“Isobel, please listen.” But she had already hung up.
LAURENCE LAY ON the floor groaning, blood gushing from his forehead where he’d thwacked it on Isobel’s coffee table. Patricia squatted over him and licked his wound in one quick motion, apologizing for doing this the quick way rather than the classy way.
The bleeding stopped. Laurence’s head felt better. He had an erection. Patricia leaned back so Laurence could sit up, and for a moment they were face to face, Patricia blushing and doe-eyed, perched above his upper thighs. He had a sense that this was a moment when all sorts of pathways might be open between them, and he was about to slam all of them shut with what he had to tell her. He only wondered for a moment if he should keep Isobel’s news to himself, because telling Patricia would mean betraying Isobel and Milton. But not telling Patricia would be, marginally, the bigger betrayal, and the one he was less likely to forgive himself for. Even though he’d just been tooth-grinding mad at Patricia and her friends, he couldn’t look her in the face and not tell her about this. He recognized this was a major life decision he was making, and then he made it.
Patricia was on her feet by the time Laurence finished his third sentence. A flurry of black rags, elbows pushing out and neck full of tendons, she was moving too fast to go anywhere. For a moment he thought she was going to shake herself to pieces with rage, and then he realized it was a second earthquake, much worse than the first. If Laurence hadn’t already been prone he would have fallen again, and this time everything that wasn’t bolted down went flying. The quake stopped, then started again, even worse. Like being inside a power drill. The ceiling was opening fissures, the floor slanted.
Of course. Focused antigravity beam. Seismic hazard zone. What else. Would you expect.
Isobel was going to need new stuff, and a new house. The quake seemed to have been good for Patricia, though. She was the only still point, as everything else went in the blender, and when the quake finally stopped she looked serene. “I spent eight years training for this day,” she said to Laurence. “I’m all over this. You should stay here. I’m glad I got to talk to you, one last time. Goodbye, Laurence.” And then she was heading out the front door.
Like hell. Laurence ran after her, huffing a little. “I’m going with you,” he said. “You’ll need me to help talk them down. How are you even going to get to the Mission, in the immediate aftermath of two massive earthquakes? Can you fly right now? I didn’t think so. I know where there’s a motorcycle we can borrow. Look, I’m really sorry my friends did this, I know how mad they were, but this wasn’t the answer, and the longer this goes on, the more stuff like this is going to heap up on both sides until we get to the point of the Undoing.”
“The Unraveling,” Patricia said. “Where’s the motorcycle?”
The juniper tree near Isobel’s caved-in house was full of birds, all shouting full tilt. Laurence had heard this a few times before, sometimes just randomly and sometimes after a big disturbance. A few dozen birds get together and just yell it out. This time, though, it seemed to spook Patricia out of her newfound calm. He asked her what the birds were saying, and she said it was the same thing they always said these days: That it was too late. Man, even to Laurence those birds sounded pissed. They should be grateful to have a tree still standing.
The BMW bike was still where Isobel’s neighbor Gavin had left it, in the shed with the shed key and spare ignition key both hidden in the same stone faun. Patricia drove, with Laurence riding bitch wearing the only helmet, and he mostly kept his eyes closed, because she rode like Evel Knievel over the steep roads, filled with cracks and the fallen gables of Craftsman-style houses and crashed vehicles and human bodies and one baby carriage pitched on its side. Laurence could smell the smoke, the sourness of gas leaks, and the meaty garbagey odor of death. They leapt over a steep hilltop and landed in a smoking ditch with an impact that crashed Laurence’s pelvis into his rib cage.
There was one major drawback to Laurence keeping his eyes closed: He kept seeing the image of Dorothea’s brains pouring out of her skull, projected against the red curtain of his eyelids. He had told himself that he’d done what he had to, Dorothea and Patricia and the others had attacked for no reason and he had just helped with the defense. But now, biking through the wreckage of Milton’s counter-attack, he was having a harder time feeling good about his role in all this. His already-nauseous stomach turned even more when he pictured Dorothea’s corpse, juxtaposed with her friendly laughter when he’d first met her. He opened his eyes and fumbled for his Caddy.
Peregrine was streaming amateur video and satellite images of the other sites of Milton’s global Day of Thunder, but it was mercifully blurry: smoke and bodies stumbling on fire and someone shooting a shoulder-mounted version of the antigravity ray. Another earthquake hit — bone rattling — just as Patricia was jumping the bike over the wreckage of the J-Church shelter, using the downed roof as a ramp.
The Total Destruction Solution bestrode Mission Street, all six legs in perfect balance despite the rocky footing. Laurence recognized Tanaa’s superb handiwork right away — that carapace was sexy as hell, the range of motion was a dream — but that was before he saw the dead bodies. There, in the rubble of the last good taqueria in town, were the twisted remains of that Japanese guy, Kawashima (Armani suit looking less than perfect for the first time ever). And that Taylor kid, with the fauxhawk, was impaled on a broken parking meter, their sternum bifurcated. Mouths smeared, limbs motionless, but still moving as everything shook. Clouds of tarry smoke lurched past.
As Patricia swung around onto Mission, Laurence caught sight of 2333 1/3 Mission Street, the grungy old shopping mall that had concealed Danger and the Green Wing, except now half the building was defunct. The front walls, and a good portion of the interior, just pulled away. Like someone had taken a massive bite out of it. You could see exposed beams, struts, and supports on the torn floors, and even the frayed ends of carpeting. The superstructure at irregular angles to the rapidly slanting world. As they got closer, flame burst out of one of the front spikes on the T.D.S., unnaturally bright, the color of orange soda.
A man climbed out of the pit that was the front of the mall at 2333 1/3 Mission Street. Man-shaped, anyway. He was covered from head to foot, his entire body a pale crusty green like overexposed bread, and it took Laurence a moment to realize this was Ernesto, without all his charms and spells protecting him. Ernesto reached the sidewalk and groped for something organic to use as a weapon — the grass growing through the cement, trees in their metal cages — but the whole area had been defoliated. The T.D.S. fired its antigravity beam, with a pink hiss, and Ernesto shot upwards, many times faster than Priya had. And then he vanished. The ground shuddered and the noise damn near ruptured Laurence’s eardrums, even with the helmet.
All of this happened just as Patricia was racing toward the T.D.S. on her motorcycle. She pushed Laurence off the back of the bike, so he landed in a pile of trash bags, knees in his face. By the time he got his wind back, pulled off the helmet, and looked up, the motorcycle was leaping by itself and Patricia was nowhere to be seen. The motorcycle hit the T.D.S. in one of its telescoping legs and bounced off, landing wheels-up in the remains of the taqueria. The T.D.S. was pivoting, seeking targets, executing a flawless sweep, but Laurence couldn’t see Patricia anywhere.
She came over the side of the T.D.S., scuttling on her hands and feet over the carapace until she found a weak point. She reached into the join between sections of carapace and the segments of underbelly, with a look of total, easy concentration. She did not look like someone who had just watched all her comrades die but rather like someone who was doing a delicate task, delivering a baby, say, under challenging circumstances. Her shoulders tensed and her mouth pulled to one side, and then both of her unprotected hands went into the guts of Milton’s killing machine.