He started to edge toward the door.
“Coop?”
Cooper stopped cold. Jeff’s voice, but normal again. Normal, and scared.
“Don’t go,” Jeff said. “Just… just stay here, okay? I hurt awful bad.”
Cooper felt a pull of emotions. The fever was making Jeff delirious, maybe even dangerous enough to do something violent, but he was also afraid and in pain. For Jeff to actually ask Cooper to stick around? That man never asked for help. That meant he was in bad shape.
“It’s okay,” Cooper said. He quietly returned to his bed, feeling his way through the darkness. He lay down. “It’s okay, Jeff. I’ll be here. Just go to sleep.”
“You won’t bail on me?”
Cooper felt a rush of love for his friend. They’d known each other their whole lives — like he could ever bail on Jeff Brockman.
“Hell no,” Cooper said. “I got your back. Just sleep. I’ll be here.”
Moments later, Jeff started snoring.
Cooper adjusted in his bed, but felt a pain on his right shoulder. He quietly sat up, craned his neck to get a look. In the faint light, he saw he had a blister of some kind. Small, reddish, straining the skin like it had liquid inside. Liquid, or… air?
He pressed a finger against it, slowly at first, then harder. It squished in, but didn’t pop.
Cooper rubbed at the area, then lay down. If it was still there tomorrow, he’d deal with it then.
For now, however, the more sleep, the better.
BECOMING MORE
Steve hurt.
He didn’t mind the pain. Something was happening… something wonderful. He wasn’t afraid of Bo Pan anymore. He wasn’t afraid of anyone, or anything.
He lay in his dark hotel room. He heard noises outside — sirens, faint screams, something that might be a gunshot — but he didn’t care. None of those things concerned him.
He wasn’t going back to Benton Harbor. He’d never see his parents again, but that, too, was okay, because — somehow — his parents were no longer his.
They weren’t his parents any more than some chimpanzees were his parents. Related? Sure, but vastly separated by different states of intelligence, different states of awareness.
Steve closed his eyes. He would sleep a little more. And he knew, he knew, that when he awoke, he would be a new man.
DAY NINE
THE FRONT DESK
Yelling from outside the room.
Cooper yawned. He sat up in bed. The room was pitch-black. He was still coming out of sleep, but damn, he felt a hundred percent better. Just not being sick made him instantly happy, giddy at feeling normal once again.
Another yell from the hall.
Then, silence.
Cooper thought of the scene on the street: one cop burning, another cop shooting a man then making out with him, a woman crawling across the sidewalk, leaving a trail of blood.
He sat very still, listening for anything, hearing nothing.
What time was it?
That question made him remember Jeff throwing the clock against the wall. Sick Jeff. Angry Jeff.
Cooper quietly felt around the nightstand, searching for his cell phone. He found it, turned away from Jeff so the light wouldn’t cause problems, then checked the time — 8:45 A.M. He’d slept through the night.
Had Jeff slept, too?
Cooper slowly moved his phone so the display’s illumination lit up the bed next to him.
It was empty.
He turned on the nightstand lamp. He blinked at the sudden light. On the floor below the TV, Jeff’s AC/DC shirt and his jeans: gone.
Cooper quietly stood, walked to the closed bathroom door.
“Jeff,” he said in a whisper. “There’s some shit going down in the hall.”
No answer.
Cooper opened the door — the bathroom was empty.
Where the hell was Jeff?
He quietly walked to the room’s main door, careful not to make any noise. He leaned into the peephole and looked out.
There was a teenager lying there, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. The kid moved weakly, unfocused eyes staring up at nothing.
Cooper automatically reached for the door handle, but stopped when he saw a flicker of motion. Through the peephole’s fisheye lens, another teenager stepped into view. Then another.
One grabbed the fallen one’s feet, the other reached under his shoulders. They lifted.
Cooper again started to open the door, to see if he could help, but one of the teenagers turned his head sharply.
Wild eyes stared right at Cooper.
He felt a blast of fear, something that rooted him to the spot — he dare not move, not even to step away from the peephole.
Was the teenager looking at him? No… no one could see through a peephole, not from that far away. Maybe Cooper had made a noise.
Not knowing why the teenager scared him so bad, Cooper stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even breathe.
The boy said something to his friend. They carried the fallen one down the hall, out of sight.
Cooper ran to the hotel phone. He stabbed the button marked “front desk.” The phone on the other end rang ten times before a woman answered.
“Hello, this is Carmella.”
“I need security,” Cooper said. “No, just call the cops. There was a hurt kid up here. Maybe there was a fight. They took him.”
“And I give a shit, why?”
Cooper blinked. “Uh… didn’t you hear me? I think that kid was hurt. He had a head wound.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” the woman said. “Fuck you very much.”
She hung up.
Cooper stared at the handset for a moment, then felt stupid for doing so and put it back in the cradle.
He looked at his cell, dialed 9, then 1, then paused: those cops in the street, shooting people. Were more cops like that? Maybe all of them? Maybe calling 911 wasn’t such a good idea.
He heard sirens coming up from the street. He walked to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. For the second time in a handful of seconds, what he saw stunned him.
Chicago burned.
He saw flames rising high from the windows of two skyscrapers. Down on the street, people scrambled in all directions. There were four fire engines, but only one had a crew that was trying to fight the fires. The other three trucks seemed to be abandoned. And no, people weren’t scrambling down there, they were… chasing… they were fighting.
A black car turned the corner, completely out of control. It skidded across cold pavement and skipped up onto the sidewalk, where it plowed into an old man. The man flew back a few feet, then vanished below the still-moving black car.
Cooper heard the now-familiar, distant snap of a gunshot, but he couldn’t see where it came from.
Chaos down on the street. Bloody teenagers in the hall. The front desk lady didn’t sound like she was dealing with a full deck. Jeff, gone. And Steve Stanton… was Steve okay? Cooper vaguely remembered Steve was on another floor, but he had no idea what the room number was.
He couldn’t worry about Steve right now. Finding his best friend was all that mattered.
Cooper looked at the nightstand, seeing if Jeff had left his cell phone — it was gone. He looked to the room’s lone chair: Jeff’s coat was there, Cooper’s piled on top. It was freezing outside… maybe Jeff was still in the building.
He dialed Jeff’s number.