“And speaking of details,” the muscular blonde chimed in, jerking her head. “The computer in that office, the hard drive. Remove it. Now.”
Cabe scoffed a bit, even as he slowly got both of his shoes under him and rose to a stoop. “Yeah, sure, I’ll get right on that. Anyone got a teeny tiny Phillips –?”
He didn’t get to finish his sarcastic request, because she’d unleashed a second stream of energy from her other arm again, demolishing the window between the corridor and the office she had motioned to in a shower of glass shards. The head of the beam was jagged and clawed, almost like a hand, seizing the white WrightTech computer from the desk and hauling it into the corridor.
If he hadn’t been scared for his life, and the life of his client, it would’ve been quite the show.
Watching with more scrutiny, it was easier to understand how her ability functioned. Each beam, an eerie appendage-like growth of translucent blue energy, was controlled by her arm, with the shape of the apex corresponding to that of her hand. Her left hand was set as if it were clutching someone by the throat, her right cupped in a rigid claw; the digits of the latter flexed and twisted, and in correlation, the turquoise glow around the computer started to put pressure on it, crushing the plastic and cracking the screen. It didn’t take much imagination to consider how much force those beams must be able to administer... especially as the mangled wreckage of what had once been a top-of-the-range WrightTech system was deposited gracelessly at his feet.
Second rule of Anomaly Fight Club: don’t ever, ever, EVER let ‘em get a hand on you. Sometimes for obvious reasons.
“I’m presuming that solves the problem,” she said more than asked, and behind her, Elliot made a choked noise of effort as her left hand closed a little tighter. “The drive please, Mr. Bond.”
“All right, tell me, is it the suit or the accent?” Cabe’s voice was dry as he sank back to one knee and removed one hand from his weapon in order to to strip away broken shards of plastic, metal, and glass from what was left of the machine. “‘Cuz it’s seriously just getting old now...”
“Take your time, Jeeves, I’ve heard the average human can hold his breath for a real long time,” the Anomaly uttered viciously, darkly, and again, Elliot let out a strangled cry. Cabe had wondered why he was being so uncharacteristically quiet.
His now grazed and scratched up hand hastily liberated the hard drive from its brackets and yanked it out from inside the gnarled shell. “Anything else you want while I’m here? I heard there’s diamonds in the keyboards.”
“That one,” she answered immediately, ignoring his sass. The remainder of the wall he’d taken out with his gunshot earlier came down like crystal as she snatched the computer from the radiology room, crumpled it like the first, and dropped it beside him. Elliot’s free leg had bent at the knee and his shoe was scraping against the wall, his right hand clawing desperately at the stream of light around his throat as if it were solid.
“I’d feel sorry for you, Mr. Wright,” said Cabe as he forced open the battered computer with the heel of his dress shoe, “but considering you didn’t let me in on this plan of yours to intercept the mole and mule, I’m fine with you suffering for a bit.”
“Intercept the mole?” The Anomaly snorted a short, hollow laugh as Cabe straightened up again with the second hard drive in his hand. “He was the mole.”
“He – he what!?”
The blonde smirked and finally released her grasp on Elliot enough that the young man could gasp frantically for air. “He’s been in contact with my boss for a while now about selling the serum. For quite the price, too.”
“You were gonna sell it?” Cabe demanded, his free hand very, very cautiously working its way back to his gun. By now, there was no point in calling in; Dasilva would be there in seconds and he didn’t want to alert their assailant that they had back-up on the way. All he had to do was... stall.
“Of course I – of course not –” Elliot spluttered breathlessly, still squirming uncomfortably against the wall.
“No, apparently he was trying to be clever,” the blonde snarled, punctuating the last word with another brief squeeze of his windpipe. “But it seems he bit off a little more than he could chew.”
“He has a knack for that, trust me,” quipped Cabe, daring to close a single step between himself and the assailant. Her hand lifted sharply, a clear warning.
