CHAPTER NINE

Matt followed Sakura toward the waiting group of uniformed officers, a hodgepodge of men and women in dress blues or SEDENA digital camouflage, shuffling feet and fidgeting on the tarmac. They sweated under the oppressive Mexican sun, though not as badly as Matt. Setting down his operations case – thumbprint-locked and five feet long, it held his combat shotgun with high-explosive, fragmentation, and armor-penetrating microgrenades, REC-7 assault rifle with ceramic composite 'bonk killer' rounds, plus an assortment of more traditional grenades and monofilament combat knives – he shook hands and introduced himself and Sakura.

General Marco Valdez looked like a half-dead version of his dossier photo. A tall man, his close-cropped silver hair popped against his dark brown skin, and the smile on his rugged face didn't reach his haggard eyes. He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish, and a young woman next to him in a dress blue skirt-suit translated in unaccented English. "Mister Rowley, Miss Isuji, thank you for coming. You've seen the news so I won't waste your time explaining the obvious: we're in deep trouble, and we don't know what to do about it. If the threat isn't contained in seventy-two hours the president has authorized the use of strategic fuel-air bombs to eliminate it. We would like to avoid—"

Sakura interrupted, her voice clipped. "When did the Mexican government get strategic fuel-air bombs?"

General Valdez turned to her as his interpreter translated, and replied through her. "We have been exploring all options for dealing with the cartels. When the civilian populations live under the terror of madmen, sometimes you do as you must."

She nodded, face a blank mask, and he continued as an aide brought up a map of Cholula on a tablet.

"The effects seem to be centered on the pyramid, and extend just over eight kilometers in every direction. Beyond that range people have fled, most of them, though aerial reconnaissance has picked up too many instances of civilians trying to flee the afflicted zone. After some unfortunate incidents we…" The interpreter swallowed. "We are killing all who seek to escape the quarantined area, and cannot send any more in. We've lost too many soldiers already, to friendly fire."

"Mind control." Matt frowned.

"Something like that. Our best and trusted soldiers turn on one another when they get too far inside the quarantine zone. We've lost a battalion, and six helicopters."

Sakura pointed toward the sky. "Eight kilometers, pretty high. High as a bomber."

"We've considered that, and have mobilized long-range assets. Your president denied our request for strategic support."

Matt put his hand up. "Wait. You can't possibly be considering bombing your own city."

The general shrugged.

The interpreter grimaced. "If you can't help us we're going to have to."

* * *

An hour later, Matt approached the quarantined zone around Cholula. The dense line of military trucks, makeshift barricades, and now-abandoned buildings ringed an enormous area. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the perimeter, armed with FX-05 Xuihcoatl 'Fire Snake' assault rifles and carbines, some with underslung air-burst grenade launchers. Pillboxes dotted the rooftops outside the barricade, the barrels of tripod-mounted machine guns poking out from piles of sandbags. In the midday heat Matt couldn't see the mountains behind a yellow-gray haze of dust, smog, and humidity, so the pyramid and its church dominated the skyline.

Soldiers made way and saluted the general, Matt and Sakura in his wake, the interpreter and two aides hurrying by his side. Matt ignored the excited whispers and awed looks, the signs of the cross and damning scowls, instead focusing on the carnage beyond the barricade.

Bright-red blood streaked the asphalt and spattered buildings. Dozens of bodies lay in the street, twisted or slumped, dark stains on their clothing, some missing limbs, others heads. Makeshift weapons littered the ground around them, pipes and axes, chains, wrenches, nail-studded chunks of construction lumber, even a few firearms – hunting rifles and old revolvers, and the occasional military-issue Fire Snake.

The whispers cackled their sadistic glee, and the sound reverberated down streets and alleys, echoing off of silent buildings. Something black mingled with the jade, filling Matt's nostrils with a burnt mix of cinnamon, coriander, allspice, and cooking flesh. It throbbed in time with his heart, each pulse a rush of violence straight to his frontal lobe. Sakura grunted, and Matt turned to assess the murder in her eyes, the promise of sex and death and sex in death, and restrained himself from knocking her down and gouging out those furious eyes and fucking her still-screaming skull. As the white whispers shocked down his synapses, his son and Akash and a million other souls muffling the jade whispers and the dark power amplifying them, Sakura's eyes softened.

