Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  “We know who you are,” one of the local cops said. “And we know who she is, too.” Lots of guns pointed at little old me. Just like every day of my life, it seemed.

  “She’s surrendering,” Reed said urgently. “I’ve taken her into custody.” I couldn’t see his face, but his tone was so bitter I thought he might throw up. “Get the suppressant.”

  There was a little trading of looks, and one of the cops bolted for his car, disappearing behind the flashing red and blue lights for a moment. When he emerged, he holstered his gun, and came up with a syringe and started to walk over the no man’s land between me and all the cops.

  “On your knees,” Reed said, still sounding sick, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking to me.

  I complied, keeping my hands anchored to the back of my head. The cop came alongside a moment later, and I felt a painful jab in the side of my neck, like a knife, as he did not bother with gentleness, and roughly pushed the plunger down until the entire syringe was emptied in me.

  It only took about ten seconds, that stretched into what felt like a lifetime, for the drug to work. I felt a distinct weakening in my muscles, like I’d just woken up and couldn’t rip a person’s head off just yet. I swayed in the night, blinded by the flashing lights, my head suddenly drifting like a balloon.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the cop started to say. “Anything you say can and will be—”

  “Hold up,” Reed said. “Just … give me a second with the prisoner.” The cop nodded assent, and Reed knelt down in front of me, his coffee-brown eyes appearing in front of mine. “I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to do this, so—”

  He hugged me again, pressing his cheek against mine, kissed me on the cheek, hugged me again, cheek against mine, kissed me on the forehead, and then stood. “I love you, sis,” he said, and there were glistening spots in the corners of his eyes.

  “Love you too, bro,” I said, a little sleepily, the suppressant acting in concert with my body’s natural fatigue to render me utterly helpless.

  The cops swarmed in as he stepped back, cuffing me hand and foot, dragging me up, reading me my rights. I heard someone say, in a relieved tone, “We got her,” though I didn’t see who or who they were talking to as I was ushered away and thrust into the back of a cop car.

  The last thing I saw before I laid my head back against the seat and started to drift off was a man, standing far in the distance, atop the hill where I’d perched with my sniper rifle. My vision seemed a lot cloudier now that I was disempowered, but his face was clear, even at this distance.

  Harry.

  He looked … sad. And he offered a little wave, his own little goodbye. Somehow I felt like he was saying something, but I lacked the capacity to know what it was. Goodbye, maybe. This is where we part.

  Then he walked over the top of the hill and disappeared into the night.

  I fell asleep in the back of the police car, lights flashing, as two police officers got in, and started to drive me away … to all the infinite days of my future.

  In jail.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Angel

  Now

  Everything hurt. The bullet wounds, the places where Adoncia and her cronies had battered Angel—everything. Everything hurt.

  But …

  Angel was still alive. Which was a hell of a lot more than could be said for Adoncia.

  Reed, though … he just stood there, shirtless, staring at the police car with Sienna in the back as it drove off. Finally, after a long moment, he stirred, turning to Angel, giving her the once over. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Everything hurts,” Angel said, just being honest. “But … yeah. I think so.”

  “Good,” Reed said roughly. “We should—”

  More cars came roaring up, this time unmarked. Black SUVs, the kind that screamed GOVERNMENT AGENCY with their blue lights mounted on the dash. One of them came squealing up almost to her and Reed, the high beams glaring in her eyes, blinding her for a moment as it came to an abrupt stop.

  “Angel!” One of the doors was thrown open, and Angel blinked as Miranda hit her with a shoulder as she came in for a hard hug. Angel probably could have avoided it—reflexes and freezing not being so much a problem anymore—but she didn’t, because …

  Well, she saw it coming. And it felt good.

