Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “No,” Scott said, not really sure how to take that. “It was a—it was the guy who I came to LA to meet.”

  “David Boreanaz?” Friday asked. He sounded serious.

  “What?” Scott frowned. “No. What are you two doing here? Shouldn’t you be rushing Kat to safety?”

  “Yeah, about that,” Butler said, stepping up. “Your girl came and took her away. Flew off into the eastern sky. Kinda like riding off into the sunset, but you know—in reverse.”

  “Riding off into the sunrise,” Guy Friday said, nodding, “but sunrise isn’t until 6:17 a.m. today.” He cocked his head. “Though, if she continues to go east, she’ll meet the sun earlier, like—”

  “Where’d she go?” Scott asked, cutting to the quick. “Also …” His voice dripped with loathing, “she’s not ‘my girl.’ Or my anything.”

  “No idea,” Butler said, “other than east.” He looked around and caught sight of the news camera in the background, then fussed with his hair for a second. “You think they’re recording right now?”

  “Yeah, they’re live,” Scott said absently, his mind on other things. “Why’d Sienna take Kat?”

  “They had a quarrel,” Guy Friday pronounced, arms still folded. “On the roof. She called the blond girl—”

  “You know what time local sunrise is to the minute but you can’t remember the name of the woman you’re protecting?” Butler asked.

  “—selfish and dragged her off,” Friday said. “I think she’s going to murder her. Probably in the desert.”

  “Oh, man.” Butler looked genuinely distressed. “That’s going to look bad on my bodyguard resume.”

  “Also,” Scott said, feeling a creeping sense of horror, “there would be a dead woman, which—I can’t tell from either of your reactions, but I think—is a horrible thing to have happen.”

  Butler looked around uneasily. “I gotta be honest … who’s going to notice one more corpse after this? I mean … like half the illuminati did not make it out of that party. They’re all pancaked on the ground floor of Luxuriant. I mean, the Marvel guys got picked up by Sienna, but I think I saw the DC execs running for the elevator, which means—I think that’s probably the end of the Superman and Batman franchises for a while.”

  “Like Zack Snyder didn’t already accomplish that,” Friday said.

  “I doubt Sienna’s going to kill Kat,” Scott said, pausing after he said it. “Probably not, anyway.”

  “You didn’t hear what she said to her,” Butler said nervously.

  “Hey.” Another voice caused Scott to turn. Steven Clayton was standing right next to him, covered in dust. “What’s up?”

  “We were just discussing whether Sienna flew off to kill Kat,” Scott said acidly. “What do you want?”

  “Has anyone tried calling her?” Steven asked, stepping into the circle.

  Scott froze for just a second. “No. No, we haven’t.”

  Steven looked around at them. “Mind if I give it a try?”

  “You don’t need my permission,” Scott said, giving him a decent glare. He couldn’t decide why he didn’t like this guy, but he didn’t.

  “No, but I need her number,” Steven said slickly, not breaking away from Scott’s glare. “You know, if you don’t want to call her yourself.”

  “No, I don’t want to call her myself,” Scott said, thumbing his phone open and scrolling to her number in his contacts. “Knock yourself out.” He held up the screen so Steven could see it.

  Butler sashayed around with his own phone in hand. “I’m just gonna go ahead and get those digits, too … maybe her firm is hiring, since I’m probably going to have a hard time explaining to other potential employers how I just lost my protectee.”

  “You think she’ll understand?” Scott had a hard time not laughing.

  “Well, she’s the one who did it, so … yes.” Butler focused on the number, keying it into his own phone. “On the other hand, I could just try and switch tracks, maybe use this as an opportunity to seek out some more traditional roles … never hurts to keep all your options open, though.”

