Villain

by Michael Grant

  I’m not even starring in my own life.

  But at the moment, the hollow-eyed, quiet, sad girl beside Cruz did not inspire notions of heroism. She looked like Cruz imagined soldiers must look after far too long in battle.

  “What do we do?” Cruz asked, hating herself for the question, hating the weakness that made her turn to Shade for the answers even now, even with Malik a few hundred yards away with tubes in his throat and veins, with tubes collecting his bloodred urine, with acres of gauze and gallons of salves hiding the horror show his body had become.

  Shade lowered her head to look through the windshield and up at the hospital. “I guess they’ll do skin grafts and—”

  “No,” Cruz said. She shook her head. “They’re not thinking of fixing him, they’re waiting for him to die.”

  A spasm twisted Shade’s face, squeezing her eyes shut, making a grimace of her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and these she did not brush away.

  Cruz said, “His only hope is the rock. Too much deep-tissue damage. His legs . . . I was there when they changed the dressings. His legs are just bones with chunks of burned meat attached, like, like those turkey legs they sell at fairs. It was awful. Terrible. There’s no coming back from that, Shade. Malik is dead unless the rock . . .”

  Shade cried silently for a while, her forehead on the steering wheel, hands limp in her lap.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Shade said finally. “I don’t—”

  But Cruz did not hear the end of the sentence because at that moment a wave of unspeakable pain assaulted her with a suddenness and violence that wrung whinnying, panicked screams from her mouth.

  Shade, too, shrieked in agony, her face distorted like a figure from some medieval painting of hell’s torments.

  And it wasn’t stopping; it wasn’t lessening; the two girls writhed and shook and bellowed in pain as if they were burning alive inside the car. Shade screamed and slapped at her body as if she was on fire. Cruz pushed open the door of the car, panicked, believing the car had caught fire.

  It was the worst thing either had ever felt, and it would not stop. And through a mist of tears and with senses twisted by mind-shattering agony, Cruz realized that they were not alone: people were streaming from the hospital, crying, screaming, rolling on the ground, tearing the hair from their heads.

  “Morph!” Shade yelled. “Now!”

  Cruz understood, though holding on to even a snippet of thought was almost impossible. Agony lent wings to the transformation as Cruz, the six-foot-tall trans girl, became to all appearances a large young black woman with dreadlocks. Cruz had gone to the first image that popped in her mind, their fellow Rockborn mutant, the FAYZ survivor Dekka Talent.

  Shade at the same time had changed even more drastically. Her face narrowed and seemed to sweep back, like a person in a wind tunnel. Her russet hair became a solid punk-rock-looking wedge. Her body seemed to be covered in something like plastic, like she was a less slick version of a Power Ranger. Her knees reversed direction, making a noise like wet stones tumbling, becoming insectoid, inhuman.

  In seconds Shade was the vibrating speed demon she could become at will. And Cruz was Dekka. The pain was subdued, lessened, manageable, but it was still right there, like a physical force, like standing beside a rampaging river and feeling its power even if all that hit you were drops of spray. They were no longer in that river but felt its devastating power and knew that one slip . . .

  “Malik,” Shade said, slowing her speech to normal time so that Cruz could understand. It was like dragging a finger on a vinyl record to slow it down, words slurring but understandable.

  Shade blew away, raced through the emergency room, a hellish scene of patients and their doctors and nurses all writhing in torment, crying, roaring, letting go of every bodily fluid. She went on, down corridors where patients dragged themselves out of sickbeds in a desperate need to do something, anything, to escape. She saw a nurse just about to jab herself with a syringe and took a millisecond’s detour to snatch the syringe away.

  Finally, Shade arrived at Malik’s room.

  And there he was: Malik.

  Of all the things Shade expected, this was none of them, because Malik stood. Stood. He had pulled the tubes from his throat and was unwinding gauze and peeling off compresses, revealing his own healthy black flesh, undamaged, unscarred.

  Impossible!

  From every direction the terrible screams lessened, giving way to moans and cries of shock.

  Shade could do nothing but stare as the full horror of what she was seeing came home to her. The rock transformed those who took it. The power the rock granted came with the necessity of a physical transformation—a morph.

