“There’s a metahuman attack going on,” he said, pointing at the door as though it were happening out on main street, not hundreds of miles away. “They say the surviving guy from the Vegas thing yesterday escaped while he was being transported and he’s fighting it out with the local cops at the airport in Denver.”
“Sonofa,” I said under my breath. This reeked of Scott like Sandra now reeked of poo. I’d been anticipating a trap, but this was beyond the pale. An airport? A civilian airport, in the middle of the damned day?”
“Jeez,” Bilson said in quiet astonishment.
“I gotta go,” I said, making for the door. Trap or no, I couldn’t just let this happen.
“What?” Bilson asked, frown turning to shock. “You just got here—”
“Incontinence,” I said, going with the first stupid story to spring to mind. I cringed inwardly, but went with it, now committed. “I have to go. Literally.” And I pushed through the door.
“We have a bathroom he—” Bilson didn’t quite get it out before I broke into a run down the street, waiting until the alley before I dodged inside and burst into flight, not caring if I got seen but doubting I would. I needed my hoodie, I needed my wig, and I needed to get to Denver.
29.
Scott
“Wow, this really is a mess,” Ferko said, watching, hair still curling and uncurling on its own, flexing as though it were working out.
There were half a dozen police cruisers on fire on the runway as well as at least three airplanes. One of them was a big one that had taxied while awaiting takeoff. Scott hadn’t seen any sign of deployed escape chutes before lightning man had lit it up and the thing had exploded with another cracking boom. It was now billowing orange flames and black smoke. Watching it burn turned up that sick feeling that had taken up permanent residence in Scott’s belly.
“Bad news about the smoke is we’re unlikely to see her come in if she approaches from the directions it’s covering,” Mac said, his knife still for once.
“I could clear it,” Reed said, “but she’d know I was here.”
“Lightning dude’s not even letting the firefighters put out the planes,” Augustus said. He sounded indifferent despite the chaos that confronted them. Fire engines were smoldering, and Scott counted eighteen firefighters down on the tarmac, their distinctive yellow coats standing out against the dull grey.
Holy hell, Scott thought. What have we done …? There was a sweat on his forehead, as though he’d swallowed a dozen jalapeños. He said nothing, though, because Rudey was nodding in satisfaction and not one of the others seemed bothered in the least by the level of havoc on display outside.
The hangar rattled again from a distant explosion, and Augustus said, “There goes another!” Scott scoured the monitors, looking for whichever plane had lit off, but he didn’t see one.
“That was a sonic boom,” Reed said, jerking his rifle up and flipping the safety off. “She’s here.”
“Hot damn,” Mac said, and again the knife was twirling on his finger, the grin on his face wide. “Showtime.”
30.
Sienna
Sometimes, enough was enough, and you simply had to say, “No mas.”
With multiple planes filled with people in flames around me, countless cops and firemen and first responders down while trying to help, trying to save people, to stop the chaotic, maniacal threat of Lightning J. (Now definitely standing for Jerkoff, with a capital J) Antipasti, we had reached that point. We should have reached it the day before when he and his dumb buddies tore up half the Strip, but it was fast becoming apparent to me that there was nothing—NOTHING—that these fuckers on the government team wouldn’t do to catch me. No stone they’d leave unturned, no slithering monster they wouldn’t turn loose to try and kill me.
So when I came out of hyperspeed, I lined up a shot with my finger, and shot a blast of hot gas at Antipasti, FROM DOWNTOWN, as a stupid sports commentator might have said. (Not literal downtown. Figurative, people.)
My shot was good, my aim was true, and this capital-D douchebag burst into flames, screaming and dying right there on the runway like his d-bag bro-friend had the day before, dissolving under my attack like he was the Wicked Witch of the West—but with more flame and no trap door to save his ass. I was a good three hundred meters away from him, too, making the sniper shot that the Denver police probably would have taken in a heartbeat if they could have.
