Code Zero (64 page)

The hair came away and he fell back as Junie flung herself sideways.

Without her hair she was bald except for a dusting of peach fuzz on her scalp.

A fist pounded on the door and Junie screamed for help as the man lunged for the fallen gun. She tried to kick it away, missed, and he snatched it just as the door burst inward in a spray of wood splinters and twisted metal.

Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

Marriott Marquis Hotel

265 Peachtree Center Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia

Sunday, September 1, 4:03 p.m.

The Berserker swung a fist at me with blinding speed but I got an elbow up in time to save my skull from being crushed. The force was incredible, though, and it plucked me clean off the ground and hurled me into a group of people trying to flee the carnage. We all landed badly and I felt something break under me. Someone’s leg, I think.

I scrambled to my feet, shoving fleeing conferees out of my way. There was a man dressed as Thor from the movies and I grabbed his hammer, hoping to smash the zombie Berserker into roach paste. I was already in full motion, taking the hammer, swinging it, aiming, hitting, and all the time realizing that the hammer was made out of rubber and plastic. It exploded into empty debris. I would have done more damage blowing him a kiss.

He snarled at me, showing his big gorilla teeth.

Shit.

Generation Twelve of the
seif-al-din
allows the infected to retain their full mental capacities even while the rest of the body begins a slowed-down process of decay. If there were a worst-case scenario for a zombie plague, genetically altered supersoldiers would be way at the top of my list.

He swung a punch that would have turned my head into pulp.

I got under it and hooked a punch into his groin.

It staggered him, just a little. He stumbled back a step and roared at me.

Roared.

Yeah.

You’d think a guy like me wouldn’t be fazed by something like that. You’d be wrong. Like I said, mutant zombie supersoldier.

Find a comfortable corner of your mind for that to curl up in.

But …

Damn if it didn’t feel like my knuckles punched actual balls instead of combat padding.

Inside my head the Killer let loose with his own roar. Fuck it. If this monster wanted to fight dirty, then I was willing to get all sorts of dirty. Maybe he thought he didn’t need armor with the
seif-al-din
cooking in his bloodstream.

I snatched my rapid-release folding knife from my pocket. It was the third one I’d had this weekend. The first was in a barrel along with my Hammer suit, either still down in the subway or in storage wherever they put toxic waste. The second was with my second Hammer suit in the decontamination unit at the Locker. This one was borrowed from Bird Dog, the DMS logistics utility infielder. He had good taste in knives, too. A Wilson Tactical Rapid Response knife with a three-and-three-eighths stainless blade. Not a lot of reach but it was so light that it moved at the same speed as my hand. My hands are very fucking fast.

I moved in and left, ducking low and slashing at the side of his knee, feeling the tendon part. I don’t care if you’re a muscle freak, a zombie, or a mutant, you need your leg tendons. He went to one knee but chopped at my head with his elbow. Bastard was fast, but I took the impact on my shoulder and used the force to propel me forward and out of range. I banged into a walker who was biting Captain Kirk. I grabbed him by the collar and jerked him backward and down. The back of his head hit the edge of a bar table. I sidestepped the mess. Captain Kirk wandered off, bleeding and screaming and weeping.

The Berserker rushed me on wobbling legs, arms wide to scoop me into a crushing embrace. I met his rush with a flat-footed stamp-kick to the front of his hips. The effect is like running into a fireplug—everything below the waist stops, everything above the waist cants sharply forward. As his head bowed forward I jammed a palm against his shoulder and for a split second he was frozen in that bent-forward position. A split second was all the time I needed to bury my blade into the top of his skull. I knew the right spot. The fontanelle. That area of the skull that’s soft on babies and never quite firms up. I drove the knife in all the way to the hilt and then wrenched it a quarter turn.

The Berserker died. Right then. There was no death spasm, no struggle to stave off the reaper. He simply stopped living. Everything that made him a monster, a person, and a threat was gone. I stepped back and let the fall of his body help me pull my knife free.

