Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  Prospero Bell closed his eyes. “Please,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”

  “Then help me,” I begged, “and I’ll help you. How do I stop it? Help me save your sister and I will help you go home. I swear it by everything I love. Give me the reset code.”

  Tears glittered in the corner of those burned eyes, and Prospero said, “The reset sequence is—”

  “No!” cried Santoro, and he attacked. He hooked a toe under one of the lengths of pipe, flipped it up, caught it, and swung it at my head with shocking speed and power. I ducked fast, but the pipe still caught me a glancing blow. I staggered, bells exploding in my head. I ran sideways, fighting for balance, trying to clear my eyes, and saw him come at me again. I jumped forward this time, crashing into him and slamming his shoulders hard against the side of the machine.

  It was the wrong thing to do. The impact hit something and suddenly all of the lights flashed at once and there was a heavy, bass whoooom. The lights ringing the gateway flared so bright it stabbed my eyes. I shoved Santoro away and tried to run, but it wasn’t something that could be outrun. It was like trying to outrun the sound of a scream. It was like trying to outrun a tsunami. It rose above me and wrapped around me and smashed down on me and it took me. It was at once totally alien and yet disturbingly familiar.

  I’d felt this before. Down, down, down in the cold bottom of the world. When the machine Erskine had built in the ancient city had pulsed and then exhaled its foul breath all over Top, Bunny, and me. The breath of something evil and hungry and strange. Then it had only been a puff of that air. Now it was a roar.

  Now it was a scream that burst from the mouth of the gate and slammed into me, lifting me physically off the ground, hurling me across the room like I was nothing. Spitting me out like a piece of gristle. The wall was there. It seemed to reach for me. To want to hurt me.

  And it did.

  I spun, curled, tried to position myself to take the impact in a way that wouldn’t ruin me. I hit. God, I hit. Shoulder. Head. Hip. The pain was like falling into boiling water. It was everywhere. Inside and out. I collapsed onto the metal floor as the God Wave washed over me and filled the room.

  And filled me.

  The lights in the room stayed on. The lights inside my head went out. The last thing I saw was the digital display on the inside of my goggles.

  03:59

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO

  THE BEACHVIEW APARTMENTS

  ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 10, 2:47 P.M.

  Lydia left Bunny on the patio while she went in to take a shower. She was quick about it, though, and pulled her robe on over wet, bare skin. Her attempts to entice him into the shower with her had been answered by a single, slow shake of the head. No words.

  As soon as she stepped into the living room, though, she knew something was wrong. Badly wrong. The couch cushions were missing and the gun safe hidden beneath them had been opened. Boxes of ammunition, spare magazines, cleaning kits, rags, and three handguns lay scattered across the floor. A six-shot nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Special lay in a growing pool of gun oil that ran from a plastic bottle that had been stepped on. Oily footprints led in a wandering trail out to the patio, but when she ran to the French doors, the patio was empty. One of the guns was missing. A Glock 26. The trigger lock had been removed and lay where it had fallen. There was no time to count the magazines to see if one was missing, but a box of .9mm shells had been torn open and bullets littered the floor.

  “¡Ay, Dios!”

  Lydia ran to the slat-wood rail and looked wildly up and down the beach. The bocce players were still involved in their game and the sound of their laughter floated to her on the breeze. Somehow the normalcy of that sound and the accompanying ordinary happiness twisted the day into an even worse shape. The oily footprints ended at the patio rail and she leaned out to see deep prints punched into the sand. They started toward the water, then turned sharply and vanished around the far side of the apartment complex. Lydia vaulted the rail, not caring that she was unarmed and wore only a damp bathrobe. What did that matter? She landed running, pivoted in the sand, and tore along the side of the building. Even then, even as panic turned her heart to ice and exploded red poppies before her eyes, she did not lose herself. She didn’t scream Bunny’s name. She knew that it could have the exact opposite effect. Her screams would be filled with fear and all that they would become was a starter pistol for whatever Bunny was going to do.

