Destroy All Monsters

by Sam J. Miller

  “Did your mom even care what your side of the story was?”

  “It didn’t matter. She thought that I wasn’t in control, that my gift involved some kind of dark magic.”

  I stood up. “And now Commissioner Bahrr and the Shield are working together. And he has Connor, and Niv. How are we going to stop him?”

  Ash shut her eyes. I saw them twitching; saw them move back and forth beneath her eyelids. Trying to control what she saw; trying to track down information that could help us.

  Finally she opened her eyes. Shook her head no.

  “You’ll get it,” I said.

  Queen Carmen had kept her a secret. She was afraid her daughter wouldn’t be safe if everyone knew she was an othersider. But what if the opposite was true? What if the secrecy made us vulnerable? Darkside had so few proud, visible othersiders. We stayed in the shadows. Hate and fear kept us quiet.

  Ash could change all that. If she stepped into the spotlight, if everyone knew what she was, maybe we could stop being scary stories that people like the Shield told to make people afraid, and to make themselves more powerful.

  “We need to get out of this rain,” she said.

  “There’s a brakeman’s hut over there,” I said. We headed that way.

  A sound like thunder echoed through the sky, but unlike thunder it just kept growing.

  “Ash,” I said, pointing to something very high up, bright lights flickering on the wing of something impossibly far away.

  “That’s an airplane,” she said.

  “What the fuck is an airplane?”

  “A machine,” Ash said. “Like a really big trolley that flies. It can go very vast distances very quickly. Over sea, over land.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “Ever since I woke up, I know lots of weird things that don’t make a lot of sense. Stuff from . . . the other side?”

  “So why can I see it now?”

  She shrugged again. The airplane’s howl echoed across the sky. “Maybe we broke the universe.”

  Forty-Seven

  Ash

  There is no other word for it: I howled.

  I knew there was nothing to say. No words that would fix this. But I couldn’t be silent. Couldn’t shut my mouth. I wept, and I wailed, and I screamed, and I howled. I dropped to my knees, because it was getting hard to breathe. Probably I was hyperventilating. Hopefully I was dying. It would be so much easier to never have to stand up again.

  The universe was broken.

  I howled until my eye twitched uncontrollably, until a headache wrapped all the way around my cranium.

  “Ash,” Solomon said, high above me in the rain.

  “Oh god, Solomon,” I said. “Oh god, I am so, so sorry.”

  “Ash, no,” he said, and got down on his knees beside me. “It’s not your fault.”

  I remembered everything. Lying on my back, on the ground. Moving in and out of consciousness. Seeing him in the doorway up above me, holding on to the tattered red blanket. Seeing Mr. Barrett behind him. His pants hastily, sloppily pulled up.

  The hospital, after. My arm, broken. My skull cracked, around my eye.

  More importantly, I remembered the not remembering. The days of darkness. The way nothing was clear. The dream I’d had, that city of rain and fire and monsters, giant squids and manta rays that swam through the skies, spiders as big as people who infested vacant buildings.

  I lay back, into the mud. Solomon lay back too. I grabbed his hand. Our fingers interlaced.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have done something. Said something. But I didn’t remember. Not enough . . .” Since that day all that had remained was a suspicion. A fear. A knowledge that Solomon had been hurt in some irrevocable way. And that I couldn’t do anything about it. And sometimes there wasn’t even that.

  “You blocked it out by accident,” he said. “I did it on purpose. I was so scared, all the time. I used to have nightmares. They started bleeding into when I was awake. I tried my hardest not to think about it. To lock it up tight. And eventually, I guess it worked. I knew I hated him—I knew I was afraid of him—but I never knew why. The other night, after the bonfire, things started to come back to me. But now . . .”

  Thunder boomed twice in the time I spent waiting for Solomon to finish his sentence.

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to calm the headache that originated there. The pressure helped only a very tiny bit.

  I said, “We have to make him pay.”

  “We can’t,” he said. “Football coach, All-American dad. Who do you think they’ll believe?”

  “It won’t be your word against his,” I said. “I saw it. I remember it, now.”

  “He’s buddies with lawyers,” Solomon said. “And they’ll say ‘How convenient that you remember everything, all these years later.’ Poor kid, she fell out of a treehouse, went weeks in the hospital. Her best friend is a fucking mental case and he’s in trouble. She’s desperate to help him. She’d say anything. She may even believe what she’s saying. Poor kid.”

  He was right, of course. Apparently he watched the same shitty cop shows as my mom.

  “Some other way,” I said. “We can make him pay. I don’t know how, but . . .”

  “Like what?” Solomon said. “Cut his brake lines? That man already did enough damage to me, Ash. I refuse to let him hurt me anymore. Or you.”

  A train whistle split the night.

  “We should move,” I said. “We’re pretty close to the tracks.”

  “We’ll be fine where we are,” he said. “I come here all the time.”

  We could hear the metal rails whine. These weren’t the freight tracks, where the trains came through slow and solemn. These were the passenger lines, that stretched north to Montreal and south to New York City, and from there to every city in the country. Follow them long enough, and we could get anywhere.

