Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Rudy!” I cried, reaching for him, but he stood in the doorway and would not approach within touching distance. Rudy Sanchez looks and even sounds like Raúl Juliá from the old Addams Family movies. A rich baritone voice, intelligent eyes that were filled with wisdom, and a manner of quiet confidence that usually put the pin back into the grenade when I was, psychologically speaking, ready to blow.

  But not now. He stood in the doorway, wrapped in the highest-level protective gear in the catalog, and studied me with eyes that were filled with pity, and concern, and fear.

  “Rudy—?”

  “Cowboy,” he said quietly, “the medical team here is doing everything they can.”

  It scared me even more to hear him spout a company line like that. When the doctors say that it is never—ever—a good thing.

  “How are Top and Bunny?”

  “We’re trying to understand this,” said Rudy. “Joe, please, you have to tell me exactly what happened down there.”

  “I already told them, goddamn it.”

  “Tell me. Please…”

  So I did. I told him every bit of it. Not sure if there was anything that I hadn’t already shared with Church and the other doctors, but I went over it again. Saying it to Rudy, though, helped steady me. At least a bit. He listens with every molecule of his body. He doesn’t miss things and he does not judge. He listens, he disseminates, he works through it, and he understands. Usually. As I spoke I saw the doubt grow in his eyes. And the fear.

  “Fuck, Rude,” I growled, “it’s all on the cameras. Check them. Pull the memory cards from the telemetry units on our suits. Upload the memory from the BAMS units. It’s all there. Everything. The video cameras on our helmets. Look at it, Rudy. Look at it and … and…”

  I could hear my voice fracture and falter. I could feel my tongue growing thick, muffling my speech, making it hard to breathe.

  Hard to think.

  Hard to …

  The fever came back all at once. It was like someone doused me with gasoline and threw a match. It came at me like a blowtorch, like a flamethrower.

  I remember trying to tell Rudy that I was in trouble. I remember reaching for him, and I remember seeing the fear turn to panic in his eyes.

  I remember falling.

  The floor opened a big, black mouth and I fell into that. Somewhere behind me, above me, elsewhere, I could hear the doctors yelling, nurses yelling, machines yelling. Then there was a long electronic scream. I knew that sound. Knew it too well.

  Rudy screamed, too. At least I think he did.

  Those screams followed me all the way down into the dark.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE NATIONAL SZÉCHÉNYI LIBRARY

  F BUILDING OF BUDA CASTLE

  BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

  TWO WEEKS AGO

  Harry Bolt yelled and backpedaled as he went for his gun.

  He stepped into a puddle of blood, his foot shot straight out in front of him, and he went down hard on his ass. Violin leapt over his falling body and he caught a momentary glare of complete disapproval on her pretty face. He saw light flash from the edges of her knives and then she was among the men.

  Shots rang out, but Harry did not see Violin stagger or fall. How she evaded the bullets was something he would never understand. Never. Lying on the floor and watching her was like sitting in a movie theater and watching Black Widow or Wonder Woman. It was surreal. She moved too fast, twisted like a dancer, reacted with perfect timing.

  It was beautiful.

  And it was absolutely terrifying.

  Because of the knives.

  The men were good. Harry had to give them props. He knew that if it was him in that fight he’d be as dead as Olvera and Florida. Deader, if that was possible. They were brutal and they fought like a well-oiled machine. Practiced, experienced in killing together, merciless.

  Violin should have died.

  Five to one. Five big, muscular, powerful, and expert killers against a single woman who was at best half the weight and muscle mass of the smallest of them. They should have ripped her apart.

  Except that’s not what happened.

  As Harry lay there in the puddle of blood, stunned, his pistol forgotten in his hand, he saw the impossible unfold before him.

  Violin moved with a coordination that bordered on the supernatural. She danced. That was it, he realized; her fighting style flowed like lovely choreography. She stepped, turned, swept, ducked, leapt, twirled, bent, lunged, dodged, and flowed like honey. Like mercury. Like light.

  The air around her was filled with rubies.

  That’s how it looked to Harry.

  Rubies.

  Bright droplets that glowed with heat as they flew.

  The men yelled, and growled, and bellowed, and screamed, and cried out for their mothers.

  As she cut them to pieces.

  Not with the brutality that they had used on Olvera, Florida, and the library guards. No. If murder could have an aspect of beauty, if the act of killing could become an art form, then this was what he was seeing.

  Pieces of them fell.

  And they fell, and even in their deaths they seemed to swoon to the ground like danseurs whose moment of dramatic demise was demanded by the music, by the narrative of the dance.

  One of the men danced backward. The leader. He parried her cut and reeled away, bleeding but not mortally wounded. He flung down his knife and reached for the Tanfoglio pistol in his shoulder holster, and for a moment Violin was engaged with two other men. It was in that single moment that Harry realized that Violin, despite everything, might lose this fight. That she might die.

  The man raised the pistol.

  And Harry fired his gun.

  He emptied his entire magazine at him. He carried a Sig Sauer P220 with a seven-round flush magazine. All seven rounds punched through the air. The distance was nearly point blank.

