Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Oh, who cares about him?” June said, grabbing her panties and working her way into them.

  “His daughter, obviously,” Ell said.

  “Well, she’s got to grow up sometime,” June said. “The world’s not all sunshine and rainbows. My parents died way before I was her age. This is a good lesson for her. She’ll probably appreciate him more now.”

  “If he lives,” Ell said. “You might have killed him! And then at the convenience store, you got in a fight with an FBI agent—”

  “What should I have done? Let him cuff us and take us away?”

  “We should have left before he showed up!” Ell burst out in a fury. “Like I wanted to!”

  June just stared at him, her jeans up but unbuttoned. “There we go.”

  Ell hesitated, his anger fading a little as puzzlement set in. “There we go, what?”

  “You said it.” June focused on buttoning her pants.

  “Said what?”

  “Like you wanted to,” June said, not looking up at him as she tugged her zipper up.

  “So?”

  “So,” June said, “it’s just like it always is. Elliot knows best. It’s gotta be Elliot’s way or it’s wrong.”

  Ell shook his head as if trying to avoid a cloud of toxin. “I’m talking about this time, this one time—”

  “Oh, it’s like this every time,” June said. “Don’t fool yourself. You think you’re so smart, and I’m just some dumb Midwestern girl who stumbled off a farm or something. ‘Oh, please, Mr. City Slicker guy, won’t you show my rural rube ass how the world works?’” She turned her back on him and slapped her own bottom to illustrate the point. “Which is bullshit, because I know more than you, obviously. Especially in the bedroom.”

  Ell looked stunned, completely thrown off balance. “I don’t—what does that have to do with—I mean, I’m not saying I know more than you or anything—”

  “Sure you are. You say it all the time. You say it without saying it, you bring it up all. The. Time.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’ve lived in the world, okay?” June stared at him angrily. “You didn’t just rescue me off some farm when we met—”

  “I know that, I was there—”

  “I was living my life. I had a life before you. I know what I’m doing.”

  “I know that. I wasn’t saying you didn’t—”

  “I’ve had experience. More than you, in fact—”

  “Come on, June! You keep bringing that up, like I care you’ve slept with way more people than me—”

  She stopped arguing and favored him with a cold glare. “There it is.”

  Ell froze, argument gone again, a kind of sick look in his eyes, like he knew he’d stepped in it again. “There … what … is?”

  “I’m so sick of you calling me a slut!” June said, storming past him. She was headed for the door. The volume of their voices had risen to the point where this shout was one among many they’d let off in the last few minutes, and it verged on a scream.

  “I didn’t call you that!”

  “Yes, you did!”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  She reached the door and started to open it, Ell three steps behind her. Her hair was still a mess, her tank top was wrinkled and clinging to her sweaty skin, and she only just slipped on her sandals at the door. “Yes, you fucking did!” she said, throwing the door open to the hotel hallway.

  Ell tried to grab the door, and she started to slam it on him. He caught it with a hand and held it open, struggling against her strength. She was stronger than he was, that was just a fact. She could whip his ass in an arm wrestling contest any day. They knew that from experience.

  Her hands were slick with sweat, and Elliot yanked the door right out of her grip. It hurt a little, and it shocked her. June’s face burned. She was pissed off and humiliated that Elliot—that little shit, he was supposed to be weaker than her, supposed to know his place—had just outmatched her.

  She hauled off and slapped him right across the cheek, the noise ringing down the hotel hallway.

  He staggered back a step, then caught his balance. His face was all bawled up, his hand pressed against his cheek, which had already turned red from the slap.

  June stared at him, fire in her eyes, about ready to deliver another, when something about the pitiful way that he looked at her caused her to hesitate.

  What the hell had she just done?

  “Oh, God,” she said, “what did we just do?”

