He screamed and screamed, even as he turned and brought up his own gun.
“Die, motherfucker!” he roared as he emptied the entire magazine into the Closers. Two of them went down, but more were coming.
More.
So many more.
And then the door at the far end of the hall burst open as a Closer came flying through, his limbs twisted, head twisted more than halfway around. The man struck the backs of the other Closers and dragged three of them to the floor. Everyone turned — the Closers and Top — to see two new figures enter the hallway.
A man and a woman. She was tall, with dark eyes that glittered like polished coal. He was a big and blocky man with tinted glasses and black gloves. She had two knives, one in each of her slim fists. He carried no weapons.
They each wore ungainly metal helmets.
The Closers raised their weapons.
And Violin and Mr. Church were upon them.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN
06:47
The corridor was exactly the same as the one in my dream.
That was freaky on a level that shook me to my marrow.
But at the same time it gave me a splinter of hope.
“This way!” yelled Harry, running ahead, but I was already going that way, running beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, but unlike in my dream I did not stop to look in each one. I knew now where I was going. Maybe better than Harry did. He hadn’t been here since this was actually his playroom.
The door to the laboratory was on my left. Another wasted second swiping a keycard. As the lock clicked I heard Ghost growl. I turned, bringing the Sig Sauer up.
The door directly opposite the lab opened and he was there.
Mr. Priest.
Esteban Santoro.
Closers crowded the doorway behind him. A lot of them.
And it was in that moment, when the odds were absolutely impossible, when it was three of us against eight of them, when the clock was running down and there was pretty much no chance I could win, that something happened. I could feel it. Way deep down inside.
It was not a battle heat. It was not fear. It was not any emotion that modern science or advanced psychology has a name for. It was something too old for that. Too primitive. Too elemental. As Santoro came at me, I felt the Killer awaken in my head. He had slept too long and we both knew it. Maybe he’d been driven into some kind of coma by the things we’d seen at Gateway, by illness, or by the rape of our shared mind by Bolton and his psychic vampires.
Who knows?
Who cares?
He came awake all at once. A killer, a monster, a beast. Beside me I heard the sound of Ghost’s snarl change, too, as the dog — in the presence of his true pack leader — yielded control to the wolf within.
The hallway was narrow. Close quarters favors the few over the many.
It favors the savage over the civilized.
With a howl of inhuman fury and red delight, the Killer attacked, and the wolf charged with him.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN
Top Sims heard the screams and forced himself up. He was covered with hot debris from where the microwave blast had destroyed Montana Parker. His skin was flash-burned and most of the hair on his head was singed down to the scalp. He had to wipe blood and soot from his eyes in order to see what was happening, but when he did see it Top could only gape.
Violin and Church had entered the fight.
Violin moved like a dancer in a ballet whose story was about the end of the world. She lunged and pivoted, swept and leapt, ducked and pirouetted with a grace that made what she did both beautiful and appalling. Men screamed as she opened them and let their futures spill out. The walls seemed to almost glow with the bright red that flew like paint from the edges of her knife.
Beside her was Mr. Church, and never once had Top seen the big man fight. Church looked too old and too bulky to move with any kind of speed. A man Top always thought was well past the prime of life, past the point where he could wade into a battle and do anything but become collateral damage. As he watched Church fight, Top knew how very wrong he was. Top had never seen anyone fight like that. It was not karate or kung fu. If the fighting style had a name, Top was sure that it would be clinical. Mathematical. It was the opposite of Violin’s elegant destruction because Church fought with no visible sense of style. His movements were machinelike, cold, and ruthlessly efficient. They were equations of deconstruction that took the problem of an armed attacker and subtracted all of the things about the opponent that allowed him to be a threat. What was left was no man at all. It was a broken thing that was permitted to fall because even his usefulness as a shield was gone.
Violin’s face bore a smile of savage delight, and it was clear that she enjoyed the art of combat. For her this was gorgeous and she wrote a symphony in the screams she coaxed from horrified throats. Church wore no expression at all, except a cold disapproval etched into the lines around his mouth. These men stood between Church and what he wanted. That was it, that was the extent of the emotional connection.
And they died.
Closers. Fierce and deeply trained. Armed and armored.
They outnumbered Violin and Church five to one.
And it did not matter at all.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN
The Mullah and his people bent forward to watch the flocks of drones fly from rooftops in New York and Philadelphia, in San Diego and Boston, in each of the ten cities. There were four operatives per city and each operative released ten drones. A total of four hundred tiny machines fitted with tubes of SX-56—with the wrath of God.
The operatives were being released now, one by one, and the looks of confusion and horror on their faces were beautiful. The gathered warlords and generals saw them as the expressions of men and women who had been forced to do holy work and were now realizing it.
The Mullah knew different.
Or, at least, the Dreamer who squatted like an imp inside his mind knew different. The looks on those faces were fear and uncertainty, self-doubt and dread. They knew they had done something wrong, something bad, but they did not understand how or why. Most of them probably wouldn’t even connect the launch of these drones to the power failure that was coming soon. So soon.
The Dreamer wished he could be there with each of them in the coming days to see how they reacted as the first news stories broke about the spread of a new and nearly untreatable form of a disease everyone in America thought was extinct. Seeing that would be nice, it would be fun.
But the Dreamer knew he would be too busy by then.
When the plague began sweeping the country, this fine and sterling nation would need the services of its greatest spy, its greatest warrior, its one unfailable hero.
While he slept in the back of his car in the parking lot of the Pier — slept and walked far in his dreams — Harcourt Bolton, Senior, smiled the contented smile of a happy man.