The Monster Series
Searching . . . for them.
He closed his eyes, trying to regain some sense of perspective, but it was no good: eyelids were just so 3-D. He focused his mind and “listened” for the Dark Watchers. They’d been there with him night and day since he’d been burned beyond saving. But now?
Where are you, my dark, invisible friends?
He could not feel them, which was a wonderful relief, but not the point. If he could not sense them, how could he find them?
The world around him was made entirely of bits and pieces: gypsum board walls, lumber, structural steel, the fabric of carpets, wires buzzing with electricity, which he saw as a pulsing green glow. Mixed in like croutons in a salad were humans, bulging water balloons of guts and muscle and blood that, when looked at from a certain angle, exploded outward in a disturbing vivisection, like something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie, strange and unsettling—and the more strange and unsettling for being recognizable.
But none of this was what he was looking for. He needed to look past all the debris. He needed, he told himself, to look in a different direction. But how was he to find that different direction, the direction where the Dark Watchers lurked?
He turned his head this way and that, and caught a glimpse of something. Not light—light was everywhere, seeming to shine right through everything in every direction but one, and in that one direction he saw a hole no bigger than a grapefruit. Inside that hole was not the black of total darkness, but something he could not describe, because inside that hole was nothingness, a pale gray, flat, nothingness without surface or depth or feature.
“I want to go there,” Malik said, and watched his technicolor words wrap themselves around the splayed gray mass that was Francis’s brain. He saw the intricate muscles of her eyes contract and turn her gaze in the direction he’d indicated.
Francis moved toward the hole. If she was using her feet, Malik never saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.
Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!
From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.
It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.
The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .
He had let go of Francis’ hand!
He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.
He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.
Some kind of defense mechanism.
He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.
He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”
But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.
And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.
He was stuck.
DRAKE MERWIN HAD reassembled himself several times during his relatively short life. It was a process he neither understood nor controlled; he only knew that whatever was done to . . . disassemble him, he came back together.
The latest such disassembly had been the result of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone. The explosion had annihilated much of him, leaving bits and pieces, many burning, smeared all over a pile of rocks in the Mojave desert. The largest bit of his head—left eye, a bit of nose cartilage, and his mouth—had landed on a cactus.
A few days had passed since then, and he now had a body capable of limited movement. His head was mostly complete, with the right side lacking only skin to cover exposed muscle and tendon. He had most of his left arm and all of his right arm, that being the ten-foot-long tentacle that was a legacy of the FAYZ. His right leg was minus a foot, and the left leg was scarcely better.
It was not an ideal body for crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Before he could do anything he would need to be more complete: hard to walk without two feet.
Drake experienced a moment of sadness and loss for the excellent cave that had been collapsed by the explosion. He’d spent years in that cave, torturing victims, savoring their agony, laughing at their increasingly desperate pleas.
Often during the months and years of his desert exile, Drake had passed the time by teasing Brittany Pig, the homunculus that always reappeared, like a living bas relief on his chest, complete with the protruding wire of her broken braces. Brittany had not yet re-emerged—that part of his chest was still open to the ribs—but she would be back. Aside from his victims, Brittany was the closest Drake ever came to human contact. “Friends” would not be the right word, but Drake had become accustomed to her.
Drake had foolishly allied himself with Tom Peaks, called Dragon by some, Napalm by others, and damned near been disassembled by various mutants at the Port of Los Angeles, including an old enemy, Dekka Talent. Dekka had been Sam Temple’s muscle, his enforcer, her and that brat Brianna. Dekka had been dangerous enough then, and she was more so now. But he could take her. Could and would.
In time. But not yet.
Peaks’s cell-phone signal had led to the missile strike that had wiped out Drake’s excellent cave. They’d been trying to kill Peaks, but he was gone by then, and Drake had borne the brunt.
It was unfair, but Drake was not one to stew over life’s unfairness. Anyway, now he had a mission. The world was coming apart, civilization was slowly crumbling, and the “new normal” was just abnormal enough that Drake thought he might have a chance at something he had wanted desperately for five years, from all the way back in the FAYZ: Astrid Ellison.
He didn’t have an address, but he thought he knew how to find it. In the meantime he only had to wait for another foot to return, and then: Los Angeles.
He had come so close in the FAYZ. So close to making Astrid suffer. This time he would not fail.
Drake had learned patience down through the years, and he waited for hours more until he had two almost-complete legs. And then Drake marched . . . well, staggered . . . toward murder.
“I’m an artist, damn it!”
Justin DeVeere muttered those words to a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in McCarran International airport.
Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare and a few other less-flattering names, had escaped the massacre at the Ranch, the HSTF-66 facility, by running into the woods until he could run no more. He’d then managed to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, which turned out to be a very poor choice of destination. Only sheer, dumb luck had kept Justin from dying from a missile en route to Vegas.
After the explosion, he’d walked on toward Las Vegas until he saw flames rising and explosions booming. Then he had sensibly turned around and walked in the other direction. He’d ended up spending the night shivering in the freezing desert and watching the flames of the distant battle.
It had sent his mind back onto half-forgotten tracks, back to when he was just a promising young artist. As he watched from a safe distance, he’d begun thinking about a multimedia art installation that would evoke the horror. And that led him to painful memories of his wealthy patron and girlfriend, Erin O’Day, who had been killed in an earlier battle.
The thing was, Justin admitted, he did not actually want to be Knightmare anymore. It had been exciting for a while, but had quickly become a bloody, violent, and very precarious existence. He’d been imprisoned at the Ranch before Shade Darby and her mutant friends had attacked and destroyed the place, freeing a freak show of mutants and cyborgs, things that were half-human, drones flown by the disembodied heads of infants, things . . . Bad things. Very bad things. And had any of the Rockborn Gang spotted him there, he’d almost certainly be dead now. He had experienced the blast of pain from Malik, and one thing was absolutely clear to Justin: he never, ever wanted to feel that again. It had been unendurable, and it had shaken him down to his bones.
I’m an artist, dammit!
That phrase had become his rallying cry. He wasn’t Knightmare; he wasn’t the creature who had destroyed a plane and burned its passengers alive. He wasn’t the creature who had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. He was an artist.
Dammit!
It was this mantra that convinced him that he needed to get back to New York. Back to where people knew him for his art. Surely some art lover would grant him shelter until . . . until the madness descending on humanity was past.
The morning after the battle, he’d once again walked back toward Las Vegas, passed by an endless stream of National Guard troop transports and FEMA trucks carrying emergency relief.
Once there, unrecognized in his normal, human body, he’d overheard people talking about the Rockborn Gang, the heroes who had saved the city. And to his horror, he’d realized they were still there, still in Vegas.
One thing Justin was quite clear about: wherever the Rockborn Gang was, he wanted to be far away.
He had no wallet, no credit cards or phone. But a young man walking past a vast construction site in North Las Vegas, and who arguably looked a bit like Justin, had all that and more. Justin had not wanted to kill the young man, but necessity made its own rules. One more body for collection by the crews that were scouring the city for the dead. Justin took his victim’s wallet and phone and caught a taxi to the airport. He’d bought the first available ticket to New York and now merely waited for the gate to be called.
Back to New York.
He would be safe in New York.
Tom Peaks had run from Las Vegas after the horror at the Triunfo, the hotel where Dillon Poe had made his unspeakably brutal last stand.
Peaks had arrived in Vegas as Napalm, the ten-story-tall reptile with the belly full of liquid fire, believing he was there to take down Dekka, who he hated for what he still thought of as betrayal.
But when he’d arrived . . .
He had not known about Dillon Poe. He’d had no idea what Dillon was doing. He had not known that the hundreds of people gathered by the entrance of the Triunfo were slaves to Dillon’s will, unable to flee.
He had definitely not known that the Charmer had sprayed that crowd with gasoline.
Now Peaks sat trembling in a booth at a diner in one of the multitude of identical shopping centers that ringed the city. His coffee was undrunk. The pancakes he’d ordered were untouched and now cold.
There had been so many horrors. So much destruction. The Ranch, his great creation, was exposed to the world and destroyed. What had once been his staff of carefully recruited scientists and techs and guards had been hunted down and murdered by vengeful mutants and cyborgs.
His family . . . He closed his eyes and tried to picture them, but each time he did he saw disgust and contempt on their faces. He could never go home to them, not now.
No job. No home. No family. No purpose in life. And for the rest of his life he would see the Triunfo fire over and over and over again. A fire he had unwittingly lit.
“Can I get you anything else, honey?’ the waitress asked.
Peaks shook his head. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table, got up, went to the men’s room, and vomited coffee and bile.
Peaks splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the dirty mirror. Looked at a face now known to every law-enforcement agency on earth.
There was no safety.
There was no escape.
There were only the screams of people burning.
Peaks stumbled out of the diner into brilliant sunlight. Across the vast parking lot was a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. He headed for it, spotted a liquor store, and bought himself a bottle of excellent scotch on the way.
“Damn good scotch,” Peaks muttered, draining a quarter of the bottle as he maneuvered through parked cars.
