DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the ones we love.
MAP
EPIGRAPH
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
“We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere.”
TED BUNDY
“Every man has his passion; some like whist, I prefer killing people.”
RUDOLPH PLEIL
CONTENTS
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part I: The Fence
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II: The Zone
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Part III: The Hive
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
THE FENCE
CHAPTER 1
132 hours
The rig was state-of-the-art; Light’s partner was not.
He would have expected it if Beverly Carson were an FNG—fucking new guy, or in this case, girl—but she was, in fact, an old-timer, and set in her ways. Light had been dispatched with her a couple of times before, when both their regular partners had been off on the same day for one reason or another. They had never gotten along, and each resented the other when they were forced together.
This one was a chest-pain call in central Tempe. The ambulance service covered the whole southeast quadrant of the Phoenix metro area, so Light and Bev had been dispatched after reporting back from a call in Chandler. The patient was female, sixty-two, and built like a bird. Light could have lifted two of her by himself. She presented conscious but complaining of sharp, excruciating chest pain, radiating to her back, neck, and jaw. She had fainted, which was when her daughter called 9-1-1, but she was awake and alert now. Her lung sounds were fine: clear and equal. The patient’s mother had died of a heart attack in her fifties, and her husband had done the same just three years earlier. She was terrified of it happening to her.
“You’re going to be fine, ma’am,” Light told her. “Can you lie down on the stretcher, so I can check your abdomen?”
She shook her head with a vigor that surprised him. “It hurts when I lay down.”
“It hurts now, right?”
“Gets worse, though. Much worse.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked. He already knew it, but wanted her to say it. He didn’t think she had forgotten her own name, but some patients were reassured by the knowledge that they hadn’t.
“Eugenia. Eugenia Kerr.”
“I’m Hank Light, Mrs. Kerr,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.” He flashed the smile that had calmed the nerves of hundreds of patients.
Sometimes right before he killed them.
Bev had wanted to take her to a STEMI center. She insisted that the twelve-lead electrocardiogram showed evidence of a massive acute myocardial infarction, and her family history suggested the same. Light had to point out the subtle differences on the ECG pattern between an AMI and what she was showing—the concave ST segments, the PR depression in several of the leads.
“Besides,” he argued, “the chest pain is worse when she’s supine. It’s pericarditis—probably with pericardial effusion, maybe tamponade. She could die if we don’t get her into an ER, and there’s one eleven minutes closer than the nearest STEMI center, so quit arguing and drive.”
He had kept taking serial ECGs and transmitting them to the Tempe St. Luke’s Emergency Department. The ED had confirmed Light’s diagnosis, which had finally made Bev shut up. But Light could tell that his partner was still steaming, even after they had off-loaded Mrs. Kerr, and she’d been whisked behind the double doors toward the OR. Bev stood in front of a snack machine just outside the waiting room, staring at the glass as if it held the answers to every question ever asked, her hands jammed into her uniform pockets.
“We should head back,” Light said.
“Give me a few.”
Light strolled back into the waiting room. Mrs. Kerr had still been conscious and lucid when they’d arrived; her life would be affected by her condition, and she might need open-heart surgery, if there was bleeding into the pericardium, as Light suspected. But she would likely live for years, and her quality of life would not be so degraded that she needed the special services Light offered on appropriate occasions. He was a hell of a paramedic, and he saved lives all the time. But that was SOP for first responders. What he provided that most didn’t was a quick, merciful end when it was called for. Others in his profession—throughout the medical community—were too often afraid of death. They didn’t see it as the ultimate mercy.
Light knew better.
Everywhere he went, he encountered people who would be happier dead. Just that morning, he had passed a homeless old woman, sitting with her back propped against a traffic-signal post, a scrawny mutt tugging on the frayed rope that held him close. Somehow, she had scraped together enough coin to buy a marker—or she had shoplifted it—and she’d found a hunk of dirty cardboard, but her resourcefulness had not gone so far as to learn how to spell. He could see scabs on her face and neck as he drove by, and an angry purple scar on her shin. What purpose did she serve, to herself, that dog, or anyone else? How much better off would she be if she went to sleep for good rather than waking up in some desert wash or back alley and facing another day of breathing in exhaust fumes and getting melanoma from the bright desert sun?
