Hero

by Michael Grant

  “Astrid?” Sam said. “We need to talk.”

  Justin DeVeere had made his way back to New York, home sweet home: skyscrapers, yellow cabs, noise, the whole thing. The Big Apple, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

  With some differences. One difference was that none of the cabs at LaGuardia would take a passenger into Manhattan. The Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey, sure. Not Manhattan.

  So he’d taken a cab to the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge. From there he had walked across the bridge—the subway was on a very sketchy schedule with a main tunnel collapsed by the ASO impact. It was the first time he’d stepped foot on a bridge since the Golden Gate, and terrible memories of that fight flooded his brain. As he walked the wide bike and pedestrian path past traffic all heading out of the city, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from downtown all the way north to the park. That was another difference.

  Reaching the far side, he found himself in a city far quieter than he recalled. New York had held firm, but in the end the reality had begun to sink in: the city was in chaos, and it was a really good time to be somewhere else. Many shops that should have been open were closed, their steel security gates rolled down and padlocked. He even spotted available street parking, an exceedingly rare sight.

  There was a bad feel to the city—not panic, quite; more like defeat. The faces he saw were blank and gloomy. There was debris in the streets, glass and bricks and random bits of office furniture. Big black plastic trash bags formed hills on sidewalks, many split open and spilling their contents. And no one was cleaning it up. There were cops everywhere, many in tactical gear, ready if necessary to shoot looters. Looking north up Second Avenue, Justin saw the lights of fire trucks. The dominant sound was of burglar alarms in cars and in buildings, loudly insisting that attention should be paid. No one seemed to care.

  The next difference he discovered was that the door to his apartment—the one rented by his now-dead girlfriend and sponsor, Erin, lovely, rich Erin—was draped in yellow crime-scene tape. There was a notice pasted to the door that warned against entry.

  He doubted anyone in law enforcement had the time or energy to come around and check, so he tore down the tape, found the spare key he kept under the edge of the hallway carpet, and went in.

  The place had been trashed, or at least searched by people not concerned to keep the search secret. Books were strewn on the floor; the sofa cushions had been sliced open, fluffy white stuffing everywhere, like the aftermath of an epic pillow fight. The refrigerator was wide open and still running. His desktop computer was gone. All of his paintings had been taken down off the walls, presumably so the cops or the FBI or whoever could search the backs. They were leaned against the back of an easy chair.

  One by one, moving as if in a trance, he opened his kitchen cupboards. Cheerios but no milk. Dry pasta, both linguine and cavatappi. A half-empty box of Kind bars. He took one of those.

  They had left his TVs, the one in the living room and the one in the bedroom, where he sat disconsolate on his sliced-up mattress. He turned on the set and waited for it to warm up as he chewed the granola bar.

  “Knightmare eating a Kind bar amid the wreckage,” he muttered. “Wonderful.”

  He was an artist, dammit. So he reminded himself. An artist! Not a monster. Not some crazy killer like that lunatic in Las Vegas. All he’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Everything he’d done had been self-defense, perfectly reasonable self-defense. The plane. The bridge. The lighthouse. He hadn’t wanted any of that to happen. It wasn’t his fault.

  You have canvas and you have paint, he reminded himself sternly. You should get to work. You should get back to your life, your real life. The life where you didn’t get Erin killed. The life where no families screamed behind windshields as their cars plunged twenty-five stories into the churning green water of San Francisco Bay.

  All of that, the horror, the fear, the excitement, the creepiness of finding yourself in a mutant body built for mayhem—he had to find a way to capture it on canvas. If he could paint it, he could control it. On the canvas he could shape his memories, rearrange and revise them.

  Yes, that was the thing to do. Never become Knightmare again. Pray that the cops were too overwhelmed to put any effort into little Justin DeVeere. There was so much happening, so much madness, surely he was already in law enforcement’s rearview mirror.

