Perennial

Edward M. Erdelac

 

ONE

 

With all the hot spots for celebrity sightings in La Futura, the maternity ward waiting room at the LF County Hospital at nine PM on a Thursday night was the last place anybody would expect to see anybody famous. No A-listers popped their brats out here. They weren’t caught dead or medicated outside of Seder’s-Horeb in the 90048, just a quick limo ride from the obnoxious estates of Waverly Hills.

But Nico Tinkham was hardly an A-lister.

He bore all the signs of a celebrity in the wild though; drab gray hoodie, baggy sweatpants, curled brim of an old LF Riders ball cap pulled low over a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, maybe a little too pricey for some poor uninsured chav sitting with his scrawny, coughing kid, awaiting the arrival of a new family addition he couldn’t afford. The tennis shoes were a dead giveaway too. Dirty they might be, but any twelve year old connoisseur from Englewood could tell you they were limited edition vintage Nike KD6 Elites, two hundred dollars out of the box. The watch was a dead giveaway too. Rolex. Of course not being an A-lister had ever stopped any D-lister from trying to look the part, even incognito. That was LF preening, and you couldn’t shake it.

The extensive, disfiguring burn scars down the right side of his face and covering his right hand might have made someone think he was nothing more than a well-dressed curiosity. But his were probably the most famous burn scars in Hillywood.

The blonde kid coughing regularly into his fist next to him was more subtle. Off-brand shoes, frayed sweatshirt, cheap stocking cap, and holes in his jeans. No paparazzo worth the name would make them as father and son, but of the harried maternity nurses and midwives, the bone-tired illegals waiting on their little first-generation Americans, no one at all on the ward even looked twice at them. They were all too caught up in their own dramas.

A tired looking Filipino nurse came out into the waiting room and massacred a Mexican surname, causing a bullish looking, tattooed fellow with a bald pate and track pants to scramble from his Naugahyde chair and follow her deeper into the ward.

Nico rose too and sauntered over to the ancient magazines, then walked idly down the corridor, only the kid he’d left behind taking any notice.

He was an old hand at sniffing out unwatched pharmaceuticals. A junkie nurse who had introduced him to the wonders of Dilaudid when he was seventeen had taught him all about swiping hospital supplies through a haze of post-coital marijuana smoke. He hadn’t really intended to do anything other than peruse a magazine while he waited, but he found himself gravitating toward the half open door of a welcoming supply closet. Sometimes mothers requested epidurals or morphine. Sometimes mothers were allergic, and that was where hydromorphones came into play. None of the allergic reaction but ten times the high. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. He had just about unballed his fist in his pocket and reached out to try the knob when a tall ginger in a white coat and glasses stepped in front of him.

“S’cuse me. Can I help you with something?”

A male obstetrician. That was one of those occupations Nico had never really been able to figure out the appeal of, like a gynecologist, or a guy who always played females in video games.

Nico made some inaudible, slightly apologetic excuse and turned about to head back to the kid and the waiting room.

That was when the short, fat armed Mexican woman in the red nurse’s scrubs stepped off the lift and pushed an empty gurney down the corridor, squeaking right past him.

No doubt about it. That was Zita.

Zita Cariño, smiling, pleasant mannered midwife, the kind who cooed over newborns and exclaimed “Ay que linda!” loud enough to wake the mother dozing across the hall, then said a benediction over their heads without asking if it was wanted or not. Pleasant. Earthy. Well-meaning. Apparently she had been notorious down in Juarez as the most accomplished baby napper in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa. She had fled Mexico with fifty thousand dollars paid out by a cartel chief for snatching the newborn daughter of his biggest rival right out of the Star Medica Hospital in Juarez. The popular narcocorrido about the affair, Los Doce Días de Navidad, said that her employer had shipped the baby in twelve individually wrapped gift boxes to her parents on Christmas morning two months after her disappearance. La Ayudante de Santa, they called her. Santa’s Helper.

Zita had used her money to set herself up in business doing what she knew best how to do, plying her trade all over California for a variety of clients. She was a kidnapper-for-hire, keeping herself afloat stealing unwanted babies out from under the noses of adoption agencies, and taking on the occasional high price abduction for childless couples willing to pay for precisely what they wanted. Some of these babies went to good homes. A lot more flat-out disappeared, passed through the darkest guts of Molech or God only knew where, the only evidence of their existence a stack of incomplete paperwork, or at the very worst, a shaky video playing across the wretched eyes of some miserable law enforcement official in a hard drive seizure years after the case had gone glacial, to haunt them and all who came in contact with the hideousness of their fate for the rest of their days.

The perpetrators of the latter misdeeds were the ones Pan hated the most.

And Pan brimmed with that hate. It made his bones shake, made his teeth come together so hard they creaked.

It angered Nico too, in a deeper way, more personal than it could ever enrage Pan. That was why this bitch needed to be sorted. As awful as she was, she could lead Pan to greater monsters.

He moved to catch up with her, but the ginger doctor caught his elbow.

“Just a minute.”

Nico turned. He was caught. One goddamned moment of weakness. Jesus, not even a full-on relapse. All he had been about to do was nudge a doorknob. That’s all. What would Pan say if Zita got away?

If he hit the doctor and bolted, that would only bring security all that faster. He looked towards the waiting room. Couldn’t see where the kid was sitting from where he stood. Why had he left?

He admonished himself. Damn it! Useless goddamn junkie.

But the doctor’s previous stern look was gone. There was a half-smile on his face, and his green eyes were narrowed and sideways.

“Are you…?”

Oh Jesus. Really? Not now!

“Are you Nico Tinkham? From the Gutmunchers movies?”

OK. Be polite. Don’t be an arsehole. Let him have his fan moment and be done with it. Wasn’t this the sort of thing he relished as a rampant egomaniac? Wasn’t it what had driven him out of Essex all the way across the great Pond to Hillywood?

“Guilty as charged,” Nico said, smiling.

“Wow!” the doctor said stupidly. “Wow!” Crandall, his nametag said. Marvin Crandall, MD. Gutmunchers fan. “You’re the last person I expected to see here tonight. Are you…? Are you expecting? I mean, not you of course. That is, I don’t know. Are you married?”

The last, in disbelief. Because why would a hideously disfigured ghoul like him have a wife? Wouldn’t he have to steal his bride and secret her to some underground lair to assail her with maniacal pipe organ serenades?

Nico opened his mouth to tell Dr. Marvin Crandall to fuck off.

Over Dr. Crandall’s shoulder, Zita opened the door to one of the maternity rooms like it was the most natural thing in the world, and laughed to the unseen occupant. She began talking loudly in Spanish.

Dr. Crandall didn’t wait for his ‘fuck you.’

“I’m sorry, it’s none of my business at all. I just wanted to let you know how impressed I was with your decision not to go forward with the cosmetic surgery on Celebs under the Knife. That was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen on television. I mean, given your history…all you went through. What did you say? ‘I am what I am?’ Very inspiring.”

Nico shrugged, gave his best aw shucks, even though Dr. Crandall had gotten his exact words wrong, and attributed Popeye’s famous maxim to him.

The burn scars up the left side of his face were what had landed him the part in the Gutmunchers movies, and in Don’t Accept Rides from Strangers, and as Dr. Damnation in Chimeric Massacre. Ironically, the very disfigurement that had ended his childhood acting career had made his adult comeback possible. It hadn’t been out of any dignified sense of self that he’d wound up refusing the corrective surgery. He had taken the paycheck to be on the stupid reality show in the first place in a moment of addiction-fueled desperation. His Gutmunchers 2 money had run out and he had needed a fix, and production on Gutmunchers 3 had been stalled because the goddamned Armenian director had broken into the production office and fucked off to Turkey with the budget to pour it into the goddamned resistance or whatever.

Then, in a moment of clarity, Nico had realized the paycheck from Celebs under the Knife would never cover the loss of income he would suffer if he wound up with the Jennifer Grey curse. Nobody in the B-movie schlock horror pictures he had been doing for the past few years wanted a pretty Nico Tinkham in their zombie bullshit. They wanted the ready-made monster to save on the makeup artist.

The unexpected on-air decision not to go through with plastic surgery to erase his burn scars had been lauded by Tonight in Entertainment as must-see television the week it aired, and the skyrocketing ratings had been the only thing that had kept the showrunners from hitting him with a breach of contract suit.

It had been some of the best acting he’d ever done really, sobbing to ‘Plastic Surgeon to The Stars’ Dr. Jean Marc Mendelsson that he had to make do with what he had, that God had marked him maybe for a reason he didn’t understand and who was he to change himself on the outside if he couldn’t change who he was on the inside.

It had been good shite, that, Nico had to admit. Even Jean Marc’s fit Brazilian assistant had had to touch up her mascara.

He’d gotten more offers after that. TV ‘Movie of the Week’ stuff, a lot of interviews. These scars had paid off in the very long run after all. Of course, the truth was he had been afraid to go without them. He really wasn’t that good of an actor.

Zita came out of the room bidding a boisterous farewell and maybe a ‘be right back’ in Spanish as she closed the door. She had a blue blanketed bundle in her arms, and after a quick check to make sure nobody was looking, she lifted the sheet on the waiting gurney and deftly stowed the kid underneath.

Then she made her way back down the corridor to the elevator bank, humming her own goddamn narcocorrida as she went.

Nico watched her pass by as Dr. Crandall began to gush about his favorite scene in Chimeric Massacre, where the villainous Dr. Damnation removed his metal mask revealing Nico’s own scarred face to Lilia Lilliard, the bound Opaque Girl.

“And then, when you drove your fist into her sternum and she materialized around it!” Crandall chuckled exuberantly. “What a great effect!””

“Yeah,” said Nico, glancing over his shoulder as Zita pressed the lift button. “The FX boys really earned their pub money with that one.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Crandall. “I know I must be keeping you.”” He reached out and grabbed Nico’s mottled pink, scarred hand and pumped it vigorously. “It’s been a pleasure.””

“Likewise, mate. Always nice to meet a fan.”

He turned then as the lift dinged open and Zita pushed the gurney inside.

But something caught his hand.

Dr. Crandall hadn’t let go.

“Oh! Listen! Would you mind terribly, giving me your autograph?”

He pushed a little notepad into Nico’s hand and a pen. It was full of prescriptions. Jesus, if Crandall only knew what a temptation it was for him to just knock him down and bolt with this little treasure.

He scribbled his name quickly, glancing at the door.

“Oh sorry. I actually need that page. Can you do it on a blank one?”

“Sure.”

“And make it out to Marvin?”

“Sure. Marvin.”

“M-A-R-V-I-N.”

He nodded. He goddamned well knew how to spell Marvin. C-U-N-T.

The doors closed. He watched the numbers descend rapidly as he handed back the notepad and Dr. Marvin Crandall shook his hand again and reiterated his pleasure at having met him.

“Say,” said Nico. “What’s in the basement of this place?””

“Oh nothing but the pathology lab, the morgue,” he said, giggling a little at the last and pushing his glasses up his nose with his index finger. Nico wondered if he had ever seen a black shirted Crandall at one of the horror hound conventions he sometimes got a signing table at. ““Oh and the loading dock. You know, for supplies and stuff.”

“Thanks, Doc. Really brilliant meeting you.”

He hurried down the corridor, ducked his head into the waiting room.

Goddammit!

The kid, Jimmy, was not sitting where he was supposed to. What a hell of a time for him to go to the loo. Now what?

The second lift dinged open, a red arrow pointing down.

He ran to catch it.

He rode it thankfully alone to the basement, and stepped out into a bleakly lit fluorescent hallway with a big yellow sign on a pair of doors to the right that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. NO ADMITTANCE.

No convenient doctor’s smock and surgical mask about. No wheelchair to jump into. If he ran into a security guard or a nurse, he’d be escorted back to the lift, maybe given the boot.

He went to the door and peered through the little glass squares. He caught a glimpse of a red clad figure turning the corner at the end of the hall.

He pushed through, got his cellphone out, and dialed.

No signal here in the basement. He was on his own.

He jogged down the corridor, hearing the squeaking of the gurney wheels like metal rats getting quieter ahead.

He reached the corner, flattened, and peered around the side like he was MI6 or bloody John Steed or something.

She had stopped the gurney and lifted the sheet. Underneath was a pet carrier with a wire door. He saw the blue of the baby’s blanket through the mesh, heard it squeal.

She told it to shut up as she gripped the handle and pulled it out from under the cart, set it roughly down.

She got a coat out from under the gurney, put it on, zipped it up, and opened an outer door, sweeping up the pet carrier.

Nico looked down at the phone again. Still no signal.

He wasn’t supposed to get this close. Just phone it in. Except no phone. Go back upstairs, try to find the kid, or follow?

The door slammed shut.

He abandoned the cover of the corner and went down to the exit, waited a moment, and pushed it slowly open, the night air frigid on his hand.

The loading dock Dr. Crandall had mentioned was there, and idling in the bay was a van marked AAA Cleaning Service. Zita had just slammed the passenger door. She looked to be rubbing her hands in front of the heater.

The kitty carrier was on the ground behind the van, the baby getting a face full of exhaust.

A shaven headed Mexican man in a red hoody and matching trainers was opening the back of the van.

Nico slid along the wall towards the end of the bay, tried the phone. Nothing.

The man in the back lifted the carrier into the back of the van and closed the doors.

He got out from under the building and tried the phone. Now it was acquiring a signal at least.

The driver’s side door slammed and the engine revved.

Nico spammed the Call button and stepped out in front of the van as it lurched into gear and stopped short of hitting him.

The driver’s side window rolled down.

“Hey, puto! Get the fuck outta the way!” yelled the driver.

