Apologize. Jesus Christ.
He said that the station was switching to the Emergency Broadcast Network, but there was only dead air after that. I turned it off.
“It’ll come back on,” said Bunny, but Top just looked away out the window.
We could see the hotel and the sprawling convention center beyond it. There was a huge inflated rubber monster truck floating above the center, and signs everywhere for a monster truck convention. Dozens of the trucks were parked along the far side of the drive, and a few were sitting at haphazard angles in the street. One was burning.
Even over the roar of the SUV’s engine I could hear a cacophony of sounds that I’ve only ever heard in the streets of countries in the midst of a civil war. Sirens wailed like demons; gunshots pokked and banged; screams rose to the skies. There were explosions, too, and the crunching of cars into each other and into meat and bone. Columns of smoke rose from between buildings on both sides of the bay. The sky was filled with helicopters—news and military.
I was born and raised in Baltimore, but a while back I ran Echo Team out of a pier in Pacific Beach. So, for several years this was my town. I knew the streets, knew a lot of the people, knew the vibe of the place.
What I saw around me belonged to some alien world. Not my town. Not any town that could be mine.
We drove.
I saw the Marriott rear up in the distance.
Behind me I heard Top say, “She-e-e-e-eet.” Dragging it out.
The hotel was burning.
— 9 —
“What floor’s POTUS on?” I demanded, looking through a pair of binoculars Bunny handed me.
“Top floor,” she said, “executive suite.” There was real dread in her voice.
Half the windows on the top floor had been blown out, and a lot of the rest were pock-marked with black dots. Bullet holes. Gray smoke twisted its way out of three windows on the north tower.
“Tell me that’s not him,” said Bunny.
But Torres shook her head. “He’s in the south tower.”
The south looked intact.
“Get us close,” I told Torres, but she was already swinging us around onto a ramp that led to the valet parking entrance. The big glass doors were streaked with blood and two local cops were trying to hold it against a pack of screaming people. Some of those people had visible bites; others looked whole but terrified. They were all desperate to get in because a dozen of the infected were closing in on them.
Torres gripped the wheel. “Call it,” she said.
“Pick a side and own it,” I told her.
She actually smiled.
Then she revved the engine, spun the wheel and then stamped hard on the brakes so that the big SUV slewed around. The back end crunched into the infected and sent them flying. But I could hear a huge metallic crack and the vehicle tilted down on a broken ball joint, the jagged metal screeching along the asphalt. Bunny and Top were out before it stopped moving, their guns up, fingers slipping inside the trigger guards. I was right there with them.
There was no discussion of rules of engagement. We’d faced infected like these before. Not the same plague, but the same bioweapon design philosophy. There was no reasoning, no Geneva Convention, no mutual agreement of honorable warfare between us and the hungry dead. Their humanity had been stolen, stripped away from them, leaving them as mindless aggressors. They were no more human than a swarm of wasps, and far deadlier. Lucifer 113 was a serum transfer pathogen. Any bite would be a death sentence. Blood in our noses, eyes, mouths, or in an open wound would be as deadly as a bullet to our hearts. We knew all that.
And yet . . .
These were people. They weren’t dressed in battle dress uniforms. They weren’t extremists acting on a skewed ideology. These were housewives and homeless people, kids and business execs, tourists and conventioneers, vendors and bystanders. None of them had a gun or a rocket launcher.
It was going to break our hearts to pull those triggers. We all knew it. This was going to scar us forever.
We fired anyway.
Top tucked the stock of an M4 CQBR into his shoulder and fired, shifted, fired, shifted. Double-taps to the chest. His eyes were cold, and they didn’t blink, and he never missed. But then he jerked erect as every person he shot recovered from the impacts and kept coming forward.
“Head shots!” screamed Torres. “That’s the only thing that takes them down.”
“Fuck me,” murmured Top. He raised the barrel and put the next round through the forehead of a pretty woman in a torn yellow dress. She puddled down as if a light switch had been thrown. “Fuck me all to hell.”
Bunny has an AA-12 drum-fed shotgun. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny has some long-standing issues. He opened up and the heavy gauge buckshot did terrible work at such close quarters. There wasn’t time for the pellets to spread, so they instead hit in clusters that disintegrated snarling faces and blew everything into clouds of red, pink and gray.
I had my old M9 Beretta in a two-hand grip and backed toward the doors, firing as the infected rushed me. They fell one by one.
But then I shot one in the head and he did not fall. He kept coming. It froze the moment for us all because it seemed to change the math. I shot him again as he leaped at me. The second bullet took him below the right eye and blew out a chunk of the back of his skull.
The motherfucker did not die. He tackled me around the legs and I fell.
I twisted as I landed, putting a lot of torque into it so that he landed first. He snapped his head forward and locked his teeth on a corner of my Kevlar chest protector. Before I could swing my gun between us, Torres put the barrel of her Glock against his temple and fired. The blast knocked his head sideways and the tension vanished from him all at once.
She helped me up and while Top and Bunny kept up the barrage we stared down at the corpse.
“Three headshots,” I said.
