strands of animal DNA. Sometimes—Armo—it had worked. Other times it was as if the rock was mocking them, using entirely different DNA—a passing mosquito, say—to create unsustainable monstrosities. One had morphed into a human-mite hybrid, a brainless slug unable to move its bulk on eight tiny, distorted human legs.
The Ranch had also pioneered cyborgs—human-machine blends: robots with human brains, weapons systems with a human head attached, or sometimes just a brain.
Silence descended as DiMarco templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips, a sign she was thinking. For a solid five minutes Atwell sat looking into space, trying to convince himself this was all right, trying to believe that years from now he would still be able to look his daughters in the eye and justify what he was doing. General DiMarco made that harder with what she said next.
“We are being handcuffed by rules and regulations that are totally inappropriate for this moment in history. We need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later. These are not street criminals, these are superpowered terrorists, mostly very young because God knows only a teenager is dumb enough to deliberately swallow a mutagenic alien virus. But young or old, they’ve already done billions of dollars in damage, not to mention cost hundreds of lives. KOS. Kill on sight! That should be the default, and we only exempt those we can use. Work for me, or take a bullet.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Atwell said, flashing mentally on the Wannsee Conference, the notorious meeting that had led to the Holocaust. There had been gutless apparatchiks there, too, nodding and saying, “Yes, sir.”
Then came the bad news he had to deliver. He’d been hoping for a good moment, but DiMarco was not in a good mood. “There’s another matter, General. The Mother Rock. We’ve got it secured here, as you know, but we’ve only just recovered data from the Okeanos Explorer, and there is a discrepancy.”
Her eyes practically burned a hole through his forehead. “Discrepancy?”
“They weighed the rock on board. We’ve now weighed it. And there is a discrepancy of nineteen pounds, four ounces.”
“Almost twenty pounds has gone missing?” Silence again, broken by a slammed hand on the desk that made Atwell jump. “Godammit! That’s 320 one-ounce doses! That does it. I’m tired of playing by the rules. Prepare a request for a national mobilization of the National Guard and a State of Emergency. We need to be kicking in doors! And let’s start with everyone who was aboard Okeanos. I want them questioned, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about how that questioning is carried out.”
Atwell sat forward, alarmed out of his calm composure. “But ma’am, the White House would have to approve that!”
DiMarco’s sneer was like a dictionary illustration of the word “cynical.” “Do you really think they won’t? This White House? We’ll have the approval in six hours, twelve tops. And I’m not waiting.”
Atwell smoothed the concern out of his expression and nodded.
DiMarco drummed her fingers on the desk. “The bigger problem,” she said, “is not the monsters we know, but those that are to come.”
Atwell frowned. “General?”
“Do you really think this crop of Rockborn is the end of it? We know that several pounds at least of the the original Perdido Beach rock are in private hands—biker gangs, treasure hunters, thrill seekers. We know Shade Darby has some or all of ASO-3. And we know something has happened to twenty pounds of the Mother Rock. And that’s not even getting into foreign threats! My God, Atwell, do you not realize what this is?”
“I think I—”
DiMarco’s hand slapped the desktop again, hard enough to make her souvenir mug jump. “This is an alien invasion, Atwell. It’s come in the form of a mutagenic rock, not little green men, but it is still an invasion. The only way we survive is total, complete annihilation of anyone who uses the rock without working for me!”
She swiveled her chair away, turning her back to Atwell, and gazed at the wall-sized map of the world. “If we are strong and ruthless, we can stop each of the ones we have, one by one. But somewhere out there may be a mutant too powerful for us. That is what worries me, Atwell: the unknown villain.”
| 5 | | | CRACKERS WITH A LUNATIC |
TOM PEAKS, FORMER head of Homeland Security Task Force 66, had emerged from the water at the Port of Los Angeles exhausted and defeated. For all Dragon’s power, he had been defeated in the end by some kid like a giant starfish. It had been humiliating, and unfortunately Tom Peaks’s companion was not one to be gentle.
“You got your ass kicked,” Drake had said.
“We need a place to hole up,” Peaks said.
Drake laughed contemptuously. “The big man who thought he’d make me his sidekick. Your face is known, Peaks. Everyone in the world is gunning for you. I have a place, I have a place where I can hole up, but what hole do you have?”
Peaks stared blearily at Drake. The sadistic psychopath was as angularly handsome as ever, untouched by the passage of time or by the terrible injuries he had sustained. He was cruel and vicious, and Peaks didn’t need Drake’s ten-foot-long python arm to convince him. Nor did you need to have seen coroners’ photos of his victims over the last four years, as Peaks had. You could see it in Drake’s eyes.
Peaks thought, I’m the Dragon, but he’s the monster.
But Peaks knew he needed time to recover. His mind was barely functioning, like a remote control with a nearly dead battery—sometimes the buttons worked, sometimes they didn’t. If he were a normal human being, he’d have self-diagnosed as suffering from depression. So he let Drake take the lead. They stole a car and drove into the desert, back to Joshua Tree National Park, to the emptiness of the Quail Mountain area, where Drake led them up and up, deeper and deeper into dust-dry hills, into wild piles of boulders, through tangled thorn and Velcro-leaved succulents, to a crack that looked too small for a man to push through. But it proved doable, just barely.
It was a cave. Peaks felt the relatively cool air and the scent of musk and mildew and carrion, rotting meat. It was dark as night, and for a moment Peaks wondered whether Drake had led him here as a trick. But the truth was, if Drake had wanted to kill Peaks, he probably could have done so at any time.
Then Drake struck a lighter and held it to a candle. Then a second and a third. The revealed interior was nothing, a thousandth the size of the great cavern at the Ranch. It was a space more vertical than horizontal, narrow at the opening and at the far end, shaped like an envelope that bulges in the middle. The roof of the cave was invisible, a darkness that called to mind tall Gothic cathedrals. The floor was perhaps twenty feet at its widest, four times that deep, with tumbled rocks leading to solid stone at the end. In daytime a faint light might filter in, but it was night when they arrived, and the only source of illumination was the candles.
Peaks wished there were fewer candles, for what they illuminated was a nightmare. Drake had used railroad spikes to crucify three people. Three bodies hung from the stone walls, the fat rusted steel spikes driven through their wrists. They’d had no support for their feet, so they would have hung with all their weight from the bones of their wrists. One was a male in a state of advanced decomposition, stripped naked, flesh little more than beef jerky, face like a drum skin stretched over a scream.
The other two were women, one almost as decomposed as the male. The other was . . . fresher, for lack of a better word. Despite being in a cave in the middle of nowhere, the flies had found her, and maggots grew fat and white in her eye sockets.
“Jesus Christ,” Peaks whispered.
Drake nodded. “Yeah, the Romans had some skills at