Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  I lit my hand as I called Wolfe to the front of my mind again. Be wary, Sienna, he offered oh-so-helpfully as my left hand flared into fire and revealed—

  Captain Redbeard standing over me with a broken nose, blood caking his mustache and beard, crazy fury in his eyes as he leered down at me.

  I thrust my hand up as he dodged, and all I caught was his beard. I grabbed with my flaming hand and he screamed like a little boy who’d gotten kicked in the crotch, dancing away from me as I lit his stupid beard on fire. I struggled to my feet in spite of the pain in my back, and I had a feeling he’d dinged my vertebrae during the fall.

  Wolfe, I groused.

  Working on it.

  “Now there’s no audience, stupidass,” I said, staring at him in the dark of the subway tunnel. “Which is fortunate for me, because I need another YouTube video of me obliterating you into dust like I need my jaw ripped off.”

  “You do need your jaw ripped off,” he sneered, beating at the little embers of fire still left in his beard. He circled me warily, watching with thinly concealed fury. “You need to shut your stupid mouth.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me you want a woman who’s stronger than you to shut her mouth,” I quipped. “This whole scheme of yours is like a giant Freudian article on airing your inadequacies. Apropos of nothing, I just read a study the other day that said that monkeys with the smallest testicles howl the loudest.”

  “SHUT UP!” he screamed.

  “You’re really just backing up the research here,” I said. My hands were up, in a defensive position, and I was ready to fly at him. Gavrikov, I said in my mind, ready the fire. We’re gonna burn the soles of his feet off.

  Aye aye, Keptin, Gavrikov said, reminding me that he probably spent a lot of time in seedy motels in the sixties and seventies watching whatever was on television.

  I had a life before you, he said sullenly.

  Never tell me about it, Chekov, I fired back, turning my attention back to Redbeard. “Time to dance, a-hole,” I said, watching him fade away and drop about six inches into the ground. He cringed in pain, his lower lip wavering. “What the hell?” I asked the air, not really expecting a response from him; he’d just anchored himself to the earth, after all, buried his feet in the earth, where presumably the concrete under the metro line had just merged, painfully, with his feet just below the surface of the floor.

  “I don’t feel like dancing,” he said smugly, pulling something out from behind him, something he must have grabbed before pulling me down here. It turned solid for a second as he pushed a button, on the oblong, cylindrical object that he held in his hand. It would have taken a dunce, or someone completely unfamiliar with movies, not to recognize the theatrical object in his hand, but I didn’t quite get it in time to stop him from doing his thing with it.

  It was a detonator. It didn’t have a glowing button or anything, but I heard the click when he pressed it.

  And then I heard an explosion go off behind my head, filling the tunnel with dust.

  It was only enough to stagger me, the force of the shock. My eardrums blew, true, and that hurt like a bastard. I could feel the blood running out of the canals, but I had my eyes open and locked back on my threat a moment later, just in time to watch the detonator hand go insubstantial.

  “You think that’s going to stop me, turd monkey?” I shouted, unable to hear myself over the damage to my ears. Wolfe, get on that, will you? It wasn’t likely Redbeard would say something useful, but the sound of me screaming into the void without being able to hear it was kind of annoying.

  Redbeard said something, something I couldn’t understand because I don’t read lips and his were covered by that stupid scraggly beard anyway. I could see the satisfaction in the way he’d said it, though, and it was enough to make me dart a look behind me—

  Just in time to get hit by a knee-high wave of water from MacArthur Park Lake as it came rushing into the subway tunnel.

  For a second, I thought I was going to be okay; I was strong, after all. I could have just flown out of the water and shot down the tunnel, escaping before it became too high or too fast for me.

  Unfortunately, I had forgotten something that Redbeard had not.

  Subways run on electricity. Electricity that comes to them via a third rail.

  The water rushing down engulfed the subway’s third rail and carried that electricity straight to me. As it hit my legs, it didn’t feel like a normal rush of water, like the tide coming in the way I’d once felt it while on a job at Galveston Beach. No, it felt like a thousand stings—

  —like pain forcing itself behind my eyeballs—

  —like every muscle in my body locked up at once—

  Wolfe, I cried helplessly, but I could feel his panic. We hadn’t trained for this, this outside possibility of getting struck by lightning. I should have; it’s not like there weren’t metas out there that could shoot lightning at me, but I’d prioritized using my healing powers to acclimate my skin to gunshots, the more common danger I ran up against.

  Ten thousand volts of electricity ran through me, attacking my muscles, attacking my heart, frying my nerves and my brain. The last thing I felt before I was rendered unconscious was the flood behind me carrying me away down the tunnel helplessly as I slipped into death like it was an old slipper, waiting for me at the home I would never see again.

  30.

  Scott

  The second explosion had caught them debating what to do—Kat still in the water, Guy Friday looking all around like a war zone was going to drop down on him at any second, and Steven Clayton frozen like he was completely clueless.

  What followed, though, that was a sound that rendered all of them clueless. That or speechless, and Scott didn’t really know which it was.

