Villain Read online

  Dedication

  To my daughter, Clara

  Epigraph

  And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

  And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

  —Revelation 13:1–2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: It Rhymes with Villain

  Chapter 2: Friends Don’t Let Friends Scream Alone

  Chapter 3: Veterans of Past and Future Wars

  ASO-6

  Chapter 4: And Coming In at Number One . . .

  Chapter 5: Crackers with a Lunatic

  Chapter 6: Do You Feel My Pain? How About Now?

  Chapter 7: There’s More than One Kind of Predator

  Chapter 8: The Symbiosis of Good and Evil

  Chapter 9: Take Over the What?

  Interstice

  ASO-6

  Chapter 10: It Takes Six Seconds to Fall Five Hundred Feet

  Chapter 11: It’s Only Pain

  Chapter 12: Semper Fi

  Chapter 13: Letting the Animals Out of the Zoo

  Chapter 14: Missed Him by That Much

  Chapter 15: The Bacterium Screams

  Chapter 16: Everything’s Coming Up Dekka

  ASO-6

  Chapter 17: The Cheerios of War

  Chapter 18: Tanks for the Memories

  Chapter 19: Ruthlessness: Not Just for Sharks Anymore

  Interstice

  Chapter 20: Monster Surplus

  Chapter 21: With Great Power Comes Pure Malice

  Chapter 22: World War Vegas

  Chapter 23: Rough Beasts, No Bethlehem

  Chapter 24: We Are the Chimpions

  ASO-6

  Chapter 25: Random Chance

  Chapter 26: The Hero Thing

  Chapter 27: Dragon and Gasoline

  Chapter 28: A Bonfire of Innocents

  Chapter 29: One Less Hotel

  Chapter 30: The Speech

  Chapter 31: Aftermath

  ASO-6

  ASO-7

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Michael Grant

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  California’s governor and legislature are rushing to replace the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, which was destroyed in a battle between police and a superpowered mutant calling himself Knightmare. . . .

  —The New York Times

  The Port of Los Angeles is still conducting damage assessments following the battle involving several mutant creatures, but early estimates run to the billions of dollars. . . .

  —Press Office, Port of Los Angeles

  The president has issued a tweet criticizing late-night comedy shows for portraying him as paralyzed in the face of this novel threat. . . .

  —Associated Press

  Ministry of State Security (MSS)

  People’s Republic of China

  Electronic Communications Intercept (ECI) #42-8909

  The following conversation took place between Deputy Undersecretary of US Homeland Security Peter Stroudwell (PS) and Angela Britten (AB), a senior advisor to the Homeland Security General Counsel, at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

  PS: The president has suggested asking the population to take direct action. His words. Direct action.

  AB: What action? Does he want the whole country hiding in shelters indefinitely?

  PS: Not that kind of action. He’s calling for a Second Amendment solution.

  AB: You’re kidding. He’s suggesting every gun nut in the country go on a mutant-killing spree? Come on, Peter, you must know—

  PS: Of course I know! Jesus, Angela, why do you think I’m talking to you? You’re in the counsel’s office, you’re a lawyer, you need to do something to head this off.

  AB: Right, because I can somehow stop POTUS. I need a drink.

  END OF ECI

  Madam Chairman, to be honest, we haven’t got the first goddamned clue how to stop these monsters.

  —Secret testimony of FBI director

  CHAPTER 1

  It Rhymes with Villain

  “HEY, FREAK? WHAT are you looking at?”

  The drunk tank, the catch-all common room used as a first stop for drunks and druggies, was a large space lined with a wall-mounted steel bench. The floor was bare cement, sloped down to a drain in the center of the room. There was a single window with both bars and thick wire over filthy glass, allowing neither sunlight nor cheer, but a grim, gray reminder that there was an outside world.

  The walls of the drunk tank were painted a sickly yellow, the color of baby puke, which went perfectly with the reek of vomit.

