He had no wallet, no credit cards or phone. But a young man walking past a vast construction site in North Las Vegas, and who arguably looked a bit like Justin, had all that and more. Justin had not wanted to kill the young man, but necessity made its own rules. One more body for collection by the crews that were scouring the city for the dead. Justin took his victim’s wallet and phone and caught a taxi to the airport. He’d bought the first available ticket to New York and now merely waited for the gate to be called.
Back to New York.
He would be safe in New York.
Tom Peaks had run from Las Vegas after the horror at the Triunfo, the hotel where Dillon Poe had made his unspeakably brutal last stand.
Peaks had arrived in Vegas as Napalm, the ten-story-tall reptile with the belly full of liquid fire, believing he was there to take down Dekka, who he hated for what he still thought of as betrayal.
But when he’d arrived . . .
He had not known about Dillon Poe. He’d had no idea what Dillon was doing. He had not known that the hundreds of people gathered by the entrance of the Triunfo were slaves to Dillon’s will, unable to flee.
He had definitely not known that the Charmer had sprayed that crowd with gasoline.
Now Peaks sat trembling in a booth at a diner in one of the multitude of identical shopping centers that ringed the city. His coffee was undrunk. The pancakes he’d ordered were untouched and now cold.
There had been so many horrors. So much destruction. The Ranch, his great creation, was exposed to the world and destroyed. What had once been his staff of carefully recruited scientists and techs and guards had been hunted down and murdered by vengeful mutants and cyborgs.
His family . . . He closed his eyes and tried to picture them, but each time he did he saw disgust and contempt on their faces. He could never go home to them, not now.
No job. No home. No family. No purpose in life. And for the rest of his life he would see the Triunfo fire over and over and over again. A fire he had unwittingly lit.
“Can I get you anything else, honey?’ the waitress asked.
Peaks shook his head. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table, got up, went to the men’s room, and vomited coffee and bile.
Peaks splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the dirty mirror. Looked at a face now known to every law-enforcement agency on earth.
There was no safety.
There was no escape.
There were only the screams of people burning.
Peaks stumbled out of the diner into brilliant sunlight. Across the vast parking lot was a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. He headed for it, spotted a liquor store, and bought himself a bottle of excellent scotch on the way.
“Damn good scotch,” Peaks muttered, draining a quarter of the bottle as he maneuvered through parked cars.
The clerk at the liquor store had given him a strange look, a shrewd look of recognition. Would he call the police? More likely than not.
Time was running short. If they came for him, he could morph and fight them off. He had only to belch the dreadful napalm and they would burn. . . .
Innocent police officers just doing their duty. My God.
He set the scotch bottle, now half-empty, on the curb and went into the Big 5. He easily found the gun-sales area. He pointed to a 12-gauge shotgun in a rack.
“How much?”
“That model will set you back $899.99.”
Peaks stuck a credit card into the reader. Denied. Tried another card. Denied.
“I know who you are,” the clerk said suddenly. He looked at Peaks as if seeing the devil himself.
“I need a gun,” Peaks rasped.
“You get nothing from me, you piece of shit,” the man said. “Give you a gun? Why, so you can kill some more children? Get out of here! Security! Security!”
Peaks bowed his head, then walked around behind the counter. The clerk, terrified, tried to back away but Peaks grabbed him by the shirt front and said, “I need a shotgun. Short barrel. And one shell. Just one.”
A minute later store security came hustling up just in time to see Peaks jack the 12-gauge shell into the chamber, place the barrel of the shotgun under his chin, and blow the top of his head all over the display case.
| 5 | HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL? |
IN SURGERY THEY had reattached Bob Markovic’s nearly severed hand. He was given painkillers. He was also given a sedative. And by the time he woke he was in a very surprising yet oddly familiar place. Consciousness returned to Markovic in the form of too-bright lights and a sea of red velour. He blinked, and then squinted against the light, and then, with rapidly mounting panic, recognized where he was.
Carnegie Hall?
Markovic’s Money Machine had season tickets to Carnegie Hall, using them to reward especially productive senior employees and the occasional politician who needed some TLC. But, he realized, he was not in the corporate seats which were up in the first balcony, stage left. He was in a seat toward the rear of the orchestra section.
And the people around him were definitely not regular patrons. Not even close. Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium held 2804 people; less than a tenth of that number were in the hall now, but they were not there to watch a show. Many were in pajamas or robes. Many others—like Markovic himself—were in hospital robes. Some were in street clothes. But all were bloody to one degree or another. Some showed just a few blood-soaked bandages slowly drying from crimson to rust color, but others looked as if they’d been dipped in red paint.
Markovic’s pain seemed to come out of nowhere, a series of pains, really, starting with the total-body bruising he quickly traced to what looked like dozens of pinpricks, or ice-pick stabs on his arms, his hands, his face. Then there was a deeper wound, a thick bandage on his chest that seeped blood and felt terrible. That wound suggested danger to life and limb. But it was the hand, wrapped in gauze and surgical webbing, that was the most troubling because he had no idea what had happened to it, or why he could not feel his fingers.
He opened his robe with his good hand and peeled back the thick bandage on his upper pectoral. This was no pinprick; this was a gash, maybe three centimeters long with a dozen black stitches holding it closed.
Have I been shot? Stabbed?
Some kind of terrorist attack?
And, given the pain and the wounds and the blood and the incessant pounding in his head, why in holy hell was he at Carnegie Hall?
He tried to stand and sat right back down, head swimming, thighs quivering, knees as firm as overcooked spaghetti. Markovic began tracing back through his memories. He’d been arguing with Simone, which was not unusual. She was an amazing kid, of course—after all, she was his daughter—but she was headstrong. Then there had been a strange light . . . no, two lights, each far more steady and intense than any star. Then . . .
Beyond that point, memory became disconnected flashes. A flash of an impact of some sort. A flash of his living room. A flash of Simone, face bloody, bending over him. Then . . . doctors? Nurses? He furrowed his brow, thinking. Cops?
The back seat of his Mercedes?
A linoleum floor?