Code Zero

Chapter Eighty-five

Colonel Samson Riggs leaned out the side door of the Black Hawk and studied the target. The building was modern but awkward, with wings of various sizes jammed in together, and with walkways and shrubbery covering the grounds. The streets were blocked off by police vehicles and everything was washed in overlapping red and blue lights. There were already crowds of pedestrians, including a fair number of kids from Emory, but the local law had set their barricades hundreds of yards back. The grounds immediately around the buildings were empty and dark. Inside the building a few night lights glowed.

Nothing moved.

Like the four remaining members of Shockwave Team, Riggs was dressed in an unmarked black battledress uniform. Unlike them, he wore no helmet. Instead, a Chicago Cubs cap was snugged down on his head. He tapped his earbud for a clear channel to the pilot. “Set us down here, Corkscrew.”

“Roger.”

The colonel felt tired. Usually a mission of this kind would have him jazzed and jumpy, ready to rock and roll as soon as boots were on the ground. But not today. His team was as somber as he was.

What was left of his team.

There had been no time for the shock and grief and wrongness of that to process through Riggs’s mind. The only thing that kept it firm was the thought that the people responsible for the deaths of his team and so many other deaths around the country might be taking a run at the CDC tonight. If so, then tired or not, he was going to do them ungodly harm.

Riggs was old for the field, pushing forty-five pretty hard, and he could feel every one of those years. He’d been a sailor, a SEAL, a CIA shooter, and for the last seven years he’d run the number-one team in the Department of Military Sciences. Only Captain Ledger’s Echo Team was racking up stats like Shockwave, but they were a newer team, assembled four years ago. By the time Echo had turned out for its first mission, Shockwave had already stormed the gates of hell more times than Riggs could count.

As the helo swung into position, Riggs watched his team get ready. Only his sniper, Rico, had been with him since the first mission. So many others had come and gone. It was the way of things when you worked for the Deacon.

The Black Hawk sank slowly toward the macadam.

His second in command, Carrie Marchman, hunkered down behind the minigun, the barrels pointed down at the building. The other members of the team finished their buddy checks of each others’ gear and clustered by the door.

“Okay, heroes, listen up. Latest intel says that the building’s security system is online, Aunt Sallie has been in direct voice contact with the senior security officer, Lieutenant Neale. He reports all clear. The building has a six-person security force, all armed, all former police officers. Neale will meet us at the rear loading door.”

“Neale’s a friendly?” asked Marchman.

“We treat him as such, but we are going to ask him to surrender his weapon and stand down while we search the building. No assumptions, feel me?”

“Hooah,” they all said.

“Combat call signs from here on,” said Riggs. “I want a clean dispersal.” He nodded to Rico. “Gangbanger, you take up a shooting position behind that trash can. See it? It offers the widest target range around the door. Hipster and Gomer watch side-to-side. Once we’re inside, we’ll split into two teams. Wicked Witch and Gomer with me going upstairs; Gangbanger and Hipster go downstairs.”

Hipster glanced at the building. “That’s a lot of real estate for five people to clear.”

“Well, life sucks just a little bit, don’t it?” said Gomer.

The wheels of the Black Hawk had barely touched the ground when Samson Riggs was first out, with Shockwave following.

As they approached the rear loading bay, a uniformed man stepped outside. He wore a billed cap, a holstered pistol, and a broad smile. He raised his hand in a friendly greeting as the group of killers converged on him.

Chapter Eighty-six

We landed on a private airfield thirty miles from the Locker. Bird Dog and his crew from the Warehouse in Baltimore met us with a pair of fully loaded Black Hawks. The helos dusted off as the last of us scrambled aboard.

Church called me with a quick update and I shared the intel with my guys.

“Aunt Sallie was able to contact Dr. Myles Van Sant, the director of the Locker,” I told them. “He had the day off and was on a fishing trip, camping in the nearby woods with a friend — Buddy Scarf, the local sheriff. Van Sant was ordered back to the Locker, but his radio and cell phone went dead shortly after entering the building. No way to know if he ran into hostiles or if there was a signal jammer. Bug’s working on determining that. There has been no further communication with anyone inside the Locker.”

“Dingo balls,” grumbled Ivan. He was one of those guys who was never quite happy about anything. Not a complainer in a way that would interfere with team efficiency, but not a cheerleader by any stretch.

“What about Van Sant’s fishing buddy?” asked Lydia. “We sending him to see what’s what?”

“No,” I said. “The sheriff’s department is too small to be anything but collateral damage. A Homeland SWAT team is on the ground, and they’ve secured a perimeter one mile out. Nothing gets in or out, and they’ve been ordered to stay well clear of the facility. They don’t have the same generation of protective gear as we do.”

“Wouldn’t a hazmat suit work?” asked Dunk.

“No,” I said. “There are at least three different bacterial agents stored at the Locker that are designed to specifically feed on the materials used in hazmat suit seals.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Dunk. “This shit is insane.”

Bunny popped his gum and grinned at him.

“The governor of Virginia is rolling out the National Guard,” I said, “but we’ll be on the ground before them. They’ll reinforce the perimeter.”

“Nice to know we’re not completely alone with our balls hanging out,” said Ivan.

“Okay,” I said to the group, “questions?”

“What do we know about Van Sant and Scarf?” asked Sam.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug—? Give us the lowdown on Dr. Van Sant.”

Immediately photos of two men appeared on screens of our forearm-mounted tactical computers. One man was dressed as a rural cop, the other in a lab coat. “Dr. Van Sant is clean as a whistle as far as MindReader can tell,” said Bug. “He’s a longtime friend of Mr. Church, and was a thesis advisor for Dr. Hu. His background check is squeaky clean. Couple speeding tickets because he bought a sports car when middle age set in, but otherwise nothing. We’re looking at him, but nobody expects him to be a bad guy here.”

“What was his relationship with Artemisia Bliss?” asked Montana.

“Van Sant testified against Bliss at her trial. I don’t think they’re down there doing the dirty boogie together.”

Noah nodded at the second picture. “What about Sheriff Scarf? What’s his story?”

“Bryan ‘Buddy’ Scarf did twelve years in the army,” said Bug, “the last six as an M.P. at the beginning of the Iraq war. Clean service record and honorable discharge nine years ago. He had people out in this part of Virginia, so he came here and ran unopposed for sheriff, got the job, and he’s been doing it as well as a place with less than three thousand people requires in an area where the closest thing they have to capital crime is growing an acre of pot.”

“How hard are we looking at him?”

I answered that. “Bug’s going deep on everyone at the Locker, and anyone even tangentially associated with it.”

“Wait,” asked Ivan. “If Van Sant was off the clock, who was running the place?”

Bug sent another picture to our screens. A bookish Indian woman with a rather severe ponytail and thick glasses. “The senior researcher on duty was Dr. Noor Jehan. She and Van Sant are the only ones who had the day code to access all of the secure areas. But Dr. Jehan hasn’t made any attempt to reach out, or at least no successful attempt.”

Lydia popped her chewing gum. “Y’know, Bug, no offense, but I’m finding it hard to believe that you can’t find a way into their computer systems.”

Bug cursed. A rarity for him, and it wasn’t aimed at Lydia. It was simply that he was deeply frustrated.

“I know,” said Bug sourly, “but it’s like trying to push your finger through a solid brick wall. No doors, no windows, no nothing. We’re completely shut out.”

“MindReader’s shut out,” said Lydia, not making a question of it. Putting it out there so we could all chew on it and everything it might mean. “You’re breaking my heart, Bicho.”

Bug sniffed. “We just found out that this was Artie Bliss. I’m shifting mental gears as fast as I can.” He paused and maybe there was some edge to his voice. “Don’t get me wrong, kids, I will beat this bruja.”

He used the Spanish word for “witch” for Lydia’s benefit.

“Bug,” I said, “give me the floor plan of the Locker.”

A 3D model of the place assembled itself on our screens.

Bug said, “The Locker is built into an old coal mine that played out in the seventies. Government bought it and Mr. Church acquired it when he founded the DMS. The top level has two parts, administration offices in the back and a tractor parts store up front. The store’s legit insofar as they actually sell tractor parts, but the staff’s ours, of course. Lots of buttons to push if anyone tries to rush the place.”

“Any of those buttons get pushed?” asked Ivan.

“Not a one.”

“Donkey balls,” he said.

Bug highlighted elements of the schematic as he continued. “Once you go past the store, there are a series of security doors. Outer level is keycard, but beyond that you hit doors with retina scans, geometry palm scanners, and variable-signal keycards. You go through those to get to the elevators, and there’s a drop of three quarters of a mile. Halfway down, on level two, are the crew quarters. The labs and containment facilities are all on levels three through seven, with the highest-security chambers at the bottom.”

“Didn’t I see this shit on Resident Evil?” complained Lydia. “I mean, this is the fucking Umbrella Corporation right here.”

“You aren’t joking,” Bug said. “You’d be surprised how many high-tech facilities show up in video games. The design team works them into popular games and then watches to see how long it takes the game geeks to think their way through. The results could make a security expert turn to heroin. Ultra-advanced no-fail designs are beaten by fourteen-year-old kids in a weekend.”

“You shitting me?” demanded Dunk.

“No. DARPA’s been doing it for a long time. Homeland uses game simulations to work up protocols for terrorist attacks. Everyone does it. And Artemisia Bliss created a killer of a game called VaultBreaker that was designed to test the security of every major facility and high-profile base in the country. It was great, too, because it led to over ninety significant security improvements.”

“Bliss did that?” said Montana dryly. “Anyone else getting chills?”

“We made a lot of changes after Artie was arrested,” said Bug. “But now that we know it’s Bliss and knowing that she might have a system like MindReader, then it’s possible she really did read the data on the VaultBreaker disk Reggie Boyd gave her. A system like that could fool the anti-intrusion programs written onto the disk.”

“Fuck me.” Montana shook her head. “So this Mother Night bitch could be in there waiting for us.”

Bug didn’t answer.

Lydia cut in. “Could VaultBreaker be used to crack the security at the Locker?”

When neither Bug nor I answered, Ivan said, “Well, kick me in the balls.”

Chapter Eighty-seven

Colonel Riggs placed the laser site of his pistol on the center of Lieutenant Neale’s chest.

“Stand right there, hands out to the side,” he warned.

Carrie Marchman — call sign Wicked Witch — angled in from the side and took the security chief’s weapon and gave him a fast pat-down. Hipster stood nearby providing cover.

“Everything’s fine here,” said Neale quickly. He was a nervous man with a sweaty face and bright eyes. Was it fear of what might be happening on his watch or the sudden excitement for a man whose usual day-to-day life was quiet to the point of tedium? In either case, he didn’t want the man walking around with a loaded gun. Bad aim and bad intel weren’t the only reasons for “friendly fire” deaths; bad nerves and bad aim accounted for a lot of it. “Really,” insisted Neale, “my team did two full sweeps since receiving your call.”

“This will make three, then,” said Riggs.

Neale looked up at Riggs. “Are you FBI or NSA? They didn’t say.”

Riggs ignored the question. “Where are your people?”

“Everyone’s inside. I was told to have them all meet you in the conference room.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

They entered the building. Rico — Gangbanger — moved in and cut left and stood at an angle that offered a clear view of the entire room. It was a large receiving and storage room. Towers of boxed supplies stood in neat rows under the downspill of fluorescent lights. The air was cool and very dry. Gomer raised his BAMS unit and turned in a slow circle.

“Green,” he said.

Riggs signaled for Hipster to walk ahead of the line with Neale while he faded back to call in. He tapped his earbud and spoke quietly. “Big Kahuna to TOC, copy?”

Aunt Sallie was managing the Tactical Operations Center with Yoda online for real-time field support. “Go for Auntie. What’s your status, Big Kahuna?”

“So far it’s all quiet. We’re going to interview the security staff. Where are we on thermals?”

“Satellite’s in position,” said Yoda. “Reading two clusters of signatures. Group of six in the loading bay—”

“That’s Shockwave plus one. How’s the signal strength?”

“Spotty. Lot of shielding in that structure. Some of your signals are weak.”

“What about the other cluster?”

“Reading seven — no, correct that, five — bodies in the first-level conference room. Wait, it’s seven again. No. Damn, the signal is really fruity.”

“Kick the damn thing,” said Riggs.

“It’s a satellite—”

“Find a way to give me clear intel. We’re expecting five friendlies. I need to know if there are two unknown signals or not.”

“The other signals are gone. Might have been ghosts created by interference.”

“Big Kahuna,” said Aunt Sallie, “proceed with caution. We’ll sort out the technical details a.s.a.p.”

“Kahuna out.”

He checked his BAMS unit and saw the comforting green light.

Neale produced a keycard and opened the door into the main facility, led them down a maze of empty corridors lit only by soft night lights, and finally to the door of a large conference room. The security lieutenant swiped his card and opened the door. Gangbanger and Hipster had their weapons up, covering the room as they entered. Five men stood inside, each wearing uniforms identical to Neale’s. They all looked nervous as Shockwave team poured into the room.

No, thought Riggs. They looked scared.

The conference room was dominated by a massive oak table and twenty chairs, the walls lined with sideboards and a coffee station. Two big black metal storage cabinets stood against the rear wall, looking incongruous, towering like obelisks.

Four things happened at exactly the same time.

Yoda was suddenly yelling in his ear. “Big Kahuna, confirmed seven signals. Repeat, confirmed there are seven signals in the conference room.”

The light on the BAMS unit flicked from neutral green to a bright and burning red.

Every guard in the room tore pistols from holsters and pointed their weapons at Shockwave.

And the doors of the metal cabinets flew open as two figures burst forth, shedding lead-shielded X-ray capes.

They were Berserkers.

Then two more things happened as the moment slid into hell.

Lieutenant Neale, still smiling his nervous smile, flung himself at Wicked Witch and buried his teeth in her cheek.

And the air was rent by the sounds of screams and gunfire.

Chapter Eighty-eight

“Let’s not dig graves yet,” said Top. He sat on an ammunition box, running his fingers through Ghost’s thick fur. “Even if Mother Night is inside the Locker, that doesn’t mean she’s strolling through there putting important shit into her purse. There’s a thirty-man security team, and none of them are pussies.” He touched various points on the floor plans. “And there are airlocks at multiple points. You can’t just punch in a code and waltz through. Takes some human interaction.”

“So what?” asked Dunk.

“So all of that’s going to take time,” he said.

“Can we predict how much time?” asked Montana. “I mean, where are the labs with the pathogens?”

Top nodded. “That’s my point. The Ark is all the way down at the bottom. On Level Fourteen. Something like eight airlocks between the front door and the prize.”

“What’s the Ark?” asked Noah.

I tapped some keys to bring up an image of a metal cylinder that looked like a portable decompression chamber. It was heavy, wrapped in bands of tempered steel and studded with massive bolts. The thing squatted on a wheeled cradle.

“The Ark,” I said, “is a special containment system in which samples of every bioweapon, pathogen, and genetically engineered disease in the world is stored. It is the single deadliest repository of biological agents anywhere on earth.”

Everyone looked as pale as ghosts.

Ivan said, “Dangling gorilla balls.”

I expanded the image again to show the airlock that provided access to the Ark. “That’s the only door that accesses Level Fourteen. It’s four feet thick and armed with thermite charges that can be remote-detonated by the duty officer, the security officer, or Mr. Church. There are similar charges inside the Ark. There are also fail-safes in the event of tampering. The idea was that even if somehow the Ark was ever stolen, those charges could be set off. The door charges would seal the vault where the Ark is stored, but if the thing is removed from the vault the charges inside would incinerate everything. Even the prions in the seif-al-din would be turned to carbon dust.”

“Shouldn’t we just send that signal now?” asked Dunk, then he corrected himself. “I suppose that command function was lost when the place was compromised?”

“Yup,” I said. “So we better all pray to God that Mother Night and her team has not breached Level Fourteen. Because believe me when I tell you that if there is a genuine entrance to hell, then that is it.”

There was a bing-bing and the pilot said, “We’re here.”

Chapter Eighty-nine

Samson Riggs heard much more than he could see in those first moments.

He heard Yoda shouting in his ear, warning him of the hidden thermal signatures. He heard Aunt Sallie demanding a sit-rep. He heard gunfire as everyone in the room — the security team, the Berserkers, and his own people — opened up and created a maelstrom of tumbling lead, wood splinters, shattered glass, torn flesh, and flying blood.

He heard Wicked Witch shriek as Lieutenant Neale — if it truly was Neale — tore at her face with his teeth.

He heard the roar of the Berserkers. Massive, ugly sounds that hurt the ears and threatened to crack the world.

And he heard his own voice.

Shouting.

Screaming.

Bullets punched him back against the edge of the door frame, but the Kevlar kept him alive. The impact was fierce, though, and black flowers bloomed all around him. Then something big and dark came at him from his left. A Berserker. Three hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and rage.

It was yesterday morning all over again. Blood and monsters. His people were dying. The world was trying to kill him.

The Berserker’s hands filled his vision as it leaped at him.

And that’s when Samson Riggs felt that burn, that high, that adrenaline rush. He heard his scream change into a roar, felt his mouth curl into a brutal smile.

At the edge of death he came alive.

He went in and down, twisting right as the Berserker lunged; Riggs chopped sideways with an elbow, knocking the monster’s mass over and past him. The creature hit the corner of the door frame, spun awkwardly, and fell outside in the hall. Riggs drew his pistol as he rose. He fired, fired, fired. A security guard with a bloody mouth staggered away from the bullets, his face disintegrating. Another clutched at his throat and vomited blood.

Gomer was beside Riggs, but the young man was not firing. His gun hung limply from one hooked finger as his body juddered and danced with convulsions as the infection from his bites did their terrible work. He gave Riggs one terrified, despairing look and the colonel shot him between the eyes.

He saw a third guard’s head snap back as Gangbanger punched a round through his eye socket. But then Gangbanger screamed as the second Berserker plowed into him and bowled him over behind the conference table. Blood splattered the walls.

Riggs fired at the Berserker, but then someone grabbed both of his ankles and yanked with such sudden ferocity that Riggs fell forward. Too hard, and too fast. He got one hand and both forearms out in time to try to break his fall but the force was too overwhelming.

His chin hit his right wrist and his gun went spinning across the floor.

Riggs twisted around as the Berserker from the hallway began climbing up his body. He saw a massive fist driving down toward his face.

And then the world became a fractured dreamscape of red and black and nothing.

Chapter Ninety

We came in low, making maximum use of cover from the forest and the mountain slopes, and we swung around so the sun was behind us. The road leading to the tractor store snaked along, looking like it came from nowhere and went nowhere. The store was a wide spot on it, high up on the mountainside. There were six vehicles in the parking lot. One late-model gray Lexus — Van Sant’s car — one SUV, and the rest were pickups. This was Ford country.

Well beyond the building, we could see the SWAT teams at the one-mile perimeter. Lots of guns, lots of backup if this got weird and spilled out into the open.

My earbud buzzed and Church was there. “Deacon to Cowboy.”

“Go for Cowboy.

“Be advised, Shockwave Team has encountered significant resistance at the second location.”

“What kind of—?”

“We have lost all contact with them,” said Church. “It is possible we have lost those assets.”

Lost those assets.

I sagged against the door frame as my heart turned to ice. How can three small, clinical words truly carry the weight of their meaning? The assets were people I knew and cared about, including my friend and role model, Samson Riggs.

Lost?

There was only one meaning for that word and it was so huge and ugly that I wanted to close it out on the other side of the door. To deny its reality. The Civilized Man inside my head felt close to tears. The Warrior wanted to taste blood.

Beside me Ghost whined softly.

Church gave me no time for grief, though. “Give me a sit-rep.”

In as human a voice as I could manage, I said, “We’re at the landing zone.”

“Cowboy,” said Church, “Shockwave walked into a trap. Expect the same and proceed accordingly.”

The words were as clinical as the others, but the meaning was very clear and filled with an anger Church would never allow himself to show. He was telling us that the rule book had just been run through a shredder. The Warrior grinned at that thought.

“We know we’re being played,” I growled. “Maybe her endgame is the Easter Egg.” That was the radio code name for the Ark. “And maybe not. Either way, she has to know we’re coming. If she expects to take possession of the package, then she has to clear the road. That means if she’s here, then she has to cancel us out. If she’s not here herself … then we need to determine where the handoff will be. It’s got to be a place she can control. Somewhere we can’t control.”

“Do you have anything in mind.”

“Yeah. Tell Bug that this is on him. Mother Night is his to find. He needs to crawl inside her head and figure out where she will be to take possession of the Easter Egg.”

“Yes,” said Church. “And Captain … good hunting.”

I looked at my team. We were all on the same channel, so they heard the news, too. There was hurt on their faces. And fear. And one hell of a lot of murderous rage.

“Listen to me,” I said, keeping my voice level. “I know that we all want a piece of Mother Night. We want to tear her world apart. But we can’t go in hot and stupid. That will get us killed and guarantee her a win. We keep our shit tight. We watch each other’s backs, we pick our targets, conserve our ammunition, and if we have to pull triggers then we kill the enemy. But we do it cold. You hear me?”

“Hooah,” they said. They all said it. That might have been the moment when Noah, Dunk, and Montana stopped being newbies and became Echo Team for real. I thought that’s what I saw in their eyes. I hoped that’s what I saw.

“Then lock and load,” I told them.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Birddog.”

“Go for Birddog,” he replied. He was the crew chief on the second bird.

“Status on the stinkbots?”

“They’re scratching at the door, boss.”

“Then let ’em out.”

The pilot of my chopper went high and wide, turning to give me a better view of the other helo. The side door on the second Black Hawk rolled back and I saw two figures crouching there, the folds of their hazmat suits whipping in the rotor wash. They each held a small machines that looked like a metal wasp. Elegant in an ugly way. Birddog — the biggest man on the tech team — leaned out and flung one of the drones into the wind. It swirled out of control for a moment, then as it reached the outer edge of the rotor wash its own engines stabilized it and it flew away smooth and straight. Another followed, and another.

