The two of them, beaten, terrified, and with searingly recent memories of unimaginable pain, bobbed in the oily water, trembling from cold and fear.
And Napalm faced the Okeanos, ready to claim his prize.
CHAPTER 24
There’s Always Something Worse
SHADE DARBY DE-MORPHED to escape the pain. It was unlike anything she had ever endured before. Her morphed hands and knees were burned deep, burned to the bones, and it was agony that all but obliterated thought.
But as she resumed her normal form, she felt the pain disappear and sighed in momentary relief. It was an important fact: she could change shapes, and each time the shape—herself or the morphed herself—was renewed, fresh and unmarked.
She ran at human-normal speed back to Cruz and Malik. Malik put his arms around her and she shook as if she was freezing.
Cruz hugged her from behind, and to her amazement Cruz felt Shade sobbing.
In the near distance Drake could be seen staggering around almost comically. His entire back, the backs of his calves, his buttocks, were all melted. He looked as if he was made of Play-Doh. His burned muscles could not walk properly. But he did not seem to be in pain, just unable to move very well as he lurched after Napalm like a poorly made robot.
Moving was not a problem for the creature calling itself Napalm. It was at the Okeanos.
Shade freed herself from Malik, but gently, and wiped her eyes. “That was bad,” she said. She needed no embellishments—they had seen. Napalm was unstoppable. Shade had tried and nearly died. Two others with morphs and powers had joined the fight and been similarly brushed aside.
“Let’s get out of here,” Malik said. “We’re not winning this fight.”
Shade’s eyes were bleak, like nothing Cruz had ever seen. She seemed empty. She did not argue with Malik, but she didn’t get in the car, either, instead stood staring hollow-eyed after the mighty monster.
“If we all worked together . . .” Cruz hadn’t even meant to say it out loud.
“Together against that?” Malik pointed, incredulous. “That girl with the dreads is badass, but her partner is basically just a big, pissed-off bear.” And Shade had done enough, more than enough. He put a protective arm around Shade, and again she let him.
“There’s me,” Cruz said.
Malik stared at her. Shade raised her eyes.
“No,” Shade said. “No, no, no. You’ll die. You’ll die, Cruz, and it will be my fault. Again.”
“Don’t, Shade,” Malik said tenderly, leaning his forehead against hers, looking her in the eyes. “It was not your fault then—it never was.”
Not Shade’s fault then, Cruz thought, but Malik wasn’t denying that what was happening here and now was Shade’s fault. And wasn’t it? It wasn’t Malik—or for that matter Cruz—who had become twisted by guilt and obsessed with finding a way to reverse her earlier weakness. It wasn’t Malik or Cruz who had laid plans to steal the rock. It was Shade’s fault. It was.
But whose fault will it be if more people die while I do nothing? Cruz asked herself.
Cruz felt herself moving without meaning to move, walking without quite intending to. It was as if her body had made a decision her brain was not yet ready to endorse. But she did not stop. Not even when Malik yelled, “Get back here, you idiot!”
The stocky black girl with ripped and burned clothing stood now beside a very tall white boy, both with their backs to her, both staring at the scene unfolding.
“Hey. I’m Cruz. My speedy friend back there is Shade Darby. I think maybe we’re all on the same side.”
Dekka and Armo spun toward her, tensed for a fight. But on seeing Cruz with her hands up as if surrendering, they relaxed.
“Do you have powers?” Dekka snapped.
“A little. I can . . . um . . . I can look like other people.” Cruz demonstrated by turning briefly into Katy Perry, then back. She half expected this formidable pair to laugh. But they exchanged a look, Dekka and Armo.
“Have to stay behind him,” Armo said to Dekka. “That’s his only weak spot, and it isn’t real weak. But head-to-head he just spews, and everything burns.”
“How’s your friend?” Dekka asked.
“Not great,” Cruz admitted.
Dekka nodded. “Yeah. Been there.”
“You know what you do with a fire?” Armo said. “You put it out, right?”
