Authors: Jonathan Maberry
The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:01 P.M.
THE OUTER COVERING of the Freedom Bell must have been a thin veneer of painted foil that covered hundreds of small ports. Deep inside the bell, in the actual metal of its body, the signal from the detonator ignited countless pockets of highly compressed gas. The whole surface of the bell disintegrated as thousands upon thousands of tiny glass darts were propelled outward with a whoosh of compressed air. No gunpowder, no nitrates: the bell itself was a giant air gun. Each dart was pointed at one end and had walls as thin as spun sugar. Half of them burst as they struck the foil layer on the outside of the bell and they discharged their contents harmlessly into the air. But the other half—maybe fifteen hundred darts in all—tore into the flesh of members of Congress and the press, stinging the hands and faces of tourists and local dignitaries and ambassadors from a dozen nations. I could feel the wave of them pass over me as I toppled to the ground with the Vice President’s wife under me. I had no idea if I’d been hit or not. Everyone was screaming. The VP’s wife shrieked in agony as we crashed onto the concrete floor.
I rolled off her and spun over into a kneeling shooter’s position. How the hell I’d held on to my gun is beyond me, but it was in my hand and I brought it up, fanning it around to find O’Brien, but he was nowhere in sight. All I could see were legs and torsos as people scattered and stumbled and fell. People kicked me as they ran and I had to scramble back from being trampled to death.
I could hear Grace’s voice, high and shrill, ordering the agents in the room to seal the doors. She knew, she understood what we were facing: all of those glass beads fired from the bell were filled with the plague. From her voice I could tell she was every bit as terrified as me.
The
Seif al Din
had been launched. After all we’d been through, we could lose it all right now if even one of the infected got out.
God
“Echo Team!” I roared, and suddenly Bunny was there, his face white as paste and splashed with blood.
“Are you hit?” he yelled.
“To hell with that—we have to seal the doors!”
“It’s already done!” I heard a voice yell with enormous force and then realized it was Brierly shouting through the amplification of my earjack. “The doors are sealed. I have teams converging to reinforce us from outside.”
The crowd hit the glass walls like a wave and some of the people closest to the doors had to be crushed by the sheer violent mass. There were screams of rage and terror, and pain.
“I have the VP’s wife,” I said. “But I can’t see the First Lady, Brierly, did she get out?”
“My assistant, Colby, and a team of agents got her to the safe room,” he said. “What the hell is going on, Ledger?”
“I’m on the back side of the podium. Find me,” I said. “Now!”
As I turned to start looking for him, Bunny said, “Boss, those darts ”
“I know. Keep an eye out. If anyone starts acting twitchy you take the shot.”
I could see how the weight of what we might have to do hurt the big young man, but he nodded. I looked around and saw Rudy still with the Girl Scouts. One of them was bleeding but from that distance I couldn’t tell if it was from the darts or the panic of the crush.
“Bunny, stay with the VP’s wife,” I ordered. “And keep your eyes open for Agent O’Brien. He’s our hostile. If you see him, kill him.” I gripped his sleeve. “Bunny did you see who Ollie was shooting at?”
“Negative. Everybody’s shooting,” he said, and as if to punctuate his comment a couple of rounds whined over his head and he flinched. The wild gunfire erupted again and the screams rose to a higher pitch.
“Just in case, don’t stand in front of him if he has a gun.”
Bunny turned to me and his eyes searched my face. “Copy that, boss.” He dropped down into a crouch over the Vice President’s wife, who was curled into a fetal ball, her face knotted with pain. Three Secret Service agents converged on him and together they formed a protective ring.
I got to my feet and saw Top and Ollie racing toward one of the doors. They were working together to prevent the crowds from getting out. Grace was already blocking the other door, her pistol out.
I saw Gus Dietrich bent over the governor of Pennsylvania, who was covered with blood. Dietrich was sheltering him with his own body and he had a smoking pistol in his hand. On the floor beside him was a Secret Service agent who had taken the blast of the glass darts full in the face. I met Dietrich’s eyes for a second and we exchanged the briefest of nods. I was conscious of the fact that several of the TV cameramen were still on their feet, their cameras mounted on their shoulders. How the hell they had kept their heads was beyond me, and I could only imagine how half the country was reacting to this. I hoped the networks had blacked it out.
I saw Brierly and grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him against the podium. There were no more gunshots but the air was still torn by screams and yells. We had to bend close and shout in each other’s ear.
