Monster

by Michael Grant

  “Suspects spotted, southbound PCH, nine miles north of Piedras Blanca lighthouse.”

  “Map it!” Shade snapped to Cruz.

  “We’re not far,” Cruz reported, and Malik pulled out into traffic.

  “Left at the light,” Cruz directed.

  “Suspect vehicle is a light blue Mini Cooper, license plate two-golf-able-tare-one-two-three.”

  “Okay, that’s straight down PCH. South. You want to go south,” Cruz said. “South! Not north, south!”

  “Floor it,” Shade said. “The cops are too busy to write traffic tickets.”

  “Yeah, and maybe the EMTs will be too busy to scrape our bodies up off the freeway.” But Malik accelerated anyway.

  “You could run on ahead,” Cruz suggested.

  Shade shook her head. “That run to pick up the radio? That about gutted me. And the Watchers were . . . The longer I’m morphed, the closer they feel.”

  The purloined radio squawked. The fugitives in the Mini Cooper had run off the road as they tried to veer from the highway and presumably find cover in the lighthouse.

  A CHP helicopter passed low over their heads, rotors tilted, moving at top speed. Behind them came the sound of sirens.

  “Just a mile!” Cruz said nervously.

  “Have you thought about how to beat him?” Malik asked.

  “Now it occurs to you to ask? I’m fast and I’m strong and I don’t bruise easily, that’s all I’ve got,” Shade said, her voice pitching upward in excitement and fear.

  Malik considered. Then, “You can use the car. This car!” He explained his idea in quick, terse sentences even as they spotted the lighthouse, a stubby cylinder atop low rocks against the gray-and-white Pacific. The land on both sides of the road was gently rolling, hay-colored grass on low hills to the left, hay-colored grass on flatter land to their right, the ocean side.

  There was a sign warning of a curve and advising forty miles an hour. The CHP helicopter was circling, taking a wide turn from following the highway to following the access road leading out to the lighthouse. Two CHP cars were already tearing down that access road, with lights and sirens.

  Shade figured the heavy guns were coming, the military-level response, but they weren’t here yet, just a distant Mini Cooper, two CHP cars, and a helicopter.

  And me, Shade thought: the superhero.

  CHAPTER 16

  Shade vs. Knightmare

  SHADE WAS ALREADY morphing as Malik sent the stolen SUV barreling after the CHP. “Let me out here,” she said in her eerie transformed voice.

  Malik for once did not argue and hit the brakes. Shade was out and gone before the vehicle came to a stop, effortlessly leaping from a moving vehicle and feeling a rush of pure joy from that ability. It was a joy that lasted for a half second before the fear flooded back as the Dark Watchers made their presence known.

  The access road was less than half a mile long, a heartbeat for Shade. Ahead was the lighthouse compound: a handful of one-story, red-roofed buildings, a network of trails, some windswept trees, an ancient water tower, and the tall, austere, white-painted lighthouse itself.

  It was a savagely beautiful location, with waves crashing on rocks and the long sweep of the California coastline to the north and south. Three cars were parked neatly in front of the administrative buildings. The Mini was not so much parked as abandoned. Abandoned and then torn apart, like a steel egg from which a gigantic bird had hatched.

  And there stood Knightmare.

  A pretty blond woman cowered against the nearest wall and covered her head with pale, bruised arms.

  The CHP cars advanced at what to Shade was a ludicrous crawl. The helicopter’s rotors were beating so slowly that Shade could see the individual blades. The woman—Erin O’Day was her name, Shade recalled—was screaming, but the sound was an eerie warble. The creature—Knightmare—stood with claw and sword spread wide in a gesture of defiance. He was massive, not quite twice Shade’s height, and wider still, measuring from sword tip to claw tip.

  He tore apart the Golden Gate Bridge!

  There was still time to turn around, run back to her friends. Save herself. She didn’t really have to do this, did she?

  Run away, run away, live to fight another day.

  It was the Dark Watchers! They didn’t want this fight. The malicious glee was gone, replaced by alarm. They feared what she might do.

  They fear me!

