Armageddon (7 page)

A battery of red LEDs flashed across Joe’s control board.

“We’ve got aliens,” he said. “Sensors are picking them up at less than one hundred meters away.”

“Get ready to rumble,” said Willy.

“I see them!” Mel said, pointing toward the windshield.

In the distance, swinging down the line of cast-iron lampposts lining both sides of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, I could see four of Number 2’s locust-winged, scorpion-tailed alien enforcers.

“There’s no exit!” shouted Agent Judge from up front. “We can’t leave the truck until this crowd thins out. All doors and points of egress are currently blocked.”

I thought about making the van disappear—that’d be one way to get outside, where the action was. But without the vehicle’s protective armored shell, we’d be trampled. And Mel, her dad, and the driver couldn’t turn themselves into a patch of asphalt and lie down till the stampede passed us over, like I could.

“Joe?” I said. “We need to be outside.”

“No problem.” He flipped a switch and jabbed his thumb up toward the ceiling. “Roof hatch.”

I was on top of the truck first. Willy, my trusted wingman, hauled himself out of the hatch right behind me. Dana, Emma, and Joe piled out after Willy.

“
She
wants to come out to play, too,” reported Dana, nodding down at Mel, who was halfway up the ladder rungs.

“Stay back on this one, Mel,” I shouted down into the hole.

“No way. I told you, Daniel: I am not a wimp.”

I didn’t have time to discuss the matter.

Using simple telekinesis, I slammed down the hatch lid and spun its wheel lock tight. Then, sparks flying, I imagined the cap being sealed with a thin bead of iron made molten under the blinding arc of an acetylene torch.

“Nice spot welding,” said Joe.

“Thanks.”

“Now,” said Willy, “can we finally go take care of this plague of scorpion-tailed locust losers?”

I LEAPED OFF the roof of the ATV and landed forty-some feet away, on the narrow ledge of the bridge’s guardrail.

“I’ve got your back!” shouted Emma, who was right behind me.

With the Potomac River on our left, the screaming horde on our right, and the sky going dark up above, it felt like we were walking the plank—
blindfolded
.

“We’ve got these two scuzzbuckets,” yelled Willy. He was on the far side of the bridge, racing down the other guardrail. Dana and Joe were tearing up the beam behind him.

The trio was aiming for a pair of the giant creatures who were using their muscular grasshopper-style legs to bound toward Virginia. When the hideous aliens reached a pair of mammoth pedestals, they skittered up the stone bases to stand beside two seventeen-foot-tall American eagle statues.

“Hurry!” one of the goons growled from its perch to the mob below. “Meet your Lord and Master down below!”

Emma and I had the other two supersized vermin waiting for us atop the forty-foot-tall pedestals on our side of the bridge.

“Daniel?” Emma called as we charged single-file down the granite banister as if we were competing in a new Olympic sport: Balance Beam Wind Sprints.

“Yeah?”

“We can neutralize these things without killing them, right?”

If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Insects, Emma would definitely be a charter member. Maybe president.

“We can try,” I said as I leaped up into the air. Shooting out a leg, I aimed my foot at what looked like one of the gangly creature’s knees or upper ankles. Emma came off the stone slab as if it were a trampoline, soared up the side of the pedestal, and grabbed hold of the second brute’s flapping foot.

Since we had opted for empty-hand combat, Emma was attempting to trip up her bad dude and dunk him down into the Potomac. I, on the other hand, was hypothesizing that my alien’s skinny kneecap would be brittle enough to break when I drop-kicked it at super-high velocity.

It wasn’t.

Sure, it crunched the way bugs do when you step on them, but it didn’t snap.

“Daniel!” I heard Emma scream. Her attack plan wasn’t working, either. The beast shook her off its foot like she was a wad of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of its
tennis shoe. Emma was now the one plummeting down toward the river.

Fortunately, she was able to hook the guardrail with her fingernails just before she plunged past it.

Unfortunately, my failed flying karate kick had infuriated my bony-kneed target. The thing howled and swiped at me with two or three of its fuzz-fringed arms. I bounded backward off the lip of the pedestal, tumbled down forty feet, and nailed my one-foot-in-front-of-the-other landing on the guardrail just in time to grab Emma before she lost her grip.