Why would anyone want to go through life crippled, or suffering from dementia so bad, they couldn’t remember their own name, or the faces of their loved ones? What joy could a blind and deaf person take from life? Who would truly rather live through the agonies of chemotherapy, or be kept alive by tubes and machines, than embrace the peace of eternal sleep?
Hank Light saw clearly where others did not. And he not only understood, but he was benevolent enough to do something about it.
He knew what they called people like him. Angels of death. They meant it as an epithet, but he wore it with pride. Death offered release from agony, and angels were here to help people. Angel of death, angel of mercy—
the results mattered more than the vocabulary. There were no negative connotations to the title, as far as he was concerned.
The ER waiting room was packed. A young Hispanic couple sat on the floor, a blanket over the woman’s chest as she nursed an infant. A heavy-set guy in a black-and-red plaid shirt and baggy shorts was leaning against a column as blood seeped out from beneath a ragged bandage just above his knee. Kids were sitting two and three to a chair, if they were skinny enough. Most of them, he guessed, were here because of the influenza epidemic sweeping the metro area. He saw a lot of red, puffy eyes and angry rashes on the cheeks, both precursor symptoms to the full-fledged onslaught. People sniffled and coughed, wheezed and hacked.
As he surveyed the scene, he heard a woman sitting alone—despite the crowd, the chairs on either side of her were empty, probably because of the rank miasma rising from her—muttering in a nonstop, nonsensical monotone. “ . . . praise be to God and the merciful baby Jesus and the Holy Ghost, for the Great Tribulation is upon us, as described in the Book of Revelation, brought first by the crowned rider on the white horse. And Wormwood shall fall upon us and the land shall shudder and quake and the beast shall appear with the horns of a lamb and the voice of a dragon, and upon him shall be the mark . . .”
Light moved away, as repulsed by the stink of her as by her inane ramblings. She believed in another life after this one. Light had seen enough death to know that it wasn’t a new beginning but an end to suffering, a release from pain, and a rest unlike any other, from which there would be no waking.
A different speaker caught his attention, this one a pale-skinned man, mid-forties maybe, with a bushy red beard and runaway eyebrows. He was talking to two younger women, who regarded him as if he were sharing the essential truth of the universe. “ . . . the end of days,” he was saying. “That meteor was a sign. A portent, if you will. And this bullshit ‘flu’ epidemic? When was the last time you saw a flu so virulent, one that spread as quickly as this one? I tell you . . .”
Light kept going, not interested in apocalyptic theories. The meteor the man had mentioned had broken up in the atmosphere above Phoenix. Meteors did that from time to time, around the world, but it had never spelled doomsday.
Hoping Bev had cooled down, he glanced toward the nook where the vending machines were hidden. No such luck. Still roaming, Light found himself over by the glass double doors when an older man hurried in, wrinkled and worried, holding what must have been his wife by the arm. The left side of her face, from above the brow to mid-cheek, was bandaged, and the look on what Light could see of her was agonized. Her eyes were swollen almost closed, and her cheeks blazed a vibrant red. Curious, he trailed them to the admissions desk.
“Listen,” the man said, before the sleepy clerk could even speak. “Rochelle was in here about twelve, thirteen hours ago. You folks stitched her up just fine, but now she’s sick. She can’t sleep, she’s in a lot of pain, and she’s got this bad flush on her cheeks. You think she could’ve been exposed to something here? Or maybe her stitches are infected?”
“What was she seen for earlier?” the clerk asked.
“Doorbell rang in the middle of the night,” the man said. “Rochelle looked out that peephole, you know, and it was Margaret Blaine, the neighbor from across the hall. In her nightgown. Rochelle opened the door, and Margaret just lit into her.”
“Lit into, in what way?”
“Scratching and clawing like a feral cat. I had to lay her out with a baseball bat just to get her off Rochelle. She’s probably here somewhere, too, but we didn’t stay around to see what became of her.”
“I’ll need your wife’s name and date of birth,” the clerk said. She shoved a pad across the counter toward the man. “Fill out the top part of this.”
The man released Rochelle’s arm and reached for the pad. The instant he did, Rochelle bolted. Her husband’s spin toward her was almost in slow motion. His hand reached out and closed on empty air, his eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open.
But she had already pounced on a young, pregnant woman, sitting next to what must have been the baby’s father, their joined hands resting on the substantial bulge of her stomach. When Rochelle landed, those hands flew apart, the young lady’s pinned beneath Rochelle’s weight.
