6 hours
The door exploded in a shower of splinters.
Most Infecteds still had slow reaction times; the Caddy plowed through them like a bowling ball scoring a strike. Its wheels humped over bodies in the driveway, and then it was in the street, running smooth.
Fallon was glad to have a vehicle again, even though the Escalade smelled like death. To be fair, outside, the odor was nearly omnipresent now; on every block, there were bodies, and the stink from each one rose and joined the others in an invisible, choking cloud. She wished there was an air freshener in the Caddy, maybe one of those paper pine trees hanging from the mirror, like her father had always kept in his Grand Prix.
Another advantage of the MEIADD—I can tell the reek is there, but it’s not nearly as strong as it might be.
On foot, she felt more vulnerable to the Infecteds. Even the ones who could use guns now didn’t seem to know how to drive, so with a working vehicle, the Sykos could always outrun them if they needed to. Unless, of course, they ran into another ambush. The Infecteds were getting good at that.
The other thing she liked about it was the cushy leather seat that held her like a lover’s hug. She remembered those, from early days with Mark. She had liked them then, and loved him. Did she still? She couldn’t say for sure, and with an amped-up psycho brain, it was no time to make such calculations.
Still, with her thoughts traveling down such avenues, she remembered something else from those days. Not at home, though—at the lab. She had never loved Elliott, not that way, but they’d been close. Mostly, what they had shared was awe. They were exploring the human brain and doing so in ways no one else ever had. It was the ultimate inner space. Even the universe had boundaries, or so the astrophysicists said. She couldn’t quite grasp how that was possible—didn’t a boundary mean there was something on the other side?—but the brain was genuinely infinite territory. A dedicated neuroscientist could be many things, but bored was never one of them.
Still, when it came to adrenaline rushes, lab work paled compared to scrambling through a city of monsters with a license to kill. She didn’t think discovering an anomaly in a brain scan would ever again carry the thrill it once had.
The trip was short. Gary to Pasadena to Glencove to Wilbur—a tight circle in this suburban hellscape. Light took the first couple of blocks fast, to leave behind the Infecteds who had massed around the house where they’d found the car. They saw a few stragglers on the way, but the closer they came to the Sutter house, the more there were. While they drove, Sansome slammed fresh magazines into each M4—the last of their hundred-round double-drum magazines. That reminded Fallon of her Glocks, so she reloaded those.
Then they were back.
The Sutter place was on fire, as were several of its neighbors, but the flames hadn’t really taken a foothold yet. They danced around the roof, on the side opposite the two-car garage. Some shrubs flanking it on that side were ablaze, too, and possibly more problematic because they were pretty close to the wall. The house could have been any house on any street in the area, maybe any street in the Southwestern United States. It was well kept, the yard neatly landscaped and trimmed. A storybook house, if the story was set in middle-class middle America and was about a plague of brain-eaters.
Light stopped half a block away. No streetlights were working, but the glow from the flames and the Escalade’s headlights shone onto the Sutter driveway. Infecteds standing there glared at the Escalade, as if sensing fresh brains inside. Pybus’s hive-mind theory seemed sound—every Infected in sight had turned toward the Cadillac.
And the rest of them—citywide—know where we are. Someplace important to them.
“We have to get to that house,” she said.
“It’s going to be a fight,” Light replied.
“I’m ready,” Sansome said. “More than.”
Lilith yawned, stretched, and said, “Let’s get this done. I’m so tired.”
Fallon looked at the Infecteds again. They were coming down Wilbur toward the Sutter house, emerging from the yards of nearby homes. She had been thinking of herself as a scientist again, when what she needed was the heart of a warrior. A killer. She pulled the MEIADD from her pocket, placed it so the probes surrounded her paralimbic region, and turned it on.
The charge flowed through her, and she felt the effect almost immediately. Her bullet wound seemed like an insignificant detail, no more than a paper cut.
The Infecteds wanted to get between her and her goal? Let them try.
“Let’s go,” she said, throwing open her door. “I’m ready to kick some ass.”
Light stepped out of the SUV, favoring his left leg. The back passenger-side door opened, and Sansome extricated himself slowly, followed by Lilith. “I don’t see a meteor anywhere,” Light said.
“Where would you put a meteor if you had one?” Lilith asked.
