“I apologize for my tardiness, Miss Lopez.”
The albino Fedboy was the guy from Denver.
Behind him were two more expressionless pinks in way too expensive suits.
“Ah, uh—” What the fuck was she supposed to do now?
“I am glad that you came. There was a feeling in the organization that you wouldn’t honor Dorset’s commitments.”
Damn it all, this was why she was here! She wanted to scream at them that there was a crazy man behind her, three seats away. She wanted to move out of here, get this over with, but the albino pink was blocking the way back to the aisle. “Can we do this somewhere else?” Angel said in a harsh whisper, looking back at Anaka to make sure he was still occupied.
Anaka was looking at the game, the back and forth between two tied teams.
“We prefer a public place, as did Mr. Dorset. Too much potential for violence.” He smiled. “It’s best if neither of us are concerned.”
I’m concerned right now, you twit, she thought. What did they think she was going to do?
“Let’s get this over with, then.”
Whitey nodded, took out a small computer, and slipped a ramcard into it. He tapped it a few times and showed her the display. It was a measure of her self-control that she didn’t gasp at the amount. The number just didn’t register, except that it had more than six zeros and no decimal point.
Angel nodded and reached into her pocket for the tickets.
Behind her she heard Anaka scream, “THEY’RE HERE!”
Angel could feel the world begin to tumble into slow motion. Anaka’s manic cry went out and seeded something in the crowd around them. Angel saw the moreaus—scattered thinly in the expensive box seats—around them start turning in their direction.
Whitey stepped back, withdrawing the hand comm. The two suits behind him in the aisle were shoving their hands into their jackets. She turned around to face Anaka, her gaze sweeping past the field.
A cheer was rising in the whole dome. There’d been some kind of turnover near the Mavericks’ end zone and Sergei was running down the sidelines with the ball. Throughout the dome the chant was, “Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
The chant around Angel was, “He’s got a gun.”
The moreys were already scrambling away, over the seats and each other. Before Angel had turned completely around, Anaka had tackled her from behind, grabbing her around the chest and running at Whitey like Sergei was running the nearly eighty yards to his own end zone.
“Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
Whitey stepped back, stumbling. Whitey’s red eyes glared at Anaka, who must’ve looked the crazy-man part. The two suits had pulled their weapons, matte-black automatics, and leveled them toward Anaka.
Anaka was using her as a shield. “You’re not going to take me!”
“Sergei. Sergei. Sergei.”
Anaka had one arm around her chest, the other one shook a huge chromed automatic at the suits. She recognized the weapon as a well-kept antique Desert Eagle—a handheld Israeli fifty-cal cannon.
Her feet didn’t quite brush the ground, and her leverage sucked, but she drew up her legs and kicked backward as hard as she could manage.
Tailored for a grand or not, her pants split right up the middle, and she felt her feet make contact right above Anaka’s knees.
“Ser-gei. Ser-gei. Ser-gei.”
Anaka let go immediately, and she heard the gun discharge. The explosion deafened her and she could barely hear the screams over the ringing. She landed, rolled past the suits, and ended up facing toward the apex of the dome in time to see the most horrifying thing she had ever witnessed.
It was impossible, so it had to be shock, or temporary deafness, but the world was silent except for her heartbeat and her breathing—more felt than heard. Above her, the holo was going, the live net feed that was being simulcast cross-country. It was on a delay, so she was seeing action on the field five seconds in the past.
Sergei was home free. He was running down the sideline; the nearest Maverick was twenty meters away. He ran like a being possessed, faster than Angel had ever seen him, or any other morey move. His head was down, tongue lolling through the face mask, tail streaming behind him, clutching the ball to his side. He had already run forty yards. He had just crossed the fifty yard line. Nothing could stop him.
Then, in the midst of his triumph, Sergei’s shoulder exploded. The expression of canine triumph turned into a grimace as he tripped. His hand went to his spraying shoulder, the forgotten football tumbling on his forty yard line.
Sergei fell, facefirst, into the thirty-eight yard line. He skidded on a slick of his own blood. He stayed there, motionless, still clutching his shoulder, the bloody football within arm’s reach.
It was only then that some goober in the booth decided it would be a good idea to cut the holo picture and the feed to the net. Even as the holo blinked out, leaving only the silvered underside of the Dome, Angel realized that it was much too late.
Chapter 28
The silence was broken by more gunfire. Angel pulled herself to her feet. Up the aisle, she saw Anaka take one in the chest. He hadn’t moved or taken cover. A flower of blood drenched the front of his rumpled suit, and he was down.
One of the suits had taken a fifty-cal shot just below the knee. He was on the ground, trying to hold onto his leg and keep from bleeding to death. The other suit was cautiously advancing on Anaka, gun out. In any other situation, keeping an eye solidly on Anaka would have been a good idea.
Of all three of them, Whitey seemed to be the only one who realized where they were. The dome was enveloped in a stunned silence, and the quartet of humans were surrounded by a ring of staring moreaus.
Angel heard the growls begin.
Whitey was subvocalizing to his nearly invisible throat-mike. The only two words Angel could make out at this distance were “. . . big problem . . .”
