Jeff Jacobson - Sleep Tight

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.

Tommy watched a young blond woman, who might have been attractive once, stagger past. Her skin was blotchy and swollen. Bugs crawled up her neck. A pair of bloody panties was still clinging around one ankle. It didn’t take much imagination to see how Tommy and Grace would be transformed, and how they would become a slave to the virus.

Tommy whispered to Grace, “We’re gonna play a game, okay? We’re gonna be as quiet as we can, okay? Remember that movie where the girl went sneaking around her house, ’cause she didn’t want to get caught? That’s us, baby. We’re gonna be quiet, right?”

Grace nodded.

Tommy held her tight and breathed into her ear, “Good girl.” He eased over the sandbags and moved slowly toward City Hall. As long as they were quiet and kept their distance, it didn’t even appear that the infected even saw them. It didn’t look like they could see much beyond their own agony anyway.

Tommy crouched next to the stage and looked for the square, heavy packets the soldiers had taken earlier. There, up near the podium. Tommy set Grace down and said, “Okay, little girl. You climb under there for just a minute and hide. I’m going up on top of this just for a minute and I can’t crawl and carry you. I just gotta grab these two important things, and I’ll be right back. You stay still. And quiet.”

Grace nodded, putting her finger to her lips. Tommy kissed her forehead and wriggled across the stage. He had one packet and was reaching for the second when he heard Grace scream.

In the street behind him, not ten feet from where Grace hid, one of the soldiers from the subways dropped to his knees and pulled out a knife out of his belt. He must have been freshly infected and the awful itching was upon him. Weeping, he twisted the blade across his skull, sawing it back and forth in a desperate effort to satiate the horrible sensation. His sobbing rose into a moan and he drove the knife blade into his armpit, scraping it back and forth.

She watched this, couldn’t hold back the terror, and screamed.