Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  “Crap.” The speedometer was down to thirty, and Gustafson was almost there. I fired a light net blindly out the window as the muscles started to sprout along the bone, hoping it would at least distract him.

  It didn’t.

  With twenty miles an hour left to go, I saw Gustafson make an abrupt, hard right turn behind the cab, and it struck me entirely too late that he wasn’t even trying to get to me at all.

  He was just trying to wreck the trailer.

  He blasted right through the coupling that joined the tractor to the trailer, and I saw a flash of blue from behind me.

  The trailer was now free of my control, and he’d set it up to crash perfectly.

  I held on tight as the momentum from his attack swept through the cab and I was yanked sideways by the force. The truck tilted and then flipped, and I fell out and hit the pavement as the world spun into chaos around me.

  67.

  Veronika

  Veronika hesitated when she saw what lined the walls of the trailer. Battened down with canvas straps, the glass containers were filled with liquid suspensions for their occupants, and blank, dead, human faces stared back at Veronika, lit by the blue glow of her hands within the belly of the dark trailer.

  The nearest container didn’t even have a body, just pieces of organic matter that looked like it had been mashed almost to a paste, floating in liquid. She could see bone fragments and she peered closer, momentarily lost in the wonder about what she was seeing.

  “What the hell is this?” Reed said as he thumped down next to her, a gust of wind blowing through the trailer upon his entry.

  “Test subjects?” Veronika asked, stunned into inaction by what she was seeing. She stared straight at the container of mashed remains. “I don’t … what is this one?”

  Reed glanced at it then did a double take. “I … I think that might be Sovereign. Or … what’s left of him.”

  “Gross,” Veronika said, flaring her power and raising the temperature in the back of the trailer by ten degrees. “You might want to get out of here before—”

  A muffled explosion rocked the trailer and the two of them were pushed into the glass nearest Reed. She doused her hands instantly, fearing she’d burn through him. She caught herself with a steaming hand, and it sizzled against the glass container she’d run into. Liquid inside bubbled as the heat transferred through at her touch.

  “What was that?” Reed asked, looking in the direction of the explosion as if he could see through the wall of the trailer.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I need to take this place up to five thousand degrees, and I doubt you’ll survive that, so you might want to make your exit.”

  He cast a final look over the contents of the trailer. “All right,” he said, hesitating. “I just …” he fixed on a face in the darkness and stared, peering. “Is that …?”

  A hard shudder ran through the trailer as it started to decelerate. “Go!” she said, and brought her hands back up. She’d need to charge plasma in order to get this all in one good shot, with enough heat to make sure any biomatter was properly disintegrated through the glass …

  68.

  Sienna

  I landed hard, but fortunately I was only going like twenty miles an hour when the cab of the truck flipped. It didn’t do it because of my driving, either; it did it because of a side impact from Dr. Art Gustafson. The truck went tumbling, I fell and did some tumbling of my own, and I dodged getting crushed by the cab only because I activated Gavrikov’s flight powers at the last second and slammed sideways into a minivan. They were doing sixty, I feel I should mention. I was doing considerably less than that.

  I thumped to a hard stop on the pavement, feeling that Lower Wacker Drive was now well named, because I’d been both whacked and brought low. I lay still as Wolfe healed my wounds, and I floated back to my feet like I was being pulled upright. It was a landing that I’d walked away from, but I didn’t feel like it was anything approaching a good one.

  Gustafason was still all lit with blue plasma, burning in a roiling torrent from head to toe. He’d done the Gavrikov thing, covering himself in the blue fire, the surface of his skin rippling, almost looking like it was alive. I hadn’t seen Veronika go all out on it, probably because like myself, she didn’t see a need to burn off her clothing unless things got dire.

  Gustafson was showing none of that restraint, though. His eyes and mouth were nothing more than black sunspots on the surface of a blue star. “You think you can stop this?”

  “The murder of all of our people?” I asked, cracking the vertebrae of my neck back into alignment. “Well, you can’t seriously expect me to just sit back not even try.”

