Disgusted, he threw her down on the ground and knelt on her chest, crushing her throat with one shin. She scrabbled and kicked furiously for what felt like forever, but eventually the life ran out of her and she went still beneath him.
There was no joy for Allan in this kill. No thrill, no sparks, just a grim sense of duty, underscored by the same annoyance and resentment he’d felt when putting down that stinking bum with the ribbons in his beard.
He had no idea how the hell things had gotten so far out of hand.
23
Walter rose cautiously from behind the dumpster where he and Bell and Nina had ducked when the eerie flash had happened. He looked down the alley across the street. It was dark again. There was no more unnatural light. There were no more sparks. In the murk, he couldn’t tell if the killer was still there, or if he was gone, or dead.
He couldn’t see the cop, either.
“Did you see it?” he asked. “Did you see what happened?”
Beside him, Bell nodded, but didn’t seem able to speak. Nina answered for him.
“The cop, he just vanished. He fired his gun, and the guy screamed, and that light came out of his body, and...”
“Gamma radiation.” Bell finally found his voice. “When Iverson told us about that, I found it very hard to believe. But I have no choice but to believe the proof of my own eyes. Incredible!”
“Maybe it was the shock of being shot,” Walter said. “Or perhaps the pain of it. Either way, his reaction caused the radiation to spike, and... my God!”
A third of Nina’s face was as pink as rare roast beef, from her left ear to a little less than halfway across her left eye. The line of demarcation between the pale, unaffected skin and the burnt skin was mathematically perfect. He took Nina’s chin and turned the inflamed portion of her face toward Bell.
“It’s like... like a sunburn,” he said to Bell. “And you, too. The left side of your face.”
Bell looked back at him.
“And you too, Walt,” Bell said. “You got it the worst out of all of us.”
Walter reached up to touch his own face. More than three quarters of the skin felt hot and tight, sore to the touch.
“A sunburn in the middle of the night,” Walter said, shaking his head.
“If we had been any closer...” Nina swallowed, pale but for the pink flush of her left side. “We wouldn’t be making sunburn jokes, we’d be gathering our teeth up off the pavement.”
Walter flinched, picturing the cop’s silhouette, vanishing like sand blown away by the wind. It was so much worse than he’d ever imagined.
“And we may have still been too close,” Bell said. “The long-term effects of such a blast, we might not know for years. It could affect our health, our children.”
Nina cut him off.
“Let’s not worry about our future offspring just yet,” she said. “We don’t know if that bastard died in his own blast, or not, but we’d better make sure.”
Bell caught her as she started toward the street.
“If we go into that alley right now,” Bell said, “those theoretical long-term effects will happen to us in the short term. Any residual radiation would kill us in a matter of days. Skin loss, organ failure, blindness, cancer.”
Walter nodded.
“Iverson said the radiation remained for several hours before dissipating,” he added.
“Yet another thing that seemed so hard to believe, at the time,” Bell said. “But now...”
Walter looked behind him. The alley they were in ended in a cul-de-sac. He started toward the street, motioning the others to follow.
“Come on,” he said. “We should get out of this area as quickly as possible, then warn the authorities about the radiation.”
It took courage to walk toward the area where the blast had occurred. Even though he was reasonably certain that the radius of the lingering radiation wouldn’t extend out to the street, his skin still tingled with psychosomatic itching at the very thought of the invisible poison in the air.
As they turned right and started for Nina’s car, shouts from down the block cut him off. He saw a young blond man in bell-bottom jeans and a bright yellow shirt turn the corner, running right down the middle of the street. He was maybe twenty-one, tops, with a sensual, girlish mouth that didn’t look like it belonged on the same face as his big shapeless nose and close-set eyes, half hidden under feathered hair.
He had a wild panicked expression that made a lot more sense when a shouting gang of men in workman’s overalls rounded the corner behind him and started chasing after him. The young man was faster than the bigger men, but he was tottering on a pair of precarious platform shoes, and as Walter watched, the inevitable occurred.
The blond man twisted his ankle in a pothole, and nearly fell. The front runner of the gang of work men, a huge, beefy but disturbingly baby-faced man with thinning black hair, caught up to the blond man, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, spinning him around and then hauling back a meaty fist.
“You set my goddamn car on fire!” he bellowed.
The young blond man cowered and covered up.
“I didn’t!” he screamed. “I was just trying to get away. It’s your fault. You pushed me!”
“Oh, so it’s my fault?” The man sneered at his cohorts “He says it’s my fault.” He turned back. “You want to know what’s your fault? This.” He laid a fist into the young man’s gut that doubled him up and sent him retching to the ground. “Don’t got much to say about that, do you?”
“Leave him alone!” Nina called.
She was striding toward the men, fearless, while Walter and Bell were hanging back. But before she had taken two steps, the young blond man screeched like a bird of prey and every parked car on the street exploded, as if a dozen bombs had been set off in perfect synchronization.
Walter, Bell, and Nina fell back, crashing into the warehouse wall and shielding their faces with their arms as great billows of flame erupted from the gas tanks of the cars, and bits of shrapnel pinged off the bricks around them.
The eruptions sent the workmen running back the way they came, swearing or praying—or maybe both. The young man in the bell-bottoms ran the other way, crying and covering his wavy blond hair as the cars blazed all around him.
“It wasn’t me!” he wailed. “I swear it wasn’t me!”
Bell sat up and stared after him, shaking his head.
“Amazing,” he said. “Poltergeist activity, pyrokinesis, phantom wounding, gamma bursts. All that potential power locked inside ordinary human beings, just waiting to be harnessed or released. We haven’t even begun to reach our full potential as a race.”
“Or our full potential as mass murderers.” Walter turned on Bell, furious. “We have unleashed monsters. Turned people’s own minds against them. Allowed frightened innocents to lash out at the pain of the world with the strength of gods! This is a nightmare!”
“Yes,” Bell said, “but imagine if one could harness these powers of the mind, at the same time as we were amplifying them. If the formula could be perfected and used in a more controlled setting, perhaps with younger subjects whose minds are still open. Think how powerful the human race could become.”
“Too powerful,” Walter said. “There would be a psychic apocalypse that would tear apart the very fabric our universe.”
Nina stood close by.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “What about the band? What’s happening to them?”
Bell laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re as safe as they can be, in the warehouse. It’s built to withstand tons of damage. And the way they were playing, I doubt they have any idea what’s happening out here.”