Suddenly Jack was beside him. He lifted Sam in his arms and ran.
It was a bullet that caused Jack to fall. One misdirected bullet hit him in the lower back. His legs went out from under him. He dropped Sam, then fell atop him.
“Jack!”
“I’m okay. It’s just . . . my legs. I can’t move my legs.”
Sam saw fear in Jack’s eyes. Jack, who had never wanted the power he was given.
Jack who had never wanted anything but to play with his computers.
“Oh, man,” Jack said.
He seemed to pass out for a moment, but then rallied. “Let me get you out . . .,” he said, and blood was in his mouth now, cutting off speech.
Jack, Computer Jack, as he had long been known, gripped the chains around Sam and pulled with all of his incredible strength.
He coughed blood onto Sam’s chest.
A single link in the chain snapped.
And Jack was gone.
Sam squirmed, trying to work free of the broken chain. He saw Gaia, nothing but a creature poorly outlined in paint and blood, a human-shaped swirl within the smoke, raise high a steel support beam, ready to hurl it with Jack’s strength.
Her arms bent, the beam fell, and she leaped out of the way and ran, as bullets flew, into the church.
Drake screamed. The sound of it, the wind from it, was in Astrid’s face. She bit down as if she was hanging on to life itself by her teeth. She was.
Drake punched her in the side of the head.
She blocked him, softening the blows with one battered hand.
He tried to wrap his whip hand around her throat, but she was too close and he couldn’t pull away, and her teeth were not just holding, they were cutting into flesh, ripping at him like a dog.
He tried to stand up, tried to get leverage, but he couldn’t get distance, and now instead of blocking his blows she gripped his head with both hands and forced her thumbs into his eyes.
Drake bellowed and squirmed and beat at her, and her mind was swimming, the blows were taking a toll, bashing her temple; his whip was trying to lash at her exposed legs, but no, no, she wasn’t going to let go, and her jaw was clenched with all the strength she had and her top teeth and bottom teeth were getting closer, closer, and Drake screamed curses, but he couldn’t get away.
Her thumbs pushed his eyeballs, hard-boiled eggs, dug past them, dug around them, dug fingernails into the space between eyeball and skull.
And she was screaming, too: the words weren’t clear, her mouth was full, and her jaw was clenched painfully, but it sounded just a bit like, “Die! Die!”
All at once, with a shake of her head, his nose ripped off.
Her thumbs were up past the knuckle; she felt the fragile bone cage crack.
Then, in one convulsive move, she pushed him off her. He rolled onto the floor, stood, and she backed away. She spit out the nose.
One of his eyes dangled from a thread.
The other oozed something like jelly from a split in the pupil.
Between them the lizard’s tail whipped madly.
He swung his own whip, lashed the air, but blindly. He caught the chandelier, ripping loose some of the Barbies hung there.
He wasn’t dead. She didn’t have the power to kill him. He would regenerate: he would come for her again.
And then, there was Taylor.
The appearance of the golden-skinned girl, the anomaly-amongst-anomalies, just froze Astrid. It was utterly incongruous.
Taylor looked down at the lashing, screaming, losing-it Drake and said to Astrid, “Peter. He sent me. To save you.”
“Thanks,” Astrid gasped, and picked bits of Drake’s nose out of her teeth.
“He’s very weak. I think he only has minutes—”
“Little Pete? I asked him to take me,” Astrid said.
Taylor shook her head, a too-slow, reptilian move. She seemed to be enjoying the way her hair flowed across her neck and forehead. “Not you. He is scared of you. Peter is scared of you. But he likes you.”
“I get that sometimes,” Astrid said. “Tell him thanks.”
Taylor disappeared from the room. Astrid turned to flee, hesitated, picked up a chair, and slammed it down on Drake’s head as hard as she could, breaking one of the heavy legs in the process.
Then she fled.
Somewhere close by, guns were firing.
The plan, such as it was, had worked.
Gaia was in the church. The idea had been that she would be drawn to the only debris she could use as weapons. The hope would be that she’d go all the way in.
And now Dekka sprang her trap.
Gaia stood, bleeding, visible now as she relinquished Bug’s power of invisibility. She stood gasping from the pain, seething in rage, frustrated again, and surrounded, literally surrounded, by all the heavy, hard, sharp-edged debris of the semi-collapsed church.
Dekka was at the altar.
“You murdered someone I love,” Dekka said, and raised her hands high. Thousands of pounds of wood and steel, plaster and glass, pews, roof tiles, and accumulated filth rose in a rush, a pillar of swirling junk.
Up and up, and Gaia rose with it.
Forty feet up and Gaia had recovered her wits well enough to take aim at Dekka, and then, just as Gaia began to fire, Dekka dropped it all.
WHOOOOMPF!
It fell and bounced and crashed and splintered with a noise like the end of the world.
Dekka jumped back to avoid being hit, but she still took a dozen small impacts from flying debris. She couldn’t see Gaia, but she wasn’t taking chances. She raised high the debris and dropped it again.
And raised it and dropped it again. Hammer blows.