It was late afternoon when they spotted the glow on the horizon, evening by the time the glow had become a sparkling jewel chest.
“Ride through town?” Dekka yelled over to Armo.
“Are you seriously asking me whether we should ride down the Vegas Strip looking cool on big motorcycles?”
“So, that would be a yes?”
“It would be a ‘duh, of course I’m riding my motorcycle down the Strip.’”
“I kind of thought you might say that.”
They glided along, past the mysterious black pyramid of the Luxor on their left and the pastiche of New York-New York, sparkling orange in the setting sun. Lights everywhere, glowing and flashing and swirling, massive billboards ten stories tall, pedestrians shuffling in herds along the strip.
Then, suddenly, Dekka saw a different pattern of lights, one not advertising or enticing gamblers. Police lights. EMT lights.
“Hey,” she called to Armo.
“I see them,” he said.
“Do we turn back?”
“Maybe it’s not about us. I mean, they’re all at that one casino. How do you say that word?”
“Venetian,” Dekka said.
They motored on toward the flashing lights, keeping to the speed limit, and were soon slowed further by traffic bunching up. They threaded their motorcycles through stopped cars and then they heard a collective oh, my God! from a hundred mouths at once, a crowd that stared upward, with hands over mouths in expressions of fear.
Dekka and Armo followed the stares and the pointed fingers and saw what appeared to be a uniformed police officer standing way up high, up on the edge of the Venetian’s version of St. Mark’s tower. The tower stood nearly five hundred feet tall.
The policeman stood there for a moment and then . . .
Screams!
The drop seemed to take forever. The man fell, feet down, hands by his side, like he was jumping into a swimming pool feet first.
He fell and fell and struck a decorative concrete railing. There was a sickeningly loud sound, a spray of blood, and the body blessedly fell out of view.
Dekka, appalled, looked at Armo. His face was stone. He said, “Yeah,” which was all Dekka needed to ride her bike up onto the crowded sidewalk, stick the key in her pocket, and begin to morph.
CHAPTER 11
It’s Only Pain
“JEEZ, SHADE, THAT car must be worth a fortune!” Cruz said.
“Well, if we’re riding into battle we should ride comfortably,” Shade said.
Palm Springs was not far away, and Palm Springs had more than its share of fast cars. The trouble had been finding something fast that would carry the three of them—Shade passed up a number of two-seater Lamborghinis and Ferraris—but that wasn’t too much trouble, and Shade had rolled up in a Bentley convertible that was rated at two hundred miles an hour. With Shade driving while in morph, the Bentley could outrun anything the California Highway Patrol had on the road. Though not everything they had in the air, which was one advantage to a convertible: you could see a helicopter overhead.
And the Bentley was very comfortable. Leather as soft as a baby’s cheek. It was a 425-mile drive—seven hours according to Google Maps. But Google Maps assumed you were sticking somewhere close to the speed limit.
Unfortunately, the reality of driving two hundred miles an hour for two-plus hours was that the wind utterly defeated the car’s clever wind-reducing technology and left Cruz in the front and Malik in the back crouching down low to avoid flapping cheeks and stinging hair.
The CHP picked them up as they passed through Bakersfield, but their cruisers couldn’t keep up. So siren-wailing CHP would pick them up briefly on the 5, fall behind, and be replaced by hastily assembled roadblocks, which the Bentley would easily evade by driving onto the dividing strip. A hundred miles north of Bakersfield, the CHP helicopters were on them, but on the long, straight stretches of the world’s most boring freeway, even they could barely keep pace.
They turned onto the 198, cutting toward Monterey. This was a two-lane road that wound through dry hills populated only by wind turbines and the occasional cow. Here there were no roadblocks, but as they veered wildly onto the 101 North they encountered the first of the news helicopters coming from Bay Area TV stations.
“Hey!” Cruz yelled against the hurricane. “We’ve become a high-speed chase.” She turned her phone so Shade could see. Sure enough, CNN was cutting between various news choppers and regular folks standing outside Burger Kings or whatever repeating that, yep, they had seen a car go by at NASCAR speeds.
