SAM TEMPLE HAD never been the sort of person to spy on others. He was certainly not the sort of person who would spy on his wife. What he had with Astrid was a relationship that had already endured more stress than a hundred normal marriages. They weren’t just solid as a couple; they were chiseled out of granite.
And yet . . .
Sam was also not overly neat or particularly obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen, so he was not the sort of person to reorganize the dishwasher. But the thing was, he had a coffee cup he’d left out on the balcony for, oh, maybe a week, and it had grown a ring of something green and scummy. He wanted to get it cleaned before Astrid noticed it because Astrid was overly neat and quite obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen.
But the dishwasher was almost completely full. In order to wedge his cup in there he had to move a few things around and . . . and then he saw the glass. It had clearly been used for orange juice. But clinging to the bottom and sides of the glass, along with the innocent pulp, were grains of something gray and gritty.
Sam pulled the orange-juice glass out and looked at it from every angle. Then he ran his finger around the inside and worked the grit between his thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, Astrid,” Sam whispered. “No, no, no, sweetheart.”
Astrid was at a spin class or Pilates or whatever, he could never recall. The world was falling apart, but the exercise classes must never stop; this was LA, after all. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, which displayed the proper time because: Astrid. He had a solid half hour, minimum.
It took just five minutes to locate the FedEx envelope, still containing a baggie partly filled with powdered rock.
Sam sat on the edge of their bed and hung his head, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of memory, and with those memories came dread. Dread of a repeat. Dread of more and more and more. He felt sick inside. He wanted to cry.
He wanted a drink.
But this wasn’t about him, or his feelings; it was about Astrid. There was no point in asking why she had done it, and no point in asking where the powder had come from. Two women who loved him in different ways were doing their best to protect him. He couldn’t get angry over the deception; they’d done it because they were worried about him.
They think I’ll crack. They think I’ll drink.
And Sam knew that Astrid did not trust him to be able to stop Drake. Which was fair enough because he knew he couldn’t stop Drake. He’d had many battles with Whip Hand, back when Sam could still fire a killing beam of light capable of cutting through stone. He’d killed Drake, or so Sam had once thought. And when they got word that Drake was still alive, Sam had done . . . had done what?
Stuck my head in the sand and did nothing.
He raised his head and saw his own forlorn reflection in the mirrored closet doors. He looked at himself almost curiously, as if trying to understand what was going on inside his own head. He was no longer the serious, quiet young surfer dude. His hair was growing darker. His skin, too, since he did still love to paddle out and sit there off the beach, sit out there on his board with his legs freezing, waiting for a wave he could ride all the way in. The surf report website was still the last thing he checked at night and the first thing he checked on waking. He didn’t get to the beach as often as he would have liked, but still he felt a need to know the surf conditions at Venice Beach, Zuma, Ventura. . . . Each time he checked, he told himself not to look at conditions for Perdido Beach, his old beach, the one where he and Quinn had surfed before the FAYZ had stilled the waters and made surfing impossible. But he always did.
Sam had not gone back to Perdido Beach. Every now and again he would start to text his old friend and surfing buddy Quinn and see whether he was up for a road trip north. But he’d never sent the text. Quinn had made a life for himself, living with his folks, attending community college, and working as a deckhand on a sportfishing boat out of San Pedro.
“You’re scared,” Sam told his reflection.
He had good reason to be scared. He was sober and wanted to stay that way.
No, that’s just your excuse.
That thought fired up resentment in him. Had he not done enough? Seriously? Had he not suffered enough? Was he not still awakened in the small hours of the morning by nightmares? Good God, what more could anyone demand of him?
But that anger fizzled and died. No one was asking anything from him. No one.
And that’s the real problem, isn’t it?
No one had said, Come on, Sam, once more. . . . And the truth was he wanted . . . Wanted what? He had a brilliant, gorgeous wife. He had money in the bank. And he had more job offers than he could even consider. He could get paid just to show up at new clubs where he was too young to drink (legally) but had enough celebrity to draw a crowd. Or he could be the advertising spokesman for Pyzel, the surfboard manufacturer—they’d made the offer. Or he could write a book. Or he could go to work for Albert, who’d offered him a make-work job doing nothing but collecting a charity check.
Or, or, or.
Each possibility filled him with a mix of dread and the anticipation of brain-numbing boredom. He didn’t want to be a rent-a-celeb. He didn’t want to pimp surfboards. He certainly didn’t want to write a book, or sit in an office all day doing whatever pity work Albert sent his way. No.
“What do you want?” he asked himself, but of course he knew. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be.
He wanted to be Sam Temple. That Sam Temple.
Astrid returned, sweaty and sexy in her bodysuit.
“You started the dishes,” she said, nodding approvingly at the churning dishwasher.
“Every few weeks I like to do something useful around the apartment,” he said.
“Or at least once a year,” Astrid snarked.
