Still of Night Read online

  — 5 —

  “Captain Ledger,” said a male voice. “This is Scott Pruitt, National Security Advisor—”

  “I know who you are,” I interrupted. “Tell me you’re calling to tell me this shit isn’t as bad as it looks.”

  There was a beat. “It’s worse than it looks,” said Pruitt.

  “Tell me.”

  “Lucifer 113 has a one-hundred percent infection rate,” he said. “It has a one-hundred percent mortality rate.”

  The three of us were clustered around my satellite phone, the speaker on. Command Sergeant Major Bradley “Top” Sims and First Sergeant Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit had walked through the Valley of the Shadow with me more times than I could count. No matter how bad things ever got there was always a light shining somewhere, however small and fragile.

  Bunny, who was a hulking kid from Orange County, mouthed the words “one hundred percent.” His face had gone pale beneath his volleyball tan. Top, the oldest of the three of us, looked stricken.

  “What’s the response protocol?” I demanded.

  Another beat. Longer this time. Then Pruitt said, “We have one chance, Captain. One, and it’s slim. But that’s why I’m calling you. The White House, Camp David, and the other secure locations here on the east coast are compromised. Half of the Joint Chiefs are dead, and so is most of Congress. The president flew from D.C. this morning to San Diego, where he met with senior military staff and was scheduled to go to the Blue Estate.”

  The Blue Estate was a codename for a government safe house near El Cajon in Southern California. It was a massive bunker built half a mile below a faux warehouse on a remote corner of the National Guard base.

  “But he never made it,” I said, knowing where this was heading.

  “No,” said Pruitt, “his detail was attacked, sustaining heavy losses. The crucial materials for our only viable response were in a briefcase carried by one of the president’s aides. That aide was killed in the convoy attack and his body—and the briefcase—cannot be recovered. A backup briefcase is aboard Air Force One, which is at Gillespie Field in El Cajon, twenty miles from the president’s current location. He is barricaded in a suite of rooms at the Marriott Marquis Marina in San Diego, next to the convention center.”

  “What about local law?”

  “San Diego has fallen,” said Pruitt bleakly. “The city is a war zone. Infrastructure failure has collapsed and there is rioting in the streets. We are unclear as to whether that rioting is predominantly panic and looting, or if the citizens are fighting the infected.”

  “Okay, how about National Guard? They’re in El Cajon, too, a couple of miles from Gillespie Field.”

  “A detail has been sent to protect Air Force One, but the majority of their forces have already been mobilized. There are over three million people in the San Diego metropolitan area. If even one percent of them are infected, that means there could be as many as three hundred thousand violent vectors in play.”

  Top closed his eyes and Bunny looked around like he wanted to run. The big, empty airplane offered no avenues for escape from the truth.

  “What do you need from us?” I asked.

  “Find the president,” said Pruitt, “and get him to El Cajon before our window of opportunity closes.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Almost none at all,” he said. “I’ve taken the liberty of rerouting your plane.”

  As he said it I could feel the big bird tilt and the engine whine rise to a roar.

  — 6 —

  On the approach to California I went aft where I could be alone and placed a call to my wife, Junie. She answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for my call.

  “Joe!” she cried. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, baby,” I said, closing my eyes and leaning my head against the wall. “How are you? How’s Ethan?”

  “We’re good, Joe,” said Junie. “We’re in Baltimore with Sean, Aly, and the kids.”

  Sean was my younger brother. He was a detective in Baltimore, a good husband and father of two great kids. There was talk about him being on the shortlist for commissioner and I hoped like hell he’d have the chance. But I could hear the TV on in the background and the news reporters were yelling.

  “Listen to me,” I said quietly, “you need to get out of town. Get out to my uncle’s old farm in Robinwood. Load up with everything you can carry—water, canned food, medical supplies.”

  “Joe, is what they’re saying true? Has this plague really spread out of control?”