“Like a bat outta hell!”
“Like they was running from the devil himself!”
The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, Shade Darby en route to . . . ?
They had become a classic California obsession: the televised high-speed chase. The whole state was watching, which was perfect from Shade’s point of view. The more public the better.
The problem was that she had never spent this long in morph, and while she was in that unnatural state the Dark Watchers were present and impossible to dismiss. At first it was the usual sense of being probed, touched, violated by insinuating dark tendrils that somehow passed through time and space to dig through her mind like bargain hunters digging through a yard sale mystery box. Like they were looking for something and not quite sure what. But as minutes stretched to an hour and more, it was less a feeling of being rudely probed and more a sense of losing herself, as if she, too, was a bystander commenting on herself.
She glanced in the rearview mirror at Malik. How many hours had he spent now in the company of those malicious intelligences? Was he still fighting? Could he possibly be? How strong was he?
How long would Malik hold on to his sanity? And what would he do if he lost it?
In that case God help us all.
She felt herself being smothered—by the Dark Watchers, by guilt, by crippling self-doubt that nagged at her, ridiculed her, mocked her pretense of resistance and her no-doubt-futile plan.
In the end . . .
“No,” she said aloud, though it was barely a chirp to Cruz or Malik, prisoners as they were of real time. She de-morphed while still driving, slowing to a manageable eighty miles an hour while she was doing so. Breathed hard as she clutched the wheel.
“What are you doing?” Cruz asked sharply, looking back at distant flashing lights now closing the distance.
Shade said, “I just needed a break.”
Malik’s lidded eyes met hers in the mirror.
She drove in real time, and the CHP vehicles caught up and the helicopters actually had to slow down.
“Stop the car and pull over immediately,” came a very authoritative voice through a bullhorn.
In response, Cruz looked up, smiled, and waved. Like they were just some crazy kids driving to Mexico on spring break.
Shade was indescribably relieved to be in her own head alone without company. But she had no time to waste and did not wish to see military-quality helicopters joining the news choppers, so after a few minutes of relative normalcy, she gritted her teeth and morphed again. The Bentley leaped away as she easily threaded through cars going a third of her speed.
Then it was off the freeway and onto what Californians call surface streets. She could blow through red lights, finding the split-second gaps between cars and threading them effortlessly, but there were no more two-hundred-mile-an-hour stretches. It was terrifying to Cruz, who had created permanent divots in the dashboard where her fingertips dug in. It might perhaps be terrifying to Malik, but Malik was silent, looking fixedly ahead, eyes unfocused.
Shade knew where Malik was now. She knew he was locked in battle with them. A battle he could escape from only by de-morphing into agony.
Nothing you can do, Shade, she told herself. Each time she managed to push away the guilt it came back, though it occurred to her that she felt it far less when she was in morph, just as she had been immune to Malik’s blast of pain while she
was in morph.
Which meant Malik’s power wasn’t going to be of much use against other mutants. But against regular humans? Like the regular humans running the Ranch?
Will he do it? Can he do it? Can he control it? Do I have any right to ask it of him?
He’s a tool for me to use.
He’s a boy who loves me. Or did.
He’s a boy I loved. And may still.
It was dark by the time they reached Carmel Valley, what Dekka had said was the entry to the Ranch. Now they drove more slowly still—barely over a hundred and twenty-five—searching for the unmarked road Dekka had described. There were three helicopters overhead, the CHP chopper and two news stations, watching eagerly, seeing the narrowing of the roads and imagining that the long chase must be reaching its end. In that they were correct.
“There,” Cruz said, pointing to a road marked with a sign that said No Thru Traffic. Of course, Shade had had plenty of time to see the sign, and Cruz’s elongated th-e-e-e-r-r-r was irrelevant.
