Tom landed on well-tended lawn before the front portico. The first thing he saw was a sheet-lightning flicker of muzzle flashes beyond the prefab barracks between the main house and the gate. The rattle of automatic fire was near continuous.
Eyes beginning to water from the smoke that twined around him, he started to trot in that direction. A brilliant blue-white flash seemed to light the whole night sky ahead of him, accompanied by a nasty crack like the sound of lightning striking nearby. An RPG had gone off nearby. As he passed between two of the lightweight wood structures a window with a wall in it exploded outward toward him. A huge figure loomed there, misshapen and dark, like a hybrid of man and steel drum. A vast arm swung toward him, trailing wood splinters.
He bent his will to going insubstantial, to allow the powerful blow to pass right through him.
He didn’t go insubstantial.
Fury spiked in him. That bastard Meadows stole Cosmic Traveler! Then a fist like a medieval mace clipped the side of his head and sent sparks bouncing off the inside of his skull. Tom spun down hard on his face on dirt worn bare by passing boots and compacted hard. The world reeled crazily about him. His stomach lurched.
Sheer anger drove him to push off from the merciless ground, snapping himself upright with unnatural strength. He found himself facing his attacker. The dude looked like the Tin Woodman on steroids. He had a lower jaw like a steam shovel. “So you’re the fella they call the Radical, huh?” the metal man said in a loopy Minnesota accent. “Tough guy. Well, it’s high time you picked on somebody your own size.”
Tom tasted blood, turned his face to spit out a tooth. Then he slammed an uppercut into the rusted-over steel plate that covered the metal dude’s gut. Iron groaned and buckled.
The metal man oofed and bent over. “Felt that one,” he said.
Tom slammed an overhand right into the bucket jaw. The metal man flew backward through the corner of the same wall he’d just burst through. A corner of the barracks slumped on top of him.
Tom turned to look for new enemies. There was a terrific commotion coming from the far side of the Red House, toward the west. By the light of flames he saw what looked like the branches of a huge tree looming above the high-pitched slate roof.
I don’t remember a great big tree there when I was here before, he was just thinking muzzily, when something like the steel jaws of a trap closed on either biceps.
He jerked his right arm forward. Skin beneath rust-roughened steel fingers. Tom slammed his elbow back against thick metal plate, felt it give. The iron man gasped in pain. The grip on Tom’s left arm slacked.
He ripped free, spun to begin trip-hammering punches into the metal monster. The armor began to dent in on itself, the steel man to sag.
Then suddenly there were wasps whining around his ears, stinging his arms and neck and cheeks, and trying for his eyes.
Bursts of automatic gunfire erupted to the south as the local soldiers regrouped. Cameo and Bugsy crouched behind the ruins of a jeep, its front wheels still gently spinning. “This is not going according to plan,” Bugsy noted.
“The earring,” Cameo said.
“What?”
“Ali’s earring. Simoon can force them all into cover.”
Bugsy took the chance of peering over the jeep’s fender. A bullet hissed by, and he ducked back down. “It’s in Central Park somewhere,” he said.
“It’s what?”
“Well . . . we broke up, you know?”
Ellen said something under her breath. She fumbled with something in her pocket, then the ruins of the fedora appeared. Nick lobbed a ball of lightning at the attackers, following it with ten or twelve marble-sized shockers as the first detonation was still rumbling. “Go!” Nick shouted. “Distract them, at least.”
“I’m on it.” Bugsy dissolved into an angry, living cloud. He flew in a funnel toward Weathers, weaving through the air in tight spirals, dropping low and racing to the sky, no tendril of wasps so dense that their loss would be crippling.
Tom Weathers’s fists rose and fell, Rustbelt shuddering with every blow. A lightning ball exploded just to the Radical’s left, illuminating him like a flashbulb—hair plastered to him by sweat, lips drawn back in an expression of inhuman rage.
Bugsy went in for the kill . . . or if not the kill, the serious annoyance. Fifty, maybe sixty wasps got in close enough to sting.
