Monster

by Michael Grant

  “There’s a story there,” Dekka said, before accelerating past them.

  Into the forest, into deep shade with a watery autumn sun strobed by the trees. Dekka’s stomach churned and her breath came short and too fast. It was near now. She was already within the diameter of what had been the FAYZ.

  She slowed without really meaning to, her throttle a reflection of her state of mind. Still she missed the turnoff and had to come back around to find it. Now the SUV she’d passed earlier passed her, still heading south.

  Then she was at the edge of town. She pulled over to the side of the road just to let the feelings wash through her. This place . . . the people . . . the horror . . . She felt as though if she went any farther, she would be trapped. She’d been within the FAYZ ever since she entered the forest. But for Dekka the FAYZ meant, above all, the town of Perdido Beach.

  This was where she had fought. This was where she had starved and had been thrilled to have a rat leg to eat. This was where she first met Sam Temple, Edilio, Lana . . .

  This was where she had loved Brianna.

  The Breeze.

  She slowed to low gear like a motorcycle at a parade. She kept her helmet on less for safety than in the paranoid sense that someone might recognize her. This wasn’t old home week for Dekka; this was a return visit to hell.

  And yet, didn’t you enjoy parts of it?

  By the end of the FAYZ, the town had been largely burned down, hundreds of homes lost. The businesses had all been looted and gutted. Since then, much had been rebuilt—the traffic lights worked, the street signs had been put back up. The shattered storefront windows were all plate glass again.

  There was light traffic, a strangely surreal sight to Dekka. During the FAYZ, gasoline had quickly become scarce, and any vehicle you saw either was Edilio and one of his militia or it signaled some kind of trouble.

  “Hey, what exactly is this place?” Armo asked.

  “The FAYZ,” Dekka said. Then, with a sigh, “The Perdido Beach Anomaly. The PBA.”

  “Okay, cool,” Armo said, apparently satisfied.

  They came to the town square, site of so many bloody battles, site of so much horror and death. The town square had been the symbolic heart of the FAYZ.

  A boy named Edilio, who had started his life in the FAYZ as an undocumented kid with no friends and zero status, had become the single most trusted and relied-upon person in the FAYZ. If Dekka had been Sam Temple’s strong right arm, Edilio had been his endlessly competent executive officer, his rock-solid support, and at times his conscience.

  It was Edilio who had taken on himself the job of burying the dead. Edilio had dug the graves and fashioned the simple markers, and stood by those graves with bowed head asking God to watch over the souls of the dead.

  To Dekka’s amazement and gratification, those graves had not been removed. On the contrary, someone had arranged for stone grave markers to be erected in place of the wooden crosses and awkward stars of David and the one weak effort at a Muslim crescent that had marked those shallow graves.

  She parked her bike. “This part I do alone,” she said, then amending, “Unless you’d like to come.”

  Armo did not want to come. He climbed off the bike and headed toward the McDonald’s.

  Dekka walked on trembling legs to the graves. An informational marker had been set up. In raised bronze letters it read:

  In respectful memory of both the wise and the foolish who struggled to survive unspeakable horror in this place.

  And in smaller letters:

  This space is maintained by the Albert Hillsborough Foundation.

  That brought a rueful smile to Dekka’s lips. Albert the capitalist, the businessman, the hustler. Lord, how she had hated him at times. But with later reflection she had come to realize that while Sam Temple might be the warrior hero, and Edilio the capable, brave, and moral day in, day out manager, it was Albert who had fed and watered the kids and kept them alive.

  She raised a hand in a small salute. “Good for you, Albert. Good for you.”

  And then, with every fiber of her being suffused with a leaden resistance, she moved among the tombstones. Names she knew—Mary Terrafino, who had been a saint until mental illness had taken her over the edge; Duck Zhang, just a nice kid who’d been given a power he never wanted; poor Hunter.

  And Charles Merriman, who had carried the nickname Orc. Orc the bully. Orc the drunk. Orc the murderer.

