Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

  June kept her hands up, and raised them higher. She chanced a look back over her shoulder, albeit slowly. Ell was across the room, and the guard was switching his attention and aim back and forth between the two of them. “Go stand by her,” the guard said, jerking his boxy pistol toward June. Ell complied, halting steps carrying him to her at a very slow pace. “Not too close,” the guard said when he was about five feet away. “Now … hands on your heads.”

  She followed his command, with exaggerated slowness, looking sidelong at Ell as she did so. The guard had them now, and there was no way she’d be able to stop him from shooting them. Not in time.

  But …

  There was one thing they’d discussed, a while back, something Ell could do to possibly stop someone who was holding a gun on them. She tried to catch his eye, but his knees were quivering; in his mind, Ell was already caught. The game was over.

  She had to break him out of that.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said, words sounding across the quiet lobby. She didn’t care what the guard said back, she was just trying to get Ell to look at her.

  He did, in shock, as though amazed she’d dare speak out with a gun pointed at her back.

  “Just keep quiet until the police get here,” the guard said, all business.

  June kept her head level, but locked her eyes on Ell. She made a very subtle motion of her head toward the guard, while trying to look like she was just standing there, not saying anything, not doing anything. She didn’t want to give him reason to fire in case he was jumpy. It would be stupid to die here, in this town, with a gun at her back. Her stomach was clenching, a fear she didn’t want to admit to seeping in over that sense of utter recklessness that had been so intoxicating up until now.

  No one could hurt her, she’d thought, though she knew, dimly, this was false. It wasn’t a thought she liked to harbor, though, and having it driven home to her in this way …

  Well, the accompanying emotional stew had more than fear in it. Anger surged out, making her stomach twist even further. She was furious that she’d been surprised like this. It wasn’t her fault, though. The guard hadn’t been out when they’d come in.

  Ell was staring at her, no anger present for him. He was in the grip of fear and fear alone. She tried to mentally project to him—the gun, go for the gun, under no illusions that she was communicating mind-to-mind. She just hoped that their time together had given him enough of a basis to make the leap she wanted him to.

  He blinked in surprise, recoiled a couple inches as though slapped on the cheek, and glanced at the guard.

  “Hold still,” the guard said. “Actually … hands on the back of your heads.”

  That was a quirk she hadn’t expected. So far, June’s were just up. If Ell had to put his on his head, though …

  Well, that would wreck the plan. So it was now or never.

  She looked at him, and nodded once, swiftly. The fear was still gripping him tightly, and he swallowed once, the lump in his throat almost a visual cue. She could practically hear the GULP! He blinked a few times, then started to move his hands to his head.

  No, she pleaded in her mind, hoping her expression would convey her anger. We need to get out of here. Now. This is our chance.

  Ell moved agonizingly slowly, hands stretching toward the crown of his head. He remained tense, but as his hands approached his skull—

  A whirl of wind so strong June could feel it on the back of her neck blew at the guard’s wrist. He cried out in surprise, and she spun to find him with his gun pointed at the window. A crack rang out; then another. He’d fired in his surprise, prepared for them to attack but not prepared for the direction it would come from.

  June leapt on him without warning or remorse, pounding him in the jaw, the face, cramming her fingers up his nose and blasting toxin as she slapped the gun out of his hand. The guard snorted and hacked in surprise before the toxin even took hold, wrestling back ineffectually against her.

  “Get the gun! Get the gun!” June screamed as Ell appeared in her peripheral vision. He dove for the weapon, clumsily fumbling it but coming up with it at last, clutched in sweaty, shaky palms and pointed at the crowd and bank tellers, still cowed into inaction.

  June got up and took the pistol out of Ell’s hand before he shot someone with it accidentally. He looked like he was about to rattle apart. “Get the money,” she said softly, not daring to look down at the guard. He was gagging, sounded like he was choking to death on his own tongue. There was nothing Ell could do for him now, the poison now fully in his system, blasted directly in via the nose.

  Ell stared at him, frozen, as the man spasmed helplessly. Ell looked helpless as well, and June snapped, “Ell!” Then, more gently, “Get the money. Please.”

  He lurched out of his stupor, moving toward the counter, where the stunned tellers still waited. One of them screamed at his approach, and he spoke to them in soft tones. He still sounded rattled, but like he was controlling it.

  June stared down at the guard, white spittle now flecking the corners of his mouth. The gun was steady in her hand, like iron welded to her fingers. She reached out to him, trying to draw any toxin still unabsorbed out to her. A little stream of it came out, a thin thread mixed with saliva and a little blood, and she took it back. She stared down at his unknowing eyes; he was insensate, his body trying to reject the substance she’d so forcefully pushed into his lungs.

  Her mouth was dry, her pulse still racing to the hammer’s beat. Was he going to die? Would he be the first person she—

  “I’ve got it,” Ell said, returning to her. He didn’t look at the guard, and she ripped her gaze away from him as soon as Ell spoke. She nodded and they both went for the door, not too fast but not slowly either.

