“Ah for the love of God, just please answer your cell,” Belle groaned at Pan.

Pan flipped it over to see the screen and put it back down on the counter, screen down. “It’s just Tobias. He wants to be friends and hang out so badly and he won’t stop bothering me.”

“I think it’s nice that he wants to be your friend.”

“I’m almost seven years older than him.”

Belle rolled her eyes at him.

The two were having breakfast together at the breakfast bar in the kitchen as the other Loe Boys were at school.

“I think you’ll find that as you get older, there'll be less people wanting to hang out with a twelve year old looking guy,” Belle said.

“Well I hope they’ll look beyond the age thing and just like me for who I am,” Pan argued.

“What, like you with Tobias?”

“Touché,” Pan grumbled as he took another dive at the cereal bowl with his spoon.

“What are you up to today then? Please, no more video games. You just fester. No more festering Pan.”

“Well that was on the cards...”

“Noo!” Belle scolded. “Go out. Get some fresh air. Get out on your skate board or something.” Belle got up to take her empty bowl to the sink. “Oh! I think I know what you can do!” she said enthusiastically.

She leant over to grab the newspaper lying on the work top. She tossed it over to Pan, with the bottom half of the front page showing. “Do you investigate things now? Could you look into this?”

Pan took it and read the headline. “Six DPW staff vanish in sewers. Time to flush out LA sewer beast?”

“Yeah! You could look into it and fight the sewer beast when you find it!”

“I thought you were telling me a moment ago to get some fresh air. I don’t think there’s anything fresh down in the sewers.”

“Well are you going to? People have gone missing, Pan.”

Pan looked deadpan back at her. “And you really believe this myth of a sewer beast?”

***

“I’ll show her there’s nothing down here,” Pan muttered to himself after he entered the sewer system.

He didn’t win the debate with his aunt, and faced with the thought of her bugging him all day, he thought it would be just as easy to go and look for himself.

Before just wandering through the sewers, Pan stopped off at a hardware store to buy some waterproof waders, boots, a filtered face mask and a few head torches.

Now that he was ready, he slid his skateboard into his back pack so that it partially stuck out behind his head and he turned the head torch on, lighting the way.

“Tobias, I’m about to go in, thanks for sending through the plans.”

“No problemo!”

Pan had taken a little advantage of the fact that Tobias was keen for a friendship and asked if he could access the plans for the sewers in the area where the DWP workers had vanished in for him.

The sewers were what he imagined them to be, having watched cartoons of fighting adolescent reptiles that lived in them growing up.

Luckily for the mask he had on, he couldn’t smell it, but everything looked as rank as he thought. Rats scurried along grooves in the walls and he wasn’t afraid of kicking any that got too close.

***

After a few hours of meandering through tunnel after tunnel, Pan came across his first clue.

Floating on the surface of the ankle deep water was an ID card on a lanyard. Pan knelt down to examine it closer. It was still relatively intact and identified the person as a Department of Public Works employer. Pan knew he was in the right area.

Following the route of the flowing water, Pan pressed on.

After a cautious fifty metres more, Pan’s beam of light picked up what he was most dreading.

Body parts.

A couple of hands, a foot, a lower leg and a few other bloodied, torn and mangled parts had gathered at the bottom of a slight decline.

What clothing that were still on the parts, were the colour of the uniforms they wore. Pan wondered if this was where they were killed, or if not, how far they had come before resting here. And finally, what on earth did it in the first place.

His curiosity piquing, he moved on, stepping over the pile of limbs and parts. Maybe his aunt was right...

Pan kept his head down, observing for any more clues. After a short time, he came across a four way junction. There was a tunnel straight ahead and jutting off either side at three o’clock and nine o’clock two more.

His danger intuition started to build up from within.

Something was about to happen.

He looked ahead, left and then right, the beam lighting up the tunnels as he did. The beam caught two orbs above the water, causing them to light up.

“Holy shit!” Pan impulsively swore out loud in fright. The orbs blinked but remained fixed.

Slowly, the boy sized man walked towards the orbs. “Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me,” he repeated to himself as he approached. “Please don’t hurt me, whatever you are…”

“Then don’t come any closer,” growled a voice from the water. Pan stopped dead as out from the water rose a behemoth of a crocodile, standing twelve feet tall onto its back legs, and its neck arched forward so those shining eyes shone again in the torch beam as they looed down at a petrified Pan.

“Motherfu-”

“Get out!” the gravelly deep voice boomed back, echoing through the tunnel. "Before I will eat you!"

“So you did kill those people!?” Pan accused, ignoring the warning.

The crocodile lunged forward, snapping its large jaws and splashing the water up.

Remembering his legs actually did work, Pan flew backwards and up out of the water, hovering just below the roof of the tunnel. “But you won't kill me!” Pan cried out defiantly.

“I don’t even want to kill you!” the crocodile responded menacingly. “I just want you to leave!”

“Oh. So you’re not hungry then? You've had your fill already?” Pan flew towards the giant croc, dodging at the last minute to get behind the beast.

Not able to turn quick enough, the crocodile thrashed it’s enormous tail out of the water and up at Pan, who had to dodge again to avoid being knocked out in the sewer, of all places.

Suspended in the air within the confines of the tunnel, Pan considered his next move, but he took too long. The croc crashed back into the water on it’s four legs, but much higher above the water line and ran for Pan, leaping up with it’s jaws wide open.

Pan flew back once again in retreat, but misjudged the distance with the brick ceiling, hitting his head. His mask moved lower off his face and he dropped into the water as the pungent, rotten smell of the sewers rushed through the gap of his mask.

In a frantic cacophony of fear, pain and complete disgust at the smells he was hit with, Pan was utterly vulnerable.

