Contagious

Chapter 122

Cope’s driver swerved into the left shoulder, past the still-moving, burning wreck of the lead Hummer. If this had been Iraq, with insurgent-launched rockets raining down from rooftops, hitting the gas would have been the right thing to do. But this wasn’t Iraq, and here hitting the gas just made Cope’s Hummer the lead vehicle—the primary target.

“Stop this thing!” Cope shouted at his driver. “We’re sitting ducks!”

The Hummer’s brakes. .h.i.t hard, throwing Cope forward.

“Go-go-go!” Cope screamed. “Get to cover!”

He jumped out the pa.s.senger door and started sprinting. He looked up at the sky to see what was killing his people. Apache Longbow attack helicopters. Compact, dark shapes, like flying tanks with that signature radar dome sticking up above the blurring rotor blades.

He was in some deep s.h.i.t.

As he ran off the pavement and onto the right shoulder, he looked back to his Hummer. Private Bates hadn’t jumped out. Instead, Bates had turned the M249 turret, trying to return fire. The man didn’t even have time to pull the trigger before a h.e.l.lfire missile slammed home. The Hummer erupted in a semi-trailer-size fireball. The blast threw Cope into the ditch on the side of the road. He hit hard, but adrenaline drove him on—he scrambled to his feet and up the five-foot-high slope of the ditch’s far side.

In front of him, a snow-covered cornfield, irregular white spotted with knee-high, rotting-yellow stalks. At least a hundred yards to the trees.

Cope snapped another quick look around him. A few soldiers were sprinting across the fields, headed for the woods. On the road behind him, tall black columns of smoke rose into the air. Five Hummers, two trucks, all destroyed. Looked more like the road to Baghdad than a Michigan highway.

All this open s.p.a.ce. If the Apaches’ pilots couldn’t see him in the afternoon sun, they’d just lock on with infrared targeting—a soldier’s body heat stood out clearly against frozen ground.

A trap. This was a kill point. The Apaches had been waiting, probably just out of sight behind a hill.

He had no chance.

He ran anyway.

Thirty yards to his right, another soldier running. A wavering line of glowing red reached out toward the man, like some science-fiction death ray—tracer rounds from an Apache’s thirty-millimeter chain gun. The rounds erupted when they hit the ground, harsh explosions launching man-size clods of frozen dirt and smoke. The initial shots went wide, but in a fraction of a second the red death ray closed the gap—the soldier exploded in a literal cloud of blood.

Corporal Jeff Cope kept sprinting.

He’d made it almost fifteen yards when he heard a roar on his left. He turned and saw the tracer-round death ray plowing a path toward him.

He didn’t even have time to look away.

12:39 P.M.: We Be Jammin’

She could feel them dying. Her soldiers, her protectors. The enemy was too powerful, too many devils out to stop her.

Chelsea Jewell began to realize that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to Chauncey. Should have listened to General Ogden.

But that didn’t matter.

She still had Mommy.

Together they could build a new network, a bigger network—one that would eventually spread all over the whole planet.

The gate to heaven?

f.u.c.k the gate to heaven. f.u.c.k the angels.

Bad words, she knew, but not really, because G.o.d decides what is bad and good. G.o.d can’t do anything bad.

Chelsea didn’t need the angels. If she escaped, she could use the Legos to make her own angels.

If she escaped. And that was a big if, because the boogeyman was coming.

If he found her, nothing mattered. She had to block him.

Block him . . . or maybe control him.

She could do that, she knew she could. She could make him do things. And who could be a better protector than the boogeyman?

Still, she didn’t want it to come to that. She didn’t want to face him. Killing him had sounded like fun when he was a long ways away. Now that he was so close, none of this was fun anymore.

12:40 P.M.: Landing Field

Dew held the satphone to his right ear. He covered his left ear with his left hand and leaned his head forward, his belly pressing into the camouflage helmet sitting on his lap.

“Yeah,” he said. “Look, Murray, we can secure whatever area you want when we land, but first you have to find us a spot to put down.”

Perry couldn’t get comfortable. They’d found him a flak jacket and a helmet. He was used to not having anything in his size, so he found it odd when both fit. The helmet in particular would take some getting accustomed to. It had a microphone mounted on the side, connected to a little push-to-talk switch clipped to his vest. Small speakers mounted inside let him hear the tinny voices of soldiers preparing for the coming fight. Some were joking, some were serious, but up and down the facing rows of seats they all looked very p.i.s.sed off. They’d lost friends during X-Ray Company’s sneak attack. Most of the conversation revolved around finding Ogden and what they would do to him when they did. The men had also offered Perry an M4, but Dew said Perry would stick with the .45, and that was that.

Dew looked up, eyebrows raised, sweat beading on his bald head despite the cool temperature inside the Osprey. He turned and regarded Perry.

“You saw the Renaissance Center in your vision, right?”

Perry nodded.

“Where was the river?”

Perry tried to think. So much s.h.i.t had gone down so fast. That image had flashed from multiple minds, like a strobe-light dance from different cameras all hitting at once. But in each of the images, the angle had been pretty consistent.

“On the left,” Perry said.

“How far away would you say it was?”
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