But even more were coming now. He could see their eyes glowing in the dark of the corridor.
At the opposite end was a large open area. It was poorly lit, but from what he'd seen of the ship so far he knew areas like that tended to open onto other areas, which might provide a way out. If he got there far enough ahead of his pursuers maybe he could find a place to hide. It was a slim chance but the only one he had.
He ducked his head and ran, ignoring the pain.
When he reached the end of the corridor he chanced a look back. He'd put a good amount of distance on his pursuers. But he wasn't sure it'd help him. He had just entered the lobby of the ship's theater. There was a bar directly in front of him, done up in blue plastic and brightly polished steel, and beside that a set of glass doors marked simply: ENTRANCE.
But to the right of the bar was a curved hallway. A small sign on the door read: RESTROOMS.
And he noticed something else.
The smell of the sea.
An exterior access, he thought. A way out.
He ran for it, passing the restrooms and stopping at a fork in the hallway. Straight ahead was a stairwell leading down to the stage access. To the right was the exterior access he'd hoped to find. He could see a small section of the deck and railing, the sea beyond it dappled in mid-morning sunlight. Paul was about to run for the outside when he saw a man hobbling into view on a leg that appeared to have been nearly denuded of flesh and muscle. Nothing but bone and a few sodden clumps of flesh and tendons clinging to the bones remained.
The man stopped, turned, and stared at him for just a moment before coming after him.
Behind Paul, the zombies that had chased him down the hall were entering the theater's lobby.
He was all out of options.
Paul ran down the stairs, praying to God with every step that he wouldn't run into the waiting arms of some zombie hiding down here in the dark. And then, all at once, faster than he was really ready for, he emerged into a room full of mannequins and outfits on hanging racks and props of all sorts and sizes.
The prop room, he thought. It was crowded with stuff, lots of nooks and crannies. Not a bad place to hide.
Paul ducked behind a rack of baseball bats, all of them marked by a sign that read:
COBB PERFORMERS ONLY
. He didn't dare try to close the door. The zombies were out there, and they were looking for him. If he tried to close the door, the movement would attract their attention and he'd be done for.
Instead, he ducked behind a mannequin dressed in a vintage Detroit Tigers uniform and slowly, silently, took down one of the wooden baseball bats and held it close.
A woman came through the door, her hair dark and matted with blood. Behind her was a man whose clothes had been stripped from his body and his torso opened up and hollowed out like the belly of a canoe. The two of them wandered through the prop room, looking for him. The man, for a moment, looked right at him before moving on.
As they moved toward the opposite side of the room, where the door was, Paul let himself breathe a little easier. They were leaving.
Until his phone went off.
Damn it! It was his twelve o'clock alert, reminding him of his regular appointment with Sutton. He pulled it out of the cargo pocket on his pants and tried to silence it, but it was too late. The zombies turned and headed right for him. They'd spotted him.
“Stay away!” he pleaded with them.
They reached for him, knocking down racks of clothes and one of the mannequins.
Outside, in the hallway, Paul could hear more zombies coming his way.
His cell phone chimed again and in his desperation he threw it at the naked man with the exposed ribs. It bounced off his face, distracting him long enough for Paul to get in front of the man and swing the bat at his head.
“Leave me theâ” he said, breaking off with a grunt as the bat connected with the man's skull. There was a sickening, wet crack that Paul felt all the way up his arms, and the man sagged to the ground.
Paul stood over him, horrified, chest heaving. “Oh, my God,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Oh, my God.”
But there was no time for him to take it in. The woman was already running through the racks of clothes, coming for him.
He turned the bat sideways in a port arms position and pushed it into her neck, forcing her chin up, using both hands to keep her face away from him. She tried to claw at his face, but with all the racks of clothes blocking her all she managed to do was pull a bunch of dresses to the floor.
Paul gave her a hard shove with the bat and took a step back. He saw his chance to strike and he took it. He swung for her face with everything he had, slapping the meat of the bat on her cheek with a blow that sent her teeth clattering across the floor like tumbling dice.
The woman fell back against a table, but gave no other indication that she was hurt. Her stare never wavered, never changed. She just stood up again, her mouth a bloody mess, her teeth smashed, and came at him again.
Paul raised the bat over his head and brought it down on her forehead like he was chopping wood. The blow caused her to fold. Her legs collapsed beneath her and she sank to the floor and didn't move.
But she was still looking at him. He had killed herâor had done whatever happened to these people when they stopped moving aroundâand the look in her eyes was still the same. Death made no difference.
He was already mentally frayed about the edges, but that vacant stare unhinged him. More of those zombies were coming in from the hallway, but he was so rattled even the threat of more fighting didn't cause him to react right away.
It wasn't until he heard them knocking about just outside the door that he moved. There was a rack of old-fashioned baseball uniforms to his right. He slipped behind them and waited, trying not to scream, as a dozen or more zombies came through the door, hunting for him.
