Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)
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Prisoners
Out of the Box #10
Robert J. Crane
Prisoners
Out of the Box #10
Robert J. Crane
Copyright © 2016 Revelen Press
All Rights Reserved.
1st Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
1.
There are two types of people in the world.
In the days of yore, when we used to hang people from a gallows for wrongdoing, the first type would see that criminal swinging, tongue sticking out, face turning blue, and say, “Gosh, I don’t ever want that to happen to me.” Then they’d go live their life, taking particular care to avoid thieving, murdering, or generally causing harm.
The second type would take in that same scene, with that same dead body, face distorted in fear and agony, and think, “That’ll never happen to me.” And then they’d go on about their life, thieving, murdering, and harming anyone who got in their way.
I hate that second type.
But then again, that second type was how I had made my livelihood since the day I’d left my house for the first time. Beating the ass of metahumans who got out of line and tossing them in the stir was my bread and butter—or at least how I paid for my bread and butter. And honey, because bread and butter on its own just isn’t my jam.
Oh, and it’s how I pay for my jam. Because you can’t eat bread and butter and honey all the time.
My bread and butter and honey and jam and money were the reason I found myself hanging out the door of a helicopter over Portland, Oregon, at three o’clock in the morning when I damned well ought to have been back in my own bed. Instead, I was staring down at a four-story office building that was slightly pyramidal, as though the architect had decided upright walls were just a little too passé for his hipster soul.
“Nice sign they left out for us,” my brother, Reed, said from beside me. He was a big-ish guy, which is to say bigger than me. He was hovering just over my shoulder as I chewed my lip and looked down at this unnatural monstrosity of suburban sprawl. It was made somewhat more unnatural by a hard casing of ice that covered every single window on the first floor of the building. It looked like a glacier had run into the building and just slid around it, freezing again once it had it good and surrounded.
It was September. In Portland. The grass was green, the night cool but still at least twenty degrees above freezing, so a building with the whole ground floor encased in ice? Not normal.
“Yo, this ice is thick,” Augustus Coleman’s voice crackled in my earpiece over the wash of the chopper’s blades. “We’re talking three, four feet at least.”
“And it’s cold, too,” Kat Forrest piped up in my ear. I controlled the roll of my eyes to prevent injury. “Brrrrr!”
“Yes, ice is cold,” I deadpanned as I surveyed the building below. It was called Palleton Labs, some local concern. The ice had formed several hours ago, when the gang and I had just so happened to be in Fresno, wrapping up a local meta criminal for handover to the feds. He’d been robbing banks, battering his way into the vaults late at night and walking off with tons of cash. He wasn’t a hard guy to find, with his brand new Lamborghini parked out in front of his tenement building. When we took him down, I counted over a hundred pieces of diamond jewelry the guy had just lying out on his table, plus an eighty-inch 4k HD TV. He also had a brand new jet ski under his carport.
I had a feeling that whoever was lingering in Palleton Labs was probably not quite as dumb as our last quarry. But then, that was a low bar to clear.
“What do you figure?” Reed asked, somehow coming off like a rural sheriff in his delivery.
“I figure we bust in and bust heads,” I said, giving him some well-deserved side-eye.
“So, the usual, then?” Augustus offered. I could see him far below as our PD chopper circled, a shadow lurking outside the frozen barrier.
“Start breaking the ice,” I said. “Reed and I will meet you inside.”
“Oh, man,” Augustus said. “Hey, Kat, any chance you wanna—”
I heard what I thought was a rustle in the breeze at first, the trees below shaking, visible even by the dim light of the fluorescent streetlamps. Then I saw boughs whipping along the side of Palleton Labs, slapping hard at the ice barriers on the side windows.
“Yeah,” Augustus said lamely. “Like that.”
“We get to jump?” Reed asked, and I caught a hint of reticence from him.
I gave him a sweet smile. “You get to jump. I can fly.” And I left him behind, shooting out the door toward the roof of the labs.
“You are such a pain in the ass,” Reed grumbled, and then I heard the wind whip in his microphone as he jumped out of the chopper. The wind shifted directions behind me, coming hard out of the north. I shivered as I drew closer to the tar and gravel roof below, then touched down as gently as if I were taking a simple step off a staircase.
Reed thumped to a landing behind me, blowing up the tail of my jacket as he came down. It was like standing next to a helicopter as it landed, and my hair flew all over my face. I spat a long strand out of my mouth and rearranged it back behind my ear. “Remind me to wear a ponytail next time I fly with you.”
“That was barely a flight,” he scoffed. He was wearing a leather jacket, too. Not because we’d needed them in Cali, but because they looked cool.