Nico looked into the glaring headlights and kept hitting Call.

Now Zita leaned out of her window.

“Hey! Move, pinche guero!”

Nico just stared. He had no idea what to say. His thumb was getting sore from jabbing the phone.

The driver’s side door opened and the bald man in the red hood came from behind the headlights, coalescing from shadow into detail. He was scowling, shoulders rolling like a panther’s as he approached.

Shite.

“You deaf? Get the fuck out the road, homes.”

Then they both heard a ring tone from somewhere very close. The tune was Peter `N Wendy’s Theme, the Elton Ormond hit tune from ten years ago, written especially for the titular TV show.

The driver of the van looked confused.

Nico breathed deeply, and stepped aside.

There was Pan, standing behind him. A slight figure, no higher than Nico’s chest, in a green short sleeved leather tunic with a peaked cap that came down over his eyes and nose in a sharp, stylized cowl. His bright blue irises shined through the eyelets. His leather gauntleted fists were bunched, knuckles on his narrow waist, encircled by the wide belt with the ringing phone and the knife. His legs and arms were sparingly muscled but looked absurdly thin in dark green Expandex.

He didn’t cut a very imposing figure, to be honest.

The driver smirked at his appearance.

“’The fuck is this shit?” he said, chuckling.

“Where’s the baby?” Pan asked in his high little voice.

“Back of the van,” said Nico.

Pan moved.

There was only about seven feet between him and the driver, but he launched himself into the air so swiftly the impact of his two feet sent the driver slamming back against the grill of the van.

Then he just floated there for an instant before righting himself, the toes of his boots eight inches off the pavement.

The driver groaned and peeled himself off the bumper of the van.

Zita shrieked from the passenger’s window.

“Es El Niño Eterno! Quemarlo, Bombero!”

“What did she say?” Nico wondered out loud.

“Burn him,” said Pan. “Look out!’

Nico felt himself shoved aside hard enough to fling him back against the wall of the dock. He lost his sunglasses. As he went flying, a jet of orange and blue flame roiled through the spot he’d been standing in, flying out of the driver’s outstretched hand.

He was a chimeric.

Pan wasn’t caught in the gout of fire either, he slipped under it, twisting gracefully, and flew at the man Zita had called Bombero.

Bombero dodged aside and Pan’s small fists smashed the front of the van, rocking it on its chassis.

Bombero’s still flaming fist came down across Pan’s back and slammed him to the pavement, but before he could blast him again, Pan’s body rose no more than an inch off the ground and shot forward under the van.

Bombero looked confused for a second, then heard the sound of running feet on the roof and looked up just as Pan came flying down at him. He caught the larger man by his hood and used his momentum to fling him head over heels, out into the parking lot, tearing his red sweater away.

Bombero rolled to his feet though, and now both arms rippled with crackling flame. He was like the burning bush. Though blue hot at the source, his skin was unburnt. His white t-shirt smoldered, curled, and fell from him, revealing an intricate tattoo painted across his muscled chest. It depicted some kind of ghastly, grinning red fleshed figure adorned in primitive turquoise jewelry and bearing a flaming serpent on his back. To Nico it looked like something in the margins of a placemat at a Mexican restaurant.

Bombero whirled his arms clockwise and then flung out both hands with a gleeful shout. Two twisting slinkies of fire erupted from his hands and merged into a horizontal blazing cyclone which swept straight at Pan.

Instead of dodging aside though, Pan flipped backwards and plunged through the windshield of the van.

The fire cyclone cascaded across the van and Zita screamed in the passenger’s seat as her hair and clothes ignited.

The back doors blew off the van and Pan came flying out with the fire at his heels, clutching the pet carrier as the heat touched off the gas tank and the vehicle exploded. The shockwave blew him against the back wall of the bay and he fell in a heap.

Bombero looked aghast at what he’d done for only a moment, then he turned and ran.

Well, Nico wasn’t about to chase after him.

He ran toward the back of the dock, holding up his hand against the flames. God, if there was one thing he couldn’t stand now, it was fire. It was as if his marred flesh remembered the old agony, and screamed a warning as he got nearer the burning wreck.

There was Pan, lying flat across the carrier, and oh God, as Nico got closer he could see the molten shape of the plastic.

Pan stirred and got to his knees as Nico arrived. He tried to pick up the carrier, but the handle was too hot and he scorched himself.

Pan knelt there, staring at it. His eyes went up and met Nico’s. There was a thin line of blood leaking from the corner of Pan’s mouth.

Then they heard the snuffling from inside.

Pan gripped the wire door and tore it off.

He reached in up to the elbows and came out with the baby. The blanket was singed, but the nipper started wailing when exposed to the two extremes of the cold air and the heat from the van fire. Despite a minor reddening of the skin, it wasn’t hurt.

Nico grabbed Pan’s elbow and led him and the baby out of the dock and into the parking lot.

“You okay?” Nico asked.

“I just bit my tongue. Zita?” He glanced back at the burning van.

“That cunt is toast and jam,” said Nico. “The human flamethrower got away.”

“I don’t want him yet,” said Pan. “Here.””

He pushed the wailing baby into Nico’s arms, and then set his lost sunglasses on Nico’s nose. Where had he found them?

They could hear sirens now.

“You’d better drop that kid off and get scarce,” Pan said to him.

“Where are you going?”

“Malibar. To get the dispatcher.”

“What should I do?”

“Go home. I’ll see you later.”

Pan sprang into the air and was a dot in the next minute, streaking up over the roof of the hospital.

Nico shushed the crying baby and headed back into the hospital through the loading dock door. He lay the kid on the gurney, pushed it back to the lift, pressed L, and left it there for somebody to find.

It was a miracle he didn’t run into anybody in the interim.

When he walked outside again the night was accosted with the red and blue splash of emergency lights and the lights of the TV news vans.

Just his luck, before he got to his car, it started to rain.

 

TWO

 

The Pacific was boiling like a big glass of Alka Seltzer.

Spray beaded on the clear wall of the Malibar beach house, even though the surf was a hundred feet or more down at the base of the cliff. The house weathered the storm, and Frank wasn't worried. He was from Nebraska originally, where the rain could turn to hail the size of a boy's fist and the wind could change your zip code. These California storms, despite the ‘weather watches' he saw the plastic faced meteorologists sweat about on the eleven o'clock news were a joke. A house like this one, glass-walled and poised on stilts like some crystal monstrosity in an old biddy's curio cabinet, wouldn't last a week in a blue norther back home. Out here, in the face of one of these blustery West Coast jobs, it would be fine.

Home.

That was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Who'd have thought then that he'd be the man he was now, smoking and watching the ocean throw a tantrum through the glass of a multi-million dollar house with a stolen baby bawling in the back bedroom and a couple of half-assed cowboys, with about the same moral sense God granted a pair of horny chimpanzees, sitting on his couch watching a Dukes of Hazard marathon.

But hell, this ridiculous house, the vintage Indian in his garage, the speedboat hanging in the shack down by his private beach, and that eight-thousand-dollar television on which Guff and Wally were ogling a cheeky Catherine Bach was all bought and built on stolen babies.

Sometimes he wished he could start his life over. Be a kid again in Nebraska. He used to know what was right then. He used to watch Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Lone Ranger on Sunday mornings, and then he'd go bouncing around the back field in his pajamas, alternately shooting the sword out of Guy of Gisbourne's hand or running some pesky bandits through with his flashing hickory stick.

He took a long drag on his Pall Mall and wished he could burn the whole damn thing down. Maybe his sins would burn away with it.

The baby was really belting it out now. Where the hell was Zita with the Pampers and the Similac? She’d been due with the supplies and the new kid twenty minutes ago. How the hell do you let a baby run out of the essentials like that? I mean, what the hell were they paying her for? No matter how desperate that couple from Vancouver was to adopt a healthy white baby, it was just bad business to deliver the kid with a full diaper and squawking ‘cause it hadn't been fed.

He shook his head. Bad business.

But the whole damn thing was the definition of bad business, wasn't it? The business of being bad. Frank had several nurses like Zita on his payroll in the hospitals across two counties. When some mother came in with plans to deliver and leave the kid there for adoption, Frank got a call. Zita or someone like her waltzed into the hospital in her rented nurse's uniform, plucked the little crib lizard out of the nursery, and brought it to Guff and Wally, his delivery boys. They waited for the nurse to call, then went bombing off in their tricked out Escalade (license plate DOH 437; the two screws meant it to be an acronym for Dukes of Hazard, but he liked to think of it as that sound Homer Simpson made whenever he fucked up). They brought the kids to Frank, because Frank knew the right people. People who knew sterile couples who had, or could raise, the cash to buy a baby and all the papers. Once the connection was made, off the kid went with Wally and Guff to meet its new parents or whatever.

Easy money. Easy money always seemed to go hand-in-hand with bad business out here on the best coast. Easy money was the foundation for the House That Frank Built.

"Damn, that kid is loud!" Guff said, reaching for another Heiney from the city of green glass bottles on the end table in front of them, like Kong reaching through skyscrapers for Fay Wray. He was a big bastard, Guff, and crazy.

"I think he's the loudest one yet," Wally agreed, peeling the label off his and smiling as Daisy Duke jumped into her Jeep and Roscoe started talking smack to that beleaguered-looking hound dog riding shotgun.

Frank waited to see if one of them would get up to check on the baby. Guff leaned forward in his seat, looking like he was going to get up, but he fished the remote out of the noisy pile of potato chip bags on the floor and turned the volume up on the TV. The baby's wailing merged with Roscoe's pursuit siren.

"Jesus," Frank said, and went past them, headed down the back hall.

"What's his problem?" Guff said to Wally.

Wally shrugged.

The lights were off in the hallway, casting the white walls in a blue glow from the skylight. He went into the back bedroom and flicked on the light. The kid was red in the face and squealing. Roscoe P. Coltrane could have tied this kid to the roof of his squad and got Luke and Bo to pull over.

He hated dealing with the kids. Hated handling them. He should have sent Guff or Wally to get the goddamned diapers. He tried shushing the baby, but he couldn't even hear himself over the bawling. He reached down gingerly and picked it up in his hands, holding it in front of him like a bag of plutonium. What the hell was the matter with him, anyway?

Against his better judgment, he put the kid against his shoulder and started patting its back and cooing to it, like he'd seen them do on TV. After a couple good pats the kid let out a belch that sounded like it came from Booger on Revenge of the Nerds.

In spite of himself, Frank chuckled slightly.

The kid threw up on his shoulder.

"Shit," said Frank.

A few minutes later he was back in the living room, mopping at his shirt with a paper towel from the kitchen island. Roscoe was cackling into his CB to an excited Cletus, both of them oblivious to the fact that they were headed right for each other.

Sure enough, Cletus was flipping his patrol car three seconds later, and the din on the surround sound was tremendous, coupled with Guff and Wally's appreciative hooting and laughing. They never got tired of this show, though only Wally had been alive long enough to have ever seen the original run.

"Will you turn that shit down?" Frank barked in frustration.

Guff pursed his lips and picked up the remote. The noise of the crashing car was still too loud.

"I said turn it down!" Frank yelled. "Gimme the remote, you dumb hillbilly," he hissed, snatching the clicker away, pressing mute, and flinging it down on the couch.

The sound of rending metal continued. It sounded like it was coming from outside.

What the hell?

The three of them stood listening for a moment, then Guff unmuted the TV and Wally slapped his arm.

“The goddamned Escalade, man!”

In five minutes they were out on the front porch. Wally had his gun, a big .44 Magnum with an unbelievably long barrel he'd bought after OD'ing on Dirty Harry movies (“It's the most powerful handgun in the world,” he told everybody, though nobody cared and it probably wasn’t anymore). Frank grabbed his arm as soon as they flicked on the driveway lights.

Their red Escalade was sitting right where they'd parked it, only it was utterly trashed. It was flat on the pavement, the axle snapped in two, and the rear tires broken off. The windshield was spider webbed and the top mashed down almost to the steering wheel. The hood was lying in the trendy Zen garden and the engine block was torn open, as though it had just given birth to a terminator. The truck's vital fluids were being washed down the drive by the rain, and the DOH 437 license tag had been shoved halfway into the grill so only the DOH showed, mockingly, like a stamped word balloon trickling out of the lips of an anthropomorphized vehicle in a Sunday comic.

Oblivious of the rain, Guff and Wally ran to their beloved vehicle, shouting a flurry of curses and touching the twisted chassis lovingly, as though it were their passing grandmother.

"What the hell happened?" Frank called from the dryness of the porch.

"Jesus, there are goddamned fist marks in the frame!" Guff said.

"What?" Frank and Wally said at the same time.

Frank stepped off the porch and ran out into the downpour. Sure enough, beat into the sides of the truck were fist marks; little ones, about the size of baseballs. He could even see the indentations of the knuckles.

Suddenly Wally was shooting into the dark, the gun sounding like a pirate cannon in his ear. Frank slapped him on the shoulder.

"What're you doin’, you asshole? You wanna bring the fuckin' cops down on us?"

"I seen something!" Wally shrieked. "Somethin' over there, runnin' through the bushes."

They went to investigate. Frank fingered the pancake-sized holes in the side of his house. He took out his keys and picked one of the hot, flattened bullets out of the hole and tossed it at Wally, making him flinch.

"Nice job, asshole," he said. “My goddamned house’ll never bother you again.”

"Frank, what the hell's goin' on?" Guff whined.

"Damned if I know, but we're just getting wet standing out here," he said.

They went back into the house.

"I cain't see how the Duke Boys are ever gonna get outta this one," said Waylon ‘the Balladeer’ Jennings.

