Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

  Why in the hell would she want to do that?

  “Start the party,” June said as Ell took up position beside her, and she nodded to the little island with its deposit slips and chained pens for people to fill out their paperwork before they stood in the line for the bank to acknowledge them.

  Ell loosed a massive burst of wind. She could see him strain as he did it, and the tornado hit the little island and uprooted it from where it had been sealed into the bank floor. Wood tore, metal squealed, the wind howled, little pens on chains broke loose from their restrictive holders and went flying in all directions.

  June just laughed, because people were already screaming and they hadn’t even done anything bad to them. “All right,” she shouted, “this is a robbery!” She puffed a purple cloud out of her fingertips and hauled it along. “If you mess with us, he—” she gestured to Ell, “will send you through a glass window, and I will send one of these,” she puffed the toxic cloud toward the line of about five people waiting for the tellers, “into your face, where it will burn your skin off.” She sneered a little as she said it. Technically, she did have the power to do that, but it would require her summoning up almost all the toxin she had in order to make its consistency strong enough to cause burns.

  “I want to see hands in the air,” Ell said. His voice was a little shaky, but people started putting hands up, so evidently they didn’t hear the shakiness. He kept his palm out, ready to send any heroes straight to their asses to rethink their plans.

  June walked up to the counter as a blond lady dressed like a professional, her purse slung over her shoulder and a look of horror on her face, stepped back from where she was taking out money. “You don’t mind if I borrow this, do you?” she asked, pointing to the bills the teller had been counting out for the woman.

  Judging from the woman’s face, she minded quite a bit, but to her credit, she only hesitated a second before saying, “Take it.”

  “Good choice,” June said. “Go stand over there with them.” She waved the woman back to the line, and kept the little purple cloud hovering on her shoulder in case she needed it. Not for the first time, she thought it’d be damned cool to have Ell’s powers combined with hers. Then she could move the cloud around a lot easier. As it was she, could haul her toxin around with her, but she couldn’t make it move nearly as fast as he could. She could still get one in a person’s face relatively quickly if they were close, but at a distance? Nope. The cloud crawled toward them. She could run and thrust her hand in their face easier. “Give me the cash,” June told the teller. “But no dye packs, and no bills off the bottom of the drawer, okay?”

  The teller nodded her understanding. June shifted her attention to the other tellers down the line; there were only two more working today, apparently, which was why they had a nice line formed. She didn’t even have to ask, the other tellers sprang into action.

  June looked back at Ell to see how he was doing. He was covering the crowd, hand up, his gaze flicking attentively over them and then back to her. He nodded once, as if to let her know he was all right, then got back to the serious business of policing the crowd. She doubted they’d try anything. It was their good luck that there hadn’t been a guard—

  The thought no sooner sprang to mind than June heard a click behind her and Ell turned, his wide eyes panicky.

  “Don’t move,” said a male voice tight with tension. June could practically hear him standing there on unsteady legs, and knew what she’d find before she even turned around.

  A security guard with a gun leveled at her, his finger on the trigger.

  13.

  Sienna

  Nothing gets your attention quite like being a wanted fugitive traveling under an assumed name only to have someone throw your real one right in your face. My eyes widened, my pulse shot up, and I tried to keep a straight face while deciding whether to lie or just tell the truth to the formerly kindly little old lady standing in front of me.

  “You don’t seem too concerned about me murdering you horribly right now,” I said coolly, and a little more nicely.

  “You could try,” Grandma Randall said. “I may not look like it, but I could put up a fight.”

  Scott watched with something bordering on horror. “Listen, Ms. Randall, we’re here about your granddaughter.”

  “Are you?” She looked over at me. “What has she gotten herself into this time?”

  I looked at Scott with surprise. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a record on this girl; then again, the confused look on his face suggested to me he didn’t know anything about it. “She’s on the run in Florida,” Scott said. “She’s … committed a few robberies.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Ms. Randall said, putting a hand on her chest. “Let’s go sit in the living room. I’ve got your water,” she said, nodding toward me.

  We followed her out, and to her credit, she didn’t do that stupid shuffle-step thing this time, which I now realized was pure theater. She walked like a normal person thirty years younger than she looked and seated herself in a chair in front of a window with the drapes open to let light stream in. The walls here too were covered in various thread-based pieces of art from quilts to a massive cross-stitched picture of a meadow complete with blue sky and flowers. Grandma Randall sat there staring straight ahead, shaking her head. “I really did do my best with that girl, but it wasn’t easy.”

  Scott and I took our cue and uneasily sat next to each other in the only other seat in the place—an old couch covered in plastic that squeaked as we sat down. He looked at me, I looked at him; it wasn’t a very long couch, and there were crocheted pillows filling either end, so we were stuck a little closer together than either of us would have preferred. “How do you mean?” Scott asked once he’d settled in.

  “She had a will of her own,” Grandma Randall said, lost in thought. “And she started to manifest around, oh, seventeen. If she was troublesome before that, that only made it worse.”

