Emergence

by Various

  “A what? I’m not a chimeric. I’m just…”

  “You mean you’ve never flown like that before?”

  “Not without an FX guy on a crane, no. Never. You really think I’m a chimeric?”

  “I’m about 98 percent sure you’re not a pigeon.”

  That made Jim smile.

  “I thought Angelus died fighting some supervillain.”

  “When La Luz took my eyes, TCA terminated my contract. It was cheaper than physical therapy. They’d been looking to get rid of me ever since I started the War Gods.”

  TCA. The Chimeric Agency. They were a government program introduced by a left leaning administration three or four years ago. They officially sponsored four-color types like Angelus, put a good face on PwP’s. Now every state had one. Solar-powered Phaethon in sunshine-y Florida, The Brown Thrasher in Atlanta, named for the state bird. California, up until two years ago, had had Angelus, though a lot of the state’s atheists had formally protested the choice. Jim had seen Angelus on t-shirts, his winged halo symbol on ball caps. Now they were vintage artifacts. California’s new star chimeric was a good looking guy called A-Frame with water-based powers and a flying surfboard. Kind of goofy, really.

  But the War Gods. That he’d never heard of.

  “The what?”

  “They started out as a kinda youth ministry for chimerics getting caught up in the gang life down in the barrio. I used my TCA pay, set up a center, found guys like La Luz, and girls too, taught `em a little bit about their culture, got them interested in the greater good. Or tried to. Sometimes you can’t take the barrio out of the man. Now the War Gods are in Quinton and Fulcrum and Cienaga, damn near every prison in California, and moving on down into Mexico. All because of me. Sometimes good intentions go awry.”

  “They killed Barry.”

  “Barry? Friend of yours?”

  “No. No friend of mine.”

  “Why would the War Gods want him dead?”

  “Not the War Gods. A friend of Barry’s must’ve killed him.”

  “Some friend.”

  He told the priest everything. About Barry, about the kids on the show, about the sick joke of the bomb in the crocodile cake. He wasn’t a Catholic, but there he was, giving a kind of confession.

  “Sounds like somebody found out you were gonna drop the dime on Barry, and decided to get rid of everybody. Was anybody not there that usually was?”

  “No. Only Cassidy. She was in the hospital, having her appendix removed. Everybody else…”

  And then it had hit him, that his mother was dead.

  Losing his father had been unreal. One day, he had just left and never come home. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen him. A lopsided grin under his mustache, his own reflection in his father’s aviators as he stood in the open doorway, his rucksack over his shoulder, hair freshly buzzed by his mother in the kitchen the night before, looking more like Goose than Maverick, though he hated when anybody told him that.

  “See you when I see you, Jim. Love you, bud.”

  But his mother. He hadn’t said goodbye. Hadn’t told he loved her. Her life had ended in a flash of fire and she was gone. His life too had ended, in a way. His previous life, the life of childhood was gone forever. He was operating without a safety net now, and there was only death below. For all her irrationality, for all her shrillness, he hadn’t realized how much he had depended on her. He had no arms to fall into now. No heart beside his own to lay his ear to and take comfort from the beating.

  #

  Pan cleared the storm. He glided through the cool mountain air, up to the bright white Hillywood Sign on Mount Grant. So pristine and untouched by the filth of the city below. A big white lie, lording it over a city of lies.

  He perched up on the second L and guzzled down his beer, shivering, watching his breath roil out.

  Father Eladio had taken him in, convinced him it wasn’t safe for him to go back and announce himself. Whoever had blown up the entire cast and crew of Peter `N Wendy would try again if they knew he’d survived.

  He learned that Tink had lived too, and against Father Eladio’s warnings, he’d gone to the hospital, floated outside his room in the burn unit, and watched him struggling to live, a poor stiff mummy suspended in traction, under layers of bandages.

  Jesus, if only he had been smarter. If only he’d taken this whole thing to the police instead of trying to be a hero about it.

