Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36)

by Robert J. Crane

  She stared at me for a second and I thought maybe I’d fried her brain. Then she nodded, and rested her hand on the lever.

  The train’s speed increased obviously, and I could feel its vibration in my bones. I flipped myself so I was facing forward, slipping in front of the door. There I rested my legs on the small step, and started to coil down into a partial squat, ready to spring.

  There was a ding-dong chime within the train, and I heard the driver’s voice echo through the carriages: “Please brace for an emergency stop. This is not a drill. HANG ON!”

  “Good girl,” I muttered, patting the cracked windshield. “Good thinking.”

  Creeper was only thirty feet in front of us now. I could see the next station, less than a mile away.

  Physics. My mom had always drummed it into my damned skull, and I’d wondered where I would be finding any use for it at all locked in my house.

  If only I’d known, I would have paid closer attention.

  I looked over my shoulder and made eye contact with the driver. “Hit it!” I shouted. Creeper was twenty feet off and started to throw a hand back to stop us—

  The train stopped, and boy, did I feel the deceleration. If I’d had a seatbelt, it would have yanked me back.

  But I didn’t. In fact, I pushed off from the train with both legs as soon as my hands broke contact, launching off in the ultimate leg press.

  “Yeehaw!” I shouted as I flew through the air. My ability to control my direction was largely reliant on the push I’d given before I’d broken away from the train. Now I was a bullet in flight, nothing but the useless flapping of my arms to give me any sort of rudder.

  Creeper’s eyes were like two dots of white growing larger and larger as I soared through the air toward him. He thrust a hand at me, panicking, but I didn’t have a speck of metal on me for him to control. I flew closer and closer and he waved his hand more and more wildly, as though gesticulating with more force would suddenly allow him to throw me off my guided-missile-like course toward him—

  Zoinks.

  I crashed into Creeper midair and brought us both down. I pulled my limbs in as tight as I could considering I was gripped around him in a metahuman bear hug. I don’t know whether panic overwhelmed him and he froze, or he just couldn’t take the force I’d hit him with, but we both lost our breath and went tumbling without control.

  He hit the ground shoulder-first and we bounced. The next impact was to me, drubbing my head into the concrete, which hurt. He got the next mini-landing, catching it all across the back of his neck, and I let him go at that point, flipping to my feet in a woozy landing in which I somehow, miraculously, ended upright. Bobbing slightly, legs woozy, but upright and standing.

  Creeper made it a couple more rolls and landed face down, moaning. A second after that, he choked out a sob, and I knew he was hurting.

  I bobbed closer to him on weak-ass legs. I was pretty sure I had the beginnings of a concussion, but I’d fought through worse. My head felt like it was underwater, and I was weaving a little with each step, but I stayed—and swayed—on my feet. A quick look back confirmed the train had, indeed, stopped. Go driver. Get down with your bad self.

  “My arm!” A whine behind me revealed that Anna Vargas was indeed alive. “I think I broke my arm!”

  “Stay right where you are; don’t move or writhe,” I said. She didn’t answer, but switched to a quiet whimper and didn’t argue, so I assumed she’d heard me and obeyed. “At all.”

  “You are...ruining...everything.” Creeper pushed to all fours, sobs dripping out between his words.

  “That’s what I do,” I said, stepping right up to him. I was keenly aware that he had a whole host of ball bearings somewhere in the tunnel behind me, and I was listening for the whistle of them over the ringing in my head. “Now...please. I’m begging you here. Are you going to surrender and come quietly or...?”

  Nope. I heard the whistle, and it wasn’t a train.

  “You...are...ruining...everything,” Creeper said, and he raised his face up so I could see the malevolence as he lifted a clenched fist in front of his face and got to his feet. “And I will not—”

  I pushed him back a step, firmly, and his eyes snapped open in indignation as he realized he’d been shoved. He teetered, tottered, staggered, and finally caught his balance while on one leg. “You think that’s going to stop me?” He looked at me like I was crazy, still standing on one leg. “I’m going to—”

  “Put your foot down?” I asked. Probably a little flippantly. “Stomp me? Or stand there like a chicken on one leg and berate me?” The whistling behind me was getting closer, but I couldn’t dodge. Not quite yet.

