Текст книги "Sleep Tight"

Автор книги: Jeff Jacobson

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

CHAPTER 61

2:47 PM

August 14

The hospital lobby was empty. It made Qween nervous. The waiting room was silent. The nurses’ station had been abandoned. The phones did not ring. The computers were dark.

But the old building didn’t quite feel empty. This was why she was nervous. Something in the air, something just out of the range of her hearing, some kind of vibration through the molecules that her conscious brain couldn’t pick up, something set off ominous warnings in her subconscious, the lizard part of her mind, as Sam would say. Somewhere, there was life inside the hospital.

Dr. Menard checked the computers at the nurses’ station. He shook his head. “They aren’t connected to the system that we used.” He headed for the elevators. “We have to go up to the third floor. There’s a central computer where I can access all the files.” He didn’t seem worried about the vibe of the place; he just looked relieved they hadn’t encountered any soldiers.

“You sure this is worth it, Doc?” Qween followed, the reluctant one now. “Smart money says there’s a damn good reason ain’t nobody here.”

The elevator doors opened immediately, as if it had been waiting for them, and they stepped inside. “Five minutes, tops,” Dr. Menard said. He fished a little plastic stick out of his pocket. “Just long enough to dump whatever I can find on this jump drive.”

Qween looked at it skeptically. “You be quick, or I’ll up and leave your ass here.”

The third floor was just as empty as the first. Great plastic sheets had been stretched over every surface, and while they may have been tight at the beginning, now they hung in tatters, as if a violent wind had ripped through the third floor. Dr. Menard moved quickly to the bank of computers at the nurses’ station in the center of the room. Cubicles with light blue curtains surrounded the area, beyond which, a long corridor stretched out. The end of the corridor was obscured with strips of shredded plastic hanging from the ceiling. It was impossible to tell if anyone was down there or not.

Dr. Menard tapped a few keys. While the system booted up, he dragged over a chair and then inserted his jump drive. “I’ll be surprised if they didn’t wipe these machines clean, but maybe we’ll get lucky if they left in a hurry.”

Qween said, “It’s the leaving in a hurry that makes me worry. We got no business being in here.” The plastic whispered under her feet, unnaturally loud in the empty area. She found herself wishing she had her cart up here; she missed the familiar bulk and weight. She had all kinds of weapons stashed inside, sure, but it had also been surprisingly versatile in a fight, all by itself. She had used it as battering ram, a shield, even an escape vehicle once, rolling away down the low hill on West Division over Goose Island.

As the computer screens flashed to life and Dr. Menard started muttering and clicking around, Qween eased down the corridor, avoiding the smears of clotted blood on the plastic. The ragged strips hanging from the ceiling caught the light from the buzzing fluorescents and shimmered with a faint green tint, like rotting strands of kelp. A medical cart lay on its side halfway down the long hallway. A couple of oxygen tanks had been forgotten at the far end. Piles of stained blue hospital gowns and scrubs had been scattered along the floor. Every single door was closed. The entire wing was so quiet she could hear the whisper of cool air hissing from the vents and the humming of some huge machinery several floors below.

Qween crossed over to the first door on the left and opened it. Inside, she found the bloody corpse of a woman strapped to a bed. It looked as if the woman had died in horrible agony, thrashing as she bled out of every orifice, spraying blood across the room in the final convulsions.

Qween backed out, wiping her hands on her cloak, and tried the door across the hall. Instead of just one corpse, she found a massive pile of body bags. All of the furniture and medical equipment had been removed, apparently to make room for the forty or fifty corpses. They had been thrown in haphazardly, as if whoever had been carrying them had been in a hurry. The bags weren’t sealed with any kind of biohazard precautions; blood was seeping through the zippers.

She shivered and reached for the door handle. She was finished with looking around. Fuck that. It was time to leave. She shut the door with a solid click. The sudden, sharp sound made her flinch and an instant later, an agonized howl erupted from two or three rooms down the hall. Someone crashed into that door from the other side. The door rattled and the handle quivered. The screaming didn’t stop. It got worse.

Qween moved quickly back up the hall. “Time to go, Doc.”