  I don’t lie to Junie. If there are things I can’t tell her because of mission restrictions, then I tell her that. That was yesterday’s rulebook. I told her everything. She isn’t the kind of person who falls apart. She’s been through the badlands herself. Junie is tough in the way that real women are tough, which is pretty fucking tough.

  “It’s going to be crazy out there,” I said. “People will panic, so—”

  “Sean has plenty of guns,” she said. “I’ll make sure we bring them, too.”

  Sean’s wife, Aly, was a good shot, and so was Lefty, their son, who’d just started college on a full-ride baseball scholarship.

  We talked details for a few minutes. Junie was so practical that it actually calmed me down, and I’d called to reassure her. I heard the bing-bong signal telling us that we were beginning our descent.

  “Call me as soon as you get to the farm,” I said.

  “I will.”

  “Call me if anything happens along the way.”

  “Joe . . . I will. We’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t say anything for too long.

  “Joe . . . will we be fine? I mean, this is going to pass, right? We’re doing something about this, aren’t we?” By “we” she meant me, and people like me. Special forces, agents of the infrastructure, the methods and protocols and everything that went into motion when there was a major crisis.

  “I’m going to give it a hell of a try,” I promised. It was not the reassurance she wanted to hear or I needed to give. But it was all I could offer, and Junie knew it.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  “Come home to me,” said Junie, which is what she always said when I was going off to war.

  “I will,” I said.

  I meant it. I really did.

  The plane tilted toward the mainland.

  — 7 —

  San Diego looked normal from the air.

  Distance is a liar.

  Perspective, on the other hand, is a brutally honest motherfucker. As the Galaxy began our descent we could see the fires. Closer still we could see whole sections of Old Town and the Gaslamp District thronged with people. On any other day you’d have thought it was a party. Fourth of July. A Day of the Dead joke occurred to me, but I kicked its ass back into the shadows of my mind.

  “Gear up,” said Top.

  We did.

  Top is the oldest active shooter in anyone’s special ops group. He should have retired a long time ago. He is a muscular fifty-something with scars all over his dark brown skin and intelligent eyes filled with equal measures of compassion, intelligence, and tightly controlled anger. If you get between him and something he cares about, you are going to regret that you were the fastest swimming sperm.

  He and Bunny went through the motions of selecting weapons and equipment with a familiarity that can only exist because of mutual trust, certain knowledge, and years of experience on the battlefields of this troubled little blue planet. They selected magazines and grenades and other gear, and buddy-checked the Kevlar limb pads and body armor.

  Bunny’s stuff was never off the rack. He’s six-and-a-half feet tall and two guys wide. Perfect for the volleyball he once played to Olympic standards, and well-suited to the rigors of combat and hardship. Blond hair, blue eyes, and a goofy smile that went exactly one millimeter deep. Behind the surfer boy look was a good-natured killer. He was
truly one of the good guys, but in combat he was something else entirely. His strength was a thing out of legend and he somehow managed to keep his idealism intact despite the things we’d all seen.

  I was younger than Top and older than Bunny. A little over six feet, a little over two hundred, a little off the mark when it comes to my psychological profile. My shrink says that I manage my damage in useful ways. Fair enough.

  We sat down for the landing but were up again while the bird rolled toward the most distant point in the San Diego airport.

  “Looks clear,” said Bunny as he peered out of the window. “Bunch of people over by the terminal, but no one over here.”

  “Where’s our ride?” asked Top, looking out of another window. “It’s a little better than five klicks to the hotel. If there’s trouble in town that could be a long walk.”

  As if in answer, a big black Nissan Armada came tearing across the tarmac toward us. It was a brute of a civilian SUV, which was fine. We were big guys and we were bringing a lot of toys to this playground. We gathered our equipment bags and deplaned. I ordered the flight crew to refuel as long as it was safe, but otherwise button up and hold tight.

