Michael Grant - Monster

First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2017 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 4052 8483 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1766 3

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

For all the GONE fans,

the best fans in the world

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA Text copyright © 2017 Michael Grant The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First e-book edition 2017 ISBN 978 1 4052 8483 7 Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1766 3 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Dedication For all the GONE fans, the best fans in the world

PART ONE: ORIGIN STORIES PART ONE | ORIGIN STORIES

Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier

1: THE MEET CUTE

2: DROPPING THE NAME TAG

ASO-2

3: THE COMMITTING OF CRIMES

4: BAD START, WORSE FINISH

5: A PERFECT SPECIMEN

6: HANGING WITH DEAD PEOPLE

ASO-4

7: AN UNHAPPY GUINEA PIG

8: DADDY ISSUES

9: ON THE RUN

10: TURNING WHITE TO RED

ASO-5

Meanwhile, in Scotland

11: A REALLY BAD COMMUTE

12: BEING USED

13: ALL DONE BEING USED

PART TWO: HERO, VILLAIN, MONSTER

Interstice

14: A CAREER SETBACK

15: A NICE TALK

16: SHADE VS KNIGHTMARE

17: BATTLE OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

Aboard the Okeanos Explorer

18: GOING HOME

19: MEET THE PSYCHOPATH

PART THREE: ROUGH BEASTS

20: FIRST ON THE SCENE

21: COOKING DRAKE

22: FIRE, WATER AND SHADE DARBY

23: LATE TO THE PARTY

24: THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING WORSE

25: SOMETHING WORSE

26: INNOCENT BYSTANDER

27: HEROES, VILLAINS, MONSTERS

28: CONSEQUENCES

29: AFTERMATH

Back series promotional page

About the Author

Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier

“IT’S THE MONSTER!” Shade Darby cried out, speaking to no one in particular.

The monster was a girl who appeared to be in her teens, but was in reality mere days old. She was known the world over from her first recorded appearance during which she had torn off a man’s arm and eaten it. While the man watched in shock and agony.

The girl, the creature, the monster , now covered from head to toe in blood, stood in the middle of the highway.

There was no traffic on the highway. There hadn’t been in a year. That was how long the dome had sat astride the 101 at Perdido Beach, creating the world’s longest detour.

One day the dome had simply appeared, a perfect sphere twenty miles in diameter which extended down beneath the ground as far as it rose into the sky. That dome was centered on a nuclear power plant, but encompassed vast tracts of forest, hills, farmland, ocean, and almost all of the town of Perdido Beach, California, which lay at the extreme southern end.

The instant the dome appeared (impenetrable, opaque, and utterly impervious to drills, lasers, and shaped explosive charges), every single person fifteen years of age and older had been ejected.

Ejected.

They had popped up on the beach, in the road, on lawns, in homes, in people’s swimming pools. Some had been injured or killed, suddenly materializing in front of speeding trucks. Some had drowned, finding themselves without warning a mile out to sea. A few had materialized in solid objects, with one man skewered by a lamppost, like a human shish kebab. And some had been turned inside out, for reasons that no one had understood then or later.

One of the first scientists to be called to the scene to explain this incredible, impossible, and yet terrifyingly real phenomenon was Dr. Heather Darby of Northwestern University, in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. She had soon realized that this would be no overnight jaunt and that the study of the dome would take months if not years.

So Dr. Heather Darby had flown her daughter out to stay with her in the temporary housing complex hastily erected by the military.

For Shade Darby, thirteen years old, it had been wonderful. First and foremost, there was the beach. Evanston had a beach, but it did not compare to the long stretches of golden sand south of Perdido Beach. Then there was the excitement of being in a sprawling, makeshift compound teeming with soldiers and police and scientists and media and, of course, the Families of the captives in the dome.

The Families. People capitalized it because everyone knew what that meant. They’d been all over TV, the Families. Hysterical at first, then angry, and finally depressed and resigned and hopeless.

But most of all for Shade there was the awe-inspiring, overwhelming presence of the dome itself. It was a mystery so profound that no human had yet come close to understanding it, not even her mother.

Finally, after many months, a decision had been reached in secret to explode a small nuclear device—that was the official term; normal people called it a bomb—at the desert-fronting eastern edge of the dome. It was the very first thing to have any impact whatsoever on the dome. And the effect it had was . . . well, the greatest show the world had ever seen, because suddenly the dome had gone . . . transparent.

When the dome first appeared and ejected everyone fifteen and over, it was speculated that all those under that age were still inside the dome, but no one knew for sure. Many thought the dome might be a solid, a massive ball, like the world’s biggest ball bearing, just sitting there. But most believed that approximately three hundred and thirty-two children, aged fourteen down to newborn, were trapped inside.