Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  “They're rolling up to the roadblock–”

  “We just lost another sniper! I heard his bones break – something landed on him–”

  “It's the flyer,” I said. “He's dropping on them. Landing hard enough to take 'em out of commission to clear the zone for...” I shook my head.

  “For what?” Jamal asked. But he knew.

  “For them to kill their ambushers,” I said, because someone – Leon – needed to hear it. But with his jaw so tight you couldn't have threaded a stalk of wheatgrass between his teeth, and his shoulders hunched like Quasimodo, I doubted the message was getting through.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Scout

  The car rolled inexorably toward the roadblock, and Scout chanced a peek over the seats.

  Police. Police everywhere. Lights flashed bright blue and red, like colored lightning against the blackening sky. The aroma of smoke was thick, choking, and a wall of pure black cloud seemed to be rushing across the horizon ahead toward them.

  “This is what we did,” Scout whispered, ducking low behind the seats before some cop could find her head and shoot her down like a dog. “We did this.”

  “Damned right we did,” AJ cackled. “And once we get out of here? We're gonna do more.” He was still low, but he rolled his head to the side to look between the seats at Scout. “Amirite?”

  She gnawed her lower lip, then gave him a quick nod. “Yes. More.”

  Another boom, a screech, and a crash ahead was followed by gunfire on a slight delay. Another boom, then–

  “Hey,” Isaac's voice came from behind the trunk as the gunfire ahead ceased, someone shouting for it to stop.

  “Isaac!” Scout's breath left her in a rush. “You're all right?”

  “Fine,” he said, and though she couldn't see him, she could hear the crackle of amusement in his tone. “I took out the snipers. Smoke's rolling in, though, so...Francine?”

  “On it,” Francine said, looking intently at the screen in the dashboard. She slammed a foot down, squealing tires–

  The Ford leapt toward the roadblock, and someone shouted. A sonic boom behind them told Scout that Isaac had left again, zooming into the sky above.

  Sharp, staccato bursts crackled like thunder to match the flashing lights. Bullets chewed into the accelerating car, and someone screamed outside as a sonic boom echoed thunderously over the shooting. Isaac was still dropping on them. The fire slackened, and a bullet passed over Scout's head, raining pebbled glass on her, cheek pressed against the cloth seat.

  “Time to light these pigs up!” Francine squealed, and the Ford slammed into something. Tires popped, muffled under the sound of the gunfire, but a shuddering sensation ran through the vehicle. The crash wasn't too hard; Scout was braced, but her face smashed into the seat in front of her, as did her ribs.

  It hurt. A little.

  “Yesssssss!” Francine howled, throwing her door open. More light flashed – actual lightning this time, and Scout could hear the electricity rushing over metal – cop cars, presumably – and someone screamed in pain.

  “Let's show 'em what we got!” AJ's voice joined the howling chorus with her, and he bailed out as he fired the AK-47 – and something else – contributing an ear-splitting noise to the fray. When Scout raised her head to look for him, she only saw a flash of him already retreating around a cop car, gun raised over his head and firing sideways as he whooped along.

  For her part, Scout stayed low, in the back seat. Going out there was no place for her, not with her limited abilities. Francine and AJ had turned out to be great additions to the team. Lightning and plasma. She could zap and he could shoot at a distance and scorch up close. Powers and skills perfect to what they were out to accomplish.

  What could Scout do? She felt like a caterpillar that hadn't even gone into its cocoon yet. Finding out about her powers had been the biggest disappointment of her life. It had ruined everything in a way.

  Smoke whipped into the car through the shattered windows, thick, black, and like it had been squeezed out of a tube. She coughed at the heavy, oily smell it brought.

  In seconds, it seemed like Scout could barely see her hand in front of her face. She coughed again, like an echo of the residual asthma she'd suffered from all her adolescent life. That was gone now, though, right? As she coughed, she wondered; it certainly felt the same as before.

  There was no inhaler that could fix this, though. She coughed again and kicked open the door that Isaac had left through only minutes before. Before all this madness started.

