First published in Great Britain in 2018

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books,

a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2018 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First e-book edition 2018

ISBN 978 1 4052 8484 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1767 0

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To my daughter, Clara

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

-

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

—Revelations 13:1–2

California’s governor and legislature are rushing to replace the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, which was destroyed in a battle between police and a superpowered mutant calling himself Knightmare. . . .

—The New York Times

The Port of Los Angeles is still conducting damage assessments following the battle involving several mutant creatures, but early estimates run to the billions of dollars. . . .

—Press Office, Port of Los Angeles

The president has issued a tweet criticizing late-night comedy shows for portraying him as paralyzed in the face of this novel threat. . . .

—Associated Press

Ministry of State Security (MSS)

People’s Republic of China

Electronic Communications Intercept (ECI) #42-8909

The following conversation took place between Deputy Undersecretary of US Homeland Security Peter Stroudwell (PS) and Angela Britten (AB), a senior advisor to the Homeland Security General Counsel, at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

PS: The president has suggested asking the population to take direct action. His words. Direct action.

AB: What action? Does he want the whole country hiding in shelters indefinitely?

PS: Not that kind of action. He’s calling for a Second Amendment solution.

AB: You’re kidding. He’s suggesting every gun nut in the country go on a mutant-killing spree? Come on, Peter, you must know—

PS: Of course I know! Jesus, Angela, why do you think I’m talking to you? You’re in the counsel’s office, you’re a lawyer, you need to do something to head this off.

AB: Right, because I can somehow stop POTUS. I need a drink.

END OF ECI

Madam Chairman, to be honest, we haven’t got the first goddamned clue how to stop these monsters.

—Secret testimony of FBI director

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1: IT RHYMES WITH VILLAIN

2: FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SCREAM ALONE

3: VETERANS OF PAST AND FUTURE WARS

ASO-6

4: AND COMING IN AT NUMBER ONE . . .

5: CRACKERS WITH A LUNATIC

6: DO YOU FEEL MY PAIN? HOW ABOUT NOW?

7: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE KIND OF PREDATOR

8: THE SYMBIOSIS OF GOOD AND EVIL

9: TAKE OVER THE WHAT?

Interstitial

ASO-6

10: IT TAKES SIX SECONDS TO FALL FIVE HUNDRED FEET

11: IT’S ONLY PAIN

12: SEMPER FI

13: LETTING THE ANIMALS OUT OF THE ZOO

14: MISSED HIM BY THAT MUCH

15: THE BACTERIUM SCREAMS

16: EVERYTHING’S COMING UP DEKKA

ASO-6

17: THE CHEERIOS OF WAR

18: TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

19: RUTHLESSNESS: NOT JUST FOR SHARKS ANYMORE

Interstitial

20: MONSTER SURPLUS

21: WITH GREAT POWER COMES PURE MALICE

22: WORLD WAR VEGAS

23: ROUGH BEASTS, NO BETHLEHEM

24: WE ARE THE CHIMPIONS

ASO-6

25: RANDOM CHANCE

26: THE HERO THING

27: DRAGON AND GASOLINE

28: A BONFIRE OF INNOCENTS

29: ONE LESS HOTEL

30: THE SPEECH

31: AFTERMATH

ASO-6

ASO-7

Acknowledgments

Back series promotional page

1
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IT RHYMES WITH VILLAIN

“HEY, FREAK? WHAT are you looking at?”

The drunk tank, the catch-all common room used as a first stop for drunks and druggies, was a large space lined with a wall-mounted steel bench. The floor was bare cement, sloped down to a drain in the center of the room. There was a single window with both bars and thick wire over filthy glass, allowing neither sunlight nor cheer, but a grim, gray reminder that there was an outside world.

The walls of the drunk tank were painted a sickly yellow, the color of baby puke, which went perfectly with the reek of vomit.

There were maybe fifteen adult men in the room, and the barely eighteen-year-old Dillon Poe, and Dillon felt very, very bad. Bad to a degree he had never felt before.

Is this what a hangover is? Oh, my God!

Dillon being Dillon, part of his mind was already looking for the potential humor in the situation. And it wasn’t hard to find. He’d gotten very drunk the night before, after walking into a bar and asking for whiskey like some cowboy in an old movie. Having no choice or will of his own at that moment, the bartender had poured, and Dillon had gagged down the first fiery shot, then another, and . . . and the next thing he knew was right now, waking up with throbbing eyes and aching head and a mouth that tasted like he’d spent the night eating roadkill.

No, not roadkill, that was generic. It was funnier to be specific. Like a dead beaver? Like a dead opossum? Rats were overdone. Like a dead raccoon?

Yeah, dead raccoon. His mouth tasted like he’d spent the night chewing on dead raccoon.

It was an absurd situation: an eighteen-year-old walks into a bar. Like the start of a joke where a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar . . . And, yeah, he admitted wearily, his brain was not quite up for writing jokes.

“I’m nah lookin’ chew,” Dillon managed to say to the belligerent man, a sandpaper tongue thick in a cotton mouth. Dillon sat up, rubbed sleep from his eyes, and instantly vomited on the concrete.

“Hey, asshole!” This from the same man who’d challenged him. He was a big, very hairy white man, though it was hard to comment on his complexion given that he was almost entirely covered in tattoos. Including the tattooed tear at the corner of one eye that testified to a murder committed. Chest hair that included some gray sprigs spouted from a lurid chest tattoo of an American flag where the stars had been replaced by swastikas. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

Dillon stood up, wobbly, weak, and deeply unhappy.

“Nasty little punk, stinking up the place!” Tattoo said.

This, Dillon thought, was really not fair: the place already reeked of puke and piss and worse. There was a man passed out facedown on the bench, a brown stain in his trousers.

Tattoo swaggered over, grabbed Dillon’s T-shirt, and kicked him in the knee. Dillon dropped to the floor, landing painfully on the concrete. “Clean that up, boy!”

What? What? How had this happened? How was he here, on his knees? Part of him counseled quiet submission: the man was bigger and had friends. But part of him, despite the alcohol-fueled misery in his brain, simply could not shut up.

“Can I use that mop on your head?”

First rule of stand-up comedy: never let a heckler get the upper hand.

Tattoo, whose limp salt-and-pepper hair did, arguably, resemble a mop, gaped in astonishment. Then he grinned, showing a row of overly bright, cheap false teeth. “Well, I guess I get to hand out my first ass-kicking of the day!”

Dillon closed his eyes and focused and almost immediately the brutal hangover faded, and subtle but utterly impossible changes began to transform Dillon’s body and face. He said, “Ass-kicking, or ass-kissing?”

This earned him a hard kick meant for his stomach, but which deflected off his arm, knocking his hand into his own puddle of puke. Bad. But on the other hand, his hangover pain was fast receding.

A relief, but not the point, really. The point was that Dillon Poe was changing. Physically. The change was subtle at first and mostly visible in his eyes, which had shifted from brown to a sort of tarnished gold color. His pupils narrowed and formed vertical, thin, elongated diamond-shaped slits. His hair seemed to suck into his head, which now bulged at the back and tapered to a version of his own face rendered in the green of a new spring leaf.

Dillon knew about the physical change, or at least thought he did. He’d caught a terrifying glimpse of himself in a barroom mirror, seeing a reptilian version of his face visible past the bottles of booze.

But he had also begun to guess that there was something about this snakelike version of himself that caused more fascination than revulsion. If anything, the few people whose reactions he’d been able to gauge seemed to find him attractive, even mesmerizing. They stared, but not in horror. Even his fellow denizens of the drunk tank did not recoil in fear or disgust, but turned fascinated, enthralled faces to him.

Dillon was not in a happy or generous frame of mind. He had clearly screwed up the night before, outing himself as a mutant. And now he was in a cage with men, every single one of whom looked meaner and bigger and tougher than he—well, aside from the weeping tourist in the chinos and canary-yellow polo shirt. But it didn’t matter, because Dillon Poe—this hypnotic, serpentine version of Dillon Poe—was more than capable of dealing with Tattoo.

Dillon looked up from the floor at the man and said, “You clean it up, tough guy. In fact, lick it up. Start with my hand.”

Without hesitation Tattoo stuck out his tongue and began licking Dillon’s scaly green hand, as avidly as a dog welcoming his master. It was fascinating watching Tattoo’s rheumy eyes, the expression of brute incomprehension, the alarm, the anger, the . . . impotence. The panic he was helpless to express.

“Now lick up that mess on the floor,” Dillon said. Instantly Tattoo dropped to his hands and knees. He said, “I don’t want to do this!” but without hesitation lowered his head, his long, grizzled hair trailing in the mess, and began lapping it up like a dog going after a dropped table scrap.

The entire room stood or sat frozen in stark disbelief. It was like they were an oil painting, all open mouths and wide eyes and expressions of disbelief. One man moaned, “Is this a hallucination? Is this real? Am I really seeing this?”

Dillon stood—his morph came with a lithely muscular body several inches taller than his own, an athlete’s body—facing Tattoo’s two buddies, who advanced, belligerent but nervous.

