Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  An explosion signaled that the first chopper had blown up, probably. I was on the other side of the buildings now, but it came through loud and clear. Nothing those military guys had been carrying could have made a boom like that, and I doubted it was the Cessna’s aviation fuel going up, though I suspected that was coming soon, too.

  “SIENNA!” Rose shouted, voice booming over the airfield. “Where did you go?”

  I spotted a gully hidden just beyond the parking lot of the admin building, the midday sun sliding behind the clouds. I wasn’t going to have long. Speeding for the gully at meta speed, I hoped—hoped—hoped that the logic I’d followed in drawing up my plan B, that straightforward thinking and scouting was about to pay off in the form of an ace I was going to pull out of my sleeve unexpected.

  A drainage culvert, only a few feet wide, yawned open at the bottom of the gully, and I sprinted for it, launching myself inside as Rose shouted, still a ways off, “Where are yeeeee?” all singsongy and crazy.

  I hit the ground inside the culvert and didn’t wait. It was mostly dry, a hint of moisture touching my elbows and running up my body, down my chest, all the way up my thighs to my feet. I lay longways in the culvert, only an inch or two of clearance to my left, and maybe a little less on my right. If I raised my head up, I’d bump the corrugated metal above me, so I kept it down and started belly-crawling as though my life depended upon it.

  Because it damned well did.

  “SIENNA!” Rose cried. “Are ye in the woods?” The unmistakable sound of a blast of fire being unleashed, and another, and another, made their way, muffled, down the tunnel. I was in about a hundred yards already, speed-crawling, and judging by the tiny pinprick of light in the distance, I had about five hundred more to go. The culvert had a downward slope, being meant for drainage in this hilly country, after all.

  Lucky for me, it didn’t look like this part of Scotland had experienced torrential rains in the last couple days.

  “Come out, come out!” Rose’s voice was getting fainter. “You can’t hide from me, luv. And if you don’t come out, you’re just going to burn to death, and that’d be a shame. I want to have words with you.”

  She wanted to have words with me, all right. Or at least one word:

  Death.

  I was wise to her game, though, and while fully aware that I couldn’t outpower Rose—not now, anyway, with my order of weapons burning in the Cessna and my chance of grabbing Suppressant melted to slag—I picked up my pace and started to sink into my own head as my body got into the rhythm of crawling.

  My stomach bumped against rough, jagged rocks, and so did my knees, my stolen pants not doing a lot to protect them. I could feel the bruises forming, the steady aches beginning in the bones where I was thumping down hard, over and over. My elbows were complaining too, and I was covered in grime from head to toe. The light in the distance was getting brighter, though it was doing so slowly enough that I wondered if I’d get out the other end before Rose got wise to the fact I wasn’t hiding in the cluster of trees she thought I was.

  I didn’t dare breathe very loud for fear that she’d hear it, magnified, from some distance. Thinking, though, that was an even greater hazard. She had to have a telepath available to her, didn’t she? She’d mentally jammed Harmon when he’d been in my head, and we hadn’t been able to read the minds of any of her thugs, either. Harmon had been pretty firm that an empath couldn’t do that the way she had.

  So…if she could read my mind…why wasn’t she on me right now like a tick on a hound?

  I put that thought aside, because I couldn’t suspend my escape on a premise that might have been false, the idea that she was some all-knowing force. Maybe she had a telepath, maybe she didn’t. Maybe her telepath was weak and couldn’t have read Guy Friday’s meager thoughts.

  But…wouldn’t she have broken Harmon by now?

  I couldn’t look back, but I kinda wanted to, not that it would have done any good. What I really wanted to do was have looked back when I had been running away from the conflagration that was Rose’s “rescue” attempt. Those Spec Ops guys had lit her up good, but she seemed to be flying around fine now. How’d she pull that off? Some kind of meta power that turned away bullets? Some ability to create a shield around herself with energy that dissolved them? I’d seen Gavrikov put up a wall of flame that melted bullets before they could harm him. Did she have something similar?

