Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  “When will you be back?” That Isabella asked this at all was a measure of how much this Sienna situation had knotted her up without my realizing it. I looked back at her, and for once I could see the concern playing through the coolness she wore like a second skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was worried that I’d worry while on assignment and end up getting myself hurt, or because just the general pervading sense of concern that Sienna had gotten in trouble overseas reminded her of my own mortality. Either way, there was something here that I hadn’t necessarily seen in other departures I’d made.

  “As soon as I can,” I said gently, and leaned over to kiss her. “Ever since we took out the supply operations for that cartel that was bringing the meta serums from Revelen, business has been slacking off. We could use this payday.”

  “It’s not worth your life,” she said.

  “It’s not just my life on the line,” I said. “This crook, whoever it is—they’ve taken hostages.”

  She seemed to take this information in, and then she nodded, inscrutable. “Hurry back,” was all she said.

  “You know I won’t linger,” I said with a sly smile, and leaned down to kiss her again before I got up, heading for the closet to get dressed. I didn’t have long, after all, and I couldn’t afford to spend my time distracted about Isabella’s worry, or Sienna—whatever was going on with her.

  It was time for me to get back to work. And Sienna, wherever she was…she’d be just fine.

  12.

  Sienna

  Things were not just fine.

  Having a Bell UH-1 Huey drop down in front of your plane while you’re taxiing for takeoff to reveal lots of men with guns and rocket launchers and the like has a way of causing a great deal of clarity in the mind, very rapidly. Vague concerns get amplified, and they manifest verbally.

  Like so: “Holy shit!”

  That was the pilot, but I was thinking along similar lines. He’d slammed the throttle to bring the Cessna back to idling, and we were just sitting there, me with my hands up, palms facing inward, toward my head so I couldn’t be interpreted to be aiming a fireball at them or anything. In a situation like this, signaling surrender was the wisest course, and the only one that might save my life.

  It was weird, because as far as I knew, the US government had given up on wanting me dead or alive and was now firmly in the camp of, “Dead is fine.” They’d proven that during our last encounter in Montana.

  Yet here we were, with a bunch of Spec-Ops-looking dudes, armed for bear—no, scratch that, they were armed for a reprise of James Cameron’s Aliens, but in it to win it, this time—and all my weapons were well out of reach, in the back, zipped up in duffel bags. Not that it would have mattered if I’d had my SCAR H on my lap. There was no way, even with meta reflexes, I was raising that thing up and drilling every single one of these guys before they punched my ticket with a Stinger missile or one of the underslung grenade launchers I saw sticking out of the chopper behind me.

  “Come out with your hands up!” the loudspeaker boomed. “Do not make any threatening moves!”

  “I am all over that,” I muttered, bumping the door handle with my elbow. It sprang open, and I slid out, feet hitting the ground a heartbeat later. I kept my hands up and bobbed out under the wing, keeping them pointed skyward, and well away from the helos directly in front of and behind the plane.

  I tossed a glance at the guys in front of me hanging out the side of the chopper. They had the look of soldiers long in service. I realized, though, that whoever was doing the talking was probably in the cockpit, and I hadn’t heard any of these guys speak. For all I knew, this was a merc team. Hell, it probably was, because the US government likely wouldn’t have wanted to deploy their own forces over a friendly country. Likely. Hardly definite. We’d done worse.

  Standing under the plane’s wing, I got my instructions. “Walk out in front of the plane. Slowly.”

  I complied, taking my sweet time in order to make sure they didn’t think I was going to do something untoward. Before I’d gotten even with the spinning prop, the loudspeaker boomed again. “Pilot, shut off the engine and get out of the plane.”

  My breath stuck in my throat. I hadn’t really consulted with the guy before I’d gotten out, but I threw him a glance now. He was wearing those aviator glasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was a thin line, and there was sweat beaded on his forehead like he’d been sitting outside in Mexico City in the middle of summer, chowing down on a burrito filled with ghost peppers or worse. I got another little tingle in my belly just looking at him, and I took a long and not subtle sidestep away from the prop, and then another one, keeping my hands up as I edged away from the plane without trying to defy the orders I’d been giving by the men with guns.

