CHAPTER 11
Jennifer
Jennifer and Jonathan
banked lower until they could see greater detail in the swarm that
worked its way toward the bridge. It moved slowly but purposefully,
seething and clicking.
“They look like
drawings,” she observed.
“I agree. I don’t get
it . . .” He dipped down farther, until he was under the bridge’s
arch. Jennifer looked around nervously for armed patrols, but no
one else was near. No sentries? It was as if Hank assumed he could
do what he did and suffer no consequence.
Well? Have there been?
She dropped to her
father’s altitude. The creatures were on the bridge now. They did
not climb the beams of the arch, but rather stayed on the road.
There was definitely purpose in their movement.
“They’re plainly sent
to do something. Why send creatures with no thickness?” Jonathan
mused. “What could they do? How could they attack or do anything
useful if they don’t exist in the same space we exist
in?”
“Maybe it’s
temporary,” Jennifer guessed. “If they can’t attack, they can’t be
attacked, either. Putting them in two-dimensional space would make
for an effective delivery system.”
“Delivering what? And
where?”
They simultaneously
looked at city hall, as the creatures marched under
them.
“Oh, crap,” she
finally said. “We’re going to have to save him, aren’t
we?”
“I’m afraid so, ace.
And it’s the two of us—no time to get help. One of us disables the
guards, the other evacuates the complex.”
“I’ll disable the
guards. You want to save Hank Blacktooth, you do it.”
“Good
luck.”
“Get bent, Dad. Love
you.”
“Love you,
too.”
It occurred to
Jennifer, as she bolted at the tower atop city hall, that those
words had an excellent chance of being the last they ever said to
each other.
All because we have to pull their asses out of the fire
when they caused the problem in the first
place.
Perhaps that’s not totally fair, she argued with
herself as she dipped below one sniper’s shot and flashed to the
left to avoid the second. There must be more
than beaststalkers working here, just like there are innocents
working at the hospital.
She flipped into
human form as she entered the tower, knocked out the two snipers
with the mahogany hilts of her crafted daggers, and tossed their
guns out the window she had accessed. People
who come in to work, want to do a good job, and go home to kiss
their kids. Families like the family you thought you had two years
ago.
She barely could make
out the shape of her father as he approached the tower. He would be
counting on her to clear a path, so she got to work.
So for all the janitors and secretaries, she
continued to convince herself as she slipped down the tower stairs,
all the network admins and evidence
handlers. A guard positioned on a landing couldn’t process
the sight of the teenaged girl coming at him until he was knocked
out by a roundhouse kick. We’ll do it for
them. We’ll evacuate them first, as it should be. Of course, they
need a reason to leave . . .
Already back in
dragon form, she burst out the stairwell door into the main lobby,
a room two stories high, where half a dozen police officers stood
guard, three up top and three below. Before they could react, their
eyes told them the entire building was beginning to shake and melt.
Jennifer added touches to the mass illusion, ones she had picked up
from practicing the ancient creeper-dragon skill for the last
several months: orange monkeys with elephant ears came shinnying
down the grooved columns that dominated the domed chamber, and the
stench of sulfur peeled off the elaborately painted plaster
walls.
And if Hank Blacktooth manages to get out in all the
commotion, she told herself as her invisible father patted
her on the back for her fine work and darted off to the mayor’s
office, well then . . . no plan is
perfect.
The officers became
the best sales force for their plan, ringing the alarm and calling
for a general evacuation of the complex. “Earthquake!” went the
cry, and Jennifer supposed that was a more efficient if less
accurate description than “Earthquake with elephant-eared monkeys!”
Very few municipal systems had a specific siren for
that.
She gratefully
watched dozens of innocent people—exactly the people she had come
to save—come swarming from side hallways and stairwells, into the
main lobby and out the front and side doors. Off into the lawn they
went, to their designated safe zones. Nobody trained for
evacuations with more effectiveness than government
workers.
In a matter of a few
minutes, she saw them all pass before her. Maintaining the illusion
required her standing still, and so she did not move as everyone
hustled and bustled, even rubbing up against her. She would be
visible to them all, she knew—a shining golden form of a dragon, if
any of them took enough time to examine her. She didn’t want to
scare them more than they already were.
Fortunately, very few
people on their way out were interested in a harmless statuesque
form when everything else was apparently coming down around
them.
The one exception was
Hank Blacktooth.
“What is the meaning
of this?” he was shouting, as an unseen force propelled him out of
his second- floor office, down the stairs and onto the lobby floor.
“What’s happening? Is this an earthquake? This doesn’t seem—what’s
that—YOU!”
The moment he spotted
Jennifer, she knew the ruse was up. Fortunately, the last of the
workers and beaststalker guards were already out of the
building—her father, she realized, had timed this purposefully,
since bringing Hank out into the lobby too soon would have ruined
everything.
“Hank,” she heard him
say, “for once in your miserable life, listen to me. We’re trying
to save you. Give me sixty more seconds of cooperation. If you
don’t believe me after what you see, you can chop my head off
yourself.”
“I will do no
such—ooof.” Hank Blacktooth doubled over, fell down the entryway
stairs, and rolled out of the building.
“That’s it, Jennifer.
We’ve got to get out of here.”
As if to emphasize
the point, the black swarm from the bridge began to discolor the
walls, seeping in through an infinite number of dimensional cracks.
They invaded the first-floor surfaces, then the second floor, then
the dome interior . . .
“Out, out, out!” he
cried, dragging her with him.
They flew through the
darkening doors, over Hank’s groaning form, and into the open air
as the building behind them began to hum. The creatures covered the
exterior as well as the interior. They found every inch of brick,
every pane of glass, every bit of wood and plaster, and dug in
their appendages. Then the hum turned into a sizzle, and the
creatures inflated into thickness. Bodies fattening, their sizzle
turned into a whine, then a roar . . .
. . . and then the
entire building was consumed by a billion tiny explosions, each one
carrying away a small piece of Hank Blacktooth’s impregnable
fortress, until there was nothing left except a hole in the
ground.