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Chapter Three

New York City

Mack tuned into the radio on his wrist, dialed to Grey Ghost’s frequency—

And heard only static whispering back: the pops and crackles of dead air.

They thought to follow him, to descend into the sewers to track his radio, but then more of those assassins turned onto the street, all dark suits and black glasses and wide razor mouths. A half-dozen here, another half-dozen marching around the other corner.

The fake-faced killers hadn’t yet spied the Centurions.

Sally pulled them into the lobby of the Empire State Building. Above their heads, the art deco gold leaf relief of the stars and planets in a long line. Beneath them, the cold terrazzo floor.

“They’re coming,” she said.

“They got Ghost?” Jet asked.

“They got Ghost,” Mack said. “What in the name of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is going on? Anybody else feel like those things got in their head?”

“They told me—” Jet began but then decided not to share the whole story. “They told me to go toward the light. I heard it but I didn’t hear it.”

Sally chimed in: “Like they were inside your head.”

Jet nodded. He felt his palms go slick.

“If Flyboy here hadn’t bonked their heads like a pair of island coconuts, those freaks would’ve had me for sure,” Mack said. “Ghost didn’t have a shot.”

“We have to get him back,” Jet said.

“Not yet, kid. We gotta regroup. Get our bearings. See what we’re up against. If they can get in our heads easy as apple pie, then we don’t stand a chance. If this attack really was on us and not on Roosevelt, then it’s time to be extra-cautious.”

Jet felt his face growing red. “Cautious? You? Selfish. That’s what you mean.”

“Hey now! Where’s this coming from, Flyboy?”

“You’re protecting your own hind end, not ours.”

Mack grabbed Jet by his suit. “You’re damn right I am. Somebody has to watch out for A-Number-One. You picking up what I’m laying down?”

“Oh, I’m picking it up,” Jet seethed.

A loud whistle cut through the lobby, echoing. Sally stood there, fingers between her lips. “Everybody listening? Good. Mack’s right, though maybe for the wrong reasons.”

“Hey—” Mack protested, but Sally cut him off with a look.

“We have no defense here. Our only hope is to get to the plane and find our way to another chapter house. Philadelphia, maybe. Regroup. Learn about—”

Outside came screams. Screams of people, yes. But something else, too.

The three of them crept toward the door. Peered out the glass.

Just as a massive winged dinosaur crashed down on a black Buick 41. Denting the car’s hood like it was made of tinfoil.

“That’s a dinosaur,” Mack said.

“It’s not the only one,” Sally said, pointing up. They tilted their heads and glimpsed what little vantage they could—across the sky drifted other winged lizards, darting between massive black dirigibles, blimps lined with strange tribal markings.

“This situation is all wet,” Jet said.

“Not only do we have a bunch of lizard-faced mooks with the ability to get in our heads standing in our way,” Mack said, “but now we got real dinosaurs in our way?”

“And dirigibles of unknown origin,” Jet added.

“Follow me,” Sally said, grabbing the both of them by the crook of their arms and pulling them toward the elevator. She stabbed a button with her wrench.

The elevator dinged.

“My jetpack is long gone,” Jet said, thumbing toward the street. “It’s still out there. We can’t go up. We go up, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Who said we’re going up?” Sally asked.

She pushed them both inside.

Once in after them, she stabbed the down button.

* * *

Sally explained as she ushered them through the darkened Empire State Building subbasement and toward a locked door marked with a plaque: NO ENTRY.

The Federal government, in all its wisdom and autocracy, decided that it needed a rat’s warren of secret tunnels laced throughout the city’s underground. Hidden evacuation tunnels for government officials, clandestine offices, fake “steam” tunnels and the like.

Using these tunnels, she said, would take them across Manhattan and dump them out at the Hudson—where Lucy sat docked.

The tunnels were twice as dark as night. The air sat still and cold.

“Got it,” Sally said, voice echoing. She fumbled around at the back of her belt, and hanging there she pulled a micro-torch she invented for on-the-go jobs.

Or, of course, to light pitch-black tunnels.

Blue flame erupted in a crackling cone, and as a result, they once again could see.

Mack checked his compass. “We just need to head east.”

Ahead of them, the tunnel was only big enough for one of them—each elbow rubbing along a cement wall. But as they crept along, the space widened and the floor dropped while the ceiling remained the same. It went from being a bog-standard utility tunnel to looking instead like a cathedral that had been buried beneath the earth—the sudden vault of the ceiling and the deco pillars in the wall only helped to complete the illusion.