  He stood menacingly between me and the trailer, which was still upright. Apparently he’d hit the truck more than the trailer. It was tilting precipitously forward, but it was still intact. Hopefully, somewhere inside was Veronika, destroying the hell out of Gustafson’s plan.

  Please, oh, please, let Veronika be doing that, I hoped.

  “So …” I said to him, “either you were hiding who you were with the fancy glowy powers,” I waved at his newfangled body, “or you did some juicing with the meta cocktail Cavanagh Tech invented.”

  He smiled faintly, a black gaping smile that looked like it was pulled off a poorly drawn comic book character. “Jacobs and I helped invent that serum. We were vital in the research process on both that and the suppressant gas. And as for this power,” he looked down at his glowing hands, and though it was hard to tell, I felt like I saw … disgust in his black eyes, “well, I extracted the last part of the breakthrough needed from Veronika’s DNA, so it’s ironic that when I used the serum, it unlocked her power in me.”

  “I don’t know if you know this,” I said, starting to circle toward him, wondering how much control he had over these powers, since they were probably new, “but Cavanagh Tech went out in a big way last year. I’m surprised you still have funding.”

  “It was a five-year grant,” he said smugly. “But our work’s done. Metahuman research is about to become a dead area of study.” Now he was sneering. “Just like you and your kind.”

  Yeah, there was a definite hatred for all things meta in him, I thought. “What did we ever do to you to justify you rendering us extinct?” I asked softly. “And yourself in the process, it looks like.” Honking horns down the tunnel told me that traffic had stopped in this direction, which was good. I had enough to worry about without playing Frogger while I stalled this ass.

  “Yes, I’m going to die, too,” he said, and he took a step toward me, his burning feet rendering the pavement liquid as a hiss of black smoke boiled off beneath him.

  I caught a glimpse of motion in the supports holding Upper Wacker Drive above us, and realized it was Reed, hanging up there, waiting for an appropriate moment to make a pain in the ass of himself. I looked away quickly so as not to blow the surprise for Gustafson, who looked like he was seething as he formulated an answer for me.

  “Before you showed up on the scene,” Gustafson said, “before you people … revealed yourselves to the world …” his mouth opened like a tortured version of Munch’s The Scream, “… I was happily married until one night, a guy approached my wife and I on the street and demanded all the money we had on us. When we finished emptying our wallets …” he blazed brighter, “… he reached out with his hair … and strangled my wife to death, wearing a smile the whole time.”

  I stared at him, not really sure what to say to that. “Uhm …”

  He burned brighter. “What’s wrong? No witty repartee? No threats to throw in my face?”

  “Now doesn’t seem like the time for a nuanced conversation about your inappropriate response to a personal tragedy,” I said with a shrug of the shoulders. “Though, for the record, most people don’t immediately leap to wiping an entire race of people OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH as a solution. Just FYI. A more measured response might make more sense. Because, I hate to tell you this … bu
t you can kill all metas, and people are still going to die in muggings. That’s not an exclusively meta thing, or gun thing, or knife thing, or geographic thing … it’s pretty much a universally human thing.”

  “You don’t see because you’re part of the problem,” he said, leering.

  “And you don’t see because your head’s up your ass,” I shot back. “Also, welcome to the problem, now that you’re one of ‘us.’”

  Reed, apparently either sick of waiting or losing his grip, came diving down right in that instant. He jetted over the top of Gustafson’s head and the force of his gust blew what looked like a tornado of heat up around the two of them. It also knocked Gustafson down on his face, and I figured I’d take this opportunity to do something.

  My response came in the form of eighteen shots from Shadow, delivered in seconds all over Gustafson’s body. I peppered his ass with 9 mil rounds without mercy, even though he was down on all fours. The rounds disappeared into him like I was shooting them into a pillow, jets of blue flame spurting out with each impact. I hoped it was his current version of blood, but when he got back to his feet, I realized it was his version of burning them up completely.

