Hero

by Michael Grant

  He had not been happy at Perdido Beach High School, but neither had he been unhappy. He’d done enough miserable work by then that homework didn’t seem like much of a burden. His mother did piecework, mending or tailoring clothing. And she had a dull job handmaking tortillas for a local Mexican restaurant looking for authenticity, never mind that his mother was Honduran, not Mexican.

  As for Edilio, he’d picked up work on the side, day-labor jobs, the kind that involved standing in the parking lot of Home Depot waiting for some person in a pickup truck to point a finger.

  When the FAYZ came, Edilio had been a nobody, an outsider, a poor kid in a middle-class school, an undocumented immigrant in a country turning hostile to his kind. Then he had been swept into Sam Temple’s orbit, and from that point on, they had been inseparable, even as Quinn became jealous and tried to undermine Edilio’s friendship with Sam. They’d stuck together because Edilio was used to being told what to do, and at first that had been what Sam needed. But things had begun to change quickly, and the relationship that had been one of white local boy and brown-faced outsider, a relationship where Sam had a certain unspoken ascendancy, had evolved. Sam had come to rely more and more on Edilio. Edilio was consulted on everything, and increasingly, he spoke up. And almost to his own surprise, he had useful things to say.

  Then, as things grew ever more dire, Sam had given Edilio the job of training recruits to serve as a security force, a tiny army. But a tiny army with real guns and real responsibilities. Edilio had been in firefights like something from a war or maybe the streets of Baltimore. Except that Edilio’s firefights might or might not involve guns, but almost always involved Sam’s blinding laser light and Caine’s telekinetic whirlwind.

  Edilio had come to see himself as a professional, almost. A soldier of sorts. An advisor. An organizer. In the end Astrid had said, “Edilio, you may be the one person to get out of here with your soul intact.” Astrid had lost her faith; Edilio had not.

  In the movie Edilio’s role was smaller than it had been in real life. For a while he’d been famous, but he was still undocumented, and fame did not work well for people who could not produce a green card. Many promises had been made, but in the end nothing had come of it. ICE had picked up his mother. His father had passed a year earlier from lung cancer.

  Rest in peace, you good man and wonderful father.

  Edilio couldn’t let his mother be hauled off alone to a country she hadn’t seen in more than a decade, so he went with her. With financial support from Albert, Edilio settled her in, rented her a small apartment where she spent her days playing cards with an elderly couple who lived next door.

  Edilio had gone off on his own, finding the job as a desk clerk in La Ceiba. He was on the management track, or so they assured him. He even had a boyfriend named Alfredo, although he preferred to be called Al. Edilio did not expect he would ever see him again.

  He’d known as soon as the earliest word of the rock came down from the States that the peaceful interlude of his life was coming to an end. While the world wondered what could possibly have caused monsters to emerge, Edilio had known. The gaiaphage, they’d called it in the FAYZ: the malicious alien will that rose from the first ASO, the one that had taken the shorter orbital path to intersect with Earth. Edilio had known that terror was coming, a terror no radical group could begin to equal. The FAYZ had escaped the dome. The FAYZ was the whole planet now. He hadn’t even been very surprised when the National Police had given him five minutes to pack a bag before hustling him off to a waiting plane.

  And now, it was all back. The fear. The unsettling weirdness. The sense of creeping evil, of doom waiting just out of sight. And on this night, in a dark rail yard in New Jersey, the evil felt very, very close.

  “I need some signatures from you,” the Marine Corps captain said, turning his clipboard toward Edilio.

  Edilio signed.

  The captain looked apologetic. “And there’s this. It’s a confidentiality agreement. Basically if you ever tell anyone about what we’re doing, you could be arrested and go to prison for a long time.”

  Edilio laughed. “Or you could just deport me again.”

  The captain let that pass. “It’s loaded in your truck. It’s crated and padded and strapped down, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to drive carefully. Sarin is . . . well, you know, it’s very nasty stuff. If you are exposed you should immediately administer the atropine pen. You’ll have muscle spasms and feel like shit, but you won’t die. Without atropine, you’re a dead man.”

