Apex

by Robert J. Crane

  “That’s a reasonable point,” she said, all computer-like again. “But I don’t know why Harry thinks I can help you with this—this baggage of yours.”

  “Who am I to you, Cassidy?” I asked, turning around to her.

  Cassidy stared at me with shrewd eyes. “You’re an occasional obstacle to be overcome and an occasionally useful person when our objectives align. You did save me from Harmon, after all.”

  “Cold. Analytical. About what I’d expect of a thinking machine.”

  “Thank you,” she said, completely sincere.

  “That wasn’t a … never mind.” I shook my head. Why the hell did Harry send her after me? “You’re not going to have a real news update on anyone’s condition for hours, are you?”

  “If they die, I’ll probably have one sooner,” she said, and then seemed to realize what she’d just said. “Which … would be bad, I guess … ?”

  “Yes, that’d be bad,” I said, and realized that her last, drawn-out sentence had been one of the longest ones I’d ever heard Cassidy try and construct, almost like she was struggling, even with her big, fast-moving brain, to put together an answer in an expedient fashion. She was taking more time to be as sympathetic as she could.

  Unfortunately, she was still Cassidy, but … points for effort.

  And that drove home an old truth I’d learned a long time ago—that there was nothing you could do if you just stood around waiting for things to happen. I could stand out here in this snowy field all damned day, but there’d be no news that’d reach me here that wouldn’t catch me in the car, no action I could take here that would help my brother or my friends …

  “Let’s go, Cassidy,” I said, starting the short walk back to the car, snow crunching beneath my feet as I put one foot in front of another and started away from the fields, away from the cold, away from nature … and back to action.

  Back to Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  Home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Eilish drove. Harry gave her a long pep talk, warning her about the dangers of switching lanes, but frankly, we were on the freeway, and there was a massive divider between the left and right lanes, so he must have gotten the reading that she’d be fine, because shortly after he turned her loose to drive, he conked out and slept through almost all of Illinois.

  Night was falling when he woke up to find us quiet. Cassidy had been silent; no news was good news, even though I pressed her for an update every few minutes at first, until finally I just let it go and silence reigned.

  An hour past the Wisconsin state line she said, “Reed is in serious but stable condition,” and I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for thousands of miles, for years of my life.

  Little updates came trickling in on the others, too, and somewhere before we got to Madison, I fell asleep.

  I woke in the dark and blinked as I saw a sign that said HUDSON NEXT FOUR EXITS.

  “Where are we?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Hudson, Wisconsin. Gateway to the state of Minnesota and entry point to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  Harry was at the wheel now, and he smiled over at me. “Almost home.”

  “Yeah,” I said and sat up. I’d missed a long stretch of hilly roads and country from Madison to Eau Claire, and now we were almost to the state line, which coincided (but was not really a coincidence) with the St. Croix river.

  We passed Exit 4, a truck stop exit with an outdoors store right off the ramp and a greasy spoon diner to take care of any burgeoning desire you had for oiling up your internal organs before you headed into the city.

  Then we passed Exit 3—three miles to the river—the road that led south to the college town of River Falls.

  Exit 2 was where all the action was—banks, big box stores, little strip malls, Hudson had most of the stuff the suburban set needed to get by on a daily basis.

  Then we crested the short hill as Interstate 94 rose slightly ahead of us, and the St. Croix river spread before me as we headed down toward the long bridge below.

  Exit 1 loomed right on the bank of the river; it led to historic downtown Hudson, a neat little strip of riverfront shops and restaurants and stores, a piece of refurbished Americana that thrived in the summers when the boat traffic on the St. Croix was thick from here north to Stillwater, Minnesota, and south to Prescott, Wisconsin. On the Fourth of July you could practically walk from one bank of the St. Croix to the other, and the fireworks displays …

  A little memory tweaked at me. I’d had a boyfriend, Jeremy Hampton, and we’d come down here and watched the fireworks by the shore on the Wisconsin side. They always started late, because the sun didn’t set until 9 PM in the summer, the days so long they practically crawled past. It wasn’t quite Alaska with its midnight sun, but it was about as close as you could get in the continental US.

  I realized belatedly I was squeezing my hand as we rolled down the hill at 70 miles per hour and reached the St. Croix River bridge. There was hardly any traffic now, rush hour long over, and the clock told me it was a little after 2 AM. Some semi-trailers rolled along with us, a few cars for variety.

  And when we crossed the state line into Minnesota, I realized my cheeks were warm and wet. I ignored them, and so did everybody else, but I wiped them with my sleeve nonetheless.

  “How far away are we now?” Eilish asked, a little sleepily, from the back seat. I wondered how long she’d driven.

  “It’s about four or five miles to Woodbury, which is basically directly east of the city of St. Paul,” I said. “It’s a massive suburb, tons of shopping and whatnot.”

  “And where are we going?” Eilish asked.

  I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. We should probably find a hotel to check into, start our search first thing in the morning.” I yawned. I might have been able to do something sooner, but taking the temperature of the room around me, most of my crew seemed to be sleepy. I looked back at Cassidy; she still seemed bright and attentive by the light of her screen, but if she’d popped a little something to keep her awake, that was hardly a surprise, was it?

