Code Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What are you talking about, old man?” asked Bunny. “They sent a whole team in here.”

  “You saw the team they sent in. A bunch of thug shooters and those fucking Berserkers. Tell me, Farmboy, which of them look like highly trained technicians capable of safely transporting the worlds deadliest pathogens out of here?”

  Bunny said nothing. He kept looking at Top.

  “Tell me where the vehicles are for this team,” added Top. Then he shook his head. “Hell, no, boy. This was a trap set for us. Or for a team like us.”

  “Almost worked, too,” said Bunny as he nodded out the vault door to where Ivan lay.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Farmboy,” Top said. “It worked exactly right. Just like whatever Shockwave walked into in Atlanta. There were only two DMS teams left and Mother Night took them both clean off the board.”

  “But we won this,” insisted Bunny. “We ain’t dead.”

  I said, “What Top is trying to tell you is that we’ve been manipulated into wasting time we don’t have to waste. What do you call it in video games when you go off the main level of play?”

  “A side quest?”

  “Yeah,” growled Top, “and another term for that is wild goose chase.”

  I kicked the side of the Ark so hard that hollow metal echoes shouted back at me. “We’re down here fighting the wrong goddamn fight.”

  “Then where’s the real fight?”

  I tapped my earbud but there was no signal. “I don’t know but we need to get out of here to find out, and I think our clock is just about out of time.”

  We turned and we ran.

  Chapter One Hundred and Four

  Westin Hotel

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, September 1, 12:41 p.m.

  Mother Night looked at her watch and saw that it was time to get ready. She showered and dressed in the Lucy Kuo costume she’d hand-sewn. For ten long minutes she did nothing but stand in front of the full-length mirror and look at herself.

  Then, with a sudden rush of white-hot anger, she tore the costume off, ripping it, pulling it away from her skin as if it were diseased. The top was taped to her breasts, and as she ripped it off the tape left angry red welts across her naked skin. She threw the rags on the floor, then got a knife out of her bag and knelt over the costume, stabbing it over and over and over …

  Time seemed to go away for a while.

  A long while.

  She blinked.

  Blinked again.

  She was no longer in the bedroom.

  Mother Night was huddled in the back of the shower stall. Naked. Bleeding from cuts on her forearms and thighs, her face swollen and sore, eyes burning from tears.

  “Wh-what—?”

  Her voice was thick. The way a sleeper’s is after a long night.

  The vomiting began then.

  Without warning, without the slightest twitch, everything in her stomach surged upward, burning her throat, bursting from between her lips, spraying the shower walls with garish red.

  Red.

  For a terrible second she thought she was throwing up blood, but it was too much and too thin.

  Wine?

  When had she drunk wine?

  When could she have had this much?

  There seemed to be no food mixed in with the wine, but the liquid was lumpy with …

  She stared.

  Another rush spilled out.

  And another.

  Then her body convulsed with dry heaves as if it were trying to rid itself of her stomach lining. She strained so hard that white sparks detonated at the edges of her vision. Blood roared in her ears.

  She kept staring at the lumps in the red mess.

  There were pills mixed in with the wine.

  Lots of pills.

  “What?” she asked again, as if the vomit itself could provide an answer.

  It took a long time.

  The dry heaves ground slowly to a halt, leaving her breathless. She gasped for air, tried not to pass out.

  Trembling fingers fumbled for the spigot and she turned it with a cry of effort.

  The water was ice cold.

  It punched the air out of her lungs and tore a scream from her.

  Inside, deep inside, a voice laughed at her.

  An old voice. The hated voice. The unevolved voice.

  You killed me.

  “What…?” she asked aloud, giving it different meaning now. Directing it somewhere. Inward. Backward in time.

  You killed me, said her older self. You stole my life. You threw everything away, you pathetic bitch.

  “Fuck you, you weak little cow,” sneered Mother Night. “You were nothing. You had no power. Look what I’ve done!”

