by Patrick Lee
"Shooter was in a window halfway up the block," one of the others said. "They're getting smarter about it."
Travis thought of the demo video on the laptop, two of the enraged men conferring thoughtfully and then trying to pick the cage lock. Livid, but not stupid. Not even close to stupid.
He turned to the window. Outside, on the bridges and in the streets between the buildings, the barricades of the dead were now adorned with the burning shells of automobiles. The blazes slowed the forward crush only a little, but had a stark effect on the fog, baking the air and clearing deep cavities through the mist around them. Like lenses through which Travis could now see the carnage, hard and clear in the firelight. He wished he couldn't.
A small knot of people broke from the crowd and came inward at a sprint. The two snipers near Travis and Paige opened fire again.
Travis leaned close to her and shouted, "We're not gonna last much longer! Four hundred thousand people out there! They see what's not working for them, they'll find a way that does!"
"What are we supposed to do?" Paige shouted. "If they come in, they'll trip the sensors!"
"How does it normally work with the Ares?" he said. "Are the attackers after the thing itself, or just the people who are tagged by it? It's just the people, right?"
Another car detonated in the street below, like a mortar round going off.
Paige shouted over the sound. "Yeah! They're just after us!"
"So let's leave!"
She looked at him like she'd heard wrong. So did the nearest of the snipers.
"They'll follow us," Travis said. "And they'll forget about the building. We'll end up dead, but at least we can draw them away from the fucking nuke. There must be service tunnels under the streets, drainage, pipeline maintenance, that kind of thing. Is there access to them from inside this building?"
"Yeah," Paige said. "There's a panel in the basement. It's not huge, but we could fit through, single file-"
She stopped. Caught her breath. A second later Travis realized why.
Then she was on her feet and running again, through the tunnel, shouting into her comm unit as she went. "Second floor teams, get to the basement! Secure the conduit access!"
Travis was right behind her, rifle in hand, hitting the stairs now, down through the wire-choked space, past the feeders running ammo, past the rabbit tunnels branching out to the shooters on every level. Third floor now. Second. First.
And here were the snipers Paige had just ordered down. Bunched around the doorway to the basement, the door itself torn from its hinges. Four men, firing on full auto at something right there, maybe just feet beyond Travis's angle of view. Paige's insight had prevented disaster by a margin of perhaps seconds: the throng had already flooded into the basement through the access tunnels.
At that moment, one of the four snipers took a shot to the head and dropped. However many people were down there, some of them had guns.
Travis realized he could hear their voices, loud as the shooting was. Could hear the screams of anger, could hear even the distinct words, in German and maybe Italian. A noise to Travis's right made him turn. It'd sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor. It came again, and this time he saw its source. The hallway floor heaved upward an inch, hit by something from below. Some heavy object in the hands of probably a dozen people, being used as a battering ram to come through the floorboards. The third impact cracked one of them, leaving a four-inch-wide gap. Through it, Travis saw the nightmare. The space below was wall-to-wall with writhing bodies, faces twisted in rage. Eyes locked onto him through the gap, and a volley of incensed screams came up.
He turned and saw Paige looking at the same spot. Then, beyond her, one of the snipers took something from his backpack. In the crazed light, Travis couldn't see what the thing was, but had a pretty good guess.
Paige turned, saw it, and screamed, "No!"
The man pivoted toward her, and Travis saw what he'd expected: a grenade.
"There are gas lines down there!" Paige shouted.
"What the fuck are we supposed to do?" the man yelled.
Paige had no answer.
The floor heaved again. A second board fractured, right behind the first, and a hand gripped it from below and snapped it down into the darkness. The hole would be wide enough to admit bodies soon. A second later, Travis heard the battering impact again, somewhere else on the main floor.
The sniper was still looking to Paige for an answer.
"I don't know what to do," she said. She repeated it, looking around as if the answer would come to her.
"Yes you do," Travis said.
She met his eyes. Narrowed hers.
"The grenade," Travis said, and then darted his own eyes upward. Through the ceiling. To something eight stories above their heads. She followed. Understood.
"It's all we've got," Travis said.
"Is it a chess move the Whisper would have expected?" she said.
"We're stuck with it, whether it is or not. Go. I'll help these guys."
She considered it for another two seconds, then nodded. She turned to the sniper and held out her hand for the grenade. He looked like he understood the plan. Or didn't care, so long as there was one. He handed it over.
"Don't take losses holding this floor!" Paige shouted. "Withdraw up the stairs when you have to! One way or another, this'll be over in the next two minutes."
Travis stared at her. Realized he was storing the image. Wondered if he'd ever see her again.
Then she was gone.
He unslung his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and went to the basement door where the others were standing.