"You feel that."

He nodded, though it wasn't a question.

"My Kazuko is protecting me. Same for you?" Sakura's daughter's voice had become her white whispers the moment she'd died from cancer, the same moment Sakura's augmentations had returned.

He nodded again, throat dry from wanting to scream. "The gang's all here."

The soldiers hadn't reacted. As the whispers clawed at the insides of his skull, Matt wondered if the egregoroi's powers keyed off of Gerstner's, and if they'd fight or play nice in his head. For the moment the white contained the jade and black, so he turned to Valdez.

"I've seen enough. We'll go in by foot." They didn't have the ESG Gryphon winged gliders they'd used to infiltrate Dawkins's stronghold on Lake Kivu, and gearing up a plane for a HALO jump would take too long. Matt could cover five miles in just over fourteen minutes without tiring himself out, and Sakura could do it in half that time. "You understand that there could be massive civilian casualties, even if we do this right."

Valdez nodded. "Our options are bad and worse."

"And we have full authorization to use US and NATO forces to contain and eliminate the threat."

"Si. Yes," he said without the interpreter.

Matt keyed up his COM. "Janet?"

"Go ahead."

"Deploy Dragonflies, and put two Reapers up. General Valdez will make sure you have clear airspace."

"You got it, bud."

The Mexican army didn't have any combat drones, but Matt had direct command of up to four, only usable outside the United States and its territories. Sleeker but well bigger than a car with a twenty-meter wingspan, each Reaper carried four Hellfire Romeo missiles – armor piercing munitions capable of leveling buildings – and two GPS-guided JDAM BLU-97/B Combined Effect cluster bombs, dozens of individually-guided smart munitions designed to make everything in a half-block area go away. For fighting an egregoroi and an unknown number of hostiles, Matt would have preferred gunship support.

They kitted up, ignoring the stares as they loaded hundreds of pounds of weapons and ammunition into pouches, packs, and straps. Sakura carried her REC7 with a satchel of 'bonk killer' ammo in spare magazines, at least four combat knives, and a bandolier with fragmentation, incendiary, and flash-bang grenades. Matt skipped the knives and assault rifle in favor of the AA-12 and his own bandolier of grenades.

Pulling on his combat helmet, he switched the visor to black and took in the Dragonfly feed, a composite overview of the city in full color projected on his heads-up display. The cloud of information spread out as the robotic insects flitted deeper and deeper into hostile territory, replacing the fog of war with a coded overlay identifying potential targets. Buildings, streets, and individual stories shaded green if clear, red if potential hostiles were present, and light blue if the Dragonflies couldn't assess for threats.

Default settings labeled every living human as a potential hostile.

Target designations popped up, giving the team a common language in the blink of an eye.

The closest hostiles crouched behind a dumpster three blocks away, just out of sight of sniper fire, their bloody hands clutching improvised weapons, clothes a torn mass of red-brown gore. Behind them a brick building stood three stories high, windows shattered, top floor smoking, with at least sixty hostiles inside, waiting. The Dragonflies called it A-1, the first target.

"Sakura, cut right. We'll circumvent A-1, go left around A-2, then punch straight for B13 through that open market. If we hit any surprises, flank them. Janet, if A-1 comes for us, knock it down."

Sakura dodged to the right, a wide loop that kept her out of sight of A-1. Matt did the same on the left, dashing from cover to cover, eyes and ears alert for anything the swarm of microdrones might have missed. His visor dimmed the visible light enough for his infrared and ultraviolet vision to work through it, providing more detail that supplemented the Dragonfly feed. The whole town reeked of blood and shit, overwhelming the underlying aroma of dust, corn flour, and cinnamon. He made it four deserted blocks before Janet piped up.

"Sakura, you've got four hostiles on your six. Matt, eight on your ten, closing fast."

"Yes," Sakura said, as Matt replied, "Roger."

He watched the bedraggled, bloodstained octet approach on the HUD, creeping up on his position, their clumsy attempts at stealth rendered moot by the Dragonflies. He zoomed in – improvised clubs and machetes, nothing that would require a gun. Matt dashed across the street and took cover behind an overturned pushcart, feet skidding across the mushy remains of apples baking in the sun.

