Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  OCEANSIDE HARBOR FUEL DOCK

  OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 9, 7:24 P.M.

  Bunny yelled, “On your six!”

  I spun and had a millionth of a second’s peripheral vision warning as someone swung a boat paddle at me. It was light aluminum with a plastic blade, but it hit like a Louisville Slugger. My gun went flying, hit the deck, bounced once and hit our borrowed XSR, and then dropped like a stone into the salt water. I spun and blocked a second swing, caught the oar with my other hand, snapped out a low kick, and as my heel smashed his knee to junk I saw with mingled shock and horror that my attacker was the sixty-year-old dockmaster. He screamed and collapsed against one of the pumps, clawing at the ruin of his knee.

  I whirled toward Santoro, who had spun around and was running flat out for one of the boats moored to the dock. A slate-gray Picuda that was two slips down from the big XSR that we’d come in. Santoro tossed the briefcase into the boat and jumped after it.

  His crew was still standing where they’d been, hands half-raised, eyes blank as zombies’.

  “He’s mine,” I snapped, and pelted after him. But I got maybe six steps before another figure rushed out of nowhere and attacked me.

  Wasn’t one of Santoro’s goons. Wasn’t the crippled dockmaster, either.

  It was a teenage girl. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, dressed in flowered shorts and a bikini top, sunglasses, and a cute straw sun hat. She had no gun, no oar, no weapon except a cell phone, but she did her level best to brain me with it.

  Yeah. A kid. With a cell phone. The day had already tilted sideways and now it was sliding down the rabbit hole.

  I slap-parried the swing, which was surprisingly fast and skillful for a kid, and I backhanded her across the mouth. Blood flew from her mashed lips and the force spun her halfway around, but instead of falling down dazed and weeping, she used the momentum of her turn to fire off one hell of a kick. A short, chopping side snap with the blade of her right foot. I bent my knee and took it on the big muscles of my thigh, then when she tried to rechamber for a second attack I swept her standing leg. She went down hard enough for her head to bonk on the hard surface of the dock. That turned her lights off for a moment and she fell over on her back.

  I spun toward my quarry.

  That’s when Santoro’s crew joined the fight. One moment they were statues with Top and Bunny holding guns on them, the next they swarmed at me. It was crazy. They didn’t go for my men. Just me. Three of them tackled me with all the force and aggression of defensive tackles at their own five-yard line. As we crashed down I heard the roar of Bunny’s shotgun. One of the men still standing was plucked off the ground as buckshot tore him to red rags. Almost in the same instant Top opened up with the HK416 and I heard the distinctive sound of hot rounds punching through living flesh.

  No screams, though. Not a one. It was the same with the guys who’d piled on me. There were grunts of effort, but not a yell, not a curse. Nothing. All three of them were swinging wild, full-power punches, just like the surfer boys had done. Like Rudy had done. I wrapped my arms around my head and let them break their knuckles on my elbows and forearms. They went totally batshit, hitting each other as much as they were hitting me. Their eyes may have been dead but they fought with a frenzy that bordered on mania.

  It’s nearly impossible to defend against that kind of assault. Even by defending I was getting hurt, and several times those wild punches had slipped through my defensive cage of bones. One shot caught me on the side of the head hard enough to fill the air around me with fireworks. I had to get out before they beat me to death. I roared and shoved upward with my hips, then twisted hard to one side like a bucking bronco. That tilted them and their combined weight dragged them sideways, and I helped by looping four fast, tight overhand lefts into shoulder and ear and side of neck. They crashed down and I kicked my way out, pivoted on my knees and started to come up, but the closest guy lunged at me, flopping forward like a dolphin trying to beach himself. He grabbed my ankle, hugged my whole foot to his chest, and tried to bite me.

  Bite me.

  So, yeah, I guess I lost it. You see, I’ve had people try to bite me before. Some living, some dead. It’s how I got into the DMS in the first place. I’ve fought infected walkers, I’ve fought genetically engineered Berserkers and Red Knights. I am not a fan of things that bite. My brain went into a different gear and I fell onto my hip so I could use both feet. My gun was long gone, lost during the ambush, but I didn’t need it for this. I drove my heel into the man’s face, flattening his nose, breaking teeth, smashing the jaw out of shape. The pain and damage I inflicted in under two seconds should have been enough to turn him into a dazed and screaming wreck.

