7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  But that was defeatist thinking, and she had to shake it loose and let it go. She looked again at Sansome’s scrawled message.

  THE SYKOS ARE HERE.

  That they were. If the fates were willing and the ammunition held out, they would make it out of here, too.

  Fallon’s detour had cost valuable time and had yet to bear fruit other than patching up Warga. Once they’d collected Sansome—­and found a sink where he could wash some of the blood from his hands—­they piled back into the UPS truck. Fallon trusted Light’s knowledge of the city streets, so told him to head for Mesa. He took Jefferson past Chase Field, then 7th Street to Interstate 17, heading east. Behind them, the sun was lowering in the sky. Fallon saw the shadows lengthening and wondered if they should have stayed at the Hyatt overnight. It was nearly summer, though, so it would be light for a few hours, yet, and she wanted as many miles behind them as possible before they had to stop.

  “Look at that,” Antonetti said. Fallon sat on the pull-­down passenger seat, and he was crouched in the space between her and Light.

  “At what?” she asked.

  “That, probably,” Light said, pointing to the southeast. A massive fire raged there, probably a whole neighborhood in flames, or an industrial park. “Phoenix will never be the same.”

  “I don’t see how it could be,” Fallon agreed.

  “Probably be like New Orleans after Katrina,” Antonetti said. “Lots of government money for redevelopment, so grifters and con men will move in to skim off as much as they can.”

  “Isn’t ‘grifters and con men’ redundant when you’re talking about government?” Light asked.

  “Hey,” Fallon said. “Remember who sent us here. They’re trying to fix this mess.”

  “I remember. That’s why I’m expecting some colossal fuck-­up along the way. The word SNAFU didn’t originate in the private sector. Neither did FUBAR. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “My cousin Paolo was in the Marines,” Antonetti said. “He said FUBAR all the time, but he never told me what it meant.”

  “ ’Fucked up beyond all repair,’ ” Light said. “And SNAFU is ‘situation normal, all fucked up.’ ”

  “He was a Marine, but he made you do all the killing for him?”

  “He didn’t make me.” Antonetti was clearly hurt by the implication. “He let me. I wanted to. He’d killed plenty of ­people, in the Gulf, but I never got a chance to.”

  “It’s not exactly something most ­people aspire to,” Fallon said.

  “We’re not like most ­people, Doctor.”

  “No, Gino. No, you’re certainly not.”

  By extension, then, neither was Fallon. And she realized she was actually perfectly fine with that.

  CHAPTER 30

  32 hours

  The freeway was jammed. It looked like the kind of rush hour Light had been talking about earlier, except it could more accurately have worn the “parking lot” tag that so many ­people used when talking about heavy traffic. These vehicles were abandoned. From her spot in the UPS truck, Fallon could see cars, trucks, SUVs, semis, a Greyhound bus, and a tour bus from Mexico. And that was just the nearest quarter mile or so. They drove with the passenger door open, having discovered that UPS drivers did it because the trucks weren’t air-­conditioned, and they sucked in the heat like rolling solar panels.

  “Can we get through?” she asked.

  “I think so,” Light said. “Especially since we don’t care if the fenders get a little dented.”

  “I just don’t want to get stuck somewhere far from an exit. We’d be the proverbial sitting ducks. Only more like fighting-­for-­our-­lives ducks.”

  “Breathe, Fallon,” Light said. “I’ve got this.”

  He eased the truck into a narrow gap. Its sides squealed as they scraped against cars; the racket made Fallon’s teeth ache. If she had any privacy, she could ask Book to send over a drone in order to see whether the freeway was open all the way to U.S. Route 60. But Light was right beside her, and being able to talk to Book was a secret she wanted to keep for the time being. She had no illusions about the danger of traveling with six murderous psychopaths, and her link to Book was an edge she wanted to preserve, just in case.

  Light did an admirable job of picking out a path although sometimes it involved shoving vehicles out of the way with the truck’s front end, which would never recover from the indignities heaped upon it.

  Many of the vehicles were empty, but some still had drivers slumped over the wheels, their skulls opened. Fallon saw an entire family inside an SUV that sat with all its doors open. Dad, Mom, and three kids in back had all become victims of the Infecteds. Blood stained the interior, the doorway, and the pavement outside. She wondered if there was a law of diminishing returns at work. The more Infecteds there were, the more uninfected brains they needed. The Crazy 8s virus wanted to replicate itself, which was what made it so contagious, but after a certain point, if it kept replicating, it would eliminate its own food supply. The problem, of course, was that when that point came, it would mean everybody in the Valley—­more than 4 million souls—­would be either dead victim or hungry Infected.

  Or a psychopath.

  They had to get to that meteor, and soon. If they lost everybody, then preventing the nuclear option would be essentially meaningless. She had to believe there were still plenty of unaffected humans around, but hiding out, afraid to show themselves because they never knew who might be infected.

  Given that urgency, they were moving too slowly for Fallon’s liking, but they were moving, and that was the main thing. They crossed the Salt River and merged with Interstate 10, but when they reached the Route 60 interchange, the way forward was completely blocked.

