Ilya’s wheelchair brake was no match for the storm and his chair began to slide. Stefan, leaning hard into the wind, practically horizontal, with his shoes slipping, grabbed the wheelchair and kept it from getting away.
All the while the Pale Queen’s creatures were battered against the support towers, the roadway, the railings, the cables. Many more were simply blown beneath the bridge to hit the water on the far side.
Then, in the midst of mayhem, the earth rolled. It was more than an earthquake. It was the earth as a heaving, bucking bull in a rodeo. The bridge shuddered and whipped. The entire roadway was like a writhing snake. Pieces of pavement broke loose, were snatched by the wind and hurled away. A car rolled over and slammed into the far side rail.
It was madness. It was death and destruction.
Mack raised his head and squeezed an eye open and saw that now even the Pale Queen’s magic had weakened. The barrier that had protected her creatures was broken in places, and the monster army was sucked out of numerous holes, landing in the churning sea and drowning.
But the storm hurt good as well as evil. The police SWAT team was nowhere to be seen. The helicopters were crumpled wrecks. The Coast Guard ship was crunched against the northern bridge pier.
The wind began to die down. The earthquake’s force lessened. Mack shot a frightened look toward the city. Most of the wind had blown straight through the Golden Gate but had only struck a sideways blow at the city. Still, Mack could see broken windows in the tall buildings of downtown—broken windows and dead monsters sliding down the slanted face of the Transamerica Pyramid. Like bugs that had hit a car windshield, they had left smeary trails of guts.
The bridge still stood, but snapped cables hung down, and the road surface was a cracked, pitted mess. Dead or dying creatures stuck in the cables like grotesque parodies of birds sitting on power lines.
The Magnificent Eleven pulled themselves together. They twisted their windblown clothing back into place. They patted their hair down. They squished the flesh of their faces back into shape.
Down below, Mack saw that the Coast Guard ship had survived. It was bent in the middle, but it had survived. And the SWAT team and marines had managed to climb onto the vertical face of the stone pier before the winds hit. The wind had pinned them against it, and that had saved their lives.
But they looked shaken up. Well, everyone was shaken up.
“I think we did it,” Rodrigo said.
“We shall see,” Sylvie said doubtfully.
“O.M. GEEE!” Hillary said. “Is this what it’s like hanging around with you people?”
Dietmar and Xiao were closest to Mack. They exchanged skeptical glances.
It was Stefan who said, “Better look at that.”
They all followed the direction of Stefan’s gaze. And they saw then that they had not won a victory, just a temporary reprieve.
The volcano had ceased to belch smoke and ash and lava. Now it was splitting open at the top, like a flower opening to the sun. It split in vast sections, like the sections of an orange.44 The newly calmed sea rippled like someone shaking out a sheet to put on a bed. The sound of rock splitting and boulders rolling and dirt cascading came to their ears.
And from
that volcano, from the underground world where she had been imprisoned for three thousand years, she rose.
The Pale Queen was come at last.
And all hope died.
Twenty-six
The Pale Queen was like a fashionista in that she could wear anything. Anything at all. Only instead of a dress or a nice pair of slacks, she could do the same with her very body, her shape. The form she took.
Her powers were unlike anything the world had seen before.
A single hand rose from the volcano as the newly made, still steaming-hot mountain split apart. A single hand so big it was plainly visible from the bridge, miles away.
That hand had five fingers, each deathly white, each ending in a wickedly curved fingernail of some glittering metal. It might have been silver. It might have been titanium. It might have been some alloy forged in the deep bowels of the earth. One thing we know: those nails could sink into solid rock and rip it like a hunk of cheese.45
Behind that hand came an arm. An arm wreathed in a bracelet made of bones that seemed to have been dipped in that same silvery metal. The flesh of that arm was as pale as a sheet of paper, but more translucent. Within the flesh one could see the pumping arteries carrying blue blood, blood that would turn black if it were ever spilled.46
The arm rose like a tower, like a living skyscraper, straight up from that volcano and then! A second hand, a second arm, now squeezing out of the volcano.
A third! And it was too much for the mound of cooling, hissing lava. The volcano simply fell apart, rolled in massive chunks to splash into the sea.