  Steven already his phone up to his ear, and Scott could faintly hear the ringing. He heard the voicemail pick up, too, a few seconds later. Scott smiled bitterly. “I wouldn’t count on a call back anytime soon, either, if I were you.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Steven said, smiling politely, not showing a tooth. “Hey, Sienna,” he said, leaving a message, “Scott and the gang just told me you got out with Kat. I made it out before Redbeard blew the place, but uh … I’m kinda searching for the next move here.” He looked around. “Cops don’t seem to have a clue, but I’m guessing he made it out. Probably heading back to his base, wherever that is. Snake to his hole and all that. Anyway …” He paused, lips twisting in a frown, “… let me know you’re okay, please, whenever you land. I’ll be waiting for your call.” He hung up and pulled the phone away from his ear.

  “Dude, you got mad screen presence,” Butler said, staring at him. “Who’s your coach?”

  “What?” Steven looked like he was coming out of a long sleep then ignored Butler entirely. “What are you guys going to do?”

  “I’m gonna try and get seen on the news,” Butler said, running fingers through his hair and then looking at them. “I need more dust to look like I was actually in this thing, don’t I? We didn’t get hit with the cloud up on the roof, and I didn’t get soaked like the others.” He craned his neck to look at another camera filming an interview a hundred feet away. “Holy shit, that’s Joseph Gordon Levitt, isn’t it?” He wandered off toward the interview, stopping to run his hands over a piece of rubble and then through his hair.

  “What are the rest of you doing?” Steven amended, looking more than a little pissed off.

  “I’m going to the Santa Monica pier,” Guy Friday said with a shrug. “Call me if you need me.” He turned around and left, walking straight out of the police line without anyone trying to stop him.

  “Why does that guy always wear a mask?” Steven asked, watching him go. “He looks like the Gimp.” He refocused on Scott. “What about you?”

  “I’m …” Scott gave that a thought and looked around. The scene—the wreckage—the people—it was all just a raging storm inside him, a liquid tornado in his chest. Before it had just seemed like clouds were rolling through his head, but now there was a solid form to it, a force, an emotion that hadn’t been there before.

  It was like he’d found something he’d lost.

  “I want to kill this guy,” he said, almost whispering. His eyes fell on the rubble. “I want to find him and kill him.”

  “I understand that fully,” Steven said, his own gaze settling on the destroyed hotel. “Where do we start?”

  And now Scott was back to blank clouds, formless and unsure. “I don’t know,” he said.

  74.

  Kat

  When the sun rose, they were over the desert, flying toward the orange orb that was breaking over the horizon. Kat was cold and shivering and had been for well over an hour, the chill having seeped into her bones. Sienna wasn’t saying anything and hadn’t since they’d left the rooftop pool deck behind. She might as well have been a plane carrying Kat for all the talking she was doing, just a silent force propelling her through the dawn air.

  “Where are we going?” Kat asked, her voice scratchy. They were only a few thousand feet up, and green, brushy vegetation speckled white, dusty ground below. It looked like bushes planted in white sands.

  Sienna didn’t answer. Kat turned around far enough to see that she was still there—obviously, since she had her hands firmly anchored on Kat’s person. She held at her a little bit of distance, though, to keep from touching her skin. Sienna’s hands were bunched up against the fabric of Kat’s dress, perfectly balancing her at the midsection. “Where are you taking me?” Kat asked again, louder this time, but her voice just as hoarse. She needed a drink. The air at this altitude had utterly dried her out.
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br />   “Far away from LA,” Sienna answered at last, sounding a little scratchy herself. There were clouds ahead. Big, white, fluffy ones, and they were headed straight for them, the orange light of the sun lighting them up.

  “I don’t want to leave,” Kat said, her voice breaking.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Sienna said.

  “Because you’re kidnapping me,” Kat said, a little defiantly. She’d been stewing in this for over an hour and she was ready to just let her have it. If Sienna planned to kill her, there wasn’t going to be much Kat could do about it in any case. Sienna was stronger, faster, meaner. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No, I’m not going to kill you, Kat,” Sienna said, her ire rising with her voice, “and screw you for suggesting it. I’m just removing you from the situation. Which is what I should have done yesterday, before I remembered you’re a selfish little cow who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but herself.”