“Now, Slick,” she ordered in an undertone that left no room for argument, “you’re going to pick them both up, paddle your ass back to the elevator, and hit the call button for me. And if you care at all for this sad, sorry excuse for an Anomaly, you’ll leave your gun here while you do it.”
“I’m sure you can empathize with my aversion to being unarmed when you’re holding my client like that.”
“And I’m sure you can empathize with how much of a first-class douche your client is.”
“Sadly,” Cabe deadpanned, “I can. But that don’t change the fact that I get paid to make sure he stays in one piece.”
“Well then,” she replied coolly, and in the blink of an eye Elliot had been thrown sideways, his body horizontal, and thrust up into the pane of glass she’d just shattered. She caught him a hair from the row of jagged, splintered glass and held him there, his left arm still bent up awkwardly between his shoulder blades as he suddenly didn’t dare struggle.
“I would strongly suggest you do what I tell you. Because I don’t.”
Third rule of Anomaly Fight Club: don’t let them use the environment around you to their advantage, Cabe was bitching to himself, as he reluctantly lowered his Glock to the ground and kicked it away. As he was moving, he took the opportunity to depress the button inside his sleeve for as long as it took to say, “Just so we’re all clear, you’re not gonna get out of the building with these drives. There’s gonna be security waiting at the bottom of the lifts.”
The intruder smirked at him cruelly. “Your version of security?”
Cabe scoffed. His Oxfords were slowly starting to take him back, back, back down the corridor that led to the elevator and vault door. He retreated in reverse, hands visible, never taking his eyes off of the other blonde. “Humans. Anomalies. You know Mr. Wright doesn’t discriminate.”
“Perhaps he should,” she said, returning his look of contempt with one of her own. “Perhaps if he didn’t still trust his life in the hands of humans, he wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Ah, great. She was one of the human-hating Anomalies. Which probably meant, cooperate or no, whilst Elliot may survive this encounter, the chances of her slaughtering Cabe on the way out simply out of spite may have just greatly risen.
Groping behind himself for the call button, Cabe held both drives against his side and watched anxiously as the intruder walked casually to join him. She brought Elliot with her, suspended several feet behind as if she were dragging him on a bright, intangible leash. Within the glow, a shard of glass the size of Cabe’s hand was pressed tight enough against the side of his neck to draw blood.
“She’s shitting herself, Sparrow,” the C.E.O. chuckled as his bodyguard came into view. “She doesn’t want you knowing, but she knows she’s set herself up.”
“I believe the pot and the kettle haven’t properly been introduced,” she spat back over her shoulder, and Elliot hissed as the glass slid a fraction against his skin.
Cabe hovered by the elevator door as they waited in silence, one hand spread cooperatively in front of him, the other clutching the naked hard drives against one hip. He rocked awkwardly on his heels, just a little. “Well. Um. It’s been fun, I’m really glad we could all get together, we should do it again sometime...”
“You don’t have to fill the silence,” the blonde growled at him, her patience more than wrung out at this point by both men and their mouths.
And she was right. Cabe didn’t have to fill the silence.
Because, in his earbud, someone else was more than happy to do it for him. A quiet, rough, fem
ale voice, speaking at a volume so low it was almost as if they were worried about being heard by someone. Someone very, very close by.
Maybe the other side of a pair of sliding doors, for example.
“Thirty-third floor recurring – fire, pain, bed and bath.”
The elevator chimed softly behind him, and he stepped aside, casting a quick glance behind him –
But it wasn’t Agent Dasilva, with the bottom of that sleek black cocktail dress shredded for dexterity and her twin guns drawn at her sides.
It was Ronnie.
With her snug, gray yoga-pants tucked into her old Doc Martins. And Hakeem’s drastically-modified Carl Gustaf M3 rocket launcher slung across one skinny shoulder.
Twenty
Veronica Moss just smiled – a creepily, eerily innocent thing on her pretty, heart-shaped face.
