Pandemic Page 128

Cooper stared at the woman he’d just killed. “Why are we bringing her?”

The Tall Man smiled. “It’s going to be a long night. Fresh is way better than frozen. Don’t worry — she has enough meat on her bones that we’ll all get to eat our fill. Come on.”

The Tall Man turned and walked toward the front door.

Cooper followed.

BOOK III

DEFCON 1

DAY ELEVEN

IT GETS WORSE

IMMUNIZED: 65%

NOT IMMUNIZED: 29%

UNKNOWN: 6%

FINISHED DOSES EN ROUTE: 56,503,000

DOSES IN PRODUCTION: 38,913,000

INFECTED: 1,488,650 (10,350,000)

CONVERTED: 1,300,000 (1,689,000)

DEATHS: 86,493 (12,250,000)

The Situation Room was starting to stink. Too many meals eaten at the long table, too many people, not enough showers. Murray had left only to go to the bathroom and to sleep a few hours at a time. For once, the burden of age — not being able to sleep for more than four hours at a time — produced fringe benefits.

The rest of the world’s infected estimate had surpassed the USA’s and was expected to skyrocket in the next few days. While 65 percent of Americans were now immunized, there was no measuring how many people across the globe had received the Feely yeast strain. The best estimate was just 15 percent of the world’s population.

That left six billion potential hosts.

Blackmon slept. While she did, everyone looked to Murray for answers. The disease was the thing, and he knew more about it than anyone else in the room. That meant when Cheng reported in from Black Manitou Island, it was up to Murray to ask the hard questions.

The man whose face stared out from the Situation Room’s monitor was a far cry from the smug, arrogant ass that Cheng had once been. Gone were his illusions of glamour and importance. He wasn’t looked upon as a genius that would save the country. The administration saw it a different way: instead of Cheng getting the credit for every life saved, he got the implied blame for every American death.

“Our models predict that one percent of the Chinese population is actually converted,” he said. “Only ten percent is currently infected.”

“Only ten percent,” Murray echoed. “Doctor Cheng, China has one-point-four billion people. You’re telling me you think a hundred and forty million Chinese people are infected?”

Cheng looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on this call. “That’s our best estimate. In two more days, it could go as high as four hundred million infected, but by then at least a hundred million of those would be fully converted.”

Admiral Porter shook his head. Somehow, the man never looked creased or sweaty. Maybe he changed his uniform every time he left to take a leak.

“Four hundred million,” he said. “That’s more than the entire population of the United States and Canada, combined.”

Porter was thinking in terms of an enemy force, which was exactly the right way to think about it. A thousand had destroyed Paris — what could hundreds of millions do?

“Cities will be overrun,” the admiral said. “If the numbers get that high, there’s no way to get China back under control.”

Cheng licked his fat lips, rubbed nervously at his jaw. “I’m afraid it gets worse.”

His image shrank down to the bottom right corner. The screen now showed a map of China. The west side of the country was colored mostly in light blue with some swatches of dark blue and a few spots of green. The east side was mostly dark blue with larger areas of that same green. The middle was all a very pale blue, or white.

“This is a population map of China,” Cheng said. “The majority of people live on the East Coast. The areas in green are more densely populated. Dark blue is still heavily populated but not as densely as the green. If the Chinese government focuses all or most of its efforts on saving the cities, the sparsely populated area in the middle could provide free range to millions of Converted. They could survive for months, if not years.”

Murray shook his head. “The Converted won’t last that long. They’d starve. It’s not like they can go out and farm or something, not without being seen.”

Cheng seemed uncomfortable, like he was holding something back.

André Vogel stood.

“The Converted don’t need to farm,” he said. “We just received a firsthand account from a field agent in Baltimore, uploaded before he died. I have images. They are … disturbing.”

Murray waved toward the monitor. “We’re all big boys and girls, Vogel. Put the damn pictures on the screen already.”

The map of China faded, replaced by a picture of a dead woman. Murray heard people hiss in a shocked breath, heard one man gag.

The woman lay face-up, staring at the sky. She would have been staring, that is, if she had any eyes. Most of her face had been ripped away, leaving a skeleton smile streaked with rusty red and crusty black. Arms and legs all showed patches of exposed bone.

“Another dead body,” Murray said. “So what?”

Vogel pulled out his handkerchief. “The agent said he saw Converted consuming this woman.”

Consuming. Eating.

Porter sagged in his chair. “The ultimate infantry. God dammit. They don’t need to grow food or forage — they eat what they kill.”

Deathly silences had become a regular occurrence in the Situation Room. Now Murray sat through another one, taking a moment to think.

Even if as much as 25 percent of the Chinese population became converted, that still left nine hundred million bodies’ worth of edible human-on-the-hoof.

Chapter end