“Are . . . you all right, Mother?”
“Oh, fine, baby, fine.” Robin hugged her hard, and Elizabeth realized that her mother had been willing to die to save her and that she really did love her—for herself.
“I love you, Mother,” she whispered fiercely, returning the hug with all her strength.
When the first explosion occurred, a jagged barrel stave gouged out most of his Visitor guard’s throat, and suddenly freed, Mike Donovan went sprawling onto the pier’s wooden beams as they shuddered under him.
As the night sky blazed in a grim parody of Fort McHenry, he saw his friends duck and scatter away from their own helpless captors while fiery debris rained down like napalm. Chris Faber grabbed Maggie, and Ham lyier dropped, rolled, coming up with his dead guard’s laser pistol, then calmly proceeded to snap off a couple of quick shots at Diana, who hit the wharf and rolled just as her platform blew up behind her.
Then Mike was up and hurtling toward safety, seeing Robin on his right dragging a dazed Elizabeth along. In front of him were Kyle and Elias leading the escape along the side of the warehouse as the Pacific suddenly erupted from the explosion of a small powerboat that had been hit by one of the barrels.
Suddenly a figure appeared from out of the smoke on his left, and Mike saw it was Margie, her expression that of a woman just waking up from a dream, and the cameraman lurking forever inside him noted the striking picture she made, a pale, hollow-eyed beauty with flames reflecting off her eyes, the water, the night.
But Willie was nowhere in sight as the smoke thickened— and neither was Julie.
If anything had happened to her . . .
Mike slowed, looking over his shoulder for her, only to see another explosion send a fireball through the roof of the warehouse less than fifty feet behind him. The next instant, the pier. directly beneath the building sagged and crumpled, sending rubble, wood, and flames into the blood-colored waters.
He coughed, his chest on fire from the fumes, but conscious only of the agony within his mind and heart.
Julie, he thought. Julie, no .. .
Then he saw her, a petite phoenix in sneakers, bolting out of the smoke, the ragged knot of her blond hair bobbing like a beacon in the hellish darkness as she pulled off her ski mask.
She hadn’t seen him; she was running past. Unable to force sound past his smoke-filled throat, he reached for her—and the world ended behind him as the warehouse went up.
Mike threw himself on top of Juliet, heat white on his back, invading his closed eyelids. He was suddenly, calmly certain that he was going to die, and that it didn’t matter as long as he could save her.
He grunted as something slammed on top of him, driving him down. Jagged shards of light leaped before his vision like negative images of the debris rocketing past, then Donovan felt himself sucked down into a whirling cauldron of thunderous sound and darkness.
Moments or an eternity later, ears still ringing, he cautiously lifted his head. Julie lay beneath his body, face pressed into the crook of her arm ... so still. . . .
Then she stirred, lifting her head. “Huh . . . who . . . ?”
“Oh, God, I love you,” he whispered into the back of her sweatshirt.
“Mike?” she struggled feebly, trying to move his weight off her.
He couldn’t move and wondered vaguely if he had been paralyzed by the explosion, but then his scrambled senses sorted themselves out, and he realized he was pinioned by someone else lying on top of him.
Levering himself up by his arms, he felt the sudden absence of weight as the other tumbled off. He turned his head and with horror recogn ?ed Margie’s slack face and blood-streaked blond hair as she lay sprawled on her side, facing him, like a grotesque parody of the way she used to lie beside him each night in sleep. “Oh, God!” he sobbed, crawling toward her, trying, without moving her, to examine her wounds.
There was a horrible, dark, wet-looking place in the back of her head, and another, larger place on her back, where twisted fragments of flesh and fabric parted around the shattered remnants of her backbone.
Mike had seen the victims of war before, the dead, the dying—even children—their bodies charred, maimed, and mutilated as they croaked their last pitiful sounds in Spanish or Vietnamese.
But nothing had ever seemed half as obscene as those splintered white fragments in Margie’s back, exposed to the night, poking out from the bubbling, darker well of her blood.
