then around the lobby. He leaned in close.

“You heard me,” he said. “Margaret is infected.”

Clarence yanked his arm free of Tim’s anxious grip.

“She’s not. She’s been with us the whole time. She drank the inoculant. So did I. So did you.”

Tim nodded rapidly, continued to glance at the elevator. Clarence understood why — he was afraid Margaret might come down. He was afraid of Margaret.

“I know she did,” Tim said. “The only thing that makes sense is she was exposed before we left the Brashear. By the time she drank the yeast, she’d already been infected for more than twenty-four hours, so it was too late to save her. Come on, man, she wouldn’t come anywhere near Cooper. Does that sound like Margaret to you?”

All the pressure, the danger… Tim had lost it. He’d cracked.

“You’re wrong,” Clarence said, struggling to keep his voice level. “She’s pregnant, you paranoid little shit. She doesn’t want to take any chances.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tim spread his arms, a gesture that took in the hotel, the city, everything. “Does this look like a sixth-grade field trip to the museum?” He pointed at Cooper. “She comes into this slaughterhouse no problem, then won’t get near him? She’s afraid of catching the hydras, Otto — she’s afraid of catching a disease that only kills the infected.”

No… Tim was wrong. He had to be.

“She tested over and over again,” Clarence said. “She blew negative every time.”

“So did Cantrell.” Tim picked up a testing kit off the portable table and held it up. The light showed a steady green “So did the guy in the red coat, the one that Cooper said was the leader of his group of Converted. The guy who died from the hydras, just like the other infected. There’s a strain the test doesn’t detect, Otto, and Margaret has it.”

Clarence stared at the testing kit. Green light. Margaret’s tests showed green lights. She wouldn’t go near Cooper. No, there had to be an explanation.

“The baby,” he said. “She doesn’t know how hydras might affect the baby.”

“Stop it,” Tim snapped. “We don’t have time for denial. We have to—”

Klimas’s voice came over their headsets.

“All personnel, Predator drones show heavy foot traffic headed our way,” he said. “Movement on East Chicago, coming from both directions on Michigan, and all of it converging on our position. They aren’t coming to swap spit and rub tummies, people. Man the perimeter, fire at anything that moves. It’s game time.”

How could they attack now? Tim said Margaret was infected… maybe she was just sick… the baby, making her act strange…

Clarence’s headset let out a short burst of static as someone switched frequencies.

“Otto, this is Klimas, over?”

Clarence reacted automatically. “Otto here, go ahead.”

“The shit is about to hit the fan. SITREP on the civvies?”

“Montoya is up in 1812 with Bogdana,” Clarence said. “I’m in the lobby with Feely and Mitchell.”

“Good,” Klimas said. “Stay right there unless I tell you otherwise, or unless someone is shooting at you.”

His wife was upstairs, and an attack was coming.

“I have to go get Margaret. I’ll grab her and—”

“Negative, Agent Otto,” Klimas said. “Stay right where you are. You are responsible for protecting Feely and the package. I’ll have Bogdana bring Montoya down. Klimas, out.”

Clarence closed his eyes, tried to think things through. The future of the human race was right next to him, sitting in a swivel chair, still partially sedated. But his family was seventeen floors above. Was Tim crazy?

Or, if Tim was right…

Clarence’s headset came alive with Rangers and SEALs calling out targets, with the sound of weapons fire.

Then several voices at once, from both inside the lobby and over the comm link, calling the same word: incoming!

Clarence heard a muffled crash of glass followed by the whoof of billowing fire that filled the lobby with a sudden and angry orange light.

GAME ON

Paulius Klimas rolled across the snowy pavement, putting out the flames that danced up his thighs. Molotov cocktails rained down around him. The smell of burning gasoline filled the air. Mortars from inside the perimeter thoooped, weapons fired, men shouted out targets or screamed in agony.

Paulius slid up against the door of a burned-out Lincoln Navigator. He peeked around the front bumper, east down Chicago Avenue. Dozens of small flames arced through the air toward his position, spinning orange stars that would land and burst, spreading long ovals of flame. Off in the distance, he saw muzzle flashes coming from behind overturned cars on Chicago Avenue and on Rush Street, as well as from skyscraper windows in all directions.

Bullets plinked off the Navigator, punched through what glass still remained in the ruined vehicle. Molotovs hit every few seconds. Most of the improvised missiles fell short, but more than a few sailed over the perimeter to set the pavement afire.

He thumbed to his SEAL-only frequency and pressed the “talk” button.

“This is Klimas. Overwatch, locate and return fire, concentrate on enemy positions in the buildings on the corners of Chicago and Rush, Chicago and Michigan. Prioritize all high-elevation enemy snipers, repeat, all high-elevation enemy snipers. SITREP by squads, go.”

The squads reported back: heavy concentrations of small-arms fire and Molotovs coming in from all directions. Most of the enemy troops had to be armed civilians. His marksmen would thin them out quickly, but just how big a force did they face?

Paulius switched to the Rangers’ channel and listened in. Captain Dundee was already calling in air support. The Apaches would be here in minutes.

The hotel was so large, Paulius still had men going from floor to floor, securing the place one room at a time. He switched back to the SEAL channel.

“Interior personnel, sound off.”

His men reported in. All but one — Bogdana. Were there still bad guys in the hotel? Had they taken out Bogs and Margo?

He switched channels again. “Civilians, sound off!”

FEEL THE HEAT

Tim coughed, trying to clear the thick, greasy smoke from his lungs and throat. He’d lost his gas mask.

He pushed himself to his knees, but stayed behind the reception counter. The Rangers were putting out fires even as bullets whizzed into the lobby, splintering into the wood walls or taking chunks out of the black marble columns.

He saw Cooper Mitchell lying prone, struggling to rise. Tim threw an arm over the man, protecting him as well as he could.

Then the big form of Clarence Otto scrambled behind the ruined counter, aimed his pistol over it toward the hotel’s front entrance.

Tim heard the short burst of static caused by someone coming onto the civilian frequency.

“Civilians, sound off!”

Klimas. In the background Tim heard the constant roar of gunfire and a wounded soldier screaming for help.

“Otto here,” Clarence said. “Feely is with me, as is the package.”

“Acknowledged,” Klimas said. “Margaret, sound off.”

There was no response.

“Margaret, sound off,” Klimas said again.

Still nothing.

Otto crouched low. “Have Bogdana bring her down, Klimas, right now.”

“No response from Bogdana,” Klimas said.

Had Margaret killed the man? Tim didn’t know if she could get the drop on a SEAL, but she was infected, he knew she was, and that meant she was capable of anything.

Clarence stayed low but took a step toward the elevator. “Klimas, I’m going to get Margaret.”

“Negative, Otto, that’s a—” Klimas stopped in midsentence. Gunfire filled Tim’s headphones, so loud it made him wince. “I repeat, that’s a negative. I’m sending Bosh and Ramierez to get her. Otto, do not leave your post.”

Clarence paused. Tim could see the man’s eyes through the gas mask lenses, see the turmoil, the indecision.

“Affirmative,” Clarence said.

Tim heard the click of Klimas switching off the channel.

Outside, the gunfire sounded constant, an orchestra of unending death. A bullet hit the centrifuge on top of the portable table, sending it spinning violently down to the marble floor.

Clarence shook his head. “I have to get her.”

He again turned toward the elevator.

Tim reached up, grabbed Clarence’s arm.

“Otto, stay here, goddamit! Don’t you fucking leave us alone!”

Cooper Mitchell tried to roll to his hands and knees but lost his balance, fell back down to his side. He looked around, eyes blinking and unfocused.

Clarence grabbed Tim’s wrist, pulled the hand free.

“I’m going to get my wife,” he said. “Stay here with Cooper. The Rangers will protect you.”

He sprinted for the elevator.

Tim felt lost. He looked at Cooper Mitchell, who was again trying to get to his hands and knees. Cooper… it was all about Cooper, about the microorganism he had in his body, in his blood.

Tim pressed his “talk” button. “Klimas, this is Feely, come in! Come in, Klimas!”

Klimas came back instantly, both his voice and the sound of gunfire painfully loud.

“Goddamit, Feely, stay off this channel!”

“Margaret’s infected. Otto went to get her. I’m alone with Mitchell. Get us out of here!”

A bullet ripped through the portable table’s metal leg — the table leaned to the right and fell on its edge.

“Feely,” Klimas said, “do you have a weapon?”

“No.”

“Then find one. Right now Mitchell is your responsibility. Protect him. The lobby is the safest place we have. That reception counter is decent cover, so stay behind it. I’ll get someone to you as soon as I can. Klimas, out.”

The frequency clicked off.

I am so screwed, so screwed…

A crash of glass, a whuff of billowing fire so close Tim felt the heat through his suit. He threw himself on top of Cooper to protect him from the flames.

So screwed, so screwed…

FREEDOM

Margaret paused on the stairwell landing of the fifteenth floor. She carefully checked her suit for tears and cuts: she couldn’t take any chances now.

She had killed Bogdana, blown his brains all over that rotted corpse. To pull the trigger, to know she was the one to end that subcreature’s miserable existence… it felt glorious.

Humans had pissed away their chance to live on this world. War, hatred, pollution, genocide… the true legacy of humankind. She hadn’t taken a life; she had simply exterminated a pest.

After she’d killed Bogdana, she’d heard the battle erupt in the streets. A look out the window gave her all the motivation she needed to keep fighting — as far down Chicago Avenue as she could see, waves and waves of people hiding behind barriers, waiting to advance. The Converted, coming to save her.

But Cooper Mitchell was downstairs. The Antichrist. If her kind poured in like a tidal wave of blessed bodies, overwhelming the Rangers and SEALS, they might come into contact with that diseased piece of garbage; they might be exposed. If as few as four or five of them contracted his hydras and then faded into the night, mingled with others, that was enough to start an unstoppable plague. Margaret’s people might be wiped out forever, leaving God’s will unfulfilled. The humans could keep developing, keep building, until someday they reached the stars.

She had to stop that from happening. She had to kill Cooper Mitchell before her people could reach him. She had the gun. D’Shawn Bosh had shown her how to use it, how to take a shooter’s stance, how to breathe out slowly, how to squeeze the trigger, never pull it.

Margaret didn’t have to get close to Cooper to kill him: she just needed a clean shot.

A clean shot, and a distraction.

That fucker Feely had probably already told Clarence and the others that she was infected — they wouldn’t trust her now, might even kill her on sight. She had to be careful, but she also had to move fast. The Converted onslaught would provide her the needed distraction. Everyone would be busy trying to repel the attack.

Kill Cooper Mitchell, then get to her people: that was all that mattered.

Afterward, she could figure out how to defuse humanity’s last weapon. She had discovered the hydras; she could also find a way to destroy them. Chicago had universities, hospitals — she could cobble together a working lab. She’d saved humanity three times over, so why couldn’t she do the same for her new tribe?

But first, Cooper had to die.

Margaret started down the steps.

THE EVIDENCE

Clarence sprinted down the hallway of the eighteenth floor, Glock 19 in hand, heading for the room where they’d found Cooper Mitchell. He leaned left to turn the corner without slowing, booted feet digging into the hallway carpet. He came around to the sight of a pair of M4s pointed his way. He tried to stop suddenly, knew in that moment bullets would rip him to shreds, but he was moving too fast — his forward momentum slammed him into the far wall.

He fell to the floor.

“Drop the weapon!” Ramierez screamed.

Clarence let the Glock fall from his hand to thump on the hallway’s carpet.

Ramierez stayed in place, black M4 tight to his shoulder and aimed at Clarence’s chest.

D’Shawn Bosh ran up, grabbed Clarence’s sidearm, took two steps back.

“Montoya,” Bosh said. “Where is she? She killed Bogdana.”

That couldn’t be true, couldn’t be; there had to be hostiles in the building.

“You guys got it all wrong,” Clarence said. “Margaret didn’t kill anyone.”

“Get your ass up,” Bosh said.

Clarence stood.

Ramierez’s aim didn’t waver. He seethed with visible fury — if Clarence gave him a reason, he knew Ramierez would put him down.

Bosh pushed Clarence down the hall.

“Move,” Bosh said. “See for yourself.”

Clarence felt so lost, so disoriented. He didn’t resist.

Another push on his back as he stumbled into Room 1812.

Clarence saw two bodies: the bloated thing that Cooper had hid beneath and, sprawled on top of it, Bogdana. A small hole in his CBRN suit, right at the back of his head, told the story.

“Point blank,” Bosh said. “Bogdana’s a SEAL, asshole — you think one of those gibbering idiots could have gotten that close to him?”

Clarence shook his head. No… not Margaret… she was immune, Clarence had seen her take the tests.

“We have to find her,” he said. “She… she’s in danger.”

The words rang hollow, even to him.

Bosh tossed Clarence’s pistol onto the bed.

“Ram and I are going to the fifth floor,” he said. “Setting up a sniper position. Look for her if you want. But when you see her, if you don’t shoot first, it was real nice knowing you.”

The two SEALs ran off down the hall.

Clarence thumbed his “talk” button.

“Margaret, answer me.”

He waited. No response.

“Margaret, please, please answer me!”

Nothing.

Clarence stared at Bogdana.

Bosh was right. Tim was right.

