Although part of me is relieved that I’m not currently engaged in a mental scuffle with Typhon, this is a horrible development. Karkinos is naturally defended from the implant and it seems that Typhon won’t let anything strike his face. Even if the Air Force were bombarding the pair with missiles and the implant snuck through, it’s likely it would be destroyed by an errant explosion.
That’s when I realize we have an easier target. I turn my attention back to Scylla. The Kaiju looks like he’s lounging in the little water that remains in the Reflecting Pool. His upper lip crinkles over and over, revealing his long teeth. He’s still stunned, but for how long?
I’m about to dial Woodstock when my phone chirps. I accept the call without looking at the screen. “Scylla.”
“What?” a female voice says.
The voice is familiar, but it’s not Collins or Alessi. “Who is this?”
“Betty,” says the woman.
I feel like I’ve been slapped. “Girlfriend Betty?”
“What other kind of Betty is there?”
“How did you get this number?” I ask.
“Some guy named Watson,” she says. “But listen. With everything that’s happened, I’ve seen you on TV. I started thinking. Maybe I was—”
I say the only thing I can think of, “Click,” and then hang up, making a mental note to have a chat with Watson about security.
My phone rings again and I answer. “Betty, you better—”
“You can address me,” Alessi says. “Not the helicopter.”
Helicopter Betty. Thank God. “Target Scylla,” I say.
“I hear you,” she says. “I’m just not sure where to target her.”
“Endo,” I say, pulling him away from his conversation with whoever it is he called. “We’re going to try the implant on Scylla. Where should we—”
“Back of the head,” he says. “Behind the eye. Either side will do.” Then he’s back to his conversation.
I relay the information, and Alessi hands me over to Collins while she preps the second—and final—attempt.
“Hey,” Collins says, almost casually. “I just wanted to let you know that if you become a vegetable after this, I’m not going to sit around feeding you pudding.”
I can’t help but smile. “But I love hospital pudding.”
“It would make you fat, lying there all immobile,” she says.
“This is true. What if I give you permission in advance to take advantage of my vegetative body? Have your way with me?”
She laughs, which further dispels some of my tension. “You sure know what to say to a woman.”
“What?” I say. “Who wouldn’t want to fool around with a pasty white, atrophying, unconscious man?”
I’m laughing now too, and I’m starting to second-guess this plan. We could just walk away now. Let nature take its course. Sure, we might spend the rest of our lives in hiding from Gordon and his Kaiju, but we’d be alive and together.
Unfortunately for me, I’m drawn toward doing the right thing like Nemesis is to vengeance. I can’t walk away. No matter what the cost. Someone has to put an end to this madness, and I’m pretty much the only one who can.
“We’re almost in position,” Collins says, her voice sobering up.
I scan the night sky and find the running lights blinking red and white, much closer than before. They’re a half mile from Scylla, holding steady at a hundred feet.
Before I can order them to fire, I hear a rough, organic scraping sound and turn back to Nemesis. Karkinos and Typhon have held their position, a safe distance from Nemesis. Perhaps sizing her up, looking for weaknesses. But Nemesis, who has more experience in the destruction category, not to mention the Kaiju-slaying category, isn’t about to give them time.
Her chest heaves. Her mouth opens.
She’s about to hock another explosive loogie. I’ve come up with a few different names for the attack. Meteoric Boom Wad was in the lead for a while. But when I thought about the act of spitting at someone and what it means, I came up with Scorching Contempt, an attack reserved for when she’s just had enough of her attacker’s shit. “Hold your fire,” I shout into the phone. “Get down. Down! Down! Down!”
I have no idea if Collins heard me or if Woodstock took action. There isn’t time. I take hold of Endo’s arm, yanking him along. He’s running behind me a moment later, sprinting across the White House roof. There’s a wet pop behind us. I can’t see it, but I know Nemesis has just fired off a bright orange wad. We have just seconds.
The door is open when we arrive, soldiers venturing outside again. “Back!” I wave my arms at them like a wounded bird. “Back inside!”
Happily, the men listen, ducking back while one of them holds the door open for Endo and me. We partly run, partly fall down the stairs. The soldier slams the door closed behind us. He looks down and shouts something at us, but his voice is drowned out by a thunderous boom that rattles the entire building. The shaking lasts for just five seconds, but the power goes out, plunging the already dark, red-lit hallway into absolute darkness.
For a moment, the men in the hallway are silent, perhaps all as surprised as I am to still be alive. I find the stairs in the dark and climb to the top, placing my hand against its steel surface. It’s warm, but not hot. The explosion didn’t reach the White House.
I yank the door open and stumble into the night. The air reeks of smoke, and not the campfire variety. This is the acrid smoke of civilization burning. Concrete, plastic, chemicals and people. It can’t be healthy to breathe, but I hardly notice it as I run back to my rooftop perch. Putting the binoculars to my eyes, I look for Betty. The helicopter is nowhere in sight.
But are they dead?
I take my phone out, but notice my surroundings for the first time. Glowing orange timbers float through the air like a million fireflies. A massive circle, a mile around Nemesis in all directions, has been scorched. The White House is just a half mile beyond the destruction. Nemesis stands at the center of the destruction, unfazed. Her opponents appear equally uninjured by the explosion. They’re the only things still standing.
