Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  Now comes the time for Bjorn Odinson to make his use known, Bjorn said.

  Ah, yes. The power of the Odin-type. It was something I tended to overlook because it was really quite—uhm … simplistic? Bjorn had the power to project startling imagery of ravens in one’s mind.

  The warmind is more than that, it is a power that can disrupt one’s very ability to—

  Yes, thank you, Bjorn.

  I concentrated as the redhead came swiping at me, looking like he was about two seconds from trying to start a full-on slap fight with me, and I let him have the warmind.

  Captain Redbeard flinched like I’d legitimately slapped him, or given him a sharp jab to the nose. BOOYAH! Take that, you insubstantial bastard. His skin flickered, phasing back into substance. While he rocked back, I used the opportunity to give him a real jab, and he went flying like I’d strapped a rocket to his face and launched him across the yard. He disappeared into the wall of the house, apparently in control of himself enough to trigger his power to save himself from a rough landing.

  Nicely done, Wolfe said. Now tear out his entrails with your teeth.

  “I don’t think it’s that kind of party,” I said, mostly to myself. Mostly. “Close, but … no.” I glanced up at Scott, wondering if I should go into the house or bash through a wall to go looking for this guy. I didn’t want to presume he was one and done on the punching, but he hadn’t disappeared behind glass; if I was going to go after him, it was going to require some pursuit, and what with a lot of people already having screamed and fled around the sides of the house, I figured it might pay to wait a second and see if he came back to me for another round since I’d just given him a good what-for.

  I looked up and saw like twenty people with their cell phone cameras watching from the edges of the upper deck, and a few more hiding behind vegetation in the back yard, sort of hiding around the edges of the party and—I dunno, filming or Instagraming or Vining or YouTubing or whatever. “Get out of here, you idiots!” I shouted. Not a one of them so much as moved.

  Figures. Anyone with brains had gotten the hell out of here before the shit had hit the fan.

  “Hey!” Steven Clayton called from next to Scott, who still held his hands up as he ushered the water back into the swimming pool a little at a time. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Kat said, throwing herself against him, once more not winning any acting awards for sincerity. “I was so worried!”

  Steven looked a little helpless with her hanging on him; she was stronger than a normal human, after all. “Uhh … good.” She was dripping all over his tux, and he’d noticed. “I’m glad to hear that.” He gently removed her from him, like she was the most awkward thing in the world.

  Hey, did I just get the attention of the big Hollywood star over Kat? Hehe. That’s funny.

  And also … weird, right?

  “Thanks, Scott!” I called as he carefully managed the last of the swimming pool’s contents back to where it belonged.

  “I am your own personal Ron Weasley in a flying Ford Anglia, yes,” he said, voice straining a little as he dropped the last of the water off the deck in front of me, leaving not so much as a spot. Boy does good work with moisture, lemme tell ya. Uhh … pretend I said that in a very even, detached tone, and forget that we’d slept together once upon a time. Because otherwise it would probably seem irredeemably dirty. “Should we check on that—uhh … do we have a name for that guy?”

  “Seems like he’s got a mad-on for Kat,” I said. “Typical Injustice Collector.”

  “Whut?” Kat asked, sounding—well, sounding like Kat. “I don’t know who he is.” Now she sounded petulant. Also like Kat. “He knew you!” She pointed a finger down at me.

  “Everybody knows me,” I scoffed then felt a little embarrassed at how egomaniacal that probably sounded. “Not in a good way,” I corrected, mostly for the benefit of Steven. Uhh … that didn’t really help my cause, did it?

  I focused on the shocked look on Steven Clayton’s face for just a second too long. I thought he was just reacting to my asinine statement, but by the time I realized he was lifting a finger to point to something behind me, it was too late.

  I felt a stunning pain in my shoulder as I started to turn, and the Redhead jabbed a hand through me, right into my arm. I stumbled forward and he pursued, ripping into my other side as I staggered. I lost my balance and fell into the pool, feeling a ripping and tearing like I was getting pecked at by a pack of carrion birds all the while.

