“We have a winner,” Armo said bleakly.
“Yeah.” Dekka raised her hands and howled and . . . nothing. “Too far away. Damn. I was sure hoping this worked from a distance.”
Vincent wrapped one thick leg around the Mother Rock and seemed almost to cuddle it.
Behind them the big new helicopter hovered a few feet above burning wreckage. The helicopter’s door slid open, and Dekka saw its main passenger.
“It’s that Knightmare guy!” Dekka said. “Great, now the freak show is complete.”
Knightmare jumped down from the chopper, indifferent to the fact that one talon foot landed on a charcoal corpse, crushing it to powder.
“Whose side is he on?” Armo wondered.
“Ours. For now,” Dekka said, pointing out that Knightmare stood facing Vincent, the long sword arm at the ready.
“You want to help him?” Armo asked.
“Do you?”
Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare, had fought Shade Darby. He had murdered airline passengers in cold blood. He had torn the Golden Gate Bridge apart. None of that his fault, all of it simply . . . necessary and thus forgivable.
DiMarco had tortured and twisted him, had stuck her vile control devices in him and used electric shocks to force him to morph for her. But in his own mind, Justin was still an artist. His eyes still sought out the unique, the extreme, the shocking.
Nothing in his experience had prepared him for what he now faced. It was, in its own way, a demented masterpiece. Something small and perhaps creepy but not in any way frightening had been turned into this creature that somehow combined absolute terror with an element of the comic. The thin brown kid was like something out of a cartoon, a weird, impossible blend of incompatible life-forms conjured by alien artists working on a huge canvas.
Justin swallowed in a dry throat. His mind yammered a running commentary mostly consisting of places he could run away to, and curses directed at DiMarco. That and the phrase It’s too big!
The hated female voice came from a loudspeaker in the air, from the Sikorsky, which had risen to a safe two hundred feet and now beat the air over their heads. “Attack! Attack!” the voice ordered.
Justin sighed shakily. Attack, or DiMarco would send intolerable pain exploding through his body. Attack, or let DiMarco reduce him to helpless immobility to be destroyed by the creature.
But still, part of Justin’s mind noted the color of the creature, admired the uncanny valley effect of a boy half riding, half absorbed into a creature that had never, could never, exist in the dull and predictable universe where Justin had lived his life.
He had a vision of a painting, an abstract using that fantastic, unique red, and the oily black of the smoke, and . . .
The creature moved forward with surprising speed, mincing on delicate tubules like a centipede.
“Attack, Private! Attack!”
Justin spared a moment for self-pity. How had it come to this? Erin, dead, and now that she was gone he missed her. She had never loved him, he’d known that, but at times she had been kind. She had been all he had. Now here he was, drafted into a fight he did not want. But the threat of pain was too compelling. He had no choice.
Anyway, Justin told himself in a weak attempt at buttressing his ego: I am Knightmare! And Knightmare fears no one!
Right?
With a cry that was meant to be a roar but came out as a frightened whimper, Justin ran straight at the nearest arm, swung his sword, and sliced effortlessly most of the way through where the arm was as thick as a sewer pipe.
He grabbed the injured leg with his claw, pulling the deep gash wider, and swung his sword again. This time the blade went all the way through to the concrete beneath and a chunk as big as an elephant came away.
Came away but did not die. Rather, the detached leg instantly crawled at Justin and he swung again, cutting a third of it away.
This third, too, did not die.
“Hydra,” Justin whispered. He had paid very little attention to any part of school, but he had done a paper that referenced the Moreau painting Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra. In Greek mythology, the Hydra was a beast with many heads, but if you chopped one off, another grew in its place.
“Go for the boy!” DiMarco’s voice, distorted by the loudspeaker and even more by the incessant whap-whap-whap of the helicopter.
The boy was at the far end of a fifty-foot arm and sitting easily twenty-five feet up.
“Sure, no problem,” Justin said, gritting his teeth. It would take speed, and once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop. All or nothing.