Margaret had done this.

She was infected.

The brutal reality hit home. He leaned against the wall. His wife, his love, the mother of his child… she was one of them.

The noise of the battle seemed to hit him all at once, the sounds of gunfire filtering up from the street. And not that far off, the pounding of helicopter rotors.

Why had she revealed herself now? Had she known this attack was coming, somehow? More of that infected telepathy, their hive-mind making them all move as one? Or was it simply because she realized that Tim had discovered her secret, that he was about to out her? But if that was the case, Margaret could have denied it — she tested negative, Tim would have had no proof.

Clarence looked at Bogdana. Had Margaret killed the man so she could slip away and join her kind?

The mission… the package… he had to focus on that. If he didn’t concentrate on saving Cooper Mitchell, on making all of this worthwhile, he knew he’d go insane.

Clarence grabbed his weapon, turned, and ran for the elevator.

COCKTAIL PARTY

Flames soared from cars, trucks, delivery vans and buses, destroying any night-vision capability. Heat from a dozen fires chased away the winter night’s chill. This wasn’t a couple of indigs hucking a bottle to pretend they could fight back against the oppressors: this was a concentrated, planned, sustained attack.

From the north, south, east and west, men called for backup.

Paulius had no backup to send.

The Converted stayed behind their cover of burned-out cars and trucks, providing few targets to hit. When heads did pop up, the SEALs and the Rangers took them out. His overwatch had mowed down most of the enemy’s high positions and were now picking off anything that moved.

The Molotov barrage had slowed since the attack began five minutes earlier, but still the bombs poured in, a constant symphony of breaking glass and billowing flame. The Converted had to be using a sling of some kind, something to hurl the gas-filled bottles farther than any man could possibly throw.

He clicked his “talk” button.

“This is Klimas, can anyone up top see what they’re using to launch those Molotovs?”

“Negative, Commander,” came back Roth’s voice. “The bad guys put burning tires in front of their perimeter wall, too much smoke to see what’s going on.”

Through the flames and the constant gunfire, Paulius heard the roar of approaching helicopters. Apaches, lining up an attack run — these local yokels were about to get a rude awakening courtesy of chain-gun music.

He peeked out under the bumper of a delivery truck, looked east along Chicago Avenue. Many Molotovs had fallen short and crashed into the pavement. The flickering flames made the air waver and warp. Through that, Paulius saw bits of movement about thirty meters out, heads peeking above cars, shadows sliding from vehicle to vehicle.

Heads… and something else, something smaller, lower to the ground.

Roth’s deep voice again: “This is East Overlook, we have large numbers of enemy infantry advancing on us from the east, on Chicago Avenue. Holy shit, boys, looks like thousands of them. Mixed units, people and those hatchling things.”

Klimas switched to the Ranger channel. “SEAL commander to Captain Dundee. SEAL commander to Captain Dundee.”

The Ranger commander answered instantly. “Dundee here, go.”

“We have a battalion-sized force of infantry attacking from the east.”

“Same from the north, south and west,” Dundee said. “Drone video confirms.”

“Weapons free,” Paulius said. “Shoot anything that isn’t us and maintain our perimeter.”

“Roger that, Dundee, out.”

Paulius switched back to the SEAL channel as a nearby Ranger opened up with a long burst from a 240.

“Weapons free, I repeat, weapons free. All but squad weapons use single fire. Make your shots count, boys — I don’t think we brought enough bullets.”

He clicked off, then leaned out past the front fender, just enough for the barrel of his M4 to aim down the street.

Three black hatchlings rushed toward him, running through the pools of fire rather than around them. Flames clung to their black pyramid bodies, curled around their tentacle-legs.

So fast… I’ve never seen anything that fast…

Paulius pulled the trigger twice, pop-pop; the middle hatchling went down hard. Another one dropped, either from a Ranger’s bullet or from one of his overwatch men up on the fifth floor. The creature’s forward momentum rolled it awkwardly beneath a burning car.

The third hatchling closed to within five meters.

Don’t fire till you see the blacks of their eyes flashed through Paulius’s mind right before he dropped it with another two-bullet burst.

The thunder of the Apaches’ rotors echoed through the city canyons. The tone suddenly became more raw, more real as the first helicopter came around a building into plain sight, just behind the oncoming wave of attackers. Paulius heard the sharp snare-drum sound of M230 chain guns opening up.

A Molotov landed ten feet to his left, forcing him away from the front fender. He scrambled to the rear fender, looked around it. Through the flickering flames and the shimmering air he saw the enemy rushing forward.

Hundreds of hatchlings, and behind them, an endless wave of people.

As fast as he could, Paulius yanked grenades from his webbing and threw them at the oncoming mob.

STREETS OF FIRE

Frank Sokolovsky wondered if there could be anywhere colder than where he stood. Besides the roof of the John Hancock Building, sixty stories up, in the dead of night, with a Chicago winter wind whipping in at twenty miles an hour? That was some cold shit right there.

He had worked his way through college on the GI Bill. He’d served most of one tour in Afghanistan before an IED blew his left foot clean off. Frank had considered himself lucky — not only had he lived, he’d been given a medical discharge and gone home to Hyde Park, to his job as a shipping manager, to his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Shelly.

Frank had felt God’s touch earlier than most. It came with pain, as did all things truly worth having. Carol knew something had changed. She knew even before Frank did, to be honest. He’d made some comment about disciplining Shelly. He still couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but when he woke up the next morning, Carol and Shelly were both gone. That was too bad, because from that morning on he’d known exactly what he would have done to them both.

Frank had left his house and just wandered. His first kill had been a mouthy old lady. Leave me alone, the bitch had said. Can you imagine? Please, no, she had said. The nerve of some people.

He discovered new friends. Together, they found humans, killed them. Then word came of a true leader, a leader asking for everyone with military experience. Emperor Stanton and General Brownstone gave him a wonderful responsibility — a Stinger missile.

For two days, Frank Sokolovsky had frozen his ass off atop the Hancock. People brought him food. Once they’d brought him a whole arm, already cooked. There was probably half of that left.

Finally, though, the waiting was over.

He stood still, mostly hidden from sight, the Stinger on his right shoulder, watching the Apache fly down Michigan Avenue about thirty feet below his rooftop elevation. The helicopter’s nose was tipped down, its 30-millimeter chain gun transforming the street below into a sparkling river of death.

The screaming war machine flew past.

Just before Frank pressed the “fire” button, he understood — without a doubt — that everything happened for a reason. He had needed money for college, so he joined the army. He’d served in Afghanistan, where he’d learned to fire this kind of weapon, where he’d suffered the injury that brought him home so he could become enlightened at just the right time. Anyone who considered that a coincidence was a fool. Frank knew the hand of God when he saw it, and for that guidance he whispered a fast prayer of thanks.

He pressed the button.

A Stinger launcher fires a FIM-92B missile: sixty inches long, twenty-two pounds. It is supersonic capable and can reach speeds of Mach 2.2. Frank’s missile didn’t attain that speed, because it was only in the air for three seconds — one second of flight powered by the launcher’s ejection motor, which hurled the missile out into the predawn sky, and two seconds of flight powered by the missile’s solid fuel rocket engine.

The FIM-92B penetrated right between the Apache’s twin turboshaft engines. The warhead erupted, blowing both engines off the machine with such force that one flew three hundred feet to hammer into the glass and steel of Water Tower Place. The other engine clipped a building roof before comet-streaking into Chestnut Street, disintegrating into a cloud of tumbling, red-hot shards that shredded everything in their path.

In an Apache, the gunner sits in front, the pilot above and behind him, an armored wall between them. The explosion killed the pilot instantly. The armor kept the gunner alive long enough for the flaming helicopter to fall seven hundred feet to the street below, where he died on impact.

The wreckage smashed into the Converted running down Michigan Avenue, a rolling fireball that pounded flesh into paste. Pieces of the Apache broke off and crashed into stores, shattering glass, breaking walls and starting several fires.

Frank Sokolovsky stared down at his handiwork. He felt bad about where the helicopter had hit — how many of his kind had died? That was part of God’s plan, though, and who was he to question God?

To the south, he saw another Apache start to climb. Maybe it had seen Frank’s target go down and wanted to get some altitude, but it was already too late; a chasing flicker betrayed a Stinger fired from the roof of the Marriott on North Rush Street. Coincidentally, Frank and Carol had stayed in that very hotel on their honeymoon.

He laughed when the fireball engulfed the Apache. The Fourth of July was nothing compared to this. The flaming Apache banked and flew into another skyscraper, impacting at about the thirtieth floor. Frank didn’t know the name of that building.

He shivered and set down his launcher. Unless someone brought him another missile, his work was done. He looked around. He’d fully expected that as soon as he fired, another helicopter would have swept in and killed him.

Maybe God had bigger plans for him. He’d head back inside, build a little fire and see if he could thaw out some of that arm.

Frank heard the Hellfire missile but he never saw it. By the time he turned around, the Predator-fired weapon detonated within fifteen feet of him, tearing him into three good-sized pieces that all sailed over the side of the John Hancock Building.

Fire danced around the Park Tower’s ruined entrance. Icy, driving wind fed the flames. Clarence felt simultaneously hot and cold, and yet he also felt neither of those things: his mind focused on the battle, on the details that would keep him alive, let him find Margaret.

“Apaches are down,” said a voice in his headset. “Bad guys have SAMs.”

“Tell the Chinooks to abort pickup,” said another voice. “If we lose them, the only way out is on foot.”

Clarence had a Ranger on his left, two on his right, all firing at the attackers scrambling over the perimeter cars.

If only they’d extracted Cooper Mitchell as soon as they found him, then they wouldn’t be facing this army of Converted. But Margaret had insisted staying was critical, and Clarence had believed her.

A voice on the open channel screamed for help. A burst of gunfire cut the scream short.

So much panicked chatter. Men shouted for help. It sounded like the Rush Street perimeter was about to be overrun.

Something whizzed past his ear. He instinctively jerked backward, so fast he fell onto his ass. He’d come within inches of taking a round in the face.

There weren’t any reinforcements coming in. Air support was gone. The Rangers wouldn’t be able to hold.

Clarence had to keep Cooper Mitchell alive.

He turned and ran into the lobby. “Feely! Get Cooper on his feet, we have to move!”

A maskless Tim shook his head hard so his spiky blond hair flopped back and forth. “No way! Klimas said to stay right here!”

Clarence ignored him. Cooper was sitting on the floor, looking around. Still groggy, but his eyes seemed normal, alert. Clarence knelt in front of him.

“Mister Mitchell, you with us?”

The man’s eyes widened and blinked rapidly at the same time. Then they focused, locked on Clarence’s.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just a little fuzzy, maybe. And call me Cooper.”

“Can you walk, Cooper?”

He nodded.

Tim leaned in. “Otto, we have to stay here!”

Clarence heard a hissing roar. His body reacted; he grabbed Tim and pulled him on top of a surprised Cooper, covering them both with his own body a moment before a crushing blast drove them all against the shaking floor.

FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

Paulius kept firing and reloading, his hands acting on autopilot while his brain tried to work out the rapidly deteriorating situation. They’d lost air superiority. Even with a significant advantage in firepower, they were outnumbered at least a hundred to one.

The snipers on the fifth floor were the only thing keeping the hostiles from overrunning Klimas’s position. At their rate of fire, they’d run out of ammo in mere minutes.

Ranger-fired mortars thoomped every few seconds, followed by popping explosions out beyond the perimeter. The firing arcs were short enough that Paulius felt the concussion wave of each detonation.

The constant roar of the 240s, the pops of M4s and the barks of Benelli shotguns told him the perimeter remained intact. M23 grenade launchers countered the endless barrage of Molotov cocktails, filling Chicago Avenue with shrapnel.

And still the Converted came on, hatchlings and armed militants stepping over the shattered and still-twitching bodies of their comrades. Twenty meters and closing.

He thumbed his “talk” button.

“Claymores, now! Light ’em up!”

He’d barely finished his sentence before the powerful mines started detonating, each one a horizontal storm of seven hundred one-eighth-inch steel balls shooting out horizontally at a speed of twelve hundred meters per second. The enemy soldiers were packed in so tight Paulius could see the Claymores’ blast patterns in the expanding cones of shredded bodies.

The advance slowed. The enemy suddenly broke, turned and ran, leaving behind hundreds of dead and dying. The little snow that remained on the street had turned into red slush, soaking up the blood that flowed down the sidewalk gutters.

I AM THE LAW

Steve Stanton lowered his binoculars.

“Chickenshits,” he said. “They’re running.”

General Brownstone nodded. “Too much enemy firepower. Looks like we inflicted some casualties, though. If I may suggest, Emperor, we should use the M72 light antitank weapons to target their snipers, and all our launched grenades to cover the second wave’s advance.”

That was the right call, and Steve knew it. He’d been hoping the first wave would overwhelm the human soldiers, but they were too well trained and too well armed.

“We don’t have many of those M72s, General.”

She nodded again. “Yes, Emperor. However, I’m certain the humans detonated all of their Claymores, and they have to be running low on ammunition. Our fast ground attack should breach their perimeter if we can clear out the snipers.”

