“Joe?”
Grace’s voice in my earjack made me jump and I faded to one side and crouched down behind the open door of a mop closet, pistol aimed into the darkness.
“Joe where are you?”
“I’m inside the center,” I whispered. “O’Brien came in here with Ollie Brown. I’m following a blood trail but no sign of them yet. I could use some backup.”
“Top Sims is on his way in with Skip. I have two other agents on the door.”
“Good. What’s the situation outside?”
“It’s bad. We’re getting the crowd quieted down, but I think some of them are already infected. Several people are showing signs of sickness. I have our people going through the crowd and separating out anyone who was hit by those darts.”
“Grace if they start to turn ”
“I know, Joe,” she said in a voice that was hard but scared. We were both thinking about St. Michael’s, but this was much worse. Members of Congress were here, and the VP’s wife; and on both sides of the glass were TV cameras. “I called Church and he had the President order an immediate media blackout. Church said that the President has declared a state of emergency for the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Oh God!”
Through the mike I could hear a fresh wave of screams.
And then gunfire.
Then nothing as Grace’s link went dead.
“Grace ” I said into the silent link. I wanted to run back. I needed to go forward. I was totally torn.
I heard a muffled sound behind me and whirled, but it was one of the Secret Service agents standing in the shadow of an open doorway. I recognized him. Agent Colby, Brierly’s second in command. I could see a couple of other agents behind him.
“God, am I glad to see you. Is that the safe room? Is the First Lady okay?”
Colby took a step into the hallway and smiled.
But it wasn’t a smile.
His lips peeled back from his teeth and bloody drool dripped from his mouth. With a feral growl like a hunting cat Colby and the other agents rushed me.
Chapter One Hundred Ten
The Bunker
ABDUL STEPPED INTO the hall, his automatic rifle ready. He was happy to be away from the hall where all sense and reason seemed to have fled. Though he understood the plan El Mujahid and Amirah had devised he still thought it was insane. It did not fit with his understanding of the Koran; but there was nothing he could do about it. He knew enough about the Seif al Din to realize that Amirah was distributing two different versions of it, one to the general staff and another to the more valuable team members. Anah, Amirah’s assistant, had tried to give him a shot but he’d fended her off, not wanting any part of this.
He was almost happy when the alarms rang, warning of an intrusion at the rear hatch.
The monitors were offline but Abdul had a good idea what was happening. Gault was not fool enough to have come here alone. So Abdul sent a team of soldiers to the hatch to intercept whatever backup the infidel had brought with him. Now he was hurrying that way himself to take charge of the situation.
He switched off the safety and took a more comfortable grip on his weapon as he stepped through a portal from the side corridor to the one that led to the hatch.
Toys stepped out from behind a stack of crates and put the barrel of his pistol against the back of Abdul’s head.
“Shhhhh,” Toys said with a smile.
Chapter One Hundred Eleven
The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:05 P.M.
COLBY CAME AT me with incredible speed, reaching with hooked fingers, teeth snapping at me while he was still two yards away. Even with everything that had happened-everything that was still happening-it took me totally off guard. I brought my gun up but not in time as he leaped in and drove me back against the wall. The other agents were three steps behind him.
My back slammed into the wall and for a fragment of a second the thought I’m dead flashed through my mind; but even as I was thinking that my body was moving. Years of conditioning make the limbs move at the reflexive level, and it was all of those years of drills, of repetitive movements, that saved me. But it was so close.
As I hit the wall my hips turned to the left and I slammed the butt of my pistol into Colby’s temple. It made his mass turn with mine and we rolled down the wall together, turn after vertical turn, putting distance between us and the other walkers. When we hit the doorway we jolted to a stop and I rammed the barrel of the.45 into Colby’s mouth, and even as he bit down on it I pulled the trigger. The big hollow-point blew out the back of his head and punched a hole the size of a nickel through the forehead of the agent right behind him. Both of them were instantly dead, but the sudden drop of Colby’s body coupled with the locked teeth around the pistol jerked the weapon out of my hand.
I pushed myself away and dodged instantly to my left as a third walker lunged over the corpses of his fellows. His arms closed around empty space.
There were three more of them-four in all. The one who had jumped at me had fallen forward. He made a grab for my ankle but I rushed forward to meet the attack of the next closest walker.
Even as I closed the short six-foot distance I whipped the folding RRF knife from its pocket holster and with a flick snapped the blade into place. The motion took a fraction of a second and as the lead walker hit me I spun away like a ballet dancer but at the end of the pirouette I ducked low and slashed him across the back of the knee. The RRF was wickedly sharp and the creature’s tendons parted like old string. As he staggered and went down I shoved him toward the second walker and lunged past their colliding bodies and slammed into the third, using a hard palm at the end of a stiffened arm to drive him back; then I ducked under his outstretched arms, avoiding his snapping teeth, and came up behind him. I grabbed his hair with my left hand and slammed the point of the knife up into the sweet spot-the arched opening at the base of the skull. The blade pierced the spinal cord and the walker shuddered to a stop and instantly fell forward.
The walker who’d tried to grab me after I’d killed Colby was scuttling forward now, running at me low and fast. I used my knife arm to parry his reaching arms and sidestepped like a bullfighter, then brought the RRF up and over and down and buried the entire blade in the wind-gate, the soft spot at the top of the skull. I gave the blade a brutal half turn and yanked it up, sidestepping to avoid the arching spray of blood and brain tissue.
That left two.
The one I’d crippled was crawling along the floor toward me but the other was up and running at me. When he was two paces out I stepped in and to the side so that his mass missed me by half an inch. Again I changed my step into a pivot and came up behind him and tried for the sweet spot again, but the hair was greasy with gel and he slipped away with my blade stuck into the solid bone of his skull. His twist wrenched the handle out of my hand and it wasn’t worth fighting for, so I let it go and wrapped my arm around his throat and gave him a reverse hip throw. When you’re facing forward it’s a hard fall but not fatal; when the thrower is back to back with the person he’s trying to throw then all of the hundreds of pounds of force are trapped in the weakest body point. His neck snapped like a bundle of wet sticks.
The last walker was crawling forward, but I jumped over his arms and came down on the small of his back. The vertebrae cracked audibly. He flopped down, dead from the waist down. I couldn’t leave him like that so I recovered the RRF. This time there was no way for the walker to twist away as my blade found its target and shut him off.
