Still of Night Read online

  “That’s it?” I was appalled. The president motorcade is made up of twenty-five to thirty vehicles. Lots of security, as well as members of the press, and key aides. There’s often a hazardous materials team riding point with local police behind them and more cops in follow cars at the tail end. It’s a lot of people in a lot of vehicles. And the president’s car is armored. Traffic is blocked ahead and on cross streets. “Sir, what about your family? Were they with you?”

  The president shook his head. “I sent them to a secure location in Virginia.” He paused, then added. “We haven’t had a status report yet.”

  I listened for some real heart, some pain, some depth of feeling in his tone, but there was not enough of it there. It surprised me. The news reports always showed him with his pretty wife and three kids. They were always smiling, always clinging close to one another. Which meant what, when measured against his reaction now? Was he so good at playing the controlled politician that his hurt didn’t show? Or was he one of those sociopathic types for whom everyone else—even family—were a little unreal, like window dressing?

  Or was I being too hard on him? After all, he’d just seen a lot of friends die, along with the people sworn to protect him. If San Diego was any indication of what was really happening across America, then there could be hundreds of thousands of people dead. Maybe a million. Was the calm, indifferent façade just that—a front erected over his very human fears? Pretending detachment so that he stayed detached? The more human part of me wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Okay,” I said, “we’ll get you out.”

  The president took my elbow and guided me a few yards down the hall, away from his guards.

  “Your orders are to get me out, Captain,” he said quietly.

  “That’s what I—”

  “Me,” he repeated, leaning on the word. “If you have enough transport to get everyone else out, that’s fine. But I need to know that you understand the key element of your mission here.”

  He still held onto my elbow.

  “I want us to be clear here,” he said stiffly, “I need to get to Air Force One. This plague is spreading exponentially. We have a window of opportunity, but it is closing very quickly. I had a certain resource with me when we were swarmed and it’s lost. Backups for that resource are aboard my jet.”

  “What kind of resource?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “That’s above your pay grade, Captain.”

  “I—”

  He cut me off. “If I can’t get to my plane within six hours then all of our computer models tell us that we will lose.”

  “Lose what, exactly?”

  He half-smiled in surprise. “I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought they told you.”

  “Maybe you should tell me.”

  “Captain Ledger, if we can’t initiate the response protocol within six hours, this entire country is going to be a graveyard. And if we fall, the whole world is going to follow.”

  And now I saw it in his eyes. Behind the control was a total, insane panic.

  I removed his hand from my elbow and very quietly said, “Then let’s get you to your plane.”

  — 11 —

  “How we going to get to El Cajon, Cap’n?” asked Top. “Our ride’s for shit and I don’t think we can Uber it.”

  “Plan B,” I said.

  “Which is?”

  I pointed out the window. Down there, surrounded by a full-blown battle between the living and the dead, were a dozen monster trucks.

  Bunny gave a sour little laugh. “Seems somehow appropriate.”

  — 12 —

  So, yeah. Monster trucks.

  There was one I had my eye on. The chassis was from a Ford F350, but the mechanic had gone a little ape shit on it and created some kind of mutant psychedelic retro hippie thing. The words “Mystery Bus” were painted in swirling colors along its side.

  Understand something, I’m not into truck porn. I’m not into these kinds of things. I’m very comfortable with the size of my own dick and don’t need to make statements with machinery. That said, my Uncle Jack was into them when I was a kid. One summer Sean and I helped him trick one out. Stunt monster trucks usually run on methanol alcohol and corn-based fuel, but the ones on the street here were likely diesel. The axles are salvaged from school buses or decommissioned military trucks and have a planetary gear reduction at the hub to help turn the massive tires that probably came from a dump truck.

  There were a lot of trucks down there to choose from, but the Mystery Bus could take more people than the rest. And it was set high up.

  “What if it doesn’t have the keys in it?” asked Murphy.

  “I grew up in Baltimore,” I said, and left it at that.

