Vogel turned sharply, his hand shot to his earpiece: new information. The room hushed, waited for him.
“Seismic readings indicate a one-hundred-kiloton detonation in China,” he said. “Probable epicenter… Ürümqi. Returning to satellite coverage.”
The main monitor switched back to the image of Ürümqi, only now the city couldn’t be seen — a billowing mushroom cloud roiled up, blocking any view of the city center. The shock wave expanded out, a ring of dirt and debris widening at supersonic speed.
Blackmon stood up, rested her hands on the table. She leaned forward, her predator’s stare locked on the scene of mass destruction.
“Admiral Porter is right,” she said. “We need to send a clear signal. We need to make sure the Russians and the Chinese know what will happen if they attack. Take us to DEFCON 2.”
THE STREETS OF CHICAGO
It could have been an Old West ghost town, complete with howling wind. Skyscrapers in place of beat-up wooden shacks, snowdrifts instead of rolling tumbleweed, but it was just as desolate, just as empty.
Some of the traffic lights were on, some were off. Most buildings sat dark. A few random windows glowed against the darkening sky.
Vehicles littered Michigan Avenue’s six snow-swept lanes. Some of the cars, trucks and buses looked fine, save for smashed-in windows and dented doors, while others were crumpled, knocked on their sides or even resting upside down with snow accumulating on their upturned tires and dark underbellies. Many were burned-out husks, blackened and misshapen from long-dead fires.
Light from the setting sun slipped through the packed, gray clouds, reflected off the tall skyscrapers. Broken windows looked like missing teeth, black spots marring the smooth glass faces.
Winter wind ate at Cooper and Sofia, cut into jeans and slacks, drove through coats to chill their bones and bellies. The snow kept falling, met in the sky by whirling bits of burned, blackened paper. Everything smelled like a day-old campfire. Icy flakes melted against skin, stuck to hair, clung on Cooper’s four-day stubble.
So many dead. Blackened corpses sat inside of blackened cars. A cindered bus sagged from the heat that had scorched it. A scattering of five corpses spread out from its twisted door — people who made it out of the vehicle, but still succumbed to the flames. Bloated and frozen bodies lined the sidewalks, lay between the ruined cars that filled and blocked the streets. It was as if God had picked up a graveyard, turned it upside down and rattled it, scattering the dead like a child dumping out a box of toys.
Cooper began to hear occasional sounds through the wind — a clank of metal, distant tinkles of breaking glass, the screams of the hunted and gleeful cheers of the hunters. He stayed close to the buildings on the west side of the street, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Nothing came out to stop him, but he and Sofia weren’t entirely alone. Here and there, Cooper saw the little pyramid-shaped monsters, sometimes scurrying across the street from one building to another, sometimes through ground-floor windows where they built their walls of solidified shit.
He also saw flashes of movement from deep inside buildings, through smashed storefronts and from behind windows higher up the towering buildings. He was being watched, watched by something bigger than the hatchlings.
Cooper had carried Sofia north on Wabash and cut east on Hubbard. At Michigan Avenue, he looked south. The snow-covered Michigan Avenue Bridge led over the Chicago River. He wondered if they should go that way instead, but Sofia tugged on his jacket to get his attention.
She raised a shaking hand, pointed at a twenty-story building a half block up on the left.
Fire had raged through the smooth glass tower, covering what windows remained with waving patterns of soot. At the bottom of the building, he saw a broken overhang that once had shielded Chicagoans from rain or snow. It, too, was twisted and blackened by the fire. A warped script W and one e were all that remained of brass letters that had spelled out “Walgreens.”
Cooper’s heart sank. He kept walking, kept carrying Sofia. Maybe the fire damage was only superficial.
It wasn’t.
Nothing remained of the drugstore. Through broken and blackened glass, Cooper saw melted metal shelves and powdery paper ash. The smell of burned plastic poured out of the place as though it was still actively ablaze.
Sofia shivered in his arms.
“Shit,” she said.
Cooper nodded. “I guess we go to the hospital next. Let me take a little rest.”
He looked around, saw a nearby car that had smashed into a bus. The car’s windows remained unbroken, intact. He carried Sofia over to it. He used the hand under her knees to open the driver’s door, then bent, his back straining as he carefully set her on the driver’s seat.
His whole body seemed to sigh in relief. Sofia weighed all of a buck-ten — not much to hold for a few moments, but an awful lot to carry across the city.
“I’m slowing you down,” she said, her weak voice barely audible over the wind. “Why are you doing this for me?”
He thought for a moment, searching for an answer.
“Because of my mom,” he said finally. “She’d want me to help you.”
A not-so-distant scream from behind, a woman’s scream, echoing through the empty streets. Cooper looked back the way they had come, his hand moving on its own, reaching for the cold handle of the gun stuffed into his pants.
Two long blocks away, he saw a woman at the base of the bridge. Her hands clutched to her shoulders as if she was trying to compress herself, make herself too small to see. Chicago’s skyscrapers rose up into the gray evening sky around her. She stood in the middle of the street, looking to her right, then turning right, then looking right again, then turning again, spinning in place in a stop-start motion. The wind blew snow at her, probably cutting right through her thin blouse.
For a moment, Cooper wondered why she hadn’t worn a coat (didn’t she know it was freezing outside?) before he realized she had probably fled some hiding spot, had run just to stay alive.
He saw movement: two other people approaching the woman. A tall man, wearing a red down jacket, and a woman wearing a blue snowsuit. They must have come out of the surrounding buildings. They closed in, and suddenly there were four more people — sliding out of ruined cars, walking through doorways.
They had the woman surrounded.
She kept turning, first her head, then her body.
“Don’t just stand there,” Cooper said quietly. “Run.”
The woman didn’t move. The six closed in on her.
And then, on the bridge, coming from the south, through the falling snow and scattering bits of paper, Cooper saw something else.
Something… huge.
He felt Sofia’s fingers clutch tight at his jacket. The raw intensity of her words hit his ears like a siren, even though they were barely more than a whisper.
“What the fuck is that? Cooper, what the fuck is that?”
Cooper didn’t know, didn’t want to know. It was a man… maybe. Sickly yellow skin, no jacket, an upper body that was far too wide for legs that would be gigantic on anyone save for an NFL lineman. And the head — Cooper couldn’t make out much other than a neck that was as wide as impossibly wide shoulders, a neck that led up to a face hidden behind a blue scarf wrapped around the mouth and nose.