Monster

by Michael Grant

  That she meant to experiment with the rock.

  And though Shade never quite said it, Cruz knew it was all connected to the absent, never-mentioned but always somehow present Dr. Heather Darby, PhD.

  Then, too suddenly, the date came. ASO-3 was on its long glide path to Earth, orbiting once before it would begin its tumble into the atmosphere. And by then whatever doubts Cruz had became irrelevant.

  Because the line was before them—and both girls knew they were going to cross it.

  Shade drove a dull but sensible Subaru, a few years old, clean inside and out, in a color that could best be described as Forgettable Beige. It was so at odds with Shade’s personality that Cruz guessed it had been Shade’s mother’s car.

  Cruz herself did not drive. She could have, she could easily pass the test, but she was not yet ready to face the trauma of something that was simple for everyone else: answering the question “Male or female?”

  Yes or no, up or down, in or out, male or female, and no, there could be nothing that did not fit into a binary. Either/or, not some of this and some of that.

  “Where’s my phone?” Cruz asked in sudden consternation, patting various areas of her body before vaguely remembering she’d left it in Shade’s room.

  “I took it,” Shade said. “Look in that bag by your feet. There are two burner phones in there.”

  Cruz looked as Shade pulled out of the driveway and turned in the direction of the freeway.

  “These are crap. These aren’t even smartphones.”

  “Cell phones—especially smartphones—are tracking devices,” Shade said, distracted by traffic. “They leave a record of your movements. First thing Sixty-Six will do when they see they’ve been robbed is look for cell phone signatures at the crash site. It wouldn’t be hard to connect my cell phone to my father, and burners are not exactly iPhones. We did discuss this, Cruz.”

  “I just . . .” A heavy sigh. “I just didn’t think you meant it. We’re practically cave people now. I’m going to go into withdrawal.” Cruz pulled out her Moleskine and a pen.

  “What are you writing?”

  “I’m writing that a monster has kidnapped me and plunged me back into the twentieth century.”

  “I thought writers enjoyed the chance to write, free of distractions.” A car sliced too close to their front bumper and Shade leaned on the horn. “Hey, asshole!”

  Cruz did her silent laugh and for a while was lost to conversation, bent over her notebook, pen held in her left hand in an awkward-looking position.

  “You stick your tongue out when you write,” Shade observed.

  “I do not!”

  “You get the tip between your teeth and it sticks out between your lips.”

  Cruz made a rumbling sound of irritation, added a sentence to the Moleskine that ended with an unnecessarily emphatic exclamation point, and put her notebook away.

  “You’re sure your folks won’t send cops to look for you?” Shade asked.

  “I’m totally, absolutely, a hundred percent sure,” Cruz said grimly, then chided herself. No, no, don’t go to the bitter place, we’re having an adventure. We’re committing a federal crime.

  Yay?

  “You wouldn’t believe how little interest they have in where I am,” Cruz said, trying to inject some lightness into her tone. “And your dad?”

  “I checked. He’s in Nebraska.” Cool, calm, unruffled.

  She must know this will put her father in a bad spot, Cruz thought. But she won’t stop.

  Won’t? Or can’t? Obsession? And why am I going along? Am I really this desperate for a friend?

  But of course Cruz knew the answer to that question. Yes, she was desperate for a friend. Yes, she enjoyed the odd status that came from being associated with Shade at school. But mostly, Cruz admitted, she herself had no goal, no plan, no clear idea of what she wanted to do. And Shade did.

  I’m a puppy who hopes Shade will throw a stick I can fetch.

  Traffic was awful as usual in Chicagoland, but in time they emerged from beneath low rain clouds to a sunnier suburbia west of the city and soon were moving along open interstate, penetrating the vast spaces of the American agricultural heartland.

  It was autumn, and the corn that extended for hundreds of miles around was being harvested. Giant, insect-like machines painted red or green powered slowly but relentlessly, stripping off the ears and leaving forlorn pale yellow stalks and mulch behind.

  “How long is this drive to hell without apps?” Cruz asked.

