Two heads peered around a white stone corner. Cooper stared into the Trump Tower’s long lobby. On his right was the forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high glass wall that looked out onto Wabash Avenue. Outside, big clumps of snow whirled down from a sky that was almost the same yellow as the feet he’d seen in the boiler room.
Directly in front of him stretched the modern, white marble floor that led to the registration desk… or at least what was left of it. Body parts littered the lobby. Puddles of tacky blood pooled around corpses, bloody footprints leading away in various directions.
He took all that in at a glance, because he could really focus on only one thing.
Hatchlings.
Twenty of them, maybe thirty. Cooper had seen shaky footage of hatchlings before, part of Gutierrez’s T.E.A.M.S. program. The video had been taken by soldiers in the woods just before the creatures attacked. But to see the things in person…
They stood around two feet tall. Three thick, twitching tentacle-legs made up half of that height, legs that attached to the bottom points of a three-sided pyramid covered in gnarled, glossy-black skin. And in the middle of each triangular side, a vertical, black eye. Purplish lids blinked rapidly, pushing in from the left and the right sides, keeping the eyes wet and clean.
The hatchlings crawled on everything: furniture, body parts, the splintered wood of the shredded front desk, even chipped and cracked white stone walls that four days earlier had been a spotless, polished marvel. The monsters lowered their bodies to these various surfaces. They jittered and shook perversely, like misshapen dogs humping wood and glass and marble. As they shook, Cooper heard crunching sounds, grinding noises.
He watched one of the hatchlings rise up on its three tentacle-legs. It climbed on top of a hard, knee-high, uneven mound that ran the inner length of the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The creature vibrated: clumpy damp material squirted from its bottom.
It was shitting. That mound… it was all solidified shit. The thing vibrated one more time, squeezing out the last bits, then the graceful tentacle-legs carried it to the torn reception desk.
No, not torn… half-eaten.
Sofia’s hands clutched at Cooper’s arm. She stood half behind him, using him as both protection and support.
“Fuck me,” she said. “I never believed they were real. I thought that news footage was special effects bullshit.”
Cooper nodded, neither knowing nor caring if he’d ever believed or not. The past didn’t matter, because he could see just how real they were.
Sofia tugged at his coat. “What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re making a bulwark or something.”
“A bulwark? What the fuck is a bulwark?”
“Like a wall,” Cooper said. “Something to stay behind during a gunfight.”
“You a soldier or something?”
“History Channel. Watch enough World War Two documentaries and things sink in.”
The sound of roars suddenly echoed through the lobby, filtering in from somewhere deeper in the hotel. Cooper couldn’t be sure where the roars were coming from — if he and Sofia were going to get out of the hotel alive, they had to go right through the little poop-making monsters.
His hands felt sweaty. He raised the pistol, started to aim at the closest creature.
Sofia’s hand rested on his forearm.
“Don’t,” she said. “Five bullets. We have to conserve” — she ran out of breath in midsentence; she was farther gone than Cooper had hoped — “our ammo.”
If he fired off a round, would the hatchlings scatter? Maybe… or maybe they’d attack, like they had in the video, swarm in, chew him up alive and then shit him out to make more of their little fortress.
He looked at Sofia. “I can shoot one, see if they run. What else can we do?”
“We could… just walk out,” she said. She closed her eyes, tried to deal with the heat washing through her body. “We don’t fuck with them, maybe they don’t fuck with us. Chavo didn’t attack you… maybe these things won’t, either.”
Cooper’s throat felt tight. A pinching feeling churned in his guts.
Sofia raised a weak hand, pointed to the glass wall.
“The street is right there,” she said. “If we stay any longer, we’ll… we’ll run into something worse than those little monsters.”
Another roar — the closest yet — seemed to punctuate her words.
She was right. They didn’t have time to find another way out.
Gun in his right hand, his left arm around Sofia’s waist, Cooper stepped out from behind the corner and walked toward the front door some forty feet ahead.
The twenty hatchlings stopped moving. Cooper paused. They all turned their bodies so two of their eyes looked his way, focused on him.
Sofia slipped, just a little. He caught her, held her up.
Now or never…
He started walking again. Sofia did her best to carry her own weight and keep pace.
The pyramid creatures watched.
The long, glass wall passed by on Cooper’s right. At the end of it, past the reception desk on the left, was the revolving door that opened onto the street.
He was halfway to it when, as a unit, the hatchlings suddenly went back to their work of humping, grinding and shitting.
Cooper and Sofia reached the revolving door. They stepped inside, pushed, walked with it until it opened onto the sidewalk of the Trump Tower’s curved entry drive.
A strong, icy wind clawed him, ripped at his coat. Sofia’s hand came up to shield her eyes and face. He and Sofia stepped forward.
The two of them stared out at a war zone.
Burned-out cars lined Wabash Avenue, including the cop car he’d seen on fire just a few days ago. Or was it hours? He wasn’t sure. Powdery snow swirled along the pavement, in places stopping and sticking, turning into long, thin, white fingers that stretched over the blacktop.
Across the street to the left, a black-glass skyscraper towered high above. Cooper didn’t know the name of it. It had caught fire at some point. The building look like a tall, sparkling cinder.
And everywhere… bodies.
Some were bloated, their swollen bellies stretching shirts and popping buttons. Some were missing arms or legs. Some had their stomachs ripped open or their heads smashed in. The clothing of the corpses rippled and snapped in time with the unforgiving wind. Pools of blood had frozen into snow-speckled red glass.
Pillars of smoke rose across the city skyline, abstract streaks of wavering grayish-black brushstrokes on a canvas of glowing yellow and orange.
Five days ago, Chicago had been… well… Chicago. Now it was a slaughterhouse.
Beneath the wind’s undulating howl, he heard no car engines, no honks, no tires squishing across slushy concrete. No talking, no yelling… no people. The lack of city sounds jarred him almost as much as the hatchlings had.
“Fuck,” Sofia said.
“I know,” Cooper said. “Oh man oh man, this is so messed up.”
“Not that. I mean it’s cold.”
Cooper nodded. The wind stung his face. Wind like this could burn you, make your skin crack and peel worse than eight hours in the sun. He started shivering. Had to be five or ten below out here, way worse with the windchill. He was lucky he’d brought Jeff’s jacket, or there was no way Sofia would have lasted more than fifteen minutes out here.
The coat meant that her wound and infection might kill her before the cold did. He had to help her.