  The staccato sound of gunfire still rang all around her. AJ? The cops? Probably both. Scout hit her knees. Little pebbles of glass found her palm and she lifted her hand, shook them away. She needed to find Isaac, or, failing that, Francine or AJ. Fortunately, she could hear the sound of lightning crackling not too far away. Francine let out a guttural, “Hah!” and it sounded like it wasn't more than twenty, thirty feet away. Scout started to crawl in that direction, the coughing still rolling her lungs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sienna

  “The smoke's everywhere!” someone shouted from the radio, protocol tossed right out the window now that they'd made contact with the enemy and had started to get absolutely owned. “Can't see anything! The lightning one is firing off everywhere, and one of the others has an assault rifle! We're getting torn apart!”

  “Bet it'd be worse if there wasn't smoke to act as cover,” I muttered darkly. Because this was dark.

  I'd met a lot of cops over my years in law enforcement. I totally understood the knock on them that came from being in the sole position to exercise legal force – and violence – in our society. I'd read the cases that could make your stomach turn, about cops going way, way wrong.

  But I also knew that those assholes were vanishingly few. Not few enough for my taste, but few enough that I felt comfortable in the brotherhood/sisterhood of law enforcement.

  Which is why now, when I knew what they were going through at that roadblock, my stomach plummeted to my feet.

  “We're a minute out,” Leon said, eyes front, focusing hard on the black cloud billowing ahead. Driving into that, we weren't going to be able to see shit.

  “We're going to need goggles or a balaclava or something in that mess,” Jamal announced, slamming his laptop shut. My guess? He'd reached the end of what he could actually do with it, which was a rare thing and definitely indicated action was coming swiftly. It was disconcerting seeing him so tethered to it again. Like his internet addiction was back in full flower.

  “I have a balaclava in the glove box,” Leon said.

  Jamal popped it open and scooped it out. He stared at it for a moment, longingly, hesitant, then turned back and offered it to me.

  “That's so gentlemanly,” I said, promptly ripping it in two and handing the other half back. Now we had two masks. “For the record, I'm only taking it because I kick ass better than all the rest of you and I need to not be choking while doing so.”

  “I hear that,” Augustus said. “I can make a rock and dirt air filter on my own.”

  “Do I even need to tell you why I don't need an air filter?” Reed asked, beads of perspiration sliding down his temple.

  “Glad we're all in agreement, then,” I said, and tapped Leon on the shoulder. “Can I borrow a gun, or do I need to charge out there and hope for the best?”

  Leon shot me a look of pure panic. “You don't have a gun?”

  I shook my head. “Had to leave my service weapon with the FBI, and they seized all the weapons in my apartment during the assassination kerfuffle. Also, for some reason, my brother is not big on guns.”

  “Hard to imagine why I dislike metal pieces of death flying at me,” Reed grunted.

  “So can I have something or nah?” I asked.

  Leon shook his head. “I'm sorry, I cannot surrender my firearm.” He slumped a little, and his voice fell to a whisper. “But it doesn't sound like you're going to have much trouble
finding one when we get there.”

  I hid my cringe as we raced into the dark cloud, visibility instantly dropping to zero. I had a feeling that he wasn't wrong.

  Leon brought us to a hard stop in the darkness. He threw the SUV into park and took a couple hard breaths. “Okay, let's–”

  “Just stay here,” I said, throwing my door open and plunging into the cloud. The smell, as bad as it had been in the car, went from merely tingeing everything to invading my mouth, my nasal passages like a smoker ramming smelly fingers into all my facial orifices. I choked, then gagged, the oily stink forcing its way into my face.

  But I plunged ahead into the cloud anyway, and shouted, “Reed – get a view!” Forgetting that he was my nominal boss.

  He didn't argue, though, and I heard the rush of wind carry him up behind me. The flashing glow of blue told me that either Jamal was right behind me, or a cop car with its lights on was cruising a few feet back.

