Within the dripping oval of her face, Shelley's lips moved. Something popped, and her skin began to smolder. Smoke poured from her hair, her nose and mouth, rose off her body like early-morning steam from a lake.
Then she burst into flame.
Another door flew open and shouts came from the other end of the room. Sarah turned her head, and Jess felt the electrical charge push past her like a breath of wind. The two guards who had begun to draw their weapons now danced in place like two puppets on a string, their limbs jerking and their hair standing on end. Ronald Gee stood just behind them in the doorway, sparks running from his fingers. His clothes had already begun to burn.
The heat and smoke were swiftly overwhelming everything else. Jess found it hard to breathe, and she pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
Sarah was moving. Jess's eyes watered as she tried to watch the girl cross the room, but she had to turn away to catch her breath, and when she turned back, Sarah was gone.
Jess stumbled out into the crackling, open space. Now that Sarah had left, the air had returned to its normal state, and only the fire was left to burn. Somehow it had gotten underneath and in the walls, and up into the roof. In another few minutes this part of the building would be a raging inferno.
The heat was almost unbearable. It was like standing on melting asphalt at twelve noon in the middle of a desert, waves of sickly heat washing over her from all directions.
She shielded her face and ran past the two guards and Gee, who were now sprawled motionless and smoldering across the floor, and out into the hallway. A little easier to breathe out here. Something cracked and shook the floor beneath her feet. She took a gulp of cooler air, coughed up deep hacking mouthfuls of soot and phlegm, and saw the open elevator shaft yawning like a great black mouth. She headed for the stairs.
One floor down, Jess ran past the playroom. Empty, thank God, they had gotten the children out. She continued to the front entrance.
The doors were gone. A ragged hole of concrete and steel took their place. She looked through, out along the path of destruction.
The man in the blue suit was doing a dance on the front steps, his white hair standing on end, his eyes bulging. Smoke curled from within the sleeves of his jacket. His skin crackled. He held a rigid, frozen pose, and then dropped as if suddenly released, rolled limply down the last two steps, and lay still.
Sarah turned on the lawn and faced the street. There were black cars out there, and vans too. The van doors slid open and men in military attack gear jumped out.
Somewhere overhead, Jess heard the chattering thump of a helicopter. She started to move down the steps, hesitated. This was going to get nasty. If Sarah was distracted, they were both dead. She knew that with absolute certainty. It had all gone too far for anything else.
I don't think they 're going to just let us walk away. But there is another way out.
Her own words, spoken just minutes ago. More true right now than ever before.
It's time to let it all loose, don't hold back.
***
McDwyer looked out over the scene as they came in low over the brush. A few moments ago they had swooped past a series of abandoned buildings, and he thought about landing there and planning a better approach through the ground cover, but decided it would take too long.
Now he was glad he did. He swore as the Sikorsky swooped toward the street. A smoking hole where the doors of the facility should be, windows blown out, and where was the girl? There. On the lawn. This was far worse than he'd feared. She was loose, and nobody had been able to get close enough to her for a clean shot with the drug to dial her down. So much for the ground troops. He spotted several of them, crouched behind cars parked sideways outside the gate. What the fuck were they waiting for anyway?
Then he saw the man jittering on the steps as if he'd caught hold of a live wire, smoke pouring from his head of white hair. Oh, Jesus. What was Berger doing this close? He should have known better ...
The situation had just gone from very bad to full-scale disaster. They would not be able to hold off the authorities for long now, even with all the pull they had on the inside. They had to move fast to control the damage, and Berger was way beyond giving orders. It was his turn. Operation Kill-Switch was under way.
McDwyer checked his weapon, shouted at his men to be ready for touchdown.
More black cars squealed to a stop outside the gates, followed by black vans. Men in full combat gear poured out of them.
Then the impossible happened. One of the black cars suddenly flung itself upward, as if ripped from the ground and tossed by a giant hand.
The helicopter swerved in a violent, adrenaline-pumping sideways dive. McDwyer felt a frozen moment of terror as he watched the car's rear tire slip just inches past the windshield. The pilot shouted and fought with the controls, and for a moment McDwyer thought they were all done. Punch your time cards, gentlemen. But then the chopper righted itself, the skids hit asphalt, and he felt his teeth click together as the car landed somewhere nearby with a bone-rattling crash.
He had the door already open before the pilot cut the engine, and he had grabbed his weapon case and was out and moving just before the world exploded.
***
Sarah stood on the front walk as the sky over her head turned black. Blood soaked through the bandage on her shoulder. But the pain was nothing now; she let it go with the rest, with the glorious, burning energy searing through her body. The air rippled as she seemed to swell in size, as she spread her arms out to the wind. Blue streaks leapt from her fingers to meet the clouds, touched her face, her hair, formed a halo around her head. She gasped, threw her hands higher, eyes rolling backward into her skull.
Out by the gates a car went flipping end over end through the air, narrowly missing the helicopter, which landed hard in the street.
One of the remaining cars exploded. A ball of yellow flame shot skyward. A van went next, the fireball erupting from the rear gas tank. And then the helicopter, with its rotors still turning lazily in the wind, seemed to puff once and stutter before the tanks went up and it disappeared into a blinding flash of white-yellow heat.
Debris tinkled across pavement, chunks of steaming metal thudding and tumbling across the grass. A piece of someone's hand, two fingers attached and twitching, landed next to Sarah's left foot. Across the street, half of a rotor blade buried itself three feet deep into the side of an abandoned row house, the metal end that protruded still smoking.
A man ran screaming across the lawn, his hair on fire. Others within the attack squad who had survived the blasts had gathered their wits about them enough to organize themselves, and the chatter of weapons joined the dull whoosh and crackle of the burning vehicles.
Sarah turned in the direction of the gunfire. The air rippled like a colorless wave passing through, and a crack zigzagged its way across the front lawn toward the guardhouse. The ground opened up and swallowed it with a shriek and a tearing of wood and metal, buckling the gates and melting the asphalt and concrete curb into a gooey mess that looked like a giant stripe of warm chocolate.
The crack continued to snake across the sidewalk, and the front axle of the remaining van fell with a thunk into the gap. The van teetered for a moment on the edge of the wide, black mouth, back end swinging up toward the sky, and then it tipped over the edge and fell with the crunch of shattered glass.
Three men with guns were exposed, still crouching behind where the van used to be. With a grunt of satisfaction she picked them up and hurled them thirty feet backward, right past the quivering rotor blade, through a clapboard wall, and into the room behind it.