The Radical turned, shouting. Beams of terrible power leapt from his hands, sweeping the air, driving Bugsy back.
One beam hit Cameo.
Michelle came out of the Red House with Fire Boy in tow. Rusty was lying facedown in the dirt next to the front stairs. A blast of light came from Tom Weathers and streaked across the open lawn. She saw Cameo collapse. Bugsy was beside her, surrounded by wasps. Oh, God, Michelle thought, horrified. They shouldn’t be here.
And she was scared. Scared for them, and scared for herself. After what had happened in New Orleans, she knew Tom Weathers was capable of doing anything.
She ran down the steps and knelt beside Rusty, dropping Fire Boy’s hand. “Wally,” she said, gently touching his shoulder. Rust flaked off beneath her fingers. “Can you hear me?”
He opened one eye, sort of. His metal skin was cracked and red with rust, and leaking blood. “Bubbles,” he said. “How’d you get here?” His voice was weak.
“Oh, the usual,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “Teleported to Africa with Noel. Came up the Congo. Found some remote labs. Killed Alicia Nshombo. Heard there was a party going on here.”
He tried to smile, but it came out as a wince. He rolled onto his side. “We gotta get rid of the lab. And Gardener . . .”
“The lab is done.” She wasn’t going to tell him about Jerusha. Not any more than he probably already knew. “Now you stay down and let me take care of Weathers.”
“You betcha,” he said with a groan.
Fire Boy tugged on her pants leg and then pointed to Rusty. “Friend?” he asked and he managed not to set anyone, or anything, on fire.
She nodded. The boy sat down on the steps near Rusty. Michelle wanted him to be in a safer place, but there was no safe place here.
She ran toward Weathers, releasing a barrage of bubbles. As they hit, his flesh ripped open. Ha! Michelle thought. An angry scream came from Weathers. It was frustration and fear. And it made Michelle smile. Now you’re scared, too. You bastard.
She hurled more bubbles. She made them heavy and fast. Weathers dodged the first few, but then one caught him and propelled him backward. He looked like a cartoon character, his legs splayed out, body doubled over. He landed in the shredded lawn and rolled. The next bubble exploded by his ear, and half of his pretty face was stripped to muscle and bone.
He popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “You bitch!” he screamed. A nimbus of yellow light surrounded him, bright as the sun. The beam that flew from his fingers was blinding, too bright to look upon. It hit her, threw her back, and made her fatter.
She lumbered to her feet and released another round of bubbles at him. “Why is it when a man is getting his ass kicked by a woman he has to call her a bitch? I mean, can’t you use some imagination, Weathers?” Anyone else would have been down. Anyone else would be dead. She didn’t know if she could stop him. And if she couldn’t, what would happen to everyone else?
Her bubbles threw him back again. He gave another shriek of frustration. “You slut! That hurt!” Then he hurled a light bolt at her. It lit Michelle up like Christmas. She blobbed out a little, and felt herself get denser. The power was fire in her veins again.
“Again!” She fired a huge, heavy explosive bubble at him. “With!” Another bubble. “The!” Another bubble. “Lame-ass!” Another bubble. “Remarks!” Another bubble. His face was hamburger, his clothes were rags, his lean torso sheeted in blood, but still the light poured from him. He would not go down.
“Great,” she said. “I’m going to have to keep listening to your blather even longer.” Her hands tremble
d. She kept bubbling. She had to stop him.
“You fat whore!” Another bolt of light. Michelle rolled her eyes as it hit. Her clothes were smoking.
“That’s horizontally challenged American to you,” she yelled. “And I’m not a whore. I’m just popular!”
God, I hate this guy. She hated him for what he’d done to Drake. She hated him for what he’d done to her. Hated him for helping turn children into jokers, killers, freaks. Hated herself for failing. For always failing everyone. She couldn’t be a hero. She didn’t even know how.
She put all the hatred into a bubble and let it go.
There was movement inside: someone coming toward her, not fleeing from the destruction. Jerusha opened her eyes wide, alarmed.
It was a child.
