by Various
He took the burn.
But it had opened his eyes.
The government wasn’t out to control the chimeric threat, they wanted to play with it. They wanted to replace the common soldier with super soldiers, put the old guard out to pasture.
Fuck that.
That was why he called himself Blowback.
They had trained him. They had made him. Now, they had to deal with the consequences. They had already covered up his work twice. He had killed six of their TCA brand-name superheroes. Picked off four of their squeaky clean trainees right in the yard of one of their secret facilities outside Dayton, Ohio four years ago, and put a window in the skull of a chimeric codenamed Ursus during his publicity photoshoot after his official induction in front of the Montana state capitol building in Helena. He’d blown that Injun’s brains all over their famous flower arrangement out front.
They’d covered those up, but they knew damned well who’d done it.
Now he took assignments all over the world for whoever could meet his price, always making time for AC jobs.
Blowback was the name he’d given himself.
The biggest joke of all was that he still used the high tech gear he’d personally requisitioned from the DCD. The XS-1 smart gun system, his low-light optical HUD targeting helmet, the little EMP pulse generator to evade detection following a hit, the ten-thousand-dollar-a-shot radium bullets he used to neutralize PwP’s. They’d wanted a super sniper, so he gave them one to fear. Even painted up his outfit in black and green so they could put him on a t-shirt if they wanted.
So far, nobody had.
This job was different from the rest. He’d been put on retainer, something he almost never did. The money was too good to pass up, though. It was a three-part job and part one was just about to step off the six ‘o clock Coastal Shooting Star at La Futura’s Federal Station, right at the cusp of rush hour.
He had a good position in the old La Futura Mission steeple three blocks over, with a good view of the train station entrance.
He had whiled the time sighting-down panhandlers and the infrequent customers of the old Mexican lady on the corner with the shopping cart full of handmade tamales, but now it was game time. The taxis had lined up along the outer drive and the commuters and travelers were spilling out.
In the corner of the head-up display in his helmet, the image of his target sat grinning stupidly as the facial recognition software kicked in and began rapidly locking in on the people coming out, flashing red as each negative match registered. He didn’t need it, but he’d fed the tango’s face into the software anyway when he’d been given the photo in a sealed manila envelope in his drop box.
As he had suspected he would, he made the guy seconds before the reticule around him turned green.
He hadn’t been given a name, just a face.
And there he was, milling uncertainly among the purposeful crowd. He had a stocking cap and a backpack slung over his shoulder, and a day’s growth of drab brown whiskers. He looked like one of those outdoors types.
Blowback adjusted his aim, ignoring the scrolling wind direction feed, and sighted on instinct.
This was a special job. No kill. Just take him in the arm, or the knee, his employer had specified. An odd request. And an addendum. After he falls, don’t be there to see him stand up again.
The guy was probably a chimeric. Why his client wanted the guy wounded instead of killed was anybody’s guess. Why he wanted him taken out publicly in front of the train station instead of on some lonely street, Blowback didn’t know. For what he was making off this shot, Blowback didn’t much care.
The last thing he did was put his finger on the trigger.
Well, the second to the last thing.
Begin part one.
The suppressed report was little more than an exhalation and a metallic clink on his end. The sonic boom of the bullet couldn’t entirely be masked as it traveled three blocks and ended its journey in the target’s right upper arm, hitting him so hard he spun around, spattering the people all around him in blood as he wavered and fell to the pavement.
Blowback was already erasing the target data in his helmet, already breaking down his rifle. He kept an eye on the guy.
People were screaming. A kindhearted porter was creeping on his belly towards the man bleeding on the sidewalk, turning all around. He knew there had been a shot and was looking for the shooter.
Good luck, pal. I’ll be gone in the next thirty seconds, well before the cops from Bulwark Division arrive.