Frank flicked off the big television.

"Hey!" said Guff.

"Shut up. I need to think," Frank said, running his hand over his mouth.

"Yeah, but…," Guff tried again, gesturing to the TV.

"Shut the fuck up, Guff!" Wally almost shrieked. He was jumpy, and he still had his gun.

Frank went to the glass wall again. Lightning danced across the wave tops down below for an instant. It was the first time he'd ever heard thunder in the eight years he'd lived here.

Then the lights winked out.

"Shit," he muttered. Great time for the power to shit the bed.

Wally gasped. Frank could see the outline of his gun.

"Put that damn thing away. So help me if that thing goes off in my house I'm gonna stick it up your ass, Wally," Frank snarled.

"Hey!" said Guff.

"What?" Frank almost yelled. "What what what? What's so goddamned important?"

"I thought I saw something go by the window just now."

Frank whirled. Nothing but nothing and more of the same.

"I don't see anything." He went to the sliding door and opened it, poking his head through. The wind whipped his wet hair and he could smell the ocean. Nobody on the patio.

"It wasn't there," Guff said. "It went by like something falling or flying."

"Oh Christ," Frank said, whisking the door shut. "Probably just a freakin' gull."

"No, it was too big," Guff said.

"Hell, man," Wally broke, unable to keep the anxiety from his voice. "What the fuck's out there? What happened to the Escalade?"

“Maybe we should call the cops?” Guff suggested.

“You dumb fuck,” Wally muttered.

"Chill out," Frank said, going to the kitchen. But he didn't know what had happened to the Escalade. He rummaged through one of the drawers and got out the flashlight. He tossed it to Wally, not letting either of them see that he had taken out a steak knife too.

"Get down and take a look at the fuse box."

Wally caught the flashlight and shined it all over the place as anyone who picks one up for the first time does.

Frank blinked as the light shined in his face like the sun. He didn't know why people felt the need to do that.

"Come with me, Frank," Wally said.

"It don't take three."

"Whaddaya mean three?" Wally stuttered.

"You, me, and that goddamned hand-cannon. Don't tell me you're afraid with that pocket howitzer you got."

Wally snickered.

"Yeah. Alright. Be right back."

The light moved off down the hallway like a will ‘o wisp and was gone. He heard the basement door open. Wally's steps tumbled down the unfinished plywood stair. The house was half on a hill, and the architect had gotten cute and sunk a basement into the hill. It wasn’t a proper sized basement, so he hardly ever went down there.

Lightning flashed, and the shadow of the rain cascaded up the wall for a minute like drops of oil. For a half an instant, a small, quick shape, like the profile of a bird, flitted across the wall.

"Didja see that?" Guff stammered.

There was a thumping as Wally came jogging back up the stairs. The will ‘o wisp reappeared. Wally's stocky silhouette, like a man pointing the ass of a big firefly.

"Man, the fusebox is fucked!"

"What?"

"All the wires and shit are hangin' out!"

"Oh jeez," Guff began repeating it like a mantra, "oh jeezohjeezohjeezohejeez."

In a minute they were all shouting back and forth.

"Wally!" Frank yelled.

They were quiet. The baby was crying again.

"Go get the kid."

"What for?"

"Just do it!"

Wally hesitated. The spotlight of his flash swung around the room and stopped.

"Jeez," said Guff.

Standing in the kitchen, just a little more than shoulder high to the counter, was what looked like a kid in a Halloween costume. All green, with a pointed hat. Like Robin Hood.

"What the fu—," Wally began, the hammer clicking back on his .44.

He never finished it. The slight form in the kitchen moved out of the light, and Frank noticed a glitter of something bright flash across the room. There was a sound like a leaky tire followed by a gurgle from Wally. He fell back, choking. The flashlight rolled in a circle on the floor and stopped next to his face, so close his right ear glowed red. There was the handle of a knife stuck up under his chin, and blood was pouring, red as a melting Christmas candle.

"Wally?" said Frank.

Guff had his gun out then. He didn't advertise it the way Wally did, but he kept an old snub nosed .38 tucked into his sock. Frank didn't know why they insisted on carrying those guns around. Didn't want to know.

Frank heard something running across the room, and saw a low, fast shadow streak past the doorway to the dining room.

Guff saw it too and was shooting, the report inside as loud as Wally's gun had been outside.

Frank ducked behind the couch, clutching the measly steak knife, suddenly wishing he had a gun himself.

Two more shots from Guff's gun, and he saw the light flashing yellow on the ceiling. There was a pane rattling roll of thunder, and Guff shouted, "Come on out, you little son of a bitch!"

Bang! Another shot, and Frank could smell it now. That smell like the Fourth of July back home.

Then there was a sound like bones cracking.

Guff screamed.

Frank dared to peer over the edge of the couch, and saw Guff go flying across the room end over end. He struck the TV and there was a smash as it came off the wall mount. He lay there in a heap. Heineken bottles rolled across the floor.

Frank looked around, backing away from the couch. The door to the garage was just off the kitchen. If he could reach it, he could get to the motorcycle. But the baby. What would happen to the baby if he left?

Would the thing get him? Well, he'd have to get the kid then, too.

His palm sweating around the handle of the steak knife, he ran for the back hallway, and stopped short.

Lightning flashed as he reached the edge of the hall. The thing was standing in the doorway of the baby's room with its hands on its narrow hips. It was a kid, or looked like one, or was the size of one at least. Just a skinny twelve or fourteen year-old kid, but in some kind of wet, green, leather shirt, with a pointed hat and…was that spandex? The kid’s eyes flashed behind the holes of the mask.

"Give me that baby, you little shit!" Frank hissed, storming down the hallway with the knife raised in his hand.

Then the figure moved. It seemed to jump right at him, but instead of bowling him over, it struck him with such force that all the wind went out of his lungs. He lost the knife, and then he was flying down the hall. The head of the little figure was pressed against his chest, two fists gripped his shoulders. He was off his feet and speeding toward the glass wall.

Then he was through it. He felt the dull pain in his back and heard the wall shatter all around him. Glass rained down, and then it was real rain, and cold, whipping wind, and they were going right off the deck. Jesus, they were gonna go right over the cliff!

They did. And Frank could hear the surf crashing, and everything above was black streaked with silver lines of falling rain, falling as from nothing. He was soaring over the water. He could see the boat shack like a chalkboard eraser far below. The wind rippled the cuffs of his slacks.

Still the little figure held him. His small fists snatched Frank by the shirt front, and he was staring into his face. It looked like a kid, still, though behind a sharp nosed cowl. And that was indeed a red feather bobbing over his right ear. The smooth chin ran with rainwater, and the lips were in a tight line. Blue eyes stared into his, intense and grim, as though they didn't fit in that young face. The kid let him go.

Frank fell. Screaming all the way. He'd often wondered if he fell from a great height if he would scream like they did in the movies. He'd never screamed on rollercoasters, but he screamed now. He turned over, and faced down. Those mad waves were smashing and foaming underneath him, rushing up fast. The wind of the fall shot down his throat, stealing his breath, threatening to over-inflate his lungs like party balloons. He was going to hit the water like a slab of concrete, but he couldn't close his eyes.

A foot from the impact he felt a painful jerk of his ankle, and he was hanging there upside down, the splashing, brewing waves spraying his face with foam. The kid was hanging there in the air, holding him by the foot. Then the water was rushing by. He closed his eyes. His face smacked wave after wave, the tide dividing around him as his head skimmed the surface of the dark, churning water. Then he was dumped on the wet beach, spluttering and shivering.

He was on his hands and knees, and felt sick. The surf was breaking over his soaked ass. A saltwater colonic. The kid had saved him seventy bucks at any hippy salon down the hill.

He looked up, and saw the kid standing in front of him, arms folded across his chest, legs straight out in an upside down V. He was all in green leather but for his thin white arms, which were sheathed in slight, adolescent muscle. His hands were hidden in green leather gauntlets. The knife he’d killed Wally with was belted around his waist.

"You're Frank?" the kid called in a high voice, still loud enough to be heard over the waves.

Frank nodded, blinking back the stinging water in his eyes.

"Who are your buyers, Frank? Give me some names."

"R-rolodex. On the kitchen counter. By the phone," Frank spluttered. Most people kept encrypted files and external drives and all that. Frank didn’t know jack shit about computers and iClouds and iPads.

The kid nodded. Then he was streaking into the air, as if an angel had reached down and grabbed him by the scruff. Frank watched the slight form go flying up, and disappear over the lip of his rear deck, hundreds of feet above. He knelt there for a minute in the wet sand, the surf lapping, then got to his feet. He'd lost a shoe. It was terribly cold.

In a few minutes, the little figure came soaring out again. In between the flashes of lightning, Frank could see him. It was like he was dancing across the air, sledding on the invisible gusts like Peter Pan.

The figure hovered there for a minute, then launched itself straight at him. He flinched, but the kid grabbed him by the shirt again, one handed this time, and in fifteen seconds he was on the front driveway, puking beside Wally's smashed Escalade while the kid stared down at him.

When Frank finished heaving, he looked up. The kid had the baby and the Rolodex in his arms. He held the baby out to Frank.

"Hold him," the kid said.

Frank took the baby.

The kid in the green costume took off again, and passed over the roof.

Frank looked down at the baby, shielding him from the rain. He was crying. Why hadn't Zita come with the goddamned formula?

There was a loud metallic banging then, like somebody beating two big pipes together. Then Frank heard a gigantic rumbling sound. He noticed the whole house was shaking. What a time for a fucking shaker!

But then the whole house started pitching and moving. The foundation cracked, and then it shifted. The front of the house jutted upwards, tearing free of the basement, and Frank could see the plumbing jutting out of the ground in right angles, quivering like metal roots. Then the whole house slid backwards and went tumbling off the cliff with a tremendous crash.

There was an explosion somewhere far below, as the house crashed into the boathouse and black smoke started billowing up. The only thing left was a big patch, the bases of the supports, and the plywood stair leading down to the smallish basement.

Out of the smoke came the kid in the green costume, descending lightly, like a guy on a wire.

He landed right in front of Frank.

The kid took the crying baby from his arms.

"Careful," Frank muttered. "He's hungry."

"Where did he come from?" asked the kid.

"Naranja Coast Memorial," Frank answered. “Out in Geyser Valley.”

The kid nodded.

“I’ll take him back. How do you get them out?”

“We got a couple OBGYN’s and neonatals all over SoCal. They’re in the Rolodex. The buyers, too. The adoption agencies.”” Frank felt relieved. Unburdened.

“Do you know what happens to the ones that don’t go to the adoption agencies?”

Frank swallowed. In truth, he had never wanted to know, but he had heard. Zita mainly handled all that. Those babies were like the dogs at the pound that nobody came for. He didn’t like to think about them, but they went somewhere. Of course they went somewhere.

“Yeah,” he said. Because what point was there in lying?

“That’s why I’m here,” said the kid, rain drizzling off him, eyes blazing behind the mask.

“I’d been meaning to get out of it,” he said, and wished he hadn’t. It sounded so lame, so cowardly. He sobbed. Christ, what a mess he was.

The kid cocked his head.

Frank heard it, too. The sirens coming up the hills.

“They’re coming for you, Frank,” said the kid. “Zita was barbequed on the loading dock of LF County Hospital an hour ago.”

He lowered his head like a penitent, surprised he was going to live to see the cops.

"Wally and Guff?" Frank asked.

"They liked to shoot bums down in the culvert in their off time," said the kid. "You should’ve screened your employees better. They’re how I found you in the first place. See ya, Frank."

Then he was up in the air and gone.

Frank stared into the sky for a long time, blinking at the falling rain, his shriveled hands in his pockets. It was cold, but the rain felt clean. He watched the smoking hole that had been his house, at the broken plumbing that spouted water in the rain like the torn capillaries of a severed arm.

He watched it till the sirens were wailing in his ears and the water in his driveway began to flash red.

 

THREE

 

Nico watched the serious-faced reporter in the Bogie raincoat and umbrella gabble on in silence on the news, fingers to his ear like he had M. on the other line and Blofeld in sight. Nico’s house was flooded with The Pet Shop Boys’ What Have I Done to Deserve This, rendering the television effectively mute, but he didn’t need to hear that artificial cadence to know that Pan had got his baddies somewhere up in Malibar.

More than a little bit of him thrilled to see the ruins of the porn star stilt home lying at the bottom of the rainy cliff, and it was only partially because of the line of work the owners had been in.

One of the dubious charms of living in LF was the near constant reminder of economic inequality. The distance between the opulent colonnaded homes of the haves and the slave quarter, roach infested flats of the have-nots was negligible. The sports cars of overpaid actors, the econoboxes of hardscrabble PA wannabes and the tool-laden pickups of bleary-eyed, overworked illegals all met at the stop lights, and they all ignored the same ruddy faced mental cases hopefully holding cardboard signs along the freeway exits.

Nico had been fortunate most of his life to occupy the rare and nebulous middle space somewhere between moderate success and catastrophic failure, thanks to a steady influx of residuals from his brief time as Slightly the Lost Boy, Peter’s right hand man on the hit show Peter `N Wendy, and a recent string of schlocky direct-to-video horror movies that had attained a second life in the streaming and rental market thanks in no small part to his previously mentioned appearances on several embarrassing celebrity drug rehab shows, and culminating in his fifteen-more-minutes-of-fame on Celebs under the Knife.

But this little-over-the-preposterous-LF-starter-home-ticket townhouse on a manmade lake in Mogera Hills hadn’t come without a price, one which he kept paying to this day.

He didn’t mean his inflated mortgage, either.

