Pandemic (73 page)

Klimas’s knee was a bloody mess. He grimaced against the pain, but held out one bloody hand.

“Can I have my knife back?”

Clarence handed it over. He never wanted to touch the thing again.

He looked forward over the truck cabin’s roof. Another wave of bad guys rushed down the middle of the tree-lined street, coming head-on.

Bosh floored it.

Engine 98’s flat face hit people so hard the cabin rattled with each impact.
Bodies flew in all directions. The truck wobbled and bounced as killers of all kinds fell under the wheels, spraying blood onto the snowy street and even up onto the sidewalks.

And then, there were no more attackers in front. Bosh had driven through, broken free. Clarence looked out the back.

Hundreds of them — no,
thousands —
filled the street, a rushing mob straight out of a zombie flick. The closest ones weren’t even fifteen feet away.

Tim was still aiming his spray off the right side. Clarence grabbed his shoulder. Tim yanked back on the cannon’s valve-handle. The spray of water quickly faded and died, dripping down onto the bed’s hoses. His face was a sheet of blood; a round had grazed his forehead.

Clarence pointed to the rear. “You wanted them concentrated.”

Tim looked. He’d been wide-eyed the entire time, terrified of everything, but now his fear vanished.

Tim Feely snarled.

“Come get some,” he said. He pointed the chromed cannon at the chasing horde and shoved the valve-handle all the way forward.

A concentrated blast shot out, hit a muscle-monster in the chest. Tim moved the stream side to side, knocking people down, kicking up a huge spray that soaked everyone around them.

And still the mob came on.

Engine 98 slammed into something big, catching Tim unawares and smashing into the back of the pockmarked cabin. The blow stunned him. He blinked, tried to clear his vision. When he looked up, he saw Clarence manning the water cannon.

Clarence aimed high, creating a wide, spreading spray that rained down on the army of pursuers.

How many had been exposed? Five hundred?
More?

Tim hurt so bad. Every bone, every muscle, if not from jarring impacts then from the endless shivering. His hands were so cold he couldn’t move his fingers, which were curled up as if they still gripped the water cannon’s handles.

Far behind, he saw some of the pursuers — soaking wet, chests heaving with big, deep breaths — giving up the chase. They would die within twenty-four hours, but not before, hopefully, exposing dozens of others.

We did it, Margo … we did it
.

Tim looked around. Roth was moving again, struggling weakly to rise. Blood matted the right shoulder of his letterman’s jacket. Just to the left, on the other side of the cannon’s base, Klimas clutched at his bloody, ruined knee.

And in the middle of the bed, Cooper Mitchell, standing tall and flipping a double bird at the pursuers.

“How’s that
taste
, motherfuckers?” Cooper grabbed his crotch and shook it. “Lick it up! Lick it
allllll
up!”

Engine 98 lurched. A grinding noise joined the diesel’s gurgle. The truck started to slow.

Tim saw the street signs: State and Banks. They weren’t far from Lincoln Park now. Two long blocks and they’d be on the green grass.

He heard a noise up above. There, two spots far off in the sky … helicopters?

Rescue. They had done it. They were going to
make
it.

Then he saw something else, something much closer … something hanging from a tree by its oversized, yellow-skinned arms.

Engine 98 drove directly underneath it.

The monster let go.

Paulius didn’t see it drop, but he saw it land in the middle of the truck bed, almost on top of Roth. In that frozen, awful moment, Paulius noticed the monster had almost a full head of curly red hair. He wondered if the person had been Irish.

A pale, sore-speckled arm stabbed down: a bone-blade slid through Roth’s letterman’s jacket, deep into his belly. The creature lifted the 250-pound man like he was nothing. Lifted, and
threw —
a screaming Roth sailed off the back of the truck to land hard on the pavement.

Paulius gripped his knife and reactively started to get up, but the agony of his ruined knee stopped him cold.

The wide-headed monster turned, locked eyes with Paulius. Rippling muscles drove its arm forward. Paulius flinched right — the tip of the bone-blade slashed the side of his neck before it punched through the cab’s back wall.

