Destroy All Monsters

by Sam J. Miller

  “They died?”

  “I assume so. The truth is, nobody knows. But they vanished. One rumor is, they were executed by the Palace, because one or more was going to betray Ash—but I don’t believe that. I know those women. They adored her. Another rumor is, Ash killed them herself. By accident—she attempted to access her power, and it overwhelmed her. Went haywire.”

  “She had a freak-out,” I said, thinking of my own blackout moments. “When they disappeared—was it around the Night of Red Diamonds?”

  Niv nodded. “It was that same night.”

  Neither of us said anything for a long, long while. We had spent our whole lives protecting Ash from the outside world. It never occurred to us that the world would need protection from her.

  At our feet, on the cover of the Clarion, Darkside Police Commissioner Bahrr had his hands on his hips. He wore a polo shirt and seersucker shorts.

  “That asshole,” I said. “What’d he do now?”

  “Eyewitnesses described a secret meeting that took place between Commissioner Bahrr and the Shield.”

  “Are you serious?” I said, eyes widening. “That’s huge! That proves—”

  “Not really. He played it off, said they were just meeting ‘to coordinate efforts for the annual Unmasking Day celebration.’ And also he ‘denied all involvement in the growing Destroyer movement.’”

  “Of course he did.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Ash’s eyes, in that vision of the other side that I’d seen. How they held pain and anger I knew nothing about. How she was my whole world, and I didn’t know what to do to help her. How helpless that made me feel.

  Maraud stepped forward, lowered her head to lick my hair. And then she licked Niv’s. And I felt safe, even though I knew we were not.

  Twenty-Seven

  Ash

  “Ash!” said Mr. Barrett, when he opened the front door. He wore an olive green polo shirt and blue seersucker shorts. They fit him way too well.

  “Connor around?”

  “Football practice,” his father said, putting his hands on his hips in a way that showed off the muscles in his biceps. This was probably not intentional. He just had a lot of biceps. Everything he did showed them off.

  “Shoot,” I said, even though I’d known damn well that Connor wouldn’t be there. I’d jogged over, so I’d arrive out of breath and get invited in for a drink of water.

  He smiled, the kind, generous smile he’d always favored me with. “You look exhausted. Do you want to come in for a glass of water?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I was there for information. Whatever had happened between Mr. Barrett and Solomon’s mother, maybe it could help me figure out the roots of Solomon’s current crisis. We are our damage, at the end of the day. And if I knew the truth, I could help Solomon confront it. Learn from it. Move on from it.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Solomon’s eyes, when he remembered something, in the instant before he ran off into the darkness along the river.

  I followed Mr. Barrett into the house. He smelled like cedar and eucalyptus.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a bottle of water from the fridge. “Do you want some electrolytes?” He opened a cabinet, full of canisters of whey protein and bags of pills and PowerBars and who knew what else. He and Connor are both super-health-obsessed.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Good answer,” he said, and squeezed something from a tiny plastic bottle into my glass. Dark red swirled in the water like blood. “This stuff is really good for you.” In seconds, the whole thing was crimson. I took a sip: fruit punch.

  “Glad to see you’re exercising,” he said, and I wondered if the sentence carried an unspoken follow-up—because you’re so chunky—or whatever. Mr. Barrett could be rough like that. It was something I felt sorry for Connor about.

  “How are your mom and dad?” he asked, continuing the sandwich assembly I had evidently interrupted. A whole stack of ham and cheese on whole grain bread, cut diagonally.

  “Fine,” I said, draining most of my punch and deciding to dive right in. “I saw Solomon yesterday.”

  Mr. Barrett shook his head. “Such a sad case, that kid. I tried, you know. To help him. I would gladly have let him stay here, after she got locked up. But he wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “What happened, exactly?” I said, all innocence. “My mom said something about a fire?”