They approached at a crouching run, covering the ground in loping strides more like animals than men, shoulders hunched, weapons dangling from their hands. The feed from Sakura's helmet camera flashed, a blur of motion as she took her assailants apart. Footsteps slapped across the pavement, stealth abandoned in favor of an all-out charge.

Matt rose, caught an overhead swing from an aluminum bat on his left forearm, then chopped down into the man's leering face. His cheek and nose exploded toward the sidewalk, and Matt turned into the blow, ducking low to avoid a swing from a second assailant.

Air whistled overhead.

Still turning, Matt chopped the side of his hand into the second man's ribs. Stumbling sideways, machete falling from his hands, the man dropped to his knees and looked into Matt's eyes with unbridled hatred. Blood dribbled from his assailant’s mouth and nose, and Matt turned to meet the next four head-on.

He shattered a skull with his helmet, snapped a neck with a kick to the side. A machete scraped down the armor on his bicep without fraying the Teflon-coated fabric, much less damaging the carbon fiber-reinforced ceramic underneath. Matt grabbed the arm and swung, hurling the machete-wielder into another man hard enough for blood to erupt from both their mouths. A board bounced off his helmet. Spinning, he crushed a throat with a punch, then turned to the last man.

Flexing his fingers, he circled around the pushcart and the bodies strewn around it. His opponent gripped a bent piece of rebar, his yellowed teeth exposed in a soundless snarl.

Hands upheld, Matt took a step back. "Walk away. You don't have to die today."

Circling, passing the rebar from hand to hand, he babbled something neither English nor Spanish, a rapid-fire string of syllables none of which Matt recognized.

He tried high-school Spanish. "Put it down. I don't have to kill you."

Snarl unchanged, the man charged. Matt sidestepped a clumsy swing, and another. The best martial artist in the world stood no chance against an Aug – this man probably sold street food or ran a bicycle repair shop.

Matt tried again. "Please stop."

The air shuddered, the enormous noise muffled automatically by his helmet, and building A-1 flashed on his HUD, then disappeared.

"Quit dicking around," Janet said. "You've got more incoming. A lot more."

Matt stepped inside a clumsy swing and brought his elbow into the man's temple, hard enough to knock him senseless but not hard enough to kill. The man fell to all fours, then lunged, his full-arm tackle wrapping Matt's waist without budging him. Matt chopped the back of his head, again hard enough to render any normal person unconscious. The man bit down, trying to chew a hole through his armor.

"Matt…"

Skull crunching under the impact of a downward punch, his opponent finally collapsed.

Matt ran.

Sakura joined him halfway to the open market, matching him stride for stride, a black combat knife in each hand. "You see this?"

Hundreds of hostiles closed on their position, maybe a thousand, matching speed and direction to intercept them though they were out of sight and several blocks away. He grunted. "I think it knows we're coming."

"C-9," Sakura replied, changing course. He followed her toward the vacant five-story office building with huge glass windows on every floor. Red blips surrounded by double-triangles shifted to match their new trajectory – farther away, they'd reach the building seconds before the mob.

"What's the plan?"

"Up, then jump to C-6." C-6 stood across the street from C-9, a brick-façade hardware store three stories tall with a terracotta roof. A shed in the back made for a fifteen-foot drop, then another to the ground. The initial jump would leave a bruise, but they'd both survived much worse.

"Won't buy us much." They rounded the corner and bolted across a small park, skirting a wading pool turned pink with half-floating bodies. A roar erupted as a growing mob sprinted across the open space to cut them off, a boiling tide of filthy men, women and children screaming and hissing in unbridled hatred. They filled the streets and alleys, loping gaits turning to outright sprints as they caught sight of their quarry.

Two Augs against a thousand people – nobody could survive that. The whispers, Jade and black, told him not to, told him to join them in the naked, bloody revelry that defined mankind.

At a dead run Sakura fired the REC7 at the front doors, shattering the glass. Her voice carried over the COM as she disappeared inside. "Slow them or you won't make it."

Matt raised the AA-12 and put his finger on the trigger, still sprinting. His Friend-or-Foe picked two dozen targets, each five to ten feet from the next. Three of them children, no older than ten. Gritting his teeth, he fired. The weapon bucked, and fin-stabilized grenades hammered the front of the crowd. Bodies burst, bodies fell, people staggered to the side holding faces and stomachs and shredded limbs.

The mob ran over the top of them, barely slowed.

