Dead Mann Running (9781101596494) (30 page)

“That’s all right, Colby,” she answered. “You were always a terrible partner anyway, and an amateur, despite how highly you thought of yourself. You might want to wipe some of that snot from your nose, or order one of your men to do it.”

Looking hurt, Green wiped his nose on his sleeve, then told his surviving dogs to lay down their guns. I wasn’t thrilled that the hand behind O’Donnell’s death and Misty’s kidnapping might get off scot-free, but that made it one armed group down, two to go.

Booth eyed the chakz next. “Mann, tell Fidel Zombie over there that if he has his cadavers stop pointing those guns our way, I’ll arrest Maruta first.”

Having heard him, Jonesey nodded. The chakz didn’t drop their guns, but they lowered them, then stepped so far back into the darkness of the bowling alley, it felt like they weren’t there anymore.

Booth ordered his men to train their sights on Rebecca Maruta’s linebackers, but they did it before the words came out of his mouth. And when Booth said, “Drop the guns,” the little men did.

He stormed up to Maruta, whirled her, and slapped some cuffs on. “You’re the sick fuck I wanted most anyway.”

She giggled girlishly, as if she really, really liked being handcuffed. Booth tightened the cuffs, thinking that’d hurt her, but when she gave off a pleased, trembling sigh,
he shivered and stepped back. She knew it would get under his skin, and if there was one thing she did like, it was getting under someone’s skin.

“I appreciate the heat of your desire, Chief Detective, but you really don’t want to arrest me.”

“Really? ’Cause I sure as hell feel like I do,” Booth said.

Her smile got so wide her eyes disappeared. “You won’t when I tell you what’s in those vials.”

All our ears perked up at that. Green stopped sniffling. Jonesey whispered, “Kyua.” Booth kept his distance, but said, “Talk.”

“This very evening, right before that unfortunate broadcast, I discovered a note from my late husband. He had the tiniest handwriting, like an insect! It turns out he was very naughty before he died. He created a mycoplasma, not a virus, not a bacteria, something in between. It loves water, even the moisture in the air. Once released, it will infect anyone who comes in contact with it.” She sniffed excitedly. “It’s also self-replicating, growing all along. It will probably burst the nutrient containers anytime now. And my people are the only ones who know how to destroy it.”

Green’s and Jonesey’s lips moved at the same time.
Destroy.
Booth caught the significance, too. “You trying to say this myco-crap will kill livebloods?”

She laughed. “No, no, no. It’s much better than that! We’ll be completely fine, so long as we live. It’s afterwards that’s the problem. At death, the mycoplasma will automatically reinvigorate each and every cell. Each and every cell. Do you understand, Chief Detective?”

She watched the furrows form on Booth’s brow and
thicken, then waited for realization to sink in. When his eyes went wide, she nodded happily.

“Yes, there it is. That’s it.
Everyone
comes back…” She tipped her head first at Booth, then at every liveblood in sight. “You, and you, and you, too! Everyone! Everyone will come back as a chak! I told you he was a naughty boy!”

H
appy fucking birthday.

I stepped from the bowling alley with Nell. All around our gaudy pocket of light, the riots continued, destroying what it could with flames or fists, guns or stubs. It seemed like only the buildings had real shapes, and everything else was tired of pretending. Maybe that’s what a world full of chakz would look like: gray trash, shifting around, forgetting what it used to be.

My foot hit something heavy. A .38 lay a few inches from the openmouthed body of one of Green’s dogs. I picked it up, almost wishing I could use it to blow my own brains out.

“Uncuff me,” Rebecca Maruta said. “Or I’ll let it happen.”

Booth was torn between rejecting what he’d just heard and deciding what to do if it were true. “You can slide further on bullshit than concrete,” he said.

Maruta looked puzzled, so I translated. “He’s calling you a liar.”

She spoke as if we were boring her. “I’ll prove it, then. I’ll give you my system password. My husband’s notes and whatever footnotes my staff has added in the last few hours are on the hard drive. That is, if you have anyone who can read them.”

“I can,” Green said. “My laptop’s in the car.”

After hearing how the new toy he’d wanted might actually work, he was looking worse for wear, unsteady on his feet. Eyes wet again, he looked around for someone to command, his gaze settling to my right. “Nell, would you please get it for me?”

