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  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.

  Chapter 106

  Lucy and I landed directly behind a parking lot, which was filled to the brim with the most expensive cars on the planet. Interesting to note, almost all of the car designs were human in origin-no one had ever understood personal transportation better, or had more passion for it. Mercedes, Daimler, BMW, Cadillac, Lexus-these were still the most desired names on hood ornaments, even for rich Elites.

  “You know your way around this place, right?” Lucy asked me.

  “I do. I used to work security here all the time. Let’s go.”

  A loud, commanding noise interrupted. “You’re Hays Baker. I remember you. And you-you’re just some human scum.”

  “Actually,” I said, “we’re both human scum. We’ve come to kill the president. You have a problem with that?”

  Of course he did-since he was Devlin, the president’s bodyguard. At least I thought the speaker was Devlin. He was surrounded by eleven nearly identical clones of himself-just as large, just as formidable, just as threatening. I’m sure it was in vain, but I prayed the clones didn’t have the same deadly level of Elite fighting augmentations.

  “We have a problem with that. Which means that the two of you have a big problem-with us.”

  The twelve deadly Devlins started to close in.

  “Plan B,” said Lucy. “Run!”

  That’s exactly what we did-very fast. But the bodyguards weren’t exactly challenged in the foot-speed department. They sort of reminded me of old-fashioned tackle-football players-the kinds who took massive doses of steroids. Lucy and I gained a little ground, but not enough. That’s when the Devlins started to fire laser rounds, as if merely crushing us with their bare hands wasn’t good enough.

  “We have to take these guys out if we’re ever going to get to the president!” Lucy yelled to me.

  “Yeah, my thought that they’d get tuckered out from chasing us isn’t working so good,” I yelled back. “Got any other brilliant ideas for stopping a dozen commando-programmed behemoths?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Maybe I do,” I said, inspiration flashing as another round exploded inches from my head. “Grab a car, any car. The keys’ll be there. No person in his right mind would steal an Elite’s vehicle, much less from the president’s driveway.”

  “Good thing we’re just a couple of crazy skunks!”

  Lucy took an oversize Mercedes pickup truck while I leaped into a sporty BMW. Both top-of-the-line, of course.

  “In this case,” I said to her through my combat headset as we started the cars, “it’s great if you get them in the head, but it’s OK to kill the bodies too.”

  Lucy and I accelerated back toward the armed Devlins, who clearly didn’t think we had the nerve or the talent to do what it looked like we were about to do.

  But we did-we had the nerve, the talent, the guts, the willpower. And besides, we were humans, and as a species, humans have a special bond with high-performance machines.

  Half the bodyguards dropped to a knee in the middle of the drive and leveled their weapons.

  My windshield exploded and I could hear Lucy sucking in breath over the communications link.

  Maybe this hadn’t been the brightest idea.

  Chapter 107

  I dropped across the seat. Metal splinters and glass rained down upon me, and the air screamed as laser blasts tore tunnels through the air where my head had been.

  Fortunately, one of the many perks of my artificial endowments is a fail-safe sense of direction, distance, and velocity. Basing my actions just on my memory of the crouching Devlin phalanx, I kept my foot on the accelerator and managed a tire-burning zero-to-ninety in just under four seconds, at which point I violently yanked the steering wheel sideways and broadsided the augmented bodyguards. I killed, or at least badly maimed, six of them.

  Then I went into a fast spinning turn and sped back for the rest while Lucy joined the melee from the other side with her own truck. Four more of the bodyguards were squashed between us like grapes.

  But there were still two of them-smarter, or at least faster learners, than their peers. I watched in frustration as they jumped behind cars-each in a different direction-avoiding the obvious carnage.

  Great minds thinking alike, Lucy and I jumped out of our ruined cars. Even if we didn’t shut down this entire operation, several Elite car owners were going to be royally pissed at us.

  “Left,” she said and pointed to her own chest.

  “Right,” I yelled.

  Something told me the original Devlin wasn’t among the initial fatalities, and I personally hoped he was the one I was going after now. I’d never liked that huge, haughty bastard. And I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

  My target called out to me, “I trained with Jax Moore, you pathetic skunk,” definitely sounding like the real McCoy.

  “Oh yeah?” I taunted, hoping to provoke him into doing something rash. “Well, let’s hope you learned your vaporization-prevention techniques a little better than he did. I heard there wasn’t much left of him after we were done with that so-called interrogation.”

  “Let’s do this, Hays Baker.”

  Just then Lucy let out a victory whoop.

  “I won’t go down quite as easily as my clones,” promised my Devlin.