  You stole my life and made yourself into a monster. A hag.

  Mother Night gripped the shower’s safety bar and pulled herself to her feet. It took a lot and her legs did not want to hold her. She tried to lift her leg over the edge of the tub, bungled it, and then she was falling, clawing at the air, finding only the shower curtain, clutching it, tearing it loose, dragging it down to the floor. She landed hard, striking the point of her left elbow on the closed toilet seat.

  You’re pathetic. A psycho bitch who doesn’t deserve to live.

  “Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

  It was all she could say as she fought her body onto hands and knees, gripped the edge of the sink, and pulled herself to her feet again. When she looked into the mirror it was not her own face she saw. It was not Mother Night.

  Artemisia Bliss stared back at her. Sensibly dressed for work. Hair pulled back into a ponytail. Glasses on the end of her nose. Eyes filled with hate.

  You’re nothing but a loser.

  “You’re a goddamn liar. You were too weak to speak up for yourself. Pretty, clever little Artemisia Bliss. Crying into her pillow. Mad at the world. Boo-fucking-hoo. I won the game. I beat everybody. I made us into this.”

  She beat her fist against her chest. The pain was shockingly hard and it felt so good. So delicious.

  So powerful.

  “I fucking won!”

  In the mirror, Artemisia Bliss shook her head.

  This isn’t a game.

  “Everything’s a game, asshole. You were always too stupid to know that. It’s all a game and I won. I beat them all. Church, Aunt Sallie, Bug. The field teams. Everyone. I fucking won.”

  The face in the mirror looked at her with such sadness.

  So what?

  “What?” Mother Night asked again.

  Who cares if you won or not? Why do you think it matters?

  Mother Night’s mouth opened but she couldn’t find the right words to explain to this phantom what it all meant. To make it crystal clear what every detail meant, why it all mattered, and the value of her victory. “I … I…”

  And then someone knocked on the door.

  As if a light switch had been thrown, the image in the mirror vanished to be instantly replaced by Mother Night’s face. She looked into those eyes—her eyes—and told herself that this was her true face. This was the only truth.

  Mother Night.

  Another knock.

  A man’s knock.

  But not, she was sure, a police knock. If the police knew she was here they’d have knocked the door down and she’d be in handcuffs or sprawled in a pool of blood.

  Her body was streaked with wine vomit. A few pills clung to her skin.

  Mother Night took the white terrycloth robe from the peg on the door, pulled it on, belted it, walked into the hall and out to the living room of the big suite. Her laptop was on the bed and she paused to hit a few keys. The screen display immediately showed the hallway outside her room via a video stream from the cameras she’d mounted there.

  Two men stood in front of the door. They were dressed casually, in Hawaiian shirts, jeans, dark sneakers. They could have been conventioneers at the hotel, or they could have been conferees there to attend DragonCon, the big
science fiction and fantasy convention that spilled across five hotels. Not everybody at the conference wore costumes from movies, comics, or games.

  They could have been ordinary men.

  But they weren’t, and she knew it.

  Mother Night recognized one of them. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, with sunglasses and a wire behind his ear. In her memory, the man stood beside a limousine, watching up and down the street as a man got out of the car.

  The man this fellow was guarding was Bill Collins.

  This man at her door was one of the Secret Service agents whose loyalty to the vice president extended far beyond his role to the country. This man was owned by Collins, heart and soul. His companion would be as well.

  And yet they were here.

  Knocking on her door.

  As if to punctuate that thought, one of the men rapped his knuckles on the door.

  The realization of who they were was so intensely painful that Bliss nearly collapsed. Her legs, already wobbling from the wine, the pills she’d taken in her fugue state, and the aftereffects of vomiting, tried to buckle, but she caught herself.

  “No,” she snapped. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  She kept her voice low. She didn’t want the killers at the door to hear her.

  The pain didn’t abate even though her legs grew more steady.

  “Bill…” she whispered.