If the second wave didn’t work, Steve’s only option was to launch the third wave. That wave was supposed to be his containment wave, the troops that would kill anyone — Converted included — that came out of the hotel.

He didn’t have time to think it through. The humans could send more helicopters at any moment, and his people had used up most of the Stingers.

The humans were running out of ammo, but so were the Chosen Ones.

He raised the binoculars. “General Brownstone, launch wave two.”

A MAN’S WORD…

Paulius ejected a spent magazine, popped in a fresh one. The enemy had fallen back, but they were still firing. He’d found new cover behind a white delivery truck. Bullets smacked into the metal body so fast it sounded like an off-rhythm drummer experimenting with a new song.

One Ranger lay dying to his left. Another to his right was already gone, or he would have screamed from the flames that engulfed his chest and arm.

An explosion came from the towering hotel above and behind him. Paulius looked up to see a cloud of thin smoke billowing from the fifth floor, window shards tumbling down to the street below. He saw a second explosion — a there-and-gone fireball blowing out a cloud of spinning glass, shredded insulation and torn metal.

He thumbed his SEAL channel.

“Overwatch, displace, rockets targeting fifth floor!”

Another explosion hit the hotel, farther to the right; three smoldering holes gaped wide, making the building look like a tree chopped at the base that might topple over and crash into the street.

The interior perimeter suddenly lit up with hard-hitting snap explosions that cast out waves of dirt and snow. Paulius threw himself face-first to the pavement — there wasn’t much one could do against a grenade volley but lie low and pray.

A machine gun barked. A man shouting “Here they come again!” drew Paulius’s attention back to the street.

He stayed on his belly, aimed his M4 under the truck, found his first targets: a pair of kids — kids, dammit — sprinting forward, each holding a kitchen knife. He took them out, two shots for the first, three for the second.

And then, Paulius saw something that his eyes couldn’t immediately process: a taxi, sliding sideways toward the perimeter, toward him, smashing bodies aside, tires pushing up little waves of red slush. There was something behind that car.

Something big.

“All units, concentrate fire on that taxi!”

The taxi’s doors blossomed with new holes as Rangers and SEALs alike focused their fire, but the vehicle was moving too fast — it was too late to stop it.

Paulius dove away from the delivery truck a moment before the cab crashed in. The truck toppled, smashed down on its right side. A Ranger who had been using the truck for cover didn’t make it clear; the heavy vehicle crushed his left foot, trapping him.

Klimas rolled to his feet, came up ready to fire — and for the first time in his military career, he froze.

A monster. Eight feet tall, shoulders and chest rippling with thick coils of muscle. Molotov firelight played off wet, dark-yellow skin. Open sores dotted the body, some trailing visible rivulets of pus. The wide neck supported a huge, heavy-jawed head topped with spotty patches of tight, curly black hair. The face seemed toylike compared to the oversized body. Its mouth was full of long, thick teeth that could easily rip flesh from bones.

And sticking up from behind each clenched fist, a long, jagged, pointed arc of bone.

The trapped Ranger rolled to his back, stared up at the monstrosity only a foot away. The Ranger screamed.

The yellowish beast raised a bare foot, drove it down into the Ranger’s stomach. The soldier’s screaming stopped. His hands weakly gripped the long leg, then his fingers slid away and his arms fell limply to the wet pavement.

The monster leaned down and roared.

Klimas heard the telltale thoop of a grenade launcher. An explosion knocked the massive creature back, splashing his bloody entrails in a long streak across the white top of the overturned truck.

Gunfire brought Paulius out of it, gunfire aimed at him — a man and a woman sprinting around the delivery truck, the man firing a rifle, the screaming woman aiming a shotgun.

In less than a second, Klimas hit them each twice. The man dropped hard. The woman landed face-first and slid across the packed snow. Klimas fired twice more, aiming for her head, but his shots hit her back instead. As she slid, she raised the shotgun one-handed, screamed “asshole!” and fired.

He felt the blast smack into the left side of his chest and belly, felt a dozen needles dig deep as some of them found ways around the gaps in his body armor.

She slid to a stop. He put a bullet in her head, then looked up.

A dozen more hostiles poured in around the truck. Two of them tackled a fleeing Ranger. Another Ranger lay on the ground, screaming obscenities at the three people on top of him, one biting his face, another stabbing a knife into his right thigh over and over again. And just beyond the truck, Paulius saw two more of the yellow monsters rushing in fast.

His position was being overrun.

I promised Feely I’d get him out, and if I don’t save him and Mitchell, then all this is for nothing.

Paulius turned and ran, tossing a flash-bang behind him. Up ahead, smoke billowed out of the hotel’s entrance.

“All exterior SEALs, fall back to the hotel! Our mission is to get the civilians to safety. Someone find me another way out of that building!”

EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE

Steve Stanton really, really wanted to ride on Jeff’s back, like Hannibal riding an elephant into battle, but that was a bad idea; there were probably still a few human snipers left in the Park Tower.

So instead of riding in glory, the emperor of Chicago walked toward the hotel. He walked slowly, and far back from the still-advancing second wave. Steve stayed a few steps behind Jeff so the bull’s wide body would block any stray fire.

Hundreds of bodies lined the streets, victims of mines, snipers and grenades. Where dying flames didn’t burn, the pavement ran red with blood.

As Steve advanced, his third wave came out of hiding. They slid out of cars, stepped out of doorways, all carrying weapons that had yet to be fired. They walked toward the hotel. There were thousands of them, so many and so thick it looked like a well-organized parade.

The third wave included most of the Converted who had been soldiers in their former lives. Each of them managed ten civilians. The soldiers communicated via hand signals, runners, cell phones, and most also had some form of radio or walkie-talkie that the scavengers had found in electronics, toy and sporting goods stores. Where the first wave had been cannon fodder, as had most of the second, the third wave was an organized combat force.

General Brownstone had gone up ahead to get a closer look. She jogged back toward him.

“General, have we entered the hotel yet?”

“No, Emperor,” she said. “The human perimeter is collapsing and the building is on fire, but there is still resistance. Shouldn’t be long now. The third wave is already setting up the containment ring — nothing is going to get out of that hotel alive.”

Containment. That was the key. They’d kill Cooper Mitchell, then kill his killers and — God willing — forever wipe out his horrid disease.

Steve checked his phone: 4:19 A.M. The battle had taken only nine minutes. In warfare, apparently, things happened fast.

He pulled his coat tighter and watched the hotel burn.

REUNITED

Gunfire. Flames. Yelling and screaming, the sounds of panic, of fury, all barely audible over a high-pitched ringing.

Tim lifted his head. His body felt numb.

Cooper Mitchell struggled to his feet. The man looked terrified and shell-shocked. Clarence was still down, unconscious. His gas mask was gone. A long piece of metal jutted out of his shoulder blade, blood trickling from his CBRN suit.

The sight of that blood brought Tim out of it. He pushed himself to his knees, scrambled across the rubble to Otto’s side. The shard hadn’t penetrated that far. There wasn’t time to do things properly, so he grabbed the shard and yanked.

Clarence twitched, moaned and rolled over.

Tim looked around for a bandage, a towel, anything remotely clean to press on the wound. Gunfire and the explosion had shredded his medical supplies, scattering them all across the burning lobby.

He helped Clarence sit up, waved Cooper over. Cooper stumbled toward them. Tim grabbed the man’s hand and pressed it against Otto’s wound.

“Keep pressure here,” Tim said. “Press hard.”

Clarence’s lip curled up, his eyes scrunched tight in pain.

“My weapon,” he said. “Someone find my weapon.”

Tim heard a shout above the unending din, a single word: grenade!

Something exploded across the lobby, close to the front door. A Ranger fell back crying out in agony. Tim stood and started toward the wounded man, but Klimas sprinted through the doors and cut Tim off.

“Feely, run! Take the package to the stairwell, move!”

Tim reached for Cooper, then saw Otto’s pistol on the floor. He snatched it up, shoved it into Otto’s hands, then pulled Cooper toward the stairwell door at the rear of the lobby.

Tim looked back, saw Klimas lift Otto to his feet and push him toward the stairwell. The SEAL commander suddenly wheeled, fired at three men who ran through the entrance: pop-pop, slight turn, pop-pop, slight turn, pop-pop. The three men fell to the floor.

Another explosion hurled shards of metal, stone and wood across the lobby.

Cooper reached the stairwell door first. He pulled it open as Tim rushed through and stepped on the landing. Otto reached the door, pushed Cooper inside hard, then held the door open with his body. He aimed out into the lobby and started firing his pistol.

“Klimas,” he screamed, “come on, get in here! Feely, take Mitchell upstairs!”

Tim again grabbed Cooper’s arm.

“Come on,” Tim said, then started up the steps.

And stopped cold.

One landing up stood Margaret Montoya.

Tim stared at her for a long second. She stared back. Both of them were too surprised to move.

Margaret reached for the gun strapped to her right thigh.

Save Cooper save Cooper save Cooper

Tim slid his body in front of Cooper, put his hands down and back, hemming him in.

Margaret raised her pistol, pointed it at Tim’s face.

Tim wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t — they stayed locked wide open. He wondered if his brain would be able to process the muzzle flash before the bullet ended his life.

Clarence stepped in front of him, his weapon aimed at his wife.

“Margaret! Put it down!”

Tim saw her face change, instantly morphing from a hateful, snarling-eyed visage to a soft expression of love and concern — like someone had flipped a switch.

“Clarence,” she said, “Tim is lying to you. I’m not infected, he is. Kill him before he kills us.”

The heavy stairwell door slammed open. Klimas came through, his weapon up and aimed at Margaret in a fraction of a second.

“Otto,” he said. “You got this?”

“I do,” Clarence said.

Clarence’s aim didn’t waver. Neither did Margaret’s.

Klimas turned, opened the stairwell door a few inches and fired into the lobby. He yanked a grenade out of his webbing, pulled the pin, underhand-tossed it through the small gap, then slammed the metal door shut.

Tim heard the grenade explode, heard men and women screaming in agony.

An army of psychos and monsters were closing in from behind. An armed and infected Margaret Montoya blocked the only escape. If Clarence Otto didn’t shoot his wife, Tim was going to die one way or the other.

SHARPSHOOTER

Cooper Mitchell was standing right there. Right there. Margaret had checked her suit, it was safe, had to be safe, the Antichrist was just a half-flight down and she couldn’t die not now, not now, not when her people were coming.

Clarence stood in front of Tim, who stood in front of Cooper Mitchell. The look in Clarence’s eyes: pained, yet committed to doing his job. He wanted to believe she wasn’t infected.

“Margaret,” he said. “Put it down.”

Why hadn’t she just fired right away? She’d frozen, surprised by Tim, shocked to see her target right in front of her. She’d missed her chance.

“Clarence, listen to me,” she said. “Honey, Tim is one of them. Why do you think he told everyone I was inf—”

A crack sound echoed through the stairwell as something slammed into her hand. Her pistol clattered against the wall, then hit the concrete floor. She took a step back, looked at her hand… blood, spurting all over her CRBN suit… her index finger… gone.

She staggered, slumped down the wall.

But he didn’t shoot, I was looking right at him…

Clarence ran up the stairs toward her. Down by the landing door, she saw Klimas, his rifle pointed at her.

A curl of smoke drifted up from the barrel.

HUSBAND AND WIFE

Clarence grabbed Margaret’s pistol to secure the weapon, but there was no need — Klimas’s single round had blown the trigger clean off, snapped the guard into two jagged metal pieces.

He grabbed his wife by the shoulders, righted her.

“Margaret! Are you okay?”

A stupid thing to say. Her finger was gone She was bleeding all over the landing.

He heard voices, both in his headset and from the people around him. He heard Klimas urging Tim and Cooper up the stairs, telling them to head to the eighth floor, heard feet hitting concrete.

Margaret looked stunned. Blood spurted from her finger stump. Clarence holstered his weapon, knelt before her and grabbed her right wrist.

“Hold on, baby, this is gonna hurt.”

He squeezed down on the stump. Direct pressure. He had to stop the bleeding.

A man ran past behind him, then another.

Margaret looked at him. No sense of pain in her eyes, just a dull shock. Shock… and hate.

“Otto, get out of the way.”

The voice of Commander Klimas.

Clarence turned quickly, keeping his body in front of his wife.

The SEAL commander had his weapon pointed slightly off to the right so it wasn’t aimed directly at Clarence’s chest.

“Otto, get out of my way.”

Clarence held up his hands. “Please, don’t do this.”

She couldn’t be infected. It just wasn’t possible. She was the mother of his child.

Klimas stepped to his left, trying to find a shot. Clarence lunged right, cutting off any angle.

Clarence didn’t even see the rifle butt come up before it slammed into his chin — not hard enough to do serious damage, but hard enough to knock him aside.

The rifle butt snapped back to Klimas’s shoulder, the barrel aimed at Margaret’s face.

Tim Feely screamed down from a half-flight up. “No! We need her alive. Trust me on that.”

Clarence again put himself between Klimas and Margaret.

The SEAL’s lip curled up in frustration. He lowered the barrel.

“You better be right, Tim,” he said. “Fuck. Let’s move.”

Something big slammed into the stairwell door, hard enough to bend it inward.

Klimas turned, fired three shots through the metal door. He reached behind his back, then tossed two things onto the concrete landing next to Clarence.

