SANDMAN SLIM

By the time I'm on the next block, he's gone. I keep turning around, like a drunken ballet dancer, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

Something hot explodes against my chest and it feels like a bulldozer is trying to park on top of my lungs.

Parker has thrown another one of his plasma balls, but show-off that he is, he missed by an inch and took out a mailbox. It's snowing People magazines and liposuction flyers. The front of my jacket is scorched down to the Kevlar and a little voice in the back of my brain is telling me to let one of the fireballs hit me so that next time they won't hurt. Only if one of them hits me, I'm not all that sure there will be a next time, so I tell the little voice to shut the hell up and go to Plan B.

I spring forward from a crouch and slam my shoulder into a parking meter. The pavement cracks. Two more slams and the meter is loose enough for me to pry it from the ground. I creep along the sides of the cars, keeping below window level. Parker has disappeared again. I try to reach out with those weird, new senses that keep telling me people's secrets, but I can't feel him. He's probably too powerful for something as crude as my kindergarten mind-reading experiments. Besides, I'm distracted by the smell of burning shops. The sound of crashes and women screaming.

Then I see him, behind a Hummer two cars ahead. He's juggling another plasma ball and the glow is visible under the parked cars. I sprint forward, hoping that I'm faster than he is at this distance.

When he steps around the car to knuckleball the burning plasma, I'm already there. I swing the parking meter up and catch him square in the chest with the end that's still hanging on to a nice chunk of concrete. Parker goes flying, smashing into the half-inch-thick glass of a bus kiosk, where he leaves a nice bloody spot on the shattered glass. I'm amazed, but he manages to crawl to his feet. That's something new. The old Parker was tough, but there's no way he could have taken a blow like that and lived, much less stood up. Then he surprises me again. He starts running away. Not as fast as before, but fast enough that I have trouble keeping up.

At the corner, he cuts left onto Wilshire and blows down the street at his inhuman pace. I'm fast at short distances. My reflexes are quick enough to snatch a knife out of a moppet's hand or yank the eyes out of a Hellion's head. But I'm not a marathon runner. Parker is a receding dot. I'm losing him.

Desperate to keep him in sight, I do the only thing I can think of. I grab the knife and slam the blade down as hard as I can lengthwise on the street. This one block of Wilshire shudders and an inch-wide crack slices the sidewalk in both directions. It's not exactly ten-point-oh on the Richter scale, but it makes Parker stumble. He looks back and, for the first time, seems a little nervous. He takes off running across the street to a tall, glass-and-chrome office building. I take off after him, but stop in the middle of the street.

When Parker reaches the office building, he doesn't go inside. He doesn't stop running or even break his stride. He takes one big leap and goes from the street up the side of the office building and keeps running. He doesn't crab up the side like Spider-Man. He sprints standing straight up, like the Flash.

My brain might have been cracked at the beginning of the fight, but now it breaks. I lived in Hell for years, and I never saw anything like this. I stand there as the traffic flows around me. Horns honk. Drivers give me the finger. Bus drivers scream at me to get out of the street. I crane my neck as Parker, the Human Fly, skitters up the side of a building, getting away.

My brain explodes like ice dropped in boiling water.

I sprint forward and get right under him.

Fuck magic.

I pull the Colt Peacemaker from under my jacket and blast all six shots into Parker's back. As each bullet hits, he slows down. When the last of the big .45 shells slams into his spine, I can see bones through the hole in his back. He stops running, stands drunkenly on the side of the building for a couple of seconds. Then his body goes limp. He starts to fall.

I step far enough away from the building to avoid the splatter when he hits. I have the knife out, ready to drive it into his heart to make sure he's really dead.

As Parker falls, his body seems to drift away like smoke. He becomes transparent. Two floors above the street, the last of him blows away like morning mist. I keep the knife out, ready for a trick. Nothing happens.

I walk back to the front of the building, looking up, hoping that Parker has somehow scrambled around to another side. He's not there. He's gone. I hear someone laughing nearby.