  I took my hands off my eyes. The world looked different, now. Brighter. Weirder. I couldn’t see the other side of the river anymore.

  The ground shook, as the train came nearer. I propped myself up on my elbows, to see it better.

  The headlight cut the night in two, swinging around the bend, catching us in its wide, bright sweep. The conductor, who must have seen us, blew his horn. Three short toots, a friendly sort of hello. Probably train conductors saw a lot of weird shit out their windows.

  And then it was screeching past us, and the light from the windows turned us a deep shade of amber. Solomon wasn’t looking. His eyes were on the sky. The rain. The spot where the moon was showing a rip in the clouds, in the distance, to the west, where they were ragged and torn, like maybe this storm would finally be coming to an end.

  I looked. I saw the people inside, asleep or reading or watching things on phones or tablets. Some were looking out the window, but they were all peering into the distance, the Catskill Mountains, the lights of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge up ahead. Dreaming of their destinations.

  Only a little girl saw me. Just for a split second, but I saw her eyes widen. I wondered what she thought of the filthy wet woman in the mud, in the night, in the pouring-down rain. At first I hoped she wasn’t too scared, and then I decided it was okay if she was. The sooner you learned there were monsters in the world, the better.

  I watched the train until it was long gone, leaving us alone with the river and the rails and the sky.

  The sky, where something moved. Too solid to be a cloud. Moving too fast. Black as the night. Swimming through the air with broad slow strokes of a massive tail.

  “Do you see that?” I asked, pointing.

  “The sky whale? Of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, and watched a massive sea creature as it descended from the sky and dove into the river.

  Of course the world would never be the same again. We had passed through something, Solomon and I. Fighting it wouldn’t do me any good. Whatever weird shit came along, I would roll with it.


  “I know what to do with you,” I said.

  “Do with me,” he said, and laughed. “Is this the part where you take me out in the back, tell me about the rabbits, and shoot me in the head?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I never liked Of Mice and Men, anyway. I’ll sneak you into my basement; you can sleep there tonight.”

  He sat up. “I’ll be fine out here. There’s an old duck hunter’s shed, in the swamp not far from here.”

  I sighed. “It’s late October and you’ve been out in the rain and it’s going to get cold as hell tonight. You’re not sleeping alone in a dark shed in a goddamn swamp.”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” he said. “It does sound kind of terrible.”

  We went back to my car, and got inside. I turned the key, cranked up the heater, but didn’t put the car in drive right away. Instead, we sat there, listening to rain hitting the roof.

  Forty-Eight

  Solomon

  Rain tapped away at the tin roof over our head. The brakeman’s hut smelled of oil and stale tobacco, but it was dry. Ash lay with her head in my lap. We held hands. Our teeth chattered.

  I thought, I could really go for a cup of Radha’s hot milk tea right now.

  And then I thought, My gods. Radha.

  Connor.

  “What?” Ash asked, when I sat up with a start.

  I leaned forward, pressed my hands to my temples.

  Thirty whole minutes had gone by, and I hadn’t thought about him once.

  They took him. This beautiful kid, this boy with an incredible gift. They were going to take it away from him. If they didn’t do something way, way worse.

  “What’s the matter?” Ash asked, sitting up, rubbing my back.

  “It’s Connor,” I whispered, hating how much it hurt to say his name. “And Niv.”

  I told her everything. The rhythm of the rain slowed down, in the time it took me to tell her. And then we just sat there. Something huge and heavy moved through the night outside our little hut—maybe a titanosaur, maybe a land dragon. Then it stopped, and let loose the most heart-rending wail. Like a foghorn on the edge of forever, crying out for ships that never come.

  Ash stood.

  “This is my fault,” she said. “Those Destroyers came looking for me.”

  I took her hand, started to say, No, don’t say that, you couldn’t have known, it wasn’t even your choice to come to the Underbridge.

  “We’ll get them,” she said, before I could get out a single word. “I promise you that.”

  I believed her. I had no reason to, but I did. Something in her voice was unshakeable. I should have known right then and there what she was planning. What she was willing to do.

  I wasn’t scared. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Ash and I were together, and together we were unstoppable.

  Forty-Nine

  Ash

  Long after midnight. The streets were dark and wet. No one was out. The world belonged to us and us alone. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Solomon and I were together, and together we were unstoppable.

  The whole drive home, I practiced my lying. Said things out loud over and over again. Practiced my responses to every conceivable thing my parents would say. Kept my face blank, empty. Rooted out all my tells, every little tic and jerk and eye movement that might let on to them when I wasn’t being 100 percent honest. Until I felt . . . ready.

  Two blocks from my house, I pulled over. “Get in the back and lie down on the floor,” I told Solomon. “Stay there for the next thirty minutes. Do you have a watch?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Phone?”

  “No.”

  “Well, shit. Try counting to sixty thirty times. Then get out—don’t slam the door—and go around back. I’ll have unlocked the door to the basement by then. I’ll leave you some sheets and blankets and stuff.”

