Emergence Read online

  Blink snorted. “I could barely get Sparky out his cage. I was hoping you might help.”

  “More guards are undoubtedly coming,” the Other said, scooping the boy up and placing him over his shoulder. “We should go.”

  “Gotta say, you look better without the headgear thingie, hero,” Blink said. “Now lead the way.”

  He glanced at Blink to find her smiling at him. The Other wondered when she had seen him without his helmet, but it was a question for another time. He started towards the stairway, the boy over his shoulder, and the thief just a step behind him.

  They stopped at the top of the staircase, the corridor ahead filled with armed guards, and ducked back around.

  “Come out,” shouted one of the guards. “Hands up and slow.”

  “We have a problem,” the Other said with a sigh.

  Blink raised her hands and stepped out into the open.

  “Good girl,” shouted a guard. “Now come…”

  Blink stepped back around the corner and lowered her hands. “I count eight.”

  “Is there another way out of here?” the Other asked.

  “Not for you two,” Blink replied quickly with a grin. “Don't worry. I'm not about to leave you after going through all this effort to save Sparky here. Eight is a lot for me to take, and they're bunched pretty close together.”

  “You used a flashbang on me a while back,” the Other said. “Do you have any with you now?”

  Blink reached up and pulled the large, round earring from her ear. It looked just like a circular disk with another one on top. “Just press the button and throw.”

  The Other lowered the boy to the floor and took the earring from Blink. “Look after him,” he said as he pressed the button and launched the device down the corridor.

  Guards shouted in confusion, and then there was a loud bang and a flash. The Other didn't stop to wonder how stupid it was to charge straight down a corridor with armed guards at the other end, he just turned and put on a burst of speed.

  Bullets zipped past him. One hit the armor on his chest and made the Other stumble a step, though it barely slowed him. Another hit his leg, and the pain was intense. The Other fell, his momentum carrying him enough to take the first guard down with him. He punched the man as he struggled to rise, knocking him unconscious.

  The guards hadn't expected the flashbang. They were all trying to recover. Ignoring the searing pain in his leg, the Other rolled into their midst and sprung to his feet, sending an armored elbow into the face of one and kicking the legs out from another.

  He moved quickly, his strikes targeted and precise. His muscles felt more used to the actions than before, almost as though he had been in training. Two more guards went down, unconscious.

  Bullets pinged off of the Other's chest armor, and one of the guards collapsed, screaming. The Other's left arm erupted in fiery pain. He launched himself at the guard who was shooting, bearing them both to the ground and punching the man so hard in the gut, his eyes rolled back in his head.

  The last guard was close and unarmed. The man reached down for a dropped weapon. The Other kicked it away. A fist thumped into the Other's face, followed by another. Ignoring the pain in his leg and arm, he closed with the man and grappled, picking the guard up and slamming him into the floor, and that’s where he stayed.

  The Other collapsed to one knee and looked to his wounds. Both were gashes, but nothing more. His suit’s armor had protected him from the worst, but the injuries still hurt like hot knives slicing into his skin.

  “You still alive down there, hero?”

  “Just about,” he shouted back.

  Blink walked around the corner supporting the lad.

  “Here,” the Other said, pulling a jacket from one of the guards and handing it to the boy. “It's chilly out there. Put it on him.”

  “You think that's the last of them?” Blink asked, nodding to the unconscious guards.

  “Hope so,” he replied with a weak smile. “I’m not sure I could take another bullet.”

  “You’re shot?”

  “Just my leg. I’m good. Let’s go.”

  The alarm was still sounding, but it appeared as though there were no more guards on site. The Other led Blink and the boy to the fence he’d broken through earlier and opened the gap once more. As they escaped under the cover of the deep night through the pasture, they spied a convoy of trucks pulling into the plant. They didn't wait around to see how many soldiers spilled out of them.

  The Other made a quick pace away from the power plant, heading towards the city. He had no idea what they would do once they got there, only that it would be easier to hide.