One said, “Hey, Spence, come on, man, stop that! Get up off your knees! Get away from that thing!” He tugged at his partner’s shirt, but Tattoo—aka Spence, apparently—would not stop licking the puke. In fact, could not stop. He tried to speak but only incomprehensible grunts emerged—it’s hard to talk with a mouth full of another person’s vomit.

The other thug snarled at Dillon. “What did you do to him, freak?”

“I am really not in the mood to be picked on,” Dillon said. His voice, too, was subtly different now. His normal voice was a bit too high-pitched to ever be authoritative, and he had a slight lisp on “s” sounds. But this voice? This voice was like a musical instrument in the hands of a master. This voice persuaded, cajoled, and seduced.

The man frowned and stopped, then shook his head in confusion before finding his anger again. “I don’t give a damn what you’re up for, freak!”

Dillon turned to this fellow, younger than Spence, with a tweaker’s emaciated body and rotting teeth. He would have tolerated any number of insults, but that particular one, “freak,” was something he’d heard too many times in his young life, both at school and at home.

Freak for having no friends.

Freak for his physical awkwardness.

Freak for the way he looked at girls who would have nothing to do with him.

Freak for being the only one of five siblings who rejected walks and hikes and camping and biking and all the other physically tiring wastes of time his family loved.

Freak for sitting in his room for days on end watching stand-up comics like Maron, Frankie Boyle, Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, and the few surviving videos of the godfather of stand-up, Richard Pryor.

And of course, freak for being a survivor of what people called the Perdido Beach Anomaly, but which Dillon, like all the survivors, called the FAYZ.

“Dude,” Dillon said, “don’t ever call me a freak again.”

“Okay,” the tweaker said.

“Say that you promise?”

The tweaker frowned and grimaced, but said, “I promise.”

And Dillon almost stopped there. Almost. But Dillon’s life was filled with times when he almost did the sensible thing or the smart thing or the right thing. A whole lot of almosts, and an equal number of “what the hells.” Of the two, “what the hell” was always funnier.

The truth was he was rather enjoying the fear in the eyes all around him. Fear and confusion and mystification, expressed in frowns and mutterings and the sorts of threats not meant to be heard by the person being threatened—coward’s threats.

Yeah, Dillon thought, you losers should fear me. Every breath you take is because I allow it. A nasty smirk formed on his lips.

“I’m not sure I trust you,” Dillon said. “Let’s make sure, huh? Let’s make sure you never call me or anyone else names again. Bite your tongue in half.”

A spasm went through the room. They leaned forward, disbelieving but enthralled. After all, a tough guy was licking the floor, like a dog determined to get every last chunk of Iams.

“You can’t make me . . . uchhh ggghrr can’t ma . . .” the tweaker said.

“Sorry, having a hard time understanding you,” Dillon said savagely.

The tweaker concentrated hard; you could see it on his face. He was trying to fight, but putting far more energy into obeying. His jaw muscles clenched until the veins in his neck stood out. Blood dribbled from his mouth.

“Jesus Christ!” someone yelled. Then, “Guards! Guards!”

“Grind your teeth back and forth and bite down hard,” Dillon said. The sound of dull teeth grinding on gristle was sickening, and Dillon might have relented had he not caught sight of the swastika tattoo on the tweaker’s arm.

No pity for Nazi tweakers.

“Hey, can you say sieg heil ?” Dillon asked.

Blood now gushed from the man’s mouth. Tears streamed from his eyes and mucus from his nose. His eyes were trapped, desperate, terrified.

“Come on, mister tough guy, gimme a sieg heil.”

“Ssnk thth stnch ccchuch . . .”

More prisoners were shouting, agitated, some wide-eyed and fascinated, others appalled, even sickened. And Dillon was sickened in a way that had nothing to do with his hangover. There was something electric about the feeling, but in both senses of the word. The power was shocking, and it shocked him in return. It seemed impossible, just absolutely, batshit impossible, and yet he could hear teeth on gristle. . . . Life shouldn’t be like that, he told himself. That could not be it. Could it?

“Guards! Guards!” The cries went up with mounting hysteria, and men banged on the bars, all of which was fine with Dillon. He wanted guards to come, because he was more than ready to leave.

A portly guard came sauntering along, her face a mask of weary indifference. Then she took a look through the barred door and immediately keyed her radio. “Backup to the tank! Hats and bats! We have a situation!”

“Open the gate, guard,” Dillon said in his calm, mellifluous voice.

The guard fumbled for keys, found the right one, and turned the lock just as two other guards came rushing down the corridor, helmets on heads, truncheons and Tasers in hand.

“Open all the gates, all the doors. Do it now,” Dillon said, and heard the clanks and the buzzes, all the noises of unlocking doors. He stood in the open doorway and glanced at the denizens of the tank, shrinking back from him.

It was a strange moment, and Dillon recognized that it was the end of one life and the start of another. It was as if some giant, animated meat cleaver—shades of Terry Gilliam—had come down out of the sky and announced with an authoritative thunk! that life was now divided into “before the drunk tank” and “after the drunk tank.”

The only way now was forward.

That could be a tagline. I could build a bit around that.

He had only realized he had this power two days ago. He’d tried it out—gently—on one of his brothers. Then on his father, a bit less gently, but all the while in ways that revealed nothing and raised no suspicions. He had intended to approach the matter after thinking it through, deciding on just how to use the power, if at all. His first thought had been to use it to get stage time at the LA Comedy Club, which despite the name was here in Vegas, and not just on an open-mike night. But that seemed a bit small for such a huge power.

There was not much point in having power if you didn’t use it, and no point in using it if it didn’t give you an edge. Right? That was the point of life, after all, wasn’t it? To do the best you could for yourself, and perhaps for those loyal to you? And to deal with doubters and haters and enemies?

But then he’d been dumped by his girlfriend, Kalisha, which was not a heartbreak—he could barely tolerate her; the girl’s sense of humor went no further than slapstick—but it was a humiliation. They’d only been going out for two weeks, and she was his first girlfriend. In the context of the senior class at Palo Verde High School, he would be reduced once again to the status of total loser. The unloved freak.

Dillon didn’t do well with humiliation; he found it intolerable, in fact, as he had found it intolerable in the FAYZ. There, he had been just another thirteen-year-old kid without powers. He’d been forced to work in the fields, braving the carnivorous worms they called zekes, picking cabbages for hours in the broiling sun, at least if he wanted to eat. The kids with powers—Sam Temple and his group, Caine Soren and his—had never treated Dillon as anything more than a nuisance, another mouth to be fed, another random, powerless nobody to be ordered around by Albert and Edilio and Dekka, the big shots. Another nobody who might be crippled or killed if he happened to get between Sam and Caine in the ongoing factional war.

And then, after the end of the FAYZ, his parents had moved to Las Vegas. He had coincidentally enjoyed a big improvement in his internet speed, and he had learned of the dark web: the sites that sold illegal drugs and guns and even arranged meetings with hit men. And there he had come across someone supposedly selling pieces of the “Perdido Beach Magic Stone.” That’s what the ad had said. A hundred dollars an ounce, to be paid in Bitcoin. He had assumed it was fake, but he gave it a try anyway, and sure enough, a chip of rock had arrived in the mail. He had slept with it under his pillow for a full month before concluding that it wasn’t working, and he’d been on the verge of throwing it out when something told him to try one last thing.

He had practically destroyed the blender. And he’d had to finish the job with a mortar and pestle that left the rock tasting like the basil that had been the previous thing crushed in the mortar. He had gagged it down.

And the next day he had made his brother do things, and his sister go change sweaters three times, and he had made his father go online and order a new and expensive VR headset.

But later that same day he’d gotten into a loud argument with his mother, and he had stormed out of the house and ordered a passing motorist to drive him to the TGI Fridays, where, using his new serpent’s voice, he told the bartender to pour. That was a mistake, clearly, because passed out he had no power at all, obviously, and the result was this drunk tank and this very public revelation of his power. There would be video from the cell, video revealing him as a mutant, one of the so-called “Rockborn,” he was certain, which meant police and who-knew-what government agencies would have his name, address, picture—both of his faces—fingerprints, credit report, and, worst of all, his most recent psych evaluation, which had labeled him a borderline personality—psych-speak for freak. The FBI would be interviewing his “known associates” before the day was out, and they would, to a boy or girl, roll their eyes and retell all the old stories of Dillon the loser, Dillon the freak, Dillon the virgin.

Terrible timing, terrible planning. He had not previously used the power for a violent end, and now that he had, he could expect to be treated no more kindly than the creature who had torn up the Golden Gate Bridge, or the monsters who had blown up the Port of Los Angeles.

The tweaker’s rotting teeth finally came together, and he spit a hunk of bloody pulp from his mouth onto the floor, where it looked like a piece of calf ’s liver. Tattoo, still on hands and knees, looked quizzically at Dillon as if to ask whether he should lap the meat up as well.

Yes, life going forward would not be the life he’d led to this point.