  “Four and a half hours. You know, Cruz, the human race survived for a million years before the first phone, let alone the first app.”

  “Survived,” Cruz said, raising a finger. “Survived. But it wasn’t really living.”

  “We have music.”

  Cruz turned on the stereo and punched buttons until she came to the loaded files. She scrolled through Shade’s music, thinking it an opportunity to get some insight into her new friend’s soul. She found a number of things she didn’t recognize, experimental music, but also more familiar reggae, blues, pop, rock, punk, even classical. If there was a coded message in Shade’s playlists, the message was that she sampled widely and committed to no particular genre or artist. But there were a few things more accessible.

  “Seriously?” Cruz asked. “Beyoncé? What else, Taylor Swift?”

  “I suppose you’d like something more cutting edge?”

  “Not really,” Cruz admitted. “Luis Malaga? Cantea?” Cruz peered at Shade, waiting for signs of recognition. “Nothing? OV7? Come on, Shade, they’ve been around forever.” She sighed. “What can I say, I move to the beat from south of the border.”

  “Isn’t that all, like, accordions?”

  “I am going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  “Mmmm. To cover the awkwardness you could put on some of my music,” Shade said, batting her eyes.

  Cruz had found the right song, the one with the most plays. “Yes, yes, this is definitely Shade Darby,” Cruz said, and hit play. The guitar was twangy, and the voice was thin but strong.

  You can stand me up at the gates of Hell,

  But I won’t back down.

  Cruz sang the refrain with a small adjustment.

  Hey, Shade will stand her ground.

  And she won’t back down.

  It was the shark who cast her a chilly, sidelong glance. Shade had a great sense of humor about lots of things, but not as much about references to her . . . her interest . . . to use a kinder word than obsession.

  They listened to music for a while until something ska came on, which they both liked, and Cruz began to dance in place.

  “You’re bouncing the whole car,” Shade said, sounding like someone’s mother.

  “I know. Help me!”

  Soon the Subaru was bouncing happily as they both danced in place, arms flailing, heads bobbing, shoulders twisting, Shade inevitably more controlled, more contained, less committed to the music than Cruz. But after three hours of corn, corn, the occasional freeway off-ramp, and still more unstoppable corn, they were both sick of music, hungry, and needing to pee fairly desperately. They pulled off into a Wendy’s.

  They peed, then ate: a salad and fries for Cruz, who was toying with vegetarianism without quite committing, and a burger for Shade, who had no reluctance to eat animal flesh.

  “You know, you attack your food,” Cruz observed. “You cut it in half like you’re the perfect little miss, then you go all Hungry Hungry Hippo on it.”

  “Did you just call me a hippo?”

  Bellies full, they set off again, racing now toward the setting sun.

  “We’re getting close.” Cruz indicated the GPS with her chin.

  “Mmmm. We’re there, basically.” Shade switched to her instructional voice. “A degree of latitude is about seventy miles, a minute is a little over a mile, and a second of latitude is, give or take, a hundred feet. It works a bit differently with longitude, but if the calculations are correct
, we’re looking for a rectangle about a hundred feet by eighty feet.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen: the human Wikipedia. WikiShade.”

  Shade pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, corn to their right, a fallow field of rich, black Iowa topsoil across the road to their left. Shade pulled a smaller, portable GPS unit from her bag. “This will get us down to the seconds.”

  She booted up the portable GPS device, and while she waited for it she deleted their destination from the car’s GPS.

  “You’re kind of getting into this whole spy, cloak-and-dagger stuff, aren’t you?” Cruz teased.

  “I kind of am,” Shade admitted, allowing herself a rare grin at her own expense.

  The handheld GPS booted up, and after a moment’s peering and muttering Shade said, “Okay, we go down that dirt road, go a half mile, and it shouldn’t be far.”

  The sun was setting as they parked beside a wooden gate wide enough to admit trucks and harvesting combines. In fact there was a green John Deere combine parked maybe two hundred yards away, looking like some fantastic alien monster turned in for the night.

