Now it was every man and woman for him- or herself.
The human animals were viciously turning on one another in their Darwinian pursuit of survival.
All is as it was always meant to be, thought Abbadon. My time is at hand!
Chapter 21
I COULD NOT believe my eyes.
Washington, D.C., looked worse than it did in the movie Independence Day.
All across the capital, buildings were imploding—coming down on themselves and sending up swirling clouds of dust and debris.
Happy Fourth of July, everybody.
This had to be Number 2’s doing; Washington had been the first city mentioned on his hit list back in the bat cave.
“We need to be there,” I said to Agent Judge. “Now.”
“A chopper is on the way. It’ll ferry us down to Fort Campbell, where we can hitch a ride on a C-140 transport plane. They’ve already loaded IOU’s ATV into the cargo hold.”
“With all due respect, Agent Judge,” I said, “we’re going to need a whole lot more than an all-terrain vehicle to go up against the universe’s second-most-vicious alien outlaw.”
“It’s an Alien Tracking Vehicle, Daniel.”
“Still, I’d rather—”
“Your father designed it for us. We still don’t know what half the gizmos and gadgets inside the thing do.”
“Don’t worry,” said Joe, my own personal Geek Squad. “I’ll figure it out.”
“We need to hustle,” said Willy. “Check out the creepy-crawlers Number 2’s found to do his dirty work.”
CNN was airing live footage of Number 2’s insect-like minions herding terrified citizens toward the entrances to D.C.’s underground Metro system. The beasts appeared to be about seven feet tall, with curled tails, see-through locust wings, and hideous human heads. They used their pointed tails as cattle prods to drive the hordes of humans down steep staircases and into the subway tunnels.
“Wait a second,” I said. “What do we know about their weaponry? How did Number 2 bring down all those buildings?”
Special Agent Judge consulted a handheld computer that was feeding him real-time updates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former headquarters in downtown D.C. I say “former” because the J. Edgar Hoover Building, a massive structure made out of raw concrete poured over steel beams, was now a pile of chunky gray gravel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks east of what used to be the White House.
“My guys on the streets report seeing no incoming missiles, no blasts from orbiting spacecraft, nothing,” said Agent Judge.
“No way,” said Dana. “That’s impossible.”
“He must’ve used stealth weaponry of some sort,” said Willy, our intergalactic arms expert.
That’s when I remembered the laser-beam blasts Number 2 used to throw the hench-lackeys who had dared to laugh during his underground pep rally.
“I saw Number 2 take out a couple of his goons back in that cavern just by glaring at them. His eyes are like high-energy laser beams.”
Maybe when he took down the class clowns, he had his eyeballs set on Stun like they used to do on Star Trek. Then, once he arrived in Washington, he’d flicked his high beams up to Total Devastation.
“Have we heard anything about casualties?” I asked Agent Judge.
“Affirmative. There aren’t any.”
“What? That’s impossible. I just saw—”
“So far, no one’s been killed or injured. Number 2 is destroying the entire city, but not the citizens.”
“So,” said Willy, “whatever he’s using, it’s the complete opposite of a neutron bomb. Instead of killing all the people and saving the infrastructure, he’s wiping out the structures while sparing the civilians.”
“This makes no sense,” I mumbled. “None of it.”
“There’s only one way for us to figure out what’s really going on,” said Mel. “We need to be in D.C. Now!”
“Us?” said Dana, arching an eyebrow. “We?”
“What? You don’t seriously think I’m going to hang here while the country I love is under attack?”
“Now, Mel,” said Agent Judge, “we’ve talked about this before. It isn’t safe out there.”
“Dad!” Mel exclaimed, gesturing at the TV screen. “I don’t think any place on Earth is safe right now.”
“You can’t come,” I said to Mel. “I’ve made a vow to never risk human life when dealing with alien outlaws on Terra Firma.”
“Really?” said Mel with a crooked smile. “Well, Daniel, I’ve made a vow, too: to never be a wimp. So come on. Like you said, we need to be in D.C.!”
