The woman let go of her own shoulders, finally turned to run, but it was too late; six people grabbed her. She screamed and jerked, tried to fight, but the others held her fast.
The man in the red jacket stood in front of her, reached into his coat, pulled out a long butcher knife.
Cooper thought about drawing his gun, taking a shot, maybe he could get lucky from this far out—
—and then it was too late. The man in the red jacket drove the knife into the woman’s belly, slid it up, like a butcher slaughtering a pig. The woman didn’t even scream, she just stared. Stared, and twitched.
Her attackers tore into her. Cooper saw hands driving down, yanking, ripping, saw those hands come back bloody and full of dangling intestines or steaming chunks of muscle.
The five people started to eat.
I am not seeing this… I am not fucking seeing this…
A tug on his coat.
“Coop,” Sofia said. “Get me the hell out of here.”
He realized the gun was in his hand. He didn’t remember actually drawing it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He stuffed it once again into the back of his pants, then reached into the car for Sofia.
TIPPING POINT
From his little table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, Tim Feely studied the numbers. New York City, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids and Chicago were no longer providing consumer data. They were too far gone for that.
Elsewhere in the country, people were stocking up on whatever they could before it was too late. That panic skewed the consumer pattern information, but there was still enough data from which to draw conclusions.
Philadelphia: 9,000% increase in cough suppressants
Lexington: huge spikes in purchases of fever reducer
Fayetteville: All stores sold out of pain relievers
The list went on and on. Most of Baltimore had lost power the day before, so there was no additional data to be had there. Indianapolis, Huntsville and Birmingham were in the same boat.
As near as Tim could tell, most cities on the Eastern Seaboard had significant outbreaks. The Midwest was even worse. The West Coast showed some signs of infected activity, but the overall stats indicated those populations were mostly normal; they’d brewed the inoculant faster there, distributed it better, done a superior job at overcoming local objections. Although murder rates had skyrocketed, police departments remained in control of the West Coast and the Southwest — except for Los Angeles.
Riots and looting had cast LA into chaos. There was no information to discern if the violence came from the Converted, or if it had blown up due to the deaths that occurred because of the mayor’s shoot-on-sight after-dark curfew.
Canada was also in bad shape. Montreal was ablaze, just like Paris. Tim didn’t have consumer data on Europe, but news reports of burning cities and corpses littering the streets told the story just fine.
Pandora’s box had opened. Just like the myth, evil things had flown out to infect the world. In that myth, the last thing to escape had been hope.
This time, Tim wondered if there was any hope at all.
COOPER’S CHOICE
Shadows moved within the darkness of a wintry Chicago night. Cooper stumbled more than he ran, the girl in his arms a heaviness that threatened to pull him down.
Just drop her… just leave her, she’s going to die anyway…
They’d found the hospital to be a burned-out husk. When they’d come in for a closer look, something had found them, followed them.
Cooper had carried Sofia away, but that something had picked up their trail. They fled north. The storm that threatened to kill them also provided some cover: blowing snow helped them hide, masked their tracks and their sounds.
His arms burned, screamed for oxygen. Sofia hung low, near his thighs, his left arm under her knees, his right around her back. He stopped only long enough to heft her high again, up to his chest, then he continued up Michigan Avenue.
He felt her fingers clutch his jacket, pulling it tighter across his chest.
“They’re coming,” she said. “I can hear them. Run faster, goddamit!”
Cooper could barely run at all, let alone faster, but he heard them, too, heard their yells, heard the roaring of some misshapen thing.
He’d walked seven excruciating blocks — careful not to step on frozen body parts or broken glass — with the cold making his hands numb, making his fingers tingle, with Sofia’s weight dragging at him, and now he was only a block shy of Chicago Avenue.
So he ignored the icy cold air that sucked deep into his heaving lungs, ignored the wind that made his face sting and burn. He moved faster.
Up ahead, on the other side of Chicago Avenue on both the left and the right, he saw gothic buildings made of white stone. They looked like castles, especially the one on the left with its octagonal tower that stretched thirty feet above. It was old, so old it had probably once towered over the surrounding buildings back when “tall” meant four or five stories. Now it was just a lost footnote in the city’s sprawling skyline. A little castle… a little fortress…
Leave her and go hide. Go in the fortress, block the door, you can hold them off…
A tug at his collar.
“There,” Sofia said. She pointed right: he saw the white WALGREENS lettering on a black overhang. Below it, a revolving door of glass in a curved metal housing. The store sat at the base of a tall, tan building. This place wasn’t burned out. Cooper didn’t see any activity in front of the store, or inside it. Maybe they could hide in there, killing two birds with one stone.
He reached the door: it was still intact, as were the glass windows on either side.
Cooper carefully carried Sofia into the rotating door, careful not to stumble and drop her or smack her head against anything. He pushed. It turned with a deep swishhh. Three steps later, he stepped into a miracle.
The lights were on.
There was no wind.
No heat, either, but without the windchill the place felt comparatively warm.
The doors might be intact, but this place hadn’t escaped the disaster. Ten feet in lay a headless body. Ice crystals formed a strangely beautiful pattern in the blood that had spilled from the man’s neck and spread across the hard stone floor.
Farther up the first aisle, between scattered bags of chips on one side and candy bars on the other, lay a second body, a woman. A look of disbelief had frozen on her face, maybe when her attackers had torn her right arm from her body, leaving the ripped sleeve of her blue jacket ragged and stiff with icy blood. That jacket remained buttoned under her chin, but open at the belly to show an empty cavity — her internal organs were gone.
“My God,” Sofia said. “Coop, we gotta hide.”
He nodded. He hefted her higher, or tried to, but his arms wouldn’t lift her. He was damn near done. “Is the pharmacy in the back?”
“Yeah,” Sofia said. “Straight back.”
Cooper stepped over the bodies.
All through the aisles, products had been ripped off the metal shelves and tossed onto the floor. It didn’t look like much had been taken, though — more a store-trashing rampage rather than people scrambling for supplies.