  “Lucky timing,” Shade said. “Late enough the farmers won’t be working out here, and just an hour and a half to go.”

  “An hour and a half?” Cruz whined. “People could be talking about me online and I wouldn’t even know.”

  “Mmmm. And somehow you actually think that’s a bad thing.”

  As early autumn darkness fell, they sat staring at the impact site—what Shade hoped and Cruz feared was the impact site—just an abstract rectangle within the larger rectangle of the unharvested cornfield. Cruz still harbored the secret hope that this was a wild-goose chase, that Shade had made an error and the rock was going to land safely in Nebraska. Or somewhere.

  But at the same time, despite her greater caution, Cruz had a second level of thought that whispered, It would be interesting, though, wouldn’t it?

  As if sensing Cruz’s ambivalence, Shade reached across to squeeze Cruz’s hand, something she had never done before. It was a little awkward, and at first it seemed forced or calculated—and with Shade you could never be sure—but Cruz squeezed back and they held that pose for a minute.

  We are about to commit a felony, Cruz reflected, and all I’m thinking about is how that gesture is a girl-girl thing. How needy am I?

  They sat in companionable silence as the sun disappeared and navy-blue darkness stole over the field. The windows were down, it was not quite warm but not cold, either, and they heard a whole world of insect life, buzzing, droning, rising and falling like a stadium full of bugs doing the wave. High above a jet drew a coral line across the sky, picking up the sun’s dying brilliance.

  “I hate to say it, but this is more fun than I’ve had in years,” Cruz said.

  “I hate to say it, but me too.”

  “If we don’t get arrested,” Cruz added.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “What if the calculations are off?”

  “Then it won’t hit here. It will smash into some other field, maybe even a town. Could be miles away, could be on another continent.”

  Shade touched the scar on her neck, drawing a finger along it, feeling the raised flesh, feeling the cross-hatching of the stitches. Cruz had noticed the gesture before, as she had noticed the faraway look that came with it.

  They tried to stay cool and nonchalant, but the tension rose minute by minute. They made small talk, but it was pitiful, distracted stuff. They would start in on some teacher and lose the thread. They would start again on some fashion or celebrity, and again lose the thread.

  Cruz asked her to dish on Malik: nope. Still, she did not ask the question her mind was screaming at her: Why are you doing this, Shade? What is the connection to the scar?

  “This probably won’t work, not without the dome,” Shade said. It was the first negative thing she’d said, the first expression of doubt, and that tiny admission of worry, of fear, of vulnerability added new layers to Cruz’s affection.

  Shade might be tough, determined, and at times perfectly ruthless, but there was a human in there.

  “Or it will work,” Cruz said. “In fact, I bet it does.”

  “Hope is the best form of torture,” Shade said dryly.

  There was a persistent lump in Cruz’s throat that she could not swallow away.

  “Three minutes,” Shade said, and there again Cruz saw the predator: the focus, the fearlessness, the hunger. No more stroking of scars, no more dreamy, faraway look.

  Cruz felt herself teetering on the edge between hope and fear. That nervousness finally gave her the courage to ask. In a rush she blurted, “Shade, why are we doing this?”

  Shade sighed and looked out through the windshield, more profile than detail in the gathering gloom. Finally, she said, “Like the man said who climbed Mount Everest, Cruz: because it’s there.”

  “What’s there?”

  Shade turned to look at her friend. The shark looked, too. “Okay, you have a right to know. I was there the day the PBA barrier came down. I was right there, inches away. I saw that creature, the one they called Gaia. I saw what she did. It was . . . awful. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. You have no idea. People, little kids, cut up like pigs at a butcher’s shop. But the power . . . It was like watching a god, Cruz.” Then, after a beat, she pointed at the scar. “It’s where I got this. A scared little girl with a great big knife.”

  Cruz, confused and alarmed, said, “Wait, Gaia was evil, not a god.”

  “Mmmm. They won’t be able to capture all the ASOs, Cruz. And if the rock has the same effects outside the dome . . . well, the world may be about to become a very strange place. A very, very strange place. And what I saw that day . . . well, no one could stop that monster. No one could stop her but someone with an even greater power. Gods aren’t always good or kind. Some are monsters.”

