Code Zero (63 page)

Top and Bunny flanked me as I raced toward the Marriott entrance, and the rest of Echo was seeded through the crowd. People screamed when they saw us and they scattered like birds. Some of them ran back up the steps to the hotel. Others ran to the Hyatt and more ducked down behind cars. A few stood there, stupid and immobile with shock, as people with guns ran past them.

Overhead, I could hear the choppers coming. We had every military bird we could muster. Sixty-three helos. Apaches, Black Hawks, Vipers. All of them heavy with missiles and rockets, machine guns leering out of side doors. Behind and in front of me the National Guard was slamming the barricades shut. The crowd surged toward them and I prayed the barricades would hold.

The crowds flooding out of the hotel were like a tidal surge and we had to fight our way up each step, bashing people aside. Some of them were so intensely terrified that they didn’t even react to the guns in our hands. They just wanted out.

Yeah, and we were trying to get in. How smart were we?

Bunny got in front of me and literally smashed people out of our way. We finally got inside the hotel and that’s when we realized just how bad things were.

People lay bloody on the ground, trampled by the panicked crowds. Some of them were clearly dead. Others lay crippled and screaming.

Down the hall and around the corner the screams were even louder, though, and we fought our way through the human tide. We were battered and struck and careened into and tripped by people who were so much less afraid of us and our guns than they were of whatever was happening inside the atrium.

I realized suddenly that Top and Bunny were no longer with me. Somehow, the crowd had separated us. Ahead, though, I could see a woman standing on a marble wall, waving her arms and shouting at the crowd. Mother Night—but too far away for me to take a shot. All around her was a scene that my mind refused to connect with the real world. After everything I’ve seen, this was too much, too far, too strange. People dressed in Starfleet costumes, people dressed as Dorothy Gale and her companions, people dressed as characters from video games I couldn’t even name, were
eating each other.

It was already far too late.

There were scores of infected.

Hundreds.

And more people died every moment, dragged down and bitten, their flesh torn away, blood everywhere. Screams and pain everywhere.

Horror everywhere.

I tapped my earbud. “Echo Team, look for Mother Night. If you see her, take the shot.”

If there were any replies, it was too loud for me to hear them.

I jumped up onto the lip of an abandoned information desk, trying to understand the pattern of this. Trying to see Mother Night.

And there she was, dressed like one of those fantasy characters in Japanese comics. Little-girl clothes recut as a statement of sexuality. I’d always thought that kind of thing crossed the line into some publicly acceptable species of pedophilia, a Lolita lust for the comic book crowd. Never my thing. I like my women grown up. Never had a desire to troll for sex on the school yard. But Mother Night was playing it up. She stood on a high marble wall, well above the grasping hands of the dead, dancing, waving her arms, laughing at the carnage she’d wrought.

It was at that moment that I realized Bug and Rudy had been right about her and I’d been as wrong as Aunt Sallie, Church, and Hu. Until that moment I’d been looking for clues to her endgame. The chaos in the streets had to be a distraction for something else. The bombs, the release of the pathogens, the videos, all of them had to be carefully planned components of some grand scheme. I’d become even more certain of it when we realized that Mother Night was Artemisia Bliss. She was the master strategist; someone as brilliant and calculating as her had to be working toward a goal every bit as big, as evil, as devastating as what the Jakobys and Hugo Vox had planned.

Had to be.

Nothing else made sense. Even Hitler had a damn plan.

But now I knew what Rudy had understood all along. He’d told us about it at her trial. Maybe Bliss herself had told Aunt Sallie and the others during her initial job interview. I read a transcript of that session, heard her talk about suicide attempts, about the need to stand out. To shine.

And hadn’t Mother Night told us over and over again?

Sometimes you have to burn to shine.

The whole world was watching now. The subway video was probably playing on every TV and computer monitor in the world. The bombs had been like finger snaps, making people turn to listen. The controlled releases of the plagues had set expectations of her power. The destruction of the CDC and the total pathogenic pollution of the Locker were not the result of bungled attempts to secure the bioweapons. She already had what she needed. She used the CDC to kill Samson Riggs and tried to killed me and Echo at the Locker. Perhaps if the Warehouse in Baltimore hadn’t been destroyed last year, resulting in all DMS field offices tripling their security, she might have tried to take out the Hangar.

