Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  “The hell?” Friday asked, swelling slightly. He’d already been partially hulked, as though anticipating a rumble.

  “We did not pick it,” the leader said with a shrug. His manner was brusque, and it was clear he didn’t care much about endearing himself to anyone. “Apparently it was Sienna Nealon who tagged you that.”

  “Gahhhhhh,” Friday said with a low grunt. “She called me Guy Friday, too, why couldn’t you have tagged me as that?”

  “Gimp fits better,” the leader said, and didn’t even bother to shrug this time. “My name is Rudi Fazekas. This is my team.” Scott mentally tagged him as Rude-y, the better to remember him. Rudey nodded to each of his teammates in succession, starting with a pale-skinned fellow to his right. “This is MacDonald.”

  “Call me Mac,” the man said with an accent that was as Aussie as a kangaroo. Mac pulled a knife and twirled it, one of the big bladed ones. Crocodile Dundee, Scott decided.

  “This is Joaquín,” Rudey went on, nodding at a man who had a distinctly South American feel to him; he was dressed in gaucho-lite, the only exception to the black tactical garb in their group. His jacket was still ostentatious but slightly toned down, a red bandana tied around his neck.

  “Olá,” Joaquín said. His eyes glowed for a second—actually glowed, then hissed, as though he’d started to fire a laser out of them and snuffed it before they burned. It was hard to miss, and Scott got the feeling he’d done it to make an impression.

  “This is Ambrus,” Rudey pointed to a man just behind him. Ambrus smiled, a wide, toothy grin with much less cool hostility than the last two. He looked like he might actually be a human being. “You can call him Booster. We all do.”

  “Like … Booster Gold?” Scott asked, that name sounding familiar for some reason. He looked to Reed. “Isn’t Booster Gold a comic book character?”

  Reed just glanced at him, staring blankly, then turned back to watching Rudey and his team. “I don’t know.”

  Scott’s brain itched, a small ache sprouting out like a vein within it had pulsated. “Okay.” He looked at Rudey. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “But you did anyway,” Rudey said with an impressive amount of pissyness. “We have a medic,” he pointed at a blondish man with olive skin. “Gothric. And this is my second in command, Ferko.” He pointed to another Eastern European fellow who looked like he had slightly more humor than Rudey. Ferko, though, had long, dark hair, with barrettes in it. Scott stared for a second, then averted his eyes. He didn’t need these guys taking his staring as a challenge.

  “Okay, let me see if I got this,” Scott said with a nod. “Rudi,” he pointed at the leader, “Mac,” the Aussie with the big knife, “Joaquín,” the South American gaucho, “Booster,” the grinning man, “uh, medic,” the blondish fellow, “and Ferko,” the man with barrettes.

  “Yes,” Rudey said, with a quick nod, almost like satisfaction, but an utterly humorless look.

  “Great,” Scott said, rubbing his fingers through his own dusky blond hair, trying to massage the scalp. “Well, you caught us at a good time. We were about to plan an ambush for Sienna.” Ferko with the barrettes snorted, and a few of the others shared a guffaw. Scott stared at him. “Something funny about that?”

  Rudey answered, and in his own inimitable style. “You have been hunting her for a month. Been trying to trip her for months before that. Always failing.” He shared a look with his team. “We will plan this ambush for you, instead.”

  Reed was on the balls of his feet in an instant, like he was bucking forward for a confrontation. “This is our mission.”

  “You’ve failed your mission how many times?” Rudey asked, no emotion in his voice. “This is why we’re here. We hunt metas for a living, and you—you’re no match for her.” He stuck out his chest like he was going to cruise forward and ram Reed with it. “This is what we do. You had one job, as they say. You have failed.”

  “Oh, it’s gonna be funny the first time she kicks all y’all’s asses,” Augustus said without a trace of humor.

  “Will not happen,” Ferko with the barrettes—Scott was still not over those—said. His hair moved over his shoulders, without so much as a touch from the man himself. It slithered, like a snake, and Scott’s skin crawled. He’s a Medusa. “We will choke her.”

