A shape dropped from the darkness above and hit the asphalt between the convoy vehicles like a demolition charge.
BL Killer Croc.
"Chato!" Amanda's voice cut through the noise.
El Diablo—Chato Santana, former gang enforcer, the man who carried a demon's fire in him regardless of his preferences—shook off whatever blankness had settled over him and raised both hands. A column of flame pushed Killer Croc back.
Hiss. A wall of ice rose across the road behind the convoy, temporarily blocking the pursuit.
Captain Cold had appeared somewhere in the last block—Leonard Snart, escaped from prison, cold gun back in hand. He'd simply attached himself to Amanda's convoy without announcing any particular intention to do so.
Amanda hadn't asked how he got out. She didn't mention it. He was here; that was sufficient.
Black Lanterns couldn't be cooked. Couldn't be frozen in any permanent sense. The assembled survivors exchanged a collective look of grim frustration. The BLs could fly. Their side was stuck in ground vehicles. There was no version of this math that ended well at their current rate.
"Where are we running to?" Snart asked, entirely too calmly for the circumstances.
"Washington." Amanda said it without hesitation.
Her actual calculation was simple. As an old acquaintance of Thea's, instinct told her Thea would have some way to protect her own mother. Amanda could use the excuse of "rushing to protect the President" as her cover story—and Washington was therefore the safest place she could be.
To her agents, this looked like an administrator thinking of the country even while being hunted. Word moved through the convoy: Even now, she's thinking about the President. Director Waller is something else.
"They're back on us!" An agent at the rear window shouted.
Over a hundred Black Lanterns were closing fast. Not just former Suicide Squad members—among the corpses A.R.G.U.S. had kept were a number of notorious criminals, many of them superpowered. Now the black rings were pointing them all at the living. Some hit with overwhelming force. Some spat acid. Some detonated. The road behind the convoy became a running gauntlet of spectacular and terrible superpower combinations deployed without strategy or restraint.
The Enchantress blinked into existence inside one of the jeeps as a column of black smoke. "Amanda—go to hell!" Five fingers spread—nails like polished knives—and drove straight for Amanda's chest.
Half the Suicide Squad members present developed a sudden, convenient case of slow reactions. Not our problem. Probably.
Katana didn't. She drove a kick into the Enchantress—like striking a stone pillar—but the impact bought Lyla Michaels enough time to drag Amanda out of the trajectory.
The claws caught Amanda's shoulder anyway. Five parallel gouges through the uniform and into flesh.
"Attack her!" Amanda's voice could have cut steel.
The squad reluctantly complied. These people still need more work, she thought, fury barely contained. Nearly got me killed.
Deadshot, El Diablo, and Bronze Tiger—none of them operating anywhere near their weight class in this fight—drove the Enchantress back long enough to create distance.
Chato's demon was a shadow of what it had once been. An encounter with Thea in a previous operation had nearly torn his soul loose, and his power had never fully recovered. He called it hellfire. In truth, it wouldn't even be enough to start a BBQ in Hell. The Enchantress dodged his fireballs without much effort; the two that connected achieved nothing she couldn't walk off.
Deadshot had a vein visibly pulsing in his forehead. The best shot in the world, completely useless when the target couldn't stay dead.
Bronze Tiger—one of the finest hand-to-hand combatants alive—was doing well just to stay on his feet.
The convoy was being herded. Slowly, deliberately, the Black Lanterns angled them off course from above. The road was narrowing. The options were narrowing. More BLs had joined in the interim—what had started as roughly a hundred criminal corpses was now closer to three hundred, as fallen A.R.G.U.S. agents added to the count.
Ordinary civilians she could at least send home to hide. The problem was the VIPs. Two senators were riding dead center in the convoy, loudly insisting they were also going to Washington to protect the President. Amanda would have dearly loved to kick them out the door.
Amanda stayed low beneath the window frame, dodging a boomerang she sensed more than saw, and spoke quietly to Lyla at her side.
"Any word from rescue?"
Lyla—who maintained her own private channel to Diggle, a fact both Thea and Amanda had long since chosen to leave alone—checked her wrist device.
Amanda already knew the Committee was untouched. Nevada. Barely any population out there, which meant barely any bodies, which meant no Black Lanterns to raise.
"Nothing yet. I think we might be—"
Amanda silenced her with a look.
"They're here." Lyla's head snapped up. Something changed in her expression—relief so sudden it looked like vertigo. "In the sky."
A massive carrier broke through the cloud layer and descended.
Weapons bays opened across its hull. Fire came down on every Black Lantern in the engagement zone simultaneously.
John Diggle—one third of the original Green Arrow team's core—stood on the bridge with both hands clasped behind his back, his black trenchcoat hanging from his shoulders, voice calm and precise as he directed fire patterns across the ground. The saturation strikes were calibrated to overwhelm BL regeneration—volley by volley, their self-repair simply couldn't keep up.
He'd always been the one standing two steps back. Always the steady hand in the background. Today Thea had handed him this—and he was going to make it count. He remembered what she'd said when she saw him in this getup, the suggestion she'd thrown out with that half-smile of hers. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the eyepatch. Put it on. Checked his reflection in the bridge window.
One eye covered, trenchcoat straight, carrier at his back. The look on his face said try me.
Not bad at all, he thought, quietly satisfied. Wait till Lyla sees this.
Below, every person who had spent the last hour convinced they were going to die looked up at the carrier breaking the clouds and exhaled something too raw to be a word. Even the Suicide Squad members let go of their grudge against Amanda for one moment and built a defensive perimeter while rescue craft descended.
Firestorm and Lobo covered the carrier's flanks.
Firestorm found his transmutation ability useless against the rings—he couldn't touch the construct—and switched entirely to raw nuclear fireballs. The temperature differential between his output and Chato's was not a close comparison. BL Killer Croc ignited like a bonfire. Even the Enchantress—veteran magic-user that she was—pulled back from the heat.
Lobo came in on the other flank with his space-Harley at full throttle, flying configuration engaged, sidecar occupied. The engine howl was followed by explosions, and more explosions, and then laughter that sounded like it was having the time of its life.
Deadshot recognized the passenger about half a second before she waved.
Harley Quinn—grinning, already winding up with a grenade as if it were a friendly greeting.
He raised his gun.