Monster

by Michael Grant

  Peaks emitted a snort that might have been a laugh. “All right, let’s do that.”

  “Good. What happens next is that you tell me what all this is about.” It was not a question or a suggestion, it was her precondition for going forward.

  Peaks jerked his head toward the door. “Join me for a cup of coffee?”

  He led her down the stairs, down below ground level, to a long hallway that led to another long hallway—it was a corridor kind of place, the Ranch: more of it underground than above. Finally they arrived at a set of stairs that they climbed to reach a mostly depopulated cafeteria. Peaks fetched coffee and they sat at a table beside a window that opened onto an interior courtyard. There was a small knot of people in the courtyard smoking, and Dekka felt the inner tug of the reformed ex-smoker. She had smoked for almost two years after escaping the FAYZ, and quitting had not been easy. Not even a little bit.

  Peaks laid his briefcase on the table, slid his laptop out, and opened it so she could see the screen. Peaks then came around the table to sit beside her. He tapped keys and a YouTube video opened.

  Dekka instantly recognized the freeze-frame. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Let’s watch it again.” The video was poor quality, a fixed camera, obviously a surveillance camera showing the bright interior of a 7-Eleven, and they were looking down at rows of food and a cold case beyond, stocked with beer and bottled water.

  And suddenly there was what looked like a girl. The girl just appeared, considering the potato chips. She was unusual in the extreme: her skin appeared to be gold, like the doomed woman in the old James Bond movie Goldfinger. Her hair was black, but looked less like thousands of small strands and more like a sort of flexible plastic.

  The girl moved in the blink of an eye to the magazine section. She grabbed three celebrity gossip magazines and was suddenly, simply . . . gone.

  “Like I said: I’ve seen it.”

  “You know who it is.”

  Dekka shrugged. “It looks like Taylor.”

  “Who is . . .”

  “One of the kids from the FAYZ. She could teleport.”

  “And she was unaccounted for after the barrier came down,” Peaks said.

  He was sitting beside her, so that she had to turn to meet his steady gaze with her own. “Taylor was a malicious little gossip and troublemaker.”

  “Taylor was? Past tense?”

  Dekka said, “She used to be a girl—a normal-looking girl, kind of pretty, really. She had the power of teleportation, and sometimes she was actually helpful. But toward the end, something happened that turned her into . . . into, I don’t even know. Some kind of weird gold Play-Doh creature.”

  “Who had powers. Still has powers. Even now, even long after the dome came down. That video is just six months old.”

  “Looks like,” Dekka drawled, refusing to speculate further. She’d always assumed the tape was a clever fake.

  “Any idea why she didn’t take food but did take magazines?”

  Dekka shrugged. “She doesn’t eat. Didn’t eat, not after she, you know, became that. And she always was a superficial little ninny, so gossip rags would be about right.”

  To Dekka’s relief, Peaks didn’t press it further: she’d been avoiding thinking about it, preferring to believe it was all some fake. Her relief was short-lived.

  “Now,” Peaks said, “I want to show you something you have not seen on YouTube, because we’ve got the only copy.” He tapped the keyboard and a window with the logo of the NSA—the National Security Agency—came up. More tapping, a password. And then, a view window.

  It was an aerial shot and looked like it had been taken from hundreds of feet above. “Drone?” Dekka asked. Peaks did not answer. And then something came into view. A person. Dekka saw the top of his head, his shoulders, the tips of his toes as he walked. Then . . .

  “Jesus!” Dekka was on her feet, her chair knocked over, her whole body electric, tingling.

  “It’s a bit hard to make out,” Peaks said laconically, playing it cool. “You can see much better in slow motion.” He pointed the mouse and the video advanced more slowly.

  And there it was.

  There it was: the ten-foot-long tentacle that snapped like a bullwhip, and snatched up what may have been a rat or a frog.

  Dekka stared and breathed hard. Speech was impossible. Her attitude of cool indifference was gone. Her eyes blazed.

  “I think we both know who that is,” Peaks said with sincere sympathy.

