“‘Part of the enemy’?”
Cronos turned to Ogden and nodded.
Ogden stepped forward and cleared his throat. “I’ve been monitoring communications traffic over the Wellplant Network, and I’ve detected certain…phenomena…among the Plants.”
“Monitoring them how?” Dymphna asked.
Ogden looked at Cronos, who laughed and shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t give away all our secrets.”
“Anyway,” Ogden continued, “we’ve detected these behavioral and cognitive similarities among those who have had a Wellplant 10.0 for more than a few days, and levels of communication and coordination far exceeding what we’ve seen in the past.”
A chill went up my spine, and a buzzing, rushing noise filled my ears as I thought back to how all the Plants at Wells’s speech had turned to look at me.
The buzz grew louder as Dymphna tilted her head back and looked down her nose at him.
“What kind of coordination are you talking about?”
The buzz no longer seemed to be coming from inside my head, and as I looked around, trying to find the source of it, a shadow passed across one of the green walls that surrounded us.
“It’s a drone,” I said, almost to myself, but as everyone turned to look at me, I shouted, “Get down!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
So many things happened at once that even in the perceptual slow motion of sudden, spectacular violence, it was impossible to keep track of it all. A volley of bullets burst through one wall of greenery, followed a microsecond later by a cloud of spinning daggers of razor-sharp glass from the windows they had just torn through. The air was suddenly saturated with the incongruous smells of gun smoke and chlorophyll and the roar of violence and destruction.
Dymphna dove to the floor as her mug exploded into shards on the table, then the table itself exploded. Rex pulled me behind a cement column as another hail of bullets erupted from the green wall to our left. A bullet impacted just above our heads, spraying us both with hot chips of concrete.
I peeked around the edge of the column as the rack holding the plants collapsed, spilling green plants and blue water onto the cement floor. The windows behind it fell away completely, revealing a police drone hovering in the open air, firing from a pair of massive guns—more like canons—each shot accompanied by a boom so loud I could feel it in my skull and in my chest.
Two men in tactical garb swung in on ropes through the hole where the window used to be, one on either side of the drone, both firing handguns, both wearing Wellplants. I recognized them immediately—one with gray eyes in a ruddy face and the other thin and blond. The creeper and the car salesman is how I had thought of them before, when they had come after Claudia and me back in Gellersville, when we were trying to save Rex from Omnicare. They worked for Howard Wells.
At the same moment, three other figures in similar gear came running up the ramp, all with Wellplants. I recognized one of them, too. It was Stan Grainger.
Cronos and his people turned to face the men coming up the ramp. Cronos froze, but the pair with him tore their hoods off in order to fight. One of them was a chimera I didn’t know, a heavyset guy with shaggy hair and a zebra splice. The other one was Roberta. Cronos remained motionless as his comrades started firing.
Stan and his fellow Plants simultaneously dove and rolled, in different directions but precisely synchronized, like some sort of dance troop or even more like a computer animation.
Stan was strong, but he had never been graceful. This was something new.
All three of them came out of their rolls at the same instant, and all disappeared behind cover and started shooting.
Cronos took a bullet in his bicep, but still he didn’t move.
Dara dove into her van and came out with a gun, firing back at the creeper and the salesman. The drone swiveled in the air—the word POLICE clearly visible on its side—and started firing at her, pinning her back into the van, shattering the windshield.
I darted out from behind the column, grabbed one of the chairs, and hurled it through the space where the windows used to be. It hit the drone just hard enough to give it a good wobble and screw up its aim. As the chair tumbled away into the air, the drone swiveled in my direction, and directed its guns at me—boom, boom, boom—as I ran back to the column.
Rex pulled me to safety as bullets slammed into the other side of the column we were hiding behind. Chunks of concrete tumbled onto the floor. I wondered how long the column could withstand such an assault, and which would get us first: the bullets or the ceiling coming down on top of us.
The headlights of Jerry’s truck came on and the tires squealed as it surged toward the gaping hole. With the windows still coated, I didn’t know who was in it, or what they were planning, but I was grateful that the drone focused its fire on the truck instead of us.
The truck picked up speed, driving straight toward the drone. Inside the van, Dara sat upright, watching the truck with a look of determination and intense concentration.
I smiled as I realized what was happening. There was still a drone stuck to the roof of the truck—Dara was controlling it remotely.
As the truck sailed through the hole and out into the open space, the drone banked away, but too late. The truck slammed into it and they both fell out of the air. Hopefully, if anyone was down there, the chair I had thrown earlier had chased them out of harm’s way.
There was a momentary lull in the shooting as everyone stared at the empty space where the drone had been, and the thought crossed my mind that if we survived this, I didn’t want to be the one to tell Jerry what had happened to his truck. As the column we were hiding behind cracked and buckled and the ceiling above it sagged, raining chunks of concrete, I heard footsteps behind me.
I turned to see Stan Grainger, just a few feet away, his gun pointed at me. He smiled, as if he recognized me and he relished the thought of pulling the trigger. It could have been coincidence, or my imagination, but it seemed as though at that same moment, simultaneously, all the other Plants turned toward me, as well.
I didn’t have time to think about that. Stan was closing in fast. I shoved Rex out of the way in one direction, then I threw myself in the opposite direction and scrambled behind the next column.
Stan came after me as his two paramilitary friends went after Rex. Stan’s smile broadened as he aimed his gun at my head. Behind him, the van shot forward with Dara at the wheel, headed toward the two men stalking Rex. The van glanced off the broken column and smacked into one of the paramilitaries, flinging him against another column with a horrible thud.
Stan paused, as if savoring the moment, and that’s when Dymphna appeared out of nowhere, swinging a piece of the table. Just before she connected, Stan turned to look at her, and she hit him right in the forehead, squarely against his Wellplant.
The glass disk cracked, and he screamed, clutching at it as blood squirted out around the sides.
With a murderous glare, he swung his gun toward Dymphna.
And he pulled the trigger.
Even amid the cacophony of gunfire around us, this single shot seemed a million times louder, its reverberations drowning out my screams. Everyone stopped and turned to look, as if they all knew something terrible had happened.
Dymphna stepped back, looking down in disbelief at the blood soaking her chest. She took another step backward and collapsed against one of the intact plant racks.