by Various
Pan glanced back. How to stop him? He had to lose him. But he was like an ant fleeing a hungry aardvark. Even if he got down into the structure, Tantrum would just tear everything apart to get to him. They blasted through the left field bullpen overlook bar and the team store in quick succession, leaving a wake of smashed liquor bottles, scattered jerseys, and broken bobbleheads.
Pan dove down into center field and made a beeline for the home team dugout, bursting through the elevator doors, punching through the floor of the lift itself, and down into the clubhouse.
Tantrum dropped down and raced right behind, shrieking the whole way, tearing up chunks of turf.
Pan flew down the corridor past the display case of Gold Glove and MVP awards, and smashed through the media interview room, followed the hallway turns, and burst finally into the clubhouse proper. He slowed only to snatch up a birch Louisville Slugger leaning against a locker and proceed down into the weight room, hearing the muffled scream of Tantrum as he reached the awards corridor and wincing at the smashing glass and shuddering noise of destruction.
The Rogers clubhouse had just been renovated, too.
Pan slipped quickly under the weight room stairs and huddled there as the heavy door blew off above him and crashed down onto the bench presses with a tremendous noise.
Pan held his breath and clamped his hands over his ears as Tantrum came down the stair, his power shriek annihilating the exercise room, smashing brick and sending fifty pound weights scattering like poker chips. The ceiling sagged on the far end and collapsed.
Tantrum ceased his screaming and drifted closer, peering at the destruction he’d wrought, looking confused.
Pan slipped quietly from under the stairs. Another scream from Tantrum and the whole infrastructure might collapse and bury them both.
He decided to take it out to the field once more.
He grabbed the railing, sprang to the top of the stairs, and whistled.
Tantrum spun and opened his mouth to scream.
Pan launched himself back through the ruined passage as fast as he could go.
Tantrum came flying behind, shrieking in rage.
As soon as he reached the broken dugout, he parted his legs and shot upward a few feet.
Tantrum passed underneath him, going too fast to see.
Pan dropped, bringing the bat down as hard as he could on the top of that bulging head.
The Louisville birch elicited a fine ballpark crack as it connected with Tantrum’s corona.
The baby was driven to the ground, bounced once in the air, and Pan brought the bat back over his shoulder and swung for the boards. This time the bat connected with the back of Tantrum’s head and broke into splinters.
Tantrum planted his face in the turf hard and somersaulted end over end. By the time he stopped somersaulting he was at first base, and a naked and ragdoll-limp Lance Lattimer once more.
Dead maybe?
It didn’t matter. He was unconscious. Roger Stadium was a shambles.
Pan hovered over the unconscious chimeric with the broken shard of the bat still in his hand, and alighted on the first baseline, panting.
Jesus, that had been close. He had gotten lucky. His blood was up, and he couldn’t help but smile with boyish excitement. This was big. This was David putting down Goliath. This was Rocky Balboa knocking out Ivan Drago.
Overhead, a wind kicked up and a bright light shone down.
He shaded his eyes against it and looked up at a chopper descending, as a second came in over the stadium and began to circle like a vulture.
He heard a tinny voice over a loudspeaker. Interrogative, declarative, he couldn’t understand it over the beating of the blades and the buzz of the engines.
Something like a staccato of whizzing mosquitos zipped down, and suddenly Lattimer backside was bristling with some kind of big blue feathered tranquilizer darts. Pan jumped back in time to watch four of them plant themselves in the grass right where he’d been a moment before.
That, he understood.
He dropped the broken bat handle beside Lattimer and rose up into the night sky, spinning between the two choppers, breaking the questing searchlight beams. He spied the DCD emblem on one helicopter in passing, but he couldn’t resist cupping his hands to his face and emptying his lungs in a sharp, ear-splitting Peter Pan crow such as he hadn’t done in years.
Then he banked hard, too hard for the DCD chopper to keep up, and flew off for the Hillywood sign as fast as he could. The DCD chopper touched down in the ballpark and two more came buzzing after him.
