Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Page 8

  Again, Trubilinski nodded.

  They settled into their chairs.

  “I’m curious,” Trubilinski said. “I was summoned to this meeting forty-eight hours ago, but by all appearances the outbreak is barely twenty-four-hours old. How long have you known about this?”

  The three faces across from him bore, by their raised eyebrows and parted lips, every indication that they were not accustomed to having questions directed their way, much less the initiative in a meeting stolen from them. Eagleson, the man with the shaved head, tugged on his lapel, leaned forward, and clasped his hands before him.

  “Actually, General, we’d just like to ask you a few questions that may be of use in establishing an accurate timeline for the outbreak.”

  Trubilinski’s great square face remained unmoved.

  The senior counselor looked at his notes. “How early, during the first outbreak, did you discover the presence of sleepers in the decontamination camps?”

  Trubilinski only stared at the man.

  Lawson, the man with a marathon runner’s build, leaned forward and held up one finger as though to mitigate the aggressive nature of his colleague’s question. “What we’re trying to find out, General, is how many individuals were released from the Florida quarantine that manifested symptoms initially, but were later found to be asymptomatic. We’re concerned that there may have been a certain percentage of the population all along that acted as carriers—perhaps even the result of a genetic anomaly.”

  When Trubilinski didn’t respond, Lawson looked to his right and left for support. “Hell, I’m not a biologist. Is that a good way of phrasing it?”

  Eagleson nodded. “We’re trying to determine the extent of our exposure here, General. Whether we can expect this sort of thing to happen in every town in America, or if we might be dealing with, say, a dozen outliers.”

  “And also,” Bernacki added helpfully, “if the discovery of a genetic variance might be the key to immunity, or even a vaccine or treatment.”

  An almost imperceptible tightening hardened Trubilinski’s face before he spoke. “What is your strategy for containment?”

  The three politicians exchanged glances.

  Trubilinski wasn’t done. “What protocols have you initiated?”

  Bernacki held up his hand, but was too slow getting the words out.

  Trubilinski beat him to it. “Does the President have plans to end our foreign wars, recall our troops, and close our borders?”

  Eagleson’s face and dome had noticeably reddened but he remained composed. “General, let me be more specific.” He drew a black-and-white photo from his portfolio and laid it on the table, spinning it around and sliding it toward Trubilinski. He tapped the image. “This case I’m sure you remember, since you interviewed him in the decon camp yourself.”

  Trubilinski looked at the image but remained nonplussed. “Tell me, gentlemen, are resources being allocated to the Cicada Project that would have ordinarily been spent establishing quarantine zones and safeguarding the general population?”

  The air left the room.

  Bernacki was the first to recover. “General, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. Would you be surprised to learn that this man”—he glanced at his notes—“Cole McGinnis, traveled to Dallas shortly before the outbreak there occurred?”

  “I trust each of you have your places in the Project secured,” Trubilinski said, almost smiling.

  Eagleson held the line. “If, hypothetically speaking, we were to pull your phone records, General, would we find that you had contacted Cole McGinnis? Before the outbreak, perhaps?”

  Trubilinski regarded them coolly. “I see,” he said at last. He pushed his chair back and stood. The three men across from him made no move to rise. “I was told I needed to bring nothing to this meeting, but I see now that it was a mistake to think that any occasion in Washington could be attended without an attorney.”

  The old general moved stiffly toward the door by which he had entered, though it was not his age or his anger that made him move so, but the honor he still bore, his head erect, the bearing of an officer; it was the mark the uniform, though discarded, had left upon the man. He quit them like a gentleman, shadowed by Secret Service agents all the way to the street, knowing all the while that the doors that closed behind him would never be opened again. Trubilinski replaced his sunglasses and disappeared among the throng.

