Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  Now this was the moment of calculated risk, because he could easily go and be a shit head, decide he’d had enough, and blow the whole neighborhood. But at the same time, letting him stand there, insubstantial, going back and forth forever was not something that was going to result in victory for me and my team. In fact, the longer I insulted him, the more likely it was that he’d eventually get itchy and pull the detonator before I could stop him, because, let’s face it, I wasn’t going to be able to stop insulting him. It just wasn’t in my nature to let this spoiled brat vent his spleen about his—whatever without continuously shitting all over him about his massive life failures.

  Yeah, I know. I’m meeting with a therapist weekly for a reason. I am also NOT ONE for the same reason.

  I drifted out onto the front lawn, listening to the revving of an engine down the block. I whistled a jaunty tune as I went, my feet setting back down on grass as I walked for the street. I glanced back and saw Redbeard come shuffling out of the wall of the house, staring after me, mouth slightly open in disbelief that I’d walked away from him.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. He sounded insulted. Good.

  “Away from you,” I said. “You need a therapist, not a superhero.”

  He gawked at me. “I’m—I’m going to destroy—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I waved him off, rolling my eyes. “But I can’t make you turn solid for a fight, so why am I wasting my time?”

  “I’m going to do it,” he said, but his voice sounded flimsy.

  “I’m sure you will,” I said, shrugging, “as soon as the cameras show up, because you’re such a confident guy that you’d do it for nothing but love of the game—oh, wait, that’s right. You’re actually doing it for attention and for your boss, neither of whom is going to be served by having this go down without a huge meta battle that gets on all the TV networks first.” I glanced up and down the street. “Seems the TV news hasn’t gotten the message. Maybe you should have scheduled a press conference.”

  “They’ll be here,” he said. It was probably the first time he’d voiced optimism in a while, because he sounded so pathetic about it.

  “Probably not,” I said. “I staged some fights at major LA landmarks this morning to get their attention. I doubt they’ve noticed a squabble here in Elysium, especially since there aren’t any cops around for miles.” I shrugged. “Maybe if you blow something up it’ll get their attention, but—say, all the bombs in the neighborhood aren’t attached to one detonator, are they? Because then that probably won’t allow for using it as an attention-getter …”

  He flushed, glancing down at his belt, telling me exactly where the location of the detonator was. Redbeard was clearly not the brightest bulb in the Christmas tree, and the way his brain was chunking along, his thoughts visible on his face, I couldn’t help but feel I’d gotten into a battle of wits with an unarmed man. Getting attention was his number one motive, and he needed to be seen doing meta shit before blowing up the neighborhood, but he’d failed to kill me, which—I mean, displaying my corpse on the end of his fist would have probably been worth a YouTube video or twelve. People on the street would have been lining up to film that, but like at everything else in his life, he’d failed.

  Sooo … what was a loser to do next? Just give up on his dreams and run away? That would have been the smart play, maybe blowing up the neighborhood out of spite on the way out. It would have messed with Brock’s plan, not having evidence of acts of gods for insurance to deny the claims, but Karl Nash could have still gotten some infamy, albeit without any live video footage of him being a megalomaniacal destructive asshole and displaying all his personality defects to the world.

  But then, that was his problem. He had to be seen, he had to be infamous, he had to be known. It was like the call of the wild to his coyote heart, the number one motivation. He needed to not only blow shit up, he wanted to be known for doing it, because it was the only way his cold and craven heart would feel like he’d taken actual revenge.

  I could see the emotions playing across his face as he tried to figure out what to do next. Silently, I was egging him on, because I’d planned this much out in advance and already knew the logical answer. Crazy people don’t generally jump to the most logical answer, though, so I waited to see if he’d get to it.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said, face twisting even harder into hate, and my previously wounded heart sang. Oh, good. He got there, finally. “I’m going to make a mess of you, and people are going to film it, I’m going to film it, and the whole world is going to see.”

  Uh, yeah. Yay. I guess.

  He came at me in a menacing walk, and I stood my ground defiantly, letting him know I wasn’t scared of him. Which … I mostly wasn’t. Mostly. I mean, the guy could technically put his hand through my brain and kill me, and he was holding it out, the skin fading slightly as he advanced on me, as inevitable as the rain anywhere but in LA.

  Okay, maybe I was a little afraid.

  94.

  Kat

  Kat shifted the car into gear. It had been years since she’d driven a stick shift, or even since she’d driven herself at all. She’d stalled the car multiple times, the transmission grinding and guttering as she failed to shift it at the appropriate times, the engine racing and screaming.

  That was all fine with her, though. It was Taggert’s car, after all. His precious baby, his vintage Ferrari.

  She had parked on the street, waiting for Sienna to show, and now there she was, backing slowly toward the street. Redbeard stepped into sight, anger on his face like a cloud of pestilence, advancing on the “helpless” Sienna.

  Kat hit the accelerator, listened to the transmission scream at her again and she frantically shifted up to prevent another stall. It did, however, cause Redbeard to look up and see her, his eyes narrowing as he tried to figure out what he was looking at.