  There were maybe fifteen adult men in the room, and the barely eighteen-year-old Dillon Poe, and Dillon felt very, very bad. Bad to a degree he had never felt before.

  Is this what a hangover is? Oh, my God!

  Dillon being Dillon, part of his mind was already looking for the potential humor in the situation. And it wasn’t hard to find. He’d gotten very drunk the night before, after walking into a bar and asking for whiskey like some cowboy in an old movie. Having no choice or will of his own at that moment, the bartender had poured, and Dillon had gagged down the first fiery shot, then another, and . . . and the next thing he knew was right now, waking up with throbbing eyes and aching head and a mouth that tasted like he’d spent the night eating roadkill.

  No, not roadkill, that was generic. It was funnier to be specific. Like a dead beaver? Like a dead opossum? Rats were overdone. Like a dead raccoon?

  Yeah, dead raccoon. His mouth tasted like he’d spent the night chewing on dead raccoon.

  It was an absurd situation: an eighteen-year-old walks into a bar. Like the start of a joke where a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar. . . . And, yeah, he admitted wearily, his brain was not quite up for writing jokes.

  “I’m nah lookin’ chew,” Dillon managed to say to the belligerent man, a sandpaper tongue thick in a cotton mouth. Dillon sat up, rubbed sleep from his eyes, and instantly vomited on the concrete.

  “Hey, asshole!” This from the same man who’d challenged him. He was a big, very hairy white man, though it was hard to comment on his complexion given that he was almost entirely covered in tattoos. Including the tattooed tear at the corner of one eye that testified to a murder committed. Chest hair that included some gray sprigs spouted from a lurid chest tattoo of an American flag where the stars had been replaced by swastikas. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

  Dillon stood up, wobbly, weak, and deeply unhappy.

  “Nasty little punk, stinking up the place!” Tattoo said.

  This, Dillon thought, was really not fair: the place already reeked of puke and piss and worse. There was a man passed out facedown on the bench, a brown stain in his trousers.

  Tattoo swaggered over, grabbed Dillon’s T-shirt, and kicked him in the knee. Dillon dropped to the floor, landing painfully on the concrete. “Clean that up, boy!”

  What? What? How had this happened? How was he here, on his knees? Part of him counseled quiet submission: the man was bigger and had friends. But part of him, despite the alcohol-fueled misery in his brain, simply could not shut up.

  “Can I use that mop on your head?”

  First rule of stand-up comedy: never let a heckler get the upper hand.

  Tattoo, whose limp salt-and-pepper hair did, arguably, re
semble a mop, gaped in astonishment. Then he grinned, showing a row of overly bright, cheap false teeth. “Well, I guess I get to hand out my first ass-kicking of the day!”

  Dillon closed his eyes and focused and almost immediately the brutal hangover faded, and subtle but utterly impossible changes began to transform Dillon’s body and face. He said, “Ass-kicking, or ass-kissing?”

  This earned him a hard kick meant for his stomach, but which deflected off his arm, knocking his hand into his own puddle of puke. Bad. But on the other hand, his hangover pain was fast receding.

  A relief, but not the point, really. The point was that Dillon Poe was changing. Physically. The change was subtle at first and mostly visible in his eyes, which had shifted from brown to a sort of tarnished gold color. His pupils narrowed and formed vertical, thin, elongated diamond-shaped slits. His hair seemed to suck into his head, which now bulged at the back and tapered to a version of his own face rendered in the green of a new spring leaf.

  Dillon knew about the physical change, or at least thought he did. He’d caught a terrifying glimpse of himself in a barroom mirror, seeing a reptilian version of his face visible past the bottles of booze.

  But he had also begun to guess that there was something about this snakelike version of himself that caused more fascination than revulsion. If anything, the few people whose reactions he’d been able to gauge seemed to find him attractive, even mesmerizing. They stared, but not in horror. Even his fellow denizens of the drunk tank did not recoil in fear or disgust, but turned fascinated, enthralled faces to him.