  “Ah, shit,” I said, executing a combat reload out of habit.

  “To say the least,” Reed agreed, coming down for a landing beside me, blasting out a soft gust of air to cushion his return to the earth. “And in terms of a plan?”

  “Uh …” I’d had trouble with Veronika when she hadn’t even completely shrouded herself in this plasma. Now that he’d decided to give in to the dark side of the fire force, I was tapped on ideas.

  Fortunately, a distraction appeared and saved me from my intellectual bankruptcy.

  The trailer behind us started to glow brightly, the sides melting off as Veronika went superhot inside it. Metal started sloughing down and the interior was bright like an Aurora-type had just lit off within. (They’re light-casting metas. It’s like a sun going off in front of your eyes, burns your retinas, maybe gives you a light tan if you’re standing too close.)

  Gustafson looked back in horror, and his mouth dropped open as the fire shrouding his body started to dissipate to show his geeky little face. “NO!”

  “Yep,” I said, and started to aim at him. He looked right at me, and the blue plasma crept back up before I could line up my shot. Damn, he was fast.

  But not fast enough.

  The shot rang out from my right and I saw a squirt of blood out of Gustafson’s ear as a .45 Long Colt round blew his brains out. He faltered, his plasma guttering out immediately as he fell to his face, naked skin reappearing where the blue glow had been burning moments earlier.

  “I think this concludes our business, Dr. Gustafson,” Phinneus Chalke said from a hundred feet away, Augustus lingering next to him with a torn-up piece of pavement hovering at the ready and Kat at his other side, her own pistol drawn.

  With a flash, the trailer dissolved into blue, the last of the slag melting down as Veronika leapt out, her flesh alive in the way that Gustafson’s had been, and I wondered as she landed if we had made it out without catching Gustafson’s plague.

  69.

  Veronika’s plasma flames pulled back to about mid-calf and down to her shoulders, giving her the equivalent of a glowing blue halter top and yoga pants. I stared at her in disbelief as she strode over to us, looking weary enough to convince me what she’d done had taken a lot out of her.

  “I never even thought of that,” I said, looking at her. “I could totally do that with Gavrikov’s power.”

  “Good, yeah, stop showing your ass everywhere you go,” she said, sounding more than a little cranky. Honking horns still sounded all throughout Lower Wacker as Phinneus, Kat and Augustus made their way over. Phinneus headed straight over to Veronika’s side while Kat and Augustus drifted toward me. I looked over and saw Harry helping a grimacing Fannon along at a normal walking pace, a half-empty bottle of scotch clutched in his free hand. We all stayed quiet until he walked Fannon over to stand with Phinneus and Veronika, who were watching us warily. The divide was obvious, the battle lines clearly drawn.

  Us versus them.

  “I’m not going to jail,” Veronika said, and I caught nods from Fannon and Phinneus to match.

  “The three of them killed a lot of people,” Reed said under his breath. “Phinneus killed Dr. Stanley, Harry did in Jacobs and that guy on the beach—”

  “You know we can hear you, right?” Harry called, shaking his head like Reed was an idiot.

  “I guess it’s a brawl for all, then,” Veronika said, almost sadly.

  “You know,” I said to Reed, “I think we’re done.”

  He gave me a wide-eyed look. “Done with what?”

  “Government service,” I said, taking a deep breath of the stale, kind of polluted air on Lower Wacker Drive. I saw Veronika’s suspicious look fade just a touch. “If the US government wants to track any of you down, they can do it themselves.” I shrugged. “I quit, effective now.”

  Reed looked a little stiff. I could tell he had some moral issues that weren’t quite satisfied. “Look, I get wanting to let them walk for good behavior or whatever, but … Phinneus killed an innocent woman, accident or not.”

  “That wasn’t an accident,” Phinneus said, smacking his lips, his Peacemaker still in hand. “Gustafson ordered it done. Seems they used to work together, but she’d decided to go in a different direction or something. Some kind of argument between them. I don’t know, I didn’t get the details. He told me to kill her, though, and I did—as you say, by accident, but there was a bullet coming for her regardless.”