  Ell scrambled back from the door, still cradling his cheek, tears already starting to drip down his cheeks. June came back inside and closed the door, but softly, and then chased after him as he retreated from her. He held out a hand to keep her back but she brushed it aside easily and grabbed him in a hug, pulling him close as he writhed. “Oh, God, Ell, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. We shouldn’t have done that. But you pushed me. You just pushed me and pushed me, and—and I couldn’t—I mean, you have to see it—you can’t grab the door out of my hand like that when I’m—shhhhhh.”

  He was sobbing softly now, his shoulders heaving gently against her chest. He said nothing.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. He’d stopped his half-hearted struggling and was crying quietly, his tears soaking the front of her tank top. “It’s just—we let it get out of hand, that’s all. It was a mistake—”

  “You hit me,” he said quietly, in a voice of utter betrayal.

  June resisted the urge to lash back, to tell him it was his own damned fault. That wasn’t right, was it? They were both to blame. “I’m sorry,” she said instead. She had a little bit of trouble getting the words out, but they came. “This place was a mistake.”

  Ell sniffled. “This … hotel?”

  “Florida,” she said. “Don’t you see? Everything’s been wrong since we came here. We shouldn’t have gone south, I told you. It’s all been wrong since we got here. We need to go north. And then west, once we’re out of this—this tiny dick-shaped hellhole.”

  Ell laughed through his tears on that one. “It … it is kind of shaped like one.”

  She smiled and lifted his head off her chest. “We need to leave. We need a little money—more than last time—and then we should just go. We didn’t argue like this before, when we weren’t here—”

  Ell hesitated, his eyes searching up and down. He was thinking about Cuba again, probably. She felt the embers of rage start to burn. So help her, if he brought up Cuba, she’d—

  Well, she didn’t know what she’d do. She was just so sick of hearing it. Why couldn’t he see? His idea of going to Cuba was what was killing them, though she didn’t want to say it, not now. Who wanted to go to Cuba? Not even the Cubans wanted to be there, which was why they kept getting on rafts that were barely seaworthy and hurling themselves into the damned ocean. You didn’t do that if you liked where you were.

  “Yeah, okay,” Ell said, sniffling again. “But … no one gets hurt this time, okay? You have to promise.”

  She looked him, afraid to let out a breath of relief. He hadn’t mentioned Cuba, and maybe, just maybe, they were finally going to do what she wanted to do. At fucking last. “No one gets killed. I can’t promise the hurt thing, because sometimes, in a robbery, people get hurt. But it won’t be like the beach,” she gave him that little victory, “or the convenience store. We’ll be in and out as fast as possible, and no one will get killed, okay?”

  His skepticism felt heavy, like a weight. “Okay,” he finally said with a nod. “Okay.” He looked around, then mopped at his cheeks with his hand, succeeding in doing nothing but smearing the tears that had drained like rivers down them. “Let me get my stuff.”

  “Shhh, not yet,” she said, pulling him close and kissing him. She couldn’t just leave it like this. Not after what they’d just done.

  “What are you doing?” he asked when they broke from the kiss. He was kinda smiling, like he knew but was fishing for the answer.

  She let
go of him and sat back on the bed, scooting up so she could lay herself across it suggestively. “I just … hate to leave this nice hotel before we get a chance to make up …” She batted her eyelashes at him in a way that was so far beyond seductive that it immediately elicited a laugh, which was what she was aiming for. “Come here, baby,” she said, motioning him to her.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, clearly hesitant to go further—yet. “I—just don’t think—”

  “Shhh,” she said again, rising up to all fours to lean across and kiss him again, long and full of passion, enough that when they parted, he kept his eyes closed for a few seconds. “Don’t think,” she said. “Just … be with me.”

  “All right,” he said as he opened his eyes. All trace of the sadness that had choked him like a poison was gone, and she pulled him forward, onto the bed with her, as he giggled and laughed, with only a little less enthusiasm than before.

  10.