  The leader of the killers wheeled around and stared.

  Harry stared back.

  Not one of his goddamn bullets had gone anywhere near him. They’d struck the wall, the door, and two rounds had gone through into the main hall.

  Harry Bolt was a lousy shot. Always had been.

  The man gave him a quizzical look. A kind of battlefield “are you serious” look. Nearly a smile. Then he raised his gun toward Harry.

  Violin whirled and cut his hand off at the wrist. She checked the swing and slashed him across the throat. All in the space of a frenzied heartbeat.

  The leader dropped to his knees only a second before the other two men pirouetted away from the angel of destruction, took sloppy wandering steps, and fell.

  The room became a tableau.

  Like a superwoman in an action movie, Violin stood with both hands held out, almost crucified against the reality of what she had just done. Her knives dripped red; her body was splash-painted with red. All around her were the men who should have ripped her apart. A faint wisp of gun smoke lingered in the air.

  Harry stared up at her in awe, in shock, maybe in love.

  She snapped her wrists down and the blood went flying from the oiled blades. She reversed the knives and slid them into the thigh sheaths.

  All in a moment.

  All in a dream.

  Yeah. Harry Bolt was in love.

  She looked down at him, at the slide that was locked back on his gun.

  “You’re not only an idiot,” she said. “You’re a useless idiot.”

  Outside there was the sound of sirens. Someone had heard the gunshots. Or maybe they heard the screams. Violin bent and pulled the black shirt off of the dead leader and then carefully but quickly wrapped it around the book.

  “Get up or go to jail,” she snapped. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”

  With the book clutched to her chest, she whirled once more and dashed for the front door.

  Harry Bolt staggered to his feet and, because he had no idea what else to do, ran to catch up.

  Harry did not look
back and therefore did not see the dark SUV pull up outside the library. He did not see the six men in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties enter the library. He did not see them hurry back out only a few seconds later.

  Because Harry did not see any of this he did not pay much attention to the fact that he was leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind as he ran.

  He did not see the six men begin to follow those prints.

  Harry Bolt, after all, was not a very good spy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SEAHAWK PLACE

  DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA

  AUGUST 20, 11:27 P.M.

  Junie Flynn was asleep, lost in a dream of strange creatures that blossomed like flowers from twisted trees, then broke off and went flapping on gossamer wings. The landscape was filled with discordant images of intense beauty and ferocious ugliness, and in her dreams Junie was one of the newly hatched creatures who flew over forests of living plants, along beaches of jagged glass sands that ran beside oceans of boiling mercury. When she cried out, her voice was a piercing shriek that sounded like the dying wail of a wounded seabird. Or like a child who was lost and knew she would never again be found.

  It was a dreadful dream and this was the third consecutive night she’d had it.

  That was how sleep was for her. Her dreams were seldom about Joe or their life here in California. She rarely dreamed of things that had happened during the day, or of the incidental mundanities of life. Her dreams flowed like a river between fantastical and nightmarish.

  As did her life.

  She seldom shared those dreams with Joe and never with anyone else.

  Never.

  On those nights when she woke shivering and bathed in fear-sweat, Joe calmed her and comforted her, and from the soothing things he said it was clear he thought that her sleep had been troubled by the cancer she had beat two years ago, or the baby she had lost when an assassin’s bullet destroyed her uterus. Or of the things she had witnessed while coasting the edges of the violent world of the DMS.

  But that wasn’t it.

  That was never it.

  Her dreams took her to strange worlds that Joe would never understand. Junie thought she did, though. After all, her DNA was so complicated and it belonged, at least in part, to other worlds than this one.

  Was that where her dreams took her? she wondered. Did this fractured and surreal landscape exist in some other place, and were images of it somehow stored in her cells?

  She hoped not, because it was a dreadful, dreadful place.

  If that was true, though, then she found it strange that she never saw people in those other worlds. Not once.

  Or, maybe it was that the creatures who lived there did not fit any definition of “people” that her senses would recognize. There were plenty of creatures here. Bizarre forms that seemed to change shape the moment she looked away from then, as if it was a game for them to hide from her through transformation. Flesh—if flesh it was—flowed and shifted and assumed improbable forms. Some of them were devilishly similar to things that triggered recognition but did so imperfectly. It was like trying to read a book written in Rorschach inkblots. Other forms were simply devilish in their own right, and when the creatures were in these forms they looked up at her as she flew overhead and they smiled with mouths that were filled with row upon row of teeth.

  Tonight, though, the dream changed and in doing so found a new level of strangeness. A new level of horror.

  This time she saw a human form running naked along the beach.

  A man.

  The soles of his feet were shredded from the jagged glass sand and there were awful gashes on his knees and palms from times when he fell. His body was crisscrossed with scratches from plants that reached for him and claws that sought him with pernicious delight.

  He ran and ran.

  Despite the pain, he ran.

  Despite the damage, he ran.

  Junie flew above him and tried to call out his name, tried to tell him where to go to escape the things that bit and the things that tore. But her voice was a wail and she had no words.

  She could not speak his name even though it screamed inside her mind.

