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BAD START, WORSE FINISH

THE SUBARU DRIVEN by Shade and Cruz pulled away and the young man climbed from the cabin of the parked green John Deere combine where he’d been waiting and watching.

Justin DeVeere turned to his girlfriend, Erin O’Day, and as he gave her his hand to help her climb down—not easy in the entirely inappropriate, skin-tight dress she was wearing—he said, “I wonder if I should have killed them and taken it.”

Justin DeVeere was nineteen and already in his junior year at Columbia where he studied art, but was not much of a student. He could paint or sculpt or assemble whatever he liked and so overawe his professors that they would hand him A’s merely for showing up. He was, people said, a prodigy. He was, people said, a young Picasso or Rothko. He was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing in the art world.

Justin DeVeere was brilliant and utterly devoid of a moral center. Extremely talented, sociopathic and maladjusted. A loner, an outsider, a predator awaiting the right prey.

Those were not the things Justin’s enemies said; it was what he knew about himself. Justin had taken IQ tests—152, which made him smarter than 99.9 percent of humanity. He had also taken the so-called ‘psychopath test’ and was unmistakably a member of that manipulative, ruthless, often charming tribe. A brilliant psychopath. A talented psychopath. A young monster.

That was how Justin DeVeere saw himself, how he knew himself to be: a brilliant, talented monster.

But he was no monster to look at, and he was quite aware of that as well. Justin always managed to look the part of the young artist, dressing in skin-tight black jeans and a series of T-shirts on which he silk screened bits of text in cuneiform or Sanskrit alphabets. Only he knew that the messages were either some version of “F— You” or a sexual reference.

He was not big, not as big as he’d have liked anyway, just five nine, white with straight black hair worn loose, down to his shoulders, pale gray eyes and, as another artist had once said while attempting unsuccessfully to seduce Justin: the face of God’s cruelest angel.

Justin’s partner-for-now, Erin O’Day, was twenty-eight, mother of a nine-year-old she had shipped off to the very best schools in Switzerland at age five and had not seen since. Justin was not supposed to know this about her, but he did—Justin was not a respecter of privacy. Erin was beautiful, sophisticated, fashionable, and sexy, but Justin had never had a problem attracting beautiful women and girls. What made Erin O’Day special was that she was the heir to a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at three hundred million dollars.

Sexy women Justin could find any day. Three hundred million dollars? That was quite rare.

Erin was part of New York society, moving effortlessly through glittering events, including the endless charity balls where she promoted young Justin. It was at one of these balls that she met Professor Martin Darby, who had been drinking and talking more than he should have. He had told her about tracking the Anomalous Space Objects and hinted that his work was top secret.

It never ceased to amaze Justin just what Erin could get away with merely by being blonde, beautiful, and poured into a dress with a plunging neckline, all of course enhanced by the kind of jewelry and fashion that screamed “money.” According to Erin, the professor had lost his wife and was clearly lonely for female companionship. And—again according to Erin—he didn’t get anything beyond some drinks and a dance or two.

Erin had had no real notion of what to do with the information, but Justin did. Justin had a friend who had a friend who was a serious hacker, and for just five hundred dollars of Erin’s money, Justin gained access to Martin Darby’s computer and learned the secrets of the Anomalous Space Objects.

Justin stood now gazing thoughtfully at the field, tilting his head, making slight adjusting motions with his hands, imagining a murder scene. Playing the part, pretending to actually think he should have killed the two because he knew full well it would turn Erin on. Erin had never known a person who could say I wonder if I should have killed them and mean it. It was viscerally exciting to her. It made her heart run mad, and sent chills of fear tingling up her spine.

Yes, Justin knew Erin O’Day and how to play her. And he remained faithful to her because while there were plenty of beautiful women in the art world, and fewer who were both beautiful and rich, he had only met one who was also excited by the darkness Justin knew lay at his core.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Erin said. She was irritable, not being a fan of cramped, chilly tractor cabins. “Our names are on flights from New York to Des Moines. We’ve left a trail.”

“Speaking of trails,” Justin said, “you wrote down their license plate number?”

Erin opened her phone, swiped a few times and held up a dark photo of an Illinois plate, fuzzy from a distance but readable.

