Hero

by Michael Grant

  They came to a wide clearing that had been scorched black and scarred by earthmoving equipment. They hovered there for a while, rotors churning the air above futile ambulances and fire trucks, New Jersey State Police vehicles, and the ubiquitous black SUVs.

  Then the helicopter swiveled and advanced a few hundred feet to an eerie, chemical-green pond. Beams of slanting sunlight revealed the ramps and deep gouges of an abandoned gravel quarry.

  They landed near the edge of the sickly-green quarry lake. They got out and the detective led the way down a long ramp still marked with the deep ruts made by heavy trucks. Dekka felt Williams’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Prepare yourself,” he said. “It’s not good.”

  Dekka was tempted to shrug off both his hand and his warning, but she recalled the stricken, gray face of the mayor and allowed that maybe there really was something she needed to be prepared for.

  The narrow gravel beach had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape, and three policemen stood a distance away, smoking and looking at the new arrivals, or at the pond, or nowhere at all, anything to not look at what Dekka thought looked like a tangle of burned bodies.

  I’ve seen burned bodies. Unfortunately.

  Williams’s face was grim, his jaw clenching. Dekka had learned that he was a murder cop, a homicide detective, not a job that sheltered you from horror. Yet he was visibly steeling himself for something. Dekka followed him with Francis at her heels. Their feet crunched gravel, too loud in the silence that followed the helicopter powering down.

  Dekka felt before she saw. A tingling on her arms and up her neck.

  Not burned bodies.

  Not corpses.

  Dekka stopped. The stink was awful, and for a moment she told herself it was that the quarry lake, but no, this was not a chemical smell. This was the stink of putrefying flesh. She knew this smell too well. In the early days of the FAYZ it had taken them a while to realize that every home needed to be searched for . . . for what they eventually found: infants, abandoned by disappeared parents, trapped in cribs, unable to do anything at all, but cry and starve.

  She breathed hard, inhalations like sobs.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, no.”

  “What is that?” Francis cried, and instinctively grabbed Dekka’s arm for support.

  Four men stood—at least, their feet were planted on the ground, like they were glued or nailed down—but they slumped and sagged, and one lay on his side, legs twisted at an impossible angle.

  Their bodies were emaciated, thin, their black tactical gear in tatters, the exposed skin red and black, entirely corrupted. Rotten.

  Swollen boils, pustules, weeping open sores, blood-red ulcerations covered every square inch of the four men. There were blood blisters, lacerations, and tumors as big as tangerines.

  And all of it, every inch of the four men, seethed. It was like watching time-lapse video of a pizza in a hot oven, the cheese bubbling and browning, the bits of meat or vegetables drying and withering.

  The stink was overpowering, and Dekka saw Francis struggling to stop herself from vomiting.

  Then the eyes in one head moved and focused, and Francis screamed.

  Williams said, “Ms. Talent, Ms. Specter, these are ICE agents Franklin, Wallberg, and Pedroncelli. And ATF agent Hernandez.”

  “Help us,” one of the ICE agents moaned, and with renewed shock Dekka realized that somehow they could still speak. Dekka recoiled in horror, not conscious of moving but obeying a DNA-deep imperative to get away, to put distance between herself and . . . and something that should never exist. Francis hugged Dekka’s arm tightly and buried her face against Dekka’s chest.

  “Best we can tell,” Williams said, his voice flat from suppressed emotion, “they are showing signs of, well, just about every awful disease you can think of. The coroner took a look and gathered some samples, but his first guess is smallpox, black plague, and leprosy. Other things, too. Like a goddamn display of every awful disease you can have, and all accelerated.”

  “But they’re still alive,” Dekka said.

  “Yeah,” Williams said. “They’re locked in place, can’t move, and that’s a good thing.” He shook his head at the irony of using the word “good.”

  “Why good?”

  “You want men carrying a dozen infectious diseases running around loose?”

  “Ah,” Dekka said.

  “They should be dead. Coroner took temperatures, and the weird thing was, no fever,” Williams said. “That means their immune system isn’t working. Isn’t there at all. They should be dead.”