Chapter 22
IT WAS DUSK when we finally rolled into the Virginia suburbs just west of the capital.
My dad had done an amazingly awesome job outfitting the Alien Tracker Vehicle for the FBI. Joe was practically drooling as he fiddled with all the sensor knobs and sliders arrayed across the control panel in the back of the sleek, aerodynamic truck. The van’s speedometer topped out at 288 mph (my dad had obviously tweaked out the engine, too), which, of course, was the equivalent to 250 knots, the maximum speed an aircraft can fly below 10,000 feet.
Yep. I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon Joe found a toggle switch that deployed wings on both sides of the titanium truck.
“Do we have weapons?” asked Agent Judge, who was up front, riding shotgun, while one of his top IOU guys manned the wheel and piloted the vehicle through the smoldering ruins of Arlington, Virginia.
“Definitely,” said Joe. “Blaster cannons, stun guns, and an extremely lethal rotating rocket launcher up on the roof.”
“But we won’t use any of the weapons unless we absolutely, positively have to, right, Daniel?” said Emma, who, of course, was wearing her Birkenstocks and GIVE PEACE A CHANCE T-shirt.
“Of course we won’t use any weapons,” sniped Dana. “We’ll just very politely ask these scorpion-tailed locust scuzzballs to put everything back the way they found it.”
“That won’t work,” fumed Willy, who was standing up, bracing himself against the bulkhead between the front of the truck and the crew area. Dana rolled her eyes.
The ATV bounded over potholes and rubble as we passed what was left of the Iwo Jima Memorial (the flag lay in tatters atop a mound of melted bronze). The driver was heading for the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
A dozen plasma-screen TVs mounted on the interior walls of the ATV displayed images of the mass destruction awaiting us when we crossed the Potomac River to enter the District of Columbia.
“There’s nothing left,” Mel announced with a gasp. “I came here on a class trip last spring… the cherry blossoms were in bloom….”
Now there wasn’t a tree of any kind standing anywhere.
Or a monument. Or a building. Not even a mailbox or parking meter.
Mel was seated next to me on the crew bench. I squeezed her hand, hard.
Because the images of devastation playing out on the video monitors were tearing me apart.
Hey, I’m a guy blessed with the greatest superpower of them all: the ability to create anything I can grok in my imagination. As a creator, nothing breaks my heart more than this kind of mass destruction. An entire city laid to waste. Magnificent monuments to everything my adopted home stands for, reduced to rubble. And yes, like Mel, I thought the National Cherry Blossom Festival—held in early April, when the Yoshino, Akebono, Usuzumi, and Fugenzo blooms hit their peak—was as stunningly beautiful as anything on any planet anywhere. And next spring? It just wouldn’t happen.
If there even was a next spring.
“Heads up,” said the driver. “We have company.”
I swiveled in my seat and looked out the front window.
I wished I hadn’t.
Chapter 23
AS WE ENTERED Washington from the west, a crazed swarm of people, numbering in the thousands, came charging across the arched bridge, headed for Virginia.
Our driver slammed on the
brakes. The mob parted and swept around the ATV, surrounding us like a raging river ready to overrun its banks.
“There’s a Metro station on the other side of the bridge, back in Arlington!” said Agent Judge. “That’s where they’re all headed.”
As the crowd swarmed around our vehicle, I checked out the video monitors. Some showed terrified residents of D.C. trampling one another like there was a day-after-Thanksgiving door-buster sale going on down in the subway stations. Others showed Number 2’s wing-backed goons pillaging and plundering across the wasteland that had once been the capital city of the most powerful nation on Earth.
One of the locust-like creatures had found himself a Ferrari and was cutting tire-screeching, rubber-burning doughnuts inside the drained concrete basin of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Some other beasts were outside the Library of Congress, burning all the books.
A trio of thugs standing on the broken steps of the crumpled Capitol tucked in their scorpion tails and smiled so they could satellite-beam souvenir images of themselves back to friends on their home planets.