  Or was she now in possession of Wolfe’s healing powers?

  The light was growing brighter ahead, and my knees and elbows and chest were damned sick of being rubbed roughly against uneven ground and rocks that had washed their way down this culvert only to get lodged in the dried silt at the bottom of the pipe. I was probably only a hundred yards from the end now, and though I could hear Rose shouting faintly in the distance, I could no longer tell what she was saying. My entire world was the pipe, and only a dull hum pervaded this place, that and my labored, steady breathing as I exerted myself to GTFO of here as quickly as I could.

  The air was stale, and dry, and even though I’d probably only been crawling for five minutes, it felt like I’d been in this darkness forever. My head was still spinning, and another question presented itself. Rose had turned an entire Police Scotland station against me back in Edinburgh, and she’d done it without even having to expose herself as the villain pulling the strings. How had she done that, if not telepathy?

  I had another theory, of course, but it now had a big hole in it. There was a type of meta called a Siren. I’d never met one myself, but an old friend of mine—Breandan, an Irishman I’d met the first time I’d come to the UK—had a girlfriend who he claimed had that power. I had no reason to doubt him, because she’d died in the war, taken by our enemies and killed, like so many metas had been. He’d said that she could control men with the sound of her voice alone—not women, only men—that she could wrap them around her finger surer than any seductress.

  If there was a male counterpart to those powers, kind of in the same way that my powers had a male counterpart, an incubus, then Rose could have absorbed those, and that was how I explained the fracas in the station in Edinburgh.

  Except…

  If Rose had the power to compel obedience by speech, or by using her mind (telepathy)…

  Why the hell hadn’t she used it on those Spec Ops guys just now? Or me? Why bother wasting time fighting them or chasing me?

  Unless she didn’t have those powers.

  I was getting closer to the light now, and it had morphed from a pinprick to the size of a bowling ball. The culvert was reaching its end, and the dust I was stirring up with each scrape of my elbow against the ground was puffing up in my face. I couldn’t see any water at the end of the tunnel, just light, and I had to concentrate to keep my body in its rote habit of crawling.

  Behind me, the faint sound of Rose’s fury still echoed, as I pulled myself from the hole in the ground and got to all fours. I sucked in a greedy breath of fresh air, smelled the greenery all around, and looked up at the iron grey sky above. I’d come out in a copse of trees, a little mini-forest down the hill from the airfield. Ahead of me, the dried-out drainage path went on, down to a pond.

  I stood there, trying to orient myself by the sun. I didn’t dare say anything, afraid that she was listening somewhere in the distance, and that even the slightest sound would stir her to my presence.

  Maybe she hadn’t tumbled to the idea that Harmon was a powerful ally that could help her immensely yet. Maybe she didn’t have any other telepaths. Maybe—

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. If I was lucky, she was just being dumb, and was ignoring the mind reader in her midst.

  But I couldn’t count on luck.

  I didn’t bother to brush myself off, because I was just going to get dirtier in the next little while. I looked back at the culvert, the little metal tube sticking its way out of a concrete earthwork, and then set my course—due south.

  Let’s go, let’s go, I said in my own head
as I broke into a run. Not a hard sprint, but a metahuman jog, one that would cover some serious ground. I forgot for a moment that I would receive no answer, and I tried to bury my disappointment—my loneliness—at the lack of reply somewhere deep inside under the fatigue, under the weariness, and under most especially the gnawing, creeping sense of fear that seemed to get larger with every confrontation with Rose.

  15.

  My heart was pounding, a relentless, steady rhythm, the only companion I had within my own body anymore. Listening to it beat out its fury at this string of abuses—Rose’s ambush of my plane, crawling through a culvert for five hundred yards, and now this—I’d probably run four or five miles, heading south—was strangely soothing now that my head was emptied of all voices but mine.

  The Scotland countryside was picturesque, and might have been pretty if I hadn’t been running for my freaking life. I’d heard the buzz of helicopters overhead, and I was seriously afraid for what would come if I got seen. Most of my run was over hilly farmland, and I worried I wouldn’t see a helo coming until it was too late.

