Deviant
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKinty, Adrian.
Deviant/Adrian McKinty.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Danny Lopez reviews the path that led him from Las Vegas, Nevada, to an experimental school near Colorado Springs and then to his imminent death at the hands of a cat-killer ready for bigger prey.
ISBN 978-0-8109-8420-2 (alk. paper)
[1. Moving, HouseholdâFiction. 2. Junior high schoolsâFiction. 3. SchoolsâFiction.
4. StepfathersâFiction. 5. Family lifeâColoradoâFiction. 6. Secret societiesâFiction.
7. PsychopathsâFiction. 8. Colorado Springs (Colo.)âFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M4786915De 2011
[Fic]âdc22
2010023465
Text copyright © 2011 Adrian McKinty
Book design by Maria T. Middleton
Published in 2011 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
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“For I will consider my cat Jeoffry ⦠For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary ⦠For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.”
âChristopher Smart, from
Jubilate Agno
(1758)
Part One: The Letters of Indrid Cold
Seven: A Conversation with the Demons
Eight: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Eleven: The Phylogenetic Scale
Thirteen: A Message from Indrid Cold
Part Two: In the Shadow of the Coil
Seventeen: The Apex of the Pentangle
Eighteen: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The mangled sounds of civilization faded slowly as he walked into the black nothingness of the desert.
His boots crunched sand, the snow slid off his coat. He moved carefully through the scrub and ground cactus and turned at last into the rock canyon. Here he was shielded from the traffic noise and the arc lamps on the federal prisons that lit up much of the lower mountain. He kept moving west until the ambient light dimmed and the stars began showing themselves. Finally he reached that place on the trail where all was quiet and even the Union Pacific trains were nothing but a distant rumble in the dark.
They were gone now, the people, their talk, their city.
He was alone.
What is it about silence that frightens us so? he wondered. Is it the prospect of being left with one's own thoughts? For some this was a torment, a dreadful confrontation with the terrible emptiness within.
He never felt that.
He liked quiet.
He shrugged. It was unimportant. He had a job to do in this place.
For the Ute Indians this natural amphitheater between great red sandstone columns was a holy place. Among these inanimate rocks the Ute chiefs and medicine men had worshipped and made offerings, pledging themselves to unknown gods in forgotten ceremonies. And before the Ute there were other peoples who had venerated this spot. For thousands of years the Native Americans had been coming here. And before the Indians, before people, this was a seabed and dinosaurs had walked the shore.
He wondered what “God” had been doing then. Watching the dull herds of stegosauruses, waiting for something more interesting to come along. God's patience, like his love and wisdom, must also be infinite, he thought dubiously.
He coughed. His blood was rich with adrenaline and his tongue was dry, bitter, thick in his mouth. He was shaking. As he shone his flashlight between the sandstone henges, the beam wobbled involuntarily.
“Is anybody there?” he called.
There was no reply and snow damped the echo, making his voice sound weirdâstrained, high-pitched, the way it
had been before he'd gone to his speech pathologist, Miss Leahy.
He forced it down an octave and tried again. “Is anyone there?”
And this time it was a little better.
“Is â¦,” he began a third time, and stopped.
There was no one there.
It was snowing just hard enough to keep everyone indoors. This
was
a popular location though. The long-distance runners from the US Olympic Training Center sometimes came out this way, and the alert battalion of the Tenth Special Forces Division often hit the mountain trails first thing in the morning. Sooner or later someone would certainly find the sacrifice. That wasn't the problem; the problem was getting them to take notice of it. Out here there were always a lot of small animal corpses: possums, squirrels, raccoons ⦠and if he didn't display the corpse correctly, the soldiers would probably take it for a coyote kill.