Oh, well.

“I’m out of here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve been a great audience, but . . .” He grinned as the old Marx Brothers ditty came back to him, and he sang, “Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going . . .”

There was no applause. He could have made them laugh and applaud, but no, some things were sacred, and he would earn his laughs the hard way, the right way. All the people he admired had been freaks in high school, and they had all become admired and beloved and rich.

David Letterman: $400 million

Jerry Seinfeld: $800 million

“Ta-ta!” he said with a jaunty wave. Then an afterthought: “Oh, you can stop licking the floor now.”

And with that, Dillon Poe—six foot two inches tall and decidedly green Dillon Poe—walked out through the cell gate, down the hall to the open security door, past guards he silenced with a word, past the jail’s grim waiting room, out into the lobby of the county building, and out into brilliant Las Vegas sunlight.

A pretty young woman passing by gave him a definite onceover that was certainly not the way she should have looked at a green, scaly creature with yellow eyes, and he smiled at her in gracious acknowledgment.

Could I work the whole snake thing into my act?

It was mid-morning in Las Vegas. The air was only hot, not blistering, but the sun was blinding, a sharp contrast with what Dillon felt inside. Because in his head he was having visions again, like he had last time he had changed . . . well, maybe not visions, more like voices. Only the voices never spoke.

No, not quite visions or voices, he realized, more like the neck-tingling sense of being watched. It was more than just the faint apprehension you might get when you thought someone on the street was eyeballing you; this was both more real and insistent, and yet impossible to make sense of. It was as if somewhere inside his head was an audience, sitting in complete darkness and absolute silence, watching him act on his own personal stage.

Dillon was an empirical guy, not someone given to mysticism or even religion. He tested things. He sought truth, because all the best comics traded in truth. His suspicion was that the dark and silent audience had something to do with the changes—the morphing, as he had heard it called. So now he tested the hypothesis by de-morphing: by resuming his unimpressive human physique. And sure enough, the invisible audience disappeared.

“Huh,” Dillon said, which a passing homeless person took as an invitation and held out a dirty styrofoam cup.

“Sorry, I don’t have any money,” the now-normal-looking Dillon said.

No money, just power. But Dillon was cynical enough to understand that in much the way that matter and energy are really the same thing, so are money and power. He could make anyone do anything. Anything. Which meant he could have anything he wanted.

He, Dillon Poe, ignored FAYZ survivor, was quite possibly the most powerful person in the world. In light of that, he asked himself: Now what?

And the answer was: Whatever you want, Dillon; whatever you want. The only way now was forward.

2
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FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SCREAM ALONE

“AAAAAHHHH! KILL ME! Kill me, oh, God, please kill me!”

Once upon a time, Malik Tenerife had argued convincingly that the idea of hell, of a place of eternal torment, was nonsense, an impossibility. Sooner or later even being boiled in a lake of fire would get dull and repetitive. After a year? Ten years? A million years?

He knew now the flaw in his argument: it only worked if you experienced time.

Malik did not experience time. Everything was now. Now! NOW! Right now he felt as if he’d been skinned alive and left raw. Right now he felt as if wild beasts had gnawed on him. Right now his brain could barely form a thought before a crashing wave of agony would wipe it away, leaving nothing but screams.

He’d heard some of what the nurses had had to say since Shade and Cruz had rushed him to the hospital. He was vaguely, distantly aware that the shape-shifting chameleon Cruz, assuming several disguises, had been with him throughout. He knew that she had filled the one request he had managed to form and articulate in a single scrawled word on a pad of paper. The word: “Rock.” But to say that Malik knew or thought was a gross exaggeration—Malik’s memory, his thoughts, his essence as a human being were a bunch of scraps swirling in a tornado. He could glimpse but not hold a thought.

Cruz had indeed been with Malik throughout. She had the power to appear as any person she could visualize, and had passed as a doctor, a nurse, an orderly. She had stayed by his side as much as possible because, even though she knew it was nothing compared to Malik’s agony, she had her own problems. When in morph, the Dark Watchers were always with her, always insinuating themselves in her mind. Sometimes she just locked herself in the bathroom, returned to her normal, true form, and cried.

She had given Malik the rock, ground up in a cup of water, and he’d managed to drink it through a straw. And then she had waited.

At first the third member of their little group, Shade Darby, could come and go, using her super-speed to be effectively invisible, nothing but a blur and a gust of wind. But now Malik’s room was heavily guarded. There were Los Angeles police just outside his door, two SWAT members, all kitted out in black jumpsuits and machine pistols, at each end of the hallway. They knew Malik was with Shade and Cruz. They were looking for Shade and Cruz, unaware that Cruz had been there the whole time.

Cruz had picked up some useful if depressing facts. She’d become a well-informed amateur on the subject of burns.

Pop quiz: Do you want second-degree burns or third-degree?

Tricky answer: It depends which bothers you more, permanent disfigurement or pain. The second-degree burn hurts like hell but will heal. The third-degree burn destroys nerves and may actually deaden sensation, but you’ll be wearing your very own Halloween mask.

“Pleeeeeaaase! Kill me!”

Cruz had also learned that there is a such a thing as a fourth-degree burn. That’s when a burn goes all the way through the skin and eats into muscle, fat, tendon, and even bone.

After giving Malik the rock, Cruz had reopened the morphine line, allowing the soothing drug to flow into Malik’s veins. But she knew now that it was like sprinkling water on a forest fire. There was no drug capable of killing this pain. The doctors were getting ready to put him in a medically induced coma, basically turning off all his brain functions so that, pain-free and unaware, he could glide to his death.

“Oh, God, make it stop!”

Cruz rose from the hard, narrow chair and gave the hanging bag a squeeze, pushing morphine more quickly into the catheter in the back of his hand.

Malik had second-degree burns. And third. And he had fourth degree, and there the scalding pain of second-degree burns became the marrow-deep, consciousness-twisting pain of muscles eaten into like he’d been attacked and half consumed by a tiger. The superheated steam and napalm from the great fire beast—also sometimes known in the media as Napalm or Dragon, and also known as Tom Peaks—had burned through clothing and skin, had snapped and curled the tendons of Malik’s ankles, had melted the muscles of Malik’s calves; it had splashed up and burned away parts of his thighs and buttocks. His lower back was second-degree burns; third-degree burns spread up his back.

The fire had exposed the tendons of his wrist. Most of his face was untouched, but a burn spread from his neck up the left side of his head, so that his ear had melted and now lay flat, a sort of bas-relief of itself. His face, as well as most of his chest and private bits, was intact aside from spot burns. The unburned bits were like islands floating in a magma sea.

One thing was clear: no one—not a single nurse, doctor, or specialist—had any doubt that Malik would die, probably within hours.

So Cruz had made the solution of water and pulverized meteor fragments that carried an engineered alien virus with the power to disassemble and reassemble DNA like a kid playing with Legos. The rock, as it was called, had created the Perdido Beach Anomaly, the place survivors of that impossible dome called the FAYZ.

The rock had turned Tom Peaks, ruthless government bureaucrat, into a massive, liquid fire–spewing beast; the rock had turned an obnoxious-if-talented young artist named Justin DeVeere into the armored, sword-armed monster called Knightmare; the rock had turned a disturbed young man named Vincent Vu into the vile creature that called itself Abaddon.

This was also, of course, the rock that had given Shade her power, and Cruz hers. No one could predict what the rock would do to Malik. No one could be certain it would do anything at all. But the alternative was to simply wait for him to die, either screaming in agony or in a coma from which he would never wake. So Cruz had run down to the hospital cafeteria to get a straw so he could drink, and held it to his trembling lips.

Malik had swallowed all he could. And then he had fallen and fallen and fallen into hell, because taking the rock had meant turning off the morphine drip so that he could swallow without choking, and within seconds, as he felt the gritty water slide down his throat, the pain rose beneath him like a tidal wave, like some terrifying volcanic eruption, an irresistible force.

The rock changed those who consumed it, but how would it manifest in Malik? The alien virus was clever, subtle, and opportunistic. It had used the DNA of Dekka Talent’s own cat to shape Dekka’s morphed self. It had used starfish DNA to grow Vincent Vu into a monster. But the rock had other tricks as well—it had turned Tom Peaks into a fearsome creature that was surely not the product of any earthly DNA, but rather a creature of half-remembered movies whose images lay buried in Peaks’s memory. And an unfortunate child in Islay, Scotland, had been transformed into a creature from a children’s board book, a creature that had had to be annihilated by shells from a Royal Navy destroyer.

Cruz herself, formerly known as Hugo Rojas before she’d come to accept the fact that “Hugo” was simply never going to be authentic as a male, had acquired a power that had no analogy in nature: she could appear as anyone. Anyone she had seen, or even seen video of. She had only to form a picture in her mind, and as if she was some sort of overhead projector, she could reflect and embody that image. Nature was brilliant at disguise and could make an insect look like a leaf, but nothing in nature matched what Cruz could do.

Had the rock virus used her own gender transition as a text in creating the morphed Cruz? It would almost imply that the virus had a sense of humor.

