Pandemic (41 page)

“That’s some pretty fucked-up shit,” Cooper said.

Jeff coughed again, even harder than before. Half bent over, he walked to the bed and flopped down.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I gotta sleep. Turn out the lights, bro.”

Seeing Jeff on the bed made Cooper’s own crippling fatigue hit home. The excitement had made him briefly forget how bad he hurt, but there was no escaping it.

“It’ll be on the news soon,” Cooper said. “Got to be, bro. We’ll find out what happened then.”

He looked out the window again. The cop was still bent over the fallen man. Two other people had come up to help, but Cooper couldn’t make out what they were doing from so far away. Across the street, two women clashed in a hair-pulling chick-fight. Friday night in downtown Chicago. That toddlin’ town.

Cooper jumped as something smashed into the wall next to him, shattered in flying pieces of black and clear plastic — the alarm clock.

“Coop, I
told
you to turn out the
fucking
lights!”

Jeff stared hatefully at him through swollen, red eyes, his mouth open, the tips of his wet, white teeth visible behind cracked lips. His face looked … different, somehow. If Cooper had bumped into this Jeff on the street, he would have barely recognized him.

Angry Jeff was back. And just like before, Cooper’s instincts screamed at him to do nothing that might set his friend off.

“Calm down, dude,” Cooper said softly. “I’ll get the lights.”

Cooper pulled the curtains tight. He moved slowly to the light switch, flicked it off. Darkness engulfed the room — even the alarm clock’s red glow was gone. A tiny bit of light filtered through the top of the curtains.

“I can hear you,” Jeff said from the darkness. “Your loud-ass breathing, Cooper, I can
hear you
.”

Now he was breathing too loud? Cooper wasn’t about to go to sleep if Jeff might wake up at any moment and beat the living hell out of him. Cooper wanted out, and he wanted out
now
.

“Jeff, brother, maybe I’ll just go downstairs and let you sleep.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.