  At the corner of the building she skidded into a turn and then froze.

  Bunny was there, kneeling on the sand between two decorative bottle palms. The barrel of the Glock pushed up hard into the soft underside of his chin. He did not look at her. His eyes were glazed, empty, like glass. There wasn’t even an expression of pain on his face. There was absolutely nothing.

  Lydia was very still. “Bunny,” she said in as calm a voice as she could force past the stricture in her throat. “Listen to me. I need you to put the gun down.”

  She repeated it several times, making it a statement of calm command. Not asking questions, not asking if he could hear her. Bunny was too close to the edge to allow him a choice. She needed him to obey. That was all. It was the only thing tethering either of them to the world.

  “Put the gun down, Bunny,” she said as she very carefully edged closer. Her heart wanted to add a plea, to beg, to call on his love for her, but she knew better. This was a tightrope stretched across the abyss and it needed only a single breath to make him fall. His face was as red as flame, his hand glistened with sweat, and his huge muscles were rigid with some kind of awful internal conflict. Each separate muscle stood out in sharp relief as if he had committed himself to a total struggle against some opponent of monstrous strength. His blond hair hung in sodden spikes over his brow; beads of moisture covered his face like rainwater. Bunny’s body shuddered with the strain. And yet there was still no trace of expression on his face.

  “Master Sergeant Rabbit,” she said, putting steel in her voice, “you will lower your weapon right now.”

  That did it. Somehow, that reached him. The pressure of the barrel eased, the hand holding it seemed to fall as if the weight of intent was too much for even those muscles to bear. The Glock came down, down, down …

  And then Lydia moved.

  She stepped in, clamped one hand over the gun, wrapping her fingers tight to provide resistance to the slide in case he fired, aware that it probably wouldn’t work. But at the same moment she used her other hand to strike the nerves on the top of his wrist. Lydia was very strong and she knew how and where to hit. She was certain that never in her life, not in all her years of combat, had she moved faster or hit with greater force and precision. She leg-checked his arm, using body weight to jerk his arm straight, to weaken the elbow in a moment of hyperextension; then she pivoted and took the gun from him. She put everything she had into the movement because she knew how strong this man was, and how quick.

  With the gun in her hand she pirouetted and danced backward, releasing the magazine, racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber, doing everything right because there was so much to lose if she did anything wrong.

  Except that Bunny never moved.

  Never resisted.

  Did not try to hold on to the weapon.

  He knelt there, staring at nothing. Saying nothing.

  Being nothing.

  And then he fell face-forward onto the sand without even trying to break his fall.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

  NOWHERE

  I woke to the sound of weeping.

  At first I was afraid it was my own sobs I heard, that I was broken. But as I struggled to come fully awake it was clear that the sobs were not inside my head or in my chest. They were close, though. And male.

  I forced my eyes open. The lab was gone. The walls were gone. Maybe I was gone. My brain was too battered to tell. The guy kept weeping. After a minute or maybe an hour, I rolled
over onto my hands and knees, coughed, spat, blinked my eyes clear. Looked around.

  He was there. A dozen feet away, huddled into a quivering ball against a stone wall. Long, jagged cracks ran from ceiling to floor and a few zigzagged out across the ground. The place was ruined, dying. Big chunks of masonry were heaped around, dust drifting like pale ghosts from the impact points. The computers at the far end of the lab were smoking and as I watched, a few small tongues of fire began to lick at the metal housing. The stink of burning plastic and rubber filled the air. Other smells, too. Cloth. And … flesh. That was one of the odors I wish was not stored in my personal inventory, but it was. And I knew it well enough to recognize it now. Someone was burning. People smell different than animals when they burn.

