Badder

by Robert J. Crane

  It contained echoes of what was happening now. Those Russian mercs hadn’t known what hit them when I’d proceeded to kill every single one of their asses without any powers at hand. I’d gone full Die Hard, and shown the world that the powers didn’t make the woman.

  This, though, was a little different situation. When that had happened, I’d had guns, explosives…what the military called “force equalizers.” Here, Rose had superpowers and I had my own two hands and feet. She had super strength, speed, dexterity…I had those, heightened, but no match for hers, I suspected. I’d been working out, sure, but she could probably draw on strength enough to lift mountains while I topped out at—well, I actually didn’t know where I topped out with just my own succubus powers. I wasn’t going to be Crossfitting with mountains, though.

  But if I could hit her with a dose of Suppressant…she’d be human, and I’d be superhuman. My meta power would probably override hers, then, which meant I could maybe drain my souls back without having to worry about her ripping the life out of me. I could give her a taste of her own bitter, shit-tasting medicine.

  I took a steadying breath. I was kneeling about a hundred yards inside the treeline that overlooked the airfield. It was quiet. The grass strip looked like it had been freshly mowed, and I wondered if they’d done it in order to accommodate my plane, which would hopefully be arriving soonish.

  Getting my hands on some Suppressant wouldn’t be overly hard. Every police force in the US was ordering it nowadays, now that metahumans had gone epidemic in America. Finding someone selling a dart gun and doses of Suppressant was probably going to be worlds easier than actually delivering it to Rose, which would involve sneaking up on her like she was a wascawy wabbit and tranqing her when she wasn’t looking.

  Now I had a plan, at least. Get Suppressant, dose the bitch, take back what was mine. Easy peasy. Sort of. I wished I had had this brainstorm earlier; I could have had Fritz send some along to this meet. It probably wasn’t quite as prevalent in the EU territories, given that they weren’t yet having the meta problems the US was, but there had to be some on hand in order to make sure their ban on our kind was enforceable. Because as far as I knew, they didn’t have a meta team of their own to deal with flare-ups.

  I stared out at the green airstrip, long grass waving between the edge of the woods and where it waited. I doubted my ride was going to be a Gulfstream or something similar, not at this tiny airstrip. Not if they knew what they were doing. They’d need to bring in a prop plane, something that wouldn’t have a jet engine to suck up foreign object debris. Something like…

  A Cessna buzzed in the distance, making its approach. I had a feeling they didn’t get a ton of traffic here, but it was hardly a guarantee that this was my plane. If it was, though, I was looking forward to getting my hands on a gun, if only for the reassuring sense that if Rose showed her face, I’d be able to pop a dozen rounds in it from long range. Seeing her grimace in pain would be so joyful right now.

  The plane swayed in the cross-breeze, the winds rustling the trees around me as I crept closer and closer to the edge of the woods. I didn’t know who exactly I was looking for, but I knew that they’d find a way to make it known that they were here to meet me. I suspected I’d need to approach them, play it cool, start a conversation. If they didn’t evince surprise at the sight of me, they were probably my crew.

  The Cessna bumped as it landed, but hugged the ground, the nose tip prop spinning so quickly I couldn’t see terribly well through it. I could tell it was a guy at the controls, though, and the way the plane bounced made me think it was carrying some decent weight on those axles considering he was the only one in there. That could have meant he had my hardware, or it could have meant he had a crate of heroin in the back. Either or.

  It taxied to a stop and rolled toward the tower and administration building—the only building on site, really—and when it finished, he waved over a guy who was standing there, waiting. They spoke, briefly, and the pilot wandered off toward the admin building while the airfield employee went and got a hose and started to fill up the plane. I watched as the guy spent some time fueling it up, then put away the hose securely. The bunkers for the fuel must have been under the ground, because there were only a couple hangars and they were both open, and definitely not meant for big planes.