Angel could smell the moreys who ringed the trio. Fear, confusion anger . . . It was as bad, worse, than the scents she’d picked up at the prison. The moreaus were a solid wall of fur, arrayed in a semicircle with the open end to the field. The moreys blocked any exit into the stands.
The growling was getting louder, and the huge ursine that blocked the aisle opposite the humans from Angel was clenching his hands into fists the size of her head.
Behind her was a railing, and a five-meter drop to the sidelines.
Over the PA the announcer was repeatedly asking the audience to return to their seats and stay there. They needed to let the police through. Angel didn’t know if it was directed at this area specifically, or the whole stadium.
Whitey nodded a few times, then he walked up to the safely disarmed Anaka and raised his hands. “It’s all right. We got him. If—”
It was the last thing he ever said. A seat ripped from the stands scythed out of the crowd and slammed into Whitey’s throat. Angel had no idea where it came from.
The suit next to Anaka’s body did the worst thing he could possibly have done, considering the circumstances. He began firing into the crowd.
Angel jumped over the railing as the crowd dissolved into a tidal wave of teeth, fur, and claws. She heard three gunshots as she vaulted onto the field. Glancing over her shoulder, her last sight of the area was that massive ursine—the crowd breaking upon and around him as if he was a crag of rock—holding aloft a bludgeon that looked an awful lot like a very pale human arm.
She hit the ground badly and stumbled a few meters. But suddenly she was clear of people. The sidelines here should have been crowded with people—the team, the vids, the staff, play officials—but the mass of people had been drawn to a circle centering on a spot near the forty yard line. A circle ringed by a dozen security people, all pinks. That must have been the entire security staff on the field, because no one made a move toward Angel.
She looked downfield and saw the teams. They were standing around the Mavericks’ twenty yard line, their position in life reversed. They stood and watched the chaos that had erupted in the stands.
She backed away from the stands as if she avoided something alive. Her hearing was coming back. There was a growling rumble that outdid the bass speakers on the PA system. The rumble was punctuated by vicious carnivore screams—yowling, barking, roaring. The crowd had swirled into vortices around the few humans occupying the stands. Spectators, security, vendors, it didn’t seem to matter.
She smelled smoke, and saw a licking of flames by the Earthquakes’ end zone.
“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Angel whispered.
The announcer on the PA sounded frantic, pleading.
A speaker was torn from its mount and landed in the field. Other people began jumping to the sidelines. It was the only escape open from the mob, and a wave of fur began to pour over the railings. It was most violent by the Earthquakes’ end zone, where the fire was.
That seemed to break the paralysis on the field. The teams by the Mavericks’ twenty yard line bolted off to the nearest exit, behind the end zone. The crowd near Sergei moved, as a unit, off to the sidelines—and another exit. All they left behind was a bloodstain and a football.
The PA was now telling a mob that was beyond caring that Sergei was not seriously hurt.
Angel ran to the crowd around Sergei, intending to follow them out of the dome, but one of the security goons leveled a gun at her. She veered off. She was left near the center of the dome, standing by a blood-soaked football. Around her, the stands were a chaotic mess. The mob was pouring out onto the field, she could no longer even see the crowd surrounding Sergei to tell if they made it off the field.
All she saw now was a mad rush for the exists.
Most sane people had the same thought she did—get the fuck out of here.
The stands were now vast lots of empty seats punctuated by knots of moreaus trying to crawl over each other. The field itself was becoming swamped, and in a few seconds she would be overrun by the mob.
The sound was horrible. Screaming, roaring, yelping—the cries of pain and fear were drowning out the pinpoints of rage.
There was nowhere for her to run to that didn’t thrust her into the heart of a terrified murderous mob. She whipped her head back and forth, hurting her ears, looking for anywhere that the masses of people were thin enough to break through—
The fire.
Even as she looked downfield to the burning section of the dome, people began rushing by her, jostling her. A jaguar bearing a red plastic box seat like a trophy nearly toppled her.
Angel ran toward the Earthquakes’ end zone. It was insane to run toward the fire, but that part of the stands had emptied out almost entirely, and the press of moreys on the field between her and there was relatively thin.
She ran, dodging panicked canines, jumping over collapsed rats, running as if she was completing Sergei’s touchdown drive.
When she reached the end zone, it was raining. The dome’s fire-control systems were trying to stop me blaze. It didn’t seem to be doing too much good. Her eyes were watering from the plastic smoke that billowed from the burning seats. Between the fire alarms, and the roaring of the fire itself, she couldn’t hear the riot going on around her.
What had been a licking of flame from the forty yard line was an entire section of the stands going up.
No wonder she was the only one near here.
She ran for the exit behind the Earthquakes’ end zone, holding her breath because of the smoke, stepped over a black ratboy with a crushed skull, and made for the corridor that led out of the damned dome.
• • •
If the Hunterdome had gone straight to Hell, it was only the first circle. When she made it out to the parking lot, the sky was already blackening with smoke. It seemed that half the cars were burning. She could hear the sound of breaking glass, sirens, and automatic weapons fire.