  “Drake.” Dekka’s voice was flat. She could barely breathe.

  “Drake Merwin.” Peaks nodded. “A violent, sadistic psychopath. A rapist. A torturer. A murderer.”

  “All that,” Dekka snarled, transfixed by the freeze-frame Peaks had left on-screen.

  Drake!

  Brianna had chopped him into bits, and yet he lived.

  Sam Temple had watched him burn to ashes, and yet he lived.

  Peaks closed the laptop. “More coffee?”

  “You have beer?” Dekka rasped, and her trembling hand twitched toward the cigarettes she no longer carried.

  An aide appeared out of nowhere and Peaks sent him off to return moments later with two bottles of Sierra Nevada—apparently the official beer of the Ranch—and two glasses.

  “I’m sure you can see why we are concerned,” Peaks said, pouring the foamy liquid for both of them.

  “He’s a monster. I mean that.” She stabbed a finger down on the tabletop for emphasis. “A monster in body and mind.”

  “Yes,” Peaks agreed. “But that’s not why we are worried. The problem both Taylor and Drake represent is this: they have somehow retained the powers they had in the PBA, the FAYZ if you prefer, while people like you have not. We think we know why.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Both of them not only acquired powers, but somehow they’ve kept them. Kept them four years after the PBA came down.”

  “Looks like,” Dekka said, clipped, tense, waiting.

  “They, unlike you, Dekka, were physically altered. They were physically changed. Only Drake, Taylor, and Charles Merriman—Orc—were altered physically. Orc died, and we’ve seen no sign of him. But something about that difference, the physical change, means Drake and Taylor still have their powers outside the PBA.”

  “You need to find him, then dig a deep hole and throw him in. Throw a nuke in after him. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

  “Actually, we do. That video was taken quite by accident from a military drone on a training run in the Joshua Tree National Park. Out in the desert. And when we ran a search we turned up eighteen instances of rape, mutilation, and murder in the area over the last four years. It’s all being blamed on illegals coming up from the border, of course, the convenient scapegoats, but it was him. People coming across the border don’t carry bullwhips. They don’t spend hours flaying victims alive, then leaving them to burn in the hot sun.”

  Dekka felt her stomach turn, felt her heart pounding, felt . . . fear. Fear like she had not felt in years. “You have to warn Astrid. He hated—hates—her.”

  “Ms. Ellison is watched twenty-four hours a day. We have armed personnel—”

  “You don’t know what he is,” Dekka said, her voice rising. “You don’t know. You do not know!”

  “Please, sit down,” Peaks urged.

  Dekka sat and swallowed her beer in a single, long gulp.

  “Here’s the thing, Dekka. It’s been kept very secret, but pieces of the same space body that created the PBA, the same mutagenic asteroid, are arriving on Earth. The first three pieces, ASO-Two, -Three, and -Four, have already come down. Now, we are doing all we can to retrieve all of that . . . object . . . but it is entirely possible that some will escape, may even fall into the worst possible hands. We could have more Drakes. We could have a lot of Drakes. Dekka, we are looking at the possibility of a world inhabited by dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with extraordinary powers.”

  “Wha
t the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Dekka demanded. “I’m a cashier, you’re the government!”

  Peaks looked at her, patient, waiting for her to calm down. Dekka saw that he was waiting for her to calm down, and really wished she could calm down, but every hair on her body was tingling, her palms were sweating, and she was nowhere close to calm.

  Drake!

  But Dekka knew how to look calm.

  She licked her lips, exhaled a long, slow breath through her barely open mouth, and said, “You need to just tell me.”

  “All right.” Peaks leaned back, satisfied that she was listening. “You are an extraordinary person, Dekka Talent. Slightly above-average IQ, a little hot-tempered, loyal. Brave?” He made a little admiring snort. “Your record is quite clear on that. But the thing that we like best about you is that you are, for lack of a better, more scientific word, strong. Mentally strong. Emotionally strong.” He smiled and shook his head in sincere appreciation. “Some combination of DNA and life experience . . . you are really quite extraordinary.”

