Monster

by Michael Grant

  Cruz gibbered in incoherent terror, nonsense sounds, the urgent need to flee all but irresistible. And suddenly Shade was gone! There was a sudden sharp gust of wind and a loud crack! Cruz heard the heavy sound of bodies falling on grass, and to her amazement, the two punks were on their backs.

  The Shade-not-Shade creature stood vibrating between Cruz and the fallen men, vibrating like she’d grabbed a power line. A buzzing sound came from her, like a large mosquito.

  “Sorry. Need. To. Talk. MoreslowlyIguess,” Shade said in a voice that sounded syrupy, like someone slowing the replay on an audio file. “I. Did it!”

  Cruz nodded, struck dumb, able to do nothing but stare.

  Shade had something in her hand—her relatively normal hand. It was the gun, the one Sunglasses had in his waistband. Cruz was about to tell her to throw it away when Shade did just that. She threw the gun in the direction of the lake. The gun should have flown twenty or thirty feet and landed on the grass between tombstones. Instead there was a crack! and the gun, breaking the sound barrier, sailed over the tallest headstones, over the length of the graveyard, over Lake Shore Drive, and splashed in the water of Lake Michigan, a quarter mile away.

  The two vandals crawled off, yammering to each other in scared voices about “crazy bitches!”

  Shade, still vibrating said, “I think. I have. Super-speed.”

  “Yeah,” Cruz said.

  Shade jumped, straight up. She flew up and out of sight, a darkness against stars, then fell more slowly at gravity-normal speed and landed hard, buckling her back-turned knees.

  She recovered quickly and said, “Jump. Good. Landing. Notsomuch.”

  Then Shade’s new and unutterably disturbing form began to fade to normal. Cruz stared in fascination at the legs reversing direction again, at the feet becoming human feet once more. It was not as simple or as easy as a dissolve between two images; there was more movement, more twisting and shrinking and fleshing out. But finally she was Shade again, a girl standing in ripped jeans. Shade retrieved her shoes, took a knee, and laced them up.

  “Good,” Shade said. “I was worried I couldn’t change back despite last night. That’s a relief.”

  “Okay, that . . . ,” Cruz began before realizing she had no descriptors big enough to cope with what she’d seen.

  “It’s amazing, Cruz,” Shade said. But her tone did not mirror the words. She sounded wary, worried. Which, Cruz thought, was the very mildest possible reaction to having your entire body transform.

  They got back to the fence and found it quite a bit harder to squeeze through with the jagged wire pointing at them rather than away, but when they finally pushed through, cursing small wounds, they saw that they were not alone.

  Shade sighed, shook her head ruefully, and said, “Malik?”

  “Yeah.” He was leaning against his car, a little two-seat BMW. “I sort of, um . . . followed you,” he said.

  “You saw?” she asked.

  “I saw something,” he said. “Something that should not be possible. Not even in a graveyard at night. What the hell have you done, Shade? What the hell have you done?”

  ASO-4

  ASO-4 WAS SCHEDULED to land in the mountains on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. An American SEAL team, launched secretly from a base in Kazakhstan, where Professor Martin Darby and a dozen others watched helmet-cam feeds on monitors, raced to the impact site, hoping to get in, seize the meteorite, and get away before hostile tribesmen knew they were there.

  It was night, and the night belonged to the SEALs with their owl-eyed night-vision equipment.

  Two helicopters landed while one stayed aloft, turning circles, its guns and missiles on a hair trigger, sensors scanning. Farther aloft floated a drone flown by a pilot sitting seven thousand miles away at a console at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Farther up still, two USAF F-16 jets bristling with smart missiles zoomed back and forth at near Mach 1 speeds. Some distance away flew the USAF airborne refueling tanker and the USAF E-3G, which watched everything with its array of electronics. And finally, three hundred miles up and well outside the atmosphere, a French satellite trained its cameras down and relayed its pictures to Paris, Langley, and the Pentagon.

