That was the truth.
The crater that had been Glencoe loomed large in front of me. It didn’t look quite like another planet from here, but close. Green spots sprouted within, hints of new life forming where a scourging fire had burned that town from the map only a few years earlier. I saw a van parked in the crater, and another just beyond. Chain-link fencing bracketed the whole crater, like someone from the government had just come in and shut the whole place off on the theory some kid would get hurt if they didn’t. Which was hard to understand, because from where I hovered, the walls of the crater sloped at less than a fifteen degree angle down to the epicenter of the blast where Aleksandr Gavrikov, that ass—I turned my irritation toward him, and he bore it with something like a GULP! inside me—had blown the place up.
It was an easy slope to drive, as evidenced by the cars parked down toward the middle of the crater. Ground zero was probably fifteen to twenty feet below the level of everything else, the earth displaced where Gavrikov had blasted it out in every direction with both heat and force. Clumps of glass shone in the morning light where it had gotten intense enough in places to melt sand.
I decreased altitude so I could come up even with Reed’s window. He glanced out at me and then rolled it down, the wind roaring in both our ears. “I’m flying ahead,” I said. “You’ve got a straight shot—you’ll catch up in about two minutes.”
“What the hell?” he asked, not keeping his eyes on the road, the baldy weirdo. “You want to have a chitchat before we show up or something?”
“You know me,” I said, “I like to talk them to death before they get a chance to get too wound up.” I brandished the spark gun and then glanced into the back seat. Augustus, Guy Friday and Scott were all crammed in back there. I waved at them. Augustus waved back, pretty halfheartedly. Scott did not look pleased. I couldn’t tell what Guy Friday was thinking, what with the mask and all.
I went to just below supersonic, sparing the boys in the Beetle a good rattling of ears and windowpanes as I shot skyward, preparing to drop down and surprise my enemies. I made it over the crater and hit clouds, then peered down and swept in a vertical dive sharp enough to send all the blood rushing to my brain. G forces? Not a problem.
I fell at speed, a meteor coming out of the sky behind the two vans that were parked in the crater. I had to wonder a little bit at the second one. They were both parked facing away from the crater entrance where the road led, like no one had bothered to turn them around to flee.
I had to guess that the Clarys knew I was coming. They couldn’t be stupid enough to think I’d let them get away with that crap they just pulled unanswered. Then again, they’d just leveled my HQ, so odds were good they probably thought they had some lead time.
I was about to disabuse them of that notion in the sternest possible terms.
At about a thousand feet above them, I figured out who was who. Simmons was sitting in the dirt, looked a little peaked. Denise had her hair stretched around her, clearly ready for battle. Ma and Junior already had their game faces on, looking all metal and glinty in the sun.
And every single one of them was looking the wrong way.
I drifted the last hundred feet and hovered above one of the vans, bringing up the spark gun without a sound. I took aim at Denise first and gave her twenty thousand volts. She bucked and jived like she’d just gotten a wicked case of ants in her pants, then fell face-first to the ground, her hair retracting to shoulder level as she dropped.
I popped off two shots at Simmons as he was raising his head to look up to figure out what the hubbub was about. “Whaa—aaaaieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” He went from normal tone of voice to a scream in 0.6, shaking in the dirt as the electrical surge ran through his muscles and probably made him crap his pants. I’d heard the spark gun had that side effect. On the weak. Which I had Simmons pegged as.
“Shit,” Junior said, thumping around to face me. He stood there, looking at his sister, a little dumbstruck.
“I figured you’d bring a gun,” Ma said, turning around to look at me with those metal features of hers. She was hardened steel over a kind of pudgy face, a weird contrast. Instead of looking statuesque, she looked like a designer hadn’t shaved the metal properly, and it gave her a toad-like look. “Didn’t know it’d be one of those prissy little Tasers.”
“This sucker hurts,” I said, patting the spark gun for emphasis. “When your little princess wakes up, she can tell you all about it.”
