Monster

by Michael Grant

  Martin climbed to his feet. “Leave my daughter and her friend alone,” he demanded with all his professorial authority.

  “No one is bothering them,” Peaks said, and then, noticing that there was still a gun in Cruz’s face, said, “I don’t think we need that.” He put a hand on the gun barrel and pushed it away. “Listen to me, Professor Darby, it is unarguable that you altered your calculations so as to mislead the search team. No one else could have done it.”

  Shade’s face was carefully blank. Cruz took her cue from Shade and stared at the air.

  “Anyone might have hacked our network. It’s not my fault if your security is inadequate.” After the initial shock, Martin had accessed his inner professor and was now bristling with offended dignity.

  From the rest of the house came shouts of “Clear!” as SWAT members moved from room to room on the ground floor and upstairs. The search for the rock would begin in minutes and with experienced searchers it wouldn’t take long.

  “Oh, man,” Shade said in a long, unhappy exhalation. “I am so sorry, Dad. So, so, so very sorry.”

  Peaks ignored her. Cruz did not. Her eyes went wide.

  “Leave him alone. It wasn’t my father who changed the numbers,” Shade said in an abashed but not exactly humble tone. “It was me.”

  Peaks’s head jerked. His eyes widened in amazement because now he was seeing Shade change . . . change . . . changed, all in a matter of seconds. He started to yell but Shade was no longer there. She raced into the kitchen, yanked a twelve-inch chef’s knife from the block, zoomed through the front door and out to the street, slashed like a crazed killer, and returned, vibrating to a stop.

  The sight of her caused a nearly comic recoil from everyone, including Martin.

  “Listen. I’m sorry.” She had to drawl at what to her was a comically slow speed, but still she suspected she was hard to understand. “But I. Just cut. The tires. On all. Your vehicles.”

  “You? You . . . what?” Peaks sputtered. He reached for his phone, fumbled, frowned, and slowly realized Shade was holding it.

  “Here! On me!” Peaks roared, and instantly came the rushing tramp of feet. Two more SWAT members came pelting down the stairs, their weapons leveled.

  And then their weapons were no longer in their hands and Shade had both guns slung over her shoulder.

  It really was absurdly easy. She could have done far more, far worse.

  Power!

  “Shoot her! Take her out!” Peaks yelled, and more SWAT members converged, all yelling, “Down down down!” at Martin and Cruz, trying to get a clear shot, and Martin yelling, “No!”

  But again, Shade was no longer there, and their weapons were no longer in their hands, but lay in a heap on the parlor couch.

  “That’s. Not. Going. To work. Mr. Peaks,” Shade said, coming to a stop.

  Martin was staring at his daughter dumbfounded—staring at a version of his daughter at least. To a father’s eyes she would have been at least somewhat recognizable, but he must have had doubts.

  “Sorry. Dad,” Shade said. “Cruz? Go to. The car.”

  Shade knew this was a moment of truth for Cruz. Cruz had just achieved at least some of what she had hoped for, maybe, and now Shade would have them on the run—on the run from the United States government, no less.

  Shade had plenty of time to contemplate the fact that she would have to admit to Malik that he was right. At least somewhat right. But maybe not all the way right, because right now, if Peaks or his gunmen made a move against her father, she could stop them. She was the power here, not Gaia.

  Not Peaks, she corrected herself.

  It could all end . . . might well end . . . in prison bars or gunfire, Shade knew. Cruz knew that, too. The emotions played across Cruz’s face in slow motion. It was suddenly becoming shatteringly clear to Cruz that her life was no longer her own: she was with Shade, bound to her, unable to escape the results of what they had done. She was a criminal, just as much as Shade. And Shade could see the realization dawn on her friend’s face, the fear, the excitement . . . and the resentment that Shade expected would grow over time.

  They could put her in prison, in a box, treat her like . . .

  No time for regrets, no time for guilt, Shade told herself sternly. That was all just emotion, feeling; what mattered now, right now, was winning this confrontation. Later she’d find a way to . . .

