Monster

by Michael Grant

  Like a teenaged girl stealing some of the rock.

  And using it.

  And developing one of the most useful, dangerous, and hard-to-defend-against superpowers.

  One little bitch of a high school girl.

  He ordered a third drink. What did it matter, he wasn’t the one flying the plane, and there’d be a car and driver waiting for his ignominious ride back to the Ranch. How should he make the announcement? How could he possibly frame it so it didn’t look like a public humiliation?

  He still needed the paycheck, and if he was a good little boy, if he knuckled under properly to the great generalissimo and the mighty bitch goddess of the Pentagon, they might let him stay on as chief of research. He should be able to stomach it, he told himself. It shouldn’t matter, he told himself. Who cared if people snickered behind his back? he told himself.

  Or . . . or he could quit. Just quit. He’d made plenty of friends in private industry, people who would love to have him and the knowledge he possessed, and who would pay twice, no three times, no ten times what he was making working for DARPA.

  Nondisclosure agreements, and noncompete agreements, and, he reminded himself, the unfortunate fact that almost every single thing he knew was classified “Top Secret” and “Top Secret: Sensitive Compartmented Information.” He had nothing to sell, really, nothing that wouldn’t get him arrested and thrown into some supermax prison.

  The cabin attendant, smiling, leaned over him. “Would you like another, sir? Or can I get you something to eat?”

  “Another,” Peaks said. “Nothing to eat.” But then, as the attendant walked away, he said, “Wait a sec. What do you have to eat?”

  “We have a cheese and fruit platter, sandwiches, and pastry for dessert. In fact, we have chocolate éclairs, which look delicious.”

  “The scotch. Then bring me an éclair and have one yourself.”

  He downed the drink in two gulps, knowing it was a drink, or possibly two drinks, too far. Well, to hell with it. Desperate times. The most desperate ever, probably. The very nature of reality was changing, the underlying rules of the universe were being hacked. And those silly bitches thought they could deal with it? Without Tom Peaks?

  Desperate times.

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Peaks muttered.

  He used his Swiss Army knife to slice the éclair open, exposing the creamy center. From his pocket he drew out a steel screw-top tube partly filled with gray dust.

  They’d given Dekka Talent an ounce.

  The éclair held three ounces.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Nice Talk

  THEY WERE IN their third stolen car.

  Felony, felony, felony.

  They were using money taken from bank tellers who saw nothing but a vague blur and felt a gust of breeze.

  Felony. Federal felony, at that.

  And they were in possession of approximately ten pounds of alien rock taken by virtue of hacking.

  Felony and felony, both federal.

  Malik was keeping track.

  And now, as they sat amid fast-food trash and empty water bottles in a stolen Lexus SUV in a Target parking lot in Silverthorne, Colorado, they were engaging in yet another felony: conspiracy.

  “Attention will be mostly on this Knightmare person,” Malik said, idly twirling a fry like a tiny baton in his nimble fingers. “But the FBI will have plenty of time to spare for us.”

  Cruz was in the backseat, experimenting with her power. She had become adept at disappearing; now she was trying something very different: reappearing, but as someone else, altering her visible self. In the rearview mirror, Malik glanced up from time to time to see a partly transparent Cruz, looking sometimes like a badly lit version of herself, and other times like other people, often celebrities. She needed photos to picture the faces she mirrored.

  At the moment it was pictures of beautiful women that held Cruz’s interest. Malik saw her flicking through them on her stolen phone, her expression almost giddy with the possibilities.

  Great, Malik thought. And I was hoping Cruz would be the sensible one.

  “We need a goal, an objective,” Malik insisted. “A plan!”

  Shade flashed an irritated look at him, which softened quickly. Malik could all but read Shade’s mind: Malik had rescued them. Malik had thrown in with them. Malik was in the same danger she and Cruz were in. Shade had heard his half of a stormy, painful call with his parents. Malik’s life was coming apart. And Shade knew it was her fault.