They’d talked about this, as they’d planned the assault. Jerusha had warned them. “They’ll have child aces, kids that they’ve subverted and twisted, with God knows what abilities. They’re dangerous, all of them. You may have to be ready to kill a child to save yourself.”
She’d warned them.
But seeing the boy, Jerusha hesitated for a breath: with uncertainty, with weariness. For all she knew this could be one of the kids on which they’d been experimenting, an innocent. One of those they’d come to save. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “Do you speak English?”
The child did not move, did not answer. He stood and stared at her, his face a mask. He was skinny, homely, an ungainly boy with a bush of unkempt hair. “Do you have a name?” she asked him. “What do they call you?”
“Wrecker.” His accent was British, his smile cold. The sudden twist of his lips, the satisfaction and rage in the expression, told her that no, she was wrong. This was something dangerous. This was another one like Leucrotta, like the Hunger who had bitten her.
Jerusha started to reach for her seed pouch again, but it was already too late. The child was holding a red brick from the rubble of the wall in his hand. With a smile, he underhanded it in her direction, softly.
A foot from her, the brick exploded, suddenly and violently, the concussion tossing her backward, and Jerusha felt terrible, white pain rip across her abdomen. Her hands reaching into the seed pouch were suddenly slick and heavy, and there was blood—far too much of it—pouring from her, and she was falling, her seeds spilling to the ground below her, her red, red blood drowning them, and Wally was shouting but his voice came from a world away and night was coming and . . .
“Wally,” she cried into the darkness. “I’m sorry . . .”
The flares and flickering glares of battle iridesced across the surface of the bubble as it swelled toward him. For a moment he saw his distorted reflection: face huge and swollen, small body dwindling to tiny legs, like a caricature drawn by a drunk Ren Faire artist. He looked beat to shit, one eye swollen shut, lips puffed, blood dripping over the war paint he still wore from the long-ago ritual in the Bahr al-Ghazal.
Moving faster than it seemed, the bubble clipped him. Tom screamed as it released its energy in an explosion that whited out his vision and consumed his right shoulder and side in shattering pain.
And then he was caught in a swirling blackness. It seemed to bear him up and up, like a drain spiraling him into the sky. He felt the shattered ribs and the bones of his shoulder joint knit themselves back together with a healing agony worse than the pain of the bubble’s destruction.
He had an impression of floating several stories above the world, buoyed by a black anger, a volcanic rage that dwarfed the passion that had consumed him so long. It was as if his consciousness were a tiny chip afloat on a sea of black lava, of elemental fury and mindless malice.
As from a very great height he saw a black-taloned hand the size of a minivan rise into his field of vision. A blue nimbus crackled about the crooked tips of its fingers, then leaped away toward the fat woman who stood on the ground glaring up at him. The lightning struck her, lit her like the filament of an incandescent bulb. Yet when the discharge died away to smolder on the ground around her, she still stood, apparently unharmed. She had only gotten fatter.
She raised her own hand, snapped it forward. A bubble swelled from it, zipped toward him. He took it in the gut like a slam from a sledgehammer mated to a cattle prod.
Pain exploded through him. He heard a voice that wasn’t his—or anything human—bellow from a throat that wasn’t human, either. Through the dazzling agony he felt strength surge into him like a hit of the strongest speed ever. Felt himself grow.
He had a sense of a vast tumescence surging from his loins, a quivering hard-on for everything that lived. And then he was swirled down into the blackness, the pit of rage that was the consciousness of the monster he had become.
“Wow,” Michelle said softly. “Didn’t expect that.”
Weathers was growing. Surging up into the air like Gardener’s baobab tree. His flesh turned the color of rotten plums. Horns sprouted on his head. Long white teeth like knives filled his mouth. His hands curled into claws. His eyes turned into burning yellow slits. He was ten feet tall, twenty, thirty. And an impossibly enormous erection grew from his crotch, pointing at her like an accusing finger.
“You should really put that thing away before something happens to it,” she said.
The thing in front of her bellowed. It was a mindless sound: harsh, earsplitting, filled with rage. Michelle had a moment of panic. She’d never seen anything like this. She had no idea what it was. But it didn’t matter. She was going to do her best until she couldn’t do anything at all.
