The second chess player reached under the leather couch and handed the young man a pair of pneumatic diamond-edged bolt cutters. "You want the safety goggles?"
"Do I look like I want fuckin' safety goggles? Wimp!" He hefted the bolt cutters and turned to Rosina. "Out. Out on the stairs."
The two of them left.
No one said anything for thirty seconds. They dealt cards, they studied the chessboard, Leo pretended huge interest in the broadband scanner. They were in anguish.
Rosina came back in, her wrist bare. A big bright smile. Like a woman on cocaine.
"It works!" gasped the second chess player. "Me next!"
The young man came in with the bolt cutters. The armpits of his suit were soaked with sweat.
"Do me next!" said the second chess player.
"Are you kidding?" said the very young man. "I know statistics. Let somebody else do it this time."
"I'll do it," Leo told the chess player. "If you'll do me afterward."
"Deal, Leo." The chess player blinked gratefully. "You're a straight shooter, Leo. I'm gonna miss you too, man."
They went out of the room. A minute passed. They came back in.
"We're real lucky," said the second chess player. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a canary-yellow washcloth he'd snagged from the bathroom.
"Either that," the very young man scoffed, "or they're not designed as well as we thought. What'd you do with the dead bracelets?"
"Left 'em in the hall."
"We'd better detonate 'em later. Wouldn't want anybody reverse-engineering that circuitry."
"Right," said Leo, with a glance at Jane. "You can see now why the Crimson Avenger became so integral to our group! Only nineteen years old-but there's one of those young rascals in every network; it happens to even the best of company."
"Why did you come here?" Jane asked the Crimson Avenger.
"I been in the Game five years now," the Crimson Avenger muttered. "It gets real old." His face clouded. "And besides, if I don't clear town but good, I'm gonna have to kill both my lame bitchfucker parents! With a fuckin' shotgun!"
Two of the poker players rose-the Asian guy and the second woman. They exchanged a silent glance heavy with deep personal meaning and the man took the bolt cutters and they left together.
Fifteen seconds later there was a loud explosion. Then, screams.
Everyone went white as paper. The screams dwindled to agonized breathy sobs.
The Crimson Avenger reached inside his jacket and pulled Out a snub-nosed ceramic revolver and walked stiff-legged to the door. He yanked it open, leaving it open behind him. There was a brief gabbling wail of anguished terror, and a shot. Then another shot. And then a long, meditative silence. And then another final shot.
Crimson Avenger came back in, with his suit lightly spattered with blood, flying little droplets of blood on the shins of his charcoal-gray trousers. He had the cutters-the diamond jaws of the device were blackened with impact. "Hers blew," he said. "We don't have to do his now. He's dead too."
"I think I've changed my mind," said the first chess player.
Without changing expression, Crimson Avenger lowered his pistol and pointed it at the bridge of the first chess player's glasses. "Okay, dood."
"Never mind, I'm going." He looked at Red, the radioman. "Let's do it."
"I'm going too," said Crimson Avenger.
"Why?" said the chess player.
"Because I got left over, and you're gonna do me last. And because if you wimp out and try to run off with that bracelet on, you're gonna do it with my bullet in your head." He sniffed, and coughed. "Dood, for a guy with three advanced degrees, man, you are fuckin' slow!"
They left. And they came back alive.
"I think a twenty-five-percent mortality rate is extraordinarily good under the circumstances," said Leo.
"Considering the extreme precautions taken to keep us from accomplishing this... yes, quite acceptable," said the second chess player.
The television, which had been showing snow, flickered into life again.
"Look, it's hitting Oklahoma City," said the first chess player. He turned up the sound a bit, and the six surviving Garners settled in on the couch, their faces alight with deep interest.
"Look at the way they've networked those urban securicams to catch that first damage wave coming in," said Red. "Not only that, but they are the very first back on the air! The staff at Channel 005 are really technically adept."
"Leave it on 005," said the second chess player. "They're definitely the best fast-response storm team in the country."
"You got it." Red nodded. "Not that we have any choice. I think everything else is still down." He began channel-switching the second set.
"Whoa," Leo told him. "Look at that SESAME satellite shot... . That's very odd, people. Oklahoma City seems to be under siege by a giant doughnut."
Rosina chuckled.
"That's a very odd shape, isn't it, Jane? What does it mean?"
Jane cleared her throat. "It means... it means that Jerry is right. Because I've seen that shape before, in his simulations. That's not a spike, it's a... well, it's a giant torus vortex down on the ground. I mean, you think of a tornado . .. and you turn it sideways and you put the tip of it into the top of it, like a snake eating its own tail.
And it becomes a giant ring, a tows. And it sucks in updraft from all directions outside the ring, and it spews downdraft out the top and sides, and it's stable. And it just gets bigger until all the heat and moisture are gone."
"What does that imply, exactly?"
Jane felt tears slide thinly down her cheeks. "I think it means that all my friends are dead."
"And that Oklahoma City is definitely dog meat," Rosina added.
"Mega," said Crimson Avenger.
Oklahoma City was methodically recording its own destruction. Jane knew immediately that she was seeing history bubble off the screen, an odd and intense kind of history. Like some decadent Roman poet reciting his autobiography as he opened a vein in the bath.
At the touch of the F-6, now in its full fury, Oklahoma City was exploding on television, block by block. It was being sucked up and peeled apart and smashed. Heavily reinforced high-rises were being pulled up bodily out of the ground, like a farmer pulling up carrots. They were very hard and very strong buildings, and when they fell over and started rolling, all their contents would gush out of their windows, in a fountaining slurry of glass and trash and mist. The falling high-rises would rip up big patches of street with them, and when the wind got under the Street, things would start fountaining up. There was a lot of room under the earth in Oklahoma City, a lot of room with a lot of human beings in it, and when the wind got into those 'long shelters it simply blew them like a flute. Manholes blew off the streets and big whale gushes of vapor came Out of the pavement, and then a whole pod of whales seemed to surface under the street, because another skyscraper was slowly falling over and it was ripping up the street surface with its internet links and its indestructible ceramic water pipes and its concrete pedestrian subway.
And somebody was putting this vision together, deliberately assembling it. Somebody had broken the screen into compound miniscreens like a bee's eyes: traffic securicams and building securicams and minibank securicams and all the other modern urban securicams that offered no one even the tiniest trace of security. And as the cams were blinked out and smashed and ripped apart and exploded and were blinded and crushed, whoever was at work just kept adding more viewpoints.
One of them was a sudden glimpse of the Troupe. It was Jerry, he had his back half-turned to the camera, he was leaning, half-doubled, into the gusting wind. He was shouting and waving one arm. It was Troupe camp, and all the paper yurts were smashed and torn and writhing in the wind. Jerry turned to the camera suddenly and he held up a broken-winged ornithopter, and his face was alight with comprehension and terror.