  “Lot of those things down there,” said the president. “Feel free to run them over with that truck. Might as well have some fun.”

  Maybe it was meant as gallows humor, but it landed flat and nobody cracked even a little smile. The president gave a disgusted shake of his head. I saw him mouth the word “pussies.”

  Top unzipped the equipment bag he’d brought from the SUV. It was full of guns, grenades, and ammunition. The president walked over and looked at them, and he gave an appreciative nod. He even chuckled.

  “Isn’t this the point where you SpecOps jocks make some hard-ass quip about kicking ass and taking names?” he asked.

  Top straightened and gave him a warm, genial, almost fatherly smile. “I’m probably going to die out there, Mr. President, and I’m definitely going to get my ass in trouble for anything I say,” he said quietly, “so I guess I better make it good. Fuck you. Fuck you all to hell and back. Fuck you to death. Fuck you and everyone you ever knew.” His smile brightened. “How’s that for a quip?”

  The Secret Service agents all started to take a threatening step forward. Bunny was standing right behind Top, and I was behind him. They looked at us, at their president, and then into the middle of nowhere. POTUS stood there with a face that had gone as red as the blood on the streets.

  “Get me to my goddamn plane,” was all he said.

  — 13 —

  We went down in the elevators. Chang and Murphy, POTUS, my team, and Torres in one car; everyone else squeezed into the other. We’d brought spare body armor and had helped the president strap it on, and I gave him my ballistic helmet. Top didn’t like that but kept it to himself. Bunny asked him if he knew how to use a gun, but the president shook his head.

  When the elevator doors opened, we stepped into one of the inner rings of hell.

  The barricaded door had failed. All the people who had been trying to keep the infected out were among the first to rush at us with dead eyes and bloody teeth. I heard someone in our car sob. Not sure who it was. Could have been me for all I know.

  We stepped into madness.

  Bunny led the way with his shotgun. It holds fifty rounds of twelve-gauge and it was a target-rich environment. Top and I flanked him while the others formed a defensive ring around the president. We waited as long as we could for the second car to arrive.

  It never did.

  It must have stopped on another floor, as ours had on the way up. There was too much noise and distance to hear if they were up there making a fight of it. I hoped they were alive, but I never found out. We never saw them again.

  “Move, move, move,” I yelled. I had one hand on Bunny’s broad back and fired my Beretta dry with the other. Dropped the mag, reloaded, fired.

  Head shots look easy in the movies. The good guys never miss on The Walking Dead. Even amateurs nail the bad guys in the sweet spot time and again, at long distances, while running. Which is total frigging bullshit. Ask any soldier who has been in a running fight about it. It’s usually a matter of putting enough ordnance downrange, and the cumulative effect does the trick. In Iraq and Afghanistan it was estimated that American soldiers—who are among the most highly trained in the world—capped off two hundred and fifty thousand rounds for ever
y enemy KIA. Yeah. How’s that for some scary math?

  Now, factor in that our sweet spot wasn’t center mass but a couple of sections of the brain and brain stem that were roughly the size of a child’s fist each. If I had a .22 with light loads in the bullets maybe it would have been easier. Those rounds usually lack the power to exit something as dense as a skull and instead bounce around inside, turning the brain into Swiss cheese. My Beretta was loaded with hollow-points, so I was blowing holes in whatever I hit, but hitting exactly those spots was a bitch.

  It was scary.

  It was closing in on impossible.

  Bunny had the smartest weapon, and I wish to Christ I’d thought to bring a shotgun. If we survived it, that would be my go-to weapon.

  If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

  There were seven of us with guns. Most of us had never worked together, and even though the other four all had training, it wasn’t the same kind. We had to create a rhythm. We shouted “Out!” and “Reloading!” and hoped each other heard.

