Code Zero (31 page)

Instead, Top, Bunny, and I were watching forensic techs take photos of people we’d killed.

Young people.

Kids.

My earbud buzzed and Nikki was there.

“Cowboy,” she said quickly, “we have assets at the desired location. Bookworm is okay. Repeat, Bookworm is safe and sound.”

Bookworm was the codename Top had given Junie last year.

I sagged against a parked car and actually had to fight back the tears. “Thank God.”

“Everything’s okay there. She’s fine. Really.”

I was so dazed that I had to scramble to remember Nikki’s call sign. “Thanks, Firefly.”

“But I have to tell you, Cowboy,” she said, “there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on.”

“I know, I know. Gettysburg and Lexington…”

“That’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s stuff going on all over the country. Lots of weird violence. Vandalism and arson. Stuff like that. And the phrase ‘burn to shine’ keeps showing up everywhere there’s something bad happening. It’s on walls, spray-painted on the street. They even brought a guy into an E.R. in Akron with it carved into his skin. They think it was done with a razor blade. We’re still trying to make some sense of it. If this is terrorism, then no one’s taking claim except indirectly. There was that Mother Night video and now all this.”

“Burn to shine,” I said. “A call to action.”

Circe was right.

“Everything’s chaotic. And even if it is Mother Night, then we can’t find a pattern to it.”

“Keep trying. Look, what about the digital prints we sent from here? You get any hits on our shooters?”

“Only two of them are in the system, Cowboy. Serita Esposito and Darius Chu. Both have juvenile records. Esposito was arrested twice for hacking. First offense was an intrusion into the computers belonging to her bank in order to add funds to her debit card. She was fourteen at the time and the intrusion went unnoticed for eleven months. Two-year suspended sentence and community service, plus appropriate fines and restitution. A couple of years later she hacked Delta Airlines to obtain first-class tickets to Paris for her and five of her friends. She was arrested upon her return to the States and is—or rather was—awaiting trial.”

“Only seventeen,” I said, feeling even older.

“She fired on you, Cowboy,” Nikki said.

“Small comfort.”

Nikki sighed. “I know.”

She didn’t know. Like all of Bug’s team, she was support staff and never once set foot in the field. But she meant well.

“What about the other one?” I asked. “The boy? Chu, was it?”

“Let’s see … he’s a Canadian citizen and, according to Montreal police, is in custody awaiting trial for armed assault.”

“I can pretty much guarantee he’s not in prison,” I said, watching them zipper him into a body bag.

“The prints match a suspect arrested in Montreal following the nonfatal shooting of a member of the Canadian Parliament. However, the photo you sent does not match the person in jail, and apparently neither do that person’s fingerprints. The Canadians are trying to determine how the swap was made, and the person in custody as Chu refuses to talk. I’ll have to go deeper and—”

Suddenly, Nikki’s voice vanished and was replaced by a three-note alarm signal. Then Church’s voice was in my ear.

“This is Deacon for Cowboy, do you copy?”

“Go for Cowboy.”

“What is the status of your team?” he said, and he sounded stressed and hurried. “Give me the short answer.”

Now was not the time to complain about cuts and scrapes. Even a lot of cuts and scrapes.

“We’re still at the cyber café, but we’re good to go,” I fired back. “What’ve you got?”

Seemingly out of left field, Church said, “Have you heard about the event in Brooklyn?”

“Other than this one?”

“In the subway,” he said. “The C train.”

“No.”

I could hear him take a breath.

“Scramble your team,” he said. “We have a Code Zero.”

Chapter Forty-nine

Surf Shop 24-Hour Cyber Café

Corner of Fifth Avenue and Garfield Street

Park Slope, Brooklyn

Sunday, August 31, 1:31 p.m.

Code Zero
.

There are no words more terrifying to me, either in my private lexicon or in that used by the Department of Military Sciences.

Hearing those words punched me in the solar plexus.