  The rumbling of the explosion shook the earth, harder than the one across the park, a little more oomph to it. But this time there was no physical sign, no cloud of dust, no debris in the air. People were screaming, the few that hadn’t run off by now, and Kat looked more uncertain than the rest of them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, looking around nervously. With good reason, Scott figured.

  “Where’s Sienna?” Scott asked, as though she’d coming popping out of the ground any second, dragging Redbeard’s beaten carcass behind her like she was returning from a triumphant mole hunt.

  “In the ground,” Steven Clayton said unhelpfully. “Hopefully in the subway tunnel beneath the park.”

  “There’s a subway tunnel?” Scott asked. “In LA?”

  “Metro Rail,” Guy Friday pronounced. “It’s actually the descendant of two different railway companies that started in 1901, if you can believe it—”

  “I can’t,” Scott said, focusing all his attention on Clayton. “You think Sienna’s in the subway?”

  “Well, hopefully she’ll be able to catch a ride on one of those cars,” Kat said, making a face as the ground shook once more beneath her. The sound of something rushing was faintly below the screams. “Maybe meet up with us later, back at the hotel?”

  “This guy could have left her in the ground,” Clayton said, looking right at Scott. “I mean, if he just wanted to be done with her—”

  “He doesn’t just want to be done with her,” Scott said, speaking with a certainty he didn’t totally feel, hoping he was right. “He wants to kill her in front of an audience. He wants to humiliate, to shock, to destroy—”

  “I don’t get that,” Guy Friday said. “I just kill my enemies. They’re dead, they can’t talk back anymore, it’s great.”

  “You’re really creepy,” Kat pronounced like it was coming as a sudden surprise to her. “Why are you so—” She was cut off mid-sentence by the rushing turned to a roar as she snapped her read around to look.

  Scott figured it out at last; the lakebed was draining behind her, the water level dropping rapidly.

  “Wow, this drought is so terrible,” Kat said sagely, sounding like she was about to launch in
to a lecture. “When are we going to learn—”

  “Oh, shit,” Steven said, and Scott couldn’t help but agree.

  The lakebed beneath Kat’s feet disintegrated, and she disappeared like she’d dropped into a pit—which she had, he realized, gone in a flash of darkness before he even had time to react.

  31.

  Kat

  She fell into the hole in the ground without anything to cling to, the earth ripped from beneath her so quickly she didn’t even have time to scream before she plunged. Water fell with her, ringing her ankles, wetting her dress up to her buttocks. She passed through it as she fell, and it drenched her as she went down, dropping into the darkness.

  Kat hit the ground without any water to break the fall, and it hurt. Not as much as it maybe would have if the water hadn’t slowed her fall, but it still hurt. She sat up slowly, rubbing her back where she’d landed, and stared into the bizarre spectacle above her.

  The water hung suspended above like it was trapped behind aquarium glass. It pulsated, sloshing back and forth behind an invisible barrier as it lifted up off the tracks like it was a video being rewound, water pouring up instead of down. It was the strangest thing she could recall watching, maybe ever, as the tunnel ahead of her cleared, the water lifting off the train tracks, sucked up into the sunny sky that shone above the liquid roof that separated her from the sky above MacArthur Park.

  Kat stared into the semi-darkness, a lamp on the wall her only guide. “Sienna?” she called experimentally. Her eyes were still adjusting.

  “What the hell?” came a distressed, malevolent voice from somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. She heard the sound of pained grunts and something like cloth tearing hard in the distance.

  Kat felt the edge of panic that ran through her. She reached out with all her senses, feeling for plant life; naturally there was none, and even that which she felt in the park above was desperately muted, rendered nearly insensate by the lack of water. The trees were suffering from the drought, and the grass was near dead, its roots too shallow to be of any help anyway.

  She backed up, her dress catching on a metal rail. She didn’t even hesitate—she slipped it clean off in a second with her meta speed. She had seen enough of this guy—Redbeard, as Sienna called him—to know he wasn’t going to be content to let her stumble in the dark with her sopping dress, hoping for mercy. She’d seen his eyes. There was no mercy there.

  Kat walked across the painfully rough concrete floor, deftly stepping over the rails as she made her way to the side of the tunnel, out of the light streaming in through the watery ceiling above. Drips of water fell all around her like light tears falling from the sky. Somewhere up there, Scott was holding back the flood as best he could. For now, anyway. That might change, and soon. He’d never been the strongest guy, at least not as far as she knew. Her earliest memories of him all involved tears of some sort, his moaning about a relationship between the two of them that was as alien to her as the thought at this point of living a life without kale smoothies or hot yoga.

  She bumped against the cold concrete wall and ran her palm over the rough surface texture as she tried to rein in her breathing. She couldn’t hear over the sound of her frightened breaths, coming one by one, ragged, as she stared into the dark unknown. That lone light had winked out suddenly, and all she could see was that the tunnel curved somewhere ahead.

