Page 35 (1/2)

PART ONE

HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN TONIGHT

JONATHAN MABERRY

DURING THE OUTBREAK

— 1 —

NOW

Ever been in a helicopter crash?

There is no way to brace There is no way to deal with any part of it Your only hope is to get right with Jesus as fast as you can and hope that he isn’t playing golf with Buddha, with his phone switched off

In the split second the pilot yells that he has a dead stick and that you’re all going down hard, you become acutely aware that a helicopter is a ses and a lot of incidental shit that’s suddenly going with you into an industrial dryer The world spins and you can feel the subjective floor beneath you drop away Gravity whispers bad pros your heart You hear grown in to screah the s you see the world whip around like a tilt-a-whirl

You know the ground is waiting for you and it loves to kill things Consider all of the billions of dead whose bones rest in the ground It’s a hungry thing and it is never satisfied

All of this is bad All of this is absolutely fucking terrifying

But any bad thing can get worse Much, much worse

Like when the guy strapped into the seat next to you on that falling helicopter is trying to bite you Not out of fear, but because he has a hunger so deep that nothing, not even death, is going to stop it

That’s hoe fell

It’s e fell

— 2 —

SIX HOURS AGO

It started in another aircraft A plane One of those big-ass air force C-5 my team back fro dropped off the rest of the hu in shocked silence as atched the news unfolding on our laptop screens

We’d been radio silent for nearly a week because Echo Team had crossed the North Korean border to find a factory where they were developing a new kind of DSRV that could transport high-yield nukes right into American harbors Intel froreed that these deep-water vehicles were invisible to our best sonar My boss, Mr Church, took ownership of the case away froue Team International into play I took Top and Bunny with me because I needed brains and muscles for a situation where lack of numbers would work better than a crowd scene Because we operate outside of American lae don’t even return the president’s emails most of the time—if we make a mess, then it’s all on us The UN Security Council knew about us, but only off the record No one else knoe exist, which is kind of the idea Covert ops, you dig?

We found the base and discovered that the North Korean DSRV progra That is sole-use aton nuke We hacked their network and identified all ten targets New York, Los Angeles, Port of New Savannah, Port of Seattle, Port of Virginia, Port of Houston, the naval base in San Diego, as well as the Jebel Ali port in Dubai, Busan in South Korea, and Tokyo Harbor And there were twenty-eight es of construction

When we left, there was a s crater where the factory had been and a tapewore to their research databases Wea ride with the air force, before itched our radios back on And that’s e all got kicked in the nuts The world we just saved was already dying, and ere too late to doabout it