As the only kid with an actual British accent to be tapped for Perennial Studios Television’s breakout teen fantasy series very loosely based on Peter Pan, Nico had been kind of a precious pig on the set from the outset. Cast as the second-in-command of Peter Pan’s gang of Lost Boys and the best friend and confidant of the lead, life had begun to imitate art, as it often did in Hillywood. He had become the unofficial leader of his fellow second-tier costars. The dialogue coach had insured the other kids meant to portray nonspecific Commonwealth accents spent a lot of time listening to what he had to say, and they necessarily spent a great deal of time together.

The other Lost Boys had become his mates. There had been George and Jermaine Fokes, the black twins from Atlanta, Henry Traynor Jr., the youngest kid with the biggest laugh on set, nephew of a famous film editor, Mikey Lencher, the Waverly Hills boy from the Frosty Flakes commercials who had narrowly lost the lead role to Jim Cutlass and never let anybody forget it, and the quiet ‘new girl” Alica De La Pena who played Tiger Lily.

Jim, who played the titular role of Peter, had been one of these one-in-a-million Hillywood dream kids. He had come to LF a year before the casting call with his aspiring actress mother from somewhere unbelievable called Wheatfield, Indiana. Jim had only auditioned for the show at all because they were about to evicted from their Vista City flat and, Nico suspected, Ms. Cutlass was contemplating a move into adult films.

Jim had been naturally charming. Good looking, surfer-fit, with those big Elijah Wood blue eyes, clean skin, and floppy blonde bangs that the pervs who bought Tiger Beat for their nonexistent daughters sweated over.

Nico was really surprised at how long it had taken Barry Mezner to make a go for him.

How Barry Mezner had ever lasted as long as he had in Hillywood without getting busted was a mystery. Well, scratch that. It wasn’t really a mystery at all. Barry had friends, and in LF you could be Adolph Hitler and still pull in six and seven figure deals as long as you had friends.

Barry was a producer and the showrunner on Peter `N Wendy. He’d come to Perennial with the concept, mashed it with the teen romance approach and the soft focus look of the show that everybody emulated after the premiere, and he got top record producer Peter Hollis to wrangle his big discovery pop superstar Elton Ormond to record the theme song, which was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for fifteen weeks, in exchange for giving Hollis’ lovely daughter Cassidy the lead role of Wendy (a double coup on his part when it turned out the girl could actually act).

More importantly, he was a pedo. Maybe that was how he’d nailed the demographic appeal of the show so well. He knew firsthand what teen girls liked.

In the years since he’d left West Thurrock, Nico had met a lot of that type in show business. He knew the lingering, sweaty palm on the shoulder, the too-intent stare, the fervent, quiet tone of voice. He could practically spot a pedo, and Barry Mezner had rung his alarm from the get-go. He had one of those man-child faces. Overweight, middle aged, meticulously clean shaven when he should have grown a beard to cover his neck rolls, ridiculous pierced ear, and the kind of clothes a guy ten or fifteen years younger would wear, too tight in the moobs and belly.

Barry had worked his way through the cast the way a pedophile does, beginning with the extras who had no real voice and could be let go any time, and then, by the end of the first season’s production, moving onto the regulars because he simply couldn’t control himself.

Henry Traynor Jr. had been the first to bear the brunt of Barry’s sick attentions. He would drive Henry home from the set on nights when his editor father was working long hours on the latest Mossberg blockbuster, which was most nights, loudly telling everyone that since he and Henry Traynor Sr. were such old friends (they had worked together on the “70s hybrid martial arts western show Karate), it was no problem.

But it had been a problem for Henry. The kid had lost his big laugh not long after Barry had become his chauffeur. Nico had seen the spark go out in his big brown eyes.

But he hadn’t said anything. None of the adults had, so why would he? The show paid well all around. When Peter `N Wendy became a smash after the airing of its first season, Barry bought Nico a Porsche for his sixteenth birthday, slyly telling him it was a good starter car for a kid.

Success emboldened Barry. He moved on to the Fokes twins. With them, he told their parents he was grooming them for more adult parts, because with child actors, he said, you had to look always to the future. For them, he had in mind an action script he’d been developing for years, and could they make sure the brothers ate right and exercised a lot and kept fit? In the meantime, he’d take them around to gyms himself to meet with famous action stars like Anson Schwarzkopff, Paul-Marc Von Demme, and their trainers, and if the brothers or their parents voiced any concern about all the time they were spending with him, Barry just reminded them how hard it was for black kids to get work in this town, and how he was doing them all a favor.

The way he got to Mikey Lencher and Alicia De La Pena was, they had signed a contract stating they wouldn’t fraternize with their co-stars, but being young and full of hormones, and spending so much time together on set, that part of the agreement had naturally fallen by the wayside. Nico had found out much later that Barry threatened to replace them both on the show and sue their parents for breach of contract. What the two of them had had to do to keep all that from happening, Nico didn’t like to think about.

Nico had wanted to tell, but by that time, he had gotten into drugs. He’d pulled his groin in the flying harness during an FX shot on the pirate ship and the nurse had prescribed him Dilaudid, which he’d rapidly developed a taste for. She’d also seduced him upon subsequent visits, and gradually they’d begun doing cocaine together. With hindsight, Nico realized she had been part of Barry’s plan to bring him into the fold. Later, he’d seen her at one of his horrible parties, and the doctor too.

The Lost Boys and Tiger Lily all went to Barry’s parties. They were usually high in the hills, in just the kind of houses Pan had brought down tonight. Here, the cast and other underage hopefuls were basically made available to Barry’s friends, for any and every purpose they could conceive of.

And the thing about Barry’s friends was, as disgusting as Barry was, he was like the tip of a black iceberg. Barry’s various friends, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, famous entertainers, clergymen, and TV evangelists, they were the cold mass that hung beneath the dark surface, and Nico was thankful for the drug binges and the cocktails which made most of those parties a hazy nightmare half remembered. Sometimes the parties were huge affairs.

Sometimes, Barry delivered them to a single individual. On those times they took a helicopter, and were blindfolded like initiates on their way to some secret spy meeting.

Those were the worst. This sick fuck kept an accurate mockup of the quarterdeck of the Jolly Roger, the pirate ship from Peter `N Wendy. He’d play the show score over speakers and prance around in a fancy silver and gold mask and hizzoner wig, wearing a laced red Captain Hook coat with nothing underneath but white stockings and those buckled pilgrim shoes. They clopped on the boards like the Devil’s feet, or an upright jackass. He reeked of some awful cologne; he must have bathed in it like a teenager. Every place the bastard touched him would stink of it for days, no matter how much he scrubbed.

They were forced to wear their show costumes for this freak, and do whatever he commanded to him and to each other. These were the most nightmarish of Nico’s hazy memories of those days, the ones he had tried hardest to smoke, snort, and shoot away. He’d never told anyone about them. Not even Jimmy. But they lingered always, the memories of that hook hand, real, not rubber like the prop on the show, the marks he made with it on their bodies in places where it wouldn’t show. Sometimes Nico would dream of that garish figure advancing on him, plucking up one of the thick belaying pins from the ship rail and giggling that high, breathless girlish giggle as he saturated it in goopy lubricant from a sticky, hair-covered tube.

The first time the helicopter had lifted them from that hellish, unknown playground, Barry had warned them all not to tell, promised them he would kick them right out the chopper door if any one of them ever said anything.

After the third season finale, Barry took Nico aside and told him he wanted Nico to do him a favor. Like Mikey and Alicia, Jim and his pretty co-star Cassidy Hollis, who, as Wendy, graced the cover of very newsstand entertainment magazine, had begun to develop feelings for each other.

“I’m not sure if they’re fucking or not,” Barry had confided in him. ““I want you to make sure they are.”

Barry wanted Nico to slip them barbiturates, get them ‘in the mood’ and record it. He said their mutual friend, Captain Hook, wanted to meet them, and it could mean good things for Barry if he helped make it happen.

That was when Nico had realized to his misery that Barry’s friends had become his friends.

At nineteen, Nico had been the oldest kid on the show, and even with his Ralph Macchio boy looks, Barry had reminded him every day, jokingly of course, that he was getting too old.

But Jim and Cassidy, they were only fifteen.

As principals, they’d been shielded from Barry’s goings on, both by Barry’s assistants and by Nico himself. They were mostly uncorrupted. Cassidy had dreams of being a serious actress, but she was no shrill prima donna. And although Jim was constantly being worried over by his failed actress mother, who made more and more demands on his behalf, he was just a kid from Indiana, and really had no idea what Barry was putting them through, and certainly no expectation that he was in anybody’s sights.

By this time, Barry had carefully crafted Nico’s image as a party boy on the set. Jim would shake his head and grin whenever Nico took the Lost Boys out on the town, and he suspected Cassidy outright disliked him. She had been on the Hillywood scene just a little longer, and maybe she suspected what was going on. But Barry had worked his magic on her. She thought Nico was the bad influence.

But Jimmy, poor deluded rube that he was, thought of Nico as a good friend. His best friend, he told him one day over the craft table out of the blue.

“You’re my best friend out here, Tink,” he’d said.

It had been after a particularly stormy appearance by Jim’s mother on set. She had loudly decried the action figure deal Barry had negotiated with a toy company for her son’s likeness, and while Nico and Cassidy knew it was all his high-strung mother, most of the crew looked at Jim sideways and rolled their eyes during her meltdown. Her behavior reflected badly on him. Jaded as they all were, they thought she was his mouthpiece.

Nico didn’t remember what exactly had happened. Jim’s mother had been ushered off set with Barry, and Jim had gone to the craft table. One of the service people had slighted him somehow. Nico didn’t really remember how. The server had piled on the condiments on his sandwich or something, and when Jim had sat down and taken that first bitter bite, he’d noticed.

Instead of pitching a fit, he had put his hands to his eyes and sobbed quietly.

“Hey mate,” Nico had said. “Don’t worry about that hash slinger. I know it ain’t you.”

He’d handed over his own sandwich.

“You’re my best friend out here, Tink,” Jim had said.

Nico hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.

“I told you. Stop calling me Tink.”

Jim Cutlass really was a boy scout. He didn’t know a thing about the subtext Barry was drizzling into the show. He had gotten the job at twelve. All he knew was that he was thrilled to be playing Peter Pan. He and Cassidy were the only two on the show that had actually read the book, besides Donald Renoir, the Shakespearian trained old queen who played Hook and loudly bitched about the banality of the role whenever possible.

When they did personal appearances, Jim was the only one to stay in character. He answered the littler fans’ questions like he was Peter Pan. This had annoyed some of the cast and crew, who thought Jim was overdoing it, but Nico had known it was for real. Jim liked being thought of as a hero by fans, and even though he’d become aware of the nature of all the female fan attention by the second season, it never really went to his head.

And that crazy wild crowing he did always brought the house down. He had brought that to Barry himself. It was something from the book, he said, a kind of battle cry Peter Pan did when he kicked Captain Hook’s arse. The TV critics called it the Johnny Weissmuller call of the new generation. It had even been sampled in rap songs.

Nico had done a lot of soul searching when Barry had come to him with the demand to bring Jim and Cassidy in to the real Captain Hook. Soul searching of course, meant drugs. He’d taken enough to overdose. He’d wanted badly to die rather than to do what Barry wanted.

They’d hushed up the incident to save the show from bad press, and Barry had visited him in the hospital with a fist of flowers.

When they’d been alone he’d said, “Don’t think your little limey ass is gonna get off the hook that easy. The offer still stands. You make it happen or you’re out.”

Out.

That should’ve sounded like paradise, but Barry’s out meant more than extricating himself from the slime he’d been wallowing in. It was baseball umpire out. It meant exposure. It meant he wouldn’t be protected anymore. He’d become Barry’s fall guy. He’d be thrown to the media, called the black sheep of the show, the Devil that had corrupted his poor fellows, kicked out of Hillywood. Burned.

It meant no more sex, not even the kind he wanted. It meant no more drugs. No more money. No more expensive gifts.

Maybe it meant more than that even. Maybe the ‘hook’ was getting his brake line cut and wrapping his Porsche around a pole, or taking that blindfolded dive out of the helicopter. Barry’s friends were like that.

Then Jim had come to see him. The only one from the cast who ever visited. He’d brought him a shredded old copy of Peter Pan.

“You get 50K an episode and all you bring me is a ratty old book? Thanks a lot, mate,” Nico had said jokingly.

“Well, you said you were always too busy to read it. I figured you’d have a little time now that you’re laid up.”

“Where’d you get this old thing? You spot it lyin’ on a bin on the way over?”

“Nah,” Jim had said, grinning easily. “That’s my own copy. It’s pretty old. My dad used to read it to me when I was a kid.”

Nico had stared, not sure of what to say.

“I can’t keep this, mate.”

“No, you can’t. It’s a loaner. I want it back. Tell you what, have it read by the time you come back to set. I’ll take it back then.”

“Cheers, mate.”

Nico had tried to read the damn thing, but it was kiddy pap. Or maybe it wasn’t, but his mind was too caught up with Barry and his friends and that awful Hook bastard to ever get anything worthwhile out of it. What room did he have in his life for make-believe?

So he’d decided to put something real into it.

The day before his release, he’d opened the back page and started to write. First he filled one side of the blank page after the last chapter, then the other side, then the inside back cover. He wrote it all out in a cramped little hand. His confession. Everything he had done for Barry. All the parties he’d roped the other kids into, the drugs. Everything but Captain Hook himself. That, he couldn’t bring himself to write about.

Then he’d vomited into the bin.

The morning he woke up, he was surprised to find Barry there seated at the foot of his bed.

“Rise ‘n shine, Slightly,” Barry had said, smiling.

