James Patterson - Toys

Something told me the original Devlin wasn’t among the initial fatalities, and I personally hoped he was the one I was going after now. I’d never liked that huge, haughty bastard. And I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

My target called out to me, “I trained with Jax Moore, you pathetic skunk,” definitely sounding like the real McCoy.

“Oh yeah?” I taunted, hoping to provoke him into doing something rash. “Well, let’s hope you learned your vaporization-prevention techniques a little better than he did. I heard there wasn’t much left of him after we were done with that so-called interrogation.”

“Let’s do this, Hays Baker.”

Just then Lucy let out a victory whoop.

“I won’t go down quite as easily as my clones,” promised my Devlin.

“We’ll see,” I called, weaving my way crabwise between the cars until I finally had a clean line of sight-and then I did something I’d always wanted to do but had never had the nerve.

I took off at full speed toward the bastard protector of the War Criminal in Chief. I got up to forty easily, then fifty, and finally sixty-which was pushing my outer limit.

He spotted me and, fortunately, his ego got the better of him. Rather than trying to gun me down, he dropped his weapon and crouched to absorb my impact. Just as I’d hoped, he wanted to do this mano a mano.

With him having easily a hundred pounds on me, and a combat pedigree I’m sure I didn’t even want to speculate about, it was definitely something of a gamble on my part. At the last second, I turned my shoulder and drove into him with all my might, causing a noise like that of a wrecking ball hitting a modest-sized house.

It took me a moment to get my bearings back, and when I figured out which way was up, I felt as if I were standing on a waterbed. But as I turned to finish what I’d started-or die trying-I quickly realized I’d knocked him out cold. He wasn’t moving a muscle, not even any of the ones in his head.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been underestimated by a genocidal maniac in recent days.

“You all right, Hays?” Lucy called to me. “Because he sure isn’t.”

With that, she walked up and put two bullets into the sleeping giant’s skull.

“Like I said, Hays. Kill the head! ”

Lucy and I ran onto the main lawn, where the action was taking place. And there he was-Hughes Jacklin himself, head of the Elite nation.

He was wearing a dark suit and couldn’t have been more serious or impressive. “My fellow Elites! I welcome you here to celebrate this wondrous and important day!” His amplified voice boomed across the concourse as he addressed the expectant, bloodthirsty crowd.

Lucy and I quickly threaded our way through the outskirts of the Elite throng. Jacklin was flanked by soldiers and other top government officials, just as he had been for his inauguration. But clearly this was an even bigger day for him, and for the Elites.

“As the sun rises on this glorious morning, so dawns a new era,” Hughes Jacklin orated, sweeping his hand toward the brightening eastern horizon. “The human strain, this menace that has hovered over the earth for millennia, is about to end. They will be extinct, relegated to the same fate as Neanderthals and other evolutionary missteps that came before them. This is a good thing, a very good thing.”

The crowd erupted with sickening cheers. Some of them might have heard rumors, but the president’s words, in this solemn and important speech, meant that the holocaust was actually happening-extinction was happening. The shouts and applause grew louder, and the historic significance of the day was lost on no one.

Jacklin stood there, basking in Elite approval and adulation. For me, he brought to mind several important historical figures-Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin. Clearly, Elites weren’t proving to be much better students of history than humans had ever been.

But then he paused, squinting up at a thick, dark cloud of human transports, old-fashioned warplanes approaching from the west. They had become visible as the night sky paled into daylight-and now were encroaching over the city limits. Another historic scene flashed into my mind- the Battle of Britain.

The crowd kept applauding louder and louder. Apparently they thought this was some kind of air show to celebrate the supreme might of the Elite empire and this special day. They couldn’t imagine that humans might actually be, dare I say it, fighting back.

But Jacklin was rattled. He cried out, “What the hell is going on? I didn’t order this!”

It was everything the resistance had-all in this one push. We had managed the element of surprise, but if Jacklin got away and reconnected with his military command…

The surpise clearly wasn’t complete. Elite jets, faster and better armed, were already streaking in from nearby bases, blasting away at their human-piloted targets. But we had the numbers, and soon the Elite planes started to go down.

Next, the air blackened with thousands of parachutes as resistance troops-humans-descended to take back the city. Suddenly, Elites in the crowd started to disperse, stampeding out from the lawn. This was clearly not on the program.

“Kill the head!” Lucy leaned in close. “Focus, Hays!”

With an earsplitting screeeeee! a fireball flew over the president’s head, twisting and slashing like a giant whirling knife. It exploded into the mansion’s elegant facade, bursting the front windows into splinters and bringing down an entire wall.

“Didn’t order that either, did you-you sonofabitch!” Lucy yelled at Hughes Jacklin as she continued to rush the stage. But there were still plenty of Elite soldiers surrounding him and the other VIPs up on the dais. The bodyguards gathered around their twisted leaders, herding them to safety.

“Dead or alive,” Lucy screamed, “we have to do our part! We can’t let him out of here!”

I unslung my rifle, perhaps for the last time, and took off running, stooping low to the ground and circling behind the stage where Jacklin had been spewing his incredible filth and hatred. I knew the layout of the presidential compound like the inside of my own apartment: the ceremonial dais looked rock solid, but it was actually a shell with an area for housing high-tech equipment underneath.

The entrance was heavily guarded by Elite commandos, but their attention was focused on the airplane wreckage plummeting from the sky. Lucy and I came in blazing.

The secret-service men unleashed a blistering return attack. I raced like a berserk paratrooper, bouncing and flipping from side to side and somehow avoiding the hail of defensive gunfire.

I quickly spotted what I was looking for-the under-stage service entrance. But the massive steel door was sliding closed! Nothing short of an armored truck full of explosives could blast through it. That, or possibly the thermal grenade I’d strapped onto my armored vest an hour ago. I hurled it into the dead center of the dwindling opening.

Lucy yelled, “And you thought baseball was a dumb sport!”

“Don’t forget boring! ” I called back.

Phooom! A blinding flash tore through the interior, turning sensitive equipment into melted debris and jamming the door.

The gap was no wider than my shoulder, but I lunged at it, wriggling through even as acrid smoke billowed across my face. Lucy was a half second behind, with only half the wriggle necessary to follow me in.

I skidded on the floor inside, spinning with my rifle raised, ready to take on more Elite guards-whatever it took to get to Jacklin and his cabinet.