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Shade tapped the rock again, using the dum-pa-da-dum-dum . . . dum-dum rhythm.
The woman turned slowly, cringing. Her eyes widened as she saw Shade’s upside-down face.
“Hey!” Shade said.
The woman’s face twisted in rage and she shouted something that Shade did not hear but could guess at. The woman was white with fury, spittle hanging at the corners of her mouth.
Shade said, “Can’t hear you, but I have a message.”
At which point Shade raised a middle finger and held it for long enough that it would be easily visible—and she hoped very memorable—to the officer.
Then she was away, running across the cavern floor, a battlefield, dodging man and machine and things in between. She zoomed up the stairs, through the corridors, and emerged with a sigh of relief into the open air.
She found Cruz and Malik where she had left them, blurred to a stop, and de-morphed.
“What happened?” Cruz asked eagerly. “Are you okay?”
Shade said, “Look,” and pointed down the hill to the Ranch. A woman in a white coat ran from a monster made of needles. She tripped and the creature rolled over her, stabbing her a hundred times, leaving human Salisbury steak behind.
All around the compound, men and women fled before avenging beasts and racing cyborgs beneath the pitiless lights. Smoke rose from one building. An explosion rocked another, blowing out windows. Machine guns chattered. And all the while the news helicopters swept over and back, sending pictures to the world.
“Let’s get out of here,” Shade said.
“They’re tearing that man apart!” Cruz cried, pointing.
Shade grabbed her shoulder. “What do you think that man did to deserve it?”
But Cruz could not stop looking. It was a scene out of a horror movie, monsters versus humans, a massacre without heroism or nobility. Slaughter. Bloody, remorseless slaughter.
“My God, Shade,” Cruz said in a whisper. “This is our future, isn’t it? This is the world now!”
Malik, eyes barely open, said one word. “War.”
CHAPTER 16
Everything’s Coming Up Dekka
FRANCIS SPECTER KNEW nothing of what was happening in Las Vegas when she saw the road sign for Las Vegas, grinned beneath her dark plexiglass visor, and turned her motorcycle north toward the distantly glowing city. She figured the outskirts of Vegas would be a good place to find a motel and spend the night.
It occurred to her that she could easily use her power to enter any room she liked, but the truth was that a simple motel would be more luxury and normalcy than she had known since early childhood. Anyway, she was squeamish about continuing to commit crimes. She had escaped the gang—permanently, judging by the size of the explosion from the Predator’s missile—and she fervently hoped that she had also escaped that whole criminal life of drugs and drunken fights and stealing. She was on a quest for normalcy. She would have gladly traded her Rockborn power for a life as an anonymous high school kid with nothing to worry about but grades.
She had been a long time in the wilderness.
But now as she drew near the city she saw a seemingly endless flow of cars and trucks heading out of town. It was night, and yet it almost looked as if people were fleeing. In fact the traffic soon spilled out of its own lanes and invaded extra lanes so that anyone going toward the city had to thread their way through oncoming cars.
She pulled off the highway to get a bottle of water at a convenience store, but as she was taking off her helmet she saw something even stranger than the mad rush of cars leaving Las Vegas. She saw two motorcycles, driven by what were either two people in amazingly convincing cosplay costumes . . . or were mutants in morph.
She stuck her helmet back on and went in pursuit.
General DiMarco s
trode stiff-legged through the wreckage of the Ranch. A drained and traumatized Atwell whispered in her ear from time to time, giving an update on what was coming in from the damage assessment team, as well as what was happening in the media, and he reminded her of calls pending from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and more.
Two things were clear to DiMarco. One: The Ranch might be finished, done for, unless something happened to move public opinion sharply against the mutants.
And two: Something like that had just happened in Las Vegas.
“Coverage is forty percent Vegas, sixty percent the Ranch,” Atwell said as DiMarco nodded curt acknowledgment at a bleeding staff doctor being loaded onto a gurney, his body a mass of blood-soaked gauze.