“Knock him into the water?” Dekka asked skeptically.
“He’s close,” Armo said. “Ship is kind of in the way.”
Dekka sighed. “Okay. You, Cruz, your job is to distract him. We’ll hit him from behind—if Armo agrees. We’ll try to knock him over, down by the water.” Dekka peered closely at Cruz. “You think you can do this?”
Cruz didn’t trust her voice. She didn’t trust her body, either, but it was apparently making all the decisions, so she turned and started walking fast, breaking into a run and veering left, winding through crushed and burning vehicles, aiming to get to the left of Napalm.
It wasn’t far, just a quarter of a mile perhaps, and as she ran she heard Napalm’s voice shout, “Ahoy there, Okeanos! I am Napalm! Give me the rock! Give me the rock or burn!”
If any of the ship’s crew was answering, Cruz did not hear them. Nor could she see any of them, at least not at first. Then she saw a hooded figure walk calmly up to the side of the ship and look up at Napalm.
The hooded figure must have said something, because Napalm roared, “Give me the rock or die!”
More inaudible conversation, and then Napalm began counting down.
“Ten . . . nine . . .”
Cruz had reached the edge of the pier, up near the Okeanos’s stubby bow.
What would distract Napalm?
Then she knew. The idea came fully formed. But was it possible? She searched her memory for shapes she had assumed. Some had been larger than her true self. She had looked the part, but when Shade or Malik touched her they sometimes found they were touching air. She, Cruz, continued to exist, the changes were an illusion, basically a hologram.
So it should be possible.
Cruz began to change. It was easier with a living model right in front of her. It was an exceedingly bizarre thing, unlike any of her previous efforts, for always before she had become humans, humans whose eyes would be at least close to her own eyes in height. But now her altered appearance, her holographic self, was so huge that she, Cruz, was like a tourist standing on the bottom tread of the stairs that led up inside the Statue of Liberty. She could see her version of Napalm from the inside, as if she were standing behind a movie screen, seeing things from behind, except that she was within.
Napalm’s eyes were forty feet up and Cruz’s eyes were only a little over five feet off the ground. She saw through the hologram, seeing her own illusory volcanic rock skin and orange fire, but as a translucent filter.
But when she moved her hands, the holographic hands moved.
“Hey! You!” Cruz yelled.
Napalm turned and froze in place. He was staring at himself, a perfect mirror image.
“What?” Napalm said in a surprisingly puzzled, unmonsterish voice.
Two identical, nearly fifty-foot-tall, living volcanoes stared at each other down the length of the dock. Cruz was all too aware that his fiery spew could reach her, drench her, burn her to death. Fear choked Cruz, and most of her brain was yammering, Run, run, run!
And now, the unwelcome guests, the Dark Watchers. They were curious. Surprised. Cruz almost felt an “Aaahh” of pleased expectation from them, as if they were watching a movie and were surprised by a sudden plot twist.
“Who are you?” Napalm demanded.
And that was when Dekka morphed once more, came running up behind Napalm, raised her hands, and screeched.
Napalm twisted frantically, but Dekka moved with him, staying behind him, out of sight, peeling layers of stone from him. Napalm batted helplessly at his back with stubby arms and roared in pain and frustration.
Then with one tremendous effort he leaped into Napalm, bounced off, hit the side of the ship and propelled himself off, bounced again against Napalm, and leaped higher still until he was atop the upper deck of the Okeanos, from where he clambered madly up the mast beneath the golf ball. Then, almost eye level with Napalm, he kicked off with a mad roar, landed on Napalm’s head, and gripped him. Steam rose from Napalm’s head and the pain seared Armo, but he did not jump away, holding on grimly for as long as he could while Dekka shredded the monster’s back and Napalm staggered blindly and in pain, slammed against the side of the ship, all the while batting at Armo and twisting to get at Dekka.
And for a while hope flared in Cruz’s breast. They were winning!
Then the big loading crane on the dock came to life with a whir of electric motors. The sturdy steel arm, an arm capable of lifting entire containers as if they were no heavier than a Lego, swung in an arc toward Napalm.
