Villain (Gone 8)

They motored on toward the flashing lights, keeping to the speed limit, and were soon slowed further by traffic bunching up. They threaded their motorcycles through stopped cars and then they heard a collective oh, my God! from a hundred mouths at once, a crowd that stared upward, with hands over mouths in expressions of fear.

Dekka and Armo followed the stares and the pointed fingers and saw what appeared to be a uniformed police officer standing way up high, up on the edge of the Venetian’s version of St. Mark’s tower. The tower stood nearly five hundred feet tall.

The policeman stood there for a moment and then . . .

Screams!

The drop seemed to take forever. The man fell, feet down, hands by his side, like he was jumping into a swimming pool feet first.

He fell and fell and struck a decorative concrete railing. There was a sickeningly loud sound, a spray of blood, and the body blessedly fell out of view.

Dekka, appalled, looked at Armo. His face was stone. He said, “Yeah,” which was all Dekka needed to ride her bike up onto the crowded sidewalk, stick the key in her pocket, and begin to morph.

CHAPTER 11

It’s Only Pain

“JEEZ, SHADE, THAT car must be worth a fortune!” Cruz said.

“Well, if we’re riding into battle we should ride comfortably,” Shade said.

Palm Springs was not far away, and Palm Springs had more than its share of fast cars. The trouble had been finding something fast that would carry the three of them—Shade passed up a number of two-seater Lamborghinis and Ferraris—but that wasn’t too much trouble, and Shade had rolled up in a Bentley convertible that was rated at two hundred miles an hour. With Shade driving while in morph, the Bentley could outrun anything the California Highway Patrol had on the road. Though not everything they had in the air, which was one advantage to a convertible: you could see a helicopter overhead.

And the Bentley was very comfortable. Leather as soft as a baby’s cheek. It was a 425-mile drive—seven hours according to Google Maps. But Google Maps assumed you were sticking somewhere close to the speed limit.

Unfortunately, the reality of driving two hundred miles an hour for two-plus hours was that the wind utterly defeated the car’s clever wind-reducing technology and left Cruz in the front and Malik in the back crouching down low to avoid flapping cheeks and stinging hair.

The CHP picked them up as they passed through Bakersfield, but their cruisers couldn’t keep up. So siren-wailing CHP would pick them up briefly on the 5, fall behind, and be replaced by hastily assembled roadblocks, which the Bentley would easily evade by driving onto the dividing strip. A hundred miles north of Bakersfield, the CHP helicopters were on them, but on the long, straight stretches of the world’s most boring freeway, even they could barely keep pace.

They turned onto the 198, cutting toward Monterey. This was a two-lane road that wound through dry hills populated only by wind turbines and the occasional cow. Here there were no roadblocks, but as they veered wildly onto the 101 North they encountered the first of the news helicopters coming from Bay Area TV stations.

“Hey!” Cruz yelled against the hurricane. “We’ve become a high-speed chase.” She turned her phone so Shade could see. Sure enough, CNN was cutting between various news choppers and regular folks standing outside Burger Kings or whatever repeating that, yep, they had seen a car go by at NASCAR speeds.

“Like a bat outta hell!”

“Like they was running from the devil himself!”

The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, Shade Darby en route to . . . ?

They had become a classic California obsession: the televised high-speed chase. The whole state was watching, which was perfect from Shade’s point of view. The more public the better.

The problem was that she had never spent this long in morph, and while she was in that unnatural state the Dark Watchers were present and impossible to dismiss. At first it was the usual sense of being probed, touched, violated by insinuating dark tendrils that somehow passed through time and space to dig through her mind like bargain hunters digging through a yard sale mystery box. Like they were looking for something and not quite sure what. But as minutes stretched to an hour and more, it was less a feeling of being rudely probed and more a sense of losing herself, as if she, too, was a bystander commenting on herself.

She glanced in the rearview mirror at Malik. How many hours had he spent now in the company of those malicious intelligences? Was he still fighting? Could he possibly be? How strong was he?

How long would Malik hold on to his sanity? And what would he do if he lost it?

In that case God help us all.

She felt herself being smothered—by the Dark Watchers, by guilt, by crippling self-doubt that nagged at her, ridiculed her, mocked her pretense of resistance and her no-doubt-futile plan.

In the end . . .

“No,” she said aloud, though it was barely a chirp to Cruz or Malik, prisoners as they were of real time. She de-morphed while still driving, slowing to a manageable eighty miles an hour while she was doing so. Breathed hard as she clutched the wheel.

“What are you doing?” Cruz asked sharply, looking back at distant flashing lights now closing the distance.

Shade said, “I just needed a break.”