Dr. Cushman watched a daddy long-legs spider ease down off the wall, skitter across the desk, and vanish down below. When she spoke again, her voice was somber. “We thought we could control it, but we were wrong. Someone at a much higher pay grade than me thought they could weaponize it. They were wrong about that, too. Turns out, we were wrong about a lot. At some point, like any good malware, this one learned to spread. At first it just seemed to spread person to person—their bodies gave off that hum, the noise, and infected others, but then we realized it had also spread to the internet, to all those connected devices. And anything electronic that could generate sound became a host, too. All of it infecting, infecting, infecting.”
She shuffled through several items on the table, found a pen, and scribbled something in the corner of the Anna Shim document.
Harbin tried to process all this. He had so many questions, but only one that mattered. “So how do we stop it?”
This made her laugh, the sharp cackle of someone unwell. She leaned back in her chair and called out over her shoulder, “Hey, Freddy, he wants to know how to stop it! How ’bout you take that one?”
Dr. Cushman waited a moment, as if expecting Hoover to answer. Then she tilted her head and told Harbin, “It’s not gonna get me. Let me show you how to stop it.”
Reaching forward, she snatched up Harbin’s gun from the table, flicked off the safety, and put the barrel in her mouth.
She pulled the trigger without hesitation, and Harbin’s body jerked with the loud report. Her head cracked back, the bullet exiting and embedding in the concrete wall behind her.
Harbin stood there for a long time, unable to move, the echo fading and dying around him, the room filling with utter silence—this complete silence, the only silence he’d heard in days. When his arms, legs, and body would finally obey him again, he managed to turn the thick sheaf of documents and read her words among the speckles of blood—
GIVE GENERAL WESTIN MY BEST.
Chapter Ninety-Eight
Fraser
Fraser dropped into his seat and jammed his leg down into the driver’s-side footwell onto the brake pedal, mashed it down along with the dead driver’s foot. There was no response. He recalled from some long-ago briefing that manual controls disconnected when these vehicles switched into autonomous mode but had hoped he’d remembered wrong. He had no idea how to disconnect the remote system. He’d be pulling wires blind.
Fraser grabbed at the steering wheel, but it spun under his grip, small servos turning it hard right, then back to the left. The Humvee smacked into runners on both sides, as if attempting to force them back, clear a path, but it did little good—the moment they straightened back out, the horde closed back in around them, bodies pressed right up against both sides, chasing from behind.
The runners in front of him hit the wall of standing runners without even a hint of slowing down, and the Humvee crashed into their backs. Even over the roar of the engine, the screaming noise of the horde, his own cries, he heard the crack of bone as legs and spines and arms splintered and snapped. He was thrown forward, his shoulder smashed into the dash with an unsettling sound and knew something broke even before the rush of pain confirmed it. The broken bodies of several runners flew, others went under, and the Humvee lurched to a stop amid a tangle of death.
The engine switched off, and the text on the LCD monitor updated: GET OUT.
Even if he wanted to, there was no way he could.
Runners crushed into the Humvee from behind, at both sides. Several ran right over the top and kept going over the writhing bodies at the water’s edge and vanished.
The text updated again: ALL WILL CHANGE SOON.
Fraser pulled the microphone from around the dead soldier’s neck. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Alex Fraser! I’m in Humvee”—he located the identification plate on the dash—“Six oh one nine three! I need immediate evacuation!”
Without the headphones, he didn’t know if anyone could hear him, but he repeated all of this several times before tossing the microphone down to the floorboard.
The horde pressed tight all around him, filling every inch of available space outside the Humvee. He reached up and yanked the overhead door shut when a leg dropped down through the opening, kicked at the open air, then pulled back out. He managed to get the door closed as footfalls rained down, as the horde choked the vehicle from above. As the metal groaned under the growing weight, he tried not to think about all the crushed cars he’d seen in the past several days.
BOMBERS INCOMING. ETA ONE MINUTE.
He stared at the five words. He was going to die here.
A hand slapped against the window beside him. A man’s hand, an Army Ranger ring on the third finger identical to the one his father had worn.
Fraser twisted and tried to get a look at the man, but he was gone a moment later as others pressed against the side of the Humvee and pushed him out of the way. The roof over the backseat buckled inward and the portion above Fraser followed. He slid deeper down.
Thick ballistic or not, he knew the glass would go soon under the weight. Christ, it was hot.
He remembered what those doctors had told him happened to the other bodies when they stopped moving, the captured runners back at the hangar. He thought of the makeshift morgue back at Zigzag.
He understood where the heat was coming from.
A woman’s face was up against the glass on his right, distorted by the pressure of so many others behind her. At first, her eyes held that same blank gaze as all the others. Then something changed. She seemed to see him. She seemed to realize where she was.
He’d never seen anyone look so scared.