At the last second, a steaming, charred Armo jumped free.
The crane arm struck Napalm in the shoulder and knocked him hard against the ship. Fire spilled onto the decks. Dekka never ceased in her attack, while Armo slunk away to change back to pain-free human form.
Cruz stared at the crane, at the glass-enclosed cabin, and saw the strange, plasticine version of Shade.
The crane backed away, then swung its ponderous weight again and hit Napalm in the chest. The crane rose, straightening its articulated arm, and slammed down on Napalm’s head.
Sparks flew from Napalm, and liquid fire gushed through the cracks and ran down like blood.
Napalm fell to his knees. His back was a tornado of stone and magma, as he was slowly, relentlessly, ripped apart.
And then, all at once, it no longer mattered.
CHAPTER 25
Something Worse
THE MOTHER ROCK had sunk deep, deep under the Pacific. It had not stayed long, but in the time it was there it had encountered many amazing life-forms. And when it was raised from the ocean floor it had retained DNA in its little cracks and pits and holes. A cornucopia. A giant buffet of some of Earth’s strangest DNA.
The Mother Rock, itself a tiny fragment of the original planetoid, was suffused with an alien-engineered virus of incredible sophistication, programmed with a sort of instinct that could give an impression of conscious will. It absorbed DNA and used it to play with other life-forms, mixing and remixing like a malicious DJ.
So when Vincent Vu ate some of the Mother Rock, he ingested not only the alien mutagenic virus it carried, but also the DNA of two of nature’s stranger creatures: Leptasterias aequalis, a starfish, and the more boringly named sea star associated densovirus.
The Leptasterias aequalis had five arms, each coated with spiny armor. Beneath each of the five arms were dozens of tiny tube feet that moved the starfish. Most of its vital organs were in the central disk, the nexus of the five arms. It was one of nature’s more harmless creations—in its natural state, for in its natural state it was so small it could rest comfortably on the pad of a man’s thumb.
But matters of scale were no problem for the Mother Rock’s own virus.
The Mother Rock’s virus was fascinated—in a purely mechanical way—by a very, very distant relation, the densovirus (as were a number of human scientists), for the densovirus had a very strange and gruesome effect: it caused sea stars to tear themselves apart. It caused starfish to amputate their own arms.
One arm of an affected starfish would simply start to walk away from its body. It would motor its tube feet and pull and pull until it began to tear, until the skin ripped and white meat appeared. It would pull away, marching on its hundreds of tube feet, each a tiny white cylinder ending in a sucker, and it would keep pulling as viscera separated and strings of gut were stretched to breaking.
The alien mutagenic virus found that the densovirus fit its profile for something . . . useful.
Vincent Vu had first morphed thirty-six hours earlier. Then he had filled his mother’s cabin so quickly that he’d had to squeeze out into the corridor, which itself was too confined, so he had simply started pushing down bulkheads and then bursting through decks, spreading his growing bulk through the ship.
The captain kept a pistol aboard for emergencies, but he died before reaching it. The six security people came at the morphed Vincent with disciplined but harmless fire, and he had killed them as well.
His mother had pleaded with Vincent, begged him, told him he needed help . . . and he had crushed her beneath one massive arm, tube legs tearing her dying body apart.
Vincent Vu had felt bad about that, but he’d had no choice. She was trying to stop him! And the new voices in his head, the ones that spoke without words, had seized on his delusion and encouraged him to believe that yes, he was Abaddon, yes, he really was Satan’s angel, yes, he was being sent to purge the earth of verminous humans. Vincent had never been the most stable of humans. He’d already listened to the mad voices in his head, the voices of the most dreaded of all mental illnesses, schizophrenia. But now he had acquired shocking power and a whole new set of voices. And he had murdered his mother. The unstable, deteriorating Vincent was now beyond mere instability; he was, in short, stark raving mad.
Stark raving mad, and terrifyingly dangerous.