Maybe she knew that she couldn’t take on Mr. Church and Aunt Sallie in head-to-head battle. Or, more likely, she left them alone so they could be her witnesses. The most important witnesses. Sure, there have to be witnesses for something to have importance. Church and the others had to see her win and know that they lost. That was the end of the equation.

That was her endgame right there.

So what was this? What was it Bug and Rudy thought was going to play out here?

Sometimes you have to burn to shine.

If you’re the one who’s burning, what’s left afterward?

Only the memory of that brilliant light.

Mother Night stood above the crowd, literally atop the wall, and figuratively as the conductor of the mad symphony playing out below.

I raised my pistol and fired at her. Handguns are great at close range but they suck ass beyond fifty yards and she was all the way across a sea of the living, the dying, and the hungry dead. I fired anyway.

For a moment I thought the gods of war had granted me their grace, because she jerked sideways. Then I realized that the bullet had hit the wall nearby and she flinched from the point of impact. She crouched, looking wildly around, and I think she spotted some of my people fighting their way through the crowd. A moment later she was gone, leaping down behind the wall, out of sight.

So I did the same thing, jumping from the information counter and diving into the crowd. I was still mostly in an area of screaming people caught in a human gridlock as they fought to flee and in their panic became the enemies of survival for everyone. Bodies lay trampled everywhere. Small knots of people huddled together in corners. I saw several people standing stock-still, their eyes glazed, colorful candy wrappers in their hands. No idea what that was all about, but I had a bad feeling I’d find out.

Here and there were pockets of resistance. A bartender held his ground behind the counter and used heavy bottles of top-shelf alcohol as clubs, smashing them over the heads of a mass of infected who were trying to crawl past him to get at several cowering patrons. A fat man in chain mail was swinging a sword, except that the sword was still in its sheath, held in place by a peace bond. Even so, he swung the weapon like a cudgel and he laid about him with a will. There were several dead or crippled walkers piled around him. Thirty feet past him, three police officers stood back-to-back in a shooting triangle, firing at anyone who came near them.

But these pockets could not last.

Did not last.

I saw one of the cops begin to reload an empty pistol, and in the few seconds it took for him to drop his magazine and swap in a new one, a teenager in a dark hoodie threw himself at the cop in a tackle that knocked all three of the officers down. Four more infected piled atop them.

Somewhere off to my left came the big boom of Bunny’s combat shotgun. Again and again. Then more gunfire to my right and behind me. Echo Team and the rest of the shooters. But the crowd was so thick I couldn’t see any of them.

I began fighting my way toward Mother Night. I needed to stop her. She was the driving force for everything that was happening and I needed to switch her off.

I tried to push my way toward her, but a new surge swept me sideways.

I thought I heard someone speaking through my earbud. I pressed the bud deeper into my ear and caught some of it. “… streets secure … crowd surge … need more trucks to block…” Then a note of rising panic. “
They’re out! They’re out! I have walkers on … oh God!
”

And then a different voice.

“… going weapons hot…”

I recognized that voice. The pilot of my own Black Hawk.

Even through the roar of the crowd I could hear a new and terrible sound. The thunder of heavy-caliber automatic guns all around the buildings.

God help us.

The infected had escaped the building and the helicopters were opening up on the crowd.

Cursing, I tried to shoulder into the melee. A shrill scream made me spin, and a walker had a woman dressed as an elf and he was trying to bite her. She had her forearm jammed under his chin, but he was much bigger. I bashed him in the temple with my pistol butt, and as he staggered off I jammed my barrel against the bridge of his nose and blew off the back of his head. Blood sprayed the face of a second walker, momentarily blinding him. I shattered his knee with a side-thrust kick and as he fell I axe-kicked the side of his neck. He landed in a sprawl, his head tilted awkwardly on a shattered spine.

When I turned to help the girl up, she was gone.

