Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  “What do you think the go signal is?” I asked, and then the sound of a door being split off its hinges echoed over the house and down the street.

  “Probably that,” Scott said, rearing back and giving the front door a mighty kick.

  “Yay for our first felony of the day,” I said, following behind him as he cleared the door and entered a living room that looked like it hadn’t seen any use at all. There was a layer of dust on a flatscreen TV on the far wall, and the couch didn’t look like it had been sat on in years.

  The carpet looked freshly cleaned, though, which was weird considering the state of everything else. I started to open my mouth to say something to Scott, but he was already charging through toward the kitchen, which I could see through an archway ahead.

  Once I was sure the living room was clear, I followed Scott. “Hey, I does this carpet look funny to y—”

  I didn’t even get the words out before Scott disappeared in front of me, a hole opening up in the floor, perfectly concealed by the shag carpeting. He fell through the trapdoor pretty as you please, the segments snapping shut behind him and once again leaving no sign that it had just swallowed my partner whole.

  Reed shouted, “Jamal!” A gust of wind blew through the house and then stilled itself as the clank of machinery or something falling clacked from that direction.

  “Dammit,” I said, looking around with unease, wondering where from or even if the attack was coming. “We really should have knoc—”

  Something grabbed me from behind, strong metal arms scooping me up and yanking me backward and down, into the darkness as a door in the wall closed behind me and I fell down, down into the unknown.

  34.

  Greg

  There was something beautiful about watching a nuclear bomb go off, especially from a safe distance. The small-scale nuke had started out as a 500-ton device, which was enough to destroy a couple of city blocks. Greg had done his thing, though, worked his magic, and now the blast radius was roughly the size of the street.

  And oh, how the street was looking, with a mushroom cloud rising above it, and a blast of flame and compression wave of force shattering the windows of the Mexican restaurant.

  Sure, there’d be some property damage. Of course there would be. You couldn’t set off a nuclear bomb, even one with a blast radius the size of a trailer, without seeing some structural devastation spread out from the point of impact.

  But Greg was far enough above it now that he wouldn’t have to worry about said devastation. He’d done his part, evacuating the street of people so quickly they hadn’t even known what was happening, and leaving it clear so that when the moment came it was just Sienna and that idiot Sledger standing there, gawking as the bomb went off in front of them.

  Greg didn’t have any illusions about Nealon surviving. She could, probably, but that was more or less irrelevant. Maybe she’d heal from the burns, shrug off the effects of the radiation that was probably going to toxify that segment of road for years to come.

  But Sledger did not possess her healing ability, and she hadn’t had any time to shield him or otherwise jet him out of there before impact. Greg had seen to that.

  So this, he reasonably assured himself, should be the end of the contract. Fulfilled, at last. The only wild card factor was Nealon. Would she take this defeat, the death of Sledger, humbly and accept it as a simple, ordinary loss in a world filled with them?

  Mmmmm … perhaps not. Which was unfortunate but characteristic of her, Greg reflected as he watched the mushroom cloud rise over east LA, already banking the SR-71 toward home and throttling up to full speed. That was all right, though. If she couldn’t accept her loss, if she wanted to settle things, Greg would make the necessary preparations to be sure he was ready for her if she came.

  When she came, he corrected, adjusting his course slightly north, toward Chicago. It really came down to if she could find him. But if she did … he’d be ready for her. After all, he’d just defeated her once. He could do it again.

  Even if it took another nuclear bomb—a bigger one, perhaps.

  One she wouldn’t be able to survive.

  35.

  Augustus

  I was locked up pretty tight in a series of plastic and metal cords, one around my neck biting into my flesh with a blade-like feel. Neither of my hands were free, and the sense of compression I was experiencing at being completely swallowed in whatever entrapping contraption Cassidy had fashioned for me was outweighed by that sharp feeling against my neck telling me that if I moved, my head and my body were going to part ways, hard and fast.

  Fortunately, Cassidy had seen fit to allow me and the others to observe the pickle we’d been put in. Scott was visible just ahead, in a cylinder buried up to his neck in some kind of dusty sand. More was trickling in above him, and an ominous vent above his head shimmered with a mirage-like vapor that suggested gas was flowing into the chamber with him.

  Reed had suffered the same fate, except he was only up to mid-chest in the grey sand-like stuff. That same shimmer was visible above him, though.

  Past him, I could see Jamal in a vat of water, shivering and up to his waist. It rolled down the sides of the plastic container, grounding him from shooting electricity anywhere meaningful.

  “Do I even have to explain to you guys how screwed you are right now?” Cassidy’s voice, electronically boosted through a speaker system, rattled through every one of the plastic bonds that wrapped my body. A strong chemical smell threatened to overwhelm me. After a pause, the ominous tone evaporated, and Cassidy said, with undisguised glee, “Okay, I’ll explain it:

  “Reed, Scott, you are both swimming in a highly combustible sand I made out of kerosene resin and wood shavings. Above you, a pilot light is waiting to be lit by even a single stirring of wind or a change in the water pressure of the pipes from outside. If it lights … you’re going to end up looking a lot worse than the last time I blew you up, pretty boy.

