Then I pushed hard for the third time today. Geez. What a versatile move.
It was a perfect counter for a runaway train, getting underneath it and then shoving it upward, off its intended track. Wolfe pinwheeled his arms, dark eyes wide and frightened as his gut realized that his intended course had just been lost and he was now flipping through the air.
He didn't make it far, crashing into the hallway and through the wall opposite. The kitchen was back there, and the stove, and I heard him hit them all as the momentum from his lunge carried him through plaster and drywall and into steel. If he'd been human and not Wolfe, I would have heard some bones breaking and the righteous squeals of pain, but as it was-
I mostly heard grunts. And swearing.
“Oops,” I said, to my mom as I sprang back to my feet, “You do your best to keep these kids off of drinking and swearing, but then they go and meet the local bad boy, and all your good work just goes right up shit creek.”
“Not helping!” my mother shouted, clutching little me as she ran down the hall.
“Car!” I shouted back at her. “Keys on the counter.” I threw a look at Lethe, who was standing, shadowed, just behind me. “Go with her. There may be more here than just Wolfe.”
I couldn't see her expression in the dark, but her voice held the edge of worry. “I don't know if that's wise. He's not so easy to handle.”
“Trust me,” I said. “I've handled him before.” And I turned back to face Wolfe.
He snarled as he stuck his face through the Wolfe-sized hole in the wall, and I greeted him with a kick when I heard him coming. It didn't stop him, probably didn't even hurt him, at least not at the skin level, but it did knock him back a step. That was the thing most people didn't realize about Wolfe, if they lived long enough in a fight to stagger him. His skin was damned near invulnerable because he'd damaged it so many times over the years, and in so many different ways, it had grown impervious to most physical damage.
But his head? His brain? That still responded to blunt force trauma, even if it didn't break the skin.
I reared back as he hit the side of the hole in the wall, aiming at his temple and putting my foot into it with a kick that would have gone right through a normal human skull. With him, it just stopped, all that force returned to me, and I adapted by hitting the ground and rolling back out of my own kick.
Still, Wolfe splayed out against the wall, his head probably ringing, on his knees. “That...wasn't a sweet trick, little doll.”
“Sweet is for treats, dickless.” I launched up and kicked him in the head again, knocking him back to his knees just as he was starting to rise. It was hard to see in the dark, but I swear I could see stars in his eyes. I bounced off again, off course, but he swiped a paw at me as I flew back, missing me by about an inch. He tried to get up and fell back down instantly. Apparently I'd rung his bell.
“Who is this...little doll?” he asked, turning his head to look at me.
It was dark, shadowed, and I had to hope he wouldn't recognize me when next we met. I turned my voice huskier, like the female equivalent of Christian Bale in the Dark Knight. “I'm...Batgirl.”
He cocked his head in confusion. “...What?”
I came at him again in a running charge, and a blatantly obvious one at that. Hilariously, Wolfe panicked, utterly unused to people damaging him or charging at him. He swung a hand, blindly, trying to club me away, but I jumped high and over him, coming down above his guard.
I landed on his head with another mighty kick, driving his neck against the huge hole in the wall I'd made. It was like a guillotine, my kick carrying with it the full force of a metahuman blow, my power not exactly runaway-train-like, but at least speeding-car-like. He was driven down, throat greeting the remnants of the wood beams in the wall, head bouncing off the floor once he'd crushed his way down about as far as he could be. His jaw ricocheted off the wood, leaving a Wolfe-sized impression in the subfloor, and a trickle of blood from his nose or neck, I couldn't tell which in the dark.
He burbled and gargled and generally made very un-Wolfe-like noises, and I knew this state of affairs wasn't going to last. He'd be on his feet in seconds, and that'd be a problem. It was possible to kill him, but it would also be highly detrimental to my future given that my battle with him had defined me, and his presence in my head had saved my life more times than I could even count.