“Mmm,” Sam said. “Oh, and by the way: we’re out of orange juice.”
Any other woman would have thought nothing of it. An innocent reminder that they needed orange juice.
But Astrid was not any other woman. She had been walking away, but Sam saw her hesitate. Then stop. Then turn to look first at the dishwasher and then aim her penetrating gaze at him.
“Astrid?” Sam said. “We need to talk.”
Justin DeVeere had made his way back to New York, home sweet home: skyscrapers, yellow cabs, noise, the whole thing. The Big Apple, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
With some differences. One difference was that none of the cabs at LaGuardia would take a passenger into Manhattan. The Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey, sure. Not Manhattan.
So he’d taken a cab to the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge. From there he had walked across the bridge—the subway was on a very sketchy schedule with a main tunnel collapsed by the ASO impact. It was the first time he’d stepped foot on a bridge since the Golden Gate, and terrible memories of that fight flooded his brain. As he walked the wide bike and pedestrian path past traffic all heading out of the city, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from downtown all the way north to the park. That was another difference.
Reaching the far side, he found himself in a city far quieter than he recalled. New York had held firm, but in the end the reality had begun to sink in: the city was in chaos, and it was a really good time to be somewhere else. Many shops that should have been open were closed, their steel security gates rolled down and padlocked. He even spotted available street parking, an exceedingly rare sight.
There was a bad feel to the city—not panic, quite; more like defeat. The faces he saw were blank and gloomy. There was debris in the streets, glass and bricks and random bits of office furniture. Big black plastic trash bags formed hills on sidewalks, many split open and spilling their contents. And no one was cleaning it up. There were cops everywhere, many in tactical gear, ready if necessary to shoot looters. Looking north up Second Avenue, Justin saw the lights of fire trucks. The dominant sound was of burglar alarms in cars and in buildings, loudly insisting that attention should be paid. No one seemed to care.
The next difference he discovered was that the door to his apartment—the one rented by his now-dead girlfriend and sponsor, Erin, lovely, rich Erin—was draped in yellow crime-scene tape. There was a notice pasted to the door that warned against entry.
He doubted anyone in law enforcement had the time or energy to come around and check, so he tore down the tape, found the spare key he kept under the edge of the hallway carpet, and went in.
The place had been trashed, or at least searched by people not concerned to keep the search secret. Books were strewn on the floor; the sofa cushions had been sliced open, fluffy white stuffing everywhere, like the aftermath of an epic pillow fight. The refrigerator was wide open and still running. His desktop computer was gone. All of his paintings had been taken down off the walls, presumably so the cops or the FBI or whoever could search the backs. They were leaned against the back of an easy chair.
One by one, moving as if in a trance, he opened his kitchen cupboards. Cheerios but no milk. Dry pasta, both linguine and cavatappi. A half-empty box of Kind bars. He took one of those.
They had left his TVs, the one in the living room and the one in the bedroom, where he sat disconsolate on his sliced-up mattress. He turned on the set and waited for it to warm up as he chewed the granola bar.
“Knightmare eating a Kind bar amid the wreckage,” he muttered. “Wonderful.”
He was an artist, dammit. So he reminded himself. An artist! Not a monster. Not some crazy killer like that lunatic in Las Vegas. All he’d ever wanted was to be left alone. Everything he’d done had been self-defense, perfectly reasonable self-defense. The plane. The bridge. The lighthouse. He hadn’t wanted any of that to happen. It wasn’t his fault.
You have canvas and you have paint, he reminded himself sternly. You should get to work. You should get back to your life, your real life. The life where you didn’t get Erin killed. The life where no families screamed behind windshields as their cars plunged twenty-five stories into the churning green water of San Francisco Bay.
All of that, the horror, the fear, the excitement, the creepiness of finding yourself in a mutant body built for mayhem—he had to find a way to capture it on canvas. If he could paint it, he could control it. On the canvas he could shape his memories, rearrange and revise them.
Yes, that was the thing to do. Never become Knightmare again. Pray that the cops were too overwhelmed to put any effort into little Justin DeVeere. There was so much happening, so much madness, surely he was already in law enforcement’s rearview mirror.
The TV came to life. It had been many hours, days even, since he had seen or heard news. He’d overheard conversations about ASO-7’s spectacular deconstruction of the city, but of a creature calling himself Vector, he’d heard nothing. Until now.
Vector had control of at least one local TV station, and it was running a loop of a creature made entirely of insects over and over again.
By the third repetition, Justin had forgotten about canvas and paint. A new world was coming, a world ruled by Vector or others like him. A world very unlikely to have much of a place for an artistic prodigy.
But a world where Knightmare would perhaps be right at home.
Drake Merwin quite liked his nice new trench coat. He’d received it as a “gift” from a man who’d had Drake’s tentacle tightening around his throat. The coat gave him a way to muffle random blurts from Brittany Pig, who had re-emerged on his chest. And it helped to hide both his whip hand and the fact that parts of him were still regrowing.