“Fuck, no,” she told him.

Since this didn’t seem like the best time to sort what etiquette he did or didn’t deserve, I headed toward his sedan. The door, bent and dented from the gun battle, groaned like an elephant. I grabbed the computer off the backseat floor where it’d fallen, flipped it open, and whirled it toward Green.

Unable to keep his emotions hidden, his expression wavered from one to another. I saw an arrogant contempt for Booth, a boyish sadness about Nell, bitter disappointment that Maruta might be telling the truth, and some more I couldn’t name. It was strange, not satisfying, to see him so helpless. He’d spent so much time trying to figure out what chakz were, now whatever he’d known about himself was slipping away.

He coughed, swallowed, and managed a pitiful semblance of his game face. “What am I looking for, Rebecca?”

“The most recent file from R & D Sector 6, Colby. It has a high-alert tag. By now the molecular analysis should be attached.”

Once he found it, we gathered around, but the document had so many big words it may as well have been hieroglyphs. He read, twitching at parts, swallowing sobs at others, and we waited.

Somewhere on the third screen, the prince of perverts lurched. I thought he was going to have a seizure, but what came out was more like a sob. Then there was another and another. Colby Green went to his knees, wailing like a lost child.

“I take it she’s telling the truth?” Booth asked.

Green nodded. Funny he’d be the only one who had it in him to weep for the fate of the world.

Maruta seemed pleased by what she thought of as his weakness. “The extent of the emotions are likely a side effect of his concussion. But I take it you get the point? Tick-tick-tick?”

Booth looked like he was thinking about letting her go.

“Tom,” I said. “You can’t. She’s not magic. Get the stuff to the CDC.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Maruta shook her head. “Bad boys. Bad, bad boys. This isn’t a dirty needle. If so much as a few drops get loose there’ll be contagion.”

Booth’s eyes grew darker, but I was the one who growled, “You’re not getting near those vials.”

Confident she could ignore me, Maruta took a smooth step closer to Booth. “Are you actually willing to take…?”

I leveled the .38 at her forehead, not caring if it took
my hand off. She looked around, if not for sympathy than for some semblance of shock at what I, a chak, was doing. Finding none, the Queen of Hell blinked, then deigned to look at me.

“Detective, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Travis Maruta and myself.”

“That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?” I said. I cocked the hammer.

Finally, she looked down. “Very well, I’ll allow the cuffs to stay. But let my people destroy it.”

Tom crunched his molars, then said, “Fine. I’ll have the CDC and the army meet us at the site. Charlotte Manson here can alert her staff. It’ll make it easier to arrest them all. Now give me the gun, Mann, and tell me where we’re all going.”

“Sure. It’s…”

A keening, low, but strong as a mournful gale, erupted from the bowling alley. The chakz had reappeared. Only now there weren’t thirty, there were more like a hundred. Every liveblood, police, dog, and little man, reached for their weapons.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Jonesey said, stumbling over one of the empty window frames, “but as representative for a certain group of aggrieved citizens, I should be there, too.”

I tried to cut him off. “Right. You heard Booth. The guard will be here in under a minute and turn your constituency to cinders.”

Jonesey nodded and held his cell phone up. “Probably, once they get through our roadblocks. But even when the fifty show up, I already outnumber them two to one. Then there’s the few thousand waiting to hear back from
me.” He walked past me and headed for Booth. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the wretched living, I shall fear no evil. Kyua is why I’m here. Let me bear witness and they’ll stand down, provided the guard does the same.”

Booth’s face trembled. He rubbed his chest and leaned back against a squad car. “Christ, either your head or my chest is going to explode any second. You want me to believe you control
all
the chakz?”

To his credit, Jonesey softened. “It’s not about control, it’s about empowerment. I tell them to trust each other, they trust me. I guarantee you on my word, at least seventy percent of the rebels will pull back. If they
don’t
hear from me, well…things get worse before they get better. What do you say? Cuff me if you’re afraid I’ll eat someone. All I’m asking is that you let me see this through to the end.”

He held out his arms. I nodded at his stub. “Not much point to the cuffs, Jonesey.”

