Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  Dammit, Gavrikov, you didn’t hit the ceiling like this when Scott or Janus or that nasty assclown Taggert had their way with her. I felt Aleksandr relax a little in my head, though he was still watching Harry suspiciously through my eyes.

  “Besides,” Harry said, glancing subtly at me, “I like a girl with a little meat on her bones.”

  Kat gave herself the once-over, self-consciously. “What am I, a vegan meal over here?”

  “Not much of one,” Harry said, “besides, you had more personality before you lost your memory.”

  “Take a right,” J.J. said into the awkward silence that followed. “And then an immediate left.”

  “Don’t do that,” Harry said, shaking his head sagely. “Take the second left.”

  “Probabilities again?” I asked.

  “No, this is just basic knowledge of Chicago traffic,” Harry said. He pointed at the computer sitting on J.J.’s lap. “Plus, I’m watching his future, and correcting for the five times I’ve read him shouting, ‘No, that was wrong, my bad’!”

  J.J. looked up at Harry in awe. “Wow. Thank you.”

  “Yeah, I’m not exactly being a hero here,” Harry said. “There’s self-preservation involved.”

  “All right, I’m up to the live feed,” J.J. said, glancing back down again. “Looks like Gustafson is on Lower Wacker.”

  I stifled a giggle. Harry didn’t bother, guffawing loudly. “That kills me,” he said then got serious. “I mean, uh … yeah, it still makes me laugh after all these years. ‘Wacker.’”

  “And here I thought you were too old for me,” I said. “Really, you might be too young.”

  “You had a twelve percent probability of smiling when he said ‘Wacker,’” Harry said nonchalantly. “Your control is good, but you found it funny. You don’t even have to admit it, I just know.” He smiled.

  Dammit.

  The limo turned and headed down a ramp, like it was descending into a parking garage. It wasn’t a garage, though, it was like an understreet—a street running under the main one. I raised an eyebrow, because I couldn’t quite recall seeing anything like this before. It was a steady, perpetual tunnel on three sides, with the fourth looking out over a river that I assumed was the Chicago.

  “This makes things dicey,” Reed said, tapping me lightly on the arm to get my attention. “Once we get eyes on him, you could fly …”

  I looked up at the roof of the “tunnel.” Yeah, I could fly in here, but not very high, that was for sure.

  “He’s five hundred yards away and moving fast,” J.J. said. Our limo driver had his pedal to the metal, maneuvering his ride in between cars like it mattered. I could see him up there, a younger guy in a suit. Looked stiff, but it was probably just the tension.

  “Screw your Uber, we should hire this guy full-time,” I said to Reed.

  He gave me a pained look. “Tell me you’re not going to go with Chang’s offer. Just tell me.”

  “Odds are against you on that one, sonny,” Harry tossed right over me.

  “There’s the truck!” Phinneus shouted. He already had his pistol out and pointed, like he was going to shoot through the windshield.

  Harry landed a hand on his arm, dragging it down, a serious expression on his face. “Whatever he’s got in that truck, it’s delicate. Survival probability of everyone in this car except the driver and the computer guy goes to zero if you shoot out the tires.”

  “Instant mission failure,” J.J. said under his breath. “Ooh. The plot thickens.”

  “So we can’t crash it,” I said as the limo weaved hard to get around some ass in a BMW that thought he owned the whole road. “How about I fly up and yank Gustafson right out of the driver’s seat?”

  Harry cringed. “Odds do not look favorable if you do that. Not one hundred percent failure rate, but … not good, either.”

  “Fannon?” I asked, and the speedster cringed. He was still being really quiet, his hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head.

  “I can maybe do a sixty miles an hour right now,” he said, and I realized his clothes were wet with blood, still. “And not for long.”

  “Can you fly me up to the top of the truck?” Veronika asked, leaning forward off the bench seat to talk to me.

  I looked up at the bottom of the road above us, the supports racing by overhead. “Yeah. We should have enough clearance to do that.”

