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  The plane was rolling too fast, the reverse thrusters had not been engaged, and with no one steering, the jet veered wildly off the runway, careening with unstoppable momentum toward the terminal building and fiery destruction.

  It was then that Justin’s mind cleared enough to see what he must do.

  He swept his blade upward, cutting through the ceiling, and continued on, cutting a jagged path around the circumference of the fuselage until, with a deafening screech of tortured metal, the front of the plane fell away. Justin saw the terrified eyes of the flight attendant still buckled into her jump seat as she was carried off with the cockpit section.

  The cockpit section slewed right, tumbled madly, turned again and again, sparks everywhere, and was struck by the right wing, which sheared off from the impact, spraying jet fuel over the runway. The right-side jet engine snapped off the broken wing and cartwheeled fantastically, bounding away like a living thing, still running on the last of its fuel.

  The main body of the plane slumped hard to its right, as the wheel on that side had been carried away with the wing. Erin tumbled into Justin, and her wrist was stabbed by one of his thorns, but he caught her in the crook of his arm. The fuselage, now skidding on its side, bucked and vibrated with an end-of-the-world sound of ripping aluminum and carbon fiber, the lower edge chewing and sparking along the tarmac. The forward momentum that would have slammed them into the terminal at a deadly speed bled off, and the fuselage stopped suddenly, sending loose luggage and unbelted passengers flying forward.

  Just above them, not fifty feet away, faces pressed to the glass of the terminal windows stared down with mouths open.

  And then: silence. Silence as everything, including the remaining engine, stopped. Dust and smoke filled the air. The fuselage was cantilevered, the broken front down, the bent and twisted tail up, the entirety lying half on its right side, with the remaining left wing soaring up and away at an angle.

  Justin stood at the front of the plane, his now-massive shape filling the open circle where once the plane had had a front. His feet were the claws of a T. rex. His shoulders were chitin-armored boulders. His head was five times its normal size. His flesh was hard and shining dully. His hands—a massive pincer and an unwieldy blade—were blue and coral. His body, where exposed, was the sickly white of a trout’s belly.

  “We have to get out of here!” Erin cried. She’d lost both her shoes, her hair was a mess, and her face was smeared with tears and the blood and gore of the elderly couple. “Listen to me: we can’t stay here!” Erin screeched. “We have to get away! You’ve killed people!” Her hand gripped his thick, inhuman forearm, then recoiled from touching him.

  Justin could feel that his face—the face he had not yet seen—was not good at expressing emotion. He did not seem to have lips quite where they should be, and his tongue was like something you might cut out of an ox. He was scared, stunned, overwhelmed, but even in the midst of that flood of emotion, he sensed something . . . something dark and distant yet right there inside his brain, something that was . . .

  . . . watching him.

  He shook off that thought and forced himself to recognize and accept what Erin was saying. He had probably killed the pilots and the flight attendant. He had certainly killed the old couple. He hadn’t meant to (not my fault!), but they were dead just the same and he was looking at their torsos, sagging ovals of exposed organs and hanging viscera, still buckled in.

  Even now, even amid the rising chorus of screams joined by cries of pain, even in the swirling midst of his own impossible nightmare, some part of Justin wished he had a camera: there was a terrible, gruesome beauty to all of it. The bodies. The gore. The impossible angles. The swirling dust. Shirts and underwear, the contents of carry-on bags, draped over seat backs like some demented granny’s idea of doilies.

  A beautiful annihilation.

  A new note could be heard in the screams, the beginnings of rage to join the horror. Justin saw staring eyes, animal fear in bulging eyes, pointing fingers, mouths open in shock and disgust, and all of it turning to fury against him.

  And there were cell phone cameras.

  Justin grabbed Erin around her waist—careful, so careful with the pincer hand that looked as if it could snap her in two. He lifted her insignificant weight and hopped down to the tarmac. Effortless! His claw feet gripped the tarmac, sinking into it like bare toes in mud.