Endo steps up to me, looking concerned. “The helicopter?”
Like me, he’s selfishly more worried about the chopper than the fact that a large portion of Washington, D.C. just got erased. I shake my head and ask, “Who is she? Alessi?”
She’s not a girlfriend or lover. I’ve never gotten that vibe. But they care for each other deeply.
“Half-sister,” he says.
Geez. I dial the number. It rings through to voicemail, and I try again with the same results. I’m about to suggest we go find them when twin roars make me cringe. Karkinos is charging, head down, spikes up. Typhon is moving too, arcing around to flank Nemesis. The real fight is about to begin.
45
Ashley Collins awoke to the smell of smoke. She coughed twice, each flex of her lungs bringing a fresh stab of pain to her skull. She groaned and put her hand to the side of her head, the source of the pain. Her hair was tacky wet. Blood.
She blinked her eyes. With clearer vision, she looked around Betty’s interior. What...? Unable to make sense of the sideways world, Collins closed her eyes again and took several long breaths, focusing her thoughts.
They had received a warning from Jon. She remembered a sudden, lurching dive behind a building. Then the helicopter tilted and they dropped.
We crashed, she realized, opening her eyes again.
The helicopter lay on its side. Collins was still strapped in place in the back seat. A spider-web fracture in the window beside her, now looking down at the pavement, revealed where she’d hit her head. Woodstock and Alessi were both missing. The view through the shattered cockpit window was fractured, but she could see a city street, lined with cars. Further ahead, at an intersection, black smoke rolled down the side street, lit by thousands of glowing, fairy-like embers.
One of the Kaiju immolated, Collins thought. We’re lucky to be alive.
/> Bracing her left arm against the window, she unbuckled from the seat. Gravity yanked her down, slamming her against the window. Her body ached all over, and she felt a nearly overwhelming desire to sleep, but she fought against it, remembering what was at stake. Who was at stake.
Jon is depending on us.
She slid into the front seat and noticed two things at once: the chopper still had power and the passenger door was open. Careful not to break anything on the control panel, Collins climbed up and out of the open door. Outside the chopper, she could hear the distant roaring of angry Kaiju, unaffected by the blast, but the sounds of the city and the military had faded. Now other sounds filled the void.
“Sonuvabitch!”
Woodstock.
Collins slid herself over the chopper’s side, moving toward the voice, and leaned over the edge. Woodstock and Alessi were both below her, working on the chopper, but they didn’t look good. Woodstock had a visibly broken leg. Alessi yanked on a wrench with one arm while the other hung useless. Despite their injuries, they were trying to free the neural implant launcher mounted to the chopper’s underside.
“I can’t get it with one arm,” Alessi complained.
“Well, I can’t very well stand, now can I?” Woodstock said, “So you’re going to have to—”
“I think I can get it,” Collins said.
Alessi looked up, saw Collins and all but collapsed. “Thank God.”
Collins slid over the side and dropped to the macadam. She landed gracefully, despite the protests of her body and her head. She was in serious pain, but compared to Woodstock and Alessi, she was healthy.
Alessi held up the wrench. “There’s just one bolt left.”
“You should have woken me up,” Collins said, taking the wrench.
“Tried,” Woodstock says. “Your arms and legs might be working fine, but you need to take it easy. A concussion is nothing to screw around with.”
Collins went to work on the bolt with one arm while cradling the launcher in the other. “You’re just saying that so you can tell Jon you said it.”
Woodstock slid himself back against the tire of an abandoned car, wincing with the movement as his legs straightened. “Pretty much.”
“This thing will still launch?” Collins asked.
“I can trigger it remotely,” Alessi said. “But someone still needs to point it in the right direction.”
Collins felt the bolt about to fall away. “How much does it weigh?”
Alessi shrugged. “Hundred pounds.”
Collins tightened her hold on the launcher just as the bolt fell away. She dropped the wrench and got both hands beneath the cylinder. Felt like more than a hundred pounds, but she’d lifted—and carried—more than that in the past. Not with a concussion, but there was no time for whining.
“You sure you got that?” Woodstock asked.
Collins grunted, hefting the cylinder up and propping it against her shoulder. “My grandfather used to say ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’”
“Spoken like a true woman of Maine,” Woodstock said with a smile. “You’re meltin’ my heart.”
“Your grandfather was quoting Mark Twain,” Alessi said, leaning against the chopper’s belly.
“Yeah, well, my grandfather was well read.” Collins looked up at the building behind which they’d taken shelter and crashed. It looked mostly intact. “You’re sure this will work?”
Alessi took a phone from her pocket and spoke the number twice. “Call me when you’re in position. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Collins had her personal phone in her pocket. She gave a nod and headed for the building’s open front doors, hoping the blast hadn’t destroyed local cell towers. Broken glass crunched beneath her feet as she moved into the building’s lobby. The reception desk looked more like a bunker. A metal detector led to the far side of the entryway where she could see a sign for the stairs. She didn’t know what the building was used for, but she assumed it contained overflow offices for House and Senate personnel.
