Toys - James Patterson [82]
Fortunately, the vehicle was so large that Jacklin—assuming I had missed the departure—had moved forward in the cabin to a control console of some kind. He managed to wheel around just as I tried to tackle him again, demonstrating that patented human inability to learn lessons.
“You’re doomed,” he said, easily dodging me. I slammed into a credenza covered in crystal goblets and decanters, all of which probably had been pirated from some human antiquities museum.
I struggled to stand as the vehicle lurched into a steep climb.
Meantime, Jacklin began to yell. “Require immediate airborne tactical assistance, alpha priority—and all forces reclaim presidential mansion im—”
Something banged into the roof of the limo and sent us both to our knees.
“You hear that!” he screamed. “You thought somehow my defense department might not manage to notice your little insurgence on the fucking presidential grounds? That’s a commando squad, and I’ll say it again—you, Hays Baker, are doomed! You and your whole filthy cave-evolved species!”
Just then the passenger door, which had by now resealed itself, peeled back—the wrong way! The noise of the twisting metal was quickly lost in the roaring wind and the noise of the jet engines outside.
A wicked-looking segmented grappling hook plunged into the cabin and dug its sharpened fingers into a leather seat. And then, as I vainly looked around for something beyond antique glassware to use as a weapon, the first commando burst through the open hatch, two pistols leveled, and began blasting away—
At Jacklin!
Chapter 114
BACK ON THE ground, Lucy and I stared down at the wounded Elite president, whose fear and disbelief were waging an epic battle on his artificially perfect face while synthetic blood and lymph oozed from the torn biotech conduits of his flesh.
Lucy covered him with a pistol as the soldiers—human soldiers—loaded him onto a gurney and strapped him down.
“We demand unconditional surrender!” Lucy snapped as soon as he was secure. “Right now, right here!”
“We?” he answered, regaining some composure. “You mean you represent this stinking pack of forest animals?”
I might have admired something in his defiance, except that it wasn’t born of courage. Just sheer egotism and ignorance. He believed the world had somehow selected him and his kind, that somehow—despite the ludicrousness of the very idea—Elites were a natural evolutionary progression.
Clearly, he felt no remorse for Elite crimes against humanity, no compassion for the suffering he had caused, no accountability for the horrors he’d unleashed against us and the world in general.
“Yes, these skunks are exactly who I mean,” Lucy said.
“You’re doomed!” he screamed. “You already nearly destroyed the world and, without us, you’ll do it all over again!”
“Shut up!” I screamed as I clamped my hand onto his throat, making sure he obeyed my command.
I leaned my apoplectic face over his and continued.
“Now listen—and I’m talking here to that thirteen percent of you that is still biological, Jacklin—because what’s going to happen to you in the next weeks is going to make you wish you’d been born a tick on a skunk’s ass rather than whatever in hell you think you are.”
And then I told him what we were going to do.
It was probably needlessly cruel. And needlessly human. But hey, when I was finished, Jacklin had gone completely white with terror.
Which, I confess, made me feel pretty good.
And then I got a hug from Lucy.
And that made me feel even better.
Chapter 115
SLOW DEATH EQUALS slow torture.
That was what former President Hughes Jacklin must have been thinking one morning, three months later. He lay in an operating theater inside the vast and ultramodern New Lake City Hospital, waiting to be punished for his role in crimes against humanity. And he certainly had a very good idea what to expect next.
There was no arrogance on his face now. After all, he was the one in a prison jumpsuit and shackles. He was the one staring at the stainless steel slow death machine that was