Chase just stared at him. “I can’t think of anything you did there that would have pissed him off bad enough to kill you over a decade later.”
“He said it wasn’t personal.” I stepped in. “Like he’s a hired assassin or something.”
She seemed to think things over. “Wait. Was he involved in that thing in LA?”
“He was that thing in LA,” I said with feeling. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I don’t have the power to irradiate squat. Blow up, yes. Add radiation? Not so much.”
She chewed her lip, and then the lightsaber blade retracted to half its size. Her body language continued to loosen up, her eyes still moving around behind those plastic safety glasses while she thought. “Deploying a nuke sounds extreme, even for Greg.”
“We’d been clashing with him all day,” I said, “while we were trying to figure out what the hell was behind this and … you know, how Greg does what he does.”
She stiffened right up, and looked straight at Friday. “Wait … you never figured it out?”
Friday caught the attention of both of us and withered under it. “I … no. And neither did Jon or Theo.”
“You guys,” Chase said, shaking her head with amusement. She looked at me and said, way more sympathetically than anything she’d said so far, “That team we were part of … not exactly the best and the brightest.”
“I kinda got that,” I said.
“Ouch,” Friday muttered. “This is totally not kittens.”
“Except for Greg,” Chase said. “He was good. Really good. I guess you saw that, though. How he could disappear and reappear, show up in places unexpectedly? Make something appear out of nothing, like—”
“Magic,” I said. “Yeah. In addition to somehow keeping a miniature nuke up his sleeve … he tried to hit us with an army arsenal that would have defeated most of the countries in the world.”
“He likes flash, he likes tech, and he likes being ready for anything,” Chase said. “And he could do it, because of what he is.” She chewed her lip again. “Look … it’s not magic.”
“I gathered as much.”
“Whut?” Friday looked at both of us in turn. “It is too, magic. You can’t explain it any other way.”
“It’s simpler than you think,” Chase said, looking at him pityingly. “Like, if you throw something at him—”
“It doesn’t pass through him if he disappears,” I said, following along.
“Right.” She arched her eyebrows, smiling, enjoying probably the most power over a conversation she’d had in months. “Because he doesn’t go invisible, he doesn’t turn to smoke or anything of the sort—”
“You know, a magician gets real upset when someone spills his secrets.” Chase and I both turned; I expected to see Greg standing there, but the voice was more pronounced, had a drawl, and lacked the precision I’d heard in our assassin’s tone even when he was furious.
There was a man standing there in a black suit with one of those bolo ties, a string around his collar with a metal circular thingie in the middle to keep the ends together. He had brown hair carefully combed over and slicked, and was pretty handsome overall, looked like he might be in his late thirties.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, since neither Chase nor Friday beat me to the punch. The fact that she didn’t say anything to him clued me in that he wasn’t the boss here, and probably didn’t belong here at all.
“I … am Sam,” Mr. Bolo said with a wide grin. If he’d been wearing a hat, I get the feeling he might have tipped it.
“That’s my second favorite book,” Friday said.
“I saw that movie,” I said, ignoring Friday’s commentary. “Sean Penn didn’t dress anything like you. And he sounded smarter.”
“We were like brothers once, Greg and I,” Sam said, ignoring my wisecrack. “Now … I’ve been hired to bat cleanup where he failed. That feels …” He drifted into thought. “Hmm … what would you call it?”
“Stupid?” I offered.
“Poetic,” Friday said.
Sam looked at each of us in turn. I wanted to preemptively punch him, but I was well past the point of doing that to people without feeling like I was getting overly violent. “I was going to say ironic.”
“Should have gone with stupid,” I said, shaking my head.
“I don’t feel stupid,” Sam said, still smiling.
“It’s an annoying tic, stupid people never realize how much they’re inflicting themselves on the rest of us,” I shot back.
Sam just shook his head, and then—
He disappeared.
“Shit,” I said.
“Whoa!” Friday said. “Another one! They really are like brothers!”