SEVEN
He had to hide out deep in the hills all night, with helicopters hunting all over the valley, probing the streets and Griffin Park for him like droning wasps.
He didn’t even dare go to Father Eladio. When an unregistered chimeric made an appearance in LF, the police and TCA went first to St. Juan Diego’s and shook him and his parish down.
Sometime around four AM the helicopters went home, and he did too, but he stashed his costume up on the roof of a remote fire watch station overlooking the valley, and swapped it for the bag of clothes he kept there as a contingency.
He flew as far as the first bus stop he could find, then took public transport home to Tink’s.
When he walked in around noon, Tink was sitting on his couch, elbows on his knees, rapt at the television. The air reeked of weed, a smell Jim had always likened to traversing the back roads of his childhood and coming across a skunk mashed flat by a car.
Tink jumped to his feet at his entrance. He was in a ratty bathrobe and Calvin Kleins.
“Fucking hell, mate. You made a splash last night, didn’t you?”
“What are they saying?” he said tiredly, plopping down on the sofa beside Tink, too exhausted to say anything about the weed.
“Aisha Cordell wants your little arse,” he said, picking up the remote and upping the volume. “No surprise there, eh?”
Aisha Cordell was every anti-chimeric’s favorite screaming head. Fifteen years ago she would’ve been another rabid right wing pundit frothing over illegal immigrants, but she had hitched her star to the emerging anti-chimeric wagon and gone as far as she could go. A half dozen ghostwritten books and pseudo-documentaries later she had her own syndicated soapbox on the Vulpes network and appeared regularly at Senate hearings raving for no less than the total extradition of every chimeric undocumented or otherwise into outer space. She was slapping her hand on a desk partly obscured by the scrolling red Vulpes News banner, which read LF MAYOR CALLS DCD NEGLIGENT, DEMANDS FEDERAL RESITUTION FOR CATASTROPHE…GOVERNOR DECLARES NATIONAL DISASTER…COUNTRY UNDER SIEGE and other cheery, related not-so subliminals.
“The chimeric contingency administrations have shown once again that they cannot be trusted to protect this country’s citizens from the growing chimeric threat,” she practically barked at the camera. “Three years ago we thought we’d seen the last of that scumbag murderer Lance Lattimer and all of a sudden Tantrum is massacring a third of LF and decimating a brand new taxpayer-funded Roger Stadium. And who manages to stop him? Not the TCA’s so-called ‘heroes,’” she said, making air quotes with her claw-like fingers. “They were hours north campaigning for TCA’s constituents in the liberal left at some fancy Port Haven soiree. No, instead we get some rogue chimeric they’re not even aware of. No surprise there. And a child, no less, and that is what worries me the most. Are we seeing the first of a new strain of underage genetic freaks? Has TCA begun experimenting on our children now through companies like DNAdvanced in hopes of replacing our military with super soldiers to help consolidate liberal power?”
“Ugh,” said Jim. “Is it all this bad?”
Tink switched channels till he found a recap of the news copter footage, showing flashes of his battle with Tantrum.
“You look pretty good out there,” Tink admitted. “That yell, mate. I didn’t know you could still do it. But you did destroy half of that ballp
ark, and there are a lot of Rogers fans in this town.”
Jim put his head in his hands. The LF Rogers were the least of his worries now.
“…go to GNN correspondent Will Marlowe in the remains of La Futura Chinatown with a pair of witnesses who say they know the identity of the costumed child.”
Jim looked up, his heart in his throat, and saw white-haired, lantern-jawed Cotton Anderson in his trademark grey raincoat holding a mic in front of the two Tong gangsters he’d been roughing up last night when Tantrum had appeared. They both looked the worse for wear, their faces swollen with bruises. The background was crowded with firetrucks and ambulances.
“Pan,” said one with apparent relish. “They call him Pan.”
“Who does?” said Anderson.
“Everybody!” said the other, spitting on the sidewalk. “He fly all over city, beating shit out of innocent people.”
“It looked like he helped a lot of people today. He definitely saved a news crew and some police,” said Anderson.
“Sure sure! Police! And white news lady!”
