End Day (12 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Looking in the limo's rearview was like touching the tip of his tongue to a rotten tooth; every time McCreedy did so it made him wince, but he couldn't stop doing it. The dully gleaming metal eyes and the bizarre jaw contraption reflecting back at him were like a fatal highway accident.

Magnetically horrifying.

In a screeching, metal-on-metal voice that hurt his ears, the little one cranked out directions—the most monstrous backseat driver imaginable. It made his mother-in-law seem a rank amateur. The breath gusting through the open privacy window was a million times worse, too. It smelled as bad as a bloated, week-old dead dog in August. And unlike his mother-in-law, the little guy seemed to have a detailed street map of Manhattan etched inside its head. It knew exactly where it was going and the precise route it wanted to take to get there.

McCreedy followed the directions as quickly as he could. He wasn't thinking about where he was driving; his primary concern was obeying without question. He kept remembering what had happened at the hospital—it was an abject lesson in don't-frustrate-the-little-one. He was almost certain he was going to die before the day was done. There didn't seem to be any way around it, but he didn't want the means to be having his head ripped off his neck.

Ahead on the left, a spot-lit American flag flew from a stanchion on the front of a seven-story gray stone building. When he drove closer, he realized it was a police precinct station.

The grating voice ordered him to stop in the middle of the street, opposite the arched, ground-floor entrance.

A desperate ray of hope surfaced. Maybe they had decided to give up and turn themselves in, he thought.

The limo's side doors opened, and the creatures in the back started piling out. An exodus that made the vehicle rock on its springs. The little one didn't seem to have much to say to the big creatures. There had been no command to get up and get out. It was as if they could communicate without words.

If they were surrendering, he thought, as a claw hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him out of the driver's seat, why were they taking along machine guns?

The precinct house looked as if it had been built in the 1930s. Squat, square and stodgy. McCreedy was bum-rushed through the arched entrance. Beyond it was a long, windowless, marble-floored foyer lined on both sides with uncomfortable-looking, scarred oak benches—a kind of unofficial waiting room outside police confines and a way station for crime victims, their families, their lawyers and the lawyers and families of the recently arrested. The benches were full.

As the purple entourage marched past, led by the limping, half-metal abomination, the assembled people froze in their seats, their chatting and squabbling ceased and the expressions on their faces shifted from sadness, pain and anger to horror.

You ain't seen nothing yet, McCreedy thought.

The entryway ended in a set of modern, presumably bulletproof, double glass doors. In the brightly lit room on the far side, McCreedy could make out a large, raised wooden desk. It looked like the kind of thing a judge would pound a gavel on in a courtroom. A man in a black uniform sat behind it, preoccupied with shuffling the sheaf of papers in front of him. When the desk sergeant looked up from his work and saw the wall of purple hoodies staring back at him, his lantern jaw dropped. Then his face turned red. Rising to his feet, he slapped something on the side of the desk.

A panic button, as it turned out.

A piercing Klaxon alarm sounded at about the same instant the creatures applied the soles of their bare feet to the doors. The tempered glass crunched, went opaque and buckled, held together by only thin layers of membrane. Not for long. Claw hands ripped open gaping holes, and the big boys poured into the station. McCreedy was dragged through the emptied doorframe, his shoes slipping on the fragments of glass. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the people on the benches running the other way as fast as they could, out the main doors.

In front of him, the desk sergeant drew his sidearm and took aim from his elevated position. His mouth opened and he shouted something, but it was impossible to make out what with the Klaxon blaring.

Seeing the gun pointed his way, McCreedy tried to duck, but a taloned hand caught him by the neck and lifted him upright, on tippy toes. It was like being clamped in a vise.

McCreedy wanted the cop to kill them all; he really did.

Until the shooting started and then all he wanted was for it to end.

Bullets coming at close range from one direction were bad enough, roaring past his head like freight trains, but the freight trains didn't stop. They made hard right and hard left turns; they veered up and down.

The creature who held him fast wasn't using him as a human shield; it didn't need one. Nine-millimeter bullets from the Glock slapped into and zinged off its head, in the process cutting slashes in the satin hood.

Stuff was blown off.

Off the head, itself.

Off the skin, hide, whatever.

Bits of it peppered and stung the right side of his face. He wiped his cheek with his fingertips and felt hard fragments, but there was no blood.

Though it seemed like much longer, the desk sergeant expended his fifteen rounds in as many seconds. By the time the slide on his weapon locked back, a double-wide had hold of him from behind. There would be no reloading.

Through the bullet rips in the hood, McCreedy saw shiny blue where the heavily corrugated skin had been blasted away. Was it bone under there? Could it be metal? It looked wet, but there was no sign of bleeding.

Dropped back on his feet, he was shoved past the duty desk. Behind him, he could hear the sergeant's sustained scream between pulses of the Klaxon. Then the screaming stopped. The alarm continued.

As the purple mob lumbered down the adjoining hallway, he struggled to keep up—it was either that or be trod under. The little one had no such worries; it was being carried like a dummy again. The odd potshot zinged overhead, but there was no concentrated resistance. Through open doorways, McCreedy saw officers and civilian employees taking cover behind desks and file cabinets.

If the creatures' goal was to kill a bunch of cops in their own house, they were letting a lot of them slip past. If the mission was to free fellow monsters held in the precinct's jail, how and when had the police managed to subdue them? He had seen no evidence that that was even possible. Bullets had no apparent effect. The beasts' physical strength seemed limitless. He doubted that the steel bars of a cell would contain one for more than a New York minute.

He couldn't think of any other reasons for them to be here, for doing what they were doing.

It was like a French horror movie—maniacally gruesome, but even with subtitles, it made no sense.