“How’d you know about these tunnels?” Jet asked.

“Remember the giant rats?” About five years ago, Sally was called to investigate a warren of super-sized rodents beneath the city. She didn’t expect they’d also be super-intelligent. But, so it went—the rats, harmless and actually quite friendly, now had kept to a small island off the coast of Norway. “I had a sandhog show me the way down.”

Mack laughed. “Sandhog.”

“That’s what they’re called.”

“No, no, I know. It’s just—c’mon, doll, that’s funny. Sandhog.”

“I’m not your doll.”

He stiffened. “I know you’re not.”

“The hogs built this city,” Sally asserts through clenched teeth. “Sewers? Subway tunnels? Ever hear of something called the Brooklyn Bridge, smart guy?”

Mack chuffed. “All right, okay, everybody settle down—”

A wretched screech echoed through the tunnels. Stopping the three of them in their tracks. Mack whispered: “Don’t suppose that’s one of your rat pals?”

Sally didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

Suddenly, the ground began to shake. Streamers of dust fell from the ceiling as the ground rumbled.

Another screech. Closer this time.

And the floor shook harder.

“Do we need to run?” Mack asked.

“We need to run,” Sally confirmed.

Jet was about to throw his own two cents into the cup—but behind them, a massive beast with pale, scaled flesh crashed through the wall. In the uncertain light of Sally’s torch they saw milky eyes, a head shaped like an iron forge, a lashing tail thick as an elephant’s leg.

Nobody needed to say it, this time:

They ran, the beast in swift pursuit.

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To celebrate, we’re releasing another preview chapter from Dinocalypse Now.

Prefer your samples in PDF form? Download this one, here, to get all chapters so far.

Chapter Two

Oxford University

The drums, the drums, the jungle drums. Screaming monkeys, a cacophony in the canopy above. River waters churned. Birds screeched overhead. The drums thumped and pounded faster and faster, a thunderous hoof-rumble of blood pulsing through the ape’s heart and rattling the brain inside his primate cranium—

“Professor Khan?”

The churning river sounds faded. The screeches of monkeys and the hammering drum-beat were suddenly cut short.

The ape blinked.

He was standing at the lectern.

A class of college-age women in gray sweaters and collared shirts stared at him from a half-moon of seats. One of the students—Maggie Gilroy—had her hand to her mouth.

It was she that spoke.

“Are you all right, Professor?”

Maggie. One of the few women comfortable speaking to him. The rest sat timid, as if he might one day pound the lectern to splinters, vault over the rail, and come at them.

“I’m… fine,” he said in crisp accented English. Each word short, but contained within the guttural growl like rocks tumbling in the deep of his throat. “What was I saying?”

“You were saying how dinosaurs could not have gone extinct and left no descendents in the world. You were noting the research of a Doctor Rudolph Ostarhyde—”

“Yes, yes. I remember now.” He adjusted his houndstooth jacket, and continued the lecture. But all the while, he felt the lectern vibrating with the heart-thudding drums.

* * *

“You’re troubled,” Edwin said.

The boy—that’s how the Professor thought of him, even though he was 19 years old, old enough to fight in wars and have a pint and sire children—tended to hover.

And right now, he was hovering. Like a skittish dragonfly over a pond’s surface.

“I’m troubled by the way you perch on my shoulder like a bird,” Khan said.

“Sorry! Sorry.” Edwin took a step to the side, quickly shuffling around to the other side of the table. All around them were shelves upon shelves of books, dusty and bound in tattered leather, some off shelves and in display beneath glass. This was Khan’s space—not an office, not really. Some derisively referred to it as his “lair.” He let that slide, though he felt the term more than a bit crass. “But something else seems to, ahh, be bothering you.”

“It isn’t. Everything is perfectly normal.” A lie.

“One of the girls, ahh, Maggie, she came to me after class and said—”

“That I stopped speaking.”

“You had another episode.”

“I was just collecting my thoughts, Master Edwin. The university and the women’s college has been good enough to let me push past the classical teachings and begin to instruct the students with a proper, more modern education. This is unfamiliar territory and so sometimes I choose to…” Choose to fugue out and become lost in the drums and the jungle sounds, sounds that appear out of nowhere and draw you in the way a honey cup draws flies. “…sometimes I choose to take time to consider my words. Your human language presents occasional difficulty.”