  That’s not what happened, though. Instead it seemed to galvanize him. He kept trying to bite my leg, and for one terrible moment those broken teeth clamped shut around my calf. The pain was immense. Absolutely fucking immense.

  I sat up and drove my thumbs into his eyes, bursting them. His mouth opened. Not in pain, but to try for a better bite.

  Jesus Christ.

  I screamed at him as I clawed the rapid-release folding knife from its holster inside my right pocket. The short, wicked blade snapped into place with a flick of my wrist and then cut a red line across his throat. Blood sprayed me and the dock.

  He tried one last bite, but he was fading. Finally. Fading and then gone.

  I rolled away and ran on fingers and toes away from the others, aware of searing pain in my leg. No idea how bad it was. Not in terms of structural damage but in potential. Was he one of them? A walker, someone infected with a pathogen like seif al din? If so, had he broken the skin? Had his saliva gotten into the wound? Had I survived the moment only to become a zombie myself? Was this it?

  As I turned to face the other men I saw everyone on the dock and it burned itself into my brain in a series of images. Not a tableau, but a collage of moving nightmare images.

  Bunny was standing twenty feet from me, his big shotgun held in his hands as he fired at one of Santoro’s men who lay sprawled on the ground. Bunny stood there and fired blast after blast with the twelve gauge, the buckshot tearing into dead flesh, ripping it apart, destroying all semblance of humanity. Over and over and over again. And in Bunny’s eyes … I saw nothing. They were empty and glazed and his face was totally slack.

  Nearby, Top was firing at the people along the dock.

  Not the henchmen, but at everyone.

  I saw an old woman fall.

  Then a skateboarder.

  “Top—noooooo!”

  He ignored me, or didn’t hear me. I saw a young couple running with their baby. The father went down with five or six bullets in his thighs. The woman and the baby vanished out of sight behind the utility shed. I’m pretty sure she was bleeding, too. No way to tell about the baby. The expression on Top’s face was inhuman and his muscles stood out like he was carved out of volcanic rock. He strove against the weapon in his hands as if it fought him, as if it wanted to kill and he was losing the fight to stop it. The civilians on the dock and inside the boat screamed. Some of them. A few were down, clutching at red bullet wounds. Some were running away as fast as they could. The rest stood there with empty eyes and empty faces.

  Between the crowd and Top was the row of boats. Santoro was untying the lines to free the Picuda. In five seconds he would be able to push off. If he got away, then whomever he worked for would have what they needed to launch a catastrophic plague. A doomsday weapon. But there were the people on the dock. Here, now. In immediate need. I was totally torn. Closer to me, the last two of his men rushed in, punching the air even though they weren’t yet within range.

  It was all so insane. The Killer in my head had not awakened. He was not in this fight at all. Hesitation was going to get me and everyone killed, and I knew it.

  I tried to run around them, to get to Santoro despite Top’s wild gunfire, but my feet felt sluggish, clumsy. I tripped and nearly fell into the two henchme
n. They threw themselves at me. The knife in my hand moved, maybe more from muscle memory than conscious will. The blade reached out to the hands that reached for me, and in that rapidly diminishing space it did awful work. Fingers flew into the air, chased by lines of red rubies. Pieces of their faces fell away to reveal muscle and bones. Veins opened like hoses. Then they were falling like discarded puppets, and I was running toward the Picuda as bullets buzzed like furious bees.

  How I did not get killed is something I’ll never know. It wasn’t the Killer at work. You couldn’t call it luck, either, because no one on that dock was lucky. Not that day. If anything, my survival was the result of a perverse god who wanted more entertainment.

