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The Dark Watchers seemed rapt. Fascinated. Indifferent to his agony as the fire curled and ashed his waist whips. His starfish body was half melted, a bubbling cauldron of magma, and he was sinking into it, sinking down helplessly.
He screamed soundlessly, his flesh melting, his mind a wild merry-go-round swirl of panic and self-righteous anger and now-intolerable pain.
“No!” he tried to cry, but his last word was a choking sound.
Vincent Vu, Abaddon the Destroyer, was reduced to a mound of flaming goo, like someone had dropped a marshmallow in a campfire.
Abaddon would destroy no more.
The tanks swerved around the fire and clanked on. They had lost just five minutes in destroying Vincent. A consequential five minutes.
CHAPTER 24
We Are the Chimpions
DRAKE MERWIN WAS now most of a face—he had a mouth, one eye, and one ear. He could see and he could hear. And because he was smashed against a boulder in a fairly upright position, he could watch the reassembly of his body.
This was not his first comeback from destruction. Brianna had used her machete and her super-speed to chop him to bits and scatter the bits far and wide in the FAYZ. It had taken him a while to come back from that.
He had been almost complete when he’d faced Sam the final time. In the breakdown of the FAYZ system, he had been weakened, and that weakening had resulted in his being burned to ashes.
For a long time there was no Drake Merwin.
And when he started to regrow, it was not from the ashes, but from one of Brianna’s chunks. She had taken the time to bury some parts of him, and other parts she had hurled into the ocean. Ninety-plus percent of those bits and pieces had slithered together to create the Drake that Sam had destroyed, but one piece had not been part of that doomed Drake iteration precisely because Brianna had tossed it into the ocean.
That chunk of Drake had been eaten by a swordfish, who then swam out to sea. The resulting swordfish turd had been all that was left of Drake, so his regrowth had not had the benefit of being able to use existing bits and pieces; no, the turd had had to grow a whole new Drake. And that Drake, the Drake who’d been splattered everywhere by the missile, had only acquired eyes very late in the process, when he was already a mangled mass of pink flesh crawling blindly up onto the beach.
Months, that’s how long it had taken him to regrow. In fact, it had been a full year before he was entirely, 100 percent himself. Well, himself plus Brittany.
But now he watched himself regrow much more quickly. The bits of him, the human shrapnel of him, crawled out of the rocks like shell-less snails and fitted themselves in place like so many puzzle pieces.
Some bits were completely unsalvageable—the right side of his face, his right eye—but to his great pleasure, his whip hand was already half regrown. He’d even managed to move it.
He was annoyed at Peaks for running off, annoyed even more that he’d somehow managed either to attract, or deliberately cause, the missile attack. And eventually that annoyance would result in Peaks being nailed to the wall of Drake’s cave. He would extend Peaks’s suffering, he would make Peaks pay, but it was more out of a sense of duty than the prospect of pleasure. Drake couldn’t let Peaks get away with it, and he would absolutely reduce the man to a shattered, mutilated creature who would beg for death, but Drake knew he wouldn’t enjoy it. Torturing Peaks wouldn’t be fun. Not really.
Drake knew what would be fun. He knew who would be fun.
“Old hate is the best hate,” Drake’s mouth whispered.
And no hate was older than his hatred of Astrid. Astrid Ellison. Astrid the Genius. It was funny to Drake that so many in the FAYZ had disliked her, because he had to admit, she had been a formidable enemy. The kids had all—well, almost all—loved Sammy. Surfin’ Sam, the reluctant hero. But if Sam was the Captain Kirk of the FAYZ, Astrid had been his Spock and Edilio his Riker and Albert his Scotty the engineer.
“Don’t forget Dekka,” Drake muttered to a passing horned toad. “His Sulu. His Worf.”
Drake hated Dekka and Edilio and Albert and . . . well, pretty much everyone. But his dreams were of Astrid. She would be fun. She would try to engage him intellectually. She would play word games with him, desperately trying to trick him. He would let her beg and plead. And then he would whip the skin from her. But Astrid was tough, and oh, she would put up an excellent fight.
The joy would be knowing that she would be so aware of her own slow disintegration. Stupid people, weak people, they collapsed quickly and ended up just screaming and begging. Astrid would end up there, too, in the end, and she would hate him, but she would hate herself even more for being weak.
The only thing better would be to have Sam nailed to the opposite wall, forced to watch it all. To see Astrid degraded as Sam watched? He could not imagine anything better.
Why had he not gone after her already? Because she was in a major city and watched/guarded by cops. That was not a situation that lent itself to long, lazy days and nights of torture. He could easily get past whatever security was around her, but he would only be able to kill her before all hell came crashing down on him. The next time he was destroyed, someone might do a thorough job of it, and it might take him years to reassemble and regrow. Astrid might be an old woman by the time he was able to go after her.
“You don’t want to rush your pleasures,” he informed the toad, who cocked one bulbous eye at him and rudely snapped up and ate a small slithering chunk of Drake. He moved his stunted whip hand and the toad ran off.
Yes, it had not been possible to realize his fondest dream—not with cops and FBI and a whole metro area in his way. But Peaks had given him new hope. Peaks seemed to think the whole world was coming down around their ears. And if that was true . . .
Drake glanced down and saw a steel wire protruding from his chest. Ah, good old Brittany Pig, as immortal as he was. They would soon be back together. His body would complete itself. His whip would return.
And in a world that was falling apart, who could stop him from finding and taking As