Another lie. Human language was all he knew. He could not communicate as an ape. He’d met gorillas before. Their chuffs and chest thumps, their grunts and snorts—it was to him just mammalian posturing, animalistic gobbledygook.

Thing was, he and Edwin shared a problem. Not that he’d ever tell the gawky tow-headed boy that, ogling at him from behind that pair of prodigious spectacles.

But Edwin was a child of privilege and shelter. He’d come from a cloistered academic family and was expected to remain in Oxford’s vaunted halls. They assigned Edwin as his assistant. The world to the boy was a place not experienced but rather read about in books.

That, too, was Professor Khan’s problem.

He was a highly intelligent ape. Not just the most intelligent ape in the world, but frankly more intelligent and better read than the majority of humans.

But all of it was theoretical. Learned, not experienced.

It was a problem Chaucer struggled with—the Canterbury Tales author reportedly warred with himself. Was it better to live a sheltered life and write of greater things, or was it wiser instead to experience things yourself?

Khan had little choice in the matter. The world didn’t trust him. They saw what he was and imagined him a beast and a brute: yes, yes, he cleaned up quite nice and was very polite and as erudite as any man, but all the same they suspected it to be a ruse.

Once in a while, heroes from the Century Club would come to him. They would consult. It was them, after all, who brought him here, who gave him a place—and in repayment, he helped plan their missions, helped offer academic support whenever called upon.

But then they always left, didn’t they? Armed with the knowledge he’d given them, they’d go back out into the world to battle whatever threat presented itself: time-traveling pirates or the spiderlings from the recently-discovered Pluto or the clanking robot-men of the Steam-Kaiser. Every time, Khan wished he were out there. Throwing fists. Roaring at the enemy.

Grunting. Chuffing. Screaming the ape language rather than the human one.

That, he felt, was what the drumbeat was trying to tell him.

And he feared what happened when he opened his heart to it.

Soon, he imagined, he might not have much choice.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Edwin said. Smiling nervously, as he was wont to do.

“I’m excellent.”

“Truly.”

“Yes. Truly.”

* * *

Again: screeching. Inside the hollow of his mind.

Professor Khan stirred, lifting his massive head from its pillow—which was, in fact, not a pillow at all but rather a book on Tibetan cryptozoology.

But the dream—and with it, the sound of screeching—did not fade.

Distant, yes. But it did not soften.

Stranger still: it did not seem to be inside his head this time.

He cleared his throat, stood up at his desk, brushed the scone crumbs from his tartan kilt (it was much easier wearing a kilt than trying to shove his gorilla body into a pair of human trousers), and took off his reading glasses.

Then: footsteps. Plodding, clumsy footsteps racing down steps to here, his “lair”—even before the door flung open and he came tumbling in like an open closet of loose broomsticks, Khan already knew the sound belonged to Edwin.

Edwin. Wearing a long gray nightshirt and sleeping cap. Carrying a small oil lamp; Khan wished the university allowed him to experiment with the “free energy” discovered by Nikola Tesla only just last year. Carrying a lamp with a proper bulb that lit up without any connection to the power source was, to some, like magic: but to Khan, it was proper science.

“Professor,” Edwin said, gulping great heaves of breath. “Professor!”

“Spit it out, lad. It’s late.”

“You must come… you must see.”

The boy’s face wore a mask of horror.

Fine. He seemed shaken—probably found a rat under his bed or a bat above it. Khan urged the boy to lead the way, and the massive gorilla trundled after.

It was a surprise then when Edwin took to the stairs but at the top did not head right toward the dormitory. Instead, he turned left.

To the exit. To the courtyard.

Curious.

Outside, the springtime air of Oxford had teeth, but it didn’t bother the Professor, what with his body being covered in a heavy coat of ape-fur.

Above: a screech.

Khan tilted his head skyward, saw a shadow pass over the moon. A shadow shaped like a bird but much, much larger. Narrow head with backward skull crest. Wings more like that of a bat stretched wide.

“Oh my,” Khan said, breathless.

It was a pterosaur. But much bigger than any of the fossils that had since been discovered. Bigger than pterodactylus, to be sure.

And it was not alone. As one shadow passed, so did another, and another.

Then a dirigible drifted into view, hazy running lamps diffuse in the night.

As Khan’s eyes adjusted, he saw the shadows: dozens of them, some were pterosaurs flying, others great dirigibles drifting.

An invasion force.

