“What brink are you talking about?” asked Zephyr, who was curious but felt that this was moving far afield of the events of the day. “Are you talking about some kind of Armageddon?”
“Not in a conventional sense, but, yes, there is a great change coming.”
“What kind of change?”
Despite the fire glow that made him look like a man composed of shadows, she could see the bright whiteness of his smile.
“Well,” he said, “that depends on what kind of apocalypse we want to create.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
SNYDER HOUSING PROJECTS
BUILDING THREE
1900 SOUTH MUSKEGO AVENUE
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 6:18 PM
Dr. Kiki Desmond stripped off her polyethylene gloves and dropped them into a hazardous-materials box one of the techs had placed inside the door. It was almost filled already with gloves, shoe covers, masks, and hairnets. A bigger barrel was crammed with disposable hazmat suits. Every time an item was dropped into the container, a sensor triggered six equidistant ports to spray a very powerful disinfectant. Once the container was full the liner would be sealed, removed, and transported to a facility for proper incineration, with the ash and gases being filtered and further purified. This was the protocol for anyone working the fringes of the scene. Doctors and staff who went into the apartments where active infections had been detected wore a heavier grade of hazmat suit. So far, Kiki had been relegated to the lower floors. It annoyed her. She hadn’t joined the CDC to keep an evidence log. She wanted to be part of the actual investigation.
But she was also low man—or low woman—on the totem pole, and this case was likely to break big. That meant the superstar doctors would be the ones who wanted center stage.
She stood in the doorway, her back to the filthy hallway, and looked out at the day. The first responders had set up crime-scene tape and police plastic sawhorse barriers around the cluster of vehicles in which her team, the police, and the paramedics had arrived. Cops worked the perimeter, and there were many more patrol cars, ambulances, and even two big fire trucks out there, visible through the sea of people. She counted nine news vans, though she couldn’t see which networks they represented and couldn’t for the life of her work out who some of them were. There just weren’t that many news stations in Milwaukee. Maybe they were cable news. All of them had big transmitter towers rising up to create a surreal forest above the heads of the six or seven hundred people who had—against all common sense—come to the scene of a bacterial outbreak.
People, Kiki new, were nuts.
The cop at the door saw Kiki and half turned, half nodded, half said something to her. She grunted back. It wasn’t a chatty moment, even though he was a big, good-looking, broad-shouldered slice of white boy. Kiki had never dated a white guy, and this one was kind of cute. She tried to catch the name on his tag, but he turned back to face the crowd. Hanrahan, she thought. Was that Irish? She thought so. There was a grad student in college who was Jamaican and Irish, and Kiki had gone out with him a few times. She wondered if Officer Hanrahan was single.
She wondered how on earth she’d ever find out.
“What the hell…?” yelped the cop suddenly, and Kiki looked up as the officer actually jumped sideways and did a little midair kick to shake something off his shoe. Kiki saw something whip across the entrance foyer, hit the wall, drop, and then scuttle off. The cop stamped at it but missed.
“It’s just a roach,” said Kiki, though she frowned, because she thought she saw the thing spit at her. Or spray. Or something. The discharge dissipated too fast for her to see what it was, or even if she’d actually seen it. It was there and gone, fading into the ambient air. She backed away, though, not wanting to inhale anything.
Did roaches spit? Could they? She knew that the Madagascar roach hissed, but she was sure it didn’t actually spray. What insects did? She racked her brain for memories from the forensic entomology courses she took. There was the devil-rider stick insect, some termite species, and a few beetles. But roaches?
“Fucking things are everywhere,” said the cop, interrupting her thoughts. “This place is infested. All these buildings are.”
Kiki didn’t like the whiney quality of his voice; it was at odds with his hunky good looks. She also didn’t like the look of the roach and whatever it had spewed, and she stepped to the door to try to see where it went. The cop shifted aside.
“Almost got it,” he said, as if that should impress her. Cockroaches weighed about a gram and a half, give or take. Less than a penny. And Hanrahan was an easy one-eighty-five. Plus he was wearing shoes with protective covers.
Why are there so many wimps out there? she wondered.
The cop, not picking up on her reaction, leaned out past her to see if the insect was still within stomping range. It wasn’t. Kiki wanted to see it, too, but not for the same reason. If the thing that had scuttled out of the house was a roach, why was it bright green with candy-red legs? She’d taken enough courses on entomology during her studies in parasites to know that roaches didn’t come in those colors. And yet it had otherwise looked exactly like a cockroach. It was the same shape and size, and moved with the same speed and economy of motion as Periplaneta americana, the good old American cockroach. So why was it bright colored?
If it was something else, some new and possibly invasive species, then could it somehow be connected with the bacteriological outbreak here?
“Where’d it go?” she asked.
“Went down between the cracks in the pavement,” said Hanrahan. “Little bastard.”