  . . . to what, Shade? To what? Undo the damage? How are you going to do that, Shade Darby?

  “Cruz,” Shade said with steely insistence, out of sync, not really sure if it was taking Cruz forever to move or if that was just the way the world was when you were hyper-accelerated. “Go!”

  Cruz spun on her heel and ran for the car. It was a madhouse on Hinman Avenue, flashing lights and rushing cops, all staring and pointing at the slashed tires of their vehicles, all with guns drawn now.

  Half a dozen of them spotted Cruz, leveled weapons, and shouted, “Freeze! Freeze!” Cruz froze and then the guns and the eyes behind them wavered, perplexed.

  Cruz had become invisible.

  Good girl, Shade thought.

  Cruz ran on, around the side of the house, slipping on wet leaves, and tumbled into the minivan’s passenger seat.

  Shade was already there, waiting.

  “Oh, my God, Shade! Oh, my God!”

  Shade made a buzzing sound, then carefully slowed her speech and said, “What. Took you. So long?”

  Shade drove, not as Shade, but as this new creature, this sleek, plasticine avatar of Shade, with her creepy insectoid legs bent awkwardly sideways to fit beneath the wheel. The minivan speedometer passed sixty before they’d blown past Starbucks. It hit eighty within a block, ninety, then a hundred miles an hour, with the Subaru careening through traffic that looked to Shade as if it had come to a stop.

  It was all scarier for Cruz, who saw cars weaving and heard the horns blowing and noted the occasional one-finger salute being raised by outraged commuters.

  “It. Will. Be okay,” Shade lied in slow motion.

  Right side of the road, left side of the road, the sidewalk, Shade sent the Subaru screaming west down Dempster. Cruz took a dream-slow look in the rearview mirror and in a syrupy slo-mo voice said, “N-n-o-o-o-o-o c-o-o-o-p-s.”

  But it was not the police that Shade felt watching her, following her. Eyeless eyes and soundless laughter, enjoyment, malice, dark and greedy obsession, the things she had dismissed as “paranoia,” were back.

  Far away and yet right here, right inside my skull.

  “Text Malik,” Shade said, and now both her voice and the car were slowing down. She was de-morphing, becoming fully human. She could not bear that vile, insinuating scrutiny for long.

  “What do I say?”

  “Text him to meet us at the mall. Tell him to hurry and bring tools and wire.”

  “Tools and wire?”

  “They’ll put out a BOLO for us,” Shade said.

  “A what?”

  “Be on the lookout. BOLO. We need a different car.”

  Cruz did not look happy. Shade turned her gaze away. Later she could deal with what she’d done to Cruz. Later she could deal with what she’d done to her father.

  The Westfield Mall was just a few miles to their north and they drove there, carefully obeying the speed limits, and at last, trembling, pulled into a parking spot.

  “Jesus, Shade,” Cruz said. She sounded awed, and not in a good way. But Shade did not want to talk, not now, not yet. The dark watchers were gone but the memory of them persisted. It was a dirty feeling, a feeling of being used, like she’d just found a Peeping Tom watching her undress. It was too intimate, that strange attention, too sure of itself.

  Malik pulled up in his little BMW two-seater. They rolled windows down and talked across the few feet separating them.

  “What is it?” Malik asked.

  “All hell just broke loose!” Cruz said.

  “Which kind of hell?” Malik asked, as calmly as if h
e were asking their favorite type of pie.

  “The FBI-kicking-in-the-doors kind of hell,” Shade said tersely.

  “Gee, Shade,” Malik said, “I don’t think your clever plan is working out real well.”

  “You going to snark or help, Malik?” Shade snapped.

  Malik cursed under his breath and pulled his car into an open spot. He climbed in behind Cruz and said, “We need something no one will notice, something common. Cruz? Find something on YouTube on hot-wiring cars.”

  The simple act of finding the right vehicle proved ridiculously hard to do, because the YouTube video explained that new cars were a whole lot harder to hot-wire, so they narrowed the search to old cars, the Subaru prowling up and down the aisles.