Heading toward London.

“Inside boy,” Khan chuffed, grabbing the boy’s bony matchstick arm in his epic primate’s grip. “We must discover the truth of this thing. And quickly.”

In his mind, he heard the drums begin anew.

In anticipation of launching the Dinocalypse Trilogy kickstarter next week, we’re sharing the first chapter of Dinocalypse Now today, from the upcoming book written by Chuck Wendig. Enjoy!

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Want to learn more? Check out dinocalypse.com!

CHAPTER ONE

New York City

Jet Black fell.

The wind whistled around him, the cold breath of the city a cutting edge. Windows whipped by as he plummeted, his jet pack sparking and hissing, crumpled like a soup can in a lion’s mouth—the illusion completed by the series of very real bite marks perforating the metal.

He felt dizzy. No, it was worse than that. He felt empty—like a hollowed out pumpkin.

Beneath him, the crowd gathered, now looking like little more than colored pins stuck in corkboard—but as he tumbled end over end through the air, jet pack boosters bursting with loud ragged coughs of worthless flame, the little people got bigger and bigger.

Soon, he would crash amongst them. Into them. On them.

Thoughts escaped him like slippery snakes and what the assassin did to him—did to his mind—left him lost and confused.

But one word—a name—continued to rise up out of the fog:

Sally.

He was going to crash in the middle of all those people, into all those supporters and dissenters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but worst of all, he was going to fall in front of Sally Slick. That was the heck of it.

Sally!

* * *

He wanted to impress her.

The heroes of the Century Club caught wind of the assassination attempt on FDR’s life just this morning, but that’s how these things always went: life did not afford the hero easy answers or comfortable timelines. Everything was always by the scrape of the teeth, by one’s chinniest of chin hairs—most heroes not only expected it, but learned to thrive on it.

The campaign scheduled Roosevelt to speak outside the brand spanking new Empire State Building, a shining spire of metal and glass and human ingenuity that was like an extension of man’s own reach, reaching for the stars and the heavens beyond. There, Roosevelt planned to outline the tenets of his Second New Deal, bolstered as he was by a supportive Congress.

The message came in scrawled on a ratty slip of fabric—

The president is going to die.

They mobilized fast. Jet, Sally Slick, Mack Silver, and the Grey Ghost—more than enough of a team to take down any cold-blooded assassin.

Little time remained, affording them no chance to scope out the place beforehand. The president had already arrived, had already wheeled himself onto the dais flanked as he was by Eleanor and all his supporters in their dark suits and broad-brimmed hats, shuffling papers in his lap as he was wont to do.

Sally said she’d stick to the stage. Mack would canvass the crowd. Ghost planned to check the tunnels beneath.

Jet’s job? To go up. Observation deck of the Empire State. Mack said it would afford him a powerful vantage point over the crowd—somehow, Mack appointed himself de facto leader of their little squad, even though Jet had been there longer and Mack was always in and out, sometimes disappearing in his plane for months.

To Jet, it felt like—well, it felt like dismissal. Up top, he wasn’t going to be able to see squat. Just people like ants and cars like little bricks and once again he’d be out of the action and set aside like a child, a child who might accidentally knock over somebody’s coffee cup or spill a saucer of milk. Great. Wonderful.

Aces.

But hey, he was a team player. He did what he had to do.

So he took to the skies as FDR began to speak and he did a steady orbit around the circumference of the building, rising in slow spirals as he ascended. The building was a marvelous feat of architecture—6500 windows, each a glimpse into another world. Or would be, if most of the building were occupied. Way Jet heard it, the building couldn’t fill its offices. Lingering effects of the busted economy. Not a lot of desire and so the building sat mostly empty.

So there Jet was, flying circles around the building, gazing into empty office after empty office and—

Movement.

A dark shape, just a shadow, behind one of the windows.

Time to get a closer look.

Jet pivoted his hips, cocked the wings of his jet pack just so, and hovered there in front of the window, peering past the bright gray reflection of the city and sun.

Nothing.

He planted his hands against the glass and eased his way alongside the building, the way a swimmer might pull himself along the edge of a pool.

There!

In another window, a tall shape—black suit, broad-brim hat.

Jet’s heart leapt in his chest like a snake-bit stallion. Could this be the assassin?

He pulled his wrist radio to his mouth, prepared to tune to Sally’s frequency and—yelling over the din of his portable jet engine, an engine that should burn his legs to crispy cinder-black matchsticks but doesn’t thanks to Sally’s own ingenious suit design—tell her about what he’s seeing. But a little voice inside him gave him pause.