Cruz had stayed in morph for hour after hour while Malik was in the hospital, playing various roles, shifting her appearance with increasing ease and speed. And for all of those hours she had endured the vile, insinuating attentions of the Dark Watchers, those voiceless, faceless, formless observers who emerged any time a morphing happened. At times it was like being whispered to by a pervert—not words, just slithering, leering tones. At times she felt she could almost glimpse them. Like when you suddenly turn your head and have the feeling that you just missed seeing something out of the corner of your eye.

Shade Darby had come and gone several times. She would stand by Malik’s bed, talk in quiet tones to Cruz, wince at Malik’s pain, and brush tears away with quick, impatient gestures, as though her tears were an irritation. Eventually Shade managed to convince an exhausted, emotionally wrecked Cruz to come with her to their latest stolen vehicle in the hospital parking lot and eat something, and hopefully sleep. She settled Cruz into the passenger seat of the Mercedes and tucked a woolen throw around her, like she was putting a child to bed. Shade turned on the engine and the seat warmers, and despite being sure she could not sleep, Cruz did just that. After several hours Cruz woke from a troubled sleep and found Shade sitting in the driver’s seat, opening a Subway bag.

“I have an Italian cold cut and a ham and cheese. Also chips.”

Cruz said nothing, but pushed open the door, leaned out, and vomited onto the concrete.

Without a word, Shade handed her a bottle of water. Cruz swirled and spit, then drank the entire bottle and dropped the empty. Then she took the Italian cold-cut sub, wolfed down half of it, swallowed, and mumbled, “Thanks.”

Shade nodded and looked away.

This was a new Shade Darby. Cruz had always seen her strange, brilliant, ruthlessly determined friend as two people in one body: there was the pretty, vaguely punk-looking girl with the interesting scar up one side of her neck. That Shade Darby was amused, kind, a bit distant but supportive. Then there was what Cruz thought of as the shark: the cold, calculating young woman with the brilliant mind.

This was a different girl, neither easygoing Shade nor the shark. This was a wounded Shade, an uncertain Shade. A girl who had made decisions that destroyed her relationship with her only surviving parent, dragged Cruz into a life of felonies piled upon felonies, and, finally, left Malik screaming in unbearable agony, a charcoal and melted-flesh version of the boy Shade had once loved and been loved by.

“How are you?” Shade asked, practically cringing, as if she expected Cruz to berate her.

But as Shade had come to recognize the damage she had done, Cruz had come to accept her own complicity. No one had put a gun to her head to force her to follow Shade. Cruz had been the new kid in school, a mid-semester transfer after being kicked out of a Catholic school for wearing dresses. Evanston, Illinois, was still a bastion of relative tolerance, but the nastiness that had come to be a part of American life, even at the highest levels, had threatened her. Until Shade. Shade’s friendship had spread an umbrella of safety over Cruz at school, and Cruz had leaped at the chance to have a friend. She had quickly seen that Shade was obsessed with the death of her mother on the day of the Perdido Beach Anomaly four years earlier, when the FAYZ dome had fallen. And Cruz knew that Shade’s head was filled with fantasies of revenge against the monstrous being called Gaia who had used her powers for slaughter. But Cruz knew as well that Shade’s revenge fantasies were just that, fantasies. No one can get revenge on a dead thing, and Gaia, that evil child, had died, destroyed in the end by the courage and sense of justice of an autistic child called Little Pete, and the charming sociopath Caine.

And yet, step by step, Cruz had gone along with Shade. She had chosen to take the rock herself, to become Rockborn. She had then acquired and learned to use a superhuman power. And she had raised nothing but the most token objections as Shade used her super-speed to steal money and cars and phones to keep them going.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, Cruz thought, an echo of her upbringing in the church. My fault. My most grievous fault.

Hero, villain, and monster, that was the three-part taxonomy of superhumans, according to Malik. Shade was meant to be a hero, intended to be a hero, wanted to be a hero, and Cruz, to the extent she’d really thought about it, imagined herself as a sort of Robin to Shade’s Batman, a sidekick.

I’m not even starring in my own life.

But at the moment, the hollow-eyed, quiet, sad girl beside Cruz did not inspire notions of heroism. She looked like Cruz imagined soldiers must look after far too long in battle.

“What do we do?” Cruz asked, hating herself for the question, hating the weakness that made her turn to Shade for the answers even now, even with Malik a few hundred yards away with tubes in his throat and veins, with tubes collecting his blood red urine, with acres of gauze and gallons of salves hiding the horror show his body had become.

Shade lowered her head to look through the windshield and up at the hospital. “I guess they’ll do skin grafts and—”

“No,” Cruz said. She shook her head. “They’re not thinking of fixing him, they’re waiting for him to die.”

A spasm twisted Shade’s face, squeezing her eyes shut, making a grimace of her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and these she did not brush away.

Cruz said, “His only hope is the rock. Too much deep-tissue damage. His legs . . . I was there when they changed the dressings. His legs are just bones with chunks of burned meat attached, like, like those turkey legs they sell at fairs. It was awful. Terrible. There’s no coming back from that, Shade. Malik is dead unless the rock . . .”

Shade cried silently for a while, her forehead on the steering wheel, hands limp in her lap.

“I don’t know what to do,” Shade said finally. “I don’t—”

But Cruz did not hear the end of the sentence because at that moment a wave of unspeakable pain assaulted her with a suddenness and violence that wrung whinnying, panicked screams from her mouth.

Shade, too, shrieked in agony, her face distorted like a figure from some medieval painting of hell’s torments.

And it wasn’t stopping; it wasn’t lessening; the two girls writhed and shook and bellowed in pain as if they were burning alive inside the car. Shade screamed and slapped at her body as if she was on fire. Cruz pushed open the door of the car, panicked, believing the car had caught fire.

It was the worst thing either had ever felt, and it would not stop. And through a mist of tears and with senses twisted by mind-shattering agony, Cruz realized that they were not alone: people were streaming from the hospital, crying, screaming, rolling on the ground, tearing the hair from their heads.

“Morph!” Shade yelled. “Now!”

Cruz understood, though holding on to even a snippet of thought was almost impossible. Agony lent wings to the transformation as Cruz, the six-foot-tall trans girl, became to all appearances a large young black woman with dreadlocks. Cruz had gone to the first image that popped in her mind, their fellow Rockborn mutant, the FAYZ survivor Dekka Talent.

Shade at the same time had changed even more drastically. Her face narrowed and seemed to sweep back, like a person in a wind tunnel. Her russet hair became a solid punk-rock-looking wedge. Her body seemed to be covered in something like plastic, like she was a less slick version of a Power Ranger. Her knees reversed direction, making a noise like wet stones tumbling, becoming insectoid, inhuman.

In seconds Shade was the vibrating speed demon she could become at will. And Cruz was Dekka. The pain was subdued, lessened, manageable, but it was still right there, like a physical force, like standing beside a rampaging river and feeling its power even if all that hit you were drops of spray. They were no longer in that river but felt its devastating power and knew that one slip . . .

“Malik,” Shade said, slowing her speech to normal time so that Cruz could understand. It was like dragging a finger on a vinyl record to slow it down, words slurring but understandable.

Shade blew away, raced through the emergency room, a hellish scene of patients and their doctors and nurses all writhing in torment, crying, roaring, letting go of every bodily fluid. She went on, down corridors where patients dragged themselves out of sickbeds in a desperate need to do something, anything, to escape. She saw a nurse just about to jab herself with a syringe and took a millisecond’s detour to snatch the syringe away.

Finally, Shade arrived at Malik’s room.

And there he was: Malik.

Of all the things Shade expected, this was none of them, because Malik stood. Stood. He had pulled the tubes from his throat and was unwinding gauze and peeling off compresses, revealing his own healthy black flesh, undamaged, unscarred.

Impossible!

From every direction the terrible screams lessened, giving way to moans and cries of shock.

Shade could do nothing but stare as the full horror of what she was seeing came home to her. The rock transformed those who took it. The power the rock granted came with the necessity of a physical transformation—a morph.

This Malik, the one with flesh and muscles, was not Malik, it was a morph of Malik, like some desperately unfunny joke. He had become not himself but a version of himself, a living memory of himself.

“It’s gone,” Malik cried. “The pain’s gone! I’m better, Shade! I’m fixed!”

3
|
VETERANS OF PAST AND FUTURE WARS

“YOU WERE CLEVER to come in through the back window,” Astrid Ellison said to her guests. “We’ve been under surveillance for the last four years, but it was pretty sketchy. You’d see a cop every now and then, or maybe an FBI car. But in the last weeks it’s been more intense.”

“Any chance the place is bugged?” Dekka Talent asked, accepting a cup of tea.

Astrid made a humorless laugh. “Of course it’s bugged, but we found the bug with some help from a guy Albert sent us. He tied the bug into a YouTube channel, and if anyone’s watching or listening they’re probably getting awfully tired of listening to autoplays of Tim and Eric.”

