Kill Switch (66 page)

“L-Ledger…?” he whispered in a voice thick with fear and surprise. “How…?”

“Toys? How the hell are you even here?” I demanded. “How did you get here? What are you
doing
here?”

Tears streamed from his fever-bright eyes. “I tried to save her, Ledger. God help me, I tried. Please …
please
 … I tried.”

I hauled myself to my feet. The room swung around me, refusing to settle. There was thunder in my head and blood in my mouth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He tried to answer, but he simply could not. Instead he stretched out his arm and with a hand that shook with the palsy of absolute terror, he pointed to something behind me. I did not want to turn. No fucking way. Whatever was happening here was all wrong. I'd hit my head, I knew that. Nothing was probably what it seemed. Everything was suspect. Nothing that I'd done since Gateway was to be trusted. I knew that. The mycotoxins. The viruses. They were messing with me. Rudy said so. Hu said so. I was delusional. Everything was a bad dream.

That's what I told myself as I turned to follow the direction of his pointing finger. No matter what was there, no matter what it was that had torn Toys down like this, no matter what horror my concussed brain wanted to show me was going to be a lie.

I turned.

I saw.

I screamed.

She was there. Across the room. Against the wall. High on the wall. Heavy iron spikes driven all the way through the precious, familiar flesh. Bloody spike-heads sticking out from wrists and ankles and stomach and breastbone. Long, tangled blond hair hung in sweat-soaked twists down her naked body. Her breasts, empty of blood, sagged. Her head hung down so that I could not see her face. I didn't need to. I knew those lines, those curves. I was more intimately familiar with the landscape of that woman than with anyone I'd ever known. The pale flesh, the paler scars. Each freckle and mole.

“I'm sorry,” said Toys, his voice filling with fresh tears. “They needed a sacrifice and I had no choice. No choice.”

My scream drowned out his words. I did not scream at him. I did not scream his name, nor did I howl out a denial. No, the shriek torn from my chest was a single word. A name.
Her
name.

Junie.

On the other side of the room the God Machine pulsed.

And the God Machine pulsed again. A fresh wave hit me.

*   *   *

Someone shook me awake and as I came up out of blackness a hand clamped itself over my mouth and a voice whispered directly into my ear.

“Quiet. They'll hear you. They're right outside.”

A female voice. Not familiar, no one I knew, and yet …

Somehow I
did
know her.

I opened my eyes. We were inside a school bus. A big damn yellow school bus. Small, pale faces peered in silent horror over the backs of seats. Dozens of them. Scuffed and dirty, some of them streaked with blood. So many young eyes, each filled with bottomless horror. In some I saw the dangerous vacuity that spoke of shock and trauma that may already have run too deep.

The woman who spoke removed her hand from my mouth and shifted to help me sit up. She was a cop, but no one I knew. A big blonde with lots of curves and a beautiful face that was set into hardness. Blue eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. Blood and dirt smeared on her clothes.

“You good?” she asked, her voice low but not a whisper. Whispers carry. Cops and soldiers know that. She was a cop, but she had the soldier look. Battle horrors leave a certain stamp on a person, a particular light in the eyes, and she had that. There was a small black ID badge pinned to her breast. It said
FOX
.

“What's going on?” I asked, pitching my voice low, too. “Where am I? Who are these children? And who are you?”

I saw doubt flicker over her face. “Oh, for fuck's sake, don't tell me you got some kind of amnesia bullshit. You didn't get hit
that
hard, you pussy.”

There was a dull ache on my forehead and I touched it. My fingers came away red with blood. “What happened?”

Officer Fox took a single short breath before answering, as if she needed the moment to control her anger. “How much don't you remember? Do you know who the fuck you are, at least?”

“Captain Ledger,” I said.

“Captain? You demoting yourself?”

“What?”

“Last I heard you were a full bird colonel,” she said. “But we can run with captain. Whatever. I don't fucking care as long as you know who you are.”