  “I hope you do,” Scott said tightly. “But let’s be clear about something—you may be here to give us some firepower aid, but this isn’t your job. It’s ours. You can help us, or you can turn around and go home.”

  Scott could almost feel electricity moving between the members of this new team. Rudey answered. “You think you’re man enough to send us back home to Revelen?”

  They’re from Revelen? Scott’s brow creased. “I think if you cause an international incident by making a mess of a metahuman incident on US soil, I won’t have to. The president will send in everything we have—Army, Navy, Air Force, drone strikes—and you’ll go back to your country in coffins.” That caused more bristling. “If you’re here to help, then help us. You want to plan an ambush? Great, I could really use your help. You want final say on the role your men take during the fight? I have no problem with that. But if you want to whip out your piece and piss all over us, just go home now. We don’t need a bunch of guys who think they’re the kings of the world—”

  “Am not no Leonardo DiCaprio,” Booster’s grin disappeared.

  “Poor choice of … whatever, I’m not looking for trouble for you or from you,” Scott said. “Can we just please … put aside this old school-new school rivalry and work together?”

  Rudey looked hard at him for a moment, but to his credit, didn’t take the temperature of his team by looking back. He was plainly in charge. “Yeah,” Rudey said coolly, after a minute. “We can work together.” He didn’t smile, though.

  “Good,” Scott said and stepped up, offering a hand. He made sure to reabsorb the moisture from the sweat he’d started to generate while they were all standing off. Rudey stepped forward and took his proffered hand, but his grim expression made Scott nervous. “Let’s get to work, then,” Scott said, trying to bury that feeling. After all, the enemy they were facing was already dangerous enough without having to worry about their so-called allies.

  22.

  Sienna

  I brought the vault down in Montana, in as isolated a spot as I could find, miles and miles from a single ground-based light source. I figured if there was no electricity for a good long ways, it was unlikely someone would come stumbling over the vault by accident. Still, I brought it down in a clearing and then pushed it into a small ravine, making sure the trees above it covered it well. I circled the area after, trying to gauge the approaches. Anyone who came looking for it would have a hell of a time getting to it; there were no roads close by, and the level of underbrush I had to push it into suggested no one had passed this way in a long time.

  “All right, then,” I muttered as I landed in a bare spot of ground that had been covered over with ferns and such before I’d slid the vault across the ground beneath it. I doubted a satellite photo would show the slide marks, though, because I’d waited until I was under cover of trees to set it down. I looked at the exterior and then took a quick walk around the entire thing. None of the sides looked weaker than any other. The top looked as thick as the walls, and the bottom, from what I’d seen as I flew it out here, was also just as apparently impenetrable. “Time to see if Logan’s crew just sucked.”

  I lit my fingers like a blowtorch and cranked them up to full heat. Despite it being a cool autumn night in Montana, I immediately started to sweat. Being this close to a blazing heat source was worse than standing out in the desert on a summer’s day. I pushed my hand forward to touch the vault, hoping I could burn through that as well.

  I left my hand there for at least ten minutes, probing, pushing my joints against it, even pulling back and giving it a full-strength, superheated Wolfe-punch. They all did nothing. I stripped naked, threw my clot
hes far, far away, and then turned into dragon-form. I made my teeth superhot and bit down on the vault after sinking my jaws around it.

  Nothing. It didn’t even bend.

  “What the hell?” I whispered as I hurriedly dressed, my body shivering against the chill of the night. Whoever had built this vault wasn’t messing around. I’d never met anything that could stand up to my powers before. “What is going on with this?”

  Even Wolfe was baffled. This metal … it is impossibly hard … stands up to anything, he said.

  I’ve seen this before, Bjorn said with haughty self-importance.

  I sighed internally, deep, below where my souls could hear it. I tried not to play favorites—okay, I didn’t try that hard; Zack was my favorite, easy—but of all of them, Bjorn was, without doubt, my least favorite. I liked him less than Wolfe, and that took real doing.

  “Where have you seen it before, Bjorn?” I asked, trying not to let it sound petulant. “And so help me, if this ends in a joke about your penis—”

  Bjorn rumbled with laughter in my head. No, though that would be a good one—

  “Not so much,” I said, “since you don’t have one anymore, eunuch.”