  “Jamal … I don’t think I need to explain this to you, because you’re generally brighter than the rest of them, but … zap, splash, drown. You got that, right?

  “And as for you, Augustus … I laced the ground outside with seismic sensors. They go off, and the French Revolution comes to visit you. Comprende?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said, “but you could have at least sprung for a real guillotine.”

  “I knew you’d get that,” Cassidy said, coming into view in front of me, her pale skin almost aglow in the basement’s soft light.

  “Because I’m such a worldly, educated dude?” I asked.

  “Because you’re taking Western Civ at the University of Minnesota right now,” Cassidy said, peering at me curiously, like I was a science experiment she was about to jot some notes on. “Now, hold still.” And she grabbed a little hanging remote with a big button—

  And pressed it.

  I waited a breath for my head to get cleaved off my shoulders, but it didn’t happen. Instead, all those hard plastic arms retracted from around my body and I stumbled out, surprised that I was suddenly set free. Scott and Reed’s tanks started draining of their combustible material, the gas valve losing its shimmering mirage as the gas cut off. A few seconds later, the grey sand was gone, and the tanks lifted off.

  Jamal came staggering out at roughly the same time, looking only a little damp. The hum of an industrial dryer clicked off from where his trap had been sitting, and I wondered why she’d bothered to design that into the thing.

  “Now then,” Cassidy said, “have we established that you are all my bitches, and that you really shouldn’t break into peoples’ houses? Crime doesn’t pay? Were you guys not paying any attention when Sienna tried and tried to hammer that lesson home to me and all the others in the prison?”

  “What’s to stop us from letting loose on you right now, Cassidy?” Reed asked, pride burning in him to the point where he looked like he was on the edge of losing all reason.

  “Human decency,” Cassidy s
aid, unimpressed. “Aren’t you the one who’s always going on about how there’s a different, a better way than what your sister does? Because greasing the basement floor with me, while soothing to your wounded pride after you stumbled ass-backwards into my obvious ambush, is considered murder. Or assault and battery, if you were to stop short of killing me, so …” She smiled brightly, giving her skeletal face a sinister cast.

  “Why did you go to the trouble of setting all that up?” Jamal asked, wringing a little drip of water out of one of his sleeves. Scott looked at him apologetically and sucked it all out with a gesture, the wetness disappearing into Byerly’s fingertips.

  “Oh, I did this months ago,” Cassidy said, dismissing the traps with a wave of her hand. “I would have done it anywhere, but since I set up here in Minneapolis, the likelihood of one or more of you discovering my location and eventually paying me a visit were extremely high, so it made sense to be prepared in case you came knocking. Or not knocking, in this case.”

  “You know why we’re here?” I asked.

  “I caught the basics from the lovebirds, after you left,” Cassidy said.

  “Wait, you’re listening in on us?” Scott asked.

  “Most of the time, no,” Cassidy said, taking a hell of a chance in my opinion by turning her back on us as she started walking to a computer station in the corner. “But I’ve got this program running—kind of odious, I know, blah—that records conversation held in the vicinity of it and analyzes for certain words—‘Cassidy’ being one of them. When it hears it, it flags it for me and I listen in on what follows.”

  “That’s illegal,” Reed seethed.

  “Nope,” Cassidy said, shaking her head. “I’m not going to tell you who, but one of your staff? They downloaded the program from the app store, and when they clicked on the terms and conditions—”

  “They consented to you monitoring their conversations,” Jamal said, putting his head in a hand. “Evil. That’s … really evil. And kind of genius.”

  “Well, yeah,” Cassidy said, “lawyers came up with the boilerplate, but you get the idea. Net effect—I get to listen to you anytime I want, but guys, really—I’ve got better things to do, so I only do it when—”

  “We whisper the devil’s name?” I asked.

  “And now you hear the flap of my digital wings,” Cassidy said. “Anyway, like I said, I got the coverage of your dilemma. Been working on it since I intercepted the convo.” She slid into her chair, apparently assured none of us were going to commit bodily harm to her, because she turned her back without looking once over her shoulder. “I didn’t have anything to do with this Colorado business, and I have no hand in what’s going on with this rich blossoming of metahumankind. It actually works against my interest, albeit negligibly, to have more metas out there. I prefer a small marketplace where my skills are in demand because I’m the only one who can provide them, and someone passing around a serum that makes more of us while also selectively applying the ones that broaden their power set and strengthen their primary to godlike proportions does me absolutely no good.”

  “Your denials sound strangely like lies to me,” Reed said coldly.

  “Listen harder,” Cassidy said, tapping away at the keyboard. “I have no reason to lie to you. I could have killed you just now. I could also have not bothered to explain truthfully how I knew you were coming for me; I could have just said I set those traps out and waited the last six months for you all to stumble into them. You wouldn’t have known any different.”

  “So why are you telling us the truth now?” I asked, drawing a heated glare from Reed. He really was out of control of himself, at least in relation to Cassidy. “Uh, if you are, I mean. Because there could be a wilder explanation you’re not telling us, you know.”