  “Glad we're out in the natural world for this one!” Augustus shouted. He, too, was behind me, and under the howl of the winds that whipped around us was another sound – the rush of dirt fighting against said winds. Augustus was building a sand castle. Or something. “So sick of fighting in the city, where there's always concrete I gotta overcome to make things happen.”

  My eyes burned within seconds of stepping out of the car. Tears dripped down my cheeks and wet the torn balaclava over my nose and mouth. I wished I'd brought goggles, though I wasn't sure what good they'd do in this soup. I blinked back against the fiery sensation, trying to clear my vision, but between the smoke and the tears, I could see maybe three feet in front of my face.

  Sound was my only useful sense in this, and Reed seemed to be doing his damndest to remove the utility of that. The winds were howling in a tornado-like perimeter, to keep the smoke in and concentrated, thus removing the ability of our villains to easily target the police.

  That might be staving off a slaughter of cops, but it sure wasn't doing me any favors. Unless you counted not getting shot at as a favor. Which I suppose I (grudgingly) did.

  “Reed, we're going to need to see something!” I shouted. Could he hear me over all this? I hoped so.

  No answer came.

  “I see something!” Jamal shouted. He pointed into the distance, at another flashing light not dissimilar to what was going on with his hands.

  We plunged ahead, toward the glow, and a red flash was added to it. Cop car lights, I realized, my eyes sodden with tears. I hit up my Wolfe healing, and it cleared the pain in my eyes for only a moment before they started to burn again.

  “This is bad,” Augustus said, hanging somewhere behind me. I didn't dare look back. “We're going to end up stumbling across the enemy by blind accident here, and I don't know that that's going to go well for us.”

  “I concur,” I said, slipping away from the police car and toward a dark shadow, barely visible as an outline in the smoke. My boots rustled across the asphalt as I tried to creep up.

  The shape resolved the closer we got; at three feet I realized it was a man, doubled over, fighting against the burning in his eyes. He raised a pistol toward me as I got close–

  “Stop!” I batted it aside; he was moving at human speed and wearing a cop uniform. “I'm here to help.” Seizing his wrist, I held it at the cuff, keeping him from bringing the gun in line with me.

  The cop stared at me through bleary eyes. “Can't see anything in this,” he said, then coughed so hard I was afraid he'd lose part of his lung.

  “Go that way,” I said, pointing in the direction we'd come from. “The cloud only extends another forty, fifty feet.”

  He nodded, and I thought I caught a little gratitude. “They're so fast. I didn't know they'd be that fast.”

  “Watch some videos of metas on the internet to bone up on your opponents next time,” I said, giving him a light shove in the direction I'd just come from. “Go. Fast as you reasonably can.”

  He nodded and vanished into the cloud, staggering as he went.

  “You shoulda taken his gun,” Jamal said.

  I tore my gaze from the silhouette of the retreating officer and shook my head. “If he's got it, he has at least a little chance if he runs into one of the metas in this sludge. I take that away...he's defenseless.” I raised my hand, and lit it up with ice powers, the temperature around me dropping a few degrees as I prepared myself – something I should have done moments earlier. “Me...not so much. Let's go.” And I plunged ahead again, into the darkness of the smoky cloud.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Reed

  I took Sienna's suggestion grudgingly, one might even say a little bitterly. I rose up into the air, flying through the curtain of smoke in a way I knew she couldn't with all these witnesses around. I didn't argue, either. Whatever our status, I didn't need to settle it right now, and fussing about it in front of Augustus and Jamal would just make me look weak.

  Once I'd reached about thirty feet in the air, I pushed an up current about ten feet over the battlefield, in effect blowing everything above that away and giving me a clear field of vision. Beneath it was a swirling maelstrom of smoke for about a hundred yards in every direction. After that, the smoke cleared to its standard haze in this part of the state at the moment – lower visibility (about a hundred yards) but not as deep and terrible as what I'd brought in around this ambush site.

