The Jeep was in the garage. It was coated in dirt, sprays of it running back from the wheels. Maybe no one had used it since he and Mom. A full tank of gas, which was good news, but no keys in the ignition.
Hawk went back inside. This was a safe house. The keys had to be somewhere. No hooks hanging by the door, so he went into the kitchen, started opening drawers. He found a white envelope with a thick stack of weathered twenty-dollar bills. He tucked it in his pocket, kept looking. Bingo, a ring of three keys, one of them bearing the Jeep logo. He was only fourteen, and hadn’t driven since that day, but he’d figure it out, and besides, the streets were empty—
Outside the kitchen windows a parade was passing.
Hawk froze, glad he’d left the lights off.
It wasn’t a parade.
It was an army.
The men didn’t wear uniforms, but the dust on their clothes and dirt on their faces made them all look the same. They carried guns, mostly rifles and shotguns, but some heavier stuff too, things he recognized from games. There were so many of them, a flood, like a concert letting out, only they walked in silence, their eyes hard. Not more than forty feet away.
One of them looked over, a long-haired scarecrow with an assault rifle in his arms and a huge bowie knife on his hip. The man stared right at him, and Hawk felt his heart bang in his throat and forehead, a wave of panic so hot he thought he’d wet himself again. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t move, just stood rooted at the counter, the keys in one hand. After a moment, the guy’s eyes flicked away and he kept moving. The house was dark, the windows transformed into mirrors. He hadn’t seen Hawk after all. Slowly, he lowered himself to his knees.
The men kept coming. Hundreds. Thousands. The sky was turning red behind them, and he had a sudden flash of something from the graphic novel.
An army of demons marching out of hell.
CHAPTER 34
“Yes, we know, but they are still outside the perimeter defenses . . .”
“Floodlights. Of course they’ll shoot them out. That’s why . . .”
“We’ve got more people than guns, and not enough ammunition, so get a network of runners going to keep it . . .”
“They don’t have vehicles. Horses.”
The room was a cross between a meeting space and an amphitheater, and packed with people jabbering into phones, staring at terminals, bouncing data back and forth. Until recently it had served for corporate meetings and product demos, and in one of those little ironies Cooper was growing tired of, the plaque on the outside of the door labeled it the War Room. A cutesy touch that would have fit in a tech start-up—which, he supposed, the NCH was.
“How should I know when they’ll attack? Sometime after the big bright spot in the sky goes away, and before it comes back . . .”
“Casualty projections are all over the board . . .”
“No, horses . . .”
Cooper imagined bulling through the room, fighting his way to Jakob at the head of the table, offering help. The prospect tired him in every way. This was already a too-many-cooks situation, and while in theory his tactical experience would be valuable, without being plugged into the Holdfast bureaucracy, what was the point?
He glanced over at Shannon. She had one arm crossed to support her elbow, the other hand at her face, the tip of her thumb just between her teeth. Her eyes drank the room. Funny—he’d seen her naked, seen her kill, seen her make herself invisible, but he couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen her just stand somewhere. It struck him as oddly intimate.
She sensed him looking—her gift, he supposed—and glanced over.
He said, “Let’s get out of here.”
The location was her idea.
When Erik had activated his Proteus virus, the first casualties had been three state-of-the-art fighter jets that were buzzing Tesla. Two of the Wyverns had collided midair, the debris raining down. The pilot had ejected from the third, and her bird had done a backflip into the side of the central building, tearing a hole four floors high and forty yards across, the jet fuel starting a fire that had consumed most of the furnishings before the auto-suppression system got it under control. The bodies had been removed and the gaping rip in the building had been sealed with plastic sheeting that billowed and popped in the wind, but little else had been done to repair the damage.
They looked at each other, then at the torched interior, the blackened remnants of desks and chairs. Shattered solar glass sparkled amidst the ash. Shannon stepped gingerly through a pile of debris, bent to pick up a metal picture frame. The glass was cracked, the image burned away. “Can you imagine sitting at a desk, just doing your job, all of a sudden an airplane comes through the window?”
“Kind of.”
“Yeah,” she said, threw him a glance not easily parsed. “Me too.”
Cooper picked his way across the ruined floor. The stink of scorched plastic hung in the air even now. Translucent sheeting reduced the world outside to blurry shapes backlit by the setting sun. “A couple of miles away, an army is waiting for darkness to fall.” He shook his head. “How did we get here?”
“Gradually, I guess.” Shannon’s voice was soft. “One lie at a time.”
“You and your whole truth fetish,” Cooper said. “Ever since the first time we talked, in that shitty hotel after the El platform. I had been very heroic, saving your life—”
“Funny, I remember that differently.”
“And you said something like, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t be a war if people didn’t keep going on television and saying there was one.’” He shook his head. “And now here we are.”
“Yeah.” She tossed the picture frame. The remaining glass tinkled. “Here we are.”
Gunfire sounded in the distance, steady and slow. Going to hear a lot more of it tonight. He sighed, rubbed at his face. “My kids are in a bunker right now. They must be so scared.”
Somehow Shannon was beside him, then. One hand on his arm. “Hey,” she said. “We’ve saved them before. We’ll do it again.”
Before he could reply, his phone vibrated. He glanced at the display. “It’s Ethan.”
She straightened. “You should answer.”
Cooper nodded, hit a button. “Hey, Doc, you’re on speaker.”
“I . . . is it . . .”
“Just me and Shannon. Have you found the missing canisters?”
“What? No. I haven’t been looking for them.”
“Doc, come on, I need you to focus—”
“You’re the detective,” Ethan said. “What do you want me to do, go door to door? I’ve been working the epidemiology of the virus instead. It’s a sonuvabitch, man, a real monster. A modification of the flu, airborne, long-lived, but with R-naught estimates in the twenties. That means each case could result in twenty or more secondary cases. And since there’s no dependable influenza vaccine, if this gets out, pretty much everyone is going to catch it.”
Cooper winced. “How bad is the illness?”
“It’s not. Pretty much the sniffles. The flu isn’t the problem. I’ve been reviewing the research notes, analyzing blood and tissue samples, trying to figure out why Abe died.” Ethan’s voice caught on that. “Cooper, it was the serum. Our work. Becoming brilliant killed him.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Abe vanished before we could do proper trials. And then he injected himself, which was crazy, you just don’t do that, but he was so paranoid, so sure he was right . . . anyway, you saw how effective it was.”