The book had been nowhere to be seen.

Barry never mentioned it. He was just there to coach him on his first post-hospital press conference. Nico had listened to the man tell him what to say and what to steer clear of. It didn’t matter much. The media in attendance had all been paid to avoid the sensitive issues. All the while he had thought about the book.

In the end, Barry had told him to get dressed. That he’d be waiting downstairs.

The nurse didn’t know what he was talking about. There hadn’t been any book on his nightstand when she’d gotten there in the morning.

He’d wondered about it all through the brief press conference, smiling vapidly, cracking wise, blinking at the camera flashes.

And in the limo afterwards, Barry had said, “Great job, Slightly. See you on set Tuesday. Oh, and don’t forget that little thing we talked about.”

“Did you ever finish it?”

The voice came from above, pulling Nico from his memories like a thrashing trout from a river bottom.

There was Pan, crouched in the open skylight, dripping rainwater onto the kitchen tiles. It was Jim Cutlass under that mask, but somehow, when it was on, he really was Pan. Not Peter Pan either. Not the imp with the baby teeth from the book or the smiling, smoldering eyed hottie from Peter `N Wendy either.

Just Pan.

Nico was standing next to the bookshelf, a copy of Peter Pan in his hand.

“Why don’t you ever use the goddamned door?” Nico said, putting the book back on the shelf, picking up the remote and killing the Pet Shop Boys, who were now well into Paninaro. “Somebody’s gonna see you.”

Pan slid through and slammed the hatch shut behind him, descending lightly to the wet floor as Nico got the mop from between the refrigerator and the stove and began to soak up the water.

He pulled off his peaked cowl, and there was that same clean-skinned face, those same floppy blonde bangs, those same big blue eyes. Well, maybe the eyes weren’t the same. Not quite. But everything else about Jim Cutlass was the same as the first time they’d met, ten years ago.

“You disappeared back at the hospital for a minute. Where’d you go?” Jim demanded.

“Had to find a lavvie, didn’t I?”

“If that’s all it was.”      

“What else would it be?”

“If I can’t depend on you, I can’t use you.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want to be used anymore, Jim. You ever think of that?”

“I wanted to bring Zita in,” Jim went on.

“You got the baby back, didn’t you? And I saw on the telly you nicked her boss, too.”

“One of her bosses. Frank wasn’t the only guy she brought kids to.”

“Yeah, but you got another one back from the house before you pushed it down the hill. And you took out them two bum killers, so you still came out the hero, didn’t you?”

“You know that’s not why I do this. If it was, I’d be on there talking to the news.”

He threw one green leather thumb at the TV, which could be heard now, and Nico naturally glanced at it.

“Up next on Vulpes 11…Capes!” the narrator was saying, as flashes of the number one hit drama show flashed across the screen. Damn it. Where was the remote?

“Listen,” Jim said, slapping of all things, an old Rolodex down on the counter. “I need you to go through here and look for familiar names.””

He went to the fridge, opened it, went clinking in the crisper for a beer.

Nico took the moment to rush into the living room and plunge his hand into the cushions, feeling for the television remote. The sofa was always swallowing the damned thing, savoring it like a bit of candy tucked into the jaw.

The fridge slammed, and Jim cranked the top off a beer with a hiss, tossed the cap into the bin.

“I need to know if any of them ever worked for Perennial, if you knew them from…Jesus Christ, Tink. Are you even listening?”

Nico straightened. He was too late anyway.

There was Jim’s old flame Cassidy Hollis on the screen. Person Magazine’s ‘Sexiest Woman Alive.’ Twenty-five years old and the hottest star on any network, heading the hottest show, the PwP drama Capes, about the daily lives of a team of superheroes. She played Diana Hale, also known as The Amazon, a tough-talking investigate reporter by day and a warrior princess smashing supervillains by night.

And there was Jim, standing stricken in Nico’s kitchen, watching the TV, a morose, love-struck, junior high kid, though he was twenty-five himself.

Nico abandoned his search for the remote and moved to switch the telly off.

“Don’t,” said Jim.

He watched the intro. Watched her move through it, smashing through walls, jumping out of planes, passionately but reluctantly giving into her attraction to the show’s billionaire bad boy dark vigilante hero, Nathan Renner, The Nightjar, to the delight of millions of breathless viewers, as all around four-color good guy and extraterrestrial Clint Kane, AKA The Immortal, looked on longingly. Personally, Nico preferred the porno parody.

Why did Jim put himself through it? It must be hell, Nico thought. To be stuck in a kid’s body, watching your leading lady all grown up.

When the triumphant, soaring, but heartbreaking theme song ended (also by Elton Ormond, perhaps a nod to Peter `N Wendy, because after all, Capes followed the same format and was basically catering to the nostalgia of the adults who had grown up with that show), and the show broke for advertising. Nico turned it off.

Jim stood there with his beer, looking kind of ridiculous, like an underage kid at a Halloween party catered by his cool older brother. Why the hell did he wear that get up? Why the green spandex? He looked like a fool.

“You know,” Nico said, chewing his lips. “I could…get you a hooker, Jim. I know a few that won’t think twice. Won’t…you know…ask questions.””

Then he was gone. Up and out into the rainy night, the skylight slamming shut behind him. He had taken the beer with; drinking and flying. And his small body, for all its toughness, couldn’t handle even a smidgeon of alcohol.

“Ah, shite,” said Nico.

 

FOUR

 

The rain was driving, beating him down, but whatever it was in Pan that gave him lift, was stronger. He soared through the boiling clouds, heedless of the tempest. Pan was stronger than he looked, and tougher. But he couldn’t lift his heart—Jim Cutlass’ heart—out of Nico Tinkham’s living room. He left it there on the kitchen floor, like the real Peter Pan had left his shadow behind in the Darling nursery.

Scientists in some lab somewhere had a Latin name for the gene that had granted him the power of flight. He didn’t know what it was. Most people just called it the Chimeric Gene. Father Eladio called it The Power.

“The Power’s a gift,” he said. “Make no mistake about it. If it comes, it comes to you when you need it the most, and in that instant, I believe your mental and emotional state defines the manifestation.”

Father Eladio’s power had come to him as a young priest just out of the seminary. He had been assisting in the Midnight Mass at a little church down in Bella Vista, about five miles north of Mexico, when a gang of chulos had burst in and attempted to drag a young woman fresh over the border out of the pew.

They had got her as far as the parking lot where their pickup trucks were waiting when Father Eladio’s power had come upon him in the form of a pair of brilliant tropical bird wings and what he referred to as his Glare of Righteousness, basically a burst of golden energy that emitted from his eyes. He had thrown open the doors of the church and saved the girl that night, leaving two men smoldering in their burned out trucks, the others groveling on their knees beside their gold-plated, diamond-encrusted guns, thrown down in superstitious terror.

“I had been in the midst of the Transubstantiation, the most sacred part of the Holy Mass,” Father Eladio explained, “and when I saw that woman in the arms of those men with their guns, I thought of the wrathful servants of God, like the ones who turned Lot’s wife to salt and slew the first born of Egypt. I was, in the moment, filled with outrage, and the Power made me Angelus.”

Father Eladio’s Power had been triggered by a selfless need to protect another. Jim’s Power had saved only himself.

It had been the Tuesday after he’d last visited Tink in the hospital. The morning of Tink’s release, he had come to his friend’s room and found him sleeping. Not wanting to wake him, he had settled in the chair beside his bed, and picked up the old copy of Peter Pan he’d given him to read; the same copy his late father had always read to him.

His mother had hated Peter Pan. She’d never really been a reader at all. Dad had read to him all the time: The Jungle Book; The Hobbit; Winnie the Pooh; but his favorite had been Peter Pan. He would fall asleep to his father’s voice and dream of flying.

His father had been a Marine pilot. He really did fly. One day though, when Jim was nine, a somber man in an officer’s uniform had arrived at their home and his mother had slammed the door in the man’s face and slid down to the floor and wailed as the doorbell rang again and the man called her name through the door.

“Mrs. Cutlass? Mrs. Cutlass!”

He had never seen his father again.

Flipping through the book that morning, Jim had smiled at the old stains and creases. Jim’s mother used to scold his dad for folding the pages to mark his place. She’d come home with bookmarks with clever sayings and popular characters on them, but his dad never used them, and they sat in Jim’s desk drawer.

At the back of the book though, had been an inscription on the previously blank pages that hadn’t been there before.

Reading it had brought Jim’s world crashing down, almost as hard as when his mother had told him his dad wasn’t coming home and they were going to California.

He had loved playing Peter Pan. When he had got the part, he had felt like it was fate, or his father watching over them somehow.

His mother had always warned him to be careful, that everybody on set was out to use him, especially Barry ‘Goddamned’ Mezner, but he’d stopped taking his mother’s advice shortly after that blow up about the toy line in front of all the cast and crew. He’d made up his mind that Barry was a nice guy, that Tink and the other kids on the show were all right.

Mostly he concerned himself with Cassidy Hollis. They studied together, rented movies together at her parents’ house (because they couldn’t really go out in public anymore without getting mobbed), and now lately, even kissed a few times when nobody was looking.

Barry had caught them holding hands once, and he’d thought they were busted for sure, seeing as how it was in their contracts not to fraternize. But Barry had just smiled and told them it was all right, not to worry about it.

The writing in the back of his book, Tink’s writing, made it plain why.

Barry Mezner was a monster. He was one of many monsters who’d been abusing Tink and the other kids in the worst ways. He had done things to them Jim couldn’t even fathom.

And now Barry wanted him and Cassidy.

He’d stormed out of the room, sick to his stomach, brain burning from the descriptions of the things Tink had written. He took the book with him. He’d wanted to tear out the filth that was written in it and flush it down a toilet. It didn’t belong in the book his dad had read to him.

But he knew it was all true.

He felt horrible for Tink and the others. How had he never noticed?

And then he felt angry. How many other people knew about this? Who on the crew knew?

He decided to find out.

He knew it was going to change his life, but he didn’t care.

He had the driver take him first to Cassidy’s house, but she and her parents were out. He didn’t even think of bringing it up to his mother. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. He loved her. Knew she wanted what was best for him. But she was irrational. He knew she wouldn’t be able to handle it. She’d have a nervous breakdown, forbid him from going back to Perennial.

And that wouldn’t do.

He wanted to confront Barry in front of the crew and the whole cast. Then he’d know exactly who was in on it. He’d be able to tell, just looking at them. This book was his Mousetrap.

He planned to do it the Tuesday when they got back for filming.

He knew what it meant. It meant the end of the show. The end of his career maybe, and the careers of his friends.

But fuck it.

If this was what Hillywood was about, he didn’t want any part of it. He’d made enough money off it to never work again, if he was smart. And the other kids? Well, he’d take care of them, too. His mother could have a conniption over it. He didn’t care. He’d get one of those parental divorces if she didn’t like it. Fuck Hillywood. Fuck Perennial Pictures, and fuck Barry Mezner in his fat neck.

His only worry was that he’d never see Cassidy again.

He decided not to call any of the other kids and talk about what he was going to do. They’d be scared. Maybe they’d tell Barry. Maybe they wouldn’t back him. Tink would. Tink had wrote him this letter, hadn’t he? Tink had known he would read it.

Should he tell Tink his plan?

No. No, not even him. Tink was a drug addict, and as much as Jim loved him, he knew he couldn’t fully depend on him.

Let the whole cast and crew, those that didn’t know already, find out what kind of crawling thing Barry Mezner was firsthand.

He spent the three days before the shoot practicing what he would do, what he would say. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Wouldn’t take anybody’s phone calls. His mother worried over him, but he wouldn’t say what was the matter.

It was such a heavy burden, though. Like a stone shirt weighing him down.

Finally, at three AM Tuesday morning, he had collapsed beneath it. He was so nervous. This would be the first real thing he ever did in his life. Acting a hero for all those little kids, for the girls, none of that meant anything. This was real.

He called Cassidy.

It went right to voice mail. Her phone was off.

He told her everything. Or as much of it as he could in the time it took for the voicemail to cut him off. It all came spewing out of him, like it was his own confession. In the end, he told her what he meant to do. Told her he loved her.

If the last part went through, he never knew.

Tuesday morning finally came.

The driver showed to take him to Perennial and his mother came with.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” she cooed, brushing his forehead.

“I’m fine, Mom,” he snapped, recoiling from her hand.

If he had known what was going to happen, he would never have done that. She’d never been the best mother, but she hadn’t been the worst, either. She had done all she could for him in the only way she knew how, and all in the shadow of his hero father’s tombstone. God, he had been a terrible son to her.

He walked onto the set like a bull.

In his mind he had rehearsed this. He would call for the entire cast and crew to gather around.

To his surprise, he found them all together already, the crew looking bored, orbiting about the actors in the center, who were crowding the empty craft services table and chatting lightly.

The Fokes brothers, Henry, Mikey, Alicia, Donald Renoir, Amy Matheson, who played Tinkerbell, already in costume, the director, Jeremy Keene, Caleb Burnett, who played Smee, laughing with the guy who played Gentleman Starkey, whose name Jim could never remember.

And Tink.

“Oi, Jim,” Tink had said, the first to notice him and his mother.

“Where’s Cassidy?”

“You ain’t heard? Appendicitis, mate. She’s all right. She’ll be out for the first couple shooting days though…”

He pushed past him, went to the middle of them.

One other person was missing.

No, there he was.

Barry came into the room, leading a kid in a Pardo’s Bakery uniform carrying a cake. The cake was a big green crocodile.

He was singing Happy Birthday. ‘Happy Fourth Season Peter `N Wendy `N Friends” it said in pink icing on the leering crocodile’s belly.

