Sleep Tight (38 page)

 

They kept Tommy pinned to the ground, a boot on his head. When he’d been pushed to the sidewalk, he’d had a quick flash of everyone kneeling down behind the wall of sandbags. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that Grace and Phil were somewhere behind him, fifteen to twenty feet back down the wall. Kimmy too. Tommy tried to concentrate.

How many soldiers?

He couldn’t remember. He tried to twist his head slightly, feeling the grit of the concrete grind into the side of his face, just to count the boots. The pressure on his skull was unrelenting. When the soldier felt him trying to move, the weight increased. Black stars bloomed and popped in front of his eyes.

Maybe a dozen soldiers. Maybe.

All he could really see was that the smoke was really pouring out of the subway tunnels now, obscuring everything in an acrid mist. He didn’t think he could hear anything over the thunder of the helicopter, but he recognized the brief burst of shooting across the street, back toward City Hall.

“It’s done!” Phil called out. “Let’s go!”

More gunfire.

The soldiers paused. Maybe one of the prisoners wasn’t quite dead, and that could explain the second round of shooting. They watched the trucks lined up along City Hall. For a moment, nothing moved but the smoke rising from underground. Then more gunfire, this time long and sustained. Someone was emptying a clip. Then, incredibly, even more firing.

Tommy rolled his eyes, trying to see how the soldiers were reacting. Several pairs of boots gathered, and he could hear them arguing. The crack from a single shot echoed across the plaza and was lost in the roar of the helicopter. Tommy barely heard it. But he felt the sudden release as the boot squashing his face against the sidewalk was suddenly gone. He twisted slightly and saw the soldier falling askew over the sandbag wall.

The soldiers around him opened up, sending a long, continuous barrage at the trucks across Clark. The gunfire even drowned out the Sikorsky for a quick second. Curved ammunition magazines hit the sidewalk around Tommy, bouncing and hollow. Fresh, full clips were slammed into place in the soldiers’ rifles.

Several soldiers started back across Clark.

Tommy eased into a sitting position, when he felt a hot barrel against the back of his head. “Sit still, or I will kill you outright, I shit you not,” a voice yelled above him.

Tommy froze.

Another burst of gunfire. This time it came from farther up Clark, halfway to Randolph. Another soldier fell. The rest responded, drenching the area with bullets. More clips hit the cement and more soldiers started drifting across the street.

Tommy glanced to his right. Only three soldiers crouched between him and his daughter. He could take them, but he wasn’t sure he would survive. And if he couldn’t get his daughter out of the city, then she would die as well. He curled his toes, flexed the muscles in his legs, and waited for a chance.

 

 

Five soldiers crept across Clark. Their rifles were up and ready, eyes alert, sweeping through the thickening smoke. Their boots were silent, hard rubber on pavement. A flickering flash of gunfire exploded from between two of the M939s. One of the soldiers went down. The rest answered immediately, squeezing triggers until the clips were empty.

Another single shot. Another soldier down.

More empty clips dropped. More full magazines were slapped into place.

More shooting. But this time, it came from a totally different direction.

A group of five or six soldiers erupted from the subway steps. They turned as one and fired back down into the subway. One of them suddenly noticed the giant Sikorsky, empty and waiting, in the middle of Daley Plaza. He punched the nearest soldier and pointed. They backed out of the stairs as one and bolted for the chopper.

Phil saw this and screamed, “Stop! Stop! That’s ours!” He sat up on the berm, pulled the girl up by her hair and flung her over the other side. He ran after the soldiers, dragging Grace along. The Sikorsky could seat over thirty passengers, but Phil was afraid it would leave without him. When he got close to the blades he turned and screamed back at Tommy and the remaining soldiers, “Come on! Run!” His hand was starting to cramp on him, so he wound his other hand through Grace’s hair and squeezed.

He flexed his first hand for a while, watching as two soldiers popped out and ran toward him. The soldiers fleeing from the subway started shouting at them. One of the soldiers from the Sikorsky shook his head and gestured at the circle of lights. The subway soldiers didn’t like it, but they took up posts halfway between the spinning blades and the circle of lights.

The soldier in charge jogged over to Phil. “Where’s the patient?”

