Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

June rested with her back against the wall, breathing slow and steady. She exchanged a look with Ell, and he forced a smile. He didn’t even really know exactly what she was going to do, because she hadn’t told him fully what she intended. He had only the barest idea, knew the effect she was aiming for, but she’d flat out lied about the means she was going to use to attain it.

  Which was just as well, because he would freak if he’d known how this was really going to go down.

  She felt the tug of the extra weight in the back of her waistband. It didn’t give her a feeling of power to have the gun there the way Ell had described. It made her nervous, thinking she might blow off a buttcheek if she shifted the wrong way. She put a hand on it just the same, trying to keep it from rolling around back there in the gap between her jeans and the small of her back.

  A thump sounded outside, like someone had just dropped a trash bag from a second story window onto the pavement. It was loud enough that even the normal humans they held hostage looked up in surprise. Ell glanced out the window and screamed, “She’s here!” Which was planned, but had just enough hysterical oomph that June knew he wasn’t having to act very much. He was genuinely panicked.

  He wouldn’t have to be for much longer.

  June held tight to the gun, hefting it up out of the back of her pants, and turning it so that she faced the entry, gun pointed at the front door. She pulled herself tight against the wall, flat as she could, aided by her skinniness, and just waited, waited for Sienna Nealon to walk in the front door.

  33.

  Sienna

  The bank looked pretty buttoned up as I passed overhead one good time before landing. Someone had gone to the trouble of closing all the shades, probably due to threat of snipers or someone like me just busting through and causing a stir given that they weren’t a normal entry point.

  I didn’t like to enter blind, though, so I ruled out the through-the-window approach once I saw how things looked.

  I’d also seen a back door, but ruled that out. It was probably a surer bet, but that was the tack a SWAT team would take, busting in, causing havoc, and letting the bodies hit the floor. Not a bad idea, and certainly safer than going in the front door, but …

  My breath stuck in my lungs, my stomach churning. My promise to Grandma Randall was like a weight around my neck. If I was treating this like any other criminal matter, I’d blow in through the back door and start dropping perps.

  But I normally didn’t make promises to meta grandmas to bring their only grandbabies in as safely as I could.

  If I hadn’t been wanted by the lawful authorities of every state, I might have considered different approaches, or started shouting to them inside. Unfortunately, about that time, the shrill noise of police sirens started down the road, and I knew my time to enter the bank without causing this scene to blow up into something so much worse was drawing down quickly.

  I’d also seen June and Elliot’s SUV parked out back, which hinted at their getaway plans. I thought real hard about blowing the tires to prevent their escape, but that would just box them in. Right now they were trapped in a confined space with a bunch of civilians, and I’d already seen June’s ability to blast a cloud of toxin like some poisonous human skunk.

  Nothing about this scenario was good. Nothing about it wouldn’t be improved by a sniper with an IR scope to look through the shade-covered windows, determine where June was standing, and redistribute her brains all over the nearest wall.

  That would have been the safe move. That would have been the smart move.

  But that wasn’t the promise I’d made to her grandmother.

  Sighing again, pushed into action by the sirens drawing closer behind me, I pulled open the front door to the bank and stepped into the cubicle lobby. Elliot was already screaming, freaking out behind the counters at my approach, clearly not ecstatic to see me.

  But now I was committed, and I had to hope that maybe—just maybe—I had enough persuasive power to talk them down before this got desperately ugly. Maybe they could be shown reason. Maybe they could see the error of their ways. Maybe the feeling we’d instilled of trouble rumbling down the highway toward them like imminent death at our last meeting would be enough to make them think this through, not do anything stupid.

  Drawing another deep breath as Elliot ran out of my immediate sight, I pulled open the door and stepped into the lobby, my hand subtly cocked to toss a net as I looked left to check my blind spot—

  The roar of the gun behind me told me I’d picked the wrong direction to look first, and the pain as a bullet splintered through the back of my head and out the front was enough to shove my head forward sharply, as though someone had shoved a drill into the back of my skull. There was high-pitched whine in my ears, and then I felt other impacts pepper my body, pinpricks of pain in my back and side as I faltered, trying to turn around to look—

  Wolfe, I said as I fell, twisting and collapsing to the ground in a heap of unresponsive limbs. A gun continued to fire above me, and I dimly felt impacts along my torso and chest.

  Wolfe, I said again.

  Wolfe!

  There was no answer.

  My eyesight dimmed, and another flash followed the blooming thunder of a gunshot. This one I felt in my face, but only for a second, and then my sight faded, and I fell into infinite, all-consuming darkness.

  34.

  Scott

  The drive to the bank was quicker following in the wake of the cop cars, like a slipstream up the streets of Gainesville, Florida. He kept the pedal down, slowing only when he needed to corner, and barely letting up enough to do that.

  It took three turns down sun-washed roads before they pulled into the bank’s parking lot. Three cruisers were already set up, cops establishing a perimeter. It was all by the numbers, what was going down here.

  Then the shooting started. Scott was out of his car before the others could get clear. The cops were diving for cover behind the hoods of their patrol cars, smart to take cover behind the heavy engine blocks.

