This had no effect on the presence, which continued to work its way over to where four men stood against the gas-chamber wall, two on each side of its door.

The darkness was filled with screams as body parts continued to fly. A red haze formed, so intense it seemed to attack the darkness itself.

Ortega slipped off to one side of the death chamber; Banner to the other. The Hmong was nowhere to be seen.

Cross and Nyati remained, now standing alone. At a "Go!" from Cross, they both stepped back through the opened door of the gas chamber, still watching the inexorable progress of ... something as it moved through the wall of human flesh.

"Sweet Jesus!" Nyati muttered under his breath.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Cross said. "This is too soon. I was sure they'd-"

Cross cut himself off. The presence he felt to his right wasn't the one gutting and discarding individual prisoners; it was the Hmong, joining them.

The three men backed all the way into the chamber. Cross seated himself in the chair where condemned convicts were once strapped down. He lit a cigarette.

Nyati took the other chair-dual executions were far from uncommon in Chicago's past.

The Hmong crouched in a far corner, covered entirely in a dark mesh blanket.

A black mist approached the threshold of the death chamber. The men instantly realized the presence had been divided into small pieces by the slashing attacks of the ma.s.s of convicts it had oozed its way through. But then they all saw it begin to regroup into a unified ma.s.s.

Slowly, it struggled to form a single ent.i.ty. The black blob had been deeply wounded-chunks of its border were missing, and gaping holes were visible within its remaining ma.s.s. And yet it kept moving forward, as if the human flesh it sought would be the replenishment it needed.

Just as the misty black ma.s.s entered the death chamber, Ortega and Banner slipped behind it and slammed the door closed. They dropped the heavy outside crossbar into place and took off, running.

They didn't run far. As soon as they reached the control room, both men randomly flipped a series of heavy switches, releasing cyanide pellets into a shallow pool of acid under the death chairs. A greenish gas immediately began to billow up.

"Now!" Cross yelled, reaching behind his neck and pulling a flat-faced mask with a dark filter over the front into place. Nyati and the Hmong did the same.

Cross jumped to his feet, drawing a heavy bear-claw knife from behind his back. Nyati unsheathed a thick length of pipe and waved his wrist; a razor-edged arrow popped free at each end. The Hmong cradled a beautifully crafted blowgun.

Without warning, Nyati and Cross attacked, slashing at the encroaching blackness ... and finally penetrating the shadow-blob, which became more visible every time it took another hit.

The Hmong was the last to act. Holding the blowgun as a brain surgeon would a tumor-removal scalpel, he emptied his lungs to blast off a single shot.

The shadow collapsed, breaking into patches of black on the floor of the chamber. But the patches immediately began to pool once again.

Nyati crawled over to the ma.s.s, tentatively extending his hand.

"It's still alive. I can feel ... something. Like a pulse, maybe. If we're gonna finish it-"

Cross pounded his palm hard against the door to the death chamber. Banner and Ortega threw off the crossbar and left it just long enough for the two men inside to dive out before they slammed it back home again. Neither of them realized that the Hmong had been the first to leave, gliding between Cross and Nyati.

Cross pulled off his mask, opened his mouth wide, reached in, and wrenched the phony molar free. He pressed the top of the tooth, which immediately began to hum.

"It's down. In the chamber," Cross said into the minimike, his voice calm, precise ... and urgent.

THE BLOND man was in the War Room, Wanda at his side. He was half-shouting into a fiber-stalk microphone. "All units. Go! Go! Go!"

Percy was behind the wheel of the unit's war wagon, cruising the highway closest to the prison. He picked up the blond man's message and stomped the gas pedal, hitting the red b.u.t.ton on the dash that kicked in the twin turbo-chargers at the same time.

Tiger and Tracker were already in the shadow cast by the prison wall. They moved in from different directions.

Tiny black splotches began to rea.s.semble inside the gas chamber. If the poison gas had any effect on this process, it was not apparent.

Adapting its shape to circ.u.mstances, the blackness flattened itself to micro-thinness. Then it slowly began to probe the seals of the death chamber's door, seeking an opening.

NYATI, NEAR death, was trying to stand, using a wooden spear as a crutch. Banner stood with him, still slashing with a prison-built sword. But he, too, was fading fast.

Cross wasn't doing much better. He opened his eyes just as the chamber door began to crack at one of the top seals, pushed open by something blacker than darkness.

He had been expecting an Evac Team, but the blackness told him they were going to be too late. He sensed the shadow calling to whatever pieces outside the chamber were still unattached.

Calling them home.

Ortega and the Hmong attacked the thickening blackness from either side of the door, but their knife thrusts no longer had any effect.

Suddenly, the shadow-ma.s.s stopped writhing. A tiny blue symbol glowed briefly on Cross's right cheekbone, just below the eye. As the blue mark crystallized into what would be a permanent scar, Cross plunged into unconsciousness.

THE ONLINE edition of the Chicago Tribune screamed: RACE WAR AT FEDERAL PRISON!.

277 CONVICTS KILLED IN PRISON RIOT!.

"WORST IN HISTORY" SAYS BUREAU OF PRISONS

"Tell me again, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" the blond man said, almost incoherent with rage.

"By the time we got there, they were gone," Tiger repeated. "Maybe back to wherever they came from. The only trace they left behind was the body count."

