Villain

by Michael Grant

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The futile words came at last because the only alternative was silence. And they evaporated, irrelevant, insufficient. Pointless. Shade gripped the wheel like she was trying to break it in half, unable to look at him. Then she turned and with one hand gripped Malik’s reconstituted shoulder. “Do it to me. Make me feel it! Make me feel it! Hurt me! Just me!”

  Malik was shaking his head no, no, but Cruz said, “Do it, Malik. See if you can focus it.”

  “I don’t want to hurt Shade!”

  “She needs to feel it,” Cruz said, shaking her head in wonder at the madness of it all, the madness and the gutting feeling that everything, everywhere was spiraling down and down and down, that the whole world was staggering to a finish line that would bring nothing but destruction.

  “I’ll try,” Malik said.

  Shade steeled herself.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . Cruz counted off seconds, expecting to be hit with the brutal agony she’d experienced earlier. But nothing. Four . . . five . . . six . . .

  “Shhhh shhhh ah ah ahahahah aaaarrrrrgghh!” Shade screamed suddenly. “No, no, nonononono! No! No! No!” Her screams bounced around inside the car, deafening. She scrabbled madly at the door with hands she could not control, nothing but escape on a mind reduced instantaneously to an animal state.

  Then Shade sagged and fell silent but for gasping breaths.

  For a long while no one had anything to say. Sweat poured down Shade’s face, joining bitter tears. Finally Shade pulled back out into traffic.

  “Where are we going?” Cruz asked.

  Shade jerked her chin forward. “That way.”

  They drove toward the mountains, toward the great dry mountains, toward the desert, away from people, away from the Port of Los Angeles, away, away, but never away from the one person Shade most wanted to leave: herself.

  And yet, buried as she was under a mountain of guilt, shattered as she was by the pain Malik had again revealed to her, nevertheless, deep down in the lowest depths of her mind, the shark began to move, somehow liberated by the pain, as if it was penance. There was no other way forward. Malik was not in a state of mind to make decisions. And Cruz? Well, Shade thought, Cruz had been amazing, but only in a support role. Cruz was not willing to take responsibility. She was not willing to lead. Only the shark could lead them now.

  Because I’ve done such a great job so far.

  They were three fugitives on the run from the entire US government, and possibly one or more mutant monsters. None could go home. None had a family anymore; they were beyond all of that. They were no longer daughters and son, they were no longer children at all, no longer anything they had meant to become. Monsters, the three of them. Monsters who had meant to be heroes.

  “Cruz,” Shade said. “I’m taking this turnoff to Desert Hot Springs. Google houses for sale. Find us one that’s been empty for a while, at least two weeks.”

  Desert Hot Springs, like every Mojave Desert town, was flat and sparse. Few if any buildings extended above a single story. Houses were all ranch-style; businesses were marked with indifferent, sun-bleached signs. They drove past developments of gated trailer parks, gas stations, modest family restaurants, always heading toward dry mountain ridges that never seemed to get any closer.

  Cruz found a house listed for sale, and they drove there. It was not in a gated development but stood somewhat forlorn, well off the main road, a single shaggy palm tree standing guard over a yard otherwise devoid of vegetation.

  Shade pulled past and parked a quarter mile away. “Excuse me,” she said, morphed, and ran. Thirty seconds later she was back. “Totally empty. I got in through a back window. We can hide the car in the garage.”

  Inside, the house was clean and completely empty, and smelled of carpet cleaner and fresh paint. But the water was still on. The water heater was not, but there was no such thing as really cold water in this part of the world. Cruz practically ran for the shower and stood for half an hour beneath a lukewarm stream, wishing the water could flow through her mind, cleaning away memory and self-doubt, anger and fear, leaving her as clean inside as out. When she was done she dressed in her old clothes, there being no towels.

  Shade glanced up as Cruz reappeared. “I need a store. A big one. There’s a Target, but it’s a bit far, so I’ll drive there rather than run. Back in an hour.”

