Armageddon - By James Patterson Page 0,17

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?”

Chapter 24

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.

Chapter 25

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