  “Pilot!” the helo loudspeaker boomed again. “You have three seconds to comply or—”

  I heard the engine throttle up before the speaker had even finished delivering the ultimatum. Whoever that pilot was, he was clearly a desperate man, and he did not mean to be captured here. I didn’t know whether he thought he was going to be arrested, or bagged and dragged with me out of the UK, but he definitely panicked.

  There was no further warning from the helicopters before they opened fire. It was like thunderous Ragnarok descended on that Scottish airfield, grenades and Stinger missiles and machine guns all belching in the afternoon sun. I threw myself to the ground and tried to roll away, my hands still over my head, maintaining my surrender even as I attempted to clear the ground zero of the damned plane that was supposed to be my ride out of this sun-forsaken country.

  It was hard to separate out the cataclysmic, cacophonous noises that followed a second later. One that I heard for sure was the WHUMP! of a Stinger missile hitting the plane’s engine. A shard of propeller landed about a foot from my face, sticking out of the ground like a mile marker on the side of a highway.

  At least two grenades found their way into the Cessna’s cabin and exploded with a dull WHUMP! of their own, and then an overpressure wave jarred me from the boom as I was sprayed with glass from the windows and fragments from the body of the aircraft. One of the doors flew past my nose as I was rolling, missing me by less than a foot.

  The sound of the guns firing was like every trip I’d ever taken to the gun range, all wrapped into one. Hell, it was like every gun on the planet was firing at once, and all in close proximity to me. The two helos hosed the Cessna with fire, walking their bursts across the cockpit, the remains of the engine, shredding it as effectively as if a giant had reached down and ripped the plane apart.

  I covered my ears and came to a rest, putting my head down. I was about a hundred feet from the plane, and trying to make it very clear that I was not with stupid, that I was not making a run for anything, that I was really just trying to preserve my life and my hearing so that I could comply with whatever instructions were next going to come my way. I only hoped that whoever they had tasked with keeping a bead on me wasn’t the sort with an extremely itchy trigger finger. I had a feeling they weren’t, because I wasn’t dead yet, and by all rights, given my reputation, I should have been perforated with a thousand bullets the second after the pilot gunned the engine. Yet here I lay, palms squeezed against my ears to try and ward off what was left of the apocalypse as my ride out of here and the guns that I been counting on crackled and burned in the wreckage of the plane.

  Well, that was five million bucks I wasn’t going to get a refund on.

  Also, my situation was looking pretty dismal, unless these guys were secretly my guardian angels. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that though, because I could count on one hand the number of times people had blown up my escape plane with a million guns while trying to befriend me. Maybe even no hands. (My life was funny; it could have happened and I may have forgotten it. So many explosions.)

  “Put your hands up!” the loudspeaker blasted out again, and you better believe I had those hands up lickety split. My
ears were ringing, but I heard the command even still, and suspected it was a kind of test to make sure I wasn’t getting buyer’s remorse and thinking of throwing my lot in with the pilot. Not a hard sell considering his lot was now in flames and probably shredded to pieces back in the cockpit. I couldn’t see his remains through the flames, but I was fairly convinced that there was no way in hell he’d gotten out of there alive.

  I raised my head slightly, enough to see that the Huey in front of me had changed position. It was backing up, slowly, the pilot a real pro at handling the thing. That screamed Spec Ops to me, and the outdated Huey gave the US government plausible deniability. It damned sure wasn’t the Brits or Scots, because here on their own soil they’d fly a different bird and have an accent. I bet there wasn’t a single scrap of identification on the soldiers or the weapons that could tie them back to America, which was smart. And the trigger discipline of whoever had been assigned to shoot me in case of emergency—probably someone in the chopper behind me—bespoke of serious training and badass gravitas. A commitment to the mission and the rules of engagement that you didn’t find in a guy that was just looking to collect a paycheck and get his ass home safely. That guy and his five comrades would have doused me in bullets and called it a day. Maybe even nuked me from orbit because it was the only way to be sure.

