The ambulance rolled through the intersection and crashed, upside-down, on the far sidewalk. The Stryker behind him skidded and stopped in the middle of the intersection, while the one that had smashed the ambulance came to a shuddering halt ten yards down LaSalle. The hatch on the Stryker to the rear popped open and a soldier appeared behind the .50 caliber machine gun.
Tommy blinked stars out of his eyes. He hoped they weren’t shards of glass from the shattered windshield. It took him a moment to realize he was hanging upside down, held in place by his seat belt. He rolled his head, flexed his fingers, pulled his knees up, making sure that nothing was broken, and everything still worked.
His knee hurt like hell, but as far as he could tell, he was still in one piece. A pair of boots crunched through the broken safety glass outside his door. His door was wrenched open with a squeal of metal pain and a hazmat faceplate leaned down and peered at him.
“How ya doin’, Tommy?”
The metallic voice sounded almost familiar, but Tommy couldn’t place it. He slapped at the seat belt release button.
“Easy, easy does it.”
From one of the Strykers, Tommy heard an amplified, no-nonsense voice say, “Step away from the vehicle, soldier. This man is a suspected terrorist. Step away. Now.”
The man in the hazmat suit ignored the warning. He reached in, and hit the release button, catching Tommy when the belt gave way. His hands guided Tommy gently to the roof of the ambulance and unfolded him so he was lying halfway on the street. Behind the faceplate, Tommy caught a glimpse of a dark face and a grin.
“Relax. We got this.”
“Last warning, soldier. We will open fire.”
The man suddenly had a giant revolver in his gloved hand. He pivoted, brought the handgun up in one smooth motion, and fired.
The man visible in the hatch in the Stryker behind the ambulance flopped back as if he just needed a few minutes to study the sky. The driver was still very much alive inside, and he had control of the cannon. The Stryker’s engine growled as the canon swiveled around with a mechanical purr, looking for the hazmat soldier.
Then an overweight black woman came out of nowhere, stepped up on the Stryker’s tires, and dropped something down through the hatch where the dead machine gunner slumped. The cannon continued to rotate, until it was almost in line with the ambulance. A muffled boom came from inside the Stryker. It shook like a dog in the middle of a dream, and Tommy understood that the woman had dropped a grenade or something.
The second Stryker hadn’t missed any of this, and it roared backwards. The top hatch swung open, and a soldier grabbed the .50 caliber. This gunner wasn’t taking any chances, he was already firing, spitting bullets all over the place. He couldn’t aim worth a damn while the Stryker was backing up, but it was clear to Tommy that once it stopped, they were all dead meat.
A dark CTA bus burst out of the darkness of LaSalle and smashed into the Stryker. Bullets sprayed into the night sky as the gunner snapped against the hatch with such violence it didn’t appear that he had any bones at all, and was instead some invertebrate species as his body rolled in the whiplash with all the resistance of a wet towel.
The bus hit the Stryker hard enough that the back tires lifted off the ground a few inches. It dropped back, bounced once, and didn’t move. The Stryker spun counterclockwise, blasting through a few sandbag berms.
The woman was now suddenly at that wreck, casually dropping a grenade inside. This time, the driver didn’t try to use the canon. He may have been running for the hatch, he may have been trying to trap the blast with a shield or whatever was inside, but in the end, it didn’t matter. There was another muffled whump, like a stifled sneeze, and it was done.
The boots left Tommy and ran for the bus. Tommy rolled over and watched the hazmat suit and the woman kick open the door. Tommy climbed to his knees. His ears were ringing and he couldn’t quite nail a perfect balance yet, but he didn’t think anything was broken. His fingers tingled now, where before there was only numbness. He cautiously rose to his feet and took a moment to orient himself.
When he felt he could walk without falling down, he lurched over to the closest Stryker. As he got closer, he found he could clench his fists and loosen his legs. He lifted the gunner’s corpse, and pulled it out. There was nothing there he could use. He took a deep breath, and climbed down. The heat was still incredible. He squinted in the murk, found the driver. The man wore fatigues.
Tommy climbed out, and after some gasping to escape the heat, he dropped back down and went for a storage locker. He felt a couple of dense plastic squares, almost like baseball bases that a family might take to a picnic. He crawled out and rolled down the tank, stuck one square under each arm and went to the bus.
The driver was out now, coughing and holding his side, but pacing around like he was shaking off a bad dream, nothing more. Hazmat suit and the woman started arguing. Tommy walked up and saw that the man pacing around was the detective who had given Tommy his card. Sam something.
The detective started to speak, and coughed instead. His tongue and teeth were dark and shiny at the same time with blood. After a few tries, he said, “I’m fine, goddamnit. Knock that shit off.”
Tommy said, “Thanks,” then limped past them, heading north.
Ed called, “Kid, you okay?”
Tommy stopped and turned. “I have to get my daughter.”
Dr. Reischtal watched the figures of white light start walking up Dearborn. Toward Washington and Daley Plaza. He pinned the microphone, a black bug with the foam head, a battery pack for the thorax, and a transponder antenna as the abdomen, to his new paper robe. He wore nothing underneath. After stripping out of the hazmat suit and his uniform and submitting himself not once, but twice, to the decontamination process, he had ordered his old clothing burned.
“Do not engage,” he told the pilots. “Pull back and continue to monitor.”
The sound of his voice was heard by a dozen satellites, who passed it back down, like electronic rain. A pair of headphones hung on the back wall of his unit, but he ignored those. Apart from the Apache pilots, he would only speak to a living human on the other side of the glass, through the exterior microphone, of course.
Dr. Reischtal was sealed in. Tighter than a bug in a rug, as his mother’s maid was fond of saying.
He called it his unit. A sealed fortress, his own private citadel, secure inside a warship, no less. Austere, composed entirely of gleaming white plastic. Completely sterile, of course. It utilized its own air filtration unit, its own power, its own waste disposal, its own recyclable water supply. Next to the door that locked from the inside, a giant bubble of thick plastic faced a simple table and chair. A scanner sat on the table, so any hard copies could be digitally scanned and downloaded by the isolated computer inside. A wall of monitors covered one wall. Two monitors displayed the feed from the Apaches. The video from the cameras attached to several soldiers’ helmets filled other screens. Several of these had gone dark.
The rest of the monitors were tuned to various television stations. Most had cut to aerial shots of the burning wreckage of Soldier Field. Although Dr. Reischtal was quite pleased with the level of destruction in the death of the stadium, he watched the last station that was still broadcasting the disintegrating press conference with interest. Lee, the fool, was dithering about, still trying to convince people he was in charge. No sign of Krazinsky, but Dr. Reischtal hadn’t expected him to show his face yet. The station finally cut away to its own footage of the skeletal wreckage of Soldier Field, the sagging walls and twisted metal silhouetted by the raging fire inside.