Still of Night (Dead of Night 3)

He said that the station was switching to the Emergency Broadcast Network, but there was only dead air after that. I turned it off.

“It’ll come back on,” said Bunny, but Top just looked away out the window.

We could see the hotel and the sprawling convention center beyond it. There was a huge inflated rubber monster truck floating above the center, and signs everywhere for a monster truck convention. Dozens of the trucks were parked along the far side of the drive, and a few were sitting at haphazard angles in the street. One was burning.

Even over the roar of the SUV’s engine I could hear a cacophony of sounds that I’ve only ever heard in the streets of countries in the midst of a civil war. Sirens wailed like demons; gunshots pokked and banged; screams rose to the skies. There were explosions, too, and the crunching of cars into each other and into meat and bone. Columns of smoke rose from between buildings on both sides of the bay. The sky was filled with helicopters—news and military.

I was born and raised in Baltimore, but a while back I ran Echo Team out of a pier in Pacific Beach. So, for several years this was my town. I knew the streets, knew a lot of the people, knew the vibe of the place.

What I saw around me belonged to some alien world. Not my town. Not any town that could be mine.

We drove.

I saw the Marriott rear up in the distance.

Behind me I heard Top say, “She-e-e-e-eet.” Dragging it out.

The hotel was burning.

— 9 —

“What floor’s POTUS on?” I demanded, looking through a pair of binoculars Bunny handed me.

“Top floor,” she said, “executive suite.” There was real dread in her voice.

Half the windows on the top floor had been blown out, and a lot of the rest were pock-marked with black dots. Bullet holes. Gray smoke twisted its way out of three windows on the north tower.

“Tell me that’s not him,” said Bunny.

But Torres shook her head. “He’s in the south tower.”

The south looked intact.

“Get us close,” I told Torres, but she was already swinging us around onto a ramp that led to the valet parking entrance. The big glass doors were streaked with blood and two local cops were trying to hold it against a pack of screaming people. Some of those people had visible bites; others looked whole but terrified. They were all desperate to get in because a dozen of the infected were closing in on them.

Torres gripped the wheel. “Call it,” she said.

“Pick a side and own it,” I told her.

She actually smiled.

Then she revved the engine, spun the wheel and then stamped hard on the brakes so that the big SUV slewed around. The back end crunched into the infected and sent them flying. But I could hear a huge metallic crack and the vehicle tilted down on a broken ball joint, the jagged metal screeching along the asphalt. Bunny and Top were out before it stopped moving, their guns up, fingers slipping inside the trigger guards. I was right there with them.

There was no discussion of rules of engagement. We’d faced infected like these before. Not the same plague, but the same bioweapon design philosophy. There was no reasoning, no Geneva Convention, no mutual agreement of honorable warfare between us and the hungry dead. Their humanity had been stolen, stripped away from them, leaving them as mindless aggressors. They were no more human than a swarm of wasps, and far deadlier. Lucifer 113 was a serum transfer pathogen. Any bite would be a death sentence. Blood in our noses, eyes, mouths, or in an open wound would be as deadly as a bullet to our hearts. We knew all that.

And yet . . .

These were people. They weren’t dressed in battle dress uniforms. They weren’t extremists acting on a skewed ideology. These were housewives and homeless people, kids and business execs, tourists and conventioneers, vendors and bystanders. None of them had a gun or a rocket launcher.

It was going to break our hearts to pull those triggers. We all knew it. This was going to scar us forever.

We fired anyway.

Top tucked the stock of an M4 CQBR into his shoulder and fired, shifted, fired, shifted. Double-taps to the chest. His eyes were cold, and they didn’t blink, and he never missed. But then he jerked erect as every person he shot recovered from the impacts and kept coming forward.

“Head shots!” screamed Torres. “That’s the only thing that takes them down.”

“Fuck me,” murmured Top. He raised the barrel and put the next round through the forehead of a pretty woman in a torn yellow dress. She puddled down as if a light switch had been thrown. “Fuck me all to hell.”