“I know, I know,” he called. He’d heard the shrieking. “Almost done.”

Then, another scream. This one distant, from the fourth floor above. Someone else joined in. A chorus of cries echoed up and down the hall. Soon, the hospital was alive with screaming.

Dr. Menard rose out of his chair, watching the ceiling. It sounded like hundreds of people were howling in despair and agony. The wave of pain reverberated throughout the halls, the empty rooms, the elevator shaft, and then somehow, grew impossibly louder. The awful sounds shook the ceiling, the walls, the very foundations of the building. Even the plastic seemed to be vibrating.

Qween kept moving back to the elevators, her Chuck Taylors making crackling noises that were nearly buried under the avalanche of shrieking. She stopped, lifting her feet to check the soles of her shoes. Nothing was there.

Qween squinted at the plastic under her feet. She put one foot out, experimentally pressing down on the floor. The texture of the floor under the opaque plastic changed somehow, swirling around her footprint. She cocked her head, trying to make sense of it. It almost looked like the surface of the floor was moving like sand in an hourglass. She turned back, and now could see, quite clearly, the plastic was stuck to the floor in the shape of her footprints.

Dr. Menard said, “Thirty seconds. And we’re out of here.”

Qween took a few tentative steps toward a tear in the plastic, over by the wall. She reached out, pinched the very edge, and peeled it back several feet. It tore easily, like wet newspaper.

The floor was alive with bugs.

They had been flowing under the plastic the entire time, heading down the hall. The bugs that had been revealed in the new tear stopped in the sudden exposure to fresh air, and behind them, the current continued to flow, and so a mound of the bugs grew as they piled up. They spilled out over the plastic and started to crawl toward Qween over the top of the plastic.

“We’re done here,” Qween said, heading for the elevator. “Don’t care if you’re finished or not. I’m fucking leaving. Now.”

Dr. Menard saw the bugs. He swallowed, tried to say something, failed, and settled for yanking the jump drive out of the CPU. He quickly scurried to the bank of elevators, noting how the bugs were still moving under the plastic on the floor in a vast, seeping flood.

The elevator doors opened and they didn’t waste time getting inside. The doors shut and the elevator dropped. “All those people—” Dr. Menard started to say.

“—are dead,” Qween finished. “Ain’t nothing you gonna do for ’em. They gone.”

CHAPTER 62

3:33 PM

August 14

The buses were full. It was time to move out.

Ed walked down the sidewalk, heading for the last bus, going over the plan in his head. The job was difficult, but not impossible.

He knew all about the bridges and street closures; the only way out of the Loop was through the single lane down by the Field Museum. Sam would ride in the first bus with some of the worst offenders, while Ed would ride in the third, keeping an eye on things and coordinating the trip from the rear bus.

The plan was to turn right on Van Buren, roll out to Michigan, then down to Congress and onto Lake Shore Drive. In addition to the prisoners, each bus would carry three guards, all armed with .12 gauge pump Winchesters. Once they were in motion, the guards had been instructed, right in front of the convicts, to shoot to kill if anyone stepped out of line. The guards were more than happy to comply.

Once the three prisoner buses were through the blockade, a security detail was supposedly waiting to escort them down to Twenty-sixth and California. It wouldn’t take much to ambush the convoy; anybody halfway organized could create problems, cracking open the buses like a can of cheap beer, leaving the inmates to go sprinting through the streets.

So Arturo had promised Ed and Sam four patrol cars, with two officers in each car, and a couple of wild-eyed cops on motorcycles who weren’t part of the main force that surrounded the Loop. Everybody else was spread out across the rest of the city to maintain the illusion that the Chicago PD still had everything under control.

Once down at Cook County Jail, they would orchestrate the unloading of the prisoners, then head back with the empty buses for another load.

Ed boarded the third bus and scanned the faces, which ranged from wide-eyed and panicked to openly hostile. He called Sam. They were as ready as they would ever be. “Let’s get going.”

“Good. Sooner we start this shit, sooner we’re done.”

Ed hung up and nodded to the driver. The driver folded his newspaper and put the bus in gear. Ed turned to watch through the windshield. He could see Sam’s lead bus roll up to the intersection of Clark and Van Buren and start to turn right. Ed felt a sense of calmness settle throughout his body; he almost felt as if he could breathe easily again. They had a long ways to go, but at least they were on the move.

