“I need to go to Wal-Mart later,” I said. “Any chance after—”
“No problem,” he said, waving me off as he started the car and put it into gear. “We’ll learn, we’ll have some fun, and then we’ll go partake of soulless commerce.”
I stared at him, not really sure if he was joking or preparing to spring Marxist philosophy on me. Instead he drove the El Camino out of the parking lot while humming lightly to himself.
“I had a little encounter with your ex last night,” I said, and he hit the brakes hard enough that if the old car had possessed airbags, they would have deployed right into our faces.
“Oh, shit,” he said under his breath, like I couldn’t hear him. He turned to face me, eyes wide. “What happened?”
I stared at him, trying to decide how to answer that. “She drunkenly accosted me.”
“I’m so sorry,” Bilson said, getting us underway again with a creaky start. “She’s not my ex, by the way. I’m very careful not to date anyone as crazy as Sandra.”
“Well, you need to be a little more careful about what you stick your dick into.”
He almost slammed on the brakes again, and looked a little guilty. “Uh …”
“Yeah,” I said, “no need for an answer. Just exercise caution next time. For everyone’s sake, really.”
He didn’t say anything else, just gulped as we headed into a road construction zone. I saw him turn his head studiously away, and it took me a minute to realize he was actively looking away from the person holding up the Stop/Slow sign that was moderating the flow of traffic.
I stared at the sign holder, and it only took me a second to realize it was Sandra. In sunglasses. She was watching us with her lips tight. “You sonofa—” I started to say.
“She works here, it’s not like I picked it on purpose,” Bilson said, shoulders tense. “I didn’t realize when I set out in this direction that she’d be on duty this way, or watching, or that you two had beef—”
“Oh, no, see, she had the beef—your beef—and now I’m stuck dealing with this psycho even though I haven’t had any damned beef—actually, after this I’m thinking of swearing off beef entirely—”
“Because you’d prefer—”
“Don’t say fish.”
“—Her?” Bilson nodded toward Sandra, who was staring through her dark glasses at us. I couldn’t see through them, but I imagined her bloodshot eyes expressive and hate-filled.
I looked out the window at Sandra as we passed, not breaking eye contact, and did the princess wave, side to side, as though I were going by on a parade float.
“Are you trying to get her to snap so you can get her fired?” Bilson asked, slightly nonplussed.
“Nah, just antagonizing her for my own entertainment,” I said, having not really thought it through. We passed her, and somehow she kept a lid on the crazy, which surprised me. I figured she would have lost it and Bilson would have had to speed away in a cloud of dust and thrown gravel.
I mean, if I was going to be stuck in local drama anyway, I was resolved to at least make a proper mess of it.
“My studio is just up ahead,” Bilson said, nodding down the street beyond the ditch diggers, pylons, and the requisite Porta-Potty that comes with every construction site.
“How likely is it that psycho hose beast is going to come stalking over on her break?” I asked, ignoring his effort to change the subject.
Bilson stiffened. “It’s, uh, happened before. But she’s usually smart enough not to start something in a self-defense class, you know.”
“That surprises me almost as much as her keeping her cool when I pissed her off just now,” I said. When Bilson looked at me questioningly, I explained, “Because nutbags usually lack the restraint that would take.”
“She seemed normal enough when we first started talking,” Bilson said, and I could tell he was uncomfortable being on this subject. He probably had other plans, plans that involved macking on me and being suave, plans that were right out the window because of his poor choice in previous prospects. “She didn’t, uh, go all overly-attached-girlfriend on me until later.”
“So she was your girlfriend.”
“No, it’s just an expression,” he said. “Err, well, an internet meme, actually.”
We pulled up to a building on Main Street, brick with two big glass windows on either side of the door. It looked like a pretty typical main street shop, except it wasn’t. It had a few flyers tacked up on either side indicating that it was a self-defense studio, and I gave it a hard look.
