Clickers III (5 page)

problem facing organized crime. Within another decade, anybody involved in the business would be speaking Spanish.

The ruse had worked. Marano thought he was dead. Tony Genova ceased to exist. Larry DiMazzio was born. The government had set him up with a condo in Arizona. Tony liked the area, especially the fact that it was as far away from the fucking ocean as a person could get. He made a living day trading. His FBI handlers—they preferred the term liaison—checked in on him once a month, but otherwise, life was good.

The only thing he missed was Vince. They had been partners for many years, and they’d seen a lot of weird shit together. Vince had also been the closest thing Tony had to a real friend—or at least what sufficed for a friend in their line of work. Vince was dumb as a rock and fatter than an elephant at an all-you-can-eat buffet, but he’d also been loyal and kind—two qualities that Tony had admired. Vince had been like a pet dog, or maybe a little brother. Sometimes he’d aggravated Tony to the point of violence, and then, the next minute, he’d make Tony laugh. Tony had loved him, in his own fashion. And now he was gone.

And today would have been his birthday.

“Larry,” the girl asked again, “are you listening to me?”

“Sorry, babe.” Momentarily forgetting, Tony slipped into his natural accent—a bizarre compendium of Brooklyn, the New Jersey shore, and Pennsylvania Dutch. “I was off in fucking La-La Land. What’s up?”

If the girl noticed the change, she gave no indication.

“I axed if you were gonna take me out tonight?”

Tony shook his head. “Not tonight. I’ve got shit to do.”

Pouting, the girl—he wished he could remember her name—pulled on her panties and bra.

“You got someone else coming over?”

“No, sugar. It ain’t like that. I’ve got to work. You know how it is.”

“Work? All you do is use your laptop. You can do that from anywhere.”

Tony sat up and reached for his silk boxer shorts. “Look. How about I give you a few bucks. You can take yourself out on the town and have a nice time. Go to a movie or the clubs or something. How would that be? How much cash do you need?”

“You calling me a whore? Is that all I am to you?”

Tony suppressed his initial response—a feat he wouldn’t have been able to manage in his old life, and smiled gently. “Of course not, baby. I care about you, and I feel bad that I can’t go out tonight. I just wanted to make it better. That’s all.”

Her expression softened again. She finished getting dressed. Tony did the same. Then he ushered her out of the house with a promise to call her soon. When she was gone, he shut the door and sighed.

“About fucking time. I thought she’d never leave. God-damned whore.”

Tony got undressed again and took a shower. When he was finished, he put on a fresh pair of silk boxers and his bathrobe. Then he sat down at the dining room table and turned on his laptop. In truth, he didn’t have to work. The way the market was right now, the best thing he could do was to do nothing—except wait, and watch for good deals on fire sale stocks. He’d lied to the girl to get rid of her. Instead of working, he had other plans.

While the laptop warmed up, Tony poured himself four fingers of Woodford Reserve bourbon and selected a Partagas Lusitanias from his cured Spanish cedar humidor. After cutting off the tip, he lit the cigar, took a sip of whiskey, and then sat down at the dining room table and clicked on the laptop’s picture folder. He didn’t have many photos from the past—guys like him weren’t exactly the type to pose for pictures. But he cherished the few he did have. After puffing the cigar to get it going, and taking another sip of whiskey, he scrolled through the pictures, pausing momentarily to look at some photos of Rick Sycheck, Jennifer Wasco, and some other survivors he’d battled alongside during the Clicker siege. The pictures weren’t his. He’d found them on various websites and saved them to his hard drive.

Tony had read one of Rick’s novels shortly after assuming his new identity, but he wasn’t much for horror fiction, and hadn’t really enjoyed the book. Tony’s reading tastes leaned more toward Elmore Leonard, Ed Gorman, Duane Swierczynski and Ed McBain. He idly wondered where Jennifer was now. She’d been a piece of ass. Not normally his type, but the girl had guts. He’d liked that. Too bad he wasn’t allowed to stay in touch.

He scrolled through the pictures until he found the one he was looking for. In it, he and Vince were sitting along the bar at the Odessa, a strip club back in York. The joint had been run by the Russians, but the picture had been taken during peacetime, when he and Vince had often frequented it. In the photograph, they had their arms around each other, smiling. Tony held a cigarette. Vince held a shot of mescal. It was the only picture of Vince that he still owned. The few others had been left behind, scattered among the ashes of his old life.

“Happy Birthday, you fat fuck. Wish you were here.”

Eyes watering, Tony drained his glass, belched, and then got up to pour another. Before he could, however, there was a knock at the door. He paused, one hand reaching for the bottle of Woodford Reserve. Cigar smoke curled in the air. Could it be the girl—whatever her fucking name was? No, he’d heard her drive away. If she’d returned, he would have heard her car pull up.

The knock came again, more insistent this time. It seemed to almost hang in the air.

Tony climbed up on top of the stove, reached above the kitchen cabinets, and pulled down his Taurus CIA .357 snub nose. One of the conditions of his deal with the government was that he wasn’t allowed to own any weapons, but he figured what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Normally, he’d have kept it somewhere he could get to it easily, but it was better to make it hard for his handlers to find it. He knew deep down inside that he didn’t need the gun, but old habits died hard. The person at the door wasn’t a hitman or assassin. It was probably just a neighbor, or a pizza delivery guy with the wrong address. Still, better safe than sorry. He tucked the gun into the deep pocket of his robe and went to the door. As he was unchaining it, a third knock sounded.