Phil pointed back at Tommy, who was being pushed over the wall. For a minute, they had to drag him along, but only because he thought Grace was still back behind the berm. When he saw her with Phil near the chopper, he straightened up and walked on his own. The soldiers were content to follow him peacefully, keeping their guns aimed at the ground, as long as he was headed in the right direction.

The soldier nodded and jerked his head back at the chopper. Phil took that as a signal to get onboard, so he pulled Grace with him and climbed through the single door. Inside, an aisle ran up through the rows of seats, three on one side, two on the other. He dragged Grace up to the first row behind the cockpit and threw the girl into the seat nearest the window.

Phil stuck his head into the cockpit. “Soon as the patient is onboard, we’re out of here, you got me?” He left before the pilot could answer and went back down the aisle and stood in the doorway. Tommy was making his way across the plaza, getting closer to the whipping blades, but still moving unbelievably slow.

“Hurry the fuck up!” Phil yelled. His words were lost in the wash of the rotors. No matter. Tommy would be inside the chopper within thirty seconds, and they would be safely in the air, leaving all the shooting and infection and death beneath them. They would deliver Tommy to Dr. Reischtal, and Phil and Lee could take their rightful place in the media as heroes of the pandemic.

Phil was just beginning to bask in the glow of the anticipated admiration, and yes, even awe, when the lights of the city disappeared, plunging Chicago into near total darkness.

Every light surrounding the plaza winked out, and the only illumination left came from the blue flashing lights of the Sikorsky. The soldiers let loose with a few panicked bursts of gunfire, then stopped when they realized they couldn’t see anything. The soldier closest to Tommy said, “Oh . . . you fucking, oh fuck . . .”

Tommy guessed one of the fires or explosions in the subways had fried one of the ComEd transformer stations. It had happened before, leaving most of the Loop without power for a summer afternoon. Beyond that, he ignored the darkness, focusing only on Grace, somewhere on that chopper. It was lit up like an angry, monochromatic Christmas tree, settled in the middle of Daley Plaza and none too happy about it.

As he got closer though, Tommy faced the stark realization that once he was onboard, it would be over. Once he was inside, they would continue to use Grace against him. He was back where he started, powerless while they threatened his daughter.

He ducked under the massive spinning blades, crept to the doorway, and stopped. He’d gotten far enough ahead of the soldiers that he could afford to sit and wait a moment.

Phil stuck his head out and saw Tommy just standing there. It drove Phil crazy. “Get inside, now!”

“No,” Tommy said.

Phil pulled a snub-nosed .38 from his waistband. It looked like something an old-fashioned mobster would carry. Beyond five feet, it was about as accurate as a crumpled paper airplane. He’d be lucky to hit a tank if he was shooting from inside. Phil had waved away the teasing from his buddies at their dinners. “If I’m not up close enough to let this baby take care of a problem, then I deserve to die for being a dumb fuck.”

He shook the pistol at Tommy. “Get in here!”

“Go ahead. Shoot me,” Tommy said, knowing damn well that Phil wouldn’t.

Phil smiled. “Not gonna shoot you, asshole. I’m gonna shoot your fucking daughter.”

Lee came out of the darkness, struggling to pull away from the clutches of Kimmy. She was whimpering, begging for something. Lee ripped his arm out of her grasp. Lee had his own Glock out. He finally shoved it in her chest. “Stupid cunt, shut the fuck up.”

“Thank Christ,” Phil said and pointed at Tommy. “Get this cocksucker on board.”

Lee put the Glock back in his shoulder holster, hopped out of the chopper, and came in low. Tommy tried to pivot, tried to get his arms up, tried to follow the bigger man’s movements, but Tommy hadn’t had anything solid to eat in nearly four days, hadn’t gotten any decent sleep, and simply didn’t know enough about bare-knuckle brawling to stop Lee.

Lee hit Tommy twice, an easy left-right combination that knocked Tommy to the ground. Tommy tried to push himself off the cement, but Lee kicked him in the ribs. And just like that, the fight was finished.

Lee grabbed the back of Tommy’s scrubs and lifted him off the ground. Tommy struggled, but only managed to twist in Lee’s grasp, and clung weakly to Lee’s head and shoulders. He drew back one feeble fist, and Lee drove his own fist into Tommy’s stomach. The air exploded out of Tommy’s lungs and he collapsed in defeat, sliding his hands down Lee’s chest as he crumpled in half. He huddled on the ground, tears spilling down through the dust and grit on his cheeks.

