Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  Still, I had meta powers, so I leapt across the first five rows as I shot a look back. No sign of Mr. Yellow-belly yet. I landed between two rows and immediately ducked down, running sideways as quickly as I could, suppressing my breathing to quiet gasps and softening my footsteps as I bolted for the side of the auditorium. Maybe I could find an emergency exit before—

  The sound of open doors being ripped, pointlessly, from their hinges put the end to that idea. I’d reached the end of the row and slipped around the side, huddling and holding my breath as Grendel chucked one of the doors toward the stage. It flew like it had been shot toward orbit by a rocket, and while I didn’t see it impact, the noise it made assured me that Grendel was not the happiest of campers.

  “Where are you?” he asked, voice caught somewhere between pure rage and scratchy like he’d swallowed gravel.

  No way in hell was I answering. I let out a very, very quiet breath and sucked in another while I stalked down one of the rows, my breathing covered up by his stomping.

  “I know you’re in here!” He seemed to be getting madder by the moment, which was interesting, because I would have thought peak anger would have come after I dropped his ass through a giant window pane, but no. “I will find you! And then I’m going to rip you to pieces!”

  Not exactly a great salesman, Grendel. What was my incentive for coming out again?

  He stalked down the back row, heading in the opposite direction from me, and again I used the cover of his footfalls to take a few gasping breaths. My right arm was starting to numb up, which was good and bad. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do any belly crawling given the state of that arm, but maybe, if forced, I could have gutted it out. My left hand was still clutching my Glock, which was probably pointless, but which I held onto nonetheless as though it were the last pair of yoga pants in America and every soccer mom on the planet was mobbing me for them.

  “I’m going to rip your skin off!” Grendel shouted, now on the other side of the auditorium.

  I just kept taking my slow, quiet breaths, looking around. There were some emergency exits along the side of the room, but the nearest was about twenty feet of open ground away from me. I wasn’t sure I could cover the open ground between me and it and open and close it so quietly Grendel wouldn’t notice before he stormed over in this direction.

  It seemed to me that my better bet might be to continue using the auditorium seats as cover to evade him until he got pummeled by FOMO (fear of missing out, clearly on all the luscious Sienna Nealon happening elsewhere in the building, cuz clearly she wasn’t here), gave up and moved on.

  There were risks to both plans; if I stayed here and Grendel managed to find me, I was going to be really limited in what I’d have to fight with. Run and make too much noise or draw his interest, and his natural advantages of speed and not dragging a broken arm like a useless, vestigial appendage slowing him down and throwing off his sprint would allow him to chase me down and rip me to shreds.

  Decisions, decisions.

  While I was thinking that one over, Grendel got tired of looking on the other side of the auditorium and leapt in my direction. I heard him leave the ground and I froze for a second before ducking as low as I could, waiting to hear him come down—

  Crash.

  He smashed back to the ground only a row or two from me. I made myself a tiny ball and hid behind the row of seats nearest me, my ass flat to the auditorium floor, hoping he couldn’t see my ponytail above the seats. Man, I wish I’d gone for the low ponytail today. When you’re hiding from a giant murder monster, every little bit helps.

  The vibrato of his landing pulsed up through my ass, causing my bones to quiver with the weight of his landing. A smell seemed to spread out from his landing point, that sickly scent of dead flowers that followed him. I tried to keep from gagging, holding my breath and keeping my head down. Don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see...

  “There you are,” he proclaimed, and his voice was way, way too close for him to be bullshitting me.

  Uh oh.

  I scrabbled away, flushed like a quail, huddled down as I broke into a low run, striving for something between absolute silence and full-fledged flight.

  It only took me a second after I’d burst into motion to realize—

  That bastard hadn’t heard me at all.

  Until now.

  His laugh was dark, terrible, and his next leap carried him right toward me. I looked back and saw those yellow eyes, that amber skin, those jagged claws.

  All aimed at me.

  All coming right for me.

  48.