I heard Mother Night shouting to the crowd, making crazy jokes with pop-culture references that were lost on me. I elbowed a bleeding man aside and turned to look. She was above me, leaning over the rail from the fifth floor. No idea how the hell she got up there. She must have had some of her anarchist crew with her to help clear out an elevator car. I raised my gun to fire again, but a powerful arm came whipping out of the crowd and slapped my pistol from my hands. The shock jerked my finger and there was a single bang, but I had no idea where the bullet went. As I lost the gun I spun toward the asshole who’d hit me. He was a real bull of a guy in a hooded sweatshirt and a rubber gorilla mask. He went to grab the front of my shirt, but I slapped his reaching hand away and drove a two-knuckle punch into his short ribs.

I might as well have been punching a brick wall for all the good it did.

He laughed.

The son of a bitch actually laughed.

So I tried to change his mood with a palm-heel shot across the chops that knocked the gorilla mask from his face.

The blow did not drop the man, as I had every right to expect.

It didn’t even stop him from laughing.

The face that leered down at me was brutish, almost a match for the mask I’d just knocked away. A heavy brown, flat nose, overgrown incisors.

It was a Berserker.

But it was far worse than that.

The skin was a pallid gray-green and he stank like rotting meat. Drool ran from the corners of his mouth, and in that bubbling spit I could see tiny maggots writhing and twisting. Its eyes, though, were filled with a terrible awareness and a dreadful hunger.

The Berserker was a Generation Twelve walker.

Oh shit.

Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

Grand Hyatt Hotel

109 East Forty-second Street

New York City

Sunday, September 1, 4:01 p.m.

Ludo Monk stared at her for several seconds, his eyes seeming to go in and out of focus.

“Pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Mother didn’t say anything about you being pregnant.”

“No one knows.”

“Joey-boy doesn’t know?”

“No one knows. Please … don’t hurt my baby.”

“No,” said Monk. “You’re lying to me. You don’t even have a baby bump. This is a cheap trick and I’ve heard crap like this before.”

“It’s the truth! Please, you don’t have to hurt me.”

“Yeah,” said Ludo Monk, “I’m pretty sure I do. That’s how it works. Baby or no baby. That’s what Mother Night needs me to do. It’s just your good luck that I’m giving
you
a choice. A quick bullet or the needle. But I got to tell you, I don’t think you should even consider the second option, because then you’re this ugly monster lady and when Joey-boy comes home you’ll get all bitey on him, and that’s a downhill slide. There’s no happy ending to that romance, you see where I’m going with this?”

“You can just leave,” begged Junie.

“We covered that already. Don’t make me make this decision myself. I’m already pissed that I wasn’t allowed to do this my way. I hate personal interaction, and you’re sitting there with those big eyes and those sun freckles looking all innocent and wholesome, and I’m going to feel like a total piece of shit either way. At least the bullet is quick and clean.”

“Listen to me,” said Junie, trying to keep her voice level, “if you know who I am, then you know who Joe is.”

“Sure.”

“Do you know
about
him? Do you?”

“Yeah. He’s crazier than I am, and I’m really out there.”

“Do you know what he’s capable of?”

“Yup.”

“Do you know what he’s done to other people? People like criminals and terrorists.”

“Yeah, he’s killed more people than God. That’s why Mother Night wanted him taken out of the picture. But now I hear that he slipped her punch. So if she can’t kill him, then she wants to do something worse.”

Junie’s heart suddenly lifted. Joe was alive. Whatever that woman had tried to do, he’d escaped or survived it.

“If you hurt me,” she said, “Joe is going to find you and he will—”

A knock on the door interrupted her words. She and the man both froze, eyes darting to the door.

And in that moment Junie moved.

She screamed at the top of her lungs, slapped the syringe out of the man’s hand, and drove her shoulder into his chest, driving him backward into the desk. The movement was much faster and harder than either of them expected, and as they hit the edge of the desk the force spun them around and toward the floor. He tried to club her with the gun and break his fall and grab her all at the same time, and he failed in all three things. The gun struck the carpet, bounced, and hit the door with a thud. Then he and Junie crashed to the floor. His hand darted out and snagged her hair, and he jerked back to try to break her neck.