Hero

by Michael Grant

  Still sitting on a floor no doubt crawling with exotic hospital germs, Simone looked past Mary and saw looming over her three people: one in NYPD uniform, two in jeans and blue windbreakers with large yellow letters across the back reading ICE, one male, one female.

  A nurse was with them. She said, “This is one of them.”

  “All right,” the female ICE agent said. She fixed Simone with a no-nonsense look, like a disappointed assistant principal who’d caught her ditching class, and pointed to a gold shield on her belt. “I’m with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, operating under emergency presidential decree.”

  “Wait, what?” Simone frowned and shook her head not so much to say no, but to try and clear her head. “ICE? But I’m a US citizen.”

  “Understood, miss. We’ve been deputized to act in this emergency. It’s for your own safety.”

  Simone was confused, but not so confused that she didn’t know bullshit when she heard it. And as a child of privilege, she knew what words to say. She climbed to her feet, wincing at pains that had become deep aches, fighting the resistance of bruised and stiffening muscles. She said, “I want a lawyer.”

  “We aren’t arresting you, miss. This is for your own protection.” The other ICE agent, a balding man with permanent worry lines around his eyes, tried out the same lie but was even less convincing.

  “I want to see my father. And I want a lawyer. I’m not going anywhere until I—”

  “Miss, you have to come with us.”

  Simone turned to the NYPD officer. “Are you standing there allowing these people to drag an American citizen, a New Yorker, out of a hospital?” The policeman winced, then looked away, clearly not happy with his role.

  “We are the federal government,” the plainclotheswoman said as if that would shut the conversation down. But this was tough New York, not nice Minnesota: New Yorkers were not by nature easy to shut up, and Simone was very much a New Yorker.

  “Hey, Feds are the people who were doing that crazy stuff out in California. I’m not going anywhere with you people.”

  “Under the Special Emergency Decree, we can take you to a secure facility for—”

  “Hey, you!” Simone snapped, pointing at the uniformed policeman again. “You’re NYPD and I’m a New Yorker. Protect and freaking serve, man. Are you going to stand there and let these guys bully me? Where’s the warrant?”

  The policeman seemed to agree, but he shook his head ruefully and said, “I’m sorry, miss, but we have orders to cooperate with the Feds.”

  “I’m an American citizen in a goddamn hospital, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, and I have done nothing wrong. You want me, you’ll have to drag me. Mary! Are you taping?”

  “On it,” Mary said, holding her phone up.

  “You need to put that phone down and wipe that recording,” the male ICE agent demanded.

  But Mary was also a New Yorker and answered, “It’s live-streaming, and basically, screw you. I know my rights.”

  At which point the agent stepped in quickly and snatched the iPhone away as Mary and Simone both unleashed verbal tirades liberally punctuated with F-bombs.

  In the end it took the NYPD officer plus both ICE agents to carry/drag Simone, while fending off Mary, and the five of them went kicking and yelling out through the emergency room and down a corridor to the parking garage, where a black SUV with darkened windows waited.

  From the Purple Moleskine

  FINDING IT HARDER and harder to think about writing fiction. Reality is too weird. I’m part of a group of superheroes, for God’s sake. Best friend can run 800 mph. Malik can make people wish they were dead. Francis moves through walls. There are silent, unseen aliens in our heads when we morph. Just the fact that I can write words like “alien” and “morph” and have them be a real thing, WTF?

  Times I think the Watchers have a sense of humor or irony. Gentle, thoughtful Malik can cause agony. Driven, obsessive Shade can outrun a 787—how perfect for someone always in a hurry.

  Then there’s me. How brilliantly cruel to give me the power I have. Let’s take the trans girl just starting to figure out how to be who and what she is, and give her the ability to appear as anyone of any gender, age, race . . . Not complaining—it’s so much better than what Malik got. Still.

  Now I’m this famous person from an iconic photo. Millions of people who don’t know me have definite opinions about me. Expectations. I’m a hero to strangers and a mystery to myself. The personal is being obliterated. I’m in a war, and the war isn’t about me or what I feel or what I need. I get that. I know I’m just one tiny part of something huge and terrifying. I get that people are scared to death and looking for a hero.

  But I am still just this one person. Just me. Cruz.

  Also I’m thinking way too much about Armo.

  Warning to self: heartbreak ahead.

  If I live that long.

  CHAPTER 3

  Boldly Going Where No 3-D Person Has Gone Before

  “HOLD MY HAND,” Francis Specter said.

  Malik held her hand.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Francis asked. “I’m worried you might get hurt or whatever and it would be my fault.”

  “You took me into the Triunfo to take down Dillon Poe,” Malik said. “I was fine. Weirded out, but fine.”

