An eye.
It fell to the floor with a soft plop, and Dekka found her voice and cried out in horror. She roared like a wounded beast. Her eyes dropped to something shiny at her feet: a brass bullet. She’d seen bullets before, all too often, and there was something wrong with this one. Where the lead slug would normally have been, the brass was crimped.
A blank!
The truth hit her like a hammer blow. A test! It was suddenly clear to Dekka: the infuriating metallic shriek to get her adrenaline pumping, the banging on the door, the “gunfire” with blanks.
Dekka stared at her hands, which had gone up in an automatic defensive gesture when the gunmen burst in. What she saw sent her reeling backward: they were not her hands! They were the hands of a beast, impossible hands, with just three fingers and a thumb, all covered in glossy black fur.
But worse, worse by far, was the crawling feel, the rustling sound of her head. She raised a trembling alien hand and touched not dreads, but what felt like fat writhing worms, or . . .
Snakes!
“No,” she whimpered. No, no, it was some distortion from the concussion that . . . the concussion that she had not felt.
One of her dreads curved around and the serpentine head at the end looked at her, stared at her with tiny yellow eyes, its fanged mouth open, forked tongue slithering out and back, out and back.
Dekka screamed, screamed and backpedaled, swiping at the snake, hearing it hiss and withdraw.
Impossible!
She closed her eyes, willing the image to be gone, praying to the God she only half believed in to end this hideous too-real hallucination. But behind her eyes she saw a dark place, shapes moving, things that might almost have been human, but that surged through a pool of blue-black, liquid latex.
What?
The black shapes turned eyeless heads to her, black tar forming a parody of her own nightmarish Medusa head. The dark, inchoate things turned as if she was an interloper at their party, then moved toward her with sudden excitement . . .
“Stop!” she cried, and opened her eyes. She stared at her hands again, at the fur-covered flesh twice the size of her own hands. But now they were changing. A fourth finger, the little finger, was sprouting like a weed in a time-lapse video. The black fur was being sucked back into her flesh.
She raised a trembling hand to feel the writhing, questing snakes on her head grow limp, hang, dry now to the touch. Just dreads once again.
Dekka wanted to scream. Wanted to roar in rage. Wanted to run and keep running.
Taylor. Drake. The ones who were physically altered by the power of the rock kept their powers. A physical change preserved the powers within the world outside the FAYZ.
“My God,” Dekka whispered, gazing in fascination at the impossible reality that she had been physically transformed, altered in ways she had not yet fully seen, and might not wish to see. Ever.
What have they done to me?
My God, what have they done to me?
Then, a terrible thought.
“E! E! Where are you?” She searched frantically through the shredded wreckage, calling her cat’s name.
She stopped when she found a small rectangle of fur and flesh.
It took ten minutes for the emergency team to dig through the rubble and reach the still-dusty, slightly flooded open space. Two EMTs pushed past her with the calm, efficient hurry of professionals.
“Anyone hurt?” one asked Dekka.
I must be back to normal, Dekka thought, and when she looked at her hands they were once more her hands.
Not just transform, but transform back.
She didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She let them look, let them figure it out for themselves. Watched them recoil. Watched one of the EMTs vomit in his mouth and then force it down.
Peaks came picking his way through the rubble. He stopped, took in the open sky above, the shredded mass, the blood, and finally turned triumphant eyes on Dekka, stared at her and then around at the devastation. “It works!”
Dekka was on him in a flash. She grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled his smug face close. “I just killed those people! I just killed my cat!”
“I . . . we . . . we assumed you’d regain your old power. We didn’t think—”
“Yeah, you got that right,” Dekka snarled. “This is your idea of a test? Jesus Christ! I killed people!”
“Yes, the test did get away from us a bit.”
Dekka stared at him in slack-jawed disbelief. “A bit? A bit? I just killed three human beings and my pet. I just killed them! You have no right! You’ve made me a killer!”