Kiki exhaled through her nostrils and turned back to the vestibule, looking along the floor and up on the walls to see if there were more of the strange insects. Then her walkie-talkie suddenly squawked at her, and she pulled it off her belt. It was wrapped in plastic, but the wrapping was loose enough to let her work the controls.
“Desmond,” she said.
There was a rattle of speech from the other end, but it was garbled and Kiki couldn’t understand a single word. It sounded like Dr. Olsen, her boss.
“You’re breaking up,” she said. “Please repeat.”
Another burst of noise wreathed in distortion. Kiki asked again for a repeat.
“Adjust the squelch,” said a voice, and she turned to see Hanrahan standing right there.
She didn’t know how to do that. This was only her second time in the field, and the other case was one that allowed her to use a cell phone. Walkie-talkies looked easy but weren’t.
“Where’s the—?” she began, and then the voice on the other end—Dr. Olsen’s, for sure—came through loud and clear. Not an incoherent babble. This time it was a short, three-word sentence. A statement. A denial. A plea. Three terrible words. Screamed so loudly that she heard it through the walkie-talkie’s speakers and she heard it come punching its way down the stairs.
“He … bit … her!”
“Dr. Olsen,” yelled Kiki, starting for the stairs. She turned to see if Hanrahan was following. He wasn’t. He was backing away, one hand over his mouth, the other on the butt of his holstered pistol. He wasn’t backing away from the stairs. He was backing away from her.
She said, “What—?”
But that isn’t what she said. No words came out of her mouth. Instead, a big, hot ball of red wetness burst from her mouth and sprayed the vestibule. The walls, the floor, the line of mailboxes. And some of it spattered the face and chest of Officer Hanrahan.
He recoiled in instant disgust and horror. “Jeeee-zus!” he cried.
Kiki tried to tell him that it was okay and that she was sorry and ten other things all at once. But her words came out all wrong. Not words at all. More like a …
Like a …
She heard herself roar.
She heard it in the last instant before a red veil dropped in front of her eyes and her head filled with a frantic buzzing sound and everything that was Kiki Desmond went away.
>
What was left still roared. What was left still spat blood.
What was left of her rushed at the cop—he was nameless now. A thing. A shape. Something to grab. To bite.
To kill.
The buzzing in her head was a scream that drowned out everything else. Even her roar. Even the cop’s shrieks of pain. Even the hollow bang of the bullet that killed her.
INTERLUDE FOURTEEN
THE BAIN ESTATE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN ZEPHYR WAS NINETEEN
“The kind of apocalypse we create? I don’t know what that means,” said Zephyr. She finished her wine, and he walked over, took the bottle from a side table, and poured the last of it into her glass. Zephyr was three glasses in and already feeling the edges of the room grow soft and fuzzy.
“At the rate things are going,” said John, “we’ll hit a climate tipping point at around the same time we reach a maximum tolerable population number. We’re long past the point where this many people can be fed, housed, clothed, and provided for in any substantial way. Their very presence forces the élite—the true élite, my dear, like you—to be perceived as cruel because you do not share your wealth with them. Nor, by the way, should you. If you emptied every penny from your family’s bank accounts, you could not ameliorate the suffering of the unwashed masses. All you would accomplish is personal ruination. Gasoline on a fire.”
As if in counterpoint to his words, the logs shifted and flames shot up.
“What’s the alternative, then?” she asked. “Dropping nukes on the Third World to put them out of their misery?”
“Nukes?” He laughed. “No, of course not. That would be stupid.”
“I didn’t really—”
“The radiation and the fallout would complete the damage to the biosphere and accelerate climate change to the point where it endangers the élite.”
Zephyr said nothing. She had been making a joke, but it was clear that John wasn’t participating in an exchange of gallows humor.
“And yet action needs to be taken,” he continued. “Natural selection is too slow a process, and, sadly, the fact of everything from lobbyists to bleeding-heart welfare groups to the opposable thumbs on the unwashed make it certain that they will persist as a cancer on the flesh of the world.” He took a bottle from the wine rack and opened it as he spoke. “No, the thing that will save the world, my girl, is a curated apocalypse.”
“‘Curated’? Is that even possible?”
“With bombs? No. With other tools?” He looked up from the bottle he held and his eyes were filled with reflected fire. “Oh, yes.”
She swallowed the last of her wine and held out her glass. “Tell me,” she said.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
THE WAREHOUSE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
MONDAY, MAY 1, 3:22 PM
We’d slept badly at the Warehouse and burned off a lot of the next day handling the paperwork and interagency reports that threatened to bury us. Rudy booked us on a flight to Seattle, because, like me, he wanted to ask Acharya and the other nanotech experts a couple of million questions and no one was letting us make a call to the DARPA camp. Sean offered to drive us to the airport.
“So we’re pretty much nowhere?” asked Sean as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. Our cell phones were in our luggage. Sean’s was in the glove compartment.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“But you don’t know who Vee was working for?”
“No.”
“Or who killed him?”