  The smell of jet fuel was all around. The emergency slide unfolded from a rear door, and in seconds the people on the plane would get free of the wreck. The people . . . and their cell phones.

  “Lighter,” Justin said in that harsh, deep, reverberating voice.

  “What?”

  “Give me your lighter. Now!”

  Erin fumbled in her clutch purse, spilled out a bottle of pills, a pack of foreign cigarettes, a tampon, and came up with the lighter, holding it out for him, and he cursed. “My hand is . . . ! You have to do it!”

  “Do what?” she demanded, desperate just to get away, to run, to hide, to find a place that would serve her enough alcohol to somehow wipe the nightmare from her mind.

  “Witnesses,” Justin said coldly.

  And in his mind he felt an unsettling pleasure, because now was his time. Now the clear, direct, emotionless reptile that had always been a part of him saw clearly what Erin could not. Or would not.

  The first of the passengers were sliding down the inflated ramp. The ramp was at a too-steep angle and a woman fell off halfway down, landing bruised but alive on the runway.

  It took Erin a few seconds to understand what Justin was saying, what he was demanding. “No, no, no, I . . . I can’t . . .”

  Justin’s massive claw now closed again around her midriff, and the message was clear. “Do it! Do it!”

  With trembling fingers, Erin flicked the lighter, a spark, a flame.

  Justin used his massive claw to rip her dress, tearing off a long shred, which hung like a limp flag from his pincer. “Light it!”

  Shaking so violently she nearly dropped the lighter, Erin set fire to the swatch of fabric.

  A passenger saw and shouted, “No, you idiot, there’s jet fuel everywhere!”

  “Yeah,” Justin rumbled. “I noticed.”

  He tossed the flaming fabric into the shallow pool of fuel that edged toward his claw feet.

  Jet fuel is kerosene, and kerosene does not catch fire as quickly as gasoline. The fabric burned blue as Justin threw Erin over one massive shoulder and turned to run, run, run, and behind them came the screams and shouts of “Fire! Fire!”

  Justin ran, great bounding leaps, twenty feet with each step, each impact ripping the concrete, ran away from the terminal and across the runway, kicking heedlessly through landing lights, passing beneath the nose of a taxiing FedEx plane, racing in panic toward the fenced perimeter of the airport as the flame spread and the smoke billowed and the screams of the doomed chased him.

  And the dark watchers laughed silently.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Perfect Specimen

  ARMO (A NAME formed by rearranging his true name, Aristotle Adamo) was a white male, seventeen, six foot five inches tall, muscular, blond, blue-eyed, with a jawline Michelangelo would have wished he could sculpt. By his own admission, Armo was not what you would call an academic sort (1.7 GPA). But neither was he a jock, despite being heavily recruited by his high school’s basketball team, football team, and even water polo team.

  He was also not a gamer, a surfer, a geek, a nerd, or member of any other sort of group. Chess club? No. Math club? Hah! Armo’s math skills ended at long division and fractions. Cheese-tasting club? Definitely not.

  Armo was not part of any clique because there was one, only one Armo at Malibu High School. MHS was neck-deep in the beautiful children of Hollywood, but still there was only one Armo. There was not a straight girl or gay boy at MHS who had not looked longingly after him. He was gorgeous, and worse than that, charismatic, and worst of all, he knew it, accepted it
as natural, and didn’t care. His self-confidence went deep, down to the bone.

  “ODD,” the counselor read from the sheet of paper on his desk.

  “Odd?” Armo asked.

  “Oppositional Defiant Disorder. That’s what the shrink, the um, sorry, the psych eval said. You’re smart enough to manage at least a C-plus average without trying and a B if you worked at it. Maybe you won’t be going to Harvard, but you could go to a decent state school, make something of yourself.”

  “I’m already something,” Armo said complacently.

  The counselor, a sad, brown mouse of a man, could not, despite his best efforts, avoid feeling himself to be something out of DNA’s recycling bin by comparison with the young god lounging in the too-small chair. The counselor sighed and thought, You may be a pain in the ass, but at least you’ll never lack for female and/or male companionship.