He gathered his courage and broke into a run, straight at the beast. He jumped atop the nearest uncut leg and ran its length even as it curled up behind him like a trailing wave.
Easy! In two seconds he would cut the creepy kid in half.
But as he swung his sword the tentacles whipped at him, smearing his armor with caustic poison and, worse in the short term, entangling his legs, so that Knightmare went sprawling. His outstretched sword arm stabbed right for Vincent, but three tendrils snatched at the blade, were cut through, but managed nevertheless to steer the blade harmlessly away.
Knightmare jumped up, looked down, and saw smoking holes in his chitin armor, but the pain was distant and the poison would never reach his bloodstream. He charged again, yelling, “Die! Die!” and swinging his blade like a scythe through the whipping worms, which sprayed poison like severed arteries pumping blood.
At last he was face-to-face with Vincent; only a few stubby tendrils whipped frantically between them.
“Who the hell are you?” Knightmare roared.
The boy had a surprisingly sweet smile and a musical voice. “I am Abaddon. I am the destroyer anointed by the god Satan! I am . . . the star!”
“You’re batshit is what you are,” Knightmare said, and prepared to slice the boy off the monster like a wart.
“You haven’t even figured it out, have you?” Vincent said, and it was his taunting voice that stayed Knightmare’s sword. “You don’t even know what this is, do you, Knightmare? I guess you’re stupid.”
Justin gaped. This kid was taunting him, insulting him. He sounded like a not very bright high school bully.
“Stupid old Knightmare,” Vincent said, voice dripping sarcasm. “You know nothing. You want me to tell you? Do you?”
Knightmare’s great armored head nodded.
Vincent held his frail human arms out, palms up, tilted his head back, and with a laugh in his voice said, “It’s all TV. It’s all entertainment!”
Knightmare did not move as the human brain of Justin DeVeere digested this statement.
“It’s a show, you dumbass,” Vincent said. “And you’re just an actor.”
Suddenly the leg the bemused Knightmare stood on heaved so violently that it crumpled Knightmare’s knees. He rose a dozen feet into the air, and like a baseball bat, a thick arm smashed into him sideways. Knightmare went flying, tumbling through the air, and skidded to a halt within a few feet of where Dekka and Armo stood.
He raised his head and, in a shadow of his usual ground-pounding rumble, said, “A little help?”
“You’re garbage,” Dekka snapped. “But I guess he’s worse.” She glanced at Armo. “On three? Or some other number?”
Armo nodded. “Three works.”
“Sword boy, you go around the back and start hacking. I’ll try to get close to the center of the star and do my thing. And Armo?”
Armo nodded. “Berserk time.”
Knightmare picked himself up, and Vincent, supremely confident now that he had either killed or disabled Napalm, glided serenely past, rolling over crushed vehicles and dead bodies.
“One,” Armo said.
“Where’s that Shade Darby person?” Dekka demanded angrily. “We could use her help!”
“Two.”
“But whatever,” Dekka said.
“Three.”
They were three, and on three, all three kicked off s
imultaneously. Dekka ran for the gap between the two nearest arms, howling and shredding as she went.
Armo leaped atop a leg and launched himself, snarling, toward Vincent’s fragile form.
Knightmare attacked from the back, swinging his sword arm with vicious strength, hacking and plunging and scything through arm and tendrils.
Once again, Vincent merely jerked his muscles and knocked Knightmare to the ground. He swung two legs together, pinning Dekka, and now she was between two closing walls of flesh, shredding and sending up a tornado of fleshy bits.
Armo was inches from burying his teeth in the smugly smiling boy. And then, a shadow behind him, a panicked glance, and the Mother Rock, wielded like a hammer, smashed down on Armo’s back.
In less than sixty seconds the attack had failed, and a winded, battered, shaky threesome watched helplessly as the monster plowed toward the city and the Dark Watchers writhed in glee.