  Sienna

  Making my way from the beautiful, sunny, island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean to Westerville, Ohio, while one of the FBI’s Most Wanted fugitives should have been more difficult than it was. But then, I was not a normal fugitive, and I was traveling in the company of the FBI agent who was supposed to hunt me down.

  Traveling with him in my arms. Like a bride.

  “This is so … degrading,” Scott muttered, the state of Kentucky below us in all its green, mountainous splendor. It was the middle of the day, and I was keeping to the clouds as much as possible. The weather had obliged, fortunately, the skies overcast and grey from about fifty miles off the Florida coast. I also kept us at an altitude high enough to allow us to stay somewhat invisible to ground observation yet still not gasp for breath.

  Yippee.

  “Quit your whining,” I said. “Think about all the TSA checkpoints and waiting at the gate you’d have had to do if you’d flown commercial. This way, all you have to do is sit there and avoid touching my skin.”

  He looked me over. “Thanks for changing, by the way. I don’t think this would have been made any easier by your robe and, uhh … whatever beneath.”

  “It’s called a swimsuit, jackass.” It just wasn’t much of one, admittedly. I hadn’t bared my belly, because I’d gotten a little self-conscious of late. If the internet had made fun of me for my non-model shape before, they wouldn’t get any kinder after my time in St. Thomas.

  “I’m a little mystified why this is the path you wanted to take,” he said, nodding at the ground passing thousands of feet below us. “Shouldn’t we have gone to Florida and hung out, waiting for the next hit?”

  “Maybe,” I said. It was a tough call, because in theory these two bandits had just hit a convenience store and maybe had a few bucks to spend. If they followed their pattern, they wouldn’t surface again for a little bit, and when they did, it’d almost certainly be because they needed money and were robbing someone to get it. Which, again in theory, left us a little time to do some background investigation.

  But if they ended up popping their stupid heads up early, I was going to be super embarrassed, because we wouldn’t be in any kind of position to stop them. “How far off are we?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Scott said, still sounding a little surly at being carried in this way. Like he had cause to whine; men had carried women like this for centuries. He was heavy enough that I might have felt it if I wasn’t using my Wolfe power, but I would have been able to maintain the carry across the entire trip even so.

  “Well, you’ve got the GPS.”

  “Oh, right.” He looked down and thumbed his phone to life. “Good thing I muted these voice warnings. Turns out it’s had to recalculate about a thousand times since last I checked because you keep off-roading.” He held it up so I could see. The message: “Off route. Recalculating,” was emblazoned across the screen again, then again as I apparently skipped over the road it suggested I take around a mountain in favor of just flying over the peak.

  “They should make a GPS for me,” I said. “Call it, ‘As The Sienna Flies.’”

  “It would sell one copy.”

  “It would sell at least one copy,” I said. “There are almost certainly other flying metas out there, especially at the rate which new ones are cropping up.”

  Scott’s jaw tightened. “You wouldn’t know anything about our sudden relative explosion of meta problems, would you?”

  “I would know a little about it,” I said. “I would know that it’s not a natural phenomenon.”

  He gave me the ‘No, Duh’ look. “Anything else?”

  “I’d blame Edward Cavanagh and his serum for it, but he’s so long dead that I don’t think he’s directly behind it.” I paused to think about a rogue possibility. “Though I suppose it’s possible he used some of his considerable fortune to gradually drib and drab that meta-making serum out in random spots across our country and possibly others, though it’s tougher to tell. Obviously we’re seeing a lot more activity, especially in the US, than the six hundred or so supposedly surviving metas should be able to generate on their own. Also, I’ve met a lot of metas in these last two, three years who were not born to the powers.”

  Scott nodded. “Yeah. Quite a few people who reached an awfully advanced age before manifesting.”