Light shrugged. “Garage, maybe? Backyard?”
“Well, you can’t see either of those from the street, can you? Sometimes you psychos are fucking retarded.”
“Watch your step, girlie,” Light snapped. “Don’t think you’re indispensable.”
“We’re all indispensable,” Fallon said. The last thing she needed was for her Sykos to start in on each other. Everybody was exhausted, dispirited, and irritable. Herself included, and with her extra-psycho jolt, she could add impatient to the rest of it.
Lilith took Sansome’s big arm in her two small hands. “Fuck with me, Hank, and Joe will demolish your ass. Won’t you, Joe?”
“I don’t—” Sansome started to say.
Fallon cut him off. “Ignore them, Joe. We have real things to worry about.”
And they did.
The number of Infecteds they faced was nothing like it had been before the Hellfires. But there were more than twenty, maybe closer to thirty. They were milling around in the flickering firelight, so it was hard to get a solid count. More streamed toward the house from every direction, like ants drawn to a picnic lunch.
Like others they’d encountered in the neighborhood, some of these were armed. One woman in her late sixties carried a shovel that was almost her size and might have nearly matched her weight. A man wielded a chainsaw, but he hadn’t started it, reducing its intimidation factor considerably. Others were genuine threats: a guy holding a shotgun in a way that suggested he knew how to use it; a woman in a Western shirt, jeans, and boots with a revolver in each hand; a muscular man in a blood-spattered butcher’s apron slowly swinging a samurai sword to and fro.
Most of them were murmuring or snarling or outright chanting the now-familiar “ane-ja, ane-ja.”
“Three-round bursts,” Fallon said, rolling the safety to that position. “Conserve ammo.”
As the others followed suit, the man with the shotgun raised it, pressed the butt into his shoulder. Fallon took aim and squeezed the trigger. Her rounds went low, catching him midchest. He staggered and jerked his trigger. The shot flew high, over their heads. Fallon corrected her aim and fired again, and this time, his head shattered like a ripe melon dropped from ten stories up.
An Infected six or eight feet behind him got a faceful of blood and brain matter. She ran a finger down her fouled cheek, touched it to her tongue, made a face.
Samurai butcher lowered his head and charged. His gait was uneven, and more so when Light fired a burst into the top of his skull. Momentum carried him one more step before he sprawled forward, his sword hitting the street and spinning like the metallic pointer in a children’s game.
Annie Oakley fired her right-hand pistol, then lowered that and raised the other, arms swinging in rhythm like they were on a swivel. Her first shot spanged off the Escalade. Before she got another off, Lilith—having ignored Fallon’s order—opened up on her at full auto, stitching up the woman’s body from jeans to brow.
“Bursts, Lilith!” Fallon shouted. She swung her attention back to the Infecteds but sensed the one-finger salute the girl directed her way just the same.
The Sykos started forward again. Each fired bursts into the crowd—even Lilith—
thinning it with every pull of the trigger. With the most dangerous ones taken out early, the others posed little threat.
Or so it seemed.
Because before they could react, a scrawny guy in a Flaming Lips T-shirt snaked a small semiautomatic pistol from behind his back and opened fire. Sansome took a bullet in the fleshy part of his right thigh. He let out a moan, shook his leg, and put three rounds in Scrawny’s left eye.
Light mopped up, putting down the last two Infecteds with carefully placed bursts, then there was no one alive—or impersonating that state—between them and the garage. After Light made a quick tourniquet above the wound with one of the Infected’s belts, Sansome broke the lock on the double garage’s doors. While he did that, Fallon checked in with Book. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have here,” she said. “The place is on fire, and there are more Infecteds coming this way—it feels like every last one in the Valley is zeroing in on this place. Can you tell where the meteor is?”
“I wish I could, Fallon,” he said. “That’s the house. It’s there, somewhere. It went in, and it never came out. I can’t narrow it down any more than that.”
“I guess we’ll have a look around.” She was trying to sound more casual than she felt. She really wanted to get in there and kill some Infecteds. Some part of her mind rebelled against that idea—some part well away from the paralimbic cortex, no doubt—but it would lose the argument.
“Listen, Fallon,” Book said. “I have a chopper en route to you. It’ll lay down some covering fire, to keep the Infecteds away from the house while you’re inside, then track you to the basin so it can drop the containment pod, then land. You stay safe in there, and we’ll get you out.”
