Mammoth (20 page)

But what was the Green Lantern without his ring, or Batman without his gadgets? Just guys in spandex suits, that’s what. When he finally convinced himself of that he set about playing to his strengths instead of bemoaning his weaknesses. He began building his own Fortress of Solitude, his Bat Cave in the sky.

Now the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, also known as Howard Christian, sat in the control seat of the Eagle of Vigilance and surveyed his realm.

He came here a lot, mostly at night, and most of all when he was upset. It was a good feeling, almost reclining in the
soft leather of the chair custom-built to his body, his feet on the pan and tilt controls, no less than three keyboards arrayed in easy reach, the large red joystick with its array of buttons built into the right armrest. Before him were eight large hi-def video screens butted together so that they could display eight separate scenes or one sweeping panorama.

He liked the term Dark Lord, but that didn’t mean he was bad. He felt he was up here in the tallest building in the world to do good, not evil. The dark part came from the fact that he was a creature of the night, unknown to the populace that lay spread out below him. But the night meant nothing to the Dark Lord. He had a thousand eyes: L.A.’s armada of traffic helicopters, security cams on almost every light pole in the city, and satellites that could read a newspaper from space.

If that was all he had, he would be nothing but the world’s most high-tech voyeur. No, he had his own secret weapon concealed in the basement, known to only a few of his most trusted employees. Its purpose was to shoot down suicide bombers approaching the Resurrection Tower in hijacked airplanes. Travelers arriving and departing LAX didn’t know it, but in addition to the FAA and Homeland Security, their planes were being tracked by Howard’s secret death ray.

It was, so far as he knew, the world’s most powerful microwave laser. If the military had something bigger, they weren’t talking about it. It could burn a hole through armor plate, and cut an airplane in half in a microsecond. Of course, it was there only as a last resort. It had never been used. But it gave him comfort to sit here in his chair, following car chases with the crosshairs centered on some fleeing sack of shit, knowing he could vaporize the bastard with one squeeze of the trigger.

Matthew Wright. Matt and Susan and a whole goddamn warehouse full of elephants and the frozen corpse of a mammoth. Where did they go?

Howard turned his thoughts away from that, for the hundredth time that day. That’s what he’d come up here to the Eagle of Vigilance for, to get his mind off this insoluble problem.

Matt Wright, whose IQ on the Stanford-Binet maxed out somewhere between 210 and 240…the scale wasn’t very useful in that range….

“Stop it,” he said, then was startled that he had spoken aloud.

He roamed the night with his thousand eyes, his finger on the trigger, his ears tuned to the police radio.

BIG
Mama took considerable satisfaction from stomping the big square animal. It was all sharp edges and hard as rock, and it stank like nothing she had ever encountered, but none of that bothered her. After she had knocked its eyes out she devoted herself to destroying the creature’s head. Done with that she hurried to its side and began pushing, meaning to turn it on its side and attack what might be the softer underbelly. The thing might be dead already, but she wanted to make sure. But something felt wrong.

She didn’t feel so good. Her head was swimming. Her massive legs felt wobbly; she swayed for a moment, then shoved again at the big square monster. In her rage, she had not even felt the tiny bites of the tranquilizer darts as they pricked her leathery skin, but the sedatives they had contained were rapidly doing their work.

She heaved again, and the creature almost went over but then it was too much, Big Mama backed off, and the thing rocked back onto its round, smelly feet.

She blinked, and looked around, feeling more exhausted than she had in her long life. She could no longer remember where she was. What were all these new smells? What were these lights up on shiny trees with no limbs on them? What were all these noises? Big Mama was confused. She went down on her knees. Maybe if she could just sleep for a little…

In a moment, Big Mama fell onto her side.