  Eve disagrees with you, Bjorn crowed.

  Uck, it was one time, because I was bored, Eve said. And never again, I might add.

  “Wait, what?” I almost heaved. “You people can—what are you doing in my head when I’m not looking?”

  Some of us? Nothing, Gavrikov said, almost sadly.

  Quite happily nothing, Zack added.

  That’s because you don’t know what you’re missing, Eve said, creeping me out.

  “Eve, I thought you were—I mean, you were with Ariadne—”

  Well, she’s not here, Eve said tersely, and in case you haven’t noticed, this is a—what do you call it? A sausage party?

  “Ugh,” I said, closing my eyes in revulsion, “and here I thought they didn’t have sausages anymore. A thousand times, ugh. It’s like you’re all in prison together.”

  The vault, Sienna, Bastian said, a little too quickly, as though he was trying to change the subject.

  “Et tu, Bastian?” I asked, sighing. I hadn’t want to know this, but like passing a car crash, now that it was there, I almost had to look. Look, and perhaps dry heave at the bloody mess I was seeing.

  You sleep a lot and we don’t, Bastian said, sounding somewhat embarrassed.

  “This explains some of my recurring nightmares.”

  The vault, Sienna, please, Zack said.

  “You could have told me, Zack.”

  I don’t want to think about it any more than you do, Zack said. Anyway … the vault?

  “Right,” I said, trying to get back to some semblance of an even keel. “Bjorn … where have you seen this kind of unbreakable metal before?”

  Mjolnir, he said smugly, then waited a second, apparently for comic timing. And my penis.

  “Damn you,” I said, sighing in the distant corner of the Montana wilderness. “And …” I didn’t know how to process that other news, the non-genital related one. “… Shit.”

  23.

  Scott

  “Your operational concept is not … terrible,” Rude Rudi admitted after studying the very basic ideas that Scott and his crew had come up with. The Revelen squad leader stood over the planning table in silence, his teammates leaning over him, save for Gothric the Medic, who was spinning slowly in a desk chair next to a row of unclaimed cubicles. “I agree with the premise that Denver is the location for this.”

  “I was considering doing it in a less populated area,” Scott admitted, feeling the reluctant tug of something in the back of his mind. What was it? Worry?

  “Your news media will be slower to pick it up if it takes place outside a population center,” Rudey said, shaking his head slowly. “It needs to be public to guarantee she’s drawn in.”

  “She’s got a hero complex,” Mac said in that hard Aussie accent, stroking the side of his massive knife blade lovingly. “She gets wind of this, she’ll come runnin’ right into the punch.”

  “I agree,” Reed said with subdued, almost grudging, intensity. “She comes charging in like a bull—”

  “And we gut her, right?” Mac asked, grinning with his knife up against his cheek.

  “Before she can so much as blink in surprise,” Reed agreed. Mac held out a fist and Reed hesitated before bumping it awkwardly.

  “Mark this point on the map,” Rudey said, pointing to the Denver airport.

  Scott started to reach for a pen, but Joaquín the gaucho’s eyes glowed green, then a small, fluorescent green beam zipped down and made a pin-sized burn in the middle of the runways. “What the …?” Scott stared up at Joaquín, who didn’t smile, but the glow in his eyes subsided swiftly, leaving them a natural green.

  “We want to keep the fight contained on the airport,” Rudey said, as casually as if his man hadn’t just burned a hole in the map with pinprick eye beams.

  “Metahumans fighting at an airport …” Reed’s voice trailed off, and he stared at the ceiling. “Why does that feel … familiar?”

  “Yeah,” J.J. said from behind Scott, nosing his way up to the map. “I feel like I’ve seen that before … somewhere.”

  “Airports are a nice place to fight,” Rudey said, tapping the map. “Lots of open space to operate.”

  “Should we … clear the runways first?” Scott asked. There was a slight hitch in the back of his mind, as though his thoughts were chained to something heavy, and he was having to push to get them out.