“It’s a work in progress,” Bilson said, alternating between looking at me and his store front. “Only been open a couple months.”
I got out of the El Camino and shivered again. I hadn’t even realized it, but he’d been running the heat in the car. That was decent of him. He hurried up to the door and unlocked it, holding it open for me so I could slip inside.
The studio was a pretty big space, probably a hundred feet by a hundred feet, with mirrors on two sides and green carpeting covering the floor. I stared at the carpeting, which seemed out of place until Bilson said, “It was a retail shop until a couple months ago. I just picked up the lease and started putting some classes together, y’know?”
“Sure,” I said. I supposed a martial arts studio could start that way. What did I know about it?
I swept my gaze into the corner, where there was a weapons rack waiting. I saw Kendo sticks, bo sticks, rubber knives and bright yellow fake guns. There was other stuff, too; and I recognized pretty much all of it, but I wanted to play it cool, so when Bilson asked if I wanted a tour, I said, “Sure,” and let him explain everything to me as though I didn’t have a clue what a katana was. I held the blade when he offered it to me and tried to pretend I hadn’t once decapitated a couple vampires with one. “Very cool,” I said, trying to sound like I was maybe just a little put off by it as well. You know, like a normal woman who hadn’t killed more human beings than a small-scale war might be.
“I’m gonna go get the locker rooms ready,” he said. “Some of my students are gonna be coming pretty soon. You want to just wait out here?”
“Sure,” I said, as he started to head through an alcove hallway at the back of the room. I could see the locker room doors from where I stood.
“By the way,” he said, turning back to me. “If it makes you feel any better—Sandra suffers from incontinence.” He smiled lamely. “Has to go pee like, every twenty minutes.”
I frowned at him. “I’m not sure why that would make me feel better, but …”
“Because she pees herself every once in a while, if there’s not a bathroom handy,” he said, shrugging. “I dunno. I don’t have much for you, just figured maybe …” He shrugged again.
“I’d delight in her misery?” An idea occurred. “That … does kinda make me feel better, actually.”
“Good,” Bilson said, smiling, and then he headed back into the locker room.
As soon as he was gone, I was out the door. I needed to follow up on that idea, and if I was lucky, I might just be able to be back before he even noticed I was gone.
27.
Scott
They all were piled together in a hangar across the tarmac from the government transport plane, watching on security monitors, with the door cracked open to the blue Denver sky. It was a chilly day, blustery wind sweeping in out of the north, and Scott was sorry he hadn’t brought his coat. He could see the Rocky Mountains to the west past the government plane, but he was trying not to get distracted by the view.
“How long do you figure?” This came from Mac the Aussie, who was twirling his knife with lightning dexterity.
“Soon,” Scott said.
“What the hell are you gonna do with that thing?” Reed asked, staring at the spinning knife, rolling like a fan on the tip of Mac’s finger. “Other than give Sienna another tool with which to perform colonoscopies on you and your team?”
“Har!” Mac grunted. “She c
an’t get my knife away from me.” He flipped it and caught it perfectly on the tip of his finger, then moved in a flash, the grip appearing in his hand, blade out.
Reed frowned, studying the motion. “That’s … you’re almost like an Artemis, but—”
“I’m not,” Mac said, flipping the knife up again. “I’ve got fast-twitch muscles that are tuned up beyond belief. Watch.” He vaulted forward, leaping thirty feet in less than a second. His arm moved faster than Scott’s eye could follow and a pelting fury of forward knife strikes jabbed into the air as though stabbing a live body. Scott shuddered at the display, imagining the tip of that knife perforating the chest, torso and neck of a living human. They wouldn’t be living after that.
“That’s … really violent,” Augustus said.
“What the hell do you think we’re here for?” Mac asked with a nasty grin and darted back over to the rest of them. He stood idle for a second, then asked, loudly, “You ever heard of the twenty-one-foot rule?”