Justin stirred restlessly, stamping his feet to warm himself while still self-consciously gazing at the dark cornfield. “I was just picturing how it would look, you know, when the sun came up, when they were found: blood splatters all over the cornstalks. I’d arrange the bodies so that . . .” He paused to consider, eyes narrow, hand drawing shapes in the air. “I’d make them strip naked first, just leave on one or two random bits—a sock, a scarf, something enigmatic that made it appear to be a clue, then bang, bang—” He mimed firing a handgun.

“No one would ever be able to make sense of it, but there’d be fifty conspiracy theories online in a week,” Erin said. Then adopting a more mature tone, she added, “But that’s not why we’re here.”

“Anywhere I am, I’m there for art,” Justin said, smirking to take the edge off his pomposity, and inwardly rolling his eyes at his own BS. “Come on, let’s see if they left us anything. Can you go get me the black light from my bag?”

“In these shoes?”

With a sigh Justin fetched the bag, unzipped it, pointed his phone light into the bag and withdrew a battery-powered wand that shone black light (more purple than black) in the hole he’d widened.

“Hah! Here’s a chip right here.” He held up a thin, sharp-edged fragment no more than an inch and a half long and a quarter of an inch thick.

“Is that enough?”

“Who knows?” Justin asked. “I guess we’ll find out. If it isn’t, we’ll track the license plates.”

“What do we do with it? Crush it and snort it?”

“In the PBA they were just exposed to the radiation. But I think that’s the slow and inefficient way,” Justin said. He frowned. “The bigger question is, where is the team of scientists who were supposed to be here? I was expecting helicopters and big trucks. So, who were those two, how did they get here, what did they take away, and what do they intend to do with it?”

“That’s four questions.”

Justin checked an app. “There’s an early flight to La Guardia, tomorrow morning. We can make it, easy.”

“Or we can make it right here,” Erin said with a leer.

“What, here?” he asked, faux innocent.

“I thought we were clear on who’s the boss . . .”

Justin grinned up at her and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

He was not in the mood, not really, much more interested in the Anomalous Space Object than the Predictable Female Object, but her desire for him, and his ability to feed that desire, were a vital parts of moving large chunks of money from her hands to his.

And there were worse ways to pass the time in an Iowa cornfield.

Afterward, they walked back to the rental car concealed off the main road in a little stand of trees. They drove to Des Moines, stopped at a Walmart en route, and checked into the DoubleTree hotel near the airport. Justin set up the mortar and pestle he’d purchased at the Walmart and ground the rock fragment to a powder.

Then he dumped it out onto the nightstand and used a credit card to form the powder into a line about six inches long.

“Want some?” he asked, holding out a straw he’d pocketed from the bar downstairs.

Erin considered, eyeing the gray line dubiously. But Justin knew she’d refuse. Erin liked others to take risks for her amusement; she didn’t take many risks with herself.

“That’s all for you, baby.”

Justin shrugged and snorted half the line. The rest he scooped up with the credit card and stirred into his vodka and orange juice.

“Feel anything?” Erin asked.

“It stings, that’s for sure.” He sneezed and wiped his nose, then drank the laced beverage in one long swig. “Well, I guess we’ll see. It may not work. You know, it only worked for some of the kids in Perdido Beach. There may be a genetic factor or something. And then there’s the question of the dome.”

“It’ll work for you,” Erin said with quiet complacency. Of course Justin knew she was pandering to him, flattering him. But he also knew she was conflicted, had been all along, wanting to hold onto Justin’s talent, wanting to maintain at least some control over him, enjoying the dangerous rush of his company, and even (probably) enjoying his love-making. But at the same time she was fascinated by the idea of her young prodigy acquiring powers. She wanted to see that, to be part of that.

The artist unbound.

At which point, Justin suspected, he might no longer need her money. Or her. The possibilities were endless.

They had a bare three hours of sleep before their respective phone alarms rang. They showered together with predictable results and took the shuttle to the airport. They caught the ten a.m. Delta flight and settled wearily into first-class seats, reclined their chairs and picked unenthusiastically at an early lunch of swordfish with crayfish garnish, before falling asleep.

Justin slept like only a nineteen-year-old can—deeply, totally, effortlessly, waking only in time to hear the captain on the intercom warning of strong crosswinds at La Guardia that, “might make for a bit of a bumpy landing, folks.”