  “Can you stay on 10 to Baseline?” Fallon asked.

  “That’s my plan,” Light said. His jaw was tight, his lips clamped together except when he was speaking. His knuckles were white. He pretended that negotiating the freeway graveyard was no big deal, but Fallon could tell that it was taking a toll. The sun was sinking ever lower, twilight now, and soon it would be full dark. She didn’t want to be so exposed when that happened.

  The Baseline exit was the next one after the Route 60 interchange. Baseline was a major thoroughfare, running parallel to the 60 for miles and miles. It was clearer, and the truck could almost reach the posted speed limit. Fallon felt better as the miles slipped past, and they got ever closer to Mesa.

  But night had fallen in the interim. They passed a few small groups of Infecteds, seemingly drawn by their headlights or the engine noise breaking the quiet. At Arizona State Route 87—­also called Country Club Drive here—­Light headed toward Route 60 again, to check its condition. Unfortunately, it was still too backed up to travel, so Light turned around on the on-­ramp and headed back toward Country Club.

  “Let’s find someplace to stop for the night,” Fallon suggested.

  “We just passed a few motels,” Light said.

  “Those were too exposed,” she said. “A motel’s good, but something off the main roads.”

  Light shrugged and turned north on Country Club, away from the freeway and Baseline. At Hampton, Fallon saw a Motel 6, well away from the road. “There,” she said, pointing. “Let’s check that out.”

  The building was a long, two-­story job, white with green doors, with strategically placed staircases at each end and each side of two wings jutting out from the main structure. Light pulled into the parking lot, past towering palm trees, and drove slowly toward the office. A few cars were pulled up close to rooms, and lights blazed in the lobby area, but nothing moved.

  “We’re going to see if we can get some rooms for the night,” Fallon told those riding in back. “The place looks deserted, but be ready just in case.”

  Everybody piled out, guns at the ready. Fallon passed through glass doors into the lobby, follo
wed closely by Sansome, then the rest. It looked empty at first glance, but when she went behind the counter, she found a pool of drying blood. Streaks emanated from it and through an open doorway, into what she assumed was the motel office.

  She followed them and found two corpses on the floor, both female. Skulls split open, brainpans picked clean. She was beginning to get used to it. The carnage still got to her, the way their faces were distorted by the head wounds, but that was almost more on an aesthetic level than anything else—­nothing was quite as ugly as someone whose face has been partly pushed down to make skull access easier.

  “God, that reeks,” Lilith said.

  “What?” Pybus asked.

  “Those dead skanks.”

  Fallon could smell them, but to her, it wasn’t much different than the smell in the residential neighborhood they’d passed through. The smell of death. Unpleasant, but not overwhelming. She was surprised at the intensity of Lilith’s reaction.

  The girl had been that way earlier, too.

  Psychopaths tended to have poor senses of smell, she remembered. Of the five senses, only smell was routed through the limbic system. It wasn’t universal—­almost nothing was, when you were talking about human beings, psycho or not—­but it was common.

  What does that say about Lilith? she wondered. Maybe nothing, but it’s worth keeping an eye on her. Maybe she’s not all that psychopathic, despite sharing the general brain structure.

  And what might that mean about her immunity?

  One of the dead women wore a black cloth lanyard with various cards on it, including one bearing the motel’s name. Fallon hoped it was a master key. Although it meant getting closer to the corpse than she wanted to, she knelt and worked the lanyard up over the woman’s neck and head. One side got snagged in a shard of the shattered skull; Fallon had to work it free, which meant touching the skull itself.

  It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. Just bone. The woman who had inhabited this body was long gone. Fallon felt pity, in an abstract way, but was otherwise unmoved. When she had it off, she held it up to the Sykos clogging the doorway. “Let’s check this place out,” she said. “They left a light on for us.”

  Some of the rooms were occupied by corpses, but they didn’t find any Infecteds. After a quick look around, they settled on two adjoining ground-­floor rooms with two double beds each, facing onto the parking lot behind the building. They left the door between them open and parked the UPS truck far enough from the front doors that it wouldn’t signal their presence inside. The setup wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do.

  Fallon volunteered to take first watch. She was hungry and wired; sleep wouldn’t come easy, anyway. But she would have to sleep, at some point. She would be most vulnerable then. The others could slip away and leave her behind, or one or more of them could decide to kill her. It was bad to be as afraid of your own side as you were of the enemy, but it was the reality she faced.

  Which meant she needed an ally.

  She ran through her companions, one by one, and disqualified each almost immediately. Antonetti was too easy to manipulate. Light was too anxious to get away. Sansome was too dumb. Pybus and Lilith were too physically weak. And Warga was—­just no.

  Which meant she had to start over, to consider them more dispassionately. When she did, only one survived the cut: Joe Sansome.

  He hadn’t wanted to share a bed with anyone—­probably he knew that if he did, that person would be rolling toward him all night long—­so he was sleeping on the floor. Hoping he wouldn’t startle upon being awakened, she crouched beside him and gently touched his shoulder.

  His eyes snapped open.

  “You’re not asleep?” Fallon asked.

  “No. I don’t sleep good. I have nightmares a lot.”