  The TV came to life. It had been many hours, days even, since he had seen or heard news. He’d overheard conversations about ASO-7’s spectacular deconstruction of the city, but of a creature calling himself Vector, he’d heard nothing. Until now.

  Vector had control of at least one local TV station, and it was running a loop of a creature made entirely of insects over and over again.

  By the third repetition, Justin had forgotten about canvas and paint. A new world was coming, a world ruled by Vector or others like him. A world very unlikely to have much of a place for an artistic prodigy.

  But a world where Knightmare would perhaps be right at home.

  Drake Merwin quite liked his nice new trench coat. He’d received it as a “gift” from a man who’d had Drake’s tentacle tightening around his throat. The coat gave him a way to muffle random blurts from Brittany Pig, who had re-emerged on his chest. And it helped to hide both his whip hand and the fact that parts of him were still regrowing.

  His feet were all the way restored, and that was a relief. It would have been very hard to drive the car he’d stolen without feet. He was on the I-10 West, passing Cabazon and trying to decide just how to go about locating one Astrid Ellison. He knew she was in Southern California, but that didn’t narrow it down by much.

  Drake was not a computer person. Maybe the address was in some corner of the internet or the dark web, but he didn’t know where to start with that. What he did know was that someone knew. Someone. But who?

  The FBI. They would know.

  Drake did not know computers and he did not have a phone, but the Infiniti he’d stolen had GPS, and he knew how to use that. He pulled off to the side of the freeway, and as big rigs went past, their slipstream rocking the car, he punched in “FBI.” A blue dot showed an FBI office in Riverside.

  “Hah! Straight ahead.”

  He took the state highway 60 exit off the I-10, then followed directions until he pulled up in the parking lot of a three-story, Spanish-style office building with a red tile roof. The building fronted on a blank, gray wall that marked the freeway.

  If Drake had one virtue, it was patience. He hadn’t always been patient, far from it, but Drake had been “killed” several times, had even been locked in a box and sunk in a lake, and he had become accustomed to long waits with nothing to do but indulge his fantasies.

  He waited patiently until he saw a woman in a charcoal-gray blazer and black pants come out and walk to her car. The car was a newish Lexus, so the woman was not a mere clerk. She pulled out, and Drake followed her. He waited as she stopped at Ralphs to buy groceries, then followed her the rest of her way home.

  There was a Slip ’n Slide on the front lawn of the pleasant two-story tract home, and My Little Pony decals in the front window.

  “Kids. Perfect.”

  Drake waited some more, until he was sure the woman would be at ease in her home. Then he got out of the car, discreetly coiling his whip hand beneath his purloined trench coat, and headed up the walkway to her front door, with a smile on his face in case she was looking out. He tried the handle. Locked. It was a good, sturdy door and would make a lot of noise if he kicked it in. He did not want to have to deal with some FBI SWAT showing up and was considering his options when the front door was opened by a boy of maybe six, who was on a mission of some sort and was surprised to see the tall young man in the trench coat.

  “Who are you?” the boy demanded.

  “Me? I’m Whip Hand, kid. Want to see?” Drake opened his coat, freeing the ten-foot-long tentacle. The boy’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened, ready to scream, s
o Drake wrapped the end of his whip hand around the boy’s throat and squeezed off any sound.

  He lifted the kicking, struggling, red-faced boy effortlessly up to eye level and said, “Is your mommy home?”

  The bulging eyes said yes, so Drake let the boy breathe and shifted his hold to the child’s torso, and carrying him like a gasping, wheezing suitcase, entered the home.

  “Is someone at the door?”

  A woman’s voice, coming from the kitchen. She had changed out of her suit into sweatpants and a UCLA sweatshirt. She was taking things out of the refrigerator and placing them on the work counter. A package of hamburger meat. Mustard. Pickles.

  “Just me, your friendly neighborhood Whip Hand,” Drake said cheerily.

