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They had left his TVs, the one in the living room and the one in the bedroom, where he sat disconsolate on his sliced-up mattress. He turned on the set and waited for it to warm up as he chewed the granola bar.
“Knightmare eating a Kind bar amid the wreckage,” he muttered. “Wonderful.”
He was an artist, dammit. So he reminded himself. An artist! Not a monster. Not some crazy killer like that lunatic in Las Vegas. All he’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Everything he’d done had been self-defense, perfectly reasonable self-defense. The plane. The bridge. The lighthouse. He hadn’t wanted any of that to happen. It wasn’t his fault.
You have canvas and you have paint, he reminded himself sternly. You should get to work. You should get back to your life, your real life. The life where you didn’t get Erin killed. The life where no families screamed behind windshields as their cars plunged twenty-five stories into the churning green water of San Francisco Bay.
All of that, the horror, the fear, the excitement, the creepiness of finding yourself in a mutant body built for mayhem—he had to find a way to capture it on canvas. If he could paint it, he could control it. On the canvas he could shape his memories, rearrange and revise them.
Yes, that was the thing to do. Never become Knightmare again. Pray that the cops were too overwhelmed to put any effort into little Justin DeVeere. There was so much happening, so much madness, surely he was already in law enforcement’s rearview mirror.
The TV came to life. It had been many hours, days even, since he had seen or heard news. He’d overheard conversations about ASO-7’s spectacular deconstruction of the city, but of a creature calling himself Vector, he’d heard nothing. Until now.
Vector had control of at least one local TV station, and it was running a loop of a creature made entirely of insects over and over again.
By the third repetition, Justin had forgotten about canvas and paint. A new world was coming, a world ruled by Vector or others like him. A world very unlikely to have much of a place for an artistic prodigy.
But a world where Knightmare would perhaps be right at home.
Drake Merwin quite liked his nice new trench coat. He’d received it as a “gift” from a man who’d had Drake’s tentacle tightening around his throat. The coat gave him a way to muffle random blurts from Brittany Pig, who had re-emerged on his chest. And it helped to hide both his whip hand and the fact that parts of him were still regrowing.
His feet were all the way restored, and that was a relief. It would have been very hard to drive the car he’d stolen without feet. He was on the I-10 West, passing Cabazon and trying to decide just how to go about locating one Astrid Ellison. He knew she was in Southern California, but that didn’t narrow it down by much.
Drake was not a computer person. Maybe the address was in some corner of the internet or the dark web, but he didn’t know where to start with that. What he did know was that someone knew. Someone. But who?
The FBI. They would know.
Drake did not know computers and he did not have a phone, but the Infiniti he’d stolen had GPS, and he knew how to use that. He pulled off to the side of the freeway, and as big rigs went past, their slipstream rocking the car, he punched in “FBI.” A blue dot showed an FBI office in Riverside.
“Hah! Straight ahead.”
He took the state highway 60 exit off the I-10, then followed directions until he pulled up in the parking lot of a three-story, Spanish-style office building with a red tile roof. The building fronted on a blank, gray wall that marked the freeway.
If Drake had one virtue, it was patience. He hadn’t always been patient, far from it, but Drake had been “killed” several times, had even been locked in a box and sunk in a lake, and he had become accustomed to long waits with nothing to do but indulge his fantasies.
He waited patiently until he saw a woman in a charcoal-gray blazer and black pants come out and walk to her car. The car was a newish Lexus, so the woman was not a mere clerk. She pulled out, and Drake followed her. He waited as she stopped at Ralphs to buy groceries, then followed her the rest of her way home.
There was a Slip ’n Slide on the front lawn of the pleasant two-story tract home, and My Little Pony decals in the front window.
“Kids. Perfect.”
Drake waited some more, until he was sure the woman would be at ease in her home. Then he got out of the car, discreetly coiling his whip hand beneath his purloined trench coat, and headed up the walkway to her front door, with a smile on his face in case she was looking out. He tried the handle. Locked. It was a good, sturdy door and would make a lot of noise if he kicked it in. He did not want to have to deal with some FBI SWAT showing up and was considering his options when the front door was opened by a boy of maybe six, who was on a mission of some sort and was surprised to see the tall young man in the trench coat.
“Who are you?” the boy demanded.
“Me? I’m Whip Hand, kid. Want to see?” Drake opened his coat, freeing the ten-foot-long tentacle. The boy’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened, ready to scream, s
o Drake wrapped the end of his whip hand around the boy’s throat and squeezed off any sound.
He lifted the kicking, struggling, red-faced boy effortlessly up to eye level and said, “Is your mommy home?”
The bulging eyes said yes, so Drake let the boy breathe and shifted his hold to the child’s torso, and carrying him like a gasping, wheezing suitcase, entered the home.
“Is someone at the door?”
A woman’s voice, coming from the kitchen. She had changed out of her suit into sweatpants and a UCLA sweatshirt. She was taking things out of the refrigerator and placing them on the work counter. A package of hamburger meat. Mustard. Pickles.
“Just me, your friendly neighborhood Whip Hand,” Drake said cheerily.
