Emergence

by Various

  Pan shot towards him again, brandishing his knife, stabbing at the point where the chin of the grinning mask met the glittering collar, but Hook’s right hand came up, and it was a silver hook that caught his knife, and they struggled.

  Hook angled the jets in his boots and they flew towards the amusement park, wrestling in midair back and forth, until they smashed into the hub of the slowly-turning Ferris wheel.

  Hook slammed Pan’s head once against the axis, and he blacked out momentarily, hanging limp in his arms. Hook carried him to the top of the wheel and laid him down on the roof of one of the baskets.

  “The Davies boys…one died in the War. Another jumped in the river, died holding his boyfriend to him. And the next oldest one, he threw himself under a train. They burned all of Barrie’s letters to them. Isn’t that sad, James? Isn’t it? Life is a book we write, and when we are finished, the manuscript is burned.””

  Pan grabbed Hook’s leg and yanked it out from underneath him.

  Hook fell from the roof of the basket and tumbled down the center of the Ferris wheel, bouncing off the spokes, eliciting sparks and groans of metal the whole way down, until he landed heavily on the platform base.

  Pan got to his feet and looked down to see Hook lying in a tangle amid the twisted metal.

  The damaged wheel began to teeter, dislodged from its base. He jumped off and landed on the roof of a popcorn stand.

  The big Ferris wheel wavered and fell crashing into the turning Merry-Go-Round, scattering the prancing white plaster horses, each transfixed by a golden unicorn pole like butterflies in some ogre’s collection. The calliope music dwindled, deepened, and died.

  Pan looked around.

  “Cassidy!” he called. “Cassidy!”

  There was a wrenching of steel, and Hook stood up in the rubble of the Ferris wheel, pushing spars of metal aside. His hat was gone, his coat torn.

  He brought up his left hand and flicked it down like someone opening an umbrella. A long, curved sword blade emerged from some hidden housing.

  He kicked aside the metal, advancing, brandishing the hook, and now the sword.

  “Proud and insolent youth! Prepare to meet thy doom!”

  It was from the book, of course.

  Pan obliged.

  They closed in the center of the arcade, beneath the ropes of starry midway lights and through the kicked-up clouds of sawdust, feinting and dodging and striking. The armor was as hard and resilient as Karasu’s had been, but now Pan was fighting out of wrath. He came in like a stinging hornet, dealing hard blows and then ducking back only to plant his feet against some vertical surface, a Zoltar booth, a high striker, or a cotton candy stand, and propel himself back into the fight, colliding with Hook hard enough to stagger him, even to dent that glittering armor and send the gold and silver flaking from him.

  Hook was all sharp edges now, and the silver hook or the cutlass scored more than a few times, drawing blood when it was not deflected by Pan’s knife.

  They took turns trying to gain the advantage of the night sky, but one would grab the other’s ankle and yank them back down into the fray. There was no respite. No quarter. Blood began, at last, to leak from under Hook’s mask.

  Hook swept the sharp sword down to cut him in half down the middle, and Pan whirled aside, spinning like a top, leapt up, and came down on the blade hard enough to snap it. Hook staggered off balance.

  Pan scrambled up his back, locked his legs around his neck. He gripped Hook’s head, insinuated the point of his knife into the right eyehole of the mask. Hook howled and launched into the air, spinning like a rocket, clawing to get Pan off his back, scraping with his hook, dragging its point along Pan’s arm.

  Though Pan cried out, he hung onto Hook until his arm couldn’t respond anymore, then he slipped around, clung to the front of his armored opponent, and worked the knife round the edge of the eyehole. The grinning face wept blood.

  He withdrew, still holding on with his knees to Hook’s chest, then thrust the red knife up under the chin of the mask. He had been seeking to finally end the madman, but instead hit some unseen catch. The mask flipped open, revealing Ormond’s battered, bloodied face. The same spring action that had opened the mask, at the same time, flung the knife out of Pan’s hand. It went flashing off into the dark.

  Ormond whimpered, his one blue eye rolling.

