Dogs of War

EPILOGUE

I sat on a picnic table and watched another wave of helicopters come in above the trees. Ghost lay on his side next to me, wrapped in field dressings, panting, weak. Alive. Rudy came out of a tent with two cups of coffee, handed me one, and sat down. I sipped the coffee.

“Tastes like horse piss,” I said.

“And you’d know that how?” he asked.

I drank some more.

Everything hurt. Inside and out. But, despite what Rudy promised would be a mild concussion, some cracked ribs, a sprained wrist, and more cuts than I can count, he said I was fine.

“Fine” being a relative term.

The helos touched down in the field and troops deployed. National Guard and DMS. Another fifty or sixty of them to add to the two hundred already on the ground. The only way you could tell the difference between our people and the Guard was that the DMS agents were in Hammer Suits and the Guardsmen all wore white hazmat gear.

All along one side of the camp’s main road were rows of bodies under sheets. Every single one of the scientists, every soldier with chips, every staff member. Those who hadn’t killed one another had been killed by the WarDogs. This was the world being brutally efficient.

I saw three figures climb down from one of the choppers. Two men, one taller than the other, and a woman. They spotted me and came running. Top and Bunny, and with them was a battered, bloody, smiling Tracy Cole.

Also alive.

Rudy put a hand on my shoulder.

I closed my eyes.

The cleanup is going to take years. Maybe a lot of years. That’s scary, but there are no shortcuts. After all, it took Zephyr Bain and her people years to set it all up.

MindReader had absorbed all of Calpurnia’s operating systems, all of her data. We now had to manage it, coordinating with governments that don’t like us, with tribal areas, in the face of regional hatreds and class wars. We had to force a mutual cooperation or face a mutual destruction. There’s a civics lesson in there somewhere.

At first we didn’t know how big the operation was until Bug began dissecting Calpurnia’s data. This was massive, multinational, multigenerational, with tendrils digging down into the soil of the past. Zephyr Bain was an apprentice of the evilest, most corrupt, most destructive people I have ever met or even heard about.

“What happened to her?” I asked Rudy. “Was she born bad? Was she crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Nicodemus — or John the Revelator — was mentoring her since she was six, then did the kid ever have a chance to become anyone other than the maniac she turned out to be?”

He sipped his bad coffee. “It’s not that simple.”

Of course it wasn’t, and the truth might be so elusive we’d never catch it. Sometimes it is. Which sucks.

We went back to the DMS, and we lived inside the wasp nest of politics and culture shock that was the aftermath of this thing. We had to dig deep and take another look at the empires of the Seven Kings, the Jakobys, Mother Night, and others. Looking for anything we missed. Looking for seeds of hate buried in the collective soil of our global community. At least now we had a new and far more powerful MindReader to help. Unlike when we dismantled those other organizations, though, Calpurnia had given us the names and details of every single person who worked for Zephyr. The guilty, the questionable, and the innocent patsies. We had them all. Aunt Sallie said that this was going to create an entirely new kind of law, both prosecutorial and defensive. Whatever. Not my thing. I’ll read about it in the papers. Or maybe they’ll make a movie.

I had bigger fish to fry.

The death toll for Havoc could have reached four billion.

The actual number of people who died was 41,811. Some idiots on the news tried to spin that as a victory, saying that the world got lucky. That God’s mercy was felt. Blah-blah-blah.

I want to punch them. I want to knock their caps out and blacken their eyes and drag them by the hair to the funerals, to the mass graves, to the houses of families all over who are sitting in silent homes, clutching their grief because it is all they have left of their loved ones.

Forty-one thousand people died. Whole families, whole towns.

Three and a half billion people were infected and required some level of medical attention, monitoring, and care. The cleanup will cost five trillion dollars.

Lucky?

Go fuck yourself.

Mercy?

Where?

What happened to Nicodemus?

Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve tried many times to get a straight answer out of Church, but he won’t be pinned down. All he’ll say is “We won.”

Which isn’t really an answer, is it?

Bug’s gotten very weird on us.

Not because he’s the hero of this thing — which he unquestionably is. No, I think the knowledge that computer consciousness is a reality has him freaked. He spends absurd amounts of time writing code for Q1 that no one else ever gets to see.

One time I said that it was kind of sad that Calpurnia was actually dead. He looked at me very funny and smiled. Just a little. But he didn’t say anything.

As for the DMS?

We’re back, baby. With MindReader more powerful than ever, we’ve been racking up one win after another. Echo Team is still shy of warm bodies, but there are a couple of cops Cole recommended. Pete Smith and Brenden Tate. Standup guys, and so far they’re kicking ass in training. Just need a new sniper and we’ll be back to operational strength. Though, Sam tells me that Duffy is one hell of a shot, so maybe all our scouting is done.

Lydia Rose is back to work. She has some scars to brag about and her arm is out of the cast. It’s possible that I have the toughest secretary in the free world.

Junie is home. Rudy is home with Circe and the baby.

Oh, and somehow Banshee, Rudy’s dog, is pregnant. Not sure how that happened, but I have a bad feeling some of the pups are going to have white fur. Lilith, Violin, and Circe will probably want to kill me, but what the hell.

On the first of July, I flew back to Baltimore to see my brother and his family.

Em seems to think it was all a dream. She hardly ever has nightmares anymore. Ali has enrolled her daughter in jujutsu classes. She studies, too. So does Sean.

My brother and I have had a lot of long talks since this began. They started at Uncle Jack’s funeral, and we’ve talked almost every day since. I thought all of this would drive him away. Drive us farther apart. That’s not what happened, though. I think Sean got to see enough of what I do to understand how it’s changed me. And I see him — the cop, the husband, the father, the man — and I respect him more than I ever did. Maybe this whole “brother” thing will work out for us. Time will tell, but I like our odds.

And Lefty?

Mr. Church has a lot of friends in the industry.

A lot of them.

It was a long road, and there’s a chance that Lefty won’t ever pitch in the major leagues.

But then again he might.

Kid throws a hell of a fastball. Even I can’t hit it. Even when I try.