Just then, an air horn blared a warning.
A battery of red LEDs flashed across Joe’s control board.
“We’ve got aliens,” he said. “Sensors are picking them up at less than one hundred meters away.”
“Get ready to rumble,” said Willy.
“I see them!” Mel said, pointing toward the windshield.
In the distance, swinging down the line of cast-iron lampposts lining both sides of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, I could see four of Number 2’s locust-winged, scorpion-tailed alien enforcers.
“There’s no exit!” shouted Agent Judge from up front. “We can’t leave the truck until this crowd thins out. All doors and points of egress are currently blocked.”
I thought about making the van disappear—that’d be one way to get outside, where the action was. But without the vehicle’s protective armored shell, we’d be trampled. And Mel, her dad, and the driver couldn’t turn themselves into a patch of asphalt and lie down till the stampede passed us over, like I could.
“Joe?” I said. “We need to be outside.”
“No problem.” He flipped a switch and jabbed his thumb up toward the ceiling. “Roof hatch.”
I was on top of the truck first. Willy, my trusted wingman, hauled himself out of the hatch right behind me. Dana, Emma, and Joe piled out after Willy.
“She wants to come out to play, too,” reported Dana, nodding down at Mel, who was halfway up the ladder rungs.
“Stay back on this one, Mel,” I shouted down into the hole.
“No way. I told you, Daniel: I am not a wimp.”
I didn’t have time to discuss the matter.
Using simple telekinesis, I slammed down the hatch lid and spun its wheel lock tight. Then, sparks flying, I imagined the cap being sealed with a thin bead of iron made molten under the blinding arc of an acetylene torch.
“Nice spot welding,” said Joe.
“Thanks.”
“Now,” said Willy, “can we finally go take care of this plague of scorpion-tailed locust losers?”
Chapter 24
I LEAPED OFF the roof of the ATV and landed forty-some feet away, on the narrow ledge of the bridge’s guardrail.
“I’ve got your back!” shouted Emma, who was right behind me.
With the Potomac River on our left, the screaming horde on our right, and the sky going dark up above, it felt like we were walking the plank—blindfolded.
“We’ve got these two scuzzbuckets,” yelled Willy. He was on the far side of the bridge, racing down the other guardrail. Dana and Joe were tearing up the beam behind him.
The trio was aiming for a pair of the giant creatures who were using their muscular grasshopper-style legs to bound toward Virginia. When the hideous aliens reached a pair of mammoth pedestals, they skittered up the stone bases to stand beside two seventeen-foot-tall American eagle statues.
“Hurry!” one of the goons growled from its perch to the mob below. “Meet your Lord and Master down below!”
Emma and I had the other two supersized vermin waiting for us atop the forty-foot-tall pedestals on our side of the bridge.
“Daniel?” Emma called as we charged single-file down the granite banister as if we were competing in a new Olympic sport: Balance Beam Wind Sprints.
“Yeah?”
“We can neutralize these things without killing them, right?”
If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Insects, Emma would definitely be a charter member. Maybe president.
“We can try,” I said as I leaped up into the air. Shooting out a leg, I aimed my foot at what looked like one of the gangly creature’s knees or upper ankles. Emma came off the stone slab as if it were a trampoline, soared up the side of the pedestal, and grabbed hold of the second brute’s flapping foot.
Since we had opted for empty-hand combat, Emma was attempting to trip up her bad dude and dunk him down into the Potomac. I, on the other hand, was hypothesizing that my alien’s skinny kneecap would be brittle enough to break when I drop-kicked it at super-high velocity.
It wasn’t.
Sure, it crunched the way bugs do when you step on them, but it didn’t snap.
“Daniel!” I heard Emma scream. Her attack plan wasn’t working, either. The beast shook her off its foot like she was a wad of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of its tennis shoe. Emma was now the one plummeting down toward the river.
Fortunately, she was able to hook the guardrail with her fingernails just before she plunged past it.