  “Why don’t you take Spanish? You know you need a language credit to graduate.”

  “I don’t want to take Spanish, I want to take Danish. My family is Danish.”

  “We do not offer Danish as a language option.”

  Armo shrugged.

  The counselor said, “You understand that everyone in Denmark speaks English, right? Usually better than most Americans?”

  A faint smile twisted the corner of Armo’s lips. “This is why it’s important to keep Danish alive. It’s my heritage.”

  “Oooookay.” The counselor laid his hands palms down on his desk in a gesture that signaled surrender. “Okay, Armo. But you won’t graduate. And if you don’t graduate, you won’t go to college.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that will make it very difficult for you to get a decent job.”

  “Like school counselor?”

  Armo’s face was blank, but there was a spark in his blue eyes, and despite the implied insult, despite the brick-wall refusal to go along with, well, anything, the counselor found himself smiling.

  That shut him up, Armo thought.

  “Can I take off now?” Armo asked, and thirty seconds later he was back out on campus, striding to the parking lot as the churning mass of students rushing between classes parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

  The parking lot was a sea of BMWs, Mercedes, and Teslas. There were also, at the other end of the spectrum, numerous Priuses and Leafs. But there was only one beat-up, orange and white, 2003 Dodge Viper. Many of the cars of the rich kids at Malibu High were fast, but only one did zero to sixty in 3.8 seconds, with a top speed of 189.5 miles per hour, and made the earth shake from the throaty rumble of the Viper’s enormous engine.

  No one but an idiot gave a seventeen-year-old a car that fast, but fortunately for Armo, his father was a former stunt man who had managed to become an action movie star. His father figured if fast-and-furious was good for him, it would surely be good for his son as well.

  The Viper’s cloth top was down, and Armo hopped smoothly over the door and dropped onto the cracked leather seat. This, this right here, this moment, when he was in his car, when he was done with school for the day, with the sun shining and the ocean sparkling, this was his favorite part of the day. He loved this moment. He looked forward all through the tedious day to this moment. The moment of escape.

  Of freedom.

  He keyed the accelerator and felt the 8.3-liter, 500- horsepower engine come to life, startling a pair of seagulls into dropping the French fry they’d been fighting over.

  Armo roared down Morning View Drive, pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway, and was hit so hard by a gasoline tanker truck that the Viper went airborne for fifty feet, spinning in midair as Armo thought, Uh-oh: that was a mistake.

  The Viper landed on the far side of the PCH, bounced over the low metal railing that fronted the beach, and came to rest upside down on the sand, knocking a three-inch crack into Armo’s thick skull.

  For a long time, a very long time, Armo saw, smelled, tasted, and heard nothing.

  Nothing. A very long nothing.

  And then . . . a sound! Meaningless, but something rather than the nothing.

  Two days after that single sound, Armo opened his eyes and saw blurry figures.

  The next day he opened his eyes again and saw a man’s face. There was something familiar about the face, but he couldn’t place it, just vague, distorted memories of previous brief emergences into consciousness. His grip on awareness was still extremely weak, in and out, with no way to know how much time passed between each brief contact with reality.

  The next day he opened his eyes again and said, “Water.”

  “Your fluids are in your IV,” a male voice said. “You are in a medical facility. Your injuries are healing nicely.”

  “Whuh?”

  “I’m Dr. Park. You are safe, you are in a medical facility,” that blandly comforting voice said. Armo squinted and sort of saw the doctor, a plain-looking, middle-aged Asian man with graying hair. “You’re going to be all right.”

  “A damn sight better than all right,” a female voice with a hint of the Old South said, but he’d have to turn his head to see her and found he couldn’t quite do that.

  “Tomorrow we’ll get that neck brace off you and try some liquids,” Dr. Park said. And Armo went back to sleep.

  The woman’s voice said, “One more day, Park. Then he’s mine.”

