Villain (Gone 8)

The freeze-frame was blurry, but it showed what looked like some terrifying combination of feline and human, pushing through a crowd. It was only the briefest glimpse.

“Dekka,” Malik said. “She’s there. In Vegas.”

“And now,” Shade said, “we have a destination.”

ASO-6

SUBMARINES ARE HOT dogs inside of buns. The bun is the outer hull, shaped to move quietly and efficiently through the water. The hot dog is the pressure hull, a cylinder built to withstand crushing pressures.

It was the bun that the chimera shredded as it dragged the Nebraska along the ocean floor.

Inside the sub the crew were like beans in a baby’s rattle. Mostly the chimera just lugged it across sand and the occasional rock. Sometimes the sub was right side up. Other times it was on its side, or upside down. The seemingly random starts and stops threw crew against steel bulkheads, smashing muscle and bone.

Other times the chimera raised the sub to near vertical, and crewmen rolled and slid and fell through the air to crash against pressure hatches. Each section of the hull was sealed off, lest a hull breach in one area drown them all.

During one particularly hellish episode, the chimera had slammed the sub again and again until there was no member of the crew without lacerations, bruises, broken bones, or a split scalp. The ship’s doctor had stopped trying to treat anyone when his arm suffered a compound fracture.

That episode had at least led to the remaining coherent crew coming to a tentative conclusion: whatever impossibly big and powerful creature was out there, they may have become stuck to it somehow. Maybe the prop had been wedged between . . . well, between whatever limbs the chimera had. Because it certainly seemed like the beast had tried to shake them loose.

Only emergency lights were on in the Nebraska. All communications, all sensors were dead. They had no way to see outside—there are no portholes in a pressure hull. No one could do anything but lash themselves into a bunk and grit their teeth.

And try very hard not to think about the fact that among the things being brutally shaken were enough nuclear warheads to kill billions.

CHAPTER 17

The Cheerios of War

“GET OUT OF my way,” Dillon snapped. “Step aside!”

It was called the Shark Tank, though the official name was the Thomas & Mack Center. It held 17,923 people in its basketball configuration, but as Dillon arrived at the venue on foot, shaking visibly from the aftereffects of stress, especially the sudden, shocking death of Saffron, which kept playing over and over in his head, he saw people streaming out, despite the fact that the game was not over, despite the fact that the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels were playing their nemesis, San Jose State.

Obviously the news had reached the fans via their cell phones. But the slowness with which the crowd moved showed the arena still held thousands.

“Sir, you can’t—” a guard began.

“Shut up and get out of my way!”

He was pushing against the crowd and would never have made progress but for his ability to order people out of his way and have them comply immediately. He was a salmon swimming upstream, but a salmon who could command the waters to part.

He grabbed the next security guard he saw and said, “Take me to the control booth. Now!”

The guard muttered something about authorizations, but he obeyed without hesitation and led Dillon through an unmarked door, down a series of long corridors, to a set of stairs that opened onto another corridor. And then through a door into a wide booth festooned with glowing monitors and a half dozen men and women all fixated on those monitors.

Beyond the monitors and desks was a long open window looking out over the arena.

“Listen up! I want a mike that everyone in the place can hear!”

Three people practically fought for the chance to bring him a handheld microphone.

“This is on?”

It was.

“Everyone stop moving and listen to me.” His voice boomed and echoed pleasingly. He could see that everyone in the arena stopped.

“Who knows how to estimate a crowd?” Dillon demanded of the people in the booth. “How many people are still inside?”

There came a babble of voices throwing out different numbers, but the consensus seemed to be that at least seven thousand people were still present and listening to the sound of his voice.