Lee threw Tommy inside the helicopter, then climbed on after him. Kimmy followed.

Tommy tried to crawl down the aisle to reach Grace. Somewhere, he could hear his daughter screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” He kept crawling forward, head spinning, pain ricocheting through his body.

Shooting erupted outside.

It was the infected.

They came swarming out of the darkness, unheard over the throbbing rotors of the Sikorsky. The first soldiers saw them and started shooting immediately. The ear-shattering sound of the gunfire and the muzzle flashes drew the infected like moths to hot neon. They attacked with the speed of shadows, tearing the soldiers apart before the victims’ eyes could adjust to the darkness.

Those inside the helicopter stared out through the few tiny windows, but couldn’t see much beyond the incessant muzzle flashes as the fully automatic assault rifles ripped great swaths in the night, cutting down the infected by the dozens. But for every one that fell, another ten took their place. The soldiers tightened their perimeter, backing slowly to the Sikorsky, firing nonstop.

The infected got close enough that Lee could see them in the glow of the landing lights. He yelled up the cabin at Phil, “Oh, shit! They’re everywhere!”

Phil opened the cockpit door again, and said, “Go! Go!”

Something smashed the door into Phil’s head, stunning him enough that he dropped to his knees. His revolver fell to the floor.

 

 

Tommy was on his hands and knees, but he wasn’t helpless. He’d been waiting for his chance. So when Phil stuck his head in the cockpit door, Tommy launched himself at the door and drove his shoulder into it, slamming Phil’s head in the doorframe. As Phil dropped, Tommy came up and turned to catch Grace, who had leapt out of her seat and wrapped her arms around her daddy’s neck.

He rose to his feet and started back down the aisle.

Lee blocked his way. He smiled. “I’m gonna be there when that crazy fuck cuts into you. I want to watch the—”

Tommy didn’t have the time. He shifted Grace to the side, still holding her with his left hand, and pulled Lee’s Glock out of his waistband with his right. He’d slipped it out of Lee’s shoulder holster when Lee had been lifting him outside of the chopper. After faking the extent of the blow so he could curl up and slip it into his pants, he’d let himself be thrown onboard, keeping the pistol pinned to his hip with his elbow.

As he brought it up, there was just enough time for the expression on Lee’s face to crumble from a satisfied smirk to a narrowing of the eyes. He was reaching for his holster, as if to check if his handgun was still there, when Tommy shot him in the face at point-blank range.

Lee’s head snapped back and he fell flat into the aisle. Kimmy screamed, wiping at the blood on her face.

“Run!” Tommy yelled at her, not stopping, still coming down the aisle, stepping on Lee’s corpse. He heard movement behind him and started to turn, knowing that he was too slow, knowing that the bullet from Phil’s revolver was in on its way. He couldn’t believe Phil was upright so quickly.

But Phil was indeed standing up, wobbling and blinking through the pain. His nose had been smashed, and blood sheeted his upper lip, dribbling down over his mouth and pouring over his chin. “Mudderfugger,” he wheezed and squeezed off a shot with his stubby .38.

Tommy flinched at the report, but the blast went wide.

Phil started forward, blowing bubbles of blood, intent on getting close enough so he couldn’t miss. Tommy stumbled backwards, trying to shift Grace to the side so he could shield her with his own body. Phil fired again.

Tommy heard a harsh grunt and glanced over his shoulder at Kimmy. The slug had caught her in the neck. She dropped back into one of the flight crew’s bench seats, raised her hand to her throat. She looked down in surprise at the blood on her fingers.

Tommy had the Glock up now, fired twice, and missed both times.

Phil dove sideways behind a row of seats.

Tommy turned back and ran, jumping through the open doorway.

 

 

Outside, the soldiers were still learning the hard way how noise and light drew the infected. The soldiers ignored Tommy and Grace completely, intent on shooting at the rushing swarm. More soldiers were now escaping from the subway and once they saw the chopper, they went sprinting for it across the plaza.

