Malik and Cruz joined Shade. She pointed and said, “They may not need a superhero; they have some kind of big cannon on that Coast Guard ship.”
“Just be ready,” Malik snapped. “Sorry. I haven’t slept in, like, forever.”
“That container must be for the Mother Rock,” Cruz observed.
“I think they’re pulling in,” Malik said. “Across the channel.”
They hopped back into a freshly purloined SUV—the CHP car had been left in a Costco parking lot—crossed the bridge, followed an off-ramp that led down past seemingly endless expanses of concrete topped by stacked containers, scruffy warehouses, and administrative buildings, crossed some railroad tracks, aimed right for the wharf where the Okeanos seemed to be heading, and ran into a number of signs, one stating that they were nearing Terminal Island, a Coast Guard base, and a second indicating that they were also approaching the Terminal Island correctional facility.
“Great,” Malik said darkly. “It’ll be a short walk to prison.”
There was security in place, so they stopped again, considering their next move.
“We need to get in there,” Malik said. He glanced in the mirror and saw a white van approaching.
“I got it,” Shade said, and immediately began her transformation. She forced herself to look down at the monstrous, insectoid legs that gave her such speed. Her flesh crept and her mind rebelled, still unable to really process it, unable to quite believe that she was physically something other than she’d been her whole life. The liquid, sluicing sounds came through her bones as her body shifted and moved, as she quickly—down to mere seconds now—transformed into a creature that only a close friend would recognize as being Shade Darby.
She glanced at Malik and Cruz. They were staring, and blinking ever so slowly. The white van that had been tearing along at good speed was now barely moving. She ran to it and looked inside. There was only the driver, a burly, thirtysomething white man in overalls. He had an ID lanyard hanging around his neck.
Shade yanked open the van door and hauled out its driver as carefully as she could—although she heard one of the bones in his arm snap—and deposited him beside the road. She couldn’t have him conscious, but he was an innocent bystander, so she slowed her fist so that when it impacted the side of his head the blow wouldn’t crush his skull.
It did, however, snap his head around and cause his eyes to flutter and roll up in his head. He began a slow-mo collapse.
Shade raced back to her friends and de-morphed, feeling clever for having changed back before the Dark Watchers could fully turn their attention on her.
“Come on,” Shade said. “Cruz? I believe your power may come in handy.”
The three of them went to the white van, and Shade handed the unconscious driver’s lanyard to Cruz. “Can you pass as this guy?”
Cruz looped the lanyard over her neck and went to take a much closer look at the man, turning his head this way and that, adding it to what she had come to think of as her face file, the faces she had memorized well enough to mimic.
By the time she stood up, she was the unconscious driver, clothing and all.
“This good enough?” Cruz asked, a bit smug, knowing that of course it was perfect.
“Okay, listen, you have to drive, Cruz. Malik and I can hide in the back, but you have to drive.”
“But—”
“No alternative,” Malik chimed in. “It’s just, what, five hundred feet to the security gate? You can do it, Cruz, you got this.”
“Straight road,” Shade said, making a chopping gesture.
“Oh, my God,” the “driver” said, sounding entirely like Cruz. “I . . . I don’t . . .”
There began a hurried, impromptu driving lesson from Malik as Shade shielded her eyes from the glare and squinted to see the cutter and the Okeanos closing with the crane-burdened dock.
As it happened, Cruz was perfectly able to drive slowly, with Malik behind her giving her instructions. At the gate Cruz flashed her lanyard, and then the guard said, “See the game last night?”
Of course Cruz had not, but she read the guard’s doleful expression and said, “We were robbed.”
The guard snorted. “We were robbed when they traded away Vasquez.”
“Tell me about it,” Cruz answered in her best approximation of a gruff and masculine voice.
And then they were in through the gate. The prison—not a huge facility—was on their left. The dock was to their right. Cruz scooted into the back as Malik clambered into the driver’s seat, and they motored past low buildings to approach a parking lot with space for perhaps a hundred cars.