Sweaty steam lofted from her skin and smeared the window. Her cheek split open, the blood singed the glass, then went white with a light so bright Fraser had to turn away. He felt the heat of it and realized the metal of the Humvee was glowing, too, burning hot and red. When the woman ignited in a flash, a boy beside her did as well. The ones around them both followed. All of them, one after the other, as if someone took a flame to a book of matches.
Fraser sucked in one last hot breath as three final words appeared on the LCD screen:
UPLOADING. STAND BY…
Chapter Ninety-Nine
President
The president and a dozen others clustered around the video monitors aboard Air Force One.
He kept telling himself he was doing the right thing.
The people around him assured him he was doing the right thing.
None of that calmed the churning in his stomach or settled the migraine gaining traction behind his eyes despite the three Imitrex he’d swallowed in the past hour. He’d taken his tie off hours ago. The top two buttons on his shirt were undone, yet he still felt like he was being choked. He had a glass of water on the table but refused to pick it up, worried someone might see just how bad he was shaking if he did.
General Westin looked up at him, a phone pressed to his ear. “The bombers are in range, sir. Deploying in ten seconds, on my mark. I need confirmation from you—are we a go?”
The president looked back at the monitor on his far left. The feed came from a McCoy 828 satellite. The image was remarkably clear—the lights of Portland, the brighter lights of the fires along the Willamette River—and to the east of Portland, at the river’s edge, the enormous black stain of the horde. He told himself the horde were no longer people, but a deluge of death and destruction. An organism, a monstrous cancer. The contrast between those two things—the bright lights of Portland and the deep black of the horde—helped him to think of what was happening there not as a them but as an it, and that separation got him over the last hump, brought him to what he must do.
The president nodded at Westin.
“I need verbal confirmation, sir. For the record.”
The president swallowed. “You’re authorized to deploy.”
He hadn’t realized how quiet the room had gotten until Westin spoke back into the phone.
“Achilles is a go. Weapons drop authorized at your ready.”
The president forced himself to breathe and stepped closer to the monitors. He found his eyes locked on that ugly black mass. It was so damn big. “How long?”
He could only manage the two words, but this was enough for Westin. He understood what he was asking.
“Deployed at a height of fifty thousand feet, the bombs will reach the surface in approximately three minutes.”
The president stepped closer to the monitor, narrowed his eyes, and tapped the screen. “If the bombs haven’t reached the ground, what is that?”
Westin followed his finger.
A pinprick of incredibly bright light had started at the easternmost edge of the horde, growing thicker and somehow brighter.
The president understood then, and the words dropped from his lips. “They’re combusting. We forced them to stand still, and it’s like the doctors said—without running to burn off the energy, it’s building, igniting.”
Westin was back on the phone. His face grew red as he barked at someone, then listened. “We’re reading temperatures on the ground in excess of a thousand degrees and climbing. This is some kind of chain reaction—they’re lighting off one another!”
The president couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. “What does this mean for the bombs?”
Westin didn’t answer. His mouth was hanging open as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the phone.
“General?”
Westin held up a finger. Into the phone, he said, “Repeat?”
On the screen, the image was so bright, it obscured everything else.
Westin looked up at him. “We lost one of the bombers. Whatever this is, it’s reaching up through the entire atmosphere. Deep into the stratosphere—twenty miles straight up, maybe higher. Extremely high temperatures…”
“Will the bombs stop it?”
Again, Westin ignored him.
“General?”
“There are no more bombs—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. They were incinerated along with that plane! The air above them is superheating, and…” His voice fell away as he listened again.
The satellite image turned pure white, then the screen went blank. Samantha Troy mumbled, “I think we lost the satellite.” She went to a laptop, made several entries, and another image came up, much farther out. “This is HornetEye 413, one of our high-altitude recon units. It orbits about ten miles higher than the McCoys.” She clicked through several screens. “This is…this is really odd…”
“What?”
“…aside from taking images, HornetEye records atmospheric disturbances. That thing is burning everything above it. It’s pulling every ounce of energy and heat around to keep going. It’s punched a hole directly through our atmosphere and—”
On the screen, the burning horde somehow managed to grow brighter still, then vanished with an implosion that left anyone watching it seeing spots.
Anyone unfortunate enough to witness this from the ground, the president thought, must surely be blind now.
Chapter One Hundred
Martha
Sophie didn’t run.
Instead, Martha watched as the little girl, this blur of vibration, stepped forward on legs that seemed to operate independently of the rest of her body.
When her eyes opened, they seemed to shine with blue light. Her head swiveled and took in her surroundings as if looking out on the hangar, on them, for the first time.
Tennant dropped to her knees beside her sister, stifling a gasp. “My God, Sophie. What have they done to you?”
Sophie’s eyes closed. When they opened again, she drew in a sharp breath—then, despite the rattling metal of the cage, the lights, the hangar itself, Martha clearly heard the little girl speak in the softest of voices. Martha realized she heard this not only from the girl across the room, but in her head, in her thoughts, this voice’s slightest whisper perfectly clear and eerily calm.
