by Various
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got the Bird monitoring the news for certain keywords. Hold on a second.”
He touched his wrist with his fingers, and something boomed loudly overhead and descended rapidly towards them from out of the cloud layer.
The Brown Bird. The Thrasher’s signature personal craft. Some kind of sleek, vaguely bird-shaped, high-tech two-man stealth wing.
It came to hover over the transmitter, and the Thrasher leapt nimbly onto the tower and climbed rapidly up.
Jim had heard a rumor that the Thrasher wasn’t even a real chimeric, that all his vaunted power was in the presentation. Amonson Spinks was Fortune 500. A self-made millionaire whose wealth came from success in establishing a wildly popular personal computer store chain that had started in the south and spread all the way to the West Coast. When TCA had recruited the mysterious Brown Thrasher, and he had revealed his own identity, some said it had more to do with his finances than any real power he had.
Father Eladio had set him straight.
“Don’t believe it, kid. Spinks ain’t just some wannabe in a suit. He’s got Power, alright. Perception. If you gain his attention, he can figure out what you had for breakfast just by looking at you. He’s probably smarter than anybody on TCA’s payroll. And something else. Once he’s on you, he doesn’t stop. Ever.”
Jim ascended along the tower and reached the side of the Brown Bird just as the Thrasher slid into the cockpit, hands racing over the controls.
“This began broadcasting forty-five seconds ago. DVR caught it from the beginning.”
A monitor swiveled out of some side compartment and the logo in the bottom right corner showed Vulpes News, but it was no anchorman.
It was Tink.
He looked more like hell than usual. He had sustained a beating. One eye was swollen shut and his lips were mashed and bleeding. The camera was tight on his face, and there was a fist entwined in his hair, holding his head up.
“Orale!” said a familiar voice.
The camera zoomed out, and there was Bombero, squatting next to Tink, who appeared to be tied to some kind of support column with telephone wire.
Bombero was shirtless, his Aztec tattoos sliding over his muscled torso. In his free hand he held a flickering open flame that was casting his downturned face in orange.
“The War Gods control Vulpes Plaza and every fool up in here,” said Bombero. “Show `em.”
The camera panned left in a nausea-inducing blur, and there was the Vulpes News studio. The desk was smashed and the body of some techie, dead or unconscious, lay in the rubble. Aisha Cordell was curled up against the backdrop on the floor, mascara running down her face.
The camera swung back to Bombero.
“Yeah! We got that puta Cordell too, we got us some Vulpes employees, and a whole lotta kids. That’s right, Pan. You heard it. Nice setup Vulpes got here. On sight employee daycare. Oh yeah, Pan, I’m talkin’ straight to you, you little bitch. Time to pay the piper. You come here. You come alone. Through the front door. No flyin’ up the side of the building or I make both sides of this ugly cabron’s face match, you dig? We got some surprises in store for your little ass. And hey, to all the other Halloween costume wearin’ maricons, you best just go down and help them TCA bitches with Tantrum, ‘cause this ain’t about you. If we see any of y’all runnin’ up on us, we just gonna start pitchin’ fools out the windows. You understand? Startin’ with Cordell. War Gods, bitches! Come on, Pan. We waitin’.”
The feed went dead.
Jim breathed.
“That was Nicholas Tinkham, your old co-star from Peter `N Wendy,” said the Thrasher.
Jim looked at the Thrasher.
“Facial recognition software again?”
He shrugged.
“I was a fan.”
“He was at the hospital, too, that night,” said Jim. “Bombero saw him. He must have grabbed him out of his house. I just came from there. There were fire marks all over the kitchen.””
“There’s no way in hell I’m buying Bombero and his little ratchet homies are behind this,” said the Thrasher.
“Who else could it be?”
“I don’t know. This is all too ambitious for the War Gods. La Luz, the smartest of them, is still in the pen up north serving a life sentence for what he did to Angelus.”
“Well, I’m going. Don’t try to stop me.”