  Orc the redeemed Christian who at the end had sacrificed his life to save others. There hadn’t been much of a body left, and Dekka wondered just what Albert found to bury. But that was not really important, and Dekka laid a hand on Orc’s tombstone. “Better late than never, Orc. You died well.”

  Caine had died just minutes before the end of the FAYZ, and there had been nothing but dust to bury. But Albert had nevertheless given him a stone that read:

  Caine Soren

  “King” of the FAYZ

  Blaze of Glory

  “Dammit.” Dekka brushed tears away. “Really, Dekka, really? Shedding tears for Caine?” Half the bodies in the graveyard were there because of Caine Soren. Caine the bad boy. Caine the unloved son. Caine the abandoned brother of Sam. Caine the power-mad, the grandiose, the ruthless.

  Caine, who so loved Diana Ladris that he gave his life for her, and for all of them.

  And finally, there it was, what she was looking for, and what she dreaded finding.

  Brianna Berenson

  “The Breeze”

  None More Bold

  Dekka’s entire body shook with emotion, her mouth an ugly grimace of pain and regret. And now the tears could not be brushed away, they came too fast, and she did not wish to brush them away. She wanted her tears to fall here, on this ground, a small offering.

  Dekka fell to her knees, leaned against the cool stone, and sobbed.

  “I’m so sorry, Breeze. I’m so sorry I haven’t come earlier. I . . . I was too weak. I didn’t want to . . . I keep your picture with me all the time, I haven’t stopped . . . I still love you. I will always love you. It’s okay that it was one-way, Breeze. All I ever needed was to love you.”

  After a long while, she stood up and dried her face on her sleeve.

  “This goddamned place,” Dekka said quietly. “This bloody, goddamned place.”

  She saw that the church had been partly rebuilt, but only partly, and the scaffolding looked old and unused, as though the project had been abandoned.

  The town hall was in better shape, but there was only a single car parked in front, and it did not look like a place that had much going on.

  The McDonald’s that Albert had kept open for a while after the start of the FAYZ had been rebuilt to shiny new perfection. But even there she saw signs of neglect, litter on the sidewalks, a cracked window.

  “Hello, Dekka.”

  Dekka knew the voice even before she turned. Diana Ladris was still beautiful, though she looked years older than her actual age. Her dark eyes were haunted, her voice quiet and respectful. But there, at the corners of those ever-alluring lips, was still a hint of the old Diana, wry and amused.

  “Diana. I did not expect to find you here.”

  Diana jerked her chin toward a small hatchback parked a few spaces from the red Kawasaki where Armo lounged, shoving a Big Mac into his face. Flowers were visible inside the little car, and flowers were in Diana’s hand. “I come once a week, whenever I can, to put flowers on the graves. I had just cleared away the faded ones when I saw you.”

  Diana laid the bouquet at the base of Brianna’s tombstone, and now Dekka would have cried again had she any tears left.

  “I should have . . . ,” Dekka began.

  “Nah,” Diana said. “No should haves, okay? They taught me that in therapy. Don’t waste time regretting, just find a way to undo whatever harm you’ve done, as well as you can. This is my thing. My little penance.”

  “How have you been, Diana?”

  Diana shrugged. “I have a job. Y
ou are looking at a semi-competent Peet’s barista. I have my own place, finally.” The wry smile appeared. “I am seven months and three days sober. And I haven’t tried to kill myself. Lately. You?”

  Dekka hesitated before answering. The vacuous “fine” was on the tip of her tongue, but she owed Diana more than that. Diana was one of the very few people she could talk to about what was happening without being taken for a madwoman.

  “Got a few minutes?” Dekka asked wearily.

  “Help me place the flowers and we’ll talk.”

  Dekka smiled at that, happy to help, happy to have a few minutes to collect her thoughts. When they were finished, the two of them walked the few blocks to the beach. Armo followed at a discreet distance, like a bodyguard. The beach was as long and beautiful as ever, curving away to the northwest. The debris of Albert’s water-purification device was gone.

  Dekka shaded her hand against the lowering sun and looked southeast. “Have they got Clifftop open?”

  Diana said, “It’s a Sheraton now.”

  “Huh.”