  This Malik, the one with flesh and muscles, was not Malik, it was a morph of Malik, like some desperately unfunny joke. He had become not himself but a version of himself, a living memory of himself.

  “It’s gone,” Malik cried. “The pain’s gone! I’m better, Shade! I’m fixed!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Veterans of Past and Future Wars

  “YOU WERE CLEVER to come in through the back window,” Astrid Ellison said to her guests. “We’ve been under surveillance for the last four years, but it was pretty sketchy. You’d see a cop every now and then, or maybe an FBI car. But the last weeks it’s been more intense.”

  “Any chance the place is bugged?” Dekka Talent asked, accepting a cup of tea.

  Astrid made a humorless laugh. “Of course it’s bugged, but we found the bug with some help from a guy Albert sent us. He tied the bug into a YouTube channel, and if anyone’s watching or listening they’re probably getting awfully tired of listening to autoplays of Tim and Eric.”

  “Albert, huh?” Dekka said with a glance at Armo.

  Armo, short for Aristotle Adamo, was very large, very strong, and not terribly bright despite his given name. He was a pathologically oppositional white high school boy who had ended up being thrown together with Dekka. And oddly enough, the partnership between the tough, serious, unshakable African American lesbian and the impulsive, reckless, impossible-to-control straight white guy seemed to work. Neither could have explained why. So long as Dekka was careful to avoid sounding as if she was giving orders and always gave Armo the option of disagreeing, he would mostly end up doing what she needed done.

  And there was value in a crazy person who could become a sort of weird, not-quite-polar bear. His power was little compared to Dekka’s, but in a fight it never hurt to have some batshit berserker on your side. And no one was more berserk than Armo once the fighting started.

  “Who’s Albert?” Armo asked.

  Sam Temple sat opposite them in an IKEA Poäng chair, brown leather and blond wood. “Depends who you ask. Most people in the FAYZ despised him. But they ate because Albert figured out how to feed them.” He shrugged. “The FAYZ revealed unsuspected depths in some. Albert’s what, like, seventeen, eighteen years old now? He’s at very least a millionaire, and if he’s not a billionaire by the time he’s thirty, I’ll be shocked. His company—FAYZco—owns four McDonald’s franchises down in Orange County and one in Oakland. And his second book is number one. Still.”

  “Business Secrets of the FAYZ,” Astrid said with a curled lip.

  It would be wrong, Dekka reflected, to suppose that time had matured Astrid—Astrid had always been an adult. Dekka pictured Astrid at three years old already delivering lectures and secretly imagining herself to be the smartest person in the room. Then again, Dekka admitted, Astrid generally was the smartest person in the room. Once upon a time she’d been known as Astrid the Genius. Of course, Astrid the Ice Queen, Astrid the Bitch, and even less polite sobriquets had also been used at times. And had also been at least partly true.

  Dekka had never much liked Astrid, but Astrid had changed over time, both in the FAYZ and after. On a superficial level she’d grown from quite pretty to stunning. The weight of pain and fear, and a small dose of humility, had added depth to her judgment
al blue eyes. And a diet of something other than rat and cabbage had given her a complexion too perfect to be natural, though Dekka detected no makeup. Astrid was manipulative, controlling, and superior, but also in the end an oddly perfect match for Sam Temple. Dekka was glad Sam had her watching his back—Astrid could be fierce.

  The strength of the bond between them even impressed itself on Armo, who quite enjoyed looking at Astrid. Armo had read a book once—just one—and it had been about the Vikings, who he considered “his people,” his heritage. Give Astrid Ellison a sword and a chain-mail coat, and she would be exactly what Armo imagined a Viking shield maiden would look like. But Armo kept his admiration discreet. Dekka had told Armo about Sam, and while Sam could no longer simply raise his hands and burn a hole through you, there was a gravity to him. Armo might be (by his own cheerful admission) all kinds of difficult and headstrong, and he would never pretend to be the smartest person in any room, but he honored warriors, and, if Dekka was to be believed, Sam Temple was the living, breathing incarnation of a warrior king, some combination of Cnut the Great, Cyclops from the X-Men, and George Washington.

