Michael Grant - Hero

“Amazing,” Malik whispered again. “I . . . I mean . . . wow. Wow.” He felt as if he’d just glimpsed the world like God—if such a creature existed—might see it. No other human being in the history of the world, aside from Francis, had seen what he’d just experienced.

“Yeah. Weird.” Francis did not share Malik’s pleasure, it was all just disorienting and unpleasant to her.

“Let’s go back up. But even slower if you can.”

Once more, with Francis’s small hand held firmly in his, the world unfolded, opened up. Straight lines became curves, curves became curlicues, inside was out, and it was all madness, complete, swirling, colorful, impossible madness. Malik laughed in pure joy, his laughter a paisley fog in the air around him. He reminded himself sternly that he wasn’t an extradimensional tourist: he was searching for answers. Searching for a way out.

Searching . . . for them.

He closed his eyes, trying to regain some sense of perspective, but it was no good: eyelids were just so 3-D. He focused his mind and “listened” for the Dark Watchers. They’d been there with him night and day since he’d been burned beyond saving. But now?

Where are you, my dark, invisible friends?

He could not feel them, which was a wonderful relief, but not the point. If he could not sense them, how could he find them?

The world around him was made entirely of bits and pieces: gypsum board walls, lumber, structural steel, the fabric of carpets, wires buzzing with electricity, which he saw as a pulsing green glow. Mixed in like croutons in a salad were humans, bulging water balloons of guts and muscle and blood that, when looked at from a certain angle, exploded outward in a disturbing vivisection, like something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie, strange and unsettling—and the more strange and unsettling for being recognizable.

But none of this was what he was looking for. He needed to look past all the debris. He needed, he told himself, to look in a different direction. But how was he to find that different direction, the direction where the Dark Watchers lurked?

He turned his head this way and that, and caught a glimpse of something. Not light—light was everywhere, seeming to shine right through everything in every direction but one, and in that one direction he saw a hole no bigger than a grapefruit. Inside that hole was not the black of total darkness, but something he could not describe, because inside that hole was nothingness, a pale gray, flat, nothingness without surface or depth or feature.

“I want to go there,” Malik said, and watched his technicolor words wrap themselves around the splayed gray mass that was Francis’s brain. He saw the intricate muscles of her eyes contract and turn her gaze in the direction he’d indicated.

Francis moved toward the hole. If she was using her feet, Malik never saw them move. She just seemed to glide, smooth and slow, drawing him along, like he was Wendy to her Peter Pan.

Suddenly Malik felt an electric jolt, not painful, but alarming. And there! There he felt the presence of the Dark Watchers!

From the nothing hole something emerged, something like an amoeba, but too big, and when he stared at it he did not see inside, did not see organs or viscera, just more of the same bland, featureless gray that shaped the rhythmically pulsating mass.

It’s digital, not physical. Or whatever passes for digital in this universe.

The amoeba went straight for him, and all at once it had wrapped itself around his head, fast as a bullwhip. He cried out and tried to take hold of the thing, but his hands . . .

He had let go of Francis’ hand!

He clawed frantically at the amoeba, but his hands would not touch it and just passed through with no resistance. He might as well have been batting at the air.

He twisted frantically, fear swelling inside him. He turned away from the nothing hole, and instantly the amoeba was gone.

Some kind of defense mechanism.

He tested his theory by looking back at the hole, and sure enough, the featureless amoeba went for him again.

He reversed direction, lost the amoeba, and called out in paisley swirls, “Francis! Francis!”

But his words did not reveal her. No answer came.

And now Malik was getting good and scared. Because the power to move between dimensions was Francis’s, not his.

He was stuck.

DRAKE MERWIN HADreassembled himself several times during his relatively short life. It was a process he neither understood nor controlled; he only knew that whatever was done to . . . dis assemble him, he came back together.

The latest such disassembly had been the result of a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone. The explosion had annihilated much of him, leaving bits and pieces, many burning, smeared all over a pile of rocks in the Mojave desert. The largest bit of his head—left eye, a bit of nose cartilage, and his mouth—had landed on a cactus.

A few days had passed since then, and he now had a body capable of limited movement. His head was mostly complete, with the right side lacking only skin to cover exposed muscle and tendon. He had most of his left arm and all of his right arm, that being the ten-foot-long tentacle that was a legacy of the FAYZ. His right leg was minus a foot, and the left leg was scarcely better.

It was not an ideal body for crossing hundreds of miles of desert. Before he could do anything he would need to be more complete: hard to walk without two feet.

Drake experienced a moment of sadness and loss for the excellent cave that had been collapsed by the explosion. He’d spent years in that cave, torturing victims, savoring their agony, laughing at their increasingly desperate pleas.

Often during the months and years of his desert exile, Drake had passed the time by teasing Brittany Pig, the homunculus that always reappeared, like a living bas relief on his chest, complete with the protruding wire of her broken braces. Brittany had not yet re-emerged—that part of his chest was still open to the ribs—but she would be back. Aside from his victims, Brittany was the closest Drake ever came to human contact. “Friends” would not be the right word, but Drake had become accustomed to her.

Drake had foolishly allied himself with Tom Peaks, called Dragon by some, Napalm by others, and damned near been disassembled by various mutants at the Port of Los Angeles, including an old enemy, Dekka Talent. Dekka had been Sam Temple’s muscle, his enforcer, her and that brat Brianna. Dekka had been dangerous enough then, and she was more so now. But he could take her. Could and would.

In time. But not yet.

Peaks’s cell-phone signal had led to the missile strike that had wiped out Drake’s excellent cave. They’d been trying to kill Peaks, but he was gone by then, and Drake had borne the brunt.

It was unfair, but Drake was not one to stew over life’s unfairness. Anyway, now he had a mission. The world was coming apart, civilization was slowly crumbling, and the “new normal” was just abnormal enough that Drake thought he might have a chance at something he had wanted desperately for five years, from all the way back in the FAYZ: Astrid Ellison.

He didn’t have an address, but he thought he knew how to find it. In the meantime he only had to wait for another foot to return, and then: Los Angeles.

He had come so close in the FAYZ. So close to making Astrid suffer. This time he would not fail.

Drake had learned patience down through the years, and he waited for hours more until he had two almost-complete legs. And then Drake marched . . . well, staggered . . . toward murder.