  “Can you come outside for a few minutes? I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “Sure, I guess.” He pushed aside the light blanket that had been attempting to cover him and rose to his feet. Fallon opened the room door, held it for him, then closed it as quietly as she could.

  “What do you wanna know?” he asked when they were outside. They strolled around the parking lot as they talked, Fallon always keeping her senses attuned for any sign of Infecteds.

  “I just wanted to talk, Joe,” she said. “It’s been three years since I saw you.”

  “Saw inside my head,” Sansome said. “With your machine.”

  She had to chuckle at his description. It was accurate, in its way, even if not phrased in very scientific terms. “Yes. That. How’ve you been? How are they treating you in prison?”

  “Pretty good, I guess. Most of the guys leave me alone. You know, ’cause I’m big, I guess. It’s lonely there, though.”

  “I’m not surprised. Sometimes it feels like it’s lonely everywhere.”

  Surprise registered on his face, his eyes widening, his mouth dropping open more than usual. He rarely seemed to close it all the way; in her younger, more callous days, Fallon would have called him a mouthbreather. He had never finished eighth grade, and his IQ was in the double digits. Some ­people like that—­especially psychopaths—­compensated with a certain animal cunning, but not Sansome. She would have judged him, back in college or grad school, and dismissed him as beneath notice. Those days were, she hoped, well behind her.

  “You get lonely, too?” he asked.

  “Of course.” Then, realizing it probably wasn’t as self-­evident to him, she added, “Yes. All the time, in fact.”

  “But you’re a big-­time scientist. You have a family, right? And ­people you work with. Friends.”

  Not so many of those, she’d come to realize. The only person she had wanted to talk to before entering the zone—­the only one she thought would really care—­was Jason, and he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. She had acquaintances, sure. And she occasionally socialized with employees at the lab, but there was a strain on those relationships from the start. Only Elliott was truly her equal there; everybody else worked for her as much as with her. “Not as many as you might think, Joe. I work a lot. That doesn’t leave much time for anything else.”

  “You should take more vacations. You’re the boss, right? Nobody can tell you no.”

  Fallon laughed again. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, you would,” Sansome said.

  “I guess you’ve had plenty of time to reflect on your murders, huh? To think about them?”

  “I do all the time. That’s why I have bad dreams.”

  “What do you think about them?”

  “I wish I never did them. It was so stupid. I was just mad all the time, but . . .” He swallowed hard; fighting back tears, Fallon thought. “ . . . but those girls didn’t deserve that. They didn’t do nothing to me. I was so stupid.”

  Fallon put a soothing hand on his upper arm. It was like touching a cinder-­block wall. “You were young and troubled. You didn’t know any better. And yeah, it was stupid. But given who you were, given your genes and your upbringing, it’s not a surprise.”

  “It’s not?” he asked.

  “I’m not saying you had to do it. It was wrong, and I think you know that now. And ­people always have the option of deciding not to do the wrong thing. But it’s harder for some than for others. For you, it was just a little too hard, then. You wouldn’t do it now, would you?”

  “I don’t really even like killing these sick ­people. The Infecteds.”

  “We’ll be done with that soon, I hope.”

  “Me, too.”

  She gave his arm a gentle rub, then released it. “You should get some rest, Joe,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here with us.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course,” she said again. “You’ve always been one of my favorite Sykos.”

  She went back inside with him. He was beaming. S
he watched him settle into his spot on the floor, pull the blanket back over as much as it would cover, and she stayed there until his breathing was steady and slow. He would have her back, she thought. He wouldn’t let any harm come to her if he had anything to say about it.

  She did have an ally here, after all. One she could count on.

  The best part was, she had been telling the truth. There had always been something likable about him, an innocence that she found refreshing in a serial killer. He wasn’t constantly trying to play her. He was direct about his feelings, and he said what he meant.

  She really was glad he was here.

  Not being here at all would have been better still, but that didn’t seem to be an option at this point.

  CHAPTER 31

  31 hours

  After Sansome closed his eyes, Fallon got up and stepped outside. The temperature was finally down in the low eighties, though it felt chilly to her in comparison to the day’s earlier heat. At least that’s what she attributed her sudden shiver to, and not to the eerie silence so close to a major highway.

  But as she listened, straining in the darkness to hear something, anything normal—­kids playing, ­couples arguing, horns honking, TVs blaring—­she did begin to hear noises that represented a different sort of normal.

  Cicadas chirping, birds singing and squabbling, wind chimes dancing in the slight breeze, the tinkling sound of a water feature somewhere close by that had kept running even after there was no one around to enjoy it. It was surprisingly peaceful, and Fallon found herself thinking that there might just be some advantages to Crazy 8s, after all.

  Just then, a mosquito buzzed by her ear, and she slapped at it, her hand coming away bloody. It made her pause. What if they were wrong, and the vector wasn’t the meteor, but something ubiquitous, like an insect, or pollen, or even the ever-­present desert dust? She dwelled on that for a moment but eventually shook her head. No point in worrying about that now. Find the meteor, get it back to PIR, and pray for a vaccine. If that didn’t work, they could look into other sources of the virus.