  I had a plan. (Actually, I had a few plans, including an escape one, but hopefully that wouldn’t become necessary.) When the pilot came back out, I was going to watch his actions for a few minutes before I approached. The fact that he’d disappeared right into the admin building—a squat, one-story building no bigger than a small house that was connected to their stubby tower—didn’t necessarily mean anything. He could have really needed to pee after a long flight. He probably had to pay for the fuel and landing fees and whatever other ancillary charges there might be to land at a field like this.

  If he left the admin building and immediately started to take off in his plane, he probably wasn’t my ride. If, on the other hand, he lingered around…

  Well, then I’d make my approach.

  The sound of the trees rustling above and behind me in the wind was a nice symphony. I looked for signs of trouble, but I wasn’t seeing any. Other than the guy who fueled up the Cessna, there didn’t seem to be anyone here. Someone was up in the tower, maybe—it was hard to tell because there was a fierce glare on the windows—but it was pretty close to the ground, maybe a story or two up at most. The admin building could have hidden some people in it, but not that many. It was safe to say there wasn’t a regiment of troops secretly hiding in its confines, but it would have been able to house a SWAT team or the like fairly easily.

  Doubly good reason to watch the pilot carefully when he came back out. If he was being pressed by Scottish cops right now, he’d probably show some sign of it if he emerged. Of course, I didn’t think they were here, but I hadn’t thought Rose was conning me, either. Now that I’d found my judgment suspect once, I’d be second- and third-guessing myself every time, at least for a while, because that girl had rendered a harsh lesson unto me.

  Just when I was starting to wonder if maybe the pilot had died in there and nobody had bothered to call an ambulance, he came bopping back out, just like normal. Or what I thought was probably normal for him. There was no hitch in his giddyap, no sign that he was more nervous or worried than when he’d come in. I finally got a decent look at him. He had olive skin, wore dark sunglasses (probably unnecessary given the weather), had black hair that was well styled, and was dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, with the tail untucked—very casual, his loafers black and shining against the green grass as he made his way back to the plane.

  The fueling attendant had made himself scarce, and that was good for me. I caught a glimpse of him tinkering around with a plane, no sign that he was paying attention to anything other than his work on a small two-prop job. That was a good sign for me that this place wasn’t under serious scrutiny, or at least that it hadn’t been infiltrated by hordes of Police Scotland agents under Rose’s control. The mechanic started working on one of the plane’s engines and didn’t even spare a glance out the open doors of the hangar, which convinced me he was who he appeared to be.

  The pilot stopped a few feet from his plane and surveyed the ground around him. He cast a gaze over the flat, open space that surrounded the airfield, like he was just taking in the weather. He shuffled around the plane for a few minutes, stretching his legs, then opened the door and pulled out an apple. He started to eat really slowly, which made me think this was either my guy or he wanted an extended break before starting on the next leg of his trip, wherever that may have led him.

  It was time to chance it. I broke cover, wandering out of the woods completely casually. It was about a hundred yards to the edge of the airfield, and there was no perimeter fence save for a low one about four feet high that I vaulted when I got close. I didn’t even have to go meta on it, I just climbed over it like a normal person, in case anyone w
as watching from a distance. No point in drawing unnecessary attention to myself by sprinting or leaping like a gazelle over the thing. Motion draws the hunter’s attention to the prey, after all, and I knew to keep my actions measured and normal. I was just a girl out for a walk, so far as anybody knew.

  The pilot caught sight of me when I was only about fifty yards away from him. He cocked his head, looked at me over his sunglasses, and after an interminable pause in surveying me, lifted his hand in a very small wave, once he had checked in either direction to be sure no one was watching us.

  We were clear, and I was pretty sure this was my guy.

  I drew closer, picking up the pace a little. “Hey,” I called out to him when I was only about twenty yards away.

  He nodded at me. “How’s it going?” European accent, somewhere in the Mediterranean area. Spanish, maybe, or Greek. Tough to tell by his English.

  “It’s been a day,” I said, now only about ten yards away. I slowed my pace further. “You waiting for someone?”

