Authors: Jonathan Maberry
Who knows?
Who cares?
He came awake all at once. A killer, a monster, a beast. Beside me I heard the sound of Ghost's snarl change, too, as the dogâin the presence of his true pack leaderâyielded control to the wolf within.
The hallway was narrow. Close quarters favors the few over the many.
It favors the savage over the civilized.
With a howl of inhuman fury and red delight, the Killer attacked, and the wolf charged with him.
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THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:45
P.M.
Top Sims heard the screams and forced himself up. He was covered with hot debris from where the microwave blast had destroyed Montana Parker. His skin was flash-burned and most of the hair on his head was singed down to the scalp. He had to wipe blood and soot from his eyes in order to see what was happening, but when he did see it Top could only gape.
Violin and Church had entered the fight.
Violin moved like a dancer in a ballet whose story was about the end of the world. She lunged and pivoted, swept and leapt, ducked and pirouetted with a grace that made what she did both beautiful and appalling. Men screamed as she opened them and let their futures spill out. The walls seemed to almost glow with the bright red that flew like paint from the edges of her knife.
Beside her was Mr. Church, and never once had Top seen the big man fight. Church looked too old and too bulky to move with any kind of speed. A man Top always thought was well past the prime of life, past the point where he could wade into a battle and do anything but become collateral damage. As he watched Church fight, Top knew how very wrong he was. Top had never seen anyone fight like that. It was not karate or kung fu. If the fighting style had a name, Top was sure that it would be clinical. Mathematical. It was the opposite of Violin's elegant destruction because Church fought with no visible sense of style. His movements were machinelike, cold, and ruthlessly efficient. They were equations of deconstruction that took the problem of an armed attacker and subtracted all of the things about the opponent that allowed him to be a threat. What was left was no man at all. It was a broken thing that was permitted to fall because even his usefulness as a shield was gone.
Violin's face bore a smile of savage delight, and it was clear that she enjoyed the art of combat. For her this was gorgeous and she wrote a symphony in the screams she coaxed from horrified throats. Church wore no expression at all, except a cold disapproval etched into the lines around his mouth. These men stood between Church and what he wanted. That was it, that was the extent of the emotional connection.
And they died.
Closers. Fierce and deeply trained. Armed and armored.
They outnumbered Violin and Church five to one.
And it did not matter at all.
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THE BLACK TENT
HOME OF THE MULLAH
ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND ASH-SHAM
MOBILE CAMP #7
SEPTEMBER 11, 12:46
A.M.
LOCAL TIME
The Mullah and his people bent forward to watch the flocks of drones fly from rooftops in New York and Philadelphia, in San Diego and Boston, in each of the ten cities. There were four operatives per city and each operative released ten drones. A total of four hundred tiny machines fitted with tubes of SX-56âwith the wrath of God.
The operatives were being released now, one by one, and the looks of confusion and horror on their faces were beautiful. The gathered warlords and generals saw them as the expressions of men and women who had been forced to do holy work and were now realizing it.
The Mullah knew different.
Or, at least, the Dreamer who squatted like an imp inside his mind knew different. The looks on those faces were fear and uncertainty, self-doubt and dread. They knew they had done something wrong, something bad, but they did not understand how or why. Most of them probably wouldn't even connect the launch of these drones to the power failure that was coming soon. So soon.
The Dreamer wished he could be there with each of them in the coming days to see how they reacted as the first news stories broke about the spread of a new and nearly untreatable form of a disease everyone in America thought was extinct. Seeing that would be nice, it would be fun.
But the Dreamer knew he would be too busy by then.
When the plague began sweeping the country, this fine and sterling nation would need the services of its greatest spy, its greatest warrior, its one unfailable hero.
While he slept in the back of his car in the parking lot of the Pierâslept and walked far in his dreamsâHarcourt Bolton, Senior, smiled the contented smile of a happy man.
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BOLTON HOUSE
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:46
P.M.
Microwave bursts turned the doorway into fire clouds of burning debris, but I ducked down and fired through the smoke. More by luck than skill I hit two of the Closers in the face; Ghost hit another with such force it drove the others back into the room. Harry Bolt fired his gun but God only knows what he was aiming at. Bullets binged and whanged down the hall, killing two of the overhead lights.
Santoro tried to shoot me but I was too close. I knew I couldn't kill him, because I needed something from him. That didn't mean I couldn't hurt him. I buried the barrel of the pistol against his belly and fired four shots. I figured he'd be wearing the same body armor, but at that range no protective padding in the world is going to keep you from feeling the foot-pounds of impact. It folded him in half. As he bent forward I kneed him in the crotch and then punched him four times in the face, breaking his nose, cracking an eyebrow. He'd beaten me once because someone had been in my head holding me back, keeping the Killer on a leash.
That wasn't going to happen now. Oh, hell no.
I swept his leg and hammered him to the concrete floor with an overhand knuckle punch to the floating ribs.
“Stay down,” I roared, then I grabbed Harry by the collar and flung him away from me. Inside the room Ghost was rolling around on the floor tearing red chunks out of a guy. A second man sat nearby trying to hold his throat in place, and failing. The other Closers were climbing to their feet, raising their guns, caught in a moment of indecision between killing Ghost and killing me.
One of them swung his gun toward Ghost's head, but I put two rounds through the man's face. Then I emptied the magazine into the others. When the slide locked back I used the gun to crush the throat of one of the others. That left two. There was no time to reload, no time to even draw my knife. Fuck it. I'd been training for moments like this since I was fifteen. If the Joe Ledger I'd been as a kid died the day those older teens attacked Helen and me, then the one who was born on that day has no mercy in his soul. Not in moments like these.