  The words stung, and so did the cold air. Kat had already been seeping tears from the speed of wind that was hitting her in the face, but this spurred a new round. “That’s not true,” she said quietly.

  “What do you care about, Kat?” Sienna asked, throwing it down like a challenge. “Other than your own worthless neck? Do you give a damn about anyone? Like any of the people who died tonight because you decided you needed to party more than other people needed to keep breathing?”

  “I didn’t know that would happen,” Kat said. “I thought we could just show up for an hour and no one would know until later—”

  “Don’t give me that,” Sienna said, and the ground started to grow larger, the green brush below getting bigger. “Just like the party, and just like MacArthur Park, right? You were trending on Twitter. Everyone knew you were there. Redbeard could have found you if he’d been blind.” The desert sands were growing larger, too, along with the spaces between the green bushes and the white ground that filled her sight all the way to the horizon. “You are an attention whore, and you were doing what you did best—getting attention.”

  “I need to set an example,” Kat said. “People look up to me. I’m an entertainer—”

  “You have no talent at all,” Sienna snapped. “You’re famous, essentially, for being an idiot that knew me once upon a time.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Kat said, flush running over her cheeks, “and you’re wrong. I get millions of people to tune in to me every week because they want to see the lifestyle I’m living, they aspire to it—the glitz, the glamour—and it inspires them. I’m an example to little girls—”

  “Of what you can accomplish without any actual talent, or bravery, or having to show up and go do real work, just by showing your ass on national television—”

  “I do not show my ass on—”

  “I’ve seen the vacation photos,” Sienna said. “You show your ass in every way possible, even when you’re not on camera. I mean, really, Taggert—”

  “Screw you!” Kat shot at her. She squirmed against Sienna’s invasive grasp; the fingers against her torso felt like aliens or worms, unpleasant invaders. “You don’t know what it’s like—”

  “Knock it off or I’ll let go,” Sienna said, the ground looming ever closer. “And instead of just being in exile for a while, you can try and scrape yourself off the desert sands for the last five minutes of your stupid life.”

  “Why are you always so mean?” Kat asked, growing very still. “You always just say … just the most horrible things.”

  Sienna did not answer for a long minute, sweeping ever closer to the ground. “Because for as long as I’ve known you,” she said at last, “you were everything I wanted to be—pretty, loved, liked—and because when I was as low as I could get, when I didn’t have a friend left in the world, you stabbed me in the back by airing my personal confessions to the world, Kat.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  Sienna let her loose, and the surprising shock of being up in the air without any support, without anything below her and no one to hold her up took over. “AHH!” Kat screamed, eyes snapping as wide as they could, taking in the vast desert beneath her, looking for the nearest help she could find, reaching out a hand—

  She seized control of a thorny bush below, a brambly bit of greenery that had deep roots designed to drink every drop of liquid they could on the desperately rare occasions when it rained. She pushed the reservoirs within the plant, taking control of the shoots, reaching up—

  They caught her nimbly, softly, moving down as she fell, absorbing the impact into the bush. It caught her as lightly as if a pair of arms had reached out to catch a child dropped from six inches of height. She turned the course sideways and the plant nudged her bare feet into the sand, pushing her upright gently.

  “You’re life and I’m death, do you get that?” Sienna loomed over her, floating six feet off the ground. “You’re the tall, willowy, classic beauty that everyone thinks is hot, and I’m short, squat and not exactly shaped like a model, okay? You were always so sweet to everybody, and you didn’t think deep thoughts or constantly worry about the fate of the world and everyone liked you anyway. And me?” She made an ugly face and looked resentfully at the rising sun. “No matter what I’ve done since I beat Sovereign, since I became a so-called ‘celebrity’ … it’s all turned to vinegar. People hate me, and I can’t … I can’t control my anger a lot of the time, okay? I’m inappropriately violent. I order a tall mocha with whip and the barista makes a face when he hands it to me, I imagine myself driving his stupid nose into the countertop—and I could do it. Now, ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t, and when I do, it’s always to some asshole who’s hurt people, like Eric Simmons, who had just wrecked a subway train full of people after trying to rob the Federal Reserve.” Her smile grew bitter as she looked straight at Kat. “But I don’t get credit for that. Instead I get a thousand think pieces written about how I’m a menace, and they use the incident at the campus with the Russians to reinforce the argument that I’m brutal dictator who doesn’t know how to do anything but kill people. Our little phone call, edited for ‘clarity,’” she made air quotations, “didn’t help.”

