Monster

by Michael Grant

  He looked around at a scene of awesome destruction. Thank God he had the sense to find an isolated place, driving well out into the desert. Because everything within a hundred yards had been crushed, ripped apart, thrown, or burned.

  The ubiquitous tumbleweeds? Scorched. The nearest Joshua tree? Kindling. The sand itself was gouged or dusted with ash or, in a few places, had been crystalized, turned to brown glass by extreme heat.

  Very extreme heat.

  Peaks had gone to the Ranch, told a few close associates about the change in command while putting a happy face on it and fooling no one. Then Peaks had spent a couple of hours downloading the contents of the computer onto a hard drive—his insurance policy, if DiMarco and the rest of them ever tried to throw him under the bus for all the, well, questionable judgment calls he’d made.

  And he purloined another pound of ground rock. He had left just in time, it seemed, since his successor (now his superior) had been diverted to a battle at the Piedras Blancas lighthouse and would be delaying her arrival at the Ranch, a battle Peaks suspected involved the art student calling himself Knightmare.

  DiMarco’s problem now, not mine.

  Then Peaks had flown down to Palm Springs, rented a car, and driven out into the desert. He had followed highways and then roads and then dirt tracks out into the middle of nowhere, out to where there was nothing in view but the austere, scalloped hills, the desiccated scrub, and the occasional lizard.

  There he had given full vent to his rage, his sense of betrayal, his thirst for what he saw as justice and another person might have called revenge.

  And in his rage he had become a monster.

  He had reveled in the extraordinary power.

  He had tested these new gifts.

  And he had felt the eyeless gaze of Dark Watchers.

  Then he had returned to human form, shaken, overwhelmed, scared, and yet excited. He had become what he had been tasked to destroy. And now he would destroy those others, one by one: the Darby girl and those with her; the traitor Dekka; Justin Knightmare, if DiMarco had somehow failed to kill him.

  And anyone else who opposed him.

  His mission was vindication. He would prove that he and he alone was capable of addressing the threat to all of humanity and all of human civilization. He was far greater, far more powerful than any of the weapons—biological or mechanical—that he had overseen at the Ranch.

  I am the most powerful single creature ever to walk the earth!

  He was fascinated by the process. After all, Peaks was not just an administrator; he had degrees in the fields of nanotechnology and zoology. But one thing was clear: lacking the support of HSTF-66 (temporarily at least, he reassured himself), he needed an ally, at least one. No matter how powerful his own morph was, Peaks knew he could not see in every direction at once. He needed someone to watch his back. Someone to throw into battle at just the right time to tip the scales. Someone to launch diversions when necessary.

  Someone with power.

  Someone with nowhere else to turn.

  Someone with absolutely no moral qualms who would happily follow orders to maim, torture, or kill as Peaks required.

  And thus had he come here, to this particular stretch of desert.

  Peaks returned to his parked rented car, now broiling hot under the desert sun. He pulled clothing from his bag and dressed quickly. He turned on the engine and the air-conditioning and opened his laptop. He stuck the stolen hard drive into the USB slot and opened a file he’d read many times before.

  Then he opened the detailed analysis derived from news reports, police reports of strange deaths, and the reports of sadistic rapes. The clever geeks at the Ranch had cross-tabbed all the data they had, analyzed possible hiding places, and reached a tentative conclusion: Quail Mountain.

  Peaks drove the few miles to Juniper Flats, nothing but a flat space between mountains, but an easy place to take the trail that led across a mile and a half of sun-blasted desert to Quail Mountain.

  He had a large bottle of Fiji water weighing down one side of his light jacket, and granola bars stuffed into the other pocket. He carried a burner phone with a spare battery pack—not that there was any coverage out in the middle of nowhere. And because he was still far from sure of how exactly to use the monster that now lived within him, he carried a Colt .45 automatic pistol and a spare clip.