  Pan drove his fist into Ormond’s face. His knuckles were broken from beating on steel, but he struck again and again with increasing force, mashing the singer’s custom nose flat, rearranging the once-contoured features, knocking teeth down the back of Ormond’s throat, dislodging his jaw, ignoring the pain , unaware even if it was the bones of his own hand he heard splintering or Ormond’s skull.

  Soon his drooping hand was indistinguishable from Ormond’s face. Both were blood and sagging pulp. Only Ormond’s eye showed.

  “Bad form,” the man somehow mumbled through bubbling blood.

  Then, the hook came up. Not in malice. It brushed Pan’s cheek in an approximation of a caress, yet still drew a thin line of blood.

  Pan slapped the hand away, disgusted.

  They were in the air over Ormond’s private pond.

  Pan released him, though he didn’t let him fall. He threw a shoulder into his chest and drove him down, plummeting earthward as fast as he could go. And then Pan stopped so that Ormond smashed full-speed into the shallow water, hard enough to bounce once.

  Pan landed on the man’s chest, put his foot on Ormond’s ruined face, and held it underwater until the weak struggling and meager bubbles ceased.

  He peered toward the edge of the pond, then waded over, stumbled, fell against the muddy bank, disturbing a bevy of nesting swans. They fluttered away, hissing.

  He lay there a moment, listening to the lapping of the dark water and the Peter `N Wendy Theme still looping from hidden speakers. He then heard the click-clacking of the one-third scale train, saw the single eye light on the front of the little steam engine flare for a moment as it looked on him, then it passed on, as though averting its gaze from his bloody state to spare its own sensitive nature.

  The train rounded the bend around the pond, and Pan blinked.

  He had spied a silhouette in the open car behind the tender.

  He extricated himself from the mud and swan shit and floated over, keeping pace with the little train above, then he flitted down to land in the car beside the seated figure.

  Cassidy.

  Bound and gagged, but alive.

  He unbuckled the gag from her head and let it fall, then sagged back in the seat beside her, exhausted.

  “I’m sorry. I lost my knife.”

  She sobbed and leaned her head against him.

  “Just give me a few minutes,” he said, slipping his cowl from his face so he could feel the cool night air.

  They said nothing for a while, just leaned against each other, watching the grounds go by, feeling the sway of the little train, as they had all those years ago when Ormond had invited them here on a sunny day.

  “Ormond?” she asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I still have my appendix,” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “I never had appendicitis. My dad paid the hospital to admit me, had the records forged, so everybody thought I was sick the day…the day everybody…”

  “The day of the bomb. So, you got my message?”

  “No. My dad had checked my phone first. He always checked my messages. Knew my passwords. He made me stay home. After the bomb…he…he told me not to ever tell anyone. He knew what had happened. He knew who had done it. All that time. He protected Ormond. How many years did he cover for that monster? For what? Because the bastard made him money.”

  “He was protecting you, too,” Jim said wearily. “Died for you in the end. Ormond killed him. He told me. I guess the bomb at Perennial was too big. It must have haunted your dad, and Ormond couldn�
�t trust him to keep quiet.”

  She looked at him. He could feel her eyes glistening in the dark. He wouldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes.

  “Jim…I…”

  He shook his head.

  “Please don’t say anything.”

  “You’re hurt bad.”

  “Chimerics mend.”

  He felt her lips brush his. Her hair tickled his swelling face, and his nose filled with the smell of her.

  He flinched away, then sat up and opened his eyes.

  “We can’t,” he said. “Not ever……”

  “I know. Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Pixie dust,” he said, forcing a smile.

  “Faith and trust,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I read it finally. Peter Pan. All the world is made of faith and trust and pixie dust. Do you still believe that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The train shuddered suddenly, and stopped. All the lights went out.

  “Oh my God. What now?” Cassidy whispered.

  Pan heard the familiar engine whine.

  “It’s alright,” he said, a minute before the wind kicked up.