The official designation for them was some gobbledy-gook like man-portable hand-launched self-propelled aerial bio-aerosol mass spectrometer. Flying BAMS units, for short. We called them stinkbots. Birddog gave them individual names. Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Understand, Echo Team had to go in there, we had to see what was happening in the Locker even if the sensors on the stinkbots lit up like Christmas trees. However, there was a splinter of comfort in know exactly how high and how smelly was the pile of shit we were about to step in.

When the last of the stinkbots was deployed, Birddog rolled the door shut and the helo lifted high into the air. Top and Bunny huddled with me over the screen display on the tactical computer strapped to my forearm. Three small windows opened up to display the data feeds from the drones. Each box included a sliding color scale, safe green on one side and alarming red on the other. We were all clustered together so tightly that I could feel the waves of tension rolling off of the others, and it was a match for my own.

“What happens if we get a hit now?” asked Dunk. “Outside the containment?”

“Then you’d better be right with Jesus, son,” muttered Top.

Dunk tried to laugh it off, tried to smile through it. No one else matched his grin, and it drained away pretty quickly.

I pointed at the ceiling of the Black Hawk. “Mr. Church is keyed in to the telemetry from the stinkbots. If the seif-al-din or any of the other class-A pathogens is out, then there’s only one fallback plan. Total sterilization of everything within six square miles. Somewhere up there are fighter bombers carrying fuel-air bombs. And if that doesn’t get the job done then to save the country they won’t hesitate to turn this part of Virginia into a big, glowing hole in the world.”

“That’s some total wrinkled yak balls,” observed Ivan.

Bunny gave them a frank stare. “If you were in the driver’s seat on this, how would you play it?”

Ivan shook his head. “I’m not saying I’d do it any other way, Hoss. What I’m saying is that this is some total wrinkled yak balls right here.”

Bunny considered. “Yeah. Can’t argue with that.”

Top snapped his fingers. “The stinkbots have processed the first air samples.”

We looked. The feed was coming in from Huey. We stared at the sliding arrow and willed it to stay in the green. Dewey and Louie sent their data. The arrows on all three ’bots trembled.

Trembled.

But they stayed green. For now.

“I don’t know whether to feel relieved,” said Lydia, “or not.”

“Not,” said Bunny. “’Cause it means we still have to go in there.”

“Yak balls,” Ivan said again.

We all nodded.

“Okay,” I told the pilot, “put us down.”

Chapter Ninety-one

Collins walked through the rooms of an empty house.

His wife was in Boston with the kids. It was a publicized event for her, a speech at a fund-raiser for one of her causes. Education or some such shit, he really didn’t know and didn’t care. All that mattered was that she was there and he was here. It was the forty-third day out of the last forty-nine that she’d been somewhere else. As he poured a scotch he had to admit to himself that she knew.

Somehow, despite all his precautions, she knew.

Not specifically about Bliss. Nor did she know, he was sure, about the two pages, the reporter from USA Today, or that French broad — what the fuck was her name? Amy Something? — from the European Trade Commission. There was no way for her to know specifics about any of them. No, it was simply that she knew. Knew he was screwing around. Knew their marriage was a joke, a thing that existed in name only. Knew that it was over for them. Just as he knew she would not officially leave him while there was even the slightest chance that he could become president. The power was too juicy. After all, Hillary didn’t leave Bill even though everyone in the world knew he was dicking around. No, she wouldn’t divorce him. She was married to the power.

But goddamn if the place didn’t seem empty without her and the kids.

The Secret Service thugs downstairs and outside didn’t qualify as company.

He went into his study, turned on the TV to watch the latest on the C-train thing, freshened his drink, and flung himself onto the couch. The press, in a remarkable and unprecedented show of solidarity, was frying the president for the slaughter. U.S. Special Forces in a mass execution of citizens. That was going to change the entire shape of the government.

His cell rang, and when he looked at the display it said MOM. He always appreciated that. If, for any reason, his phone records were subpoenaed they would show that the call did, in fact, originate from his mother; however, it was all part of the magic Bliss did with her little mutant computer

He debated whether to answer it or not. Every bit of contact with Bliss — or with Mother Night, as she insisted on being called — was a deadly risk.

“Fuck it,” he mumbled, and punched the button.

“Hello, sonny boy,” she said.

“Don’t call me that,” he growled. The voice simulation software she used as part of her scrambler technology did way too good a job of making her voice sound exactly like his mother’s. It was freaky and it made him feel like he wanted to go wash his hands with strong soap.

She said, “Are you keeping up with current events?”

“Funny. Remote tribes in the Amazon know what’s going on. You certainly went whole hog on this, honey. Talk about market saturation.”

“Power of social media,” she said. “They’ll probably impeach your running mate. I may have just made you president.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Why are you so sour?” she asked.

He sipped his scotch and crunched some ice. “Really loved the anthrax thing. That was a bit of a surprise. They said there was enough anthrax in there to kill half of Washington.”

“Not really. Maybe half of Congress, which wouldn’t be as tragic.”

“Tragic? Really? Do you even know what that concept is all about?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “I’m immoral, not amoral.”

“I wish you wouldn’t sound so happy about it.”

“Aren’t you? Not about the anthrax, I mean. About the whole thing?”

“Happy? Of course I’m not happy. Christ, don’t you know me yet?”

“Yeah, I know. You’ve given me the speech. It’s not about destroying America, it’s about rebuilding America. A patriot’s revisionist view. Necessary evils, like performing an emergency amputation to prevent gangrene from spreading. Yes, Bill, I know the story.”

“It’s not a ‘story,’ damn it,” he said, anger burning in his chest. “This is the only way to save—”

“—America from itself. Yes, I know,” she insisted. “I really do know. Calm down.”

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down, you crazy bitch. And don’t you dare trivialize this. We’re doing God’s work here.”

The silence on the other end of the line was profound and heavy, and it went on so long Collins thought she’d hung up.

“Are you there?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Then fucking say something.”

“What do you want me to say? We’ve always known that we come at this from two different places. What are you trying to do here? Try and convert me? It’s never been about politics for me, so let’s not pretend that I give a wet fart about it. Yours or anyone’s.”

“I can’t believe that,” he said with a gentleness that surprised even him. He lay back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. “No matter what else you are, Bliss, you’re an American. Maybe not by birth, but America gave you everything you have, everything you—”

“Don’t even try,” she interrupted. “You’re going to give me that same tired old speech about how someone of my intellect would never have been allowed to shine if I’d grown up in China. How, as a woman, I’d never be given rank or status. Well, here’s the newsflash, honey, I didn’t get a lot of that here, either. I worked my ass off for America. I helped save the country from one threat after another, and if it wasn’t for me, half of the DMS operations would have failed in whole or part. That means I saved millions of lives, Bill. Millions.”

“I know and—”

“Let me finish,” she snapped. “You always cut me off, you always think I’m just ranting. I let you go on and on about your New American Revolution, and you say I don’t understand you. Well, now it’s time for you to try to understand me. I put the best years of my life into the DMS. I even tried to work around their antiquated procedures in order to make them more efficient. And what did I get for it? I was never allowed to file patents and I was never allowed to publish. With my gifts I should have been world famous. I should have been on the cover of every magazine. When was the last time there was a superstar scientist of my caliber who wasn’t an old white guy? I’m young, I’m pretty, and I deserve more than I was given. For every life I saved, for keeping the world from going to hell, for keeping the world from fucking ending, I deserved so much more than a pat on the back and a paycheck that amounted to pocket change. And let’s not forget that I was fired and arrested because I was helping you. If you hadn’t insisted on trying to take down the DMS I would never have been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I literally gave my life for you. Artemisia Bliss died for you and your American dream. Mother Night won’t make that kind of mistake, Bill. Not for you and not for anyone. America has let me down too many times. Now it’s time for me to get what I deserve. And everything I deserve.”

It was such a surreal thing for Collins to hear this passionate rant spoken in his mother’s voice. He closed his eyes and rested the icy whiskey glass on his forehead.

Into the crushing silence, he said, “I hear you.”

“Do you?” she asked harshly.

“Yes,” he said, “I really do. And, no matter what else you think, please believe that I honestly want that for you. I want you to have all the things you deserve.”

His words seemed to throw her, because the next thing she said was “Look, Bill … about the anthrax. I knew it would never get anywhere near you. I thought it would help you, help reinforce you as a victim of this. Maybe point a finger at the presidency. Him as bad guy, you as one of the many Americans enduring the terrorist attacks, et cetera. You know?”

“It was clumsy.”

“Was it? It worked, didn’t it? People are glad you’re alive. They see you as one of the targets of the wave of violence. That put you solidly into the good-guy category.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, sitting up so he could finish his drink. “Nicest present anyone ever gave me.”

She laughed. A little too quickly, showing nerves and uncertainty. He made himself laugh, too.

“Seriously, Bliss, I appreciate the gesture. Really. As weird as it sounds right now, it’s nice to know you have my health and well-being so much in mind.”

“Always, big guy.”

He sighed, long and slow. “You know … I’ll miss you, you crazy bitch.”

“We’ll see each other again.”

“Sure,” he snorted. “In like two years if I don’t run for the big chair. Longer if I get in. Probably never.”

“We’ll see each other.”

“Even if we do, you won’t even look the same.”

She chuckled. Low and throaty, the way she used to. “Depends on how closely you look.”

“Damn. Wish it was now. Where are you holed up?”

“C’mon, you know we can’t play that game.”

“Right, sorry. Guess I meant to say, ‘What are you wearing?’”

She laughed again. A real laugh. “Trite and sleazy, but cute. I’m wearing a big smile, how’s that?”

“Good enough. Keep smiling.”

“Bill…?”

“Yeah?”

“I hope you get what you deserve, too.”

The line went dead, and Collins slumped back against the cushions and did not move for ten minutes. Then he sighed once more and punched in a number on his cell. The call was answered almost at once, as he expected it would be.

“Yes,” said a male voice. Neutral, soft.

“Did you trace the call?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

The man gave him an address.

“How soon can you take care of this?”

“Local assets are already in motion.”

“Call me when it’s done.”

Collins switched off the phone and got up to build one more drink. On the TV, reporters were interviewing people who wanted the president to be impeached and arrested for the subway massacre. A scrolling banner promised that the president would address the nation at one o’clock in the afternoon. Collins could imagine the roomful of speechwriters and spin doctors trying to make sense of the situation enough to be able to draft a speech that didn’t sound like the patronizing horseshit it would have to be.

He walked over to the window and looked out at the morning sky. A Secret Service agent noticed him and turned to give him a nod. Collins saluted with his whiskey glass and continued to stare out at the endless blue sky.

“Goodbye, you crazy bitch,” he murmured.

The words were mean, but his tone was filled with love and regret.

Chapter Ninety-two

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her cell phone.

The call to Bill Collins had been strange. She’d expected him to appreciate the anthrax ploy. It was just the sort of thing that he needed to separate him from the president. A victim, standing with the other victims in an America under assault. While at the same time the president, whether deemed innocent or guilty in the court of public opinion, would forever be seen as the man who reacted wrongly, with too much power and a total disregard for human life. She was sure that no amount of spin control could repair that kind of damage.

Thinking about that made her feel immensely powerful. It drove back the monsters of doubt that kept trying to nip at her. It drove nails into the slinking remnants of her conscience that kept trying to crawl after her long past the point where it should be dead.

Ledger had been wrong about that. So had Riggs. Conscience couldn’t easily be carved out and strangled into silence. It was a persistent little bastard.

Only power — more power — kept it at bay.

Her thoughts, however, kept drifting back to Collins.

Was there something in his voice?

She was sure there was. But what was it?

Bliss trusted him a great deal. After all, he had engineered her false death and escape from prison. That had been all him, and it must have been a difficult and necessarily dangerous operation.

Which meant that he had to care enough about her — love her enough — to take such a risk.

So what was that in his voice?

She opened a can of Diet Coke and sipped it. CNN was on the TV and AP on her laptop. The country was going nicely out of its goddamn mind. It was close to chaos out there. More bombs went off. The last doses of the quick-onset Ebola were released in a cab filled with Japanese businessmen — let the State Department make something out of that. They’d have to assume it was Chinese agents acting on American soil. The last wave of random street attacks was pushing police and other first responders to the outside edge of operational efficiency. Just a couple more pushes and it would be chaos in point of fact.

Her cell rang, and she answered it on the first ring.

“Hello, Ludo,” she said, smiling.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Are you in position?”

“Yes.”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“Nope.”

“Good. I’ll text you with a go code. You remember which is which?”

“Yes, Mother. One is go, two is execute, and three is drop and run.”

“Very good. You deserve a biscuit.”

“Thanks.”

“And, Ludo—”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want a bullet for this one.”

“Oh.”

“Something was left in the safe in your room. Use that.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“Ludo, for Christ’s sake stop saying okey-dokey. We’re master criminals. We’re supervillains. Can’t you for come up with something that doesn’t sound like we’re a couple of hicks?”

“Yes, Your Exalted Evilness. How’s that? Or should I call you Dark Lady?”

Mother Night sighed. “Take your meds and stay by the phone.”

She disconnected the call.

Between the bittersweet call to Bill Collins and the surreal call to Ludo, Mother Night felt odd and lonely. Tears burned in the corners of her eyes.

A voice whispered into her ear. The ghost of a voice.

Walk away.

“No,” she told the voice. It was her old unevolved self. The voice of Artemisia Bliss. The weak self. The old self. Though now that voice sounded strangely firm and powerful.

You can do it. You have enough money. The bank transfers cleared. You’re richer than you ever dreamed. You have the power. Take it and go.

It was true in a way. The bank transfers had cleared and she’d transferred the funds again and again, filtering them through dozens of accounts she’d set up over the last few months. The buyer, North Korea, was being buried under a landslide of political backlash and would probably never recover. And even if the Koreans hadn’t been such suckers it wasn’t like she would have had to deliver anything. Everything was bullshit.

She could run.

Right now. Just up and go and never look back.

It was so tempting.

And yet …

“No.”

If you stay here they’ll catch you, warned Bliss.

And there it was. Like a flash; like a switch being thrown. As shocking as a bucket of cold water in the face.

They will catch you.

They.

Aunt Sallie. Mr. Church. Bug. Dr. Hu.

They.

They had caught her before. Caught her and shamed her in her own eyes. They had made it seem like she wasn’t strong enough or quick enough or smart enough to stay one step ahead. They’d caught her. They’d laid a trap for her. They’d outwitted her.

That fact screamed inside her head every night and every day. It had been like a knife in her mind from the moment of her arrest.

They had outsmarted her and stolen her power.

If she walked away now, how could she ever prove to them that she was stronger, quicker, and smarter? And if they closed in on her and she had no weapons left, then how could she fight back? Her stock of the pathogens was almost gone. All she had left were what she thought of as party favors. To absolutely insure her safety she needed much bigger supplies, and a greater variety of them. If she had those, no one would dare harm her. They could never be sure she didn’t have something poised to go off in a gavotte of mutually assured destruction. After all, hadn’t she already proved that she was crazy, that she would do absolutely anything?

Yes, she damn well had. Ask anyone.

Walk away …

“Shut the fuck up!”

Mother Night screamed it so loud it filled the whole suite.

“No — no — NO!”

She snatched up the TV remote and hurled it with savage force at the screen, which exploded in a shower of glass and sparks.

Mother Night glared at it, hunched from the throw, chest heaving as if she’d run up a steep hill, teeth bared.

“No.”

That time her voice was so soft, so small, so cold. Like a bullet waiting to be fired.

Chapter Ninety-three

From the air the Locker looked exactly as nondescript as it was supposed to look. A small tractor parts store with a wraparound parking lot. Pair of green metal Dumpsters on the west side. Scattering of vehicles in the lot, mostly pickup trucks. Ghost whuffed softly at the apparently empty terrain.

“I thought a lot of people worked there,” said Montana. “Where are their cars?”

“Secondary parking lot close to town,” I said. “Staff comes in on a bus and they stay down in the Locker for three-week shifts. Bus drops them off when the store is officially closed.”

Top nodded to the pickup trucks. “We can scan their plates once we’re down, but from here they don’t look like the kind of vehicles an infiltration team would use.”

“Maybe the bad guys came in a bird, too,” suggested Dunk, but I shook my head. “The staff at the tractor store would have seen that and hit the alarms. No, they either came in nondescript vehicles or they came over the hills.”

We pulled on the hoods of the Hammer suits and fitted the visors into place. They had clear lenses with night-vision goggles mounted above, ready to swing down should the lights go out. I ordered the pilot to set us down by the heavy Dumpsters. They would provide cover while we offloaded.

“Then dust off and stay on station,” I told him, “eyes open and weapons hot.”

He set down as light as a feather. The rotor wash picked up dirt and old trash and swirled it around in a cyclone of detritus, but it all whipped away and fell out of sight. With the stealth mode engaged, the nearly silent landing of the helicopters had a ghostly and unreal quality that provided no comfort.

Top jerked the door open, and Sam leaped out first, fading left, kneeling with his rifle to his shoulder to offer cover as the rest of the team hit the ground and ran for the cover of the Dumpster. They looked like gray shadows in their Hammer suits.

Ghost fidgeted and whined, eager to get out and bite something, but we were going to do an infil into a potentially biohazardous site, and they don’t make hazmat suits for dogs. They should, but they don’t. I told him to stay topside with Sam. Ghost gave me a look of such hurt and personal affront that it let me know in no uncertain terms that he would poop in my shoes at the first convenient opportunity.

“Don’t give me that face,” I said. “If the bad guys get out I promise that you can track them down and go all Hound of the Baskervilles on them. But you’re not going inside.”

We jumped down from the bird and ran fast for cover. Top took Lydia and Noah with him and headed around back. Bunny, Dunk, and Montana ran straight to the front of the building and flattened out in a blind spot of the security cameras. Or, what would have been a blind spot if the cameras were functioning. They sat there, unmoving, their little red lights gone dark.

Sam Imura broke right and ran to a tumble of three cracked boulders and laid his rifle in a cleft where two of them had smashed together. When he gave me the nod Ivan and I made our run. Sam’s weapon of choice is a 408 Cheyenne Tactical sniper rifle that fires .338 Lapua Magnum supersonic rounds. Getting hit by one of those rounds is like being swatted off the planet by God. And if Sam fires at you, you will get hit. It’s easy math. Sam’s worst day on the range makes my best day look pathetic, and with him there I felt confident in running the distance from the helo to the iron Dumpster.

Behind us the Black Hawk lifted up and away, rising to a height of two hundred yards and making a slow circle of the building.

Ivan and I found a secure location and he took up a firing position while I did a visual sweep of the terrain. Nothing moved but dragonflies, grackles, and a squirrel who panicked and ran like a gray streak when Ghost materialized behind him.

Bunny’s squad moved to the parking lot and quickly went from vehicle to vehicle, using helmet cams to send images of each license plate. Nikki’s team ran them through MindReader.

“Cowboy,” said Nikki, “every plate checks out as either an employee of the tractor store or a farmer from within a twenty-mile radius.”

The terrain continued to be empty and uninformative. I headed to the far side of the front wall and knelt in a cleft between two withered decorative shrubs, then crabbed slowly sideways toward the front door. It stood slightly ajar, blocked from closing by something I couldn’t yet identify. I tapped my earbud. “Report.”

“Sergeant Rock to Cowboy,” said Top. “Nothing going on back here. Rear door is closed and locked. No recent footprints in the dirt leading to or from. No windows back here.”

“Copy that. Leave a door prize and converge on me.”

Top clicked off. “Door prize” was another name for a blaster-plaster, which was a sheet of flexible material saturated with high explosives. When it was inactive it could take a rifle bullet and not detonate. But there were small wires running through it that, when the material was stretched and placed over the seam of a closed door, leaked compounds that combined to form a chemical detonator. You peeled off plastic film to expose a strong adhesive that bonded it to almost any solid surface. Left undisturbed, it could sit there for hours. Left too long and the detonator chemicals oxidized and became inert. However, if anyone opened a door or window sealed with a blaster-plaster, then it went boom. It packed a lot of oomph per inch.

A few seconds later, Top’s squad came running around the far end of the building, moving fast, with a lot of small, quick steps so that their aim wasn’t jarred. They squatted down behind me, Lydia facing back the way they’d come, Top shoulder-to-shoulder with me.

“Something’s blocking the door from closing,” I told him, “but I can’t get an angle on it. Watch my back.”

I leaned out and took as close a look at the door as I dared. A mailbox blocked my view of the obstruction and the front of the building was in shadow. Too dark to see well but not dark enough for night-vision glasses. I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta, which is easier to fire when moving in a low crouch and which has a powerful flashlight mounted below the barrel. Four slow crabbing steps got me to the right spot and I trained the flashlight beam on the obstruction.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“What are you seeing, Cap’n?” asked Top.

I said, “It looks like a hand.”

Another step, then I changed the angle of the flash in order to see inside.

It was a hand, no doubt about it.

But it wasn’t attached to anything.

Chapter Ninety-four

The hand lay in a pool of dark blood. It had been cut off a few inches above the wrist. Not a clean cut, either. There was a heavy silver school ring on the pinky. I used the zoom function on my helmet cam to pick out the details.

“Nikki? Can you see the ring?”

She had clean-up software that — as Ivan once put it — could count freckles on a gnat’s balls. “Highland High School,” said Nikki. “Class of ’92. A local, probably a farmer.”

I felt a dart of sadness bury its needle in my chest. Some poor bastard, maybe working his dad’s farm instead of going off to college, comes in here to buy parts and walks into a nightmare. Walks off the cliff at the end of his life. Sometimes the hardest deaths to take aren’t those of fallen heroes but of innocent bystanders who, had they stopped at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, might have missed this whole thing and gone on with their lives.

