Pandemic Page 103

Morris looked down at his bloody mess of a foot. He pressed it down harder — the woman stopped fighting. She drew in wet, broken hisses of air.

The man looked back to Steve, hope blazing in his wide eyes. “Can I kill her? She was always bitching about everything. Like the goddamn toilet seat. Like she’s such a helpless princess she can’t reach a finger out and tip the goddamn thing forward? Can I kill her? Can I?”

Steve stepped closer and looked down at the woman. Her wide eyes pleaded for help. In those eyes, Steve saw fear. She was afraid, because she wasn’t him, and he wasn’t her. She was human.

“Kill her,” Steve said.

Morris pumped a fist like he’d just scored a goal in hockey.

“Fuck yeah!” He screamed down at his wife. “You shoulda been nicer to me, you nagging bitch! You shoulda been nicer!”

He raised the bloody foot, then slammed it back down again heel-first into her throat. She grunted. She stiffened. Her arms and legs twitched.

Morris stomped again and again. Steve watched.

The woman stopped moving. Wide, dead eyes stared out. Her throat was a real mess.

Steve took off his laptop bags, set them on the floor.

“Carry those,” he said. “We have to find more friends. And after that, I think we need to find a place for you to lie down.” Steve reached out, his fingertips tracing the firm outline of the hard, bluish triangle on the man’s chest.

“Tomorrow, I think,” Steve said. “Tomorrow, something wonderful happens to you.”

THE BOILER ROOM

Cooper moved down the concrete-and-metal stairwell. He kept one hand on the rough, unfinished walls. In the other, he carried Jeff’s coat.

He moved slowly. He didn’t want to make any noise, because every time he passed a landing he heard plenty of noise coming from beyond the heavy, reddish-brown metal doors.

Yelling. Shouting. Screams of rage. Screams of pain. And laughter: the kind of laughter only insane people made.

Three times he’d heard another kind of sound, a sound that damn near made him piss his pants. Twice from below and once from above, he’d heard the sound of a metal door opening and slamming against a landing wall, the echoing of a laughing/​screaming/​giggling/​yelling man or woman running into the stairwell. Cooper had held his breath, waiting for them to come his way, but all three times he’d been lucky and they’d gone in the opposite direction.

He reached the first floor. Past the heavy fire door, he heard more noise than he’d heard on any floor before it. He briefly thought about opening the door and taking a peek, but a line from some old book popped into his head — when you look into the void, the void looks back into you, or something like that.

All that mattered right now was tracking down his friend. Together, they would find a place to hide until the cops or the National Guard or whatever came to make everything safe again.

Cooper moved down another flight to what had to be the basement level, then down again until the steps ended on a flat, concrete floor. He’d reached the subbasement. Might as well start here and work his way up. Cooper put his ear to the landing door’s cool metal — he heard nothing.

He thumbed the door’s lever, quietly pulled the door open.

The empty hallway looked like a service area: more concrete floor, but here it was smoother, slightly polished. White walls with bumpers on the bottom, black marks on the walls where carts had scraped against them.

He stepped into the hallway, slowed the automatic door’s closing until it clicked shut with the tiniest snick of metal on metal.

Cooper looked at his cell phone. Still one bar. He dialed Jeff’s number. He held the phone to his ear only long enough to make sure it was ringing, then lowered it, pressed it against his thigh to mute that sound.

For all the commotion going on upstairs, it was very still down here. Still and quiet, like a tomb.

He listened. He held his breath.

Come on, dude, where are you?

And then, very faint, a sound so thin he wondered if he was imagining it: the crunching guitar chords of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” — Jeff’s ringtone.

Cooper turned in place, trying to nail down the direction. There, halfway down the hall, a pair of white, windowless metal doors. He walked to them, looking left, looking right, listening for any sound that might warn him of company.

Somewhere around a corner, a door smashed open, echoing through the concrete hallways. Cooper heard a man screaming in anger.

“… cut you … cut you up … run, motherfucker!”

The yelling grew louder. Shit, the man was coming his way. Cooper thumbed the left-hand door’s latch and yanked it open. He quickly stepped inside a poorly lit area, quietly pulled the door closed behind him.

He turned, letting his eyes adjust to the low light — and when they did, he found himself facing a smiling, bald man sitting on a folding metal chair.

A single overhead light lit up that man’s white shirt, played off his pink head. He wore a patterned tie loosened at the neck. Black slacks, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The clothes and his beer gut screamed conventioneer from Wisconsin.

“Hello,” the man said.

“Uh,” Cooper said. “Hi.”

Cooper quickly looked around, got his bearings. He was in a boiler room. On his right, two big metal tanks on concrete footings. The tanks needed a fresh coat of paint — gray enamel bubbled here and there, had been scraped away in others. The size of the tanks held his attention for a moment: it figured a large hotel like this would need a ton of hot water, but that wasn’t something you thought of when you checked into the Trump’s swank lobby.

Chapter end