  Her eyes played across the dimly lit ground, the sunlight fading the deeper into the tunnel she looked. The raised rails were evident, but somewhere ahead had to be—

  She saw the shadowed lump on the ground, the human-sized figured draped across the tracks, and she started to move without thinking it over first. Sienna, she thought, recognizing the wider hips of the body turned on its side, draped over one of the rails, insensate—

  She heard the sound of a foot scuffing across the concrete just in front of her a second before Redbeard landed a punch to her temple that sent her staggering sideways. Kat’s cheek hit the rail. What little light there was faded out, going black as she slipped unconscious.

  32.

  Scott

  Scott was pretty sure he was going to break something, and soon. He wasn’t exerting any actual muscles to keep MacArthur Park Lake from draining into the giant abyss that had opened underneath it, but it felt like he was at serious risk of being dragged into the ground by the sheer volume of the weight of water he was holding up. From where he stood on the concrete quay, he had a feeling that that the ground beneath him wasn’t exactly stable, but he felt so drained, so taxed by what he was doing that the thought of even walking a few steps to get the hell away from the sucking hole in the ground that led into the tunnel below seemed impossible.

  “Nice lift, bro,” someone said from behind him, and Scott wondered if it was Guy Friday. The sky was bright, and yet the world was dark around him, like the exertion was causing him to squeeze off the blood vessels in his brain. “What is that, like a hundred thousand gallons?”

  “Something … like … that …” Scott muttered through lips he could barely force apart. The entirety of MacArthur Park Lake wanted to rush out to find its level, which was down in those tunnels. He couldn’t hold all that water, no chance.

  But he could hold the foot or so at the giant gaping hole in the lakebed, pressing the molecules so tightly together that only a trickle could slip through into the tunnels.

  Maybe.

  It felt as though he was lifting, though, didn’t it? Like he had a train on his back, as though he was testing his meta strength by physically lifting a car. His head felt like it was going to explode, like it was going to blow off—like that guy Sienna had kicked in the back so hard his skull blew up. At the time, Scott had sort of admired that—from a strictly detached point of view, of course.

  Now, though, he had a certain newfound respect for that poor bastard.

  “What are you gonna do, bro?” the voice asked again. It felt like someone was reaching into his chest now, squeezing his heart, like Redbeard had come up here, unnoticed, and just put a hand through his chest and was casually giving it a hard clamping. “Kind of a big concrete pond here. That’s a lot of water. You think you can lift it all?”

  “No,” Scott murmured, feeling the water pressing tighter as gravity fought against his efforts. It was just so much water. So much water. An ocean, practically. And if it had just been a normal pond, with banks that went right up to the edge in a gentle slope, maybe he could have made it rise up the bank a little. But, no, MacArthur Park had to have a nice little concrete edging all the damned way around, a whole drought-induced foot of empty space that he’d have to make the water climb if he wanted to move it out like he’d done—hopefully—to the subway tunnel.

  He had done that. He could feel it. He’d reached in and scooped the water out, impossibly, like he’d turned back the tide at the ocean’s edge—which was a thing he’d never tried, but was pretty sure he couldn’t do.

  Or could I?

  Scott felt the rising pressure, like the whole ocean had settled on his shoulders, and he knew what he had to do. Water always found its level, and it was damned sure trying to go down right now. He could feel the pressure, the exertion, and knew that somewhere down there, below the water he was barely holding back, were Kat and Sienna.

  How do I hold back this water?

  How do I … get rid of this water?

  “You look like you’re ready to collapse,” the voice said. Scott heard it clearly even as the world seemed to fade around him, and he was not entirely sure he wasn’t talking to himself. “What are you going to do, bro?”

  “I need to … get rid … of this water,” he said, eyes fluttering as he struggled to stay conscious. It felt like everything was slipping out of his grasp.

  “No reservoirs for miles. Just lots of houses, stores—you know, places where people live, schools, all that. You start pulling the water out and rolling it down Wilshire, you’re gonna see a lot of people drown. Cure’s worse than the di
sease, bro.”

  “Stop calling me bro,” Scott said, and he hit his knees, the concrete hard, echoing in dual shocks of pain down his shins as the weight of the water threatened to drag him into the abyss. It loomed below, so dark and inviting. All he had to do was take a step off, into the water’s loving embrace, and it’d be done … “I need help.”

  “I dunno, bro. This town’s pretty dry. Been a long time since the rain, you know what I mean? The air doesn’t feel like it has a drop of moisture anywhere in it …”

  “Reed,” Scott whispered, a faint idea forming somewhere in there, at the mere thought of the name. If Reed were here, he could help me …

  … help me …

  … how could Reed help me? It’s water, not …

  … there’s no water in the air.

  0% humidity.

  But … air can take water.

  And I can—

  —if I can take water from the air, maybe I can—

  He came to his feet in a rush, dragging in a breath as he pulled water from MacArthur Lake into his fingers, into his skin, and expelling it out a little at a time in a mist through his mouth.

  Too slow, he thought.

  Way too slow.

  But maybe I can—

  Can I …?

  No way to know unless you try.

  And slowly, painfully slowly, Scott lifted his hands and watched the first layers of moisture start to lift off MacArthur Park Lake like a fog, rolling over the edges of the concrete basin that kept them contained, as easily as if Reed himself were steering the moisture away.

  33.

  Kat