“It’s, uh,” Scott said, searching his memory. Hadn’t Sienna taught this at some point? “It’s the distance whereby if you have a knife and your subject has a gun, they can’t draw and shoot fast enough to stop you before you—”
“Tear them about eight hundred new holes, yeah,” Mac said, still grinning ferally. “For me, it’s the hundred-meter rule.”
Scott watched the Aussie make the same frightening, repetitive knifing attack. He shivered again, and not from the cold oozing through the crack in the hangar door. “That’ll hurt.”
“Show them now,” Booster said, nodding to Mac. Booster’s skin had a light glow to it, and when Mac moved this time, he seemed to go twice as far, and his attacks were blindingly fast; now he was just a blur.
“I seen a speedster move like that,” Augustus said.
“I could chop a speedster to shark bait,” Mac said with another rough laugh. “Chum the waters, y’know.”
Scott looked to Augustus, but Augustus was looking away. It was an impressive display, maybe even enough to catch Sienna off guard. He looked at the security monitors. The airport was visible in the background, planes taxiing, people probably going about their regularly scheduled days as usual. The whole airport was bound to be full of innocent civilians—
No, he thought. That doesn’t matter.
Does it?
That sick, nagging feeling settled on him again. He hadn’t slept well on the flight, and he’d had to return a phone call when he landed. He blinked. That one had been strange, but he couldn’t quite remember what had happened during it, as though he had been having a nightmare in the middle of it. Had it been with Phillips?
“We got motion,” Ferko the Medusa said, leaning forward, his hair slithering at his shoulders, itching to escape the barrettes.
Scott stared at the monitor. The transport plane was rocking unnaturally, something going on inside. “That flight crew’s going to be serving up a mess,” Mac cracked.
“I don’t think they’re going to make it,” Scott whispered, feeling like something had slammed down hard on his forehead. They’d been human beings, innocent, trapped in that plane without knowledge of what was coming.
“Oh, yeah! Here we go,” Rudey said, peering intently at the monitor as lightning coursed down the body of the aircraft and a small figure jumped out the side, flinging lightning behind him.
“Aviation fuel is really explo—” Booster started to say, but a deafening boom shook the hangar, rattling the walls as the monitor went white for a moment.
“I have eyes on target,” J.J. said, clicking something on the keyboard. “I’m sending tweets from a hundred different accounts, randomized, with some stills I snapped from cameras around the airport. Should help boost this to trending, but …” He whipped a phone up to his ear. “Yes? Hello?” He used a worried, harried voice. “I’m at Denver airport and there’s been an explosion, and there’s a—my God, he’s—there’s a man shooting lightning out of his hands, I think he’s a metahuman! OH MY G—” He hung up, then spun around in his chair and smiled. “That ought to get the ball rolling, dontcha think?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “Now we just need to make sure and get a chopper in the air to cover the chaos. If we lose this guy … it’s game over.”
“News chopper is already spooling up for takeoff,” J.J. said proudly, pointing at one of the camera feeds. Sure enough, there was a news crew jumping in. “Denver PD is also putting a unit in the air. Give it a minute, and this will be all over the news—if it’s not already.” He flipped one of the monitors, and it switched to a local news station with the words “BREAKING NEWS” splattered all over the screen. “Oh, yeah. Meta attack? It’ll go national fast. They’ll be hoping she shows up.”
Scott stared at the lone figure of the criminal making a break for it down a runway. Airport police cars were already rolling after him, sirens wailing. Lightning man wouldn’t make the exterior fence, not nearly in time, and he seemed to realize this, turning around and running back toward the airport. “He’s going for the fight,” Scott whispered, and somehow, that didn’t seem at all good to him.
“Rock and roll,” J.J. crowed, pointing to another monitor, where one of the twenty-four-hour cable networks was breaking in with the report from Denver, even without a reporter on scene. “We’re in business.”
28.