  Her hair blew in his face again. He smelled it, even above the jet fuel odor, and closed his eyes as it whipped across him.

  Then the Brown Bird’s lights shone down on them as it landed across the tracks.

  The hatch opened, and the Brown Thrasher jumped down and came over, boots crunching on the gravel.

  “Shouldn’t you put your mask back on?” Cassidy said urgently.

  He shook his head as the iconic, sweeping bird-shadow fellow across them both.

  “It was Elton Ormond,” said the Thrasher.

  Pan gave him a finger gun and smiled.

  “Looks like I was one step ahead of you this time, Thrasher.”

  “I suppose he’s dead?”

  “He bombed Perennial all those years ago. He also killed Peter Hollis. And there are three more bodies in his dining room. Go have a look at the room in the back of the house. Go through his computer files. Before you ask why.”

  “Miss Cassidy,” said the Thrasher, bowing slightly. “You’d better come with me.”

  “She can’t,” said Pan.

  “Pan…,” said the Thrasher.

  “She’s tied. And I can’t use my hands.”

  “Ah.” The Thrasher bent over her, taking something from his belt that looked like bird beaked scissors, and snipped her bonds.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” Cassidy said in Pan’s ear.

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  Then he stood up in the train car, wobbly kneed, gathered himself up, and pushed off, climbing into the dark.

  TWENTY

  The crowd was enormous, bigger even than the vigil of mourners who had lit candles to mark the passing of the fifty-five civilians and the two P.O.N.E. officers killed in Tantrum’s second attack.

  People love a celebration more than a memorial.

  And people loved The California Girls.

  Everybody knew the story worldwide by now. Four teenage chimerics and their leader had saved LF where TCA and P.O.N.E. and the police and Army had all failed. They’d come out of nowhere, like Pan, whom everybody but the most diehard Rogers fans had mostly forgotten.

  Why they were embraced and Pan was shunned was easy to see.

  They were bubbly, fun, cute, vivacious. There was their leader, Termagant. She looked to be past forty, all in white with short silver-blonde hair. Nobody quite knew her powers, though it was rumored she was an Alpha-level telepath and the one most responsible for the amazingly coordinated team. She was definitely an Alpha-level promoter, because she stayed wisely in the background and let her girls, who seemed perfectly appealing across demographic lines, bask in the limelight.

  The plucky Astarte, whom Pan had met, seemed to be second-in-command. She had cut through solid concrete with her energy spear. In what became the most shared image to come out of that disaster, she had been famously captured on film, a news truck above her head in one hand, sparing a moment to lean over and kiss the handsome reporter Cotton Anderson as he rose astounded from the rubble beneath. That shield of hers somehow had the power to resist Tantrum’s psychokinetic blasts.

  A girl called Roar had the ability to assume the shape and exaggerated powers of any feline, shifting in the blink of an eye from a snarling tiger woman into a speeding cheetah girl. At the party thrown in their honor, Roar had glitter-gloss on her black skin, wore black lipstick and goth clothes. Her blue hair scored big with the disaffected youth.

  Third up was Hyna, a tough-looking Latina shapeshifter, who could not only change her face, but assume a bizarre, resilient battle form that looked like a seven-foot-tall cross between a dinosaur and a human with bright blue skin and glowing red eyes. She’d taken hold of Tantrum by the ankles and smashed him through a building.

  Last was Bipolar, who, during the big battle, had gone up to the KO’d Pecos and A-Frame, touched them, and then split herself into three exact duplicates of herself, two of which utilized their powers.

  TCA and the DCD took an extreme interest in them, especially Bipolar, but couldn’t come near them. They had three-point-eight-million adoring fans protecting them, after all, and in the weeks after their appearance they were everywhere. Billboards, apparel, there was talk of a cartoon series. They were featured in a remade Katy Perry video of the famous “California Girls” song, with a few lyrical tweaks by Perry, just for them. At a downtown celebration, the mayor, shouting above the roar of the ecstatic crowd, called them ‘La Futura’s Favorite Daughters.’

  Not everybody was so enamored.

