The Monster Series

Markovic made an effort to shift the conversation to less fraught grounds. “How are classes working out?”

“Fine.” The all-purpose conversation-killer: fine.

Markovic frowned. He was a good-looking man. Back in the days when Simone still had friends over, they’d often made sotto voce comments on her “hot dad.” But a full head of dark hair, broad shoulders, and fine features went only so far in distracting from dismissive brown eyes and what might be called “resting prick face.”

“Hey, look!” Markovic pointed up to where dark blue seemed ready to smother the setting sun. He leaned forward against the carved, waist-high balustrade.

Simone joined him and saw a bright pinpoint of light, far to the southwest. At first she thought it might be a star, but the light . . . actually, now that she squinted it was two lights . . . while tiny, were piercing. The lights had appeared suddenly, grown, and blinked out. But now, from that same direction came trails, sparks of fast-moving brightness.

“Shooting stars?” Simone suggested.

Markovic shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Simone was just about to plead homework as an excuse to get away when it became suddenly, terrifyingly clear that the fast-moving sparks were not dimming or going away. In fact—

BOOOM!

A window-rattling concussion as the sound barrier was broken, and a heartbeat behind that, a shattering crash that literally shook the ground beneath Simone’s feet.

“What the hell?” Markovic cried.

BOOOM! BOOOM!

Across the park, the Majestic, a luxury apartment building that rose in twin twenty-nine story towers, exploded outward as a massive boulder blew through it like a baseball thrown through a Lego structure. The meteorite boulder tumbled across the park, annihilating anything in its path. Behind the boulder came tons of brick and steel and eviscerated bodies that fell on the street and into the park like a landslide, completely blocking Central Park West, crushing trees and burying the bridle path.

Neither Simone nor Markovic had time to move, time even to react, when something like hail but infinitely faster hit them and knocked them flat. Simone had a flash of herself flying backward through the glass balcony door that had been blown out by the same hurtling shrapnel a millisecond before her head would have crashed into plate glass.

When she opened her eyes, the view was inexplicable. She was staring sideways at a dark fireplace at the far end of a stretch of carpet. There was a ringing in her ears and a pounding in her head so intense she half believed someone was beating her with a stick. Tiny pebbles, some barely larger than dust or sand, littered the floor.

Simone sat up and was overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea that nearly made her vomit. Then came the pain. Pain everywhere in her body, arms, chest, face, all hurt like she’d been battered. It felt as if every part of her was bruised.

Only then did she notice the blood.

Close-up on blood-smeared hands.

Simone stared in horror and realized that it was her blood, her own blood seeping from half a dozen punctures in the side of her left hand, more on the back of her right hand, more still up both arms, holes, most so tiny they could almost be insect bites that she’d scratched bloody. But other holes were bigger, like the hole an ice pick might make.

Blood seeped through her clothing, dots of red growing like poppies, and she felt a scream rising inside her. She scrabbled to her feet, nausea and pain making the world tilt and spin, and lurched on wobbly legs to the big, framed mirror over the mantel.

It was like a scene from Carrie. Her face was red with blood dribbling from half a dozen tiny holes, one within an inch of blowing out her right eye. It was like she’d been attacked by a porcupine. But this was Manhattan, for God’s sake; there were no porcupines.

She tore off her T-shirt and gaped at similar puncture wounds across her shoulders and chest, down to her belly. Only her legs had been left untouched, protected by the stone balustrade.

“Dad? Daddy?” she cried in a wavering voice. “Daddy?”

She found him, unconscious, pierced as she was, bloody, and with his left hand hanging by veins and viscera. She screamed and fell to her knees beside him, looking for signs of life. His chest rose and fell; he was breathing, but the blood, the blood was gushing from his wrist. Simone pulled out her phone—it was pierced and dead. She ran for the landline and dialed 911 with trembling fingers and blurted out her fears to a harried operator. Then she ran back to her father, pulled off his belt, and used it as a tourniquet for his wrist.