  My curiosity was up about the guys in the chopper behind me, but I didn’t let it get the better of me, keeping my eyes squarely ahead. “Get on your knees,” the next command came, and I followed it less than a second later, without removing my hands from the air. Better safe than sorry, and I had enough ab strength to pick my ass up out of the dirt without my hands. It probably looked weird, though, like I was a snake rising up to bite.

  “Looks like you’re going home,” the voice over the loudspeaker said, and I could hear the chopper behind me throttling down, ever so subtly. They would probably put guys on the ground, then dose me with Suppressant, bag me, drag me, and off we’d go for a chopper ride to—hell, I dunno. One of the RAF stations the US Air Force staged out of over here if they were feeling cheeky. Maybe an American base in Germany, Spain or Greenland if they were playing it safe.

  They encircled me quickly, but only partially, from behind, in order to keep from making a circular firing squad. I kept on my knees, hands straight up in the air. If they were expecting me to go dragon, or launch flames, or shoot light nets out of my ass at them, they showed no sign of it. Which suggested to me…

  Somehow…they knew I couldn’t do any of those things anymore.

  It was the only explanation that made sense for this sudden change of tactics. Somehow the US government already knew I’d been disempowered, and they’d seen a chance to sweep in and take me off the board without nearly the worry I’d caused before.

  Assuming these guys were US government. Assuming they didn’t work for—

  One of the guys to my right burst into flames, his M249 SAW ripping off a blast skyward as he staggered back, burning. A guy just to my left carrying what looked like an injection gun that had a chemical vial sticking out of its handle staggered and jerked, a red laser perforating his face and replacing it with nothingness. His neck just ended above the collar, and he slumped back, body not realizing what had happened to its driver. His injection gun vaped up a second later, the plastic and metal turning to slag under the onslaught of that same meta laser beam.

  Suppressant. Right there, just a few feet away. It lit off and burned to nothingness like my hope of easy escape.

  Screams rang out behind me, and I didn’t dare look. I threw myself to the ground as bullets spanged and shot in long strings, the men who had been about to capture me all dying in seconds, bloody seconds.

  When everything paused for just a beat, I pushed my chin up out of the dirt, and rolled over halfway, just to confirm what I already suspected.

  Rose was hovering over me like an avenging angel, about ten feet off the ground, favoring me with a smile that bordered on a sneer, hands aglow with her meta powers. Instead of a benevolent goddess here to save me, though, I saw an angry one, a furious one, lording it over me that she’d swept in at the last second to keep some other bastard from getting me before she could.

  “Hi,” she said.

  13.

  Rose

  Rose awoke with the morning light peeking in between her curtains, and there was a sick feeling lingering in her belly, like she’d gotten nauseous overnight.

  Of course, she was awakening with that feeling every day lately.

  Rose lifted her head off the pillow. It had a smell about it now, the smell of hair unwashed for days, of the pillowcase unlaundered. The bed had the same scent, because her laundry had stopped being done for her and she had no desire to do it for herself.

  She sat up in bed, looking at the ceiling. Smooth, white, it had once been reassuring, a familiar thing to awake to every morning. She used to keep lying there, staring up at it, thinking about her day. Thinking about her lessons, thinking about Graham, about the village…

  Now she still thought about all those things, but…differently.

  Rose listened. Dim whispers reached her ears from outside her room. Quiet talk in the kitchen between Granddad and Mam, she decided at last. That was all they did nowadays. Quiet talk when she wasn’t around. Quiet talk when she was.

  It was all anybody did around her these days.

  She arose, putting her feet over the side of her bed. She felt sticky all over, hair still limp and tangled where it hadn’t been fiddled with for days. Weeks, maybe. She only made a cursory effort anymore to address her looks, her hygiene, because…what was the point, really?