Unfortunately, my failed flying karate kick had infuriated my bony-kneed target. The thing howled and swiped at me with two or three of its fuzz-fringed arms. I bounded backward off the lip of the pedestal, tumbled down forty feet, and nailed my one-foot-in-front-of-the-other landing on the guardrail just in time to grab Emma before she lost her grip.
Over on the other side of the bridge, things were even worse.
Chapter 25
LOCUST MAN 3 had Willy locked in all four of its gruesome clutches and was holding him as if he were an ice-cream cone to be licked with a tongue oozing saliva the consistency of corn syrup.
Meanwhile, Joe was stuck under the same freak’s floppy black foot.
“We need weapons,” I heard Willy shout through the thing’s sticky slurps.
Ninety feet away from the action, I quickly materialized an FDNY fireboat pump and hose so I could water-cannon the creepazoid with thirty-eight thousand gallons of Potomac River water per minute. The gusher smacked the thing in its thorax with a wet SPLAT! Luckily, as it began to topple off the pedestal and into the river, it dropped Willy and Joe was able to roll free. The two of them raced back toward the truck to grab the rocket launcher off the roof.
Why didn’t they ask me to quickly materialize some instant weaponry?
Easy: they knew I’d be busy.
The fourth locust-scorpion thing had Dana in its grip.
“Daniel?” she shouted. “Now would be an excellent time to turn yourself into an electric bug zapper!”
I zoomed across the span of the bridge, hurdling over the heads of the stragglers who were bringing up the rear of the crowd racing for the subway entrance in Virginia. Above me, the monster started whirling its wings. It lifted off from the eagle pedestal like a turbocharged helicopter, hauling Dana straight up to fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred feet above the bridge.
“Hang on!” I shouted up to the starry sky, where all I could make out was the squirming silhouette of Dana in the grip of the giant flying insect. I scurried up the pedestal and was about to turn myself into a Black-winged Pratincole (an African bird that loves to hawk for locusts) when I heard a deafening screech.
“Eeeeee!”
It sounded exactly like the squeal a lobster makes when you plop it into a pot of boiling water.
Then I heard three more ear-piercing wails.
“Eeeeeeeee!”
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Up above, the flying fiend’s claws snapped open.
Dana fell from the sky.
So did the giant locust.
Darting sideways, I caught Dana right before she impaled herself on the very sharp tip of a sculpted eagle wing.
“We’ve got the rocket launcher!” Willy shouted as he and Joe raced up the bridge lugging what looked like an extremely heavy, multi-barreled Gatling gun.
The bug I had blasted off its pedestal into the river used two of its appendages to climb up over the side of the short bridge. The other two limbs were holding the sides of its head as it screamed in unrelenting pain.
Back on the other side, the two aliens who had been harassing Emma were grabbing what appeared to be earholes in their vaguely humanoid heads. They were also wailing.
“Eeeeeee!”
The baddie that had nabbed Dana lay on its back in the middle of the asphalt roadway, shrieking and kicking its feet.
“Eeeeeeeee!”
Now the other three beasts toppled to the ground, twitching their hideous, sawtooth-ridged legs in the air as they cried out in agony.
“Eeeeeeeee!”
Then all four of the creatures stopped squealing.
They went totally stiff.
From my perch up on the northern pedestal, I felt like I was looking down on the giant set of a Raid commercial.
“Are they dead?” asked Dana, who was still nestled in my arms.
“Looks like it,” I said.
Cradled against my chest, Dana leaned up and startled me with a kiss.
“You’re still my hero,” she whispered softly. “Even if you do have a weird thing for Earth girls.”
“Come on, Dana. Mel’s nice. She’s also real.”
“Whatever. I’m just happy to be alive, even if it’s only in your imagination.”
“That was awesome, Daniel,” said Joe, after I had carried Dana down to the roadway to join the rest of the gang.
Yes, Dana could’ve jumped down on her own, but I got the feeling she liked being back in my arms.
To tell the truth, I didn’t mind it, either.