  Friday

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Friday shouted, sprinting up the face of the building. “I am climbing the pyramid of social media success, which is really just a giant metaphor for my life!”

  Everything hurt. His arms. His legs. His back. Hell, even bofa, though he’d been very careful to inspect those for damage before beginning his run up the side of the building.

  “This is a totally kittens metaphor,” Friday said, the hole in the building just a hundred yards in front of him. “I need to squeeze this into my next studio album. Which will be my first studio album. Maybe my third I’ll go back to recording in non-optimal spaces, where the sounds of life intrude like farts coming from the next bathroom stall over. Hehehehe. Ooooof.” One of his ribs was all jacked up. Maybe more than one. It hurt to laugh, which was a terrible shame since a wise man had once said that laughter was like the prophylactic of life. Because it was like protection against an immeasurably hard thing poking at you. Yeah, something like that.

  The yawning hole in the side of the building waited, and Friday leapt for it, because why bother looking first? Sienna was waiting. What should he say, jumping into this? ‘Geronimo’ was the classic, but everyone said it was racist these days. Like tube socks and lilac bushes. Why was that?

  The question made Friday’s head hurt, so he shouted, “Native American Dude-Guy!” and leapt into the hole. He was not a racist.

  The landing was a little better than the one he’d undertaken on the Prius. Honestly, for such a femme car, it wasn’t very soft. He’d hoped for something pillowy, but he’d really needed a prophylactic to protect him from the hardness of that.

  He managed to three-point his landing here, catching himself on both legs plus one hand, for a supercool, superhero landing. Then he stood, hands up, like the judges were going to award points.

  But they weren’t, because there were no judges in this game. It was a cold game, only life and death on the line, no scores. Like Russian Roulette, or Monopoly.

  Looking around, Friday found himself in the middle of some sort of bizarre concourse, an ode to the weak-teet opulence of Silicon Valley. There were tree planters and mahogany surfaces and glass-railed balconies, and somehow the décor offended every part of him, including his junk. “Bleagh,” he said, looking around. “Pick a style, douches. What the hell is this eclecticism? I should have been an art critic. God knows art needs the criticism. What a shitty industry you’ve become, so shallow and vapid and incestuous. Like the Lannister gene pool.”

  “Friday?” Veronika’s voice caught him off-guard, and he turned to find her running up with her new posse, some of whom were very old. And some of whom were distinctly metrosexual. The chick with the mini-afro looked like she had a top notch funk level, though. Veronika herself was a badass, of course, even if she’d always refused to let him watch her scissor someone. She’d been very fair about it, only breaking his hand the one time to get the point across that it was a strong, Simon Cowell-style “No” from her. Friday respected that negotiating position.

  “What’s up, Big Red?” Friday asked, nodding at her hair, which was a very different shade than when last they’d seen each other. “I see you’ve colorized for fall.”

  Veronika rolled her eyes. “You’re going to want to be staying out of our way for this.” The old guy behind her with the old-timey rifle racked the lever on its
stock like it was some kind of warning, catching the bullet it ejected and feeding it back in within a quarter second. Very cool, for an old guy.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to back your sweet tits off,” Friday said, puffing out his chest. “I’m with the FBI, and this is my jurisdiction. Heavy emphasis on the ‘dic’ part of that. And I’m not afraid to swing it around, helicopter-style.”

  Veronika’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a contractor with the FBI, and believe me when I tell you that’s the only thing keeping me from singeing your short hairs off for making any reference to my tits, you pig.”

  Friday didn’t back down. Not ever. Especially now. “Joke’s on you, Veronika,” he said, tightening his smile. “I wax them off, so you’ll have nothing to singe.”

  “Oh, sugar,” the lady with the afro said, “you can file that under ‘TMI.’”

  “Why am I arguing with an idiot?” Veronika asked, letting out an impatient breath. “Stand aside—”

  “What’s your jurisdiction?” Friday asked, hands on hips, standing like a mighty and unyielding bulwark of justice between Veronika and whatever heinous lawlessness she was about to get up to. This was the job, after all.