“I won’t,” said the Thrasher. “The instructions are pretty clear. Somebody went to a lot of trouble tonight to make sure you’d be at Vulpes Plaza without any backup. I’ll do what I can from out here.”
“Wait. Cassidy,” said Jim. “If they found Tink, they could find her.”
“I’ll make sure she’s all right,” said the Thrasher. He held out his hand.
Jim clasped it.
The Thrasher swiftly slapped something around his wrist that clinked together. At first he thought the Thrasher had betrayed him, fooled him into TCA custody. But it was just a metal wristlet similar to the one he himself wore.
“Birdcall. I can monitor you with it. We can communicate. I’ll be your eyes. You’d better get going.”
The canopy of the Brown Bird closed. Jimmy didn’t stop to watch it bank away. He headed for Millenium City and Vulpes Plaza.
TWELVE
The Ever Ready movies that had transitioned Bryce Wallace from prime time sitcom schlub to full-on action hero had also made a landmark of Vulpes Plaza, the headquarters for Vulpes Network, billionaire Rudolph Napier’s global media juggernaut.
An imposing postmodern high rise of glass and red granite, it had been destroyed over and over again in miniature in dozens of movies since, perhaps as some universal catharsis shared by frustrated liberal-minded screenwriters everywhere. Thirty-five stories of high-powered office space, it included a pricey restaurant, a gymnasium and spa, a daycare, and a multi-million dollar lobby of polished marble and steel.
Now it stood lit up like a fairy tale fortress amid the skyline of Millennium City, the wide grassy park on which it stood cordoned off by a minimal police presence of a few lonesome squad cars and a single hook-and-ladder fire truck, as most of the emergency response force of the city was elsewhere trying to contain Tantrum. A few dozen people milled about behind the barricade, shouting at the police, crying. Why hadn’t they been evacuated with the rest of the building employees?
Parents.
A couple of spotlight trucks commandeered from nearby movie premieres had been brought in and directed up at the skyscraper, and one ambulance and a Vulpes News camera truck were at hand. In the distance, explosions and flashes of light popped in the sky like an innocuous fireworks display as human and chimeric alike fought against Tantrum.
Pan did as he’d been instructed. He landed in front of the barricade and walked across the lawn toward the front entrance.
One of the cops hollered through a bullhorn: “Pan! This is the La Futura Police! Stop and turn around with your hands up! Return to the barricade! You’re under arrest!”
“You’d better see me after, chief!” Pan called back over his shoulder, neither slowing nor looking.
“Let him go, Jesus Christ!” A man in the crowd hollered. “At least he’s doing something!” He half expected a bean bag projectile in the back, or a blast of a firehose, but no one moved to stop him.
He passed a bank of patio tables outside the ground floor restaurant, the umbrellas folded up like rows of slumbering plant buds waiting to open at the return of the day. The semicircular glass awning before the door had a jagged hole in it, and beneath, a body lay face down in a pile of broken glass and a pool of dark blood.
Pan stopped beside the body. There was a headset around the man’s head. Some hapless line producer probably flung out of the broadcast studio window by Bombero or one of the War Gods.
One dead. How many more bodies inside?
The glass front doors were shattered and broken, and
stepping through them, he saw the circular steel security bay and two more men in navy blue Vulpes blazers strewn over the white countertop. A walkie-talkie lay where it had fallen out of one’s hand. Both men were soaking wet, as if they’d been submerged.
He crouched beside one of the men and lifted his head, flinching as water spilled from his mouth onto the marble floor.
“Careful,” the Thrasher’s familiar voice broke the stillness, making Pan jump.
“Dammit,” he whispered. “You scared the crap out of me. Do you have Cassidy?”
“Keep your eyes open. I’ve got thermal imaging going and I can see somebody moving near the elevators.”
Pan peered over the lip of the counter between the bodies.
Behind the security station was a wide lobby area with a smallish marble fountain in the center. It was currently off. Banks of elevators stretched off in three directions.