“Let’s go!” Ham Tyler was shouting from a thousand miles away. “We ain’t out of the woods yet, especially if there’s more of that red dust crap around. Some of the scalies still have guns.”
“I will help, Mike,” said a quiet voice, and Donovan looked up to see Willie.
The Visitor was covered with soot. Flying glass had slashed his right arm even through the borrowed sweater and jacket, where green ooze was congealing at the spot near his shoulder, but he gazed steadily at Donovan.
Mike looked at him for a moment, then nodded wordlessly. As carefully as they could, they picked up Marjorie and carried her up to the road a block or so away, Julie staggering beside them, racked by spells of coughing. When they were safely above the fires and the scattered Visitor troops, although still within the hellish glare from the burning pier, they laid Margie gently down on the narrow dirt shoulder, Mike cradling her head in his lap. His hands had turned sticky and dark red from the blood on her back.
She looked steadily up at him, recognition in her eyes, her mouth moving to form words, but no sounds came out, only a soft gurgling.
“Don’t, Margie,” Mike whispered, caressing her cheek. “Just ... lie still.”
She let out a small sigh, shuddered convulsively, then her gaze turned fixed and glassy. He watched with horror as her pupils widened. ...
No, it couldn’t be, she wasn’t— Mike stared wildly around, focusing on Julie kneeling beside him, fingers touching
Margie’s throat. She looked at him, then down, shaking her head as she coughed again.
For an instant he was furious with her. How could she just sit there, doing nothing, while Margie was . . . “Aren’t you going to do something?”
She raised a sooty, blood-streaked face. “There’s nothing I can—”
“What do you mean, nothing? Start CPR, mouth-to-mouth resusci—”
“Mike, she’s gone. I’m sorry.” Tears gathered, cutting through the filth in ivory streaks.
After a long, long while, the words reached him, and he understood. Slowly Mike reached down with a hand that trembled a little to close the staring, dead eyes.
Chapter 17
Afterwords
“Get away from me, you beast!” Groaning, Maggie Blodgett covered her head with the sheet as Druid, yipping happily, dove for her tousled hair once again. “God, I ache everywhere and want to sleep for the next twenty hours straight, and King Konglet here wants to play kissy with my head again.”
“Can’t say as I blame him,” Chris Faber said, leaning back against the pillows. “Kinda like playing with your hair myself.” For emphasis, he reached over to tug on a curl.
Sunlight was high and bright on the carpet of his bedroom, and he supposed it was twelve or one. Actually, it didn’t matter. He had no place he had to be, and surely no place he’d rather be, than here beside the woman he loved.
The little Shih Tzu saw his hand movements as a further invitation to play, and jumped again, causing Maggie to squeal. “Faber, control your animal!”
“Druid, get down,” Chris said in the tone he reserved for no-more-nonsense commands. The small, hairy face turned a look of disappointment in his direction, then bounded off the bed in search of other amusements.
“Well, we made it through another one.” Maggie sighed as she inched herself up from under the sheets.
“Small doggy attack?” he asked, deadpan.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yup.” He stared up at the ceiling. “You were really great, blastin’ away at those s
calies like you were twice their size.”
“You weren’t too shabby yourself. For a big guy, you sure can move fast when you have to.” Her eyes turned thoughtful. “We were lucky last night. Think our luck will hold out, Faber?”
“We have to keep believing that it will.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, then turned over to rest her chin on his chest. “I have to admit, living on the edge like this does make our time together even more special somehow, you know?” She kissed his shoulder.
“You bet your sweet ass.” He grinned lazily. “Suppose we try out your luck right now, and see if you can come up with a Visitor joke I haven’t heard.”
“Oh, God, I’ll never ...” She thought for a moment, then her grin turned sly at the comers. “Okay. Why did the Visitor eat the punk-rock biker?”
Chris lay silent and perplexed for several moments. Finally he admitted, “Hon, you’ve got me for once. Why?”
“Roughage,” she deadpanned, then began to laugh aloud at his expression.