  That the men were not dead was testified to by a continuous moan of pain, occasional sharp yelps, and desperate pleas all saying the same thing.

  Please. Please. Kill me. Let me die.

  People were coming down the ramp to the gravel beach, people in white hazmat suits, five of them, their faces invisible behind plastic shields, looking like lost astronauts.

  “What are they doing?” Francis asked.

  “They’re going to shoot them full of more antibiotics, I’d guess,” Williams said.

  “Can we talk to them?” Dekka asked.

  “We’re not to get any closer. This is it. The risk of disease . . . the city does not need the black plague; we have plenty to deal with.”

  Dekka watched as the hazmat team advanced, knelt by the tortured men, unlimbered medical kits, and stabbed needles into flesh that would barely register a needle’s pinprick.

  “How soon before we see results?” Dekka asked. Williams could only shrug.

  And then: the answer.

  The seething, the sense that their very flesh was crawling with bacteria, viruses, amoebas, and parasites, grew worse, much worse, and with shocking speed, until they looked more like marshmallows dropped into a fire, their skin erupted in boils six inches across, with obscenely swollen buboes growing as big as cantaloupes before bursting and draining green pus.

  And the screams. The screams. The pitiful cries for death.

  Kill me! Please, God, kill me!

  The hazmat crew withdrew quickly to a safe distance. The antibiotics had not just failed; they seemed to act like accelerants, like spraying lighter fluid on hot charcoal.

  “Why don’t they die?” Francis cried, nearly hysterical.

  Dekka put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she knew it was useless. She couldn’t comfort herself, let alone Francis. She was powerless. Powerless, standing there, watching something from a nightmare, listening to the agony of men being tortured like heretics in a medieval dungeon.

  “Have you ever seen anything . . . ?” Williams asked, not wanting to seem helpless, not wanting to cede authority to Dekka, but unable to keep the pity and the horror out of his voice.

  “Nothing like this,” Dekka whispered.

  Dekka struggled to keep breath in her lungs. Every cell in her body screamed, Run, run! Whoever, whatever had done this to these men could do it to her next. Dekka had survived unspeakable horrors in the FAYZ, the worst of which had been insects the size of rats inside her own body, the solution to which had been . . . She pushed that memory down, down to where she could put it aside and focus instead on this new wickedness.

  “I have to call someone,” Dekka said. She turned away from the scene, took a deep breath, and dialed. “Malik. Listen, Malik, there’s a situation . . .” Right, situation. Like this was some random squabble between neighbors or something. She described what she saw to Malik and sent him a photo.

  She listened to Malik, and said, “Stay on the line, huh?” To Francis she said, “Malik has a suggestion.” She winced, knowing that she was asking the young girl to do something insane. “Francis? Do you suppose you could, you know, take a look in the . . . whatever you call it?”

  “Over There,” Francis supplied.

  Francis swallowed hard. She was a brave girl, but she was shaking. Yet Francis seemed determined not to look weak, and Dekka had the stomach-turning realization that Francis was
unwilling to look weak to her, to Dekka. She could give Francis an excuse not to do this; she could let Francis off the hook. She could tell her to run straight back up to the helicopter and close her eyes until they were far away.

  But she wouldn’t. This was leadership. This was what Sam Temple had done times beyond counting: sending good people into danger, sending them into trauma and a lifetime of nightmares—if they survived at all. General Eliopoulos’s words came back to her. It’s what these stars on my shoulders are about—sending good young people into harm’s way.

  “Do your best,” Dekka said, hating herself for it.

  Francis swallowed hard and nodded.

  Francis’s eyes took on the oil-slick rainbow whirl that signaled the first stage of her morph. Then her body itself became not a rainbow, quite, but a whirl of colors and shapes, of things unrecognizable, and a second later she slid through the ground, simply sank into the dirt.