Clyde Clary, Jr., snickered, waving a hand in front of his nose. “Yeah, I bet Denise’ll tell us all about it.”
“I was talking about Simmons, but …” I shrugged, and Junior cackled at my jibe as I floated around to hang over them at a ninety-degree angle from where their cars were parked. I didn’t want to provide them with a straight shot in case someone was hiding in the vehicles, nor give them an easy time of it in case they wired it with a bomb. This felt like a compromise. “Claudette Clary, Claude Clary, Junior … do I even need to tell you how under arrest you are?”
“You want to read off the charges?” Ma asked, leading me to believe she was going to tack resisting arrest onto whatever list I could produce.
“I kinda just want to beat your ass into a pile of molten metal,” I said. “You’d probably be doing yourself a big favor by surrendering and coming quietly, but I doubt you’re going to do that, so …”
“You get some real funny ideas about how metal works—” Junior started, but Ma held up a hand to silence him. He shut up, thank goodness.
“You know it ain’t gonna be that simple, right?” Ma asked, not taking her eyes off me. Just like her boy Clyde’s, her eyes didn’t turn steel with the rest of her. Once upon a time, I’d taken his eye right out of his skull in a fight that had damaged the hell out of the Directorate cafeteria. I wondered if she knew that—that I knew they had a weakness.
“Simplicity isn’t required,” I said, still hovering above them so they had to look up at me. “If it was easy to beat your ass, lots of people would have done it by now.”
“Lots of people have tried,” Ma said. “No one’s succeeded.”
“I killed your boy,” I said, just throwing that out there. “He was like you, and I didn’t just beat him. I killed him.” I didn’t add any taunt to it at all, just made it a statement of fact. “If it comes down to it, do you want to lose your grandson the same way?”
For the first time, Ma’s face went perfectly along with the steel that coated it. She looked frozen in metal, clad in iron, stiff as could be. I couldn’t tell if that made her pissed, scared or just contemplative, but she didn’t look away. “It ain’t gonna be like that this time,” she said. “You lured him into a trap when he was drunk—”
“I was near to powerless against him back then,” I said, “and I killed him. You sure you want to tempt fate now that I’m the most powerful meta on the planet?”
“Pshawww,” Junior said, dismissing me in roughly the same way his daddy would have. The prideful prick. “You got a sense of unearned accomplishment ’round you, girl.”
“What I’ve got is a hell of a lot of dead people dragging along behind me,” I said, and I fixed him with my stare. “Also, your word of the day toilet paper is clearly paying off, so kudos to you.”
“You may have walked my boy into a trap while he was a young and stupid—” Ma said.
“Well, you’re half right.”
“—but I ain’t either of those, and you didn’t lead us here,” she said, and there was no masking the sense of triumph in the way she said that. “We led you, and you followed like a bull after a red cloth. All we had to do was shake your house down around your ears, drop a ton of rock and stone on your little friends, and here you came a runnin’.”
The back doors to the van nearest to me opened with a hard thump, and a man jumped out with an M249 SAW—that’s Squad Automatic Weapon, a machine gun used by the Army and the Marine Corps in war zones when they wanted to make the enemy put their damned heads
down and stop shooting under threat of a whole lotta bullets whizzing through the air above them. This guy had one cradled on his arm like Rambo, except he was wearing overalls and he didn’t exactly have the chiseled physique. He looked kinda old, actually, but big enough to handle the SAW without dropping it, which wasn’t a minor accomplishment. “Meet Cousin Blimpy,” Ma said, nodding her head at him.
Another guy got out of the side door of the van with way, way too much exposed armpit for his shirt to still be considered a functional piece of clothing. “This is Blimpy's boy Buck,” Ma kept on making the introductions like this was a picnic or something, “and his daughter Janice.” She nodded at a woman who followed in Blimpy’s (I can’t believe I just met a guy who calls himself Blimpy) wake. Ma smiled, and I knew that she’d well and truly set the trap. “And thank you for charging right in.”
43.