“Hold the fuck on,” Tony shouted.

He undid the deadbolt and slowly opened the door.

The two men and one woman that stood there weren’t neighbors or lost pizza delivery people.

And they had guns of their own.

Big guns.

Bigger than his. He wondered if they knew how to use them, and guessed that they probably did.

The first man spoke. “Tony Genova.” It wasn’t a question.

“Sorry.” Tony casually slid his hand into his pocket. His heart rate sped up. “You got the wrong place. My name’s Larry DiMazzio.”

“No,” said the second man. “Your real name is Tony Genova.”

“Real names are important,” the woman said. “They give you power.”

“Listen, you got the wrong guy. Now fuck off. Whatever you’re selling, I ain’t interested.”

Tony tried to shut the door, but the first man reached out and caught it with his hand. Tony grunted. Suddenly, moving the door was like pushing a boulder. The guy was a few inches taller than Tony, and of medium build, and didn’t look
that
strong.

“Motherfucker…”

Forgetting about the door, Tony’s fingers encircled the pistol. He tried to withdraw it from his robe, but before he could, the second man reached out and touched him on the neck.

“Sleep.”

“Fuck,” Tony whispered.

Then his legs gave out and the room went black.

He slept, just as the man had told him to do.

The researchers died quickly and messily. Most of them had run out onto the beach, attracted by the initial commotion like insects to a light bulb. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. The massacre had begun in earnest.

The initial force had already moved inland, following along in the wake of the two-story behemoths. Now, hundreds of Clickers rushed ashore, driven forward by the Dark Ones. They streamed from the ocean on their giant, segmented legs, enraged and hungry. Dark Ones sat astride some of the more domesticated creatures. Other Clickers were totally wild, lashing out at anything that moved. The beach descended in pandemonium. People fled, crashing into each other and falling to the sand, or stampeding over one another in an effort to escape. A professor from Princeton died of a broken neck and an anthropologist from London suffered a heart attack as their peers trampled them. They were the lucky ones. The others who fell barely had time to scream as the horde swept over them. Claws and tails lashed out, severing appendages and impaling bodies. The air was filled with shrieks and screams and tearing sounds—and the noise of the Clickers’ claws clacking together.

CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK!

A maintenance worker grabbed the arm of a friend and engaged in a ghoulish tug-of-war with a massive Clicker. The game ended only when the creature snipped his friend in half. The worker toppled backward as two more Clickers lurched toward him. He scrambled across the sand on his hands and knees, gasping a prayer to a God he’d never believed in until now, and then leapt to his feet. As he turned to run, a segmented tail whipped forward. The impact of the stinger jabbing him in the chest felt like being shot. The loathsome beast raised its tail, lifting the hapless victim off the ground. He hung in the air, thrashing and kicking, gore gushing from his open mouth, as the monster pumped venom into his body. Within seconds, his skin began to bubble and hiss. Then it sloughed off his frame and splattered onto the sand. Other Clickers rushed forward and began to shovel the sizzling, soupy mess into their beak-like mouths.

Myrna and Julia, two women from the research center’s food services division, ran toward an outcropping of rocks jutting up from the sand. They tried to clamber up the slick surfaces but kept sliding back down. A group of Clickers pursued them, waving their claws in the air. The helpless women backed up against the stones and wept. One creature pushed Myrna against the boulder and then snapped her head off with one scarlet claw. Blood jetted from the stump of her neck and the monster bathed in it, feeding greedily. Julia screamed in horror as her friend’s severed head rolled at her feet, staring up at her with eyes still open. Julia had always heard that a decapitated head was still conscious for a few moments after death. It could still see and register what was happening. Julia wondered if Myrna’s last impression would be of this—and then a barbed stinger rammed forward, spearing her in the abdomen.

Perrin Tempel, an expert in linguistics from the Univer-sity of Minnesota, found himself unable to move as a Clicker advanced toward him. He wanted to, but fear had rooted him to the spot. He couldn’t run, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even blink as the monster advanced. All he could do was watch. During their last invasion, he’d seen the creatures only on television and the web. Up close, they were very different. For a moment, he was struck by the bizarre beauty of the beast. The Clicker’s serrated pincers were tinted with a delicate crisscross pattern of red and magenta, deepening to a thick shade of black at the tips. As it drew closer, Perrin’s bladder voided. The front of his pants grew wet. The Clicker made a warbling sort of hiss and darted forward. Deciding not to look at its claws or stinger, Perrin focused on the thing’s black, stalked eyes. His last thought was that they reminded him of ball bearings. Then the Clicker seized him. It briefly waved Perrin back and forth in the air like a trophy before cutting him in half. The linguist’s innards spilled out all over the swaying grass. His blood arced through the air, splattering against the thing’s hard shell. Ignoring the other fleeing humans, the Clicker paused in its murderous frenzy to slurp up the pile of Perrin’s spilled intestines and other organs. Half of Perrin’s lifeless body still dangled from its claw.

A marine biologist named Chris Wick found a discarded shovel and used it to fend off a pursuing Clicker. The monster grasped it, snapping the makeshift weapon in half. Then it did the same to him. Its