Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 67

"She does," said Church, "the feed is leaking to the Internet."

"s.h.i.t. You got to find some way to-"

"Bug is close to cracking her system and is confident he will be able to jam all the cameras. I will alert you when that happens."

"Make it fast. We're going after Mother Night and I don't want her gloating to the world."

"Captain, listen to me," said Church, "we're not interested in an arrest. Not this time."

"Preaching to the choir."

"Then good hunting, Captain. And G.o.d bless."

He was gone and I looked at the lobby. Maybe I was asking for help for something that was already helpless. But d.a.m.n it, this was still a fight. There were still more people uninfected than transformed.

And I needed to get to Mother Night. G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I needed to look into her eyes and determine for myself if there was any shoe left to drop. Was this slaughter what she wanted or did she still have one last game to play?

"We need to get to the elevators," I yelled. "Clear me a path. Right now."

Bunny swapped in a new drum and everyone fished for fresh magazines. The elevators were thirty yards away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

Even so, we had to try.

We raised our weapons at the seething crowd and began firing.

I would like to say that the only people we killed were infected. I would dearly love that to be true.

But that would only be a lie.

Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen.

Grand Hyatt Hotel 109 East Forty-second Street New York City Sunday, September 1, 4:04 p.m.

As the door burst open, Ludo Monk s.n.a.t.c.hed up the pistol, turned, fired without aiming. The figure coming through the doorway moved with blinding speed. There was a second shot. A third.

A scream.

No, screams.

A woman's scream. High, shrill, filled with pain and terror.

And his own voice. Nearly as high, screeching so loud that the sound of it burned away the clouds in his mind, leaving him clearheaded for a moment. No intruding voices, no peculiar patterns of thought. In that moment he could see and hear and understand everything with a clarity that was so rare and ...

And lovely.

It was beautiful. Never once in his entire life had there been such fidelity of vision and perception. Never before had something stilled the voices in his head. Not even the pills did it this completely.

Monk tried to understand what was happening.

He turned his head and it moved very loosely on his neck. Too loosely. He knew that his neck was not broken, yet the muscles were strangely slack.

"What-?" he asked.

A figure moved from left to right in front of him. Tall, slender, female, and familiar. He didn't know her name, did he?

Something ...

Something musical.

He was sure of it.

"M-Mother-?" he asked, hoping it was her. Needing it to be her.

There was no answer. Not to his question. But the woman with the musical name was speaking. Shouting.

Monk turned his head again, trying to see who was talking. Why was it so hard to remember who was in the room with him? He knew that he should know this. It was just a few moments ago.

A few moments.

Everything had changed in those moments.

His mind became clearer and yet he could not fill it with names or meaning.

The woman was kneeling now and he saw her bend down over something ...

No.

Over someone.

Another woman.

A woman who seemed to be lying on a red blanket.

Or floating in a red pool.

Monk could not tell which, but as he watched the blanket or pool it grew larger and larger.

"Mother?" he asked again.

The women ignored him. Neither was his mother.

He heard the tall woman yelling something.

"Junie! Junie, stay with me. Stay with me..."

That was funny to Monk because it was clear that the other woman, the bald woman, wasn't trying to go anywhere. So strange.

The lights in his mind began to go out as if someone were walking through a room and flipping switches. The darkness was soft and cool and it covered him completely.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty.

Marriott Marquis Hotel 265 Peachtree Center Avenue Atlanta, Georgia Sunday, September 1, 4:11 p.m.

It took two or three thousand years for us to fight our way across the lobby. Halfway there, Lydia joined us. She had a Sig Sauer in one hand and a Glock in the other and her face was flecked with powder burns.

We kept going, kept fighting.

This was so much worse than the slaughter outside the Ark chamber down in the Locker and worse even than the subway slaughter. Some of these people stared at us in horror, the hurt of betrayal in their terrified eyes. Some of them begged us for help even as their eyes began to glaze from infection. There were people of all kinds there. Adults of every age. Children.

Tears burned like acid in my eyes as I fired.

Then we reached the elevator. The door was jammed open by a knot of corpses and three walkers who crouched over them, feeding messily.

"Yo! d.i.c.kheads!" yelled Montana. Their heads jerked up and she blew them back against the wall and out of this version of h.e.l.l. Bunny grabbed the dead and flung them into the lobby, tripping two other walkers who were rushing us from behind. Before I could bring my gun up, the two walkers pitched sideways, red spray blowing from the sides of their heads. I never even heard the shot and I wasted one moment looking around for the shooter. Had to be Sam, but I couldn't see him.

