Monster (Gone 7)

“My kind of fun,” Drake said.

“You really are a psycho,” Peaks said, shaking his head in amused disbelief.

To his surprise, Drake seemed to consider the idea seriously. He was silent for a while, long enough for Peaks to get nervous. At last Drake said, “I used to be this kid. Probably a little messed up, but still, this kid. Then Sam Temple burned me. Diana had to cut my arm off. Then the gaiaphage gave me this.” He unwrapped his snake arm. He brought the tip close to Peaks’s face, not quite touching, not quite threatening. “I am what the gaiaphage made me.”

He laughed then. “And they like it. The Dark Watchers. They like pain, which is good, because so do I.” Then his mood changed abruptly. “But don’t call me a psycho or any ot

her names you come up with. You can call me Drake, or you can call me Whip Hand. You call me anything else, old man, and I will make you scream my name till your throat is raw.”

Well, Peaks thought, Dekka had not overstated just what a monster Drake was. No, not even a little. He might make a useful ally if he could be controlled.

Big if, he admitted silently. Very big if.

PART THREE: ROUGH BEASTS

CHAPTER 20

First on the Scene

THE PORT OF Los Angeles was a massive, sprawling complex of docks and jetties, huge cranes for off-loading containers, vast parking lots full of Japanese and Korean cars awaiting transportation to dealers, hundreds of container-hauling trucks, warehouses, great cylindrical fuel tanks, motor pools, and squat, unadorned office buildings that looked like overgrown backyard sheds.

All that was on the land, which had been shaped to form multiple bays and inlets and channels, but the land was mere servant to the sea and its ships and tugboats and pilot craft.

Malik drove onto the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a smaller, uglier version of the Golden Gate Bridge that soared over the main channel, just high enough to allow loaded containerships to squeeze beneath. Traffic was sparse on the bridge and Malik pulled over halfway across.

Shade hopped out and went to the rail. To her left was the cruise ship terminal, where a sleek, massively top-heavy Emerald Princess was just tying off. Beyond it, closer to the open sea, was the retired battleship Iowa, its great guns long silenced.

Two ships were in the channel, passing beneath the bridge: the Coast Guard cutter Berthold, and the Okeanos Explorer.

The Berthold, at 420 feet in length, was at once innocent and dangerous, blazingly white with the usual red chevron slanted down the side of the bow, but with a Bofors 57 mm gun in a turret ahead of the superstructure. That superstructure was topped by a mast festooned with sophisticated electronics.

The Okeanos, which the Berthold had escorted into port, was half as long, white but lacking the sort of perfectly maintained, obsessively clean, and painted look of the Coast Guard ship. It was topped by what looked very much like a giant golf ball, a shell surrounding sophisticated radar and other sensors.

Malik and Cruz joined Shade. She pointed and said, “They may not need a superhero; they have some kind of big cannon on that Coast Guard ship.”

“Just be ready,” Malik snapped. “Sorry. I haven’t slept in, like, forever.”

“That container must be for the Mother Rock,” Cruz observed.

“I think they’re pulling in,” Malik said. “Across the channel.”

They hopped back into a freshly purloined SUV—the CHP car had been left in a Costco parking lot—crossed the bridge, followed an off-ramp that led down past seemingly endless expanses of concrete topped by stacked containers, scruffy warehouses, and administrative buildings, crossed some railroad tracks, aimed right for the wharf where the Okeanos seemed to be heading, and ran into a number of signs, one stating that they were nearing Terminal Island, a Coast Guard base, and a second indicating that they were also approaching the Terminal Island correctional facility.

“Great,” Malik said darkly. “It’ll be a short walk to prison.”

There was security in place, so they stopped again, considering their next move.

“We need to get in there,” Malik said. He glanced in the mirror and saw a white van approaching.

“I got it,” Shade said, and immediately began her transformation. She forced herself to look down at the monstrous, insectoid legs that gave her such speed. Her flesh crept and her mind rebelled, still unable to really process it, unable to quite believe that she was physically something other than she’d been her whole life. The liquid, sluicing sounds came through her bones as her body shifted and moved, as she quickly—down to mere seconds now—transformed into a creature that only a close friend would recognize as being Shade Darby.

She glanced at Malik and Cruz. They were staring, and blinking ever so slowly. The white van that had been tearing along at good speed was now barely moving. She ran to it and looked inside. There was only the driver, a burly, thirtysomething white man in overalls. He had an ID lanyard hanging around his neck.

Shade yanked open the van door and hauled out its driver as carefully as she could—although she heard one of the bones in his arm snap—and deposited him beside the road. She couldn’t have him conscious, but he was an innocent bystander, so she slowed her fist so that when it impacted the side of his head the blow wouldn’t crush his skull.

It did, however, snap his head around and cause his eyes to flutter and roll up in his head. He began a slow-mo collapse.

Shade raced back to her friends and de-morphed, feeling clever for having changed back before the Dark Watchers could fully turn their attention on her.