Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  A feeling slammed into his gut like a spear and jabbed right into his middle. Cold and sharp, it bled him of his warmth. How—?

  “As I said, she’s gone,” Liliana said. “Antonio is preparing to go after her—”

  “The police are already on their way,” Philip said. “So is Sienna Nealon.” He could see the spectral figure of her drifting through the warehouse. The ghost of Christmas future. “She’ll be here in moments.”

  “Fight or flight?” Liliana asked. She had a way of boiling it down.

  “Flight,” Philip said in an instant. He could see the police response even now, and it involved dozens of men with weapons, firing happily into the dark of the warehouse and filling the air with far too many bullets for even him to dodge. Assuming he could have seen his own future in there anywhere.

  Liliana bristled. “We’ve hurt them once today already.”

  “And we shall again,” Philip said and touched her shoulder just briefly. “But we’re not going to do it by standing toe to toe with them in some crass, pugilistic contest. Our encounters must be neatly structured to our advantage.” He met her eyes, those soulless pools, and repressed his shudder. “Antonio!” he called. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  He heard the movement of the bomb maker in the darkness near the torture room. “I can be ready in less than five.”

  Philip mentally blessed a man who lived his life so much like a rolling stone. “Exit plan one.” He looked from the darkness where the bomb maker stood to the darkness that filled Liliana’s eyes. “No reason not to give them a few rounded slaps to the face while we’re fleeing, is there?”

  Chapter 55

  The bomb squad was on the scene, trying to help by planning things out, but after about twenty minutes of listening to all the various jurisdictions whipping their junk out and peeing for distance and to mark territory, I got bored of it and went smashing through the upper windows of the warehouse.

  Yes, it was probably dumb. I did not care.

  At home, backed by the power and support of my own agency, I would have waited and planned out an assault that hit all the appropriate entrances while minimizing the risk to everyone involved.

  The problem was that I was on foreign soil, the people I was working with didn’t realize how powerless they were, and the bomb squad was intelligently tentative but insanely slow. I could read the writing on the wall for this one, and I predicted that Mr. Ski Mask and his crazy cohorts were going to have plenty of time to wake up to a nice, leisurely breakfast of bacon and beans—in North London, if they were so disposed, with enough time to wander back and take a luxuriant afternoon nap followed by a late dinner downtown before the boys in blue were comfortable with moving.

  It wasn’t like I could blame them; they’d lost their sniper teams to explosives they hadn’t even seen. Being cautious was prudent.

  As I went crashing through the spray-painted windows at the top of the warehouse, I had to concede that prudence was a suit I was extremely short in.

  I didn’t land on the concrete floor, figuring I’d be safer not wandering anywhere Antonio Ruelle might have placed a tripwire. Once the glass finished shattering and falling, I listened as I hovered in the air.

  Not a sound. Not a drip, not the hum of a fluorescent light, not the tick of a ventilation system, nothing.

  I almost thought I’d smashed into the wrong warehouse, but then I smelled the blood.

  It hit me in a wave, heavy and thick, like the time I’d been with federal agents when they’d raided a slaughterhouse thinking a suspected meta was hiding out among the crew that worked the killing floor. It had turned out to be a guy who’d done a little too much cocaine and made a few errors of judgment while on the stuff. Like parking his car in a fashion that had led an overly jumpy police department to believe he’d thrown it through a local shop’s front edifice rather than judiciously applying the handbrake and sliding through the plate glass window sideways. I didn’t blame them for that, and I’d even told him how much I’d admired his non-sober driving skills. With a fist to the head. He didn’t shake that off, the menace to society.

  But I digress. The place smelled of blood, and I followed my nose to a square-shaped room with thick walls. I drifted down and pushed open the steel door that was barely cracked open, almost afraid of what I would find.

  It was not pretty, not one little bit of it. There was beauty in the human body, wonder in the blood vessels that pumped oxygenated liquid from the lungs to the heart, down to the extremities and up once more for trip after trip. I had long admired the curves and lines, the muscles and tendons that made us work as we did.

  But I admired them when they were all together, in working order.

  What I found in that room looked like a jigsaw puzzle that had been taken asunder and would never fit back together, no matter how many medical examiners stood by with their books debating the placement of the pieces that remained.

  I heard something, in the far distance, and strained my ears as I drifted out the door of the slaughtering room. There was no reason to remain, no other entrances or exits, and the only thing left to keep me there was a sickening sense of revulsion. I left. Left and closed the door behind me in the faint and foolish hope that I could leave what I’d seen behind the door.

  I moved toward the sound. An office was raised above the floor, a series of metal stairs leading up to it. I drifted slowly toward it, as though I was too afraid that rushing would set something off. I could hear police sirens just outside now, and I knew my hasty action had prompted them to move. And probably to curse me. I was pretty sure of that last one, anyway.

  I entered the office, its wood door and glass window propped open like it was waiting for me. From within I could see into the other side of the warehouse. There were a few vehicles parked there and little else of note. Garage doors that stretched to the ceiling were closed firm, and I stood there in the silence, waiting for my senses to give me a clue of where to go next.