Then the first bus stopped. One of the soldiers was waving his arms over his head, pointing north, to where the lines of CTA buses were trickling down Jackson. Sam hopped out of the bus and walked over to the soldier. Sam pointed east down Van Buren. The soldier shook his head. Sam pulled out his phone.

Ed answered the call. “Christ, what now?”

“Believe the old-timers called it a failure to communicate,” Sam said. “Seems that nobody told these boys where we’re headed, and it doesn’t fit their plans.” Ed could hear the soldier yell something at Sam. Sam yelled back, “And I don’t give two shits about what you want, so go fuck yourself, pal.”

Ed hung up and locked eyes with the driver. “You stay here, keep the engine running, and you don’t move for anybody, until you hear from me. Got it?”

The driver shrugged, put the bus in park, and whipped open his newspaper yet again. Ed went down the steps and out into the heat and humidity. He was surprised he’d gotten used to the air-conditioning on the bus that fast. He quickly joined Sam at the front of the first bus.

Sam was still yelling at the soldier, “—tin star jackass wannabe hero. You ever pull that lump on your neck there out of your ass, you might try thinking for yourself for once.”

“Okay, okay,” Ed said. He shot Sam a look that said to keep his mouth shut.

Sam shrugged, put his hands on his hips, and turned his back on everything, watching the El tracks, missing the rumbling and sparks of the trains.

Ed approached the soldier. “What’s the problem?”

The man wore a hazmat suit without the helmet. An assault rifle was strapped across his back. Extra clips sagged from webbing down the front of his chest. A throat mike wrapped around his neck. “You’ve been misinformed. I’m afraid there is no way these prisoners can be transported anywhere but Soldier Field for decontamination procedures, no exceptions, by order of the president of the United States.”

Ed considered this, then spoke softly. “Do you have any idea who is on board these buses? Take a hard look at this building here. This is a maximum-security federal penitentiary, understand? We are currently transporting over sixty inmates down to the facilities at the Cook County Jail. To put them through some kind of decontamination process, along with regular citizens, this is out of the question. We don’t have the man power. Are you following any of this? The president wasn’t thinking about this when he signed that order.”

“No exceptions,” the soldier repeated.

Ed felt his blood pressure spike. He said, “I don’t know who the fuck you work for. I don’t care.” He pulled out his star. “You see this? This gives me the right to do whatever the hell I deem necessary within the city of Chicago. And that, pal, is a fact.”

The soldier permitted himself a crooked, faint smile. “Look around. We’re in charge. And that, pal, is a fact.”

Three Strykers came roaring down Clark, each of them taking a position across from each bus. The rear door of the closest one opened with a rough hiss, and two more soldiers got out. Neither one wore any kind of insignia on his hazmat suit, but it was clear from the behavior of the other soldiers that these two were superior officers.

One stomped over. He had close-cropped, iron-gray hair and goggle-like sunglasses that clung to his skull as if they’d been surgically attached. He asked the younger soldier, “What’s the holdup?”

Ed said, “We seem to be getting off on the wrong foot here. These prisoners need to be taken down to the Cook County Jail.”

The soldier with the sunglasses turned to Ed. “Who are you?”

“Detective Jones. Chicago PD.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’ve been told, but our orders are quite clear. Every single man, woman, and child inside the perimeter will be evacuated and complete the decontamination process. After that, there is a medical evaluation, and then, and only then, will they be released. No exceptions. If we do not follow proper protocol, we risk breaching our containment system, which could lead to an outbreak. Then it isn’t simply Chicago that is in danger, it is the entire continent. We will not allow that to happen.”

“So tell me, what measures have been put in place to minimize the possibility of a prison break? If you planned this out, you surely recognized the fact that over five hundred inmates from a maximum-security federal prison would have to be evacuated. How do you intend to deal with these violent, dangerous individuals who will happily seize this opportunity to kill anyone in their way and escape?”

“That is your responsibility.”

