CHAPTER 26
They had just hit the outskirts of Mission City, and Jack had just started to think that maybe they’d made good on their gambit, that they’d eluded the Decepticons and stolen the AllSpark right out from under their noses, when Arcee said, “Heads up, six o’clock,” and he remembered an old battlefield axiom: no plan ever survived contact with the enemy.
Jack glanced backward. Past the Sector Seven vehicles, past the Autobots, past Optimus. The highway still held little more than sparse civilian traffic, but there were two vehicles that caught his eye. A police car that radiated sleek aggression, even that far back, and, beside it, a goddamn Buffalo MPV. “What the hell?” Jack asked. “Are those—”
A ripple passed through the olive-green angles of the Buffalo, and the boxy vehicle threw itself forward like it’d learned how to somersault, the whole back half twisting one-eighty. And, just as Jack recalled something about awe not just being wonder but dread, the Decepticon cast off its six-wheeled juggernaut of a disguise and emerged from hiding in a dead sprint.
“Decepticons?” Arcee snapped. “Yes! It’s Bonecrusher, and we can’t maneuver!”
And, that was a problem because, by God, was he fast. The police car Decepticon couldn’t do much more than linger in his wake. Bonecrusher had to be as tall as Optimus, but significantly wider, and he was gaining on the convoy even as every inch of Jack’s mind was telling him that there was no way something so big could move so fast.
There wasn’t much traffic on the highway, which was a small blessing, but what little there was scattered like a flock of startled ducks before Bonecrusher's charge. A bus swerved to the left, trying to get out of the Decepticon's way but miscalculating his speed or his direction or just his concern for collateral damage, and the Decepticon put his shoulder into it, punching through the vehicle like a meteor through tin foil. Awash in the flames of the bus’ fuel tank going up, Jack had the split-second thought of a demon charging out of his nightmares—and still Bonecrusher did not slow.
Ratchet and Ironhide dropped back as one, blocking the lanes, while Optimus slammed on the brakes and fell out of formation, tearing up the asphalt as he double-timed his transformation. He leaped clear, turning to face Bonecrusher as his pectoral armor settled into place—and the Decepticon crashed into him, tackling him like a football player carried by an avalanche, and the pair went over the side of the overpass, dropping out of sight.
“Arcee!” Jack shouted. “Optimus! He just—”
“I know,” she replied. “He’ll be fine.” She held formation, as did the other Autobots. “He knows the risks. He’ll do his part, and he trusts us to do ours.”
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But there was no sign of Optimus by the time they reached downtown Mission City—but, thinking positively, nor was there any sign of Bonecrusher. Jack had to put money on Optimus, but he had no idea of the odds on that call. Then, they lost Jazz. He broke formation to prevent the police car—Barricade, apparently—from keeping tabs on their movements. They didn’t hear anything from him after that, either.
The convoy slowed as it moved through the city streets. The sidewalks and doorways were filled with people glaring at their phones, griping about systems being down, calling out to them as they passed and asking if they were the National Guard. Whatever Soundwave had hit them with went far beyond Hoover Dam, it appeared. The odds of getting any back-up in time for the main event felt increasingly remote. If it came to a fight, Jack didn’t want to bet on small arms against giant alien robots that made the term darkly appropriate.
The convoy pulled up in the middle of an intersection. Lennox disembarked, followed by Epps, and waved Jack over. He hopped off Arcee and made his way across the intersection, shouldering his pack to make sure it was still there, while the other members of their impromptu platoon shouted at the bystanders to get inside.
“What’s the plan, Captain?” Jack asked.
“That depends,” Lennox replied, eyes up. Looking for the same things Jack was—lines of fire, routes of egress, incoming Decepticons. “You think our friend Banachek got through to Nellis?”
“Don’t know about friend, but, hey, I hope so.”
Lennox grinned but there wasn’t any humor in it.
“Great. Then we’re on the same page.”
Epps shook his head. “Yeah, well that page better be titled We Can’t Stop These Things Without The Air Force.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lennox replied. “The mission hasn’t changed. Right now, we’ve got cover, so, we need to get that cube—”
“What cube?” Sam asked.
Jack turned, and there she was. Sam Witwicky, in her brown hoodie and jeans, looking more like she’d wandered into a party she hadn’t been invited to than the middle of a military operation. Lennox thrust a finger at her, and then at the closest doorway.
“You need to get inside.”
“She’s with us,” Jack said.
“What?” Lennox asked. “Who is she?”
“I’m Sam,” she replied. “Who’re you?”
“Captain Lennox. What do you mean she’s with us, Darby?”
“Okay,” he said, chagrined, “she’s with me.”