  This was a person. Or maybe more than one. I sat back on my heels and tried to make sense of what happened. The lab was wrecked as if it had been struck by something worse than the God Wave. Maybe an earthquake? The lights around the inner rings of the gate were still glowing with hellish light. Steam curled out of the mouth of the tunnel and roiled against the rough stone of the ceiling. Several of the fluorescent lights had torn loose from their bolts and hung precariously by wires.

  I turned to the man who lay against the wall. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat and he wasn’t dressed like a Closer. For a crazy moment I thought it was Toys. It looked like him, though that was impossible. Toys was in San Diego. A thousand miles from here.

  But … he wore the same clothes Toys had worn when he stayed at my house. Same shirt and pants. Same sandals. Same wristwatch. My brain seemed to slip out of gear. How could Toys be here? How?

  I crawled to him. He was facing away from me, arms wrapped around his head. I could see pale scars crisscrossed on his hands and wrists. Toys had those same scars. He’d gotten them when he’d thrown himself across Circe O’Tree at the hospital when Nicodemus and his Kingsmen stormed the hospital to try and kill Church’s pregnant daughter. Toys and Junie had shielded her with their bodies and both would carry those scars forever.

  I said, “Toys—?”

  The sobs instantly stopped at the sound of my voice. Or, maybe, at the sound of his name.

  Then the weeping man rolled over, his body whipcord taut, and past the shelter of his protective wrists he stared at me with familiar eyes.

  “L-Ledger…?” he whispered in a voice thick with fear and surprise. “How…?”

  “Toys? How the hell are you even here?” I demanded. “How did you get here? What are you doing here?”

  Tears streamed from his fever-bright eyes. “I tried to save her, Ledger. God help me, I tried. Please … please … I tried.”

  I hauled myself to my feet. The room swung around me, refusing to settle. There was thunder in my head and blood in my mouth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He tried to answer, but he simply could not. Instead he stretched out his arm and with a hand that shook with the palsy of absolute terror, he pointed to something behind me. I did not want to turn. No fucking way. Whatever was happening here was all wrong. I’d hit my head, I knew that. Nothing was probably what it seemed. Everything was suspect. Nothing that I’d done since Gateway was to be trusted. I knew that. The mycotoxins. The viruses. They were messing with me. Rudy said so. Hu said so. I was delusional. Everything was a bad dream.

  That’s what I told myself as I turned to follow the direction of his pointing finger. No matter what was there, no matter what it was that had torn Toys down like this, no matter what horror my concussed brain wanted to show me was going to be a lie.

  I turned.

  I saw.

  I screamed.

  She was there. Across the room. Against the wall. High on the wall. Heavy iron spikes driven all the way through the precious, familiar flesh. Bloody spike-heads sticking out from wrists and ankles and stomach and breastbone. Long, tangled blond hair hung in sweat-soaked twists down her naked body. Her breasts, empty of blood, sagged. Her head hung down so that I could not see her face. I didn’t need to. I knew those lines, those curves. I was more intimately familiar with the landscape of that woman than with anyone I’d ever known. The pale flesh, the paler scars. Each freckle and mole.

  “I’m sorry,” said Toys, his voice filling with fresh tears. “They needed a sacrifice and I had no choice. No choice.”

  My scream drowned out his words. I did not scream at him. I did not scream his name, nor did I howl out a denial. No, the shriek torn from my chest was a single word. A name. Her name.

  Junie.

  On the other side of the room the God Machine pulsed.

  And the God Machine pulsed again. A fresh wave hit me.

  * * *

  Someone shook me awake and as I came up out of blackness a hand clamped itself over my mouth and a voice whispered directly into my ear.

  “Quiet. They’ll hear you. They’re right outside.”

  A female voice. Not familiar, no one I knew, and yet …

  Somehow I did know her.

  I opened my eyes. We were inside a school bus. A big damn yellow school bus. Small, pale faces peered in silent horror over the backs of seats. Dozens of them. Scuffed and dirty, some of them streaked with blood. So many young eyes, each filled with bottomless horror. In some I saw the dangerous vacuity that spoke of shock and trauma that may already have run too deep.

