Hero (Gone 9)

Thanks, Albert. That’s . . .”

“I watch the news, Astrid. I know what’s going on. I also know the only reason I have what I have, including my life, is because of your husband. So, down to my last penny if you need it, Astrid.”

She texted him the name of the product.

She had most of what she needed and would soon have the rest. There was only one thing left to do.

Astrid went to their small, tidy kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She weighed an ounce of the ground rock on her digital kitchen scale. Then she mixed the powder into the juice.

She heard the sound of a key at the front door. Sam.

“Here goes,” Astrid said, and quickly drank the juice down.

CHAPTER 15

Over There

“IT’S TERRIFYING,” DEKKA said. “I’ve seen bad things, way too many bad, bad things, but . . .” Words failed her. She shook her head.

Francis sat silent, as usual, watching the people she irrationally thought of as “the grown-ups.” Or maybe it wasn’t so irrational; after all, they were each more “adult” than the adults in the biker gang she and her mother had lived with.

Their borrowed brownstone had a small yard, and they all felt like they’d spent way too much time in casinos and hotels and planes. They were craving fresh air and sunlight, and at the moment the sun was peeking through clouds, so four of them sat on lawn furniture while Dekka paced back and forth across the brick patio and Armo did chin-ups on a child’s rusting swing set.

“Social media is in a panic,” Cruz reported, looking up from her phone.

“Over this Pine Barrens thing?” Dekka asked, frowning.

“Someone streamed video.”

They all huddled together to watch a fifteen-second video play. It was nothing but wildly blurry images and screams, all set to the soundtrack of machine guns.

“Don’t read the comments,” Cruz warned. “Half the people are like, ‘good, kill them all.’”

Shade said, “Not that I usually follow the stock market, but they had to close it down because people are freaking out and selling everything.”

“It’s worse in some places,” Malik said. “There’s video of something that looks like a slug three miles long slowly eating Shanghai. They’re evacuating the city—twenty-four million people—because the Chinese may have to drop a nuke on their largest city to kill the thing. People in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being inverted, turned inside out, if they disobey some character who calls himself the Supreme Caliph of the Universe. They’ve stopped the London Tube because something—no one knows what—is down in the tunnels spraying sulfuric acid on anyone who comes within fifty feet. A bunch of countries have been taken over by their own armies, and Rockborn are being rounded up.” He shook his head dolefully. “I don’t see the endgame. I don’t see how we ever get back to normal.”

“Normal is dead,” Shade said harshly.

Francis liked Malik. He was always very kind to her, always deferential when he wanted her to do something. Shade Darby was a different story—she was not mean or cruel, but neither was she exactly warm and cuddly.

“The rest of the world will have to take care of itself,” Shade said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “We’ve got enough on our plates.”

Cruz sighed. “People are saying there’s someone up in Harlem who looks like some kind of human-rhinoceros hybrid who’s just destroying storefronts for no reason. They’re also saying there’s some blue girl flying around, and a woman who grew thirty feet tall and started tearing open liquor stores and drinking gallons of booze. They say she’s passed out drunk in front of the Flatiron Building. People are taking selfies.”

She turned her phone around to show Francis a picture of a massive woman’s head, easily six feet from chin to crown, eyes closed. On her forehead someone had used a thick Sharpie to write Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum. Someone else had plastered a bumper sticker over her upper lip so that it looked like a bad mustache. The bumper sticker read, I was an honor student—I don’t know what happened. And those were some of the more polite ways passersby had amused themselves.

Francis was shocked, though she knew her reaction was silly. There were about a thousand more important things than worrying about a giant unconscious woman. But the sight of a woman passed out reminded her of her mother, and of her old life. Francis missed nothing about that old life, but she’d had no time to begin to cope with the reality of her mother’s death. Her mother had once been loving and kind and concerned before the meth addiction had relentlessly stripped away so much of her humanity.

Not for the first time, but with special urgency now, Francis realized that she was alone in the world, but for the Rockborn Gang. She had nowhere else to go. No one else to be with. This gaggle of strangers was the closest thing she had to family.

Dekka said, “You know it’d be easier to think about playing superhero if people weren’t such tools. But giant naked drunk women aren’t our problem, at least not right now. We could probably take care of the crazed rhino, but the bug guy is on a different level.”

Armo sauntered over from the swing set. “I got this Rhino dude. You want to come, Cruz?”

“Me?”

Armo shrugged. “I don’t need to be here for the strategizing. I’d rather, you know, do some superheroing.”