Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13)

by Robert J. Crane

  Scott had one purpose, and one purpose only—to get Sienna out of here. To get her somewhere safe.

  To get her well.

  He dialed his cell phone as he drove. “Pick up, pick up,” he muttered as it rang, as though uttering a prayer.

  And on the third ring, it was answered.

  “Hey, it’s me,” he said before they’d even had a chance to finish saying hello. “I need your help.”

  37.

  June

  Ell drove and June just stared out the window as they headed down the interstate, trees passing in a blur. They kept going north, Gainesville feeling far behind them even though they were only passing the last Gainesville exit now. The car reeked of her sick, sitting in the floorboard in a whitish puddle that shuddered every time Ell changed lanes roughly. They hadn’t said anything since she’d thrown up, because what the hell was there to say?

  She’d killed Sienna Nealon.

  Done what no one else could do.

  And for some reason … it felt like she’d been hit with the worst damned fever she’d ever caught. Not that she caught fevers anymore. That was non-meta stuff. Or kids’ stuff, for metas who hadn’t manifested yet.

  “What the hell do we do now?” Ell asked, voice shaky. He was barely holding it together, but he was driving eighty-five in a construction zone where the signs warned sixty was the speed limit.

  “Just keep going,” June said, her own voice shaking. “Get us to Valdosta in Georgia, maybe we can stop there for a while. Change cars or something.”

  “Hell, June,” Ell said, thumping his skull back against the headrest, hard. “Bae …” he said softly. “You really did it, didn’t you?”

  “Yep,” she said in quiet horror. Well, there was no taking it back now. Felt like she’d crossed a line. But she’d been pushed there, hadn’t she? Like pride had demanded it.

  Pride had demanded she kill the most powerful meta with a bullet to the back of the head.

  June bent forward and threw up again, her already empty stomach protesting that there was nothing left to give, waves of stinking bile causing Ell to crack his window and gag himself.

  When she was done, they fell back into silence. That carried them ten miles, and June’s brain was working about as well as a dull pencil, just scratching the thoughts out slowly.

  I killed Sienna Nealon.

  Shouldn’t that be …

  Shouldn’t I be …

  Isn’t that …

  … Good?

  But the wave of nausea came at her again, and she only just kept herself from retching once more. No, it didn’t feel good.

  It didn’t feel any good at all.

  38.

  Scott

  He drove out of town until he found one of those cheap motels, the kind that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the seventies. Tumbling-down red shingles marked the triangular roof in the center of the wide building, where the lobby sat between two wings of rooms that stretched out in either direction like arms from the body. Three of the doors were open on the right side of the building, maid carts sitting out to suggest they were being serviced. A spattering of cars were in the parking lot, and the sign declared that they both had vacancies and that the room rate was $49.99 per night.

  Scott pulled in and checked in, leaving Sienna alone in the car for a few minutes, his mind on holding the blood in her body so it didn’t spill out in every direction. The clerk was friendly, helpful, and entirely responsible for carrying on both sides of the conversation. Scott didn’t say much of anything unless required, handing over his ID when asked, paying in his father’s company credit card and not caring, signing his father’s name with careful aplomb—his dad wouldn’t care anyway, if he even noticed. He always covered Scott’s expenses when asked. And even when not, because he still hoped his son would join him in the family business.

  Scott pulled the car around to his room, and got out, opening the red door and propping it with a small block of water he summoned out of the bathroom sink. No one was around, but he would have barely cared if they were. Only the keenest observer would have noticed what he was about to do, anyway.

  Sienna opened the passenger door and stepped out, faltering a little as she stood. Her eyes were firmly closed, her head lolled just slightly, as though she’d woken out of a long sleep in the car and decided to crawl into bed in the hotel without fully waking. It was the best he could do, controlling her by the blood in her veins. She lurched forward, awkward steps carrying her over the threshold under what looked like her own power.

  Scott strained. This was pushing even his limits. If she’d been conscious or struggling, there was no way he could have maintained this flimsy hold over her blood without disastrous results.

  He walked her over to the bed and let her collapse, his own breath coming now in long, heavy breaths from the exertion. He dissolved the block in front of the room door and it swung closed of its own volition, slamming noise echoing in the still room.

  “Okay,” Scott said, standing there, checking the plugs he’d made of her blood, trying to keep it all together. The flesh was starting to knit itself together in her body, and even in her brain, but slowly. Painfully slowly.

  Dangerously slowly.

  She said nothing. She did not stir. She simply lay there, on the dirty bedspread, unmoving, eyes closed. A simple twitch came a few seconds later, the most life she’d exhibited since he’d whisked away from the bank.

  “Are you in there?” he asked, standing sentinel over her. “Sienna?”

  She still did not answer. And as he stood in the darkness, his loud breathing and her soft his only company, he wondered if she ever would again.

  39.

  Sienna

  “I’m leaving the agency,” Scott said, looking me right in the eye as he said it, his face carrying that morose, “I’m worried what you’re going to say but this is really bogging down my mind, man,” look that he had when he had overthought something.

