“Means the main house is one flight up,” Scott said. “Wherever the stairs are.”
Janis pointed out a dangling rope. “Trap door.”
Using her powers, she unlatched something on its topside and pulled the rope until a ladder unfolded into a dim square of light. Tyler dispelled the ball lighting and got in line behind the others. They ascended the ladder single file and pulled themselves into what looked like a utility room.
“The disruption fields are gone,” Scott said. “Must just be below ground.”
“Yeah, I can actually feel the spaces now,” Janis remarked. “Front door is this way.”
They cut through a kitchen and living room. The house had a lived-in look, wood walls adorned with pastoral paintings and folk art. Tyler didn’t realize there were agents in the house—a man and woman—until Janis took them out with a pair of mind blasts. Their bodies slumped back into the chairs they’d risen from, a shotgun sliding from the man’s sleepy grip.
Tyler was just joining the others in the front foyer when, from the back of the house, an elevator door opened. By the grunts, it sounded like the door required manual assistance. Janis wasted no time forcing the front door, wood and metal splintering around several bolts.
Tyler sprinted with the others down an unpaved road leading from the farm house, his breath transforming to mist in the cold air. He thought he’d tripped and been thrown forward before realizing a force had lifted him from the gravel. He looked to either side and saw that Janis had all of them. Encased inside the field, the air around Tyler churned warmly.
Where the road curved right, Janis veered them left, through a pasture—cows lowing in surprise and hustling from their path—and toward a hill in the middle distance. Just before the hilltop, Janis set them down. A half moon cast her face in pale light. She winced once, as though recovering from a relenting pain, then peered back the way they had come.
As Tyler found his footing in the soft earth, he followed her gaze. He could make out the glints of Steel and her armored men fanning from the farmhouse. Tyler looked around at the vast emptiness that rolled away beneath a clear constellation of stars. He then looked at the other Champions. They were two-hundred miles from home with no way of getting there.
Margaret crossed her arms in front of her and gripped her thin blouse at the shoulders. “What now, geniuses?” she asked in a shivering voice.
Good question, Tyler thought to himself.
33
The sensation of someone shaking his shoulder awakened Reginald. He snorted in surprise, then sat up from the couch, the edge of an afghan falling from his shoulder. It had still been light out when he’d laid down to rest, but now the room was full dark, and his mouth was dry—a side effect of the Vitrin.
“Are you hungry?”
A light snapped on, and Reginald saw that his sister was carrying a white plastic bag with red oriental writing on the side. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and pushed away the sleep. Rain fell outside.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Almost nine.” She removed cartons of food from the bag and set them on a round table in the corner, beside the small kitchen.
When they had arrived at her place a few days earlier, Reginald had been struck with how similar her choice of residence was to his over the years. The simple, run-down façade masking a level of security that the higher-end homes couldn’t match. Iron bars over the windows and doors. Security grade locks to every room. Invisible detection fields.
Good at keeping enemies out.
Or in.
Reginald caught the carton and plastic fork she tossed him and placed them on the dark consignment-store coffee table in front of him. When he unfastened the top of the carton, steam rose along with the smell of soy sauce.
“Hope you’re all right with beef and broccoli,” she said.
“Yeah, fine.”
He took a bite and looked over to see her sitting at the table, her own fork twisting brown noodles into a wet knot. She seemed to remember something. She reached into the bag and pulled out an Orange Fanta, tossing it to him gently so it wouldn’t explode when he opened it.
Three days with his sister, and Reginald still hadn’t figured her out.
“Where were you this afternoon?” he asked.
“Meeting with the Witch.”
“Oh, yeah?” Her directness caught him off guard and he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. He sucked orange fizz from the top of the cracked-open can so as not to appear too interested.
“We’re good on the Vitrin,” she said.
“For how long?”
“For however long I ask for it.”
Reginald noted the hardness of her response. She wasn’t just proclaiming her authority vis-à-vis the Witch, but over him, as well. As warder of his supply, she could cut it off in an instant. But since she seemed more willing to talk than usual, he decided to push his luck.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
“For you?”
“For us.”
She chewed mechanically and took a swallow of Pepsi. Reginald didn’t think she was going to answer him so was surprised when she spoke.
“The Witch claims that with the Champions out of the picture, world equilibrium will be restored.” She dug her fork around the carton. “It will be a balance of powers game again.”
“The Soviets are in no financial shape to compete.”
“That’s being taken care of.”
Reginald wondered what the Scale was planning. Nothing good, certainly.
“Have you ever considered another vocation?” he asked.
“Like what? Interior decorating?”
She had a point. Their first night back in town, they had stayed in a motel under the guise of a pair of aging tourists. Shadow left in the middle of the night. When she returned, Reginald heard her cleaning something metal in the bathroom sink. The next morning, he saw the dried crimson spots around the faucet. He didn’t have to ask to know she’d taken care of whatever surveillance the Witch had set up around her home. There was only one vocation Shadow excelled at, and that was murder.