There was a whole new level of security in place in that parking lot: a dozen vehicles either marked LAPD or unmarked but clearly official. A big, black LAPD SWAT van the size of a UPS truck waited beside a small armored car with massive rubber wheels painted with the stencil. The vehicle was marked “RESCUE LAPD.” A Los Angeles Port Police motorboat cut figure eights into the gray-green water of the channel. A police helicopter hovered overhead.
Their way forward was blocked by Port Police on motorcycles, with men and women in dark suits and dark glasses nearby. These did not look like folks who would be tricked by a lanyard; they would search the vehicle and demand to see specific permissions to enter the area. So again Malik pulled over, beside an improbable baseball diamond. A basketball court occupied the space between the baseball diamond and the parking lot. He made a point of leaning out of the window and staring, like any curious dockworker might upon seeing a very unusual sight. Even a boat suspected of bringing in drugs did not merit this kind of reception.
“I can’t get any closer,” Malik said. “I doubt even Cruz could get through.”
Shade nodded. “Mmmm. I can. But I don’t want to until it’s necessary. The less time I spend with the Watchers, the better.”
The Okeanos touched the dock. But it did not remain quite still; it seemed to be drifting. Then a strange figure covered by a poncho with hood pulled up despite the stunning Southern California weather rushed to the stern to throw a cable to waiting hands ashore. That same cloaked figure then ran forward to throw the second line.
“What, have they only got one crewman?” Malik wondered aloud.
And that was when a car pulled up just ahead of the parked van. Malik tensed. Shade watched, ready to morph at the first sign of trouble. She could see two heads silhouetted in the car.
The driver got out. He was a middle-aged white man with sandy hair. He had a passenger with long, dirty blond or light brown hair. The passenger turned in his seat and looked right at Malik, who instinctively shrank back.
To the amazement of everyone in Shade’s group, the middle-aged man now began stripping off his clothing, carefully folding each item and laying them on the driver’s seat, until he was down to a pair of boxer shorts.
“Crazy?” Malik mused.
But then the pale, skinny, unimpressive, and mostly naked man began to change.
“Worse than crazy,” Shade said. “He’s a child of the rock.”
CHAPTER 21
Cooking Drake
PEAKS FOLDED HIS clothing with trembling hands. He saw a parked van, but there was just some kid at the wheel, and Peaks had bigger issues to deal with.
“You coming?” Peaks demanded.
Drake grinned. “When I’m ready. I want to see what you’ve got first.”
Peaks shook his head slightly and under his breath said, “I wish I knew what I’ve got.” Louder he added, “What I’ve got, my friend, is big, hot, and unhappy.”
Peaks focused his mind on the thoughts most likely to enrage him. In fact, he replayed the scene of his firing, of his humiliation. And change came to Tom Peaks. He heard a sound like wet gears grinding through mud, a sound that vibrated through his bones. The ground began to recede, seeming to fall away from him as he shot up. He looked down and saw misshapen feet already so large that they extended beneath the car, and down through the sunroof he s
aw Drake watching him with wary blue eyes.
Peaks raised his hand to look at it, and it was no longer human in size, color, or shape. His hand looked like one of those Fourth of July “snakes,” like magma vomiting from the mouth of a volcano, black crust over a glowing red beneath.
Peaks was perhaps the most experienced person on earth when it came to the ASO virus and its effects. At the Ranch he had run many experiments, first on test animals and later on humans. He had seen the gruesome, disturbing morphing process, like something out of a demented movie special effects computer.
He had seen it all. But in others, not himself. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, that same helpless feeling, that same dread. But against the astonishment and the fear was fascination.
My God: look at me!
He grew still larger and larger, broader and broader, until he was as big as an African elephant. He glanced down and now Drake was no longer smirking. There was an expression of something like awe on the creep’s cruel face. That look calmed Peaks’s fear. There was nothing as good for calming fear as seeing that you terrified someone else.
Then . . . rage!