  Edilio glanced at the pickup truck he had “liberated.” Malik was in the driver’s seat. He’d come along for protection and company, and Edilio was grateful. This dark deed on this dark night was made a bit easier by having someone else with him.

  “Don’t worry, we will be all kinds of careful,” Edilio said to the captain. He finished signing and handed the clipboard back.

  “Listen, I uh . . .” The soldier looked down at the oily gravel under his feet. “I’ve been in the shit. Two tours. I’ve seen the video of Vector’s victims. And I just wanted to say that you’re about the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. I just wanted to say what many people have said to me: thank you for your service.”

  Despite himself, Edilio was touched. “Captain, I’m just hoping not to screw up.”

  The captain grinned ruefully. “Mr. Escobar, that is the fondest hope of every poor son of a bitch who has ever walked toward the sound of guns: ‘Please, God, just don’t let me screw up.’”

  CHAPTER 33

  Plans and Plots and Stolen Kisses

  THEY HAD ABANDONED the armory and the brownstone. Both would be known to Vector, if not already, then soon enough.

  Edilio, with some assistance from Simone, found them an empty apartment ten blocks away. It wasn’t hard finding abandoned property; the city was half-empty already, and the only traffic still on the streets was heading away. Video of the horrors at City Hall and One Police Plaza and the Federal Building had broken the city’s courage. It was one thing to face a Knightmare or a Napalm; they could be fought, and the worst consequence of losing was death.

  Death was far better than what Vector threatened.

  The memory of the pus-draining, rot-reeking, diseased, agonized Williams was fresh in Dekka’s mind. The memory of reducing him to hamburger . . . that was fresh, too.

  The new apartment faced Central Park, just a few blocks from the Markovic home, though somewhat less luxurious. It was an anonymous location, a well-furnished apartment that had belonged to an elderly couple who, should they suddenly decide to come home, would be rather shocked by what they saw.

  Everyone was in morph. No one was human. They thought, hoped, prayed that Vector’s disease-bearing minions couldn’t infect a morph. And they were very damned sure they didn’t want to take the chance of remaining vulnerably human.

  The Watchers were having a field day, access to all of them, all the time, eight little nodes through which they could watch. Eight minds for them to occupy.

  Edilio did not have a morph and refused any suggestion that he consider taking the rock. He did, however, insist on what they each had agreed to: if any one of them was taken by Vector, the others would end their suffering in the only way possible: they would be killed. Killed, Dekka knew, by her if she was uninfested herself. A suicide pact. Or was it a murder-suicide pact? Yes, she supposed that’s what it was.

  That at least is not something Sam ever had to face.

  Simone and Shade had made regular scouting trips to Grand Central to see whether Vector would emerge to hunt them down. But Vector showed no signs of launching his insect army for the final blow. Yet. Possibly their move had left him with a cold trail, and he didn’t know where they were. Or possibly he no longer considered them a threat.

  Yet.

  “I’ve restocked with flamethrowers, but these are even more primitive than the first round,” Edilio said. “I piled them in that closet there. But the real weap
on we have is in the truck down in the parking garage.”

  “That’s a hell of an object to have stuck in the back of a pickup truck,” Simone said.

  “Better than bringing it in here,” Sam pointed out.

  They were in the unfamiliar living room, Dekka feeling like a burglar. Just another felony—what else is new? Two sofas faced each other across a dark carved Moroccan-style coffee table piled with food. They sat looking like costumed extras from a Star Wars movie taking a lunch break on the set.

  Cruz and Armo were off raiding adjacent unoccupied apartments and had already rounded up an impressive larder of cookies, crackers, cheese, hummus, canned beans, and soup before deciding to continue their explorations rather than sit in on yet another planning session.

  So the plan for round three with Vector was hatched between Dekka, Shade, Malik, Simone, and Sam, with Edilio confining himself to questions of logistics. Francis napped in one of the bedrooms.

