Michael Grant - Hero

“I’m an artist, damn it!”

Justin DeVeere muttered those words to a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in McCarran International airport.

Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare and a few other less-flattering names, had escaped the massacre at the Ranch, the HSTF-66 facility, by running into the woods until he could run no more. He’d then managed to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, which turned out to be a very poor choice of destination. Only sheer, dumb luck had kept Justin from dying from a missile en route to Vegas.

After the explosion, he’d walked on toward Las Vegas until he saw flames rising and explosions booming. Then he had sensibly turned around and walked in the other direction. He’d ended up spending the night shivering in the freezing desert and watching the flames of the distant battle.

It had sent his mind back onto half-forgotten tracks, back to when he was just a promising young artist. As he watched from a safe distance, he’d begun thinking about a multimedia art installation that would evoke the horror. And that led him to painful memories of his wealthy patron and girlfriend, Erin O’Day, who had been killed in an earlier battle.

The thing was, Justin admitted, he did not actually want to be Knightmare anymore. It had been exciting for a while, but had quickly become a bloody, violent, and very precarious existence. He’d been imprisoned at the Ranch before Shade Darby and her mutant friends had attacked and destroyed the place, freeing a freak show of mutants and cyborgs, things that were half-human, drones flown by the disembodied heads of infants, things . . . Bad things. Very bad things. And had any of the Rockborn Gang spotted him there, he’d almost certainly be dead now. He had experienced the blast of pain from Malik, and one thing was absolutely clear to Justin: he never, ever wanted to feel that again. It had been unendurable, and it had shaken him down to his bones.

I’m an artist, dammit!

That phrase had become his rallying cry. He wasn’t Knightmare; he wasn’t the creature who had destroyed a plane and burned its passengers alive. He wasn’t the creature who had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. He was an artist.

Dammit!

It was this mantra that convinced him that he needed to get back to New York. Back to where people knew him for his art. Surely some art lover would grant him shelter until . . . until the madness descending on humanity was past.

The morning after the battle, he’d once again walked back toward Las Vegas, passed by an endless stream of National Guard troop transports and FEMA trucks carrying emergency relief.

Once there, unrecognized in his normal, human body, he’d overheard people talking about the Rockborn Gang, the heroes who had saved the city. And to his horror, he’d realized they were still there, still in Vegas.

One thing Justin was quite clear about: wherever the Rockborn Gang was, he wanted to be far away.

He had no wallet, no credit cards or phone. But a young man walking past a vast construction site in North Las Vegas, and who arguably looked a bit like Justin, had all that and more. Justin had not wanted to kill the young man, but necessity made its own rules. One more body for collection by the crews that were scouring the city for the dead. Justin took his victim’s wallet and phone and caught a taxi to the airport. He’d bought the first available ticket to New York and now merely waited for the gate to be called.

Back to New York.

He would be safe in New York.

Tom Peaks had run from Las Vegas after the horror at the Triunfo, the hotel where Dillon Poe had made his unspeakably brutal last stand.

Peaks had arrived in Vegas as Napalm, the ten-story-tall reptile with the belly full of liquid fire, believing he was there to take down Dekka, who he hated for what he still thought of as betrayal.

But when he’d arrived . . .

He had not known about Dillon Poe. He’d had no idea what Dillon was doing. He had not known that the hundreds of people gathered by the entrance of the Triunfo were slaves to Dillon’s will, unable to flee.

He had definitely not known that the Charmer had sprayed that crowd with gasoline.

Now Peaks sat trembling in a booth at a diner in one of the multitude of identical shopping centers that ringed the city. His coffee was undrunk. The pancakes he’d ordered were untouched and now cold.

There had been so many horrors. So much destruction. The Ranch, his great creation, was exposed to the world and destroyed. What had once been his staff of carefully recruited scientists and techs and guards had been hunted down and murdered by vengeful mutants and cyborgs.

His family . . . He closed his eyes and tried to picture them, but each time he did he saw disgust and contempt on their faces. He could never go home to them, not now.

No job. No home. No family. No purpose in life. And for the rest of his life he would see the Triunfo fire over and over and over again. A fire he had unwittingly lit.

“Can I get you anything else, honey?’ the waitress asked.

Peaks shook his head. He fished out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table, got up, went to the men’s room, and vomited coffee and bile.

Peaks splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the dirty mirror. Looked at a face now known to every law-enforcement agency on earth.

There was no safety.

There was no escape.

There were only the screams of people burning.

Peaks stumbled out of the diner into brilliant sunlight. Across the vast parking lot was a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. He headed for it, spotted a liquor store, and bought himself a bottle of excellent scotch on the way.

“Damn good scotch,” Peaks muttered, draining a quarter of the bottle as he maneuvered through parked cars.

The clerk at the liquor store had given him a strange look, a shrewd look of recognition. Would he call the police? More likely than not.

Time was running short. If they came for him, he could morph and fight them off. He had only to belch the dreadful napalm and they would burn. . . .

Innocent police officers just doing their duty. My God.

He set the scotch bottle, now half-empty, on the curb and went into the Big 5. He easily found the gun-sales area. He pointed to a 12-gauge shotgun in a rack.

“How much?”

“That model will set you back $899.99.”

Peaks stuck a credit card into the reader. Denied. Tried another card. Denied.

“I know who you are,” the clerk said suddenly. He looked at Peaks as if seeing the devil himself.

“I need a gun,” Peaks rasped.

“You get nothing from me, you piece of shit,” the man said. “Give you a gun? Why, so you can kill some more children? Get out of here! Security! Security!”

Peaks bowed his head, then walked around behind the counter. The clerk, terrified, tried to back away but Peaks grabbed him by the shirt front and said, “I need a shotgun. Short barrel. And one shell. Just one.”

A minute later store security came hustling up just in time to see Peaks jack the 12-gauge shell into the chamber, place the barrel of the shotgun under his chin, and blow the top of his head all over the display case.

IN SURGERY THEYhad reattached Bob Markovic’s nearly severed hand. He was given painkillers. He was also given a sedative. And by the time he woke he was in a very surprising yet oddly familiar place. Consciousness returned to Markovic in the form of too-bright lights and a sea of red velour. He blinked, and then squinted against the light, and then, with rapidly mounting panic, recognized where he was.

Carnegie Hall?

Markovic’s Money Machine had season tickets to Carnegie Hall, using them to reward especially productive senior employees and the occasional politician who needed some TLC. But, he realized, he was not in the corporate seats which were up in the first balcony, stage left. He was in a seat toward the rear of the orchestra section.