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It wasn’t over

With a deep animal howl, Amy threw back her head Now Peter understood what he was seeing So in seconds The facial features ers and toes stretching into clawed prehensility Teeth ejected in advance of the picketlike rows, and the skin hardening into its thick, crystalline carapace The space around her had begun to glow, as if the air itself were lit by the accelerated force of her transformation With a violent jerk A theround, crouching with liquid grace to absorb the impact of her fall, there were not eleven virals on the field but twelve

There were Twelve

She rose She roared

Which hen, in the basement of the Dome, Lila Kyle and Lawrence Grey, their fates never to be known, joined hands, counted to three, brushed the hts went out

Chapter 65

The explosion in the basenition of thirty-two hundred pounds of highly coy roughly equivalent to the crash of a so, its explosive force rocketed upward, seeking any alley of travel to acco expansion-stairwells, hallways, ductwork-before folding back on itself and blasting through the floor Once it was unleashed into the larger spaces of the building, the rest was up for grabs Windows blew Furniture went airborne Walls were suddenly there no longer It rose and as it rose it expelled a gyring wake of pure destruction like a tornado in reverse, everything flung up and out from its white-hot heart, until it found the bones of the structure itself, the steel girders and meticulously chiseled limestone blocks that had suspended its roof above the Iowa prairie since the days of the pioneers, and blew thean to fall

Three miles away, the spectators in the stadium experienced the destruction of the Dome as a chain of discrete sensory occurrences: first a flash, then a boo down of blackness as the city’s power grid collapsed Everybody froze, but in the next instant soed A new force roused to life inside theents planted in the stands had already begun their assault on the guards, but now they weren’t alone The crowd rose up in violence, a wild mob So ferocious was their undammed fury that as they fell upon their captors it was as if their individuality had dissolved into a single animal collective A swarm A stampede A pod They became their enemy, as all must do; they ceased to be slaves, and so beca

He felt this first in the backs of his hands-an abrupt constriction of the skin, as if he were being shrink-wrapped He held them up to his face In numb incomprehension-the pain had yet to arrive-he watched as the flesh of his hands puckered and began to split open in long, bloodless sea over the surface of his body His fingertips found his face It felt like touching a skull His hair was falling out, his teeth His back bent inward, drawing him into an old man’s stoop He fell to his knees in theto dust

"Grey, what did you do?"

A shadow fell

Guilder lifted his face The virals filled his darkening vision with a final iht, what is happening toBut he saw no kinship in their eyes

Betrayer

Betrayer

Betrayer betrayer betrayer

Other things were occurring-gunshots, voices yelling, figures running in the dark But Guilder’s consciousness of these events was instantly subsuer awareness, cold and final, of as about to happen to hiht, Shawna, all I wanted was a little company All I wanted was not to die alone

And then they were upon hi of events, which accounted for just thirty-seven seconds in the lives of the participants, occurred in overlapping fra toward the center Illuht-the barrels at the periphery continued to burn-and the virals’ phosphorescent glow, the scene possessed a whiff of hell The virals, finished with Guilder, his body scattered in desiccated pieces that were more dust than corpse, had asse Amy with a look of caution Perhaps they did not know yet what she portended; perhaps they were afraid of her Peter, his weapon reloaded, was firing in bursts into their h without visible effect; the bullets skiht sparks; they didn’t so lance in his direction Fro forith her pistol raised, just as Nina and Tifty were racing downfield to flank them The plan was nowerect on the platforth of chain She jerked theing the arcs Spinners, Peter realized A spinners, to disorient the virals Faster and faster the chains whirred in the air above her head, a hypnotic blur of movement The creatures froze, entranced With an avian dart, Aaze cole of attack Peter kneas about to happen

Amy Harper Bellafonte, fully weaponized Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, airborne

As she shot forward, she let the chains fly, snapping them from her body like a pair of whips Si her posture intheh, her physical person transfor ras She was a fraction of their size, but h the first one, blasting him backward; by the ti two others around their necks With a hard yank she drew the left one toward her, buried her face beneath his jaw, and shook hi in its mouth

He howled

And, with a jet of blood and a bony cracking sound, died

She unfurled hi the body away like a top Her attention turned to the second viral, but the balance had shifted: the eleone; the hypnotic effect of the spinners had worn away The creature launched toward her, their bodiesin an uncontrolled collision that sent the end over end away from the platform Amy wrenched the chain free but seemed disoriented; she crouched on her hands and knees in the dirt A kind of whole-body ripplingvirals, their shared consciousness reasse focus One more wink of time and they would fall on her like a pack of aniht have, if not for the s more than a collective; he was forced to do so now One of the virals was different In bulk and stature he appeared no larger than a man In the instant before the others leapt upon Amy, he beat thehted between her and her attackers, turning to face thee His chest expanded in ahis teeth