Vincent was on a manic high. He had battled the great fire-breathing Napalm and left him broken in the mud of the channel. He had tossed Knightmare around like a toy. He’d had more trouble with Dekka; she had hurt him, and he suspected that the day would come when she would be a problem, but that day was not today. He could see her defeat in the weary droop of her shoulders. Armo, too, had been casually shrugged aside.
Now what Vincent wanted was rest. The mania was softening, ebbing, and melancholy now tainted his great victories.
The Dark Watchers loved him, he could feel it. He was the star! And wasn’t that a nice pun? A starfish star. Ha!
Five separated sections crawled beside him, a small but dangerous meat puppet army. He was unstoppable! He was the greatest power on earth! And they loved him for it.
He slithered across the parking lot and with a negligent swipe of one leg smashed the side of the main prison building. Crumbling masonry revealed shocked prisoners in khaki uniforms, some of whom promptly bolted.
It gave Vincent an idea, though. He could create havoc by breaking open jails and prisons, like in that Batman movie. On the other hand, if you wanted to mess up Los Angeles, all you really had to do was create traffic jams, right?
Did he want to mess up LA? Vincent hadn’t really thought about the next step. In fact, he had no clear goal in mind, other than providing the Dark Watchers a delightful entertainment. He’d done that in spades, but what was next?
Vincent understood his place in the emerging new world: he was a super-villain. The super-villain! Clearly. Okay, so what did super-villains do, exactly? Take over the world? What would he do with the world if he did take it over? That sounded like a complicated job, and he wasn’t at all sure it was a job he wanted to do. It felt as if there would be math involved.
The old voices were whispering to him. They no longer yelled, as if they were cowed by the new force that had taken root in Vincent’s scrambled brain. They reminded him that he was Abaddon, a dark angel, a destroyer of worlds. He could begin the work. He could kill and kill and kill!
Vincent sat atop and at the center of the star, riding high. He had a clear, unobstructed view of the port around him, and he considered taking some time to annihilate the dozens of great cranes, smash the containers, sink the ships—all things he was sure he could do. But why? It was all much clearer when he was manic. When the mania passed, what followed was a passive, abstracted state that normally sent him to his bed to read or watch videos and eat snack food products.
But now he was this, this great and powerful monster, Abaddon! And he was his puppets as well, seeing through their dim eyes when he chose, controlling them if he needed something from them, otherwise letting them follow like ducklings after their mother.
He kept moving, then looked left and spotted the battleship Iowa, long decommissioned and now just a tourist destination. He slid into the water of the channel and found that he could sink or swim as he chose, walk across the muddy submerged bottom, or float over the flat water.
Destroying the battleship would be fun at least, the Watchers would enjoy that, even if he took no joy in it himself.
But then, coming up the channel was the Coast Guard cutter. The Bofors rounds had bruised him but not done serious damage, exploding against the surprisingly tough outer skin. So he wasn’t terribly worried to see the white ship.
But the Coast Guard had learned. They had only a few armor-piercing shells on board, mostly to sink derelict ships that could not be salvaged. The first armor-piercing shell penetrated Vincent’s skin before exploding. It was sharply painful and left a crater. Chunks of Vincent’s body flew through the air, but even before they landed he felt their separate, dull, subservient intelligences awaken. His puppets! Each shell would make more.
On the other hand, Vincent was not at all sure what would happen if he, himself, the still-human part of him, was hit. He submerged, cool water flowing over him as if he was a submarine diving. His human form was the last part to go under. He’d already discovered that he did not need to breathe underwater, but something about it still made him nervous.
The gray steel of the Iowa’s hull was a wall ahead of him, the keel just a few feet out of the mud. Vincent slid two legs beneath the hull and pulled sharply. The Iowa tilted crazily, sending the stupidly brave folks who’d stayed around to watch tumbling across the deck.
But when Vincent tried to break the ship, he found the hull still too strong. All he could really do was rock the great ship back and forth, which was not very exciting to see. Not really . . . entertaining. Not at all what one expected of Abaddon.
