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The Monster Series
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.”
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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