“On your six!” I heard someone shout, and I turned to see Montana behind me. She was bleeding from a broken nose, and one eye was puffed nearly shut. She had her rifle up and fired three shots past me, dropping two walkers.

“Give me your sidearm,” I snapped, and she pulled her Glock and handed it to me along with two magazines. There was considerable gunfire to our right, and we turned to see Bunny plowing the road with round after round from his drum-fed shotgun. Noah was with him, but there was no sign of Top.

Outside, the sound of machine-gun fire was intensifying.

The look in the eyes of my team was probably the same as what had to be in mine. Despair and fury in equal measure.

“Mother Night’s up on the balcony. Where’s Sam?”

Bunny jerked his head to the far side of the lobby. “Lost him and Top somewhere over there. They saw her running for the elevators with one of those Berserker assholes.”

“The Berserkers are infected with Gen. Twelve.”

“Well … fuck me blind.”

A voice began speaking in my ear and I covered my ears to listen while my team circled up, their backs to me, firing into the crowd to try to stop the unstoppable tide.

“Deacon to Cowboy…”

“Go for Cowboy.”

“The infection is in the streets. We are working to contain the spread. Have you acquired the target?”

“Not yet.”

“Give me an assessment. Can the civilians inside that hotel be saved?”

It was such a hard, cruel, necessary question.

“If they’re in their rooms, maybe. I think we’re losing the lobby.”

“Be advised that the president and the governor have authorized sterilization of that building if there is no hope of preserving significant numbers of uninfected.”

“Not yet, damn it.”

“Give me another option.”

“We need boots on the ground. Not out there—in
here.
Send in the damn cavalry.”

Church paused. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“And Mother Night may have video cameras in here.”

“She does,” said Church, “the feed is leaking to the Internet.”

“Shit. You got to find some way to—”

“Bug is close to cracking her system and is confident he will be able to jam all the cameras. I will alert you when that happens.”

“Make it fast. We’re going after Mother Night and I don’t want her gloating to the world.”

“Captain, listen to me,” said Church, “we’re not interested in an arrest. Not this time.”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“Then good hunting, Captain. And God bless.”

He was gone and I looked at the lobby. Maybe I was asking for help for something that was already helpless. But damn it, this was still a fight. There were still more people uninfected than transformed.

And I needed to get to Mother Night. Goddamn it, I needed to look into her eyes and determine for myself if there was any shoe left to drop. Was this slaughter what she wanted or did she still have one last game to play?

“We need to get to the elevators,” I yelled. “Clear me a path. Right now.”

Bunny swapped in a new drum and everyone fished for fresh magazines. The elevators were thirty yards away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

Even so, we had to try.

We raised our weapons at the seething crowd and began firing.

I would like to say that the only people we killed were infected. I would dearly love that to be true.

But that would only be a lie.

Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

Grand Hyatt Hotel

109 East Forty-second Street

New York City

Sunday, September 1, 4:04 p.m.

As the door burst open, Ludo Monk snatched up the pistol, turned, fired without aiming. The figure coming through the doorway moved with blinding speed. There was a second shot. A third.

A scream.

No, screams.

A woman’s scream. High, shrill, filled with pain and terror.

And his own voice. Nearly as high, screeching so loud that the sound of it burned away the clouds in his mind, leaving him clearheaded for a moment. No intruding voices, no peculiar patterns of thought. In that moment he could see and hear and understand everything with a clarity that was so rare and …

And lovely.

It was beautiful. Never once in his entire life had there been such fidelity of vision and perception. Never before had something stilled the voices in his head. Not even the pills did it this completely.

Monk tried to understand what was happening.

He turned his head and it moved very loosely on his neck. Too loosely. He knew that his neck was not broken, yet the muscles were strangely slack.

“What—?” he asked.

A figure moved from left to right in front of him. Tall, slender, female, and familiar. He didn’t know her name, did he?

Something …

Something musical.

He was sure of it.

