AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Drake stood tall, relaxed, his ten-foot-long tentacle arm wrapped casually around his waist, the tip twitching eagerly. He was, Peaks thought, exactly as he’d pictured him: handsome but cruel, with a predatory, animal quality to his gaze.
The nightmare of the PBA.
The killer, the rapist, the torturer.
The brutal, psychopathic monster: Drake Merwin.
“Well, you found me,” Drake said laconically.
“I have a proposition for you,” Peaks said, tenderly touching the agonizing slash on his chest.
“You are not the first to claim he had some good reason why I shouldn’t whip him to death. And the women, oh, they always have some sob story to tell.” Drake laughed.
Peaks swallowed his revulsion at this, at the vicious scenes his imagination supplied. “Tell you what, Drake. I’ll say what I have to say, and then you decide what to do with me.”
“I decide regardless,” Drake said with a sneer. “But tell me your story.”
“Okay,” Peaks said, shaking with fear, fighting the urgent pain. But Peaks was not overly worried: Drake could not defeat him, not if he morphed. That said, he knew he could not morph into the monster if Drake struck too quickly. ?
??First, do you recall a certain Dekka Talent?”
Drake’s hiss sounded like a rattlesnakes.
“One of the things I’d like you to do, Drake, is kill Dekka Talent.”
There was a long silence. And then Drake unlimbered his whip arm and casually uprooted a bush, which he tossed onto the fire, causing it to flare brightly.
Drake sat down, cross-legged, his whip arm now draped over his shoulders, a slow, writhing python.
“I’m listening,” Drake said.
“The world is changing. Changing in ways none of us can really imagine. ASO . . . the rock. The one that became the gaiaphage, that same rock, more of it is landing. It was my job to stop it getting out into the hands of, you know, civilians. Regular people.”
Drake’s eyes narrowed.
“But that effort has failed. The rock is out in the world, already in too many hands. And with it comes incredible, unpredictable powers.”
“Just like the good old days,” Drake said.
“Actually, much worse. You see, the rock is like an opportunistic virus. It affects, it interacts with, its entire environment, using whatever it finds at hand, to shape the change.”
“The change?”
“The only two people to escape the PBA with powers intact were the two people who were physically changed. Morphed. Taylor, and you, Drake.”
Drake was perfectly still, listening, waiting, like a cobra watching a mouse. The end of his whip twitched.
“The rock, very much like a clever virus, has found a way to survive without the dome. It altered the physiognomy—sorry, the body—creating a sort of hybrid creature made out of the person’s DNA, any other DNA that happened to be nearby, and in some cases seemed affected by need, by desire, as if it was reading synapses inside the brain, feeding on memory, on passion.” Peaks shook his head ruefully, admiringly. “Oh, it is a very, very clever piece of work, this rock. Millennia ahead of human science.”
He snapped out of a reverie and looked into Drake’s soulless eyes.
“It . . . they . . . will win. The rock will have its way, you see. That’s clear to me now. I don’t know why, I don’t know what it plans, but it is not a mere virus. No. It is being watched. Perhaps it is a sort of lens that allows connections through a bent and folded space-time, I don’t know, but I know that some consciousness . . . is watching.”
Drake nodded. “I know it. It never left me.”
This got Peaks’s attention. “Are you telling me it’s in your head ever since . . .”
“Before and after,” Drake said in a dreamy tone. “It never leaves me. Just like she never leaves me.”
