Kill Switch (22 page)

“Save the world?” he echoed. “Fuck the world.”

But he clinked his glass with hers.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

NAVAL AUXILIARY LANDING FIELD

SAN CLEMENTE ISLAND

68 NAUTICAL MILES WEST OF SAN DIEGO

AUGUST 20, 11:26
P.M.

They put me in a small medical bay that wasn't much bigger than a porta-potty. Everything was white and sterile and scary as hell. Doctors and nurses came in wearing hazmat suits, trailing wires and hoses. They took every sample that it is possible to take from a human being, and they did it all very fast. Desperately fast, which was not at all reassuring. They asked me a lot of questions but the more I talked, the more truthfully I answered them, the stranger the looks they gave me. Soon they weren't even meeting my eyes.

My fever spiked and then dropped sharply. Did that a couple of times. Each time it spiked I saw the numbers on the machines. First time was 100 degrees. Second time was 101.4. My heart was racing. My joints hurt and my glands felt like hot rocks under my chin. Sweat poured down my body. They had me on IVs but I think all of it flowed out of my pores. The lights began getting brighter, sounds became tinny and shrill.

“What's wrong with me?” I asked, desperate for something to cling to.

“We're doing everything we can,” someone told me. Or maybe everyone told me that. Not an answer. Even a bad answer is less scary than that.

Then another doctor entered the room. Same hazmat suit as the others, but the face behind the plastic was one that I absolutely wanted to see. Needed to see. It was the face of a man who always seemed to have answers for me.

“Rudy!” I cried, reaching for him, but he stood in the doorway and would not approach within touching distance. Rudy Sanchez looks and even sounds like Raúl Juliá from the old
Addams Family
movies. A rich baritone voice, intelligent eyes that were filled with wisdom, and a manner of quiet confidence that usually put the pin back into the grenade when I was, psychologically speaking, ready to blow.

But not now. He stood in the doorway, wrapped in the highest-level protective gear in the catalog, and studied me with eyes that were filled with pity, and concern, and fear.

“Rudy—?”

“Cowboy,” he said quietly, “the medical team here is doing everything they can.”

It scared me even more to hear him spout a company line like that. When the doctors say that it is never—ever—a good thing.

“How are Top and Bunny?”

“We're trying to understand this,” said Rudy. “Joe, please, you have to tell me exactly what happened down there.”

“I already told them, goddamn it.”

“Tell me. Please…”

So I did. I told him every bit of it. Not sure if there was anything that I hadn't already shared with Church and the other doctors, but I went over it again. Saying it to Rudy, though, helped steady me. At least a bit. He listens with every molecule of his body. He doesn't miss things and he does not judge. He listens, he disseminates, he works through it, and he understands. Usually. As I spoke I saw the doubt grow in his eyes. And the fear.

“Fuck, Rude,” I growled, “it's all on the cameras. Check them. Pull the memory cards from the telemetry units on our suits. Upload the memory from the BAMS units. It's all there. Everything. The video cameras on our helmets. Look at it, Rudy. Look at it and … and…”

I could hear my voice fracture and falter. I could feel my tongue growing thick, muffling my speech, making it hard to breathe.

Hard to think.

Hard to …

The fever came back all at once. It was like someone doused me with gasoline and threw a match. It came at me like a blowtorch, like a flamethrower.

I remember trying to tell Rudy that I was in trouble. I remember reaching for him, and I remember seeing the fear turn to panic in his eyes.

I remember falling.

The floor opened a big, black mouth and I fell into that. Somewhere behind me, above me, elsewhere, I could hear the doctors yelling, nurses yelling, machines yelling. Then there was a long electronic scream. I knew that sound. Knew it too well.

Rudy screamed, too. At least I think he did.

Those screams followed me all the way down into the dark.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE NATIONAL SZÉCHÉNYI LIBRARY

F BUILDING OF BUDA CASTLE

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

TWO WEEKS AGO

Harry Bolt yelled and backpedaled as he went for his gun.

He stepped into a puddle of blood, his foot shot straight out in front of him, and he went down hard on his ass. Violin leapt over his falling body and he caught a momentary glare of complete disapproval on her pretty face. He saw light flash from the edges of her knives and then she was among the men.

Shots rang out, but Harry did not see Violin stagger or fall. How she evaded the bullets was something he would never understand. Never. Lying on the floor and watching her was like sitting in a movie theater and watching Black Widow or Wonder Woman. It was surreal. She moved too fast, twisted like a dancer, reacted with perfect timing.

It was beautiful.

And it was absolutely terrifying.

Because of the knives.

The men were good. Harry had to give them props. He knew that if it was him in that fight he'd be as dead as Olvera and Florida. Deader, if that was possible. They were brutal and they fought like a well-oiled machine. Practiced, experienced in killing together, merciless.

Violin should have died.

Five to one. Five big, muscular, powerful, and expert killers against a single woman who was at best half the weight and muscle mass of the smallest of them. They should have ripped her apart.

Except that's not what happened.

As Harry lay there in the puddle of blood, stunned, his pistol forgotten in his hand, he saw the impossible unfold before him.

Violin moved with a coordination that bordered on the supernatural. She danced. That was it, he realized; her fighting style flowed like lovely choreography. She stepped, turned, swept, ducked, leapt, twirled, bent, lunged, dodged, and flowed like honey. Like mercury. Like light.

The air around her was filled with rubies.

That's how it looked to Harry.

Rubies.

Bright droplets that glowed with heat as they flew.

The men yelled, and growled, and bellowed, and screamed, and cried out for their mothers.

As she cut them to pieces.

Not with the brutality that they had used on Olvera, Florida, and the library guards. No. If murder could have an aspect of beauty, if the act of killing could become an art form, then this was what he was seeing.

Pieces of them fell.

