Hero

by Michael Grant

  Cruz knocked. “Mr. Markovic, it’s Julio. We have a water leak coming from your bathroom.”

  A raspy, feathery voice from inside said, “Well then, I have no choice but to let you in, do I?”

  That was when Dekka knew.

  “He’s morphed and he’s ready!” Dekka whispered. “No waiting. Armo?”

  Armo launched his morphed self—almost nine hundred pounds of muscle, sinew, and fur—against the door, which did not just splinter but almost seemed to fly apart. He staggered forward under his own momentum and fell facedown.

  Dekka bounded in, stepped on Armo’s back, raised her hands, and prepared to shred whatever the hell the creature in front of her was.

  Shade burst in through the already-shattered balcony door.

  And with terrible timing, Malik and Francis popped into view inside the apartment but just behind Markovic, where Dekka risked shredding them.

  Dekka held her fire and momentum carried her forward into—then through—Markovic. The insect cloud parted and re-formed as Dekka smashed into a side table and sent a vase to shatter on the marble floor.

  Armo was on his feet, fast for a creature his size, but then came a flash of movement, a bluish blur, and Armo had gained a living backpack.

  A living backpack in the form of a blue girl entirely covered in what looked like tiny bee wings. She had an arm around Armo’s thick furry neck, her legs curled around his chest, and a pistol pressed hard against his head.

  “I know you’re fast, Shade Darby,” this new apparition shouted, “but so are bullets.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Bug Fighters

  SHADE FROZE. COULD she take the gun before the girl could squeeze the trigger?

  Dekka’s folly was instantly clear to Shade. They’d come after a guy made of insects, and what did they have as a weapon? Dekka had cleverly brought all her forces into the fight, but her forces were powerless and in each other’s way.

  And no one had anticipated some flying Na’vi with a nine-millimeter.

  “I’m not going to let you kill him!” the blue girl said, her voice shrill.

  “If he doesn’t back the hell off right now, we’ll bring this whole building down on him,” Dekka threatened.

  That bold statement came out at molasses speed from Shade’s perspective, but it still surprised her. Dekka had quickly seen her error and shifted her threat. Bring this whole building down?

  All right, Dekka!

  “Do that and we all die,” the blue girl said, “including Berserker Bear!”

  “Really?” Armo complained. “I gotta die under that name?”

  Shade was carefully watching the girl’s hand, her trigger finger in particular, wondering how quickly the girl would react. It was one thing to disarm cops who didn’t expect to have to cope with some speed demon; it was a different story when it was a Rockborn girl who knew all about Shade and was watching her with unblinking gaze. Plus, the girl had been quick. Not Shade-quick, not even close, but quicker than a normal human.

  Shade concluded that she could disarm the girl, but she would need a distraction. She vibrated in place, ablur, a missile ready to launch at the first opening.

  “Who the hell are you?” Dekka demanded.

  “My name is—”

  “She’s my daughter, Simone, you pathetic fools!” Markovic crowed as his thousands of component parts whirled in a contained tornado. “My little girl!”

  To the surprise of everyone, Markovic included, Simone said, “Dad, if you hurt anyone, I’ll let them have you.”

  “Okay, no one move,” Dekka said. “Listen, whoever you are, Simone, it’s not going to work. Your father here either de-morphs and lets us take him in, or he dies. You may get Armo, but we’ll get him. And you.”

  “Go away!” Simone yelled. “Leave us alone!”

  “No,” Dekka said with deceptive calm.

  It was like a scene from some old western, Shade thought. Like Clint Eastwood in a saloon facing down six guys with guns. But this Clint—Simone—would not win a fight against the Rockborn Gang.

  “Simone? My name is Malik.” Malik moved slowly closer and drew Francis with him, out of Dekka’s line of fire. “I don’t know if you know this, but there are three kinds of supers—people with powers.”

  Simone heard him but kept her gaze firmly on Shade, always with her pistol hard against Armo’s shaggy head.

