looked less like a mad doctor and more like a stir-crazy refugee. His lab coat hung in dirty tatters and the white shirt beneath it revealed two bloody wounds from direct bullet hits. Cap realized that Campbell’s aim may not have been so random after all.
“You!” the crazed man shrieked upon seeing his arch-nemesis. In a blur of frenetic speed, Dandridge leapt behind a lab table, seizing a remote unit as he slid out of view.
“You think I’m some sort of extortionist, don’t you?” he cried.
Cap heard electronic sounds issue from behind the bench. With a single kick of his powerful legs, he jumped up and over it to crash down on his foe. Dandridge croaked out something that sounded like “Foomp!” and curled up into a groaning ball of pain. Still he clutched the remote in his fear-clenched fingers. A thumb pressed down on a red stud.
“I didn’t want to blackmail the world. I wanted to pacify it! Drop my bugs into a war zone and they’d eat all the weapons!”
Cap snorted as he wrenched the device from Dandridge’s hand. “And if men continue to fight like men? Hand-to-hand, tooth and nail? You’d have your other bugs attack their flesh and tear them apart!”
“Convert useless human trash into useful building blocks,” Dandridge gasped as Cap once more threw him over his shoulders. “The ultimate recycling!”
Something on the lab bench snickked open. Looking down at the
tabletop, Cap saw a globe the size of a baseball open up at the top like an eye’s iris.
“What is it, Dandridge?” One hand, muscled like a Roman god’s, clamped down on the wounded man’s throat.
“My next stage of development,” he gurgled. “A scavenger with wings! You may have destroyed the swarm I released against your plane, but I’m sending these straight toward the mainland, where they’ll begin to devour the world!”
Without any further deliberation, Cap twisted the halves of his grenade, activating it, and tossed the bomb inside the small containment vessel. Turning swiftly, he headed to the door with Dandridge his captive.
Dandridge laughed in wild triumph. “How do you like that, Madsen? You had the idea, but I put it to the most notorious use possible!”
Cap gazed about the room until he saw a small man shackled in a dark corner.
“Cover your ears!” he shouted, clapping his hands over his own an instant before the grenade exploded, sending a hammer-blow shock wave through the lab. Glassware everywhere shattered. Chairs flew away from ground zero, as did everything else not bolted to the floor.
Cap shielded his eyes from the detonation, too. Even though he had designed his contact lenses not to over- amplify bright lighting, they would cease to function after such a dazzling photon blast, and he needed them for his escape.
Glass and metal shards ripped into his skin. Dandridge cried out in further pain and the man in the corner simply whimpered through the ringing in Cap’s ears. He threw Dandridge to the floor hard enough to knock the maniac’s wind out, incapacitating him. Running to the prisoner’s side, Cap grasped the manacles and pulled with all the force of his arms, legs, and back.
On one, a chain link deformed and broke free with a clink. The bolt that held the other to the wall protested under the unbelievable strain, only to shear its threads with a crack like a gunshot. Cap gave the goateed man the preferred perch across his broad shoulders; Dandridge—gasping for air—had to settle for being dragged by the back of his blood-drenched lab coat.
Cap’s sea legs rammed against the metal floor like twin pistons, propelling him and his human cargo down the dim corridor toward the beachhead. In the distance he heard the sound of the Seamaster roaring to
life. From behind, fainter, a curious buzzing like angry locusts gained on him.
“It’s all over now,” Dandridge muttered weakly as Cap hauled him through the arching central chamber toward the outside. “The scavengers fly all night and use their solar cells to charge up during the day. They will reach the mainland. From there they can spread anywhere. And they replicate.”
Captain Anger said nothing as they pounded out of the artificial cavern into the night. Rock stood at the ocean’s edge, holding a longboat in place with one muscular arm while signaling with the other.
“Paidyom!” he called out. “You were almost late!”
“In America, we call that ‘on time,’” Sun Ra shouted. He strode toward the boat with a dozen troops and half as many prisoners behind him. “Watch this!” Speaking into a headset boom mike, he barked out the command “iDerecha!” and all the electric zombies turned right as one. “iSube al barco!” he said, and they marched single file into the water and dutifully climbed into the boat. The freed prisoners followed, elbowing and kicking their former tormentors into position. Dandridge’s unaltered cohorts had fled the island already, no doubt racing toward the Mexican shore.
Gazing at Tex, already sitting in the boat with Secretary General Arafshi, Sun Ra nodded toward the zombies and said, “Looks as if you have some surgery to schedule.”
“To the plane!” Cap shouted, placing the small man gently in the boat and tossing Dandridge in like luggage. The errant scientist hit the gunwale with the sound of a sack of potatoes dropped from a speeding truck and slipped silently to the wet strakes. With a pantherish leap, Cap jumped from shore to ship and landed lightly by the tiller.
Throwing full power to the engine, he guided it toward the Seamaster. Beyond the glare of its spotlight, he saw Leila in the cockpit running through her checklist. Johnny Madsen shone the light in their direction, illuminating the choppy water ahead of the longboat. The slap-slap-slap of hull against waves soothed the captain, though his thoughts never strayed from his mission.
“Leila,” he radioed. “Is the countermeasure ready?”
“Ready to drop as soon as we’re airborne,” she replied.
She turned the massive aircraft around in the water and powered it up to move toward the advancing boat. At fifty yards and closing, she
throttled back and turned the plane’s bay to face them. Jonathan cycled the hatch open and helped the refugees inside.
In less than a minute, everyone clambered aboard and he sealed the hatch shut. Sun Ra guided the freed captives to their seats—really nothing more than one-foot-square pieces of stamped metal that folded down from the fuselage. He ordered the zombies—in Spanish—to seat themselves. Leila helped Tex strap the UN Secretary General into a rescue basket.
Captain Anger made his way to the cockpit and slipped into the pilot’s seat. Without a word of warning, he slid the four throttle levers forward and gunned the engines to full power, the four Pratt & Whitney J75-P-2 turbojets each providing 17,500 pounds of thrust. Anything not bolted or strapped down slid to the nearest rear bulkhead. With a minimum of water-taxiing, the Martin P6M Seamaster rose up on its hull and leapt out of the water.
The ride instantly smoothed out as Cap’s deft hands controlled the wheel. Turning and banking steeply yet gracefully to the right, he saw the island below as a dark abomination in the night-shrouded water. A short distance beyond stood its unaltered sister island. As he maneuvered the aircraft into position for a bombing run, he radioed the Anger Institute.
“Flash, dispatch Falcon III to monitor the mainland closest to Escollos Alijos. Dandridge tried to release a flying scavenger and a few may have escaped the percussion grenade I set off in the lab.”
“Roger.” The Falcons—unmanned autonomous aircraft—flew at up to sixty thousand feet altitude and could circle for months or years at a time over a selected site, sending back real-time images of the ground below with a resolution far better than satellite photos. This one—the third in the series of solar-powered, ultra-lightweight spycraft that the Anger Institute had in the air, monitoring danger zones around the world—would watch the mainland for any signs of destruction caused by any winged scavengers that made landfall. Until Captain Anger could devise and release his own flying reprogrammers.
“Heads up back there,” Cap said over the intercom. “Rotating the bomb bay door!”
The black titanium rack on the center deck of the bomb bay held only one weapon: a gunmetal grey cylinder four feet long with stubby red vanes on one end. Machinery whirred into life and the entire rack rotated downward as a large section of hull rotated upward. For a few seconds the cool evening air blew into the compartment like a mini-hurricane. Then only the sound of the jet engines and a faint clunk as the bomb dropped