  “The bar there serves themed cocktails: the FAYZ, the PBA, the Sam Temple—that’s something with vodka and limoncello, for some reason. The Lana is vodka and some nasty green tea drink, you know, for healing supposedly. You and I didn’t rate.”

  Dekka shook her head slowly. “I guess the irony that FAYZers have a tendency to drink too much is lost on them.”

  “Big hotel chains don’t do irony,” Diana said. She led them to a bench, and the two old not-exactly-friends sat side by side and looked out at the ocean as the horizon rose to meet a reddening sun.

  Without further preamble, Diana said, “You’re in some kind of trouble.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Suddenly you’re back here. And you’re actually talking. Dekka Talent, who had never been known to speak more than a dozen words a day.”

  Dekka smiled. “Well, I’m all about action.”

  “And I guess you know there’s a big white dude in sad overalls following us.”

  “Yeah, I . . . I sort of picked him up along the way.” She sighed heavily. “He’s all right, so long as you don’t try to tell him what to do. The boy makes me seem easygoing.”

  Diana laughed. “Right. You. Easygoing.”

  “Diana,” Dekka said, her grin disappearing, “it’s all starting again. But this time it’s not just a twenty-mile-across dome, it’s the whole world.”

  She told Diana all she’d seen, all she knew. From time to time she glanced at Diana and saw the young woman’s face grow red from the sunset, then dark from shadows and darker still from concern that deepened into worry.

  “Well, that’s all . . . bad news,” Diana said at last. “You were good to keep Sam and Astrid out of it.”

  “Yeah, well, now that I’ve gone rogue, HSTF-Sixty-Six may take a run at him,” Dekka said regretfully. “But I didn’t have a choice, Diana. Peaks and his whole operation are an atrocity.”

  “So now you’re right back in it,” Diana said.

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “In the old days I could have held your hand and told whether you were a three bar or a four or a five.”

  “Five,” Dekka said flatly. “Maybe six if there is such a thing. This power is . . . it’s incredible. But each time I use it, I have to change into this . . . thing, this creature. And when I’m morphed, I sense . . .” She shook her head. “It’s something dark, Diana, very dark. It watches. Sometimes it’s like it’s laughing. Other times it’s annoyed or impatient with me.”

  “You didn’t just come here for old time’s sake,” Diana said. “You came to see if . . . if it is still alive.”

  Dekka nodded slowly.

  “They’ve closed the mine shaft,” Diana said. “At first they had crews down in there, but various bad things happened, so they blew up the shaft. They sealed it up like they meant it this time. Concrete.”

  Dekka said, “They took it. They dug it out. That’s the only answer. HSTF-Sixty-Six has whatever is left of the gaiaphage. I should have realized that’s what they were using for their god-awful experiments. Jesus, Diana, they put some of the gaiaphage in me! Part of the thing that made Gaia, the thing that killed . . .”

  Dammit, will I ever be able to say it without choking up?

  “Peaks tried to tell me there was still something dark and sinister in Perdido Beach,” Dekka said, back on less emotionally draining turf.

  “There is,” Diana said. “The town is still about half empty. Drive through the neighborhoods and you see houses half rebuilt, then abandoned. The school’s running again, but they’re closing it next year for lack of students. No one even tried to reopen Coates Academy. I guess when your private school lists alumni that include Caine and Drake and me . . . Anyway, no, it’s not all gone. There’s something still here, like a sort of echo, a memory of what happened here. The whole town is like a graveyard, not just the square. It creeps people out. You know about the shoot-out?”

  “Which one?”

  “Bunch of bikers—gang type, not weekend riders—and cops. Like, a year ago, before they sealed the mine. Bikers had moved in, set up a kind of camp. They were actually conducting tours down to see the rock. Cops rousted them and there was a gun battle. Bunch of the bikers were arrested. Two died.”

  “That never made the news.”

  Diana formed her wry, seen-it-all smile. “Yes, news out of Perdido Beach tends not to be widely covered. The whole world wants to forget this place, Dekka.”

  “Don’t we all. But I’m afraid the world is about to get a wake-up call.”