Beyond it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. The basement, a vast space maybe twelve feet deep, crawled like a snake pit full of bodies, the living and the dead so intermixed it was hard to differentiate them. As the leading edge of the wave advanced up the stairs and was cut back by the autofire, those behind dragged the bodies aside, between themselves or above. The corpses that rode the crowd pumped arterial blood from bowl-sized exit wounds, spraying and coating the throng.
Men, women, children. No fog to hide them now. The crowd was the sort you might encounter at a mall, or a supermarket, or anywhere. Some of the parents were holding seven-year-olds by the hand, as if unwilling to lose sight of them. Even as they dragged them forward into the gunfire. And even the seven-year-olds looked ready to kill someone. Would have tried to, had they reached the top of the stairs.
The forefront continually surged and was seared back, ten to twelve steps below. Travis shouldered his rifle. Lowered the sights to the crowd on the stairs. Didn't fire yet. Suddenly wasn't sure he could. They were just people. Bloody and screaming, and furious enough to come forward into machine-gun fire. But still just people. It wasn't their fault this was happening to them.
One of the snipers stopped to reload. It took him only three seconds, but in those seconds of reduced fire, the crowd gained four steps, and the back-and-forth cadence resumed there. Their progress was like a ratchet, locking in each little burst of progress, never really losing it.
A moment later, as the first sniper resumed fire, the other two ran dry in unison, and fumbled for fresh magazines. The crowd rushed upward at full speed; the lone shooter could only cover any one spot at a time. An old man wearing a ridiculous green bow tie, like a St. Patrick's Day reveler drunk off his ass, came scrambling up out of the pack wielding a steak knife, aiming for the thigh of one of the reloading snipers, who wasn't even looking his way. Travis pulled the trigger and took most of the old man's head off. The body pitched back and was immediately grabbed and hauled upward, out of the way, by the next two attackers: a teenage boy and a woman no older than thirty. Travis shot them both in the chest, and didn't stop shooting as each new target presented itself. He understood within seconds what it took to do it: you just didn't look at the faces. That was how the snipers were managing. It was a miserable fucking tactic, he knew. And it wasn't a real coping method
for what he felt. It was just a kind of debt. He'd pay it back later. If there was a later.
Behind him there came a violent crash. He turned, along with the others, to see some kind of steel shelf unit sticking up through the floor, having broken a wide hole through. It dropped away a second later, and then there were hands gripping the edges of the hole, people below no doubt hoisted on the shoulders of others.
"Fall back to the stairs!" Travis shouted.
A head came up through the hole. Covered in someone else's blood. Could've been either sex, any age. Travis put a bullet into it and watched it drop back through the opening, like the shelf had.
He and the others were moving now. Backing up in stutter-steps so the crowd on the basement stairs didn't surge. They reached the stairs to the second floor and made their way up, reloading and firing as they went, the throng matching their pace as they climbed. Paige rounded the landing on Level Seven. Miller was still there, doubling ammo and spare rifles. Feeders were running armloads to the snipers.
"Get some down to ground level!" Paige yelled, and didn't wait to see her nod. She continued on. Up to Level Eight, then Nine.
The warhead. The red star like an eye, watching her. Daring her.
This would either work or it wouldn't. If it didn't, well, there were worse ways to die than standing near the heart of a thermonuclear blast. Truth be told, there was probably no better way. It would reduce her to loose atoms about ten thousand times faster than her nerves could send the pain signals to her brain. Faster than her eyes could report the sudden light to her visual cortex a few inches behind them. It would literally feel like nothing at all.
Still, pretty goddamned scary.
She knelt before the thing. Considered the grenade and the available space inside the warhead. Right against the primary would be the best place to put it. This primary was an implosion type. A uranium sphere surrounded by shaped charges, precision wired to a detonator. Properly triggered, the shaped charges were designed to blow in millisecond unison, crushing the uranium to critical mass and setting off a fission reaction. That was the A-bomb aspect of the device. The A-bomb, in turn, would set off the H-bomb portion. But if the grenade went off right up against the shaped charges, and scattered their careful arrangement before any of them blew, then none of that would happen. The uranium crush would fail, and the whole sequence would stall.
That was the idea, anyway. It wasn't the sort of thing anyone had tested.
She set the grenade in place, between the shell of charges and one of the aluminum struts that braced the primary. She held it in place with her left hand, and with her right she pulled the pin. The handle swung open, and she heard the fuse ignite with a pop.
Turning now. Running hard. Into the room full of blazing white-orange light and not much else, past the inscription in the floor, past the nest of wires and the Ares and the amplifier and the silvery bond between them. To the far side of the room, putting as much space as possible between herself and the grenade blast. Wondering if she'd hear just the first crack of it before her life ended mid-thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.