  Dekka saw that Sam had put on weight. Not fat, but thickness in his shoulders and arms. Sam Temple at age fourteen had had terrifying power and staggering responsibility dropped on him. He had made mistakes, he had failed at times, but he had become a great leader, an inspiration. Dekka had become his strong right arm, his soldier, his advisor. Dekka and Sam were connected in ways that only two combat soldiers who’ve shared a foxhole can be.

  For no particular reason, Sam reached across the coffee table and took Dekka’s hand. She squeezed back and held it for a long minute as memories flowed invisibly between them.

  “Sammy,” Dekka said, shaking her head.

  “Dekka,” he said.

  “Bad shit happening, Sam.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? The FAYZ, I mean.”

  Dekka nodded. “The same asteroid or whatever it was, the rock, more of it has come, and more may be coming. I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows—maybe Shade Darby. But the powers . . . that’s all changed. I don’t know if that’s because of the dome, or because Little Pete held the gaiaphage back, but whatever, this stuff is out of control now. The main difference is that you need to physically morph.”

  “Like Orc?” Astrid asked.

  “Maybe. But turned up to eleven. And we can turn it on or off. I can become this . . . this thing. This creature. By choice. When I am the creature, when I am in morph—which is what we’re calling it for some reason—I can make things come apart. Shred things. People, too, if I’m not careful. Armo came by a different path, but he’s one, too, now, a COR, a Child of the Rock. Rockborn or Rockborn 2.0, some people say.” Dekka’s lip curled. She had never been a big fan of social media, and after years of being referred to as “the black lesbian” and much worse, and now frequently identified as “Lesbokitty,” her opinion had not improved. “You and Astrid are being labeled as O-COR—Original Children of the Rock. The Rockborn 2.0 include people like Shade Darby and her friend Cruz. And as you’ve seen on TV, a bunch of, um, unpleasant people.”

  “We saw the video of the Golden Gate and the Port of LA,” Astrid said.

  “And there’s this . . . thing,” Dekka said in a low tone. She tapped the side of her head. “When we change, when we morph, we . . . I was going to say ‘hear’ but we don’t, we just feel or sense or are aware of these . . . well, we’ve been calling them Dark Watchers. I think it’s them. I think it’s the same creatures who fired the damned asteroid toward us.”

  “Dark Watchers?” Astrid said, narrowing her eyes. “Interesting. Probably just a coincidence.”

  Her husband looked at her expectantly.

  “It’s an old California legend,” Astrid said. “The Dark Watchers. I think it started with the Chumash Indians and was picked up by the Spanish, who called them Los Vigilantes Oscuros. Supposedly they are nonhuman creatures who only appear at twilight in the area around Monterey down to, well, down to Perdido Beach. Steinbeck actually referenced them. . . . Anyway,” she concluded, sensing that her lecture was getting a bit lecture-y, “probably coincidence.”

  A long, tense silence fell, broken finally by Armo, who said, “I’m sorry, but do you have anything to eat?”

  Astrid patted Sam on the shoulder and said, “Why don’t you make some sandwiches?”

  Something passed between Sam and Astrid, something tinged with frustration and regret. Sam nodded finally, like a condemned man accepting a judge’s just sentence. He left and Armo went with him, leaving Dekka and Astrid alone.

  Astrid wasted no time. “You are not dragging Sam into this, Dekka.”

  Dekka felt a surge of irritation—a very familiar feeling when she dealt with Astrid.

  “He doesn’t have the power anymore. He’s just a guy, a regular human being.” Astrid stopped herself, seeing Dekka’s raised eyebrow. “Okay, he’s still Sam. But he has no powers. He’ll go with you if you ask him, you know he will. And he’ll die.” Her voice cracked on that last word. “He had his war, Dekka.”

  Dekka heard the echo of her own voice saying just about those same words to Tom Peaks, the man who had run the monstrous HSTF-66 facility called the Ranch before being fired and choosing the path of the rock to become the monster Dragon.

