Recognition came like a slap. “I saw you!” she exclaimed in French.
“Speak English, bitch,” he rasped. “Why did you stop?”
“You were there! I saw you.”
Wild-eyed she looked at Alicia. “Why do you stop, child?” the woman asked.
“He’s the enemy! He was there with those men in the Ijaw village where—where they chopped the boy’s arms off!”
The injured man barked a laugh. “Too bloody right I was. People’s Paradise wanted Niger Delta oil, didn’t they? Needed an excuse to go to war with the whole world at their backs, didn’t they? So it’s play both sides, now, Butch Dagon, innit? For dirty work, I’m your man. Bloody Nigerians thought I was theirs, but it was your dirt I was doing all along. So get back here, girl, and finish what you started. I earned it, right enough!”
Through a curtain of hot tears Dolores looked to Alicia. Knew she would deny the man’s words, damn his lies.
Instead, Alicia smiled encouragingly and made urgent hand motions for Dolores to continue.
Dolores turned and walked out. “Wait!” she heard Dagon bellow. “Get bloody back here!”
She went left down the hall, back in the direction Alicia had led her. Hot tears fogged her eyes and streamed down her cheeks.
“Don’t fucking walk away from me!” Dagon shouted. “That bloody lion buggered me right up. You’re a healer. Heal me.”
She refused to look back. Guilt tore her, and the sense of duty. I cannot bear to heal such a creature, she thought.
“Heal me, damn you to hell! Bitch!”
Behind her she heard a sound unlike anything she had heard before. Half rustle, half gurgle. A breeze blew past her down the hallway.
She spun.
A monster crouched there. A great mound of fur-covered muscle. Half its fur was burned away; great red and char-black wounds had broken open and begun to seep. Its eyes were bloodshot.
A pointed maw opened. Jagged yellow teeth filled it. The monster vented a squealing snarl and charged.
Dolores stood frozen. As the horror gathered itself to leap upon her the hallway lit with dazzling white radiance. Heat hit her left side.
The sunbeam impaled the leaping monster. It blew apart into chunks and splatter. She screamed as hot clots hit her in the face.
A strong arm caught her from behind. She stiffened. Then knowing the touch she turned, melted against her lover’s strong chest.
“Oh, Tom,” she said. “It’s terrible. We have to tell the world. It was all a lie! That monster was working w-with Alicia all the time!”
Even with the arms of the world’s most potent ace wrapped around her it took all her courage to say that. She accused the president’s own sister of terrible crimes. Knowing Alicia was capable of terrible acts of justice.
Tom grunted softly. “Too bad you heard all that,” he said, stroking the short hair at the back of her head.
“This cannot be allowed. The truth must be told. I—I’ll find the Chinese reporter. She’ll get the story out!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Tom said. “Really, really sorry.”
“Oh, Tom, why did it have to turn out so? I thought we stood for truth and justice. For revolution! Now I learn it was all oil and power.”
His strong hand cupped her head from behind. She raised her face to his and smiled. “You won’t change your mind?”
“I wish that I could,” she said. “I wish I could unhear what was said. But the world must know.”
His fingers tightened on the back of her skull. They twisted her head viciously clockwise. Dolores actually heard the pop of her cervical vertebrae breaking. A red spark shot through her brain.
Then she wasn’t anymore.
“Oh, sweet Lord,” Alicia Nshombo said from the doorway. “The poor dear! Did it have to be so?”
Gently Tom lowered the dead girl to the floor. “I told you, babe,” he told her softly. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He straightened, brushing absently at some wet furry clumps of Dagon she’d left on his blue chambray shirt. “She was going to blow it all,” he told Alicia. “She wasn’t objectively Marxist yet, you see.”
Alicia’s ample face clouded. “But she was heroine of the hour! Kitengi just gave her a medal in front of God and everyone. She’s still wearing it, for sweet Mary’s sake. What am I to tell the media?”
He grinned. “The truth,” he said. “She died a martyr. Raised the alarm when that notorious tool of the British Empire, Butcher Dagon, infiltrated the palace to assassinate Doc Prez.” He shook his head. “Poor kid. She was the Butcher’s last victim.”
