“You surely do,” he said, guffawing lightly, giving it way more humor than the remark deserved. “Can I just say? I’ve been a huge admirer of yours for a long time now.”
“It’s nice to be admired,” I said, a little forlornly, without looking over at him. It had been nice. Of course, not that he remembered it, but those days were well over now.
“Ye’ve just done so many amazing things,” he gushed. “That meteor over Chicago?” I turned to look at him, and he was staring at me with a glowing face. “I mean, I guess that was never technically confirmed by anyone, but—I mean, everyone knows it was you under that big bloody rock. They don’t just hover in the air in the air by themselves and gently come to rest in a lake, you know.”
I could remember the weight of it on my shoulders. “Yeah. I know.” I kept looking out the window.
“And that first battle in Minneapolis!” He was on a roll now. “I mean, watching the cell phone footage of that…it was just incredible. You go turning into a dragon and chomping on that Sovereign bastard! I mean, it’s like the stuff of legends. I love it.” I looked over at him and he blushed. “You know. I admire it.”
It had been a long time since anyone had said anything this nice to me, and it stung considering I’d ripped some memories out of this man’s mind to make it happen. “Yeah, well…you and nobody else these days.”
“Och, you’ve got just tons of admirers,” he said. “I’m sure a lovely lass such as yourself probably has a never-ending line of male admirers seeking your hand.”
“Nope,” I said quietly. “Not my hand. Nor anything else, lately.” If I had any energy, that might have been a lot more self-pitying, but as it was, I didn’t have much thought to spare for the deficiencies of my love life.
The ride was a steady stream of gushing, and the officer’s excitement at meeting a “real-life celebrity superhero!” only made my guilt at messing with his mind more present in my own. Here I had someone who had been a genuine fan of mine, and yet the knowledge that I had done terrible things had turned him against me. Somehow that made me feel even guiltier for depriving him of his memories, even though they were all misapprehensions about what I’d done.
The police car slid up to the side of the road and stopped, and the officer nodded his head. I avoided looking at his nameplate; I didn’t want to feel any more responsible for him than I already was. “Train tracks are right over there.”
“Any idea when the next train will come through?” I asked.
“Usually every few hours, I think?” He didn’t sound too sure.
“Thanks,” I said, and popped the door open. Standing there, I leaned back in. “Hey…you mind keeping the fact I was here between the two of us for a while? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
He tapped the bridge of his nose. “Just between you and me. I’ll keep it under my hat for a few days, then?”
“If you could,” I said, smiling faintly. “Good luck to you—”
“Officer—” he started, extending his hand toward me.
I recoiled from him, and watched the pleasant expression melt off his face. If I touched him again right now, it’d vault him into immediate pain as my powers started to rip his soul out of his body whole. “I, uh—sorry,” I said.
“Oh, not a problem,” he said, apparently just as embarrassed as I was horrified. “Just wanted to…shake yer hand.”
“Maybe next time,” I said, and shut the door, walking away before he could come up with another thing to say that would make things more awkward for us both. I could hear a train whistle in the distance, and it sounded like sweet freedom, with maybe just a little tingle-twist of guilt.
28.
I rode through the night, thankfully unable to sleep under the gentle sway of the train on the rails. It didn’t feel like it moved all that fast, rattling as I lay atop one of the carriages, staring up at the steadily lightening sky. I had a bad feeling about where we were going, thinking it probably wasn’t York. I kept low, laying flat the whole time I was aboard because I figured, being on an open-topped car, standing or sitting up would reveal my profile to any witnesses watching the train pass. There probably weren’t going to be many at this time of night, but all it’d take would be one and my chase would suddenly get a whole lot more exciting.
The slow break of day found the train squealing brakes and slowing down, and as I popped my head up, I could see no more countryside around me. Now it was suburban neighborhoods, or the Scottish version thereof. Looking around, way, way ahead I could see Edinburgh Castle perched atop its massive basalt peak.
“Hellfire and brimstone,” I said.
I’d been afraid of this when I’d caught a westbound train, but I was running shy of options that didn’t involve stealing or co-opting a car to make for York. While I could have gotten the cop back in town to drive me, and it might only have been a few hours, I had these fears about the dispatcher trying to reach him and failing, and sounding the alarm. The same applied to me stealing a car right now. I might get away with it, but all it would take would be someone noticing it before I reached York and they’d be looking for me. I didn’t know how integrated Police Scotland was with the UK police services—it could have been very integrated, or suffer from a total lack of cooperation—and didn’t feel like gambling my escape on it.
But the closer I got to York, the less of a gamble it would be. The closer I got, the more it’d be an issue of navigation rather than risk of discovery. But not being able to find where I was going was a very real concern, and it made me wish I’d brought John Clifford’s map with me, even though I knew it wouldn’t have survived my swim in the Firth.
The train continued to slow, chugging down to what felt like twenty miles an hour. Pretty soon, I had a feeling, it would stop, and that was a vexing thought. If I’d had a complete map of Edinburgh in my head, it would have made things easier. As it was, I needed to figure out how to find a southbound train, preferably without strolling right into the middle of Waverly Station and buying a ticket.