  This realization was like a bolt of steel added to her spine. Knightmare was a monster, a villain, a murderer. And the Watchers did not want him hurt.

  I’m not your puppet!

  Knightmare was even bigger up close and radiated power and violence. Shade vibrated to a stop, forcing herself to speak slowly.

  “Hey. You. Should. Um . . .” She had not exactly thought about what to say to the monster. “Stop. Being. An. Asshole.”

  With slowness that tried Shade’s patience, the creature turned malevolent pupil-less black eyes on her. “What the hell are you?”

  “I’m. The. Hero.”

  Shade was pretty sure he would blink at this if he had eyelids. He did not appear to. His eyes were black balls, inhuman, soulless.

  The CHP arrived. Their car doors opened. Two officers were slowly, slowly taking positions behind the cover of their doors, handguns drawn.

  “Go ahead, shoot, you puny nothings!” Knightmare bellowed in his crack-of-doom voice.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  The highway patrolmen emptied their clips at point-blank range. Shade saw the bullets flying. She saw the slugs strike their target. She saw them spin away.

  Guns don’t bother him, so what am I supposed to do?

  Cruz and Malik coasted up in the stolen vehicle, taking their sweet time. Malik and Cruz piled out. Slowly. Malik left the engine running, then reached back in and threw it into gear. The SUV crawled forward, just as they’d planned. Shade to distract so that Malik could get the vehicle closer.

  Well done, Malik.

  She returned to the SUV in a single bound as Malik was still slowly walking away. She opened the door and climbed in. Her morphed body was a very poor fit for the seat, but she was able to jam one foot down on the accelerator and watch the speedometer move from eight miles an hour to twenty to forty-five, at which point the SUV was just a few feet from impact. She leaped out, easily matching what to her was not even walking speed, and watched as the SUV advanced on Knightmare.

  His dead eyes turned, spotting the SUV, and he began to move.

  It was a surreal ballet, the SUV advancing at a seeming crawl, Knightmare swinging his sword at a slightly faster pace. SUV . . . sword. SUV . . . sword.

  Shade shifted position to see better. The front bumper was inches from Knightmare’s left leg as the sword arm completed an awkward arc.

  The SUV crashed into Knightmare with a loud crumpf!

  Knightmare’s sword arm sliced into the SUV behind the driver’s seat.

  Knightmare’s leg was slammed by the impact of the big SUV and he lost his balance. His sword arm had carried him around with its momentum and now he fell on his back atop the SUV.

  Erin’s unnatural warbling scream rose in pitch.

  The CHP in the helicopter had their door open and fired down at him with a shotgun, the fat slugs clearly visible as they flew.

  Shade looked around, searching for some tool, some weapon. By the main highway was a barbed-wire fence. She raced back and ripped lengths of wire free, coiling it, then ran back just as Knightmare climbed—apparently unhurt—off the crushed SUV. He glared up at the helicopter and then did something Shade would not have thought possible for a creature of his size and weight: he jumped.

  Knightmare jumped twice his own height, and at the top of his rise he swung the sword arm.

  “No!” Shade cried in a millisecond buzz.

  But Knightmare was too high and the helicopter was too low and the sword arm smashed into the whirling blades, which shattered and came apart, hurling jagged steel
in every direction.

  Then the sword’s arc cut into the top of the helicopter and down through the passenger space. Shade watched in horror as the blade sliced down through the body of a patrolman, down through his shoulder, down through his chest, out through his hip.

  The helicopter crashed into one of the administrative buildings, bashing in the red-tile roof. Shade saw it all in slow motion with exquisite detail: the tiles flying, the stucco crumbling, the rotors shattering, the pilot struggling with the stick, mouth open, starting to scream . . .

  Am I fast enough?

  Shade ran straight at the disaster. She ducked beneath a stumpy, turning rotor, leaped atop a crumbling wall, paused for a millisecond to aim, and threw herself through the air. She landed hard against the nearside door of the helicopter, hands scrabbling for purchase, one foot finding a skid, fingers finding the door handle.

