Monster. Майкл Грант
with some nonmetaphorical weight, with her powerful legs and shoulders, you might pick a fight with Dekka, but only if you were drunk or very stupid.
Dekka walked outside to the artificially bright, slightly chilly parking lot. Dekka’s pride and joy, her Candy Fire red and black Kawasaki Ninja 1000, waited under its transparent plastic rain cover. Dekka hated her job, but in decent weather the ride from the Strawberry Safeway, up the 101, across the San Rafael Bridge to the apartment she rented in Pinole, was the best part of her day. Unless it was raining, which was seldom in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dekka folded the rain cover and thrust it into one side of the hard plastic saddlebag, and a few groceries she’d picked up on the other side. She settled her helmet over her dreads, relaxed in the reassuring anonymity from the black visor, and was just about to fire up the engine when two very large black SUVs pulled into the mostly empty lot.
The SUVs came to a stop, forming a sort of loose V directly in front of her.
Dekka started the engine, feeling the familiar reassuring throb that vibrated all through her body, glanced left to make sure she could turn away, and the passenger window of the second SUV rolled down to reveal an identity card deliberately illuminated by a cell phone light.
“No, no, no, no,” Dekka said, but in a tone of resignation not fear. She sighed, killed the engine, and pulled her helmet off. “Really? After an eight-hour shift on my feet?”
Two men and a woman climbed from the second SUV, each showing ID. They were all dressed in Official Civilian Outfits: dark blue or black suits, ties for the men, an open collar for the woman. They might as well have had the word “Government” tattooed on their foreheads.
“Ms. Talent?” the woman asked. “Dekka Jean Talent?” She was middle-aged, stocky, with a wide, flat face that suggested Slavic roots.
“What’s this about?” Dekka asked, guessing at least part of the answer. They weren’t there about the damaged canned goods she may have on occasion taken without exactly getting specific approval. Nor were they there to collect for the speeding ticket she got rocketing down the Pacific Coast Highway south of Santa Cruz the week before.
“I’m Natalie Green,” the woman said, producing a brief spasm that might be a type of smile. “I’m with Homeland Security. This is Special Agent Carlson, FBI, and Tom Peaks.”
Dekka did not miss the fact that Tom Peaks was not identified by his affiliation, or that his identity card had been very quickly folded away before she could really see it.
“What?” Dekka asked.
“We would like a few moments of your time.”
“Why?” She was not yet worried—this was not her first encounter with authority. From time to time some branch of government would decide to question her, usually about one of the other Perdido Beach survivors. She had steadfastly refused to give any information at all—there were still those who wanted to prosecute some of the survivors, and Dekka would do nothing to help make that happen.
What happened in Perdido Beach stayed in Perdido Beach.
Well, aside from about two dozen survivor books, a movie and a TV series ‘inspired by’ what everyone else called the PBA, the Perdido Beach Anomaly, but what Dekka, like all who were there, would always and forever call the FAYZ.
Natalie Green shrugged, tried out her scary millisecond smile again and said, “Maybe not out in the open in a parking lot? If you would come with us . . .” She gestured toward the second SUV.
“Really?” Dekka asked again, sounding irritated—which was hardly unusual for her. Patience was never one of her virtues.
“Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops,” Natalie Green said. “We won’t leave the lot.”
Dekka cursed, not quite inaudibly, and said, “Whatever.”
The driver of the second SUV got out and came around like a well-trained chauffeur to hold a door open for her, and remained outside as Green and Peaks sandwiched Dekka into the middle of the back seat and agent Carlson took shotgun.
“Nice,” Dekka said, looking around at the posh leather interior. The dashboard glowed blue and red. The heater streamed air onto the windshield, holding a line of condensation at bay.
“Ms. Talent, first of all, it’s an honor to meet you,” Green said. “I’ve read most of the literature that came out of the PBA, and it’s clear that you were very important to the survival of those people, very central to stopping the worst excesses.”
“Uh-huh,” Dekka said, slow and guarded. “Don’t tell me you want a selfie.”
Blank stare.
“Okay,” Dekka said with mounting impatience. “Can you just tell me what this is about?”
“It’s been four years, well, a little more than four years.” It was the first thing Tom Peaks had said. He had an odd voice, too high to match the serious face. “You’re what, eighteen years old now, a legal adult?”
That voice could get grating pretty quickly.
“Nineteen, and who are you again?”
“Tom Peaks.”
“Yeah, I heard your name, but who are you?”
He was in his late thirties, wore moderately fashionable glasses, and parted his sandy hair on one side with military precision. His blue eyes were overlarge behind the glasses, intelligent, alert, and almost rude in the directness with which he stared at her. “I’m with DARPA. That’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“Okay.”
“Are you happy working at Safeway?” Green asked. She was annoyed by Peaks, thought he was pushing himself into what she, Green, should be managing.
Dekka gave Green an incredulous look. “No one is happy working at Safeway. It’s a minimum wage job. Half my income goes for rent.”
“You never went back to school? No plans for college?”
“I’m not very smart.”
Now it was the FBI agent’s turn, talking over his shoulder and watching her in the rearview mirror which he had tilted for that purpose. “All due respect, Ms. Talent, we have a pretty good idea of your IQ. You’re certainly bright enough to be doing something other than cashiering. You could take the GED.”
“Maybe I just love touching vegetables.”
“Or maybe you already got your GED, passed it in the seventy-fifth percentile, and were offered a full scholarship to Cal State San Fran and decided to turn it down and do various dead-end jobs: you delivered flowers, you worked at Toys R Us during Christmas, you temped . . .”
“And again: why are we talking? Why am I not on my way home to feed my cat?” Dekka was beginning to feel trapped. She glanced at the door handle and saw that it was not locked.
“We’ve done studies of the PBA survivors, especially the ones who acquired . . . powers, for lack of a better word,” Green said as Peaks and the FBI man watched. “Of the three hundred and thirty-two kids initially trapped in the PBA dome—”
“We called it the FAYZ,” Dekka interrupted.
“Of those three hundred and thirty-two kids, fifty-one developed one supernatural power or another. Most were relatively weak powers. Only nineteen of you developed major powers and survived. You were one. And of those nineteen, seven have since developed serious psychological disorders.”
“It was kind of stressful, what with the starvation and the violence and the forty percent death rate.” Dekka made no effort to tone down the sarcasm.
Peaks said, “Yes, there’s that, but we suspect there’s more to it. Some of you adjusted well to life outside the PBA . . . the FAYZ. You among them, even though your parents were not