I didn’t remember ever getting a meeting with Tito Gantz. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said you were crazy, but I knew what I’d just remembered was real. It was real. It happened, then it got wiped out….
“Wait,” I said. The train kept moving.
“Wait,” I said again. “This is Flax. I changed my mind. I want to change my destination.”
“State your override destination,” the computer said. I thought for a second. My heart rate was starting to pick up again, cutting through the fog.
“Voodoo Proper,” I said. “Heinlein Industries.”
“Destination is blocked,” the computer said. “Would you like to choose another?”
“Piece of shit …”
“Would you like to choose ano—”
“Alto Do Mundo Station,” I said, pointing out the window. “There. Pull in there.”
The car veered so suddenly, I almost lost my footing. It went down into the nearest tunnel and picked up speed.
I chewed the inside of my lip until I tasted blood. I wanted to bite something. I wanted to sink my teeth into something so bad, I wondered if maybe I had turned. Maybe the inhibitor died, and I was one of them and I didn’t even know it.
The train evened out and air whooshed as it came out of the tunnel and into the station. Lights popped up outside the windows again and I saw a wall decorated with little, fancy colored tiles that spelled out the station name.
ALTO DO MUNDO CENTRAL STATION
As the platform flew past, I saw a few bodies facedown among the trash. A bench was knocked over on its back, and glass was scattered across the tiled floor. Black stains trailed along one walkway, and I saw spent shells. No revivors, though. The underground looked secure.
The train slowed, then stopped. The doors opened, and I drew my pistol and stepped out onto the platform. Voices echoed through the station from back up at street level, a dull roar over the pop of gunshots. The toe of my boot scattered shell casings that jingled off across the floor as I started to move toward the closest stairwell. There’d been a major fire fight down there as well.
ADM Station looked to me like some third-world thug’s palace. Even the stations I’d seen in what I’d call the good parts of town were nothing like it; before the fighting it must have looked like the inside of a fucking five-star hotel. Instead of pizza joints and food carts there were fancy restaurants, and bars. There was no graffiti, and the floor was tiled and shiny. There were green plants arranged to make the inside look like a park, and water ran down the walls at either end into a pair of big fountains. Right in the middle, under the huge vaulted ceiling, was a bronze statue of a huge, ripped dude with a giant globe on his back. It was hard to believe I was still in the same city.
The place had seen fighting, though. From the look of it, revivors must have pushed their way down to try to get in from underneath, then been forced back. There’d been a lot of gunfire, and blood, both human and revivor, ran across the stone-tile floor. Up ahead, divots were dug out of the sides of a fountain where a body lay facedown in the rubble. Glass from the storefronts had been blasted out and covered the floor. I counted more than twenty bodies before I got halfway across.
I didn’t see any sign of Singh or the others. Checking through the squad’s last orders, it looked like they were tracking their target using a GPS signal in one of their phones up in the penthouse. I punched in the ID and picked up the signal. According to the map, it was close, maybe half a block from where I was, but the signal strength put it high up above me.
Past the statue, I saw a wall of elevators and a big, fancy sign that said LOBBY ACCESS. The call lights were lit, so it looked like they were still running.
I punched up the closest one and the doors opened into a car big enough to hold fifty people. There was only one in there at the time, though. It was Ramirez, sitting on his ass, leaning into the corner of the elevator with a hole in his head. The mirrored wall behind him was shattered and specked with blood.
Stepping through broken glass, I leaned down and pulled his ID off his belt. It looked like the elevator only went to ground level. I hit the button and rode it up.
As it rose, I could hear the racket above get louder: gunfire, screaming, and someone yelling over a bullhorn. The doors opened onto a landing where all the gold, marble, and crystal was still in one piece, but across the lobby on the other side was the main entrance, and outside it was chaos.
The entryway was all bulletproof glass, scarred with gunshots where bodies lay slumped on the other side. It looked out over that huge, semicircular stone stairway I’d only ever seen from the other side, where bodies clashed in a huge, sprawling mass.
There were hundreds of revivors out there. They’d surged through the streets from all sides. The square was completely mobbed, and they pushed toward the building front where Stillwell had set up a makeshift military barricade. Bodies thrashed on the other side of a row of military trucks and a wall of soldiers holding up riot shields. Flood lamps shone down over the crowd as the revivors tried to break through, fingers clawing through gaps in the line. Shots cracked through the night air, but there were too many of them. Even as I watched, a group of revivors shoved their way through the gap in the shields and made a run for the line of vehicles. A turret opened up and an arm flipped back into the crowd in an explosion of gray meat. Across the square, another group managed to get over the trucks, and I saw a body throw itself against the glass before it was pounded with gunfire. A thick, black streak was smeared down the surface as it slumped to join the other bodies.
On the other side of the lobby was the main elevator hub, and I ran to it. At the far right end was an express that went up to the penthouse. According to the last reports, that’s where she’d be.
The doors had a security scanner. I put Ramirez’s ID to it and the light flashed.
“Ramirez, Edward,” the door said. “First-Class Citizen. First Sergeant. State the nature of your business.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“State the nature of the emer—”
“National security. Open the fuck up.”
Outside, more revivors had pushed through. One jumped over a fallen body, and when its coat opened, I saw black wiring bundled around a blue LCD readout. It pitched forward as automatic gunfire tracked across its back. It hit a pane of glass and began to go down onto the concrete. I saw the detonator flash in its hand.
“Open the doors!” I barked.
The blast shook the floor, and the glass panel exploded through the entryway on a blast of hot air as more bodies began to storm past the barricade. One of the vehicle-mounted turrets spun around and opened up, cutting two revivors in half as they approached the hole but it was no use. I saw more of them climb up the side of the vehicle and grab the gunner from behind. They were through.
The elevator doors opened, and as the jacks began to fill the lobby, I jumped in.
“Destination?” the car asked.
“Penthouse!”
Through the doors I saw another explosion go off, and there was a surge of screams as another turret opened up. More revivors had made it to the lobby and begun to scatter. Figures broke off in every direction. A stairwell door banged open and some of them crowded through. Others were heading in my direction, toward the elevators, and a bullet whined past my ear, punching into the glass behind me.
“Can you shut down all elevators but this one?” I asked the computer.
“I am unable to complete your req—”
“Just go!”
Bodies scrambled across the lobby toward me, while the soldiers fired after them. The last thing I saw before the doors slid shut was a strung-out-looking female with black gums breaking through the pack. I heard her body slam against the other side.
My gut dropped as the elevator launched like a rocket, and the number on the LCD above the door began to count up.