“Hey, that’s all right,” he said after he’d stopped laughing. “Where in hell did you hear that one?”
“Nowhere.”
“What do you mean, nowhere?”
“I made it up.” She bit him playfully. “I figured it was the only way I’d ever get one by you.”
“‘Roughage,’ eh?” he said, mock-growling as he reached for her. “I’ll show you roughage. . . .”
Willie was explaining the recipe for his blender drink to his new friend Claire when Mike Donovan walked into the Club Creole.
This was Willie’s favorite time of day. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the lunchtime diners were almost gone, yet it was a little early for the happy-hour group. This was a good time to take care of small but necessary chores—especially with someone nice to talk with across the bar.
Someone very, very nice . . .
Wearing a cheerful blue dress, the young woman with soft red-gold hair and brown eyes had come into the bar two hours ago and ordered a Coke innocently enough. But her voice resonance and a couple of seemingly offhand remarks— actually carefully coded—had revealed her as one of his own kind and a member of the fifth column, the resistance group aboard the Mother Ships that was secretly opposed to the policies of the Leader.
She had heard that a Visitor worked as a bartender at the Club Creole and had been very anxious to meet him. Claire was especially impressed to hear of the successful action on the waterfront, and she had been suitably solicitous about his bandaged arm.
“Hi, Willie,” Donovan said, sliding onto a barstool and waving away the offer of a Coors. “No, just coffee.” “Hello, Mike,” the bartender said, turning his attention away from Claire to peer concernedly at his friend’s face.
Donovan’s bruises were dramatic but not serious; what really troubled Willie was his expression. Willie was hot yet really skilled in reading the subtle movements of skin over flesh and bone that denoted human emotions. Something in the tautness around Mike’s eyes, however, and the position of his mouth said that his friend was very disturbed about something more than grief from Margie’s death, although he was trying to hide it, perhaps even from himself.
“Is anything the mutter, Mike?” he ventured, placing the coffee in front of him.
“That’s ‘matter,’ Willie,” Elias corrected automatically, coming behind him with a tray of silverware.
“Have you seen Julie today?” Mike asked. “I’ve been trying to get hold of her, but they said she called in sick at work, and she hasn’t answered her phone all day.”
Willie frowned, trying to recall her exact words. “She said that she had an appointment with the doctor this morning, and she did not know how much time he would take from her.” “Oh.” Donovan managed to look both reassured and worried at the same moment. “Did she say why she was going to—?”
“Hey, Taylor, when did you let the lizards back in?” Willie felt his crest prickle in indignation as Ham Tyler sauntered into the room. “This is Claire,” he said. “She is not a lizard, but one of my own kind, a member of our fifth column—and she is my friend, so you—”
“And any friend of Willie’s is welcome at the Club Creole,” Elias added, looking directly into the flat brown eyes of the former intelligence agent. From across the room, Miranda Juarez smiled and winked.
Shrugging, Ham took the seat next to Donovan. “How you doing, Gooder?”
“I’m okay,” Mike said, finishing his coffee. “Heading on over to Julie’s.”
“Good idea,” Tyler said.
“Well, see you all later,” Mike said, slipping off the barstool. “Thanks for the coffee, Willie.”
“You are welcome, Mike,” the bartender said, smiling, then he turned back to the young woman across the bar from him. “Tell me about your cover. It sounds vacillating.”
“Fascinating,” Mike said over his shoulder as he pulled the door open. He stepped out into the summer heat and stood blinking for a moment in the brightness before he slipped on his dark glasses and pulled his cap down. Hard to believe that this was the same world as the one that had encompassed that hellish inferno down at the dockyards last night.
He sighed, feeling the tightness in his chest again as he thought about the phone call he’d made at noontime to Margie’s sister so she could claim the body. He didn’t even dare go to the funeral; the Visitors wouldn’t miss the opportunity to stake it out, just waiting for him to show up.
Donovan turned as the door opened behind him. “Hey, Gooder,” Ham Tyler said, stepping out. “Hang on a second.” “Sure. What’s up?”
