Michael Grant - Monster

“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 was 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 Federal Express 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.

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 counsellor 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 palm 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 60 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 stuntman 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 mid-air 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.”