Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  Also, he’d already tried to order my drink for me, even though I was sitting right in front of him and possessed of all my speech capabilities at the time.

  This is why I don’t date. Also, because I can consume the souls of my fellow human beings with only the touch of my skin on theirs.

  But mostly because of this. And because these sorts of dates make me want to consume the vapid, lightweight souls of dudes like Dick-o here like crackerjacks right out of the gym-toned bodies that hold them.

  The waitress, a lovely young lady named Wendy, who wore a shining name badge on her spotless white outfit with sharply creased black pants, meandered over for the third time with our drinks perched on a plate. I eyed them hungrily and she gave me a tight smile. She’d been standing between us at the round table when Dick (let’s just drop the pretense that he should be called anything else) had made his bold gambit of telling me what I wanted to drink, and she’d shot me a “Can you believe this guy?” look of solidarity.

  Can you believe this guy? No. No, I can’t.

  “Oh, good,” Dick said as Wendy positioned herself once more between us at this itty-bitty little table in the middle of the room. The dining room was pretty packed, all done up with neon blue tones. I half expected them to pull back a curtain at the back of the restaurant to reveal an aquarium where they harvested the fish we were going to be eating. “I think I’m almost ready.”

  Wendy smiled at me, clearly trying to lead Dick out of rudeness against his natural instincts. “And are you ready to order, ma’am, or do you need a few more minutes?”

  “I am well prepared to order,” I said, putting the one-page menu down. “In fact, the sooner, the better. Maybe we can even skip the appetizers and soups and just get right to the main event.” So we can get the hell out of here as quickly as politeness allows me to.

  I know, I know. Why am I bothering to be polite?

  Because I promised I would, of course. Duh. It’s one of the therapy things that Dr. Zollers had me working on, and I could already see the disappointed gleam in Ariadne’s eyes if I came home before nine. She’d treat it like a personal affront, maybe even see it as an insult, since she’d been the one to help me pick out this particular Dick. I don’t know why she’d take it so personally, she doesn’t even like d—

  Uhh, never mind. She’d taken over my mom’s room, and I was beginning to fear she’d picked up some of the passive-aggressive (mostly aggressive) qualities of its previous occupant.

  “Question,” Dick said, still staring at the menu. He’d yet to actually acknowledge Wendy’s arrival with eye contact, like, you know, a human being would. “Is this lobster locally sourced?”

  Wendy blinked away her surprise very quickly. “Uhm, no,” she said, and it sounded a little strained, like she was trying to hold in some laughter. “It’s freshly caught Maine Lobster. Just flown in this morning.”

  “Hmm,” Dick said, staring at the menu as though it held the secrets of life. “Is it ethically raised?”

  That raised my eyebrows, and Wendy’s as well. “Ah, well,” she said, recovering admirably quickly, “it’s fresh, so it was raised in the ocean until it was caught, and then kept alive in a tank in the back—”

  “Yeah, but is it ethically treated?” Dick asked, finally looking up to fix poor Wendy with a very serious look that I couldn’t take seriously. Was this Dick actually trying to act like he had some sort of conscience? Because thus far, I had him figured for a psychopath. Having known a few in my time *cough cough* Wolfe and Bjorn *cough cough*—

  Hey, Wolfe said in my mind.

  Guilty, Bjorn said, clearly cool with my diagnosis, maybe even proud of it.

  —I felt qualified to at least hazard a guess in Dick’s case.

  “Well,” Wendy said, a smile plastered on her face that reminded me of the way Jackie, my agency’s press secretary, looked on camera right before she was about to lose her shit on national television, “once you order one, we’re going to drop it, still living, into a pot of boiling water while it screams in pain until it dies, and then once it’s cooked, we’re going to bring it out and you’re going to crack open its shell and eat its muscles, so … not sure you’d consider that ethical, but …”

  “Mmhmm,” Dick said, nodding seriously. Definite psychopath. “Hm. What about—”

  “Okay,” I said, dropping my menu on the table. “I have to go to powder my nose.” Which was possibly a euphemism for commit suicide in the most painful way possible. Wait, second-most painful. This date was pretty much first-most painful at this point.