  She yanked the door open, swung into the helicopter’s cockpit, started to grab the pilot, saw he was still buckled in, and unsnapped the seat belt as the glass bubble of the cockpit smashed into crumbling brick. Masonry was pushing its way through the glass. In a heartbeat the pilot would be dead.

  “Hang on!” she yelled at morph-normal speed, which of course the pilot could not possibly understand.

  Shade grabbed the pilot by his jacket with one hand, grabbed the doorjamb with the other, and shoved off blindly, backward. The pilot flew out of his seat even as Shade saw a wooden beam pierce the glass. The beam was driven so hard into the pilot’s seat that it pushed all the way through, tearing stuffing and springs out of the back.

  But the pilot, like Shade, was flying backward through the air.

  The fall was at normal speed, so Shade had time to wrap her arms around the pilot and twist in midair to take all the impact on her back. She hoped she was strong enough to take it.

  W-h-h-u-u-u-m-m-m-p-h-h-h!

  The landing seemed to take forever, but that did not lessen its impact. She had fallen only twenty feet, perhaps, but still the wind exploded from her chest and she lay dazed for a long while—perhaps three seconds in real time—before she could suck in air. The pilot lay on his back atop her. She rolled him away. He was dazed but breathing.

  Hell yes: superhero! Shade thought.

  “Are. You. All right?” she asked, noticing that she had ripped his jacket to shreds.

  The pilot was not in the mood for conversation. He was more in the mood for incoherent, babbling terror.

  A pillar of dust and smoke rose from the crashing helicopter, and then something Shade almost did not recognize: the sound of an explosion, a single loud Bam!, and then a protracted roar as fuel ignited.

  A piece of steel flew like a scythe toward the stunned pilot. Shade snatched it out of the air.

  In the meantime one of the CHP had turned and run in pure animal panic. The other one was emptying his reloaded pistol at Knightmare, but the creature barely noticed him.

  Shade glanced left and saw more CHP lights coming. But what were they going to do that these doomed patrolmen had not already tried?

  For only the second time in her life, Shade was suddenly, and without training or preparation, on the verge of an actual, physical fight. And Knightmare was many times more dangerous than the vandals in the cemetery.

  “I really wish I prayed, because now would be a good time,” Shade buzzed.

  Shade retrieved her castoff barbed wire and launched herself at Knightmare. She loosely tied one end of the barbed wire around one leg, then ran in a tight circle, looping the wire five times around Knightmare’s legs before she bounded away to a safe distance.

  Knightmare tried a step. She could actually watch the dull emotion form on his face, the puzzlement, the worry, the frustration, the fear, as he fell, tripped by the wire.

  He would break free in seconds, but for Shade a few seconds was a long time. Long enough for her to snatch the pistol from the patrolman’s hand just as he’d slammed in a fresh clip. There was no time for her to register the fact that she had never held a gun in her life before this moment. She ran, bounding, and leaped atop the downed monster. She aimed the gun at his right eye and . . .

  Blam!

  This time it was her bullet she watched. It was her bullet that flew harmlessly past Knightmare’s eye.

  “Damn!”

  She jumped closer to the eye, which was slowly focusing, dark circles within still-darker circles. From a distance of three feet she fired again. This time the copper-jacketed slug plowed into the eye. It dimpled the surface, like a marble dropped on Jell-O, but then the Jell-O exploded outward, the vitreous black goo displaced by the bullet entering the membrane.

  It was like watching a water balloon filled with ink explode in slow motion.

  Shade jumped clear and now the Dark Watchers seemed almost to be singing, but in discordant tones, as though disagreeing with themselves. The attention was intense, distracting. She panted hard, limbs all leaden, heart pounding like it was trying to break through concrete. The exhaustion was utter and it gutted her. For a moment she could only stand as her head swam and her stomach wanted urgently to be sick.

  Knightmare snapped the barbed wire easily, just so much thread to him. He roared in pain, roared and clapped his claw hand over his face, roared and swung his sword around, trying to hit his nearly invisible foe.

  Shade had hurt him, but not fatally, not by a long shot. One eye was a black stain, but the other one still worked.

