Tears burned like acid in my eyes as I fired.
Then we reached the elevator. The door was jammed open by a knot of corpses and three walkers who crouched over them, feeding messily.
“Yo! Dickheads!” yelled Montana. Their heads jerked up and she blew them back against the wall and out of this version of hell. Bunny grabbed the dead and flung them into the lobby, tripping two other walkers who were rushing us from behind. Before I could bring my gun up, the two walkers pitched sideways, red spray blowing from the sides of their heads. I never even heard the shot and I wasted one moment looking around for the shooter. Had to be Sam, but I couldn’t see him.
We crowded into the elevator.
The lights on every floor were lit and at each stop we had to shove back the living and the dead. It was as heartbreaking as it was terrifying.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can…” began Montana, her voice low and fragile, but then she stiffened. “No,” she snapped, directing it at me or herself, or both. “No.”
We reloaded.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “If there had been some other way to ease you into this. Or to let you know this is what we did…”
“No,” she said again, and there was a bright—almost fevered—ferocity in her eyes. “This has to be done. If not us, who?”
Behind her, Noah laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Hooah.”
“Hooah,” echoed Bunny, Lydia, and I.
The doors opened and we stepped out onto a balcony that was completely crowded with the infected. There were at least five Berserkers among them, towering like titans above the throng of ordinary walkers. Beyond the Berserkers, standing against the balcony wall, was Mother Night.
The crowd of the dead let out a deafening moan of raw, unending hunger, and rushed at us from both sides.
Once more we formed a shooting line, Bunny and Noah facing forward, Lydia and Montana facing behind us, and me looking for a way to get to Mother Night. I had the irrational feeling that this was actually hell. The real hell. And it would be nothing but this. Red slaughter and the roar of guns, blood and pain and death.
Some of the infected seemed to be whole, without bites or marks to indicate how they’d died. And I recalled the woman I’d seen downstairs, looking like she was on the edge of becoming a walker. I remembered the candy wrapper in her hand. There were other wrappers, and plenty of unopened candies down there on the floor. It didn’t require a leap of genius intellect to come up with a theory on that. The seif-al-din pathogen could easily be added to food, or injected into a tasty piece of chocolate. It fit with the “love me while I destroy you” vibe that Artemisia Bliss had constructed within her Mother Night persona.
I saw an opening and left the shooting line, using the borrowed pistol and knife to carve a path to Mother Night.
A Berserker saw me trying to do an end run around the pack of dead and he began wading toward me, pushing walkers out of his way. He gave me one of those mind-numbing roars. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband but he came at me with those big, bone-cracking hands.
“Dumb ass,” I said, and shot him through the eye.
Behind him, a second—perhaps smarter—Berserker raised a handgun and fired three shots at me, forcing me to dive behind a metal trash can while I returned fire. I hit him in the chest, which did nothing to the undead son of a bitch, and when he opened his mouth to laugh at me, he vomited blood, tissue, and a high-powered rifle slug.
Sam.
I still couldn’t see him but right them I wanted to kiss him. If I had a sister I’d let him marry her.
Two other Berserkers closed in on me, both firing handguns. A bullet punched me in the chest and knocked me back. The Kevlar stopped it, but from the sudden, grinding pain I knew that something was broken. When I raised my gun, the pain jumped to the top of the scale and I realized that the raw impact of the Berserker’s bullet had cracked my sternum.
But a split second later I saw the Berserker wheel away as a dark form rose up from the press of bodies. There was a flash of silver, over and over again, and the Berserker seemed to fall apart. Then I saw Top moving away from him, two sturdy fighting knives in his fists. He had no gun and the front of his Kevlar vest was torn open and hung down, exposing brown skin crisscrossed with old scars and purpled with new bruises.
The battle raged on.
Mother Night saw me coming and she turned and ran, but it looked less like she was fleeing in panic and more like a catch-me-if-you-can flirtation.
So I ran after her.
I fired my gun dry and swapped and fished for my last magazine. Fired and fired.
Then I was at the edge of the crowd. I stabbed a walker in the eye and flung his body behind me to slow down pursuit. The balcony curved around and I pelted after Mother Night, though each step was screaming agony. My chest felt like it was on fire.
Then I rounded the next corner and there she was.
She’d climbed up onto the rail and had her arms spread wide to steady herself. Four of her small video cameras were mounted on the walls, their lenses aimed at her, little red lights burning.
Bliss turned to me and blew a kiss. “Hello, Joe.”
In my earbud I heard another voice. Bug. He said, “It’s done.”
I slowed to a stop, gun pointed, waiting for her last trick. “Hello, Artie.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What would you prefer? Psycho Bitch? ’Cause that seems to work.”
She actually smiled. “Been called worse.”
“Yeah, me, too. Side effect of being a functional psychotic.”
“You should know,” she agreed.
“Yup.”
She nodded to the gun. “Aren’t you going to shoot me?”
“Good chance of it.”
There was a playful twinkle in her eyes. “But—?”
“Need to ask a question first.” I said. “Why?”