As if on cue, the plane bucked, rising on a gust then falling too fast with the sickening sensation of a roller coaster hurtling down from the first big drop. Then just a few thousand yards from the runway, wheels already down, there came a powerful gust that shoved the plane sideways, knocking Justin’s head forward.

A startled cry that some might interpret as fear came from Justin’s lips, which he then twisted into an ironic smile in hopes that his nervousness would seem to be a joke.

It wasn’t a joke. The next swerve was positively terrifying, wild enough to cause the drinks cart to break free and slam into a bulkhead. A flight attendant seated in the rear-facing jump seat grabbed it and pinioned it with her feet.

Justin had no special fear of flying, but he had a very healthy fear of death, and a deep dislike bordering on phobia about being out of control. Adrenaline flooded his arteries. His muscles tensed. He gripped the armrests as if twisting the leather would let him steer the plane.

And then . . .

Suddenly Justin’s roomy first-class seat wasn’t so roomy. It was odd, he thought at first, an illusion, a psychological effect of nervousness. But yes, it was as if the seat was narrowing. Justin’s shoulders felt too large, and when he turned his head his chin actually scraped against a bulbous, massive swelling that rightly belonged on a whole different person, a much larger, much more muscular person.

“What the . . .?” Justin blurted. He was blowing up like an inflatable bed, muscles bulging at shoulders, thighs, arms, all of him growing. His seatbelt stretched and then snapped!

“What’s happening?” he cried, snatching at the broken seatbelt with fingers that were not right, not right at all.

He screamed.

The pilot fought the crosswind and the plane rocked from side to side as they skimmed above Brooklyn. The engines surged and faded, surged and faded. Justin caught a glimpse of a cemetery just below them.

“Justin!” Erin cried suddenly, staring at him, mouth open, shying away from him as far as her own seatbelt would allow. “You’re . . . you’re . . .”

“What? What?” he cried, and now it was his voice that was not right, not his voice at all! His voice had become this huge thing, deeper, more masculine, gravelly. He sounded like some weird cross between Vin Diesel and Darth Vader.

“Look at your face! Look at your face!” Erin practically screamed. But of course he couldn’t, he couldn’t look at his own face, but he could see that the rest of him was becoming something very different. It was almost impossible to believe that it was him.

Madness to look down at your own body, hands, feet and not recognize them!

“My God, it’s happening!” he said in that voice like truck wheels going over wet gravel. “It’s happening!”

“D-d-does it hurt, baby, does it hurt?” Erin squeaked. She looked ten years older with her face distorted by fear.

“Just so . . . Just . . . weird. I . . .” Justin said.

And still he grew, swelled, thickened, his legs masses of bunched muscle. His black jeans tore, rrrriiiiip, and exposed limbs that looked like armor, like naked bone, like . . . no, like shell, like the hard chitin that formed a lobster’s shell. Tiny pricks, wicked little rose thorns rose from the armor that covered his legs and now arms.

Snap! The armrest broke off.

Erin screamed, words all gone, in full panic now, and she yanked off her own seatbelt and fell on her rear end in the aisle, legs pistoning, trying to escape being crushed. The flight attendant seated in the rear-facing jump seat said, “Ma’am, return to your—” before she froze in mid-word, eyes bulging in horror, jaw trembling as she saw Justin.

They were seconds from touching down when the fingers of Justin’s still-human right hand melted together and he cried out in gibbering terror. His right hand no longer had fingers, no longer had a wrist. It was a spear, a sword, dirty blue and coral in color . . . and it was growing!

This is not what I wanted! I wanted to shoot light beams!

Even his terrified mind was ashamed of that juvenile complaint. It was working, he was morphing into something very different. He was becoming . . . art!

As the sword arm grew, his left hand thickened, and it split in half, split bloodlessly wide open between middle and ring finger, forming a hideous lobster-like pincer that swelled until it must have weighed fifty pounds all by itself. Justin whinnied in terror.

It ought to hurt, some small, still-aware part of his mind knew. It ought to be agony. But it was not painful, not really, just mind-bending, insane, impossible.

Impossible!

But all the while his right hand, the sword, kept growing, growing, the melted fingers flattening first into something like a boat’s paddle that thinned at the edges and glittered as it became, unmistakably, a blade. Now, with startling speed, Justin’s blade hand grew outward, longer and longer till the blade tip sliced straight through the side of the cabin, ripping the aluminum flesh of the plane just below the window as if it were no more substantial than a paper bag.