THE
herd was already way beyond upset. They were separated from the matriarch, huddled and milling together next to a
tall, smooth cliff. The cliff was made of something smooth and clear as water, but which seemed to have no smell at all. Several times they had tried to get to Big Mama’s side, and each time some of the two-legs with dark blue heads had pointed sticks at them. These sticks weren’t sharp, but they were horribly noisy, noisier than anything any of them had ever heard except thunder. There was fire inside the sticks, and smoke, and the smoke smelled awful.

Now Big Mama fell over on her side. The beta female, what humans might have called the master sergeant of the herd, raised her trunk, smelled Big Mama’s distress, and bellowed.

SUSAN
had tried to fire her remaining tranquilizer darts at the herd of mammoths down the street, while the big matriarch was still occupied in her epic battle with the Los Angeles city bus, but she couldn’t see if she hit anything with the three darts she fired. She tried to get closer but was turned back by police, who didn’t have time to listen to her explanation that she might be able to sedate the beasts. All her arguments were turned aside, and she saw this wasn’t the time to stand on principle. The cops were barely organized, frightened, and anything could trigger a disaster.

By then Big Mama was staggering, looking around in bewilderment. She let out a mighty bellow. Then she fell on her side. Down the street, the herd began trumpeting.

THE
first call came from a frantic patrolman crouching behind his car door. He reported a rampaging elephant, then three elephants, and then an entire herd of elephants. Howard’s fingers flew over his keyboards as other officers responded, giving their locations and estimated time of arrival at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea.

One of the screens before him promptly displayed the three commercial satellites currently in range of the Los Angeles area. Through long practice, Howard quickly translated the positions and derived their look-down angles in his head, then selected GEOS-324 as the one with the best view down Wilshire. As a normal user he would have to make an appointment
or get in line to gain controlling access to one of the satellite’s array of five high-res imaging systems, but Howard owned a company that owned a company that owned GEOS-324, so he punched in an override code, and somebody got bumped. A blurred image of five city blocks appeared on another screen, from an angle thirty degrees west off the vertical from the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. He touched another control and the camera zoomed in until only two blocks filled the screen. Available light in the city was usually enough for a pretty good picture, but Howard wasn’t satisfied with what he was seeing, so he brought up a program for real-time enhancement, and the picture clarified and brightened considerably.

In the back of his mind was an equation he could not justify, but which nagged him nonetheless on a level that made his hands sweaty: One herd of elephants vanishing in Santa Monica = One herd of elephants appearing on the Miracle Mile. There was a dizzy logic to it that some primitive level of his mind could not dismiss. Those
must
be his lost elephants. He had seen films of what a rampaging elephant could do, and the idea of a herd of them running wild through a city was almost too frightening to contemplate.

The picture on his screen wasn’t very clear. It looked as if some streetlights were out in the target area. He brought up an infrared image on a second screen. He enhanced it. He was presented with a view down Wilshire, looking east. Already quite familiar with interpreting the night-vision infrared orbital cameras, he quickly picked out a line of vehicles that weren’t moving, out in the middle of the street, the brightest part of them being the unseen engines under the hoods. Near the curb by the park that surrounded the tar pits and the museum was a larger heat source that he quickly identified as a city bus, and right in front of it was a massive, moving object. He clicked up the magnification twice. It sure looked like an elephant, and it was doing battle with the bus. Beyond it, he could see police cars, doors open, with officers crouching behind them.

There was something odd about the elephant. Howard switched back to the visible light lens, and clicked it up two more notches. The resulting picture was grainy and indistinct, even with the real-time enhancement, but he immediately noticed
the fantastically long tusks, the hump behind the animal’s head, and the incredible size, four or five feet taller than his Indian elephants. Howard was the first person in Los Angeles to realize that the city was facing an invasion of mammoths.

THIS
time when the herd charged, the fusillade of shots over their heads had little or no effect. The mammoths emerged at a dead run from the shadows of the building where they had been milling in confusion, and nothing less than the firepower to stop a tank was going to do anything about it. That sort of ordnance was on its way, estimated time of arrival five minutes. But for now the LAPD faced the thundering herd with nothing but handguns and assault rifles. None of the weapons at hand had the punch to reach a mammoth’s brain or heart.

