sprang upward. For a moment he hung in orbit. The stars shone down. He lingered a heartbeat, enough to feel the sting of the naked sun and the pressing of his eyeballs and blood outward against the vacuum. He didn’t explode in vacuum: no one did. It was just a single atmosphere’s difference in pressure: deal.
Then he was back, hovering two meters above a T-90 whose driver had decided or been ordered to charge straight ahead toward the infidels, in hopes of escaping the blackness, or at least getting to grips with the foe. Heat belching from the topside vents of the 1,100-horsepower engine enveloped him like dragon’s breath. He dropped to the deck behind the turret.
Squatting, Tom gripped. Grunting, he stood. He dead lifted the heavy turret right out of its ring. Spinning in place, he hurled it like a colossal discus toward a nearby T-72. It struck the side of its turret. A violent white flash momentarily obscured both as ammo stowed in both turrets went off.
Tom dropped to the ground on the first tank’s far side. Still massive despite the loss of turret and gun, it heeled perceptibly toward him as the blast fronts from multiple explosions slammed into it. High-velocity fragments cracked like bullets overhead.
The driver’s hatch fell open with a ring as the last remaining crewman sought to abandon ship. Suddenly a giant bristling shape hunched on the truncated tank’s low-sloped bow armor plate. Sensing danger the driver, half out of his hatch, froze.
Then he screamed as Leucrotta’s immense jaws slammed shut with a terrible crunch, biting the driver’s face off the front of his skull.
Tom took in the situation. The whole Caliphate armored force milled in utter confusion. At least the parts that weren’t burning. Leucrotta and the were-leopards ran freely and killed dismounted soldiers like rabbits. The Darkness-touched PPA gunners continued to pour fire and steel into their enemies. The whole Muslim army was finished as a coherent force; it was now a stampede seeking in all directions for an exit.
All that remained was to slaughter everything in reach. Tom Weathers really liked that part.
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle is lying on a beach letting the sun bake her.
The outline of a boy blocks out the sun. “Who are you?” she asks.
He opens his mouth, but words don’t come out. Light and fire spew forth.
Michelle wants to run away, but she knows she can’t escape. Fire and light and power surge into her. Her body expands, opening to the overwhelming force. The power goes on and on and then the weight is crushing her, bearing her down into the ground. The earth groans beneath her. And the power inside her is thick, overwhelming, brutal. It’s running through her veins. It wants out.
It wants to bubble.
Just as she feels the bubbles start to flow, she hears Juliet.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Juliet says. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed petting a small rabbit.
When did we end up in bed? Michelle wonders. And where did the bunny come from?
“Ink, you don’t have to fucking be here all the time,” says Joey. Joey is sitting on the other side of Michelle. A cold worm burrows into her stomach. Does Juliet know about that night with Joey in the hurricane?
“What else can I do?” A tear rolls down Juliet’s cheek and Michelle reaches out to wipe it away. But her hand comes in contact not with Juliet’s warm face, but with cold, rubbery flesh.
She jerks her hand back, but it connects with more dead skin.
“Jesus,” she says. But Jesus isn’t here. It’s just her alone.
It’s dark, but not impenetrable darkness. She’s lying inside a tangle of corpses piled up on one another.
Is this another Behatu camp nightmare? But it doesn’t feel right. The colors are wrong. The light is off. And, it smells. It smells like rotting flesh. She’s never had a sense of smell in a dream before.
Michelle tries to turn over, but she can’t feel her legs. Her arms are useless weight, too. The light filtering through the dead limbs around her is greenish. And the air is thick and humid.
Panic begins to crawl into her throat. She’s alive, but no one knows it. No one knows she’s here. “Help me!” she screams.
“You know, we’re her parents, and if we say she’s dead, she’s dead.” Mommy? What was she doing here?
“You people are even worse than Michelle said you were.” What was Ink saying? Now they were all sitting on the bed in Juliet and Michelle’s apartment. The sheets were a pretty floral pattern that Michelle bought because Ink liked flowers.
“I don’t care if you and Michelle are involved in some sickening relationship,” Daddy said. “We have rights.”
“The fuck you do,” said Hoodoo Mama.
Oh, God, Michelle thought. Joey will kill them.
“Best as I can tell, you fuckers have no cocksucking rights regarding Bubbles here ’t’all. Selfish pieces of sticky brown…”
“Joey!” Ink again.
“My goodness,” her mother says. How could her mother’s voice send a knife of pain through Michelle while at the same time she still wanted to curl up in her mother’s arms?
But her mother is gone now. Michelle is back in the pile of bodies. Down in the twilight of dead flesh.
“Help me,” she whispers.
A spider slides down a fine silk filament and dangles in front of her. It puts its front legs under its chin and studies her. Then it points up. Michelle rolls awkwardly onto her back to look in the direction its foot is pointing.
Peering over the edge of the pit is a leopard. Its eyes glow phosphorescent yellow. Cold sweat breaks out on Michelle’s brow. Her fear is coppery in her mouth. Another leopard joins the first. Soon the entire edge of the pit is rimmed with them.
The leopards exchange glances, occasionally yawning, revealing sharp, ivory-colored teeth. Then they begin to growl. Low guttural sounds like they’re talking to each other.
Her heart is pounding. They must know she’s down here. They must know she’s alive. They must smell the fear on her. She can smell it herself now, along with the heavy feral odor of the cats. Tears burn her eyes. She tries to blink them away, but they slip out and slide down her cheeks, leaving an itchy trail.
What the hell? Michelle thinks. I’m the Amazing Bubbles. I don’t lie in a pit crying because some damn leopards are looking at me like I’m lunch. They can’t do anything to me.
And she tries to bubble, but she can’t. No hands, she thinks. If I had hands, I could bubble.
“You’re not so fucking special, Michelle,” Joey says. “And zombies are not disgusting.”
Michelle looks down at herself. She’s turned a greyish color and her clothes are in tatters. Black mold is growing on her skin. She holds her hand up in front of her face. At least now she has a hand. Bones peek out between the rotted parts of her fingers.
“This is so wrong,” she says.
Barataria Basin
New Orleans, Louisiana
Jerusha Carter gazed Out over a mile-wide expanse of open water. White egrets floated overhead like quick, noisy clouds; blue herons waded in the nearby shallows, and an alligator’s tail sluiced through the brackish water not far from her boat.
The scene wasn’t entirely idyllic; the sun was merciless, drawing wet circles under her armpits and beading her forehead. Midges, mosquitoes, and huge black flies tormented her. The muck had managed to overtop her high boots and slither down both legs. A storm front was coming in from the Gulf: thunderheads white above and slate grey below piled on the horizon, and the mutter of distant thunder grumbled in the afternoon heat.
The Barataria Basin was a marsh south of the city of New Orleans, one of the several such natural buffers for the city and St. Bernard Parish in the event of a hurricane. It was Jerusha’s job to help restore it. Once, she’d been told, before the levees had been built, this entire area had been marshland, not a lake. Since the 1930s, the area
