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Chapter 110 – Christmas SurpriseAlex stewed about whatever the new thing was. She really hoped it wasn’t some deadly missile thing fired out of that submarine. Even if Willow had said the submarine only had torpedo tubes, so you couldn’t fire a missile out of it.
So … what did The Collective want with that sub, and what were they doing? Or was this even a Collective thing, and not something nasty because of stupid Russian guys dumping radioactive waste and biochemical waste in stupid places? She still hadn’t heard what they were going to do about that creepy radioactive lake with the creepy radioactive lake-monsters.
The hotel room had two nice beds, and Alex volunteered to share the bed with Shar. Shar wanted the one closer to the potty, but Alex didn’t care.
Alex’s mom hugged them both and said, “Alex, I’m sorry I didn’t trust you to take care of Shar. And I’m sorry I didn’t trust Jack enough. But I worry about Shar. I worry about both of you. I love both of you so much, and you’re both so brave, but it hurts me when I watch you go off and I don’t know if you’ll come back safe and sound.”
Alex knew her mom really meant ‘I don’t know if you’ll come back at all.’ She said, “I love you, too, Mom, but sometimes the way I can love you the most is to go off and do stuff to protect you.”
Shar snuggled against both of them and confessed, “I wasn’t brave today. I was really scared. If Alex hadn’t been there with me, I don’t think I would’ve done it.”
Alex gave her an extra squeeze. “Going off and doing stuff and not being scared at all isn’t brave. Going off and doing stuff that really scares you? That takes bravery. You were really brave today, and I’m really proud of you.”
Shar got sniffly, and then Alex’s mom got teary, and so they all ended up crying together. Alex was glad Jack didn’t see her crying. Or Jo.
And Shar was willing to take a quick bath if she got to watch “The Iron Giant” afterward, so they all sat on the beds and watched Shar’s copy of the movie and quoted their favorite lines, because by then they all pretty much knew the entire movie by heart.
* * *
Alex woke up with a little snugglebug clinging to her. She wondered if maybe Shar was more worried about flying on that PyreJet than she was letting on.
Graham drove over and picked them all up and took them to the mess hall, where Shar had a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and Alex had a dozen flapjacks. They looked and tasted the same as pancakes as far as she could tell.
They had to drive for an hour to get to this mega-cool Air Force testing lab that had a wind tunnel big enough to put a Winnebago in. It was big enough to put two Winnebagos side by side, and then two more behind them, and two more behind that. Alex wondered if they stuck entire jets in there for wind tunnel testing.
In the middle of the wind tunnel, Dr. Ledbetter and two of his co-workers were setting up this harness system on these slings that were hanging from what looked like a track with rollers.
He came out of the wind tunnel and met them. “Great! You’re here. Today, we want to put Pyre in here and just let her see how fast she wants to go. When she goes faster, she’ll pull the harness system forward on the tracks, and we’ll increase the airspeed to compensate so she’ll be moved back to the middle. Then, when she slows down, the pull on the harness system will lessen and she’ll slide backward on the tracks, and we’ll reduce the airspeed. So we’ll just keep her in the middle of the wind tunnel the entire time. And periodically, we’ll do a little smoke test so we can see how the aerodynamics look. Okay? Any questions?”
Shar put up her hand like she was in class. “Is your name really Doctor Lead Bottom?”
Several people tried really hard not to snicker as he turned red and said, “Umm, Ledbetter. My name is Dr. Thomas Ledbetter.”
“Okay,” Shar said cheerfully.
Alex got Shar suited up in her silver coverall and the helmet. This helmet had a sort of short fin along the center like a plastic mohawk. Alex thought it looked sort of aerodynamic, and it made her think of the movie “The Rocketeer”. It made Shar think of Ariel’s little fish friend Flounder who wasn’t a flounder. And they had a PyreJet with all six rockets loaded, so Shar could go as fast as she wanted.