  As a consequence, I was zigging and zagging between wooded areas. I’d stop for a second, take a breath, and get my ass through the woods until I could see another wood, preferably one that was mostly south. Then I’d haul said ass toward those woods, as fast as my meta self could run. If anyone saw me, they’d know instantly I wasn’t human, because humans couldn’t run that fast. But I hoped that I’d be to my destination before they realized what I was doing, being as I was giving all villages a wide berth and only popping into sight of farmhouses for a few minutes between forest sprints.

  Why was it always the cardio I regretted not getting enough of? Not the strength training, because my strength was desperately down without Wolfe. No, it was the damned cardio I’d slacked off on during my stay in the UK, because training cardio as a meta in your hotel room is not the easiest of things to pull off. Sure, I wasn’t in terrible shape, but I wasn’t in peak condition either.

  These were the struggles of the metahuman fugitive. Also, I effing hate cardio. Who wants to gasp like a fish?

  I was between open stretches, on a high hill, when I saw it below: the Firth of Forth, that river estuary that emptied into the North Sea. I’d been running south to find it, and here it was, day’s end not quite approaching, but not terribly far off. Looking out across the gleaming water, I could see a few ships, tankers and cargo vessels, probably from Edinburgh, or bound to Edinburgh, passing by at slow steam.

  Standing there, catching my breath, I was reminded that the next phase of my getaway plan was perhaps the most dicey now that I’d evaded Rose. The Firth was less than a mile away, and I could cover that mile quickly if I didn’t continue to zig and zag looking for tree cover. It had been a while since I’d heard a helicopter, after all, and it had been my good luck (there was that word again) that they apparently hadn’t been using infrared or heat sensors during this manhunt.

  There was tree cover to the west, and farther cover after that, but it looked like it was starting to get sparser the closer I got to the Firth. I swore under my breath, because that left me with a choice—break cover and run for it, chancing a helicopter or farmer seeing me as I did so, or take the safe route for a little longer.

  It was probably a measure of how rattled I’d been by Rose these last two days that when I broke cover, I sprinted for the next copse of trees instead of going bold and making for the Firth. Finding myself under their shade a minute later, I took another breath, soothing myself for what was to come. Soon, I wouldn’t be getting a break for a long time. I stood under the shade of the trees, not that I needed shade on a day like today. There wasn’t exactly a lot of sun right now.

  I took in the smell of the trees as I stood there, put my hand on one of them for support. I thought about lying down, but if I did, I might not get up again for a while and I needed to be well out of here before I collapsed. In fact, given that they were using search helicopters, next time I slept it needed to be either indoors or else under a car, somewhere that my IR signature would be masked in case they did start to employ sensors in their search.

  Because that had to happen soon. They couldn’t just keep sending helos overhead in hopes they might blindly stumble onto me.

  I broke cover and ran for the next set of woods a minute later. I was timing myself, making sure I didn’t spend too long in any one place. I hadn’t heard the sound of a helicopter in a few minutes, but I could dimly hear one now, chopper blades churning through the air behind me. I poured on the speed, my legs throbbing, screaming, really, as I broke into a metahuman band of exertion that probably made me move in a blur.

  I zoomed under the shade of the next woods, and came to a sliding stop before I burst out the other side. This was a small wood, maybe a hundred or two hundred trees, nestled in the middle of farmland. I went all the way to the southern edge of it and stared south, hoping to find my next checkpoint down the hill toward the Firth.

  Instead…I found the end of my freaking cover.

  There were no more woods between me and the Firth, just a bunch of fields and what looked like a park with a bunch of camping trailers in it. There was human activity within, and I didn’t want any of that, so I chose my course accordingly. I’d break straight for the Firth once I was sure the chopper was clear.

  If the chopper got clear.

  I could hear it back there, doing a sweep. I didn’t dare peek out at it from within the safety of my concealment. It seemed to be sweeping straight toward me, maybe a mile off to the east.

  That was concerning.