  “You’re not even wearing any makeup,” Dick said with a sneer.

  There was a slight gasp from Wendy, who grimaced but quickly caught herself, covering her mouth to hide her surprise and giving me a sympathetic look. “I was being polite,” I said, barely hanging on to my civility. Think of poor Ariadne, and how devastated she would be if I come home early and with a sad story about disemboweling my date with my bare hands. She’d look at my bloody dress and the smile of satisfaction on my face, and she’d be so disappointed. “I need to take a giant, massive steaming dump and deliver it to the toilet.” And his name is Ricard-o, I did not add but seriously wanted to. I shot Wendy a look. “Would you mind telling me where the restroom is?”

  “I’ll show you the way,” Wendy said, trying hard to hide a smile as she gestured toward the bar. With deft fingers she picked up my drink and set it on her tray, beckoning me away from the king of all jackasses.

  “Thank you,” I said, brushing past Dick with Wendy trailing in my wake.

  “I’ll just wait here, then, I guess,” Dick said, spitting sarcasm. “Starving to death or something.”

  “I think that’d be the ethical thing to do,” I muttered under my breath, loud enough for Wendy to hear me as we headed toward the bar. I heard her snicker as we snaked through the crowd of tables toward it, a giant, polished, warm wood contraption that stretched from one end of the room to the other. It was filled to the max, and I could see a corridor beyond, likely the entry to the kitchen, the bathrooms, or both.

  “Do you actually need to go?” Wendy asked, handing over my drink, some kind of fruity, delicious-smelling thing.

  “Nope,” I said, guzzling the sugary, boozy excellence in one gulp. “Gonna need a few more of these if I’m going to go back over there, though.”

  She made a face. “Why would you even think about going back over there?”

  “Guilt,” I said. “Not for him. For my, uh, mom-figure.”

  “Mom guilt is a powerful thing,” Wendy said with a bob of her head as she sidled up to the end of the bar with me in tow. “Blanchard,” she said, catching the attention of a dark-haired guy behind the bar. “I’ve got a lady here who needs another.” She took my glass carefully from between my fingers and waggled at him.

  Blanchard made his way over, his face a little pale. “Did you see what’s going on right now?” He chucked a thumb at a small TV behind the bar that was tuned to one of those cable news networks. It was subtly hidden in the décor, a nice little diversion for the crowd at the bar that maybe wanted to enjoy their drink without conversation. I could sympathize.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to hone in on what was being said; I couldn’t quite get it over the roar of a thousand conversations in the bar.

  “A plane’s about to crash in Milwaukee. They lost their pilot and co-pilot and they’re about to run out of fuel.” He glanced at me and did a double take. “Hey, aren’t you—”

  “Is there an exit back there?” I asked Wendy, almost breathless. She nodded, and I was off in a flash, my dress fluttering in the wind as I blew through the back door and out into the frigid Minnesota night.

  Dammit. I forgot my coat.

  3.

  Scott Byerly

  The promise of the beach was beckoning to Scott Byerly—salt air, warm sands, a pleasant breeze across the crowded ocean shore. He’d gotten a glimpse of it on the way to his meeting, and the
waters had called to him, but he’d done the right thing and gone to the meeting, trying his best not to think of how it’d feel to put his toes in the water and walk on the sand once he was done.

  The LA heat was a little much for him, but the crowd he’d seen just outside of his very own meeting—the reason he’d even come to Los Angeles in the first place—had been a weird thing for a Minneapolis native to behold.

  “What the hell is that?” Scott had asked Buchanan Brock, a tall, powerfully built man in his fifties. Brock was a man looking to do business with Scott’s father, and so he’d been asked to take the meeting. After an hour and a half of pleasantries, he felt like he’d gotten a little swept up in Brock’s charm.

  “This is Hollywood, son,” Brock said, his deep voice laced with some amusement. “Probably some starlet or another.” He’d nodded his head when the crowd went into a buzz. They’d been standing just outside Brock’s office; his host had walked him all the way out when the meeting was done, engaging him pleasantly the whole way. “Looks like it’s that one girl, the new meta one that everyone’s talking about.” His tall forehead wrinkled. “Say, don’t you know her …?”