Ed started to ask the hypothetical question of whether or not the man was fucking serious when his phone rang again. Shaking his head, he pulled it out to check the number. With any luck, it would be Arturo with a solution to this mess.

It was the warden. Ed answered it. “What?”

“We have a problem.... Something is happening. . . .”

Ed could hear chaos in the background. “Gonna have to be more specific.”

“We’ve lost contact with several floors.”

“Please clarify ‘lost contact.’ ”

That got the military officer’s attention.

The warden sounded frantic. “Guards were, uh, making a final sweep of the laundry facilities, I believe. There were guards lost . . .” More shouting in the background. Ed stuck his finger in his ear, straining to hear. “. . . floors thirteen through sixteen are not responding . . .” Gunfire, sudden and close.

Ed jerked the phone from his ear, turning to look up at the wedge-shaped building.

The officer stepped back, speaking low and fast into his throat mike. Hatches popped open on the three Strykers and soldiers appeared behind the .50 caliber machine guns like heavily armed jack-in-the-boxes. Another dozen soldiers ran along Van Buren and lined up on the sidewalk, their rifles unslung and ready.

The officer said, “I suggest you gentlemen step back and allow us to assess the situation.”

Ed ignored him, concentrating on his phone. The warden had stopped talking altogether. For all Ed knew, the warden may have dropped the phone. One lone gunshot, more screaming. Then silence.

Another dozen soldiers lined up along the El tracks over Van Buren.

Sam tapped Ed’s shoulder and pointed.

Ed turned and saw all the soldiers, the firepower. He lowered his phone.

The glass visitor doors opened and a man staggered out into the sunlight. He moved as if he couldn’t see very well, taking conservative, hesitant steps, holding his hands up over his eyes, to protect them from the light. He wobbled, confused for a moment, then struck out, almost at random, in a direction that headed straight for the building’s massive northern pillar.

Ed walked over, followed closely by Sam. A warning shout went up behind them. They glanced at each other, then at the figure that was stumbling along, trying to get as far as possible from the door. As they got closer, they could see that the man was wearing a guard’s uniform, although that did not necessarily mean he was actually a prison guard.

They got within ten feet. The man stopped. He was white, mid-thirties, a little overweight, with red blotches across his skin. Ed couldn’t get a fix on whether he was actually a guard, and eventually believed it because of how the clothes fit.

So far the man hadn’t said anything.

“You okay?” Ed asked, watching the doorway. Sam had his Glock out.

A bug crawled out of the man’s hairline and made its way down his puffy face to his nose, and disappeared under a nostril. He didn’t appear to notice or mind. He scratched at his armpit, made eye contact for the briefest glimmer, and said, “It itches. Oh God, it itches.”

“Why don’t we get you some help?” Ed said.

Another bug crawled out of the guard’s collar, over his jaw, braving the sun, and disappeared up the other nostril. A third came out of his hair and crawled across his open eye.

The eye imploded, and the back of his head crumpled into a pink mist.

The sound of the gunshot bounced around the plaza, echoing between the El tracks and the building. Ed and Sam dropped to their knees, spinning, as Ed yanked his .357 out of his shoulder holster and Sam brought his pistol up with both hands. They faced over twenty soldiers, lined up along the sidewalk and the El tracks.

The body of the guard collapsed.

Ed yelled at the officer, “You said this was our responsibility.”

“Until we visually confirm presence of either bugs or the virus. Then our authority supersedes everything.”

Ed never got a chance to argue. Another man bounced out of the front door, but wasn’t slow and hesitant like the first one, this guy was running for all he was worth. He wore a prisoner’s jumpsuit and tried to slip around the corner to Clark. A three-round burst from one of the soldiers took him down in a tangled heap of orange cotton and splashes of blood.

Then a third. A fourth. More prisoners poured out of the visitor entrance, heading in all directions. It was almost like the bugs crawling out from the guard’s collar, using their overwhelming numbers to escape. The prisoners, like the bugs, flinched at the sudden sun and heat but kept running.

Gunfire erupted around the small plaza in a sudden storm. The prisoners were literally blown apart, their heads folding messily into themselves, causing the sudden lurching expressions of astonishment, as their lungs popped and their legs split open horizontally across the kneecap. At twenty to thirty yards, it wasn’t a challenge; it was more like shooting fish in a barrel.