It stabbed me in the heart.

A big, dark ball of black terror expanded inside my chest.

We have different codes for the various kinds of threats we face.

Code E is an Ebola outbreak.

Code N is a nuke.

But Code Zero …

God.

That was used only for a specific kind of horror that I hoped was gone forever from my life and from this world.

“Wh-hat?” I stammered. “
How?
”

Church told me about the C train and the SWAT team that went down into the tunnel. I held my phone up so I could watch the video feed. It was herky-jerky and tinted green from night-vision equipment. The ghostly shape of the big silver train rose out of the darkness as the SWAT officers swarmed toward it. I could see that the windows of the train were cracked and some of them had been smashed outward. People wriggled through the shattered windows and filled the tunnel.

I call them people, but I knew that it was a term applicable only in the past tense. They were streaked with blood, their clothes and skin torn. Their mouths biting at the air, their eyes black and dead.

The SWAT team reacted to them the way compassionate people will. They tried to help. But I heard the helmet radio feed from command telling them to fall back, to make no contact. Warning the cops of a biohazard threat.

Some of the cops held their ground, caught by indecision. Some retreated a few paces. A few could not let their compassion for injured fellow citizens outweigh personal safety.

And that is the horror of warfare in the twenty-first century. Terrorists view compassion as a weakness and they attack it as a vulnerability, making the benevolent pay for their own humanity. The SWAT officers who stepped forward to help were buried beneath a wave of the infected.

I wanted to turn away from the images, I wanted to smash the phone so I couldn’t hear the screams. There was too long a delay in responding. The gunfire—the awful, necessary gunfire—came much too late.

The feed ended abruptly when the camera was smashed.

It brought me all the way back to my first day with the DMS. To the first of horror of this world in which I now live. Code Zero indicated an outbreak of a very specific kind of disease pathogen. A bioweapon of immeasurable ferocity. The people who designed this weapon called it the
seif-al-din
.

The sword of the faithful.

It was nothing that could have ever developed in nature, though each of its components was, to a degree, natural. The core of the
seif-al-din
was a prion disease known as fatal familial insomnia, a terrible variation of spongiform encephalitis from which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. In its original form it was a process that took months, and the victim generally died as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. But Sebastian Gault and his scientist-lover Amirah rebuilt the disease and married it to several parasites and a radical kind of viral delivery system. The infection rate of this designer pathogen is absolute, and it triggers an uncontrollable urge in the infected to spread the disease. It is spread primarily through bites.

The infected host lapses into a nearly hibernative state, with most body systems shut down and all conscious and higher mental functions permanently destroyed. Stripped-down parts of the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems remain in operation—only enough to keep the host on its feet and able to attack in order to spread the disease.

Unless you used very precise medical equipment it is impossible to detect signs of life. Heartbeat is minimal, respiration is incredibly shallow. And those tissues that are not necessary to the parasitic drive are not fed by blood or oxygen and therefore become necrotic. What is left is a mindless, shambling, eternally hungry killing machine with an infection rate of nearly one hundred percent.

A walker.

A
zombie
.

No one had survived a bite; no one came back from infection.

That was the
seif-al-din.

That was a Code Zero.

We stopped an intended mass release at the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia four years ago. All of our computer models predicted that an outbreak in a densely populated area would result in an uncontrollable spread. If this got out, the world would consume itself.

Totally.

Completely.

Ravenously.

Dear God.

All of this—the science, the memories, the horror—flashed through my brain in a hot microsecond after the video ended.

“
Where?
” I demanded.

Church told me. “The infected are still in the tunnel, but it’s only a matter of time before they find their way to the station and then up to the streets. I have a chopper in the air. It will pick you up in Prospect Park. Echo Team will rendezvous with you at Euclid Avenue station, and I’ve called in the National Guard. Every subway exit is being sealed, but I need you to go down there, Captain. I need you to stop this.” He paused for a terrible moment, then added those dreadful words. “No matter what it takes.”