From around the corner stepped a woman. She wore a short green skirt and a backless green and blue halter top. She was Latina, with bright blue hair in cornrows and thick blue lipstick. Her limbs were emblazoned with sleeves and leggings of wavy blue tattoos which apparently completed some kind of jade-skirted Mesoamerican goddess in an elaborate headdress on her back with streams of water flowing from her hands. The word Chalchiuhtlicue arced over her exposed, hard muscled stomach. She looked every bit like a hardened MMA fighter.
“Chalchiuhtlicue is an Aztec river goddess,” the Thrasher informed him.
“Swell,” said Pan, leaping up on top of the security counter.
Father Eladio had told him all about the founding members of the War Gods. Tying their specific power sets to the Aztec gods was supposed to instill a sense of cultural pride in them as wayward youths. He didn’t remember this girl’s real name. She called herself Inundación.
“El Niño Eterno,” she said, sinking one bare foot into the water of the fountain and wading to the middle, up to her ankles. “You was stupid to come here, kid.”
“You were stupid to have stayed,” said Pan.
He shoved off the counter and hurtled himself down the lobby at her, intending to knock her senseless before the fight could begin. He was on her in an instant, but instead of striking her, his fist was deflected by a twisting wall of water that leapt into the air around them. The cyclone bent at a gesture from her; it struck the center of his chest in the shape of an open hand with all the force of a fire hose, knocking him back against the security counter. He hit it hard enough to crack the marble.
Dazed, he glanced to see Inundación standing on the surface of the water. It turned into a short spout and lifted her toward the ceiling. She had a lighter in her hand, and was holding it to a fire sprinkler sensor.
“That’s not good,” the Thrasher observed.
An annoying alarm rang out, and the ceiling of the lobby erupted in rain.
The pelting water didn’t gather, but slid weirdly away, toward Inundación, and then rushed toward Pan like a slingshot.
The water pinned him to the counter, the stream traveling slowly up his chest to blast him in the face. He closed his mouth, tried to turn away, but she shaped the water into prying fingers which wrenched his jaw open. The water began to fill his throat and lungs. No doubt this was how the security guards had drowned.
Spluttering and blind, he reached up with both hands, gripped the lip of the marble countertop, and managed to pull himself up and over, crashing down behind it, putting the counter between the water and himself.
“She can’t create the water, only control what’s there,” said the Thrasher.
Pan coughed and peeked around the edge of the counter as the stream ceased and trickled back to her, churning and twisting like an iridescent snake.
A light flashed behind the security desk and Pan understood it was likely the cutoff switch for the sprinkler system. At least he hoped. He lunged forward and tripped it. The alarm killed, the sprinklers ceased.
He glanced up at the body of the security guard on the counter and saw a stun gun in the man’s holster under his jacket. He pulled it free and, rummaging through the utility drawer, found a roll of tape among the keys and flashlights.
“Come on out, you little puta!” Inundación called, her voice muffled.
Pan vaulted over the counter and flew down the hall at her.
Inundación still stood in the fountain, but now a shimmering, slowly turning sphere of water surrounded her.
As soon as she saw the streak of green, a tendril of water arced out, spinning at him like a sprung coil. Pan turned as he came, narrowly passing beneath the whipping, opaque tentacle. He flung the stun gun at the sphere; he had depressed and secured the trigger with the tape, and it splashed into the bubble sparking.
Inundación shrieked as her protective shield flashed with blue light, the electricity surging briefly through the conducting water.
She let the water drop, and it splashed back into the fountain, as she dodged the chattering stun gun. But not Pan’s follow-up kick, which she took on the chin.
Inundación stumbled out of the fountain and hit the marble floor hard on her back. Pan landed beside her face and, gripping her arm, flew toward the far end of the lobby, dragging her across the wet floor and away from the fountain. When he had built up enough momentum, he flung her at the back wall.
