“I can drop you around back of the building,” Greg said with a nod. “You should be able to find transport from there.”
“Excellent,” Wexford said. He nudged McGarry’s bound form. “What shall we do about this fellow, then?”
“Oh, I’ve got a plan for him,” I said, heaving him to his feet. “At least, after this is over. But I don’t need him running off before then, so I think … maybe we just shrink him and leave him so tiny that even Sam won’t be able to find him.” I shrugged. “That way, if anything happens to us, he can spend the last minutes of his life running from a giant ant while it tries to make him dinner.”
“Seems fair,” Greg said with a shrug, grabbing the bound McGarry and pulling him close.
“This is going to be totally kittens,” Friday said.
“What?” Greg looked at him like he’d been dropped on his head a few too many times.
“He’s saying it’s going to be awesome,” I said, as Greg shrank himself, McGarry, Friday and Wexford small enough that they could fit into my pocket. The scale thing was kind of cool, I reflected, in that once he started shrinking me to fit between the airtight gap in the plane’s door, they’d all remain proportional in size to me as I was now, safely tucked away in my pocket until I started to grow again once I was out and flying. I’d have to be careful to remain upright, though, or risk them tumbling out and down to their deaths.
“Can I say awesome again now?” Friday squeaked, now no bigger than my hand as I scooped him up, careful not to touch his skin and placed him in my right breast pocket. I put Wexford in next to him, then grabbed Greg, who was holding tight to McGarry, and put him in on the left pocket. Now they all had a front row seat to our descent.
“Sure,” I said wearily, “knock yourself out. Say ‘awesome’ again. A million times, if you like.”
Friday seemed to think about it for a few seconds. “You know what? I think I like saying, ‘This is going to be totally kittens!’ even better!”
“I miss the days when one prepared for a moment like this by saying, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,’” Wexford said.
“It’s the twenty-first century, dude,” I said as I readied myself before the door, about to hurl myself and these others through a microscopic crack in it before facing death and danger again, one last time, before I left the city—and country—of my birth. Maybe for good. “Also, there’s that part later in the passage about closing up the wall with our English dead, and you’re the only English here, so …”
“An excellent point,” Wexford said. “Let it be ‘awesome,’ then. Or whatever alternative you favor.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “This is going to be totally kittens.”
But somehow, maybe because of all the worries and thoughts churning in my mind … I wasn’t all that convinced.
65.
We flew out of the Concorde and down to the office building below, stopping behind the brick structure in an isolated spot to let Greg grow Wexford back to his usual size. The Brit strutted off with his inimitable confidence, and once we’d dropped McGarry, still bound up and shrunken to miniature size, in a spot on the sidewalk against the wall just outside the door to the agency’s new office, in we went, Greg, Friday and I.
My first thought when we shrank to slip through the door was … damn, I was paying for a nice place. Not to say our old office was a crap sty, but it wasn’t as nice as this. I’d seen the blueprints for the buildout, and I even knew the name of the full-time secretary we passed in the lobby was Casey, but knowing these things isn’t the same as seeing them, and it cause a pang of sadness as I flew toward the hall to the bullpen.
If I thought I was struck by sadness in the lobby … well, it was nothing compared to what I felt once we made it into the bullpen.
“I’m growing us to ant size,” Greg said from my back. “We should still escape notice, but it’ll make traversing longer distances easier. Sam likely won’t go any smaller than this anyway, because he can’t fly.”
“Good to know,” I said, keeping my emotions bottled like a Sprite someone had shook up like a fiend. There was definitely some emotional carbonation threatening to blast out. From where I flew, a few feet above them, I could see all my friends: J.J. and Abby, working side by side in a cubicle in the corner, Augustus with his head down over a stack of forms like he was an accountant, Jamal a couple desks away playing with his phone while ignoring the stack of paperwork sitting in front of him. Kat looked like she was asleep at her desk, Scott was diligently working at his, the frown on his face that look of concentration he got when he didn’t know what he was doing but didn’t want to ask.