Before the father-to-be could react, Rochelle had shaped her hands into claws and started digging into the mother’s face. A fingernail snagged the corner of her left eye and ripped down, opening a gash. Both father and mother screamed as blood streamed down her cheek. Hissing like a steaming teapot, Rochelle jammed her nails into the tear she had made and pulled, as if intending to tug off the side of the young lady’s face.
Finally, the father gained his feet and acted, punching Rochelle hard enough to dislocate her jaw. The older woman hit the floor. Her stitches had torn open, and blood splashed the tiles around her, from her wound as well as from her hands and the young mother’s ruined face. Light saw a couple of pudgy security guards finally hustling toward the scene—one wiping chocolate from his fingers onto his uniform pants—and figured they would put Rochelle in cuffs, and that would be the end of it.
He was wrong.
It was only the beginning.
The room erupted in a howling riot of unbridled carnage.
The bearded man who had been lecturing about the end of days was on the floor, one of the young women subjected to his diatribe beside him, bashing his skull again and again on the tiles.
The nursing mother clawed at the soft spot on her baby’s scalp as its father tried to hold her back, but then she turned on him, and the infant fell to the floor, its cries unheeded.
The guy with the injured leg had caught up to Rochelle’s husband and was smashing the old man’s head against the edge of the counter over and over. The older man was already dead, but the big guy didn’t stop until skin and skull were cracked, and brain matter tinged with blood leaked out. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor with the man in his lap and started scooping out brains with his bare hands, shoveling them into his mouth and growling at anyone who ventured near.
Light was fascinated by the tableau playing out before him. Some of those doing the attacking, like Rochelle and the big man eating her husband’s brains, had clearly suffered recent injuries. Others had not, but he couldn’t tell, through the frantic motion and showers of blood, who might have been showing symptoms of the flu, or of any other illness, before chaos broke out.
He wasn’t sure he quite cared at this point.
Where is Bev? he wondered. He didn’t have to like her to know that if things got too hairy, it wouldn’t hurt to have her at his back.
He started toward the vending machines, but before he had made it three steps, a woman who had seemed to be sleeping—or dead—sprang from her chair and lunged at him. Light tried to stiff-arm her, but despite her small stature, her strength was ferocious. Her arms were a whirlwind of motion, her hands like claws, and as she snapped and snarled, spittle flew from her mouth, wetting Light’s face. He got some in his mouth, and spat.
Then someone else was on him, attacking from behind. A strong hand grabbed his shoulders, and an arm snaked around his neck. Already off-balance from the first attacker, he went down on one knee. The one behind him—a man in his fifties, Light judged when he saw the guy, with wire-rimmed glasses, short hair, and the mild look of a clergyman or an accountant—released his shoulder and ripped at his face, opening a wound there. The man was wounded himself, and blood from his forehead dripped into Light’s cut as he tried to dig deeper into Light’s flesh.
As if encouraged or enraged by the sight of blood, the woman came at him again. She raked her nails across his cheek, taking skin with them. She wasn’t working in concert with the man, Light was sure. They both seemed to want the same thing—judging by the guy he’d seen earlier, Light’s brains—but their attacks were not coordin
ated. It was as if each was unaware of the other’s presence.
He hoped he could use that to his advantage.
Light pushed to his feet and stomped down on the man’s insole, putting all of his strength into it. He felt bones give under his boot, and the man’s grip loosened. Light spun, grabbed the man’s shirt, and swung him around into the woman. They both fell to the ground and discovered the squalling baby, whom they immediately began fighting over. Light backed away and resumed his search for his partner, a little more urgently this time.
Heading for the vending machines again, he saw the woman who had been praying and ranting about the Great Tribulation. She lay on the floor, glassy-eyed, blood seeping from several head wounds. She wasn’t dead; her breathing was ragged, her extremities twitching. Not dead yet, but soon, and mercifully so. Light brushed back his bangs and glanced at the waiting room’s cameras, ensured that none would show her on the floor, and knelt beside her. When he closed his hands over her mouth and pinched her nose shut, awareness returned to her eyes. But only for a few moments; and then she was blessedly still.
When Light rose again, Bev was emerging from the nook. “Light, we’ve to get out of here!” she cried.
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