He grimaced around his next swallow of food, unable to suppress the thought of her creeping toward a bed that Madelyn was lying in and that he had just abandoned.
“Was your foster home as bad as mine?” he asked to rid himself of the image.
“It was what it was.”
“I often thought death was the only reprieve. Director Halstead found me and offered an alternative.”
He peeked over at his sister. The dark angles of her face were hard and inscrutable. He wondered if she was considering what her life might have been like if Halstead had reached out to her before the Witch had.
“One way or another, destiny finds us,” she said.
“There’s always a choice.”
“Funny, coming from you.”
“How is that funny?” he asked.
“All of your so-called choices have had death as the alternative. You just said it yourself—death or the Champions? You chose the Champions. When your mutations turned bad, it was death or the Scale. You chose the Scale. And from what I can tell, you’ve done the Scale’s work ever since, willingly or not. No one chooses the alternative.”
Reginald glared at her.
“Maybe we’re not as different as you like to think,” she said.
“I never murdered the innocent.”
“Neither have you spared millions.”
“Oh, that crap again.” He stabbed his fork into the half-empty carton and rose to his feet.
Maybe it was the assortment of blades she kept on her, but Shadow appeared unconcerned by his show of anger. She turned away and took another bite, chewing slowly.
“What’s to stop me from finishing you in your sleep?” he asked.
“The Vitrin, for one. You know I’m the only person who can get it for you.”
“Maybe I’ll choose death this time.”
“Maybe. But there’s also whatever prevented you from pulling the trigger when you had me in your sights.”
Reginald remembered that day in his old house when he’d just freed himself from Techie’s contraption. How, at the crucial moment, the memory of his four-year-old sister had surfaced. Sitting astride their emaciated horse, kicking her dusty feet, crying “gid up!”
That was the problem, and on some level Shadow seemed to understand it. As often as he saw her as Madelyn’s and their unborn child’s killer, he saw her as an innocent girl, too.
And maybe she was right. Maybe they had both grasped at the first hand that reached down into the misery of their lives. It just so happened that Halstead’s represented good and the Witch’s evil. And though Reginald had seized both, he was old enough by the time he encountered the Witch’s to know the difference. His sister hadn’t been.
“What do you remember about your life before the foster home?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Red dust.”
“So you do remember.”
She glanced at him, then back at her food.
“Why is that so damn hard for you to admit?” he asked.
“Why is it so hard for you to let go of?”
He shook his head and strode past her.
“Where are you going?”
“Water,” he said. “Want some?”
“I could use a glass.”
In the kitchen, he took two chipped glasses from the cupboard, dropped a pair of ice cubes in each, and filled them at the sink. He left one on the counter and carried the other to the kitchen table. He leaned over to set the glass down beside her Pepsi. When she reached for it, he clamped his right arm around her, pinning her arms. The crook of his other elbow hooked her throat.
Ropes of muscle leapt and strained inside his embrace, but he had her. She tried to topple her chair back, but using the leverage of his legs, one knee against the chair back, he prevented it.
Her struggle took the sound of guttural grunts.
He had waited three days for the Vitrin to restore his strength. Three days for her to let her guard down. Now he had her. He shifted the cells in his arm until her carotid arteries were clamped. Then he counted off the seconds in his head. Twenty to unconsciousness. Two minutes to death.
The table shook above her thrashing legs, rattling the ice cubes in the water glass.
… twenty … twenty-one …
Her legs stopped kicking.
… twenty-four … twenty-five …
The rest of her fell slack, head leaning onto his upper arm. Her cornrows, stiff against his cheek, shifted to gray.
She severed Madelyn’s windpipe, he reminded himself.
… one-ten … one-eleven …
She killed your boy.
…. one-fifteen … one-sixteen …
He stared at the ceiling.
… one-nineteen …
He relented.
She was out, but breathing. He lowered her to the floor, face down.
With a knee in her back, Reginald patted her down for blades, removing five of them, two from hidden sheaths in her boots. From the back of his pants, he retrieved a hidden length of cord. He tied her wrists and ankles, then bound the two together behind her and drew a loop around her neck. The knots were fashioned to tighten with struggle. When she came to enough, she would try to shapeshift her way out, but that would take time.
He stood and looked around. Sweat blotted cold through the front and back of his shirt. She didn’t keep the Vitrin in the house. He had already searched. He had considered following her that day, to see if she stopped wherever she was stashing it, but that would have risked raising her guard.
His one hope was that she hadn’t stashed their latest allotment, that it was still in her car.
Reginald stepped over Shadow and grabbed the keys from the kitchen table. She still hadn’t moved. Out in the garage, he punched the combination to the steel door as he’d watched her do on their arrival. The garage door motored up. He got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and roared from the garage in reverse. Night rain pelted over the roof and windshield.
He turned the car around in the road. There was a bus station downtown. Far enough away to be out of her range but not so far that someone would have time to draw a bead on her car—
Something nailed the driver side door. A second later the left front tire blew out. The car pulled left and heaved onto the curb.
