Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “So … you’re lonely,” Augustus said carefully, almost like the words were a chemical mixture that might blow up in his face.

  “Oh, God, yes,” Kat said, realizing the truth of it. “All the time. How can you be surrounded by people … have the cameras—have them yell, ‘Cut!’ and then no one talks to you until they start rolling again, except to give a little direction? How does that happen?”

  “Uhmm … because you don’t have any friends?” Augustus asked, wide-eyed. His eyes got bigger. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “To tell the truth?” Kat asked, stunned, staring straight ahead. “I don’t have any actual friends. Why has that been so hard to say? So … hard to realize?” She put her face in her hands. “I busted Sienna so hard on the fact that people don’t like her, but they supposedly like me, and I’m more alone than she is.”

  “I feel like I should get you some help,” Augustus said, standing abruptly. “You want me to call Dr. Zollers for you?”

  She sniffed and looked up. “Dr. Zollers? He’s back?”

  “Yeah,” Augustus nodded so hard it looked like his head would spring off. He looked desperately uncomfortable at Kat’s display of emotion. “I can call him. This is not even a thing. I’ll even pay for your therapy session if you—”

  Kat sniffed, staring out the window, and caught motion in front of the house across the way. “Hey, were you watching this house for someone?”

  Augustus turned and peered out. “Yeah, we’re—Oh, oh! That’s him! That’s Grayson Dieter, he’s the—that’s the guy we’re here to apprehend!” He spun in excitement, as though looking for Reed, and, not finding him, locked wide eyes on Kat. “I gotta get Reed. We need to move on this—but if I shout, he’ll hear, because he’s a meta—”

  Kat stood and vaulted over a nearby couch as she went for the front door. She paused at the handle as she turned it, and it sprung open. “Get him, go. I’ll follow this guy.” And she plunged out the door before Augustus could respond.

  The air was warm and the sun was like fuel for her soul. She walked down the house’s short driveway with a spring in her step. This was natural. This was normal. This wasn’t the half-assed walk down the driveway of her house in LA in the mornings, a fight against gravity just to get out of bed and propel herself into action for the cameras.

  This was real. This was important. There was a fugitive not a hundred feet away from her.

  She looked him over as he walked down his own short driveway at a hurried pace. His shoulders were hunched, hands driven into his pockets, his dark brown hair long and hanging over his eyes. He was glancing around furtively, as if someone might jump out at him any minute now.

  He rotated his head to look at her, catching her motion as he stepped across the lawn toward the sidewalk, and did a double take. When he saw her, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open, and she knew she’d been recognized.

  “Grayson Dieter!” she shouted, her voice crackling with authority over the quiet Austin neighborhood, “Stop where you are and put your hands in the air!”

  Dieter looked dumbstruck, frozen on the grass, hands still jammed in his pockets. He stood like that for a solid second before his meta reflexes caught up with him and he started to run.

  Kat threw out a hand by instinct, feeling the woven roots of the grass beneath Dieter’s feet. She commanded them, roots that were adapted to the dry climate, grass that wasn’t dying of thirst, and she compelled it to action.

  Before Dieter even took a step, the grass had lashed across his feet, rooting him to the earth. Dieter’s eyes got even wider as he lost his balance and fell forward, jaw meeting sidewalk because his hands were trapped in his pants pockets.

  Kat sprinted across the street as Dieter lay there, dazed, and she flipped him onto his back. He stared at her with glazed eyes that snapped into focus, and he ripped his hands from his pockets—

  Kat snapped a hard punch into his jaw, rocking his head back into the concrete sidewalk. That’s for you, Taggert, for using me.

  She followed it with another, seizing his t-shirt collar with her other hand and yanking him back up like a punching bag attached to a chain. She hit him again, and again, and again, and again—

  “Whoa!” Sienna’s voice flooded Kat’s consciousness as hands seized her and pulled her roughly off of Grayson Dieter. She looked down and saw a bloodied, mangled face, bones broken and eyes rolled up in his head. “Holy shit, Kat, what the hell did you do?” Sienna asked, pushing her out of the way.

