Monster (Gone 7)

o.” She rode on, silent, lost in thought. Well, she asked herself, what are you doing, Dekka? Are you hiding or are you fighting?

Part of her desperately wanted to find Sam and Astrid. She’d been Sam’s sidekick; she’d never before been the one making all the decisions. She, like most of the kids of the FAYZ, had left that burden on his shoulders.

No, she wasn’t doing that to Sam.

Finally, Armo tired of waiting on her. “Wanna know what I’ve been thinking?”

“Yeah?”

“The Port of Los Angeles.”

Dekka digested that for more than a minute, couldn’t figure it out, and said, “Why?”

“Because people think they can drug a guy like me, but they can’t. And I hear things people don’t think I hear,” Armo said smugly. “The big one, the big rock, the Mother Rock, DiMarco calls it. That’s where it’s going. LA.”

A warning light went on in Dekka’s head. Something. Something wrong about going to the Port of Los Angeles. No, not something wrong, exactly; more that it sounded familiar. Like she’d heard the suggestion before. Like it had been whispered to her in a dream.

“I mean,” Armo added, “assuming you’re going to choose fight over hide.”

“Why assume that?”

Armo laughed. He had a nice laugh. “Well, hey, I don’t know you, but I’m kind of thinking you don’t seem much like a girl who hides.”

Oh, but I have been hiding, she thought. I’ve been hiding for four years.

It came to her then that if she couldn’t talk to Sam, she could still guess what his answer would be. His . . . and Brianna’s.

“Neither of us has a phone,” Dekka said. “We should pick up a map.”

“A map to where?”

“A map to you know damn well where,” Dekka said, and Armo laughed into her ear.

CHAPTER 19

Meet the Psychopath

PEAKS LAY ON his back, staring up at a darkening sky. He was shattered.

He picked himself up slowly, not bothering to brush away the dirt that clung to him.

He had done it. He had become . . . something. Something very much not human. Something huge and hugely strong, something brutal and indestructible.

He looked around at a scene of awesome destruction. Thank God he had the sense to find an isolated place, driving well out into the desert. Because everything within a hundred yards had been crushed, ripped apart, thrown, or burned.

The ubiquitous tumbleweeds? Scorched. The nearest Joshua tree? Kindling. The sand itself was gouged or dusted with ash or, in a few places, had been crystalized, turned to brown glass by extreme heat.

Very extreme heat.

Peaks had gone to the Ranch, told a few close associates about the change in command while putting a happy face on it and fooling no one. Then Peaks had spent a couple of hours downloading the contents of the computer onto a hard drive—his insurance policy, if DiMarco and the rest of them ever tried to throw him under the bus for all the, well, questionable judgment calls he’d made.

And he purloined another pound of ground rock. He had left just in time, it seemed, since his successor (now his superior) had been diverted to a battle at the Piedras Blancas lighthouse and would be delaying her arrival at the Ranch, a battle Peaks suspected involved the art student calling himself Knightmare.

DiMarco’s problem now, not mine.

Then Peaks had flown down to Palm Springs, rented a car, and driven out into the desert. He had followed highways and then roads and then dirt tracks out into the middle of nowhere, out to where there was nothing in view but the austere, scalloped hills, the desiccated scrub, and the occasional lizard.

There he had given full vent to his rage, his sense of betrayal, his thirst for what he saw as justice and another person might have called revenge.