Dogs of War

by Jonathan Maberry

  That wasn’t the only thing twisting my nuts, though. I was afraid that one of these days there would be no one to answer the call. Not me and not anyone else. One of these days there would be a gap between one crime and the bigger one, between one catastrophe and one that really brings down the curtain, and all of us would be either off the clock, too bashed to stand, already under fire, or looking the damn wrong way.

  It was the last part that scared me most of all.

  If we’re reactive rather than proactive, what happens when we react too slowly or too late? What happens when we make the wrong call and go after one thing and miss the other? What’s the backup plan when we go charging in the wrong direction and before we can turn around it all blows up?

  I’m rambling, I know. The inside of my head is untidy, and even my thoughts don’t follow a logical pattern sometimes. I’m going to blame it on the whiskey.

  Yeah. That sounds good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  INLET CRAB HOUSE

  3572 HIGHWAY 17

  MURRELLS INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA

  SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 9:08 PM EST

  Bunny felt an impact and turned to see Tracy Cole shouldering her way past him. She had her service weapon in both hands and was fanning the barrel across the melee, but she didn’t fire.

  Of course she didn’t fire. There was no clear aggressor here. No perpetrators. No criminals wearing masks to disguise their identities. No terrorists in black balaclavas to allow them to become faceless agents of a corrupted ideology.

  These were ordinary people slaughtering one another.

  She kept yelling at them, kept trying to impose order on a situation from which all sense and order had been swept. Then she turned and looked up at him.

  “What the hell’s happening?” she demanded.

  All Bunny could do was shake his head.

  Suddenly there was a shot in the midst of the screaming, and they both turned to see Top Sims rise up on the far side of the overturned table, his pistol held high, barrel toward the ceiling as a young man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts tried to claw his way toward the weapon. Top bled from long scratches on his forearm, and he had the man’s throat caught in one hard, brown hand. The shot had gone up into the ceiling, and Top had pulled his finger from the trigger guard after that one wild discharge.

  A second young man—this one wearing a Gamecocks football T-shirt and jeans—dived at Top and the three of them vanished behind the table.

  Suddenly Bunny was moving. His big body was in motion before he realized it. There were five or six people between him and his friend. Bunny hadn’t drawn his weapon. Against all training, it hadn’t even occurred to him. But he reached out with both hands and grabbed people by arms and scruffs and hair and clothes and hurled them away. He heard a roar and didn’t know if it was his own throat making that sound. The people flew like rag dolls, and it didn’t matter if they were small women or large men. He plucked them up and cast them out of his way and reached the table. At first all he could see was a tangle of arms and legs, clothes and blood. Then he saw the man in the football shirt biting Top. Biting his leg, trying to chew through Top’s trousers. From the way Top kicked, it was clear that he was in great pain, but there was no blood around the bite. Not yet.

  Bunny bent forward and grabbed the man with both hands and tore him away from Top. Some of Top’s trouser came with him, caught between gnashing white teeth. Bunny pivoted and smashed the man into the closest wall. Even with all the screaming, the sound of breaking bones was like a bundle of breaking sticks. Bunny let the man drop and started to turn back to Top, but a hand caught his ankle and he stared down in shock and horror as the smashed man tried to claw his way forward to bite Bunny’s Achilles tendon.

  “No,” Bunny said as an old horror surged to the surface of his mind. He had fought people like this before. People who were out of their minds, or beyond their minds. People who were totally lost in the urges of a hunger so deep, so terrible, that it consumed every part of who they had been, leaving only a thing in its place. A thing that needed to feed and could not be stopped by fear or intimidation or even pain. A hushed, frightened voice whispered urgently in his head.

  Aim for the head … aim for the head. There’s no other way to stop them. Aim for the head.

  He felt a hardness in his hand and stared down in stunned horror to see that he now held his gun. His arm raised the weapon. His traitor finger slipped inside the trigger guard and curled around the—

  “No!”

  His voice seemed to come from somewhere else.

  His finger froze in place and he felt his leg lift, felt muscles flexed, took ownership of the reflex action, and then kicked out. It was a powerful kick, backed with rage and fear, and it caught the young man on the point of the chin, lifted him, snapped his head back, hurled him against the wall, dropped him.

  The man’s eyes rolled high and white and he collapsed backward, panting but unconscious.

  Unconscious.

  That knowledge did something for Bunny. The man was alive but had been knocked out.

  The dead could not be knocked out. The Walkers, the victims of the Seif al Din could not be dazed. They could only be fed or killed.

  This, as dreadful as it was, was not that.…

  Bunny felt something happen inside his chest and inside his head. On one side of a broken moment he was a victim, a helpless passenger in events that were spinning out of his control. On that side of time, he was still the man who had been destroyed on the gas dock last year.

  And then that moment passed. It changed, and, in doing so, it changed him.

  It was like someone rebooting the generators of a great power plant. There was darkness and stillness, and then there was a great clunk as the switch was thrown. There was the surge of starter power to the turbines, and then they began spinning and spinning, creating and reclaiming power. In his perception, this took a long time. Hours, ages. In the reality of that crisis, it was the other half of a moment.