“Watch out!” Chase shouted, spinning toward me. “He’s—”
Whatever she was going to say was lost on me as she started to distort. Her face receded in the distance, like I was getting yanked away from the lumberyard at Mach 1, except I didn’t feel like I was moving. Something was definitely happening, though, something weird, because I could see the ground surging up at me, the grains of dirt hidden between the gravel rocks looking like pebbles as I rushed toward them.
I found myself staring at the world from a very, very different point of view. I could see Chase and Friday, standing like mountains over me, and miles and miles away. Suddenly, the thing that Theo had said about standing on a rocky cliff made total sense.
The floor in the bunker would have been pebbled and cracked, filled with sand that had been tracked in out of the desert. And because of that, it would have looked like a rocky landscape …
If you were a millimeter tall.
“Welcome to my world,” Sam said, and I turned to find him standing there, almost double my height now. “Well, mine and Greg’s.” His smile widened in triumph as he stared at me for only another moment, delivering his taunt, already growing again, returning to normal human size but offering a parting shot as he went, leaving me trapped like this, smaller than an insect. “I hope you enjoy it here … because you’re gonna spend the rest of your life this small.”
45.
Augustus
The catwalk collapsed beneath us, pitching me headfirst toward the damned boiling, dark green liquid in the cauldron below. “Ohhhh, craaaaaap!” I shouted as I slid, trying like hell to find some sort of earth element to hold on to me. There was concrete beneath my feet, way, way down at the floor, the component pieces manipulable by my powers, but I’d have to break up the slab first, and that would take time …
Outside, in the desert, there was soil and dirt and rock to work with … but if I went for it with all my strength and concentration—an iffy proposition while I was falling into a toxic vat of chemicals—it wouldn’t get here before I went splash. And turned into something horrible, like Jack Nicholson’s version of the Joker, but, y’know, black. And young. And much sexier.
The wind flared beneath my feet, taking me off course and away from the edge of the chemical vat. It swept me to the side and gently lowered me to the floor below.
Just in time for some dude in a chem mask to blast at me with another of those blue plasma bursts like Veronika used.
I screeched, I’m not ashamed to say, and bolted my ass and the rest of me, meta speed as I sprinted from the site of impact. The plasma hit the side of the vat with a sizzle, burning through and filling the air with an awful smell of melting metal, a chemical aroma that might have threatened to make me sick if I wasn’t so damned busy running for my life.
“Damn!” Someone shouted above me. It sounded like Scott. A geyser of chemicals went spraying out behind me, catching on fire as it sluiced out. It didn’t blow up, fortunately, because that would have hurt, but it lit up as it came out, going like a napalm sprayer in ’Nam, a solid jet of flame that made me duck, warming my ass as I circled around another vat for cover.
“This shit’s about to go off!” I muttered as someone came around the corner and screamed at me through their che
m mask, waving their hands in surrender. They didn’t wait for me to say anything, they just turned tail and ran, but at human speed. I came around the edge of the vat to see ’em joining with another group of similarly attired workers, all of them beating feet toward one those glowing EXIT signs they post so you can see where to run if the lights go out. They took that shit seriously, too, and when they hit that door, they didn’t even look back.
In my mind, I’d already mentally divided the workers from management, figuring maybe those guys that just ran off didn’t know what was going on here. Whoever was firing that plasma, though, they knew what they were doing. They had to be involved, running security for this place with meta powers.
Someone moved ahead and I turned in time to see a blast of blue come blazing at me. I ducked and it tore past, ripping into the corrugated metal past me and letting in some of that Vegas sunshine as it shredded a six foot hole in the wall.
That could have been me. Nice.
I dodged around the vat I’d been circling as another blast, red this time, and originating from energy dude’s eyes came ripping after me. Liquid sprayed behind me as I sprinted like a track star away from the source of the crazy lasers and all else. A blast of bright green that looked like it was almost neon and shaped like a full-bodied version of a sound wave, complete with oscillation, came shooting around the curve of the vat after me. It made a humming noise as it ripped through the mighty steel of the vat like a scissor through paper.
“Sheeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuut!” I am not ashamed to say I was screaming really loud and high as I came around and damned near ran into Reed. There was a steady spray behind me, the vat opening up along the line where energy man had torn it nearly in half.
Reed looked at me in surprise as I ran toward him. “What?”
“There’s a dude behind me that’s shooting energy out of every damned orifice!” I shouted, stopping for a second to report. “Well, maybe not every one. I guess he hasn’t taken his pants off yet.”
“If you see him do that, I’d keep running,” Reed said dryly. He stepped up next to me like we were about to present a united front on this fight. The chemical spraying out of the vat in front of us was causing a flood of reddish liquid across the concrete floor, like a bloody tide, and it made me wonder what the hell this one was.
“Something’s coming,” I said, my ears perking up. Something was indeed circling around the vat; I could hear it moving toward us.
A man emerged from the chemical spray like a monster from a horror movie. He wasn’t a small little dude, either, he was big; swollen at the arms and chest, thighs the size of whole hog carcasses. He thumped when he walked, several hundred pounds of weight dropped down on his two feet. “That’s a Hercules,” Reed said.
“It’s more than that.” I looked the guy up and down; the proportion was all, all wrong. He was at least ten feet tall, and while our old pal Friday had been a Hercules and done the “hulking up” thing enough times I was familiar with it, he never really grew taller. “This guy’s got a height thing going on.”
Reed nodded once, understanding. “Atlas.”
“What’s an Atlas?” I asked.
“They can grow,” Reed said. “Get tall. Probably a related power, next to the Hercules one, so it got unlocked by the Skill Tree Unlocker.”
“Oh, well.” I looked at Mr. Atlas Hercules, which sounded like a great name for an eighties action hero. He had muscles piled on muscles, and had grown his proportions to the point where I felt like I was standing in front of the Incredible Hulk, just waiting to get pulped. “How are we going to fight this thing?”
“We aren’t,” Reed said, stepping forward and stopping just short of the line of spray bursting out of the vat. He motioned me back. “I got this.”
I took a step back on command because it made good sense, but once I realized I’d done it, the other part of what he said clicked through for me. “You’re gonna fight that thing?”
“Don’t worry,” Reed said, turning to look straight at Mr. Atlas Hercules, who was just standing there, looking intimidating, and staring down at Reed, who looked like he might be about a foot tall compared to the big guy. “I won’t fight fair.”
“Yeah, I don’t think he will either, Reed,” I said, but Atlas Hercules roared like an animal and came at Reed, so I didn’t get a chance to hear a reply.
The beast took a quick step forward and swung at Reed, who looked for a second like he might just stand there and take it. Chemicals spraying all around him, orange light shading the scene, it really did look like it was ripped out of the frame of a horror film, and Reed had the monster coming right at him with a punch that would’ve leveled New York City.
I was expecting Reed to break into a dozen pieces when the punch landed, because he looked he was just going to take it with his feet planted like an oak, but at the last second Reed started to twist. He stepped sideways, turning his body and dodging, whipping out and slapping Atlas Hercules’s hand like he was giving the big bastard some additional momentum. A puff of superfast air shot right into Atlas Hercules’s hand, and the big man kept going like Thor’s hammer and held on, his hand yanking him along to the side and off balance.
Atlas Hercules didn’t just stagger; he was full-on ripped off his feet and did a face plant on the concrete floor, getting a snoot full of chemicals as he landed in a heap, tangled up in his own feet after Reed’s jiu jitsu maneuver. His landing made a sound like a building falling down. I was all set to start applauding like Citizen Kane in that meme when Atlas Hercules made a “Mmmmmm arrggghhhhhhh!” noise, like he couldn’t even speak anymore on account of being a brainless monster.
