The King of Plagues jl-3

by Jonathan Maberry

“No.”

  “Any religious themes in your plot?”

  “Just the usual stuff. Fundamentalist Shiites. Not very original, I’m afraid, and I’d probably have changed it in the writing. The genre’s moving away from using Muslims as the go-to bad guys.”

  I said nothing.

  Hanler sipped his coffee and stared up at the ceiling. “It would be kind of weird if a writer was involved in this sort of thing,” he said. “We cook up the worst possible catastrophes. Brilliant crimes, terrorist campaigns, mass murders. We get inside the heads of serial killers and extremists. Good thing we’re the good guys.”

  “If all of you are,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s that. Sorry this wasn’t more useful. And I hope like hell that I didn’t waste your time.”

  Me, too, I almost said aloud.

  We stood and shook hands. Hanler eyed me for a moment. “Look, Joe, if it turns out that it was one of the people at ThrillerFest or someone from the T-Town group, someone who used my idea …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Put the son of a bitch down like a rabid dog.”

  “Why? For stealing your idea?”

  “No,” he said without humor. “Because it means that I’m partly responsible, however far removed, for the deaths of four thousand people. I have trouble sleeping at night as it is. I think knowing that for sure … Christ, I think that might kill me.” He sighed and smiled a weary smile. “Come on; let me buy you one for the road. And something for Circe and your pal.”

  And that fast everything went all to hell.

  There was a series of firecracker pops somewhere outside and the whole front set of windows of the Starbucks exploded inward.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Starbucks

  Southampton, Pennsylvania

  December 19, 5:43 P.M. EST

  A barrage of heavy-caliber bullets tore into the coffeehouse, tearing apart the counter, shattering the big urns of hot coffee, sending stacks of paper cups flying, and ripping apart the spot where I’d been standing a split second before.

  The heavy front glass was thick enough to have deflected the first rounds; otherwise I’d be dead. Instead I hooked an arm around Hanler and a young woman wearing a Grinch sweatshirt. I felt two hard jerks at the flaps of my sports coat and knew that a couple of rounds had missed me by inches. We hit the deck just as the first screams rose, louder than the gunfire. Then a second window blew and suddenly I was screaming myself as glass splinters rained down on my head. I shielded my eyes with my arm.

  “Down! Down! Get down!” I roared.

  I pivoted and looked out from under my bent arm. Most of the customers were already in motion, dodging and ducking, leaping over counters and pitching themselves behind the overstuffed chairs. But a few stood there with slack mouths and eyes like deer on a highway … and the bullets tore them to rags. A college jock with a Rutgers ski cap flew backward into a display of stocking stuffers, his white parka blooming with red flowers. As he fell his outflung arms knocked down an old man and a teenage girl, sending them sprawling and saving their lives by accident as the heavy-caliber rounds swarmed the air.

  Even through the thunder of gunfire I could hear Ghost barking like crazy, but I couldn’t tell if he was hurt.

  “Hanler! Crawl behind the counter! Hanler!” I yelled, but Marty Hanler didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. He lay facedown on the floor and blood spread from beneath him in a growing crimson pool. Damn.

  “He’s over there!”

  The yell came from the shattered window and a split second later a line of bullets pocked the floor near my head. I used my right foot to shove the screaming young woman out of the way as I rolled in the other direction. I tore open my sports coat, found the knurled grips of my Beretta, racked the slide as I rolled to a kneeling position, and brought the weapon up in a two-handed grip. The first of the shooters stepped through the window. He wore heavy body armor and had a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth and wore ski goggles. He held a Colt AR-15 Tactical Carbine, firing at anything that moved.

  I gave him a double tap.

  The first round punched into his sternum—it didn’t penetrate his vest, but it froze him into the moment—and I put the next round through his right eye. The impact snapped his head back and probably broke his neck, and it painted the two men behind with blood and brains. I shot the second one in the mouth as he tried to yell.

  The third shooter swept the room with an AR-15 that had an oversized hundred-round drum magazine. Bullets chopped the floor and turned tables into clouds of splinters.