  Dillon was not in a happy or generous frame of mind. He had clearly screwed up the night before, outing himself as a mutant. And now he was in a cage with men, every single one of whom looked meaner and bigger and tougher than he—well, aside from the weeping tourist in the chinos and canary-yellow polo shirt. But it didn’t matter, because Dillon Poe—this hypnotic, serpentine version of Dillon Poe—was more than capable of dealing with Tattoo.

  Dillon looked up from the floor at the man and said, “You clean it up, tough guy. In fact, lick it up. Start with my hand.”

  Without hesitation Tattoo stuck out his tongue and began licking Dillon’s scaly green hand, as avidly as a dog welcoming his master. It was fascinating watching Tattoo’s rheumy eyes, the expression of brute incomprehension, the alarm, the anger, the . . . impotence. The panic he was helpless to express.

  “Now lick up that mess on the floor,” Dillon said. Instantly Tattoo dropped to his hands and knees. He said, “I don’t want to do this!” but without hesitation lowered his head, his long, grizzled hair trailing in the mess, and began lapping it up like a dog going after a dropped table scrap.

  The entire room stood or sat frozen in stark disbelief. It was like they were an oil painting, all open mouths and wide eyes and expressions of disbelief. One man moaned, “Is this a hallucination? Is this real? Am I really seeing this?”

  Dillon stood—his morph came with a lithely muscular body several inches taller than his own, an athlete’s body—facing Tattoo’s two buddies, who advanced, belligerent but nervous.

  One said, “Hey, Spence, come on, man, stop that! Get up off your knees! Get away from that thing!” He tugged at his partner’s shirt, but Tattoo—aka Spence, apparently—would not stop licking the puke. In fact, could not stop. He tried to speak but only incomprehensible grunts emerged—it’s hard to talk with a mouth full of another person’s vomit.

  The other thug snarled at Dillon. “What did you do to him, freak?”

  “I am really not in the mood to be picked on,” Dillon said. His voice, too, was subtly different now. His normal voice was a bit too high-pitched to ever be authoritative, and he had a slight lisp on “s” sounds. But this voice? This voice was like a musical instrument in the hands of a master. This voice persuaded, cajoled, and seduced.

  The man frowned and stopped, then shook his head in confusion before finding his anger again. “I don’t give a damn what you’re up for, freak!”

  Dillon turned to this fellow, younger than Spence, with a tweaker’s emaciated body and rotting teeth. He would have tolerated any number of insults, but that particular one, “freak,” was something he’d heard too many times in his young life, both at school and at home.

  Freak for having no friends.

  Freak for his physical awkwardness.

  Freak for the way he looked at girls who would have nothing to do with him.

  Freak for being the only one of five siblings who rejected walks and hikes and camping and biking and all the other physically tiring wastes of time his family loved.

  Freak for sitting in his room for days on end watching stand-up comics like Louis, Maron, Frankie Boyle, Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, and the few surviving videos of the godfather of stand-up, Richard Pryor.

  And of course, freak for being a survivor of what people called the Perdido Beach Anomaly, but which Dillon, like all the survivors, called the FAYZ.

  “Dude,” Dillon said, “don’t ever call me a freak again.”

  “Okay,” the tweaker said.

  “Say that you promise?”

  The tweaker frowned and grimaced, but said, “I promise.”

  And Dillon almost stopped there. Almost. But Dillon’s life was filled with times when he almost did the sensible thing or the smart thing or the right thing. A whole lot of almosts, and an equal number of “what the hells.” Of the two, “what the hell” was always funnier.

  The truth was he was rather enjoying the fear in the eyes all around him. Fear and confusion and mystification, expressed in frowns and mutterings and the sorts of threats not meant to be heard by the person being threatened—coward’s threats.

  Yeah, Dillon thought, you losers should fear me. Every breath you take is because I allow it. A nasty smirk formed on his lips.