  But all that technology was of no use in the end. A Kazakh interpreter had earned two hundred dollars (and his life) by giving advance warning to members of the Haqqani Network, among the world’s best-trained, best-disciplined terrorists. The Haqqanis had no notion of what was happening, just that a SEAL team was landing two miles away from a nameless village of six families, all devoted to raising goats and transporting opium.

  The Haqqanis had long since learned to be wary of American technology. They knew about the eyes in the sky. They knew that their heat signatures would be picked up, so they had arrived early and nestled deep in rock crevices, piling brush above themselves and driving a small flock of sheep and goats into the area to add to the signal confusion.

  The SEALs landed, leaped out, and formed a perimeter. They were the best-trained soldiers in any army and the Haqqanis had a cautious respect for them, so they waited to see just what all this hubbub was about before starting a fight.

  From the second helicopter came different soldiers. These moved with far less liquid grace, and instead of automatic weapons they carried instruments.

  The Haqqanis watched, puzzled, as these new arrivals walked back and forth in a grid pattern, before finally circling around a small patch of what, to the Haqqanis’ eyes, looked a bit like a bomb crater.

  Then out came a metal chest carried by two soldiers, and the rest of the technicians busied themselves wrapping plastic around a particular rock about the size of a car tire.

  The Haqqani mission leader had seen enough: whatever this rock was, it was worth a very big commitment of American and allied resources. If the Americans wanted this particular rock that badly, then it must be worth something to a tribe that made its living off extortion, terror, opium, and hostage-taking.

  Rifle and machine-gun fire opened up in the night, arcing toward the SEALs, killing one instantly and wounding another.

  Rocket-propelled grenades flew, trailing sparks and smoke, and slammed into one of the two parked helicopters.

  The SEALs began an orderly, disciplined withdrawal, but the technicians either dropped to the ground or fled for the helicopter.

  Now it was a melee, a firefight, with Haqqanis shooting down and SEALs shooting at targets they couldn’t really see. It was quickly clear that the SEALs could not hope to hold on, and they withdrew by stages to the surviving helicopter, two of their number struggling to drag the heavy chest and its rock cargo.

  The drone found a target and sent a rocket into the dark rocks, blowing one of the Haqqanis apart and injuring another.

  The helicopter was hovering now, just a foot off the ground as the men with the chest covered the last, desperate few yards. And then a sharpshooter’s bullet took off the side of one man’s face. He fell, and a fellow SEAL jumped down from the helicopter, threw the wounded man over his shoulder, and slung him into the helicopter door as an RPG round barely missed, pelting the beating rotors with noisy shrapnel, sending sparks flying.

  The SEALs’ helicopter rose, turned, and roared away.

  The chest, and the rock it contained, remained behind.

  The Haqqani leader knew he had minutes, maybe just seconds, before the jets blasted the area and annihilated every living thing. He sent three of his best men at a run to seize the chest.

  Sure enough, the F-16s fired their missiles and the little dell exploded in fire and smoke.

  But by then the chest was in the entrance to a shallow cave, and the Haqqani battle chief was frowning down at what looked like nothing but a rock.

  He had lost three men, leaving three widows and five orphans. And it began to occur to him that if this really was just a rock, he was going to have some explaining to do.

  CHAPTER 7

  An Unhappy Guinea Pig

 
; THERE WAS A quick stop at Dekka’s apartment to grab a few things and her black-and-white cat, Edith Windsor (“E” for short). With the FBI man Carlson watching, Dekka threw a few shirts, some underwear, and socks into a duffel bag. The cat went into a plastic cat carrier.

  “Anything else?” Carlson asked.

  Dekka stood in the center of her living room. The tiny kitchen was separated only by a counter. The bedroom door stood open and Dekka wondered if she should make the bed before leaving. There was a sense of permanence about this departure, not necessarily as if she’d never see the apartment again, but rather as if this were the closing scene of the last four years of her life.

