BOB MARKOVIC HAD risked running toward the tree line when the shooting started. He had jumped up and run, gasping for breath, staggering, clutching the bandaged hole in his chest where a fragment of ASO-7 still lodged and ignoring the throbbing pain in his hand.
The first of what was to be five .50-caliber machine-gun bullets, each with more destructive energy than a hunter’s rifle bullet, struck him just as he reached the line of pine trees.
That first .50-caliber round blew a tunnel right through his back and out of his chest, taking about a third of his heart with it.
The second round struck him in the thigh, penetrated to and shattered his femur, which stopped his momentum and made him crash headfirst into a tall, shaggy pine-tree trunk.
He was dead before he slumped to the ground.
The third entered through his right cheek, smashed a row of molars like someone attacking a porcelain sink with a sledgehammer, and in one of those odd quirks of ballistics, blew out through the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord.
The remaining two slugs turned his intestines and stomach to broken sewage pipes.
No human being could survive those wounds. Markovic’s blood drained into the mud and filled the gaps in the bark of the pine tree he lay crumpled against. His bladder and bowels emptied. His liver had no blood left to cleanse. His heart fell silent.
And yet, Bob Markovic knew who he was and where he was. He felt the cold mud beneath him. He heard the sounds of truck engines, of heavy boots, the grunts of men and women carrying bodies. He saw a night sky retreating before oncoming dawn.
Markovic looked out over the field, over dozens, maybe more than a hundred, men, women, and yes, children, lying in clumps or alone in distorted positions. The black-clad gunmen were now walking through the bodies, making sure they were dead, firing twice into each: one in the head, one in the throat.
Bang. Bang.
Walking behind the shooters was a second echelon carrying five-gallon jerricans of gasoline, which they hefted high and upended to slosh fuel on the bodies. And a big earthmover was coming up the road, ready to dig a hole and shove the human ashes into it.
Markovic knew that any moment they might spot him. He wondered if Simone was among the dead and felt a pang at the thought, though God knew Simone was already on the path to an early death in Markovic’s mind—her experimentation with drugs, her bad taste in boys followed by a decision to cast herself as a lesbian. Her radical politics.
Still, she was his daughter. And he knew he should be feeling more than he was. The effects of stress, shock?
The effect of being both dead and somehow alive?
He wondered if he could stand and run. But he knew he could never outrun the gunmen. Somehow they had failed to kill him, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find a way. He doubted being incinerated would be a good thing.
Run!
Markovic tried to stand, expecting it to be hard, but to his surprise he stood easily, and was so shocked by this that for a moment he forgot to run. He held up his hand and could not stop the shriek of horror that came from him. His hand was not his hand. It was shaped like his hand, there were four fingers and a thumb, but it was a hand entirely covered by a seething mass of what had to be insects. Thousands of them.
A scream of pure panic rose within him, a scream that somehow emerged as an agitated buzzing sound. Like the sound a hive of bees might make if you poked it with a stick.
He looked down at his own body, and all of him, every exposed inch, was covered in a thick carpeting of tiny creatures, creatures as small as ants, creatures as large as small beetles.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Three rifle shots, all carefully aimed. All struck their target . . . and passed harmlessly through Markovic.
“What the . . . ,” a black-clad man yelled. “Shoot that thing!”
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Now half a dozen weapons opened fire, bullets passing through Markovic and digging into the tree behind him, leaving small holes in him that were instantly covered by the insect mass.
At the same time, he felt himself sinking, sliding down along the tree trunk, sliding down until the damp earth seemed to have swallowed his bottom half up.
“Get that gas can over here!” a voice yelled.
Two men ran with heavy steps toward him, carrying jerricans. Gasoline spilled from one of the tanks.
Fire! No, he did not like fire. Down! Down! a panicked voice cried soundlessly. Down into the ground!
He was just head and shoulders when the first splash of gasoline landed on him. Markovic held up a bug-covered hand as if to shield himself, but something else happened.
Hundreds of insects flew in a mass at the nearest man with a jerrican. Markovic stared stupidly at what he’d thought was his hand, a hand that had just flown off. Beneath what he’d thought was a coating of insects, there was nothing. He had no body. He was nothing but . . . he was just . . .
