Emergence (16 page)

As for what was happening, an anonymous man offered cash up front plus whatever merchandise the kids could get away with if they were to rob a predetermined place in the Market Valley district on a certain day and time. Serpentine didn’t know anything else beyond that there were a bunch of street kids who’d been part of their group who’d manifested in the last few weeks. She was
pretty
sure they’d been in on the offer, too, and she’d given me their names and where I might find them normally. Wasn’t much to go on, but if I made a liberal attempt at connecting the dots, it made me think the man I’d seen on the roof was involved in the overall scheme, whatever it was.

Now all I had to do was wait…again.

#

And I did, but the next attempted robbery happened earlier than the rest, before the morning traffic cluttered the streets. I’d zeroed in on the likely area by checking the other locations out on Google Maps, and it seemed the others had formed a basic upside-down
L
shape—or a
7
if you wanted to be technical—which made me think it might form a nice tidy square around 15th and Church Street with the fourth attempt. I was right, but that only made me more cautious as I heard the ruckus of a blatant robbery erupt below.

If I could figure out the pattern, the police had to have done so as well. They might even know about the man paying the kids, so I expected a much quicker response this time. I was pretty certain, however, that they didn’t know about the man in the mask.

And sure enough, he peered over the edge of some Church Street tenements about two blocks south, poised where he could see the latest crime unfold and follow the progress of some unfortunate chimeric street kid.

I circled around fast as I could, doing my best not to be noticed, and to get to him before he ran off again. There was no certainty he didn’t have super speed or teleportation or some power that would help him get away, but I didn’t have any choice. I had to confront him blind. Whatever his powers were, I’d just adapt.

Focused on the drama, he didn’t notice me until I was right on him. I thought about slamming into his back, but not knowing his powers kept me from doing so. If he wasn’t resistant, I’d end up paralyzing or killing him; instead, I tried to creep up on him, putting me in range should he try something.
Try
being the operative word.

“If it isn’t the
hero
from the other day. The one who battered the poor rock boy into a sad heap of pebbles. Quite the performance. Didn’t think you had it in you when you first showed up, I have to admit,” he told me, turning to face me. The skull grinned while sirens pealed in the distance. “Your presence here suggests you’ve caught on.”

Good thing he couldn’t see my face or he’d know I hadn’t caught on to much of anything beyond him playing some role in whatever was going on around here with these idiot kids. “Guess we’re not all as lost as the cops.”

“An interesting epitaph,” he said. “Smarter than the police, yet still dead.”

A chill ran through me at hearing him speak calmly about murdering me, his tone so casual that he could have been ordering a cup of coffee. While I’d known it was a possibility, part of the business of playing hero like I’d told Serpentine, I’d never had anyone openly threaten to kill me before…and sound so
sincere
about it. My confidence drooped a little, but I stood my ground. Still, my hands trembled; I clenched them into tight fists.

“Not so bold when your opponent isn’t a child, are you…
Whiplash
?”

The use of my name caught me off guard; then I remembered shouting it out to the crowd before I ran off, plus it was right in the title of that sweet YouTube video of me being kinda bad-ass. Maybe even in the local news, but it still threw me for a loop to be
known
. I scrambled to keep him talking, to give myself a moment to recover. “Nice to see I’m leaving an impression. Now, how about you tell me who you are so I can stop calling you Skull Face Guy.”

He obliged. “Monger’s the name, but you’ll be calling me by another soon enough:
Master
.” The conviction in his voice was terrifying, forcing me into fight or flight mode, adrenaline surging through me, vision blurring.

So I attacked.

Let’s face it, I’ve never been real good at running. My Spandex-covered ass could attest to that fact.

There wasn’t much of his eyes to see, but I don’t think he expected me to come at him so quickly. White showed behind the black holes of the mask, and he scrambled to avoid me.

Too late.

