Then it was on him.
Then it was tearing at his throat.
Sick joke.
Then Whitaker was screaming. Trying to. "What he was doing, really, as he was failing, was gurgling. Blood was free-flowing. What wasn't pooling in his throat was just spraying. Whitaker kept up the fight, swung at the thing. Bare-handed, tried to beat it back. Whitaker was fighting for his life.
Whitaker was losing.
Eddi was sailing.
Like a Hollywood, A-list action chick, Eddi was sailing for the mutie. One hand out and groping at it, the other hand clutching her knife. The knife. The one her late father, a casualty of May Day, had legacied to her.
in all of MTac a single, nonreg weapon got the same dispensation and respect as Soledad's O'Dwyer. At the moment, Eddi was driving the weapon hilt-deep into a freak.
And blood fountained, turned the fur of the white tiger pinkish red.
And the freak went crazy with itself. It bucked. It kicked. It juked. It threw Eddi, finally, clear.
And good, Soledad thought. Good for that. Eddi was out of the line of fire. It was just her and the freak.
Soledad squeezed her trigger.
The O'Dwyer let slip its bullets. The bullets, four, nearly in unison found their way into the freak. Lethal on their own, Soledad's bullets carried a little something more. Hollowed, each with a flywheel. Air ramjetted against the wheel, which drove a microturbine that self-generated an electrical charge. Eleven hundred feet per second, the flywheel making 850 revs per one hundred feet. It made for a hell of a charge. On impact with the freak's body, inside the freak's body, the charge discharged. The freak got 675,000 kV of fresh-brewed juice. Per slug. That kind of electricity does a horrid thing to a malleable mass.
The freak snapped, contorted grotesquely against itself, voltage punching at it, ripping at it from the inside out. Its struggle made it seem as though, against its own will, it was trying to move in three or four or five directions at once. Limbs-ones that were properly formed and others, little mutated things that sprang from the tiger-form wherever they pleased-both reached for help and curled in pain. The whole of it twitched spastically and gave the impression of one of Satan's brood that, hellish as it was, fought the twin mortal afflictions of Parkinson's and epilepsy. From a tiger, from the nightmare tiger it'd become, the thing took on the form of a dog. A partial dog, partial humanoid. Then it, the humanoid portion of the thing, kind of started looking like John Madden if John Madden were melting. If his face were on the side of his head, if his mouth were pried open but incapable of delivering the scream it attempted to yelp.
Then it was a deformed John Madden with what looked like a goat making an escape from his thigh.
Jerking. Twitching. Slowing.
Then it was just a freak on the floor bleeding out.
Whitaker was bleeding out.
Aoki was curled, clutching herself.
Alcala was sitting, his right hand folded back in an incorrect manner.
Into her mic, Soledad: "Pacific to Metro! Eleven ninety-nine; officers down! We need EMS at this location forthwith!"
And then she was over to Whitaker, putting pressure to his neck, lips to his ears. Talking to him hut. not telling him false promises-it's going to be all right. Don't worry, boy, you're gonna pull through. What Soledad was doing, Soledad was handing out orders.
"Hang on, Whitaker, You hear me? I do not lose operators! You bang the fuck on!"
And in herself she heard herself say, no longer as a command but as a sigh of relief: I will not die today.
And outside the bank, across the street, as the door opened, as EMS, as uniformed cops spilled in and got a look at the torn-up MTacs, Soledad heard voices chant: "Metanormals are people too!"
If the general public wanted to have a scare, they'd consider what happens immediately following a rough or south MTac call. A rough call is when one or more operators end up in serious condition. A call gone south's when one or more end up terminal.
Most MTac calls were rough calls.
And when a call goes south, when operators land on a bus to the closest ER, the nearest morgue, for a minute until a replacement MTac (or MTacs) can be slotted into an element-whether elements are shuffled or a cop is added to G Platoon, the LAPD unit that covers Metanormal tactical responses-the city, the people of the city are just that much more vulnerable. If freaks, if muties were a little more on the ball, if they really wanted to stir up some trouble, they could come at the MTacs in waves. We could take on a couple of them at once. I know we could. A few of them. Maybe. But sooner or later… There are about forty suspected muties in LA County. That's the best guess from DMI, the Division of Metanormal Intelligence, the spooks who keep a surreptitious eye on freaks.
Forty of them.
If the freaks really wanted to have at it, how long would it take for them to wear us down, wipe us out? My fear… well, honest, I've got a lot of them. But one that's becoming vivid to me is the one where I come off a call, I'm in a hospital healing up, or there tending to an operator who's gotten it bad, when we get a general alert: A flamethrower in Tarzana. A terraformer ripping up Carson. A UCM is flattening Century City. And when that happens, when that call comes in, I'll know, we'll know: It's not a coincidence of incident. It's the opening salvo. It's the beginning of the end. The race war we've been waiting for.
And when that happens…
When that happens…
I'll load up my gun.
I'll go to work.
Have to.
I'm alive for a reason.
Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Soledad's mouth had been stitched. Alcala's wrist was getting set. Eddi'd been bruised up, but that was it. No broken bones, cracked ribs. She was good. Soledad would've been clear of the hospital, clear of Santa Monica-its own city, a liberal city that brushed up against LA; that they had a different take on the "metanormal problem" was obvious from the cold looks Hypocritically oathed doctors openly sent her-except for Whitaker.
Whitaker was in very rough shape. Mauled about the neck. Massive blood loss. A stroke while under the knife. It was a mild one, but there's never, Soledad imagined, any good thing about having a stroke.
Best to be hoped for, out of surgery, Whitaker would get listed as critical. From there, the slow crawl from critical to serious was going to take a while. If it happened at all. And from, there…
Eddi and Soledad sat in a waiting area just off emergency surgery flipping mental coins. The opposite sides: Whitaker was gonna make it/Whitaker was gonna expire. And even if things landed right, even if he did live, what kind of living would he really have to look forward to? Months of physical therapy to get his jaw and facial muscles working enough to chew Jell-O. Vicious scars a reminder of the incident every time he so much as looked in a mirror to shave. And mentally?
Forget about going through a near-death experience. Just a near-death experience. What Whitaker might… what he will, Soledad modified herself, what he will survive was something that would walk with him beyond a couple of sleepless nights and a handful of sessions with a PTSD counselor.
Jesus.
Soledad thought as she did after every call that went south: All this to take out one of them. Just one. Jesus.
She let her head fail back, rest against the wall behind her.
All this for one of them. How many were in the SoCal area? How many were there really? Those forty: a guesstimate from DMI. There could be, could be twice that. Three times..