Pandemic (50 page)

He saw movement: two other people approaching the woman. A tall man, wearing a red down jacket, and a woman wearing a blue snowsuit. They must have come out of the surrounding buildings. They closed in, and suddenly there were four more people — sliding out of ruined cars, walking through doorways.

They had the woman surrounded.

She kept turning, first her head, then her body.

“Don’t just stand there,” Cooper said quietly. “
Run
.”

The woman didn’t move. The six closed in on her.

And then, on the bridge, coming from the south, through the falling snow and scattering bits of paper, Cooper saw something else.

Something … 
huge
.

He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words hit his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.

“What the fuck is
that
? Cooper,
what the fuck is that
?”

Cooper didn’t know, didn’t
want
to know. It was a man … maybe. Sickly yellow skin, no jacket, an upper body that was far too wide for legs that would
be gigantic on anyone save for an NFL lineman. And the
head —
Cooper couldn’t make out much other than a neck that was as wide as impossibly wide shoulders, a neck that led up to a face hidden behind a blue scarf wrapped around the mouth and nose.

The woman let go of her own shoulders, finally turned to run, but it was too late; six people grabbed her. She screamed and jerked, tried to fight, but the others held her fast.

The man in the red jacket stood in front of her, reached into his coat, pulled out a long butcher knife.

Cooper thought about drawing his gun, taking a shot, maybe he could get lucky from this far out—

—and then it was too late. The man in the red jacket drove the knife into the woman’s belly, slid it
up
, like a butcher slaughtering a pig. The woman didn’t even scream, she just stared. Stared, and
twitched
.

Her attackers tore into her. Cooper saw hands driving down, yanking,
ripping
, saw those hands come back bloody and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.

The five people started to eat.

I am not seeing this … I am not fucking seeing this …

A tug on his coat.

“Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the hell out of here.”

He realized the gun was in his hand. He didn’t remember actually drawing it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He stuffed it once again into the back of his pants, then reached into the car for Sofia.

From his little table in the
Coronado
’s cargo hold, Tim Feely studied the numbers. New York City, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids and Chicago were no longer providing consumer data. They were too far gone for that.

Elsewhere in the country, people were stocking up on whatever they could before it was too late. That panic skewed the consumer pattern information, but there was still enough data from which to draw conclusions.

The list went on and on. Most of Baltimore had lost power the day before, so there was no additional data to be had there. Indianapolis, Huntsville and Birmingham were in the same boat.

As near as Tim could tell, most cities on the Eastern Seaboard had significant outbreaks. The Midwest was even worse. The West Coast showed some signs of infected activity, but the overall stats indicated those populations were mostly normal; they’d brewed the inoculant faster there, distributed it better, done a superior job at overcoming local objections. Although murder rates had skyrocketed, police departments remained in control of the West Coast and the Southwest — except for Los Angeles.

Riots and looting had cast LA into chaos. There was no information to discern if the violence came from the Converted, or if it had blown up due to the deaths that occurred because of the mayor’s shoot-on-sight after-dark curfew.

Canada was also in bad shape. Montreal was ablaze, just like Paris. Tim didn’t have consumer data on Europe, but news reports of burning cities and corpses littering the streets told the story just fine.

Pandora’s box had opened. Just like the myth, evil things had flown out to infect the world. In that myth, the last thing to escape had been
hope
.

This time, Tim wondered if there was any hope at all.

Shadows moved within the darkness of a wintry Chicago night. Cooper stumbled more than he ran, the girl in his arms a heaviness that threatened to pull him down.

Just drop her … just leave her, she’s going to die anyway …

They’d found the hospital to be a burned-out husk. When they’d come in for a closer look, something had found them, followed them.

Cooper had carried Sofia away, but that something had picked up their trail. They fled north. The storm that threatened to kill them also provided some cover: blowing snow helped them hide, masked their tracks and their sounds.

His arms burned, screamed for oxygen. Sofia hung low, near his thighs, his left arm under her knees, his right around her back. He stopped only long enough to heft her high again, up to his chest, then he continued up Michigan Avenue.

He felt her fingers clutch his jacket, pulling it tighter across his chest.

“They’re coming,” she said. “I can hear them. Run faster, goddamit!”

Cooper could barely run at all, let alone
faster
, but he heard them, too, heard their yells, heard the roaring of some misshapen thing.

He’d walked seven excruciating blocks — careful not to step on frozen body parts or broken glass — with the cold making his hands numb, making his fingers tingle, with Sofia’s weight dragging at him, and now he was only a block shy of Chicago Avenue.

So he ignored the icy cold air that sucked deep into his heaving lungs, ignored the wind that made his face sting and burn. He moved faster.

Up ahead, on the other side of Chicago Avenue on both the left and the right, he saw gothic buildings made of white stone. They looked like castles, especially the one on the left with its octagonal tower that stretched thirty feet above. It was old, so old it had probably once towered over the surrounding buildings back when “tall” meant four or five stories. Now it was
just a lost footnote in the city’s sprawling skyline. A little castle … a little fortress …

Leave her and go hide. Go in the fortress, block the door, you can hold them off …

A tug at his collar.

“There,” Sofia said. She pointed right: he saw the white
WALGREENS
lettering on a black overhang. Below it, a revolving door of glass in a curved metal housing. The store sat at the base of a tall, tan building. This place wasn’t burned out. Cooper didn’t see any activity in front of the store, or inside it. Maybe they could hide in there, killing two birds with one stone.

He reached the door: it was still intact, as were the glass windows on either side.

Cooper carefully carried Sofia into the rotating door, careful not to stumble and drop her or smack her head against anything. He pushed. It turned with a deep
swishhh
. Three steps later, he stepped into a miracle.

The lights were on.

There was no wind.

