Monster (Gone 7)

Free rent, free beer, Netflix w

orks . . .

But of course she knew this was not the whole of it. She was a lab rat, she supposed, some kind of experiment. After all, DARPA was all about research, wasn’t it? Supersmart scientists all beavering away looking for new and exciting ways to kill America’s enemies?

I’m a lab rat. But I’m a lab rat with two pints of Half Baked.

Ten minutes later there was only one pint of Half Baked, and between the hot shower and the long drive and the stress of uncertainty—along with a degree of excitement, she had to admit—Dekka got sleepy. She took from her bag the one personal item she’d brought, propped her picture of Brianna on the nightstand, and fell asleep.

The next morning the fun began.

Dekka endured hours of psychological tests, followed by part of an afternoon of physical tests, with mounting impatience—patience had never been Dekka’s thing—before finally calling an irritated stop.

“We’re done,” Dekka said.

“Actually,” the medical tech said, “we still have—”

“And yet: we are done.”

“But we—”

“Hey. Listen to me. Listen to the words coming out of my mouth.” There was a voice that Dekka could access when necessary: it was her don’t screw with me voice. It was not the voice of a nineteen-year-old young woman, it was the voice of a person who had survived hell and was impressed by absolutely no one. “We. Are. Done. So pull the damn needle out of my arm.”

The tech pulled the needle out and slapped on a bandage.

“Thanks.”

Tom Peaks appeared, as she suspected he would. “So, are you all finished up here?” he asked brightly.

“Can we not waste time pretending that you don’t have me under surveillance every minute of the day?”

Peaks emitted a snort that might have been a laugh. “All right, let’s do that.”

“Good. What happens next is that you tell me what all this is about.” It was not a question or a suggestion, it was her precondition for going forward.

Peaks jerked his head toward the door. “Join me for a cup of coffee?”

He led her down the stairs, down below ground level, to a long hallway that led to another long hallway—it was a corridor kind of place, the Ranch: more of it underground than above. Finally they arrived at a set of stairs that they climbed to reach a mostly depopulated cafeteria. Peaks fetched coffee and they sat at a table beside a window that opened onto an interior courtyard. There was a small knot of people in the courtyard smoking, and Dekka felt the inner tug of the reformed ex-smoker. She had smoked for almost two years after escaping the FAYZ, and quitting had not been easy. Not even a little bit.

Peaks laid his briefcase on the table, slid his laptop out, and opened it so she could see the screen. Peaks then came around the table to sit beside her. He tapped keys and a YouTube video opened.

Dekka instantly recognized the freeze-frame. “I’ve seen it.”

“Let’s watch it again.” The video was poor quality, a fixed camera, obviously a surveillance camera showing the bright interior of a 7-Eleven, and they were looking down at rows of food and a cold case beyond, stocked with beer and bottled water.

And suddenly there was what looked like a girl. The girl just appeared, considering the potato chips. She was unusual in the extreme: her skin appeared to be gold, like the doomed woman in the old James Bond movie Goldfinger. Her hair was black, but looked less like thousands of small strands and more like a sort of flexible plastic.

The girl moved in the blink of an eye to the magazine section. She grabbed three celebrity gossip magazines and was suddenly, simply . . . gone.

“Like I said: I’ve seen it.”

“You know who it is.”

Dekka shrugged. “It looks like Taylor.”

“Who is . . .”

“One of the kids from the FAYZ. She could teleport.”