The crocodile loomed over Pan, it’s snout just above Pan’s knees. He gave up worrying about the smell and focused on keeping his breathing slow and trying to be calm.

“P-please... don’t hurt me.”

“Don’t hurt me,” replied the croc, a lot more passively.

“Deal,” Pan croaked, nodding his head in agreement.

“Good. Thank you.”

“But th-those people? That was you?”

“Yeah, I ate them, but I didn’t kill them,” the crocodile admitted. Pan scuttled back and got up. The crocodile relaxed. “I might be a talking crocodile, but I know there’s a slight difference.”

Pan couldn’t argue with that logic. “Then who is, and for Christ sake why have I not asked this before now, but who or what are you if you’re able to talk to me?”

“I’d rather you just left.”

“Not until I know what’s going on. Or I’ll be back down with the authorities.” Pan stared down the crocodile, not blinking and showing he meant business.

The crocodile resigned himself to having to give Pan his way.

“Let’s start with my name. I’m Pan. What’s yours?”

The crocodile hesitated. “Mine is Tico Navarro. But my friends… well, they used to call me Tick.”

“Do you want me to call you Tick?”

“Depends on what you plan to do with me? Not if you’re going to bring the authorities down here.”

Pan smiled softly. “I’ll call you Tick then. So um… how did a talking crocodile come to be a talking crocodile? And how did you get down here?”

The crocodile hesitated again. He looked uncertain about what to reveal. “I... You might not believe it, but believe it. It's true. I was a soldier in an elite squad. Deep top secret stuff we did and we were selected for a project. They called it the APEX Project, and they injected us with therapies that gave us the DNA characteristics and predator instincts of some of the animal kingdom’s top predators...”

“Apexes…” Pan repeated, following on.

“Yes. I remember very clearly it stood for Animal/Person Enhancement Xchange, but it was very much about making soldiers into strong, instinctive beasts.”

“Fricking hell. When was-" Pan’s danger intuition swept over him, stopping him dead the middle of his sentence.

“Tick! Stop!” a young girl’s voice echoed out from the darkness. “I know you get lonely down here but stop talking for, God’s sake! What have I said about just talking to anyone and everyone?”

Pan watched as a teenage girl of Japanese heritage walked out of the shadows. Her jawline length black hair was held back by a yellow handkerchief headband. She wore dusty blue dungarees over a black tee shirt and black rubber boots to protect her from the sewer. She held in both hands a baseball bat with a bloodied circular blade sticking out from the top of it.”

“I’m going to have to kill him now,” she said rather annoyed.

“Woah woah, no. We’re cool!” Pan protested. “I’m Pan. I’ve just come down here to look for the missing Public Works workers in the news. I'm just bored.”

“Christ, Tick, you told him I killed them?” she hissed angrily.

“Er… no, no he didn’t actually. Although, I guessed the moment I saw your saw bat that you may have… He was just telling me about the APEX Project.”

“Tick?!” she screamed in frustration, kicking the water.

“What, Ohko? He’s a kid who can fly. I thought if I told him, he’d understand and go,” Tick reasoned, albeit remorsefully.

“Don't be dumb! Kids who can fly down in sewers cannot be trusted!”

“Hey, Ohko, is it? Look, honestly I just wanted to solve a mystery. What… kids don’t want to do that?” he said, reluctantly leaning into his kid like appearance.

“Get out of here Tick,” Ohko instructed. Tick didn’t need telling twice, and left, causing Pan to levitate up so the croc could run underneath him.

“He talks too much,” moaned Ohko once Tick had gone. "He gets lonely and I can only spend so much time down here with him."

“He’s got a lot to say.”

“Having a lot to say will get him killed.”

“Do you have a lot to say? Namely… I don’t know… about killing people?” Pan asked.

“He needs to eat doesn’t he? And he doesn’t like doing it himself. He gets hungry and weak and so I have to look after him. It’s how it’s been and how it will continue to be!”

“You can’t kill innocent people, Ohko. You do know that don’t you?”

“It’s mostly shit head waste of spaces who I feed to Tick. Those workers were just an accident. But the only person who knows all that is you...” She dropped the top end of the bat and held it menacingly by her side.

“You really want to do this down in the sewer? Right then…” he said. “Time to fight dirty. Literally.”

She swung her bat at him wildly and a little amateurishly if he gave himself the chance to admit, which he dodged quickly, flying into a 360˚ spin landing behind her.

He kicked her in the back, knocking her forward. As she turned, he punched her in the face.

When she looked up, Pan was already gone.

***

“So that’s what happened. I just wondered if you were able to find out more about this APEX Programme?” Pan asked, after filling in The Secretary with what happened in the sewers two days earlier.

“All that I have is coming up as redacted,” she said looking at her screen huffing. “It’s classified beyond even anyone’s clearance here. I’d have to go high high up, but I wonder if it would be worth it?”

“No, probably not,” he agreed.

“You’re not planning on going back down there are you?” she asked.

“Not if I can help it. It’s taken me two days of constant showering to get me to this point of being able to go out and not smell. No, but I’ll keep an eye out above ground for the girl.”

“But you don’t have her name, you said?”

“No,” he lied. “I was busy keeping an eye on where he bat was going.”

“That’s fair enough.” The Secretary smiled. “If there’s nothing else, I’ve got to get on, Pan, but thanks for coming to me with this.”

“No problems. Bye Ma’am.” Pan got up and walked to the door as The Secretary looked on.

The door shut and she picked up the phone.

It rang for a while, and then she said, “Hello. It’s me. Tico Navarro has been found… Yeah, in the sewers of LA… Shall I leave it with you?... Ok, thanks. Bye.”