And It Arose from the Deepest Black (John Black Book 2) (14 page)

I sat on the ground, just feet from the glowing eyes of Gorgol Omicron, within a haze of dust that painted everything a dim grey, that limited my world to only the 20 feet or so in which I could make out any detail. Then the sphere widened, and slowly I could see more. More dust was pushed away by the labored last breaths of the Gorgol. Soon, the air began to return, and the cloud settled.

Before me, the amber eyes of Omicron dimmed and went out, and his body lay still. But I waited for him to arise once more. I wanted him to arise. Part of me did. LOST. MOTHER. HOME. In some ways, I had lost the will to harm this creature, at least not without knowing more about him. To find out his true nature. Was he really a force of hatred and destruction, or simply living on such a larger scale that we were overlooked?

Get up. Please. I’m sorry.

No, I’ve killed you. I am more than you.

Two sides fought within me.

One wanted Gorgol Omicron to stay dead and gone. The other wanted him to get up.

But he didn’t. The creature shuddered, and a long slow breath rolled out of him, a final release, the last of his living force.

What have I done?

I looked into Omicron’s now-dark eyes, trying to understand. But understanding eluded me. Something was gone. Something more than Omicron had been taken away.

Still, there was the fire.

Good riddance.

After a time, motion to one side, past the dead Gorgol, caught my eye. Flashes of red and yellow, Pip and Bobby, approaching fast. Above, I noticed a helicopter circling, realized it had probably been there all along, its rhythmic
thump-thump-thump-thump
just a natural part of the landscape, like the debris and the rock. And now, a new landmark. The massive, lifeless form of Omicron.

With one hand, I absently touched at my mask. Sure enough, it was there, although it was torn and ragged on one side. My belt was once again just a belt, hanging limply in my hand, and I was covered in the thick saliva of the creature. I doubted even my mom would have recognized me in such a state, and I was exhausted. So I didn’t care too much about possible news cameras hovering overhead.

I tried to blink away the daze I was in. The circling helicopter began to remind me of a dream. Of a circling dragon with a familiar voice.

Then, higher, nearly behind me, another form appeared, its khakis and boots hard to mistake. Jake Weissman glared at me from above, as I stood beside the dead body of Gorgol Omicron. The look in his eyes was anger, maybe hatred. All for me.

One part of me rued that look.

The other part wanted to smack it off his face.

Then Jake’s head turned sharply, and I saw his mouth fall open. He started west toward the setting sun as the helicopter overhead suddenly tilted in the same direction and sped away.

1

“You did it!” Bobby shouted as he ran to meet me, Pip only slightly behind. I didn’t reply, my eyes instead tracking Jake as he began to head west across the rocky hilltops above, as if running he could catch the helicopter in flight. “Joh— I mean,
Black
— you did it!” I had nearly forgotten about our color-code names. Bobby slowed to a jog before coming up and giving me an enthusiastic bear hug.

“Nice work,” Pip said as she joined us, standing just feet from the motionless forest of Omicron’s teeth. “How’d you manage to do it?”

So I explained, as quickly as possible — slicing open the monster’s leg, then climbing the hill. And Omicron chomping down on me, only to get stuck through the brain by my improvised weapon. Bobby and Pip seemed impressed. They couldn’t see my face, with the mask and all the creature slobber covering me. They couldn’t see how I felt. I had killed, and afterward I regretted what I’d done. And yet, there was still a strange cocktail of pride and happiness bubbling within me.

Prid
e
.

What is pride? If my anger had been a thick, juicy slab of steak, my pride was the full belly afterward.

I slayed the beast. I was proud of what I’d done.

Pride. I messed with some kids once, because of my pride. My father died.

Suddenly I was unable to stop the tears. With Pip there, I remember being embarrassed, although why, after the fact, seems unimportant. Like Omicron, my dad was dead. Sure, if the creature was coming for my sister, I was doing the right thing. “Then why doesn’t it feel right?” I said aloud. Bobby and Pip both looked at me, but didn’t say anything.

Guil
t
.

How much of the stuff could one person rack up?

