I eyed him closely. “You don’t seem surprised by my return, Hawk.”

He shrugged. “Nah. I figured you were still out there, somewhere, waiting for the right moment before you dragged your sorry ass out of whatever hidey-hole you’d slithered into.” I could tell he was lying, though-I always could. He’d literally jumped for joy when he thought I’d fallen into that reactor core. Seeing me again (even if it wasn’t the real me) was troubling him deeply; it was obvious by the way he kept nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

I directed the android’s servomotors to twist the corners of its mouth into an approximation of a smile. “Yes, well, now that I’ve ‘slithered’ back out, I have just one question for you.”

He tensed, no doubt expecting me to attack. “And what’s that?”

“Are you familiar with the Book of Revelations?” I asked.

DevilHawk started, then shook his head in disbelief. “Huh. Never figured you as the type to get religion, Prof.” He flashed that insufferably condescending grin of his. “You gonna start quoting Scripture now?”

“Just a verse or two,” I replied. I cleared my mechanical throat. “ ‘And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death. And Hell followed with him.’ ”

As planned, that was the moment when my-or, rather, the synthadroid’s-chest began beeping. Counting down.

The Hawk’s eyes widened. His jaw slackened. It was such a delicious moment when he finally realized that he’d been conversing with a machine. That he’d been denied another opportunity to pound my head down around my ankles. And that my stand-in was about to explode.

I immediately pulled out of the computer brain and returned to my body. I’d had the last word; now I could observe what came next from the safety of my lair. Overnight, Smythe had dispatched a squad of technicians to install hidden cameras throughout the area, so I could enjoy the festivities. All I had to do now was sit back and watch.

The Hawk leapt forward, grabbed hold of the android’s shirt, and tore it open. No doubt he expected to find a timer under there, one that would give him some idea of how much time remained before the blast. Time enough, I suppose, for him to find a way to defuse the bomb.

There was no timer, however; I’d stopped using those years ago. Perhaps if DevilHawk had paid for a subscription to Scientific American instead of Maxim, he would have been able to keep up with the recent changes in mad scientist technology, instead of focusing all his attention on the cup size of the latest cosmetically-sculpted supermodel. I, on the other hand, learned of and quickly invested in some of the more popular trends in terrorist equipment, such as biological weapons, laser-guided missiles… and voice-activated switches. In this case, quoting from Revelations was the trigger; the bomb was set to detonate five seconds later. Long enough for me to savor the horrified look in the costumed hero’s eyes as he saw the end coming.

The explosion was… spectacular. Like Vesuvius unleashing its molten fury or the gates of hell being thrown wide open. Every one of my hidden cameras were vaporized in a split-second; a minute later, my lair was struck by an intense shockwave-even three miles down-that knocked out the generators and plunged us into darkness. By the time we were able to get some of the systems back online and the monitors restored, I was left with only the views provided by my spy satellites to see what was taking place in Amicus.

And what a sight it was. The flames roared high above the spot where the city should have been, extending upward into the atmosphere as though the devil himself was reaching up with a giant hand to pluck the stars from the sky. And when I focused the cameras on the ground, I saw no evidence that Amicus still existed-every building, every tree, every person had been consumed.

“Oh, my God…” I heard Elsinore whisper behind me. I, on the other hand, was at a loss for words.

It was a much larger explosion than I’d expected. And it didn’t stop.

Suddenly, the sky itself was aflame, and the fire began spreading, moving outward from Amicus in all directions. And as the conflagration began its apocalyptic race around the planet, I recalled a declassified U.S. government document I’d once come across in my studies: a report filed by Arthur Compton, one of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the early days of atomic bomb research. In it, he mentioned that a fellow scientist, Edward Teller, had expressed some concerns about the first test explosion-that the possibility existed they might wind up igniting the atmosphere through the fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. He was proved wrong, of course. Atomic bombs were incapable of setting fire to the atmosphere.

Hellfire, however, could. And did.

And as the world burned, I came to understand just why Other-Plum had steered away from testing his compound. He knew-feared-this might happen.

I came to another chilling realization at that moment, for my subconscious had never stopped trying to decipher the crudely scrawled word I’d seen on my twin’s patent application for Plum ’s Controlled Compound. It had finally worked through the puzzle; now I had my answer.

It wasn’t “Detonation.” It was “Deflagration”-the continuous process by which combustion spreads via thermal conductivity, as when something hot, like an uncontrollable flame, heats and then ignites something cold.

Like the atmosphere.

That was a little over a year ago. The flame front circled the globe in a matter of hours, burning brightly until the lack of oxygen finally extinguished it. By then, every human and animal, bird and insect, flower and tree had either died from asphyxiation or been incinerated-save for those men and women (and one child) who were gathered in this underground facility. And even that situation would change, over time.

The first three months were especially trying. As the realization that they would never see their loved ones again, never be able to set foot on the surface for the rest of their lives, finally sank in among my followers, problems arose. Some committed suicide; others slowly went mad. The majority, however, decided to turn their anger on me. Elsinore did her best to keep the rabble in line; eviscerating the most vocal among them seemed the best deterrent, though they never stayed quiet for long. By the time things finally settled down, I was reduced to thirty underlings from a staff of more than one hundred.

Well, it certainly helped to make the emergency rations last longer. But it did nothing really to resolve a far greater crisis: what to do for breathable air when the oxygen supply ran out seven months later.

Thankfully, most of the surviving noncombatants were technicians, not soldiers, which meant we could focus on carrying out my solution to the predicament: abandon the lair and travel to another Earth via the dimensional portal. Unfortunately, a number of the gate’s power cells had been damaged by the explosion’s shockwave, and repairing the system would require cannibalizing other equipment that had been damaged just as badly. It would also take more time to accomplish the work than we had available air in the oxygen reserves… unless the ranks were thinned even further.

I put that consideration on hold until the repairs were well underway. What little chance we had of departing the necropolis this Earth had become served as a great motivator for my staff, and I was not about to deny them that hope, especially when it meant the difference between escape and another potential uprising. Still, I knew cuts would be necessary at some point, given the dwindling amount of supplies on hand-there was no getting away from it. Yet I couldn’t just start… firing the techs. I needed their expertise. That left upper management, and I knew I would have to personally oversee those terminations.