PEAKS FOLDED HIS clothing with trembling hands. He saw a parked van, but there was just some kid at the wheel, and Peaks had bigger issues to deal with.
“You coming?” Peaks demanded.
Drake grinned. “When I’m ready. I want to see what you’ve got first.”
Peaks shook his head slightly and under his breath said, “I wish I knew what I’ve got.” Louder he added, “What I’ve got, my friend, is big, hot, and unhappy.”
Peaks focused his mind on the thoughts most likely to enrage him. In fact, he replayed the scene of his firing, of his humiliation. And change came to Tom Peaks. He heard a sound like wet gears grinding through mud, a sound that vibrated through his bones. The ground began to recede, seeming to fall away from him as he shot up. He looked down and saw misshapen feet already so large that they extended beneath the car, and down through the sunroof he s
aw Drake watching him with wary blue eyes.
Peaks raised his hand to look at it, and it was no longer human in size, color, or shape. His hand looked like one of those Fourth of July “snakes,” like magma vomiting from the mouth of a volcano, black crust over a glowing red beneath.
Peaks was perhaps the most experienced person on earth when it came to the ASO virus and its effects. At the Ranch he had run many experiments, first on test animals and later on humans. He had seen the gruesome, disturbing morphing process, like something out of a demented movie special effects computer.
He had seen it all. But in others, not himself. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, that same helpless feeling, that same dread. But against the astonishment and the fear was fascination.
My God: look at me!
He grew still larger and larger, broader and broader, until he was as big as an African elephant. He glanced down and now Drake was no longer smirking. There was an expression of something like awe on the creep’s cruel face. That look calmed Peaks’s fear. There was nothing as good for calming fear as seeing that you terrified someone else.
Then . . . rage!
It erupted inside Peaks like a muffled bomb of fury and hatred, a rage far out of proportion even to the indignities he’d suffered. He felt as if liquid fire was coursing in his veins, like a nuclear pile was burning in his gut. He felt exalted, transformed!
The power!
Peaks felt as well the presence of unseen eyes, a mocking, interested, malicious gaze, but that did not trouble him while he was in this state, not while he was rising ever upward on a geyser of mad fury.
A red veil fell over his sight and he felt himself, his mind, Tom Peaks himself, flickering like a candle about to go out. But that would not do, it would not do at all, he needed his wits about him, he needed to be able to see and react. And with all the determination at his command, he held on to his consciousness, retained awareness, moving fingers and feet to prove to himself that he controlled this beastly body. But with this accomplishment came the certainty that his control over this monster was tenuous at best. It was as if the creature had a simple, brutal mind of its own, a rage-fueled single-mindedness that competed with Peaks’s own sophisticated consciousness for control. It was a bit like two drivers trying to steer the same vehicle. He could direct his morph, but could not entirely contain its fury.
He was far above the car now, towering over it so that Drake might as well have been a pedestrian passing on the sidewalk beneath a five-story building.
And that was when Peaks made a mistake he would not have made had he had more time to test out this morph. He glared down at Drake and the rage took control. Peaks roared down at Drake, roared in a voice that shattered the windshield and set off the car alarm. And as he opened his mouth and roared, a wave of liquid fire vomited forth.
It was napalm, some rational corner of Peaks’s mind observed, like jellied gasoline, and it did not burn like a flame or even a blowtorch, it stuck and burned. Gallons of it sprayed across the vehicle, instantly peeling paint, dripping down into the car through the sunroof, melting seats and dashboard controls, wilting the steering wheel, sending up a cloud of stinking, oily black smoke.
And Drake, too, burned. He burned and his flesh melted from his face, so that Peaks saw a flame-wreathed skeleton with blue eyes sizzling like frying eggs in their bone sockets.
Drake calmly opened the door of the car, rolled out onto the grass of the baseball diamond, and kept rolling as the napalm clung to him, burning, peeling skin away, frying the meager fat, boiling his blood. Drake rolled, keeping his whip hand tightly coiled around him, then jumped up to run across the grassy field, dropping flaming gobbets of melting flesh as he ran. A long, narrow gap separated the land from the dock, a gap forming a sort of freshwater ditch between dock and land. Drake leaped and disappeared from sight.
For a terribly long time, Peaks stared in furious horror, dimly aware that he had gone to great trouble to recruit a henchman and had now killed him.
But then . . . a whip snapped up from the water and the end wrapped around a tall, lithe palm tree, and with a single, powerful yank, a dripping-wet Drake landed nimbly back on the grass.
He was more skeleton than flesh, white bone clearly visible, his skull, his ribs, one entire shoulder. What flesh remained was the color of a steak left to burn on a too-hot grill. And yet, from the upper part of Drake’s chest, a tangle of chrome wires protruded. But perhaps most terrifying of all, Drake’s whip hand was now a snake’s skeleton, a long, flexible vertebral column and hundreds of circular ribs.
“You’re alive?” Peaks roared, meaning to whisper.
“You’ll have to give me a few minutes,” Drake said, sauntering quite nonchalantly back across the grass from third base, not even seeming resentful. “It takes me a while to regrow.”
CHAPTER 22
Fire, Water, and Shade Darby
“JESUS H. GODZILLA,” Malik said through chattering teeth.
The creature that had once been an unremarkable, middle-aged man now towered over them, and unless Shade was hallucinating, he had just melted a boy with a long octopus-looking arm, and that boy had just climbed out of the car, jumped into the water, and emerged like some unkillable slasher movie villain.