They turned onto the road, tires screaming in protest, and within seconds they were confronted by three armored vehicles racing to meet them. Racing to meet them and being easily passed despite their effort to form a roadblock. Armored cars might do as much as fifty miles an hour; the Bentley was still doing almost three times that.
Up and up the winding road through the trees they went, and now a fourth helicopter, faster, sleeker, and far more dangerous, had been added to the chase. But even military helicopters have trouble with a vehicle able to take hairpin turns at a hundred miles an hour and twice that speed on the straightaways.
The dark helicopter, an Army Apache, gave up pursuing and instead dipped its nose and raced ahead, able to take a straight line while the Bentley twisted and turned, and as Shade came tearing around a curve, she found herself face-to-face with the Apache hovering over the road just a dozen feet off the ground like a falcon waiting for a mouse, the blast of its rotors kicking up a whirlwind of dust and debris and bending saplings.
Shade slammed on the brakes, and the car fishtailed madly. She was about to leap from the Bentley to rush the helicopter herself, but at the last second she saw the flash of fire and smoke and yanked the car sharply left as the missile flew past, missing them by inches and exploding in the trees.
The Bentley slewed wildly, and not even Shade’s speed could control it. The car plunged off the side of the road, crashed through a guardrail, and went airborne like some steampunk flying machine, and off the side of a hundred-foot drop. The slope was almost vertical, blanketed in pine trees and punctuated with rock outcroppings.
“Shade!” Cruz screamed in slow motion.
The Bentley was in the air, the heavy engine dragging the nose down, plummeting toward trees and rocks and annihilation. Shade snapped her seat-belt release, stood with one foot on the dashboard and the other on her headrest, bent down, grabbed Cruz under the armpits, and hurled Cruz upward against the force of gravity.
Cruz flew and screamed in what to Shade was comically slow motion, hung in the air for a very long time, then was captured by gravity and began to fall. In that time Shade rolled into the back seat, grabbed Malik under one arm, and launched herself backward as the car fell away from her.
Rising, Shade slammed into Cruz, twisted in midair, snatched her friend, yanked her close, put her free arm around Cruz’s chest, and with both her friends in her arms had time to consider how to lessen the impact of the inevitable hard landing.
The car fell, engine lowest, its wheels spinning just a foot away from the jumbled cliff face. It smashed through a small tree, banged into another, twisted and smashed sideways through a third.
The slope of the cliff came out to meet Shade as she fell, and she slid and ran, skidded and hopped on her disturbing insectoid feet, bleeding off speed, dodging trees, absorbing the energy into her inhumanly powerful legs, fighting the mass of herself and her two friends.
The car passed her now, smashed into a tree thick enough to destroy the hood, slammed nose-down into a boulder, flipped end over end, and skidded the rest of the way on its back, trailing a debris cloud of expensive trim in all directions.
Shade, still carrying Malik and Cruz, neared the bottom of the cliff and turned skidding into running across gentler grades and finally slowed enough to drop Cruz and Malik onto the pine needles. Through the trees Shade could make out glimpses of barracks-style buildings ahead and below, just as Dekka had described it.
For Cruz and Malik, it had all taken about seven seconds.
“Jesus H. Christ, Shade!” Cruz erupted once she had patted herself frantically as if she expected to be missing some bits.
Shade slowed her answer, taking forever to say a “sorry” that could be heard and understood by people living in real time.
Where the trees ended was a wide greenbelt perimeter that preceded a double chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
Shade de-morphed, the better to communicate. Back on the road above, the military helicopter was rising to search for its suddenly disappeared prey. One of the news helicopters had captured the whole thing on video, and now the military craft was hovering near the news chopper and a male voice was yelling through a loudspeaker. “You have violated secure air space. Leave the area immediately!”
“Look!” Cruz yelled, pointing at a file of vehicles hastily loaded with armed men and women, some still frantically buttoning uniforms over bulletproof vests. The vehicles were driving into the band of cleared ground between the woods and the compound’s fence.
