Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36)

by Robert J. Crane

  Brance nodded, warm relief streaming down his cheeks. “Okay. I—”

  Something popped in the distance, and the tower groaned, then jerked again, hard to the side. Brance’s fingers slipped, numbly, and—

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

  Jules

  There was a certain level of satisfaction in working with your hands to solve your problems. Jules smiled as the cable snapped up. That was four, and the tower was rocking unsteadily. It was definitely going to go over soon.

  “All my problems are about to vanish, suckers,” Jules muttered. One last cable would do it for sure.

  He broke into a jog, listening to the wind whip around him. It was really going tonight. Grist for the mill; the tower was already rocking madly, and the wind was only making it worse.

  Jules made it to the next anchor and dropped to his knees, well familiar with the procedure by now. Just a quick tug...then another...the anchor would pop out of the support and...

  “Stop right there!”

  Jules turned, anchor gripped in hand. It was so close, almost ready to pop out.

  It was that damned Indian TBI agent, and he was holding an AR-15. “I killed your men,” he said, business end pointed right at Jules. “Stop now, or you’ll end up like them.”

  “Hey, I surrender,” Jules said, taking his hand off the anchor. It was almost out. He rose slowly to his feet. If he gave it a little nudge it’d probably pop out on its own...

  Ah, what the hell. He was so close to solving this particular problem.

  He gave it a bump with his foot as he stood there, hands in the air and—

  BOOM BOOM BOOM!

  Jules felt like he got punched in the chest. Thrice. Sharper, more pointed than what Brance had done.

  He tumbled back a staggering step, hit the dirt. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the Indian guy running for the anchor, trying to catch it before—

  It plopped out and shot across the grass, cable jerking it toward the tower as another ominous groan filled the night.

  Jules let out a gasp. Touched his fingers to his chest, felt the wetness between them.

  The tower made a terrible noise, but Jules didn’t enjoy the thrill of his “success.”

  This wasn’t worth his life. His dreams.

  He was going to get a house here in Brentwood. Drink tea in the luxurious green hills. Live a life of leisure.

  “Not...worth it,” Jules whispered, lips slick with blood as the darkness closed in around him for the last time.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

  Reed

  Trapped between a flood water and a raging fire, I stood with Logan Mills in the Lotsostuff warehouse, not sure of what to do next and definitely out of room to run.

  The flames licked at us from in front, and the water rushed behind me. I wished, not for the first time this adventure, that Scott Byerly were here.

  “Well,” Mills said, “this sucks, but I guess my life’s kind of over anyway.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “This isn’t the end for us.” The fire burned, moving forward a little bit. Angelo loomed above, grinning a black and soulless grin down at us. I touched Mills’s arm. I knew how he felt, what he meant. “One failure doesn’t end it all.”

  “You sure?” Mills asked, irony livening up his dead tone. “Mine’s a pretty big failure. When your screwup results in the erasure of a billion dollars from the planet, I think I might qualify as life-ending.”

  “Your life is over,” Angelo agreed.

  “No, it’s not,” I whispered, my hand shaking. I reached out with the wind—

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

  Sienna

  The tower shifted again, now in a pronounced lean to one side. I was hanging, my cold hands numbly fighting to hang on as I pulled myself up. “This,” I muttered, “would be a prime time to have Gavrikov with me. Thanks, Rose, you—”

  What I called her was lost to the wind.

  “Ahhh—ahhhhh!” Brance was taking this turn of events about as well as he seemed to take everything else in his life lately. He was hanging on with one hand.

  “Dude,” I said, climbing up the side of the tower as it angled farther sideways, “you desperately need to do some reading on anti-fragility while you’re doing your time.”

  “What?” Brance looked down at me, voice ripped through with terror.

  “Never mind,” I said, climbing the last bit between us. “But also, maybe read a book on problem-solving and coolness under pressure.”

  When I reached him, he was holding so tight to a red piece of latticework that his fingers had indented the solid steel.