Jim squeezed his fists, dug into his palms to keep them from trembling. How could the sonofabitch smile and joke like this? He looked around at his cast mates, noticed for the first time their flat eyes, even as they feigned smiles. How had he never noticed there was something wrong? Jesus! For Barry to be urging them to celebrate, how could they stand to be around him?

As Barry set the cake down, Jim reached into his bag for the book with Tink’s confession.

His mother brushed past him, cackling loudly.

“Oh, isn’t that sweet, Jim?”

Sweet?

He wanted to wrap his fingers around Barry’s fat neck and throttle him to the floor.

A hand touched his arm.

It was Tink.

“Jim…”

Barry sunk a knife into the cake, a coup de grace, right across the grinning crocodile’s throat.

A coup de grace for all of them, it turned out.

The fire, the heat, the sound. It was like the whole world abruptly ended.

Everyone around the table had probably died instantly, except for Tink, who’d been standing directly behind Jim.

So it wasn’t quite true that the manifestation of his Power hadn’t saved anybody. Maybe it had saved Tink. Burned him terribly, but saved his life.

“Your Power began like a father woken up from sleep to a burning house. It protected you. Got you out of danger,” Father Eladio said.

What it had done was fling him a hundred or more feet into the air, through the roof of the soundstage, and sent him hurtling eighteen miles away.

The impact of smashing through the ceiling and the concussion of the bomb’s explosion had knocked him out. He awoke hours later, shivering in the cold, whipping night wind coursing around a church steeple, which he was circling slowly like a child’s lost balloon.

St. Juan Diego’s.

Father Eladio’s parish.

Finding himself a hundred feet in the air with no memory beyond the flash of light and fire from the explosion, Jim shrieked in abject terror. He remembered thinking he was dead, that his soul had departed his body and was just floating around on the breeze.

The hunchbacked Mexican priest heard him screaming and thrashing, scaled the bell tower and called to him, talked him into a kind of calm.

“I don’t know what’s happening!” Jim blubbered uncontrollably. He was covered in soot, dirt, and blood, and his ears still rang.

“You’re flying, kid!” said the priest. “I’m gonna throw you a line. Catch it, hold onto it. I’ll pull you in.”

It was only after the fourth try that he had realized the priest wasn’t poor with a lasso, but totally blind.

Down in the rectory, swaddled in a vestment and drinking hot cocoa, he watched Father Eladio settle into a chair, take off his dark glasses, and set them on a table. He was in his late fifties, his crow black hair shot with silver. Jim saw with a shiver that both his eyes were glass, the irises angled in weird directions.

“Are they straight?” Father Eladio asked.

“No,” Jim said quietly.

He shrugged and put his dark lenses back on.

“How’d you lose them?” Jim asked.

“A guy named La Luz pulled `em out. Oh, two years ago now.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Meanest chimeric I ever trained. So far.”

Chimerics. The word took a long time getting through his addled brain.

“What? Why would you train chimerics?”

“’Cause I am one,” he said. To show it, he unbuttoned his shirt, much to Jim’s discomfort, until the beautiful parrot red and yellow wings unfolded from his back. Not a hump at all.

“Holy shit, you’re Angelus,” Jim said, forgetting for a minute his own situation. “I know you from TV.”

“Sure, kid. I know you from TV, too. Kind of a closet fan, you understand. A priest watching a show liked Peter `N Wendy, some wiseass is bound to start rumors. Thought the FX were pretty good. Didn’t realize you were a chimeric.”

“A what? I’m not a chimeric. I’m just…”

“You mean you’ve never flown like that before?”

“Not without an FX guy on a crane, no. Never. You really think I’m a chimeric?”

“I’m about 98 percent sure you’re not a pigeon.”

That made Jim smile.

“I thought Angelus died fighting some supervillain.”

“When La Luz took my eyes, TCA terminated my contract. It was cheaper than physical therapy. They’d been looking to get rid of me ever since I started the War Gods.”

TCA. The Chimeric Agency. They were a government program introduced by a left leaning administration three or four years ago. They officially sponsored four-color types like Angelus, put a good face on PwP’s. Now every state had one. Solar-powered Phaethon in sunshine-y Florida, The Brown Thrasher in Atlanta, named for the state bird. California, up until two years ago, had had Angelus, though a lot of the state’s atheists had formally protested the choice. Jim had seen Angelus on t-shirts, his winged halo symbol on ball caps. Now they were vintage artifacts. California’s new star chimeric was a good looking guy called A-Frame with water-based powers and a flying surfboard. Kind of goofy, really.

But the War Gods. That he’d never heard of.

“The what?”

“They started out as a kinda youth ministry for chimerics getting caught up in the gang life down in the barrio. I used my TCA pay, set up a center, found guys like La Luz, and girls too, taught `em a little bit about their culture, got them interested in the greater good. Or tried to. Sometimes you can’t take the barrio out of the man. Now the War Gods are in Quinton and Fulcrum and Cienaga, damn near every prison in California, and moving on down into Mexico. All because of me. Sometimes good intentions go awry.”

“They killed Barry.”

“Barry? Friend of yours?”

“No. No friend of mine.”

“Why would the War Gods want him dead?”

“Not the War Gods. A friend of Barry’s must’ve killed him.”

“Some friend.”

He told the priest everything. About Barry, about the kids on the show, about the sick joke of the bomb in the crocodile cake. He wasn’t a Catholic, but there he was, giving a kind of confession.

“Sounds like somebody found out you were gonna drop the dime on Barry, and decided to get rid of everybody. Was anybody not there that usually was?”

“No. Only Cassidy. She was in the hospital, having her appendix removed. Everybody else…”

And then it had hit him, that his mother was dead.

Losing his father had been unreal. One day, he had just left and never come home. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen him. A lopsided grin under his mustache, his own reflection in his father’s aviators as he stood in the open doorway, his rucksack over his shoulder, hair freshly buzzed by his mother in the kitchen the night before, looking more like Goose than Maverick, though he hated when anybody told him that.

“See you when I see you, Jim. Love you, bud.”

But his mother. He hadn’t said goodbye. Hadn’t told he loved her. Her life had ended in a flash of fire and she was gone. His life too had ended, in a way. His previous life, the life of childhood was gone forever. He was operating without a safety net now, and there was only death below. For all her irrationality, for all her shrillness, he hadn’t realized how much he had depended on her. He had no arms to fall into now. No heart beside his own to lay his ear to and take comfort from the beating.

#

Pan cleared the storm. He glided through the cool mountain air, up to the bright white Hillywood Sign on Mount Grant. So pristine and untouched by the filth of the city below. A big white lie, lording it over a city of lies.

He perched up on the second L and guzzled down his beer, shivering, watching his breath roil out.

Father Eladio had taken him in, convinced him it wasn’t safe for him to go back and announce himself. Whoever had blown up the entire cast and crew of Peter `N Wendy would try again if they knew he’d survived.

He learned that Tink had lived too, and against Father Eladio’s warnings, he’d gone to the hospital, floated outside his room in the burn unit, and watched him struggling to live, a poor stiff mummy suspended in traction, under layers of bandages.

Jesus, if only he had been smarter. If only he’d taken this whole thing to the police instead of trying to be a hero about it.

They interviewed a tearful Cassidy, who thanked God she had nearly died from a ruptured appendix which had spared her from fiery death alongside her cast mates. She’d been put under police protection during the investigation.

Jim Cutlass was declared dead. There wasn’t enough left of the cake delivery boy, an undocumented worker, to identify, so he’d been buried in a grave in Hillywood Forever alongside the twins, Alicia, and Donald Renoir, under a fantastic black marble sculpture paid for by fans, depicting the whole cast as their characters. Jim Cutlass became mentioned in the same breath as Phoenix and Ledger. His face started popping up in those schmaltzy Nighthawks-type portraits, jerking soda for James Dean. Forever Young, said the epitaph, and they played Alphaville at the funeral. Elton Ormond made a rare public appearance to see the boxes lowered into the holes. He recorded a tribute version of Peter `N Wendy’s Theme and donated the proceeds to the families. Perennial Pictures rebuilt the soundstage and renamed it the Lost Boys Stage. MTV set up a suicide hotline for depressed fans.

It was all too much for Cassidy. She didn’t attend.

The cops never made any headway. They confined their investigations mostly to the copious fan mail, tracking down the odd hate mail sender and finding mostly sweaty basement dwellers and religious types who had taken offense at the undercurrent of sexuality in a show about teenagers and fairies. For a while they suspected an ex-cast member, one of the Indians who had been written out as Tiger Lillie’s betrothed towards the end of season one, but the guy was a surfing instructor in Honolulu and about as far from belligerent as you could get.

Then, about three months after the funeral, Peter Hollis died in a car accident, driving his Maserati right off a cliff in Malibar, apparently high as an angel on cocaine. Internet speculators started tying him to the bombing, saying Barry and the studio had refused to renegotiate Cassidy’s contract or let her go from it so she could pursue a movie career and Daddy had gone all Corleone for his little girl. They started saying she had never even had an appendectomy, even when the medical record of the operation somehow wound up online.

Cassidy was in therapy for years before she made her comeback on Capes.

So was Jim.

But his therapy was of a different kind. Father Eladio taught him to use his powers in secret, introduced him to other unregistered chimerics; the kind that could give and take a mega-level beating in a reinforced gym (the one he’d purchased to train the War Gods), who could teach him to really box, not just swing wild. They went into the mountains and practiced flight. He didn’t have the strength of Hero or Pecos, but he learned to take down a tree with his momentum. He tested the upper reaches of his Power.

It was six years before he was ready.

He started small, because he didn’t know where else to start. He helped Father Eladio weed out the coyotes who took the money of immigrant mothers and then sold them and their children off once they reached the north. He wore a disguise, and Father Eladio taught him not to be seen by the authorities, but to make an impression on the bad guys. Chimerics that drew attention to themselves didn’t always like what they got. TCA would come to you friendly, sure, with promises of a new life and a cushy government job. But not every chimeric could be an A-Frame or a Phaethon. Some, he said, went straight to the labs to see what made them tick.

And no one was going to put a kid chimeric on the cover of Time.

Because ten years later, he was still the same kid Father Eladio had found floating around the bell tower of his church like a wounded bat.

“Will I always be like this?”

“You can’t tell with the Power,” said Father Eladio. “It’s like I told you. When it came to you, when it bloomed in you, it coded itself with what was in your mind. All this Peter Pan stuff. The flight, the speed. And yeah, it looks like youth. Could’ve been worse.”

“How?”

“Thank God you weren’t on Yo Gabba Gabba or something. You might’ve wound up a big, orange, warty cyclops.”

Still, it was hard not to feel pitiful at times. He had looked five years younger at the time of the accident. It was the kind of Johnny Depp boon most actors dreamt of. But now he was five years away from thirty and still looked thirteen.

Except, Tink had told him, for his eyes. The Power couldn’t stop what was behind them from aging.

What he’d seen in his four years as Pan had weathered him behind the eyes.

He had set out to find who had sent the bomb to Perennial, but it was impossible as an outsider to gain access to his old life again.

He’d seen kids on the streets that suffered the same as the Lost Boys had, and they filled him with rage. The teen runaways leaning into cars under the overpasses and showing their skin out on Hillywood Blvd. The kids doing the unspeakable for a bit of junk to pump into their arms to drive the awareness of their own miserable existences out of mind just long enough to get them to the next hit.

He did what he could to help them all. He beat abusive Johns to a pulp, until they couldn’t remember their own names let alone the kid in green who had thrashed them. He waded in a greasy garden of neon lit misery, uprooting the weeds he found, and finding little else but more of the same night after night.

Until he’d found Tink again.

It had been in the back alley of some Hillywood club. A ratty individual had stumbled from the back door with a loud bang and four leather-clad weightlifter types had followed him out and commenced to stomping him into the pavement.

Pan had dropped down and flattened them with as many punches, turned, and seen his old friend Nico Tinkham—literally his old friend—wasted and drawn, greasy hair flecked with early gray.

“What the fuck are you supposed to be?” had been Tink’s greeting.

He hadn’t been able to stop himself from pulling back his cowl and revealing himself.

“Tink! It’s me!”

Tink had fainted dead away.

Jim found his wallet in his pocket with his address, a shitty studio apartment, overpriced as anything and bare of furniture but for a mattress on the floor.

He’d sat there with him in the dark, listening to him breathe as he had in the hospital, grimaced at the extent of the scars smudging his face and body, the network of bruises and holes tracing the veins in the pit of his elbows, between his toes.

He’d turned the TV on, just in time to watch the broadcast of Celebs under the Knife that changed Tink’s life for the better.

Jim’s life too, for he’d moved in with Tink a few short months after that, getting his meager possessions from the basement of St. Juan Diego’s Church of The Holy Power and moving them to the spare room closet of Tink’s new Mogera Hills townhouse, bought with money from the offers he got shortly after he refused plastic surgery for his face on national television. If anybody ever asked, he was Tink’s nephew visiting. But nobody ever did.

Hillywood had chewed up Nico Tinkham, and Jim Cutlass too.

Pan bit back.

Tink’s Hillywood contacts had led him to the baby napping ring, to Zita and Frank and his two bum killers, and a half dozen other child pornographers, drug dealers, kidnapers and traffickers before that. It was a war, and like any other war, it didn’t really end, except for the casualties.

So far he had avoided the limelight.

But how long could he keep it all up?

He had almost taken Tink up on his offer tonight. That was why he’d fled. Was he ready to delve into that world, just to appease the man pacing like a bull inside this boy’s body? What then, would separate him from the human vermin he’d used his Power against up until now?

