“The Palace says she wants to make a plea for peace,” Niv said. “For calm. For understanding.”
I thought of my front-page photograph. How we were starting to shine a light on the Shield—bring him out of the shadows.
I did that, I thought proudly. Because of me, the queen has chosen to act. But pride gave way to fear fast. There were so many people who hated us. Who would much rather we just stay quiet.
“When’s the speech?” I asked.
“Sunday,” Niv said. “Noon. All the radio stations are going to be broadcasting it.”
“I want to go see Quang!” Connor cried.
“Well, you can’t,” Radha said. “I won’t have you out there while things are so topsy-turvy.”
“I can take him,” Niv and I both said at the same time. I smiled, and let myself look at him. He looked back.
“No,” Radha said, with harsher anger than I’d ever heard her use before. After that she paused for a couple of seconds, but she did not apologize. “Things are scary out there. If anything, the queen making a speech has me more frightened. She must know more than us—something bigger is going on than a few street fights and home invasions.”
Connor looked like he was about to cry again, so Niv pitched him forward suddenly, stopping inches away from the floor, prompting a shriek of terrified happiness. Niv laughed with him, and began to roller-coaster him around the room.
I hugged Radha. A train whistle sounded, crossing the bridge far above, and she flinched, and I held her tighter.
Twenty-One
Ash
A train whistle sounded, far below. The strip mall on Wolf Road was at the top of a hill, looking down on all of Albany. Twilight. I could see the steam from the train as it headed toward Utica. I sat on the hood of my car with my latest triumphant purchase across my lap.
Albany was my last stop; I’d visited thrift stores in every decent-sized town within forty miles of Hudson, and found three guitars. All of them in shit condition, as far as I could tell, but none of them totally hopeless.
I would get them fixed up. I would leave one at my house, hidden behind the porch swing. One for the abandoned railroad shack by what Solomon called the Blighted Spaces. One for him to stash in another of his secret locations. That way, wherever he was, whatever he was going through, he’d be able to make music.
Albany was a shithole, but it had its moments. Like this one. An eerie calm; Friday night; the highway full of people heading home for the weekend. The full weight of Saturday and Sunday ahead of us. The sun was setting and the wind was picking up and the moon was already out. The place was magic. Across the parking lot, Albany’s only Indian restaurant was making the night wind delicious.
The feeling came upon me out of nowhere: happiness. An overwhelming sensation, all through my body.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. It just didn’t happen very often. The meds weren’t exactly causing it; I knew that. But maybe they helped to quiet down the fear and the sadness and the rage that sometimes shattered this feeling before it could flower. The world around me was beautiful and I was wearing my favorite sweatshirt, and the hood of my car was still warm from driving and I had just bought a gift that I knew would make Solomon happy. I felt so full of love right then that I really could have cried.
Instead, I took out my camera. Snapped a picture, then another. Then five more.
But it was no use. I knew it without needing to go back to the darkroom and develop them. The images I caught contained none of what made me break out in goose bumps.
I could feel it in my arms, up and down my spine, like electricity—this bliss, this joy, this perfect contentment—but I couldn’t capture it on film. All anybody would see, looking at these images, was a dirty, darkened parking lot where the lights were just coming on.
Love for the world, and hatred for the world. Somewhere between them, or in both simultaneously, lay the truth. About life, about Solomon . . . about me.
I got in the car. I drove back toward Hudson, but I did not go home. I went to Connor’s.
And yeah, maybe part of me just wanted a hookup. But Connor was my friend too. He made me laugh. He thought I was way smarter than I actually was. He hated a lot of the same things I hated.
And I had questions.
The kind he was uniquely positioned to answer.
He was in the front hallway when I arrived, freshly showered and wearing a raglan-sleeve hoodie that did wonders for his profile. He smelled like clean clothes and Dial soap and cinnamon chewing gum.
“Ash, hey!” he said, and gave me a hug. His keys jingled in his hand.
“Where you off to?” I asked.
“Football stuff,” he said.
“Not practice,” I said. “This late?”
“Nah,” he said. “It’s a meeting.”
“A meeting? Are you, like, selecting officers for your board?” I looked at him until he looked away, without answering.
I thought of Bobby, and all the other guilty-looking football boys.
“Have you guys heard anything about all that vandalism going on?” I asked.
He reddened. “No.”
“You’ve always been a bad liar, Connor,” I said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”
At this, he chuckled. “But listen. For real. You need to let this go, Ash. Just so you know.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Just so you know.”
Connor reddened further. He looked at the floor for a while, and then he raised his eyes to meet mine. Still didn’t say anything. We eye-wrestled like that for a little while, but he did not stand down. So I turned and left.
“Have a good meeting.”
By the time I got to my house, I was so knotted up—with anger over the wave of vandalism, and with sadness over how Solomon was hurting—that I had looked up the number for Child Protective Services and was halfway through dialing it before I even realized what I was doing.
Here is a shortened, cleaned-up version of the internal argument that went on in my head for several minutes:
What the hell, Ash?
