Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Page 7

  Twelve

  THE DOOR was unlocked. Cole leaned into the truck. No sign of her. No room to hide behind the seats. He looked back through the rear window at the security gate and began to imagine what she’d seen and heard from her vantage point in the truck: first, more than two dozen gunshots, and then Cole thrown against the gate and slung across the store by something that looked like a human grizzly bear. Of course she’d thought it was over. Cole was dead and she was alone, without a weapon of any kind, without the slightest chance of survival.

  Cole wondered if she’d tried to start the truck. The keys still hung in the ignition. Of course, even if she had tried, the police cruiser blocked her in and she might not have been confident she could ram it out of the way.

  Cole shut the truck door and crunched through broken glass, stepping over the ruined metal framework of the airlock onto the front sidewalk. Was she inside the eight-wheeled vehicle? Some sort of military transport or National Guard rescue unit? Was the air horn a signal to join them? If so, why didn’t they simply drive closer? None of it made the slightest bit of sense.

  Then he saw her.

  She stood in a mulch bed across the parking lot, her back to him, standing between two decorative fruit trees. He wouldn’t have seen her at all in the dark, except for a floodlight at ground level aimed at a stone wall in front of her, the sign for a restaurant in the mall commons.

  “Lindsay!” It sounded like no more than a bark from inside the respirator. Cole started to remove the mask, but hesitated. It seemed somehow wildly imprudent to yell into that night, as though the armored vehicle were a slumbering giant that might be awakened. But it was not asleep, Cole realized. He could hear the low rumble of its diesel engine, and an instant later the air horn sounded, another loud peal of several second’s duration.

  Cole pulled the respirator away from his face. “LINDSAY!”

  No response.

  He limped to the driver’s side of the cruiser, blue lights flashing in his eyes. He tucked the Glock into his waistband and found the cop’s key ring in the bottom of the mechanic’s bag. The largest key with a black plastic fob looked promising, but on trying it he found that it didn’t come close to fitting the keyhole.

  The air horn sounded again.

  Cole glanced around the parking lot, then looked back at the key ring. He flipped through a dozen small keys until he found a flat steel one with a Chevy symbol. It fit. He opened the door and got in, tossing his mechanic’s bag into the passenger seat on top of an aluminum clipboard stocked with accident reports in carbon triplicate. The driver’s side was like an airplane cockpit for all the buttons and switches and screens that presented themselves to him. Cole inserted the key in the ignition and turned it over. The tachometer jumped and digital readouts and a laptop mounted beside the console woke up, blinking dire warnings. Cole knew all too well what they were likely to say.

  He shifted into drive and gunned the engine, turning a sharp circle across the parking lot to the flower bed where Lindsay did not even turn her head at the blue lights washing over her. Cole slammed the gearshift into park and threw open the door. He got out with his hand on the Glock and eyed the armored vehicle. It hadn’t moved. Less than a hundred feet from him now. Other than its idling engine, it gave no hint of occupancy and bore no markings on its drab gray exterior. Darkly tinted windows, narrow and probably bulletproof, ran along the top of the vehicle, and if it was lit within the glass admitted nothing. It could have been a billionaire’s bugout vehicle or it could have been a SWAT unit, other than the obvious fact that its occupants were employing no special weapons or tactics. Nothing was right about it; Cole’s every instinct urged him to get back in the police cruiser and get the hell out of there. All this damned altruism was going to get him killed.

  “Lindsay,” Cole said in a low voice as he approached. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her, her head bowed and shoulders shaking. Just before he reached her, a brilliant light atop the armored vehicle began flashing, the beam aimed in the opposite direction across the parking lot.

  What the hell?

  “Lindsay.” Cole reached for her shoulder, just as he had done when he first met her, but this time he hesitated. He circled slowly in front of her, bending to see her face. Her eyes were closed and she still wore the paper dust mask. There were no tears on her face but she was emitting a series of rapid exhalations, not quite hyperventilating or weeping, only the symptoms of an incalculable trauma for which, Cole knew, there was no support, little comfort, and perhaps no real recovery.