The interior of the building was lit by emergency lights, glowing against a few of the walls. She could see, but just barely. She moved by sliding her feet forward, afraid of tripping over some unseen obstacle. But the path was clear, and she soon reached a row of elevator doors followed by the doorway to the stairs.
A wave of dizziness swept through her body. Stars danced in her vision. She carefully set the metal cylinder down and took several deep breaths, focusing on remaining upright. If she went over, she didn’t think she’d get back up for a while.
I’m never going to make it up the stairs, she thought, recalling the building’s fifteen-story height.
She glanced at the elevator. Would they still be running? It was possible that emergency power in the government building would operate the elevators, at least for a short time, so VIPs didn’t get stuck. Dragging the cylinder across the marble floor, she pushed the call button. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open.
Collins didn’t think about religion much, but she had no doubt some higher power had just intervened on her behalf. “Thank you, baby Jesus.” She stepped inside and hit the button for the highest floor. The doors slid shut. The elevator shuddered and rose. It felt like slow going for an elevator, and the overhead light flickered a few times, but it rose up steadily.
The doors jittered open, as though struggling to complete a final task. The hallway beyond was lit by dim emergency lights. Feeling a little more rested after leaning against the elevator wall, Collins put the cylinder against her shoulder again and moved into the hall. She quickly found the stair entry to her left and hobbled to the door. Inside the stairwell, she looked up. Two flights to go.
She took several, rapid, deep breaths, saturating her lungs with oxygen. The effort cleared the cobwebs some, but did nothing for the pain. She took the stairs quickly, taking deep breaths the whole way. By the time she reached the second landing, she was sweating and out of breath, but the effort got her blood flowing and fought against her desire to simply pass out.
A green metal door blocked her path to the roof. She tried the handle and found it locked, as expected. With a sigh, she placed the launcher down on the concrete landing and drew her .50 caliber handgun, happy that she’d reloaded the weapon after escaping the secret Zoomb laboratory.
This is going to hurt, she thought, wishing she could cover her ears. With just a moment’s hesitation, she pulled the trigger once. The cacophonous report made her shout, and clutch her free hand to her ear, but the powerful round did its job, destroying the door’s lock.
She took the now-loose handle, shook it about and pulled. The door ground open, unleashing a warm smoky haze. Collins coughed and felt her nausea return, but she pushed past it, picking up the launcher and heading into the battle-lit night.
She staggered onto the roof, heading toward the sound of battle. When she reached the charred edge, she looked out into hell. A massive swath of the city had been reduced to charcoal. Fires burned around the perimeter. Judging by the amount of smoke rising from below, she believed her building was burning, too.
Crouching near the building’s edge, she placed the launcher on the stone-covered roof and dialed Alessi on her phone. “You’re already there?” Alessi asked, sounding surprised.
“Elevator worked,” Collins said. “Please tell me you’re ready.”
“Just point the launcher toward Scylla. I’ll use the guidance system to target her and fire the rocket, but...it’s going to get hot for you.”
“I understand how rockets work,” Collins said. “Let’s just get this done.”
She put the phone on speaker mode and dropped it in her pocket. Then she hoisted the launcher onto her shoulder and stepped closer to the edge. Nemesis stood a mile away, facing Collins. Karkinos and stoic Typhon stood in front of Collins, their backs to her, oblivious to her tiny presense. They appeared to be sizing each other up, slowly moving in b
road destructive circles like wrestlers in a ring.
She found Scylla still lying in the reflecting pool, but starting to stir. They didn’t have long. She pointed the launcher toward Scylla and shouted, “Good to go!”
“Hold on,” came Alessi’s muffled voice. “Once this thing launches, you can move, okay?”
“Just fire it!” Collins shouted. Her head was spinning, her arms shaking.
“Target locked,” Alessi said. “Firing in three, two, one—”
The rocket inside the canister ignited, blowing the back off. She could feel the heat singe her shoulder, but she held the launcher in place. Then the rocket was free, kicking back a wave of heat. Collins shouted in pain, dropped the launcher and fell to the roof, where she remained, unmoving, as the rocket-propelled neural implant cut a path over the ruins of downtown Washington, D.C.
46
Mark Hawkins shouted with surprise as his feet left the ground. He was lifted up by an arm far stronger than the average human’s. But this surprise was a happy one, because the fist wrapped around the back of his armor belonged to Lilly, not Gordon.
Seeing his prey escaping, Gordon lunged, but he was too late. Lilly’s express elevator carried Hawkins thirty feet up, and then across, slipping through entwined branches, moving from tree to tree, faster than Gordon could run on the ground.
When Lilly finally stopped moving, she deposited him on a high branch and asked, “Okay?”
“Fine,” he replied. “Thanks.”
She gave a feline smile and disappeared in a blur of black fur.
After collecting himself, Hawkins nocked an arrow and searched for Gordon, feeling like Robin Hood as he looked over his bow’s fiber-optic sight, standing on a branch thirty feet above the ground. He was concealed by the leaf-laden branches, but the foliage also hindered his view. He mumbled curses while he moved further out on the branch, which bent from his weight.
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