Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Dr. Greene,” said the white man, “my associate has asked for your compliance.” He placed the prongs against the top of Greene’s left knee. “You do not need either of your legs in order to assist us. A legless man can still direct us to the information we request. So can a man with one hand and one eye.”

  His voice never rose beyond a soft, conversational tone.

  Greene began to weep. But he also began to nod.

  “Don’t,” he begged. “Please … don’t.”

  “Will you cooperate, Dr. Greene?” asked the black man.

  “Y-yes!”

  “Will you obey all of the rules we have agreed upon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And you will hold nothing back? You will give us every bit of information, every record, every copy of tests, and all case notes on this patient?”

  “Yes.” Greene was trying not to sob. Failing. Bleeding. Losing himself into this moment. “Which … which patient?”

  The pressure of the strange gun left his knee.

  The black man said, “Give us everything you have on the patient coded in your case notes as number three-three-six-P-eight-one.”

  Greene stopped breathing for a moment and stared at them, and in that moment he knew what this was about.

  “Give us everything you have on Prospero Bell,” said the white man.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  NOWHERE

  I don’t know where I was. Or if I was anywhere.

  I’ve always wondered what happens to our minds when we die. People talk about seeing their life flash before them. That happened to me, but not in the right way.

  It wasn’t my life I saw.

  It was the people in my life.

  * * *

  I saw Junie. My lady, my best friend, the love of my life.

  She was in our living room in our condo in Del Mar. I watched her drop the phone and slide off the couch onto the floor. She was screaming.

  Screaming.

  I could hear the voice on the other end of the phone.

  Rudy Sanchez.

  Junie’s screams drowned him out. Drowned out the world.

  Ghost was there. My big white shepherd. Fierce combat dog, veteran of many of this world’s killing fields. He came to her, whining, his tail drooping, pressing his muzzle against her as she curled into a ball, knees up and arms wrapped around her head.

  A man came rushing down the hall. Slim, young, scarred, familiar. Alexander Chismer. Known as Toys. Her close friend. My former enemy and now a kind of ally. A man who had saved the lives of Junie and Circe and maybe a good portion of the world. He still held the hand towel with which he was drying off. He hadn’t even dropped it when she screamed.

  “Junie!” he yelled, and vaulted the couch rather than run around it. He dropped down beside her and pulled her into his arms. Like a friend, like a brother. “What is it, love? What’s happened? Jesus Christ, tell me what happened?”

  She kept screaming a single word.

  “No!”

  Over and over again. Ghost howled every time she did.

  No.

  Or maybe it wasn’t “no.” Maybe it was a name, something that sounded similar.

  Joe.

  When someone screams like that it’s hard to tell.

  I heard a sound. No, sounds.

  “He’s coding, damn it.”

  Another voice. A stranger’s voice.

  “Charging … charging … clear…”

  And then my mind and my body and my soul were filled with hot light.

  I stood on a hill that swept down toward a mansion that had been built to imitate an English manor house, though I knew I was in America. Somewhere.

  The house was burning.

  Bodies littered the lawn.

  I saw Ghost. His white fur was splashed with blood and he was limping badly. Some of the bodies down there were dressed in the unmarked black battle-dress uniforms that we wear when the DMS goes on a job. The clothing was badly torn. The bodies inside had been ripped up by shrapnel and gunfire.

  Suddenly there was a man standing next to me. Tall, strong. Familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. He wore the same thing as me. Exactly. Even down to the bloody bandage wrapped around my upper arm.

  His face, though …

  Even though he was three feet away I couldn’t see his face. It was blurred, indistinct, like the face of someone who moved at the wrong time when a photo was being snapped.

  He spoke to me.

  “Did you honestly think you’d win, Joe?”

  I tried to speak, to tell him that of course we’d win. That I would win. But the only thing that came out of my mouth was a torrent of dark blood.

  He stood there and laughed as I sank down and died.

  I felt a needle go into my chest.

  And I was somewhere else.

