I dove for the pavement, burying my face in the half inch of cover below the curb. I doubted it was going to give me much to work with, but I wasn’t that big and—
I forced my eyes shut as the glow of a dying sun lit up the warehouse. I wondered if this was what it felt like at ground zero of a nuclear bomb, and I smelled something an awful lot like flesh burning. My face was pressed into the dirt of the gutter, the grains of individual sand burning and scorching my cheek as I lay there. Even through my shut eyes, I felt like I was staring into a sunny sky, the red cast of the blood running through my eyelids visible as I lay there. I held my breath and felt the hairs in my nose catch fire, the inside of my sinuses feeling like someone had lit a Q-tip and shoved it up there, twirling it as they went.
After painful seconds that flowed like hours, the burning passed, the brightness died away. My throat felt raw, like I’d screamed while gargling acid. I pulled a hand up and felt my face. Cracked and burned skin greeted my touch, and I felt for my long, brown hair. It was gone.
Working on it, Little Doll, Wolfe said calmly.
I felt the flesh pucker under my touch, felt it smooth after another few moments, and felt my breathing return to normal. I opened my eyes and looked up in time to watch strands of newly grown hair fall down in front of me. I brushed them back behind my ears and stood haltingly, like I was taking my first steps.
My clothing was burned all the way around. One of my boots was just gone—the left one, the one closest to the warehouse. I felt something insanely hot still in my other boot and shook out of it. I glanced down to see my backup pistol, my Walther PPK/S, melted into a silvery piece of slag. I sighed and mentally billed the Agency for another.
I stood in my bare feet, glancing down at my body. I had enough clothing still intact—but scorched—to be considered legally decent on most American beaches. But that was about it. It looked like I’d gone incredible Hulk, and all that was left was the tatters, except it was all ashy and scorched. Plus I was pale, pearly white, not green.
The warehouse was no more. There were still some girders half-standing, but they looked slagged in a major way, like they’d been melted down at the top. Some of them were bowed and falling, like wax instead of steel. There was very little fire in the aftermath, just a few places where combustible things had caught, presumably.
I looked over to where I’d left Janus. He’d been a little farther from the explosion than I’d been when last I’d seen him.
He was gone. Utterly gone.
The green weeds that had sprung up in the years of neglect of the vacant lot were completely vaporized, and I saw some of the sand had turned to glass. I cast my gaze to the next nearest thing, the Atlas that had been lying like a wall across the lot where I’d dropped him.
And I wished I hadn’t.
He was scorched and shrunken—well, not really shrunken. He looked like a twelve-foot tall mummy that had gotten really burned. The skin was coal black, the hair was gone completely, and if he survived I’d have been so shocked—
Then he moved.
I stood there, gaping. A huge chunk of what had been muscle flaked off his shoulder as the body rolled over, and I realized something was underneath him.
Janus.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the former Omega operative crawled from beneath the giant corpse. He looked badly burned, but alive. Half his face was red and broken.
But he was alive.
I hurried over to him and he waved me off with a hand. “Don’t … touch me …” he said. His wire frame glasses were gone, and there was congealed blood running through his grey mustache.
“I need to get you to medical assistance,” I said, and started to bend down to him.
“I think I will live,” he said, fixing me with a gaze that held just the faintest hint of amusement, “provided you do not rip this piddly remainder of a soul from my body in the next few moments.”
I glanced down and remembered that, oh, yeah, I wasn’t wearing much in the way of flesh covering for my extremities. And apparently I’d forgotten that my primary power was to drink people like a cold can of Pepsi on a hot day. “Sorry,” I said.
He waved a hand, and when he spoke again, he sounded choked. “It is nothing to worry about. It seems I found a use for a Century operative at last.”
I chuckled, then again, then felt the inescapable sense of dirge-like mirth flowing from me in fits and starts. I laughed, loud, and long, equal parts sorrow and sickness and gallows humor. And I only got quiet as I heard the sirens of ambulances approaching, growing louder as they came, the heralds reminding me that the crisis was far, far from over.
Chapter 32