  When they burst into the sunshine, June went for the driver’s seat on the Pontiac. Ell took notice, even as zombielike as he was, and diverted to the passenger seat. Once in, he threw the money into the back seat as June started the car. The roar of the engine was like a gunshot all over again, and she perfunctorily put the car in reverse. She didn’t speak as she gunned it out onto the main road, a strip surrounded by mini malls and chain restaurants that looked faded under the washed-out Florida sunlight.

  She pressed down on the pedal as she blended into the flow of traffic coming up to a light. It was green, so she raced through, the engine noise mingling with the sound from the passenger seat.

  Ell was crying.

  She didn’t know quite what to say to that.

  He sobbed, hands in his lap, pitiful sounds like she’d heard from him back in the hotel room. It was an awful noise, his crying, and she ignored it for a few minutes as the rage rose inside her.

  Why did he have to get involved, that stupid guard? Why couldn’t he …?

  How did we miss him? That was Ell’s fault—

  No. The guard wasn’t in the main room when we came in. He must have been on lunch break.

  It wasn’t anyone’s fault but his own, she decided finally, and then spoke. “It’s not your fault, Ell. He wasn’t there, you saw. He came out when he knew we were robbing the bank. He chose this. He wanted to be the big man. Well …” She didn’t finish the thought, which ran along the lines of … But now he might just end up a dead man instead.

  “We didn’t have to do that to him,” Ell said, composing himself enough to speak, his voice verging on cracking.

  “Yes, we did,” she said without hesitation. “Yes. It had to be done.”

  “No,” he said, but she recognized it wasn’t so much a refutation of what she’d said as his own poorly expressed wish that he could turn back the clock to a few minutes earlier—and make this whole chain of events play out differently. June felt a little sick, thinking much the same. What if they’d picked a different bank, one where there was no guard? Or one they could have gotten the drop on? Her heart wasn’t thudding quite as loudly anymore, but her stomach still felt queasy.

  “It’s okay,” she said,
and took hold of Ell by the back of the neck. She stroked his hair at the back of his head, down the back of his neck, rubbing him gently. “It’s going to be okay.” She pulled him close.

  Ell just sobbed, though, like he had earlier. And she held him while he did, whispering soothing words as she took them away from this place.

  15.

  Sienna

  “So … Disney,” I said as we soared through the heavens, heading south and sticking to clouds for cover. “She’s going to do what generations of athletes have, and go to Disney World.”

  “What are the odds she goes and doesn’t cause trouble?” Scott shouted over the whipping wind.

  I shrugged, keeping my ears open for the sound of engines. Occasionally, I needed to watch out for jetliners. “Well, they make trouble everywhere else they go. I wouldn’t care to chance the odds in a place like that.”

  Scott fell silent for a short spell. “Grandma Randall locked you in on that promise, didn’t she?”

  “She’s no pushover, that one,” I said, a little darkly. It wasn’t like I’d planned to give a half-assed effort to bringing in her baby June alive before, but having that extracted from me the way Grandma Randall had certainly put an emphasis on saving her in a way I might not have focused on otherwise.

  “You seemed to take it pretty seriously,” Scott observed.

  “I don’t really enjoy lying,” I said. “My mom brainwashed a visceral dislike of it into me through some pretty harsh punishment, so … like Pavlov’s dogs, it rings a certain unpleasant bell in my head when I catch myself doing it. I’m certainly not above it, but … yuck.”

  “So you feel obligated to keep your word.”

  “As best I can,” I said tightly, the tension within me at this annoying state of events bleeding out in my words. The problem with trying to take potentially dangerous criminals alive was that you gave them all sorts of opportunities to cause harm to you and others—and the risk was compounded if they were armed or a metahuman.

  “Well,” Scott said, “I’ll be honest—I was hoping for this to go peacefully all along.”

  “So was I, dumbass,” I snapped back at him. “It’s not like I go into these things wondering how I can cause maximum havoc, okay? It’s just that when their will to do unlawful shit clashes with my will to make them stop, it usually escalates the situation because, as you mentioned, ego drives a large part of this process, especially with these young and dumb ones.”

  “I only mentioned the ego thing because you taught it to me,” Scott said. “So basically you just referenced back to yourself.”

  “Whatever,” I said, a little too confused to detangle who said what originally. “Can we just talk about our new, burgeoning supervillains walking around a theme park with thousands of people and especially children? Because however nasty June’s poison has been for the adults she’s come into contact with, I imagine—and I’m no doctor here—that it’s bound to be worse on the respiratory systems of the young. Maybe the old, too, I dunno.”

  “Probably fewer old folks at Disney World.”

  “This is Florida. It’s old folks all the way down here.”

  “Another thing about this, though,” Scott said. “They haven’t actually killed anyone.”

  “Yet,” I fired back.

  He rolled his eyes, shifting slightly in my bridal carry. “I don’t mean to redirect your thunder or anything—”

  “I don’t do thunder. It’s nuclear fire, punching people to death, or eating them like the Lady Dragon I am.”

  “—but seeing them as murderous threats is getting a little ahead of yourself.”

  “I think it’s just being prepared for the escalation,” I said. “Because this is how it happens when you go head to head with the law. Don’t be naïve.”