The three machine gunners on the Strykers took that as a cue and unloaded on the buses. The ridiculously heavy bullets smashed through the windows, the side of the bus, through the seats, through the prisoners closest to the side, then more seats and the second set of prisoners across the aisle. Collisions with the seats and some of the major ligaments changed the original trajectory of the bullets, but they continued on, into the seats across the bus, smashing through more prisoners and seats, and out through the other side. They killed everyone onboard, including the drivers. The feather-like remnants of the newspapers floated serenely around the steering wheels and corpses.

When the third prisoner had bolted from the entrance, Ed and Sam dove to the side, rolling into shelter behind the north pillar. Gunfire came from Van Buren, then the deep, booming crackling from the Strykers’ .50 caliber guns opened up from the west, on Clark. They crouched, heads down, elbows up, arms wrapped over their heads to protect themselves from the exploding glass wall that encased the first floor.

The gunfire trickled away as the flood of prisoners slowed and stopped. Several unnaturally quiet seconds ticked past. The soldiers started reloading. Then, new gunshots, somehow different. Ed risked a glance at the shattered remains of the first floor. More men were now fleeing the prison, both prisoners and guards, but this second wave was armed. That was why the gunfire sounded different—it was coming from behind Ed and Sam.

The soldiers fell back into defensive positions and resumed shooting. The prisoners and guards dropped to the sidewalk and wriggled up behind the piles of corpses, using the bodies for cover. They stuck their shotguns and handguns over all the dead flesh and fired blindly.

Ed saw one soldier fall from the El tracks and land like a bag of loose laundry, sprawling over a low sandbag wall. But that was the only soldier he witnessed get hit. A few shotguns, with shortened barrels for close-range defense, and a handful of Smith and Wessons were no match against thirty or forty state-of-the-art fully automatic assault rifles, and the slaughter continued.

However, the prison had the advantage of a seemingly endless supply of prisoners and even a couple of guards. Whenever one of them went down, someone behind them would pick up the fallen weapon and continue shooting. They kept coming, streaming out of the MCC.

At first, Ed couldn’t figure out why the prisoners would face almost certain death, running face-first into a blizzard of bullets. Then he remembered the bug crawling across the first guard’s face and realized the bugs must be infesting the prison, and they were driving the prisoners out of the prison, despite the gunfire.

He tapped Sam on the shoulder, and nodded toward the shattered buses. They needed to take advantage of the new distraction and at least get clear of the damn cross fire. They scuttled across the sidewalk on the Clark Street side, keeping the buses between them and those .50 caliber machine guns. They rolled through the shattered glass in the gutter and scooted under the middle bus. Gunshots continued to pop and crackle around them.

Ed fought to control his breathing, to slow his heart. His ears rang from all the shooting. His eyes watered from the stinging smoke and glass. The air smelled of harsh gunpowder and metallic taste of blood.

“When these boys finish cutting down the prisoners, they’re gonna come looking for us, you know that, right?” Sam asked, half-whispering, half-yelling into Ed’s ear to be heard.

Ed nodded. Still, he hesitated, watching the prisoners struggle forward, only to be blown apart. He hated to cut and run, leaving the inmates to their doom, but there was nothing the detectives could do. If the bugs had gotten into the prison, then the prisoners were as good as dead anyway.

“Any suggestions?”

Sam twisted around, getting a fix on the Strykers. “We try to just walk out of here, they’re just gonna shoot us in the back and forget about it.”

Ed nodded. He knew better than to think the soldiers were on their side.

Sam asked, “How bad you want to get out of here?”

Ed thought about Carolina and her son. “Bad enough to shoot my way out if that’s what it takes.”

Sam grinned. “Atta boy. You remember that.” He crawled to the other side of the bus and surveyed the street. He called back to Ed, “Gimme thirty seconds, then come around to the other side of that tank down there or whatever the fuck they call it.” He pointed at the Stryker farthest south on Clark.

