Emergence (39 page)

Karasu tumbled with surprising agility and regained his footing, then lashed out three times with his sword at three different angles, popping in and out of view and reappearing in a new position each time. Pan dodged the first two strikes, and managed to draw his knife fast enough to get the blade between his torso and Karasu’s edge.

There was no way a store-bought blade was going to punch through this armor, and it was likely the blade would snap if he attempted to block Karasu’s steel again. It looked to be some kind of high tech alloy. Maybe even
dahhnathrium
. He found himself wondering again how a loser like Handley had gotten a hold of this suit.

The ceiling was too low for him to fly effectively; he had to rely on his own speed and reflexes. It was frustrating, because he couldn’t even engage Karasu in hand-to-hand. He barely walked away from their first meeting, and that was when the guy had been in a kimono and Halloween mask with a big stick. Karasu had reach and speed and skill, and now he had a suit of armor that Pan’s strongest punches barely dented. He had taken apart a truck with his hands and pulled down a stilt house, yet still couldn’t get through this armor.

Pan shook all that off, kept his mind in the fight. Ducked, flipped, feinted and spun, and every other second there was a sword whisking millimeters from his body and puffs of mist all around, heavy enough to obscure the furniture.

Fleeing was not an option. He tried putting the teppans between him and Karasu, only to have the man teleport on the other side in the blink of an eye. He was unstoppable, relentless, and he kept shouting that unnerving battle scream.

As Pan grew winded, an idea formed, and he led Karasu in a running fight weaving between the teppans, trying to goad him with halfhearted jabs of his knife that the would-be samurai laughed off, even when they landed. In reality though, he ducked beneath the large griddles and used his knife to slash the propane hoses.

“Good, kid,” said the Thrasher. “Good. Watch it!”

He was fighting back a self-congratulatory grin when he dodged the wrong way. Karasu rammed the sword through the left portion of Pan’s torso, just above his belt line. He felt its point
pop
through the skin on his back.

He was so surprised he flew away and smashed through another paper screen, landing on a private room table, one of those low affairs bordered by traditional cushions so the diners could sit on the floor.

Pan clapped a hand to his side and gasped, looking between his knees at the streak of blood he’d left down the length of the table.

“Jesus,” said Thrasher. “You all right, kid?”

He coughed and tried to sit up.

There was a pop in front of him. Karasu stepped out of a bloom of white mist like some kind of towering nightmare. “And so it comes to an end, boy. I will send your soul to
meifumado
.”

He wasn’t sure where or what meifumado was, but he didn’t want to find out.

Karasu shifted his stance and raised the bloodied sword above his head. “Prepare yourself!”

Karasu dropped the blade down to cleave him.

Pan rolled for the edge of the table, and then one large mailed hand clamped down on his throat and pinched.

He gasped, eyes bulging behind his mask.

“I knew you would not die with honor,” Karasu said, straddling him now, the tip of his crow beak mask inches from Pan’s nose. ““Very well. Then there will be pain.”

The world shifted and changed, and his stomach gave a lurch as though he had just crested the top of a rollercoaster and plunged. He realized he had teleported. Or rather, Karasu had teleported with him. He was back in the main dining area, and the mist of the teleportation was rolling away. But no, it wasn’t entirely that.

There was an angry hissing in his ears. The mist wasn’t dissipating…because it wasn’t mist. It was cooking smoke. He was flat on his back on one of the superheated teppans and Karasu was holding him down by the throat, choking the life out of him and ‘pan’-frying him at the same time.

He couldn’t breathe.

The heat was agony on his back and shoulders. He thrashed and gasped, tried to arch his body away from the hot surface; it was no use. He slapped both hands against the mailed fist pinning him to the griddle.

Above him, the nightmare in black steel laughed. He was too big. Too strong. Too insane. In his free hand, he raised the sword.

“Die in pain, little demon! I will smell your seared flesh before I take your head!”

Then his face mask unfolded mechanically, exposing that albino pale, craggy face, those Nordic blue eyes and that brushy white moustache, so incongruous with Pan’s idea of a samurai warrior. He looked like an angry Irish bartender beneath.

As soon as the face mask opened, Karasu inhaled deeply and gagged.

