Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “Must be nice to have friends like that,” I muttered.

  “Yes,” Michelle said. “But it leaves us with the same question—what are you going to do about it?”

  I pushed the door open, pondering my answer as I stepped back out into the smelly alley, the stink of day-old chicken in the dumpster next door almost gagging me as I went back to braving the humidity outside. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know. But I’m sure of one thing.” And now I looked back to find her watching me, intently, waiting to see what I’d say. “I don’t let the bad guys just walk away.”

  The door closed on her smile as I walked off down the alley, the horizon already starting to lighten.

  71.

  Olivia

  The overnight lady at the front desk of my motel had known a perfect place for me to go practice my skills. I hadn’t told her that’s what I was doing, of course; I’d just said I was looking for a junkyard where people dumped machinery and garbage in the desert and she’d come up with a place in about two seconds, staring at me over the end of her cigarette as I tried not to cough.

  Looking out over the rusted waste of car frames and old appliances and the occasional bag of discarded garbage, I got the feeling that maybe the lady at the desk had dumped a thing or two out here herself.

  It didn’t smell great, and there wasn’t a lot of light when I arrived, my Uber driver skeptically dropping me off with only a ‘Not sure what you’re thinking, but okay’ sort of look as we parted.

  There had to be hundreds of appliances laid out in this little gully just off the road, a perfect natural drop in the desert topography. It was like the beginning of a canyon that never got any deeper, and the frames of rusted-out, picked-clean cars interspersed through the mess didn’t help with the overall aesthetic. There were even a few old corrugated shipping containers that had rusted out, which must have taken years given the dearth of rain.

  “Okay,” I said, standing at the edge of the road. The desert air was a little cool at this time of morning, only a slight purpling in the east to give aid to my metahuman-enhanced sight. I could see all right, not great, but it’d have to do for the purposes of this exercise.

  “Let’s see if you were right, Sienna,” I whispered, shedding my cell phone and wallet, and taking a moment to bury them in the sands at the corner of a rusted minivan just a dozen paces off the road’s shoulder. I didn’t know what was going to happen over the next few minutes, but I didn’t want to find out at the expense of losing all my ID and my link to the world.

  That done, I shed my jacket and balled it up, setting it just underneath that frame, snug behind a rusted-out axle. I shivered in the cool air, then stood, sandwiched between an old Frigidaire and the hulk of the 90s minivan.

  I took a breath, in slow, out slow, and thought about what Sienna had said. I had a personal bubble that could redirect the momentum of others away from me.

  So…what happened when I redirected myself?

  “I can do this,” I said, voice shaking just a little. “I can do it. I can…” Another breath, slow in, slow out. The Frigidaire was only a few feet away. “I can…”

  I sagged. “I can stand here all day and not actually do anything.” I plopped my face into a hand.

  This was the problem, wasn’t it? I was so damned tentative, so risk-averse. What if I ran at the refrigerator and something bad happened? I hit it? Okay, I pretty much never hit anything, because of my personal bubble, but what if it failed this time?

  Well, I might end up with a bloody nose and a couple bruises. Which was a fair bit better than the lady who’d caught the accelerated splinters from the exploding bar yesterday because of me.

  “No more being a coward,” I whispered.

  And I broke into a run.

  Once upon a time, jogging in Orlando, I’d accidentally flung a man. Because he’d gotten too close, and my powers had triggered, and—well, it was a mess.

  My fault. I wasn’t in control.

  I’d never been in control. Not from the day that Roger had gotten his hooks into me.

  “I am in control,” I whispered as I flung myself into the fridge—

  My personal bubble activated against the fridge, knocking it over and sending me—

  I rocketed back, flung the dozen paces into the minivan ruin. It shuddered as my personal bubble caught on it, trying to transfer the momentum I’d picked up from the bounce off the fridge.

  I was flung, weightless, out of control, jerked in the opposite direction again as I tucked myself into a ball and shot toward a discarded chest of drawers.

  It felt like I was going a hundred miles an hour toward it, and I might have been. It flashed toward me and I was there, paused, hung in midair as my bubble worked, momentum being transferred from me to the chest, and—

  The chest of drawers launched as though it had a rocket attacked to it, shattering against another rusted-out car frame only a few feet away. It dissolved in a shower of pressed wood fragments, more dust in the desert air.

  “Ahhh,” I said, gasping after my brief ping-ponging. I touched my chest, my legs, feeling around everywhere for a wound, a pain, something, anything to suggest I hadn’t just done something completely insane and gotten away with it injury-free. “Ahh…uhm…”

  But I had. There wasn’t a spot of dust on me. I’d even managed to land on my feet after balling up into the fetal position during the second bounce.

  “Huh,” I said. “Hum. Okay. Well, that’s one thing…”

  The next test was a little more difficult. For it, I strolled up to an abandoned tire from a semi-truck, turned onto its side. I lifted it with my meta strength, testing myself, because I didn’t really do the whole ‘workout’ thing. Turned out I could lift it easily, and I did, pushing it to where one of the corrugated shipping containers sat. This one was in pretty okay shape, the beginnings of corrosion visible down the sides, but mostly hale and hearty, compared to others in the boneyard.