  “How...how are we going to get out of here?” Brance asked, the tower tilting another degree every few seconds.

  “Well, ideally, you would have climbed down to me rather than forcing me to go higher up to come save you,” I said, bleeding irritation as my mind worked the problem, “but now that we’re here—can you climb down?”

  Brance looked down, and whether it was the fact that the once-stable tower was now tilting ever more dramatically to one side or that he hadn’t worried about dying until I rejuvenated his hope in life, the stark-white terror that painted his face told me he wasn’t climbing anywhere on his own.

  “Okay, well, I’m going to have you climb on my back, then,” I said, “and then we’ll—”

  A sickening groan of stressed metal put the kibosh on that plan as the tower listed wildly. Something buckled far, far below us, and I could feel the metal supports giving up as the tower began to fall.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

  Reed

  Fire and water, two elemental forces standing in opposition to me and Logan Mills.

  The plan was clear, even though these two geniuses hadn’t said anything: trap us with water, scourge us from the planet with fire. The warehouse walls boxed us in to right and left.

  Fire to the front of me, water to behind...here I was, stuck in the middle with Mills. Exhausted beyond my logical capacity after using the wind to suck all the air out of the warehouse fire earlier, my hand was shaking from the exertion of using my powers to their limits.

  Still...our lives were on the line, and I had a very basic idea of what to do.

  “Hang on to me,” I said to Mills, and he looked at me like I was crazy. “Seriously.”

  “Aw, come on, man,” Mills said, easing a little closer and putting one hand on my shoulder. Quite lightly.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to do it. Might want to get real secure in your sexuality, real fast,” I said, and clenched my fist.

  A roaring torrent of wind buffeted by us, swirling in a circle only feet from us. It caught the leading edge of the waves behind us, sucking them up, and the fires that closed in ahead, bringing them around in a swirling elemental maelstrom.

  “You think that’s going to stop us?” Angelo grinned down dark malevolence. “We should have killed you as soon as we got powers, Mills. You never dealt fair with us—liar.”

  “I never lied to you!” Mills shouted over the rising winds.

  I was having to spool up the tornado around us a lot faster than I wanted to, and it felt a little like lifting max weight after you’d already completely exhausted your muscles. I was running on fumes as I pushed, expanding my tornado out and stacking on wind speed.

  “What the...?” Big Bert said behind us. I didn’t dare look to see what he was up to, because it was taking all my concentration to spin up this tornado and watch Angelo up front. He was the direr threat anyway.

  The winds around us were sucking up all the water trying to pass, and expanding out now, working on Bert and Angelo, each hovering in their respective directions. The vortex was getting strong now, passing from the realm of F5 tornado and into the realm of F6, which was only theoretical because none had ever been recorded.

  Except when I made them.

  400mph winds blew and consumed the water and fire, swirling them together in a furious blend that c
reated a sizzle and hiss, black smoke as they suppressed one another. Angelo screamed as he got yanked through the air, his power of flight unable to cancel the winds I was sending his way.

  “Holy shit!” Mills shouted in my ear. He was clenching tight enough to me to fill my hug quotient for years to come.

  Big Bert flew by in front of us, and it looked like—forgive the pun—he couldn’t hold his water. His mouth was open and he was screaming. Angelo went by in a blur next, also screaming, flames doused from his skin.

  I slowed the winds, turning down the blender I’d created, and then, once I’d reached non-fatal speeds, let them both hit the walls of the warehouse on either side. They each crashed into the concrete block with a sickening thud, and I hoped they were out.

  All my energy sapped, I thudded onto my ass, Mills barely keeping me from breaking something as I fell. The edges of my vision were dark and cloudy, and I tumbled over slowly, thanks to his aid, and lay down on the concrete floor of the warehouse.

  “Might wanna dial...911,” I said, trying to lift my head to look at Angelo and Bert, trying to assess whether they were still threats. I failed, and ended up staring at the warehouse ceiling. Which was rent asunder, I mean completely ripped off. The corrugated metal had a hole in it the size of a...

