Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11)

by Robert J. Crane

  Yeah. I needed to sleep. My eyelids were embracing gravity like someone had fastened those two big metal Clarys to them and thrown the dumbasses over a cliff.

  “All right, then,” I said, making my way to my bed. I wished I’d still had the gun I’d taken off of Scott, but I’d left it in the desert for lack of a place to carry it safely on my person. At my next hidey-hole, I was resolved to dress loosely enough to carry a pistol at all times, because if I was going to face this power-sapper again, I’d need other means at my disposal than just my powers.

  “Clear your mind,” I said, lying back in the soft bedding that I hadn’t embraced in almost forty-eight hours. “Focus … focus …” I tried to think of nothing but one person, the one person I wanted to talk to in all the world right now. I pictured her dark hair, her skeletal frame, her little nose, and when the darkness of sleep took hold of me, I seemed to open my eyes somewhere else.

  She was there.

  “Hello, Cassidy,” I said, staring at her across the black background that surrounded us. I smiled. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  41.

  She didn’t look as scared as she had the time I’d caught her outside Omaha, but Cassidy Ellis didn’t look entirely pleased to see me, either. She looked around the dark space surrounding us, an arena of blackness and shadow, and then back at me, keeping her head down. This was a dreamwalk, one of my succubus powers to connect with sleeping people in a shared dream. I seldom used it, and it wasn’t a widely known ability, or else the news media would probably be shitting themselves at the thought I could visit them all in their dreams anytime I wished. Cassidy was a quick thinker, and I suspected there was more going through her head right now than I could have even guessed at, especially since she didn’t seem altogether surprised to find me in her dreams. “What do you want?” she mumbled.

  “Peace on earth, good will toward men and women,” I said.

  She cocked her head at me, but only for a second. “Because Christmas is coming up in a few weeks. Clever.”

  “You kindasorta get me, Cassidy. The quips, at least. The far-reaching analogies and references that no one else picks up.”

  “Uh huh,” Cassidy murmured, shuffling uneasily on those stick-like legs. “What do you really want?”

  “Questions answered.”

  “Have you tried Google?” She didn’t put much mustard into her reply, and her response landed kind of flat, like she was trying to act defiant without actually being defiant. Token defense. I wondered why she would do that. Was it just a product of her mad intelligence combined with an utter lack of self-awareness?

  Or was it intentional?

  “Google can’t answer the questions I’ve got,” I said, deciding to plunge right ahead. “Like, for example—where are you, right now?”

  She flushed, bright pink. “I—I don’t want to tell—”

  Whether it was the product of her mind being wildly undisciplined or her unconscious shaping the dreamwalk, the darkness around us receded and was replaced by a stately-looking room with furniture that looked very old. “Huh,” I said, glancing around. It could have been a lot of places, I supposed, but one came immediately to mind. “So you’re staying at the White House?” I didn’t ask it as a question, because I suspected making it a statement was more likely to draw confirmation.

  She blushed, but did not answer. It could have been a screen, but I somehow doubted it. “No, I’m in California.” Flimsy answer, unworthy of the most brilliant intelligence on the planet.

  What the hell was she playing at?

  “Interesting,” I said, contemplating my next question while Cassidy just stood there, staring at me. She didn’t avoid my eyes, but she wasn’t communicating much through her own. It was a dull stare, one that drifted, as though she considered herself a temporary prisoner in this place.

  “Aren’t you going to torture me?” she asked. “I hear you can do that.”

  She almost sounded like she wanted me to. “I try not to anymore,” I said carefully, my brain racing as I tried to tease out what the hell was going on here.

  “Sure you don’t.” That was laced with … disappointment? She looked away.

  “Where’s Simmons?” I asked, for want of a better question.

  Her face went hard. “Don’t know.” I believed her and considered jabbing at her to unearth the circumstances of their parting, but passed because …

  Well, because she was just acting weird.

  “You might want to hurry,” she said, almost triumphantly, but it was hollow.

  “We’ve got all night,” I said, frowning at her. “Don’t you know how these things work—”

  The world shook around me, as though a giant had stepped on the earth next to me. A deep, familiar voice rumbled through my dream, “GET OUT!”

  I blinked as the rumble subsided, and my mouth popped open in surprise. “I’ve felt this before …”

  Cassidy’s eyes gleamed, just for a second, triumphant, but she said nothing.

  I had felt this before, when Cassidy had me rendered comatose with a poison and Dr. Zollers had tried to dislodge me from my unconscious state before I nuked the entirety of Minneapolis.

  “Zollers …?” I murmured, then, more firmly. “Dr. Zollers.”

  Quinton Zollers appeared in an instant, wearing pajamas, looking slightly sleepy, but awake enough to stare me right in the eye. “Something I can do for you, Sienna?”

  The world shook around us again, and Cassidy stumbled to her knees. “GET OUT!” The voice shouted again, louder, as though it were trying to break through into my dreamwalk.

  “Ooh,” Zollers cringed, blinking his eyes as though someone had shone a spotlight into them.

  “Is that—?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered without waiting for me to finish.