  On the level of pure human emotion—a level she felt floated at an immense distance—there was heartbreak. Bill. How could he do this?

  On all other levels, however, there was a cynical amusement. How could he not do this? It was neither surprising nor unforgivable. In his place, she would do the same.

  Probably should do the same, time allowing.

  Still, it did hurt.

  Oddly, she knew that he loved her, and she him. So strange. Maybe that’s how gods love. It was all very Shakespearean.

  She waited, watching as they listened and finally nodded to each other. One man shifted to watch the hall as the other removed a keycard. Both men drew pistols from under their Hawaiian shirts and held them down by their legs, out of sight even though the hall was currently empty.

  Mother Night spent one moment listening inside her head for the voice of Artemisia Bliss, but there was only silence.

  She smiled and waited for the men to enter.

  Because the hallway was deserted, no one heard the two men scream.

  Chapter One Hundred and Five

  The Locker

  Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility

  Highland County, Virginia

  Sunday, September 1, 1:02 p.m.

  It took twenty-two minutes to climb flights of stairs and scale the elevator shaft. We encountered six wandering walkers and put them down. With each encounter it was simply a matter of one of us making a head shot. There was no drama attached to it, which is surreal. We were so numb, so terrified, so humiliated that the infected we killed had become little more than irritants.

  In a flash of thorny precognition I knew full well that this was going to come back to bite each us on the ass. Once we were past the heat of the fight—and providing Mother Night didn’t destroy the fucking world—we were going to visit those killings in our dreams, in our quiet times. The infected were victims. Colleagues in the DMS. Scientists, technicians, office staff, maintenance, cafeteria staff. People. Humans whose lives had been stolen from them and whose bodies had been hijacked by a parasitic bioweapon that made them into monsters. Yeah, sure, we had to kill them. And no, there was no way we could stop and mourn or even regard their humanity in our haste to get out of there and back into radio contact, but you can’t write bad checks like that without them bouncing. We would all have to pay those penalties someday, somehow.

  But for now, we climbed, we ran, we killed, we fought, and we prayed.

  The hardest part was the decontamination process. One full hour of being blasted by steam and chemicals and foams and God knew what else. Eventually we staggered out of the offices into the Tractor Store, wearing sweat-soaked underwear. We even had to leave our guns behind.

  We reeled into the sunlight of a Monday afternoon.

  Ghost came racing and barking toward us, then slowed and stopped as he smelled the chemicals on me. He growled at me and even bared his fangs.

  Fair enough.

  Sam broke cover and ran to us, his rifle ready, face twisted into doubt. He looked past us, waiting for Dunk and Ivan to come out of the building. Looked in vain, and I saw pain flicker across his features. He and Ivan were close. I took his earbud and tapped it to get a command channel. First thing I did was call for the Black Hawk and order the pilot to have the Lear fueled and ready. Then I called Church and told him what had happened.

  “I’m adding Bug to this conversation, Cowboy,” said Church. “He has something you need to hear.”

  Bug came on the line. “Are you okay?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “What do you have?”

  “Okay,” he said, “you told me to get inside Artie’s head, right? Well, I went back over everything I knew about her. What she wanted, what she did. I thought about the stuff said about her at the trial. Stuff about her psychiatric history.”

  “Cut to it, Bug. Tell me you have something.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I think I know what she’s going to do. I think I know how she’s going to win this.”

  It was hard to hear.

  It hurt.

  Not because it was surprising. But because there was so little time to do anything about it. Even as we crowded into the Black Hawk, I was certain that Bug was right.

  About Mother Night’s plan.

  And about the fact that she was going to win.

  Chapter One Hundred and Six

  Westin Hotel

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, September 1, 1:50 p.m.

  Mother Night took a long, hot shower, washing away the dried wine she’d vomited all over herself. Washing away the blood from the two Secret Service men.

