“That’s our orders,” the second soldier said. He didn’t bother with the “sir.”

“There it is,” the first soldier said, sounding relieved. He pointed at an oncoming white bus in the wrong lane. With a sinking feeling, Dr. Menard realized it wasn’t a CTA bus. It was a Cook County sheriff’s prisoner transport bus. He swallowed. This was going from bad to worse. “Listen,” he said. “I can walk. Really. It’s no big deal.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Orders.” The two soldiers stepped apart, blocking both directions down the sidewalk. The bus got closer.

Dr. Menard stopped pretending. “You two have no idea what’s really happening, do you? This virus, it isn’t going to be stopped by an evacuation, do you understand? It is going to spread, unless we study it. We have to unlock it, don’t you get it?”

The two soldiers stared at him but didn’t say anything.

The bus pulled up behind him in a cloud of diesel exhaust. The driver, buried behind a layer of bulletproof plastic, opened the doors. Dr. Menard turned back and found the soldiers aiming their rifles at him. Mindful of the jump drive in his front pocket, he climbed aboard. The doors snapped shut behind him.

CHAPTER 64

5:22 PM

August 14

Dr. Menard didn’t think anything was wrong with the people on the bus at first. Sure, some of them appeared to be sleeping. Well, maybe most of them. And a guy in the back was weeping. Loudly. The rest of the passengers, the few that were awake, looked just like him, confused and scared and trying not to lose hope that the soldiers were there to help.

He moved through the bus, and the reality started to sink in.

The sleepers weren’t just taking a power nap. They were out cold. These people had curled up into a fetal position across two seats, or had ended up on the floor. A few of them had been written on with permanent marker. Someone had scrawled, KICK ME across some businessman’s face. Another guy, just a kid really, with long hair, dirty glasses, and a Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt, had HAVE FUN KILLIN PEOPLE, DUDE written in blocky letters from one cheek, across his nose, to the other cheek. Still another had a target circled on his forehead.

A tight, choking feeling enveloped Dr. Menard. He couldn’t help but notice the heavy-gauge wire that covered the windows. He wanted to turn around and bang on the driver’s plastic barrier and demand to be released. This bus was full of people infected with nearly every stage of the virus. But he knew that wouldn’t work. It might get him shot.

No. The soldiers knew damn well this bus was full of the infected.

So Dr. Menard kept moving toward the back of the bus. Nearly all of the seats had been taken. He didn’t know where to sit. At least none of the passengers had slipped into the final, violent phase. Yet. Almost at the very back, he spotted an Asian woman in surgical scrubs, staring morosely at her lap. Sensing a kindred spirit, he sat carefully next to her, trying not to let his elbow touch her arm.

The bus turned onto Upper Wacker and they drove past the hospital. He craned his head around, but he couldn’t see any sign of Qween. He glanced at the woman next to him, but she still hadn’t looked up. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him, eyes hollow and wet with tears. The prisoner bus passed an empty CTA bus, and the glass reflected a glare from the setting sun back into the interior of the passenger bus. Nearly everyone flinched at the sudden flash of light, including the woman wearing medical scrubs. She turned her head away from him, and he finally saw them.

Three bedbugs were feeding on the back of her ear.

Dr. Menard jerked away and stood up in the aisle. Down at the front, the driver’s eyes met Dr. Menard’s eyes in the mirror, then flicked back to the street. Dr. Menard did his best to stand while the bus turned left on Jackson and sped up. He brushed imaginary flecks off his clothes and couldn’t stop. His hands shook.

He pressed his hand against the jump drive in his front pocket, just to reassure himself. It was still there; of course it was still there. He told himself that they would be unloaded at Soldier Field, and all he would have to do was make it through the decontamination process. It wouldn’t be much fun, but he could handle it.

He knew he would have to say good-bye to his clothes. That would be first. He figured that he would either slip the jump drive in his mouth or, if push came to shove, so to speak, he could hide it in his ass. Then they’d be hit by some kind of powder? Hard to say. Showers were guaranteed, probably a number of them. God only knew the chemicals that would be sprayed on them. Heat definitely. Lots of heat, to kill any bugs. From there, he imagined they would turn people loose inside the stadium itself. He’d join everybody else, and they would wait.

Everything would be put on hold until the SWAT teams in the subways came up for air. Once the rats had been destroyed and the pesticides had been sprayed from one end of the city to the other, then the government would want to declare the evacuation had been a success. They’d have to let everybody go at that point. They couldn’t rightly declare a victory without turning the survivors loose. It wouldn’t suit their version of the truth. Hell, if the CDC or the president wanted, they could claim they’d saved everybody in Soldier Field.

Be patient, Dr. Menard told himself. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. He would live to see the end of this.

The bus turned onto Lake Shore Drive, and he marveled at the wall of tanks and trucks that had been arranged to form a barricade across both Lake Shore Drive and Roosevelt. Dr. Menard glanced through the back windows. There were no more buses behind them. In fact, as far as he could see, nothing else moved on the streets.

The prisoner bus barely slowed down as it slipped through the barricade. For Dr. Menard, this was not a good sign. It meant that they didn’t want to stop and inspect the bus. It meant that they already knew who was on board, and wanted them through as fast as possible.

Soldier Field loomed ahead, the new gleaming steel and glass addition dwarfing the original dignified columns and solemn structure. Dr. Menard was confident they would pull around to wherever they had set up the decontamination staging area, probably outside in a parking lot somewhere. The bus headed down into the underground parking lot.

Of course, Dr. Menard reassured himself. They must have a huge lot under the stadium, easily accessible by the buses, and easy to control. It made sense that they would set up the decontamination tents down here. But instead of going deeper into the parking lot, the bus rolled up a ramp, and before he fully understood what was happening, the bus emerged out from under the northern seats of the stadium, past the goal post, and across the end zone.

Some of passengers moaned at the sudden reappearance of light as the bus left the darkness of the underground parking lot. Dr. Menard ignored them and peered through the wires at the stadium as the bus rolled arrogantly over the grass, passing the ten-yard line. The twenty. The thirty. Until finally, it slowed and stopped around the forty-yard line, joining dozens of other buses, all lined up in neat rows on the field.

Dr. Menard stormed up the aisle to the driver’s cubicle. He pounded on the plastic. “Where are the decon showers? What’s the protocol here? You cannot just dump these people in here. We need to be screened, do you understand? You have infected onboard! Get us out of here.” He pointed at the driver with one hand and clutched the jump drive with his other.

Something tickled the back of his neck and he slapped at it but he never took his stare off the driver.