Lee’s head snapped back and he fell flat into the aisle. Kimmy screamed, wiping at the blood on her face.
“Run!” Tommy yelled at her, not stopping, still coming down the aisle, stepping on Lee’s corpse. He heard movement behind him and started to turn, knowing that he was too slow, knowing that the bullet from Phil’s revolver was in on its way. He couldn’t believe Phil was upright so quickly.
But Phil was indeed standing up, wobbling and blinking through the pain. His nose had been smashed, and blood sheeted his upper lip, dribbling down over his mouth and pouring over his chin. “Mudderfugger,” he wheezed and squeezed off a shot with his stubby .38.
Tommy flinched at the report, but the blast went wide.
Phil started forward, blowing bubbles of blood, intent on getting close enough so he couldn’t miss. Tommy stumbled backwards, trying to shift Grace to the side so he could shield her with his own body. Phil fired again.
Tommy heard a harsh grunt and glanced over his shoulder at Kimmy. The slug had caught her in the neck. She dropped back into one of the flight crew’s bench seats, raised her hand to her throat. She looked down in surprise at the blood on her fingers.
Tommy had the Glock up now, fired twice, and missed both times.
Phil dove sideways behind a row of seats.
Tommy turned back and ran, jumping through the open doorway.
Outside, the soldiers were still learning the hard way how noise and light drew the infected. The soldiers ignored Tommy and Grace completely, intent on shooting at the rushing swarm. More soldiers were now escaping from the subway and once they saw the chopper, they went sprinting for it across the plaza.
Metal scraped across metal. About fifteen yards down Washington, a manhole cover popped out of its groove and slid into the street. Soldiers immediately lunged out, crawling feverishly onto the street. Most were unarmed, having lost their weapons below. As soon as they found their feet, they broke out running in all directions. Some saw the chopper and broke for it.
Tommy stayed low and kept moving, holding Grace tight on his hip, running like a fullback weaving and dodging through the defensive linemen. He reached the sandbag wall on the western side of the plaza and dropped to his knees, crouching, covering Grace with his body. Her emotions had caught up to her and she started to cry. He put his lips against her ears and whispered, “Shhhh, shhhh. It’s okay. Daddy’s got you now. Daddy’s got you. Shhh. Shhhh.”
Behind him, the sound of the Sikorsky’s rotors changed pitch. The pilots had finally decided enough was enough, and they were pulling out. The massive engines whined, and the tree-length blades sliced through the air, slow at first, then faster and faster as the last of the soldiers scrambled on board. More soldiers ran into Daley Plaza every second, bursting out of more manhole covers and the shadows surrounding Washington and Clark. But the CH-53K wasn’t waiting. Lights flashed as the chopper lifted into the air like a constipated dragonfly, moving slowly, weaving slightly, having trouble putting distance between itself and the ground.
Some of the soldiers started shooting at the ascending helicopter. The panic had slipped into anger that quickly; if they couldn’t get a lift out, if the chopper wouldn’t wait for them, then fuck it, no one was getting out. At least two of the squads carried a rocket launcher and fired them. They missed two out of three times. The third time, the first rocket caught the helicopter right in the guts, and vaporized seven of the soldiers inside.
The CH-53K was blown sideways, tail up, nose at the rushing ground. The pilot fought against being blown head over heels, a death spasm for this helicopter. The blades, seventy-nine feet long, whipped through the air at eight hundred feet per second. The pilot brought the nose up but couldn’t manage to stay in the middle of the street.
Phil spent the last seconds of his life trying to get out of his seat belt. He thought if he could just get out of the seat and move to the back of the helicopter he could survive the crash. He tried, but couldn’t manage to compress the right buttons in his panic and stayed trapped in his seat. Not that it would have mattered in the end.
The pilot had almost leveled off when the blades smacked through the glass and concrete of one of the theater buildings to the east. One of the four blades caught fast on a steel beam in the building’s fourteenth floor, and in less time then it takes to blink, the rest of the blades snapped into the beam and it was all over. The chopper whipped around as if it was slapping the building with its tail rotors. The fuel didn’t catch until it was halfway down the building, tumbling and bouncing down the side of the wall of glass, and it finally exploded. The wreckage slammed into the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks, sending burning fuel across the street in a blazing sunflower display. The impact blew an angry huff of wind back through the streets.
Dr. Reischtal watched it all unfold on the two monitors fed by the Apaches. The Sikorsky’s explosion blew out the infrared cameras and the images dissolved in a bright blast of green light.
Dr. Reischtal didn’t move. He watched the chaos without expression.
A few seconds later, the heat died away, and he could once again see how the plaza had been overrun. It was impossible to discern the soldiers from the infected. He kept searching for a figure carrying a child. This individual was all that mattered now. He wanted, no needed, to see the figure surrounded and attacked, to watch the infected hack Tommy Krazinsky and his daughter into pieces, to witness the man and the girl being ripped limb from limb.
He couldn’t find them.
Perhaps it was time to inform the president. Chicago was lost.
He dialed the number. Waited for the ring. Instead, there was just a dull click. Then nothing. He dialed it again. Same result. Dr. Reischtal left his phone face up on the table, stretched out his palms, curled his fingers into claws, then pulled them back to him, scraping his short fingernails across the plastic. The president was either too busy to answer, or was avoiding him.
Either way, it didn’t change anything.
Chicago was still finished.
He called Evans.
“Just got through,” Evans said. “Damn near there. Give us half an hour, forty-five minutes to get clear. I’ll call you as soon as we’re all topside.”
Dr. Reischtal said, “Of course,” and hung up. Evans had twelve trucks with him. They would provide the initial blast, sending death up through the underground caverns and subway tunnels. Three more tankers had been left in the massive parking garage under Millennium Park, at the north end of Grant Park. Six more had been spaced out along Lower Wacker, covering the north and west sides of the Loop.
If three trucks had been enough to utterly destroy Soldier Field, over twenty would vaporize most of downtown Chicago, and the tankers full of 2-4-5 Trioxin interspersed with the rest of the explosives would extinguish every form of carbon-based life within the blast radius.
Unlike Soldier Field, where only three trucks had to be synced, this would involve linking at least twenty-four trucks. It was time to begin. Dr. Reischtal dialed the number to start the arming process.
The fireball from the Sikorsky wreckage had drawn infected from all over the city. Most of them were infested with bedbugs. The bugs crawled through their hair, in and out of noses. Sometimes bugs would cluster in groups and feed, usually down around the corners of the mouth in a frozen, scaly scab of thirty or forty. Some of the freshly infected were still shambling around in a drunken haze. Not enough blood had been taken to steal consciousness and the victim could only fight to stay upright while coughing bugs out of their lungs and brushing them away from their eyeballs, surrendering the rest of their skin.
For the most part, the infected ignored Tommy and Grace, focusing instead on the fireball to the northeast. They flowed through the smoke across Daley Plaza, sometimes howling and gibbering with rage at the flickering light and erratic spurts of gunfire still chattering around the streets, as the soldiers fled in all directions.