  “It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that—”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “This is a battle of wills to them. They reach out their hand, take something that’s not theirs. If they get away with it, if no one slaps them back, why would they stop?”

  “Because they have human reason and common sense?” Scott asked, dismissing me with a roll of the eyes. “Because they know that sooner or later, they’ll get caught?”

  “You’re thinking about it like an adult,” I said. “Like a grownup who’s felt the touch of mortality.” Probably a few too many times, thanks to his association with me. “They’re young. Yes, they could tell you that, of course, logically, intellectually, someday, far in the future, they will die. Because everybody does, basically, and everybody knows that.”

  “But?”

  “But that’s not how they feel,” I said. “When you’re young, you’re immortal. Death is an abstract concept, so far off that your gut says you’re immune to it and your brain doesn’t really catch up with the idea until you’re years older. They’re, what? Nineteen? They’re not thinking intellectually about death and the possibility that they’re driving up their odds of meeting it head on and losing to its gnashing teeth. Not right now. They’re feeling good. They’ve slapped the system around, beaten the man. Maybe they’ve felt the brush of death, maybe they haven’t, but until it gets driven home to them to the point where in their heart they know it’s coming, where they wake up in the middle of the night and it’s so obvious if they don’t stop that they will die, that they feel the fear of it from head to toe, like the cold sweat that they snap awake in …” I wanted to gesture, but my hands were occupied carrying him. “They won’t stop. Because why would they? They’re winning. And they won’t stop winning until the police come at them hard enough to end this. It won’t be gentle, because lives will be at stake in a way they haven’t been so far. These two are dangerous. And they’re going to provoke a deadly response to that danger.”

  Scott mulled his reply for almost a minute. “Maybe,” he finally conceded. “But I do have this question … who goes to a theme park when they’re on the run? Someone arrogant enough to believe they’re untouchable?”

  I squirmed a little, remembering a discussion I’d had a couple months back with the souls in my head. “Yeah. Someone who thinks they’re unbeatable and for whom death isn’t a big concern.”

  Someone like you, Zack said heavily.

  Jah, Eve said, piling on, what was it you told us? That no one could beat you? That you could only be killed, that they couldn’t take anything more from you?

  And I was right, I said, keeping this discussion carefully within the bounds of my head. But for me … death is an option that’s on the table.

  In your head, maybe, Wolfe said. But just like these kids, you don’t feel it breathing down your neck. It doesn’t cause you to wake up sweating and afraid in the night.

  Just as well, I hate sweaty bedsheets, I said. They’re gross. Now why don’t you all go play with each other or something?

  Oh, not again, Harmon groaned, and I saw Bjorn’s leer in my mind’s eye. I had to agree with Harmon for once.

  “So what do we do?” Scott asked, jarring me back to the real world, the one in which I didn’t have to watch the dirty goings on of Eve and Bjorn. They didn’t even like each other, which somehow made it so much worse whenever it happened.

  “You need to start coordinating a response with the FBI and the Orlando authorities,” I said. “Get them involved, let them know we have a threat. Because you and I—or you alone—aren’t going to be able to cover this. I’ve never been to Disney but I imagine it’s not a tiny place—”

  The ring of Scott’s phone interrupted me. He struggled to pull it out of his pocket, and when he got it free he made a face. “Phillips.”

  “You should take it,” I said. “We’ve been out of contact for a while. It’s possible they could have surfaced.”

  He gave me a look of disgust that told me exactly what he thought of answering the phone, but he did it anyway. “Hello? Yes? Yes, I can hear you a little better now.” I angled us lower toward the ground, trying to get us in better cell range. Atlanta was coming up off
to our left, so there was surely enough cell service at hand to keep him from dropping the call.

  Scott listened, his face like chiseled granite, and then he went slightly grey before he hit the mute button and looked right at me. “You were right. They just struck again. A bank in a town on the Florida coast.” He stopped speaking for a moment, and somehow I knew what followed would be the worst of the news thus far. “They took out a security guard.”

  “Dead?” I asked, the fear that I was about to have to break my new vow to Grandma Randall causing my heart to spike in alarm.

  “He’s in critical condition,” Scott said. “They don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  16.

  We were late to the party. I knew it even before we came in for an unobserved landing behind a self-storage place and walked over to the bank. I’d never even heard of Merritt Island, Florida, until today, but I could tell by the time we reached the bank’s parking lot it wasn’t going to be a place I associated with anything good.

  The typical crime scene was already in place when we came strolling up, probably making the cops wonder where we’d come from. They didn’t say anything, though, because they were eyeing the crowd of spectators and a couple of press people, which was smaller than you would have seen at a crime scene in a major city. Scott spoke to a sheriff’s deputy in a dark green uniform, and he let us into the crime scene, lifting the tape so we could pass under. I glanced back at the press people, but they didn’t deign to pay attention to me; just a couple reporters too busy talking to each other to notice that the most famous fugitive in America was crossing into a crime scene right under their nose.

  “It’s such a pain in the ass that I’m wanted,” I muttered meta-low to him, quiet enough that no one but he could hear me. “Makes getting places so much more difficult now. It’d be so much easier if we could just fly everywhere.”