Mother Night seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. “Why? You mean you really haven’t figured it out yet?”
“I’ve got some theories.” The pain flared in my chest and I winced.
“You bit?”
“Broken sternum. Stood too close to a bullet.”
“Not bit?”
“Nope.”
“Mm. Ah, well. Can’t have everything.”
“Seems you got everything you were after,” I said, making it casual. “Or is there still a cherry you’re looking to put on top of it.”
The question seemed to push some unusual buttons in her psyche, because a whole series of emotions wandered across her face. Doubt, happiness, triumph, anger, and even something that appeared to be innocent wonder. Finally, her brow wrinkled and she said, “I thought you would understand, Joe.”
“Really? Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one crazier than me.”
“I might be nuts, kid, and I might have a whole committee shouting inside my head, but I never wanted to burn the world down.”
Her frown deepened. “Neither do I.”
I gestured to the madness down in the atrium. “You tried to release a doomsday weapon. Surely at some point you looked up doomsday in the dictionary.”
She cocked her head to listen to the sound of gunfire from the swarm of helicopters. “They’ll stop the infection. Even if they have to burn Atlanta to the ground, they’ll stop it. There was never any doubt about that.”
“What if we hadn’t figured out that this was your big finale?”
She shrugged. The action caused her to wobble on the rail, but she regained her balance. “Whoa. But, no … I left you enough clues. Step by step there was enough for the DMS to figure it out in the right order and at the right time. Everything happened exactly right.”
“Really? You’re standing on a rail and, honey, there is no way out. And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t bring a pair of handcuffs.”
“Of course not. Terminate with extreme prejudice. That’s the phrase you guys like to use. V
ery manly, very macho.”
“Yeah, it makes our dicks hard. You going somewhere with this? Is there some big dramatic speech you want to make? Any last shoe to drop to prove to us how smart you are and how dumb we are?”
“First, I know you’re smart. What would be the fun of winning against a group of morons. You, Church, Aunt Sallie, Willie Hu, Bug … you’re all the best. No one can stop you. You’ve proved it over and over again. The best of the best of the best.”
“Except for you.”
“Except for me.”
“So … we’re, what? We’re Moriarty to your Holmes?”
“Close enough.”
I nodded to the rail on which she stood. I lowered my gun, let it hang at my side. “And that’s the Reichenbach Falls? Am I supposed to climb up and plunge over with you in the big finish?”
“Oh, would you?”
“Fuck you.”
She sighed. “Hey, a girl can ask.”
We actually smiled at each other. For just a moment.
Then she said, “Holmes killed Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. His archenemy fell and Holmes survived. Except that’s not how this plays out. I’ve already killed you.”
“What?”
“Not physically. No … after everything that’s happened, I’m beginning to think that you can’t be killed. You’re like James Bond. You always walk away, even if you’re busted and broken. You survive and live to fight another day.”
I said nothing, waiting, cringing for what she was going to say next, now that we were really up to it.
“The only way I could kill you was to hurt you, Joe,” she said. “I read your files. I know what happened when you were a teenager, what turned you into the maniac, the killer you’ve become. I believe that if something like that happened again, it would push you all the way over the edge. All the way. You’d be like me. Maybe worse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hope you loved her, Joe,” she said. “I hope you loved her with all your heart.”
I felt a sudden, blinding pain in my chest that had nothing to do with a cracked sternum. I realized, I understood now. My body swayed as the enormity of it opened a big mouth in the floor that threatened to swallow me whole.
“Junie…?” I whispered.
Mother Night’s red mouth widened into a huge, insane grin of absolute triumph.
“I win,” she said. “Everyone in the world is looking at me right now. Everyone. You didn’t defeat me, Joe. Not you or your goon squad. Not Willie Hu or Aunt Sallie. Not Bug and not even Mr. Church. I made you all play my game exactly the way I wanted it. You wouldn’t even be standing here if I hadn’t allowed it to happen. I’m Mother Night,” she said triumphantly, “and I win this game. There’s nothing else left for me. No worlds left to conquer, because I beat this one. I did what no one else could ever do. And everyone watching me right now will know that Mother Night won.”
I smiled at her. Despite the pain in body and soul, despite the terror that wanted to crush me down to my knees, I smiled.
“No, Artie,” I said, “you don’t get to win.”
Doubt flickered in her eyes. “What?”
“Look at your cameras,” I said.
She did.
All the little red lights were dark. “Bug hacked your system. He figured it out and cracked it like a walnut. The video was cut before you opened your mouth, so no one heard your big speech.”
She pulled her sunglasses off and let them fall over the rail. Her eyes were huge.
“Here’s how this ends,” I said. “You spent so much time building up the Mother Night character that it’s become a symbol. You used a couple of doubles already. At the Cyber Café and elsewhere. People think Mother Night is a group, not a person. And we’re going to make sure that’s all anyone ever knows. A terrorist organization created a fake identity and various nondescript, faceless agents assumed the role of Mother Night. There will never be a real Mother Night. No one will ever know that a woman named Artemisia Bliss ever existed. MindReader is already systematically erasing all records of you. You think you won? Fuck you. We’re going to edit you out of the world. You’re going to be forgotten. You’re going to be the nothing you deserve to be. None of the victims or the survivors will ever know you even lived.”