  The miles before Woodbury, I-94 was shrouded on either side by thick woods, broken by the occasional pasture or stretch of farmland. I couldn’t see the bare land in the dark, but I could see the outlines of the trees by the side of the highway as we passed, and there was something comforting about it.

  “Brake lights ahead,” Harry murmured from beside me. I looked; he was right. People were tapping their brakes ahead, just as we were coming up on the first Woodbury exit.

  The big semi truck next to us slowed as we did. Pretty soon we were both crawling along, right under the overpass for Woodbury Drive. Radio Drive, the big Woodbury exit, was still a mile ahead.

  In the darkness, the glow of headlights, brake lights and street lamps hanging over the freeway combined to give Harry a soft glow while we were under one of the overheads, and then a shadow cast by the roof of our SUV would pass over him when we moved under one. We were crawling along now at less than twenty miles per hour, inching up to the Radio Drive exit, where I could see the lights for the Woodbury Lakes shopping plaza glowing past all the brake lights on the freeway.

  “What the hell is all this?” I asked, leaning forward, like moving my head twelve inches in that direction would make any kind of difference in my visual acuity. “A traffic jam at two in the morning?”

  Harry’s face was all screwed up in concentration and suddenly we came to an abrupt stop.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he shifted into park, blinking a few times as he did so.

  He turned and looked at me, and I saw his confidence again, though he lacked the boyish smile. “We need to bail out of the car. Now.”

  “What?” Eilish piped up from the back seat.

  “We need to go now,” Harry said, turning back to the ladies in the back seat.

  Cassidy didn’t need to be told twice; she clapped shut her laptop, tossed
it in her bag without ceremony, and was ready to move in a second.

  Eilish seemed to need a little more time, fishing around in the floorboard around her ankles, gathering up her plastic bags of junk food. “So … is this going to be a fight, then? Should I carb up to prepare myself?”

  “Only if you want to crash hard in the middle of it,” I said, frowning. I’d been in those kind of fights before, the ones where I wished I’d had something more than a donut when my blood sugar dove off a cliff in the midst of a battle. Adrenaline tended to keep the damage from that to a minimum, but adrenaline couldn’t cover up everything when it came to crappy eating habits.

  “Well, I need these,” she said, shoving bags onto her arms, like she was some homeless lady from the park.

  “Come on,” Harry said, throwing open his door. “We need to move.” He reached across the center console and grabbed me by the wrist for a second as I was about to get out. My eyes met his in the dark car, and I felt electric to the touch for a second. “We will find you,” he said, and then he let go, was out the door.

  “What does that mean?” I got out and watched Harry grab Cassidy by the arm and point her toward the median. She took off at a run, heading for the center of the freeway.

  “Eilish, this way,” Harry said, as the Irishwoman scooted across the seat and emerged on his side of the car. He helped her out and then nodded at the median. “Go.”

  I started toward him, but he looked at me and shook his head. “This isn’t your path, Sienna.”

  “What the hell, are you my spirit guide now?” I asked.

  He just smiled, a little tightly. “For best results … just be yourself.” And then he took off at a run after them.

  I stood there, now three lanes of traffic between us, and watched them go. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked. If he was heading that way, and said it wasn’t my path …

  Then, logically, whatever we were dealing with here would be …

  In the other direction.

  I whirled, eyes scanning, and sure enough, in the channel between lanes directly in front of me was a figure. Tall, broadly built, his ebony skin dark in the night, he came striding toward me, full of the swagger and confidence of a man who’d already squarely kicked my ass in a Waffle House once today.

  The Terminator.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Be myself,” I muttered, under my breath, as the Terminator strode toward me, sheltered on either side by two big semi trucks. “That’s great advice, Harry. A wonderful mantra for someone who’s had entire sections of her mind wiped clean like a dry erase board. Super helpful.”

  The Terminator didn’t bother to speak, or issue an ultimatum, or even say something cool like, “Hasta la vista, Sienna.” He just came at me, picking up speed, that shadowy effect melting behind him as he ran, smoking off him like he was carrying a pound of evil dry ice in his clothing.

  “Be myself,” I muttered again. “Here’s a question, then—who the hell am I?”

  The Terminator came at me in a blur, and I reacted—a little slowly—by throwing up a blocking hand. It was old instinct, something ingrained in me by my mother over years of sparring sessions and reinforced in my adulthood by countless ones I’d forced myself to partake in to keep fresh. Speed had been less of an issue these last few years, with all those other metas in my body to give me attacks I could use at long range.

  Now, though … these old techniques were going to have to find new life, or else I’d be seeing the end of mine at the hands of someone faster and more prepared than me.

  My forearm thudded against his wrist, turning aside his blow as I shifted my balance on my front leg. I don’t know if the Terminator was expecting me to cower and retreat a little more—like I had in our last encounter—but he’d committed his full weight to his attack and my brain had recused itself from the immediacy of the threat. Adrenaline had kicked in, and now life was moving at both an alarmingly fast pace, and yet still a slow one.

