Emergence (55 page)

I half turned and took a step, preparing to ascend, when I saw her out of the corner of my eye. One moment she was glaring at me from her grandma’s rusty patio chair, the next she was a faint blur, and then I felt a sledgehammer blow to my ribs.

Despite months of combat hardening, I was a novice back then when it came to checking collateral damage. We demolished two fences, a wooden shed, an elderly Latino woman’s fastidiously trimmed herb garden—just missing the woman herself, thank heaven—and a recently-stolen Yamaha V-Star cruiser, all before we ended up in the middle of 20th Avenue.

That was from one punch.
One
.

Clearly, little Viv had some pent-up rage issues. A guy like me, a chimeric who could shrug off small arms fire without even trying—despite what people think, a salvo of 9 mm Lugers still feels like an angry swarm of bees—had become her target, like it or not. So, instead of launching her off of me and into the air with a double heel kick, I lay there and took it.

“You don’t…”
Punch
. “Get…”
Punch
. “To walk…”
Punch-punch
. “Away!”

Viviana sat on my chest and her small sledgehammer fists came down in a staccato flurry. Right around the fourteenth or fifteenth punch she started to do some real damage. My lip split. My teeth bounced in their sockets. The next punch
felt
like it embedded my left eyeball into the back of my skull; I sure hoped it hadn’t as that would be a bitch to fix. Despite her size, the girl was no lightweight. All that unrestrained fury drove her powers to heights I suspect she didn’t even know she had. How could she? Unless the girl had been out in the local rail yard poking her knuckles through steel-reinforced train cars. Shit. Maybe she had been.

After two dozen blows, my entire upper body was buried nine or ten inches deep into the fractured road, making one hell of a pothole, so I was about to yank her off me when she just stopped, one fist in the air, mascara streaking her face in fresh wet lines. She shook and sobbed and fell forward onto my chest. I realized car alarms were sounding off and dozens of oglers had gathered, a crowd of folks in suits and dresses having just emerged from the gospel church to our left.

I couldn’t see out of my left eye, reached up to find it was swollen shut. I almost chuckled; instead, I put my arms around the kid in a familiar way and let her cry a bit.

#

<
Typical. Reckless. Heedless. Not a thought given to innocents…>

I cocked my head at Doctor Legato.
What was that?

“And you seem to have a history of this type of behavior.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Type of behavior?”

“How do you reconcile that whenever you intervene against—”

“Against what? Criminals?”

“Let’s say ‘
offenders’
…“

I scoffed, but she went on. “…you tend to leave a wake of destruction like the aftermath of some bad
Godzilla
movie.”

“First of all, Doc, there is no such thing as a bad
Godzilla
movie. Second, I’m the one who tries to prevent the wake of destruction. Look, if I didn’t know better—”

She started ticking things off on her fingers. “San Juan, 2010, the Revengers. Anchor City, 2011, against Doctor Phantom a.k.a. The Immortal. The Hattenberg Gas Fields debacle in 2013. Oculus and Inferno, 2014. The Chimeric Lives Matter rally in D.C., 2015. And just eight months ago, you and your teammates fought the entire Covenant and nearly half of the South Bay district was—”

“Those are incidents where things escalated quickly, but sometimes…look, sometimes you have to get a little rough. There’s no way around it.”

“Yeah. Violence comes with the territory in your line of work,” the doctor said, paused a beat. “It’s my opinion you’re dangerously self-destructive.”

“Oh yeah? Your professional opinion. That’s what you’re putting into those Bitotiqs of yours?”

“Yes, actually.”

I clenched my jaw. Her heartbeat was irregular. “DeAngelo. He put you up to this.”

“I have never spoken with Director DeAngelo in my life. But a Class A-plus-
plus
chimeric who can fly at supersonic speeds, toss tanks a hundred yards, and shrugs off point blank armor-piercing rounds, runs amok seeking out chimerics in hopes they might, I repeat
might
, be able to kill him? Sound accurate?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Do you know the amount of collateral damage your quest for the afterlife has cost? Consider just this city alone, not to mention dozens,
scores
of other cities and towns across the globe?”

“Like I said, ridiculous
and
pointless. And I don’t run
amok
. What does that even mean? Amok?”

