Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “Did you miss it when I admitted I had anger issues?”

  “—and thanks a hell of a lot for bringing me out here where I’m safe from everything but the cacti,” Kat said, falling right down into the soft sand.

  “You can control the cacti, can’t you?” Sienna asked, looking to the horizon. “You should be safe from them, too.”

  “If I don’t get a skinny latte soon,” Kat said, sighing, “I’m going to impale myself on the needles, so no, I’m not safe from them.” She looked around. “Where did you even bring me? Arizona?”

  Sienna showed a hint of guilt at that. “Not quite.”

  “Are we in Mexico?” Kat looked around as though a Mariachi band might jump out from behind the brush.

  “Come on,” Sienna said, hovering closer to her, extending her arms.

  “Can we go home now?” Kat asked, pushing herself up, sand drifting out of the folds of her dress.

  “No.”

  “Come on,” Kat said as Sienna spun her around and lifted her up again. “I just … just take me home. I’ll hide until—”

  “Until what?” Sienna asked acidly. “Until I deal with this problem for you? That’s another reason I don’t like you.”

  “Do you dislike all the people you have to protect?” Kat asked, resignedly. “Because that would explain why you act the way you do to so many—”

  “Oh, shut up.” And they flew off into the eastern sky.

  75.

  Karl

  Once Karl had found a car and driven home, it didn’t take much for him realize that the police had compromised his bolt-hole. Normally, one would find a police patrol in Elysium maybe once a month. The LAPD didn’t come to Elysium unless they were called, and when they did, it was in force.

  He passed three cruisers once he got off the freeway, just maneuvering around to some of the local restaurants, picking up drive-thru. As he drew closer to the bolt-hole, he suddenly he realized the pedestrians were gone, gone, gone. The herd was thin, even for this early in the morning, and that wasn’t normal, either.

  Ergo, cops were in force in the neighborhood, and why would they do that?

  He pulled over into a parking lot outside an old, abandoned K-Mart. There were a few other stores still hanging on in this strip mall, but not many. He let his stolen Buick idle with the AC blowing while he dialed his phone and waited for an answer, his eyes scanning the rearview mirrors all the while. A cop car went past on the road, and he didn’t think it was one of the ones he’d seen before. He could see the old-style lights on the outline of the car’s roof.

  This was just …

  It was so …

  Perfect.

  When the answer came on the other end of the line, Karl couldn’t help letting the smile creep into his voice. “The cops found the bolt-hole.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end. “You ready?”

  “I am as ready as I could ever be,” Karl said, feeling like his chest was swelling with the excitement. “It’s all taken care of. All I need now is the last element, and we’re good.”

  “Well,” his benefactor said, “it sounds like you should get to work, then.”

  “I want to wait until daybreak,” Karl said, still smiling. “Whole lot of people are going to die today. I want the cameras to catch as many of them dying as possible.”

  “I know.” There was a pause, and he could almost imagine his backer grinning. “You’re excited, aren’t you?”

  “I am. Can’t imagine anything sweeter,” Karl said. “This is goodbye, then.”

  “Goodbye, Karl. You’ll do fine, and you know where to go after this.”

  “I do,” Karl said, the excitement causing him to tap his fingers on the wheel. “So long, sir.” And he hung up.

  It was time.

  This was what he’d been waiting for.

  Now he’d get everything he’d ever wanted, and whether he walked out the other side or not … his benefactor would make sure that no one—NO ONE—would ever forget his name.

  76.

  Sienna

  Kat was screaming when we came shooting down out of the clouds at our destination, which was so very not helpful but was such a Kat thing to do.

  I guess, if I’d been trying to be fair, I might have conceded that we were approaching the ground at something on the order of three hundred miles an hour and cut her a little slack, but I still wasn’t feeling terribly generous toward her, so I just concentrated on the speck of green grass streaking up toward us incredibly fast and sped up.

