Valen stood for long minutes, looking at the plate he held, at the machine, and at the incredible devastation around him.
“What…?” he asked aloud, but there was no one alive or awake to hear him. Ari Kostas was alive, but he had two broken legs, a broken jaw, and was unconscious. And Marguerite seemed to linger at the edge of the big fall into blackness with a concussion and possibly a skull fracture.
Valen was awake, mostly whole, and alone. The earthquake had torn the island apart. The cave system had collapsed, burying their dig under a million tons of broken rock. Everywhere he looked were the jagged stumps of broken trees, and far away, on the populated side of the island, towers of smoke from fires smudged the sky.
He wandered back to the machine and found the plate he’d torn loose. He picked it up and for a moment considered hurling it into the jungle. With all of the uprooted trees and torn earth no one would ever find it again. Maybe that was what he should do. And then dismantle the rest and carry the pieces to the roiling surf, smash the quartz on the rocks. End whatever ancient or alien madness this thing was.
That was what he should have done. Valen knew it. The human heart inside his chest warred with the colder exigencies of political agenda and patriotism. Gadyuka and her superiors had selected him for a reason. Did they know this might happen? It seemed likely. Or, if not this specific thing, then something equally unnatural.
He stared at the machine as he bent and picked up a piece of twisted tent pole.
Smash it and be done with it, he told himself. No one will know. No one can see.
He could claim it was destroyed along with everything else. Whatever it was, this thing was too powerful. What if it had been activated in a city? What if it had been assembled in Moscow? What kind of devastation would it do?
And then something occurred to him. Something Gadyuka had alluded to but not really explained. He spoke a name aloud and knew that it, all those years ago, and this right here, were part of the same new skewed reality.
“Chernobyl…,” he whispered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
There were no Secret Service agents waiting in ambush for Aunt Sallie when she entered the Capitol Building. She made her way to the chamber where the House of Representatives was gathering. She made it in time to see the Speaker call the House to order, then yield to the chaplain to offer a brief prayer. It was nondescript and the amens were perfunctory, even among the more devout repre sentatives. If the bill on tap this morning had been one dealing with a hot-button topic, there would have been the usual grandstanders needing to be seen as openly devout, especially those up for reelection. Then the Speaker offered up the legislative journal from the previous business day, which was approved by all. After that they stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It was all rote, and done without passion or fuss, clearing the decks for that day’s legislative business.
Auntie stood watching, scanning for familiar faces among the Republicans on the right side of the center aisle and Democrats on the left. Found a few, caught no one’s eye. Everyone was focused on the Speaker of the House, Andrew Jackson Howell. The bill was read and the debate was waived because this was a bipartisan agreement that had already been worked over so that it was palatable to both sides. Even so, there were steps to follow and rituals to be honored, so Aunt Sallie leaned against a wall and waited, expecting this to be tedious and probably a waste of her time.
It was neither.
Speaker Andrew Jackson Howell sat with his head bowed during the reading of the bill and through some points of order. He did not say anything when the voting began. It was not until the eleventh member of the House was asked to cast her vote that Speaker Howell abruptly stood up and screamed out eleven words that shocked the whole chamber to silence.
“My God, my God, why is it so quiet in here?”
His scream was so loud, so high, so raw that bloody spit flecked his desk.
Everyone froze, staring at him. Gaping. No one knew how to react to a moment like this. Even Aunt Sallie was shocked to gaping stillness.
Howell glared around, turning this way and that like a trapped animal. His eyes were huge, unblinking. Filled with madness. He suddenly snatched up the fountain pen and shook that fist at the representatives and the staff and the press.
“They can walk through walls, you know!” he roared, and then Howell rammed the pen into his own throat.
He tore it free and arterial blood shot from the wound like spray from a hose.
And he stabbed himself again. This time in the right eye.
His knees buckled and he collapsed face-forward, and the impact drove the nib of the pen all the way through his eye socket and into his brain.
Andrew Jackson Howell was dead before anyone could reach him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I flew through the air, propelled by a cloud of green fire. This isn’t too bad, I thought. Then I hit a tree, crashed through a mass of pine needles, feeling the sharp ends of twigs slash at me. A moment later I was falling the other way. Down. Hitting every fucking tree branch on the way to the grassy ground. The grass did nothing to cushion the impact. I lay there, flattened and gasping.
Something else crashed down beside me. It yelped and howled. Ghost. Alive. Hurt, but alive.
Raising my head was next to impossible, but the Killer within me roared. Pain drives him. He eats it and lives off it. I found myself on my knees, blinking to clear my eyes. I couldn’t see Bunny. No way to tell if he rode the wave of superheated air, like Ghost and I had, or if he’d been burned to nothing. The agents were hiding behind their wrecked car, no longer bold, because Top had opened up with the chain guns. The agents were clearly wearing some kind of shock-dampening body armor under their suits, but a heavy-caliber machine gun doesn’t give much of a shit about that. Both agents were, weirdly, splashed with luminous green paint. I had no idea why, how, or where it came from.
They each held pistols that were very familiar to me. Not firearms in the conventional sense. They had round, blunt barrels, but instead of an opening, the flat end of each gun was ringed by three curved metal spikes that ended in tiny steel balls. The guns didn’t fire bullets or even Taser flechettes. No, these weapons discharged short and intense bursts of superheated microwave energy, except that the green color was a new touch. I’d fought against men armed with microwave pulse pistols before. Those killers had also been dressed like this. Black suits, white shirts, black ties. Men in black. The name they went by was “Closers.” The first ones we’d met had worked for a group called Majestic Three. The DMS had shut down M3, wiped out the Closers, and acquired several of the MPP weapons.
I wished I had one right then, because the SUV had soaked up the machine-gun fire and the agents were still alive.
I tapped my earbud for Top. “Sergeant Rock, ram the vehicle. Do it now.”
If he responded, I couldn’t hear it over the gunfire, but a moment later the engine roared and he hit the gas, sending the Betty Boop forward like a battering ram. Mike Harnick built the frame to be able to take a head-on collision with an armored personnel carrier. The beat-up SUV belonging to the Closers had no chance at all. Top smashed into it with a horrendous shriek of metal on metal. The smaller SUV jumped backward and I saw both agents vanish beneath its bulk.