James Patterson - Toys

This was Armageddon-and at least I was on the side of good.

I walked up to Lucy, who was-well-Lucy to the end. “The Elites,” she said, “they don’t have a chance in hell.”

New Lake City was burning!

I could already see that the heart of the great city, where I had lived most of my adult life, might be no more by morning. The same could be said for the human race if we failed now.

Lucy and I began to see columns of smoke and flames from miles away as we approached the city, flying high above in Lucy’s car. The fires were moving around, not just spreading, but tossing and twisting with an eerie life of their own.

“It’s the dolls!” Lucy said. “Those horrid little beasts are setting whole neighborhoods ablaze. Look at them!”

“And the simulators, video games, computers, phones-Lucy, I’m not feeling real good about this,” I finally admitted to her.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s just your old prejudice about Elite superiority coming through. Watch closely now, Hays. This is what we call a game changer. Look down there.”

Suddenly, there were explosions everywhere I could see in the city. Small, self-contained ones. The effect was like what you see in a sports stadium when tens of thousands of camera flashes go off. These flashes went off for at least ten minutes-to the point where I had to either look away or go blind.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Lucy when it was over. “What just happened?”

“You could say it was a product recall. Those dolls, and several other toys, were very dangerous, Hays. Especially for children. But not anymore. We’re eliminating the problem. I just hope we did it in time.”

I looked down at the city again. There were still lots of people in the streets-humans and Elites-fighting hand to hand.

“Lizbeth helped-involuntarily, of course,” Lucy said. “Those clever, second-guessing Elites had a fail-safe device in case something went wrong with their toys of death. Lizbeth told us where it was, and- poof . No more killer dolls, killer phones, killer simulators. There’s still a problem though-big problem, actually. This war is far from over.”

“And the problem would be?”

“If you want to kill an Elite, you have to kill the head . We haven’t done that, have we? That’s our mission, Hays. We’ve managed to throw up enough electronic jamming to cut off the presidential compound for a very short window of time. We can surprise them. We can kill the head before the body wakes. Let’s go-you and I.”

So now I understood our destination. The presidential mansion was just starting to glow with the light of dawn, and the flying penthouse was settling in for a landing on the rooftop. President Hughes Jacklin, that goddamn war criminal, and his upper-crust cronies would be finished dividing the world up among themselves. It was like the old human days-with the corruption of banks and Wall Street shenanigans.

A huge crowd of Elites was already gathering on the grounds below, eagerly waiting for the president to step out and deliver his long-anticipated 7–4 Day speech.

“Let’s go cut off the head,” said Lucy.

Lucy and I landed directly behind a parking lot, which was filled to the brim with the most expensive cars on the planet. Interesting to note, almost all of the car designs were human in origin-no one had ever understood personal transportation better, or had more passion for it. Mercedes, Daimler, BMW, Cadillac, Lexus-these were still the most desired names on hood ornaments, even for rich Elites.

“You know your way around this place, right?” Lucy asked me.

“I do. I used to work security here all the time. Let’s go.”

A loud, commanding noise interrupted. “You’re Hays Baker. I remember you. And you-you’re just some human scum.”

“Actually,” I said, “we’re both human scum. We’ve come to kill the president. You have a problem with that?”

Of course he did-since he was Devlin, the president’s bodyguard. At least I thought the speaker was Devlin. He was surrounded by eleven nearly identical clones of himself-just as large, just as formidable, just as threatening. I’m sure it was in vain, but I prayed the clones didn’t have the same deadly level of Elite fighting augmentations.

“ We have a problem with that. Which means that the two of you have a big problem-with us.”

The twelve deadly Devlins started to close in.

“Plan B,” said Lucy. “Run!”

That’s exactly what we did-very fast. But the bodyguards weren’t exactly challenged in the foot-speed department. They sort of reminded me of old-fashioned tackle-football players-the kinds who took massive doses of steroids. Lucy and I gained a little ground, but not enough. That’s when the Devlins started to fire laser rounds, as if merely crushing us with their bare hands wasn’t good enough.

“We have to take these guys out if we’re ever going to get to the president!” Lucy yelled to me.

“Yeah, my thought that they’d get tuckered out from chasing us isn’t working so good,” I yelled back. “Got any other brilliant ideas for stopping a dozen commando-programmed behemoths?”

“Not a one.”

“Maybe I do,” I said, inspiration flashing as another round exploded inches from my head. “Grab a car, any car. The keys’ll be there. No person in his right mind would steal an Elite’s vehicle, much less from the president’s driveway.”

“Good thing we’re just a couple of crazy skunks!”

Lucy took an oversize Mercedes pickup truck while I leaped into a sporty BMW. Both top-of-the-line, of course.

“In this case,” I said to her through my combat headset as we started the cars, “it’s great if you get them in the head, but it’s OK to kill the bodies too.”

Lucy and I accelerated back toward the armed Devlins, who clearly didn’t think we had the nerve or the talent to do what it looked like we were about to do.

But we did-we had the nerve, the talent, the guts, the willpower. And besides, we were humans, and as a species, humans have a special bond with high-performance machines.

Half the bodyguards dropped to a knee in the middle of the drive and leveled their weapons.

My windshield exploded and I could hear Lucy sucking in breath over the communications link.

Maybe this hadn’t been the brightest idea.

I dropped across the seat. Metal splinters and glass rained down upon me, and the air screamed as laser blasts tore tunnels through the air where my head had been.

Fortunately, one of the many perks of my artificial endowments is a fail-safe sense of direction, distance, and velocity. Basing my actions just on my memory of the crouching Devlin phalanx, I kept my foot on the accelerator and managed a tire-burning zero-to-ninety in just under four seconds, at which point I violently yanked the steering wheel sideways and broadsided the augmented bodyguards. I killed, or at least badly maimed, six of them.

Then I went into a fast spinning turn and sped back for the rest while Lucy joined the melee from the other side with her own truck. Four more of the bodyguards were squashed between us like grapes.

But there were still two of them-smarter, or at least faster learners, than their peers. I watched in frustration as they jumped behind cars-each in a different direction-avoiding the obvious carnage.

Great minds thinking alike, Lucy and I jumped out of our ruined cars. Even if we didn’t shut down this entire operation, several Elite car owners were going to be royally pissed at us.

“Left,” she said and pointed to her own chest.

“Right,” I yelled.