Authors: Robert J. Crane
They were heading straight for Glencoe, Minnesota.
“I’m about to wreck their day and their car,” I said, and braced to launch myself into the sky, my spark gun in hand.
“Hold it,” Phillips said, and he just asked so nice I couldn’t help but stop myself.
I flipped him the bird. “Why?”
“What are you going to do?” he asked, ignoring my rude gesture.
“Bring them in,” I said. “Just like the others. Why? Are you going to give me a ration of crap about how I’m suspended?”
He looked inscrutable, as usual. “No. You’re going to take on the four of them alone, though?”
I rolled my head a little left and a little right, hedging. “Maybe.”
“Take support,” Phillips said, and he gave a nod at Reed, then Augustus. He paused as he looked at Scott, then Zollers. “Who the hell are you people again?”
“Consultants,” Zollers answered.
“Hired by whom?” he asked icily.
“Me,” Ariadne said, stepping up to stand between him and the team. “We needed extra muscle.”
“Where’d you find that in the budget?” Phillips asked, seeming genuinely curious, or as close as he could get without showing much actual emotion.
“We suddenly have a surplus in the facilities management area,” she said, casting a conspicuous look over her shoulders at HQ.
Phillips’s face fell down to the ground floor, any hint of amusement now gone. “That’s gonna be a deficit and you damned well know it. This is gonna cost.” He took in the whole wrecked campus. “This is going to …” He let out a sound of complete frustration and looked at Guy Friday with stern resolve. “You go with them.”
“Hey, bossman, the parking garage just ate shit,” Augustus said, pointing to the evidence of his statement. The topmost floor looked like it had been bent into a slanted V as it collapsed. “How are we supposed to get to this battle?”
Phillips stayed true to his inscrutable self, but reached into his pocket and fished out his keys. “Here.” He tossed them to Reed. “Not exactly a Challenger, but …”
“Oh, come on.” Reed looked disgusted, which was an even weirder look on him without the eyebrows. It kinda freaked me out, to be honest. His gaze drifted along the main driveway, and there, sitting parked with the sheet metal portico draped across it, was Phillips’s company car, an orange-as-soda-mixed-with-blood VW Beetle. “Really?”
“It’ll get you where you’re going,” Phillips said, eyeing the car. “If you can get it out of there.”
“Okay,” I said, and looked over my little team. “Reed, Augustus, Zollers, Guy Friday, Scott—” I paused, frowning. “What a sausage fest.” I shook my head. “Get to your ride, boys. Let’s go.” And I started into the air, ready to wreak some havoc.
Following the orange beetle meant my progress was frustratingly slow. I wanted to zip ahead with my spark gun and started raining down some lightning from the heavens. The smallest part of me regretted that I didn’t have lightning powers, because I still kinda wanted those, but the spark gun would have to do for now.
The wind was cool, the breath of autumn in the air. It hadn’t even been that long since the State Fair, but it was already here, lurching into the close of another year. Pretty soon the ground would be covered with snow, and I’d have to wear a coat or set myself on fire just to tolerate flying through this crap.
Or not. My base did just get destroyed, after all. I eyed the fields of the Minnesota landscape, caught a glimpse of one of those ten thousand lakes we were known for. I could just call it a wash, pull up stakes and go elsewhere. They’d just brought my home down around my ears again, and it felt like a little bit of a signal to me that maybe I was getting a little too rooted for my own good.
For the first almost eighteen years of my life I’d essentially lived in the same house and never come out. Then I’d attached myself to an organization headquartered in the exact same place as I lived now, serving a non-governmental agency until the real government came in and took over. Somewhere between, I’d chased vengeance on my own accord for a while, and it had been the most disruptive, destructive time of my life.
No more.
No strings
, Zack said.
Nothing keeping you here.
“I still have a house,” I said as the orange beetle wended its way along the lane below like a bug crawling across a floor. Oh, so slow. Step on it, Reed.
Houses sell
, Zack said.
“I still have a job,” I said and felt a quiver. “Apparently. For now.”
You can always get a new one.
I took a breath. “This is all I’ve ever known.”
And until you stepped outside on a cold winter day, the inside of your house was all you’d ever known.
That was the truth.