  “Hold that pose, asshole,” she said. She thrust a hand forward, seizing the roots of the grass beneath Redbeard’s feet and causing them to reach upward to grab him just like she’d done to Grayson Dieter. His feet may not have been wholly there, but he was walking on something, and the roots found the thin soles and wrapped them up tight as Redbeard jerked in surprise at the unexpected resistance, looking up at her with his eyes now wide as she drove the Ferrari right at him in a hard slide, jamming the brakes as she mounted the curb and went onto the lawn.

  95.

  Sienna

  I wasn’t going to be hiring Kat as my driver anytime soon, I knew that much as I saw the old Ferrari come shooting at Redbeard. She hit the curb hard enough to rip off the bumper, but even that didn’t slow her down. The sports car hit a hard skid and came at my opponent sideways. I could have sworn I saw the grass beneath it rippling as the car slid into the space where Redbeard was standing, his hands thrown up defensively even as he faded out of phase in panic.

  So, he did react emotionally. That was helpful.

  When Kat came to a skidding halt, the Ferrari was parked with Redbeard sticking right out of the roof from chest up, hands still thrown out in front of him, his eyes closed. Kat kicked open the door and bailed out the side before Redbeard recovered—quite wisely for her, I thought.

  “Sienna, now!” she shouted, and I obliged her.

  Gavrikov, I said, and threw a hand up, blasting a round of flame into the gas tank.

  The Ferrari blew up as Kat rolled toward me, a billowing cloud of fire blasting out of the body and chassis of the sweet, exquisitely cared-for classic. I would have felt really, really guilty about it if I hadn’t known it was Taggert’s car and that my destroying it meant he’d get zero replacement costs from the insurance company. Acts of gods, that’s right. Thank you, Redbeard, for providing me and Kat a moment of sweet, sweet vengeance in the midst of this battle. Lemonade from lemons and all that.

  I didn’t expect the sudden explosion of the gasoline to kill Redbeard, and I wasn’t terribly surprised when it didn’t. It wasn’t even that big o
f an explosion, actually, more of a WHOOOOOOOMP! as the tank went up. It certainly didn’t blow up like in the movies, or like any of Redbeard’s targets did. It was quieter, less percussive, but the flames were pretty hot.

  Kat crawled to her feet and looked back at our little neighborhood barbecue, stunned, her mouth open.

  “Don’t go catatonic on me now, Cameron,” I shot at her.

  She blinked at me and got off her knees. “Do you think—”

  “No,” Redbeard said, stepping out of the fire, the soles of his feet black. Dude needed a shoe store.

  “Have you ever thought about wearing something with heels?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Feels like it would solve some of your problems—”

  Another squeal of tires came from down the street, and this time, like a trained sucker, Redbeard looked again. Another sports car came shooting to a stop a few feet short of hitting me, and Scott popped out, hands up. “What’s up?” he asked, mostly for effect, I suspected.

  “The number of points on Kat’s license,” I answered honestly.

  “I’m gonna kill you all,” Redbeard said, sounding a little more unhinged.

  “You’ve done a smashing job of it so far,” I said, watching out of the corner of my eye as Steven got out of his car, a little slower than Scott, obviously, but holding his Glock in his hands, waiting for a chance to shoot Redbeard in the feet, plainly. Or elsewhere.

  With the flaming sports car as his backdrop, Redbeard looked a little shadowed, the fire dancing behind him. It would have been a cool shot in an action movie, but because it was overcast, it came off a little muted and—

  Ugh. I have to get out of this town.

  “I got this,” Scott said, nodding at Redbeard, a little tension on display in his rugged jawline.

  “You’ve got a handful of nothing,” Redbeard growled back.

  “That should be the title of your autobiography,” I said helpfully. “Which no one will read.”

  When Redbeard turned to retort to me, Scott blasted at him with a full force water wash from both hands. Redbeard saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and started to smirk as he opened his mouth to say something, but shut it as the water washed his feet out from underneath him and he faceplanted in the newly created mud with a splash.

  “Nice one, waterboy,” Steven said.

  Kat threw out her hands like she was conducting a symphony, and I watched green and brown roots burst out of the sodden, muddy ground and seize Redbeard by his newly solid hands. He stared dully at them for a moment and then pulled them free, looking angrily at all of us, his skin going ghostly again.

  That was when I knew we had him.

  He had panicked earlier when the car was coming and gone insubstantial. Now, when threatened with the possibility of falling through the earth when Scott took his feet from beneath him, he’d gone solid through and through. That told me he was operating purely on instinct when he was fighting. It wasn’t training, it wasn’t smarts, it was a really angry guy who had some damned helpful powers that he didn’t fully control, especially when emotion got involved—specifically fear and anger. It made me wonder if he’d been shifting states when I was taunting him in the dark. I suspected it did.

  And boy, did I know how to stir those emotions.

  “What a chickenshit,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Your power is such a perfect illustration of who you are—you have no ability to touch or influence the world around you. You’re a nothing. You don’t even really exist—and when I kill you, it’ll be like you were never here at all.”

  Redbeard’s complexion reddened slightly. “You think that hurts my feelings?”