“Then why were you such a baby about it before we jumped?” I asked, looking around for a roof door. It didn’t look like I was going to find one.
“Because I can’t always control my landings,” he said, sweeping left and right over the bare roof, launching off the metal ducting in a stir of wind and coming to a landing on the far side of the roof. “No entry over here.”
“Bummer,” I said, shrugging as I made my way over to the far corner of the building. “I need your help here for a sec.”
He flew up and over in a low arc about ten feet off the roof and came down, a little more gently this time. “What did you say? I don’t think I heard you.”
“I said come help me, dick.”
“What do you need help with, oh great and mighty?” he asked, smirking in the darkness.
“Something pretty minimal, and thus perfect for you,” I said, listening to the sound of trees battering against ice somewhere below. “I’m going to cut through the roof—”
“With what?” Augustus chirped from below. I could hear the boredom in his voice. Watching trees beat the shit out of an icy barricade had apparently lost its excitement already.
“With fire, of course,” I said, lightning up a finger with Gavrikov’s power. “Blowtorch style.”
“And you’re not going to burn the place down?” Kat asked, sounding like she was both mildly concerned and mildly exerting herself controlling the trees.
“I control fire, fools,” I said. “Now, Reed, get ready to vortex the roof section I cut off so it doesn’t go crashing down and warn them we’re coming.”
“Because the sound of trees hammering at their barricade isn’t warning enough?” Reed asked.
“Well, they may know that Kat and Augustus are coming, but that doesn’t mean we need to ruin the element of surprise for ourselves,” I said, kneeling down and sticking my blowtorch finger into the tar ceiling. I made it a very focused flame, cutting right through the roof and pulling it in a slow circle.
“Wait, we’re the distraction?” Augustus sounded a little nonplussed. “Like … sacrificial lambs? Because I’m guessing the thing that did this was a frost giant. You know, a Jotun.”
“Don’t be all dramatic about it,” I said, about halfway done with my cutting job. “Most frost giants are the size of normal people, and the only one I met who wasn’t was a total wuss who still had to get other people to fight his battles for him. Besides, we don’t even know what we’re dealing with. You could be two-on-one against some frost dwarf.”
“Man, I don’t want to fight Iceman Peter Dinklage,” Augustus said.
“Peter Dinklage was Bolivar Trask, not Bobby Drake,” Reed said idly, his attention on the hole I was nearly done carving in the roof. His hand was shaking slightly, and I could hear a gust pushing on the segment of roof I’d cut out, whistling through the ceiling and ductwork within. It rattled and then popped out the little circle of roof, and carried it about five feet away before setting it gently upon the tar and gravel.
I poked my head into the hole, and there was nothing but darkness. “Lumos!” I said for fun, and the fire on my fingertips sprang up. I stuck my hand in the hole and saw ceiling tiles below, along with some wiring and other stuff. I reached for the ceiling tile separating me from whatever was below and failed, my height once again holding me back. “Reed,” I said, “be a good sport and get this tile, would you?”
He was leaning over me, looking down. “It’s not gonna be that quiet. I suspect that last gust probably rattled through the ducts.”
“Over the sound of the Entish army below, who’s going to notice wind in the ceiling?” I asked, mostly joking to cover my worry. This was not quiet so far, not nearly so quiet as if I’d had a damned door in the roof I could’ve just broken and entered.
“Any meta with half decent hearing,” Reed said as he blew the ceiling tile up and out of the hole in the roof. I barely moved my head out of the way in time.
“Great,” I grumbled as I dropped down into Palleton Labs, fluorescent lighting giving me a clear picture of a white tile floor waiting beneath me. It smelled like a hospital, sort of sterile. The wall was beige but with a subtle crosshatching pattern that suggested wallpaper rather than paint. There were office doors and windows behind me, lining the outer perimeter of the building, and a solid wall to my right that suggested there was a central room or series of rooms on this level that was a little more hidden from public view.
I cleared my entry hole and Reed came in behind me, messing up my hair once more. “Okay, seriously?” I said, spitting out a strand again.
“Isabella carries a hair tie on her wrist,” Reed said, a little too proud of himself. “You know, for just such occasions.”
“She also carries a six-foot iron pole up her rectum,” I said, “and your balls in her purse. But you don’t see me doing either one of those things.” I lifted off the ground and hovered my way toward the corner ahead like a specter.
“Harsh,” Augustus said.
“Are you going to bust down the damned ice anytime soon or are you gonna let the little blond girl do all the work for you, Augustus?” I sniped.