  Fifteen

  HOW LONG he had been unconscious, or what had happened, whether he had been sleeping or near death, or where he might find himself when he awoke were thoughts hardly formed in Cole’s mind when light came piercingly into his brain. But this was no mere light; it was sound masquerading as light, or a blast so loud it seemed to bring the light with it, as surely as the first word of God himself over the unformed deep.

  Cole blinked. His eyes adjusted slowly. His face was stiff, his limbs slow to respond. Sunlight refracted through the spiderwebbed windshield like the facets of an ice sculpture. He was slumped against the driver’s side door, a spent airbag hanging limp from the steering wheel in his lap. Beside his head, the side curtain air bag hung loose where it had sprouted from the door frame.

  Another blast shocked him fully awake. The air horn. What the hell?

  Cole struggled to right himself, realizing the seatbelt was cinched tight across his lap and torso. He pushed aside the deflated side curtain airbag and looked out the window, the glass there still intact.

  He saw the armored vehicle first. It sat broadside in the street, less than a hundred feet away. Between them, shattered pieces of plastic auto body littered the pavement, and on the opposite curb lay a crumpled human form in dark clothing that Cole could only guess was the pedestrian he’d struck the night before.

  Cole reached for the cruiser’s ignition, only to find the key still forward in the running position. He twisted the key back and forward again. The starter stuttered, but the engine wouldn’t fire. A tiny warning light below the speedometer glowed in orange letters: low fuel. Cole tried it again. No luck. Sometime after he’d lost consciousness the engine had probably run itself out of gas.

  Movement drew Cole’s eyes back to the armored vehicle. On the roof, a figure clad in a white biohazard suit was stooping to emerge from the open door of the welded steel cage. The man straightened and cradled something compact and black in his gloved hands, pivoting his whole body as he panned it over the street and slowly lifted it toward the trees.

  Cole’s eyes lifted with it.

  What he saw struck him as viscerally as a physical blow, the back of his throat constricting as though he were choking on his own breath.

  The trees were full of climbers.

  They festooned the branches, duct-taped by the arm here and bound by the leg there, hanging in the forks of major branches, wedged, feet dangling, snagged in the highest crotch of the limbs large enough to hold them. They seemed not persons so much as insects, and not even insects so much as lifeless husks. Emerged from heads fallen back, from gaping mouths and bloodied eye sockets were the pale stalks risen silently all that long night of horrors, tapering up seven or eight feet and terminating in football-sized anthers, visibly yellow even from that distance, dusted with billions upon billions of Cordyceps spores offered to the wind, each spore sufficient to render a man slave to the fungus.

  “Oh my god,” Cole whispered against the glass—glass dusted with yellow spores as heavily as pollen in the springtime. He reached instinctively for the respirator and found it still hanging from his neck. He fumbled numbly with the straps, his breath burning like fire in his lungs before he got the mask cupped over his face and the elastic straps cinched tight. He exhaled against the valves, inhaling too deeply and laboring too hard before he closed his eyes and got it under control. He blinked several times and looked in the rearview mirror.

  A shape there. A h
ead, but not a human silhouette, its neck too thin. A chill came over him. He twisted his neck violently to see through the backplate.

  Lindsay lay lifeless across the backseat, one arm hanging in the floorboard. The stalk had stretched her jaw open hideously as it emerged, her eyes shocked into pinpoints and the anther deformed softly against the cruiser’s ceiling like a thing filled with helium. It had not yet fully unfurled, its surface still gleaming and flaccid.

  A guttural scream came involuntarily from Cole and he fought with the seatbelt for several terrible seconds before he released it and flung the door open and tumbled, hands and knees, into the dry grass of a lawn, ripping away the mask as bile spewed from him, shuddering and coughing and dry heaving until his spine quivered with the bitter rejection of it.

  When, at last, he spat several times and rocked back on his heels and looked at the armored vehicle, he saw that the man in the biohazard suit was pointing the camera directly at him.

  Cole’s voice was little more than a croak. “What are you looking at?”

  He coughed bitterly and spat again. Louder: “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT?”