  “You get me up there,” she said, turning around to look out, “I burn through and destroy whatever that plague thing is by superheating it.” She had a hopeful, alive look in her eyes as she turned her head back to me. “Whatever disease he’s carrying, I’m guessing it’ll burn up under superheated plasma.”

  Harry stared out the window. “A lot better odds on that one.”

  “I can fly out, too,” Reed said. “Provide support, maybe some covering fire—”

  “Odds dropped at the covering fire part,” Harry said, squinting at the truck.

  “I can just fly out and make a nuisance of myself, maybe offer a second target,” Reed said. Harry threw out a thumbs up.

  “I’ll see if I can open some barriers, maybe blow some conduits like in Watch Dogs,” J.J. said. When everyone looked at him, he said, “Kidding! Totes kidding.”

  “That game was boss, yo,” Augustus said.

  “I know, right?” J.J. said, gushing. “I do not understand the haters.”

  “Our odds of success just dropped two percent while we endured that egg-headery,” Harry said sourly.

  “And out we go,” I said as Veronika and Reed sprang into motion.

  The truck had a long, grey trailer behind it, and it was driving at the speed limit. I wondered where Gustafson was taking this monstrosity, but I didn’t have time to worry about it.

  “I’m ready,” Veronika said, and I stepped out of the limo with her clutched in my arms. We soared over two lanes of traffic and I dropped her with a thump on the roof of the tractor trailer before settling down myself.

  “Whoa! Down!” she shouted and we both ducked a support beam. It was a few feet above us, but if we’d remained standing we both would have suffered a real headache. “It’s every misogynist’s dream,” Veronika quipped. She must have caught my blank look. “We’re both on our knees.”

  Reed came to a clumping landing behind us, way slower and more unwieldy than ours. He staggered and dropped just below the next beam, the concrete support nearly giving him a haircut. “Anything you can do …” he said with a smirk.

  “I bet the sibling rivalry is fierce in your family,” Veronika said, her hand turning blue and hot in a second. The air lost all chill, the breeze of the moving truck the only thing keeping her plasma from overwhelming me even a few feet away.

  “Look out!” Harry’s voice shouted across the divide between lanes as someone honked.

  There was another noise that followed his warning by a couple seconds—loud, terrifying—

  Gunfire.

  63.

  Veronika

  Bullets punched through the trailer around her, and Veronika instinctively threw herself to the side. They sounded heavy, and chunks of metal from the roof of the trailer blew away in inch-sized segments, instantly driving her into panic mode. Fistfights were fine, fire was her specialty, but guns?

  Veronika didn’t mess with guns. Not ever, if she could avoid it.

  She maintained her balance when she dodged, but forgot that there was no edge to where she was standing. It wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t like she’d ever climbed onto the back of a trailer and stood there before. She just evaded the threat, like normal, and when she took a hard step back …

  … Her foot found not a damned thing there to catch her.

  Nealon was dodging in her own way. Like a parachute had deployed on her back, she shot away from the gunfire. Her brother looked stricken, rolling backward just in time to catch a support beam on the shoulder. Veronika heard the crack just before she disappeared over the edge of the trailer, but she didn’t see whether
he landed on top of it or fell off the back.

  And it didn’t much matter to her at that point, either, because she tumbled right off the side into empty air, the concrete lanes below racing up to greet her like an old friend—

  64.

  Sienna

  I instinctively sped back as soon as I saw the shots bursting hand-sized holes in the trailer. Whatever sort of cannon Gustafson was firing, it was coming from the cab and it was causing enough damage that any of us that took a hit from it would be out of commission for the rest of this fight.

  I recovered my wits before I got too far away from the truck. Reed clobbered himself on one of the supports, clipping it with his shoulder and rolling off the back. He caught himself and came to a floating stop over the car behind him as traffic ground to a halt on Lower Wacker Drive. (I wasn’t smiling about it now.)