  Wolfe, I said to myself before the hits had stopped coming, and I felt him go to work with his power to heal me. The pain faded in seconds, and there was a splash as someone jumped into the water to save me. I wondered why Scott would waste his time doing that when could have just had the water reject me right out like he had with Kat. Then I felt strong arms take hold of me and start to lift me out of the water. I wanted to hold tight to my rescuer, but instead I grabbed them by the arm and prompted Gavrikov to turn off the gravity, causing us both to soar right out of the water.

  I saw the surprise on Steven Clayton’s face as I flew him over the yard and dropped him on the soft grass. He hit and rolled like a man who’d been trained in martial arts quite a bit—which he probably had. He hadn’t become an action hero by not doing at least a few of his own stunts.

  I swept around, looking for Redbeard, the pirate hobo, but all I found was Kat, shaking on the upper deck, Scott perched at the edge of the railing, watching me. Also, those idiots with cell phone cameras.

  “Where’s the big noise?” I asked, coming to a landing next to Clayton. “And I do mean ‘big noise,’ too, because I’m gonna make that little shit scream louder than a metal band when I get my hands on him—”

  “Gone,” Scott said solemnly. He didn’t look nearly so rattled as Kat, who was probably in danger of falling apart, she was shaking so much. It wasn’t from the cold either, because I’d just taken a dip in the same pool she had and it had to be like seventy-five degrees out here. “But not before he explained himself a little more.”

  “Oh, yeah?” My feet touched down on the ground, and the weight of gravity settled back on me. “What did ZZ Red have to say for himself?”

  Scott looked at Kat before answering, but she was too busy looking down to answer for herself. “Said there weren’t any real cameras here tonight.” He looked at the circle of spectators still filming all the action with their phones. “Said it wasn’t public enough for her to die here. He said …” Scott licked his lips, but stopped.

  “He said,” Kat picked it up, her fear obvious even through her bitter tone, “that he wanted the whole world watching when I died—and you, too.”

  18.

  Karl

  There were easier ways to die, but Karl couldn’t think of any that would be nearly as satisfying as the end he had planned. He was walking away from the house now, down the hill, disappearing through the other houses and scaring the hell out of people in their living rooms and bedrooms and out on their decks as he ran through without regard for what they were thinking. Their scared and surprised faces were motivation, like fuel or food, the thing that kept him going. He loved the revulsion, the attention. It was like sweet candy after not getting a taste of anything for months.

  And he knew how that felt, too.

  He stopped down the road a bit, looking back up the hill, pausing in the middle of someone’s lush, green lawn. Water glistened on the blades of grass, and not from recent rainfall, either. He looked up at where he’d been, lights coming on in some of the houses he’d taken shortcuts through, and smiled. Their fear was his pleasure, and he was about to take a whole lot of pleasure.

  They’d remember his name when it was all over, that was for sure.

  He fished his phone out of his pocket, dialing a number he knew by heart. When his benefactor picked up, he asked a simple question: “Now?”

  “Now,” his benefactor said with a voice heavy with a smile and hung up so Karl could make his ne
xt call. It rang once as he sat waiting in anticipation, listening to the barking of dogs and shouts of people in the night.

  The explosion at the Vargas house rocked the hills, the shockwave shattering glass in the house behind him. He’d left the bomb under a bed on his way out to confront Kat the first time, and it had sat there waiting for him to do just this.

  Sirens were already wailing at his handiwork, and Karl waited, watching, listening to them scream closer and closer. It was a satisfying noise, the sound of notoriety, of his rising reputation. Yes, they would remember him, all right. Just a few more moves and he’d see to that. They’d write his name in the history books for all time.

  19.

  Sienna

  Oh, Redbeard, I thought as the house exploded, showering all of us behind my hastily cordoned-off perimeter with glass, there had to be less painful ways to die than pissing me off.