No heat, either, but without the windchill the place felt comparatively warm.

The doors might be intact, but this place hadn’t escaped the disaster. Ten feet in lay a headless body. Ice crystals formed a strangely beautiful pattern in the blood that had spilled from the man’s neck and spread across the hard stone floor.

Farther up the first aisle, between scattered bags of chips on one side and candy bars on the other, lay a second body, a woman. A look of disbelief had frozen on her face, maybe when her attackers had torn her right arm from her body, leaving the ripped sleeve of her blue jacket ragged and stiff with icy blood. That jacket remained buttoned under her chin, but open at the belly to show an empty cavity — her internal organs were gone.

“My God,” Sofia said. “Coop, we gotta hide.”

He nodded. He hefted her higher, or tried to, but his arms wouldn’t lift her. He was damn near done. “Is the pharmacy in the back?”

“Yeah,” Sofia said. “Straight back.”

Cooper stepped over the bodies.

All through the aisles, products had been ripped off the metal shelves and
tossed onto the floor. It didn’t look like much had been taken, though — more a store-trashing rampage rather than people scrambling for supplies.

He stumbled on a box of candy, causing him to hit the shelves on his left, rocking them a little before they settled back down with a
bang
.

Sofia’s face wrinkled in pain. She’d taken the brunt of that blow.

“Sorry,” he said.

She said nothing.

Cooper kept moving. The fluorescent lights created the strange sensation that — aside from the bodies, of course — this place was still open for business, that the horrors outside had passed it by.

He reached the pharmacy counter. Instead of looking for the door, he set Sofia on the counter, then hopped over. When his feet hit the floor, his exhausted legs gave out beneath him. He fell in a heap on the tile, banging the top of his head against the corner of a rack that held hundreds of little plastic pull-out bins.

“Owww.” Cooper rolled to his back, hands pressed to his new injury.

“Graceful,” Sofia said. “Just … let me catch my breath, then I’ll … start carrying you.”

He lifted his head to look at her. She’d pushed herself up on one elbow to stare down at him. Jeff’s big coat made her seem so small, so feminine. She looked like death warmed over — face gaunt, black hair stringy and frozen in clumps, eyes half lidded — but the left corner of her mouth curled into a shit-eating grin.

Back flat on the floor, muscles burning, chest heaving and head stinging, Cooper started laughing.

“Sofia, you’re kind of a dick.”

She nodded weakly. “I’ve been told that once or twice in my day. You mind getting me down from here?”

The brief moment of humor vanished. He fought his aching body and stood, gently lifted her from the counter, then set her down with her butt on the floor and her back against the inside of the counter. If anyone else came in the store, Cooper and Sofia wouldn’t be seen unless the intruder came all the way to the rear.

She reached up and caressed his face. “Thanks, Cooper. I mean it. I’d be dead already if it weren’t for you.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. He turned to the pull-out bins, started filing through the paper envelopes inside of them.

“Amoxicillin, maybe? You allergic to that?”

“No idea,” Sofia said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

He nodded. “I guess we will.” He dug through the envelopes.

“Hey, Cooper … you feel okay?”

“You mean other than cold and exhaustion? Sure, I guess. Why?”

“You got some kind of big blister on the back of your neck.”

He stopped flipping through the envelopes. He remembered the puffy, air-filled spot he’d seen on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s some kind of allergic reaction, I think. Hives or something. I haven’t checked in a while, but I had them all over my body.”

He reached to his neck, felt what she was talking about: a puffy blister the size of a small marble. He pressed on it, heard a soft
pop
, saw a tiny mist of slowly floating white. Sofia’s breath scattered it away.

“Gross,” she said. “Like a puffball.”

Cooper nodded. “Yeah. That is kind of gross.”

She gave a halfhearted shrug. “The least of my worries right now. Can you get me some water? I’m really thirsty.”

He noticed her breath crystallizing when she talked. The store gave them shelter, but he’d have to find a way to get heat, fast.

He pulled out six of the plastic bins, slid them over to her.

“Look through those envelopes,” he said. “We want amoxicillin, penicillin, shit like that. I’ll get you that water.”

He stood, looked over the counter and out into the store — still empty. The pharmacy door was off to his left. It opened into store’s horizontal rear aisle. Most of the end-cap displays were untouched. If he’d needed a new mop head or a four-for-three bargain on Tampax, it would have been his lucky day.

He saw the refrigerators off to the left, still lit from within. He skipped the soft drinks, grabbed three bottles of water and an orange juice instead. One refrigerator contained sandwiches. He grabbed three.

The lights are on … the refrigerators are working
.

In all the apocalyptic movies, the power was one of the first things to go. But not here in Chicago. With the city all but destroyed, wouldn’t the
psychos have hit a power plant? A transformer? Power lines, maybe? Apparently not.

He looked up and down the line of refrigerators. There was enough food and water to last him and Sofia for several days. And if they ate through all that, the shelves were still filled with dry goods, canned tuna, crackers … enough to last them
weeks
.

Long enough for the National Guard to arrive, to take control of the city.

An idea struck him. He jogged through the aisles, careful not to step on anything, looking for small appliances. In Aisle Six, he found what he wanted: an electric heater.

He juggled his loot as he walked back to the pharmacy door. If he could find a way to board up that front entrance, maybe board up whatever rear entrance the place had, they could stay here at least long enough for Sofia to get better.

Just to the right of the pharmacy door he found a waist-high wall of bandages and disinfectants.

He walked into the pharmacy and set the food and water next to her. She held up a white paper bag: amoxicillin.

“Good girl,” he said. He opened a bottle for her and put it in her hands. He then opened the medicine, put two pills in her mouth. She lifted the water bottle — weakly, but on her own — and took a drink. Her eyes closed in relief.