  “I was really worried about you, Miranda,” Angel said when they broke. “I thought Jorge’s cartel flunkies—”

  “I got a warning from the FBI about them coming,” Miranda said gravely, face shadowed by the lights of the SUV glaring at them in the night. “I’ve been cooperating with them for about a week now. They wouldn’t let me call anyone, though. I just … figured you’d be all right, you know? Because you’d never done any work for them, and because the Jorge thing—what happened to him—wasn’t widely known, even among the cartel.” She kept her hands on Angel’s arms, looking her up and down. “I’m so sorry. I should have pushed them harder, had them bring you in—”

  “It’s okay,” Angel said, a little relief rushing through her. “I came out of it okay in the end, but …” Here she blinked and bowed her head.

  “But what?” Miranda asked, waiting, like she knew something bad was coming.

  “It’s Sienna,” Angel said, catching a glimpse of Reed, standing like a statue, still staring down the road after the vanished cop car. She tilted her head mournfully. “They got her.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Angel

  Four Years Ago

  The cops came and went, the firefighters took one look around and left, and the morgue wagon had carted Jorge’s body away hours ago, thankfully. Suspicion had passed, very easily, after Sienna had explained what had happened and Miranda had backed her up. “He fell into the fire,” had seemed such a blazingly stupid thing to say, and yet—

  No one had seemed too put out by the story, especially after Sienna had brought up Jorge’s suspected connection to a cartel. All in all, Angel thought it had been over rather quickly.

  The downside, of course, to all of this …

  Her restaurant was still partially ruined.

  “The burned carpet is going to cost a lot to replace,” Angel said, her fourth margarita sloshing in front of her. “And those plate glass windows … “

  “I might know a charity that likes to help small business owners,” Sienna said, who was nursing her second. Angel didn’t really see the point in restraint. Her restaurant was in ruins, after all, and the dinner crowd? No one had even shown up.

  Now it was almost eight o’clock. Another disaster.

  “It’ll be okay, Angel,” Miranda said, ruffling her sleeve supportively. “It takes time to build a loyal customer base. And maybe people have driven by and seen the window smashed—and—”

  Angel shook her head. “No. Half the time we don’t have any customers at dinner anyway. Lots of corporate office space around here, so we get a lunch rush, but … not many houses close by. Dinner is always dead after six o’clock.” She threw her head back. “Whyyyyyy?”

  The sound of crunching glass caused her to throw her head forward again, and the head rush that followed made Angel almost want to puke. There was someone outside her door, lingering there, and her eyes widened as she saw—

  “Sophie!” Angel said, vaulting to her feet. “You came back!”

  The older woman hesitated outside the partially open door, all stately reserve as she stood there. “It looks like you’ve fallen on even harder times since last I was here. I can come back some other—”

  “No, no, no—” Angel said, hurrying across the burnt carpet to usher her in. She stepped gracefully through the doorway, not looking particularly surprised, her eyes not even widening at Angel’s high speed approach to the door. “Please. Come in. I’ll fix you whatever you want. Anything.” She held out a hand and gestured to Sienna and Miranda, who were watching the exchange. “I was just about to cook for my friends, so
you—you should come in. Because you—are—definitely one of my friends, especially after yesterday.”

  Sophie only hesitated a moment before stepping inside the open door. “Well,” she said, “since you seem to be making something anyway.” Her posture indicated reluctance, but she came in, letting Angel lead her over to the table.

  “Have a seat, join us,” Angel proffered a chair to her, sliding it out, whistling the whole while. It was so stupid to be that excited over one customer, and yet— “This is Sophie. She’s a regular,” Angel said with pride. “Or...she’s come twice. That’s almost a regular to me.”

  “Hello,” Sophie said, looking at Miranda in particular. She seemed not to have taken much note of Sienna yet.

  “What can I get for you, Sophie?” Angel asked, leaning toward her. “A menu? Or do you know what you w—”

  “I’ll have a margarita and a steak burrito,” Sophie said, and her eyes drifted slowly over to Sienna, who was watching her, lips pursed in concentration. “Rice and beans on the side.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Sienna said. “Hm. Like you read my mind.”

