Dekka moved closer. “Sergeant, I get that you don’t know what to do, but the fact is I can kill everyone on this floor—you, your officers, the people, everyone. I can reduce them to bloody McNuggets.”
The sergeant wasn’t entirely sure one way or the other, so Dekka glanced around, spotted a corner of the floor with a dozen slot machines and no people nearby. She raised her hands as if in benediction, opened her mouth, and let loose a tiger’s roar, and the entire area—the slot machines, the railing, the chairs, even the carpet on the floor—became a howling tornado, a shrieking wild chaos.
Dekka lowered her hand, and the shredded remnants fell clattering to the no-longer-carpeted concrete floor.
“See?” she demanded. “Now, what the hell is going on here?”
Over in the sports-betting area the huge screens that usually broadcast horse races now showed the exterior of the Venetian. A second policeman stood on the precipice of the tower.
The second policeman jumped. Just like the first. No hesitation, no drama. Just a step into nothingness and a long, long fall.
“He can make people do anything,” the sergeant blurted. “They do whatever he tells them, and they don’t stop. We’ve cut off the phones to the suite he’s in, and we’ve handed out ear coverings to our SWAT guys, but he’s surrounded himself with staff and tourists and even some cops and security. We can’t get at him without shooting our way past innocent people.”
Dekka nodded, as if this was the sort of thing she heard every day: some person with a power misbehaving badly. It was a story she’d heard too many times in the FAYZ.
“Get us ear covering,” Dekka said. “And we will take him down.” Then she added, “Without having to shoot innocent people.”
A policeman, not the sergeant, hastily proffered two sets of shooter’s ear coverings.
“Ready?” Dekka asked Armo, who was trying with only limited success to fit the ear coverings over a head that they were definitely not designed for.
“This is total hero stuff, isn’t it?” he asked, a bit giddy.
“It is if we win,” Dekka said dryly.
They stepped into the elevator, followed by stares ranging from hopeful to skeptical to simply overwhelmed. As they passed the tenth floor they put on their earmuffs. Dekka listened for the dinging of the elevator bell as it rose, but heard nothing. She felt rather than heard their arrival at the top floor.
They exchanged glances.
The door slid open.
The carpet immediately in front of the elevator was soaked with blood. The wallpaper was spattered with it. Two dead police officers and three others not in uniform lay scattered down the hallway. Near the far end of the hallway stood a solid phalanx of men and women, old and young, some in uniform, most not. A few had guns. All stared with eyes blazing with alertness and fury. The instant they saw Dekka and Armo they began yelling, but their words were inaudible.
“Seriously, what the holy . . . ?” Armo began, before realizing Dekka could not hear him.
“Everyone move aside,” Dekka ordered.
No one moved aside. Instead perhaps twenty of them began to charge. Not at a walk but at a run, like Dekka and Armo were loose footballs that had to be recovered.
Armo caught Dekka’s eye and pointed at himself. Then he advanced on the mob, holding his massive arms wide, his spike claws scraping the walls on either side and shredding the wallpaper. A shot rang out. Armo flinched but sped up. The mob and Armo met, and the front row of attackers went down like bowling pins.
But they jumped right back up, some leaping on Armo, trying to get their arms around his throat, grabbing handfuls of slick white fur, trying to hold on to his ankles. He was very big and very strong, but there were at least a dozen people grabbing at him. He was clearly trying not to hurt them, but the result was that he was immobilized.
Dekka squeezed past Armo, jumped over outstretched arms, knocked a gun out of one man’s hands, punched a man in the face, and reached the door at the end, which bore the right number, the number the sergeant downstairs had given her.
She did not knock or use the doorbell. She raised her hands, roared, and the door (and part of the surrounding wall) flew apart. She hurled the shreds of steel and wood at the crowd—not hard enough (she hoped) to permanently injure anyone, but enough to distract some of Armo’s army of Lilliputians.
Dekka stepped through the door.