The target was probably in shock. He wasn’t moving. Hopefully he didn’t have some sensitive condition the client hadn’t warned him about. If he died from trauma, well, that wasn’t Blowback’s problem. He hoped he wouldn’t have to argue payment.
Then something weird happened, and despite his better judgment and the client’s warning, he zoomed in on the prone figure for a moment.
The tango appeared to be convulsing.
The porter had reached him, laid hands on him to drag him to cover maybe, but he recoiled at the sight of the guy’s face.
Blowback brought it in to full magnification. The tango’s face was contorted in pain (or was it rage?), and his eyes were shining red.
More, he appeared to be shrinking, his hands withdrawing into his sleeves, shoes tumbling off his diminishing feet as they retreated up his pant legs.
Blowback had seen enough. He knew what was about to happen now, and had to shake his head at his anonymous client’s audacity. He might kill more people in the next five minutes than Al Qaeda had done in their whole career. Funny to think a wing shot would precipitate such an enormous death toll.
He retreated down the ladder as the high-pitched scream started. In ten minutes he’d be watching it all unfold on the evening news from a comfortable condo overlooking the traffic of Olympiad Avenue he’d been provided.
Maybe he’d order some entertainment.
End part one.
SIX
“For those just tuning in, the death toll in the rampage across southern La Futura now stands confirmed at ninety-five,” the anchorman said, shuffling papers and pressing his index finger to his ear. “Reports say it began when an unidentified man collapsed in front of Federal Station thirty minutes ago. We now know this man to be the Alpha-level chimeric Lance Lattimer, a former Wall Street futures trader better known by his psychotic and violent alter-ego, Tantrum, which manifested during Lattimer’s attempted suicide leap from the roof of the New York Stock Exchange three years ago. During that initial outbreak, Tantrum left over two hundred New Yorkers dead by his psychokinetic powers. Our correspondent Patty Park is live from the scene in Chinatown this evening. Patty?”
Patty Park crouched behind a police barricade of scurrying SWAT, strands of her black hair strewn across her face, the light from her cameraman making her dark eyes shine like those of a terrified animal facing down a roaring Peterbilt.
“Mitch, historic Coronel Street Market was destroyed in the first few moments of Tantrum’s attack. We don’t know how many people lie buried in the rubble at this point. He’s moving up Hill Street in the direction of Roger Stadium. We’re right in his path. The police are attempting to rally with two armored cars from the Bulwark Division Station.”
“Patty, what about superhuman response?” Mitch asked.
An explosion caused Patty and the police in the background to duck down instinctively, and a fine white powdery mist descended on them, dusting them like a layer of sugar.
“Still no word from TCA hero A-Frame. He departed the charity ball he was attending up north in Port Haven with The Brown Thrasher and Pecos as soon as word reached them, but it could be up to an hour before they arrive and…”
“What about the LFPD’s new P.O.N.E. unit?”
“Word is they’re stuck in traffic on the southbound 504. You know, none of them are fliers, so…”
Two ugly, dark armored vehicles with
mounted battering rams rumbled past the camera and Patty spun, gesturing frantically for the camera to follow their progress as the cops cheered them on.
“Get this! Get this!” she shouted.
The camera swung to track them as they tore down the deserted street. Hill Avenue cut through Chinatown and was part of the annual Chinese New Year parade route; everybody was used to seeing it littered with those paper cap wrappers and the remnants of streamers and red firecracker bricks, not rubble. The numerous businesses, eateries, warehouses, and junk shops selling battery-powered waving cats, cheap Japanese swords, and lacquered chopsticks to the undiscerning tourists south of University Street had simply ceased to exist. It looked like Hiroshima. Broken glass littered the streets, and here and there red, vaguely human-shaped splotches that were all that remained of the people who had run screaming from the leveled buildings blossomed on the pavement like Banksy-style street art. The block was flattened. Water from orphaned pipes spewed into the air, and plumes of black smoke spread across the dark sky.