“It's captain,” I said. “You're Officer Fox?”

“Then you
do
remember?”

“I read your name tag.”

“Balls. We're trying not to die and you're checking out my tits.”

“Your name tag,” I repeated. “Who are you and what's happening?”

“What's the last thing you remember?”

There were sounds outside. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, a few hollow pops of small arms. Growls.

Growls?

“I was in the Playroom,” I said. “Got hit with a God Wave and—”

She punched me. In the chest. Hard.

“No,” she snapped. “Don't go getting stupid on me. I don't know what the shit a God Wave is, but that's not part of what's happening. This is here and now. This is Stebbins County and we are in deep shit. Can you remember anything about that? About Lucifer 113?”

Yeah, I knew about that microscopic monster. It was the bastard child of a Cold War bioweapons program. But all that knowledge was from a report. One of thousands I had to read over the years to keep track and get perspective. Nothing from an active case.

“It's the God Wave,” I insisted. “It's screwing everything up.”

“Come the Christ on, Ledger,” growled Fox. “Sam talked about you like you had the biggest dick in Special Forces and you're babbling about some religious surfer bullshit? I need you to get your head out of your ass and get back in the game, because we are in deep shit.”

“Sam? Sam Imura? Is Sam here?”

A shadow crossed her face. “He … was. I told you what happened at the food depository. He fell … they…” She shook her head. “It doesn't matter. We're here and we need to do something.”

The gunfire was trailing off. There were fewer shots but the growls were getting louder. Closer.

“They're coming back!” cried one of the children, and they all started crying. Too much, too loud. I could hear the way those sounds changed the noises from outside. The growls got louder, more insistent.

No. They weren't growls. They were moans. And that fast I knew what they were. Even though it was impossible, I
knew.

I caught Fox's wrist in a tight grip. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “I have a head injury and I can't remember much. But if those are
walkers
out there, then you need to bring me up to speed real damn quick. I need a sitrep and don't paint it with pretty colors.”

She gave me a strange look. Almost a smile. A little relief, maybe. A small warrior's smile. She nodded.

“Short version of a bad story,” she said. “I'm Officer Desdemona Fox. Dez. We're south of Roanoke and we're trying to get to Ashville. We have three school buses. Used to have more but…” Tears glistened in her eyes, hard as diamonds. She pawed at them and plunged ahead. “Sam and his team helped us get out, but we lost most of them. We had to go off the main roads because of the traffic jams. A whole wave of those dead bastards hit us two hours ago. You and your boys came out of no-fucking-where and we made it ten more miles down the road. Then we got hit by another surge of them and you got nailed by debris when you didn't duck fast enough when the grenade went off. What'd I leave out that you need to know?”

“How bad is it?” I demanded. “How far has it spread?”

The look she gave me was one of hard, unflinching fatalism. It was the reason there was no trace of hope or optimism in her eyes. “It's everywhere, man. How can you not know that? This is the actual end.”

Suddenly hands began pounding on the outside of the bus. Heavy, soft, artless thumps. Nothing fast, nothing precise. Just the battering of mindless need. I knew that sound. The hungry dead. The relentless dead.

I'd fought this before. It was how I got into the DMS. Sebastian Gault had developed a prion-based pathogen that turned people into something straight out of
The Walking Dead.
Except this wasn't TV. This was the world and we'd had to do terrible things to save it. So many people died to put the monster back into its cage. Then it surfaced again after Artemisia Bliss stole the
seif al din
pathogen from the secure facility where it had been locked away. She'd unleashed it on a subway train in New York, at a Best Buy in Pennsylvania, and at a science fiction convention in Atlanta. Worst day for civilian deaths in American history. Again, my team and I had been forced to pull triggers and cut throats in order to save the nation—hell, the entire world—from consuming itself. No joke, no exaggeration.

