Fantasmagoria (32 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“I take them home. I feed them. I tell myself it’s for science. I tell myself I’m advancing knowledge, finding cures.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

“We don’t have time for this. They’ll be--”

“Jack!” Gilbert yelled. “You’re not listening! That’s why I live in the old abandoned city. I had two collections. Not just the fairies. The bodies were in the oven, the one that was burning. I didn’t want you to see. I thought . . . I thought you wouldn’t help me if you knew.”

The withering sprite fluttered in the air as Jack stood silent. He didn’t know what to say.

Gilbert, on his knees, ripped off his gloves and grabbed his head. “I have these . . . urges. It’s like beautiful women singing in my head, telling me they’ll love me if I do bad things.”

“A dark chorus.”

“Exactly.” Gilbert looked up. “How did you know?”

“Just something I heard.”

“I’m a monster.” He slurped the tears that trickled down his cheeks. “I am. I thought my illness made me this way. But you heard her. I’m some kind of demon half-breed. There’s no cure for me. There never was.”

Jack was silent.

“What a joke.” Gilbert shrugged and wiped his nose. He looked at the ground and began to strip off his suit. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to help you kill Erasmus and save all those kids.”

“Yeah.”

“But at least I can stop the Amazons from stopping you. And I can destroy that serum. I can make sure they don’t create anyone else like me. I can do that much.”

Jack shook his head. He couldn’t believe it.

“It’s just like you said at Hoosegow, Jack. It’s not about what happens to you in life, or about what’s fair or not fair. What matters is the choice you make for yourself despite what happens to you.”

Jack nodded. “Are you sure it will be enough? I mean, I stuffed a hundred pounds of plastique down her throat and she still walked away.”

“I’ve had years to go over the calculations. Trust me. The world has never seen anything like this. Ever. Everything within a few hundred yards of me will be vaporized immediately. After that, the shock wave will rip this entire compound apart, melt all the metal, and open a hole in the earth. You really need to run, Jack. Get to those trucks. Get out of here. I’ll wait a few minutes so you can get clear.”

Jack took a step back.

“Run!” Gilbert stripped out of the rest of his suit as Jack stepped back. “I’m a walking doomsday. The Furies are the least of your troubles now.”

Jack turned and ran. He bounded in two-meter leaps as his fully charged mechanical legs propelled him down the tunnel.

“I’m sorry.” Gilbert lowered his head and stood in nothing but boots and fairy-print boxers. He wiped the tears from his cheeks with both hands. “I should have known better, and I’m sorry.” He sniffed and wiped his nose and looked at the withering sprite, which settled on the ground next him. Gilbert smiled at it. “I’m sorry, Dad. I love you. Thank you for never giving up on me.”

§ § §

An open-topped jeep rumbled to life and Jack drove off down a long tunnel capped in trees. The jeep barreled through the shrubbery and bounced over uneven ground. Jack was under the stars.

A few miles ahead, the saucer scratched the ground with its white beam, and in the distance, pillars of smoke rose from a city under siege. The lights of skyscrapers flickered on and off. The Imperial zeppelin burned and drifted at a steep angle. There were sirens. War.

Jack turned toward a nearby road and cleared the better part of a mile before he heard the crack of an explosion. The ground lifted beneath him. He was thrown from the jeep and rolled across cratering dirt. When he lifted his head, a cloud of fire rose over the collapsed hill behind him. It billowed to heaven in the shape of a mushroom. Jack stared. Drifting upward, lighting the night sky, it was strangely beautiful.

Gilbert had been right. He destroyed everything.

The zeppelin exploded in the distance and rained fire on the city. Jack turned, charged the flywheel in his chest, and with a great heave, righted the jeep, which rested twenty meters beneath the lip of the fresh crater. He drove to the road and into the city parallel with the saucer. He turned his head to see the great beam of light slice right through an eighty-thousand-seat stadium. As it passed, the structure was cleaved. The cut was perfect, clean, like a knife through firm butter. There was no debris.

The invader crept toward downtown. And all around the planet, similar craft moved in a coordinated spiral. In mere days, they would wipe everything. The whole world would become a blank white marble in space.

Jack screeched to a halt at the entrance of the cross-town freeway. He needed to get across Parkus before the invader sliced the road in half, but it was filled with abandoned cars and impassable.

“Fuck!” He hit the steering wheel and cracked it.

And that’s when it happened.

Gilbert Tubers changed the world forever.

§ § §

It began as a tremor few would have noticed. Flocks of birds hiding in the trees took to flight. Dogs howled. Schools of fish darted from the island’s shore.

The tremor was followed by a quake, and Jack felt it. He climbed out of the jeep and turned back toward the Serrated Hills. But there was nothing.

The quake was followed by a cataclysm.

The crater left by Gilbert’s demise erupted like a volcano. Great boulders flew a mile high as smaller debris arced out across the valley floor.

Jack jumped back and stared, head tilting up, as the granite skeleton of the Serrated Hills rose into the night sky in a thousand pieces. And then fell.

“Oh, shit.”

A boulder landed on a shopping center, crushing it, and Jack ducked. Another took out a fifty-foot-tall road sign in a burst of sparks.

“Damn!” He dove off the road and into a ditch as car- and house-sized rocks hit the ground like a meteor shower.

The saucer stopped. The beam of light went dark.

Jack stared at a smoking hunk of igneous basalt. It had landed in the road ten feet from him, left a crater, and covered him in dirt. He stood and shook himself off.