  Malik thought, Yeah, you’d damn well better be nice to me.

  “According to Twitter, the center of all this is in California,” Shade said. “So that’s where we’re heading.”

  “And why exactly would we be heading to the center of all the problems?” Malik demanded.

  “This is all connected to the PBA. Most of the survivors are in California,” Shade said.

  “Which is not an answer, Shade.”

  Shade shrugged. “You’re right. So, you have a better idea?”

  “We need to disappear for a while,” Malik said.

  “Or . . . ,” Shade said, glancing back at Cruz. “Oh, my God, Cruz!”

  In the rearview mirror was what looked an awful lot like a translucent Taylor Swift.

  “I know!” Cruz cried. “I’ve been trying to . . . and it kinda works! I can disappear,” Cruz said, her voice heavy with awe and amazement, “and then reappear looking, well, however I want.”

  “And you went with Taylor Swift?” Shade demanded.

  Cruz turned her newly stolen iPhone around and showed them both a photo of Swift. It was almost entirely identical to Cruz, aside from the translucence.

  “I need a photo and, look, this is real creepy . . .” She turned her head sideways and the entire back half of her head was invisible. It was like she was wearing a Taylor Swift mask over an invisible head. Like the face was floating in air.

  “Ahhh!” Malik yelped.

  “Okay, that is amazing,” Shade said. She reached to touch Cruz’s face. “Amazing! It feels completely real.” The skin dimpled where Shade touched it. She could feel Cruz’s body heat. She could feel her agitated breath.

  Shade touched the invisible back of Cruz’s head, and it, too, felt real.

  “You know you just poked me in the ear, right?” Cruz said.

  “This is insane,” Malik said. “This is . . . this is . . .” And then he started to laugh his strange barking-seal laugh, the laugh that had embarrassed him all his life, but that seldom failed to elicit a grin from Shade.

  Shade’s eyes narrowed and just a hint of her teeth showed through a tight grimace of a smile. “This gives us a whole new power.”

  “I know!”

  “Are you, um,” Malik began. Then he reformulated his question. “I mean, do you think it changed, um . . . uhhh . . . you know. Other things? Down-there things?”

  Cruz-with-the-Swift-face patted her chest, her still-male chest. “No,” she said, a bit deflated. “I’m still a boy . . . down there. I would need a visual, a picture. And la Swift does not pose naked.”

  Malik threw up his hands. “I don’t even know how to start thinking about all this. We are way off the weirdness scale here.”

  “My God, Malik Tenerife just admitted he doesn’t understand something. I want to record that,” Shade snarked. “Hero, villain, monster, right? So help me figure out how to play hero. It’s our only way through all this. I realize in your comics there’s constantly some big crisis where the cops just sort of stand around helplessly waiting for a superhero to fly in, but that isn’t real life.”

  “Is now,” Malik said glumly.

  Shade rolled her eyes. “Okay, you know I’m going to ask you why you think that, so why not just tell me rather than dragging it out.”

  “Knightmare,” Malik said smugly—deliberately smug, to annoy Shade. “He’s the monster, although I strongly suspect he’s really a villain.”

  “Not according to him
,” Cruz said from the backseat. “You saw his Tweets.”

  Malik waved that off impatiently. “Doesn’t matter. He can play the monster role all he wants, but he’s left a trail of death behind him, so we can treat him as a villain.”

  “Under the official rules of comics?” Shade drawled.

  “He destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge,” Malik said, and made a face that said, What, that’s not enough?

  “Definitely villain behavior,” Cruz chimed in, herself once more.

  They fell silent, Malik and Cruz both knowing Shade well enough to know that in the end she’d be the one to decide.

  “Could I beat him in a fight?” Shade asked. “Until the other night in the cemetery, I’d never even been in any kind of fight.”