Maybe Jake Weissman was right. Maybe the creatures
should
be left alone. Who knows? Maybe they could even be reasoned with. I hadn’t tried to connect with Omicron’s mind until the very end, when it was too late to do much more than lash out. What would have happened if I had spent longer trying to reach him? Could a human mind reach a Gorgol mind?

Lost. Mother. Home.

I thought so.

It was bizarre and senseless to feel such guilt, killing a monster that destroyed everything in its wake. But lying next to us, Omicron looked…
pathetic
. A sad, lonely shadow of the once ferocious creature it had been.

Bobby, my friend, must have sensed some of what I was feeling, realized the weight of more than one death now pushed firmly down on my shoulders. He sucked in a breath, standing up straight before me like friends do at funerals. “You okay, Johnny?”

I was glad he forgot to use my code word, and figured, with the helicopter gone, no one was there to overhear us anyway. The tears flowed as I wrinkled my brow and tapped the side of my head. “I touched his mind, Bobby. Omicron’s. I felt what he felt. There were these feelings…
Lost. Mother. Home
. He didn’t say the words, not even in my mind, but those
feelings
were there. Those three specific feelings.”

“And you think Omicron was a
baby
, looking for his
mommy
?” Pip said.

I wheeled on her, too emotional to stop myself. “Maybe! What would you know? You just want us to
kill, kill, kill
!”

Pip was taken aback. “No, John. I wanted us to
stop
the killing.” She nodded toward the Gorgol’s body. “The killing that thing was doing. People were dying, innocent people, dying for no reason. Besides, you said yourself that these things are looking for Holly. Are you just going to let that happen, let her and a bunch of innocent people die?”

Thinking of my father, I lashed out again. “Innocent people die all the time!”

Bobby stepped forward, between Pip and me. “Yeah, they do,” he said. “But not for no reason.”

“Really?” I said, raising my voice. “What’s the reason my dad died?”

Bobby looked at me without blinking. “To make you,” he said, pointing a finger at me. He lightly tapped me, in the center of the chest. The way I had tapped Sol, but with a completely different intent, and completely different results.

I laughed, a single harsh sound, tears still streaming down my ridiculous mask. A mask I wanted nothing more than to rip off. “Right. Bobby, he
made
me when I was born. All he did when he died was
leave
, and for no good reason. I caused that accident. If anything, the whole thing made me a killer and an idiot. Just like now. There could have been another way.” I wiped at my eyes through the ragged hole in the mask. Still, at least part of me felt differently.
No, there’s only one way. These Gorgols need to die before they get to Holly. You know it’s true.

Bobby put a hand on my arm. “Johnny, you’re wrong. With your dad, it was an accident, and it was only an accident. Good people
do
die. But it always has a point. Even if it’s just the same point, over and over. To remind the rest of us that we
all
have to be good, or else good will die out from the world. Today, you tried to be good, to help
other
good people from dying, to help your sister, so their good and hers wouldn’t die.” Bobby turned, looking at Omicron’s lifeless body. “Johnny, you have a choice, every day. You may not even realize it, or care, or whatever, but you do. You have power, real power. You don’t have to be the nice guy. If you chose to be bad, I don’t know if anyone could stop you. I couldn’t. But you choose to be good, because of people like your dad before you. And, I don’t know... I think because he died, it means more. You’re more likely to be like him. To be a hero like him.”

I wiped my eyes again.
Don’t have to be the nice guy?
I thought.
What if I’m not? And what if I don’t really choose whether I’m good or bad?

“Johnny,” Bobby said. “It might just be that, because of your dad, you saved the world from Sol. And now, from Omicron, too.”

I felt so conflicted. Pride. And guilt. “But what if Omicron wasn’t bad? What if Omicron was just lost?”

“Then all of this sucks, and I’m sorry,” he said. “But that creature was still killing people, even if it was just by accident. Something had to be done. Our world doesn’t really have room for giant monsters to roam around, smashing things and hurting people.”

Monsters
…

Wait.

“What happened to Sigma?” I asked.