Matt rushed through the broken glass and backed into the lobby, indiscriminately spraying the crowd with frag rounds. People burst, spraying those behind with steaming red blood and chunks of meat and bone. As the entryway choked with hot, messy remains the mob pushed, using sheer mass to slide the smoking remnants forward.

Matt reloaded on the run up a spiral stair to the second floor where Sakura fired controlled bursts into the hostiles, prioritizing those who'd made it around the growing pile. The mob flowed across the entryway like grasping tentacles, each sucker a human soul enslaved to the egregoroi's will.

Sakura threw a pair of grenades down the stair and disappeared into the fire exit. Firing, Matt followed, slamming the door behind him before running up after her. Taking stairs four at a time, he pulled the pin on a frag. The door below banged open, so he let the grenade fall, spoon tumbling from his fingers after the explosive. He pulled another, still running, and dropped it.

One detonated, the second moments later. Ears ringing, he made another two floors before his eardrums healed enough to hear again. Footsteps hammered up toward him, so he dropped two more grenades before hitting the crash bar on the top floor and rolling out into a hallway carpeted with drab industrial gray-brown.

Sakura kneeled between executive offices with massive windows that looked out over the city and toward the haze-obscured mountains beyond, her REC7 trained on the far exit. Above her, a ladder led to a hatch. "It's open. Go."

Backing toward it, he opened fire on the exit door as it opened, blasting the first through into smithereens. The far door banged open and Sakura dropped one man, then two, then five.

Matt fired three more shots, shouldered his weapon, and leapt. His hand closed on the bottom of the maintenance ladder, metal cool against his skin. He hauled himself up, shouldered open the roof access and clambered out into hazy sunlight. Sakura's rifle popped below. He took aim into the hole and yelled, "Clear!"

She appeared at his side before he could pull the trigger, sending a trio of fragmentation grenades down the hole. The access door slammed closed under its own weight. It had no lock.

"Let's go." He took a step and she grabbed his wrist.

"Not yet."

She nodded toward the mob on the street, hundreds of people still flowing into the building, faces twisted in inhuman rage but without the slightest sign of pushing or shoving. A green circle appeared on his HUD, high in the sky and approaching fast.

"Oh, shit. Sakura, these people are innocent."

She nodded, almost more of a bow. "Yes."

"Goddammit." They didn't have the ammo, even at a bottleneck, to deal with thousands of fanatical civilians. Even if they did, they'd never kill them all before more arrived, and General Valdez would run out of options.

Sakura fired as the hatch cracked open. It shut, then opened again a moment later. The first body erupted out of the hole, and though she shot the woman in the head two more spilled out, barely slowed by the bleeding meat obstacles in their way.

"Fuck," Matt said, bowling a grenade into the hole as Sakura double-tapped the three on the roof. Red mist puffed from their heads, and they dropped.

"Now." Sakura disappeared in a blast of wind, and he turned to follow her blur as she disappeared off the roof, flying out toward the hardware store.

"Incoming," Janet said.

Feet crunching across the gravel, Matt reached the edge and leapt. A concussive wind knocked him forward, the rising fireball from the Hellfire Romeo turning the world orange red as he sailed over the street.

Legs churning, he hit the terracotta tiles and tumbled forward, using his momentum to roll from his shoulder to his hip before regaining his feet on the precarious slope, taking five more steps and leaping again, skidding off the tin roof of the shed to land on the ground, weapon raised, scanning for hostiles.

A cloud of concrete dust rose above them, billowing out to blanket the neighborhood.

His shoulder burned.

Janet chimed in. "About a thousand down, but there's a lot more where that came from. If you're going to make that temple, you need to hoof it."

Matt took off at a run, Sakura at his side. "What have you got left for armament on those Reapers?"

"Five Hellfires and four whatever the hell those others things are. But the Powell has moved into position in the Gulf, and can provide us with some other options." A US Navy Destroyer in weapons range opened all kinds of possibilities.

"Like what kind of options?"

"High Speed Strike Weapons, bunker busters, if the Mexican government authorizes it." Still experimental, HSSWs traveled at six times the speed of sound and used compression shockwaves to provide lift. The four thousand-pound missiles slammed tungsten rods into their target with the energy of a ton of TNT each, a tiny fraction of even a small nuclear warhead, but concentrated on a tiny area. The shock of impact would obliterate reinforced concrete and ravage living bodies before the explosives even detonated.