  It was not so easy to search the mountain. Quail Mountain was almost six thousand feet high and cut with multitudes of gullies eroded by the infrequent rain and more frequent wind, each of which was an obstacle to movement. Other obstacles were prickly bushes and cacti, the blinding sun, the burning heat, and the ever-present possibility of poisonous reptiles. He soon wished he had more water and better boots. Hours of climbing yielded no clues, and by the time the sun touched the distant western horizon, he was feeling defeated.

  He was torn between continuing his search and racing back to the car—now something like three miles away—and continuing the search the next day, or sticking it out, possibly through the night. In the end he could not bear the thought of slogging all the way back to his car and spending the night in a motel. So he gathered bits of brush and knocked the limbs off a dead Joshua tree and made a fire.

  He made the fire the old-fashioned way, with a lighter. That fact made him grin.

  Night came with a suddenness familiar to those who’ve stayed too long in the desert. The fire soon consumed the dry-as-dust kindling and he had little of anything larger to burn, so he sat hunched over in front of dying embers as the sky above blazed with stars and planets. He listened to the too-near yips of coyotes.

  He had no warning.

  Half asleep, he heard a sound like a bat flitting through the air, and then something was around his chest and he was yanked away from the fire and onto his back.

  He yelled an inarticulate “Hey!” and the thing that had grabbed him now pulled away, only to come slicing forward to land on him with such force that it tore his jacket open at the shoulder, ripped through the shirt beneath, and bit into his flesh.

  “Aaaahhh!” The pain was shocking and Peaks was mortally certain that he would be dead in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, but in his pain and panic he still cried out just the right word.

  “Drake!”

  No second blow fell. The pain was what branded cattle must feel, but he rose shakily to his feet, trying to peer into the darkness.

  “You know me?” The voice was oily smooth, utterly confident, unafraid but curious.

  “Yes. I know who you are. You’re Drake Merwin. I’ve been looking for you.”

  Peaks heard someone move closer but stood his ground, and slowly Drake emerged from the pitch black into the weak orange light and sinister shadows cast by the embers of the fire.

  Drake stood tall, relaxed, his ten-foot-long tentacle arm wrapped casually around his waist, the tip twitching eagerly. He was, Peaks thought, exactly as he’d pictured him: handsome but cruel, with a predatory, animal quality to his gaze.

  The nightmare of the PBA.

  The killer, the rapist, the torturer.

  The brutal, psychopathic monster: Drake Merwin.

  “Well, you found me,” Drake said laconically.

  “I have a proposition for you,” Peaks said, tenderly touching the agonizing slash on his chest.

  “You are not the first to claim he had some good reason why I shouldn’t whip him to death. And the women, oh, they always have some sob story to tell.” Drake laughed.

  Peaks swallowed his revulsion at this, at the vicious scenes his imagination supplied. “Tell you what, Drake. I’ll say what I have to say, and then you decide what to do with me.”

  “I decide regardless,” Drake said with a sneer. “But tell me your story.”

  “Okay,” Peaks said, shaking with fear, fighting the urgent pain. But Peaks was not overly worried: Drake could not defeat him, not if he morphed. That said, he knew he could not morph into the monster if Drake struck too quickly. �
��First, do you recall a certain Dekka Talent?”

  Drake’s hiss sounded like a rattlesnakes.

  “One of the things I’d like you to do, Drake, is kill Dekka Talent.”

  There was a long silence. And then Drake unlimbered his whip arm and casually uprooted a bush, which he tossed onto the fire, causing it to flare brightly.

  Drake sat down, cross-legged, his whip arm now draped over his shoulders, a slow, writhing python.

  “I’m listening,” Drake said.

  “The world is changing. Changing in ways none of us can really imagine. ASO . . . the rock. The one that became the gaiaphage, that same rock, more of it is landing. It was my job to stop it getting out into the hands of, you know, civilians. Regular people.”

  Drake’s eyes narrowed.

  “But that effort has failed. The rock is out in the world, already in too many hands. And with it comes incredible, unpredictable powers.”

  “Just like the good old days,” Drake said.

  “Actually, much worse. You see, the rock is like an opportunistic virus. It affects, it interacts with, its entire environment, using whatever it finds at hand, to shape the change.”

  “The change?”

