Villain Read online

  Dillon didn’t do well with humiliation; he found it intolerable, in fact, as he had found it intolerable in the FAYZ. There, he had been just another thirteen-year-old kid without powers. He’d been forced to work in the fields, braving the carnivorous worms they called zekes, picking cabbages for hours in the broiling sun, at least if he wanted to eat. The kids with powers—Sam Temple and his group, Caine Soren and his—had never treated Dillon as anything more than a nuisance, another mouth to be fed, another random, powerless nobody to be ordered around by Albert and Edilio and Dekka, the big shots. Another nobody who might be crippled or killed if he happened to get between Sam and Caine in the ongoing factional war.

  And then, after the end of the FAYZ, his parents had moved to Las Vegas. He had coincidentally enjoyed a big improvement in his internet speed, and he had learned of the dark web: the sites that sold illegal drugs and guns and even arranged meetings with hit men. And there he had come across someone supposedly selling pieces of the “Perdido Beach Magic Stone.” That’s what the ad had said. A hundred dollars an ounce, to be paid in Bitcoin. He had assumed it was fake, but he gave it a try anyway, and sure enough, a chip of rock had arrived in the mail. He had slept with it under his pillow for a full month before concluding that it wasn’t working, and he’d been on the verge of throwing it out when something told him to try one last thing.

  He had practically destroyed the blender. And he’d had to finish the job with a mortar and pestle that left the rock tasting like the basil that had been the previous thing crushed in the mortar. He had gagged it down.

  And the next day he had made his brother do things, and his sister go change sweaters three times, and he had made his father go online and order a new and expensive VR headset.

  But later that same day he’d gotten into a loud argument with his mother, and he had stormed out of the house and ordered a passing motorist to drive him to the TGI Fridays, where, using his new serpent’s voice, he told the bartender to pour. That was a mistake, clearly, because passed out he had no power at all, obviously, and the result was this drunk tank and this very public revelation of his power. There would be video from the cell, video revealing him as a mutant, one of the so-called “Rockborn,” he was certain, which meant police and who-knew-what government agencies would have his name, address, picture—both of his faces—fingerprints, credit report, and, worst of all, his most recent psych evaluation, which had labeled him a borderline personality—psych-speak for freak. The FBI would be interviewing his “known associates” before the day was out, and they would, to a boy or girl, roll their eyes and retell all the old stories of Dillon the loser, Dillon the freak, Dillon the virgin.

  Terrible timing, terrible planning. He had not previously used the power for a violent end, and now that he had, he could expect to be treated no more kindly than the creature who had torn up the Golden Gate Bridge, or the monsters who had blown up the Port of Los Angeles.

  The tweaker’s rotting teeth finally came together, and he spit a hunk of bloody pulp from his mouth onto the floor, where it looked like a piece of calf’s liver. Tattoo, still on hands and knees, looked quizzically at Dillon as if to ask whether he should lap the meat up as well.

  Yes, life going forward would not be the life he’d led to this point.

  Oh, well.

  “I’m out of here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve been a great audience, but . . .” He grinned as the old Marx Brothers ditty came back to him, and he sang, “Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going . . .”

  There was no applause. He could have made them laugh and applaud, but no, some things were sacred, and he would earn his laughs the hard way, the right way. All the people he admired had been freaks in high school, and they had all become admired and beloved and rich.

  Louis C.K.: $25 million net worth

  David Letterman: $400 million

  Jerry Seinfeld: $800 million

  “Ta-ta!” he said with a jaunty wave. Then an afterthought: “Oh, you can stop licking the floor now.”

  And with that, Dillon Poe—six foot two inches tall and decidedly green Dillon Poe—walked out through the cell gate, down the hall to the open security door, past guards he silenced with a word, past the jail’s grim waiting room, out into the lobby of the county building, and out into brilliant Las Vegas sunlight.

  A pretty young woman passing by gave him a definite once-over that was certainly not the way she should have looked at a green, scaly creature with yellow eyes, and he smiled at her in gracious acknowledgment.

  Could I work the whole snake thing into my act?

