I pivoted as he drove me backward and clopped him hard on the side of the head, sending him crashing into a bureau. He hit really hard, and although it had to be painful, he spun off the impact and dove at me again, this time trying to bite my throat.

Which was when Ghost hit him like a cruise missile, metal teeth clamping onto Mitrović’s thigh, high near the groin. Impossible to ever tell if it was a deliberate attack to the femoral artery or an unlucky accident, but suddenly blood geysered up. I grabbed Ghost and hauled him back, ordering him to release his bite. He did, but he took a chunk of meat with him.

Mitrović did not scream in pain. Instead, even with a mangled leg, he drove at me again, howling like a demon from the pit. My hand moved, and my knife moved with it, slapping across the man’s throat, opening a second fire hydrant of blood.

He dropped right there.

All of this happened in the time—call it a second?—that it took Top to run around the big bed and bring his Snellig up. He looked at me, and I shook my head.

“The fuck was that?” demanded Bunny, coming in from the hall.

But I think we all knew what it was.

And when we heard the wild screams from downstairs, it confirmed it. File it under worst-case scenario.

Mitrović—and maybe everyone else on the staff—had been dosed with a designer bioweapon Kuga had used on civilians in both North and South Korea and on a mass of dignitaries, security people, politicians, and the press at the D9 denuclearization summit in Oslo, Norway. A bioengineered neurotoxin made from the Loligo beta-microseminoprotein found in the longfin inshore squid. Once dosed, it drove everyone exposed to it into a state of total murderous fury.

We called it Rage.

There was no cure except time. No way to manage it except Sandman, and it was too late for that. Mitrović was bleeding out, and even if I’d wanted to save his life, that ship had sailed right off the edge of the planet.

I whirled.

“The lab!” I yelled, and we ran from the room and thundered down the stairs, following the shrieks. They were coming from the same mudroom we’d used, except they stabbed outward through the very walls. I knew that it meant there was a hidden entrance, but damn if it didn’t make me feel like we were in a haunted house. Or a haunted asylum.

INTERLUDE 4

SALES PRESENTATION VIA SHOWROOM

SIX MONTHS AGO