Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  No, all of that was science. Weird science, sure. Bad science, no doubt. But those horrors had been the end results of physics and medicine, genetics and chemistry, structural engineering and radical surgery. At the end of the day—and there had been some very bad days for Top and his colleagues—everything they’d encountered could be mapped out, dissected, dismantled, and explained.

  The things that had happened in the Gateway lab could not be.

  Not yet.

  And now the DMS was falling apart. Instead of providing stable ground for him and Bunny to stand on, the ship was canting down into the watery deep. Top had lost friends on some of the other teams. Other friends were under investigation for mishandling of their cases. A few were probably going to jail.

  It was all falling apart and Top felt the timbers splitting inside his head and heart.

  Top glanced over his shoulder. Bunny was still seated behind the wheel, hands in his lap, eyes staring at who knew what. Memories? Possibilities? He certainly wasn’t looking at anything on the street. It hurt Top. And it did not help one bit that Top understood what was going on in the young man’s head and heart.

  Even so, this was a job and it needed getting done, so he rapped lightly on the side window. Bunny flinched. A rare and ugly thing for him. Bunny was a good kid but he was tough as iron and, in Top’s experience, did not have much “give up” in him.

  Unless now he did.

  It was hard to say.

  It was bad to think about.

  Bunny rubbed his eyes, took a deep breath, and blew out his cheeks as he exhaled.

  Top tapped on the window. “Come on, Farm Boy, they ain’t paying us to be tourists.”

  Bunny got out of the car, closed the door and locked it, buttoned his jacket so the breeze wouldn’t blow it open to show his shoulder holster. He came around the front of the Expedition and stood beside Top. Now the crowds on the street tended to cross to the other side. The ones that didn’t parted like a river around a rock. Top looked up at Bunny.

  “You good to go?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Bunny said, and took a step toward the building.

  Top shifted around to block his way. “‘I guess’? What kind of horseshit is that? I asked you a straight question. Are you good to go?”

  Bunny straightened. He was nearly six seven and had massive arms and shoulders. Blond hair and blue eyes and a dark tan that made his white teeth seem to glow. Top had seen Bunny pick grown men up and hurl them like sacks of potatoes. He’d seen him throw himself into a crowd and batter half a dozen other men down to the ground. He’d walked side by side with him through a hundred vicious firefights. As he searched Bunny’s eyes he looked for that man. The one who anchored Echo Team with muscle and heart.

  And Top could see the moment when Bunny became aware of what was going on, when he understood the conversation they were both having with unspoken words.

  Bunny took another big breath, and exhaled slowly. “I’m good,” he said.

  Top studied him a moment longer, then nodded. “Me, too,” he lied.

  They turned and went to the back of the car to remove one briefcase and a metal equipment case. Top took the briefcase and Bunny hefted the equipment. They walked into the building, flashed their FBI credentials at the guard, and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Neither said a word.

  Their job was a simple one. The only tenant of the sixteenth floor was the office and private laboratory of Dr. Raoul San Pedro. The office had been shut up except for a twice-monthly cleaner who dusted the furniture. Following the incident in Antarctica, the office had been officially sealed by the FBI and a police detail had been assigned to guard the door pending resolution and disposition of San Pedro’s effects. Top had a federal order in his pocket that would allow him and Bunny to enter the premises and remove anything that might be of use. The order was vague in detailing what they were looking for, but sweeping in the authority it afforded them. The tools in the bag Bunny carried were to help them locate hidden electronics or a safe, and if a safe existed they had what they needed to open it.

  Except that isn’t what happened, because as soon as they stepped off of the elevator the whole routine pattern of the job changed.

  There was no cop in the hall.

  There was only blood.

  “Shit,” gasped Bunny as he dropped the heavy case and went for his gun. Top beat him to the draw.

  The hall was empty. They pivoted to cover it, up and down, but aside from the elevator there was only a janitor’s closet, the fire stairs, and the double door to San Pedro’s office.

  The closet door stood open, the supplies spilled out onto the floor in a tangle of mops, brooms, an overturned wheeled bucket, burst bottles of cleaning fluid, ruptured cans of spray polish, and a roll of black plastic trash bags that was twisted across the floor like the shed skin of some dark snake.

  Bunny immediately ran down to the other end of the hall to check the fire stairs while Top crouched and kept his weapon trained on the doors to the lab. One door was closed, the other was ajar. When Bunny returned, shaking his head to indicate that the stairs were clear, Top nodded to the open office door. There was a clear handprint painted in bright red. A line of blood ran slowly down from it. The two men exchanged a brief, knowing glance. Blood is thick and clots quickly. For it still to be wet enough to crawl down the door meant that this was new.

  It meant that this was still happening.

  Top gave a curt nod and Bunny immediately shifted to flank the door. There were a few different ways to play this. Go in high and low and shoot the first thing that didn’t look kosher. Go in fast and quiet and let the situation dictate what happened next. Or stay in the relative safety of the hall, identify themselves as federal officers, and demand that whoever was in there lay down their weapons and cooperate with the arrest.

  Those were all methods Top and Bunny had used many times.

