Villain (Gone 8)

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.

In her rearview mirror, the compound of the Mojave Huns exploded in a ball of orange flame. It was not an unexpected end for the gang—cooking meth required knowledge and discipline if you were to avoid blowing things up. But at this hour? Who would have left a fire burning in the “lab” at this hour?

She pulled off onto the shoulder. Less than a mile, a one-minute drive, separated her from the flaming annihilation of the gang . . . and of her own mother. Francis squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see mental pictures of her mother blown apart, and at the same time desperately fending off a powerful but shameful emotion that swelled within her.

Relief.

She should cry, she thought. But tears did not come, nor did they seem likely to. She had long since given up on fantasies of rescuing her mother. Her mother had ceased to be a mother in any real sense. Francis had been on her own emotionally for years already.

“Bye, Mom,” she whispered. And after some hesitation, added, “Love you.”

I should cry. I should need to cry.

Heart in her throat, shaking with fear and the knowledge that she herself should have died, Francis motored on, passing Russell’s and merging onto the freeway. There was very little traffic and, acutely aware that she had no license, she kept to the speed limit.