Contagious (43 page)

The horns kept honking.
Alan swallowed and let out a big
ahhh.
“Dude,” Peter said, “you need to take smaller bites. Seriously.”
“True,” Alan said. “Just got carried away. You ready?”
Peter nodded. “That guy’s horn is bugging me. Maybe we should show him what it means to love instead of hate?”
“Chelsea would like that,” Alan said. “But we don’t have time. I’ll talk to him.”
He opened the door carefully and stepped out into the hazy gray light of a frigid winter afternoon. Cars whizzed by on the second lane, missing him by inches, kicking up fine sprays of dirty slush.
The guy kept honking.
Alan reached back in and grabbed his M4. He saw a French fry on the seat and popped it into his mouth. It was still warm—five-second rule and all. As he chewed, he walked to the Hummer’s back bumper.
The car behind him was an SUV. Who still drove those things? Pretty fucking tough on the environment.
The driver saw Alan, saw Alan’s gun.
He stopped honking.
Alan pointed the M4 and squeezed off a burst. The SUV’s windshield spiderwebbed, splattering with red from the inside.
Tires screeched. People saw him and swerved, not thinking about the fact that they were on an overpass and there was nowhere
to
swerve. Cars smashed. Metal ground. Plastic cracked. Glass scattered.
Alan turned and saw Peter leaning over the overpass rail, an AT4 rocket on his shoulder. A cone of flame belched out the back as a rocket streaked down, trailing smoke for two seconds before it hit a gray Chrysler. The car turned into a fireball rolling along at sixty-five miles an hour, spewing parts and burning tires as it went. Peter dropped the empty rocket tube, aimed his M4 and started firing on the panicked traffic below.
Alan would join him in a second, but first he had to take care of all the people suddenly stuck in their cars. In only ten seconds, the Eight Mile Road overpass was already shut down.
Alan pointed, squeezed off a burst, turned to the next target and repeated.
NOON: IT HITS THE FAN
Murray Longworth hated the goddamn Situation Room. He’d had it, just
had it.
Maybe Vanessa Colburn was right. Maybe it
was
time for a new generation. Let the kids have the country—it was time for Murray Longworth to go golfing.
They’d killed the satellite, goddamit. They’d
won.
It should have been over, and now a wave of bad news so high he could drown in it. A sense of hopelessness, a feeling that no matter what you did, the enemy was going to keep coming, keep trying to kill you—it didn’t just depress him, it exhausted him.
Thirty-three soldiers dead at the Gaylord airport. Thirty-three
so far,
because some of the wounded weren’t going to make it. Ogden gone AWOL. The Exterminators unaccounted for. And now Detroit.
They had all gathered in the Situation Room; the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, Tom Maskill, Vanessa. Gutierrez himself would be there soon.
The main flat-panel screen changed to a news helicopter’s shot of a highway. The bottom left corner of the screen showed a logo for Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. The bottom center of the screen read EIGHT MILE OVERPASS AT I-75. Hundreds of cars sat motionless on the three lanes heading north as well as the three lanes heading south. On I-75, cars had driven up the inclined shoulder, some stopping there, others rolling back down to land on their sides or roofs.
The traffic on the overpass itself looked much the same—motionless cars, smoke, flames and bodies sprawled everywhere. The only movement was near one green vehicle.
A Humvee.
Even from the high angle, Murray could see two men in fatigues. Wherever they moved, little puffs of smoke from automatic weapons soon followed.
The speakers suddenly played the sound that accompianied the image.
“. . . we don’t know who these men are or how many people are hurt. We can see bodies from here. The vehicle is army green, but there is no unit insignia.”
An air response was already on the way. A-10 tank killers from Selfridge would be the first to engage, then Apache attack helicopters. Murray had even scrambled Ogden’s squadron of four dedicated Strike Eagles—he just prayed he wouldn’t have to use any bombs on Detroit.
“Murray,” Tom said.
Murray tore his eyes away from the screen. Tom had a phone in his hand again.
“Dew Phillips on line two, said it’s mission-critical.”
Murray nodded, grabbed the nearest phone and hit line two as he looked back to the surreal carnage on the screen.
“Dew,” Murray said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, so is Perry, but a squad of Ogden’s men tried to kill us. They took out Baum and Milner. Perry identified the gate location—it’s in Detroit, and apparently it opens up at one-fifteen sharp.”
“We’ve got a lot of gunfire in Detroit,” Murray said. “Rockets, too. Looks like more of Ogden’s men. He’s AWOL, so he’s either dead or hiding somewhere and calling the shots.”
