Pandemic Page 172

Clarence looked at the extended hand. Then he looked at the knife. No, it had to be him.

“Was,” he said. “Was my wife.”

He turned again, faced her, forced his feet to move.

Margaret’s body shook, this time from sobs. Tears filled her eyes, ran down her forehead to vanish in her dark hair. She drew a ragged breath in through her nose, paused, then screamed again.

Reality slurred for a moment. Everything shifted. He’d met her five years ago, fallen in love with her almost immediately. So brilliant, so hardworking, so utterly committed to doing whatever it took to get the job done. And what a job that had been.

She’d fallen for him almost as fast. For a while, things had been perfect. They had been so happy together. They thought they had all the time in the world.

They didn’t. No one did. Ever.

No matter how much time you have, that time always runs out.

Clarence stepped forward.

Her screams grew more ragged as vocal cords gave way. She thrashed harder, so hard the whole ladder rattled, but the SEALS knew their business when it came to tying knots.

He reached out with the knife. The blade shook madly, so much so that it looked like a prop made out of rubber.

He was Abraham, ordered by G.o.d to sacrifice his own son. Only G.o.d wasn’t here, and no one was going to appear in a cloud of holy light and tell him it had just been a test of his devotion.

Clarence started to talk, but his throat tightened and he choked on the words. He swallowed hard and tried again.

“Good-bye, my love.”

He pressed the edge of the blade against her throat. She screamed and screamed, she chewed madly on the gag, she jerked and kicked and fought for life.

Clarence closed his eyes.

He pushed up as hard as he could and slid the knife forward, felt the blade slice deep. The ladder rattled harder than ever. Still pressing up, he pulled the blade back, felt it bite into tendons and ligaments. Hers wasn’t the first throat he’d cut. It wasn’t like the movies — one slash didn’t do it, you had to saw a bit to get at those arteries.

He pressed up even harder and slid forward again, then pulled back again. Hot wetness splashed onto his hand.

Her screams ceased.

Eyes still locked tight, he sawed forward one more time, back one more time.

The ladder stopped rattling.

He heard the sound of his wife’s blood splattering into a plastic mop bucket.

From behind him, Klimas’s command voice boomed.

“Feely! Get this blood ready to go!”

Clarence realized he was still holding the knife. He let it drop, heard it clatter, then covered his face with his hands.

He slowly sank to the floor.

All the time in the world …

All the time in the world …

MISSION OBJECTIVES

Paulius Klimas wasn’t a religious man. His lack of faith, however, didn’t stop him from a small prayer of thanks:

Thank G.o.d it’s winter.

The Windy City was living up to its name. Snow, ash and dirt swirled, rose and fell as gusts curled off buildings and rolled down the streets. Paulius guessed the temperature was hovering in the single digits, but the windchill dropped it far below zero. The weather numbed him, made it hard to move, but he was thankful because it produced a much-desired side effect: the streets were mostly empty.

Even monsters and psychopaths hated the cold, it seemed.

He and D’Shawn Bosh moved quickly. Roth’s sporting goods store had been stop number one. Bosh had gone for Cubs gear, while Paulius opted for a black, knee-length Bears coat and matching hat. They both wore gray Chicago Fire sweats over their fatigue pants.

Paulius also looked a little pregnant. He had a one-gallon milk jug of Margaret’s blood strapped to his belly. Feely had said his body heat would keep it from freezing solid.

They were headed east on Oak. Dust from the JDAMs had billowed out even this far, some four and five blocks from impact, turning the standing snow from white to gray.

Though the bad guys clearly didn’t like the cold, a few of them remained outside. Paulius saw several bundled-up people, heads covered in hats and faces wrapped in scarves. They all carried weapons of one kind or another: hunting rifles, pistols, knives, axes, even carbines. One fat guy lugged a chain saw. The dirt, the streets filled with ruined cars, an armed militia walking free — Chicago reminded Paulius of a subzero Mogadishu.

The monsters, however, didn’t seem to mind the conditions. Three-legged hatchlings scurried everywhere. As for the huge, yellow behemoths with the wicked bone-blades sticking out of their arms, Paulius saw at least one on every block. It was all he and Bosh could do to keep walking, to try to pretend the creatures were nothing unusual.

Roth’s experience held true: without uniforms, Paulius and Bosh drew little attention. They reached Michigan Avenue, looked out onto a park covered in gray snow. At the park’s far edge lay U.S. Route 41, and beyond that, Lake Michigan.

“d.a.m.n,” Bosh said. “We ain’t getting out that way.”

Paulius nodded. There were even more cars blocking the road than when he and his men had swum in the day before. He pulled out his binoculars, steel-cold fingers complaining at even that small motion. Through them, he saw the reason for the growing and already-impa.s.sable roadblock: two of the sickle-armed, muscle-bound creatures were rolling a burned-out Toyota pickup down the road. They pushed it near several other cars, then bent, lifted, and flipped the vehicle on its side as if it were nothing more than a toy.

He stowed the binoculars. “After we pick up the others, we’ll have to use surface streets to drive north. Let’s go.”