  “I’m not sure I trust you,” Dillon said. “Let’s make sure, huh? Let’s make sure you never call me or anyone else names again. Bite your tongue in half.”

  A spasm went through the room. They leaned forward, disbelieving but enthralled. After all, a tough guy was licking the floor, like a dog determined to get every last chunk of Iams.

  “You can’t make me . . . uchhh ggghrr can’t ma . . . ,” the tweaker said.

  “Sorry, having a hard time understanding you,” Dillon said savagely.

  The tweaker concentrated hard; you could see it on his face. He was trying to fight, but putting far more energy into obeying. His jaw muscles clenched until the veins in his neck stood out. Blood dribbled from his mouth.

  “Jesus Christ!” someone yelled. Then, “Guards! Guards!”

  “Grind your teeth back and forth and bite down hard,” Dillon said. The sound of dull teeth grinding on gristle was sickening, and Dillon might have relented had he not caught sight of the swastika tattoo on the tweaker’s arm.

  No pity for Nazi tweakers.

  “Hey, can you say sieg heil?” Dillon asked.

  Blood now gushed from the man’s mouth. Tears streamed from his eyes and mucus from his nose. His eyes were trapped, desperate, terrified.

  “Come on, mister tough guy, gimme a sieg heil.”

  “Ssnk thth stnch ccchuch . . .”

  More prisoners were shouting, agitated, some wide-eyed and fascinated, others appalled, even sickened. And Dillon was sickened in a way that had nothing to do with his hangover. There was something electric about the feeling, but in both senses of the word. The power was shocking, and it shocked him in return. It seemed impossible, just absolutely, batshit impossible, and yet he could hear teeth on gristle. . . . Life shouldn’t be like that, he told himself. That could not be it. Could it?

  “Guards! Guards!” The cries went up with mounting hysteria, and men banged on the bars, all of which was fine with Dillon. He wanted guards to come, because he was more than ready to leave.

  A portly guard came sauntering along, her face a mask of weary indifference. Then she took a look through the barred door and i
mmediately keyed her radio. “Backup to the tank! Hats and bats! We have a situation!”

  “Open the gate, guard,” Dillon said in his calm, mellifluous voice.

  The guard fumbled for keys, found the right one, and turned the lock just as two other guards came rushing down the corridor, helmets on heads, truncheons and Tasers in hand.

  “Open all the gates, all the doors. Do it now,” Dillon said, and heard the clanks and the buzzes, all the noises of unlocking doors. He stood in the open doorway and glanced at the denizens of the tank, shrinking back from him.

  It was a strange moment, and Dillon recognized that it was the end of one life and the start of another. It was as if some giant, animated meat cleaver—shades of Terry Gilliam—had come down out of the sky and announced with an authoritative thunk! that life was now divided into “before the drunk tank” and “after the drunk tank.”

  The only way now was forward.

  That could be a tagline. I could build a bit around that.

  He had only realized he had this power two days ago. He’d tried it out—gently—on one of his brothers. Then on his father, a bit less gently, but all the while in ways that revealed nothing and raised no suspicions. He had intended to approach the matter after thinking it through, deciding on just how to use the power, if at all. His first thought had been to use it to get stage time at the LA Comedy Club, which despite the name was here in Vegas, and not just on an open-mike night. But that seemed a bit small for such a huge power.

  There was not much point in having power if you didn’t use it, and no point in using it if it didn’t give you an edge. Right? That was the point of life, after all, wasn’t it? To do the best you could for yourself, and perhaps for those loyal to you? And to deal with doubters and haters and enemies?

  But then he’d been dumped by his girlfriend, Kalisha, which was not a heartbreak—he could barely tolerate her; the girl’s sense of humor went no further than slapstick—but it was a humiliation. They’d only been going out for two weeks, and she was his first girlfriend. In the context of the senior class at Palo Verde High School, he would be reduced once again to the status of total loser. The unloved freak.