  He smiled thinly. “Not anymore. Get in and let’s get out of here.”

  “How was the view from inside?” I asked as I passed him, never once taking my eyes off him. I climbed up into the plane through the pilot’s door and crawled over into the passenger seat, not wanting to board the aircraft in clear view of the admin building or the hangars.

  “Sleepy,” he said, getting in and fastening his seatbelt. I didn’t really want to fasten mine, because it restricted my motion, but I also didn’t want to get thrown from the aircraft now that I couldn’t fly or heal myself either, so I did the ostensibly smart thing and buckled up. “Only a clerk to process paperwork,” he said. “Maybe another in the tower for ATC. Why?”

  “Just paranoid,” I said, and he smiled again, thinly. He was a pro, probably a smuggler, but I didn’t care what he did right now. I just wanted to get the hell out of Scotland intact. “You got my gear?”

  “Big bag in the back,” he said, nodding over his shoulder, before positioning a boom mic in front of his face from a headset. “I’m told it contains everything you asked for. I was also told to ditch it if I was in any danger of getting caught.”

  “Yeah, this isn’t the sort of stuff you want sitting on the passenger seat when the cops roll up,” I said, turning back to see a big military duffel and a smaller one next to it. “What’s in the other bag?”

  He didn’t look back. “That’s for me.” I caught the hint of a smile. “In case of trouble.”

  “Oookay,” I said, “well let’s hope for none of that.” I suspected it was a handgun or something of the sort. Maybe a knife if he was the overly cautious sort. My instincts of him being a smuggler seemed more and more likely by the minute, which meant if he was carrying a rocket launcher for me and machine gun, an assault rifle…carrying a pistol of his own, even in the UK, wouldn’t exactly have been a tremendous addition of trouble with the law.

  He brought the plane around in a bumping taxi, and I looked out the window at the air traffic control tower as I passed. He was talking to them in his headset, requesting permission to take off. There was a little bumping as he guided the plane, the ground uneven on this landing patch. Not terrible, but it was no airport runway, that much was plain.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked. And when he cocked his head at me for asking, I said, “You know, in case we get separated in flight.” Which was a joke.

  He let out a grim smile. “A field south of London to refuel, and then past the Channel into mainland Europe.”

  “Where’s my final destination?” I asked him over the sound of the prop spinning, chopping through the air like the world’s most hellacious fan. It was loud, even through the headset I was wearing.

  “We’re heading to—” He stopped, and I caught the flicker of motion ahead a second after he did. It must have originated behind the tower, because there’d be no sign of anything the moment before, but now—

  There were choppers.

  Two of them.

  They looked like old Hueys, the military helo that America had made famous in Vietnam. They were still painted in the olive green of a military helicopter, but their age was showing, and they could have belonged to anyone. There were men with guns inside, hanging out of the big open bay doors, and a voice crackled through the air, aided by a loudspeaker on the side.

  “Sienna Nealon! Surrender now, or you will be killed!” Judging by the hardware the black-tac-geared guys within were carrying…they could do it, too. Several times over. I saw Stinger missiles, a couple of M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, a machine gun that could fill the air with 100 rounds per minute without breaking a sweat, and a dude with a big fifty-caliber sniper rifle that could put holes in a human body the size of a Gatorade bottle. And not one of the small bottles, either.

  Something about this setup trickled through me with the dim creeping of fear that made its way from my brain into my stomach, churning the acid in mere seconds. It wasn’t the weapons, though I had plenty of reason to be fearful of those. They could kill me easily now, after all. And it wasn’t the second helicopter, which came sweeping in behind us, similarly laden with men with guns.

  It was, I realized, the fact that when they’d shouted their message of surrender, these heavily armed men…it hadn’t been with a Scottish accent.

  It had been an American one.

  The US government had found me.

  11.