“Why the hell did you shoot that woman?” he demanded, and I was conscious of the fact that his pistol was half turned toward me. I batted it aside.
“Andrea Lester was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer. She rigged her own bell to fire those darts.” I pulled him closer. “She’s working with El Mujahid, and your agent, O’Brien, is one of them. He set off the device.”
That hit him hard. “My
God
! We screened her, she was cleared to be here.”
“These guys must have had inside help. Trust no one right now.”
“Inside—?”
“No time for that. Listen to me and listen close. The darts from the Bell they contain the infectious agent Grace told you about. You know Ebola? This is a hundred times worse.” I pulled his ear to within an inch of my mouth. “If one single person gets out of this room we’ll have a worldwide plague on our hands. There is no cure.” I said that slowly, punctuating each word. “Believe it.”
Brierly’s face twisted into a mask of such utter horror that I thought he was going to scream. Then he ducked as bullets struck the plastic walls around the Liberty Bell. I turned and saw someone dressed like a Philly cop pointing his pistol at us. He fired again and I pushed Brierly out of the way and returned fire. The fake cop pitched back.
I said, “Contact your men outside. Nobody leaves this building. Nobody! We’re going to need troops and a class-A biohazard team.”
He licked his lips, blinking several times as the devastating news sank in, and then I saw the man behind the bureaucrat take over. “Christ, I hope you’re wrong about this, Ledger.”
“I wish I was,” I said. “But I’m not.”
Brierly tapped his mike and began rapping out a series of curt commands. He ordered that all teams seal and defend every exit in the building, and he reinforced that to include exits that led off from the offices and rooms beyond the STAFF ONLY. “Hummingbird is to be located and secured.” Hummingbird was the code name for the First Lady. Junebug was the VP’s wife. When he got confirmations he turned to me.
“Okay, the First Lady is in the safe room. The VP’s wife is being guarded by one of your men and three of my agents. We’ll move her to the safe room in a bit.” He looked marginally relieved.
“Brierly, you need to make sure everyone understands that we can’t let
anyone
out of here. Not even the President’s wife.”
He stared at me, torn by his responsibility to protect his charges and the greater reality of the plague. Finally he nodded and keyed his mike. “This is Director Linden Brierly. This is an all-stations alert. On presidential orders no one is to leave this building. No exceptions. Repeat and confirm.” All posts confirmed, but I could imagine a lot of them were either scratching their heads or getting really spooked. “You’d better be right about this.”
I left him to his job and went to try and find O’Brien but I couldn’t see him anywhere. The gunfire was dwindling now, just sporadic shots interspersed with yells and screams.
Movement to my right made me turn and Grace was there, with Top right behind her, both with guns drawn. Grace had blood on her clothes but when she saw my expression she glanced down at her clothes then met my eyes. She shook her head. “There was a young woman standing right in front of me,” she said, and left it there.
The gunfire stopped but the crowd was still surging back and forth like frightened animals in a pen.
“Grace we have to calm these people down!”
“I’m on it,” she said and spun off, calling to Top and Dietrich and soon they were moving like bulls through the crowd, shoving people back, yelling orders to everyone, grabbing Secret Service agents and putting them to work. Skip Tyler was near the back wall, reloading his gun.
“Skip,” I said as I rushed over, “help me find O’Brien.”
“The red-haired guy? He went through there a second ago.” He pointed to the STAFF ONLY door that was tucked into a corner. We raced over but the door was locked from the other side.
“You sure he went this way?”
“Yeah, him and Ollie followed a whole bunch of Secret Service agents who were hustling the First Lady into the safe room.” He looked confused. “That was the protocol, right?”
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled and kicked the door in. “Skip, guard this door. Get Grace or Top to give me some backup, but nobody else gets in. You hear me? Nobody. I’m counting on you to hold this line.”
The young sailor gave me a serious nod and took up a defensive stance. “You got it, Captain.”
I ran through the doorway.
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker
GAULT OPENED A slit in a wall panel and peered through it and almost gasped. Amirah was not five feet from him. Below her the nurses had nearly completed the injections.
He steeled himself and aimed his pistol through the gap and put the red dot of his laser, light as a whisper, on Amirah’s back, right between her shoulders. One shot from this distance would punch through her spine, tear through her heart, and burst from between her breasts to leave a gaping red hole the size of a golf ball. One flex of his finger and the traitorous bitch would be dead. He could do it. He knew he could.
