And past the gate, a white and brown Winnebago. From inside, even through the jamming, he sensed the infected.
“She’s in there,” Perry said, and pointed.
Dew shouldered his M4 and opened up on the Winnebago. Within seconds, four other men unloaded on it as well. Shiny dots appeared as bullets tore through the thin walls. One tire popped, then another.
Dew stopped firing and put in a fresh magazine.
“Secure the building!” Nails called. “No prisoners, make sure they’re dead, and do not touch the bodies. And find Ogden! I want to piss on his fucking corpse.”
The men spread out.
Perry walked right under the gate toward the Winnebago. Behind him he heard Dew.
“Murray, we have the building, abort bomb run,” Dew said. “Repeat, abort bomb run, keep the F-15s on-station, just in case. We’ll rig the gate to blow manually.”
Perry kept walking. He held his .45 tight but was careful to keep his finger off the trigger. The Winnebago had so many holes it looked darkly comical. He stepped toward the small side door.
Blood leaked from it.
Dew kept shouting. “Nails! I want C-4 at the base of every arch, and don’t be stingy with it on those other parts.”
Perry stared at the blood dripping from the bottom of the RV’s door, lightly pattering onto the dirty, cracked concrete below.
More commotion behind him, Nails screaming, men yelling back and forth, but little of it registered in Perry’s thoughts.
He still sensed that other presence, but barely—the jamming had grown during the firefight, so bad now that it was almost all gray again.
This was it. It had to be.
He opened the bullet-ridden door and looked inside.
A body, but not Chelsea. A man in a postal worker’s uniform, dead and still oozing blood onto crinkled plastic that partially covered the narrow floor.
Perry leaned over the body and quickly looked around.
Chelsea wasn’t there.
No, no-no-no …Chelsea had been the moving signal. She was gone.
“Perry!” Dew yelled. “Get your ass out here!”
Perry shut the door and turned back to the others.
The gate was glowing, like white frosted glass illuminated by countless tiny, slow-moving, high-powered bulbs. It lit up the warehouse interior, filling it with a beautiful glow.
Perry walked up to the gate. He could already feel the heat. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. A biological jewel glowing with light drawn from a million stars. Texture like a rough tree trunk. A smell like leftover barbecue. Emotions of love, admiration, even awe, they rolled through him, too strong to deny.
Perry saw it, felt it and sensed it all at the same time. The vibration. The opening. The spongy green door from his dreams of six weeks ago, an eternity ago. A connection from infinite distance, the threads of the universe binding, entwining, coalescing into something that blended all existence. Purity.
“Nails, how much longer?” Dew said. “It’s one-fourteen. This thing opens up in sixty seconds.”
“Almost there, sir!”
Perry stroked the gate one last time. It wouldn’t be long now. He left his hand there, feeling the growing heat.
“Okay, it’s ready!” Nails screamed. “Moooove out! Go-go-go-go-go!”
Men sprinted out of the ware house. Perry marveled at their energy, their intensity. Someone hit him on the shoulder.
“Stop staring at their asses, kid,” Dew said. “Let’s go.”
Dew hobble-sprinted toward the door. Perry followed, barely needing to jog to keep up. They ran out and across the field. He tried to concentrate as he ran, concentrate on the fading sensation that had to be Chelsea Jewell. What direction? He couldn’t tell.
Nails’s men squatted in a wide, loose circle, each man facing out, guns at the ready. Nails pulled a small black plastic clicker from his breast pocket.
“Fire in the hole,” he said, then clicked the clicker three times.
The walls of 1801 Atwater blasted outward at the base. The last surviving bits of glass shattered, along with the plywood that covered most of the windows. Pieces of the roof shot into the sky, trailed by thick tendrils of expanding black smoke. The building collapsed upon itself, hundred-year-old brick walls falling in and down. A second later, rolling smoke and dust billowed out, obscuring everything.
“Holy shit,” one of the men said, laughing. “That’s awesome.”
“Crap,” Dew said. “I sure hope there’s nothing contagious in this dust.”
He pulled out his satphone. “We got it, Murray.”
Perry felt her, just a bit, the last trailing of sensation. Chelsea. Moving, still blocking him…
…then she was gone.
And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he’d never get her back, not unless she wanted it to happen. She had become too powerful.
“I lost her,” Perry said. “I lost Chelsea.”
Margaret crouched at the base of a small abandoned building, watching dust roil through the air around her. A block away, the Globe building had just exploded and collapsed, sending a thick dust cloud rolling through the abandoned lots. She wondered if the cloud carried the contagion—but she and Clarence were safe in their suits. The sticky tape on her hands would keep the glove cuts sealed. A white-trash version of BSL-4 safety, but it worked nonetheless.
Clarence moved along the sidewalk. His right shoulder stayed close to the graffiti-covered brick wall, but he didn’t touch it—she had warned him about sliding across anything, even leaning on things for cover should he wind up in a shoot-out. The tough hazmat suit could still tear if dragged across any jagged metal.
Helicopters soared overhead, guns fired, explosions made the ground vibrate—war had come to Detroit.
Clarence peeked around the corner. He watched for a few seconds, then reached back and gently pulled her hand, urging her forward until she could see for herself. Down the block, on the other side of the intersection, stood yet another abandoned building. A corner unit, battered front door opening out at an angle toward the intersection of Franklin and Riopelle. Light gray, two stories, boarded-up windows; it looked like an old restaurant or bar, maybe a corner store from decades past when this area had more buildings than abandoned lots.
“That’s where the gunmen took the hostages,” he said.
“What’s in there?”
“I don’t know. If the gate is gone, Ogden has to know it’s over, that he lost. He filled the building with hostages so we can’t drop a big fucking bomb on his ass.”
“Or maybe they’re trying to convert those people? Infect them?”
“Maybe,” Clarence said. “Maybe some of them, but it makes more sense to have regular people as hostages. Otherwise they have no negotiating power.”
“What do we do now?”
“We’ve got to get help. Listen, you watch where those soldiers went in, and don’t move. Ogden’s headquarters blew; our guys had to cause that. I’ll slide around to the other side of this building—the gunmen can’t spot me from there—see if I can flag down our guys and get them over here.”
Clarence slowly ducked away from the corner. Margaret knelt and watched. Every twenty seconds or so, a car drove through the settling dust, full of people hunting for a place to hide. When they saw her or Clarence, saw their biohazard suits, the cars instantly sped up to get away. The faces inside looked terrified, shell-shocked. Nothing she could do for these people, not without making a scene, making herself visible to the gunmen in the building across the street. She silently prayed that all the cars would just keep driving.