There was not one part of this that made sense.
All the protesters had used essentially the same tricks—sneaking signs in—and they were spaced too evenly, too thoroughly throughout the audience. The signs had a cliché nature to them, as if they were movie props intended to sell the theme of the moment.
Which, of course, they had to be.
And another few pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. This wasn’t misdirection to draw focus from Going Viral. I think this was plan A all along. Make sure the public got all those signs—and more to the point—each of those groups on cell camera videos. Give it just enough time for those pics and vids to land on Twitter and the other social media platforms. Then start a riot in this convention center. The big play? Maybe capture or, likelier, kill as many governors as possible. There were groups planning that late last year but doing it piecemeal. Kuga never did things small. Fifty-five governors, a big split between red and blue states. People seeded into the crowd who were likely legitimate, though politically manipulated members of those groups; and maybe a goodly number of Fixers playing roles. Let the whole country see that Americans were willing to up the ante and go big in the worst possible way. Put it in a pot and stir until you have a new civil war.
Kuga sold arms and was apolitical; he’d sell them to anyone. To everyone. He was creating a brand-new and enduring client base. This plan was brilliant, and it was scary as hell.
And I was right in the middle of it.
I saw the exact moment when the choreography of disaster began.
Two men—one white, one Black—were yelling at each other. Very loudly, and with a lot of jabbing of fingers inches from each other’s faces. I know there’s a lot of racism in America, but this was too picture-perfect. A large white man with swastika neck tattoos and a Black man with a do-rag and a T-shirt with a picture of George Floyd.
“Shut this down!” I yelled to Wilson or Church or whoever the hell was listening. I began making my way through the crowd, pushing past people, shoving some aside, holding up my fake ID, announcing that I was Secret Service.
I might as well have been invisible for all the good I accomplished, because by the time I reached the fringe of the circle of folks—all of whom were now screaming their hate—both the white man and the Black man pulled guns.
I tapped my com unit. “Christ, send backup. Now.”
The whole room became a war zone.
Just.
That.
Fast.
CHAPTER 164
THE PAVILION
BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER
STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON
Mia ran fast, but the bullets were so much faster. Two of them caught her between the shoulder blades and punched all the air out of her lungs. She fell hard and rolled badly, coming to rest in a gap between two pines. The body armor had saved her life, but the impact had been tremendous. Pain seemed to pulse outward from both sides of her spine, and breathing was a real challenge.
The minigun chopped at the trees, creating a cyclone of flying bark and pine needles. Mia crawled as fast as she could and tumbled over into a small natural depression as the forest above her was chewed apart.
She tried to make sense of this. Clearly, the Lightning Bug hadn’t knocked out all the electronics on those goddamned machines. Maybe the mini-EMP bomb had been too far away, or maybe the K-110’s computers were shielded. She didn’t know and, in that moment, did not care.
Something whipped by overhead and flew straight at the fighting machine. It was one of Andrea’s crow drones. The birds were unarmed, but it paused in midair, hovering like a hummingbird right in front of the driver’s face mask. The minigun’s angle of fire went totally wild for a moment, and then stopped as the driver tried to swat the drone away.
That gave Mia a chance, and—despite the agony in her back and only spoonfuls of air in her lungs—she got to fingers and toes and scampered away through the brush.
* * *
Bunny was still engaged in a running fight, pausing for one second only every few yards to turn and fire an explosive shell at the Fixers. Four of them were on the far side of the K-110 that had fired at Mia, and they were using crowbars and hand spikes to clumsy another of the big crates toward the edge of the flatbed. Belle hammered at the crate, but the bulky container effectively blocked the Fixers.
Bunny knelt beside a tree, aimed, and fired, but his shot went high and hit the top of the crate instead of one of the Fixers. The explosion blew off one side of the huge wooden box, and the fighting machine inside toppled out. The four men scattered, but one was half a step too slow, and the K-110 smashed down on his rear leg. He collapsed screaming. The other men snuck under the truck and squirmed up and out again with the fallen machine as cover. Bunny saw a glint of metal and glass as the access hatch opened and a Fixer wriggled inside. He fired at the cowling, but even though he scored a direct hit, the K-110 hummed to life.
The ungainly device got to its feet, and the driver brought the gun arms up. Bunny hit it again and again with high-explosive rounds, but if it did any damage, he couldn’t see it. He had more of the Lightning Bugs in his pocket, but he was way too far out of range. He was going to have to get a lot closer to try to fry those things. Just as he set himself to move, the second K-110 opened up with its machine gun, forcing him to turn and run for cover. Going away from the thing.
He glanced back as he ran and saw that the first machine had turned to return fire from the trees—Belle or Andrea, Bunny couldn’t tell—and from that angle, the thing was able to cover the attempt by one of the Fixers to climb into the semi’s cab.
CHAPTER 165
EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER
LABORDE, TEXAS
It was a brawl.
It was a gunfight.