So they got Shar in the harness and pointing with her head toward the front of the wind tunnel, then they clipped the PyreJet onto her shoes.
“Ready, Pyre?” checked Dr. Ledbetter.
“Yeah! All I have to do is shoot it and let the wind push on me?”
“That’s it.”
Alex said, “And I’m right over here.”
And it was really safe. And simpler than it sounded. The wind tunnel started up, and Shar fired her rockets. Then she got up to maybe fifty miles an hour, although the wind was blowing at the same speed, so she stayed still in the slings. Dr. Ledbetter’s people did some ‘smoke tests’ which sounded icky but weren’t. They were just a little tube on a wire that put out a tiny stream of white smoke. They moved it around in front of Shar so they could see where the wind went over her smoothly, and where it swirled around and broke up the stream of smoke, which Lieutenant Marshall said was an easy way to tell where the smooth aerodynamic flow got broken up.
Alex’s mom asked, “Why do you want to know about that?”
Lieutenant Marshall explained, “The more aerodynamic she is, the farther she can travel at a set speed with the same amount of fuel. And the more aerodynamic she is, the faster she can go if she really wants to.”
Her mom frowned. “I don’t want her going too fast.”
He said, “I think it’ll be a long time before we get to that point. We’re still keeping her in a harness and keeping her on lines. We’re not going to try anything like that for quite a while.”
Alex tried to make her mom feel calmer. “You heard the colonel yesterday. He’s gonna want Shar going through all kinds of training on using it right and on using a parachute if she needs to, and all that stuff. I have a feeling he’s gonna be training her for a long time before he lets her do anything the least bit risky.”
“Well, I certainly hope so,” her mom said cautiously.
But Alex could tell Shar was having a great time. The whole contraption looked really safe, and she wasn’t shooting around uncontrolled, because the more she blasted the PyreJet, the more they upped the windspeed, so she just kept staying in one place with wind whipping past her. She even did like Dr. Ledbetter wanted, changing her speed slowly, and holding it steady while they did each little smoke test, and then cutting it back gradually until she and the wind both stopped.
After that went really well, they did another half a dozen trials in the harness. Each time they tried a different helmet, and a slightly different ‘uniform’ and a different-shaped snowboard. They stopped in the middle for lunch and a nap for Shar, and then by the time they wrapped up it was time to drive back and have dinner at Jo’s apartment. Dr. Ledbetter even let Shar pick her favorite snowboard-shape and carry it around with her, although she had to promise not to lose it before the test tomorrow where they’d let her blast off under a paratroop jump tower so she could go up to a hundred fifty feet up and move around a bit, while still safe and secure because her harness was going to be hooked up to bungee cords that guys on the tower would be taking in and letting out.
Alex could tell Shar was scared, but really wanting it to work. Shar clung to her side, “You’ll be with me, right?”
Alex nodded. “Sure!”
Shar thought it over for a few seconds. “Okay, because it would be awesome if I could fly around with you when we fight badguys and save the day.”
Alex insisted, “Shar, you’re not going to get to do that until you’re a lot older.”
* * *
That evening they were just having take-out pizza at Jo’s place, when Jack showed up looking grim. Even though she was in Alex clothes, he said, “Tera, we need to talk.”
Uh-oh. Alex knew what that meant. Okay, everyone in the room knew what that meant. Even Shar.
Jack took Alex into Jo’s little living room, which was only a few feet from her ‘dining room’ which was just a small table outside the kitchen area. He sat down on the couch and pointed at the spot next to him. Alex sat.
Jack pulled a file out of his briefcase and set it on Jo’s coffee table. “We finally got satellite imagery of Anadyr.” He opened the folder and showed Alex a high-altitude photo. It looked like something that might have been a pretty little seacoast village with tons of pretty snow. Except …
Except for the path of destruction from the water’s edge, through the port area, through the town, and to a spot that looked like a small nuke had gone off. Then there was another path of destruction back to the water.