His feet were all the way restored, and that was a relief. It would have been very hard to drive the car he’d stolen without feet. He was on the I-10 West, passing Cabazon and trying to decide just how to go about locating one Astrid Ellison. He knew she was in Southern California, but that didn’t narrow it down by much.
Drake was not a computer person. Maybe the address was in some corner of the internet or the dark web, but he didn’t know where to start with that. What he did know was that someone knew. Someone. But who?
The FBI. They would know.
Drake did not know computers and he did not have a phone, but the Infiniti he’d stolen had GPS, and he knew how to use that. He pulled off to the side of the freeway, and as big rigs went past, their slipstream rocking the car, he punched in “FBI.” A blue dot showed an FBI office in Riverside.
“Hah! Straight ahead.”
He took the state highway 60 exit off the I-10, then followed directions until he pulled up in the parking lot of a three-story, Spanish-style office building with a red tile roof. The building fronted on a blank, gray wall that marked the freeway.
If Drake had one virtue, it was patience. He hadn’t always been patient, far from it, but Drake had been “killed” several times, had even been locked in a box and sunk in a lake, and he had become accustomed to long waits with nothing to do but indulge his fantasies.
He waited patiently until he saw a woman in a charcoal-gray blazer and black pants come out and walk to her car. The car was a newish Lexus, so the woman was not a mere clerk. She pulled out, and Drake followed her. He waited as she stopped at Ralphs to buy groceries, then followed her the rest of her way home.
There was a Slip ’n Slide on the front lawn of the pleasant two-story tract home, and My Little Pony decals in the front window.
“Kids. Perfect.”
Drake waited some more, until he was sure the woman would be at ease in her home. Then he got out of the car, discreetly coiling his whip hand beneath his purloined trench coat, and headed up the walkway to her front door, with a smile on his face in case she was looking out. He tried the handle. Locked. It was a good, sturdy door and would make a lot of noise if he kicked it in. He did not want to have to deal with some FBI SWAT showing up and was considering his options when the front door was opened by a boy of maybe six, who was on a mission of some sort and was surprised to see the tall young man in the trench coat.
“Who are you?” the boy demanded.
“Me? I’m Whip Hand, kid. Want to see?” Drake opened his coat, freeing the ten-foot-long tentacle. The boy’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened, ready to scream, so Drake wrapped the end of his whip hand around the boy’s throat and squeezed off any sound.
He lifted the kicking, struggling, red-faced boy effortlessly up to eye level and said, “Is your mommy home?”
The bulging eyes said yes, so Drake let the boy breathe and shifted his hold to the child’s torso, and carrying him like a gasping, wheezing suitcase, entered the home.
“Is someone at the door?”
A woman’s voice, coming from the kitchen. She had changed out of her suit into sweatpants and a UCLA sweatshirt. She was taking things out of the refrigerator and placing them on the work counter. A package of hamburger meat. Mustard. Pickles.
“Just me, your friendly neighborhood Whip Hand,” Drake said cheerily.
The FBI agent yelped in shock, started to run, but stopped herself seeing her son in Drake’s power. Her dark eyes went wide. Drake could practically see the connections being made. The FBI knew about him, Tom Peaks had said as much. They had begun to realize that he was the person behind a string of gruesome, sadistic attacks from Palm Springs to the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.
“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?” Drake said.
The FBI agent was pale, eyes scared, but she didn’t panic. “I know who you are.” She made no effort to hide her contempt. “Put my son down.”
“Good, that makes it easier that you know who I am. You know what I’ve done. You know what I can do to your kid, here, and to you.”
The agent’s lip was trembling, but Drake had to almost admire her strength. Most people took one look at Drake and ran. They didn’t get away, but they always tried. Not this woman.
Pity he had other things on his mind, or it would have been fun to break her slowly, over the course of days. Weak people were no challenge to break, but Drake sensed this woman would be.
He sighed inwardly. Business before pleasure.
“You’re going to hop on your computer and get me an address.”
She shook her head. “I can’t access FBI files from home.”
Drake smiled. He dropped the boy onto the floor, took a step back, and heard the agent scream as he brought his whip hand down hard on the boy’s back. The howl of pain was delicious; the mother’s scream of “No! No!” was even better.
Ten minutes later, Drake had the address.
Thirty minutes later he was back in his car.
Eventually someone, perhaps the husband if there was one, or worried coworkers, would find a baby crying in her crib, and two mutilated dead bodies. He’d had no choice but to kill the woman—she would have warned Astrid. The boy he’d killed mostly because he wouldn’t stop crying and yelling, “You’re bad! You’re bad!” Which had struck Drake as being almost an insult. Bad? Bad? I’m not bad, I’m the living embodiment of evil, you little monster.
“Coming for you, Astrid,” Drake said, laughing. “Coming for you.”