  “I stopped him,” Kat said, staring down at the damage to Grayson Dieter’s face. She raised a finger to point at him and realized her knuckles were bloody, skinned from the force of the blows she’d rained down him. “Right?”

  “Oh, you stopped him all right,” Augustus said, trotting up as Reed landed in a gust of wind a few paces ahead of him. “You damned near killed him, also, but you definitely stopped him.”

  Kat stared at her knuckles, at the breaks in the skin that gently oozed blood. “Oh. Oh my.”

  “Uhh,” Reed said, kneeling next to Dieter, “I … don’t know if this guy’s going to make it to the hospital. That’s a skull fracture, and he’s—”

  “Oh, shush, Mr. Dr. Perugini,” Sienna said, folding her arms in front of her, and looking straight at Kat. “Kat … do your thing.”

  Kat blinked. “You … want me to finish him off?”

  Sienna’s jaw dropped slightly. “No. I want you to heal him, which is your thing. If I wanted him beaten to death, I would have said it was time to do ‘my thing.’”

  “Apparently, ‘your thing’ isn’t just yours anymore,” Augustus said, looking at Grayson Dieter with more than a little alarm. “Because … I mean, damn. She racked him up.”

  “Oh,” Kat said, “right.” She advanced on Dieter slowly, looking down at the bloodied, battered face. “I guess I should …”

  “Yeah,” Sienna said, “I guess you should.”

  Kat knelt, looking at Dieter all the while. His eyes were rolled back in his head, his tongue looked like it had fallen back in his throat, his mouth open and most of his teeth missing. “Did I really do that?” she whispered.

  “Well, I damned sure didn’t,” Sienna muttered. “For once.”

  Kat put a hand on Dieter’s jaw, felt that strange crawl down her skin, that bizarre tingle that she never really felt anymore. It wasn’t like nerves or chills. It was a warm feeling, a lovely one, really, like stepping next to a fire on a cold night, or diving into the ocean on the hottest day of summer.

  Her skin flushed and the energy flowed to the tips of her fingers, down into the jaw of Grayson Dieter. He groaned and his muscles contracted, his bloodied wounds knitting together like a perfect CGI demo. His eyes rolled forward and he looked around, his jaw assuming its normal shape and teeth sprouting from the empty, bloody spots in his gums.

  “What … the hell …?” Grayson Dieter asked, looking at the faces around him in surprise.

  “Yeah, you’re under arrest,” Sienna said, stepping forward and hauling Dieter to his feet just so she could kick him down to his knees. She held out a hand and Reed stepped up, slapping cuffs onto Dieter’s wrists.

  “Wha …?” Dieter mumbled, looking around in alarm. “Where’d that …” he locked eyes with Kat. “Get her away from me!”

  “Yeah, I’m on that,” Augustus said, dragging Dieter to his feet as Reed closed the cuffs on his other wrist. “Come on, Grayson. You’ve been a shy boy lately, keeping your head down. I can see why you wanted to do that now, getting your ass kicked by a 98-pound little white girl? Man, you gotta be embarrassed as hell right now …” Reed followed behind, casting a look at Sienna and Kat both, inclining his head as he walked away. There was something being communicated between he and Sienna, and Kat picked it up even though she couldn’t tell what was being said.

  Sienna, for her part, just stared at Kat, blinking every so often. It was the only sign Kat had that she wasn’t being watched by a stat
ue or a dead person. “Nicely done,” Sienna finally said, nodding once at Kat, then walking off back across the street.

  Kat just stood there, basking in the strange, warm glow that ran through her skin. “It really was,” she said. Because for the first time in a long time, she knew she’d done right.

  80.

  Sienna

  I was still shaking my head from Kat beating our perp when I remembered I had things to do. Nothing like watching the declawed kitten kick some ass to remind you that other asses were waiting for you to kick them as well.

  She did well, Gavrikov said.

  Yeah, I replied silently. Probably just looking to blow off some steam.

  Perhaps, he replied.