They held their fire as the herd reached the prostrate form of Big Mama, but the animals paused only long enough to snuffle at the sleeping mammoth with their trunks. The mammoths could tell from her smell that she was not dead, and they could see the rise and fall of her massive chest, and they might have wondered why she had picked this moment, of all moments, to lie down and snooze, but they didn’t linger on the question. What was clear was that something was horribly wrong. The beta female, now the de facto herd leader, made her second command decision, raising her trunk and bellowing, a terrible declaration of frustration and rage that reached right down to the monkey part of the human brain to make every hair on the body stand up. Instantly the whole herd wheeled and charged at the line of police cars stretching across the broad street.

The cops held their positions, and most held their fire, but they couldn’t hold it forever. A shot rang out, then another, and the first burst from an automatic rifle set off a fusillade that stopped the mammoths in their tracks.

The bullets from the handguns did little more than irritate the beasts, but the rifles did real damage. One cow fell to her knees, then staggered up, her head streaming blood. The firing continued, and the charge was stopped. The herd wheeled and took off rapidly in the opposite direction, west on Wilshire.

As many police and soldiers have learned when in a firefight,
once you have started firing your weapon it can be very hard to stop until it is time to reload. The hail of lead continued as the mammoths ran away from the police line. Now they were being hit from behind.

In all times and in all things there was one prime instinctive directive all mammoths lived by:
The Herd sticks together.
But now herd civilization collapsed, just as human civilization did when a hundred people tried to escape a burning building through a single door. The herd ceased to exist, they no longer pressed together as they ran, but each ran blindly in whatever direction looked best to her overloaded senses. The steel and glass canyon of Wilshire Boulevard channeled them, but some were in the middle of the street, some on the sidewalks, and the one who had gone to her knees was stumbling, bewildered, over rows of parked cars, crushing hoods and trunks.

They went three blocks in a very short time, and found themselves facing another row of police cars, bumper to bumper across the road. This time the order to fire was given quickly, and once more the mammoths came to a halt, not as a group this time, but one by one as the bullets tore into their thick hide. One went down, fell on her side, and though she was breathing, she did not get up. None of the other mammoths came to her, they were far beyond noticing a fallen comrade now. The survivors wheeled once more and headed east. The street was spotted with dark puddles of blood.

Several officers came out from behind their patrol cars and began to advance on the fleeing mammoths, firing as they went. To the east, more officers were doing the same.

“NO!”
Susan shouted.
“Stop shooting!”
Matt had to grab her and pull her back against the partially destroyed fence surrounding the tar pit, then force her to the ground as bullets whizzed through the air all around them. They huddled on the ground and watched as the herd fell apart, broke against the western line of cops, turned, and came back toward the original killing ground. One was down, and a second seemed to have injured herself badly, tearing a foreleg open on a jagged piece of metal from a Toyota Land Cruiser she had stomped almost flat.

“Here they come again,” Matt said. “Maybe we should get behind the fence here. It won’t stop them, but it might channel them away from us.”

Susan could only sob as Matt pulled her to her feet and through the hole in the fence, where they crouched a little down the slight slope and watched the slaughter continue.

HOWARD
watched with increasing horror as the scene unfolded before his satellite-aided eyes. The big green blobs in the infrared cameras charged west, then east, then west again. One, then two of them ceased to move.

His frustration was growing. Because of the location of the tar pits, even with his situation high in the Resurrection Tower to the south of the unfolding action, he had doubted he would be able to get a look with the telescope in the tower. He could see things happening in the nearby mountains, see into windows on the sides of buildings that faced him, and the roofs of almost any building within fifteen miles, but a two- or three-story building two miles away always blocked his view of the street beyond it. His recollection of the La Brea Tar Pits area was that such buildings stood between him and the disaster unfolding on Wilshire.