  It was mid-morning in Las Vegas. The air was only hot, not blistering, but the sun was blinding, a sharp contrast with what Dillon felt inside. Because in his head he was having visions again, like he had last time he had changed . . . well, maybe not visions, more like voices. Only the voices never spoke.

  No, not quite visions or voices, he realized, more like the neck-tingling sense of being watched. It was more than just the faint apprehension you might get when you thought someone on the street was eyeballing you; this was both more real and insistent, and yet impossible to make sense of. It was as if somewhere inside his head was an audience, sitting in complete darkness and absolute silence, watching him act on his own personal stage.

  Dillon was an empirical guy, not someone given to mysticism or even religion. He tested things. He sought truth, because all the best comics traded in truth. His suspicion was that the dark and silent audience had something to do with the changes—the morphing, as he had heard it called. So now he tested the hypothesis by de-morphing: by resuming his unimpressive human physique. And sure enough, the invisible audience disappeared.

  “Huh,” Dillon said, which a passing homeless person took as an invitation and held out a dirty styrofoam cup.

  “Sorry, I don’t have any money,” the now-normal-looking Dillon said.

  No money, just power. But Dillon was cynical enough to understand that in much the way that matter and energy are really the same thing, so are money and power. He could make anyone do anything. Anything. Which meant he could have anything he wanted.

  He, Dillon Poe, ignored FAYZ survivor, was quite possibly the most powerful person in the world. In light of that, he asked himself: Now what?

  And the answer was: Whatever you want, Dillon; whatever you want. The only way now was forward.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friends Don’t Let Friends Scream Alone

  “AAAAAHHHH! KILL ME! Kill me, oh, God, please kill me!”

  Once upon a time, Malik Tenerife had argued convincingly that the idea of hell, of a place of eternal torment, was nonsense, an impossibility. Sooner or later even being boiled in a lake of fire would get dull and repetitive. After a year? Ten years? A million years?

  He knew now the flaw in his argument: it only worked if you experienced time.

  Malik did not experience time. Everything was now. Now! NOW! Right now he felt as if he’d been skinned alive and left raw. Right now he felt as if wild beasts had gnawed on him. Right now his brain could barely form a thought before a crashing wave of agony would wipe it away, leaving nothing but screams.

  He’d heard some of what the nurses had had to say since Shade and Cruz had rushed him to the hospital. He was vaguely, distantly aware that the shape-shifting chameleon Cruz, assuming several disguises, had been with him throughout. He knew that she had filled the one request he had managed to form and articulate in a single scrawled word on a pad of paper. The word: “Rock.” But to say that Malik knew or thought was a gross exaggeration—Malik’s memory, his thoughts, his essence as a human being were a bunch of scraps swirling in a tornado. He could glimpse but not hold a thought.

  Cruz had indeed been with Malik throughout. She had the power to appear as any person she could visualize, and had passed as a doctor, a nurse, an orderly. She had stayed by his side as much as possible because, even though she knew it was nothing compared to
Malik’s agony, she had her own problems. When in morph, the Dark Watchers were always with her, always insinuating themselves in her mind. Sometimes she just locked herself in the bathroom, returned to her normal, true form, and cried.

  She had given Malik the rock, ground up in a cup of water, and he’d managed to drink it through a straw. And then she had waited.

  At first the third member of their little group, Shade Darby, could come and go, using her super-speed to be effectively invisible, nothing but a blur and a gust of wind. But now Malik’s room was heavily guarded. There were Los Angeles police just outside his door, two SWAT members, all kitted out in black jumpsuits and machine pistols, at each end of the hallway. They knew Malik was with Shade and Cruz. They were looking for Shade and Cruz, unaware that Cruz had been there the whole time.

  Cruz had picked up some useful if depressing facts. She’d become a well-informed amateur on the subject of burns.

  Pop quiz: Do you want second-degree burns or third-degree?

  Tricky answer: It depends which bothers you more, permanent disfigurement or pain. The second-degree burn hurts like hell but will heal. The third-degree burn destroys nerves and may actually deaden sensation, but you’ll be wearing your very own Halloween mask.

  “Pleeeeeaaase! Kill me!”