In the center of it, advancing up the street, floating lazily ten feet in the air and slowly turning, was Tantrum. Bright, devil red, a huge, distended cranium filigreed with thick pulsing veins like a Telosian on Star Trek. Besides the huge bald head, he looked exactly like a weirdly floating buck naked infant, an evil version of the benevolent Star Child of Arthur C. Clarke’s, constantly wailing, screaming, a high, inhuman shriek.
And wherever that scream was directed, the masonry of buildings scattered, and flesh and muscle flew from the bones of unfortunate bystanders, until their skeletons collapsed and blew away to powder and ash.
Case in point, the two armored cars barreling at full speed towards the frightful enfant terrible.
The noise of the engines, or maybe the flash of their headlights, caught Tantrum’s attention. He looked at them and screamed, little dimpled fists trembling before his downturned, scowling face.
The pulse of psychic energy that emanated from that tremendous brain was visible as a heatwave distortion. As soon as the bar of the energy tide struck the two vehicles, the armor shed from them like sheep’s wool before the shears. The chassis and engine exposed, the bolts fastening them together hung suspended in the air for a moment before the whole affair clattered to pieces. It happened too quickly for the crews inside to scream. Their deaths were instantaneous, but terrible, and even the practiced hand of the cameraman flinched from the sight and returned to record Patty Park’s horrified reaction as a second fine mist rained down on her and the cops around her. This one dotted her skin and raincoat scarlet.
She wheeled aghast at the camera, tears mixing with the blood running down her cheeks.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
The camera cut back to Mitch Brenner manicured and coiffed safely in the studio, hand to his mouth in mock concern.
“Patty. Are you all right?” he asked stupidly.
“What’s that?”
The feed cut instantly back to blood-soaked Patty as she pushed the camera physically back toward the hellish Tantrum.
“Shoot, Bobby! Shoot!” she urged.
A figure descended quickly out of the sky. Small. Slight. No more than a child, really. The police spotlights caught the green of his strange costume. He was dressed like a masked Christmas elf, with a belted green leather tunic and gauntlets, some kind of green bodysuit, and a peaked, Robin Hood-style cowl. His appearance would’ve been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so unexpected.
“Hey, kid!” the newcomer shouted in a shrill pre-teen’s voice, as he stomped a heavy manhole cover with one foot, sending it spinning in the air. He caught it one hand and cocked it back like a Frisbee.
Tantrum revolved in place to face him, turning his destructive power from the barricade and from Patty Park and her crew.
The kid in green sent the manhole spinning. It collided with Tantrum’s forehead and the killer infant went flying head over heels, smashing through the front window of a Chinese restaurant.
“Get the hell out of here!” the kid yelled directly at the cops as the camera zoomed in tight on his beardless face, on the blue eyes flashing through the holes of his pointed cowl.
On his couch, in his home in Mogera Hills, Nico Tinkham sat bolt upright, knocking over his bowl of Cheetos and splashing Coke across his hardwood floor.
“Holy shit!”
Pan was in over his head.
This was comic book stuff. TCA, Alpha level, honest-to-God-saving-the-world-superhero stuff. He’d only ever fought one other chimeric, and the guy had been nowhere near this level of power.
He had been in Chinatown shaking down a couple of benevolent Tong guys from Frank’s Rolodex about a sex slavery operation somewhere down on Chung King Street when he’d heard the sirens and that awful wail. He had deliberated about what to do for a moment. How many had died while he’d pondered whether or not to respond? How many had died while he’d waited, hoping the P.O.N.E. squad or Hero or some other high-power chimeric would show up to take out Tantrum?
Supervillains weren’t Pan’s specialty.
Everybody knew about Tantrum. He was unchecked Id. Father Eladio believed a person’s Power was shaped by their mental state. Take an entitled, hedonistic, Harvard educated, ex-wolf of Wall Street power broker looking down an insider trading rap and a messy divorce with no pre-nup while on a raging overdose of cocaine, have him smash the window of his office and take a suicide dive. Tantrum was what had floated to the street. Pure fury and rage, given the caveman club of off-the-charts psychokinetic power to smash everything and anything he saw.
