I wheeled on the men and snarled at them. “The fuck was that?”
“She was infected,” said the point man.
“She was sick,” I said, getting up in his face. “She was a civilian, and now she’s fucking dead.” Ghost sidled up beside me, growling at the man, but I huffed out a breath then ordered him back. I turned to look at all of them. “You’re scared, I get that, but this is not Seif al Din and it’s not Lucifer 113. This is rabies. The rules of engagement are simple. Return fire if fired upon. Protect yourselves. That does not mean hosing everyone who twitches. Our Hammer Suits will protect you. Your training will protect you. Keep your shit wired tight, and, unless you have no choice, put a round in someone’s leg and not in their goddamn head. Are we clear?”
“Sir,” they said in unison, the word crisp and clear, sharp as a slap. None of us knew how this was going to be handled later on. All of them knew that I could have them stripped of rank and arrested. Maybe I would. Depends on how the day went. The fact that the receptionist was already doomed complicated the math for all of us.
And a moment later the math was screwed all to hell as the sound of automatic gunfire and screams filled the air. Coming from the rear of the building. Coming from the stairwell. C and B squads.
The day was falling apart and, like madmen, we rushed toward the grinding sounds of pain and death.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
1800 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD
MONTGOMERY PARK OFFICE BUILDING
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2:08 PM
The closest fight was in the stairwell, and I kicked open the fire door to see Duffy and his team firing at what could only be called a horde. Nothing else describes it. Forty or fifty people, all of them covered in blood, all of them streaming red from savage wounds caused by teeth and who knows what else, cramming their way down the stairs. I recognized some of the faces as people from Vee’s office. But there were others, too. People from other firms based in that building. Maybe visitors or customers. Ordinary people who had been transformed into a pack of mindless killers.
Duffy and one other man had Snellig guns and were firing without aiming, because there was no need to aim. But the other two agents in his squad were shooting to kill.
Order and discipline was cracking apart.
This was what the DMS had come to. After the Seven Kings, after Kill Switch, this is what we were. Not the élite anymore. Not the best of the best. But fractured and fragile human beings who had to wrestle with PTSD and our certain knowledge that the world is not secure on its hinges, that all of its supports are cracking and fracturing, that we are probably no longer enough to do what Church and Aunt Sallie had hired us to do.
This was how it was when I first joined the DMS. I had been part of a recruitment program to replace soldiers who—just like these men and women—were beyond their ability to deal, to cope, to properly react. We weren’t supposed to be average. We were supposed to be cooler, calmer, less affected, less influenced by the seemingly impossible demands of our very specialized job.
Kill Switch had changed that. It had planted seeds of doubt in our hearts and minds that grew wild in the dark of our insecurities. The betrayal of trusted people like Hugo Vox and Artemisia Bliss had poisoned us with self-doubt. The loss of so many of our top agents had made us take a closer look at our very human frailties and vulnerabilities.
That’s sad. It’s scary. And it’s deadly.
Inside my head the Killer in me, one of the three aspects of my fractured mind who are always warring for control, roared out. He wanted to join this fight, to bathe in blood even if it was rife with infection. The Modern Man part of me wanted to retreat, to hide from the truth of this.
But, for once, it was the Cop part of me that won out. Maybe because I was back home in Baltimore, or maybe because this wasn’t a time for either blind retreat or blind attack.
“Out!” I yelled. “Everyone out. Fall back and seal the fire-tower door. Do it now!”
There is panic and then there is the habituated response to training. I yelled at them with the voice of absolute command, of authority. Of power. There was no fear in my voice, even though it was blazing in my heart.
“Sergeant Duffy,” I roared, “fall back. A squad, give cover. Everyone out.”
Duffy was the first one to snap out of it. He fired four quick shots at the closest of the attackers, so that they collapsed in front of the horde and momentarily blocked the stampede. It’s what he should have been doing all along. Then he backpedaled, spun, and began shoving his people out of the fire tower. I stepped into his spot and emptied the rest of my magazine of darts. Twelve shots, twelve of them falling, choking the rush. No more of the gunshots rang out as the squads backed out. There were two exits to the tower, one that went outside and one that emptied into the lobby. I pushed two of my guys toward the exterior door with orders to seal it shut from outside and then stand guard until relieved. They hit the crash bar and went out into the sunshine. A split second later, I heard the chunk as one of them kicked a doorstop under the metal. We all carry tools for breaching and blocking.
The infected began crawling over the unconscious bodies, sometimes pausing to punch or bite them for no reason. Rage was rage, and this was it in its purest and ugliest form. I swapped out my magazines and fired six more shots.
Then I paused as I saw the blood-streaked face of Vee Rejenko. His nose was broken, and he was missing two teeth on the left side of his face. There were long scratch marks across his face, and he was totally naked.
I raised my gun and shot him in the chest.
He fell, and then I backed out of the fire tower.
The door opened inward and I pulled it shut. “Web-wire it,” I ordered. “Now!”
