by Various
“Don’t blaspheme, Pecos, por favor. It’ll turn the old ladies against you.””
“Hey, kid!” Pecos called over the chatter of his fans.
Jim crossed the street and headed for the alley between a bodega and a currency exchange, where the people inside were peering out the windows at the commotion, a couple of the flannel and wife beater cholos sitting on the curb in front of the grocery standing up and coming over.
“They want you to come inside, Pecos. They want you to say the novena with them.” He apparently repeated himself in Spanish as an interrogative to the gathering crowd, and they issued an affirmative in unison.
Jim spared a look just before he disappeared down the alley, and a smirk he wished Father Eladio could see.
Pecos was swamped by his admirers. He kept glancing after Jim as he was swept in the tide up the church steps.
But something made Jim frown. He was talking into a cellphone between dumb smiles and accommodating nods at the people around him.
Jim heard car tires squeal and saw a shiny black SUV come around the corner, the engine roaring.
As the headlights flashed across him, he broke into a run.
Midway down the alley a second vehicle skidded to a stop at the end of the alley, tipping over a pair of trash bins.
The passenger and rear doors opened and two men in stereotypical black suits popped out, brandishing bulky, quite original-looking weapons.
They fired simultaneously, and Jim leapt into the air.
Something stung him in the right ankle and a metal net went skidding across the alley pavement, sparking with blue lightning as it went.
He rocketed skyward as the TCA agents or whoever they were cursed below him.
When he was a block away, he slowed long enough to inspect his ankle. There was a dart like he’d seen them porcupine Tantrum with at the stadium. It was sticking in his sneaker, the tip just poking through his sock and hiding in his flesh. He batted it out, but saw a wound. How potent were the drugs they used? Was he just imagining nausea?
He tore his belt from his pants and cinched it tight around his right thigh just above the knee.
He tore through the air, the wind rushing in his ears. His vision began to swim somewhere over Hillywood and Vane, and he had to skim the rooftops, using the garish lights below to navigate.
He heard helicopters. Were they for him? He didn’t know. He couldn’t keep flying around like this, or he’d be photographed, identified. Then what?
He tumbled into a sloppy landing on the roof of the Pantazis Theater. Whatever TCA used, it was working on him. Maybe slower than it should, but it was doing him in. He felt drowsy, drunk.
He heard sirens. Just the usual Hillywood nonsense? Fight in line at a club? Guy in a Hero costume punching out a Japanese tourist down in front of the Mandarin Theatre for not tipping?
He saw a police chopper bank in his direction a few miles out and decided to play it safe and drop down into the alley. He landed a little harder than he’d intended and crashed down on a dumpster, fell hard on his rear end.
He sat there for a minute, panting, watching the chopper light.
He dug out his phone and fumbled with the touchscreen. Everything was blurring.
The chopper was loud, getting louder.
He couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, just shouted in the mic, or thought he did. He couldn’t be sure if his words were clear.
He tried to tell Tink to pick him up. Tried to tell him he was behind the Pantazis in the alley.
The garbage began to blow in little tornadoes all over the alley, and he winced against the tempest of napkins and newspapers, slipped into the stage exit doorway as the alley flooded with light.
It hurt his eyes and he closed them. His eyelids were like heavy shutter doors slamming down, and when he found he couldn’t lift them, he settled into a cramped, cold heaviness, and the whir of the chopper blades overhead faded away.
Jim fully expected to wake up strapped to a cold steel slab miles underground, surrounded by glaring lights and white coats.
The silk sheets took him completely by surprise, as did the ocean view. He recognized the Malibar coastline, having been here to bust up the baby-napping thing only a few weeks ago.
The room was dim from the half-drawn vertical blinds, and the sun was slipping down toward the waves, illuminating the foam and making the beach glow orange like Tang. Dusk. How long had he been out?
There was a balcony just off the bedroom, and but for his jacket, hat, and shoes, he was still dressed.