  “Wait a minute,” Malik said, snapping his fingers. “We don’t need to hot-wire, not with your ability, Shade.”

  They saw a Mercedes SUV just pulling into a spot.

  “Excuse me,” Shade said, and began the swift transformation—swifter, easier each time—and then was gone in a blast of wind and a door slammed way too hard. Cruz and Malik caught a brief glimpse of her as she raced up behind the woman driver, who was extricating a toddler from a car seat. Shade dipped into the woman’s purse and took her key chain in less time than it took the woman to blink.

  Malik hopped into the driver’s seat. “I got this, switch the plates.”

  The Mercedes plates came off and were swapped for the plates of an Acura three rows over. Cruz got in the back, Shade climbed awkwardly into the front passenger seat, in the middle of resuming her normal appearance, and they drove off.

  “We just stole a car,” Cruz said. Her normally olive face was unnaturally white, tinged with green.

  “The least of our problems,” Shade said.

  “Yeah,” Malik said, “this will go really well when I explain to some cop that it wasn’t the fault of the young black male, it’s the fault of the white girl. She’s the car thief, Officer, why are you pointing a gun at me?”

  “Oh, my God, where do we go?” Cruz wondered.

  Malik said, “I have a place we can go. At least for as long as it takes the cops to connect me to all this. My cousin has a place.”

  Shade leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Malik.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Pop the SIM card out of your phone, Cruz,” Shade instructed, as she did the same. “Throw it out of the window.”

  “The rock!” Cruz said. “We left the rock!”

  “Nah,” Shade said, and produced the object from her bag. “I had plenty of time to grab it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Turning White to Red

  HE WAS HAVING the most lovely dreams.

  Armo lay in a drug-induced dream state. He was, despite being in a dream, aware that he was bound at wrists and ankles and lying on a steel gurney. He was aware, in that vague, amused sort of way that the drugs allowed, that he was a prisoner. That he was being used. That he was surrounded by machines with bright LED lights and various people in white smocks with masks over their mouths.

  It was an odd thing about Armo: ever since he was very young he’d had the ability to lucid dream. A former girlfriend had been the first to explain that this wasn’t normal, and so he had looked it up, and sure enough most people lucid dreamed only on rare occasions. It seemed that back in ancient times it was more common, and part of what made some people think they had the gift of prophecy.

  But Armo was pretty sure this dream wasn’t the sort of thing prophets saw, because this dream was, to put it bluntly, the sexiest dream he’d ever had.

  Armo was a D-plus student, but he was not an idiot. He knew the dream wasn’t his—that it was coming from elsewhere.

  In the dream there was a Yoda-like figure—not in the sense of being a small green troll, but rather someone meant to seem wise. Someone you definitely wanted to obey. And that person and the person who sometimes stroked his face as he dreamed were almost certainly the same person. The same woman. The woman in green with a heavy brass ring with raised letters around a red stone.

  The woman with the steely southern accent.

  The dream version of the person kept whispering that if he obeyed her in all things, he would have all his heart’s desires. It was she, the dream woman, who sent him out to battle demons and trolls and mutants, all to save gorgeous women and be rewarded with the most astonishing sexual favors.

  This, the dream woman said, this is your future when you obey me. You will be a hero! A warrior! And you will have many, many women!

  When you obey!

  It certainly sounded good to Armo’s hallucinating consciousness. All except one part: that whole “obey” thing.

  Even lucid-dreaming Armo didn’t like that word. It was instinctive, automatic. Since childhood, when Armo heard the word “obey” or a phrase like “just do what you’re told,” these things happened: his lips would thin into a horizontal line that curled just slightly up on the right side; his jaw muscles would flex and his nostrils flare; he would fill his lungs; his heart would slow; and there would come slight, almost unnoticeable movements of shoulders and hands, a shifting of weight, and his gaze would narrow to a tunnel.

  Like the school counselor and two psychologists had said: Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Armo knew the term, and he had never disputed it. Armo didn’t see himself as a bad person, not even a rude or unkind person. He didn’t use his size to beat people up or bully anyone. He loved dogs and anything with fur. He was, in his own estimation, a decent dude.