  Reed

  I was awoken in the middle of the night by the call, jarring me out of a fitful sleep. Isabella was breathing softly by my side, but even she was wakened by the buzz of my phone. I rolled over in the peaceful darkness of our apartment and fumbled past my hand lotion (they get dry in winter in Minnesota, come on), the pad of paper and pens, and finally to my cell phone charger next to the bed. I damned near fumbled it in my sleepy clumsiness, but managed to hit the unlock button and push it to my ear. “Hello?” I asked blearily.

  “It’s Miranda,” came the calm voice at the other end of the line, and for a second my stomach dropped, remembering that when last I’d left consciousness, my sister had been on the run in Scotland. My brain decided to jump to conclusions, and as my breath stuck in my throat I wondered if her next words were going to be, “I’m sorry—she’s dead.”

  But they weren’t. Instead: “We’ve received an emergency request for assistance from a little town outside Odessa, Texas. They’ve got a hostage situation involving a metahuman.”

  My heart, a second earlier feeling like it was thudding toward two hundred beats per minute and an explosion, suddenly stilled. “Okay. When do they want us there?”

  “Yesterday, if you could travel through time,” she said. “They’ve got the place surrounded, but this person—the hostage-taker—they’ve got a family barricaded in a house. Mother and small children.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. I can catch a plane when the airport starts up—”

  “No.” Her voice was solid, iron in the middle of the night, like a wall I was running up against. “I’ve already booked a private jet. It’ll leave as soon as you get to Eden Prairie airport. Pack lightly.”

  “Who’s riding shotgun with me?” I asked. Technically, I could pick anyone I wanted, but I guessed that she’d have already called or texted someone else to get them moving, and I had a suspicion who it’d be.

  “Angel,” she said flatly, and I rolled my eyes a little, but shrugged. Angel was all right, I guess, but I preferred Jamal, Scott or Augustus to watch my back, mostly because I’d been working with them for years and Angel for about six months. She was a fireball, but I could see the advantage in sending her. She spoke Spanish fluently, which had been useful on more than one occasion in Texas, and she was Miranda’s cousin.

  Downside: she liked to drive. Always. And she was dangerously good at it, but it felt like she was always about half a heartbeat from putting whatever rental car we were in through the highway dividers and off the road into the ditch. She was that kind of maniac, the kin
d that liked to play with the manual gear-switching feature on high-end cars. Personally, I let my car make those sorts of decisions for me, but not Angel.

  “Okay,” I said. “You know, I could just fly myself. Grab one of the guys on the way—”

  “This will be faster, and, as a side benefit, legal,” she said, and I didn’t feel like arguing. I didn’t really love gliding through the clouds at high altitude without a plane to protect me anyway, not over long distances like Minnesota to Texas. I could do it, but I didn’t love it.

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said, and hung up, clicking the lamp next to the bed as I rolled over the side. I rubbed my eyes, the bedroom shown in dim light.

  “Where are you going this time?” Isabella asked, turning over in bed to look at me. She was still beautiful in the middle of the night, her makeup all rubbed off before bed and a pair of woolen pajamas with a sky-blue-with-white-polka-dots pattern not at all like the old Victoria’s Secret Collection she’d worn to bed every night when we first started sleeping together.

  “Somewhere in Texas,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. I kept a ready bag packed, so that was going to be easy. All I had to do was throw on some clothes and get the hell out of here. Maybe I’d fly myself to the airport—no. No, it’d probably be better if I didn’t, since Governor Shipley had technically cancelled my flight privileges over the state at the same time she’d yanked Sienna’s. She was up for re-election this year, and I was voting for the other guy.

  “When will you be back?” That Isabella asked this at all was a measure of how much this Sienna situation had knotted her up without my realizing it. I looked back at her, and for once I could see the concern playing through the coolness she wore like a second skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was worried that I’d worry while on assignment and end up getting myself hurt, or because just the general pervading sense of concern that Sienna had gotten in trouble overseas reminded her of my own mortality. Either way, there was something here that I hadn’t necessarily seen in other departures I’d made.