  And … oh Christ—Rudy and Circe! They were still outside.

  If they were still alive.

  Rudy didn’t carry a gun, but he had common sense, good survival instincts, and a cell phone. I hoped he was hiding under my car calling for backup.

  The counter above me disintegrated into a storm cloud of splinters and I threw myself forward and down, one arm hooked over my face to protect my eyes as I went onto my side and fired blind. I put half a magazine through the flying debris and the chatter from the assault rifle abruptly stopped.

  “He’s over behind the counter!” a man yelled from the other side of the store.

  Suddenly three other long guns opened up from the far end of the store, blasting the side window and running lines of destruction along the floor. People screamed as bullets found them, punching through heavy winter coats, tearing chunks out of legs and arms, and splashing the floor with red.

  This was going from bad to absolute frigging disaster. Adrenaline was pumping through me by the quart, but at the moment it was triggering more of the flight impulse than the desire to fight all these guys. I was scared out of my mind; I’ll admit it to anyone.

  “Grenade, grenade!”

  I didn’t know if someone was calling for a frag or telling his comrades that he was throwing one, but I did not want to wait around to find out. I came up firing and put the rest of the mag downrange, forcing them back for a second. The grenade dropped from dead fingers and fell outside the store.

  There was a huge whump! and a dozen car alarms began to blare.

  Any hope I had that the blast had taken out the rest of the shooters was blown to hell as they opened up again. And I prayed that Rudy and Circe were nowhere near that grenade when it blew.

  I had only one spare magazine and I swapped it out as I flung myself to the left, hitting the base of the front wall. Broken glass covered the floor, and as I slid out of the line of fire the jagged shards tore through my trousers and bit into my left thigh like a swarm of piranha.

  The third shooter—the one I hit while firing blind—was down but not dead. He lay partly inside the coffee shop and was slowly trying to crawl back out. Blood dripped from a thigh wound and another on his right forearm. The strap of the AR-15 was wound around his injured arm.

  I stretched for a long reach just as the other shooters opened up again. My scrabbling fingers caught the strap and I jerked it toward me, hauling gun and gunman into the store. The shooter tried to make a fight of it, but I wasn’t in the mood. I jerked harder and as he flipped over onto his back I chopped down on his windpipe with the butt of the Beretta.

  There was movement to my left and I saw Ghost crouching behind the ruined counter, his teeth bared, his white pelt dottled with blood. His muscles bunched as he prepared to make a run at the gunmen.

  “Down!” I snapped. It was forty feet to the side window, and fast as Ghost was, he’d never get them before they got him. The dog gave me a fierce, despairing look. He wanted to be in this fight. He probably smelled my blood and the ancient instinct to protect the pack leader was coming close to overriding his training.

  Behind me a man growled, “C’mon, Turk; get this motherfucker!”

  Then one of the gunmen kicked the rest of the glass out of the window and stepped through. There were at least a dozen people in the coffeehouse, and most or all of them were hurt. A lot of them were dead, too. I cut a look at Hanler, b
ut he lay in the center of a lake of blood and wasn’t moving. I didn’t think he was ever going to.

  Son of a bitch.

  I took the AR-15 and from the weight I could tell that the drum mag was more than half-gone. How many rounds left? Twenty? Thirty? The dead man’s coat was open and I flipped back the flap, saw a second mag hanging from his belt, and made a grab for it.

  The shooter caught the movement and suddenly the dead man’s body seemed to rise from the floor as rounds punched into his meat and muscle, jerking the corpse into a horrible parody of convulsive life.

  Lying flat on my back, head toward them, I raised the rifle with both hands and emptied the first magazine at that end of the store. It sounds easy, but the recoil slammed into my upraised arms and threatened to tear them out of the shoulder sockets.

  The gun clicked empty way too soon; I’d guessed wrong about how many rounds were left. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen rounds left, but it bought me a second’s worth of grace, which was all I needed to swap out the magazines.

