Monster (Gone 7)

And Shade was left with Cruz. They stood side by side looking stupidly at the swinging door through which Malik had disappeared.

“Pray,” Shade said to Cruz. It was somewhere between an order and a plea. “You believe in all that, so pray. Okay? Pray.”

“I am praying,” Cruz said. And silently added, For him, for you . . . for the whole human race.

CHAPTER 27

Heroes, Villains, Monsters

DEKKA AND ARMO stood side by side watching the huge mutant starfish struggle in the water, watching steam billow up, watching the surge of water splash up and over the dock.

A new helicopter, much larger, was hovering, looking for a place to land that wasn’t aflame. The Coast Guard cutter pumped futile cannon and machine-gun rounds into the water.

“What do we do, bet on the outcome?” Armo asked.

“If I had my old power, I could move that rock somewhere, well, I was going to say ‘safe,’ but what the hell does that even mean?” Dekka wondered.

One of the meat puppets seemed to notice her, and the creepy human-starfish hybrid creature came at a run. Dekka shredded it with barely a glance.

But then, one of Vincent’s legs slapped the dock and with its tubules began slowly, wearily, it seemed to Dekka, pulling itself all the way onto the dock.

The Coast Guard ceased firing because a miss now might kill innocent civilians.

Dekka and Armo backed away, retreating faster and faster, as the creature filled most of the parking lot, not quite as big as it had been since it had lost arms to both the densovirus and Napalm’s fury, and the regrowing sections were shorter. But it was still enormous, and the belt of poisonous tentacles still writhed and lashed, reaching out almost as far as the creature’s red legs. And, like a model riding atop a nightmare vision of a parade float, Vincent Vu still emerged from the central circle at the nexus of the arms.

“We have a winner,” Armo said bleakly.

“Yeah.” Dekka raised her hands and howled and . . . nothing. “Too far away. Damn. I was sure hoping this worked from a distance.”

Vincent wrapped one thick leg around the Mother Rock and seemed almost to cuddle it.

Behind them the big new helicopter hovered a few feet above burning wreckage. The helicopter’s door slid open, and Dekka saw its main passenger.

“It’s that Knightmare guy!” Dekka said. “Great, now the freak show is complete.”

Knightmare jumped down from the chopper, indifferent to the fact that one talon foot landed on a charcoal corpse, crushing it to powder.

“Whose side is he on?” Armo wondered.

“Ours. For now,” Dekka said, pointing out that Knightmare stood facing Vincent, the long sword arm at the ready.

“You want to help him?” Armo asked.

“Do you?”

Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare, had fought Shade Darby. He had murdered airline passengers in cold blood. He had torn the Golden Gate Bridge apart. None of that his fault, all of it simply . . . necessary and thus forgivable.

DiMarco had tortured and twisted him, had stuck her vile control devices in him and used electric shocks to force him to morph for her. But in his own mind, Justin was still an artist. His eyes still sought out the unique, the extreme, the shocking.

Nothing in his experience had prepared him for what he now faced. It was, in its own way, a demented masterpiece. Something small and perhaps creepy but not in any way frightening had been turned into this creature that somehow combined absolute terror with an element of the comic. The thin brown kid was like something out of a cartoon, a weird, impossible blend of incompatible life-forms conjured by alien artists working on a huge canvas.

Justin swallowed in a dry throat. His mind yammered a running commentary mostly consisting of places he could run away to, and curses directed at DiMarco. That and the phrase It’s too big!

The hated female voice came from a loudspeaker in the air, from the Sikorsky, which had risen to a safe two hundred feet and now beat the air over their heads. “Attack! Attack!” the voice ordered.

Justin sighed shakily. Attack, or DiMarco would send intolerable pain exploding through his body. Attack, or let DiMarco reduce him to helpless immobility to be destroyed by the creature.

But still, part of Justin’s mind noted the color of the creature, admired the uncanny valley effect of a boy half riding, half absorbed into a creature that had never, could never, exist in the dull and predictable universe where Justin had lived his life.