  I shook that one off and grabbed my cell phone, vaulting straight over the house and landing in the backyard, my own private refuge. I could hear Augustus still chiding Grayson Dieter as he herded him inside. He and Reed would need to make arrangements for transporting Dieter back to our prison in Minnesota at the ruins of the old campus. And Kat would probably have to go with them, for safety. Hers, clearly. Definitely not Dieter’s. She’d really pounded the hell out of that guy.

  I ignored the voicemail I’d acquired from an unknown number and looked at the contact I’d pulled up, taking a deep breath. “All right, J.J.,” I muttered and hit the dial button, pressing the cold screen to my cheek in the warm morning air.

  “Hello,” came the deflated answer on the fourth ring. I could tell just by listening to him that he’d clearly been warring with himself on even answering. “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes rolling painfully as I coughed out my apology. “I was needlessly cruel in what I said, and it was wrong, and I regret it. You’re a valuable member of our team, and without you, we’d be spinning uselessly, like a futzed compass, on more occasions than I can count.”

  There was a giant, gaping silence. I waited, listening. “J.J.?” I finally asked.

  “I’m just waiting for your request,” J.J. said, clearly filled with suspicion.

  “No requests,” I said. “Just an apology. I’ll let you go.” I started to hang up.

  “Waiiiiit,” J.J. said. “You weren’t calling me for info? You always call me for info, for hacking—”

  “Because I can’t do any of those things myself,” I explained. “I’m useless with tech and you know it. But I don’t have a technical issue now, and I assume if you had anything to share regarding our perp, you’d have pushed it through channels, so … no, I was just calling to apologize. That was it, and I’m done, so …”

  “Huh.” He sounded actually dumbstruck. “That is so weird.”

  A little tiny flash of annoyance coupled with embarrassment ran through me. “Me apologizing to you is weird?” I paused. “Right. It is weird.”

  “Well, yeah, that,” he said, not decreasing my annoyance, “but I was actually mustering up the courage to call you when you rang.”

  I clutched the phone tighter. “You were? Not a social call, I assume.”

  “Hahah, no, you wouldn’t be first on my list if—uh, I mean … no. It wasn’t.” I heard the tapping of keys in the background of the call. “I got an anonymous email a few minutes ago that kind of laid out what’s going on in LA.”

  “What?” I squinted, looking up into the sunny day. “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone’s laid out the plan behind this Redbeard guy—real name Karl Nash, by the way,” J.J. said. “And what’s going on here is … well, there’s more to it than we thought.”

  81.

  I stood in stark silence in the house in Austin, surrounded by Augustus, Reed, Kat, and Grayson Dieter, who was watching us while doing his best impersonation of a picture on the wall, silent and motionless. He watched Kat with frightened eyes the whole time, though.

  “Wait,” Augustus said, looking at me with a puzzled gaze, trying to sort through what I’d just told him, “so this isn’t just a crazy guy on a rampage, in the classic manner of young, socially awkward and/or mentally ill young white men?”

  “Hey,” Reed said, frowning.

  “No,” I said. “Karl Nash—that’s Redbeard’s name—he is crazy, socially awkward and on a rampage. But he’s also got a backer and a plan.”

  “Dude’s been causing a lot of seemingly random havoc for a man with a plan,” Augustus said.

  “It hasn’t been that random, though,” I said. “He planned out the hotel attack and the one on MacArthur Park to cause maximum casualties.”

  “But there are easier ways to kill a whole bunch of people if you’re a meta,” Reed said. “I mean, the guy probably proved it with his impromptu train massacre, didn’t he? That was more lethal than anything except the Luxuriant attack.”

  Kat was watching us all hash it through, as quiet as Dieter. “If he just wanted to kill people, why target me?” Her eyes flashed, and she glanced at me for just a second. “I mean … us. What’s the plan there?”

  “Well, according to J.J.’s source,” I said, still puzzling over why someone would have sent us this heads up, “Nash—Redbeard—”

  “I don’t like that name for him,” Reed said, shaking his head.

  “Feels like it’s not menacing enough,” Augustus agreed.