I have to do this. Solomon needs help. He won’t go get it willingly.
But is this the right way? And are you doing it for the right reason?
There is no right way. There are no simple answers. If I tell them about the brakeman’s hut where he sleeps sometimes, maybe they’ll send a social worker instead of calling the cops.
I finished dialing.
“Hi,” I said, when a woman answered. “I wanted to provide information about the location of an at-risk minor who was recently flagged with you for a wellness check?”
I felt better, when I hung up the phone. But it didn’t last long. The doubts came creeping in. And that stirred up that whole tangled nest of complicated emotions. Anger, that I had made the call—that I couldn’t go back in time and take it back. Fury, that the laws of physics had to be so fucking rigid. In a few minutes I felt cactus-prickly and itching for a fight. So I went downstairs and found my mother watching television, and launched right in.
“What do you know about what happened between Solomon’s mother and Connor’s father?”
Mom frowned. She looked toward the shut door to Dad’s office. Which is what she does when what she has to say, she knows he won’t like.
“She tried to burn the house down,” Mom said softly.
I gaped at her. “What? Why would she do that?”
“You’d have to ask her,” Mom said.
“I’m asking you. You were friends, weren’t you?”
“Hadassah was not a well woman,” Mom said.
“Who is well? Am I well? Are you?” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“It would be irresponsible of me to repeat it.”
“But she’s in prison.”
“Yes.”
Mom was watching a cop show. And here’s something I learned from her cop shows: wherever there’s a woman in jail for a violent crime against a
spouse or partner, there’s a man who did some especially heinous things to push her to that point.
What did you do, Mr. Barrett?
I headed for my room. A couple dozen gun shots echoed from the television.
Twenty-Two
Solomon
A couple dozen gun shots echoed from the canyon. The Clarion office’s windows were all open and the smell of eucalyptus was strong. The front of the building faced out onto one of the most grimy, crowded streets in Darkside, but the back leaned over the beautiful wilderness of a Blighted Space. Brontosauruses munched happily on the tall trees.
“I need you to stop,” Cass said.
“Stop?” I asked incredulously. I’d seen Cass scream at a reporter with a stab wound to the leg for not sticking around to interview the woman who stabbed her. More than once I’d heard her say that “self-preservation is not a helpful instinct for a reporter.” “Are you . . . feeling okay?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but it’s getting too dangerous out there. And you’re a great photographer, but you’re also a kid. This is strictly me being selfish, by the way. I have enough to stress about without a dead teenager on my conscience.”
I laughed. She laughed.
“Promise me,” she said.
“I can make no such promise.”
She frowned, and handed me a copy of the Darkside Post. “You saw this?” Darkside Police Commissioner Bahrr was on the front page, standing on the hood of his truck with a shotgun in his hands. Hunting chupacabras and rakshasas in the Northern Marsh.
“That asshole,” I muttered.
“He’s nervous,” Cass said, “about the queen making a speech. He’s threatened by her. Wants to get his own share of the press, so he poses for this.” She threw the paper down. “One of my journalists is working a source. She found some paperwork, intentionally misfiled at police headquarters: a shipment of five thousand handcuffs reported missing last month.”
“How do you misplace five thousand handcuffs?” I asked.
“You don’t,” she said. “This is no accident. The commissioner is supplying the Shield’s soldiers with weapons and other tools. And with all those cuffs, they could kidnap literally thousands of othersiders—and the Shield could break them. No one would be safe. That is why I need you to stop.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I won’t buy any more photographs from you. Not until all this blows over.”
“I get it,” I said. “Even if I see the perfect shot, I’ll skip it.” But I remembered what she’d said to me once: Forget getting the shot. Focus on the truth. That’s the hardest thing for a photographer to capture.
She stood, and came toward me. And I flinched, because who had ever seen Cass express any emotion other than an angry one? She chuckled, at my fear, and then she hugged me.
“Take care of yourself out there, Solomon. Even when we’re not looking for trouble, it has a way of finding us.”
After that, I wandered. Away from the eucalyptus-smelling canyon, into the denser disorderly streets. Bright lights in some windows; dark patches where the Blight had struck and turned the land foul.
I loved Cass, trusted and respected her—but I couldn’t stop. I was an addict, now. Hunting for the truth.
The world was full of monsters, and my camera wasn’t much of a weapon against them, but it was the only one that I had.
Maraud was still paddocked, down at the Underbridge. Which is why, when I heard the screams and followed them to the soccer field at the end of the alley in front of me, I couldn’t do a damned thing to stop what I found.
The cry was distinctive. Nothing else sounds like a snake hissing and a lion roaring and goat bleating all at once. It was a chimera, but this one was in greater distress than I’d ever heard. Huge three-headed fire-breathing monsters are usually the things that inspire fear, but this chimera was itself very much afraid.
Sure enough, I found it roaring; swinging its terrifying tail; belching fire in chaotic jets. Only when I got up close could I see what it was fighting.
