“We have to keep moving,” Dillon said, grabbing Saffron’s hand and pulling her along.
“Earmuffs,” Saffron sobbed. “That’s all it takes to stop you!”
Earmuffs and the Rockborn, Dillon corrected silently. He flashed on the old Verizon ads: Can you hear me now? Probably something there . . . should make a note in his comedy notebook . . . later.
“We have to get out of here, find some new place, some place to hide, to . . . to rest . . . to think,” Dillon said.
“Think?” Saffron snarled. “Every minute that goes by they’ll be more ready. My God, I can’t believe all of this is happening!”
An army, that was what Dillon needed, an army. Not the ancient relics who pulled the slot-machine crank handles at the Venetian, but younger, fitter, more capable people.
“You were right about one thing you said,” Dillon said to Saffron as they pushed through the killing crowds using Dillon’s voice to part the waters. “I need an army. An army of voice slaves. But, who? Where am I going to find them?”
Saffron was completely unprepared for the level of insanity in the street. She cowered and flinched and said, “That crazy man back there almost stabbed me!”
Then Dillon spotted something. A woman wearing a San Jose State jersey. He grabbed her as she tried to bite his arm. “Stop attacking me. Answer me: Why are you here?”
The woman blinked. “I . . . I came because we had tickets for the game, but they turned out to be forgeries. I couldn’t get in.”
“This game, it was tonight?”
The woman—who seconds before had been desperately searching for someone to kill—shrugged. “It’s still going on, I guess.”
Dillon and Saffron exchanged glances. A man filled with a Dillon-enraged need to kill, kill, kill, ran his Jeep into a gaggle of frantic pedestrians, throwing broken bodies left and right before stalling out atop a pile of squirming, screaming victims.
“Get out,” Dillon ordered the man, who was weeping and apologizing and whimpering that he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t stop. Dillon jumped in behind the wheel, leaned over to open the passenger door for Saffron, and saw her dragged back by a large bald man.
“Hey, you, baldy! Leave her alone!”
The bald man insta
ntly released Saffron, and she grabbed the headrest and tried to pull herself into the car when a man raced up, swung a meat cleaver, and cut into the back of her neck and through her spinal cord. Dillon saw her eyes go from alert to alarmed to wounded, like she couldn’t believe the unfairness . . . before going blank. She was dead before she slumped to the ground.
Dillon whinnied in terror, pushed the gear shift into reverse and jammed on the gas, running over more people, swerved wildly, and then fishtailed out onto the Strip before being blocked by traffic.
“Get out of my way!” he yelled out of the window, but other drivers had their windows rolled up for safety and heard nothing. So he rammed the space between the nearest two cars, and looking back in his rearview mirror saw Saffron’s body, her head at an impossible angle.
The mass lunacy Dillon had created now enveloped Dillon’s stolen car so that he advanced at a snail’s pace. He sat fuming, weeping, begging the audience of watchers in his head to show him a way.
But that wasn’t how it was going to work, Dillon realized. If the Dark Watchers had any affection for him, they’d have warned him about that Dekka creature and her furry white friend.
No, they only watched, he realized bitterly. They really were just an audience, but like a cynical New York audience, they were just as pleased to see him flop.
“I’m on my own,” Dillon said to the steering wheel. “Everyone is against me.”
It was, he told himself, unfair.
“Jesus!” Cruz erupted as Shade drove her and Malik away down dimly lit, serpentine mountain roads in a purloined BMW previously owned by a Ranch geneticist who was currently dragging his bleeding body through the woods. Cruz was staring at her phone.
“What?” Shade snapped.
“Something . . . It’s nuts, I mean nuts. Crazy. Las Vegas! There’s some kind of full-on battle taking place, thousands of people under some kind of mind control. Dead people everywhere!”
“Mind control?” Shade asked. “Are you kidding me now?”
Cruz leaned forward, holding her phone for Shade to see. Shade was no longer in morph, so driving at normal human speed since they had spotted no pursuit, which she slowed to a crawl as she watched the video.
“Scroll back,” Malik instructed, speaking for the first time in a while. “There! Stop!”