It was total chaos.
The white man and the Black man who’d been yelling at each other both drew their guns and fired. What surprised me was that they actually fired. That made no sense if they were Fixers. Was I possibly wrong about this being a staged fight? Had all Santoro and Kuga done was manipulate disparate groups into a situation where violence was inevitable?
No. That was too convenient, too pat.
The men fired as they tried to duck for cover. Neither hit the other, but the screaming civilians behind them were not as lucky. I saw a woman with an old MAGA hat fall, dragging her young son down with her. No way to tell if the kid had been shot. On the other side, a Black man with gray hair and a preacher’s Roman collar spun away, hands clamped to a bleeding stomach.
Other people fell, though many were diving for cover.
On the dais, police and security personnel were pushing the governors down into crouches and shoving them in stumbling runs toward the exits.
But then the exit doors banged open, and that’s when I knew that I’d been right about it all. Four big men emerged from the exits, a mix of races, all of them armed and moving as precise military units. These were the Fixers, dressed in civilian clothes. No fancy body armor, no cybernetic fighting machines. Hopefully no goddamn explosives. But from their speed and the bellows of fury they howled into the air, I knew they were being driven by R-33. And they were both relentless and filled with rage as they plowed into the security teams.
I saw so many people go down in the first barrage—cops, uniformed security, aides, tech staff, and some of the governors. No way to tell how many were hit or how badly. All around me, people were fighting. Rioting. And again, no clear way of determining who was a militiaman or radical tricked into coming here, who was a Fixer seeded into the audience, and who was just a civilian whose simmering political anger had boiled over. It was a true melee, a free-for-all.
I saw all of this while moving.
I pulled the Snellig and, as I ran through the thrashing crowd, shot anyone who’d been holding a placard, anyone holding a gun, anyone clearly going after a civilian. I wanted to get to the dais and take out the Fixers, but there was a churning sea of p
eople between me and them.
A fat man with a huge beer belly and massive forearms got in my way and threw a head-smasher of a punch at me. I ducked it, rammed my shoulder into that belly, and used him as a combination shield and battering ram as I slammed into the Black man who’d accidentally shot the woman. I rose up, headbutting the fat guy. I stamped hard on his foot, splintering the bones, and leaned past him to shoot the white guy who’d nailed the preacher. Then I shot the Black guy. All three went down, and I quickly knelt by the preacher, but he was dead, his eyes staring up with profound surprise at the heavens. As I turned toward the woman with the kid, I saw someone else kneeling to help. Good.
As I rose, something hit me hard on the back, and I whirled to see a very old white woman with an umbrella. She began hammering at me and calling me some of the filthiest names I’d ever heard.
I let Sandman hush her up, but I caught her as she fell and laid her gently on the floor. Her hand flopped over and lay almost precisely in the outflung palm of the dead minister. I wonder if that would trend on Twitter.
Yeah, the world was mad.
I began moving, firing at active shooters, avoiding counterattacks by the dazed and confused.
When I was within ten feet of the dais, a voice rang out, sharp and clear, even with all the ambient furor.
“Ledger!”
My name had been yelled with such anger and shock that it jolted me. I turned and looked up, and there, on the stage, was Rafael Santoro.
CHAPTER 166
THE PAVILION
BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER
STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON
The K-110 on the back of the semi bashed the crow drone away, sending it tumbling and broken into the grass beside the truck.
More of the bird drones swarmed in, but the fighting machine simply ignored them and kept pouring covering fire into the trees. The sheer destructive power of the minigun was denuding the slope of trees and shrubs, destroying any chance for a stealthy advance.
Fixers were now swarming up onto the semi and attacking the remaining packing crates. Two of them began tossing body armor to the others, who ducked down to gear up. But they froze as an explosion sounded deeper inside the Pavilion complex.
“Pappy,” yelled Bunny into his coms, “where the hell are you?”
“On my way, Farm Boy,” came the reply.
“Hurry the hell up, old man.”
Was that a laugh he heard or a curse? Hard to tell with all the noise.
He was out of the effective range of the minigun and well beyond the useful range of his own weapons, so he broke into a run as he began a wide circle. The fact that the camp was deliberately smothered by thick trees was a blessing in disguise, because it allowed him to make maximum use of cover.
Movement ahead made him drop to one knee and freeze beside an old oak. Two Fixers in full armor were running down the slope toward the road. They must have come from another guard post and managed to suit up before joining the action. They were heading directly his way, but he didn’t think they’d spotted him yet.
Bunny weighed his options. Let them pass and use their approach to disguise his own? Or ambush them and at least try to cripple both to prevent them from joining the fight?
He was familiar with the Fixer body armor now and knew that there were vulnerable points. No armor made could protect every single area of the body. The need for flexible and nimble movement came with a price. That was half the challenge; the other half was to stop them without killing either, because he didn’t think he could outrun the resulting blast.