“What’s the play, Cap’n?” asked Top.

I didn’t answer immediately. We now knew for certain that this was no technical glitch, no industrial accident. Sure, we knew that coming here, but there had been a tiny fragment of hope. Ah well. Our luck had been running piss-poor for a while now. Why change? Mind you, I was still hoping that there were only one or two maniacs hiding inside, waiting to give up peacefully and get right with Jesus. And turquoise warthogs might fly out of my ass.

I took two devices from my pockets. The first was the size of a deck of playing cards. I thumbed a button and adjusted a dial, then held it toward the door, moving it back and forth slowly, first from side to side and then up and down. The small green light didn’t change, didn’t moderate toward orange or red.

No electronic devices.

That was the first relief. This doohickey didn’t scan for jammers, it scanned for devices keyed to electronically detonate bombs. So far so good, but still not the time to do the happy dance. The second device looked like a collapsible cane for the vision-impaired, and when I unfolded it the lightweight hollow sections fit into place exactly like a cane. Except this one was nearly ten feet long and ended with a small red rubber ball that looked like a clown nose. It wasn’t. It was actually about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of sensors suspended in a ball of foam. The alloy of the cane was nonconductive, the handle wrapped in rubber.

If we’d had more time, if there wasn’t a clock the size of Big Ben ticking as loud as gunfire in my ear, I could have logistics send me a bomb disposal robot. That wasn’t going to happen, so I waved everyone else back and then crunched myself into as small a size as possible, angling so that my body armor offered the greatest degree of protection in case I was dead wrong about that whole bomb thing. Then I extended one arm, holding the rod like a conductor with a baton. The red tip hovered an inch away from the door and then lightly brushed it. If it picked up anything — such as a trembler switch being activated by my opening the door — it would send a sharp warning to the electronics detector I still held in my other hand.

I took a breath, offered a generic prayer to whichever god was on call, and pushed.

Then froze.

The door didn’t move.

Was there a wire somewhere I didn’t see? Would further pressure snap it?

I licked my lips and pushed just a little harder.

The door swung inward.

I waited.

Nothing went boom.

I pushed again.

It wasn’t that there was resistance from a wire; the door was simply heavy. I waited some more. I could almost feel each of my team waiting, eyes sharp, breath held, fingers laid along the curves of trigger guards, hearts pounding.

There was no explosion.

After a thousand years I withdrew the rod and collapsed it, then stowed it and the detector into my pockets. I ordered Ghost to go find Sam and stay with him. Then I tapped my earbud to open the team channel. “Everyone get ready, I’m about to get loud.”

I pulled a flash-bang.

“Flash out!” I yelled and lobbed it side-arm in through the open door.

The flash-bang did what the catalog says it’ll do. It flashed and banged. I squeezed my eyes shut, buried my head, and clamped my hands over my ears. As soon as the blast was over I was in motion, Bunny and Top swarmed up behind me, and the others followed. We broke right and left, guns up, yelling at everyone and anyone to drop weapons, raise hands, not get shot.

However, everyone in that store was beyond caring or complying.

There were nine people in there. Eight men and a woman. The woman wore an apron that had the name of the tractor company on the bib. She sat on the floor behind the counter. Four black holes were stitched across her chest.

Everyone else was just as dead.

Shell casings littered the floor. They looked like little metal islands in an ocean of red. But not all of the killing had been done with guns. Someone had used a heavy, bladed weapon in here. Long wounds were gouged across bodies. Heads and limbs were hacked off. Top nodded to a wall display of fire and woodcutting axes. There were clips for six axes but only five were on the wall.

“Check the air,” I said, but the others were already looking at the screen displays of the portable BAMS units clipped to their belts.

“In the green, boss,” said Bunny from the far side of the room.

“Green here, too,” said Ivan, who stood by the door.

“Green and good,” confirmed Top.

I glanced down at mine. Green.

I wondered how long it would take my nuts to crawl down out of my chest cavity even if it stayed green. Maybe by Christmas. Definitely not today.

We checked the whole store and found only the echo of pain and the persistence of death. The people here had died hard. Maybe the counter woman had it the easiest, she was the only one who looked to have been shot to death. We were all silent as we took this in. We weren’t shocked into stillness. It wasn’t that. We were assessing the situation, gauging our unknown enemy. We’d expected there to be bodies here. The level of savagery was surprising. The efficiency with which this installation had been invaded spoke to a brilliant and calculating mind; the butchery spoke of passions that were out of control.

“No sign of Dr. Van Sant,” observed Montana. “Does that mean he made it into the facility?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted. “Be real useful if we found him alive and able to talk, though. He knows the day code, and without those we have to blow open a lot of doors. I’d prefer not to have to do that.”

“Because of the damage?”

“No, because if any of the fail-safe systems are still functioning then the shock might trigger them. In which case we don’t get out.”

Montana studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Then I guess we better find him.”

Top walked over to one corpse whose body had been hacked almost beyond recognition as human. I watched Top’s eyes as he took in what little information was left.

“Boy,” he said. “Fifteen, sixteen.”

He didn’t say anything else, didn’t fill the air with any macho threats, but we all knew and understood. Top was the only active DMS team member who had kids. Well … one kid, his daughter, who’d lost both her legs when an IED exploded under her Bradley. His son was buried in Arlington. They’d found enough of him for funeral purposes. Those tragedies had been the impetus that made Top apply for the DMS. The memory of a son torn apart by enemy fire and a beautiful, brave daughter living her life in a wheelchair made Top into a different kind of soldier than the rest of us. His fury was cold, calculating, and enduring. He never lost control or fell prey to battle madness, but if he had his sights on the bad guys who did this, then they were going to come to watershed moments in their lives that they would not enjoy.

I moved past Top and he followed in my wake as we rounded the counter and went through the open doorway to the back room. The curtain partition was on the floor, tangled around the dead woman. Bloody footprints tracked past her.

“What do you figure?” I asked him, nodding to the prints.

“Too many to count,” he said. “The overlap. But they’re all wearing the same shoes.”

The tread was unmistakable. Not military boots, or even the pseudo-military stuff the wannabes and militiamen favored. These were all Timberlands.

Dunk looked over our shoulders. “Tims? All new, too. No signs of wear. Weird.”

“They’re dressing for this job,” said Top. “Probably changed in a van. We catch them, they’ll have civvies to change back into and the clothes they wore in here will go into a bonfire.”

Lydia pressed her foot down next to one of the intruder prints, then lifted it away to compare the marks. Our shoes had a distinctive pebbled tread, the kind you see on tactical footwear made by companies like Saratoga.

We all saw what she meant us to see.

“They’re not wearing Hammer suits,” said Ivan.

“Or anything like Hammer suits,” said Montana. “Pretty sure Timberland doesn’t make biohazard versions of their shoes.”

Dunk said, “They could have hazmat suits on with the booties tucked into their shoes.” He paused, frowned, shook his head. “No, that’s stupid. Sorry.”

“Well,” said Bunny, blowing out a breath as he looked around, “this is either very good or very, very bad.”

The good would be if the bad guys just wanted to steal the pathogens without immediately releasing them. The bad would be if they were on a suicide mission and didn’t give a fuck about protective equipment.

Top, who was always in the same gear as me, touched my arm and said, “If these jokers came down here to die for the cause, then why try for anonymity with the new shoes? I think they’re here to take the Ark, not open it.”

It was a glimmer of hope. But a little hope can be like a splinter in the mind. It can lure you into believing in a positive outcome, and that can take the edge off your skills.

“We’re not making any assumptions,” I said to the team.

We were in a small dummy office that held two desks, a water cooler, and a file cabinet. Enough for appearances. A door marked “Employees Only” hung by one hinge. The lock assembly had been torn out by a savage kick. The footprint on the door wasn’t huge — maybe size ten — but whoever had delivered that kick knew their business. Single kick, too.

We went through into the next room and then wasted five minutes checking and clearing the administration offices that comprised the rest of Level One of the Locker. As we passed from room to room the stink of cordite clogged the air, and the gun smoke was almost thick enough to block out the sheared-copper smell of blood.

Almost.

There was simply too damn much blood.

Bug’s intel said that there were fourteen support staff members working in the Locker’s topside offices.

We found all fourteen. With the nine in the store this added up to the twenty-three cooling thermal signatures.

Twenty-three people whose lives had ended. Unexpectedly, terribly.

In bits and pieces.

Body parts were strewn around on the floor. Some of the secretaries and staff members were sprawled across their desks, their bodies torn open in a final indignity worse than rape. The walls were spattered by arterial sprays. Blood dripped from the overhead fluorescents.

“Christ’s balls,” murmured Ivan.

Bunny said, “What the fuck?”

You’d think that people like us wouldn’t or couldn’t be shocked by yet another example of man’s potential for appalling brutality. You would be wrong.

“Berserkers?” mused Bunny.

“Got to be,” said Top.

Bunny waggled his combat shotgun. “Glad I brought my boom-stick.”

“Jefe,” said Lydia, “how many ways are there out of this place?”

“Two,” I said. “This way and a service corridor.”

“Okay, ’cause I’m only seeing footprints going into this elevator. I haven’t seen anything coming out.”

I nodded and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Ronin.”

“Go for Ronin,” said Sam.

“Any movement from the service exit on the east side of the building?”

“Negative.”

“Very well, but get close and tell me exactly what you see,” I said.

There was a rustling sound and then Sam said, “Okay, I’ve got eyes on it. Confirming that it’s undisturbed. Exterior screws are intact.”

“Lift the cover plate.”

The service corridor was a tunnel big enough to wheel parts down. From the outside it looked like a big electrical junction box, the man-sized ones that county power companies put up. But those doors opened to reveal a cubicle in which were the same kind of high-tech hand and retina scanners we had down here. And there were several levels of security behind that, including a length of reinforced corridor that could be filled with fire at a moment’s notice.

“Everything is intact,” he reported. “No one’s come out this way. Even the weeds are undisturbed. Your bad guys are still inside.”

In light of all the vicious slaughter, that news should have scared us. But I felt a weird little smile carving its way onto my face. I avoided meeting the eyes of the others, or even looking at their faces. They’d be wearing the same killers’ smiles. It was an ugly thing to see on the faces of good people.

I looked at the main security doors that provided access to the elevators. The built-in scanners — hand, retina, and keycard — were junk. Wires dangled from what was left of them.

“Okay,” I said, tapping my earbud again, “Ronin, put a blaster-plaster on the grille and find cover. You’re our eyes topside. If you see anything hinky — I don’t care if it’s a bobcat walking with a limp — put it down.”

“You got it, boss,” he said. “Me and Ghost will watch your backs.”

I heard a soft whuff in the background.

“Green Giant,” I said, “let’s get those doors open.”

Bunny applied a magazine-sized blaster-plaster to the heavy doors. “Ready.”

We moved away and hid behind desks.

“Fire in the hole!” yelled Bunny as he triggered the detonators. Bigger the bomb, bigger the boom. The steel double doors blew apart, open like the petals of a flower to reveal an elevator shaft. No car.

“Gear up,” I said, but everyone was already rigging rappelling equipment. I did a quick look down the shaft and saw nothing but concrete, greasy cables and a few small utility lights. The hole was so deep we couldn’t even see the top of the car.

Top dug into his pack, removed a lime green tennis ball, and let it drop. Then he flipped open the small tactical computer strapped to his forearm and tapped keys. The tennis ball was filled with several small sensors packed in Styrofoam beads. We watched the meter count off the distance of the drop.

“All the way down,” Top said again.

A series of numbers flashed across the screen, giving us ambient temperature, negative elevation, motion detection, audio, and thermals. But the meters had nothing to read. No sound, no movement, and no heat signatures for anything human or animal.

“Hellboy,” I said to Ivan, “you’re on point. Drop to within fifty feet and if you hear anything drop a flash-bang. Once you’re down, give us a shout.”

Bunny anchored him with a powerful hand on Ivan’s belt that allowed him to lean out and clip on to the main elevator cable. He gave Bunny another nod, adjusted his gear, then stepped out into the shaft and was gone.

Top and I leaned out to watch him rappel down with practiced ease. At fifty feet he stopped, reported all clear, and went down the rest of the way. Lydia went down next. Then Top, Bunny, and me. The newbies followed.

We crouched atop the car and bent to the access panel to listen.

We heard nothing at all.

“Dead down there,” said Ivan.

Bunny gave him a withering look. “Really bad choice of words, dude.”

Ivan colored. “I meant … no gunfire. Nobody yelling.”

I removed the access panel and we pointed lights and guns into the car. Nothing.

No, not exactly nothing.

There was a dripping red handprint on the wall by the control panel.

“Listen up,” I said quietly, “we go down, open the doors, and then make our way into the facility. We have to assess the situation and react based on what we encounter. There are a lot of civilians down there.”

“We hope,” said Dunk.

“Yes, we hope.”

“Mission priorities?” asked Top.

“It’s all about the Ark,” I said. “We have to protect it at all costs. The civilians down there are secondary to that, though if the Ark is safe, then we do whatever we can to protect and evacuate the staff.”

“Rules of engagement?”

“Nobody pulls a trigger unless you have no choice. Return fire and protect yourself, but don’t approach this as a target-rich environment. We want to protect the staff and we want to take prisoners. Check your BAMS units, but make sure someone’s watching your ass whenever you do. If you so much as encounter a common cold germ you sing out.”

They said, “Hooah.”

I tapped Ivan’s shoulder and nodded to a junction box on the wall. The door hung open and wires trailed out like guts. “See if you can fix that, see if you can get this elevator in operation.”

He nodded and unclipped a toolkit from his belt.

To the others I said, “Let’s do it. We all go in, we all come out.”

“Hooah.”

One by one we dropped into the car. Lydia and Ivan took up stations to either side of the double doors as I took a shooter’s stance off center of the opening, my Beretta up in both hands.

I gave Lydia a nod and she pressed the button to open the doors.

They parted and rolled back and Dr. Van Sant stood there.

He was smiling.

Laughing.

His clothes were disheveled, his thin hair messy, and there was a streak of blood on one cheek. But he was laughing.

He held a bloody fire axe in trembling hands. He stared at us in shock for a moment, then a single laugh burst from his chest.

“Dr. Van Sant,” I began, “I am Captain Ledger, DMS, and we’re here to—”

That was as far as I got before he screamed at the top of his lungs and tried to bury the axe in my skull.

Chapter Ninety-five

“Captain — watch out!”

Lydia shoved me hard and I staggered sideways as the axe blade whistled down with incredible force and speed. It gouged a huge chunk out of the poured linoleum floor and rebounded, staggering Van Sant.

He was laughing all the time. Bloody bubbles popped at the corners of his mouth.

Lydia and I hit the deck and rolled over; I pushed her away and kept rolling until I was on fingers and toes. Bunny rushed the doctor and then had to suck back his stomach to keep from getting sliced open. The others crowded back and put guns on Van Sant.

“No!” I bellowed. “Do not fire. He has the bypass codes. I repeat do not fire.”

Van Sant kept swinging at Bunny, driving the big young man backward. Bunny was fast for all his size, and he ducked and dodged until he got the timing right, then he stepped inside the arc of the next swing, grabbed the shaft of the fire axe with both hands, and with a savage grunt tore it from the scientist’s grip. There was absolutely no pause between that action and Van Sant’s response; he instantly lunged forward and clamped his jaws around Bunny’s muscular wrist.

Bunny screamed in pain and backed away, trying to wrench his arm free. There was a note of hysteria in the big man’s voice.

Lydia shrieked in terror and threw herself at Van Sant, hammering the doctor’s face with a vicious flurry of punches. Van Sant’s face disintegrated under the assault. I saw blood and teeth fly as the doctor reeled backward. He lost his hold on Bunny, but as he fell back there was a long streamer of protective material clamped between his teeth.

The doctor, far from subdued, suddenly whirled, grabbed Lydia by the hood, and slammed her face-forward into the wall. A crazy, high-pitched cackle of laughter bubbled continuously from him.

Noah shifted around to take a kill shot and I slapped his barrel down.

“We need him, goddamn it,” I barked.

“He’s going to kill—” began Noah but then Van Sant shoved Lydia at him and laughed as they crashed into me and we all went down.

That’s when Top made his move, sliding in sideways between Van Sant and us to deliver a brutal side-thrust kick to the doctor’s knee. The bones broke with gunshot clarity, but as Van Sant fell he took Lydia with him. He snapped at her like a rabid dog and then slammed her head down against the ground. Once, twice.

I pushed myself off the wall, grabbed Van Sant by the collar, and hauled him backward. He snarled and whirled toward me and suddenly I had teeth lunging for my throat.

“Fuck this,” growled Top, and he swung the stock of his M14 around and smashed it into Van Sant’s face. More bones broke, the doctor’s left eye socket lost all shape, his body trembled at the edge of terminal shock.

And yet …

He did not go down.

He did not slow down.

He leaped at Top, clawing at the visor of his hazmat suit, biting the air because he couldn’t yet bite the flesh.

Van Sant and Top hit the wall side-by-side and collapsed to the floor. Top was unable to bring his barrel to bear, so he used the gun as a bar to keep the deranged scientist from trying to bite.

There was a krak!

Van Sant was plucked away from Top and knocked into the wall. His head no longer looked like a head. He collapsed down, his rage and his madness and that awful laughter stopped.

Stopped.

We all lay there for a broken moment.

Dunk stood ten feet away, a smoking rifle in his hands.

He said, “I … I had to…”

And the access codes were lost to us. And all I could say was “I know.”

The moment seemed to freeze around us into a tableau of impotence, horror, and violence. Top and I were covered with blood. Lydia was dazed, hanging at the edge of consciousness. Montana and Noah crouched over her. And Bunny stood apart, the sleeve of his Hammer suit hanging in tatters, a hand clamped over the spot where Van Sant had bitten him.

We all stared at him.

“Bunny…?” Top asked softly.

He looked down at the hand he was using as a patch. “Oh, God…”

Chapter Ninety-six

Jacen Rolla knew that this was going to be his story. He was the first reporter on scene and he’d been sending in regular sound bites to his editor at Regional Satellite News. His cameraman told him that four of those sound bites were already getting serious airplay on the networks. For a second-stringer like Rolla that was God whispering to him that his time had come.

He’d done two other stories at Building 18—one during an anthrax scare last March and again for a zombie apocalypse bit for Halloween. He knew the best place to stand so that the complex would loom behind him. He had his jacket and tie off, sleeves rolled up, and hair ever so slightly mussed, as if he’d been in the trenches all night. It was the kind of image that sold Anderson Cooper during Katrina. A no-nonsense reporter who cared more about the story than good grooming or personal safety.

All of which was pure bullshit, but it played so damn well on TV and the Net.

The cameraman gave him the nod and Rolla pitched his voice to convey authority, concern, and a hint of the ominous.

“We can now confirm that a SWAT team from Homeland has entered Building Eighteen, and there are reports of gunshots coming from inside the facility.”

That was unconfirmed by any source, but Rolla knew shots when he heard them, even if they were muffled by walls and doors. There were also flashes from inside the building, and if they weren’t muzzle flashes then he’d eat his microphone.

Because there was nowhere else to go with the immediate story, Rollo began a recap of the Mother Night campaign of terrorism — his verbiage — in which he connected dozens of events. Much of it was conjecture and wild guesswork, but Rollo was absolutely dead-on when he made his assumptions. Of all the news coverage during those events, in retrospect, Jacen Rollo’s was the most accurate, both in chronology and supposition.

It was the kind of gut-instinct journalism that all reporters wish they had. The kind that Rollo was unaware that he possessed. Suits at the various networks were watching his coverage and taking note. So was a huge portion of the American TV-watching population.

It was therefore later estimated that more than sixty million people saw him blown to bloody rags when Building 18 exploded.

Chapter Ninety-seven

Top scrambled to his feet and pushed past me. “Talk to me, Farmboy. Are you bit?”

Bunny stared at his arm.

“Are you bit?” Top demanded, and as he said it he brought his rifle up.

Pointing it at Bunny.

Ivan gaped at Top. “What the fuck are you—?”

“Stay out of it,” I warned. To Bunny I said, “Top asked you a question.”

Bunny gulped in a huge lungful of air and as he exhaled I could hear him shudder at the edge of tears. Panic was a howling thing that screamed in his eyes.

“It … it d-didn’t break the skin,” Bunny said, tripping over it. “The arm pads…”

We all wore Kevlar limb pads over the Hammer suits. They’d deflect a bullet but they were for shit against knives. I doubted it, because I’ve seen Ghost rip through similar padding on hostiles more than once.

“Farmboy … you know we got to see that bite,” said Top gently, though he didn’t lower the gun.

“I’m telling you, man, it didn’t break the skin.”

“You know you got to show us.”

“Boss,” said Ivan, “check your BAMS.”

I did.

I wished I hadn’t.

The orange glow had deepened. It was almost red.

Bunny’s eyes flared with panic. “What’s in the air? Christ, what’s in the air?”

Ivan held his unit out and turned in a slow circle, letting the little intake motor suck up particles. When he checked the reading again I heard him make a small, sick sound.

“Shit,” he said. And that was all he needed to say.

“But the air … the contaminants…”

Top and I just looked at him.

“Show me the motherfucking arm,” said Top through gritted teeth.

There were tears in Bunny’s eyes. Even through the plastic visor I could see them. It took about a thousand years, but he finally raised his hand to expose the bite.

The sleeve was torn.

The Kevlar was torn.

The skin was bruised.

But there was no blood.

Not a drop.

We all looked at it.

“Oh Jesus, please…” breathed Bunny.

