Villain. Майкл Грант

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СКАЧАТЬ truth, because all the best comics traded in truth. His suspicion was that the dark and silent audience had something to do with the changes—the morphing, as he had heard it called. So now he tested the hypothesis by de-morphing: by resuming his unimpressive human physique. And sure enough, the invisible audience disappeared.

      “Huh,” Dillon said, which a passing homeless person took as an invitation and held out a dirty styrofoam cup.

      “Sorry, I don’t have any money,” the now-normal-looking Dillon said.

      No money, just power. But Dillon was cynical enough to understand that in much the way that matter and energy are really the same thing, so are money and power. He could make anyone do anything. Anything. Which meant he could have anything he wanted.

      He, Dillon Poe, ignored FAYZ survivor, was quite possibly the most powerful person in the world. In light of that, he asked himself: Now what?

      And the answer was: Whatever you want, Dillon; whatever you want. The only way now was forward.

2

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FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SCREAM ALONE

      “AAAAAHHHH! KILL ME! Kill me, oh, God, please kill me!”

      Once upon a time, Malik Tenerife had argued convincingly that the idea of hell, of a place of eternal torment, was nonsense, an impossibility. Sooner or later even being boiled in a lake of fire would get dull and repetitive. After a year? Ten years? A million years?

      He knew now the flaw in his argument: it only worked if you experienced time.

      Malik did not experience time. Everything was now. Now! NOW! Right now he felt as if he’d been skinned alive and left raw. Right now he felt as if wild beasts had gnawed on him. Right now his brain could barely form a thought before a crashing wave of agony would wipe it away, leaving nothing but screams.

      He’d heard some of what the nurses had had to say since Shade and Cruz had rushed him to the hospital. He was vaguely, distantly aware that the shape-shifting chameleon Cruz, assuming several disguises, had been with him throughout. He knew that she had filled the one request he had managed to form and articulate in a single scrawled word on a pad of paper. The word: “Rock.” But to say that Malik knew or thought was a gross exaggeration—Malik’s memory, his thoughts, his essence as a human being were a bunch of scraps swirling in a tornado. He could glimpse but not hold a thought.

      Cruz had indeed been with Malik throughout. She had the power to appear as any person she could visualize, and had passed as a doctor, a nurse, an orderly. She had stayed by his side as much as possible because, even though she knew it was nothing compared to Malik’s agony, she had her own problems. When in morph, the Dark Watchers were always with her, always insinuating themselves in her mind. Sometimes she just locked herself in the bathroom, returned to her normal, true form, and cried.

      She had given Malik the rock, ground up in a cup of water, and he’d managed to drink it through a straw. And then she had waited.

      At first the third member of their little group, Shade Darby, could come and go, using her super-speed to be effectively invisible, nothing but a blur and a gust of wind. But now Malik’s room was heavily guarded. There were Los Angeles police just outside his door, two SWAT members, all kitted out in black jumpsuits and machine pistols, at each end of the hallway. They knew Malik was with Shade and Cruz. They were looking for Shade and Cruz, unaware that Cruz had been there the whole time.

      Cruz had picked up some useful if depressing facts. She’d become a well-informed amateur on the subject of burns.

      Pop quiz: Do you want second-degree burns or third-degree?

      Tricky answer: It depends which bothers you more, permanent disfigurement or pain. The second-degree burn hurts like hell but will heal. The third-degree burn destroys nerves and may actually deaden sensation, but you’ll be wearing your very own Halloween mask.

       “Pleeeeeaaase! Kill me!”

      Cruz had also learned that there is a such a thing as a fourth-degree burn. That’s when a burn goes all the way through the skin and eats into muscle, fat, tendon, and even bone.

      After giving Malik the rock, Cruz had reopened the morphine line, allowing the soothing drug to flow into Malik’s veins. But she knew now that it was like sprinkling water on a forest fire. There was no drug capable of killing this pain. The doctors were getting ready to put him in a medically induced coma, basically turning off all his brain functions so that, pain-free and unaware, he could glide to his death.

       “Oh, God, make it stop!”

      Cruz rose from the hard, narrow chair and gave the hanging bag a squeeze, pushing morphine more quickly into the catheter in the back of his hand.

      Malik had second-degree burns. And third. And he had fourth degree, and there the scalding pain of second-degree burns became the marrow-deep, consciousness-twisting pain of muscles eaten into like he’d been attacked and half consumed by a tiger. The superheated steam and napalm from the great fire beast—also sometimes known in the media as Napalm or Dragon, and also known as Tom Peaks—had burned through clothing and skin, had snapped and curled the tendons of Malik’s ankles, had melted the muscles of Malik’s calves; it had splashed up and burned away parts of his thighs and buttocks. His lower back was second-degree burns; third-degree burns spread up his back.

      The fire had exposed the tendons of his wrist. Most of his face was untouched, but a burn spread from his neck up the left side of his head, so that his ear had melted and now lay flat, a sort of bas-relief of itself. His face, as well as most of his chest and private bits, was intact aside from spot burns. The unburned bits were like islands floating in a magma sea.

      One thing was clear: no one—not a single nurse, doctor, or specialist—had any doubt that Malik would die, probably within hours.

      So Cruz had made the solution of water and pulverized meteor fragments that carried an engineered alien virus with the power to disassemble and reassemble DNA like a kid playing with Legos. The rock, as it was called, had created the Perdido Beach Anomaly, the place survivors of that impossible dome called the FAYZ.

      The rock had turned Tom Peaks, ruthless government bureaucrat, into a massive, liquid fire–spewing beast; the rock had turned an obnoxious-if-talented young artist named Justin DeVeere into the armored, sword-armed monster called Knightmare; the rock had turned a disturbed young man named Vincent Vu into the vile creature that called itself Abaddon.

      This was also, of course, the rock that had given Shade her power, and Cruz hers. No one could predict what the rock would do to Malik. No one could be certain it would do anything at all. But the alternative was to simply wait for him to die, either screaming in agony or in a coma from which he would never wake. So Cruz had run down to the hospital cafeteria to get a straw so he could drink, and held it to his trembling lips.

      Malik had swallowed all he could. And then he had fallen and fallen and fallen into hell, because taking the rock had meant turning off the morphine drip so that he could swallow without choking, and within seconds, as he felt the gritty water slide down his throat, the pain rose beneath him like a tidal wave, like some terrifying volcanic eruption, an irresistible СКАЧАТЬ