So I grabbed, lifted him up above my head in a military press, one hand anchored to the scruff of his neck and the other firmly clenching the back of his jeans, which were just way too tight considering these pre-hipster days. With a hearty shove, I pushed his back up into the air, bouncing it a couple feet off my palm, and in a move right out of the WWE-
I brought his head down in a piledriver, smashing it into the subfloor so hard it buried him through all the way up to his shoulders.
He dangled there, head buried in the concrete and wood. His body was almost certainly already healing itself, and I figured I had seconds at best. I bolted out of the hallway as his left leg spasmed, his body at a bizarre angle, bridging over so his whole body was arched, his lower back probably uncomfortable. Not that I gave a single damn for his comfort.
I heard the Wolfe's roar behind me as I burst out the front door. Lethe already had the car going, rolling out of the driveway. I could see my mother's shadow in the back seat, and she was rolling down the window.
Leaping, I sailed into the car feet first as Lethe accelerated. I toothpicked through the window, hands at my sides, and almost nailed little me as I sailed in and through, smacking into the far door with an almighty thump as we took off.
“Nice moves,” my mother said as I peeled myself off the door and dropped onto the seat. I could see Wolfe running behind us in the street lights, a hulking shadow whose rage-filled face was illuminated each time he passed under one. “What did you do to him?”
“Showed him the limits of his fighting style,” I said, looking out the back window. “Pushed him to the limits of his survival.”
My mother frowned. “What does that even mean?”
“It means I kicked his a – well, you know,” I said, booping little me on the nose with my index finger as Wolfe receded behind us and my grandmother took a curve with a squeal of tires.
“Congratulations,” Lethe said, “that's not a thing that happens very often.”
“I'm not sure it's a thing that's going to happen again,” I said. “I caught him by surprise this time. Made him mad, kept him angry and unthinking. He's not stupid, though. Next time he comes at us, he'll be cooler.” I looked behind me, but Wolfe was gone.
Didn't matter. I'd be looking over my shoulder the whole rest of this little trip, because he had a bad habit of showing when you least expected him to.
“Next time,” Lethe said, finishing my thought for me, “he won't underestimate you. And... he'll be looking for blood.”
26.
“What do we do now?” my grandmother asked after we'd taken another dozen turns. It was dark outside the car, street lights passing outside the windows, dusky sky growing dimmer by the minute.
My mother was staring off into space, little me squeezed between us in the back seat. Mini Sienna was incredibly still, eyes still open, pressed against her mother on one side, head leaned against my right bicep. She looked up at me as though expecting me to answer the question.
“Well, we don't have an immediate fallback position,” I said. “And we just lost our food and base of operation, so...” I shrugged.
“If you want to go to West Texas, I can promise asylum down there,” Lethe said, looking at us both in the rearview.
I glanced at my mother, who looked wearier than little me. “I don't care where we go,” she said, and she sounded even worse than she looked, if that was possible.
I tried to think about how I'd felt all the times I'd been pursued by enemies or the government. It was wearying in a way that was hard to describe. It wasn't any one thing, necessarily; it was the
combo platter of everything that wore you down. Hearing sirens and turning on instinct, sure that they're coming your way. Your adrenaline spikes, you listen, and they pass, but you can't shake the feeling that they're still coming after you, that this was just a feint.
Then, for the rest of the day, you're tired and edgy, like someone drained all your energy out of a hose hooked up to your bloodstream.
Imagine that feeling persisting for days, weeks, months, years. It was miserable, and my mother was five years into it, always looking over her shoulder.
Add a daughter to the mix, one that she was perpetually fearful of losing? One that couldn't pull her weight, couldn't even properly run from trouble?
I just shook my head. I didn't even want to imagine what that was like. Hell on earth, I supposed, or as near to it as the human brain could conceive. It certainly made me empathize with her decision to lock me down in one location. Keep that location secure and you had one less thing to worry about.