“M—Mother—?” he asked, hoping it was her. Needing it to be her.

There was no answer. Not to his question. But the woman with the musical name was speaking. Shouting.

Monk turned his head again, trying to see who was talking. Why was it so hard to remember who was in the room with him? He knew that he should know this. It was just a few moments ago.

A few moments.

Everything had changed in those moments.

His mind became clearer and yet he could not fill it with names or meaning.

The woman was kneeling now and he saw her bend down over something …

No.

Over someone.

Another woman.

A woman who seemed to be lying on a red blanket.

Or floating in a red pool.

Monk could not tell which, but as he watched the blanket or pool it grew larger and larger.

“Mother?” he asked again.

The women ignored him. Neither was his mother.

He heard the tall woman yelling something.

“Junie! Junie, stay with me. Stay with me…”

That was funny to Monk because it was clear that the other woman, the bald woman, wasn’t trying to go anywhere. So strange.

The lights in his mind began to go out as if someone were walking through a room and flipping switches. The darkness was soft and cool and it covered him completely.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

Marriott Marquis Hotel

265 Peachtree Center Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia

Sunday, September 1, 4:11 p.m.

It took two or three thousand years for us to fight our way across the lobby. Halfway there, Lydia joined us. She had a Sig Sauer in one hand and a Glock in the other and her face was flecked with powder burns.

We kept going, kept fighting.

This was so much worse than the slaughter outside the Ark chamber down in the Locker and worse even than the subway slaughter. Some of these people stared at us in horror, the hurt of betrayal in their terrified eyes. Some of them begged us for help even as their eyes began to glaze from infection. There were people of all kinds there. Adults of every age. Children.

Tears burned like acid in my eyes as I fired.

Then we reached the elevator. The door was jammed open by a knot of corpses and three walkers who crouched over them, feeding messily.

“Yo! Dickheads!” yelled Montana. Their heads jerked up and she blew them back against the wall and out of this version of hell. Bunny grabbed the dead and flung them into the lobby, tripping two other walkers who were rushing us from behind. Before I could bring my gun up, the two walkers pitched sideways, red spray blowing from the sides of their heads. I never even heard the shot and I wasted one moment looking around for the shooter. Had to be Sam, but I couldn’t see him.

We crowded into the elevator.

The lights on every floor were lit and at each stop we had to shove back the living and the dead. It was as heartbreaking as it was terrifying.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can…” began Montana, her voice low and fragile, but then she stiffened. “No,” she snapped, directing it at me or herself, or both. “No.”

We reloaded.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “If there had been some other way to ease you into this. Or to let you know this is what we did…”

“No,” she said again, and there was a bright—almost fevered—ferocity in her eyes. “This has to be done. If not us, who?”

Behind her, Noah laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hooah.”

“Hooah,” echoed Bunny, Lydia, and I.

The doors opened and we stepped out onto a balcony that was completely crowded with the infected. There were at least five Berserkers among them, towering like titans above the throng of ordinary walkers. Beyond the Berserkers, standing against the balcony wall, was Mother Night.

The crowd of the dead let out a deafening moan of raw, unending hunger, and rushed at us from both sides.

Once more we formed a shooting line, Bunny and Noah facing forward, Lydia and Montana facing behind us, and me looking for a way to get to Mother Night. I had the irrational feeling that this was actually hell. The real hell. And it would be nothing but this. Red slaughter and the roar of guns, blood and pain and death.

Some of the infected seemed to be whole, without bites or marks to indicate how they’d died. And I recalled the woman I’d seen downstairs, looking like she was on the edge of becoming a walker. I remembered the candy wrapper in her hand. There were other wrappers, and plenty of unopened candies down there on the floor. It didn’t require a leap of genius intellect to come up with a theory on that. The
seif-al-din
pathogen could easily be added to food, or injected into a tasty piece of chocolate. It fit with the “love me while I destroy you” vibe that Artemisia Bliss had constructed within her Mother Night persona.