  I carried the huge tire in my arms, the top of it several feet above my head, the bottom of the donut arc cradled against my chest. I let the top flop down so that I held it out from my body perfectly horizontal.

  “Test two,” I said, holding it like that with some effort. It wasn’t light, especially extended in this awkward fashion. The shipping container was about twenty feet away, with nothing but small debris between me, the tire, and it. “Let’s go.”

  I thought about the times I’d used my personal bubble to blow dust off my clothing. That was exercising a form of control over it, but it was so small I’d never really thought about it as me doing something dramatically different. But it was—it really was taking control of my powers, using them actively.

  Another deep breath, another one out.

  Then I pictured myself launching the tire out of my personal bubble, straight ahead. Just like blowing the dust off myself. Except bigger.

  Lots bigger.

  The tire launched out of my hands as if slung from a catapult, hitting the container with enough force to rattle it, the boom of rubber-to-metal contact echoing for miles across the desert sands. It stuck, dented, and the lack of movability in the container forced the momentum of the tire to reverse on itself—

  It flew back at me, big and black and going about a hundred miles an hour right at my face. I made a meeping noise as it came for me, squinting my eyes shut.

  I didn’t even have to do anything this time. My bubble activated automatically, and the tire shot back the way it came, twice as hard.

  It knocked the container back a foot, making a boom that echoed like thunder over the quiet desert.

  And I stepped forward as the tire shot back at me, speed double what it had been the first time it came back.

  It hit my bubble and wavered for a millisecond, my power turning all its force—and then some—back at the container. Now there was less space between us. I took another step forward as it launched off me, slamming into the container with the force of a runaway train—

>   The container dented, corrugated side collapsing several feet inward, the container’s edge tipping a couple feet off the ground. The tire shot back at me, but by now I was strolling into it, anticipating it coming back at me—

  This time it came at me as fast as the speedster, hit my bubble and shook, shivered, and heated up in midair as my power worked to reverse its course yet again. When it left my orbit I swear it felt like I’d just launched a missile.

  It homed in on the side of the shipping container and struck, the rubber exploding, the metal shredding—

  All that force had to go somewhere, and the somewhere it chose was every damned direction. I looked away by instinct, shielding my eyes, though I knew I didn’t have to.

  When I looked back…the shipping container was blown open like a bomb had gone off inside. Even the floor was shredded into almost unrecognizable pieces. Fragments of corrugated metal no larger than the tire lay strewn and still settling against the earth and various other pieces of debris in a roughly hundred-yard circle from where they’d started.

  Of the tire…there was no trace. At all.

  “Holy sugar,” I muttered. I was only ten feet from the point of impact when it had gone off. I’d closed the distance in half, finding my courage and walking toward the trouble rather than away. I almost hadn’t realized it. “Okay. Okay, that’s…that’s two. That’s…” I broke into a grin. “That’s really something.”

  Because it was. It was kind of amazing, really.

  “Last one,” I said, and concentrated. I turned around, looking for something to bounce off of, to tie these two lessons together. My ears were still ringing from the explosion of the container, and I rubbed at one of them, hoping it’d go away. It had started high but now had moved to a faint buzzing sound like—

  “Oh,” I said, and turned around. The minivan where I’d started was only a couple dozen paces away, and I ran for it, finally putting together what that muted sound was. I dove for the rear axle and dug, unearthing my phone as I slung aside sand furiously. I might have been able to do it quicker with my new powers, but the last thing I needed was to launch my phone up into the van wreck.

  I pulled it out just as it stopped buzzing. On the screen it informed me that I had ten missed calls.

  All from Reed.

  “Uh oh,” I said, and called him back, hurrying as I pocketed my wallet.

  He answered on the first ring. “Where were you? I’ve been trying to—”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, slinging my jacket on and stumbling back up the hill toward the road. “I was just out in the desert doing—”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on in Vegas right now?” The violent urgency with which he spoke jarred me out of my apology and explanation in a second.

  “Wh-what?” I asked, reaching the edge of the road and seeing, with my own eyes, what he was talking about.

  There was smoke wafting off the Strip, black and heavy, clouding the skies in the distance.

  “It’s the speedster,” Reed said, sounding stricken over the phone. “They’re at it again. At least four people are dead. And…” His voice tightened. “Olivia…they’re calling you out. Personally.”

  The phone slipped away from my ear as I seemed to lose strength. The black cloud over the Strip was like a flag of death hanging over the sky.

  I lost my voice, felt like I was choking, couldn’t get a breath. My mouth was dry, desert dry. My skin tingled, the silence a stark contrast to whatever catastrophic events were happening in Vegas right now.

  “Where are you?” Reed asked, tinny and metallic, over the phone.