  Years of practice, years of training, had allowed me this detachment in the frenetic pace of a battle. The crazier things got, the cooler I got, because …

  Well, because I’d fought world-ending threats before, and this guy was just an aspiring Sienna-ending threat.

  No big.

  He twisted away from my block, trying to rechannel his force and hit me with his other hand. I acted from instinct and headbutted him, catching him forehead-to-cheek. Not exactly optimal, and it hurt, but I heard a satisfying crack that signified I’d broken his cheekbone.

  The Terminator staggered back a step, his face slightly misshapen, that smoking effect melting behind him. It seemed to be some sort of by-product of his speed, something I’d never seen before, but I had the brief thought that something like that maybe had an illusory or distractive quality about it, as well. Meta powers didn’t tend to fall into the realm of completely useless, not at this level, which told me he had some ability with it that I maybe hadn’t seen yet. Because he probably hadn’t felt like he was losing enough to employ it.

  There was a nice cut on his cheek, a thin trickle of blood sliding down it just below his eyeball. He looked down for a second, then back up at me, and there was nothing in his eyes but vicious resolve of the sort I’d probably had whenever I was about to kick someone’s ass. It was very intimidating for most of his subjects, I was sure.

  “If it bleeds … we can kill it,” I said, staring him down. Then I blinked. “Wait. No. Sorry. Wrong Schwarzenegger movie.”

  “What?” His voice was deep and resonant. His genuine confusion shone through in his response.

  “That was from Predator, but you’re the Terminator,” I said, readying for his next attack. “My bad.”

  He squinted at me, as though trying to determine whether I was crazy, bantering in the middle of a fight like this. He must have decided I was just stupid, because he came at me again. The fact that we were trapped between cars didn’t give him a lot of room to maneuver, and he couldn’t flank me without going wide around one of them or leaping over its top, both of which would leave him exposed to a counterattack. And also allow me to see him coming from a mile away.

  The Terminator led with a short punch, a jab designed to knock me back, but I whipped an arm around it and captured his wrist under my armpit. I whirled, ready for him, because I’d seen which side he led with, and I shifted my stance as I came around. I stole his balance perfectly and whipped him face-first into my SUV.

  He cracked against the passenger window glass, shattering it with the palm of his free hand, which he used to prevent his head from rattling against the car. I continued my motion, his left arm trapped under my right arm, and I pinned him against the car, hyperextending his elbow in the process.

  I was almost back to back with him at this point, and even with him pinned against the car, this was not a good place to be against a metahuman. I hit him in the lower back with an elbow and then released him, whirling away and leaving him against the vehicle for a quarter second before he spun around on me, nursing that elbow I’d just jacked up.

  “Human flesh over a metal endoskeleton?” I asked, rhetorically. “Not so much.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” he asked, low and gruff, cradling his arm against him. I’d given his tendons and cartilage a good bend in the wrong direction, and even a high level meta would feel that for a bit—unless they were Wolfe.

  But nobody was Wolfe anymore.

  I took a breath, trying to put the rampant stab of emotion I felt at that lonely thought behind me. “I’m making fun of you,” I said. “It’s this thing I do to annoy my opponents, get them off balance, even when they’re faster than me. It’s one of the few things I really remember about myself—”

  He came at me without any blatantly obvious warning—except a subtle change in his balance as he set himself up for it. If I hadn’t been paying attention, if I hadn’t danced this dance with countless other people, if Mom hadn’t taught me … I
might have missed it and gotten blindsided, had to throw up a scattershot series of blocks and hope for the best.

  But I saw it, and when he came at me …

  I dodged, I blocked, I turned him aside and rammed him into the car door next to me. I had him pinned against the mass of the car, his arm barred this time, putting my knee into his back to keep him there. If he moved against me, he’d break his own bone, or at least dislocate his elbow.

  Finally, I had the Terminator pinned between a rock and a hard case.

  But he failed to acknowledge this fait accompli and gave the car a shove with his free hand. It squealed, tires moving against the pavement, and sending the family within into a frenzy. They scrambled to get the hell out of the vehicle, their faces pasty white within the confines of the car’s cab. It was a mother and her three kids, and I could read the panic in her eyes, could hear her frantic screams as she climbed over the center console into the passenger seat and hurried to open the door and escape that way. She was screaming for her kids to follow her as the Terminator continued pushing against the car and moving it, tires skidding, across the pavement.

  The kids were screaming now, too, trying to get out. One of them, presumably the oldest, had thrown open the passenger side door and was hurrying to unfasten a toddler in a forward-facing car seat. Their cries were drowned out by the squeal of the tires on the pavement, the Terminator was moving the vehicle, meta strength shoving two thousands of metal toward the van in the next lane over. I could see the eyes of the guy in the driver’s seat of the van, and they were wide and panicked, because he saw what was coming.

  The doors were open on the passenger side and the mom was standing there, screaming for the kids to get out. The car was creeping toward her like a slow-moving lava flow across the freeway. The open passenger door made contact with the side of the van and, caught too wide open to just close, it started to bend at the hinge joints. The metal squealed, protesting at this rough abuse, pressure being applied in a way it was not meant to be pushed.