  Joe.

  Her lover ran from shambling, twisting, metamorphosing beasts that chased. But he also ran toward a great, gray storm cloud that hung strangely low over the horizon.

  Except that it wasn’t a storm cloud.

  No. It was something far more dangerous. Something far worse.

  Joe ran in a blind panic toward it, and the cloud—that shapeless mass—lifted itself from the horizon and rose into the sky. Silent, powerful, indifferent to gravity, acknowledging no physical laws at all. It rolled backward, exposing a face. Eyes that burned with black fire and a snarling mouth wreathed by wriggling tentacles.

  As it turned its face upon the world, every single creature below, from the shape-shifting monsters to the sentient trees, screamed out in a language that did not belong in this or any world.

  She screamed herself awake.

  INTERLUDE FOURTEEN

  OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE

  EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS FIFTEEN

  Dr. Greene was not expecting visitors and it was too late for clients. His secretary and nurse had already gone home and the office was locked. He liked working into the evening because the quiet gave him time to reflect on his day’s sessions and dictate case notes. His iPad was snugged into the speaker dock and Miles Davis was blowing soft, sad, complex jazz and blues at him.

  When the door to his inner office opened, Greene yelled in shock. A high, sharp, almost feminine sound. He half jumped up but succeeded only in shoving his chair back so that it struck the wall hard enough to knock a framed certificate from its hook.

  Two men stepped into the office. One was black, the other was white. They were both in their middle thirties. Tall, fit-looking, and wearing identical black suits, white shirts, black ties. Both of them had wires behind their ears.

  Neither of them was smiling.

  “Who the hell are—?” began Greene, his anger shooting up to match the level of his shock. But the black man silenced him by placing a finger to his own lips in the kind of shushing gesture an adult might use on a child.

  The white man raised his hand and pointed a gun at Greene. Or, at least some kind of gunlike weapon. It had a handle and trigger, but instead of a barrel there was a blunt snub of an end with no opening, and around it were four steel prongs that curved inward so that the metal balls on the end nearly touched.

  “Dr. Michael Greene,” said the man with the gun. It was a plain, uninflected statement, not a question.

  “Who … who are you?” gasped Greene, his voice subdued as much from the shushing finger as the strange weapon. “How did you get in here?”

  “Dr. Greene,” said the black man, lowering his hand, “we need you to turn over to us all of the materials you have on one of your patients.”

  Greene bristled. “That’s absurd. Are you with the government? Let me see your identification. Let me see a warrant.”

  The white man and the black man said nothing, did nothing except stare at him. They both had brown eyes that were as flat and uninformative as the painted eyes of mannequins.

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality is—”

  And that was as far as he got.

  The black man suddenly raised his foot and kicked the side of the desk. Greene’s office furniture was all made from heavy hardwood, seasoned and sturdy, with steel reinforcements and a dark cherrywood glaze. The desk weighed nearly 350 pounds. So when it shot backward, propelled by that single kick, the desk struck Greene with shocking force. The desk’s legs were buried deep in the carpet, without casters or wheels, and yet that kick moved it like it was made from balsa. The footwell engulfed Greene’s knees, but the desktop crunched into his gut so forcefully that it snapped the doctor forward with such speed that he had no chance to get his hands up to protect his face. His nose, chi
n, and forehead slammed down. Pain exploded in his head and blood splashed outward to form a rude Rorschach pattern on the open file folder for one of his newest teen patients.

  Greene rebounded from the desk and sagged into his chair, bleeding and dazed. The lights in the room seemed to flare to white-hot brightness, but that was only in Greene’s head because immediately darkness seemed to cover him like a blanket.

  Then the desk was gone. Through a haze of blood and stars, Greene saw the black man grab the corner of the desk and yank it out and then shove it sideways. Both men closed on the sprawled doctor. The prongs of the gun dug into the soft palate under his chin. The men leaned close. He could smell their breath. It was like smelling the heated breath of a pair of predator cats. Foul and fetid.

  “Dr. Greene,” said the black man in a voice that was somehow more frightening than the violence for its softness and lack of emotion, “you will give us all of your files—hardcopy, digital recordings, and computer files—on one of your patients. You will do it now and you will hold nothing back. If you have any duplicates of this information you will tell us where it is and how we can obtain it. You will not hide anything from us. And when we are finished with this transaction, you will never speak of this to anyone. You won’t mention it. You will not tell the police, your family, your rabbi, or your friends. You will tell no one. If you need medical assistance, you will tell the doctors that you tripped and fell. They will believe you because you will want to be very convincing. If you fail to comply with us now, or discuss this incident with anyone later, we will kill you, your wife, your children, your parents, and both of your sisters. Do you understand me, Dr. Greene? No, do not nod. Tell me that you understand. Tell me that you are willing to comply with all of these requests. Assure me that you will obey every rule we have set forth.”

  Blood ran down the back of Greene’s nose, filling his throat, making him gag and choke. The pressure of the prongs eased so that he could turn his head and spit blood onto the carpet. He coughed and spat again. Fireworks seemed to detonate all around him and he was nauseous and dizzy.