Pandemic Page 123

Something … huge.

He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words. .h.i.t his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.

“What the f.u.c.k is that? Cooper, what the f.u.c.k 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 b.l.o.o.d.y and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.

The five people started to eat.

I am not seeing this … I am not f.u.c.king seeing this …

A tug on his coat.

“Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the h.e.l.l 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.

TIPPING POINT

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.

Philadelphia: 9,000% increase in cough suppressants

Lexington: huge spikes in purchases of fever reducer

Fayetteville: All stores sold out of pain relievers

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.

COOPER’S CHOICE

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, G.o.ddamit!”

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 gla.s.s — 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 …