  And Bunny was back again.

  He could feel himself return. His limbs no longer acted by reflex or accident. It was almost joyful.

  Except that he was still in hell and the demons were tearing the world apart.

  He spun, gripped the edge of the table, and flung it behind him. Top was pinned under the other young man and was clubbing at him with the artless, ineffectual blows of blind panic. It hurt Bunny to see it, because Top was never out of control. He was the stable center of Echo Team, and everyone knew it. Or, he had been before the gas dock. Since then he had been a ghost haunting his own life. As Bunny had been.

  Bunny grabbed the attacker by the hair and hauled him backward. The man instantly hissed and spun and tried to bite Bunny’s arm. Bunny clubbed him with the butt of his pistol. Skin tore and bones cracked as the man flopped down.

  Proof. More proof that this was only an outer ring of hell but not hell itself.

  “You alive, old man?” Bunny growled as he caught Top under the arm and hauled him to his feet.

  Top staggered, caught his balance, pushed away from Bunny. His eyes were filled with fear and confusion. “What the … what the…?” was all he could manage. The fighting—and the killing—raged around them.

  Bunny didn’t know what else to do, so he belted Top across the mouth with the back of his left hand. The blow spun Top in a full circle and the older man nearly fell. He crashed against the window, rebounded, and Bunny stopped him with a hard, flat palm against his chest. Almost the same thing he had done to Tracy Cole’s boyfriend, but with an entirely different meaning. And a different effect.

  Top slapped Bunny’s hand away and put the barrel of his pistol hard against the underside of Bunny’s chin.

  “The fuck you doing, Farm Boy?” demanded Top. “You gone and lost your shit, too?”

  Bunny held his gun up so that Top could see it. And see that it wasn’t pointed at him.

  “This is your six o’clock wake-up call,” said
Bunny.

  Top stared at him as if he was insane.

  And there was another fractured moment of change, except this time Bunny could see it happen to someone else. Top was gone, wrecked, ruined … and then he wasn’t.

  Top licked his lips, blinked his eyes, and lowered his gun.

  Tracy Cole was across the room, pulling a woman away from several bleeding kids. Bodies lay sprawled. A few people crawled between struggling groups, leaving trails of blood behind them. People screamed in fear, howled like animals.

  “It’s not Seif al Din,” said Bunny again.

  Top nodded. He raised his pistol and took it in both hands, searching for a target. Bunny placed his fingers lightly on Top’s wrist.

  “They’re civilians,” said Bunny.

  Top looked at him, then at the people, then nodded again. It meant something different now. He blew out his cheeks and then shoved his pistol back into its holster. Bunny did the same.

  Together they waded, unarmed, into the madness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  JOHN THE REVELATOR

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

  ENGINEERING QUADRANGLE, B327

  PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

  FOUR WEEKS AGO

  “You talk about the technological singularity almost like a religion,” said the professor.

  “No,” said John the Revelator, “not almost like. It is a religion. Singularitarianism is very real and very valid.”

  The professor smiled faintly. “And what is the theological basis of this religion?”

  “Well, to understand it would mean to step back from standard views of what a religion is. It certainly isn’t Christian or Abrahamic.”

  “Not all religions are,” said the professor.

  “Of course not. There’s Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and hundreds of smaller religions, including extinct religions such as the worship of the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons. There are probably more extinct religions than active ones, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “There’s a commonality, though,” said the professor. “A belief in a higher power, even if that higher power is as vague as the energy in, say, plants or a certain species of animal. A bird, perhaps. What is the god of singularitarianism?”

  “There isn’t a god. Not in the traditional sense.”

  “Then what?”

  “You might say that it’s a kind of animism in which the technology of computers, software, and robotics is collectively the locus of the sacred. So, in pure terms, the technological singularity is atheistic.”

  “How, then, is that a religion?”

  John spread his hands. “What is atheism but a denial of theism? To most people, atheism is the denial of the Abrahamic God. Again I point to Taoists, Buddhists, the worshippers of Baal, and countless others as religions in which the Judeo-Christian version of God is either not worshipped or simply not a factor. And let’s not forget atheists when we count the number of devoted adherents to religion. In my experience, there are few evangelists more dedicated to proselytizing than an atheist who wants to prove that his cosmological view is correct.” He laughed. “How many of them pretend to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster as part of their denial of religion, when in fact they’re practicing a religion regardless.”

  “How does that relate to computers? Technology isn’t a god.”

  “Is it any less of a legitimate god than Thor or the Navajo Hero Twins, or Hotei the Japanese god of abundance, or the deity du jour of any given culture? People worshipped those gods with their whole hearts, and you cannot tell me that their faith was false simply because that religion became extinct.”

  The professor shook his head. “That’s not what I’m saying. Those cultures worshipped a spiritual concept. Technology isn’t spirit.”

  “Is it not? Prove that robots have no spirits, no souls.”

  “They are machines.”

  “Humans are organic machines. If you want to have the debate as to whether any of our thoughts, emotions, or beliefs are real or the product of brain chemistry, environmental survival instincts, and evolution, by all means. We can go deeper and discuss whether the universe was created by a freak accident of physics or shaped by intelligent design. Do you want to have that discussion?”