  Right then, he realized that, yeah, he was standing on one leg. Yes, like a chicken. He looked down and realized, but didn’t full stop to process that there was something beneath that foot that he hadn’t put down.

  Like a child I’d taunted into action, Creeper put his foot down.

  Onto the subway’s third rail.

  Watching a person get electrocuted does not look quite like it does in the movies. There were some blue sparks, but they didn’t course over his body like he’d been blasted by a Thor-type. They were restricted to where his foot made contact with the third rail, the fatal dose of electricity contracting every muscle in his body. He jerked and spasmed like someone had shoved a cattle prod up his ass—

  And the whistling of the ball bearings?

  Didn’t stop.

  It got closer and louder.

  Very cognizant of the third rail I’d just goaded him into stomping on, I flung myself down and out of the way as much as possible. The wet smack of a hundred ball bearings being somehow attracted to him in his moment of death was as sickening a sound as I’d ever heard, followed closely by the groaning sound of his powers dragging the train in spite of its brakes.

  Fortunately, all that stopped a moment later as the ball bearings finished rendering unto Creeper the fate that he’d tried—desperately—to put onto me a half-dozen times in as many minutes.

  I looked up and found he was gone from the waist up, the remainder of him thrown clear of the third rail by the thousand impacts of his ball bearings.

  “Ooh, hoist on your own petard,” I said, then collapsed. I hit hard concrete all across my back, and the ache began in earnest.

  “My arm is broken,” Anna Vargas whined down the tunnel. “You broke my arm!”

  “Think of the publicity this will get you, though,” I said, unable to command my limbs to move as the concussion sank in, along with the various and sundry pains one accumulated leaping from a moving train at sixty or seventy miles an hour and smashing into another human being. Hell, I was lucky to be alive.

  So was Anna Vargas, though it seemed she didn’t think so. Gratitude was such a lost art in our society.

  “You ruined my premiere,” she whined.

  “Pretty sure Creeper did that,” I managed to get out. Things were getting hazy.

  “You’re a murderer,” she called. “And a homophobe.”

  I made a grunting noise in the back of my throat. “That second one is a lie. Damn you, Friday.” I sighed. As to the other charge...

  Whatever the number of people I’d killed was, we could add another with the death of Creeper, however little I’d actually had to do with the full execution of it. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could have expected me to keep track of these things.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “What did you do this time?” These were Willis Shaw’s first words to me as I strolled into his office at a leisurely pace and flopped down in the chair across from his desk.

  “Me?” I played innocent. “Saved the day with my usual grace and aplomb. Kudos were handed out. I received some of them. And acclaim. Much acclaim. And also, there were—” I lowered my voice to a quick, barely coherent mutter “—almost—” raised it back up “—no fatalities.”

  Shaw just stared at me. His face had two settings: poker and irritable. He
vacillated between the two now, and I wondered which I was going to get, the inscrutable Special Agent in Charge of my division, or the barely controlled anger of a boss whose employee was being a recalcitrant shitbag.

  Then he flipped his computer monitor on its axis so I could see it, and boy, did I see. I saw Creeper’s disembodied legs strewn across the train tracks in a photo that looked like it had been taken by one of the subway train’s passengers as they were led out of the tunnel by rescue personnel. It was captioned Slay Queen Strikes Again!

  “Hmm,” I said, frowning. “I would have gone with, ‘Slay Queen Holds Half-Off Sale.’ And I want to point out, in my own defense, I did qualify my ‘no fatalities’ thing with an ‘almost.’ Not my fault you normal people have terrible hearing.”

  Shaw just glared at me. “Injuries?”

  “Maybe there might have been one or two.”