The TCA tranks had left him groggy. His head felt four pounds heavier, and when he tried to slip out of bed and crouch in the shadows on the floor to get his bearings, it was more like his bearings got him, and he flopped down hard on the wood floor, whapping his nose so that his eyes stung and his ears rang and his upper lip ran with hot liquid copper.
The room filled with light, and he instinctively leapt up and back, into the corner of the room, his back against the ceiling.
He blinked away the light and glanced toward the glass door of the balcony.
“Wait!”
Her voice.
Jesus.
He covered his bleeding nose with the back of his hand, splayed his fingers like a kid at a horror movie, not wanting to see the woman in the doorway, but desperate to look.
Cassidy Hollis stood there in jeans and a black sweater, her face lined with the tracks of tears.
“Oh my God,” she whispered into her own hands, and sat down heavily on the stool at the mirrored dressing table next to the door. “It is you. Jim.”
He saw his reflection. A fifteen year-old kid who looked thirteen, skinny, in dirty jeans sagging around his narrow waist, and a baggy t-shirt. A boy in stained socks, clinging to the ceiling of a woman’s bedroom, blood dripping down on the floor from between his upraised fingers.
He had only been able to glimpse her at Tink’s. The Cassidy he had known was in there. This was the girl grown. But she was different than she looked on television. They had covered her little flaws. When she cried on the show, there were no blemishes. She was like an alabaster statue, befitting a warrior queen. Here, her face was flushed, the hairs springing out of place, like they used to when they’d ridden their bikes together. The freckles. She hadn’t outgrown them. He’d wondered where they’d gone, watching her on TV. Of course they’d just covered them up. Hillywood covers up everything.
She totally destroyed him. She was painful to look at, like a first crush glimpsed with her children in adulthood, he imagined. But this was worse.
“Ah, fuck,” he whimpered. “Fuck!”
He sprang for the glass door.
“Pixie dust,” she said quickly.
He had his hand on the sliding door. He didn’t tear it aside and leap out over the balcony, but he didn’t turn around either. He couldn’t look at her.
He heard her weight on the floorboards, saw the ghost of her reflection growing in the glass and shut his eyes.
“You didn’t mean to call me,” she said.
“No.”
He must have dialed her in his delirium. He was used to there being only two numbers in his contacts. The tranks had muddied his brain. He hadn’t been thinking. And the chopper over the alley, he hadn’t been able to hear her voice message.
“What happened?”
“TCA agents tried to grab me. I got shot full of some kind of tranquilizer. How long have I been out?”
“A day. I didn’t think you’d be here when I got back. I thought I’d imagined you.”
Jesus. A whole day? He had thought he was out only a couple hours. TCA didn’t mess around.
“How did you get my number?” she asked. “How did you know how to contact me?”
He took the crumpled card from his back pocket and dropped it on the floor.
“Nico,” she said. “You’ve kept in touch with him, but not me?””
He didn’t say anything, though he felt his ears grow red and hot, the color spreading across the back of his neck.
“That day. The day of the bomb. Something happened to you. I’ve read…about chimerics. Or…PwP’s. Talked to some. From TCA. You know, consultants for the show. Sometimes, something terrible has to happen for them to get their powers.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
He opened his eyes, and saw her reaching one hand out to him.
“Don’t.”
“Why?” she said, though the hand hovered. “Jim…””
“Just don’t.”
The hand faded away from the image in the glass.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
To protect you, he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her how he’d become Pan to find out who’d sent them that bomb, who’d killed their friends. He wanted to say it had all been to keep her safe.
But he didn’t say that. All of that. Pan. The green suit. Flying around, beating up bad guys. Despite all he’d seen and done, to say it, sounded childish.
“Look at me, Cass. You know why.”
“You don’t have to be…ashamed.”
Was he ashamed? Was that what it was?
“The way you’re talking to me. Like I’m a kid. I’m not a kid, Cass.””
