Firestorm (Complete)

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan lanced the air with jets of blue flame, but it was like trying to shoot down a raincloud. He wasn't sure the Smoke Man could even be harmed in his gaseous state; the best he could do was keep the bastard spread out so he couldn't materialize and bring his knife to bear.

"Go!" Aidan shouted at Slim. "You can't help me with a Glock!"

Slim backpedaled, swore, and then started lumbering through the sheds toward his car. "Shadow!" he yelled. "The hell are you, man, let's bail!"

Aidan wasn't so lucky - running for his bike would mean heading straight into the teeth of the Elevens, and he was already almost out of matchheads. He started working his way further up the hill toward the cell tower. There would be cover there, and if worse came to worst, he could wait until the Elevens had dispersed and come back for his Harley later. Anyway, it sounded like their attention had diverted elsewhere.

With a grimace, he burned up the last of his fuel and sent up a dome of fire like a shield. He could see a ghostly face pressing against it through the smoke, its twisted jaw open and howling, and he sent the fiery shield bursting outward like a nova, scattering the Smoke Man through the stagnant summer air.

A patch of darkness he hadn't noticed melted away, and Shadow stood there, eyes wide and shining. "Holy hell, ese, did that do it? Did you glass the fucker?"

Aidan stumbled and nearly fell on the slippery gravel. "I wish we were so lucky," he panted. "He'll pull himself back together, you and Slim need to get out of here before..."

He'd turned and glanced down the hill where several of the Elevens were running now. The gunfire had stopped, but one hulking gangbanger in a black bandanna was packing something that looked like a grenade launcher. He followed the weapon's line of sight down toward the freeway, where two small figures were running for the sound baffle. He didn't know what he was looking at until he saw a flash of purple skin and black hair.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, fuck, no!"

[Jim Lewinski]

They skidded to a halt, trailing a plume of dust down the length of the decline, and despite the life-or-death nature of their predicament, Jim still winced at the sound of his scraping sneakers. Behind them, the pack were closing, and had mercifully exchanged bullets for taunts. Once over the fence, Aimee only had to spiderman down the sound barrier, and she'd be safely out of sight. And the sooner Aimee was safe, the sooner he could get out of dodge, which was why he'd taken it upon himself to assist Aimee in scaling the wire mesh with an undignified shove to the butt.

"Come on, Aimee, they almost on top of us!" he shrieked, "Follow the traffic to the first rest area and that's where we'll-"

From somewhere on the hillside sounded a deep thum, Jim turned in time to catch a glimpse of an object arcing against the night sky like a shimmering comet. It struck the ground and tumbled towards them, spiralling smoke in its wake, until it lodged itself against his foot. It was a small metal cyllinder and it vomitted its contents in thick golden clouds.

"Gas!" he gasped, and stumbled away, "Aimee, don't breath it, it's- it's- it's..."

Jim squinted, his nose twitched and he reared back as if about to sneeze, then he took off like a rocket up the hillside.

[Aimee Connors]

When one holds one's breath, usually a deep inhalation is taken in order to avoid breathing for as long as possible. Unfortunately, that one breath was one too many. Aimee spluttered as the yellowish gas made her face itch and eyes water, and found herself stuck to the fence as surely as if she'd been superglued to it.

She shrieked as her skin prickled all over with sandpaper-like nodules, miniscule 'hooks' that would adhere to anything. Her hair stuck to her face. Her clothes looked like she'd been attacked by the worst case of static cling known to man. In her panic Aimee pushed against the fence with her forehead, trying to leverage her right hand off from it, but then she couldn't take her face away from the fence again.

She screamed again, certain she was going to get shot in the back, and dissolved into choking sobs. The entire fence rattled back and forth as she as she still struggled with the chain link, her skin painful as she tried to rip away from where she was stuck.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan sprinted through the sheds toward the fence, hardly even registering the jarring impacts of running downhill on slippery gravel, or the warning in the back of his head that if he got into the expanding cloud of aerosolized Nectar, the hillside might resemble a hot day in Pompeii. Jim was already gone and out of sight, and he could only hope the speedster could find his way to safety, but Aimee's screams cut through him like razor wire and left his gut empty and quivering. He would have run straight in front of half a dozen Tres Once guns had the Smoke Man not ghosted straight into his path.

Aidan took in a sprinter's breath of the corrosive smoke, and his lungs spasmed, throwing him off-balance and pitching him to the gravel parking lot. He tumbled over and over, taking patches of skin off his forehead and off the palms of his hands, and he curled up choking and wheezing out ribbons of black smoke. Through tear-blurred eyes, he looked down the hill to see the Onces closing toward Aimee's pinioned body.