  Sometimes a situation was so thoroughly in motion that they didn’t get to call the play.

  Like now.

  The door opened and a man stood there. A medium-tall white man dressed almost identically to them. He held a weapon in his left hand. Not a Glock like Bunny or a Sig Sauer like Top.

  This was a stubby pistol with three converging metal spikes at the business end. No open barrel. Not even something to fire flachettes like a Taser. It was not that kind of weapon, and both DMS agents recognized it at once. It terrified them both as much as it made them furious.

  “Federal officers. Drop your weapon!” yelled Bunny, his own pointed center mass at the man. “Do it now or I will kill you.”

  The man smiled at them.

  He pulled the trigger of his strange little gun.

  It made an odd little sound.

  TOK!

  The air shimmered and the wall behind Top and Bunny exploded.

  INTERLUDE TWENTY

  BALLARD MILITARY BOARDING SCHOOL

  POLAND, MAINE

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS EIGHTEEN

  Prospero wondered what it would be like to die.

  It was coming.

  He didn’t fear the pain. His body felt like it was wrapped in barbed wire. Those dogs … their teeth …

  God.

  They kept biting even while he was stabbing them to death.

  Damn dogs.

  It hurt so bad.

  The fires, though … that had been worse. Smart as he was, it never occurred to him that running uphill from a burning building was a stupid idea. The winds were blowing steadily from the south and the lawn burned, then the shrubs, and then the trees. Prospero could have outrun it if not for the damn dogs.

  Was it a blessing that it had started to rain? Was that a gift from his god? Or was that a punishment, extinguishing the flames so that he could suffer longer?

  He did not know and that lack of knowledge screamed in his head.

  Now he crawled through the grass and left a trail that glistened like the mucus of a great slug. The slime looked black
in the moonlight and was only red when another part of the building collapsed and sent a pillar of fire into the air.

  Prospero prayed to his god.

  He prayed to the dreaming god who slept beneath the waves.

  He begged his god to wake, to stretch out a mighty hand and bring him home. God wouldn’t need a machine to do that. It was only the small, the weak, and the helpless ones like Prospero who needed a doorway. Gods didn’t need anything.

  He prayed for salvation. He prayed that God or one of his servants would answer his prayers.

  “Please,” he begged as he crawled.

  In the woods behind him the sergeants began yelling. They’d found the dogs.

  They would be coming soon.

  Prospero crawled faster.

  Then he heard a sound and froze. Not behind him. This was a soft noise as a foot stepped down on the thick grass. Prospero’s heart sank as he raised his head and looked up, looked ahead.

  There, between him and the road, was a pair of heavy old willows, one leaning left, the other leaning right, each one pulled into ogre shapes by their age and ponderous weight. Beyond them was the black ribbon of the road.

  And there, idling with its lights off, was a car. The driver’s door was open.

  Prospero held his breath and tried not to make a sound. Was this one of the sergeants come up the side road to head him off? What would happen? Would it be more kicks, or more of the cattle prods? Would it be a knife or a bullet?

  The knife Prospero had brought with him from the school was back there somewhere, stuck in the second dog’s throat, wedged into bone.

  There was a second soft noise and a piece of shadow detached itself from the black trunk of the left-hand tree. It moved forward, becoming man shaped. Was there a gun in his hand?

  The figure came and stood over him.

  “Prospero,” he said. A quiet voice. Cultured. Foreign?

  The boy raised a bloody hand, half to ward off a blow and half to beg for help.

  “Please…,” gasped the dying boy.

  “Prospero,” said the man. Sure now. Prospero could see the flash of a smile. Bright white teeth. Then the figure squatted down and lifted him as easily as if he weighed nothing. No grunt of effort. Nothing.

  The boy clutched the man’s dark shirt. “Did he send you? Are you one of his angels?”

  The man just smiled and carried the boy to the car.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 8:18 A.M.

  So, yeah, kick me while I’m down. Kick me, stomp on me, park your car on me.

  Church said nothing as it all sank in. I mean, on one hand, hooray. Bolton is the real deal. All those wins he racked up in the field, all of the deep and crucial intel he’s obtained since then. Still my hero, but at that exact moment I would have gladly chopped him into cat treats and fed him to Church’s cat.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m back now. It’s going to get pretty chummy if we’re both trying to squeeze our asses into my chair.”

  “It won’t come to that. Harcourt has been very considerate of our feelings,” Church said dryly. “He’s using one of the spare offices and has said, many times, that he will work with us. He didn’t ask for this assignment and I believe he feels embarrassed. It’s possible he even resents being put in this position.”

  I nodded. Nobody was winning right now. I said, “You’re old friends with Bolton?”

  Church took a moment. “We have worked together in a number of cases that ended satisfactorily.”

  “Wow, you couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if you were actually asleep. Why? What have you got against Bolton?”

  “Against him? Nothing.”

  “But—?” I prompted.

  “Captain, this isn’t high school. It’s not required that everyone in our line of work be close friends or confidants. It is enough that Harcourt and I have found a certain rhythm for effective collaboration. He has his way of getting things done and it works for him.”

