Chapter 17
"Isaiah," Liam said.
"Don't."
"Isaiah, put it down."
"Liam, I swear to God, don't come near me."
Liam did not come near him.
He stood eight feet away in a room full of smoke and glass and a dead man in the doorway, and he looked at his best friend holding a gun on his other best friend, and he made himself think.
Not feel. Think.
Work the read.
"All right," Liam said.
Isaiah's arms were shaking so badly the muzzle was drawing circles in the air.
"All right?" he said.
"All right." Liam kept his hands where Isaiah could see them and lowered himself, very slowly, until he was sitting on the concrete. "You've got the gun. I'm sitting down. Nobody's going to jump you."
"Liam, don't do this."
"Do what?"
"The thing you do." Isaiah's face crumpled. "The talking. Where you take it apart and make me feel stupid. Don't. Not now. I've made up my mind and I have got about forty seconds of nerve left in me and if you take that away from me I will never get it back."
"I know," Liam said.
"Then don't."
"I'm not going to argue with you," Liam said. "I'm going to ask you three questions, and then if you still want to, I'll get out of the way."
Isaiah's mouth twisted.
"That's arguing."
"It's not." Liam looked up at him. "I promise you it isn't. Three questions. And Isaiah, I want you to notice something first."
"What."
"She said thank you," Liam said.
Isaiah's arms sagged an inch.
"So?"
"So that was her." Liam's voice did not rise.
"That was Chloe. That was Chloe Buck looking down the barrel of a gun and thanking you for pulling the trigger, and I want you to sit with that, because it means she is still in there and she is still fighting, and she has been fighting for eleven hours with no help from anybody."
"That's why I have to—"
"Question one," Liam said.
Isaiah stopped.
"If you shoot her," Liam said, "where does it go?"
The white room hummed.
Isaiah blinked.
"What?"
"It's in her head," Liam said. "You blow her head apart. Fine. Where does it go, Isaiah? Does it die? Does it stop existing? Or does it walk out of that corpse the way it walked out of a swamp, and stand in the corner of this room, and start talking to you?"
Isaiah's face went gray.
"You don't know," Liam said. "Neither do I. Nobody in this room knows. Doctor Vance didn't know either and he was going to do it anyway, and he was a frightened old man who had been alone for two years and he was not thinking straight."
"It came out of the trees," Isaiah said. "It's been in those trees for years. It doesn't need her, it used her—"
"Exactly," Liam said.
Isaiah stopped again.
"It doesn't need her," Liam said. "It needed hands. Any hands. And there are four sets of hands standing in this room right now, and if you kill the one it's in, what makes you think it doesn't just come and stand behind yours?"
The gun came down an inch.
"Question two," Liam said.
"Liam—"
"Where is it standing right now?"
Isaiah's eyes flicked around the room.
"What?"
"Where is it," Liam said. "In the room. Point to it."
"It's in her—"
"Is it?" Liam did not move. "Isaiah, it has been talking to you for eight days. On the boat. Through a steel door. Through the walls of a concrete box. It doesn't need a mouth to talk to you and it never has."
He leaned forward.
"So how do you know," he said, "that everything you have thought in the last five minutes has been yours?"
Isaiah went absolutely white.
"Stop," he said.
"How do you know it isn't standing right behind you?"
"Stop it."
"You emptied a gun into an old man," Liam said, "and thirty seconds later a voice in this room told you it was marvelous, and told you it was your doing, and told you that you did it because it made you afraid, and then you picked up that gun again and you started loading it."
Isaiah was shaking his head, hard, over and over.
"You didn't decide anything," Liam said. "It walked you here. It has walked you here step by step for eight days, exactly the way it walked Chloe up that hillside, and it did not need to touch you once."
"NO."
"Isaiah, look at the shape of it." Liam's voice cracked. "It wants that stairwell open. It cannot open it. It needs hands and it needs a guess, and it has run out of time because it's tied at the wrists on the floor."
He pointed at the Desert Eagle.
"And the fastest way in the world to get a pair of untied hands standing in front of that keypad," he said, "is to make you kill the person whose hands are tied."
The gun came all the way down.
Isaiah Macklemore stood in the middle of that room with a Desert Eagle hanging at the end of his arm and his mouth open and his face doing something that was not quite grief and not quite terror.
"Oh God," he said.
"Yeah."
"Oh God, Liam, it was going to—"
"I know."