C
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A
PTER
18
The elevator lurched to a stop, and Tess bladed her shoulders off in a shooter's stance, ready to fire. “Stay behind me,” she said over her shoulder.
Sutton managed a thin squeak of a reply as she nodded.
Tess turned back to the door, drew in a deep breath, and waited. If she saw anything on the other side she was going to slap the close door button and take their chances on another floor. And when they did finally get off, no more elevators. She didn't like feeling this uncertain of what she was stepping into.
But then the doors slid open . . . and it looked clear.
She waited, scanning the landing, straining her hearing to the hallways beyond.
“Is it safe?” Sutton asked.
“I'll check. Hold the door open for me.”
Reluctantly, Sutton put her finger on the open button.
Tess nodded to her. “It'll be okay. I'll give you the signal to step out.”
Tess stepped out of the elevator, checking her left, then her right with two quick twists. Their cabins were along the port side, two floors down, and she went that way, scanning the corridors there for movement. She saw a man and woman midway down the hall that led to their cabins, but they were spread out and she felt certain she could put them both down without endangering the senator at all. She just hoped that nobody would pop out of the open cabin doors along the way.
She went back to the elevators, where Sutton waited. The poor woman looked positively ill.
“You ready to do this?” Tess asked.
Sutton nodded.
“Okay. Now there are two of those people between here and the stairs. We need to get past them and then take the stairs down to seven to your cabin. I want you to stay behind me, and I mean right behind me. Got it?”
Again, Sutton nodded.
“Good. We're going to get to your cabin, lock the door, and I'm going to try to find a way to signal for help.”
“How are you going to do that? I thought you said nothing works.”
“We'll keep trying. I'll burn bed sheets off the balcony like smoke signals if I have to. We'll find a way. Just make sure you stay right behind me.”
“Okay.”
“All right, let's go.”
The two people in their corridor had spotted Tess and were already advancing on them when Tess rounded the corner. Of the two, the woman moved faster and Tess sighted in on her first.
The woman's mouth hung open, and when she raised her hands toward Tess, the fingers looked mangled. Her chest was covered in blood and what looked like bits of half-eaten food. When the woman got about ten feet away Tess fired, hitting her on the bridge of her nose. Her head snapped back and she dropped to the floor.
“Is she dead?” Sutton asked.
“I think so.”
They advanced on the body uncertainly. The woman looked still enough, but after seeing that one man take a direct shot to the head and keep on going, Tess wasn't taking any chances.
Keeping herself between Sutton and the body, Tess circled around the fallen woman. She didn't move. Didn't even twitch. Tess was about to turn and shoot the man who was hobbling toward them when she saw movement in a doorway directly in front of her. It was a woman trying to reach her way around the door.
Sutton gasped, but Tess was already on it. She took a step forward and kicked the door as hard as she could. It smashed into the woman's face and sent her sprawling back into the room.
“Time to move,” Tess told Sutton, and they broke into a run for Sutton's cabin.
As they neared the man, Tess opened fire, hitting him five times in the face.
He was still reaching for them even as he fell to the ground.
By the time they reached Sutton's cabin, doors were opening all down the length of the corridor. Tess saw at least five people step into the hallway as she was struggling to get the access card into the slot on the door.
“Is it broken?” Sutton asked. “Oh, God, hurry.”
“I amâ”
The door lock turned green and Tess pushed the door inward, noticing several things almost at the same time.
The first was Dr. Sutton, covered in blood and dead against the foot of the bed with a gunshot wound to the back of his head.
The second was a woman standing on the far side of the bed, the same woman she'd seen holding a martini out to Paul Godwin at the Washington Hilton.
And the third thing she noticed was the gun coming up in the woman's hand.
Tess fired six shots as the woman dove to the right and rolled toward the desk. The slide on Tess's pistol locked back in the empty position and she quickly ejected her magazine and slapped in a new one, but before she could fire again, the woman leveled her sights on Tess and opened fire.
There was a burst of white light shot through with orange and gray and then Tess's world went black.
C
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PTER
19
For their briefing, the mission commander, Major Jim McBride, chose a hangar near Corpus Christi Bay, where the Chinooks they were going to fly out to the
Gulf Queen
could flare off and out to sea without attracting a lot of unwanted attention. The two teams, twenty-two men in all, were seated in folding chairs in the middle of the hangar floor, facing a big screen TV up at the front of the room. McBride stood in front of the TV. Juan stood off to the side with one of McBride's lieutenants, a much younger man who was on his second operation with Delta. In the crowd, Juan saw a few familiar faces, men like Rick Carter and Gabe Drake and Tom Hoffman, all of them E8s now. He'd been on many, many ops with those guys, and every once in a while he'd catch them smiling at him, pointing at him and cracking jokes. The rest of the guys were all E6s and E7s, a lot younger, but still with the look of seasoned operators. They wouldn't be on Delta otherwise.