“I’m counting on it,” she said. “Watch if you want to. We’re going in.”
Sansome slid the door up in its tracks, and a light flickered on automatically. There was a car on the right side of the garage. A washer, dryer, and utility sink stood up against the back wall on the left. A workbench lined the side wall, tools mounted neatly on a pegboard above it. Underneath it were toys: a plastic tool set, a play kitchen with a pink plastic stove and refrigerator, a big bin full of Legos. Everything neat, everything in its place.
Except the chunks of rock on the floor. They were green, and seemed to almost shimmer in the dim glow. A grin spread across Lilith’s face, and she started toward them.
“Don’t, Lilith!” Fallon said. “If those are pieces of the meteor, we shouldn’t touch them. We don’t know anything yet about its composition, or what else it might have brought with it.”
“Dude, that’s fuckin’ Kryptonite!” Lilith said. “Don’t scientists watch movies?”
Fallon sighed. “You getting this, Book? Are we done?”
“Those are crumbs,” Book’s disembodied voice replied. “We need the whole cookie. The biggest piece of it, anyway. Keep looking.”
The scuff of shoes on the driveway alerted Fallon. She spun around. The drive had filled with Infecteds again, and there were more behind them, on the street, coming their way. Some of them started up with the “ain-ja” chant, and soon they were all repeating it.
“I don’t think they like us being here,” Fallon said, wondering just how far away that helicopter was.
“If they want us out,” Light said with a grim smile, “then I think we need to get in. The meteor’s got to be in there.”
Book was trying to keep up with so many screens, he wished he had more eyes. Two UAVs crisscrossed high over the city, sending back forward-looking infrared footage of the city streets. Fallon was right; the Infecteds were on the move. Every group he saw was headed east, toward her and the others.
He was also trying to watch what she saw, and to monitor the Apache’s gun camera. It was still a few miles from her location, but closing fast. The radio chatter from the chopper was nonstop, but he was barely listening—a lot of “roger” this and “copy” that, all of it meant for other ears than his. While Fallon was in the house, there wasn’t much it could do for her, but if Infecteds tried to surround the place, the chopper could strafe them, maybe unleash a couple more air-to-ground missiles if it came to that.
Her, he thought. I’m not even pretending to care about the others anymore. Is it the forced intimacy of watching essentially through her eyes, hearing her every utterance, her breathing, even, in rare moments of quiet, the rush of blood through her veins?
Whatever. I’m not analyzing anything I’m not paid to. All I know is that I desperately want her to come out of there in one piece. Whatever happens then happens.
The video coming in from the Apache was infrared, like that of the drones. Until the sun came up, it was the only way to get decent images. People—regular uninfected human beings—came through as bright white objects moving through what seemed like a photographic negative landscape. But Infecteds burned even hotter—where enough of them were massed closely together, no detail could be seen beyond a big, white mass against a dark background.
Fallon was looking at Infecteds gathering around the driveway, just outside the garage. Then she snapped her head around so suddenly, peering into the garage, that he felt a wave of vertigo. She was saying something, but the radio chatter from the Apache had turned loud and anxious, so he swiveled to that screen just in time to see a . . . something . . . arcing out of the night, carrying enough heat of its own to show up as a very light grey on the screen.
He realized what it had to be at the same time one of the guys on the radio said it.
“RPG! Shit! We’re taking—”
A blinding flash, then the screen went black, the radio silent.
Where the hell did that come from? Book checked the locations of the UAVs, but they were too far out to help—one over downtown Phoenix and one farther northwest, toward Glendale.
Who would have rocket-propelled grenades in the city? His thoughts immediately ran to the Raiders. They’d had all kinds of military-style weapons and a profound hatred of government.
But hell, this was Phoenix. Hatred of government was practically the local pastime. Amassing weapons ran a close second. It could have been a drug cartel or a right-wing “Patriot” group or some kids who’d ransacked an abandoned armory for laughs.
All he knew for sure was that he’d have to interrupt whatever report Robbins was getting and make sure there was another bird on the way to Fallon, and fast.
“We’re coming for you,” he mouthed into the microphone.
He couldn’t tell if she heard, or not. It didn’t really matter.
She had other things on her mind at the moment.