Toys

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.