Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  If the laws of physics had been in effect, that might have mattered. But apparently he’d missed it earlier when I levitated on a sled of rock, because all he did was chop my golem in half without actually ripping any rock out of my control, and I just went with it, dividing the golem and attacking him with both parts, separating them to avoid getting shaved again by his flat torrent of water.

  I thought about forming a cone to boost my voice and shout at him, hoping to start a little unfriendly back and forth, but I doubted he’d even hear me, surrounded as he was in his own personal aquarium. Man, Sienna taught me this game her way and I just can’t shake the old lessons. How were you supposed to fight someone when you couldn’t talk smack to them?

  It was pretty crazy looking, what we were doing. I had a kind of heady moment as I sat there, encased in my rock golem’s chest as I came at him again.

  I was getting pretty tired of this back and forth, so I readied a big spear of stone behind me, preparing to deploy it on a new limb I was crafting, like a scorpion’s tail. Then I decided to make another one because who wouldn’t want a stone scorpion with two tails? In case the first one failed, you know.

  It damned near killed me inside not to shout out something like, “Feel the sting, baby!” before I came at him, but it would be stupid to telegraph a move like that. So instead, I just hit him with everything I had, attacking from below, and the minute I could see he was distracted …

  I launched both of those powerful tails at him, determined to punch my way through his bubble and right into the bastard’s heart, even if it killed him. Because this dude? He was not playing around, and if I kept stringing this out, I had a feeling sooner or later he was going to end me.

  Omar wheeled in his bubble the minute my attacks struck. I blasted another shotgun peppering of gravel and rock at him from below as my golem’s disembodied legs renewed their attack in tripod mode, but none of it deterred him from his total focus, which was on me and my scorpion tails of jagged stone.

  The tails were lodged in the water, and I shoved at him, and he shoved them right back at me. It was like a tug of war, except, dammit, I should have been winning. The stone was cracking against the force of his water shield, which …

  Hell, it should have been impossible.

  Omar came belting around with something that looked like a fist of water, and it smashed my first tail, the one stretching up over the left side of my golem, shattering it into the component rocks. “Shit!” I said, wearing out on this not talking. I shot at him with a dose of rock from below, and he stopped that, too. It was starting to look like a good, old-fashioned standoff when I heard the rumbling in the distance.

  The sound didn’t trigger at first; I was stuck in my golem, after all, working to block his access to the water supply at the source of the well. But as the rumbling got louder, I couldn’t ignore it anymore, and I finally turned my head from the eternal struggle with Omar to look at whatever the hell was making noise like an epic rockslide.

  It wasn’t a rockslide.

  It was a damned avalanche.

  And it had come from the top of the peak.

  All the ice.

  All the snow that dotted the foothills and up the mountain.

  All of it was rolling down toward me.

  And eventually, after it wiped me out and carried Omar off to celebrate his victory …

  It’d take out the entire town of Steelwood Springs and everybody living in it.

  14.

  Sienna

  I streaked through the air, heading south out of Portland, the sun high in the sky above me as I headed into a cloud bank with Guy Friday clutched in my arms, avoiding the touch of his skin as though it were poisonous and plague-ridden.

  Also, I was still really, really pissed that Greg Vansen had thought I would ever, ever, ever—you get the point, I guess—date Guy Friday.

  “Where are we going?” Friday asked plaintively as I caught Interstate 5 and bumped up to way beyond the speed of sound. He sounded a little frightened as he asked.

  “We’re going to find Jon Wiegert,” I said. “Apparently he’s in the High Sierras today, jumping out of a plane, so …”

  “Ohh, so we’re going to California,” Friday shouted over the gusting wind that swirled around us. It’s hard to overstate how much wind resistance there is when you’re traveling at supersonic speeds. He’d already bulked up a little bit, presumably to better weather the wind effects. I had him firmly clutched around his still-damp sleeves. There was no skin to skin contact, so as far as I was concerned, we were all good.

  “Probably more like Nevada-bound, but it’s right on the border,” I said, probably not as snippily as I should have considering Friday had just cost me my Portland safe house, my weights, and my TV. Also, some clothes, and— “Damn! I dropped my cell phone when Greg appeared out of nowhere.”

  “Do you need it?” Friday asked.

  “Eventually, yes,” I said. “But it’s not that big of a problem.” I had another safe house in an apartment complex outside Reno, so stopping off along the way didn’t seem out of the question since we were heading that way. Lucky thing, me having a network of safe houses everywhere. “So … you really have no idea how Greg Vansen just appeared inside my freaking safe house?”

  “Nope,” Friday said, like the matter was just settled. He was hanging in my arms like he was quite content to just let me do all the work, including all the thinking—because clearly, I was here to do the thinking for him.

  In fairness, that was probably a good idea, since his type of thinking had given me a story about how random Panamanians were screaming about how huge his genitals were.

  “He didn’t seem to know who you were when he went to kill you,” I said. “Are you sure this has anything at all to do with your time together on that death squad or whatever?”

  Friday was quiet for a minute. “Well, I thought so, but … I don’t know. Maybe not?”

