Authors: Robert J. Crane
“Ma,” Junior said, taking a break from looking out as they thumped up the driveway to the old house, “why ain’t you worried?”
“The girl’s suspended,” Ma said, certain as she could be. “And we know what she’s dealing with. She’s got no access to anything at this point.”
“Well, she found us somehow,” Junior said, raising a decent point. “You don’t think she can drone strike us or something?”
Ma pondered that. “You got a point there. Could be that computer geek figured out a way back to us. Cassidy wasn’t nearly so smart as she thought she was, I reckon, being as she got caught flat-footed. But we stayed off the main roads, took the long way around, not a camera in sight and none of us have a cell phone, so …” She shook her head. “If she’s gonna get us, she’s gonna get us. We’ll make our stand here, and this time we won’t run.”
“If that’s way the way it’s gonna be,” Junior said, and she knew he was resolved now. Moment of weakness passed, he threw open the van door and got out.
Ma followed, hanging by a nervous Simmons. The boy looked washed out. “Just relax yourself, Eric,” she said, and put a meaty hand on his shoulder. He quailed at the touch. “You just stick with us for a bit, and when we get all done with this, you’ll be knee deep in some pretty little stick figure on the coast before you know it.”
“Do the girls out there really have more plastic parts than a Barbie?” Junior threw out.
Simmons just blinked at him as they walked toward the front porch. “Uh …”
“What the hell are you doing here?” The voice was all challenge, greeting them from the porch. “Ma Clary over here in Iowa, as I live and breathe.” The man who stood there wore overalls, the stereotypical sonofagun. He looked like a farmer even though he damned sure wasn’t. “Never thought I’d see the day your clan came a callin’ again, not after last time.”
“Y’all don’t know how to do a Christmas dinner, Blimpy,” Ma fired back. His name was Dirigible Jim Clary, but everyone had called him Blimpy since he listened to the Hindenburg go down on the radio and jumped around like a maniac. His parents hadn’t even named him until then. His mother was human and from the old school, when infant mortality was so high you didn’t give a kid a name until they hit two; made it easier to part with them if you didn’t get too attached. “You don’t even think about having a squabble until after everybody gets fed.”
“That was all on your boy,” Blimpy said. He wasn’t fat, that was for sure. Looked like he had wrought-iron limbs under his overalls. “He picked that fight, and I finished it for him.” Blimpy turned and opened the screened door, shouting inside. “Janice! Buck! Get out here! We got kin come to visit.”
Ma took the lead, sauntering up to the bottom railing of the porch. “Sorry to come calling out of the blue.”
“It ain’t a problem,” Blimpy said as the door flapped open to admit a boy who would have been more aptly named if he’d been Blimpy instead of Buck. Buck wore a stained t-shirt with a Coca-Cola logo on it, holes all around the armpits to give a beautiful view of stray hairs sticking out. He didn’t have a single one to spare on his head save for the sides, but he certainly had plenty to stick out of the armpits of his t-shirt. “Just so long as you didn’t come looking to finish up that brawl. How long ago was that?”
“Eight years,” Ma said. She threw out an arm and thumped it again Junior’s arm as he stopped at her side. “Junior here was just a boy, didn’t even have his power yet.”
“No, nor did Denise,” Blimpy said, eyeing the girl. “What are you now, girl?”
Denise didn’t answer, but her hair shot out and hung in front of Blimpy who eyed it in surprise before grasping it and giving it a shake like it was a hand. “Medusa, huh? Well, all right then. Didn’t know we had any of your kind in the family.”
“Comes from her mother’s side, I think,” Ma said. “Listen, Blimpy, we got a problem.” Janice brushed through the door behind her dad, looking like hell, hair out in every direction. That was the nice thing about being a Medusa, Ma supposed; she never saw Denise looking like that.
“What kinda problem?” Blimpy asked, pausing and spitting off the porch. He got a distance with it.
“We got a feud with the feds,” she said. “We went after the one that killed Clyde—”
“Huh,” Blimpy said, spitting again, “I told him before he went off to that job that it sounded like a government deal.”
“Well, Sienna Nealon was the one that killed him,” Ma said, “and now we got a feud with her. She wrecked our house.”
Blimpy calculated that about a second. “Well, come on in, then.”
Ma nodded as he opened the door. “You sure?”