  The gunshots were loud, blasting away inside the bank, a hard club soundtrack that he didn’t like the music to. Sienna was probably already in there, he knew, and waiting for the shooting to stop didn’t even occur to him.

  He broke into a run for the door, taking note that there were no spider web cracks in the glass, no hint that bullets had come this way at all.

  They were all being fired into the bank, then.

  Something about that tore at him, and he ripped the door open with a rising level of panic, even before he saw the body lying prostrate, ahead, legs trapped in the lobby door.

  It was Sienna, blood pooling out from everywhere—from her chest, from her back, her hair was matted down with it—

  And it was pouring out of her face.

  35.

  June

  “Go! Go! Go! Go!” June shouted as they burst out the back door of the bank. They were lucky about the timing; she’d seen the cops pull up out front, but they hadn’t started to circle around back yet when she’d started shooting. As it was, she and Ell made it to the car, her on shaky legs, and him on maybe shakier ones. “Just drive!” she screamed before he could yell explosively at her for the part of the plan she hadn’t told him about.

  The part where she shot the hell out of Sienna Nealon, right in the back of the damned head.

  June felt blood sliding down her cheek. One of her shots had come bouncing back at her, but she wasn’t sure which one. She was pretty sure it was the last, but the whole chain of events felt fuzzy—scary, even. Like a violent and disturbing nightmare.

  Her hands shook as Ell put on the speed and jumped the curb, bumping down onto the road as he made his turn. There were no cops in front of them, nor behind in the mirror as June stared out.

  “Ohmig—” Ell started and stopped himself mid run-on. “What did you—what did you—what did you do?”

  June felt faint, like the blood had all rushed out of her face. It had seemed like such a
good idea, such a simple, smart way to get this heavy shit off their backs. Just deal with Sienna Nealon and they’d be home free.

  So she’d done it. She’d sat there, waiting until Sienna walked in, and sure enough, she looked the wrong way, presented the back of her head …

  And June had just unloaded on her. Fired the first shot, and then another. She didn’t even realize until something struck her in the cheek—that bullet bouncing back, she figured—that she’d had her eyes closed tight for most of it.

  “I think I killed her,” June said, and made a gulping sound of quiet desperation. She didn’t feel exultant, she didn’t feel excited, she just felt …

  Sick. Like she was about to throw up.

  “I think I just killed Sienna Nealon,” she said. Then she could hold it back no more, and putting her head between her legs, she vomited all over the floorboard.

  36.

  Scott

  “Sienna!” Scott shouted, knocking the Plexiglas door off its hinges and falling to his knees at her side. Blood was squirting out of her cheek with every pumping of her heart, but her eyes were closed, and—

  Shouldn’t she be healing? Shouldn’t that wound be closing up right now? Like it never even—

  “Sienna,” Scott said, hands shaking as he fumbled over her, trying to assess the damage. This was triage, after a fashion, the way he’d learned from Glen Parks and Dr. Perugini, way, way back in the Directorate days.

  The first thing he needed to do was—

  “Stop the bleeding,” Scott said, trying to find the most obvious wound. It wasn’t easy; she had a finger-sized hole in her forehead that could have been either an entry or exit wound, and the one in her cheek was just spouting red—

  Harmon, Scott said, concentrating as hard as he could. Harmon, are you there? Can you hear me?

  Can’t— a faint voice answered back, —think—dying— The voice sent panic into his heart, and then went silent.

  “He’s just messing with me,” Scott said under his breath. “He has to be just—”

  But the blood flow was slowing, wasn’t it?

  “No no no no no!” Scott shouted. “Why is it you end up dying with me, Sienna? This doesn’t happen when you’re hanging out with other people!”

  The geyser at her cheek was diminishing to a small fountain of red. Her face was slack, eyes closed, lost in the darkness. He looked around the bank, seeking help, but none was to be found. The customers were clutching at each other or hugging their knees, the horror of what had happened here having stunned them into silence.

  That was the net effect of seeing an execution carried out in front of you, Scott figured.

  But she wasn’t dead—yet.

  “What do I do, what do I do?” The words flowed without reason, without stopping, so fast he doubted anyone could understand them. The power of Wolfe was not healing her. She was gravely wounded. He stared at the prominent hole in her forehead, shoving his hand over it to try and staunch the flagging blood flow. He looked around, trying to see—yes, there was an exit wound. Back of the head. Or was that the entry wound? Either way, it was bleeding, and he could see—

  “Oh my …” Scott stared. He had to stop, putting a hand to his face and turning away. She was shot through the head, through and through, with a bullet having passed …

  Right through her brain.

  But that was where Harmon, Wolfe and the rest were, right? Did that mean they’d been blown out, like a clog of hair caught in the pipes when a sudden burst of pressure came along?

  Were they gone forever?

  Scott took a deep breath, then another, then realized he was hyperventilating. He had to get this under control.

  “If they’re gone, they’re gone,” he murmured under his breath. “There’s nothing I can do about that now. And if they’re gone … if Wolfe’s gone …”

  Then Sienna would have to heal herself, with her own meta powers.

