He went berserk, kicking and arching his back, flopping around in one last burst of energy. Once unlocked, some of the metal bars simply slid apart, and he was able to bend the rest of it enough to break free. He still had both armrests strapped to his arms and a strip of metal along his left leg, but he was loose.

The first thing he did was to pull the catheter out. The second was to pull the needles connected to the IV units out of the back of his hand.

The third thing he tried was the back door.

It was unlocked.

CHAPTER 67

8:39 PM

August 14

Qween’s cart was gone.

She’d left it here countless times back when the city was normal, filled to the brim with asshole businessmen, women in expensive suits and jogging shoes, bike messenger punks, bored cops, and other homeless scum who wouldn’t blink at stealing a shopping cart. Back then, it had been the perfect place, tucked securely away behind a cluster of foul-smelling Dumpsters in a narrow alley perpetually shrouded in shadows a block from the post office. Nobody had ever messed with it.

Now, all of the Dumpsters had been pushed out in the center of Adams for no reason she could decipher. She poked around in them for a minute, making sure her cart wasn’t still somehow stuck in the middle. It wasn’t. It was gone.

She drew a hitching breath, let it out slow, rubbed her face. She hadn’t cried in damn near twenty years, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to start now. She tried not to think about some of the things that had been inside. Things she couldn’t replace.

Faint laughter. She turned east, and saw two soldiers in the intersection of Adams and Clark. The streetlights had started buzzing, automatically switching on. In the spill of yellow light, Qween saw the soldiers kicking around a bundle of loose rags. Off to the side, lying sideways in the gutter, was a shopping cart.

Ice cold rage crackled up her back, coating her spine with frost. Her fingers drew back into fists. Fury fogged her brain, overpowering any sense of caution. She started down the street.

One of the soldiers bent over and picked up the rags daintily, using only his gloved forefinger like a hook. “Jesus. Makes you wonder how anybody could live like this.” He wore a big, shit-eating grin that did little to hide his buckteeth. Like the boys in Tommy’s neighborhood used to say, this guy could eat corn on the cob through a chain-link fence.

The other said, “No shit.” He was smaller, with a face so narrow it could have passed for the triangular blade of a butcher knife. His sunglasses hung around his neck from a neoprene strap, no doubt necessary so the glasses wouldn’t just slip right off the slim hatchet of a nose. “What gets me is why the fuck would anybody choose to be homeless in Chicago. I been here in the winter. It’s fucking cold, man! You’re homeless, why don’t you just leave, you know? Head down to Florida or someplace warm.”

Qween stomped into the light. “You dog dicks having fun?”

It scared them. They definitely weren’t expecting to see anyone on the streets, much less a pissed-off homeless woman. Buck-teeth dropped the rags and went for his assault rifle. The rags hit the ground and split open, spilling yellowed envelopes. Most were full of handwritten letters, but one envelope contained a stack of twenty or thirty black and white photographs.

“Fuck’s your problem, bitch?” he said.

The other one, the one that looked like the obstetrician had been a little too enthusiastic with the forceps during his birth, slipped his own machine gun off his shoulder. “Where’d you come from?” His eyes flickered to the darkness of Adams behind Qween.

“Y’all having fun with my stuff?” She glared at them.

They actually took a step backwards. Two armed men, and this old woman made them take a step back. It shook them, and once the fear had dissipated, once they realized there was no one behind her, their own anger took center stage.

Buck-teeth took three steps forward, as if to make up for his involuntary step backward. “My partner asked you a question, you dumb bitch. Where’d you come from?”

“Nobody’s supposed to be left downtown,” his partner said.

“That’s mine,” Qween said simply, hands on her hips.

“What? This pile of shit?” Buck-teeth ground his boot into the photographs.

Qween couldn’t help herself. She stepped towards the soldier, reaching out in helpless despair to her photos. The soldier with the blade-like face stepped around behind her, brought the butt of his rifle around and drove it into the base of her skull. Qween went down to her knees.

“Teach you to scare me, you stupid cunt,” he said.

“This is a fucking quarantine zone!” Buck-teeth yelled.

Qween struggled to stay erect, even on her knees. She knew that if she fell on her side, stomach, or back, these soldiers would stomp her to death. Their fear would demand nothing less. She forced her hands to grip the front of her thighs, anything to hold her upright.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Buck-teeth said. “This is a restricted area. You know what that means? Huh? It means we can shoot you on sight, if we want to.”

Qween exhaled, trying to clear her spinning head. “You got the balls, asswipe, then go ahead.” Later, she would admit that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but at the time, she was too pissed off to think straight.

“Fuck you say?” Buck-teeth demanded, jamming the barrel of his assault rifle into her temple, driving her head over to her left shoulder.

“I said”—Qween eye’s found his face—“that your big, flapping, wet pussy puts mine to shame.”

For a second, Buck-teeth wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. His eyes met his partner’s face, and those eyes, sunk into that blade-like face, looked everywhere but back at him. Buck-teeth finally realized the depth of the insult. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You think you’re funny, bitch?”

“You fellas catch this prisoner all on your own?” came a voice behind him.

Two hazmat suits walked out of the darkness of Adams. One was skinny, but the second looked way too chubby to be some kind of hard-ass mercenary. Both carried assault rifles. Unlike Buck-teeth and his buddy, these two wore their helmets. It was impossible to see their faces.

Buck-teeth blinked uncertainly and smiled. It was a fearsome sight. Those teeth looked like they might just escape at any moment and go rampaging through the streets. “No problem here. Just interrogating a prisoner that got left behind.”

“Yeah,” his partner said. “She came outta nowhere.”

“I see.” The heavyset hazmat figure stopped ten feet away. “So you two thought it was okay to beat up some old woman.”

“Hey.” Buck-teeth shrugged. “She was asking for it. Stupid bitch must’ve been hiding.”

“Well, shit.” The thin hazmat figure strode forward, unslinging his own assault rifle. “Why didn’t you say so?”

He settled his sights on the back of Qween’s head, and without any warning, slid the barrel over and shot Buck-teeth in the throat in a short burst of gunfire. Before Buck-teeth’s partner, could move, protest, anything, the thin figure shot him at point-blank range in the chest with another quick four-or-five-round eruption.

Sam pulled off his helmet and admired his assault rifle. “Goddamn. I’m gonna get me one of these.”

The bodies of Buck-teeth and his partner folded in half, collapsing into the street.

Qween risked a look. She recognized the voices.

Sam looked up. “Hiya, Qween.”

Ed shook his head, then slipped off his own helmet. He looked at the dead mercenaries and asked Qween, “You always go out of your way to piss people off?”

CHAPTER 68

8:43 PM