Apex

by Robert J. Crane

  A child’s scream cut the night, echoing in my ear, and I realized that unless I did something quickly, they were all going to be crushed against the van in the next lane, unable to flee because of the bending doors that had them penned in. The driver of that vehicle was already pulled forward as far as he could, but he was butting up against the back of a semi-trailer, and if he inched forward anymore, the rear of the trailer was going to decapitate him.

  I had this sorry bastard, the Terminator, pinned exactly where I wanted him, and then he’d had to go and put innocent people in danger. I panicked, some alarm going off in my head telling me that this was not acceptable, that this was wrong, that he was crossing a line into territory that I found absolutely detestable.

  For a fraction of a second, I placed my bare hand on the base of his neck, touch the exposed skin. I imagined the burning pain, the searing as my powers started to work and his soul started to work free of his body, into mine—

  And just as quickly I ripped him from the car as he shoved it, using my leverage to swiftly spin him away from it, placing myself between him and that vehicle, between him and the children and mother he’d been just about to mash into a paste.

  I’d meant to crash him into my own SUV, parked only a few feet away, but as I yanked him around, he hooked his elbow and locked it in place, pinching two of my fingers so it took me an extra second to work them free.

  A second is forever in a fistfight.

  I hadn’t quite gotten them loose when he whipped me into a punch I didn’t see coming—hello, distraction, trying to free myself from his momentum and the whirl—and he leveled me into my own vehicle, neatly reversing the plan I’d set for him. I hit it with a lot more force than I would have been able to marshal against him, though, denting the door in solidly upon impact, the windows shattering above my head, bones cracking all up and down my back.

  “So she shows her weakness,” the Terminator said over the ringing of bells in my head and the screaming of every nerve in my back from my shoulders to the base of my spine. I was pretty sure I’d broken every rib, or at least it sounded that way to me in the chorus of howls as the neurons fired. “Do you consider yourself some kind of hero?” He loomed in my vision. “A funny thing from the most wanted criminal in America.”

  I tried to get to my feet, but without Wolfe to heal me …

  Wolfe …

  … I couldn’t muster the strength. Muscles use bone to anchor them, to push off of, but with my ribs broken, my entire back in furious agony, I couldn’t push up to my feet. The best I could do was lean against the car, trying not to topple over left or right, my legs bent, my body nearly in a sitting position.

  It would have been handy to have some fire to throw …

  … Gavrikov …

  Or a light net …

  … Eve …

  Maybe a little fear to cast in the Terminator’s mind?

  … Bjorn …

  I’d settle for being able to turn into a dragon and bite his head off.

  … Bastian …

  But there was no one here to save me now. No voice to encourage me to fight on …

  … Zack …

  Just me, alone.

  On a freeway.

  Broken bones scattered throughout my body.

  Crippling pain running through me.

  A question occurred as the Terminator took a step closer, and I couldn’t raise so much a hand against him.

  “Who are you?” I asked, my voice rasping. Every breath hurt.

  “That’s classified,” he said with a tight smile, and raised his fist, one last time, to smite the hell out of me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Ibet the identity of your daddy … is classified, too … even from you,” I said, holding my sides. Darkness was closing in around me, the man I had taken to calling the Terminator looming over me, fist raised high, ready to bring it down and crush me once and for all.

  And this was my last gambit. A “yo daddy” joke. One step above the rhetorically classic “yo mama.”

  But the funny thing was …

  The Terminator actually hesitated. He kept his fist high, his face scrunched up in concentration, and he asked, somewhere between confusion and disgust, “What?”

  I lifted my leg in a hard jerk and slammed my foot into his groin. It wasn’t much; it still activated enough muscles in my core to completely wreck my ability to hold myself upright, triggering pain against all those broken ribs, and I slumped and fell over immediately afterward.

  If I’d been a normal human, it’d have been a good, solid kick in the balls, one that would have sent my opponent to his knees, clutching his groin, wondering if my “yo daddy” joke distraction had just cost him the ability to be a daddy himself someday.