Ed gave him the thumbs-up. Sam rolled out, got to his feet, and scrambled across to the far side of Clark. Ed took one last look back at the prison, noting how the shooting was slowing down. There weren’t many prisoners left to fire back. He tried to ignore the shards of safety glass strewn across the asphalt as he used his elbows to pull himself along under the bus to the back.

He scurried across the gap to the third bus in the line and dove underneath it as well. He crawled the length of that bus, then figured at least thirty seconds had passed. He rose stiffly, knees cracking like frozen power lines in a high wind, and peered back at the plaza.

The soldiers were moving in now, finishing off the last of the prisoners. At least two or three guards had seen the writing on the wall, and while they couldn’t go back upstairs, they weren’t in any rush to stick their heads outside and get their brains blown out, so they’d holed up inside, behind the visitor desk. They’d pop up once in a while and fire a volley through the shattered glass, just to make the soldiers keep their distance.

Ed knew the attempt was futile, and those guards were finished. It was just a matter of time. He tried not to think about the poor bastards stuck inside the lobby, still shooting it out with the soldiers, and hurried over to the last Stryker. Like he had promised Sam, his only responsibility now was to get out of the city alive. He ducked down under the nose to avoid being detected by the periscope and the driver’s video image sensor.

The guy on top running the .50 caliber was too preoccupied with punching holes the size of softballs in the concrete above the guards inside to keep an eye on anything closer. Ed didn’t think the soldier had enough of an angle to see where the guards were hiding, and seemed to be blasting away for the hell of it.

The unholy volume of the machine gun made it hard to think, so Ed just kept his head down and hustled around to the other side of the vehicle. The shock waves from each shell pummeled him with invisible fists and made him dizzy. He didn’t even hear the shot from a handgun, only saw that suddenly the machine gunner stopped and slumped to the side. Blood poured out of his mouth and nose.

The rear door flopped open, and two soldiers jumped out, guns ready. They spotted Ed immediately. One of them screamed, “Freeze!”

The other one said, “Shoot him. Shoot the fucker.”

Ed didn’t even have time to raise his arms before Sam somehow materialized behind the soldiers. Two shots, so close together they sounded almost like one solid report. Blood spattered across Ed’s sport coat. Both soldiers collapsed.

Sam slipped his pistol back into his holster and rolled the closest soldier over. “You take that one. Hurry.” He felt around for the Velcro straps that protected the zipper. “We got a minute, maybe two tops, before they figure out they’ve lost these guys.”

Ed finally figured out what Sam was doing. He got to work on the other soldier. As they struggled with the hazmat suits, Ed tried to process what had just happened. It left him feeling cold. Sam had just killed three men inside of ten, maybe fifteen, seconds. It scared Ed a little. “You sonofabitch. You use me as bait again, I’m liable to bust you in the chops.”

Sam tried to wipe some of the blood off the hazmat suit. “Quit your bitchin’. I took care of it.”

A minute and a half later, Ed and Sam helped each other zip up their suits and kicked their sport coats under the Stryker. They had left their own handguns back inside their shoulder holsters, and took the assault rifles from the dead soldiers. Sam pushed the bodies of the soldiers under the Stryker. Ed stuck his head inside the vehicle and found a couple of helmets, along with a backpack, on the front seat. He opened it and found it was full of foreign MREs, with no less than seven languages labeling the contents. Plastic water bottles. A map.

“Grab all the cool shit,” Sam said. He squinted. Found his glasses. Used them to determine what he was seeing. He waved to one of the guards on the other side of the broken glass. The guard held a shotgun and two fingers up.

Sam got it. One gun. Two shells. He shrugged, and gestured at the Stryker, wordlessly telling the guard that if they could get outside, the Stryker was all theirs.

Ed found a pair of night vision goggles. More ammo. He dumped it into the backpack. Ed slipped it over his shoulder and handed a helmet to Sam. He said, “We supposed to just waltz right past ’em?”

“That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

They pulled the helmets over their heads and left the Stryker, heading north. At Van Buren, they turned west, leaving the sporadic shooting behind. They passed through rows of sandbags, moving quickly. A group of soldiers came jogging along, heading for the firefight, and never looked twice at the two figures in military hazmat suits.

Ed and Sam faded into the shadows.