“Whatever you've got going on in Texas, that might work as a long-term solution,” I said, not actually thinking it was. After all, I didn't grow up in Texas, I grew up in Minnesota, and that meant eventually my mother and little me would have to head that way – somehow. “But in the short term, we're in a stolen car and Omega's called in the big damned guns. Their biggest gun, in fact, I think. Trying to run from that is going to be...difficult.”
“Standing and fighting him strikes me as a peculiar sort of suicide,” Lethe said.
“Well, maybe you could charm him into leaving us the hell alone,” I said, looking at her in the rearview.
She blinked in surprise but recovered quickly. “I don't think Wolfe is very susceptible to charm.”
“How do you two know Wolfe so well?” my mother asked, and man she sounded haggard and put out.
“I don't,” I said, and found myself chorusing with Lethe. Our eyes met again in the mirror, and we each knew the other was lying.
“Fine,” my mother said. I guess all the adults knew we were lying.
“How do you know the bad man?” little me asked. Okay, so everyone in the car knew.
“I've fought him before,” I said, trying to limit the flow of information. For timeline purposes. And maybe shame, because who wants to admit to having Wolfe in your head for years on end? “Many times.”
“No one survives enough clashes with Wolfe to get to know him,” Lethe said, still watching me in the rearview.
“Yeah, well, most people don't survive him crushing on them for millennia, either, but here you are,” I said, going ahead and giving away her entire game.
She hit the brakes and the car slewed, threatening to fishtail until she worked the wheel enough to get it under control. She coasted us to the side of the interstate and turned on me. “How do you know that? There's no way in hell I'd ever have told you...that.”
“Grandma said 'hell',” little me observed quietly. “That's a bad word. We don't say that.”
“You wouldn't have told me all about Wolfe to save my life?” I asked, trying to take the conversation in a direction that would lead me away from having to make a painful admission about how I knew Wolfe so well. My mother and grandmother did not need to know Wolfe's ultimate fate. Hell, for all I knew, telling them would convince them to do something to alter it, and no good would come of that.
Her eyes were hard, assessing me, looking deep into mine. “I didn't tell you any of this to save your life.”
“Well, I've told you all I can without messing things up in the future,” I said, retreating to that rhetorical safe harbor. “We're going to have to leave it at that, and you can comfort yourself knowing that someday you'll find out the whole truth.”
“Uh huh,” she said, withdrawing back over the seat and putting both hands back on the wheel. She accelerated slowly off the shoulder, taking us back into the flow of traffic, which seemed light for this time of night. “I'm sure I will. You can count on it.”
I rolled my eyes. She'd find out; her and the rest of the world, eventually. She and my mother weren't thinking in that paradigm, though. Metahumans and metahuman events had been a secret all their lives, for the most part, or at least somewhat shadowy, occluded by being part of myth and legend whatever other bullshit metas did to hide back in my grandmother's days of hanging out with Odin and Thor and whoever else. The fact that I was a modern-day celebrity in my own time was probably not a thought that had occurred to them, nor was a world in which my absorption of Wolfe was common knowledge to...oh, everyone, and much-discussed on the internet even now.
“So we need a short-term plan and a long-term plan,” my mother said. “Short-term...we need to get out of Dodge. With no money and no food, and a stolen car. That's a few pretty major problems.”
“Long-term we have to outmaneuver Omega,” I said. And get my mother and little me hidden from their sight since we couldn't completely annihilate Omega in 1999. Couldn't say that, though, so instead, “And get a safe house where you can lay low.”
“Right,” Lethe said. “One problem at a time, I suppose. How do we solve the short-term issue?”
“Rob a bank,” I said, because it was the first idea that came to mind.
That drew every eye in the car. Except little me's, because hers were finally closed. When had she gone out? Hell if I knew, but she was out, and she stirred, bumping her head against the side of my arm.
“Why a bank?” my mother asked ruefully. “Why not a jewelry store? Or an art museum? I mean, if we're going to turn to a life of crime, why not do it right?”