"Tell them General Valdez authorizes it, and when we're a quarter mile from that temple, have them level it. Then use the Reapers to play crowd control while we find Mr Happy, if there's anything left of him."

* * *

The church – and the pyramid below it – disintegrated a split second before the sonic boom hit, slamming Sakura against the wall of the building behind her. She took off at a dead run, straight toward the collapsing ruin, covering half the intervening distance before the ground had settled.

A figure rose from the rubble, ten feet tall and radiant. His almond eyes accentuated rugged skin tanned a deep brown, and his pronounced forehead and protruding jaw proclaimed him a creature from an earlier epoch. A cloak of woven corn husks trailed down his back and across the ground as he stalked forward, his enormous, muscular body bedecked with jewelry – simple beaded necklaces, bracelets, and anklets of green jade connected with fine silver links – and nothing else. His eyes burned with an all-consuming black fire.

Her gaze traveled down to his comically large penis, engorged and swinging with every step, and back up past oversized hands and giant, square teeth to meet his eyes.

Desire bloomed in her abdomen, and lower, a physical need more powerful than any drug. It consumed her, and for the first time in her life she wanted a man. She wanted to be violated by this heinous monstrosity, consumed, broken and used.

Kazuko laughed, and Sakura laughed with her, an American laugh made for effect, and the daitengu scowled. Rowley called them Watchers and rolled them into his Judeo-Christian mythology, but Sakura recognized a demon when she saw one, and didn't need Rowley's monotheistic trappings to see through this one.

It spoke, nonsense words in a pre-Olmec tongue. Guttural and low, they reverberated in her bones, and she stumbled to a stop.

Another wave of desire shuddered through her, her body wet and ready and wanting him to destroy her. Her uncle had wanted her like this, as had oyabun Kasahara Noboru. The first had taken her innocence at far too young an age, while the second she had used for three years to decapitate an ancient dynasty of boryokudan, what the westerners called Yakuza. Both had wielded the pathetic flesh between their legs to stake a claim, to subjugate beyond all human decency and reason, to enslave and to own. One dead, the other in prison, she'd shown each their folly, but not before Kasahara had given her a daughter.

She laughed again, and spoke to the giant creature in formal Japanese. "Surely you understand me, daitengu, at least in speech." Head raised in defiance, she drew her combat knives. "But I understand you so much more."

It spoke again, and she flushed again, this time with rage. The desire to kill, to take its life – to take any life – a raging fire in her breast threatening to burst forth and consume all around her in an orgy of never-ending violence. She wanted nothing less than to paint the ground with its blood, and gorge on the remains.

Her first kill had been a john beating her mother. She'd picked up a kitchen knife and slid it into the side of his fat belly, sawing forward as he pulled away in shock and horror. His entrails had spilled out onto the bed, coating her mother and the sheets beneath, a seppuku borne by choices without honor. Instead of incarcerating her, the police had used her, and she had lost count of how many she had killed while undercover as Kasahara-san's mistress and enforcer, nor how many more as an augmented soldier for ICAP.

And not one of those murders had come from rage or desire, but only duty and honor.

She laughed again, and stepped forward. "Perhaps you do not understand me at all, daitengu. Perhaps you are just a pathetic thing in want of an audience."

His arrogant scowl deepened, lips twisted into a snarl, the paragon of the expression worn by his murderous followers. It spoke in all languages and none. "I am Ometeotl, the father of Gods, and I will not be mocked."

Shaking her head, she advanced on the balls of her feet, ready to spring, keeping the wry smile on her face. "It is not my fault that the truth mocks you, daitengu. You are a relic, sad and old, deserving only of pity, a wounded dog lashing out with mindless, misplaced fury. It is fortunate that I am here to put you down and end your dishonor."

With a roar, Ometeotl charged.

* * *

Matt hefted the sign, a seven-foot chunk of metal with a ball of concrete on one end and a red octagon with 'ALTO' in white letters on the other. Almost well-balanced, it packed a much heavier punch than his combat knives and carried a significantly smaller chance of injuring Sakura than the AA-12.