  We screamed to a stop—well, she screamed, and I clamped a hand over her mouth for the last hundred feet—in the backyard of a small house. Kat was wriggling, but not thrashing, which was fortunate for her since I was only holding her with one hand. I brought us from three hundred miles per hour to zero pretty fast, and she snapped in my arms as I braced her, absorbing as much of the shock as I could. When we were motionless, a foot above the ground, I pulled my hand off her mouth heard her making a, “Huhhhhhhhhhhh,” kind of whining and breathing sound.

  “You all right?” I asked, gently lowering her feet to the ground.

  She wobbled on unsteady legs for less than a second before she collapsed on the lawn. “N … No, I am not all right,” she said in a whisper. She looked around at the fenced-in yard around us. “Where are we?”

  “Austin, Texas,” I said, taking a quick glance at my phone to make sure I had it right. I did. I’d been checking it regularly before we made our final approach, looking at my GPS to be sure I didn’t miss our stop.

  “Why?” she asked, twisting around to look at me. “Why would you bring me to Texas?”

  “Well, it’s far from California for everyone who can’t break the sound barrier at will,” I said, looking around. The sun was up here, but not by too much. “You should be safe.”

  “You’re just going to drop me off in some random yard?” Kat’s jaw fell in disbelief. “Do you think I won’t—what, I won’t catch the first flight to LA?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think you will.”

  Her eyes burned with resentment. “Well, I will. You can’t stop me.”

  “I’m not going to even try,” I said, and looked up when I saw motion at the sliding glass door to the house. “I’ll leave that to them.” I nodded as the door slid open.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Reed hissed, stepping out onto a slab of concrete that comprised a patio. Augustus Coleman was peering out from behind his shoulder, eyes foggy with sleep and mouth open in a yawn, or maybe shock.

  “Sorry to interrupt your boys’ club poker night,” I said. I grabbed Kat under the arm, hauling her to her feet and breaking skin contact in less than a second. “But I’ve got more work for you.”

  “More work?” Reed did not look happy. “We’ve been trying to catch a positive ID on Grayson Dieter for days—”

  “We’ve been on our asses for days,” Augustus said from behind him. “Taking shifts staring out the front window. Most boring assignment ever. I caught up on my homework on day one, and I’ve been waiting for Monday to come so they’ll email me more so I have something to do besides watch his ass make little baby tornadoes on the coffee table.” Augustus nodded at Kat. “What’s this?” He blinked. “Wait … is that …?”

  Reed just rolled his eyes. “Now you want us to do stakeout and babysitting?”

  “Dude, that’s Kat Forrest,” Augustus said, elbowing him hard in the ribs. He stepped out onto the patio, and I realized he was in his boxers and a t-shirt. “What’s up?” he asked, nodding at her, smiling a little stupidly.

  “Augustus,” I said, looking meaningfully at his attire.

  He got the hint in a second. “Oh! Oh, shit!” He disappeared back into the house.

  Reed was slightly better dressed, at least, wearing jeans with his t-shirt. “She can’t stay here,” he said.

  “It’s funny you say that,” I bumped Kat forward, and she started walking toward the patio like
she was being forced to at gunpoint, “because here I thought I was your boss—”

  “Ungh,” Reed made a sound like a zombie in the dark. “You always do this when we butt heads over decisions, you pull the ‘I’m your boss’ card—”

  “Just another reason why people don’t like you,” Kat said, a little sing-songy, either because she was gloating or because she was woozy from our rapid descent. Which I had done so as not to tip off the subject of the stakeout, by the way, not just to make Kat nauseous and scared. That was just a fringe benefit.

  “Shut up,” Reed and I said at the same time. His hair was still short from where it had been burned off a few months earlier, and at the moment he looked like the firebomb had taken his humor with it. “We’re busy here,” he said.

  “You’re watching a house for hours a day,” I said as Kat and I stepped onto the patio. “You can watch her, too.”

  “I don’t really need to be watched,” Kat said, “I need to get back to LA—”

  “So that more people can die on the altar of your career?” I eyed her with an unforgiving look. “How about ‘no’?”

