Pandemic (52 page)

“There,” he said. He smiled at Cooper. “You’ll come with us.”

“Where?”

“To a hotel,” the Tall Man said. “It’s real close. This is pretty goddamn kick-ass, if you ask me. It will be great to have someone who knows Mister Stanton as part of our group.”

Cooper didn’t know what to do — if he tried to go off on his own, would they know he was lying? Would they know he wasn’t a “friend”?

The Tall Man turned to Jeff. “Bring the woman.”

Jeff, or the thing that used to be Jeff, walked forward, shreds of his jeans swaying with each step. He reached out with his right hand, slid the jagged, pointed bone-blade into Sofia’s neck, drove it deep into her chest until his knuckles pressed against her shoulder. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing more than a bag of chips. Her arms and legs dangled limply. Her remaining blood slowly pattered down to the red-smeared floor.

Cooper stared at the woman he’d just killed. “Why are we bringing her?”

The Tall Man smiled. “It’s going to be a long night. Fresh is way better than frozen. Don’t worry — she has enough meat on her bones that we’ll all get to eat our fill. Come on.”

The Tall Man turned and walked toward the front door.

Cooper followed.

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.”

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.

“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.”