“Seventeen billion dollars. That’s just Port Haven. Your home. And only since 2010. So, you see, you’ve cost—”

My mind shifted abruptly to the TCA lighthouse facility. Director DeAngelo is on a tirade about the collapse of the Bowen Financial building during a ‘battle-royale’ with the Covenant:
…one-hundred-and-fifty-goddamn-million dollar building, Noah! Nickolas Bowen is one of our chief patrons!

Co-director Laws just sat there, not saying a thing. She had been going to bat for me less and less.

You and your idiot cohorts even destroyed the goddamn parking garage. Not to mention the security personnel still inside and all the people working after hours!

“What?” I blinked erratically, shifting back to the present. “That’s not right.”

“That
is
right, Mister Jensen,” Legato replied. “I have a fastidious memory for facts and figures and my interests in studying—”

“No,” I interrupted. “There wasn’t anyone inside the Bowen building or the parking garage! I made sure of it.” I glared at the doctor, whether she could see me or not. “You know, for me being some ‘anonymous client’ that you weren’t briefed about, you know way too much about my history. Who pulls seventeen billion out of their ass like that?”

“I have a fastidious—”

“Nope. No. I smell a rat, lady. We’re done.” I started to stand up.

“Sit down, Mister Jensen.”

I raised my finger at her. “Stop calling me that.”

“Stop calling you ‘Mister Jensen’? What do you prefer? Hero?”

I wasn’t sure if that was my own self-loathing talking or if the doc was putting the voice in my head despite my mental shields; either way, I let off a blossom of body heat. Sight or not, I wanted her to feel something.

The room’s temp shot up at least fifteen degrees in an instant.

Click-click
. The A/C came on. Something rippled across my skin, up my arms and legs and the back of my neck.

Dammit, why was I getting so bent out of shape? Was it because of the voices I’d been hearing? This wasn’t the first time. Was it the endless fifths of vodka I soaked up at night just so I could sleep for two, maybe three hours? It wasn’t a new subject; how much
urban planning
my activities had instigated over the years. There were plenty of articles. Hell, I was the favorite subject—or used to be before I publicly shunned the cape and removed myself from the limelight—of Vulpes Network’s talking heads like fricking Buck Richman or that grating little pundit Aisha Cordell on
American Hour
and on her
Call-To-Action
blog or vlog or whatever crap she calls it.

The doctor took a slow breath. “Your reaction suggests maybe we’ve struck a nerve, and…I’d really like to help you work through this. Please sit.”

I remained standing. “I’m not buying it.”

Her face turned in my direction, but she kept her glossy-lipped trap shut.

I continued: “First, that may or may not be the bill for my so-called ‘self-destructive’,” I made air quotes and instantly felt like an idiot, “rampages, but maybe if I
hadn’t
been around the cost would have been way higher, lady, in lost lives.”

“
I’m
not finished. So, what? You have me run through some deep emotional back story, then start pushing buttons? I’m pretty sure I know what you’re up to, serving up a Freudian value meal with a side of Nietzsche fries. That’s pretty reckless, Doc, considering who you’re dealing with.”

“And I think you’re more than what you claim to be. You’re like that sensory Goth-wannabe Veil and I thrashed a couple years ago. Chaos Hound or whatever. You feed off emotional garbage, gnaw on it like a juicy T-bone.”

Her face hardened; like, not just hard, she sneered, jaw muscles clenching. I sensed her heartbeat quicken. She flickered a tiny smile. Her voice came out measured, a dour undertone slithering beneath the surface. “Now you’re being inordinately
offensive
.”

“Yeah?” As they say, I had no fucks left to give this woman. I started for the exit. “I’ll send you an inordinate gift basket. Whatever the hell that means.”

<
STOP!
>

Legato’s commanding voice bounced around inside my skull with surprising clarity, tripping me up. She actually made me feel small. So, this Legato was more than an empath; she
was
some sort of hybridized telepath. And a liar.

“Get out of my head,” I said, not even turning to look at her.

Anxiety and anger came hard at me wave after wave. I was quickly starting to feel useless. Weak.
Small
.

I turned to face her, saw that she was hovering a foot off the ground, fists clenched.