  They interviewed a tearful Cassidy, who thanked God she had nearly died from a ruptured appendix which had spared her from fiery death alongside her cast mates. She’d been put under police protection during the investigation.

  Jim Cutlass was declared dead. There wasn’t enough left of the cake delivery boy, an undocumented worker, to identify, so he’d been buried in a grave in Hillywood Forever alongside the twins, Alicia, and Donald Renoir, under a fantastic black marble sculpture paid for by fans, depicting the whole cast as their characters. Jim Cutlass became mentioned in the same breath as Phoenix and Ledger. His face started popping up in those schmaltzy Nighthawks-type portraits, jerking soda for James Dean. Forever Young, said the epitaph, and they played Alphaville at the funeral. Elton Ormond made a rare public appearance to see the boxes lowered into the holes. He recorded a tribute version of Peter `N Wendy’s Theme and donated the proceeds to the families. Perennial Pictures rebuilt the soundstage and renamed it the Lost Boys Stage. MTV set up a suicide hotline for depressed fans.

  It was all too much for Cassidy. She didn’t attend.

  The cops never made any headway. They confined their investigations mostly to the copious fan mail, tracking down the odd hate mail sender and finding mostly sweaty basement dwellers and religious types who had taken offense at the undercurrent of sexuality in a show about teenagers and fairies. For a while they suspected an ex-cast member, one of the Indians who had been written out as Tiger Lillie’s betrothed towards the end of season one, but the guy was a surfing instructor in Honolulu and about as far from belligerent as you could get.

  Then, about three months after the funeral, Peter Hollis died in a car accident, driving his Maserati right off a cliff in Malibar, apparently high as an angel on cocaine. Internet speculators started tying him to the bombing, saying Barry and the studio had refused to renegotiate Cassidy’s contract or let her go from it so she could pursue a movie career and Daddy had gone all Corleone for his little girl. They started saying she had never even had an appendectomy, even when the medical record of the operation somehow wound up online.

  Cassidy was in therapy for years before she made her comeback on Capes.

  So was Jim.

  But his therapy was of a different kind. Father Eladio taught him to use his powers in secret, introduced him to other unregistered chimerics; the kind that could give and take a mega-level beating in a reinforced gym (the one he’d purchased to train the War Gods), who could teach him to really box, not just swing wild. They went into the mountains and practiced flight. He didn’t have the strength of Hero or Pecos, but he learned to take down a tree with his momentum. He tested the upper reaches of his Power.

  It was six years before he was ready.

  He started small, because he didn’t know where else to start. He helped Father Eladio weed out the coyotes who took the money of immigrant mothers and then sold them and their children off once they reached the north. He wore a disguise, and Father Eladio taught him not to be seen by the authorities, but to make an impression on the bad guys. Chimerics that drew attention to themselves didn’t always like what they got. TCA would come to you friendly, sure, with promises of a new life and a cushy government job. But not every chimeric could be an A-Frame or a Phaethon. Some, he said, went straight to the labs to see what made them tick.

  And no one was going to put a kid chimeric on the cover of Time.

  Because ten years later, he was still the same kid Father Eladio had found floating around the bell tower of his church
like a wounded bat.

  “Will I always be like this?”

  “You can’t tell with the Power,” said Father Eladio. “It’s like I told you. When it came to you, when it bloomed in you, it coded itself with what was in your mind. All this Peter Pan stuff. The flight, the speed. And yeah, it looks like youth. Could’ve been worse.”

  “How?”

  “Thank God you weren’t on Yo Gabba Gabba or something. You might’ve wound up a big, orange, warty cyclops.”

  Still, it was hard not to feel pitiful at times. He had looked five years younger at the time of the accident. It was the kind of Johnny Depp boon most actors dreamt of. But now he was five years away from thirty and still looked thirteen.

  Except, Tink had told him, for his eyes. The Power couldn’t stop what was behind them from aging.

  What he’d seen in his four years as Pan had weathered him behind the eyes.