  I stood in a darkened room. Another living room. Sea air blew through the window and cold moonlight traced the edges of another man and woman who huddled together in their grief. A big dog whined and howled.

  Not Junie, though. Not Toys. Not Ghost.

  Dr. Circe O’Tree-Sanchez sat on the couch and held the weeping form of her husband, Rudy. Their dog, the monstrous wolfhound Banshee, sat by the window and howled at the moon. In a bassinet ten feet from them a baby slept through it all.

  Circe said, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m so sorry.”

  I tried to say something. I couldn’t let this moment stand. The script was wrong and the actors were all reading the wrong lines. I yelled at them. Rudy and Circe did not hear me. Could not. Of course they couldn’t.

  But Banshee …

  The big dog stopped howling and turned her head toward me. Toward where I thought I stood. Or hovered. Or whatever a dead man does.

  Banshee’s eyes met mine.

  She saw me.

  They say that dogs—some dogs—can see things in the unseen world. Junie tells me that kind of thing all the time. Dogs can see spirits. And ghosts.

  Banshee could see me.

  Me.

  I screamed.

  And a voice said, “Hit him again.”

  “Charging … charging … clear!”

  I blinked and it was bright daylight.

  Mr. Church stood in the shadows thrown by a huge old oak tree. Autumn leaves blew gently across the tops of the autumn grass and between the rows of headstones. In the trees, birds sang songs of leaving and of farewell; the songs they sing before they all fly away because winter is coming.

  The cemetery was quiet and still green. Church wore a topcoat and he had one gloved hand in his pocket. The other held the hand of a tall, stern-faced woman who wore a ruby red cloth coat and a broad-brimmed gray hat.

  Lilith. She looked older than I remembered. Not much, just a little. Not Church, though. He never seems to change. His face was hard, though, without trace of humor or hope.

  They stood looking down at a gravestone. I didn’t need to read the name on it to know what I was seeing. They did not speak for a long time and I thought they wouldn’t. Then Church broke the silence.

  “I did not see this coming,” he said. “I should have. This is my fault.”

  “How many times will you be betrayed before you realize that you should never trust anyone? You believe in people, St. Germaine. That will always get you hurt. It always has.”

  “This war is to protect people.”

  “We’ll never agree on that,” she said.

  Church looked at her. “What can we agree on?”

  “The war is the war,” she said softly. “No matter how many of our family we have to bury, we still have to fight.”

  Church drew in a breath, sighed, nodded.

  Then he stiffened and turned, his eyes searching the graveyard as if he’d heard something.

  “What is it?” asked Lilith, releasing his hand and reaching under her coat, half-drawing a concealed pistol.

  Church said nothing. His roving eyes stopped and fixed on one poi
nt.

  He looked directly at me.

  Like Banshee, I think he could see me.

  But how? What did that mean? What does something like that mean about a person? How could any ordinary person see me?

  I was dead, after all. I was dead and time had passed. The grass on my grave looked old.

  * * *

  White-hot light blasted me out of that moment.

  * * *

  I saw Bug in his office. The threadbare goatee he’d been trying to grow these last few months was now a full beard. Scraggly and unkempt. Like the rest of him. Bug was a small guy, thin and nerdy, but that had changed. Now he was a skeleton, a stick figure. Gaunt, with hollow cheeks and dark smudges under his eyes. His hair was badly brushed and his nails were bitten down to raw flesh.

  He was at his console in the MindReader clean room. Except it wasn’t clean. His desk was a mess, littered with pizza boxes and plastic plates on which half-eaten food was going bad. Cans of Red Bull and empty coffee cups were everywhere. Amid the detritus was a framed picture of his mother, murdered by the Seven Kings. There was a picture tacked to a wall-mounted corkboard. Grace Courtland, my former lover and a victim of the Jakobys. That corkboard was crammed with photos, many of them overlapping like a pile of dead leaves. I saw my old teammates John Smith and Khalid Shaheed. I saw Colonel Samson Riggs and Sergeant Gus Dietrich. I saw so many of the people I’d known and fought alongside. The people I helped bury.