  Standard agency procedure after a metahuman event was to evacuate the area in case there was a secondary threat—usually, that would be another meta. It could, however, include bombs, and in this case, that’s exactly what we had, apparently. I had to admit, after meeting our little aggrieved ginger, I had a sneaking suspicion he was the sort that wanted to make his miserable mark as violently as he could, with little compunction for what would happen to anyone in his wake. Turned out I was right.

  Yay, me.

  “Did you hear?” Anna Vargas, star of some vapid reality show like Kat’s, but without super powers, wandered by next to Flannery Steiner, one of Los Angeles County’s Least Wanted. Since Steiner had neither cocaine nor a naked man nor a moving vehicle close at hand, I gave them both a wary eye and eavesdropped. “We’re already trending on Twitter!” She didn’t seem too upset about her house, probably because she figured she was insured and it’d be taken care of. That was going to be a rather rude shock.

  “I know,” Steiner said, clearly enjoying the publicity and minimally concerned about the death threats against Kat or the party house that had just been blown up like two hundred feet away from where she stood. “Isn’t it awful?” Her tone suggested it was anything but, the harpy.

  Steven Clayton came wandering up, looking a little dazed. “You all right?” he asked me again.

  “Fine,” I said, looking back at the burning house. I didn’t know exactly what kind of bomb had been used, but it had made for a hell of a detonation and didn’t leave too much fire behind. It was spreading now, of course, but it looked more like the structure had just been demolished versus—well, you know those huge pyrotechnic explosions you see in movies? Yeah. This may have been Hollywood, but it didn’t look like that. More bang, less burn. My ears were still ringing a little. I glanced at Clayton and felt a shock run through me. “Why? Do I not look okay?”

  “Well, you look like one of the extras from a really bad zombie movie I made in my youth,” he said, studying me. I had some holes in my clothing, it was true, and there was more than a little red seeping through.

  “I saw that one,” I said, nodding. He cocked his head at me, and I shrugged. “It was on Netflix, and I was bored—” I paused. “Also, I think you’re still in your youth.”

  “Got me there,” he said with a smile. He didn’t grin, I’d noticed, which was a mark in his favor. Smiling stupidly ought to be the province of, well, the stupid.

  “Get over there!” Taggert shouted from behind me. I turned around to see him hectoring a guy with a camera—not the same one I’d threatened with sodomy earlier, but a new one—pushing him to lift the camera up so he could get a clear view of the blown up house. “Get some good establishing shots, some clear ones of the aftermath, of the fire trucks when they show up, the cops …” He snapped his fingers in Karyn, the assistant’s face, and her glazed-over eyes snapped out of the trance she was in. “Find someone who was filming the whole thing and get them to sell us footage of the explosion, huh?” He shoved her lightly away, and she scurried off to accost a man with a cell phone in his hand. Taggert caught my eye and grinned. “Gotta think of everything.”

  “Thanks for proving my point on that one, Taggert,” I muttered. Clayton gave me a quizzical look, but we both got distracted by the arrival of the first police cars, sirens doing that WHOOOOOP thing, all digital and annoying and shrieky. “You seen Kat?” I asked him.

  “She’s right there,” Clayton said, pointing about ten feet behind me. Kat was in a little gap in the crowd, Scott standing next to her like a silent sentinel, arms folded. The good news was, I could have hit them with a spit from here. The bad news was that I hadn’t realized it. In the chaos, Captain Redbeard could have made another, more successful kill attempt, and I might not have seen it in time to stop it.

  “Oh, good,” I said, trying to decide if it really was good. Man, I was tired.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Clayton asked with a frown.

  “It’s past my bedtime,” I said, yawning as the cop car made its way through enough of the crowd to come rolling to a halt. “And do you have any idea how long it takes to do witness statements on these things?”

  “Uhhh … no?”

  “Good for you,” I said with a tight smile of my own. “But you’re about to find out.”

  Taggert sashayed a little closer, clearly not that upset about what I would classify as a disaster, but which he apparently considered nothing less than a wonderful evening. “You know how long this is going to take? Kitten’s got a Vanity Fair photoshoot tomorrow in the a.m.”

  I was too tired to wonder why he didn’t just say “morning.” “Hours,” I said. “You might want to cancel that.”