  He just didn’t like doing what he was told. In fact, anytime Armo did something bad, it was almost always because someone had ordered him not to.

  Of course, none of the physical manifestations of Armo’s disorder occurred at this moment, because Armo was drugged out of his mind and practically paralyzed. And yet the woman, the real-world woman, evidently sensed something . . . off . . . about him. He could tell.

  From a million miles away, Armo heard her say, “Doctor, are you sure the conditioning is effective?”

  Armo did not hear the answer, just the unease in the woman’s voice.

  Yeah, dream lady, you feel it, don’t you?

  He slept for a while then, probably a long while, deep, deep sleep, and this time with no dreams, lucid or otherwise.

  When he woke again, he was alone on a cot. He blinked. He took silent inventory: hands, legs, shoulders, all seemed to be working. Eyes left: a steel wall. Eyes right: a small cell with a desk bolted to the floor, and a steel toilet and sink combo thing.

  Am I in jail?

  He sat up and had to fight the urge to throw up as a wave of drug after-effect nausea passed through him, followed swiftly by a crashing headache.

  He now saw that he was naked, and he felt a bit chilly, not to mention a bit exposed. He sat there a while, blinking uncomprehendingly at a transparent wall, at what appeared to be a single sheet of obviously very thick glass. He had the impression of large, open spaces beyond, but it was gloomily lit and the glass distorted everything. Had to be a distortion, because otherwise he was looking out at a sort of prison, or zoo, with murky figures in similar cells.

  And that couldn’t possibly be real. Could it?

  There was an itch on the back of his neck. He reached to scratch it, and his fingers touched something small, cool, and metallic. The flesh around it was puffy and swollen, tender to the touch. Despite the headache, despite the nausea, despite his utter bewilderment at his location or condition, where he was, why he was there, what was going on . . . he was sure the cold object on the back of his neck was some type of control device.

  His mouth pressed into a flat line, slightly curled up on the right; his nose flared; his—

  And then, there she was, again: the woman. The one who stroked his face when she thought he was unconscious and called him her “perfect warrior.” She tapped a keypad beside his cell door and he heard her speak in the voice of the woman from the dream.

  “
Good morning, Armo. I’m Colonel DiMarco. I am your direct superior. From this point forward you will obey me, and follow my orders to the letter.”

  “Cold in here,” he said.

  “It won’t be for long.” A slight smile there. A confident, even cocky smirk.

  There’s ODD, and then there’s stupid—Armo tried not be stupid, so he said, “Yes, ma’am,” and looked down for a moment, signaling submission and concealing from her the defiance in his eyes.

  “Good. Now, we’re going to do a small experiment. You will feel some . . . what do they say? Discomfort? But through it all you will obey the sound of my voice.”

  There was a second person, a man, standing a little back, his face hard to see through the thick glass. And farther back still, ghostly figures in white lab coats.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  The dream/real woman smiled and said, “Let’s go with ‘Colonel,’ shall we? Say ‘Yes, Colonel.’”

  Armo thought, You are piling up trouble for yourself, lady. But he said, “Yes, Colonel.”

  Colonel DiMarco said over her shoulder, “Proceed.”

  And half a second later Armo’s head exploded. The pain was staggering, literally staggering, and he dropped to his knees and tried to claw at the device on his neck. But his fingers had gone strange and clumsy.

  Pain off.

  He gasped. Sucked air. The pain was gone but still echoed through him.

  But something else was happening, something very, very odd. He held his hand in front of his face. It was his hand, but bigger, with short, stubby fingers now ending in wickedly curved claws that even as he watched seemed to change from something brown and biological to something artificial and metallic.

  Impossible!

  He watched transfixed, horrified, trying to tell himself it was all just some kind of weird nightmare, but if it was a dream it was very convincing—as convincing as the translucent white hairs that suddenly sprouted from the back of his hands and ran like a tsunami up his arms.

  “The polar bear DNA infusion is working,” DiMarco said excitedly. “Controlled mutation! I told you it could be done!”