  They were talking quietly in the separate dining room of the suite because a sunburned Armo and Cruz were watching a movie in the living room, and Shade was reading something on a laptop provided by the casino hotel’s management. Dekka had gone down to replace a broken taillight on her precious motorcycle, involuntarily assisted by two starstruck guys from building maintenance.

  Malik had not exactly cleared this experiment with the others. He worried that if they knew what he was up to, they’d come up with an endless list of objections, and he didn’t want more delay. The others did not have the Dark Watchers constantly, constantly in their heads. They could watch a movie. They could read. Malik was straining just to avoid screaming half the time, not from physical pain but from the crushing humiliation and impotent anger that came from having alien consciousnesses poking through your mind, seeing the world through your eyes.

  Using me. Violating me.

  There were times when anger would almost suffocate him, and that was not a feeling Malik liked. Malik was about doing things, fixing things, and above all, understanding things. Passively raging at invisible creatures in his head was not good for him; it was toxic and foul. It made him feel weak.

  It had been wonderful going to bed the night before with Shade. It had been her move. The assumption had been that the two guys, Malik and Armo, would share a room, but Shade had said, “I want you close so I can keep an eye on you.”

  Awkward had not begun to cover Malik’s feelings. He’d thought of objecting but had not been able to come up with a good rationale. So he’d just nodded and excused himself to take a shower.

  I was not hard to persuade.

  Then Shade had joined Malik in the shower where they helped each other get very, very clean.

  It was the closest Malik had come to being able to ignore the ongoing horror that was his true body now, and the loss of privacy and sanctity that twisted his mind. But even as they were making love, the Dark Watchers had been there, making Malik feel that in some way he was betraying Shade by exposing their intimacy to the voyeurs in the shadows.

  Enough. Enough feeling bad. Time to do something.

  “Okay, so something simple to start with,” Malik suggested to Francis. “The hallway is on the other side of this wall. Shall we?”

  Malik squeezed her hand and smiled encouragingly at Francis, whose eyes became swirling rainbows of color, a rainbow that spread over her face.

  There was a sudden feeling of the whole world tilting sideways, like Malik was looking at it through a prism. Colors shifted toward ultraviolet, and then the world seemed to unfold as if every object, the chairs, the bed, the walls, were origami. They
unfolded and refolded into impossible shapes, nothing still, nothing permanent. He looked at Francis and saw not a girl but a silhouette of light containing rainbows.

  Then he chanced to look down and saw his own feet and legs and nearly screamed, because the view was of the burned-down-to-the-bone legs that were his de-morphed reality.

  He quickly looked away and ordered himself to stay calm, but by that point they were standing, still holding hands, in the hallway outside, and reality was reassuringly 3-D again.

  “Wow.”

  “Are you all right?” Francis asked anxiously.

  “That is one serious roller coaster,” Malik said.

  “Yeah. Totally freaked me out the first time.”

  “I would imagine so,” Malik said dryly. “Are you up for another?”

  Francis shrugged assent.

  “Do you have any control over how fast we move?”

  “I don’t know. You want me to go slow?”

  “Try, yes,” Malik said. “How about we go from here down to the casino?”

  They were still holding hands, and again the world tilted, shifted toward ultraviolet, and came apart as if all of reality was no more substantial than tissue paper. This time Malik carefully avoided looking at his own body, and instead found himself in a slow-moving tornado of things almost impossible to recognize. Was that the floor unfolded? Was that what a bed looked like from extradimensional space? He saw water pipes with water running not through them but beside them. He saw what were surely fiber-optic data lines, but they were writhing blue serpents surrounded by a hurricane of colorful dots.

  He passed humans, men, women, a child, the inhabitants of the rooms between the suite and the casino floor far below, though up, down, above, and below had a very different meaning here. He saw people as paper-thin faces glued onto an explosion of gray matter; he saw their intestines sluggishly pumping food; he saw them as arms and legs spread out into a kind of diagram, with bone exposed and muscles twitching unattached, and arteries with blood both inside . . . and somehow not.

  With his free hand, Malik reached toward a shimmering light seemingly made up of discrete, sparkling bits like so many fireflies, but there was nothing to touch. He tried again, reaching his hand to touch a deconstructed wall, and saw his fingers trace lines in dust but unable to go deeper into what he could see so clearly.

  When he looked up and held his gaze steady, he found he could look through every floor above and see blue sky through a shifting forest of objects that obeyed none of the rules of three-dimensional euclidean geometry.

  It was disorienting in the extreme, making his stomach churn and his balance fail. He stumbled, tried to stop himself, but fell through a wall and a floor and almost lost his grip on Francis’s hand before he stopped falling for reasons he could not even guess at.

  And then, all at once, they were on the casino floor in reassuring 3-D space being stared at, openmouthed, by a blackjack dealer who had just dropped a stack of chips on the floor upon seeing them materialize out of nothing.

  “Sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you,” Francis said to the dealer.

