“Scroll back,” Malik instructed, speaking for the first time in a while. “There! Stop!”
The freeze-frame was blurry, but it showed what looked like some terrifying combination of feline and human, pushing through a crowd. It was only the briefest glimpse.
“Dekka,” Malik said. “She’s there. In Vegas.”
“And now,” Shade said, “we have a destination.”
ASO-6
SUBMARINES ARE HOT dogs inside of buns. The bun is the outer hull, shaped to move quietly and efficiently through the water. The hot dog is the pressure hull, a cylinder built to withstand crushing pressures.
It was the bun that the chimera shredded as it dragged the Nebraska along the ocean floor.
Inside the sub the crew were like beans in a baby’s rattle. Mostly the chimera just lugged it across sand and the occasional rock. Sometimes the sub was right side up. Other times it was on its side, or upside down. The seemingly random starts and stops threw crew against steel bulkheads, smashing muscle and bone.
Other times the chimera raised the sub to near vertical, and crewmen rolled and slid and fell through the air to crash against pressure hatches. Each section of the hull was sealed off, lest a hull breach in one area drown them all.
During one particularly hellish episode, the chimera had slammed the sub again and again until there was no member of the crew without lacerations, bruises, broken bones, or a split scalp. The ship’s doctor had stopped trying to treat anyone when his arm suffered a compound fracture.
That episode had at least led to the remaining coherent crew coming to a tentative conclusion: whatever impossibly big and powerful creature was out there, they may have become stuck to it somehow. Maybe the prop had been wedged between . . . well, between whatever limbs the chimera had. Because it certainly seemed like the beast had tried to shake them loose.
Only emergency lights were on in the Nebraska. All communications, all sensors were dead. They had no way to see outside—there are no portholes in a pressure hull. No one could do anything but lash themselves into a bunk and grit their teeth.
And try very hard not to think about the fact that among the things being brutally shaken were enough nuclear warheads to kill billions.
CHAPTER 17
The Cheerios of War
“GET OUT OF my way,” Dillon snapped. “Step aside!”
It was called the Shark Tank, though the official name was the Thomas & Mack Center. It held 17,923 people in its basketball configuration, but as Dillon arrived at the venue on foot, shaking visibly from the aftereffects of stress, especially the sudden, shocking death of Saffron, which kept playing over and over in his head, he saw people streaming out, despite the fact that the game was not over, despite the fact that the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels were playing their nemesis, San Jose State.
Obviously the news had reached the fans via their cell phones. But the slowness with which the crowd moved showed the arena still held thousands.
“Sir, you can’t—” a guard began.
“Shut up and get out of my way!”
He was pushing against the crowd and would never have made progress but for his ability to order people out of his way and have them comply immediately. He was a salmon swimming upstream, but a salmon who could command the waters to part.
He grabbed the next security guard he saw and said, “Take me to the control booth. Now!”
The guard muttered something about authorizations, but he obeyed without hesitation and led Dillon through an unmarked door, down a series of long corridors, to a set of stairs that opened onto another corridor. And then through a door into a wide booth festooned with glowing monitors and a half dozen men and women all fixated on those monitors.
Beyond the monitors and desks was a long open window looking out over the arena.
“Listen up! I want a mike that everyone in the place can hear!”
Three people practically fought for the chance to bring him a handheld microphone.
“This is on?”
It was.
“Everyone stop moving and listen to me.” His voice boomed and echoed pleasingly. He could see that everyone in the arena stopped.
“Who knows how to estimate a crowd?” Dillon demanded of the people in the booth. “How many people are still inside?”
There came a babble of voices throwing out different numbers, but the consensus seemed to be that at least seven thousand people were still present and listening to the sound of his voice.
Dillon walked to the edge of the booth, right up to the window. “Put a spotlight on me.” Into the microphone he said, “You are all my slaves. You are my slave army. You will obey me. Say it. Say you will obey me!”
