And, because this is the fucked-up twenty-first century, some of them stood there with their cell phones, recording it all. For what? Their Facebook pages? Snapchat or Instagram?
“Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!” shrieked a cameraman near us as he clapped his hands violently in front of his face.
“Can’t you fucking hear me?” demanded a blond reporter I recognized from a cable station. “Can’t you fucking hear me?”
The earthquake tore through Washington, and pieces of stone crashed down around us. I forced myself to move, grabbed Auntie, and dragged her away from the building. We clung together as we staggered down the juddering stairs and then there was a massive sound and we turned to see three of the massive marble columns crack and break apart. They toppled over us and crashed on the lower steps, forcing us back.
“Silence!” shouted a man in a bloody sweatshirt. He pointed at Aunt Sallie. “Silence! Silence! Silence!”
And then he ran forward, howling like a demon, slashing at the air with his fingers. Other people followed, screaming equally meaningless things. I forced myself up, put myself in their path. There were at least a dozen of them. None of them were armed. None of them looked sane as they rushed forward, seeming to focus on the sick woman lying behind me. The Killer in me seemed to understand it. She was hurt, weak, vulnerable, and they were acting on an instinct deep in the lizard brain. Some of them even snapped their jaws as if promising what they wanted to do.
They were civilians, sure. They were also a mob. They were coming for one of mine. For a member of my family.
The Cop, the Modern Man, and the Killer all stood up inside of me. Shoulder to shoulder for the first time I could ever remember. In a twisted way they were all my family, which made them all family with Aunt Sallie.
I almost drew my gun. Almost . And I almost drew the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the inside of my trouser pocket. With either of those I could have killed the whole bunch of the people.
Could have.
Didn’t.
Maybe after I’d first joined the DMS I’d have reacted differently. Killed more easily, made assumptions that this was a plague like Seif al Din. Part of me even wondered if this was the genetically engineered rabies we’d encountered during the Dogs of War affair last year. But for once I think the Modern Man in my head won out. He, of all of us, knew that this wasn’t anything I’d ever faced before. He begged for mercy.
Mercy, though, is relative.
This whole thought process took maybe a tenth of a second, and then the man with the bloody sweatshirt reached for Aunt Sallie.
And all of the broken parts of me went to war.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Jennifer VanOwen was stepping out of the elevator when she felt the tremor ripple up through her leg muscles. It was not fierce, not frightening. If anything it felt rather nice. Like the higher jets in a Jacuzzi. Even so, she frowned.
People up and down the hall stopped and looked around. After last night’s rumbles they had to know what this was, and yet they all had that deer-in-the-headlights look. VanOwen found it equal parts amusing and disappointing. She worked with these people; they could at least pretend to be intelligent.
The rumbling ended and there was a moment of silent stillness, after which some people laughed. Some began telling each other what had just happened. While still others whispered as if speaking in a normal voice would invoke and anger the gods of the earth. VanOwen pasted on a mildly concerned half smile and made her way to her office. Her assistant was jabbering in the hall with one of the junior assistants to some nobody from the next floor. VanOwen locked herself in, ran a scanner over the walls to make sure there were no bugs. There never were. Then she settled in her chair and used her cell to make a call, waiting through eight rings until it was answered.
“Why are you calling early?” asked the voice on the other end.
“I wanted to get something straight between us,” said VanOwen.
A pause. “Okay.”
“You’d better be right about this,” said VanOwen.
“About which part?”
“Don’t screw with me. I’m warning you, and you had better listen.”
“I am listening.”
“If I get killed today, then lawyers you don’t know about are going to open documents that are going to make life very damn ugly for you. Don’t even think I’m joking.”
The second pause was much longer. “Just do your job, Jennifer. Let us do ours.”
The line went dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
There had been earthquakes in the nation’s capital before. In 2011 an interpolate quake with a magnitude of 5.8 rocked the region and was one of the largest of its kind east of the Rocky Mountains. That quake was felt across more than a dozen states and even up into parts of Canada. It was estimated that the quake was felt by more people than any other quake in United States history, owing to the dense East Coast population. That event did a lot of damage, but none of the damage was individually very intense. Cracked walls, broken windows, street disruption. The price tag was hefty, though, costing insurance companies, businesses, and individuals nearly three hundred million dollars. No one died, and there were very few injuries.
That was 2011.
That was not today.
The epicenter of the quake that struck Washington, D.C., on that February morning was within blocks of the Capitol Building. At its peak, it rocked the region as a monstrous 7.8.
Five hundred thousand car alarms went off almost at once. It was as if all the banshees in the world had gathered for a convention and were trying to outdo each other in tearing the air apart.
Building alarms jangled, too. Then police cars, fire engines, and ambulances screamed their way through the writhing streets. And, almost as an afterthought, alert sirens began caterwauling.
The Washington Monument did not collapse, but massive chunks of it broke off and fell. The very first fatalities in the disaster were three teenagers who stood in its shadow, ignoring the massive spike in favor of the texts they were sending about the fact that there was an earthquake. They were part of a group of tourists from San Jose. Earthquakes were nothing to them. Until this one became everything.
They never heard the screams of their teacher, who was four feet away and did not get a scratch on her skin. Her heart and mind, though, were deeply and irrevocably scarred.
Two police cars collided at the intersection where New York Avenue Northwest crosses Thirteenth Street. Both patrol cars were tearing along with lights flashing and sirens wailing and buildings shivering themselves apart on both sides of the street. When the National Museum of Women in the Arts building collapsed, it shot a huge cloud of dust and debris into the intersection at exactly the wrong moment. The two cars punched into the cloud from opposite sides. Visibility was three feet in front of the windshields. They never saw each other until after they collided. Airbags and seat belts can only do so much, and they had not been designed for this.
Not for this.
Zach Jonas was doing a standup on the steps of the Capitol Building, updating the reports he had been filing all day. His tie was askew because his producer thought that looked good. In fact, before each new segment the producer messed his hair a little more, jerked the tie a little this way or that, and had the makeup woman touch him up to look more flushed, suggesting urgency and passionate involvement. Zach figured that he’d have been in shirtsleeves if it wasn’t so damn cold, and the producer absolutely would not let him shoot while wearing his parka. He could snug into it for a few minutes at a time, gulping coffee to keep the wind from leeching the last bits of warmth from him, but then the producer was badgering him to take it off and get ready.