I didn’t have any other options, I realized, looking frantically for Chandler. He was nowhere to be seen, probably still scrabbling around in the grass looking for my keys. For all I knew, he wouldn’t get the AR in time to stop Brance from doing...well, whatever he had in mind to do.
Out of options and pressed for time, I leapt up onto the concrete support, intending to start my climb after Brance.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE
Jules
“This is it!” Jules said, pointing as Gil took the turn hard. There was a cop car with lights flashing in the driveway, another couple vehicles with flashers parked ahead of it. The antenna loomed over everything, and Jules licked his lips as they pulled in behind the Brentwood PD car.
“This don’t look like the kind of thing we’re going to be able to involve ourselves in, boss,” Gil said. “There are cops here.”
Jules stared at the parked car. “There’s one cop here, yeah. And probably Nealon and her partner, that Indian guy.”
Gil looked back at Jules. “Well...what are we supposed to do about that?”
Jules frowned. He’d been considering this real carefully. “We need to be a little cautious here. We—”
A cop came wandering up toward the window and Leo rolled it down. “Hey, you guys can’t park here,” the cop said. “We have a situation, and—”
Leo opened the door, hard, hitting the cop right in the gut and doubling him over. Before the officer had a chance to respond, Leo was out, and slammed the man in the side of the head, knocking him out cold.
Jules just stared for a second, then sighed before sliding out of the back seat. “Okay, in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. Leo, get his body cam and disarm him, then cuff him and toss him in his back seat. Watch out for the cameras on the cop car.” He shook his head. “We need to play this careful and—” Distant shouting drew his attention.
Someone was climbing the big antenna out there in the field. Jules peered into the distance, then nodded, smiling. “Okay,” he said, pointing, “there’s our boy. Let’s go deal with him before more of these cops show up.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR
Reed
“Whoa.” Logan Mills staggered back as the flaming man burst through the window into his office. “What the hell...?”
“I guess we’ve found the person who burned your warehouse,” I said, readying the windows. The man on fire breaking all the spotted glass as he came in was helpful; now I could bring a full-fury tornado if I had to. I squeezed my hand into a fist, felt for the air...
And realized...damn, was I tired from creating a vacuum zone in the warehouse during the fire. I suppressed a yawn. Using meta powers at high volume was intense stuff, and making me wish I could take a nap before this confrontation.
Fire Man didn’t look like he was waiting for anyone, though. He was burning, completely covered in flame, and glaring down Mills with...well, pitted eyes of black surrounded by crackling orange flames. “I heard you telling your lies.”
“They’re not lies,” Mills said, eerily calm given that a man whose skin was living flames was hovering a few feet about his office floor. “I’m busted, uh...guy.”
The fire man’s flames receded from his head down his face, leaving us with a view of Angelo Drake’s leering face. He looked a little different wreathed in flames. Also, not hanging around two inches from Theresa’s shoulder.
“Figures,” I muttered under my breath.
Angelo stared at me, eyes a little wild now that they weren’t on fire anymore. “What figures?”
“That the super intense guy who was super invested in the cause would turn out to be the violent lunatic,” I said.
“I want my people to get what we’re due,” Angelo said, thumping a flaming hand on his fiery chest. “We worked hard for you. You became a billionaire while paying us peanuts, and now you’re saying you’ve got nothing?”
“Yeah,” Mills said. “Just about. I mean, think about it, Angelo. I didn’t do the normal CEO thing and sell my stock for gain or put it up as collateral for a loan. You’ve seen what I drive; it’s a Ford Escape. You’ve been to my house. It’s the same one I had when we started this thing; 1500 square feet on half an acre.” His face darkened. “And I’ll guess I’ll probably lose it, too, along with the car.”
Angelo’s face darkened. “You can’t fool me. We all saw the cover of Fortune. You’re a billionaire. Like the Amazon guy, or the founder of Apple.”
“Except those companies made money,” Mills said, almost mournfully. “I was trying to compete with them and I cut the margins too thin. We’ve never made a dime. And my stock is worthless, which means I’m not a billionaire.” He chuckled ruefully. “In fact, you’re probably worth more than I am at this point.”
“Liar,” Angelo whispered. “You hearing this, Bert?”
“I’m hearing it,” Big Bert said, vaulting into the window with streams of water holding him aloft, spraying out of his hands.
I barely raised an eyebrow at his entrance. “Well, well, if it isn’t Theresa’s second bodyguard. Is she going to be showing up next?”
“She didn’t know we were doing this,” Big Bert said, looming over us all.
“Well,” Mills said, “now you know why I wasn’t coming to the negotiating table.”
They were both quiet for a second, then Angelo spoke, with a dangerous, quiet malice. “Yeah...I don’t believe you.”
“You greedy guys are all the same,” Bert agreed. “You’re holding out because you want to keep us working people down.”