  Justin DeVeere might be a violent psychopath, but he was no fool. With a quickness of mind that worried Shade, Knightmare saw his best shot. He turned and bounded away, each stride carrying him two dozen feet, straight toward the lighthouse.

  The lighthouse was on a small man-made hill. A set of stone steps led up to a surprisingly grand porticoed entryway and a narrow door through which Knightmare barely squeezed sideways.

  By the time Shade had conquered her nausea, Knightmare was all the way inside. Furious at the loss of time, Shade leaped to the lighthouse. It was a leap unlike anything she had tried before. It was as if her thick, morphed thighs contained some kind of spring-loaded mechanism, and it quite simply hurled her through the air, hurled but also tumbled, for she had no way to control her flight. She cartwheeled, head over heels, had plenty of time to see the curved wall of the lighthouse but absolutely no way to avoid crashing into it.

  The impact knocked the wind out of her but was not painful. No, the painful part was when she fell to the ground, banging off the portico.

  She was mad now. Mad at Knightmare, mad that she couldn’t control her body, mad at what felt like some kind of psychic interruption from the Watchers.

  With one powerful foot she kicked in the door. Inside, things were much as she expected. There was a small desk and a chair, but really the only important feature was the steel spiral staircase.

  “Counterclockwise. Of course.”

  Somewhere Shade had acquired the knowledge that in ancient castles the spiral staircases always went counterclockwise, because in the old days of sword fighting you defended your castle from the top down. A spiral that went counterclockwise meant your sword hand—usually your right—was free, while those coming up the stairs had their sword hands cramped.

  This was one of those pieces of data Shade had never imagined being useful. But as it happened, she was in a tower, and she was facing, in effect, a swordsman whose “sword” was on his right.

  The stairs were narrow, too narrow for her to squeeze past the lumbering monster above her. He had used the lighthouse to minimize the advantage her speed gave her.

  Knightmare stopped at a platform halfway up, turned, and aimed his sword arm downward, waving it side to side, daring her to try to get past.

  “Who are you?” Knightmare cried.

  Shade vibrated to a stop just beyond the slow sweep of his sword arm. “Shade. Darby. Pleased to. Meet you.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Can’t. You’re. The. Villain. I’m. The. Hero.” The silliness
of her response would have made Shade laugh at herself if it were not for the rising nausea as ghostly tendrils tickled the boundaries of her mind, prodding, pushing, like blind burglars trying to find an open window.

  “It’s not my fault! I can’t control this creature!”

  “Yeah. We think. That’s. Bullshit. You’re talking. To me. So you are. In control.”

  Knightmare slowly took that on board. His remaining eye glared black hatred at Shade. “Leave me alone!” His bellow was so loud, Shade worried it could bring the old structure down around their ears.

  “Can’t. Hero. Villain. Monster. Long story.”

  On the one hand, dialoguing with Knightmare gave Shade a moment to rest. On the other hand: They watched. They probed.

  “What do you want?” Shade raged at those dark and distant objects. “What do you want from me?” Just a loud buzz to Knightmare.

  Standing there on the staircase, looking up at an armored freak, reminded Shade of a very important point: she had no natural weapons. She had tossed aside the gun, and now she had only her speed.

  Leave him be.

  The thought came unbidden, and it puzzled Shade. Leave him be? Leave the monster who had killed a planeload of people and dozens more in the course of destroying the Golden Gate Bridge?

  It made some sense: she likely could not stop Knightmare. It made sense to save her own life and those of her friends and get as far away from this terrible creature as she could.

  And yet: Where exactly did that thought come from?

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” she said, defiant, speaking to creatures who might be nothing but figments of her imagination. Somehow addressing the Dark Watchers made her feel steadier. More herself. Stronger.

  No, no, she was not about to just run away. She had the power she had sought; her own actions had brought her here. This was another Gaia, a superpowered villain, the very thing superheroes were meant to cope with.

  Right?

  Her thoughts went to weapons. The cops outside had guns, but they hadn’t been very useful. The only vulnerability Knightmare seemed to have was his eyes. His eyes and maybe that ferocious mouth.