“Uh-oh,” said Hong.
They sat in the gloom of one of the suite of rooms they’d been assigned in the palace. Sun Hei-lian sat beside a junior tech named Li, helping edit video of today’s medal ceremony. She hit pause, freezing a quartet of Chengdu Jian-7 fighters her government had provided the PPA in mid-flyover, and swiveled her chair.
She frowned. “Why are you showing me stock footage of a mushroom cloud, Hong?”
“It’s . . . not stock footage.”
The image on the wide-screen television was grainy, shot from ground level. A round head of smoke and dust rolled up a blue sky, a shape unmistakable and chilling. In the foreground white dunes and wisps of pale grass framed the terrible image.
The setting looked familiar. Feeling as if her blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen, Hei-lian said, “Where?”
“From the Nigerian coast, near Brass. France 24 TV’s sending it real-time.”
Li turned beside her. “Wait, Brass? Isn’t that—?”
Hong nodded. “Ground zero’s the head of the invading PPA army.”
“Still getting no readings,” Tom’s voice said. His voice crackled over the radio. A storm had gathered over the blast site with unnatural speed. Lightning laced the clouds and raked the ground.
“That is not possible,” said Professor Évariste Tiwari, from Kongoville’s Liberation University. An internationally known physicist who had worked with UN antinuclear proliferation teams out of Los Alamos, he was a small, stooped Congolese with a big bald head and a round belly pooching out the front of his rumpled black Western-style suit. “Even if it was an airburst, it must have left a plume of fissile material not converted to energy by the reaction.”
“No joy, Doc. Geiger counter barely registers a peep.”
A dozen people crammed the room where the Committee aces had been debriefed. The smell of nervous sweat almost overpowered the smell of Alicia Nshombo’s violet soap. The wide-screen monitors mostly showed various satellite news feeds endlessly replaying the France 24 video, which had started right after the detonation’s distinctive flash drew the cameraman’s attention. A couple, muted, showed live debate from an emergency session of the UN Security Council, where Russia and China furiously demanded sanctions if not worse be imposed on both Nigeria and its sponsor, the British Empire, for crimes against humanity. It was sheer formality: the Empire held a veto.
Glancing that way occasionally Hei-lian gathered that the U.S. ambassador sat and said nothing to defend Great Britain. Which might mean his own government was none too pleased with its old ally for letting loose the nuclear demon.
Mostly she, like the others—her crew, President Dr. Nshombo, Alicia, Professor Tiwari—focused on the monitor showing the feed from the video camera strapped to Tom’s chest. What it showed horrified even Hei-lian, accustomed as she was to the endless iteration of sorrow and atrocity that comprised modern Central African history.
In this land frost never touched, the green grass had gone winter gray. Skeletal trees smoldered beside the bent and burnt-out wrecks of a Simba Brigade armored column. The chassis of some Russian-made tank cradled upside-down in the branches of a stout tree. It had shed its massive turret somewhere as the blast flipped it through the air like a tiddlywink.
“I see something moving down there,” Tom said. “I’m going down for a look.”
r /> “Be careful,” Nshombo said. It was a measure of the strain he was under that he consented to sit in a chair. His hands grasped the arms so hard Hei-lian half expected he’d leave grooves in the hard wood. Standing beside him, Alicia reached down to pat one hand reassuringly. “Your instruments might be malfunctioning. There might be fallout anyway.”
“No sweat,” Tom came back. “A little radiation doesn’t scare me.”
Hei-lian kept her face impassive at the implied slap at the People’s Republic. After some quick satellite consultation between Hei-lian and her superiors Tom had used his gift of hyperflight to bounce to orbit and then down to Beijing, where he picked up hastily gathered radiation-detection and air-sampling gear. He now wore it on a makeshift harness along with the video camera and a Guoanbu satellite-link radio.
Hei-lian caught Hong’s eye. He monitored the telemetry from Tom’s sensors. He gave her a scarcely perceptible headshake. No malfunction. He might have a weak stomach, but he was shaping up well under stress.