Damn, that was fast.
A quick glance past the rain-streaked glass showed her dark figure sprinting across the lawn, leading with a firearm. Reginald wrestled the car back onto the road as two more shots cracked the driver side window at head level.
Thank God for bullet proofing.
He depressed the gas. The car thumped into an uneven acceleration. Another shot tore open the left rear tire. The car slewed over the rain-soaked road. Reginald clamped the steering wheel with his forearms to maintain control. At the approaching intersection, he let the blown wheels pull him left.
He didn’t see the parked car until he was sliding toward it.
Metal keened against metal. His right mirror sheared off. The cars separated, but he lost traction. He spun half a revolution until he was facing the intersection he had just left. The car leaned to one side.
Shadow appeared beneath a streetlight and changed out magazines.
Should have finished her when I had the chance.
Reginald depressed the accelerator and aimed for her. But with two tires out, the steering was shot. He couldn’t hold his mark. Shadow stepped from his path and took out the remaining two tires on the passenger side. Chunks of rubber flew free. Metal rims ground over wet pavement.
With nothing to grab the road, the car began skating sideways. Sparks kicked up behind him as pieces of torn-up asphalt pelted the undercarriage.
Only a matter of time before…
Flames burst from the underside of the car.
…that happens.
He cleared the intersection but was heading for a jacked-up truck parked street side. He threw open his door and pitched out, hitting the asphalt at a roll. Pain tore through his right knee. He tightened and entered the truck’s dark underspace as the car careened into its bed. Reginald crawled out the other side. Keeping the truck between him and where he’d last seen Shadow, he climbed a junk-strewn lawn to a front porch.
Clinging to the house’s shadows, he shifted. At the top of a set of wooden steps he leaned on the porch railing. A pyre burned in the street. If the car had contained any Vitrin, he’d just lost it.
From the intersection, a slender shadow approached at a fast walk.
“Hey!” Reginald called. He had taken on the guise of an overweight man in brown pants and a wife beater. “The hell is going on out there?”
“Go back inside,” Shadow answered.
“Anyone hurt?” he asked.
“No.”
Reginald grumbled and turned toward the front door. The porcelain knob twisted in his grasp, thank God, and he pushed his way into a dark home. He heard frantic whispers. A light clicked on in a back room.
“Someone there?” a man’s voice called out.
Reginald stole through the house and out a back door. He’d smashed his right knee against the pavement and it was agony to put weight on, but he had no choice. He had to make distance. Shadow would have figured out by now that he was no longer in the car. She might even suspect he’d shifted into the man she’d just spoken to. Reginald surveyed a fenced-in lawn from a set of rear steps.
Behind him, the front door banged open.
Reginald hastened down the steps, but his knee gave out. He fell the rest of the way, landing in wet grass.
A shot shook the inside of the house. Someone cried out.
As he stood and backpedaled, Reginald winced for the homeowners before realizing the sound hadn’t come from a pistol. The owner had discharged a shotgun. The cry had been Shadow’s.
Reginald grasped the top of the wooden fence as the back door flew open.
“Stop right there!” a man shouted.
With a heave, Reginald was over. He landed on his hands and good leg in another back lawn. A blast tore away a chunk of fencing above him. Splinters pelted his head. Reginald shifted as he hobbled around the side of the house, this time taking the form of an elderly woman.
He made it to the road before deciding he couldn’t go much farther, not on foot. He picked a house at the street’s end and, pulling open a screen door, pecked on the front door. Moments later, the door opened in as far as a chain would allow. A round, maternal face peered out.
“Goodness gracious!” the woman said, closing the door and unfastening the chain.
“My car broke down,” Reginald-as-the-old-woman said as the door opened wide. Rain water trickled from his permed gray hair down the sides of his face. “And I’ve got the arthritis bad.”
“Well, get in here and get yourself dried. My husband will give you a ride wherever you need to go.” The large woman rounded toward where Reginald could see the pale glow of a television. “Curtis!”
Reginald wiped the bottoms of his flats on a welcome mat and stepped inside.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said as she closed the door behind him. “You’re very kind.”
Probably the last kindness he’d see for awhile, he thought as she hustled off. He was on the outs with the Champions and now the Scale. He was also out of Vitrin. In ten days his own body would rebel against him. Whether he had realized it or not, he’d escaped Shadow by choosing death.
The woman reappeared with a bundle of lemon-colored towels. Reginald took the top one and pressed it to his face. Its warm, clean fragrance stirred up memories of Madelyn and the promise he’d made to her. A promise he had yet to fulfill.
“I thank you,” he said again.
34
Janis climbed into the truck’s cab and scooted along the bench seat until she was bumping up against Scott. Margaret pushed in beside her while Tyler settled into the narrow space behind the seat, shoving a tool case aside.
“I’ve always wanted to try this,” Scott whispered, pulling the plastic case from the underside of the steering wheel. “I mean, an ignition system is just another circuit, right? Directs current from the battery to the ignition coil.”
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 19