Metal scraped across metal. About fifteen yards down Washington, a manhole cover popped out of its groove and slid into the street. Soldiers immediately lunged out, crawling feverishly onto the street. Most were unarmed, having lost their weapons below. As soon as they found their feet, they broke out running in all directions. Some saw the chopper and broke for it.

Tommy stayed low and kept moving, holding Grace tight on his hip, running like a fullback weaving and dodging through the defensive linemen. He reached the sandbag wall on the western side of the plaza and dropped to his knees, crouching, covering Grace with his body. Her emotions had caught up to her and she started to cry. He put his lips against her ears and whispered, “Shhhh, shhhh. It’s okay. Daddy’s got you now. Daddy’s got you. Shhh. Shhhh.”

Behind him, the sound of the Sikorsky’s rotors changed pitch. The pilots had finally decided enough was enough, and they were pulling out. The massive engines whined, and the tree-length blades sliced through the air, slow at first, then faster and faster as the last of the soldiers scrambled on board. More soldiers ran into Daley Plaza every second, bursting out of more manhole covers and the shadows surrounding Washington and Clark. But the CH-53K wasn’t waiting. Lights flashed as the chopper lifted into the air like a constipated dragonfly, moving slowly, weaving slightly, having trouble putting distance between itself and the ground.

Some of the soldiers started shooting at the ascending helicopter. The panic had slipped into anger that quickly; if they couldn’t get a lift out, if the chopper wouldn’t wait for them, then fuck it, no one was getting out. At least two of the squads carried a rocket launcher and fired them. They missed two out of three times. The third time, the first rocket caught the helicopter right in the guts, and vaporized seven of the soldiers inside.

The CH-53K was blown sideways, tail up, nose at the rushing ground. The pilot fought against being blown head over heels, a death spasm for this helicopter. The blades, seventy-nine feet long, whipped through the air at eight hundred feet per second. The pilot brought the nose up but couldn’t manage to stay in the middle of the street.

Phil spent the last seconds of his life trying to get out of his seat belt. He thought if he could just get out of the seat and move to the back of the helicopter he could survive the crash. He tried, but couldn’t manage to compress the right buttons in his panic and stayed trapped in his seat. Not that it would have mattered in the end.

The pilot had almost leveled off when the blades smacked through the glass and concrete of one of the theater buildings to the east. One of the four blades caught fast on a steel beam in the building’s fourteenth floor, and in less time then it takes to blink, the rest of the blades snapped into the beam and it was all over. The chopper whipped around as if it was slapping the building with its tail rotors. The fuel didn’t catch until it was halfway down the building, tumbling and bouncing down the side of the wall of glass, and it finally exploded. The wreckage slammed into the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks, sending burning fuel across the street in a blazing sunflower display. The impact blew an angry huff of wind back through the streets.

 

 

Dr. Reischtal watched it all unfold on the two monitors fed by the Apaches. The Sikorsky’s explosion blew out the infrared cameras and the images dissolved in a bright blast of green light.

Dr. Reischtal didn’t move. He watched the chaos without expression.

A few seconds later, the heat died away, and he could once again see how the plaza had been overrun. It was impossible to discern the soldiers from the infected. He kept searching for a figure carrying a child. This individual was all that mattered now. He wanted, no
needed
, to see the figure surrounded and attacked, to watch the infected hack Tommy Krazinsky and his daughter into pieces, to witness the man and the girl being ripped limb from limb.

He couldn’t find them.

Perhaps it was time to inform the president. Chicago was lost.

He dialed the number. Waited for the ring. Instead, there was just a dull click. Then nothing. He dialed it again. Same result. Dr. Reischtal left his phone face up on the table, stretched out his palms, curled his fingers into claws, then pulled them back to him, scraping his short fingernails across the plastic. The president was either too busy to answer, or was avoiding him.

Either way, it didn’t change anything.

Chicago was still finished.

He called Evans.

“Just got through,” Evans said. “Damn near there. Give us half an hour, forty-five minutes to get clear. I’ll call you as soon as we’re all topside.”

Dr. Reischtal said, “Of course,” and hung up. Evans had twelve trucks with him. They would provide the initial blast, sending death up through the underground caverns and subway tunnels. Three more tankers had been left in the massive parking garage under Millennium Park, at the north end of Grant Park. Six more had been spaced out along Lower Wacker, covering the north and west sides of the Loop.