“No.”
“Or why?”
I sighed. “No.”
“Or pretty much anything?”
“It’s not as simple as that, Sean,” I said. “And, for your information, this is how it usually works. Look, this isn’t like the comics. Villains don’t announce their evil master plans. They don’t make grandiose challenges, nor do they typically engage in a catch-me-if-you-can game where they leave clues. We have to wait until what they do makes a mark on the world, then we investigate, collate, build a hypothesis, run it down, and hope that we make sense of it all before the timer ticks down to zero. It’s not the same as police work, where the crime is usually already done and it’s a matter of building a case and finding the perp. It’s less like crime prevention and more like homicide investigation. This is counterterrorism and antiterrorism and it’s a different rulebook.”
“Shit,” he said, but I knew he understood. It was just that he didn’t like it. Can’t blame him. None of us in the DMS do this because we’re hooked on adrenaline. We do it because we like the quiet life and there are occasionally very noisy neighbors. He said, “So … you’re going to see some experts?”
“It’s our best next move.”
“Can I come?”
“Sorry,” I said, “but no.”
“I’m in this now,” he protested. “Doesn’t that mean I get to play it out?”
I shook my head. “It’s not as simple as that. The people we’re seeing are at a top-secret government testing facility on the other side of the country. It’s going to be tough enough to get Rudy and me in there. No way I could swing you a pass.”
“Shit!” said Sean under his breath. I exchanged a look with Rudy.
“Keep in touch with Sam,” Rudy suggested. “If we learn anything of use to your end of things, he’ll share it with you.”
“And if you don’t learn anything?”
“We will,” I said.
“Oh, really? And you can say that without hesitation? How?”
“Because,” said Rudy, “it’s what we do. And, yes, I know how that sounds. However, it is what we do. We have enormous resources to investigate this kind of thing. What we can’t guarantee, though, is the timetable. Some of our cases break open in a few days and others take months. What I can promise is that we will learn something as quickly as it is possible for us to do so.”
“That’s not all that comforting.”
Rudy spread his hands. “Would you prefer that I lie to you?”
“Christ, you’re getting as bad as Joe.”
“He is a notoriously bad influence on civilized behavior,” said Rudy, and that actually made Sean smile.
I heard my phone buzz in the back. Muffled, but definite. Sean and I exchanged looks.
“It might be your CI.”
I wasn’t at all sure the person texting me qualified as a confidential informant because he hadn’t actually informed me of much, but Sean had a point. I asked him to pull over, and I went and fetched the phone. There was indeed a new text message:
They’re coming for you.
I texted back:
I need more than that.
Help me
I didn’t expect an answer, but I got one anyway:
She is making me sin.
I’m not a sinner.
She is making me do bad things.
A chill ran up my spine, and when Sean and Rudy looked over my shoulder they tensed. I wrote back:
Who are you?
Nothing.
Nothing for almost one full excruciating minute. And then:
Just because we’re sisters doesn’t
mean we share the same sins.
I glanced at Rudy, who mouthed the word sisters. I texted:
I can help you.
No response.
I want to help you.
No response.
Tell me your name.
She responded with a burst of text, the most she had ever sent at once. And, again, I felt a dreadful chill inside my chest:
I was born to save the world from itself.
I was born to bring about the new world order.
I was born to end the tyranny of the destroyers,
the users, the takers, the polluters, the wasters.
I was born to cull the human herd of those
who take and cannot give, those who want and cannot provide, those who drain the system but cannot restore. The poor, t
he hungry, the destitute, the unwanted.
I was born to eliminate them as if cutting off a gangrenous limb or pulling a dead tooth.
I am the flood.
I am the cataclysm.
I am the sower in the field.
I am the angel of death.
After that, nothing.
“What the hell…?” murmured Sean.
INTERLUDE FIFTEEN
THE BAIN ESTATE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN ZEPHYR WAS TWENTY-ONE
They made a killing, and that was how they celebrated.
John and Zephyr were in the back of the stretch Lexus SUV, separated from Campion by soundproof glass. They split a bottle of Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino and used it to wash down a bag of doughnut holes from a drive-through place. Everything was funny to them today.
Her father’s estate, years in probate, had cleared eleven months ago, releasing the entirety of his accounts and holdings to her. The exact amount fluctuated with the vagaries of the market. There was the oldest part of the family business, Bain Industries, but that was more of an administrative umbrella these days. Under it’s cover were dozens of companies of various sizes, from BainBots, a boutique robot novelty manufacturer to Bain Logistics, a software giant that provided systems for all aspects of the military. Under the same umbrella was FarmBots, TeachBots, BookBots, and others, each focusing on a different aspect of the technologies market. The top earner was the military group, but HealthBots was close, and it provided everything from the latest generation of surgical robots to AI systems that integrated primary care, groups of specialists, and real-time personal medical-records systems. Her net income from that group of companies was sixteen billion per year.
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