  “Because in spite of whatever you think, after my last conversation with Sienna—which was after the fall of President Harmon, just so we’re clear,” she grinned wickedly at Reed, apparently rubbing it in, “she got me thinking about something.” Cassidy stopped tapping at the keyboard for a second and spun around to face us. “It was a real eye opener, coming from her, because really, I’ve never thought of her as—obviously not as an intellectual giant, but barely an intellectual dwarf. Anyway, she said something interesting, and I’m paraphrasing here to hit an old saying … ‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’

  “And I realized … this dimwit was right,” Cassidy said, sounding vaguely enthused. “The world, to me, has long been this series of interlocking pieces that I saw every edge and seam of. I knew how it worked—little fuzzy on the people part of it, but the gist, the systems—I got those. But I’m committing these stupid felonies to get money? Why? Because my boyfriend wanted me to? Bleh.” She stuck out her tongue like a teenager. “I could do better. It wasn’t like there wasn’t opportunity out there. So …” She spun back around and started typing again.

  “So you decided to make a fortune …?” Jamal asked, looking around the dingy, poorly-lit basement. Other than the traps and the computer, there really wasn’t much of anything down here except bare, concrete block walls. “To prove you were smart?”

  “Yep,” Cassidy said, “and all on this side of the law, too.”

  “How are you doing it?” Scott asked, sounding like he was genuinely interested.

  “Selling digital data in the third world to the highest bidder,” Cassidy said without missing a keystroke. “See, in places like Venezuela, the government wants to control everybody and everything, and since they write the laws, they pretty much can. So if you can monitor the emails and calls and digital footprint of their declared enemies of the state, they tend to want to buy that stuff at a high price.”

  “That’s … even more evil that authoring an app and EULA’ing it so you can eavesdrop on us,” Jamal said.

  “And illegal,” Reed said.

  “No, again,” Cassidy said. “You’re zero for two, legal eagle, you should probably consult a lawyer before you go for strike three. I’m fully compliant with the laws of the countries I’m operating in, and also paying my taxes like a good US citizen on my overseas contracting. I’m not operating in any jurisdiction forbidden by US law or treaty, and I’m not spying on anyone on US soil without—y’know, the kind of tools that require the consent of the person who downloads one of my spying apps. So-o-o … I’m in complete compliance with US law and the law of every country that the US has an extradition treaty with.” She tapped the keyboard a couple more times as if punctuating her point, and said, “There.”

  “There … what?” Scott asked. The four of us were still just standing there, like we were afraid another bunch of doors were going to open up beneath us and whisk us off to the next round of traps.

  “Been doing some digging on Augustus’s case for the last half hour,” Cassidy said. “I’ve emailed it all to each of you.” She looked at Jamal apologetically. “Sorry about your phone, but you didn’t really want to carry it anyway, did you? Trying to break the habit and all that?”

  Jamal stared at her. “Yeah.”

  “I commend you for it,” Cassidy said airily. “Anyway, you’re going to find that the Omar that Augustus clashed with in Colorado is connected to a US branch of a foreign entity. I couldn’t find a clear motive for them juicing people into metahuman status, but based on the skim of their communications, they’re getting paid for it and taking their job very seriously. Head of US operations is a guy named Mark McGarry, based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, but it looks like he’s on the road right now—reason and destination unclear.” She spat all that out from memory, without turning back to check her computer once. “He doesn’t seem to be directly involved in actually setting up the plumbing machinery that’s producing the metas. He’s a very high-level guy, but he’s really just the mouthpiece for the big bosses overseas.”

  Reed looked like he was ready to either grind his teeth or give Cassidy a big kiss. “Overseas where?”

  “Headquarters looks like it
’s in Bredoccia, Revelen,” Cassidy said. “Lot of hubbub going on over there right now, but I’m not sure why they’re making metas like crazy in the US, because although it’s giving you guys a lot of work, running around to catch the nuisance ones, it’s not really had any kind of deleterious effect on society as whole so far, at least not at the level they’re running things.”

  “Is it the government of Revelen that’s sponsoring this?” Jamal asked quietly.

  “Not sure,” Cassidy said. “It’s kind of a failed state post Iron Curtain, so there’s not a published hierarchy of government since the last big changeover about five years ago. Drawing any conclusions from the mess of muddled info that’s made it out of their borders these last few years would take a lot more time and attention than I’m willing to give it, especially since I’ve got my own stuff cooking, and y’know, it’s your job and I’ve already done enough of it for you.”

  “Answer me this, though,” Reed said, still a step from grinding his teeth, “how did this McGarry and his crew get their hands on these chemical enhancements for meta powers?” Reed asked, looking to us for answers.

  “Don’t know, exactly,” Cassidy answered before any of us could say anything. “But their supply is being made right here in the US of A, so …” She shrugged. “I emailed you the facilities they’re using, the names and addresses of the plumbers distributing it, everything I found in my cursory search.” She yawned. “Which is probably better than your deep search, but, you know … whatever. Happy to do the neighborly thing and help, at least this once.”