In that instant, he reared back, and fumbled to close his mask. He let go of Pan.

Pan gasped. His starved lungs gulped for air; of course, the room was thick with propane gas from the severed hoses expelling their tanks.

He choked, eyes burning, yet he sprang away from the tortuous heat, digging in his glove for Inundación’s lighter.

He struck it and flung it behind him, flying blindly toward the elevator.

The room exploded in orange fire, and Pan rode a fireball through the open door, smashing into the far wall of the car.

Karasu’s screams were the last thing he heard as he sank to the elevator floor.

FOURTEEN

He didn’t know how long he’d been lying curled up in the elevator car. Pan jumped awake. One time, his mom and dad had left him in the backseat overnight. It had been the last leg home from their camping trip to South Dakota and, despite his mother’s arguments, his dad had pounded down a thermos of coffee and sworn up and down he could make it back home by morning.

It was pleasant, sleeping curled up in the backseat. Dad let him unbuckle his seatbelt so he could lie across the seats, though Mom hated that, too. He would drift off, listening to the rumble of the road beneath his ear and the hum of the engine and the wind outside the window.

He’d awoken afraid of warm sunlight on the hot seat, thinking his dad had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed in the night and they’d been lying in some ditch somewhere, only to find the car parked in their own driveway.

He’d stumbled blearily into the house to find his parents at breakfast. They hadn’t wanted to wake him. It wasn’t the backseat of their car he’d been sleeping in this time, though; it was the floor of the elevator, and he remembered his parents weren’t waiting for him at any breakfast table. They were dead.

He
whanged
his head on the railing of the elevator, and then all the pain hit him, the raw burns on his back, the hole in his side, the general exhaustion of the fight with Karasu.

The elevator was stopped.

“Thought I lost you, kid. How you doing?” the Brown Thrasher said, close in his ear.

He curled on the floor in his own blood, not wanting to move.

“PAN? CAN YOU GO ON?”

That androgynous electric voice on the intercom.

“Where am I?” Pan muttered into his gloved hand so the cameras wouldn’t see him speaking.

“Stopped somewhere between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. The gymnasium’s right above you, and I can make out one target on thermal imaging. He’s waiting there for you. No idea yet what he can do. That last asshole wasn’t War Gods, so could be anybody.”

He sat up and hung his head between his knees.

“Is he dead? Karasu?”

“He’s alive, but he’s out of commission.”

“CAN YOU EVEN STAND?”

He wasn’t sure. Nothing felt broken.

“STAND UP, PAN, AND LET ME KNOW YOU CAN GO ON, OR SLIGHTLY AND THOSE CHILDREN ARE THROUGH.”

Pan coughed and sighed into his gloved hands.

“Are they even alive?” he muttered.

“TI says yes. I got twenty-four heat signatures.”

Christ. Who was this monster?

He blinked his eyes and looked down at the floor of the car, dark with his blood. He found his knife and slipped it into its scabbard, then he pushed his back against the wall and eased himself to his feet. Fresh blood leaked from the wound in his side, but only from the front. Most likely the hot teppan had cauterized the hole in his back.

“THAT’S IT. GOOD. GOOOOOD. OK. GOING UP.”

The elevator car lurched and ascended. That slight motion nearly pitched him off his feet, but he gripped the railing and held on as the floor indicator lit fifteen and the doors dinged open.

The elevator let out to a reception desk, presumably where the gym members checked in.

Pan staggered out of the car. The doors closed behind him.

“I BELIEVE IN YOU, PAN.”

Pan shook his head.

It was easier to fly than to walk, so he allowed himself to float a few feet off the ground, and went around the desk, through the men’s locker room with its banks of gunmetal lockers, and out into the weight training area.

Nobody around.

“He’s on the track,” the Thrasher said.

Pan floated like a blood-spattered apparition doomed to bear the marks of its violent end, past the benches and rows of treadmills to the door marked
TRACK
.

He pushed through, and came out into an open space that seemed to stretch off around the corners to the left and right. The floors were rubbery and marked with lanes, and the outer walls entirely glass. He realized it was a running track that circled the entire building, affording joggers a commanding view of the entire city as they orbited the tower.

