Villain (Gone 8)

Drake laughed contemptuously. “The big man who thought he’d make me his sidekick. Your face is known, Peaks. Everyone in the world is gunning for you. I have a place, I have a place where I can hole up, but what hole do you have?”

Peaks stared blearily at Drake. The sadistic psychopath was as angularly handsome as ever, untouched by the passage of time or by the terrible injuries he had sustained. He was cruel and vicious, and Peaks didn’t need Drake’s ten-foot-long python arm to convince him. Nor did you need to have seen coroners’ photos of his victims over the last four years, as Peaks had. You could see it in Drake’s eyes.

Peaks thought, I’m the Dragon, but he’s the monster.

But Peaks knew he needed time to recover. His mind was barely functioning, like a remote control with a nearly dead battery—sometimes the buttons worked, sometimes they didn’t. If he were a normal human being, he’d have self-diagnosed as suffering from depression. So he let Drake take the lead. They stole a car and drove into the desert, back to Joshua Tree National Park, to the emptiness of the Quail Mountain area, where Drake led them up and up, deeper and deeper into dust-dry hills, into wild piles of boulders, through tangled thorn and Velcro-leaved succulents, to a crack that looked too small for a man to push through. But it proved doable, just barely.

It was a cave. Peaks felt the relatively cool air and the scent of musk and mildew and carrion, rotting meat. It was dark as night, and for a moment Peaks wondered whether Drake had led him here as a trick. But the truth was, if Drake had wanted to kill Peaks, he probably could have done so at any time.

Then Drake struck a lighter and held it to a candle. Then a second and a third. The revealed interior was nothing, a thousandth the size of the great cavern at the Ranch. It was a space more vertical than horizontal, narrow at the opening and at the far end, shaped like an envelope that bulges in the middle. The roof of the cave was invisible, a darkness that called to mind tall Gothic cathedrals. The floor was perhaps twenty feet at its widest, four times that deep, with tumbled rocks leading to solid stone at the end. In daytime a faint light might filter in, but it was night when they arrived, and the only source of illumination was the candles.

Peaks wished there were fewer candles, for what they illuminated was a nightmare. Drake had used railroad spikes to crucify three people. Three bodies hung from the stone walls, the fat rusted steel spikes driven through their wrists. They’d had no support for their feet, so they would have hung with all their weight from the bones of their wrists. One was a male in a state of advanced decomposition, stripped naked, flesh little more than beef jerky, face like a drum skin stretched over a scream.

The other two were women, one almost as decomposed as the male. The other was . . . fresher, for lack of a better word. Despite being in a cave in the middle of nowhere, the flies had found her, and maggots grew fat and white in her eye sockets.

“Jesus Christ,” Peaks whispered.

Drake nodded. “Yeah, the Romans had some skills at making death take a long, long time.”

“You murdered them!”

Drake laughed. “Nah, I just nailed them up there. Had a little fun with them, sure, but it’s hunger that killed them. You want to give them water from time to time, otherwise it’s too quick. Thirst will kill you in anywhere from three days to a week. But hunger? Hell, that can take up to four or five weeks. Longer if you give them the occasional bat or coyote turd to eat.”

His cruel lips smiled. “That bitch there, the redhead? She took thirty-four days. Screaming, begging, crying. Like my own personal sound system.”

Peaks felt sick. He had known what Drake was. He had seen pictures of people, mostly women, flayed by the Whip Hand. He’d heard or read all the stories from the FAYZ survivors. He’d even seen the movie based on Ellison’s book. But pictures and stories and movies still did not prepare him for the reality. For one thing, only reality smelled.

What have I gotten myself into?

In his arrogance, Peaks had always imagined using Drake as a convenient tool, as if the sick bastard was a screwdriver he could just pull out as needed. He’d also thought he could use and control Dekka Talent.

Note to self, he thought wryly, don’t assume that young equals weak or compliant.

Still, he reassured himself, Dragon was within him, and if Drake tried anything . . . and yet, for all that, Peaks was scared all the way down to his liver.

“Speaking of starving to death, do you have any food?” Peaks asked, trying to sound unimpressed.

Drake nodded. “A little. I don’t need to eat, but I sometimes like the taste. And Brittany Pig likes to chew on a cracker sometimes. Can’t swallow, of course.” He whipped off his T-shirt, revealing a tight, lean body with six-pack abs and the bulge of a girl’s face rising like a hideous wart on his upper chest.

Long ago Drake had become fused to Brittany. Brittany had once, many years earlier, been one of Sam and Edilio’s “soldiers,” a moral, religious, decent girl who been driven hopelessly mad. The metal wires of her broken braces still protruded from the mouth that liked to chew and then spit out the occasional cracker or cookie.

It was testimony to the horror of the cave, candlelight flickering off bleached bone and tattered skin, that Peaks barely bothered to notice Drake’s . . . companion.

Drake whipped his python arm through the air and snatched a box of Ritz crackers and tossed it to Peaks. “You can have these, but feed one to Brittany Pig.”

And Tom Peaks—once one of the most secretly powerful people in the country—realized he lacked the strength of will to refuse. Gingerly he fed a Ritz to the wire-jutting mouth and watched with morbid fascination as she chewed and let the results dribble down Drake’s belly.

“So now what, mastermind?” Drake asked. “You promised me Astrid. I’ve got room for her on my wall.”

“There’s security on Ellison and Temple, and it’ll be doubled or tripled now,” Peaks said through his cracker crumbs. “But a month from now?” He shrugged. “It’s all coming apart now, Drake. Civilization is cracking and crumbling. Law and order won’t be sustainable.”

Drake tilted his head, genuinely interested. Crumbling civilization sounded like just the thing for him.

“We thought we could contain this, but we can’t,” Peaks said.

Drake’s whip snapped again, and from the darkness emerged a warm can of beer, which Peaks drank gratefully.

“Tell me,” Drake said. “Give me your play-by-play.”