Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “She understands how it is,” he said. “She’s—well, you know, she’s just great. She’s got an old soul—”

  “You have no idea.”

  “—Sometimes a man just needs a favor, and I’ve certainly granted her more than a few—”

  I wanted to vomit for realsies. You know how right before you’re super nauseous, you almost pray for the vomiting to happen, just to get it over with? And how sometimes, afterwards, it feels better, like maybe you expunged the horror from your system? I really hoped for that moment of purgation, even though I didn’t think that the sickness of the mind that Taggert’s revelation had just forced upon me had even a chance of being purged through vomiting. If I had, I wouldn’t have even hesitated, I would have stuck my finger so far down my throat with meta speed that I might have given myself an accidental tonsillectomy.

  “I can see you’re thinking about it,” Taggert said with that same grin.

  “And I wish I wasn’t,” I said, “I wish I could take away my own memories with my power, instead of just being able to take away other peoples’. I would give away my powers and let someone else take this memory and then shoot them in the head with high caliber hollow-points until their brains were splattered all over the floor, and then I would mop them up, douse the bucket and the floor and wall with gasoline and burn it, then nuke the building afterward just to be sure the memory was gone from this earth for good.”

  Taggert had his lips pressed together tightly; I had finally wiped the grin off his face. “So … no shower, then?”

  “Even if you weren’t absolutely the most appalling man I’ve met even tonight—and that’s saying something, because you’re in the running with Captain Redbeard the invidious man and Dick-o, the worst first date of all time—I am still not getting Kat’s sloppy seconds.” Scott appeared at the balcony above and started making his way across the windows, ending up in the room across from Kat’s. I made a face. “Again.”

  “Have it your way, then,” Taggert said coolly and strode off to the doors of his suite. He closed them both on himself, mustering a grin again, but this one seemed more … fake? “If you change your mind …”

  “Then I’ll be sure to throw myself out the window over there,” I gestured toward the plate glass to my right, “and not use my powers.”

  He shrugged like it was no big thing and closed the door. I didn’t hear the click of a lock, and it bothered me.

  My phone buzzed again.

  Ricardo

  Call me. We should do breakfast. You are captivating and I must see you again.

  “Oh, for—” I said, tossing my phone, surprisingly gently, onto the nearest chair. I turned, expecting to find my room under where Scott’s was, but—

  Aw, hell.

  There was nothing but a kitchenette there.

  Karyn came down the stairs just then, all mousy and head-down. “Umm,” I said, trying to intercept her, “this suite is short a room.”

  She didn’t stop. She was beelining for the door after what was probably a long and degrading day which doubtlessly had her questioning her life choices. “There’s a couch,” she said, not bothering to stop and do something for me like—I dunno, kill Taggert and burn his corpse and personal possessions so I could have his room, or tell Kat she could have the couch, because the person protecting her should be treated like a guest, or just give me a half-second’s commiseration about being treated like the ass end of this shit show—anything, really.

  Nope, Karyn went out the door and didn’t even bother to tell me to lock it behind her. I did it anyway, though, loafing around, not quite willing yet to accept the hard truth that my logical mind was forcing on me. I didn’t want to, not after this night.

  Ughhhh.

  I was the bodyguard. I was protecting Kat, whom I loathed but thought of as a victim now that I knew—EWWW EWWW EWWWWWW—what price she’d paid for fame.

  And now I had to sleep on her couch.

  “You’d at least better be comfortable,” I muttered to the couch, as if it could hear me.

  It wasn’t.

  “I hate this town,” I said, the lights glittering at me from beyond the window even after I’d turned off all the ones in the suite. The honking of an angry car horn somewhere below seemed to agree with me, and I passed out before the kink in my neck from the shitty pillow could give me a neck-ache.

  23.

  Karl

  Karl had a house set up in the Elysium neighborhood, a perfect little hidey-hole, or a bolt-hole as his benefactor called it. It had almost no furniture, but the air mattress he had to sleep on was in the middle of the smallest room in the house, and that Karl found immensely soothing.

