Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  All of them died.

  Harry knelt there, horrified and dumbfounded, his gun nearly forgotten in his hands. Violin ran outside and then came hurrying back.

  “The street is clear but there may be more,” she barked. “Be ready to move.”

  Without waiting for him to reply she ran upstairs and returned seconds later with an oversized suitcase. Harry knew what had to be inside it. He could almost feel the cold power of that damn book.

  She also had a medical kit tucked under her arm and let it fall in front of Harry. “Grab that,” she said, pain flickering across her face. “We’ll need it. Come on.”

  She paused long enough to scoop up her small laptop and tuck it into an oversized pocket on her left pants leg. Then she ran from the house.

  Harry Bolt stood up slowly, blinking from the smoke, his ears still ringing.

  “What…?” he asked the room. But there were only dead men to answer.

  Then he heard a thump from the rear of the house. The crack of wood, the crash of breaking glass. There were more of them.

  He turned and ran.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

  9888 GENESEE AVENUE

  LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 5, 11:41 A.M.

  How do you know if you’re asleep and dreaming that you’re awake or if you’re actually awake? After all the things I’d seen and felt, all the places I’d been, I did not know.

  Maybe it was the pain that woke me. I became gradually aware of a leaden heaviness in my limbs and a pervasive ache that went all the way to the bone. In dreams I’d felt pain, but it was always big pain. The sear of flames, the white-hot burn of a knife across flesh, or the volcano heat of a bullet buried deep in my skin. Those were phantom pains or distortions of remembered pain.

  This felt real.

  It was not as intense, but it did not flash on and off like dream pain.

  I hurt. My body was wrong and the pain owned me. It weighed me down like chains even as my senses came awake.

  I opened my eyes, surprised that I had been asleep and not dead. Really surprised, actually. I was surprised I still had eyes to open.

  The room was different.

  It wasn’t the little biohazard cubicle. It wasn’t an intensive care unit, either. This was bigger. Less threatening, less dire. More normal.

  If “normal” was a word I could ever apply with any accuracy to my life anymore.

  It was a hospital room. A real hospital, too. It had the look, the smell.

  I lay there and tried to understand what was going on.

  Where was I?

  What was left of me?

  And … what were those things I saw? Was I able to go somewhere else, or were they simply bad dreams?

  How does one tell?

  Well … you ask.

  I turned my head and saw that I was not alone.

  A woman was curled into a leather chair positioned beside my bed. She had a blanket pulled around her, covering her to the nose. Her eyes were closed and for a long time I lay there and watched her breathe, watched her sleep. Saw the spill of curly blond hair rise with her chest, saw the down-sweep of lashes against the sun-freckled cheeks. Saw the woman I loved more than any person on this planet.

  Junie.

  I didn’t want to wake her. She looked so peaceful and if she woke, would it be to the news that I was, in fact, dying?

  Or would waking release her from the dread of believing I was already gone?

  Such questions to fill the mind of a man who thought he was dead and in hell. Actual filled-with-monsters hell.

  I rolled onto my side as far as tubes and wires would allow. There was no muscle tone left as far as I could tell and even that simple action was like bench-pressing a Volvo. But it brought me marginally closer to her. I reached over to her, lightly—so, so lightly—touched her hair. Whispered her name.

  “Junie…”

  Her eyelids fluttered.

  And opened.

  Junie looked at me with fear, with wonder.

  With joy. She flung off the blanket and surged up from the chair, bending over me with equal parts passion and need and care. Being gentle with me, as if I was a fragile and easily breakable thing. Which I was.

  I was almost nothing.

  But I was alive.

  We were alive.

  And this was definitely not hell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

  9888 GENESEE AVENUE

  LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 5, 3:52 P.M.

  I kept falling asleep and waking up. Kept dreaming wild dreams in between. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was dreaming even though I was awake. Or thought I was. The room stayed the same, though. There were flowers on the table and half a dozen get-well cards taped to the walls.

  The hard lines of what was happening and what I thought was happening had grown fuzzy while I slept, and it was almost as if my long sleep was reluctant to let me go.

  “It’s okay, honey,” said Junie. “Don’t force it. Don’t fight it.”

  When I looked at her, she was not Junie. She was a corpse, withered and burned. The shadowy man with the blurred face stood beside her chair. The only part of his face I could see was his mouth. He was smiling, smiling. Big white teeth.

  “You’re a self-righteous thug, Ledger. I’m going to take it all away from you. Everything you have, everything you love. All of it.”

  “Who are you?” I croaked.

  He reached up and dug his fingers into the gray swirl of nothingness that was his face and slowly peeled it off, revealing it to be a mask.

  The face beneath the mask was my own.

  I screamed.

  And woke up.

  “It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie. Again. Exactly the same way, except this time when I looked at her she was alive and whole, and she was alone.

  I blinked and I was alone. Her chair was empty and the light falling through the window was gray.

  “Please.” Not sure whom I was talking to or what I was asking for.

