CHAPTER 21
Jennifer
Jennifer was coming
off shift on the roof when Susan and Gautierre came back from their
full-town patrol. She gracefully slipped off his back as he hit the
pavement.
“Jenn, the police
station! It’s under attack!”
“Skip?”
Susan
nodded.
“Are they
evacuating?”
Her friend could only
shrug. The terror on her face was all Jennifer needed.
In a split second she
was in the air on blue wings, Gautierre close behind her. They were
barely over the treetops when they saw the explosion.
“Cripes!” This blast
was fiercer and louder than the one at city hall. He’s getting better at this. The bugs are getting
nastier. Chunks of the building a full mile away landed on
the houses below their wings, and they could sense the stench of
the green plume that rose from the crater.
“Look for survivors!”
she ordered Gautierre.
They found thirteen
wounded over the next half hour, with several clearly dead and many
dozens more missing. The two of them began turning over rubble and
finding more. At first they were the only two who could withstand
the poisonous fumes. Then a fire truck arrived and washed most of
the reek away, and others could join in.
The ambulances—some
real, some makeshift—came quickly and whisked the wounded away to
the hospital. Gautierre and she kept at it, still in dragon form,
with medics and police officers and townspeople at their side. They
found another wounded person, then another.
“Keep digging!”
Jennifer ordered them. And they obeyed.
Heavy equipment
arrived—there was only one backhoe within the dome, but there were
several jackhammers and quite a few trucks to carry the rubble
away. In their stronger dragon shapes, Gautierre and she helped
them move it all. They unearthed fewer survivors, and more
corpses.
Scanning the ruined
site after an hour, it occurred to her they might come across Hank
Blacktooth. No one had seen him since the explosion.
Did she want him
dead, or alive?
Does it matter? He’ll die soon enough, the day Skip wants
to send a swarm for him and only him. Like he sent one for Dad.
What can I do to stop it? Nothing. Xavier can search all he
likes—within a month, we could all be dead.
She fought back tears
of despair as her wing claws dug furiously. They cut open on sharp
edges of rock and steel, and she kept digging through the pain.
Voices called out to her, and she kept digging.
Finally, Gautierre
put a wing on her and turned her around. “Jennifer! The police are
getting a radio call—it’s your mother.”
Scrambling out of her
pit, she flipped to human and grabbed the radio from a nearby
officer. With a double take, she realized it was Chief
Whittle—Carrot Helmet?—who had a look
of concern on her face. She pressed the radio button.
“Mom?”
“Honey. Our spotters
think another one’s coming.”
“Where?”
“The
hospital.”
Jennifer’s blood
froze. “Mom. Get the fuck out of there.”
“We’re evacuating.
Can you get here? I might need to get in the air, if . .
.”
“Sixty seconds.” She
handed the radio back to the young chief. “I’m going to leave my
friend here to help you. You’re going to protect him.”
“No one’s going to
touch him, Ms. Scales. You have my word. He’s found eighteen
trapped survivors and digs faster than the backhoe. Thirty
different people have come up to me asking his name, so they can
thank him personally.”
“Gautierre
Longtail.”
“I’ll pass that
along.”
“Thanks.”
She scrambled into
the sky, pressing her wings hard, coming quickly within sight of
the hospital and the rolling fields beyond. Her mother was waiting
in the parking lot, with several staff bunched around
her.
Useless, Jennifer thought tenderly. They can’t protect her. All they can do is get ash blown
on them.
She landed next to
them and looked where they were pointing.
“Smaller,” Jennifer
muttered.
“Big enough,”
Elizabeth guessed. It was the size of a large dragon—in fact, it
held a shape very much like one, trailing wisps as it floated over
the vegetation, as if a dragon were melting overhead.
“Turning!” the
spotter called out from the roof. “Coming right for
us!”
A beaststalker whom
Jennifer recognized from the city council—Sarah Sera—tugged at
Elizabeth’s sleeve. “You or your daughter will be the target. You
have to get out of here. You have to get out of here at least five
minutes ago.”
Elizabeth exhaled. “I
don’t want to leave—”
“MOM.” Jennifer was
already spreading her wings. “Get on board.”
“Another one!” called
out a different spotter, pointing a bit farther to the west.
“Coming faster!”
Elizabeth turned to
Sarah. “Evacuate the hospital.”
“Mom!”
“Use a spread
pattern, so it can’t hurt too many at once. If—”
“Get on me
now!”
“If the building is
destroyed, take everyone to Smart Bean Foods. Jennifer and I will
try to meet you—ack!”
