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
The Locker
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility
Highland County, Virginia
Sunday, September 1, 1:02 p.m.
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
Westin Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia
Sunday, September 1, 1:50 p.m.
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
Georgia Airspace
Sunday, September 1, 2:22 p.m.
“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.