Monster (Gone 7)

And then Dekka stopped, looked right at him, and said, “Please.”

Orders? Armo did not take orders.

Requests? Well . . .

He threw Dekka a mock salute with his paw and charged straight at Drake.

“Now, let’s talk, Tom Napalm Peaks, you liar, you criminal freak,” Dekka said.

She raised her hands, palm out, opened her mouth, and shrieked.

Instantly Napalm’s volcanic rock shell began to come apart, flakes of stone rained down like hail, and Napalm bellowed in outrage. He opened his mouth and ejected a mass of lava. Dekka’s shredding lacerated the molten rock, sent drops in every direction, but too much got through. A glob of liquid fire attached to Dekka’s forearm, another to her belly. She backed away, batting at the fire, but it stuck to her claws now, and even her higher pain threshold did little to lessen the excruciating, imperative, panic-inducing agony of burning alive.

Dekka dropped her hands and dodged sideways seconds ahead of a full load of fire that spilled across the ground she’d occupied, spread out in a puddle, and reached the tires of a parked car. The tires melted and burned. The heat of the fire was so intense that the fur on Dekka’s arms singed and curled. Her snake dreads twisted away, sheltering behind her head.

Armo, looking like some deranged artist’s conception of a polar bear mated with a human, ran straight at Drake, straight at Shade, an out-of-control berserker beast in a furious charge. Drake frowned and tried to jump aside, but in the process he lessened his grip on Shade for just a split second—a split second that was the equivalent of a leisurely ten seconds to Shade. She bent her knees back, dropped through his coiled arm, and then stumbled forward, landing on hands and knees in the liquid fire.

“Aaaahhhh!” came the mosquito buzz of pain.

Armo hit Drake like a ton of bricks and sent him skidding on his back. But Drake was quick and, like Dekka, was a veteran of many fights. He rolled to his feet and aimed his whip and . . . And Armo ran straight into him again, an irresistible force, a wild white-furred beast gone absolutely mad, slashing with its diamond-hard claws, biting with steel teeth, pummeling with knees and elbows, a whirlwind of incoherent, insane animal violence.

“You brought a sidekick?” Dekka said to Napalm. “Me too.”

Once again she raised her hands, trying to ignore the pain of burns, and again the stony shell began to come apart, to disintegrate. It was like a time-lapse video of a mountain eroding, but still small drops of fire burned Dekka. She was hurting Napalm, but not fast enough, and this time the liquid fire was a flood, a fire hose spreading smoking destruction, Napalm turning his head from side to side. The magma rolled into and over Dekka’s feet and she screamed, an eerie part-feline howl of pain and terror and rage.

The fire spread toward Drake as well, on his back beneath Armo’s berserker onslaught. Drake dug in his heels and tried to scoot himself away, but like a tsunami the fire swept around him, frying him like a piece of pork fat in a barbecue. Drake felt no pain, but the fire did damage, eating into the sinews of his newly regrown back, melting the meager flesh of his buttocks.

The face on Drake’s chest howled in shrill hysteria.

Armo’s knees were in the flames, and if anything could penetrate his berserker madness, that was it. He jumped back, balanced atop Drake, and used him as a launchpad to leap free.

Dekka was beyond pain. Her feet were melting. Flame ran up the fur that covered her. She screamed in pure panic, screamed, and ran as flame engulfed her, ran as flame rose to blind her, straight for the water, straight toward the Okeanos.

Water! Water!

Napalm turned away with a derisive laugh

and with long strides marched, unstoppable, after her, the Okeanos momentarily forgotten in his hunger to annihilate one of the two young women who had destroyed his career and life’s work.

The Coast Guard cutter then opened up suddenly, spraying Napalm with machine-gun fire.

To no effect.

A military helicopter gunship arrived in a rush, tilted forward, a deadly, matte-black insect. It launched a missile that hit Napalm squarely in the shoulder, exploded, and blew smoking chunks of volcanic rock from him, baring a patch of fire like some inflamed scab. Napalm bellowed incoherently, wordlessly, at the helicopter, but did not slow his progress.

Now the Coast Guard opened up with the Bofors gun. Its 57 mm shells carried less punch than the missile, but it could fire two hundred rounds a minute, three rounds a second, and its aim was accurate. The shells exploded against Napalm’s chest like a jackhammer: Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

Napalm took a step back, took another, and dodged to his left, which placed the Okeanos’s superstructure between himself and the Bofors gun. The shelling stopped.

Dekka hit the water and was already de-morphing by the time the oily liquid closed over her head. As she changed, the clinging liquid fire was drowned by the water and fell away. She stayed under as long as her wind lasted, then pushed back into the air and began clambering up over sharp rocks. To her intense relief, the burning pain was gone.

She raised a foot from the water and saw that it was still there, and human once again. But now the memory of the flames consuming her weighed her down, made her hesitate. The Dark Watchers did not like that, not at all, and with urgent silence they cheered her on.

A burning Armo suddenly splashed into the water beside her. He thrashed and roared until he, too, resumed his normal human shape.

The two of them, beaten, terrified, and with searingly recent memories of unimaginable pain, bobbed in the oily water, trembling from cold and fear.

And Napalm faced the Okeanos, ready to claim his prize.