Juan remembered briefings like this, right before Go Time, how focused everybody was. But at the first mention of zombies, the mood lightened. Most of the guys cracked smiles. A few made jokes. That didn't bother Juan, though. He knew they'd tighten up once the video feed started.
McBride told the room to shut up. “This is Special Agent Juan Perez of the Secret Service,” he said. “For this mission, his call sign's going to be Sierra 1.”
“Yeah, more like Fag 6,” Drake said.
A chuckle went around the room. The ribbing was actually a backhanded compliment, and Juan was grateful for it. In the teams, FAG meant Former Action Guy. It was a term of endearment usually reserved for guys on the teams who had transitioned over to the CIA or the NSA, and it carried with it the connotation that this guy is cool, he gets it, he's one of us. It let everybody in the room know that one of their leaders considered Juan totally capable. Nobody was going to have to carry him on this mission.
McBride went on without acknowledging the interruption. “Some of you have already heard the threat on this op, and what you heard is true. If you are attacked by passengers, you are to treat them as hostiles and respond accordingly.”
More chuckles went around the room.
“So this is seriously like Left 4 Dead?” one of the younger guys said. “We're going on a zombie hunt?”
Everybody laughed again. They thought it was preposterous, of course. Twenty-four hours earlier, Juan would have thought the same thing. But of course the truth was that they were going in against what could possibly be the worst biological plague the human race had ever seen. And they'd be doing it with nothing but Nomex flight suit gloves and body armor.
“I think you're gonna find this a little more intense than a first person shooter game,” McBride said. “We're going to avoid contact with the compromised passengers whenever possible. If you do have to engage though, stay focused on shot discipline. Conserve your ammo and focus on headshots.”
“Yeah, but it's just zombies, right?” somebody asked. “No vampires or werewolves?”
Another wave of laughter went through the room.
McBride smiled, too, then stepped out of the way of the TV and hit play on the remote. The footage from Juan's pocket digital recorder came up first, and the room went silent. Juan watched what his pocket video camera had captured earlier that morning as he worked his way through the Cavazos Meatpacking facility. He relived it all, right up to the moment he encountered the first zombie.
That was when he turned his attention on the crowd watching the video, gauging their reaction. He saw them nod as he doubled-tapped the men in the hallway, and then nodded himself as the men watching the video leaned forward, their expressions turning to confusion when the man didn't go down.
But it wasn't until Juan shot the chunk out of the man's head and he still kept coming that they started making noise.
“Oh, no way,” one of them said.
“Holy shit,” another answered.
The man on the video tottered forward, hands outstretched, and one of the younger guys laughed. “It is. It's a total fucking zombie hunt,” he said.
Juan watched them slap each other on the shoulders and chatter about what was playing out on the screen, and in that moment he missed being part of the teams more than ever before. He was forty-four years old now, at the very top of his field, and yet he knew at that moment that he had never been happier than when he'd been in the teams.
The guys in Delta were treated like kings. He remembered their compound at Fort Bragg. They had it allâa full gym, two swimming pools, luxury housing. They had the finest armorers in the Army, willing and able to make any custom modifications an operator could want. They had on-call nutritionists and the Army's finest doctors and weight training coaches. They had access to more perks than a pro sports team. All they lacked were the scantily clad cheerleaders. Why anyone would walk away from that was a mystery.
Or at least it had been to the guys Juan worked with.
But it had been pretty simple, really. Juan was married at the time to the girl he'd dated most of his senior year in high school. Madison Kramer was her name, and for about six years they did okay. He'd recognized little things at first, signs they were drifting apart, and if it hadn't been for the constant deployments, being gone four months at a time, maybe they could have worked on it, gotten back to how it had been when they started out.
But of course that didn't happen. In real life, people just don't change.
At the end, he didn't even know her anymore. She was drinking a lot. He thought she was probably doing drugs, too, though he'd gone through the house and never found any. But she had the look, the weight loss, the apathy, the circles under her eyes.
He loved her, though. Truth was he was totally crazy for her. Realizing he had to quit the teams if he had any chance of saving his marriage, he did just that. He thought about joining the Marshal's Service, but a recruiter convinced him to come over to the Secret Service instead. He made it through the academy with flying colors, and Madison went to counseling. For a while, things had started to look up, but they didn't stay that way. She began to drink again. He saw the fogged-over, drugged-out look come back. He came home after a four-day trip to Philadelphia and found her sitting on the couch in her T-shirt and panties, cigarette burns on her thighs, and there wasn't a trace of the girl he'd known in her eyes.
“What the hell are you into?” he'd asked her.
But the answer didn't matter, because it was all lies at that point anyway. That was the end right there.