Two people stood there. A pretty girl with wildly excited eyes, dressed expensively and with way too much jewelry around her wrists and neck, and what looked like the Geico gecko wearing an actual tuxedo. Like he thought he was James Bond.
The snake-man spoke. Dekka pointed at her ear coverings and saw a slight recoil.
“You are either going to come willingly and be muzzled, or I’m going to have to hurt you.”
He seemed to shout something, but again, she could not hear.
Unfortunately, in the melee in the hall, Armo had lost his earmuffs. Dekka had a split second to see a great beast hurling itself at her. She spun but hesitated and was bowled over by Armo.
Bowled over by Armo going straight at the reptile in the tuxedo, who he hit so hard that the boy flew half the length of the room, smashed into the floor-to-ceiling plate glass, and fell to the carpet, stunned.
Dekka seized the moment and delivered a straight-up sucker punch that caught the girl under her chin, snapped her head back, buckled her knees, and dropped her to the floor as limp as a wet towel.
Armo had the reptilian young man pushed up against a wall, with his long claws poking hard against the creature’s throat.
But then, luck intervened. A policeman, bruised, bloodied, his uniform shredded, leveled his service revolver and fired once. Dekka did not know whether he was shooting at Armo or at Dillon, but the result was to shatter the floor-to-ceiling window.
Sudden wind pushed at them, then sucked them toward the opening, toward a fall that not even Armo could hope to survive.
Armo staggered, caught himself, released his hold on Dillon just long enough for Dillon to scream out of the window.
“Kill! Everyone, kill!”
Some of the people below heard it. And one radio reporter had a hot microphone so that Dillon’s voice went out over the airwaves to thousands of Las Vegas residents in their cars with the radio on.
Armo scrambled back, tripped, fell on his back and stabbed his claws into the carpet, teetered on the edge with his body from the waist down hanging out of the window. Then he rolled over, got to one knee, and from that position punched Dillon so hard in the stomach Dekka thought it might kill him. She tore off a length of bedspread and wrapped it tightly around Dillon’s mouth. Then she used his belt and a bathrobe cord to truss him like a pig, hands and feet behind his back, hands then tied to feet.
Dekka pushed her ear covering back so it rested on her neck.
“Well,” she said. “You really, really don’t take orders, do you?” she asked Armo.
“See? Oppositional Defiant Disorder: it’s useful sometimes.”
Armo lifted the squirming, furious Dillon by his hair, and Dekka dragged Saffron by one arm down the hallway, kicking and shoving and punching their way through the voice-controlled lunatics in the hallway; they threw the pair into the elevator like two sacks of manure.
“Thank God,” Dekka said, relieved. “This guy’s power is nuts.”
Armo nodded warily. “You ever have that in Perdido Beach?”
“No, thankfully,” Dekka said. “Though Penny was close in some ways. We were lucky to stop her.”
They emerged from the elevator to a scene of renewed frenzy. Police and EMTs had barricaded the street doors against a dozen or so tourists who beat on the door before turning to attack each other. Gunshots could be heard from the street outside. Dillon’s last shout through the broken window had had an effect. Sirens and flashing lights were everywhere, every Las Vegas cop, every casino security team, the local office of the US Marshals, the local FBI, and forces
from adjoining towns had all come rushing to help control what was now thousands of Vegas residents and tourists engaged in open-ended mass slaughter.
“Freeze!”
Dekka blinked at a man wearing a suit, who had a 9-millimeter automatic pointed at her. Beside him stood a female version, also with gun leveled.
“Seriously?” Dekka said.
“Dekka Talent and Aristotle Adamo, I’m arresting you under the emergency decree.”
Dekka, never the most patient of people, leaped with the liquid grace and deceptive speed that was part of the gift of cat DNA. She knocked the man’s gun aside like it was a child’s toy, pushed him roughly into the woman, and Armo was on the two of them like a brick dropped on a daisy.
“What are you idiots doing?” Dekka demanded.
“We’re your best bet, Talent,” the woman snarled. “There’s a KOS out for you.”
“A what?”
“Kill on sight,” the woman said.
