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The message beeped.

“You stupid d.i.c.khead! Call me back the second you get this, and tell me where you are.”

Cooper hung up, then immediately called again, only to get voice mail for the second time.

The bas.e.m.e.nt. That narrowed things down, at least.

Cooper got dressed. As he did, he caught a reflection of himself in the room’s mirror. That blister on his shoulder was gone, just a red spot now. He took a closer look; no, not gone, broken open. A shred of weak, torn skin dangled from the edge. No wetness, though … it looked like something had puffed it up like a balloon, then the balloon popped.

He quickly examined himself in the mirror. He had more of the blisters: on his chest, his hip, below his right knee. Something leftover from whatever had made him sick? An allergic reaction to detergents in the hotel’s sheets?

The blisters didn’t hurt, and he didn’t have time to worry about them. He dressed. He grabbed his coat and also Jeff’s for good measure — if they had to go outside in the bitter Chicago cold, they’d both need to stay warm.

Cooper walked to the door, reached down to open it, then stopped. He looked out the peephole again, half expecting the teenage kid to be staring right back at him.

Nothing there.

Nothing except for a little red streak on the far wall, where the first teenage kid had fallen.

A streak of blood.

Cooper took a deep breath, steeled himself.

He opened the door and stepped into the empty hall. He had to find Jeff. Jeff first, then maybe the two of them could track down Steve. Until then, Cooper hoped Steve Stanton could fend for himself.

FOLLOW ME

Steve Stanton strapped on his two laptop bags stuffed with three laptops. He stepped out of his room on the Trump Tower’s seventeenth floor.

Anger coursed through his body, set every muscle cell on edge. He felt an almost overpowering urge to smash a human’s head in, find a brick and crack the skull open so he could get at the brains, pull them out, stomp them and …

His own thought played back in his head: smash a HUMAN’S head in.

Why had he thought of it like that? Why hadn’t he thought of the word person, or man or even woman?

Why? Because Steve Stanton was no longer human, not at all — humans were the enemy.

He heard a scream coming from the right, around a corner and farther down the hall. He walked toward that scream.

Steve turned the corner. He saw a s.h.i.+rtless, middle-aged man dressed in tan slacks. The man’s belly hung over his belt. He wore no shoes. He stood above a woman in a torn, red dress. Steve a.s.sumed the two red sandals scattered nearby belonged to her. She was on her b.u.t.t, one hand behind her, the other raised up, palm out.

“Morris! Stop hitting me, for G.o.d’s sake!”

In response, the man — Morris, Steve a.s.sumed — reared back and kicked the woman in the thigh. The woman let out another scream. She rolled to her hands and knees and tried to crawl away. Morris reached down and grabbed her right ankle, yanked her back. The woman fell flat on her stomach, arms out in front of her.