“Patty Park is Korean, actually,” said Anderson.
The two lowlifes began to scoff and bicker in Cantonese, and waved Anderson off.
Anderson shrugged and turned to the camera, fixing the audience with his Caribbean blue eyes.
“Well, there it is. The boy apparently goes by the name Pan.”
“As in Peter Pan?” asked Van Jerginson in the studio with a disbelieving chuckle. He hummed a few bars of Peter `N Wendy’s Theme.
“Whatever he calls himself,” said Anderson, cutting off his colleague’s antics, “and whoever he really is, Van, I think it’s pretty clear that in preventing Tantrum from moving unchecked through La Futura, he saved a lot of lives last night. Personally I think it’s worth the price of a bunch of pissed-off baseball fans.””
“I don’t think you can say pissed-off, Cotton. Oh, he can…?”
Tink hit mute on the TV and turned to Jim.
“Well, you’ll have the mothers of America behind you anyway, Jim. Maternal instincts aside, they’d all shave their heads if dreamy old Cotton Anderson mentioned he liked the look. And you watch. The teenaged birds will be maxing out their daddies’ credit lines as fast as somebody can screencap and print Pan posters from the news footage.”
Tink trailed off for a bit, glanced at the TV, and cocked his head.
“Don’t,” said Jim.
“You’re a hot commodity again, Jim. Even if nobody knows who you are. Why not make a little dosh on the side?”
“It’d get back to you, and that’d get back to me. The DCD was out all night looking for me.”
“Yeah, and not just the whirly birds,” said Tink. “The paparazzi spotted The Brown Thrasher and A-Frame flying around, too. Looks like the heavy hitters are staying in town to find you.”
“Perfect. What happened to Tantrum?”
“He’s in LF County Jail downtown, pumped full of sedatives. Locals and the Feds are fighting over him. You heard Cordell. Everybody who’s not trying to figure out who you are is demanding a public execution. They’re fast tracking the trial, I guess. Bloody Americans. You okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired,” he said, yawning and standing up. “I’m going to bed.”
“Welcome to the comeback club, Jim,” he said, and his lopsided grin in that burn-scarred face gave Jim an unwelcome chill. Now he knew why Tink was such a draw in the horror movies.
He’d bring up the weed to him tomorrow. Now all he wanted was sleep.
He went upstairs and showered, used up the last of the Band-Aids and gauze. Beyond a few cuts that would heal in a couple days, he was fine. Just fatigued.
He was drifting off to sleep when he heard the front doorbell, threw off his covers, and put his back to the ceiling.
He listened carefully as Tink’s stocking feet padded across the creaking wood floors, the latch and lock rattled, and the door swung open.
There was no sound for a moment. Was Tink expecting someone? His only guests were prostitutes and it seemed unlikely he’d call for one now, given their circumstances. Weed dealer? What was his name? The obnoxious guy always trying to push him to buy something harder. Charles something. But he didn’t show up unannounced either. For a moment his heart sank. Had Tink sold him out? All that talk about making a little money. There was some kind of standing reward for turning in unregistered chimerics to TCA. They’d got the idea from Immigration. Had Tink bit? Was he that hard up? Jim had been living here without chipping in for the rent or food. Tink had assured him it was fine, that he had enough from residuals coming in. But he’d also asked him a few times if in his nocturnal crimebusting he could bring home the occasional briefcase of drug money or something to help out around here. Jim had thought he was joking.
Then came the voice.
Her voice.
A voice he’d know anywhere.
“Hello, Nico.”
“Cassidy?” Tink exclaimed. “Bloody fuckin’ hell…I mean, s’cuse me, but. Oh shit. Come inside, luv, before somebody sees you.”
He heard the rustle of fabric and high heels or boots on the floor, and the door shut.
“It’s good to see you, Nico.”
“Sure. Uh. You caught me…sort of unawares here. The place is a mess. I’m a bloody mess. Let me…just run upstairs and puts some trousers on. Go sit at the island. Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s all you need, eh? Bloody photographers snapping you coming out of this place and me in my knickers,” Tink was chuckling over his shoulder as he came up the stairs.
