Emergence (29 page)

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.