But now he was feeling like hell, sweating on a mild October day, a headache at the back of his skull and working its way forward. He couldn’t stop swallowing, his mouth seeming to fill with saliva as soon as he cleared it. Shit. I picked up a bug overseas. He’d be forced to take days off, might miss his trip to Hong Kong. He’d have to see his doctor, but was having trouble remembering the man’s name or even how to make an appointment.
As the mayor and governor wrapped up their remarks and the President took the stage to a swell of cheers and applause, the salesman blinked, his vision growing blurry. He was certain he’d come here to see someone…who was it?
What was happening to the salesman was being repeated around him in the crowd, others who had reached the end of Trident’s incubation.
Just as Soo Yim had done over the Pacific.
THE STAGE
Agent Sheffield stood behind and to the left of the President as he spoke, dressed in a dark suit and wearing sunglasses, just like the other men on the detail. He wasn’t feeling well, but that was no surprise. The members of the PPD, also known as the working shift, kept the same hours and pace as POTUS (and then some) and the constant travel and preparation was bound to take a toll. He’d just have to muscle up and get through it. There was no other acceptable option.
His attention was currently focused on Brown and Atwell, the two agents positioned in front of the podium at the base of the stage, facing the crowd. Atwell was alternatively wiping his forehead and rubbing the back of his neck, and Brown was fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot. It was out of character for the two men, agents who were among the most disciplined Sheffield had ever known. At these events they were always menacing slabs of rock, their only movements the slow, constant swivel of their heads as they scanned for danger.
Sheffield blinked. What had he been thinking about? And what was that irritating droning noise? Someone talking, or a small, private plane diving toward the plaza? Even this thought didn’t make him look up or alert in any way.
His eyes began to tear as his vision blurred.
THE PODIUM
“We have work to do,” President Fox said into the microphone, his voice booming across the plaza. “We have to focus on our problems here at home while still maintaining a strong presence around the world.”
Cheering greeted the statement.
“And we’re doing it. The new jobs package, increasing veteran’s benefits, providing for families and schools, pushing for greater research to make us less dependent upon foreign oil.” Another pause for the cheering. “We’ve begun trade reform, reaffirmed our commitment to overseas allies through training and equipment, increased our naval presence around the Horn of Africa to combat piracy. We’re on our way, but more must be done.”
The crowd roared, and Garrison gave them a genuine smile, pleased by the response. Maybe they could win Ohio. He was about to move into the portion of his speech that was specifically directed at the state’s steel industry, to give assurances that the federal government would be on their side when it came to unfair trade arrangements with the Chinese. As he waited for the last wave of applause to subside, he noticed the two agents below him in the front, Atwell and Brown. Brown was slowly drifting off-post to the right, and Atwell was walking straight toward the waist-high metal barricade that held the crowd back, picking up speed.
He hesitated, distracted. Are they seeing a threat? What-?
Atwell reached the barrier, now almost running, and grabbed a middle-aged woman waving a small flag. He sank his teeth into her shoulder, then used her body as leverage to pull himself over and into the crowd, bearing the woman to the ground.
Screaming erupted and people tried to scatter in the densely packed gathering. To the right, Agent Brown was crossing the barrier as well, attacking a man wearing a baseball cap. More screams split the air, coming from different points within the plaza – lots of points – and suddenly the entire mass seemed to be moving.
“Crash! Crash!” someone yelled to his right, and a second later Garrison was hit from that side with a near-tackle, his body thrown left as big arms swept him into a hug. It was LaBeau, a massive black man with a shaved head, the biggest agent on his detail bearing him toward the stairs on stage left. Sheffield, the other agent who should have joined the tackle at the cry of Crash, instead bared his teeth and grabbed onto LaBeau’s arm as he passed, letting out a snarl. He bit at the big man’s coat sleeve and tried to drag him down, but LaBeau threw an elbow, smashing Sheffield’s nose and breaking him loose, not slowing as he lifted the President and launched down the stairs.