  Malik cast a sidelong look at Shade. “The thing is, if you’re playing the hero role, you don’t actually have to beat him, you just have to try. And people have to see you trying.” Then, to Cruz in the rearview mirror, “Speaking of typical tropes, you and I are either sidekicks or enablers. I guess you’re the sidekick, since you have a power.”

  “Did you see the videos?” Shade demanded, ignoring the byplay. It was a purely rhetorical question—they’d all watched the YouTube videos repeatedly. “That’s a big, scary thing, that Knightmare.”

  “With your speed?” Cruz asked. “He’d probably never touch you.”

  Shade now twisted to talk to Cruz. “When you morph, when you use your power . . . do you still always feel . . .”

  Now it was Cruz’s turn to look grave. “The dark things watching? Yes. That’s why I don’t change for long. I feel them, and each time it’s like I can hear them a little better, not that there’s an actual sound . . . just . . .” She shrugged. “What is it, they, whatever?”

  Shade shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Guess,” Malik demanded.

  Shade was quiet for so long, Malik was sure she’d say nothing. But then, “I think of them as the Dark Watchers. I think they are the same thing that was inside that girl. Gaia.”

  “Which tells you what?”

  “I have to pee,” Shade said.

  “Cut the bullshit, babe.”

  Shade took a deep breath. “You want a theory? I’ve got a theory. Everyone always thought the ASOs were benign life-creating viruses, basically. But what do real viruses do? They turn healthy cells into breeders of more virus. And sometimes they turn a healthy cell into cancer. I think somehow a consciousness is in that ASO virus, in that rock.” Eyes down, she added, “I think they’re using us. I think maybe we’re . . . an experiment. Unless . . .”

  “Unless?” Malik prompted.

  “Unless we’re just entertainment.”

  “And yet you think this is all still a great idea?” Malik said, harsher than he intended. “It would help me to not think you’re crazy, if you’d at least admit this is all a huge mistake.”

  “I’m going in to use the ladies’.” Shade did not invite them to come with, nor did she offer to get anything while in the Target store.

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Cruz asked when Shade was gone.

  Malik didn’t bother answering.

  “I don’t think I should have eaten the rock,” Cruz said.

  Malik, with great self-discipline, resisted the urge to say and to shout and perhaps even to sing at the top his voice that he had told her so, that he had warned them both that they were taking on a fight with all the might of the government.

  “I don’t know what I thought would happen,” Cruz said. “I don’t know, I just . . . Maybe it’s all a mental illness, like my father and, like, half of people think. I just wanted to . . . Just trying to . . . But maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe it really is just gender dysphoria, a mental illness, a—”

  “—So what if it is, Cruz?” Malik cut in impatiently. He was coming to have great affection for Cruz, but her unwillingness to stand up to Shade irritated him. Half the time she was in what Malik considered the rational world, and half the time she was a bit of flotsam carried along on Shade’s obsession. “Look, Cruz, what if your trans thing is just some mental problem? Dysphoria, or whatever. What does it matter what the diagnosis is if there’s a cure, and the cure doesn’t hurt anyone? How has anyone got a single damn reason to care how you look or what you call yourself? If you’re crazy, the people hating on you are a hell of a lot crazier.”

  That brought a crooked smile to Cruz’s lips.

  “Your friend in the Target ladies’ room is perfectly sane,” Malik went on bitterly. “There is not a shrink on earth Shade couldn’t convince she’s all right. Smart as hell. Very good at rationalizing. And yet, look where we are, Cruz. She’s sane and smart and here we are, and I wouldn’t bet ten cents we’ll be alive a week from now. So how smart does that make the two of us that we follow her? What the hell is the matter with us?”

  “You follow her because you love her,” Cruz said.

  There followed a silence. Then, “Goddammit, Cruz.” Malik lowered his forehead to the steering wheel and banged it softly.

  “It’s true,” Cruz said.

  “Of course it’s true. Jesus, Cruz! You’re not supposed to say it.”