You don’t know what you’re looking at, pal, Jet thought. Could be anything or anyone. Janitor. Sales agent. One of the Secret Service men keeping an eye on the place.

A trickier voice chimed in, too:

And if this is the assassin, then you can handle it. It’s just one killer. Finally you can show them why you belong on this team. You can show Sally why you matter.

Mack would just kick in the window. That’s how he was: act now, think—and often apologize—later. Damn the consequences. Jet was a good boy. Not the type to break windows (well, there was that one time with the first jet booster prototype, blew out all the barn and farmhouse windows in a five mile radius, but he still says that was Sally’s fault).

He’d go in from the top down. Hit the observation deck. Use a door.

Jet pushed away from the building—and gunned it straight up.

To the 86th floor!

Jet’s boots—padded with shock absorbers so, according to Sally, he didn’t shatter his spine every time he came in for a hard landing—thudded against the observation deck, the city splayed out around him.

He found the door, and shouldered it open.

And came face to face with the man in black.

Pale flesh. Dark-lensed glasses in the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat.

But it was his grin that was the most troubling. A wide, shark’s grin with yellowed needle teeth—teeth plainly not human! —stitched from corner to corner.

Those teeth opened. A slow, gassy hiss emitted.

Then they snapped shut.

Jet moved fast: backpedaling as two .45 pistols descended from spring-loaded arm-holsters and leapt into his grip fast as firesparks.

But where Jet moved fast, his opponent did not—the assassin took a slow and measured step forward, that needle-mouthed grin never wavering.

Guns up. Jet bracing for anything.

“Stop right there, assassin,” Jet commanded.

But the man took another step.

Hissing. Pink tongue playing against razor teeth.

“Fine,” Jet said. “You want to play it that way? I can play it that way.”

Thumbs cocked dual pistols.

But before he could do anything to subdue the malefactor, a sharp pain shot through his forehead like a railroad tie blasting clean through his cerebral cortex—

Ghostly waves, like ripples from a pond after a pebble struck the surface, radiated from the man in the black suit, dissipating as they reached Jet.

A pulsing, booming voice erupted suddenly inside Jet’s head.

YOU ARE WEAK, the voice said.

“No,” Jet said, struggling against the voice. He tried to squeeze the triggers—

DROP YOUR WEAPONS, FOR THEY ARE AS INEFFECTIVE AS YOU.

He tried to say something, but his word came out a strangled squawk.

GIVE UP. GIVE IN. SAY GOODBYE.

A warm flare, soft and comfortable, lit bright inside Jet’s mind—the light and heat became a doorway and he saw a way out, saw a way to leave this place and to shed his weakness the way a snake sheds his skin, and for a moment he smelled heady rains and the lush greenhouse odor of a sodden jungle and it all became so clear, so easy.

Give up. Give in. Say goodbye?

Yes.

No.

Sally.

Sally wouldn’t want him to give up. That wasn’t the Centurion way. He’d never earn her respect if he just curled up like a kicked dog.

Fight back. Break free.

Jet staggered backward, one shuffling step at a time. The razor-grinned man continued to match Jet’s every movement, approaching in perfect tandem.

His muscles burned. Every effort set his body and mind on fire. He managed to raise one of the guns but then it felt like a puppet string tugged hard on his hand and his fingers shot open—the weapon clattered to the deck, with his second gun following seconds later.

Backward, backward, ever backward.

His heel struck something. His jetpack clanged against the fence of the deck.

Fight back. Break free.

For Sally.

It was like moving a boulder with just a pinky finger.

Like crawling up a mountain on your belly.

Like pulling the moon to earth with naught but a ratty fraying rope.

But somehow, he exerted the will.

Jet grabbed the fence behind him and spun around with a grunt, then braced himself and triggered the jet engine’s boosters—two hot plumes of flame shot out like fire from a dragon’s nose. The man shrieked, flailing. Yes. Yes!

That voice, again. Thunder in his mind, rumbling:

YOU HAVE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.

Jet looked over his shoulder.

Turns out, ‘cold-blooded assassin’ was more accurate than he ever imagined.

The man’s face—his human face—was gone, dissipated like the illusion it was. Left in his place was a reptilian thing, a smashed saurian rictus with leathery red flesh and foul green eyes—two knife-slash nose-slits sniffed the air above that same horrible needle-tooth maw.