“How’s it going, guys?” The voice cracked over me like a thunderbolt out of a cloud, the speaker standing at the entrance to his office. Seeing him there in his suit, with his hair all styled up in his ponytail, arms folded because he was Mr. Serious and in charge …
It was my brother, Reed. I felt a jolt run through me, and I swallowed hard to keep that emotion safely down, where it belonged.
“Oh, we’re just dying of joy out here,” Augustus said. Always ready with a good shot, that guy.
“Can we hire an administrator to do this for us?” Scott asked. “You know, to save time.” He reddened almost imperceptibly, and I knew it was because he didn’t want to admit he was in over his head on whatever he was doing.
“You need to take us lower,” Greg said. “Sam will be moving across the floor when he comes.”
“Right,” I said, launching us into a dive. “So … the plan is to fly around these cubicles in slow circles until we see him, then … kick his ass?” I was barely holding my shit together, and spelling out our absurd plan helped take my focus off the fact that almost everyone I loved and cared about was within twenty feet of me.
And I couldn’t say a word to them.
I should have listened to Zollers, I said in my head, longing for someone, even the wretched souls imprisoned in my skull, to hear me. I should have dreamwalked to them. Talked to them. But I didn’t.
Why do you suppose that is? Harmon asked. He seemed to be taking the lead now when it came to my psychological well-being.
I don’t know, I said, shutting down the thought before it had a chance to choke me up. I don’t want to talk about this right now.
All right, Harmon said softly. But … later.
“Sure,” I whispered, sniffing and shaking it off. He wouldn’t let me forget, that much I knew.
“Hey, guys,” Friday said, “I think I see Sam.”
“I don’t think Sam could have made it here yet,” Greg said, giving off a sniff of his own.
“Yeah … I think that’s him.” Friday pointed at a spot on the carpet.
I strained to look where he was indicating. The carpet was a commercial standard, not a lot of height to it and shaded pretty dark. The fibers looked huge even at the height of a foot, which is where we were flying. “I don’t know how you’d see anything at this distance.”
“He’s right there,” Friday said. “Right fricking—” He waved his hand and I brought us down, not really sure why I was trusting Friday to—
Oh, shit. There he was, Sam, walking through the low-pile carpet like he was making his way through marsh grass, trudging along halfway across Augustus’s cubicle entrance. “He’s here!” I said, bringing us down low.
“How did he get here so quickly?” Greg asked as we came down for a landing, interposing ourselves right in Sam’s path.
“You think you know me so well, Greg,” Sam called into the twenty feet or so of space between us. Or more like a millimeter, actually. “But I’m not a stupid guy.”
“You’re trying to kill my friends,” I said, “and you’re about to do it for zero dollars, because your contract has been voided by the untimely disappearance of Mr. McGarry.”
Sam just stared at me. “Y’all took out McGarry?”
“That’s right,” I said, ignoring Greg’s insistent tug at my sleeve. “
You’re now a charitable organization if you go through with this. Also, I will personally annihilate you.”
“Sienna,” Greg said softly, “I was all in favor of cutting his financial incentive to kill us and then informing him at a distance, but this is an entirely different thing. You’ve just copped to hitting him right in the bank account. I don’t think he’ll take that well.”
“Greg’s right,” Sam said, “and incidentally, the reason I know I’m smart? Greg doesn’t choose to work with dummies.”
“That’s right!” Friday said. “We’re all geniuses.”
Everyone just sort of stopped, stared at Friday for a second, hulking in his place behind a carpet fiber the size of a small tree, ignored him in order to make ourselves feel better about our own intelligence, and moved on back to the war of words that seemed to be heading toward an actual war. “If you try and go ahead with this,” I said, “not only are you going to end up with nothing, but I’m going to make it my mission to turn you into something that will get sucked up by the cleaning lady tonight when she makes her rounds with the vacuum at ten PM. There’s going to be no win in this for you, Sam. But you can still break even by walking away. Hell, we could even be generous and give you a ride home.”
