Chapter 16
Liam did not answer her.
He knelt on a bloody concrete floor with both hands locked around Chloe Buck's wrist, and her finger hovered one inch above the last button on the keypad, and behind him a fan hummed in the ceiling of a room that had been sealed for two years and four months.
"You heard her," it said.
Chloe's mouth was smiling and Chloe's eyes were screaming and both of those things were happening on the same face at the same time.
"Isaiah," Liam said.
"Yeah."
"Get her arm."
Isaiah hit the floor beside him and got both arms around Chloe's elbow and hauled it down, and Liam threw his weight backward, and the two of them dragged her four feet from the door.
She screamed the whole way.
"Cully!" Liam shouted. "Rope!"
"There's no rope—"
"Then find something!"
"Here."
James Wilford was already pulling off his belt.
He went down on his knees in the blood with them and got Chloe's wrists crossed and lashed and pulled the leather tight, and she fought him, and he was sixty-three years old and he did not let go.
"Hold her," he said.
"I'm holding her."
"Son, she's stronger than the three of us—"
"I know."
They got her down on the concrete on her side with her hands bound behind her and Isaiah lying across her legs, and she thrashed for thirty seconds and then, all at once, she stopped.
And laughed.
"Well," it said. "This is undignified."
Liam sat back on his heels.
He was breathing like he had run a mile. His hands were red to the wrist. The photograph inside his coat was digging into his chest and he had forgotten it was there.
"It won't work," it said pleasantly.
"Shut up."
"You've tied her hands. That's very good. That's exactly what I'd have done." Chloe's head lay on the concrete and her eyes rolled up to look at him and they were enormously amused. "And what happens in six hours, Liam? What happens when your arms get tired?"
Liam said nothing.
"You have to sleep," it said. "She doesn't."
"Doctor," Liam said, without turning around. "The last digit."
Silence.
"Doctor."
"I'm here," Marcus Vance said.
He was standing exactly where he had been standing. He had not picked up the .45. His hands hung empty at his sides.
"What's the last digit," Liam said.
"I don't know."
Liam turned around.
"You built it—"
"I don't know, son." The old man's voice came apart. "I built the lock and I set the override three years ago and I have entered five digits every night for two years and I have never once entered the sixth, because I have never once decided, and I do not remember it."
"You don't remember."
"I remember five." Marcus was shaking. "I remember five because I have typed them eight hundred times. The sixth is in a manual on Level Two, in a binder, in a cabinet, and I have not opened that cabinet in two years because I was afraid that if I read it I would do it."
Liam stared at him.
And then he began, horribly, to laugh.
"So it doesn't know either," he said.
Marcus blinked.
"What?"
"It's been standing behind you in the dark for two years watching you put in five digits," Liam said, "and there is no sixth digit to watch, because you never pressed it."
He turned and looked down at the thing on the floor.
"It doesn't have the number," he said. "The last button's a guess."
The thing in Chloe's body stopped smiling.
"Ten," it said.
"What?"
"There are ten buttons." Her voice had gone flat and cold and there was nothing warm left in it at all. "It's one chance in ten. And I have all the time in the world, and you have six hours before your arms give out."
The white room hummed.
"Then we don't guess," Liam said.
He stood up.
"Isaiah. Cully. Take her out."
"What?"
"Out of this room. Right now. Up the corridor, out the door, up the stair. Get her away from that keypad."
Isaiah looked up.
"Liam, out there is a city with four hundred men coming—"
"Then take her outside and keep taking her." Liam's voice was rising. "Put her in a boat. Put her on open water in the middle of the Sound where there is not one single door in any direction. It's got no hands unless she's got hands, so give it nothing to open."
Isaiah's mouth fell open.
"That's the answer," Liam said. "It doesn't matter that we can't get it out of her. It matters that we don't leave her standing in front of the one door in the world that must never open."
"He's right," James said.
"Then move."
They lifted her.