The camera’s eye angled down. The scorched earth swept up. Tom leveled his flight off at perhaps thirty meters’ altitude.
Six figures shuffled toward him along the road. They had a mottled reddish color.
“Closing in,” Tom reported.
“Mon Dieu,” Alicia said, choking.
For a moment Hei-lian’s brain resisted making sense of what her eyes saw. Then she could no longer hide from it. Their clothes had been burned or blasted away. Their skin was gone. Their eyes were shiny tracks glazed down flayed cheeks. One cradled coils of his own intestines in stubbed arms. A purple greasy tail trailed in the white dust behind him.
“Use the wastebasket, Hong,” Hei-lian said through teeth clenched so hard they squeaked. The tech caught it up just in time. The room filled with the acid reek of vomit.
Hei-lian barely noticed.
“Going back up,” Tom said. If the horrific and pathetic sight affected him his voice gave no sign. Hei-lian wondered what went through his mind.
“I can see a crater ahead of me now,” he said. “Not very big. Maybe fifty–sixty yards across.”
“This cannot be!” the professor exclaimed. “A crater would mean the fireball came in contact with the surface. Vaporized soil and rock would be sucked up and mingled with unconsumed radionuclides. It would produce substantial fallout.”
He took off his glasses and polished them furiously with a handkerchief. “Substantial.”
But the instruments continued to show radiation levels scarcely more than background. Something strange was going on here. Hei-lian felt relief at having a mystery to distract her from the images that kept shambling through her mind.
“I’m coming up to the crater,” Tom said, in effect narrating the action they saw on the screen. “Wait—there’s something down there in the middle of it.
“It’s—a kid. A naked kid. In the middle of the fucking crater.”
Tom Weathers touched down. The heat from the lumpy green glass walls baked his skin and forced him to squint his eyes to prevent their drying out. His Geiger counter chattered; the voices from Kongoville assured him he could endure it for a few minutes without permanent harm.
The boy lay sobbing in the midst of a patch of unaffected sand.
“Hey,” he called. “Hey, kid.” The boy was white—fish-pale all over, in fact, and jiggling chubby. Maybe he spoke English.
The kid had his head on his arms. He kept crying.
“Listen,” Tom said. “It’s okay. I’m gonna get you taken care of.”
“Go ’way!” the boy shouted with a wave of his arm. English. Cool.
Tom squatted down at the edge of the patch of sand. “You want me to just leave you here to the mosquitoes? Not a good plan, man.”
“I—killed them. I kill everybody. I shouldn’t be around people. I didn’t want to do it. I want to die!”
“Hey, buddy,” Tom said. “Just take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”
The boy sat up. His pale belly spilled sadly over plump thighs. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to. But the Highwayman shoved me out of the truck and drove off and then he was gone and these tanks were coming down the road. They started shooting at me. I got scared, and—” He drew in a big shuddering breath and waved his hand around. “This.”
“You did this?”
He nodded. “It always happens when I get scared.”
“Let me get this straight,” Tom said. “You cause nuclear explosions?”
“Yes! Haven’t you been listening? When I get real scared I fucking blow up. Are you some kind of ’tard?” The spasm of anger passed and his eyes gushed tears again. “I wish I was dead. I’m too dangerous to be around!”
The voices in Tom’s head were going ape-shit now. He ignored them. The warm feeling—like the aftermath of a good fuck; that three-way with Hei-lian and Lilith, say—spreading up through his belly from his loins told him what he was dealing with, and what he had, at any cost, to do.
“What’s your name?”
“Drake.” He sniffled and dabbed tears from his eyes. “Who are you?”
“Pleased to meet you, Drake. I’m Tom Weathers. Locally I got hung with some unpronounceable handle. I used to go by the Radical.”
“The revolutionary guy on the posters.”
“That’s me. You can call me Tom. Unless you can say Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Even if you can, call me Tom.”
The fat boy fell over and curled right back into fetal position. “What the fuck?” Tom burst out before he could stop himself.
