And she was scared. Scared for them, and scared for herself. After what had happened in New Orleans, she knew Tom Weathers was capable of doing anything.
She ran down the steps and knelt beside Rusty, dropping Fire Boy’s hand. “Wally,” she said, gently touching his shoulder. Rust flaked off beneath her fingers. “Can you hear me?”
He opened one eye, sort of. His metal skin was cracked and red with rust, and leaking blood. “Bubbles,” he said. “How’d you get here?” His voice was weak.
“Oh, the usual,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “Teleported to Africa with Noel. Came up the Congo. Found some remote labs. Killed Alicia Nshombo. Heard there was a party going on here.”
He tried to smile, but it came out as a wince. He rolled onto his side. “We gotta get rid of the lab. And Gardener…”
“The lab is done.” She wasn’t going to tell him about Jerusha. Not any more than he probably already knew. “Now you stay down and let me take care of Weathers.”
“You betcha,” he said with a groan.
Fire Boy tugged on her pants leg and then pointed to Rusty. “Friend?” he asked and he managed not to set anyone, or anything, on fire.
She nodded. The boy sat down on the steps near Rusty. Michelle wanted him to be in a safer place, but there was no safe place here.
She ran toward Weathers, releasing a barrage of bubbles. As they hit, his flesh ripped open. Ha! Michelle thought. An angry scream came from Weathers. It was frustration and fear. And it made Michelle smile. Now you’re scared, too. You bastard.
She hurled more bubbles. She made them heavy and fast. Weathers dodged the first few, but then one caught him and propelled him backward. He looked like a cartoon character, his legs splayed out, body doubled over. He landed in the shredded lawn and rolled. The next bubble exploded by his ear, and half of his pretty face was stripped to muscle and bone.
He popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “You bitch!” he screamed. A nimbus of yellow light surrounded him, bright as the sun. The beam that flew from his fingers was blinding, too bright to look upon. It hit her, threw her back, and made her fatter.
She lumbered to her feet and released another round of bubbles at him. “Why is it when a man is getting his ass kicked by a woman he has to call her a bitch? I mean, can’t you use some imagination, Weathers?” Anyone else would have been down. Anyone else would be dead. She didn’t know if she could stop him. And if she couldn’t, what would happen to everyone else?
Her bubbles threw him back again. He gave another shriek of frustration. “You slut! That hurt!” Then he hurled a light bolt at her. It lit Michelle up like Christmas. She blobbed out a little, and felt herself get denser. The power was fire in her veins again.
“Again!” She fired a huge, heavy explosive bubble at him. “With!” Another bubble. “The!” Another bubble. “Lame-ass!” Another bubble. “Remarks!” Another bubble. His face was hamburger, his clothes were rags, his lean torso sheeted in blood, but still the light poured from him. He would not go down.
“Great,” she said. “I’m going to have to keep listening to your blather even longer.” Her hands trembled. She kept bubbling. She had to stop him.
“You fat whore!” Another bolt of light. Michelle rolled her eyes as it hit. Her clothes were smoking.
“That’s horizontally challenged American to you,” she yelled. “And I’m not a whore. I’m just popular!”
God, I hate this guy. She hated him for what he’d done to Drake. She hated him for what he’d done to her. Hated him for helping turn children into jokers, killers, freaks. Hated herself for failing. For always failing everyone. She couldn’t be a hero. She didn’t even know how.
She put all the hatred into a bubble and let it go.
There was movement inside: someone coming toward her, not fleeing from the destruction. Jerusha opened her eyes wide, alarmed.
It was a child.
They’d talked about this, as they’d planned the assault. Jerusha had warned them. “They’ll have child aces, kids that they’ve subverted and twisted, with God knows what abilities. They’re dangerous, all of them. You may have to be ready to kill a child to save yourself.”
She’d warned them.
But seeing the boy, Jerusha hesitated for a breath: with uncertainty, with weariness. For all she knew this could be one of the kids on which they’d been experimenting, an innocent. One of those they’d come to save. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “Do you speak English?”
The child did not move, did not answer. He stood and stared at her, his face a mask. He was skinny, homely, an ungainly boy with a bush of unkempt hair. “Do you have a name?” she asked him. “What do they call you?”
“Wrecker.” His accent was British, his smile cold. The sudden twist of his lips, the satisfaction and rage in the expression, told her that no, she was wrong. This was something dangerous. This was another one like Leucrotta, like the Hunger who had bitten her.
Jerusha started to reach for her seed pouch again, but it was already too late. The child was holding a red brick from the rubble of the wall in his hand. With a smile, he underhanded it in her direction, softly.
A foot from her, the brick exploded, suddenly and violently, the concussion tossing her backward, and Jerusha felt terrible, white pain rip across her abdomen. Her hands reaching into the seed pouch were suddenly slick and heavy, and there was blood-far too much of it-pouring from her, and she was falling, her seeds spilling to the ground below her, her red, red blood drowning them, and Wally was shouting but his voice came from a world away and night was coming and
…
“Wally,” she cried into the darkness. “I’m sorry…”
The flares and flickering glares of battle iridesced across the surface of the bubble as it swelled toward him. For a moment he saw his distorted reflection: face huge and swollen, small body dwindling to tiny legs, like a caricature drawn by a drunk Ren Faire artist. He looked beat to shit, one eye swollen shut, lips puffed, blood dripping over the war paint he still wore from the long-ago ritual in the Bahr al-Ghazal.
Moving faster than it seemed, the bubble clipped him. Tom screamed as it released its energy in an explosion that whited out his vision and consumed his right shoulder and side in shattering pain.
And then he was caught in a swirling blackness. It seemed to bear him up and up, like a drain spiraling him into the sky. He felt the shattered ribs and the bones of his shoulder joint knit themselves back together with a healing agony worse than the pain of the bubble’s destruction.
He had an impression of floating several stories above the world, buoyed by a black anger, a volcanic rage that dwarfed the passion that had consumed him so long. It was as if his consciousness were a tiny chip afloat on a sea of black lava, of elemental fury and mindless malice.
As from a very great height he saw a black-taloned hand the size of a minivan rise into his field of vision. A blue nimbus crackled about the crooked tips of its fingers, then leaped away toward the fat woman who stood on the ground glaring up at him. The lightning struck her, lit her like the filament of an incandescent bulb. Yet when the discharge died away to smolder on the ground around her, she still stood, apparently unharmed. She had only gotten fatter.
She raised her own hand, snapped it forward. A bubble swelled from it, zipped toward him. He took it in the gut like a slam from a sledgehammer mated to a cattle prod.
Pain exploded through him. He heard a voice that wasn’t his-or anything human-bellow from a throat that wasn’t human, either. Through the dazzling agony he felt strength surge into him like a hit of the strongest speed ever. Felt himself grow.
He had a sense of a vast tumescence surging from his loins, a quivering hard-on for everything that lived. And then he was swirled down into the blackness, the pit of rage that was the consciousness of the monster he had become.