  Malik and Cruz sat on freshly vacuumed beige carpet and leaned their backs against beige walls. The electricity was still working, and Cruz turned on the air-conditioning. She found an old red plastic Solo cup in the back of a cupboard, rinsed it out, and brought a glass of water to Malik, who gratefully gulped it all down.

  “Shade will figure something out,” Cruz said, wincing as she realized how weak that sounded.

  “Yes,” Malik said. But he wasn’t listening. Not to Cruz, anyway.

  “Watchers?” she asked.

  Malik nodded slowly, eyes fixed on nothing. “It’s like . . . like . . . like being touched. Molested. Inside your head. I feel them in there. They’re pushing into places . . . memories . . .” He shook his head. “I guess you already know all that. When I resist them, they laugh at me.” He tapped the side of his head. “In here. It’s like I have other people inside my brain, Cruz, like . . .” Tears came again, bitter, helpless. Defeated.

  The agony of his burned body, or the agony of a mind invaded. Those were Malik’s choices now. He could see it all clearly: pain or madness. Because in the end, Malik knew, the Dark Watchers would defeat him. They were tireless and relentless, dark tendrils reaching inside him, through him, treating him like some sort of video library where they could just punch up his memories and watch them play out like his short life was a biopic.

  “Malik,” Cruz said softly. “Maybe this is stupid . . .”

  No answer.

  “Maybe it’s nuts, but . . . but if they can watch you, maybe it goes both ways. You know? Maybe you can learn about them.”

  She was rewarded by a narrowing of Malik’s eyes, the first familiar thing he’d done since the hospital.

  “Maybe,” he said, but shaking his head no.

  And a minute later, “Maybe.” And this time he did not shake his head.

  Shade reappeared, heralded by the sound of the car pulling into the garage. She had sleeping bags and prescription painkillers, whose sudden absence from the shelves following what felt like a burst of wind would baffle the pharmacist. And she had food, orange juice, and a bottle of vodka.

  They ate and drank, and Malik popped a handful of pain pills, just in case he de-morphed in his sleep. Oxycontin wouldn’t do anything more than dull the sharpest edges, but it was all they had.

  Malik fell asleep first.

  Shade and Cruz watched him, then their eyes met.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” Cruz said.

  Slowly Shade shook her head.

  “Well, I can guess,” Cruz said impatiently. “But Shade, you cannot let this destroy you.”

  A quirk appeared at the corner of Shade’s mouth but collapsed into a downturn. “But it already has, Cruz,” she said. “It already has.”

  CHAPTER 7

  There’s More than One Kind of Predator

  “WANT A HIT, kid?”

  Francis Specter, fourteen, had earbuds in, and Lars Frederiksen was singing about growing up “on the farms” and being raised by bikers.

  Francis had not spent time “on the farms,” a euphemism for juvenile prison, but she was definitely being raised by bikers. Bikers like “Mangohead” Briscola, her mother’s current “old man,” who had earned his nickname by wrapping his bike around a streetlight pole and cracking his head open. The surgical repair job had left him with a segment of skull that was raised a quarter inch above the rest of his scalp, and from that six-inch slab, his normally dark hair grew a sickly orange, hence, “Mangohead.”

  Mangohead Briscola was forty-five years old, which was fairly well-aged in biker gang culture, and
had a full, greasy beard dotted with Cheeto dust, a pitted, unhealthy face, and rotting teeth. Many meth-heads had rotting teeth, one of several reasons Francis Specter could think of to say . . .

  “No.”

  “Awww, come on, young-and-tender, get some of this up your nose”—he held out a vial filled with white powder—“and we can have us a party.”

  “I’m fourteen years old, you creep.”

  Mangohead grinned. “Old enough to bleed . . .”

  Francis walked away on stiff legs, followed by his raucous catcalls. “Sooner or later we’re gonna party, you ’n’ me!”

  Francis had nowhere particular to go; there weren’t exactly a million choices. The gang—the Mojave Huns—had what they liked to call a compound, which was three trailers; two tin shacks; a rust-weeping Winnebago up on cinder blocks; a reeking, vile outhouse; and a rusting LPG tank badly painted with the gang’s logo, which was a stylized depiction of a very blond and very white Hun swinging a battle-ax.