  Minutes passed, minutes with Dekka’s ears filled with the chorus of agony, nostrils full of the reek of decay, eyes unable to look away because to look away was to abandon these poor men. Francis popped back into 3-D reality and stood trembling, fists clenched, eyes squeezed as tightly as her jaw. Dekka waited impatiently, knowing she could not rush the girl. Francis would speak when she was ready.

  “I can’t do anything,” Francis said at last, tears spilling from closed eyes.

  “Tell me,” Dekka urged quietly.

  Francis opened her eyes, looked at and then away from the doomed men. “There’s something connected to them. Not like the cable things we saw from the Watchers, something different, like . . . like roots. Like tree roots, kind of, but everything Over There is hard to make sense of, you know?”

  “Can you cut these root things?” Dekka asked.

  Francis shook her head. “I tried grabbing on, but they aren’t always, you know, actual things. My hands just passed right through them.”

  Into the phone, Dekka said, “Did you get all that, Malik?”

  Malik said, “Antibiotics won’t work. No medicine will. This goes deeper, this is way deeper than just disease organisms. This is bad. Someone has a very, very dangerous power.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Dekka replied and hung up. “We’ve got nothing.”

  Williams sagged. Dekka shook her head.

  “Who did this to you?” Dekka called to the men.

  “Bugs . . . ,” one man managed to gasp. “A man made out of bugs.”

  To Williams’s questioning look, Dekka snapped, “No, I don’t happen to know anyone made out of bugs.”

  “Don’t leave us like this. Kill us!”

  “Are you in pain?” Dekka asked gently.

  A strangled laugh became a cry, and a second man said, “You can’t even begin . . . My God! Kill me! God in heaven, make it stop!”

  “End it,” the first man gasped. “Have mercy and kill us. Please, please, I’m begging you: Kill us!”

  Detective Williams took Dekka’s arm with some force and pulled her away. Dekka took Francis’s arm in turn, and they fled for the safety of the helicopter.

  Kill us. . . .

  Kill us. . . .

  CHAPTER 12

  Rare Moments of Peace

  MALIK PUT AWAY his phone.

  “Bad?” Shade asked him.

  Malik nodded. “I think Dekka was crying.”

  The utter improbability of that was disturbing all by itself. Dekka? Crying?

  Dekka?

  “When do we get a day off from this?” Shade muttered. She was frying eggs in the brownstone’s designer kitchen surrounded by gleaming copper and shiny stainless steel and every known or unknown kitchen device. It was, Shade thought, a kitchen you could run a restaurant out of. But frying eggs was the limit of Shade’s culinary skill, and she was pretty sure she was screwing even that up.

  Malik sat perched on a barstool at the granite-topped kitchen island and kept his hands busy arranging a basket of fruit by size.

  “You ever read Heinlein?” Malik asked. “Something Wicked This Way Comes?”

  Shade’s answer was a knowing, mirthless laugh.

  Malik had heard the heralds of a great evil in the voices of men begging for death. He had heard it in the hopelessness of Francis’s voice. Worst of all was the awed pity in the voices of his friends and the policeman. They were seeing something unspeakable. Something wicked.

  Something was coming that would obliterate this small moment of normalcy with Shade. Any moment of peace, any moment that was not a crisis, was precious to Malik now. His head was full. He felt like a swollen water balloon that only needed a few more drops to burst. He had not a moment of freedom from the Watchers; if anything, it felt as if there were more of them than ever. Part of him wondered if they had become alarmed at his penetrations into Over There. He felt no emotion from the Watchers, seldom did, and when he sensed anything like an emotion, it was eagerness or impatience.

  Malik wished he felt fear from the Watchers; that would be a good sign. He wanted them to be afraid. He wanted to be what they feared. But it was more important than ever to be very careful about what he believed and what he did not, to separate facts from wishes. Malik had never been one to accept anything at face value; he always needed evidence, and of Watcher panic he sensed none.

  “Feeling the Watchers? You kind of went silent on me.”

  Malik snapped back to the present, seeing Shade’s concern. “A bit.” Then he forced a smile. “You know what we’d do if we were smart?”