Jack pointed at the nuked area. “The sat imagery guys think that used to be where they had their warehouse district and the oil-burning power plant for Anadyr and the whole surrounding area. It’s now a big burned spot. Maybe even a crater, although we can’t tell that from this satellite image. So somebody who was sick and tired of me yelling about stuff got a sat image for Provideniya, too.”
He flipped the picture over to another satellite image of a town. And it looked frighteningly similar, except the town was smaller. A snow-covered seaport, with a huge path of destruction through it, going straight, then hitting a big circle of destruction, then going back to the water.
Jack said, “We already had measurements on some of these streets and buildings, so we know that path of destruction is maybe two hundred feet wide. Even wider where one of these taller buildings got knocked over.”
Alex stared in horror as she thought about entire areas being totaled like this in the middle of a brutal Russian winter. “Is this … that North Korea thing?”
Jack shook his head slowly. “I’ve been bugging guys for more sat imagery for days, so here’s four Russian towns along the Arctic Ocean, between the Bering Sea and Novaya Zemlya.”
He pulled out four more pictures which looked almost exactly the same as Anadyr and Provideniya, except these all had the docks and ocean to the north of the town. Three of them looked just the same. One of them looked worse. Way worse. It looked like the inbound path of destruction was maybe five or six times as wide.
She asked, “Is this magnified more than the others?”
Jack grimaced. “Unfortunately, no. Same scale. But Gates tells me this is where a Russian heavy weapons battalion was stationed. Operative word: was. If there’s any bit of that battalion left, they’re without comms, because Gates can’t get through to them. He knew half a dozen guys there, and he said they had tanks, armored fighting vehicles, mechanized infantry combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers, you name it. Whatever this is, it had no trouble crushing everything the Russians threw at it.”
He pulled out a map of Russia that had six red dots. Four along the northern coast east of Novaya Zemlya, and two on the Bering Sea. Alex looked, and Jack had written dates and times beside each dot.
He pointed at the map. “These are the CIA’s best estimates on when these towns got blasted off the face of the earth, based partly on someone’s extremely smart analysis of fluctuations in the Russian power distribution grids. Whoever that guy is, he deserves a cookie.”
Jack pointed at the dots, but Alex could see that whatever it was, it was moving east along Russia’s Arctic Ocean coast, and then south through the Bering Sea into the Pacific Ocean. He said, “Whatever this is, it’s moving right now at roughly 45 miles an hour.”
Alex remembered what Willow had said. “Which is the underwater speed of that stolen sub.”
Jack gave her a big smile. “I don’t know why you think you’re not smart.” He pointed at the area south of Anadyr. “We might have given the Russians and USPACOM a few hints, and they put some ships in the area. Two Russian subs have gone silent, and may be destroyed. And we just lost the USS Cole. That’s an Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer.”
Alex admitted, “I don’t know what that means.”
Jack said, “These suckers are designed to be multi-role destroyers. They’ve got anti-aircraft warfare gear. They’ve got anti-surface gear. They’ve got anti-sub gear. They’ve even got anti-stuff-on-land gear. There shouldn’t be anything one of these DDGs can’t take. Something took it down before it had a chance to alert anyone.”
He pulled out his phone and played a little sound file. It was a radio operator reporting what the USS Cole had found. There wasn’t anything on the surface, but they had two big sonar hits and two distinct sound detects. They pegged one as an old Alfa-class Russian sub running hot. The other one was probably just a whale or something. When the sub fired a torpedo at them, they turned to avoid it and launched an ASROC that took out the sub.
Then the radio operator suddenly yelped, “Oh, holy fu–…” and the sound file went to static.
Jack said, “USPACOM is sure the Cole got that sub, and that it wasn’t hit by a torpedo. They don’t know what happened to it. But helicopter-dropped sound arrays say there’s something big moving underwater, and now it’s moving faster. A lot faster. Maybe that sub was controlling it, or leading it, or somehow slowing it down. At the rate it’s moving now, it’ll be down near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski in less than three hours. I’d like you to take the Blackbird and go take a look. You in the Blackbird are the only chance we have to get something there in time, and be confident that what we send can handle the crisis.”