He fought against a wave of terror that would cripple him if he let it. He had no body now, nothing, because if he’d had a body his heart would be hammering and his flesh would be tingling and his throat would be widening to scream and scream and never stop.
Markovic did not scream, but someone did; Markovic heard the inhuman cry as he disappeared from view beneath the soil.
He heard guns firing right above him, bullets thudding into the earth, but the sound was muffled by dirt. Irrelevant. Because now Markovic was in a hallucinogenic dream, a dream that he was not one man but millions. A dream that he swam through soil as easily as he might move through air.
His mind was overwhelmed with images, shattered visuals, all devoid of true light but somehow lit nevertheless, as though the soil itself glowed faintly. But there was no making sense of what he saw; nothing was right, nothing was real, at least not any kind of real he’d ever known. It was like seeing the world through a million eyes at once, and even as that tidal wave of dim, distorted, kaleidoscopic visuals was overwhelming his ability to process, there were other inputs as well. He felt scraping all over his body, like sandpaper. He smelled things he could not place, things he knew he’d never smelled before.
Down he went, dirt-swimming, flowing, not a great, solid human, but thousands of individual bits and pieces, all digging and squirming as if directed by one will.
And they are, he thought: my will!
Markovic then felt a swelling rush of power, of the realization of power, of the thrilling knowledge that the extent of his power was not even yet known.
I can’t be killed with bullets!
He was on a speed high, reveling in the liquid swiftness with which he bored through solid ground, flowing around rocks, reassembling, unstoppable. Like a flood. Like a swarm of locusts.
He felt no fear now, which was odd. He should be feeling fear; he knew that. He should be feeling scared to death. But, then again, he should be dead. Maybe was dead by most conventional standards. Certainly he was not breathing, nor did he feel any urge to.
The pieces fell into place quickly: it was the rock. Clearly. Obviously. He’d been hit with dozens of tiny pieces of the meteorite as well as the larger one that had ripped his hand nearly off, and the pebble that had lodged in his chest.
I’m one of them. A mutant.
Rockborn!
Again his daughter’s name floated up in his consciousness. Simone. Had she been killed? Probably easier that she . . . No, no, no, she was his daughter. He loved her. It’s just that she was not relevant to his current situation. He would worry about Simone, and if it came to it, he would grieve for her. But right here and now he had very pressing issues. In point of fact he was deep underground and moving at speed, moving for the sheer joy of speed, moving for the thrill of dirt scraping his thousands of shells.
Like an ant colony, he thought. I am many, but with one mind over all.
But he was not alone. He felt a different consciousness, not a will, really, just a mind other than his own. A strange sensation, like he was being watched. Like he was a curiosity. Like he was a specimen under a scientist’s microscope.
What have I become?
Markovic moved on, heedless, reckless, pushing doubt aside and reveling in this incredible ability. Then, all at once he was hit head-on by a wall of cold water. It flowed over and past him, through him, bringing icy cold.
The thousands of compound eyes he looked through were blinded by bright light. He felt a panic seize him—he was exposed! Vulnerable!
But slowly he felt his parts adjust, swimming with churning insect feet, assembling into a swirling mass in gloomy, chemical-green water pierced by slanting early-morning sun. His thousands of eyes adjusted to the light, and his panic subsided as slowly the picture of his surroundings became comprehensible. This was no river, nor a natural lake. The sides were too steeply vertical. And he saw ramps wide enough to accommodate big trucks, spiraling down the sides of those submerged cliffs, and knew what this was. He had dug his way right into what must have been a gravel mine, now filled with water to form a lifeless lake. Far below him, on the floor of the pond, were two vehicles, old cars that had probably been pushed in so the owners could claim insurance.
He brought himself together—like a consolidation, his business mind thought—and breached, a densely packed cloud of insects swimming so fast that Markovic came almost all the way up out of the water. Before he settled back again, he saw two young boys standing at the edge of the flooded quarry, tossing rocks. The boys yelped and pointed. One fled; the other drew out his phone to take a picture.
Markovic let him. Who cared? There might be people to fear, but the boy with the camera was not one of them. So Markovic used the sunshine to examine himself. He was multitudes seeing through thousands of eyes at once, seeing in every direction. It was overwhelming, too much, like trying to watch a hundred televisions at once. Again panic threatened, but he did not give in, would not give in. He was Bob Markovic, and he would not be terrified.
