Villain (Gone 8)

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.