  “That was amazing,” Malik said. “Incredible! I don’t even . . .” He was breathless with excitement. He’d always liked his physics classes, and this was a wild master class in n-dimensional space, except that this wasn’t a dry discussion of theory. He’d done in reality what in theory was impossible. He had passed through a dimension beyond normal 3-D space. He was a 3-D creature, with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, trying to make sense of his world as seen from a very different perspective.

  “Amazing,” Malik whispered again. “I . . . I mean . . . wow. Wow.” He felt as if he’d just glimpsed the world like God—if such a creature existed—might see it. No other human being in the history of the world, aside from Francis, had seen what he’d just experienced.

  “Yeah. Weird.” Francis did not share Malik’s pleasure; it was all just disorienting and unpleasant to her.

  “Let’s go back up. But even slower if you can.”

  Once more, with Francis’s small hand held firmly in his, the world unfolded, opened up. Straight lines became curves, curves became curlicues, inside was out, and it was all madness, complete, swirling, colorful, impossible madness. Malik laughed in pure joy, his laughter a paisley fog in the air around him. He reminded himself sternly that he wasn’t an extradimensional tourist: he was searching for answers. Searching for a way out.

  Searching . . . for them.

  He closed his eyes, trying to regain some sense of perspective, but it was no good: eyelids were just so 3-D. He focused his mind and “listened” for the Dark Watchers. They’d been there with him night and day since he’d been burned beyond saving. But now?

  Where are you, my dark, invisible friends?

  He could not feel them, which was a wonderful relief, but not the point. If he could not sense them, how could he find them?

  The world around him was made entirely of bits and pieces: gypsum board walls, lumber, structural steel, the fabric of carpets, wires buzzing with electricity, which he saw as a pulsing green glow. Mixed in like croutons in a salad were humans, bulging water balloons of guts and muscle and blood that, when looked at from a certain angle, exploded outward in a disturbing vivisection, like something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie, strange and unsettling—and the more strange and unsettling for being recognizable.

  But none of this was what he was looking for. He needed to look past all the debris. He needed, he told himself, to look in a different direction. But how was he to find that different direction, the direction where the Dark Watchers lurked?

  He turned his head this way and that, and caught a glimpse of something. Not light—light was everywhere, seeming to shine right through everything in every direction but one, and in that one direction he saw a hole no bigger than a grapefruit. Inside that hole was not the black of total darkness, but something he could not describe, because inside that hole was nothingness, a pale gray, flat nothingness without surface or depth or feature.

  “I want to go there,” Malik said, and watched his technicolor words wrap themselves around the splayed gray mass that was Francis’s brain. He saw the intricate muscles of her eyes contract and turn her gaze in the direction he’d indicated.

  Francis moved toward the hole. If she was using her feet, Malik never saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.

  Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!

  From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.

  It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.

  The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .

  He had let go of Francis’s hand!

  He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.

  He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.

  Some kind of defense mechanism.

  He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.

  He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”

  But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.

  And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.

  He was stuck.

  CHAPTER 4

  Psychopath Roll Call

  DRAKE MERWIN HAD reassembled
himself several times during his relatively short life. It was a process he neither understood nor controlled; he only knew that whatever was done to . . . disassemble him, he came back together.

  The latest such disassembly had been the result of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone. The explosion had annihilated much of him, leaving bits and pieces, many burning, smeared all over a pile of rocks in the Mojave Desert. The largest bit of his head—left eye, a bit of nose cartilage, and his mouth—had landed on a cactus.

  A few days had passed since then, and he now had a body capable of limited movement. His head was mostly complete, with the right side lacking only skin to cover exposed muscle and tendon. He had most of his left arm and all of his right arm, that being the ten-foot-long tentacle that was a legacy of the FAYZ. His right leg was minus a foot, and the left leg was scarcely better.

  It was not an ideal body for crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Before he could do anything he would need to be more complete: hard to walk without two feet.

  Drake experienced a moment of sadness and loss for the excellent cave that had been collapsed by the explosion. He’d spent years in that cave, torturing victims, savoring their agony, laughing at their increasingly desperate pleas.

  Often during the months and years of his desert exile, Drake had passed the time by teasing Brittany Pig, the homunculus that always reappeared, like a living bas relief on his chest, complete with the protruding wire of her broken braces. Brittany had not yet re-emerged—that part of his chest was still open to the ribs—but she would be back. Aside from his victims, Brittany was the closest Drake ever came to human contact. “Friends” would not be the right word, but Drake had become accustomed to her.

  Drake had foolishly allied himself with Tom Peaks, called Dragon by some, Napalm by others, and damned near been disassembled by various mutants at the Port of Los Angeles, including an old enemy, Dekka Talent. Dekka had been Sam Temple’s muscle, his enforcer, her and that brat Brianna. Dekka had been dangerous enough then, and she was more so now. But he could take her. Could and would.