  “Thanks. But you told me all that and it’s flattering and all, but let’s cut the bullshit, okay? What do you want?”

  “Well, it’s like this. We have some of the rock—what we’re calling the ASO, the Anomalous Space Object. You have direct experience of possessing and using the power the ASO can convey. You are therefore very unlikely to suddenly turn into a . . . a Drake. So we want to test it on you.”

  “Test what?”

  “We want to expose you to the rock. We want to see if these fragments are still capable of causing mutation. We want to see, Dekka, whether you can once again acquire powers.”

  “Can’t be done, not outside the FAYZ, that’s what everyone said.”

  “Yes, well, we suspect that everyone is wrong. I have another bit of tape to show you. Did you happen to see anything about the plane accident at LaGuardia?”

  “Yeah, the one that broke up on landing?”

  “The video I have isn’t very good; the person shooting it on their phone was terrified.” He tapped his laptop and up came yet another video. It was narrow, with the phone held vertically. At first she could make nothing out, just what looked like airplane seats and wildly gyrating lights and arms and heads. The soundtrack was screams, cries, shouts, loud prayers: terrified humans begging for mercy.

  Then the picture steadied for just a few seconds and Dekka saw a monster, a coral-tinged, huge, hulking creature with what looked like a long blade where the right hand should be and something like a lobster’s claw for the left hand.

  The picture slipped, more wild gesticulations, more screams, and the sound of metal screeching and jet engines suddenly louder.

  The video stopped.

  Dekka waited.

  Peaks said, “The plane did not simply break up. It was sliced open, opened up on one end by someone armed with a blade capable of cutting through aluminum like a can opener on a can of cat food.”

  “That’s no one I ever saw or heard about in the FAYZ,” Dekka said.

  “No. It’s a young art student, believe it or not. We are almost certain that he traveled to Iowa and managed to take what we were calling ASO-Three. But we don’t believe he was the only one. There are four distinct sets of footprints, though an effort was made to obscure them. So someone else, right here in America, may also have pieces of the meteorite. And that’s not even getting into foreign locations.”

  Dekka had nothing to say. Her mouth was dry. Her heart felt as if it was trying to pump molasses through her veins.

  “And worse, far worse is to come. Most of the ASOs are small, like the one that’s been stolen but that we will soon recover. But there’s one rock coming—we call it the Mother Rock—which, if it were captured by some enemy force, might be enough to build a massive mutant army. We need to understand this phenomenon, Dekka. We need to know how this happens, how it can be controlled. Sixty-one people died on that flight. Most were burned to death, which is a very bad way to die. We’ve done the best we can to cover up the cause, spreading all kinds of wild rumors to discredit the truthful accounts, but it’s only a matter of time before people see the truth.”

  “So you want to test the rock, the ASO rock, on me, see if I develop powers.”

  Peaks leaned forward, eyes burning behind his spectacles. “In this world there are very, very few people who can be trusted with that kind of power, Dekka. Power corrupts. Power distorts. It can bring out the best in people, but it is much more likely to bring out the worst. If this rock, this ASO can create that”—he pointed at the freeze-frame of the bladed monster—“we could be on the verge of a massive change that would upset every institution of government, business, society in general. Drake. Taylor. This art student. It is our duty to stop these people.”

  “You want me to turn into that? No thanks!”

  “Ah, but our young art student was able to revert, to turn back into himself. It seems as if the power and the morph are inextricably linked. This makes it worse, you see, because people with powers can change back, disappear into the population. Dekka: they must be stopped.”

  “You stop them,” Dekka said. “I’ve had my war.”

  “I know that,” Peaks said. “We aren’t looking for that. We aren’t looking for soldiers, Dekka, we need to understand the effects of the ASO. We need to test it on you, see whether you—uniquely qualified you—regain your power. And then, Dekka?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Then we need to find a way to take that power away. Because only then can society be safe from the Drakes and the Justins.”