  The FBI agent yelped in shock, started to run, but stopped herself seeing her son in Drake’s power. Her dark eyes went wide. Drake could practically see the connections being made. The FBI knew about him, Tom Peaks had said as much. They had begun to realize that he was the person behind a string of gruesome, sadistic attacks from Palm Springs to the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

  “Aren’t you going to ask who I am?” Drake said.

  The FBI agent was pale, eyes scared, but she didn’t panic. “I know who you are.” She made no effort to hide her contempt. “Put my son down.”

  “Good, that makes it easier that you know who I am. You know what I’ve done. You know what I can do to your kid, here, and to you.”

  The agent’s lip was trembling, but Drake had to almost admire her strength. Most people took one look at Drake and ran. They didn’t get away, but they always tried. Not this woman.

  Pity he had other things on his mind, or it would have been fun to break her slowly, over the course of days. Weak people were no challenge to break, but Drake sensed this woman would be.

  He sighed inwardly. Business before pleasure.

  “You’re going to hop on your computer and get me an address.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t access FBI files from home.”

  Drake smiled. He dropped the boy onto the floor, took a step back, and heard the agent scream as he brought his whip hand down hard on the boy’s back. The howl of pain was delicious; the mother’s scream of “No! No!” was even better.

  Ten minutes later, Drake had the address.

  Thirty minutes later he was back in his car.

  Eventually someone, perhaps the husband if there was one, or worried coworkers, would find a baby crying in her crib, and two mutilated dead bodies. He’d had no choice but to kill the woman—she would have warned Astrid. The boy he’d killed mostly because he wouldn’t stop crying and yelling, “You’re bad! You’re bad!” Which had struck Drake as being almost an insult. Bad? Bad? I’m not bad, I’m the living embodiment of evil, you little monster.

  “Coming for you, Astrid,” Drake said, laughing. “Coming for you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Coup

  A SWAT TEAM assembled out of ICE agents and a couple of New York state troopers had assaulted Bob Markovic’s apartment at two in the morning. And now, with the sun rising in the east, Markovic was distracted and annoyed by incessant cries of pain and fear from seven black-clad, heavily armed men and women in the hallway outside his apartment, and three more inside. The cries for mercy, the pleas for death, made it very hard for Markovic to concentrate. He had to plan for the future, for this new and amazing future. And he had to do it with the incessant, looming presence of unseen, unheard creatures watching his every thought and action from inside his own head.

  Not that he had a head, per se.

  What was it, that sense of being observed all the time? Was it some aftereffect of becoming what he now saw as his enhanced, superior self? Small price to pay for power. Still, it was an irritant, and it made him feel vulnerable.

  Markovic had quickly realized that his lifelong habit of pursuing profit, of accumulating great piles of money in various off-shore tax havens, was no longer the right game to be playing. Money was an artifact of civilization, and civilization was dying. Civilization had made power abstract by inventing money and government, but this was the Wild West now. And in the Wild West, what had mattered was actual, real, brutal power.

  Markovic had that power. In fact, his power was growing. His component elements—the bugs—had tripled in number, and he had learned how to dispatch groups of them. He could send a hundred of his bugs across town and still see what they saw and hear what they heard. And he could control them. The only limitation he had discovered was that he could not dispatch single bugs; there seemed to be a need for his component parts to move in swarms of hundreds or thousands. But this wasn’t much of a handicap. That, and cold definitely slowed him down. It didn’t stop him, certainly didn’t kill him, but out on the cold streets his bits felt slow and sluggish.

  Good thing it’s not winter.

  The ability to send portions of himself out on missions was very like being a drone pilot. He could sit (well, hover) comfortably and safely in one location and reach out and destroy anyone, anywhere. Or at least anywhere within the city—he hadn’t yet tried to go farther.