  The fight in the lobby was a bloodbath. There were fifty or sixty of the infected. It didn’t matter that some of them were kids. It didn’t matter that they could not think and could not return fire. They rushed at us in a mob. Soldiers aren’t trained to deal with a swarm of unarmed civilians attacking with teeth and hands, or to fight enemies who did not easily go down in any conventional way.

  We lost Murphy before we ever got to the door. I felt a hand on my shoulder and the grip half-turned me. I spun to see him trying to grab onto me like I was his lifeline, but there were two of the infected clamped like lampreys onto him, biting an ear and a calf. He knew he was dying but he tried to cling to life by clinging to me, to the living.

  Then he was gone and we had to let him go.

  The president was screaming at the top of his lungs. Shrill. I wanted so badly to hit him. But he wasn’t the only one screaming.

  “Top,” I bellowed, “plow the road.”

  He dipped into a pouch and came out with a fragmentation grenade. “Frag out,” he roared and hurled it underhand so that it arced over the monsters trying to squeeze through from outside.

  We dropped into a momentary huddle, all of us crowding around POTUS.

  The blast radius of the grenade cleared the door and showered us with bloody debris and jagged glass. I hooked an arm under the president’s shoulder and jerked him to his feet.

  Bunny cleared the last of the obstructions and then we were on the valet parking ramp.

  “Oh . . . fuck . . . ” breathed Torres.

  The Mystery Bus was half a football field from where we stood. Fifty long goddamn yards. Between it and us were hundreds of the dead.

  Hundreds.

  I did not see a single living person out there. Not one.

  “Grenades,” I barked, and the three of us, Top, Bunny and me, began bombarding the throng.

  We threw half a dozen grenades each. The blasts shook the world, deafened us, punched us over the hearts. Then we ran into the red-tinged smoke, skidding on blood, firing in all directions, killing anything that moved.

  We slaughtered our way to the monster truck.

  — 14 —

  The keys were in the truck.

  So was the driver. He had no arms, no face, no eyes, but he thrashed because he was belted in place. I put a shot through his temple and Torres popped the lock and pulled him down. I saw Bunny pick up the president and actually throw him in through the back door. There was a sharp cry of pain, but then Bunny shoved Chang up after him. I turned to yell at the two remaining Secret Service agents, but they were gone. I never saw them fall. They had simply been edited out of the world. Top crowded in behind the wheel. Doors slammed and hands began banging on the truck’s metal skin. The blows were weird. Hard, but also soft. Limp hands striking without skill, powered by raw need.

  “Go, go, go,” I yelled, but he was already turning the key. The powerful engine roared to life and I nearly wept with relief when the little arrow on the fuel indicator swept up to full.

  “Hold onto your dicks,” Top said and put the truck in gear.

  The crowd, weakened and dismembered as it was, still wanted to keep us there. They had numbers and weight and they could not feel pain.

  The truck was truly a monster. The over-built engine roared like a mad bull and the massive wheels turned. We braced ourselves for impact, but it wasn’t like that. Not at first.

  No, the truck ground its way down the street. The tires were sixty-six inches high and forty-three inches wide, with deep tread. The massive weight of the vehicle and those brutal tires crushed the fragile bodies into pulp. I made the mistake of looking into the rearview mirror and saw that we were leaving a lumpy red road behind us. Nothing I’ve ever seen was as awful.

  When I looked at Top, his face was set in immoveable stone and he looked ten years too old.

  I pulled up a map program on the small tactical computer strapped to my wrist. It was a little over eighteen miles along Route 94 to 125 and then California 52 east to Gillespie Airport. We had five hours left.

  It took us more than four hours to kill our way there.

  Four long, goddamn hours. Night caught up with us. It kicked the sun off the edge of the world and tried to smother us with blackness. The lights of San Diego vanished behind us, curtained by smoke even before twilight burned off. The highway was packed, but the fucking truck was designed to crunch its way over everything. We did a lot of that, and it felt like the Mystery Bus was shaking itself to pieces. We saw plenty of fights that I wish we could have helped with. People still alive and trying to stay that way.

