The elevator doors slid shut, and they were gone.
What was she doing? If she wanted to look for environmental factors, she should be starting in the lobby, where Mitchell had videotaped the bodies, where the Converted had died.
Tim shook it off. Margaret knew what she was doing. He turned back to the unconscious Mitchell.
“Well, Mister Mostly Unconscious, let’s find that magic bug so we can get the hell out of here,” Tim said. “I really don’t want to be here long enough to find out if I’m die-die-dielicious.”
Cooper Mitchell didn’t say anything.
Tim got to work.
FLASH MOB
Steve Stanton shivered despite his thick jacket, snowpants, gloves and hat. The wind and the cold had both intensified when the sun went down.
He and General Dana Brownstone stood in the front of a public transit bus, looking through binoculars at the soldiers around the Park Tower Hotel. Just ahead of the bus, dozens of Chosen Ones stayed low behind a barrier made of cars, trash bins, doors and general refuse.
Hatchlings scurried in and around the objects, secreting a brown fluid that was quickly transforming the barrier into a solid wall. Steve’s people had tested that material in several places through the city — it stopped all small-arms fire, probably stopped everything shy of a tank cannon.
Fortunately, the humans didn’t have a tank.
General Brownstone lowered her binoculars. “The sun will be coming up in a few hours, Emperor. I recommend we attack before dawn.”
Steve lowered his binoculars as well. He stared out at his people, and beyond them to the towering tan hotel rising high into the night sky.
“Maybe we should wait for morning,” he said. “We have a mob, not a trained army. I don’t want our people accidentally wasting bullets on each other.”
Brownstone smiled. “Don’t worry about that, Emperor. The humans were kind enough to put on uniforms.”
Steve gave Brownstone an admiring look — he should have thought of that. Just shoot at the people in the uniforms and bulky suits. How much easier could it be?
He lifted the binoculars again. He could make out the heads and shoulders of a few masked soldiers peeking out from behind the line of ruined cars. To the right of an overturned VW Beetle, the few remaining streetlights played off the black barrel of a nasty-looking, tripod-mounted weapon. The human soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but they were special forces, well armed and clearly disciplined. They would kill Steve’s Chosen People by the thousands.
Good thing he had hundreds of thousands.
And it wasn’t like the Chosen Ones were some barbarian army armed with spears and knives: his people had guns, too — and he had special soldiers of his own.
He lowered the binocs, let them dangle against his sternum.
“How many fighting-capable followers have smartphones?”
“One thousand, two hundred and twelve,” Brownstone said instantly. “Each phone is held by the head of a primary cell, and each primary cell has visual or foot-messenger connections to three secondary cells. We can quickly coordinate an infantry force of thirty thousand.”
Steve held out his hand, palm up. Brownstone handed him a phone. He looked at the time: 3:33 A.M. Most of those thirty thousand Chosen Ones could reach this location within forty-five minutes or less. He called up Twitter, logged on to his @MonstaMush account. He typed in his message:
Bottle poppin’ 4am, party 4:10. #ChicagoFlashMob. Hug & hold #ChicagoVIP if u find him! Please RT!
He hit “send.”
Brownstone looked at the message. “Aren’t you concerned the human signal intelligence analysts will see that?”
Steve shrugged. “Nationwide, there’s probably still a thousand tweets a second. If anyone sees it, they won’t know what it means, and even if they somehow figure it out they won’t be able to react soon enough.”
Brownstone nodded. “If the humans have overhead surveillance, they’ll spot our coordinated movement. We can expect air support to arrive quickly — predator drones, Apaches, possibly other aircraft we haven’t seen yet.”
“Let them come,” Steve said. “Get word to the rooftops. From here on out, destroy whatever flies in.”
Brownstone saluted. “Yes, Emperor.” She exited the bus. She would carry Steve’s orders to the masses.
He looked out the bus’s door to the yellow-skinned bull hiding alone behind a burned-out Mercedes thirty feet away. The day before, that bull had come looking for Steve. It had made contact with dozens of Chosen Ones along the way, and not one of them had fallen ill. Jeremy Ellis had taken the bull straight to his biology lab, yet found no trace of disease. Ellis thought the bulls were not only immune to Cooper Mitchell’s disease, they also weren’t carriers of it.
“Yo!” Steve yelled to the bull. “Are you ready to find your old friend?”
Like a puppy called by its master, the massive creature took two hurried steps toward the bus before it stopped, remembering it wasn’t supposed to get close.
“COOOOOPERRRRRR,” the bull said. “FIND… COOOPERRRRR.”
Steve smiled. God willing, Cooper Mitchell would die at the hands of his lifelong friend. The mutated hands, with those awesome bone-blades.
All things in due time. Steve checked the cell phone: forty minutes to go…
GAME CHANGE
Jackpot.
Tim lifted his head from the microscope. He wanted to drink scotch and screw and watch cartoons… maybe in that order, maybe not. He wanted to party.
Cooper Mitchell’s blood contained thousands of hydras.
Tim had also found dead hydras in the frozen bodies that had been in the hotel lobby. Correlation wasn’t causation, true, but the results pointed to one motherfucker of a correlation: Cooper Mitchell was Patient Zero. The good kind of Patient Zero.
I’ve got you Norman Bates bitches by the short and curlies… you’re all gonna die.
“Cooper, you lovely, lovely bastion of microbial awesomeness, you might have just saved the world.”
The man’s story indicated he infected those around him almost immediately. The hydras debilitated individuals within just eight to twelve hours of initial exposure, killed them within twenty-four. What was more, Cooper said he hadn’t touched any of the people who had found him in the Walgreens, yet at least five of the six had contracted the fatal pathogen. That meant the hydras were airborne, and were highly contagious; just being in the same room was enough.
It didn’t matter what Margaret found up on the eighteenth floor, or anywhere else for that matter. The mission became one simple objective: get Cooper Mitchell out of Chicago and into a lab.
According to Cooper, only the “Jeff Monster” had survived the twenty-four-hour lethality. Tim had seen images of the big creatures, so different they looked more akin to gorillas than humans. That kind of large-scale physical alteration required large-scale genetic change: perhaps hydras took longer to affect them, or possibly didn’t affect them at all.
But that wasn’t Tim’s problem. The hydras killed the other known forms — the dead in the Park Tower’s lobby included two triangle hosts, two kissyfaces and one that had no marks of any kind yet died all the same.