To their credit, the responding officers did not immediately set about wiping out the animals. Their first priority was the protection of human life, but a strong second to most of them was to capture the elephants alive, if possible. Protection of property was clearly in third place, so the first officers at the scene stood by as Big Mama demolished the city bus, once it was clear there was no one inside and all nearby pedestrians and motorists had fled the scene.
Roadblocks were quickly established a block away in all directions from the site of the temporal breakthrough, and lines of cops stood behind them pointing shotguns and handguns at what might have been six, might have been eight milling and confused pachyderms. It was hard to tell in the dark, which had been made worse when several streetlight poles were knocked over by confused mammoths.
When two of the animals started to make a charge for freedom the officers in their path first tried firing into the air, and unleashed such a fusillade that the mammoths turned quickly and rejoined the milling herd.
Things remained in a standoff for almost five minutes. HOWARD Christian was not physically suited to being the only thing he had ever really wanted to be: a superhero. He knew it was childish and so he had never told anyone of his ambition, not even when he actually was a child. What he really wanted to do was swing through the concrete canyons of New York on fibers of mutated spider silk, or grow steel claws like his favorite X-Man mutant, Wolverine.
But what was the Green Lantern without his ring, or Batman without his gadgets? Just guys in spandex suits, that's what. When he finally convinced himself of that he set about playing to his strengths instead of bemoaning his weaknesses. He began building his own Fortress of Solitude, his Bat Cave in the sky.
Now the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, also known as Howard Christian, sat in the control seat of the Eagle of Vigilance and surveyed his realm.
He came here a lot, mostly at night, and most of all when he was upset. It was a good feeling, almost reclining in the soft leather of the chair custom-built to his body, his feet on the pan and tilt controls, no less than three keyboards arrayed in easy reach, the large red joystick with its array of buttons built into the right armrest. Before him were eight large hi-def video screens butted together so that they could display eight separate scenes or one sweeping panorama.
He liked the term Dark Lord, but that didn't mean he was bad. He felt he was up here in the tallest building in the world to do good, not evil. The dark part came from the fact that he was a creature of the night, unknown to the populace that lay spread out below him. But the night meant nothing to the Dark Lord. He had a thousand eyes: L.A.'s armada of traffic helicopters, security cams on almost every light pole in the city, and satellites that could read a newspaper from space.
If that was all he had, he would be nothing but the world's most high-tech voyeur. No, he had his own secret weapon concealed in the basement, known to only a few of his most trusted employees. Its purpose was to shoot down suicide bombers approaching the Resurrection Tower in hijacked airplanes. Travelers arriving and departing LAX didn't know it, but in addition to the FAA and Homeland Security, their planes were being tracked by Howard's secret death ray.
It was, so far as he knew, the world's most powerful microwave laser. If the military had something bigger, they weren't talking about it. It could burn a hole through armor plate, and cut an airplane in half in a microsecond. Of course, it was there only as a last resort. It had never been used. But it gave him comfort to sit here in his chair, following car chases with the crosshairs centered on some fleeing sack of shit, knowing he could vaporize the bastard with one squeeze of the trigger.
Matthew Wright. Matt and Susan and a whole goddamn warehouse full of elephants and the frozen corpse of a mammoth. Where did they go? Howard turned his thoughts away from that, for the hundredth time that day. That's what he'd come up here to the Eagle of Vigilance for, to get his mind off this insoluble problem.
"Stop it," he said, then was startled that he had spoken aloud.
He roamed the night with his thousand eyes, his finger on the trigger, his ears tuned to the police radio.
17
BIG Mama took considerable satisfaction from stomping the big square animal. It was all sharp edges and hard as rock, and it stank like nothing she had ever encountered, but none of that bothered her. After she had knocked its eyes out she devoted herself to destroying the creature's head. Done with that she hurried to its side and began pushing, meaning to turn it on its side and attack what might be the softer underbelly. The thing might be dead already, but she wanted to make sure.
But something felt wrong.
She didn't feel so good. Her head was swimming. Her massive legs felt wobbly; she swayed for a moment, then shoved again at the big square monster. In her rage, she had not even felt the tiny bites of the tranquilizer darts as they pricked her leathery skin, but the sedatives they had contained were rapidly doing their work.
She heaved again, and the creature almost went over but then it was too much, Big Mama backed off, and the thing rocked back onto its round, smelly feet.
She blinked, and looked around, feeling more exhausted than she had in her long life. She could no longer remember where she was. What were all these new smells? What were these lights up on shiny trees with no limbs on them? What were all these noises? Big Mama was confused. She went down on her knees. Maybe if she could just sleep for a little...
In a moment, Big Mama fell onto her side.
THE herd was already way beyond upset. They were separated from the matriarch, huddled and milling together next to a tall, smooth cliff. The cliff was made of something smooth and clear as water, but which seemed to have no smell at all. Several times they had tried to get to Big Mama's side, and each time some of the two-legs with dark blue heads had pointed sticks at them. These sticks weren't sharp, but they were horribly noisy, noisier than anything any of them had ever heard except thunder. There was fire inside the sticks, and smoke, and the smoke smelled awful.
Now Big Mama fell over on her side. The beta female, what humans might have called the master sergeant of the herd, raised her trunk, smelled Big Mama's distress, and bellowed. SUSAN had tried to fire her remaining tranquilizer darts at the herd of mammoths down the street, while the big matriarch was still occupied in her epic battle with the Los Angeles city bus, but she couldn't see if she hit anything with the three darts she fired. She tried to get closer but was turned back by police, who didn't have time to listen to her explanation that she might be able to sedate the beasts. All her arguments were turned aside, and she saw this wasn't the time to stand on principle. The cops were barely organized, frightened, and anything could trigger a disaster.
THE first call came from a frantic patrolman crouching behind his car door. He reported a rampaging elephant, then three elephants, and then an entire herd of elephants. Howard's fingers flew over his keyboards as other officers responded, giving their locations and estimated time of arrival at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea.
One of the screens before him promptly displayed the three commercial satellites currently in range of the Los Angeles area. Through long practice, Howard quickly translated the positions and derived their look-down angles in his head, then selected GEOS-324 as the one with the best view down Wilshire. As a normal user he would have to make an appointment or get in line to gain controlling access to one of the satellite's array of five high-res imaging systems, but Howard owned a company that owned a company that owned GEOS-324, so he punched in an override code, and somebody got bumped. A blurred image of five city blocks appeared on another screen, from an angle thirty degrees west off the vertical from the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. He touched another control and the camera zoomed in until only two blocks filled the screen. Available light in the city was usually enough for a pretty good picture, but Howard wasn't satisfied with what he was seeing, so he brought up a program for real-time enhancement, and the picture clarified and brightened considerably.