  Veronika tumbled off the side a second later, and I shot after her. She couldn’t save herself like my brother could, and she was the linchpin of our current plan, so she was priority in my view. She threw out a glowing hand as she tumbled in a spin down the side of the trailer, her fingers burning and ripping through the metal in a vain and desperate attempt to slow her fall. It was instinctive, a grasp at straws, and it wasn’t even slowing her down.

  I soared in and caught her six inches from the ground, dodging over a Toyota pickup that screeched to a halt before veering into a wall to avoid the swerving tractor trailer. Gustafason must have either taken a hand off the wheel to fire at us or he was intentionally trying to smear me and Veronika. I shot back to the roof amid a hail of honking horns and screeching tires and dropped to a crouch, Veronika clutched in front of me doing the same.

  “Well, that was a near thing,” she said with a dryness that told me her talent for understatement was strong. Her hand was still glowing, and without hesitating she punched a finger into the trailer roof at a shallow angle and started to saw a circular hole. “What about the gunfire?” she said, concentrating as she dug into the metal.

  “I’m guessing it was a big, fat revolver,” I said. “Either .44 Mag or .357. A wheel gun like that’ll take a few seconds to reload, assuming he has a box of ammo at hand.”

  “I don’t respond well to lead,” Veronika said, finishing making her entry into the trailer. “Be a dear and make sure he doesn’t perforate me?” She looked back, firing me an encouraging smile before dodging a support beam.

  “You got it,” I said as she stood up and jumped into the dark trailer below like a SEAL toothpicking into water from a chopper.

  I zoomed off the side of the trailer and went low, inches from the pavement low. The lane of traffic beside the tractor trailer was clear for the moment, and the truck wasn’t weaving as hard as it had been when I was flying on the other side. I was going to try the stealth approach, sneaking up to the cab, where I could possibly wrestle with Gustafson for control of the gun.

  I caught a glimpse of him in the cab, the back of his dark, curly haired head as he looked around, trying to see through the cab. The back window was all shot out, and he was alone. Apparently he hadn’t trusted an accomplice for this particular genocide mission.

  I eased in low while his back was turned, sliding up to the running board on my belly and then raising my altitude as we shot past an SUV like it was parked. He’d definitely hammered the accelerator, which was bad news for those of us worried that a crash might unleash the bioweapon. I let my feet rest on the running board and started to ease up. I caught sight of a flash of steel as he waved the gun around with one hand while trying to steer the truck.

  “Hey, asshole!” Harry’s voice crackled over the empty lane of traffic between us. The limo was a car length back from me and I turned, horrified. Harry had his head just barely out the window, the smoky, dark glass down just enough to let me see his eyes. He glanced down and winked at me, then disappeared inside the darkness of the limo.

  A blast of blue fire shot out of the truck above me, inches above my head, as though Veronika herself were sitting in the cab. It arced over me and slammed into the Hummer limousine, consuming it from front bumper to rear in less than a second.

  The gas tank exploded and the wreck rolled hard, lighting the darkness of Lower Wacker Drive as Augustus, Kat, J.J. and all the rest of them came to a fiery end.

  65.

  Veronika

  It was dark in the trailer, and the dim flashes of light provided by the small opening she’d made in the roof and the slashed holes in the side allowed only a little of the tunnel light in. Veronika lit both hands and held them aloft, trying to get a sense of what she was dealing with, here.

  “Oh,” she said as the soft blue glow illuminated the truck’s cargo. She swallowed hard. “So that’s what it is.” Her voice was at least a couple octaves higher now.

  66.

  Sienna

  I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Veronika in the cab, but I didn’t want to believe that the assassin had betrayed me. She could have, though, easily, in spite of Harry’s reassurances, just cutting her own path right into the cab and then destroying my backup, except for Reed.

  And for all I knew, she’d torched him, too, after I’d flown off to deal with Gustafson.

  I felt stiflingly hot on the running board, like I was going to burst out of my skin. The cold wind crackled around me as the truck accelerated away from the wreck of the limo, and my breaths came slower and sharper as the decision was made.

  Gustafson had to be stopped, and if Veronika was in there with him, she had to be stopped, too.