All around them, Secret Service agents were pinning screaming people to the ground, savaging them with hands and teeth, oblivious to the evacuation. Garrison’s legs tried to keep up, but Agent LaBeau was a juggernaut, almost completely carrying him and accelerating. Gunfire cracked from somewhere behind them and then again to their left, and everywhere people were running, running.
A close shriek made Garrison look to the right, and he saw his Chief of Staff backed against a large window, flailing his arms as a presidential staffer and another agent clawed and bit and tore open his neck. Thomas Barrow’s eyes widened in surprise as a scarlet jet of arterial blood shot across the glass behind him.
“Tommy,” Garrison gasped.
The Beast was ahead of them, its rear door open and an agent standing nearby, his firearm out but dangling at the end of a limp arm as the man stumbled against the side of the limousine, holding his head with his other hand. More gunfire as the screaming climbed in octaves. LaBeau drove him toward the limo’s rear door.
They were hit again from the side, someone in a suit who growled and snapped and clawed at them both. A groping finger went into Garrison’s eye and he cried out. It was Danny the body man, Garrison’s former Marine, now glassy-eyed with grayish drool spilling from his lips. Danny bit LaBeau in the ear, teeth crunching on cartilage and the plastic of a radio earpiece. The big agent didn’t scream, only twisted the President away from the attack and tried to move forward, the weight of a second man now slowing him.
Another hit, this one from behind, Agent Sheffield who had caught up to them from the stage. The impact and mass of four struggling men took them all to the ground, and Garrison grunted and lost his breath as he hit with the other three on top of him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sheffield take a bite out of LaBeau’s cheek, then his neck, and the big black agent let out an enraged roar. LaBeau twisted again, this time the pistol coming out of his holster, and he rammed the muzzle under Danny’s chin and blew out the top of his head. The body man crumpled, falling away. The big agent heaved upward, rotating his body yet again while still holding onto the President, firing twice at point-blank range into Sheffield’s chest. As the dead man slipped off to the side, LaBeau was on his feet once more, hauling Garrison up and moving him toward the open limo door.
The agent who had stumbled away along the Cadillac snapped his head around, his pistol clattering forgotten to the pavement, and rushed them with a mad howl. With one arm wrapped around the Commander-in-Chief, LaBeau shot him three times in the chest. Then he was shoving Garrison inside, scrambling in after him and slamming the heavy door, locking it.
“Drive!” LaBeau bellowed, his voice carrying through the closed divider, and the agent behind the wheel hit the gas. The grille threw a pair of running bodies aside as the heavy Cadillac accelerated and swung left toward the side street that would take them out of the plaza. LaBeau pushed Garrison to the floor as he spoke rapidly into his wrist mic, ignoring both a cheek and an ear that hung in bloody flaps, crimson spreading across his white shirt from the neck wound.
The black Suburban of the CAT team shot in front of the Beast, moving left to right with agents sticking automatic weapons out its windows and a circular roof hatch split down the window springing up and back in two half-moons. A pintle-mounted mini-gun slid up and out with an agent in black tactical gear standing behind it. Then they were out of sight, an
d a second later there was the deadly whirr and stutter of the mini-gun going into action.
The Beast’s grille thumped again – something wet sprayed across the windshield – as it rocketed out of Key Plaza and into the streets of Cleveland.
THE BEAST
With only a few exceptions, Agent LaBeau among them, every member of Garrison Fox’s Personal Protective Detail, advance teams, support teams and civilian and military entourage contracted Trident in Indonesia on day-one, when Soo Yim drank of Tapak’s dark gift and began quickly passing it along. LaBeau had missed the trip, staying behind to attend his mother’s funeral in Memphis. He hadn’t picked up Trident until day-three of the spread, so his incubation was running behind the others. And just like they had been (until now) he was asymptomatic.