  “Make it three,” Miranda said, turning to smile at Angel. She smiled back; Miranda probably knew that making three of the same dish made it easier on Angel.

  “Coming right up,” Angel said, and started threading her way through the tables to the kitchen, humming happily as she did so.

  She would come out of this all right. That much she knew for sure. And tomorrow …

  It would be another day.

  Sienna’s voice reached her as she hit the galley doors. “So … Sophie … has anyone ever told you that you kinda look like Sigourney Weaver …?”

  Angel paused, just for a second.

  Huh.

  She actually did look like …

  “I can’t say I’ve ever heard that before,” Sophie said. “But there’s a first time for everything, I guess.”

  Angel just nodded, thinking—yeah, she really did look like Sigourney Weaver. How about that. The weird little things, those were the spice in life, weren’t they?

  Developing sudden and unexpected metahuman powers.

  Having your restaurant partly burn because of drug traffickers.

  Meeting the most powerful woman in the world.

  Angel sighed. Maybe things were a little too spicy.

  Still … she had work to do. Food to make. A metahuman guest, her cousin, and a woman who’d helped her a lot—and who looked like Sigourney Weaver—to feed.

  Humming a tune, Angel listened to the conversation through the pass as she got down to the business of feeding her guests.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Dr. Helen Slaughter

  The Cube

  Young America, Minnesota

  Day One

  0735 Hours

  “You picked a hell of a day to start,” Warden William Bletchely said with unmitigated enthusiasm as they walked down the long, sloped tunnel into the prison. “An auspicious occasion, I guess you could say.”

  Bletchely was the type to get excited over almost nothing. Young for the job, too, in the doctor’s estimation. She’d taken the measure of him when he’d greeted her upon her arrival, but she didn’t feel a need to watch him now save for out of the corner of her eye, because—well, she’d met Bletchely’s type before. An infinite sequence of him—addicted to the job, and high on the possibilities whenever something new and “thrilling” happened.

  “Is it?” she asked, without much enthusiasm of her own. This was just a job, after all, to Dr. Slaughter, who’d surely done this sort of thing before. Many times, in fact, according to her resume.

  “I suppose it hasn’t hit the news yet,” Bletchely said as they reached a security door that was entirely metal, and entirely too thick for anything short of an atom bomb to punch through, “but we have a new inmate starting today. Fresh off a capture last night.” Bletchely’s dark eyes danced. “In fact, you’ll be the first to even speak to her. Quick medical exam—you know, as best you can, through the restraints—and then she’s off to processing.” He ran his keycard through the slot as he chuckled. “She’s been cooling her heels for a few hours, since they brought her in. I imagine she’s quite ready to have a conversation at this point, so I’ll be there in case she decides to confess anything.”

  The doctor raised her eyebrow—just slightly—at that. It didn’t surprise her that Bletchely would want to be involved in any contact with a high-level prisoner. Probably had fantasies about making a case against her, delivering some key piece of evidence or testimony that would send the prisoner away for a long, long time, while he was carried on the shoulders of adoring peers directly to his next promotion, and all the attendant glory that would come with such an achievement.

  The doctor kept her opinion about this—as she did so many things—to herself. It was long habit by now.

  The door clanked open slowly, revealing a large elevator box. Bletchely preceded her, and the doctor followed him, keeping her hands crossed upon each other as the heavy doors closed and the elevator started to move. She could hear the industrial strength cables moving just outside the box, which was immense. Used to cart massive metahuman storage units down to the prison level, it was considerably larger than a garden-variety elevator, and the doctor felt a little like she was in the midst of a steel storage space, tight and confining, like a prison bunk of her own.

  “I can’t wait to hear what she has to say,” Bletchely blathered on. “She’s been by herself, confined, for hours. That’s the sort of isolation that tends to make a prisoner want to talk to anyone—but you know that,” he deflated slightly on the last part, though his enthusiasm remained constant. “Maybe she’ll make this easy.”