Damn you, Amirah,
he said, and without meaning to he mentally added,
my love.
Tears jeweled his vision, warping her with prismatic distortion. The barrel of the pistol wavered. His assault team would be entering the cave any moment and Toys would lead them here. Gault shivered, partly at the thought of the firestorm Captain Zeller would be unleashing here in the Bunker, and partly at the thought of Toys’s transformation. Had his assistant actually changed that much or had Gault been blind all these years to the scorpion he kept by his side?
The seconds ticked away. Soon the whole Bunker would be a hell of bullets and blood. Soon everyone would be dead. Amirah, too, whether he killed her himself or not. His orders to Zeller had been specific. Kill everyone, no exceptions.
Amirah.
God.
Tears broke and rolled down his cheeks and before he could stop it a single, heartbroken sob escaped his throat. He saw Amirah stiffen, but she did not turn, and Gault forced his hands to steady, to hold the red pinprick of the laser sight on her back.
Be a fucking man,
he snarled inwardly.
Amirah.
And then she spoke.
“Sebastian,” she said.
Amirah turned without haste to face him. Her head was bowed, looking down to see the red laser dot on her chest, wavering right over her heart. She raised her head slowly.
Gault felt a cold hand reach into his own chest and squeeze his heart to a tiny block of ice. Amirah’s eyes were wide and glassy, bright with fever. She reached a hand up to the front of her
chadri,
gathered the black cloth in her fingers, and slowly pulled the scarf down to reveal her smiling mouth. Her lovely olive skin had paled to a sickly sand color, almost gray, and her full lips were stained with fresh blood.
“Sebastian,” she said softly as her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl of vicious animal hunger.
“My God.” Gault recoiled in horror. “What have you
done
?”
Amirah advanced toward the wall and even through the narrow opening of the observation slit he could smell her. A fetid, rotting-meat stink that rolled off her like the perfume of hell.
“Seif al Din,”
she whispered, leaning to peer in through the slit.
“You’re infected!” His gun hand was shaking so bad that he almost dropped the weapon. Sweat burst from his pores and his pulse snapped like firecrackers. “What have you done?” he asked again in a terrified whisper.
She shook her head, still smiling. “No, Sebastian, I’m not infected. I’m
reborn.
I’m more alive now than I ever imagined.”
“This will kill you!”
She shook her head again. “The pathogen is no longer fatal I’ve perfected it. You only saw Generation Seven.” She giggled. “That one scared you, Sebastian. You almost screamed like a woman.” Amirah wiped drool from her lips. “By now my lovely El Mujahid should have launched Generation Ten on the American people. They will be dying soon, Sebastian. All of them.
Seif al Din
is so quick.” She snapped her fingers in front of the slot and Gault jumped.
“Generation Ten? You’re insane!”
“I’m immortal,” she countered. “You see we had a breakthrough, Sebastian. We’ve been working so hard for so long, and you thought we were plodding along with Generation Three. But, oh Generation Ten is immediate. The body reanimates immediately. No lag time, no time to quarantine the infected. Generation Ten is the perfect plague.”
“Perfect?” The word was like bile in his mouth.
She ignored him, totally rapt by her discoveries. “But we went further still. Generation Eleven was a disappointment, but, oh Generation
Twelve
!” She drew the word out, filling it with wonder and with threat. “We broke through into an entirely new area of science. It’s what I’ve been laboring on for the last year while you left me here in this bunker. The killer pathogen was developed to Generation Ten before you even knew of the second generation.” She laughed at the look of shocked hurt on his face. “We had the plague but we couldn’t use it until we had the cure. And now Oh, Sebastian, it’s a fire in my blood! I can feel it moving through me.”
“You used it on yourself! You’ve turned yourself into one of those damned monsters ”
“Do I look like a monster?” she said. She stepped back from the slot and cupped her breasts through her robes. “Do you think I’m a monster, Sebastian?”
“God ”
Amirah’s face instantly changed and she whipped her hands away from her breasts and slapped them against the wall on either side of the slot. It was like an entirely different personality had shoved itself into place behind her dark eyes. “God? How dare you even mention Him! Your god is money, you worthless piece of shit.”
Gault recoiled and raised the pistol.