Thousands of puzzled faces looked up at him. And with one voice, they thundered, “We will obey you!”
“I am the Charmer! I have come to lead you. Rejoice!”
Where the hell he got the word “rejoice,” he would never know. It was some distant holdover from Sunday school. But it pleased him, seemed to give him some new reserve of strength. A sea of faces gazed up at him, most showing UNLV red and black, others in San Jose’s blue and gold, all began yelling happily, as though their team had won.
Rejoicing! Hah!
Incredible. An incredible thing to see, Dillon thought. Too bad Saffron . . . He shrugged off that sad thought—he’d liked her, he’d have liked to sleep with her, but she was replaceable. In fact, he could see several young ladies down below who could replace her.
“So, let me ask you,” Dillon said, his voice echoing off the polished wood floor and bouncing around the high steel rafters, “what’s the difference between a dollar and the San Jose Spartans?” Pause. “You can still get four quarters out of a dollar.”
Roughly a half dozen laughs. Well, it was an old joke, just slightly reworked. And this was a tough audience, scared and confused as they were.
“Anyway, you are my slaves, and I have a job for you. I want you to leave this place and—”
The mob started moving.
“Not yet! Damn! Let me finish my sentence.” He sighed. This whole voice-of-God thing had a steep learning curve. “I want you to leave here, drive or walk to the Strip, and attack anyone you see in uniform. Kill them all. Police, security, anyone in a uniform.”
And with that he dismissed the rest of his “funny but not deadly” vow. Even he couldn’t quite see the humor in the situation, but what was he supposed to do? Just wait to be exterminated?
Thousands of puzzled, troubled faces, all waited.
“Now!” Dillon cried. “Now, my slave army! Go! Kill! Kill!”
Then, reminded of something interesting, he added, “All except the cheerleaders. You stay where you are and I’ll be right down.”
The cheerleaders were seven young women and two young men, college kids dressed in black spandex shorts and tight red tops with the letters UNLV across the front.
Reaching the floor, Dillon winked at them. “You nine are my private personal guard. The Charmers Cheerers.” No, that wasn’t quite right. “The Charmers cheer squad. Never mind. Security!” Three nearby campus cops came at a run. “Give these people your gun belts. Don’t worry, we’ll find enough for everyone!”
“You nine follow me wherever I go, and do whatever I say. Now, let’s get out of here, because a serious shitstorm is about to start.”
The murderous crowd had almost emptied out of the arena, and it occurred to Dillon that he didn’t need to follow them. They had their orders, and if past history was any judge, they’d keep attacking and killing anyone in uniform until Las Vegas was cleansed of cops and casino security.
“I am the king of Las Vegas,” he said, and laughed. Pity about Saffron, but look at me now, he thought. My own squad of hot college girls. Well, and the two guys. He could get rid of them, but he didn’t want to look sexist. Anyway, maybe he’d get them all to do a special cheer for him and do the whole pyramid thing, and he assumed the guys were helpful for that.
&nbs
p; The Charmer’s Chatterers?
The Charmer’s Chaplains?
The Charmer’s Cheerios?
That might be okay. Yeah. He’d try it out with audiences, see if it worked.
With thousands of helpless slaves and with nine cheerleaders, Dillon was starting to recover his confidence. But he had been shaken by Saffron’s murder, and more shaken by Dekka and Armo. But, he told himself, he would never again be caught off guard. The two Rockborn meddlers would have their hands full coping with his thousands of ready killers.
“Someone show me the way to the best VIP box,” Dillon said, clapping his hands. “We are going to party like it’s the end of the world!”
Malik closed his eyes in the back seat, blocking out the wind, blocking out the fear, pushing everything away.
Like meditating.
Like meditating while teetering on the edge of disaster.
Malik had never been proud of his intellect. He considered it a gift from his DNA, like being dealt a pair of aces in a hand of poker. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it, it was not the result of effort, so he wasn’t proud. But he was grateful.