  Every time she thought about the looks on their faces as they died it made her laugh. Their arrogance was insulting. They’d come in, holding their guns down at their sides, smiling, expecting her to do what? Faint? Fall down and cry? Beg?

  Fuck that.

  With their first step across the threshold they snapped the silver wire she’d placed at ankle level and that triggered a pair of compressed-gas dart guns. The chemical dropped them in their tracks. Dying, but not dead. A little fun with chemistry.

  She pulled them into the room, closed the door, wrapped duct tape around their ankles and wrists and across their mouths, and let them watch as she carved pieces off, bit by bit, from each. They tried so hard to scream, but paralysis kept their pain and terror trapped inside. Afterward she’d covered them with a blanket. It was fun while it lasted, but overall it was pretty disgusting.

  It was the first time she had ever killed anyone with her own hands.

  She’d done it as a challenge to her inner voice, daring Artemisia Bliss to say something. To try to do something.

  But that voice seemed to be gone.

  Pussy.

  Before taking her shower, she called her teams at the CDC and the Locker. One call was answered, and she heard what she wanted to hear. The other call was not. Ah well. That could mean anything.

  Off to the shower.

  She turned off the water, dried herself, spent some time to get her makeup right, and then stood for almost twenty minutes in front of her open closet, trying to decide what to wear.

  The original plan had been to go over to the Hyatt in costume, dressed as Lucy Kuo from the video game Infamous 2. There was all sorts of subtext and meaning in that. All about betrayal and revenge.

  The costume was in ragged pieces scattered all over the room.

  She could remember destroying it, but not quite exactly why. The fugue had started then,
and events at the edges of it were fuzzy.

  The other costumes had less meaning, though some were very sexy and would look great on TV.

  Which was the problem, as she now considered it.

  If she wore a costume to the final act, that meant she was playing a character. Would the character eclipse her?

  Probably.

  Not entirely, of course, because—hey, she’d spilled blood, coast to coast. The name Mother Night was never going to be eclipsed.

  The face, however, might.

  And wouldn’t that suck?

  It would certainly suck some of the meaning out.

  So, in the end, she dressed as Mother Night. The wig, the sunglasses, the skin tones and piercings. It was, after all, what her fans would want. What they’d appreciate. She had no doubt at all that she would have fans. Her anarchist fruitcake children were all devoted to her, even though—let’s face it—she didn’t give a stale fart about them. They should all have had “means to an end” tattooed on their foreheads. Useful, fun, occasionally charming, but dumb as hamsters. And yet, fans, every last one of them.

  There would be others.

  That was the nature of power. People idolized it, mythologized it. People showed up at events like DragonCon dressed as Hannibal Lecter, as Freddy and Jason and Pinhead. As Darth Vader and Dracula. As Nixon and Bin Laden. As killers both real and unreal. There were always those among the vast sea of disempowered who wanted to borrow power by wearing a fake identity. That was the central pillar of fandom, and Bliss knew that in earlier years she was as guilty of it as anyone.

  So the best way to use that, as well as honor it, would be to give them the role model in point of fact.

  And so, as Mother Night, from gleaming black Betty Page hairdo to spike heels, she was the über-terrorist, Mother Night.

  It would not surprise her one bit if there weren’t already three or four girls in the seething crowd of conferees dressed as her. Certainly no one would look at her in this environment and believe her to be the real Mother Night.

  Not yet.

  Soon, though.

  God, yes. Soon.

  Her clothes were fun. A short plaid skirt that showed a lot of leg. White stockings that ended two inches below the hem and were clipped to a cream lace garter belt. A half-shirt that showed her hard-muscled bare midriff, and a vest with lots of pockets. Gunbelts slung low over her hips. The guns were bright yellow water pistols. Lace fingerless gloves with a frilly ruff at the wrists. A blood-red circle-A on her shirt. No bra. Lots of jangly bracelets with gold and silver zombie-head charms. The last touch was a backpack crammed with goodies.