  Cruz had also learned that there is a such a thing as a fourth-degree burn. That’s when a burn goes all the way through the skin and eats into muscle, fat, tendon, and even bone.

  After giving Malik the rock, Cruz had reopened the morphine line, allowing the soothing drug to flow into Malik’s veins. But she knew now that it was like sprinkling water on a forest fire. There was no drug capable of killing this pain. The doctors were getting ready to put him in a medically induced coma, basically turning off all his brain functions so that, pain-free and unaware, he could glide to his death.

  “Oh, God, make it stop!”

  Cruz rose from the hard, narrow chair and gave the hanging bag a squeeze, pushing morphine more quickly into the catheter in the back of his hand.

  Malik had second-degree burns. And third. And he had fourth degree, and there the scalding pain of second-degree burns became the marrow-deep, consciousness-twisting pain of muscles eaten into like he’d been attacked and half consumed by a tiger. The superheated steam and napalm from the great fire beast—sometimes known in the media as Napalm or Dragon, and also known as Tom Peaks—had burned through clothing and skin, had snapped and curled the tendons of Malik’s ankles, had melted the muscles of Malik’s calves; it had splashed up and burned away parts of his thighs and buttocks. His lower back was second-degree burns; third-degree burns spread up his back.

  The fire had exposed the tendons of his wrist. Most of his face was untouched, but a burn spread from his neck up the left side of his head, so that his ear had melted and now lay flat, a sort of bas-relief of itself. His face, as well as most of his chest and private bits, was intact aside from spot burns. The unburned bits were like islands floating in a magma sea.

  One thing was clear: no one—not a single nurse, doctor, or specialist—had any doubt that Malik would die, probably within hours.

  So Cruz had made the solution of water and pulverized meteor fragments that carried an engineered alien virus with the power to disassemble and reassemble DNA like a kid playing with Legos. The rock, as it was called, had created the Perdido Beach Anomaly, the place survivors of that impossible dome called the FAYZ.

  The rock had turned Tom Peaks, ruthless government bureaucrat, into a massive, liquid fire–spewing beast; the rock had turned an obnoxious-if-talented young artist named Justin DeVeere into the armored, sword-armed monster called Knightmare; the rock had turned a disturbed young man named Vincent Vu into the vile creature that called itself Abaddon.

  This was also, of course, the rock that had given Shade her power, and Cruz hers. No one could predict what the rock would do to Malik. No one could be certain it would do anything at all. But the alternative was to simply wait for him to die, either screaming in agony or in a coma from which he would never wake. So Cruz had run down to the hospital cafeteria to get a straw so he could drink, and held it to his trembling lips.

  Malik had swallowed all he could. And then he had fallen and fallen and fallen into hell, because taking the rock had meant turning off the morphine drip so that he could swallow without choking, and within seconds, as he felt the gritty water slide down his throat, the pain rose beneath him like a tidal wave, like some terrifying volcanic eruption, an irresistible force.

  The rock changed those who consumed it, but how would it manifest in Malik? The alien virus was clever, subtle, and opportunistic. It had used the DNA of Dekka Talent’s own cat to shape Dekka’s morphed self. It had used starfish DNA to grow Vincent Vu into a monster. But the rock had other tricks as well—it had turned Tom Peaks into a fearsome creature that was surely not the product of any earthly DNA, but rather a creature of half-remembered movies whose images lay buried in Peaks’s memory. And an unfortunate child in Islay, Scotland, had been transformed into a creature from a children’s board book, a creature that had had to be annihilated by shells from a Royal Navy destroyer.

  Cruz herself, formerly known as Hugo Rojas before she’d come to accept the fact that “Hugo” was simply never going to be authentic as a male, had acquired a power that had no analogy in nature: she could appear as anyone. Anyone she had seen, or even seen video of. She had only to form a picture in her mind, and as if she was some sort of overhead projector, she could reflect and embody that image. Nature was brilliant at disguise and could make an insect look like a leaf, but nothing in nature matched what Cruz could do.

  Had the rock virus used her own gender transition as a text in creating the morphed Cruz? It would almost imply that the virus had a sense of humor.