  The world shook around me again, splinters of light breaking in through the darkness receding. Cassidy just stood there, mute, terrified, and I locked eyes with her for only a second. I knew what was happening now, and I couldn’t speak to her, couldn’t chance it.

  I looked to Dr. Zollers. “Find me,” I said, and he nodded.

  The darkness broke open, that malicious force that had been clawing at my dream breaking through, and I snapped awake just before it got in. I didn’t need to see it, didn’t need to face it, not now. I already knew what it was, the last “GET OUT!” shouted in that familiar voice driving home the identity of the speaker, and giving me the answers to so many questions in the process.

  It was President Gerry Harmon.

  That son of a bitch was a telepath.

  42.

  Harmon

  “Dammit,” I said, feeling the anger burn inside. I’d broken into the dream just a second too late, catching but a glimpse of Sienna Nealon and her pet telepath before they both disappeared like smoke on a clear day.

  Cassidy, however, was still there, still waiting, my mind bridging the connection between the two of us, giving me access to speak directly into her head. It was something I didn’t choose to do very often; I much preferred to nose around peoples’ thoughts without their knowledge. Speaking into their ear, well, that was just a little too much like … God, I suppose. And perhaps a hair too subtle for me.

  I didn’t bother to ask what Cassidy had told Sienna; it was obvious, laid bare in her mind. She hadn’t told her anything, not really—just the obvious question of where Cassidy was had slipped out. I could forgive that, chalk it up to a weak mind. And Cassidy had a weak mind. For all her power of cognition—and it was considerable—she lacked discipline and emotional control, which caused her to bleed her pain and anguish out everywhere, resulting in stupid choices unfiltered by a wiser mind.

  Until I came along.

  “I didn’t tell her—”

  “I know,” I said, soothing, patting her mind down in all the right places to suppress the alarm she was feeling. My art wasn’t nearly as subtle when it came to emotional control as an empath—like, say,
that bastard Robb Foreman—but by messing with thoughts I could provoke certain emotions, play them up. I could even plant false notions in peoples’ minds, like I had with Sienna Nealon’s idiot brother, or twist motivations already in place, as I had with her ex-boyfriend Scott. He had been a willing pawn, already laboring under memory loss when I’d met him in passing at a party in LA. It had given me a chance to touch his feeble mind, play, take out some of the secrets lurking beneath the surface.

  And once they were exposed, I could slither through the open door of his mind as easily as if I’d had a key made. I owned him now, though I had my fingers in so many minds these days my efficacy was reaching its limits. It was something I’d long known; people tended to do my bidding for only so long without a renewal of my influence. It wasn’t linked to time, either, it was completely tied to how many others I’d had to dabble in bringing to my way of thinking in the intervening time.

  Ultimately, that was why my wife outlived her usefulness. I still loved her, but controlling her had become quite the task.

  “She knows I’m here,” Cassidy said, eyes flitting nervously about.

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “If she comes looking for a fight, I’ll tear her mind apart the way I should have when last we met.” That produced a slight cringe from me; I hadn’t altered her because I knew that Dr. Zollers was waiting in the wings, tied to her mind, and that he’d feel it if I did something.

  So I’d let her go. More was the pity. Now I wished I’d taken her for my own and had him killed. That is not as easy for either a president or a telepath to do as you might think. Zollers was canny. I’d read his file. He’d see me coming miles away, as well as any servant I sent to take him off the field of play.

  Now Sienna Nealon was my worst enemy when she could have been my most faithful servant.

  “If she comes with Zollers at her side, they might overwhelm you—” Cassidy said.

  “Sienna’s not going to rip through US Secret Service,” I said, confident in this much. “She has too much respect for these enforcers of the law to do that. She views herself as a hero. If she and Zollers come for me it’ll be him versus me and her versus the entire Secret Service … plus a few other tricks I have up my sleeve.” I held back on sharing because Cassidy … well, she was enough of a liability as it was. “No, she’ll flail in the wilderness a while longer, and hopefully we won’t have to wait too long before the damned military—”

  A ringing outside my little connection with Cassidy jolted me, and I grabbed the phone by my bed. Cassidy was still there, though she couldn’t hear what I was saying. “This is Harmon,” I said.

  “Sir,” came the voice of General Forster, “we’ve got her.”

  43.

  Scott

  Salt Lake City at night didn’t provide much of a view of the actual Great Salt Lake, though Scott had felt it as they’d flown over it in the dark, a sparkling, still series of waters that were followed by a nasty swamp on the approach to the airport. “J.J.,” he said, trying to keep the tension that had ratcheted up inside him well hidden, “what’s the word?”

  “The word is that the Air Force has her on satellite,” J.J. said. “And she’s coming this way.”

  Scott leaned over the geek’s shoulder, the Revelen soldiers and his own team watching closely behind. It was an overhead view, like a GPS map, but something small was moving right there, across it in a hurry. “Damn, she’s fast,” Booster said.

  “Not as fast an AMRAAM missile,” J.J. said, a little less cheery than usual. He pointed at three streams following in her wake. “And here they come …”

  44.