  Markovic was one of a new breed of oligarchs, he decided, an oligarchy not of money but of raw power. In the time before his rebirth as Vector, he had measured himself annually by the Forbes list of richest people. He’d risen as high as number eighty-two. Mostly those people, the super-rich, had ignored him. Markovic wasn’t “cool.” What he did for a living made right-thinking people squeamish, like bankers were any better. And he wasn’t part of the old-money establishment, either, so he was dissed by the old bluenoses and by the tech bros as well.

  He had never been invited to the big annual ball for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’d even donated some money to cancer research and still had not been invited to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Spring Ball. He’d bought a mansion in Palm Beach and done a little better there at easing into “society,” but still he had few friends and far too many people who thought they were better than he.

  But now? Now he had something even better than money. The power to terrorize and destroy. Which was good, but it did not define a goal for him, really. He’d known how to measure success in the money game, but this was a different game. All he knew for sure was that this was an opportunity, and whatever the game was, he intended to win it.

  Markovic knew Simone had gone to join the Rockborn Gang. Stupid girl no doubt thought she could keep them from killing him. What nonsense—sooner or later Markovic would destroy the Rockborn Gang, or they would destroy him; there was no avoiding that reality. He’d have sought them out and killed them off already but for a fading concern for Simone. But Simone’s involvement with them meant that he might, sooner or later, have to deal with his daughter, and that was not a pleasant thought. He could never do to Simone what he’d done to the men and women screaming and begging for death in his entryway. Not that.

  But, that said, he couldn’t wait passively for the young mutant killers to come for him, could he? Next time they might just find a way to succeed.

  He had built his strength. He had learned the many ways to use his new body. The time had come for a demonstration of his power. Time to lay down the law and make New York understand that the city was his now.

  Mine. All of it. Mine!

  At nine a.m., when the people still in the city who still had jobs they still showed up for would be at work, Markovic swarmed out of the broken sliding glass door, barely pausing to note that he was effortlessly flying through the air, a dense cloud of insects—well, something like insects, anyway—that sometimes formed itself into the shape of a man. He raced down Park Avenue, then took Madison Avenue to Broadway, always heading downtown, south. He could have flown above the buildings but he wanted to assess the state of the city.

  The city had already changed. He saw half a dozen looted stores, the evidence of fires, trash strewn in the street. A burned-out taxi sat in front of a tapas restaurant. A water main had broken and no one had y
et fixed it, so that half a block of Broadway was under six inches of water. Most of the traffic lights he passed were in emergency flashing mode, which would have made traffic impossible but for the fact that there were fewer than the usual number of cars or trucks on the streets, and what traffic there was all had a single direction: away.

  Markovic zoomed on, quite enjoying himself, until he reached his goal.

  New York’s City Hall was an early nineteenth-century building in French Renaissance style, a grand old edifice. It was big, but dwarfed by the even larger Tweed Courthouse behind it, which housed the Department of Education for the city.

  Should he? No, just City Hall. No need to ruin the day of educators. The time would come when he’d need people like that to teach his laws to a generation of children who would grow up knowing that Markovic—Vector—ruled their world.

  Markovic swarmed right in the front door, flowed past the security detail, split himself into a main group and three smaller swarms, and spread out through the building.

  Ten minutes later, most of New York City’s government were screaming in agony, their bodies devoured and yet never to be consumed by disease. Only the mayor was missing, which was a disappointment, but he would get to her. People tried to run, but he was too swift. They barricaded themselves in offices and pushed furniture against the doors. Silly fools: there had never been a door an insect could not get past.

  One Police Plaza was just a block away, an awful, putty-colored cube. In minutes the police chief, his aides, and hundreds of cops and clerical support were in agony.

  One last target. The Javits Federal Building, which housed the FBI and Homeland Security, was conveniently in the same neighborhood. Markovic struck here with extra relish, in light of what the Feds had done at the Pine Barrens. Try to kill me? Hah. Go to hell.

  Literally.

  In just under an hour, Markovic had infected hundreds of federal employees and crippled the leadership of the city.

  New York City was without any functional government.