  The driver spun into a skidding, shrieking stop that kicked up a cloud of friction smoke. The driver’s door popped open to reveal a woman dressed in the black of a San Diego city police uniform. She was short and solid, with a Mexican face and hair that was falling out of a tight bun.

  “Captain Ledger?” she yelled, pitching it almost as a plea.

  “I’m Ledger,” I said, walking toward her.

  “I’m Torres, SDPD. Get in. Now.”

  Top was studying her, but Bunny had a flat hand up to shade his eyes as he stared at the people over by the terminal building. He said, “Oh . . . shit.”

  And ran for the SUV.

  Top and I turned, and that’s when we saw it. Those people were coming toward us. They were ordinary people. Some in regular clothes, some in various airport uniforms. A few soldiers and TSA agents among them. The one uniting theme about them was the color.

  Red.

  It was splashed on all of them. Hands and arms. Clothes. Mouths.

  Maybe seventy of them.

  Top threw his gear bag into the SUV and climbed into the backseat next to Bunny. I saw him draw his sidearm as he did so. I lingered for a moment. I wasn’t rooted to the ground by shock or anything like that. I’m not known for hesitating.

  No, my heart was breaking.

  These were people. So many people. And they were infected.

  Which meant they were dead.

  Pruitt had told us. One hundred percent infection rate, one hundred percent mortality rate. The parasites in Volker’s bioweapon killed them, and the parasites woke them up again as aggressive vectors. They were dead.

  And they were coming for us.

  — 8 —

  “Drive,” I growled as I slammed the front passenger door.

  Sergeant Torres drove. She drove like hell was chasing us.

  It was immediately obvious that the Armada was not a government-issue car. No radio or tactical computer, no lights or sirens. There was a bloody handprint on the left side of the windshield and shell casings on the floor.

  She spun the wheel and kicked the pedal down as the first of the infected reached us. As the SUV turned, I saw a panorama of faces. White faces, a lot of shades of brown. Their mouths snapped at the air as if trying to chew their way toward us; their hands reached and fingers slashed in our direction. Their lips curled back from bloody teeth but their eyes—damn, that was the worst part. There was nothing in the eyes. No flicker of hate, no anger, no anything. They weren’t even the black eyes of a shark. The eyes of all of these people were empty. Vacant.

  Dead.

  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then these windows looked into vacant rooms of empty homes. No one and nothing lived there.

  Behind me I heard Top murmur, “God Almighty.”

  Bunny said nothing at all.

  Torres crushed the pedal against the floor and the Armada shot past the crowd. I heard the slithery, raspy sound of fingernails on the door and then we were beyond the crowd. We looked as they turned and began to follow. It was not exactly a pack response, but something colder and odder. The parasites within each of them reacted with identical single-mindedness and reflexive efficiency. The prey moved and so each of them moved.

  “Welcome to San Diego,” said Torres, trying for a glib joke and failing.

  There were other people on the airport grounds. We saw bizarre tableaus as we raced past.

  A pair of baggage handlers were beating an infected pilot with vicious swings of heavy suitcases. The pilot’s bones were shattered, with white ends stabbing outward through skin and uniform, but even with all that he kept trying to get back up, kept trying to grab them.

  A mechanic knelt on the ground, worrying at a co-worker’s throat like a dog tearing up a squirrel. He did not even glance at us as we passed.

  A little Middle Eastern boy walked blindly across the tarmac, most of his lower face gone. His empty eyes turned toward us and he reached out with small hands.

  A fat woman with most of her blouse torn away walked in a sloppy circle, hands clamped to her stomach to try and hold her intestines in place. Her strength failed and her guts spilled out and I heard Bunny gag.

  “What the fuck, boss?” he begged, but I had no answers.

  Instead, I turned to Torres. “What can you tell us?”

  She cut me a brief look. “The president is in his suite,” she said quickly. “He has some Secret Service left, and there are some officers on the scene, but it’s all falling apart. We have the lobby barricaded, but it’s a big hotel and it’s right next to the convention center. There’s a couple of dozen ways in. When I left, the place was already under siege.”