The monster shrieked.

Jet clambered up the fence—

But jaws closed hard around his jetpack. The saurian shriek gave way to the crunch of metal and the snapping of sparks. Jet hit the boosters one more time, again bathing the beast in the flames of his jetpack. This time, the pack was pointed to the floor—

The momentum lifted Jet above the fence and over the edge of the building.

And then the engines died with a sputtering cough and a rattle-clang.

Jet Black fell.

* * *

“What was our hope in 1932?” FDR asked the gathered crowd, his hands gripping hard the sides of his shortened podium. He leaned forward in the chair and told them: “Above all things, the American people wanted peace. Peace of mind instead of a gnawing fear.”

The crowd applauded. Sally stayed off to the side but couldn’t help feeling taken in by the president’s words: she looked forward to a world that didn’t need the likes of her and the other Centurions, a world that had not forgotten the Great War and its cousin, the Great Depression, but instead had moved past them and instead found greatness in better things.

“Americans sought to escape personal terror. They looked for the peace one feels when they have security in their home, safety in their savings, permanence in their jobs.”

Feeling the power of his words drawing her in, Sally steeled herself: Eyes peeled, remember why you’re here! You can agree with him later, but for now he needs our protection. She spied a glimpse of a leather aviator’s cap moving through the crowd:

Mack Silver, refusing to take the damn thing off even though they stood firmly on the ground and were nowhere near the sky. Admit it, she thought, you like it.

You like him.

She quieted that voice with a mental kick.

FDR continued: “…Americans sought peace with other nations and peoples in this time of upheaval, this time of dread unrest. This nation will not fall again toward…”

He continued speaking, but for Sally, the voice was lost.

Because there, in the sky, she saw something. A glint, a tiny dark figure against the endless windows of the Empire State Building, the body turning end over end—

She spied the wings. The suit. The goggles.

Oh, no.

Jet was in trouble.

Falling. Fast.

Good thing Sally knew things about Jet Black’s jetpack that Jet himself didn’t even know. This wasn’t the first time he’s fallen from the sky like a meteor rocketing to earth—last time she did an upgrade on his equipment, she tucked away a parachute in a secret compartment. A parachute that would release with the hit of a single button, a button on a small radio box that Sally happened to carry for times just like this.

She reached for her leather belt, around which hung an array of critical Sally Slick tools—spanner, ball peen hammer, sonic emitter, net gun—and found the box. She moved to quickly unclip it and extend the two pairs of antenna—

Behind her, a footstep.

And a terrible, terrible hiss.

She wheeled in time to see one of the men in dark suits emerge from the line of FDR’s on-stage supporters.

Sally caught a flash of sharp teeth.

Then her mind seized and she found inside her a warm light and the smell of verdant rainforest. Jet…

GO TOWARD THE LIGHT.

The box dropped from her hand.

* * *

Vile thing, the ground. Mack hated it. Hated stomping around on the—well, which was it? The fundament? The firmament? Whatever you called it, he despised it. On the ground he always felt as good as a boat anchor stuck in the sucking mud. Nothing like soaring up there in the skies in Lucy, his heavily-modified Boeing 314 clipper, with the always-escaping horizon providing proof that adventure waited in the distance—

Jet had the right idea. At least, about that.

It was worse here in the crowd. Shoulders and elbows and feet. Mack wasn’t claustrophobic, but he felt like he might soon be if he didn’t get out of this throng.

Sally: so wide-eyed to hear the president speak. Blah blah blah, leaders of nations, proud men, blah blah blah. Just figureheads yapping. Give Mack the tribal chief of a Micronesian cargo cult any day of the week.

She was—well, she was pretty enough. Eyes had that certain twinkle, that go-get-‘em gleam, that sparkle of sticktoitiveness. Sally Slick was the strongest and cleverest woman Mack knew. Hell, she was stronger and smarter than just about anybody he knew, man or woman.

Why didn’t he go after her, then? That was it exactly. Too strong. Too smart. Mack liked them… softer, sweeter, and more apt to put up with his nonsense. Just easier that way. A woman should feel more comfortable in an evening gown than a pair of dusty overalls.

On the stage, his and Sally’s eyes met—

Still, those eyes did twinkle, sparkle, gleam…

She looked up, suddenly. A panicked tilt of the head like a spooked animal.

