On the other end, Jeff’s cell rang. And rang.
“Shit, bro, pick up.”
On the seventh ring, Jeff answered.
“Coop?”
A surge of relief at hearing his voice.
“Jeff, dude, where are you? Shit is going off outside. I don’t know what’s happening but we need to bail the hell out of Chicago. We have to get to the Mary Ellen and get out of here.”
Jeff said nothing.
“Jeff, talk to me — where are you, man?”
“Not… sure.”
His voice sounded so deep, racked with pain and confusion.
“Jeff, just tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. Are you in the hotel?”
“Hotel?”
“Yes, the Trump Tower, where we’re staying? Are you in the building?”
Cooper waited for an answer. Jeff sounded like he was on the edge of passing out.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “Uh… basement.”
“Basement? Good, Jeff. Where in the basement? Focus, brother, focus. I’ll come get you. Look around and tell me what you see.”
“It hurts,” Jeff said. “Coop, it hurts.”
“Okay, I hear you, but tell me where you are, buddy. You—”
The phone went silent, the connection broken.
Cooper immediately dialed again. The phone rang and kept ringing until voice mail answered.
“This is Jeff Brockman of Jeff Brockman Salvage, and if you’ve got the bills, we’ve got the skills. Leave a message and we’ll get back at ya, pronto.”
The message beeped.
“You stupid dickhead! Call me back the second you get this, and tell me where you are.”
Cooper hung up, then immediately called again, only to get voice mail for the second time.
The basement. That narrowed things down, at least.
Cooper got dressed. As he did, he caught a reflection of himself in the room’s mirror. That blister on his shoulder was gone, just a red spot now. He took a closer look; no, not gone, broken open. A shred of weak, torn skin dangled from the edge. No wetness, though… it looked like something had puffed it up like a balloon, then the balloon popped.
He quickly examined himself in the mirror. He had more of the blisters: on his chest, his hip, below his right knee. Something leftover from whatever had made him sick? An allergic reaction to detergents in the hotel’s sheets?
The blisters didn’t hurt, and he didn’t have time to worry about them. He dressed. He grabbed his coat and also Jeff’s for good measure — if they had to go outside in the bitter Chicago cold, they’d both need to stay warm.
Cooper walked to the door, reached down to open it, then stopped. He looked out the peephole again, half expecting the teenage kid to be staring right back at him.
Nothing there.
Nothing except for a little red streak on the far wall, where the first teenage kid had fallen.
A streak of blood.
Cooper took a deep breath, steeled himself.
He opened the door and stepped into the empty hall. He had to find Jeff. Jeff first, then maybe the two of them could track down Steve. Until then, Cooper hoped Steve Stanton could fend for himself.
FOLLOW ME
Steve Stanton strapped on his two laptop bags stuffed with three laptops. He stepped out of his room on the Trump Tower’s seventeenth floor.
Anger coursed through his body, set every muscle cell on edge. He felt an almost overpowering urge to smash a human’s head in, find a brick and crack the skull open so he could get at the brains, pull them out, stomp them and…
His own thought played back in his head: smash a HUMAN’S head in.
Why had he thought of it like that? Why hadn’t he thought of the word person, or man or even woman?
Why? Because Steve Stanton was no longer human, not at all — humans were the enemy.
He heard a scream coming from the right, around a corner and farther down the hall. He walked toward that scream.
Steve turned the corner. He saw a shirtless, middle-aged man dressed in tan slacks. The man’s belly hung over his belt. He wore no shoes. He stood above a woman in a torn, red dress. Steve assumed the two red sandals scattered nearby belonged to her. She was on her butt, one hand behind her, the other raised up, palm out.
“Morris! Stop hitting me, for God’s sake!”
In response, the man — Morris, Steve assumed — reared back and kicked the woman in the thigh. The woman let out another scream. She rolled to her hands and knees and tried to crawl away. Morris reached down and grabbed her right ankle, yanked her back. The woman fell flat on her stomach, arms out in front of her.
Morris grabbed her hip and flipped her over. Before she could say another word, he pressed his bare foot hard against her neck. His face scrunched into a confused mask of rage. She twisted, turned her lower body, tried to kick. She grabbed at Morris’s foot, clawed at it, her purple fingernails leaving crisscross streaks of ragged red on his skin — but the foot did not move.
The man leaned lower, rested his forearms on the knee of the leg pressing down on her neck.
“How about that toilet seat now, Cybil? How about that fucking goddamn cunty toilet seat now, you ball-busting, dried-up-pussy bitch? I guess you shouldn’t have nagged me about putting it down, huh? Huh?”
Steve walked closer. The man seemed entirely focused on the struggling woman. There was a bluish triangular growth on the man’s chest, under his skin just left of the sternum. And another on the right side of his belly.
Steve stopped cold: something in the air…
A smell.
He breathed deep into his nose; he recognized that scent even though he’d never smelled it before. He sniffed again… the man had the scent, but not the woman.
The triangles, that smell… he is my kind, he is me.
The man — Morris — was staring at Steve.
“Hi,” Morris said. “You, uh… you want to help with this?”
In that instant, so many things became clear. Morris was nothing but an ugly husk meant to carry infinite beauty, beauty that would soon break free of his body, leaving him a dead shell.
Morris was stupid.
Steve was smart.
“You’ll do what I tell you to do,” Steve said.
Morris didn’t take his foot off the squirming woman’s neck, but his eyes narrowed as he tried to understand.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll do what you tell me to do.”
The woman yelled, fought with renewed energy. She clawed and ripped. Her fingernails turned Morris’s foot into a ragged mess that splashed blood on her face and chest.
This man would do what Steve said. Steve felt it.
So much happening all at once. Steve thought back on a lifetime of not standing up for himself, of staying quiet, of avoiding conflict or embarrassment. His circumstances had denied him his birthright. He was brilliant. He was a genius. His destiny was more than wrapping knives and forks in fucking napkins.
Steve Stanton had been born to rule.
He nodded toward the woman. The human woman.
“Morris,” Steve said, “do something about her.”
Morris looked down at his bloody mess of a foot. He pressed it down harder — the woman stopped fighting. She drew in wet, broken hisses of air.