  “So, what do you do next?” Diana asked.

  Dekka took her time considering her answer. “Peaks and HSTF-Sixty-Six want to keep the whole thing quiet so they can create their own army of superpowered warriors. Supposedly just to stop whoever might get their hands on the rock.” She shook her head. “But that’s bullshit. The government wants the power and doesn’t want anyone else to have it, and that scares me. The Mother Rock is supposedly heading to LA. Once they have that . . .” Dekka shrugged.

  “Are you sure it’s a bad thing, the government having the rock? I mean, they are the government.”

  Dekka kicked at the sand with her toe. “What they’re doing at the Ranch, that’s way past anything a government is supposed to do. They’re experimenting on people. Doing awful things. Nightmare stuff. No, that’s not a government I need to obey.”

  They walked back to the town square in silence, both young women lost in thought and memory. Armo went ahead and now waited by the motorcycle.

  “Diana, Armo,” Dekka said.

  They shook hands. Dekka offered no further introductions or explanations.

  Then Dekka offered Diana her hand.

  Diana took it solemnly and held it for a moment. “Take care of yourself, Dekka. There’s one thing your Peaks person was not wrong about: if anyone can be trusted with this power, it’s you.”

  If, Dekka added silently, recalling the dark and distant whispers.

  If.

  “Hey, I thought of something,” Armo said as they crossed what had been the southern border of the dome. He was behind her on the bike, which put his mouth near her ear. She’d lost her helmet along the way and now her dreads streamed back, whipping at his face, so he hunched close to avoid being whipped. His powerful arms were around her waist, and his hard chest was against her back.

  This is the most intimate I’ve ever been with a dude, Dekka thought. Meh.

  “Like what?” asked Dekka. “I made a promise to see Carl’s family . . . But first I wanted to, I don’t know, I had to see Perdido Beach. I couldn’t just drive on by.”

  “So, what are you up for?”

  “Up for?” She had to yell to be heard over the engine and the wind and the steady rhythm of tires on concrete.

  “I mean, are you hiding? Or are you fighting?”

  Dekka breathed a small laugh. “You have a nice way of getting to the point, Arm
o.” She rode on, silent, lost in thought. Well, she asked herself, what are you doing, Dekka? Are you hiding or are you fighting?

  Part of her desperately wanted to find Sam and Astrid. She’d been Sam’s sidekick; she’d never before been the one making all the decisions. She, like most of the kids of the FAYZ, had left that burden on his shoulders.

  No, she wasn’t doing that to Sam.

  Finally, Armo tired of waiting on her. “Wanna know what I’ve been thinking?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The Port of Los Angeles.”

  Dekka digested that for more than a minute, couldn’t figure it out, and said, “Why?”

  “Because people think they can drug a guy like me, but they can’t. And I hear things people don’t think I hear,” Armo said smugly. “The big one, the big rock, the Mother Rock, DiMarco calls it. That’s where it’s going. LA.”

  A warning light went on in Dekka’s head. Something. Something wrong about going to the Port of Los Angeles. No, not something wrong, exactly; more that it sounded familiar. Like she’d heard the suggestion before. Like it had been whispered to her in a dream.

  “I mean,” Armo added, “assuming you’re going to choose fight over hide.”

  “Why assume that?”

  Armo laughed. He had a nice laugh. “Well, hey, I don’t know you, but I’m kind of thinking you don’t seem much like a girl who hides.”

  Oh, but I have been hiding, she thought. I’ve been hiding for four years.

  It came to her then that if she couldn’t talk to Sam, she could still guess what his answer would be. His . . . and Brianna’s.

  “Neither of us has a phone,” Dekka said. “We should pick up a map.”

  “A map to where?”

  “A map to you know damn well where,” Dekka said, and Armo laughed into her ear.

  CHAPTER 19

  Meet the Psychopath

  PEAKS LAY ON his back, staring up at a darkening sky. He was shattered.

  He picked himself up slowly, not bothering to brush away the dirt that clung to him.

  He had done it. He had become . . . something. Something very much not human. Something huge and hugely strong, something brutal and indestructible.