  Scott had lost focus as soon as he’d laid eyes on Kat. How long has it been since I’ve even seen her in person? Probably right after the—after … well, Sovereign …

  His feet had carried him, unexpectedly, toward the crowd of paparazzi and flashing cameras. His senses had compelled him in the other direction, toward the beach, toward water—this whole town felt dry as a desert gulch. Normally he could pull water out of air like a magician with a rabbit and a hat. It was an uncomfortable sensation, akin to mid-winter in Minnesota, when the air was this dry. It was like being buried up to his neck in sand, and he was just dying to loosen the tie he’d worn into his meeting with Brock, maybe leave it aside as he dipped toes in the ocean.

  Instead, he found himself pulled toward Kat, crossing between a shining, gleaming, glass-fronted building and a black SUV looming just at the edge of the crowd of paparazzi. He watched her graceful crossing; she was moving slowly, though, way slower than she needed to. She was walking funny, too, and it took him a second to realize she was posing for the cameras, her face frozen in a look he couldn’t recall seeing on her face at any point in their relationship.

  Not that she remembers our relationship, he thought with more than a little bitterness, the reflected glare of the sun off the front of the office building nearly blinding him.

  He didn’t quite realize what he was doing when he yelled out, “KAT!” at the top of his lungs, booming and heavy enough to jar her out of her artificially posed walk. She missed a step in surprise and looked at him through giant sunglasses that covered her below her cheekbones. Her forehead looked … puffier? What the hell …? Did she Botox? She’s a meta … we don’t age like normal people … what the …?

  She whispered in the ear of another man who came up to her side, loud enough he could almost hear her even over the crowd of paparazzi, loud enough that he realized she was playing to the boom microphone that had been swung over her head like a branch with mistletoe at Christmas.

  Kat made her way through the crowd and the paparazzi moved aside for her two mountainous bodyguards. They cut a path through at the behest of the guy who she’d been talking to. He locked eyes with the older man and caught a surprisingly buoyant smile from the fellow, who followed a few paces behind Kat with another woman in his wake. Scott took in the little entourage with a glance and landed back on that guy again. He looked … amused? Pleased? Something uncomfortable that was causing some smile lines to crease up the side of his acne-scarred face.

  “Scott,” Kat said as her two bodyguards shoved a photographer out of the way to make room for her to stand about a foot from him. The boom mic that followed her swung down perilously, so close that Scott wondered if he needed to duck his head. A man with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed his way up to film them, perfectly positioned about ten feet away, putting them in the middle of the frame. Scott gave him a look, a very distinct What the f—? sort of look of combined horror and disgust. “What are you doing here?” she asked, sounding like she was a little horrified herself.

  “Uhm, I had a meeting over there,” Scott said, pointing his finger over his shoulder. He looked for Buchanan Brock, figured maybe the man would back up his story, but he was gone, probably back into his office and out of the damned dry heat.

  “Really,” Kat said, making clear she was not exactly convinced.

  “It’s been a while,” Scott said, feeling more than a little on-the-spot and painfully aware that the camera and microphone combo were recording this awkward and uncomfortable interaction for broadcast to … well, the entire world, really. All eyes on you and the only thing you can come up with is that? He stopped short of smacking himself in the forehead.

  “It has,” Kat said, looking more than a little tense. “I’m a little surprised to see you in LA.”

  He frowned. “Because?”

  “It’s not really your sort of scene,” she said airily, still hiding behind those dark glasses. Her voice sounded strange, more stilted than he could recall it ever being before.

  “Well, I’m only in town for a couple days—the meeting, maybe some lounging by the seashore,” Scott said, feeling his discomfort rising but trying desperately to get it under control. Remember, she doesn’t recall any of our history. Not a thing. Yep, this was just as uncomfortable as he’d recalled it being every other time he’d tried to talk with her before the war had ended. “I’ll be gone before you know it,” he said, wishing that moment were here now.

