Читать книгу Hero - Майкл Грант - Страница 12

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.

One thing Justin was quite clear about: wherever the Rockborn Gang was, he wanted to be far away.

He had no wallet, no credit cards or phone. But a young man walking past a vast construction site in North Las Vegas, and who arguably looked a bit like Justin, had all that and more. Justin had not wanted to kill the young man, but necessity made its own rules. One more body for collection by the crews that were scouring the city for the dead. Justin took his victim’s wallet and phone and caught a taxi to the airport. He’d bought the first available ticket to New York and now merely waited for the gate to be called.

Back to New York.

He would be safe in New York.

Tom Peaks had run from Las Vegas after the horror at the Triunfo, the hotel where Dillon Poe had made his unspeakably brutal last stand.

Peaks had arrived in Vegas as Napalm, the ten-story-tall reptile with the belly full of liquid fire, believing he was there to take down Dekka, who he hated for what he still thought of as betrayal.

But when he’d arrived . . .

He had not known about Dillon Poe. He’d had no idea what Dillon was doing. He had not known that the hundreds of people gathered by the entrance of the Triunfo were slaves to Dillon’s will, unable to flee.

He had definitely not known that the Charmer had sprayed that crowd with gasoline.

Now Peaks sat trembling in a booth at a diner in one of the multitude of identical shopping centers that ringed the city. His coffee was undrunk. The pancakes he’d ordered were untouched and now cold.

There had been so many horrors. So much destruction. The Ranch, his great creation, was exposed to the world and destroyed. What had once been his staff of carefully recruited scientists and techs and guards had been hunted down and murdered by vengeful mutants and cyborgs.

His family . . . He closed his eyes and tried to picture them, but each time he did he saw disgust and contempt on their faces. He could never go home to them, not now.

No job. No home. No family. No purpose in life. And for the rest of his life he would see the Triunfo fire over and over and over again. A fire he had unwittingly lit.

“Can I get you anything else, honey?’ the waitress asked.

Peaks shook his head. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table, got up, went to the men’s room, and vomited coffee and bile.

Peaks splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the dirty mirror. Looked at a face now known to every law-enforcement agency on earth.

There was no safety.

There was no escape.

There were only the screams of people burning.

Peaks stumbled out of the diner into brilliant sunlight. Across the vast parking lot was a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. He headed for it, spotted a liquor store, and bought himself a bottle of excellent scotch on the way.

“Damn good scotch,” Peaks muttered, draining a quarter of the bottle as he maneuvered through parked cars.

The clerk at the liquor store had given him a strange look, a shrewd look of recognition. Would he call the police? More likely than not.

Time was running short. If they came for him, he could morph and fight them off. He had only to belch the dreadful napalm and they would burn. . . .

Innocent police officers just doing their duty. My God.

He set the scotch bottle, now half-empty, on the curb and went into the Big 5. He easily found the gun-sales area. He pointed to a 12-gauge shotgun in a rack.

“How much?”

“That model will set you back $899.99.”

Peaks stuck a credit card into the reader. Denied. Tried another card. Denied.

“I know who you are,” the clerk said suddenly. He looked at Peaks as if seeing the devil himself.

“I need a gun,” Peaks rasped.

“You get nothing from me, you piece of shit,” the man said. “Give you a gun? Why, so you can kill some more children? Get out of here! Security! Security!”

Peaks bowed his head, then walked around behind the counter. The clerk, terrified, tried to back away but Peaks grabbed him by the shirt front and said, “I need a shotgun. Short barrel. And one shell. Just one.”

A minute later store security came hustling up just in time to see Peaks jack the 12-gauge shell into the chamber, place the barrel of the shotgun under his chin, and blow the top of his head all over the display case.