Vincent Vu morphed was a creature of five massive, thick, crusty, bright red arms. He filled the Okeanos. At the center of this starfish body, rising like a flower’s stamen, was Vincent . . . or at least Vincent from the waist up. He appeared almost to be riding the great starfish.
Where Vincent’s human body melded into the starfish was a sort of girdle of tentacles, another gift of aquatic DNA, very much like Drake’s whip hand but thinner and twice as long, and each—as he had discovered to his delight—carried a corrosive, acidic tip.
During the long trip to the Port of Los Angeles, Vincent’s starfish body had torn itself apart, arms walking off on their own. But as the densovirus caused him to tear himself apart, new legs grew quickly to replace the departed sections.
And the runaway arms, driven to tear themselves free, were still mostly under the command of Vincent Vu. Those runaway arms had become his servants, his henchmen. They slithered and crawled throughout the ship, smothering crewmen to death—and those were the lucky ones. The less fortunate ones were disassembled, piece by piece, square inch by square inch. Some had taken hours to die.
Even less lucky crew members were . . . absorbed. The arm sections crawled over the backs of screaming men and women, penetrated their bodies with their tubular legs, grew inside the helpless victims, and made puppets of them—twisted, scarred, disfigured puppets. One such puppet had concealed his disfigurement with a hood and had been the one to tie off the ship.
But the need for concealment was past. The ship was under attack by a powerful monster who was after the Mother Rock. Vincent could not allow that.
He was too big to simply emerge from belowdecks. His red arms extended down corridors into engineering, into the labs, into the sleeping quarters, into the holds. From the tip of one leg to the other, Vincent Vu now stretched 140 feet. For the last six hours, with land in sight, and the Navy handing escort duty over to the Coast Guard, Vincent had been in complete control of the ship. His puppets had said all the right things over the radio, had done all the right things bringing the ship into port.
Vincent hated the idea of leaving the ship, but Napalm was leaving him no choice. So he squeezed himself and pushed his human form up through the hold the better to see the situation. He was, at first sight, a thin, bare-chested boy.
And then, having seen Napalm, Vincent simply pushed upward with all parts of his great, extended body. The upward pressure buckled the decks. The few remaining bulkheads broke free from decks with a se
ries of crunches and snaps. The superstructure tilted. The sides of the ship bulged outward.
Finally, with the earsplitting noise of steel being torn like so much canvas, he began to truly emerge. A red arm rose from the foredeck, an elongated triangle, tube feet waving. Another erupted through the side of the ship. A third swelled within the superstructure, bursting portholes and hatches. The big golf ball that sheltered the radar crumpled, the legs of the mast snapped or bent, and the golf ball smashed down onto the pier.
A fourth leg rose behind the container that held the Mother Rock and wrapped itself around the prize.
Napalm took a step back and stared in blank astonishment. But Peaks recovered quickly and recognized the threat: this new beast was after the rock, too. And Peaks meant to have that rock for himself.
“Fascinating,” Peaks said with his monster’s voice. “I’d love to study you. But sadly, I have to destroy you.”
Vincent’s answer was a soft but defiant “Try.”
Napalm sprayed fire at the crusted leg cradling the container. The leg drew back, dropping the heavy container onto the deck with two loud bangs—the noise of the container hitting the deck, and a split second behind it the deeper thump of the Mother Rock slamming around inside the container.
Napalm bounded over the side, crashing down in fire and smoke on the deck of the Okeanos. But that deck was being torn apart, with great jagged rips opening, as if the entire ship was exploding in slow motion.
Napalm rained fire down into the gaps and was rewarded with a very human-sounding scream. Then, from the direction of the bow, an arm no longer attached to Vincent’s main body came at Napalm, trailing its ruptured viscera, running on tubular legs like a red torpedo.
Napalm turned and blew flame at the arm, but it did not stop. It burned, but it did not stop, and Napalm felt rather than saw a second detached arm slithering toward him from the starboard side, crawling up and over the rail like a sea monster rising from the water.
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