“I really don’t,” Mills said. “I—”
Not really one for drawn-out conversations with the overly angry, I raised a hand and blew Angelo and Bert out the now-gaping hole where the windows had stood. It caught them by surprise and they both went tumbling out into the night as Mills stood there, blinking, at their sudden departure.
“This conversation was going nowhere good.” I grabbed Mills by the arm and dragged him toward the door before he could react. “That’s not going to keep them away for long. We need to get you out of here.”
I could see the gears click into place for him. They weren’t going to listen to a damned thing he said, they were so convinced he was lying and snowing them. “Yeah,” he said, and I threw the door open so we could get the hell out of there.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE
Brance
How the hell was he supposed to get out of this?
Brance was climbing like a fiend, unsure of what to do. Like a man backed into a corner by bad choices, he’d chosen to climb the wall. Well, the antenna, in this case.
The results were predictable.
“Brance, stop!” Sienna shouted up at him for about the fifth—tenth—who even knew how many times it was? Did she know any words other than, “Brance, stop!”? He wanted to keep climbing, but at the same time he needed to make sure she wasn’t crossing over to get a clean angle to shoot him, so he looked down—
She wasn’t.
His panic did not abate, however, because instead she’d moved right to the middle of the tower’s structure and was bracing herself to climb.
His reaction was pure instinct. He leaned his head over, looking down through the center of the diamond and let out a yelp—
The air distorted around the sonic blast he’d bellowed, just like the one he’d hit her with before, flying through the shaft in the center of the antenna—
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX
Sienna
I’d made up my mind to climb when I heard the bizarre yelp from above. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, and the last time I had—
I’d ended up catching a donkey kick to the chest.
My fingers firmly clutching the antenna lattice, I swung out of the center of the antenna just as a wave of powerful sound rushed through—
It hit the concrete foundation of the antenna, that huge slab, and I heard something rattle fiercely as busted shards peppered me furiously
.
I paused for only a moment until the chaos had subsided, then started to climb. I’d made it up ten, fifteen feet when the foundation beneath me, where the metal met the now-shattered concrete, let out an ominous squeal.
“Uh oh,” I muttered. But I didn’t stop climbing.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
Jules
“What do we do?” Gil asked into the quiet night. The police lights were flashing from all three cars, and Jules was staring up at the antenna in the distance. Now a second figure was starting to climb from the base, and unless he’d misinterpreted what he’d just seen, Brance had blasted the foundation of the radio tower. The dumbass.
“What the hell are you doing?” came a vaguely accented question from just ahead. Someone was shining a light toward them from the back of that BMW that fancy Nealon had been driving at the club.
“Hey, we’re just concerned citizens out for a walk—” Jules started. Denial was in his blood.
Unfortunately his denial was cut off by Leo—that fucking idiot—opening up with his pistol.
Jules sprinted, his old legs not quite as good at this as they used to be, but his hands up in the air. He wasn’t even really armed, unless you counted an old snubbie revolver in a shoulder holster. He damned sure wasn’t going to draw it, and if he heard even one bullet whistle his way, he was stopping, dropping and rolling like he was on fire. “Idiots!” he shouted, mostly to himself, because the Indian TBI agent opened up with what sounded like a machine gun, and Jules gave no cares for what happened next, so long as he didn’t catch a round.
He figured he’d run toward the antenna, seeing as it was the closest cover, but he wasn’t exactly thinking deep or he would have hidden behind the cars. Still, something was better than nothing, so Jules puffed and huffed across the field, listening to the exchange of gunfire behind him and making sure that he was running perpendicular to where any shots might be coming.
About halfway across the field, Jules stopped as something loomed in the dark, casting a slight shadow across the yellow-green field grass. It stretched up in a diagonal toward the middle of the tower.
A support cable, anchored to a concrete piling, buried in the field.
The gunfire kept going behind him, and Jules stared at the cable support for a second, trying to decipher how it worked. There was a metal anchor in the middle, and Jules stooped, putting a hand on it. With a tug, he tried to free it.
It didn’t move but a little. Still...
He gave it another tug. It moved a little more.
Jules grinned and ripped at it with all his strength.
The anchor popped free, and with a little kick to the mated support, the cable let loose of the support piling.
In the distance, the tower squeaked, then swayed. He looked where it joined the tower, squarely in the middle, and counted eight support cables. They were sunk around the antenna like compass points around it in the field.
With a grin to himself, Jules wiped the metal anchor for fingerprints and tossed it. Plausible deniability was all he needed here. “I didn’t have anything to do with the shooting, Your Honor,” he muttered to himself, breaking into a jog toward the next support piling, “and I have no idea what happened to make the tower fall...with that singer guy or Ms. Nealon on it...”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
Reed
There was nothing like a brisk run when you were already physically exhausted. Especially when the obstacle course you’d chosen for your cardio was a cluttered warehouse office, then a set of steel stairs down an even more cluttered warehouse floor which would never have passed an OSHA inspection.