  “Can you get us in?” I asked.

  She took too long to answer that. “I’m not even sure I can get you all that close. People are going crazy in the streets.”

  Top leaned forward. “Did anyone tell you what this is? Do you know what’s happening?”

  “I heard a lot of crazy rumors. Some kind of terrorist attack. A bioweapon or some shit. Or an accident at some government lab. Everyone has a story.”

  “What do you think is happening?”

  She looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I think someone left the back door of Hell unlocked.”

  We said nothing.

  “I shot a guy in the chest. Three rounds, center mass,” said Torres. “He went down because one of my bullets must have hit his spine. But even on the ground, even with a hole drilled through his fucking heart, he kept trying to bite me.”

  “Jesus fuck,” said Bunny.

  “I put another round in his head,” said Torres, but there was a hitch in her voice. “I shot him while he lay there on the ground.” She wiped at a tear and then looked at the wetness on her fingertips. Then she smeared it on the arc of the steering wheel. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that death is broken.”

  She reached Airport Terminal Road, which was choked with cars, some of them stopped in the middle of the road. People—alive and undead—were fighting between the cars.

  “Hold onto your dicks,” she said. She crossed herself and wrenched the wheel over to send the Armada punching through a line of neatly-trimmed hedges. The big vehicle had four-wheel drive but it wasn’t built for this, and seatbelts or not, we were whipped and slammed around as the wheels crunched over curbs, shrubs, and fallen bodies. Then we burst out on North Harbor Road, which was also congested but not as badly. The engine roared as she accelerated while zigzagging around cars and people.

  A man stepped out into our path and there was a godawful thump. He went flying, crashing into the windshield hard enough to punch a spider web of cracks into the safety glass. I had a microsecond to see the man’s face. I saw the pain and panic in his eyes. Maybe Torres saw it, too. Maybe knowing that she’d crippled or kille
d an uninfected person would ruin her. Maybe she was already gone by then. Don’t know. The car muscled on and she never took her foot off the gas. The wind blowing past us pushed beads of dark red through the labyrinth of cracks.

  “They didn’t tell us it was this bad,” said Bunny.

  Torres laughed. A single snort that was a shuffle step away from hysteria. “I walked my dog this morning,” she said after a few seconds. “I had coffee with my boyfriend at Starbucks before my shift.” She shook her head. “When all of . . . this . . . started, it seemed to just explode, you know?” She cut us looks, hoping we’d understand. Needing it, as if to say that this was bigger than her, that it wasn’t her fault.

  “Yeah,” I said, which was lame, but what else could I say?

  We roared on. She steered the car like she’d spent her entire life training for this ride. My heartbeat was like a machine gun and my blood pressure could blow bolts out of plate steel, but I kept it off my face and out of my voice.

  “It’s a plague,” I said. “A bioweapon.”

  I told her the story. I told her the truth. Because why? Because fuck it. The world was falling off its hinges and this cop was in hell. In actual hell. And because she deserved to know the truth. I did not give a cold, wet shit about national security or need-to-know. That was as dead as the bodies in the street.

  I knew that Torres appreciated the truth. I knew it hurt her, too. The truth is like that.

  “Turn on the news,” suggested Top. I did, and most of the channels were filled with pre-programmed music. Not the time for an Eagles retrospective or classic hip hop. I found the local news and the reporter was weeping so brokenly that I couldn’t make out a single word. On another station, there was a field report from some guy back in Pennsylvania that was being broadcast nationally. His opener would have been a joke two hours ago. It wasn’t now.

  He said, “This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse . . . ”

  The story he told was about him and a cop named Dez Fox and several busloads of school kids trying to make it from Western Pennsylvania to Asheville, North Carolina. The roads were mostly blocked and the dead were everywhere. I heard gunshots and screams, and then the feed died. There was dead air for maybe ten seconds and then a reporter came on and tried to apologize for losing the feed.