fallen through, becoming the only adult inside. His bad luck.
It had been his arm that Gaia had torn from his body. She had then cooked the flesh with a blast of searing light from her hands, and ripped the medium-rare flesh, chewing and swallowing as the man named Alex lay traumatized and weeping at her feet. This event had been caught on video. The video practically burned down the internet as everyone on planet Earth not living in a cave or a coma, watched it in appalled fascination.
That had taken a lot of the fun out of #GaiaForPresident.
It was that girl, that monster Gaia, who now appeared at the south end of the dome, covered in blood and burns, her clothing rags.
Shade Darby’s phone rang, making her jump. Her mother of course. She knew why her mother was calling. Dr. Heather Darby was making sure her daughter was safe in the barracks, because Heather Darby, at that moment just a hundred feet away in a tent crammed with scientific equipment, knew her daughter did not always listen to her.
Shade let the call go to voicemail. No way was she leaving. No way was she going to miss this. The show was approaching its climax, Shade could sense it. Something big was coming.
There came the chime of a text. Shade did not even look at it.
And then as Gaia stared balefully down at the huddled mass of frightened children pressed against the dome wall, she raised her hands.
“Shade! Shade Darby!” Her mother’s voice was barely audible above the rising swell of voices as people cried out and pointed.
Gaia raised her hands and beams of light, so bright that Shade could scarcely look at them, stabbed from Gaia’s upraised palms into the crowd of children pressed desperately, hopelessly inside the dome.
For what felt like slow-ticking minutes, Shade stared in disbelief. Children were sliced through by the beam of light. Children burned. A boy no more than seven years old melted like a candle in a microwave, burned and melted, and from Shade’s throat came a rising wail, a scream, and all around her screams and bellows of horror, and then it had all risen in pitch, because sound did not escape the dome . . . but light did!
“Shade!”
Gaia’s killing beams scythed through the children in the dome, but stabbed as well through the transparent barrier. Laser light burned cops, tourists and media. It burned the Families. It burned the tacky souvenir stands with their plastic dome keychains.
People became herd animals, a mass of wildebeest spotting a lioness springing from the tall grass. People recoiled, backed away, saw the person standing beside them decapitated, and ran in sheer panic, all reason gone, shoving and climbing over each other as those deadly beams swept left and right, and people were cut down as they ran. Arms and heads dropped away like macabre litter, torsos ran two steps before toppling over. Seared human meat smoked and sent up a nauseating barbecue smell.
Shade felt her body tingling, felt her heart seem to stop then speed up, felt the echo of her own screams inside her head as she lay face down, hugging the ground, but never looking away. She never once looked away as trapped children, their mouths open in unheard cries of despair, died before her eyes, died so close she would have felt their last breath.
Then behind Gaia came a creature that seemed almost to be made of gravel. It barreled down the hill, heavy and awkward, a boulder with thick legs and windmilling arms. It slammed into Gaia and sent the blood-drenched monster-child flying. There came a ragged cheer from the onlookers crawling on the ground like Shade, or cowering at what they hoped was a safe distance behind emergency vehicles and National Guard Humvees.
Inside the dome a handsome boy with dark hair and a commanding air appeared. He was improbably armed with a shoulder-held missile, like something from a news report of distant war. He leveled the missile and fired it at Gaia. The missile flew, leaving a trail of smoke and sparks, traveling a short distance and missing its intended target. It exploded silently against the inside of the barrier, a dozen feet above Shade’s head. She recoiled in reaction, pressing her face into the dirt, hands over her ears though there was no shock wave.
The explosion inside the dome shattered the stone creature, stripped the outer covering away, leaving, for just a moment, an almost human shape. A boy. But a dead boy. He fell alongside dozens of others, and bloody Gaia howled silent rage and brutish laughter.
She was, Shade thought, the most amazing creature she had ever seen or imagined: fearless, insane, evil, and powerful. A demented young goddess. Fascinating.
Beyond Gaia, the boy who fired the missile seemed to shrug. They were speaking, Gaia and the dark-haired boy, an almost normal-seeming conversation. Others on the inside looked on, tense, but keeping their distance. The boy was a teenager not that much older than Shade herself, but he did not have youthful eyes.
Then came a blast of light so intense it burned Shade’s retinas, blinding her temporarily. She rubbed her eyes and blinked, and when she could see again, both the dark-haired boy and bloody Gaia were ashes.
And suddenly Shade heard new sounds, from a new direction, from inside! Screams. Cries. Moans of pain and the gibbering of pure terror. She smelled the smoke of the burning forest at the far end of the FAYZ. She smelled the final, sickening excretions of the dead so near at hand. She smelled the brackish odor of freshly spilled blood.
A dead child sagged forward and lay across the line of the dome wall, hand outstretched, almost touching Shade.
The dome was . . . gone!
A panicked mob of the starved, filthy, ragged, scabbed, heavily armed inhabitants of the Perdido Beach Anomaly rushed heedlessly out into the world. Dozens of them clambered madly over their own dead and wounded friends. One in her panic kicked Shade’s head, stunning her. Shade tried to rise to avoid being trampled, and a girl, no more than ten or eleven years old, raced screaming by, swinging a machete at imaginary pursuers. The blade caught the side of Shade’s throat.
No pain, not at first, just shock as Shade pressed her hand to the wound and gaped as it came away red to the wrist.
She sank back on the ground, wanting to cry for help, wanting to call to her mother now, her mother who no longer cried her name.
Shade felt suddenly dizzy, woozy, feet and hands not working quite . . . She rolled onto her back and looked up at the cloudless sky. Strange. The sky. Blue. She felt the rhythmic pulsing of her lifeblood escaping the confines of her arteries.
She blinked. She thought the word Mom, and fell swirling down into unconsciousness.
Ten minutes later, Shade woke to find herself lying on a gurney, flashing lights everywhere, her vision blurred, head pounding, needles in her elbow, a blood-pressure cuff around her wrist, thick bandages around her throat. An EMT squeezed a bag of plasma to force the lifesaving fluid into Shade’s collapsing arteries. Shade, barely clinging to paralyzed, nightmarish consciousness, blinked furiously to clear her vision, and focused at last on a black plastic body bag. And on the gloved hand of the fireman pulling the zipper up.
Up and over her mother’s face.
| 1 | | | THE MEET CUTE |
“THE FIRST SUPERHERO was not Superman,” Malik Tenerife said to Shade Darby. “It was Gilgamesh. Like, four thousand years ago. Super strong, super smart, unstoppable in battle.” He raised a finger for each point.
“First name Gil, last name Gamesh?”
“That’s very cute, Shade. Pretty sure they were making that same joke four thousand years ago. Gilgamesh, baby: the first superhero.”
“Not going with Jehovah?”
“I