  “Did she get in fights?” Scott asked. “Cause trouble at school?”

  “More like drinking,” Grandma Randall said. “Drugs. Nothing too hard, I don’t think, though it’s impossible to tell, I suppose. Skipping school, falling grades. And those boys she brought home—when she came home at all.” Grandma Randall shuddered. “Classless mutts.” She looked at me. “Were you a little hellion as a teenager?”

  I tried not to react visibly. “I didn’t leave my house until I was seventeen.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Hm. So you’re making up for lost time now, then?”

  I heard Scott suppress a snicker. “Do you have any idea where your granddaughter might be headed? She seems to be going north now, though she was headed south for a while.”

  “I have no idea, no,” she said with a rough shake of the head. “I haven’t heard from her since she left. I find it hard to believe she’d come back here, though.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “I remember being a rebellious teenager,” Grandma Randall said with a small smile. “When your parents are wrong all the time and you’re right, and you’d do anything to reject everything they say. Well, I expect right now she’s rejecting me and she’s rejecting Ohio and everything else that represents how she was raised. I doubt she’ll come back here.”

  That made a certain amount of sense. “Does June have a cell phone?” I asked.

  “She did,” Grandma Randall said. “I don’t know if she still does. She’s not stupid. She might have gotten rid of it if she’s on the run.”

  “Wouldn’t she want her friends to be able to reach her?” Scott asked.

  “She didn’t have many friends,” Grandma Randall said. “She had boyfriends, a revolving door of the bastards. And I do mean bastards, for the most part.”

  I tried to sort out whether that was Grandma’s old age talking, or an accurate assessment of June’s taste in men. Given that she was now a fugitive, her choices probably weren’t entirely sound. />
  Of course, I was a fugitive, so maybe my choices, in men and everything else, weren’t entirely sound, either. No, scratch that. They definitely weren’t.

  “You’re painting quite the vivid picture of your granddaughter, here,” Scott said.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say to that.” Grandma Randall shrugged. “I did my best with her, but I was outmatched. June was going to do what June wanted to do, and once she got past the age where I could effectively browbeat her into line … what was I supposed to do? Physically abuse her? Subdue her? Beat her into—”

  “We get the point,” I said uncomfortably. “And no … that typically doesn’t end well.”

  “She’s a grown woman, now,” Grandma Randall said, “or as near to it as to make the distinction irrelevant. The law says she is, anyway, and now she’s crossed the law. I may not like it, but the consequences are hers. I couldn’t do anything about it if I wanted to.” She settled back in her seat, looking utterly helpless.

  “Do you want to?” I asked.

  She looked at me with barely disguised irritation. “She’s my granddaughter. Raised like my own daughter. Of course I would want to do something about it. However annoyed I might have been at her intransigence … I don’t wish her any ill. I want the best for her.”

  “Then help us find her,” I said.

  “What if I’m not sure if you finding her is the best thing for her?” Grandma Randall asked with a sly smile.

  I froze. “Who would you prefer to confront her? A local police department that doesn’t have a hope of stopping her or her beau without using lethal force? Or someone who could use one of these,” I shot a light net at a quilt, binding it into a bundle of blankets, “and a few choice punches to the face to deliver the beating you apparently regret not doling out. Well, I promise I won’t spare the rod when it comes to disciplining your kid. But I’ll also do everything I can to make sure she doesn’t end up dead.”

  Grandma June just sat there, studying me intently. “All you can doesn’t seem to be enough most of the time, dear.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard about me—” I started.

  “I know what I’ve seen of you,” Grandma Randall said. “How many people have you killed?”

  I shared a look with Scott, in which he basically threw up his hands in surrender, because apparently he didn’t have anything to add to this particular conversation. “Hundreds,” I said. Why sugarcoat it? I didn’t even bother to add a protesting, “But I’ve been doing better …” If someone was hanging one of those Workplace Accident signs with my name on it, it had been like ninety or a hundred and twenty days since the last time they’d had to flip the numbers to zero on me killing someone.

  But of course, most people went their whole lives without killing anyone, so … that probably wasn’t much of an endorsement.

  “I’ve lived through quite a few things in my life,” Grandma Randall said, getting a far-off look in her eyes. “The Great War. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “World War One, sure,” Scott jumped in. Sure, now he had something to contribute, now that we’d moved off talk of me killing people.

  “The Great War,” Grandma said, like a storyteller of old, acknowledging Scott’s contribution with a nod, “was the first one where sending a metahuman onto the battlefield didn’t provide much advantage. Between chemical weapons—which were developed by studying my family and our powers—” she held up a hand and a little puff of purple cloud appeared. She rolled it over in her fingers expertly before making the toxin disappear, “—and tanks, machine guns … our advantages in warfare, which had been so great as to render us as gods up to that point … were almost nil when you filled the air with enough bullets to snuff even a superhuman being with a few shots.”