Boots crunched on the gravel behind him. Aidan scrambled unsteadily to his feet and wheeled around as the Smoke Man's knife came whizzing past his ear. He stumbled backwards and ducked another strike, and then he was on a patch of sad, sun-parched grass, the kind that lit like flash paper. Still coughing, Aidan swung back at the Smoke Man, shooting an arc of blue flame from the dry grass, and another, and another, leaving scars of white ash in the ground. His head pounded and his chest burned. He didn't have the oxygen to continue the fight.

And then the Smoke Man, the storage sheds, and the hillside disappeared, and for a moment Aidan thought he'd blacked out, but he still felt his feet beneath him, and he could hear the Elevens shouting near the fence below. He scrambled blindly to his left and into the fading evening light, just outside a patch localized darkness as thick as the LA River.

"Smoke this, pendejo!"

It was Shadow's voice from inside the darkness. Aidan heard a scuffle, a collision of bodies, and then the wet thud of a knife splitting flesh.

The darkness blew away like fog before the sunrise. Shadow stood in the center of it with a look of angered bewilderment on his face. The Smoke Man's knife was buried in his chest. Not stabbed, but embedded. The point of the blade split through his sternum, and the pommel of the handle had broken his spine. Shadow crumpled to the ground, and smoke poured from his nose and mouth.

[The Tres Onces]

"Chavala got herself caught like rat. Like a cockroach!"

"You do any other colors? Green? Red? Give us a show, little girl."

The Tres Onces fanned out around the fence where Aimee was trapped like a bug on flypaper. One of them kicked away the Nectar grenade as it gasped out a few more puffs of yellow aerosol; the gas didn't seem to affect them at all.

One of the Elevens grabbed Aimee roughly around the waist and pulled, but she didn't budge. Another tried to pull her by the arms, but his hands stuck to her skin, and he swore loudly as he tried in vain to yank free, setting the whole fence rattling.

"Relax, moron!" The leader of the group, the big gangbanger carrying the grenade launcher came lumbering down the hillside. "The Nectar'll wear off in a minute, and then her powers disappear. She'll come off of there easy enough. Won't you, chola?"

He grinned at Aimee, flashing a mouth full of tooth rot. "They gonna have fun cuttin' you apart in Jericho."

[Aimee Connors]

She couldn't see very well, her face stuck fast to the chain link, but the voices around her made her quake in fear. Aidan was around somewhere... and Jim was probably halfway to New York by now. "He-help!" she tried, her voice too breathy to carry.

The gang members laughed, and one of them tossed a handful of gravel at her. The rocks clung to her skin, but some bounced off her clothes to rattle to the dirt. Aimee wanted off the fence, wanted the guy off her arm... He was hurting her, pulling despite being warned just to wait. Her whole skin felt like it was on fire.

After a moment her eyes rolled up in her head and she fell bonelessly off the fence.

[Aidan Fox]

There wasn't time to grieve, wasn't time to rest, wasn't time to register the horror of what he'd just witnessed. There wasn't time for Aidan to deal with the searing pain of lactic acid in his oxygen-starved muscles, and there certainly wasn't time for them to seize up and send him lurching to the ground. The Elevens were already hauling Aimee away, and the Smoke Man was taking shape again over Shadow's twisted body. The assassin bent down and pulled the knife from the dead mutant's curled fingers.

Aidan scrambled backwards despite the spasming protests in his legs as the man prowled toward him. He may not have had the strength to stand, but now he was surrounded by the dry grass.

Sorry about this, Shadow. You deserve better.

Aidan seized a clump of brittle grass in each hand and set it alight, and blue tongues of flame spread hungrily all around him, eating up nearly a quarter acre, including Shadow's body. The Smoke Man vanished into a cloud to escape the brush fire, and he plunged toward Aidan, intending to kill him from the inside out like he had Shadow.

With a hoarse cry, Aidan twisted the flames together into spinning vortex, catching the column of smoke in the middle. He spun the vortex faster and faster until it became a twisting cyclone that reached high into the air, scattering the Smoke Man across the pale summer sky.

And then the grass was exhausted, and so was Aidan. His head flopped back against the ground in the center of a broad circle of smoking cinders.

[The Tres Onces]

"We got the purple one, Julio. Cruz says they found the skinny white kid over the hill. Ran himself into the side of a garage and just passed out."

"Good work, Nico. Pack 'em up and meet us back at the plant."

Julio pushed his phone back into a jacket pocket and lifted the binoculars to his face again. He found Shadow and Aidan crumpled in the middle of a smoldering gash across the hillside.