But he hated the sound of that, too. Hated the sound of his own voice. It sounded exactly like something a kid would say.
“I know…I…”
“Do you know what it’s like?” he hissed. “To see you? To think about what we had, and know…it can’t ever be that way again?”
Goddamn, he sounded like a love-struck middle-schooler living out his vampire fantasy scenario. He wanted to turn around. Wanted to tell her all these things. Wanted what? To kiss her? His face flushed. He’d damn near have to stand on his toes. Would she laugh at him? God, he was terrified that she would.
“That was a long time ago, Jim,” she said slowly. “We were both kids.”
He bit down hard.
“Yeah. Except now, only I am.”
He flung open the door so hard the glass cracked. He stepped out onto the balcony.
Damn!
Could nothing go right? Everything he did and said made him feel like an idiot.
“Wait, Jim!” she called from the room. “I’m trying to understand……”
The sea smell, the cool wind of the oncoming evening. He stepped onto the railing.
“Sorry about the door,” he mumbled lamely.
He jumped and took off over the roof.
He didn’t feel like crowing, so he screamed until he thought his voice would crack.
But of course it never did.
TEN
The front doors of the LF Municipal Courthouse opened and Lance Lattimer’s defense attorneys were assailed by the waiting mob of reporters who thrust microphones in their directions and shouted questions, and angry, sign -wielding protesters shrieking for their client’s blood.
These were not Blowback’s targets.
He was suited up in a wide open empty office space on the thirtieth floor of a high rise facing the back of the courthouse, which his employer had rented for him.
Away from the tumult of the press, four SWAT officers wheeled the nearly-comatose Lance Lattimer out of the prisoner dock into a waiting MRUV flanked by two police motorcycles and two squad cars. It was one of those re-purposed military MRAPs, spray painted black and tagged LFPD, specifically, a Cat II 18-ton BAE Caiman 6x6 Multi-Terrain Vehicle.
As the gate opened and the cruisers turned onto Knoll Street, Blowback dipped the barrel of his rifle ever so slightly downward through the neat hole cut in the glass, and sighted the two motorcycle cops.
The one on the right raised his gloved hand to the gate operator in the booth.
Begin part two.
Blowback killed the operator as he lifted a hand in answer, then took out the two bike cops.
The MTV was already turning the corner, the squads raising their sirens. If they had heard the reports, they took no notice.
Blowback pulled his rifle back inside and walked casually along the side of the building, past the empty cubicles as he had done every day for the past week, timing the progression of Lattimer’s entourage.
By the time he reached the southeast corner of the building and slid his rifle through the hole cut in that window, the cruisers had turned the corner ahead of the MTV, making their way towards the tall county jail three blocks over.
There were two policemen in each cruiser and their windshields were like movie screens. In four seconds they were slumped in their seats behind white webs of shattered glass, and the patrol cars drifted together, then rolled to a stop.
The MTV came next.
This next trick had required some planning. Blowback ejected his magazine and rammed home a fresh one of FMJ rounds.
As the MTV operator noticed his entourage’s condition, he did what Blowback had expected him to do. The driver and passenger shutters slammed down and the big engine gunned.
The MTV barreled forward, smashing its two dead escorts aside and rolling for home, the cop driver trusting that Tensylon composite armor to protect them from the rifle shots that had taken out their comrades.
Blowback didn’t aim at the vehicle.
Instead, he smashed the window, stood in the whipping wind, and aimed for a spot his employer had told him about in the intersection just ahead, marked with an innocuous blot of orange spray paint, such as a road crew or city surveyor might leave to mark his work. He didn’t sight it. The high winds would make a liar out of anybody’s scope. He just took his time, checked his own instincts against the wind velocity calculators in his helmet, and squeezed.
As the nose of the MRAP got within a few feet of the spot, the supersonic missile of copper broke the pavement and set off the subterranean IED he had been assured was there.