Destroyers, soldiers of the Shield. A horde of them. They came in pairs, swinging chains, and alone, with torches and long, sharp weapons.
Trees burned all around the field. Two people were already sprawled motionless on the ground, but there were an awful lot more where they had come from.
An unarmed Destroyer walked out, waving his arms. Taunting it. The chimera charged—and another Destroyer swung a chain, which wrapped around the monster’s hind legs. Thrown off-balance, it came down in a heavy crash. The taunting Destroyer was firmly in its jaws, and it bit down hard.
That triumph did not amount to much. More came, closing in on it now that it was down, sharp weapons aimed for soft parts.
“Stop!” I screamed, but I might as well have been speaking to people in another reality. They were laughing. Cheering. Hooting, hollering.
Abruptly, the animal’s cries went from angry roars to heart-hurting whimpers.
A crowd of people stood and stared. A couple of them were crying. I looked to a woman who I felt certain was an othersider—but if she was, she was too afraid to use her ability to intervene.
“Hey!” said one of the Destroyers, seeing the camera around my neck.
“Take a picture,” another one said, holding up the chimera’s forepaw. The thing was bigger than his torso, and he could only hold it aloft for a couple of seconds.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, which was when I noticed how hard it was to breathe.
I sat down on the dead grass. A white stripe of chalk ran past my feet. In summer, kids played here. I looked up, trying to focus on the stars, something faraway and safe that could help me calm down. But I couldn’t see the stars.
Smoke billowed up from the burning trees set ablaze by the chimera’s breath. The cylinders of flames burned like bonfires on a chilly beach. They hooted and bellowed, these monstrous murderer savages, and I clenched my eyes to shut out the feral sight of them, but I could still hear them.
Twenty-Three
Ash
Smoke billowed up from the bonfire, a cylinder of flame, warm and safe on that chilly beach. The fire lit up the faces of my fellow partygoers, almost all of them boys, and made them look feral and wild and exaggerated. Very Lord of the Flies. It occurred to me to be afraid. Maybe Sheffield had lured me here to be murdered.
“Put more wood on it!” someone yelled.
“There’s too much wood on it already,” someone else yelled. A buoy clanged, out on the Hudson River. Someone splashed kerosene, from a massive red metal jug.
“They’re animals,” Sheffield said, sitting down in the sand beside me. “Cavemen, at best.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friends.”
He shrugged, sipped from a bottle of root beer. “Not sure about that.”
All the other boys were drinking actual beer. I wondered why he wasn’t. Maybe what Sheffield liked more than being drunk, was being in control.
“You’re not sure whether it’s not a nice thing to say, or you’re not sure whether they’re your friends?”
“The second one,” he said, and turned to look at them.
Most but not all of the football team was there.
It wouldn’t do, for photography—not with lighting like this, the dark of the night and the creepy shifting illumination of the bonfire. The sand was cold. I planted my hands in it, and shivered.
“So why are you hanging out with them?”
“Some of them are my friends,” he told me. He looked like he had more to say, but left it at that.
“What about Bobby Eckels?” I asked, pointing to him. He stood at the edge of the firelight, sharing a bottle of something stronger than beer with a friend. Watching me.
Sheffield laughed. “A bit of an idiot, isn’t he?”
“I have no idea.”
“He’s a bit of an idiot.”
“This is a great conversation.�
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Sheffield laughed again. He laughed a lot, seemed like, but rarely because things were funny. More like because it bought him time—time to think of something to say. “Why the football team, Ash?”
“School spirit,” I said, because I had anticipated the question, and practiced my response. Nothing further; no expression on my face.
“Some of the guys were suspicious. You’re not the school spirit type. When was the last football game you went to?”
Answering his questions would only lead me further onto his turf. “I appreciate that other people appreciate it.”
He nodded his head, like a chess player whose opponent has made a particularly skilled move. I stood up, and raised my camera, and aimed it at Bobby. Sickly green flames swirled around him. He saw me, and his face broke into a snarl.
“You don’t like to get your picture taken,” I called to him, across the fire.
“I don’t,” he said, and even on just those two words I could hear how drunk he was.
“Why not?”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“A fan of the team,” I said. “And a friend of Jewel’s.”
He lost his cool completely. His mouth went slack. His eyes widened. He took a step back.
“You used to be friends with Jewel,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
A couple other guys around the campfire had stopped talking, to better pay attention to us. I kept on.
“You ever go to her house?”
“Calm down,” Sheffield said to me, standing up. “Obviously Bobby is still very upset about what happened. Poor Jewel.”
“Where were you?” I asked. “When it happened?”
Sheffield put a patronizing hand on my shoulder and said, “Shhhh.”
Bobby breathed a little easier, with Sheffield coming to his rescue. So I raised my camera, and took a picture.
“And what happened, exactly?”
He made a choking noise in his throat, and I took another picture.
“Someone broke in,” I said. “Someone who knew her.”
Destroy All Monsters Page 10
