I guess he got it, because he let go of my arm. Or maybe that was because Louis-Cesare had just shown up, and they wanted to try killing each other again. I left them to it, burst back outside, waded through the guys, and grabbed Ev.
“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.
“Can you launch this with one of your rockets?”
He looked at the small disk on my open palm. “Is it sticky? I could put it on the side of one of my rockets—”
“Yes, yes, it’s sticky!” I said, peeling off the little paper backing.
“I can try.”
“What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked me. Because I guessed he’d decided this was slightly more important than beating up Tomas.
“The biggest thing I’ve got.”
If it didn’t work . . .
I decided not to think about what would happen if it didn’t work.
The dragon made its dive, Ev raised the launcher to his shoulder, being way too calm for any human blood to flow in those veins, and let loose. The recoil sent him stumbling back into us, putting all three of us on the floor. And giving me a perfect view of what happens when a two-ton paper dragon meets a device that magnifies an explosion by a hundred times.
“Yeah!” Zheng yelled, the guys whooped, and I continued to stare at the firework-sized confetti raining down everywhere, gobs and gobs of it, like we were flying through a ticker tape parade.
Only those usually follow a victory, don’t they?
And ours wasn’t won yet.
“Oh, come on!” Jason yelled. “This is bullshit!”
He had a point. Because the confetti was still blowing through the air when an army of motorcycle riding assholes pulled up alongside us. And in back. And for as far as I could see down the road, where they were running over our other pursuers, in some cases literally.
The samurai were back for an encore, and this time, there had to be a couple hundred of them. I guessed they’d followed the dragon, who had thoughtfully led them right to us. And while this enemy couldn’t fly, we weren’t doing so hot at that right now, either.
The truck had levelled out at barely five feet off the ground, which didn’t even clear some of the garbage piles. It definitely didn’t put us out of the reach of our latest problem. Who were already climbing on board.
I grasped for my purse, had a boot stomp down on my hand, and grabbed an acid grenade off Bertha instead. I shoved it in my attacker’s unnaturally large mouth and as far down his throat as I could reach, then pulled the pin. And watched a miracle happen as Zheng’s boys fought to wrestle him back off the truck.
Nothing had worked on these guys, absolutely nothing.
Until now.
The grenade went off and his “ink” started to smear, his eyes dripped down his face, and his features melted. The guys were forced to let him go after a moment, because there was literally nothing left to hold onto, just a black and white puddle of goo on the floor. They looked at me; I looked at them.
And then we were all throwing acid grenades.
The results, however, were mixed. The grenades flattened the samurai’s tires, as their rides seemed to be made of the same stuff they were, and turned them into monstrous versions of themselves, with greatly elongated noses, gaping maws for mouths, and earlobes that stretched halfway down their chests. But they didn’t stop them. Maybe because the explosions were hitting the roadside or their armor, instead of discharging internally.
And then my hand reached for another grenade—and reached, and reached and reached, because we were out, damn it!
Even worse, we plowed into a garbage pile a second later that had completely blocked the street. The truck was tough; it made it through. But it caused an avalanche of soda cans, tumbled bricks, and charred roof tiles to hit the windshield, half of which lodged there, blocking Zheng’s view ahead.
“Clear it off! Clear it off!” he yelled, but his guys were too busy unloading on the ever-growing field of monstrosities behind us.
And on both sides of us, I realized, as the road was just wide enough to allow them to pull alongside. They were threatening to swamp us, taking machine gun bursts directly to the face, which did little more than give them a bad case of acne. Yet their hands crumpled the guns they grabbed as if they were made out of paper.