  “We’ll see,” I called, weaving my way crabwise between the cars until I finally had a clean line of sight-and then I did something I’d always wanted to do but had never had the nerve.

  I took off at full speed toward the bastard protector of the War Criminal in Chief. I got up to forty easily, then fifty, and finally sixty-which was pushing my outer limit.

  He spotted me and, fortunately, his ego got the better of him. Rather than trying to gun me down, he dropped his weapon and crouched to absorb my impact. Just as I’d hoped, he wanted to do this mano a mano.

  With him having easily a hundred pounds on me, and a combat pedigree I’m sure I didn’t even want to speculate about, it was definite
ly something of a gamble on my part. At the last second, I turned my shoulder and drove into him with all my might, causing a noise like that of a wrecking ball hitting a modest-sized house.

  It took me a moment to get my bearings back, and when I figured out which way was up, I felt as if I were standing on a waterbed. But as I turned to finish what I’d started-or die trying-I quickly realized I’d knocked him out cold. He wasn’t moving a muscle, not even any of the ones in his head.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been underestimated by a genocidal maniac in recent days.

  “You all right, Hays?” Lucy called to me. “Because he sure isn’t.”

  With that, she walked up and put two bullets into the sleeping giant’s skull.

  “Like I said, Hays. Kill the head!”

  Chapter 108

  Lucy and I ran onto the main lawn, where the action was taking place. And there he was-Hughes Jacklin himself, head of the Elite nation.

  He was wearing a dark suit and couldn’t have been more serious or impressive. “My fellow Elites! I welcome you here to celebrate this wondrous and important day!” His amplified voice boomed across the concourse as he addressed the expectant, bloodthirsty crowd.

  Lucy and I quickly threaded our way through the outskirts of the Elite throng. Jacklin was flanked by soldiers and other top government officials, just as he had been for his inauguration. But clearly this was an even bigger day for him, and for the Elites.

  “As the sun rises on this glorious morning, so dawns a new era,” Hughes Jacklin orated, sweeping his hand toward the brightening eastern horizon. “The human strain, this menace that has hovered over the earth for millennia, is about to end. They will be extinct, relegated to the same fate as Neanderthals and other evolutionary missteps that came before them. This is a good thing, a very good thing.”

  The crowd erupted with sickening cheers. Some of them might have heard rumors, but the president’s words, in this solemn and important speech, meant that the holocaust was actually happening-extinction was happening. The shouts and applause grew louder, and the historic significance of the day was lost on no one.

  Jacklin stood there, basking in Elite approval and adulation. For me, he brought to mind several important historical figures-Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin. Clearly, Elites weren’t proving to be much better students of history than humans had ever been.

  But then he paused, squinting up at a thick, dark cloud of human transports, old-fashioned warplanes approaching from the west. They had become visible as the night sky paled into daylight-and now were encroaching over the city limits. Another historic scene flashed into my mind-the Battle of Britain.

  The crowd kept applauding louder and louder. Apparently they thought this was some kind of air show to celebrate the supreme might of the Elite empire and this special day. They couldn’t imagine that humans might actually be, dare I say it, fighting back.

  But Jacklin was rattled. He cried out, “What the hell is going on? I didn’t order this!”

  It was everything the resistance had-all in this one push. We had managed the element of surprise, but if Jacklin got away and reconnected with his military command…

  The surpise clearly wasn’t complete. Elite jets, faster and better armed, were already streaking in from nearby bases, blasting away at their human-piloted targets. But we had the numbers, and soon the Elite planes started to go down.

  Next, the air blackened with thousands of parachutes as resistance troops-humans-descended to take back the city. Suddenly, Elites in the crowd started to disperse, stampeding out from the lawn. This was clearly not on the program.

  “Kill the head!” Lucy leaned in close. “Focus, Hays!”

  With an earsplitting screeeeee! a fireball flew over the president’s head, twisting and slashing like a giant whirling knife. It exploded into the mansion’s elegant facade, bursting the front windows into splinters and bringing down an entire wall.

  “Didn’t order that either, did you-you sonofabitch!” Lucy yelled at Hughes Jacklin as she continued to rush the stage. But there were still plenty of Elite soldiers surrounding him and the other VIPs up on the dais. The bodyguards gathered around their twisted leaders, herding them to safety.

  “Dead or alive,” Lucy screamed, “we have to do our part! We can’t let him out of here!”

  Chapter 109

  I unslung my rifle, perhaps for the last time, and took off running, stooping low to the ground and circling behind the stage where Jacklin had been spewing his incredible filth and hatred. I knew the layout of the presidential compound like the inside of my own apartment: the ceremonial dais looked rock solid, but it was actually a shell with an area for housing high-tech equipment underneath.