  Only now did Dekka see that those last four years had been a dream, unreal, somehow. The FAYZ was real. This life, this depressing apartment, her crappy job, the stack of unpayable bills on the coffee table, her barely there social life with her dull friends, her nearly nonexistent love life, all of it a gray, badly lit, poorly photographed home movie that no one wanted to watch, least of all her.

  And what was next for her?

  “Back to the FAYZ,” she muttered.

  “Didn’t hear you, what?” Agent Carlson asked.

  Dekka shook her head. “One more thing.” She took her framed picture of Brianna, the one Brianna’s parents had given her, wrapped it in T-shirts, and packed it away in her bag.

  Dekka and her cat were sent off in a convoy of black SUVs to the south, down the 101 through the brightly lit streets of San Francisco, down the Pacific Coast Highway, past Monterey and Carmel. They left the PCH and headed east along ever-narrower roads into rugged, wooded hills, with night closing in all around. They reached a high chain-link gate with a guardhouse and three uniformed security types with machine pistols slung. Their IDs were checked, flashlights blinding Dekka as she produced her driver’s license.

  Once they were through the gate, the road paving was dramatically better, smooth as butter. It curved up and east, up and east until they crested a hill and Dekka saw what might have been an isolated high school or a minimum-security prison: half a dozen two-story buildings painted tan and marked with stenciled numbers. Stadium lights turned the whole place eerily bright.

  “It’s a Defense Department facility,” Tom Peaks narrated. “They used to do research on radiation back in the fifties when it was built. It has an official designation, but everyone calls it Hidden Valley Ranch, you know, like the salad dressing. Or just the Ranch.”

  “It’s not Defense Department anymore,” Dekka said. “Those weren’t military police, they were private security.”

  Peaks nodded and smiled, as if he was the proud teacher of a student who’d said something clever in class. “Very good. Yes, it is no longer technically DoD. It’s now run by Homeland Security, specifically HSTF-Sixty-Six, a designation you may hear from time to time. But don’t worry, it is all very secure and very well guarded—fences, electronic sensors, cameras. And those guards may be contract help, but they’re all former MPs or other ex-military. You’ll be quite safe.”

  And quite trapped, Dekka thought, which was probably your point.

  The convoy parked and Peaks showed Dekka into one of the buildings, a charmless, two-story elongated rectangle that must once have been an army barracks. Building 104, according to the stenciled number.

  They climbed stairs, Dekka banging her cat carrier while Peaks helpfully shouldered her bag, to reach a doorway halfway down a gloomy hallway. Inside was a small one-bedroom apartment, with a kitchenette and, oddly, a grand piano that filled a third of the main room.

  “I don’t play,” Dekka said.

  “Oh, that. Yes, we had a Romanian gentleman staying here, a concert pianist. You’re welcome to tinkle away, you have no immediate neighbors.”

  “Swell.” Dekka set Edith Windsor down and turned to Peaks, anxious to get rid of him and use the bathroom. “Food?”

  “You’ll find everything you need,” Peaks said. “Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll send someone for you at seven a.m.”

  “The hell you will. I’ll go at nine a.m., and that’s my best offer.”

  Peaks smiled and nodded. “Fair enough.” He left, pulling the door behind him.

  Dekka stood in the silent room, so like a bargain hotel, she thought, one of those places with the word “suites” in the name. She tested the door: it was not locked, which was reassuring. She raised the blinds and looked out on a view of bulky air-conditioning units and a bit of parking lot, which frankly was no worse than her own apartment’s view of a Dumpster and part of a smaller, dimmer parking lot.

  In the cupboards they’d stocked E’s favorite cat food, along with snack foods that were suspiciously familiar. They were making no effort to hide the fact that they had spied on her and entered her apartment to gather information. They even had the Peet’s Sumatra coffee Dekka liked but usually could not afford.

  There was a small but new refrigerator with milk, sliced honeydew melon, sliced cheddar cheese, Genoa salami, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale . . . My God, Dekka thought, they’ve even stocked the freezer with Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked. It was as if they’d moved her own refrigerator to this new place, minus the spilled maraschino cherry juice and the withered carrots.