“Look at her magazine,” Klimas said. “If there’s only one round gone, that’s the bullet she used to kill Bogdana. Then the decision is yours. We’re going to the eighth floor where there’s a way out. We’re not waiting for you.”

Klimas sprinted up the steps.

Clarence looked at what the SEAL had dropped — two zip strips, one grenade.

He felt hands fumbling for his weapon.

He turned instantly and did something he had never thought himself capable of doing: he hit Margaret.

A short left to the jaw, snapping her head back. She let out a moan, sagged weakly.

Bullets tore through the dented metal door, kicking up puff-spots of concrete when they sparked off the cinder-block walls.

Clarence’s left hand grabbed the zip strips and grenade, shoved them into his pocket even as his right drew his Glock. The door rattled once from someone hitting it, then bounced open.

He fired three times at the first movement. Bodies ducked away, leaving the door to automatically swing shut.

Her weapon… her magazine.

Clarence grabbed the ruined pistol and shoved it into his empty thigh holster. He reached behind Margaret’s back, lifted her and tossed her over his shoulder even as his feet carried him up the concrete steps.

His legs drove him to the next landing. Behind him, he heard the first-floor stairwell door slammed open, this time from something bigger than just a man.

A roar, an inhuman sound that echoed through the enclosed stairwell.

Clarence bounded up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time despite Margaret’s extra weight.

He heard footsteps behind him. Footsteps and a deep, giggling growl.

Careful to keep Margaret on his shoulder, Clarence shoved his pistol into his webbing belt, then pulled the grenade Klimas had given him. He squeezed the handle, lifted the grenade to his mouth, bit down on the pin and twisted his head to yank it free.

He tossed the grenade behind him, heard the handle flip away and bounce off the wall with a hollow, metallic ting.

Four seconds…

He kept driving upward, two steps at a time.

Two seconds…

He made it up a flight and a half before the bang rattled the stairwell, shaking the air and the concrete alike. Farther back, he heard a scream of pain, a scream just as inhuman as the roar had been.

Push, push, push… don’t think about how your legs burn, and don’t you dare think about Margaret…

Chest heaving, he reached the eighth floor. He heard yells from farther down the stairwell, but they weren’t as close as before. He opened the door and carried Margaret into the hallway.

He turned the first corner he saw, getting out of sight of the stairwell door. Chest heaving, he set Margaret down. The right side of her jaw was already swelling. Blood ribbons coated her hand. She blinked slowly, tried to sit up. He gently pushed her back to the floor, needing only a tiny amount of pressure to do so.

“Margo, hold on. Just hold on.”

He had to check her weapon, see if Klimas was right.

Margaret clutched weakly at his forearm. “Get… off… me.” She looked at him with nothing but hate in her eyes.

This isn’t my wife… this isn’t Margaret…

Clarence drew her ruined pistol from his thigh holster, looked at it.

She couldn’t be infected. Couldn’t be.

He pushed the release and slid the magazine free. There wasn’t time for it, but he couldn’t help himself. He counted off the rounds. Eleven.

The weapon held twelve.

Just one round missing.

Margaret pushed at him, pushed hard. “Get off me! Give me the gun, honey, they’re coming to get us! Save the baby!”

The baby.

Was she pregnant? Or was that another lie, created to manipulate him? She had played him for a fool.

He pocketed her magazine, then pulled out the zip strips.

She saw them and started to scream — not a scream of fear, but the guttural, throat-ripping sound of an enraged, trapped animal.

“Don’t you tie me up you needle-dick motherfucker! Get your fucking hands off me!”

Clarence grabbed her arms, flipped her onto her stomach.

“I’ll cut off your balls and feed them to you, you stupid nigger! Let me go, let me go!”

She squirmed, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight him. He wrenched her wrists back. Her still-bleeding stump flicked blood across the hallway carpet.

With one hand, Clarence held her wrists together. With his other, he looped the zip strip around them, then yanked it tight.

“I hate you fucking insects we’re going to kill you all kill you all!”

Clarence stood, lifted her and again threw her over his shoulder. His exhausted legs burned instantly. He ignored his body’s complaints, thumbed the “talk” button.

“Klimas! I’m on the eighth floor, where the fuck are you?”

A WAY OUT

Clarence stumbled toward Room 829. He recognized the two SEALs crouched by the door: Bosh and Ramierez. Inside, he saw the big one, Roth, using a combat knife to saw through the drywall.

Farther in, Klimas was peeking through heavy curtains. Tim Feely and Cooper Mitchell sat in the middle of a king-size bed, trying to stay out of the way. Two more SEALs stood near Klimas. Their name patches read HARRISON and KATANSKI.

Clarence smelled smoke… the fire from the first floor, spreading. The room felt hot.

Klimas turned, saw Clarence and Margaret. His gun came up fast. Harrison and Katanski also brought up their rifles. Roth remained focused on the wall.

Margaret kicked and thrashed. “Please don’t shoot me! I didn’t do anything, please!”

Her hatred and anger had vanished. Now she sounded like a normal woman, a terrified woman. There had to be a way to save her, save the baby. Feely could do something, he could beat the infection. He just needed the right equipment and time to do the research, that was all.

“I’ve got her,” Clarence said. “She’s my responsibility.”

Klimas took a step closer. “You tied her up. You checked the magazine, didn’t you.”

Clarence said nothing.

Klimas nodded. “She shot Bogdana. Put her down, Otto.”

Clarence knew that Margaret had to die. His brain told him that, but his heart shouted a different message.

“No,” he said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

Feely slid off the bed, his hands out in front of him, palms up.

“Everyone just take it easy,” he said. “Klimas, I told you, we need her.”

Klimas didn’t look away from his stare-down. “Why?”

“Because she’s infected,” Tim said. “She’ll contract Cooper’s hydras, the thing that kills the Converted.”

Margaret stopped squirming.

Clarence forgot about the gun. He looked at Tim.

“You want to use my wife as a weapon?”

Tim started to talk, but coughed instead. Clarence felt a sting in his eyes. He smelled burning wood, melting carpet, odors filtering up from the fire below. Wisps of smoke curled near the ceiling.

Tim thumped a fist against his chest, coughed again, then continued. “Otto, if you’re right and she’s not infected, then she’s got nothing to worry about.” He looked at her, spoke sweetly: “Isn’t that right, Margopolis?”

Clarence felt her shaking her head. “Our baby,” she said, her words choked with deep sobs. “We don’t know how it will affect the baby. Keep Cooper away from me, honey, keep him away.”

Roth walked over, spoke to Klimas. “Commander, it’s ready.”

Klimas’s eyes narrowed. He lowered his weapon.

“Otto, I’m getting Cooper and Tim out of here,” he said. “If Margaret moves funny, I’m wasting her, and if you do anything to stop me, I’ll waste you. Got it?”

Clarence nodded. “Fair enough.”

Klimas tilted his head toward the man-size hole Roth had cut into the drywall. Through it, Clarence saw concrete.

“That’s the exterior wall of the hotel,” Klimas said. “It abuts another building that’s only a foot away. We’re blowing through both and entering that building. Then we’re descending to a tea shop that’s on the ground floor, at the corner of Pearson and Rush. I’m hoping the building is empty, and we can make it down without much of a fight. From there, we’re going to figure out a way through the enemy lines.”

“Enemy lines?” Clarence said. “They’re just a mob.”

“You’ll see soon enough,” Klimas said. “Everyone, into the hall.”

Bosh and Ramierez were still at their posts, guarding the hallway in both directions. Smoke curled thickly at the ceiling; the place was going up fast.

Roth pulled the door shut. He held a small detonator in his hand.

“Fire in the hole,” he said, then pushed the button.

It didn’t sound like much of an explosion, more of a whump than a bang. Roth opened the door. A cloud of dust billowed out. Clarence looked in: the blast had punched clean through — he felt cold air pouring in, saw a brick wall beyond.

“First wall down,” Roth said. “Now to blast our way into the other building. Sixty seconds.”

He started placing small charges of C-4.

On his shoulder, Clarence felt Margaret start to shake. He turned, saw that Cooper Mitchell was standing right next to them.

He was holding his exposed wrist near Margaret’s bloody hand. On that wrist, a red spot, a small patch of sagging skin: it looked like he’d just popped a huge blister, but Clarence saw no fluid. Tiny motes of floating white hung in the air for a moment, then dissipated into nothingness.

Cooper smiled wide. “Enjoy that, lady. You enjoy the fuck out of it.”

He stepped away.

Clarence set Margaret down on her own feet. With her hands still zip-stripped behind her back, she leaned against the wall. She shook violently.

She stared at Cooper Mitchell, her eyes wide with terror.

HIT THE LIGHTS

Paulius lay on a tile floor, mostly hidden behind the low, brick wall of the dark tea shop’s broken window.

Outside in the cold, windy night, the few remaining lights lit up hundreds of Converted running through the streets: yelling in victory, screaming in psychotic rage, sometimes shooting guns into the air. Most of the time they moved south, toward the Park Tower.

But sometimes, they seemed to get confused — they ran north on Rush, or west on Pearson, and when they did, their own kind shot them down.

Thirty meters along either of those roads, a line of cars, trucks and other debris ran from sidewalk to sidewalk, completely blocking any way through. Barrel fires burned in front of these bulwarks, blurring any sight of the forces that hid behind them.

Paulius had to figure out how to cross those lines.

The gothic Archdiocese of Chicago was directly to the north, across Pearson. Paulius saw troops and guns lurking in the church’s broken stained-glass windows. He could lead his people into that building, search for an exit that would come out behind the Converted’s street-blocking wall, but he had no idea how many enemy troops waited inside.

Kitty-corner to the tea shop — across the intersection of Pearson and Rush — was a ten-story brick building, but going for that would expose him to fire from the troops behind the bulwarks of both streets. Plus, there was no guarantee the place wasn’t full of snipers just waiting for him to show his hand.

And due west, across Rush, a round skyscraper some forty stories tall. Same problems as the other buildings.

Every route seemed blocked, heavily defended.

There had to be a way.

He couldn’t count on help from anyone else, because no one answered his calls. As far as he knew, all the Rangers were dead. He’d lost most of his own men: just six out of twenty left, including himself. But if he could get Cooper Mitchell to safety, his SEALs would not have died in vain.

The move from the Park Tower to the tea shop had bought a few minutes’ reprieve, at best. The hotel was on fire, but if enemy troops were still in there, still searching, they’d soon find the hole Roth had blown through the wall. After that, Paulius had only minutes before the Converted swarmed in.

There was only one option: he had to punch an opening in one of the enemy lines. That opening wouldn’t come cheap, and they had very little ammo left with which to make it.

He turned and crawled across the cold floor, his fatigues scraping against broken glass. He moved behind the shop’s main counter to join the others: Feely, Cooper Mitchell, Bosh, Harrison, Katanski and Ramierez. Clarence and Margaret were tucked into an alcove near the bathrooms, out of sight of the windows. Margaret had a gag in her mouth, which Clarence had put there on Paulius’s insistence.

If she made any noise, she died; Clarence and Margaret both knew that.

Feelygood was the only reason Paulius had let Margaret live. If they could turn that murdering bitch into a weapon against her own kind, that held a certain poetic justice.

Paulius waved his men close. Such brave soldiers, all that remained of SEAL Team Two. Clarence joined them, as did Tim and Cooper.

“We need to figure out a way past their lines,” Paulius said. “We’re outgunned. They’ve got excellent coverage on our positions. As soon as we show our heads, they’ll start firing and it won’t last long.”

Ramierez tugged at his fatigues, drawing attention to them. “How about we lose these? Try to look like the enemy, get close enough to make something happen?”

“They’re killing anything that comes close, including their own,” Paulius said. He looked at the surrounding faces. “I need other ideas.”

Bosh shrugged. “It sucks, but we’re going to have to make a distraction. Shoot out the streetlights. We hit them up with grenades from here, then me and another guy head west on Pearson, try to draw their fire. Few minutes later, Commander, you and the others take the package north on Rush.”

A suicide mission, but D-Day was perfectly willing to do it.

“Too many of them for that,” Paulius said. He looked at Roth. “Any luck raising the Coronado, see if they have any ideas?”

Roth shook his head. “Negative, Commander. Short-range communication still works — not that there’s anyone answering — but we lost all long-range communication in the assault. I’m trying to get through on the MBITR, but I need to find a line of sight to a satellite. That’s hard to do from in here. I might be able to reach the Coronado from the roof of this building. If I can, we could request air support.”

Tim raised a hand. “MBITR?”

“Satellite radio,” Paulius said. “And our air support is gone — we saw both of the Apaches destroyed. We can’t risk bringing in the Coronado’s Seahawks, not when the Converted might have more Stingers. That means the only way out of here is on foot, so we can get Mitchell to a place the Seahawks can land safely. We need something to blow a hole in those lines.”

Ramierez shook his head. “Too bad we can’t just drop some big-ass bombs on them. Not just on the blockade, but on all those fuckers packed in nice and tight around here. We’d kill a shitload of them.”

A big-ass bomb… Paulius had forgotten about the mission’s last element of air support.

“The B2 might still be up there,” he said. “If we can contact it, maybe it can drop a JDAM on the north line, let us escape, then hammer all around the hotel.”

