Clarence knew that Margaret had to die. His brain told him that, but his heart shouted a different message.
“No,” he said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”
Feely slid off the bed, his hands out in front of him, palms up.
“Everyone just take it easy,” he said. “Klimas, I told you, we need her.”
Klimas didn’t look away from his stare-down. “Why?”
“Because she’s infected,” Tim said. “She’ll contract Cooper’s hydras, the thing that kills the Converted.”
Margaret stopped squirming.
Clarence forgot about the gun. He looked at Tim.
“You want to use my wife as a weapon?”
Tim started to talk, but coughed instead. Clarence felt a sting in his eyes. He smelled burning wood, melting carpet, odors filtering up from the fire below. Wisps of smoke curled near the ceiling.
Tim thumped a fist against his chest, coughed again, then continued. “Otto, if you’re right and she’s not infected, then she’s got nothing to worry about.” He looked at her, spoke sweetly: “Isn’t that right, Margopolis?”
Clarence felt her shaking her head. “Our baby,” she said, her words choked with deep sobs. “We don’t know how it will affect the baby. Keep Cooper away from me, honey, keep him away.”
Roth walked over, spoke to Klimas. “Commander, it’s ready.”
Klimas’s eyes narrowed. He lowered his weapon.
“Otto, I’m getting Cooper and Tim out of here,” he said. “If Margaret moves funny, I’m wasting her, and if you do anything to stop me, I’ll waste you. Got it?”
Clarence nodded. “Fair enough.”
Klimas tilted his head toward the man-size hole Roth had cut into the drywall. Through it, Clarence saw concrete.
“That’s the exterior wall of the hotel,” Klimas said. “It abuts another building that’s only a foot away. We’re blowing through both and entering that building. Then we’re descending to a tea shop that’s on the ground floor, at the corner of Pearson and Rush. I’m hoping the building is empty, and we can make it down without much of a fight. From there, we’re going to figure out a way through the enemy lines.”
“Enemy lines?” Clarence said. “They’re just a mob.”
“You’ll see soon enough,” Klimas said. “Everyone, into the hall.”
Bosh and Ramierez were still at their posts, guarding the hallway in both directions. Smoke curled thickly at the ceiling; the place was going up fast.
Roth pulled the door shut. He held a small detonator in his hand.
“Fire in the hole,” he said, then pushed the button.
It didn’t sound like much of an explosion, more of a whump than a bang. Roth opened the door. A cloud of dust billowed out. Clarence looked in: the blast had punched clean through — he felt cold air pouring in, saw a brick wall beyond.
“First wall down,” Roth said. “Now to blast our way into the other building. Sixty seconds.”
He started placing small charges of C-4.
On his shoulder, Clarence felt Margaret start to shake. He turned, saw that Cooper Mitchell was standing right next to them.
He was holding his exposed wrist near Margaret’s bloody hand. On that wrist, a red spot, a small patch of sagging skin: it looked like he’d just popped a huge blister, but Clarence saw no fluid. Tiny motes of floating white hung in the air for a moment, then dissipated into nothingness.
Cooper smiled wide. “Enjoy that, lady. You enjoy the fuck out of it.”
He stepped away.
Clarence set Margaret down on her own feet. With her hands still zip-stripped behind her back, she leaned against the wall. She shook violently.
She stared at Cooper Mitchell, her eyes wide with terror.
HIT THE LIGHTS
Paulius lay on a tile floor, mostly hidden behind the low, brick wall of the dark tea shop’s broken window.
Outside in the cold, windy night, the few remaining lights lit up hundreds of Converted running through the streets: yelling in victory, screaming in psychotic rage, sometimes shooting guns into the air. Most of the time they moved south, toward the Park Tower.
But sometimes, they seemed to get confused — they ran north on Rush, or west on Pearson, and when they did, their own kind shot them down.
Thirty meters along either of those roads, a line of cars, trucks and other debris ran from sidewalk to sidewalk, completely blocking any way through. Barrel fires burned in front of these bulwarks, blurring any sight of the forces that hid behind them.
Paulius had to figure out how to cross those lines.
The gothic Archdiocese of Chicago was directly to the north, across Pearson. Paulius saw troops and guns lurking in the church’s broken stained-glass windows. He could lead his people into that building, search for an exit that would come out behind the Converted’s street-blocking wall, but he had no idea how many enemy troops waited inside.
Kitty-corner to the tea shop — across the intersection of Pearson and Rush — was a ten-story brick building, but going for that would expose him to fire from the troops behind the bulwarks of both streets. Plus, there was no guarantee the place wasn’t full of snipers just waiting for him to show his hand.
And due west, across Rush, a round skyscraper some forty stories tall. Same problems as the other buildings.
Every route seemed blocked, heavily defended.
There had to be a way.
He couldn’t count on help from anyone else, because no one answered his calls. As far as he knew, all the Rangers were dead. He’d lost most of his own men: just six out of twenty left, including himself. But if he could get Cooper Mitchell to safety, his SEALs would not have died in vain.
The move from the Park Tower to the tea shop had bought a few minutes’ reprieve, at best. The hotel was on fire, but if enemy troops were still in there, still searching, they’d soon find the hole Roth had blown through the wall. After that, Paulius had only minutes before the Converted swarmed in.
There was only one option: he had to punch an opening in one of the enemy lines. That opening wouldn’t come cheap, and they had very little ammo left with which to make it.
He turned and crawled across the cold floor, his fatigues scraping against broken glass. He moved behind the shop’s main counter to join the others: Feely, Cooper Mitchell, Bosh, Harrison, Katanski and Ramierez. Clarence and Margaret were tucked into an alcove near the bathrooms, out of sight of the windows. Margaret had a gag in her mouth, which Clarence had put there on Paulius’s insistence.
If she made any noise, she died; Clarence and Margaret both knew that.
Feelygood was the only reason Paulius had let Margaret live. If they could turn that murdering bitch into a weapon against her own kind, that held a certain poetic justice.
Paulius waved his men close. Such brave soldiers, all that remained of SEAL Team Two. Clarence joined them, as did Tim and Cooper.
“We need to figure out a way past their lines,” Paulius said. “We’re outgunned. They’ve got excellent coverage on our positions. As soon as we show our heads, they’ll start firing and it won’t last long.”
Ramierez tugged at his fatigues, drawing attention to them. “How about we lose these? Try to look like the enemy, get close enough to make something happen?”
“They’re killing anything that comes close, including their own,” Paulius said. He looked at the surrounding faces. “I need other ideas.”
Bosh shrugged. “It sucks, but we’re going to have to make a distraction. Shoot out the streetlights. We hit them up with grenades from here, then me and another guy head west on Pearson, try to draw their fire. Few minutes later, Commander, you and the others take the package north on Rush.”