“Because I’m not one of them,” Cooper said. “Your wife is. Deal with it.”
He stared at Otto until the bigger man looked away.
Tim sniffed. “Margaret’s already lost. We can’t save her.”
Otto stared at the floor. “She’ll get those blisters, right? Isn’t that enough? Between her and Cooper, isn’t that enough?”
“It’s not,” Tim said. “Based on what we learned from Candice Walker, it will be another day, maybe two, before the pustules form on Margaret’s skin — if they form at all, because she’ll be dead by then. We just don’t know. What we do know is she already has the hydras in her blood. I know this is hard, but you… we don’t…”
Tim ran out of words. He looked at Klimas, maybe trying to get help. Cooper noticed that the SEAL had his pistol in his hand, down low against his thigh — subtle, but ready to go if Clarence got crazy.
“Using Cooper isn’t an option,” Klimas said. “We’re not putting him at risk so he can pop his zits on the bad guys. The weapon we need is inside of Margaret. We need her blood. All of it.”
Otto looked up. He was a man destroyed, a man gutted.
“Can’t you all hear how insane this sounds? This is barbaric. You want to put my wife’s blood into a fire truck? What the fuck are we, vampires?”
Tim pulled his fur coat tighter.
“Call it what you will,” he said. “If we do this, then even if we don’t get Cooper out alive, we can still start a plague that might kill them all.”
“And you know that how?” Otto said. “You’re going to butcher a woman who saved everyone in this room… to test out a theory?”
Klimas’s hand flexed on the pistol. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Otto looked from man to man, searching for support, finding none. His fists tightened until his hands shook.
Cooper almost felt bad for the dude. Almost. At least he didn’t have to watch his wife transform into a monster.
Tears formed in Otto’s eyes, spilled over, left thin trails of clean, wet brown through the dust that coated his skin.
“This isn’t just about Margaret,” he said. “She’s pregnant. Just take some of her blood. A couple of pints — that won’t kill her.”
Pregnant? Cooper looked back at the woman tied to the chair. Didn’t matter if she was. Why should she get to live when Jeff turned into a thing, and Sofia turned into dinner?
Cooper hadn’t wanted to kill Sofia, he hadn’t, but killing her had kept him alive. He could still taste her… still taste her charred skin… still taste the juice that had dribbled from her steaming flesh…
I had to do it had to do it I had no choice no choice at all.
Feely started to speak, then paused. He was trying to find the right words.
“She’s lying,” he said finally. “And even if she’s not, if she actually is pregnant, then the baby is also one of them.”
The last bit of fight slid out of Agent Otto, as clearly as if someone had pulled a hidden plug and let it drain away.
Klimas spoke again, softer this time.
“If you want to say your good-byes, Otto, you need to do it now.”
Clarence sniffed back snot, hissed in a breath. More tears formed.
“Okay,” he said. He nodded, slowly at first, then with exaggerated motion. “Okay, I… I see it. That’s the way it has to be.”
“Go for a walk,” Klimas said. “You don’t need to be here for this.”
Otto’s eyes squeezed tight. He pinched hard on the bridge of his nose.
“No,” he said, his voice hollow and hoarse. “If she has to be set free, I’ll do it.”
The big SEAL wearing the ridiculous Chicago Bears jacket sniffed sharply, then turned and walked away. The other one, Bosh, just stared at the ground.
Klimas held his pistol in his right hand. With his left, he reached to his side and drew a wicked-looking Ka-Bar knife. He flipped it, held it by the seven-inch blade, and offered it handle-first to Otto.
“I’ll honor your request,” Klimas said. “But if you try anything, I’ll put you down, and then she dies anyway.”
Otto started crying all over again. His big shoulders shook as he reached out and took the knife.
BESIEGED
IMMUNIZED: 89%
NOT IMMUNIZED: 6%
UNKNOWN: 5%
FINISHED DOSES EN ROUTE: 10,134
DOSES IN PRODUCTION: 98,000
INFECTED: 6,000,000 (40,000,000)
CONVERTED: 5,125,000 (23,500,000)
DEATHS: 6,000,000+ (40,000,000)
It was all over but the crying, really. Thankfully, Murray wasn’t much of a crier.
The tipping point had been reached. Twenty-three million Converted, worldwide. No army, no matter how well equipped or organized, could stop that many people. And Cheng’s best guess was another forty million were infected — in the next three days, statisticians projected the total number of Converted to reach sixty million.
Industrial production of the inoculant had collapsed. So, too, had America’s transportation network. It was now impossible to drive from New York City to the West Coast. Converted occupied the Rocky Mountains, making the range impassable. The last reliable form of transportation — airplanes — was in danger of falling; every remaining airport, both military and civilian, was under constant attack by hordes of monsters and screaming psychopaths.
Battles raged in the streets of D.C. The army manned a solid perimeter fourteen blocks square, with the White House dead-center. Admiral Porter’s people estimated that thirty thousand Converted were pressing in on two thousand U.S. military defenders. And every now and then, one of those defenders would turn out to be Converted himself, slaughtering those around him in an effort to open up a hole in the lines.
Air support wouldn’t last much longer. Fewer people to repair and rearm planes, fewer bases, and on three separate occasions — one F-22, one F-35, and one Apache — an aircraft had turned from defender to attacker. The burning hole in the West Wing came courtesy of the F-22 pilot’s kamikaze effort.
At every level of the military, paranoia ran rampant. No one could say for sure if the man or woman next to them might be the enemy, the kind that didn’t test positive.
Ronald Reagan Airport and Bolling AFB had fallen. There was no airport close enough that they could risk driving President Albertson to it, even with the five Ml-Abrams tanks parked on the White House lawn. Three times the military had tried to bring in evac helicopters, and all three times the Converted had shot those aircraft down. The enemy had SAMs, and plenty of them.
The bottom line: no one was leaving the White House. Not even Albertson. Admiral Porter’s best estimate was that loyal troops could defend the White House for another six days, seven at the most.
Murray had once dreamed of the Situation Room burning to the ground. Now it looked like that might actually happen, only with him still in it.
AFTERMATH
Emperor Steve Stanton, Minister of Science Doctor-General Jeremy Ellis, and Supreme Master of Logistics Robert McMasters stood on a tall pile of rubble, all shivering against the biting wind. They looked down at the ten-foot-deep crater that had once been bustling Michigan Avenue. Shattered vehicles, broken concrete, jutting metal and shredded bodies lay in and around it, all victims of the powerful detonation.
Those had been some seriously big bombs.