  The next day Armo was feeling much better. He could see clearly, though the dull beige hospital room was nothing much to look at. He saw himself, most of himself, stretched out under a white sheet. He tried to move a leg and it moved. Tried to move the other leg, and it ached, but it, too, was still attached. Hands? There they were, right in front of his face, and he could count to ten on his fingers.

  “So, how are we today?” Dr. Park bustled into the room.

  “Water?”

  The doctor poured some from a plastic jug into a paper cup and held it to Armo’s parched lips. The pleasure was exquisite.

  “What happened to me?” Armo asked.

  “Well, you had a disagreement with a tanker truck. Broken leg, broken collarbone, multiple contusions and abrasions, the most serious matter being a cracked skull.”

  “Is my . . .” Armo pointed with awkward fingers at his crotch.

  “Yes, your penis and testicles are undamaged.” Dr. Park rolled his eyes.

  Armo sighed relief. “My car?”

  “Totaled, I’m afraid.”

  Armo fought back tears. “Is my mom or dad here?”

  “We’ll talk about all that later,” Dr. Park said. He did something with a small toggle on the clear plastic line that ran into the veins of Armo’s wrist and a wave of weariness flooded him. Armo closed his eyes, but he did not lose consciousness—Dr. Park was not an anesthesiologist and gave him a dose that would put a normal-size person under, but Armo was not a normal-size person.

  Armo listened as a second person walked in. He’d heard this voice before, the tense female voice out of the South. The last time it had said, A damn sight better than all right.

  “How’s our patient?”

  “Much better. The leg fracture is almost completely healed. The skull fracture is knitting up well. His vitals are steady, in fact—”

  “So he’ll recover completely?”

  “He’ll likely have some memory loss,” Dr. Park said.

  “So much the better.”

  “I don’t think we—” Dr. Park began in a chiding tone, but the woman cut him off.

  “It may well make him more manageable. Anyway, we’ll give him enough to fill whatever hole is in his memory.”

  Armo heard the woman walk slowly around, from his right side to his left, then back. “You must admit, he’s a nearly perfect specimen. Big, strong, and not overly bright.”

  Armo frowned at that but quickly resumed a blank, unconscious expression.

  “I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Dr. Park said. “According to his school record, he’s a rather difficult character.”

  Colonel Gwendol
yn DiMarco, US Army, laughed. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing he soon won’t be quite human.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hanging with Dead People

  SHADE KNEW SHE was being watched.

  She opened her eyes slowly, peeking at first, and seeing just what she expected: Gaia sat in the easy chair.

  Shade’s heart pounded slow and heavy, a bass drum playing a dirge. Booom . . . Booom. She did not move her arms or head, perhaps could not move them with dread running through her veins and arteries like a drug, like a poison. Only her eyes were hers to command, and she looked only at the girl.

  Gaia sat silent and still. The only movement was the slow dripping of blood that ran down her forehead to encircle her eyes before pooling and then spilling down her cheeks. Blood tears.

  But then Gaia’s mouth began to move. It was as if she was chewing something too big to fit in her mouth. Her teeth bit and then ripped at something Shade could not—

  —and then she saw!

  It was the arm she had ripped from the first and only adult to enter the FAYZ. It was the arm and Shade could see it, could see Gaia’s teeth stripping blackened, crispy skin. The arm did not bleed, but blood drops fell from Gaia’s face and she grinned as she chewed, and grinned as she looked directly at Shade.

  And the arm . . . the arm was growing in length even as Gaia tore the wriggling veins from the flesh, it grew and changed and now there was a shoulder, a white, feminine shoulder, not a man’s shoulder—a woman’s shoulder—and now a neck. Chills raised goose bumps all over Shade’s body and a low moan formed in her throat, a moan she could not quite force out, a sound that wanted to escape but couldn’t.

  No. No. Noooo. Nooooo! NOOOOO!

  The arm had made a shoulder, the shoulder a neck, and now the hair, now the auburn hair and an ear and in that ear the earring Shade had bought her mother on Mother’s Day and—

  “NO!” The sound came this time, a muffled cry, as if she were forcing it up through mud.