The crater that had been Glencoe loomed large in front of me. It didn’t look quite like another planet from here, but close. Green spots sprouted within, hints of new life forming where a scourging fire had burned that town from the map only a few years earlier. I saw a van parked in the crater, and another just beyond. Chain-link fencing bracketed the whole crater, like someone from the government had just come in and shut the whole place off on the theory some kid would get hurt if they didn’t. Which was hard to understand, because from where I hovered, the walls of the crater sloped at less than a fifteen degree angle down to the epicenter of the blast where Aleksandr Gavrikov, that ass—I turned my irritation toward him, and he bore it with something like a GULP! inside me—had blown the place up.
It was an easy slope to drive, as evidenced by the cars parked down toward the middle of the crater. Ground zero was probably fifteen to twenty feet below the level of everything else, the earth displaced where Gavrikov had blasted it out in every direction with both heat and force. Clumps of glass shone in the morning light where it had gotten intense enough in places to melt sand.
I decreased altitude so I could come up even with Reed’s window. He glanced out at me and then rolled it down, the wind roaring in both our ears. “I’m flying ahead,” I said. “You’ve got a straight shot—you’ll catch up in about two minutes.”
“What the hell?” he asked, not keeping his eyes on the road, the baldy weirdo. “You want to have a chitchat before we show up or something?”
“You know me,” I said, “I like to talk them to death before they get a chance to get too wound up.” I brandished the spark gun and then glanced into the back seat. Augustus, Guy Friday and Scott were all crammed in back there. I waved at them. Augustus waved back, pretty halfheartedly. Scott did not look pleased. I couldn’t tell what Guy Friday was thinking, what with the mask and all.
I went to just below supersonic, sparing the boys in the Beetle a good rattling of ears and windowpanes as I shot skyward, preparing to drop down and surprise my enemies. I made it over the crater and hit clouds, then peered down and swept in a vertical dive sharp enough to send all the blood rushing to my brain. G forces? Not a problem.
I fell at speed, a meteor coming out of the sky behind the two vans that were parked in the crater. I had to wonder a little bit at the second one. They were both parked facing away from the crater entrance where the road led, like no one had bothered to turn them around to flee.
I had to guess that the Clarys knew I was coming. They couldn’t be stupid enough to think I’d let them get away with that crap they just pulled unanswered. Then again, they’d just leveled my HQ, so odds were good they probably thought they had some lead time.
I was about to disabuse them of that notion in the sternest possible terms.
At about a thousand feet above them, I figured out who was who. Simmons was sitting in the dirt, looked a little peaked. Denise had her hair stretched around her, clearly ready for battle. Ma and Junior already had their game faces on, looking all metal and glinty in the sun.
And every single one of them was looking the wrong way.
I drifted the last hundred feet and hovered above one of the vans, bringing up the spark gun without a sound. I took aim at Denise first and gave her twenty thousand volts. She bucked and jived like she’d just gotten a wicked case of ants in her pants, then fell face-first to the ground, her hair retracting to shoulder level as she dropped.
I popped off two shots at Simmons as he was raising his head to look up to figure out what the hubbub was about. “Whaa—aaaaieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” He went from normal tone of voice to a scream in 0.6, shaking in the dirt as the electrical surge ran through his muscles and probably made him crap his pants. I’d heard the spark gun had that side effect. On the weak. Which I had Simmons pegged as.
“Shit,” Junior said, thumping around to face me. He stood there, looking at his sister, a little dumbstruck.
“I figured you’d bring a gun,” Ma said, turning around to look at me with those metal features of hers. She was hardened steel over a kind of pudgy face, a weird contrast. Instead of looking statuesque, she looked like a designer hadn’t shaved the metal properly, and it gave her a toad-like look. “Didn’t know it’d be one of those prissy little Tasers.”
“This sucker hurts,” I said, patting the spark gun for emphasis. “When your little princess wakes up, she can tell you all about it.”
Clyde Clary, Jr., snickered, waving a hand in front of his nose. “Yeah, I bet Denise’ll tell us all about it.”
“I was talking about Simmons, but …” I shrugged, and Junior cackled at my jibe as I floated around to hang over them at a ninety-degree angle from where their cars were parked. I didn’t want to provide them with a straight shot in case someone was hiding in the vehicles, nor give them an easy time of it in case they wired it with a bomb. This felt like a compromise. “Claudette Clary, Claude Clary, Junior … do I even need to tell you how under arrest you are?”