Then Top was in motion, shoving his rifle into Dunk’s hands, pushing Bunny back against the wall, tearing open his pack, pulling out the small roll of black electrician’s tape we each carried, winding it around Bunny’s arm, turn upon turn upon turn, sealing the ragged hole in the protective clothing. And all the time talking in rapid fire under his breath. “… can’t fucking take you anywhere you stupid cracker farmboy, don’t know how to wipe your own ass, ought to knock you on your ass and see if I can kick some sense into you…”

Bunny was still praying to Jesus.

On the floor Lydia groaned.

I clapped Ivan hard on the shoulder, knocking him in her direction. “Help her.”

He snapped out of his shock and dropped to his knees to help her.

I touched Top on the arm. “That’s good,” I said. “That’s good.”

But Top seemed reluctant to step back. He gave the tape two more turns then angrily tore it off and slapped the end firmly down. He stepped back awkwardly, almost a stagger-step, and stared hollow-eyed at Bunny.

“Top—?” I asked.

He gave me a wild look for a moment, then he seized control of himself and slammed his control back into place.

I squatted over Van Sant’s corpse. His clothes were torn and it was clear he’d been brutalized. The question was … in what way. Top and Bunny stood on either side of me looking down at the body.

Noah asked the question. “What was wrong with him? Was he a walker?”

“I think so,” I answered.

“But he was using an axe … I thought they were mindless.”

I sighed. “It depends on which generation of the seif-al-din they had. This looks like Ten, maybe. If it was Twelve he’d have his full intelligence.”

“Jesus,” he said, appalled. “Why would someone create something like that?”

“It was a doomsday plan. A small group of radical extremists wanted to dose their own people with Generation Twelve and everyone else with Generation Six.”

“That’s insane.”

Ivan punched him on the arm. “Dude, what part of ‘doomsday plan’ sounds sane to you? If you’re going that far out and trying to kill everyone, is it really that much crazier to leave some thinking zombies behind? It’s all fucked up.”

Noah almost smiled. “Zombie balls.”

It took a two-count but despite everything everyone cracked up.

The laughter was brittle and short-lived, and as I pulled back the collar of Van Sant’s shirt it died completely. There two ragged half circles torn into his flesh. The marks of human teeth.

He’d been bitten.

Then I touched the BAMS unit to his throat. It had a small panel for reading surface temperatures. The meter said ninety degrees.

“Dead,” I said.

“I had no choice,” began Dunk, but I cut him off.

“No. His body temperature is already down five degrees. He’s been dead for a while.”

Montana helped Lydia to her feet and she leaned heavily on her as they came to join us.

“Talk to me, Warbride,” I said.

There was a glaze in her eyes but it was fading. She looked around to orient herself and then those eyes flared when she saw the damage to Bunny’s suit. She pushed past Montana and grabbed Bunny, checking every inch of the tape to look for the smallest flaw.

“Canejo!”

Dunk looked at Noah. “Big guy’s popular around here.”

Bunny gently pushed Lydia back. “I’m okay,” he said, though he still sounded breathless and scared. “It’s cool.”

It wasn’t cool, and we all knew it. He may not have been bitten, but the BAMS unit told the tale about the ambient toxicity. The air was a soup composed of at least four different pathogens. We had no way to know if the tear in Bunny’s suit was going to prove as fatal as a bullet to the heart.

The others gathered around me.

“What’s that mean?” asked Dunk, looking as scared as he should be. As we all were.

“It means that you don’t want to unzip to scratch your balls,” said Ivan.

“No,” he said, “does that mean they’ve already opened the Ark?”

That was a tough damn question.

“We can’t know,” I said. “This place is a research facility, so the BAMS could be reading stuff released from labs on any of the lower levels. We’re going to have to get to the Ark to make sure that it’s intact.”

It was news I didn’t want to say and they didn’t want to hear.

I was going to say more, but the lights suddenly went out, plunging us into absolute blackness.

“Night vision,” growled Top, and we all snapped the devices down over our goggles. The darkness went from a stygian nothingness to that weird and disturbing green.

“I got movement!” cried Montana.

I whirled and saw that she was right. Someone stepped into view from one of the small offices that lined the far wall. A woman. Tall, slim, dressed in a white lab coat that was spattered with black dots. Black in this light, red if we still had normal lighting.

“Freeze!” I yelled. “American Special Forces. I need you to put your hands over your head and—”

The woman bent forward at the waist and bared her teeth at us. The shriek she uttered was in no way human. It sounded more like a mountain lion.

Then she rushed at us.

Not a slow, shambling gait.

She ran full tilt at us, hands reaching, fingers hooked to grab, teeth bared to bite.

“Damn,” murmured Montana.

She raised her rifle and shot the woman in the chest.

The rounds punched through her and knocked her back and down.

But she immediately began climbing to her feet.

Ivan reached out in an almost intimate way, touching Montana’s arm to raise the barrel.

“The head,” he said. “You know this.”

Montana took the shot and the left half of the infected woman’s head disintegrated into pulp. Her next step was meaningless and she pitched forward, landed hard, and slid to within a few feet of where Montana stood.

“Faster,” she said softly. “They’re faster.”

No one answered.

There was no chance.

Doors opened all along the wall and people began pouring out. Some running. Some staggering. All of them marked by the wounds that had killed them.

Just as we had in the subway, we raised our weapons and moved into a shooting line. It was hell for me, and I’d had years to fit the reality of this into my head. For my team it must have been a hotter hell because this was an insane rewind of yesterday.

But then the game changed on us.

One of the running figures suddenly dropped to one knee, raised a pistol, and began firing at us.

“Gun!” yelled Ivan.

We broke left and right, firing as we dived for cover.

Except for Dunk.

His head suddenly snapped backward and black wetness flew up from the ruin of his face. He fell hard and did not move.

“Goddamn it!” howled Noah and he hosed the shooter, knocking him down and back.

Before the body hit the ground two other guns opened up from beyond the crowd of running infected.

I had an angle on one shooter and took him with a double tap to the chest and head. He pitched sideways, careening into two walkers and dragging them down. Their heads whipped around at the sight or smell of fresh blood, and the monsters fell on him, tearing at his clothing to expose the meat.

Not sure if that meant that there was some chemical on their clothes that masked their smell, but whatever kept the shooters safe during the charge was for shit when there was blood in the air.

Works for me. Something to bear in mind.

Bunny, Lydia, and Noah were crouched down in the open elevator doorway, firing continuously. Montana and Ivan had ducked behind a desk. I knelt next to the desk, taking whatever shelter its corner offered.

The first wave of the dead reached us and their screams tore through the darkness, challenging the thunder of our guns for domination. Montana and Ivan both copied my double-tap method, using first shot to stall the mass of the oncoming infected and thereby allowing an easier headshot. The others were sawing back and forth with automatic fire, trying to kill or cripple enough of the dead to create a barrier.

“Frag out!” I yelled as I pulled the pin on a grenade and hurled it into the center of the oncoming mass. The infected caught in the center of the blast radius were torn to pieces. Others lost limbs and went down.

One of the opposing guns went silent, too.

It was the moment we needed to take charge of the situation.

Bunny, Lydia, and Top moved forward, using the brief advantage to take better shots while the rest of us covered them. Noah concentrated his fire on the third shooter and he had to drop three infected before he took the money shot. The third gun went silent.

That opened another door for us. We all rose from cover and moved into the diminished crowd of walkers. I still had my Beretta and the others switched to handguns, allowing the dead to close to point-blank in order to guarantee a head shot.

We fired and fired.

They fell.

One by one, they went down.

Then there were none.

“Reload!” bellowed Top.

Dunk lay sprawled between Top and I. A short, squatty ATF agent from Boston. A man I’d been in two horrific battles with, but about whom I couldn’t really recall a thing. Not one personal detail. A bit of a sense of humor, some genuine astonishment at the things he was experiencing. A good soldier. A brother, fallen in battle.

There was no time to react, to acknowledge, or to grieve.

With the night-vision goggles in place I couldn’t see anyone’s eyes, couldn’t tell how they were dealing with this. One by one they turned away to focus on the room.

Top and Noah knelt on either side of one of the shooters. The man wore a lightweight hazmat suit over street clothes. The white protective material was tucked down into the Tims.

“That’s some weird shit,” said Top.

“Would that even work against this stuff?” asked Noah, gesturing to indicate the pathogen-filled air.

“Not for long,” I said.

“Wonder if they knew that,” mused Noah.

It was a good question, and it opened up a very interesting line of speculation.

I called up the floor plan of the Locker, picking the fastest route to the Ark.

There was no “safest” route.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Clock’s ticking.”

Chapter Ninety-eight

We had several levels to go down to reach the Ark. Twice we had to use blaster-plasters to blow open sealed airlocks. As we ran I tried to reach Nikki or Church or anyone on the command channel, but there was nothing and we hadn’t found the jammers.

I thought about Samson Riggs and his team. Was this the kind of thing they’d walked into?

Riggs was older and more experienced than me. He was a superior team leader in all regards. If Mother Night had taken him out, then what chance did I stand?

Doubt of that kind is an ugly, ugly thing.

The warrior in my head snarled at me.

We ran down level after level. Four times we encountered infected, all of them employees of the Locker. We tore them down with guns and grenades.

We made it all the way to the airlock on Level Fourteen.

We were a long way down, and as we crept into the room it became apparent that we had just stepped into one of the inner rings of hell itself.

The chamber on our side of the airlock was big and dark, with hundreds of metal packing crates stacked in rows. Some of the crates had been pulled down and pushed together to form a barrier directly in front of the Ark airlock. Thousands of shell casings littered the floor all around the barrier and everything — cases, floor, and airlock façade — was splashed with blood. This was clearly where the Locker’s security forces had made their last stand. Thirty men and women, all highly trained, all combat veterans, had tried to hold this position.

And that is where all of them died.

Now they stood there, around and behind the barrier, their faces slack and white, their eyes dark, their bodies torn by bullets and blades. Here and there among them were a few of Mother Night’s people, as damaged and dead as the rest.

The dead turned toward us as we entered the room.

They bared bloody and broken teeth at us.

Behind them, the airlock to the Ark stood ajar.

We were too late.

Chapter Ninety-nine

The infected guards milling in front of the Ark were all looking at us now. Maybe it was the heavy stink of gunpowder hanging in the air, but even though they were aware of us in the room they seemed confused, not yet reacting to us as prey.

I wanted to take that moment and use it.

“Echo Team,” I said sharply. “Take them down.”

We opened fire. Bunny had switched from an M-4 to the big shotgun with the drum magazine. Fully loaded, it was a brute of a weapon, but it was a toy in his hands. The gun bucked and bucked as he fired round after round at them, aiming head-high and blasting snarling faces into meaningless red junk. The others let out a howl of savage hunger and rushed us, all hesitation shattered.

It was a slaughterhouse.

Another fucking slaughterhouse.

How many times would this happen? How many times would Mother Night force us to massacre people who had already suffered, people who had died in fear and pain from the pathogen, or from the bites of their friends who’d been infected first? How many rungs down were we required to climb into the pit? Nietzsche wrote, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” Was that the endgame here? Was Bliss somehow punishing me, the killer with whom she philosophized about the creation of monsters, by making me kill so much that I lost my humanity?

I could feel it slipping.

I was screaming. No. Yelling with a weird and savage joy.

It was a dangerous, dangerous place to be.

The dead came at us and we — did what? Made them deader? Desecrated their corpses? What would you call this?

“Kill them!”

It was my own voice shouting.

The voice of the Warrior, the Killer who lives inside of me. The one who gets stronger with every trigger pull.

I obeyed his orders.

I killed.

And so did the people who followed and trusted me.

As the infected rushed us, we met their charge and as a group began angling to one side, forcing them to attack us on our flank as we edged toward the open door of the Ark.

That’s when Mother Night sprung her trap.

Bright lights flared on all around us, blinding us, stabbing through the optics of the night vision, tearing cries of pain and confusion from us as we scrambled to raise the devices away from our tortured eyes.

On either side of us, two stacks of metal cases leaned out and fell with mighty crashes as six huge figures sprang out from hiding.

Berserkers.

Chapter One Hundred

Bug sat in front of the big MindReader monitor, fingers hanging poised above the keys. The screen was broken into dozens of smaller windows, each filled either with images of the disasters or data about Mother Night and Artemisia Bliss. His eyes jumped from window to window so fast that anyone observing him would think he was having a seizure. His mind was whirling with information, trying to do what MindReader does. Look for patterns. Make connections.

MindReader was a computer, though. Possibly the most powerful one on earth. But a computer nonetheless. It could not make true intuitive leaps. It could not speculate or imagine. It was not capable of abstract thinking. A box of circuits and storage slots could not, by definition, think outside of itself. Not even this one.

Bug, however, could.

And if he didn’t exactly know Mother Night he damn well knew Artemisia Bliss. They’d worked together for four years. Every day. Designing and scheming together. Solving problems like this together.

“What’s your damage?” he asked the Bliss who dwelt in his mind. The remembered version of her.

Then he grunted.

That, he realized, was the wrong question.

This wasn’t about her damage.

This was about her hunger.

That was the truth because it had always been the truth about her. She was always hungry.

For knowledge?

No. That was data, a means to an end.

For recognition?

Maybe. That was close, and he knew it.

People coveted what they saw. They lusted for specific things. They envied specific people. They hated people who had what they wanted.

So … who did Artemisia Bliss hate?

And why?

What did those people have that she wanted?

The answers to those questions were the answers to this question.

He knew that.

Bliss hated Aunt Sallie.

Why? Auntie was older. No. She was black. No, race had nothing to do with it. She was a combat veteran. Something there. A tickle. She was …

If he had to pick a single word that defined her. Just one. What would it be?

Dangerous?

Close. Very close. But … wasn’t that a side effect?

Yes. She was dangerous because she was powerful.

That was so close.

What about Church. Pick a word.

Powerful.

In every way, powerful.

Dangerous, too.

Power and danger.

Bliss hated him, too. Bug. He’d testified against her, too.

Why would she hate him? She would have to know that he was compelled to testify, and her hatred wasn’t born in the courtroom. It had to be there for her to do this kind of damage. It had to have been there for years, cooking, changing her.

So why would she hate him. He wasn’t powerful. He wasn’t dangerous.

Any power he had came from MindReader.

Bug stopped and cocked his head, reappraising that thought.

Was it true?

Was it an accurate assessment?

No. Maybe it wasn’t. If MindReader was only a computer then it was no more powerful than whoever put it to work. That was no different than a gun. It could not pull its own trigger.

Bug was the power behind MindReader. Something he had always known but never realized or considered.

And that’s why Bliss had hated him, too.

Because Bug was allowed total access to MindReader. Only two other people on earth had that privilege. Church and Auntie. How that must have galled Bliss. She always thought she was smarter than Bug, that she knew more about computers than he did, that she could do more than he ever could had she been allowed that freedom of access. She’d begged to show that to Church, to Auntie. To Bug.

It all came down to power.

He thought back to all the times the two of them played video games together. She won more than he did. And made a point of telling everyone about it.

That she’d won.

That, at least on those terms, she was more powerful than he was.

And something else flickered in Bug’s mind. Something that Rudy had said in his testimony at her trial. Bug closed his eyes as he pulled those words out of their storage slot in his mind.

“Her pathology clearly indicates that winning is of critical importance to Miss Bliss. That manifested in a number of ways, from using a variety of psychological manipulations to win arguments, even over minor points, to posting video game scores on the corkboard in the lunchroom. She needed to win and to be seen to win. To be acknowledged as the winner. It was one of the ways in which she felt empowered.”

That was part of it, but Bug was sure there was something else. Another point Rudy had made later during cross-examination. What was it?

“Come on,” he told himself, tapping his feet nervously on the floor. “Come on.”

Then it was there, like a file pulled from a nearly corrupted folder in a buried subfolder. There was only a fragment of it. Something Rudy had disclosed under protest because he felt it violated doctor-patient confidentiality. Only a federal court order was able to make Rudy say it.

“I counseled Miss Bliss about her drive to obtain power — as she defined power — and about her need to be recognized as the winner. She is not without a significant history of psychological problems. There are two documented suicide attempts from when she was a teenager. In both cases the attending psychiatrist concluded that these were cries for help or for recognition, or for acknowledgment of the power a child has when endangering their own life. She controls, for a short duration, the attention and actions of all adults around her. In light of my own sessions with Miss Bliss, I do not entirely agree with the conclusions of those early therapy sessions. It is my considered and professional opinion that she continues to be unstable and that she barters with herself for her own continued existence. Existence is predicated on winning. I cautioned her that one day she might either fail in so spectacular a way as to rob living of its richness, or that she would win too big a prize, because if you have climbed Everest, whither then?”

Chapter One Hundred and One

Mother Night paced back and forth in her room.

Everything was going exactly right.

Like clockwork.

Perfect.

Ever since Collins had managed to free her from prison, she had worked toward this moment. Using Huge Vox’s screening software and his massive database of information culled from tens of thousands of businesses, she had compiled a master list of disenfranchised and emotionally damaged people. She’d used Haruspex to troll the confidential records of hospitals, police departments, and foster care agencies to find even more of them, winnowing her list down to a few hundred. The ones who had been abused and discarded, or marginalized because they were statistically inconvenient to a system that did not allow for creative care of its fringe elements. She’d cultivated them with gifts, empowerment speeches specifically designed to play on their needs, be they anarchism, extreme socialism, radical patriotism, religious mania, or something else. There were so very many lost ones out there, and many of them — despite claiming to want or need no one — clung to Mother Night because she validated their existence. And her gifts were always well received. Food, money, video games, drugs, weapons. All paid for with money siphoned from accounts in banking and trust corporations whose security was no match for a system like Haruspex, whose parents were Pangaea and MindReader.

For two years Mother Night crafted her own persona and drew her minions to her, letting them suckle at the milk she provided. For two years she built the master plan of Burn to Shine. The greatest terrorist attack in history. That’s how it would be remembered. Through her faceless, broken minions she would be the most feared and powerful person on the planet. Even if that was only for the span of a weekend.

She. Mother Night. Artemisia Bliss.

More powerful than the president of the United States.

More powerful than Mr. Church.

As she paced she had to keep telling herself that this was exactly what she wanted. That she had already won.

But just as it had done earlier, that awful inner voice, her unevolved self, kept needling her, nagging her.

Run, it would say.

And she would scream at it.

She stopped pacing and went to the window. From the sixty-ninth floor, the city of Atlanta was beautiful. Sunlight and blue skies reflected from all the glass, and she could see for miles. It was a shame that she could not see the smoke curling up from the Centers for Disease Control. Wrong view for that, and it was a mistake she regretted making when picking this room.

She thought about calling Ludo Monk, and it took her a long moment to realize why that had occurred to her.

It wasn’t because she needed to give him instructions.

No.

It was because she had no one to talk to.

There was no way Collins was going to take any further calls from her. And … who else was there? Yesterday she’d had some fun sending blind texts to Samson Riggs and Joe Ledger, but the novelty wore off. That wasn’t real conversation.

There was no real conversation.

There was not even the possibility of real conversation.

Any conversation.

She felt a tear dangling from her jaw before she even realized that she was crying.

Then a thousand thoughts fluttered through her mind like a flock of starlings. Strange thoughts. Bad thoughts. Thoughts of dying, of suicide — though those thoughts were always with her. Other things, too. Like maybe she should call someone in the press. Give someone the interview of a lifetime. Make the most important call ever. Tell the whole story. Wow them.

Would that work?

Would that ease the pain?

Maybe.

For as long as the call lasted.

And then what?

Then what?

She placed her palms against the big glass window. It was sealed, no way to open it. She wished there were a balcony.

Or maybe not.

It was too tempting to simply swan-dive out of the pain and into the nothing.

Instead she turned and put her back to the wall and slowly slid onto the floor.

And wept because she was lonely.

She wept because she had won.

She wept because there were infinite worlds.

She wept because she believed she could conquer them all.

She wept.

Chapter One Hundred and Two

The Berserkers rushed us. They were all as tall as Bunny — six six or larger — with monstrously overdeveloped muscles. They wore black body armor, head to toe, that left only a triangle of their face visible through a clear plastic shield.

The belt slipped on the gears of time. The speed and insanity of the fight shifted as the Warrior became the Killer and he shouldered all other parts of me aside.

I had my Beretta in my hands and I spun and moved into the line of attack of the closest Berserker. I’d fought these monsters before. I knew that if they had one chance, one fragment of advantage, then they would win. They were immensely powerful, designed by cutting-edge science to be ferocious and savage, driven to the point of madness by chemical adjustments and drugs.

But the point of madness was now somewhere behind me.

As the Berserker grabbed me I rammed my gun against the plastic covering over his mouth and pulled the trigger. The round went straight through the clear cover but the dense bulletproof material of the Berserker’s head cowling prevented it from exiting, so instead it bounced around inside the thing’s head, turning monster into meat.

But as it fell, its fangs locked inside the trigger guard and tore the weapon from my hand. I let it go and whipped out my rapid-release folding knife as I turned.

Bunny was down, rolling on the ground with another of the monsters. Noah was down, too, but he was trying to fight his way out from under a pile of infected. Top and Lydia were running and trading shots with the Berserkers. Montana and Ivan were behind the stack of fallen cases. All I could hear were curses, screams, and howls of bestial fury.

A Berserker smashed one of the zombies aside and ran at me, raising a Ruger Blackhawk and firing. I shoved another of the infected into the path of the bullets, ducked low, and came in hard and fast. I head-butted his shooting arm up so that its next round exploded one of the overhead lights; and as I did so I used both hands to drive my blade through the plastic guard and into one flaring nostril. The blade bit deep, blood exploded over my hands as I gave the blade a vicious counterclockwise turn and then ripped it out.

He screamed so high and shrill that I thought my eardrums would burst. I dodged left, jumped, and kicked him in the side of the knee, landing as much of my weight as I could on the joint. It shattered audibly, and the Berserker was falling sideways into the hands of a half dozen of the zombies, who bore him down.