  “I need to do press,” she protested, crossing into whining and making my ears feel like they were ready to bleed. “Disappearing right now is—”

  “Wow,” Reed said, cutting her off, “you really are shallow and vapid now. I argued for you, you know.” He shook his head. “When Sienna said you were a total write-off as a human being.”

  “Thanks,” Kat said, clearly meaning anything but. “But I don’t need your approval.”

  “Okay, I’ll watch her,” Reed said, meeting my eyes, all trace of resistance gone.

  “Knew I could count on you.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at him, “Bro.”

  “Yeah, don’t do that.” Reed shook his head. “You can’t pull it off.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket and I went to check the caller ID. “Zollers,” I said in pleasant surprise. “You mind getting her something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Kat said irritably, “and this is kidnapping, you know.”

  “Katrina Forrest,” Reed said, once again rolling his eyes, “for your own protection and that of others, you are under arrest under the authority of the Metahuman Policing and Threat Response—”

  “I know the name of the agency,” Kat snapped as Reed took her arm in hand and I answered my phone.

  “Hey yo,” I said, looking out over the Austin morning. It was already kinda balmy, the sun shining and the air dry.

  “Hey,” Dr. Zollers said. “How are you doing?”

  “I just had Kat placed into protective custody after physically hauling her out of Los Angeles,” I said as Reed shut the sliding glass door behind him, giving me the illusion of privacy. “So … I’ve had better and worse days, really.”

  “Did you enjoy that?” Zollers asked, slipping immediately into therapist mode.

  “Uhmm …” I gave it some thought. “Not really. We had a lovely argument in the middle of the desert, but frankly, I could have done without it. It didn’t exactly give me closure.” I paused. “Say, you’re not just calling because I didn’t book a session this week, did you?”

  “Well, as much fun as it is running a startup practice,” he said, and I could hear him smiling with just a hint of strain, “no, I’m not so desperate for a paycheck that I need to bill you for this—though it is going to come in at a special rate of eight hundred dollars per hour—”

  “You know I’d pay it,” I said seriously.

  “I know you would,” he said. “But I’m just concerned by what I’ve picked up in your emotional state, that’s all. Also, the news. This … this villain you’re up against …”

  “He’s a doozy, isn’t he?” I stared hard at the horizon, the blue sky and fluffy white clouds. “He just … man, he hates. He’s like a world champion hater. I don’t like Kat or what she does for a living, but this dude irrationally hates her with a force that I can’t even muster for Old Man Winter at this point. Possibly for my first date the other night, though …”

  “He does seem like an injustice collector,” Zollers said. “Just from what I’ve seen on TV, anyhow. His exchanges with you, documented on YouTube—”

  “How is it that YouTube is like the historical archive of my life?”

  “—and you’re right, he’s furious about some past issues, possibly related to his clash with Augustus.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll talk to Augustus about that in a minute.”

  “Don’t expect him to be much help,” Zollers said. “I took a look at the file the agency has—”

  “How did you—” It only took me a second. “Never mind. Stupid question.”

  “—and this Redbeard, as you’ve taken to calling him … he merits a line, and I don’t think it’s because Augustus forgot him. It’s because he only dealt with him for sixty seconds or less.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Redbeard nearly killed his girlfriend, and Augustus buried him. Now he’s back, five months later, and he’s mad about—well, everything.”

  “What you should consider,” Zollers said, smooth as ever, “is what happened in the interim.”

  “Well, clearly Redbeard went crazy—”

  “No, I mean—what do you think happened to him next?”

  I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. “He probably found a tunnel and—”

  “It could be,” Zollers said, “but I looked at the geography, and I don’t think there’s much in the way of tunnels beneath Augustus’s neighborhood, which is where that clash happened.”

  “Well, he had to get out of the ground somehow,” I said, frowning. “He couldn’t just—” I stopped. “Could he?”