  Dekka fed E, who stared balefully at the food, then stalked off to find . . . yes, there was a cat box with fresh litter. Of course there was—Peaks and his people had thought of everything.

  Dekka unpacked her duffel bag and regretted that she forgot to pack her favorite ratty chenille robe, but in the closet there was a brand-new version of it hanging.

  “Okay, then,” Dekka said. She popped open a beer and drank half of it in one long swig.

  “Wi-fi?” She opened her laptop and waited while it searched for a wi-fi signal. It found one labeled “Guest—DT,” which was not password-protected. She signed on with no trouble, checked a few favorite sites, and then opened her email and typed:

  I am being held prisoner by DARPA.

  She typed her own email address as the destination, then hit send.

  She was not surprised when the email sat spinning in her “out” tray for a long while before the system gave up and suggested she try again later.

  “Uh-huh. Later. Right.”

  She had internet access but could not email, and was fairly certain that she could not text, DM, or even leave a blog comment. She was connected but cut off, able to see but not speak. She tested her Netflix and iTunes accounts; both worked fine. Then she tested her ability to upvote a post on Reddit, and once again: nope.

  Download yes, upload no.

  She considered looking for the cameras they had no doubt installed in the little apartment, but this was a DARPA facility, and this apartment was obviously built to hold people under observation, so Dekka accepted the reality that she would likely never find their surveillance equipment.

  Instead she pushed back from her laptop, stood in the center of the room, and said, “Fine for now. But where’s the thermostat? It’s hot in here. And I need to know my bike is safe.”

  There was no answer for a long minute. Then a voice that came from . . . well, everywhere . . . said, “Climate control is on the wall to the left of the closet. Your motorcycle is safe in the main lot with the cover on.”

  “Thanks, fairy godfather,” Dekka said.

  She showered—they had her favorite brand of shampoo, not the cheap stuff she usually bought but the nice stuff she occasionally got discounted or damaged from work. She dried with very nice towels, put on the robe—it was identical to hers except for the lack of chocolate stains and the hole she’d burned with a dropped joint.

  She had another beer and considered. Normally she might talk to the cat, but not with people listening.

  Not the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Not by a long shot.

  And that thought called up a wave of memories, some still so raw after four years that she had to squeeze her eyes shut and search for safer territory.

  Free rent, free beer, Netflix w
orks . . .

  But of course she knew this was not the whole of it. She was a lab rat, she supposed, some kind of experiment. After all, DARPA was all about research, wasn’t it? Supersmart scientists all beavering away looking for new and exciting ways to kill America’s enemies?

  I’m a lab rat. But I’m a lab rat with two pints of Half Baked.

  Ten minutes later there was only one pint of Half Baked, and between the hot shower and the long drive and the stress of uncertainty—along with a degree of excitement, she had to admit—Dekka got sleepy. She took from her bag the one personal item she’d brought, propped her picture of Brianna on the nightstand, and fell asleep.

  The next morning the fun began.

  Dekka endured hours of psychological tests, followed by part of an afternoon of physical tests, with mounting impatience—patience had never been Dekka’s thing—before finally calling an irritated stop.

  “We’re done,” Dekka said.

  “Actually,” the medical tech said, “we still have—”

  “And yet: we are done.”

  “But we—”

  “Hey. Listen to me. Listen to the words coming out of my mouth.” There was a voice that Dekka could access when necessary: it was her don’t screw with me voice. It was not the voice of a nineteen-year-old young woman, it was the voice of a person who had survived hell and was impressed by absolutely no one. “We. Are. Done. So pull the damn needle out of my arm.”

  The tech pulled the needle out and slapped on a bandage.

  “Thanks.”

  Tom Peaks appeared, as she suspected he would. “So, are you all finished up here?” he asked brightly.

  “Can we not waste time pretending that you don’t have me under surveillance every minute of the day?”