  Rose dragged herself out of bed, still wearing the jeans and shirt from the night before. She opened the door to the hall and heard the voices in the kitchen quell. Stepping across the hall, soft as a mouse, she closed the bathroom door and relieved herself, making this one solitary concession to hygiene.

  When she was done, she left the bathroom, flushing, again, a small concession. She opened the door to silence, and worked her way slowly down the hall, shuffling, almost like a zombie, toward the quiet living room and kitchen.

  She found them standing awkwardly in the kitchen. Granddad was next to the fridge, arms folded, grey bushy eyebrows furrowed heavily, and eyes pointed at the floor. Her mam had her back turned.

  Mam always had her back turned these days.

  Rose thought about conditioned response, the theory that you became accustomed to, acclimated, trained to respond in certain ways by certain stimuli. In her case, it’d be days and weeks of silence, strained words to convey small points, and overwhelming quiet the rest of the time.

  Today looked to be no different, with the two of them silent and immobile as statues, not even looking up or turning around to acknowledge her.

  A sudden urge of wild abandon tweaked at her, like a raw nerve tinging at her spine. “Good morning,” she said, softly. In the quiet it was like a bomb going off.

  Her mam did not react, did not move. Why would she? She had a good streak going, having not spoken to Rose since…then. The day of.

  “Morning, Rose,” her granddad said, also softly. He did not look at her.

  “I think I’ll go out for a while,” Rose said. No reply.

  After waiting a good half minute, Rose went for the door. She opened it slowly, hoping someone would say something—anything, really.

  Silence was all that lingered within the house.

  The sky was sunny, for once, a peculiar turn of events if ever there was one. It had been sunny the last few days, even more peculiar still.

  Rose didn’t care for that. She wanted grey skies to reflect her dark mood. The more opaque the clouds, the better, in her view. Twenty-four hours of night per day wouldn’t have been out of line.

  Hamilton went past, on the crossroad up ahead next to the Macdonald house, and Rose raised a hand to wave, reflexively. Apparently her response hadn’t been completely conditioned out of her, but H
amilton caught sight of the motion and hurried on, not daring to stop or even look back once he realized who was waving at him.

  Rose turned to walk toward the path out of the village that she’d followed on that day—that awful day, the one that changed everything.

  The one that ruined her life forever.

  She trudged, feet against the road, the worn soles of her shoes protesting that they were thin and in need of replacement. Her feet protested, too, catching a rock that popped up through the sole. Rose grimaced, but didn’t complain aloud.

  It was the least of her problems lately.

  She was walking past Miriam Shell’s house when the door opened. Rose slowed, figuring she might try saying something. Reaching out, trying to make some human contact, at least—

  Graham stepped out through the door, pulling his shirt on. His trousers were undone, and a voice carried behind him on the wind.

  “And you can come back tonight, if you’d like.” Miriam emerged behind Graham, broad smile beamed at him. She wore a thin, silken sort of gown. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” She stepped out onto the porch and ran a hand over his bare, smooth shoulder, then, catching sight of Rose before he did, turned him around. Graham went along with it, and she drew his lips to hers for a long, full kiss.

  Rose just stood there, watching it, dumbstruck and horrified.

  A part of her, distant and in the back of her mind, wanted to scream, to cry, to do anything but stand there silently as her mind assembled the pieces that had been thrown out on the table before her like a puzzle box overturned.

  Instead, she watched in silence as Miriam parted Graham’s lips and put her tongue in his mouth, obvious as the sun in the bloody sky, and then broke from him with a wide, satisfied smile and a sidelong look at Rose to make sure she’d caught it all.

  She had. It would have been impossible to miss.

  “I’ll see you later, luv,” Miriam said, stroking Graham’s chest and letting a gentle sigh as she admired his physique. She turned and headed back inside, casting one last look of smug satisfaction at Rose.