“What are you talking about? I’m an American citizen. You can’t just shoot people. What the hell?”
“We can shoot all the animals we want,” the man snarled.
“I want to punch him,” Armo said, looking back at Dekka.
“Feel free.”
So Armo swung his paw, caught the man on the jaw, and left him lying unconscious atop the woman struggling to reach her gun, which had landed a foot beyond her outstretched fingers.
And then, a tingling warning of danger and Dekka turned, already knowing what she would see. During the brief melee Dillon had removed his gag.
“Everyone! Attack them! Kill the mutants! Kill! Kill!”
He danced back as police and EMTs, tourists and staff spun, stared, fixed their aim, and rushed at Dekka and Armo.
“Hah! In fact, you two mutants kill each other. Now! Yeah! Kill each other!”
Dekka took a step back from Armo, and Armo did from her. But then, neither of them attacked. In fact, neither had any urge to obey.
“Do it!” Dillon roared, as Saffron disentangled herself and ran to his side. “Kill each other!” As Saffron leaped to the attack, Dillon amended quickly. “Not you, Saffron.”
But Dekka and Armo both were busy coping with the attacks of the controlled, fending off wild-eyed retirees and moms and even a few kids, trying to do as little damage as possible, but retreating all the while toward the exterior doors.
Madness inside the casino. And no way now to get at the boy with the impossible-to-disobey voice as he retreated behind a phalanx of dozens, maybe a hundred or more maddened zombies.
Madness outside the casino as well. Screams and roars of rage, gunshots, the sounds of fists thudding against flesh, sirens, alarms . . . chaos! All of it bathed in the eerie neon light of millions of bulbs.
Dekka and Armo, punching and kicking through the mob, searched for their motorcycles and found them knocked over, but still where they had left them hastily parked on the sidewalk. They shoved and pushed and, when necessary, pounded people. Then, just as Dekka had managed to fire up her engine, a woman leaped at her, landing sideways across Dekka’s gas tank, her face so close Dekka could feel the warmth of her breath. And before Dekka could take her paws from the handlebars to push the woman away, her dreads struck.
Until that moment the effect that happened when she morphed—her dreads turning to agitated snakes—had seemed like nothing more than a bit of a threat display, a bit of theater. But in the blink of an eye, a dozen of the snake-dreads had struck, sinking tiny black fangs into the woman’s cheeks and nose and neck.
What happened next forced a scream of horror from Dekka’s own lips. Because the woman changed horribly, and with brutal speed. Her skin shriveled, wrinkled, and turned the putty color of an old desktop computer. Her eyes swelled in their sockets, stared at Dekka in uncomprehending horror, then dimmed and, like her flesh, shriveled until they were little more than two white-and-red raisins at the bottoms of empty eye sockets.
Armo, seeing that Dekka was just staring and shouting in terror, reached over, grabbed her shoulder and said, “Ride!”
Dekka shook herself, pushed the dying woman aside, and hit the throttle.
CHAPTER 15
The Bacterium Screams
AS SHADE WAS ripping through the Ranch, Malik lay on his back, looking up at trees. They formed intricate patterns, leaves lower, pine needles higher, black lace doilies against a spread of faint stars, just appearing.
Cruz sat nearby, looking down at the Ranch and feeling a mix of emotions, none of them pleasant. She beat herself up for not being with Shade down there, though she knew she would only slow her friend down. She felt desperately sad for Malik. Malik, eternally morphed. Malik who had not just lost his home and family to Shade’s obsession, but now had lost his body, and soon, perhaps, his mind.
And what can you do about it? Cruz asked herself.
Nothing. Nothing but be carried along, one of life’s little bits of flotsam and jetsam in the river Shade.
She felt bad sparing even a little energy for self-pity, but it was there just the same. Before she had met Shade, Cruz had just barely begun on her own path to understanding herself. She had spent most of her lifetime in futile efforts to be what she was not, to please a father who would never love who she really was, and a mother who was cowed and defeated and quiet, like someone out of The Handmaid’s Tale.