  I’d heard the rumors; human history books weren’t exactly repositories of accurate information on meta contributions to the development of mankind, but now that metas were known to the world, some scholars were doing interesting work in trying to map out our own secret history. I’d had second- and third-hand accounts from people I’d personally talked to about how the Great War had done devastating things to the meta psyche, if there was such a thing as a collective thought pool for my people, who were spread out to the four winds.

  “It was just devastating,” Grandma Randall went on, apparently down the track my own thoughts had been taking. “We were gods. Hidden, of course. Hidden since long before I was born … but we knew what we were. Knew we could have a place in the world, if we ever chose to step out. Of course there were organizations powerfully motivated by the desire to keep us hidden to protect their own interests but … I think even they were shocked when that happened, when our own died in such great numbers, and not because their fellows had taken the field against them, but because humans had finally caught up. Their weapons rendered our advantages moot. And their bullets rendered our loved ones … dead.” She blinked, staring at the beige carpet, then up at me. “You ask me which I’d choose, you hunting my girl, or the police? The police with their rifles and pistols and enough to bullets to fill the air and turn her brains to mush … or you, who have killed hundreds of people.”

  “They pretty much all had it coming,” I said, a little weakly. Scott turned his head to give me a SHUT UP look. It worked; I clammed up.

  “I suppose I’m going to have to trust you to do this,” she said, not sounding particularly thrilled about it. “Because what are my alternatives? No human is going to be able to stop my June. They’ll have to kill her. But you …” She stared me down. “… You don’t have to kill her.”

  I squirmed a little in my seat. “No. Hopefully not.”

  “I want your word,” she said. “Swear to me you won’t kill my granddaughter.”

  My insides writhed. “I will do everything I can not to—”

  “Swear to me.” The old lady’s eyes blazed, fixed on me like a spotlight.

  A ragged breath came from my throat, and I tried to compose myself. I’d faced down murderers, rapists, criminals of all kinds, people with body counts larger than mine, and here I was, intimidated by a little old lady. “No,” I said, and shook my hand. “I will give you my promise that I’ll do my best not to kill her, but if your granddaughter makes the decision to kill other people, and puts me in a position where I have to choose between her life and an innocent one she’s threatening … no way in hell. I will kill her dead and leave her corpse smoking in time with the last pulses of her heart.”

  Grandma Randall raised her eyebrows. “But,” I said as Scott adopted a strangled look, like I’d just choked him or something, “like I said … I’ll do my best. And my best is going to be a lot better and more likely to bring her in safe and whole than some PD down in Florida that hasn’t ever dealt with a meta before and doesn’t want any of their brother officers to die at the hands of some asshole passing through with a chip on her shoulder and a yearning to tear up their backyard.” I sat back and waited.

  Grandma Randall didn’t say anything. Not for a long time. She just sat there, silhouetted in her chair, against the window. “I could call the police on you, you know,” she said at last.

  “And then you’d have no one looking to bring your granddaughter in alive.”

  “Because I’m chopped liver?” Scott asked.

  “Because you’re aiding and abetting a federal fugitive right this minute, numbnuts,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  Grandma Randall suddenly seemed to deflate. “You’ll give me your word, then?” she said quietly. If her posture said anything, it was that she was about two seconds from sliding out of her chair into a puddle on the floor to cry about everything that had gone horribly wrong in her relationship with her granddaughter.

  “I will give you my word that I will do everything within my power—and I have quite a lot of power—to bring in June and her newest wayward bastard boyfriend in alive—”

  “I don’t reall
y care if you bring him in alive.”

  “Well, I’m going to try anyway,” I said. “You have my word.”

  Grandma Randall nodded, surrender complete. “I don’t know for sure that she’ll go there now …” She had the slumped shoulders of utter defeat, as though she’d just refought World War One and lost again, “… but she has always wanted to go that … certain theme park in Orlando.” She shrugged. “If she’s anywhere close to it …”

  I tried to imagine June Randall, with her toxic fingers, in the middle of the thousands and thousands of kids at a major theme park attraction. “Thank you for your help,” I said in a strangled voice. Scott probably had the same look on his face that I did—thinly veiled panic. That maybe wasn’t all that veiled. Without another word, we left Grandma Randall to her contemplations and headed for the door, airborne seconds later without giving a thought to who might see us flying away.

  14.

  June

  “Nobody move,” the security guard said as June stood there, back to him, hands in the air. “The cops are on their way, and we’re just going to wait here, calmly, until they arrive.”

  June didn’t dare wheel around on him. Could she take a bullet and keep going? Probably. If he hit her in the right spot, everything her grandmother had told her suggested she could go on, maybe even take the gun away from him and beat him senseless with it.

  But if he kept firing, and one of those bullets hit somewhere like the heart, or the head …

  Her breath caught in her chest. That’d be the end of the line right there, and the prospect filled her with a visceral immediacy, a clenching in her guts that caused her heart to thud like a hammer against nails.