Empire's End (11 page)

The other cops would be positioned in the
backstage area and throughout the audience. “Guess I won’t be
seeing you out there, partner,” Voorhees said to Halstead.

“Let’s grab lunch after this is over. Then
we’ll head into the Red.”

“The what?”

“Lake district. It’s red on the city map.
Keep up, Voorhees.”

He smiled at that.

* * *

Backstage at the amphitheater, Georgia
Manning looked over her notes, memorizing the lies, affirming them
in her mind so that they’d come out of her mouth as gospel truth.
She told herself it was necessary; the airfield had to be
completed.

And why should you feel bad for lying to
these people? You’ll be leaving them behind, won’t you?

She had tried not to think about that. She
had hoped not to acknowledge the great betrayal until it was over
and done with. Gillies had forced her into this damn speech. Why
couldn’t he have taken care of this? He was the sociopath who loved
playing man of the people. This was his grand plan—

And you’ve gone along with it like an
obedient dog.

She closed her eyes, swallowed the doubt and
the shame, and composed herself for her public appearance.

Something sharp stuck her in the back. She
turned with a loud cry. “What was that?”

“Sorry,” came the reply. Manning rubbed her
back with a scowl, then returned to her notes. Jesus, that really
hurt. She’d have to find out which of the civvies shuffling around
behind her had done it. Might have been on purpose. A thankless
lot.

Out on the stage, Voorhees looked over the
thin crowd. Maybe a hundred fifty people. He’d anticipated a real
security issue when Casey pulled every officer off the street for
this.

Manning came out from the backstage area to
sparse applause. She moved slowly, hands on her lower back, looking
more than a little out of sorts. Voorhees tried to catch her eyes,
but she looked right through him.

It hurts. It hurts a lot more than I first
thought. Oh God, it hurts...

Senator Manning stepped to the edge of the
stage. The crowd quieted down. Voorhees and Blake exchanged
concerned glances.

I don’t feel right... everything seems so
far away... it’s like I’m not really here.

Manning’s eyes were glazed over and half
shut. She let go of her back and slumped forward. She was going to
fall. Voorhees moved quickly toward her.

I don’t... I’m not...

It doesn’t hurt anymore...

I don’t hurt anymore.

She fell forward.

Voorhees caught her arm and pulled her back,
lying her down on the stage. Blake rushed over, speaking into his
radio. “We’ve got a situation out here. The Senator’s down. I
repeat—”

The Senator’s eyes were closed, her body
limp. She felt like a corpse. Voorhees checked her pulse: none.

“Oh my God.”

Then she woke up.

She lunged at Voorhees’ arm, snapping her
teeth, and he stumbled back and fell on his ass and scrambled for
either his radio or his baton, he wasn’t sure, while the Senator
got to her feet and stared out at the crowd with dead eyes.

Murmurs turned to screams.

Manning ran at Blake, who dropped his radio
and swung out with his baton, cracking her over the head. She
stumbled, but continued headlong into him, and they both collapsed
in a tangle of thrashing limbs.

“VOORHEES!” Blake screamed. The other cop
looked up, just as he drew his baton... and he saw Manning tear a
thick strip of meat from Blake’s left forearm.

The amphitheater was in chaos. People threw
one another down toward the stage as they fled. Killian and
Halstead ran out from backstage and saw Blake running from Manning,
blood spurting from his arm.

Tackling Manning, Voorhees drove her face
first into the stage. He slammed the baton into the nape of her
neck. Why in the
fuck
didn’t he have his widowmaker? She
struggled beneath him with shocking strength, trying to claw his
legs and bite his wrists. He brought the baton down on her over and
over. He heard her skull give and felt his weapon sink into gray
matter. Still she fought, and hissed, and then she threw him off of
her back and off of the stage.

Manning rose with wild, feral eyes—Killian
smashed her mouth with her baton. Manning caught it in her claws
and wrenched it away from the cop. Halstead shoved Killian aside
and met the Senator’s broken, gnashing jaws with her own baton.
Black blood gushed forth.

Killian recovered her baton from the stage as
Voorhees climbed back up. Most of the audience was gone, save for
those frozen with terror.

