Toys

looked, well, trusting.

Lucy hung the mask up and turned to her instrument tray-a gleaming selection of scalpels, clamps, and bone saws. I already knew that the operation required opening up Lizbeth’s brain and connecting it by probe to a hologram imager. The probe would then scan her memory bank for information about the Elite genocide plan.

Lizbeth had to know the plan, or at least some important details, and this was our only way to find out before it was too late. It would be better if we had that bastard Hughes Jacklin on the operating table, but Lizbeth would have to do.

I’d managed to keep myself relatively hard-hearted about all this, but now I had to leave-go back outside with the troops and not watch the actual brain surgery. The resistance soldiers were crouched on their haunches, looking like they could stay that way for days. I stood there alongside them-and waited.

I didn’t feel much pity for Lizbeth, no more than I had for McGill or Moore. But she had been my wife and mother to our children. One way or another, this was good-bye.

Chapter 104

I had no idea what to expect next-none of us did. Not in the next few minutes or the next few days, if truth be told. Maybe the human race would end; maybe the entire planet would be finished. Hard to predict.

The minutes crept by, an eternity of waiting in a dense, thickly treed forest, which felt primeval, except for the ghostly army of soldiers who rustled around with their tense preparations for war.

Then I heard an unexpected sound coming from the command post. It started as a murmur of voices, but quickly rose to excited shouts.

There seemed to be both outrage and triumph, but there were so many languages, it was hard to tell what had just happened.

There was no mistaking Lucy’s voice though: “Hays, this is it! Come in! Hays! Please come and see the insides of your wife’s bloody brain.”

As I ran back inside, I was startled by Lizbeth’s violet hair. It was streaming away from her head like it would if she were in a windstorm.

Then I realized that the top of her skull was actually separated from the rest of her head. I knew I would take that image to my grave.

“She’s fine,” Lucy said. “I told you-I’m a very good surgeon. Look through- there.”

My gaze swung to the hologram imager, where everyone else was staring. On the screen was the most horrific thing I’d ever seen in my life, and that included the film of 7–4 Day I’d watched at my parents’ house.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Jessica and Jacob dolls were wandering through a squalid human settlement. And the dolls were exploding- a staccato boom boom boom, like from an artillery barrage that wouldn’t end. Each doll was a walking, talking bomb.

Every violent flash released a fireball through the streets, along with billowing clouds of what had to be poison gas. The screaming humans, some of them small children, slapped desperately at the flames that crawled on their skin until they collapsed from the toxic vapor that seared their lungs.

It must have actually happened-an experiment maybe, a test run held in some isolated town. Obviously, Lizbeth had witnessed it personally since the images came from her memory.

In true Elite fashion, it was incredibly simple, brilliantly evil. And there were other terrifying images: simulators that appeared to give their users fatal strokes; phones that killed when they came in contact with human skulls; a vibrator, which I don’t even want to describe; video games that overstimulated players to the point of death.

The assembled human leaders pushed past me, rushing to communicate the frightening information back to their nations. They were still shouting in different languages, but this time, I knew what they were saying: Destroy the toys! Stop the Elites.

Meanwhile, the massive human army was finally on the move. I could actually see tens of thousands of soldiers readying their weapons and piling into armored transports, prepared to launch an attack against the better-equipped Elite forces in the city.

This was Armageddon-and at least I was on the side of good.

I walked up to Lucy, who was-well-Lucy to the end. “The Elites,” she said, “they don’t have a chance in hell.”

Chapter 105

New Lake City was burning!

I could already see that the heart of the great city, where I had lived most of my adult life, might be no more by morning. The same could be said for the human race if we failed now.

Lucy and I began to see columns of smoke and flames from miles away as we approached the city, flying high above in Lucy’s car. The fires were moving around, not just spreading, but tossing and twisting with an eerie life of their own.

“It’s the dolls!” Lucy said. “Those horrid little beasts are setting whole neighborhoods ablaze. Look at them!”

“And the simulators, video games, computers, phones-Lucy, I’m not feeling real good about this,” I finally admitted to her.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s just your old prejudice about Elite superiority coming through. Watch closely now, Hays. This is what we call a game changer. Look down there.”

Suddenly, there were explosions everywhere I could see in the city. Small, self-contained ones. The effect was like what you see in a sports stadium when tens of thousands of camera flashes go off. These flashes went off for at least ten minutes-to the point where I had to either look away or go blind.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Lucy when it was over. “What just happened?”

“You could say it was a product recall. Those dolls, and several other toys, were very dangerous, Hays. Especially for children. But not anymore. We’re eliminating the problem. I just hope we did it in time.”

I looked down at the city again. There were still lots of people in the streets-humans and Elites-fighting hand to hand.

“Lizbeth helped-involuntarily, of course,” Lucy said. “Those clever, second-guessing Elites had a fail-safe device in case something went wrong with their toys of death. Lizbeth told us where it was, and- poof. No more killer dolls, killer phones, killer simulators. There’s still a problem though- big problem, actually. This war is far from over.”

“And the problem would be?”

“If you want to kill an Elite, you have to kill the head. We haven’t done that, have we? That’s our mission, Hays. We’ve managed to throw up enough electronic jamming to cut off the presidential compound for a very short window of time. We can surprise them. We can kill the head before the body wakes. Let’s go-you and I.”

So now I understood our destination. The presidential mansion was just starting to glow with the light of dawn, and the flying penthouse was settling in for a landing on the rooftop. President Hughes Jacklin, that goddamn war criminal, and his upper-crust cronies would be finished dividing the world up among themselves. It was like the old human days-with the corruption of banks and Wall Street shenanigans.

A huge crowd of Elites was already gathering on the grounds below, eagerly waiting for the president to step out and deliver his long-anticipated 7–4 Day speech.

“Let’s go cut off the head,” said Lucy.