Michelle turned back to the boy. She said in French, “I’m not going to hurt you.” But he started screaming. Flames shot out of his mouth again and the wallpaper in the hall caught on fire.
“Great,” Michelle muttered. “Just great.” She hopped over the hole in the floor, crouched down next to the boy, and grabbed his arms. She began to form a bubble around him. In a few seconds, he was encased. The bubble wasn’t going to last long, but if he started breathing fire again, he’d use up the oxygen inside and knock himself out. She needed him out of the way while she destroyed the lab.
The first door she tried was stuck. Michelle blew it to pieces and stepped through the hole. Inside the room were lab tables and various pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize. In one corner, three men wearing lab coats cowered. They began begging her for mercy.
“Get out,” she said. They scrambled to their feet and ran past her. Michelle blasted everything in sight. Pieces of metal and glass flew into the air and rained down on her. Instead of going back out into the hall, she just blew a hole into the next room.
This room was like the last one. Tables, equipment, glass, cowering men in lab coats. Rinse. Repeat.
She worked her way through the labs on this side of the hallway. When she got to the end of this row of rooms, she went back into the hallway and checked on Fire Boy. He was sitting quietly in the bubble. He turned and looked at her quizzically. The bubble wouldn’t hold much longer, so she needed to finish up quick. She bubbled and blew a hole in the door across the hall, and then went through it.
This lab was different. There were cots lining one wall. On the walls were brightly colored pictures of smiling children. It reminded Michelle of the lab she and Joey had found in the jungle. She felt sick.
She worked her way through the room, destroying the beds, the pretty pictures, the cabinets filled with syringes and bottles of the virus. Then she bubbled her way into the next room. More beds. More smiling pictures. It felt good to blow them up.
The last room contained rows of built-in refrigerated cabinets. They didn’t last long. Room by room she systematically obliterated everything she found. She was thinner when she came back into the hallway.
Fire Boy was still in the bubble. Smoke was filling the hallway. Flames licked up the walls. Michelle touched the bubble and popped it. The boy looked up at her, giving her a small smile. She smiled back. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and a wave of fire enveloped her. He clamped his hands over his mouth.
Michelle squatted next to him and said, “You can’t hurt me, but you should try not to open your mouth when there are other people around. At least until you figure out how to control your power.”
He nodded. Then he smiled at her again. She smiled back. She couldn’t help it. Then she said, “Come with me.”
Battle flashed and crackled all around the rambling Red House with its complicated compound roof.
Tom landed on well-tended lawn before the front portico. The first thing he saw was a sheet-lightning flicker of muzzle flashes beyond the prefab barracks between the main house and the gate. The rattle of automatic fire was near continuous.
Eyes beginning to water from the smoke that twined around him, he started to trot in that direction. A brilliant blue-white flash seemed to light the whole night sky ahead of him, accompanied by a nasty crack like the sound of lightning striking nearby. An RPG had gone off nearby. As he passed between two of the lightweight wood structures a window with a wall in it exploded outward toward him. A huge figure loomed there, misshapen and dark, like a hybrid of man and steel drum. A vast arm swung toward him, trailing wood splinters.
He bent his will to going insubstantial, to allow the powerful blow to pass right through him.
He didn’t go insubstantial.
Fury spiked in him. That bastard Meadows stole Cosmic Traveler! Then a fist like a medieval mace clipped the side of his head and sent sparks bouncing off the inside of his skull. Tom spun down hard on his face on dirt worn bare by passing boots and compacted hard. The world reeled crazily about him. His stomach lurched.
Sheer anger drove him to push off from the merciless ground, snapping himself upright with unnatural strength. He found himself facing his attacker. The dude looked like the Tin Woodman on steroids. He had a lower jaw like a steam shovel. “So you’re the fella they call the Radical, huh?” the metal man said in a loopy Minnesota accent. “Tough guy. Well, it’s high time you picked on somebody your own size.”
Tom tasted blood, turned his face to spit out a tooth. Then he slammed an uppercut into the rusted-over steel plate that covered the metal dude’s gut. Iron groaned and buckled.
The metal man oofed and bent over. “Felt that one,” he said.
Tom slammed an overhand right into the bucket jaw. The metal man flew backward through the corner of the same wall he’d just burst through. A corner of the barracks slumped on top of him.
Tom turned to look for new enemies. There was a terrific commotion coming from the far side of the Red House, toward the west. By the light of flames he saw what looked like the branches of a huge tree looming above the high-pitched slate roof.
I don’t remember a great big tree there when I was here before, he was just thinking muzzily, when something like the steel jaws of a trap closed on either biceps.
He jerked his right arm forward. Skin beneath rust-roughened steel fingers. Tom slammed his elbow back against thick metal plate, felt it give. The iron man gasped in pain. The grip on Tom’s left arm slacked.
He ripped free, spun to begin trip-hammering punches into the metal monster. The armor began to dent in on itself, the steel man to sag.
Then suddenly there were wasps whining around his ears, stinging his arms and neck and cheeks, and trying for his eyes.
Bursts of automatic gunfire erupted to the south as the local soldiers regrouped. Cameo and Bugsy crouched behind the ruins of a jeep, its front wheels still gently spinning. “This is not going according to plan,” Bugsy noted.
“The earring,” Cameo said.
“What?”
“Ali’s earring. Simoon can force them all into cover.”
Bugsy took the chance of peering over the jeep’s fender. A bullet hissed by, and he ducked back down. “It’s in Central Park somewhere,” he said.
“It’s what?”
“Well… we broke up, you know?”
Ellen said something under her breath. She fumbled with something in her pocket, then the ruins of the fedora appeared. Nick lobbed a ball of lightning at the attackers, following it with ten or twelve marble-sized shockers as the first detonation was still rumbling. “Go!” Nick shouted. “Distract them, at least.”
“I’m on it.” Bugsy dissolved into an angry, living cloud. He flew in a funnel toward Weathers, weaving through the air in tight spirals, dropping low and racing to the sky, no tendril of wasps so dense that their loss would be crippling.
Tom Weathers’s fists rose and fell, Rustbelt shuddering with every blow. A lightning ball exploded just to the Radical’s left, illuminating him like a flashbulb-hair plastered to him by sweat, lips drawn back in an expression of inhuman rage.
Bugsy went in for the kill… or if not the kill, the serious annoyance. Fifty, maybe sixty wasps got in close enough to sting.
The Radical turned, shouting. Beams of terrible power leapt from his hands, sweeping the air, driving Bugsy back.
One beam hit Cameo.
Michelle came out of the Red House with Fire Boy in tow. Rusty was lying facedown in the dirt next to the front stairs. A blast of light came from Tom Weathers and streaked across the open lawn. She saw Cameo collapse. Bugsy was beside her, surrounded by wasps. Oh, God, Michelle thought, horrified. They shouldn’t be here.