  With a howl of animal rage I jumped into the Picuda, which had swung on its last remaining line and came thumping sideways into the dock. My leap was clumsy and mistimed, and my left shoe caught the edge of a locker, sending me crashing down hard enough to knock the knife from my hand. I saw it bounce off the corner of the small black briefcase. Santoro was on the forward bow untying the line from the cleat. The second I landed he dropped the rope, swarmed over the windscreen, and came at me with blinding speed. No weapons, but he didn’t need them. He should have—even off my game with the Killer gone or dead I was still a first-chair special operator. Suddenly I was backpedaling from a flurry of short, precise, vicious, and insanely fast blows. They came in at all the wrong angles and I wasn’t balanced yet for a solid response. The boat wobbled as once again I tried to hide inside a nest of forearms, elbows, and shoulders. If he’d been going for face or body hits he’d have busted his hands on my skeleton.

  That’s not what happened.

  He was a brilliant fighter. Not good, not great. Brilliant.

  He used one- and two-knuckle snaps and corkscrew punches to the nerve clusters and connective tissue on the key points of my arms. Mashing nerves, deadening muscles, exploding white-hot pain.

  I can deal with pain. I know pain. Experience has taught me that pain can be thought through and fought through in the heat of the battle, that it can even make you stronger and faster and better. The Killer who lives inside my head feeds on pain and all it ever does is make him roar; it makes him hunger for blood.

  But the Killer was still asleep. And I felt like I wanted to sleep. When I tried to block, my arms moved too slowly and in the wrong ways. When I tried to hit him, I was clumsy and my blows packed no power.

  Santoro laughed as he slapped my feeble punches aside.

  “This is for my brother, yes?”

  He had the same accent as Rafael. The same cruelty in his eyes as he set about dismantling me, attacking with a savage precision that made a joke out of my counterattacks and ignored my defenses.

  This wasn’t about pain. It wasn’t even about winning.

  It was about revenge. About punishment.

  If you know where to hit you can dismantle an opponent, you can take away his weapons and tear down his defenses and turn a formidable enemy into the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

  That’s what he did.

  No one’s ever done that to me before. Not since I was a kid. Sure, I’ve lost fights before, but no one has ever outfought me so thoroughly that I felt like a punching bag. He got inside my guard and jabbed me in the right sinus, boxed my ears, smashed the nerve clusters on both elbows, hit me in the top of the left thigh, stuck his thumb in the hollow of my throat, elbow-chopped my inner forearms, hit me over the heart with a one-two combination, and head-butted me. Then he caught me with hard knuckle shots to radial and ulnar nerves and my left arm went dead. I ducked down to try and take his next punch on my skull, hoping to break some of his hand bones with the famous Ledger hard head. But he changed a knuckle punch into a slap that felt like a donkey kick to the brain. I threw myself at him like a losing boxer would do, hugging him to stifle the flurry of hits.

  Santoro pivoted as I grabbed him and he used my momentum and mass, plus the tilt of the boat, to hip throw me into the cockpit. I hit the steering wheel, the seat back, every knob and control including the little fire extinguisher tucked into the metal clamps. Hit the goddamn clamps, too.

  Then he jumped on top of me, catching me in the solar plexus and floating ribs with his heels, and as I folded in half, he chop-kicked me under the chin. My whole body went limp but my consciousness hung by its fingernails on the crest of the abyss.

  In the movies, fight scenes are ten minutes long. In the real world they’re over in seconds. Someone wins, somebody loses.

  I lost.

  He beat me to the edge of consciousness.

  All the way to the edge.

  But … only to the edge.

  I had nothing left and it would have been nothing for him to end me with a blow to my throat. He could have stomped me to death. He had all the cards and I was a wrecked heap.

  Then I saw him straighten and his eyes went momentarily as dull as his men’s had. He stared right through me, but while the eyes remained dead and expressionless his mouth curled into a joyful and terrible smile.

  “Sucks to lose,” he said, “doesn’t it? It hurts. It’s humiliating.”

  He backhanded me across the face. Not a killing blow. It was punctuation and it was belittling. I tried to block it, tried to turn away, but my body felt like it was made of broken stone. Too damaged, too heavy.

  “You don’t get to win this time, Ledger. You don’t get to be the hero and you don’t get to save the day.”

  Another slap.