The scene immediately around her was surrealistically free of people. Ranks of cars marched away into a hazy pall of gray smoke. She ran between the ranks of cars, across asphalt strewn with the remains of broken windows.
There was the sound of an impact, maybe an explosion, in the distance, and the sounds of gunfire ceased.
Even though she was choking on the smoke of burning vehicles, she realized that she was wrong in thinking that half the cars were burning. The smoke cleared as she ran and it was clear that most of the fires were near the dome. Whoever started the cars burning had been systematic. They were all luxury sedans, sports cars and such. BMWs, Jaguars, Maduros—Angel ran past a burning Ferrari and decided that most of the expensive cars had been parked close to the dome.
When she cleared the pall of smoke, she began to see people. A few lanes away, a trio of rats seemed to be taking baseball bats to a car. A familiar-looking babyshit-brown pickup with particleboard walls in the back nearly ran her down as it screamed across her lane. The driver laid on the horn constantly, and as she watched the pickup’s retreat, someone in the back threw something at a parked Porsche. There was a smash and the Porsche was enveloped in a sheet of flame.
A second later, a Hunterdome security car tore after the pickup, sirens blaring. It swerved to avoid her and plowed into a parked Estival four-door. A shuddering whine filled the air as the rent-a-cop tried to reengage the flywheel. He managed it, even though he had reduced the length of his car by a meter, backed the car up, and floored it after the pickup, leaving the abused rubber odor behind.
Angel stood there a moment, unable to move.
“The world has gone nuts.”
What was worse, the spark that had touched this off had gone out on a national broadcast. What she was watching could be happening everywhere. Something inside her made Angel want to feel responsibility for this. She did her best to crush it.
“This isn’t my fault.” She had repeated it a half-dozen times before she realized she was saying it out loud.
Get to the airport, she thought. This wouldn’t reach down there, she could catch her flight and get out of all this insanity. She made her way toward the edge of the parking lot, weaving through a riot of moreaus. Half seemed intent on smashing cars, the other half in driving out of here. She passed three accidents, and at one place there were at least twenty rats and rabbits trying to make a roadblock by pushing a burning van into the middle of the traffic lane. Angel felt real fear when she noticed that the van involved was one of the SWAT vans she had seen stationed around the parking lot.
More than once she passed the smell of blood. She never paused long enough to check whether it was human or morey.
Angel was in sight of the edge of the parking lot when she saw the Land Rover. In contrast to the manic activity elsewhere, the Brit four-wheeler was moving slowly, deliberately. It wove carefully between the cars, looking as if, should it find its way blocked, it would be content simply to roll over the offending blockage. Whether the obstacle was human, moreau, or a car. The windows were tinted, so she couldn’t see the occupants.
She went out of her way to avoid it. She didn’t want to be considered an obstruction. When she ducked back onto the traffic lane beyond it, she glanced behind her.
The Land Rover had turned and was following her.
“Shit!” Angel ran straight for the edge of the lot. She heard the Rover’s engine grunt like a hungry animal as it accelerated after her. All she could think of was, after all this, she did not want to be lunch for some random nut in a luxury off-roader.
She leaped at the chain-link fence from five meters away and hit it about halfway up. As she scrambled up the fence she began to panic, realizing that that damn truck could plow through the fence without breaking a sweat, and it would reach the fence before she even brushed the barbed wire on top.
As if it r
ead her mind, as soon as her ears brushed the razor-wire lining the top, she felt the vibration from the Rover’s bumper kissing the fence. At least the nut didn’t blow through the fence going eighty.
Angel looked down at the silver-gray vehicle as the passenger door opened, and though she thought she was ready for anything, she nearly let go of the fence when she saw Mr. K.
Chapter 29
After she got into the rear of the Land Rover and was buckled into a seat much too plush for an off-road vehicle, Mr. K’s bodyguard proved her suspicion that the Rover could plow through the fence without breaking a sweat. The Rover bucked once and opened a ten-meter gap in the parking lot’s security perimeter.
As the driver turfed a lumpy embankment, looking for an access road, Mr. K gazed back at her with his deep violet eyes. “Fate smiles. I was sure we had lost our chance to contact you when the riot began.”
Angel rubbed her forehead, a headache stabbing through her temples. The whole game, the last two days in fact, were a hazy mess in her memory. “I thought . . . When I got back—”
Mr. K nodded. “The mainframe at VanDyne may be an order of magnitude in advance of anything I have ever seen, but it is an utter primitive when it comes to cloaking its signal.”
“Huh?” Her head was throbbing. Every time the Rover hit a bump, her ears brushed the ceiling and the bottom fell out of her stomach. When was the last time she’d eaten something, or gotten a decent rest?
“It called us back with the decoded data. Just as you ordered. Unfortunately, it did nothing to finesse the Fed watchdogs that monitored the one dedicated line it had. TECHNOMANCER, as it calls itself, just seized access to the line, grabbed a Fed satellite for its own use, and pushed into our system by brute force. A twelve-year-old with a voltmeter could have traced that signal. We were packing by the time the sirens must have been going off in Washington.”
“Everyone got out?”
“Yes. A near thing, since we had to set up to EMP the whole system.”
The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2 Page 51