That changed with the very first bite, the one from Danny that had left his ear a bloody ribbon. Danny’s now-active Trident organism transmitted instantly with the bite, awakening a dormant virus three days early.
Even as they were leaving the plaza, LaBeau started to shake from the chills, and a headache erupted at the base of his skull and quickly rushed over the top and into his eyes.
SHOTGUN
Special Agent Sanders, the coordinator and supervisor for all Secret Service operations at the Cleveland event, stood in the front of the USSS Mobile Command Center, a black motor home with tinted glass that sat parked at the rear of the plaza. Two other agents were in here with him, frantically working communications consoles. An agent on the speaker’s platform had called crash, and what should have been a swift, well-orchestrated response to an AOP – Attack on Principle – was instead degenerating into chaos.
According to what Sanders was hearing on the radio as well as what he’d seen with his own eyes, CAT was deploying into the crowd, its mini-gun chopping down what had to be hostiles in order to provide cover for the Beast. The President was reported to be aboard with his driver and a wounded agent, heading for exit route number two and the secure area at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport where Angel was waiting. Marine One had gone airborne for a pick-up, and the Black Hawk carrying the Secret Service ERT was overhead, tracking the fleeing limo. Radio traffic clogged the airwaves, and the supervisory agent’s two communications men were trying to keep up with it all.
But the wheels were coming off.
The only agent from the President’s Personal Protective Detail he could contact was LaBeau, racing away in Stagecoach with POTUS. None of the other agents were responding.
After a violent burst of emergency calls from units stationed around the perimeter and the report of “engaging” from a single Sierra team, there had been nothing. There was also no response from any of the agents positioned out at Air Force One, and similar silence from the crews of the aircraft itself, as well as its sister plane. Other than the chatter coming from the two responding helicopters and the Beast, the only USSS voice out there came from a lone agent positioned somewhere between the plaza and the airport, shouting into his radio that the extraction route was compromised and for the Beast to switch to an alternate. His voice was cut short by a scream before he could identify which route was compromised.
Sanders tried to get him back, but it was the agent’s final transmission.
“Cement Mixer is on,” one of the communications men announced. The supervisory agent was about to move to the console when he noticed two things outside the big front window of the motor home that froze him in his tracks. The first was that the nearby press corps bus was being overrun by frenzied, bloody figures. News anchors and White House correspondents were caught against the metal sides and torn apart as raving figures scrambled up through the open door, pursuing their prey inside. Sanders saw the bus shaking, and bloody hands streaking the windows from inside.
More startling than that, not twenty feet from the mobile command post, he saw a Navy officer shuffling across the lawn of the plaza, moving aimlessly, a steel briefcase handcuffed to one wrist. It dangled on its chain, twisting and bumping against his leg.
“Shit! Fumble, fumble!” Sanders grabbed one of his comms men by the shoulder and pointed at the Navy officer. “Go get the football!”
Without hesitation the agent bolted out of his seat and shot out the side door. Sanders watched him make the short run across the grass, then turned back to the console where the Director of Homeland Security’s face filled one of the screens.
“We’re black, Mr. Secretary,” Sanders said. “POTUS is in our control but is not secure. Comms are failing and his Detail is unresponsive, assumed fully compromised. Angel is not responding. We’re working on an air evac with Marine One.”
In the White House Situation Room, Bob Chase looked grim. “I’m initiating Bank Vault.”
Immediately the supervisory agent pointed to his remaining comms man and directed him to put it out. A moment later the agent was calling to all USSS units, “Bank Vault, Bank Vault.”
On screen, Chase shook his head. “Things are coming apart here, too. There’s gunfire in the White House, and we’re locked down. No one is responding at Service headquarters, and we can’t…”
He never finished the sentence. Special Agent Sanders saw a Marine in his dress blues appear behind the Homeland Security Director, eyes glassy, mouth hung open and drooling. The Marine pulled Bob Chase from his chair before Sanders could even shout a warning, then killed the Cabinet Secretary with his hands and teeth.