  “No,” said the professor, though he looked uncomfortable.

  “No, of course not, because there is no beginning or end to it,” said John. “There is no way to resolve the argument, because infinity isn’t quantifiable and therefore we cannot know what actually created everything. We don’t know the limits of eternity. We don’t know the limits of subatomica any more than we know how many dimensions exist or what constitutes reality. We don’t know any of that. So how can you, a learned scientist and teacher, tell me that a machine has no soul just because its component parts were assembled by humans, or by other machines designed by humans? If we humans have souls, then you cannot, with absolute certainty or veracity, say with perfect knowledge that no trace of our souls has been shared with machines. You’d like to say it, but you can’t.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said the professor, and that made John smile more broadly.

  “So it’s a matter of belief?”

  The professor sighed. There were some snickers from the audience, possibly from his students.

  John said, “Just because singularitarians don’t believe in God, or even a god, does not mean that they are not part of a religious movement. A case can be made that singularitarianism is not substantially different in structure and approach from, say, Neoplatonism. The way in which the potential and emerging realities of AI are viewed is not substantially different from Neoplatonic views of the Plotinian Nous. Couple that with aspects of Western animism that are reflected, in one way or another, in writings about AI and the singularity. Even the unenlightened general public reacts to AI and some aspects of robotics in the same way they react to human minds and animals. I joke about the Terminator movies and how Skynet became self-aware, yet this is a valid concern of those who are aware of the potential for AI but misunderstand its true nature. They see computers as minds that are waking up and that, once awakened, possess humanlike emotions, goals, and desires.”

  “That’s a distortion by people who don’t understand the nature of computer intelligence,” countered the professor.

  “And now you’re skating on very thin ice, my friend,” said John. “Of course it’s a belief, and belief is the core element of any religion. People believe in the singularity, in computer intelligence, in the potential—good or bad—of intelligent computers. Some fear it and some love it, even though virtually no one completely understands it, and how is that different from the emotions felt by the worshippers of any church anywhere in the world, anytime in the history of humankind.”

  The professor continued to argue, but John continued to shoot him down. Gently, but with the kind of authority that began edging the majority of the audience toward accepting the validity of what he was saying.

  John said, “The singularity is a challenging belief when misunderstood. It does not posit the physical appearance of a god. No bushes will ignite, no angels will blast trumpets. The focus of the belief is not in any kind of humanoid deity. There will be no towering figure with a white beard. The god of the technological singularity is an AI superintelligence that is both human in origin and divine in potential. It will lift up those who worship it in the way that it needs to be worshipped, meaning those who embrace the benefits of evolving technology, and it will damn those who resist it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  INLET CRAB HOUSE

  3572 HIGHWAY 17

  MURRELLS INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA

  SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 9:21 PM EST

  Top and Bunny stood there, covered in blood, hands red to the wrist, chests heaving, minds burning like cinders. All around them were bodies. The living and the dead. Tracy Cole stood with her back to the wall, brown face gone dead pale, her gun hanging from a slack ha
nd, feet braced as if the floor was going to tilt under her and send her sliding into the pit.

  Bunny reached a trembling hand to his ear and tapped his earbud, tapped again, and then realized that he wasn’t wearing it. His mouth opened and closed like a fish as he began slapping his pockets until he found his cell phone, dug it out, punched the speed dial for Captain Ledger. A voice-mail message told him that Ledger would not be reachable until …

  Bunny hung up and cut a look at Top. His friend looked sick. Physically sick. They had been forced to resort to savagery and brutality to stop the people in the restaurant from killing one another. Doing harm to stop harm. There was a joke in there somewhere, but Bunny couldn’t find it. He punched in a different code. The call was answered on the second ring.

  “Systems,” said a voice.

  “Pier One,” said Bunny, fumbling the right code words out of the debris in his mind. “Green Giant to command. I have a biohazard situation. Type unknown. Human vector probable. Multiple casualties. I need a brushfire response team, and I need command to intercept first responders.”

  Church came on the line. “Green Giant,” he said, using Bunny’s combat call sign. “A full biohazard team is inbound. Local law is being told to set up and maintain a perimeter but to abide by it. Give me a sitrep.”

  “It’s bad,” said Bunny. “I think we have eight or ten dead. Twenty injured. Lots of bites. It’s not Seif al Din.” He told Church how the incident had played out.

  “Is either of you injured?” asked Church.

  “No, sir. Cuts and scrapes.”

  “Is either of you bitten?”

  Bunny looked at Top, met his eye, then nodded down to the torn trouser leg. Bunny gave an uptick of the chin, and Top pulled the pant leg up. The skin below was badly bruised, but there was no blood, no torn flesh.

  “No, sir,” said Bunny into the phone. “We, um, might have some contamination in superficial wounds. Foreign blood in cuts. Our shots are current.”

  All DMS field agents received regular vaccinations for the most common biological threats. None of those shots would stop a newly designed bioweapon, but often the weapons used by terrorist groups were common viruses and bacteria, ranging from anthrax to tuberculosis. Bunny doubted that they had been inoculated against whatever the hell had happened here.