  The cameraman didn’t move. His eyes were only two circles of tinted glass fitted into the biohazard suit, unblinking as the lens of the camera itself.

  Cole reached for the respirator. Spores were everywhere. He could feel them between his fingers from the grass. Too late. He was a dead man. He fastened the respirator back in place anyway and crawled into the open door of the cruiser.

  Behind him, the air horn ripped through the air, a longer peal followed by several staccato bursts. Cole found the Glock in the floorboard and came out of the car with it, shaking with rage, leveling the pistol at the armored vehicle in time to see a steel hatch closing on the roof. Cole gave them several rounds anyway, the pistol bucking in his hand and the impacts sparking against the armored plate.

  The vehicle sat impassively.

  The horn sounded again.

  Cole let the pistol fall to his side, a dread and apprehension far beyond horror coming over him with a sudden epiphany. He looked up and down the street. But for the agonized figures in the trees he was still alone. He backed to the cruiser, eyeing the armored vehicle as though it were a wild animal in standoff with him. Without looking directly into the back seat, he found his mechanic’s bag and removed the key ring from the ignition.

  A riot shotgun was mounted vertically to the backplate between the front seats. Cole found one of the tiny handcuff keys on the ring and inserted it into the locking mechanism. The clamp over the barrel swung open. Cole could tell by the weight of the gun that it was loaded, at least six rounds in the tube, maybe eight. He found the trunk release under the dash and pulled it.

  He limped to the rear of the car, following long white scars ripped through the decals of the police department. He stopped at the trunk and looked into it. An odd assortment of gear presented itself. Bright orange traffic cones. A measuring wheel. Yellow jumper cables. Several black duffel bags of the tactical variety emblazoned with the word police in reflective lettering—a very good sign.

  Cole glanced at the armored vehicle and reached for the first bag, which, it turned out, wasn’t a duffel at all but a heavy, load-bearing vest outfitted with an empty pistol holster on the left breast and four Velcro MOLLE pouches, each containing two loaded AR magazines. Much of the vest’s weight and bulk, Cole quickly realized, came from body armor plates inserted into Velcro sleeves in the vest, front and back.

  Cole unsnapped the buckles and slid his arms into the vest immediately.

  Still no movement from the armored vehicle.

  He situated the vest on his shoulders and buckled it, then he unzipped the remaining bags and pawed through their contents. The first was only a gym bag containing a spare uniform, running shoes, synthetic shorts, white cotton socks mated into balls, and toiletries in a plastic bag filmed with condensation.

  The second bag was a backpack with thick, padded straps, surprisingly heavy when Cole lifted it. Another furtive glance down the street before he unzipped it. The first thing he saw were folded papers bearing concentric black rings. Range targets. A pair of earmuff-style hearing protectors. Small, heavy boxes packed like bricks in the bottom of the bag. Cole dug through the boxes, scarcely breathing as he read the labels: nine-millimeter and 5.56 ammunition. Hundreds of rounds of each.

  “God bless America.”

  Another long peal from the air horn startled Cole from the reverie of a kid on Christmas morning. The street was still empty.

  Cole glanced into the trunk one last time and noticed a long black Pelican case packed against the rear seats.

  “Please be what I think you are.”

  The case was the right kind of heavy. Cole wrestled it out, but both the snaps were locked. He found the cop’s key ring in his pocket and flipped through them until he came to an odd little key with a tubular shank. It fit. He unlocked both snaps, braced the case against the bumper with his knee and opened it.

  A beautiful black AR-15 with a sixteen-inch barrel, collapsible stock, and Eotech sight still gleamed with a light coat of oil. Somebody’s baby. Cole lifted it from the foam padding and peeled back the bolt carrier, the chamber bright and clean.

  He locked the bolt open and ripped into one of the MOLLE pouches for a magazine. The sight of the loaded rifle in his hands still evoked no response from the armored vehicle. Cole had a theory about these people growing stronger in his mind by the minute.