Sam just stood there, staring at the ground. “I’m afraid you got a part of that wrong,” he said, shaking his head. “See … I went all in on this, thinking I’d have a chance to impress Mr. McGarry, make up for not killing your pal Friday, uh, yesterday.” He made a funny face as he realized the verbal contortion he’d just made, but went on. “I sunk a lot of my own money into making this job come off smoothly, perfectly, and now that you’ve gone and cut the old monetary umbilical cord … seems to me I’m pretty well screwed.” He grimaced. “I wish you hadn’t done that, because now … now I’m in a real fine mess. In fact, you might even say …” His voice hardened, and he looked super pissed, “… I got nothing left to lose.”
“Don’t do something even stupider—” I started to say.
But it was too late. Sam reached into his pocket and pulled something out. It was a small case, and it grew in front of us, the item he’d shrunk going to full-size—or at least our size—in less than a second … and suddenly we all knew where Sam had invested his money on this job.
And it was, to borrow Wexford’s cribbing of the American word … a doozy.
A rank of a hundred soldiers—hired mercenaries—blossomed in front of us like those mythical sea monkeys that you were supposed to just add water to. Except these were real-deal guys, human beings with assault rifles, formed up in a rank like an army ready to march, their guns up, pointed at us.
And there were way, way too many to miss.
66.
Augustus
“Hey, Jamal,” I hissed, sticking my head up over the wall of my short cubicle, “do you have an extra set of headphones?”
My brother paused, turning to look at me over the cube between us, filled by the irritable Angel, who had her head down and was blatantly ignoring us after catching my sideways glance. “Nah, I don’t have another pair. Why didn’t you bring your own?”
“I forgot I was going to be doing paperwork all day, for the rest of my life,” I said, sagging back down in my chair. My stack still looked like my wallet these days: thicker than I would have ever believed. “Man,” I sighed.
I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and spun around. I stared at the carpet next to the entry to my cubicle. I would have sworn I’d seen something there a second ago, but there was clearly nothing going on.
With a shrug, I turned back to a witness statement from a town in New Hampshire that was particularly dense. “Who writes this shit?” I muttered, stretching my fingers before I picked up my pen and got back to work.
67.
Greg
Greg watched in horror as Sam deployed a hundred seasoned mercenaries and they opened fire, barely getting his hands on Sienna and Friday in time to shrink them low, already tiny bullets flying over their heads like he’d witnessed in that Montana lumberyard.
“Why is my life just a series of people constantly shooting at me?” Sienna asked as the air above them churned into a frenzy of bullets, the shots ringing out like thunder around them.
“I think it’s because you always belittle and demean people,” Friday said seriously. “You’re reaping hard that nasty crop of sarcasm you’re perpetually sowing.”
“Shut up and stop accurately assessing my personality quirks,” Sienna said, grabbing him again as Greg hopped onto her back, zipping them forward around the stalks of carpeting fibers that stood above them like pillars of the world. “Let’s go whip Sam’s ass and go home.”
“What about these poor mercs?” Friday asked. “You’re just going to leave them tiny to die in the carpeting?”
Sienna’s face twitched. “Yes. Because I’m hell on mercs. It is known.”
“Cold,” Friday said as they veered past a fiber of carpet bigger than any redwood Greg had ever seen.
“I’ve done worse for less reason,” she said. “Maybe they’ll find their way over to J.J.’s desk and live a meek subsistence on crumbs dropped from his snack hoard and the occasional spill of Mountain Dew and Red Bull.”
Greg held on tight, taking care not to touch her skin. “Believe it or not, food doesn’t taste nearly so good when you’re shrunk. And it causes mighty bouts of indigestion.”