Blimpy looked at her shrewdly. “You think I don’t know what it means, opening the door to you? You got a feud with a federal officer. I know damned well what it means.” He leaned toward her. “But you know what else I know? All the stories my daddy told me about the days when gods could damned well do what they wanted, when power was the ticket. Way I see it, that Sienna girl, she’s the—whaddyacallit—the last bastion, the refuge of that agency—she’s all they got, is what I’m saying.” He smacked his lips. “I reckon we take her out, times are gonna be changing around here.” He tugged his door open a little more and Buck made way, stepping off to the side. “So come on in … let’s talk about how we go about ending this feud.” And they did.
Sienna
I came barreling into headquarters with my prisoner twisted up in my grasp. Cassidy had taken the moment of our landing as an opportunity to throw a shit fit, probably because she knew there were security cameras all around the lobby just waiting to capture her temper tantrum and the Sienna-clubbing-a-baby-seal reaction that would likely result. That film would sit in an archive somewhere, waiting for her or someone affiliated with her to someday hit it with a Freedom of Information Act request, and who knew, maybe it’d even be granted. We’d been lucky in that regard so far.
But I could see how she probably pictured it, and it had all the makings of being the next great YouTube hit video. Because it’d get millions of hits, plus the one where I knocked her unconscious and dragged her insensate body to her cell.
Rogers wasn’t on duty now. Instead it was two guys, neither of whom I recognized. I suspected we’d suffered another mass culling of security personnel while I’d been comatose recently, but I hadn’t had anyone confirm it for me. I was suspended, after all, so informing me as department head probably wasn’t high on their priority list.
“Hi,” I said, dragging Cassidy screaming across the floor. She was bucking her back against the tile, thumping her skinny ass up and down. “Got another one.”
The two guards looked at me like I had toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe instead of a slightly damp, pale-as-milk skinny Minnie in tow. Her butt was actually making sucking sounds against the tile floor as I dragged her up to them. Her onesie was strong, and I was thankful for this, since she was clearly the biggest infant on the planet at the moment.
“Uh … we can’t take that,” the one on the left said, clearly speaking for both of them in this matter.
“You might want to,” I said, “she’s a federal fugitive, wanted in connection to the jailbreak that took place here in January.” Just threw that out there, waited to see what effect it had.
The guards looked at each other, clearly not super happy about being in the middle of this. They cradled their M4s for comfort. Or something. “We, uh … you know what? The boss is on his way down,” one of them finally said.
“Oh, good.” I twisted tighter on Cassidy’s onesie as she bucked against the floor and screamed. “We’ll just wait for him to get here, then.” The two guards stared at her as she continued her toddler act. “So,” I said, making conversation, “how’s things? Enjoying your jobs so far?”
The one who’d spoken earlier looked like he was in a trance, watching Cassidy. The other looked right at me. He was middle-aged. His nametag said “Thorsen.” “Been quiet up till now,” he said, looking back to Cassidy as she tried to roll face down and punch the floor. “You know, my two-year-old does that when he gets really mad.”
I nodded sympathetically. “How do you handle it?”
“Just ignore it,” he said, shrugging. “Sooner or later they quit.”
“She’s not doing this for us,” I said, “she’s doing it for the cameras.” I sensed Cassidy as she stiffened like a board. Apparently her emotional immaturity extended to having her plans foiled as well.
“What the hell is this?” Andrew Phillips asked as he strolled into the lobby. Cassidy had stopped with her fit and was now playing dead.
“I found your brain,” I said to Phillips as I noticed a man in a tactical black ops type uniform, complete with ski mask, trailing a few feet behind him. “I mean, not yours, obviously, since I’m still fuzzy on whether you even have one, but
the
Brain—the one behind the prison break your first week.”
Phillips kept his distance and his lurking shadow did the same. Phillips eyed Cassidy like she was a puddle of manure that was slowly seeping in under his door. “How do you know?”
“Magic,” I snarked. Phillips looked at me with those dull eyes. “I backtraced her to a safe house outside Omaha where I caught her with Eric Simmons and some … old friends.”
“What kind of old friends?” Phillips asked, almost sounding like he was interested.
“A family by the name of Clary,” I said, a little grudgingly. Phillips was a hell of a poker player; his eyes moved only slightly at the mention of the name.
“Huh,” he said. “So … are they the ones responsible for your little acid trip?”