  “I rather doubt that,” the doctor murmured as the elevator arrived at the lower floor. Bletchely hadn’t even heard her, though in fairness, she’d said it so low he hadn’t a prayer of picking it up unless he’d been a meta.

  A long hallway proceeded forward, and Bletchely walked down it, the doctor following in his wake. “I’ll give you the grand tour later,” the warden burbled, “but suffice to say we have a facility that is completely modern, and highly specialized in keeping this type of prisoner under wraps.” He beamed. “Most of the time your contact with prisoners will be supervised by guards, of course, due to the potentially dangerous nature of our inmates.” He stopped outside a door and used his keycard again. The door slid, and they entered what was clearly a medical unit, complete with hospital beds draped with heavy restraints. Everything was a few degrees off from what a normal hospital would look like; locks on all the cabinets, guards with shock batons filling the room.

  It was a prison hospital, and the doctor certainly felt the prison part of it.

  “This way, this way,” Bletchely said, hurrying over to another door and slipping his key card in. It hissed open, and he ducked in. The doctor followed him into a simple, square room. A few implements—stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, a few other things—lay on a single, plastic trolley against the wall, almost as far from the prisoner as possible.

  “And here she is,” Bletchely said, as the door slid shut behind them. He spoke in a tone of awe, as though he were showing some prized piece of art in a collection.

  The prisoner was bound hand and foot to a metal table, chained, cuffed and strapped so heavily that it was almost comical. There was barely a square inch of her from neck to toes that wasn’t covered by some strap or chain, and even her mouth was covered over by a restraining mask with only a few holes in it to allow speech to pass. Her forehead was strapped down, too, and she was at a 45-degree angle; she had to look down at Bletchely and the doctor.

  Which she did. Very intently.

  “Hello, Ms. Nealon,” Bletchely said, far too excitedly for the doctor’s taste. Though the doctor was sure he didn’t mean it that way, there was something almost lustful in his voice that she found distasteful. “My name is Warden Bletchely, and I’m in charge of this faci
lity—and, by extension … you.”

  “Congrats on becoming my successor,” Sienna Nealon said through the mask, only slightly muted by it, her eyes fixed on Bletchely. “I hope your tenure here is better than mine and marked by fewer riots.”

  Bletchely laughed weakly. “Oh, yes, very … very clever.” He evinced a hint of discomfort as he turned to the doctor. “I’ve brought our physician to give you a cursory examination before we transport you to your cell. This is Doctor Helen Slaughter … She’s new, so go easy on her.” Bletchely laughed at his own joke.

  Sienna Nealon’s eyes found the doctor’s, and there was a hint of narrowing for just a moment. “I’ll try.”

  “I do appreciate that,” the doctor said, and commenced her exam. Bletchely kept quiet, but so did Nealon, her gaze catching the doctor’s only every once in a while.

  Silence reigned, and that was quite fine with the doctor. She had a job to do, after all, within certain bounds. It was done in minutes—she’d completed as much as she could with the patient so restrained. “Thank you,” she told Sienna Nealon, stepping back and shedding her rubber gloves with a snap as she pulled them free.

  “Guards,” Bletchely said, speaking to a camera as he waved them in. The door opened and four guards appeared, dressed head to toe in heavy vests and armor. They flanked Nealon, unbolting her from the table. She did not resist but let them take hold of her using long steel stakes that affixed to joints along the restraining apparatus. It gave the guards several feet of latitude to avoid getting close to her.

  “Seriously, guys, with the sticks and the Hannibal Lecter mask, even?” Sienna cracked as they attached all this to her and then pushed her forward, toward the door. “Actually, you know what? That’s probably a good idea. Capital thinking, fellas.”

  “Let’s go,” one of the guards said, tension bleeding through his voice as they started to push her forward toward the door.