  But I was freaking metahuman.

  And I punted his ass across the damned road, his crotch riding at about the level of his shoulders as he Team Rocket’d over the car behind him and landed somewhere in the ditch beyond. “You shoulda made like a squirrel,” I muttered as he flew, “and learned to protect your nuts.”

  I heard the landing over the screaming of my ribs. It sounded like it hurt.

  Without a moment to spare, I heaved myself off my knees and fought against the pain surging through my body. I moved nearly bent double, clutching my chest as I navigated around my own SUV, now partially in the other lane, casting only a look behind me to see if the mother and her three kids had escaped the car behind me.

  They had. Whew.

  The mom was holding her baby tight as she ran for the exit ramp, the driver of the van next to her running alongside her, grabbing a couple of the kids to help them along. It was nice to see strangers helping each other, even if I had to watch it while bent double and hauling ass across lanes of parked traffic under the wide, watchful eyes of lots of drivers probably wondering what the hell they’d just witnessed.

  I crossed the median, leaping over the barrier between lanes with a seething grunt as the landing made me almost scream. Pain ran through me with every movement, and I felt like I was blacking out on my feet. Near-instant healing was something I was sorely missing at the moment, as someone honked at me and I dodged a Cadillac Escalade by a matter of inches. The draft current almost knocked me down as it whizzed behind me at seventy miles an hour.

  Lucky for me that whatever was causing this traffic jam had slowed things down in the eastbound lane, too. I managed to make it across the freeway with no major incidents.

  I was looking around for Harry and the others, but I didn’t see them anywhere. Sirens were going in the distance, and I knew that I had to make myself really scarce before they showed up, because the last thing I needed was legal entanglements right now.

  There was a tall embankment and a ten foot fence dividing Interstate 94 from the world beyond. Darkness was still creeping in on the edges of my vision, and I was afraid I was going to pass out any second. I looked left, then right. Ahead, some few hundred yards, I could see the Radio Drive eastbound onramp. Flashing police lights told me that going that way was a terrible idea. Looking right, I saw nothing but empty freeway back to the Woodbury Drive exit, and that was a bad idea, too.

  I looked at the fence, almost beseechingly. Couldn’t it be shorter?

  There was nothing for it, though, so I jumped it, damned near catching a foot on it because I was trying to leap with a shattered rib cage. My right foot brushed the top bar and then I descended in a steep dive.

  I hit the ground and rolled, not intentionally or in an aikido way meant to diffuse the force of impact, but rather in a my-freaking-lungs-just-collapsed-oh-my-merciful-heavens-arghhhhh kind of way. I stayed on the ground for a minute, an hour, who knew at that point? All I had was pain, pain, and the world was probably ending around me. All I could hear was blood rushing in my ears, the coppery taste of it in my mouth, and the smell of wet, cold air seeping into my lungs.

  Ah, home. If only I’d been in a reasonable condition to appreciate the fact I was ki
ssing Minnesota soil again. Well, snow, anyway. But since it was Minnesota, and January, that was basically the same thing.

  I was cursing under my breath when a car came to a coasting stop on the road in front of me. I hadn’t even really noticed it was there, but it was, a frontage road that ran up to a well-lit shopping strip a hundred yards away that bore a tower with the words, “Woodbury Lakes,” lit up on it.

  There were no flashing red or blue or white lights to indicate that whoever had stopped next to me was a cop, but I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for escape by this point. My ribs were so wrecked I would have been lucky to fight off an aggressive caterpillar at this point—and fortunately there were none of those handy. Because Minnesota. In January.

  A car door opened, and I heard solid heels clicking on pavement. Through the veil of blanketing pain, I realized I was being regarded by someone, very slowly, as they approached. But steadily; they weren’t hesitating or hanging back. Strong hands gripped me beneath my underarms, and I was lifted, tearing a gasp from me as my entire rib cage realigned again.