My first task accomplished, I turned my attention to the second. Setting up an ambush for me would mean having a watch post nearby, with a team or multiple teams ready to go. I suspected they’d have air support of some kind or another, if they wanted to cover all the bases, but that wouldn’t show up until I was obviously in the kill box.
The smart play for me would have been to exit at top speed, straight up, and then execute a loop once I was above the clouds and haul ass home to Cedar City, then vacate my safe house there in favor of something halfway across the country. That would have kept me from confronting my would-be ambushers, and my main task would have been done.
Unfortunately for me—and my ambushers—they’d probably killed about five hundred civilians today in their zest for drawing me in, and I was madder than Sandra probably was right now (and much less covered in shit).
I wasn’t going to let that stand.
I heard them below, in one of the hangars, and zipped down soundlessly, stopping myself a foot above the hangar roof. I stayed there, waiting, listening, as their boots thundered out onto the tarmac. I counted at least ten, some footfalls heavier than others. Friday was obvious, because he sounded like a rhinoceros when he moved. I wondered who the new arrivals were, but I didn’t wonder long.
I popped my head over the side of the hangar and started slinging light nets for all I was worth.
Taking out the whole team only took about five seconds. I was fast, they were close, and I got them from behind in ambush, back ranks first. They cried out, of course, and the front ranks turned, but I already had them webbed up before they could raise a gun, a knife or their hands.
I saw Scott in the middle, tied tight with light webs, Reed seething with his rifle bound to his side, Augustus rolled over on his face, and Friday struggling under the burden of extra webs. Because he was extra large. There were also six other guys I didn’t know, ranging from one dressed like a South American cowboy to fellows who wore the traditional black tactical gear of SpecOps teams the world over. One of them even had a tactical beard, and was struggling to free a massive knife that was trapped at his side by my light net.
“So …” I said dryly, my black wig hanging down over my eyes. I blew it out of the way as I hovered there, just above the edge of the hangar roof, peering down at them. “I bet you guys didn’t quite see this going how it did.”
“Is not over yet!” called one of the new guys. He had a medic patch on his shoulder, and spoke in an Eastern European accent.
“Gothric,” said another one sternly. He shook his head (as well as he could under the nets) at the medic, as if to suggest that talking to li’l ol’ me was a big no-no.
One of the other black-garbed guys wasn’t struggling at all, and then I realized his hair was moving unnaturally. I fired a dozen light webs and secured his whole gourd to the tarmac with a rocking thump, leaving only room for his nose to stick out in order for him to keep breathing. I was tempted to not allow that much, because these guys—these top-shelf assholes—had let a lot of people die to get me here, but I wasn’t quite ready to start murdering government employees. “Yeah, don’t do that,” I said once the Medusa’s head was properly secured to the pavement.
“You’re not going to stop us,” Reed said with steely fury, staring up at me with the most hateful eyes I’d ever seen from him. Seriously. There was a bottomless pit of anger there, a fury that went all the way to the soles of his shoes. “You won’t get away with this.”
“I’m not getting away just yet,” I said cautiously, trying to decide
what to do about my brother. For the last month I’d assumed he’d thought I was out of control, but this … this was something else. “I had to protect my own life in Eden Prairie, Reed,” I said, testing my assumption. “McManus turned the reporters into some kind of feral, mind-controlled horde that attacked me.” I paused, considering the phrase. “Well, more of a feral, mind-controlled horde than they naturally are. I drove ‘em off, and none of them got killed, but the others—the prisoners—they had me surrounded. They were going to kill me, Reed.”
“You should have let them,” my brother said with such guttural fury that it clinched in my mind that this was not my brother speaking. Something had happened to him, something akin to what had happened to those reporters, except he was perhaps slightly more mindful than they’d been. “You should have died!” he said with astonishing vitriol. Even though I knew he wasn’t running the show or speaking these words himself, the words still stung.