Bosh laughed, a sound of frustration. He shook his head. “A JDAM to break us out? I’ve seen one of those take the top off a fucking mountain. The B2 crew would need pinpoint accuracy, Commander. If they’re off-target to the south by even a few hundred feet, it’ll kill us.”

Bosh was right. A B2 strike was risky, damn near suicidal, but they were out of options and almost out of time.

“Roth, you’re on,” Paulius said. “You and Ram head up to the roof. Try to reach the Coronado, have them task the B2 to strike a hundred meters north of our location.”

Roth let out a low whistle. “In bomb-speak, Commander, that’s right on top of us.”

“It is, and it’s going to work. There might be enemy units on the roof of this building, so kill anything you see. Stay alive long enough to contact the Coronado.”

“Wait,” Clarence said.

Paulius glared at the man. He was the last person he wanted to hear from right now.

Clarence dug into his pocket. He pulled out a cell phone, held it up like a kid at show and tell.

“This gives me a direct line to DST director Murray Longworth. I’m pretty sure he’s at the White House, sitting in the Situation Room with the Joint Chiefs.”

Paulius stared at the bulky phone, then started laughing. The guy who refused to see reality had a direct line to the Joint Chiefs? Like this night needed to get any stranger.

“Well then, Agent Otto,” Paulius said, “why don’t you just go ahead and give the White House a call?”

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE

Murray Longworth watched the world burn.

The Park Tower mission had ended in disaster. SEAL Team Two and the Ranger company, wiped out. Clarence, Margaret and Feely, undoubtedly dead.

And if all of those people were gone, then Cooper Mitchell was gone as well.

Vogel hadn’t found any other survivors of the HAC trial. Mitchell had been the last hope of cultivating hydras.

The Situation Room’s main monitor showed the next step in mankind’s downward spiral: nuclear first-strike options against China. Porter wanted to launch. Albertson wasn’t putting up much resistance. No hydras, nuclear war about to erupt — Murray realized it was all over.

The Converted had won.

He jumped a little when his cell phone buzzed. That was the one on his inside left pocket… the direct line to Clarence Otto.

He answered. “Otto?”

“Yes sir, Director,” Otto said. “We’ve got Cooper Mitchell. He’s alive.”

Murray felt a slight pain in his chest.

“How the fuck did you get out of there? I saw Predator footage, they were all over you.”

“Never mind that,” Otto said. “We have Cooper and we can still get him out of the city. To do that, we need to call in an air strike from the B2. We need it right now. Can you make that happen?”

“You bet your ass I can. Hold on.”

He lowered the phone.

“Porter! Put those nukes back in your pants for a minute, we’ve still got a chance.”

ANTICIPATION

Cooper Mitchell knew he was going to die.

No way this would work. But it wasn’t like he had a choice, and maybe he’d get to see some of those bastards die before he found out if there was an afterlife.

The SEALs all crouched down low behind the tea shop’s counter, waiting for the boom.

“It’s going to be a powerful explosion,” Klimas said. “It’ll probably knock us silly for a bit, but you have to get up fast and be ready to go.”

Klimas was pretty badass. Cooper knew that all SEALs were badass, but this guy didn’t seem fazed that his unit had been hacked to pieces and — probably — eaten.

“We go straight through their lines, and we stay together,” Klimas said. “If you get separated, the rally point is First St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, at LaSalle Boulevard and Goethe, seven blocks north. Everyone clear?”

Cooper saw the SEALs take cover behind anything solid that stood between them and the impending bomb.

Feely was trembling. Dude looked scared as hell. Cooper was scared, too, had been for days, but better a bomb or a bullet than a barbecue.

They ain’t gonna eat me, Sofia.

Klimas looked at Cooper, and at Feely.

“You two boys stay with me,” the SEAL said. “Visibility is going to be shit. Whatever it takes, do not fall behind. This is our one chance. Don’t fuck it up.”

Nine faces looked upward simultaneously, ears all responding to the same thing: a faint whistling sound, rapidly growing in intensity.

“Incoming,” Klimas said. He tucked into a fetal position, laced his fingers behind his head and pressed his arms tightly against his ears.

Cooper did the same.

INTO THE BREACH

Tim Feely’s world shook; it roared.

Glass and brick flew into the tea shop, smashing into shelves and tearing the walls to pieces. Big chunks of masonry pounded into the counter, cracking wood and splintering tile. Dust and smoke drove into his lungs. He coughed, screamed for help only to realize his voice sounded impossibly small and faraway.

He blinked, tried to see through the swirling haze.

A hand grabbed his collar.

“Get your ass up, Feely! Move!”

Klimas. His voice sounded distant, but it was a beacon.

Tim heard Klimas screaming at Cooper. Something collapsed from the ceiling and crashed into the floor. Tim stumbled toward the shattered window… they had to go north, they didn’t have long.

“Move-move-move! Out the window!”

Tim stepped over the low sill and onto the sidewalk, out of the tea shop and into an apocalypse. The winter wind swirled up clouds of thick dust, cutting visibility to just a few feet. He heard things crashing, things falling, pieces of building crumbling and dropping to the street below.

Gunfire.

He stooped, tried to get low. His hands found a car. No, part of a car. He started to kneel down behind it when that iron-grip hand grabbed him again.

“Up,” Klimas said. “Stay behind me.”

Another SEAL fell in next to Klimas — Tim didn’t know which one. They moved, he followed. They ran half crouched, rifles at their shoulders, turning left and right to fire while never breaking stride.

Tim saw a man on his right: Cooper Mitchell.

Something exploded off to the left, kicking up a fresh wave of dust and dirt. Tim shielded his face and kept moving.

People screaming.

Guns firing.

The snap of small explosions.

He looked forward, saw Klimas’s back — but the other SEAL wasn’t there anymore.

Klimas stopped at a red Prius that seemed to be embedded in some kind of cracked, fluid-looking masonry. He waved Tim forward.

“We’re going over the top, let’s move!”

Tim realized the car was part of a wall, a good six feet high, that stretched out both left and right. He threw himself at it, hands grabbing at anything he could grip. Broken glass and metal shards sliced into his skin but he didn’t stop. Up and up he went until he reached the top.

He heard an automatic weapon firing, then the blast of a shotgun. He slipped and fell, tumbled down the hard wall’s far side. Something whacked his left calf, knocking it cold and numb.

Clarence ran by, Margaret bouncing on his shoulder like a gagged rag doll.

“Keep going, Feely! Move!”

Clarence vanished into the swirling dust.

Tim’s chest drew in panicked breaths of dirty, icy air. He felt a knife in his lungs, cutting and tearing. He was going to throw up.

Whatever it takes, do not fall behind.

Klimas. He’d promised to get Tim out of there. Tim righted himself, got his feet beneath him and started running, then slowed.

Cooper… none of it mattered without Cooper.

Tim turned back, saw Cooper land face-first on the rubble-strewn pavement.

And behind him, a stumbling man with half his face torn away, dust-caked blood sloughing down the white of his exposed temple and cheekbone, a big-toothed forever smile where his lips no longer were.

He held a red axe.

Cooper… none of it mattered without Cooper.

Tim ran toward them, or tried to, but his leg wouldn’t respond, so he hopped instead.

On the ground, he spotted a head-size shard of concrete.

Tim bent, grabbed, lifted, hopped.

The man limped toward Cooper, one shredded foot dragging along for the ride. He raised the axe into the air, gurgled a wet battle cry, and arched his back to bring the blade down hard.

Tim got there first.

He didn’t recognize the sound that came out of his own mouth. He’d never made a noise like that, not once in his entire existence.

With both arms, he shoved the jagged concrete forward, drove a rough point into the good side of the man’s ruined face. The hard concrete crunched through tooth and bone, rocked the man’s head back, dropped him like he’d been hit by a heavyweight hook.

The axe clattered to the slush-streaked pavement.

“Cooper! Get the fuck up!”

Cooper crawled forward on raw hands and torn knees, the jeans on his right thigh wet with dust-coated blood.

The half-faced man sat up. He reached for the axe.

Cooper… none of it mattered without Cooper.

Tim Feely stepped forward, the pain in his leg forgotten. He put one foot on the axe, raised the chunk of concrete into the air.

The man looked up — maybe he smiled, but now both sides of his mouth were destroyed, so who could tell?

Tim brought the concrete down like a misshaped hammer: the man’s skull collapsed, folding in on itself in a sickening, liquid crunch.

The man didn’t move.

Tim leaned down, drew a deep breath and screamed a long, unintelligible roar at his dead enemy. The intelligent part of his mind, the educated part, the civilized part, that part had checked out. Something primitive had taken its place.

A hand on his neck, pulling him.

“Feely, come on!”

Klimas. Klimas had come back for him.

The SEAL pulled Tim through the smoke, pushed him, did the same with Cooper, stopped and turned and fired, pushed and pulled them some more.

Tim stumbled forward. He didn’t know how long, he just kept moving. His ears rang. He had no strength left. He couldn’t breathe. He felt dizzy. He kept moving until someone grabbed him, shoved him to the left.

“In there,” that someone said.

Tim shuffled through a door. So dark. The world spun, made it hard to walk. He was much closer to vomiting now. A strong hand on his arm. Someone dragging him along up a long flight of hard stairs.

Dizziness, nausea, weakness… right at the end, he realized those were the symptoms of blood loss.

Tim Feely fell to the floor, and blackness overtook him.

Dawn’s light burned through the store’s tall, second-story windows.

Paulius shivered from the cold. He sat still, waiting for a response from his missing men. There was none. He’d been trying for three hours.

He thumbed his “talk” button.

“Roth, Harrison, come in.”

Paulius released the button and waited.

No answer.

“Roth, Harrison, come in.”

Still nothing.

His hands felt numb, as did his toes. He pulled the long, fur coat he’d found tighter on his shoulders. They’d taken refuge in a clothing store — and, of course, it was a women’s clothing store. He wore the coat like a cloak.

He was back far enough from the window that he couldn’t be seen from the road, but close enough that he could look out. Four lanes of Oak Street running east and west, intersecting the three lanes of Rush that ran north-northwest to south-southeast. He had a wide, commanding view of the surrounding area.

Right after they’d cleared the barrier, Katanski had taken a shotgun blast to the throat. He was probably dead before his body hit the ground. Roth and Harrison were missing. Ramierez had made it, but he was badly wounded.

Only Bosh and Klimas were still in proper fighting shape. He’d sent Bosh out to the rendezvous point at LaSalle and Goethe. It was dangerous to send him out alone, but Paulius didn’t have a choice — he had to stay with Cooper Mitchell.

Ramierez sat close by, his back against the wall. Cooper was asleep in front of a rack of shoes. Dr. Feelygood was also out, lying on a big pile of dresses. Paulius had cut away Feely’s shredded, now-useless CBRN suit, then covered the man in a couple of fur coats.

Clarence and Margaret were on the far side of the store. Paulius didn’t want either of them anywhere near the others.

“Roth, Harrison, come in,” Paulius said. “Bosh, come in.”

Nothing.

Ramierez lifted his head, a bloody bunch of gauze taped against the socket of his ruined left eye. He had a long velvet coat hung over his shoulders, another across his lap.

“Don’t sweat it, Commander,” he said. “Must be too much building interference to reach Bosh. I’m pretty sure Roth is an immortal, and we both know Harrison is made of iron.”

Paulius forced a smile. Ramierez had lost an eye and taken a bullet in the belly, yet he was still trying to build up those around him. That was a SEAL for you. And just like a SEAL, Ramierez had his weapon in his hands — if the Converted came barging in, he was still ready to fight.

“We’ll find them,” Paulius said. If there was a time to lie, it was now. “How you holding up?”

“I’m just…” Ramierez leaned his head forward as a wave of pain washed over him. He stayed that way for a few seconds, then looked up. “I’m solid, Commander. But maybe I’ll just take a little nap.”

“Negative,” Paulius said. “You stay awake, that’s an order. Keep trying Roth and Harrison, got it?”

Ramierez managed a slow nod.

Paulius had done all he could for the wounded: stitches for Cooper and Feely, bandages for Otto, sure, but abdominal surgery for Ramierez? Out of Paulius’ league.

He pulled off his headset and stuffed it into a pocket of his fatigues. He pulled the fur coat tighter, then walked toward Feely.

Paulius passed by Otto and Margaret. She was sitting on a chair, still bound, still gagged. Otto had covered her in coats, leaving only her head exposed. He had ditched his CBRN suit — the thing had been just as shredded as Feely’s — but hadn’t put on any extra clothing. The man preferred to shiver, apparently. Maybe it added to his self-indulgent misery.

Otto tilted his head toward Ramierez. “How is he?”

“Dying,” Paulius said quietly. “Did you call Longworth?”

“Yeah,” Otto said. “He knows we made it out.”

“You ask him how many Stingers were in the reserve bases around here?”

Otto nodded. “The brass thinks the Converted could have over fifty of them in Chicago.”

Fifty. Dammit. Sending in any helicopters for pickup would be suicide. Paulius would have to find a way to take everyone to a safer area and hope the Converted had concentrated their Stingers downtown. He’d look for a spot to the north, on the shore, make it easier for the Seahawks to approach. That was the best hope, and it still meant a hike of several miles for Feely and Cooper, both of whom had significant leg wounds, and for Ramierez, who couldn’t move at all.