There was a second’s pause. “I guess I kinda asked for that, but … yeah, let me mess up the landscaping here and we’ll be along shortish.” I heard a sound like earth moving, and I knew that he was finally taking a hand in busting through the ice. I liked Augustus a lot, but I was pretty sure sometimes he forgot exactly how much power he had at his fingertips. I hadn’t told him, but he was without doubt the strongest meta on the team other than myself. I didn’t want him to get a swelled head, but the day he decided to start using his powers to the fullest instead of holding back for fear of hurting someone, he was going to be a force to be reckoned with.
The sound of our teammates railing against the ice got louder, floating up from floors below, and I listened for anything closer than that. I was rewarded with the squeak of Reed’s shoe against the tile floor, and I froze, my irritation rising.
“Sorry,” he said, probably able to read my frustration in my body posture, “I wasn’t expecting an op right now.”
“Always expect an op,” I said, starting forward again. “It’s not the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Heh,” he said under his breath, so low it was a whisper of a whisper, audible only to meta ears up close.
The sound of trees and now something else—Augustus in armor—whaling on the side of the building provided a disquieting soundtrack to our forward creep. I was moving slowly so as not to abandon Reed. I cast frequent looks back as he crept along, trying to avoid squeaking as we approached the corner. The sound of boughs on ice reverberating through the building reminded me of a movie where they turned up the noise of a drum in the background, thumping every few seconds as the tension built to a fever pitch.
I waited at the corner as Reed crept up behind me, barely breathing. “You look tense,” he said as I stuck my head out. Down the corridor, light filtered out from a door to the center of the building in a thin shaft. It looked misshapen, like someone had busted through it.
“I am not all about that bass right now,” I said as the sound of thumping grew even louder, more unnerving, more irritating. It should have been a soothing sound, that of help being on the way, but instead it was grating. They were hammering so hard that I could feel the shuddering of the building all around me.
“I figured you’d be a huge fan of that song,” Reed said, and I didn’t have to turn around to hear the glee in his words.
I started to reply with a barb of my own, but something broke far below us, making a shattering noise that echoed up through the hall. “We’re in,” Augustus said, huffing a little.
“You’re in,” Kat said, doing a little huffing of her own, “I’m still behind you. Wait up, will you?”
“I will n—oh, shit!” Augustus shouted.
The building shook again, something smashing into something else. I shot an alarmed look at Reed. Kat chimed in just in time: “We have met the enemy, and he is not a frost Peter Dinklage! He’s big, Sienna.”
“Just my luck,” Augustus said with a pained grunt. “He ain’t a pushover, either. Hit me like a Space X rocket coming in for a landing on my chest.”
“Where are you?” Kat asked, puffing a little.
“Second floor,” Augustus said, grunting. “He busted me right through the—AUGHHHHH!”
This time the smashing sound was even more pronounced, clearer, and I suspected that Augustus had moved up another level inadvertently. “Augustus!” I shouted.
“Yeah,” he said, winded. “I’m coming to you. One painful-ass floor at a time …”
“Following,” Kat said. “Thr
ough the convenient, Augustus-shaped holes in the fl—AHHH!” Something shattered below. “Oops, got seen. Detouring!”
I traded a look with Reed. “We need to—”
“Help them,” he said.
“Figure out what they’re after,” I cut over him, drawing a look of indignation from my soft-hearted brother.
“You’re going to leave them to fight this thing on their own?” Reed asked, his eyebrows arching, his body tensing like Dr. Perugini had just tried to transfer that six-foot pole of hers to his ass.
“Yes, I trust them to do their jobs,” I said. “A frost giant, however big, is not going to stop Augustus and Kat. And while they’re doing that—”
“What the hell is so important here that we’re going to abandon our friends—teammates—”
“Son of a—!” Augustus shouted. The unmistakable crash of something going through a floor echoed through the halls behind us as a cloud of dust exploded in one back corner like someone had thrown a sack of flour in the air. When Augustus spoke again, I could hear him clearly, though a little echoey. “Okay. I’m on the fourth floor. Where y’all at?”
A roar followed, echoing through the earpiece and also around the corner behind us. “You go help him,” I said, “I’ll check out what the iceman—”
“Frost giant,” Augustus said.
“On it,” Reed said, darting away from me and down the hall, gusting wind and blowing my hair back again.
“I’m like, a floor behind,” Kat puffed into my earpiece. “Just hang on.”
I ignored her, secure in the knowledge my team had things in hand. A frost giant wasn’t that tough, after all, and any surprises that might be waiting behind me … well, Reed, Kat and Augustus were more than a match for them.
I turned my eyes once more to the light streaming into the corridor around the corner, and started forward again, shooting forth at high speed. I needed to know what—if anything—was waiting for me behind that door.
2.