"Landing!" one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above. Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.
She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn't slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood-but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.
The orange-white light still filled the room. The gunfire downstairs went on unhindered.
Paige had never destroyed an entity before. Some of the strictest protocols forbade it. For obvious reasons. Who the hell knew what would result?
She'd know in a second.
She unslung her rifle, shouldered it, centered the sights and fired on auto.
The Ares made a sound like a human scream when it shattered. The room plunged into near darkness as the thing's light vanished, and the plasma channel to the amplifier switched off. Where the Ares had been, wild orange arcs of electricity skittered like fingers over the surrounding floor space, grabbing for purchase. Then they weakened, flickered, and died away. The change came over the crowd in an instant. Travis let go of the trigger, spun hard and shoved aside the barrel of the only gun near him still firing.
The people on the steps below fell back. Where there'd been rage, there was now only shock. And fear. More fear than he'd ever seen. They drew away from the shooters, eyes wide and heads shaking, pleading in at least three languages. No ignoring their faces now. Travis saw them-felt pretty damn sure he would always see them, the way they looked in this moment. Would never lose a detail of this image if he lived to a hundred and five.
Within a matter of seconds the stairs below him were clear, at least of the living. The crowd had turned, shrunk away around the banister and out of view down the next flight. A sound came to Travis now. Like rushing air channeled through some narrow space, keening and high and fierce. It came from every direction. He understood. It was the crowd outside. It was thousands of people suddenly finding themselves waist-deep in the bodies of their friends.
Paige's voice came over the comm unit in his ear. "Weapons tight, but hold positions. Choppers are coming for evac, five minutes. Sit tight until then, in case this isn't over." Five minutes later. Out through the front doors. Over the cobblestone approach. Past the wrought-iron fence. Dawn saturating everything pink, and the fog churning in compound dynamics: surging in toward the still-burning cars, curling violently in the rush of air from the Black Hawks. Four of them. Coming in low from the east, right along Theaterstrasse. Setting down in the street, their rotor wash at ground level pushing the fog back enough to reveal the mounds of bodies at the perimeter. Travis saw the nearest pilot and copilot survey the carnage, their mouths forming words he could lip-read pretty easily.
A moment later he was aboard the third chopper, with Paige beside him, along with a dozen of the others. Strapping in. Paige had the black cube from the ninth floor in her lap. The amplifier.
She cupped her mouth to his ear and shouted, "Take a look!"
She turned the cube over in all directions, showing him every side of it. All were smooth, featureless. No place for any wires or cables to connect. The damn thing had just been lying there, plugged into nothing. It alone was the amplifier; the nine stories of circuitry were all for show.
One more addition to the list of shit he couldn't square with.
The rest of the team from the building had already piled into the remaining Black Hawks, and within seconds the formation was rising. The streets below were deserted of the living for as far as Travis could see. The choppers cleared the roof, pivoted, and headed south over the city in a tight line, black silhouettes against the dawn. At Meiringen, the 747 was already staged
at the end of the runway, engines powered and ready. They boarded at a sprint, and three minutes later the aircraft was climbing above Switzerland at the steepest angle its wings could bear, on the chance that someone with a Stinger missile was down there on the pine-covered slopes. When they leveled off at 45,000 feet, Travis saw three escort fighters settle into formation off the starboard wing. No doubt the same number graced the other side, along with others far ahead and behind.
Paige made an executive decision to put the co-pilot at the tail of the plane, under guard, and then chose three operators at random to sit with the pilot in case he made any strange moves. When she returned to the seat she'd occupied on the flight over-next to the one Travis now sat in-she looked more exhausted than relieved.
The black amplifier cube sat on the floor nearby.
Paige ticked off the relevant bullet points on her fingers. "His building is gone; we'll level it with an airstrike as soon as the wounded are pulled out. We have the amplifier. Of the three entities he controlled, we've recovered the transparency suit and destroyed the Ares. He still has the Whisper." She looked at Travis, and he saw something that was almost-but not quite-optimism in her expression. "So what just happened in Zurich? Did we dodge whatever he was planning?"
"We'd have to know what he was planning," Travis said.
"Everything he's worked on for fourteen years is either destroyed or in our possession," she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him.
Travis nodded, accepting her point, but unsure all the same. There was just no way to know what the plan had been. What it might still be.
Paige's cell rang. Crawford at Border Town. She put it on speaker again.
"We got something on that last name on Pilgrim's list," Crawford said. "Ellis Cook. Let me just make sure I understand what you told me. These names were carved into the floor inside the room on Level Nine?"
"Yes," Paige said.
"Where nobody's been for at least four years," Crawford said.