Oh, the woes of being a fugitive.
The sky had adopted a blue-purple haze, clouds strung across it. I’d seen prettier dawns, but I couldn’t recall when. It was a strange sort of stray thought that smacked at me, recalling to mind that over the last few years I hadn’t exactly taken a ton of time to stop and smell the roses, even before I was a fugitive. I’d been so busy building up my agency, trying to do my job, that I was doing a pretty piss-poor job of living my life.
No time for that now, though. I looked out across the Edinburgh neighborhoods around me, and realized that this was probably going to have to be the time to dismount, much as it sucked. It was probably somewhere between four and five in the morning, and the longer I waited for this train to chug me on into the station—or the train yard—the more likely I was to be seen.
So I hopped off, landing heavily on an embankment made of big pieces of grey rock where they’d built the tracks up off the ground. The dismount might have broken my leg if I hadn’t been a meta and thus already pre-conditioned to be a little tougher than a normal human, because YEOUCH! That landing stung. My palms hit the ground too, as my legs bent, helping take the impact for me.
I popped back up and immediately ran to a nearby clump of bushes. I’m sure that didn’t look suspicious at all, a dark-haired, squat lady jumping off a train and hiding in the bushes. Well, what were my other options? Stroll through town like nothing was happening? That was probably going to have to be my play when it came to my next move, because darting back and forth between shrubberies in eastern Edinburgh wasn’t likely to work all that well.
What I really needed was access to a map, or better still, a phone. With a mobile phone I could look up routes to York via train, figure out the quickest path, even figure out the likely train tracks where such trains would pass. I mean, I was heading on a westerly course now, but who knew where Edinburgh’s southern spur line was? It could have been behind me for all I knew.
This was information I needed, and I needed it urgently. There wasn’t anything for it; I was going to have to steal a phone, and quickly.
The mere thought of that caused the nervous buzz in my stomach to heat up to a bubbling boil. The last time I’d been in Edinburgh, it was like the city itself had turned against me, delivering Frankie—Rose’s catspaw—right to me on several occasions. Looking back, it could entirely have been Rose, using a GPS in her phone to constantly send her location to him.
Buuuuut, enough other weird stuff had happened around here to make me wary of accepting the easy explanation, the one that would essentially make Edinburgh slightly more friendly to me now (not that it would be friendly friendly, given that the cops were still looking for me, but…relatively less hostile, I guess).
All I needed right now was a bunch of Edinburghers dialing up 999 or calling Rose directly if she somehow did control them through Siren powers. And that was a fear that was circulating in the back of my mind, moving closer to the front all the time.
I emerged from my clump of bushes and found myself behind a few businesses. There was a McDonald’s in front of me, and also an optician's office in a couple low-slung, one-floor commercial buildings. They were situated on a two-lane with some nice shoulder margin on the side road, and I could see cars coming in either direction, but sparingly, maybe one every minute or so.
The McDonald’s was open twenty-four hours, which I regarded as an unfavorable sign. If there was good news in all this, it was that I had perhaps a few customers to blend in with, maybe one of whose cell phones I could steal if they were being very unattentive and I was feeling particularly sneaky. I didn’t love the element of chance in all this, but what the hell else could I do? I needed access to Google, and now.
I sauntered up to the door of the McD’s like I owned the place, and surveyed the inside before opening the door. I was in luck, but I couldn’t decide whether it was good or bad.
There wasn’t a soul in the place except for the employees, and that gave me an idea.
Walking in, I found myself in a very standard-ish McDonald’s. Long counter up front, an electronic ordering kiosk (!—That was new, or at least new to me) back from the counter about ten, fifteen feet. The menu looked a few degrees off what I would have seen in an American location, but that was fine. My stomach was rumbling again, and I was determined to get whatever I could get here, and be quite content with it. I could already smell the fries, and they smelled…mmm…good.
I slid on up to the counter after making sure there truly was no one here out in the main restaurant. I didn’t want to pretend I had very long, because a customer could have been beelining toward me right now, heading for their normal morning coffee and inevitable rendezvous with troublesome destiny (i.e., my fist if they were unlucky).
Looking around like my head was on a swivel, I sauntered up to the counter. There was definitely someone back there, but I had a feeling that with the ordering kiosk, they were maybe just making food or taking drive-thru orders. I heard them humming a happy song, and it sounded a little like Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off. It was a good choice, unlike deciding to come to work this morning.
I jumped the counter and suddenly I was in the Employees Only area of the McD’s. I didn’t have time to reflect on my rulebreaking though, because I hurried back behind the equipment—fryers and whatnot—to find an employee working with their back turned and oblivious to my approach.
Drawing a deep breath, I fell on them immediately, seizing hold of them by the neck. I realized a little late that the employee in question was a dude, albeit a shorter one. I didn’t let him turn around, clutching him firmly by the back of the neck the way you might grab hold of a particularly disobedient and struggling cat. My hand was squarely on his skin, and I held him tight as he screamed for the next few seconds until my power kicked in.