Bobby looked back at Pip and shrugged. “We were fighting her hard, making some ground, losing some. She’s fast and difficult to land a hit on, that’s for sure. But then she just stopped. Balled herself up the way the Gorgols seem to do and rolled away.”

“Rolled away? Where?”

Bobby pointed west, the same way Jake had gone, the same way the helicopter had gone. “Back to the ocean, I guess.”

I thought for a moment. Why was everyone and everything suddenly so keen on going back to the ocean? I seriously doubted that Sigma was giving up and running away.
Oh, maybe there’s a surf competition. Or a bikini contest. Luau, perhaps?
I was trying to lighten my own mood, but it wasn’t working very well.

From the west, we heard Sigma’s cry, higher-pitched than Omicron’s, but still strong and echoing. And like a distorted mirror of sound, there came another. A second cry overlapping the first, deeper, louder, and even stronger. Bobby looked at Omicron beside me, still and silent and gone, then turned to Pip and me with awe and fear.

“There are
three
of them?” he asked.

Three fireballs in the sky.

“Of course there are,” I replied.

2

Pip, Bobby, and I, masks still covering our faces, crested the last rise before the ocean and immediately froze.

At sea, the water roiled. Not just in one place, and yet not in every place. Not in a small isolated area, as if from a dolphin or whale, and yet not so widespread as to be natural to the water itself, as if from the weather. No, something was stirring the ocean, and stirring it in a very width swath.

Something even larger than the two Gorgols we knew.

Closer to shore, Sigma was putting on a strange display, slipping in and out of the surf, letting loose deafening cries. My heart sank. Sigma’s calls weren’t angry, or threatening. They were the pathetic howls of a dog left chained up in the cold. A baby crying for milk that isn’t coming. A sister who has lost a brother.

LOST. MOTHER. HOME.

“It’s their mother,” I said, to no one in particular.

Pip turned to me, her eyes too big and white within the opening of her mask, like there was nothing but eyes underneath. “
That
?” She pointed just as something large and dark broke the surface.

The new Gorgol was still mostly hidden by the surf, but she was coming ashore fast. I say “she” because I believed — and still believe — that she was Omicron’s and Sigma’s mother. And she was big.

Visually, their mother looked like both of the younger Gorgols, despite the fact that they only loosely resembled each other. She had the thicker, stony-scaled back of Omicron, but her long, thin tail, trailing off behind her to make a snaky S in the waves, mirrored Sigma. From the sides of her head down to her wide shoulders, she was hooded like Sigma, but that hood was solid and dark, looking completely impenetrable. Momma was a mashup of both Gorgols, on steroids.

I didn’t hear it until the next day on TV, but Mother Gorgol soon had her own name, in keeping with the others: Alpha. It fit her perfectly. Not an alpha male — who needed that? This was an alpha female. She was simply
Alpha
, the first, the biggest, the strongest, the one.

Below us, Sigma issued a staccato bark, and for a moment Alpha paused. Then she reared up and shrieked at the darkening sky.

“She knows, now,” I said. “She knows I killed Omicron. And that means she’ll be after me.”

Bobby put one hand on my shoulder. “After
us
.”

To my surprise, Pip rested a hand on my other shoulder. She didn’t say a word, but the meaning was clear. We were a team. Three of us versus two of them. Even if it meant a death sentence for us all.

The thought of killing again flared, the fire lighting once again. It intrigued me. Too much. It was a lure, a drug. Anger fueled the fire. Pride justified what you did with it. I tamped it down, forcibly. “But I don’t want to fight them anymore,” I said in a low voice. At first I didn’t think Pip or Bobby could even hear me. A moment passed when nothing happened.

Then Bobby clapped me on the back gently. “If that’s the case, well…,” he said, turning his back to the scene below, where the Gorgols were reunited. “We’d better run.”

I gave Pip a sidelong glance and could tell she didn’t want to leave. But something had changed. We’d somehow become a true team. When Bobby began to lead me away, Pip followed without complaint.

Not one of us noticed Jake, who must have been standing atop a nearby cliff, looking down on the same scene at the beach we had seen. But Jake, he definitely noticed us.