  It was a perfect little lair for scheming his schemes, for imagining how things were going to go. He’d already seen his face on the news, the footage blurry and all shaky-cam, like these people had never filmed an action scene before. It didn’t make him happy, exactly, because Karl didn’t really feel happiness anymore, but he got a rough sense of satisfaction out of it, a cold feeling of victory, like he was rubbing it in their faces even now. It wasn’t the big triumph yet, the one that would show them all, but it was pretty good.

  The air mattress was a nice touch. He could have slept on the floor; it was nice to have even that kind of surface to rest on after months of—well, of what he’d dealt with. It was springy enough, light enough, especially in its half-deflated state, to mimic a little of what he’d learned to love.

  He still couldn’t sleep, though. No, he was too wired. Months of planning had led up to this day. And even though this day was over, the next ones—the ones of reckoning—they were going to be even better.

  When he closed his eyes, he pictured the looks on their faces—Kat Forrest’s had been good, a mixture of stunned disbelief and terror. She was a leech. She was disgusting.

  Sienna Nealon’s hadn’t been quite so satisfying, but ripping her up had been. It had been so good, dumping her in the pool and then leaving her behind to watch as he blew up the house. She’d been so damned smug through their whole tête-à-tête; it had been nice wiping that off her face when he’d ripped into her muscles. Hopefully she was a little scared now, that she was feeling wronged like he’d been. It was just a taste of what was to come.

  He was the righteous one in this exchange. Her little puppet, Augustus, had imprisoned him in the earth for months. MONTHS. He’d been doing his job, and that shit had just ripped the ground out from underneath him—HIM.

  What had followed had been hell. What he’d been through was something no one else had been through. The horror was a raw nerve, easy to touch but hard to handle, searing, irritated skin left burnt and hanging in the wind. Or, no, not the wind, not really.

  Karl felt the shame, the acidic singe in his gullet as his heartburn flared again. He heard a gunshot in the distance, and he sat up on the air mattress, looking down at his gaunt, emaciated arms, naked under the sheet. He pulled it off, the warm night making it irrelevant. His thighs were painfully thin, even now, like forearms. He’d been a big guy once, well put-together.

  Now he was horror. A skeleton looked back at him from the mirror.

  They’d all pay for this. All of them. They’d see who he was, what they’d done. He’d make them feel the shame of helplessness, of being done so very damned wrong.

  Yes, they’d all see. The whole world would. They couldn’t ignore him anymore, and they were talking about him even now, as he stood in the shadows.

  He could imagine their faces when he stepped out. Then they’d never stop talking about him.

  24.

  Scott

  Dawn found Scott still awake, staring out over the city, but he didn’t want to venture out into the living room area because he’d realized, a little belatedly, that Sienna was sleeping out there. He’d gone out in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep and found her curled up on the couch. She’d shifted at the sound of his footsteps, and he’d felt bad; here he had taken one of t
he bedrooms without even giving it a thought and she was stuck on a sofa. At least it looked comfortable, he justified it to himself.

  He stared at the dawning day breaking over the city of Los Angeles and took a breath of the clean hotel air. It was better than the hotel his dad had put him up in, but he didn’t have a change of clothes or any of his toiletries, so it was kind of a wash. Normally he would have taken a shower, but instead he’d turned on the TV as background noise. They were still talking about the drought, how they hadn’t had rain since last fall, when it had deluged a few times and then quit. That didn’t seem like the atmosphere to take a long shower in. It would have made him feel guilty.

  The taste of morning breath stuck on his tongue, and he tried to remember when he’d last had an actual meal. Had he even had finger food at the party? No, he’d run into Brock before he’d found the food, and now whatever was left of the spread was ash. He tried to smile, but he didn’t really feel like it. He had a sense of malaise in this whole thing that was unsettling, but it had settled—on him. On his bones, in his bones. It wasn’t just the dry air, either. It was everything, a feeling that had followed him from Minnesota.

  Why had Kat said that he and Sienna were together? They’d never so much as gone on a date. He racked his memory; he’d seen the articles, the gossip rag stuff that said they were boyfriend and girlfriend, but that was gossip rags. It wasn’t like they ever got anything right. They made shit up for a living, like the weatherman or politicians.