  And there, in one corner, was my own face.

  And Top Sims and Bunny.

  Lydia Ruiz was there, too. And Sam Imura.

  All of us.

  All of the dead.

  I wanted to yell at Bug, to tell him that Lydia and Sam and a lot of the others weren’t dead, that he was wrong.

  But he wasn’t wrong. This was Bug but this wasn’t now. This was what the world was going to do. To us and to Bug. There was none of the innocence left in his face. All of the joy of life had been bled out of his eyes and all that remained was fear and hate.

  So much fear. So much hate.

  If the world could destroy someone like Bug, if the things that bad people do could erase the powerful innocence of a person like him, then what hope was there for anyone else?

  I wanted to say something to him, to warn him to step back from the abyss, to find an anchor for his hope. To continue being alive while he was alive. But I wasn’t Jacob Marley and this wasn’t a Christmas story with a happy ending.

  * * *

  Blast. The bright heat.

  Again.

  * * *

  I saw something else, something that shifted my brain into another gear without bothering to use the clutch.

  It was me.

  In bed. Hooked up to fifty kinds of weird machines that beeped and pinged and insisted that I was still alive. Some kind of alive. Not the good kind. I looked thinner, wasted, smaller, deader.

  But not dead.

  I was in an oxygen tent and there was a man with me. He wore a hazmat suit, but I could see his face. I knew him.

  Dr. William Hu.

  He sat in a chair beside my bed, bent forward as he read through a thick stack of medical test reports. His face was drawn but his eyes were intense. The floor around him was littered with papers.

  “No,” he said, and flung a file folder away. He read through the next one, growled the same thing. “No.”

  It went soaring across the room.

  “No.

  “No.

  “Goddamn it, fucking no.”

  He was alone and I was sleeping. Or in a coma. But somehow I knew he was talking to both of us. He flung down another report.

  “Don’t you goddamn die on me, Ledger. Don’t you do it. I won’t let you die, you son of a bitch.”

  I watched him search for answers. I watched Dr. Hu fight for me. As if my life actually mattered to him. Maybe it did. I can’t stand the guy. Never could. He hates me, too. So not once have I ever wondered how deep that animosity ran.

  Perspective is every bit as sharp a knife as assumptions are dull.

  “Shit,” he snarled. “No, no, no.”

  * * *

  Blast.

  I was elsewhere.

  And somewhere else again. And somewhere else after that.

  Was this the same thing that happened back under the ice when I was in the bedroom of the cottage shared by Bunny and Lydia? Was I walking through someone else’s life again? Is that what the dead do? Is a haunting some kind of perverse peeping Tom show that never ends?

  I saw the man with the blurry face several more times. Nearby. At a distance.

  And I realized that I’d seen him once before. When I was awake. When I was alive.

  Down in the ice. Down in the frozen cavern of Gateway. He’d been there, ducking out of sight right as everything started going to hell.

  Who was he?

  What was he?

  * * *

  Blast.

  Elsewhere.

  * * *

  This time I didn’t know where I was.

  For a moment I thought I was back inside the cave down in the Antarctic. It was a cave and it was huge, but …

  It was hot. Geothermal heat. I could see steam rise from vents off to my right. Huge columns rose twisting toward a ceiling that was so vast it was lost in shadows. Every once in a while static lightning flashed within that smoke, and in the strobe bursts of light I saw things.

  There was a machine. The same one we saw in the ancient city. A massive ring of steel and copper and glittering jewels.

  Except it wasn’t the same. This one was even bigger. Two or three times the size. Monstrous. And it was glowing. It was alive.

  I thought about that word. Alive. Felt it. Tasted it. Knew it to be true. The machine was actually alive. It pulsed. Throbbed. Breathed. Lived.

  But that was only part of what I saw. As troubling and frightening as that machine was, it paled almost to insignificance by what hung in the air above it. I’d glimpsed it before, but now I saw it. It was titanic. It stood there, miles high, dominating the sky. More powerful than the tortured landscape of the fuming vents of superheated steam.