  “Guys,” I snapped. “Explaining the big scheme here. How about you both zip it and debate supervillain names on your flight back to MSP?”

  “Sorry,” Reed said. “So what’s his play?”

  “There’s this neighborhood,” I said, still trying to wrap my brain around everything J.J. had said to me, “called Elysium. Great location, but it was built in like, the forties and it’s become a real crime-ridden mess—”

  “As all great havens of the Greek dead do, given time,” Reed cracked.

  “—anyway, Nash’s backer is setting up to provoke another rampage right there in Elysium,” I said. “They’re hoping to draw me into a fight—”

  “They want to get into a fight with you?” Augustus asked, mouth slightly agape. “That is the worst plan ever. Do they not know how that always turns out?”

  “Yes, Karl is likely to die,” I said, “but you have to keep in mind, he doesn’t care. He’s a nihilistic, mentally damaged glory-killer who just wants people to remember his name when he’s dead. He wants to be noticed, to be the center of attention, and to be remembered so bad that he’s willing to go out in a blaze of glory in order to make that happen.” I took a deep breath.

  “So what’s that get his backer?” Reed asked with a shrug. “I mean, other than this neighborhood—Elysium—leveled to the ground?”

  “That’s what it gets him,” I said, my lips pressed tightly together.

  Augustus got it first. “Because if the neighborhood gets leveled in a meta fight—”

  “Acts of gods,” Reed said, understanding washing over him. “The residents’ homeowners insurance won’t pay—”

  “And this guy comes in with cash and buys them out,” I said. “That’s why Karl has been using explosives so much. He’s planted explosives under every house, and so even if the fight doesn’t destroy it all, the insurance companies are going to claim it’s all in the same big shit pie and deny the claims. These people will be left with plots of empty land and not a dime of recompense—assuming they survive.”

  “That’s dirty,” Augustus said, shaking his head. “I bet you anything the kingpin behind this got his idea from what happened to my neighborhood, because if not for Cavanagh shelling out to rebuild our houses before he died, we would have been in the same situation.”

  “Wow,” Reed said, shaking his head. “Why is it always land schemes in LA?”

  “Have you seen the price of a three-bedroom out there?” Kat asked, scoffing. “This is gonna be like printing your own money. The price of land in that neighborhood is going to triple or quadruple overnight. Elysium is between the beach and downtown, right off a major freeway—it’s the best location you could ask for, and all it needs
is to be completely destroyed and rebuilt.” She made a face. “That’s so evil, driving people out of their homes … but—”

  “Don’t finish that thought,” I said, shaking my head at her. “I need to stop this from happening.”

  “How?” Reed asked. “I mean … how do you stop the invisible man?”

  “All due credit to Wells, he’s not invisible,” Augustus said, “he can just, y’know, make parts of himself pass through solid matter. He’s more like ‘The Ephemeral Man.’ ‘The Substanceless Man’?” He frowned. “‘The Ghost’?”

  “Pretty sure that last one’s been done to death,” Reed said with a frown. “Only utter hacks would name a character ‘The Ghost.’”

  “Speaking of people without substance,” I said, “you two need to take Kat with you back to Minnesota.”

  “I’m sitting right here,” Kat said, going from zero to outraged in a heartbeat. “And I’m not going with them.”

  “Fine, you can stay here in Austin,” I said.

  “I need to come with you,” she said, with a different kind of fervor than she’d exhibited in the desert.

  “Look,” I said, sighing, “let me take care of this, and then you can go back to your life and your cameras and whatever, okay?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “This is my responsibility.”

  I froze in the middle of constructing my next argument. “Whaaa …?”

  “For whatever reason,” Kat said, bowing her head, “this—I don’t want to call him by his name, that’s giving him too much credit—Redbeard—he picked me as a target.” Her head came up, and there was a lot of anger in those green eyes. “He killed … so many people trying to get to me. I may have been a secondary or a publicity target or whatever in the eyes of his backer, but this guy made it personal. This is my responsibility, and I can’t just hide my face while people are dying.”