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  Normal. Not a word to be applied to Tom Peaks himself, who had salved his hurt feelings at being demoted by taking a large dose of the rock and turning into a massive, fire-breathing, magma-vomiting, reptilian creature who’d burned down much of the Port of Los Angeles before being dragged into the channel by an even more bizarre and dangerous creature created out of starfish DNA.

  Peaks had concealed the crazy within, and perhaps, DiMarco thought, his dull, cubicle-like office was part of the disguise. She had chosen a space closer to the action, and the action at the Ranch was all underground. Anyway, she’d never been much of a sun worshipper.

  Her office now was a singular structure occupying one end of the great cavern, the combination cave and excavation that hid all their work from electronic eyes on satellites and drones. On Google satellite maps, the Ranch looked like what it had once been: an older, repurposed army facility.

  Should call it the Iceberg, not the Ranch, DiMarco thought, nodding with grim pleasure at what she took to be a rather clever joke. Because more of it was underwater than above. Although not water, but land, earth. Dirt. Or at least a giant hole in the dirt. So, an iceberg if you meant that . . .

  Well, DiMarco knew she was not a natural wit.

  Her office was a long rectangle originally built as a construction office for the contractors who had excavated and built the massive underground facility. The location had the great advantage of being up high on a granite outcropping that formed a shelf a hundred feet above the cavern floor, just twenty feet below the jagged stone roof. She’d had it totally remodeled, of course, so the old corrugated-tin cladding had been replaced by reinforced concrete eight inches thick. The small, dirty windows that had been enough for the construction supervisor had been replaced with a single long window, twenty-four feet from end to end and six feet tall. Level 8 bulletproof glass, of course, just a hair over six centimeters thick, and capable of shrugging off five rounds from a high-powered sniper rifle.

  Within the Bunker—as DiMarco’s office had been instantly nicknamed—were just two interior walls. One, on the left end, closed off DiMarco’s adjutant, secretary, and security detail. On the right end DiMarco had her private bathroom. But occupying fully two-thirds of the square footage was her own office, dominated by a massive steel desk partly made of armor recovered from a Russian tank that had come to misfortune in Ukraine. The desk was painted olive drab, a very military contrast to the rest of the office, which had expensive Persian carpets and rich mahogany bookshelves stuffed with everything ever written about the Perdido Beach Anomaly and the emerging field of exobiology, and a great many books on arcane aspects of genetics and the hacking of same.

  Major Mike Atwell, DiMarco’s adjutant, walked in, five long strides from his own office, stepped off with careful precision to bring him just before her desk, where he executed a pivot that faintly snapped his heels together, and lay the morning briefing book on her desk.

  The paper copy was a formality, of course; DiMarco already had the digital version open on her computer.

  “Have a seat, Mike,” DiMarco said.

  Atwell, a thirty-one-year-old West Pointer with not one but two PhDs—genetics and military history with a focus on China—was a man who would never manage to look as good as he should in his impeccably tailored uniforms. He was getting full at the waist, had shoulders that were more vertical than horizontal, and had been cursed with a face that screamed “nerd.”

  “Let’s run down the top-ten list,” DiMarco said.

  Atwell nodded and began from memory. He might not have shoulders, but he had prodigious recall.

  “We are well beyond ten at this point,” Atwell said, earning a sharp look from DiMarco, who hated being told what she already knew. “Vincent Vu, who calls himself Abaddon the Destroyer, has been spotted subsequent to the Port of LA battle, as himself, as a kid, at a 7-Eleven in Long Beach and a Target store in Glendale, as well as appearing as Abaddon and, for reasons that remain obscure, destroying half a mile of used car lots. Three dead.”

  DiMarco nodded. “I’m not sure Vu is target number one, but go on.”

  “In second place, your predecessor, Tom Peaks. He’s being called Dragon in the press. Sometimes Burning Man or Hot Lizard in social media.”

  “He’s number one,” DiMarco said. “You can’t just assess according to damage done, you have to consider the mental capabilities as well. Vu is genuinely mentally ill, and a teenager to boot, who knows nothing and certainly has no larger plans. But Peaks?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Atwell said, though he was far from convinced that ill was any better than evil. “In third place we have Shade Darby, with her super-speed. Very powerful and very smart, a bad combination. We’ve analyzed the videos, and the best guess is that she can hit speeds in excess of seven hundred miles an hour, which, depending on atmospheric conditions, can mean Mach 1, the speed of . . .” He let that trail off, seeing the warning look from DiMarco, the look that said, I know what Mach 1 means.

  “Next up, Dekka Talent. She’s very powerful, reasonably bright, and more experienced at actual physical combat than any of the others, and probably more than any soldier currently serving in uniform, frankly. In the media they’re calling her everything from Catstein to Catzilla to Lesbokitty.”

  DiMarco nodded, and her upper lip disappeared behind her lower lip, a clenched-jaw expression that often preceded an angry eruption.

  No eruption this time. Not yet.

  “Fifth place is Aristotle Adamo, aka Armo.”

  “I made that boy!” DiMarco snapped. “I gave him power beyond anything he could imagine, and offered him . . .” She waved a hand to encompass the world of pleasure she’d tried to use to control the uncontrollable brat. This one DiMarco took personally. Dekka had been Peaks’s special project, Armo had been hers, and it was not a happy reality that the two had apparently teamed up.

  “Six is Hugo Rojas, aka Cruz. She’s a trans female or gender-fluid male—we aren’t sure yet—a follower, not a leader. She seems to have the power to alter her appearance at will. She can appear as any person, old, young, big, small, any race, any gender.”