Tink hadn’t meant anything by it, he knew. He was honestly trying to help. He’d existed in a decidedly more carnal world than the sacristy of a Mexican church for the past ten years.

He thought of Cassidy more often than not these days. She was the last woman he had ever touched, and they’d both been fifteen at the time. Jesus, if she ever saw him, ever found out he was alive, what would that do to her?

Was the savagery with which he punished the criminals he took down becoming his only pleasure?

He didn’t like to think about it.

But he wondered how long he could maintain.

 

FIVE

 

His Christian name was Billy Lee Birkenstock.

Blowback was the name he’d given himself.

They said he was a chimeric, but he thought they were full of shit. These days, you get to be the best at something, all the pussies who couldn’t cut it whisper the word behind their hands and shrug off their own failure. He wasn’t any goddamned chimeric. He didn’t have any freak goddamned gene.

He’d been a top shot with a rifle since the time he could lift one. His father, an ex-Marine, had taught him during dry spells between binges right off the back porch of their place in Clinton, Kentucky. He’d put a .22 bullet through the eyes of a squirrel in mid leap between two sycamores when he was five years old, at about 150 yards. His daddy had attributed it to his having loaded the rifle with rat-shot. In his way, his old man had been as much of a pussy as the suits who told him he was a chimeric. Booze had softened him, dulled his edge. Nothing like the hard-ass in dress blues in his graduation picture on the wall.

“Here, boy,” he’d laughed, the beer breath beating down on young Billy Lee, “try that with a man’s rifle.”

And he’d thrust his M14 into his tiny hands, the magazine heavy enough to break his bare toes if it fell.

He’d had to prop it on the porch rail, and the recoil had knocked young Billy Lee on his little ass, but he’d blown the torso of a nesting sparrow clean away, and he and his dad had gone over and found the bloody wings and head lying perfectly arranged in the grass.

His daddy had slapped him upside the head.

“Don’t do that again.”

It was all the ‘good job, son’ he’d ever get from his old man.

The Marines took him from Clinton when he was eighteen, and he earned his MOS 0203 and Scout Sniper School training, which was where the chimeric whispers started, till he shut them up with his fists. He trained with SAS and IDF snipers and no one ever outshot him with a rifle. He had a photographic memory for detail and instant recall. He won every Kim’s Game he ever played.

Admittedly, with a pistol, he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. But with a rifle, he was as infallible as if he were pointing his own finger.

Envious shooters weren’t the only ones whispering about him. He got recruited by a black ops arm of the Company out of the Scouts pretty soon after rotating back from the ‘Ghan to Pendleton with 200 kills attributed to him, including a 2,700 yard shot at high wind that had popped the eye out of a Haji pointing an RPG down at a column of pogues and broken Hathcock’s record.

From there, the real work began. The Company gave him training the DI’s at Pendleton could never imagine. Following his culmination, he was inserted all over the world to assassinate various ‘contrarians’ and ‘enemies with designs retrograde to the desires of the United States.’

Over his career, he saw the steady proliferation of PwP’s (persons with powers) and naturally found a few of them in his sights, applying the same hand-eye accuracy that had enabled him to blow a sparrow in flight out the air with an M14 when he was five to soaring, speeding, shapeshifting humans. After killing his fourth on the roof of a casino in Mumbai, he was recalled and informed by the higher ups that of the seven field operators of his rank, he was the only one who had managed to eliminate chimeric targets. In fact, he was the only one to have even survived the attempt. Naturally, the Company wanted to find a way to prepare the six incoming replacements for Anti-Chimeric missions.

Specifically, they gave him free rein to develop a program funded by the Department of Chimeric Defense, which they named Dreamcatcher; an elite, clandestine, Anti-Chimeric wetwork team with emphasis on sniper training.

Up till then he’d favored a .408 CheyTac Intervention for AC missions, with an Advanced Ballistics Computer package built into a visored helmet of his own design, since he disdained the use of a spotter given the independent nature of his work.

He opted for one of the new Precision Guided Firearm XS1 systems for his trainees; essentially, wired smart-rifles equipped with the same sort of built-in microprocessors employed in drones and tanks. With the firing solutions being calculated at lightning speed in the scopes, it should have been an idiot-proof system, even for shooters not up to his own exacting standards.

But after nine months training the so-called best shots in the world, culled from the special forces of ten NATO countries, he still saw them get taken apart one at a time by a rogue speedster in Honduras.

It turned out smart guns just couldn’t do what he did.

The Company told him as much. The Dreamcatchers were a failure and they were scrapping the program. Now they wanted whatever was in his blood that made him special. They wanted his chimeric gene to replicate a cadre of super snipers.

He insisted he wasn’t a chimeric. Hell, he killed chimerics. He had grown to hate the bastards. Flying over all their heads in their four-color costumes, lording it over men like him, men like his daddy had been before the booze, getting all the glory while his father, a decorated veteran, had been shunned for his service, for being ten times the hero any of these costumed jackasses were.

But the order had been given. Submit to blood testing and experimentation by TCA, father a team of labrats, or get burned.

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.

He shot toward him, and Pan slipped north, going as fast as he could go.

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.

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 ballpark, 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 been 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…”

There was a pause and they both started chuckling.

“You’re joking,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe a little. I’ve mostly gone digital.”

“Like most people.”

“But don’t be such a stranger, Cass. It’s been a lovely visit. Lovely.”

“Yes. Nico, I…I wanted to say, I’m really happy to see how you’ve turned things around. I know…I was not supportive of you. Everything…everything with Barry I mean.” She said his name in a whisper, like he was Voldemort.

“Eh, you was just a girl, weren’t you? I mean, we was kids. How could you know, yeah?”

“The night before…I never told anyone this. Um. The night before…what happened.”

“The bomb.”

“Right. Sorry. Jim left a message on my phone. He told me everything. I mean, about Barry and the other kids. I didn’t get it until way after I got out of the hospital you know, for my appendix. By then, it was all over. I was so very wrong about you. Part of the reason I didn’t go to the funeral was that I couldn’t even look at you.”

“Well, after the bomb, a lot of people couldn’t look at me,” Tink chuckled. “Nah, look. It’s all right.”

“I was so ashamed!” she gurgled, crying now. “Sometimes I think…I was responsible. I mean, if only…I had gotten the call. If only I had told someone.”

And then the sobbing was muffled. Jim eased himself down the stair and peeked. They were in each other’s arms. She was crying into his shoulder, her long blonde hair tumbling down the middle of her back. She was wearing a long gray leather jacket, and from the bottom, her calves swelled and tapered into elegant ankle boots. Tink’s chin was over her shoulder, and his eyes flitted up to the stairs and frowned sharply at him as she lifted her head and parted.

He slid back out of sight.

“Like I said. We was just kids, luv. Don’t torture yourself. That arsehole Barry’s dead in his grave. Now look, you better shift it before somebody runs your license plate and the vultures start circling. We’ll be on the front page of the National Snoop. ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”

“You’re not a beast, Nico.”

“Ah, go on. You can’t tell, but I’m blushing. I swear.”

She laughed.

Her boots chopped to the door.

Rattling as it opened.

“And don’t forget about the gig. I’ll make sure I’ve an opening in me schedule.”

“I won’t! Look, here’s my card. That’s my personal number. Call it.””

The door shut.

Jim flew into Tink’s room and went to the ceiling. He lay there, staring out the window, watching her walk down the front to her waiting car, a silver Audi.

Tink came up the stairs, looked in his room, turned all around, and spotted him.

He leaned in the doorway.

The Audi turned on the street and drove off.

Jim could still smell her in the house. Lilacs. Different from what she’d worn when they were dating, but underneath, still her.

“Oi!” said Tink. “Get the fuck off my ceiling before I get the broom. Always leaving footprints up there. What’s the cleaning lady to think?”

Jim dropped down and craned his neck, watching the silver car till the taillights glowed and she turned off.

“I bet she fucking forgets,” Tink muttered, going downstairs.

 

EIGHT

 

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been…”

“Never since your last confession,” Father Eladio said through the screen. “You pray like a damned Protestant. What the hell are you doing here, Jim? You’re going to get us both into a lot of trouble.”

“It’s been three weeks. Are they still watching you?”

“Well, I haven’t seen anybody,” Father Eladio quipped. “But I would assume so, yeah. Don’t you watch the news?”

Lance Lattimer was on trial. It was the second time this year a high profile case bearing on public interest in chimeric disturbances had gripped the nation. Like the Anchor City case involving that old chimeric-killing Marine and the unfortunate incident that followed with the Red Wraith, the whole Tantrum case was being televised, too. It was sickening. Lattimer was a mass murderer, yes, but who could tell just how much control he had when he became Tantrum? He definitely had no idea what was happening to him in court. He was swimming in tranquilizers, propped up on a dolly behind the defense table, chained and covered with machineguns throughout the proceedings. His arms sprouted intravenous tubes. One fed him a steady dosage of catatonia-inducing drugs, the other was poised to pump a lethal payload of sodium thiopental into his bloodstream at the touch of a button. As they marched the tearful family members of his victims past him, his eyes bobbed in his skull like neglected beta fish. When a woman spit in his face he didn’t even flinch, and the prosecution said it was evidence of his lack of remorse.

“I thought they forgot about me,” said Jim. “The Brown Thrasher’s back in Atlanta and A-Frame’s in court in case Lattimer busts loose again.”

“They want you to think they forgot about you. That’s how they work, chivato. You were doing good keeping under the radar, but in case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t exactly a lot of blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boys hanging out in this neighborhood. What’s the matter? You need something?”

“No, I mean, not really. I guess.”

“Don’t tell me you’re risking the heat just ‘cause you miss it.””

Jim bit his lip. The truth was, he did miss it. He hadn’t even gone back for his suit in the past two weeks. He’d been going stir crazy in the house all day with Tink. They had both been climbing the walls, snapping at each other. Then Tink had got the call he’d been waiting for. He was shooting a guest spot on Capes. Some kind of villain role, that if it went over well, could end up a recurring part. He’d been doing sixteen hours the past two days, and Jim had gotten bored and fled the coop, at first only going down to the Army and Navy to buy a throwing knife to replace the one he’d lost, but eventually taking the train down here.

“Look, Jim. It’s a bug, I know. But think it out. You went from El Niño Eterno to a lot of cholos and pornographers to Pan on the national news. I’m not sure who wants your culo the most. TCA, the Rogers’ owners, or child protective services. Believe me, they’ve all come around here asking about you.”

Jim snickered.

“I’m not kidding, man. People take their baseball pretty fuckin’ seriously in this town.”

Then the blind priest laughed a little himself.

“Alright, look. Say five Hail Marys and meet me in the basement before somebody sees you.”

“What’s a Hail Mary?”

Father Eladio hissed and passed the rectory keys through the screen to him.

#

Fifteen minutes later Father Eladio had doled out the last reconciliations to his penitents and ushered the last of the bums dozing in the back pews out onto the street, pressing money from the poor box into their gritty hands and making them promise to spend it at the flophouse and not the corner liquor.

Jim sat in the basement that served as the parish rectory, at a little card table, sipping a Modelo.

“Hey, who told you you could drink my beer, man?” said Father Eladio as he came shuffling down the steps and shut the door behind him. “Somebody walks in they’re gonna bust me for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

The light from the naked bulb made sunbursts in his dark lenses.

“What happened to the fridge you had down here? This tastes like piss,” Jim said.

“Little Bonifacia Gutierrez had her baby and she couldn’t afford the formula. It was my shower gift, along with a breast pump.”

“TMI, Father,” Jim grimaced.

“Facts of life, guero,” said Father Eladio, feeling for the open case, sliding out a beer, and coming over to the table to sit across from him in his vestments. ““Everybody’s got to grow up.”

“Every boy but one,” Jim intoned.

“Cut the crap, man. Why’d you really come?”

“I just needed to talk to somebody.”

“I ain’t just somebody.”

“Well, I can’t get into a bar to talk to a bartender, so that leaves you.”

“So spill it.”

“Cassidy came by our house the morning after Chinatown.”

“Cassidy Hollis? From Capes? Your lady?”

“Yeah.”

“I like her. On the show, I mean. The writing’s kind of bullshit though, isn’t it? She find out about you?”

“No. No, she didn’t see me. But it was like…she said she had an idea it was me. Pan was me.”

“The girl’s in touch with her heart. Que malo! That’s hard, man. So what do you think?”

“I think I’m exactly the kid I appear to be if I’m still thinking about her this way.”

“Except she’s thinking about you, too.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Which is fucked up.”

“It is.”

Jim swallowed and took the plain business card he’d taken off the fridge where Nico had pinned it under a magnetic banana.

“I’ve got her number here.”

He’d even programmed it into his phone. Coded the contact name, just like he did all the others in the list. Tink was Slightly. Cassidy was Wendy.

Father Eladio sniffed. Then he reached across the table and slid Jim’s beer bottle a few inches away from him.

“This isn’t really my area of expertise, but I listen to enough TV to know drunk dialing’s a bad idea.”

“Is that all you’ve got? At least Tink offered to get me a prostitute.”

“Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree here with that,” said Father Eladio raising his hands. “Let’s be real. I can’t really offer you advice on this, Jim. I doubt this situation has ever arisen in the whole of human history, so when you figure it out, let me know so I can cite precedent for the next poor cabron that comes along.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I could tell you to follow your heart, if you want. But I don’t think that’d be what you want to hear. I could tell you God has a plan, but the way you pray, I don’t think that’d be very comforting either. I could say, sometimes a man or a woman has a path laid out before them, a greater purpose than what most people feel. And then the things other people take for granted, like love, seem a monumental, unattainable treasure denied to them.”