Once the agents had something to do and a commanding voice to give them orders, they moved well. Four of them pulled web-wire kits out of their packs and began slapping the anchors to the metal doorframe. These kits are something new, and I’d only used them twice before. The anchors have a chemical gel pack inside bulkier sacks made of metal. Once in place, it takes a single blow with the side of the fist to smash a pair of plastic vials inside the gel packs, which releases chemicals that mix and cause a very hot but very brief heat flash, effectively melting the metal packet to the steel doorframe. The anchors are attached to spools of line that are an incredibly tough combination of Kevlar, steel, and spider silk. With the anchors in place, the lines are pulled across the doorway and attached to packs on the other side. It takes five seconds for the anchors to flash-weld to the frame and about ten seconds for a trained soldier to crisscross a doorway with the strands. During those fifteen seconds, we trained a lot of guns on the door. If it opened too soon, then a bad day was going to get worse.
The horde slammed against the door and began beating on it with fists and feet and maybe heads.
Not one of them turned the doorknob. Not one of them opened the door.
Not for at least two full minutes.
When it finally jerked open, the crowd surged against a mesh of unbreakable material. We knew, though, that the web-wire was only as strong as the doorframe.
Hands gripped the wires and tried to tear them loose. Some of the people actually twisted their heads and tried to bite the lines, and I saw the tough wires tear their lips and gums and cheeks. I stepped as close as I dared to the hands that reached through the mesh. Broken fingernails clawed at the air in front of my face.
“Gas,” I said.
Duffy took a gas grenade from his belt. It’s what he should have used before. It’s what I should have thought of while we were still in the fire tower. The Hammer Suits have air filters and goggles. We were all off our game. Every single one of us.
“Do it,” I said, and Duffy reached high and pushed the grenade through the mesh while others pushed away the reaching hands. The grenade hissed out a cloud of gray smoke. The gas in itself was harmless; it was a delivery system for an aerosol version of
horsey.
We stood in awful silence as, one by one, the bleeding, broken, battered infected sagged to their knees, coughing, snarling, weeping, and finally sprawling atop one another in a ghastly silence.
Not sure how long it was before someone spoke. I think it was Duffy. Might have been me. A single word.
“God…”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
SNYDER HOUSING PROJECTS
BUILDING THREE
1900 SOUTH MUSKEGO AVENUE
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2:11 PM
“Mama.… I’m sorry…”
Carla Lopez looked up from the glossy pages from which she was clipping coupons. Dozens of them were arranged around her in stacks. Diapers for the baby, formula, vegetables, meats, cereal, paper products. Every penny counted, and the checks she received didn’t stretch as far as her need.
Her daughter, the elder of her two kids, stood in the shadows of the hallway, wearing a pink T-shirt and nothing else. Mariposa was four, and Jorge, who slept in a nest of blankets on the couch, was five months old. Their father, Alejandro, had been deported to Mexico before the baby was born. Moving to Wisconsin hadn’t been enough to keep the immigration people from taking him. The fact that both children were born here, and the intervention of a pro-bono civil-liberties lawyer had so far managed to allow Carla and the kids to stay. But their home was a tiny room in a dirty building in a dangerous low-income housing project. There were roaches everywhere. Rats, too. And Carla always carried a kitchen knife when she went to the store or out to a job interview or to one of the endless interviews at the government buildings.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
The little girl stood just inside the line of shadows, but Carla could see that her eyes were wide.
“I messed the bed,” said Mariposa, then she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Mama!”
Carla laid down the scissors and the advertising pages. “Oh, baby girl,” she said as she got to her feet. “It’s okay.”
She hurried over to her daughter, but she didn’t turn the hall light on. Electricity was expensive. She could see that her daughter’s T-shirt was dark with wetness.
“Come on, Mariposita. Let Mama see.”
She took her daughter’s hand and they walked the few short steps to the bedroom. Carla began sniffing as she entered, hoping it was pee and not poop. Pee stains could be washed out in the sink.
She smelled neither. Instead, there was a different odor in the air of the darkened bedroom. It smelled like hot copper wires and sulfur matches. Panic flared in Carla as she worried that a wire had shorted. Rats had chewed through wires at the Delgado place in Building C and the whole place nearly went up in flames. But the smell wasn’t coming from the baseboards. The bed was a black nothing in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry,” said Mariposa, still sniffling. “I didn’t mean to…”
Carla reached for the chain pull on the small bedside lamp. The bulb was only 40 watts and it cast a weak yellow glow across the few sticks of furniture—the white plastic mail tubs used as a bureau, the chair with the duct-taped backrest, and the bed. It touched Carla’s heart that little Mariposa—her sweet butterfly—had been so embarrassed by wetting the bed that she’d pulled the blanket up to hide the evidence. To hide the proof that she wasn’t the big girl she kept telling everyone she now was.
Something moved over by the wall, and Carla flinched as she saw a scuttling form race from the pool of light toward the shadows beneath the bed.
“Cucaracha,” she murmured, wrinkling her nose in distaste, but a moment later she frowned at the memory of it. There was something strange about the insect, even though she’d seen it for a split part of a second. It wasn’t the usual glistening black cockroach or even the red-brown wood roach. This was green. A bright, artificial green. Like a Lego. It was so odd that Carla nearly bent to look beneath the bed, but her daughter spoke again.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Mariposa.