Cousin Blimpy opened up with the SAW as I quick-drew the spark gun and blasted the nearest target – Buck, with his failure of a t-shirt – as bullets filled the air around me. Blimpy’s aim was off, thankfully, probably because I was already flying to avoid his fire. I was in pure reaction mode, not wanting to get clipped by a .223 bullet. They weren’t exactly huge, being the same ammo an M-16 used, but they weren’t a picnic in the park on a sunny day, either, and there were a lot of them flying at me presently. The chatter of the gun was deafening, a steady ripping noise like someone was mowing a lawn right next to my ear while also chainsawing through a piece of steel.
I dove left and Cousin Blimpy sprayed. He had a smaller turn radius but I was faster; it was a race, so I dodged low as I flew, forcing him to correct up and down rather than just spin. When I made it behind his van, the gunfire stopped after I heard him chew up his side mirror and break both the driver’s side window and the front windshield. If Reed’s insurance wasn’t picking up for car bombs, I had to believe that Cousin Blimpy was definitely going to be out more than his deductible for self-inflicted automatic weapon damage.
Idiot.
Janice was gawking at me from where she stood next to the passenger door of the van, so I pumped her full of voltage and didn’t stop to watch her squirm. While I was just as fascinated as everyone else to find out what kind of meta she was, I would have been a lot happier doing so while watching her on the other side of a prison cell, where I could flood her with ten thousand gallons of energy dampening gel and watch her switch from uppity to struggling to keep her head afloat. Humility usually set in shortly thereafter. It was fun to watch.
“Get her!” Ma hectored, probably pretty uselessly. I couldn’t see Cousin Blimpy, but I had to guess he wasn’t so sanguine about the idea of ripping holes in his van with a machine gun while blindly trying to kill little old me. Sure, he was in for murder of a federal agent, but destroying his own property was where he drew the line.
“She’s over here!” Junior shouted, like it was some big revelation where I was hiding, as if they hadn’t all just seen me dive behind the damned van. The hardest thing I’d had to do in this battle so far was to keep from rolling my own eyes so hard they’d do permanent damage to the inside of my head. Meta strength and all that, you know.
I heard a whine in the distance and for about a quarter second I wondered if Cousin Blimpy had finally decided to stop screwing around and just waste me through the van with the beltfed, but like a cornfed idiot, the answer was no.
It was the Beetle, rolling through the crater at top speed, looking like a rally car way out of its damned element, like Reed was going to end up turning the damned thing over before he could reach me and be of any actual use.
“What the hell?” Junior asked, spinning around and leaving the back of his empty, metal head exposed only eight feet away. I seized on this fine opportunity by dropping the spark gun and grabbing him in a big hug and then twisting him as I flew into the air at supersonic speed.
“Whut—the—” he got out as I took him up, up and more up, about a mile, then, before he could get a solid grasp on either of my arms, I released him and gave him a good shove back toward the crater. “Your dad used to say ‘Geronimo’ when he did this, which I always thought was kind of racist, but—” I shrugged. He looked a little panicked, arms pinwheeling as gravity took hold of him.
I didn’t stick around to see the cascade of emotions that were probably setting in on his face as he began his journey back to earth. I’m sure it would have followed Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages closely, and while it would have been fun to see him try and bargain with an uncaring me before accepting he was going to slam hard into an even more uncaring earth, I had shit to do that didn’t involve watching Clyde Clary, Jr., faceplant into dirt.
Blimpy had apparently decided that I’d flown off for good, because he was taking aim at the orange Beetle when I came back down. I didn’t waste my time going for the spark gun; I landed on his back with all that supersonic force with a front kick right to the base of his spine. If he was going to try and kill people, I knew where I stood on the matter, especially since those were my friends in that car.
I couldn’t exactly feel the compression wave run up his spine, because my nerves weren’t sensitive enough to detect that sort of thing through muscle and bone and whatnot, but I did see his back ripple like an alien was snaking its way through his overalls, and his head lifted off from his body like it was launched from Cape Canaveral. I’d never really seen that before, and it was really gross. You can imagine what followed, and I dodged back, not really super excited to get covered in a geyser of his bodily fluid, and watched the remainder of his corpse topple, machine gun still clutched tightly in his dead hand.
