The last thing he wanted was that kind of image to linger in everyone’s minds.
He stepped around the bed, calculating the damage. The room was in such a state of destruction that the amount needed to repair everything staggered even him. His initial reaction had been to start the process of billing the estate for the damages, but he’d reconsidered after someone had mentioned the negative publicity he would attract by charging the family of the suicide victim.
He edged around the couch, watching the space under the bed. He bent closer. He couldn’t see any bugs, but Roger had assured him that that didn’t mean anything necessarily. The image of their fecal matter filled his thoughts, no matter how much he wanted to pretend the clotted droppings didn’t exist.
His gaze landed on the corner, behind the nightstand. He pulled it away, shining his flashlight at the partially peeled silicone, the painted trim that had been pried away from the wallpaper. Nothing moved in the light. The dead bugs from Roger’s insecticide were still there, as if someone had scattered wet coffee grounds. Once again, he couldn’t help himself; he had to expose the worst wounds of the hotel, and tapped the silicone with the toe of his wingtips. Living bugs erupted around the floor trim in the hundreds. Thousands. It was as if the building itself had vomited the tiny parasites into the room.
The bugs spilled over themselves in an almost liquid movement as they oozed from the cracks. The carpet grew alive under his shoes. They swarmed up the legs of the nightstand. His leg brushed the mattress and he flinched as bugs gushed from the seams.
Mr. Ullman didn’t waste any time getting back to the doorway. He slammed the door shut and locked it. He hustled down to the elevator and hit the button and fought the urge to hit the button again. That little shit Roger was going to hear about this.
Mr. Ullman checked back down the hall. The shadows around the door seemed to grow. He blinked, ran one hand through his thinning hair. The only thing he could hear was the thrumming of the cables and the rest of the elevator, but his eyes caught movement, down at the door to room 1426.
Shadows dripped from under the door. They grew along the corner of the hall. Flowed down the carpet at Mr. Ullman. He punched the down button, over and over.
The darkness grew, still utterly silent. Millions of the bugs flooded the hallway, washing across the carpet in waves of foul-smelling tiny bodies. He heard the elevator come to a slow stop on his floor.
The elevator doors split in half and he fell inside. He leapt for the CLOSE DOOR button, and jumped up and down to activate the capacity indicator, anything to close the doors. Bugs spilled inside.
The doors slid shut.
Mr. Ullman stomped on the bugs, grinding them into the thin carpet. He hit the basement button. He planned to deactivate all of the air systems throughout the hotel, all of the air intake and circulation, anything he could think of. He hoped that it would at least stop the bugs from spreading to different floors. The only way to accomplish this task was to gain access to a secure terminal in the basement, behind ten inches of steel. There were only three keys. Mr. Ullman had one. The facilities manager had a copy. One of the elected officials of the board had the other.
He stepped back to assess the bug situation in the elevator. He couldn’t tell how many he’d killed; if you scraped it all together it might be enough to butter a slice of toast. More were still crawling around the doors, about three inches off the floor. Mr. Ullman stepped in close, bent his toes on the door just above the bugs, and slid his shoe down, crushing the bugs with the ball of his foot.
The floor numbers flashed. His ears popped.
Once he shut the air circulation down, his next move would be to visit each of the remaining guests’ rooms. They could either leave under their own volition, or be removed by the soldiers who were even now marching through the city. After his encounter with the bugs, he did not care.
Once the guests were no longer on the premises, he would inform the staff and they would file out in an orderly fashion. Of course, being the general manager, he would be the last out of the building, handing the operations key over to the emergency personnel.
The elevator slowed, stopped.
The doors opened and Mr. Ullman stepped into the basement, full of visions of handing the damn key over to somebody else. He was four or five steps down the corridor before he realized he was walking through an inch or two of the bugs. They were up his pants before he had a chance to even register the sounds of all of them under his shoes. He tried slapping at them with his clipboard, but he might as well have been trying to stop the rain with fresh laundry in a Midwestern thunderstorm.
He went to his knees.
The virus was already slipping into his brain, slinking into the cells, corrupting everything exponentially. He didn’t know that he was already infected, and still fought as he fell forward. Waves flowed to him, as if the tide of bugs had been lovingly called to the moon. They covered him, crawling over his face, into his hair, down his suit, fastening those horribly efficient tubes to every inch of his skin. He held on to the key until it was nudged aside by bugs looking for a place to feed.
CHAPTER 55
10:27 AM
August 14
Ed tried to turn right on Randolph and head west between City Hall and the Thompson Center, but found himself face to face with the imposing grille on the front of a CTA bus. All three lanes of the street were blocked by buses, all them going the wrong way, streaming toward Grant Park and the lake. The sidewalks were full of civilians, lining up to climb aboard. Soldiers stood back near the buildings, watching everything.
Ed spun the steering wheel back to the left, drove through the intersection, and pulled over. He killed the spinning lights and said, “This is as close as I’m gonna get to that hospital. It wouldn’t do you two any good to be seen driving up with us. Be a good idea to get in quiet.”
“No shit?” Qween said. “They must pay you extra to figure shit like that out.”
Dr. Menard opened the door and climbed out. Qween followed, making popping noises with her tongue. She slammed the door.
Sam lowered his window. “You’re a cranky little minx, you are, so go easy on any sonofabitch you come across.”
Ed looked them over one last time, this old woman who had been living in the streets, the haggard doctor with the broken glasses, gave them a solemn nod, and pulled smoothly away. He wound down Clark, threading his way through the sandbags, Strykers, and trucks full of soldiers, and hit the siren again.
Qween pulled Dr. Menard close and spoke very quietly. “Look around. They’re gonna haul everybody’s ass they can find out of here. Right now, try and look like we’re jus’ waiting for the bus, like ever’body else.” She took a moment, turning slowly, taking everything in, as people ignored them and flowed around them like water around the remnants of an ocean pier.
She sensed the panic seething just under the surface. Their eyes spoke volumes. Too wide and uncomprehending for people that had lived and worked in the Loop for years. These people looked like Midwestern tourists who had found they had been mistakenly dropped off in downtown Baghdad.
It wasn’t just the expressions. One woman had bottles of water stuffed in a bulging purse, a man carried three briefcases, and another man awkwardly carried the large hard drive of a desktop computer. Nobody was flat-out running, but they looked like they wanted to. Instead, they formed shuffling lines until the next empty bus rolled into place.