"Today's a good day, boys," he said. "It's the day we're finally going to take back our town and put those bastardos mutantes in their place."

And then he saw movement. Aidan stirred, and then he rolled over onto his hands and knees and coughed into the cinders. Julio shook his head. "Un-fuckin-believable."

"We could send Nico back in," one of his lieutenants said. "Finish him off for good."

"No," Julio replied. "He might still have fuel to burn. Besides, I'm not done watchin' him suffer."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan staggered to his feet. He'd managed to expel the last of the Smoke Man from his lungs, but he was still lightheaded and sore all over, and the air on the hillside felt uncomfortably thick and close. Aimee and the Elevens were gone. He didn't have the faintest idea where Jim was. He felt like the ground had been pulled out from under him, and he was staring down at an abyss so deep he didn't know if there was a bottom to hit.

He limped on past Shadow and dug in his pocket for his cell phone. Miraculously it was still in one piece. Without a moment's hesitation, he speed-dialed Jake's number.

[Jacob Foley]

By the time Jake had returned home with Anna, they were just in time to witness the closing seconds of the Dodgers game and the consequent exodus of dejected teenagers from the family room. The air in the house was stifling and thick with the smell of stale popcorn and sweaty feet. Jake grimaced. The speakers at the community meeting, of whom his sister was one, failed to mention that the first casualty of charity was the nose.

There were other smells coming from the kitchen as Anna emptied the contents of take-out cartons onto dinner plates, it was enough to rouse the spirits of even the most crestfallen of Dodgers fans as they assembled around the table, such is the power of good food.

"Aimee! Jim!" Jamie called from the foot of the stairs, "Dinner's ready!"

"Hey, has anyone seen-"

Jake was cut off by the vibrating in his pocket, he fished it out his cellphone and after giving it a glance, retreated into hallway. Once out of earshot, he answered the call:

"What's up, man? You're late for dinner."

[Aidan Fox]

A quick glance around the storage complex told Aidan the coast was clear. He didn't see Slim anywhere, but he'd heard a roar of engines and squeal of tires further down the hill, which could only be the Elevens speeding away with their prize in tow.

"Jake," Aidan said, and there was no disguising the hollowness in his voice. "Are you alone? Really alone?"

Once he got an affirmative, he plowed on. "The meeting with Slim and Shadow went bad. Really bad. The Elevens were all over us. Shadow's dead."

[Jacob Foley]

The short burst of bad news struck Jake like a blow to the gut, knocking the air from his lungs, and with a knotted stomach he retreated immediately for the garage. When he spoke, his throat felt dry and contricted.

"I'm on my way."

On the other end of the line he heard the trauma in Aidan's voice and the fatigue in his ragged breaths, and it took some considerable effort to not pair up a mental image with such an eerie soundtrack. He climbed into the truck, its engine still ticking from the trip home, and turned the key in the ignition.

"Lie low, Aidan. I'll be there in no time."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan crested the rise to the gravel parking lot. Miraculously, his Harley was still standing there untouched. He started limping faster.

"That's not all," he said. "The Elevens are gone, but..."

He spotted Ronnie's bike lying crookedly against the office and a couple discarded bike helmets in the dirt nearby.

"Aimee and Jim followed me. They must've been watching when the Elevens showed up. Jim took off, and I don't see him, but..."

For the third time that evening, he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Jake, they have Aimee. They took her away."

[Jacob Foley]

At that, a creeping cold climbed his spine, freezing him to the spot. Their greatest fear had at last been realised: one of the very kids they sought to protect had been caught in the crossfire of their dirty dealings. It made him sick to his stomach and it was another moment before he could speak.

"Okay. Okay. We're gonna make this right. I'll call Calaveras. Just hang tight."

[Aidan Fox]

"Don't come here, they might still be watching."

Aidan threw a leg over his Harley and shot a glance across the highway at the apartment complex on the far side. He saw a pair of headlights go on and start pulling out of the parking lot.

"You call Calaveras and have him meet us at the City Walk Arcade. We'll work it out then."

No sooner had Aidan snapped his cell phone shut than it rang in with another call. It was a number he didn't recognize. He considered letting it go to voicemail, but, with that sickening feeling still gnawing at his stomach, he flipped his phone back open and answered in the most natural voice he could manage.

"Hello?"

"I found something of yours. You should be more careful with your things, mutie."

Aidan tasted bile at the back of his throat. "Julio."

[The Tres Onces]

"Ah, good. You already know your daddy's name. Because from this day, I own you, bitch. Just like I own the two little freaks who were followin' you around."

