Quake (23 page)

“Don't worry too much,” Hotspur said, putting the gun down. “Not yet anyway. I rather like having you around, keeping me company. And really, there's nothing you can do to stop me now. We come to the very end, as it was always meant to be.”

“You don't have to do this. You could change your mind. It's been known to happen.”

Hotspur's fingers flew across twenty keyboards and Faith watched as carefully as she could, looking for an anomaly that would give the real Hotspur Chance away.

“This is the antidote the world needs right now,” all the Hotspurs said. “Some pills are hard to swallow, but that doesn't mean they won't fix what ails the patient. No one will ever understand, and that's okay. I don't expect understanding.”

“What if you're wrong?” Faith pleaded. She swiped her hand through another fake Hotspur and found herself wholly unprepared when he used his single-pulse mind to throw her across the wide room and slam into a wall. She crumpled onto the floor, and when she stood up, slightly dazed, only one Hotspur stood before her. It was holding the titanium-bullet gun, pointing it at her head.

“I am not wrong.”

She'd struck a nerve, but before she could think to send him flying to his death he beat her to the punch, sending her one more time across the room and slamming into the far wall.
He's powerful
, Faith thought.
More powerful than normal single pulses.

When she stood and turned to the room all twenty Hotspurs were back, working at their stations. They looked up at her, mournful and angry. “Did you know it's hypothetically possible to have the opposite opinion of every single living person and still be right?”

“So you're God, then. Perfect.”

“Not perfect,” Hotspur said, tapping wildly at the keys. He looked up and appeared to be contemplating the God part. “You're a history buff—I know this about you. Were you aware that great individuals, people you probably admire very much, had rather a high view of themselves?”

“Like who?” Faith asked in an effort to keep him distracted.

“George Washington wanted very much to be called His Mightiness. Columbus practically demanded that he be addressed as the Admiral of the Ocean. Can you imagine? The king of all the navigable seas? And what about Catherine the
Great
? Did you know she refused to open any letter that was not addressed to Her Imperial Majesty? Victor Hugo, the esteemed writer, demanded that Paris be renamed in his honor. The list goes on and on—any person who stands far above the rest has good reason to ask for such titles. But I never asked for any of that.”

“You don't make any sense,” Faith said. She felt like arguing with him, but she knew that would be a mistake.
He's trying to distract you. Don't let him
, she thought.

“So close,” Hotspur said. “Just a few more keystrokes and our little man will be vanquished. A shame he'll go with the rest, in the blink of an eye. At least he won't feel it. Well, not for very long anyway. It will be over almost before it began.”

Faith was simultaneously running out of time and ideas. What could she do?

“Ahhh, here we are, then,” Hotspur said. “Just need the right number of zeroes—one hundred and twenty-two—and a one, and then we're all done. Finally.”

Hotspur turned to Faith, one hand typing, the other holding the gun trained in her direction.
Which one is he?
She couldn't know. She was in a room full of gun-wielding maniacs, and yet there was only
one
maniac.

“I'm not going to shoot you, Faith,” Hotspur said. As he spoke, one of his electrograms faltered. A clue had emerged at last. A halo bloomed around its body and it sputtered out of existence. “We're both going to die down here. We all are. Because the world needs someone to blame or it will go mad and spiral into chaos. Don't you understand? I don't need a grand title or anyone to worship at my feet—I'm beyond all that. I know what humanity needs. People need more than this event, so long in the making. People need someone to blame.”

Two more electrograms vanished and Hotspur's finger kept hitting the zero key. He knew how many he was typing in.

Seventeen Hotspur Chances looked into Faith's eyes with a destructive sadness, a willful defiance against humanity. “I am your Hitler. I am your Stalin. I am your demon, your death maker, your one to blame on down through the ages. I take this moniker willingly upon myself and I go happily into the great unknown because that, Faith Daniels, is what you need. It is not who I am, it is who you need me to be. Do you understand?”

He paused a moment and shook his many heads with a smile. “Of course you don't understand—no one does. No one will ever see the truth about all this: that I was right, that I saved the entire world, that I alone had the courage to do what had to be done. You are like children, all of you. So I give you what you need. I give you a villain to hate so you can sleep at night.”

Five more Hotspurs plinked out of existence as his finger held in the air above the key, then moved across the keyboard to the number one, farthest away from the zero. His finger hung there and all but three Hotspurs vanished.

Three Faith could pick up and move. Three she could deal with, and so she did.

As his finger moved down and brushed the one key, she lifted all three off their feet and into the ceiling above. Two didn't move at all, but the real Hotspur did. His head hit the solid mass of wall overhead, crushing his skull, and he fell back to the floor at the only true workstation in the room. With all the electrograms gone, the entire room was virtually empty. Just the one station where a man could work and get things done, like murdering hundreds of millions of people in the blink of an eye.

Faith was about to move in for the kill, to make sure he was finished off, when his hand flashed upward and slammed down on the right side of the keyboard.

Hotspur Chance had hit the last key. The one key.

The screen he had been staring into flashed with light and code streamed in liquid lines. Something big and terrible was happening.

“You were almost fast enough,” Hotspur said. “Not quite, though.”

A bloody smile smeared across his mouth and Faith lifted him off the floor, dropped him hard in the chair at his desk, and moved his nearly dead hands over the keyboard.

