“Who are you?” he demanded, edging backward, reaching into a pocket of his expensive suit.
“I’m Joe fucking Ledger,” I said, and blew off his left kneecap. His scream was enormous, and he fell into a twitching, thrashing heap.
I don’t know why I announced my name. There was no way for me to think he’d know it. Maybe it was because this fight had become so personal. I didn’t want these pricks to think this was all cops and robbers. This was people.
He stared up at me in abject horror.
And he mouthed my name.
“L-Ledger … oh my God.”
Despite the pain, he managed to pull a little .25 Raven Arms pistol out of his pocket. Tried to point it at me.
I shot him through the elbow, and the gun thumped to the floor.
The man screamed.
And screamed.
I knelt in front of him and put the hot barrel of my gun into his crotch.
“Stop screaming,” I said. I only had to say it once. His screams ended on a strangled note of new fear. He stared bug-eyed at me, his olive complexion turning a greasy gray-green.
“Who are you?” I asked. I did not ask nicely.
“F-f-fuck you.”
“Wrong answer,” I said, and shifted the pistol. I blew his other kneecap off. “Try again.”
He screamed and screamed until I used my free hand to slap the screams from his mouth. Then he started crying. This time I placed the barrel against his temple while I picked his pocket, flipped open his wallet, and read the name on his driver’s license.
“Michael Stefan Pharos, M.D.,” I said.
Ah … now that was a name I’d heard before.
I leaned close. “Listen to me, shitheels, we both know this is over for you. Question is how you want it to end. Alive, with good doctors fixing your parts and lawyers trying to keep you alive for a long time. Or do I fuck you up right now so badly that your last hours are going to be a screaming hell? You think you’re in pain now? Look into my eyes, Doctor Pharos. Look at me and tell me if you think there are any limits to what I am willing to do to you. If you know who I am, then you know you are in the wrong place with the wrong damn person.”
His eyes were huge and filled with absolute understanding.
“You need to tell me right now,” I said.
“T-tell you what?” he gasped.
“Reset codes. Tell me how to stop Regis and Solomon.”
He wanted to lie. We both knew it. Even now, with three gunshot wounds, with shock setting in, with his blood pooling around him, he wanted to lie. But you can only lie when you think you have a chance to get away with it. The mistake he made was doing what I told him to do. He looked into my eyes.
He saw what I wanted him to see. The killer, crouched there, hungering to take him into that world of endless cold. He knew that death wouldn’t be his ticket out any more than lies would.
“The … King…” he said. “The last … King.”
I leaned so close that our faces touched. A kind of intimacy that only exists there at the edge of sanity.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Very softly.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-three
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 4:09 P.M.
Top Sims rose from behind a boulder and aimed his pistol at the Blue Diamond guard. He said nothing. He was not the kind of man who needed to mark an event of this kind with a comment. A joke. A smart-ass witticism. They did that in movies. Real soldiers just pulled the trigger.
He shot the guard in the back. One, two. The bullet punched in between the shoulder blades, shattering the spine, severing the spinal cord, bursting the heart. The man was dead before he knew he was in threat. Before the body could even react to the loss of central nerve conduction, Top turned and put another two rounds into the second guard, who was smoking a cigarette and looking out at the slanting rain.
Brian Botley saw Top’s face as he fired those shots. And he saw no flicker of emotion.
Jesus, he thought.
Then he tightened up his own resolve and followed Top over the rails and onto the porch.
Bunny was somewhere on the far side of the inn.
He heard the big man’s voice in his earbud.
“Green Giant to Sergeant Rock. Three down, no problems.”
“Copy that. Two on the deck here.”
“Ready to kick some doors and make some noise?”
Top smiled then. “Yes, I am, Farm Boy. Yes, I damn well am.”
He turned to Brian. “You’re up, Hotzone.”
Brian nodded and held up his sequential detonator. “Fire in the hole.”
He pressed the trigger, and the finger pier exploded in a fireball. The force lifted the speedboat out of the water, turned it over, and smashed it down on the rocks.
Three seconds later, the doors of the inn banged open, and Blue Diamond security operatives came pouring out, weapons ready.
Brian clicked the button again.
And again.
And again.
With each click, one of the charges planted beneath the decking exploded. Huge fingers of flame and smoke reached for the men of Blue Diamond and crushed them in fiery fists.
While the blasts were still rolling outward toward the mainland, Top, Bunny, and Brian began firing into the smoke.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-four
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 4:09 P.M.
Lydia and Boy fired and dodged, fired and dodged as the fight raged around them. And in a freak moment of combat synchronicity, both guns locked empty at the same moment.
Instantly, Lydia was up and running straight at the Cambodian woman, even as they both fished for fresh magazines. Out of the corner of her eyes, Lydia saw something, though, that nearly stopped her midstride. Someone stood in the doorway to Circe’s bedroom. Bloody, gasping, holding a chair as he swung and smashed at Kingsmen. The killers were not shooting. They clearly wanted to take Circe alive, and they had the numbers to overwhelm the sole defender.