“We know,” Dew said. “It’s all over the news.”
“Where are you?”
“With Whiskey Company,” Dew said. “Two platoons in three Ospreys, headed for Detroit. We’ll be there in thirty minutes. We’ll set down, then Perry will find the gate.”
Murray popped four more Tums into his mouth and chewed. This couldn’t be happening. They’d had it
won.
“Another one,” Tom called out.
“Dew, hold on,” Murray said. He looked at the screen. The bottom left corner of this one showed Fox-2 News. The center bottom of the screen read 8-MILE OVERPASS AT M-10 JOHN C. LODGE FREEWAY. The scene looked like a mirror image of the other, hundreds of cars piled up on the road, a Humvee on the overpass with soldiers firing away.
Nothing could get through that tangled mess of cars. Ogden was shutting down the highways into and out of Detroit.
Murray turned his attention back to the call. “Dew, if this is Ogden’s doing, what the hell is he up to?”
“Causing chaos,” Dew said. “Looks like he’s trying to block all traffic in and out. He wants a big perimeter with lots of civilians inside it so you won’t drop bombs if we find the gate.”
“Motherfucker,” Murray said.
“Are the other two DOMREC companies still at Fort Bragg?”
“They’re already on their way to Detroit,” Murray said. “They should land at DTW in about thirty minutes. I’ll also activate the Eighty-second Airborne. It will take them eight hours, but . . .”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t need to finish. If the gate opened and something came through, the Eighty-second would be the first organized unit to tackle it.
“I hear you,” Dew said. “One more thing. Sergeant Major Nealson said he saw at least two platoons of X-Ray Company at the airport this morning. They aren’t there now, and there’s only two squads accounted for—that means a platoon and a half has to be on the way to Detroit. Roughly forty-five men. Get some birds in the air to take them out.”
“Take them out?” Murray said. “We don’t know those men are infected. We can set up a roadblock, test them. If they’re negative, we use them to go after whatever Ogden has in Detroit.”
“A roadblock?” Dew said. “Are you
insane
? Do you really want heavily armed, combat-tested soldiers going up against some state troopers in a roadblock?”
Dew was right. “I’ll take care of it,” Murray said.
“Get on the offensive, Murray. Pin them down, whatever it takes. We have to get Perry on the ground in Detroit so we can find the gate.”
“Wait for Yankee and Zulu companies to arrive from Fort Bragg,” Murray said. “Ogden’s units have ten Stinger missiles, and you can bet he took them all to Detroit. We need to account for those before you go in. We can’t afford to lose Dawsey.”
“L. T., if Perry’s right about the time, that thing opens up in seventy-five minutes. Whatever you do, don’t drag your feet.”
“Just hold outside the city,” Murray said. “We’ll get to work softening up his positions, tasking satellite coverage to see if we can spot the gate and find you someplace to land.”
12:15 P.M.: Dew Warns Margo
Margaret stood in the isolation chamber, looking down at Officer Carmen Sanchez. Clarence stood outside the chamber—patient, quiet, clearly ready to act if Sanchez sprang to life.
But that just wasn’t going to happen. Sanchez was having difficulty breathing, and it was only getting worse. She might have to intubate him soon. That, or take him off the latrunculin altogether, because he wouldn’t live through another hour of the treatment.
His tongue still looked normal.
His tissue samples no longer showed crawlers. Either the latrunculin had worked or the last ones had moved into his brain. But if they
had
reached his brain, was the chemical stopping them from forming that mesh? Could the mesh form despite the chemical?
No. She refused to believe that. It had worked. This was so much bigger than just Sanchez. Latrunculin
worked
. It killed them. Not all of them, but a lot, and that meant she had a weapon. The weapon needed development, true, but at least she had a starting point.
And if it didn’t work, then she had nothing. No cure. Sanchez had been exposed to a small amount of the vector. If she couldn’t defeat that much, what could she do against higher amounts of exposure? Some of the John Doe’s pustules had grown to the size of baseballs—a hundred times the size of what had popped on Sanchez. Someone hit with that much contagion and she’d have no chance at all.
Fuck Murray’s secrecy. Margaret was going public, and she’d call Dew out on his offer to back her up. Would Clarence also back her, or would he continue to
obey orders
?
Gitsh’s voice in her earpiece. “Otto, Dew’s calling in.”
“Patch him through,” Clarence said.
“You’re connected, Dew,” Gitsh said. “Otto and Margo are listening in.”
Dew’s voice, urgent and excited. “Otto, have you or your people had any contact with Ogden’s men?”
