the puke. In fact, could not stop. He tried to speak but only incomprehensible grunts emerged—it’s hard to talk with a mouth full of another person’s vomit.
The other thug snarled at Dillon. “What did you do to him, freak?”
“I am really not in the mood to be picked on,” Dillon said. His voice, too, was subtly different now. His normal voice was a bit too high-pitched to ever be authoritative, and he had a slight lisp on “s” sounds. But this voice? This voice was like a musical instrument in the hands of a master. This voice persuaded, cajoled, and seduced.
The man frowned and stopped, then shook his head in confusion before finding his anger again. “I don’t give a damn what you’re up for, freak!”
Dillon turned to this fellow, younger than Spence, with a tweaker’s emaciated body and rotting teeth. He would have tolerated any number of insults, but that particular one, “freak,” was something he’d heard too many times in his young life, both at school and at home.
Freak for having no friends.
Freak for his physical awkwardness.
Freak for the way he looked at girls who would have nothing to do with him.
Freak for being the only one of five siblings who rejected walks and hikes and camping and biking and all the other physically tiring wastes of time his family loved.
Freak for sitting in his room for days on end watching stand-up comics like Maron, Frankie Boyle, Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, and the few surviving videos of the godfather of stand-up, Richard Pryor.
And of course, freak for being a survivor of what people called the Perdido Beach Anomaly, but which Dillon, like all the survivors, called the FAYZ.
“Dude,” Dillon said, “don’t ever call me a freak again.”
“Okay,” the tweaker said.
“Say that you promise?”
The tweaker frowned and grimaced, but said, “I promise.”
And Dillon almost stopped there. Almost. But Dillon’s life was filled with times when he almost did the sensible thing or the smart thing or the right thing. A whole lot of almosts, and an equal number of “what the hells.” Of the two, “what the hell” was always funnier.
The truth was he was rather enjoying the fear in the eyes all around him. Fear and confusion and mystification, expressed in frowns and mutterings and the sorts of threats not meant to be heard by the person being threatened—coward’s threats.
Yeah, Dillon thought, you losers should fear me. Every breath you take is because I allow it. A nasty smirk formed on his lips.
“I’m not sure I trust you,” Dillon said. “Let’s make sure, huh? Let’s make sure you never call me or anyone else names again. Bite your tongue in half.”
A spasm went through the room. They leaned forward, disbelieving but enthralled. After all, a tough guy was licking the floor, like a dog determined to get every last chunk of Iams.
“You can’t make me . . . uchhh ggghrr can’t ma . . .” the tweaker said.
“Sorry, having a hard time understanding you,” Dillon said savagely.
The tweaker concentrated hard; you could see it on his face. He was trying to fight, but putting far more energy into obeying. His jaw muscles clenched until the veins in his neck stood out. Blood dribbled from his mouth.
“Jesus Christ!” someone yelled. Then, “Guards! Guards!”
“Grind your teeth back and forth and bite down hard,” Dillon said. The sound of dull teeth grinding on gristle was sickening, and Dillon might have relented had he not caught sight of the swastika tattoo on the tweaker’s arm.
No pity for Nazi tweakers.
“Hey, can you say sieg heil ?” Dillon asked.
Blood now gushed from the man’s mouth. Tears streamed from his eyes and mucus from his nose. His eyes were trapped, desperate, terrified.
“Come on, mister tough guy, gimme a sieg heil.”
“Ssnk thth stnch ccchuch . . .”
More prisoners were shouting, agitated, some wide-eyed and fascinated, others appalled, even sickened. And Dillon was sickened in a way that had nothing to do with his hangover. There was something electric about the feeling, but in both senses of the word. The power was shocking, and it shocked him in return. It seemed impossible, just absolutely, batshit impossible, and yet he could hear teeth on gristle. . . . Life shouldn’t be like that, he told himself. That could not be it. Could it?
“Guards! Guards!” The cries went up with mounting hysteria, and men banged on the bars, all of which was fine with Dillon. He wanted guards to come, because he was more than ready to leave.
A portly guard came sauntering along, her face a mask of weary indifference. Then she took a look through the barred door and immediately keyed her radio. “Backup to the tank! Hats and bats! We have a situation!”
“Open the gate, guard,” Dillon said in his calm, mellifluous voice.
The guard fumbled for keys, found the right one, and turned the lock just as two other guards came rushing down the corridor, helmets on heads, truncheons and Tasers in hand.
“Open all the gates, all the doors. Do it now,” Dillon said, and heard the clanks and the buzzes, all the noises of unlocking doors. He stood in the open doorway and glanced at the denizens of the tank, shrinking back from him.
It was a strange moment, and Dillon recognized that it was the end of one life and the start of another. It was as if some giant, animated meat cleaver—shades of Terry Gilliam—had come down out of the sky and announced with an authoritative thunk! that life was now divided into “before the drunk tank” and “after the drunk tank.”
The only way now was forward.
That could be a tagline. I could build a bit around that.
He had only realized he had this power two days ago. He’d tried it out—gently—on one of his brothers. Then on his father, a bit less gently, but all the while in ways that revealed nothing and raised no suspicions. He had intended to approach the matter after thinking it through, deciding on just how to use the power, if at all. His first thought had been to use it to get stage time at the LA Comedy Club, which despite the name was here in Vegas, and not just on an open-mike night. But that seemed a bit small for such a huge power.
There was not much point in having power if you didn’t use it, and no point in using it if it didn’t give you an edge. Right? That was the point of life, after all, wasn’t it? To do the best you could for yourself, and perhaps for those loyal to you? And to deal with doubters and haters and enemies?
But then he’d been dumped by his girlfriend, Kalisha, which was not a heartbreak—he could barely tolerate her; the girl’s sense of humor went no further than slapstick—but it was a humiliation. They’d only been going out for two weeks, and she was his first girlfriend. In the context of the senior class at Palo Verde High School, he would be reduced once again to the status of total loser. The unloved freak.
Dillon didn’t do well with humiliation; he found it intolerable, in fact, as he had found it intolerable in the FAYZ. There, he had been just another thirteen-year-old kid without powers. He’d been forced to work in the fields, braving the carnivorous worms they called zekes, picking cabbages for hours in the broiling sun, at least if he wanted to eat. The kids with powers—Sam Temple and his group, Caine Soren and his—had never treated Dillon as anything more than a nuisance, another mouth to be fed, another random, powerless nobody to be ordered around by Albert and Edilio and Dekka, the big shots. Another nobody who might be crippled or killed if he happened to get between Sam and Caine in the ongoing factional