  I drew a breath, then let out the loudest war cry I could. Who knows what I said or if I said anything at all? Just noise. Loud and feral, the primitive and inarticulate cry of the Warrior within as I rolled onto my stomach and came up into a low crouching run, firing from the hip, blasting on full auto as I dodged from wall to wall. I don’t know how I didn’t get shot. Battlefields are like that. Sometimes you have the best armor and the best cover and a ricochet pings off a wall and punches your ticket, and sometimes you feel painted with magic as you run through hellfire without a scratch. Bunny calls it having a Die Hard moment. Top says that it’s Madman Mojo. I don’t have a name for it, but I made it to the counter alive. I hip-checked Ghost and sent him on a nail-skittering sideways slide into the wall. He yelped in pain, but he was still on his feet and out of the line of fire.

  Then the tone of the fight changed. Only one gun continued to pour fire my way; the others were shooting at something outside.

  Rudy and Circe?

  It sounded like a dozen guns in play out there.

  I dove for cover, and my heart sank in my chest. There were more of them, and no matter how much of a Die Hard moment I was having, I couldn’t win against an army. In the movies a hero can win against unlimited odds. This wasn’t the movies. I was already slowing down and I was going to run out of ammunition very soon. And then I was going to die.

  There was a scream and a crash and I looked up as one of the shooters came backward through the window, arms flung wide, chest and face exploding like fireworks.

  Then I heard it.

  “Echo! Echo! Echo!”

  A deep, bass rumble of a shout.

  Top!

  The shooters at the far end turned toward the shouts, and I rose up and hosed them. But one of them spun and fired a full mag at me. I felt the wind of the first rounds as I dropped back out of sight.

  There were more screams, and no more rounds came my way.

  I ducked and crabbed sideways and looked down the store and saw that one shooter was gone, punched back out through the window and sprawled like a starfish on the hood of a parked Hyundai. A second man had dropped his weapon and was trying to stop his life from leaking out of a hole in the side of his neck.

  The third shooter held his ground and was slapping a fresh magazine into place. I’d been waiting for that moment, and I rose up from hiding and ran at him. Ghost was right on my heels, racing along with the silent speed that a fighting dog has when blood is in the air and it’s time for the kill. The AR-15 was a burning monster that bucked and jerked in my hands as I put twenty rounds into the shooter. Vest be damned. I drilled a hole through his chest you could drive a truck through, and what was left of him pinwheeled out through the window.

  Two more shooters ran past the window, heading toward the front, but I heard a fusillade of mixed-caliber reports and both men staggered back, turning and juddering as Echo Team chopped them apart. There was more movement outside and I saw Top Sims and Bunny duck down behind a car and trade fire with yet another pair of shooters. How many of the bastards did they send? I mean, I’m flattered and all that they think I’m that tough, but an entire army seemed a bit excessive.

  I reached the window. The man with the neck wound wasn’t hurt near as bad as I thought and he pivoted and used a bloody hand to draw his sidearm. There was a flash of white, a fierce growl, and a sharp crunch, and then the gun arm collapsed into red junk as Ghost took him. He screamed, but Ghost growled like a monster out of myth.

  “Keep!” I ordered Ghost, and the big shepherd stopped short of killing the man but didn’t let go of the mangled arm.

  I crouched and did a fast look around the corner of the window. There were four shooters on my right, all of them firing over the hoods of parked cars. It was weird. You see scenes like this in Iraq and Afghanistan, not in suburban Pennsylvania. I’m sure there was a lesson in there about cultural arrogance, but I was too busy to sort out the nuances at the moment. I dropped the AR-15 and took the sidearm from the guy Ghost was babysitting. The guy didn’t seem to mind. He was busy trying not to scream.

  I sighted down on the closest shooter. Top caught my eye and shook me off. I withheld my shot and then saw why. Khalid Shaheed had worked his way around to the far side and was three steps from a flanking position. One of the shooters must have spotted him and started to turn, so I blew out the windshield of the car he was hiding behind. He made the mistake of being surprised and looking up.

  Khalid put a round through the guy’s ear.