  It was a thing. A creature. Maybe a god. I don’t know and even though I was already dead and insubstantial, I knew this monster could hurt me. It could consume me. Its legs were like towers, like skyscrapers, and the body was vaguely humanoid. But the head … Jesus Christ. The face was covered by thousands of wriggling feelers that knotted and twisted like gigantic gray-green worms. Long worms surrounded its mouth. But … no, they weren’t worms, they were more like tentacles, but each one was bigger than the largest arm of the greatest squid or octopus that ever lived. The creature tore at the air with scaly claws that looked like they could slash through plate steel, and behind it, stretching out from its back, were leather wings.

  That’s what I saw standing above the machine. A god from some drug-induced nightmare universe.

  I hoped.

  I prayed. I screamed. I begged the world to make this thing nothing more than a fantasy of a dying mind. Or a dead man’s nightmare.

  The godlike creature threw back its head and from that mouth, hidden by those writhing tentacles, came a roar so impossibly loud that it shattered the ground on which it stood. I saw vast pillars of lava leap up and then everything was covered with smoke and fire.

  The flames wrapped around me, around my ghost, and burned me down to nothing.

  INTERLUDE FIFTEEN

  BELL FAMILY ESTATE

  MONTAUK ISLAND, NEW YORK

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS SEVENTEEN

  “Christ, Corrine,” gasped Bell as soon as she entered his study, “you look like shit. What happened?”

  “I need a drink first, Oscar. Bourbon. Hit me hard.” She sank into a chair and held out a hand, grunting her thanks as he gave her a tumbler he’d filled with four fingers of Pappy Van Winkle. It wasn’t his usual drink, being more of a scotch man, but Sails had brought the bottle on one of her previous trips. Sh
e preferred the rougher taste of bourbon to the smooth burn of single malt. Sails took a huge gulp, forced it down, gagged, coughed, and nodded her thanks.

  Bell set the bottle down on the edge of his desk and pulled a chair close to hers. Sails looked like she’d aged ten years; she was grainy and pale, with dark smudges under her eyes and a nervous twitch in her hands. She took another substantial mouthful.

  “That fucking machine,” she said.

  “What about it? Was there an explosion or something? I told Prospero he needs to make that regulator work or—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not that. I mean … maybe it’s that, too. But this was … this was…”

  And she began to cry.

  Oscar Bell came out of his chair, pulled her out of hers, and held her close. It pissed him off that he had fallen in love with her, that they were in love with each other. That was inconvenient and it went against one of his strictest rules: never let sentiment interfere with business. But, it had happened, and now it was a fact. He loved this cold, vicious, brilliant monster and she loved him.

  He held her close and let her cry it out, let her cry herself to the point where she could find her voice again. It took a while. It required more of the bourbon, and by the time she was calmer and they were seated together on the big sofa by the fireplace, her voice was thick from weeping and slurry with alcohol.

  She spoke and he listened.

  “It’s the God Machine,” she said. “I hate that godforsaken thing.…”

  The Gateway team, led by Marcus Erskine, had built two scale models of Prospero’s machine. Each one had cost upwards of forty million dollars. The first one, Bell knew, had been a spectacular failure that had exploded seconds after it was turned on. Five technicians had been killed, eleven others injured, and the lab destroyed. It was almost exactly the same thing that had happened at Ballard Academy when Prospero had fired his first prototype.

  The first Gateway test had yielded other effects, as well. It generated an electrical nullification field—one of the “side effects” that irritated Prospero—that was far more powerful than anticipated. It was so strong that it blanked out power on half the continent. The Russian and Chinese research stations had gone dark for an hour and when they came back online there was a massive exchange of furious communication with Moscow and Beijing. Diplomats had to scramble to keep everyone from going to a high state of combat readiness. Not that America ever accepted blame for it. They claimed to have been victims, too. Luckily there had been some sunspot activity and in the end everyone blamed that. It was the “Kill Switch” Oscar Bell had promised, but it was still uncontrollable.