Their conversation over, she stood in the middle of the square as the egregoroi charged, knives at her sides, an actual, honest-to-goodness smile on her face. She'd kept her visor clear, so she meant the fallen angel to see it. To make it angry. Matt ran, and timed his swing for the moment before it hit her.

Concrete shattered against Ometeotl's ribs, the blow knocking the fallen angel sideways. It grasped for Sakura and she whirled in a blur, severing two of its fingers in a spray of hot black blood.

Matt swung again, bringing the sign down in a vicious overhead chop. The demon dove to the side, and shock ran up Matt's hands as the sign sparked off of the concrete. He swung the makeshift axe again, then backpedaled as Ometeotl's hand gushed blood across his visor. Wiping it away, he grunted as a punch shattered his ribs and sent him tumbling, chest aflame.

He landed on his back and skidded. Sakura's REC7 chattered, a welcome distraction from the itching fire as the fused bone that made up his ribs knitted. He kipped to his feet, reached for the AA-12 and met air.

Ometeotl held it like a baseball bat, hands around the barrel, as he charged Sakura.

Both figures blurred, too fast to differentiate. Blood sprayed, red and black, as Matt approached, flexing, giving his body time to heal enough for round two, scooping up the sign along the way. In the distance a missile popped like a star flower on the Fourth of July, raining countless tiny objects like falling bees onto the ground below. The earth rumbled as the cluster munitions detonated, and Matt wondered how many innocent lives this egregoroi had made them take.

A heft of the sign told him what he needed to know. Walking up behind the thing, he spun, putting all his weight and might into the blow. Metal bit deep into its bicep and the egregoroi stumbled, white bone showing through the dark red flesh.

Sakura stepped in and her knives flashed, dull black streaks punching in and out of the thing's neck and upper torso. She ducked under its arms and rolled between its legs, coming up behind it, both knives buried in its kidneys.

It whirled, ripping them out of her hands, and back-handed her. Her visor burst sideways in a mess of reinforced glass, teeth, bone, and unidentifiable chunks of bloody meat.

Matt chopped down, severing Ometeotl's arm at the shoulder. It fell next to Sakura's limp body, both gushing blood across the sidewalk. Red mingled with black and sought cracks and crevices, the greedy earth sucking up the warm liquid.

The demon roared and lashed out with the AA-12, a clumsy, noncommittal swing. Matt grabbed it and stumbled sideways, alert to the new limb snaking forth from the gushing hole in its shoulder. Ometeotl spun him as he stretched his finger forward. As the biometrics read his fingerprints he pulled the trigger.

Its lower arm exploded. Hot, bloody shrapnel pinged off of Matt's helmet as he fired again and again, sinking four more rounds into the demon's torso. It fell in a black-red heap. Wiping steaming mess from his visor, he stalked forward and stomped down on the thing's exposed spine, crushing vertebra and severing connection to its legs.

Another cluster munition carpeted the neighborhood to his left, and in the burst of light, fear shimmered in the creature's eyes.

It spoke, black words that shocked through Matt's mind, pulsing with the murderous whispers and commanding him to take his own life. He crushed Ometeotl's throat with his boot, then kneeled next to the gaping, struggling head, plucking a thermite grenade from his bandoleer – designed to destroy enemy vehicles and melt through enemy bunkers, it burned at over two thousand degrees Celsius, hot enough to vaporize steel. "You don't belong here. This was never yours to take. Go back to the hell you earned."

The thermite grenade just fit between its large, square teeth, and he shoved the canister back, hard, putting his weight into it. He pulled the pin, stood and stepped back. A second later the white-hot fire reduced Ometeotl's head to ash, and Matt's eyes ghosted despite Augmentation and his auto-darkening visor.

He turned on his heels and kneeled down next to Sakura, her head a mass of blood and hair. He plucked glass from the remains of her face, and breathed a sigh of relief as they pulled away from newly-forming skin. Gently, his fingers sought the extent of the damage – a burst eye, missing teeth, most of the bones in her face crushed beyond recognition.

Her jaw worked up and down, and her tongue writhed in a mouth she couldn't close. He shushed her, then triggered the COM. "Janet, report."

"Hostiles are standing down. They seem pretty confused."

"Good, 'cause Sakura's going to need a while."

"Mmkay, I'll hold off the locals. The paperwork on this one's going to be a bitch."

He stroked Sakura's hair and pulled off his helmet. "Let Valdez do it."