Krokodil gripped the wheel, and tried to clear her mind of the unwanted images. Her entire body shook.
Remembering Hawk's tutoring, she centered herself, trying to make her mind the calm eye of the raging hurricane.
Elder Seth appeared in the centre of the Jibbenainosay, eyes blank. He was waiting for her to kill him, she knew.
She remembered her other selves. Jessamyn Bonney. Jazzbeaux. Jesse Frankenstein's Daughter. They came to her, and melded with her current person.
Krokodil.
She was Krokodil.
She started up the motor, and did a three-point turn in the lagoon. Cape Canaveral was almost directly due East.
The Cadillac knifed through the swampwater, leaving nothing behind but a wake.
IV
Raimundo's jaws closed over the Donny, snapping him off half-way down his torso. The dinosaur worried at the Josephite until the mouthful came loose, and Donny's lower body fell, twitching, to the floor.
"Heyyy, homes," said Raimundo between swallows, "chewy-chewy, maaaann!"
"Watch out," Elvis said. "He's not out of it yet."
Donny's body got up. One arm was still attached by a strand and a joint, and the fist convulsed, discharging the gun. A bullet whined against the blades of the ceiling fan.
Raimundo nudged the headless Josephite, knocking him down, and put a three-taloned foot on the wriggling thing. The dinosaur put all his weight on one leg, and Donny squished apart.
Josephites appeared behind Raimundo. Elvis head-shot two, and they went down. They weren't all Waltons, thank the Lord.
Raimundo stumped off into the thick of battle, stray bullets flattening against his hide.
Elvis and Shiba dashed out of the wrecked office. Shiba chewed the ankles of a Marie Walton, wrenching her leg off. Elvis fired his remaining shots at the armoured transport, and paused to reload. The battle seemed to be turning in their favour.
Raimundo loomed over the transport. Its tower was swivelling, trying to bring a chaingun to bear. The dinosaur ripped the thing free and, its magazine flapping, pointed it down into the interior of the transport. He got a talon into the manual trigger-guard, and fired it. Empty cartridges clattered against the armourplate, and the interior of the transport rang with resounding ricochets and cries of pain.
The Suitcase People were coming out ahead. The Josephites hadn't sent a large enough force on this strike.
Shiba had been stabbed in the tail by a Marie, but was chewing on a writhing arm. He was ripping the creature apart. The head was babbling adspeak, endorsing the latest oven cleanser, while the fingers of her remaining hand crawled towards Shiba's left eye. Elvis grabbed the wrist, and bent it back. Shiba, through a mouthful, said thanks.
A Josephite with his hands up shouted, "I surrender, I surrender," his hat falling from his head. He was a young kid; one of the clear-eyed idealists who wanted a miracle, Elvis suppposed. A Donny Walton twisted the boy's head around on his shoulders, and was torn apart by gunfire. He staggered forwards, his face still a smiling blank, and collapsed like a marionette.
Krokodil had said the Waltons were clones, but Elvis wasn't sure. All the sex- and labourclones Elvis had met revealed a total lack of personality. While the Waltons were walking stereotypes, there was a tenaciousness and cunning about them that suggested a nasty intelligence. He was reminded of soldier ants, those insects who move in a huge, hungry mass, seemingly governed by one guiding group mind.
A half-Marie advanced rapidly on its hands, and was hosed down with fire by an indentee humping a flamethrower. The thing screeched and burned, the lacquered hair crumpling in an instant. Elvis shot into the fireball until it wasn't moving any more.
Raimundo was howling with victory, his huge throat open wide enough to swallow a sheep whole. An iguana-faced soldier gave him a high-five slap, and they bumped asses in a little dance. The dinosaur's steps made the ground shake.
"Yo, homes," Raimundo shouted, "we don' real gooooood!"
Shiba was bipedal again. The smoke cleared. There were dead Josephites all over the compound, and not a few indentees and Suitcase People.
A tear leaked from Shiba's 'gator eye.
"A waste," he said. "Regrettable. The next time, we shall not be so unprepared. I shall see to it."
A lizardman in fatigues walked across, limping slightly, a bloodied pad pressed to a neck wound. He saluted. Elvis recognized Captain Tip Marcus, the security chief he had met earlier.
"I accept full responsibility, Mr Shiba. I should have posted more people in the swamp. You may have my bars…"
Shiba shook his snout. "No. You did what you could with your resources. I am the one who should have foreseen all this."
They could have continued their polite argument, each trying to grab the lion's share of the blame, but there was a distraction.
A Donny crawled out of the transport, broken by Raimundo's random fire, but still in one piece. He hissed, hands turned to claws, and fell off the ve-hickle. Raimundo stomped on him, and he stopped moving. The mess stamped into the dirt spilled recognizable organs, but there wasn't much blood. Krokodil had been right. The combat fatigues were torn enough to disclose a featureless tailor's dummy of a body, without nipples or genitalia.
"Frankie, skin me op, maaan!" the dinosaur shouted.
The iguana soldier pulled a reefer the size of a man's arm out of a haversack and gave it to Raimundo.
"Yow, incredibly gen'rous, homes!"
Raimundo stuck the spliff into his maw, and leaned towards a patch of burning wall that had been spattered by a phosphor grenade. The dinosaur sucked in marijuana smoke, and his eyeballs rolled.
"This ees great shit, maaaan!"
The dinosaur's chest inflated, stretching his ragged T-shirt to its seams. Then, Raimundo shot ten-foot spurts of smoke from his nostrils.
The whole compound was going to wind up stinking of whoopee weed at this rate.
"Ramirez," snapped Marcus. "Remember…discipline!"
Raimundo waved a claw, and took another prehistoric toke. "Yo, homes. Discipline an' shit, maaan! We don' stomped os some righteous Black Hat bad-ass! Call os the kiiings of the jongle!"
A petite, veiled woman with green arms came up. It was Marielle, Shiba's assistant-cum-secretary. She had a provisional damage and casualty report.
"This is unfortunate," Shiba said, looking at the figures. "We shall have to work hard."
The woman scuttled away, head down.
"We should hit them, maaan! Hit them hard so they don' never forget. The Suitcase People rule the swamp. This is our territory, and don't no one gonna freak with us!"
Raimundo wiped his enormous head with his hands, as if slicking back the hair he didn't have any more. Marcus was nodding.
"He's right, Mr Shiba. We should go on the offensive. I've got some intelligence reports from the Cape. They're up to something. This assault force was below strength because they need all their personnel. We should strike now, while they're preoccupied."
Shiba hung his snout thoughtfully.
"How many people can we put in the field?"
Marcus was eager. "Enough. If we make a strike, we can call in all the non-aligneds out in the swamp. The Josephites haven't been discriminating between factions."
Elvis understood that some of the Suitcase People were living ferally in the swamp. They were the ones who could barely remember their human lives. The bastard who had stolen the Cadillac was probably one of those, although no one he had questioned could think of a mutant matching his description.
"Rolling stock?"
"Visser left us a couple of half-track amphibians. And we've got a stockpile of Good Ole Boy guns 'n' ammo. If Raimundo hasn't shot up the armoured car the Josephites came in too badly, we could requisition and re-equip it."