“Seems so,” I said. “But more important to our current discussion, she masterminded that incident that made you look like an ass on week one, so …”
He gave me a hard look as I watched him think it through. “You’re still suspended,” he said, then jerked his head toward the door to the prison. “Let her in.”
“Thanks,” I said and started dragging Cassidy again as Thorsen the guard opened the door for me. A less gracious person might have pointed out that lately I’d been doing my best work while suspended, i.e. Chicago, but whatevs, man. He was unlikely to listen in any case.
“You should take that vacation you planned,” Phillips called after me.
“I keep trying,” I said as Cassidy launched into full tantrum again, hammering the floor as I dragged her bodily to jail, “but these assholes just won’t give it a rest.” The door closed behind us, and Cassidy’s wails of infantile stupidity echoed in the small room as I waited to put her in a cell again, but this time for good.
I checked J.J.’s cubicle on the fourth floor and found it empty, with no hint when he’d be back. I opened the doors to every conference room and the supply closet where he’d once hidden during an attack without any luck before conceding he was probably done for the evening. I thought about calling him, but had to face facts—he was no Jamal, and by this point his brain had to be exhausted to the point of near uselessness. That didn’t meant I couldn’t drag some use out of it, but I’d just forced the Clary family to destroy their own house in order to save themselves from me. I didn’t perceive them to be an immediate threat. I mean, even if they were going to drive from Omaha to here, it was going to take a few hours.
And I didn’t feel like they were in that position when I’d parted ways with them. They were running away for a reason, after all. Running scared, running blind, trying to get away from me and—I suspected—trying to avoid the grid, which they knew was like a net that would entrap them.
They weren’t stupid. Coming straight at me, barreling up the highway in a van that had registered license plates, that’d be running right into the net. I went to J.J.’s cubicle and did a little of the type of computer work that it always surprised people I knew how to do. Everyone thinks of me as a world-class ass-kicker, forgetting that I’ve got other skills. I was co-head of the damned agency for years, and I didn’t just sit in an office that whole time.
I issued a BOLO—“Be on the lookout for”—warnings with state and federal law enforcement agencies, flagged Claudette “Ma” Clary, Clyde “Junior” Clary, and Denise Clary, and updated Eric Simmons’s information to reflect his new “Known Associates.” Ma Clary was clean as a whistle, but Junior had a record and so did Denise, though hers was for petty beefs like shoplifting. One of the police reports attached to her name had a store employee swearing she lifted items using her hair, which told me a little more about her.
Medusa-types could use their hair like a weapon, exerting control over it the way others could use elements. It was a weird power to watch in use, and one I’d only run across a couple times.
So, I had an earthquake maker, two stoneskins and a Medusa after me. If it came down to it, I could kill them all, of that I was fairly confident.
Still, I felt a nervous ripple through my stomach, one that wasn’t helped by the sound of a familiar voice coming through my office door. “Aren’t you still suspended?”
I looked up, ready to give whoever had said it a big, fat piece of my mind with some cherry syrup on top (I make it sound way better than it would actually be). And then I forgot all about it in an instant, because the person who was standing at my door …
… was Reed.
He looked like hell and I told him so. His beard and long hair were gone, burned away in the fire and leaving behind red, angry skin in their place.
“Thanks,” he said, sliding into my office a little gingerly, like he still hurt, though likely not from my friendly jab. He hesitated before speaking again, and I suspected it was not from pain. “I heard you haven’t killed anyone yet.”
I froze, looking at him like I’d got caught doing something bad instead of something … uh … good, right? “Who told you?”
“Ariadne,” he said, clutching at his side like he had a broken rib. He could have. “Why do you look like I just accused you of murder?”
“Because I haven’t killed anyone,” I said, back a little stiff. “I haven’t killed anyone for you, specifically. I mean, I should have been murderously angry, throwing vengeance and blood left and right, but instead—”
“Oh, you don’t have to go wiping out the plagues of humanity on my account,” he said, slipping down into one of the chairs in front of my desk. He looked deeply uncomfortable as he did it, and it didn’t subside once he got settled, a grimace plastered across his lips. “Far be it from me to suggest you should go massacre people just because I got my car blown up.” His discomfort turned to pursed lips of anger. “Though I am more than a little pissed about Baby. Not sure car bombings are covered under my insurance.”