  Cruz lay her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re in this mess, Malik, but I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Playing the part of the idiot ex-boyfriend,” Malik grumbled. “The official enabler.”

  “Maybe,” Cruz said softly. “But she needs you, and so do I. You can call yourself an idiot, but I would give . . .” Her voice choked and for a moment she couldn’t go on, and when she did it was in an emotion-roughened tone. “I would give anything, anything in the world, to have just one person love me the way you love her.”

  Malik placed his hand over her hand on his shoulder. Then he jerked his chin in the direction of the restaurant. “The superhero cometh.”

  Cruz followed the direction of his gaze. “I think of her as being half human, half shark.”

  “Yep. That’ll do,” Malik said.

  “All right,” Shade announced through the window. “California and the hero track it is. Right? Because none of us had a better idea.”

  “Fait accompli,” Cruz said.

  It took them two days and three more stolen cars to reach California.

  En route they listened to the radio for news reports, and Cruz kept an eye on social media, but there were no new sightings of Knightmare. The Coast Guard stopped the ship Knightmare had snagged at the Golden Gate and found no sign of Knightmare or the woman with him. The ship’s crew all agreed that the creature and the woman with him destroyed the ship’s radio and forced them to launch a lifeboat just off the coast of the Monterey Peninsula.

  Shade, Cruz, and Malik approached Monterey, but they turned back when they got word of roadblocks ahead. They spent the night in a motel that accepted cash and monitored both the TV and the web. But there was no news of Knightmare.

  The next morning they drove twenty miles and found a second motel, and again spent a night watching TV and cursing the slow wi-fi.

  At the motel Kim Kardashian made an appearance. A very complete appearance, since Cruz had full-body shots to work with. An appearance that, to Shade’s undisguised disgust, managed to stop Malik in mid-sentence, despite the fact that he was prosing away about Eddie Van Halen’s guitar work.

  By the third day of this, the hero option was looking hopeless. They heard of a fire raging in San Luis Obispo, but it was too far away for Shade to pull a dramatic rescue. They considered whether Shade could fly to a war zone and save a bunch of lives, but concluded that the FBI was quite likely to spot them if they bought tickets to Afghanistan.

  They heard of two surfers lost beneath a freak wave, their bodies presumably swept out to sea, but it was hard to see where super-speed would be of any help there.

  They watched The Incredibles and speculated about whether Shade could run on water like the kid in the movie.

  And then: a sighting. Knightmare had ju
st emptied a bank vault in Salinas, and that was only six miles away. They raced to the scene, but stopped well away as the town was crawling with every variety of law enforcement officer.

  “Knightmare’s got the same problem we have,” Shade said. “He can’t use credit cards, which means he’s either sleeping in the open or hiding out in no-tell motels he can pay for in cash.”

  “There are dozens of those within an hour’s drive,” Malik said. “And the police will have figured that out, too.”

  “Yes, of course they will. And they have the resources. Which means we need the same resources, we need to know what the cops know.”

  “What if we had a police scanner?” Cruz suggested.

  “That’s just the public frequency,” Malik said. “We’d need a radio tuned to whatever private frequency they’re using.” Then, to Shade, “How far can you run?”

  “I don’t know. But we could park a couple miles away, that’s just a few seconds’ run. I can go right into Salinas and snag a radio.”

  “Might be worth thinking about,” Malik mused, but Shade had already transformed and a second later was out the door. “Yes,” Malik called after her, “it was good to discuss all this and work it out in advance and not just go running off like a . . .” He sighed, sat back, closed his eyes, and said, “So, Cruz. Know any jokes?”

  But before Cruz could think of any, Shade was back and holding a squawking police radio. “And I got these.” She handed a pack of Smarties to Cruz.

  “Excellent,” Cruz said.

  It took seven hours of listening to intermittent chatter between a CHP captain, an LAPD commander, an FBI special agent, and a person who was never identified by affiliation before they sat up suddenly.