He looked at it. “Well, whatever.”

Booth kept rubbing his chest. “Somebody call Kagan or the governor. This one’s their call. They were quick to get me out of holding after that broadcast, so I can guess what those cowards will say. Shit. I should have hired a fucking school bus. Can we please try to get out of here before the vampire union or someone else shows up?”

Someone else.
Damn. Maruta, Green, the chakz, the cops, it was like the end of a stage play, everyone here except…

“Tom, put us in a car. Everybody if you have to, just make it fast. I’ll drive.”

Booth’s eyes flared. “You making demands now, too?”

“No. But someone’s missing from this picture, don’t you think?”

He thought about it, rubbed his chest some more, and nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s move. Crap.”

Disarmed, the hired goons were cuffed. With the police van destroyed, they sat in a line on the curb. State witness Colby Green, in protective custody, and Maruta were unceremoniously shoved in the back of a squad car. With an okay from our corrupt governor, Jonesey was put in a second car with two cops.

I’d hoped Nell would slip in with the dead and wander off, but, acting like she had some backstage pass, she got in the car with Jonesey. Her expression dared me to try to stop her. No one else said anything about it, so I didn’t mention it. Like a lot of situations, if I’d thought it through, I might have done different, but at the time I was thinking it wasn’t like the mycoplasma could hurt a chak.

By the time we were ready to roll, the guardsmen arrived, reporting that aside from some liveblood looters, things had suddenly quieted down. Booby’s Bowl looked empty, but I knew the dead were all around, waiting in the shadows for their phones to ring.

I got behind the wheel of the first car. Booth, swilling some Mylanta supplied by one of the guardsmen, took shotgun. Once he confirmed we had the CDC tracking us and an entire army regiment being deployed, we were on our way. I headed down the main drag, followed by a car with Jonesey and Nell. Within a few blocks, two more squad cars joined us.

The broken windows of our bloodied city looked like blackened eyes, the shredded doors like missing teeth. The LBs we passed were more about videotaping for
YouTube than vandalism. There were still fires, still ferals, but without a guiding force, they wandered aimlessly. The patches of quiet grew longer until finally that’s all there was.

The silence made me antsy. Booth was busy talking on the radio and nursing his gut. My head was full of puzzle pieces refusing to make a picture. I didn’t know if that was because I was too crappy at puzzles to make it happen, or the biggest piece, Bad Penny, hadn’t turned up yet. Common sense said if she’d been listening in and heard what the birthday surprise was, she’d tell her bosses the bad news and stay clear. But ever since this began common sense had been an oxymoron.

I didn’t want to talk to the Hell Queen, but she was the only one who could fill in some blanks. If she wanted to. I looked at her in the rearview.

“Colby already told me he has no idea who the ninja is. How about you?”

If she was surprised Green didn’t know Penny, she didn’t show it. She didn’t show anything. Serves me right for trying a direct question.

“How will you destroy it?”

Without a gun to her head, she might even have ignored that question, but there was nothing else going on. “Acid or superheating usually works. We just have to be sure we get it all.”

“And if it gets out, no cure?”

She looked idly out the window. “It takes up to two years of antibiotic treatment to eradicate the known mycoplasmas, and this is something new.”

“Why would your husband even make something like this?”

She met my eyes in the mirror. I knew she thought of chakz as less than dirt but something about my question amused her. “You’d be better off asking why he’d make something like
you.
”

That rattled me a bit. I wasn’t sure why. “So the stuff in the vials was another mistake. Good thing we caught it before you started marketing. But why was it in that briefcase?”

“He was being a very bad boy,” she said. Her smile faded slowly, giving me the weird impression she missed her partner in crime.

“In what way? Was he trying to sneak it out of the lab himself? Working with someone like the ninja?”

She made a vague effort to keep from laughing too loudly at me. “No. He’d never do anything like that without permission. That wasn’t the way he liked to surprise me.”

Good lord, if this was his better half, what was Travis like? The rumor mill pegged him as the submissive partner in their little S and M game, a workaholic who reveled in being out of control. But this went far beyond bedroom fun and games. Their work put the species at stake and they knew it. Did they already see themselves as the sort of god Colby Green imagined he might become?