  A ping from his gauntlet drew his attention. It showed a displacement from a teleporter somewhere to the east. The Other turned. Blink and the boy were both gone. He considered going after them, but Blink would know how to hide the boy, and he guessed one day soon he'd have another chance at her.

  #

  Sheets twisted around his feet, his body covered in sweat and his pillows strewn about the bedroom, Daniel ached in a dozen different places. His nightmares had been intense and terrifying.

  As he rolled out of bed, wincing at the painful bruises on his left arm and leg, he stumbled over to his clock, realizing the alarm wasn't sounding. It was nearing midday. He looked at the date to find it was Saturday and breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn't missed work.

  He tried to go about his day, but fragments of his nightmare kept coming back to him. He had been captured by a teleporting chimeric. She was young and pretty and talked as though she knew him. There was a boy too, he seemed to remember.

  Daniel shook his head, trying to rid himself of the lingering dreams.

  He picked up his tablet and searched through the morning's news. The headline was about the power plant. Apparently it had gone dark again during the night and the authorities had found the chimeric known as the Other had been involved. The article reported that DCD operatives had chased the villain from the scene and were even now putting more extreme measures in place to stop future chimeric involvement. The article finished by condemning the actions of this Other, and hailing the Department of Chimeric Defense and local authorities for putting an end to the recent power disturbances.

  Daniel read the article three times. The Other was dangerous. A chimeric with undetermined powers. He would need to keep a track of the villain and develop whatever countermeasures he could come up with. He couldn't shake the feeling that he had met the Other, and that they might meet again.

  With his daily morning routine finished, Daniel Dust sat down in his workshop and opened his computer. He remembered the boy from his dream. His skin was a yellow-brown tint and crackled to the touch.

  Like lightning.

  Daniel decided to find a way to safeguard himself from electrical strikes.

  He needed to prepare.

  Perennial

  Edward M. Erdelac

  ONE

  With all the hot spots for celebrity sightings in La Futura, the maternity ward waiting room at the LF County Hospital at nine PM on a Thursday night was the last place anybody would expect to see anybody famous. No A-listers popped their brats out here. They weren’t caught dead or medicated outside of Seder’s-Horeb in the 90048, just a quick limo ride from the obnoxious estates of Waverly Hills.

  But Nico Tinkham was hardly an A-lister.

  He bore all the signs of a celebrity in the wild though; drab gray hoodie, baggy sweatpants, curled brim of an old LF Riders ball cap pulled low over a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, maybe a little too pricey for some poor uninsured chav sitting with his scrawny, coughing kid, awaiting the arrival of a new family addition he couldn’t afford. The tennis shoes were a dead giveaway too. Dirty they might be, but any twelve year old connoisseur from Englewood could tell you they were limited edition vintage Nike KD6 Elites, two hundred dollars out of the box. The watch was a dead giveaway too. Rolex. O
f course not being an A-lister had ever stopped any D-lister from trying to look the part, even incognito. That was LF preening, and you couldn’t shake it.

  The extensive, disfiguring burn scars down the right side of his face and covering his right hand might have made someone think he was nothing more than a well-dressed curiosity. But his were probably the most famous burn scars in Hillywood.

  The blonde kid coughing regularly into his fist next to him was more subtle. Off-brand shoes, frayed sweatshirt, cheap stocking cap, and holes in his jeans. No paparazzo worth the name would make them as father and son, but of the harried maternity nurses and midwives, the bone-tired illegals waiting on their little first-generation Americans, no one at all on the ward even looked twice at them. They were all too caught up in their own dramas.

  A tired looking Filipino nurse came out into the waiting room and massacred a Mexican surname, causing a bullish looking, tattooed fellow with a bald pate and track pants to scramble from his Naugahyde chair and follow her deeper into the ward.

  Nico rose too and sauntered over to the ancient magazines, then walked idly down the corridor, only the kid he’d left behind taking any notice.