And they fell, and even in their deaths they seemed to swoon to the ground like danseurs whose moment of dramatic demise was demanded by the music, by the narrative of the dance.

One of the men danced backward. The leader. He parried her cut and reeled away, bleeding but not mortally wounded. He flung down his knife and reached for the Tanfoglio pistol in his shoulder holster, and for a moment Violin was engaged with two other men. It was in that single moment that Harry realized that Violin, despite everything, might lose this fight. That she might die.

The man raised the pistol.

And Harry fired his gun.

He emptied his entire magazine at him. He carried a Sig Sauer P220 with a seven-round flush magazine. All seven rounds punched through the air. The distance was nearly point blank.

The leader of the killers wheeled around and stared.

Harry stared back.

Not one of his goddamn bullets had gone anywhere near him. They'd struck the wall, the door, and two rounds had gone through into the main hall.

Harry Bolt was a lousy shot. Always had been.

The man gave him a quizzical look. A kind of battlefield “are you serious” look. Nearly a smile. Then he raised his gun toward Harry.

Violin whirled and cut his hand off at the wrist. She checked the swing and slashed him across the throat. All in the space of a frenzied heartbeat.

The leader dropped to his knees only a second before the other two men pirouetted away from the angel of destruction, took sloppy wandering steps, and fell.

The room became a tableau.

Like a superwoman in an action movie, Violin stood with both hands held out, almost crucified against the reality of what she had just done. Her knives dripped red; her body was splash-painted with red. All around her were the men who should have ripped her apart. A faint wisp of gun smoke lingered in the air.

Harry stared up at her in awe, in shock, maybe in love.

She snapped her wrists down and the blood went flying from the oiled blades. She reversed the knives and slid them into the thigh sheaths.

All in a moment.

All in a dream.

Yeah. Harry Bolt was in love.

She looked down at him, at the slide that was locked back on his gun.

“You're not only an idiot,” she said. “You're a useless idiot.”

Outside there was the sound of sirens. Someone had heard the gunshots. Or maybe they heard the screams. Violin bent and pulled the black shirt off of the dead leader and then carefully but quickly wrapped it around the book.

“Get up or go to jail,” she snapped. “Whatever you're going to do, do it now.”

With the book clutched to her chest, she whirled once more and dashed for the front door.

Harry Bolt staggered to his feet and, because he had no idea what else to do, ran to catch up.

Harry did not look back and therefore did not see the dark SUV pull up outside the library. He did not see the six men in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties enter the library. He did not see them hurry back out only a few seconds later.

Because Harry did not see any of this he did not pay much attention to the fact that he was leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind as he ran.

He did not see the six men begin to follow those prints.

Harry Bolt, after all, was not a very good spy.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

SEAHAWK PLACE

DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 20, 11:27
P.M.

Junie Flynn was asleep, lost in a dream of strange creatures that blossomed like flowers from twisted trees, then broke off and went flapping on gossamer wings. The landscape was filled with discordant images of intense beauty and ferocious ugliness, and in her dreams Junie was one of the newly hatched creatures who flew over forests of living plants, along beaches of jagged glass sands that ran beside oceans of boiling mercury. When she cried out, her voice was a piercing shriek that sounded like the dying wail of a wounded seabird. Or like a child who was lost and knew she would never again be found.

It was a dreadful dream and this was the third consecutive night she'd had it.

That was how sleep was for her. Her dreams were seldom about Joe or their life here in California. She rarely dreamed of things that had happened during the day, or of the incidental mundanities of life. Her dreams flowed like a river between fantastical and nightmarish.

As did her life.

She seldom shared those dreams with Joe and never with anyone else.

Never.

On those nights when she woke shivering and bathed in fear-sweat, Joe calmed her and comforted her, and from the soothing things he said it was clear he thought that her sleep had been troubled by the cancer she had beat two years ago, or the baby she had lost when an assassin's bullet destroyed her uterus. Or of the things she had witnessed while coasting the edges of the violent world of the DMS.

But that wasn't it.

That was never it.

Her dreams took her to strange worlds that Joe would never understand. Junie thought she did, though. After all, her DNA was so complicated and it belonged, at least in part, to other worlds than this one.

Was that where her dreams took her? she wondered. Did this fractured and surreal landscape exist in some other place, and were images of it somehow stored in her cells?

She hoped not, because it was a dreadful, dreadful place.

If that was true, though, then she found it strange that she never saw people in those other worlds. Not once.

Or, maybe it was that the creatures who lived there did not fit any definition of “people” that her senses would recognize. There were plenty of creatures here. Bizarre forms that seemed to change shape the moment she looked away from then, as if it was a game for them to hide from her through transformation. Flesh—if flesh it was—flowed and shifted and assumed improbable forms. Some of them were devilishly similar to things that triggered recognition but did so imperfectly. It was like trying to read a book written in Rorschach inkblots. Other forms were simply devilish in their own right, and when the creatures were in these forms they looked up at her as she flew overhead and they smiled with mouths that were filled with row upon row of teeth.

Tonight, though, the dream changed and in doing so found a new level of strangeness. A new level of horror.

This time she saw a human form running naked along the beach.

A man.

The soles of his feet were shredded from the jagged glass sand and there were awful gashes on his knees and palms from times when he fell. His body was crisscrossed with scratches from plants that reached for him and claws that sought him with pernicious delight.

He ran and ran.

Despite the pain, he ran.

Despite the damage, he ran.

Junie flew above him and tried to call out his name, tried to tell him where to go to escape the things that bit and the things that tore. But her voice was a wail and she had no words.

She could not speak his name even though it screamed inside her mind.

Joe.

Her lover ran from shambling, twisting, metamorphosing beasts that chased. But he also ran toward a great, gray storm cloud that hung strangely low over the horizon.