  Francis had read about the original Huns online. They had come from Asia and were definitely not white folks, but she had never been reckless enough to point that out to Mangohead, or to her mother, and certainly not to the pack’s leader, who flew a Pepe flag over his trailer. Nor were the original Huns drug dealers.

  The compound was only a few hundred feet off the 392, which fed into Interstate 40, and Francis could, if she chose, walk a mile along the two-lane road through red-sand nothingness to Russell’s Truck and Travel Center, a truck-stop restaurant, convenience store, and gas station. Beyond that it would be a very, very long walk—seventy-five miles—to Amarillo, Texas. That was it aside from little no-account “towns” that were nothing more than fast-food restaurants or gas stations.

  Her only escape, her only window on the world, was through her phone and a desperately slow internet connection that took a full minute to load a single Wikipedia page.

  It had been sheer boredom that had led Francis to take some of what the gang called the Jesus Rock, a few chips of stone from some place called Perdido Beach. The rock glowed faintly green in the dark, and the gang had decided it was their inspiration, a sort of lucky totem. The gang held nothing sacred but loyalty to the gang, silence to the police, and a sort of negligent, unfocused, half-mocking worship of the rock, whose true power they knew nothing about. Only Francis was clever enough to connect the gang’s “sacred” stone with the monster who had annihilated the Golden Gate Bridge.

  She had taken one of the rock flakes out into the desert one night and spread a blanket, lain on her back smoking a joint and looking up at the one true wonder to be enjoyed in the New Mexico emptiness: a magnificent sky filled with a million more stars than any city dweller ever saw. There, mildly high and mellow, for reasons she would never be able to explain except that “I was bored,” she’d ground the rock flake to powder using the hilt of her knife. And then she had snorted it.

  Two days later, Francis had gone with her mother to the Lowe’s market in Tucumcari. They’d taken the ancient baby-puke-yellow Chevy pickup truck, detailed to shop for groceries for the nineteen people in the compound. Francis’s assignment had been to shoplift steaks—they had money for some things, but definitely not steaks.

  Francis had been caught with two packs of ribeye steaks in her backpack and had run from the store clerk and the fat security man. Her mother, who was supposed to provide a distraction should such an unfortunate event occur, had passed out, and was sitting splay-legged amid crushed boxes of Cheerios and Wheat Chex.

  Francis had raced for the front of the store and been cut off, turned and headed for the back of the store, intending to run through the storage area and escape out through the loading dock. But a large man had loomed up out of nowhere, and she’d had nowhere to go.

  So she had . . . well, she had no words to explain what had happened next. She remembered a feeling of panic, knowing that if she was busted, the gang had no means of (and very little interest in) bailing her out. In her fear she saw things differently. Weirdly. The exterior wall of the grocery store, lined with cartons of bleach and six-packs of paper towels, had seemed to twist. It was impossible to describe, she had no words for it. But it felt as if she had somehow slid up and over and around the wall and was suddenly in the parking area at the back of the store.

  Since then she’d told no one. But when she could, when she was sure no one was watching, she had experimented. It was odd, because the world was absolutely as solid as it ever had been . . . unless she first got herself in what she thought of as the right frame of mind. When she did that, she saw the world differently. And to her shock she saw herself differently, too. Her skin seemed to shimmer, like sunlight on a greasy puddle. Like a rainbow.

  She had passed her rainbow hand effortlessly “through” trailer walls; she had walked through—although it felt like sliding “around”—the LPG tank; she had lain on her flea-ridden cot in the shed and had dropped through it without effort.

  Then, she had nerved herself up to the ultimate screw-you: she had passed through the gang leader’s own trailer. Not through like she was inside the trailer, but sort of . . . through and around, like the trailer was a flat box within which she could see the Big Man eating a burrito like he was on TV and she was a 3-D person floating above it. But even that wasn’t quite it, because she had not just seen him eating a burrito, she had seen the burrito going down his throat to settle in his belly. She had seen his heart and his lungs and both the inside and outside of him simultaneously.