The saucer was motionless, waiting, as the entire island groaned and shifted under a new center of gravity. Jack stumbled as the south facing beaches of the Floating Island dipped under water, and a great wave swept over the wharf swallowing twelve city blocks. Everything below Gunnerson’s Park was gone. Only the tops of a few multi-story buildings poked above the churning water. A crack in the bedrock swallowed Doubler’s Cross and snaked through the city. Fires erupted.

Jack walked back out onto the road, now tilted with the rest of the surreal landscape, and looked toward the Serrated Hills. Several peaks were missing. In their place was a pillar of smoke so thick and high that it was visible from space, a planetary burn.

And then he saw it in the dark. A small constellation of red lights smoldered inside the deep smoke. Jack thought they might be fires, except they were a thousand feet in the air.

A thunderclap.

A roar unlike any other parted the cloud pillar like a curtain, and Jack dropped to one knee.

A great beast stood in the cratered remains of the hills. It rose on two legs and had four large arms tipped in ragged claws. The red lights were its eyes, all eight of them, and they burned in a constant scowl. Massive irregular spines, almost like crystals, covered its back from the top of its head to the tip of its long tail. The rest of it was dark, with skin like cracked granite. And its teeth . . . Jack stared. It had multiple rows, and while some marched in single file, others jutted sideways from the creature’s mouth like badly hammered nails.

It bellowed again and stepped out of the crater and onto the valley floor. The ground rumbled with each step. Jack ran to the jeep, but it was crushed. He turned to see the red eyes trained on the flying saucer, a mere three hundred yards distant.

Kraxus the Destroyer roared in anger at the alien presence. His spines began to flicker and glow. He opened his mouth and a darkness erupted, a beam of dark energy. Before it escaped his teeth, it collapsed on itself and inverted to pure white. Jack felt the blast of heat from several miles away. The beam rippled through the sky and obliterated the saucer, melting it clean through. The shell exploded.

Jack ducked as a shard of metal ripped through the upper floors of a university dormitory. He saw bodies fly into the night. There was screaming. People ran from hiding in any direction away from the monster. He needed a way out.

Down the street, Jack saw a gold-painted Aminal tank poking through the side of a grocery store. It was tipped in a solid steel lion head, like a battering ram. The metal tread was smoldering but the engine was still idling. He ran. The two occupants inside had burned to a crisp. The war dragon had baked them alive.

A man and woman were on their knees inside the store, praying. They wore white aprons. Their faces were dirty and covered in scratches.

“What do we do?” the man pleaded.

“I don’t know,” Jack replied. He pulled the black skeletons out of the golden tank as Kraxus lumbered toward the shell of the downed craft. Each step shook the ground.

“What are you gonna do?”

Jack gritted his teeth. “I’m gonna kill Erasmus Pimpernel.” He climbed inside and shut the hatch.

“But where do we go?” The man stood and cried out as Jack hit the wrong lever and crashed forward through rows of groceries. The couple yelled and raised their hands.

Jack turned and rolled through the deli and into the street as Kraxus stomped on the shattered saucer again and again, crushing it beneath his armored feet.

A second saucer appeared on the horizon. The Destroyer roared, turned, and again his spines glowed. The beam ripped from his mouth, flew over the ocean, and struck the approaching craft.

But the invader had erected an energy shield, and the monster-god’s beam was deflected into the water. Great plumes of steam rose to the sky. The saucer erupted in an undulating energy wave of its own, and Kraxus was knocked back under a shower of sparks. He stumbled through an office park and landed on a house-covered hill.

Now it was a battle.

(THIRTY-FIVE) Rise of the Biodroid

Jack rolled through town in the lion-faced tank, crushing anything in his path. The city was in anarchy. The warring armies didn’t know whether to engage their foes or retreat from the clashing titans. Discipline shattered, and Jack saw one gorilla soldier help an Imperial knight to his feet only to be shot dead by another.

Jack avoided the major roads as he headed for the now-submerged wharf. He peered up through the tank’s narrow view port, trying to get his bearings amid the ruins of the city, when the war dragon attacked. It was following its last orders, oblivious to the cosmic battle that crept toward downtown, and it bathed the tank in fire. Jack cringed as the interior heated. His pseudoflesh baked and began to turn dark brown.

“Shit.”

But he was lucky, and nothing exploded.

The dragon banked in the air and came round for another pass. Jack turned down an alley where the space was too narrow for an aerial assault, and the dragon swooped by. But now he was heading the wrong way, and he had no idea how to operate the turret.

“Fuck it.”

Jack turned again and crashed through a wall. He plowed through an office and pushed everything—desks, chairs, papers, filing cabinets, telephones, and potted plants—out of his way. Under the office roof, he was safe from the dragon’s fire.

The tank crashed through the far wall and pancaked a row of cars as it covered the parking lot, then smashed through the glass doors of a pizzeria. The salad bar exploded in produce as Jack drove through it, and from there through building after building. Jack saw food, household appliances, tanning equipment, pets, clothes, shoes, home decor, computers, and rows of dry cleaning roll over the top of the tank or be crushed underneath. But it was the perfect cover; the tank was exposed only briefly as it crossed alleys and side streets. Jack smashed through an adult shop and a candy-striped sex toy lodged itself in his view port. When the Aminal machine tore through the side of a book warehouse, Jack smelled salt water. When he plowed through the far wall, he saw the new waterline. He had made it.