“I can see Momma and Poppa and Grammy and…everyone. Tennant, I see everyone. I feel everyone. I hear everything.”
Martha glanced down at the iPad in her hands. The screen was covered in flashing warning messages—temperature, blood pressure, blood oxygenation—all beyond logic. This girl shouldn’t be alive, let alone speaking.
Tennant tried to take Sophie’s hand but jerked away when she came in contact with her sister’s skin. She cradled her fingers like she’d touched a hot oven.
“It’s okay…I’ll be okay…I know that now.”
Sophie drew in another harsh gasp and pinched her eyes shut. When she opened them again, the bright blue had returned, and the fear was washed from her face. She looked out at them with the gaze of someone far older than her eight years. The voice that spoke was still hers but also not, as if mixed with many others.
“Transcendence…is coming. A new world. A wonderful world. All will run. All will run with those who have been and all will run with those to come. Our body is one. Our mind…is one.”
Sophie sucked in another breath and her back stiffened for a moment. There was a quick glimmer of the girl who was, then she was gone again.
Martha had to tell herself this was another’s voice, not Sophie, someone, something else. A great being. As impossible as that might be to accept, she knew it was true. She got as close as she dared. She could feel the heat radiating out, rising from Sophie’s pores. “Who are you?”
The girl who was once Sophie looked at her, the voice that was not hers said, “I am we. I am all there is. I am what is to be.”
Her body vibrated with such speed, such force, she was a shimmer against the harsh lines of the cage behind her. Martha realized just how loud the noise around them had become. There was no blocking it, no hiding, no way to avoid the sound that crept over every inch of her body, worked down through her pores, and shook her bones. Two of the soldiers were down on their knees, hands pressed to their ears against the noise.
Tennant looked like she was in shock. Blood trickled down the sides of her face, but like Martha, she made no attempt to block the sound. She only stood there and glared at what was once her sister and was now something else. When she shouted, her voice cracked against her tears. “You can’t take my sister—she’s all I have left!”
Sophie lowered her gaze to the ground and shook her head. “Those who run, they run from all you have done and the hate and the anger and the fear. They run to what is next. They run to the cleansing. Rebirth from ashes.”
Her eyes closed then.
Martha could do nothing as steam rose from the child’s flesh, as she glowed with a heat so intense the air itself threatened to ignite, far exceeding what she and Harbin had witnessed with the runners.
Sophie ignited in the brightest white. This flame that poured from her flesh leaped straight up, burned through the roof of the hangar, and continued skyward until it vanished somewhere in the heavens with a deafening roar.
Martha, Tennant, the soldiers—they all recoiled from the light.
Then Sophie was gone.
And silence engulfed them all.
Chapter One Hundred One
President
Three hours later, from the far corner of the room, the president looked out at the podium of the James S. Brady press briefing room at the White House, a location familiar to all Americans, second only to the Oval Office.
They had considered a ball cap and windbreaker and maybe an outdoor speech, but decided that might give the impression that things were unresolved, that the worst was yet to come. He needed to stem a panic, not fuel one.
An Oval Office speech might come later, if need be. To provide additional closure. Maybe a fireside chat.
He wiped the sweat from his palms onto his trousers as one of his interns straightened his tie.
A woman with a rolling cart carrying enough makeup to cover the cast of an entire television production for a season dabbed more powder on his forehead.
He waved the hastily
drafted speech at his press secretary. “Are you sure about this?”
“It’s a valid explanation. It leaves room if we need to adjust the narrative later. We’ll track the response in the press and on social media and make adjustments as necessary. This is the right thing to do.”
The right thing.
As opposed to the truth.
The president frowned. “Where’s General Westin? Maybe he should stand up there with me.”
“He’s on with the Joint Chiefs, sir. If necessary, we’ll have him do a follow-up speech later today. We’ll see how this one goes. Best to hold him in your pocket for now.”
Drawing in a deep breath, he crossed over to the podium and set the pages on top. An identical copy of the speech had been loaded into the teleprompters, but he’d been told the use of paper would help with the image they were trying to portray. Urgent, yet organized.
The president looked out over the rows of chairs and fought the urge to squint. The lights were always so damn bright. He cleared his throat. “At approximately eleven fifty-one last night, the largest solar flare on record reached across the cosmos and touched down just outside of Portland, Oregon. This flare, traveling at 1,250 miles per second, provided no warning and left immense devastation in its wake. It’s still very early, but I’ve been told the death toll will amount near one million American souls. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of all those involved.” The words PAUSE HERE flashed on the teleprompters, so he did, lowering his gaze for a moment, before swallowing and going on. “The damage to property and infrastructure is also substantial but inconsequential in relation to the loss of life. We can and will rebuild. We will honor our dead. I’ve declared a national emergency. Resources and aid are en route, joining the military already on the ground in this trying time. Our scientists, along with teams from around the world, are currently analyzing not only the immediate effects of the flare, but the long-term implications.”
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