The clerk at the liquor store had given him a strange look, a shrewd look of recognition. Would he call the police? More likely than not.
Time was running short. If they came for him, he could morph and fight them off. He had only to belch the dreadful napalm and they would burn. . . .
Innocent police officers just doing their duty. My God.
He set the scotch bottle, now half-empty, on the curb and went into the Big 5. He easily found the gun-sales area. He pointed to a 12-gauge shotgun in a rack.
“How much?”
“That model will set you back $899.99.”
Peaks stuck a credit card into the reader. Denied. Tried another card. Denied.
“I know who you are,” the clerk said suddenly. He looked at Peaks as if seeing the devil himself.
“I need a gun,” Peaks rasped.
“You get nothing from me, you piece of shit,” the man said. “Give you a gun? Why, so you can kill some more children? Get out of here! Security! Security!”
Peaks bowed his head, then walked around behind the counter. The clerk, terrified, tried to back away but Peaks grabbed him by the shirt front and said, “I need a shotgun. Short barrel. And one shell. Just one.”
A minute later store security came hustling up just in time to see Peaks jack the 12-gauge shell into the chamber, place the barrel of the shotgun under his chin, and blow the top of his head all over the display case.
IN SURGERY THEY had reattached Bob Markovic’s nearly severed hand. He was given painkillers. He was also given a sedative. And by the time he woke he was in a very surprising yet oddly familiar place. Consciousness returned to Markovic in the form of too-bright lights and a sea of red velour. He blinked, and then squinted against the light, and then, with rapidly mounting panic, recognized where he was.
Carnegie Hall?
Markovic’s Money Machine had season tickets to Carnegie Hall, using them to reward especially productive senior employees and the occasional politician who needed some TLC. But, he realized, he was not in the corporate seats which were up in the first balcony, stage left. He was in a seat toward the rear of the orchestra section.
And the people around him were definitely not regular patrons. Not even close. Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium held 2804 people; less than a tenth of that number were in the hall now, but they were not there to watch a show. Many were in pajamas or robes. Many others—like Markovic himself—were in hospital robes. Some were in street clothes. But all were bloody to one degree or another. Some showed just a few blood-soaked bandages slowly drying from crimson to rust color, but others looked as if they’d been dipped in red paint.
Markovic’s pain seemed to come out of nowhere, a series of pains, really, starting with the total-body bruising he quickly traced to what looked like dozens of pinpricks, or ice-pick stabs on his arms, his hands, his face. Then there was a deeper wound, a thick bandage on his chest that seeped blood and felt terrible. That wound suggested danger to life and limb. But it was the hand, wrapped in gauze and surgical webbing, that was the most troubling because he had no idea what had happened to it, or why he could not feel his fingers.
He opened his robe with his good hand and peeled back the thick bandage on his upper pectoral. This was no pinprick; this was a gash, maybe three centimeters long with a dozen black stitches holding it closed.
Have I been shot? Stabbed?
Some kind of terrorist attack?
And, given the pain and the wounds and the blood and the incessant pounding in his head, why in holy hell was he at Carnegie Hall?
He tried to stand and sat right back down, head swimming, thighs quivering, knees as firm as overcooked spaghetti. Markovic began tracing back through his memories. He’d been arguing with Simone, which was not unusual. She was an amazing kid, of course—after all, she was his daughter—but she was headstrong. Then there had been a strange light . . . no, two lights, each far more steady and intense than any star. Then . . .
Beyond that point, memory became disconnected flashes. A flash of an impact of some sort. A flash of his living room. A flash of Simone, face bloody, bending over him. Then . . . doctors? Nurses? He furrowed his brow, thinking. Cops?
The back seat of his Mercedes?
A linoleum floor?
And a gurney rolling fast down long corridors, he remembered that. And the next memory was coming fully conscious in the last place on earth he’d ever . . .
It must have been a mass casualty event. His brain was working now despite the pain everywhere. Mass casualties, and the first responders had decided to use Carnegie Hall as a temporary . . .
Temporary what? Hospital?
He squinted to focus and turned his stiff neck. Beside every door—and there were a dozen or so—beside each one was a national guardsman in green uniform, helmeted, and carrying an assault rifle.
Some hospital.
He fumbled for his phone, but he was in a hospital robe, underpants and socks, which meant his street clothes and phone were back at whatever hospital had done whatever they’d done . . .
“What is going on?” he muttered, getting no response. So he looked left and right and decided the best target for conversation would be the woman seated in the row behind and left.
“Excuse me,” he said through a parched mouth. “Do you know what’s going on?”
The woman had gray hair cut short, was small, compact, and full of nervous energy, like a clever sparrow. “The explosion,” the woman said.