  There are times, when my inner psychological parasites are at their worst, that I wonder if any of my life is real. Maybe I never survived the trauma of my teen years, when my girlfriend Helen and I were attacked by a gang. I was beaten nearly to death and she was brutalized in other ways. Maybe I never lived past that day. Maybe this is all some kind of purgatory. Or maybe my body survived but my mind snapped. There’s a lot of evidence for that; I could build a case. After all, the things I’ve seen and done since possess the qualities of nightmares. Zombies, vampires, mad scientists, secret societies, clones, genetic freaks. Has the world gone mad or was I batshit crazy? Or some combination of both? Doubt of that kind is a terrible thing. It holds a match to the high explosives of paranoia and then everything you believe in, everything you trust, goes boom.

  “It’s okay, Joe,” said Junie’s voice. I turned toward her once more, blinking tears from my eyes. Except it wasn’t Junie. It was Rudy Sanchez.

  My friend.

  My shrink.

  Fellow veteran of the wars. A fellow traveler on the fun-show ride that was the Department of Military Sciences and the fight against terrorism in all its many forms.

  “R-Rudy…?” I asked, doubting this. Doubting him.

  “Good morning, Cowboy,” he said.

  “Am I alive?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You are. And thank God for that.”

  I looked around. It was the same room but something was different. The flowers on the table looked older. There were more cards taped to the wall.

  “Where’s … where’s Junie?”

  “I sent her home to get some sleep,” said Rudy. “She was completely exhausted. She’s been here every day.”

  Every day. Not sure what that meant. Not yet.

  “Top? Bunny…?”

  He nodded. “They made it through. Thank God for that, too. They
’ll be fine.”

  Made it through. It was meant to be comforting, but somehow it wasn’t.

  “The rest of the flight crew is fine, too,” he added. “They didn’t get it as bad.”

  Get it.

  It.

  I licked my dry lips. “What … happened?”

  Rudy took too much time girding his loins to deliver bad news. I know him, I know his face, so there was no chance he was going to say something I wanted to hear. He pulled his chair closer. He looked haggard. Unshaven and unkempt, and Rudy was always a meticulous man. The kind of guy who would take time to trim his mustache and comb his hair before leaving a burning building. Not now, though. He looked like he’d been mugged with enthusiasm, dragged by his heels through an alley, and kicked awake by homeless people. He smelled of sour sweat and too much coffee.

  “Joe,” he said, laying a hand cautiously on my shoulder, “you’ve been in a coma. You understand that?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m sleeping-fucking-beauty. How long?”

  “Two weeks,” he said.

  That hit me really damn hard. Two weeks? Gone. Simply erased from my life.

  I said, “Tell me.”

  He did. It was the flu. Not just any flu, not SARS or MERS or anything like that. This was what you might call “old school.” The simple truth was that Top and Bunny and I were infected with the Spanish flu. Yeah. That one. Or at least a mutated strain of it. The disease that swept Europe, Asia, and North America in 1918 and ’19. During that outbreak over five hundred million people were infected, and of those one in five died. Eighty to one hundred million people. Dead. It remains as one of the worst pandemics in human history, with only the Black Plague having verifiably killed more people.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, fighting to sit up. “Didn’t they cure that shit like forever ago?”

  “Not exactly,” said Rudy. “It ran its course but there were complications. This was the end of the First World War, whole populations were displaced, and medical services were taxed and…” He stopped and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, there are vaccines available for this and other strains of avian flu; however, the particular strain that infected you and your men was, until now, unknown to science. It looked like the Spanish flu and even acted like it in laboratory tests, but there were subtle differences, including the presence of unknown forms of bacteria that somehow bonded with the virus. That presented Dr. Hu’s medical team—and a great number of experts we consulted—with a genuine challenge. Not that it will give you much comfort, Joe, but books and papers will be written about it.”

  “Um … hooray?”

  “You should probably buy Will Hu a beer. You’ve become his favorite lab rat.”

  I tried again to sit up, and failed. “I feel like I’ve been mugged by the Hulk. How bad am I?”

  “Weak,” he said. “Once you were out of danger they transferred you here. At Mr. Church’s request they began some muscle massage, passive movement, and a few other therapies to slow the rate of muscle atrophy. You’re going to have to take it very slow, though, and be very careful. You’ll need a lot of rest and a lot of physical therapy.”

  “Fuck that. I want to get the hell out of here. Right now.”

  “You’d fall on your face.”

  “Then get me a wheelchair and a protein shake. Come on, Rude, I need to talk to Church. Houston—”

  “Houston is a tragedy, Joe, but it’s being handled. I’m sure Mr. Church will fill you in.”

  “Good. He can do that at my office. Where are my pants?”

  “You wouldn’t make it to the door. You’ll need time, therapy, and some medicines before you’re fit to walk.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” I swung my legs out of bed and went to stand up. The room took a half spin and I could feel myself falling backward. When I woke up Rudy was eating a fish taco off of a paper plate. It was full dark outside.

  “Did you have a good rest?” he asked, dabbing at sauce on his mustache.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  He smiled and took another bite.