  For my part, I just stared back at him, for a full second, trying to decide how best to react to this particular stunner that wasn’t all that stunning.

  “Oh, for the sake of …” Gerry Harmon said, looking around the scenery. We were in my old room at the agency, before I’d quit, before it’d been reduced to rubble in an earthquake, and before it had been, uh … toxified and shattered by me being imprisoned in my own body …

  “You really have a dramatic life,” Harmon said again, looking around. The scene seemed to have been paused, Scott staring into my eyes with hope and fear and—hell, who knew what else was going on in his mind?

  “You know,” Harmon said in severe annoyance. “This is his memory we’re in.”

  Oh. That explained it.

  “How long ago was this?” Harmon asked.

  “Why are you asking questions you know the answer to, telepath?” I fired back.

  “My telepathy isn’t working at the moment,” Harmon replied snottily. “Someone got herself shot in the back of the head like a moron. Mind reading requires a mind to read from, you know.”

  “Then why are you still able to do it?” I jibed, realizing that I kind of insulted myself with that one, since he was nominally using my brain as a base of operations.

  Harmon made a loud, guttural noise to express his displeasure. “Part of me wishes I wasn’t able to, because it’s really quite dull reading what you’re thinking all the time. I used to spend my days with the brightest of the bright, the most capable and engaged minds. The front row, if you will, focused on policy and solving the great problems of the day—”

  “Sounds pretty boring,” I said, stepping out of my place in Scott’s memory, leaving him and his puppy dog eyes frozen in time.

  Harmon shot me an irritated look, pretty much the only kind he seemed capable of, at least recently. “So you’re going to leave it off like this? Without playing through the rest of what happened?”

  “Aww, did I leave you on the cliff? Poor baby.” I looked
around my old room. It felt homey in a way I hadn’t experienced in a while, and a sudden tug of sadness overcame me. I didn’t have this home anymore and I didn’t have my old house anymore—

  Hell, I didn’t belong anywhere anymore.

  “Of course, I know how this ends,” Harmon said, plainly trying to conceal his obvious interest in watching things play out. “But … you’re a terrible conversationalist and I’d rather watch this trainwreck unfold with my own eyes than try and kill time until you die with conversation.”

  I blinked at that. “Until I die …?”

  He stared back at me, dark eyes bereft of their usual amusement. “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You got shot in the head. Do I need to draw you a map?”

  “But I’m not dead.”

  “Very perceptive.”

  “I’m a meta,” I said. “I’ll heal.”

  “You know what an anagram for meta is? Meat.” He still didn’t smile. “You know what the common thread between us and the humans is? We all become meat, eventually. We all rot, eventually. No one lives forever, Sienna. Not me, plainly. And certainly not you. You always said you’d either live to see everyone you care about die around you or you’d go out quickly and violently.” He looked around the room, as though searching for something. “It appears to have been the latter.”

  “I heal pretty fast.”

  “You heal fast with Wolfe,” he said. “By yourself … you do all right. But I question your ability to fix a giant hole through the middle of your brain. Traumatic brain injury, or, if you prefer—a gaping hole in your head?” He poked a finger at the side of his skull to illustrate. “Why do you think it’s just you and me in here right now?”

  “Wolfe?” I asked quietly. “Gavrikov? Zack? Eve? Bastian? Hell, Bjorn?

  Harmon smiled tightly. “Should I sing ‘Just the Two of Us’? Or have you gotten the point?”

  “I bet your voice is atonal and awful, and somehow you’d probably make that song sound terribly smug. I don’t want to chance it.”

  “Have it your way, then,” Harmon shrugged. “Still, doesn’t change things. You are dying.”

  “I can heal.”

  “Bet you’ll still be singing that song at the moment of your death,” he said, plopping down on my bed. It didn’t move under his weight, the bedspread stayed perfectly still, like he wasn’t there at all. “It won’t sound smug, though. More … scared, I think.”

  “Why do you think I’m dying?” I asked.

  “Because the bullet, when it passed through your brain, tore out parts that you won’t easily be able to heal on your own,” Harmon said. The lights flickered around us. “Connections that allow your body to heal, allow the normal toxins we produce to be purged. That allow you to speak to your guests.” He tapped his own head again. “In short … that bullet hit vital systems, the ones that allow you to walk and talk and breathe and be a general pain in the ass. Without them …” He patted the bed. “You won’t move. You won’t wake up. You’ll slowly drown in the poisons your body produces, strangling the last of your fleeting and frankly never-all-that-impressive brain activity. And I get to watch it all happen and accompany you into the abyss.” He made that sour face again. “Fortune smiles, and it is a razor-toothed wolf with claws bent on dragging us out of this world screaming.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like fortune,” I said, my breath catching in my lungs.

  “It is what it is,” Harmon said with a grim smile. “And what it is … is death. Even you can’t stop that, Sienna.” The lights flickered once more. “And it is coming … soon.”

  40.

  Scott

  The beating of her heart was slowing down, hour by hour, and all Scott could do was sit there, not even holding her hand, as the time wound down. The room stank of rot, of a fetid body slowly slipping toward death. It probably smelled in here before they even arrived—he couldn’t recall now—but Sienna’s slide, her breathing running shallow—all of it conspired to make the room reek of an end coming, and not a pleasant one at that.