A dead-white hand grabbed at my goggles, trying to pull them off, but I kicked out and the infected fell away. If I lost those then the mucus membranes around my eyes would be an open door to the pathogens in the room. If that happened I was dead no matter who won the fight.

There was no time to think about that as a third Berserker came wading toward me, swinging for my head with the stock of his rifle. But he staggered as a fusillade of rounds hit him in the side. The foot-pounds spun him but didn’t drop him. His armor was too solid and he had enough mass to bull through any bruising from the impact. He whirled toward the shooter and I saw Montana kneeling atop one of the crates, her rifle tucked into her shoulder. There was a jagged crack across the front of her goggles. The Berserker was caught in a moment of indecision — take me or go for her.

Montana made him pay for that with six rounds through his face.

Three Berserkers down.

I leaped over the falling body to try to help Bunny, but I saw the big kid from Orange County drive a Ka-bar up under the soft palate of the Berserker. As he did it, they both roared like monsters. The mercenary flopped over dead, temporarily pinning Bunny to the ground. White hands reached down, tearing at the corpse, trying to find purchase on Bunny’s Hammer suit.

Then Top was there, unarmed, rushing in, scooping up Bunny’s shotgun, firing, firing as he bought Bunny the chance to worm his way out.

A piercing scream made me turn and there was Ivan, fighting hand to hand with a Berserker. The big creature was bleeding from the mouth, big gouts of blood splashing on his chest and Ivan’s. I couldn’t tell what injury Ivan had inflicted, but then I saw something that drove an icy blade into my heart.

There was a long, ragged gash down Ivan’s chest and the layers of his Hammer suit were parted like the obscene lips of a terrible wound. I could see Ivan’s bare chest and there was no visible mark on him, but all of his protection against the monsters in the air was gone.

Gone.

Ivan must have known it, too, because he went absolutely insane with combat rage. He drew a bayonet and a short fighting knife and he attacked the Berserker, chopping pieces of padding and flesh away, ripping the life from the killer.

“Cowboy! Watch!”

It was Noah’s voice, and I darted left and spun as two zombies came hurtling at me, propelled by a mighty shove from the remaining Berserker. Noah had his gun up, but I was inside his field of fire. I waved him off as I closed on the zombies from the outside, slashing down at the knee tendon of the closest one and shoving him into the other. They went down. The Berserker threw himself at me. Nearly four hundred pounds of brute strength and crushing weight. I dropped flat and then kicked up, spoiling his lunge, sending him spinning into a bone-jarring fall.

I back-rolled to my feet, but Noah was there, aiming past me now, sighting along the barrel. He emptied half a magazine into the Berserker. The first bullets pounded the thing into forced immobility, and with that freeze-frame, Noah used the last four rounds to blow out its lights.

The gunfire was thinning as Echo Team chopped the last of the infected down.

I reached for a fallen rifle, but as I straightened, the last of the walkers fell over, a black dot painted on its pale forehead.

Thunder echoed through the cavernous room, bouncing back and forth, diminishing with each collision, and finally fading into a terrible silence.

We stood there, each of us frozen in whatever posture of combat we’d been in when the silence caught us.

We did not look at the fallen walkers.

We did not look at the dead Berserkers.

There was only one thing any of us could see.

Ivan stood by the pile of overturned cases, his dripping knives in his bloody hands. Where his uniform was torn we could see his skin. It was no longer untouched. Now huge blisters as big as walnuts were expanding, straining the thin layers of skin, and finally bursting to seed the air with tiny droplets of blood. Black lines of infection raced crookedly up his stomach and chest and vanished beneath the undamaged part of his mask. Blood ran in lines down from that hood.

With a cry of horror he tore his mask off and flung his goggles away. The blisters had turned his face into something out of nightmare. His eyes were bright red and he wept tears of blood.

“Help me!” he said, but his throat was so thick with wet wrongness that it came out as a strangled gurgle. He pawed the air in our direction, imploring us to do something even though we all knew there was nothing that could be done.

Nothing.

Not even if he was in a medical bay with the world’s top doctors around him. These were bioweapons of the worst and most terrible kind. No cure, no treatment.

No hope.

Ivan sank slowly to his knees.

Top handed the shotgun to Bunny and took the pistol from Noah. He looked at me.

It cost me a lot to give a single nod.

It cost Top every bit as much to see it.

He raised the pistol and sighted on Ivan.

Ivan reached out to him. Begging him for the bullet.

Montana yelled, “No!”

But the madness of the moment demanded a different answer.

Chapter One Hundred and Three

We stood over Ivan’s body for as long as we could. I knew that there was little chance he would receive a proper burial. Even if the technicians and biohazard teams would somehow sterilize this place and bring it back online — an event I did not believe possible — any organic material would have to be incinerated and the ashes treated with chemicals and then sealed in ceramic-lined steel drums. We’d bury a box under a stone with Ivan’s name on it.

Top knelt and placed the pistol on Ivan’s chest. None of us would ever want to fire the gun that had killed our friend.

And besides, a warrior needs his weapon as he rides into Valhalla.

Finally, I turned away and walked to the door of the Ark vault, pushed it open, stared inside.

There was a heavy set of industrial-grade acetylene tanks and a welding mask. The whole front of the Ark had been cut open, the locks melted away, the steel panels for each compartment pried up. My BAMS unit was picking up traces of everything. Every single goddamn virus and spore and bacterium and prion that was stored at the vault was now swimming in the air.

But as I studied the storage slots I could see that even though they had been opened, they were still full. The Berserkers had not stolen the pathogens. They’d merely released them. They’d totally contaminated the Locker. Top and Bunny came in and saw what I saw.

“I don’t get it,” said Bunny. “They opened these up before we got here.”

“I know.”

“That makes no sense.”

Top backed up a step and looked out through the door at the mass of bodies outside. I could see his eyes through his goggles and they were narrowed. Intelligent and calculating.

“Talk to me, Sergeant Major,” I said.

“I don’t think this was a theft, Cap’n,” he said slowly.

“No,” I agreed.

“What are you talking about, old man?” asked Bunny. “They sent a whole team in here.”

“You saw the team they sent in. A bunch of thug shooters and those fucking Berserkers. Tell me, Farmboy, which of them look like highly trained technicians capable of safely transporting the worlds deadliest pathogens out of here?”

Bunny said nothing. He kept looking at Top.

“Tell me where the vehicles are for this team,” added Top. Then he shook his head. “Hell, no, boy. This was a trap set for us. Or for a team like us.”

“Almost worked, too,” said Bunny as he nodded out the vault door to where Ivan lay.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Farmboy,” Top said. “It worked exactly right. Just like whatever Shockwave walked into in Atlanta. There were only two DMS teams left and Mother Night took them both clean off the board.”

“But we won this,” insisted Bunny. “We ain’t dead.”

I said, “What Top is trying to tell you is that we’ve been manipulated into wasting time we don’t have to waste. What do you call it in video games when you go off the main level of play?”

“A side quest?”

“Yeah,” growled Top, “and another term for that is wild goose chase.”

I kicked the side of the Ark so hard that hollow metal echoes shouted back at me. “We’re down here fighting the wrong goddamn fight.”

“Then where’s the real fight?”

I tapped my earbud but there was no signal. “I don’t know but we need to get out of here to find out, and I think our clock is just about out of time.”

We turned and we ran.

Chapter One Hundred and Four

Mother Night looked at her watch and saw that it was time to get ready. She showered and dressed in the Lucy Kuo costume she’d hand-sewn. For ten long minutes she did nothing but stand in front of the full-length mirror and look at herself.

Then, with a sudden rush of white-hot anger, she tore the costume off, ripping it, pulling it away from her skin as if it were diseased. The top was taped to her breasts, and as she ripped it off the tape left angry red welts across her naked skin. She threw the rags on the floor, then got a knife out of her bag and knelt over the costume, stabbing it over and over and over …

Time seemed to go away for a while.

A long while.

She blinked.

Blinked again.

She was no longer in the bedroom.

Mother Night was huddled in the back of the shower stall. Naked. Bleeding from cuts on her forearms and thighs, her face swollen and sore, eyes burning from tears.

“Wh-what—?”

Her voice was thick. The way a sleeper’s is after a long night.

The vomiting began then.

Without warning, without the slightest twitch, everything in her stomach surged upward, burning her throat, bursting from between her lips, spraying the shower walls with garish red.

Red.

For a terrible second she thought she was throwing up blood, but it was too much and too thin.

Wine?

When had she drunk wine?

When could she have had this much?

There seemed to be no food mixed in with the wine, but the liquid was lumpy with …

She stared.

Another rush spilled out.

And another.

Then her body convulsed with dry heaves as if it were trying to rid itself of her stomach lining. She strained so hard that white sparks detonated at the edges of her vision. Blood roared in her ears.

She kept staring at the lumps in the red mess.

There were pills mixed in with the wine.

Lots of pills.

“What?” she asked again, as if the vomit itself could provide an answer.

It took a long time.

The dry heaves ground slowly to a halt, leaving her breathless. She gasped for air, tried not to pass out.

Trembling fingers fumbled for the spigot and she turned it with a cry of effort.

The water was ice cold.

It punched the air out of her lungs and tore a scream from her.

Inside, deep inside, a voice laughed at her.

An old voice. The hated voice. The unevolved voice.

You killed me.

“What…?” she asked aloud, giving it different meaning now. Directing it somewhere. Inward. Backward in time.

You killed me, said her older self. You stole my life. You threw everything away, you pathetic bitch.

“Fuck you, you weak little cow,” sneered Mother Night. “You were nothing. You had no power. Look what I’ve done!”

You stole my life and made yourself into a monster. A hag.

Mother Night gripped the shower’s safety bar and pulled herself to her feet. It took a lot and her legs did not want to hold her. She tried to lift her leg over the edge of the tub, bungled it, and then she was falling, clawing at the air, finding only the shower curtain, clutching it, tearing it loose, dragging it down to the floor. She landed hard, striking the point of her left elbow on the closed toilet seat.

You’re pathetic. A psycho bitch who doesn’t deserve to live.

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

It was all she could say as she fought her body onto hands and knees, gripped the edge of the sink, and pulled herself to her feet again. When she looked into the mirror it was not her own face she saw. It was not Mother Night.

Artemisia Bliss stared back at her. Sensibly dressed for work. Hair pulled back into a ponytail. Glasses on the end of her nose. Eyes filled with hate.

You’re nothing but a loser.

“You’re a goddamn liar. You were too weak to speak up for yourself. Pretty, clever little Artemisia Bliss. Crying into her pillow. Mad at the world. Boo-fucking-hoo. I won the game. I beat everybody. I made us into this.”

She beat her fist against her chest. The pain was shockingly hard and it felt so good. So delicious.

So powerful.

“I fucking won!”

In the mirror, Artemisia Bliss shook her head.

This isn’t a game.

“Everything’s a game, asshole. You were always too stupid to know that. It’s all a game and I won. I beat them all. Church, Aunt Sallie, Bug. The field teams. Everyone. I fucking won.”

The face in the mirror looked at her with such sadness.

So what?

“What?” Mother Night asked again.

Who cares if you won or not? Why do you think it matters?

Mother Night’s mouth opened but she couldn’t find the right words to explain to this phantom what it all meant. To make it crystal clear what every detail meant, why it all mattered, and the value of her victory. “I … I…”

And then someone knocked on the door.

As if a light switch had been thrown, the image in the mirror vanished to be instantly replaced by Mother Night’s face. She looked into those eyes—her eyes — and told herself that this was her true face. This was the only truth.

Mother Night.

Another knock.

A man’s knock.

But not, she was sure, a police knock. If the police knew she was here they’d have knocked the door down and she’d be in handcuffs or sprawled in a pool of blood.

Her body was streaked with wine vomit. A few pills clung to her skin.

Mother Night took the white terrycloth robe from the peg on the door, pulled it on, belted it, walked into the hall and out to the living room of the big suite. Her laptop was on the bed and she paused to hit a few keys. The screen display immediately showed the hallway outside her room via a video stream from the cameras she’d mounted there.

Two men stood in front of the door. They were dressed casually, in Hawaiian shirts, jeans, dark sneakers. They could have been conventioneers at the hotel, or they could have been conferees there to attend DragonCon, the big science fiction and fantasy convention that spilled across five hotels. Not everybody at the conference wore costumes from movies, comics, or games.

They could have been ordinary men.

But they weren’t, and she knew it.

Mother Night recognized one of them. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, with sunglasses and a wire behind his ear. In her memory, the man stood beside a limousine, watching up and down the street as a man got out of the car.

The man this fellow was guarding was Bill Collins.

This man at her door was one of the Secret Service agents whose loyalty to the vice president extended far beyond his role to the country. This man was owned by Collins, heart and soul. His companion would be as well.

And yet they were here.

Knocking on her door.

As if to punctuate that thought, one of the men rapped his knuckles on the door.

The realization of who they were was so intensely painful that Bliss nearly collapsed. Her legs, already wobbling from the wine, the pills she’d taken in her fugue state, and the aftereffects of vomiting, tried to buckle, but she caught herself.

“No,” she snapped. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

She kept her voice low. She didn’t want the killers at the door to hear her.

The pain didn’t abate even though her legs grew more steady.

“Bill…” she whispered.

On the level of pure human emotion — a level she felt floated at an immense distance — there was heartbreak. Bill. How could he do this?

On all other levels, however, there was a cynical amusement. How could he not do this? It was neither surprising nor unforgivable. In his place, she would do the same.

Probably should do the same, time allowing.

Still, it did hurt.

Oddly, she knew that he loved her, and she him. So strange. Maybe that’s how gods love. It was all very Shakespearean.

She waited, watching as they listened and finally nodded to each other. One man shifted to watch the hall as the other removed a keycard. Both men drew pistols from under their Hawaiian shirts and held them down by their legs, out of sight even though the hall was currently empty.

Mother Night spent one moment listening inside her head for the voice of Artemisia Bliss, but there was only silence.

She smiled and waited for the men to enter.

Because the hallway was deserted, no one heard the two men scream.

Chapter One Hundred and Five

It took twenty-two minutes to climb flights of stairs and scale the elevator shaft. We encountered six wandering walkers and put them down. With each encounter it was simply a matter of one of us making a head shot. There was no drama attached to it, which is surreal. We were so numb, so terrified, so humiliated that the infected we killed had become little more than irritants.

In a flash of thorny precognition I knew full well that this was going to come back to bite each us on the ass. Once we were past the heat of the fight — and providing Mother Night didn’t destroy the fucking world — we were going to visit those killings in our dreams, in our quiet times. The infected were victims. Colleagues in the DMS. Scientists, technicians, office staff, maintenance, cafeteria staff. People. Humans whose lives had been stolen from them and whose bodies had been hijacked by a parasitic bioweapon that made them into monsters. Yeah, sure, we had to kill them. And no, there was no way we could stop and mourn or even regard their humanity in our haste to get out of there and back into radio contact, but you can’t write bad checks like that without them bouncing. We would all have to pay those penalties someday, somehow.

But for now, we climbed, we ran, we killed, we fought, and we prayed.

The hardest part was the decontamination process. One full hour of being blasted by steam and chemicals and foams and God knew what else. Eventually we staggered out of the offices into the Tractor Store, wearing sweat-soaked underwear. We even had to leave our guns behind.

We reeled into the sunlight of a Monday afternoon.

Ghost came racing and barking toward us, then slowed and stopped as he smelled the chemicals on me. He growled at me and even bared his fangs.

Fair enough.

Sam broke cover and ran to us, his rifle ready, face twisted into doubt. He looked past us, waiting for Dunk and Ivan to come out of the building. Looked in vain, and I saw pain flicker across his features. He and Ivan were close. I took his earbud and tapped it to get a command channel. First thing I did was call for the Black Hawk and order the pilot to have the Lear fueled and ready. Then I called Church and told him what had happened.

“I’m adding Bug to this conversation, Cowboy,” said Church. “He has something you need to hear.”

Bug came on the line. “Are you okay?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “What do you have?”

“Okay,” he said, “you told me to get inside Artie’s head, right? Well, I went back over everything I knew about her. What she wanted, what she did. I thought about the stuff said about her at the trial. Stuff about her psychiatric history.”

“Cut to it, Bug. Tell me you have something.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I know what she’s going to do. I think I know how she’s going to win this.”

It was hard to hear.

It hurt.

Not because it was surprising. But because there was so little time to do anything about it. Even as we crowded into the Black Hawk, I was certain that Bug was right.

About Mother Night’s plan.

And about the fact that she was going to win.

Chapter One Hundred and Six

Mother Night took a long, hot shower, washing away the dried wine she’d vomited all over herself. Washing away the blood from the two Secret Service men.

Every time she thought about the looks on their faces as they died it made her laugh. Their arrogance was insulting. They’d come in, holding their guns down at their sides, smiling, expecting her to do what? Faint? Fall down and cry? Beg?

Fuck that.

With their first step across the threshold they snapped the silver wire she’d placed at ankle level and that triggered a pair of compressed-gas dart guns. The chemical dropped them in their tracks. Dying, but not dead. A little fun with chemistry.

She pulled them into the room, closed the door, wrapped duct tape around their ankles and wrists and across their mouths, and let them watch as she carved pieces off, bit by bit, from each. They tried so hard to scream, but paralysis kept their pain and terror trapped inside. Afterward she’d covered them with a blanket. It was fun while it lasted, but overall it was pretty disgusting.

It was the first time she had ever killed anyone with her own hands.

She’d done it as a challenge to her inner voice, daring Artemisia Bliss to say something. To try to do something.

But that voice seemed to be gone.

Pussy.

Before taking her shower, she called her teams at the CDC and the Locker. One call was answered, and she heard what she wanted to hear. The other call was not. Ah well. That could mean anything.

Off to the shower.

She turned off the water, dried herself, spent some time to get her makeup right, and then stood for almost twenty minutes in front of her open closet, trying to decide what to wear.

The original plan had been to go over to the Hyatt in costume, dressed as Lucy Kuo from the video game Infamous 2. There was all sorts of subtext and meaning in that. All about betrayal and revenge.

The costume was in ragged pieces scattered all over the room.

She could remember destroying it, but not quite exactly why. The fugue had started then, and events at the edges of it were fuzzy.

The other costumes had less meaning, though some were very sexy and would look great on TV.

Which was the problem, as she now considered it.

If she wore a costume to the final act, that meant she was playing a character. Would the character eclipse her?

Probably.

Not entirely, of course, because — hey, she’d spilled blood, coast to coast. The name Mother Night was never going to be eclipsed.

The face, however, might.

And wouldn’t that suck?

It would certainly suck some of the meaning out.

So, in the end, she dressed as Mother Night. The wig, the sunglasses, the skin tones and piercings. It was, after all, what her fans would want. What they’d appreciate. She had no doubt at all that she would have fans. Her anarchist fruitcake children were all devoted to her, even though — let’s face it — she didn’t give a stale fart about them. They should all have had “means to an end” tattooed on their foreheads. Useful, fun, occasionally charming, but dumb as hamsters. And yet, fans, every last one of them.

There would be others.

That was the nature of power. People idolized it, mythologized it. People showed up at events like DragonCon dressed as Hannibal Lecter, as Freddy and Jason and Pinhead. As Darth Vader and Dracula. As Nixon and Bin Laden. As killers both real and unreal. There were always those among the vast sea of disempowered who wanted to borrow power by wearing a fake identity. That was the central pillar of fandom, and Bliss knew that in earlier years she was as guilty of it as anyone.

So the best way to use that, as well as honor it, would be to give them the role model in point of fact.

And so, as Mother Night, from gleaming black Betty Page hairdo to spike heels, she was the über-terrorist, Mother Night.

It would not surprise her one bit if there weren’t already three or four girls in the seething crowd of conferees dressed as her. Certainly no one would look at her in this environment and believe her to be the real Mother Night.

Not yet.

Soon, though.

God, yes. Soon.

Her clothes were fun. A short plaid skirt that showed a lot of leg. White stockings that ended two inches below the hem and were clipped to a cream lace garter belt. A half-shirt that showed her hard-muscled bare midriff, and a vest with lots of pockets. Gunbelts slung low over her hips. The guns were bright yellow water pistols. Lace fingerless gloves with a frilly ruff at the wrists. A blood-red circle-A on her shirt. No bra. Lots of jangly bracelets with gold and silver zombie-head charms. The last touch was a backpack crammed with goodies.

Her lipstick was the most whorish red she could find, and she bent and kissed her own mouth in the mirror.

Her mouth. Not the pouty mouth of Artemisia Bliss.

Before she left the suite, she picked up her cell, typed a single digit in a text message, and sent it off. She smiled, thinking about how much fun Ludo Monk was going to have.

As she reached for the door handle the voice was there again.

Please! it screamed.

“Go away, you stupid bitch.”

She tried to reach for the door handle but her hand wouldn’t move.

No. I won’t let you.

The darkness started closing in around Mother Night. Like before, only she saw it coming this time.

I won’t let you.

Mother Night screamed.

Chapter One Hundred and Seven

“It’s called DragonCon,” said Bug. “It’s one of the largest science fiction and gaming conventions in the world. Something like sixty or seventy thousand people.”

“And you think Mother Night is planning a strike there?’

“Yes,” he said quickly, “and for a couple of reasons.”

“Hit me.”

I was dressed in black BDUs that didn’t fit well. Everyone had found clothes except for Bunny, who only had pants. Our jet hurtled through the skies at unsafe speeds, flanked by F-15s, with a path cleared by executive order. The National Guard and every cop with a gun was massing in four separate staging areas, waiting for the word.