“Hey, Reed, you best get out of there before he gets m—”
Atlas Hercules launched off the ground, onto his knees and then back on his feet, swinging around for the fences—or more accurately, Reed’s chest.
Reed didn’t wait this time, he started moving right away. He fell back in a roll as Atlas Hercules came forward with his swiping rage punch, and Reed actually caught it between his hands, slapping them together on the monster’s wrist like he was killing flies or clapping. He anchored his grip and dropped back gently, rolling as he landed, kicking up with his feet and planting both in the big man’s chest.
A WHOOSH! of air caught Atlas Hercules on the roll as Reed pulled him forward and off balance again. Reed’s back met the concrete, and he arched into a ball so that he distributed the force of landing in a roll from the small of his back up to his shoulders, and when he reached the shoulders, he arched and stuck his feet up; Atlas Hercules was trapped, about to pancake down on him, but that rush of hard air hit the big bastard in the stomach—
Atlas Hercules went airborne, forward momentum combined with Reed’s sudden blast of air to flip him ass over teakettle (stole that from Sienna) through empty air and into the side of another chemical vat. He crunched, metal clanged, and he collapsed to the ground, landing on his neck at an ugly angle. Where he’d struck the vat there was a two foot indentation in the solid, foot-thick steel.
“Yikes,” I said as Atlas Hercules slumped, legs still sticking up in the air. He gradually fell over, his body starting to shrink as he wilted like a flower, gravity taking hold and pulling him back to earth. “Damn, boy,” I said to Reed, “that was really somethi—”
I was interrupted by another blast, this one a fresh, bright blue like Veronika’s plasma again, except it was about five feet wide, the scariest, hottest kamehameha I’d seen this side of Street Fighter. It blazed past, so hot I felt like it burned my cheek even though it cleared me by three or four feet, tearing through another round of catwalks and ripping a massive hole in the ceiling. More Vegas sunlight streamed in from above, bright blue sky looking down on us.
“Reed, we need to—” I didn’t have time to finish, didn’t have time to think, because Mr. Energy followed up his plasma burst with a searing blast of red out of his eyes, and I was dodging back as it split Reed and me apart, dividing us up before
I could get to him.
As I leapt back to avoid the red blast from my foe’s eyes, another blast—the neon green wave from his hand—came streaking at me from the other direction, a pincer-like move that was going to split the difference—and split me—right through the middle.
46.
Sienna
The incredible shrinking Sienna was not pleased. I was a millimeter tall, standing in a land of giants, a tiny figure in a massive lumberyard I could no longer even see the ends of clearly. The world beyond was a blur, a miasma of colors, the clarity stripped away by the massive scale. Yes, there were trees in the distance, but they were not at all clear to me, just a blur of forest green.
What was clear to me were three things: Guy Friday, whose black, dirty, disgusting boots were only a mile or two behind me; Chase, who stood like a pillar slightly to my right, her lightsaber glaring down at me like a red sun; and finally …
Sam, that bastard, who was a thousand feet or so away. Or at least the leading edge of his toe was. The rest of him stretched way, way up there, and when he spoke, it was like the heavens opened up and Alanis Morissette started speaking. I couldn’t cover my ears fast enough.
“Now I’ve gone ahead and dealt with Sienna, dear,” Sam said, his charm and drawl all blurred out by the fact it sounded like a banshee screaming, but deeper, his size amplifying his voice so that it was like a bass speaker behind my ear. “Young lady,” I thought he was looking at Chase here, but from way down on the ground I was ill placed to see where his eyes were directed. Hell, he could have been talking to Friday. “I got no gripe with you. If you want to walk away right now, I’m content to let you go on. My contract is with your acquaintance Percy Sledger, and I see no reason to drag you into this.”
“Shit, he’s gonna kill Friday and I’m smaller than a fricking ant,” I said, my voice sounding completely normal—which meant it probably didn’t project to the titans above me.
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 23