“You’re gonna kill me!”
“Say what?” Tom was no slave to Western linear thought. Still, he thought that was a pretty funny worry for somebody who’d been announcing his desire to die so loudly thirty seconds ago. “Why the f—Why would I kill you, Drake? I wanna help you.”
“But you’re with the People’s Paradise.”
“Yeah.”
“Before they dumped me, the kidnappers were talking about, about the PPA. I think I just blew up your army.”
“We’ll get more,” Tom said. He imagined steam coming from Doc Prez’s ears at that. But the Indians would give them more tanks. Shit, if he could only bring this kid around, nobody would deny the PPA anything. Ever.
“But there’s only one you,” he said. “Right?”
The boy nodded.
“The People’s Paradise of Africa is a place where people can breathe free and never have to fear oppression again. Hell, I make sure of it.”
A blue eye peeked at him. “Oppression?”
“Shit, yeah. You’ve been oppressed. Wouldn’t you say? I mean, you tell me you got kidnapped, roughed up, dumped out on the road. And shot at by tanks. Sounds like oppression to me.”
“And if I go with you—”
“You’re safe. Nobody picking on you anymore.” Although it struck him you’d have to be an exceptional dumbass even for a jock to pick on somebody who could vaporize you and everything within seventy-five feet of him, toss fifty-ton tanks into trees a mile down the road. “You’d be appreciated. Hell, you’d be a hero. We’ll give you a parade.”
“A parade? Really?”
Tom nodded, solemnly. Fuck, Kitengi’d probably give you his sister’s virtue. And a nerd like you might even go for —
He straightened. “Okay, Drake. Let me help you up. Then I’ll bounce us back to Kongoville, get you cleaned up, get some decent food in you.” Not that the last looked too urgent, but the kid was probably hungry. All the time.
Drake looked past him and his eyes went wide.
Tom had been caught by surprise once. That was one time too many. He stepped quickly left and wheeled.
A man stood in the crater, as muscular as himself. And even more golden: not just his hair but his skin. Even his eyes. He held a scimitar.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “A teleport, huh. So you’re the sneaky sack of shit that shot me in the back. What, no Kalashnikov this time?”
“Figured it out, di
d you?” The newcomer had a fruity Brit accent.
“Just now.”
“You’re not so dim as you look. A gun didn’t work so well last time. Beheading’s pretty final, though. If needs must.”
“Needs must?”
“I didn’t come for you,” the golden man said. “I came for the boy.”
“Ah, well then—” As if surrendering, Tom raised his hands.
Fire flashed from both palms. But the man was gone.
Tom threw himself into a forward roll. He heard the scimitar swish behind him.
“Your powers aren’t much use against a teleport,” the man said. He lunged for Tom, sword upraised—
Tom stood twenty feet away. It was as close as he could manage, doing a hyperflight bounce to near Earth orbit and back. Better than he expected, actually. He smelled the soles of his tennis shoes melting on the hot glass.
“Kinda hard to kill someone who can move at light speed, too,” he said.
The golden man glared. Then he smiled. “Ahh. But if one doesn’t know when and from where—”
He vanished.
“—the blow will strike—”
The words came from close behind. Tom looked down his nose to watch the scimitar tip slash beneath his chin. He turned.
His opponent stared at him with eyes like gilded saucers. “The blade,” he said. “It passed right through your neck!”
“I’m just full of surprises.”
He hit the man in the center of his broad muscle-bulging chest. The bastard was fast; he almost managed to turn away in time to slip the tank-armor-buckling punch. But not all the way. Tom’s fist grazed him and spun him through the air to slam into the slanted green crater wall.
Tom heard a sizzle, smelled burned hair. The golden man squalled like a cat and vanished.
A moment later he was right in Tom’s face and the sword came whistling down between Tom’s eyes. It passed harmlessly down his body.
“Can’t . . .hit me when you’re insubstantial,” the man grunted, whipping the sword around in a figure-eight through the center of Tom’s torso. “I’ll wager you can’t . . . shoot fire, either. . . .”