  “He said it wasn’t personal,” I said. “I’m not necessarily for believing everything our super-deadly magical assassin says, but he genuinely didn’t seem to know your face. That tends to make me think that maybe hunting down this Jon Wiegert guy is going to be a dead end.”

  “Well … what should we do, then?” Friday asked.

  I shrugged as much as I could without dropping him. For some strange reason, I was treating Friday a lot more delicately now that he’d brought me a case than I ever had before. “Still go talk to Jon, just to cover our bases, I guess.”

  Actually, once I thought about it … it wasn’t all that strange.

  This is what you do, Harmon said.

  Speaking of which, I said, firing up the old synapses and talking in my own head, howzabout you put those super telepathy powers to work and tell me what was really going on in Greg Vansen’s head when we were fighting just now? Why is he after Friday?

  Gerry Harmon gave me a sparkling, presidential smile of the sort a politician gives when he wants to be a hugely condescending dick. Or maybe it was just Harmon being Harmon. That would take all the fun out of it for you, wouldn’t it? You’ll figure it out.

  “Asshole,” I said, only half meaning it. He knew me.

  “What did I do?” Friday asked, sounding a little hurt.

  “Other than wrecked my cozy little life in Portland? Nothing,” I said. I didn’t put much oomph into it, though. Instead, I sped up, eager to find this Jon Wiegert in hopes that he might give me another thread to chase … and that maybe I’d find another after that, and another, and another …

  … in fact, if it could go on forever? That wouldn’t be so terrible.

  “Oh, well, no big deal, then,” Friday said. “Your place was a dump, anyway. All that fire and shooting probably raised the value.”

  On second thought, maybe a short, easily solved case wouldn’t be so bad …

  15.

  Augustus

  The whole damned mountain looked like it was coming down, or at least the frosty con
e at the top of it was, heading right toward me at the behest of the Poseidon who was locked in my death grip, grinning at me from beneath the surface of his shield of water. A thought occurred to me pretty damned speedily—a Poseidon shouldn’t have been able to affect ice, which meant—

  “Damn,” I whispered under my breath, shoving both golem hands against the water bubble and trying to get away from Omar before the coming avalanche slammed into me.

  Omar had been juicing, all right. He hadn’t just used the serum that gave entry-level superpowers. He’d taken the one that President Harmon had given me too, leveling his powers up to epic-water-god level.

  And then, apparently, he’d also taken the upgrade that allowed him to use powers that were similar in nature. Ergo, while Scott Byerly could stare at a cup of ice all damned day and couldn't make it do anything until it melted, Omar here was bringing down an entire mountain of the stuff with the apparent intent to bury me like an Everest expedition.

  “Oh, shitttttttt!” I shouted out the rocky, tunnel-like cone that was my only viewport to the world from inside my golem. This catastrophe was at least partially my fault; I might not have brought the ice and snow down, but I was the only superpowered person between it and the city with a chance of stopping it.

  I reared back with a rock hand and slapped against the side of the water bubble hard as Omar was already pulling back. The effect was immediate; he shot forward like I’d spiked his little watery volleyball and headed for the trees lining the driveway. Apparently he was already trying to use this opportunity to get away, and I just gave him a little push. I couldn’t have known that, though, because I couldn’t see his face through the layers of water between us.

  Before he’d even fully disappeared into the trees, I was already turning back to deal with the oncoming crisis. The avalanche was rumbling hard, a cloud billowing up and above the fatal slide of ice and snow, following it down the mountain like a storm warning.

  I reached out into the rock in the distance and started to fracture the earth where I could feel the rumbling slide of cold sluicing its way down the mountain. I thought about those metal panels cops raised when they wanted to seal off a street—square pieces of metal that you just lifted up a couple feet and boom—car couldn’t pass.

  An avalanche wasn’t a car, but it operated on a similar principle, didn’t it? Momentum and matter, running away down a hill. It wasn’t as solid as a car body, but that worked to my advantage, too, if I could slow the bulk of the mass. Strip away most of the mass and it’d just be a little trickle coming down the hill.

  Ripping up the rock plates facing in the opposite direction seemed the natural choice, so I started doing it. I jetted into the air on my rock avatar like it was launched with a rocket. Levitating solid rock used to take a lot out of me. Now, while not optimal for traveling long distances, it was fairly easy to maintain for a couple miles, at least.

  I got a bird’s eye view of the avalanche, and it sent chills through me. It was a big mess, sliding on down that mountain, and I was already wondering if my idea was even going to slow it. It had runaway train speed going for it, too, but I was working at setting up my system of rock brakes, slightly ahead of where the avalanche was coming. It looked like a river of white, roiling currents in it seething with pure, furious power as it took on the appearance of a storm surging down the hill.

  “Okay, here we go,” I said, two hundred feet above the cascading white. My brakes were ready, and the avalanche was only a hundred feet from them. Fifty. Then ten …

  I lifted the segments of rock, pulling them up at a forty-five degree angle in lines across the path of the avalanche’s advance. The brakes were ten, fifteen feet high and stretched a mile across the slope. There were twenty of them, and it looked like a vent had opened in the ground, gills for some massive, earthen creature that was hiding beneath.

