When it came time to process all of the evidence, she took photos of every item placed into the sterile bags, and kept a copy of her own evidence log. Later her bosses would want to match it against the one kept by the police.
The fountain pen that the Speaker had used to stab himself in the eye lay on the floor in a pool of blood. After stabbing himself with it, the Speaker had been clutching the instrument in his hand, and it was torn free when he fell. It landed on the floor, shattering the green crystal into a dozen little chunks. The forensic evidence collectors had taken the pen and the larger chunks, but there were still some left, standing like tiny islands in small lakes of drying blood. An orange evidence marker cone stood beside the blood and the green chips. The number on that cone was nine.
Kang looked at the cone and kept hearing the Beatles song “Revolution 9.” John Lennon’s voice droned “Number nine, number nine, number nine,” and it echoed through her head.
The pieces of crystal were small, and most were completely covered by blood, but the bits that weren’t seemed to glow with an inner light. Had that been the case all along? she wondered. Or was it a reflection from the panel of ultrabright LEDs the police had erected to help the forensics team? She wasn’t sure, but she began to have the impression that it was the stones themselves. Lit from within.
Suddenly one of the chips, the largest piece, seemed to move all by itself. And the small pool of blood around it rippled. Kang flinched.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
That kept playing in her mind despite what was happening on the floor.
Someone somewhere off to one side said, “Holy shit.”
It surprised her because no one else was close enough to see the chip. Well, chips, because now they were all trembling. Shivering. And there were tidy, sluggish ripples in the viscous blood.
Then another voice, equally distant, said, “What the hell’s going on?”
Kang didn’t look at them. They were far away. At the other end of the room, or down a hall, or maybe up in the air. She didn’t know and didn’t care.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
The chips were all moving, turning in place like the hands of tiny clocks. Not fast. But turning. They seemed to vibrate, to dance.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
“Everyone get out,” yelled a voice. “Get into the doorways. That’s where it’s safe.”
Something fell over and broke. Someone screamed. Kang did not look. She was absolutely fascinated by the chips. The green crystal fragments were so pretty and they seemed to want her to bend closer, to listen, to know something.
“Agent Kang,” yelled a voice. “Come on—move! We have to get—”
She stopped listening as surely as if there was a mute switch in her mind that she was able to locate and flip.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
She began reaching for the closest chip.
“What the hell are you doing?” yelled another voice. Or maybe the same voice. Kang neither knew nor cared. “Don’t bother with that stuff. We need to get out of here.”
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
The words were muted and made no real sense to her. It was as if whoever was speaking was underwater.
Then a hand grabbed her, caught her by the arm, pulled her back, spun her. She stared into the face of a man in a police uniform. He was screaming at her. She could feel the heat of his breath. She could feel spit on her face. His eyes were wide with panic.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Then the man’s face seemed to blossom like a red flower. No. It came apart like a rose in a windstorm. Red petals flew everywhere. Something—was it a body?—fell backward and down. Dropping out of her awareness.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
Marilyn Kang did not look at the gun in her hand. She did not feel the recoil as she fired the shot into the face of the police evidence collection technician. She did not feel any of the shots she fired. She did not hear the bangs or the screams. Or anything. Except for the song lyric repeating in her head, there was nothing at all, no sound. The silence gaped around her, vast and deep. Bottomless.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
She thought about the lovely green crystal chips.
“So pretty,” she said.
She was unaware of the slide locking back on her gun. She did not feel her hands move as they ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one. None of that was part of who she was or where she was or what she saw or what was happening.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
When she killed the people crouching in the doorway as pieces of debris fell from the ceiling, Kang saw none of it. When she walked into the hall and began firing at screaming staff members, it was all happening to someone else in some other place.
She never heard the ceiling above her crack.
All she could see were the crystal chips. They seemed to rise into the air on tiny red wings as they soared toward …
Toward what?
Where?
They didn’t fly through stone halls or inside a building at all. What Kang saw was an opening in the whole world, and beyond …
A rocky slope edged by plants and flowers of extraordinary beauty. Ferns towered a hundred feet above her, and there was a rose growing up from a crack in the ground; at the end of each stem three bright red flowers spread their petals. Far above her, at the top of the slope, was a slender tower made from red stones. Behind the top of the tower was the moon. One of the moons. There were many others hanging in the sky like pale balloons. Triangular-shaped craft shot past at incredible speeds. And in the distance, there was a vast and terrible thing. Beautiful in its way, like a giant or a god. An impossibly large body that was vaguely human but which had a head like a giant octopus and a beard made entirely of writhing tentacles. Long, dark wings unfolded from its broad back and it reached for her with a scaly hand tipped with claws as long as—
Sixty pounds of plaster and stone from the ceiling struck her on the crown of her head, crushing all thoughts from Marilyn Kang’s mind.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE CAPITOL BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The earthquake hit the Capitol Building with the fists of giants.