The thing—the monster—bellowed again. Then it started toward her, Fire Boy, and Rusty.
“Hey!” Michelle hurled a medicine-ball-sized bubble at it as she led it from her friends. “I’m the one you want. Come on, big boy. Here’s where the action is.”
The monster howled in pain and staggered as the bubble exploded on its thigh. Lightning danced across its claws and crackled from its horns, blue-white against the night sky. A bolt stabbed down at her, just missing as she leapt aside. The earth smoked where it hit.
Michelle let a stream of bubbles go, aiming for the ground below the creature. A crater opened up and the monster gave a frustrated scream as it tumbled down into the pit. Michelle tried to bulldozer earth on top of it with a stream of bubbles, but it roared again and jumped out of the hole. It landed hard on its hooves, making the earth shake all around her. A turret on the Red House came crashing down behind them.
“Crap,” Michelle said as it ran toward her. The monster leapt into the air, and then landed on top of her.
Her body blossomed as she was squished into the ground. She bubbled, forcing the monster off balance. It staggered and slipped off her.
As Michelle climbed out of the monster’s footprint, she started bubbling again. She was beginning to think there was no way she could defeat this thing. On the other hand, it didn’t appear as if he could hurt her, either.
“See what you’ve done now?” said Mark Meadows.
The hippie floated in what seemed like midair. He sat in full lotus, naked but for the long grey-blond hair streaming down around his skinny shoulders. The space Tom found himself sharing with his nemesis seemed lit by a violet glow. Behind Mark glowed, for want of a better word, a backdrop that looked like a sort of great big Rorschach blot tie-dyed in a gaudy rainbow of colors. The bright golden sunburst ball in the middle surrounded Mark like a full-body halo from a medieval painting of a saint.
“Fuck me,” Tom said. “You’ve got me trapped in a fucking hippie poster. And you’re quoting Oliver Hardy at me.” He shook his head. “All it’s missing is bad sitar music and dope barely masked by sandalwood fucking incense.”
Mark raised two fingers. Marijuana and sandalwood filled the air. Sitar music began to play. “Welcome to my subconscious. Or should I say, welcome back.”
“What happened?”
“You got really, badly hurt. The trauma shock was enough to kick Monster free. Now neither of us is in control. Happy?”
“Oh, I’m fucking overjoyed. You hippie piece of shit!” Tom launched himself at Mark. The cross-legged man simply receded before him. As if he were chasing his own image in a mirror. Screaming with rage Tom raised his hands and willed forth sunbeams. They did not shine. “Your powers don’t work here,” Mark said, shaking his head half sadly, half in seeming gentle amusement. “The few that you have left.”
Tom launched a flying kick. But the floating man turned sideways. Tom flew past. Then, somehow, was facing him again. He tried throwing punches. Kicks. Spitting.
All had the same effect on his enemy.
At last Tom felt himself hunched over, clutching his thighs and panting. “Don’t think you’ve won,” he wheezed. “You can’t beat me. You’re nothing! I’m everything you could ever hope to be in your miserable pencil-necked life. I’m more!”
To his surprise Mark nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “I tried to bring you back for years. Dedicated my life, my whole existence, to that holy quest. Neglected my job, neglected myself. Neglected my family, even though I loved them desperately. I did it because I wanted to do right. Wanted to save the world. And because I wanted the girl. But mostly because I wanted to belong.”
“What are you rattling on about?”
“I never did. Never belonged. I was always the odd kid out at school. Always had my nose in a book. At home, too. My dad was a good man, in his way. I found that out later when we got to really know each other, like, as adults—back when I was first on the run with Sprout, and he swallowed a lot of his prejudices and preconceptions to help us because he thought that was the right thing to do. But back when I was a boy he was super competitive. Never could figure out why I wasn’t interested in athletics or following him into the military.”
Tom tried to say something. But Mark wasn’t paying him any attention. Tom lunged at his nemesis. And ran right through him as if he were less than shadow.