  He had set out to find who had sent the bomb to Perennial, but it was impossible as an outsider to gain access to his old life again.

  He’d seen kids on the streets that suffered the same as the Lost Boys had, and they filled him with rage. The teen runaways leaning into cars under the overpasses and showing their skin out on Hillywood Blvd. The kids doing the unspeakable for a bit of junk to pump into their arms to drive the awareness of their own miserable existences out of mind just long enough to get them to the next hit.

  He did what he could to help them all. He beat abusive Johns to a pulp, until they couldn’t remember their own names let alone the kid in green who had thrashed them. He waded in a greasy garden of neon lit misery, uprooting the weeds he found, and finding little else but more of the same night after night.

  Until he’d found Tink again.

  It had been in the back alley of some Hillywood club. A ratty individual had stumbled from the back door with a loud bang and four leather-clad weightlifter types had followed him out and commenced to stomping him into the pavement.

  Pan had dropped down and flattened them with as many punches, turned, and seen his old friend Nico Tinkham—literally his old friend—wasted and drawn, greasy hair flecked with early gray.

  “What the fuck are you supposed to be?” had been Tink’s greeting.

  He hadn’t been able to stop himself from pulling back his cowl and revealing himself.

  “Tink! It’s me!”

  Tink had fainted dead away.

  Jim found his wallet in his pocket with his address, a shitty studio apartment, overpriced as anything and bare of furniture but for a mattress on the floor.

  He’d sat there with him in the dark, listening to him breathe as he had in the hospital, grimaced at the extent of the scars smudging his face and body, the network of bruises and holes tracing the veins in the pit of his elbows, between his toes.

  He’d turned the TV on, just in time to watch the broadcast of Celebs under the Knife that changed Tink’s life for the better.

  Jim’s life too, for he’d moved in with Tink a few short months after that, getting his meager possessions from the basement of St. Juan Diego’s Church of The Holy Power and moving them to the spare room closet of Tink’s new Mogera Hills townhouse, bought with money from the offers he got shortly after he refused plastic surgery for his face on national television. If anybody ever asked, he was Tink’s nephew visiting. But nobody ever did.

  Hillywood had chewed up Nico Tinkham, and Jim Cutlass too.

  Pan bit back.

  Tink’s Hillywood contacts had led him to the baby napping ring, to Zita and Frank and his two bum killers, and a half dozen other child pornographers, drug dealers, kidnapers and traffickers before that. It was a war, and like any other war, it didn’t really end, except for the casualties.

  So far he had avoided the limelight.

  But how long could he keep it all up?

  He had almost taken Tink up on his offer tonight. That was why he’d fled. Was he ready to delve into that world, just to appease the man pacing like a bull inside this boy’s body? What then, would separate him from the human vermin he’d used his Power against up until now?

  Tink hadn’t meant anything by it, he knew. He was honestly trying to help. He’d existed in a decidedly more carnal world than the sacristy of a Mexican church for the past ten years.

  He thought of Cassidy more often than not these days. She was the last woman he had ever touched, and they’d both been fifteen at the time. Jesus, if she ever saw him, ever found out he was alive, what would that do to her?

  Was the savagery with which he punished the criminals he took down becoming his only pleasure?

  He didn’t like to think about it.

  But he wondered how long he could maintain.

  FIVE

  His Christian name was Billy Lee Birkenstock.

  Blowback was the name he’d given himself.

  They said he was a chimeric, but he thought they were full of shit. These days, you get to be the best at something, all the pussies who couldn’t cut it whisper the word behind their hands and shrug off their own failure. He wasn’t any goddamned chimeric. He didn’t have any freak goddamned gene.

  He’d been a top shot with a rifle since the time he could lift one. His father, an ex-Marine, had taught him during dry spells between binges right off the back porch of their place in Clinton, Kentucky. He’d put a .22 bullet through the eyes of a squirrel in mid leap between two sycamores when he was five years old, at about 150 yards. His daddy had attributed it to his having loaded the rifle with rat-shot. In his way, his old man had been as much of a pussy as the suits who told him he was a chimeric. Booze had softened him, dulled his edge. Nothing like the hard-ass in dress blues in his graduation picture on the wall.