  The entrance was heavily guarded by Elite commandos, but their attention was focused on the airplane wreckage plummeting from the sky. Lucy and I came in blazing.

  The secret-service men unleashed a blistering return attack. I raced like a berserk paratrooper, bouncing and flipping from side to side and somehow avoiding the hail of defensive gunfire.

  I quickly spotted what I was looking for-the under-stage service entrance. But the massive steel door was sliding closed! Nothing short of an armored truck full of explosives could blast through it. That, or possibly the thermal grenade I’d strapped onto my armored vest an hour ago. I hurled it into the dead center of the dwindling opening.

  Lucy yelled, “And you thought baseball was a dumb sport!”

  “Don’t forget boring!” I called back.

  Phooom! A blinding flash tore through the interior, turning sensitive equipment into melted debris and jamming the door.

  The gap was no wider than my shoulder, but I lunged at it, wriggling through even as acrid smoke billowed across my face. Lucy was a half second behind, with only half the wriggle necessary to follow me in.

  I skidded on the floor inside, spinning with my rifle raised, ready to take on more Elite guards-whatever it took to get to Jacklin and his cabinet.

  But there weren’t any guards.

  Instead, I heard a hoarse, familiar laugh up ahead.

  Tazh Khan walked forward, his face blackened with soot. “Next time you warn me you throw grenade. OK?” he cheerfully scolded.

  Chapter 110

  “This way!” he pointed. “Termite soldier scum!”

  The staccato crack! crack! of weapon fire was ringing in the air as I burst up through a trapdoor and onto the next level. I had my rifle ready, expecting the president’s guards to be there.

  The first thing I saw was one of the Elite militia men. He caught a bullet and his head exploded like a sledgehammered watermelon-except it was filled with silvery microchips instead of black seeds.

  “Kill the head! Like I said, Hays.”

  Lucy had come through like the warrior she was! She had met up with her team, and they had used their old-fashioned rifles with stunning accuracy to clear a path to Hughes Jacklin and the other leaders.

  And then-there he was! The president spun around and stared at me like I was, well, some kind of human scum.

  He stabbed a forefinger in my direction. “Kill him!” he commanded his guards, who were led by a guy I could have sworn I’d just killed-Devlin. Could they all have been clones?

  The outsize bodyguard made a quick study of the expression on my face.

  “Hello again, Hays,” he said, stepping forward and waving the president and the other VIPs back toward a door, which led off of the dais. “You didn’t possibly think I’d have been hanging out in the parking lot with my clones while my president was unveiling the dawn of our new free society?”

  “Funny how one doesn’t usually hear termite colonies described as ‘free societies,’ ” said Lucy, edging forward with me and Tazh Khan as Devlin leveled his guns at us and his remaining thick-necked brethren formed a defensive wedge behind him.

  There was no turning back-and there was no delaying. We couldn’t let the president escape. We had to kill the head before it
reconnected with the larger body of Elite muscle beyond that door.

  Chapter 111

  I swung my weapon around and fired as I dove to the ground. The glowing spray of the bodyguards’ automatic weapons raked the room at waist level. But my shot went wide or-was it possible? Had Devlin somehow dodged my bullet?

  I watched in slow-motion horror as the feet of the VIPs pounded through the far doorway. After all this…

  “Go ahead, be heroes for your boss,” I shouted at the bodyguards as Tazh Khan, Lucy, and her platoon of human commandos took up position behind me. I’d never heard a sweeter sound than the kerchink, kerchink of the rounds as they were racked into the old-fashioned, but nonetheless deadly, metal weapons.

  “Maybe he’ll give you a pay raise in hell,” I continued. “Think about it. You’re outnumbered ten to one! Easily. You’ll all be dead in seconds.”

  The Elite guards looked at the dozens of dull metal barrels aimed at them and only hesitated a second before tossing their guns aside and backing away toward the door and their escaping leadership. Despite all the deadly technology and strength of the Elites, there were advantages to fighting them: loyalty didn’t stand a chance against their massive drive for self-preservation.

  But one of them hadn’t dropped all of his weapons-Devlin. As I got to my feet, he flung some sort of ceramic projectile that skimmed past my head and landed with a crunchy, thunking noise in something behind me.

  As a hailstorm of at least a hundred rounds turned Devlin into a pink mist, I turned to see what the projectile was, and instantly wished I hadn’t.

  The weapon, a small knife, was buried to its wicked hilt in Tazh Khan’s forehead.

  Chapter 112

  Lucy embraced her fallen friend. I’d never seen a human expression of pain that held a candle to this one. Not even my own when my parents had died.