He moved to follow her gaze, but someone bumped into him. Hard.

“Hey, watch it, Pally!”

Another body shouldered against him from the other direction.

Mack turned, fingers curling into rock-hard fists.

“Push me again and you’re gonna get a taste of—”

Wide eyes. Razor teeth.

BREATHE DEEP AND SURRENDER.

Mack’s breath caught in his chest—he smelled something like tilled earth and heard the rustle of leaves inside the cavern of his mind.

His jaw went slack, his eyes rolled toward the back of his head.

* * *

Sally felt the tidal pull on her own consciousness, drawing her mind deeper and deeper toward that rainforest smell, toward the warm radiating light.

But the crowd knew something was going on, now—they started to murmur and yell, to wake up to the fracas, and it was just enough to pull her back.

Sally dropped to one knee. Her hand darted to the stage, feeling around until it found the box—

Jet!

But again her body seized! Rigid against the psychic assault, her muscles frozen in place.

The assassin stood above her. Grin stretching too wide, teeth like knitting needles. A terrible thought struck her: they’re not going after Roosevelt, they’re coming after us.

But as that struck her, something else struck her assailant:

A mic stand. The stand and microphone—a Volu-Tone mic, square as a brick and just as heavy—cracked the attacker in the side of the head. As the assassin stumbled sideways, Sally caught a deep breath and saw Roosevelt himself sitting there in his chair, wielding the microphone stand as if it were a baseball bat and this was Yankee Stadium.

“Sometimes,” FDR said, “on the road to peace you have to break a few heads.”

Sally’s smiled, swooned, but then realized—

Jet was falling.

Only a few more seconds and that’d be it for him and the crowd.

Sally grabbed the box, stabbed the button and—

* * *

Jet heard a pang of metal behind him; his body jerked hard as a silken parachute blasted out from its secret back panel and caught air with the heads of the crowd staring up at him from less than a hundred feet beneath him.

He waved his hands wildly about—”Clear the way! I’m coming in hard!”

The crowd parted, opening a circle, and Jet’s boots pounded the asphalt. He tucked into a low roll and was already up again, popping the buckles on his pack and letting it thunk against the street. Already the crowd had come alive, not yet caught in the full grip of panic but still hovering about, curiosity still holding them fast.

There!

Jet caught sight of Mack Silver, with his eyes unfocused and mouth hanging agape, caught in the grip of two more assassins—they dragged him through the crowd, heels scraping against pavement.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jet said, sliding through the agitated crowd and coming up behind the two interlopers—just as they turned to hiss at him he grabbed the side of each of their heads and slammed them together. As he did, their costumes—costumes that weren’t real, masks that were just illusions, projections putting forth a false human face—fell away like running water…

Revealing their snarling saurian features.

The one opened its toothy maw and screeched at Jet—

A screech cut short as Mack’s fist fired up from underneath like a breaching whale.

The second of the pair lunged—not with a pair of human hands but rather, a trio of gleaming, black claws—and Jet narrowly ducked out of the way and used the creature’s momentum to further fling the beast into the crowd.

Mack grabbed Jet in a headlock, kissed him on the top of his helmet. “Thanks, kid.”

“We’re the same age,” Jet said, squirming from his grip.

“Sure, sure, I’m just more mature,” Mack said with a wink. “C’mon, Flyboy. Time to regroup. Let’s find Sally and Ghost.”

* * *

She could barely find her voice long enough to say thank you before the Secret Service men were already whisking Roosevelt away, wheeling him to the street and into a car and peeling rubber before disappearing.

At Sally’s feet, her attacker curled up on his side.

But his face was gone. Replaced by a foul reptilian visage. A clear membranous lid slid open and closed over the creature’s eyes, jaw working like the mouth of an oxygen-starved fish. A slow wheeze like the leak in a tire whispered from his puckered scale lips.

He was coming to.

Then: a shadow fell over her.

Sally whipped around, threw a hard fist—

Which Mack caught like a fastball. Even he seemed surprised by its speed and power.

“Whoa, Slick, pull back the reins,” he said. “You’re gonna work up a froth.”

“This wasn’t an attack on the president,” she said.

“What?” Jet asked.

“Nah,” Mack added. “She’s right. It was an attack on us.”

Jet seemed to consider this. “A trap.”

The other two nodded, and in unison said: “A trap.”

Beneath them, the saurian stirred.

“We need to find Ghost and get to Lucy,” Mack said. “And fast.”