Gradually he realized that he could control his visual feed, that he could mute the cascade of sights and sounds, and narrow his focus to those things he needed to see. And the most pressing need was to see and understand himself.
This was a nightmare of images, insect faces swirling around like they were caught in a tornado. He was within that tornado, able to see inside what he now was. He saw nothing human, no slight shred of his body, nothing solid or fixed. Nothing but the swarm of mismatched insects, things like dragonflies but with bright-red wings, things like cockroaches but with wings like moths. Bugs crawling on other bugs, as if they were hitching a ride. There were centipedes, but each ending in a circular, gnashing mouth full of tiny, sharp teeth; there were things that looked like common houseflies, but seen at close range they had canine muzzles—tiny, winged dogs.
He knew he should be horrified, disgusted, panicked, and he felt some of that emotion, but the urge to surrender to fear was gone. He had never been one to overly concern himself with risk—not when there was also opportunity. Power was opportunity, by definition, and he was powerful. Powerful in a way that even money had never given him, a physical power, a real power. The power to be shot and yet be unhurt. The power to move through dirt like it was water, and water like it was air. And he had only just begun to explore the possibilities.
Besides, he knew enough about the so-called Rockborn that they could move easily from human to morph and back to human. This was not him, this was not Bob Markovic, his essential self remained. Somewhere. This was just a brand-new, absolutely amazing ability. He felt like he had when he’d bought a Bugatti Veyron and stepped on the gas on an empty stretch of the Long Island Expressway.
The power!
Bob Markovic had not become the man he was through whining and self-pity, let alone panic. He was curious, however, especially about whether his swarm could move on the surface of the land as easily as beneath it. He spotted a low bank, a grim gravel beach of sorts, where one of the ramps emerged from the water. To his relief, he had no difficulty at all gliding up onto the narrow gravel beach. After that it took a few tries to stand up like a man, or at least like a buzzing, vibrating, clicking facsimile of a man.
He had a sudden image of addressing his board of directors in this guise.
Hah! That’d shake them up!
The kid with the camera phone had run off, presumably to upload his video to YouTube.
What was that?
He felt the odd, back-of-the-neck tingle that warned someone was watching him, and not the strange observers he seemed to feel in his head. Sure enough, when he looked around—something he could do without moving his man-shape, merely by choosing to focus in that direction—he spotted three men in black tactical gear carrying assault rifles at port arms. They were on the far lip of the quarry, and they’d spotted him. They were pointing, their faces twisted by confusion and growing fear.
Could they kill him?
Hah. You can’t shoot a swarm of insects.
But now a fourth man appeared, straining under the weight of big steel tanks on his back. A short hose connected the top of the tanks to a sort of nozzle, something like a fireman’s hose.
Flamethrower!
Markovic was definitely not sure he would survive that.
He began to dig again, experience and growing confidence making him faster, but he had failed to see the true danger until a military helicopter swept in just above treetop level and wheeled around to bring its weapons to bear.
A tail of flame shot from the helicopter’s weapons pod.
One missile fired. One missile struck, with a massive ka-BLAM!
Markovic felt a wave of searing heat, felt parts of him wither and crisp and die. No pain, just an awareness that some of his eyes had suddenly gone blind. The debris of the explosion fell like hail around him, but the falling gravel did him no harm.
Now when he raised eyes above the surface of the water, he saw the gunmen were much closer, coming around the quarry, running toward him, pell-mell down the ramp. The man with the tanks on his back huffed and puffed to keep up.
Rage took Markovic. This was unfair! He had done nothing wrong. He’d hurt no one. He was the victim! He hadn’t asked to be hit by some space rock, nor had he volunteered to be shot down in a stinking field.
“I am the victim here!” Markovic shouted in a voice unlike his own, a voice like a thousand locusts shaping buzzes and the beating of wings into words. It was a staccato sound like a person talking directly into whirring fan blades, a rasping, inhuman sound.
The man with the flamethrower caught up as the gunmen slowed, all four now grown cautious, seeing that the missile had not killed Markovic.
Markovic’s reedy whisper said, “Leave me alone! Go back or I’ll kill you!”