The upgraded, spray-painted canon on her shoulder gave an unholy hiss, spurting steam, before unleashing a gigantic, glorious plume of smoke and fire and fury in a single, epic bolt at her target. The rocket, likely one of the ones Agent Faraj had specifically designed for indoor use, hit its destination at full-force – it plowed into the blonde Anomaly’s midsection in a flurry of flame and fluorescent blue light, the pressure of it driving her the entire length of the corridor and mercilessly hurtling her body against the reinforced back wall.
“Ding,” was all Ronnie said in response: the tiniest, softest sound. A perfect homage to the tone of the elevator itself.
The instant the missile had struck, and the Anomaly had withdrawn her powers to shield herself, Elliot and the glass shard had been released from her supernatural grasp and plummeted seven or eight feet toward the floor. Blood stained the collar of his shirt, and the skin of his neck and face was bright red, but other than that he seemed mostly unharmed as he gathered himself together and rolled onto his knees.
Of course, despite it all, he was grinning from ear-to-ear.
“Now that,” he declared, “was old-school stylish. Well played, Science Girl.”
Ronnie twisted her knees and ankles in a polite curtsey, then waved her less loaded-down hand to urge both suited men into the elevator. The area of the curved wall directly behind where the young agent had ignited the rocket launcher was charred and black from the heavily-reduced back blast, which caused Elliot to scowl and roll his eyes as he scrambled without much of his usual grace toward the car.
“The two of you are going to destroy my office playing your little spy games, you know.”
“Will you shut up and move!?” sputtered Cabe, giving his client a firm nudge from behind to hurry him forward. He was feeling naked and vulnerable without his gun, and his first action the instant he was safe on-board the elevator car was to retrieve the spare from his ankle holster.
“Dasilva’s on her way up, Flint’s meeting us in the lobby. W.A.R.D.’s sent out the reinforcements we had ready. Are we really gonna leave her up here?” Ronnie was asking with her face twisted sourly as she worked solo to reload the rocket launcher from the satchel slung across her back. “Doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of the whole secret lab thing?”
“No serum on site, and Sparrow’s got all the good stuff,” announced Elliot, wearing the shit-eating grin to end all shit-eating grins. “I’m a smart motherfucker.”
“Not that smart,” Cabe griped under his breath, and almost as if on cue, at the far end of the laboratory, the smoking heap of dust, concrete, and flesh that was their assailant gave a snarl of effort and hauled itself inelegantly to its feet. Her entire body seemed to be breaking out in those glowing blue stripes beneath her armored bodysuit, the skin of her arms almost entirely swathed in furls and sparks of bright, white light.
“Down, please,” Cabe managed weakly as, one powerful leg after the other, she began hurtling through the lab toward them in a streak of bioluminescence.
In the same torturous cliché he had seen play out over a hundred times in movies and on television, Cabe flinched in anticipation as the reinforced doors of the elevator slid inch by agonizing inch to meet in the middle. And they were going to make it, too, he was sure of it.
That is, at least, until a flash of that same brilliant white light sliced through the barely-ajar doors, barreling into Cabe with the force of a battering ram. He cried out involuntarily as all of the air was forced from his body; the strangely-tangible energy slammed him back against the wall of the elevator car once, twice, before binding itself snugly around his midsection and wrenching him forward into the elevator doors.
“CABE!”
Ronnie’s shriek rattled around in his head as the successive blows stunned the Field Agent into a thick haze. It felt like there was a solid steel bar wrapped around his waist, its grip solid and unyielding. It began to constrict, crushing his chest and stomach and impeding his ability to catch his breath after being winded before. Shit... shit!
Elliot reacted instantly; he slapped his keycard down onto the control panel screen, simultaneously pressing the Door Close button with the thumb of the same hand. Ronnie only stood staring in abject horror a few seconds longer before her adrenaline snapped her into action.
As for Cabe, well... after some of the things he’d witnessed, and with his own eyes too, he’d learned long ago to stop questioning the realism and plausibility of what he saw on the field, and just accept it. Repudiation was suicide, remember. There’d be time for science later.