She said she wanted a divorce.
It crushed him, but he gave it to her.
Three years later, she was dead. Too much meth in some little town in Ohio he'd never heard of before.
And for that he'd given up his life in the teams. It had all made sense at the time. But now, seeing his life that could have been, the logic behind the choices he'd made was hazy with regret.
But that was the past, and right now the briefing was winding down. They'd switched from his video to footage from the IRS platform, the drone circling the
Gulf Queen
. The ship was really starting to burn. It was leaking smoke all over the ocean.
McBride hit pause on the remote, and the room's attention shifted back to him. He said, “Remember: This is not a stand-up fight. If you have an option not to engage, take it. But if you do have to engage, headshots are the order of the day. And from what you saw there it may take several headshots to put one of them down.” He turned to Juan. “Agent Perez, you have anything you want to add?”
“No, sir,” Juan said. “You got it. Headshots if you have to, but only if you have to. The more noise we make, the more they'll come running.”
“Okay,” McBride said. “Anybody else?”
“Yeah, I got a question,” one of the younger guys said. “What are we gonna do with that ship once we get the target out of there? I mean, if it's got all those zombies on it, who's gonna take care of that?”
McBride didn't hesitate. “We have a pair of F-15s standing by. Once we call out jackpot on the target, they're gonna sink her.”
Instantly, the smiles and the joking faded and the room went quiet.
There hadn't been any instructions on rescuing other survivors, just the senator, and every man in the room knew what that meant.
“Okay,” McBride said. “That's it. We'll have grid sheets for you in a few. Study the ship's layout, and memorize Senator Sutton's face. We move out in an hour.”
And just like that the briefing was over.
The guys filtered away, each one to his respective ritual for getting his gear prepped for the mission. Then McBride and Rick Carter pulled Juan aside.
McBride said, “Agent Perez, Rick here figured you wouldn't have any of your own gear. Is that right?”
“I'm afraid so,” Juan said. “I've got my Sig, but that's about it.”
“Okay. Is that the sidearm you want to use?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fair enough. That's a good weapon. Okay, Rick, you gonna get him taken care of on his assault kit?”
Carter gave him a big smile. “Oh, yeah.”
“Good. You guys make ready. We're burning daylight.”
Carter hit Juan on the shoulder. “Come on,” Carter said. “Brother, have I got a surprise for you.”
Juan stared at him, confused for a moment, but Carter's grin was huge and it was infectious. He liked Carter a lot. In fact, of all the guys Juan had served with back in the day, he'd shared the most in common with Carter. Juan was Hispanic, born and raised in the poorest barrios of Del Rio, Texas. Carter was as white as Wonder Bread, but he'd come up from Seattle's hardscrabble Rainier Valley area, raised poor just like Juan. The two of them had come up together through the Rangers, making Delta on the same rotation, and had covered each other on a lot of missions since then. They understood each other, always had.
“What have you got?” Juan asked.
Carter led him over to one of the teams' supply vehicles and pulled down a heavy duffel bag. “Go ahead,” he said. “Check it out. Papa's got a brand-new bag.”
Still smiling, Juan opened it. Inside, he found a couple of sterilized Nomex flight suits. Operators never wore name or rank or even country of origin insignia on their uniforms, and these were no different.
“I didn't know if you'd gotten fat while servicing the first lady,” Carter said, “so I brought you a couple different sizes.”
Juan felt like a kid on Christmas morning. When the teams operated out of a regular facility, each man was assigned a walk-in locker about the size of a closet. Everything he would need for tailoring an assault kit to a specific mission was stored there. But on operations like this one, they had to bring all their gear like this, in duffel bags. Juan looked around the room and saw others laying out their gear as well, each one of them as superstitious as a baseball player about to step up to the plate.
Juan glanced back at Carter. “Go on,” Carter said. “You haven't seen the good stuff yet.”
He was right. The real treasures were buried deeper still in the bag. Juan pulled out two pairs of gloves, one to wear during the assault and the other a pair of heavy leather mitts for when they fast-roped down to the deck. He found a helmet and boots, a ballistic vest, a holster for his Sig, just about everything he was going to need for the operation.
And then, he saw it.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“Yeah, I thought you'd like that,” Carter said.
Juan reached in and removed an old friend. It was the M4 with the customized ten-inch barrel that he'd used on countless raids. He didn't even need to test the five-pound trigger to know it. You spend that much quality time with a weapon, you know it immediately, even after twelve years.
He met Carter's gaze. “But . . . how?”
“It was still in the armory,” Carter said. “I asked if they still had your paperwork on file and they did. The armorer had to look around for that, but he came up with it. I cleaned it myself to make it ready.”
Juan let out the breath he was holding. “He sure did,” he said. “Rick, thanks, man. Really, thank you for this.”
“Don't mention it. Let's just hope you can still shoot straight.”