  “What would we do if we were smart? Dammit! I broke one of my eggs! I mean, one of your eggs.”

  “We would trademark the Rockborn Gang and license our name for merchandise. We could make millions for doing no work.” He forced a smile. Soon Dekka and Francis would be back. Soon this small moment of peace would end.

  Shade slid the eggs onto two plates, taking the broken one for herself. “Here. And no complaints: I am not a chef.”

  “Merch, movies, a lecture tour . . . ,” Malik went on. “Salt?”

  “Comic-Con. We could absolutely do Comic-Con. Salt’s right there. The grinder.” Shade took a stool beside him. “Yeah, millions, with which we would do what?”

  Malik shrugged. “Run away to New Zealand?”

  They ate for a while. Then Shade said, “Do you think it’s upsetting the group dynamic, me and you, I mean?”

  Malik smiled and laid his hand over hers on the counter. “It’s done good things for my personal dynamic. I assume that was your goal.”

  “Mmm? My goal?”

  “I mean, sure, you find me irresistible—who wouldn’t?—but I know you, Shade. You never have just one thing in mind.”

  Shade put her fork down. “You think it was charity?”

  Malik shrugged. “Call it a morale boost.”

  Shade sighed. “You too, huh? Shade Darby, always up to something. Always manipulating.”

  Malik’s expression was affectionate but dubious. “And you’re not?”

  Malik had expected her to toss off a quip, but Shade considered as she seasoned her food. Malik was testing her, and of course she knew it. That was the upside of his being with Shade: whatever Malik said or even thought, Shade got it, understood. But that was also the downside.

  “Did it ever occur to you that I’m human? That I just needed to be with you?” Shade asked.

  Malik nodded. “It did occur to me, babe. It did.” He tilted his head and looked at her appraisingly. “People can have more than one motive. And, well, you feel bad. Guilty. Which, by the way, two things: one, it’s progress. The Shade I used to know didn’t do guilt. And two, you’ll notice I’m not complaining.”

  Shade grabbed a napkin and wiped a bit of egg from his mouth. Then she leaned into him and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes because he always did. He felt her mouth on his, her tongue teasing him, her exhalation on his cheeks, and felt the wonderful, careless weakness of surrender.

  After all this time, after all he had seen and
done, after all that had been done to him, as strong as he felt he had become, he had no power, never would have any power, to resist her.

  “Yes, I feel guilty,” Shade whispered. “And no, I’m not that person anymore. Or at least I’m less that person.”

  Malik nodded. “When we were together, I used to tell you I loved you.”

  “Past tense?” Shade asked, trying for lighthearted and achieving only a quivery uncertainty.

  “Oh, I have to say it again?” he asked archly. “Okay. Shade, I never got over you. Of course I still love you. How could I not still love you?”

  Shade’s breath caught in her throat, and Malik saw to his absolute amazement that tears were spilling down her cheeks. Malik took her napkin and wiped one away with great tenderness, as though he thought her flesh might bruise.

  “Oh, shit,” Shade muttered, and now the tears were coming fast, and sobs seized her next few words. She swallowed hard, started to speak, stopped. Then, finally, in a low, strained voice said, “I love you too, bunny.”

  Malik laughed. “This is what it takes to get you to say those words? After all these years. All it takes is a total catastrophe that may destroy all of human civilization, and then you can say it?”

  “Well,” Shade said, smiling weakly, “I didn’t want to seem easy.”

  Malik erupted in his absurd, embarrassing donkey laugh. “The word ‘easy’ will never be applied to you, babe. In the dictionary next to the term ‘high maintenance,’ there’s an illustration of you.”

  “Mmm. You know, Dekka and Francis are still out. Cruz went with Armo to pick up some junk food. . . . I mean, these people are nice to lend us this house, but they are way too into health food—”

  “And?” Malik interrupted her digression.

  “And, well, we kind of have privacy.” She laid a hand on his thigh.

  A while later they lay side by side in the king-sized bed in the master bedroom, Shade with her head on his bare chest.