Over on the other side of the bridge, things were even worse.

LOCUST MAN 3 had Willy locked in all four of its gruesome clutches and was holding him as if he were an ice-cream cone to be licked with a tongue oozing saliva the consistency of corn syrup.

Meanwhile, Joe was stuck under the same freak’s floppy black foot.

“We need weapons,” I heard Willy shout through the thing’s sticky slurps.

Ninety feet away from the action, I quickly materialized an FDNY fireboat pump and hose so I could water-cannon the creepazoid with thirty-eight thousand gallons of Potomac River water per minute. The gusher smacked the thing in its thorax with a wet
SPLAT!
Luckily, as it began to topple off the pedestal and into the river, it dropped Willy and Joe was able to roll free. The two of them raced back toward the truck to grab the rocket launcher off the roof.

Why didn’t they ask me to quickly materialize some instant weaponry?

Easy: they knew I’d be busy.

The fourth locust-scorpion thing had
Dana
in its grip.

“Daniel?” she shouted. “
Now
would be an excellent time to turn yourself into an electric bug zapper!”

I zoomed across the span of the bridge, hurdling over the heads of the stragglers who were bringing up the rear of the crowd racing for the subway entrance in Virginia. Above me, the monster started whirling its wings. It lifted off from the eagle pedestal like a turbocharged helicopter, hauling Dana straight up to fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred feet above the bridge.

“Hang on!” I shouted up to the starry sky, where all I could make out was the squirming silhouette of Dana in the grip of the giant flying insect. I scurried up the pedestal and was about to turn myself into a Black-winged Pratincole (an African bird that
loves
to hawk for locusts) when I heard a deafening screech.

“Eeeeee!”

It sounded exactly like the squeal a lobster makes when you plop it into a pot of boiling water.

Then I heard three more ear-piercing wails.

“Eeeeeeeee!”

Up above, the flying fiend’s claws snapped open.

Dana fell from the sky.

So did the giant locust.

Darting sideways, I caught Dana right before she impaled herself on the very sharp tip of a sculpted eagle wing.

“We’ve got the rocket launcher!” Willy shouted as he and Joe raced up the bridge lugging what looked like an extremely heavy, multi-barreled Gatling gun.

The bug I had blasted off its pedestal into the river used two of its appendages to climb up over the side of the short bridge. The other two limbs were holding the sides of its head as it screamed in unrelenting pain.

Back on the other side, the two aliens who had been harassing Emma were grabbing what appeared to be earholes in their vaguely humanoid heads. They were also wailing.

“Eeeeeee!”

The baddie that had nabbed Dana lay on its back in the middle of the asphalt roadway, shrieking and kicking its feet.

“Eeeeeeeee!”

Now the other three beasts toppled to the ground, twitching their hideous, sawtooth-ridged legs in the air as they cried out in agony.

“Eeeeeeeee!”

Then all four of the creatures stopped squealing.

They went totally stiff.

From my perch up on the northern pedestal, I felt like I was looking down on the giant set of a Raid commercial.

“Are they dead?” asked Dana, who was still nestled in my arms.

“Looks like it,” I said.

Cradled against my chest, Dana leaned up and startled me with a kiss.

“You’re still my hero,” she whispered softly. “Even if you do have a weird thing for Earth girls.”

“Come on, Dana. Mel’s nice. She’s also
real
.”

“Whatever. I’m just happy to be alive, even if it’s only in your imagination.”

“That was awesome, Daniel,” said Joe, after I had carried Dana down to the roadway to join the rest of the gang.

Yes, Dana could’ve jumped down on her own, but I got the feeling she liked being back in my arms.

To tell the truth, I didn’t mind it, either.

“So,” asked Willy, “how’d you take down all four bogies at the same time?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t.”

Dana put a hand on her hip. Shot me her “give me a break” eyes.

“Well, if you didn’t do it,” asked Emma, “who did?”

“Hey, you guys—were those four the only troublemakers?”

It was Mel. Her voice was booming out of a loudspeaker mounted on top of the FBI truck.

