Michael Grant - Monster

Oh, the theories!

The theory Shade Darby liked best was that they were all inside, all those children. She wanted to believe that some benign power had taken care of them. Shade, like most people, hoped that they were all somehow okay.

Then the dome had become transparent, and the world seemed to freeze in place as every television and news website on Earth stared through cameras mounted on TV trucks, drones, helicopters and satellites—not to mention millions of individual smartphones—at what lay revealed.

The children definitely were inside. They were not okay. They were not at all okay. They were filthy, starved, scarred in body and mind, armed with everything from spiked baseball bats, lead pipes, and kitchen knives, to home-made flamethrowers, shotguns, and automatic weapons.

And there were far fewer than three hundred and thirty-two still alive.

They stared out through the dome, those wild children, and the world had stared back.

A savage, descent-of-man, dystopian madness.

And of course an instantly trending Twitter and Instagram meme. #Dome #PerdidoBeach #LOTF #BubbleKids. And then, when those inside had managed to communicate through scribbled notes held up for the cameras, the world learned what those on the inside called it and a new hashtag was born: #FAYZ.

The mordant acronym FAYZ: Fallout Alley Youth Zone.

But the dome was not the only warping of reality, for it soon became clear that some of those inside, not all, but some, had acquired fantastic powers. Supernatural powers. Comic book powers. Powers they did not always use for good.

Shade had been there every day since the dome had gone transparent, watching rapt and often appalled. Her mother had standing orders for Shade to stay away from the dome, but Shade was the daughter of two scientists, and curiosity ran very deep in her genetic make-up. So each day, as soon as she was sure her mother was occupied, Shade would wrap her too-noticeable auburn hair into a bun and cover it with a cap, then sneak from the grim barracks down to the dome, joining the throng of families.

It was the Families that kept it all from being mere spectacle. The Families would hold up signs. Do you know Monica Cowell? Is James Tipton safe? Please tell me if my son, my daughter, my sister, my grandchild is alive and safe.

#NameTheDead.

Many of the parents and grandparents learned that the one they had been praying for had been dead for months. Dead from starvation. Dead from animal attack. Dead from suicide.

Dead from murder.

A girl who called herself the Breeze, a skinny, puckish girl who could move at impossible speeds, wrote signs and held them up to be seen and photographed.

Sorry, your son Hunter is dead.

Sorry, your daughter Carla died eight months ago.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Life had not been peaceful inside what the media and the authorities and even the President of the United States called the Perdido Beach Anomaly. PBA. PBA lacked the bitterly dry humor of FAYZ, which solemn adults thought too glib.

Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. Synonyms: oddity, peculiarity, abnormality, irregularity, inconsistency, incongruity, aberration, quirk, rarity. “PBA” was safe and bloodless and sounded scientific, but Shade knew that all it signified was, “We don’t know.”

Theories? Lots of theories. But understanding? There was none of that.

Shade had watched it all, heard the cries of grief, seen the tear-streaked faces. It was sickening but fascinating, and impossible to look away from.

Inside the dome, frightened children huddled close to their side of the transparent force field. Two very different worlds stared at each other, like monkeys in a cage, though which side were the monkeys was not at all clear.

Outside the dome, parents held up signs to be read by six-year-olds armed with butchers’ cleavers and gnawing on raw fish. Ten-year-olds sat sullen and listless, drinking from whiskey bottles. And nothing could be done. The atmosphere outside was thick with sadness and despair. But beneath all that sadness and despair, at a discreet distance where they could be hypocritically denied, were excitement and anticipation.

It was the greatest show on earth.

Shade sat cross-legged on the folded blanket she brought, arm’s length from the dome wall. Just beyond, right where she could have shook their hands if the barrier were gone, sat half a dozen kids, ranging from toddler to teen. More behind them, and more still stretching north and south. Refugees unable to cross the invisible border. Dying while the world watched with morbid fascination.

It was strange and disturbing, being so near, seeing everything yet hearing nothing. A few days earlier, Shade had been in this same spot eating a cereal bar and the kids on the other side had watched her every bite with a predatory intensity. They had salivated like dogs. Shade had not made that mistake again.

Then had come rumors of a terror to dwarf all others in the dome. A terror called Gaia, though the signs held up inside the dome used half a dozen different spellings. Guyuh. Gayu.

#Gaia.

Dozens of fake Gaia Twitter and Facebook and Instagram accounts under that name, all finding the notion terribly amusing. Until the tape.

At the instant of transparency, at the moment the nuke had detonated, the dome’s force field had failed for just a split second. A young man named Alex, an adult of sorts, had been attempting to climb the dome. In that instant of transformation, the dome had flickered and he had fallen through, becoming the only adult inside. His bad luck.

It had been his arm that Gaia had torn from his body. She had then cooked the flesh with a blast of searing light from her hands, and ripped the medium-rare flesh, chewing and swallowing as the man named Alex lay traumatized and weeping at her feet. This event had been caught on video. The video practically burned down the internet as everyone on planet Earth not living in a cave or a coma, watched it in appalled fascination.

That had taken a lot of the fun out of #GaiaForPresident.

It was that girl, that monster Gaia, who now appeared at the south end of the dome, covered in blood and burns, her clothing rags.

Shade Darby’s phone rang, making her jump. Her mother of course. She knew why her mother was calling. Dr. Heather Darby was making sure her daughter was safe in the barracks, because Heather Darby, at that moment just a hundred feet away in a tent crammed with scientific equipment, knew her daughter did not always listen to her.

Shade let the call go to voicemail. No way was she leaving. No way was she going to miss this. The show was approaching its climax, Shade could sense it. Something big was coming.

There came the chime of a text. Shade did not even look at it.

And then as Gaia stared balefully down at the huddled mass of frightened children pressed against the dome wall, she raised her hands.

“Shade! Shade Darby!” Her mother’s voice was barely audible above the rising swell of voices as people cried out and pointed.

Gaia raised her hands and beams of light, so bright that Shade could scarcely look at them, stabbed from Gaia’s upraised palms into the crowd of children pressed desperately, hopelessly inside the dome.

For what felt like slow-ticking minutes, Shade stared in disbelief. Children were sliced through by the beam of light. Children burned. A boy no more than seven years old melted like a candle in a microwave, burned and melted, and from Shade’s throat came a rising wail, a scream, and all around her screams and bellows of horror, and then it had all risen in pitch, because sound did not escape the dome . . . but light did!

“Shade!”

Gaia’s killing beams scythed through the children in the dome, but stabbed as well through the transparent barrier. Laser light burned cops, tourists and media. It burned the Families. It burned the tacky souvenir stands with their plastic dome keychains.