Just above them, not fifty feet away, faces pressed to the glass of the terminal windows stared down with mouths open.
And then: silence. Silence as everything, including the remaining engine, stopped. Dust and smoke filled the air. The fuselage was cantilevered, the broken front down, the bent and twisted tail up, the entirety lying half on its right side with the remaining left wing soaring up and away at an angle.
Justin stood at the front of the plane, his now-massive shape filling the open circle where once the plane had had a front. His feet were the claws of a T. rex. His shoulders were chitin-armored boulders. His head was five times its normal size. His flesh was hard and shining dully. His hands—a massive pincer and an unwieldy blade—were blue and coral. His body where exposed was the sickly white of a trout’s belly.
“We have to get out of here!” Erin cried. She’d lost both her shoes, her hair was a mess, her face was smeared with tears and the blood and gore of the elderly couple. “Listen to me: we can’t stay here!” Erin screeched. “We have to get away! You’ve killed people!” Her hand gripped his thick, inhuman forearm then recoiled from touching him.
Justin could feel that his face—the face he had not yet seen—was not good at expressing emotion. He did not seem to have lips quite where they should be, and his tongue was like something you might cut out of an ox. He was scared, stunned, overwhelmed, but even in the midst of that flood of emotion, he sensed something . . . something dark and distant yet right there inside his brain, something that was . . .
. . . watching him.
He shook off that thought and forced himself to recognize and accept what Erin was saying. He had probably killed the pilots and the flight attendant. He had certainly killed the old couple. He hadn’t meant to (Not my fault!), but they were dead just the same and he was looking at their torsos, sagging ovals of exposed organs and hanging viscera, still buckled in.
Even now, even amid the rising chorus of screams joined by cries of pain, even in the swirling midst of his own impossible nightmare, some part of Justin wished he had a camera: there was a terrible, gruesome beauty to all of it. The bodies. The gore. The impossible angles. The swirling dust. Shirts and underwear, the contents of carry-on bags, draped over seat backs like some demented granny’s idea of doilies.
A beautiful annihilation.
A new note could be heard in the screams, the beginnings of rage to join the horror. Justin saw staring eyes, animal fear in bulging eyes, pointing fingers, mouths open in shock and disgust, and all of it turning to fury against him.
And there were cell phone cameras.
Justin grabbed Erin around her waist—careful, so careful with the pincer hand that looked as if it could snap her in two. He lifted her insignificant weight and hopped down to the tarmac. Effortless! His claw feet gripped the tarmac, sinking into it like bare toes in mud.
The smell of jet fuel was all around. The emergency slide unfolded from a rear door and in seconds the people on the plane would get free of the wreck. The people . . . and their cell phones.
“Lighter,” Justin said in that harsh, deep, reverberating voice.
“What?”
“Give me your lighter. Now!”
Erin fumbled in her clutch purse, spilled out a bottle of pills, a pack of foreign cigarettes, a tampon, and came up with the lighter, holding it out for him and he cursed, “My hand is . . .! You have to do it!”
“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.
| 5 | | | A PERFECT SPECIMEN |
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,