Contagious (45 page)

“Ah, you can talk,” Montoya said. “That’s great. Do you think you can answer a couple of questions about how you feel?”
Sanchez nodded.
Your thoughts feel very weak, Mr. Sanchez. I’m not sure you’ll be of much use to us.
“So try to take a deep breath for me,” Montoya said.
“Maybe . . . not,” Sanchez said.
“Maybe not what?” Montoya said. “You can’t take a deep breath?”
Well then, Mister Sanchez, the people who are with you are very bad. What should we do about this?
“Kill me,” Sanchez said.
“Mister Sanchez, we’re not going to kill you. You’re going to make it.”
I understand. We are on our way.
He turned his head to look up at the woman. He smiled at her. “She’s . . . coming,” he said. “Isn’t that . . . nice?”
Montoya leaned back, away from him. She suddenly looked guarded, afraid. “Who’s coming?”
“Ch . . . Ch . . . Chelsea.”
He didn’t see her hand move, but he felt gloved fingers on his jaw, forcing his mouth open.
“No,” Montoya said. She sounded like she might cry.
“No.”
“Margaret, what is it?”
A man’s voice. God would probably kill him, too.
“His tongue,” Montoya said. “Blue spots, he’s got it.”
“Get to the decon chamber and wait for me,” the man said. “Move.”
Sanchez heard footsteps, a door open, then a little farther away a bigger door open. It was all kind of a whirl. He hurt
soooooo
bad, and his brain wouldn’t process things fast enough.
I’m sorry you can’t join us, Mister Sanchez, but you really helped out, because we’ve been looking for the bad people who are doing this to you.
“I’m . . . glad,” he said.
Another black suit on his left. Bigger. A black man inside. A black man with a broken front tooth. Pointing a pistol.
“I’m sorry about this,” the man said.
Sanchez saw a flash, and then he was gone.
12:35 P.M.: On the Road Again
Margaret waited in the decontamination chamber for Clarence. She knew what he was going to do, and she knew that it would only take a couple of seconds.
She needed out. She just wanted to go home to her apartment in Cincinnati. She wanted to spend way too much for a Starbucks and sit down and read
People
or
US Weekly,
something truly brain-dead, because she wanted to
be
brain-dead.
Maybe she already was.
Her brain didn’t seem to amount for much anymore. It hadn’t saved Amos. It hadn’t saved Betty Jewell or Bernadette Smith. And it hadn’t saved Officer Carmen Sanchez.
Too much death. Too much failure.
Clarence entered the decon chamber and closed the airlock door behind him. She activated the spray. Thanks to her earpiece, she could hear Clarence’s orders despite the high-pressure spray.
“Dan, get outside, back of Trailer A,” Clarence said. “Gitsh, Marcus, we’re out of here. Check north, up by the tractors. Make sure no one is coming down the old train tracks.
“Got it,” Marcus said.
Margaret shut off the spray, then opened the other door. Seconds later, dripping with bleach, they both walked out of the trailer and into the shade of the overpass. Dan was standing there in his biohazard suit, holding a pistol, looking scared.
“Okay,” Clarence said. “We’re going to walk out the way we drove in and head for the water. There we only have to watch for attacks from three sides. I’ll take point. Gitsh and Marcus, you’ve got the rear. Dan, you’re in the middle with—”
Gitsh’s voice, urgent and sharp in her earpiece, cut off Clarence in midsentence.
“Company!”
Gunfire erupted, amplified by the overpass’s brick walls. Margaret’s arms flew up around her head, an instinctive reaction, a panicked reaction. A hand grabbed her wrist, yanking her into a run.
Sunlight. She came out the far side of the underpass before she even knew that it was Clarence who’d pulled her along.
“Margaret,
come on
!”
Breath locked in her throat; she stumbled, then regained her feet and ran. That put the sound of gunfire behind her.
In front of her, below the next underpass, two cars. A compact and a convertible. Just people looking for a place to hide, probably, but apparently Clarence didn’t want to find out for sure.
“This way!” he yelled, then he turned right and started sprint-climbing up the steep, tree-spotted, snowy-dirt slope. Margaret followed, arms pulling, legs pumping, heart hammering.
A hissing sound from behind.
Then a shattering roar.
She looked back—a ball of fire and smoke billowed out from the underpass, so thick she couldn’t even see the MargoMobiles.
A hand on her ass, pushing her.
