Monster (Gone 7)

Shade’s legs suddenly bent backward, the knees reversing direction. Her thighs swelled with muscle clad in dull armor the color of dried blood.

In seconds Shade was a terrifying hybrid creature, human mostly from the waist up, though a sleek, streamlined version of herself. From the waist down she might have been some terrifying insect or great bird. Shade stood balanced easily on narrow, spiky claws. Altogether she was several inches taller than normal, with her weight forward like a speed skater in motion, her face and hair looking as if they had been smeared back by a hurricane wind, her hair backswept into reddish spikes.

Cruz gibbered in incoherent terror, nonsense sounds, the urgent need to flee all but irresistible. And suddenly Shade was gone! There was a sudden sharp gust of wind and a loud crack! Cruz heard the heavy sound of bodies falling on grass, and to her amazement, the two punks were on their backs.

The Shade-not-Shade creature stood vibrating between Cruz and the fallen men, vibrating like she’d grabbed a power line. A buzzing sound came from her, like a large mosquito.

“Sorry. Need. To. Talk. MoreslowlyIguess,” Shade said in a voice that sounded syrupy, like someone slowing the replay on an audio file. “I. Did it!”

Cruz nodded, struck dumb, able to do nothing but stare.

Shade had something in her hand—her relatively normal hand. It was the gun, the one Sunglasses had in his waistband. Cruz was about to tell her to throw it away when Shade did just that. She threw the gun in the direction of the lake. The gun should have flown twenty or thirty feet and landed on the grass between tombstones. Instead there was a crack! and the gun, breaking the sound barrier, sailed over the tallest headstones, over the length of the graveyard, over Lake Shore Drive, and splashed in the water of Lake Michigan, a quarter mile away.

The two vandals crawled off, yammering to each other in scared voices about “crazy bitches!”

Shade, still vibrating said, “I think. I have. Super-speed.”

“Yeah,” Cruz said.

Shade jumped, straight up. She flew up and out of sight, a darkness against stars, then fell more slowly at gravity-normal speed and landed hard, buckling her back-turned knees.

She recovered quickly and said, “Jump. Good. Landing. Notsomuch.”

Then Shade’s new and unutterably disturbing form began to fade to normal. Cruz stared in fascination at the legs reversing direction again, at the feet becoming human feet once more. It was not as simple or as easy as a dissolve between two images; there was more movement, more twisting and shrinking and fleshing out. But finally she was Shade again, a girl standing in ripped jeans. Shade retrieved her shoes, took a knee, and laced them up.

“Good,” Shade said. “I was worried I couldn’t change back despite last night. That’s a relief.”

“Okay, that . . . ,” Cruz began before realizing she had no descriptors big enough to cope with what she’d seen.

“It’s amazing, Cruz,” Shade said. But her tone did not mirror the words. She sounded wary, worried. Which, Cruz thought, was the very mildest possible reaction to having your entire body transform.

They got back to the fence and found it quite a bit harder to squeeze through with the jagged wire pointing at them rather than away, but when they finally pushed through, cursing small wounds, they saw that they were not alone.

Shade sighed, shook her head ruefully, and said, “Malik?”

“Yeah.” He was leaning against his car, a little two-seat BMW. “I sort of, um . . . followed you,” he said.

“You saw?” she asked.

“I saw something,” he said. “Something that should not be possible. Not even in a graveyard at night. What the hell have you done, Shade? What the hell have you done?”

ASO-4

ASO-4 WAS SCHEDULED to land in the mountains on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. An American SEAL team, launched secretly from a base in Kazakhstan, where Professor Martin Darby and a dozen others watched helmet-cam feeds on monitors, raced to the impact site, hoping to get in, seize the meteorite, and get away before hostile tribesmen knew they were there.

It was night, and the night belonged to the SEALs with their owl-eyed night-vision equipment.

Two helicopters landed while one stayed aloft, turning circles, its guns and missiles on a hair trigger, sensors scanning. Farther aloft floated a drone flown by a pilot sitting seven thousand miles away at a console at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Farther up still, two USAF F-16 jets bristling with smart missiles zoomed back and forth at near Mach 1 speeds. Some distance away flew the USAF airborne refueling tanker and the USAF E-3G, which watched everything with its array of electronics. And finally, three hundred miles up and well outside the atmosphere, a French satellite trained its cameras down and relayed its pictures to Paris, Langley, and the Pentagon.

But all that technology was of no use in the end. A Kazakh interpreter had earned two hundred dollars (and his life) by giving advance warning to members of the Haqqani Network, among the world’s best-trained, best-disciplined terrorists. The Haqqanis had no notion of what was happening, just that a SEAL team was landing two miles away from a nameless village of six families, all devoted to raising goats and transporting opium.

The Haqqanis had long since learned to be wary of American technology. They knew about the eyes in the sky. They knew that their heat signatures would be picked up, so they had arrived early and nestled deep in rock crevices, piling brush above themselves and driving a small flock of sheep and goats into the area to add to the signal confusion.

The SEALs landed, leaped out, and formed a perimeter. They were the best-trained soldiers in any army and the Haqqanis had a cautious respect for them, so they waited to see just what all this hubbub was about before starting a fight.

From the second helicopter came different soldiers. These moved with far less liquid grace, and instead of automatic weapons they carried instruments.

The Haqqanis watched, puzzled, as these new arrivals walked back and forth in a grid pattern, before finally circling around a small patch of what, to the Haqqanis’ eyes, looked a bit like a bomb crater.