We crowded into the elevator.

The lights on every floor were lit and at each stop we had to shove back the living and the dead. It was as heartbreaking as it was terrifying.

"I don't know how much more of this I can..." began Montana, her voice low and fragile, but then she stiffened. "No," she snapped, directing it at me or herself, or both. "No."

We reloaded.

"I'm sorry," I said to her. "If there had been some other way to ease you into this. Or to let you know this is what we did..."

"No," she said again, and there was a bright-almost fevered-ferocity in her eyes. "This has to be done. If not us, who?"

Behind her, Noah laid a hand on her shoulder and said, "Hooah."

"Hooah," echoed Bunny, Lydia, and I.

The doors opened and we stepped out onto a balcony that was completely crowded with the infected. There were at least five Berserkers among them, towering like t.i.tans above the throng of ordinary walkers. Beyond the Berserkers, standing against the balcony wall, was Mother Night.

The crowd of the dead let out a deafening moan of raw, unending hunger, and rushed at us from both sides.

Once more we formed a shooting line, Bunny and Noah facing forward, Lydia and Montana facing behind us, and me looking for a way to get to Mother Night. I had the irrational feeling that this was actually h.e.l.l. The real h.e.l.l. And it would be nothing but this. Red slaughter and the roar of guns, blood and pain and death.

Some of the infected seemed to be whole, without bites or marks to indicate how they'd died. And I recalled the woman I'd seen downstairs, looking like she was on the edge of becoming a walker. I remembered the candy wrapper in her hand. There were other wrappers, and plenty of unopened candies down there on the floor. It didn't require a leap of genius intellect to come up with a theory on that. The seif-al-din pathogen could easily be added to food, or injected into a tasty piece of chocolate. It fit with the "love me while I destroy you" vibe that Artemisia Bliss had constructed within her Mother Night persona.

I saw an opening and left the shooting line, using the borrowed pistol and knife to carve a path to Mother Night.

A Berserker saw me trying to do an end run around the pack of dead and he began wading toward me, pushing walkers out of his way. He gave me one of those mind-numbing roars. He had a pistol tucked into his waistband but he came at me with those big, bone-cracking hands.

"Dumb a.s.s," I said, and shot him through the eye.

Behind him, a second-perhaps smarter-Berserker raised a handgun and fired three shots at me, forcing me to dive behind a metal trash can while I returned fire. I hit him in the chest, which did nothing to the undead son of a b.i.t.c.h, and when he opened his mouth to laugh at me, he vomited blood, tissue, and a high-powered rifle slug.

Sam.

I still couldn't see him but right them I wanted to kiss him. If I had a sister I'd let him marry her.

Two other Berserkers closed in on me, both firing handguns. A bullet punched me in the chest and knocked me back. The Kevlar stopped it, but from the sudden, grinding pain I knew that something was broken. When I raised my gun, the pain jumped to the top of the scale and I realized that the raw impact of the Berserker's bullet had cracked my sternum.

But a split second later I saw the Berserker wheel away as a dark form rose up from the press of bodies. There was a flash of silver, over and over again, and the Berserker seemed to fall apart. Then I saw Top moving away from him, two st.u.r.dy fighting knives in his fists. He had no gun and the front of his Kevlar vest was torn open and hung down, exposing brown skin crisscrossed with old scars and purpled with new bruises.

The battle raged on.

Mother Night saw me coming and she turned and ran, but it looked less like she was fleeing in panic and more like a catch-me-if-you-can flirtation.

So I ran after her.

I fired my gun dry and swapped and fished for my last magazine. Fired and fired.

Then I was at the edge of the crowd. I stabbed a walker in the eye and flung his body behind me to slow down pursuit. The balcony curved around and I pelted after Mother Night, though each step was screaming agony. My chest felt like it was on fire.

Then I rounded the next corner and there she was.

She'd climbed up onto the rail and had her arms spread wide to steady herself. Four of her small video cameras were mounted on the walls, their lenses aimed at her, little red lights burning.

Bliss turned to me and blew a kiss. "h.e.l.lo, Joe."

In my earbud I heard another voice. Bug. He said, "It's done."

I slowed to a stop, gun pointed, waiting for her last trick. "h.e.l.lo, Artie."

"Don't call me that."

"What would you prefer? Psycho b.i.t.c.h? 'Cause that seems to work."

She actually smiled. "Been called worse."

"Yeah, me, too. Side effect of being a functional psychotic."

"You should know," she agreed.

"Yup."