  He gave me a dismissive wave of the hand. “We’ll just have them fix it with Photoshop if she’s got bags under the eyes. No big.”

  I turned to see Steven Clayton with a full-bore cringe on his face. “There’s no business like show business, huh?” He did not answer me, but I had a feeling that I knew more or less what he was thinking by the expression on his face.

  20.

  Scott

  Scott sat with his head down, trying to ignore the flare of the police and ambulance lights. The fire trucks were further up the hill by now, and the whole scene was consumed by people in formalwear being asked questions by uniformed emergency personnel. First aid was being administered, and by Scott’s reckoning, about a thousand photos were being Instagrammed per minute.

  “You know,” he said to Kat, who was sitting on the ground next to him, “for a bunch of people who had a decently close brush with death tonight, your friends don’t seem overly concerned.”

  Kat stirred out of her torpor, her dress still damp from where she’d gone in the pool. He held out a hand and drew the moisture to him, pulling it free of the fabric and out of her hair. He pulled a stray tear as well, though he didn’t say anything about it as it glistened through the air toward him, reflecting the red and blue light.

  “That guy—the red-haired bum guy—he really does want to kill me, doesn’t he?” Kat asked.

  “Seems like,” Scott said after a pause for thought. “I mean, he’s following you around with intent.”

  “What did I ever do to him?” she asked, blinking. Another droplet came oozing out of the corner of her eye, subtle and small.

  Scott shifted uneasily where his ass met the hard concrete curb. “You exist. Some people don’t need any other reason.”

  “At least Sienna did something to him,” she said, sniffing slightly, “you know, to make him mad—”

  “I don’t think she actually did …”

  “—I’ve never even met him before and he hates me enough that he wants to kill me,” she said quietly. She averted her gaze, watching her cameraman taking shots of the house as the firemen turned their hoses on it, streams of water sailing through the night to put out the small blaze still burning in the wreckage of the home. “I’m sorry I treated you like a stalker earlier.”

  “Hm?” Scott roused himself out of a perfectly good stupor. He hadn’t gotten used to Pacific time yet. �
��Oh. Right. Yeah, I’m sorry you did, too. Any chance you’d be willing to fix that in edits?”

  “I’ll talk to Taggert about it,” she said, staring blankly at the scene and all the chaos unfolding within it. “I’m sure he’ll want to portray you and Sienna both as heroes trying to protect me. I don’t see how you could look like my enemies after coming to my rescue like that.”

  “Maybe,” Scott said. He had his suspicions otherwise. He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry I seem like a stalker.”

  “You’re not,” she said, shaking her head. “You never did. You just … you remember things I don’t.” She met his eyes carefully, her green ones still glittering with heartfelt emotion. “I’m sorry that I can’t. I’ve seen the pictures … we seemed happy together.” She looked around until her eyes alighted on Sienna, and a hint of jealousy marred her pretty features. “Not as happy as the two of you seemed before I left, but still … It can’t be easy to watch her catch the interest of a guy like Steven Clayton.”

  Scott felt his skin tighten around his eyes, his lips twisting up into an involuntary smirk. “Sienna? Why does everyone keep saying we were together? We’re just friends.” He nodded his head toward her, where she stood, very uneasily, next to Clayton, answering the questions posed by an African-American woman in a suit with a badge hanging out of her front pocket. “If she, uh, y’know, ends up dating America’s most eligible bachelor—”

  “He’s People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year,” Kat said with a dash of impatience.

  “Whatever the case,” Scott said, “I’m happy for her.”

  Kat made a face like she’d swallowed a lime slice. “Yeah. Happy for her. Me, too.”

  21.

  Sienna

  Detective Meredith Waters of the LAPD had the sort of long-suffering look that I suspected I’d worn on more than a few occasions myself. She watched me with dark, wary eyes as I answered every question she asked, and she still kept a close watch on me when she started directing her questions toward Steven, who answered them with a lot of florid expression, the sort of thing he probably learned as an actor.