“Where’s Ben?” I asked as Logan leapt down the stairs as though the fire was chasing behind him. He was a little aggressive, and I used some wind to cushion his fall so he didn’t break an ankle and bring our little Logan’s Run to an abrupt halt.
“Locking up,” Logan said, also huffing. “Probably at the far end of the building. That’s where he usually starts.” He had a little bit of extra weight around his midsection, and I suspected—if he was anything like me—one of the things he’d sacrificed for his business was his physical fitness. Because I hadn’t hit a gym in months, but luckily my meta metabolism and genes kept it off my waist, unlike Mills.
“Hopefully,” I said, giving us both a wind at our backs to keep us moving along. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that we were going to be able to outrun them forever. But if I could get us to an exit and out, I could fly us clear of here—
The windows above shattered, and in came Big Bert riding a wave like he’d was in Malibu.
“Heads up!” I shouted, puffing air beneath Logan and myself and blowing us over the crashing waves, which swept in behind us and formed an instant breakwater, cutting off our escape in that direction.
I only gave it another quick look before deciding, nope, sticking around here was a bad idea. I readied myself to blow us both out the window where Big Bert had entered, but—
Angelo came crashing in through the windows in front of us, bringing a wall of flame with him.
We were trapped.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE
Sienna
“Brance, why are you making me climb a freaking historic radio tower in the dead of the night in Tennessee?” I asked, wondering who the hell Chandler was unloading on below. Whoever it was, they were firing back, and he was pumping a hell of a lot of rounds at them. “I mean, really, who does that? Losers, that’s who, Brance. Losers climb historic radio towers on a Saturday night. Everyone else has plans. Lives. Dates. Sex, even. That’s not a suggestion, by the way. Your next stop is jail, so that’s probably not going to be an option you want to pursue. Unless it is. I won’t judge.”
The tower was creaking quite angrily, which, I assumed, had a lot to do with what Brance had done when his voice shot down to the bottom. A fine sheen of concrete dust covered my clothing thanks to that, and it couldn’t have been good for this multi-ton metal structure to get its support footings partially demolished.
“Leave me alone!” Brance called back piteously. He was almost to the top, hanging up there at the point of the diamond. I was a little over halfway up and had slowed my advance in case he decided to voice blast me. With no real desire to be pancaked, I was exercising caution.
“I can’t do that, Brance,” I said. “You’ve done some wrong. But it doesn’t have to be the end. What you’ve done so far? Assault, battery. I mean, quite a few of those, but still...you could do your time and get out and still have lots of ability to reform or whatever.”
“I just wanted them to hear me,” Brance sobbed into the cold night air.
“They still could,” I said. “Metas live longer, man. Go do your time; it’ll be like—like—uh—what’s that Johnny Cash song inside the prison—?”
“‘Folsom Prison Blues,’” Brance answered, instantly.
“Yeah,” I said, “except you can get out. Really.” I steadied myself as the tower swayed. I’d heard tall structures like this moved in the wind, but to feel it—wheeeeee, yikes. Disorienting. “This doesn’t have to be the end.”
The tower let out a moan of protest, as if to contradict me, and I looked down.
Something was happening below. The cable supports that held the tower in place? Two of them seemed to be just hanging there, all tautness gone.
With a creak, the tower shifted to my right, hard, lurching, and my feet went out from under me.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN
Jules
“Heh.” Jules watched the second cable fly free of the concrete support and didn’t stop to admire his handiwork for long. The tower was already showing a pronounced list in the other direction.
“Two to go?” he wondered aloud. The gunfire continued behind him, without a break. Hopefully the boys would sort that out before he got back to the car, but if not? Ehh, he’d just walk to the freeway and get an Uber or something.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
“How could I possibly get out of this?” Brance asked. His cheeks were wet and cold, the heights of the tower swaying. He didn’t feel afraid of them, for some reason. “All I wanted was to sing! To be heard!” His knuckles were a pale white, fingers chilled and numb. “How could I ever do that now? With what I am?”
“Uhm,” Sienna’s voice came, wind whipping over it, now only thirty yards down. “Well, I have an idea about that.” She was easier to hear now that the gunfire had stopped echoing in the night.
“You’ve seen what I can do!” Brance called. His fingers were loosening, his grip fading with the cold and having to hold tight to the tower. Every moment he spent up here, the closer he came to dropping off. “How am I supposed to sing to people when I hurt them?”
“There’s this thing called suppressant,” Sienna said, deadpan. “Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
Brance stopped dead, stunned. “Wha...yeah.” His voice rose. “Yeah! Suppressant!” A smile pulled up the corners of his mouth. “Yes! Yes!”
“Yes, yes,” Sienna said, leaping up another few rungs of the latticework. “We can get you suppressant. You’re going to be on it for a while anyway, I’m guessing. But I’m sure we can work something out where after you do your time, given the nature of your powers and your, uh, tenuous control over them, you can have a supply of suppressant.” She reached a hand up to him. “But Brance...we really need to get down from here. Okay?”
Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36) Page 33