  “Miles away,” I whispered, raising it back up to my chin. “I’m…I’m miles—”

  “Stay there,” Reed said. “Augustus and Jamal will be there in a couple hours, and I’m leaving now; I’ll be right behind them. Once we’re there, we can—”

  I swallowed, and it felt like I was choking on my own fear. “More people will die by then,” I whispered.

  Reed didn’t answer for a second. “Yes. Probably. But—”

  I closed my eyes.

  This was it.

  This was the choice that Sienna had talked about.

  I could stand back and let things run their course, let Augustus and Jamal come in on the morning flight and clean things up…

  Clean up my mess.

  Or I could…

  I could…

  I balled my hand into a fist. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  “Wait, what are y—”

  I hung up on him, slipping the phone back into my pocket and then shedding it with my coat.

  The desert air, once more, seemed to slip up my sleeves as I stood in the silence for one last second.

  “Now or never,” I whispered, and I tossed my coat under the ruin of the old minivan and sprinted down the hill toward the boneyard. When I was about ten feet away, my momentum building on the downhill run, I leapt, tucking my feet beneath me and hoping that I could do this—

  —I concentrated, thinking about momentum, about speed, about force, about—

  —about the old trailer speeding toward my face at a hundred miles an hour—

  An inch away from collision, the rusty metal so close I could have stuck out my tongue and tasted it, my bubble activated.

  With a vengeance.

  I didn’t just bounce against the rusted trailer with the force of my downhill run, I blasted off from it with all the directed power I’d willed out with my concentration.

  I used my power to launch from the junkyard into the sky, taking flight across the desert, my head forward and arms pulled back like an aerodynamic spear.

  Like I was flying.

  Like she used to do.

  “Okay,” I said, cool air rushing around me as I flew toward the black skies above the Strip, nervous tingles running across my skin, “let’s go do this.”

  That thought was all I allowed myself to speak, but it wasn’t all I let myself think.

  Let’s go be a hero.

  72.

  Brianna

  She waited until near sunup to make the drive back to New Orleans, figuring it’d be easier to slip in under cover of rush hour. They were looking for her now, after all, and there was no point in making it easy on the cops by giving them a white female suspect driving through New Orleans in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t exactly stick out like a sore thumb, and might even get passed by given the right wig, but it was a whole lot easier to slip in concealed in the endless stream of morning traffic on 10.

  She listened to Debussy’s Claire de Lune on repeat the whole way from Arnaudville to downtown New Orleans. The Superdome passed in silent shadow, the rays of the sun barely touching it, orange hues cast along the sides as she turned onto Canal Street.

  The city was abuzz. There was the old Charity Hospital, grey and dead, sitting alone in its faded glory. A second line band was starting to assemble at the corner of Villiere, apparently set to march down the street in short order. It seemed early for it, but Brianna just shrugged it off.

  She was dressed as a cleaning lady, dark wig and sunglasses paired with a blue uniform of a local hotel back in Baton Rouge. She’d taken steps to gather as many different costumes as she could. She smiled, thinking of the provenance of the idea—Sienna Nealon, again. How many times during Sienna’s fugitive years had her cover been blown, and pictures of her in some new and unique style appeared in the newspapers and plastered all over the internet? So many hairstyles, manners of dress. She’d been a one-woman class in hiding, and Brianna had taken notes.

  On so very, very many subjects.

  The hotel loomed ahead on Canal Street, and she steered for it, pausing at a traffic light. She kept her head down, looking sideways out the window of her beaten-up old Honda Civic at the police officer standing on the corner, scanning the cars. He looked right at her for a few seconds, then kept scanning. Looking for her, it seemed, and he missed her.

  Excelle
nt.

  The light turned green and she accelerated, not too fast, not too slow, trying to seem utterly normal. Hotel Fantaisie was just ahead, and she surveyed the sidewalk from the light a block back as the tram rang its bells and ran along the center of Canal Street. Shops were starting to open, and pedestrian traffic was picking up.

  Still, the five or six uniformed Louisiana State Police troopers stuck out on the hotel block. They stood on the sidewalk, most of them, just watching the approaches, while a couple of the plainclothes officers tried to look casual and failed.

  Brianna had to suppress a smile; this wasn’t going to be too hard.

  She turned into the alley just before the hotel, knowing full well there’d be more cops here, and there were. Five of them along the alleyway, just trying to look like they weren’t keeping an eye on everything while they plainly were.

  The parking garage behind the hotel would be crawling with them, too. Probably at least a few in the buildings on either side of the hotel, too, for good measure.

  That was all right. She’d reached her stop.

  She pulled up next to the first officer in the alley and rolled down her window, slowly, carefully, not quick and jerky like a metahuman, and leaned out to talk to him. She put on an accent, tried to make it Eastern European, because those tended to blur together to most ears, and because with her complexion she’d have an easy time passing—at least for long enough.

  “Excuse me…what is going on here?” she asked, trying to furrow her brow in worry. She was a maid who was going to be late for work with all this congestion. That was all.