Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  Angel blinked, taking it all in. She stood at the pass, flipped the towel over her shoulder, and just listened.

  “… He’s this alpha-jerk, right?” Sienna went on. “Got pride enough to fill ten aircraft carriers. You know the type?” Miranda nodded. “Works at some factory or another. Walking, talking stereotype of a wife beater. Which—it’s not fine, it’s never fine, but—it wasn’t absolute terror and hell until he developed powers.” She got a glint in her eyes, and her jaw tightened. “The wife lands in the hospital a few times but comes running back. Part of that addictive, feedback loop cycle of … worthlessness and emotional manipulation that comes with that kind of abuse, I guess. Textbook. ‘I love you so much, it’ll never happen again … no one will ever care for you as much as I do, that’s why I get so angry’ … blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, ‘I really just want total control of your body and life and for you to do exactly what I say, when I say it, and be my total slave and servant twenty-four seven three-sixty-five and never have an oppositional thought of your own.’ That kind of thing.”

  Miranda nodded, then looked down. Angel had heard her talk about divorce cases involving domestic violence a time or two. “Yeah,” was all she said.

  “You know what the difference is between an authoritarian and a totalitarian?” Sienna asked, tamales forgotten. “An authoritarian has a certain way they expect things to be. ‘Follow these rules, and we’ll get along fine.’ You see plenty of domestic abusers like that. Awful people.” She leaned forward. “But a totalitarian … they’re a whole different ballgame. They can’t handle any independent thought. No deviation from the norm. You don’t even get your private feelings there; it’s one hundred percent obedience in word, action and spirit. This guy would literally question her about everything she did, everything she thought—and if she ventured a slightly wrong answer—this one time she told the cops it was because of the way he thought laundry should be folded—she did his shirt wrong and he put her in the hospital.”

  Sienna leaned back. “That guy …” She shook her head. “He was a nightmare. But he was survivable—probably just authoritarian—until he got his powers. Then … no one could stop him. Local cops couldn’t do shit against him. So they call me in “ She shook her head. “But it’s too late. She wouldn’t testify against him when he was unpowered, there was no chance it was happening after he got superpowers. The night before I got the call, he gets pissed at her over—I’ll never forget this—the temperature of the soup she made for him—and he kills her. Just beats her to death, caves her skull in with a bare fist. Cops couldn’t do shit, he held them at bay with his powers all night—they didn’t even know until I gatecrashed the party the next day to find him sitting there, her corpse on the floor.” Her face twitched.

  “What … what did you do to him?” Miranda asked, staring at Sienna, who sat, stone-faced, flushed, breathing a little heavier and clearly trying to control anger that was pluming out of her.

  “He resisted arrest,” Sienna said, a little too neutrally. “It didn’t end well for him.”

  “Umm,” Angel said, feeling like all the air had gotten sucked out of the room. She looked around the prep area—there was this bunch of ghost peppers just sitting there for any customers who wanted to up the spice level …

  Angel grabbed the ghost peppers and the cutting board and put them up in the pass, then circled around, through the galley doors and into the dining room. Picking up the peppers, she paraded them over to Sienna and Miranda and thumped them—gently, she had to be more careful of these things now that her strength was through the roof—upon the table.

  “What … the hell is this?” Sienna asked, looking down at the diced peppers.

  “These are … ghost peppers,” Angel said, feeling a little smoky wind of confidence come back to her. Things were getting a little too grim for her taste in here.

  Sienna looked down at the peppers, then up at her. “… And what do you expect me to do with this?”

  “Try one,” Angel said, having a momentary freeze of thought at offering the most powerful metahuman on the planet the hottest peppers she’d ever tasted, but, hey, you only lived once. And maybe not that long if Sienna Nealon got mad at you.

  Sienna raised an eyebrow at her, and amusement crossed her features, eyebrow rising. “Sure,” she said after a brief pause, “why not?” And she picked up a pepper slice with her bare hand and popped it, whole, into her mouth before Angel could warn her to start with a smaller bite.