“A worthy fate for these assholes,” she said, sweeping low and between them. “Diarrhea to death.”
Ahead, Greg could see Sam, reaching into his pocket and deploying another load of soldiers, these a quarter the size. “We have a problem,” he said, pointing.
“Shit,” Sienna said. “How many of these guys is he carrying?”
“I don’t lack for enthusiasm!” Sam called as they shot toward him. “I loaded up on mercenaries. They’re going for dirt cheap right now, almost like someone hasn’t been cutting ’em down like wheat lately the way they used to.”
Greg looked down at Sienna and caught Friday looking up at her. She reddened a little, and said, “What? I’ve been on the run. And gentler. Though that era seems to be coming to a rapid close.”
“I need to stop Sam,” Greg said, “while you two deal with these toy soldiers. Otherwise, who knows how many of them he’ll pull out?”
“Need a toss?” Sienna asked as Greg slid forward, shrinking to fit in her hand. “Or are you just tired of riding on my back?”
“More A than B,” Greg said, “so if you’d be so kind …”
“Thanks for flying Sienna air,” she said, and Greg felt himself shot from her hand on a glowing web of light. Sam was just ahead, reaching into his pocket again, and Greg grew as he approached, the net of light fading as he came to his old foe, extending his leg—
He caught Sam just as his old friend was trying to shrink, Greg’s foot in his ribs causing Sam to stagger, dropping whatever he’d had in hand a moment earlier. “Shit,” Sam said, returning to roughly the same size as Greg. Sam swiped at his head, mopping up a bead of sweat. “This is how it’s going to be, is it?”
“Yes,” Greg said, throwing himself forward at Sam, striking him in the midsection with a punch as the two of them tumbled down, shrinking as they fell, “this is how it’s going to be.”
68.
Sienna
“Hey,” Friday said just after I threw Greg toward his rendezvous with fate—or at least Sam.
“What?” I asked, stopping in time to avoid plowing into a carpet stalk. There were about a hundred soldiers behind us, a hell of a lot bigger than us, too. I could hear them tromping, trying to catch us in a hurry.
“How are we going to fight these guys when we can’t shrink or grow?” he asked.
“Well, I can grow into a dragon—” I started to say, then realized—no, I couldn’t. Not without returning to normal dragon size and completely flattening my agency’s office building. “Uhm …” I said.
“Fire?” Fri
day asked. “Like, blazing hot—”
“I’m not starting a fire in here,” I said, “and besides … they’d probably see at least the flashes in the carpet and notice something going on. I do have these light nets, but …” I caught a glimpse of one of the soldiers; he was a giant compared to us. I barely reached his knee. “That’s probably not going to do a lot against a hundred targets this size.” I ran through the sequence; I could retreat, I guess, flying up to the ceiling, but that wouldn’t win the fight, and Greg would be stuck down here. If Sam won, I’d be really badly placed to stop him …
Which left the Warmind …
Against this many of them? Bjorn asked. And of this size? I don’t think I can help you here …
“There are a hundred more even bigger than these guys just a little further back,” Friday reminded me, oh so helpfully.
“Well, hell,” I said, “I’ll admit it—I’m fresh out of ideas.”
A deep sigh filled my mind, a smug, paternalistic, I-know-you-need-me sigh that I’d kind of anticipated. Fine, Gerry Harmon said, there’s no need for drama.
Oh, are you willing to help? I kept a wary eye on the incoming hordes of mercenaries. I could hear them crashing their way through the forest of carpet.
Yes, Harmon said, like he was some poor, put upon, long-suffering soul. Let me introduce you to the wonder that is telepathy. Because clearly … you need some assistance.
“I’m going in!” Friday shouted, tearing out of my grip and hulking out as he hit the ground running. He swelled, muscles bulging, probably getting about as wide across as one of these guys was, but only a third of the height.
“Wait!” I shouted, but he was already running toward the fight that was coming our way.
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 33