“Albert, huh?” Dekka said with a glance at Armo.

Armo, short for Aristotle Adamo, was very large, very strong, and not terribly bright despite his given name. He was a pathologically oppositional white high school boy who had ended up being thrown together with Dekka. And oddly enough, the partnership between the tough, serious, unshakable African American lesbian and the impulsive, reckless, impossible-to-control straight white guy seemed to work. Neither could have explained why. So long as Dekka was careful to avoid sounding as if she was giving orders and always gave Armo the option of disagreeing, he would mostly end up doing what she needed done.

And there was value in a crazy person who could become a sort of weird, not-quite-polar bear. His power was little compared to Dekka’s, but in a fight it never hurt to have some batshit berserker on your side. And no one was more berserk than Armo once the fighting started.

“Who’s Albert?” Armo asked.

Sam Temple sat opposite them in an IKEA Poäng chair, brown leather and blond wood. “Depends who you ask. Most people in the FAYZ despised him. But they ate because Albert figured out how to feed them.” He shrugged. “The FAYZ revealed unsuspected depths in some. Albert’s what, like, seventeen, eighteen-years-old now? He’s at very least a millionaire, and if he’s not a billionaire by the time he’s thirty, I’ll be shocked. His company—FAYZco—owns four McDonald’s franchises down in Orange County and one in Oakland. And his second book is number one. Still.”

“Business Secrets of the FAYZ,” Astrid said with a curled lip.

It would be wrong, Dekka reflected, to suppose that time had matured Astrid—Astrid had always been an adult. Dekka pictured Astrid at three years old already delivering lectures and secretly imagining herself to be the smartest person in the room. Then again, Dekka admitted, Astrid generally was the smartest person in the room. Once upon a time she’d been known as Astrid the Genius. Of course, Astrid the Ice Queen, Astrid the Bitch, and even less polite sobriquets had also been used at times. And had also been at least partly true.

Dekka had never much liked Astrid, but Astrid had changed over time, both in the FAYZ and after. On a superficial level she’d grown from quite pretty to stunning. The weight of pain and fear, and a small dose of humility, had added depth to her judgmental blue eyes. And a diet of something other than rat and cabbage had given her a complexion too perfect to be natural, though Dekka detected no makeup. Astrid was manipulative, controlling, and superior, but also in the end an oddly perfect match for Sam Temple. Dekka was glad Sam had her watching his back—Astrid could be fierce.

The strength of the bond between them even impressed itself on Armo, who quite enjoyed looking at Astrid. Armo had read a book once—just one—and it had been about the Vikings, who he considered “his people,” his heritage. Give Astrid Ellison a sword and a chain-mail coat, and she would be exactly what Armo imagined a Viking shield maiden would look like. But Armo kept his admiration discreet. Dekka had told Armo about Sam, and while Sam could no longer simply raise his hands and burn a hole through you, there was a gravity to him. Armo might be (by his own cheerful admission) all kinds of difficult and headstrong, and he would never pretend to be the smartest person in any room, but he honored warriors, and, if Dekka was to be believed, Sam Temple was the living, breathing incarnation of a warrior king, some combination of Cnut the Great, Cyclops from the X-Men, and George Washington.

Dekka saw that Sam had put on weight. Not fat, but thickness in his shoulders and arms. Sam Temple at age fourteen had had terrifying power and staggering responsibility dropped on him. He had made mistakes, he had failed at times, but he had become a great leader, an inspiration. Dekka had become his strong right arm, his soldier, his advisor. Dekka and Sam were connected in ways that only two combat soldiers who’ve shared a foxhole can be.

For no particular reason, Sam reached across the coffee table and took Dekka’s hand. She squeezed back and held it for a long minute as memories flowed invisibly between them.

“Sammy,” Dekka said, shaking her head.

“Dekka,” he said.

“Bad shit happening, Sam.”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? The FAYZ, I mean.”

Dekka nodded. “The same asteroid or whatever it was, the rock, more of it has come, and more may be coming. I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows—maybe Shade Darby. But the powers . . . that’s all changed. I don’t know if that’s because of the dome, or because Little Pete held the gaiaphage back, but whatever, this stuff is out of control now. The main difference is that you need to physically morph.”

“Like Orc?” Astrid asked.

“Maybe. But turned up to eleven. And we can turn it on or off. I can become this . . . this thing. This creature. By choice. When I am the creature, when I am in morph—which is what we’re calling it for some reason—I can make things come apart. Shred things. People, too, if I’m not careful. Armo came by a different path, but he’s one, too, now, a COR, a Child of the Rock. Rockborn or Rockborn 2.0, some people say.” Dekka’s lip curled. She had never been a big fan of social media, and after years of being referred to as “the black lesbian” and much worse, and now frequently identified as “Lesbokitty,” her opinion had not improved. “You and Astrid are being labeled as O-COR—Original Children of the Rock. The Rockborn 2.0 include people like Shade Darby and her friend Cruz. And as you’ve seen on TV, a bunch of, um, unpleasant people.”

“We saw the video of the Golden Gate and the Port of LA,” Astrid said.

“And there’s this . . . thing,” Dekka said in a low tone. She tapped the side of her head. “When we change, when we morph, we . . . I was going to say ‘hear’ but we don’t, we just feel or sense or are aware of these . . . well, we’ve been calling them Dark Watchers. I think it’s them. I think it’s the same creatures who fired the damned asteroid toward us.”

“Dark Watchers?” Astrid said, narrowing her eyes. “Interesting. Probably just a coincidence.”

Her husband looked at her expectantly.

“It’s an old California legend,” Astrid said. “The Dark Watchers. I think it started with the Chumash Indians and was picked up by the Spanish, who called them Los Vigilantes Oscuros. Supposedly they are nonhuman creatures who only appear at twilight in the area around Monterey down to, well, down to Perdido Beach. Steinbeck actually referenced them . . . Anyway,” she concluded, sensing that her lecture was getting a bit lecture-y, “probably coincidence.”

A long, tense silence fell, broken finally by Armo, who said, “I’m sorry, but do you have anything to eat?”

Astrid patted Sam on the shoulder and said, “Why don’t you make some sandwiches?”

Something passed between Sam and Astrid, something tinged with frustration and regret. Sam nodded finally, like a condemned man accepting a judge’s just sentence. He left and Armo went with him, leaving Dekka and Astrid alone.

Astrid wasted no time. “You are not dragging Sam into this, Dekka.”

Dekka felt a surge of irritation—a very familiar feeling when she dealt with Astrid.

“He doesn’t have the power anymore. He’s just a guy, a regular human being.” Astrid stopped herself, seeing Dekka’s raised eyebrow. “Okay, he’s still Sam. But he has no powers. He’ll go with you if you ask him, you know he will. And he’ll die.” Her voice cracked on that last word. “He had his war, Dekka.”

Dekka heard the echo of her own voice saying just about those same words to Tom Peaks, the man who had run the monstrous HSTF-66 facility called the Ranch before being fired and choosing the path of the rock to become the monster Dragon.

“I don’t want him to come,” Dekka said. “Not really. I mean, look, does part of me sort of automatically reach for him when the trouble starts? Yeah, Astrid. If I live to be a hundred, whenever the shit hits the fan I’ll still probably be thinking, ‘Get Sam.’ But you’re right. And I know it.”

Astrid sighed. “So does he. He knows. He’s barely voting age and he feels he’s washed up. He doesn’t know what to do. We have money from the book and the movie, so we’re not struggling, but Sam needs to find a place for himself in the world, and it can’t be with you, Dekka.”

Irritation drained away. Dekka hung her head and said, “You know, I don’t like you, Astrid, I never have. But you stand by Sam. You love him, and I honor the hell out of that. If I ever meet someone who loves me half as much as you do him, well, that would be pretty great. I will never do anything to hurt Sam.”

Strange, Dekka thought, two young women who could not be more different, talking about Sam Temple as if he was a fragile child they had to protect. Sam and Armo came back in, laughing at some shared joke, and set sandwiches down. Armo had one halfway down his throat already. Both young men caught the mood, and Sam shot a look at his wife and then at Dekka.

“Ah. So the decision’s been made,” he said with a mixture of rueful acceptance and frustration. He shrugged. Then he held up the hands that had once had the power to blast a beam of light capable of cutting through steel. Nothing happened. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be of much use.”

Dekka said, “Right, you’re all done for, useless and pathetic.” She shook her head. “Don’t make me slap the crap out of you, Sam. I am not going to feel sorry for you, and if you feel sorry for yourself, I swear to God I will kick it right out of you.”

To Dekka’s delight and Astrid’s relief, Sam burst out laughing. “I have missed you, Dekka. You, Edilio, Lana . . . Breeze.”

Dekka felt the familiar catch in her throat on hearing that last name. Brianna, the Breeze, Dekka’s one-way, unreciprocated, hopeless, doomed, magnificent love. “We kicked more than our share of ass,” Dekka said.

Sam looked intently at his friend. “You’ve got something else to tell us, Dekka.”