  “It’s funny you ask,” Zollers said, and I heard the sound of shuffling paper at his end. “I have a report here about a starvation-thin white man with an overgrown red beard and long hair turning up in the Indian Ocean, picked up by a passing freighter. They didn’t know what to make of him.”

  “As one doesn’t, when picking up a red-haired hobo-looking fellow in the middle of the Indian Ocean.” I pondered it for a minute in the silence of the morning. “You think he drifted through the whole damned earth?”

  “I suspect, yes,” Zollers said. “He’s a meta, probably pretty far up on the power scale”

  “But he’d need to eat,” I said, not believing it. “To drink. To breathe.”

  “When I was doing my practice at the Directorate, before you showed up,” Zollers said, starting to lecture, “Dr. Sessions ran across a meta who had been entombed for a hundred years. No air, no water, no food.”

  “Uhhh … I don’t like where this is going …”

  “He seemed dead,” Zollers went on, “like he was in a suspended state. We never did find out what type he was, because when Sessions and Perugini went to perform the autopsy—”

  “Really, really don’t like where this is going.”

  “—he sprang to life, scaring the hell out of both of them,” Zollers said. “Now, he died shortly thereafter—”

  “Of shock?”

  “Of a scalpel to the eye. Dr. Perugini … she’s not the sort you want to mess with.”

  “I called that even before there was an imminent danger of her becoming my sis-in-law.” I hoped Reed was eavesdropping and heard that.

  “Anyhow,” Zollers said, “when Sessions did the autopsy, he speculated that the man first fed off all his fat reserves, and after that, his brain entered a state of—well, oxygen deprivation and malnutrition, as well as—”

  “I get the gist,” I said, definitely feeling skeeved out. “And now I know more about torturing a metahuman than I really wanted to.”

  “I’m sure the Nazis performed experiments of that sort that were probably even less humane,” Zollers said. “In any case, this meta—he was mad by the time Perugini and Sessions revived him. Crazy. His brain lacked vital nutrients in addition to oxygen, and he was permanently damaged in a way that
affected his cognitive function. He must have been high on the power scale as well, because we have very clearly documented cases of metahumans dying of oxygen deprivation.”

  “Remind me to avoid accidentally locking myself in a coffin.”

  “I thought you already slept in one during the day,” Zollers deadpanned.

  “Nice.” I puckered my lips. “So Redbeard’s genuinely crazy in addition to feeling wronged by me and Kat, for undefined reasons.”

  “He may not need clearly defined reasons, and that’s the point. His mind is not functioning in a logical fashion.”

  “Neither is Kat’s. Hey, maybe she’s starved herself, too—”

  “Sienna.”

  “Well, it’s a possibility,” I said, knowing that it wasn’t. “Have you seen her bony ass?” I gave us a moment. “This guy’s not going to stop, is he?”

  “He’s fixated on both of you,” Zollers said. “He’s failed a few times in trying to end at least Kat, if not both of you. But he won’t be done until he’s killed you.”

  I didn’t bother to mention that he hadn’t failed that hard, since Redbeard actually had killed me once already. That was the sort of thing I generally preferred to spring on my friends in person. “Well, he’s going to have a hard time getting hold of Kat,” I said. “But me … I’m going to have to go after him.”

  “Be careful when you do,” Zollers said, and I could feel the sense of worry through the phone, “because in addition to being crazy as hell, he likely wants nothing more than to see you bleed and die in front of the whole wide world … a repayment for the sins he imagines you’ve committed against him.”

  77.

  I stayed outside for a few minutes after I hung up with Zollers, just staring into the sky, hoping for an answer to come streaking down and hit me in the forehead. Unfortunately, it did not, and after less than sixty seconds, a little voice piped up from inside me instead.

  You were awfully hard on Klementina, Aleksandr Gavrikov said quietly. Yes, he practically whispered in my head, which was a lot nicer than the shit that Bjorn or Wolfe usually pulled, two men who spectacularly failed at “indoor voice.”