  “Monsters, villains, and heroes,” Malik went on. “To some extent we’re all of us monsters! I mean, look at comic book characters. The Hulk is a monster, right? He doesn’t mean to do anything wrong, but he is what he is. Then there are villains. In comic books, that would be people like—”

  Shade moved so fast no one saw her. She leaped, stuck her right index finger through the trigger guard, and yanked the weapon away. One second Simone held a gun, and the next instant she didn’t.

  Armo reached back over his shoulder and grabbed Simone’s arm as she tried to go airborne. “Uh-uh-uh, no you don’t.” Simone tugged with surprising strength, but Armo’s huge paw had wrapped two-inch-long black claws around her arm, and if Simone wanted to pull away, she would have to leave an arm behind.

  “Markovic or Bug Man or whatever you are,” Dekka said, “I’ll count to three, and you’d better be trending human or I’ll shred you.”

  “That would be unfortunate for your police officer,” Markovic sneered.

  “What?”

  Detective Peter Williams came through the door, staggering. His face was bathed in sweat. His hands and neck erupted in boils, pustules forming and popping and oozing. Then it was as if his feet were nailed to the floor. He struggled to move but could not.

  “I . . . ,” Williams gasped. “Don’t let him . . . Kill him!”

  “See, if I die,” Markovic said, “then your pet cop gets sicker and sicker and . . . and here’s the cool thing, the thing that makes it so scary: he will get sicker and sicker and yet not die. Hah! He doesn’t die until I decide he dies.”

  Williams, unable to walk farther, sank in a heap.

  “He stays like that, on his knees, right here, with every kind of disease eating him alive until—”

  “No, Dad,” Simone said.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Simone, it’s leverage,” Markovic snapped.

  Williams gasped, “Kill him! K—”

  His words ended in a grunt of pain and a sound like someone choking on a bone. Then his tongue, swollen to three times its usual size and turning black, filled his mouth and rendered anything else unintelligible.

  Shade, still in morph, watched with horrified fascination as every visible inch of Williams was effortlessly conquered by billions of microorganisms. Her vaunted speed was of no use now.

  “I don’t want a fight,” Markovic said. “I really don’t. See, I’m a businessman; I understand risk. Reasonable risk, unavoidable risk, potentially profitable risk. And the thing is, I know if this turns into a bloodbath, you may kill me. But that won’t save your pet cop. And before I go down, I will turn each of you into . . . that.” He turned his insect-cloud head toward Williams.

  “Let him go,” Dekka said, knowing her words were useless.

  Markovic laughed. “Dekka Talent. Shade Darby. Malik Tenerife. Well, well. Here to commit murder for a good cause, are you? Playing hero? Saving the world?”

  “No one will die if you—”

  “Don’t be naive,” Markovic snapped. “None of us get out of this alive. They have to kill us. Do you imagine for one minute that Washington will allow the existence of a girl who can run straight past security and poke a sharp stick in the president and then disappear? Please. We’re all on a hit list, and you must know it!”

  What Markovic was saying in his slow-as-drying-paint way had some resonance with Shade. It would have resonance with anyone who’d been at the Ranch. And anyone who’d seen tanks blasting their way down the Las Vegas Strip.

  “What makes all of you the heroes and me the villain? How many died at the Ranch be
cause of you, Shade Darby, the self-appointed hero? Hmm? What about you, Malik? The pain you caused? You broke people’s minds, there are people in psych wards thanks to you, hero.”

  Markovic saved his harshest venom for Dekka. “And then we have Dekka Talent, FAYZ survivor. I read the book. Saw the movie. The actress who played you was good.” He nodded. “All of you FAYZ people, you PBA crowd, you managed to sell yourselves as the good guys, but oh—my, my, you’ve taken lives, haven’t you? You, Dekka: you’ve killed people. And were there perhaps a few innocents who died along the way? Eh? Hero or villain depends on who’s telling the story, Malik; that’s the problem with your three-part taxonomy.”

  Markovic moved toward Dekka. She held her ground. Shade tensed, ready to . . . to do what, exactly? Use her speed to crush thousands of insects?

  A can of Raid might be useful.

  “Here’s my origin story,” Markovic went on. “Minding my own business, got sprayed by asteroid fragments, the government grabs me, takes me to a field, and murders me. Now the government has sent a hit squad of mutants to kill me. You. The six of you. The Rockborn Gang, indeed.”