Lydia slapped the magazine home and threw it even as she bellowed out a name.
“Toys!”
He looked up to see the pistol pinwheeling through the air toward him. One of the Kingsmen made a grab for it, but Toys kicked him in the groin and then snatched the weapon out of the air. That was all Lydia saw before Boy tackled her and drove her down onto the floor.
The fight was immediately intense.
The Cambodian woman was lethally quick and much stronger than she looked. The wiry kind of strength that is always surprising. Always dangerous.
Boy hit her in the face with a palm heel, kneed her in the crotch with a bony knee, head-butted her, and tried to spoon her eyes out with hard thumbnails. All of it in a tumbled tangle of two frenzied seconds.
Lydia knew she was in trouble.
This woman was so god-awful fast.
The kind of person who had the power of confidence because she’d probably won every important fight she’d been in.
The blows kept coming from every direction.
If she tried to defend herself, Lydia knew that the Cambodian woman would simply dismantle her. There are times when a defense is no defense at all.
So Lydia said, “Fuck it.”
And attacked.
She slapped her palms together like a diver and thrust them up between the pummeling arms. Then she whipped her arms apart and grabbed Boy’s biceps. At the same time she bucked her hips up to shove Boy forward and flopped sideways to roll along the inside of the woman’s thigh. The leverage swatted Boy onto the floor, and Lydia immediately hip-checked into the woman’s crotch. Lydia wore a full equipment belt, and even though Boy did not have testicles, everyone is vulnerable to a sudden, harsh assault in the groin.
“Like head-butts bitch?” snarled Lydia, and thrust her head between bo
th sets of struggling arms, aiming to explode the woman’s nose.
But Boy was too good a fighter to become helpless because of pain and surprise. She twisted her face and took the blow on the point of her cheekbone. It hurt, but it hurt Lydia more. She reeled back, and the world began whirling around her.
Boy tore her arms free and hit Lydia in the face and chest and throat.
And then Lydia was falling backward toward a great darkness that reached up to take her.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-five
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 4:11 P.M.
Doctor Pharos told me where to find the King.
The last King.
The only King.
He told me that the King had the codes. And the password.
Toward the end, he begged to tell me everything he knew. Everything.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think he was so completely forthcoming because I’d shot him or because of the threats I made. Sure, that was a part of it. A big part.
No, there was something else.
When he spoke about the King, his face was twisted into a mask of horror and disgust. And hatred.
Something else, too. Hurt, maybe? Hard to tell, but my gut told me that was it. All of those emotions wrapped up into a tangle of contempt that allowed Pharos to betray this man.
Who Pharos was and what his part in all this was, I had no idea. That was for later, if there was a later.
For now, all that mattered is that he told me where I could find the last of the Seven Kings.
I stood up and stepped back from him. He was a broken doll on the floor. Blood still flowed from the bullet wounds in knees and elbow. I was tempted to end it for him there, to pop one last cap and say adios.
Didn’t, though.
Instead, I left him there to bleed.
If he was still alive when I was done, maybe we’d explore a first-aid option.
Maybe.
“Come on,” I said to Ghost, and we went running. The building shuddered with explosions, and outside I heard men shouting and guns firing. The soundtrack of war. Maybe the last movement in the symphony of the American apocalypse.
Too soon to tell.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-six
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 4:11 P.M.
Alexander Chismer—Toys to everyone who knew him—was a monster, and he knew it. A murderer and enabler of murderers. A killer with so many deaths on his conscience that he could not name all of his victims.
Had the Kingsmen’s bullets killed him, he would have accepted it as justice. Ironic, but just.
Had the shattered glass of the window cut him to pieces and left him bloodless on the floor, he would have thought it equally just.
Instead, he was alive.
Behind him, Circe O’Tree-Sanchez lay in her bed. Junie Flynn knelt next to her. Unarmed, lacerated, bleeding, terrified.
In front of him, a knot of Kingsmen rushed forward to take Circe. Behind them stood the impossible figure of Father Nicodemus. Toys had heard enough stories to know what kinds of things the priest would want to do with the woman and her child.
Death was the kindest gift Nicodemus ever bestowed on his victims. Being alive and in his custody was far, far worse.
Toys knew all of this.
Just as he knew that he was the worst kind of person to stand between Nicodemus and his prey. Hugo said that a valiant soul could do it, but he was probably joking.
Toys’s soul was as sullied and black as it was possible for a human soul to be.
When Lydia threw the gun, he considered letting it pass over his head. He considered grabbing it and giving it to Junie.
He even considered grabbing it and turning it on the two women. Killing them rather than letting them discover how much worse being alive could be.
He watched his hand rise toward the gun, not sure if he would slap it away or catch it. The world seemed to have slowed, to become unreal.
The plastic grips of the pistol handle smacked into his palm. Real and immediate. The weight of it pushed his hand down.