Radiant fingers, bright as the sun, crawled their way inside one jammed door and began wrenching it away from its partner. Elliot growled and threw his body weight forward to try and help the doors close, his right hand still holding his keycard and the button down to enact the emergency-close protocols Cabe had learned about during his first walkaround. Ronnie’s hands, along with Cabe’s own free one, clawed and ripped desperately at the supernatural beam of light that had wound itself around his midsection to very little avail. Despite the fact that they could interact with it as a solid, at had no creases, no cracks, and no weak points.
Second rule of Anomaly Fight Club...
The bizarre appendage had him pinned to the top of the barricade she was trying to wrench open, in such a way that he could see her sneering at him through the inch-wide gap. Her face was glowing that same brilliant, stark white, more than close enough that he could feel every breath against the skin of his cheeks.
“Drives – please – Slick...”
“Sorry, elevator’s full, elevator’s full!” Cabe turned his attention away from struggling with his bonds in order to assist Elliot, who was still trying to shove the doors violently closed amid a horrific alarm from below his keycard on the control panel; the flats of his hands slipped and smeared desperately across the smooth, metal, bulletproof doors, unable to get a decent grip. The fingers of Cabe’s free hand pulled at the barrier, his Oxfords slipping against the smooth metal as they fought to do the same. Any pressure, any purchase either one of them could grasp, they clung to it for dear life.
“Gun! Gun!” Cabe was hollering frantically at his handler, kicking his ankle back in her general direction for her to access it. Setting off the rocket launcher was too risky in the enclosed space, not when the gap in the door kept moving and changing its girth with the struggle, but a small handgun would be just dandy.
Ronnie caught the hem of his trouser leg on the third attempt, and had just reached to draw the weapon from its holster when Cabe’s body and the gun were both suddenly shoved violently out of her reach and slammed full-force against the back of the circular elevator. Once, twice, and again --
“FUUUCK!”
The Field Agent’s ungodly yell of pain echoed not only within the confines of the car itself, but the entire way along the elevator shaft, dropping down to the basement and ricocheting up as it reverberated throughout the hollow metal tube. There was a deafening splintering sound to accompany it, as the wall behind Cabe gave way to the pressure and he was thrust through it, hard, and smashed against the twin sets of emergency rungs that
lined the hoistway wall.
Dazed and disoriented, and quite possibly also a little broken by now, Cabe was vaguely aware of his companions shrieking two different versions of his name at him from what seemed like a mile away. Then, he became acutely aware of his predicament: still clutching both of Elliot’s prized hard drives to his stomach, suspended outside of the car some four-hundred feet above nothing but plunging darkness and eerie purple lights, which were blinking at him from within the abyss like lazy, synthetic fireflies completely irreverent to his dilemma.
Second rule, fucking second rule...!
“Drives – PLEASE!” came the snarl from their Assailant, through several punctured layers of wood, plastic, and metal. The beam of light around Cabe’s stomach squeezed tight enough to draw an involuntarily noise from him, before slamming him against the rungs of the shaft-way again. “NOW, Wright! Or I’ll rip him in TWO!”
Cabe’s head was whirling from both physical shock and the lack of oxygen, as breathing started to become a chore. Shit... I’m gonna pass out up here... but I can’t drop the damn drives... c-can I...?
“Just an F.Y.I., Sparrow –” Elliot’s voice was strained, likely because he was still struggling with the door, but still served to answer the unspoken question between the two men whose chemistry had developed considerably over the past week. “– I know letting go seems like the easiest solution here, but considering that’s four years of research, if there’s an alternate way out of this mess... grab onto something!”
It was as if the universe didn’t think the two W.A.R.D. agents had endured enough surprises for one evening.
From within the lift car rattled a colossal boom, not unlike a thunderclap. At the same time, or maybe a few milliseconds later, a ball of hot-pink light and fuchsia sparks burst from the jagged gouge in the side of the car, the static like needles against his face. He grunted and threw a hand up to shield himself – which reminded him of exactly what his client had just said to him. Something about grabbing onto something.
Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives Page 30