“Move!” Daniel said. “They’ve got fucking rockets!”
She scrambled up the hill, knees grinding into the dirt and rocks until she remembered the hazmat suit, and then she ran on feet and hands only. Sharp bits poked through the PVC into her palms and fingers, but she could tape those later. They reached the black fence on top of the incline. Her gloved fingers clawed at the rubber-coated chain-link, and she swung over the top before she even knew what she was doing.
More gunshots from behind. Things whizzing past her head.
Daniel crying out.
Margaret pushed off the fence and hit the ground hard. She stood and looked around. White building, Ford dealership. Behind her, the fence, behind that . . . Daniel, rolling limply back down the incline.
Clarence’s hard grip on her wrist again. “Move!”
They ran away from the dealership and into an eight-lane road choked with bumper-to-bumper traffic. No buildings on the other side of the street—an empty lot to the left and a parking lot to the right. Some people were looking out of their car windows, but most had heard the explosion or seen the rising smoke and were already abandoning their vehicles, sprinting for cover anywhere they could find it.
Margaret finally regained her balance and yanked her hand away from Clarence.
“Just go. I’ll keep up. What about Gitsh and Marcus?”
“Dead,” Clarence said. “And Dan took a round in the head. He’s gone.”
They skirted cars and ran into the half-empty parking lot ringed with trees growing up through the asphalt. On the far side, they hopped a smaller fence and found themselves on a cobblestone street, old bricks bumping under the soles of their thick biohazard boots. Two blocks straight ahead, across yet more tree-dotted, wreckage-strewn vacant lots, she saw an abandoned three-story brick building. Faded white letters on faded blue paint at the top of the building spelled out GLOBE TRADING COMPANY. She started toward it, then stopped when Clarence again grabbed her.
“No, don’t,” he said. “Look at the bottom there, by the corner.”
She did and saw two men in army uniforms running out of the building. A second later, two more.
“They have men stationed in there,” Clarence said. “That’s their fucking headquarters for all we know. We gotta get out of here. Come on!”
People ran in all directions. It wasn’t the screaming sprint of a monster movie, but rather silent running, people moving fast in a half-crouch, looking every which way for the next threat. Margaret and Clarence must have appeared to be such a threat, because one glance at them sent people running the opposite way.
Margaret and Clarence ran left down the old brick road, putting the abandoned lot and the Globe building beyond it on their right. She heard gunfire behind her again—the men who’d killed Gitsh, Marcus, and Dr. Dan, they were giving chase. Shit-shit-
shit,
was this how her life would end? A bullet in the back?
The road changed from bumpy brick to bumpy pavement. On their right a red brick building, one story, loading-dock doors open. Clarence aimed for it.
Margaret was already exhausted. “Where are we
going
?”
“Away from the bullets.” Clarence stopped at the loading dock, lifted her by her waist and set her on the ledge, then hopped up behind her.
“Just run, Margo. We have to find a place to hide or we’re dead.”
12:38 P.M.: Corporal Cope’s Big Day Out
The convoy roared down I-75. Three Humvees, followed by two M939 five-ton troop trucks, followed by two more Humvees. With that much heavy vehicle ripping along at ninety miles an hour, cars just got the hell out of the left lane and let the convoy roar by. Farmland spread out on either side, snow covering the broken remnants of last year’s crops. Beyond the fields, rows of trees, at least a quarter mile from the highway. Beautiful scenery.
Corporal Cope rode in the third Hummer, feeling his connection with God. Soon they would see the glorious gateway and, God willing, would be there when the angels came through.
God, it seemed, was not willing.
The lead Humvee suddenly morphed from a hardy piece of military gear into an orange blossom of fire, spewing bits of metal and body parts all over the highway. The explosion engulfed a slow-moving VW Beetle in the right lane, and sent part of a rear axle through the windshield of the Ford Explorer directly behind it.
The second Humvee swerved to the right, around both the suddenly tumbling Explorer and the newly burning Beetle. The Hummer driver showed amazing reaction time, but at ninety miles an hour the heavy vehicle quickly lost traction. Its rear end fishtailed, making it almost perpendicular with the road when the wheels dug in and it flipped violently, barrel-rolling into the ditch. Cope saw a freeze-frame image of a man thrown free, already missing an arm and part of a leg.