“Or are there more locusts for me to eliminate from this equation?”

“THERE’S A TOWN in Kentucky called Locust,” Mel informed us as the ATV, with all of us back inside, crawled through the deserted streets of what used to be Washington, D.C. Now it looked like something out of the Stone Age.

“So,” she continued, “we know how to deal with the noisy little buggers when they swarm into town to devour our crops.”

“So what’d you do?” asked Willy. “Blast them with some kind of invisible insect-repellent death ray?”

Mel smiled her crooked grin—the one that had totally stopped my heart when she’d flashed it at me as I came out of that creek soaking wet.

“Something like that,” she said. “I rigged up the van’s sound system to act as an ultrasonic device and blasted extremely high-frequency waves out of the external speakers, because locusts have complex tympanic organs….”

“Huh?” said Joe.

Emma helped him out. “Ears, basically. A stretched membrane backed by an air sac and sensory neurons. Sort of like a tiny tympani drum with nerves.”

“Oh,” said Joe. “Eardrums.”

“We humans can’t hear sounds pitched higher than twenty thousand hertz,” Mel continued, “but locusts can detect frequencies up to
one hundred thousand
hertz.”

“They teach you this at horse school, Mel?” Dana said, somewhat snidely.

“Nope. Middle school.”

“Uh-oh,” Joe said, gesturing toward the monitor mounted above the truck’s blinking control panel. “Here comes something else humans are gonna wish they couldn’t hear.”

He amped up the master volume knob, and we heard the final trumpet strains of “Hail to the Chief.”

Every flat-screen TV was now filled with the official seal of the President of the United States.

“Pull over,” Agent Judge said to the driver. “We probably need to watch this. Looks like President McManus has activated the Emergency Broadcast System.”

The driver crunched over to what remained of the curb. According to a sign I saw lying in the wreckage, we were on Constitution Avenue, right in front of the ruins of the National Archives Building, which had once looked like the Parthenon in Athens.

Now it looked more or less like the scrap pile behind Granite ’R’ Us.

“Here we go,” said Willy as the presidential seal faded away.

A very nervous President John McManus—who hailed from Tennessee and had snowy-white hair—sat behind a military-issue steel desk with his hands folded, trying to look calm and presidential. There were no American flags on the desk, no family photographs.

“He must be in the bunker,” said Agent Judge. “The secure underground location where they’d take the president if we ever had a nuclear attack.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” cooed an off-camera voice, which I immediately recognized as belonging to Number 2, “the President of the United States.”

“My fellow Americans,” said President McManus, “I come to you this evening with a heavy heart. For many years, we, your leaders in the United States government, have dreaded the day when alien beings from planets unknown would land on Earth and, with their superior weaponry, conquer us. Well, as you have undoubtedly heard, that day has arrived. Today, our nation’s capital was taken over by an invading army of technologically advanced alien invaders.”

“What?” said Willy. “He’s already surrendered?”

“Sure sounds like it,” said Joe.

“To those of you currently residing outside of Washington, D.C., be advised: your own Armageddon is rapidly approaching.”

“Tomorrow,” said the off-screen voice.

“That voice. That’s him, right, Daniel?” said Mel. “Number 2?”

“Yeah.”

The camera pushed in tighter on the president’s very
worried face. “My fellow Americans, I urge you all to lay down your weapons. Do not fight back. Our victorious visitors have promised me that no American citizens will be harmed as long as we all do as we are told.”

“Man,” said Willy, “how much mistletoe is hanging off Number 2’s coattails? The president is kissing his butt, big-time.”

“This is bad,” said Emma. “I mean, I’m all for
peace
, but not without justice….”

Me? I figured it was the same-old, same-old:

Politicians selling their souls to the highest bidder.

“IN CONCLUSION,” SAID President McManus, “rest assured that the government of the United States is still quite functional, here in our secure underground facility.”

The camera widened out to show a cluster of very important-looking men and women in business suits, plus a couple of guys in military uniforms.

“The Speaker of the House, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Supreme Court agree that it is in our nation’s best interest for all of you to surrender peaceably and seek safety in the vast network of shelters our conquerors have established underground.”