  I stared at him. “You’re not exactly reassuring me about my decision to let you walk.”

  “Hey, you’re not the only one unhappy about it,” he said, sounding a little miffed. “I hate when a contract goes unpaid. I did my service years ago.”

  “Cost of doing business,” Veronika said, never peeling her eyes away from me. “Sometimes you do a hit, sometimes you take a hit.”

  “Let’s just go home,” I said to Reed, then looked to Kat and Augustus. “Maybe stop off at a bar on the way to the airport?”

  “I like that plan,” Harry called out, “and I also like that the chances of anyone here killing each other just dropped to three percent.”

  I froze at that and glanced at Reed, who just shrugged, looking mildly disgusted. “Uhm … okay, I guess you’re invited, Harry.”

  “Count me in, then,” Colin Fannon said uneasily, still holding his stomach. Blood oozed out from between his fingers. “I could use a stiff drink.”

  “Thirded,” Veronika said, still glowing from her makeshift plasma clothing. “Also, maybe a change of attire.”

  “Shall we?” I asked, taking one last look at the crater and smashed cab where we’d wrecked the truck on Lower Wacker Drive. (It was back to worth a chortle again.)

  “A drink can’t come soon enough,” Harry agreed, leading us on. “I guess this time, it’s a series of cabs, eh …?”

  “Oh, damn,” I said mildly. When Reed looked at me, I shared my thoughts. “Remind me to make sure Chang covers that limo driver’s loss.”

  “As a condition of your employment?” he asked, but with less bitterness than he would have a few days earlier.

  “That’s right,” I said and started walking with the others. With the traffic flow stopped at our backs, I thought I could see an exit ramp leading up to the surface ahead. It looked like daylight, and for my part, I couldn’t get there soon enough.

  70.

  Somewhat to my surprise, we all actually did meet up at the airport bar at Midway—or almost all of us, anyway. And we did take a convoy of cabs, after catching up with J.J., who was hiding well out of the line of fire during the fight near the truck.

  I’d started to ask them how they’d survived the destruction of the limo, but the answer occurred to me before I opened my mouth and removed all doubt that I was an idiot—Harry had read the destruction coming befor
e he opened his stupid mouth and provoked Gustafson to fire, so naturally he’d have made sure everyone was out or being evacuated before he did it.

  When I looked back once we made it to Upper Wacker, Phinneus was gone. I probably could have predicted that, if I’d tried. If he trained Parks, I had a feeling that the two of them shared that antisocial tendency. Myself, Parks, Phinneus—we were lone gunners by nature. I only worked with a team because I’d kind of realized how lonely it got having your ass out on the line without anyone to save you if things went south. As an assassin in the shadows, things probably went south a lot less than they did when you were perpetually brawling with the most powerful people on the planet.

  “So … that was a thing that happened,” Colin Fannon said, taking a drink of beer. We were sitting in a bar that had a brick facade layered all around it, just past the security checkpoint at Midway Airport. It was part of a much larger food court, and we’d pulled a couple tables together in the midst of a somewhat buzzing crowd. Fannon went on, almost a note of mourning in his voice: “We just turned against our employer in favor of the target.” He met eyes with Veronika and shook his head. I saw liquid go spreading out on his freshly changed shirt, which told me he’d either peed high or he still had a leak. I didn’t know how to say it, though, so I just averted my eyes and took a sip of my own drink, which had a very festive umbrella in it.

  “The thing you realize about life after you see all the possibilities for a while,” Harry said, waxing rhapsodic, his words starting to slur just slightly, “is that really, almost nothing is impossible. I mean, right now, there’s a half a percent chance that a segment of roof comes crashing down in the corner of the bar in about five minutes.” He threw up his hands like that illustrated his point. “And you know that fighter plane they’ve got hanging up in the walkway to the terminal?” His eyes twinkled. “It’s not likely, but I’d walk around it if I were you.”