  That done, I was left with a battlefield of my own creation that was utterly obscured. “Now what?” I muttered, surveying the arena of ebon smoke. There was definite movement within, and a few spots where I could see the flashing lights of police cars. I considered scooping another foot or two off the top to give myself a clear picture of what was going on, but something stopped me.

  A sonic boom.

  Above my head.

  I blew sideways a second before it went off, because I could detect the ripple in the atmosphere surging toward me. There was a flyer, and they were on their way at me like a bullet. But much bigger.

  When I swept out of the way, the flyer blew by at a couple hundred miles an hour. I saw a surprised look on a youthful face, a head that was leading behind an outstretched fist.

  So he'd tried to hammer me with a fist at Mach One. That'd be lethal for most people.

  Fortunately, I wasn't most people.

  With a sweep of my hand I conjured a tornado force wind that blew up at him from the ground, launching him off course. His legs tumbled over his head and he disappeared into the smoke like a baseball lost in a passing cloud.

  “Shit,” I muttered, watching the dark spot where he'd vanished. I debated pursuing, but that'd be me going in blind.

  No, I decided, as I listened and heard gunshots firing off on the far side of the cloud, flashes of light in the smoke marking the flight of bullets somewhere down there, better I stay up here and fend off the flyer if he came again. Besides, I had a feeling that depending on who was doing that shooting, I was going to need to be ready to clear the air up here, and soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Augustus

  “Sienna?” I called, but I'd taken a wrong turn in the fog after that last police car. She'd run ahead with Jamal, seeing something, and I'd turned for a second to summon up some more dirt, and when I turned back...

  Well, I'm not proud of this, but I'd packed the dirt armor a little too tight around my face, obscuring my vision. And with all the smoke blowing around, I couldn't figure out which direction we'd been heading.

  Rookie mistake when fighting in a cloud of smoke? Maybe. But I hadn't done this smoke-fighting thing before, so I felt like I was deserving of some slack being cut.

  “Man, this is grim,” I said, plunging through the smoke, trying to avoid coughing like a lil' bitch taking his first hit. The smoke was intense, thick, like someone had lit fire to an engine right under my nose. I couldn't see anything, and my eyes were streaming tears that I was blinking furiously so I could see.

  Shots rang out behind me and a serie
s of metal rounds thudded into my earthen shield. I spun, closing the eye holes in my earthen armor, reinforcing the chest and face plate with dirt I was pulling in a hard stream from the roadside. In case more shots came.

  They did.

  Flashes of light ripped through the smoke storm, and I leaned my head down, creating a visor in front of my eyes. The bullets were sinking into my chest armor; one good coincidental hit with a second bullet impacting where a first already had, and it'd push one or both into my chest. Which would be a major ouch.

  “Hey, hey!” I said, whipping my hand up and trying to form a second shield out from my body to prevent that. I could barely see the silhouette shooting at me, but they were advancing out of the darkness, barrel still flashing, letting rip with a fully automatic gun.

  “This is crazy,” came a guy's voice. Not the clipped, professional tones of a cop on the job. More like a stoner who'd just staggered out of his room trailing...well, smoke. He emerged from the shadows, no longer a silhouette, an AK style weapon pointed at me, bandanna around his face, tears of his own streaming as he peered at me through bleary eyes. He was close enough now to see me, my shield, and he straightened. “You're a meta.”

  “No kidding,” I said, and flung my dirt shield at him like Captain Afro-America.

  The shield flew at him and he did a backflip as it sailed beneath him. He drew a bead on me as he flipped through the air and...

  Gulp.

  Flinging an arm in front of my face, I whirled around, exposing my side and back. Bullets ripped into the shield of sand around my forearm and plunged like a knife into the skin. They peppered my side and I grunted, feeling one of them punch through the dirt and sting me, a little poke between the ribs. Another caught me in the thigh, and I fell over.

  The pain wasn't too bad, and my opponent landed opposite me, rifle still on target. “You're not too tough, though, bruh,” he said lightly, lifting the rifle to sight it on me.