D.J., Aunt Sallie, and I were on the steps outside, and we could all tell right away that this was no tremor. This was a monster waking up beneath our feet. Ghost crouched down, barking furiously. The whole world seemed to suddenly go out of focus, because every wall, every street pole, every parked car began to vibrate at the same time. It was surreal in the worst possible way.
Auntie twisted as the steps beneath her feet cracked, and she spun, arms reaching for D.J., but he was toppling backward. I lunged forward and caught her. She was a heavy woman, too much fat over her muscle, and I was falling, too. I spun with her in my arms, tucked my head, and took the impact across my hip and shoulders. It was like getting simultaneously kicked in the lower back while being hit across the upper back with a two-by-four. Auntie cried out in pain as she landed atop me.
She rolled off and I could see that despite my best efforts, she’d struck her shins against the edge of the stone step. Intense pain shot through my hip and spine, telling me that I was more badly hurt than I thought. I ground my teeth and fought my way to my knees. All around me people were screaming and running, and I stared in abject horror as a deep black crack opened like a mouth right in front of where I knelt. A police car canted sideways into it. Gas and water shot upward from different parts of the torn street. The growl of the tortured earth was a horrible, deafening thing. The earthquake was intensifying. People ran, collided, fell. Some vanished into the cracks that fed on them.
“D.J.,” I yelled as I fought my way through pain and lights that burst in my eyes to where Auntie lay, “help me.”
When he didn’t answer I turned to see if he was okay. He was. But he st
ood stock-still, not looking at Aunt Sallie or me. Or anything. His eyes were as empty as a store mannequin’s and his lips hung rubbery and slack. Ghost began growling at him, baring his titanium teeth, no longer recognizing D.J. as one of us. Turning on him the way he’d nearly turned on me last night at the Warehouse.
I heard Auntie speak, her confusion more evident than her pain. “D.J.…?”
D.J. turned to her and smiled.
Then he drew his sidearm in a smooth movement that was all reflex, the kind of thing agents are trained to do. His hand brushed his jacket flap back, reached up to the Sig Sauer he wore in a nylon shoulder holster, drew it, pressed the barrel under his chin, and pulled the trigger. The bullet blew off the top of his head and blew one eye out of its socket and blew all the sanity out of the day.
Aunt Sallie screamed. Ghost yelped. I gaped at the body of my friend as he fell like a boneless rag doll.
The world shook itself to pieces around us. People screamed as they ran. Auntie and I looked around, trying to find some answer to what had just happened. There were none. The world was not going to help us out of this. No. Because everywhere we looked we saw madness.
People running.
People standing still as if they had turned to stone.
People attacking each other. Beating, biting, tearing at clothes and skin and hair and eyes. Two police officers stood twenty feet apart and shot each other over and over until they both fell dead. A woman picked up her infant child and threw her into the closest crack. Then, with a shriek, leaped in after her. They both vanished from sight. A man in a business suit was slowly undressing, folding each garment and placing them on the rattling ground. When he was naked he sat down and began punching himself in the face with slow, hard, measured blows. A pair of Secret Service agents were trying to break up a fight between reporters and civilians. Finally, one of the agents staggered back, his face streaming with blood, drew his gun, and fired. He aimed every single shot at a fireplug, hitting it every time.
A fat woman went running past us, screaming at the top of her lungs. She said, “Why can’t I hear my own head?” Those words, clear and loud, over and over again.
A young woman was fighting with a much larger man who was trying to grab an older woman. The young woman seemed quite sane and was fighting well, obviously having had a little karate training. The old woman was one of the silent and unmoving ones. The big man was much stronger, but he seemed to have forgotten everything about how to fight.
Most of the people in the street still looked sane, but they were terrified and ran with blind panic away from toppling walls and exploding streets and from those who had gone insane. I heard more gunshots and glass shattering and gas hissing. Suddenly a car burst into flame and half a dozen news reporters flung themselves into the blaze. They all screamed as they burned, but there were words twisted into the screams.
And, because this is the fucked-up twenty-first century, some of them stood there with their cell phones, recording it all. For what? Their Facebook pages? Snapchat or Instagram?
“Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!” shrieked a cameraman near us as he clapped his hands violently in front of his face.
“Can’t you fucking hear me?” demanded a blond reporter I recognized from a cable station. “Can’t you fucking hear me?”
The earthquake tore through Washington, and pieces of stone crashed down around us. I forced myself to move, grabbed Auntie, and dragged her away from the building. We clung together as we staggered down the juddering stairs and then there was a massive sound and we turned to see three of the massive marble columns crack and break apart. They toppled over us and crashed on the lower steps, forcing us back.
“Silence!” shouted a man in a bloody sweatshirt. He pointed at Aunt Sallie. “Silence! Silence! Silence!”
