saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.
Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!
From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.
It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.
The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .
He had let go of Francis’ hand!
He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.
He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.
Some kind of defense mechanism.
He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.
He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”
But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.
And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.
He was stuck.
| 4 | PSYCHOPATH ROLL CALL |
DRAKE MERWIN HAD reassembled himself several times during his relatively short life. It was a process he neither understood nor controlled; he only knew that whatever was done to . . . disassemble him, he came back together.
The latest such disassembly had been the result of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone. The explosion had annihilated much of him, leaving bits and pieces, many burning, smeared all over a pile of rocks in the Mojave desert. The largest bit of his head—left eye, a bit of nose cartilage, and his mouth—had landed on a cactus.
A few days had passed since then, and he now had a body capable of limited movement. His head was mostly complete, with the right side lacking only skin to cover exposed muscle and tendon. He had most of his left arm and all of his right arm, that being the ten-foot-long tentacle that was a legacy of the FAYZ. His right leg was minus a foot, and the left leg was scarcely better.
It was not an ideal body for crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Before he could do anything he would need to be more complete: hard to walk without two feet.
Drake experienced a moment of sadness and loss for the excellent cave that had been collapsed by the explosion. He’d spent years in that cave, torturing victims, savoring their agony, laughing at their increasingly desperate pleas.
Often during the months and years of his desert exile, Drake had passed the time by teasing Brittany Pig, the homunculus that always reappeared, like a living bas relief on his chest, complete with the protruding wire of her broken braces. Brittany had not yet re-emerged—that part of his chest was still open to the ribs—but she would be back. Aside from his victims, Brittany was the closest Drake ever came to human contact. “Friends” would not be the right word, but Drake had become accustomed to her.
Drake had foolishly allied himself with Tom Peaks, called Dragon by some, Napalm by others, and damned near been disassembled by various mutants at the Port of Los Angeles, including an old enemy, Dekka Talent. Dekka had been Sam Temple’s muscle, his enforcer, her and that brat Brianna. Dekka had been dangerous enough then, and she was more so now. But he could take her. Could and would.
In time. But not yet.
Peaks’s cell-phone signal had led to the missile strike that had wiped out Drake’s excellent cave. They’d been trying to kill Peaks, but he was gone by then, and Drake had borne the brunt.
It was unfair, but Drake was not one to stew over life’s unfairness. Anyway, now he had a mission. The world was coming apart, civilization was slowly crumbling, and the “new normal” was just abnormal enough that Drake thought he might have a chance at something he had wanted desperately for five years, from all the way back in the FAYZ: Astrid Ellison.
He didn’t have an address, but he thought he knew how to find it. In the meantime he only had to wait for another foot to return, and then: Los Angeles.
He had come so close in the FAYZ. So close to making Astrid suffer. This time he would not fail.
Drake had learned patience down through the years, and he waited for hours more until he had two almost-complete legs. And then Drake marched . . . well, staggered . . . toward murder.
“I’m an artist, damn it!”
Justin DeVeere muttered those words to a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in McCarran International airport.
Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare and a few other less-flattering names, had escaped the massacre at the Ranch, the HSTF-66 facility, by running into the woods until he could run no more. He’d then managed to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, which turned out to be a very poor choice of destination. Only sheer, dumb luck had kept Justin from dying from a missile en route to Vegas.
After the explosion, he’d walked on toward Las Vegas until he saw flames rising and explosions booming. Then he had sensibly turned around and walked in the other direction. He’d ended up spending the night shivering in the freezing desert and watching the flames of the distant battle.
It had sent his mind back onto half-forgotten tracks, back to when he was just a promising young artist. As he watched from a safe distance, he’d begun thinking about a multimedia art installation that would evoke the horror. And that led him to painful memories of his wealthy patron and girlfriend, Erin O’Day, who had been killed in an earlier battle.
The thing was, Justin admitted, he did not actually want to be Knightmare anymore. It had been exciting for a while, but had quickly become a bloody, violent, and very precarious existence. He’d been imprisoned at the Ranch before Shade Darby and her mutant friends had attacked and destroyed the place, freeing a freak show of mutants and cyborgs, things that were half-human, drones flown by the disembodied heads of infants, things . . . Bad things. Very bad things. And had any of the Rockborn Gang spotted him there, he’d almost certainly be dead now. He had experienced the blast of pain from Malik, and one thing was absolutely clear to Justin: he never, ever wanted to feel that again. It had been unendurable, and it had shaken him down to his bones.
I’m an artist, dammit!
That phrase had become his rallying cry. He wasn’t Knightmare; he wasn’t the creature who had destroyed a plane and burned its passengers alive. He wasn’t the creature who had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. He was an artist.
Dammit!
It was this mantra that convinced him that he needed to get back to New York. Back to where people knew him for his art. Surely some art lover would grant him shelter until . . . until the madness descending on humanity was past.
The morning after the battle, he’d once again walked back toward Las Vegas, passed by an endless stream of National Guard troop transports and FEMA trucks carrying emergency relief.
Once there, unrecognized in his normal, human body, he’d overheard people talking about the Rockborn Gang, the heroes who had saved the city. And to his horror, he’d realized they were still there, still in Vegas.