If three trucks had been enough to utterly destroy Soldier Field, over twenty would vaporize most of downtown Chicago, and the tankers full of 2-4-5 Trioxin interspersed with the rest of the explosives would extinguish every form of carbon-based life within the blast radius.

Unlike Soldier Field, where only three trucks had to be synced, this would involve linking at least twenty-four trucks. It was time to begin. Dr. Reischtal dialed the number to start the arming process.

 

 

The fireball from the Sikorsky wreckage had drawn infected from all over the city. Most of them were infested with bedbugs. The bugs crawled through their hair, in and out of noses. Sometimes bugs would cluster in groups and feed, usually down around the corners of the mouth in a frozen, scaly scab of thirty or forty. Some of the freshly infected were still shambling around in a drunken haze. Not enough blood had been taken to steal consciousness and the victim could only fight to stay upright while coughing bugs out of their lungs and brushing them away from their eyeballs, surrendering the rest of their skin.

For the most part, the infected ignored Tommy and Grace, focusing instead on the fireball to the northeast. They flowed through the smoke across Daley Plaza, sometimes howling and gibbering with rage at the flickering light and erratic spurts of gunfire still chattering around the streets, as the soldiers fled in all directions.

Tommy watched a young blond woman, who might have been attractive once, stagger past. Her skin was blotchy and swollen. Bugs crawled up her neck. A pair of bloody panties was still clinging around one ankle. It didn’t take much imagination to see how Tommy and Grace would be transformed, and how they would become a slave to the virus.

Tommy whispered to Grace, “We’re gonna play a game, okay? We’re gonna be as quiet as we can, okay? Remember that movie where the girl went sneaking around her house, ’cause she didn’t want to get caught? That’s us, baby. We’re gonna be quiet, right?”

Grace nodded.

Tommy held her tight and breathed into her ear, “Good girl.” He eased over the sandbags and moved slowly toward City Hall. As long as they were quiet and kept their distance, it didn’t even appear that the infected even saw them. It didn’t look like they could see much beyond their own agony anyway.

Tommy crouched next to the stage and looked for the square, heavy packets the soldiers had taken earlier. There, up near the podium. Tommy set Grace down and said, “Okay, little girl. You climb under there for just a minute and hide. I’m going up on top of this just for a minute and I can’t crawl and carry you. I just gotta grab these two important things, and I’ll be right back. You stay still. And quiet.”

Grace nodded, putting her finger to her lips. Tommy kissed her forehead and wriggled across the stage. He had one packet and was reaching for the second when he heard Grace scream.

In the street behind him, not ten feet from where Grace hid, one of the soldiers from the subways dropped to his knees and pulled out a knife out of his belt. He must have been freshly infected and the awful itching was upon him. Weeping, he twisted the blade across his skull, sawing it back and forth in a desperate effort to satiate the horrible sensation. His sobbing rose into a moan and he drove the knife blade into his armpit, scraping it back and forth.

She watched this, couldn’t hold back the terror, and screamed.

Before Tommy knew what was even happening, one of the infected was already on his knees, crawling under the stage to reach Grace. She screamed even louder. The infected, a middle-aged man in a suit, stretched out and clawed at the girl. Bugs flitted across his face, wiggling in and out of his ears and collar. They covered his back and spilled out of his shoes.

Tommy scrabbled back across the stage, realizing that he wouldn’t make it in time.

Suddenly, Qween was there, grabbing the man’s ankles and dragging him away. She pulled him across the pavement, dropped his legs, and tried to catch her breath as he howled at her and rolled over. She kicked him in the head, avoiding the bugs that spilled off of him.

But she wasn’t fast enough to avoid the bug that latched onto the back of her hand. And by the time she spotted it in the flickering light from the flames across the plaza, it was too late. The thing had already driven its proboscis into her skin and was drinking her blood when she smashed it with her thumb. She flicked it into the street.

She tucked the thoughts and panic away and let her eyes go soft. She knelt and peered under the stage at Grace. “Now, now, baby girl, don’t fret none. Miss Qween is here, and nothin’s gonna hurt you.”