  “You still have that big Totoro beanbag chair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to sleep on that.”

  “Of course,” I said, touching his wet arm. “Although it might not be as big as you remember it. We’ve both grown a lot, since we were ten.”

  He frowned, got out, went around to the back seat. When he was in the car again I pointed to the side of the road, where a trio of rabbits as big as dogs, with antlers like deer, were chewing on a bush. “Should I be concerned about those?”

  “No,” Solomon said. “They’re jackalopes. Harmless scavengers.” He got down on the floor, curled up into the smallest ball he could.

  As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I knew at once that all my preparations were insufficient. Woefully inadequate. Because Mr. Barrett’s car was parked in our driveway.

  Which, of course it was. Because he’d known that sooner or later I’d have to come home. Because finding Solomon was his number one priority. Because he was afraid of Solomon. What Solomon could say, what he could do.

  But, as far as he knew, only Solomon knew the truth of his crimes. I hadn’t said a word in all that time. He believed I had completely forgotten. I needed to make him think I still had.

  So I sat in my car in the driveway and took ten deep breaths, and then went inside.

  “Ash!” my parents exclaimed, when I slammed the door shut, intentionally too loudly, so they’d come running. Which they did.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, making my face expressionless, making my voice sad.

  They saw I was okay. They hugged me. And then they got mad. Assaulted me with questions, one on top of the other.

  “Where the hell have you been—”

  “We called a hundred times—”

  “Left you a million messages—”

  “This bad weather—”

  “Anything could have happened—”

  “All kinds of awful car accidents—”

  “Super sorry,” I said, and took out my phone. “It got soaking wet, out in the rain. I had to turn it off. Take the battery out. Wait for it to dry.”

  This mollified them slightly. An explanation was all they needed. Even a kinda stupid one.

  “Hello, Ash,” Mr. Barrett said, stepping out of the living room. Looking concerned . . . but also looking intimidating. The smell of beer was in the air; baseball gabbed from the television. They’d been sitting around, probably for hours.

  “George was telling us what happened,” Mom said.

  “What you did was very irresponsible,” Dad said.

  “What?” I said, eyes wide, all innocence. “What did I do?”

  “Solomon was signed over into my custody,” Mr. Barrett said. “You were wrong to take him.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said, eyes sad, truly penitent. “But maybe I misunderstood. I thought you said no charges were filed. So he couldn’t even have been technically under arrest. So . . . why would he need to be in anyone’s custody?”

  He frowned. And my father tilted his head slightly. Only I, and maybe my mother, knew that’s what Dad did when something didn’t quite add up. “Not formal custody,” Mr. Barrett said. “But they released him into my care. I felt a sense of responsibility. I was very worried.”

  “He wanted french fries,” I said. “He said you hated McDonald’s”—this was true—“and would never ever take him or Connor there.” Also true. “He asked me to take him. Nothing wrong with that, right?”

  Mr. Barrett opened his mouth, but in the split second of hesitation that followed I saw exactly how to proceed.

  “I took him to your house right after,” I said. “Why weren’t you there?”

  “I was here,” he said, and something was gone from his voice, a small degree of his normal cool and control.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I was waiting for you. The way you two ran off—”

  I laughed, but just a little. “Yeah, I mean, I get that. Solomon was pretty spooked. The county jail will do that to you.”

  “It’s been hours, Ash,” Mom said. “Where have you been all this time?”


  “Me and Solomon went for fries, and a long drive, then went back to Mr. Barrett’s. Like I said, he wasn’t there. If only someone had been home . . .”

  Both my parents looked at Mr. Barrett. Waited for an explanation. Even a stupid one. While he fumbled for it, I proceeded to line up the last few straws that would be needed to break the camel’s back.

  “He was worried,” I said. “Thought you’d be mad at him. Asked me to leave him there. Sitting on your front stoop in the rain.”

  My mom made a small awww noise. Mr. Barrett doesn’t have a porch. No shelter from the storm.

  “You should find him there. That is, if he stayed,” I said. “He might have run off. Gone anywhere, really. You know how Solomon is.”

  No one spoke, not right away.

  Boom. My work here was done. Mr. Barrett was the irresponsible one here. The one who they believed had acted irrationally.

  “Damn,” he said, and chuckled. “You’re right. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. Figured this would be the first place the two of you would go, so I came over, and then me and your mom and dad got to talking, and before you know it, here we are.” He smiled, and my parents smiled back. An explanation; even a stupid one. “Better get home, then.”

  Goodbyes were said, embraces and handshakes exchanged. When Mr. Barrett looked at me, I could see the frustration in his face. He had underestimated me. He didn’t know my intention, but he did know that this conversation had not gone the way he’d fully expected it to.

  And even though I knew it was stupid, dangerous, ran the risk of exposing how much I knew, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “He seemed pretty shaken up to see you. Scared, almost. What’s that about?”

  “Who knows,” Mr. Barrett said, rubbing his chin. Looking dead at me. Eyes ablaze. “You know how Solomon is.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”