The woman tumbled, but even as she flew, the water from the fountain flowed swiftly past him, like a surging river suspended in mid-air; it caught her, buffering the impact so that she splashed as if into a pool. She turned within the cushion of water and kicked off the wall, somersaulting onto the floor again, as the water flowed down the wall and coalesced around her feet.
Pan glanced left and right, then began rebounding back from wall to wall, hitting each of the elevator buttons as Inundación spat a tooth into her hand.
“You’re gonna pay for that, pendejo.”
One of the elevators dinged.
With a shrill cry of rage, Inundación formed the water about her into a moving wave, which carried her toward him.
Pan dove into the opening doors and kicked the close button.
He saw her come surfing into view just as the doors slid shut. The elevator began to ascend.
“You think you can get away that easy?” she yelled.
Water spurted between the elevator doors and began to rise in the box.
But Pan’s feet weren’t even wet.
He burst through the top of the elevator and straddled the hole he’d made as the floors flashed by in the dark shaft. He rose ahead of the car, reached an adjoining set of doors on the third floor, and pried them open. He then sprinted across the empty hall to the opposite elevator, forced the doors, and peered inside. The car was somewhere above, so he leapt into the open shaft and swiftly reached the bottom.
Pan quietly slid the lobby doors open.
Inundación stood with her back to him, her hands pressed against the doors he had originally gone through, her fingers splayed, willing the water up the shaft to fill the elevator she presumed he was still inside.
“Hey, Pan!” she called. “How long can you hold your breath?”
As soon as the doors had parted enough for him to pass through, Pan shot across the lobby, took Inundación’s head in both gloved hands, and rammed her face into the metal elevator doors.
She slid to the floor, unconscious.
“Nice job,” said the Thrasher. “But I’d get her outside.””
He took her under the arms and flew to the front doors, where a spotlight now shined.
Pan burst out into the night air.
“Now listen here, you little…!” began the cop on the bullhorn.
“Her name’s Inundación!” he yelled, before the cop could finish. “Keep her away from water! I’m going back in!”
And he did.
He paused again at the security desk and looked at the bracelet on his arm.
“Thrasher, what about
Cassidy? Do you have her?”
“She’s fine. She’s going to a party with Paul Thurbee and Jolene. I’ve got a trace on Thurbee’s car. They’re scared by all the Tantrum stuff, so they’re going out of town to Elton Ormond’s ranch in Olea.”
Elton Ormond. She’d be safe there at Second Star. Funny that she’d go there. When Ormond had taken them on a tour of it, back when both of them were kids just a season into Peter `N Wendy, Ormond had told them how he had built the lavish wonderland as a sanctuary against the outside world. He’d found the place charming, and liked talking to Ormond about Peter Pan. The singer was as big a fan of the book as he was. Cassidy had said it was weird for a grown man to have so many kids’ toys. Carousels and Ferris wheels, cotton candy machines and bumper boats, and rows of old arcade games.
But a cast got to be like a family. It made sense she’d go with her family someplace safe.
He glanced down at his feet, and saw the lighter Inundación had used to trigger the sprinkler system. He stooped, picked it up, and slid it into the cuff of his leather glove.
His concerns over Cassidy alleviated, he could concentrate on stopping these maniacs and getting Tink and the other kids and Aisha Cordell out of there.
Pan was halfway to the elevators when the explosions went off.
THIRTEEN
“What the hell was that?”
“Hang on, I’m looking,” came the Brown Thrasher’s voice. ““Looks like eleven of the twelve elevator cars just blew. Remote charges. They should be heading your way pretty quickly.”
There came a shuddering series of crashes in the lobby that made him duck once again behind the security desk. There was no way to describe seven elevators plummeting a number of stories to the ground floor except that he imagined a pair of tanks falling from the sky might sound similar. When the tremendous sound had subsided, the lobby’s elevator doors were all dented outward visibly, except for one.
Alarms went off and the security console lit up like Christmas, but after a few moments they were cut off, probably by some control hub elsewhere in the building. That meant somebody could have chosen to turn the sprinklers back on for Inundación, but hadn’t.