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The Monster Series
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.
“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!”
“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.