  I ripped the door off the truck and grabbed Gustafson’s arm. His eyes widened at me and his arm burst into blue plasma light.

  Crap. He was a meta.

  I yanked him hard as he started to burn all over. The seatbelt vaporized instantly, along with my left hand, but I managed to set him in motion before it burned off. He moved like butter, like his flesh turning to plasma had greased him. It hadn’t, but going superhot had freed him from all moorings and obstacles, and he tumbled over me, missing burning my face off by bare inches.

  He hit the pavement hard and it sizzled as it melted around him. His skin was gone now, replaced by the blue plasma fire that Veronika wielded so easily. My lack-of-a-hand burned with the phantom pain of nerves now gone, and I fought against it, summoning Wolfe to the front of my mind to deal with this problem as I yanked myself into the sizzling seat that Gustafson had occupied only a moment before. My clothes started to burn from the residual heat, my skin boiling and blistering.

  The steering wheel was a melted problem, now a half-circle of plastic secured by one fastening rather than three. If I pulled too hard on it, It’d break off and I’d lose total control of the truck. I looked down and noticed that Gustafson had also melted the accelerator into slag at the floor and completed burned the brake down to a tiny nub. Probably carried the pedal out with him when I’d yanked him.

  “Shit,” I said to no one in particular.

  I kept one hand gently upon the weakened steering wheel and pressed my other to the nub of the brake. It burned through my shoe almost instantly, and started going through my foot and down to bone. My blood started boil, and it did not feel good. Cardiac arrest followed shortly thereafter, and maintaining muscle control became … well …

  Gavrikov! I screamed in my head. I had to absorb this residual heat, and now, or Harry’s much-talked-about probabilities were going to head down, and quickly. I stifled all thought of the people who’d been in the limo when Gustafson had taken it out. I needed distractions right now like I needed a big, flaming hole in my foot. And since I already had one of those, the other distractions were unwelcome.

  The heat started to dissipate, absorbed through my skin. The burning wounds started to close, and new bones sprouted from my wrist where Gustafson had torched off the hand. The brake lodged in my foot and my skin started to heal around it. I didn’t have time to pull it off to give the skin a chance to grow around it, I just kept it mashed, the pain of something j
ammed into my bone and tissue an agony that I had to grit my teeth against. I had the brake pushed all the way down and the truck was barely slowing.

  I heard a grinding of gears and started to panic. Trucks didn’t have automatic transmissions, did they? There was a smoking mess next to me where a center console might once have sat, but a metal shifting knob, good and melted, jutted out of the floorboard. Damn.

  The engine stalled and suddenly the wheel got a lot harder to control. I looked into the rearview and saw the glowing blue figure of a man running after me, little smoke clouds of black burning off each time he put a foot down. “And here comes Doctor Manhattan,” I muttered under my breath as the steering wheel tried hard to pull the truck to the right. I gently resisted it, afraid it was going to snap the last support holding the wheel to it. The speedometer still read sixty miles per hour.

  And then the steering wheel support broke, and all that was left of the wheel was a circular nub around the center column.

  “Dammit,” I whispered as I tossed the wheel out the open door. My left hand wasn’t anywhere close to healed yet, but I had plenty of grip in my right. I grabbed the center column hard, my fingers sinking into the plastic. I turned it slightly to the left and it responded sluggishly. The whole truck shuddered at the motion, but it didn’t turn over or jacknife, and the speedometer now read 45 miles per hour.

  The driver’s side door clattered, still open, the latching mechanism not having caught the door lock yet. It moved open and the rearview mirror aligned to show me another glimpse of Gustafson. He was catching up damned fast, probably only thirty feet from the door.

  “Crapola,” I said, trying to grasp with my left hand to shut the door. It wouldn’t buy me much time, but all I needed to stop this thing safely was a few more seconds …

  Unfortunately, my left hand was only bone and sinew. The muscle hadn’t quite shown up yet, so trying to articulate the digits to grab the door was kind of like getting a mannequin’s hand to do anything.