Manning had been a lovely woman, poised and
painted and always ready to be presented to her constituents. Now
she was a gruesome parody of her former self, racing across the
stage like an animal and flying back as she was hit again, and
again, and again.

Blake was howling. Manning saw him lying
prone at the end of the stage and charged. Voorhees clipped her
knee with his baton and she went sprawling. Halstead and Killian
fell upon her, smashing her head into a lumpy pulp, sending bits of
bone flying and blood spewing from what remained of her face.

Her arms and fingers kept twitching. She was
still undead. But she’d been immobilized.

Other P.Os swarmed onto the stage, and Casey
came rolling down the center aisle, barking into his radio.

All was madness. Voorhees peeled off his
overcoat and shook the gore from it. Blake screamed in agony,
seeing Manning’s quivering corpse and knowing what he was to
become. Emergency services arrived, and the techs recoiled from
Blake when they saw his gaping wound.

“Oh God,” he wept, grabbing at Voorhees’ leg,
“I’m dead... Voorhees, I’m dead.”

The techs finally got up the nerve to
approach the man and set down their equipment, wrapping gauze
around his arm while they took his vitals. Blake just rocked back
and forth, shaking his head. “Dead. Dead. Deadeadead.”

The he saw the scalpel, wrapped in plastic,
in the tech’s treatment kit.

You can never know until it happens to you.
How you would react, what thoughts would race through your mind...
and what dark, primal instincts might take hold. Blake saw the
scalpel. There was no further thought. He snatched it and pushed
the blade through the plastic into his carotid and he dragged the
blade through his windpipe with a gurgling scream.

Voorhees watched numbly, his baton slipping
from his hand.

Killian shrieked and tried to grab the
scalpel, but she was far too late.

Halstead turned away with a shivering
grimace, a look that said she had seen it a dozen times before and
knew she would see it again.

Casey simply set down his radio and
sighed.

Blake hit the stage, and one of the techs
stifled the arterial spray with a rag and everyone sat in silence
as a man became a memory.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Killian said,
pale-faced, as she stood with the others in a hospital
corridor.

A door marked MORGUE opened, and Casey stuck
his head out. “Voorhees?”

“Why me?” Voorhees asked as he followed Casey
through the door.

“Because you saw her better than anybody
else.”
Except Blake
went unsaid.

Manning’s headless body was strapped to a
table in a brightly-lit room. A thin man with a crooked smile stood
over her, pulling on latex gloves. “I’m Doctor Zane,” the man said.
“Please direct any questions you may have to me, and I’ll ask the
deceased.”

Voorhees let that one go without comment and
stood silent while the doctor cut away the twitching subject’s
garments. Laying them open, Zane began prodding Manning’s flesh
with his fingertips, looking for the bite.

“Can you tell us how long she’d been
infected?” Casey asked. Zane shook his head. “Infection period
always varies. Still don’t know why. You know what they say,
though, about spiritual constitution. ‘The flesh is willing if the
spirit is weak.’”

“Do you really believe that?” Voorhees
asked.

“It’d make perfect sense,” Zane replied, “if
I believed in the spirit to begin with. But since I don’t, no.
That’s a load of crap.”

One at a time, he loosened the restraints of
Manning’s limbs and lifted them for examination. “The real question
is, if she’d been infected for long, why hadn’t she told
anyone?”

“Simple. She didn’t want to be sealed away in
quarantine to die.”

“Dead is dead,” Zane muttered. “I don’t
understand people.”

“She wanted to settle her affairs,” Casey
suggested. “Or maybe she was just hoping she wouldn’t turn. The
infected aren’t known for their rationality.”

“Well I’ll be.” Zane lifted Manning’s hips
slightly and called the P.Os over to his side of the table.

“Fresh puncture to the left lower back,” he
M.E. said. “And look at this...”

He produced a pair of tweezers and carefully
removed something from the small wound. “Looks like a bone
fragment.”

“There were bone fragments all over the place
out there,” Casey said.

“But that wound was small, and covered,” said
Voorhees. “How did bone get in there?”