“What explosion?”
The woman glanced over her shoulder like they were in fifth grade and she was worried the teacher might hear her gossiping. “One of those meteors. The alien ones. I heard the major—I think he’s in charge here—talking about it. One of those alien rocks was heading for the city, so they nuked it. I guess they saved the city by breaking it up, maybe, but we still got hit by a lot of stuff. Smaller pieces. I live on West Forty-Ninth and it’s burning.”
Markovic nodded. “Thanks.”
“They said we’re here for our own safety,” the woman said, reluctant to relapse into silence.
But Markovic was already on to considering the possibilities. He could just get up and walk out. He was in pain, but the serious wound in his chest had been sutured and, well, whatever had been done with his hand. Presumably he was not in imminent danger of death. And he’d be a lot more comfortable at home than here.
But could he leave? That was the question. He took a moment to observe, twisting painfully this way and that. He saw two different people attempt to exit, and both times be sent back to their seat by a guardsman.
So, not a hospital: a holding cell, a temporary jail. They were prisoners. More importantly, he was a prisoner.
“Why hold us prisoner?” he wondered aloud.
The answer was not long in coming to him. They had all been struck by shrapnel from the meteorite. And by now everyone knew the possible consequences of exposure to the rock.
“They’re isolating us,” he muttered under his breath.
“Dad?”
“Simone?” There she was, standing right before him. “Oh God, baby, I’m so glad you’re okay.” The word “okay” died on his lips as he realized that she had been peppered with shrapnel as well, that her body was a series of leaking bandages. Her face looked like she’d tried to shave during an earthquake.
Simone made a half-hearted effort to hug him, but stopped when she realized the pain it would cause them both. She lowered herself gingerly into the seat beside him.
“What are they going to do with us?” Simone demanded.
Markovic shrugged and winced at the movement, which sent pain stabbing up his neck. “I don’t know, but I’m calling Cowan.” Cowan was Markovic’s lawyer.
“They took everyone’s phones. I don’t think they’ll let you call,” Simone said.
“The hell they won’t,” Markovic snapped. He stood up, fighting crashing waves of headache and nausea, and steadied himself with a hand on Simone’s shoulder. He looked around imperiously, decided he should go straight to the top, and weaved his tottering way up the aisle to the main doors where a National Guard major stood, surrounded by junior officers.
Simone followed him. She didn’t approve of her father, but he was still her father, and the truth was he generally got his way: no one was better at bullying underlings than Bob Markovic.
“Major, a word,” Markovic said.
The major was a middle-aged man with blond hair cut so short he appeared bald from a distance, a fleshy nose, and a body as fit as a fifty-year-old man whose real full-time job was managing a branch office for a mortgage broker was likely to be.
“Sir, you need to take a seat,” the major said.
“Actually, major, I don’t take orders from you. See, you’re a National Guard toy soldier, and I’m Bob Markovic. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, I assure you it means a great deal to the mayor, the governor, and all the congresspeople and senators you could name. So—”
“Sir. I’m very busy. We have an emergency situation here. So please take your seat.”
“I will not take my seat, you jumped-up doorman.” Markovic stabbed a finger at the major’s chest.
The major turned away, a look of distaste on his face. “Lieutenant, have this gentleman escorted back to his seat.”
The lieutenant reached for Markovic’s intact arm.
“Don’t you lay hands on me!” Markovic yelled, and slapped the lieutenant’s hand away, and that was when a military police sergeant stepped in and jabbed a black rectangular object into Markovic’s side.
Markovic heard the sparking of the stun gun. He jerked wildly, staggered back, and was saved from falling by the lieutenant and a sergeant.
“This man with you?” the lieutenant demanded of Simone.
“He’s my father.”
“Then you need to get him to calm down.”
Simone said nothing but stepped in to wrap her stunned and quivering father’s arm over her shoulder. He had been barely ambulatory. Now he was not just weak but confused, unable to control what direction he was going, and Simone led him back and deposited him in his seat.
“Fascist bastards!” Markovic said when the effects of the stun gun’s charge had diminished.
“You got the rich-white-guy treatment,” Simone said pitilessly. “I saw a black guy try it and he got handcuffs.”
“Spare me your libtard crap, Simone!” Markovic raged. “This is illegal. It’s unconstitutional! I have rights!”
There was a flurry of activity around the major. Civilians in suits had come in from outside and were arguing with the major. Evidently the major lost the argument, because one of the men in suits walked down the aisle and climbed nimbly onto the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Carlos Malina from the Department of Homeland Security. An emergency has been declared, and an emergency decree has been issued.”