  “The only two people to escape the PBA with powers intact were the two people who were physically changed. Morphed. Taylor, and you, Drake.”

  Drake was perfectly still, listening, waiting, like a cobra watching a mouse. The end of his whip twitched.

  “The rock, very much like a clever virus, has found a way to survive without the dome. It altered the physiognomy—sorry, the body—creating a sort of hybrid creature made out of the person’s DNA, any other DNA that happened to be nearby, and in some cases seemed affected by need, by desire, as if it was reading synapses inside the brain, feeding on memory, on passion.” Peaks shook his head ruefully, admiringly. “Oh, it is a very, very clever piece of work, this rock. Millennia ahead of human science.”

  He snapped out of a reverie and looked into Drake’s soulless eyes.

  “It . . . they . . . will win. The rock will have its way, you see. That’s clear to me now. I don’t know why, I don’t know what it plans, but it is not a mere virus. No. It is being watched. Perhaps it is a sort of lens that allows connections through a bent and folded space-time, I don’t know, but I know that some consciousness . . . is watching.”

  Drake nodded. “I know it. It never left me.”

  This got Peaks’s attention. “Are you telling me it’s in your head ever since . . .”

  “Before and after,” Drake said in a dreamy tone. “It never leaves me. Just like she never leaves me.”

  “She?”

  Drake grinned. He tugged at the neckline of his filthy T-shirt and pulled it down to reveal the pale flesh beneath. And there, like some mad 3-D tattoo, was a face, the face of a girl with twisted braces’ wires sticking out from between cracked lips.

  “The Brittany Pig,” Drake said, enjoying the look of horror on Peaks’s face. “We were melded long ago, me and Brittany Pig, but our relationship has changed, you know? We used to be two separate people, one replacing the other at times. But eventually she grew on me. Get it?” His laugh was a form of assault, a brutal challenge. “She grew on me.”

  Peaks managed to nod but did not trust his voice. The face on Drake’s chest was not an illusion, not a tattoo. It was a living face mouthing silently, staring at him with eyes that were windows into madness.

  “Sometimes she says their words,” Drake said. “Sometimes the banshees wail and it comes out here.” He tapped the face and the braces-filled mouth snapped at his finger.

  “The banshees?” Peaks whispered.

  “Them. The dark ones. The demons. The Dark Watchers.”

  “What do they say?” Peaks asked.

  Drake made a mirthless chuckle. “Mostly it’s Kill. Yes, they like that, killing. Pain. Terror. It entertains them. They like to be entertained.”

  Peaks had seen freaks. He had created freaks, nightmarish creatures like Carl. He had a very high threshold when it came to fear. But the thin, handsome, vicious boy with the living face on his chest and the lightning-quick whip hand? Well, this was a new level of malice. This was a creature in long-term, close contact with the Dark Watchers that Peaks had only glimpsed, or read about in the statements of experimental subjects. There was a force about Drake, a sort of invisible but unmistakable aura of malignancy.

  I tried to recruit the stable one, Peaks reminded himself. I tried to do the right thing.

  “Time to try the wrong thing,” Peaks muttered under his breath. “Here’s the thing, Drake. I just underwent my own change. I became . . . well, very powerful. Very powerful. I know half your mind is thinking of killing me, but you would not succeed, not with just your whip hand.”

  There was a tantalizing suggestion buried in there somewhere, and Drake sensed it.

  “What do you want?” Drake asked.

  Same question Dekka asked more than once. Well, it’s a fair question, Peaks thought. What do I want? I wanted once to save the world.

  That realization was bitter now. Save the world! Save the world from superpowered freaks like . . . well, like Peaks had now become. Like this sick piece of once-human garbage with the whip.

  And now? What did Peaks want now? To survive in the world that was coming. To be the greatest of the powers. To dominate. To control. To prove himself and avenge his humiliation.

  Yes, he still wanted to save the world. But the world he saved would be his world, a world where he received the recognition he deserved.

  But first and foremost, he had to acquire as much of the precious rock as he could, keep it safe and under his control. With the Mother Rock, Peaks could stop the government’s plans and substitute his own. Their army would be his.