But I was already pushing past cops and EMTs, yelling for Top and Bunny. Ghost barked as we ran. All four of us were bleeding and hurt but we ran like we didn’t care, like we didn’t have time to be hurt. I could hear the distant beat of the heavy rotors of a military Black Hawk. Prospect Park was only a few blocks from here.

We piled in the car. I hit lights and sirens and we broke laws as I kicked the pedal all the way down, scattering civilians and emergency personnel in every direction.

There are times to stand there with your jaw slack and your pulse hammering, and there are times to get your ass into high gear and run over anything in your way.

Chapter Fifty

Pierre Hotel

East Sixty-second Street

New York City

Sunday, August 31, 1:34 p.m.

Ludo was masturbating when the phone rang.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants and boxers puddled around his ankles, staring at the rifle on its tripod as his hand moved with feverish speed.

Nearby, the rifle gleamed. Oiled and curved and so lovely.

Olga.

The phone began jangling with the same shrill outrage that was in his mother’s voice when she’d caught him doing this. There had been no gun that first time, but that didn’t matter. She’d dragged him out into the hall in front of his younger brother and older sister, his underpants still down, and had beaten him to the edge of unconsciousness. Calling him a freak, a pervert. Telling him that God was watching. Saying that God would punish him.

Ludo had tried to cover his shame with hands over his groin and face, but his mother slapped those hands away and rained blows on every inch of him. Even when his siblings started screaming for her to stop, she kept hitting.

Ludo did not remember how it had ended. He’d begun screaming, too, and he’d screamed so long and so loud that it opened a big, dark trapdoor in the floor of his mind, and he’d plunged downward into shadows.

There had been other beatings, of course. And his mother had removed the locks on the bathroom door so she could barge in to try to catch Ludo doing something disgusting. Something worthy of a beating.

The others got beatings, too. His sister, Gayle, lost hearing in her left ear because of a beating. And Bobby, who was a bleeder, had tiny scars all over his body. Mother always found something they were doing wrong.

Always.

She hadn’t ever caught him masturbating again, but that didn’t matter. She searched his belongings and found things that gave her fists their purpose. A copy of
Playboy
Ludo had stolen from a drugstore. Pictures of naked girls Ludo downloaded from the Net. Then, later, as Ludo spent more and more time swimming in the shadows beneath the floor of his mind, the things she found were different. Gun magazines. And then guns.

That was when the beatings stopped.

As Ludo grew, he sometimes walked in on her in the bathroom. While she was on the toilet. Ludo would stand there with a gun in his hand, saying nothing while his mother tried to hide her shame.

That’s when his mother started drinking.

She never could find his guns after that. She looked everywhere. When he was out, either at school or bagging groceries at the Acme, his mother looked. Every once in a while Ludo would leave a bullet for her to find. The lead tips were bright with dots of her lipstick. Ludo wished he could have seen her face when she found those.

A few weeks later, after his mother died in an unexplained fire, Ludo snuck into the cemetery the night they buried her. With shadows swimming around him, he dropped his pants and masturbated on her grave.

It was the fastest he ever came. And it removed so much of the tension in his soul. Even so, it was oddly asexual, despite the necessary mechanics of the process. He never fantasized about his mother. He didn’t think about seeing her naked—a thought that deeply disgusted him. And he never thought about having sex with her. He’d rather stab his own eyes out. What turned him on was the thought of maggots and worms wriggling their way through her skin. The mental picture of cockroaches and beetles feasting on her flesh and shitting on her bones was deeply erotic.

Today, though, it was the gun.

Olga.

So pretty.

So saucy.

Sitting there in the hotel room, waiting for the kill order, he kept glancing at her. Kept remembering what it felt like to slip his finger inside her trigger guard. To let his fingers glide ever so lightly along the length of her barrel. He stuck the tip of his tongue into the opening of the barrel, licking and tasting the gun oil.