  “Here, boy,” he’d laughed, the beer breath beating down on young Billy Lee, “try that with a man’s rifle.”

  And he’d thrust his M14 into his tiny hands, the magazine heavy enough to break his bare toes if it fell.

  He’d had to prop it on the porch rail, and the recoil had knocked young Billy Lee on his little ass, but he’d blown the torso of a nesting sparrow clean away, and he and his dad had gone over and found the bloody wings and head lying perfectly arranged in the grass.

  His daddy had slapped him upside the head.

  “Don’t do that again.”

  It was all the ‘good job, son’ he’d ever get from his old man.

  The Marines took him from Clinton when he was eighteen, and he earned his MOS 0203 and Scout Sniper School training, which was where the chimeric whispers started, till he shut them up with his fists. He trained with SAS and IDF snipers and no one ever outshot him with a rifle. He had a photographic memory for detail and instant recall. He won every Kim’s Game he ever played.

  Admittedly, with a pistol, he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. But with a rifle, he was as infallible as if he were pointing his own finger.

  Envious shooters weren’t the only ones whispering about him. He got recruited by a black ops arm of the Company out of the Scouts pretty soon after rotating back from the ‘Ghan to Pendleton with 200 kills attributed to him, including a 2,700 yard shot at high wind that had popped the eye out of a Haji pointing an RPG down at a column of pogues and broken Hathcock’s record.

  From there, the real work began. The Company gave him training the DI’s at Pendleton could never imagine. Following his culmination, he was inserted all over the world to assassinate various ‘contrarians’ and ‘enemies with designs retrograde to the desires of the United States.’

  Over his career, he saw the steady proliferation of PwP’s (persons with powers) and naturally found a few of them in his sights, applying the same hand-eye accuracy that had enabled him to blow a sparrow in flight out the air with an M14 when he was five to soaring, speeding, shapeshifting humans. After killing his fourth on the roof of a casino in Mumbai, he was recalled and informed by the higher ups that of the seven field operators of his rank, he was the only one w
ho had managed to eliminate chimeric targets. In fact, he was the only one to have even survived the attempt. Naturally, the Company wanted to find a way to prepare the six incoming replacements for Anti-Chimeric missions.

  Specifically, they gave him free rein to develop a program funded by the Department of Chimeric Defense, which they named Dreamcatcher; an elite, clandestine, Anti-Chimeric wetwork team with emphasis on sniper training.

  Up till then he’d favored a .408 CheyTac Intervention for AC missions, with an Advanced Ballistics Computer package built into a visored helmet of his own design, since he disdained the use of a spotter given the independent nature of his work.

  He opted for one of the new Precision Guided Firearm XS1 systems for his trainees; essentially, wired smart-rifles equipped with the same sort of built-in microprocessors employed in drones and tanks. With the firing solutions being calculated at lightning speed in the scopes, it should have been an idiot-proof system, even for shooters not up to his own exacting standards.

  But after nine months training the so-called best shots in the world, culled from the special forces of ten NATO countries, he still saw them get taken apart one at a time by a rogue speedster in Honduras.

  It turned out smart guns just couldn’t do what he did.

  The Company told him as much. The Dreamcatchers were a failure and they were scrapping the program. Now they wanted whatever was in his blood that made him special. They wanted his chimeric gene to replicate a cadre of super snipers.

  He insisted he wasn’t a chimeric. Hell, he killed chimerics. He had grown to hate the bastards. Flying over all their heads in their four-color costumes, lording it over men like him, men like his daddy had been before the booze, getting all the glory while his father, a decorated veteran, had been shunned for his service, for being ten times the hero any of these costumed jackasses were.

  But the order had been given. Submit to blood testing and experimentation by TCA, father a team of labrats, or get burned.