“That’s just fantastic,” Paulius said. “I don’t suppose Murray can convince Admiral Porter to send a nice little armor division or two our way?”

Otto shook his head. “There aren’t any armor divisions. At least not in the Midwest. What’s left of our military is engaged in active combat, including all of our reserves. Testing kits are running low. The Converted are popping up in almost every unit, special forces included. Murray is even afraid to drop in reinforcements for us, because he can’t be sure members of those units won’t be compromised and try to kill Cooper themselves. It’s real bad out there.”

Paulius tried to control his temper. They had the package, they’d done it.

“It’s real bad here, too,” he said. “Doesn’t he have anything for us?”

“He does. He’s sent one of the last available Apaches to the Coronado. And he’s stationed an AC-130U at Scott AFB down near Champaign, has it assigned just for us. The crew is sequestered to make sure no infected slip in. We’ve got those, plus one of the Coronado’s Seahawks for evac — the other Seahawk got reassigned to make room for the Apache. We give Murray one hour’s notice, he can put those assets where we tell him.”

Paulius worked through the options. The AC-130U was a ground-attack aircraft, armed with a 25-millimeter Gatling gun and a 105-millimeter howitzer cannon. It was an ideal weapon to use against ground forces, especially ones that packed in tight like the Converted tended to do. The plane could strike from high up — it still had to worry about Stinger fire, but not as much as the low-flying Apaches.

“At least that’s something,” Paulius said. “Just have to figure out where to go for pickup, and how to get there.”

“Right,” Otto said. “Nothing to it. Not like we’re in the middle of enemy territory or anything.”

Paulius nodded toward Margaret. “What about her? She magically cured yet?”

Otto hung his head.

Paulius looked at her. She met his stare, mumbled two syllables. The gag made her words unrecognizable, but the cadence reminded him of mush-mouthed Kenny from South Park. Her meaning was all too understandable: fuck you.

“Ma’am,” Paulius said.

He walked to Feely. The little guy had taken a small-caliber round through the calf, probably a .38. The wound wasn’t life-threatening, and Ramierez needed real help, which meant Tim’s nap time was over.

Battle brought out a person’s true nature. Paulius had gotten too far ahead, lost sight of the men he was supposed to protect. When he doubled back, he saw Tim fighting to protect the much-larger Cooper Mitchell. Tim Feely thought himself a coward, yet he’d killed a man in hand-to-hand combat, crushed the enemy’s skull with a hunk of concrete.

That moment encapsulated the essence of bravery: cower and run from danger, or step up and face it, kill to protect your own. Maybe Tim Feely wasn’t SEAL material, but he sure as hell had a warrior’s soul.

Paulius gently shook the man’s shoulder. “Doctor Feelygood. Wake up, brother.”

Tim’s eyes fluttered open. Like everyone else, his skin was caked with dust; it made him a dozen shades darker than his former, extrapale self. He stared out in confusion for a moment, then his eyes focused on Paulius. Tim sat up quickly.

“Easy,” Paulius said. “We’re safe for now.”

Tim looked around, saw Otto sitting with Margaret, saw Ramierez against the wall.

“Where are we?”

“Barneys New York.”

Tim paused, then nodded, as if that was the most normal thing he could have heard.

“Good, good,” Tim said. “I was looking for a sale on Manolos. Size eight, if you please.” He looked at the fur coats covering him, then at the one around Paulius’s shoulders.

“Nice,” Tim said. “Did you bring your pimp cane and my chalice?”

He was joking. That was a good sign. “How do you feel?”

Tim didn’t answer. He lifted his leg, looked at the blood-spotted bandage on his calf. “Stitches?”

Paulius nodded. “Yep. Seven, I think.”

“Blue Cross should cover that. Can I assume that your stitches are all nice and neat?”

“Probably not,” Paulius said. “But they tell me scars are a mark of character.”

“Gosh, lucky me. I’ll have so much to talk about at my next book club meeting.”

Paulius subtly pointed at Ramierez. “He’s gut-shot, fading fast. Need you to fix him up.”

Tim stood. He pulled on one of the fur coats and limped over to Ramierez.

Paulius watched. Tim pressed his fingers to the man’s neck, then gently looked inside Ramierez’s fatigues, which Paulius had left open.

Tim hobbled back, spoke quietly enough that Ramierez couldn’t hear.

“I don’t have anything to work with,” Tim said. “Even if I did, I doubt I could save him. He’s lost too much blood. As he is now, he’s got maybe a few hours. Can we get a helicopter in here, get him back to the Coronado?”

“No, we can’t take that chance. We’re still too close to where the Converted have probably deployed their Stingers. We have to get farther north. Can we carry him?”

Tim pursed his lips, let out a long breath. “He wouldn’t last a half mile. He’s not the only one. I can barely move, hoss. Could we drive out?”

“Not without a tank. You saw the roads — too many cars blocking the way. We need something big, and I didn’t see any semis out there.”

Tim pulled at his lower lip as he thought.

Ramierez gave a halfhearted wave. “Commander, it’s Bosh. He’s got Roth. Coming in now.”

Paulius’s chest swelled with relief, but he tempered the emotion, pushed it down. Bosh could have made that call under duress.

“Otto, get up,” he said. “Come with me.” Paulius gripped Tim’s shoulder, turned him toward Ramierez.

“Ram, you need something to do. Show this man how to use your M4.”

Tim’s eyes went wide? “Me? I’m no good with guns.”

“Yes, you,” Paulius said. “And you’ll learn, right now. Go.”

Tim moved to Ramierez just as Otto walked up, Glock in hand.

“With me,” Paulius said, then walked to the top of the wide stairs.

One flight down, he saw Bosh quietly enter the store along with a big man wearing sweatpants, a red Chicago Bulls knit hat and a white-sleeved Chicago Bears letterman’s jacket. The man might have passed for a civilian were it not for the SCAR-FN rifle in his trembling hands. Roth. The clothes looked cleaner than he did.

Bosh threw a quick salute, then turned back to guard the front doors.

Roth trudged up the stairs, each step an effort.

“Jesus H,” Paulius said. “You look like a pile of spilt fuck.”

Roth nodded. “At least I’m still ticking.”

“And Harrison?”

Roth shook his head. “We tried to hide in an office building. We stumbled onto a bunch of them camping out. It got crazy, sir. One of those giant fucking things threw a file cabinet at him. He went down, they swarmed on him, I… I couldn’t… I should have—”

“Forget it,” Paulius said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Just forget it. He died doing his job.”

Roth looked cashed out, mentally, physically and emotionally.

Paulius tugged the letterman jacket’s faux leather sleeve.

“Thought you were a Bengals fan.”

Roth patted the embroidered orange “C” on his left breast. “This thing kept me alive, sir. From now on, go Bears. Ramierez had the right idea — the bad guys were hunting us based on our uniforms. First store I found after I got away from that office was a fan shop. These clothes made it easier to blend in a little. From a distance, none of them gave me a second glance.”

Paulius slapped the bigger man on the shoulder. “Grab some sack time. We might have to move quick.”

Roth didn’t need to be told twice. He nodded and walked to a rack of sweaters. He didn’t even bother taking the sweaters down for padding, just crawled beneath them, lay on his back, and was out in seconds.

Margaret Montoya coughed, a lung-rattling sound that echoed through the cold store.

Clarence turned and walked toward her.

Paulius wondered what it was like to love a woman so much that you’d abandon reason and logic, let your heart blind you to what your eyes could plainly see. For the first time, he found himself feeling sorry for Clarence Otto.

Tim came at a fast hobble, his face lit up with excitement.

“Klimas, holy shit,” he said. “Remember that firehouse we saw on the way in?”

Where I shot two brave men in cold blood?

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I saw those cops,” Tim said. “I’m not passing judgment, okay? Whatever had to be done had to be done, but I gathered they were guarding the firehouse. Were they?”

Feely seemed far too amped up. And in the fur coat, he did look a little like a pimp.

“Doc, what’s your point?”

Tim tilted his head toward Margaret, did a bad job of trying not to make the motion obvious.

“Argaret-May is inected-fay with eydra-hays,” he said. “She’s oughing-kay. You get me?”

Paulius sighed. “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

“She’s infected. If Cooper’s story is accurate, she’ll be dead in… wait, how long have we been here?”

“About five hours.”

“Then she’ll be dead in nineteen hours,” Tim said. “But that’s not what matters. What matters is the hydras are replicating inside of her right now.”

He looked off. His lips moved like he was counting something, or speaking to himself in a language only he knew.

“I think I have a way to save Ramierez,” he said. “A way that not only gets us north in a hurry, but lets us infect hundreds of those motherfuckers along the way. If any of them radiate out to other areas, it’s very possible that the hydras will spread all over the Midwest. Klimas, if you can pull this off, we might even start a chain reaction that could kill them all.”

Paulius stared down at the man. “If I can pull what off?”

Tim’s eyes shone with a combination of intensity, hope and the dread of a nasty job that had to be done.

“The firehouse,” he said. “And what’s inside… the fire truck.” He nodded toward Margaret. “We’re going to put her in it, so to speak. Margaret Montoya gets to save the world one more time.”

THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

A hand on his shoulder, shaking him lightly.

“Mister Mitchell, wake up.”

Cooper opened his eyes. Tim Feely, standing over him.

Tim smiled. “How are you doing?”

Was he wearing a fur coat?

“Leg hurts,” Cooper said. The understatement of the year. His right thigh throbbed, stung. “I cut it on something climbing over that poopwall.”

“Poop-wall? You mean that street barricade?”

Cooper nodded. “Yeah. That.”

“Well, whatever caused it, the cut required fifteen stitches. You might have ligament damage as well, so walk carefully. Unfortunately, it was Klimas who did the sewing, as my deft digits are a bit dinged up.”

Tim held up his hands. They were bandaged in a dozen places. Some of the white strips had spots of red.

Cooper remembered the half-face man with the axe. Tim could have kept running, but he’d come back.

He’s not like you, Coop ol’ dawg… Doc Feely doesn’t leave anyone behind…

“Uh, what you did back there… thanks.”

Tim’s smile faded. “I don’t want to think about that. Not ever again.”

He pointed across the store to where Otto and Klimas stood along with two other men. Cooper recognized Bosh, and also that big SEAL — Roth, was it? — who for some reason was decked out in Bears gear. Ramierez sat by himself against a wall. Sleeping, maybe. And that infected lady, watching everything. She had a gag in her mouth and was practically buried in a pile of women’s coats.

“Come join us,” Tim said. “Time to talk about how we’re getting you out of here.”

Cooper listened to Klimas lay out the idea. Tim’s idea, maybe, but Klimas was in charge so it was his no-bullshit voice that outlined what would happen next.

Whoever came up with it, the idea sounded insane.

Everyone looked at Clarence Otto, waited for his response.

The man stayed silent for a moment. His jaw muscles twitched. There was murder in his eyes.

Otto raised a hand, pointed a finger — right at Cooper.

“He’s got the hydras, too,” Otto said. “Why don’t we use him?”

Oh, fuck that. This lovesick idiot wanted to save that diseased whore?

“Because I’m not one of them,” Cooper said. “Your wife is. Deal with it.”

He stared at Otto until the bigger man looked away.

Tim sniffed. “Margaret’s already lost. We can’t save her.”

Otto stared at the floor. “She’ll get those blisters, right? Isn’t that enough? Between her and Cooper, isn’t that enough?”

“It’s not,” Tim said. “Based on what we learned from Candice Walker, it will be another day, maybe two, before the pustules form on Margaret’s skin — if they form at all, because she’ll be dead by then. We just don’t know. What we do know is she already has the hydras in her blood. I know this is hard, but you… we don’t…”

Tim ran out of words. He looked at Klimas, maybe trying to get help. Cooper noticed that the SEAL had his pistol in his hand, down low against his thigh — subtle, but ready to go if Clarence got crazy.

“Using Cooper isn’t an option,” Klimas said. “We’re not putting him at risk so he can pop his zits on the bad guys. The weapon we need is inside of Margaret. We need her blood. All of it.”

Otto looked up. He was a man destroyed, a man gutted.

“Can’t you all hear how insane this sounds? This is barbaric. You want to put my wife’s blood into a fire truck? What the fuck are we, vampires?”

Tim pulled his fur coat tighter.

“Call it what you will,” he said. “If we do this, then even if we don’t get Cooper out alive, we can still start a plague that might kill them all.”

“And you know that how?” Otto said. “You’re going to butcher a woman who saved everyone in this room… to test out a theory?”

Klimas’s hand flexed on the pistol. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Otto looked from man to man, searching for support, finding none. His fists tightened until his hands shook.

Cooper almost felt bad for the dude. Almost. At least he didn’t have to watch his wife transform into a monster.

Tears formed in Otto’s eyes, spilled over, left thin trails of clean, wet brown through the dust that coated his skin.

“This isn’t just about Margaret,” he said. “She’s pregnant. Just take some of her blood. A couple of pints — that won’t kill her.”

Pregnant? Cooper looked back at the woman tied to the chair. Didn’t matter if she was. Why should she get to live when Jeff turned into a thing, and Sofia turned into dinner?