She had been trying to figure out how she could start on hormone treatments. She’d been walking it all through in stages in her mind—do the hormones and see how that felt. Maybe breast surgery and see how that felt. Then, maybe the serious surgery, the one that would make her fully physically female. She’d spent ridiculous amounts of time just trying to learn the legalities and had come up against the fact that she was basically stymied until she was eighteen. And then, if she could maybe get a job and maybe get health insurance and maybe this and maybe that . . .
All of that inner turmoil, her fragile hopes, her too-realistic fears, had been papered over by Shade’s wild ride, and by Cruz’s own decision to take the path of the rock, to become Rockborn. And the rock had messed with her. Nowhere near as bad as what Malik was dealing with, but the rock had messed with her, just the same.
How clever you are, little alien rock. How cleverly cruel.
Now, thanks to the rock, she could appear however she wished. She could be male or female. She could be Dwayne Johnson or Meryl Streep. Big, small, blond, brunette, white, black, Asian . . . and all of it false.
False.
It was margarine rather than butter, carob rather than chocolate. Near beer. An oregano joint. It was looking at photos of the aurora borealis when what you wanted was to lie beneath a real sky glowing with color.
When was she ever going to get back to those earlier dreams? When was she ever going to get a chance to actually experience the physical changes she’d half longed for, half feared?
When do I get to be me?
But self-pity, even justified self-pity, shrank when she looked at Malik. She knew—better than Malik himself—the damage that had been done to him. She’d been in the hospital room when his bandages were changed.
Malik and Cruz, both with their lives irretrievably destroyed.
By Shade.
Yes, by Shade. By her obsession. By her ambition.
And by my choice to follow her.
Malik’s eyes closed, shutting out the trees and the sky. He barely felt his own body; his skin was not true skin, his nerves not real nerves. The only true and real thing about him was his mind. It was his mind, still, but not his to control entirely. He was still himself, but he was no longer alone in his own skull.
Something Cruz had said came back to him. Something about being able to learn about the Dark Watchers. Like a bacterium on a microscope slide wanting to look up through that microscope and see the eye staring down at him.
He tried to shut out distant screams and gunfire. Tried to ignore the massacre he knew was taking place just down the hill. He breathed
deep and smelled pine needles and heard the rustle of the breeze. But the dark space inside his head spread out, widened and deepened, as if what was inside him was infinitely greater than what was outside. Darkness and more darkness, but somehow that darkness had a structure. A shape. It was real. In that darkness he sensed their gaze. They watched him. They were . . . intrigued.
Why do you watch me?
No answer, of course. No indication that his unspoken question had been heard.
Who are you?
The only response was a chill as an invisible-but-felt tendril curled around him, reached inside him, seemed almost to be leafing through his memories like someone reading a book.
What do you want?
Was that laughter? Were they laughing at him?
He knew he was weak and they were powerful. He knew that they could see what he could not. He thumbed through his own memories—or was it them making him do it? He searched for answers, explanations, theories, Malik being Malik, and he was pleased that even now under the unceasing scrutiny of the Dark Watchers, he still sought answers.
He remembered once reading the Victorian-era story called Flatland for physics class. It was a fascinating tale of life lived entirely in two dimensions, with creatures who had left and right, forward and back, but no up and down. They were as trapped as Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man. But a person in the three-dimensional world could see into those two-dimensional creatures. The 3-D man could, from the 2-D perspective, pass through impassable walls, literally see the insides and outside of a 2-D creature. To the 2-D people, the 3-D man was not visible unless he touched their flat plane, and then all they could see was a 2-D cross-section, appearing as a circle. To the residents of Flatland, the 3-D universe was impossible to imagine, let alone see.
Just as a 3-D man could not grasp, let alone see a 4-D reality.
Yet.
That word hung in Malik’s brain. It felt as if it had come to him, not from him.
Yet?
The sounds of conflict intruded on his thoughts: the sirens that had gone off right after he had hit the Ranch with a blast of pain were still sounding, gunfire, an explosion, unmuffled military engines firing up. Orders were being shouted.
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