  His phone started to buzz and he answered it without thinking, hoping he knew who it would be.

  It wasn’t.

  “Where the hell are you?” Andrew Phillips barked in that rough, emotionless tone he projected without effort.

  “Out,” Scott said, yanking the phone away from his ear and flipping through the settings to make sure the GPS was disabled, the way he’d left it. It was. “Why?”

  “I just got a report from a crime scene in Gainesville, Florida,” Phillips said tightly. “They say Sienna Nealon showed up where those two idiot kids were robbing a bank. Witnesses indicate a struggle of some kind. Nealon got shot. You were there. You took her out of there.”

  “That sounds far-fetched,” Scott said, mind wanting to race but hobbling dully instead, replies coming at half-speed. How was he so tired? All he’d done was sit here.

  “The local police report getting hit and entrapped in a wave of water and soda.”

  “Weird.”

  “You assaulted local officers.”

  “That’s a strong charge,” Scott said. “I hope you’ve got some proof.”

  “You’re aiding and abetting a known fugitive.”

  “Oh, get over yourself,” Scott said, shaking his head. “You know she’s innocent, that Harmon trumped up all that bullshit. You’ve seen the evidence—she got attacked in Eden Prairie. She defended herself against a mob of people she put in jail who were attacking her, and to the unaffiliated observer it looks an awful lot like she was trying to save her own life against people our government let out of jail.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Phillips said. He was just dull and neutral enough that he was almost convincing. “We have a finding. We have warrants. You have a job to do. Bring her in.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Scott said, pointedly not looking at her. “And I kinda doubt you have security footage of any kind to back up what you just accused me of.”

  “Just because we can’t see her face on the footage doesn’t mean we can’t come after you with warrants,” Phillips said. “We have witness statements. You want to be careful which side you choose right now—”

  “I’m on the side of justice, you jackass,” Scott said. “Just because you want to deny what happened in Eden Prairie because it’s politically convenient to keep your wagon hitched to Harmon’s party, don’t expect me to lie and close my eyes and pretend I don’t see evil.”

  “She’s a murderer.”

  “So were you,” Scott said. He went on into the stark silence. “Don’t you remember? You were going to have Guy Friday kill her when she was comatose in the medical unit at the agency.”

  “She was a clear and present danger to the safety of—”

  “Just like those meta prisoners from the Cube were a danger to her?”

  Phillips did not evince any emotion in his reply. “You can’t honestly think this is going to turn out well for you.”

  Scott snickered. “Why? You can’t prove I’ve done anything wrong. That bank was dark, your surveillance footage is borked, I doubt you can scrape together a witness outside the bank who saw anything, and even if you could, civil service laws are going to make it a real hell for you to fire me or even tar me with a bad recommendation for my next employer. So … what are you going to do? Good luck making your case in court, your impotent whinings aren’t going to get me to come in or whatever you’re wanting me to do … hell, there are federal employees under indictment still working, so … what? Whatcha gonna do, Andy?” His expression hardened. “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to fuck right off, that’s what.”

  “I—”

  Scott hung up. “Yeah, I don’t care,” he said, and for the fiftieth time in the last two hours, he took up the edge of the ragged white bedsheet and placed it against Sienna’s wrist, using it to insulate himself from her skin as he took h
er pulse. He counted the beats …

  They were still slowing.

  She was still dying.

  The phone started to buzz again, but this time he looked at the caller and when he saw it was Phillips, he did not answer. He thumbed the switch to keep it from rattling against the bedside table and leaned in, embracing the silence, counting the minutes and hoping the help he had called for would not come too late to save her life.

  41.

  Sienna

  “Are you going to tell me what happened here?” Harmon asked with breathless impatience. “Or do I have to die of boredom before I die of your brain damage?”

  I looked around the frozen scene, Scott stuck in place where I’d left him. This was his memory, but I had this one as well, from my side of things. I stepped out of myself for a moment and looked through his eyes.

  God, I looked ragged. Thin, even. Not that it would take much compared to how I was now.

  “I dunno. A few months after we beat Sovereign, I guess.” I was puzzling over it; time had almost lost all meaning at that point in my life.

  “Yes,” Harmon said, “when the rats were already abandoning the sinking ship.”

  He wasn’t wrong, though he was being a bit crass. Kat and Janus had left first, signaling their desire to move on. Zollers had gone next.

  And, of course, Scott.

  “You look really energized here,” Harmon said with blossoming sarcasm. “Is this during the period when you were running yourself ragged trying to protect the earth after you’d saved it?”

  “It was the period when I would have happily murdered your Secretaries of State and Homeland Security,” I said, looking at the dark circles under my eyes. I probably didn’t have those now, so recently off my beach vacation, though the spare tire around my waist maybe made up for them. My stomach rumbled as if to underscore the point. “You know, because they offered my agency’s help to all these skittish world and local law enforcement agencies, when everybody seemed to think there was a dangerous meta hiding under every bed.”