She succeeded in slowing if not stopping the arterial flow, dragged an ottoman over and elevated his feet as she’d learned in some half-forgotten first-aid course. Then she ran back to the balcony, thinking of shouting down to the street for help.

But one glance told her that help would be slow in coming.

The Majestic had only been the first building to be annihilated. The apartment building half a block south had been hit, and its wreckage now spilled across Fifth Avenue. Flames rose in huge columns, south near Rockefeller Center. Only then did she begin to realize the extent of the horror.

Mom! I have to call Mom!

But now the phone circuits were jammed. Manhattan had suffered the equivalent of a bombing attack.

Exterior. Upper East Side Manhattan. Evening. Like something out of a World War II movie, shattered buildings, fire and smoke.

If she was going to save her father’s life, it would be up to her, alone. Step One: getting a man nearly twice her weight to the elevator, something she accomplished by hauling at the edge of the carpet he lay on.

Bob Markovic had two cars in the garage below street level, a black Mercedes S-Class roughly the size and weight of a small yacht, and a classic Triumph TR3 with a standard transmission. Simone found both keys in her father’s pocket and chose the Mercedes. Markovic was not a small man, and cramming him, unconscious, into a tiny sports car was not going to work.

Simone dragged her father out of the elevator and out onto the concrete, leaving a slimy trail of blood. The car was a hundred feet away, and she sensibly decided to bring the car to him.

He was moaning and making slight movements, but was nowhere near being able to walk, and it took enormous effort to heft him into the back seat, made no easier by the pain rocketing around her own body, not to mention that her hands were slick with blood.

It had been a while since Simone’s one and only driving lesson, and she moved at creeping speed up the ramp and out onto Fifth Avenue.

The emergency-room entrance to the hospital was jammed with cars, taxis, and ambulances, so Simone had to abandon the car a block away, but she found a helpful passerby who took one of her father’s shoulders while she took the other. Inside the emergency room was chaos, orderlies, nurses, security guards all trying to cope with dozens of people marked by the same pinpricks, as well as some far more seriously hurt. One woman, hauled along unconscious by her two teen-aged children, was missing the left side of her face. A woman cried and begged for attention as she cradled a blood-soaked mass of blankets swaddling a blessedly unseen baby.

Simone had no choice but to leave her father lying on the floor, where he risked being trampled, as she competed for the attention of besieged nurses.

After an interminable wait, during which time the numbers of patients doubled every few minutes, orderlies came to whisk Bob Markovic away on a gurney. Then Simone, too, was led to a line of curtained bays, all full to overflowing, and told to sit on the floor and wait. All around her a controlled panic of doctors and nurses dealt with burns, crushing injuries from falling walls and roofs, terrible cuts from flying glass, panic-induced heart attacks, and quite a few with injuries like Simone’s.

Simone waited and sat and oozed blood for hours, listening to cries of pain and screams of grief, forgotten in the mayhem. At one point she noticed that she was sitting in a pool of her own blood, that it had saturated the seat of her trousers. But her body was fighting back, deploying clotting factor, doing all that a billion years of evolved survival mechanisms could to keep the blood on the inside.

She managed to use a nurse’s station line to call her mother, who was, thankfully, alive but unable to go anywhere since a piece of rock had blown right through the elevator in her building. Simone also called her current girlfriend, Mary, and snagged a few ibuprofen, which did almost nothing to dull the bruising pain in her body or the migraine building steam in her head.

After hours of waiting, after multiple unanswered questions about her father’s condition, they put Simone through a full-body CT scan. A doctor had ordered an MRI, but that was before another victim had been placed in the machine. MRIs use super powerful magnets, and no one had realized the shrapnel was magnetic. The first patient in the MRI had been ripped to hamburger by dozens of bits of the rock being drawn through the meat of her body.

Two hours after the CT scan, and far into the night, they were telling her nothing. But the staff—justifiably exhausted and haggard—looked more than just tired, they looked scared.

