Villain (Gone 8)

He was about to shut off his phone when by habit he clicked on the Washington Post and saw the screaming headlines about Las Vegas. And there, in blurry video, his nemesis, his failure: Dekka Talent.

It did not take a man of Peaks’s intellect and education to see that Vegas would be the center of an epic battle. Government versus mutant versus mutant.

With DiMarco humiliated, maybe the Pentagon would see that they’d made a mistake casting Peaks aside. Maybe they’d start to see that he was the only one who could lead the fight against the Dekkas and Shades and Knightmares of the world.

Especially if he turned the tide of battle in favor of the government. But not, he realized, if he was still involved with Drake. People who crucified people in caves were never going to be popular, whereas Dragon . . . well, who didn’t kinda sorta like dragons? And with time he could spin the massacre at the Port of LA as just a case of him trying to stop what’s-his-name, Vincent Vu.

He had a stolen SUV. And he had . . . he checked his wallet . . . twenty-seven dollars, which should buy him enough gas to make the three-and-a-half-hour drive.

Dillon had spent a delirious night in the huge, posh VIP box looking out over the now-empty stadium. He still had his Cheerios, all fully armed, though not at all good at actually shooting, as he had discovered when he had them target shoot in the arena, aiming at basketballs he rolled for them. He’d enjoyed himself to the point of exhaustion, with CNN on in the background, the pictures shifting from dramatic overhead chopper shots to wild-eyed street reporters to surveillance cameras inside casinos to gray-faced, worried “experts.”

Experts, he’d sneered. There was no such thing as an expert in what was happening.

His only regret was that the news cut away to what was apparently video uploaded to YouTube by the Shade Darby person.

He watched that over and over again, fascinated by the horrors that had been created there. Fascinated as well by the slaughter. And strangely a bit jealous of Shade. Media coverage should be totally on him, the Charmer, not divided with the creepy girl with the sleek, Plasticine head and the bug legs.

He slept for a few hours and had himself bathed in the giant whirlpool tub. He tried calling for pizza delivery, but his landline was dead. A cell phone worked, but the phone just rang and rang. No one in Las Vegas was delivering pizza.

He sent two of the Cheerios down to find food in the hot dog and beer stands, but they never came back. He had ordered them to get food and return, so either the orders were too vague, or impossible to carry out, or . . . or someone had taken out two of his Cheerios.

Dekka? The bear? Or was Shade Darby here now?

No need to be afraid, he reassured himself. He had the greatest of all powers. And he had an audience to impress.

“Now what?” he wondered, and went back to the TV, to exhausted-looking news anchors and . . . Breaking News. The news that was breaking involved amateur video of a tank column. An actual army tank column! It was like something out of the Iraq war.

“Wow,” Dillon said. “I stirred something up here, didn’t I?”

One of the cheerleaders, the Asian woman who said her name was Kate, answered. “Yes, you did. A lot of people are going to die.”

He shot her a look and almost ordered her to bite her tongue off. “If I want criticism, I’ll ask for it. So shut up.”

But she wasn’t wrong. The UNLV mob had formed into three subgroups, one very large mob of maybe five thousand, and two smaller groups, all wandering up and down the Strip looking for anyone in uniform.

The Strip itself, and the various walkways between casinos, were all studded with bodies, most dead, some crawling along leaving blood trails on bare concrete.

“Tanks, huh?” Dillon said, then sang a bit of a ditty—“Tanks for the memories”—which earned a nervous smile from Kate and made him like her a little. He was glad he hadn’t made her mutilate herself. “Two goldfish are in a tank. One says to the other, ‘Hey, how do you drive this thing?’” That got an honest titter.

Her laughter warmed him, but he was still worried. He had taken on the cops and won. He’d taken on Dekka and Armo and at least survived. But tanks? Yeah, that was going to be tough.

What he needed, he realized, was to get on nationwide TV, like Saffron had said. Just ten seconds of airtime and he would be able to create millions of obedient slaves.

“No, Dillon,” he said suddenly, snapping his fingers. “I don’t need TV.”

He had a Facebook page with seventy-eight “friends.” That would be a start.

“Hey, Kate. Take my phone. You know how to film video?”

In the bowels of the National Security Agency, the r

eigning world champions at electronic surveillance, now, in the emergency, allowed to spy openly on what they called “US persons,” a computer pinged.

An analyst known as Captain Crunch for the box of sugary cereal he kept close at hand turned in his chair in his cubicle and said to the guy in the next cubicle, “Hey, I’ve got a hit on Subject 19.”

It took twenty minutes of verification and double-checking, by which time half a dozen senior NSA supervisors were huddled around Captain Crunch’s cubicle, and many more eyes watched via computer link.

It took another hour for the news to make its way up the chain of command. And thirty minutes for orders to reach the Creech Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.