What about you, Dark ones? Do you feel pride?
Till now Malik had used his brain primarily to get good grades. High school had required very little effort, and even his all-too-brief start at Northwestern had not felt very challenging.
But now . . . well, now he needed every last IQ point and wished he had more. He had Cruz’s phone and from time to time would scan articles on topics that were at the limits of his mental capacity. Physics. Quantum physics. Multiple universe theories, of which there were several versions. The fanciful theory that our universe is a simulation. One giant game of the Sims.
Easy for you, isn’t it? You’re the top of the food chain and I’m what? An insect trying to understand you?
Many had speculated on multiple universes and sims, especially since the Perdido Beach Anomaly, the FAYZ. But physicists and sci-fi authors and the like had long played with the notion that our universe might not be the only one; that the big bang might have thrown off many, many universes.
Some thought universes were like foam, like a handful of soap bubbles scooped from a bath, each bubble pressed against and deformed by others. Others preferred flat universes, piled up like a ream of paper.
Do you know the answers? Or are you still figuring it out?
When speculation turned to simulations, the questions centered on whether the sim was like a wind-up toy, going along all on its own. Others imagined the sim universe as a game, something being actively played. It was very like a belief in God—not the benign God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but something closer to the ancient Greek gods: capricious, emotional, needy.
All these ideas had long been dismissed for one simple reason: there was no proof. None. Until . . .
Until the FAYZ had proven that the laws of physics, the supposedly unbreakable laws of the one and only universe, had been broken. Broken, shattered, and stomped upon.
That shouldn’t have been possible.
And yet . . . Am I right, you invisible intruders? Would you tell me?
For four years many physicists had hidden their heads in the sand, stuck their fingers in their ears, and yelled la la la la, so as to shut out the seemingly impossible. Others had rushed to concoct theories that treated the PBA as a strange, localized warping of space-time. But now that, too, was a dead end, because now the whole world was the FAYZ.
Still, the vast majority of people, even many scientists, could not come to grips with the new reality. Fear was a big part of it. But also the limits of the human brain, a brain that could not visualize a universe that had forward, back, left, right, up and down, past and future, but no elsewhere.
Is that built into the sim? Did you design us to be blind to other dimensions?
Malik liked questioning them. They never answered, of course, and they never let him alone, but somehow demanding answers of them gave him a sense of control. An illusion, perhaps. A bit of self-deception, perhaps.
Yet, when he questioned, he felt that they heard him. Just as he was convinced his blast of pain had reached them in some form.
I can’t see or hear you. I can’t even imagine you. But I can demand answers from you.
“Little solace,” Malik muttered.
Cruz looked at him. “What’s little solace?”
Malik sighed. “Nothing,” he said. Then silently added, yet.
CHAPTER 18
Tanks for the Memories
“WHAT THE HOLY hell . . . ?” Brigadier General Maxwell Fullalove put the landline phone back in its cradle. He had a full colonel and two majors with him in his HQ, along with various enlisted folks and junior officers. None could quite grasp the nature of their orders.
“We’re driving an ABCT into Vegas?” the colonel sputtered. An ABCT, armored brigade combat team, consisted of roughly 4,700 soldiers, ninety Bradley infantry fighting vehicles equipped to carry six armed soldiers, a 25-millimeter chain gun, a 7.62-millimeter machine gun, and two TOW anti-tank missiles. There were also over a hundred armored personnel carriers. But the real punch came from ninety M1A2 Abrams tanks, which carried machine guns, missiles, and either 105- or 120-millimeter cannons. “Bradleys and Abrams on the Vegas Strip? If nothing else, it’ll play hell with the road surface . . .”
Fort Irwin, California, was in a desperately isolated area of desert and more desert. It was the National Training Center, specializing in preparing combat brigades for the real thing. At present it had two serious forces, its own OPFOR—opposition force, which acted as “the enemy” in training operations—and the visiting Iron Brigade, whose insignia was a blue-red-and-gold pyramid badge with the slogan Strike Hard!