  “Exactly.” I thought of Jamie Barton, AKA Gravity, in Staten Island, who’d been in her late thirties/early forties before her power had shown up. Or Caden Sims, who had flatly admitted to artificially inducing powers in himself before he’d gotten himself killed by ArcheGrey only a couple months prior. “I suppose I should feel bad for the people in charge of policing that, because hoo, boy, if things continue apace, they are going to be busy, busy, busy.” I must have said it a little too gleefully. Scott gave me a very cross look, probably because I was talking about him like he wasn’t even there.

  “And yet here you are, doing a little policing of it yourself,” Scott said when he got his smartass facial expression under control again. “And not for the first time, either.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sure a Denny’s in Pennsylvania that needs a new coat of paint—oh, and a new everything else—would disagree with you.”

  “First of all, restaurants can’t talk, they’re inanimate. And second of all … whut? I clearly don’t even eat, so, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I practically dared him to call me a liar on that one. Though I would have had a hard time denying it, because when I had shed the robe and dressed before we left, I’d found I had to hold my breath to button my new jeans.

  Whatever. The weight helped hide my true identity. Yeah. That was a good enough excuse.

  Scott wisely remained silent on the subject. “What are you hoping to find out from—”

  “From Ohio?” We were on our way to see June’s grandmother, who had apparently raised her. “Background, mostly. I want to know who this girl is, what kind of person she was before she got drunk on her own power. Mostly …” I got serious, because this was serious business, “… I want to know if she’s the kind of person you save, or that you have put down like a rabid dog.”

  Scott squirmed a little in my arms. “I brought you in on this in order to make sure we didn’t have to put them down.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, but you don’t get to make that determination.”

  He raised an eyebrow and sounded vaguely outraged when he said, “But I’m in charge!”

  “Not of me,” I said politely. “And with all due respect to your position—”

  “Which is your way of saying, ‘I have no respect for your position.’”

  “I have plenty of respect for the position. It’s your boss I have no respect for, and you’re technically just his mouthpiece or hand or … codpiece, maybe, if you make him look good. Inadequate codpiece if you’re making him look inferior.”

  Scott snorted at that. “I don’t think I’ve ever been pleased to be called an inadequate codpiece, b
ut … here we are.”

  I chuckled. “So … Phillips is still in charge? Even after Harmon blew out?”

  President Harmon, please.

  “You’re such an officious jackass, Gerry.”

  Scott frowned at my internal/external dialogue. “Yeah, Phillips is still in charge,” he said, ignoring my outburst. “And he hasn’t changed much.”

  “He wouldn’t have,” I said, “Harmon never mentally manipulated him.”

  Scott stared straight ahead, eyes suddenly unfocused. “Oh, wow. I never thought anyone could be that … I don’t even know how to describe it … without being brainwashed.”

  “He’s a horrendous shitbag,” I said, and Scott snapped around to look at me in surprise. “Well, it does cover it, you have to admit.”

  “I freely admit it,” Scott said with a nod. The phone in his hand beeped. “Speak of the devil.”

  “I wouldn’t answer that up here.”

  Scott shot me a sly grin. “Because he’ll hear the rush of the wind and suss out that I’m being carried across the skies in your arms?”

  “No,” I said with great amusement, “because cell phone service up here is really spotty.”

  He pondered that for a second. “Good,” he said, and answered the phone. “Hello? Hello … ? Yes, it’s me, I can barely hear you … the static is terrible … I don’t know if I’m going to be able to …” He lifted the phone and looked at the screen with a faint grin. “What a shame. I lost him.”

  “What a shame indeed,” I said. We both had another good chuckle as we cruised over the wide, brown Ohio River below as the phone chirped again, recalculating its course for the umpteenth time.

  11.

  Westerville was a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, one of countless places on the map I’d never been. In truth, I didn’t have any real desire to visit there because it wasn’t well known for its natural splendor, like, say, Colorado or Arizona, and it didn’t have any sort of massive cultural relevance to recommend it, like New York City. But then again, most people probably had the same opinion of Minneapolis, and it was my happy home. Or had been, until I’d had to rabbit.