The Kingsmen came at him.
Nicodemus laughed aloud with a sound like screaming cats.
And then there was the thunder of gunfire. The glitter of a spent cartridge flying up and away out of sight. The thud of the handle punching back into his palm. The shiver of shock running up his arm.
He saw the face of a Kingsman break apart three feet in front of him.
Another bang. A chest burst open and red flowers filled the air.
Toys did not know how many bullets were in that gun. He did not consciously aim and fire. But his finger tightened and his arm shifted, and with every shot a Kingsman died.
Every.
Single.
Shot.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-seven
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 4:13 P.M.
I was expecting a long elevator ride to a hidden dungeon far below the inn. I was expecting an airlock or some kind of high-tech security wizardry to bar my way.
Instead, when I followed Pharos’s directions I found a big set of wooden doors.
The sons of bitches weren’t even locked.
I turned the handle, took a breath, kicked the door, and leaped into the room.
Big room. Wall covered with TV monitors. Hospital bed in the center of the room. Couple of chairs. Five people.
Two of the Blue Diamond thugs right inside the door.
A pair of guys who looked like grad students.
And a wreck of a man in a hospital bed.
On the TV screens I could see bridges burning. I could see ships sinking. Columns of smoke rising from the hearts of cities. Massive multicar pileups on highways. Planes falling from the skies.
I saw what the King saw.
Regis and Solomon at work.
When I entered the room, the man in the bed was watching the screens and smiling.
I knew immediately that he was the last of the Seven Kings.
A withered, broken scrap of a man.
This was what the Seven Kings had become? A dying man and his stooges.
I raised my gun and pointed it at the King.
“Nobody fucking move!”
Everyone fucking moved.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-eight
UC San Diego Medical Center
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, California
April 1, 4:13 P.M.
Lydia hit the floor hard. She could barely see through the bursting white lights in her eyes. She saw Boy raise a foot to stamp and forced herself to turn. The kick clipped her hip but struck only the floor. Lydia rolled into the leg as hard as she could and sent the Cambodian flying face-forward.
The woman caught herself with a skillful front fall and then stabbed out with a counterkick to Lydia, catching her midthigh. Lydia rolled away and got to toes and fingertips and started to rise, but it was a fake; the Cambodian jumped high to intercept, and Lydia flattened and dove low, catching her around the thighs and bearing her down. It made the woman sit down hard on her tailbone. The shock snapped the woman’s teeth together and dimmed the lights in her eyes.
It was Lydia’s doorway back into the world. She fell on her side and chop-kicked the woman in the face, knocking her onto her back. This time the woman fell badly, rapping her head on the ground. Lydia reached over and clawed her way atop the Cambodian. She shimmied forward and dropped her knees onto the woman’s biceps, trapping both arms.
Lydia could have wasted time pummeling her. She could have broken her own hands by hammering at the woman’s face with her fists. But Lydia wasn’t stupid. That kind of fighting is for ring competition, where there are rules. Instead, Lydia grabbed the woman’s ears, used them to pick her head up and them slam it b
ack down. Then she slapped her left palm flat over Boy’s face, drew back her right hand, folded it into a half fist, and punched down with her secondary knuckles. Once, twice. A third time.
With each blow, the shape of Boy’s throat changed.
After the last punch, there was no useful shape left to it.
“Besa mi culo, puto,” she snarled and then spat into Boy’s face.
Gasping, nearly spent, Lydia toppled off of the thrashing, dying woman.
Immediately, something brushed her face, and she swung a punch, but her knuckles brushed something soft, and a dark blur passed above her. She gaped at it.
Banshee. Covered in blood, foam flecking her muzzle, racing for a fresh kill.
Lydia turned to see that behind the hound lay a dozen bodies that had been torn to red ruin.
Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-nine
Tanglewood Island
Pierce County, Washington
April 1, 4:15 P.M.
The two Blue Diamond guys were the closest. They tried rushing me while going for their guns at the same time. I shot one, but the other one body-blocked the guy I shot, so they collided into me. We all hit the edge of the doorway. Ghost went after the second security thug, got his titanium teeth locked into the guy’s wrist, and pulled him down for some fun and games on the floor.
That left the grad students. I wasn’t sure what or who they were. I was hoping they were computer nerds or part of the tech team. But from the enthusiastic way they rushed me, I knew that wasn’t it.
The guard I’d shot had a death grip on my gun arm, and as he fell his two-hundred-plus pounds tore the Sig Sauer from my hand. I had to let it go or fall with him. I let it go and danced sideways as the first of the grad students slashed at me with a double-edge British commando dagger that he produced from God knows where. The thing was razor-sharp and cut through the top shoulder strap of my Kevlar.
I backpedaled and then jumped back as he darted in, quick as a cat, with a second and third slash. The little bastard was good. In and out.
The other kid began circling to my right, and as he did so he snapped his arms toward the floor, releasing a pair of weapons that fell right into his hand. Not knives. Scalpels.