“She will,” said one of the new guys with a wide grin. His skin was slightly glowing. “Right about … now, in fact—”
As soon as he said it, my hovering seemed to cut out, as though gravity had been switched back on beneath me. My stomach lurched as I dropped, my ass hitting the corner of the triangular hangar roof and sending a wave of pain from my tailbone up. I plummeted to the tarmac below, arms moving at roughly a tenth of my usual Wolfe-enhanced speed, and I slammed into the ground hard.
Something cracked in my leg, in my hip, and I slapped my hands against the ground to ward off the concrete from catching me in the face. It worked, but pain radiated out from my elbow in a screaming way, like a bolt of lightning running up my humerus. My mouth was open in shock, other aches of lesser intensity running through my body.
My ambushers were lying before me, still confined in my nets, until suddenly, Guy Friday jolted out. “Wheeee-haw!” the big man said, swelling as easily he tore through my web.
Reed vaulted up next, struggling as he ripped out of his own. The others broke free one by one, and I struggled to stand on my own two, wobbly feet.
Wolfe? I wondered inside, panic setting in. My hip was in agony, and I could barely stand. My arm was hanging at my side, and I didn’t know if I could even move it.
Trying! Wolfe shouted, plainly near panic. It’s—too slow—one of them is—
He said something in Greek that I didn’t quite understand, but I got the gist.
One of them had stolen my powers, turned them down like a volume adjustment.
And I had feeling that he’d done the exact opposite to the men standing before me, about to attack, which meant I was outnumbered, overpowered … and with no way to escape.
31.
Harmon
“They’re engaging her now,” came the voice of one of my Joint Chiefs over the speakerphone, General Forster. I was in the situation room, with a video feed on the monitors from one of three Reaper drones that were orbiting the airport in Denver. That had been Cassidy’s contribution to the operation, with some SpecOps teams standing by to insert in case Byerly’s meta task force failed.
“What countermeasures do we have in case she tries to leave?” I asked, already fairly certain of the answer.
“We have a full complement of AMRAAM—that’s the air-to-air missile—and Hellfires, which are the air-to-surface, ready to launch on your command.” There was no equivocation whatsoever from the general. I’d hand-picked him, after all, and he was unlikely to defy my wishes, even if it came to launching missiles in a heavily populated civilian area.
“Excellent,” I said. “Stand by, and let’s see if they can get her without unleashing hell … fire.” I smiled at my own pun, and settled back in my seat to watch Sienna Nealon’s end.
32.
Sienna
“Fuck.” I couldn’t think of a better way to describe my situation, which was pretty ugly. I couldn’t see any sign of air support for these guys, but really, with my ability to fly struck off my list of options, they didn’t necessarily need air support to keep me boxed in their kill zone.
“You’re about to be,” said the knife guy with the Aussie accent, and he moved.
I barely had time to react, and my reaction was inadequate. I popped a fire blast right at him, but instead of it coming out sizzling at five thousand degrees Fahrenheit, it was more like I’d tossed a handful of warm embers at him. He swiveled to miss, executing a dancer-like pirouette, and I shot at him again. I was way too slow, but the only advantage I had was that he was charging at me, so I kept filling the air with my piddly, baby-dragon, soot-and-ashes blasts.
He came around in a spin and caught one full in the face. It was pure luck on my part, because he was moving so fast and I was moving so slowly that I wasn’t even consciously reacting, I was just filling the air with my slightly-hotter-than-a-summer-sidewalk bursts. He did scream and spin off like a top, though, so at least there was that. He landed in a pile, and I had a suspicion he’d be popping back up, angrier than ever, in just moments.
Bastian, I said, this is an emergency. What about going dragon?
I don’t know, Bastian said, sounding uncharacteristically helpless. With this sapper doing his thing, you could end up with a partial transformation or in miniaturized form, I have no idea. Might not want to chance it.
“Shit.” I said, trying to not to use the same profanity twice in a row. The guy dressed as a gaucho caught my eye, and I realized he was staring at me with bright green eyes. They were a little too bright, in fact, and I realized about a half second before he shot at me that he was another energy projector, and I dove sideways.