  She had even tested her nerve, as well as her power, by walking across a busy highway and letting a Costco tractor trailer blow through/around her.

  Francis Specter had acquired a power. She was Rockborn 2.0.

  She spent a long time online, her inquiries leading to pages full of talk about extra dimensions and even a holographic universe.

  And then she had chanced upon a snippet of video showing someone identified as Dekka Talent, looking like an angry black feline walking erect, with dreads that ended in snakes’ heads, but sitting on a very nice motorcycle. On a motorcycle while black, which the Mojave Huns considered a sort of race crime, as if bikes were only for white people.

  Francis had long considered running away. No day passed without Mangohead or one of the others hitting on her; no day passed without being offered meth, mescaline, Oxy, occasionally cocaine. At fourteen she knew she should be in school, but her last day of school had been three years ago, back when her mother was a respectable school librarian, not a brown-toothed, haggard, hollow-eyed junkie.

  But each time she’d dreamed of escape, the question was always the same: Where? She was a million miles from anywhere. If she tried hitchhiking, the odds were she’d either end up busted or picked up by some leering trucker or discovered by some member of the gang. The gang would call it treachery, and she would take a beating, which, based on previous beatings, would leave her stiff and sore at best, bleeding and incapacitated at worst. A previous “traitor” was buried in the desert a few miles away from where she stood.

  But the “dangerous” black cat-girl on the bike? Well, in Francis’s imagination it was as if Dekka Talent was secretly waving her over. Dekka had become a destination.

  Francis had started to plan. First things first: money.

  On the next supply run to Tucumcari, Francis had wandered away to the Wells Fargo bank, where she effortlessly slid around the wall and into the bank. It had been a Sunday, so the bank was closed and empty. She’d looked around inside for a while, opening drawers and finding nothing, before finally confronting the heavy steel vault door.

  It did not matter how thick the door was; Francis saw it as a series of geometric lines that made her vaguely nauseous to see since they made no sense at all. But she slid around the door and into the vault. There she reached effortlessly into safe-deposit boxes. She walked—slid—away with $3,200 in cash, plus a stash of fake green cards, a very nice necklace that might be real gold, and a little pouch full of what
Francis hoped were rare coins.

  She noted with pleasure that while she was Rainbow—her self-mocking term for her extra-dimensional self—she could carry things with her—her clothing, for a start, which was extremely useful. But also, obviously, her loot from the bank.

  She’d hidden her cache out in the desert under a flat rock. The spare key to Mangohead’s chopper—a six-bend ape-hanger hog—was now in her jeans.

  And she was waiting for night to fall.

  “Night,” as in people sleeping, seldom came before three in the morning, but finally the howling drunks and the jittery tweakers settled down, passed out, leaving no one alert but the gang’s dog, a much-abused pit bull Francis had cultivated with occasional bits of “people food.”

  Once she was sure it was as quiet as it was going to get, Francis retrieved her cache of money and her other bit of contraband, a five-gallon water can. She then went from bike to bike, trembling with fear, pouring a few cups of water in each gas tank. People thought sugar in a tank would kill an engine, but that, Francis had learned, was an urban legend—sugar does not dissolve in gas. But water sinks below gasoline, gets into the fuel line and . . .

  The motorcycles might start, but they weren’t going to get far.

  Then she stuffed the “sacred rock” into the deep pocket of her jacket, threw a leg over the saddle of Mangohead’s bike, inserted the key, and with a deep, steadying breath, fired up the engine.

  The dog barked. A voice somewhere in the night said, “Who the f . . . ,” before fading out.

  Francis accelerated away slowly, down the 392, savoring the vibration of the powerful engine, tortured by her own small but growing sense of hope. In the distance ahead was the sickly fluorescent glow of Russell’s truck stop. But something was overhead, something unusual. She slowed and looked up in time to see a ghostly, pale gray shape zoom almost silently overhead, maybe two hundred yards up, maybe more. It looked like an airplane, but was too quiet.

  She shrugged it off and rode on for mere seconds before she saw a blinding flash of light behind her, followed not quite immediately by a concussion that made the road surface jump.