“It was lodged in the meat,” Zane said. “My
guess is, it’s part of whatever made that wound.”

The room started to spin. Voorhees slammed
his hands down on the autopsy table. “
Wait.
”

He stepped back, taking in the sight of
Manning’s nude, twitching body. Then he said, “This was a
murder.”

Casey gaped at him. “How?”

Voorhees pointed to the tweezers in Zane’s
grip. “That bone is infected. It’s from a rotter.”

“She was
stabbed with infected bone?
”
Casey cried.

“Not bad,” Zane whistled.

“You can’t be serious,” protested Casey. “How
would the killer have known that Manning would turn on stage?”

“Maybe that wasn’t the plan,” said Voorhees,
“or at least it wasn’t
necessary
that she turn right there
at the amphitheater. She could have turned anytime... at a Senate
meeting, for example.”

“Manning was assassinated,” Casey
breathed.

“And we were forced to destroy her,” Voorhees
said grimly.

“Hey, don’t do that to yourself.” Zane patted
Manning’s clutching hand. “Remember—they’re not us.
Homo
inferis
, gentlemen. No longer human.”

He dropped the bone fragment into a bottle.
“I’ll test this for infection to confirm your theory. Good luck
finding the sicko who did this.”

Voorhees already had a suspect. But he knew
that neither Casey nor the Senators would like it.

Maybe this would be their wake-up call. Maybe
this would be the end for Meyer.

Adam awoke in flames.

He saw his charred arms and hands, black
fissures brimming with fire, and began rolling frantically back and
forth.

He was lying in the same street, only now it
was empty. Eviscerato had taken the dead.

It was midday; he must have been smoldering
for at least twelve hours. It was upon realizing this that the pain
hit him in a blinding wave.

GOD!
He could feel it throughout his
entire being. From the yawning open wounds where the heat had split
his skin to his very core. He writhed on the broken asphalt and
screamed to wake the dead.

The scythe. The general store.

He forced himself to his knees, new pain
knifing through his legs and back. It spiked through him and
exploded in his brain. He couldn’t see. He could only smell his
burning flesh.

He fell and rolled again, rolled over and
over until there was no way the flames couldn’t have been
extinguished; but the heat persisted, gnawing at every nerve in his
body, rushing over him in waves that made his fingers splay to
their widest point and his toes curl into his feet. He was a
brittle, blackened shell of a being. Why hadn’t they just torn him
apart?

Because they were thorough. Humans always
burned the undead to ash. It was the only way to be sure.

He got up again, throwing himself to the
sidewalk. He just needed to get inside the store... if, in fact,
they had left his scythe there.

But they couldn’t touch it. It would kill
them. Had they found some other way? Had the huge man pulverized it
with his hammer?

Pushing through the door, Adam crawled across
the floor, stopping every few feet to scream as renewed pain washed
over him. Would the pain ever end? Was he capable of healing? He
didn’t know!
I wish I were dead!

No. No! He couldn’t think like that. This
couldn’t be the end, a smoking husk lying on the street in some
godforsaken town that would never see life again. He had a mission.
He had purpose. And he had will.

He willed himself across the floor, feeling
for the blade. His fingers found it. He let out a defiant roar,
channeled the pain into his throat and forced it from his lips
until the walls seemed to shake.

Adam was able to stand. He limped across the
store and stumbled through the door into the sun.

The Omega stood at the end of the street,
shovel planted in the asphalt.

Adam pulled the straps over his arm and
secured the blade as best he could. The heat still crawled through
his nerves, blurring his vision. But he stood and faced his
nemesis.

The Omega pulled the shovel free. Adam ran at
him.

He was knocked back with a blow to the head
that made his ears ring. The world spun and swam around him; he
tried to regain his bearings, but-

The Omega slammed the shovel into his back
and, as he doubled over, brought it down on his neck like an
executioner’s blade. He felt it bite into his flesh and moaned.

The rotter grabbed the crisp tatters of
Adam’s suit and flung him headfirst into the ground. Asphalt
buckled. He was wracked with pain, paralyzed. He could only lie
there and feel the shovel raining new agony down on him.