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“But I’m not . . .” The memory of their plan, the one that involved pretending that he had no control over Knight
mare, came back, like a life preserver tossed to a drowning man. “I’m not him, General, I can’t control him! Ma’am.”
DiMarco laughed. It was a surprisingly nice laugh, full of genuine warmth and perhaps even a touch of maternal concern. But her voice when she spoke carried no such warmth.
“Listen to me, Private, and listen good. You have two choices going forward. Choice number one is you work for me.”
Justin was about to ask what choice number two was, but a glance at his own helplessness and the barrels of four expertly handled automatic weapons left no doubt about alternative number two.
He sagged, exhausted, depressed, beaten. Utterly beaten. Erin, dead! He was alone, all alone, with the whole world out to kill him.
“I guess I work for you,” he muttered under his breath. Then quickly added, “General.”
“Welcome to the war, Private,” DiMarco said with obvious satisfaction. “Welcome to World War Three.”
Aboard the Okeanos Explorer
THE COMBINATION WAS 8-4-9-6-6-1.
It was amazing what high-def video could capture.
Two days passed during which the Okeanos, escorted by elements of the US Navy and watched minutely by satellites belonging to most of the major nations on earth, carried its precious cargo toward the Port of Los Angeles.
They were just forty-eight hours out of Los Angeles when a storm came up from the south and lashed the ship with near-horizontal rain. Visibility was down to less than a mile and all hands were busy working the ship.
The box was guarded twenty-four hours a day by an armed member of the security detail, but when hiring the contractors, HSTF-66 had overlooked one small matter: three of them suffered terribly from seasickness. Especially with the ship moving like a roller coaster.
So the box was unguarded for three hours, and that was more than enough.
Vincent Vu punched in the combination and slipped inside. He had a flashlight, his camera, and a ball peen hammer he had swiped from the bosun. He spent some time taking pictures, but the rock was a massive gray lump inside a massive gray box and there wasn’t much he could do with that. He could, however, use the cover provided by a howling wind to chip off a goodly sized chunk of rock, which he took back to the hammock that had been slung for him in one of the storerooms.
By this point Vincent—like everyone aboard except for the largely deaf cook—knew what the rock was. He had overheard nervous jokes from scientists talking about what the rock might do. Talk of mutations. Superpowers. A world on the brink of a revolution that might cause all of civilization to crumble.
All that sounded good to Vincent Vu. The voices in his head liked it, too.
He had no mortar and pestle, so he had to smash the rock as well as he could with the hammer, scooping up the flakes and crumbs with his student ID. Then, falling into a depressive state, he did nothing for the better part of a day. But when he woke in the middle of the night, feeling himself elevated into a manic state, feeling a sudden urgent need, he swallowed what he had, choking it down as the larger chunks scarred his throat.
In the end, five ounces of rock found its way to Vincent’s stomach.
He went to sleep after a while and dreamed of a strange sort of argument. The voices in his head were arguing with a new voice, but one that did not quite make sounds. No, this new voice did not speak, but it made itself felt, and that feeling was of vast emptiness, of impossible distances, but at the same time of intimacy so immediate it felt as if this new force had cowed his old voices. Those voices, the auditory hallucinations of his schizophrenia, faded. They did not go away, but they spoke now sotto voce, in hurried, frightened whispers.
The new voice—the voiceless voice—was less angry than his hallucinations. These dark things, these distant yet intimate things, did not touch his auditory centers but seemed to speak directly to his emotions.
Vincent felt that they liked him. He felt that they had high hopes for him. And he felt, somewhat to his surprise, since he had never quite bought into the hallucinations in which he appeared as Abaddon, that these Dark Watchers agreed, that they were . . . content . . . to have him truly become Abaddon.
When he woke from the dream, Vincent found reality stranger by far. For unless this was some new hallucination, he was changing in dramatic, extreme ways.
CHAPTER 18
Going Home
DEKKA WAS IN a hurry to get to the last place on earth she’d ever expected to visit again. She was on Highway 1, throttle almost all the way open, her Kawasaki throbbing steadily between her thighs . . . and a large white boy with one powerful arm around her waist. The speedometer read ninety miles an hour, and the road signs said it was another fifty miles to Perdido Beach.
She had no phone and no apps and thus nothing to warn her of police roadblocks or speed traps ahead. She hoped the BOLO for her had expired or that something more urgent was occupying the authorities. And she was being smart, spending the better part of two days crawling southward on back roads, some no more than dirt tracks, and sleeping one night in a winery shed that smelled of fruit and mold, and the other night in a tumbledown hunter’s shack.
To her relief, Armo had been a decent traveling companion. He seldom spoke, he asked no questions, and he had managed to procure food for their overnight stay by raiding a nearby farm. He had also purloined a pair of denim overalls that were about six inches too short. Shoes remained a problem—he wore size 13E—but he’d found a pair of flip-flops that were too small but slightly better than nothing. He was less conspicuous than he’d been in nothing but stretched-out boxers, but he was still something of a spectacle.
After much careful evasion, Dekka had rejoined Highway 1, the famous Pacific Coast Highway, planning to stay with it through the gloom of the Stefano Rey National Park and past the nuclear plant, and from there to Perdido Beach along the back roads that eventually become Ocean Boulevard.