  “I heard you and Sienna were hanging out again,” Kat said, a little softer.

  Scott let out a slow breath. “I helped her and Reed a couple months ago, yeah.” His mind flitted through possibilities associated with that question.

  “Are you two dating?” Kat asked, coolly.

  “What?” Scott stifled a laugh. “No. We didn’t—”

  “Uh huh,” Kat said, making a face that played directly to the camera without her once looking at it. What the …? Scott thought for the dozenth time in the last few minutes.

  “Need to wrap this up,” the sun-glazed guy lurking behind her said quietly enough that Scott barely heard it over the crowd noise. The flashes of cameras in his peripheral vision were blinding. Wasn’t it the middle of the day? “Can you get an angry confrontation out of this?”

  “What?” Scott looked at the guy, aghast. “‘Angry confrontation’?”

  “Oh, that’s right, he’s a meta,” the guy said.

  “This is Scott Byerly,” Kat said, her voice loud and staged. “He thinks we dated once upon a time.”

  “Because we did,” Scott said hotly.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Kat said, swallowing visibly. “There’s no need to get violent.”

  “I’m not—what?” Scott’s facade of control degenerated. “I’m not violent. What are you talking about?”

  “That’s good,” Taggert said, whispering softly. Scott anchored his gaze on the man’s acne-scarred face. “Just ignore me,” Taggert said to him, just out of view of the camera that was fixed on Scott and Kat. “Pretend I’m not here.”

  “If only I could,” Scott snapped. “Kat, what the hell is this?”

  “I asked you to stop stalking me,” Kat said, voice in a low quiver. The flashes of bulbs, the click of cameras were blinding lights to Scott, but he held his eyes painfully open as his jaw dropped. “I know you’ve got powerful connections, and I’m a just a girl who—”

  “What the actual—?” Scott let his head slump in disbelief and disgust. “I’m not stalking you. I saw you, and I thought I’d say hello—”

  “You’ve made up all these details of a relationship that never happened,” Kat said, shuddering slightly on camera. She adjusted her sunglasses and wiped a single tear off her cheek—her right cheek, perfectly positioned where it would be in frame.

  Scott felt himself hit hard boil and his fi
sts clenched. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “You don’t need to be so abusive,” Kat said, taking a step back, her voice quivering.

  “Abu-WHAT?” Scott boggled. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in years!”

  “I know you’ve been following me,” Kat said.

  “I’ve been in Minnesota!” Scott sputtered. “It’s hard to follow you from Minnesota, unless you count watching the occasional interview, or your TV show—”

  “You’re stalking me,” she said quietly, and her bodyguards closed ranks, positioning their enormous frames between her and Scott. “You’re unhinged, Scott, and this has to stop. All these things you remember about our supposed relationship—they’re all in your head.”

  “Uh, no,” Scott said, “they’re just not in yours, unfortunately, because of your powers draining your memory—”

  “You need professional help,” Kat shouted from between the two towering bodyguards as they protectively shuffled her away. “You need to talk to a psychiatrist, Scott!” Her voice was all insipid concern, so filled with worry. “You can’t keep living like thi—”

  A spatter of blood hit her sun-glowing white blazer and drenched her tastefully exposed, bronzed upper chest. The dark crimson was like ink on her browned skin, barely visible between the linebackers who protected her from Scott.

  “What the—” he mouthed, and then another splatter of crimson liquid bathed her blond hair, running down the side of her face in beads as her own mouth dropped in surprise. A little blood hit her exposed, bleached teeth.

  Her bodyguards fell, leaving Kat exposed between the two of their corpses. Wounds gaped on their sides, holes a few inches wide. A tall, lanky man stood next to Kat. He was pale as snow but freckled, and he had long red hair and a ragged beard that stretched down the middle of his chest. He grabbed Kat by the wrist, fingers sinking into her golden skin and squeezing, hints of white showing around the edges of his fingers as he squeezed and then shook her. She flapped like a paper being waved, dragged by his superior strength as she stared at him in stunned horror.