There was no nice way to do what I was doing, or at least no nice way that didn’t involve me being a stereotypical succubus seductress, and that just wasn’t going to happen, so I woman’d up. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to brainhack him, removing his memory of this encounter as I lifted him and positioned him back toward the front of the service area. That done, I gave him a little shove forward and he toppled over, missing the memory of why he’d fallen—it was a pretty traumatic thing, being assaulted from behind, after all—as well as his memory of what had happened to his cell phone and his favorite hoodie, both of which I now knew were in the employee break-room just between the kitchen and building’s rear exit.
Sweeping out of the kitchen as I heard the guy I’d assaulted swearing at his unexpected fall, I tried to creep as quietly as I could, snatching a sandwich off the rack as I went. I hit up his locker and “borrowed” his cell phone and hoodie, slipping on the latter and unlocking the former with the passcode I’d stolen from his mind. I felt some mild discomfort at my act of Robin Hooding his stuff, but unfortunately his life wasn’t in danger from lacking a cell phone and a disguise, while mine very much was.
I headed out to the road, and started walking along the sidewalk, pretending I was just another modern day zombie, my face stuck in my phone, a McD’s bacon, egg and cheese—British bacon, so basically ham—bagel in hand, and my hood up high to block anyone from seeing my now-ratty hair. I stared at the screen as I punched up a map of Edinburgh first. The GPS locked onto me, and boom! Now I knew where I was.
Then I got to work on the secondary problem, my feet tapping along the city sidewalk, the green row of hedges across the street slowly lighting up in the dawn. I pulled up a train schedule for Scotrail, trying to figure out how the service worked from Edinburgh to York as I munched on my sandwich, which was the first thing of reasonable healthful benefit I’d eaten in quite a while. Which was sad to say.
What I found was interesting, and took a little map study to work out. The easiest path from Edinburgh to York actually went quite a bit east out of Edinburgh and then hooked south through Berwick-upon-Tweed (what a funny name), Newcastle upon Tyne, and so on, down to York. Travel time looked to be about two and a half hours, which wasn’t terrible if I could hide on top of a carriage during the whole trip.
When I checked the GPS, it said I was 1.4 miles walk from Waverly Station, which was the closest and the one the train from York departed from. I wondered if there was a closer station, but I couldn’t see it on my map, and the schedule I’d gotten for this one trip seemed to suggest there were no other local stops. Of course, the website wasn’t the most navigable I’d ever seen, especially for a Luddite like me, so that wasn’t a definite guarantee or anything. Still, 1.4 miles was nothing, really.
I picked up my pace, continuing to use the phone as cover even though I was no longer looking at the screen. Luckily for me, the fast food employee had charged the thing fairly recently, giving me a nice 95% charge to work with. The last thing I needed right now was for it to go dead on me when I might actually need it. I figured right about the time it died or around noon today, I’d need to chuck it, because my mark would get wise to its disappearance and either report it stolen or cancel the service. One of those was much worse than the other, assuming the police took time to investigate its usage. They probably wouldn’t, but when confronted with a city that seemed to be run by Rose and which promised horrible death should I be found…who would want to take the chance of being found out?
Keeping my head down and my eyes sweeping for trouble was an easy enough thing to do. The city air was chill and coming alive, the purple sky turning gradually more orange. My heart was hammering in my chest as I looked around surreptitiously. The traffic on the road steadily increased as time wore on, and I was stuck to a human walking speed to avoid making trouble by revealing myself as a meta by breaking into a car-speed sprint.
According to the map app, it was going to take me about thirty minutes to walk to Waverly, and I was going to get to pass by the Queen’s house. Yay, scenery. Hopefully they didn’t take their security too seriously, beca
use getting caught out in front of Holyrood House would be embarrassing.
I stalked along Lower London Road, according to the map, which then said it turned into Kirkwood Place. I was passing four-story apartments now on my left, rows of cars parked in every single space. The city was starting to wake, and that was bad news for me, in a way. I might have looked a little more unusual skulking along in the dark, but there were fewer eyes to scrutinize and take notice of me. That would have been a plus, especially given how many people were looking for me right now.
Heading up the hill, I had to hang a slight right at the split of the road, passing a beige apartment building. This area looked to be in good repair overall, but was desperately quiet in a way I didn’t care for. The hum of cars in the distance made it seem like an aura of menace hung over the city. Trees rustled in the wind every now and again.
Someone spoke behind me, and a door slammed. My pulse spiked, and I looked back. Just a couple guys coming out of a flat, laughing and talking to one another. They didn’t seem like zombies working for Rose, but then, maybe they wouldn’t have. They went straight to a car and got it, driving past me without so much as a look a moment later.
My heart rate slowed. If I didn’t get out of Scotland with Reed, this was going to be the new normal. Always fearing the next corner, the next person I passed. Always worrying what was waiting for me just over the horizon, in the next five minutes, and the five after that.
That kind of certainty was a taste of fear I hadn’t known in a long time.
It had been slowly ratcheting up the last few months before I’d left America. It had hit what I thought was the fever pitch when President Harmon had sent the entire US law enforcement and military infrastructure after me, but then that had died down for a while after I’d beaten Harmon.
Badder (Out of the Box Book 16) Page 20