Down in the kitchen, Cassidy laughed politely.
As soon as he was in the upstairs hall, Tink’s face dropped and he ducked into Jim’s room, looking confused for a minute, till his eyes went up to the ceiling.
“What‘s she doing here?” Jim hissed.
Tink shrugged. He was in the same bathrobe, boxers, and coffee splashed Capes shirt he’d been in yesterday. It actually had Cassidy’s face on it.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jim whispered, shaking his head.
Tink looked down at the shirt and snickered.
“That’s actually pretty funny,” he observed with a smirk.
“Tink! What does she want?”
“Look, I’ll find out. And I’ll get rid of her. Just for crissakes shut your gob and keep out of sight!”
He went to his own room, picked a wadded-up pair of jeans from the laundry pile on the floor, and pulled them on.
He gave Jim an A-OK and went back downstairs.
“Hello, you!” he called. “Well, I just realized you went and caught me lounging in my Capes shirt with your pretty face across it and everything.”
“Oh. Hah,” she said. “Oh my God, I didn’t even notice. That’s so funny.”
“Isn’t it? Well I’ve always been your biggest fan. Sorry about the coffee stain there. Uh, would you like some? Coffee, I mean?””
“No. No thank you.”
“Well. Uh…to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? If you’re feeling me out for a guest appearance, I’m quite sure my agent’s going to say yes.”
Jim hovered down the hall and hung in the stairwell, listening, but also, against his better judgment, trying to catch a glimpse of her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I came here. I haven’t even spoken to you in…well, not since…”
“Yeah, it’s been a while. Not like we’d spoken much before.”
“No. No we didn’t, did we?”
They were quiet for a minute.
The fridge opened and closed, and Jim heard the crack hiss of a soda can. One of Tink’s god-awful cherry Dr. Peppers. They tasted like melted licorice and cough syrup.
“You’re blindsiding me a bit with this, luv. This isn’t part of some twelve-step program, is it?”
“What? No. No. No, this is crazy. It’s crazy. It’s just…you’ve bee
n watching TV? The news? All that stuff with that kid and Tantrum.”
“Pan. Yeah, I saw.”
“I’ve been going over the footage. I mean, I’ve been looking close. The costume, the…”
“Yeah it’s good, isn’t it? I noticed too. Even did Jim’s old shout. I wonder if he’s watching reruns or something. If he is I want my bloody residuals.”
“What?”
“I mean, it’s nice, isn’t it? To think what we done all those years ago with that show. What Jimmy done. That it’s doing some good. I mean, I don’t know about you. Playin’ hero, that’s one thing. But seein’ somebody out there, actually doing it. I mean, I know he’s not in a Slightly costume, but it’s nice to think we inspired this kid. That’s what I’ve been thinking anyway. And it’s like…”
“Almost like,” Cassidy picked up quickly, “Jim is still alive.”
“Yeah. I miss him too. I mean, he was me mate. I dunno what you two had, but…”
“It’s silly,” said Cassidy.
“No, it ain’t.”
“No, I mean. When I saw him on the news last night. I started…oh, this is stupid. I started crying because I thought for a minute……”
She trailed off.
“I’m fucking crazy,” she sighed.
“Nah,” said Tink. “Well, maybe a little bit.”
“Pixie dust,” said Cassidy, and she giggled.
Jim smiled. He used to tell her she was too pretty to cuss. Used to tell her to scrunch up her nose and say ‘pixie dust’ instead. Then she’d tell him to fuck off and he’d laugh.
“Well,” said Tink.
“I’m so sorry I showed up like this. I should’ve called first. I had my agent find your info. Actors and cops, right?”
“Celebrities, anyway. Just tell him not to lose it. I’m serious about the gig. If you have any openings, that is. Be great to bring the old gang back together, even you know, if it is just the two of us now.”
“Oh my God, of course, Nico.”
Keys jangled. A chair groaned on the floor. She was getting up to leave.
“Or maybe you could get Elton Ormond to autograph my Chiller album.”
“I could…he comes around the set a lot…”