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“It was horrible, horrible, I felt as if I was on fire. The pain . . . I could look down and see that I wasn’t hurt, but the pain, the agony . . . It was unbearable. I honestly thought that if it didn’t stop very soon, I would kill myself.”
“Huh,” DiMarco said thoughtfully. “We want Mr. Tenerife if we can get him. Let’s see just how devoted he is to the girl who dragged him into all this.”
“Finally, number ten is still Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare.”
DiMarco gave him a hard look. “Young Justin is in custody and working for us now.” She stabbed a finger in the direction of the cavern outside her window. “He’s caged and tagged, and enlisted as a private in the US Army. And not even that sword of his can cut through a foot of reinforced concrete and six inches of electrified Vanadium steel.”
Atwell licked his lips nervously. “Ma’am, I think we should remember that both Dekka and Armo were formerly held here, and both escaped.”
“They escaped Tom Peaks, not me!” she said, adding grit to the last two words. “Anyway, if we’re going to start counting our own kept monsters, hell, we’ve got worse than Knightmare locked up down here.”
Yes, Atwell thought grimly, and may God forgive us all. The Ranch had been doing crash research in numerous avenues: they had tried to weaponize and control the rock by feeding it various strands of animal DNA. Sometimes—Armo—it had worked. Other times it was as if the rock was mocking them, using entirely different DNA—a passing mosquito, say—to create unsustainable monstrosities. One had morphed into a human-mite hybrid, a brainless slug unable to move its bulk on eight tiny, distorted human legs.
The Ranch had also pioneered cyborgs—human-machine blends: robots with human brains, weapons systems with a human head attached, or sometimes just a brain.
Silence descended as DiMarco templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips, a sign she was thinking. For a solid five minutes Atwell sat looking into space, trying to convince himself this was all right, trying to believe that years from now he would still be able to look his daughters in the eye and justify what he was doing. General DiMarco made that harder with what she said next.
“We are being handcuffed by rules and regulations that are totally inappropriate for this moment in history. We need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later. These are not street criminals, these are superpowered terrorists, mostly very young because God knows only a teenager is dumb enough to deliberately swallow a mutagenic alien virus. But young or old, they’ve already done billions of dollars in damage, not to mention cost hundreds of lives. KOS. Kill on sight! That should be the default, and we only exempt those we can use. Work for me, or take a bullet.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Atwell said, flashing mentally on the Wannsee Conference, the notorious meeting that had led to the Holocaust. There had been gutless apparatchiks there, too, nodding and saying, “Yes, sir.”
Then came the bad news he had to deliver. He’d been hoping for a good moment, but DiMarco was not in a good mood. “There’s another matter, General. The Mother Rock. We’ve got it secured here, as you know, but we’ve only just recovered data from the Okeanos Explorer, and there is a discrepancy.”
Her eyes practically burned a hole through his forehead. “Discrepancy?”
“They weighed the rock on board. We’ve now weighed it. And there is a discrepancy of nineteen pounds, four ounces.”
“Almost twenty pounds has gone missing?” Silence again, broken by a slammed hand on the desk that made Atwell jump. “Godammit! That’s 320 one-ounce doses! That does it. I’m tired of playing by the rules. Prepare a request for a national mobilization of the National Guard and a State of Emergency. We need to be kicking in doors! And let’s start with everyone who was aboard Okeanos. I want them questioned, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about how that questioning is carried out.”
Atwell sat forward, alarmed out of his calm composure. “But ma’am, the White House would have to approve that!”
DiMarco’s sneer was like a dictionary illustration of the word “cynical.” “Do you really think they won’t? This White House? We’ll have the approval in six hours, twelve tops. And I’m not waiting.”
Atwell smoothed the concern out of his expression and nodded.
DiMarco drummed her fingers on the desk. “The bigger problem,” she said, “is not the monsters we know, but those that are to come.”
Atwell frowned. “General?”
“Do you really think this crop of Rockborn is the end of it? We know that several pounds at least of the the original Perdido Beach rock are in private hands—biker gangs, treasure hunters, thrill seekers. We know Shade Darby has some or all of ASO-3. And we know something has happened to twenty pounds of the Mother Rock. And that’s not even getting into foreign threats! My God, Atwell, do you not realize what this is?”
“I think I—”
DiMarco’s hand slapped the desktop again, hard enough to make her souvenir mug jump. “This is an alien invasion, Atwell. It’s come in the form of a mutagenic rock, not little green men, but it is still an invasion. The only way we survive is total, complete annihilation of anyone who uses the rock without working for me!”
She swiveled her chair away, turning her back to Atwell, and gazed at the wall-sized map of the world. “If we are strong and ruthless, we can stop each of the ones we have, one by one. But somewhere out there may be a mutant too powerful for us. That is what worries me, Atwell: the unknown villain.”
CHAPTER 5
Crackers with a Lunatic
TOM PE
AKS, FORMER head of Homeland Security Task Force 66, had emerged from the water at the Port of Los Angeles exhausted and defeated. For all Dragon’s power, he had been defeated in the end by some kid like a giant starfish. It had been humiliating, and unfortunately Tom Peaks’s companion was not one to be gentle.
“You got your ass kicked,” Drake had said.
“We need a place to hole up,” Peaks said.