“No sir,” Clarence said. “We’ve been working all night on the John Doe and the police officer. We didn’t even know Ogden’s men were in Detroit.”
“They are,” Dew said. “And you are to avoid him at all costs. Your trailer, is it visible from a main road?”
“No. We’re tucked under a little railroad overpass, trees on either side. Excellent concealment. You can’t see us at all.”
“Okay,” Dew said. “Then maybe you should just stay put.”
“Dew,” Margaret said, “what’s happening?”
“Ogden is working for the triangles.”
Margaret looked at Clarence, her anger at him forgotten for the moment. “
Ogden?
How . . . how do you know?”
“His men tried to kill Perry. Perry’s okay, but they got Baum and Milner. Ogden’s men are shooting the fuck out of the highways in Detroit, murdering people left and right. The gate is somewhere in Detroit, and Ogden wants to protect it.”
She shivered at the implications—just like that, Ogden and his men, converted, working for the enemy. She’d missed something back in Gaylord, clearly. And even if her new drug worked, was it already too late?
“We’re coming in,” Dew said. “Perry is going to find the gate. If we can get to you, we will, but otherwise stay put.”
“Watch out for infected bodies,” Margaret said. “That’s how the contagion spreads. Bodies can have big, puffy pustules, filled with spores. Those pop on you, you have the new strain. And they can spread it through their tongues, so make sure no one licks you.”
“Understood. You have a cure for this shit yet?”
Margaret looked down at Sanchez. “We’re very close.”
“Get your info to Murray, Margo, in case Ogden finds you and takes you out. You guys are in a bad spot. I’m pretty sure you’re
inside
Ogden’s perimeter.”
“Understood,” Clarence said.
She couldn’t stop now. She had to get Sanchez out, away from the danger.
“Dew,” Margaret said, “I appreciate what’s going on, but we have to evacuate the patient. He could be the key to stopping this.”
“If Ogden finds you, he’ll kill you,” Dew said. “He’s hit all the major roads out of Detroit. Surface streets are jammed with people trying to leave, so there’s no fucking way you can get a semi out of town. You guys either stay where you are, or you leave the trailer, find a hidey-hole and lay low till I know I can get transport to you. You got it?”
“But Dew, this is a critical phase—”
“We’ve got it,” Clarence interrupted. “We’ll evaluate the situation and act accordingly.”
“Good,” Dew said. “No offense, Margo, but let Otto handle this unless you like the taste of bullets. And how about you guys put away the nerd gear once in a while and watch the fucking news.” He hung up.
“Uh, guys?” Gitsh said. “I think you better come to the computer room. We just turned on the local news, and we’re in a lot of trouble.”
Clarence looked at Margaret, then held an arm toward the airlock door—
After you
.
Margaret took one more look at Sanchez, then headed to the airlock.
12:20 P.M.: BONUS POINTS
Northwest Flight 2961 from Detroit to Bangor never had a chance.
The Airbus A319 jet carrying 193 passengers took off from Detroit Metro Airport. Michelle McMichael, age sixty-three, had the window seat because Bernie, her husband of forty years, basically had to pee every twenty minutes. He got the aisle. That was fine by Michelle. She liked to hold a map and look out the window when they flew. Using the map to identify landmarks was a fun way to pass the time. As the A319 banked to the right, it gave her a nice view of a long stretch of I-94. The map said she was looking south at Taylor, Michigan. She craned her head to look back at the airport.
That was when she saw it.
Michelle was no military expert, but she’d seen enough movies to know a missile’s smoke trail when she saw one. And just like that, she knew that this was the end.
Michelle had time to reach out and grab Bernie’s hand. She looked into his eyes and said, “I love you,” and then the Stinger missile hit the A319 just behind the right wing.
The warhead penetrated and erupted, splitting the plane in two and ripping the right wing free from the fuselage. Michelle died on impact, she and her seat torn into three separate pieces. Bernie actually lived through the initial blast, barely, but was quickly incinerated as a fireball rolled through the broken cabin.
The A319’s tail spun away and started to drop. A secondary blast disintegrated the midsection. From row ten forward, the A319’s nose arced toward the city, trailing fire and smoke as if it were a second, gigantic rocket.
At the northwest
corner of Detroit Metropolitan Airport, also known as DTW, Vining Road passes over a parallel set of railroad tracks. Under this overpass stood Brian Hunt and Jordan Willis, formerly of Domestic Reaction Batallion’s X-Ray Company, now proud members of Chelsea’s Army. The overpass hid them and their Hummer from view yet still gave them a clear field of fire on several of DTW’s runways.