It took all four of them. Isaiah under the shoulders, Cully at the feet, Liam and James at the hips, and Chloe Buck went rigid as a plank and screamed obscenities in a voice that was not hers, and they carried her out from between the racks toward the inner door.
They got fifteen feet.
And Marcus Vance stepped into the doorway.
He had picked up the .45.
"Put her down," he said.
Liam stopped.
"Doctor."
"Put her down on the floor and step away from her."
"Get out of the door."
"No."
The stainless slide came up level, and it was not shaking now, and Liam understood in one clean cold instant that the old man had spent the last ninety seconds arriving somewhere and had finished arriving.
"You are not taking that thing out of this building," Marcus said.
"We are taking her away from the—"
"You are taking it into a city of three thousand people." His voice was perfectly steady. "You are carrying a thing that wants a plague out of the one room in the world that can hold it, and you are going to put it in a boat, and you are going to fall asleep, son, because everybody falls asleep."
"Doctor—"
"And in a week, or a month, or a year, it will get a pair of hands to a lock somewhere and there will be nobody left who knows what it is."
Marcus's eyes were streaming behind the cracked lens.
"There is a body in that stairwell. Do you understand? There is a body in that stairwell because somebody was standing on the wrong side of a door when it closed, and that door closing is the only reason there is anybody left alive on this continent at all."
"That's my friend," Liam said.
"I know it is."
"Doctor, look at her—"
"I have been looking at her for eleven hours," Marcus Vance said, "and I am the only man in this room who is not going to lie to himself about what she is."
He thumbed the hammer back.
"Put her down," he said.
Nobody moved.
And then Isaiah Macklemore said, quietly, "Liam. Left rack. Third shelf."
Liam did not turn his head.
"What?"
"I saw it when we came in," Isaiah said. "I've been looking at it for twenty minutes. Left rack, third shelf up, black plastic case, and it's not a medical case, because medical cases don't have four latches and a foam cutout."
"Isaiah, he's got a gun on us."
"I know he does," Isaiah said. "Somebody who worked here brought a gun to work, Liam. Somebody who built a bunker under a city and knew what was in it brought a gun to work and never took it home, and it's been sitting on that shelf for two years, and it's about eight feet from my right hand."
Marcus's eyes flicked sideways.
It was half a second.
It was enough.
Isaiah let go of Chloe's shoulders and went for the rack.
The .45 boomed.
It went off in that concrete room like the world ending, a hammer blow of sound that flattened everything, and the round went past Isaiah's head and blew a fist-sized crater in the wall behind him and filled the air with white dust.
"ISAIAH!"
Isaiah hit the rack with his shoulder and the black case came off the shelf and burst open on the floor.
And in it, nested in gray foam, was the ugliest, biggest, most absurd handgun Liam had ever seen in his life.
It was enormous.
It was a slab of stainless steel the length of a man's forearm, with a barrel like a section of pipe and a hexagonal muzzle and a bore that looked, on the floor of that white room, like the mouth of a well.
There were two cardboard boxes in the foam beside it.
Fifty rounds each.
Isaiah got his hand on it.
"DON'T," Marcus screamed, and swung the .
45 down, and Isaiah rolled onto his back with the thing in both hands and worked the slide with a motion that Liam recognized four months too late, because he had watched his friend do exactly that with a Beretta on a blanket by a stove and had thought nothing of it at all.
I read a book. There was nothing to do.
The .45 came level on Isaiah's chest.
And the Desert Eagle went off.
It did not crack. It did not bark. It made a sound that Liam felt in his teeth and his sternum and the soles of his feet, an enormous flat whump of pressure that punched the dust in the room sideways, and the muzzle flash lit the whole ceiling white.
The first round took Marcus Vance in the stomach.
He folded around it.
The second took him high in the chest and put him against the doorframe.
The third took him through the shoulder.
Isaiah did not stop.
He lay on his back on a concrete floor in a room full of medicine and he fired that gun until it stopped firing, seven rounds in about two and a half seconds, and every one of them hit, and the sound was one long rolling detonation that Liam would hear in his sleep for the rest of his life.