  “Don’t fight it,” came a female voice as smooth as an aged Lagavulin. It sounded familiar, but hell if I could have placed it, even with a gun right to my head. She dragged me, effortlessly, a few feet, until I heard the opening of a car door. I was lifted, bodily, into the passenger seat of a vehicle—I could tell because I could see the windshield right in front of me between seething gasps for air—and I settled into the least painful position as my savior walked back around and got in the driver’s side, shutting the door behind her.

  “W … who … are … you?” I managed to squeeze out in agonized gasps as she slowly turned the car around and eased it back the way she’d come. I could only see her out of the corner of my eye, and blurry, because my vision was clouded by tears of pain.

  She had brownish hair with traces of highlights, and it was in a kind of cool, wavy coif, something that looked like it had taken some time to make happen. I couldn’t see her skin, but she didn’t look old, just … mature, I guess. She had the strength of a meta, maneuvering me around like that, but I couldn’t really make out her eyes, or her face.

  “You don’t remember me, then?” she asked, turning to favor me with a look. “Remarkable.”

  “It’s not that remarkable,” I said, still struggling to find a less agonizing position. “I recently suffered … tremendous memory loss.”

  “Is that so?” she murmured with a kind of disinterest that sounded funny at the time. Later, it occurred to me that she’d either known about it or else didn’t care. Either/or.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Now my brain’s like, all Swiss cheesey.” I was mumbling, heading toward unconsciousness. “There are holes … big enough to drive Harvey Weinstein’s ego through.”

  “That’s a big hole,” she said.

  I looked at her; for a moment I thought she was Ariadne, but no, I remembered clearly what Ariadne looked like. “Seriously … I know you from somewhere.”

  “Of course you do.” Such a smooth voice. Mm. Scotch.

  “Where do I … know you from?” I asked.

  “The past.” Crisp. Elegant. Totally evasive.

  “Well, no shit. I didn’t figure we’d met in the future. Though … that actually did happen to me once.”

  “Akiyama?”

  I blinked and a little tear dripped down my cheek from where I’d wept it a little earlier. From pain, purely. I turned to try and look at her again. “How do you know about Akiyama?”

  “How many ribs do you think you’ve broken?” she asked, ignoring my question.

  “How many … are in the human body?” I gasped a little as it felt like a sharp piece of rib bone hung in my side. It felt like getting stabbed. “Because I would say that number … plus a hundred more.”

  “You don’t even stop when you’re in agonizing pain,” she said. “Same Sienna.”

  “You know me?” I asked.

  “Well enough.” Her voice melodic, and I stared at her through the wet veil that obscured my sight, blurring the world around me.

  “Wait …” I peered closer. That hair, the way it was styled, the color, the voice … “Are you Sigourney Weaver?” I slumped a little more in my seat. “Wrong movie again. She was in Aliens, not Terminator.”

  “This is no movie,” she said. “And since you don’t remember me … maybe I’m just a figment of your imagination.”

  “Figments of my imagination don’t carry me away from the scene of my certain capture,” I muttered, keeping my hands absolutely still. I’d found a position of pure equilibrium, where I didn’t feel the need to pass out in pain, though the sensation of agony was lurking around the edges of my consciousness. “It takes an actual accomplice to do that.”

  “Accomplice after the fact, perhaps,” she murmured, and I got the feeling she wasn’t even necessarily talking to me anymore. She had such composure, though. She really did remind me of Ariadne in that way, but the voice was way smoother. Octaves lower, far more confidence.

  Oh, and superpowered. Let us not forget that.

  “Were you in Scotland with me?” I asked, feeling a wooziness set in.

  “No,” she said simply, and—I thought—with a tiny hint of regret. “But I’m pleased you made it through that ordeal.”

  “Ordeal?” I almost laughed, but it hurt too much. “Hell, that wasn’t an ordeal, that was a freaking apocalypse.”

  “Yet still you stand.”

  “I’m really more slumping right now. Trying not to move.”

  “For now,” she allowed. “But nothing keeps you down for long, Sienna.”