  “The biggest of the rocks is on its way to the Port of Los Angeles. The Mother Rock,” Peaks said.

  “Ah,” Drake said. “I’ve been meaning to head into the city.”

  “That one piece, well, you could transform an army with it. I . . . we . . . could control a force like nothing the world has ever seen. We could crush any other mutant force. We could even fight HSTF-Sixty-Six and the US government to a standstill.”

  “Then what?”

  The question surprised Peaks. He blinked. He hadn’t really thought in detail about what happened next; he’d been focused on fantasies of revenge and self-justification.

  “Well, then I suppose you, Drake, if you’ve been a faithful lieutenant, could have whatever you like.”

  Drake leaned forward. He unlimbered his whip hand and poked at a stick in the fire, sending up a cloud of sparks amid the smoke. Then with his normal hand he pulled his shredded T-shirt up over his head so that the face, the disgusting wire-filled mouth, could be seen clearly in all its disturbing horror.

  “Tell the nice man what we want, Brittany Pig,” Drake said.

  The eyes opened, black-on-black eyes that reflected no light but seemed to blaze with a dark fire within. The glittering mouth spoke just one word.

  “Fun.”

  “Fun?” Peaks could not believe he was talking to a sort of three-dimensional, living tattoo with broken braces. But normal had left the building, and crazy was in charge now.

  “My kind of fun,” Drake said.

  “You really are a psycho,” Peaks said, shaking his head in amused disbelief.

  To his surprise, Drake seemed to consider the idea seriously. He was silent for a while, long enough for Peaks to get nervous. At last Drake said, “I used to be this kid. Probably a little messed up, but still, this kid. Then Sam Temple burned me. Diana had to cut my arm off. Then the gaiaphage gave me this.” He unwrapped his snake arm. He brought the tip close to Peaks’s face, not quite touching, not quite threatening. “I am what the gaiaphage made me.”

  He laughed then. “And they like it. The Dark Watchers. They like pain, which is good, because so do I.” Then his mood changed abruptly. “But don’t call me a psycho or any ot
her names you come up with. You can call me Drake, or you can call me Whip Hand. You call me anything else, old man, and I will make you scream my name till your throat is raw.”

  Well, Peaks thought, Dekka had not overstated just what a monster Drake was. No, not even a little. He might make a useful ally if he could be controlled.

  Big if, he admitted silently. Very big if.

  PART THREE: ROUGH BEASTS

  CHAPTER 20

  First on the Scene

  THE PORT OF Los Angeles was a massive, sprawling complex of docks and jetties, huge cranes for off-loading containers, vast parking lots full of Japanese and Korean cars awaiting transportation to dealers, hundreds of container-hauling trucks, warehouses, great cylindrical fuel tanks, motor pools, and squat, unadorned office buildings that looked like overgrown backyard sheds.

  All that was on the land, which had been shaped to form multiple bays and inlets and channels, but the land was mere servant to the sea and its ships and tugboats and pilot craft.

  Malik drove onto the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a smaller, uglier version of the Golden Gate Bridge that soared over the main channel, just high enough to allow loaded containerships to squeeze beneath. Traffic was sparse on the bridge and Malik pulled over halfway across.

  Shade hopped out and went to the rail. To her left was the cruise ship terminal, where a sleek, massively top-heavy Emerald Princess was just tying off. Beyond it, closer to the open sea, was the retired battleship Iowa, its great guns long silenced.

  Two ships were in the channel, passing beneath the bridge: the Coast Guard cutter Berthold, and the Okeanos Explorer.

  The Berthold, at 420 feet in length, was at once innocent and dangerous, blazingly white with the usual red chevron slanted down the side of the bow, but with a Bofors 57 mm gun in a turret ahead of the superstructure. That superstructure was topped by a mast festooned with sophisticated electronics.

  The Okeanos, which the Berthold had escorted into port, was half as long, white but lacking the sort of perfectly maintained, obsessively clean, and painted look of the Coast Guard ship. It was topped by what looked very much like a giant golf ball, a shell surrounding sophisticated radar and other sensors.