  There was a feeling in his mind that he quite couldn’t identify, though. Like something stuck in his teeth that he couldn’t work loose with his tongue, no matter how hard he tried.

  Scott went into the bathroom attached to his room and ran water. It wasn’t exactly a shower, but it would do. He ran his hands under the tap, drawing the water in. He could store it inside—retain water, he always joked—and he needed it right now, in this town. After he’d had his fill, he let it run a little longer. It was like taking a drink on a hot day, like quenching a thirst.

  He shut off the tap and didn’t bother toweling off his hands. They were already dry.

  He eased over to the suite door and opened it. He took quiet steps up to the balcony and looked over. Sienna was still on the couch, slobbed out—there was no other way to describe it—mouth open, a little bit of drool running down her chin. He cringed and assisted it back into her mouth from above, then tiptoed down toward the kitchen, hoping they had something in the mini-fridge.

  He was almost to the kitchen when the knock sounded at the door. He froze, like someone had whacked him in the back and forced him to stand upright. Sienna stirred on the couch but did not wake. He adjusted his course to the door, reaching it in a half dozen steps as the next pounding came. He flipped the lock quickly, the word “SHHHHH,” already building to be let out from his lungs, threw the door open to deliver his message—

  And froze when he saw what was standing on the other side.

  It was man wearing a black ski mask with an ovoid hole to allow his eyes to look out. He was massive, a mountain in the hallway, enormous, dangerous—and before Scott could say anything, he pushed his way into the suite.

  25.

  Sienna

  I woke to the sounds of a scuffle, that funny after-sleep taste in my mouth and one leg hanging off the couch. It was a rude awakening; not the rudest I’d ever had, but not exactly a gentle kiss from Steven Clayton—errr, I mean Prince Charming. (I might mean Steven Clayton.)

  I rolled my head to find Scott being put in a headlock by a dude in tactical gear with a black mask covering his face. I blinked twice, Scott’s neck trapped beneath a hammy forearm, and stopped myself from rolling off the couch just in time.

  “Guy Friday!” I snapped, and the black-masked idiot looked right at me. “Let him go.”

  Guy Friday did as I asked, well-trained chimp that he was. Scott bolted away from him as soon as the grip lessened enough for him to escape, and he turned and raised his hands like he was going to give the monkey a bath. “What the hell?” Scott asked, trying to clear his throat.

  “I wasn’t apprised that you were involved in this situation,” Guy Friday said in a thick voice. “It wasn’t in the briefing materials.”

  “You just worked with him like, two months ago,” I said, cracking my back as I got to my feet. My leather jacket slid off me where I’d been using it as a blanket, and I caught it deftly. “Maybe give him the benefit of the doubt next time?” Under the mask, I thought I could see Guy Friday thinking it over, but it wasn’t easy to tell. He wasn’t exactly a brain trust. “What are you doing here?”

  “The director sent me,” Guy Friday said, hands at his sides, his muscles fading a little now that he considered the danger over, I guess. He was a Hercules-type, able to grow his muscle mass in times of crisis. Or when he wanted to head to the beach and show off, probably still wearing his ski mask the whole time. It was good for all occasions, I guessed, whether hitting the slopes or robbing a liquor store. “I was ordered to find you and keep an eye on the situation, manage the crisis.”

  “Well, we’re managing to crisis just fine, thanks,” I said. “Why, we’re crisis-ing like pros here.”

  “Crisis is not a verb,” he said stiffly.

  “It could be,” I said, a little resentful. “Let’s crisis, fools!” I said experimentally. He just shook his head. “It’s gonna be a thing. You wait and see.”

  Kat’s blond head appeared at the balcony, took one look at Guy Friday and screamed before turning and running back into her room. I heard the slamming of a door and the bolting of a lock. “They’re going to have to Photoshop the brown spot out of her yoga pants,” I said.

  “What?” Guy Friday asked.

  “She’s doing a photoshoot for Vanity Fair today,” I said with a forced smile.

  “That’s stupid,” Guy Friday said.

  “Yeah, the timing is dumb,” I agreed. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she and her manager/producer/lover are immovable on the subject.”