“I just . . .” Tyler hesitated for a second, then looked up. “I wanted to tell you I was sorry about Mrs. Donovan. During the fireworks last night, I didn’t get the chance.”
Donovan nodded, genuinely touched. “Thanks, Ham. I appreciate it.”
Tyler sighed, looking up at the Mother Ship hanging over Los Angeles. “Hell of a world, eh, Gooder? And it ain’t even all ours anymore, since the day those snakes parked up there. Speaking of scalies, I wonder how the Lizard Queen herself is doing?”
“Diana?” Mike frowned. “I was kind of hoping that she’d bought it, along with her red dust.”
“No such luck.” Tyler shook his head as he stared upward at the gargantuan vessel. “She’s still around to continue making a pain in the ass of herself—I’d bet on it. She’s got more lives than a cat.”
Lifting her wavy dark hair back from her forehead, Diana stared into the mirror in her private quarters, checking the repairs to her pseudo skin and hair.
The places that had been tom looked smooth and seamless again. With a sigh, she turned and headed for the door.
The whole experience had turned into such a humiliation. First to have triumph at her fingertips and the members of the hateful human resistance falling right into her lap besides, only to have the whole thing go up in literal smoke, thanks to the Starchild.
Poor little misguided creature—she had obviously been too young to absorb many of the lessons Diana had tried to teach her before her second molt. But such splendid power. If only it could be turned to a larger good.
As she strode the corridor toward the science division, Diana frowned, remembering how angry and frightened she had been when the pallets had heaved up from under her, sending her sprawling onto the dirty pier. She had watched the fire rise, her troops scatter, until she had been forced to dive into the water to narrowly miss destruction from the shrapnel and the flames.
Probably the worst moment of all had been when the rescue shuttlecraft had swooped low over the water, throwing out a line. Diana had been hauled up ignominiously dripping and sputtering, her wig tom partly off from a piece of flying shrapnel and flopping down her back, exposing her crest, her lovely white dress uniform stained and utterly ruined. Scrambling soggily into the vehicle, she had turned to thank the pilot—and looked right into the smug, hateful face of Lydia.
As she turned the comer into her lab, Diana won
dered briefly whether she would rather have died.
“Greetings, Diana.” Lydia’s smile was sickeningly wide as she strode into the lab behind her superior officer. “I do hope you are making a speedy recovery from your terrible ordeal, dear.”
“Yes, thank you,” Diana felt her own mouth tightening into a thin line. “You left a message that you wished to see me about the records Bernard left behind.”
“Yes. Or, rather, those he didn’t leave us. ” Lydia folded her hands over her stomach and shook her head in exaggerated regret. She was obviously enjoying this moment almost as much as last night’s rescue. “It seems that Bernard may have been anxious about his work and the possibility that he could be replaced. He left very incomplete notes. I’m afraid his red dust defoliant can’t be duplicated because we can’t reconstruct his formula.”
Diana flicked her fingers dismissingly. “Well, it hardly matters. I just spoke to Bashir on the Iranian Mother Ship. He has already begun obtaining and processing water from the Persian Gulf. Our Leader will have the supply he needs, and it will only be a few days later than originally anticipated.”
Lydia’s expression turned scornful. “And how many of our people will die because of this delay? Did he also tell you that, Diana?”
“The unexpected is the hallmark of wartime, Lydia.” Diana waved a nonchalant hand at her security officer. “I would always keep that in mind, if I were you.”
Nodding curtly, Lydia turned and left.
“Damn her!” Alone in her private quarters a few minutes later, Diana finally allowed herself the small luxury of balling her hands into fists and savoring the hot rush of venom in her mouth for a moment. She thought about Bashir, how pleased, even smug he had sounded when he had assured her that the water procurement and desalinization could be handled aboard his ship without any problem. He would personally oversee the operation, he said, and then accompany the shipment back to Sirius—-where, no doubt, he would be received with the full honors and recognition due a hero returning from the battlefield in triumph.
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