  The steady beat of the blades against the air was a cheery sound, like death approaching on wings of steel. I tried to control my breathing. It was loud, furious, agonizing in its way, trying to keep it under control. I wanted to suck in gasps of oxygen and expel fearful breaths, but I couldn’t. I kept it quiet, as though somehow they could hear me from above.

  I waited, the sound of the chopper first starting to fade, then receding. I didn’t know how they’d chosen their course, but apparently they’d chosen poorly, as Reed was so fond of quoting. Once the blade noise had died down, I set my last checkpoint.

  Right on the shore of the Firth.

  Plunging ahead at a dead sprint, I ran for it. I headed for the water with breakneck speed and complete abandon. I cleared fences with a single leap, like a champion hurdler, and cut through farm fields hard enough to harvest a part of their crop. My feet hurt, my legs hurt, and my lungs were like a pair of balloons that someone had inflated inside my chest. Foreign, painful, they hung there in discomfort within me.

  And the consolation was…there was no consolation, because what was coming next was going to be so. Much. Worse.

  I reached the bank of the Firth and came surging down, carefully. I had nothing but some cash on me, and I’d stowed it in my pocket, deep, in preparation for this next thing. It didn’t do any good to wait, so as soon as I reached the shore, without hesitating…

  I plunged into the Firth of Forth.

  The shock of the cold water was like death washing over me. Okay, maybe not that bad, but it was freaking colllllllllld. My teeth started to chatter, but I didn’t let a little thing like death and impending hypothermia stop me.

  No, I had an escape to make, and freezing waters were not going to deter me from my plan.

  The frigid chill settling into my bones, I plunged deeper into the Firth, and started my swim south. I’d estimated by the map it was something like ten or twelve miles.

  If I hurried…I figured I could make that in about an hour.

  My heart sinking—at the cold, at what I was having to do to survive, at the general unfairness of the world presently—I steadied myself and started my long swim south.

  16.

  Reed

  Odessa, Texas was more or less what you’d expect when you think of Texas. I hated to say it, but most of the TV shows meant to depict Texas had been shot in California at one point in time,
because saguaro sagebrush country looked more or less the same to the untrained eye. It was long stretches of what I’d call desert ground—kind of a sandy tan, with most of the greenery more of a deep brown, they were the main sign of life around here.

  Other than, y’know, the town.

  Odessa itself wasn’t too big. Wikipedia had estimates of a population of 160,000 or so. If they had a sign declaring that number, I’d probably missed it while playing on my phone. The Odessa PD had sent a driver for us at Midland Airport, and Angel and I had made our way here in the back of one of their cars. Well, I’d been in the back. Angel had been up front, twitching like she’d wanted to be in the driver’s seat until I had zoned out and started scrolling the internet.

  Looking for news on my sister, of course.

  There was no actual news, just a metric ton of analysis. It wasn’t like they’d caught her between my flight and my arrival. Police Scotland weren’t even saying anything, just keeping tight-lipped about whether they’d encountered her at all. Tips were pouring in, they said, and having been involved with the law enforcement side of those kinds of manhunts, I was reasonably sure they weren’t lying.

  The problem with that kind of tip was that you got a lot of static. It seemed like everyone who had encountered a short, dark-haired girl in Scotland this last week would probably be calling, and the investigators would have to sort through which of them were credible leads, and which were fanciful farces. Usually that was made somewhat easier by tagging your target’s location at a given time and drawing concentric circles outward from that locale based on the time of travel it took to move from one place to another. That allowed you to eliminate a lot of the noise, because if they were in, say, Dallas at 10a.m. today on a Walmart security camera, and you got a tip saying they were in Honolulu at a pizza place with kids and a family at noon, you could pretty much write it off as bullshit if they were your average fugitive, because your average fugitive does not dare try and pass through TSA security checkpoints and the like while wanted. They’re restricted to ground travel, and Honolulu ain’t in the ground travel path from Dallas within two hours. Or ever, until they get around to building a bridge between LA and Hawaii.