  “I meant Vanity Fair is stupid,” Guy Friday said, suddenly an expert in magazines. “Adhering to a scheduled event when someone has declared their intent to kill you is suicidal.”

  “At last, something upon which we can agree,” I said. “And here I thought we had nothing in common.”

  He perked up, looking at my hip. “Is that a CZ Shadow II?”

  “Oh, wow,” Scott deadpanned, “you guys have so much in common you should get married.”

  “No, thank you,” Guy Friday said, sounding as serious as if I’d just proposed to him for real, “I quite enjoy the single life, and wouldn’t care to be chained down just yet.” He wandered toward the staircase and looked out the window, and I thought, just for a second, he was admiring the view of the skyline. “This is a disaster.”

  “I agree,” I said, “urban planning hasn’t really improved since the skylines of—”

  “I meant the window,” Guy Friday said. “You could put a sniper outside and pick the target off with ease.”

  I looked out the window. There were no other towers of similar height for well over a mile, and in fact anyone trying to shoot up into our room would have a beast of a time making that shot due to the angle, what with us being on the top floor. “Ummm … I’d be more worried that someone would come through with a helicopter and a Gatling gun, but okay … sniper. Will definitely consider that.” And file it under “I” for “Idiot.” Captain Redbeard was more likely to ride the elevator up and just walk in, do his thing and drop off a bomb while we were all sleeping. Which I had considered but was too tired to take very seriously. Bodyguarding is not really my jam. “Someone should go calm down Kat before she dials 911,” I said, and looked to Scott.

  He looked back at me for a moment then realized I meant him. “Oh. Right. Yeah.” He started toward the staircase, paused, looked like he wanted to say something, then dismissed it and headed on his way.

  “Any idea why this target was picked?”
Guy Friday asked.

  “The suspect is a guy Augustus had a dust-up with in Atlanta a few months back,” I said, watching Guy Friday’s eyes for a trace of reaction. “You know, Augustus?” He stared at me blankly. “Black guy? Can use earth powers?”

  “I know of him,” Guy Friday said without a hint of emotion.

  “Yeah, well, this guy put a hand in his girlfriend—”

  Guy Friday’s eyes narrowed. “He did what?”

  “He—he can make himself pass through solid matter, and he kind of stuck a hand in Taneshia’s back and like, ripped a hole in her body—”

  “He ripped her a new one,” Guy Friday said, but sounded strangely unamused, like he was filling in a blank. “The body already has several holes,” he went on to explain, oh-so-helpfully.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “Augustus dealt with him at the time, dragged the ground out from under his feet and buried him in a hole—” I paused a second to track this with my experience. Redbeard could make himself totally insubstantial, walk through walls, dodge through punches, all that, but he didn’t fall through the earth when he did any of that. Yet Augustus had yanked the ground from beneath his feet.

  How?

  I looked around for my phone and found it on the nearby chair. I had notifications out the wazoo. Six were from Dick, a progressive spiral of jealousy and anger as he realized I was apparently not meeting him for breakfast, but the seventh was a missed call from Augustus.

  Thankfully, he left a voicemail. Which I immediately pulled up and put on speakerphone.

  “Hey, yo,” Augustus’s youthful voice came, “got your message about that phase-shifting dude. Yeah, I remember him, bald man, red eyebrows and goatee, and a shit attitude. I thought I’d seen the last of him after what he did to Taneshia. Reed and I are in the middle of something pretty big at the moment—yeah, okay, it’s actually just the world’s longest stakeout, we’re talking like, a week going on now—anyway, when this wraps up I’m heading to LA for sure. Anyway, this guy, he’s got the ability to slink through solid matter, but he’s got to keep the bottoms of his feet solid when he does this stuff, or else he’ll slide into the earth. So just, y’know, aim for the flat foot. I don’t know.” There was a sound in the background, Reed muttering. “Okay, gotta go. Just hold him off and I’ll be there to help you—I’m just kidding. I’m sure you’ll have him all wrapped up by the time the Austin, Texas, version of The Longest Day is finished over here. Later.”