  “I told you I didn’t have anything to do with that,” Kat said.

  “Yeah,” Sienna replied, “and you didn’t have anything to do with going ahead on the Vanity Fair shoot yesterday that cost a bunch of people their lives, and you definitely didn’t know that going to the party last night would kill—hell, I don’t even know, but probably hundreds.” She shook her head. “The thing that burns me …” She glared right at Kat. “You weren’t being brave and we both know it. You were being selfish. But everyone’s going to say you were being brave, because they love you and hate me, and that’s just the way it is.”

  “That’s not my fault, either,” Kat said numbly.

  “It’s a little your fault.”

  “I didn’t lead you into talking about how you killed those Russians,” Kat said. “I didn’t bait you into talking about smacking around Eric Simmons, and when we did talk about it, I at least acknowledged the other circumstances, what with him saying what he did to that waitress—”

  “And none of that made the cut,” Sienna crossed her arms and looked away, still hovering in the dawn air, “so you get no points with me.”

  “None of it would have mattered anyway,” Kat said. “People don’t hate you because you beat the shit out of Eric Simmons or killed a bunch of Russians who were staging a jailbreak of dangerous prisoners.”

  “Really?” The sarcasm dripped off Sienna’s words. “Then please, oh expert, tell me why they hate me—in your opinion.”

  “Because you’re such a bitch,” Kat shot at her. “I mean, really. Normal people don’t kill, okay? They don’t shoot people, they don’t beat people with their bare hands, they don’t set fire to them with superpowers—none of that happens in civilized society. And if they have to do any of those things, they damned sure don’t mouth off to Gail Roth and come off like a
psycho afterward. You’re your own worst enemy.” Kat folded her own arms. She doubted Sienna was going to get any of this, it would just roll off her like a punch to the face. And that girl could take a punch. “You look like a lunatic all the time. You’re mad at me because I’m pretty and put together and try to act in a way that makes people like me—”

  “‘Act’ being both the operative word and one of the things that irritates me most about you, yes.”

  “Well, it’s a full-time job acting like you’re a well-socialized human being when you’re dealing with the press, okay?” Kat exploded. “Because they’re busy trying to find every little speck of dirt they can, and you’re busy looking like there’s none, like you’ve never taken a dump in your entire life. It’s inhuman, and the sport we make in this country of trying to raise people up before we find their flaws and tear them down so we can burn them in effigy? Dodging that is a full-time job, too, and you treat it like it’s a—like it’s—like it’s nothing. You don’t worry about it. You don’t try to be likable and you wonder why people don’t like you?”

  “I don’t wonder that hard, okay? It may not be one of my powers, but self-awareness isn’t something I’m utterly short of.”

  “Well, you gripe about it like it’s the thing you want most,” Kat said, “but you don’t act like it matters at all. You’ve got this defiance about you, like, ‘I’m going to be who I’m going to be,’” Kat waved her hands at Sienna, “but you get mad when people don’t like who you are. Well … stop acting like a shrew and a bully to everyone.”

  “I’m that way mostly to you.”

  “You’re that way mostly to everyone,” Kat said. “Steven is the only person I’ve seen you interact with since you got here that you didn’t fill full of barbs. You—you got in an argument with the president at his own fundraiser, for crying out loud—”

  “He’s a dick.”

  “Yes, everyone’s a dick but you,” Kat said, feeling the fight ebb out of her. “You’re the only sane, non-cantankerous person in the world.” She leaned closer and looked up at Sienna. “Or maybe your godlike powers make you the most irritable, impatient—”