  The other shooters faltered, caught in a cross fire.

  Top bellowed at them in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice, “Drop your weapons and step out from behind the vehicles! Do it now!”

  It was a simple choice. It was their only remaining choice. An idiot could have recognized it as the only way out of the moment.

  But the dumb sons of bitches went for it. They opened up on Khalid and on Top. The return fire came from Top and Bunny, from Khalid, from me, and from DeeDee, who appeared out of nowhere and took up a shooting position right outside the window. It was a four-way shit storm, and it was over in seconds. Nobody was going home from that party.

  DeeDee looked up with a dazzling blue-eyed smile. “Howdy, Boss. Did you get me a vanilla latte with foam?”

  I actually laughed and then I heard tires squeal. I jumped out of the window and sprinted for the front of the building with DeeDee on my six. A white van roared past us and headed for the far exit. The side door was open and I saw two men with scarves standing braced in the opening. They both had assault rifles and I was starting to pivot, reaching to push DeeDee out of the way, when there were two sharp cracks and the men pitched backward into the van. I whipped my head around and saw John Smith lying chest down over the hood of Black Bess, his sniper rifle smoking.

  The van was still going, the driver hell-bent on getting his ass out of the parking lot. We all opened up on the vehicle, battering it with rounds, but the driver had the pedal on the floor and we didn’t have a good angle on him.

  “Rudy!” I bellowed as I broke into a dead run.

  “Here!” came a strangled croak from the other side of the building. I spun and cut across the lot to try to cut the van off. As I cleared the corner I saw Rudy on his knees, right hand clamped over his left arm, his face white as paste as blood poured from between his fingers.

  What I saw behind him twisted my brain around.

  Circe O’Tree stood over Rudy, legs wide in a solid shooter’s stance, holding a smoking Glock .40 in a two-handed grip, the barrel pointed right at me.

  I almost shot her.

  However, she wasn’t aiming at me. She was aiming past me, and I whirled and dodged sideways as she fired. Her first three bullets exploded the van’s windshield and the next two hit the driver in the face. The van suddenly swerved as the driver pitched sideways, his dead hands dragging the wheel hard over. The van missed Circe by ten feet and Rudy by less than a yard.
It plowed into the back of my Explorer and crushed it like a beer can.

  For one crystalline moment the entire scene was dead silent, as if we were all frozen into a photograph from a book on war. This could have been Somalia or Beirut or Baghdad or any of the other places on our troubled earth where hatred takes the form of lethal rage. We, the victors, stood amid gunsmoke and the pink haze of blood that had been turned to mist, amazed that we were alive, doubting both our salvation and our right to have survived while others—perhaps more innocent and deserving than ourselves—lay dead or dying.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Starbucks

  Southampton, Pennsylvania

  December 19, 5:49 P.M. EST

  Then the moment crumbled to dust as sirens burned the air and hearing returned to our gunshot-deafened ears so that we heard the screams of those still clinging to life.

  “Top!” I yelled.

  “Clear!” he called as he and Bunny came out from their points of cover and swarmed the dead, kicking away their weapons, checking for pulses behind the appearance of death.

  I turned and ran toward Rudy, but Circe was there, pushing him down. She had a knife in her hand—God only knows where it came from—and she was cutting his sleeve away, yelling at him to hold pressure there, there, dammit, changing from the person who had just killed into the doctor who had dedicated her life to doing no harm. Tears glittered like diamonds at the corners of her eyes.

  “Dr. O’Tree,” Rudy said in a voice slurred by shock and pain, “it’s a pleasure to—”

  “Shut up,” she snapped.

  “Okay.”

  As Circe worked, her gaze kept flicking up and past me. I followed her line of sight and saw the six small holes clustered in the center of the driver’s windshield of the van. The figure inside was slumped sideways, eyes wide and fixed and nothing much else remaining of his face.

  DeeDee knelt beside Circe with an open field surgical kit. She popped a surette of morphine and jabbed it in Rudy’s arm. He said something in Spanish that sounded like “I love you,” and passed out.