And then he ran forward, howling like a demon, slashing at the air with his fingers. Other people followed, screaming equally meaningless things. I forced myself up, put myself in their path. There were at least a dozen of them. None of them were armed. None of them looked sane as they rushed forward, seeming to focus on the sick woman lying behind me. The Killer in me seemed to understand it. She was hurt, weak, vulnerable, and they were acting on an instinct deep in the lizard brain. Some of them even snapped their jaws as if promising what they wanted to do.
They were civilians, sure. They were also a mob. They were coming for one of mine. For a member of my family.
The Cop, the Modern Man, and the Killer all stood up inside of me. Shoulder to shoulder for the first time I could ever remember. In a twisted way they were all my family, which made them all family with Aunt Sallie.
I almost drew my gun. Almost. And I almost drew the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the inside of my trouser pocket. With either of those I could have killed the whole bunch of the people.
Could have.
Didn’t.
Maybe after I’d first joined the DMS I’d have reacted differently. Killed more easily, made assumptions that this was a plague like Seif al Din. Part of me even wondered if this was the genetically engineered rabies we’d encountered during the Dogs of War affair last year. But for once I think the Modern Man in my head won out. He, of all of us, knew that this wasn’t anything I’d ever faced before. He begged for mercy.
Mercy, though, is relative.
This whole thought process took maybe a tenth of a second, and then the man with the bloody sweatshirt reached for Aunt Sallie.
And all of the broken parts of me went to war.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Jennifer VanOwen was stepping out of the elevator when she felt the tremor ripple up through her leg muscles. It was not fierce, not frightening. If anything it felt rather nice. Like the higher jets in a Jacuzzi. Even so, she frowned.
People up and down the hall stopped and looked around. After last night’s rumbles they had to know what this was, and yet they all had that deer-in-the-headlights look. VanOwen found it equal parts amusing and disappointing. She worked with these people; they could at least pretend to be intelligent.
The rumbling ended and there was a moment of silent stillness, after which some people laughed. Some began telling each other what had just happened. While still others whispered as if speaking in a normal voice would invoke and anger the gods of the earth. VanOwen pasted on a mildly concerned half smile and made her way to her office. Her assistant was jabbering in the hall with one of the junior assistants to some nobody from the next floor. VanOwen locked herself in, ran a scanner over the walls to make sure there were no bugs. There never were. Then she settled in her chair and used her cell to make a call, waiting through eight rings until it was answered.
“Why are you calling early?” asked the voice on the other end.
“I wanted to get something straight between us,” said VanOwen.
A pause. “Okay.”
“You’d better be right about this,” said VanOwen.
“About which part?”
“Don’t screw with me. I’m warning you, and you had better listen.”
“I am listening.”
“If I get killed today, then lawyers you don’t know about are going to open documents that are going to make life very damn ugly for you. Don’t even think I’m joking.”
The second pause was much longer. “Just do your job, Jennifer. Let us do ours.”
The line went dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
There had been earthquakes in the nation’s capital before. In 2011 an interpolate quake with a magnitude of 5.8 rocked the region and was one of the largest of its kind east of the Rocky Mountains. That quake was felt across more than a dozen states and even up into parts of Canada. It was estimated that the quake was felt by more people than any other quake in United States history, owing to the dense East Coast population. That event did a lot of damage, but none of the damage was individually very inte
nse. Cracked walls, broken windows, street disruption. The price tag was hefty, though, costing insurance companies, businesses, and individuals nearly three hundred million dollars. No one died, and there were very few injuries.
That was 2011.
That was not today.
The epicenter of the quake that struck Washington, D.C., on that February morning was within blocks of the Capitol Building. At its peak, it rocked the region as a monstrous 7.8.
* * *
Five hundred thousand car alarms went off almost at once. It was as if all the banshees in the world had gathered for a convention and were trying to outdo each other in tearing the air apart.
Building alarms jangled, too. Then police cars, fire engines, and ambulances screamed their way through the writhing streets. And, almost as an afterthought, alert sirens began caterwauling.
* * *
The Washington Monument did not collapse, but massive chunks of it broke off and fell. The very first fatalities in the disaster were three teenagers who stood in its shadow, ignoring the massive spike in favor of the texts they were sending about the fact that there was an earthquake. They were part of a group of tourists from San Jose. Earthquakes were nothing to them. Until this one became everything.
They never heard the screams of their teacher, who was four feet away and did not get a scratch on her skin. Her heart and mind, though, were deeply and irrevocably scarred.
* * *
Two police cars collided at the intersection where New York Avenue Northwest crosses Thirteenth Street. Both patrol cars were tearing along with lights flashing and sirens wailing and buildings shivering themselves apart on both sides of the street. When the National Museum of Women in the Arts building collapsed, it shot a huge cloud of dust and debris into the intersection at exactly the wrong moment. The two cars punched into the cloud from opposite sides. Visibility was three feet in front of the windshields. They never saw each other until after they collided. Airbags and seat belts can only do so much, and they had not been designed for this.
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