“So basically, superheroes go alone,” said Jim, reaching for his beer and slipping Cassidy’s card back in his pocket.

“Actually I was talking about priests and nuns, but sure, okay.”

They drank their beer, smiling.

“There’s the kids too, Father,” Jim said after a minute. “How many are getting hurt while I lay low?”

“Don’t develop a messiah complex, kid. You could drive yourself crazy thinking that way. I mean, what about the children down in Juarez? Or Manila, or Hackensack, New Jersey? Evil’s everywhere, and you can’t be everywhere at once all the time. There are guys out there doing the same job you’re doing. They were doing it three weeks ago and they’re doing it now, and they’ll be doing it three weeks from now, God willing. You won’t be able to help anybody if they catch you, right? Just keep it cold. You’ll be back in it eventually. Listen, I did ask you, have you been watching TV?”

“Yeah, but there hasn’t been anything about me. I found some old Peter `N Wendy fans going apeshit on Reddit, but…”

“Shit, you do have a messiah complex,” said Father Eladio, shaking his head. “Don’t Protestants teach the Beatitudes? It’s the meek who inherit the earth.”

“Well, I mean…”

Father Eladio held up his hand.

“I’m kidding. I meant have you been watching Lance Lattimer’s trial?”

“Oh. Yeah, off and on. It’s kind of a circus. He’s all drugged up, just sitting there while people cry and scream at him. I almost feel sorry for him.””

“Maybe you should. Have you heard about the bullet yet?”

“Bullet?”

“Yeah the defense brought it up this morning. They found a high-caliber bullet wound in Lattimer’s upper arm.”

“Well, there were a lot of cops shooting at him.”

“Yeah, except what happens when you shoot Tantrum? You were there.”

“Well, usually nothing. The bullets just…sort of melt.”

“Right. So if there’s a bullet wound in Lattimer, and nobody shot him after you broke a bat over his head…”

“Then…he must’ve been shot before he changed?”

“Right again. And why is Lattimer so pumped-up full of juice? To keep him calm. Because when he’s agitated, Tantrum comes out.”

“I don’t get it. So somebody shot him and he changed? It was an accident?”

“I don’t think there’s any question it wasn’t an accident. Lance Lattimer was a pendejo, we know. Insider trading, cheating on his wife, Wall Street prick. Okay. But if he was as outright evil as people have made him out to be, we would’ve seen a lot more of Tantrum in the last two years since New York. I think he’s been on the run, hiding. Trying to stay calm. And a man who keeps something like that in check, he might not be a good man, but he’s not an evil man. He’s not a supervillain.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.” Jim emptied his beer. “So, Jesus, somebody shot him and he lost it. Was it a mugging or something? Robbery?”

“Nobody holds up a guy with a bullet like they pulled out of Lattimer. The defense says it was a high-powered rifle round. They found it in the pavement out in front of Federal Station. Had to use a Geiger counter to sniff it out. It had radium in the tip.”

“Radium?”

“Right. That’s how they found the evidence of a wound in the first place. Radium bullet slows a chimeric’s regeneration, if they have it. So, who shoots Lance Lattimer with a radium bullet from a high-powered rifle?”

“I don’t know. Who?”

“I don’t know, either. But I do know that back when I was Angelus, a TCA chimeric named Ursus was killed in front of the Montana State Capitol by a bullet just like that. Six months ago we might have said it was that Hathcock guy they put on trial, but he’s dead now. And a bullet like that never turned up again, as far as I know, until now.”

Jim peeled the label off his Modelo thoughtfully.

“So why would somebody shoot Lance Lattimer with a radium bullet? They had to know who he was.”

“And what would happen if they didn’t shoot to kill. Snipers don’t generally aim for the arm.”

“Maybe somebody spoiled his shot,” said Jim.

“Or maybe the shooter wanted Tantrum to come out and play. Maybe the same guy who popped the Red Wraith after the Hathcock trial incident. Maybe another player, who knows?” Father Eladio drained his beer and plunked it down. “Anyway, that’s what the defense is saying now.”

 

NINE

 

It was dusk when Father Eladio got up to prepare for Saturday evening Mass. He encouraged Jim to stay, but Jim begged off. He didn’t get much from church and the Mass was in Spanish anyway.

He pulled up his hood and lowered the brim of his cap as he walked out into the street, upstream of the tide of elderly Mexican ladies fingering rosary beads and tired-eyed men in mesh back caps and cowboy hats and wailing brown babies.

He saw the big guy in the white Stetson and smile pocket shirt on the corner, one boot heel propped up against the lamppost he was leaning on. Those boots were size 20, easy, and the cowboy’s bucket jaw and linebacker shoulders made him look like a tall tale come to life. He was big enough to reach up and bat the streetlight with one huge hand, probably put it out like a candle. He was no LF cowboy with a curled snakeskin hat and pastel blue and black bowling shirt. His huge boots were scuffed and worn, his hat sweat stained, the brown Western shirt as un-ironic as a wad of Skoal. His skin was a shade lighter than the neighborhood might’ve produced, but with his black hair and dark eyes he might’ve passed unnoticed, except for the fact that he was heads taller than anybody else in a four-block radius.

And the big fellow picked him out of the parishioners as easy as Jim had made him.

That boot slid down the lamppost and the heels started clopping heavy as Clydesdale hooves on the concrete.

Jim’s first thought was to duck back into the church, but he didn’t want to bring Father Eladio any more trouble, or risk a destructive fight around so many people.

He knew the cowboy was a chimeric, and suspected who he was.

Pecos. TCA’s own homegrown-aw-shucks-t’weren’t nothin’-ma’am-Texas-good-old-boy. Wade Sixkiller was his name. A part-Cherokee who’d been discovered wrestling bulls in a little traveling rodeo outside El Paso at the age of eighteen. So he hadn’t gone home to Texas after all.

Powers. He didn’t know Pecos’ powers exactly. Just knew he was supposed to be pretty strong and tough, and he had once brought down a Cessna with a cable steel lariat he didn’t appear to be carrying.

Jim turned and quickened his pace down the street as Pecos reached the curb.

“Hey, ‘pard! Hold up a sec!” he boomed over the heads of the Mexicans headed for church.

Some of them looked at him, the women and girls lingering.

Father Eladio appeared in the door of the church and called out, smiling.

“Is that Wade Sixkiller I hear? Didn’t realize you were a Catholic, Wade!” And then, in rapid Spanish, he fired off an announcement to his parishioners, the only word of which Jim caught was ‘Pecos.’

Suddenly everybody took an interest in the big cowboy. They mobbed him, the little kids running up and hugging his tree trunk legs, the girls crowding in close to sneak a feel of his hard pectorals, the men breaking into gold-capped smiles and coming in to slap his back, to touch him for luck, or just to say they had. He was a celebrity. A bona fide superhero.

Jim smiled but didn’t look back, as he heard Pecos mutter.

“God dang it, Angelus.”

“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.

That hook flashed always in the back of his mind.

Jimmy had told him of the baby rapers and pedos he’d taken down. Told him in detail of what he’d found in their dens. Maybe the relation of his deeds had been meant to give Nico comfort, or maybe it had been meant to salve the guilt he felt for everything that had happened. It was strange to think of it as survivor’s guilt, but there it was. Something like that drove Jimmy, drove Pan. But Jimmy had never found that bastard with the hook.

What had gotten him thinking about it?

The set?

He’d been overjoyed to be on a professional set again. They filmed Capes at Perennial, right across from the Lost Boys stage where he’d left fifty percent of his skin blackening on the walls all those years ago. He’d missed that bustle, that feeling of importance walking on a quality set in costume. Oh, he had always joshed with the crew, treated them like equals, but in his heart, there was that unmistakable lordliness of celebrity. Empty, he knew, but a pleasant illusion.

And Capes was professional. No one-man band, fly-by-night, one-camera setup Gutmunchers affair. Everything by the numbers, yes sir, no sir. Assembly line of makeup artists, real clappers, cameras more expensive than his house.

And there was Paul Thurbee AKA Nathan Renner AKA The Nightjar, beloved daytime soap star turned Person’s Sexiest Man Alive two years running, and his bubbly popstar girlfriend Jolene, chatting up the Emperor of Pop himself, Elton bloody Ormond, all in posh red velvet jacket and black silk shirt, leather pants and on every ring a diamond. He was holding on, was old Elt. He’d changed his look oh half a dozen times since he’d done Peter `N Wendy at the height of his record-breaking $125 million Malcontent tour. Now he favored wide dark shades, a pencil thin mustache, and long, perpetually wet black hair. He was pale as a bloody vampire and Nico had almost bowled over some poor PA to get to the craft table where the three of them were standing.

“Oy!” he’d gushed. “Smashing! Smashing to see you all.””

Paul Thurbee had done a double take at his approach, the prat. About to compliment the makeup department till he realized who he was, no doubt.

“Oh, hey. Nico Tinkburn!”

“Tinkham!”

Prat.

“Tinkham!” said Thurbee, turning to his girlfriend. “This is Nico Tinkham,” he said to Jolene, knowing it was him that needed the introducing and not her. “You know, from…”

She smiled and put out her hand.

He took it in his and gave it a light squeeze, still grinning.

“From…,” he repeated, flashing that glamour girl smile that hid her vapid.

“Ah, Gutmunchers?” he suggested.

“No no no,” said Thurbee snapping his fingers. “What’s the name? You know. The show! With the…”

“Peter `N Wendy,” said Elton Ormond in his unusually high voice. Some people said he took something to keep it that high, or had had something done.

He reached across the craft table and Jolene and Thurbee sort of faded away.

“No no no,” Thurbee said, still snapping his fingers.

“It’s nice to see you again, Nico,” Ormond squeaked, so quietly Nico had to lean in to hear him.

He noticed the plastic surgery scars up close, which the hair and the glasses were meant to hide. He was stretched thin, old Elton Ormond, desperately trying to stay young and dynamic in a business being overrun with vapid cunts like Jolene.

Nico had never met Elton Ormond before. The mega-star had visited the set of his self-proclaimed favorite show once when he hadn’t been there, and Elton Ormond had taken Jimmy and Cassidy out for ice cream and a movie or something, at his own private residence, Second Star Ranch, that half-mythical three-thousand acre wonderland of weirdness the general public loved to speculate about but almost nobody had ever seen.

Jimmy and Cassidy had told them it was like a private amusement park with a zoo, a roller coaster, carousel, even a bloody water park all in this secluded valley somewhere in San Bernardo.

His hand was slight, but burning somehow. Warm, like it had been in his pockets. Or maybe that was just Nico’s starstruck imagination. He had been a fan of Elton Ormond since he was a kid. His mum had played the old Ormond Boys records, and pointed out his soulful wailing over the synchronized voices of his older brothers. Elton Ormond had grown up in showbiz. He’d been a star at seven-years old. He was a legend.

“Mister Ormond! I…I’m a huge fan! This is so brilliant!”

Elton Ormond had said it was good to see him…again? But of course he meant Peter `N Wendy. Elton Ormond probably didn’t watch shite like Gutmunchers and reality TV.

To his surprise, Ormond’s free hand went up and touched the burned side of his face. “Oh, you were Slightly. I’m so sorry.””

That strange gesture had given him a chill.

Ormond must have seen the look on his face, because he excused himself and withdrew. Put his hands in his pockets and flitted off to his nearby security guards, who folded in on him, obscuring him from view.

“Fuckin’ weirdo,” muttered Jolene, reaching for a miniature wiener in a tiny croissant covered in little black poppy seeds.

“Watch your figure, babe,” Paul Thurbee urged as she stuffed the whole thing in her mouth.

Nico retained that strange feeling the rest of the work day. He’d floated on through rehearsal, been cued several times during shooting, visibly annoying the director and the other actors. Somebody whispered he was still on drugs.

He wasn’t, but he’d stopped for some on the way home.

Now he was staring at this little ski slope of oblivion, and smelling his hand.

The hand that had shook Elton Ormond’s.

The smell of Elton Ormond was still there, even after an eleven-hour shoot, a lunch break, and a furious scrubbing.

It wouldn’t come off.

He put the flats of his hands on the counter and stared hard at the cocaine. It was white as the chalk cliffs at Dover where his mum had taken him once on holiday. It was pure as his first snow. He wanted to bury his face in it, to fill his nostrils with that pleasant, heady burn.

To burn out the reek of Elton Ormond’s cologne, which he hadn’t smelled since he was a kid.

Because it turned out he had met Elton Ormond before.

He had.

The Emperor of Pop.

More like the grand high wizard of Bernie’s pedo set.

That high voice. How had he never made the connection before?

It made him want to retch. He was still in a cold sweat. He had been a zombie on set. His true big break, and he had blown it because his stomach was roiling, trying to reject a poison that was ingrained in his blood like a vampire virus.

A poison Bernie had put there.

But who was the real poisoner? Bernie was just a lackey.

Who was the head vampire?

He had to tell Jimmy.

He had to tell Pan.

He stared at the mound of white.

Snort first, and then the phone? Could he possibly do this with a clear head?

Then something bright caught his eye in the skylight.

Something heavy landed on the roof.

Then the roof was gone, and so was the cocaine mound, blown away by the sudden rush of outside air as the heavy, bright something dropped through the ceiling in a rain of debris, smashing the tiles with its weight, gripping him in its cold metal grasp.

Then the kitchen filled with fire and Nico Tinkham was truly flying for the first time in his life, soaring straight up into the orange sky at something like 70 kmph, cradled in cold arms of silver and gold.

He couldn’t even scream against the rush of wind.

 

ELEVEN

 

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