Sam scoffed, and pointed over her shoulder at Bumblebee. “Please. I’m with him. But it’s good to see you’re okay, though. Hey, Arcee. So, what cube?”
Lennox’s face fell toward open confusion, but then shifted back, and he shook his head. “No, no. This is good. We can work with this. Okay, listen, Sam—”
Something screamed through the air above them, circling in. Jack glanced up, caught the sharp lines of an F-22 Raptor passing behind the skyscrapers. “Hey,” he said, pointing. “F-22. Two o’clock.”
“We’ll hold that thought,” Lennox told Sam. “Epps, get on the radio and tell them to roll in air cover and some Black Hawks to extract. I’ll pop smoke.”
He did. Lennox drew a flare and ignited it, and green smoke spread through the intersection. “Raptor, Raptor,” Epps called into his radio. “Do you copy? We have your visual. Be advised, green smoke is the mark. We need close air support and Black Hawks vectored for extraction, over.”
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The Raptor circled around for another pass. Something felt off. The back of Jack’s neck prickled. He had the distinct thought of a circling vulture, and that he’d forgotten something important.
“Raptor, Raptor,” Epps called again. “Do you copy, over?”
The Raptor banked in, turning hard and burning harder, coming straight up the street. The long straight street which, some part of Jack reminded him, made one hell of a shooting gallery. There was something he had forgotten, a known unknown...
“Raptor,” Epps murmured. “Oh, Raptor, please tell me you copy.”
There were moments, Jack knew, when time slowed. When you saw the glint of a rifle but hadn’t yet heard the bark of a bullet in flight. The inevitability of physics, of violence. The parabola arc of a shell in flight—that singular moment when it reached its apex, and began to fall back toward Earth, toward impact...
Jack felt himself take a breath, and in the gap between inhale and exhale, had just a second to catch the sunlight catching on the sleek lines of the Raptor’s wings and fuselage. The clutch of missiles dropping from its weapons bay, the exhaust plumes flaring—
“It’s Starscream!” Ironhide roared, already on his feet, already moving. Hefting a box truck alongside Bumblebee, lifting it like a shield, and just as Lennox screamed for everyone to “Hit the deck!” Starscream’s fusillade blasted Jack’s world, and what was left of their plan, into pieces.
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Everything hurt. Jack wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, just that he had. A slight hitch in his mind, a gap between then and now. But the pain meant he wasn’t dead. Jack rolled over, onto his back, coughing, and found himself staring up into Arcee’s optics.
She loomed over him, covering him like a bodyguard. Had covered him, literally. Her facial plates were as unreadable as ever. “Hi. Tell me you’re not dead.”
“I’m not dead?” Jack offered, blinking.
Arcee nodded.
“Then get up before he comes around for another run,” she replied, standing up and stepping back. She swept the skies with her energon arm-cannons, turning a circle. “I can’t see him! Ironhide?”
“I’ve got nothing!”
“Ratchet?”
“Nothing! Just interference!”
The intersection was a mess of broken asphalt, shattered glass, and twisted bodies. Some of them were in Sector Seven blacks. Some of them were not. The Sector Seven buggies were wrecked, and Lennox was busy pulling survivors and casualties from them as Epps shouted into his radio. The truck that Ironhide and Bumblebee had hefted up as a shield had been blown to pieces, but Ironhide looked okay. Which left Bumblebee. Where was Bumblebee?
“Jack!” Sam shouted, like she was on the verge of tears. “Bumblebee!”
The heart-wrenching tone was awful enough, but as Jack peered through the dust and smoke, he caught a glimpse of the door-winged shape of Bumblebee on the other side of the street—and the haze broke, and he saw him, crumpled against a storefront.
His legs had been blown off at the knees.
“Bumblebee!” Sam called, kneeling before him. “Come on! You have to get up!”
He couldn’t. He pulled himself out of a ruined storefront like a soldier who’d been shot in the gut, crawling hand over hand. Bumblebee warbled something wordless. “Arcee!” Jack called, racing over. “Ratchet!”
He didn’t know why he was calling them. There was nothing they could do. Not now, not in the middle of a battlefield. He was halfway there anyway, knowing he had to do something, when a shell blasted what was left of a damaged sedan into so much more wreckage.
Jack slid into cover, turning toward the source of the fire. It was a tank, rolling down from the other end of the street, maybe two blocks away. The distinctive silhouette of an M1A1 Abrams—only, it wasn’t. The more Jack stared, the more he realized it was to one of their tanks what a wolf was to a pug. It had a heavier armor package, a prow to clear mines, and a pair of secondary cannons set in a second turret above the primary smoothbore. Shit, it had a pair of missile pods that looked like they belonged on an attack helicopter.