Tantrum maintained an instinctive shield of invisible willpower wherever his attention was directed. Bullets melted when they touched that shield. Even warheads pancaked. The only way to stop Tantrum was to get him to calm down. Put him to sleep. Knock him out. Nobody had been able to kill him yet, apparently. After his New York City rampage, everybody had assumed the DCD had executed him, or at least forced him into a coma until they figured out a way to nullify his powers. But apparently none of that had been true because here he was, on the other side of the country, doing more of the same three years later.
The only way to attack was with distraction. Then, while the distraction died screaming, you hit him from behind. But like all chimerics, he was tough. It took a lot to rock that big brain inside that reinforced skull.
The bricks of the Chinese restaurant separated from the mortar and each other and just crumbled around Tantrum.
At least the cops and the camera crew were running for it, as he’d ordered, although the latter was lingering.
Pan had never been seen publicly. Never been on the news. Might never be again if he kept thinking about it.
That devil baby came flying out at him, screaming, face a mask of rage, little pudgy fingers clawing at the air to get at him.
He dropped into the open manhole, into the sewer.
He stopped inches from the foul river beneath and flew down the dark tunnel toward a flicker of light he knew was sifting down from the manhole in the next intersection north, away from the police.
A red light shone in the tunnel behind him as he pulled up into a swift vertical ascent. He had seconds before Tantrum ripped apart the pipe.
He put his fists up and burst out of the sewer and didn’t look down until he was about sixty feet in the air.
Down below, the street crackled and burst like turf over a gopher’s passage.
He looked about. Where to take him? Away from Chinatown, if any of it was to remain standing. He saw the lights of Roger Stadium on the hill, the empty parking lot. It was the offseason. Nobody there.
The muffled scream rang out anew as the boiling mad baby rose from the ruined sewer, the broken concrete and steel tumbling away all around him.
“Up here, laughing boy!” Pan called down, shouting through his spread hands to be heard.
Tantrum glared up at him, eyes burning, face contorting.
What was Tantrum’s range? He didn’t know. He weaved and rolled as Father Eladio had told him, but mostly he just put his hands at his sides like a ski jumper and rocketed ahead, feeling the heat of Tantrum’s powers like a faint tickling of his heels that made the hairs on his body rise.
A rifle shot cracked out in the night. Pan glanced back to see Tantrum turn from his pursuit and direct his shriek against a low-flying police chopper with a ballsy sniper leaning out the door.
The sniper managed to leap from the helicopter as it crumpled like a can and tumbled from the sky.
Pan dove and caught the cop by his TAC vest in a blink and flung him through the lit window of an upper floor apartment, not stopping to see if he or the surprised occupants were okay.
A nearby Vulpes News chopper had drawn Tantrum’s attention.
Pan pulled up. He could see the pilot frantically gesturing to the man beside him in the bubble cockpit as he veered off.
Tantrum floated towards them.
Pan drew his knife and flung it.
It should have pierced the red infant’s bulbous temple. Instead the silvery blade splashed against his unseen thought shield like some kind of night-blooming flower and spattered the ground as liquid steel, molten hot. Tantrum turned towards him once more and Pan led him off toward the stadium.
He was faster, but only a little. He gained all the lead he could, then dove down to the baseball diamond, landing hard on the pitcher’s mound.
He looked up and saw Tantrum clear the rim of the arena and come screaming down at him.
Pan jumped forward and flew straight into the stands, ducking and cutting hard to the right past the upper deck concessions.
Tantrum lashed out, carving a deep furrow in the Bermuda grass, then blowing rows of seats apart in either direction in his fury.
He followed Pan’s flight path and the two superhumans orbited the concourse, Tantrum decimating everything in his path.