Her eyes grew wider and wider and filled with tears. “You … you can’t … …”
“It’s already done,” I said. “You lose.”
I raised my gun and put two rounds through the center of her cold, black heart.
She fell backward and damned if there wasn’t a smile on her face as she plunged over the railing and fell.
All around me there were shouts and moans and the sound of gunfire. I heard none of it, saw none of it. All I could see or hear was the lingering image of her smile and the sound of my own screams.
Epilogue
1
Chaos.
After all the theories, after all the psychological profiling and strategic models, it came down to chaos. In the end, just chaos.
That’s what Mother Night brought to America. That was her endgame.
God.
The DMS has spent so long fighting religious fundamentalists and terrorist splinter cells, kill squads from enemy states and domestic militiamen. Each time there is some kind of agenda, some clash of ideologies.
For Mother Night, all she wanted was to be recognized as the winner, and then lie down on her pyre and let it all burn.
Megalomania is the word Rudy used to describe her, but it’s too thin and shallow to say what needs to be said. Though in truth I don’t really think there is a word for what Mother Night was.
No, I’m wrong about that.
There is a word.
Monster.
The threats about erasing her from history had been spur-of-the-moment, but Bug and Church made it happen. Even her prison record and trial were expunged by MindReader. You can look for some trace of Artemisia Bliss, but you won’t find a damn thing. Nothing. And Aunt Sallie built a thoroughly convincing story about a legion of nameless, faceless people using the Mother Night name and costume as part of a terror campaign. The real person was so deeply buried in the new “official story” as to become individually irrelevant. Did that mean we actually won? I’ll let social philosophers figure that out.
2
Historians may well call the last two days the worst in U.S. history.
There have been days with bigger body counts. Fifty-one thousand died in three days at Gettysburg in 1863. Thirty-four thousand died in the Battle of Chickamauga, twenty-two thousand at Antietam. But they were casualties during battles in a war. We were not at war on Labor Day weekend. We were supposed to be at rest. At play.
Six thousand, eight hundred and four people died in Lexington and in Brooklyn, in Willow Grove and in Washington, and in a cluster of four hotels in Atlanta.
It could have been so much worse.
If the police and military in Atlanta hadn’t done their jobs, it would have been the end for us. It would have been the first night of the apocalypse and no one would be alive to tell the story.
But we prevailed.
Prevailed.
That word showed up in a lot of speeches over the next few days. It sounds like a heroic victory, and sure, there were plenty of heroes, but I’m not sure there was a victory. Not in the truest sense.
None of the pathogens escaped the quarantine and free-fire zones.
The bioweapons never fell into the hands of our country’s enemies. Mother Night never really intended to hand over those pathogens. It was all a lie, a theft, an illusion to make her feel powerful. To prove that she was powerful.
As a result of that auction, though, the enemies of the United States have become significantly weakened. North Korea most of all. Virtually every nation on earth has ceased trading with them and most have imposed incredibly harsh sanctions. Even China has distanced itself from North Korea. There’s speculation as to whether the
government will last.
The other countries in that auction claim that they were involved either under duress because of Mother Night’s threats or to remove those items from the black market and thereby insure the safety of the world. Total bullshit, of course, and off the public radar the State Department was beating them up pretty heavily because of it. So, in a weird, twisted way Mother Night actually helped the United States. In political terms. In all other ways she did unbearable harm.
So … did we win or lose? Was that a victory?
You tell me.
3
Before Bliss’s body had finished its long fall to the floor of the atrium, I was in motion, running for the closest exit, screaming into my microphone for Bug or Church or anyone to send people to my hotel.
To Junie.
God.
Junie.
A maniac had killed her guards, broken into her hotel room, and offered her the choice of seif-al-din or a bullet. She’d pleaded with him.
Not for her life.
For a life I didn’t even know was there.
A baby.
Our baby.
Oh, God …
Violin had busted down the door. I’m not even sure if I have it straight in my head why she went to the hotel at all.
There was a fight. Shots.
The killer, Ludo Monk, died.
Junie was shot.
She did not die.
Did not.
Did not.
But the bullet did terrible damage. Awful damage.
Irreparable. Cruel damage.
I sat in Junie’s hospital room, drinking bad coffee, watching her sleep, watching the news on TV. All regular programming was canceled. Everything was news coverage except on the movie and cartoon stations. The reporters all managed to do stand-ups in front of debris, or rows of bodies under sheets, or with flaming buildings behind them. Their producers cooked up catchphrases and labels and did everything they could to buzz them out into the social media floodwaters.
Fox News called it the Battle of Atlanta. They went out of their way to make sure they painted the current administration as villains willing to go to war with their own people.
MSNBC went with the Fall of Atlanta. They demonized the warmongers who were willing to rain fire down on U.S. citizens. In substance, it was no different from what Fox was saying.
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