Besides, after a week on the Okeanos he was tired of ships and the sea. So he slithered up onto the far side of the channel, keeping the Iowa between himself and that stinging Bofors gun. Leaving the port, he rolled into and over a neighborhood of inexpensive, two-story apartment blocks, smashing cars, knocking down stucco walls, and collapsing tile roofs, and that at least was entertaining because people came running out into the street, hopped into cars or fled on foot, sometimes only half dressed.
He broke power lines and gas lines with predictable results: fires blossomed in his wake.
He felt weary, though. Hollowed out. The voices whispered and the Watchers silently urged him on, but every movement was an effort now and he came at last to a stop, planted in the midst of a residential neighborhood. People fled before him, and that was nice, but his energy was all gone.
He wanted a rest. He wanted everyone out of his head. He needed to sleep.
A brave homeowner fired at him with a handgun. Vincent barely noticed. The homeowner, out of bullets, dropped the gun and fled.
Three big Sikorsky helicopters were veering to get in front of him, looking for a place to fight him again.
No more. Not now.
And Vincent Vu began to change.
The great red arms shriveled and shrank. The flails lay limp and curled up like doodlebugs. He was surprised when his feet—his own, human feet—touched pavement.
Sirens rose and fell. Red lights came rushing down the street. But when they came screeching up and leaped out with guns drawn . . . they found nothing but a frightened-looking kid.
“Hey!” a cop shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”
“Where should I go?” Vincent asked plaintively.
“Go home, you damn fool! Don’t you know it’s the end of the world?”
So Vincent did just that. He walked away, joined a crowd of rushing people, passed many more emergency vehicles, and finally found his way to the home his mother would never see again.
His father greeted him with a hug. “Thank God, you’re okay! Do you have any idea what’s happening down by the port?”
CHAPTER 28
Consequences
“ARE YOU FAMILY?” the doctor asked Shade and Cruz.
“No, but—” Cruz began.
“We’re all the family he has here.” Shade talked over her. “Everyone else is back in Chicago.”
“You need to contact them,” the doctor said, and his expression was grim
. “We may be able to keep him alive for twenty-four hours.”
Shade fell into a molded plastic chair. They were in a hectic corridor, weeping family members, gurneys preceded by shouts of “Clear a path, clear a path,” doctors and nurses and people carrying iPads to take down health insurance information.
Twenty-four hours!
The enormity of it threatened to overwhelm her.
Cruz said, “Shade, I didn’t mean what I said about it being your fault . . .”
“Yes you did,” Shade snapped. “You meant it because it’s true. He’s here because of me! He’s burned because of me!” She slapped her chest with a clenched fist. “He’s dying because of me!”
She covered her face with her hands, wishing tears would come because that at least would be some kind of release. The doctor was still talking, explaining that they had given Malik painkillers, but that they were going to put him in a medically induced coma because not even the strongest fruits of the opium flower could hold this pain at bay.
“Can we see him?” Cruz asked.
The doctor, already heading away to his next emergency, waved a hand over his shoulder and said, “You won’t like what you see.”
“I can’t see him,” Shade said.
“You need to say good-bye to him,” Cruz said. It came out harder, more accusatory than she intended.
Shade shook her head. “I saw her, I saw my mom in the body bag, and every night before I fall asleep . . . I don’t want to be haunted by Malik, too.”
Cruz knelt before her and took her hands, prying them away from Shade’s face. “Honey, if you don’t you’ll be sorry later.”
“How the hell could I be more sorry than I already am?” Shade raged.
“Well, I’m going,” Cruz said. She stood, feeling the aftereffects of adrenaline wearying her muscles.
Malik was alone in a bed, his head slightly elevated. He was entwined in electronic leads and plastic tubes, one of which was down his throat. He was swathed like a mummy with only a strangely undamaged left hand free.
He trembled, every muscle in his body seeming to vibrate like a tuning fork. Pumped full of morphine, he was still conscious, with one eye open, staring through a gap in the white gauze. That eye looked at Cruz, stared at her from the bowels of hell.