“Reverse the code!”

But Hotspur's hands were as lifeless as two pieces of wood. He breathed faintly and looked up at Faith.

“What do they say about Faith?” he asked, and Faith thought it was a cruel final blow to play on her name's meaning. “I thought you could move mountains?”

Everything inside Faith burned with pain as she thought of the long journey that had led her to this moment. In all that time she had somehow managed to avoid killing someone with her bare hands. It was a line she had made sure she never crossed. She feared what it might do to her, how it might change her. But now, as she stared at the bleeding man in front of her who had terminated millions of lives, she reached out and put her hands around his neck. The skin was warm and she felt the big veins and the bones underneath. She felt him struggle to breathe and imagined his brain collapsing into itself, the cells in a deadly dance, searching for oxygen and blood. As she watched him struggle, tears welled up and ran down her face. She felt a storm of regret and anguish for what she was doing, for what this man had done, for failing to stop him.

And then it was over. Hotspur Chance was gone and she released him. She couldn't stop her hands from shaking.

And for the first time in ages Faith cut herself some slack:
I did everything I could
, she thought. At that moment she lost all hope in any kind of happy future, but there was a little grace, and that had been enough to keep her alive.

She looked once more at the workstation, from which so much destruction had been orchestrated. The whole screen had filled and more code ran in fluid lines across the top of the screen, pushing new lines down and off the bottom. Faith couldn't help wondering if each character she saw represented a human life being shocked out of existence.

Wait, that wasn't right.

Faith blinked hard, leaned in closer.

The lines of code weren't being added. It was an illusion at such high speed.

The lines of code were being
removed.

Hawk's voice echoed softly into the nearly empty space. It was like a voice straight out of heaven, and everything terrible about Faith's life lifted in the space of a heartbeat. Six simple words, but for Faith they were the voice of a nerd angel.

“I think I have it contained.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“Hawk?”

Faith wanted to believe it was really him, but there was still a small part of her that couldn't trust it as she watched the numbers continue to reverse on the screen. She'd been burned by trusting people and things and feelings before.

“A little busy right at the moment,” Hawk said.

“Did it start yet?” Faith yelled, but what she was really thinking was
Has anyone died yet? Has Hotspur's killing machine been engaged?

There was a long enough pause to make Faith question everything all over again, but then Hawk's voice returned. “Not yet. It's like staying in front of a hundred electrified zombies coming at me from different directions. Good thing I played all those video games! I'm beating this undead code back into the ground. I got this!”

His voice was crisp and clear on speakers mounted somewhere Faith couldn't see.
This is really happening
, she thought.
We're saving the Western State.

“I think I hear you saying you've got this under control,” Faith said. This was one thing she wanted to be sure about. “So the zombies are the electrical charges Hotspur released into the State? And you're . . . what, like, zapping them?”

She couldn't speak geek to save her life.

“You got that right! The initial impact sent out charges that need to pass through a series of relay checkpoints. I've created a zero virus and now I'm tagging the relays before they can hit.”

Silence from Faith sent Hawk into another code-slinging frenzy of hyper chat.

“It's a mistake, Faith. Hotspur Chance made a
mistake
. He was going for efficiency and speed, but he failed to put in any kind of backup plan if something went wrong.”

Faith couldn't help looking at Hotspur Chance's face, caught in a twisted grin, and remembering what he'd said:
I'm never wrong. I'm always right
. The same thing had happened to Clara. They thought they were never wrong, so they didn't plan for it.

“Sounds like his real mistake was assuming you wouldn't be there to stop him,” Faith said.

“Maybe so,” Hawk said, but Faith could tell he thought it was something else. “I want you to understand this, it's important to me. All these electrical signals—zombie death machines, if you will—he pointed them all at one relay point. The smart thing about that? If the relay is open, they all sail through at once. It's an electric zombie apocalypse in the Western State. Not to be gross, but everyone fries at once. The whole system is infected in the same few seconds of time. But the really stupid part, the part I can't believe, is that he didn't plan for anyone to close that relay point. It never occurred to him it might happen, because he hard-coded this thing from the start. My level of hacking didn't even exist when he programmed this. I hadn't entered his imagination. Anyway, I closed the relay barely in time, and that's when it got interesting.”

“Interesting how? You don't mean there's still a chance?”

“Nope, no, no chance. Even if I keeled over from a heart attack right now, this electricity infestation is toast. Go back to the zombie parallel—they all turn back when they reach the closed relay. They get confused. They start eating one another! Okay, that's seriously gross, but that's what happens. They chow right through one another until some of them leak out and then they hive, because that's what Hotspur programmed these zombies to do. They hive, and then they go searching for the next available relay. Mind you, all this is happening in seconds, not minutes or hours. It's fast.”

“Can you keep up? Are you sure?”

“Don't have to. I just ran the last piece of programming and hit enter. My programming follows the action, watches where they're going, and stands at the ready with a zombie-killing wall of death!”

“Why not just shut all the relays down at once?” Faith asked. She thought it sounded dangerous to leave them open in case even one stream of electric energy found a way out.

“Can't do that. It would shut down the entire Western State. That's what electromagnetic shocks can do, and that would be a disaster of its own. Not as big, but definitely not good. Those relays are used for all the Western State's energy to move around the grid. Also, there are 3.8 million relay points. It's too many.”