Cooper hadn’t wanted to kill Sofia, he hadn’t, but killing her had kept him alive. He could still taste her… still taste her charred skin… still taste the juice that had dribbled from her steaming flesh…

I had to do it had to do it I had no choice no choice at all.

Feely started to speak, then paused. He was trying to find the right words.

“She’s lying,” he said finally. “And even if she’s not, if she actually is pregnant, then the baby is also one of them.”

The last bit of fight slid out of Agent Otto, as clearly as if someone had pulled a hidden plug and let it drain away.

Klimas spoke again, softer this time.

“If you want to say your good-byes, Otto, you need to do it now.”

Clarence sniffed back snot, hissed in a breath. More tears formed.

“Okay,” he said. He nodded, slowly at first, then with exaggerated motion. “Okay, I… I see it. That’s the way it has to be.”

“Go for a walk,” Klimas said. “You don’t need to be here for this.”

Otto’s eyes squeezed tight. He pinched hard on the bridge of his nose.

“No,” he said, his voice hollow and hoarse. “If she has to be set free, I’ll do it.”

The big SEAL wearing the ridiculous Chicago Bears jacket sniffed sharply, then turned and walked away. The other one, Bosh, just stared at the ground.

Klimas held his pistol in his right hand. With his left, he reached to his side and drew a wicked-looking Ka-Bar knife. He flipped it, held it by the seven-inch blade, and offered it handle-first to Otto.

“I’ll honor your request,” Klimas said. “But if you try anything, I’ll put you down, and then she dies anyway.”

Otto started crying all over again. His big shoulders shook as he reached out and took the knife.

BESIEGED

It was all over but the crying, really. Thankfully, Murray wasn’t much of a crier.

The tipping point had been reached. Twenty-three million Converted, worldwide. No army, no matter how well equipped or organized, could stop that many people. And Cheng’s best guess was another forty million were infected — in the next three days, statisticians projected the total number of Converted to reach sixty million.

Industrial production of the inoculant had collapsed. So, too, had America’s transportation network. It was now impossible to drive from New York City to the West Coast. Converted occupied the Rocky Mountains, making the range impassable. The last reliable form of transportation — airplanes — was in danger of falling; every remaining airport, both military and civilian, was under constant attack by hordes of monsters and screaming psychopaths.

Battles raged in the streets of D.C. The army manned a solid perimeter fourteen blocks square, with the White House dead-center. Admiral Porter’s people estimated that thirty thousand Converted were pressing in on two thousand U.S. military defenders. And every now and then, one of those defenders would turn out to be Converted himself, slaughtering those around him in an effort to open up a hole in the lines.

Air support wouldn’t last much longer. Fewer people to repair and rearm planes, fewer bases, and on three separate occasions — one F-22, one F-35, and one Apache — an aircraft had turned from defender to attacker. The burning hole in the West Wing came courtesy of the F-22 pilot’s kamikaze effort.

At every level of the military, paranoia ran rampant. No one could say for sure if the man or woman next to them might be the enemy, the kind that didn’t test positive.

Ronald Reagan Airport and Bolling AFB had fallen. There was no airport close enough that they could risk driving President Albertson to it, even with the five Ml-Abrams tanks parked on the White House lawn. Three times the military had tried to bring in evac helicopters, and all three times the Converted had shot those aircraft down. The enemy had SAMs, and plenty of them.

The bottom line: no one was leaving the White House. Not even Albertson. Admiral Porter’s best estimate was that loyal troops could defend the White House for another six days, seven at the most.

Murray had once dreamed of the Situation Room burning to the ground. Now it looked like that might actually happen, only with him still in it.

AFTERMATH

Emperor Steve Stanton, Minister of Science Doctor-General Jeremy Ellis, and Supreme Master of Logistics Robert McMasters stood on a tall pile of rubble, all shivering against the biting wind. They looked down at the ten-foot-deep crater that had once been bustling Michigan Avenue. Shattered vehicles, broken concrete, jutting metal and shredded bodies lay in and around it, all victims of the powerful detonation.

Those had been some seriously big bombs.

The once bright and gleaming Park Tower was a blackened finger pointing to the sky. Fire had consumed much of the building, gutting it, leaving hundreds of charred corpses inside like it was some oversized piñata of death.

A small army of hatchlings worked through the rubble, all with one specific task: find the body of Cooper Mitchell. Only then would Steve know he was truly safe.

“Doctor-General Ellis,” Steve said. “Do you really think we’ll recover Cooper’s body?”

Ellis’s eyes flicked to the pistol strapped to Steve’s thigh. For some reason, the man always seemed to think he was moments from being shot.

“If Cooper is in there, he’s probably too burned to be recognizable,” Ellis said. “But we do have to try, Emperor. If I can get him to my labs, maybe I can find a cure.”

If the good doctor-general didn’t get infected himself and die in the process, of course.

Steve again stared into the crater. Unseen planes had dropped the bombs. One second everything had been fine, the next, all crazy explosions and total chaos. Steve wasn’t sure how many of his people had died. Maybe the late General Brownstone should have spread them out a little bit more. Live and learn.

Poor General Brownstone. She’d been close to the hotel, directing the third wave when the bombs hit. At least someone had found her head.

That left Steve with no option but to make Ellis head of the army. Ellis didn’t have the mind for the job, but he’d do until Steve found a soldier with command experience who had actually lived through the night. Steve had thought of giving McMasters the job, but he didn’t trust the man — maybe McMasters was thinking of taking over.

Actually, when it came to the power structure, it was better to be safe than sorry. Steve made a mental note to kill McMasters later.

The bombs had been a brilliant stroke, he had to admit; they had wiped out most of his organized army. He was still the emperor, but now what he ruled was little more than a mob.

He had to start over. Start over somewhere else. He was lucky the humans hadn’t used a nuke. That luck wouldn’t last long.

“Master of Logistics, it’s time we looked at moving on. I don’t care for big cities anymore.”

McMasters slipped a little on the concrete, regained his balance. “Yes, Emperor. General Brownstone’s evacuation plan hasn’t been affected. She organized caches of working vehicles. We could start clearing out a road, have the trucks and buses moving out in about four or five hours?”

Damn, but that was a big crater. Whatever had dropped the bomb that made it might still be up there, looking down, waiting for the next target.

“Make it so,” Steve said. “But Doctor-General Ellis and I won’t be with that group. General Brownstone had motorcycles as well, did she not?”

McMasters nodded. “She had a few caches of those as well. I know some are at the parking garage at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, up north in the Boystown neighborhood.”

Perfect. That location was five miles from where Steve stood, far enough to survive the worst effects of a large nuke if the humans decided to drop one on downtown Chicago.

“Start the exodus,” he said. “I want hundreds of vehicles leaving at the same time, heading south, east and west.”

Steve had wanted to rule from Chicago, but clearly that was not God’s will. In a few hours, the Chosen Ones would radiate outward, drawing attention while he and a few others slipped away to the north, using motorcycles to navigate through the congested roads. He would find a place to hide for a while, and let things run their course.

Humanity couldn’t last that much longer. And when they were gone, Emperor Steve Stanton would begin again.

A LAST KISS

His fingers flexed around the knife’s handle. So light in his hand, so heavy on his soul.

This had to be done. Clarence knew that.

Roth and Bosh had found a ladder. They’d used pantyhose to strap Margaret to it, her back against the rungs, then tied each end of the ladder to a clothing rack. Her face was about two feet closer to the ground than her feet. Below her head, they’d put a scuffed, yellow plastic mop bucket.

Margaret saw him coming. She was still gagged. Her eyes flicked to the knife in his hand, then widened with both fear and anger. She chewed on the gag, made noises that were pleas, or curses, or probably both. Her body lurched against the restraints. The ladder and clothing racks rattled, but didn’t budge.

What, had he thought that Margaret would go easy? Had he thought that at the last moment, she might accept this fate, look at him lovingly, forgive him for what must be done? Maybe in that Candyland vision, he’d remove her gag and she would whisper how she loved him, how she was sorry it had to be this way but she was so grateful he was taking away her pain.

That wasn’t going to happen.

This would not be nice.

This would not be easy.

Margaret Montoya, or whatever had taken her over, didn’t want to die. Just like any person, any animal, she wanted to live.

Clarence walked closer.

Her eyes narrowed. She screamed, a sound of desperate rage. The gag muffled some of it, but only some.

No. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t.

Clarence turned to leave, but stopped short — Klimas was standing just a few feet away. Had he been there the whole time? The SEAL nodded in man-to-man understanding. He extended his hand, palm up.

“Give me the knife,” he said. “Take a walk. No shame in it — she’s your wife.”

Clarence looked at the extended hand. Then he looked at the knife. No, it had to be him.

“Was,” he said. “Was my wife.”

He turned again, faced her, forced his feet to move.

Margaret’s body shook, this time from sobs. Tears filled her eyes, ran down her forehead to vanish in her dark hair. She drew a ragged breath in through her nose, paused, then screamed again.

Reality slurred for a moment. Everything shifted. He’d met her five years ago, fallen in love with her almost immediately. So brilliant, so hardworking, so utterly committed to doing whatever it took to get the job done. And what a job that had been.

She’d fallen for him almost as fast. For a while, things had been perfect. They had been so happy together. They thought they had all the time in the world.

They didn’t. No one did. Ever.

No matter how much time you have, that time always runs out.

Clarence stepped forward.

Her screams grew more ragged as vocal cords gave way. She thrashed harder, so hard the whole ladder rattled, but the SEALS knew their business when it came to tying knots.

He reached out with the knife. The blade shook madly, so much so that it looked like a prop made out of rubber.

He was Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his own son. Only God wasn’t here, and no one was going to appear in a cloud of holy light and tell him it had just been a test of his devotion.

Clarence started to talk, but his throat tightened and he choked on the words. He swallowed hard and tried again.

“Good-bye, my love.”

He pressed the edge of the blade against her throat. She screamed and screamed, she chewed madly on the gag, she jerked and kicked and fought for life.

Clarence closed his eyes.

He pushed up as hard as he could and slid the knife forward, felt the blade slice deep. The ladder rattled harder than ever. Still pressing up, he pulled the blade back, felt it bite into tendons and ligaments. Hers wasn’t the first throat he’d cut. It wasn’t like the movies — one slash didn’t do it, you had to saw a bit to get at those arteries.

He pressed up even harder and slid forward again, then pulled back again. Hot wetness splashed onto his hand.

Her screams ceased.

Eyes still locked tight, he sawed forward one more time, back one more time.

The ladder stopped rattling.

He heard the sound of his wife’s blood splattering into a plastic mop bucket.

From behind him, Klimas’s command voice boomed.

“Feely! Get this blood ready to go!”

Clarence realized he was still holding the knife. He let it drop, heard it clatter, then covered his face with his hands.

He slowly sank to the floor.

All the time in the world…

All the time in the world…

MISSION OBJECTIVES

Paulius Klimas wasn’t a religious man. His lack of faith, however, didn’t stop him from a small prayer of thanks:

Thank God it’s winter.

The Windy City was living up to its name. Snow, ash and dirt swirled, rose and fell as gusts curled off buildings and rolled down the streets. Paulius guessed the temperature was hovering in the single digits, but the windchill dropped it far below zero. The weather numbed him, made it hard to move, but he was thankful because it produced a much-desired side effect: the streets were mostly empty.

Even monsters and psychopaths hated the cold, it seemed.

He and D’Shawn Bosh moved quickly. Roth’s sporting goods store had been stop number one. Bosh had gone for Cubs gear, while Paulius opted for a black, knee-length Bears coat and matching hat. They both wore gray Chicago Fire sweats over their fatigue pants.

Paulius also looked a little pregnant. He had a one-gallon milk jug of Margaret’s blood strapped to his belly. Feely had said his body heat would keep it from freezing solid.

They were headed east on Oak. Dust from the JDAMs had billowed out even this far, some four and five blocks from impact, turning the standing snow from white to gray.

Though the bad guys clearly didn’t like the cold, a few of them remained outside. Paulius saw several bundled-up people, heads covered in hats and faces wrapped in scarves. They all carried weapons of one kind or another: hunting rifles, pistols, knives, axes, even carbines. One fat guy lugged a chain saw. The dirt, the streets filled with ruined cars, an armed militia walking free — Chicago reminded Paulius of a subzero Mogadishu.

The monsters, however, didn’t seem to mind the conditions. Three-legged hatchlings scurried everywhere. As for the huge, yellow behemoths with the wicked bone-blades sticking out of their arms, Paulius saw at least one on every block. It was all he and Bosh could do to keep walking, to try to pretend the creatures were nothing unusual.

Roth’s experience held true: without uniforms, Paulius and Bosh drew little attention. They reached Michigan Avenue, looked out onto a park covered in gray snow. At the park’s far edge lay U.S. Route 41, and beyond that, Lake Michigan.

“Damn,” Bosh said. “We ain’t getting out that way.”

Paulius nodded. There were even more cars blocking the road than when he and his men had swum in the day before. He pulled out his binoculars, steel-cold fingers complaining at even that small motion. Through them, he saw the reason for the growing and already-impassable roadblock: two of the sickle-armed, muscle-bound creatures were rolling a burned-out Toyota pickup down the road. They pushed it near several other cars, then bent, lifted, and flipped the vehicle on its side as if it were nothing more than a toy.