  “You know that about me, do you?” I asked, my head slumping against the seatback. It was comfortable, and I’d been sleeping in a car for the last day or more. Why not again now?

  The darkness started to seep in, stealing my consciousness as she answered. “I know that about you,” she said, and she sounded definite about it. “That … and so much more …”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Iwoke in a motel room that was not half bad, my breath coming into my lungs with a thin reminder of pain that had mostly fled. Traces of it remained all up and down my ribcage as I moved, tensing the muscles in my abdomen and sitting up on a threadbare bedspread that had probably seen a better day or two.

  “Ew,” I said, rolling to the edge of it. I was still fully clothed, fortunately, though I hoped they boiled these bedspreads between hotel guests, and at a high temp, too, maybe five hundred degrees. I knew what happened in hotel rooms. I’d seen the news show investigations. And, uh, also been a hotel guest with a boyfriend or two.

  The pain was mostly gone from my back as I looked around. It wasn’t a very big place, a pretty typical two-bed hotel room. I ran fingers along my flanks, seeking places where the ribs felt disjointed through my shirt. No obvious points stood out, and there was no tenderness as I pressed harder.

  I’d healed. However long I’d been out, it’d been long enough for my metahuman powers to bring my body back up to snuff. No small thing given how injured I’d been.

  My head ached, probably the result of not having any Scotch for a while. I’d missed a good evening of drinking, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that other than annoyed. I stood, glancing at the dark curtains behind me. Light streamed through a small crack in them, giving the room a little illumination. Peeking between them I saw a grey Minnesota day.

  At least, I assumed I was still in Minnesota. I could have been anywhere, though, really.

  “Hello?” I called. There was a light on in the bathroom, which I couldn’t really see into from where I stood in the room. I meandered over, shuffling, slow, just in case someone came jumping out at me.

  There was nothing to worry about, though. My personal savior, Sigourney Weaver, was gone, not a trace of her left in the room. No purse, no keys, no suitcases, no personal effects at all.

  She’d just dropped me off here to recuperate and … vanished?

  “What
the hell … ?” I used the bathroom and washed my hands, then took a look at myself in the mirror. There was a little blood on my face, so I borrowed one of the wash cloths under the sink and fixed that problem, trying not to look at my too-thin face as I worked on making myself look—well, not presentable, but at least like I hadn’t just been in a street fight. Which I kinda had. More like a freeway fight, I guess. Rumbling with the Sharks. Or the Terminator, in this case.

  I went back into the room, which was quiet. The clock told me it was 11:32 in the morning. I looked closer at the phone and it had the name and address of the hotel, which was in St. Paul, pretty close to the Minneapolis city limits judging by the address on Snelling. Now that I listened, I could hear the sounds of the city outside the window, though when I’d looked outside earlier all I could see was a vacant lot next door and train tracks a little farther in the distance.

  “Oh, man,” I muttered and sat back down for a minute. I tried to take stock of my situation.

  I’d damned near beaten the Terminator in a straight-up fight until he’d dragged innocent people into it. That was pretty dirty, and told me a lot about him. He seemed fully prepared to make a jelly paste out of those people if I hadn’t put my life on the line to stop him. That made him a villain, full stop, and the next time I met him I was not going to hold back in my efforts to put a fist through his face and out the back of his head. Not that I’d had much chance to be restrained thus far, but any thought that he might be some determined law enforcement operator hell bent on catching me had gone out the window when he’d tried to pulp that family. Decency and the benefit of the doubt definitely weren’t going to hold me back anymore.

  Now I found myself squarely in the middle of the Twin Cities. Someone had brought me here, and—who the hell was Sigourney Weaver, actually? Had I really met her before? Was she part of the memories Rose had sucked out of my brain, never to return? It was a shame my life didn’t function like the movies, because if it had, I’d have had a happy ending when I’d blown Rose’s own brains out. In a Hollywood ending, all my memories would have magically returned, and I probably would have gotten all those superpowers back that I lost, too.