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“Get down on the ground, now!”
Armo leaped, swung one big paw, and knocked the sergeant’s gun to the ground. He wrapped his powerful arms around her and turned her, helpless as a tantruming toddler, to face Dekka.
“Listen to me, Sergeant, I realize what I look like,” Dekka said. “I realize what you probably think of me. But I am here to put a stop to this bullshit, and from the look of it you could use some help.”
“Let me go or I will charge you with—”
“Dammit, tell us what’s going on! There are cops jumping off the roof!”
Armo released the sergeant but stayed ready.
Dekka moved closer. “Sergeant, I get that you don’t know what to do, but the fact is I can kill everyone on this floor—you, your officers, the people, everyone. I can reduce them to bloody McNuggets.”
The sergeant wasn’t entirely sure one way or the other, so Dekka glanced around, spotted a corner of the floor with a dozen slot machines and no people nearby. She raised her hands as if in benediction, opened her mouth, and let loose a tiger’s roar, and the entire area—the slot machines, the railing, the chairs, even the carpet on the floor—became a howling tornado, a shrieking wild chaos.
Dekka lowered her hand, and the shredded remnants fell clattering to the no-longer-carpeted concrete floor.
“See?” she demanded. “Now, what the hell is going on here?”
Over in the sports-betting area the huge screens that usually broadcast horse races now showed the exterior of the Venetian. A second policeman stood on the precipice of the tower.
The second policeman jumped. Just like the first. No hesitation, no drama. Just a step into nothingness and a long, long fall.
“He can make people do anything,” the sergeant blurted. “They do whatever he tells them, and they don’t stop. We’ve cut off the phones to the suite he’s in, and we’ve handed out ear coverings to our SWAT guys, but he’s surrounded himself with staff and tourists and even some cops and security. We can’t get at him without shooting our way past innocent people.”
Dekka nodded, as if this was the sort of thing she heard every day: some person with a power misbehaving badly. It was a story she’d heard too many times in the FAYZ.
“Get us ear covering,” Dekka said. “And we will take him down.” Then she added, “Without having to shoot innocent people.”
A policeman, not the sergeant, hastily proffered two sets of shooter’s ear coverings.
“Ready?” Dekka asked Armo, who was trying with only limited success to fit the ear coverings over a head that they were definitely not designed for.
“This is total hero stuff, isn’t it?” he asked, a bit giddy.
“It is if we win,” Dekka said dryly.
They stepped into the elevator, followed by stares ranging from hopeful to skeptical to simply overwhelmed. As they passed the tenth floor they put on their earmuffs. Dekka listened for the dinging of the elevator bell as it rose, but heard nothing. She felt rather than heard their arrival at the top floor.
They exchanged glances.
The door slid open.
The carpet immediately in front of the elevator was soaked with blood. The wallpaper was spattered with it. Two dead police officers and three others not in uniform lay scattered down the hallway. Near the far end of the hallway stood a solid phalanx of men and women, old and young, some in uniform, most not. A few had guns. All stared with eyes blazing with alertness and fury. The instant they saw Dekka and Armo they began yelling, but their words were inaudible.
“Seriously, what the holy . . . ?” Armo began, before realizing Dekka could not hear him.
“Everyone move aside,” Dekka ordered.
No one moved aside. Instead perhaps twenty of them began to charge. Not at a walk but at a run, like Dekka and Armo were loose footballs that had to be recovered.
Armo caught Dekka’s eye and pointed at himself. Then he advanced on the mob, holding his massive arms wide, his spike claws scraping the walls on either side and shredding the wallpaper. A shot rang out. Armo flinched but sped up. The mob and Armo met, and the front row of attackers went down like bowling pins.
But they jumped right back up, some leaping on Armo, trying to get their arms around his throat, grabbing handfuls of slick white fur, trying to hold on to his ankles. He was very big and very strong, but there were at least a dozen people grabbing at him. He was clearly trying not to hurt them, but the result was that he was immobilized.
Dekka squeezed past Armo, jumped over outstretched arms, knocked a gun out of one man’s hands, punched a man in the face, and reached the door at the end, which bore the right number, the number the sergeant downstairs had given her.
She did not knock or use the doorbell. She raised her hands, roared, and the door (and part of the surrounding wall) flew apart. She hurled the shreds of steel and wood at the crowd—not hard enough (she hoped) to permanently injure anyone, but enough to distract some of Armo’s army of Lilliputians.