I hadn’t needed my full speed to deal with Stone, and I’d held back to keep from burning out against the rocky behemoth. There was none of that caution this time around, and Monger hadn’t known what I was capable of. My fist landed center mass. Something
crunched
beneath the blow, his breath streaming out, and Monger took flight, hurtling from the roof, arms swinging wildly. An acrid, chemical stench lingered in the air, stinging my nose and stirring up memories. I ignored it, keeping my eyes on Monger. The adjacent tenement building stopped his momentum, a meaty
thud
resounding just before he bounced and toppled headlong toward the ground three stories below. His head hung limp and he fell in silence.

Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when my conscience kicked in.

I spent a split-second weighing my options. Here was a guy who’d threatened to kill me minutes before and was using children for some scheme I still had no clue about. He deserved whatever happened to him at the end of the fall. He
deserved
to die.
Right? Didn’t he?

I leapt off the roof with a growl.

He might deserve it, sure. It wasn’t my place to make that judgment. I darted down alongside him and grabbed his arm, waiting until we were just a few feet above the ground. I changed our angle, shooting us off horizontally down between the buildings, my power absorbing most of our momentum. I let him go then. He careened to the ground as if he’d only fallen a few feet, bouncing through the rubbish that littered the alley. Monger let out a pained groan after he’d come to a stop, and I let out a relieved sigh he wasn’t dead.

“Where’s all that shit talk now?” I pulled him up by his shirt and thought about clocking him again.

“You should have let me fall,” he coughed, wet and reedy, then slammed his shin into my knee. It buckled under the force, my power not there to protect me. I stumbled to the side and caught my balance against the wall. My leg throbbed.

Monger scrambled to his feet and held something to his mouth, wisps of dark smoke spilling through his fingers. It lasted only a moment before he pulled his hand away, the same scent as before reaching my nose. He came at me right after, as if he weren’t hurt at all, arms extended to grab me. I couldn’t let that happen. To stop moving was death.

He neared and I ducked, driving an elbow into his ribs as I cannonballed past. Monger hissed, and when he spun to come after me again I spied blood staining the white of his mask around his mouth. I surged left to avoid him, but he must have predicted that.

His fist
thudded
against my cheek and sent me tumbling through the air. It was a hammer blow, and I was grateful to my power for saving me from it. Still, he’d redirected me in mid-surge, and that scared me. The power he possessed was godly.

I shifted direction before he could get his hands on me, darting upward while he closed, leaving him behind to spew out a line of curses that would make a sailor blush. Another surge set me down on a balcony a couple stories above the alley where I could catch my breath. My leg shuddered, pain radiating from the joint. It was hard to stay on my feet without holding the railing.

“What’s the matter, Whiplash?” Monger shouted. “Lost your nerve so soon?” He struck the wall. Pieces of masonry exploded and the balcony swayed under me, my leg threatening to collapse. He laughed mockingly, the sound filling the alleyway and echoing about.

I’d said I wasn’t good at running, but I’d always been real good at trying new things. He struck the wall again, but I wasn’t on the balcony to feel it that time. A surge sent me careening straight up into the air, where I spied red and blue lights flashing and closing in on our area. A second surge and I sprang over the rooftops, away from Monger. I kept surging from there until I found my way home.

Inside, the sliding glass door locked behind me—the illusion of safety is important—I collapsed on the couch and cried until I could find the strength to hobble to the bathtub and soak away the pain that made my leg damn near useless. After that, I swallowed a mouthful of ibuprofen.

There weren’t enough painkillers in the world to make me feel better.

FIVE

Evening rolled around and, to my surprise, I felt a little better. Only a
little
, though.

After the long, scalding hot bath, more ibuprofen, and enough ice to lower the ambient temperature in my apartment by a couple of degrees, I was able to walk without crying. I whimpered a bunch, mind you, but I didn’t cry again.

My leg was one solid mess of red and black from the calf up to mid-hamstring. It felt as if someone had taken a bat to it. Just looking at it hurt, and I shuddered every time I did, wondering how much damage Monger could have done to me had I not been surging when he’d punched me. There hadn’t been much room for him to build momentum with the kick, yet he’d nearly crippled me. Imagining the possible damage set my head to swimming and my heart to thundering. He could have followed through with his threat to kill me with just one blow.