  “Hey,” he said softly, “It’s going to be okay. Look, I came back. You did great, Lindsay.”

  He reached for her elbow, noticing the tags still hanging from her jacket sleeve.

  “You’re just in shock, that’s all. Come on, you can get some rest while I drive.”

  The instant he touched her arm, her eyes opened to reveal black pupils and whites shot through with veins. An unnatural scream began in the back of her throat, rising to a pitch of the sort one might hear in the forest at night and attribute to wildcats fighting. Her fists flashed in the flicker of the blue lights and before Cole could react she began pommeling him over the head and shoulders.

  “Stop! Lindsay, stop!” Cole crossed forearms with her, blocking the next blow, then he grabbed her opposite wrist and spun her around, jerking her arm down and trying to bear hug her before she could get her arms up again.

  He was fighting a demoniac. He lifted her off the ground, her heels flailing his shins and her head nearly breaking his nose when she whiplashed it back into his face.

  “Lindsay, you’re fine, stop fighting me.” He backed toward the cruiser while she writhed and screamed, a sound at once guttural and murderous, a witch being burned alive, maybe, but nothing recognizably human. What on earth would they think if they were watching from the armored vehicle?

  Cole got her to the rear door and realized he needed a third hand to fling it open. This was the kind of bullshit cops put up with all the time, he figured. The instant he released one arm to grab the door handle, Lindsay’s hand came flying back and fingernails raked the side of his face.

  Cole batted her hand away and slammed her against the side of the car with the arm still encircling her. He had the door open. He grabbed a fistful of her jacket and shoved her across the rear seat, narrowly avoiding being kicked in the face before he got the door shut.

  The driver’s side door still stood open. Cole bent to get in, only to realize the Glock was missing from his waistband. He took a quick step back from the car, fearing Lindsay had somehow grabbed it. The cruiser shook on its shocks as though it contained a wild animal, but no holes appeared in the glass. Cole scanned the pavement around him. It was there. He swore and snatched it up and limped back to the car. He got behind the wheel. Lindsay was beating her fists against the backplate, only inches from Cole’s head.

  “You could not pay me to be a cop,” he said.

  He put the car in drive and accelerated, whipping past the armored vehicle and glancing in the side view mirror just as a pair of enormous headlights blinked on behind him.

  Thirteen

  COLE DODGED LIGHT POLES and concrete curbs, the cruiser’s blue lights flashing and the speedometer climbing north of sixty before he braked hard and careened out of the parking lot onto a broad, six-lane thoroughfare. In the back, Lindsay lost her grip on the backplate and tumbled into the passenger door, screaming.

  Behind them, a pair of massive headlights traced an arc through the darkness before they locked on the cruiser, the glare in the mirrors nearly blinding Cole and seeming to unnerve Lindsay, who writhed on the backseat, moaning as though snakebit, beset by delirium and shock.

  Cole had no map in his head for the turns he made, always at the last second and without slowing, the tires squealing, the rear fishtailing before it followed, and inevitably, three seconds later, the lig
ht would flood them again, the armored vehicle’s huge diesel engine roaring until it closed within one hundred feet, but never any closer, and never falling back for long.

  “What do you people want from me?” Cole jerked the wheel and punched the gas, the cruiser leaning on its shocks but holding steady, and in the side-view mirror he saw the eight-wheeled vehicle skidding through the intersection like a brick, the welded cage atop it nearly knocking into the traffic signals above.

  Cole tried to think—as rationally as he could with Lindsay wailing like a wraith trapped between the realm of the living and the dead. If the occupants of the armored vehicle were the authorities—maybe the Dallas Police or even the military attempting to enforce a curfew—he had accumulated plenty of actual crimes that night to worry about. A litany of them, come to think of it. He’d broken into a box store and stolen merchandise. He’d discharged a weapon in the city limits, but that was nothing exceptional on a night like this. He’d shot more than twenty of the infected—homicide, if they wanted to be sticklers about it. He’d been the last person to leave the scene where an officer had been mauled to death, and he’d tramped in the man’s blood and taken his weapons, but they couldn’t know any of that yet, could they? He’d also stuffed a woman into the back of a car, presumably while they watched, and, of course, there was the issue of the stolen cruiser itself, an offense egregious enough to bring out SWAT in an armored vehicle any other night, but something told Cole that wasn’t it, either. If they wanted to apprehend him, they could have fired on him or rammed the vehicle or hailed him with a megaphone. None of it made sense.