  “More proof of experimentation on America’s youth by companies like DNAdvanced and Biotiq,” Aisha Cordell spat from her refurbished studio. ““When are you going to wake up, America? Do you want your own daughters prancing about like whores for the enjoyment of the lib—?”

  Father Eladio switched off the TV.

  “That’s enough of that.”

  Jim shook his head.

  Two chimerics had saved her life, but she had insured Margarito had a good stretch in San Quinton ahead of him once he got out of physical therapy.

  Father Eladio had secured him a good lawyer, and they had high hopes.

  “I don’t get people like that,” Jim said.

  “If she didn’t keep doing what she’s doing, she’d be out of a job,”” said Amonson, coming down the basement steps in his tailor made suit, looking as out of place in the cluttered surroundings as was humanly possible.

  “Mister Spinks!” Father Eladio exclaimed, smiling. “You want a beer?”

  “I don’t drink,” said Spinks, looking around at the dingy church basement. “This place looks like a blind man keeps it.”

  “Hey, not so loud, man. I got a couple of nice old ladies that come in once a week to clean.”

  “You should make it twice a week. This place is falling apart.”

  “Maybe you could write a check for the church, rich man, widen the eye of the needle a bit for your camel ass.”

  “He’s got to be an atheist,” said Jim, chuckling.

  “Agnostic, actually,” said Spinks, brushing a cobweb from the sleeve of his suit.

  “Sit down, Thrasher,” said Pan, scooting stiffly in the folding chair to make room at the card table.

  Spinks put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I can’t stay. Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  “Sore, but on the mend.”

  His broken hands were the worst part, but the bones were knitting well enough. Father Eladio had taken him to a general practitioner that didn’t ask questions, told him he’d gotten his wounds in a gang fight.

  Spinks put his attaché case on the table and flipped it open, shuffling papers.

  “So…the bomb at Vulpes Plaza was dirty. It wouldn’t have taken out the entire block, but
it would’ve made the building unusable.”

  “That’s it?” Jim said.

  “Public perception of RDD’s is pretty overblown,” said Spinks. “It takes time to decontaminate an area, but it can be done. We call them Weapons of Mass Disruption.”

  “Huh,” said Jim.

  “Ormond’s hard drives have been turned over to the FBI and Second Star security cameras have been scrubbed, so you won’t show up. We’re spinning it into an angry parent’s revenge. That speedster you killed is providing the identity and the body. They’ll have killed each other. It’s all very sordid, but Ormond was such a recluse it’ll work. The story breaks tomorrow. We’re letting the California Girls have their moment.”

  “The kid should be up on the grandstand with them for stopping Ormond,” said Father Eladio.

  “Believe me,” said Spinks, “that’s the last thing you want. You thought the blowback from Rogers Stadium was bad, try telling a billion screaming Ormond fans that their idol was a child molester. Oh, that reminds me, the shooter. Guy’s name is Billy Lee Birkenstock, AKA Blowback. TCA wanted him for killing some trainees in Ohio, for Ursus in Montana. He’s going to be far away from humanity for the rest of his days. Maybe we can take a break from homicidal snipers for the time being. Handley…you know he was Ormond’s gardener at Second Star years before he got his teaching job? That’s how they knew each other. He’s back in San Quinton now. Bombero and his homies, too.”

  “I’d like to visit them, if I could,” said Father Eladio.

  “It can be arranged.”

  He took some papers out of his case and handed them to Jim.

  “What’s this?” said Jim.

  “The deed to your friend Tinkham’s house in Mogera Hills. We paid it off, and we’ve got contractors rebuilding the roof. It’s yours now.”

  Jim looked at the paper.

  Tink was dead, and it was yet another funeral he hadn’t been able to attend. Father Eladio had officiated, assured him he’d sent him off right. Cassidy had been there. Looking for him.

  “You should probably sell it,” said Jim quietly. “Give me a little to relocate, and donate the rest to protect something. How long before Cass comes knocking? She can’t know where I’m at.”