Villain_Gone by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant [Grant, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Published: 2018-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Everything’s Coming Up Dekka

FRANCIS SPECTER KNEW nothing of what was happening in Las Vegas when she saw the road sign for Las Vegas, grinned beneath her dark plexiglass visor, and turned her motorcycle north toward the distantly glowing city. She figured the outskirts of Vegas would be a good place to find a motel and spend the night.

It occurred to her that she could easily use her power to enter any room she liked, but the truth was that a simple motel would be more luxury and normalcy than she had known since early childhood. Anyway, she was squeamish about continuing to commit crimes. She had escaped the gang—permanently, judging by the size of the explosion from the Predator’s missile—and she fervently hoped that she had also escaped that whole criminal life of drugs and drunken fights and stealing. She was on a quest for normalcy. She would have gladly traded her Rockborn power for a life as an anonymous high school kid with nothing to worry about but grades.

She had been a long time in the wilderness.

But now as she drew near the city she saw a seemingly endless flow of cars and trucks heading out of town. It was night, and yet it almost looked as if people were fleeing. In fact the traffic soon spilled out of its own lanes and invaded extra lanes so that anyone going toward the city had to thread their way through oncoming cars.

She pulled off the highway to get a bottle of water at a convenience store, but as she was taking off her helmet she saw something even stranger than the mad rush of cars leaving Las Vegas. She saw two motorcycles, driven by what were either two people in amazingly convincing cosplay costumes . . . or were mutants in morph.

She stuck her helmet back on and went in pursuit.

General DiMarco strode stiff-legged through the wreckage of the Ranch. A drained and traumatized Atwell whispered in her ear from time to time, giving an update on what was coming in from the damage assessment team, as well as what was happening in the media, and he reminded her of calls pending from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and more.

Two things were clear to DiMarco. One: The Ranch might be finished, done for, unless something happened to move public opinion sharply against the mutants.

And two: Something like that had just happened in Las Vegas.

“Coverage is forty percent Vegas, sixty percent the Ranch,” Atwell said as DiMarco nodded curt acknowledgment at a bleeding staff doctor being loaded onto a gurney, his body a mass of blood-soaked gauze.

“The full Shade Darby tape is up on YouTube, and the hit counter is going crazy.”

“Show me,” DiMarco said.

The two of them stood in the blood of slaughtered scientists and techs and security men and watched Atwell’s phone.

DiMarco’s eye twitched. Her mouth was a snarl. She watched the brief videos of the cells. Followed by Shade’s opening of same. The speech by Tolliver.

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