Explanation of what had happened came not from any of the doctors but from Mary, who’d had to walk twenty-three blocks through a city lit by police-vehicle light bars and accompanied by a soundtrack of sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. The subway was shut down. Cabbies had all headed for cover. Buses were being used as emergency treatment facilities.

Mary’s first words were not helpful. “Oh, my God, Simone! Oh, my God!”

Simone tried to smile, but her face was stiff from impact bruises and a dozen bandages dotting her body. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart, it’s gruesome. And I think my dad is worse off; they won’t even tell me what’s happening with him.” Simone was not prone to hysteria, but she heard the edge of it in her own voice.

“Don’t worry. It will be okay.” Mary’s tone carried no conviction, and her face was a mask of disgust. She kept moving her hands as if about to reach out to Simone, but then kept pulling away, as if she was frightened.

“I don’t even know what happened,” Simone said.

“Haven’t you seen the news?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was one of those rocks. You know, like the ones that turn people into mutants or whatever?”

“Mary, what are you talking about?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m just saying what the news says. They said a big rock, a meteorite or asteroid or whatever, was heading toward Manhattan, so they nuked it.”

The bright pinpoints of light: nuclear explosions going off at the edge of space.

“The nukes broke it up, I guess, but it still hit. There’s buildings burning and all. I had to cross the park, and it’s full of people all scared to death. People are saying it’s worse than 9/11.” Mary had started to cry, which angered Simone: Mary wasn’t the one bleeding.

Still sitting on a floor no doubt crawling with exotic hospital germs, Simone looked past Mary and saw looming over her three people: one in NYPD uniform, two in jeans and blue windbreakers with large yellow letters across the back reading ICE, one male, one female.

A nurse was with them. She said, “This is one of them.”

“All right,” the female ICE agent said. She fixed Simone with a no-nonsense look, like a disappointed assistant principal who’d caught her ditching class, and pointed to a gold shield on her belt. “I’m with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, operating under emergency presidential decree.”

“Wait, what?” Simone frowned and shook her head not so much to say no, but to try and clear her head. “ICE? But I’m a US citizen.”

“Understood, miss. We’ve been deputized to act in this emergency. It’s for your own safety.”

Simone was confused, but not so confused that she didn’t know bullshit when she heard it. And as a child of privilege, she knew what words to say. She climbed to her feet, wincing at pains that had become deep aches, fighting the resistance of bruised and stiffening muscles. She said, “I want a lawyer.”

“We aren’t arresting you, miss. This is for your own protection.” The other ICE agent, a balding man with permanent worry lines around his eyes, tried out the same lie but was even less convincing.

“I want to see my father. And I want a lawyer. I’m not going anywhere until I—”

“Miss, you have to come with us.”

Simone turned to the NYPD officer. “Are you standing there allowing these people to drag an American citizen, a New Yorker, out of a hospital?” The policeman winced, then looked away, clearly not happy with his role.

“We are the federal government,” the plainclotheswoman said as if that would shut the conversation down. But this was tough New York, not nice Minnesota: New Yorkers were not by nature easy to shut up, and Simone was very much a New Yorker.

“Hey, Feds are the people who were doing that crazy stuff out in California. I’m not going anywhere with you people.”

“Under the Special Emergency Decree, we can take you to a secure facility for—”

“Hey, you!” Simone snapped, pointing at the uniformed policeman again. “You’re NYPD and I’m a New Yorker. Protect and freaking serve, man. Are you going to stand there and let these guys bully me? Where’s the warrant?”

The policeman seemed to agree, but he shook his head ruefully and said, “I’m sorry, miss, but we have orders to cooperate with the Feds.”

“I’m an American citizen in a goddamn hospital, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, and I have done nothing wrong. You want me, you’ll have to drag me. Mary! Are you taping?”

“On it,” Mary said, holding her phone up.

“You need to put that phone down and wipe that recording,” the male ICE agent demanded.

But Mary was also a New Yorker and answered, “It’s live-streaming, and basically, screw you. I know my rights.”