“Jack, I can’t even pronounce ‘Petro-whatever-isky’.”
He told her, “You don’t have to speak Russian. I just need you there to see what’s going on, and stop it if you can. I’ll send you in with a sat phone, so you can give us updates when it’s convenient. Plus some decent cold-weather gear and some food. And it’s not like the people in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski won’t speak English if you need something. We’re the country that’s due east. And USPACOM is moving some ships that way right now, because they’re not happy about losing the Cole.”
She asked, “How do I get home once I fly in and take a look?”
He said, “We’ll have USPACOM put a chopper into the town. You can hitch a ride in it, and then we’ll fly you home out of Japan. It’s only a couple of hours north of Japan at your speed, so a fast chopper can get you to an airport we can use for the Blackbird pretty quickly.”
She wrinkled her forehead as she thought it over. “Okay. But I wish I knew more about what it is.”
Jack frowned. “Me, too. I just don’t see a pet whale doing damage like this. And with the sub gone, the whole ‘stomp the town to pieces’ routine may be out. So we have no idea what’s going to happen.”
She said, “Give me time to say bye, and then you can show me the heavy weather gear.”
Shar hugged her and whimpered, “I don’t want you to go!”
Her mom hugged her and said, “Me, neither, but I know you’re going to. Just be careful.”
She hugged both of them. “Maybe I’ll be back before morning.”
Jack made sure she got half a dozen more pieces of pizza on a paper plate, and a bunch of napkins. Then he led her outside to a Humvee being driven by Sergeant Scott. There was a Terawatt gym bag in the back seat, so after she wolfed down most of the pizza, she flew into the gym bag and changed. She just left off the gloves so she could keep eating pizza. They drove over to the tarmac, where a Blackbird was already on the longest runway and being refueled. They stopped next to a big hangar with a row of offices on the side, and Jack pointed out one office that Lieutenant Bailey was standing in front of.
Alex wiped her hands off really carefully, flew over, and said, “Lieutenant. It’s good to see you again.”
He smiled. “It’s always a pleasure. We’ve got something special for you. Acid Burn came up with the design and the 3-D wireframe model we used for the pattern. It’s like a snowsuit to go over your uniform, but it’s much thinner, because there’s a heating system in between two thin insulating layers.”
She followed him into the office, and there was what looked like a one-piece Terawatt bodysuit. It felt about as thick as a pair of thermal socks. It went from a tight mock turtleneck down to gloves which were missing the tips of her first two fingers for each hand. It looked like a white leotard and black tights and white kneeboots, but the boot part was a cloth boot-cover like spats. She went silvery, pulled it into her morph, and went back to normal inside the suit. It didn’t feel bulky at all.
Lieutenant Bailey instructed, “Slide your right hand into the slit pocket at your right hip.”
She did. She could feel two small, cup-shaped metal contacts to slip her first two fingers into.
He said, “When you get cold, just run a current between your two right fingers. That’ll power the heating element throughout your suit. You should be able to stay nice and toasty-warm regardless of the outside temp.”
She asked, “What about my head?”
He smiled. “A helmet. Your face is going to freeze otherwise, if you’re flying at a hundred miles an hour through arctic temperatures.” He held up what looked like a white motorcycle helmet. “It’s heavily insulated except under the faceplate, which seals around the edges. It’ll fit tightly to your suit’s neck. You should be as warm as a man in arctic gear. It also has room for your earjack, and you can open the faceplate to eat whenever you want to.” She used her TK to pull her wig up into a loose bun, and she pulled the helmet on before snugging the collar part closed.
Jack said, “Check your pockets on your outer thighs.”
She had stretchy pockets on the outside of both thighs. Jack pulled out a whole box of energy bars and showed her how to slide half a dozen into each pocket without it looking hugely bulky.
