“Good. So where do we get this chicken wire?”
The Red House squatted in the darkness, unaware that a hundred thousand wasps were making their way through the brush, past the fences, into the air ducts and hidden trenches and outbuildings. The insects avoided the light, gathered in small clumps on the underside of leaves, followed along behind the soldiers who thought they were alone in the night.
Bugsy’s head and part of his torso sat in the backseat of an improbable ’67 Cadillac, nestled in the dense underbrush. “Okay, kids,” he said. “I’m pulling the trigger.”
Inside the compound, two soldiers walked through their patrol, bored and smoking. Then hundreds of small green wasps were crawling under their uniforms, stinging their mouths and eyes. One of the soldiers panicked, and his screams and gunfire brought the camp to life. Through thousands of multifaceted eyes, Bugsy watched the lab’s internal security force rush to respond.
He kept on stinking the newcomers until someone dug out a flamethrower. “Okay,” he said. “That’s as distracted as I can get ’em. I’m pulling back.”
“Let’s go,” Cameo said.
Clangclangclangclangclang…
Wally charged down the middle of the road. He carried a wide, hastily built cage of iron rebar. A pair of spotlights followed his every stride. Somewhere, in the darkness outside the lights, automatic weapons chattered, kicking up little puffs of rust and dirt and blood.
Yeah, he had their attention.
He headed straight for the compound. Finally, finally, it was time to break that place. They could have started hours ago, but…
Rustbelt, fellow, you’re rather like a tank, Noel had said. Let us consider the possibilities. And then he’d gone on and on and on about tactics and feints and RPGs for what felt like forever. That’s why Wally carried the cage. Something about armor-piercing warheads and liquid copper and other stuff Wally didn’t- ka-RHUMP!
An explosion against the cage knocked Wally off his feet. It splattered him with what felt like lava, like white-hot rain. He heard rust sizzle, felt iron bubble. It hurt bad enough to make him cry out, but the round didn’t cut him in half like it was supposed to.
Okay, so maybe Noel was right.
Wally reached the perimeter. Under a hail of grenades and small-arms fire, he grabbed two fistfuls of fence and went to town.
Jerusha found herself crouched in the darkness under the trees, with the fence of the compound a hundred yards away. Wally was on the west side of the compound. She worried about him more than herself. He was all alone out there.
The ka-RHUMP of RPGs and the chattering of small-arms fire suddenly erupted on the other side of the compound grounds: Rusty’s feint after Bugsy’s initial probe on their side. They could hear shouting and see lights swaying and careening over the grass. With an audible foomp, two huge searchlights kicked out, their blue-white fury pointed toward the fencing on the far side. “Go!” Lilith hissed at Jerusha. “It’s your turn.”
Jerusha started to shuffle toward the fence, moving as quickly as she could. It wasn’t fast enough for Lilith. She hissed audibly and grabbed her.
After a moment of coldness, they were there. “Can you do this?” Lilith asked. Jerusha nodded, not certain whether she was relieved or angry. She plunged her hand into her seed pouch, feeling for the kudzu seeds: she found them, and tossed them to the ground, opening them as they fell so that leafy vines rippled under the moonlight.
It was harder than she’d expected. Her exhaustion and weariness, the hunger that gnawed at her constantly, all made wielding her power more difficult. She rooted the vines hard, then wrapped the tendrils around and through the chain link. She leaned back as she guided the vines, pulling with them in sympathy as they tore at the fence. The smaller vines snapped from the strain, and she thickened them as the fence leaned, groaning, the metal protesting.
A pole snapped from the ground, trailing fencing, then another, and the vines pulled a section of the fence entirely down. Gardener nearly fell herself as the fence went down. Cameo started forward. Lilith waved her back. “Let her finish!”
Bugsy’s wasps were hovering over the mines he’d found; Jerusha threw more seeds, this time letting the vines curl out along the ground, thrashing the ground where the wasps indicated. The mines exploded in gouts of black earth and yellow-orange bursts that nearly blinded them.
She staggered. She nearly fell. The edges of her vision had gone black, and she hoped none of them noticed.
“Now!” Lilith said. “Go! Gardener, let’s get you to that house.”
Cameo and a clotted swarm of wasps slid past her. Jerusha shuddered. Lilith came up behind her, dark hair and silver eyes, and folded her arms around her.
Ka-phoom!
“What the hell?” Michelle muttered. The jeep bounced and jumped over the dirt road. Every time Michelle flew up and smacked down hard on the seat, she got a tiny zing of power. Night had fallen and all the shadows had fled. There were muted pop-pop-pop s of gunfire. The jeep slowed and she noticed that the driver was gripping the wheel like no tomorrow. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just get me close and I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
The driver didn’t look very relieved. He stopped the jeep and pointed into the jungle. “Take the path and you’ll find the main road to the Red House,” he said. “But you shouldn’t go there. You will die.”
Michelle jumped out of the jeep. “That’s so sweet of you,” she said. “But if there’s any dying to be done, it won’t be me who does it.” He shrugged and jammed the jeep’s transmission into reverse and spun around. In moments, he’d vanished down the road.
The path would have been difficult to see in daylight, but now it was almost invisible. But Michelle found it and plunged into the jungle.
It was a shock when she burst from the jungle onto a paved road. She’d expected to be struggling through the bush forever. There were more gunshots. And she started running up the road.
When she reached the top of the hill, she saw the Red House compound. It was chaos. The front gate was busted in. Smoke hung in the air from RPGs. There was a maze of holes blasted into the ground. A gunshot pinged into her. It was impossible to tell where it came from.
Perched above the jungle, the huge brick mansion and its ornate edifice looked out of place here. Fingers of vines were shooting up one side of the house, moving crazy fast. Jesus Christ, Michelle thought. What the hell is Gardener doing here?
Then she saw Rusty running around the other side of the building, grabbing weapons and hitting anyone he could get his hands on. The rage in his expression shocked Michelle. He was a sweet kid from Minnesota. He had no business having a look like that on his face.
But at least she had some help. She wasn’t alone. And even in the midst of the smoke, gunshots, and screaming, that cheered her up some.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Sun Hei-lian sat on the edge of the bed in her room in the vast People’s Palace in Kongoville.
The only thing that moved about her was her eyes. They tracked Tom’s every move as he paced back and forth in front of her. His tennis shoes made overlapping red tracks on the hardwood floor and throw rug. “I knew it all along,” he said. He was talking so fast he was tripping over the words. “Okay. Okay. Not all along. Not when we were, like, squatting out in the bush together. But I knew he was going bad for a long time.”
Hei-lian still said nothing. That was righteous. He had more than enough to say. She was just a woman, after all. And hadn’t Brother Stokeley said, back when he was righteous, that the only place for a woman in the movement was prone?
A knock at the door made him jump and yell, “Shit!” Hei-lian jumped, too, going very pale. He wondered why she was so tightly wrapped.
“What the fuck do you want?” he hollered.