"I'm done with this," Percy said. "Taking one alive, yeah, that was a brilliant idea. Look what it cost! And all for nothing."

"As long as I'm the head of this outfit, I don't give a d.a.m.n what you think," the blond man responded, back to his bloodless self-control. "Get out of my sight, all of you. I've got to work up another capture scenario."

Except for Wanda, all the others walked away.

A soft gray shadow followed them briefly, as though to shield them from harm. After a moment, it started to flow in the other direction, back toward the blond man and Wanda. At above-human detection levels, the "capture scenario" line was repeated. Then ...

"Hit!"

A glimmering pair of playing cards hovered over the heads of the blond man and Wanda: the ace and jack of clubs.

When the cards disappeared, the blond man and Wanda were hanging from the ceiling, missing their spines and skulls.

"THE OPERATION'S been closed down," Tiger told Cross. They were in the Visiting Room, about a month after the "riot."

"Because Blondie and his girlfriend got done?"

"No. Although I can tell you, even Tracker got a little pale when we found them in the War Room, just ... hanging like they were."

"The deal's still in place?"

"Immunity in front? I wouldn't bet the farm on it, not now."

"What can I get?"

"You can get out."

"I could do that without you. Remember, I'm not convicted of anything, and I've got a hunch the feds are going to drop the case."

"What do you want?"

"Stand up."

Cross held Tiger tenderly. As they kissed, his right hand dropped to Tiger's prominent b.u.t.t. Every eye in the room followed that hand, not the one hidden under Tiger's thick, striped mane.

"I didn't think that would work," she said, speaking very softly.

"It was a mortal lock," Cross a.s.sured her. "There's a little sc.r.a.p of paper under the back neckline of your sweater now. There's four names on it. They all need to have their cases reversed on appeal."

"So long as they didn't-"

"Four cases, three homicides, one rape. No kids, no drugs. And all innocent."

"That's still asking a lot. I don't mean from me-you know how they work."

"Yeah. Yeah, I do. But unless they handle this job, who're they going to debrief?"

"They don't need more than-"

"Yeah, they do. I think I've finally got this one figured out. And they'll need all of those guys on the list to have it make sense. Polygraph them, hit them with the truth serum, whatever they want. Maybe this time they'll go back and actually investigate. They'll see it for themselves."

"So you say."

Cross leaned in toward Tiger, his lips feather-touching her ear. "They didn't attack any of us-they ... it ... whatever it was, it only fought back in self-defense."

"They didn't hit me or Tracker, either. Percy's missing, but that could mean anything."

"Come back here and listen, okay? What I'm telling you is just between us. For now."

Tiger wiggled herself close, threw her left thigh over Cross's right. "How's this?"

"Very fine."

"Don't play games," Tiger warned him. "You think I had an o.r.g.a.s.m when you grabbed my a.s.s?"

"I came pretty d.a.m.n close."

"Just stop! Why didn't they attack any of you?"

"I don't know. I mean, they kind of did. But what I do know is that they could have finished us if they wanted-we were all running on empty, blood included. So they're not kill-crazy; they were on a mission. It's got something to do with crime, but only certain kinds of crime."

"How can-?"

"Sssh! Just listen. It's like they're thinning the herd. Culling out the sc.u.m. You check the sheets of the men they slaughtered, I'll bet you find something in common."

"What?"

"I don't know. But it feels like ... it feels like they're trying to ... yeah, I know how this is gonna sound ... like they're trying to take out the humans who're polluting their own race."

"But they're not-"

"Maybe not. But they kill humans, right? That's the race I'm talking about. We-humans, I'm saying-we're never satisfied with just killing each other, are we? No, we rape, we torture ... we march people into gas chambers a lot bigger than the one we tried to trap it in. There's nothing you can do to a human being that hasn't been done. By other humans.

"That ... shadow or whatever it was ... it's like it was playing a game of blackjack. Only 'hit' doesn't mean 'hit me'-it means 'hit them.' "

"They can read the cards every person's holding?"

"Maybe it is something like that. The closest I can get to what I'm trying to say is ... remember, when the n.a.z.is marched people into the gas chambers, it wasn't just Jews. h.o.m.os.e.xuals, Gypsies ... it would have been everyone on the planet but themselves. And even that wouldn't have lasted."

"I know."

"No, you don't. That's the political part, not the ... genetic, I guess. There's only one way to keep blood 'pure.' Inbreeding. And we know what happens in these families where incest covers too many generations. There's records going all the way back to Sawney Bean. And that's just written records. It might take us a while, but, eventually, the human race was going to rot from the inside out."

"I ... I can see that. But the n.a.z.is didn't succeed."

Cross took Tiger's hand in his. She made no move to pull away.

"Tiger, if you want to file this under 'Lunatic,' that's up to you. But what my mind keeps seeing is that smoke. The smoke from their ovens. That gray, shadowy smoke.

"What if, every time human slaughter ever occurred in the history of the world, there was more of that smoke? What if the smoke had ... I don't know ... something of the slaughtered people in it? What if it became a thing of its own?"

"I'm not telling those junior G-men any story like that."

"I don't want you to. I'm not telling them myself. I'll just feed them enough to send them alien-hunting."

"This ... theory of yours, you want to keep it to yourself?"