  “Huh.” DiMarco grunted and turned on a sour smile. “I’m sure he, she, or it enjoys that.”

  Atwell quashed his instinctive disgust at her sneering bigotry. “Seven is Francis Specter. She’s just fourteen, mother and father both members of a meth-dealing biker gang known to have been one of the gangs drawn to the Perdido Beach cave. No idea whether she consumed some rock or was down there in the hole long enough to be affected less directly.”

  “What do we have on her powers?”

  Atwell blew out a sigh. “Damned little, I’m afraid. She seems to be able to pass through solid objects, or allow solid objects to pass through her. We just located a seven-second snippet off a traffic camera in Glenrio, New Mexico. May I?” He indicated the remote control on DiMarco’s desk. He clicked the button to open a sliding panel that revealed a large TV monitor. A few more clicks, and they had choppy, grainy black-and-white video of a girl with jet-black hair crossing a busy highway. A car came into view, swerved madly to avoid her, and was followed by a Costco tractor trailer that slammed into her at sixty-four miles an hour.

  And passed right through her: the entire length of the tractor trailer. Francis Specter had walked on out of camera range as if nothing had happened.

  DiMarco had him replay it twice. “Fascinating. My first thought was that she alters her density, or the density of solid objects, but we’d see an increase in apparent size then. The lab’s current working theory is that she moves into an unseen dimension and essentially moves around the object through a fifth dimension of space-time.”

  “The truck driver says all he saw was like a blurred rainbow.”

  “A what?”

  “He says that in the split second he saw her, she looked like a walking, blurry rainbow.”

  “Why don’t we see it on the video?”

  Atwell said, “Well, one
, the driver could be hallucinating, or two, she’s got her back to the camera and the effect is only on her skin.”

  DiMarco drummed her fingers and looked at the freeze-frame blur. “Criminal parents. If she’s bending space, it will be impossible to lock up or restrain her in any way. Pity. She’s a KOS.”

  KOS. Kill on sight.

  “Glenrio is hard on the New Mexico–Texas border,” Atwell said. “New Mexico authorities will not cooperate, but the gang frequently crosses into Texas, and we have people in the Texas Rangers who can . . . can do what needs to be done.”

  Atwell, as a student of military history, understood that he was being given an illegal order, an order that violated the law and the Constitution. And his oath as an officer. It made him queasy. Just not queasy enough to refuse.

  “KOS! And I’m not concerned with blowback. We have assets of our own, we don’t need to lean on the police,” DiMarco said. “Eighth place?”

  “The Perdido Beach survivor Drake Merwin, aka Whip Hand, known to millions from the Ellison book and the movie. He’s teamed up with Peaks, which is bad enough, but worse, ordinary people think he’s Alex Pettyfer, the actor who played him in the movie. In reality he is worse than could be shown in a PG-13 movie, much worse—a psychopath and a sadist. A murderer, rapist, torturer, an all-around nasty piece of work.”

  “KOS?” DiMarco frowned. “No, I think not—we want him. I assume you’ve read-in on him? The whip arm thing is not the power that interests me; he is apparently indestructible. You could run him through a blender and pour the bloody goo in the ocean, and a few days or weeks later he would be back. No, no KOS on Drake Whip Hand—he may yet be useful.”

  Atwell made a note, concealing his disapproval. Atwell understood the need for drastic measures, but working with vicious animals like Drake Merwin was not why he had enlisted.

  “Number nine is Malik Tenerife. A college freshman at Northwestern, high IQ, devoted, we think, to Shade Darby. We have only very preliminary information about him. He was badly burned by Peaks in the battle at the port. Doctors gave him a zero chance of surviving, but somehow he walked out of the hospital, seemingly healthy. He had an unusual effect. I just this minute got some video . . .”

  DiMarco rapped her knuckles on her desk, an impatient signal to get on with it.

  This time the video was from a professional news camera, showing a middle-aged nurse with a tear-streaked face.

  “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.

  Drake laughed contemptuously. “The big man who thought he’d make me his sidekick. Your face is known, Peaks. Everyone in the world is gunning for you. I have a place, I have a place where I can hole up, but what hole do you have?”

  Peaks stared blearily at Drake. The sadistic psychopath was as angularly handsome as ever, untouched by the passage of time or by the terrible injuries he had sustained. He was cruel and vicious, and Peaks didn’t need Drake’s ten-foot-long python arm to convince him. Nor did you need to have seen coroners’ photos of his victims over the last four years, as Peaks had. You could see it in Drake’s eyes.

  Peaks thought, I’m the Dragon, but he’s the monster.

  But Peaks knew he needed time to recover. His mind was barely functioning, like a remote control with a nearly dead battery—sometimes the buttons worked, sometimes they didn’t. If he were a normal human being, he’d have self-diagnosed as suffering from depression. So he let Drake take the lead. They stole a car and drove into the desert, back to Joshua Tree National Park, to the emptiness of the Quail Mountain area, where Drake led them up and up, deeper and deeper into dust-dry hills, into wild piles of boulders, through tangled thorn and Velcro-leaved succulents, to a crack that looked too small for a man to push through. But it proved doable, just barely.

  It was a cave. Peaks felt the relatively cool air and the scent of musk and mildew and carrion, rotting meat. It was dark as night, and for a moment Peaks wondered whether Drake had led him here as a trick. But the truth was, if Drake had wanted to kill Peaks, he probably could have done so at any time.