At which point the agent stepped in quickly and snatched the iPhone away as Mary and Simone both unleashed verbal tirades liberally punctuated with F-bombs.

In the end it took the NYPD officers plus both ICE agents to carry/drag Simone, while fending off Mary, and the five of them went kicking and yelling out through the emergency room and down a corridor to the parking garage, where a black SUV with darkened windows waited.

From the Purple Moleskine:

FINDING IT HARDER and harder to think about writing fiction. Reality is too weird. I’m part of a group of superheroes, for God’s sake. Best friend can run 800 mph. Malik can make people wish they were dead. Francis moves through walls. There are silent, unseen aliens in our heads when we morph. Just the fact that I can write words like “alien” and “morph” and have them be a real thing, WTF ?

Times I think the watchers have a sense of humor or irony. Gentle, thoughtful Malik can cause agony. Driven, obsessive Shade can outrun a 787—how perfect for someone always in a hurry.

Then there’s me. How brilliantly cruel to give me the power I have. Let’s take the trans girl just starting to figure out how to be who and what she is, and give her the ability to appear as anyone of any gender, age, race . . . Not complaining—it’s so much better than what Malik got. Still.

Now I’m this famous person from an iconic photo. Millions of people who don’t know me have definite opinions about me. Expectations. I’m a hero to strangers and a mystery to myself. The personal is being obliterated. I’m in a war, and the war isn’t about me or what I feel or what I need. I get that. I know I’m just one tiny part of something huge and terrifying. I get that people are scared to death and looking for a hero.

But I am still just this one person. Just me. Cruz.

Also I’m thinking way too much about Armo.

Warning to self: heartbreak ahead.

If I live that long.

3 BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO 3-D PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

“HOLD MY HAND,” Francis Specter said.

Malik held her hand.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Francis asked. “I’m worried you might get hurt or whatever and it would be my fault.”

“You took me into the Triunfo to take down Dillon Poe,” Malik said. “I was fine. Weirded out, but fine.”

They were talking quietly in the separate dining room of the suite because a sunburned Armo and Cruz were watching a movie in the living room, and Shade was reading something on a laptop provided by the casino hotel’s management. Dekka had gone down to replace a broken tail light on her precious motorcycle, involuntarily assisted by two starstruck guys from building maintenance.

Malik had not exactly cleared this experiment with the others. He worried that if they knew what he was up to, they’d come up with an endless list of objections, and he didn’t want more delay. The others did not have the Dark Watchers constantly, constantly in their heads. They could watch a movie. They could read. Malik was straining just to avoid screaming half the time, not from physical pain but from the crushing humiliation and impotent anger that came from having alien consciousnesses poking through your mind, seeing the world through your eyes.

Using me. Violating me.

There were times when anger would almost suffocate him, and that was not a feeling Malik liked. Malik was about doing things, fixing things, and above all, understanding things. Passively raging at invisible creatures in his head was not good for him; it was toxic and foul. It made him feel weak.

It had been wonderful going to bed the night before with Shade. It had been her move. The assumption had been that the two guys, Malik and Armo, would share a room, but Shade had said, “I want you close so I can keep an eye on you.”

Awkward had not begun to cover Malik’s feelings. He’d thought of objecting but had not been able to come up with a good rationale. So he’d just nodded and excused himself to take a shower.

I was not hard to persuade.

Then Shade had joined Malik in the shower where they helped each other get very, very clean.

It was the closest Malik had come to being able to ignore the ongoing horror that was his true body now, and the loss of privacy and sanctity that twisted his mind. But even as they were making love, the Dark Watchers had been there, making Malik feel that in some way he was betraying Shade by exposing their intimacy to the voyeurs in the shadows.

Enough. Enough feeling bad. Time to do something.

“Okay, so something simple to start with,” Malik suggested to Francis. “The hallway is on the other side of this wall. Shall we?”

Malik squeezed her hand and smiled encouragingly at Francis, whose eyes became swirling rainbows of color, a rainbow that spread over her face.

