Ghost was snarling and snapping, and when I flicked a look at him I could see badly injured people all around him, and his white fur was splashed with bright red.
Christ.
Then two new people came at me like defensive tackles, driving low with their shoulders like they’d practiced this a hundred times. I stepped into them and palm-smashed their heads together. There was a loud melon-smack sound and they went right down. I ran over them and jump-kicked a Pulitzer Prize — winning news anchor, dropped a DCPD cop with a forearm smash across the face, broke the leg of a Secret Service guy I recognized from the old Linden Brierley days, swept the legs out from under a skinny teenage girl with magenta hair, and clocked the junior senator from Idaho with an overhand right that knocked the lights from his eyes.
All of this happened in fragments of seconds. So fast. Insanely fast. While all around us Washington, D.C., tore itself apart.
My back was white-hot fire and I couldn’t get a good breath. Sweat stung my eyes and I knew that I could not win this fight. Ghost yelped in pain, but I wasn’t able to help him.
But then I felt movement behind me and I whirled, ready to hurt someone else.
It was Aunt Sallie. Somehow she’d gotten to her feet. Blood ran down her legs from where she’d hit the edges of the steps, and her clothes were torn. She had something in her hand that looked like a roll of quarters, but then she gave her arm a whiplike shake and a dense polycarbonate telescoping rod snapped into place. With a growl, Auntie stepped past me and began attacking the crowd, breaking knees and ribs and hands and elbows with savage force and ruthless precision. Ghost jumped forward to fight beside her, with me on her left.
Together we met the charge of the last eight attackers.
In all the years I’ve known Auntie, I’ve never seen her fight. She was old, sick, injured, but goddamn if she wasn’t one of the best fighters I’d ever seen. Like… ever. If this was how she fought now, I knew full well that I would never have wanted to face her back when she was in her prime. Church hadn’t partnered with her for her charm.
There were three of us, and we were injured. There were eight of them and they were driven by insane fury and evident madness.
It lasted maybe three full seconds and we fought our way down to the bottom step.
Then it was over.
We stood panting, exhausted, nearly feral as we crouched there, ready for more, almost wanting more. I could see four or five people in the street with cell cameras aimed at us. Capturing it all.
A moment later an awful sound filled the air, and we looked up in horror to see the Statue of Freedom, the nineteen-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze colossus that has stood on the cupola above the Capitol Building since 1863, lean outward. She seemed to bow her head as if admitting defeat, and then the fifteen thousand pounds of her mass crashed down on the edge of the dome, cracking it like glass. The statue turned as it struck, and went rolling and tumbling down onto the upper structure and then falling outward and down to the steps. The crested military helmet punched through the flat stone and broke the statue’s neck. The rest of the massive body crashed down onto D.J.’s body and came to rest where Auntie and I had been mere seconds before.
Auntie leaned against me as a sob broke deep in her chest. I caught her and held her. The earthquake, as if satisfied with this dramatic finale, abated, and everything faded out into screams and weeping, to sirens and despairing cries. I held Auntie as the tears ran like cold mercury down our cheeks.
“It’s okay,” I said, “we’re safe.”
She said my name, but it came out wrong.
So wrong. Garbled and wet and slack.
I looked down and saw her staring up at me with mad, desperate eyes, and for a moment I thought that she had fallen victim to whatever insanity had made D.J. kill himself and some of the people erupt into violence.
No.
It wasn’t that.
Her eyes were glazed and staring. Her lips tried to speak, tried to form words. My name. Any words. But they couldn’t. I could see them fail in the attempt. The skin on the right side of her face looked like melting wax, losing its natural shape, sliding, turning to rubber. Her right arm and leg twitched once and then lay slack as if half of her had died there in my arms. Her eyes looked through me and if they saw or recognized me, I couldn’t tell. Drool ran from the corners of her mouth. I knew the symptoms because I’d seen the effect before. In my grandfather. In a neighbor’s uncle.
Aunt Sallie had just suffered a massive stroke. She lay dying in my arms. The world was broken and there was no help coming.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The shelter beneath the White House was so heavily reinforced that even the earthquake could not destroy it. The shock waves tried, though. Chunks of concrete had broken loose from the walls, exposing sheets of steel that were buckled but not ruptured. Cracks ran along the ceiling, but the concrete up there was veined with wire netting to prevent falling debris.
The president sat on a sofa which was innocuously ornate, a leftover from some previous administration and moved down here for want of something better to do with it. He sat in the corner of the couch, fists balled on his thighs, eyes blinking too often, lips parted and rubbery with shock. Eight other members of his staff were there, but not the chief of staff, who had gone over to the Capitol Building after Howell’s suicide. Eight Secret Service agents. Eleven military officers. Aides and advisors. Jennifer VanOwen sat beside him. The president’s wife and children were elsewhere. Safe, he was told.
The air filtration was working perfectly, as were the lights. The sounds of the troubled earth had faded now, followed by a long, expectant, dreadful silence.
“I think it’s over,” someone said, but no one acknowledged the statement. The earthquake had been big. Way too big. Too furious. The TV screens showed feeds from news services, and the stories unfolding made no sense. People had turned on each other. That was as big a story as the quake itself. So much violence. So much blood. Some of the video footage came from cameras that stood on unattended tripods or lay abandoned on the ground where they’d fallen, and God only knew what happened to the film crews.
“Is it over?” asked the president after another few moments.
One of the generals was on his phone and turned toward him. “I… I think so, Mr. President. But we should stay down here a little longer just in case.”
“Yes,” agreed the president quickly. “As long as we’re safe down here.”
“This bunker was built to withstand a direct nuclear hit on the White House, Mr. President. We’re quite safe.”
The president licked his lips and nodded. Then he fished his cell phone out of his pocket and composed a tweet.
It’s okay. I’m fine.
One of his senior advisors, his director of communications, asked if he could see the text. The president shook his head and sent it.
The tweet hit social media with the same unstoppable force as the earthquake had struck D.C. And did nearly as much damage.
It’s okay. I’m fine.
I.
Those words would haunt the president for the rest of his time in office.
As the others in the room checked their Twitter feeds, which had become automatic actions for them, they saw those words. Many stared in horror, or shock. A few turned away to hide more telling expressions.
Only Jennifer VanOwen smiled, but she hid that, too.