  “For a doctor you’re not a very nice man,” I told him.

  “You are incorrect. I am well known for my courteous bedside manner.”

  I wanted to say something smartass. Nothing came to mind. I tried to blink my eyes clear.

  The room was empty.

  Rudy was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ARKLIGHT SAFE HOUSE

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

  TWO WEEKS AGO

  Harry Bolt knew how to steal a car. It was one of the things he did very well. He found a Volvo that looked old enough not to have an alarm, jimmied the door, and hot-wired it. Violin slid into the passenger seat with the suitcase tucked into the footwell behind her. Her clothes were smudged with soot and they glistened with blood. Some of it was hers.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” he said.

  Her look could have peeled layers of metal off a tank. “Don’t be a child.”

  “But—”

  “Drive. Look for a tail, can you do that?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Then go. No destination. Don’t get us pulled over and don’t draw attention.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She ignored him and removed her small laptop and opened it. She did not hit any keys, but instead spoke to it. “Authorize Arklight field protocol five.”

  The monitor flashed several times and then settled on a screen saver with the smiling face of the Mona Lisa. Harry nearly sideswiped a car looking at it.

  “Pay attention,” snapped Violin.

  The Mona Lisa spoke. “Oracle welcomes you.”

  “Oracle,” said Violin, “I am in company. Friendly. Not family. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed. All secure data is shielded.”

  Violin then switched to a language that Harry did not recognize even one word of. It sounded a little like Italian, but then most European languages sounded a little like Italian to Harry, and he could not speak Italian. Harry drove aimlessly, constantly checking the traffic patterns. If they were being followed he could not spot it, and he did not think so. Beside him, the strange woman’s tone became sharper, more agitated, and she said some other words he didn’t know but that he was positive were curses. They had that quality.

  “Pull over,” she barked. When he pulled to the curb she turned the screen to him. The Mona Lisa was gone and now there was a diagram of a hand with splayed fingers. “Place your hand here.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it.” It was not a request, though not exactly a threat, either, but he took it that way and placed his hand on the screen. A scanner bar lit up and ran from top to bottom, mapping his palm and fingerprints. Suddenly Harry’s driver’s license, passport information, and birth certificate popped up in different windows on the screen.

  “Hey!”

  “Drive,” she said, and this time gave him directions. She spoke once more in the strange language to the computer and then signed off. He caught glances of her out of the corner of his eye. She sat there, chewing her lip, looking troubled.

  “You want to tell me who the heck you are, what the heck is going on, and where the heck we’re going?”

  “I have bad news,” she said.

  “Really? Why spoil such a great day?”

  “Your team is dead.”

  “I know that. Both of them were—”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off. “Your station office. There was a fire. Everyone is dead.”

  Harry screeched to a halt in the middle of the street. Horns blared at him.

  “What?” he bellowed.

  “Drive the car,” she hissed. “You’re going to draw attention.”

  He started driving, but he felt like he was in another world. Dazed and confused. “What happened?” he asked softly. “Was it those Brotherhood assholes?”

  “No. Closers, I think,” she said. “Oracle gave me
the story from the news services. Authorities suspect a gas explosion of some kind. The entire building went up.” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

  Harry nodded and wiped tears from his eyes. “I hated those guys.”

  “The Closers?”

  “No, the guys at the office. Total bunch of dickheads.” Tears ran down his cheeks. Then he bristled as her words finished processing in his shocked brain. “Wait … whoa, hold on just a damn second. Closers? Closers? How the hell are Closers involved in this crap?”

  “Do you know who the Closers are?”

  “I’m in the fricking CIA, of course I know who they are. Men in freaking black who used to work for Howard Shelton and those ass-pirates at Majestic Three.”

  “What is an ass-pirate?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is why there are even still Closers anymore. I thought the DMS chopped them all up. How are they back and why did they target my station? And why did they try to kill us?”

  Violin stared out the window for a moment, then turned and looked over the seat at the suitcase. “We are in a lot of trouble.”

  Harry just rolled his eyes.

  “The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum—the Brotherhood—are bad enough. They are dangerous but they’re few. I can handle them, but—”

  “I saw. You did pretty good against those Closers, too. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

  “My mother taught me.”

  “Geez. I bet you cleaned your room when you were a kid.”

  She studied him. “When I was a little girl my room was a filthy cell in an underground prison. My mother had to kill a dozen men to get me out.”

  Harry blinked at her. “Is that a joke?”

  “I wish it were.”

  “Holy…”

  “It’s in the past where it belongs,” she said. “Right now we are in deeper trouble than I thought. If these are Closers, then they will have resources we can’t match. Not the two of us, and you have no station left to help us. The Closers will have people inside your embassy and in local police.”

  “I can make some calls. My dad knows—”

  “We cannot trust anyone on your side of this, Harry. Not even your father. If the Closers are after you, then they will have people on him, tapping his phones, hacking his computers. Reach out to him and they will backtrack to you. It’s what I would do.”