“He hasn’t gotten any dumber,” Dekka said to Astrid, trying for a light tone.

“Well, he couldn’t, really,” Astrid said, playing along. It was an old joke between Astrid the Genius and Sam the surfer dude.

“Spill it,” Sam said, undeterred.

Dekka folded her hands, twining the fingers. “I don’t think it showed up on the public footage, at least not the stuff I’ve seen.”

Sam waited, and Astrid, as if sensing the need, stood up.

“Drake,” Dekka said. “Whip Hand is back.”

ASO-6

ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Six was not a large chunk; in fact, by the time fiery reentry had burned off a bit, it would weigh just forty pounds on impact. The impact had been carefully calculated to be in the Atlantic Ocean, four hundred nautical miles west-northwest of São Miguel Island in the Azores.

But the loose grip of astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper changed that. During a 2008 space walk, astronaut Stefanyshyn-Piper had accidentally let go of a briefcase-sized tool kit.

Because ASO-6 was smallish, it picked up a bit of a wobble when it smacked into that orbiting space garbage, and went off in a different direction than its original trajectory. It hit water thirty miles off the coast of the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia, just north of the Florida line.

The water wasn’t deep by Atlantic Ocean standards. The rock would likely be recoverable. But the vessels intended to carry out the recovery were all about two thousand miles from the location, a trip that would take them days to complete.

In the meantime the Coast Guard cutter Abbie Burgess was dispatched to monitor the scene.

Fourteen hours later, with the undersea research flotilla steaming toward them, the Abbie Burgess sank, with the loss of twenty-one lives.

The only radio message to be heard from the Abbie Burgess was, “Oh, God! Oh, G—”

A Coast Guard helicopter sent to the scene found only a few bits of floating wreckage. And no bodies.

4
|
AND COMING IN AT NUMBER ONE . . .

BRIGADIER GENERAL GWENDOLYN DiMarco did not like the office Tom Peaks had vacated at the Ranch, the secret research and development facility in the hills east of Monterey, California. It was too bland, too office-like, too normal.

Normal. Not a word to be applied to Tom Peaks himself, who had salved his hurt feelings at being demoted by taking a large dose of the rock and turning into a massive, fire-breathing, magma-vomiting, reptilian creature who’d burned down much of the Port of Los Angeles before being dragged into the channel by an even more bizarre and dangerous creature created out of starfish DNA.

Peaks had concealed the crazy within, and perhaps, DiMarco thought, his dull, cubicle-like office was part of the disguise. She had chosen a space closer to the action, and the action at the Ranch was all underground. Anyway, she’d never been much of a sun worshipper.

Her office now was a singular structure occupying one end of the great cavern, the combination cave and excavation that hid all their work from electronic eyes on satellites and drones. On Google satellite maps, the Ranch looked like what it had once been: an older, repurposed army facility.

Should call it the Iceberg, not the Ranch, DiMarco thought, nodding with grim pleasure at what she took to be a rather clever joke. Because more of it was underwater than above. Although not water, but land, earth. Dirt. Or at least a giant hole in the dirt. So, an iceberg if you meant that . . .

Well, DiMarco knew she was not a natural wit.

Her office was a long rectangle originally built as a construction office for the contractors who had excavated and built the massive underground facility. The location had the great advantage of being up high on a granite outcropping that formed a shelf a hundred feet above the cavern floor, just twenty feet below the jagged stone roof. She’d had it totally remodeled, of course, so the old corrugated-tin cladding had been replaced by reinforced concrete eight inches thick. The small, dirty windows that had been enough for the construction supervisor had been replaced with a single long window, twenty-four feet from end to end and six feet tall. Level 8 bulletproof glass, of course, just a hair over six centimeters thick, and capable of shrugging off five rounds from a high-powered sniper rifle.

Within the Bunker—as DiMarco’s office had been instantly nicknamed—were just two interior walls. One, on the left end, closed off DiMarco’s adjutant, secretary, and security detail. On the right end DiMarco had her private bathroom. But occupying fully two-thirds of the square footage was her own office, dominated by a massive steel desk partly made of armor recovered from a Russian tank that had come to misfortune in Ukraine. The desk was painted olive drab, a very military contrast to the rest of the office, which had expensive Persian carpets and rich mahogany bookshelves stuffed with everything ever written about the Perdido Beach Anomaly and the emerging field of exobiology, and a great many books on arcane aspects of genetics and the hacking of same.

Major Mike Atwell, DiMarco’s adjutant, walked in, five long strides from his own office, stepped off with careful precision to bring him just before her desk, where he executed a pivot that faintly snapped his heels together, and lay the morning briefing book on her desk.

The paper copy was a formality, of course; DiMarco already had the digital version open on her computer.

“Have a seat, Mike,” DiMarco said.

Atwell, a thirty-one-year-old West Pointer with not one but two PhDs—genetics and military history with a focus on China—was a man who would never manage to look as good as he should in his impeccably tailored uniforms. He was getting full at the waist, had shoulders that were more vertical than horizontal, and had been cursed with a face that screamed “nerd.”

“Let’s run down the top-ten list,” DiMarco said.

Atwell nodded and began from memory. He might not have shoulders, but he had prodigious recall.

“We are well beyond ten at this point,” Atwell said, earning a sharp look from DiMarco, who hated being told what she already knew. “Vincent Vu, who calls himself Abaddon the Destroyer, has been spotted subsequent to the Port of LA battle, as himself, as a kid, at a 7-Eleven in Long Beach and a Target store in Glendale, as well as appearing as Abaddon and, for reasons that remain obscure, destroying half a mile of used car lots. Three dead.”

DiMarco nodded. “I’m not sure Vu is target number one, but go on.”

“In second place, your predecessor, Tom Peaks. He’s being called Dragon in the press. Sometimes Burning Man or Hot Lizard in social media.”

“He’s number one,” DiMarco said. “You can’t just assess according to damage done, you have to consider the mental capabilities as well. Vu is genuinely mentally ill, and a teenager to boot, who knows nothing and certainly has no larger plans. But Peaks?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Atwell said, though he was far from convinced that ill was any better than evil. “In third place we have Shade Darby, with her super-speed. Very powerful and very smart, a bad combination. We’ve analyzed the videos, and the best guess is that she can hit speeds in excess of seven hundred miles an hour, which, depending on atmospheric conditions, can mean Mach 1, the speed of . . .” He let that trail off, seeing the warning look from DiMarco, the look that said, I know what Mach 1 means.

“Next up, Dekka Talent. She’s very powerful, reasonably bright, and more experienced at actual physical combat than any of the others, and probably more than any soldier currently serving in uniform, frankly. In the media they’re calling her everything from Catstein to Catzilla to Lesbokitty.”

DiMarco nodded, and her upper lip disappeared behind her lower lip, a clenched-jaw expression that often preceded an angry eruption.

No eruption this time. Not yet.

“Fifth place is Aristotle Adamo, aka Armo.”

“I made that boy!” DiMarco snapped. “I gave him power beyond anything he could imagine, and offered him . . .” She waved a hand to encompass the world of pleasure she’d tried to use to control the uncontrollable brat. This one DiMarco took personally. Dekka had been Peaks’s special project, Armo had been hers, and it was not a happy reality that the two had apparently teamed up.

“Six is Hugo Rojas, aka Cruz. She’s a trans female or gender-fluid male—we aren’t sure yet—a follower, not a leader. She seems to have the power to alter her appearance at will. She can appear as any person, old, young, big, small, any race, any gender.”

“Huh.” DiMarco grunted and turned on a sour smile. “I’m sure he, she, or it enjoys that.”

Atwell quashed his instinctive disgust at her sneering bigotry. “Seven is Francis Specter. She’s just fourteen, mother and father both members of a meth-dealing biker gang known to have been one of the gangs drawn to the Perdido Beach cave. No idea whether she consumed some rock or was down there in the hole long enough to be affected less directly.”

“What do we have on her powers?”

Atwell blew out a sigh. “Damned little, I’m afraid. She seems to be able to pass through solid objects, or allow solid objects to pass through her. We just located a seven-second snippet off a traffic camera in Glenrio, New Mexico. May I?” He indicated the remote control on DiMarco’s desk. He clicked the button to open a sliding panel that revealed a large TV monitor. A few more clicks, and they had choppy, grainy black-and-white video of a girl with jet-black hair crossing a busy highway. A car came into view, swerved madly to avoid her, and was followed by a Costco tractor trailer that slammed into her at sixty-four miles an hour.

And passed right through her: the entire length of the tractor trailer. Francis Specter had walked on out of camera range as if nothing had happened.

DiMarco had him replay it twice. “Fascinating. My first thought was that she alters her density, or the density of solid objects, but we’d see an increase in apparent size then. The lab’s current working theory is that she moves into an unseen dimension and essentially moves around the object through a fifth dimension of space-time.”

“The truck driver says all he saw was like a blurred rainbow.”

“A what?”

“He says that in the split second he saw her, she looked like a walking, blurry rainbow.”

“Why don’t we see it on the video?”