“Aaahh!” Justin’s bladder emptied into his ripped jeans, but that was the least of his concerns.

The window cracked and blew out. A hurricane of cold wind rushed in, grabbing inflight magazines and menus and whirling them around the cabin. And now came more screams, screams of disbelieving panic as everyone in the first-class compartment saw, and lurched up from their seats and backed away, toward the cockpit or down the aisle into coach, piling over each other while the jet shuddered and rocked violently. Everyone was in a panic, rushing to get away, staggering, slipping, shouting, everyone but the elderly couple seated just ahead of Justin and Erin who were either asleep or amazingly oblivious.

Justin tried to draw his sword hand back, but it was too long (Not my fault!), too long to fit inside the plane and, instead of retracting, that blue and coral blade sliced upward (Not my fault!), ripped effortlessly through the molded plastic and the aluminum outer skin of the plane, ripped up through the overhead luggage compartment, bisecting carry-on bags, and the plane lurched more wildly than ever, and an appalled Justin (Not my fault!) saw that the cut he’d made was widening. An inch. Two inches. Three! The plane was breaking apart, and in a few more seconds the rear seventy percent of the plane would break off and they would all die in a fiery crash.

And people will say it’s my fault, but it’s not—I didn’t ask for this!

The wheels touched tarmac with a rubber squeal, the plane bounded, slewed sideways, bounced again, screams and screams and screams all the while, and Justin screaming too, and Erin knocked into the now-empty seats across the aisle, staring at him with eyes so wide her pupils were just dots surrounded by white.

And then, miraculously, the plane was rolling on all three wheels, rolling down the tarmac, but the screaming did not stop because now they all knew that a monster was among them, a nightmare creature who rose from his seat, head scraping the ceiling. It turned heedlessly to look back at the passengers and swept his blade hand forward, slicing through the seat ahead and the elderly couple occupying those seats. (Not my fault!) The blade cut through their chests and the tops of their bodies, from mid-chest upward, toppled off, landing with a wet and heavy impact, like cattle in a slaughterhouse, nothing but slabs of meat. Blood and gore bubbled up from their torsos, and in pure panic now, seeing what he had done (Not my fault!), not knowing what else to do, Justin surged toward the exit door, but his blade swept on, slicing through the galley, through the bathroom, and through the back of the cockpit, and suddenly there were no controls, and quite likely (though Justin could not see for sure) no pilots either.

The plane was rolling too fast, the reverse thrusters had not been engaged, and with no one steering, the jet veered wildly off the runway, careening with unstoppable momentum toward the terminal building and fiery destruction.

It was then that Justin’s mind cleared enough to see what he must do.

He swept his blade upward, cutting through the ceiling, and continued on, cutting a jagged path around the circumference of the fuselage until, with a deafening screech of tortured metal, the front of the plane fell away. Justin saw the terrified eyes of the flight attendant still buckled into her jump seat as she was carried off with the cockpit section.

The cockpit section slewed right, tumbled madly, turned again and again, sparks everywhere, and was struck by the right wing which sheared off from the impact, spraying jet fuel over the runway. The right-side jet engine snapped off the broken wing and cartwheeled fantastically, bounding away like a living thing, still running on the last of its fuel.

The main body of the plane slumped hard to its right as the wheel on that side had been carried away with the wing. Erin tumbled into Justin and her wrist was stabbed by one of his thorns, but he caught her in the crook of his arm. The fuselage, now skidding on its side, bucked and vibrated with an end-of-the-world sound of ripping aluminum and carbon fiber, the lower edge chewing and sparking along the tarmac. The forward momentum that would have slammed them into the terminal at a deadly speed bled off, and the fuselage stopped suddenly, sending loose luggage and unbelted passengers flying forward.

Just above them, not fifty feet away, faces pressed to the glass of the terminal windows stared down with mouths open.

And then: silence. Silence as everything, including the remaining engine, stopped. Dust and smoke filled the air. The fuselage was cantilevered, the broken front down, the bent and twisted tail up, the entirety lying half on its right side with the remaining left wing soaring up and away at an angle.

Justin stood at the front of the plane, his now-massive shape filling the open circle where once the plane had had a front. His feet were the claws of a T. rex. His shoulders were chitin-armored boulders. His head was five times its normal size. His flesh was hard and shining dully. His hands—a massive pincer and an unwieldy blade—were blue and coral. His body where exposed was the sickly white of a trout’s belly.

