Once upon a time, a rotating glass door had kept out the Chicago winds. That, too, was nothing but shattered glass and twisted metal.
Clarence approached and stood next to her. The mask hid most of his face, but not his eyes. He looked at her with a pathetic expression of hurt and confusion.
It would be nice if she could kill Ramierez. But to murder Clarence? That wasn’t just a luxury — more and more, Margaret needed that as much as she needed to breathe.
Maybe her kind would descend upon this hotel and slaughter these soldiers. She would have them string Clarence up by his feet, cut him apart a piece at a time. She’d slice off his eyelids so he wouldn’t be able to look away as people smiled at him and ate those pieces.
She stared back at him, not wanting to give him any satisfaction at all, not wanting him to think that things were okay between them. Until she had a chance to kill him, she wanted him to hurt.
He turned away, walked into the hotel. Margaret smiled a little, then forced that down. She was still surrounded by the enemy. She had to be careful.
She heard gunshots from inside the hotel. She heard men yelling but couldn’t make out the words. Those sounds were lost as one of the helicopters roared overhead.
A bullet plinked into a car to her right. Then something hit her, knocked her face-first to the glass-strewn entryway, pinned her there — the soldiers realized she wasn’t one of them anymore, they were going to kill her, slide a knife into her back, they—
“Sniper,” Ramierez said. “Stay down, Doc.”
From high above, the helicopter let out a new noise, a short-but-intense demon’s roar. The faraway sound of tinkling glass smashing against concrete joined the cacophony.
Ramierez rolled off her, lifted her to her feet. He looked her up and down. “You okay, Doc?”
She nodded. “I think so.”
Broken glass, I was rolling on broken glass…
“Ramierez, do you see any cuts in my suit?”
He gave her a cursory glance. “The suits are thicker than that, Doc, you—”
“Just look!”
Ramierez nodded, then checked her all over — placatingly, but also thoroughly.
She was entering a building crawling with the hydra strain. This place was death. Any cut, no matter how small, could spell the end.
“Looks clear,” Ramierez said. “You’re fine, Doc. And this lobby is secured, so you can relax.”
She let out a genuine sigh of relief.
Ramierez led her deeper into the lobby, which looked even more like a war zone than the streets outside. She recognized details from the YouTube video: the fire pit, now spotted white with windblown snow; corpses that had frozen solid and still wore jeans and winter coats; the soot-blackened ceiling; the shredded reception desk. The only thing missing was the body on the spit — maybe some of her kind had come in here, decided not to let good food go to waste.
To the left of the fire pit, Rangers were unfolding portable tables and unpacking the equipment she’d asked for. Tim stood there, directing them, using what was left of the reception desk as the lab’s main area.
Margaret looked around. The CBRN-suited Rangers seemed to be everywhere. They were setting up more of the tripod-supported weapons by the ruined door and also in the lobby’s broken windows, creating a field of fire out onto Chicago Avenue. More Rangers were undoubtedly setting up similar positions all around the hotel. If her kind attacked, these soldiers would mow them down by the hundreds.
Other Rangers carried large weapons to the elevator, which, surprisingly, seemed to still be working. She saw Klimas conferring with the Ranger commander — Dundee was his name — at what looked to be a hastily constructed command center, complete with laptops and soldiers already working away on them.
She saw Klimas reach up to the small earpiece at his right ear. He stared off, listening, then said something she couldn’t hear. He jogged to a stairwell door, calling out as he went.
“Ramierez, Bosh, Roth, with me! You too, Otto. We’ve got reports of hostiles in the building, so we’re going straight for the package. Elevator gets us there the quickest, so let’s move!”
On the way in, she had been “the package.” Now that they had reached the hotel, that term referred to someone else: Cooper Mitchell. Klimas and the others were headed to the eighteenth floor. On the form he’d submitted online, that’s where Mitchell had said he would be waiting.
In room 1812.
UNDER THE BED
Cooper heard a helicopter. It sounded big, loud, like military helicopters did in the movies. He also heard occasional blasts of gunfire. It had worked: someone was coming to save him. He just had to stay alive a little bit longer, and hope the rescuers got to him before the cannibals did.
The hotel still had heat. Anywhere but downstairs, where winter winds swirled snow through the lobby, the Park Tower remained well above freezing. At first, that had been a welcome discovery. Now, not so much.
If it were below freezing, the dead bodies up here wouldn’t have rotted, bloated, and the corpse he hid beneath might have been frozen solid instead of turning into the wet, reeking mess that sagged down around him. The smell was enough to make him vomit, but to do that would be to make noise — to make noise was to die.
Die, or worse.
You ain’t gonna eat me, motherfuckers, you ain’t gonna eat me…
The motherfuckers in question were close. They were searching every room in the hotel. Earlier he’d risked moving down a few floors, just to keep checking his surroundings. On the fifteenth floor, he’d heard two men talking; talking about his YouTube video, talking about their search — for him.
It had seemed like such a good idea to upload that video, to make sure people knew who he was so the government couldn’t just make him disappear. He felt so, so stupid now, but it had never crossed his mind that the video would make all the murderers in Chicago want to waste him.
Cooper had thought about running to a higher floor, but he’d waited too long and now he didn’t dare. They were on the eighteenth floor. He’d barely had enough time to implement his next bright idea: dragging a sloughing corpse into room 1812 and hiding beneath it. His brain didn’t seem to work right anymore. Too much stress, too much horror, he didn’t know. He was smarter than this. He knew he was. If only—
Noises, coming from the next room. He moved slowly, adjusted the weight of the body on top of him, pressed his ear against the wall. He could hear muffled voices.
“Check under the bed,” one said.
“Stop telling me that,” said another. “There’s no space under these beds.”
Cooper started to shake. He slowly shouldered the corpse a little higher, so he could reach down to his back. Quietly, so quietly, he drew Sofia’s pistol.
Ain’t gonna eat me, Sofia, not like I ate you, no fucking way, I got four bullets left…
THE PACKAGE
It seemed so odd that the hotel still had power. Clarence was grateful for working elevators, though — climbing seventeen flights of stairs would have done him in. He was the only one wearing CBRN gear, which made him feel oddly out of place among Klimas, Bosh, Ramierez and Roth.