“You don’t even understand what it means to
worship
God. You couldn’t know, Sebastian, what it feels like to feel Him in every thought, every breath, to hear His words flowing over the desert sands. You pretended to read the writings of the Prophet to fool El Mujahid, but you lacked even the depth of understanding to let those words enter your soul! You think you made me into your whore? Do you think that I would truly betray my husband, my people, my
faith,
for you?” She spat at him and he dodged away, terrified of what might be in that sputum. He swung the pistol up and put the dot of the laser sight on her forehead where it glowed like an Indian
bindhi.
“I loved you,” he said weakly. And then his mind replayed those words and he realized that he had said “loved,” not “love.” It nearly broke him. In his mind’s eye he saw himself turning away from her and bringing the barrel of his pistol up to his own temple. Better to snuff out that loss than endure its absence.
But although his hands trembled the gun did not move.
Amirah ignored it. “Have you figured it out yet? You must have or why else would you be here, Sebastian?” She was using his name like a whip and each time it stung him. “You think you found us, but we had been looking for you for years. Not specifically you—you’re just not that important—no, we were looking for any faithless greedy dog who had the resources you have. It was so easy!” She laughed and shook her head, delighting in the pain she caused him. “It was so easy to lure you with covert hints through your network of spies, to draw you to us step by step, to stage things so that you always felt that you were in control when all the time this was a plan my husband and I had made. Yes my
husband
. El Mujahid, the greatest of God’s warriors on Earth. A true soldier of the Faith, a man who lives the words of the Prophet every minute of every day.”
“But you we ”
She spat again, but this time on the floor. “What? We
made love
? Is that what you were going to say?” Her voice made the words intensely ugly. “I’m not a man, Sebastian. I can’t go into battle with guns and knives like my husband and his soldiers. I’m a woman and I am forced to use other weapons no matter how utterly disgusting and humiliating it has been to open my body to you.”
“No,” Gault snapped back, anger flaring. “I know you loved me. I
know.
”
He saw the mad look in her eyes flicker and for a second that other personality, the dreamy one, seemed to drift back. And Gault knew—knew for sure—that he saw the fires of love still there. Or maybe it was only the embers, for in the next moment the hard and murderous personality reemerged.
“Each day I get down on my knees to beg forgiveness from Allah for what I have done, even though it is His will and serves His ends. You made me a whore in the eyes of God, Sebastian. How many deaths does that earn you?”
Behind Amirah there was a strange sound. The gathered scientists and technicians were all jabbering loudly, some in shocked protest, others in fury. Amirah stepped back to allow Gault to see what was happening.
“They think we have an antidote,” she said softly as below more than two thirds of the crowd were sinking down to their knees or collapsing onto tables. “They think we are all safe from
Seif al Din
.”
“What have you done?”
She turned to him. “I gave my best people—a few fighters, a few scientists—Generation Twelve. Like me.” She raised her arm and pulled back her sleeve to show the needle mark on her arm. From the dark pinprick black lines of infection radiated out like a dark spider-web.
“You’ve killed your own people.”
“Oh no not all. The rest of them were given Generation Ten, and soon I’ll open the Bunker doors and they’ll spread out across Arabia like the plague they are. The Great Satan does not have enough bullets to stop the waves of them that will come.”
“You’re insane! You’ve doomed us all.”
But Amirah shook her head. “No Generation Twelve is different. We don’t die like they do. We
ascend.
I’ve already ascended. I died without dying, Sebastian, but I suffered no brain death, no loss of brain or motor function, no loss of intellect. I am me, Amirah, scientist, wife of El Mujahid, loyal handmaiden to Allah, a servant of the word of the Prophet but now I cannot ever die. I’ve been reborn, you see.
Seif al Din
has cut through me like a purifying scythe. My sins, my earthly attachments have been carved away by the Sword of the Faithful. What remains is pure. What remains is the instrument of God on Earth.”
“Oh Amirah my princess,” Gault murmured, tears cascading down his cheeks. “What have you done? What have you done ”
“Beginning today thousands of doses of Generation Twelve will be sent from here to those fighters who have proven their faith. Once they have ascended they will share the gift with their families and their most trusted friends, and then we will sit back and watch the rest of the godless world devour itself!”
“I won’t let you!”
Amirah reached out to grasp the lip of the observation slit. She pulled herself close and whispered like a child conveying a great secret. “I know everything about the Bunker, Sebastian.
Everything
. I know all your secrets.”
Gault stared at her, puzzled, and then he heard the slow scuff of shambling feet in the darkness of the corridor behind him.