  It came in the form of a scratching, one that still sounded terribly far off. There was a desk in the corner and I flew over it in a slow, wafting, gravity-less arc that let me drift until I stopped.

  Below me was a hole cut into the floor. It looked as if the desk had been covering it until very recently. A rope, anchored to one of the desk’s legs, flowed down into the darkness below.

  I sighed, pondering my course of action. The smart thing to do would be to wait for the police. There could be bombs. It could be booby-trapped. My enemies could be waiting down there to ambush me; they’d already proved to be surprisingly effective at it.

  A flash of hot anger ran through me, and I realized I really didn’t care if they were down there waiting or not. I wanted them, wanted to pound them into snot and stuffing, to bleed them the way they’d bled others, and leave their messy smears in a room where someone could find them and wonder if they’d ever formed a full and complete human. In their cases, though, I had the luxury of deciding that no, the piece had never formed a whole human, because an actual and complete human could not casually and happily do what these bastards had done to Maxwell Llewelyn, to Angus Waterman, to Angela Tewkesbury.

  The fury filled me and I felt it burn under my skin. “Wolfe. Gavrikov. Eve. Bjorn. Roberto.” I stared into the darkness, and I could almost see the eyes of the people in my head staring back at me from within. “Stay close.”

  I flew down into the blackness below the warehouse, and hoped—just hoped—that I’d soon find the three antagonists who had done so much to make my last few days a hell.

  Somewhere, maybe, if I was lucky, I’d find Janus, too, alive and close to well.

  If not, I doubted any of the three of these bastards would make it back to the surface alive or well.

  Chapter 56

  Philip could hear her coming down the tunnel, the clammy air seeping in through his suit. A thousand drips of moisture stained the walls, the filth and the dirt even deeper set in this place than it had been in the wa
rehouse.

  All he needed to do was run, taking care to avoid the nearest rail. He wasn’t exactly sure which of them was electrified, only that one certainly was and he didn’t want to touch it.

  Liliana was leading the way, moving ably down the tracks with Janus over her shoulder. He was vital. He was necessary. If he hadn’t been, Philip would have been quite content to have her drop him on the electrified rails so they could be done with it and run full speed away from the lurking nuisance that was working her way toward them even now.

  This was a disused tunnel, Philip knew, a spur for a line that had been closed a few years earlier. It was a fortunate thing, something he’d known before he bought the warehouse. They’d bored the tunnel shortly after, always planning ahead. He’d learned long ago that no future was certain, only that some were more certain than others. The escape of the Tewkesbury wench had proven that point once more. He had no idea how she’d done it, but she had, and she’d pay for it later in spectacular fashion, if he ever caught up with her again…

  “She’s coming,” Antonio said from behind him, forcing him to instinctively look back. The bomb maker had the cylinder with the painting in it under his arm and was listing a little to the right. Philip knew it wasn’t from the weight; it might have been from a previous injury.

  “We need time,” Philip said. “You have to stop her.”

  He’d hoped for a smile from Antonio but got nothing of the sort. Instead, the bomb maker held up the cylinder. “I can’t drop this. Not now.” He eyed the thing with a loving feel, like it was his wife or his mother rather than a piece of canvas with oil paint on it. Philip hadn’t even bothered to mention that rolling a painting of that sort would likely have a deleterious effect on the canvas. Why bother? The bomb maker was an unsophisticated sort; he would have been better off with a poster of the damned thing rather than the genuine article.

  “I’ll take it,” Philip said, stopping and holding out a hand. A drip of water from overhead caught him right in the shoulder, but he kept his irritation in check while waiting for Antonio to hand over the painting. “You can do this. Right now you’re the only one who can.” He did not leave any element of suggestion in his words; better to have the man think he was destined for success than leave any doubt regarding the probabilities.

  “You won’t drop it?” It figured. The idiot was more worried about the painting than his life. Ah, well, that was probably the effect of having the nearest thing to the faith in a deity without having any actual deities present.

  “I will ensure that it comes to no harm,” Philip said, taking the cylinder and tucking it under his arm. “Now, quickly, prepare your ambush, stop her, and then catch up with us.”

  “All right,” Antonio said with a sharp nod. Then he spun, heading back into the darkness of the tunnel, running back toward the entry to the warehouse.

  Philip waited until he was well out of earshot before tossing away the cylinder into the space between the wall of the tunnel and the closest rail. The police would surely find it there—eventually. And it would, indeed, be safe, being far enough away from Antonio to hopefully avoid his explosives and his idiocy.

  Philip turned to see Liliana waiting for him, eyeing him, having watched the whole thing. She said nothing, but her expression said worlds.

  “His future is not bright,” Philip said by way of explanation. “And neither is yours if we don’t keep moving.”

  That got her in motion once more. Philip sighed. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man may indeed have been king, but talking to people who had no concept of what you were discussing held frustrations and loneliness entirely of its own.