“They spread it over five hotels in Atlanta,” Bug continued. “The Hyatt Regency, the Marriott Marquis, the Hilton and Towers, the Sheraton, and Peachtree Place. Brings in about forty million in tourist dollars. And it raises tens of thousands for charities and—”

“I don’t need the sales pitch,” I barked.

“No, you need to hear this. One of the things they do every year is a massive blood drive. Auntie thinks that might be ground zero for Mother Night.”

“You sound skeptical. Why?”

“Well … as devastating as polluting the blood would be, it wouldn’t stand out as the biggest event of the last two days. I think she has something else planned.”

“They have a mass gathering of zombies to do the dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” They had more than fifteen hundred people there last year. A bunch of celebrities from zombie movies and TV will be there, including the cast from The Walking Dead and George Romero, the guy who did Night of the Living Dead.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Beside me, Top shook his head like a sorrowful hound dog.

“No,” insisted Bug. “It’s part of the event every year.”

“That’s where you think Mother Night will hit?”

“I do. At least … I think so.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way she can absolutely win.”

He told me why.

He talked about Bliss’s need to win. About her suicidal tendencies, fueled by boredom and a fear of not being acknowledged as the best. About her growing dissatisfaction because she could not publish anything about the ultrasecret work she was doing, even though that work — inarguably — had helped guys like me save the world. About a child who was so freakishly smart that she could not help but grow into an oddity. Sure, some people — a rare few — manage their genius. But many do not. That old saw about there being a fine line between genius and madness wasn’t bullshit. Bug cited the documentation and case studies.

As he told me this I knew that Church was listening, and I wondered how this was hitting him. The entire success of the DMS was built on having the very best. The smartest, the most insightful, the fastest thinkers, the innovators. Was he wondering if his own desire to have an irrefutable A team of the best and brightest was somehow flawed? That it was appropriate to the job we had to do but maybe inefficient when it came to saving the people who did that job. I knew for sure that I had lost psychological ground since going to work for him. Every time I went to war with the kinds of people we had to fight, and every time I faced the horrors that those people inflicted on the world, I went a little crazier. Even Rudy was showing some cracks around the edges, and he was a rock. Christ, he was my rock. He kept me sane, but every day he had to face secondhand horrors as field guys like me unloaded on him in therapy sessions.

Was Church examining his own conscience, wondering if this was somehow his fault?

Was Hu? After all, he’d hired her.

Was Aunt Sallie, who’d taken Bliss on despite personal misgivings?

Was I complicit? I’d let her use me as a sounding board for her explorations of the evolution of evil within a person’s soul.

“Deacon,” I said, “we have to shut it down. The convention … we have to shut it down.”

Church’s voice was heavy and slow. “Cowboy, there are sixty thousand people there. Most of them are tourists staying at those hotels or surrounding hotels. I’ve been on the phone with the governor of Georgia and the mayor of Atlanta, as well as advisors from Homeland and the National Guard. They believe that any attempt to shut the conference down will likely result in a panic that would send all of those people into the streets. If Mother Night releases a pathogen during that panic, then we will lose all possible control. There would be absolutely no way to contain the outbreak.”

“We have to do something.”

“We are. National guard and police are moving into position now. Truckloads of barricade materials are being brought in and we are going to try to create a quarantine zone around those five hotels. We have people coordinating the logistics. However, I spoke with the president five minutes ago and he has authorized a fleet of helicopters for air support and we’re scrambling bombers from Robins Air Force Base.

“To do what?”

“To sterilize the area.” It sounded like those four words were pulled out of Church’s mouth with pliers.

Sterilize.

“How?” I asked, though I already knew. It was simply that my mind rebelled at conjuring the word.

“Fuel-air bombs. In the event that we are certain the seif-al-din has been released at the conference, we will burn everything within a six-square-block radius. And if it comes to that, Captain … God help us all.”

“Then we have to damn well make sure it doesn’t happen,” I snarled. “We need spotters in the crowd. We know what Bliss looks like, in or out of her Mother Night getup.

“Cowboy,” said Bug, “you don’t understand. You don’t go to events like this. These are fan conventions. At least one out of every three people is in costume.”

My heart, which had been teetering on the edge of a long drop, toppled over into darkness.

The jet flew on.

But toward what?

Chapter One Hundred and Eight

Junie Flynn sat on the bed, legs crossed, shoulders against the headboard, eyes closed. Meditation was the only thing that kept her from climbing the walls. And even then, inside the calm space she had created while the minutes and hours passed, tension nipped at her with rat teeth.

No calls.

No word.

Nothing.

Not from Joe or anyone at the DMS. The only call she’d received had been a short, awkward one from Violin asking if they could talk sometime, maybe. Junie agreed, of course, but before she could ask what Violin wanted to talk about, the strange and moody woman had hung up.

Apart from that, Junie’s cell remained as silent as if it were broken.

She knew that this was how it had to be. Secrecy was paramount for the DMS. If anyone ever suspected that she knew something about one of Joe’s missions, then she would become a liability. She could be used as a lever against Joe. It broke her heart to know that she was the one chink in his armor.

Love was such a wicked thing at times. How like a blade. Used one way, it could carve and sculpt and prune, it could remove a tumor or harvest a flower. Used another way, it stole life and scarred beauty and destroyed hope.

Love was like that.

In Junie’s view it was the most powerful force in the universe, the core of creative energy, the shaper of all things, giver of life and author of possibilities. However, it could be turned to wicked purpose.

Mr. Church knew that, she was certain. The two men stationed outside her door were not there to protect her. Not really. They were there to protect Joe.

To protect the mission.

She understood that, appreciated it, and hated it, too.

The minutes grew like weeds to become hours, and Junie fought her panic. Moment by moment, the calm space around her withered and contracted.

When someone knocked on the door she jumped and cried out in a voice like a startled bird.

Chapter One Hundred and Nine

“Now that’s really in poor damn taste,” growled Police Officer Michael Feingold.

His partner, Officer Carol Daniels, was standing a few feet away, arms wide to keep the crowd from crossing while traffic crawled past. He followed Feingold’s line of vision and didn’t have to ask what he was referring to.

Mother Night was crossing the street.

It was a young woman dressed exactly as the one from the video. Betty Page wig, sunglasses, painted lips, and an outrageous costume that pushed the envelope of modesty. Here at DragonCon they saw a lot of people push that same envelope, and occasionally tear it open. Earlier that day they’d busted two men dressed only in blue body paint and carrying plastic spears. They claimed to be ancient Celtic warriors. Even tried to argue that a layer of paint constituted clothing. It didn’t. Daniels and Feingold made them sit in their cruiser for a couple of hours and then gave them a citation and fine.

The girl in the Mother Night costume was wearing a high-cut midriff top that exposed the bottoms of her breasts.

“She shows even half a nipple and I’m busting her for public indecency,” said Feingold.

Daniels grunted. “That costume’s what’s indecent.”

The crowd parted to let the woman pass, and there were equal amounts of boos and cheers.

The woman held a sequin-encrusted leash that connected to studded leather collars on two men who stumbled along behind, hands bound behind their backs, pillowcases over their heads. The men were covered in realistic-looking wounds. Both of them wore blood-soaked white dress shirts, the flaps hanging. On the back of one, the words GOVERNMENT LACKEY were written in red lipstick. The other had GOVERNMENT STOOGE. Two other men followed behind, dressed in hoodies and gorilla masks.

The light changed and Daniels dropped her arms to let the crowd cross the street, rivers of people going from the Hyatt to the Marriott or the other way. It amazed both officers that these people still wanted to dress up in costumes, go to panels, cruise the dealers’ rooms, stand in line for celebrities, when half the damn country was in flames. At the morning role call, the sergeant said that the mayor was considering shutting down the convention but no one had a workable plan for what to do with sixty thousand tourists. The fear was that to stop the con would be to create doubt about a possible terrorist attack and that would result in immediate panic.

And, of course, chaos.

A plan was being worked out, according to the sergeant, and most likely this evening, as the activities of the day wound down, they would coordinate with event staff, hotel security, and some National Guard to shut it down and more or less tell everyone to stay in their rooms.

The plan, Feingold and Daniels agreed, was horseshit. No way it would work. There would either be a panic or a riot.

Having a fruitcake dressed as Mother Night was not likely to help matters. It was socially irresponsible as well as potentially dangerous. Riots have erupted over less.

As the woman crossed the street she passed within a few feet of Feingold and Daniels.

“I have to,” murmured Feingold, and then stepped into her path. The woman stopped.

“Is there a problem?” asked Mother Night. The two men in gorilla masks stopped also, flanked her as if they were bodyguards. The men with the pillowcase hoods milled as if drunk.

“Miss, I feel I need to urge you to reconsider your costume,” said Feingold, trying to sound calm and authoritative. “Some people might take offense.”

The woman tugged her sunglasses halfway down and looked at him with big, innocent brown eyes. “Oh, my. It’s just for fun.”

“People are dying,” said Feingold, his tone shifting into harshness. “Not everyone would think what you’re wearing is fun. Some people might get pretty angry about it.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” said the woman. “They’re going to kill me later on anyway. All part of the fun.”

“What?”

“It’s part of the show. Good guys and bad guys. Big dramatic finish and, oh, poor me, I die. Don’t you know that’s how it goes?”

“That’s not funny.”

The woman pushed her glasses back into place. “Oh, no, you’re wrong there. It’s hilarious.”

With that she moved around Feingold, nodded to Daniels, tugged on the sequined leash, and sauntered off, giving the crowd something to look at with absurdly exaggerated hip swagger. Lots of catcalls, whistles, obscene comments, shouts, and laughter. Her slaves staggered along behind her, their awkward balance occasionally steadied by the big men in masks.

Daniels came and stood next to her partner, who had his fists balled at his sides and whose face was now the color of a boiled lobster.

“She’s asking for trouble,” grumbled Feingold.

“Well, shame on her if she finds it and needs our help,” sniffed Daniels. “I might just not see her. Bitch.”

The crowds surged back and forth and the officers had to shift their focus back to the management of all those people. Feingold, unable to completely let it go, kept throwing looks at the hotel that Mother Night and her entourage had just entered.

Then something else caught his eye and he looked up as a phalanx of helicopters moved slowly from east to west above him, no more than a hundred yards above the hotels. They were military birds. Feingold had done a tour each in Iraq and Germany, and he knew helicopters. Those were AH-64D Apache Longbows and UH-60 Black Hawks. He counted at least a dozen of each, and four AZ-1Z Vipers. They vanished behind the buildings.

“The hell was that all about?” asked Daniels.

“Don’t know. Something with the attacks.”

Suddenly there was a burst of static from their radios and the dispatcher said, “All units, call in for instructions.”

Chapter One Hundred and Ten

Junie crossed to the door. The lock was in place. She leaned close.

“Yes?”

“Agent Reid, ma’am.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Shift change.”

“Oh, okay.”

She peered through the peephole and saw an agent dressed in a dark jacket, white shirt, and dark tie. He had a long, lugubrious face and the kind of bland, expectant expression people had when waiting for someone to answer the door. He turned and said something to someone else Junie couldn’t see. Probably Reid.

Junie flipped the lock back and opened the door.

“Do you guys need to use the bathroom before you…”

There were three people in the hallway. Agents Reid and Ashe.

And someone else.

Reid and Ashe lay on the floor. Blood pooled under their heads.

The other man stood there, and his bland expression changed into a slow smile. He raised a pistol and pointed it at Junie.

“People like you make this too easy.”

Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

She walked through madness leading her slaves on a leash.

Her costume was perfect, and she knew it, showing enough skin to attract the eye, and because she was dressed as the infamous Mother Night from yesterday’s video, every eye that fell on her lingered.

In any other place, she and her hooded slaves would create a screaming panic or have witnesses calling the police. But this was DragonCon, and there were hordes of bloodthirsty vampires, storm troopers from the 501st Vader’s Fist, Cenobites from the hell dimension, and far worse. By comparison, the gruesome and humiliating nature of her costume was understated.

Everywhere Mother Night looked she saw a deliberate insanity, a willful detachment from the ordinary. The atrium of the Marriott Marquis was vast, soaring four hundred and seventy feet above the lobby, and seeming to ripple and flow. Mother Night always thought it looked like the inside of the spacecraft from Alien. The one designed by H. R. Giger. Like this was the throat of some titanic dragon rather than the lobby of a hotel. The entire lobby, wall to wall, was crammed with people. But also not people. There were Orcs and Hobbits, Vulcans and Klingons, Vikings and spacemen, dead presidents and celebrity monsters. This late in the day, the panels were shutting down and the parties were kicking into high gear. Every tier of the atrium was abuzz with people going from room to room, in costume and in street clothes, sober and drunk, stoned and abstinent. Laughing. Everyone laughing.

She saw a line of teenagers in hoodies and backpacks with anarchy symbols spray-painted on their backs. Impromptu costumes. People shook beers and doused them, and they retaliated by throwing handfuls of confetti as if bombing the crowd. Hotel security and police scowled, and several times they stopped the kids to check their backpacks. They found beer and some pot. A few kids were dragged off. The rest were absorbed into the party.

Mother Night estimated that the lobby was packed with four thousand people. The fire codes were a joke. Thousands more shouted from the balconies.

The costumes changed as the day faded and night came on. There were fewer kids and a lot more booze. Costumes got smaller, more risqué, occasionally obscene, always delightful.

Strolling among them was such fun. Especially once the crowd began to get her costume. People with toy guns pretended to shoot her. The kids dressed in hoodies immediately fell into step behind her, appointing themselves as her entourage. She knew that her beauty and skimpy costume were as much a draw as her “character.” By playing Mother Night on this weekend, in this town — with the destruction of the CDC the buzz everywhere — she was a walking cause célèbre. Cameras flashed, flashed, flashed.

It was so delicious. Even the people — and there were many — who thought that her costume was in bad taste and far too soon, reacted to her. Their disapproval and contempt was evident on their faces, in their shouts, in the fact that they followed her in order to berate her. Once the crowd was aware of her, everyone reacted to her in one way or another.

Everyone.

She constructed a haughty half-smile interspersed with flashes of a broad “yes-we’re-all-in-on-it” grin.

It was so thrilling.

To be out in public as Mother Night.

What surprised her was how long it took for any of the police officers to approach her. Most of them gave her a glance and turned away. It made her wonder if some of them had lost colleagues in the current wave of chaos. Poor babies, if they did, she thought.

Lots of people wanted to take photos with her, and she stood smiling with them, striking an imperious pose.

People wanted her autograph, and she signed convention programs, newspaper headlines, T-shirts, and even skin.

People began offering to buy her drinks, and she let them. They toasted her, and she toasted chaos, and everybody raised their glasses and shouted the word.

Chaos.

Then she turned to one of the teenagers in the hoodies.

“You, minion, come here … Mother wants you.”

He obeyed as if he truly were her minion, and that made the crowd laugh. He came and dropped to one knee before her, head bowed like a samurai waiting on the pleasure of his daimyo.

“Hold this,” she said, handing the leash of her slaves to him.

She signaled another of the hoodie crowd, and he imitated what his friend had done, the way sheep will so quickly and reliably follow each other even into a bog. Mother Night shrugged out of her backpack and handed it to the second of her new minions. He extended his arms and held the pack while she rooted through it. Mother Night removed a double handful of chocolates, each wrapped in colorful plastic. She tossed them to the crowds and they went crazy grabbing at them, snatching them out of the air, playing a vicious tug-of-war when two people grabbed one at the same time. Mother Night laughed and laughed. She scooped out more and threw them, wildly and sometimes with precision toward a specific person whose costume she admired. Hands reached for the treats. Some hands reached past the candy to try to touch her, so she obliged and danced her fingertips along theirs, gracing each of them with the gift of contact.

Contact with her.

Then she removed one last thing from her bag. A pair of scissors with big, happy, pink plastic handles. She snipped them in the air a few times.

“Okay, monkeys,” she yelled, “who wants to help me free my slaves?”

The crowd roared.

Chapter One Hundred and Twelve

When Officer Feingold received the call from dispatch he thought it was a change of assignment. He and Daniels had been outside for hours and it had been a long, hot day in the unrelenting August heat. The dispatcher told him to leave Daniels in charge of traffic control and that he was to report to his supervisor, a sergeant who was around the corner. He was told to do this quickly but without causing undue alarm.

He understood the wisdom of that. No one reacts well to the sight of a policeman running down the street.

“You going to be okay?” he asked Daniels.

“Yeah, let me know what’s up.”

Feingold patted her on the shoulder and headed up the street, moving at a brisk walk that was not quite a run. As he neared the corner he saw other officers converging on the same spot. He followed them around the corner and nearly jerked to a stop. There were four trucks parked in a row, engines on and idling, while lines of National Guardsmen were off-loading dozens of sawhorse barriers. Down at the far corner Feingold could see other trucks being similarly off-loaded. The crowds that passed glanced curiously at the soldiers and cops, but when one of the passersby — a young black woman dressed as Lieutenant Uhuru — asked what was going on, a huge white man who looked like an oversized California surfer said, “Getting ready for the parade.”

“Parade?” laughed the young woman. “That was this morning.”

“Different parade,” said the surfer, and he gave her a big, white-toothed smile. One of the soldiers, a slender Latina, punched the big man in the arm and said something in rapid-fire Spanish. The young black woman shrugged and walked on.

Feingold found his sergeant-supervisor, who was preparing to address several dozen cops. “What’s with the barricades, Sarge? Did I hear something about a parade?”

A man in poorly fitting black BDUs answered his question, and it was immediately clear that he, not the sergeant, was in charge. The man looked around to make sure that there were no civilians within earshot before he spoke.

“Listen to me,” he said. “We have reason to believe that the woman who calls herself Mother Night may be somewhere here at DragonCon. As soon as we’re set, we are going to shut down all streets leading into or out of Peachtree Center. You will work in pairs and when the signal goes out, every team will move into position at the same time with the barricades to block the streets. The trucks will then take up position behind the lines of barricades, and the National Guard will establish defensive positions between the vehicles, the barricades, and the walls of the corner buildings. That’s a whole lot of people moving all at once. We need to snap the lid shut on this area and we need to do it without mistake.”

“Excuse me,” said an officer, “but is there a bomb threat here?”

The soldier, who had neither name tag nor rank insignia, said, “We have to assume that as a possibility, but our major concern right now is a biological threat. You saw the videos of the Brooklyn subway. That was a biological attack.”

He then told the officers about something called the seif-al-din; and about what it did.

“This is not a drill,” he concluded, “and it’s not a joke.”

“What about the people inside?” asked the same officer. “How do we get them out?”

“Once we seal the area we’ll have filter points at each corner. The crowd will be directed to those points and we’ll evaluate them and process them through as quickly as we can.” He held up a small device. “You all know what a BAMS unit is, well, this one is portable. We have thirty of them here and another hundred on their way.”

“People are going to freak,” said another officer.

“Yeah, they will, so it’s your job to manage that. Announcements will be made inside each hotel asking people to return to their rooms or, if they are not booked at the hotel where they are when this goes down, they will be asked to sit down and await further instructions. The exact wording is being worked out and it will sound better than what I just said. But overall, crowd control is critical, not just to save lives but also to give us a chance to find—”

“I saw her,” said Feingold, and instantly every pair of eyes turned to him.

“What?” demanded the soldier.

“I–I mean I think I saw her,” stammered Feingold. “Mother Night. I think I just saw her go into the Marriott not ten minutes ago. Oh God!”

Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen

The stranger kept walking forward, his gun barrel against Junie’s stomach, forcing her backward to the bed. There was a sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel, which gave him an extended reach.

“Please,” said Junie. “Please, don’t.”

For a moment the man appeared confused and then alarmed. Then he smiled. “What, you think this is a rape? Christ, lady, do I look like a rapist? God. Don’t be so rude.”

“I–I—”

He jabbed her with the gun. “Where’s your cell phone?”

Without meaning to, Junie’s eyes flicked toward the bed. He spotted the cell, nodded to himself.

“You have anything else? iPad? Laptop?”

She said nothing, unsure as to the kind of answer he wanted, or which answer would keep her safe. He solved the problem for her by raising the pistol so that the barrel touched her cheek below her left eye.

“Lie to me and I blow a hole through your head,” he said quietly. “Tell me the truth, the day goes a whole different way.”

“Laptop … over there.” She made a small, vague gesture toward the desk. “What are you going to do to me?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he moved around her and scooped her cell off the bed, then backed up until he stood by the desk.

“Just these two? Nothing else? No?”

She shook her head.

“Good. Now go sit on the bed.”

She hesitated for a moment, then obeyed.

“I have to do something and while I’m doing it I want you to stay right there. If you move I’ll kneecap you. Understand? Good.”

He pocketed the cell and tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, then he stepped halfway into the hall, looked up and down, and dragged the two bodies in, one at a time. Then he took a newspaper from the desk, opened it, and laid it on the hall floor over the spilled blood. There was surprisingly little, but Junie knew that corpses didn’t bleed. The two men had single bullet holes in their heads. No exit wounds. She understood what that meant, too. Assassins used small-caliber weapons like .22s because the bullet lacked power to exit the skull and instead bounced around to do fatal damage. Less mess, too. The gun this man carried was a silenced .22.

The man closed the door, hooked the wheeled chair from the desk, pulled it to the middle of the floor, and sat. He removed his pistol, unscrewed the sound suppressor, pocketed that, and laid the gun on his thigh. He removed her cell phone from his pocket and weighed it in his hand for a moment, and then tossed it onto the bed. It landed near Junie but she dared not touch it.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “If this had gone a different way you’d have never met me. Plan A was for me to put a bullet into your head from across the street. Not here, but at FreeTech. Bang. Single shot, your brains are one of those splash paintings by that guy. What was his name? Jackson Pollock. That was Plan A.” He took a deep breath and raised his eyebrows for a moment before exhaling. He removed an object from his pocket and held it up between thumb and forefinger. “Plan B is I come here and use this on you.”