Far across the city, he could see the smoke and fires of Tantrum’s rampage, the flashing of countless emergency responders, and fleets of helicopters probing the devastation with their searchlight beams.

A man in a janitor’s coveralls lay face down on the floor nearby. There was a vacuum on its side next to him, attached to a retractable extension cord running into a space about eye-level on the wall.

Pan went to the man and turned him over. His face had been beaten to a pulp, all the congealed blood and bruises combined with the swelling of his head, making him look like some kind of shambling thing out of one of Tink’s
Gutmuncher
movies.

“Yo! What up?”

Pan tensed and looked to the right.

Walking leisurely toward him around the bend was a shirtless Mexican man, about twenty-three or so, bald, and tattooed all over his body. His arms were encircled by red and white stripes, and a complicated Aztec pictogram of a dancing figure with an elaborate headdress of green, white, and red plumes covered his chest, with the name
Mixcoatl
arcing over his shredded stomach. The red and white stripes even covered his face and bald head, and black ink across his eyes gave a domino mask effect. He had a beer bottle in his hand, and stopped a moment to tip it back.

When he spoke, his mouth shined with gold.

“You must be
El Niño Eterno
, yeah? Pan?”

Suddenly, the man was right in front of him, and the bottle exploded across his face so hard it took him right out of the air and flattened him. He lay there stunned, smelling blood and beer.

“’Sorry. This is a no-fly zone, shorty,” said the man with a gold grin, tossing the broken bottle over his shoulder.

“Another teleporter?” Pan mumbled miserably, rubbing his mouth. His lips were split and dribbling blood.

“He didn’t teleport,” said the Thrasher. “He moved.””

Ah, Jesus.
A speedster. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed and sixty-punches-a-minute…molecular disruption, if he
really
knew what he was doing. Father Eladio had told him speedsters were some of the most dangerous chimerics to face.

“Fuck, no. I ain’t no teleporter
. Mi llamo es Rapido, maricon
.”

“Rapido Maricon?” Pan said. “Well. That’s very brave of you.””

“Oh! You got a little mouth on you, eh?” Rapido said, peering down at him. “Or what’s left of one anyway. You ready for this,
comma
,
pinche
?”

“You
are
fast. Slow down, pal. Buy me a drink first.”

“Man, shut
up
!”

Something happened. He wasn’t sure what. Rapido hit him. Maybe six or seven times.

He fell to his knees, coughing up blood.

“Thas’ right, bitch!” Rapido said, genuflecting beside him. “Ain’t so easy to talk shit with a mouthful of blood, is it?”

Pan whisked out his knife, but swiped empty air.

He felt a foot plant in the middle of his seared back, and he was slammed to the rubber floor.

“You got claws, huh, kid? Yo, but Hook says you ain’t no kid. He says you’re older than me. Fuck, homes! That’s gotta suck, right? Yo, you look like, what? Twelve years old. Damn man, so you be chasin’ that itty bitty titty or what?”

Hook?

Pan pushed off the ground and shot down the track, banking fast around the turn.

Suddenly, Rapido was in front of him, and he ran right into his outstretched arm and flipped. Rapido caught him and flung him, and he hit the glass so hard it spiderwebbed. He crumpled to the floor, head ringing like a bell.

“Yo, I said no flyin,’ G.”

“RAPIDO.”

Rapido looked around curiously, cracking his knuckles, as if he could see the source of the voice through the intercom speakers.

“Yo!”

“STOP TALKING.”

“Whateva. You the boss,” he said, throwing up his arms.

Pan sat up and put his back to the broken glass.

Something big suddenly rose into view, and he heard the whir of a helicopter. It was a Vulpes News chopper. It had probably been out covering Tantrum and returned to base only to find the building under siege. Now the crew was trying to get a look inside. They were so close Pan saw the lens cradled in the arms of the cameraman leaning out of the side door.

Rapido raised his muscled arms and grinned for the camera.

“Yo! Look like we famous, kid. You ready to make this happen in front of a live studio audience or what?”

He preened for the camera, strutted, and grinned.

“Go on, Pan. I’ll give you a ten-second head start.”

Ten seconds.
He’d take it.