  “Oh?” He scrolled the screen down to another photo of the wrecked train, complete with first responders carrying people out on stretchers. It read 37 Injured in Subway Catastrophe.

  “Say...” I folded my arms over my chest. “If you already knew, why did you ask?”

  “Because I wanted to see how your infantile ass would explain this monumental screw-up.” Shaw’s eyes were dancing with dangerous annoyance.

  “I feel like you should reserve ‘monumental’ for when I break the Statue of Liberty, send the Unisphere off its axis at Flushing Meadows, or knock the Bull and Fearless Girl over on Wall Street,” I said. “The subway is, after all, more of a ‘fixture’ than a ‘monument,’ technically speaking.”

  Shaw was surprisingly restrained given that I was intentionally antagonizing him. Was it possible that after all these months of working with me, he’d finally figured out that the quickest way to make me be a bigger asshole was to yell at me? “Today,” he said, keeping his voice quite level, “you missed half a day of work going to court to testify in a case that was not our case. It was a local case. Not federal.”

  “I know all this. I would have thought you’d welcome a chance to get my happy ass out of the office for a half day, though.”

  “This—” Shaw waved a hand over the screen “—was also not your case. Similarly, it was a local case. For the local PD and local superheroes to handle.”

  I made a face. “Manhattan doesn’t have a local superhero.”

  Shaw’s face wavered a little. “What would you call Captain Frost?”

  “An assclown. In yoga pants. I mean, really, there is visible moose knuckle there. It’s horrifying.”

  He evinced a little reaction, a small twitch at the corner of his eye. “And Gravity?”

  “Staten Island’s finest, but not easily on call for the island of Manhattan or the other boroughs up here,” I said. I shrugged. “Look, I do heroing, okay? I don’t sit back and let shit go down without taking some responsibility.”

  “But you don’t,” Shaw said, strangely muted.

  I had a bad feeling I knew what he meant. “Don’t...what?”

  “Take responsibility.” Shaw slid the screen down the page of the newspaper a little farther. It had a picture of a crying Anna Vargas holding her hand. “You did this?”

  “I did not, in fact,” I said. “That happened when Creeper, as I had taken to calling the villain who’d kidnapped her, dropped her after I...uh, struck his body from the air with my own. After being launched from a train.”

  “Hm.” Shaw sounded very matter-of-fact. He was usually a yeller. The lack of was disquieting. “How are you going about making things right for this young lady?”

  I waved my hand at the weepy picture of Vargas. “I mean, I made sure she got checked out by EMS. Beyond that—”

  He tapped the screen and I peered at it. There were subheads beneath the headline.

  Anna Vargas claims Sienna Nealon has cost her everything!

  ‘Three years ago she wrecked my house, tonight she almost claimed my life.’

  ‘Next time we meet I’m afraid she’ll kill me.’

  “Now that’s just unfair,” I said, sagging in my chair. “I saved her life. That dude was kidnapping her for clearly odious purposes. She was definitely going to get the lotion on the skin, if you catch my meaning, because Creeper was just that kind of guy. As for her house, I did not plant bombs around it and blow it up, that was Redbeard—”

  “Where do you come up with these names?” Shaw just shook his head.

  “From my imagination. It’s a fairly obvious leap with some pirate overtones.”

  Shaw made that hmph-ing sound again. “You’re going to court again tomorrow?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “There’s a conviction hanging on it.”

  Shaw nodded slowly. “You have an actual case waiting. One of ours.” He spun his screen back around, tapped at the keyboard, then flipped it again. “Local authorities request assistance with a metahuman matter.”

  I stared at what looked the wreckage of a bar and a stage. “Where is this?”

  “Nashville.” He pursed his dark lips. “Been there?”

  “Not sure. Briefly, once or twice on a layover, maybe?” I frowned. “This looks unpleasant. Any fatalities?”

  “No,” he said darkly. “Unlike your handiwork, just injuries.”

  “Scathing.”

  “The details are in your inbox,” Shaw said, sliding his screen back. “You will not be attending court tomorrow. Your flight leaves in the morning.”