Cope’s driver swerved into the left shoulder, past the still-moving, burning wreck of the lead Hummer. If this had been Iraq, with insurgent-launched rockets raining down from rooftops, hitting the gas would have been the right thing to do. But this wasn’t Iraq, and here hitting the gas just made Cope’s Hummer the lead vehicle—the primary target.
“Stop this thing!” Cope shouted at his driver. “We’re sitting ducks!”
The Hummer’s brakes hit hard, throwing Cope forward.
“Go-go-go!”
Cope screamed. “Get to cover!”
He jumped out the passenger door and started sprinting. He looked up at the sky to see what was killing his people. Apache Longbow attack helicopters. Compact, dark shapes, like flying tanks with that signature radar dome sticking up above the blurring rotor blades.
He was in some deep shit.
As he ran off the pavement and onto the right shoulder, he looked back to his Hummer. Private Bates hadn’t jumped out. Instead, Bates had turned the M249 turret, trying to return fire. The man didn’t even have time to pull the trigger before a Hellfire missile slammed home. The Hummer erupted in a semi-trailer-size fireball. The blast threw Cope into the ditch on the side of the road. He hit hard, but adrenaline drove him on—he scrambled to his feet and up the five-foot-high slope of the ditch’s far side.
In front of him, a snow-covered cornfield, irregular white spotted with knee-high, rotting-yellow stalks. At least a hundred yards to the trees.
Cope snapped another quick look around him. A few soldiers were sprinting across the fields, headed for the woods. On the road behind him, tall black columns of smoke rose into the air. Five Hummers, two trucks, all destroyed. Looked more like the road to Baghdad than a Michigan highway.
All this open space. If the Apaches’ pilots couldn’t see him in the afternoon sun, they’d just lock on with infrared targeting—a soldier’s body heat stood out clearly against frozen ground.
A trap. This was a kill point. The Apaches had been waiting, probably just out of sight behind a hill.
He had no chance.
He ran anyway.
Thirty yards to his right, another soldier running. A wavering line of glowing red reached out toward the man, like some science-fiction death ray—tracer rounds from an Apache’s thirty-millimeter chain gun. The rounds erupted when they hit the ground, harsh explosions launching man-size clods of frozen dirt and smoke. The initial shots went wide, but in a fraction of a second the red death ray closed the gap—the soldier exploded in a literal cloud of blood.
Corporal Jeff Cope kept sprinting.
He’d made it almost fifteen yards when he heard a roar on his left. He turned and saw the tracer-round death ray plowing a path toward him.
He didn’t even have time to look away.
12:39 P.M.: We Be Jammin’
She could feel them dying. Her soldiers, her protectors. The enemy was too powerful, too many devils out to stop her.
Chelsea Jewell began to realize that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to Chauncey. Should have listened to General Ogden.
But that didn’t matter.
She still had Mommy.
Together they could build a new network, a
bigger
network—one that would eventually spread all over the whole planet.
The gate to heaven?
Fuck the gate to heaven. Fuck the angels.
Bad words, she knew, but not really, because God decides what is bad and good. God
can’t
do anything bad.
Chelsea didn’t need the angels. If she escaped, she could use the Legos to make her
own
angels.
If
she escaped. And that was a big
if
, because the boogeyman was coming.
If he found her, nothing mattered. She had to block him.
Block him . . . or maybe
control
him.
She could do that, she knew she could. She could make him do things. And who could be a better protector than the boogeyman?
Still, she didn’t want it to come to that. She didn’t want to face him. Killing him had sounded like fun when he was a long ways away. Now that he was so close, none of this was fun anymore.
12:40 P.M.: Landing Field
Dew held the satphone to his right ear. He covered his left ear with his left hand and leaned his head forward, his belly pressing into the camouflage helmet sitting on his lap.
“Yeah,” he said. “Look, Murray, we can secure whatever area you want when we land, but first you have to find us a spot to put down.”
Perry couldn’t get comfortable. They’d found him a flak jacket and a helmet. He was used to not having anything in his size, so he found it odd when both fit. The helmet in particular would take some getting accustomed to. It had a microphone mounted on the side, connected to a little push-to-talk switch clipped to his vest. Small speakers mounted inside let him hear the tinny voices of soldiers preparing for the coming fight. Some were joking, some were serious, but up and down the facing rows of seats they all looked very pissed off. They’d lost friends during X-Ray Company’s sneak attack. Most of the conversation revolved around finding Ogden and what they would do to him when they did. The men had also offered Perry an M4, but Dew said Perry would stick with the .45, and that was that.