“And your new sat phone,” Jack told her. Alex looked around. He said, “You’re already wearing it. We’re going with a system Acid Burn rigged up that interfaces your tPhone and earjack with a system in the helmet that utilizes LEO satellite tech. It’s encrypted through your tPhone, since it’s not a milsat system. But you may have to charge it yourself if it runs low.” He turned her so she could see herself in a big mirror. “The two silver dents over your right cheekbone are the contacts so you can charge it up anytime you need to. That way, you don’t need a pound of batteries in your helmet.”
Alex said, “This is pretty awesome. Anything else?”
Jack smiled. “Well, yeah.” He handed her a utility belt to go over her cold-weather suit. On the back of the belt hung two bulging plastic bags. “Two one-liter bags of water, each with a sippy-straw. I suggested Diet Coke, but the lieutenant shot me down.”
She smiled and swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thanks, Jack.”
He frowned. “You can thank me by not getting in trouble and not getting hurt and wrapping this up ASAP.”
She flew off to the Blackbird. It was all fueled up and ready to take off down the runway, and the pilot was just sitting there waiting on her. She puddled in through the little port in the canopy, and sat in her seat.
“Flight plan already filed, ma’am.”
She just told him, “Great. I’m ready.” And she went silvery as he zoomed down the runway and took off.
It took over two hours to get to the other side of the Pacific. The whole way there, she stewed about what could be going on. She was just assuming it was Maggie Walsh and more creepy DNA badness, but what if it was something else? After all, The Collective had other mad scientists. There were all the other scientists in that Downingtown lab who had ended up being Purina Blob Chow. She was figuring there were other scientists who were maybe behind whatever happened to Lanzhou and Beirut. And maybe they had even more scientists doing even more badness that she hadn’t even imagined yet.
She wondered if this could be some sort of huge machine with a ton of people operating it, like a sub. But that didn’t make any sense to her, because then they wouldn’t need that stolen Russian sub tagging along.
There was always the possibility that the USS Cole really had pinged a nearby whale, and whatever this problem was didn’t show up on sonar, so they had no intel at all on it.
She thought about a giant whale-sized blob, but that would freeze solid in arctic weather. And the blob had pretty much flowed between buildings, not crushed everything in its path.
When the Blackbird started descending and slowing down, Alex knew she needed to get ready. She could see the Russian coast down below and dead ahead of her.
When the pilot gave her the go-ahead, she popped open the port, puddled out onto the outer canopy, closed the port behind her, and bailed. She flew downward at a pretty high speed, aiming for the tiny town she could see below.
She went normal and used her TK to dial. It did a weird thing that she figured was related to the sat phone system, and then it dialed Acid Burn. “Acid Burn here.”
“Hey, Burn, it’s Tera. Your connection thing seems to be working great, but remember: we’re encrypted but not private. Someone could be tapping us and trying to decrypt everything.”
“Oh, I know, I got all that worked out, I thought about using a different sat phone system, but this one has better coverage, especially up near the Arctic Circle, and anyway I’m really worried about this thing, because we’re talking six towns, the USS Cole, and nobody knows how many Russian subs and ships because they won’t admit it to anybody, and George said some really naughty things about their officers and politicians who don’t have enough sense to figure out they need to talk to us about this stuff.” She giggled naughtily, “He said they don’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel. And he said it in that Texas accent, so it was even funnier. And then he told me not to tell Pinkie Pie he said it.”
Alex zoomed in toward the town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski. Okay, she’d had to look at Jack’s map like ten times to memorize the name. Why couldn’t they have simple names like Pavlovtown or Oceanville? Maybe Townsville. She thought about the Powerpuff Girls cartoon and smiled to herself.
As she got down low enough to make out boats and cars and things, she realized there was a small army sitting near the docks. Tanks and weapon carriers and trucks and probably tons of soldiers with all kinds of weapons. And there were two big, heavily-armed cruisers in the middle of the bay. It looked like one cruiser was flipping depth charges or something into the water. And there were a dozen helicopters flying her way. Uh-oh.