  He was an old hand at sniffing out unwatched pharmaceuticals. A junkie nurse who had introduced him to the wonders of Dilaudid when he was seventeen had taught him all about swiping hospital supplies through a haze of post-coital marijuana smoke. He hadn’t really intended to do anything other than peruse a magazine while he waited, but he found himself gravitating toward the half open door of a welcoming supply closet. Sometimes mothers requested epidurals or morphine. Sometimes mothers were allergic, and that was where hydromorphones came into play. None of the allergic reaction but ten times the high. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. He had just about unballed his fist in his pocket and reached out to try the knob when a tall ginger in a white coat and glasses stepped in front of him.

  “S’cuse me. Can I help you with something?”

  A male obstetrician. That was one of those occupations Nico had never really been able to figure out the appeal of, like a gynecologist, or a guy who always played females in video games.

  Nico made some inaudible, slightly apologetic excuse and turned about to head back to the kid and the waiting room.

  That was when the short, fat armed Mexican woman in the red nurse’s scrubs stepped off the lift and pushed an empty gurney down the corridor, squeaking right past him.

  No doubt about it. That was Zita.

  Zita Cariño, smiling, pleasant mannered midwife, the kind who cooed over newborns and exclaimed “Ay que linda!” loud enough to wake the mother dozing across the hall, then said a benediction over their heads without asking if it was wanted or not. Pleasant. Earthy. Well-meaning. Apparently she had been notorious down in Juarez as the most accomplished baby napper in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa. She had fled Mexico with fifty thousand dollars paid out by a cartel chief for snatching the newborn daughter of his biggest rival right out of the Star Medica Hospital in Juarez. The popular narcocorrido about the affair, Los Doce Días de Navidad, said that her employer had shipped the baby in twelve individually wrapped gift boxes to her parents on Christmas morning two months after her disappearance. La Ayudante de Santa, they called her. Santa’s Helper.

  Zita had used her money to set herself up in business doing what she knew best how to do, plying her trade all over California for a variety of clients. She was a kidnapper-for-hire, keeping herself afloat stealing unwanted babies out from under the noses of adoption agencies, and taking on the occasional high price abduction for childless couples willing to pay for precisely what they wanted. Some of these babies went to good homes. A lot more flat-out disappeared, passed through the darkest guts of Molech or God only knew where, the only evidence of their existence a stack of incomplete paperwork, or at the very worst, a shaky video playing across the wretched eyes of some miserable law enforcement official in a hard drive seizure years after the case had gone glacial, to haunt them and all who came in contact with the hideousness of their fate for the rest of their days.

  The perpetrators of the latter misdeeds were the ones Pan hated the most.

  And Pan brimmed with that hate. It made his bones shake, made his teeth come together so hard they creaked.

  It angered Nico too, in a deeper way, more personal than it could ever enrage Pan. That was why this bitch needed to be sorted. As awful as she was, she could lead Pan to greater monsters.

  He moved to catch up with her, but the ginger doctor caught his elbow.

  “Just a minute.”

  Nico turned. He was caught. One goddamned moment of weakness. Jesus, not even a full-on relapse. All he had been about to do was nudge a doorknob. That’s all. What would Pan say if Zita got away?

  If he hit the doctor and bolted, that would only bring security all that faster. He looked towards the waiting room. Couldn’t see where the kid was sitting from where he stood. Why had he left?

  He admonished himself. Damn it! Useless goddamn junkie.

  But the doctor’s previous stern look was gone. There was a half-smile on his face, and his green eyes were narrowed and sideways.

  “Are you…?”

  Oh Jesus. Really? Not now!

  “Are you Nico Tinkham? From the Gutmunchers movies?”

  OK. Be polite. Don’t be an arsehole. Let him have his fan moment and be done with it. Wasn’t this the sort of thing he relished as a rampant egomaniac? Wasn’t it what had driven him out of Essex all the way across the great Pond to Hillywood?

  “Guilty as charged,” Nico said, smiling.