  The woman who spoke removed her hand from my mouth and shifted to help me sit up. She was a cop, but no one I knew. A big blonde with lots of curves and a beautiful face that was set into hardness. Blue eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. Blood and dirt smeared on her clothes.

  “You good?” she asked, her voice low but not a whisper. Whispers carry. Cops and soldiers know that. She was a cop, but she had the soldier look. Battle horrors leave a certain stamp on a person, a particular light in the eyes, and she had that. There was a small black ID badge pinned to her breast. It said FOX.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, pitching my voice low, too. “Where am I? Who are these children? And who are you?”

  I saw doubt flicker over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me you got some kind of amnesia bullshit. You didn’t get hit that hard, you pussy.”

  There was a dull ache on my forehead and I touched it. My fingers came away red with blood. “What happened?”

  Officer Fox took a single short breath before answering, as if she needed the moment to control her anger. “How much don’t you remember? Do you know who the fuck you are, at least?”

  “Captain Ledger,” I said.

  “Captain? You demoting yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Last I heard you were a full bird colonel,” she said. “But we can run with captain. Whatever. I don’t fucking care as long as you know who you are.”

  “It’s captain,” I said. “You’re Officer Fox?”

  “Then you do remember?”

  “I read your name tag.”

  “Balls. We’re trying not to die and you’re checking out my tits.”

  “Your name tag,” I repeated. “Who are you and what’s happening?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  There were sounds outside. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, a few hollow pops of small arms. Growls.

  Growls?

  “I was in the Playroom,” I said. “Got hit with a God Wave and—”

  She punched me. In the chest. Hard.

  “No,” she snapped. “Don’t go getting stupid on me. I don’t know what the shit a God Wave is, but that’s not part of what’s happening. This is here and now. This is Stebbins County and we are in deep shit. Can you remember anything about that? About Lucifer 113?”

  Yeah, I knew about that microscopic monster. It was the bastard child of a Cold War bioweapons program. But all that knowledge was from a report. One of thousands I had to read over the years to keep track and get perspective. Nothing from an active case.

  “It’s the God Wave,” I insisted. “It’s screwing every
thing up.”

  “Come the Christ on, Ledger,” growled Fox. “Sam talked about you like you had the biggest dick in Special Forces and you’re babbling about some religious surfer bullshit? I need you to get your head out of your ass and get back in the game, because we are in deep shit.”

  “Sam? Sam Imura? Is Sam here?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “He … was. I told you what happened at the food depository. He fell … they…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here and we need to do something.”

  The gunfire was trailing off. There were fewer shots but the growls were getting louder. Closer.

  “They’re coming back!” cried one of the children, and they all started crying. Too much, too loud. I could hear the way those sounds changed the noises from outside. The growls got louder, more insistent.

  No. They weren’t growls. They were moans. And that fast I knew what they were. Even though it was impossible, I knew.

  I caught Fox’s wrist in a tight grip. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “I have a head injury and I can’t remember much. But if those are walkers out there, then you need to bring me up to speed real damn quick. I need a sitrep and don’t paint it with pretty colors.”

  She gave me a strange look. Almost a smile. A little relief, maybe. A small warrior’s smile. She nodded.

  “Short version of a bad story,” she said. “I’m Officer Desdemona Fox. Dez. We’re south of Roanoke and we’re trying to get to Ashville. We have three school buses. Used to have more but…” Tears glistened in her eyes, hard as diamonds. She pawed at them and plunged ahead. “Sam and his team helped us get out, but we lost most of them. We had to go off the main roads because of the traffic jams. A whole wave of those dead bastards hit us two hours ago. You and your boys came out of no-fucking-where and we made it ten more miles down the road. Then we got hit by another surge of them and you got nailed by debris when you didn’t duck fast enough when the grenade went off. What’d I leave out that you need to know?”

  “How bad is it?” I demanded. “How far has it spread?”