  “I don’t want him to come,” Dekka said. “Not really. I mean, look, does part of me sort of automatically reach for him when the trouble starts? Yeah, Astrid. If I live to be a hundred, whenever the shit hits the fan I’ll still probably be thinking, ‘Get Sam.’ But you’re right. And I know it.”

  Astrid sighed. “So does he. He knows. He’s barely voting age and he feels he’s washed up. He doesn’t know what to do. We have money from the book and the movie, so we’re not struggling, but Sam needs to find a place for himself in the world, and it can’t be with you, Dekka.”

  Irritation drained away. Dekka hung her head and said, “You know, I don’t like you, Astrid, I never have. But you stand by Sam. You love him, and I honor the hell out of that. If I ever meet someone who loves me half as much as you do him, well, that would be pretty great. I will never do anything to hurt Sam.”

  Strange, Dekka thought, two young women who could not be more different, talking about Sam Temple as if he was a fragile child they had to protect. Sam and Armo came back in, laughing at some shared joke, and set sandwiches down. Armo had one halfway down his throat already. Both young men caught the mood, and Sam shot a look at his wife and then at Dekka.

  “Ah. So the decision’s been made,” he said with a mixture of rueful acceptance and frustration. He shrugged. Then he held up the hands that had once had the power to blast a beam of light capable of cutting through steel. Nothing happened. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be of much use.”

  Dekka said, “Right, you’re all done for, useless and pathetic.” She shook her head. “Don’t make me slap the crap out of you, Sam. I am not going to feel sorry for you, and if you feel sorry for yourself, I swear to God I will kick it right out of you.”

  To Dekka’s delight and Astrid’s relief, Sam burst out laughing. “I have missed you, Dekka. You, Edilio, Lana . . . Breeze.”

  Dekka felt the familiar catch in her throat on hearing that last name. Brianna, the Breeze, Dekka’s one-way, unreciprocated, hopeless, doomed, magnificent love. “We kicked more than our share of ass,” Dekka said.

  Sam looked intently at his friend. “You’ve got something else to tell us, Dekka.”

  “He hasn’t gotten any dumber,” Dekka said to Astrid, trying for a light tone.

  “Well, he couldn’t, really,” Astrid said, playing along. It was an old joke between Astrid the Genius and Sam the surfer dude.

  “Spill it,” Sam said, undeterred.

  Dekka folded her hands, twining the fingers. “I don’t think it showed up on the public footage, at least not the stuff I’ve seen.”

  Sam waited, and Astrid, as if sensing the nee
d, stood up.

  “Drake,” Dekka said. “Whip Hand is back.”

  ASO-6

  ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Six was not a large chunk; in fact, by the time fiery reentry had burned off a bit, it would weigh just forty pounds on impact. The impact had been carefully calculated to be in the Atlantic Ocean, four hundred nautical miles west-northwest of São Miguel Island in the Azores.

  But the loose grip of astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper changed that. During a 2008 space walk, astronaut Stefanyshyn-Piper had accidentally let go of a briefcase-sized tool kit.

  Because ASO-6 was smallish, it picked up a bit of a wobble when it smacked into that orbiting space garbage, and went off in a different direction than its original trajectory. It hit water thirty miles off the coast of the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia, just north of the Florida line.

  The water wasn’t deep by Atlantic Ocean standards. The rock would likely be recoverable. But the vessels intended to carry out the recovery were all about two thousand miles from the location, a trip that would take them days to complete.

  In the meantime the Coast Guard cutter Abbie Burgess was dispatched to monitor the scene.

  Fourteen hours later, with the undersea research flotilla steaming toward them, the Abbie Burgess sank, with the loss of twenty-one lives.

  The only radio message to be heard from the Abbie Burgess was, “Oh, God! Oh, G—”

  A Coast Guard helicopter sent to the scene found only a few bits of floating wreckage. And no bodies.

  CHAPTER 4

  And Coming In at Number One . . .

  BRIGADIER GENERAL GWENDOLYN DiMarco did not like the office Tom Peaks had vacated at the Ranch, the secret research and development facility in the hills east of Monterey, California. It was too bland, too office-like, too normal.