  “You could have just said that upfront instead of making it a question, boss,” I said, standing up and brushing myself off. I hadn’t even realized how dirty I’d gotten during my little train chase. Also, there was a hole in the back of my blouse I was just now noticing.

  “I’m not your boss,” Shaw said, back to tapping away at his keyboard.

  “But you keep giving me orders anyway,” I said cheerfully.

  “I mean I’m not your boss anymore, Nealon,” Shaw said.

  I froze in the door frame. “Beg pardon?”

  Shaw stopped tapping and looked dead at me. “Transfer orders just came through. You, Holloway and Hilton are being reassigned to DC to be supervised...more closely. Director Chalke thinks you need a firmer hand.”

  “Mmmm.” I shook my head. “Firmer hands get broken around me. Squeeze me, I react badly. Like a Coke can in subzero temps.”

  “Be that as it may,” Shaw said, “you’re transferring as soon as you get back. Might want to make a start of packing your stuff before you leave for Nashville.” He was so serious, so not yelling.

  Now I knew why.

  “Good luck, Nealon,” Shaw said, and he looked back at his screen, our conversation—and reason to interact—apparently now over. “Because based on your record...you’re definitely going to need it to survive in DC.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Reed

  The winds were clear across the midwest as I swept through the skies over Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, and finally Tennessee. Snow-covered hills gave way to the brown flatlands of western Illinois, and somewhere just north of Kentucky it finally started to green, changing shades until just south of Nashville it turned really verdant.

  Murfreesboro was a city of a little over 100,000 almost squarely in the middle of Tennessee. According to Wikipedia, it was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, which was not something I’d heard. Flying gave me lots of time to enjoy the finer corners of the web, though, until my battery started to die as I was on final approach. Well-timed, that.

  I’d heard of this company with the labor dispute only by reputation and news articles. The headquarters of Lotsostuff (actually their name, amazingly) was an immense warehouse on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. Also according to Wikipedia, it had been purchased by founder Logan Mills for a relatively low price five or so years ago due to a downturn in the area. Property values had since rebounded, so if nothing else, he was sitting on a fortune just in real estate.

  Plus it was filled with stuff.

  It was al
so easy to pick out on approach due to its massiveness. The warehouse stretched the length of several football fields, way bigger than the Metrodome, for instance, though quite a bit shorter. It sprawled on the outskirts of Murfreesboro, a blocky superstructure of corrugated-roofed warehouses that was probably visible from outer space.

  There was a crowd gathered at one of the entrances to the fence that surrounded the place, easily visible as I slipped down to a thousand feet or so of altitude. They looked like milling ants, and somehow a vague feeling deep in my detective instincts told me I’d found my labor dispute.

  A small line of navy-clad cops had formed a perimeter just outside the fence, a pitiful firebreak on the milling, angry ants—or rather, laborers. I felt a pang of discomfort rolling into this. I had my natural sympathies, and they were with the guys on the line. But even from this height I could tell things were getting rough, some shoving going on. The cops weren’t wearing SWAT gear, and they weren’t wearing private security uniforms. They had real badges, and the cop cars parked nearby said POLICE in big white letters on a blue stripe with Murfreesboro smaller on the white paint of the car underneath. These were not rent-a-cops designed to break the strike.

  I couldn’t let the angry natives cause a riot with the local PD, so I separated them from the fence with a little...gust-o.

  I know. A dad joke and I’m not even a dad. What can I say? My father taught me well before his untimely passing.

  With a little twist of my hand, I sent bursts of wind strong enough to move the crowd. They were forced back—driven, really—stumbling, as I descended into the no man’s land I had created.

  The crowd of furious Lotsostuff workers watched me like they were standing under the blades of a helicopter. Some were maybe a little more irritable than others, even though I was trying to be gentle. I saw relief on the faces of the cops, as well as one guy in a shirt and tie that now had some seriously dust-covered shoes.