  Cole found the road surprisingly free of obstacles. Either the public had largely obeyed the order to stay put, and a mass-exodus hadn’t happened yet, or he hadn’t gotten close enough to the interstate to find lanes of snarled traffic.

  He passed a pickup driving in the left hand lane. In the bed, two men served as bookends for a vertical stack of flat-screen TV’s, new in their cardboard boxes. Their faces were aghast as they watched Cole come alongside them, their mouths slack and eyes wide, and it took Cole a moment to remember that he was driving a police cruiser with the lights flashing. He couldn’t help but grin.

  “Let me out.” A low voice came from the backseat directly behind Cole’s head.

  Cole nearly ran off the road.

  “Let me out.”

  “I can’t exactly let you out right now. Feeling any better?”

  Lindsay pressed her mouth to one of the holes in the stamped metal backplate. “Let. Me. Out.”

  “I’d be happy to if we didn’t have the A-Team crawling our ass at the moment.” Cole took a hard turn left that slid Lindsay across the seat.

  Her voice seemed to come through gritted teeth. “Let me out, you son of a bitch!”

  “Whoa, easy girl.” Cole glimpsed her face in the rear view mirror, the whites of her eyes huge with rage. “No need to bring mom into this.”

  Behind them, Cole saw the headlights sweeping around the corner, just a little bit slower than they’d been in the last turn. He wondered if he could lose them by making multiple turns in rapid succession. The flat Texas landscape was hardly suited for making a getaway. Especially not with those blue lights flashing. Cole reached across his shoulder for the seatbelt, fastened it, and had just begun to examine some of the unfamiliar switches and controls on the dash with the hope of turning the lights off when Lindsay hit the backplate behind him with the force of a caged animal and screamed at a pitch that made every muscle in his body flinch.

  “DAMMIT, WOULD YOU STOP?” he shouted.

  Lindsay beat her head against the backplate, unleashing the fury of one possessed, shaking the car side to side on its shocks, spraying the back of Cole’s neck with blood and spittle.

  Cole swore and began flipping switches at random: five silver ones in a row, obviously an aftermarket addition to the car’s standard features. The first turned on a searchlight mounted to the driver’s side window; Cole flipped it back off. The second began the wail of the siren, hardly competition for Lindsay’s rage, and seeming, if at all possible, to make her even more crazed, as though she were briefly attempting to harmonize with it before Cole shut it off. The third switch was already flipped up, Cole realized, holding the wheel steady and groping the panel in the dim light of the interior. When he toggled it down the blue lights ceased at last.

  “Nothing to it,” he breathed.

  Lindsay had begun to beat her head against the rear window as though she intended to break the glass or kill herself. This wasn’t just shock; Cole was sure of that now.

  He accelerated and took another hard turn, as much to throw Lindsay off the window as to lose the armored vehicle. The tires screeched again and Cole wondered, fearfully, how much abuse the treads would take before he blew one.

  He saw the lights of the armored vehicle in the mirror just as he reached another intersection, and on impulse he jerked the wheel for a quick left, twisting a knob to turn off the cruiser’s headlights and then pushing the accelerator all the way to the carpet, the dim landscape leaping at him before his eyes adjusted, the road only dark by the standards of night in the city, that perpetual urban twilight, oblong halos of incandescent streetlight cast on the pavement at intervals, flashing through the cab.

  Nothing behind them yet.

  Lindsay screamed, right behind Cole’s head this time, seeming to know she could use the sound as a weapon.