Atwell said, “Well, one, the driver could be hallucinating, or two, she’s got her back to the camera and the effect is only on her skin.”

DiMarco drummed her fingers and looked at the freeze-frame blur. “Criminal parents. If she’s bending space, it will be impossible to lock up or restrain her in any way. Pity. She’s a KOS.”

KOS. Kill on sight.

“Glenrio is hard on the New Mexico–Texas border,” Atwell said. “New Mexico authorities will not cooperate, but the gang frequently crosses into Texas, and we have people in the Texas Rangers who can . . . can do what needs to be done.”

Atwell, as a student of military history, understood that he was being given an illegal order, an order that violated the law and the Constitution. And his oath as an officer. It made him queasy. Just not queasy enough to refuse.

“KOS! And I’m not concerned with blowback. We have assets of our own, we don’t need to lean on the police,” DiMarco said. “Eighth place?”

“The Perdido Beach survivor Drake Merwin, aka Whip Hand, known to millions from the Ellison book and the movie. He’s teamed up with Peaks, which is bad enough, but worse, ordinary people think he’s Alex Pettyfer, the actor who played him in the movie. In reality he is worse than could be shown in a PG-13 movie, much worse—a psychopath and a sadist. A murderer, rapist, torturer, an all-around nasty piece of work.”

“KOS?” DiMarco frowned. “No, I think not—we want him. I assume you’ve read-in on him? The whip arm thing is not the power that interests me; he is apparently indestructible. You could run him through a blender and pour the bloody goo in the ocean, and a few days or weeks later he would be back. No, no KOS on Drake Whip Hand—he may yet be useful.”

Atwell made a note, concealing his disapproval. Atwell understood the need for drastic measures, but working with vicious animals like Drake Merwin was not why he had enlisted.

“Number nine is Malik Tenerife. A college freshman at Northwestern, high IQ, devoted, we think, to Shade Darby. We have only very preliminary information about him. He was badly burned by Peaks in the battle at the port. Doctors gave him a zero chance of surviving, but somehow he walked out of the hospital, seemingly healthy. He had an unusual effect. I just this minute got some video . . .”

DiMarco rapped her knuckles on her desk, an impatient signal to get on with it.

This time the video was from a professional news camera, showing a middle-aged nurse with a tear-streaked face.

“It was horrible, horrible, I felt as if I was on fire. The pain . . . I could look down and see that I wasn’t hurt, but the pain, the agony . . . It was unbearable. I honestly thought that if it didn’t stop very soon, I would kill myself.”

“Huh,” DiMarco said thoughtfully. “We want Mr Tenerife if we can get him. Let’s see just how devoted he is to the girl who dragged him into all this.”

“Finally, number ten is still Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare.”

DiMarco gave him a hard look. “Young Justin is in custody and working for us now.” She stabbed a finger in the direction of the cavern outside her window. “He’s caged and tagged, and enlisted as a private in the US Army. And not even that sword of his can cut through a foot of reinforced concrete and six inches of electrified Vanadium steel.”

Atwell licked his lips nervously. “Ma’am, I think we should remember that both Dekka and Armo were formerly held here, and both escaped.”

“They escaped Tom Peaks, not me!” she said, adding grit to the last two words. “Anyway, if we’re going to start counting our own kept monsters, hell, we’ve got worse than Knightmare locked up down here.”

Yes, Atwell thought grimly, and may God forgive us all. The Ranch had been doing crash research in numerous avenues: they had tried to weaponize and control the rock by feeding it various strands of animal DNA. Sometimes—Armo—it had worked. Other times it was as if the rock was mocking them, using entirely different DNA—a passing mosquito, say—to create unsustainable monstrosities. One had morphed into a human-mite hybrid, a brainless slug unable to move its bulk on eight tiny, distorted human legs.

The Ranch had also pioneered cyborgs—human-machine blends: robots with human brains, weapons systems with a human head attached, or sometimes just a brain.

Silence descended as DiMarco templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips, a sign she was thinking. For a solid five minutes Atwell sat looking into space, trying to convince himself this was all right, trying to believe that years from now he would still be able to look his daughters in the eye and justify what he was doing. General DiMarco made that harder with what she said next.

“We are being handcuffed by rules and regulations that are totally inappropriate for this moment in history. We need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later. These are not street criminals, these are superpowered terrorists, mostly very young because God knows only a teenager is dumb enough to deliberately swallow a mutagenic alien virus. But young or old, they’ve already done billions of dollars in damage, not to mention cost hundreds of lives. KOS. Kill on sight! That should be the default, and we only exempt those we can use. Work for me, or take a bullet.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Atwell said, flashing mentally on the Wannsee Conference, the notorious meeting that had led to the Holocaust. There had been gutless apparatchiks there, too, nodding and saying, “Yes, sir.”

Then came the bad news he had to deliver. He’d been hoping for a good moment, but DiMarco was not in a good mood. “There’s another matter, General. The Mother Rock. We’ve got it secured here, as you know, but we’ve only just recovered data from the Okeanos Explorer, and there is a discrepancy.”

Her eyes practically burned a hole through his forehead. “Discrepancy?”

“They weighed the rock on board. We’ve now weighed it. And there is a discrepancy of nineteen pounds, four ounces.”

“Almost twenty pounds has gone missing?” Silence again, broken by a slammed hand on the desk that made Atwell jump. “Godammit! That’s 320 one-ounce doses! That does it. I’m tired of playing by the rules. Prepare a request for a national mobilization of the National Guard and a State of Emergency. We need to be kicking in doors! And let’s start with everyone who was aboard Okeanos. I want them questioned, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about how that questioning is carried out.”

Atwell sat forward, alarmed out of his calm composure. “But ma’am, the White House would have to approve that!”

DiMarco’s sneer was like a dictionary illustration of the word “cynical.” “Do you really think they won’t? This White House? We’ll have the approval in six hours, twelve tops. And I’m not waiting.”

Atwell smoothed the concern out of his expression and nodded.

DiMarco drummed her fingers on the desk. “The bigger problem,” she said, “is not the monsters we know, but those that are to come.”

Atwell frowned. “General?”

“Do you really think this crop of Rockborn is the end of it? We know that several pounds at least of the the original Perdido Beach rock are in private hands—biker gangs, treasure hunters, thrill seekers. We know Shade Darby has some or all of ASO-3. And we know something has happened to twenty pounds of the Mother Rock. And that’s not even getting into foreign threats! My God, Atwell, do you not realize what this is?”

“I think I—”

DiMarco’s hand slapped the desktop again, hard enough to make her souvenir mug jump. “This is an alien invasion, Atwell. It’s come in the form of a mutagenic rock, not little green men, but it is still an invasion. The only way we survive is total, complete annihilation of anyone who uses the rock without working for me!”

She swiveled her chair away, turning her back to Atwell, and gazed at the wall-sized map of the world. “If we are strong and ruthless, we can stop each of the ones we have, one by one. But somewhere out there may be a mutant too powerful for us. That is what worries me, Atwell: the unknown villain.”

5
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CRACKERS WITH A LUNATIC

TOM PEAKS, FORMER head of Homeland Security Task Force 66, had emerged from the water at the Port of Los Angeles exhausted and defeated. For all Dragon’s power, he had been defeated in the end by some kid like a giant starfish. It had been humiliating, and unfortunately Tom Peaks’s companion was not one to be gentle.

“You got your ass kicked,” Drake had said.

“We need a place to hole up,” Peaks said.

Drake laughed contemptuously. “The big man who thought he’d make me his sidekick. Your face is known, Peaks. Everyone in the world is gunning for you. I have a place, I have a place where I can hole up, but what hole do you have?”

Peaks stared blearily at Drake. The sadistic psychopath was as angularly handsome as ever, untouched by the passage of time or by the terrible injuries he had sustained. He was cruel and vicious, and Peaks didn’t need Drake’s ten-foot-long python arm to convince him. Nor did you need to have seen coroners’ photos of his victims over the last four years, as Peaks had. You could see it in Drake’s eyes.

Peaks thought, I’m the Dragon, but he’s the monster.

But Peaks knew he needed time to recover. His mind was barely functioning, like a remote control with a nearly dead battery—sometimes the buttons worked, sometimes they didn’t. If he were a normal human being, he’d have self-diagnosed as suffering from depression. So he let Drake take the lead. They stole a car and drove into the desert, back to Joshua Tree National Park, to the emptiness of the Quail Mountain area, where Drake led them up and up, deeper and deeper into dust-dry hills, into wild piles of boulders, through tangled thorn and Velcro-leaved succulents, to a crack that looked too small for a man to push through. But it proved doable, just barely.

It was a cave. Peaks felt the relatively cool air and the scent of musk and mildew and carrion, rotting meat. It was dark as night, and for a moment Peaks wondered whether Drake had led him here as a trick. But the truth was, if Drake had wanted to kill Peaks, he probably could have done so at any time.

