Jack kicked a twisted turret barrel out of his path. His burns still stung, but his strength had flooded back the moment the beams stopped.Vexler had left a junkyard behind the camouflage veil. Turrets lay torn off their mechanical arms, their barrels bent like straws, and cannons lay split open.The madman hadn't left a single gun standing. But the dome stood untouched.It towered over the ruins, smooth and gleaming. Vexler's stray railgun rounds lay flattened at its base.The earpiece crackled and Vandrake spoke up."My Lord. The chopper has picked up the King of Diamonds. He's unconscious, but he keeps mumbling that he can still fight.""Good. Keep him away from the guns until he heals, even if he begs.""Understood."Vandrake hesitated."My Lord, are you certain you don't want backup? Give the word and Springfield will have a full battalion over that dome within an hour.""No. This is personal, Vandrake. These are my parents who are in danger. I should have been the one coming in

Morgana's black robe split down her back with a sound like tearing canvas.Gray flesh bulged through the rip, mottled like a corpse. Her spine cracked and stretched until she hunched taller than the doorway she had just smashed, and her eyes swelled black from lid to lid above the veil.Both her arms shot out across the dome.They grew longer and longer, bones popping as they lengthened, and twisted around each other into one huge spiral of gray flesh and black claws. It drilled through the air toward the platform, straight at Jack and Victor behind him."I will rip you both to pieces!"On the highway, Jack had caught that hand and been shoved down the road. This time he had no intention of catching anything.He planted his feet and threw a single punch.His fist stopped a hand's width short of the claws, and the air in front of it exploded.The blast smashed the spiral back down its own length. The gray arms crumpled like a stamped-on garden hose, and the force kept going, straight i

Jack cut across the lot in three long bounds and landed between Morgana and the broken door.He didn't wait for her to reach him. He threw punch after punch into the air, and blast after blast slammed into her chest and drove her back a step, then another.Morgana stopped.Her whole body shook. The growl in her chest rose into a scream of pure rage that rattled the crystal walls of the dome."You dare get in my way, errand boy!"The gray hide on her back split open with a wet tearing sound.Two more arms burst out behind her shoulders. They were longer than the first pair, and black ooze dripped from their claws. They shot over her head and hurtled at Jack from both sides.He smashed the first one away with an air blast. The second one wrapped around his chest.Then the first swung back and seized his legs.The instant they touched him, his strength started to drain away.It poured out of him like water out of a cracked bucket. His skin burned wherever the gray flesh pressed against i

Teeth ground against Jack's neck and snapped on his skin as if it were steel.The flood of dead bodies rolled him down the street, over and over, a thousand gray hands clawing at his face.Starfall had torn out of his grip when the horde hit him. It stood somewhere behind him in the broken asphalt."Eat him, my children!" Morgana shrieked from the roof. "Tear Victor Cromwell's errand boy to pieces!"The zombies couldn't scratch him. They could only carry him. So Jack let them.The switch he had flipped on the avenue slipped, and everything he had locked away flooded back.His father lay scattered across a factory lot. His mother had flown to the North Pole with a plasma bomb in her arms and probably burned with it. His sister slept in that palace without knowing he was her brother.And Juliet, the woman he loved, had watched him walk away, and she probably didn't love him anymore.He had saved strangers all his life, and he couldn't save one of his own.Jack let his power sink, little