Torres was breathing hard. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s not just the brain,” she said. “Maybe it’s a special part? Like the brain stem or something?” She shook her head. “I’ve been trying to make sense of it all the way here. I think it’s like that.”
The firing diminished and I turned to see the last of the dozen infected go down. Top and Bunny began swapping in fresh magazines as they backed toward us.
“Did either of you have trouble dropping these things with a head shot?” I asked.
Bunny shook his head, but Top nodded. “Yeah. Got to get it right. High and center. I clipped a couple and it didn’t do shit. Punched into the brain, but maybe not the sweet spot.”
“That’s what Torres thinks,” I said. “Brain stem or something else.”
It was Bunny who came up with the answer. “Motor cortex. Got to be.”
“Why’s that, Farm Boy?” asked Top.
“That’s where the control is,” said Bunny. We all looked blankly at him. “Look, the motor cortex is the part that controls the voluntary functions and like that. If the parasites have hotwired these poor bastards, then they have to be using some part of them. So, motor cortex.” He tapped the front and top of his head. “Put a hot round through here and they’ll go down. And the brain stem thing makes sense, too. Unless this is some voodoo shit, running around, biting and all that shit needs nerve conduction. That’s the cranial nerves going down through the brain stem.”
“How the fuck you know this?” demanded Top. “You ain’t cracked a damn book in years.”
“TED talks, old man,” he said. “I listen to ’em while I jog.”
“Okay,” I said, cutting in. “Brain stem and motor cortex. Christ. It’s bad enough we need headshots, now we got to be accurate as fuck.”
We turned to the people huddled behind stacked chairs and tables on the inside of the hotel doorway. A guy in a black suit and bloody white shirt came out to talk to us. He had a wire in his ear and a look of profound shock on his too-white face.
“Captain L-Ledger . . . ?” he asked in a wavering
voice. He held a gun in his hand, but the slide had locked back and he hadn’t replaced it. His eyes had a jumpy quality that told me he was standing on a windy cliff and wasn’t sure which way to step.
“Secret Service?” I asked, more to remind him of who he was rather than identify him.
“Yes, sir,” he said with a bit more certainty.
“What’s your name?”
“Murphy,” he replied. “Julius Murphy.”
“Okay, Murphy, where’s POTUS? Is he safe and can you take us to him?”
He said the president was safe and told us to follow him inside.
I looked down the ramp to where more of the infected were shambling our way. It was a surreal sight. They did not move as slow as movie zombies, but they weren’t fast, either. It was more a lack of coordination and maybe a disconnect from muscle memory. That and the injuries that had killed them. So many had chunks bitten out of their arms and legs, and that loss of muscle and tendon made them clumsy. They staggered and limped and sometimes crawled our way. You could outpace them with a brisk walk.
That wasn’t the point, though.
Despite those terrible injuries, they moved forward with a relentless consistency that spoke to an inability to fatigue, or to tire, or to stop. Sure, you could outwalk them, but for how long? It was like trying to outrun a glacier. Eventually it would catch up.
They would catch up, and sooner or later you’d have to deal with the implacability of them. There was no way to ever outrun their utter reality.
The realization terrified me on a level I’d never felt before. When Echo Team had faced other infected monsters similar to these, it had been in contained settings. A warehouse and a meat packing plant in Baltimore, inside the Liberty Bell Center in Philly. Not out in the open. Not with it spread so far already.
I think that’s when I realized that the world had changed. It was no longer creaking on broken hinges. It had fallen off. Unless there was some radical way the president had to reverse this, I knew that I was looking at the future.
I was staring through a ragged hole in the now to an actual apocalypse.
To Armageddon.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to hide.
I wanted to die.
I did not do any of that. Instead I turned and shoved Murphy toward the hotel door. “Let’s go,” I roared. Top, Bunny, and Torres walked backward behind me, firing at the oncoming tide of death.
— 10 —
We helped the people reinforce the doorway as best we could, and we shared a few of the weapons we’d brought with us. Murphy led us through the hotel to the elevators. There were a lot of scared people in there, but so far none of them were infected.
However, I took Torres aside and asked her about the people at the barricade who had visible bites.
“You understand that they’re going to get sick, right?” I said quietly.
She nodded, eyes big and filled with pain.
“Have you seen how fast this plays out?” I asked. “From bite to, um, transition?”
“Depends on how bad it is,” said Torres, and Murphy, who overheard, nodded.
“From what I’ve seen, sir,” said Murphy, “there seems to be some connection to consciousness. If they pass out then something happens and it accelerates, but someone with the same injury who stays awake seems to be able to fight it.”
“Fight it or last longer?” asked Top.
Murphy shook his head. “I . . . don’t know. This is all just happening now.”
“Okay,” I said, “but if anyone gets some reliable intel on this thing then we have to get it out to everyone. Bunny, call your theory in to Pruitt. Top, watch our backs.”
All of the hotel’s power was still on and the fires were in the other tower. Murphy said we could trust the elevators, so we crammed inside. When the doors opened on seventeen, Torres nearly blew the head off a terrified room waiter. The poor little guy staggered backward, let out a cry like a kicked seagull, whirled and fled.