  Mr. Barrett put his knife down, and looked at me. Was he wondering how honest he could be? Why I wanted to know all of a sudden? “She torched my car,” he said. “Doused it in gasoline, flicked a lit cigarette at it. It was inside the garage at the time.”

  “Oh my god,” I said. “Why did she do that?”

  He rubbed his beard. “She thought I was cheating on her.”

  I laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of humor in it. “Were you?”

  “No,” he said, laughing too. Then he stopped abruptly. “Hadassah was not a well woman.” The exact same words my mom used. “Whatever sickness Solomon has, I wouldn’t be surprised if he inherited it, you know? And she was raised in a very strict Orthodox Jewish community. Turned her back on all that, but it really messed her up.”

  Sounded a lot like gaslighting to me, but I just said, “Wow.”

  “I try to keep tabs on him, you know. Even though he pushed us away, I still care about the poor guy. I hear he’s not doing so well in school. How did he seem, the last time you saw him?”

  “Tough to say,” I said, and I stopped myself, without really knowing why.

  Mr. Barrett did care about Solomon, as far as I could tell. Wanted the best for him. So why did it feel wrong to share Solomon’s stories with him? The dinosaur city and the Refugee Princess? Even to say he was experiencing hallucinations, losing track of what’s real and what isn’t, felt like a betrayal. So all I said was “He’s pretty unhappy.”

  “He’s lucky to have you,” he said. “Solomon needs something stable in his life. Something he can trust. You know how he’s prone to persecution fantasies.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but the words made something click in my mind.

  Persecution fantasies—my father had used the exact same phrase. Except how would Mr. Barrett know that? Solomon hadn’t developed those until pretty recently.

  “Did you want a ham sandwich?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Seems like you’ve got a system here. Everything in its proper place. Just enough. I should get going.”

  “Did you want me to give a message to Connor?”

  “Right,” I said. “Yes. Tell him I stopped by.”

  “That’s all?” He grinned. I wondered if he knew that Connor and I were sleeping together. Or if he thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Or if he’d think less of me, if he knew we were just Friends with Benefits. There was something old-fashioned about Mr. Barrett, under all that scruffy, hip GQ silver-foxness, and I didn’t imagine he’d be super-open-minded about our arrangement.

  So I stopped myself from saying, Tell him I can’t wait to feel his hot body pressed up against mine.

  “No, that’s all,” I told him.

  As I was walking down the driveway, Sheffield came up it.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, not bothering to hide my anger at him.

  “Me and the coach have to meet to coordinate efforts for the annual Halloween dance. How are you doing, Ash? After the dramatic events of last night? I was going to call you, but—”

  “You mean after your little asshole friend tried and failed to murder me? And you and the rest of your little asshole friends didn’t do a damn thing to stop him?”

  “Relax, sister,” Sheffield said. “Everything turned out fine, didn’t it?”

  “No thanks to you. And I’m not your sister.”

  “We would have stopped him.”

  “You’re a liar,” I said.

  Sheffield laughed. “Jeez, okay, Ash, I’m super sorry about what happened. Really. I don’t know wh
at came over Bobby. Except that you were kind of fucking with him. It doesn’t excuse how he acted, but still . . . You’re not completely blameless here.”

  “Don’t you both-sides me,” I said. “Calling someone out on their bad behavior is not the same thing as the bad behavior itself. And you can go ahead and scratch Call Ash to apologize off of your to-do list.”

  “I wasn’t going to call to apologize,” he said, button nose wrinkling up in an ingratiating little smile. “I was going to call to say that if you still wanted to photograph all my little asshole friends, we’re cool with it. The whole team.”

  I blinked. “Why? I pass some kind of test? Is that what last night was?”

  “People were impressed, that’s all. Everybody knows Bobby’s a psycho. The way you stood up to him was pretty impressive. You know, we’re not as diabolical as you seem to think we are.”

  This, I did not believe.

  “Maybe I don’t want to photograph you anymore.”