Sienna
I didn’t have to go far to execute my plan, just a quick jog down the road, ignoring the chilly wind that was tickling my (why in the hell were they …?) exposed thighs, and making me grimace at the lengths I was going to in order to avoid trouble.
Well, I was about to incur some trouble, but I thought this trouble would be worth it.
I huffed down the street and made it back to the Porta-Potty at the edge of the construction zone, hiding in its shadow. It was on the nearer side of construction site, fortunately, so it was easy to get to. The door was on the opposite side of where I was squatting, which meant I could safely hide here from any of the workers who approached to use the bathroom, and they wouldn’t be able to see me unless they were paranoid enough to circle around the toilet first. No one was that paranoid, I figured. Well, no one but me, anyway.
I was there less than five minutes, listening to the background noise of the dirt movers, the bulldozers, and the shouts of a foreman, when I heard a female voice—oh, so familiar—yell, “I’m taking five, John. For the john.”
“Dammit, Sandra,” Foreman John shouted back. “You just went!”
“And I’m going again,” Sandra said with an aura of venom. “You need a doctor’s note?”
I heard the foreman grumble something about the halcyon days before women worked on job sites, and it made me raise an eyebrow. Then again, Sandra wasn’t exactly a credit to my gender, so I restrained myself from engaging in the bone-splitting revenge I might otherwise if I’d heard someone say what he said under his breath.
Sandra stumped along, whistling a little tune under her breath—Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, I thought—and then soon enough she opened the Porta-Potty door, stepped inside, and I could hear her dropping trow and sitting down.
Eve, I said in my head, can we bind a thread but make it not glow?
Sure, Eve said, nodding within me in obvious pleasure, we can make it almost invisible.
“Excellent,” I whispered as Sandra stopped humming inside the Porta-Potty. I did a quick circuit of the toilet, using my net power to thread a heavy strand of nearly invisible light around the center of the door, then twice more at the top and bottom. They wouldn’t last more than about an hour, assuming someone big and strong didn’t come along and break them, but really, that was plenty enough time for me.
I came around the back again and stopped, leaning my shoulder against the Porta-Potty with a thump that shook the plastic casing. “Hey, Sandra,” I said conversationally, loud enough I knew she could hear me inside the toilet.
“What the f—who is that?” Sandra called. I could hear her scu
ffing her feet. The jangling noise sounded like she was trying to get her pants from around her ankles and belted up so she could come bursting out to confront me.
“It’s your new friend Trash, Sandra,” I said with undisguised glee. “And I just wanted to tell you if I’m trash … you’re shit, Sandra. Shit.” And I pushed the Porta-Potty over on the door side, sealing her in.
She screamed, there was a loud splash, and that frothy, stinking mess of thirty days of construction worker bowel movements and urine came washing out over her. I lifted the Porta-Potty bottom up a few feet, just to make sure she got the full effect of her bath, then lightly set it back down.
“You—you little—”
“Remember, Sandra, you’re shit,” I said. “To me. To everyone, really. Remember that as you’re washing your hair for hours tonight, like I had to do last night.” And taking up her whistled rendition of Wrecking Ball (it felt right), I sauntered off down the street casually, as though I hadn’t just drenched my new enemy in fresh sewage.
I made it back to Bilson’s studio just as the first student was coming in, and he held the door for me. He was an older guy, expression serious in contrast to my happy, smiling, whistling demeanor. I could see the Porta-Potty way down the street, still on its side, though it looked like some construction workers were milling around now, contemplating rescuing their erstwhile comrade. None of them seemed all that jazzed about it, for some reason. I suspected it was more than just the way Sandra now smelled. After all, I doubt Bilson had been the only one to learn the hard lesson from her about being careful where he parked his prick.
“Hey,” Bilson called out to me as I came in with the other student. “Where did you—”
The guy that came in with me spoke up before I had a chance to answer or he could finish. “Did you hear about what’s happening in Denver right now?”
Bilson frowned at him, apparently forgetting my mysterious disappearance. “No. What?”
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