The fourth round took the old man's left arm off at the elbow.
It simply took it off. There was an arm and then there was not an arm, and the rest of it went spinning back into the racks and brought down a tray of glass.
The fifth and the sixth went through his chest and out through the doorframe behind him.
The seventh missed.
And then there was nothing but the ringing.
The slide was locked back. Isaiah lay on the floor with the empty pistol pointed at the ceiling and his mouth open and his chest heaving, and the room was full of white dust and smoke and the smell of burnt powder.
Marcus Vance slid down the doorframe.
He sat on the floor with his back against it and his ruined chest, and his glasses had come off, and he looked very old and very small, and he was still alive.
He looked at Isaiah.
He tried to say something.
Nothing came.
And James Wilford crossed that room, through the smoke, through the broken glass, and sat down on the concrete next to a dying man for the second time in six days, and took his one remaining hand.
"I'm here," he said.
Marcus Vance's mouth moved.
"Say it," James said. "Say it, and I'll hear it, and it'll be said."
"Elias," Marcus said.
"He made it," James said. "You heard the boy. He made it two thousand miles and he told them and they came. It worked, Doctor. Every part of it worked. Your door held and your brother ran and they came."
Marcus Vance looked up at the ceiling of a room he had built.
"Don't let it out," he said.
And he died.
Nobody moved.
Isaiah lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling and did not put the pistol down, and his whole body was shaking so hard that his boots were drumming on the concrete.
"I killed him," he said.
"Isaiah—"
"I killed him, Liam. I killed him, I killed him, I killed him—"
"He was going to kill you."
"I emptied it into him." Isaiah's voice went up and broke. "I emptied it. I didn't stop. I felt it in my hands and I didn't stop, and his arm, Liam, his arm came off, I took an old man's arm off—"
Liam took the pistol out of his hands.
He took it and set it on the floor and got his arms around his friend and held him, and Isaiah Macklemore sobbed into his shoulder like a child, and behind them, tied at the wrists on a bloody concrete floor, Chloe Buck began, very softly, to laugh.
They all turned.
"Oh, that was marvelous," it said.
Liam let go of Isaiah.
"You," it said, and Chloe's eyes were shining, "are the most useful people I have ever met in my entire existence."
"Shut up."
"He was the only one who was going to do it," it said. "Do you understand that? He was the only one in this room with the stomach. I've been listening to him talk to himself for two years and he was going to do it, and now he's on the floor with one arm."
Chloe's head turned.
"And you did it for me," it said to Isaiah, tenderly. "Because I told you about the bow."
Isaiah made a sound.
"Isaiah, don't listen to it," Liam said.
"You did it because I made you afraid of being the man who doesn't act," it said. "For a week. Every night. On the boat. And this morning you finally acted, and look what you did."
"ISAIAH, DON'T LISTEN TO IT."
But Isaiah Macklemore was looking at the black case on the floor.
At the two cardboard boxes of ammunition in the gray foam.
And Liam saw what he was looking at, and Liam's blood turned to water.
"Isaiah," he said. "Isaiah, look at me."
Isaiah did not look at him.
He picked up the Desert Eagle.
He picked it up off the concrete, and he thumbed the magazine release, and the empty magazine dropped into his palm, and he began, with the steady practiced hands of a man who fixed things, to load it.
"Isaiah," Liam whispered.
"It's right," Isaiah said.
"It's not right—"
"Somebody has to do it, Liam." Isaiah's voice was perfectly calm and there were tears running down his face and he did not stop loading. "The doctor was going to do it and I killed him, and now there's nobody. So it has to be me."
He slotted the magazine home.
He racked the slide.
And he stood up, and turned, and pointed the biggest handgun in the world at Chloe Buck's head from six feet away.
"I'm sorry," he said.
And Chloe Buck stopped laughing, and looked at him with her own eyes, all the way, all the way in there, and said:
"Thank you."