  “Too risky,” Ferko of the Medusa hair said. He actually used his hair as a pointing device, running a strand up and down the runways. “If it’s all clear when it shows on the news, she might see the trap coming. She’s brave, not stupid.”

  “And sure of her own near-immortality, it would seem,” Booster said from his usual position in Rudey’s shadow.

  “Because she is near-immortal,” Augustus growled. “She can channel fire through her skin, fly, blow up like a bomb, hit hard enough to make an MMA fighter’s guts blow out his back, net you up with ribbons of light, and turn into a dragon if she gets real pissed.”

  “Let’s not forget the ability to hit you with a mind blast hard enough to stunt your growth for a few years,” Reed said.

  “Or heal from any wound,” Rudey said. “We’ve seen the footage, read the dossiers. We know what we’re up against.” He brought his finger back to the map. “When can you have this plan ready to execute?”

  “Our prisoner is awaiting transport in Las Vegas,” Scott said. There was something akin to a faint scream in the back of his head that made him hesitate, cocking his head, wondering if he’d imagined it. “He’s ready to move, so we could send him to Denver tonight, get on a plane ourselves. We make sure his dose of suppressant is missed tomorrow morning, and by midday we’ve got ourselves a mess on aisle four that’s crying out for cleanup.” He paused, deciding whether he should throw the barb that was on his mind. “Unless you’d prefer to take a night, get some good sleep—”

  “My men are ready,” Rudey said, taking the insult exactly as Scott had intended. Scott doubted that Rudey’s powers were a duplicate of Joaquín’s or he might have worried he was about to get burned by eye blasts. “Let’s not waste any more time. We go out there, we bait the trap, and we bring Sienna Nealon’s head back to your bosses here in Washington—in a bag.”

  24.

  Sienna

  “So that’s how Mjolnir got so damned legendary,” I muttered as I started up the steps to my apartment. I was talking to myself—well, mostly—because I was still turning over Bjorn’s revelation in my head. “Still, knowing about that doesn’t really help unless I can—”

  I froze at the top of the steps. It was a cool night in Cedar City, just like Montana but with a few degrees difference. The air had been a little more moist in Montana, and that made it feel colder. I looked down the open walkway of the second floor, and realized
pretty quickly there was someone lurking in the shadows.

  “I see you,” I said, readying myself. I summoned Wolfe, Bjorn, Gavrikov and Eve right to the fore of my mind. I thought about employing flight, but the fight instinct was hard. Bastian, stand by, I thought.

  Roger that, Bastian said.

  “I’m not surprised,” came a high voice as a slim figure detached from the darkness. The words were slurred, and I peered at the shadow, trying to discern a face. Whoever it was, they’d been drinking. It was a she, I could tell by the build. When my neighbor’s front door light caught her, I sighed in relief, then annoyance. “With that hair color, you can probably see in the dark.”

  It was Sandra, the construction worker who’d been giving me evil looks earlier when I was talking to Bilson.

  Local drama. Ugh.

  “Something I can help you with, stranger?” I asked, halting before taking the last few steps up to the second floor walk. I didn’t like the idea of getting in a screaming match with a weirdo right in front of my apartment.

  “Yeah, I got a bone to pick with you,” Sandra said, shuffling toward me.

  “Is it a chicken bone?” I asked, easing back down the stairs. “With some meat on it? Cuz I’m hungry.”

  Sandra was acting like she smelled blood in the water, speeding up to intercept me before I got away. “I saw you talking to him earlier, eyeball-screwing him like he was yours or something.”

  “Uhmmm …” I continued to back off, making it down the stairs and to the corner of the nearest underpass that led out back of the apartment complex. I was trying to put up an inoffensive, non-aggressive front, but Sandra kept picking up the pace to match my retreat. “Yeah, I’m not interested in him. He just started talking to me—”

  “You liar,” Sandra pronounced, breaking into a drunken, lilting run as I turned the corner. I thought about waiting in ambush for her, but the idea of cold-cocking a normal human was bad, albeit satisfying. I was trying to avoid drawing attention to myself or my safe house, after all. She was also getting louder as her frustration with me grew.