  Shade blurred away, yanked a duvet from the nearest bedroom, zipped back and threw the blanket over Markovic, and was gratified to hear Dekka slow-mo shouting, “Run! Run!”

  Francis grabbed Malik and Armo by their hands and blinked out of the 3-D world.

  Shade yelled, “Hold on!” which of course no one could hear as anything but a half-second buzz, threw herself at Dekka, hit her like a linebacker, and propelled Dekka and herself through the shattered glass door and over the balustrade.

  Could Dekka survive a fourteen-story fall, even in morph?

  Francis, Malik, and Armo snapped back into reality on the sidewalk below, and Shade saw that there was a real chance of Dekka crushing one or all of them.

  But as she and Dekka fell, Francis looked up and spread her arms wide. Dekka landed on Francis and the two of them seemed to disappear into the concrete of the sidewalk.

  Shade landed hard—she had a body built to absorb shock, but fourteen floors was no joke. She hit the ground, heard the sound of chitin snapping, like someone clipping a toenail, fell on her back, and began to de-morph even as Francis and Dekka reappeared.

  Safe. All but Detective Williams, whose voice followed them down, screaming in agony.

  “Williams,” Shade said.

  “I know!” Dekka snarled.

  “We can’t leave him like that. You know what we have to do, Dekka. I would but . . . wrong power.”

  Dekka swallowed hard and shook her head. “There must be some other way, some other thing we can . . .”

  Cruz said, “Shade, we can’t just—”

  “We can’t just do nothing,” Shade interrupted. “That man helped us; he doesn’t deserve to be left to scream in hell!”

  But Cruz just shook her head, and Armo fixed his gaze on the ground.

  It was Malik who decided the issue. “Look, I’ve been there, I know about pain that will drive you mad and make you beg for death. None of you know, not really. I do.”

  “And?” Dekka asked.

  “We have to be compassionate,” Malik said. “We can’t leave him like that.”

  Dekka’s face was a frozen mask; she said nothing and did nothing but breathe as everyone waited on her. Shade knew what the answer had to be. But you don’t bully or rush someone into taking life.

  Finally, Dekka looked at Francis and in a voice so deep and so low it was almost inaudible said, “Francis? Can you give me a lift to the hallway outside the apartment?”

  They crossed out of 3-D space and a minute later they returned. The look on Dekka’s face left no one asking questions.

  CHAPTER 19

  Losing Battles

  “WE LOST. I mean, that’s the reality: we lost.” Shade Darby paced across the living room of the brownstone.

  “We haven’t exactly surrendered,” Malik said mildly. “We just got outplayed in the first game of a series.”

  “We lost,” Shade snapped. “We went to take this bug guy down, and we walked away leaving him alive. We lost. We left a man behind, and it all would have been a hell of a lot worse without Francis.”

  “How are you?” Malik asked Francis.

  “Shaky,” she admitted.

  “So Markovic is still around, and Williams is . . .” Dekka sagged into an easy chair, gripped the arms, and hung her head. “I wasn’t prepared. I led you guys into it, and I was not prepared. I won’t let that happen again.”

  “What could we have done differently?” Cruz asked.

  “I would have . . .” Shade glanced at Dekka. “We should have thought about what we were facing. We had no useful weapons to use against it.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t recall you making that suggestion earlier, when it might have helped.” It was clear, even to Shade, that Dekka was containing her anger, but might not hold it in forever.

  Shade stabbed a finger toward Dekka, who sat, immobile, as Shade moved restlessly. “Listen, Dekka, we need some basic ideas for how we’re doing this. Priorities. And priority number one is take down the bad guys.”

  “By letting Armo take a bullet in the head?”

  Armo raised a hand tentatively, like a schoolboy who thought he might have an answer but wasn’t sure. He was ignored and lowered his hand.

  “Yes, if that’s the only way,” Shade said. She was admittedly intimidated by Dekka sometimes, but intimidation didn’t stick with Shade. In her mind, Dekka had screwed up. She’d held her fire and she’d let herself be slowed down by Markovic, and worst of all, her plan had only gone as far as getting them all in place. Some distant part of Shade whispered that she was being unjust, that she was taking her frustration out on Dekka. But that was only a whisper.