  Sienna

  I cleared out of Cedar City as soon as I woke up. I’d pushed it too long enough already, taking that nap, and I knew after waking to the knowledge that there was a telepath in the Oval Office bent on destroying me that it was unlikely I was going to be getting any more sleep tonight, if ever.

  It all made sense now. Harmon had been wrecked in the first debate by Senator Foreman, who was an empath. Care to guess which type of meta telepaths were weak against?

  Yeah. Empaths. Telepaths couldn’t pick them up at all. Which explained how Foreman had single-handedly wiped the floor with the fiercest, most seasoned debater in politics. It also explained why Harmon was so damned good at debating—he could read his opponents’ thoughts and cut them off before they made their attack, leaving them a spluttering mess. He’d done it enough times that his debate performances were all over YouTube with captions like, “President Harmon DESTROYS …” Thousands of them. And now I knew why.

  Because the bastard cheated.

  This was how I’d lost my team, my friends. He’d probably been there, in San Francisco, figured out where they were hiding and dropped by. Who’s not going to open the door for the president of the United States? Even Reed, rebellious animal though he was, would have answered that knock.

  And lost his mind a few seconds later. Now he was one of the pod people that were all lined up against me.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, blasting along at ten thousand feet and heading for the bright lights of Salt Lake City in the distance. Without a phone or GPS, I had to steer from city to city, bright spot to bright spot on the horizon. It wasn’t the quickest method of travel, and I frequently ended up going out of the way since I was operating from a map that was in my head, but I knew I was generally heading in the right direction. My destination tonight was Spearfish, South Dakota, another town just small enough to avoid major league attention. I had a safe house waiting there, hopefully one that hadn’t been found. I doubted it had, but I had certain traps in place so that I could tell if anyone had gotten into it.

  I didn’t have any warning when the first AMRAAM missile slammed into me.

  The explosion rocked me, shards and pieces designed to destroy a multi-ton airplane perforating my chest, torso and even my limbs. I managed to get my head down in time to avoid serious impact, but the rest shredded the hell out of me even so, the shockwave sending me tumbling. I heard a popping in my chest and I couldn’t breathe, my breaths coming quickly and desperately, warm blood flooding out of my lips in a spray with every exhalation.

  I spun as I dropped, limp, pain shooting through me, g-forces twisting my body this way and that as I fell out of the sky, heading toward a moonlight-streaked body of water below—the Great Salt Lake? I wondered idly—spiraling hard toward certain death.

  45.

  Harmon

  “We have eight F-22 Raptors in the area,” General Forster said over the conference line as I watched the overhead satellite imagery from the Situation Room. “Also an AC-130 Gunship for close support, a few A-10 Warthogs—”

  “Spare me the granular detail,” I said, waving him off. Even my most loyal generals were constantly trying to get me to sign off on a bigger budget. More toys for them to play with. That was a losing battle.

  “Your FBI task force is lifting off from Salt Lake City airport in a Black Hawk—”

  “Just say helicopter, for crying out loud!” I said, losing patience. “Do you think I really care whether they’re arriving in a specialty helicopter or a paddle boat? Just get them there, dammit. Kill her.” Because that was all I really cared about.

  46.

  Sienna

  I couldn’t breathe anymore, couldn’t get a breath, and panic was setting in. I was choking on my own blood, my chest filled with the pain of my perforated lungs venting air into my chest cavity, like a balloon was swelling painfully within me. I was so high up, so desperately high, the world spinning around, shadowy blue horizon clearly differentiated from the glowing lights of Salt Lake City in the distance.

  Gavrikov! I called in my head as time seemed to slow.

  Your body is failing! Gavrikov returned.

  Wolfe!

  I am working on it, give me a moment.

  Something burst in front of me and another spattering of pain slapping my chest and torso, fingers of agony digging into
my guts, cracking my ribs, peppering my cheeks and peeling them open. I couldn’t see out of one of my eyes, I realized as I spun, head feeling as though the blood were pooling around the edges of my skull, threatening to burst out with centrifugal force, and I wondered how things could get any worse.

  Then the next missile blew up behind me, and the world went utterly dark.

  47.

  Harmon

  “Splash one. Bogey is falling,” a pilot’s staticky voice reported over the speakerphone in the Situation Room.

  “Roger that,” Ground control replied. “Bogey is down—”

  “Keep shooting her,” I said.

  “Sir,” General Forster began, “she’s falling out of the sky after multiple missile hits—”

  “Hit her with multiple more,” I said.

  There was only a moment’s hesitation, which was more than I was willing to tolerate. “Aye, sir. Wolfhound Six, continue to engage.”

  “Understood,” said the pilot over a crackling radio channel. “Fox Three!”

  48.

  Scott

  It wasn’t easy to pick her out of the darkness, a tiny figure falling on a barely lit sky. It was after dark, but the moon was out, and that shadow looked to Scott a little like a bird dropping. If he hadn’t had metahuman vision, he might not even have seen her, but see her he did, plummeting as another explosion—smaller and less violent than they looked in the movies—lit off next to her.