A powerful blast of water caught the monster full in the chest and face, sent it tumbling over the equipment box. It smashed through the rear window of an Audi.

Fire Engine 98 pulled away.

Paulius reached up with his left hand, pressed it against the right side of his neck.

He felt blood pouring down.

Fifteen meters back, Roth managed to get to his knees before the horde descended upon him. A muscle-monster drove a bone-blade straight into his back. Paulius heard Roth’s final scream, then the man vanished beneath a swinging flurry of knives, axes and lead pipes.

The water cannon’s powerful stream slowed — what had been a steady, straight blast now curved down, the landing spot quickly growing closer as the pressure faded.

“Shit,” Clarence said. “We’re empty.”

The truck suddenly started to wobble left and right, wobble
hard
.

Paulius heard another new noise. Over the grinding engine, over the sound of metal scraping pavement, and over the ravaged vehicle’s broken rattle each time it hit a bump, he could just make out the
thumpa-thumpa
of rotor blades.

And also, something else …

The roar of motorcycles.

Steve Stanton’s biker gang rolled to a stop at the T-intersection of North Avenue and North State Parkway. The park — flat and green, dotted with snow-covered, leafless trees — lay behind them. The wind had finally died down. It was turning into a beautiful day.

There were five motorcycles now: the four he’d started with, plus one man who’d brought a Stinger missile from downtown.

One block south on North Parkway, a shattered fire engine shivered its way toward them. How was that thing even moving? The windshield had so many splintered holes it looked white rather than clear. Torn metal lined the bottom where a bumper had once been. No grille, just a squarish, black hole with an oddly bent dead man jammed into it.

The thing wobbled, left-right, left-right. Shredded tires flapped visibly.

Steve pointed at one of his bulls.

“You, go kill the driver.”

The yellow-skinned beauty didn’t ask questions, it just sprinted down the street on impossibly thick legs.

Steve looked at the others. He made a cutting motion at his throat.

“Kill the bikes,” he said. “Get that Stinger ready. Let’s finish this thing.”

The bulls did as they were told.

When the last motorcycle’s gurgle died away, Steve heard something else.

He turned to look back.

Since his conversion, he hadn’t felt fear. Not once. That emotion swept over him now — not even fifty meters away he saw a helicopter coming in just over the park’s sparse trees. He thought back to that girl in his office, the one who said the helicopters she saw “looked mean.” Now Steve understood what she meant.

“Well, shit,” he said, then he felt strong hands wrap around his waist and roughly pull him to the right.

The Apache pilot made a judgment call. Those were monsters standing at the park’s edge … genuine, straight-from-a-nightmare
monsters
. They were the bad guys. Ergo, anyone standing side by side with monsters was a bad guy as well.

Five men, five motorcycles, four monsters.

“Light ’em up,” he told his gunner.

From inside the helicopter, the Apache’s M230 chain gun sounded like a staccato, three-second roll on a toy snare drum.

Thirty-millimeter rounds tore into flesh, metal, grass and concrete, kicking up chunks of dirt, puffs of blood and flashing clouds of smoke. All targets dropped. The pilot saw a monster running right, carrying a small man in his arms. The pilot started to call out the target, but one of the fallen men rose to his knees, struggled to bring a long tube up on his shoulder.

“SAM,” the pilot said.

Another three-second drum roll answered.

The man didn’t
drop
so much as he
disintegrated
.

“SAM neutralized,” the pilot said. “New target running right, get him.”

“Tracking,” the gunner said, but it was too late — the monster dove through the window of a gothic, white-stone apartment building.

The pilot looked down the road, to the approaching fire engine. Another monster there, rushing headlong toward the battered vehicle. The creature was too close to it: chain gun fire would also hit the truck.

The Apache pilot slowed to a stop and hovered, just thirty feet above the park.

“Wait for targets of opportunity,” he said. “Be careful, we can’t hit our people.”

“Affirmative,” the gunner said. “Should we elevate and hit that mob chasing them?”

“Negative,” the pilot said. “Those assholes are already taken care of.”