  The avalanche hit like a hurricane running up against concrete jetties I’d seen on TV during storm season, and boom! White snow launched into the air when it clashed with my brake, rolling over the first brake, then the second, then the third …

  I could feel the front lines of my brake system start to fracture. “Uh oh.” I’d never tried anything like this before, and the idea that it could fail hadn’t really occurred to me.

  It was failing, though, and right before my eyes. The first line broke cleanly off, sheared by the force of the downhill slide of the avalanche. When it let loose, the mile-long line of rock shattered and was carried downhill, slamming into the second brake and catching on it immediately, creating a kind of ramp for the avalanche to launch off of.

  It looked like a waterfall had been set up on the hill, a spray of white cascading over it at a near-horizontal angle because of the slope. If it lasted, it might have been considered one of the wonders of the world. It was, after all, a mile-wide cascade of snow, rock, trees and ice down a hill. A few pines went floating down below me, buffeted by the currents.

  “This is crazy,” I muttered, wondering if maybe I was the one who was crazy. Maybe I would have been better off building one giant brake—like a Great-Wall-of-China-type thing, buttressed by all the rock I could summon. But then, if that had busted, there would have been no chance to do what I was doing now, which was …

  … Well, which was trying to adapt to my failure by doubling down. Yeehaw.

  The avalanche had slowed now that it had reached the tenth or so brake I’d created in the line. I ripped up five more down the line, and was activating a couple up the slope a bit, trying to slow the advance before it reached the waterfall the breaking of my first line had caused.

  I felt like I was directing a symphony in chaos, watching snow and debris roiling below. Another tree trunk disappeared—just completely disappeared, full grown pine—into the snow like it was sucked into an undertow.

  Yeah. This was crazy. And I was crazy to try and stop it. It was like a man trying to hold back a hurricane.

  But I wasn’t facing nature here, not really.

  I was facing a madman meta trying to save his own ass and unleashing hell on an unsuspecting Rocky Mountain town in the process.

  But if Reed Treston could stop a damned tornado … well, I wasn’t one to be outdone.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I shouted, ripping deeper into the earth, channeling the rock beneath me in ways I’d never tried before. The thing I’d done with the well gave me inspiration, and I shuffled rock to create pits a hundred feet deep beneath me, a couple dozen feet wide, just to slow things down a little.

  This avalanche was an elephant, stampeding its way down the mountain, destroying everything in its path. With every tree it uprooted, with every piece of rock it tore from my breaks, it added to the inevitable mass that allowed it to increase speed down the hill toward town. This elephant didn’t mean to stop, either, and it wouldn’t until I took care of it.

  An old joke popped to mind: How do you eat an elephant?

  One bite at a time.

  I opened more of those pits, crunching together rock, siphoning it, moving it down the slope and adding it to my brakes. This was like deadlifting a ton, moving this much earth. I’d never done it before, and it taxed me in ways I couldn’t recall being taxed. My brain was already stuttering from the exertion of the fight against Omar, but this—

  This was vital. I had to do this.

  Below me, the roaring snow was running downhill like rapids on a wild river. But it was swirling and eddying more now, caught up having to fill those sudden pits I’d created. The brakes were starting to have some effect, too; the avalanche had blown through the first round of them I’d pulled up, but it was slowing now. I could see the top of the fifth and sixth lines, poking their heads up out of the snow. Trees stuck out like snowy toothpicks.

  My brow was covered in sweat, and I cast off the last of my golem, joining the rocks to the last barricade. The snow was oozing downhill now. It just needed one last thing to arrest its momentum. I raised the other brakes, just a little higher
, my hands shaking as I mimed the motion I wanted the earth to make. I normally didn’t even have to do that anymore, but I was so worn out I felt the need to, just to make sure it got done.

  My hands were shaking as the front wave of the avalanche slid up against that last barricade, the Great Wall of Augustus. I lowered myself, the spitting cold of the cloud that the avalanche had let off chilling my skin like an icy shower. I set down on the top of my wall and felt some strength return to me, now that I was back in touch with the earth. I wanted to kick off my dress shoes and let my feet go against the rock, so I did. I shredded my socks off with pebbles, and it felt good, like a massage as I stood there, commanding the avalanche to stop.

  And it did.

  “Damned right,” I said, as the wall beneath me groaned under the weight of tons of ice and tree and snow and rock. I was gradually reasserting my control over the latter, adding to my makeshift dam that was holding back the tide of hell that Omar had brought down.

  Omar. I looked back, trying to see if he was lurking out there, maybe trying to sneak up on me.

  There was no sign of bubble man, no hint of him beneath the untouched pines that covered the slope beneath me. Way, way down there, I could see the house where we’d begun our little clash. His van was still in the driveway, and off—way in the distance—I could see trees moving like something was passing between them roughly enough to disturb them.

  Omar. Still in his bubble. Heading west, out of the valley, and at speed I’d never be able to match.

  “Damn,” I said, sagging against the rock wall beneath me. It felt good to be against the earth again, and I lay there, contemplating my next move, and didn’t even realize when I fell asleep there in the sun.