“You need to calm down, Dekka,” Peaks said. He pried her hands from his collar. “I’m sorry about those men, I really am. But they were soldiers. Soldiers sometimes die—”
“This isn’t a damn war!”
“Oh, but it is,” he said flatly. “It is absolutely a war.” And then, his voice low and urgent, he said, “Have you . . . Did you happen to look at yourself, your hands perhaps?”
Dekka’s lie came easily. “I was a bit busy being terrified.”
“Mmm,” Peaks said, eyeing her skeptically. “Yes. Well, whatever you did blew out all the cameras. But in the seconds just before . . .” He let it trail off.
She had no choice but to ask. “What?”
Peaks shrugged. “It looked as if you had been transformed. Physically transformed.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Dekka lied again.
“Of course.” Peaks looked around at the wreckage. “You’ll need a new room. We can arrange to get you a new cat.”
Dekka closed her eyes, wanting to weep for her unintended victims.
She wanted to feel nothing but rage at what had been done to her, at what it had cost in innocent lives.
But beneath the anger, beneath the guilt, beneath the sheer terror, beneath the skin-crawling realization that she could become a monster of cat fur and snakes, beneath the evil imagery of dark forces turning their malevolent and greedy gaze upon her, was a small, not very admirable or moral voice that whispered . . .
Power, Dekka.
You have power.
CHAPTER 13
All Done Being Used
“NOW THAT WE’VE seen that you have acquired extraordinary power—far greater than what you had in the PBA, I think you’ll agree—we need to find out how to refine, hone, and direct that power,” Tom Peaks said to Dekka.
“No,” Dekka said, and there was heat behind that no.
“You seem upset,” Peaks said.
“Upset?” Dekka laughed mirthlessly.
They were in Peaks’s office, a top-floor space that afforded a commanding view of the facility. Dekka had seen the view and was not impressed. The Ranch from any angle still had the dull look of an industrial park, or one of the less whimsical tech company campuses: brick or cinder-block buildings, parked cars, neatly trimmed grass, everything squared away in perfect right angles. Pine forests surrounded the facility, the trees gray, cringing at the approach of winter.
“The scientists want—”
“I don’t care what they want,” Dekka said dully. Then she frowned. “Wait a minute, what are you talking about, honing and refining? I thought you wanted to find a way to erase the powers.”
Peaks made a face, a pursing of lips, accompanied by a shrug. “In time.”
Dekka sat with hands gripping her armrests, her own hands, thankfully, human hands.
My God: the power!
“Seriously,” Dekka said. “Cut the crap, or I walk. I won’t be your tool. I won’t be a puppet. You tell me what’s what, or we’re done.”
“What is it you want to know, Dekka?”
“This is not about learning how to turn off powers.”
Peaks was quite still, watching her. “Oh?”
“You want to use me. You want to use me as a weapon.”
Peaks tried out a smile meant to be self-deprecating, but that ended up looking ghoulish. “W
ell, Dekka, I am a humble employee of DARPA, and that is what—”
Dekka was on her feet. “Like hell,” she snapped. “I fought my war, I did that already. I don’t need a new set of nightmares to wake me up at three a.m.!”
“Dekka, sit. Please.” He let the silence stretch until she reluctantly resumed her seat. “Okay then. Everything I’m about to tell you is secret. Top-secret.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you been back to Perdido Beach?”
Dekka frowned, caught off guard by a surprising feeling of guilt. “No. Why would I? It’s not exactly a place full of fond memories.”
“People have moved back to Perdido Beach,” he said. “But most of them leave within a year. The population today is a third of what it was before the anomaly. Houses are cheap, the town is mostly rebuilt, and yet the crime rate is nine times higher than it used to be. Assaults, rapes, murders. Motorcycle gangs and white supremacists and registered sex offenders, that’s who dominates Perdido Beach today.”
Dekka nodded, wondering why she didn’t know this. Had she ever made any effort to find out about Perdido Beach today? No. She had never even Googled it.