  “Wow!” the doctor said stupidly. “Wow!” Crandall, his nametag said. Marvin Crandall, MD. Gutmunchers fan. “You’re the last person I expected to see here tonight. Are you…? Are you expecting? I mean, not you of course. That is, I don’t know. Are you married?”

  The last, in disbelief. Because why would a hideously disfigured ghoul like him have a wife? Wouldn’t he have to steal his bride and secret her to some underground lair to assail her with maniacal pipe organ serenades?

  Nico opened his mouth to tell Dr. Marvin Crandall to fuck off.

  Over Dr. Crandall’s shoulder, Zita opened the door to one of the maternity rooms like it was the most natural thing in the world, and laughed to the unseen occupant. She began talking loudly in Spanish.

  Dr. Crandall didn’t wait for his ‘fuck you.’

  “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business at all. I just wanted to let you know how impressed I was with your decision not to go forward with the cosmetic surgery on Celebs under the Knife. That was one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen on television. I mean, given your history…all you went through. What did you say? ‘I am what I am?’ Very inspiring.”

  Nico shrugged, gave his best aw shucks, even though Dr. Crandall had gotten his exact words wrong, and attributed Popeye’s famous maxim to him.

  The burn scars up the left side of his face were what had landed him the part in the Gutmunchers movies, and in Don’t Accept Rides from Strangers, and as Dr. Damnation in Chimeric Massacre. Ironically, the very disfigurement that had ended his childhood acting career had made his adult comeback possible. It hadn’t been out of any dignified sense of self that he’d wound up refusing the corrective surgery. He had taken the paycheck to be on the stupid reality show in the first place in a moment of addiction-fueled desperation. His Gutmunchers 2 money had run out and he had needed a fix, and production on Gutmunchers 3 had been stalled because the goddamned Armenian director had broken into the production office and fucked off to Turkey with the budget to pour it into the goddamned resistance or whatever.

  Then, in a moment of clarity, Nico had realized the paycheck from Celebs under the Knife would never cover the loss of income he would suffer if he wound up with the Jennifer Grey curse. Nobody in the B-movie schlock horror pictures he had been doing for the past few years wanted a pretty Nico Tinkham in their zombie bu
llshit. They wanted the ready-made monster to save on the makeup artist.

  The unexpected on-air decision not to go through with plastic surgery to erase his burn scars had been lauded by Tonight in Entertainment as must-see television the week it aired, and the skyrocketing ratings had been the only thing that had kept the showrunners from hitting him with a breach of contract suit.

  It had been some of the best acting he’d ever done really, sobbing to ‘Plastic Surgeon to The Stars’ Dr. Jean Marc Mendelsson that he had to make do with what he had, that God had marked him maybe for a reason he didn’t understand and who was he to change himself on the outside if he couldn’t change who he was on the inside.

  It had been good shite, that, Nico had to admit. Even Jean Marc’s fit Brazilian assistant had had to touch up her mascara.

  He’d gotten more offers after that. TV ‘Movie of the Week’ stuff, a lot of interviews. These scars had paid off in the very long run after all. Of course, the truth was he had been afraid to go without them. He really wasn’t that good of an actor.

  Zita came out of the room bidding a boisterous farewell and maybe a ‘be right back’ in Spanish as she closed the door. She had a blue blanketed bundle in her arms, and after a quick check to make sure nobody was looking, she lifted the sheet on the waiting gurney and deftly stowed the kid underneath.

  Then she made her way back down the corridor to the elevator bank, humming her own goddamn narcocorrida as she went.

  Nico watched her pass by as Dr. Crandall began to gush about his favorite scene in Chimeric Massacre, where the villainous Dr. Damnation removed his metal mask revealing Nico’s own scarred face to Lilia Lilliard, the bound Opaque Girl.

  “And then, when you drove your fist into her sternum and she materialized around it!” Crandall chuckled exuberantly. “What a great effect!””

  “Yeah,” said Nico, glancing over his shoulder as Zita pressed the lift button. “The FX boys really earned their pub money with that one.”