Monster. Майкл Грант

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СКАЧАТЬ teetering on the edge between hope and fear. That nervousness finally gave her the courage to ask. In a rush she blurted, “Shade, why are we doing this?”

      Shade sighed and looked out through the windshield, more profile than detail in the gathering gloom. Finally, she said, “Like the man said who climbed Mount Everest, Cruz: because it’s there.”

      “What’s there?”

      Shade turned to look at her friend. The shark looked too. “Okay, you have a right to know. I was there the day the PBA barrier came down. I was right there, inches away. I saw that creature, the one they called Gaia. I saw what she did. It was . . . awful. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. You have no idea. People, little kids, cut up like pigs at a butcher’s shop. But the power . . . It was like watching a god, Cruz.” Then after a beat, she pointed at the scar. “It’s where I got this. A scared little girl with a great big knife.”

      Cruz, confused and alarmed, said, “Wait, Gaia was evil, not a god.”

      “Mmmm. They won’t be able to capture all the ASOs, Cruz. And if the rock has the same effects outside the dome . . . Well, the world may be about to become a very strange place. A very, very strange place. And what I saw that day . . . no one could stop that monster. No one could stop her but someone with an even greater power. Gods aren’t always good or kind. Some are monsters.”

      “I’m not—”

      “If it works there will be other monsters, Cruz. Other Gaias. And more people will be hurt. More people . . .” And for a moment Shade seemed unable to go on. Then her voice abruptly steely, said, “Thirty seconds.”

      No, Cruz thought, that wasn’t quite the whole truth. It was related to the truth, but it was just the story Shade told herself.

      “Time,” Shade announced, tension almost choking the word off. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

      “I hope this works for you, Shade.”

      “I know, Cruz. Four . . . three . . .”

      And there it was in the night sky to their left, a spark, not very bright, like someone tracing a laser pointer across the sky. It was a tiny missile—the estimate was four kilos, just under ten pounds—moving at thousands of miles an hour, a shooting star come to bring them hope. Or to dash that hope.

      “Two . . .”

      For the first time since Cruz was a very little child, she wished upon a shooting star.

      “One,” Shade whispered, and the meteorite hit the ground. There was no explosion, just a dull, flat sound, like someone dropping a big sandbag. A puff of gray dust rose, barely visible in the darkness, but just exactly where Shade expected it to land.

      “Wow,” Cruz said.

      “Mmmm,” Shade agreed. Her casual act was not even slightly believable.

      They took a breath, then all at once piled out of the car. Cruz pulled a shovel from the back and raced to catch up to Shade who was galloping ahead.

      The ground was plowed into furrows, which tripped Cruz repeatedly. And, too, there were the six-foot-tall stalks that snatched at her with Velcro talons and slapped her with heavy ears of corn. They come to a halt when they reached the first charred and broken cornstalks and advanced more slowly after that, as if sneaking up on someone. Then suddenly there it was, looking for all the world as if a rogue tractor had come through dragging a narrow plow. The rich black earth was gouged, with a mound of ejected clods marking the spot where the rock went subterranean.

      “There! Dig there!” Shade ordered.

      Cruz dug. And dug. She uncovered a narrow tunnel, like something a hefty gopher might have made. “Go that direction another ten feet,” Shade instructed, her voice ragged, in tenuous control of her emotions.

      And then as Cruz slammed the blade into the ground, they heard the metallic impact of steel shovel on metallic rock.

      They looked at each other, Shade and Cruz, and time seemed to stop.

      “Okay,” Shade said at last, voice quavering. “Dig it up.”

      It was metallic gray, the color of pencil lead, not much bigger than a softball, but more oval than round, with a pitted surface. To every appearance a regular, unimportant meteorite, like thousands that impact the Earth every day. Shade flicked the flashlight off and they were rewarded by a faint but vaguely sinister glow, slightly green. Shade reached for it.

      “Don’t touch it!” Cruz cried. “It’s probably hot!”

      “Actually, it’s more likely to be cold. It was a long, long time in absolute zero, and it spent just seconds in the atmosphere.”

      Cruz shook her head in rueful amusement: of course Shade would have thought of that. Of course.

      Shade touched the rock—touched it with the solemnity of a medieval Christian pilgrim touching a piece of the true cross. She ran her fingers over it, feeling its contours, gently exploring the pits and cracks, brushing dirt away almost tenderly.

      “This is it,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .”

      “We should probably get out of here,” Cruz said nervously. She carried the rock back on the shovel blade to the Subaru while Shade used cornstalks to obscure their tracks.

      Cruz set the rock in the back of the car. Then, feeling transgressive, feeling that it wasn’t her right somehow, Cruz touched it, touched an object that had traveled an unimaginable distance. It was just a rock really, just a faintly glowing rock. But it had a power Cruz could feel, an attraction.

      Frodo and the Ring, Cruz thought, and laughed nervously at the comparison, because the thought came with an extra question: Is Shade Frodo? Or is she Gollum?

      “It won’t take Sixty-Six long to get here,” Shade said, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans and kicking the clods from her shoes. “We can’t hide the fact we beat them to it, but we can confuse the scene a little, at least.”

      “Not much we can do about the tire tracks, I guess.”

      “No,” Shade agreed. “But as soon as we get back to the interstate we’re going to cut a divot into one of the tires. Just enough that if anyone ever checks it won’t be a perfect match.”

      “Have you been watching CSI reruns?”

      “I may be a criminal mastermind.”

      Cruz said nothing.

      Shade started the engine. And then they stopped for just a moment, staring at each other with solemn expressions.

      “Wow. We did it,” Cruz said.

      “Well,” Shade said, “we did the first part of it.”

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