About eight-hundred pounds of TNT exploded under the vehicle, collapsing the street under its prodigious weight, and flinging the unwieldy MTV on its side. He’d learned that one in the Helmland province.
Blowback shouldered the rifle, cinched it tight, flipped the trigger finger back on his heavy gloves and kicked the coil of nylon rope into space. He checked his carabiners and chest rig and leaned over the edge so that he was facing straight down.
Then he began to run, left arm extended, playing the rope in a rapid Aussie descent that took him all the way to the ground in seconds.
Boots on the pavement, he hastily disconnected his device from the harness at his back and unslung his rifle, stalking straight toward the upended MTV and checking about warily for tangos.
He had thirty seconds. He could already hear the inbound choppers. He doubted anybody in the MTV was dead. That armor was hellishly effective. But they were tumbled dry.
He clambered up onto the MTV and slapped a shaped charge from his thigh pocket onto the hatch and laid his rifle on the hull.
The heavy door blew open and he leapt inside with his Ka-bar. The interior lights were fucked, but in his helmet he could see clear as day, and he dispatched the four SWAT inside and moved onto Lattimer.
The prisoner looked like a whacked out Hannibal Lecter, mummified in restraints, head lolling from the IVs, which had been thrown about the cabin.
Blowback ripped them free of his arms and pulled out the special cocktail his employer had provided. He had no idea what was inside, just what it was meant to do; counteract the crap that was keeping Tantrum in check.
He stabbed Lattimer in the neck and jammed the plunger down.
The misty eyes cleared like fog being blown from a lake.
Still he blinked tiredly.
Blowback slapped him three times, gripping his jaw on the last rebound, hard, and saw the blood run over the web of his thumb and forefinger.
“Wakey, wakey,” he said, and watched the man’s face flush red.
Time to go.
>
He turned and climbed out of the MTV.
There was a chopper circling his position.
He swept up his rifle and dropped the pilot in the cockpit, putting the bird into a violent spin that sent the police sniper inside it tumbling. His scream ended when he burst on the street a few feet away.
While the co-pilot wrestled to keep the chopper in the air, Blowback slipped into the crater the explosives had made, and dropped into the sewer tunnel beneath.
He headed east, towards the drainage ditch where a motorbike waited.
End part two.
#
Nico stared at the cocaine on the kitchen island.
Was he really going to do this?
A little taste of A-level success and he was back to his old tricks?
Where the hell was Jimmy anyway, to stop him?
Damn Jimmy.
But it wasn’t his fault, was it? That was more of old Nico’s thinking. Everything that happened to him, everything he did to himself, was somebody else’s fault. The bleary, half-remembered nights of vomit and blowjobs, where sometimes he was the recipient and sometimes the giver of both, the nightmarish pulse of those shitty nightclubs and the bastards in their high-end cars with the high-end girls looking fearfully at his face, some of them even crying at the sight of him.
Where did it all come from? Not from him burying his nose in this little pile of blessed forgetfulness. No, couldn’t be that. Had to be Barry.
Barry the bogeyman. Barry with that disgusting crease of flesh between his shorn pelvis and Roman lord’s belly, imprinted with the band of his underwear like some faded fresco, stroking his hair but pressing his head forward. Down.
Barry and his friends, each a carnival show horror unveiled, a terror to him and the other children, some of them laughing as the other kids cried, drowning out their wails of horror and abject misery with their own moans of pleasure, filling scenes better left dark with stark camera flashes to preserve the moments on their incriminating hard drives at home, to entice other creeping ‘friends” from their various infernal circles to join Barry’s parties.
But they weren’t really Barry’s parties, were they? He knew that.
Barry was the lapdog, the sniveling Smee to Hook, that foul master-pervert who ruled alone like a masked and decadent Bligh from the theater-sticky quarterdeck of his own personal mockup Jolly Roger, the boards stained by every conceivable bodily fluid, but most especially children’s tears.