Fire Engine 98 vibrated as if it was driving on an endless road of deep potholes. The motor finally died. The truck rumbled along on momentum alone.

Clarence heard the newly energized roar of the trailing mob — they saw their opportunity to finish the task.

He turned to look forward. Ahead, clouds of smoke floated up from shredded bodies and mangled motorcycles. A yellow-skinned behemoth rushed straight for them.

“Klimas, your knife!”

The SEAL offered it up handle-first. Clarence took it, saw that Klimas had a blood-covered hand pressed hard against the side of his neck.

“Tim! Help Klimas!”

Clarence felt the cabin shudder from impact, heard the
crunch
of breaking glass, the deep-throated growl of a monster and the scream of a man.

He slid up and onto the cabin’s roof, hands and legs spread wide to try to stay on the still-lurching vehicle. He slid forward across the slick, eight-foot-long, bullet-ridden surface.

Clarence looked up in time to see the engine bearing down on the motorcycles, the bodies and the sidewalk and park just beyond them. The truck ground over the obstacles, hitting so hard the cab bounced up, throwing him into the air. He came down hard, face
smacking
against the pockmarked metal. The knife flew from his hand.

The truck’s front end plowed into the snow and dirt and grass … the knife skittered across the roof … Clarence pushed forward. The knife slid off the cabin’s edge … Clarence reached out and down.

He caught it.

Half hanging over the roof, he looked into the cabin, saw a broad, yellowish back on top of concave spider-webbed glass, and the flailing, bloody hands of the man trapped beneath.

Fire Engine 98 finally rolled to a stop.

Clarence raised the Ka-Bar knife high. He plunged it down into the monster’s neck.

The thing barked out a noise of confusion, surprise and pain, a single syllable that could have been a question mark. It reared up hard and fast, its head crunching into the cabin roof right below Clarence’s waist, knocking Clarence up and forward and off — the frozen ground came up fast and smacked him in the face.

Cooper Mitchell had still
been facing out the back of the truck and flipping off the horde when Engine 98 hit the motorcycles and the sidewalk curb. The truck had decelerated quite suddenly — Cooper had not. He’d flown across the truck’s bed, stopping only when his head smashed into the water cannon’s metal post.

Tim’s hands pressed on
Klimas’s neck. To his right, Cooper rolled weakly, clutching the back of his head, face screwed up tight.

“Mitchell,
get up
,” Tim said. “The helicopters are here!”

Tim heard the roar of a crowd; he looked back — the horde was rushing in, weapons held high, blades glinting in the morning sun. Not even fifty meters away and closing fast.

He took his hands off Klimas’s neck, slid one arm under the man’s legs, the other behind his back. There wasn’t time to do things right. Tim pushed up as hard as he could, groaning with effort as he tried to lift the heavy man onto the equipment boxes and dump him over the edge.

The horde closed in. They could see the red truck that they had chased across the city, now just fifty yards away. So close … 
so close
. The humans had sprayed them with water. Such a strange thing to do, but the Chosen would dry out soon enough.

The Chosen knew the motorcycles had carried their emperor. As they ran, they shouted to each other, in shock, in sadness.

He’s dead!

The emperor got shot!

No way he lived through that!

Few of them had met the emperor, but they all remembered the emperor’s final order: kill Cooper Mitchell.

Forty yards …

They saw a small man push a bigger man over the edge of the truck. The bigger man fell hard to the ground below. The small man leaped over the side.

Thirty yards …

They saw another man stand up in the back of the truck, swaying, confused, his hands clutching the back of his head.

As a unit, they all recognized the man. They had all seen the pictures, and many of them had watched the video. It was him:
Cooper Mitchell, public enemy number one
.

The horde let out a unified roar. They had him now. They rushed down the street, so many of them that the humans didn’t stand a chance.

Twenty yards …

The AC-130 was too
high up for the engines to be heard. So far away, in fact, that the horde didn’t even hear the plane’s guns go off.

The street transformed into a flashing hell as 1,800 rounds per minute of 25-millimeter high-explosive fire tore into bodies, vehicles and pavement.