It was an empty threat, Markovic thought: he had no weapon, he had no armed men on his side, he could barely even “stand.” This was his own government—a government that had collected millions in taxes from Markovic’s Money Machine—and it was trying to kill him! Madness!
Unfairness. Injustice.
“Tone, light him up, for Christ’s sake!” one of the gunmen shouted.
Suddenly Tone, the man with the flamethrower, slapped at his face. Then slapped again.
“What the hell, Tone?”
But then the gunmen, too, found themselves besieged by flying insects diving with relentless intent into their eyes, crawling toward their ears, scooting over lips and into screaming mouths.
“What the hell?”
“What, what, oh, God, what’s happening?”
“Ah, ah, ah! They’re biting!”
“Help me!”
Guns fell from fingers. The flamethrower was shrugged from Tone’s back. The four men writhed wildly, looking like marionettes whose puppeteer was having a seizure. It was almost comical, Markovic thought. But for the screams.
Markovic moved toward them, striding on swarm legs, stepping with massed insects in lieu of feet. He could do more than see the four men: he could smell them, taste them, take their temperature, hear their panicky heartbeats. He had eyes inside their mouths. He had close-up views of insect mouthparts and stingers stabbing into flesh.
It was at once utterly fascinating and profoundly disturbing. He was watching, smelling, feeling men afraid for their lives, men desperate to escape the swarm of insects around them. He tasted the adrenaline flooding their veins, veins now feeding hundreds if not thousands of insects.
One man broke and ran toward the water to jump in, but he tripped, and when he tried to rise to his hands and knees, he could not.
The other men tried the same thing, each seeing the water as a way to escape. And, Markovic thought, it might have been. But they would never reach the water, of that he was sure, though it was mere feet away. None of the men seemed able to walk, to move a leg. Their waving, slapping, gesticulating arms slowed, growing heavy.
Markovic sensed a foul odor, a smell so strong and repugnant he instinctively reached to pinch the nose he no longer had. He knew the smell. Sickness. Rot. Decay. Oh, yes, he knew that smell. He’d been in the Navy in the Persian Gulf, and the destroyer he’d served aboard had come across a derelict sailboat, its sail in tatters, the wood bleached white by the relentless, pitiless sun. He had been part of the boarding party. Markovic, then Lieutenant Markovic and armed with a pistol, had pried up a hatch and shone a flashlight down into hell.
Two dozen humans, men and women and babies in arms, lay there. Half at least were dead, and the rest might soon be. They were refugees from the war in Yemen and had contracted cholera from infected water and food. The deck was awash in vomit and diarrhea, but the worst of the stink was decaying flesh. The decaying flesh of people who had been six days dead in 115-degree heat, with no one strong enough to throw them overboard.
This was that same unbearable stink. The odor of putrefaction. The odor of disease and death.
He thought of his insects all returning to him, and in four distinct clouds they rose from the men and flew back to rejoin the swarm.
Somehow Markovic had expected to see the men perhaps pocked with red bite marks. The reality was worse. So very much worse.
Well, Markovic thought grimly, I guess that will be a lesson to anyone who messes with me.
But that did not mean he wanted to stay and watch. He moved away, fast. He kept moving his “legs,” but that was mere habit, for he moved not like a running man, but like a cloud on a stiff breeze, a buzzing mass of death-dealing insects.
Okay, enough, Markovic thought as he reached the relative cover of some pine woods. Time to change back.
He focused his thoughts on his true body, his true self.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, adding urgency to the attempt. By now everyone knew the Rockborn could morph and de-morph at will, but nothing was happening. He had a mental image of himself running into a wall, a tall cinder-block wall. This was not in any of the accounts he’d read or seen on TV. The Rockborn could change back at will. Everyone said so!
Now the fear came at full throttle, irresistible. He tried again, and once again it was like hitting a wall, a wall beyond which there was nothingness.
Death.
He remembered the machine-gun bullets, the ones that had ripped his then-flesh-and-blood body. He remembered thinking he had to be dead, could not possibly be alive and yet . . .
The truth was there, easy to see, yet so awful, so impossibly horrific. . . . Bob Markovic, who always accepted reality and made the most of it, could not bring himself to believe what with dawning terror he knew to be true: he could not change back. His old body, the original Bob Markovic, was dead.