Mammoth

"Come on!" Susan shouted, and started ru

"What are we going to do?" Matt asked when he caught up with her.

"Stop them," she said.

"Stop..." He supposed asking her how was not the sort of thing a supportive soul mate should do, but he couldn't help wondering. He wasn't sure Susan meant to stop the mammoths or the police, or both, and wasn't sure which would be the easier task, but he had to admire her flat-out, no-questions-asked, no-prisoners-taken commitment.

And looking ahead, he began to wonder if stopping the police would even be a good idea, assuming they could do it, because just beyond them the battered and bloodied herd had just swept aside the thin wall of police cars on the narrow side street and were within a few feet of the half-dozen spectators too slow, stu

That was when the first mammoth exploded. There was no big bang and no flames. The massive head simply came apart in a shower of blood and meat and bone, and the ten-ton pachyderm hurtling along at fifteen or twenty miles per hour stopped dead and was shoved backward ten feet as if by a giant hand, tumbling onto its back and into the mammoth following it. A stream of blood fountained from the corpse like a high-pressure hose into the face of the second mammoth, which fell over the body, bellowing in terror. Matt thought he could hear a bone snap in the animal's foreleg, but it was struggling to its feet when it, too, blew up. This time Matt heard a sound he later described as a giant hammer hitting a slab of meat on a butcher's block, and huge chunks of the mammoth's body were flying through the air. The air was thick with the smell of burning meat. The animal was almost cut in half, dead before it hit the ground. The cops had stopped ru

"I have no idea." Then he looked down the street, past the traffic at the end, beyond the low buildings, and saw the bright pi

Things began sliding into place in Matt's mind, like little marbles sliding around in their metal racks.

HOWARD fired a third time, then a fourth, and now there was only one mammoth left standing. The animal didn't even try to move. All the fight, even all the fear seemed to have gone out of her. Too overloaded with impossible sights and sounds, standing in the middle of the carnage that had been her herd, the only home she had ever known, she simply gave up. Blood seeped from dozens of bullet wounds.

The young woman with her child had finally managed to get moving and was nowhere to be seen. There was no one left within fifty feet of the lone surviving mammoth, in fact, but the old man standing with his walker, looking at least as stu

Then at the bottom of his screen Howard saw two bulky men in black clothing and helmets ru

The old man had gotten maybe ten feet away from the mammoth when she began to follow him. She had never been the alpha, beta, or even gamma cow in the herd, she had been following all her life and now, in her extremity, her instinct took over.

There was a flash of light, and Howard realized the special weapons team had fired a warning shot over the cow's head.

"No, don't shoot," Howard muttered through clenched teeth.

But they did. Howard saw fingers of orange light streak from the barrel of the machine gun—

—AND Matt saw a line of big holes stitch themselves across the last mammoth's side and, incredibly, punch out the other. The noise of the gun was stu

He liked animals; he would never have bought the circus if he hadn't.

Plus, the value of a herd of mammoths was almost beyond calculation.

Plus... imagine the liability problems if this incident could somehow be traced back to him.

But that last one, that poor stu

In his mind's eye he saw the lights dim in the big top, heard the drum roll, heard the dramatic voice of the ringmaster, his voice echoing over the public address:

"And now, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages... Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus... a Howard Christian Company... the Greatest Show On Earth for over a century... proudly presents... after an absence from planet Earth of over ten... thousand... years!... The Columbian Mammoth!" It was an a

God damn them, trigger-happy cops.

He took a last look at the scene of slaughter, the remains of what could have been the biggest circus attraction the world had ever seen, now just heaps of steaming meat with a baffled old man sitting on his ass on the asphalt beside his walker right in the middle of it, and reached for his phone to dial Warburton. Howard sensed there was going to be a lot of coverage of this incident, inquiries, commissions, press snooping around, private "advocates" of one stripe or another, most of them looking for somebody to sue for damages, and he needed to alert his senior fixer to get cracking on containment, at whatever cost. Then he spotted Matthew Wright standing there on the street behind the line of police.

Matt Wright, Doctor Matthew Wright, with his 1600 SATs, his IQ off the end of the charts, Matt Wright who was able to do without apparent effort things that Howard Christian had worked his ass off all his life to achieve. Matt goddamn Wright who had the temerity, the gall to accuse Howard of...

He zoomed in on Matt's face. It was a much more battered face than it had been the last time Howard saw it. Blood and dirt were smeared across it in about equal measure. His clothes were tattered, his hair was filthy. Howard nudged the controls of the telescopic sight and now, in addition to dirt and a smear of blood, crosshairs appeared on Dr. Wright's forehead. Howard felt his trigger finger twitch.

For a moment, Matt was looking right into Howard's eyes, as if daring him to shoot. He could almost feel the gigawatts of power gathered in the basement, coiled like a snake, ready to lash out at the speed of light with the application of only a few ounces of pressure from Howard's finger.

He took a deep breath, and removed his hand from the trigger. At almost the same moment, Matt turned and, pulling on Susan's hand, hurried away down Curson Avenue, directly away from Howard, almost as if he sensed the danger.