  “If you could spell that word in your present condition, I might take the time to explain who sent me,” Veronika said, making a hand gesture with her fingers to go around him. “As it is, I’m busy and—”

  “Oh, come on,” Friday said, trying to step to one side and block the weird metrosexual hipster guy with the funny hair, but faltering because he also needed to move to the other side and block the old dude with the rifle—

  He ended up tripping over his own feet and hitting the ground, which pleased no one. Or at least not himself.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Veronika said, detouring around him.

  “Hey, you guys, come on!” Friday said, scrambling to get back to his feet. “We should be working together toward our common goal of stopping the yellow monster and whatnot. This is your chance to show that you’re really not about hating men, Veronika.”

  “Just cuz I hate you doesn’t mean I hate all men, sugar tits,” Veronika tossed back.

  “These are totally pecs!” Friday shouted after her. “You know you’re admiring them!”

  “There you are,” Grendel’s voice hissed, somewhere just ahead of them.

  Everyone stopped. Veronika turned, looking back him, her perfectly penciled eyebrows a neat little angry V. “What was that?”

  “My stomach,” Friday said, thinking about as fast as he was able. “I ate something terrible last night that really disagreed with me. I swear. I’ve got the toilet selfie to prove it.”

  “I saw that,” the metrosexual guy said. “On Instaphoto. It went viral.”

  “It was totally kittens, wasn’t it?” Friday beamed with pride.

  “I could have gone without seeing it, to be honest,” Metrosexual said.

  “That’s because you’re intimidated by manly, non-vegan dumps.”

  “What the hell was—” Veronika was burning, cutting right over them both.

  A roar came blasting from out of the auditorium, furious and loud.

  They all stood for just a moment longer, staring at each other. Then Friday forced a sheepish grin—

  And they all bolted for the auditorium doors together.

  49.

  Sienna

  My plans always had this terrible habit of working out not at all as I wanted them to, and dammit, I’d had enough of it. Still, being as I had a gargantuan monster that was as yellow as an egg yolk and the size of the Barbary Coast chasing after my ass, it seemed a bad time to complain about it. After all, what was I going to do? Stop and rail at Grendel about how much it sucked that things never seemed to go smoothly and my way in moments such as these?

  I’m sure he’d listen with a sympathetic ear to that. Probably mine, after he’d ripped them off and squashed my head.

  So I did the only thing I really could do at that moment:

  I ran like hell, all pretense of ducking low and hiding forgotten.

  Grendel bounded after me, wiping out three rows of seats like they were made of sand. A shower of pieces—cushion, metal, bolts, etc.—went spraying past, a couple hitting me like shotgun pellets, but I ignored them in favor of saving the entirety of my body rather than quibbling over the ouchies I’d just suffered.

  He was coming at me rather like a train down the tracks, his eyes growing like the yellow light on the front of the engine as he closed on me. I was trying to run for the stage, figuring maybe I could jump up on it, exit stage left and bring the curtain down on him or something to distract him while I found the nearest window and hurled myself out of it and down the pyramid.

  But I realized I wasn’t going to make it another ten feet before Grendel ran me over like a squirrel in the street. Except he’d probably exhibit more remorse after annihilating the squirrel. Maybe. Hard to say; it certainly seemed like he had it out for me at this point, but maybe he hated squirrels, too. Maybe he was just a murderous asshole to everyone, though it felt like if that were the case, he really should have had a more extensive body count by now.

  I reversed course, making an ungainly move wherein I skidded to a stop on both feet and physically hurled myself backward blindly. I tucked into a roll as I landed on the scruff of my neck and kept tumbling, hoping Grendel had committed hard enough to his course and me to mine that he’d miss me.

  He did, but not by much. I felt the wind of his wild swing at me catch my leg, leaving a centimeter-deep cut that ripped through the pants on the back of my thigh. It stung, but a lot less than getting completely run over, stomped and shredded by those claws would have.