  Chapter 57

  I swept slowly down the tunnel as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I couldn’t see in complete darkness, but there were lights mounted on the walls of the tunnel every ten or fifteen yards, glowing just faintly enough that I could see. I could tell I was in what looked like a train tunnel, complete with tracks running beneath me. I could see the darkened metal and hoped like hell it wasn’t an active line. Was the underground electric? I was pretty sure it was, since there wasn’t any steam or smoke fogging the stations, which meant that somewhere beneath me was a live rail that would shock the living hell out of me if I were to touch it.

  Objective number one—don’t touch the giant taser.

  There was the faint sound of voices somewhere in the distance, but even with the scant light source I couldn’t see anyone. I knew they were out there, though, and probably in the direction that the lights led into and that the voices were coming from.

  Objective number two—don’t get ambushed.

  I was checking my back every few minutes just to be sure I wasn’t missing someone sneaking up on me. I went relatively slowly, which is to say I wasn’t blazing along as fast as the human eye could see. I was still afraid of bombs, still sure they were planning on pulling something else to cover their retreat.

  I just didn’t know what it was going to be or when it would hit.

  I was working on a plan, but that old saying about plans not surviving contact with the enemy was doubly true when your enemy had unpredictable super powers. So far all I had were a series of objectives and a few tools to accomplish the job. One tool was super fast healing, but my enemies had previously showed that they knew how to overwhelm that one. I needed to be extra careful.

  Another tool was my ability to throw fire, but I wasn’t overly excited about using that one down here. I didn’t know exactly how London’s utilities were set up, but I was guessing there were gas lines around here somewhere, since people didn’t tend to want to run those above ground. One wrongly thrown fireball and I wouldn’t be worrying about touching the giant taser or getting ambushed anymore.

  I also had the ability to turn into a dragon, which was null in these close quarters, unless I wanted to defeat my enemy by mushing them between my super scaly skin and the block walls. Tempting, but using my dragon power shredded my clothes and left me naked, and also left me covered with their bloodied remains when things were all said and done. That wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker by itself, but when combined with the lack of mobility in these tight quarters, it didn’t make me super excited about it.

  Plus, I’d already gone through like ten sets of clothes in the last day. If I had to borrow money from Webbo again, I’d definitely be in danger of not being able to use his nickname with impunity. Priorities.

  That left me with the ability to cast non-lethal nets of light and to project a distractionary measure called the “War Mind” into my enemies’ heads. By themselves, neither of those powers sucked. When combined with the ability to punch like a 747 crashing into a field mouse and to heal most of the injuries thrown my way, I like to think most people would have thought my odds were pretty swell.

  I am not most people. When I’m playing a game of poker with my brother, bad odds are acceptable. He cheats anyway.

  When I’m betting my life, I prefer to stack everything on my side of the table and let it ride with the confidence that when shit goes sideways, I have eighteen aces in the hole. Yes, I know there are only four aces in a deck. I don’t care. I want more. Only losers want less.

  I could hear something in the middle distance, something lurking in the darkness. I wondered how many of them had hung back, waiting to spring the trap on me. Probably at least one. Three would have been smart but not wholly necessary for a rearguard action. If two of them were out there, there’d be no reason for all three not to stay. So the smart money was on one, probably.

  “Probably” was not very reassuring.

  There was no doubt that whoever was out there was watching me. I was in motion, they were not, and I was in the warm light from the nearest lamp. Breaking it would leave me just as blind as the person I was trying to ambush, maybe even more so.

  I floated a few feet above the ground, tentative, and wished I had a working pistol. Not that it would have necessarily been much use right now, but it would
have been encouraging to have it on hand. I drifted forward slowly, at the same pace you’d take if you were taking steps extremely gingerly.

  And then something exploded.

  It was on the ground when it went off, a flash and flare of force and shrapnel that I reacted to as soon as I heard the click of it starting to arm. I hurled myself backward into the void as it lit the tunnel with a sharp white light, and the roar followed a moment later. My ears echoed from the boom and I felt slivers of metal run over the arm I threw up to protect my face. I felt a half dozen stings running through my flesh and hoped I’d been lucky.

  “Wolfe,” I said, though I could barely hear myself through the ringing in my ears.

  On it, he said. The pain began to subside.

  “Antonio Ruelle,” I said into the darkness. The explosion had faded, leaving only a hint of embers where the bomb had waited for me. I could see its casing by the fading light. It was round, hollowed-out, a few inches wide, and looked a little like a mine. I knew I hadn’t stepped on it, what with the fact I’d been flying at the time, so it must have been remotely triggered. “Mad bomber.”

  “I’m not mad,” he said, breaking the silence. I could still hear a ringing in my ears and the stink of the explosive residue lingered in the air.

  “No?” I looked into the darkness and felt something—someone—watching me from its depths. “You helped kill a lot of people this morning, Antonio. That’s pretty crazy.”

  “I did a job which I was paid for,” he said, and I could tell he was to the left, just not exactly where he was. He sounded muffled. “That makes a tradesman. Death was incidental.”

  “That’s cold,” I said, coming forward again, a little at a time. “I mean, at least your boss has a personal axe to grind to explain why he’s so eager to kill. You just do it for the money?”