Armageddon's Children (40 page)

A huge section of the wall was broken out near the stairwell, and Hawk could tell at a glance that the damage was recent. It hadn’t given way on its own; it had been forced. Beyond the rubble of the wall a body lay half buried in the debris. Farther in, doorways and entries had been forcibly broken out and widened, their jambs shattered, the supporting walls ripped apart. Even in the heavy layer of shadows and thin veil of weakening light, Hawk could detect other bodies scattered about.

Everything, for as far as he could see through the damaged walls and entries, was in ruins.

He stepped into the room, climbed over the rubble, and bent down to the first body. He had to pull part of an old curtain off it to make certain it was one of the Cats. It was an older boy, his eyes open and staring, his face contorted in pain and horror. There was a huge swollen purplish mark on his neck with a dark center, as if he had been stung. Hawk had never seen a wound like it. He studied the body for other damage and didn’t find any. With Panther following, he moved on.

They found a dozen dead boys and girls of varying ages, some of them bearing the same purplish mark and others simply crushed. One was decapitated and another missing both arms and one leg. The level of violence was shattering; the Cats had been caught unawares and unable to defend themselves. It looked as if they had tried to flee, but there had been no escape.

Despite his revulsion and Panther’s whispered insistence that they get out of there, he pressed on. In the very back room, they found Tiger and Persia. Tiger had apparently been trying to protect her, his body half flung across hers where she lay sprawled on a mattress that was pushed up against the back wall. The short-barreled flechette lay on the floor to one side, bloodstained and bent. Hawk picked it up. Both barrels had been fired. Tiger’s head was almost torn loose from his body, and his neck bore the same strange purplish mark they had seen on the bodies of the other Cats. He had fought hard to protect his little sister, but in the end it had not been enough. Hawk stared down at him, unable to find the words to express what he was feeling. He could hear Panther mumbling from across the room, the words dark and angry.

He glanced at Persia. She bore the same sting mark, but her face was peaceful. Perhaps she had died quickly and without knowing what was happening to her. Sadness emptied him out. She was only eleven years old. No one should die at eleven. He knew it happened every day, that it had happened every day for as long as he had been alive and much longer before that. But knowing it didn’t make witnessing it any less horrific. He wished he had come earlier to his meeting with Tiger. He wished he could have done something to prevent this.

He looked around at the wreckage of the rooms and the scattering of bodies. What in the world had done this?

Then he caught sight of Persia’s right leg. It had been severed cleanly at the ankle, and the foot was missing. On the other foot, clearly visible against the white surface of the bloodstained mattress, was a pink tennis shoe with silver laces.

He remembered that on his way here he had seen its mate not two blocks from their underground home, and he felt his heart stop.

Owl!

Shouting frantically for Panther, he raced from the room.

O
WL SAT QUIETLY
in one corner of the common room, poring over another of the medical books she had been researching since Hawk and the others had left, her eyes scanning quickly from page to page. It was the fourth book she had opened, but she still didn’t know anything more about the Weatherman’s form of plague than when she had started. There just wasn’t enough written about the plagues; so many of them had developed in the aftermath of the chemical attacks and poisonings that there hadn’t been time to write anything down, let alone find the means to publish it. She was relying on texts that were out of date twenty years ago, but it was all she had—that and her personal experience, which wasn’t much better given the rapid evolution of sicknesses all over the world.

She rubbed her eyes to ease the ache of her weariness. She wished sometimes that she could walk, that she wasn’t confined to this wheelchair. She wasn’t being selfish, although she had her share of those moments, too. She was simply frustrated at being unable to just get up and see what could be done instead of having to rely on others. She wanted to go down to the waterfront and have a look at River’s grandfather, but Hawk would never allow it. He might agree to bring the old man to their underground home, but only if she was able to give him some assurance that doing so would not endanger the family. It was bad enough that River was already exposed to whatever her grandfather had contracted. Hawk would never risk exposing the other children, as well.

She wasn’t even sure, thinking on it, that he would allow River back. It seemed inconceivable that he would not, but Hawk could be intractable about certain things, and this might prove to be one.

Across the room, where he lay curled up in his favorite spot, Cheney stirred awake suddenly and lurched to his feet with a low growl. It was the second time he had done so in the last few minutes and the fourth or fifth since Hawk had left, and she knew right away what was happening. The big dog was reacting to the noises in the wall they had both been hearing for the last two hours.

Sparrow appeared in the bedroom doorway, her young face dark and intense. “It’s back there now,” she said. She gave a quick toss of her blond head toward the rearmost bedroom, which was Owl’s. “And it’s moved into the ceiling.”

Before, it had been under the floor of the boys’ bedroom, and before that somewhere outside the walls entirely. Each time, Cheney had leapt up and gone sniffing from corner to corner, hackles raised, a low growl building in his throat. He did the same thing this time, working his way to the back of their quarters, big head swinging from side to side, nose to the floor and then lifting. Owl had no idea what was going on, so she watched Cheney’s progress, searching for clues.

“What do you think it is?” Sparrow asked her.

She shook her head. “It’s making a lot of noise; it must be something bigger than a rat. Maybe a Spider or a Lizard prowling about, one that doesn’t know the rules yet.”

That was what she said, but it wasn’t what she believed. The sounds didn’t remind her of any she’d heard a Spider or Lizard make. They didn’t remind her of anything she had
ever
heard. She found herself wishing that Hawk would return, even knowing she was perfectly safe within the shelter of their hideout, behind the reinforced iron-plated doors and heavy concrete walls and with Cheney to protect them. She knew she was letting her fears run away with her, but she couldn’t seem to quite stop them from doing so.