  The mission, though, the response protocol—that mattered more than anyone or anything, but damn if it didn’t hurt to have to keep moving forward.

  In the back, Bunny, Torres, Chang and the president clung to restraining straps and tried not to look at each other. Bunny reloaded all the weapons. We had two grenades left and five or six magazines for each gun.

  We were still a mile away when we saw the base.

  No, that’s wrong.

  From a mile out we could see the flames.

  — 15 —

  Top circled around to Kenney Street, on the north side of the field, near the biggest runway. We idled on the road outside the gate, watching the big Jet Air Systems factory burn. The light from it painted the sides of Air Force One in Halloween colors. Shadow goblins seemed to caper along the curved sides of the big Boeing 747.

  There was a very stout wall and heavy gate, which was closed and locked.

  “Ram the gate,” said the president, but Top shook his head.

  “Steel construction,” said Top. “We’d wreck this truck and not put a dent in it.”

  There were a lot of infected wandering around the field, and signs of one hell of a battle. The National Guard had clearly been called in to protect the president’s plane. Maybe a hundred of them. A dozen of them were on the roof of the burning building. They were the only ones I could see.

  On our side of the fence were maybe three hundred infected. They clawed and scratched and even tried to bite the big truck, as if they were hoping to eat their way to us.

  We all watched the plane through binoculars.

  “Door’s closed,” said Chang. “Lights are on inside.”

  “Call them,” ordered the president.

  Chang made the call and when the pilot answered, POTUS snatched the phone from her hand. “Major Arlin, this is the president.”

  “Thank the lord, sir, I am so relieved to know that you’re safe and—”

  The president interrupted him. “What is the status of Air Force One?”

  “All secure inside,” said the pilot. “Systems are green for take-off. We fueled up, Mr. President, but we were ordered to keep everything flight ready. We’ve burned through some of it.”

  “Do we have enough to reach Hawaii?”

  “No, sir, and the fuel truck and crew have been compromised.”

  �
�The whole damn field has been compromised, Major, where the hell can we go?”

  Major Arlin rattled off a list of secure destinations in California, Nevada, and New Mexico.

  “Groom Lake,” said POTUS quickly. “It’s remote.”

  “Very well, sir. What is your ETA?”

  I took the phone and explained where we were. “There’s a gate between us and it looks too solid for us to crash. We’re going to have to open it. That’s going to let all these infected in.”

  “Who cares?” demanded the president.

  I had to fight back the urge to slap him. Not because he was becoming hysterical or anything, but he was irritating the pure shit out of me.

  I pointed. “See that big shiny jet? See those engines? Once they spin up for take-off, they’re going to be sucking in a lot of air. You got a few hundred dead people wandering around and one or more of them are going to get sucked in and then you have no engines.”

  “Well, shoot them for Christ’s sake. Come on, Ledger, you’re supposed to be the number one gunslinger. Surely you’re not going to let this stop you. Not with what’s at stake. I need to get onto that plane and it’s your job to make it happen right goddamn now.”

  “First things first, sir,” I said tersely. “We need to open and then secure the gate after the truck’s inside.”

  “Can’t you use one of your grenades to open it?”

  “No,” said Top. “Not what they’re designed for. We need to use a blaster plaster.”

  He explained. It was a technology developed for use by the Department of Military Sciences, which is the group I was in before Rogue Team International was formed. Proprietary technology. Looks like a sheet of bubble wrap, but much tougher. The little blisters are filled with chemicals and the flat parts have wires in them. You peel back a clear film to expose a strong industrial adhesive, place the thing on any surface you want to destroy, and either pull a small wire that activates a ten-second timer or use a remote. The timer triggers tiny electrical charges that rupture the walls of the blisters. The instant the chemicals mix they detonate with about six hundred times the explosive force of detonation cord. A ten by ten sheet of blaster plaster would send a standard mailbox fifty feet into the air or blow the front end off a Ford F250.