  “Yes, you ginormous baby,” I shot back. “I think you’ve known it all along, which is why you’re continuing to have these little tantrums. You’ve got colic and you want mommy to pat you on the back and make it all better.”

  He wavered a little, the disgust rolling off him as he went insubstantial again after that slight return to form. “You’re nothing but a bunch of hot air.”

  I nodded at Scott and he shot out with another fierce burst of water that took Redbeard’s feet from underneath him again, creating another mud puddle that Redbeard splashed in as he landed, his face now twisting with fury—

  Just as I shot a flaming burst at the water beneath his face. It flash-boiled and he flinched as it spattered like a shotgun burst, angry red marks springing up all over his face like teenage acne, the blisters already starting to form. “I make hot air,” I said, “because technically boiling water is—”

  He hissed like the puddle had when I nuked it, springing back to his feet, more angry than wounded, though he was clearly hurting from the attack. He took another step forward and Kat seized his feet, stalling him for a second as he raged again, ripping the roots free with an angry kick. “You look like a stomping child,” I said. “How appropriate.”

  I guessed he was about two more good insults from completely losing his shit, because his face went even redder. He had mud and burns on his face and hands, he was wavering, his appearance rippling as he shifted phases, and I could tell he was—as Zollers had accused me of in the past—stuffing resentment. That’s not healthy, I’m told. I was equally sure Redbeard planned to release that unhealthy emotion on me—or another target—at his earliest convenience. “You bitch,” he said simply.

  “No, you bitch,” I said, “and whine, and moan, and complain, and grouse—”

  He reddened and flickered again. One more good insult would get him. Maybe two bad ones.

  “You’re all nothing,” he said, more to reassure himself than anything, I was sure.

  “No,” Kat said, her head held high, “you’re nothing. We are famous. We’re everything you wish you could be—and nothing that you are … loser.”

  I wouldn’t have thought that it would be Kat—daffy, frivolous Kat—who would put a serious villain like Redbeard (and for all my insults, he’d done serious damage and was a serious villain) over the edge. But it must have been something about the classic high-school popular girl way she delivered that line, because it sent Karl Nash over the edge like she’d nailed his ass with a sports car going a hundred miles an hour and he was solid as a normal human being.

  The reaction was immediate; I could see his pupils dilate from where I stood. He was still a little slumped from where he’d been warring with her grass root snares, but he snapped up immediately like he’d had his tail plugged into an electrical outlet. He looked at her with wide, furious eyes and his lips pushed together so hard that they went pale. He reached down and fumbled at his belt, rummaging until he came up with the prize—

  The detonator.

  Wolfe, I said, Gavrikov, Eve, Bjorn—

  I blasted Redbeard right in the eyes with a net of light as I simultaneously hit him with the warmind. The net hit dead on, his upper face disappearing behind a blinding strip like someone had bound a blindfold made of pure, iridescent light around his eyes. He staggered as though I’d punched him from both the blinding light shining into his retinas and the dark mental attack I was subjecting him to.

  That was all a distraction, though.

  I shot forward at just under sonic speed, channeling the power of Wolfe as I went. I caught the subtle ripple through Redbeard’s chest that told me he was solid for a second, out of control of his own body, and I took full advantage.

  I came down with every bit of strength I had, raising my hand and lowering it in a flash, turning the underside of my flattened hand to an iron-like consistency with Wolfe’s power and hours of beating my various limbs against a giant block of steel. It was tiresome work, but it tended to pay off in moments like this, when I matched my hand against Redbeard’s wrist at something like three hundred and fifty miles an hour—

  And I sheared his hand off in the middle of his forearm.

  I caught the falling hand and stepped back, prying it loose of the detonator just in case, holding the little plastic nob in my own and taking his hand by the
wrist in my other like a bad prop comic.

  Redbeard staggered back, turning insubstantial again. The net of concentrated light fell off his eyes and he blinked repeatedly as he stumbled backward toward the flaming wreckage of Taggert’s car. He squinted and stared out at us as he recovered his sight, trying to figure out what had just happened. Based on the look on his face, the pain of his severed limb hadn’t quite hit him yet.

  “Hi,” I said, waving his own hand at him.

  I don’t normally glory in the misery of others, but watching his brain catch up with the fact that he’d just suffered an amputation was pretty damned hilarious, if you’re starved for entertainment like most of America. I mean, people watched Kat live her meaningless life in their spare time. That’s not any sicker than waving someone’s amputated hand at them.

  “What the—” Karl said, looking down at his forearm in shock. “You—you—”

  “‘You hero,’” I finished for him, waving his hand like it was one of those little novelty flags on the fourth of July. “‘You winner.’ ‘You star—’”

  “You b—”

  “You already used that one,” I said with a roll of the eyes. Okay, I’ll admit it, sometimes I do glory in the misery of others. I’ll add it to the list of things to change about myself. But tomorrow. I held up the detonator and flash-burned it out of existence by heating it to four thousand degrees in the course of less than a second. “Come up with something new already. It’s not like you’re handicapped—” I held up my hand in front of my mouth, mockingly, asshole that I am. “Oops. Too soon?”

  “You Skywalkered me,” Redbeard said limply, and he looked all used up, like he was ready to just fade into the earth.