“What the hell?!” Ma screamed, one shoulder dropped as she took in the spectacle of me hovering over the corpse of another one of her kin.
“Did you think I was fucking around here?” I asked her, all my patience for her bullshit as gone as Cousin Blimpy’s head.
“I think you’re dead!” she screamed, rage clearly overcoming whatever sense she had left. “DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!”
Before I could respond to that, Junior came crashing back to earth, landing on her very own van and turning it into a pancake. She looked, I looked, and when the dust settled, two big old legs were sticking up in the air, steel vanishing back to flesh, and all four tires popped as the frame came to rest right on the crater’s ground. “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh …” Junior moaned, not looking like he was going to get up real soon.
I looked at Ma, and she looked back at me, her jaw hanging open. “You were saying?” I asked coldly as the orange Beetle came to a stop a few feet away and my friends started to pile out into the brisk autumn air, the odds already tilted way in our favor.
44.
Ma
This wasn’t going the way she’d planned it, not at all. Denise, Janice, Buck and Simmons were already sidelined, Junior looked to at least be out for the next few minutes, and Blimpy was dead as a damned doornail, missing his head like it had been blasted off with a fourth of July firework. Ma found herself wanting to scream at Sienna Nealon, to get a good hold of her and just squeeze the girl’s head until it made a satisfying pop and she looked like Cousin Blimpy, God rest his soul.
Ma wasn’t left with too many options, though. She darted a look at the approaching vehicle, a whole load of men already pouring out of it like a clown car. She saw the brother, the partner, the ex-boyfriend—how many guys did this girl have in her life? This was just unseemly. And who was the man in the black mask, looking like he was about to go for a ski?
“Quit while you’re only slightly behind, Ma,” Sienna said from just behind her, and Ma swiped as she came ’round, missing taking the girl’s head off by only a few inches. Sienna blurred right back to where she’d been hovering before and the movement of air was enough that Ma felt it. “Nobody else has to die.”
Ma could feel the steel move in lines on her face. “I think one more person needs to, at least.” She stared at Sienna, breath coming hard, nostrils flaring, and all she wan
ted was to smash the smug face right off her. She made to take another swipe, but Sienna dodged again, well in advance of her even getting close.
It was gonna be like this, that was obvious. Well, all right then.
Ma turned her head as she charged at the Beetle and the men surrounding it. If she couldn’t make Sienna Nealon pay by taking the smug look off her face by personally crushing it … she’d just crush someone the girl cared about and watch her face fall as that someone died in front of her.
45.
Sienna
I saw what she was planning to do play across her steel face before she even started moving and … yeah, no. That was not going to happen.
She sprinted for the orange beetle, and to my surprise, Guy Friday charged out to meet her, swelling as he went. He looked like one of those inflatables that someone was blowing air into, going from an ordinary-sized guy in a black shirt to the incredible Hulk, but without shredding his clothing. I was actually kinda impressed, and was tempted to ask, “Do you lift, bro?” But it seemed like inappropriate timing.
He and Ma Clary clashed, and I have to admit, I didn’t think he was going to hold as well as he did. He took a thunderous punch to the chest, hard enough to break a sternum, I would have figured, maybe chop up some ribs and make them shortribs (har har—at least I find myself funny), but he was already punching back, hitting Ma in her non-glass jaw with enough force that it sounded like bones cracked. They were probably his, I figured, until he hit her again, and again, so if he was breaking his knuckles in the process, this dude was fearsomely stupid or had a pain threshold of the sort I didn’t want to mess with.
Ma came around with her feet planted and grabbed his arm, throwing him forward in a neat little jiu-jitsu move. Guy Friday lost his balance and stumbled, staggering away as Ma resumed her run toward the car.
06 - Vengeful Page 14