  “Well, whatever,” he said. “That sucks. But I get it.”

  Silence. Long enough for the artist in me to start whispering.

  Because, actually, last night made me more convinced there was something the team was hiding. Something solid. If I shot them, it would give me more to say about them. About who they were, and what lurked behind their handsome smiles and rugged cheekbones. The terrible things that they did. The terrifying unphotographable darkness behind their eyes.

  As Cass would say, the Truth.

  “I get to pick the place,” I said, after thirty solid seconds of silence. “And the time. And I get to bring people with me.”

  “Well, shit, Ash, this isn’t a damn peace talk. I mean, yes, of course, all those things, but you make it sound like you’re a mobster agreeing to venture into hostile territory to negotiate a ceasefire.”

  “Bye, Sheffield.”

  I left him and walked back to my car. I called Connor. He didn’t answer.

  Sex was best, for feelings of frustration and fear and depression, but when it wasn’t available I’d settle for food. I drove to McDonald’s and went to the drive-through and the man who handed over my burger and french fries had his arms densely tattooed, a giant squid on one forearm and a sperm whale on the other, forever locked in battle, and I wanted him so bad I had to roll up my window fast before I said something stupid.

  And then, miracle of miracles: Connor called me.

  “Hey!” I said, shivering with anticipation, but as soon as he spoke I knew this would not be an intimate encounter.

  “Come over,” he said, his voice small and frail-sounding. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Five minutes later I was back at his house. My head spun.

  “I won’t even bother to ask you to keep this a secret,” he said, when I found him in his backyard. “I know you couldn’t.”

  I sat down in the dirt next to him. Handed him my french fries without thinking about it. He didn’t look up at me. “I should start at the beginning,” he said. “He calls it the Induction Ceremony.”

  “Sheffield?” I asked.

  Connor nodded. “He gives you a task. You have to do it.”

  It was dark out. I could barely see Connor’s face. The treehouse was a black shape in the sky above us, blotting out the stars.

  “A task like flooding Jewel Gomez’s house,” I said. “Or spray-painting fucking swastikas on a Jewish girl’s house.”

  Connor nodded.

  Of course. It was that simple. Sheffield was a manipulative little fucker who liked to be in control. For some reason, he had the entire football team wrapped around his finger. They danced like his puppets, and he got off on every second of it.

  “Once it’s done, his task—once he’s confirmed that it was acceptable—he certifies you as Inducted. And then you get to choose the next person to Induct.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Thunder boomed in the distance. “Storm coming,” Connor said. “Saw it on the news just now.”

  “Why are you’re telling me all this?” I said.

  He looked up at me, and even in the dim light from his kitchen windows I could see the pain in his face. “Because I just got my assignment today.”

  I grabbed his arm, squeezed it. “Can’t you refuse?” I asked.

  “I thought I could,” he said. “My dad is the coach, for Christ’s sake. But they chose me, and Sheffield made the assignment.”

  “He tells you what to do?”

  “Not what. Who. Who to target. The task you do, it’s up to you—although Sheffield can veto it if he thinks you’re letting someone off easy. It just has to be directed at someone specific.”

  “Like Jewel Gomez,” I said. “So? Who is your assignment?”

  It’s me, I thought. Sheffield knew how close Connor and I were. And he had plenty of reason to hate me, since I was apparently the only one who objected to or even cared about his little Ponzi Scheme of Infinite Cruelty. He wanted to mess me up badly by having my Friend with Benefits hurt me somehow. What an absolute—

  “It’s Solomon,” Connor said.

  Thunder, again. I gaped at him. Well, that made even more sense. And made me even madder.

  “Of course,” I said. “That sadistic little shit. Well, you’re going to refuse. Right? Obviously.”

  “That’s the thing,” Connor said. “If you refuse, it’s worse. Because Sheffield will assign that target to someone else. And he’ll devise the task himself. And it will be way more vicious than I would ever be.”