Sanders recoiled from the screen, failing to notice that his remaining comms man was leaning his head against the console, sweating and shuddering, staring at nothing. The roar of the CAT’s mini-gun made him dart to the front window again, and although from this angle he couldn’t see the counter assault team or what they were firing at, he did see the agent he’d sent outside.
The man was flat on his back in the grass, the Navy officer straddling him and ripping the man’s insides out through a horrible stomach wound, cramming them into his mouth. The steel case containing the nuclear launch unit, the Football, still dangled from its handcuff.
“Mother of God…” said Sanders, reaching for his sidearm.
He never made it. The giggling communications agent behind him saw to that.
SIERRA-3
David King rounded the corner of the rooftop structure, expecting to see his two-man shooter position in place, the men kneeling behind a rifle propped on the concrete parapet and a spotting scope. The rifle was there, but the shooter was standing upright next to it, arms limp at his sides as he stared down at the plaza. The spotter was twenty feet away, sitting with his legs splayed, gripping the sides of his head and drooling between his knees.
David stopped cold.
The shooter made a grunting sound and moved forward, going right off the roof, knocking his rifle over the side as he went.
“No!” David shouted, running to where the man had been. Then someone shouted, “Crash! Crash!” over the secure radio channel, and below him thousands of people were instantly in motion. From his high vantage point he had a wide view of the entire plaza, and his first impression was that of a stampeding herd on the African savannah. Barriers were tipped over, people began screaming as bodies crushed against each other, trampling the slow to react. Over the radio, one of his positions called, “Engaging,” even as he swung his binoculars toward the presidential podium.
The crack of gunfire came from half a dozen locations below, and he grabbed his radio handset. “All positions, this is Sierra-3, you are green to engage.” He didn’t know where the attack was coming from, but it was underway and he wasn’t going to make his teams wait for individual permission to fire. They had eyes on the scene, and would know what to do. One of them already had.
None of his positions acknowledged the order however, and other than a single sniper calling engaging followed by the boom of a sniper rifle, there was nothing more.
He couldn’t even start to process what had happened with the two men at Sierra-Six, one still sitting in a drooling daze on th
e roof and the other now broken down on the sidewalk in front of the building. David snapped up his binoculars and looked to the podium. There he saw an agent he knew, LaBeau, shoving POTUS into the rear of the Beast, a trail of fallen bodies behind him. The CAT vehicle crossed the limo’s path, and an agent already in the roof turret, swinging up the 7.62mm mini-gun (a modern day version of the Gatling gun that could fire between two and six thousand rounds per minute) opened up on a crowd of civilians rushing toward the stage. He swung his weapon left to right with devastating effect. David could see clouds of pink mist as high velocity, heavy caliber slugs shredded human bodies.
The presidential limousine made a turn and accelerated out of sight, chased by a single Cleveland Police car with its lights and sirens going. David radioed to the mobile command post that POTUS was away, CAT was deploying and that he had zero comms with his Sierra teams. There was no response. Even as he was calling Shotgun, Special Agent Sanders was being devoured inside the motor home by one of his own men.
David cursed. He had no rifle! There was nothing he could do from up here with only his sidearm except watch events unfold and make radio transmissions that no one was answering. Below him the chaos escalated as many in the crowd began turning on their fellow spectators, ripping and biting, chasing down those who tried to get away. Sirens howled, gunfire popped from all directions and thousands of terrified people fled in waves to escape the madness that had erupted in Key Plaza. Maimed and twisted bodies littered the lawns and sidewalks in their wake.
The sniper team leader saw the counter assault vehicle slow and drift to a stop against the rim of a small fountain. The driver’s door swung open and a SWAT-clad figure stumbled out, holding his head in both hands and staggering away. In the turret, the agent who had been firing the mini-gun suddenly vanished into the hatch, as suddenly as if he’d been snatched down a rabbit hole.
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