  “So as soon as you don’t like a decision I make, you figure it’s time for you to take over, Shade? One mistake and done, right? You want us to start counting up your mistakes? Because I’ll bet we’d all have some things to say on that topic.”

  “At least I don’t forget my goal!”

  Dekka stood. Self-pity time was over. “That’s the one thing you never forget, Shade: you. You, you, you.”

  Armo sighed, stood up, and wedged himself between the two women as they moved closer to each other. “Dudes. Come on. Chill.”

  “How many people are going to die because we weren’t ready?” Shade demanded, and she saw from the way Dekka winced that the blow had landed.

  “You think I’m happy about that?” Dekka erupted. “Listen, little rich girl, this isn’t my first time making a decision that could turn to shit. But don’t throw that hesitation thing at me. I don’t sacrifice people’s lives, in this case Armo’s life.”

  “Good leaders make sacrifices,” Shade said. “This is war, Dekka. This is a war to save human civilization. People are going to die. And if we’re part of this war, we’re going to kill. And sometimes we’re going to sacrifice the innocent. Because if we lose, then the villains win.”

  “Your idea of a hero is someone who lets people die?”

  “I don’t give a damn about heroism; I don’t like losing. My idea of a winner is someone who does whatever it takes to win. And as it happened, we didn’t exactly save Williams, did we? While we were talking with some blue bumblebee, Markovic was sending his bugs to infest Williams!”

  Dekka stood dangerously still and silent, and Shade knew she’d gone too far. She tried to come up with words to take it back, but it was too late.

  Finally, Dekka, speaking in a low, terse growl, said, “I didn’t exactly see you volunteering to take care of Williams, Shade. You were happy enough to leave that to me.” She held up her hands and looked at her own palms as if they had betrayed her.

  With the power in those hands, Shade knew, Dekka had killed a man. A doomed man. A man begging for the release of death. But a human being, a man who had done no wrong, nothing to deserve being shredded into chunks no bigger than a McNugget . . . The accus
ation stung: she could have done it, maybe not as easily as Dekka, but she could have done it. And as Dekka said, she had not exactly volunteered.

  Shade felt the anger drain away to be replaced by guilt and sadness. “He seemed like a good guy. Detective Williams.”

  Dekka swallowed and nodded and could only say, “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry, Dekka,” Shade said, hanging her head. “I just . . . It doesn’t matter, I’m sorry.”

  Dekka sighed, and as Armo stepped aside she took Shade in an embrace. “It’s hard, Shade. All of this. Violence. Hurting people, even if you have no choice. Seeing people hurt. Seeing people afraid or in pain. It just hurts, Shade.” And Shade felt Dekka’s body shake with suppressed sobs.

  “I used to wonder why so many FAYZ survivors became drunks or druggies. Or suicides.” Shade stepped back and brushed away tears. Cruz appeared with a box of tissues.

  “This stuff, you want to just put it all in a box,” Dekka said. “But it never fits. You can never quite close the lid on that box. All of a sudden, from nowhere, for no reason, it just hits you.” She accepted a tissue with a nod to Cruz. “We had this girl, Mary? She was a saint—I mean, if I ever met a saint. Mother Mary, we called her . . . and she broke. All of it, the fear mostly, I guess, it broke her. I watched Mary lead a group of little kids off the edge of . . . That kind, sweet girl . . . She just came apart. And people always think, ‘Oh, that won’t happen to me; I’m tough.’ But you’ll be standing in a line at Starbucks or whatever, everything fine, and then it’ll come back, and suddenly you have to sit down, you know? It knocks the wind out of you.”

  Armo said, “Look, as long as we don’t know the game, we can be outplayed.”

  “It’s not a game,” Shade said, frowning. “This is people’s lives.”

  “But it’s still a game,” Armo insisted, “and we don’t know what the rules are. Do we sacrifice people? How many? Do we just kill any mutant who does something bad? I mean, what is it we’re doing? What are we?”

  Shade was about to say something dismissive, but she recognized that there was truth in what Armo was saying.