  There was a lot left unsaid and I could read a bit between the lines, but it wasn’t the right moment for a confessional conversation. Not that I thought my chances of prying details out of Church were any good.

  “For now,” he said, “please understand that I am not running the ISIL investigation. That is entirely under the directorship of Harcourt Bolton. The president has asked me to finalize our official report on Gateway and then to focus on another matter.”

  “Which is what? Some kid stealing lunch money?”

  He smiled thinly. “Gateway first.”

  “Sure. Fine. Let’s do that. Because as we all know, a pile of rubble is far more important than the threat of a global terrorist organization.” When he made no comment I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes like a Valley Girl. “Where do you want to start?” I asked quietly. Almost demurely, damn it.

  “We need to understand what happened down there, and there are a few factors to consider. You described an underground city as well as some of the other elements, notably the oversized albino penguins.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you aware that there is some precedent to some of what you described?”

  I stiffened. “What are you talking about? What kind of precedent?”

  Mr. Church said, “Certain elements of your account—and those of your team—parallel elements of a story that is very popular among devotees of a certain kind of pulp horror fiction. Have you ever heard of, or possibly read, the short novel At the Mountains of Madness by the writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft?”

  “Sure, I heard of Lovecraft, but I don’t read much horror. Never read that book. Was there a movie?”

  “The novel was written in 1931 and published in 1936 in a pulp magazine called Astounding Stories. It was very popular and has been reprinted in book, e-book, and audio form many times since. Circe tells me that the story helped popularize the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ as well as Antarctica’s place in that cycle of myths.”

  I lunged at that. “Well, maybe they’re not myths. We saw that city, and, let’s face it, we’re not exactly as skeptical of little green men in spaceships as we used to be.” I gave him a hard look. “Are we?”

  I wasn’t making a joke.

  A few years ago we in the DMS had been forced to adjust our thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We no longer had the luxury of being knee-jerk skeptics. Not anymore. Church and I both knew that our world had become substantially larger during the Majestic Black Book case. We’d stumbled onto a covert arms race between a secret cabal within our defense department called Majestic Three and their opposite numbers in China, North Korea, and Russia. They were all trying to reverse engineer exotic technologies from crashed vehicles. And by “vehicles,” I’m not talking about anything with a local license plate. Start with Roswell and work from there and you’ll climb into the same boat. Majestic Three, or M3 as they were more commonly known, were so far off the radar that even the DMS thought they were only some kind of pop culture conspiracy myth.

  Not so much a myth, as it turned out.

  The three “governors” of M3 were top-grade scientists who were preparing to launch a fleet of triangle-winged super-speed T-craft that they wanted to use to start, and win, a war with the other superpowers. They had lots of weird science culled from those crashed ships, and it gave them a real edge for a while. Echo Team went up against M3’s own special ops guys, a group of—no joke—men in black. Called themselves the “Closers,” and they had all sorts of nasty gadgets including these nifty little microwave pulse pistols. Not exactly rayguns but close enough.

  The kicker was that the original owners of that tech—who we never got to actually see—made it clear that they wanted their toys back. Specifically they wanted the design science for the T-craft, which was all kept in a special handwritten journal. The Majestic Black Book. The governors of M3 kept t
hat book well protected, and a lot of the hard science was recorded only in it. They didn’t trust the security of computers, even those that weren’t attached to landlines or Wi-Fi.

  E.T. and his buddies bullied us into recovering the Black Book. We did, and the original was turned over. I wasn’t there for that part of the job. I’d taken some gunshot wounds during the big, messy finale. By the time I got out of the hospital the Majestic Black Book case was over. Since then none of us have heard a peep from anyone who doesn’t have “Earth” as point of origin on his passport.

  Now … there was this crazy stuff in Antarctica.

  Church sighed. “It’s a troubling matter.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, you could say that. And you weren’t attacked by a mutant penguin. Have you seen Bunny’s face?”

  “I have.”

  “Speaking of Bunny … where is he? Where’s Top? Where’s everybody?”

  “Most of our teams are out on assignment. You can talk over the specifics with Harcourt later. As for First Sergeant Sims and Master Sergeant Rabbit, they are on light duty. I have them out collecting evidence from the offices of the scientists who were killed down at Gateway.”

  “They okay?”

  Church made one of his rare jokes. “Shaken, not stirred.”

  I laughed louder than the joke deserved. Ghost woke up again, looked around, saw there was nothing to eat or bite, farted very loudly, and went back to sleep. Church, without comment, went and opened a window. The sea air was nice. Bastion jumped off his chair, climbed up to the windowsill, and sat there watching the pelicans.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  55 WEST B STREET

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 8:25 A.M.

  The blast picked Bunny and Top up like the hand of a fiery giant and slammed them into the opposite wall. The force hit the man in the dark suit, too, but he was already falling, struck at the same instant by bullets fired from both DMS agents’ guns. Everyone went down. The gunman toppled backward through the doorway, but Top and Bunny slammed into the wall and then crashed to the floor.

  It was all very fast, very noisy, and very painful.