Tommy shrugged.

Sergeant Reaves blinked, took a deep breath, held it, and walked over to Tommy, rubber hazmat boots crunching on the dried blood. He leaned over Tommy, placed one gloved hand over his face. With his thumb and forefinger, he spread Tommy’s right eyebrow and cheek, widening the eye to painful extremes. He repeated the movement with Tommy’s left eye, peering intently at Tommy’s eyeball. Satisfied, he released Tommy’s head and spun the wheelchair around, so that Tommy faced the far side of the room.

Tommy had no idea how his eyes might give something away, and had a nightmarish flash that Sergeant Reaves was simply going to pull out his pistol and put a bullet in the back of his head. He tensed, waiting for that blast of oblivion, but Sergeant Reaves simply dragged the wheelchair backwards through the blood to the doorway and out into the hallway.

Sergeant Reaves exhaled outside the room. He wheeled Tommy down the hall to the elevator and they waited in silence for the doors to open.

Tommy wondered if he was being taken back to his original room. One entire wall had been covered with a heavy curtain, and Tommy was convinced it had concealed a window. If he could just get out of his wheelchair, he might have a chance at breaking through the window. And if he could break the window, he could climb out. He didn’t care if there was a ledge or not, he’d take the risks of climbing out of a twelve- or thirteen-story room compared to facing Sergeant Reaves or Dr. Reischtal.

Tommy kept his right foot pulled in on the metal footrest, nice and snug, as if the leather strap was still wrapped around his ankle. He had no idea how he might break out of the wheelchair restraints, but he had one foot loose, and that was a start. He just needed some time alone in his room where he could break the window.

The elevator doors slid open. Sergeant Reaves wheeled Tommy inside and pushed the button for the lobby instead of going upstairs. Tommy wanted to keep quiet, wanted to be a hard-ass, didn’t want to give Sergeant Reaves the satisfaction of hearing Tommy speak first, but as the descending floor numbers flashed, his will broke. “Where we going?”

For a long time, Tommy didn’t think Sergeant Reaves would answer. Tommy knew he had fucked up, and swore at himself for being weak.

Sergeant Reaves finally said, “Dr. Reischtal has given instructions to transfer you to a more secure location. This building . . . is no longer safe.”

Tommy didn’t know what to say. He stayed quiet as they dropped. The doors opened on the first floor with a happy ding. They came out behind the front desk and beyond it, Tommy could see that the waiting room was empty. Sergeant Reaves pushed him out a back door into the thick summer air that hung over the river. The tables between the hospital and Chicago River were vacant. Even the benches stood alone.

Tommy watched a bus push over the Madison Bridge; then, as if this was the last CTA bus in the city, the bridge split in half and began rising. From the wheelchair, every bridge he could see had been opened, as if the stitches on a fresh wound had been popped, that black thread cut in a hurry with a bone saw, sparing the clean flesh from the infection.

An ambulance was waiting on the sidewalk. Two more soldiers, completely encased in hazmat suits, rolled Tommy up a ramp into an ambulance. They locked his wheels. He hoped they couldn’t make out fine details with their plastic faceplates and wouldn’t notice the broken strap around his right ankle. One sat in the back on the opposite bench and stared at Tommy.

Sergeant Reaves stood a ways from the ambulance, his back to the river, and watched without expression as the other soldier slammed the back doors. He didn’t move. Tommy hoped it was the last time he ever got close to the man.

The other soldier climbed into the front and started the engine. He turned the lights on and drove through the sandbags until joining the parade of buses. Through the back windows, across the Chicago River, all along the river walk, Tommy could see trucks pulling massive tankers, arranging them into place next to the river, and more figures in hazmat suits uncoiling long hoses into the river. The ambulance turned onto Upper Wacker and the image was lost.

Tommy glanced at the soldier in the back with him. The man’s eyes, encased behind protective plastic, were blank and dead. Tommy might as well have been looking into the eyes of some deep water shark, something that went blind in the light and hunted by some kind of primitive, almost supernatural sense.

The buses pulled to the side for the lights and siren, allowing the ambulance to streak through downtown. They flew down Madison, and turned right on Michigan. When they hit Monroe, they turned left, heading into Grant Park, toward the Lake. As they broke free of the shadows of all the buildings, Tommy again turned to the back windows, looking at the afternoon sun. It was the first time he’d seen true sunlight in two days. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine he could feel the rays on his face, and that somehow the warmth and security of the sun could pass through the thick glass of the back windows.

They followed Monroe all the way to Lake Shore Drive and turned south, where they joined a convoy of CTA buses, all merging into one lane, the only lane through the blockade on Roosevelt, next to the Field Museum. Tommy leaned forward and could see the line of buses snaking along Lake Shore Drive past the parks, past the baseball fields, past Buckingham Fountain, and once they were through the roadblock, the buses turned east once more onto short McFetridge Drive, and curled down into the Soldier Field underground parking lot.

While the buses descended beneath the stadium, the ambulance left the line and continued east, toward Adler Planetarium. They turned south and pushed through the clustered knots of trailers, trucks, and military vehicles strung out across Northerly Island Park. The narrow strip used to be a landing strip called Meigs Field, until Daley Junior had a bunch of bulldozers rip up the runway in the middle of the night back in 2003. Now it was a flat, grassy field, full of emergency equipment. Everything was pushed back as far as it could go, their backs against the water, as though they wanted to get as far as possible from the stadium.

The ambulance driver pulled around and backed into a narrow spot among a group of FEMA trailers. The soldier in the back didn’t move and never took his eyes off Tommy. Out of the front windows, beyond summer docks and small boats, Tommy could see the line of buses disappearing under the northern end of Soldier Field. Out of the back windows, nothing but the endless blue expanse of Lake Michigan.

He heard voices outside, but couldn’t make out any specific words. There was a muffled knock at the back doors, and the soldier in the back with Tommy got up and unlatched the doors, swung them wide open.

Dr. Reischtal stood there. The sun was not kind to his skin. “Good afternoon, Mr. Krazinsky. Sergeant Reaves has assured me that, for some unknown reason, you have not only survived the night with Mr. Wycza but as of yet, there is no sign of infection.” His lips pulled back into a thin grimace that may have been a smile. “We shall soon discover why. A proper laboratory is en route. When it arrives, I will see for myself exactly what secrets live inside you.”

The soldiers slammed the doors, leaving Tommy alone in the ambulance.

CHAPTER 61

2:47 PM

August 14

The hospital lobby was empty. It made Qween nervous. The waiting room was silent. The nurses’ station had been abandoned. The phones did not ring. The computers were dark.

But the old building didn’t quite feel empty. This was why she was nervous. Something in the air, something just out of the range of her hearing, some kind of vibration through the molecules that her conscious brain couldn’t pick up, something set off ominous warnings in her subconscious, the lizard part of her mind, as Sam would say. Somewhere, there was life inside the hospital.