  “Vector hasn’t moved yet,” Shade said, forcing herself to slow her speech to be understood. “We have to hit him fast, before he makes plans.”

  Dekka felt a rush of wind, and Shade was gone. Seconds later a sandwich appeared on the table, minus one bite.

  “We’re relying a lot on Francis,” Malik pointed out. He was the one most used to the irritant of the Watchers and was the least agitated now. Everyone else who had morphed, especially Sam, for whom this was a new feature of life, seemed distracted and on edge.

  “Yes, we are relying a lot on Francis,” Dekka agreed. “You have a better way?”

  Malik thought hard, then admitted, “No. I don’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  Sam said, “I’m new to this Watcher thing. Are we sure they don’t pass information along to Vector?”

  “They may,” Malik said. “We don’t see any evidence of it yet, but it could happen. They seem more like lurkers watching a game rather than active players.”

  “I worry about that Mirror person,” Shade said too rapidly. “He says he can mimic any Rockborn, which would mean he could be me, or Malik, or you, Dekka.”

  “Who’s going to jump in the bubble?” Malik asked. “I would, but I’m not strong enough. It will have to be Armo or you, Dekka.”

  “I’ll do it,” Dekka said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be the one,” Sam suggested. “You’re the general; you should be out of the action.”

  “Oh? Like you always were?” Dekka retorted drolly.

  “You’re strong in morph, Dekka, but that gas shell is more than two and a half feet long and weighs just about a hundred pounds,” Sam interjected. “Is Armo stronger than you?”

  “This could be a suicide mission,” Dekka said. “I’m not sending Armo. I’ll manage.” She ended with a hand chop signaling the matter was decided. No one argued further.

  “So, let’s walk through it again,” Malik said. “I do my thing, just a one-second blast, just enough to scare the hell out of any unmorphed humans with Vector. Shade zooms in and issues the warning. Hopefully any humans in there make a run for it. Then Sam does his thing. Francis takes Dekka and our new toy. In and out. The timer is set for six minutes. Bang.”

  Dekka nodded. Vector Plan #3. Maybe the third time would be the charm.

  Or maybe this was the last round. She closed her eyes and saw Williams, except now it was her, Dekka, her flesh erupting . . . her tongue swelling . . . her throat torn by screams of pain.

  Dekka. Herself. Begging for death.

  Two defeats. A third would very likely be the end of the Rockborn Gang.

  “Oh, my God. That’s an entire red velvet cake.” Cruz stared at the object, all covered in white frosting, kept fresh beneath a glass bell jar. Untouched perfection.

  “We should bring that back for everyone to share,” Armo said doubtfully. “Right?”

  “Well,” Cruz said, “I am a little worried that it might be stale or taste bad. So we should probably sample it first.”

  They were an extremely unlikely pair of burglars. A seven-foot-tall mass of muscle and white fur, and Jennifer Lawrence, Cruz’s morph of choice at the moment. JLaw seemed like a good choice; after all, what red-blooded male didn’t like her? But Armo had not seemed terribly impressed, and of course why would he? He knew who Cruz really was, and she was not Jennifer Lawrence.

  “Let me get plates and forks.”

  “I can’t eat with a fork,” Armo admitted, holding up one of his big claw-tipped paws. He grinned and gleefully stuck his rail-spike black claws into the cake at roughly the middle and scooped a huge piece into his other paw and began eating.

  “Yeah, okay, I can do that, too, if we’re going all barbarian.” Cruz dug JLaw’s hand into the cake and scooped out a smaller piece, red crumbs falling to the floor, icing smearing her fingers. She licked the icing one finger at a time and looked up to see Armo watching her. Then she laughed because a cupcake-sized chunk had fallen to his chest and was now sliding down his white fur.

  Cruz snagged the escaping piece, and without thinking about it, really thinking only that Armo’s claws were not much good for delicate work, she fed the cake into his muzzle.

  He looked at her through big gold-and-black eyes and licked her hand with his bluish-pink bear tongue. And then, time just seemed to stop. Cruz knew time had stopped because she was no longer breathing. He towered over her and she looked up at him.