  He stood the rifle against the bumper beside the shotgun and hurriedly consolidated his gear into the dead officer’s backpack. He tossed aside the paper targets and the earmuffs and added in the full-sized Glock, the empty magazines, and the flashlight. His stomach ached at the very sight of the jerky and nuts, and he stuffed them into an outer compartment, easy to access. He loaded his AR pistol with a magazine from the vest and jammed it into the backpack’s zippered laptop sleeve. It would do. He would leave behind his mechanic’s bag, the broken strap rendering it useless.

  Cole holstered his Glock 19 on the vest, snapping together the thumb break and shaking the pistol to ensure it fit snugly, and he had just begun to worry about how he would carry both the shotgun and the full-sized AR, neither of which had slings, when he heard the familiar, if unwelcome, whirring of tiny rotors.

  Sixteen

  THE DRONE appeared over the gable end of a nearby house, hovering only a few feet off the asphalt shingles. It came slowly down the pitch of the roof, dry leaves skittering away from its downdraft, the rotors seeming to pulse with intensity as it left the roof and hovered over the yard, advancing directly toward Cole.

  He looked at the armored vehicle. No sign of movement.

  Cole was reaching for the shotgun when a man in civilian clothes burst from the bushes beside a house two doors down. He tumbled to the ground, then got to his feet, taking several staggered steps as though drunk, looking around him as though he hardly believed what he saw, or as though the world had been so irrevocably altered that even a typical suburban neighborhood now held all the mystery of an alien landscape.

  The man’s head turned slowly, taking in the street, sector by sector. Cole crouched beside the cruiser, the shotgun in his left hand, the AR in his right, ready, he thought, for anything.

  The buzzing of the drone drew the man’s attention first, then, by degrees, seemingly as a consequence of relaxing the muscles in his neck, his gaze lowered until it settled directly on Cole.

  Shit. Cole didn’t move. For several long seconds he tried not to blink. Only the side of his face and shoulder were visible beside the cruiser’s taillights.

  The man’s face broadened into a huge, malfeasant grin, then he threw back his head and the cords in his neck grew taught with a savage cry, a whoop that segued into a wolf-like howl, and even before the howl completely tapered off, others began breaking through the bushes on either
side of the street, appearing at the tops of fences and falling over, running down the sidewalks, looking frantically about themselves, disoriented, taking sudden steps toward each other until a kind of recognition and disappointment came over them and they turned to look elsewhere. Several stopped in the street and doubled over, coughing violently.

  Cole dropped the shotgun and braced the AR against the side of the cruiser. He flicked off the safety and mashed a button on the rear of the Eotech. A reticle appeared, glowing bright red beneath the sight’s hood.

  The manager had already broken into a sprint across the intervening yards toward Cole, and the others were beginning to notice. Cole lay the reticle on the man and squeezed the trigger. He went down in a tangle of his own arms and legs.

  Every cougher in the vicinity jolted at the gunshot and immediately reoriented themselves. More than a dozen were already running for him, and more were appearing, barely visible in Cole’s peripheral vision as he lined up the next shot and the next, a knot of them appearing at the far end of the street like a motley collection of joggers.

  Cole glanced over his shoulder and began to panic. He could only cover so much territory. Open lawns stretched behind him. No one had flanked him yet, but he knew they would find a way soon enough. He began backing away from the cruiser, taking shots, snapping the reticle from one Cord zombie to the next, squeezing the trigger, squeezing the trigger, the rifle’s recoil absorbed in the pocket of his shoulder and ejected brass shells flipping by his head.

  They came roaring for him, stumbling across their own dead and racing across the lawns: men and women of every shape and size, race and age, even children among them, their only homogenous trait that terrible unity of purpose, their every eye fixed on Cole, their gait no less urgent for the fact that he was alone, their outrage not reduced since the first of them had charged a crowd of terrified citizens barely twenty-four hours before.