“We have to get out of here!” Erin cried. She’d lost both her shoes, her hair was a mess, her face was smeared with tears and the blood and gore of the elderly couple. “Listen to me: we can’t stay here!” Erin screeched. “We have to get away! You’ve killed people!” Her hand gripped his thick, inhuman forearm then recoiled from touching him.

Justin could feel that his face—the face he had not yet seen—was not good at expressing emotion. He did not seem to have lips quite where they should be, and his tongue was like something you might cut out of an ox. He was scared, stunned, overwhelmed, but even in the midst of that flood of emotion, he sensed something . . . something dark and distant yet right there inside his brain, something that was . . .

. . . watching him.

He shook off that thought and forced himself to recognize and accept what Erin was saying. He had probably killed the pilots and the flight attendant. He had certainly killed the old couple. He hadn’t meant to (Not my fault!), but they were dead just the same and he was looking at their torsos, sagging ovals of exposed organs and hanging viscera, still buckled in.

Even now, even amid the rising chorus of screams joined by cries of pain, even in the swirling midst of his own impossible nightmare, some part of Justin wished he had a camera: there was a terrible, gruesome beauty to all of it. The bodies. The gore. The impossible angles. The swirling dust. Shirts and underwear, the contents of carry-on bags, draped over seat backs like some demented granny’s idea of doilies.

A beautiful annihilation.

A new note could be heard in the screams, the beginnings of rage to join the horror. Justin saw staring eyes, animal fear in bulging eyes, pointing fingers, mouths open in shock and disgust, and all of it turning to fury against him.

And there were cell phone cameras.

Justin grabbed Erin around her waist—careful, so careful with the pincer hand that looked as if it could snap her in two. He lifted her insignificant weight and hopped down to the tarmac. Effortless! His claw feet gripped the tarmac, sinking into it like bare toes in mud.

The smell of jet fuel was all around. The emergency slide unfolded from a rear door and in seconds the people on the plane would get free of the wreck. The people . . . and their cell phones.

“Lighter,” Justin said in that harsh, deep, reverberating voice.

“What?”

“Give me your lighter. Now!”

Erin fumbled in her clutch purse, spilled out a bottle of pills, a pack of foreign cigarettes, a tampon, and came up with the lighter, holding it out for him and he cursed, “My hand is . . .! You have to do it!”

“Do what?” she demanded, desperate just to get away, to run, to hide, to find a place that would serve her enough alcohol to somehow wipe the nightmare from her mind.

“Witnesses,” Justin said coldly.

And in his mind he felt an unsettling pleasure because now was his time. Now the clear, direct, emotionless reptile that had always been a part of him saw clearly what Erin could not. Or would not.

The first of the passengers was sliding down the inflated ramp. The ramp was at a too-steep angle and a woman fell off halfway down, landing bruised but alive on the runway.

It took Erin a few seconds to understand what Justin was saying, what he was demanding. “No, no, no, I . . . I can’t . . .”

Justin’s massive claw now closed again around her midriff and the message was clear. “Do it! Do it!”

With trembling fingers Erin flicked the lighter, a spark, a flame.

Justin used his massive claw to rip her dress, tearing off a long shred, which hung like a limp flag from his pincer. “Light it!”

Shaking so violently she nearly dropped the lighter, Erin set fire to the swatch of fabric.

A passenger saw and shouted, “No, you idiot, there’s jet fuel everywhere!”

“Yeah,” Justin rumbled. “I noticed.”

He tossed the flaming fabric into the shallow pool of fuel that edged toward his claw feet.

Jet fuel is kerosene, and kerosene does not catch fire as quickly as gasoline. The fabric burned blue as Justin threw Erin over one massive shoulder and turned to run, run, run, and behind them came the screams and shouts of, “Fire! Fire!”

Justin ran, great bounding leaps, twenty feet with each step, each impact ripping the concrete, ran away from the terminal and across the runway, kicking heedlessly through landing lights, passing beneath the nose of a taxiing Federal Express plane, racing in panic toward the fenced perimeter of the airport as the flame spread and the smoke billowed and the screams of the doomed chased him.

And the Dark Watchers laughed silently.