She listened some more, but the sounds were gone. She exchanged a quick glance with Sparrow, who shrugged and went back to reading to Squirrel. She liked it that Sparrow had begun taking such an interest in books. Some of it had to do with her willingness to assume the big-sister role with Squirrel, whom she adored. But some of it was due to a real interest in learning how to read and wanting to learn what all those words could teach her about life. Sparrow had endured a harsh and brutal childhood, one that she had revealed in full only to Owl, and there was every reason to believe that she would never be interested in anything but honing her considerable survival skills. Yet here she was, reading books as if nothing mattered more. Life could still surprise you sometimes.

Owl settled back in her wheelchair and returned to perusing the medical books. She wished she had a better understanding of medical terms. Most of what she knew she had learned through practical experience while still in the compound. She had no formal training. But if someone in your family or a close friend of your family didn’t know medicine, your chances of survival lessened considerably. Owl had always been interested in seeking out ways to protect the lives that others would be quick to write off.

“Can Squirrel have a cola?” Sparrow called out from the other room.

Owl said yes, watching Cheney reemerge from her bedroom and wander back over to his spot on the floor. He had an uneasy look to him, and even as he settled back down, he kept his head lifted, his gray eyes alert as they stared off into space. She listened again for the strange noise, but it was gone. She looked back down at her book, reading. Maybe Tessa would know something; she would have Hawk ask her at their next meeting. She wished those meetings didn’t have to take place, that Tessa would just come live with them as Hawk wanted. It was too dangerous to meet in violation of compound law. It would take only one mistake for them to be discovered, and if they were, retribution would be swift.

The sound came again, a scrabbling this time, directly overhead. Cheney was on his feet at once, thick fur bristling, muzzle drawn back in a snarl. Owl glanced up, tracking the scrabbling as it moved across the ceiling from the front of the room to the back and toward the rear bedrooms. Cheney tracked it, as well, hunching after it in a crouch, gimlet eyes furious. Owl turned her wheelchair in the direction of the noise and waited. The noise ceased.

Then, all at once, it began anew, a furious digging sound this time, a ripping away at things that suggested a determination bordering on frenzy. Sparrow appeared in the doorway once more, mouth agape as she stared at the back rooms. She was holding Squirrel by one hand. The little boy’s face revealed his uncertainty.

Owl didn’t know what was happening, but she didn’t think it was good. “Sparrow,” she said as calmly as she could. “Get several prods from the locker and bring them to me.”

She wheeled herself over to the front of the room, close by the iron-plated door, and beckoned Squirrel to come join her. The little boy hurried over and climbed into her lap. “There, there,” she cooed, soothing his fears as he buried his head in her shoulder. “It’s all right.”

Sparrow removed three of the prods from the locker and brought them to Owl. She took two and propped them against the wall behind her. She let Sparrow keep the other. At the far end of the room, Cheney was all the way down on the floor in his crouch, so agitated he was shaking as he inched forward, then crabbed slightly to one side, muzzle lifted toward the sound of the scrabbling.

Cracking sounds resounded through the underground like gunshots, sharp and unexpected, followed by a slow shifting of something big. Cheney backed away toward the center of the room, keeping his eyes on the bedroom ceiling. Then, all at once, the entire ceiling in Owl’s room gave way. It happened so fast that she barely had time to register the event before it was over. Heavy chunks of plaster, wooden beams, and wires and cables embedded in the mix came crashing down under the weight of a huge dark presence. Dust billowed into the air, momentarily obscuring everything. Squirrel screamed, and even Sparrow jumped back in shock. Owl was already thinking that they had to get out of there.

But it was too late. The dust settled and a nightmarish creature emerged from the debris. At first, Owl couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The creature was a long, jointed insect that looked to be a type of centipede, but one that was hundreds of times larger than it should have been, stretching to twenty feet and rising four feet off the floor. Its reticulated, armored body was supported by dozens of crooked legs and undulated from side to side in a snake-like motion as it advanced. Feelers protruded from atop its shiny head, and a pair of wicked-looking jaws opened and closed from below. There were spikes everywhere, and bits and pieces of clothing and debris hung off the tips like strange decorations. A series of bulbous eyes dotted its flat, hairy face, eyes that were blank and staring.

Cheney was on it at once, tearing at the spindly legs, ripping them off as fast as jaws could close and teeth could shred. The huge insect whipped about to snare him, using mandibles and body weight to try to crush the big dog, but Cheney was too quick and too experienced to be so easily trapped. The battle raged back and forth across the far end of the common room, the combatants smashing everything from furniture to shelves to dishes to lights. Owl and Sparrow watched in horror, transfixed by the ferocity of the struggle. Squirrel just hid his head and begged someone, anyone, to take him away.

For a time it seemed that Cheney would prevail, darting in to tear off legs and rip at armor plates, then darting away again. But the giant centipede was not affected by the damage done to it. It was a creature Owl instantly decided must have been mutated by the chemical and radiation attacks that had taken place as much as five decades earlier. How it had grown to its present size or why it had appeared here was fodder for speculation, and the answers would probably never be known. What mattered was that its alterations had given it tremendous strength and stamina, and not even the considerable wounds that Cheney was inflicting seemed to affect it.

Eventually, the effort began to tell. Cheney was tiring, and the centipede was not. The razor-sharp jaws were beginning to find their mark, ripping at the big body, tearing off chunks of fur and flesh and leaving the big dog’s mottled coat matted and damp with blood. Owl could tell that Cheney was slowing, that his attacks were less ferocious and driven more by heart than by muscle. But Cheney would never quit, she knew. He would die first.