“Because,” I said, trying to answer her silly question with absolute seriousness, “we need cash in order to get the hell out of town and solve our short-term problems. Grandma has no access to immediate cash because she lost her ID-”
“It's true,” Lethe said. “If I had an ID, we could just do a bank transfer. Or if we had a stable base of operations, I could call for help and have them meet us with cash. Without either, though...”
“We need money,” I said. “Not priceless art or jewelry that we'd have to fence. Cold, hard cash enough to buy a car that's not stolen and drawing police attention, then we drive like mad to get out of this flat, empty, forever-hell of a state.”
That prompted a long silence. “So you want to rob a bank?” my mother asked, sounding like she was about to keel over right there. Also, that she was severely unimpressed with my planning skills.
“I don't want to,” I said, “but I think we need to. We need enough money to get out of Iowa. That means a clean car that's not going to constantly be in danger of getting us flagged to the cops and by extension, Omega. It means money enough to fill said car and our bellies so that we can execute that combat move and get the eff out of here.” I looked at the little face smushed against my arm. I'd said 'eff' and she was sleeping. Just being safe, I suppose.
“What if we get caught?” my mother asked. “What if we draw Omega right to us? We've lost them for now. We can ditch this car, get another-”
“Rinse and repeat as we starve our way north to the next nearest city?” I asked. “What then? We still won't have any money, or legal means of getting any. All we'll have done is maybe shake our troubles, but I question that. I think a string of stolen cars across Iowa is likely to lead Omega right to us. I've followed those kinds of trails a few times myself.” I smacked my dry lips together, wishing I'd had something to drink before we'd fled the house, because man I was feeling parched, especially because my first time following one of those sorts of trails had been chasing my mother down across southern Minnesota and up through Wisconsin to an Omega facility in Eagle River.
My mother nodded, once, which was as much of a concession of defeat as she was probably capable of at present, and a hell of a lot more than I'd have gotten if she'd been well-rested and unworried. “You make a valid point, but...I still don't have to like it. And I don't agree that bank robbery is the hands-down solution.”
“It's really more of a stick-u
p solution,” I said. “Though honestly, we'd probably be better off doing it right now, while the bank is closed. No need to worry about witnesses or hostages, and if we're careful we might not even trigger the silent alarm.”
“Robbed a lot of banks, have you?” Lethe asked, looking once more through the rearview mirror.
“Solved a few bank robberies,” I said, looking right back. She didn't need to know that yes, I had robbed a bank, literally in the last week, going by my concept of linear time. And it had been a smashing success...in the sense that we'd smashed through the wall and gotten what we came for before the cops got all over us.
“I don't like it,” my mother said, chewing her lip.
“How do you like a starving baby girl?” I asked. “Or running out of gas? Or getting caught stealing another car?”
“Even less,” she finally conceded, though it took a minute of silence for her to get there.
“How do you want to do this?” my grandmother asked.
“Ideally, we'd put a wrecking ball through the wall and just walk in,” I said, “but since we don't seem to have a wrecking ball available...I dunno.”
“We might be able to cut in through a ceiling for maximum ease,” my grandmother said. “Or smash a window, though that's bound to set off the alarm. Getting through into the safe is going to be the big problem.”
“Or...we could hit something else,” my mother said, shifting uneasily in her seat. “Something less likely to draw law enforcement attention. Something we could better handle.”
I shared a look with my grandmother. “Do tell,” I said. “I'm definitely open to anything that keeps me out of trouble with the law, even in these wild, old days where they're not likely to come looking for me if they pick up a fingerprint.” Seriously, who was going to charge a five-year-old with robbery?
“Oh, it's still thievery, so there's plenty of trouble to be had,” my mother said, keeping her eyes front, straight ahead. “But we'd be stealing from a slightly less...legal...source. Which would keep the cops out of it, if we do it quietly.”
Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23) Page 14