#

A sweltering night in Naranja County, not that a heat wave in La Futura’s concrete jungle bothered me. I coursed through the thick air toward the derelict church. A dog barked below me. In an alley a block away, a homeless man slurred insults at his empty bottle, while further off, towards Hillywood, Channel 4’s traffic-copter skirled above the jammed knot of exits and expressways. Last, the thump of some poser’s cranked-up bass system dropped off as I let it all fade, until there was nothing…except the crickets in the weeds. I let the crickets chirp a moment, then shut them out too.

I hovered. Closed my eyes a moment, reveling in the stillness I’d created. To borrow the cliché, it was the calm before the storm.

Just like with my hearing, with a little focus I could widen my spectral range beyond visible light. Never really cared much for X-ray vision. Always had trouble with depth control. It’s not like in the comic books. One second you’re taking a glimpse at some adoring fan’s lacy Victoria’s Secrets, then something shimmies, so to speak, and you’re staring at Stage 2 breast cancer. “I hear it responds well to early treatment,” I’d said, before launching up, up, and away.

Thermal vision, though. No argument about its uses. I altered my photoreceptors, shifted to infrared, and opened my eyes. Much handier. Easier to control the depth of field, too.

Twenty-five feet in the air, I pulled rotted lumber away from a boarded-up window. Quietly. And just enough to get inside. Artemis’s voice whispered in my receiver, reminding me to keep it quiet since we were dealing with lab hostages. Stealth wasn’t typically how I rolled, but I was making a cameo on this mission. It was Artemis’s and Veil’s sand pile; I wasn’t about to piss in it. I was fine with my role as the ‘big gun.’

Oh yeah, ‘labs’ is a not-so-PC colloquialism for ‘labrat chimerics,’ by the way, or folks who’ve been changed, hastened, or otherwise customized on purpose. The results are rarely for the better. It’s one of those don’t-ask-don’t-tell things the Feds and the TCA don’t really want citizens knowing about. Unfortunately, we’re the ones who have to deal with their screw-ups.

Anyhow, the abandoned church’s stained glass had long since been shattered. It was dark in this rundown district, so I wasn’t too concerned with the city lights announcing my presence. I hovered inside, floating amongst the shadows of the upper balcony. I peered past the banister and down, counted a dozen images; six of them stood around and seemed to be in charge of the other six, which I supposed were labs sitting in pews in the nave area. They may be the hostages or new recruits or whatever the hell La Luz had planned for these suckers. Bottom line, they were chimerics. Unpredictable at best. Usually untrained with no idea of their capabilities or limits.

I reported the War Gods’ numbers and positions in a low whisper. Bombero was among them, standing where the altar would have been had it been there, and glowing like a red gas giant, the big bastard; he’s a pyrotechnic whose manipulation powers were categorized a high Class-B.

Still, no La Luz. I turned it over for a second in my head. La Luz was a living solar battery, and most reports have him active during the day, so maybe he’s not as active at night? I said as much into my com.

Director DeAngelo cursed under his breath. “Angelus said he’d be here, dammit.”

Wasn’t sure who this Angelus was, but DeAngelo’s Intel was usually good. “Maybe he’s underground…” I did a sweep of the basement with my thermal vision as best I could. Nothing.

“Doesn’t matter,” Artemis voiced in my ear. “Keep an eye out for V, coming through the back. We’re still doing this.”

“Roger that,” I responded.

DeAngelo and Artemis had been adamant about no casualties, but Veil and I had been up against situations like this before. I respected what the TCA was trying to do here, working with the DCD’s P.O.N.E division—this mission was about quick, quiet containment; still, sometimes a few eggs got broke no matter how much you tried to kid-glove things. Besides, Bombero had flamed a bus-full of 4th graders on a day trip to Cosmics Stadium a few months ago, the poor kids caught in the crossfire of the emergent gang violence La Futura had become known for in recent years. I was Jonesing to bring the hammer down. It’s why I’d joined the mission. So, casualties or not, I wasn’t going out of my way to spare any War Gods a little pain.

I squeezed my hands into fists. My knuckles were eager.

Veil’s familiar outline came up through the floor behind the War Gods. Unlike Bombero, her thermal image was hardly discernible, and she moved with a natural stealth and grace very few had.