Just
one
.

The newscaster on TV reported about sniper attacks on chimeric victims in Anchor City, said something about the murder of an old marine, then segued to talking about the day’s drama in Port Haven and the DCD’s response to it. I watched dumbly, trying to ignore my leg. Evidently, no one had seen Monger and me going at it, but there was plenty about a fourth chimeric in as many days robbing a check cashing joint and a Walgreens ATM to boot. One of Monger’s kids had apparently gotten away, despite the local DCD on high alert and arriving much sooner than the last three times.

I grew tired of listening to the guests prattle about chimerics. Aisha Cordell, of course, came on screen and added nothing to the discussion except for her usual ‘look-what-we’ve-become’ crap. I stabbed the off button on the remote. Wonderful silence filled the room. I didn’t need to hear a so-called
expert’s
opinion on this mess. The architects of our new evolutionary track had told me directly.

Well, maybe
directly
was misleading.

They phoned it in from the past.

Kind of like that guy on the History Channel with the crazy hair claiming everything we couldn’t explain in the world was done by aliens. Well, in this case, he was right.

I dozed off a little, lucidly remembering waking up in the hospital after the plane went down. The stress of the crash had decoded my abilities, and while I couldn’t remember what happened or even how I’d ended up outside of it, as Hero claimed I was before it went down, I
do
remember perfectly the ‘voice’ inside my head.

It was cold and distant, the words coming to me through the ages, from the dawn of humanity as it would tell me. For all its insanity, there was a sincerity to it I couldn’t deny. There was no doubting it. The voice washed over me and numbed my pain at the loss of my family, my mom and dad, little Nita, soothing me so I could hear and understand its missive.

We chimerics—a term coined by humanity after the first of us came online—were the progeny of an ancient race of beings: aliens, truly.

The Dahhnathra
.

Possessed of a means to fold space, they were travelers, explorers. Their voyages had taken them far from their homeland and had brought them in contact with many other beings across the universe. Sadly, most of those they encountered were cruel and driven to destroy that which they did not understand, that which was not like them.

When the Dahhnathra discovered Earth, a planet whose offspring were barely in their infancy, simple, weak, and vulnerable, they became fearful these helpless creatures might be visited by the intergalactic and more warlike species. So, the Dahhnathra embedded a trigger in our DNA, a kind of a genetic time bomb, within humankind, those that populated Earth way back when, at least. It was kind of a gift, meant to prepare us, to circumvent a slow evolution, so that we might have a chance should cruel beings stumble across us before nature had time to evolve us.

This was the message. The voice of something otherworldly, explaining my purpose to me. The reason for my new existence. But, just like we always do, humans are screwing the pooch.

Whereas our powers were gifted to us to save humanity, to preserve our world against an inevitable enemy invasion from space, we’d yet to see an alien, had yet to encounter anything but empty space in our countless years of screaming into the void.

Despite the voice that spoke to each and every chimeric as they manifested, despite the trials and tests and experiments that proved over and over that chimerics were a different breed of human—
Humanity 2.0
—the world buried its head in the sand of denial. Here we were, right back to where we started: fighting one another on our tiny, inconsequential planet, while the dangers of the universe loomed.

A sharp knock startled me, pulling me from my drowsy musing. I hadn’t been expecting anyone. My pulse raced, and I pulled myself to my feet, and then I heard a key in the lock. I groaned.

Steve.

The door eased open. “You here, babe?”

I flopped back down on the couch with a grunt. There’d be no running away from this like I had Monger. “Yeah, I’m here.” One day I’d have to take that key away from him.

I heard the cheery smile in his voice and immediately felt bad for thinking that. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t a good one, either.

“Cool,” he said, shutting the door and coming over to where I sat. “I was thinking maybe we could—” He caught sight of my face and froze, mouth working soundlessly until he could force something out. “What the hell happened?”