The item was a syringe filled with green liquid.

“Personally, I don’t dig this whole thing. I already have enough monsters in my head, you dig? No? Doesn’t matter. The thing is that Mother Night thinks there’s a chance your action hero boyfriend may actually survive all of the stuff she has planned for him. Guy’s a wild card, so I can see her point. So she wants him to have a really interesting homecoming, if you follow me. Yeah,” he said, smiling, “I can see you do.”

Junie stared at the syringe. Her mouth was totally dry and her heart felt like it was going to burst from her chest.

“But,” continued the little man, “I’m not a bad guy. Not really. Not completely, anyway. I personally think you should get a choice. You’re a nice lady, and this isn’t about you anyway.”

“Please don’t…”

“So, the choice is this. You get to pick the way this ends. This way,” he said, holding up the syringe, “or this way.” He held up the pistol.

“God, please.”

“God ain’t part of this conversation, miss. It’s just you, me, and a choice. Mother Night didn’t authorize me to give you this choice. This is me being a nice guy.” He smiled. “So what’s it going to be?”

“You don’t understand,” said Junie. “It’s not about me. I … I’m pregnant.”

Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen

The crowd jumped and roiled around Mother Night, and she laughed to see them writhe. She held the pink plastic scissors over her head, waggling them back and forth. The action made the underside of one breast peek deliciously from beneath her cutoff shirt. Men and women hooted and whistled.

“I need a volunteer!” she called, and they pressed forward, all of them totally caught in the moment even though none of them had any idea of the payoff to this game. It didn’t matter. The world seemed to be going crazy and this was their reality. The rolling, endless party that was DragonCon and this beautiful, sexy, wild woman.

“Me! Meeee!” cried a girl dressed as an anime character with fuzzy pink cat ears. She was closest and her voice soared through the din. “Me!”

Mother Night smiled at her. A big, wide, wonderful smile. She hooked a finger under the girl’s chin, lifted her face, and kissed her on the tip of the nose. “You win.”

Then she handed the scissors to the girl.

The crowd thundered its appreciation, though there were cries of disappointment threaded through the noise.

Mother Night made a twirling gesture to the boys in hoodies and they spun the slaves around in a full circle. Once, twice, again.

“Snip, snip!” yelled Mother Night, and she stepped aside to give the girl in the fantasy costume access to the slaves. Their hands were tied with strips of red cloth.

As she approached, the girl pretended to be grossed out by the wounds all over the slaves, but it was all comedy and every time she made a face the audience laughed harder.

“Snip, snip, snip,” said Mother Night.

The girl flourished the scissors — and received cheers — then she turned and gently inserted the blades between the bound hands of one of the slaves. The cloth was wet, the slave was struggling, and it took a bit of doing to cut through the material. But suddenly the bonds fell away and the man’s hands were free. He swayed as if very drunk.

“Now take off his hood and give Prince Charming a big kiss!”

Lots of hoots and rude comments followed that.

The girl with the fuzzy cat ears blushed, a hand to her mouth, as she tentatively reached up, took hold of the pillowcase that had been used as a hood, and with a great dramatic flourish whipped it off.

And screamed.

The face below was slashed and hacked and covered with blood. His skin was pale, his eyes dull and empty.

The crowd gasped and stepped back.

Then they cheered even louder, shouting their praise of the great, lifelike, professionally accomplished zombie makeup.

There were shouts of “The Walking Dead!” and “George Romero is God!”

The applause was massive, it shook the walls and rose high into the atrium. People on balconies threw confetti and colored scarves and anything else they had. Mother Night moved out into the center of the floor, waving at them, encouraging them, ignoring the guards who told her to dial it down. There was no dialing this down. It was like Mardi Gras times ten, and the whole place shook with laughter, yells, and applause.

The girl with the fuzzy cat ears grinned and blushed, and it was all so wonderful, so much fun.

Until the man she had just freed grabbed her by the shoulders, yanked her forward, and tore out her throat with his teeth.

Most of the crowd did not see it, could not hear it, did not know it for almost five full seconds. Then, like ripples from a stone dropped into water, the yells of the crowd turned to screams. Mother Night flicked out a switchblade and slashed the bonds of the second slave, whipped off his hood, and shoved him toward the boys in the hoodies. The dead thing, which had once been one of Bill Collins’s assassins, snarled and flung itself at the boys. Biting. Tearing.

The girl with the fuzzy cat ears sank to her knees, blood pouring from her throat. In her veins, in her flesh, the infection was already taking hold. The seif-al-din had been engineered to work at blinding speed. Nature could never have created it, only science twisted to awful purpose could have done this.

Before her mind and body were truly dead, the infected girl with the fuzzy cat ears snaked her hands out, grabbed the arm of a woman who was trying to help her, and sank her teeth into the soft flesh of her inner arm.

Mother Night cried out in nearly orgasmic joy.

This was power.

This was her victory.

The end of everything started right here, with her as the zero point, the center of the new big bang, the author of this red madness.

Inside her head the old, unevolved voice cried out, but that voice went unheard and unheeded.

Around Mother Night the slaughter began.

Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

Vice President William Collins stood a few feet behind the president and to his right. The posture he affected was intended to convey a separation between the commander in chief and himself — head bowed, hands clasped in front of his body, positioned to the extreme edge of what would be the televised image. The attorney general, Mark Eppenfeld, stood next to him. On the other side of the podium were the director of Homeland Security, the secretary of state, and the surgeon general.

The press was relentless. Asking the hard questions, tearing apart everything the president said, chewing at the edges of his credibility. Collins tried not to fidget, aware that the press — and the American people — would be scrutinizing him for complicity, for guilt, or for distance. He wanted to convey distance while at the same time looking like he wasn’t a rat deserting a sinking ship. It was delicate, and he gave every movement, even subtle changes of facial expression, serious thought.

At that moment, the NBC correspondent was asking which provisions of law allowed the president to order troops to open fire on the “sick and wounded” in the Brooklyn subway.

Ouch, thought Collins, that one’s going to leave a mark.

The president paused before answering, letting his famous penetrating stare do some of his work while he organized his answer. He had scripted answers for a lot of questions, but so far the man had gone off-script a dozen times. Trying for the personal touch, relying on genuineness and spontaneity to reconnect with a truly hostile audience. Every reporter in the place, even those who were friends of the administration, smelled blood in the water and they wanted to tear him apart. Careers were being made today, or would be if their program of attack journalism played out in their favor. This question was a killer and it was the fulcrum on which everything turned. Collins didn’t know how the president would handle it.

“I would like to be able to tell you that the video which was broadcast today was a total fabrication, that no such tragedy occurred and that I played no part in the decision to use lethal force. However, I promised the American people that I would tell them the truth, and that I will do. That I am prepared to do.”

He paused and his dark eyes moved slowly across the sea of faces.

Good luck selling it, asshole, thought Collins.

The president stood very straight, his head high, eyes clear. “Since the tragedy of 9/11 our nation has been engaged in a so-called War on Terror. That war is ongoing. It has never gone away. It makes the headlines less often even when bombs explode in our cities. We, as a society, have lived with terrorism for nearly a generation. It has become a regular part of our lives, and even though it is a part of our shared American lexicon, too often we forget to consider its nature or its scope.”

The press grew very quiet, and Collins could see some doubt on their faces. This wasn’t going the way they expected and they, like he, didn’t know where the president was going with this.

“Many people seem to believe that we have won the war on terror, that groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda are on the run. They continue to be threats,” said the president, “but there are greater threats out there, dangerous enemies whose identities are not household names. These enemies wage a constant war against the American people and our ideal of freedom and democracy. The weapons they bring to bear are often far more sophisticated than are commonly associated with terrorist groups or cells. Exotic bioweapons, genetic weapons, designer pathogens, weaponized diseases designed for the purposes of ethnic genocide, and other threats of equal complexity. To some, these weapons may appear to be the stuff of science fiction, but I can assure you they are not.

“The only way to oppose such weapons and to insure the safety of the American people, our country and our allies, was to form a group under special charter. That group is composed of some of the most brilliant scientific minds of our time and the most elite and courageous special operations forces gathered from the SEALs, Marine Force Recon, Army Special Forces, FBI Hostage Rescue, the ATF, SWAT, and other groups. These men and women are the best of the best and it is their job to fight this war on terror with every weapon we can put into their hands.”

Holy shit, thought Collins, he’s outing the damn DMS. He’s actually going to use the DMS to save his own ass.

The president spoke for several minutes to a stunned audience. He did not name names, but he gave a general description of the Department of Military Sciences. And he described some of the bioweapons the DMS had tackled.

“Mr. President,” said a reporter, “don’t you think the American people have a right to know more about this organization?”

The president fixed him with a considering stare. “In a perfect world there would be no secrets and no need for secrets. In that perfect world our enemies could not use knowledge about the inner workings of our covert special forces against us. In a perfect world all battles would be fought on a level playing field and according to a set of rules. This is the twenty-first century and there are no rules of fair play and good sportsmanship. Precious documents like the Geneva Convention and the Bill of Human Rights mean less than nothing to our enemies. The tragedy that occurred yesterday was not the result of a military coup, it was not an example of excessive force by a corrupt administration, nor was it military or police brutality. What happened yesterday was a tragedy. The terrorist who calls herself Mother Night released one of the world’s deadliest pathogens into that subway car. That pathogen infected and killed every single person. All of those deaths, every one of them, can be laid at the feet of this enemy of our country. What was shown on the video was a distorted version of a terrible, painful, but necessary response.”

He called the surgeon general up to describe the function of the seif-al-din pathogen. He was frank, calm, precise, and terrifying.

Then the president returned to the podium. “It’s sometimes difficult for us to grasp the realities of this disease because its very nature is one of deception. The parasites that drive the pathogen manipulate the central nervous system of the victims, making their bodies move and act in an aggressive manner. But in that state, at that stage of the disease, the person who once inhabited that body is dead. That person has been murdered by the cowards who released this disease. Because this disease is one hundred percent communicable and the mortality rate is also one hundred percent, the only possible response — the only safe, sane, and moral response — is to destroy the central nervous system. That is what the people of our joint specials forces team did. It was a tragedy for everyone involved. For the victims of the disease, our innocent brothers and sisters murdered by these terrorists; and for the brave members of our Special Forces.”

He paused.

“Now, imagine for a moment what they felt. Imagine how they felt. Having to open fire on what appeared to be their fellow citizens. Imagine the pain and the horror they felt.” He shook his head. “Those soldiers are victims, too. They have had injuries inflicted on them in this war. Emotional hurt that they will have to carry with them for the rest of their lives.”

Another pause. Even Collins held his breath.

“I am going to play a five-second clip from that incident. As you will see and, more important, what you will hear is a false audio track overlaid onto the actual audio. You will see that Mother Night intended to use this video to make everyone who watched it complicit in her attempt to drive us apart. We were able to separate that false soundtrack, and you’ll hear it and then the original.”

He nodded to a technician and a movie screen slid noiselessly down from the ceiling. The lights dimmed and the video began.

However, it was not the video from the subway.

It was something radically different, and only later would the White House cybercrimes team be able to determine that it was planted in the system using a type of computer intrusion alarmingly similar to MindReader.

The video was clearly taken from a camera mounted on a bedpost, and it was equally clear that one of the two people in the video was unaware that a camera was rolling. That was evident because no sane person would say the things he said.

“… and you’re sure you can get that video out to everyone?” asked the man.

“Of course,” said the woman.

“It’s got to go every-fucking-where. I mean it. I want the American people storming the White House with pitchforks and torches. I want them to hang that sanctimonious motherfucker by his balls. And then, by God, I am going to take this country back to its roots. Even if I have to roll tanks down Broadway, I’ll do whatever I have to do to bring America back on track. Born in fire, reborn in fire.”

“Oh,” said the woman, “you know what I think. Sometimes you have to burn to shine.”

There was more, but by then the video had done all the damage it could do.

The man in the video was William Collins.

The woman was Mother Night.

They were naked, in each other’s arms.

When the lights came on, everyone looked to where Collins had been standing, but he was gone.

The Secret Service eventually found him. It was the sound of the single gunshot that drew them to the spot where Collins lay, the barrel of a pistol in his mouth. His suit was blue, his shirt was white, and his blood was bright red.

Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen

When I heard the screams I knew we were too late.

I was already running toward the Marriott, pistol in my hand, a swarm of shooters behind me. People came running out of the hotel. Some of them were in costume, some weren’t. No one looked hurt but that didn’t mean anything. Not really. Even a small bite would do it. Or blood in their eyes or mouth. We’d have to trust to the techs at the barricades to make judgment calls. God help anyone who had so much as a cold sore, because no one was getting a break today. We were in hell, and nothing good happens in hell.

Top and Bunny flanked me as I raced toward the Marriott entrance, and the rest of Echo was seeded through the crowd. People screamed when they saw us and they scattered like birds. Some of them ran back up the steps to the hotel. Others ran to the Hyatt and more ducked down behind cars. A few stood there, stupid and immobile with shock, as people with guns ran past them.

Overhead, I could hear the choppers coming. We had every military bird we could muster. Sixty-three helos. Apaches, Black Hawks, Vipers. All of them heavy with missiles and rockets, machine guns leering out of side doors. Behind and in front of me the National Guard was slamming the barricades shut. The crowd surged toward them and I prayed the barricades would hold.

The crowds flooding out of the hotel were like a tidal surge and we had to fight our way up each step, bashing people aside. Some of them were so intensely terrified that they didn’t even react to the guns in our hands. They just wanted out.

Yeah, and we were trying to get in. How smart were we?

Bunny got in front of me and literally smashed people out of our way. We finally got inside the hotel and that’s when we realized just how bad things were.

People lay bloody on the ground, trampled by the panicked crowds. Some of them were clearly dead. Others lay crippled and screaming.

Down the hall and around the corner the screams were even louder, though, and we fought our way through the human tide. We were battered and struck and careened into and tripped by people who were so much less afraid of us and our guns than they were of whatever was happening inside the atrium.

I realized suddenly that Top and Bunny were no longer with me. Somehow, the crowd had separated us. Ahead, though, I could see a woman standing on a marble wall, waving her arms and shouting at the crowd. Mother Night — but too far away for me to take a shot. All around her was a scene that my mind refused to connect with the real world. After everything I’ve seen, this was too much, too far, too strange. People dressed in Starfleet costumes, people dressed as Dorothy Gale and her companions, people dressed as characters from video games I couldn’t even name, were eating each other.

It was already far too late.

There were scores of infected.

Hundreds.

And more people died every moment, dragged down and bitten, their flesh torn away, blood everywhere. Screams and pain everywhere.

Horror everywhere.

I tapped my earbud. “Echo Team, look for Mother Night. If you see her, take the shot.”

If there were any replies, it was too loud for me to hear them.

I jumped up onto the lip of an abandoned information desk, trying to understand the pattern of this. Trying to see Mother Night.

And there she was, dressed like one of those fantasy characters in Japanese comics. Little-girl clothes recut as a statement of sexuality. I’d always thought that kind of thing crossed the line into some publicly acceptable species of pedophilia, a Lolita lust for the comic book crowd. Never my thing. I like my women grown up. Never had a desire to troll for sex on the school yard. But Mother Night was playing it up. She stood on a high marble wall, well above the grasping hands of the dead, dancing, waving her arms, laughing at the carnage she’d wrought.

It was at that moment that I realized Bug and Rudy had been right about her and I’d been as wrong as Aunt Sallie, Church, and Hu. Until that moment I’d been looking for clues to her endgame. The chaos in the streets had to be a distraction for something else. The bombs, the release of the pathogens, the videos, all of them had to be carefully planned components of some grand scheme. I’d become even more certain of it when we realized that Mother Night was Artemisia Bliss. She was the master strategist; someone as brilliant and calculating as her had to be working toward a goal every bit as big, as evil, as devastating as what the Jakobys and Hugo Vox had planned.

Had to be.

Nothing else made sense. Even Hitler had a damn plan.

But now I knew what Rudy had understood all along. He’d told us about it at her trial. Maybe Bliss herself had told Aunt Sallie and the others during her initial job interview. I read a transcript of that session, heard her talk about suicide attempts, about the need to stand out. To shine.

And hadn’t Mother Night told us over and over again?

Sometimes you have to burn to shine.

The whole world was watching now. The subway video was probably playing on every TV and computer monitor in the world. The bombs had been like finger snaps, making people turn to listen. The controlled releases of the plagues had set expectations of her power. The destruction of the CDC and the total pathogenic pollution of the Locker were not the result of bungled attempts to secure the bioweapons. She already had what she needed. She used the CDC to kill Samson Riggs and tried to killed me and Echo at the Locker. Perhaps if the Warehouse in Baltimore hadn’t been destroyed last year, resulting in all DMS field offices tripling their security, she might have tried to take out the Hangar.

Maybe she knew that she couldn’t take on Mr. Church and Aunt Sallie in head-to-head battle. Or, more likely, she left them alone so they could be her witnesses. The most important witnesses. Sure, there have to be witnesses for something to have importance. Church and the others had to see her win and know that they lost. That was the end of the equation.

That was her endgame right there.

So what was this? What was it Bug and Rudy thought was going to play out here?

Sometimes you have to burn to shine.

If you’re the one who’s burning, what’s left afterward?

Only the memory of that brilliant light.

Mother Night stood above the crowd, literally atop the wall, and figuratively as the conductor of the mad symphony playing out below.

I raised my pistol and fired at her. Handguns are great at close range but they suck ass beyond fifty yards and she was all the way across a sea of the living, the dying, and the hungry dead. I fired anyway.

For a moment I thought the gods of war had granted me their grace, because she jerked sideways. Then I realized that the bullet had hit the wall nearby and she flinched from the point of impact. She crouched, looking wildly around, and I think she spotted some of my people fighting their way through the crowd. A moment later she was gone, leaping down behind the wall, out of sight.

So I did the same thing, jumping from the information counter and diving into the crowd. I was still mostly in an area of screaming people caught in a human gridlock as they fought to flee and in their panic became the enemies of survival for everyone. Bodies lay trampled everywhere. Small knots of people huddled together in corners. I saw several people standing stock-still, their eyes glazed, colorful candy wrappers in their hands. No idea what that was all about, but I had a bad feeling I’d find out.

Here and there were pockets of resistance. A bartender held his ground behind the counter and used heavy bottles of top-shelf alcohol as clubs, smashing them over the heads of a mass of infected who were trying to crawl past him to get at several cowering patrons. A fat man in chain mail was swinging a sword, except that the sword was still in its sheath, held in place by a peace bond. Even so, he swung the weapon like a cudgel and he laid about him with a will. There were several dead or crippled walkers piled around him. Thirty feet past him, three police officers stood back-to-back in a shooting triangle, firing at anyone who came near them.

But these pockets could not last.

Did not last.

I saw one of the cops begin to reload an empty pistol, and in the few seconds it took for him to drop his magazine and swap in a new one, a teenager in a dark hoodie threw himself at the cop in a tackle that knocked all three of the officers down. Four more infected piled atop them.

Somewhere off to my left came the big boom of Bunny’s combat shotgun. Again and again. Then more gunfire to my right and behind me. Echo Team and the rest of the shooters. But the crowd was so thick I couldn’t see any of them.

I began fighting my way toward Mother Night. I needed to stop her. She was the driving force for everything that was happening and I needed to switch her off.

I tried to push my way toward her, but a new surge swept me sideways.

I thought I heard someone speaking through my earbud. I pressed the bud deeper into my ear and caught some of it. “… streets secure … crowd surge … need more trucks to block…” Then a note of rising panic. “They’re out! They’re out! I have walkers on … oh God!”

And then a different voice.

“… going weapons hot…”

I recognized that voice. The pilot of my own Black Hawk.

Even through the roar of the crowd I could hear a new and terrible sound. The thunder of heavy-caliber automatic guns all around the buildings.

God help us.

The infected had escaped the building and the helicopters were opening up on the crowd.

Cursing, I tried to shoulder into the melee. A shrill scream made me spin, and a walker had a woman dressed as an elf and he was trying to bite her. She had her forearm jammed under his chin, but he was much bigger. I bashed him in the temple with my pistol butt, and as he staggered off I jammed my barrel against the bridge of his nose and blew off the back of his head. Blood sprayed the face of a second walker, momentarily blinding him. I shattered his knee with a side-thrust kick and as he fell I axe-kicked the side of his neck. He landed in a sprawl, his head tilted awkwardly on a shattered spine.

When I turned to help the girl up, she was gone.

I heard Mother Night shouting to the crowd, making crazy jokes with pop-culture references that were lost on me. I elbowed a bleeding man aside and turned to look. She was above me, leaning over the rail from the fifth floor. No idea how the hell she got up there. She must have had some of her anarchist crew with her to help clear out an elevator car. I raised my gun to fire again, but a powerful arm came whipping out of the crowd and slapped my pistol from my hands. The shock jerked my finger and there was a single bang, but I had no idea where the bullet went. As I lost the gun I spun toward the asshole who’d hit me. He was a real bull of a guy in a hooded sweatshirt and a rubber gorilla mask. He went to grab the front of my shirt, but I slapped his reaching hand away and drove a two-knuckle punch into his short ribs.

I might as well have been punching a brick wall for all the good it did.

He laughed.

The son of a bitch actually laughed.

So I tried to change his mood with a palm-heel shot across the chops that knocked the gorilla mask from his face.

The blow did not drop the man, as I had every right to expect.

It didn’t even stop him from laughing.

The face that leered down at me was brutish, almost a match for the mask I’d just knocked away. A heavy brown, flat nose, overgrown incisors.

It was a Berserker.

But it was far worse than that.

The skin was a pallid gray-green and he stank like rotting meat. Drool ran from the corners of his mouth, and in that bubbling spit I could see tiny maggots writhing and twisting. Its eyes, though, were filled with a terrible awareness and a dreadful hunger.