He stowed the binoculars. “After we pick up the others, we’ll have to use surface streets to drive north. Let’s go.”

They moved south on Michigan Avenue. On the far side of the street, a Converted woman was using a hacksaw to cut away at the arm of a frozen corpse. As Paulius and Bosh moved past, the woman didn’t even look up.

The firehouse wasn’t much farther.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

The president of Russia glared out from the Situation Room’s large screen. President Albertson glared back. At least, that’s what Murray thought Albertson was going for — in truth, it looked like he was trying hard not to soil himself.

Stepan Morozov’s face sagged with prolonged anger and extreme exhaustion. He wore a suit coat, but no tie. His sweat-stained shirt was unbuttoned down to the sternum, showing graying chest hair.

“President Albertson, the time to act is now,” Morozov said. “China is going to launch her missiles. Our intelligence confirms this. If Russia and America combine for a first strike, together we will eliminate China’s nuclear capability.”

Albertson opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. Murray saw beads of sweat break out on the man’s forehead.

On the screen, Morozov’s eyes narrowed. “Mister President? Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” Albertson said quickly. “Yes, I heard you.”

When Albertson didn’t offer anything else, Morozov’s face started to redden.

“The Chinese have already struck us,” he said. “A million Russians are dead. The Chinese leadership says nothing — no apology, no explanation. We must assume that they are infected. If we strike while they are disorganized and silent, we might hit them before they can launch at all.”

“And we might not,” Albertson said. “They could launch in retaliation, get their missiles away before ours hit. I’ll consider your proposal… I’ll talk it over with my staff. Thank you for the call.”

Murray couldn’t believe what he was watching. The Russian president was asking the United States to join him in a large-scale nuclear attack on the world’s most populous nation, and Albertson just wanted to get off the line. The man was overwhelmed, completely unprepared for something like this.

Morozov snarled. A string of spit ran from his top lip to his bottom, vibrating with each word.

“There is no time to consider,” he said. The string of spit popped free, landed on his chin. “Maybe there is a reason you don’t want to strike! Maybe you are infected, and you are already talking to the Chinese about first-striking us!”

Albertson shook his head. “I… we… of course we’re not infected! We… we…”

Morozov shook his fist. “Then prove it! Strike now, before it is too late!”

“I…” Albertson said. “We…”

Murray stood up. “President Morozov, we are close to finishing a weapon that will wipe out the infected, all of them, worldwide.”

In the Situation Room, faces pinched tight in anger or went blank in shock — two heads of state were deciding the fate of the world, and Murray Longworth was butting in?

On the screen, Morozov turned to look at Murray. The virtual conference technology made it feel like he was looking Murray dead in the eyes.

“You are Longworth?” he said. “The one who handles the… the… ah, yes, the special threats.”

Murray was a little surprised to be recognized so quickly, but he plowed forward.

“Yes, President Morozov, I am the director of the Department of Special Threats. Our solution, sir, is highly contagious. It spreads from one infected to the next. Our team is in Chicago, testing this solution as we speak. If Russia’s actions cause a nuclear strike on Chicago, then our solution will also be destroyed. And to be blunt, your weapons, our weapons — none of them can do a damn thing to save our citizens and our nations. If your people haven’t told you that already, they are either ignorant of reality or they are telling you what they think you want to hear.”

Morozov’s face grew redder. His eyes widened.

“Who do you think you are talking—”

“Shut up,” Murray said. He couldn’t take this anymore, couldn’t take the pressure and these people posturing while the world died around them.

He walked up to the screen as if Morozov was a real person and they were about to stand toe-to-toe. “If you launch, you doom the entire human race. We need more time.”

Morozov stared out from the screen. His left cheek twitched.

“Our intelligence says your military has abandoned Chicago.”

Murray nodded. “And what better place to run our test than in a city overrun with the infected? We need more time, Mister President. We can stop this thing without nuking the bejesus out of China.”

Morozov turned to look offscreen. Murray saw him mouth the word bejesus, then shrug. Someone offscreen answered him. He nodded, turned back to stare at Longworth.

“I am told that you are a soldier?”

The question surprised Murray. “I was,” he said. “I served in Vietnam.”

Morozov spread his hands, palms up. “Once a soldier, always a soldier. I served my country in Afghanistan.” His anger faded somewhat. “You have killed people, Mister Longworth? You have seen your friends die?”

What the hell does this have to do with anything?

“Yes to both,” Murray said.

Morozov bit his lower lip. He nodded, turned slightly to look at Albertson. “You have twenty-four hours to prove this. Then, America will join our attack. As one of your former presidents once said so eloquently, you are either with us, or you are against us.”

He made a gesture to someone off camera. The screen went blank.

Albertson’s face glowed with a sheen of sweat. He put his sweaty hands on the table. He was trying hard to look like he was in control — trying, and failing miserably.

“Admiral Porter,” he said. “If Murray’s people fail, what do you think we should do?”

The admiral sagged in his chair. “I’ve been in this game for forty years. I never thought I’d say something like this, Mister President, but it’s my recommendation that we join the Russians.”

Albertson closed his eyes. “All right. I need some time to think. I need a few minutes of sleep, maybe.”

He stood. As Murray and the others watched, the president of the United States of America walked out of the Situation Room to take a nap.

FROZEN FOOD

The bodies of the two policemen were gone. Probably hauled away, probably eaten — an ultimate dishonor that wouldn’t have happened if Paulius hadn’t killed them.

He wondered, briefly, if the cops were taking their revenge from the grave. He and Bosh couldn’t find a way into the firehouse. The windows and doors weren’t just boarded up, they were blocked by sheet metal that had been bolted in place from the inside. The public transit bus remained embedded in the firehouse door; the cops had even secured the area around it, blocking any way in. The bus’s smashed-in front end meant no one was going through it without a blowtorch.

Paulius and Bosh knelt in the shadows of the firehouse’s small backyard, out of sight from the main road. An eye-high wall — made of the same gray stone as the firehouse — lined the yard, providing a place to stay out of sight. It also gave some shelter from a constant wind that rattled a single, bare tree. Decent cover for now, but they had to find a way inside before they were seen.

The cold had finally got to Bosh. He couldn’t stop shivering.

“What’s next, Commander? Shoot through a door?”

Paulius’s toes felt numb.

“Too much noise,” he said. “If we can slip in unseen, we’ll have more time. We don’t know if the engine is damaged, or if it even runs. You said you saw the cops come out of the back of the bus?”

Bosh nodded. “We’d checked it minutes earlier, and it was empty. The cops must have seen the Rangers, then come out of the firehouse and into the bus to stay under cover while getting a better look.”

“Could they have come through the bus?”

“Maybe,” Bosh said. “I looked inside, but we were advancing so I just gave it a quick once-over.”

“Let’s check again.”

Paulius moved to the corner of the firehouse, looked along the building’s west wall out onto Chicago Avenue. Across the demolition derby of a street, a hospital: THE ANNE AND ROBERT H. LURIE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL OF CHICAGO, said the big white letters above the glass building’s front entrance.

He saw no movement. He advanced. Bosh followed, covering him. Paulius moved to the rear of the bus. He hand-signaled Bosh to stay put, then entered the open door halfway down the long bus’s right side.

Inside, Paulius counted seventeen corpses. By the looks of them, they’d either died during warmer temperatures, or later thawed out long enough to start bloating before things returned to subzero. Some of the bodies had been gnawed on, meat torn away down to scratched bone.

Paulius realized why the Converted had taken the bodies of the two cops: they hadn’t been frozen solid. Fresh meat.

He shuddered, got his head back in the game. The bus tilted up at a slight incline. He walked down the aisle toward the front, slowly, careful to make sure each corpse was just that — a corpse.

He heard a click in his headset.

“Commander,” Bosh said, “three hostiles coming this way, from the west. Moving quick, maybe sixty seconds till they reach us.”

Paulius had only seconds to search. There had to be a way in. The windshield? Spiderwebbed and smashed, but still intact — no one had come through there. The front-right entry door? Also smashed, so bent and twisted there was no way it would ever open again. No one had come through there, either.

If he’d been those cops, told to guard that facility, what would he have done? They’d taken the time to armor up the building, but they obviously left themselves a way in and out.

Paulius knelt down and looked under the dashboard. Right where the driver’s feet would go, he saw a floor mat. He pulled it aside to reveal a hole large enough for a man to crawl through.

He hit the “talk” button twice, sending two clicks to Bosh.

The bus creaked slightly as Bosh entered and moved silently up the aisle. Paulius pointed to the hole.

Bosh handed his M4 to Paulius, then sat on the driver’s seat and slid his feet into the hole. His Chicago-Cubs-jacket-covered gear made him have to wiggle a bit, but he popped through.

Paulius heard approaching voices.

“I heard something over here,” a woman’s voice said.

“Ah, the firehouse again?” said a man. “Fuck that, there’s no way in.”

Paulius handed Bosh’s M4 through, then his own. He slid into the hole.

“I’m hungry,” the woman said. “There’s bodies in the bus.”

Paulius was halfway in when his long Bears jacket snagged tight, pulling the sleeves up hard against his armpits.

“Those bodies are gross,” the man said. “When we unthaw them, they’re rotted and black.”

“That’s all that’s left,” the woman said. “Unless you know where there’s some living meat that everyone missed?”

Paulius pulled, but couldn’t see where he was hooked. He couldn’t even turn all the way around to the hostiles if they walked into the bus.

“Come on,” the woman said. “There’s got to be something worth eating in there. Come on.”

The voice couldn’t be more than ten feet away.

Hands grabbed at his waist. He reached for the knife sheathed on his chest — it was gone, he’d given it to Otto. He raised a hand to strike downward, but saw Bosh’s head wedged into the tight corner.

Bosh’s shaking black hands fumbled at something. Paulius felt the coat snap free, then he was yanked down into a dark crawlspace. He landed on frozen ground.

Paulius reached a hand back up, quietly, and grabbed the edge of the floor mat. He silently pulled it over the hole.

He waited in the darkness. He wiggled his body enough to draw his sidearm. He heard footsteps inside the bus.

“This forearm looks kinda okay,” the man said. “Kinda.”

“Great,” the woman said. “This is only temporary, Harry. I can’t wait until we get out of here in a couple of hours. I bet cash money there’s fresh meat down in Champaign.”

A few more footsteps, then nothing. Paulius sat silent, listened to the Converted’s fading conversation.

On his hands and knees, he scooted backward through the tight space, across the frozen ground until he felt concrete. He stood: he was inside the firehouse — a long, wide garage, gear hanging from the walls, electric heaters spaced around the floor, their coils glowing orange — and sitting there pretty as you please was the red, white, black and chrome bulk of Fire Engine 98, all thirty feet of her. Polished, clean and gleaming.

The boxy cab alone looked as big as an SUV; it would hold six people, easy, with plenty of window room to fire weapons out either side. The wide, wraparound windshield took up the top half of the vehicle’s ten-foot-wide flat front.

A square, chrome grille sat below that windshield, lights and flashers on either side. The front bumper was a massive thing: red-trimmed white metal sticking out some two feet from the grille, perfect for smashing past abandoned cars. Below the right-side windows at the rear of the cab, inch-high gold letters spelled out CHICAGO FIRE DEPT. Up on the front right, gold lettering read ENGINE CO. And below that a big, white 98.

The boxy rear section of the vehicle was around fourteen feet long and ten feet high, with a bed full of neatly coiled hose. Long equipment boxes ran the length of the bed, a ladder strapped horizontally to each side. Anyone in the bed would be able to take cover behind those equipment boxes, rest weapons on the flat tops and be protected from most small-arms fire.

Separating the rear bed from the cab, a three-foot-thick section of chrome packed with hose connections and valves. And on top of that control section, the crown jewel, the thing that might let Tim Feely’s plan actually work: a water cannon mounted on a swivel.

Bosh let out a low whistle.

“Ho-leee shit, Commander,” he said. “I’d rather have a tank, but since we don’t have one, this is pretty damn close.”

Bosh opened the driver’s door. He had to step up on a footrest to look inside. He reached in, grabbed something, then leaned back out and dangled that something in front of Paulius.

A key chain with a single key.

“Looks like they were considering bugging out,” Bosh said. He pointed to the rear of the building. “There’s a good fifty feet of space behind this baby, so we can build up a head of steam.”

“How are we going to move that bus?”

“Don’t think we have to,” Bosh said. “It’s just a shell. They took the engine out. Drive train, too. That’s why we could crawl under it. They even kept it warm in here, maybe to make sure the fire truck would start right up. I think those cops were getting ready to ram their way out and take their chances.”

Paulius nodded. If he’d left the cops alone, would they have driven to safety? He couldn’t allow himself to worry about that now.

“I’ll figure out how to get this blood into the water tank,” Paulius said. “Have to make sure the water’s warm enough, but Feely said the hydras should survive no problem.”

He looked at Bosh. “You’re qualified in heavy vehicles. You want to drive?”

Bosh smiled. “Hell yes, Commander. Navy SEALs was my second choice. As a kid, I always wanted to be a fireman.”