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21: WITH GREAT POWER COMES PURE MALICE

       22: WORLD WAR VEGAS

       23: ROUGH BEASTS, NO BETHLEHEM

       24: WE ARE THE CHIMPIONS

       ASO-6

       25: RANDOM CHANCE

       26: THE HERO THING

       27: DRAGON AND GASOLINE

       28: A BONFIRE OF INNOCENTS

       29: ONE LESS HOTEL

       30: THE SPEECH

       31: AFTERMATH

       ASO-6

       ASO-7

       Acknowledgments

       Back series promotional page

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IT RHYMES WITH VILLAIN

      “HEY, FREAK? WHAT are you looking at?”

      The drunk tank, the catch-all common room used as a first stop for drunks and druggies, was a large space lined with a wall-mounted steel bench. The floor was bare cement, sloped down to a drain in the center of the room. There was a single window with both bars and thick wire over filthy glass, allowing neither sunlight nor cheer, but a grim, gray reminder that there was an outside world.

      The walls of the drunk tank were painted a sickly yellow, the color of baby puke, which went perfectly with the reek of vomit.

      There were maybe fifteen adult men in the room, and the barely eighteen-year-old Dillon Poe, and Dillon felt very, very bad. Bad to a degree he had never felt before.

       Is this what a hangover is? Oh, my God!

      Dillon being Dillon, part of his mind was already looking for the potential humor in the situation. And it wasn’t hard to find. He’d gotten very drunk the night before, after walking into a bar and asking for whiskey like some cowboy in an old movie. Having no choice or will of his own at that moment, the bartender had poured, and Dillon had gagged down the first fiery shot, then another, and . . . and the next thing he knew was right now, waking up with throbbing eyes and aching head and a mouth that tasted like he’d spent the night eating roadkill.

      No, not roadkill, that was generic. It was funnier to be specific. Like a dead beaver? Like a dead opossum? Rats were overdone. Like a dead raccoon?

      Yeah, dead raccoon. His mouth tasted like he’d spent the night chewing on dead raccoon.

      It was an absurd situation: an eighteen-year-old walks into a bar. Like the start of a joke where a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar . . . And, yeah, he admitted wearily, his brain was not quite up for writing jokes.

      “I’m nah lookin’ chew,” Dillon managed to say to the belligerent man, a sandpaper tongue thick in a cotton mouth. Dillon sat up, rubbed sleep from his eyes, and instantly vomited on the concrete.

      “Hey, asshole!” This from the same man who’d challenged him. He was a big, very hairy white man, though it was hard to comment on his complexion given that he was almost entirely covered in tattoos. Including the tattooed tear at the corner of one eye that testified to a murder committed. Chest hair that included some gray sprigs spouted from a lurid chest tattoo of an American flag where the stars had been replaced by swastikas. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

      Dillon stood up, wobbly, weak, and deeply unhappy.

      “Nasty little punk, stinking up the place!” Tattoo said.

      This, Dillon thought, was really not fair: the place already reeked of puke and piss and worse. There was a man passed out facedown on the bench, a brown stain in his trousers.

      Tattoo swaggered over, grabbed Dillon’s T-shirt, and kicked him in the knee. Dillon dropped to the floor, landing painfully on the concrete. “Clean that up, boy!”

      What? What? How had this happened? How was he here, on his knees? Part of him counseled quiet submission: the man was bigger and had friends. But part of him, despite the alcohol-fueled misery in his brain, simply could not shut up.

      “Can I use that mop on your head?”

      First rule of stand-up comedy: never let a heckler get the upper hand.

      Tattoo, whose limp salt-and-pepper hair did, arguably, resemble a mop, gaped in astonishment. Then he grinned, showing a row of overly bright, cheap false teeth. “Well, I guess I get to hand out my first ass-kicking of the day!”

      Dillon closed his eyes and focused and almost immediately the brutal hangover faded, and subtle but utterly impossible changes began to transform Dillon’s body and face. He said, “Ass-kicking, or ass-kissing?”

      This earned him a hard kick meant for his stomach, but which deflected off his arm, knocking his hand into his own puddle of puke. Bad. But on the other hand, his hangover pain was fast receding.

      A relief, but not the point, really. The point was that Dillon Poe was changing. Physically. The change was subtle at first and mostly visible in his eyes, which had shifted from brown to a sort of tarnished gold color. His pupils narrowed and formed vertical, thin, elongated diamond-shaped slits. His hair seemed to suck into his head, which now bulged at the back and tapered to a version of his own face rendered in the green of a new spring leaf.

      Dillon knew about the physical change, or at least thought he did. He’d caught a terrifying glimpse of himself in a barroom mirror, seeing a reptilian version of his face visible past the bottles of booze.

      But he had also begun to guess that there was something about this snakelike version of himself that caused more fascination than revulsion. If anything, the few people whose reactions he’d been able to gauge seemed to find him attractive, even mesmerizing. They stared, but not in horror. Even his fellow denizens of the drunk tank did not recoil in fear or disgust, but turned fascinated, enthralled faces to him.

      Dillon was not in a happy or generous frame of mind. He had clearly screwed up the night before, outing himself as a mutant. And now he was in a cage with men, every single one of whom looked meaner and bigger and tougher than he—well, aside from the weeping tourist in the chinos and canary-yellow polo shirt. But it didn’t matter, because Dillon Poe—this hypnotic, serpentine version of Dillon Poe—was more than capable of dealing with Tattoo.

      Dillon looked up from the floor at the man and said, “You clean it up, tough guy. In fact, lick it up. Start with my hand.”

      Without hesitation Tattoo stuck out his tongue and began licking Dillon’s scaly green hand, as avidly as a dog welcoming his master. It was fascinating watching Tattoo’s rheumy eyes, the expression of brute incomprehension, the alarm, the anger, the . . . impotence. The panic he was helpless to express.

      “Now lick up that mess on the floor,” Dillon said. Instantly Tattoo dropped to his hands and knees. He said, “I don’t want to do this!” but without hesitation lowered his head, his long, grizzled hair trailing in the mess, and began lapping it up like a dog going after a dropped table scrap.

      The entire room stood or sat frozen in stark disbelief. It was like they were an oil painting, all open mouths and wide eyes and expressions of disbelief. One man moaned, “Is this a hallucination? Is this real? Am I really seeing this?”

      Dillon stood—his morph came with a lithely muscular body several inches taller than his own, an athlete’s body—facing Tattoo’s two buddies, who advanced, belligerent but nervous.

      One

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