Toys

Chapter 105

New Lake City was burning!

I could already see that the heart of the great city, where I had lived most of my adult life, might be no more by morning. The same could be said for the human race if we failed now.

Lucy and I began to see columns of smoke and flames from miles away as we approached the city, flying high above in Lucy’s car. The fires were moving around, not just spreading, but tossing and twisting with an eerie life of their own.

“It’s the dolls!” Lucy said. “Those horrid little beasts are setting whole neighborhoods ablaze. Look at them!”

“And the simulators, video games, computers, phones-Lucy, I’m not feeling real good about this,” I finally admitted to her.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s just your old prejudice about Elite superiority coming through. Watch closely now, Hays. This is what we call a game changer. Look down there.”

Suddenly, there were explosions everywhere I could see in the city. Small, self-contained ones. The effect was like what you see in a sports stadium when tens of thousands of camera flashes go off. These flashes went off for at least ten minutes-to the point where I had to either look away or go blind.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Lucy when it was over. “What just happened?”

“You could say it was a product recall. Those dolls, and several other toys, were very dangerous, Hays. Especially for children. But not anymore. We’re eliminating the problem. I just hope we did it in time.”

I looked down at the city again. There were still lots of people in the streets-humans and Elites-fighting hand to hand.

“Lizbeth helped-involuntarily, of course,” Lucy said. “Those clever, second-guessing Elites had a fail-safe device in case something went wrong with their toys of death. Lizbeth told us where it was, and-poof. No more killer dolls, killer phones, killer simulators. There’s still a problem though-big problem, actually. This war is far from over.”

“And the problem would be?”

“If you want to kill an Elite, you have to kill the head. We haven’t done that, have we? That’s our mission, Hays. We’ve managed to throw up enough electronic jamming to cut off the presidential compound for a very short window of time. We can surprise them. We can kill the head before the body wakes. Let’s go-you and I.”

So now I understood our destination. The presidential mansion was just starting to glow with the light of dawn, and the flying penthouse was settling in for a landing on the rooftop. President Hughes Jacklin, that goddamn war criminal, and his upper-crust cronies would be finished dividing the world up among themselves. It was like the old human days-with the corruption of banks and Wall Street shenanigans.

A huge crowd of Elites was already gathering on the grounds below, eagerly waiting for the president to step out and deliver his long-anticipated 7–4 Day speech.

“Let’s go cut off the head,” said Lucy.