  Cruz had stayed in morph for hour after hour while Malik was in the hospital, playing various roles, shifting her appearance with increasing ease and speed. And for all of those hours she had endured the vile, insinuating attentions of the Dark Watchers, those voiceless, faceless, formless observers who emerged any time a morphing happened. At times it was like being whispered to by a pervert—not words, just slithering, leering tones. At times she felt she could almost glimpse them. Like when you suddenly turn your head and have the feeling that you just missed seeing something out of the corner of your eye.

  Shade Darby had come and gone several times. She would stand by Malik’s bed, talk in quiet tones to Cruz, wince at Malik’s pain, and brush tears away with quick, impatient gestures, as though her tears were an irritation. Eventually Shade managed to convince an exhausted, emotionally wrecked Cruz to come with her to their latest stolen vehicle in the hospital parking lot and eat something, and hopefully sleep. She settled Cruz into the passenger seat of the Mercedes and tucked a woolen throw around her, like she was putting a child to bed. Shade turned on the engine and the seat warmers, and despite being sure she could not sleep, Cruz did just that. After several hours Cruz woke from a troubled sleep and found Shade sitting in the driver’s seat, opening a Subway bag.

  “I have an Italian cold cut and a ham and cheese. Also chips.”

  Cruz said nothing, but pushed open the door, leaned out, and vomited onto the concrete.

  Without a word, Shade handed her a bottle of water. Cruz swirled and spit, then drank the entire bottle and dropped the empty. Then she took the Italian cold-cut sub, wolfed down half of it, swallowed, and mumbled, “Thanks.”

  Shade nodded and looked away.

  This was a new Shade Darby. Cruz had always seen her strange, brilliant, ruthlessly determined friend as two people in one body: there was the pretty, vaguely punk-looking girl with the interesting scar up one side of her neck. That Shade Darby was amused, kind, a bit distant but supportive. Then there was what Cruz thought of as the shark, the cold, calculating young woman with the brilliant mind.

  This was a different girl, neither easygoing Shade nor the shark. This was a wounded Shade, an un
certain Shade. A girl who had made decisions that destroyed her relationship with her only surviving parent, dragged Cruz into a life of felonies piled upon felonies, and, finally, left Malik screaming in unbearable agony, a charcoal and melted-flesh version of the boy Shade had once loved and been loved by.

  “How are you?” Shade asked, practically cringing, as if she expected Cruz to berate her.

  But as Shade had come to recognize the damage she had done, Cruz had come to accept her own complicity. No one had put a gun to her head to force her to follow Shade. Cruz had been the new kid in school, a mid-semester transfer after being kicked out of a Catholic school for wearing dresses. Evanston, Illinois, was still a bastion of relative tolerance, but the nastiness that had come to be a part of American life, even at the highest levels, had threatened her. Until Shade. Shade’s friendship had spread an umbrella of safety over Cruz at school, and Cruz had leaped at the chance to have a friend. She had quickly seen that Shade was obsessed with the death of her mother on the day of the Perdido Beach Anomaly four years earlier, when the FAYZ dome had fallen. And Cruz knew that Shade’s head was filled with fantasies of revenge against the monstrous being called Gaia who had used her powers for slaughter. But Cruz knew as well that Shade’s revenge fantasies were just that, fantasies. No one can get revenge on a dead thing, and Gaia, that evil child, had died, destroyed in the end by the courage and sense of justice of an autistic child called Little Pete, and the charming sociopath Caine.

  And yet, step by step, Cruz had gone along with Shade. She had chosen to take the rock herself, to become Rockborn. She had then acquired and learned to use a superhuman power. And she had raised nothing but the most token objections as Shade used her super-speed to steal money and cars and phones to keep them going.

  Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, Cruz thought, an echo of her upbringing in the church. My fault. My most grievous fault.

  Hero, villain, and monster, that was the three-part taxonomy of superhumans, according to Malik. Shade was meant to be a hero, intended to be a hero, wanted to be a hero, and Cruz, to the extent she’d really thought about it, imagined herself as a sort of Robin to Shade’s Batman, a sidekick.