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?”