* * *

O
FFICER
C
RAIG
W
ESTER
thought the day was going to be totally boring. He was stuck behind a desk after a beat-down incident involving a robbery suspect. One kick to the head too many, and as luck would have it, the action had been caught on a tourist's video camera.

Now he was running for his life.

The first pulse of the Klaxon emergency alarm had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. At the sound of rapid pistol shots from the precinct's entrance, he had jumped to his feet. When he'd stuck his head around the doorway, he'd seen the duty sergeant struggling feebly in the grasp of a very wide person in a purple hoodie and more purple hoodies barreling down on him, like a herd of rhinos. He'd recognized them at once as the suspects in a series of terror attacks all over the city. Responding to those attacks had left the precinct house woefully undermanned.

Wester had drawn his weapon, but there'd been nothing he could do. There'd been too many hostiles between him and his sergeant. In a moment of panic—or heroism—he'd turned and now ran down the hallway ahead of the intruders, shouting warnings into the side rooms as he went.

There was an emergency plan in place in case of an all-out, armed assault on the station house. Though such a thing seemed highly unlikely, every officer in the precinct was drilled in the procedure until they could follow it in their sleep. Behind the brass's backs, the rank-and-file referred to it as
Plan Nine from Outer Space
and “fighting Martians.”

But as a result of that training, Wester knew exactly what to do.

Ahead of him, the hallway bobbed with black-uniformed cops. They hit the entrance to the fire stairs and flowed quickly and smoothly down them, not quite stepping in cadence but close to it. Wester brought up the rear, last man through the door. He didn't look back.

The alarm sounded even louder inside the stairwell. It would have been hard to think if he had been thinking. But he wasn't. He was acting by rote, like a programmed robot, following those ahead of him, following the action plan like a lifeline. They trooped down the stairs, past the story where the holding cells were, then through the door on the next floor's landing. Their destination, the precinct's armory, was a concrete-lined, steel-reinforced bunker. To reach it, somewhere out of sight in front, an officer used a keypad to unlock the heavy hallway door.

As last man through, Wester pulled the door shut until he felt the lock click. He turned but couldn't start down the steep staircase because there was a momentary bottleneck of black uniforms below him.

When he reached the bottom of the steps, the armory's heavy wire door was open and officers were pouring through into the brightly lit, windowless room beyond.

Above and behind him at the top of the stairs, something hit the other side of the door, hard. The shock wave rattled the walls. It sounded like a battering ram.

Wester knew Plan Nine protocol included the immediate recall of all available units and personnel to the station. Basically, it was “drop whatever you're doing and come running.” But from the sound of the battering ram, the shit storm was going to hit long before reinforcements arrived.

When he entered the armory, he was handed an armored vest, a black Kevlar helmet, an M-16, three 30-round magazines and a set of ear protectors. The weight of the automatic weapon felt good in his hands; the earplugs dulled the noise of the alarm and the booming from the door upstairs. He cracked in a magazine but did not touch the charging handle. Again it was Plan Nine protocol. No rounds were to be chambered until the targets were in sight and the command to fire was given. The last thing anybody wanted was the accidental discharge of a fully automatic weapon in a crowded, concrete-walled room.

The armory was equipped with a video monitor connected to the station's CCTV cameras. Everyone was looking up at it, at a massively built, hooded individual who was kicking the living shit out of a steel door. It was caving in under the rain of blows. Behind the kicker were more just like him.

There were none of the usual Martian wisecracks.

“Switch the camera,” someone behind Wester said. “Let's see the rest of the station.”

The picture changed to the ground floor, but what it showed was even more startling. Cops and civilians were down everywhere, and they weren't moving. It looked as if a tornado had ripped through the station house.

Between the blasts of the Klaxon, the booms of the kicks at the door, muffled gunfire erupted from directly above them.

“For Pete's sake, switch the camera back!” an officer said.

The view on the monitor shifted. In the hallway outside the armory door, three brave cops were taking on a half-dozen hoodies. They had their Glocks up and were blazing away at can't-miss range. Wester could see the suspects' heads jerking at the impacts.

The bullets didn't seem to have any effect.

“They aren't going down,” someone in the rear said. “Why aren't they going down?”

As they watched, the purple hoodies stepped right up to the muzzles of the discharging weapons, picked up the officers as if they weighed nothing and drove the tops of their heads into the concrete wall. The limp bodies slumped to the floor below starbursts of skull, brains and blood.

“Who are these fuckers?” the cop beside Wester snarled.

“You mean, what are they,” someone else corrected.

An officer at the armory counter slammed the phone down so hard the black plastic base shattered. “I was on the horn to One Police Plaza trying to get some backup here,” he said. “She put me on hold! The bitch put me on hold!”

Then the door above them banged open. The rhythmic booming stopped.

“They're coming. Jesus Christ, they're coming!”

A woman's voice in the rear shouted over the emergency horn, “Get in position.” It was a female lieutenant and she sounded all business.

Just as they'd trained, eight officers kneeled in front, and five stood behind them.

“Safeties off. Ready your weapons.”

Charging handles clattered as thirteen first rounds were chambered. Kneeling, Wester looked through the security screen that walled off the anteroom from the armory proper. The distance between the service counter and the bottom of the steps was less than ten feet. The stairs themselves were just wide enough for two people to pass in opposite directions. The hatch above the service counter was pulled down, closed and locked, as was the entry gate.

“Let 'em hit the wire, then we all open fire at once,” the lieutenant said. “We've got plenty of ammo here. The screen should hold them back. Clean shooting, now, just like at the range. Stay on target. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Do your job.”

Wester settled the M-16's butt into the crook of his shoulder. He knew he was as ready as he was ever going to be.

When he saw the feet of the first purple hoodie come down the steps, his chest constricted. The feet weren't in shoes, and they weren't human. They looked like the final touch on a full-body Halloween costume.