The emergency order from a General DiMarco—backed up, to the surprise of Fullalove, by the Pentagon and the national security advisor—had thrown the base into a controlled panic of activity.
“Get to work,” Fullalove snapped. He was no more happy about this lunatic order than his officers were, but this was the army, not debate club. “I want hourly status updates.”
Fullalove figured he could field most of a scratch brigade, taking from his own OPFOR as well as the visiting Iron Brigade.
The big problem as always was logistics, starting with the loading of live ordnance, thousands of tank rounds, hundreds of thousands of rounds of machine-gun and chain-gun ammunition, not to mention the issue of fuel. Then they would need to refuel en route, which meant sending fuel trucks, of which he had far too few. Moving at speed right down the interstates with no regard for traffic or road surfaces, and moving at tank speed—he had neither time nor enough flatbeds to truck the tanks to the scene—they could be in Vegas five hours after they set out. But even with top-priority, all-hands-on-deck measures it would be ten hours before they could start. Ten hours to prepare, five hours to drive, and it was now after three a.m. That would have them arriving in the city at sunset the next day.
And then?
His orders went no further than, “Engage enemy mutants and restore order.” Nuts! A tank brigade in the middle of an American city? He had seen the news; he knew Las Vegas was experiencing an emergency, but the solution to civil unrest was not supposed to be tanks, for God’s sake. These were not Special Forces; they weren’t even infantry, though they would have some foot soldiers with them. These soldiers were not trained for civil unrest. One modern ABCT could have taken on and defeated the entire German army of World War II. The destructive power was shocking. And he’d been assured he would have support from the air as well, though what in hell the Pentagon thought they could accomplish with F-18s over a major city was terrifying to contemplate.
He considered taking personal command of the operation, but this whole thing had career suicide written all over it. Congressional investigations, maybe even a court-martial. He had two experienced colonels he could task with the job, the OPFOR commander, Andrea Mataconis, who was a protégé, and the visiting unit
’s colonel, Frank “Frankenstein” Poole. The nickname came from the colonel’s unusually high forehead, and from junior officers who whispered that he was a monster if you pissed him off.
Fullalove summoned Poole, who arrived in crisp uniform and polished boots, his oblong face alight with excitement.
“Poole, I’m giving you this scratch brigade. You will take command and advance at speed to Las Vegas to deal with the . . . the situation.”
Poole was a gung-ho, hard-charging officer, but he wasn’t crazy, so he said, “General, I assume there will be written orders?”
Fullalove nodded, already imagining himself before a Senate investigating committee of smug, stupid senators. “I’m having them cut right now. But Frank, you’re going to have a lot of autonomy on this. We don’t exactly have battle plans for this sort of thing. You’ll develop rules of engagement as we get new info.”
“Understood, sir.”
Frankenstein Poole received his written orders—vague and clearly rushed—and practically levitated down the steps to his waiting staff car. He’d served fifteen years and had yet to fire a shot in anger. Now he was to ride into Vegas like George freaking Patton, with every camera on earth watching.
“Hell, yeah,” he said, and laughed.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had 2,600 sworn police officers. The casinos hired many times that number of security officers of varying levels of professionalism. All wore uniforms.
The first police officer to die at the hands of Dillon’s slave army was officer Carla Sanchez, exhausted from the already bloody day. She and her partner had pulled into a 7-Eleven to get coffee when a half dozen civilians charged them and beat her to the ground before she could draw her weapon. Her partner fired off a full clip of 9-millimeter, killing two and wounding one, before the rushing mob swept over him as well, oblivious to the danger.
Officer Sanchez’s last conscious thought was that it was strange, very, very strange, to die from tire-iron blows delivered by a middle-aged woman who kept apologizing.
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