Then a hand grabbed her, caught her by the arm, pulled her back, spun her. She stared into the face of a man in a police uniform. He was screaming at her. She could feel the heat of his breath. She could feel spit on her face. His eyes were wide with panic.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Then the man’s face seemed to blossom like a red flower. No. It came apart like a rose in a windstorm. Red petals flew everywhere. Something — was it a body? — fell backward and down. Dropping out of her awareness.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
Marilyn Kang did not look at the gun in her hand. She did not feel the recoil as she fired the shot into the face of the police evidence collection technician. She did not feel any of the shots she fired. She did not hear the bangs or the screams. Or anything. Except for the song lyric repeating in her head, there was nothing at all, no sound. The silence gaped around her, vast and deep. Bottomless.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
She thought about the lovely green crystal chips.
“So pretty,” she said.
She was unaware of the slide locking back on her gun. She did not feel her hands move as they ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one. None of that was part of who she was or where she was or what she saw or what was happening.
Number nine, number nine, number nine.
When she killed the people crouching in the doorway as pieces of debris fell from the ceiling, Kang saw none of it. When she walked into the hall and began firing at screaming staff members, it was all happening to someone else in some other place.
She never heard the ceiling above her crack.
All she could see were the crystal chips. They seemed to rise into the air on tiny red wings as they soared toward…
Toward what?
Where?
They didn’t fly through stone halls or inside a building at all. What Kang saw was an opening in the whole world, and beyond…
A rocky slope edged by plants and flowers of extraordinary beauty. Ferns towered a hundred feet above her, and there was a rose growing up from a crack in the ground; at the end of each stem three bright red flowers spread their petals. Far above her, at the top of the slope, was a slender tower made from red stones. Behind the top of the tower was the moon. One of the moons. There were many others hanging in the sky like pale balloons. Triangular-shaped craft shot past at incredible speeds. And in the distance, there was a vast and terrible thing. Beautiful in its way, like a giant or a god. An impossibly large body that was vaguely human but which had a head like a giant octopus and a beard made entirely of writhing tentacles. Long, dark wings unfolded from its broad back and it reached for her with a scaly hand tipped with claws as long as—
Sixty pounds of plaster and stone from the ceiling struck her on the crown of her head, crushing all thoughts from Marilyn Kang’s mind.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The earthquake hit the Capitol Building with the fists of giants.
D.J., Aunt Sallie, and I were on the steps outside, and we could all tell right away that this was no tremor. This was a monster waking up beneath our feet. Ghost crouched down, barking furiously. The whole world seemed to suddenly go out of focus, because every wall, every street pole, every parked car began to vibrate at the same time. It was surreal in the worst possible way.
Auntie twisted as the steps beneath her feet cracked, and she spun, arms reaching for D.J., but he was toppling backward. I lunged forward and caught her. She was a heavy woman, too much fat over her muscle, and I was falling, too. I spun with her in my arms, tucked my head, and took the impact across my hip and shoulders. It was like getting simultaneously kicked in the lower back while being hit across the upper back with a two-by-four. Auntie cried out in pain as she landed atop me.
She rolled off and I could see that despite my best efforts, she’d struck her shins against the edge of the stone step. Intense pain shot through my hip and spine, telling me that I was more badly hurt than I thought. I ground my teeth and fought my way to my knees. All around me people were screaming and running, and I stared in abject horror as a deep black crack opened like a mouth right in front of where I knelt. A police car canted sideways into it. Gas and water shot upward from different parts of the torn street. The growl of the tortured earth was a horrible, deafening thing. The earthquake was intensifying. People ran, collided, fell. Some vanished into the cracks that fed on them.
“D.J.,” I yelled as I fought my way through pain and lights that burst in my eyes to where Auntie lay, “help me.”
When he didn’t answer I turned to see if he was okay. He was. But he stood stock-still, not looking at Aunt Sallie or me. Or anything. His eyes were as empty as a store mannequin’s and his lips hung rubbery and slack. Ghost began growling at him, baring his titanium teeth, no longer recognizing D.J. as one of us. Turning on him the way he’d nearly turned on me last night at the Warehouse.
I heard Auntie speak, her confusion more evident than her pain. “D.J.…?”
D.J. turned to her and smiled.
Then he drew his sidearm in a smooth movement that was all reflex, the kind of thing agents are trained to do. His hand brushed his jacket flap back, reached up to the Sig Sauer he wore in a nylon shoulder holster, drew it, pressed the barrel under his chin, and pulled the trigger. The bullet blew off the top of his head and blew one eye out of its socket and blew all the sanity out of the day.
Aunt Sallie screamed. Ghost yelped. I gaped at the body of my friend as he fell like a boneless rag doll.
The world shook itself to pieces around us. People screamed as they ran. Auntie and I looked around, trying to find some answer to what had just happened. There were none. The world was not going to help us out of this. No. Because everywhere we looked we saw madness.
People running.
People standing still as if they had turned to stone.
People attacking each other. Beating, biting, tearing at clothes and skin and hair and eyes. Two police officers stood twenty feet apart and shot each other over and over until they both fell dead. A woman picked up her infant child and threw her into the closest crack. Then, with a shriek, leaped in after her. They both vanished from sight. A man in a business suit was slowly undressing, folding each garment and placing them on the rattling ground. When he was naked he sat down and began punching himself in the face with slow, hard, measured blows. A pair of Secret Service agents were trying to break up a fight between reporters and civilians. Finally, one of the agents staggered back, his face streaming with blood, drew his gun, and fired. He aimed every single shot at a fireplug, hitting it every time.
A fat woman went running past us, screaming at the top of her lungs. She said, “Why can’t I hear my own head?” Those words, clear and loud, over and over again.
A young woman was fighting with a much larger man who was trying to grab an older woman. The young woman seemed quite sane and was fighting well, obviously having had a little karate training. The old woman was one of the silent and unmoving ones. The big man was much stronger, but he seemed to have forgotten everything about how to fight.
Most of the people in the street still looked sane, but they were terrified and ran with blind panic away from toppling walls and exploding streets and from those who had gone insane. I heard more gunshots and glass shattering and gas hissing. Suddenly a car burst into flame and half a dozen news reporters flung themselves into the blaze. They all screamed as they burned, but there were words twisted into the screams.