Snarling, Jennifer
had grabbed her mother’s coat with her teeth and dragged her into
the air.
The moment her hind
claws left the parking lot, the first shadow changed course to
intercept. It was only a few seconds before Jennifer spotted the
second one—this one in the shape of a spider, and different from
the first in color as well. In fact, Jennifer wasn’t sure she could
really even call it a shadow . . .
“Honey. I’m slipping
out of my jacket. If you could—gah!”
Jennifer snapped her
head around quickly enough to deposit her mother on her back. She
felt the woman’s fingernails embed themselves in her
scales.
“That wasn’t funny,
kid.”
“Get on board when I
ask, next time. What do you think of these two swarms? They look
different from what Skip has sent before.”
Elizabeth peered
downward. “They’re both after us, each in a different shape. The
dragon is probably meant for me, the spider for you.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.
I’d hate to have to share. I suppose we should be glad he’s not
going after the hospital. At least they won’t have to
evacuate.”
“It’s a matter of
time. Once you and I are gone, Skip’s job gets considerably
easier.”
“Cheery thought.
Perhaps we could try to stay alive? For funsies?”
“Head
west.”
“Over
them?”
“We’ve never seen a
swarm jump. I’d rather get out to the farmland on the edge of town.
There are fewer people there, so they’ll do less
damage.”
“This doesn’t exactly
strike me as a survival strategy.”
“How long can you
stay in the air?”
Jennifer’s mind went
back to a seemingly endless flight over the seas of Crescent
Valley. It was stressful and kind of awful at the time, but now it
seemed like a vacation. “At least eight hours. Haven’t really ever
tried to push it beyond that.”
“We have eight hours
to come up with a plan, then.”
“No problem,”
Jennifer lied through sharp teeth.
They did not need
eight hours. As they crossed over the first shadow, it rose to meet
them, and Jennifer at once felt alarm, relief, and
irritation.
“Evangelina!”
The shape did not
respond aloud, but coalesced into a three-dimensional winged form
that cruised by their left flank, momentarily blotting out the sun
before it circled back to hover over its companion
shape.
Sister. Sister-mother.
“Do you think she and
Skip—”
“Friends? Unlikely,
given what I saw from her the last time she ran into
him.”
“Good news, then. And
the second one must be Dianna Wilson.”
“Pretty odd time to
show up.”
“Not odd at all. Your
father was married to Dianna once, and Evangelina is their
daughter.”
“So they’re here
because he’s dead? What, they want to bring a pot roast to the
after-funeral party?”
“I doubt
that.”
Jennifer looked
suspiciously at the newcomer’s tattered black wings, six spindly
legs, viciously spiked tail, and shrouded facial features. “Okay,
so? He’s dead, they’re here? How does that make
sense?”
“Calm down, honey. We
can ask them. If they were going to attack, they would have done it
by now. Right?”
“HEY.” Jennifer made
a beeline for her half-sister. “MY MOTHER AND I WANT TO KNOW WHAT
THE HELL YOU’RE DOING HERE.”
No time, sister. Another swarm is coming.
“What, are you—is
this draw-a-scribble-on-our-home-town day, or some shit?”
How can Skip draw this quickly? It doesn’t
matter. “Where is it?”
Mother feels it coming from the bridge. Heading this way.
“Coming for the
hospital.”
“Evacuate!” Elizabeth
called out to the people below. “Get clear of the
building!”
Not necessary. Mother and I will handle this.
Evangelina darted off
toward the bridge, descending farther and farther until Jennifer
was sure she was going to crash. They followed her, as did the
spider shadow they now knew to be Dianna Wilson.
Instead of crashing,
Evangelina’s dragon shape soaked into the surfaces of the trees and
structures, becoming a shadow again without losing any
speed.
Jennifer saw the
oncoming swarm now, a jumbled mess of the same sorts of creatures
that had taken away her father, destroyed city hall, and buried
townspeople at the police station.
“It’s huge—at least
triple what he’s sent before.”
“That can only be for
the hospital,” her mother deduced.
“How does he do
it—how does he make so many, so quickly?”
“The better question
is, how are Evangelina and Dianna going to—oh, my.”
The hunger never ends it never ends it never ends
Evangelina
accelerated toward a swarm that looked ready to consume her—until
her shadow swiftly expanded, covering an area ten times that of the
swarm. Like a predator fish that had teased its prey with a
deceptively small lure, Evangelina opened its maw and consumed the
entire swarm whole, seeming to swallow a gulp of the Mississippi
River as she did so.