The sleepers weren’t just taking a power nap. They were out cold. These people had curled up into a fetal position across two seats, or had ended up on the floor. A few of them had been written on with permanent marker. Someone had scrawled, KICK ME across some businessman’s face. Another guy, just a kid really, with long hair, dirty glasses, and a Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt, had HAVE FUN KILLIN PEOPLE, DUDE written in blocky letters from one cheek, across his nose, to the other cheek. Still another had a target circled on his forehead.
A tight, choking feeling enveloped Dr. Menard. He couldn’t help but notice the heavy-gauge wire that covered the windows. He wanted to turn around and bang on the driver’s plastic barrier and demand to be released. This bus was full of people infected with nearly every stage of the virus. But he knew that wouldn’t work. It might get him shot.
No. The soldiers knew damn well this bus was full of the infected.
So Dr. Menard kept moving toward the back of the bus. Nearly all of the seats had been taken. He didn’t know where to sit. At least none of the passengers had slipped into the final, violent phase. Yet. Almost at the very back, he spotted an Asian woman in surgical scrubs, staring morosely at her lap. Sensing a kindred spirit, he sat carefully next to her, trying not to let his elbow touch her arm.
The bus turned onto Upper Wacker and they drove past the hospital. He craned his head around, but he couldn’t see any sign of Qween. He glanced at the woman next to him, but she still hadn’t looked up. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked quietly.
She looked at him, eyes hollow and wet with tears. The prisoner bus passed an empty CTA bus, and the glass reflected a glare from the setting sun back into the interior of the passenger bus. Nearly everyone flinched at the sudden flash of light, including the woman wearing medical scrubs. She turned her head away from him, and he finally saw them.
Three bedbugs were feeding on the back of her ear.
Dr. Menard jerked away and stood up in the aisle. Down at the front, the driver’s eyes met Dr. Menard’s eyes in the mirror, then flicked back to the street. Dr. Menard did his best to stand while the bus turned left on Jackson and sped up. He brushed imaginary flecks off his clothes and couldn’t stop. His hands shook.
He pressed his hand against the jump drive in his front pocket, just to reassure himself. It was still there; of course it was still there. He told himself that they would be unloaded at Soldier Field, and all he would have to do was make it through the decontamination process. It wouldn’t be much fun, but he could handle it.
He knew he would have to say good-bye to his clothes. That would be first. He figured that he would either slip the jump drive in his mouth or, if push came to shove, so to speak, he could hide it in his ass. Then they’d be hit by some kind of powder? Hard to say. Showers were guaranteed, probably a number of them. God only knew the chemicals that would be sprayed on them. Heat definitely. Lots of heat, to kill any bugs. From there, he imagined they would turn people loose inside the stadium itself. He’d join everybody else, and they would wait.
Everything would be put on hold until the SWAT teams in the subways came up for air. Once the rats had been destroyed and the pesticides had been sprayed from one end of the city to the other, then the government would want to declare the evacuation had been a success. They’d have to let everybody go at that point. They couldn’t rightly declare a victory without turning the survivors loose. It wouldn’t suit their version of the truth. Hell, if the CDC or the president wanted, they could claim they’d saved everybody in Soldier Field.
Be patient, Dr. Menard told himself. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. He would live to see the end of this.
The bus turned onto Lake Shore Drive, and he marveled at the wall of tanks and trucks that had been arranged to form a barricade across both Lake Shore Drive and Roosevelt. Dr. Menard glanced through the back windows. There were no more buses behind them. In fact, as far as he could see, nothing else moved on the streets.
The prisoner bus barely slowed down as it slipped through the barricade. For Dr. Menard, this was not a good sign. It meant that they didn’t want to stop and inspect the bus. It meant that they already knew who was on board, and wanted them through as fast as possible.
Soldier Field loomed ahead, the new gleaming steel and glass addition dwarfing the original dignified columns and solemn structure. Dr. Menard was confident they would pull around to wherever they had set up the decontamination staging area, probably outside in a parking lot somewhere. The bus headed down into the underground parking lot.
Of course, Dr. Menard reassured himself. They must have a huge lot under the stadium, easily accessible by the buses, and easy to control. It made sense that they would set up the decontamination tents down here. But instead of going deeper into the parking lot, the bus rolled up a ramp, and before he fully understood what was happening, the bus emerged out from under the northern seats of the stadium, past the goal post, and across the end zone.
Some of passengers moaned at the sudden reappearance of light as the bus left the darkness of the underground parking lot. Dr. Menard ignored them and peered through the wires at the stadium as the bus rolled arrogantly over the grass, passing the ten-yard line. The twenty. The thirty. Until finally, it slowed and stopped around the forty-yard line, joining dozens of other buses, all lined up in neat rows on the field.
Dr. Menard stormed up the aisle to the driver’s cubicle. He pounded on the plastic. “Where are the decon showers? What’s the protocol here? You cannot just dump these people in here. We need to be screened, do you understand? You have infected onboard! Get us out of here.” He pointed at the driver with one hand and clutched the jump drive with his other.
Something tickled the back of his neck and he slapped at it but he never took his stare off the driver.
The driver’s expression was unreadable behind the hazmat faceplate. All Dr. Menard knew was that the driver was facing his direction. The gloved hand hit a button and the door behind Dr. Menard opened. Dr. Menard refused to turn around.
The driver opened his own door and stepped outside. And walked away.
Dr. Menard looked back at the passengers. Everyone was asleep now. He came to a decision and went purposefully down the stairs. He put his foot on the badly wounded turf and moved swiftly. As he rounded the front of the bus, the thing that surprised him was the quiet of such a huge structure. Apart from some asshole yelling garbled directions through a megaphone down around the southern food court, the silence that hung over everything was unnatural, this calmness.
He turned in a slow circle and realized the main reason that such a huge place was so quiet was because most of the people were sleeping. Down on the field, people had crawled under the buses to escape the light. All those people under the buses made him think that they’d created some kind of horrible nest or burrow.
He put one foot on the top of the front tire and pulled himself onto the bus’s hood. From there he crawled up the windshield and stood on the roof, getting his first good look at the immense stadium. It looked empty. Then he saw the shapes wedged behind the seats, the rumpled seams of backbones and elbows and hair that skulked behind every row. Very few had fallen asleep sitting up. It looked like everyone had sought out the tightest, darkest, most secure spots as they drifted off, as if it was some kind of primeval ritual.
The few people he saw actually walking, or at least moving, all seemed unaware of each other. They stumbled through the rows of buses, looking for a quiet place to rest. For whatever reason, they seemed content to curl up next to someone else who was already sleeping. He couldn’t quite tell, but from the buses nearby, it looked like the front doors were all wide open, and full of sleeping figures. The only vigorous movement Dr. Menard could see was inside the back of the CTA bus directly in front of him. It looked like a group of men were gang raping a young woman. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or not. He hoped she was.