  “Oh,” Angel said. “Ohhhh. Uhm.”

  “What?” Sienna asked, but it hit her a second later. “Ohh. Ohhhhhhhhh.” Her mouth fell open, and tears burned at the corner of her eyes. Drool slipped out the side of her lips, which looked numbly stuck open. “GAHHHHHHHHH!”

  “You’re supposed to start smaller than that!” Angel said as Sienna downed a whole cup of water, to little avail. Water didn’t do much to diminish the burn.

  “Ohmygahhhhh,” Sienna said, drool sloughing off her chin, “Imfwiggingcwyin! I—I contwol fire and this is too hot for meeeee!” She bolted to her feet and started mopping the tears out of her eyes—

  “NO NO NO!” Angel tried to stop her, but it was too late. She’d touched the pepper with her right hand while putting it in her mouth, and—

  “AUGHHHHHHHH!” Sienna jerked backward, recoiling from her own fingers. Her right eye was already swelling from the acidity that had passed by touch from her fingertips into the delicate eye membranes. “WOLFE!” A pause, drool sliding down her chin. “What do woo mean, woo can’t do anything while the acid is still in there? AUGHHHHHH!” And she literally flew through the air toward the bathrooms. The thump of a door being thrown open with some violence followed a moment later.

  “That …” Miranda said, watching, a little shell-shocked, “was …” And she broke into a giggle. “… You just … you just …”

  Angel broke into a giggle of her own. “She … is going to be … so not happy when she gets that washed out.” Angel cringed. “I hope she knows to irrigate the eye.” She spurred herself into motion after being frozen for a long moment. “I should go tell her to—”

  A crash behind her stunned her into stillness. Something had burst through the front window. Heat licked at her, Miranda screamed—

  Someone had thrown a firebomb into the restaurant, and now it was exploding—

  And the flames—

  The flames were everywhere.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sienna

  Now

  Itook the high ground without much of a fight. Two guards at the top of a hundred-foot mound of displaced sand and rock, and they both ate shit with a hard punch to the back of the head, delivered at close range after a nice, quiet sneak. It might have gone better for them if they hadn’t been up there dicking around, smoking cigarettes, laughing at stupid jokes, their backs to the perimeter.

  But hey, they were foreign mercenaries, guns for hire, and I’d killed enough of those types in the last few years to have put a real dent in the supply of people willing to pick up a weapon and point it at anyone if the price was right. Cry me a river.

  “Guess who’s Queen of the Hill now, bitches?” I whispered as I belly-crawled to the edge of this mound of quarry refuse. It was a pretty steep decline over the edge, giving me prime real estate for looking into two mammoth craters in the earth below this mountain in the middle of suburban Minnesota.

  Maple Grove was one of the tonier of Minneapolis’s ‘burbs. It wasn’t quite on the swankness level of Wayzata or Edina, but, located northwest of the city, it was definitely one of the nicer, newer bedroom communities. It had miles of retail, too, every big box store you could imagine, literally just behind me and across the road. Why, if I’d turned my scope-mounted AR-15 a mere 100 degrees to the left, I could have plinked the letters out of about ten mammoth retail store signs from here. A full mini-mall lay just across the road, another, even larger one with smaller retail shops stood kitty-corner
to the quarry, and from there Elm Creek Boulevard stretched ever on in a continuous tract of retail, restaurants, hotels and office buildings for what seemed like miles.

  Luckily, it was the middle of the night, after bar close, so there wasn’t much traffic drifting by on the roadways. Not that I was planning to send any bullets that way … but since when have any of my plans come off without a hitch?

  As Queen of the Hill, my kingdom included two very large, fairly deep (a hundred feet or more) gravel mines, which were, in effect, just pits in the earth where heavy machinery had dug out large chunks of earth for use as fill for construction projects. It wasn’t the prettiest of scenes, and the pits I was looking into had a little rainwater resting at various points across their sprawling bottoms, like a natural lake. Except unnatural.