  But could she do that? With a bullet through the brain, would she be able to heal—to come back from that?

  And if she could … would there be enough left of her to matter?

  The squeal of a siren in the parking lot behind him made Scott turn. He’d forgotten about all of them. They were surely still setting up a perimeter, ready to start negotiating. For all he knew, they had no idea that the robbers had fled. They might have gotten away clean already.

  But if the SWAT team came in? They’d bag Sienna Nealon right now, because there was no way she was going to fight back.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  What was he supposed to do? The first instinct, to get her to a doctor, he overrode quickly. What could a doctor do that she couldn’t, with her advanced healing? Even without Wolfe to draw on, Sienna had once grown back her entire arm overnight. What did Dr. Perugini do for her in those situations, when Sienna landed herself in the medical unit for some injury or another?

  Mostly nothing. She just sat back and let Sienna heal herself.

  But what if she didn’t heal herself? What if she was too damaged …?

  “I need to get her out of here,” Scott whispered. Whatever else might have been going on, this much was certain: no doctor could do enough for her to justify her waking up metacuffed to a hospital bed. Hell, they’d probably use suppressant on her, which would kill her ability to heal.

  Which would, in turn, kill her.

  That decided it. He sat up, ramrod straight, and gathered her in his arms. He had to get her out of here, to somewhere safe. There was nothing in the world of medicine, in the world of normal humans, that could help her—

  Oh.

  “Oh,” he said as he got to his feet. There was that.

  One thing at a time. First he had to get her out of here, through a cordon of police cars. Another bumped into the parking lot as he watched through the dull glass, and he closed his eyes. SWAT would be here soon, ready to come crashing in and subdue the bank, pacify things, make sure the bad guys were gone.

  He couldn’t be here when they came in.

  They couldn’t be here.

  “How far are we from the ocean?” Scott mused as he stood there, Sienna in his arms. Blood was already washing down his suit and dress shirt. He didn’t care. It pooled on his shoes, and he didn’t care about that, either. How far were they from the ocean?

  Entirely too far. But that didn’t matter as much anymore, did it? There was water everywhere—in the air, in the pipes, in the convenience store three doors down …

  He closed his eyes and concentrated. Took stock of all the water around him, taking care not to accidentally draw out the blood of the people in the bank since he could feel it pulsing through their veins. Before, before the power Harmon had given him, he couldn’t feel blood in a human body unless it was flowing out. It wasn’t pure enough, wasn’t close enough to water for him to hold dominion over it unless it was freely flowing. He couldn’t have reached into an unwounded body and touched blood.

  Now, though …

  He pushed into every wound Sienna had. It wasn’t much, but the stoppage would help, at least in the short term. The blood stopped seeping, started crawling back off his shoes, off his shirt, his suit, and flowed back into her as though time was reversing itself, the drips climbing back into her body. The whole pool rose into the air like gravity had quit, pouring back into her.

  And in the back of the bank, in both bathrooms and the employee break room, he seized hold of the sinks and blew them up, dragging the water out, pulling it from the toilets. Gallons were disgorged in seconds as he shredded the pipes.

  At the convenience store down the street, every single water and pop bottle in the store burst at once, all the liquid blowing out the door and holding behind the fence between the clothing store next door and the fence that separated it from the bank parking lot. For good measure, Scott started to draw every drop of moisture out of the humid air. It probably would have been heavier in summer, but even in spring, Gainesville’s air held plenty of water in its mo
lecules.

  It took a lot of effort, but he marshaled those forces to him—the water and soda just waiting past the fence, the moisture from the air outside, pulled in through the doors so that the air outside rippled like a mirage just outside the doors. And the hundreds of gallons of water that were hovering now behind him, just waiting in the air. He ignored the muttered crosstalk from the hostages in the bank, amazed and terrified.

  “On three,” he said to Sienna. “One. Two. Three—”

  He blasted the doors open with the water he’d collected, and it burst out in flood of biblical proportions. He took care to make a perfect car-shaped hole within the wall of water he sent out, and it crawled over his vehicle and washed on, dragging officers and police cars out of the parking lots as they were hit by another wall of soda and water from behind and channeled, screaming and spluttering, out into the road.

  Scott took care to make sure no one drowned; that no one’s head went under the water and soda for more than a few seconds. But he washed them out on one side of the road with a fury, cars and all, sending them out in a blockage, creating a little moat with no visible edges to halt traffic as he burst out of the broken doors and hurried Sienna to his car.

  In the shining daylight he could see her wounds so much more clearly. The plugs where he’d stopped the bleeding were like angry red dots on her face, in her clothing, against her skin. He shoved her into the passenger side door and slid across the hood and into his own seat. Jamming the car into reverse before he’d even finished starting it, he was tearing out of the parking lot seconds later, turning left to avoid the massive wall of liquid he was holding up to his right, cops and their cars imprisoned within it, struggling to the surface for breath.

  He let it all go when he was a few hundred yards away, and the wall of fluid burst like someone had broken the invisible dam holding it back. He saw it in the rearview but ignored it and the chaos that it caused in its wake.