“Burn, can you get a message like RIGHT NOW to the Russians that I’m one of the good guys and they don’t need to start shooting at me?”
“Uh-oh, I’m on it right now, and Pinkie Pie and his boss say they already sent the Russians a heads-up that you were coming to help, and I’m trying to find a way to tap into their comms, but they’re on a private sys–…”
“Burn? Burn? Burn!” But there was nothing but static.
She wondered what else could go wrong next.
And that was when both of the cruisers in the harbor exploded in huge fireballs, one right after the other.
Something was under the wreckage of the closer cruiser and moving right at the shore. It was big enough that there was a wave from the thing. The water was bulging up maybe fifteen feet above the ocean level, and was maybe forty feet across. Plus, it was moving at the shore at maybe sixty or seventy miles an hour.
The helicopters swooped down toward the bulge in the water. She moved in at high speed to help.
It broke the surface. From her position behind and off to the side, it looked like a massive, round thing. Well, round-ish. It looked about thirty feet across and thirty feet high. It was uneven and ugly and bumpy and a gross gray color.
She pulled even with it, and then moved ahead of it.
It rose further out of the water, and its eyes opened, and she suddenly had the urge to scream.
Oh, holy crud! She was looking at a head. This was just its head! There was more of it! And it was coming up out of the water fast.
The helicopters opened fire on it. High-caliber ammo ricocheted off its face and missiles exploded on its skin.
It roared with a noise that shook the helicopters, and the water boiled behind it. It opened its mouth, and a blast that looked like a giant CO2 fire extinguisher shot out in a big cone.
Only it wasn’t like a CO2 fire extinguisher. It was like a blast of blue-white energy. It just melted the closer helicopters, and blasted most of the others out of the sky. The two remaining helicopters desperately tried to wheel out of the way.
It was farther out of the water now, and Alex could see that it had a jagged kind of dorsal fin all down its upper back and further into the water, and the fin was glowing fiercely. She was totally sorry she’d thought about the Powerpuff Girls, given what they regularly fought.
She flew in a strafing run behind its head and hit it with three massive bursts of lightning, hoping she could distract it for long enough that the last helicopters could get away.
The lightning hit it in the side and back of its massive head, and it didn’t like that. But she didn’t stop it. Okay, taking a dozen missiles in the face hadn’t stopped it, so she hadn’t expected her lightning would do the job either.
It still turned its massive head to try and find her, even as it kept moving forward. Its eyes were glowing a fiery orange, and its mouth was open. Holy crud, it had teeth bigger than she was!
She tried calling for help, but she couldn’t get a signal. The most she could get was a ferocious static in her earjack whenever its dorsal fin lit up. No wonder no one had been able to call for help before it was too late. It was its own signal jammer.
It rose even further out of the water. It had forearms that were vaguely human. Ish. No, they were more like something off a Tyrannosaurus, only this thing was much, much larger than a T. rex could ever be. And the arms were proportionately longer than the arms of a T. rex.
She suddenly remembered a conversation with Willow about the Downingtown secret lab, and the DNA samples that hadn’t been eaten by the second blob. They’d had dinosaur DNA.
Maggie Walsh had been given access to dinosaur DNA for heaven only knew how long. Alex just knew this was the result. Maggie Walsh had made this thing.
Maggie Walsh had made this thing at some kind of secret Arctic base for The Collective, who had swiped that Russian sub for something connected with it. Maybe the sub was like one of those dog whistles so they could lead it around to attack wherever they wanted. And with that sub gone, the thing was completely out of control.
Crud!
The missiles from the helicopters had done a tiny bit of damage to its thick, bumpy skin, but as the thing’s fin glowed even more, the skin seemed to heal up. That wasn’t good.
It rose further out of the water. The glowing fin that went all the way down its back was jagged and spiky and huge. The thing was now charging forward and the water was only up to its hips. And it was mega-big. Impossibly big.