  He was very convincing, and Dekka knew she had no choice but to help. But at the same time, there was a lie buried in that nice speech. Dekka sensed it, but couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  “All right,” Dekka said. “You can stick more needles in me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Daddy Issues

  “I WANT SOME.”

  They were in Malik’s room, the day after the cemetery. Cruz had thought Shade’s house was posh, the very symbol of upper-middle-class Evanston. But Malik’s home made Shade’s look like a shack. His mother was something important at a bank in Chicago, and his father was an author of best-selling mystery novels. (A fact that Cruz filed away for future use: a published author might be very helpful someday to an aspiring young writer like herself.) Their house fronted Lake Michigan and was filled with abstract art on the walls and African sculpture resting in lit alcoves or atop marble stands in the spacious formal rooms.

  Malik’s own room was nearly the size of Cruz’s entire apartment. Cruz knew there were people who lived like this, but she’d always somehow assumed those were TV people, celebrities, not regular humans.

  Malik had a small collection of classic electric guitars hanging on one wall, framed posters of Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Slash, Prince, and various other presumably great guitar players who Cruz did not recognize.

  They sat, the three of them, Shade in an easy chair, Cruz in a cool, hanging swing chair that made her desperately jealous, and Malik on his bed.

  “Want some what?” Malik asked.

  “Rock,” Cruz said. “I want some of the rock.”

  “You know the Law of Holes, Cruz?” Malik asked. “It goes like this: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

  “Mmmm,” Shade said, “and why are you so sure we’re in a hole?”

  “Really?” Malik asked with a skeptical tone. “You think, what, you’re good? All set? Shade, you committed a federal crime; you acquired a power. You think the whole government of the United States of America is just going to let that happen? Some girl can turn into some creepy, plasticky, half-flea-looking thing and outrun the speed of sound, and the government is just going to shrug and say, Whatever? Have you thought through what this power means, Shade?”

  Shade didn’t answer, just gave a little hand flourish and eye roll that meant, You’re going to tell me anyway, so go for it.

  “A person with sup
er-speed,” Malik said, reminding Cruz of WikiShade, “can go anywhere, steal literally anything: money, secrets. You could zoom into a bank and clean them out. You could go to the Louvre and take the Mona Lisa. You could run into an investment bank, harvest every password. You could do the same at the CIA or the NSA. And not to get too grim about it, but you could run right past the Secret Service and kill the president of the United States. It’s better than super strength, or firing energy beams, or telekinesis, or invisibility; it’s better than just about anything but teleportation or mind control.”

  “Teleportation,” Cruz mused under her breath. She thought, but did not say, That would be a cool power for a writer: observe anyone, anywhere, anytime.

  “The government has to stop you, Shade, they have no choice,” Malik said.

  “Thank God we have the brilliant Malik to tell us the obvious.” It was a bit snide, even for Shade, but Malik was used to her.

  “You say your house is bugged, which means they suspect you, or at least your dad, so it’s only a matter of time,” Malik said.

  Shade shifted uncomfortably and, looking more defensive than Cruz had ever seen her, said, “It’s a fait accompli.”

  Cruz raised her hand like she was in school. “What is ‘fate accomplee’?”

  “It’s French,” Shade and Malik said at the same time.

  “It means, accomplished fact, something that’s done and can’t be undone,” Shade said. “Like stealing ASO-Three. Like eating it. Like becoming”—she waved a hand—“whatever it is I’ve become. Fait accompli.”

  “I helped steal the rock,” Cruz said. “So I’m in trouble, too. So I think I have a right to, you know . . .”

  Shade shared a glance with Malik, who shook his head. “Don’t look at me, I am not interested. So far I’m just an accessory after the fact. And I am not interested in becoming super anything.”

  “You already have super-condescension,” Shade said.

  “Yeah, totally unlike you, Shade.”

  “That YouTube of the plane crash? That creature?” Shade said, almost plaintive. “Come on, we all know it’s the ASO, that flight was coming from Iowa. Someone else already got hold of some of the rock.”