  “This is all completely crazy,” I said. “I can’t believe you all go along with this. Have you told your dad?”

  Connor shook his head.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Sheffield told us not to.”

  I groaned, in exasperation. “I can’t believe everyone on the team knows about all this, and won’t, I don’t know, call the police or tell the principal or something.”

  “I’m doing something,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do about it?” I kind of yelled.

  “I don’t know. But I know you’ll do something. You’re the strongest person I know.”

  Thunder. Lightning. Far away, but getting closer. I had a lot of questions. But I was too angry to ask them.

  “I gotta go,” I said. Clouds were moving in overhead, looking like massive sea monsters getting ready to fight. I thought of the squid and the whale on the arm of the McDonald’s employee.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You have to understand—it all started out really chill. Goofy pranks, things like that. I didn’t realize how out of control it was until—”

  “Save it, Connor,” I said sharply. “You all have a lot of people to apologize to, but I’m not one of them.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Solomon

  The night of the queen’s speech, a sky whale and an air kraken were fighting in the air around the bridge. A bad omen—certainly for the kraken, who put up a good fight but was clearly doomed from the start. The squid spewed black-ink clouds in a spiral from one end of the bridge to the other, as the whale chased it relentlessly around and around. The whale was black against the deep blue twilight sky.

  A battle like that was a rare enough sight that a big crowd gathered, and the oddsmakers were trying their hardest to get people to place bets. Radha and I were out there with them, with Connor holding both our hands, until the fight entered its final stages and Radha hurried us inside so the little boy would not be too badly scarred by the carnage.

  “Is the squid going to win?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But we have to hurry to listen to the queen’s speech.”

  I hoisted Connor up onto my shoulders and roared around the living room until he got distracted from the high-pitched noises coming from the sky.

  “March forward, tyrannosaur,” he said, drumming on my scalp with his little fists.

  “I’m not a T. rex,” I said, making my hands in
to three-clawed paws. “Are you blind? I’m clearly an allosaurus.”

  “March, allosaurus,” he said, his voice high with delight.

  Ash smiled at the sound of it. Niv was frowning over something in the newspaper.

  I marched in slow circles of the kitchen, roaring occasionally. On the radio, commentators were filling the dead air until the Palace broadcast began. Virtually unprecedented, they said, and The impossible task of saying something that will make both sides happy, or at the very least not make either side any angrier.

  “She doesn’t make many speeches. How come?” Connor asked.

  “She’s a very busy woman,” Radha said, and her eyes flitted to the little shrine in the corner. Small paintings of the gods, Radha’s personal pantheon of chosen protectors: the bone-white royal tyrannosaur, and the queen herself at the center of it. “She’s busy working to keep us all safe.”

  “Is that true?” he asked me, sounding skeptical. Niv and Ash avoided eye contact.

  “Of course,” I said.

  You have to kind of lie to kids. The truth is too messy, too ugly, too confusing. You have to give them this little bubble, this all-too-short time when they believe the world is okay. And my lie made Radha smile. She knew about my time in the Palace, but I’d never told her anything about the queen herself and she was too in awe of the woman to even ask.

  The talking heads on the radio cut out, and a blare of trumpets announced a Palace priority message. Usually that meant some kind of emergency—a wildfire, or kraken lord attack. Sometimes it meant that on-street parking would be free for a remembrance or royal birthday. But this time, instead of the mellow spokeswoman who normally made those announcements, a clipped and proper male voice simply said:

  Ladies and gentlemen, Her Majesty, Queen Carmen.

  None of the lengthy honorifics of her full title, the one we all learned by osmosis from street signs and radio clips—by the grace of the gods Queen-Empress of the Middle Valley, Regent-Mayor of Darkside and Governor of the Lower Riversea, Grand Duchess of the Carnivores . . . and so on.

  None of that. Just a short pause, a hiss of static, and then—her voice.