"It was going to make me shoot her and then it was going to be standing next to me and I'd have had nothing left, I'd have had nothing, I'd have done anything it said—"
"I know."
Isaiah dropped the gun.
It hit the concrete with a crash that made everyone jump, and he sat down on the floor next to it, and he put his head in his hands.
And on the floor, six feet away, Chloe Buck said, "You never asked the third question."
Liam looked at her.
Her eyes were open and they were flat and dead and enormously calm.
"He wants to know," it said. "He's been sitting there hoping you'd get to it. Go on, Liam. Ask me the third one."
"No," Liam said.
"Ask me what happens to her."
"No."
"Because you already know." Chloe's head lay on the concrete, and her voice was almost tender.
"You've known since the willows. There's nothing left of Ada. There's nothing left of Coble, or his wife, or his brother, or the little girl with the song. They don't come back, Liam. I don't give them back."
She smiled.
"I wear them," she said, "until there's nothing left to wear."
Liam stood up.
He picked the Desert Eagle up off the concrete and put it in his belt and did not look at her.
"Cully," he said. "Take her feet."
They carried her out of that room.
It took every ounce of strength the four of them had.
She went rigid and she screamed and she bucked, and Isaiah took the shoulders and Cully the feet and Liam and James took the hips, and they carried her out through the inner door, past the body of Marcus Vance, and up two hundred feet of white corridor.
She screamed the whole way.
She screamed things that no one in that corridor would ever repeat, private things, the worst things, and she screamed them in a voice that got everything right,
and by the time they reached the outer door Cully was weeping openly and James Wilford's lips were moving in something that was not English.
They got her out.
They came out of the hillside into the cold gray dawn of a dead city and set her down on the ruined street, and she stopped screaming instantly, the way a lamp goes out, and lay there looking at the sky.
Doyle was waiting.
He was standing at the bottom of the stair with forty Pike men behind him, and he had been standing there all night, and he looked at Liam's face and then at the body of the girl on the ground and then at the enormous stainless pistol in Liam's belt.
"What's in there?" he said.
Liam turned around and looked at the open door.
The green light burned in the cracked glass.
"Everything," he said. "Everything you ever hoped was in there. Bandages, antibiotics, saline, sutures, a wall of vaccine in glass vials. It's real, Doyle. It's all real and it's all sitting on shelves forty feet inside that hill."
Forty men made a sound.
Liam held up his hand.
"And there's a stairwell at the back," he said, "with a red light on it, and behind that stairwell there is a freezer with six hundred litres of the thing that killed the world."
The sound stopped.
"The man who built it is dead on the floor in there," Liam said. "He'd been sitting in that room for two years guarding a door he couldn't bring himself to open or destroy. And the only thing keeping that stairwell shut is that the last button on the keypad is a guess."
He looked at Doyle.
"So here's what you're going to do," he said.
"Say it."
"You're going to take everything off those shelves," Liam said.
"Every vial. Every crate. You're going to carry it up this hill and you're going to spread it out across four crews and three thousand people and you are going to make it so that there is no one place left in this city worth burning a hillside down for."
"And then?"
"And then you're going to bring that door down," Liam said.
Doyle went very still.
"You told me a barge is coming north with enough powder to bury this hillside in the sea," Liam said.
"So let it come. Let the Shore come with all of it. But let them come after the shelves are empty, and let them bury a hole in the ground with nothing in it but a freezer that must never, ever be opened."
Doyle looked at the door for a long moment.
"That's the only thing anybody's ever asked me for," he said, "that I'd actually be proud to do."
They spent the day emptying it.
Three thousand people came down that hillside.
That was the thing Liam had not been ready for, and he stood on the ruined street and watched it and could not speak.
Word had gone up the hill at dawn and by noon the square was full and by two o'clock there was a line of people running from the door of that facility up the bluff and out into the city, and they were passing crates hand to hand.
Ballard men and Pike men in the same line.
Women out of the ruins with children on their hips. An old man with one leg sitting on a crate at the top of the stair, counting, keeping a tally in charcoal on a board because somebody had to.
Doyle stood in the middle of it and shouted himself hoarse.
And James Wilford walked up and down that line all day with his Bible under his arm and said nothing at all, and put his hand on shoulders, and every so often somebody stopped him and asked him something, and he answered them, and moved on.
Liam did not join the line.