So what happened? How was I on a school bus with all these kids and a cop telling me that some
other
bioweapon, Lucifer 113, had slipped its chain? How could I not have prevented this? Where was the DMS when the Devil got out of its cage? How was it possible that the apparatus of defense that Church had built could have failed on so spectacular a level?

How? The dead hammered on the bus. The children screamed.

“This isn't real,” I told her.

“Fuck you,” she said, and punched me again. Harder. “Look around you. These kids are all that's left of my town. Every bus is filled with kids.
Kids.
Look at them. Listen to them, for Christ's sake. Not real? God, I want to kick your teeth down your throat. This is happening and it's happening right now. You're supposed to be a genuine goddamn American hero, Ledger. Why don't you Velcro your nutsack back on and act like it.”

The dead began hammering on the side of the bus with renewed intensity.

I struggled to get to my feet.

And the God Wave hit me again.

*   *   *

I stood on the side of an overturned school bus.

Dez Fox was gone. The bus was years old, wrapped in creeper vines, rusted and dead. There was a sound behind me and a young man climbed up to stand next to me. At first I thought it was Sam, but I was wrong. He was younger, taller, slimmer. His eyes were sadder. He had a katana slung over his shoulder, angled for an overhand draw. His name was Tom, but I don't know how I knew that.

“There's a trail through the trees,” Tom said, nodding off to my left. “Heads up into the hills. Zoms won't go uphill unless they're chasing something.”

“I taught you that, kiddo,” I said. My voice sounded different. Older, filled with hard use and gravel. The kind of voice you could get if you screamed enough.

Far ahead we could see movement on the road as first one and then several emaciated figures staggered out of the tall weeds.

“Time to go, Tom,” I said.

We turned and walked the length of the school bus. He dropped lightly to the ground and then offered a hand to help me down. It was disconcerting to realize I needed it. In the distance on the other side of the bus the dead had caught our scent and they began to moan. We faded into the trees, heading uphill.

The God Wave took me away before I saw where we were going.

*   *   *

And then I stood on the shores of a black ocean.

Creatures roiled and twisted in the surf. Dark shapes that made no sense to a sane mind. Out on the horizon there was a mist, white as milk, rolling in. It churned, too, as if there were things moving inside it, approaching where I stood. If it reached me while I stood there they would consume me. No question about it.

“It's beautiful here,” said a voice, and I turned to see a handsome young man standing beside me. He was whole and straight. No burns, no madness flickering like candle flame in his eyes. And he could have been Junie's twin brother.

“I guess you'd have to know how to look at it,” I said.

Prospero nodded. “It's not your home.”

“No.”

There were storm clouds above us and something moved inside of them, too. Not animals, not beasts. Machines. As I watched, a half dozen of them broke from the clouds and soared above us. Two groups of three. Each of the machines was triangular in shape. They were elegant and they soared above us toward a row of mountains that towered miles and miles into this impossible sky.

“Not outer space,” said Prospero. “You know that, right?”

“I guess I do.”

“That's too far to travel.”

“Yes.”

“But here,” he gestured to the nightmare world around us, “my home is right next door to yours.”

“Prospero,” I said, “my world is dying. My people are going to burn when all the lights go out. Children are going to get sick and die. I can't do this without you.”

He said nothing as he turned to watch the triangular craft dwindle into tiny dots.

“Your father and Harcourt Bolton have stolen your machine and they are using it to destroy everyone I love.”

He smiled. “My father is dead. He shot himself, did you know that? They broke him up and threw him away. Poor Daddy.”

“Okay … but Bolton is still trying to steal what you made. He's turning you into a monster by exploiting what you built.”

“I
am
a monster. I come from a world of monsters.”

I turned to him. “Maybe that's true, Prospero, but you're not evil. You never were. In my world
Bolton
is the monster. And he is definitely evil. He keeps you in chains. You're the monster in his basement. And he will never let you go home.” I gestured to the world. “You're dreaming this, but you're still a prisoner in that basement.”