Villain (Gone 8)

The only time the Schizos—his name for his usual voices—receded was when he turned into the creature, into Abaddon. Then he faced new voices, different voices that spoke not in words but in urges, and those voices, the Dark Watchers, reduced the Schizos to a background murmur.

He rose from the couch in the house he’d taken by killing the previous inhabitants. (Reason #4 for leaving

: The bodies were starting to stink.) He found a handgun in the nightstand of the master bedroom, and car keys in the dead wife’s purse. He had never driven a car before—he was too young—but he’d seen it done plenty of times. And he knew how to enter a destination in the GPS.

L-A-S V-E-G-A-S.

Anyway, it looked like the cops had bigger problems than arresting underage drivers. As he drove down surface streets through the greater Los Angeles metro, he saw the signs of destruction and decay, not from what he’d done down at the port, not from any freak. This was looting and vandalism, burned-out cars, shop windows covered with plywood, uncollected trash bags burst open, glass on the street, fire hydrants open and gushing water. Streetlights flashed on their emergency settings. Cars and trucks passed by, loaded with household goods. Refugees. Going where? he wondered.

A billboard for an upcoming movie had been spray-painted over with just one word in dripping red paint: REPENT. A graffito on a real estate office wall used blue paint to say, KAM, the abbreviation for KILL ALL MUTANTS. There were swastikas and obscenities, hatred of this or that group.

Few people walked the streets, mostly just homeless folks pushing Ralphs grocery shopping carts loaded with the typical rags and cans, but topped now with pilfered TVs and computers and fur coats. The few others out in public walked in pairs or small groups with at least one gun prominently displayed.

The world was a gingerbread house, and it was being eaten away, bite by bite.

I came as Abaddon the Destroyer, Vincent thought. Gaze upon my work and bow down before me!

But he did not yell this from the windows. This was not the time or place. That would come.

Justin DeVeere, aka Knightmare, had escaped the Ranch and kept moving as fast as he could, tumbling down hillsides, scraping against tree trunks, stumbling over fallen branches.

It was a simple, straightforward, run-for-your-life moment. For approximately a millisecond he had considered helping the uprising, using his power to help wipe out the Ranch. . . .

But he got past that very, very quickly.

Being Justin, he accompanied his gasping panic with a self-justifying narrative. “Not my problem . . . outta there! Screw all of them . . . not standing around trying to be Captain Courageous . . . every man for himself . . . situation like this . . . one of the most important young artists . . . any kind of artist, to hell with young . . . not cannon fodder, I’m Justin DeVeere!”

Of course, he was Justin DeVeere with a control chip in the back of his neck, right where a tap on an app could send waves of pain through him. Yeah, that was an issue. If DiMarco survived—and somehow he expected that, like a cockroach, she would survive—she could still activate the chip any time she wanted.

Well, depending on what kind of transmitter she had. Did it work from satellites? That would be bad.

Suddenly he burst from the woods onto a nicely paved two-lane road.

“No!” he cried. He had been running in what he hoped was a straight line, but it was apparently just an arc, because he was back at the main road, but still not at the front gate.

His sense of direction was poor, but he was in luck, because coming from the Ranch was a flatbed truck, followed by an assortment of official vehicles and private cars. It was like something out of a Mad Max movie. It was monsters on parade.

The flatbed truck pulled to a stop, and Justin gaped at the cyborg monster occupying most of the cargo area.

And gaped harder when the creature swiveled a hideously deadly-looking chain gun toward him.

“You staff or prisoner?” the cyborg demanded.

“Me? I’m . . . I’m like you,” Justin stammered. “I mean, not a cyborg, but a rock guy. You know, Rockborn. A mutant.”

“Yeah, you’re too young to be staff.” This judgment was rendered by the human eyes behind a tank-like slit. “I’m Master Sergeant Matthew Tolliver. You coming with us?”

“Where are you going?” Justin asked.

“Las Vegas.”

Justin could have asked why. He should have asked why. But at the moment he had an invitation to Vegas from a terrifying cyborg with machine guns and rockets.

So, Vegas. Yeah, that would be perfect. He would be able to disappear into a crowd of tourists. And if he couldn’t parlay his good looks and artsy bullshit into finding a sugar momma in Vegas, well . . .

“Vegas it is,” Justin said.

“Vegas and Valhalla!” Tolliver said grimly. “Semper Fi!”