Armageddon - By James Patterson Page 0,18

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?”

Chapter 26

“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