There was a sudden feeling of the whole world tilting sideways, like Malik was looking at it through a prism. Colors shifted toward ultraviolet, and then the world seemed to unfold as if every object, the chairs, the bed, the walls, were origami. They unfolded and refolded into impossible shapes, nothing still, nothing permanent. He looked at Francis and saw not a girl but a silhouette of light containing rainbows.

Then he chanced to look down and saw his own feet and legs and nearly screamed, because the view was of the burned-down-to-the-bone legs that were his de-morphed reality.

He quickly looked away and ordered himself to stay calm, but by that point they were standing, still holding hands, in the hallway outside, and reality was reassuringly 3-D again.

“Wow.”

“Are you all right?” Francis asked anxiously.

“That is one serious roller coaster,” Malik said.

“Yeah. Totally freaked me out the first time.”

“I would imagine so,” Malik said dryly. “Are you up for another?”

Francis shrugged assent.

“Do you have any control over how fast we move?”

“I don’t know. You want me to go slow?”

“Try, yes,” Malik said. “How about we go from here down to the casino?”

They were still holding hands, and again the world tilted, shifted toward ultraviolet and came apart as if all of reality was no more substantial than tissue paper. This time Malik carefully avoided looking at his own body, and instead found himself in a slow-moving tornado of things almost impossible to recognize. Was that the floor unfolded? Was that what a bed looked like from extradimensional space? He saw water pipes with water running not through them but beside them. He saw what were surely fiber-optic data lines, but they were writhing blue serpents surrounded by a hurricane of colorful dots.

He passed humans, men, women, a child, the inhabitants of the rooms between the suite and the casino floor far below, though up, down, above, and below had a very different meaning here. He saw people as paper-thin faces glued onto an explosion of gray matter; he saw their intestines sluggishly pumping food; he saw them as arms and legs spread out into a kind of diagram, with bone exposed and muscles twitching unattached, and arteries with blood both inside . . . and somehow not.

With his free hand, Malik reached toward a shimmering light seemingly made up of discrete, sparkling bits like so many fireflies, but there was nothing to touch. He tried again, reaching his hand to touch a deconstructed wall, and saw his fingers trace lines in dust but unable to go deeper into what he could see so clearly.

When he looked up and held his gaze steady, he found he could look through every floor above and see blue sky through a shifting forest of objects that obeyed none of the rules of three-dimensional euclidean geometry.

It was disorienting in the extreme, making his stomach churn and his balance fail. He stumbled, tried to stop himself, but fell through a wall and a floor and almost lost his grip on Francis’s hand before he stopped falling for reasons he could not even guess at.

And then, all at once, they were on the casino floor in reassuring 3-D space being stared at, openmouthed, by a blackjack dealer who had just dropped a stack of chips on the floor upon seeing them materialize out of nothing.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you,” Francis said to the dealer.

“That was amazing,” Malik said. “Incredible! I don’t even . . .” He was breathless with excitement. He’d always liked his physics classes, and this was a wild master class in n-dimensional space, except that this wasn’t a dry discussion of theory. He’d done in reality what in theory was impossible. He had passed through a dimension beyond normal 3-D space. He was a 3-D creature, with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, trying to make sense of his world as seen from a very different perspective.

“Amazing,” Malik whispered again. “I . . . I mean . . . wow. Wow.” He felt as if he’d just glimpsed the world like God—if such a creature existed—might see it. No other human being in the history of the world, aside from Francis, had seen what he’d just experienced.

“Yeah. Weird.” Francis did not share Malik’s pleasure, it was all just disorienting and unpleasant to her.

“Let’s go back up. But even slower if you can.”

Once more, with Francis’s small hand held firmly in his, the world unfolded, opened up. Straight lines became curves, curves became curlicues, inside was out, and it was all madness, complete, swirling, colorful, impossible madness. Malik laughed in pure joy, his laughter a paisley fog in the air around him. He reminded himself sternly that he wasn’t an extradimensional tourist: he was searching for answers. Searching for a way out.