A blast of green energy shot through where I’d been standing a second before, and I sought cover behind some of his compatriots. Well, I actually put Friday and the medic-guy—Gothric—between us, so that Gaucho Green-Eyes couldn’t see me, and he’d have to shoot through his pals to hit me. Fortunately, Wolfe had finally managed to get my elbow and leg back to normal, but in about thrice the time it would have normally taken.
Take great care, Wolfe said.
Trust me, I thought very loudly, it’s uppermost on my mind.
“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” Friday said, almost glowing himself underneath that gimp mask. He raised a fist, and he seemed a lot faster than I’d ever seen him before. It struck me that I was also slower and weaker, which didn’t augur good things. I needed to keep him between me and Gaucho Scott Summers, after all, lest I get zapped from the surface of the planet by those green eyebulbs.
“I’mma sing some Rebecca Black at you here in a second,” I said, wondering if I had enough strength to counter him fist to fist. Probably not, I figured, but that was okay, because I’d spent the majority of my life training to fight people bigger and stronger than me. Like my mom.
Friday punched at me, and I slapped his blow aside at the last second, keeping it from turning my skull into a bowl of creamed corn. I caught his wrist in the joint of my elbow and brought the heel of my palm down on his elbow. I gave it a little pop, because that was all I had time for, and was rewarded with a grunt of pain as I hyper-extended the joint. He started to use his immense strength to counter, but I scraped a foot down his shin and stomped on the instep of his foot before elbowing him in the ribs and then the belly. I danced outside his reach before he could mount a counter-attack, which would probably have been brutal.
The name of this game was “Don’t Get Hit,” and fortunately it was one I’d played early and often in life. When you unknowingly train with a meta before your powers manifest, making sure you don’t get hit becomes oh-so-important to your continued bone development—right up there with getting enough milk—as well as your dental health. Gothric, the medic, was lingering just to Friday’s side in convenient kicking position, so I doubled him over with a twisting kick that probably wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t sunk it right into his solar plexus. He’d had his arms perfectly spread in a defensive manner, but just a couple inches too high to keep out that a
ttack.
“Get out of the way!” Reed shouted from behind Friday, and I knew he was trying to get a clear shot at me with that rifle he was toting. The rage in his eyes when I’d talked to him had been killing-level, and I didn’t doubt he was going to put me down with whatever means he had at his disposal. It didn’t seem likely those means would include a gentle gust when he could bowl me over with a wave of bullets.
I tried to think strategically as well as tactically. They were going to attempt to flank me, surround me, make it a circular firing line. Fortunately the hangar was at my back, but also, unfortunately, the hangar was at my back, limiting my ability to retreat. I threw out a hand and peppered Augustus, who was coming up to my left, with severely-weakened light nets, right in his eyes. He blinked furiously, suggesting I’d bedazzled him and little more, but in a game of seconds, I was just trying to control the crowd so that nobody got close enough to end me while I searched for a solution to the crisis at hand.
You should absorb more souls, Eve pronounced, at this most opportune of times. May I suggest a lovely, leggy woman with a heart of—
“No,” I said as Friday came back around for another attack. “Why would I want more of you people having sex in my head?”
Friday froze mid-swing. “Whut … sex?” He sounded almost hopeful.
I threw myself into him with a double foot dropkick, using the remaining vestiges of my flight power as well as my meta strength as a boost. I hit him flush, and all the air went out of him like I’d just popped a balloon. His eyes got big, and he flew backward into Reed, whose “OOF!” I heard as Friday slammed into him, a few rounds of M-16 ammo discharging wildly into the sky as they both came crashing down.
“Damn!” I said, dodging behind Gothric the medic again. I grabbed him by the lapels and held him in front of me as I punched him. I could see Gaucho Marx and his red neck bandana behind him, but I interposed Gothric’s head between us, using him as a human shield. Gothric’s eyes were wide and glowing. I had him off balance, but I decided that although this temporary stalemate was exactly that—temporary—the team medic was a perfect chance to really test what kind of strength I had left now that they were sapping me.
Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11) Page 13