“We had a team go into the mine, down to the depths where ASO-One penetrated. Down to where the creature lived.”
“The gaiaphage,” Dekka said, and swallowed hard after the word. The gaiaphage, that seething, inhuman evil that caused so much fear, so much pain, resulting finally in the birth of the monstrous child Gaia.
“Yes, the gaiaphage,” Peaks said. “The unholy mix of alien meteorite, uranium, and human DNA. We sent a team of six. One of the women on that team went mad and attacked her fellow team members with a pickax. She killed two, injured two more. They had to beat her down with sticks and stones. She’s a patient here, as a matter of fact, raving mad. A complete psychotic break.”
Dekka sat, silent.
“So we sent a second team, this time with two armed Marines. The Marines killed the team, and then themselves.”
“Jesus.”
“So we sent robots, modified bomb-disposal robots, and we were able to retrieve samples of what had been the gaiaphage. Just rock now, or so we thought. Dead. Inert. Then we tried a sample on test animals, chimpanzees. One of the chimps tore the face off her handler. And one of the chimps . . . Wait, I have the video.”
He tapped his keyboard and turned his monitor for Dekka to see. There was no sound, just video, showing a chimpanzee in a cage, and suddenly . . . the chimp was outside the cage.
“Teleportation. Taylor’s power,” Dekka said.
“We had to kill the chimps.”
Dekka snorted. “So you went looking for a better test subject, a better chimp: me.”
“We need to understand what we are dealing with,” Peaks said. “Whatever is down in that mine shaft still wields some kind of power. Decent people flee Perdido Beach. Criminals and lowlifes are drawn to it. The robots found beer bottles and cigarette butts in that cave. People have been in there, people we don’t know, people who were drawn there.”
“Why don’t you seal off the town?” Dekka demanded.
“And let the whole world know we have a malicious alien presence sitting out in the desert a few miles from the 101? People are still coming to terms with the fact that someone is out there, light-years away in space. People aren’t even close to accepting the fact that our entire world, the very laws of physics, are really no more secure than computer software.”
“People live their lives,” Dekka said with a shrug. “They come to my register at Safeway and buy their milk and their lettuce and go home to their spouses and kids and jobs.”
“Several fragments we know of have landed,” Peaks said. “You want to know where? ASO-Two came down in the Atlantic off the coast of Scotland and broke apart, spraying bits and pieces all over the Isle of Islay. ASO-Three landed in Iowa and someone stole it—a teenaged girl got most of it, as it happens. ASO-Four landed in the mountains of Afghanistan and fell into the hands of some very bad people.” He leaned into her, intensity like steam coming from his eyes. This was not calm, soothing Peaks, this was a scared, angry, determined, even fanatical Peaks. “So we sent a larger Special Forces team in to take back the rock, but there was a delay and our guys got there too late: they were annihilated to the last man. Not shot, though. See, we recovered the bodies. They had been turned inside out. You know how you pull off a glove and sometimes it turns inside out? Like that. Organs and bone on the outside. I’ve seen some terrible things . . .”
His eyes glittered at that, and some instinct of Dekka’s warned that there was more to the gloating tone of his voice. More secrets. More lies.
“The rock is out there, Dekka. Fragments of it are already out there, and more is coming.”
Dekka saw sweat shining on his forehead. His hands twined together, fingers twisting, before he caught himself and with an effort resumed his usual impassive expression. “We’ve got a monster out of some kids’ book terrorizing a Scottish island, a terrorist who can turn people inside out, a girl so fast she makes your old friend Brianna look like she’s standing still, and some unstable psycho art student calling himself Knightmare who so far has caused something like two billion dollars in damage and killed a hundred and nine people. That’s just for starters. We have possession of the Mother Rock, thank God; it’s on a ship surrounded by more firepower and surveillance than you could imagine, so it’s safe, but ASO-Six and ASO-Seven are yet to land.”