  They were each about two or three hundred yards in length, about a hundred yards wide, and there was some construction equipment parked down within them, including pumps that drained them—mostly. I mentally calculated the day and came up with … Sunday? That felt right and was probably the reason Adoncia was using this place. It seemed like it might have been still being mined on Monday thru Friday.

  But since it was the weekend, she’d been presented with an opportunity she apparently couldn’t pass up—a nice, wide open zone of defense where all directions could be surveyed, and any approaching threat could be seen coming quite a ways off.

  Well … if you kept the high ground, it could, anyway. Losers.

  The entire complex of mines stretched for a lot farther than just this little segment of two pits. I’d looked at it before on Google Earth, and it looked like miles of space. It had actually surprised me the first time I’d been up here, seeing this much prime land this close to Minneapolis being used for something other than building a bajillion McMansions or endless mini-malls, but I guess gravel fill paid well enough that whoever owned it hadn’t decided to sell it off to developers yet. That was probably coming later, after they’d gotten all the good gravel out of it.

  For now, though, I was looking through my scope and counting up all the armed mercs that encircled the two quarries that lay before me. Two were now dead behind me and a further fifty-six were distributed throughout the complex ahead.

  All armed.

  All waiting.

  For me.

  Hoo boy.

  It was tough to tell exactly where Angel was being held from up here. There were two construction trailers, one in each pit. They both had the lights on, and I could see movement, shadows behind the shades.

  I laid out my bag beside me, counted out the number of mags I had for the AR. Ten mags. Thirty rounds each. Three hundred bullets.

  For fifty guys. Sound like a lot? It’s not. I mean, if I could headshot every single one, obviously I’d have enough. But once people started moving around, I was going to have to start aiming for center mass, and .223 bullets against body armor? Were not going to be one-hit kills. Hell, even without body armor it’d take multiple rounds to put someone down in most cases.

  I dug around in the bag, checking the other stuff Harry had packed. One of those new Mossberg M590 Shockwave shotguns. Six shots, 12 gauge. It was a hand cannon, a pump-action for close-up work of the “splat, your center torso is now an open-air dining facility for rats” variety. An extra box of shells. He’d also packed a Sig Sauer P226 Mk 25, the same pistol Navy SEALs supposedly used as their standard issue sidearm. Only one mag, which suggested to me that I wasn’t going to be using it much, if at all. Ejecting the mag proved that point; two rounds waited within, one in the chamber and one to make the mag look not-empty. I could imagine only two uses for that—either I was going to cap someone with the two bullets within, or I was going to surrender that piece at some point.

  I liked option A better than option B, but I wasn’t super fond of either. More bullets would have been more better, Harry.

  Then there was the last thing— Mannanàn Mac Lir’s Walther PPK. I had a full six-round mag in that one, plus one in the chamber, and a spare mag. Thirteen bullets. But the .380 was pretty weak tea, especially against guys with body armor, so I hoped my life (or Angel’s) wasn’t going to come down to relying on it.

  Still … better than nothing.

  Wherever Adoncia was, it was a safe bet that once I drew her out, she’d be trying to keep to cover, probably use Angel as a hostage against me. I mean, she could just kill her flat out, but then there’d be absolutely no incentive for me to stop until I’d murdered every single mercenary on site plus her—or at least her. I didn’t rule it out, because Adoncia did seem a little crazy, but …

  Most likely, she was going to try and get me to stop by putting the metaphorical (and no doubt literal) gun to Angel’s head. Which would put me into a compromising position—play by their rules and surrender …

  Or watch Angel die in front of me.

  But … through long experience and law enforcement training, I was aware of a fact that few going into a hostage situation understood.

  Whenever you went into a hostage scenario involving a dangerous, murderous person in charge of the hostage … that hostage is essentially dead already if they remain in the hostage taker’s grasp. Left unchecked, Adoncia would eventually kill Angel, there was no doubt in my mind. It’d be slow and painful, probably the sort of the thing the cartels did to their victims as a warning to anyone else who crossed them, savage stuff you read about in horror stories, but …

  Left where she was, Angel was a dead woman walking, a ticking clock over her head counting down the time.

