Armageddon - By James Patterson Page 0,16
of the titanium truck.
“Do we have weapons?” asked Agent Judge, who was up front, riding shotgun, while one of his top IOU guys manned the wheel and piloted the vehicle through the smoldering ruins of Arlington, Virginia.
“Definitely,” said Joe. “Blaster cannons, stun guns, and an extremely lethal rotating rocket launcher up on the roof.”
“But we won’t use any of the weapons unless we absolutely, positively have to, right, Daniel?” said Emma, who, of course, was wearing her Birkenstocks and GIVE PEACE A CHANCE T-shirt.
“Of course we won’t use any weapons,” sniped Dana. “We’ll just very politely ask these scorpion-tailed locust scuzzballs to put everything back the way they found it.”
“That won’t work,” fumed Willy, who was standing up, bracing himself against the bulkhead between the front of the truck and the crew area. Dana rolled her eyes.
The ATV bounded over potholes and rubble as we passed what was left of the Iwo Jima Memorial (the flag lay in tatters atop a mound of melted bronze). The driver was heading for the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
A dozen plasma-screen TVs mounted on the interior walls of the ATV displayed images of the mass destruction awaiting us when we crossed the Potomac River to enter the District of Columbia.
“There’s nothing left,” Mel announced with a gasp. “I came here on a class trip last spring… the cherry blossoms were in bloom….”
Now there wasn’t a tree of any kind standing anywhere.
Or a monument. Or a building. Not even a mailbox or parking meter.
Mel was seated next to me on the crew bench. I squeezed her hand, hard.
Because the images of devastation playing out on the video monitors were tearing me apart.
Hey, I’m a guy blessed with the greatest superpower of them all: the ability to create anything I can grok in my imagination. As a creator, nothing breaks my heart more than this kind of mass destruction. An entire city laid to waste. Magnificent monuments to everything my adopted home stands for, reduced to rubble. And yes, like Mel, I thought the National Cherry Blossom Festival—held in early April, when the Yoshino, Akebono, Usuzumi, and Fugenzo blooms hit their peak—was as stunningly beautiful as anything on any planet anywhere. And next spring? It just wouldn’t happen.
If there even was a next spring.
“Heads up,” said the driver. “We have company.”
I swiveled in my seat and looked out the front window.
I wished I hadn’t.
Chapter 23
AS WE ENTERED Washington from the west, a crazed swarm of people, numbering in the thousands, came charging across the arched bridge, headed for Virginia.
Our driver slammed on the brakes. The mob parted and swept around the ATV, surrounding us like a raging river ready to overrun its banks.
“There’s a Metro station on the other side of the bridge, back in Arlington!” said Agent Judge. “That’s where they’re all headed.”
As the crowd swarmed around our vehicle, I checked out the video monitors. Some showed terrified residents of D.C. trampling one another like there was a day-after-Thanksgiving door-buster sale going on down in the subway stations. Others showed Number 2’s wing-backed goons pillaging and plundering across the wasteland that had once been the capital city of the most powerful nation on Earth.
One of the locust-like creatures had found himself a Ferrari and was cutting tire-screeching, rubber-burning doughnuts inside the drained concrete basin of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Some other beasts were outside the Library of Congress, burning all the books.
A trio of thugs standing on the broken steps of the crumpled Capitol tucked in their scorpion tails and smiled so they could satellite-beam souvenir images of themselves back to friends on their home planets.
Just then, an air horn blared a warning.
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,