It erupted inside Peaks like a muffled bomb of fury and hatred, a rage far out of proportion even to the indignities he’d suffered. He felt as if liquid fire was coursing in his veins, like a nuclear pile was burning in his gut. He felt exalted, transformed!
The power!
Peaks felt as well the presence of unseen eyes, a mocking, interested, malicious gaze, but that did not trouble him while he was in this state, not while he was rising ever upward on a geyser of mad fury.
A red veil fell over his sight and he felt himself, his mind, Tom Peaks himself, flickering like a candle about to go out. But that would not do, it would not do at all, he needed his wits about him, he needed to be able to see and react. And with all the determination at his command, he held on to his consciousness, retained awareness, moving fingers and feet to prove to himself that he controlled this beastly body. But with this accomplishment came the certainty that his control over this monster was tenuous at best. It was as if the creature had a simple, brutal mind of its own, a rage-fueled single-mindedness that competed with Peaks’s own sophisticated consciousness for control. It was a bit like two drivers trying to steer the same vehicle. He could direct his morph, but could not entirely contain its fury.
He was far above the car now, towering over it so that Drake might as well have been a pedestrian passing on the sidewalk beneath a five-story building.
And that was when Peaks made a mistake he would not have made had he had more time to test out this morph. He glared down at Drake and the rage took control. Peaks roared down at Drake, roared in a voice that shattered the windshield and set off the car alarm. And as he opened his mouth and roared, a wave of liquid fire vomited forth.
It was napalm, some rational corner of Peaks’s mind observed, like jellied gasoline, and it did not burn like a flame or even a blowtorch, it stuck and burned. Gallons of it sprayed across the vehicle, instantly peeling paint, dripping down into the car through the sunroof, melting seats and dashboard controls, wilting the steering wheel, sending up a cloud of stinking, oily black smoke.
And Drake, too, burned. He burned and his flesh melted from his face, so that Peaks saw a flame-wreathed skeleton with blue eyes sizzling like frying eggs in their bone sockets.
Drake calmly opened the door of the car, rolled out onto the grass of the baseball diamond, and kept rolling as the napalm clung to him, burning, peeling skin away, frying the meager fat, boiling his blood. Drake rolled, keeping his whip hand tightly coiled around him, then jumped up to run across the grassy field, dropping flaming gobbets of melting flesh as he ran. A long, narrow gap separated the land from the dock, a gap forming a sort of freshwater ditch between dock and land. Drake leaped and disappeared from sight.
For a terribly long time, Peaks stared in furious horror, dimly aware that he had gone to great trouble to recruit a henchman and had now killed him.
But then . . . a whip snapped up from the water and the end wrapped around a tall, lithe palm tree, and with a single, powerful yank, a dripping-wet Drake landed nimbly back on the grass.
He was more skeleton than flesh, white bone clearly visible, his skull, his ribs, one entire shoulder. What flesh remained was the color of a steak left to burn on a too-hot grill. And yet, from the upper part of Drake’s chest, a tangle of chrome wires protruded. But perhaps most terrifying of all, Drake’s whip hand was now a snake’s skeleton, a long, flexible vertebral column and hundreds of circular ribs.
“You’re alive?” Peaks roared, meaning to whisper.
“You’ll have to give me a few minutes,” Drake said, sauntering quite nonchalantly back across the grass from third base, not even seeming resentful. “It takes me a while to regrow.”
CHAPTER 22
Fire, Water, and Shade Darby
“JESUS H. GODZILLA,” Malik said through chattering teeth.
The creature that had once been an unremarkable, middle-aged man now towered over them, and unless Shade was hallucinating, he had just melted a boy with a long octopus-looking arm, and that boy had just climbed out of the car, jumped into the water, and emerged like some unkillable slasher movie villain.
Cruz screamed in sheer, out-of-control terror. Malik’s face was a mask of horror, teeth bared, eyes wide. Shade’s insides turned to water. She felt a desperate urge to find a bathroom, preferably one on another continent. But she did not scream, she had no right to scream, she was a monster, too, or would be in mere seconds.