Then Drake struck a lighter and held it to a candle. Then a second and a third. The revealed interior was nothing, a thousandth the size of the great cavern at the Ranch. It was a space more vertical than horizontal, narrow at the opening and at the far end, shaped like an envelope that bulges in the middle. The roof of the cave was invisible, a darkness that called to mind tall Gothic cathedrals. The floor was perhaps twenty feet at its widest, four times that deep, with tumbled rocks leading to solid stone at the end. In daytime a faint light might filter in, but it was night when they arrived, and the only source of illumination was the candles.

Peaks wished there were fewer candles, for what they illuminated was a nightmare. Drake had used railroad spikes to crucify three people. Three bodies hung from the stone walls, the fat rusted steel spikes driven through their wrists. They’d had no support for their feet, so they would have hung with all their weight from the bones of their wrists. One was a male in a state of advanced decomposition, stripped naked, flesh little more than beef jerky, face like a drum skin stretched over a scream.

The other two were women, one almost as decomposed as the male. The other was . . . fresher, for lack of a better word. Despite being in a cave in the middle of nowhere, the flies had found her, and maggots grew fat and white in her eye sockets.

“Jesus Christ,” Peaks whispered.

Drake nodded. “Yeah, the Romans had some skills at making death take a long, long time.”

“You murdered them!”

Drake laughed. “Nah, I just nailed them up there. Had a little fun with them, sure, but it’s hunger that killed them. You want to give them water from time to time, otherwise it’s too quick. Thirst will kill you in anywhere from three days to a week. But hunger? Hell, that can take up to four or five weeks. Longer if you give them the occasional bat or coyote turd to eat.”

His cruel lips smiled. “That bitch there, the redhead? She took thirty-four days. Screaming, begging, crying. Like my own personal sound system.”

Peaks felt sick. He had known what Drake was. He had seen pictures of people, mostly women, flayed by the Whip Hand. He’d heard or read all the stories from the FAYZ survivors. He’d even seen the movie based on Ellison’s book. But pictures and stories and movies still did not prepare him for the reality. For one thing, only reality smelled.

What have I gotten myself into?

In his arrogance, Peaks had always imagined using Drake as a convenient tool, as if the sick bastard was a screwdriver he could just pull out as needed. He’d also thought he could use and control Dekka Talent.

Note to self, he thought wryly, don’t assume that young equals weak or compliant.

Still, he reassured himself, Dragon was within him, and if Drake tried anything . . . and yet, for all that, Peaks was scared all the way down to his liver.

“Speaking of starving to death, do you have any food?” Peaks asked, trying to sound unimpressed.

Drake nodded. “A little. I don’t need to eat, but I sometimes like the taste. And Brittany Pig likes to chew on a cracker sometimes. Can’t swallow, of course.” He whipped off his T-shirt, revealing a tight, lean body with six-pack abs and the bulge of a girl’s face rising like a hideous wart on his upper chest.

Long ago Drake had become fused to Brittany. Brittany had once, many years earlier, been one of Sam and Edilio’s “soldiers,” a moral, religious, decent girl who been driven hopelessly mad. The metal wires of her broken braces still protruded from the mouth that liked to chew and then spit out the occasional cracker or cookie.

It was testimony to the horror of the cave, candlelight flickering off bleached bone and tattered skin, that Peaks barely bothered to notice Drake’s . . . companion.

Drake whipped his python arm through the air and snatched a box of Ritz crackers and tossed it to Peaks. “You can have these, but feed one to Brittany Pig.”

And Tom Peaks—once one of the most secretly powerful people in the country—realized he lacked the strength of will to refuse. Gingerly he fed a Ritz to the wire-jutting mouth and watched with morbid fascination as she chewed and let the results dribble down Drake’s belly.

“So now what, mastermind?” Drake asked. “You promised me Astrid. I’ve got room for her on my wall.”

“There’s security on Ellison and Temple, and it’ll be doubled or tripled now,” Peaks said through his cracker crumbs. “But a month from now?” He shrugged. “It’s all coming apart now, Drake. Civilization is cracking and crumbling. Law and order won’t be sustainable.”

Drake tilted his head, genuinely interested. Crumbling civilization sounded like just the thing for him.

“We thought we could contain this, but we can’t,” Peaks said.

Drake’s whip snapped again, and from the darkness emerged a warm can of beer, which Peaks drank gratefully.

“Tell me,” Drake said. “Give me your play-by-play.”

Peaks considered. “Well, look at it this way. The Perdido Beach Anomaly, the FAYZ, was a massive blow to everything humans thought they knew. And the more we learned, the worse it got. What happened inside that dome was impossible under the laws of physics. Which means the laws of physics are either bullshit, or they are like computer code and can be hacked, or”—he shrugged—“or everything is an illusion.”

Drake nodded. “We’re their TV.”

“The Dark Watchers?”

“Whatever,” Drake said. “Brittany Pig says they’re gods, right, Piggie?”

The mouth on his chest gnashed and a whispery voice, speaking in gasps, said, “Gods of hell, not heaven.”

“See? She’s fun to talk to.”

I’m going mad, Peaks thought. I’m going absolutely insane. I’m in a cave decorated with crucifixion victims, chatting with a serial killer who feeds crackers to the girl who lives on his chest.

“So,” Drake pushed, “what happens if civilization crashes and burns?”

Peaks shrugged. “Then we’re back to evolution, survival of the best adapted, the most fit. People who adapt survive; those who don’t, don’t.”

Drake had lit a collection of twigs and now had a small fire going. Peaks watched the smoke rise. There was another opening to the cave, that was clear, something that acted as a chimney.

“What is it you want, Drake?” Peaks asked.

“Me? Just my usual fun.”

“That?” Peaks nodded toward the hanging bodies.

“And more. See, thing is, Tom, I can’t be killed. Everyone’s tried. But somehow I just keep coming back. It’s kinda weird until you get used to it. Like when Brianna chopped me up and scattered pieces everywhere. I reassembled. Then Sammy boy burned me to ashes. But there was a chunk of me left from Brianna’s work, and that’s all it took.” He shook his head as if remembering better times. “I didn’t have, you know, thoughts or anything. But when that last piece of me started to grow, well, pretty soon—BAM!—I was back to being me. Me and Brittany Pig. So, see, I’m not worried about adapting or evolving or even surviving.”

“So, you won’t be going to college,” Peaks said, deadpan.

Drake showed wolfish teeth. “I’m a simple boy with simple needs.”

“Torture. Rape. Murder.”

“Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. You know that guy, that rich tech guy who disappeared a couple years ago? That’s him.” He nodded at the crucified man. “Day one he offered me a million dollars. The next day he offered to give me a billion dollars.” Drake smiled, enjoying memories. “What are you after, Peaks?”

Tom Peaks thought it over. He’d been a respected and powerful man. He’d had a family, a career, things he liked and cared about and enjoyed. But that was all gone now.

“Survival,” Peaks said. My God, he thought, is that really it? Is that what it’s come down to? From running HSTF-66 to praying for mere survival at any cost . . . in just a week?

Drake laughed. “You aren’t me, Peaks. I can’t be killed, but you can be. Sooner or later they’ll get you.”

Peaks wanted to argue, but something inside him was crumbling like a stale cookie. He felt sick, sick down to his soul. He had lost his family . . . his career . . . his meaning in life. He had shocking power as Dragon, but he knew what assets the government had, and he knew Drake was right. They would find him and they would kill him.

“You don’t even know how to process this, do you?” Drake mocked. On his chest, Brittany formed a leering, metallic grin. “You’d have lasted about six weeks in the FAYZ. Caine Soren would have had you licking his shoes for a hunk of boiled rat. You think you’re all bad-ass with your Godzilla thing, but you barely survived Dekka and Shade Darby. Be glad ol’ Sammy doesn’t still have his powers. Wimp.”

That insult caused a flare-up of pride, and Peaks almost said something. Almost. The truth was, he was scared. Scared of the future, scared of what he’d done. Scared to death of Drake. He now truly understood Dekka’s extreme reaction when he’d first told her Drake was alive.

But along with the sneers, he sensed that Drake was looking for leadership. Drake had no plan, never would have any plan, beyond his next murder.

“We need the same thing they need if they are to survive. We need chaos. Without chaos, the government will eventually prevail. This has to become a fight of all against the government.”

Drake raised an eyebrow. Brittany slavered.

“Without a complete breakdown of civilization,” Peaks said, “we will all be hunted down, one by one.”

“Uh-huh,” Drake agreed. “I’ll bet you could use a drink with a bit more kick.” He whipped his tentacle out and came back with half a bottle of vodka. “Here you go. Liquid courage.”

Peaks twisted off the cap and took a long drink. Then he said, “I need to know everything you know about the Dark Watchers. What do they want? And more importantly, will they help?”

“They don’t help. They just watch. Sometimes they get impatient; sometimes they laugh. Sometimes you can kind of tell they don’t want you to do something. But they don’t interfere. See . . .” He leaned forward, casting house-of-horror shadows on his face. “This whole thing, the rock, the FAYZ, all this? It’s a TV series, Tom. They’re just waiting to see how it all comes out.”

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