Emergence (30 page)

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?”