Muscles began to spasm, causing people to arch violently backward, throwing them down in a human blossom as if a powerful wind had been aimed directly at the grandstand. Allen Lamar and his two compatriots fell moments later, overcome by their proximity to the fumes pouring out of Lamar’s canister. The invisible cloud moved on the breeze, felling everyone it touched.
Spectators began to stampede, back pedaling away from their dying neighbors, yanking at spouses in a frantic effort to get ahead of the unseen monster attacking the stadium. Terrified parents grabbed their younger children and fled, slipping on the vomit of the person next to them, clutching their throats as they ran. The band fell silent and the air was filled with mournful wailing and the pounding of feet on aluminum stadium seats.
His back to the wind and still a dozen yards away from Lamar, Johnson pulled up short. He caught sight of Andrea Lopez running directly toward him. Of course she would be the one who disobeyed his order. She had an ass-magnet that pulled her toward danger with the gravity of ten thousand suns.
A father and his teenage son stumbled directly in front of her, and then fell headlong into the paved walkway. Lopez hit the invisible cloud at a sprint, chest heaving, drawing in a lungful of whatever deadly stuff this was. Her legs gave out as if she’d been hit in the head with an iron bar. Forward momentum carried her skidding across the concrete nose first. Her hands dangled at her sides on useless arms. Legs writhing, she struggled, trying in vain to rise.
Johnson slammed the top of the chain link fence with both hands, fighting the urge to rush in. It was much too late to save her — and there were hundreds more lives to consider. Instead, he vaulted over the fence and onto the track that surrounded the football field — pushing dumbstruck cheerleaders and the flag-waving drill team back farther, into the wind.
Angie James’s voice crackled across the radio. “Lopez is down—”
“Stay back, Angie!” Johnson screamed, for the benefit of his agents as well as all those around him. “Everyone stay back! This is gas! Repeat. We’re dealing with poison gas!”
The press gaggle, there to do a story on a state football championship, smelled something much more tempting in the carnage. The reporter’s mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads,” drew them toward the danger as surely as it had poor Lopez. One of them, a balding guy with a hefty belly, rushed past Johnson in the melee to get a closer look. His camera fell from his grasp moments later as he sagged to his knees, clutching his chest and staring at the night sky in shock. A group of four other cameramen watched him fall and skidded to a stop, deciding it was best to keep their distance.
“Are you getting this?” Johnson heard a female reporter ask one of the photographers.
“Oh, hell yeah,” the cameraman said, the giddiness in his voice belying the carnage spilling across the field. “We’re live.”
The death blossom grew as the invisible poison moved through the grandstands, felling everyone it touched.
Johnson looked back and forth, wracking his brain for some kind of plan. Well over a hundred killed by an unseen and apparently unstoppable force, their horrific deaths streamed on live television.
It was the stuff of terrorists’ dreams.
All the girls on the drill team but one dropped their flags and fled to the far side of the field. The remaining girl stood frozen in place, eyes glazed at the sight of so much death — the false maturity of high school draining away to expose the face of a frightened little child.
Her flag popped and waved in the breeze, folding in on itself as the wind shifted — to blow back toward the field.
In the stands, spectators broke in a full stampede, pushing and shoving, jumping over the dead and dying, trampling the small and weak, anything to escape — anything to live. A referee, not two steps away from Johnson, fell where he stood, laughing hysterically and ripping away his striped shirt. Beyond the ref, the Reavis High student dressed as the red-and-white ram mascot swayed on his feet before toppling at the sidelines. The gigantic horned head rolled off to reveal a shock of blond hair and the stricken face of a young man.
Johnson’s hands tightened reflexively into fists. A heated knot seethed low in his belly. For a fleeting instant, he wondered if it was the poison gas or anger. He decided he didn’t care. Taking three quick breaths, he ran for the horned head of the ram mascot, jumping the lifeless body of the referee on the way. Holding his breath, he scooped up the hollow costume head and carried it toward the cardboard canister that still foamed and spewed its deadly contents into the air from the grass beside the arched body of Allen Lamar. Johnson did his best to approach from upwind, and dropped the giant ram head over the canister like a lid in an effort to contain the gas. He thought it worked until he noticed the cartoonish screen mouth the mascot used to see through. Exertion and adrenaline worked to deplete his body of oxygen. His lungs screamed for air.
With no clear vision of what the threat actually was or where it was coming from, people ran in every direction. Some even stampeding across the field, street shoes slipping in the fresh grass, floundering to their feet and running on. Some were in a panic, hoping only to save themselves. In others, humanity bloomed, and they risked their lives to aid those falling victim around them. One of every two who got within fifteen feet of the spewing canister fell in their tracks, even now that it was covered with the costume ram head.
A half second before his lungs convulsed and forced him to draw a breath, Johnson stripped off his leather jacket and draped it over the mascot, plugging the screened opening.
The muscles in the agent’s back tensed as soon as he breathed, yanking his head back as if some unseen hand grabbed a handful of his hair. A searing pain ran like an electric current up both sides of his spine — a Taser jolt that didn’t abate. He fell backward, balanced for a long moment on his heels and the back of his head, his eyes wide and staring up at the stadium lights. The muscles in one side of his back overpowered the other, convulsing even harder so he fell sideways. He struggled to regain his balance, to push himself up, but there was nothing there. It was as if something had been scrambled between his brain and the muscles he wished to control. The tension in his back grew until he thought his bones would crack, but the pain eased, and he suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to laugh. He lay on his side now, the cool grass of the football field pressed against his cheek. From the corner of his eye, he could just make out Andrea James directing people away from the overturned costume head. She must have seen him cover it and knew the threat was there. Johnson tried to close his eyes, but even the muscles in his face rebelled, drawing back into a grimace that he was sure looked like a terrifying grin. His chest heaved as if crushed by an unseen weight. Spasming lungs made him begin to giggle uncontrollably, even as a single tear escaped his eye and ran down his stricken cheek and into the trampled grass of the football field.
Twenty yards upwind, a slender brunette woman wearing a red fleece jacket and matching hat used two fingers on the screen of her phone to zoom in on the picture of the downed FBI agent. “This is gold,” she said to the cameraman beside her. “Tell me you’re getting this…”
Chapter 7
Quinn brought up a live stream from Dallas on his phone while he listened to the breaking news on the Hoyt’s truck radio. He’d spent enough time in Iraq to know the devastating effects of poison gas when he saw them.
An Alaska State trooper and three uniformed officers and a handful of detectives and brass from Anchorage PD rolled up but let the cop shooters sit handcuffed on the side of the road. Everyone stood in the shadow of the mountains alongside the Seward Highway, glued to their phones as the news of the terrorist attack unfolded.