  Then he said, “I would kind of like to kiss you someday.”

  And that did not help Cruz’s breathing issue at all.

  “I mean, not now because, you know: bear.” Armo sounded flustered, as if thinking he’d embarrassed her. “I don’t quite have lips right now. Also you’re not you.”

  A squeaky laugh came from her. “I should be JLaw all the time. I get the nicest compliments.”

  “What’s JLaw?”

  “Jennifer Lawrence. JLaw. The actor. You know. She was in Silver Linings Playbook.” Nothing. “Or American Hustle.” Still nothing. “She was in The Hunger Games.”

  “Oh, yeah, I saw that.” He nodded his big shaggy head. “That girl. She had a bow and arrow.”

  “That’s her. I thought maybe you’d . . .” She shrugged, not quite sure how to finish that thought. She’d thought what, exactly? That he would be attracted to a movie star and forget that she was really just Cruz? She finished lamely. “She’s gorgeous. You know, like you.”

  Dark eyes fringed in white fur contemplated her. “I don’t like when you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Act like you have to hide, or be some famous movie star.”

  Cruz sighed shakily and looked away. “It’s just, I know what I look like to people. I look like a guy trying to pass himself off as a girl. I mean, in my head . . . But what’s in my head isn’t what people see.”

  “I’m not people.”

  “I mean, when this is all over I can start on the hormones and then, you know, maybe, if I have the money, I can do reassignment surgery. Then I’ll look more like how I feel inside my head.”

  He waved all that away. “Whatever, that’s up to you. I don’t tell anyone what to do.”

  “But what if you could?” Cruz blurted. “I mean, if somehow it was up to you?”

  “Up to me?” He scooped up what was left of the cake—no one else was getting any part of it—and thought about it. “Look, you’re Cruz. Right? I mean, that’s who I know, I don’t know some other person you might be, or I don’t know . . . it’s all confusing.”

  Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I know. It’s confusing for me too.”

  They fell silent for a while as Armo licked up icing. Then he said, “We could try.”

  “Try what?”

  “There are no Bug Man bugs here. We could stop being Berserker Bear and Transit. Just for a minute, but you can’t tell Dekka because she’d give me that look of hers.”

  “You want to de-morph.”

  “For a minute.” And already Cruz saw the changes begin. The face that had been an uneasy melding of the huma
n and the ursine became more human. The fur that covered him seemed to be sucked into him like a million strands of spaghetti. He shrank from absurdly large to merely very large.

  And then, there he was. And there she was, still hiding behind her false face.

  This could go so wrong.

  Yes, it could. But we could both be dead an hour from now. What the hell are you scared of?

  She dropped the mask, resuming her normal appearance. “So,” she said with forced nonchalance, “are we going to do this kiss thing?”

  They were.

  And nothing went wrong.

  Many blocks south, Markovic waited and expanded. He had no way of counting his individual parts, but he definitely felt the damage the Rockborn Gang had done. He’d played it cool and confident, but the truth was their attack had shocked him.

  He’d overlooked the fact that all his human supporters would be knocked out of the action right from the start by Malik. He hadn’t imagined the gang would have flamethrowers. He’d underestimated just how hard it was to cope with Shade Darby’s speed. In fact he was fairly sure the speed demon had been in and out of Grand Central at least once more and no one had even seen her, let alone been able to stop her.

  And the skinny little girl, the one who looked like she was twelve, what she had done to one of Markovic’s few useful mutant recruits, the guy who’d called himself Bengal Tiger, had been scary. Tiger had not returned, and Vector had no idea what she had done with him. Another of his recruits, Knightmare, had gone to the bathroom just before the battle and had not returned, and Markovic suspected that little girl had somehow taken him out of the game, just as she’d done with Tiger.

  What was it she was doing? She’d grabbed a handful of Tiger’s fur and he’d disappeared. A second later the girl was back. And nothing more was seen or heard of Tiger or Knightmare.