I leapt over a dying man and hit one of the two remaining Closers with a leaping palm shot on the point of the jaw that spun him halfway around, but it spun his head farther. Too far. He corkscrewed into the ground, dead or dying. The last man tried to make a fight of it. He lashed out with a short chopping roundhouse. One of those devastating Thai boxing kicks that would have shattered my leg had it landed right. But he put too much hip into it, trying for torque power instead of whipping snap. It should have been a follow-up move, or maybe it's that he's used to fighting slower opponents. I shifted right into the path and took his shin on my bent thigh. It hurt, sure. But in the middle of a fight it's not pain that mattersâit's damage, and he didn't do any. I did. I punched his forearm muscles hard enough to lame them, chambered, and short-punched him in the chest. That turned him and lifted his chin and I used the open Y of my other hand to smash him in the Adam's apple. He staggered backward, making dying fish sounds.
“Joe!” cried Harry, and I turned to see Santoro pulling him backward, one arm wrapped around the kid's throat, the other trying to reverse the grip on the gun he'd just ripped out of Harry's hand. I grabbed the guy whose throat I'd just crushed, spun him, and used him as a shield as I drove toward Santoro. The assassin fired five shots and each one of them pounded into the dying guy's back, but the undergarment kept them from passing through to me. The slide locked back just as Harry stamped down on Santoro's foot. The kid pivoted and drove an elbow into the man's face. Santoro stumbled back, stared at me as I threw my now-dead shield away, and then he turned and bolted down the hall.
I pelted after him, yelling back at Harry, “Get into the lab! Call Bug. Find the God Machine. Ghost, go with!”
Santoro ran from me and I ran after.
I caught up to him as he fumbled a swipe card through the slot on a reader to open the last door in the hallway. I hit him hard with a flying tackle and we both went crashing into the room.
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THE PIER
DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:46
P.M.
Top staggered out of the armory as Church came hurrying over. The big man's clothes were spattered with blood, his mouth hard, eyes filled with fire. Church knelt by Sam Imura and placed two fingers against his throat and raised an eyelid.
“He's alive.”
Top was closer to Brian Botley, but when he felt for a pulse he found nothing at all.
“Where's Bolton?” demanded Church.
Top licked his lips. “I ⦠haven't seen him.”
Church half turned to Violin. “Find him.
Go
.”
She leapt over the dead like a gazelle and vanished down the hall.
Church tapped the helmet he wore. “If you can walk, there's a duffel bag with more of these. It's in the hall outside of the conference room. Don't pick up a weapon until you put one on, understood? Bring me one for Sam, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Top was in no shape to run, but he ran anyway.
Church settled Sam against the wall and applied pressure to his wounds. Top came shambling back with the duffel bag, a helmet pushed down on his own burned scalp. He handed a cap to Church, who fitted it carefully over Sam's head. Then Church bent and picked up a fallen microwave pistol.
“Stay with him,” he said as he rose.
Top caught a brief glimpse of Church's face as he turned to continue his hunt. The man's expression was not the detached and mechanical face he'd worn when fighting the Closers. There was emotion now. There was desperation and there was hate. Few things frightened Top Sims. The look in Church's eyes did.
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CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE
BOLTON HOUSE
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:47
P.M.
The room we entered was one I had been in before. I knew it even as Santoro and I went crashing and thrashing along the floor, rolling among lengths of pipe, knocking over worktables and scattering tools. The chamber was massive, and from the leftover fixtures on the walls I could tell that this used to be the Bolton family bowling alley. A place of fun, a place to relax.
Except now the room was dominated by something huge that gleamed with silver and copper and gold and steel.
The God Machine. Huge,
real
. Glowing with power. I kicked Santoro away and back-rolled to my feet. It reeked of wrongness. It was as alien a thing as any monstrosity I'd seen in my dreams.
Santoro rose, his face dripping with blood. He stood near the circular mouth of the machine, and behind him were dozens of gemstones. A fortune in cut diamonds, topazes, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. They were socketed into the copper sheeting, and behind each a bright light flashed in sequence. Santoro saw me gaping at it and he grinned at me with red-streaked teeth. “You're too late, Ledger. The code has been input and our weapons are already in the sky. Even if you killed me now there's nothing that can stop this.”
I whipped the rapid-release folding knife from its pocket clip and with a flick of the wrist the blade glittered in my hand. “I'm going to keep cutting parts off of you until you tell me how to shut it down. How's that sound, motherfucker?”
Santoro beckoned me with little flips of his fingers. “You have to beat me first. We're one and one, my friend. Let's see who wins the final round.”
Off to my left I heard a sound and risked a slanting look. It was a twisted shape that almost, but not quite, looked human. He wore white pajamas that were smeared with food and snot and piss and blood. His skin was wrinkled and puckered and blistered. He was exactly as I'd seen him in my dream.
I said, “Hello, Prospero.”
What was left of Prospero Bell smiled at me with white teeth in a burned red face. His eyes glittered with emerald fire every bit as bright as the gems on his machine. There was pain in those eyes, and wildness, and absolutely no trace of sanity. As he stepped forward I heard a tinkling sound and realized that the boy had a metal cuff locked around his ankle, and a chain that trailed back to a squalid corner of the room where there was a soiled cot, a filthy toilet, a card table, and a chair. Beyond that was an elaborate computer workstation that was as clean as the rest of Prospero's cell was dirty. And I understood how it worked. The young man was a prisoner here, a captive of Harcourt Bolton for God knew how many years. Since the Ballard academy had burned down, maybe. He was allowed to continue his work but the chain did not allow him to reach the mouth of the God Machine. A slave forced to toil in the shadow of what he believed was his salvation. I felt so bad for the kid, but the clock was ticking.