  Cole swore and took another blind hard right, what turned out to be a tree-lined neighborhood street, the dark shapes of cars parked along both curbs choking the road down to a narrow gauntlet, but he gripped the wheel and accelerated, feeling the air displaced on either side of the cruiser by the parked cars whipping past, and not recognizing the shadow of the pedestrian in his conscious brain until a shudder ran through the frame and a circle of broken glass appeared on the windshield with the suddenness of an exploded snowball, a myriad cracks registering the indenture of a flying human body and instantly rendering Cole’s view nothing but an opaque network of fractures.

  He had time only to reflexively touch the brake when an irresistible force lifted him from his seat, the airbags deploying and his seatbelt striking him across the waist and chest with whiplash force, as though his body had been dropped from the sky on a tether, and then the utter blackness of lost consciousness closed over him.

  Fourteen

  GENERAL TRUBILINSKI arrived by taxi outside a White House under heightened security. Marines in full battle dress patrolled behind concrete barriers. On Pennsylvania Avenue, a conflagration of protesters held signs that demanded of the government everything from find a cure to zombies are people, too.

  Trubilinski stepped from the taxi, removed his sunglasses, and presented himself at the gate—for the first time in civilian clothes. Secret Service agents clad in black tactical gear with M4 carbines slung across their chests did not hurry to validate his appointment in the West Wing as they might have only a year ago. They were young men, fresh out of the infantry, with close-cropped hair and hard eyes. They scrutinized his photo ID and then they scrutinized his face. One of them made a phone call from a nearby guardhouse.

  An armed escort led the retired general into the building via an unmarked entrance, where stood two more agents at a security checkpoint. Trubilinski emptied the contents of his pockets into a polished brass bowl while the agents watched. A smart phone and a leather wallet, his pair of aviator sunglasses. He stepped through the metal detector and held his arms up while the second agent wanded him, the unit beeping when it passed over his left knee. The agent wanded the knee again, and again the unit beeped.

  The agent patted Trubilinski’s pant’s leg around the knee. “Sir, is there anything metallic in your leg?”

  “Oh, yes,” Trubilinski said, looking down at his knee as though he had quite forgotten it until then. “A metal plate. I picked it up in a little con
flict you may have heard of, called Vietnam.”

  “Yes sir,” the agent said.

  The first agent touched his earpiece. “One of the aides will be right down.”

  Trubilinski had barely replaced his phone and wallet in his trousers and his sunglasses in his breast pocket when a paneled door opened and a young man in a suit and tie—young enough to be his grandson—nodded politely and said, “Right this way, General.”

  The conference room was richly appointed in a manner consistent with the rest of the White House, with heavy white molding and gilt wallpaper above the wainscot. Behind a long mahogany table polished to a mirrored sheen sat three dour-looking bureaucrats, all in their forties to early fifties: one thin, one fat, and one with a shaved head and military build. Gone, apparently, were the days of his glory, when the President sent Air Force One in the night to fetch him, and a conference room like this would have been brimming with scientists, military brass, emergency management experts, and, of course, the President himself.

  As though intentionally missing a beat, a long moment passed before the fat one finally stood and gestured to an empty chair across the table. “Please, General, have a seat.”

  Trubilinski moved stiffly to the chair as though an entire courtroom were watching him. He was not under investigation, though the arrangement had obviously been intended to make him feel that way. He had received a Presidential pardon in the last hours of the previous administration—an administration for which the present one had an abject disregard. Still, a man could not be tried for the same crime twice.

  The other two men rose—somewhat reluctantly, it seemed—and the four shook hands across the table.

  “General,” the fat man said, “I’m Anthony Bernacki, Chief of Staff. This is Mike Eagleson, Senior Counselor, and James Lawson, Senior Advisor.”

  Trubilinski nodded.

  “The President will be regrettably absent,” Bernacki conceded, as though he were conscious of the empty chairs in the room, most notably the one at the head of the table, flanked on either side by American flags, and set apart otherwise by a polished onyx ashtray, a resting place, apparently, for the Dominican cigars the President was rumored to enjoy.