  And if I surrendered to Adoncia … the same would be true of me, barring some opportunity for escape.

  Looking down into the two quarries from my vantage point, knowing all this … why, with that information plus one other little factor, I was given unprecedented freedom to act.

  What’s that other factor, you ask?

  I was already a wanted outlaw.

  And the person who was to be used as a hostage was already, essentially, dead, unless I did something to change the situation.

  I felt a little shiver run through me as the summer night wind blew gently over the hilltop. It wasn’t cool, but there was an air of familiarity about it, and I got that feeling—just for a second—like I was being watched. It made me want to hurry and get this party started.

  “Time to die, assholes,” I breathed, and started putting bullets in the air.

  The really nice thing about a well-made AR (and this one was beautifully made—Harry didn’t skimp) was that it possessed a smooth trigger pull and very little recoil. I’d sighted it in on the way here, probably scaring the hell out of anyone reasonably close to Eagle Lake Park in Robbinsdale, but I’d put five bullets on target at two hundred yards against a dirt mound, just to make sure the scope hadn’t gotten messed up in transit. Two clicks and it was sighted.

  And now … I was blowing heads up. Pink mist filled the air as mercenaries caught rounds in the skull and started to scramble for cover. Of which … there wasn’t much.

  Because Adoncia had picked an open-air battleground, figuring that seeing me coming and being able to use her optic blasts at long range would be key to winning the day.

  I changed mags calmly, over a dozen mercs down already, the entire place scrambling, counter-fire winging my way but not getting particularly close—yet. It was one of the great ironies of being me, the most powerful meta in the world, that everybody had for so long focused on the flying, and near-instantaneous healing, the dragon transformation, and the light nets and the fireballs—

  But they never seemed to remember that before all that … and after, in fact, now that I’d lost my powers …

  I was still a beyond-crack shot and had killed more people while utterly depowered than most serial killers could claim with a lifetime to work.

  “I see a flaw in your plan, you laser-eyed bitch,” I singsonged as I dropped two more mercs. This place was hopping now, and I’d had to switch to body shots, alas. I figured I
was getting close to going through about half the mercs, switching targets so furiously fast that only a meta could have pulled it off. And even then, only one that had been instructed in the fine art of shooting by someone like Glen Parks, drilled relentlessly and endlessly until I was master sniper.

  They were like ants, swarming like crazy, and I was the exterminator, shooting little pinpricks and putting them down. I was going through magazines like a gym bro went through protein shakes, and shadowed figures in body armor were keeling hard all over the quarries. The return fire was getting more frenzied now, but no less accurate.

  Her fifty had turned into fifteen, then ten. Everywhere I saw a flash as someone drew a bead on me, I fired back with devastating accuracy, and the flashes stopped, the whistling cracks of bullets cruising over my head and smacking the ground in front of me halted.

  And in the quarry to my left, a door was kicked off the hinges on a construction trailer, and a heavily accented bellow filled the night. “STOP! Or I will kill her!”

  I shifted my scope to see Angel backlit against the interior light of a trailer. She was standing in the doorframe, someone holding her up as she threatened to keel forward. She was still bleeding from the earlier gunshots—apparently Reflex-types didn’t heal quite as quickly as a succubus—and it was impossible to see the expression on her face at this distance and with the backlighting.

  “Okay,” I called out. “I give up.”

  “Put your hands up … and walk down here! Slowly!” Adoncia’s voice was a screech at this level.

  Safety-ing the AR, I looked down at the magazine stack. I was almost out. Nine mags in under two minutes. Probably forty kills or casualties. Hard to tell how much, because of the ringing in my ears, but there was definitely some wounded moaning going on. I stared at the AR a little quizzically; I’d just changed it up, which meant there were thirty shots or so left unused. The barrel was smoking, though, practically glowing at the tip, so it was probably best I was done for now. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d get back up here and use the last thirty rounds, but …