“You want to read off the charges?” Ma asked, leading me to believe she was going to tack resisting arrest onto whatever list I could produce.
“I kinda just want to beat your ass into a pile of molten metal,” I said. “You’d probably be doing yourself a big favor by surrendering and coming quietly, but I doubt you’re going to do that, so …”
“You get some real funny ideas about how metal works—” Junior started, but Ma held up a hand to silence him. He shut up, thank goodness.
“You know it ain’t gonna be that simple, right?” Ma asked, not taking her eyes off me. Just like her boy Clyde’s, her eyes didn’t turn steel with the rest of her. Once upon a time, I’d taken his eye right out of his skull in a fight that had damaged the hell out of the Directorate cafeteria. I wondered if she knew that—that I knew they had a weakness.
“Simplicity isn’t required,” I said, still hovering above them so they had to look up at me. “If it was easy to beat your ass, lots of people would have done it by now.”
“Lots of people have tried,” Ma said. “No one’s succeeded.”
“I killed your boy,” I said, just throwing that out there. “He was like you, and I didn’t just beat him. I killed him.” I didn’t add any taunt to it at all, just made it a statement of fact. “If it comes down to it, do you want to lose your grandson the same way?”
For the first time, Ma’s face went perfectly along with the steel that coated it. She looked frozen in metal, clad in iron, stiff as could be. I couldn’t tell if that made her pissed, scared or just contemplative, but she didn’t look away. “It ain’t gonna be like that this time,” she said. “You lured him into a trap when he was drunk—”
“I was near to powerless against him back then,” I said, “and I killed him. You sure you want to tempt fate now that I’m the most powerful meta on the planet?”
“Pshawww,” Junior said, dismissing me in roughly the same way his daddy would have. The prideful prick. “You got a sense of unearned accomplishment ’round you, girl.”
“What I’ve got is a hell of a lot of dead people dragging along behind me,” I said, and I fixed him with my stare. “Also, your word of the day toilet paper is clearly paying off, so kudos to you.”
“You may have walked my boy into a trap while he was a young and stupid—” Ma said.
“Well, you’re half right.”
“—but I ain’t either of those, and you didn’t lead us here,” she said, and there was no masking the sense of triumph in the way she said that. “We led you, and you followed like a bull after a red cloth. All we had to do was shake your house down around your ears, drop a ton of rock and stone on your little friends, and here you came a runnin’.”
The back doors to the van nearest to me opened with a hard thump, and a man jumped out with an M249 SAW—that’s Squad Automatic Weapon, a machine gun used by the Army and the Marine Corps in war zones when they wanted to make the enemy put their damned heads down and stop shooting under threat of a whole lotta bullets whizzing through the air above them. This guy had one cradled on his arm like Rambo, except he was wearing overalls and he didn’t exactly have the chiseled physique. He looked kinda old, actually, but big enough to handle the SAW without dropping it, which wasn’t a minor accomplishment. “Meet Cousin Blimpy,” Ma said, nodding her head at him.
Another guy got out of the side door of the van with way, way too much exposed armpit for his shirt to still be considered a functional piece of clothing. “This is Blimpy's boy Buck,” Ma kept on making the introductions like this was a picnic or something, “and his daughter Janice.” She nodded at a woman who followed in Blimpy’s (I can’t believe I just met a guy who calls himself Blimpy) wake. Ma smiled, and I knew that she’d well and truly set the trap. “And thank you for charging right in.”
Cousin Blimpy opened up with the SAW as I quick-drew the spark gun and blasted the nearest target – Buck, with his failure of a t-shirt – as bullets filled the air around me. Blimpy’s aim was off, thankfully, probably because I was already flying to avoid his fire. I was in pure reaction mode, not wanting to get clipped by a .223 bullet. They weren’t exactly huge, being the same ammo an M-16 used, but they weren’t a picnic in the park on a sunny day, either, and there were a lot of them flying at me presently. The chatter of the gun was deafening, a steady ripping noise like someone was mowing a lawn right next to my ear while also chainsawing through a piece of steel.