The Russian tanks and weapons carriers let loose. But the thing was so cranked up that there was some kind of energy barrier around it, and the missiles and bombs were exploding before they got to its skin. It unleashed another cone of bluish-white breath that set fire to everything it touched. The docks. The boats at the docks. The warehouses at the docks. The tanks and trucks. The soldiers that were still firing RPGs and stuff at it.
She made another pass behind its head and blasted it as hard as she could with lightning, hoping she could distract it enough to save at least some of the soldiers.
It kept moving forward, but it stopped blasting the soldiers. Good! It turned its massive head and tried to track her. Not good. She totally did not want to find out what would happen if it blasted her with that super-breath thing it did.
It whipped a massive tail up out of the water and thrashed it at her. She had to go straight up at her top speed to avoid getting swatted like a gnat. It had a giant tail, too? That was just not fair!
It came up out of the water and stomped its way through the burning docks and warehouses. Its lower body wasn’t like any Tyrannosaurus she’d ever seen. No, its legs were more like … Oh, what the heck were those things Ray liked so much when he was back in his dinosaur phase?
An Iguanodon. It had back legs like an Iguanodon, or at least like the little plastic Iguanodons Ray had liked. Plus a big, thick, long tail. It was a giant dinosaur-like monstrosity designed by a mad scientist to destroy towns.
Okay, if that stolen sub was gone, why was it still seeking out towns? There wouldn’t be any way it could even tell where cities were when it was miles away underwater. So what was she not seeing?
It ignored what little was left of the battalion of soldiers, and it made its way straight inland, smashing anything in its way. It even went right through a high-voltage power line. It definitely didn’t like hitting the thing, because it made that ear-pounding roar, but it ripped through the power line and kept going.
Another three squads of tanks opened fire on it, and Alex tried blasting it in the eyes with lightning bolts to keep it from targeting the tank corps. She made sure she was up over its head so she was out of reach of those massive arms and she wasn’t going to get melted by its fire-breath attack.
It roared angrily and swatted at her with its arms, and then with its tail, and then with both arms and its tail. Its tail was way more flexible and dangerous. It pretty much ignored the tanks for a minute while it tried to smack her out of the sky, but its skin was so thick the tank rounds weren’t doing much to it.
Then it turned back and blasted everything with a long burst of bluish heat breath that turned all three groups of tanks into melted metal on huge swaths of charred ground.
It looked like there was nothing left except scattered soldiers who didn’t have anything like the firepower to take it down. And it was still heading inland.
Alex figured it was all up to her. A 5'7" girl against a giant, unstoppable dinosaur-thing that had to be over two hundred fifty feet high.
She went silvery. She swooped in behind its head and landed just behind its left ear, doing her best to hang on with nothing but the clinging capabilities of her morph. Then she reached out with all of her TK and tried to clamp its carotid arteries closed.
She could feel the arteries, deep inside its neck. But they were massive, and unbelievably stiff, and the force of the blood pumping through them felt like a hundred firehoses. She tried until her head felt like it was going to burst, but she couldn’t generate enough force to clamp one of them even halfway closed.
She was concentrating so hard she didn’t see the massive hand that clawed at its head and flicked her off. It felt like she was smacked by a train.
She went flying through the air and crashed into a building. It felt like it broke every bone in her body, except she was still a silvery puddle. She would have screamed at the agony, but it felt like the wind was knocked out of her, too. That didn’t make any sense, since she was still a puddle.
She realized she had crashed through a wall, through an interior wall, and had ended up embedded in yet another interior wall. And she was still alive, even if she hurt all over so bad she wanted to scream.
Then she realized the building was moving, and she did scream, just as that enormous tail came flying through the air again, and the whole building was knocked over. A huge slab of ceiling swung down and hammered her back against the wall before she could even try to fly to safety, and thousands of tons of building collapsed on top of her.