After the door closed Top nudged me and touched his hand. I nodded. I’d seen the bloody bandage, too. Poor bastard.
We stopped at four other goddamn floors. Twice people tried to get on. They were scared, crazed, but we could not let them in. One of them held a baby in her arms. It was slack and smeared with red, and when the door closed Top leaned his forehead against the wall, eyes closed, and cursed God. Bunny stood with his hand on Top’s shoulder but didn’t say anything. Really, what the hell can you say to that?
The last time the doors opened on the wrong floor we saw a scene out of some kind of nightmare. Two completely nude women knelt on the floor eating the face off a third. I don’t know what the story was. They all looked like they’d been beautiful. They were all too young for what happened to them.
We shot them before the doors closed. Call it a mercy. That’s what we told ourselves. Didn’t really help all that much.
Then the doors opened on the top floor and suddenly there were guns everywhere. Pointing out from the inside of the car; pointing at us from the hall. A mix of Secret Service agents and cops. All of them disheveled, splashed with blood that was more black than red, with eyes that were too wide and showed too much white around the irises.
“Okay, let’s all calm the fuck down,” I said. When nobody moved, I showed good faith by raising my pistol barrel to the ceiling, and told my guys to stand down. The door started to close and I put my foot against it. “We’re U.S. Special Forces. Who’s in charge here?”
A tall Asian woman pushed past the others, snapping at her people to lower their weapons, which they did grudgingly and with hands that visibly shook. She wore a black suit over a torn white blouse spattered with blood. She looked to be about forty but there were deep lines around her mouth that aged her. I suspected they’d been carved there over the last day or two.
Guns were lowered but nobody holstered anything. I stepped out of the elevator and faced the woman.
“Mary Chang,” she said, “assistant special agent in charge.”
“Where the AIC?” I asked.
Her eyes wanted to shift away from mine, but she was too well trained. “Dead,” she said. “We lost seventeen of twenty-two agents on this detail. This thing it . . . it’s worse than we thought.”
“No shit. Where’s POTUS?”
“I’m here,” said a voice.
I turned to see the president standing in the doorway to a suite halfway down the hall. He was in shirtsleeves and there wasn’t a drop of blood on him. His hair was even combed. He had one agent and four cops with him, all of them with guns drawn and barrels pointing to the floor in front of them. Only one was so scared that his gun barrel was pointing at the top of his own foot. The president looked me up and down as we walked toward each other. “Captain Ledger. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of commanders in chief. Some I respected, some I was indifferent to, and a few were worthless cocksuckers. This guy was pretty good, from what I’d heard from friends on the inside of the White House power circles. A moderate who tried to work with people on both sides of the aisle. Fifty-something, slim, black haired and gray eyes. But there was something too slick and polished about him. He looked like a movie version of a president rather than the real thing. He was one of those people that other people usually liked at once. Charisma and a good plastic surgeon. My immediate take on him was “manipulative self-absorbed asshole.”
He didn’t offer his hand and instead stood there, giving me the kind of measuring look that was supposed to make me think he was assessing everything about me and making reliable deductions. Good luck with that. I don’t look like a psychopath, but my shrink tells me otherwise. I have a smile that crinkles the skin around my eyes, I have good teeth and a deep-water tan. I could just as easily have come from Central Casting. I know for sure he didn’t know my backstory because it’s been comprehensively erased from all databanks. A side-benefit of working for Rogue Team International. We are, for
all intents and purposes, ghosts. We get the backgrounds we need for a mission. All the president could really know was when he asked for the right guy.
Thing is, I am that guy. And I wish to fuck I’d been in-country when Lucifer slipped the leash. Maybe I’d have figured something out. I usually do. I know that sounds arrogant as fuck, but it is what it is. There’s a reason I get sent into places like this. Top and Bunny, too.
“Where do we stand?” I asked. Maybe I should have added “sir,” but I wasn’t in the mood.
“My motorcade was hit on the way here,” said the president. “They swarmed us. We lost . . . nearly everyone. The press corps, my aides . . . gone. I need to get out of here. I need to get somewhere safe. Air Force One is at Gillespie Field in El Cajon.”
“I thought we were supposed to take you to the Blue Estate on the National Guard base.”
“Plans change. I need to get to my plane. They tell me you can get me there.”
He said “I” and “me.” Not “us.”
I searched his eyes, looking for remorse, looking for some trace of compassion for the people who’d died to get him through the swarm and up to this room. Not seeing all that much of it.
“Had to be a hundred of those things,” he said.
“They’re people,” I said, mostly to be a dick.
“They were people. They’re not anymore,” he said, which was fair enough, but I did not give him even so much as a grunt of agreement.
Murphy, who stood next to me, said, “We came here because it was a pre-selected rally point. But there were more of the, um, infected in the streets. The motorcade was swarmed. That’s when we lost the AIC and a lot of the others. Had some marines in plainclothes, too, but the crowd . . . well . . . ”
I nodded. “How many made it up here?”
“Counting Mary here,” said the president, “and Murphy over there, I have five Secret Service left in my detail. And two of my aides.”
Still of Night Page 3