  “I’m not—”

  “If it works, there will be other monsters, Cruz. Other Gaias. And more people will be hurt. More people . . .” And for a moment Shade seemed unable to go on. Then, her voice abruptly steely, she said, “Thirty seconds.”

  No, Cruz thought, that wasn’t quite the whole truth. It was related to the truth, but it was just the story Shade told herself.

  “Time,” Shade announced, tension almost choking the word off. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

  “I hope this works for you, Shade.”

  “I know, Cruz. Four . . . three . . .”

  And there it was in the night sky to their left, a spark, not very bright, like someone tracing a laser pointer across the sky. It was a tiny missile—the estimate was four kilos, just under ten pounds—moving at thousands of miles an hour, a shooting star come to bring them hope. Or to dash that hope.

  “Two . . .”

  For the first time since Cruz was a very little child, she wished upon a shooting star.

  “One,” Shade whispered, and the meteorite hit the ground. There was no explosion, just a dull, flat sound, like someone dropping a big sandbag. A puff of gray dust rose, barely visible in the darkness, but just exactly where Shade expected it to land.

  “Wow,” Cruz said.

  “Mmmm,” Shade agreed. Her casual act was not even slightly believable.

  They took a breath, then all at once piled out of the car. Cruz pulled a shovel from the back and raced to catch up to Shade, who was galloping ahead.

  The ground was plowed into furrows that tripped Cruz repeatedly. And, too, there were the six-foot-tall stalks that snatched at her with Velcro talons and slapped her with heavy ears of corn. They came to a halt when they reached the first charred and broken cornstalks and advanced more slowly after that, as if sneaking up on someone. And suddenly, there it was, looking for all the world as if a rogue tractor had come through dragging a narrow plow. The rich, black earth was gouged, with a mound of ejected clods marking the spot where the rock went subterranean.

  “There! Dig there!” Shade ordered.

  Cr
uz dug. And dug. She uncovered a narrow tunnel like something a hefty gopher might have made. “Go that direction another ten feet,” Shade instructed, her voice ragged, in tenuous control of her emotions.

  And then, as Cruz slammed the blade into the ground, they heard the metallic impact of steel shovel on rock.

  They looked at each other, Shade and Cruz, and time seemed to stop.

  “Okay,” Shade said at last, voice quavering. “Dig it up.”

  It was gray, the color of pencil lead, not much bigger than a softball, but more oval than round, with a pitted surface. To every appearance a regular unimportant meteorite, like thousands that impact the Earth every day. Shade flicked the flashlight off, and they were rewarded by a faint but vaguely sinister glow, slightly green. Shade reached for it.

  “Don’t touch it!” Cruz cried. “It’s probably hot!”

  “Actually, it’s more likely to be cold. It was a long, long time in absolute zero, and it spent just seconds in the atmosphere.”

  Cruz shook her head in rueful amusement: Of course Shade would have thought of that. Of course.

  Shade touched the rock—touched it with the solemnity of a medieval Christian pilgrim touching a piece of the true cross. Shade ran her fingers over it, feeling its contours, gently exploring the pits and cracks, brushing dirt away almost tenderly.

  “This is it,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .”

  “We should probably get out of here,” Cruz said nervously. She carried the rock on the shovel blade back to the Subaru while Shade used cornstalks to obscure their tracks.

  Cruz set the rock in the back of the car. Then, feeling transgressive, feeling that it wasn’t her right somehow, Cruz touched it, touched an object that had traveled an unimaginable distance. It was just a rock, really, just a faintly glowing rock. But it had a power Cruz could feel, an attraction.

  Frodo and the Ring, Cruz thought, and laughed nervously at the comparison, because the thought came with an extra question: Is Shade Frodo? Or is she Gollum?

  “It won’t take Sixty-Six long to get here,” Shade said, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans and kicking the clods from her shoes. “We can’t hide the fact we beat them to it, but we can confuse the scene a little, at least.”