“Malik!” She grabbed his shoulder. “You and Cruz get the hell out of here. Now! I have to—”
But what she had to do was not made clear, because the magma creature had turned his attention back to the Okeanos nestling up to the dock.
He . . . it . . . began to run.
One step and he was twenty feet away. Another great bounding step on legs as long as telephone poles and as thick as ancient redwoods. The vibration of each planted foot was like a low-level earthquake.
“He’s not exactly slow himself,” Shade muttered as she pushed open the door and stood on legs not quite her own.
The police forces in the parking lot didn’t need to be told to fire—they blazed away with handguns and shotguns, but if the bullets struck the magma creature, there was no sign that they were a problem for him. And then the monster threw wide his arms, a defiant Is that all you got? gesture.
Bang-bang-bangbangbangbang!
The police fired until their clips were empty, reloaded, and fired again, and all to no effect.
The monster bent to bring his hideous, burned-reptile head lower, mouth wide in a grin full of fire and smoke. He let go a sound that even from more than a hundred yards shook Shade down to her bones.
Ggggrrrahhhh-hah-hah-GARRRRR!
They had made a stop at a martial arts store and picked up various weapons for Shade: throwing stars, nunchakus, an actual sword, but they were pitiful stuff to use against this creature. Shade retrieved a pathetically small knife and an absurd set of nunchucks and realized looking at them that she had no chance, no chance at all.
Run, Shade, run away!
She could be in the next county in five minutes’ run. She could be in Mexico in twenty minutes. This creature was orders of magnitude too strong, too dangerous for her to battle.
But you’ve got nunchakus! a savagely sarcastic inner voice reminded her.
I need a damn tank!
She glanced at Malik and Cruz, frozen in their slowness.
“Hero, villain, or monster,” Shade said shakily. “And I’m supposed to be the hero.”
In her imagination it had always been a battle against the blood-smeared girl, against Gaia. In her fantasies she’d had powers of her own, and though the battle had been hard, she had always prevailed. She had always triumphed. Her throat had never been cut. There had been no scar to serve as a constant reminder that she, Shade Darby, was respo
nsible for her mother’s death. That she, Shade Darby, had been helpless and weak.
But this was not fantasy. This creature was thirty or forty feet of very real fire and death.
I can’t beat that!
If she turned away, if she ran like every ounce of her brain was screaming at her to, it would all be for nothing. She’d have condemned Cruz and Malik and herself to eventual prison. She’d have ruined her father’s career. All for nothing.
Was this how real world heroes felt? Trapped? Too committed to run away? You didn’t see that in the movies, Shade thought, you didn’t see the bone-rattling fear that came with facing deadly battle. Hopeless battle.
He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me!
She had impetuously attacked Knightmare at the lighthouse, but she’d figured she could hold her own with him. Knightmare was big and dangerous, but this? This magma beast wasn’t some art student playing the villain and waving his sword around; this was death made flesh.
What a fool she had been, what an arrogant, stupid fool. And now she could either run away and live with the knowledge of her cowardice or endure the pity of Malik and Cruz, and then their bitter resentment that their lives had been disrupted and perhaps shattered for nothing. For nothing.
For nothing but my fantasies.
Fight or flight? Basic human hardwired survival instincts. Fight or flight?
She had read somewhere that every battle at some point turns on the willingness of one person to run toward danger . . . or to turn and flee.
Fight or flight?
The answer when at last it came should have been a triumphant shout, but it came out as a shaky, doomed whisper.
“Fight.”
Shade kicked off and zoomed after the creature as he kicked at police cars, crumpling them like empty beer cans. Shade saw a police officer, his uniform aflame, flying through the air like a football.
The monster was fast, able to move at more than human speed, but Shade was moving at bullet speed and she easily caught him. She raced rings around him, dodging gobbets of fire that dribbled from his mouth, looking for vulnerabilities, for weaknesses, but he was to all intents and purposes a massive pile of walking magma. From twenty feet away it was like sticking your head into a pizza oven. The heat of his touch boiled the tarmac beneath his great reptilian feet.