Carla shushed her gently and reached for the corner of the blanket. She lifted it and looked to see how bad it was.
And then she froze, because the smell was much stronger beneath the cover. It was not an earthy feces smell, nor was it the sharper ammonia stink of urine.
And there was a stain.
Oh, God … the stain …
She looked down at it, at the color, and then turned toward her daughter, seeing Mariposa in the weak yellow light. Seeing the color there, too. Not the wetness of accidental pee. Not that. A much darker color. A wrong color.
A red color.
On the bed, and on her daughter. On Mariposa’s shirt and on her thighs and running in crimson lines to the floor.
Red.
So red.
Beneath the bed, Carla could hear the scuttle of tiny feet.
“I’m sorry,” said the little girl once more.
But the voice was wrong, and Carla turned sharply to see her daughter’s face change. One moment it was the sad, sleepy, frightened face of her daughter, and then there was a flicker of confusion on Mariposa’s features, and then they changed again.
Changed so quickly. Changed into something else.
The little girl’s lips curled back from her tiny teeth, her nose wrinkled like an animal’s, like a dog’s, and her eyes … they went blank for a split second and then filled with sudden, intense, unbearable hatred.
And rage.
Mariposa howled. Actually howled. Like a dog. Like a wolf.
Like a thing.
Carla whispered her daughter’s name. “Mariposa…?”
Then the howling, snarling, biting thing that had been her daughter leaped at her. The screams that filled the night were dreadful. Buried beneath those screams was a foul, wet, tearing sound.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
THE WAREHOUSE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2:23 PM
Ghost and I got back to the Warehouse and immediately went in for another round of decontamination. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate that shit? Maybe getting a Lysol enema would be a worse thing than the decontaminant gunk we use, but I’m willing to try it in order to find out. The stuff gets everywhere. I mean that. Everywhere. Let your mind paint a picture.
Ghost came out of his shower smelling like wet dog, which is bad enough, but a wet dog perfumed by what smelled like toxic waste. Fun. He gave me a long-suffering look, his ears and tail drooping.
“Tell me about it,” I said, and he licked my hand. That was okay. His way of acknowledging that we were in this together.
Sean was in the mess hall watching the news coverage of what was being described as an industrial accident that had resulted in the release of dangerous chemicals. Pure bullshit. I went and stood by his table but didn’t sit.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.
I thought about it, then decided what the hell. He was in this as deep as I was. So I told my brother and watched his face turn gray with shock.
“God … what if this gets out?” he said in a choked whisper.
I looked at him. “Out? It’s already out.”
“But … what the hell is this?”
“This is what I do,” I said, and left him there.
Sam was in his office with Rudy Sanchez, who looked old and pale and scared. Rudy hurried over and hugged me, then bent and kissed Ghost on the head.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Not in any way that matters,” I told him.
“Joe,” said Sam, waving me to a chair. “We located the second SUV that was tailing you. When our agents approached the vehicle, the two men inside attacked them. Same as with all the others. Both of Vee’s men were KIA at the scene.”
“Our guys okay?”
“Yes, and no witnesses,” said Sam, “so thanks for small mercies. As far as we can tell, that makes a clean sweep of Vee Rejenko’s entire operation. There is not one person unaccounted for who is not dead or under restraint.
There isn’t anyone we can interview, and since this is rabies there’s not much hope of any of the infected from this afternoon giving us anything.”
“Ay Dios mio,” said Rudy quietly.
“Shit!” I said.
Sam opened a closet and removed three glasses and took a very expensive bottle of Ginjo sake from the fridge. Cheap sake is served hot; the good stuff is slightly chilled. He poured cups and we drank without toasting. He refilled the cups and we sipped as we dissected what was happening. We had so much information, and it all amounted to a big fat question mark.
And then I got another goddamn text message. Sam and Rudy crowded around to look at the screen, and I was comforted to see that the light on the MindReader uplink was still flashing. Sam got on the phone with Yoda, who said he saw it but still couldn’t trace it. The message read:
She won’t stop until they’re all dead.
Just that. No follow-up and no reply to the response text I sent.
“She?” mused Rudy. “Who is ‘she’?”
“I don’t freaking know,” I snarled, barely resisting the urge to throw my cell phone against the wall as hard as I could. Sam put Yoda on speaker.
“I’m, mmmmm, sorry,” he said. “This isn’t, mmmm, making any sense.”
“Don’t want to hear that,” I told him, and hung up.
I slumped into my chair and we had more sake. I know you’re not supposed to hammer back shots of the good stuff, but what can I say? Sam gave a philosophical sigh and refilled my glass.
Rudy nodded toward the phone that now lay in the center of Sam’s desk blotter. “Excuse me if this is a poor question, but are we sure that’s connected to this matter?”
“Yes,” I said, and Sam nodded.
“Why?” asked Rudy.
“What the hell else would it be?” I snapped, but Rudy held up a professorial hand.
“No. Don’t yell. Explain it to me. We all believe it’s connected, but why do we think that? What is it about those texts that validates our assumptions?”
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