Emergence (26 page)

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.