Dekka felt herself sinking into her chair and almost wishing Peaks had not told her. The meteorite, identical to the alien rock that caused the Perdido Beach Anomaly, was spreading out across the globe.
Peaks said, “The physicists at CERN and MIT are trying to make sense of, well, the physics. They’re scared. They’re scared in ways that I lack the education and the IQ to even understand. But I’m not required to understand that, I’m only required to find a way to . . . to counter . . . the likely immediate results.”
“Which are?”
He leaned across his desk and lowered his voice, his trick for conveying sincerity.
“Did you see the dark watchers?”
Dekka froze. She immediately knew what he was referring to.
He allowed her silence to stand, taking it as acknowledgment. “We used to think the ASOs were part of a benign alien effort to sow life across the galaxy. We believed the gaiaphage had attained consciousness solely because of a twist of fate—the impact with uranium and human DNA. But we’re not so sure of that anymore, Dekka. We are beginning to suspect that the ASO virus is itself intelligent. And that its intentions are not in any way benign. We think it is capable of using any DNA at hand—Justin DeVeere had swordfish and lobster and appears to have a chitin armor, like lobster shell. And you saw the blade arm. But we also think it has the ability to exploit thought patterns. Needless to say, this is decades, centuries, beyond our abilities.”
Dekka said nothing.
“Do you understand what that means, Dekka? If true, it means that Earth has already been invaded by hostile aliens. And that means Perdido Beach writ large,” Peaks said. “Your gaiaphage metastasized. A new world, Dekka, a world where individuals, some friendly, some not, some good, some not, may acquire powers so great that our police forces and our intelligence assets and even our armies may be unable to cope. And even the best of the people who develop powers, even the heroes, will be watched and, we have to assume, be influenced, by the consciousness that is in those Anomalous Space Objects. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“It sounds bad,” Dekka said, unable to conjure up a better word.
“Bad? Bad? Dekka, the world we’ve known may be coming to an end.”
“It’s like some kind of comic book movie,” Dekka said.
Peaks laughed and sat back. “Believe it or not, we’ve got a team at work analyzing Marvel and DC comics, trying to work out a scenario, trying to work through the implications of a world where—”
“Is it real
ly that bad? I mean, so we’ll have a bunch of Spider-Men running around grabbing criminals.”
“Yes, well, unfortunately comic book writers tend not to work through the negatives. There are core human beliefs being subverted here.” He tapped his keyboard again and a graph appeared. “See this line?” He traced it with his finger. “That’s the number of millennialist cults here in the US. We had seventeen we were tracking before the PBA. We now have eight hundred and nine at last count. Cults, fanatics, lunatics, psychopaths, ambitious dictators, terrorists . . . how do you think they’ll all react when they realize that the PBA wasn’t just a one-time, one-location thing? How well do you think they’ll resist whatever the ASO has in mind for us?”
“I don’t have to imagine,” Dekka said flatly. “I was there for Round One.”
Peaks nodded. “Exactly. Three hundred and thirty-two kids were in the PBA. Forty percent died before the barrier came down. Another twenty percent have died since, mostly from suicide or drug overdoses. Others are in prison for various crimes. And others still are in mental institutions. Far too many to explain just from posttraumatic stress.”
“Why hasn’t that been in the news?”
“Because we’ve been covering it up as well as we can, but it’s all over social media, all over the conspiracy websites. Dekka, human civilization is on the brink. World War Three is coming . . . unless we can find a way to neutralize the effect of the rock. Unless we can stop the most dangerous of those who acquire powers. Unless,” he said with an intense stare that chilled Dekka to the marrow, “we can create a loyal army able to take on and defeat those who handcuffs and prison bars cannot hold. Those who bullets cannot stop.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to be? Part of your army?”
He said nothing, just waited.
“What if I refuse?”
Peaks shrugged. “Then we will ask you to remain here at the Ranch.”
“A prisoner?”
He shrugged again, but added a regretful face, tacked on like an emoji.
“This is nuts.”
“The times we live in.”