CHAPTER 33

The fires were getting worse. All the smoke was making it hard to breathe, and even harder to see. Pilar struggled through the worst of it with her shirt pulled up over her mouth and nose, slowly but surely working her way up to the Lido Deck. She’d been hearing gunfire, a lot of it, and explosions, too, and she was afraid she knew what that meant.

She’d run out of time.

Still, she had no idea if the senator was dead or not, and she had to have that confirmation. Get it or don’t bother coming home.

But the smoke was making it hard to find her way and she didn’t even see the zombie until she ran into him. It was a man of about twenty, tall and skinny with a full sleeve of tattoos on his right arm, most of which was caked with dried blood. Part of his foot was mangled; otherwise, he might have been faster. As it was, Pilar had time to get behind him and shove him hard into the wall. His face hit the metal and he bounced off, tumbling to the floor.

She’d used up all her ammunition up on the bridge, and without a weapon couldn’t afford to stay and fight with this zombie, especially as there were likely to more of them. With all the noise up on deck, they’d almost certainly be flocking her way.

Pilar left the man flailing on the ground, still trying to get at her, even though hitting the wall had shattered his teeth, and ran for a nearby flight of stairs.

They led up to the pool area, where the gunfire was starting to slack off.

She crawled behind a line of chaise longues to a small bar, careful to keep her head down. What she saw both surprised and thrilled her. A pair of black helicopters were circling overhead as though searching for somebody. There were bodies everywhere. Hundreds of zombies lay chewed to rags by automatic gunfire, and here and there amid the bloody piles of mangled bodies lay soldiers in black Nomex flight suits. There were no insignia on any of the uniforms, but Pilar didn’t need to see any to know with whom she was dealing. These men were either SEALs or Green Berets, possibly Delta Force. She’d seen their kind, always equipped with the most amazing weapons, working clandestine raids in Ciudad Juarez. They hit hard and fast and were always deadly.

Except that today didn’t seem to be their day.

There were three still alive that she could see. They were moving along the deck above her, covering each other as they fell back one at a time toward the front of the ship. There was a helicopter landing pad just in front of and below the bridge. Perhaps they were headed there for extraction.

They didn’t make it far though. As she watched, a wave of zombies poured out of a doorway directly in front of the soldiers. Even with their automatic weapons, they never stood a chance. Two of the men were knocked down and swarmed, while the third fell over the railing and landed on the deck next to the pool directly across from her.

She saw him roll over onto his back, staring up at the balcony where his fellow soldiers were dying, and it was then she recognized him. It was the Secret Service agent from the Washington Hilton, the one who’d stopped the assassination. He was tenacious, that one.

But the zombies weren’t done with him. Several of them jumped over the railing, and the agent was forced to scramble out of the way as they fell all around him.

He got up and ran.

They charged after him, and the next instant he disappeared into a darkened corridor, twenty of them right on his heels.

And then there were none, she thought. Very nice.

She scanned the carnage left over from the botched raid, her gaze finally settling on one of the soldiers. He was facedown in a pool of blood, the back of his uniform torn open and his body shredded. But his weapon was intact, and so too were the extra magazines he carried.

One of the helicopters was still circling, and she waited for it to pass overhead and orbit away from her. When it did, she ran over to the body and took his rifle, an imposing-looking M4 carbine with a collapsible stock. The best money could buy, she noticed. These guys had to be Delta Force.

“Too bad it didn’t do you any good,” she said.

She went through the man’s magazine pouches, pulling out as many as she could carry. She was stuffing them in her pockets when she heard a woman yelling at the helicopter from across the pool.

Pilar’s mouth fell open. It was Senator Sutton. Right there in front of her.

“Hey!” Sutton yelled, waving her arms at the helicopters. “Hey, down here!”

Pilar glanced up at the circling helicopters. They were starting to come back around. She had no idea if the gun crews had seen the senator yet, but it didn’t really matter. Pilar only had a few seconds to move. All the noise Sutton was making was drawing a crowd, and zombies were already running toward her from the deck above them.

Pilar raised the rifle, stepped over the dead soldier, and started firing.

Sutton must have seen the movement out of the corner of her eye, for she gasped at the sight of Pilar and ran inside a video arcade just as the bullets started flying.

“Damn it!” Pilar said.

She started after Sutton, who was headed for the stairs at the back of the arcade. If she managed to get down those steps she would find herself in a junction from which she could take any number of paths through the ship. That couldn’t happen.

Pilar sprinted after her, gaining on the older woman almost immediately.

Just outside the doors of the arcade Pilar slowed, raised her rifle, and sighted in on the senator’s back. It was a clear shot, a kill shot, but before she could pull the trigger, the senator turned and fired a spray of bullets from a pistol. Several of her shots hit the video game next to Pilar and exploded sparks all over her.

Pilar ducked behind the doorframe.

Holy crap, she thought. Where’d she get a pistol?

Pilar turned, pointed the rifle toward the stairs, and backed away from the doorframe so she could put some rounds down range as soon as she got a glimpse of the senator. But what she saw was the senator’s shadow sinking down the stairs. She didn’t have a shot.

And she was running out of time. The zombies that had attacked the soldiers above her were coming off the stairs now, and they were running right for her.

More were coming out of the café next to the video arcade.

For a moment, Pilar thought of charging down the stairs after the senator, but she knew she’d never reach them in time. She looked behind her and saw a gap in the zombies that would take her around the far side of the pool.

There were stairs there.

She’d have to go that way. It was her only chance of cornering the senator, even if she had to do it down there in all that smoke.

And what other choice did she have, really? She had been put on a set of rails by decisions—her own and those of others—long ago, and those rails led inexorably to this end. Kill Senator Rachel Sutton or die herself. There was no other option.

Not for her anyway.

And so she ran.