The Berserker was a Generation Twelve walker.

Oh shit.

Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

Ludo Monk stared at her for several seconds, his eyes seeming to go in and out of focus.

“Pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Mother didn’t say anything about you being pregnant.”

“No one knows.”

“Joey-boy doesn’t know?”

“No one knows. Please … don’t hurt my baby.”

“No,” said Monk. “You’re lying to me. You don’t even have a baby bump. This is a cheap trick and I’ve heard crap like this before.”

“It’s the truth! Please, you don’t have to hurt me.”

“Yeah,” said Ludo Monk, “I’m pretty sure I do. That’s how it works. Baby or no baby. That’s what Mother Night needs me to do. It’s just your good luck that I’m giving you a choice. A quick bullet or the needle. But I got to tell you, I don’t think you should even consider the second option, because then you’re this ugly monster lady and when Joey-boy comes home you’ll get all bitey on him, and that’s a downhill slide. There’s no happy ending to that romance, you see where I’m going with this?”

“You can just leave,” begged Junie.

“We covered that already. Don’t make me make this decision myself. I’m already pissed that I wasn’t allowed to do this my way. I hate personal interaction, and you’re sitting there with those big eyes and those sun freckles looking all innocent and wholesome, and I’m going to feel like a total piece of shit either way. At least the bullet is quick and clean.”

“Listen to me,” said Junie, trying to keep her voice level, “if you know who I am, then you know who Joe is.”

“Sure.”

“Do you know about him? Do you?”

“Yeah. He’s crazier than I am, and I’m really out there.”

“Do you know what he’s capable of?”

“Yup.”

“Do you know what he’s done to other people? People like criminals and terrorists.”

“Yeah, he’s killed more people than God. That’s why Mother Night wanted him taken out of the picture. But now I hear that he slipped her punch. So if she can’t kill him, then she wants to do something worse.”

Junie’s heart suddenly lifted. Joe was alive. Whatever that woman had tried to do, he’d escaped or survived it.

“If you hurt me,” she said, “Joe is going to find you and he will—”

A knock on the door interrupted her words. She and the man both froze, eyes darting to the door.

And in that moment Junie moved.

She screamed at the top of her lungs, slapped the syringe out of the man’s hand, and drove her shoulder into his chest, driving him backward into the desk. The movement was much faster and harder than either of them expected, and as they hit the edge of the desk the force spun them around and toward the floor. He tried to club her with the gun and break his fall and grab her all at the same time, and he failed in all three things. The gun struck the carpet, bounced, and hit the door with a thud. Then he and Junie crashed to the floor. His hand darted out and snagged her hair, and he jerked back to try to break her neck.

The hair came away and he fell back as Junie flung herself sideways.

Without her hair she was bald except for a dusting of peach fuzz on her scalp.

A fist pounded on the door and Junie screamed for help as the man lunged for the fallen gun. She tried to kick it away, missed, and he snatched it just as the door burst inward in a spray of wood splinters and twisted metal.

Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

The Berserker swung a fist at me with blinding speed but I got an elbow up in time to save my skull from being crushed. The force was incredible, though, and it plucked me clean off the ground and hurled me into a group of people trying to flee the carnage. We all landed badly and I felt something break under me. Someone’s leg, I think.

I scrambled to my feet, shoving fleeing conferees out of my way. There was a man dressed as Thor from the movies and I grabbed his hammer, hoping to smash the zombie Berserker into roach paste. I was already in full motion, taking the hammer, swinging it, aiming, hitting, and all the time realizing that the hammer was made out of rubber and plastic. It exploded into empty debris. I would have done more damage blowing him a kiss.

He snarled at me, showing his big gorilla teeth.

Shit.

Generation Twelve of the seif-al-din allows the infected to retain their full mental capacities even while the rest of the body begins a slowed-down process of decay. If there were a worst-case scenario for a zombie plague, genetically altered supersoldiers would be way at the top of my list.

He swung a punch that would have turned my head into pulp.

I got under it and hooked a punch into his groin.

It staggered him, just a little. He stumbled back a step and roared at me.

Roared.

Yeah.

You’d think a guy like me wouldn’t be fazed by something like that. You’d be wrong. Like I said, mutant zombie supersoldier.

Find a comfortable corner of your mind for that to curl up in.

But …

Damn if it didn’t feel like my knuckles punched actual balls instead of combat padding.

Inside my head the Killer let loose with his own roar. Fuck it. If this monster wanted to fight dirty, then I was willing to get all sorts of dirty. Maybe he thought he didn’t need armor with the seif-al-din cooking in his bloodstream.

I snatched my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket. It was the third one I’d had this weekend. The first was in a barrel along with my Hammer suit, either still down in the subway or in storage wherever they put toxic waste. The second was with my second Hammer suit in the decontamination unit at the Locker. This one was borrowed from Bird Dog, the DMS logistics utility infielder. He had good taste in knives, too. A Wilson Tactical Rapid Response knife with a three-and-three-eighths stainless blade. Not a lot of reach but it was so light that it moved at the same speed as my hand. My hands are very fucking fast.

I moved in and left, ducking low and slashing at the side of his knee, feeling the tendon part. I don’t care if you’re a muscle freak, a zombie, or a mutant, you need your leg tendons. He went to one knee but chopped at my head with his elbow. Bastard was fast, but I took the impact on my shoulder and used the force to propel me forward and out of range. I banged into a walker who was biting Captain Kirk. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him backward and down. The back of his head hit the edge of a bar table. I sidestepped the mess. Captain Kirk wandered off, bleeding and screaming and weeping.

The Berserker rushed me on wobbling legs, arms wide to scoop me into a crushing embrace. I met his rush with a flat-footed stamp-kick to the front of his hips. The effect is like running into a fireplug — everything below the waist stops, everything above the waist cants sharply forward. As his head bowed forward I jammed a palm against his shoulder and for a split second he was frozen in that bent-forward position. A split second was all the time I needed to bury my blade into the top of his skull. I knew the right spot. The fontanelle. That area of the skull that’s soft on babies and never quite firms up. I drove the knife in all the way to the hilt and then wrenched it a quarter turn.

The Berserker died. Right then. There was no death spasm, no struggle to stave off the reaper. He simply stopped living. Everything that made him a monster, a person, and a threat was gone. I stepped back and let the fall of his body help me pull my knife free.

“On your six!” I heard someone shout, and I turned to see Montana behind me. She was bleeding from a broken nose, and one eye was puffed nearly shut. She had her rifle up and fired three shots past me, dropping two walkers.

“Give me your sidearm,” I snapped, and she pulled her Glock and handed it to me along with two magazines. There was considerable gunfire to our right, and we turned to see Bunny plowing the road with round after round from his drum-fed shotgun. Noah was with him, but there was no sign of Top.

Outside, the sound of machine-gun fire was intensifying.

The look in the eyes of my team was probably the same as what had to be in mine. Despair and fury in equal measure.

“Mother Night’s up on the balcony. Where’s Sam?”

Bunny jerked his head to the far side of the lobby. “Lost him and Top somewhere over there. They saw her running for the elevators with one of those Berserker assholes.”

“The Berserkers are infected with Gen. Twelve.”

“Well … fuck me blind.”

A voice began speaking in my ear and I covered my ears to listen while my team circled up, their backs to me, firing into the crowd to try to stop the unstoppable tide.

“Deacon to Cowboy…”

“Go for Cowboy.”

“The infection is in the streets. We are working to contain the spread. Have you acquired the target?”

“Not yet.”

“Give me an assessment. Can the civilians inside that hotel be saved?”

It was such a hard, cruel, necessary question.

“If they’re in their rooms, maybe. I think we’re losing the lobby.”

“Be advised that the president and the governor have authorized sterilization of that building if there is no hope of preserving significant numbers of uninfected.”

“Not yet, damn it.”

“Give me another option.”

“We need boots on the ground. Not out there — in here. Send in the damn cavalry.”

Church paused. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“And Mother Night may have video cameras in here.”

“She does,” said Church, “the feed is leaking to the Internet.”

“Shit. You got to find some way to—”

“Bug is close to cracking her system and is confident he will be able to jam all the cameras. I will alert you when that happens.”

“Make it fast. We’re going after Mother Night and I don’t want her gloating to the world.”

“Captain, listen to me,” said Church, “we’re not interested in an arrest. Not this time.”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“Then good hunting, Captain. And God bless.”

He was gone and I looked at the lobby. Maybe I was asking for help for something that was already helpless. But damn it, this was still a fight. There were still more people uninfected than transformed.

And I needed to get to Mother Night. Goddamn it, I needed to look into her eyes and determine for myself if there was any shoe left to drop. Was this slaughter what she wanted or did she still have one last game to play?

“We need to get to the elevators,” I yelled. “Clear me a path. Right now.”

Bunny swapped in a new drum and everyone fished for fresh magazines. The elevators were thirty yards away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

Even so, we had to try.

We raised our weapons at the seething crowd and began firing.

I would like to say that the only people we killed were infected. I would dearly love that to be true.

But that would only be a lie.

Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

As the door burst open, Ludo Monk snatched up the pistol, turned, fired without aiming. The figure coming through the doorway moved with blinding speed. There was a second shot. A third.

A scream.

No, screams.

A woman’s scream. High, shrill, filled with pain and terror.

And his own voice. Nearly as high, screeching so loud that the sound of it burned away the clouds in his mind, leaving him clearheaded for a moment. No intruding voices, no peculiar patterns of thought. In that moment he could see and hear and understand everything with a clarity that was so rare and …

And lovely.

It was beautiful. Never once in his entire life had there been such fidelity of vision and perception. Never before had something stilled the voices in his head. Not even the pills did it this completely.

Monk tried to understand what was happening.

He turned his head and it moved very loosely on his neck. Too loosely. He knew that his neck was not broken, yet the muscles were strangely slack.

“What—?” he asked.

A figure moved from left to right in front of him. Tall, slender, female, and familiar. He didn’t know her name, did he?

Something …

Something musical.

He was sure of it.

“M — Mother—?” he asked, hoping it was her. Needing it to be her.

There was no answer. Not to his question. But the woman with the musical name was speaking. Shouting.

Monk turned his head again, trying to see who was talking. Why was it so hard to remember who was in the room with him? He knew that he should know this. It was just a few moments ago.

A few moments.

Everything had changed in those moments.

His mind became clearer and yet he could not fill it with names or meaning.

The woman was kneeling now and he saw her bend down over something …

No.

Over someone.

Another woman.

A woman who seemed to be lying on a red blanket.

Or floating in a red pool.

Monk could not tell which, but as he watched the blanket or pool it grew larger and larger.

“Mother?” he asked again.

The women ignored him. Neither was his mother.

He heard the tall woman yelling something.

“Junie! Junie, stay with me. Stay with me…”

That was funny to Monk because it was clear that the other woman, the bald woman, wasn’t trying to go anywhere. So strange.

The lights in his mind began to go out as if someone were walking through a room and flipping switches. The darkness was soft and cool and it covered him completely.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

It took two or three thousand years for us to fight our way across the lobby. Halfway there, Lydia joined us. She had a Sig Sauer in one hand and a Glock in the other and her face was flecked with powder burns.

We kept going, kept fighting.

This was so much worse than the slaughter outside the Ark chamber down in the Locker and worse even than the subway slaughter. Some of these people stared at us in horror, the hurt of betrayal in their terrified eyes. Some of them begged us for help even as their eyes began to glaze from infection. There were people of all kinds there. Adults of every age. Children.

Tears burned like acid in my eyes as I fired.

Then we reached the elevator. The door was jammed open by a knot of corpses and three walkers who crouched over them, feeding messily.

“Yo! Dickheads!” yelled Montana. Their heads jerked up and she blew them back against the wall and out of this version of hell. Bunny grabbed the dead and flung them into the lobby, tripping two other walkers who were rushing us from behind. Before I could bring my gun up, the two walkers pitched sideways, red spray blowing from the sides of their heads. I never even heard the shot and I wasted one moment looking around for the shooter. Had to be Sam, but I couldn’t see him.

We crowded into the elevator.

The lights on every floor were lit and at each stop we had to shove back the living and the dead. It was as heartbreaking as it was terrifying.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can…” began Montana, her voice low and fragile, but then she stiffened. “No,” she snapped, directing it at me or herself, or both. “No.”

We reloaded.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “If there had been some other way to ease you into this. Or to let you know this is what we did…”

“No,” she said again, and there was a bright — almost fevered — ferocity in her eyes. “This has to be done. If not us, who?”

Behind her, Noah laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hooah.”

“Hooah,” echoed Bunny, Lydia, and I.

The doors opened and we stepped out onto a balcony that was completely crowded with the infected. There were at least five Berserkers among them, towering like titans above the throng of ordinary walkers. Beyond the Berserkers, standing against the balcony wall, was Mother Night.

The crowd of the dead let out a deafening moan of raw, unending hunger, and rushed at us from both sides.

Once more we formed a shooting line, Bunny and Noah facing forward, Lydia and Montana facing behind us, and me looking for a way to get to Mother Night. I had the irrational feeling that this was actually hell. The real hell. And it would be nothing but this. Red slaughter and the roar of guns, blood and pain and death.

Some of the infected seemed to be whole, without bites or marks to indicate how they’d died. And I recalled the woman I’d seen downstairs, looking like she was on the edge of becoming a walker. I remembered the candy wrapper in her hand. There were other wrappers, and plenty of unopened candies down there on the floor. It didn’t require a leap of genius intellect to come up with a theory on that. The seif-al-din pathogen could easily be added to food, or injected into a tasty piece of chocolate. It fit with the “love me while I destroy you” vibe that Artemisia Bliss had constructed within her Mother Night persona.

I saw an opening and left the shooting line, using the borrowed pistol and knife to carve a path to Mother Night.

A Berserker saw me trying to do an end run around the pack of dead and he began wading toward me, pushing walkers out of his way. He gave me one of those mind-numbing roars. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband but he came at me with those big, bone-cracking hands.

“Dumb ass,” I said, and shot him through the eye.

Behind him, a second — perhaps smarter — Berserker raised a handgun and fired three shots at me, forcing me to dive behind a metal trash can while I returned fire. I hit him in the chest, which did nothing to the undead son of a bitch, and when he opened his mouth to laugh at me, he vomited blood, tissue, and a high-powered rifle slug.

Sam.

I still couldn’t see him but right them I wanted to kiss him. If I had a sister I’d let him marry her.

Two other Berserkers closed in on me, both firing handguns. A bullet punched me in the chest and knocked me back. The Kevlar stopped it, but from the sudden, grinding pain I knew that something was broken. When I raised my gun, the pain jumped to the top of the scale and I realized that the raw impact of the Berserker’s bullet had cracked my sternum.

But a split second later I saw the Berserker wheel away as a dark form rose up from the press of bodies. There was a flash of silver, over and over again, and the Berserker seemed to fall apart. Then I saw Top moving away from him, two sturdy fighting knives in his fists. He had no gun and the front of his Kevlar vest was torn open and hung down, exposing brown skin crisscrossed with old scars and purpled with new bruises.

The battle raged on.

Mother Night saw me coming and she turned and ran, but it looked less like she was fleeing in panic and more like a catch-me-if-you-can flirtation.

So I ran after her.

I fired my gun dry and swapped and fished for my last magazine. Fired and fired.

Then I was at the edge of the crowd. I stabbed a walker in the eye and flung his body behind me to slow down pursuit. The balcony curved around and I pelted after Mother Night, though each step was screaming agony. My chest felt like it was on fire.

Then I rounded the next corner and there she was.

She’d climbed up onto the rail and had her arms spread wide to steady herself. Four of her small video cameras were mounted on the walls, their lenses aimed at her, little red lights burning.

Bliss turned to me and blew a kiss. “Hello, Joe.”

In my earbud I heard another voice. Bug. He said, “It’s done.”

I slowed to a stop, gun pointed, waiting for her last trick. “Hello, Artie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What would you prefer? Psycho Bitch? ’Cause that seems to work.”

She actually smiled. “Been called worse.”

“Yeah, me, too. Side effect of being a functional psychotic.”

“You should know,” she agreed.

“Yup.”

She nodded to the gun. “Aren’t you going to shoot me?”

“Good chance of it.”

There was a playful twinkle in her eyes. “But—?”

“Need to ask a question first.” I said. “Why?”

Mother Night seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. “Why? You mean you really haven’t figured it out yet?”

“I’ve got some theories.” The pain flared in my chest and I winced.

“You bit?”

“Broken sternum. Stood too close to a bullet.”

“Not bit?”

“Nope.”

“Mm. Ah, well. Can’t have everything.”

“Seems you got everything you were after,” I said, making it casual. “Or is there still a cherry you’re looking to put on top of it.”

The question seemed to push some unusual buttons in her psyche, because a whole series of emotions wandered across her face. Doubt, happiness, triumph, anger, and even something that appeared to be innocent wonder. Finally, her brow wrinkled and she said, “I thought you would understand, Joe.”

“Really? Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one crazier than me.”

“I might be nuts, kid, and I might have a whole committee shouting inside my head, but I never wanted to burn the world down.”

Her frown deepened. “Neither do I.”

I gestured to the madness down in the atrium. “You tried to release a doomsday weapon. Surely at some point you looked up doomsday in the dictionary.”

She cocked her head to listen to the sound of gunfire from the swarm of helicopters. “They’ll stop the infection. Even if they have to burn Atlanta to the ground, they’ll stop it. There was never any doubt about that.”

“What if we hadn’t figured out that this was your big finale?”

She shrugged. The action caused her to wobble on the rail, but she regained her balance. “Whoa. But, no … I left you enough clues. Step by step there was enough for the DMS to figure it out in the right order and at the right time. Everything happened exactly right.”

“Really? You’re standing on a rail and, honey, there is no way out. And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t bring a pair of handcuffs.”

“Of course not. Terminate with extreme prejudice. That’s the phrase you guys like to use. Very manly, very macho.”

“Yeah, it makes our dicks hard. You going somewhere with this? Is there some big dramatic speech you want to make? Any last shoe to drop to prove to us how smart you are and how dumb we are?”

“First, I know you’re smart. What would be the fun of winning against a group of morons. You, Church, Aunt Sallie, Willie Hu, Bug … you’re all the best. No one can stop you. You’ve proved it over and over again. The best of the best of the best.”

“Except for you.”

“Except for me.”

“So … we’re, what? We’re Moriarty to your Holmes?”

“Close enough.”

I nodded to the rail on which she stood. I lowered my gun, let it hang at my side. “And that’s the Reichenbach Falls? Am I supposed to climb up and plunge over with you in the big finish?”

“Oh, would you?”

“Fuck you.”

She sighed. “Hey, a girl can ask.”

We actually smiled at each other. For just a moment.

Then she said, “Holmes killed Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. His archenemy fell and Holmes survived. Except that’s not how this plays out. I’ve already killed you.”

“What?”

“Not physically. No … after everything that’s happened, I’m beginning to think that you can’t be killed. You’re like James Bond. You always walk away, even if you’re busted and broken. You survive and live to fight another day.”

I said nothing, waiting, cringing for what she was going to say next, now that we were really up to it.

“The only way I could kill you was to hurt you, Joe,” she said. “I read your files. I know what happened when you were a teenager, what turned you into the maniac, the killer you’ve become. I believe that if something like that happened again, it would push you all the way over the edge. All the way. You’d be like me. Maybe worse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I hope you loved her, Joe,” she said. “I hope you loved her with all your heart.”

I felt a sudden, blinding pain in my chest that had nothing to do with a cracked sternum. I realized, I understood now. My body swayed as the enormity of it opened a big mouth in the floor that threatened to swallow me whole.

“Junie…?” I whispered.

Mother Night’s red mouth widened into a huge, insane grin of absolute triumph.

“I win,” she said. “Everyone in the world is looking at me right now. Everyone. You didn’t defeat me, Joe. Not you or your goon squad. Not Willie Hu or Aunt Sallie. Not Bug and not even Mr. Church. I made you all play my game exactly the way I wanted it. You wouldn’t even be standing here if I hadn’t allowed it to happen. I’m Mother Night,” she said triumphantly, “and I win this game. There’s nothing else left for me. No worlds left to conquer, because I beat this one. I did what no one else could ever do. And everyone watching me right now will know that Mother Night won.”

I smiled at her. Despite the pain in body and soul, despite the terror that wanted to crush me down to my knees, I smiled.

“No, Artie,” I said, “you don’t get to win.”

Doubt flickered in her eyes. “What?”

“Look at your cameras,” I said.

She did.

All the little red lights were dark. “Bug hacked your system. He figured it out and cracked it like a walnut. The video was cut before you opened your mouth, so no one heard your big speech.”

She pulled her sunglasses off and let them fall over the rail. Her eyes were huge.

“Here’s how this ends,” I said. “You spent so much time building up the Mother Night character that it’s become a symbol. You used a couple of doubles already. At the Cyber Café and elsewhere. People think Mother Night is a group, not a person. And we’re going to make sure that’s all anyone ever knows. A terrorist organization created a fake identity and various nondescript, faceless agents assumed the role of Mother Night. There will never be a real Mother Night. No one will ever know that a woman named Artemisia Bliss ever existed. MindReader is already systematically erasing all records of you. You think you won? Fuck you. We’re going to edit you out of the world. You’re going to be forgotten. You’re going to be the nothing you deserve to be. None of the victims or the survivors will ever know you even lived.”

Her eyes grew wider and wider and filled with tears. “You … you can’t … …”

“It’s already done,” I said. “You lose.”

I raised my gun and put two rounds through the center of her cold, black heart.

She fell backward and damned if there wasn’t a smile on her face as she plunged over the railing and fell.

All around me there were shouts and moans and the sound of gunfire. I heard none of it, saw none of it. All I could see or hear was the lingering image of her smile and the sound of my own screams.