"What do you want?"

Julio grinned and leaned his head back against the plush leather headrest in the backseat of the Merc. "Now, see, that's what I like to hear," he said. "You knowin' your place. Which is on your knees in front of the real rulers of this town. I have had enough of you and your band of fucking gene-freak sideshow rejects. I don't want anything from you, mutie. I want you out of my town. Every last stinking one of you."

[Aidan Fox]

"And how is holding two kids hostage gonna do that for you?" Aidan fired back. "Come on, Julio, they're not the ones you want. They've got nothing to do with you and me."

"Who said anything about hostages? I get paid for the freaks I bring in. Hey, maybe I don't even bring these two in. Maybe I keep them for myself. I could have a lot of fun doing my own science project. Maybe I find what part of 'em makes 'em into freaks. Maybe I cut it out of them and see if it makes 'em normal again."

"They're not. The ones. You want."

Aidan slipped the key into his ignition and put up his kickstand. He needed this conversation to end so he could get back to Jake and Pedro and plan some way out of this nightmare.

"And what is it I want, genius? Tell me. I'm just dyin' to hear the story."

"You want the one who cost you Los Santos. Come on, you had La Raza on the run before I showed up. I know that's why you sent your lackeys after me tonight."

[The Tres Onces]

"You flatter yourself," Julio sneered back. "You're just another mutie to me. There's a bullet with your name on it, and there's a bullet for every other freak in that sorry-ass reject outfit you call a gang."

"Then why'd you pull your boys off us and leave us to your pet smoke monster? I'm the one you want. Snatching two kids doesn't get you a thing unless you get me. So..."

There was a pause. Julio savored it like choice wine.

"You win, Julio. Let the kids go, and I'll surrender myself to you. Like you said. The town's yours."

"No," Julio replied, "I don't think so. Two-for-one isn't such a good exchange from my end, you feel me? Anyway, you're not tellin' the story right. It wasn't just you who stirred up La Raza. It was you and that pothead friend of yours."

Julio took a deep breath of fresh, smog-laced Angelino air and let it out nice and slow.

"Bring him along. You and Foley. Do that, and I just might be willing to deal."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan sat motionless on his bike, swaying as if he'd just taken a body blow. His free hand curled around the rubber handlebar grip so hard his fingers throbbed.

"When and where?" he said.

"Yeah. That's what I thought. You know the old factory on Francisco, right? Meet me there, nine o'clock. You and Foley better be the only ones I see, or I paint the floor with their mutated brains."

The connection ended. Aidan stared numbly at the cell phone screen, then slapped it shut and shoved it back into his pocket. He fired up the ignition, lifted his feet off the ground, and sped off into the gathering night.

[The Tres Onces]

The factory on Francisco street was a relic from a 1960s industrial boom that had since fled the south end of LA, leaving blocks and blocks of abandoned industrial parkland littering the town in patches like brushfire scars in a thriving forest. In the neighborhoods that had money, they were torn down and replaced - with housing, with businesses, with shopping centers. Others, like the end of the row in West Carson, lingered on and became the places even the LAPD took detours around. They bred trouble the way dumpsters bred roaches.

A convoy of lowriders, followed by the sleek, black Mercedes, rolled through the front gate in a chain link fence topped by spools of barbed wire, waved on by men holding AR-15s and wearing flak vests under their clothes. The cars rumbled over the cracked pavement onto a parking lot that was more gravel than asphalt now, past a row of trailers where a few more men stood around smoking blunts and shooting the breeze. When the convoy ground to a stop, Julio stepped out of the Mercedes and gave a signal. The layabouts sprang into action and popped open the trunks of the two lowriders, where Jim and Aimee had been thrown carelessly like lost luggage on the world's worst airline. A pair grabbed Aimee's wrists and ankles between them, and another pair seized Jim, and they swung the two mutant teens into the main building through a set of sliding garage doors.

When the kids came to, they were sitting back-to-back on the concrete floor of a cavernous room, surrounded by corrugated steel walls, acres of filthy glass, and a jagged aluminum ceiling six stories up. They were handcuffed, and a loop of heavy chain ran through the cuffs and through a steel bracket sunk deep into the floor. Every door in every wall was attended by at least one armed guard, and nearby was a folding card table where six more men gambled over a pile of bills and a jug of cheap liquor. On the other side of the floor from the sliding doors they'd entered through was a complex of scaffolding, balconies, and office windows, as if the factory had swallowed half of an oil rig. Julio stood on one of the balconies with one hand on the rusty railing and the other gently tumbling a glass of tequila. The king was back in his castle, and soon all would be right with his domain once more.