  I rolled and bounced, flipping a few times while I tucked knees to chest. I probably looked like a weird, reverse Olympic diver, but when I came down I managed to land on my feet. I took aim with the Glock and fired as I broke into a run in the opposite direction, heading for the main exit to the auditorium as Grendel crashed into the stage and made a hell of an impact. If I’d been between him and it, as he’d clearly intended, I’m not sure there’d have been enough of me intact for him to skin.

  My gunshots did not seem to deter him, and my aim was not world-class while I was sprinting, anyway. I found myself limping, pulled to the right by—well, by the broken arm on that side. It threw off my balance on that entire hemisphere of my body, which suggested very bad things that I didn’t have time to worry about in the frenzied effort to escape from this with my life.

  “HUZZAH!” a shout echoed over the auditorium as I ran through the last of my magazine. I tore my gaze away from Grendel. There, at the entry—

  Was Friday.

  And Veronika, who came up behind him and shoulder-checked his ass flat, sending him forward ten, fifteen feet in a globulous mass of muscle and dumbass. She looked a little nonplussed, and backing her came three people, two of whom I knew.

  One was Phinneus Chalke, a man who’d trained my mentor, Glen Parks. Chalke was a real-deal cowboy gunfighter of old whose powers were perfect muscle control. He’d developed these skills along the lines of gunplay, and had made himself into probably one of the foremost shots on the planet for about a hundred years running. If there was a world sniping championship, Phinneus Chalke would have been the badass legend defending champion that almost no one bothered to show up to even contest anymore. His accuracy was scary alarming, even to me, with pistol, rifle, and hell, probably a stone if that was all he had on hand. He was wearing a vest that looked like it had been cut fresh out of an alligator’s hide this morning, and a straw hat that matched it. Usually he ran a little more country-and-western and a little less cajun-and-creole, but his rifle was still the 1873 Winchester, held in both hands, and a Colt Peacemaker was still hanging from his hip, so I guess he didn’t look that different from how I remembered him.

  A couple steps behind him was a black lady—and I do mean black in every respect. She was African-American and also could
fade literally into the shadows, and was doing so right now. Her name was Kristina. Never caught her last name. Cassidy Ellis had once sent her to rescue me from a drug cartel and then the metahuman prison, the Cube. She waved at me with perfectly manicured nails as she disappeared into darkness.

  The last guy with them...hell if I knew who he was. He wore skinny jeans, loafers, had his brown hair shaped into something I thought had gone out with the emo movement, and topped it all off with a plaid flannel shirt that was probably fashionable but wildly out of sync with his ’do.

  “Hi!” I said, leaping the last row and nearly crashing into the wall thanks to my right arm’s numbness and uselessness messing with my balance. “Nice to see you all. Try not to get killed or whatever—”

  I was sprinting to get past them, figuring I’d let them tag in for a while. From my perspective, fighting Grendel seemed a fairly hopeless endeavor by this point, and I was resolved to regroup and come back to fight again when I had something a little stronger at my disposal, like Reed and company, or maybe a nuclear warhead. Failing that, I’d at least have preferred full use of my good right arm, since it was in fact my dominant hand, and my Glock was now empty.

  A row of seats crashed down in front of me, cutting me off from Veronika and her team neatly, components flying in all directions and forcing me to duck and cover lest I be blinded by the shotgun-scatter of junk.

  When I peeked out again, Grendel was there, big as life and twice as ugly. And I think we all know by now that between the beatings I take and the government constantly being up my ass, life was an often-ugly thing to me.

  I rolled back to my feet, nearly tumbling over again thanks to that damned right arm. Grendel was a couple rows from the rear of the auditorium. The seats he’d chucked at me—two rows of them, I now realized—formed a nice little barrier between me and the door because he’d ripped a section of concrete floor with them. They formed a neat T blocking me from the exit, and he was positioned to keep me contained in the little pocket he’d made with them.