“I’ll take care of them,” Shade said. “Keep Malik moving!”
“Wait!”
Shade heard him just in time, halfway back to morph. “What?” Malik had been almost mute, like having a zombie along for the ride.
“Let me try,” Malik said.
She had not nerved herself up to ask him. She had thought of asking him, but some lingering shred of normal decency had stopped her. The shark’s ruthlessness was not for Malik.
“You don’t have to do this, Malik,” Shade said.
“You’re safer if I do it, Shade,” Malik said.
Cruz yelled, still very keyed up from having essentially flown through dense forest at speeds that had nearly blown her T-shirt off. “What? What, are you psychic now, Malik?”
Not entirely impossible given the world as it now existed post-rock, Shade had to admit.
Malik looked at Shade, who could not quite bring herself to meet his gaze. “I’m not psychic. I just know how unprepared you are for feelings, Shade. Normal people feel guilt and self-doubt pretty often, but you, Shade? You have no coping mechanism for this. And I’m afraid what you’re trying to do now is end it all.”
Shade froze. Cruz blinked at Malik, then nodded, understanding.
“I’m not . . . ,” Shade said, but found no words to complete the thought.
“Not consciously,” Malik said. “But you’re being reckless. You have a weapon. You have to use it. You do not have my permission to get yourself killed.”
Shade shook her head, but only barely. Her denial would have carried more conviction had she been able to look at him, but she kept her eyes aimed away, at the woods, at the sky, at Cruz, only long enough to see that Cruz agreed with Malik.
“No, Malik, I can do this. You don’t have to—”
Suddenly Malik pushed his face close to Shade’s. “It’s all I’ve got now,” he snarled. “It’s all I have, all I can do to help. So shut up and let me do it.”
Shade stepped back from his rage. But a part of her was almost relieved. Open anger was easier than Malik’s vacant, silent suffering.
Shade nodded, not trusting her voice.
Malik closed his eyes and said, “You both need to be morphed.”
CHAPTER 12
Semper Fi
I AM MASTER Sergeant Matthew Tolliver, United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
The words were silent, in his head alone, because to speak them aloud risked getting a ve
ry nasty, very painful shock.
His space was a cell, not small as cells went, but far from the open skies and endless horizons of his Montana childhood. He had served aboard naval vessels, of course, six tours in the Mediterranean, and aboard ship the accommodations were tight to say the least. But on a ship he still had the sea and the sky and a cold breeze on his face.
Now he had a steel box with a bulletproof glass wall on one end looking out on gloom and gray, shadowy distorted lab workers in white coats, private guards in uniform, and from time to time big trucks and earthmovers passing. General DiMarco’s “bunker” was up to his left, just a ripple in the glass.
A steel box containing a steel box containing Tolliver, for in addition to losing his freedom and his family and his place in the world, Tolliver had lost his body. He was no longer made of flesh and bone and blood, he was a machine with a human head, a tank with a man’s head encased in an armored steel bell.
I am Master Sergeant Matthew Tolliver, United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi.
After he had suffered a training accident at the Marine base in Twentynine Palms, HSTF-66 had come for him, rushing him away to supposedly expert treatment. They had sliced down his back and pulled out his spine, cutting away the veins and arteries, the tendons and nerves. His spine and his head had been removed in a single piece, and then, in a series of operations—he had lost count—the remaining biological Tolliver was connected to a maze of wires and servers and battery packs.
It had taken a month just for him to learn to control the articulated “arm” on his right side. After that it had taken only days to master the engine that drove his four big, cleated wheels. The weapons systems, already optimized for digital controls, were the easiest. Fully loaded, he was armed with a cluster of three MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system) capable of shooting down most helicopters; he had six rocket-propelled grenades; he had a six-barrel mini-gun that could fire up to six thousand rounds per minute. He could go three hundred miles on a tank of diesel fuel at speeds of up to fifty miles an hour. The tank body was small, dense, and heavily armored, weighing ten tons—about the weight of three cars.
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