  “You get to lose. But here’s the thing, here’s the fun part,” said Santoro in the voice that was not his own. “You get to watch. You’ll be there when the lights go out. You’ll be there when the screaming starts. And you’ll be there as all of those children start to die. You. Joe Ledger, America’s shining hero. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll let you push one of the death carts. Maybe your penance will be taking all of those small, diseased bodies to the fire pits. Won’t that be fun?”

  Another slap.

  The world winked out for a moment. Maybe it was damage or maybe it was me wanting to crawl into a hole deep inside my head and not hear any of this. To not know any of it.

  Then I saw the glazed look fade from Santoro’s eyes. He blinked and looked around, nodded to himself, and bent to pat me down, tear my pockets open, and basically mug me. My DMS gadgets and other items clattered to the deck. He looked down at the stuff, paused for a moment, then quickly bent to scoop something up.

  Then he cut a look at me, smiled once more. “Adios, my friend. It’s been a pleasure, yes?”

  His accent was back in place. I saw his foot move but there was no way for me to avoid the kick. It knocked me out of the world.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  OCEANSIDE HARBOR FUEL DOCK

  OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 9, 7:28 P.M.

  When I forced my eyes open I was alone on the boat.

  There was an engine roar to my left. My body hurt worse than I can describe but the leaden heaviness was gone, and when I dragged my bruised head and shoulders up high enough to see, I saw Esteban Santoro go roaring out of the gas dock in another boat. It was the XSR. It’s not a fishing boat or a motorized play toy. The XSR is a military interceptor, a British-built super-speedboat that can hit eighty-five knots. Santoro had stolen my keys and was roaring off in the boat, taking the drives with him.

  The XSR kicked up a bow wave that threw the Picuda against the dock and sent me tumbling back down into the bottom of the cockpit.

  There was a crackle of gunfire and I turned to see Top and Bunny, both of them bloody, firing at the XSR.

  Firing and missing.

  Missing by a mile.

  Like they weren’t even trying to hit it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

  PACIFIC OCEAN

  SOMEWHERE WEST OF OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 9, 7:31 P.M.

  I staggered drunkenly to my feet, unsure of how badly I was hurt. Not giving much of a shit. The key t
o the Picuda was in the ignition.

  The goons were all dead or dying. And Santoro was getting away.

  All around the dock people were screaming. A minute ago they’d been mostly staring like zombies, now they were shrieking in pain, in fear, in horror. I couldn’t even count the dead and wounded. Everyone seemed to be covered with blood. Top stood there, shaking his head and blinking his eyes. He stared at the gun in his hands and then with a cry of disgust hurled it into the water. Then he slapped himself. Very fast and very hard. Again and again.

  “Stop it!” I bellowed.

  He froze, mouth open, teeth bloody, eyes filled with panic and pain.

  “What did I … What did I…?” It wasn’t a statement he was able to finish. What he did lay bleeding and screaming all around him.

  In the distance I could hear the wail of police sirens. Behind me was the growl of the XSR.

  “Get in the boat!” I roared as I unwound the bowline.

  Top lingered for a moment, still caught inside the bubble of horrified realization. Then he took a wobbly step forward. Bunny was a statue, gaping at the red inhumanity on the ground before him, the shotgun hanging limply from his right hand.

  “What?” he asked. “What?”

  “Get in the fucking boat!”

  Like a couple of men woken from a drugged sleep, they came limping over.

  Top jumped in and landed clumsily, hardly trying to break his fall. Bunny fell over the gunnels as I moved away from the dock. When the boat was clear I turned the wheel and hit the gas. The Picuda threw a bow wave high enough to drown the NO WAKE sign and rock every other boat at the dock.

  I tried not to hear the sounds of misery and outrage that chased us from the dock. When we were clear of the dock I pointed her nose toward the water that still thrashed from the XSR’s passage, opened up the throttle, and went for it.

  Bunny and Top clawed their way to their feet and pulled themselves along the rails, fighting the drag as I cranked the engine higher and higher. Top managed to get into the copilot chair. His face was streaked with blood. I had to shout to be heard over the engine roar.