Like a herd of panicked cattle they surged away from the barrier, screaming.
Connie Temple did not move. She couldn’t. She had to watch this final slaughter. A witness, even if she died for it.
On the left and on the right, the first of the children inside burned. And the first of the adults outside screamed as hair caught fire and limbs fell severed to the ground.
And something large pelted down the hill, a monstrosity, a nightmare creature.
THIRTY
25 MINUTES
YEA, THOUGH I walk . . . valley of the shadow of death . . .
Orc was not a great runner. He weighed hundreds of pounds. His gravel legs were not quick.
His staff will comfort me . . . Angels and so on . . .
But the downslope helped a little. And the smoke didn’t bother him so much. Maybe his throat was different.
I will fear no evil . . .
She didn’t hear him coming.
The Lord is my shepherd . . .
A hundred yards left.
Her lights burned slowly toward the center, and she threw her head back and laughed and laughed as the crowd outside panicked and ran and died and the crowd inside crawled over one another like desperate animals to escape the slaughter and were cut in half.
Thou art with me. Not just thy staff.
Thou.
Orc hit Gaia like a truck.
She flew. Hit the ground facedown amid the panicked children. The impact rolled Orc into the barrier, squashing a girl beneath him. He hit the barrier and it sent a shock through him, so he jumped up, raging against it, searched for Gaia, saw her rolling onto her back, saw her face distorted with fury, saw her raise her hands.
He was off balance, trying to get to his feet, when she fired.
Both beams hit him mid-chest.
Orc collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
He lifted one massive stone fist to try and shield the patch of human skin that still covered part of his mouth.
People inside and out scattered in panic. The air was filled with screams.
Orc was on his knees. Two holes had been burned right through him. He looked at Gaia, who stood now, enraged, and advanced on him.
“I’m not scared of you,” Orc said, slurring the words like in the bad old days when he was a drunk. “I’m going to dwell . . . I forget . . . forever.”
Gaia advanced on him, but the crowd, the huddled, terrified mass, had used the distraction to break and run.
Gaia felt the fear creeping back in.
And then the missile exploded against the barrier.
Lana stumbled down from Clifftop. It felt like forever since she’d been away from that foul room, that now-terrible place.
She could see in the distance fire eating at the edge of Perdido Beach. She tasted the smoke.
“Not much point quitting if the air’s going to be one big cigarette,” she muttered.
Her battle was over. She felt it inside. The gaiaphage had ceased to struggle against her. She had fought and won her own little war.
Suddenly Patrick came bounding up beside her.
“So, Sanjit sent you to look after me, huh?” She reached down and patted his head. “You and me, boy. You and me.”
There came a loud explosion, a flat but powerful sound, just off to her right.
There would be people hurt by that kind of a thing.
For the last time, the Healer headed toward the sound of suffering.
The missile hit the barrier immediately behind Orc. His body took most of the blast.
It blew him apart. TV cameras caught the moment when a thousand little stones went flying like shrapnel. The rock was blown from his back and much of his chest, from his shoulders and most of his head. It was as if he was a mud-crusted shoe knocked against the wall. The mud gravel was knocked away in patches.
His internal organs were crushed. His eyes bled. For a terrible moment a body, the body of a young man, with pink flesh rising from still-stony legs, tried to push itself up off the ground. Surely just a physical instinct, surely not a conscious effort, because he could not be alive.
Charles Merriman, long known as Orc, tried to rise, and instead fell dead.
Orc’s massive body had shielded Gaia from the worst of it.
She lived, still, but the shrapnel and the fire had stripped the skin from much of her body, a terrible mimicry of Orc’s own destruction.
She was a creature of blood, red from head to foot.
But she lived still.
Sinder ran from the terrible scene. She tripped over bodies, got up, and ran some more.
She glanced back once and saw Orc hit.
She could hardly breathe for the beating of her heart and the sobbing that tore at her.
Her feet pounded earth, tripped, stood, ran, glanced back again and saw Gaia coming.
A beam of light shot past Sinder and she screamed. A girl to her right made a soft gasp and fell. The hole in her neck was smoking.
Feet on concrete now, the road, running. Clifftop! To the left, but uphill, and Gaia was coming, and another deadly beam of light, so close Sinder felt the heat of it on her cheek and cries and shouts and the sound of people gasping for breath, gagging in the smoke.
And suddenly, Caine rising up behind a wrecked car. He was holding something long and white.
The panicked crowd parted around him. Sinder ran on, glanced back, saw Gaia still running and firing, and Caine grim and steady.
“Damn,” Caine breathed. “That is one tough monster Diana and I made.”
The rest of the missiles were off to the side of the road in their crates. He kind of didn’t think he’d get a chance to reload.
Edilio was there, unpacking a second missile, but nope, Caine thought, Edilio isn’t going to get the shot, either.