A Decepticon. Another one.
Ironhide and Ratchet were already charging the tank, but they were charging an enemy that already had them locked up, had its firing solution, and it fired off a volley from its secondaries. Ironhide vaulted the shots, but Ratchet took two hits, and he staggered, snarling something in Cybertronian.
“Captain!” Jack called, pointing. “Enemy armor!”
“Move out! All teams engage!” Lennox replied, and led his men to follow the charging Autobots. Jack had taken three steps after them, joining the advance, before he realized he didn’t have a weapon. So, he just paused, and stood there.
The tank swung its main cannon to bear on Ratchet as the Autobot recovered, and Ironhide raised his arm-cannons—just as Jazz slid in from the intersecting street, already shifting from sports car to robot, and leapt upon the tank, grabbing its primary weapon and wrenching it to the side just as it fired.
The shot blasted apart a storefront, and Jack heard the Decepticon roar over the explosion, as the tank began to stand up in a manner that Jack could only read as furious. Jazz clambered over its shifting form like a dancer or a goddamn spider monkey, kicking one of the tank’s missile pods free, and swinging his own arm-cannon to bear at the tank’s head—but not fast enough, the tank grabbed Jazz and tossed him across the street.
Ironhide fired, and his shots went wide, snared by Decepticon jamming, only for them to arc back in and strike the tank on the chest. It turned to engage him, just as Ratchet swept in from the side and laid into the tank with what had to be a goddamn surgical buzzsaw, hacking the tank’s left arm off at the elbow with one sweeping strike. Still, the tank was indomitable, and it lashed Ironhide with missiles and sprayed down Ratchet with minigun fire from its remaining arm.
“Concentrate your fire!” Lennox shouted in the distance, and the soldiers opened up with their grenade launchers, putting round after round into the tank. Jack had no idea if they were having any effect. A shot from Ironhide took the tank in the chest, and it tumbled back, howling and burning. Something bright blue arced through the air—energon—as the tank went down.
All those blocks away, Jack just stood there and, once again, felt like he was trapped in the open air. That there was nothing he could do except watch his friends die. That, for all their efforts, all they had achieved was to knock a single Decepticon down.
A dark shape swept over the street and, if Starscream had been a vulture circling for prey, then this was was the shadow of a dragon swooping down from on high. Ratchet glanced upward, and Jack knew who it was before he said it: “It’s Megatron! Fall back!”
The Decepticon warlord dropped out of the sky, shifting from an angular starfighter to his warlord form, resplendent and scarred. He turned as he landed, swinging his fusion cannon to bear on the closest target—Jazz.
And Jazz, turning to retreat, saw what Jack saw—the fleeing humans, Lennox’s men and women, civilians. All whom desperately needed cover, or none of them would make it out of there alive.
Jazz turned to face Megatron, raising his right arm—
Megatron fired first, blasting Jazz into the air, freeing him from the bonds of gravity, and sending him tumbling. He hadn’t even hit him. He hadn’t needed to. He’d struck the ground near Jazz, and the sheer firepower of his weapon was enough that even a glancing blow was apocalyptic. Jazz hit the ground, sparking and smoking, his armor shattered, falling away from him. Groaning, he shook his head, and struggled to rise.
“Fall back!” Ratchet shouted. “Retreat! Jazz, get out of there!”
“Jack,” Arcee said, grabbing him by the shoulder. “We have to go.”
“Cover him!” Lennox shouted. “Cover the Autobot!”
Lennox’s men obeyed, firing as they withdrew, covering each other in teams. Jazz got to his hands and knees, only for Megatron to stomp him back down against the asphalt. The grenades popping against his silver armor might as well have been firecrackers.
Megatron reached down, seizing Jazz by the leg, and hauled him into the air with one hand, like he was nothing but a misbehaving doll. Jazz, dangling in Megatron’s grip, fired his energon blaster, once, twice— “That all you got, Megatron? Huh?! You want a piece?!”
Even as far away as he was, Jack knew it was nothing but empty defiance. Spitting in the eye of a demigod.
“You want a piece of me, Megatron?!” Jazz snarled, thrashing. “You want a piece?!”
Megatron tilted his head.
“Oh no, little cretin,” he crooned, as he clutched Jazz around the neck with his other massive hand, tightening his grip around the Autobot’s ankle—and, as distant as he was, Jack could see the Decepticon smile.
“I want two!”
With the slightest flex of his shoulders, Megatron ripped Jazz in half, bright blue energon spilling to the road below, hissing and bubbling, and then threw the bisected Autobot aside. And, just like that, Jack thought, the fighting withdrawal had become something closer to a rout.