He swapped the drum of explosive rounds for double-aught buck, and as they ran past, he opened up on full auto from twelve feet. The heavy sprays of buckshot scythed through the flexible knee joints, and both Fixers screamed as they fell. One of them lost his entire lower leg in a grotesque shower of bright blood.
Bunny was up and moving before either had a chance to bleed out.
He got all the way down to the road when that side of the hill seemed to tear itself free of the earth with a monstrous thunder strike of sound. Pieces of torn turf and shattered trees chased Bunny, hammered him, and finally smashed him to the ground.
The blast plucked Mia out of her hiding place behind a massive dogwood. The leaves of the tree burst into flame as pieces of burning debris landed among the branches.
Flash-burned and half-dazed, Mia staggered away, blinking and pawing away blood from her nose. She suddenly realized that she no longer held a gun, but when she looked back, the entire area around the dogwood was ablaze. The breeze was blowing from the north, pushing little dancing demons of flame into the tall summer grass.
“Oh … shit,” she wheezed as she turned and ran. She slapped the Sig Sauer from her holster and held on to that for dear life, as much for its deadly potential as for a talisman.
She reached the road ahead of the semi and saw that every one of the Fixers was either firing toward the trees where Belle’s sniper fire had come, off to the east where she’d seen Bunny hightail it, or toward the explosion up the slope. No one was looking in her direction.
Then there was a roar as the semi’s big engine growled itself awake.
Her heart sank, because there were now three fighting machines on the back of the semi with drivers in them. More than half of the Fixers were aboard, too, using the rest of the packing crates as cover as they waited to simply be driven out of the firefight.
She and her friends in Havoc Team had done a lot of damage, but not nearly enough. These Fixers and their deadly weapons were going to escape.
Gunfire erupted from two different points—the sniper rifle and an M5—on the far side of the loading area, which meant that Andrea had stopped playing with his toys and was joining the fight on the ground.
The K-110 on the ground began stalking toward them, letting the incoming fire spend itself uselessly on its reinforced cowling. A few of the Fixers clustered behind it, using it as cover as they and the machine went hunting.
Mia knew she couldn’t help Belle and Andrea. They would survive or fall on their own. She had to find some way of stopping that truck.
A plan began to form in her head.
A very, very bad plan.
CHAPTER 167
EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER
LABORDE, TEXAS
The whole universe froze around us both.
He was on the dais, standing over the body of a Secret Service agent, a dripping red knife in his hand. Blood pooled out around the agent, draining from a slashed throat. There was a Fixer beside Santoro, and well behind him, I saw Eve. She was staring, too, her eyes bugged out with a mix of fear and malevolence.
The whole room swam, and shadows crept in at the edges of my vision. The Darkness asserting itself, needing to be fed. I stupidly wondered if the parking lot was now full of night birds.
I raised the dart gun, but the crimson-eyed Fixer flung himself at me. It was so fast I couldn’t get out of the way, and the descending weight smashed me back and down. I twisted as I landed, though, and came up on top of the killer and brought the Snellig barrel up. But just as the Fixer back at the processing plant had done, he slapped it away with such force the pistol went spinning out over the crowd.
I wasted no time and dropped my knee into the pit of his stomach, parried his hands to one side, and drove my right thumb into his eye socket. There was an explosion of red, and he shrieked so loudly, it hurt my head. Instead of writhing in agony, he punched me in the side hard enough to lift me off him. I crashed down and immediately rolled away as he hammered down with his fist. I pivoted on my hip and kicked him in the mouth. Enhanced or not, skin, muscles, bones, and tendons are still vulnerable. My kick knocked his jaw askew.
I hopped to my feet and pulled my Wilson knife from its pocket sheath, thumbed it open with a flick of my wrist, and, as the Fixer lumbered up, I swept his foot out from under him, caught his hair as he fell, and cut his throat.
Then I spun just in time to
see Santoro shove Eve toward the backstage door.
“No!” I yelled, and it came out weird. Too big, too rough, too alien. It was the voice of the Darkness speaking through me.
Together—I and that destructive thing inside me—I leaped onto the dais and raced after them.
But the door banged open, and another group of Fixers came out of the back.
I immediately turned and ran like hell.
And saw, on the far side of the room, the main doors open, and three people fight their way through the tide of escaping civilians. One was a short, dumpy young guy; another was a thin man of medium height; and the third was a tall woman with a heavy fall of midnight-dark hair. They saw me and immediately began fighting their way in my direction.
Harry Bolt.
Toys.
And Violin.
CHAPTER 168
THE PAVILION
BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER
STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON
The K-110 moved like a predatory dinosaur—a velociraptor for the techno age.
The driver shifted from the minigun to a rocket launcher and sent grenade after grenade into the trees. The forest blew apart in sheets of flame and burning gas, and the machine walked into that hell.
Andrea saw this from behind the corner of the compound’s sewage pump house. He had Lightning Bugs, but the machine was still out of range.
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