  Well...a tornado.

  “How you doing, Mills?” I asked, my voice wobbly.

  Mills had a cell phone almost to his ear, but he seemed pretty quiet, not too sanguine. “Still alive,” he said finally. “Still ruined, though.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “How?” Mills pushed the dial button and a faint voice announced that he’d reached 911 and asked what his emergency was.

  “Well,” I said, as he started to talk to them, “you could be those guys.” I managed to lift my head enough to see—

  Angelo and Bert splayed out against the walls on either side of us. I wasn’t sure they were even alive, but if they were? They were going to be recuperating for a while.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

  Sienna

  Holy hell, I was falling.

  Then I caught myself on my fingertips, hanging from the latticed support of the tower. It lurched and paused, tipped at a forty-five-degree angle, nothing but the residual remainder of the concrete base holding us upright even this minimal amount.

  I looked down, then gulped.

  It was a solid five hundred plus feet to the ground.

  And I could no longer fly.

  “Craaaaaaaaap,” I muttered.

  Brance was screaming so loud to my left that I could barely hear myself think. Reaching out with one hand, I grabbed him by the arm and swung him over to my back. He anchored on my neck like I was his last chance at holding onto life, because...well, I was.

  I clenched my chin to my collarbone to keep him from choking me around the neck, and started to climb down, dropping ten feet at a time, catching myself on the next support, then dropping again.

  “Easy does it,” I said as Brance’s screams gave way to whimpering. “Easy, easy.”

  “We’re going to fall and die,” Brance said.

  “No one likes a whiner, Brance,” I said, his wrist rubbing against my chin. “Get your shit together and put on your big boy pants. Screaming about it is not going to reverse gravity. In fact, if you hit the wrong note right now, it’s going to hasten me giving way to gravity, and then your survival chances are going to get a lot slimmer, a lot quicker.”

  “O-okay,” he stammered. He was still shaking, but at least he’d stopped crying. “Have you...been in a situation like this...before?” Brance got out between stammers of fear.

  “Yeah, this is just like that freaking tower in Revelen,” I said. “You know, on the news? When the building collapsed with me inside?” I swung down and caught a lattice of steel, this one white. Some were red, barely visible in the light of a half moon. I’d made it down almost a quarter of the way already by dropping and catching myself. Well, us.

  “Oh,” Brance said, and his voice dropped an octave or so. “Well, you made it out of that.”

  “Yes, I did,” I said, timing my next swing. I dropped us about twenty feet this time, accelerating things somewhat. “And we’ll make it out of this, too, if—”

  The tower let up a terrible groan, vibration coursing through the metal and my fingers where they gripped the antenna’s structure.

  “Uh oh,” I muttered. I couldn’t drop down aggressively right now, so I dropped down quickly to the next lattice and the one beyond. The tower was shifting, straining—

  And I had only come down about a third of the way from the top, still some four hundred feet from the ground.

  With a groan, the antenna support finally gave up, and the tower lurched sideways, surrendering to the forces of gravity.

  My grip failed as Brance’s weight twisted me and I tumbled, Brance still wrapped around my neck, toward the dark fields waiting hundreds of feet below.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

  “You okay?” Chandler’s voice was distant, far off, as I sat on the hood of the BMW, straining against the desire to close my eyes and keel over right here. Lots more flashing lights surrounded me now, the Brentwood police department out in force at the scene of the antenna crash.

  “Well, I didn’t die,” I said, rubbing my shoulders where Brance had nearly choked me out. He was cuffed, suppressed, and in the back of Chandler’s SUV, awaiting delivery to the Nashville jail. “On the other hand, the landing involved me rolling down that hillside over there with the weight of a country music singing fugitive draped around my neck like the heaviest choker necklace ever, so there’s that.”

  “He seemed a little out of it,” Chandler said. The AR-15 was still slung around his shoulders, but he had it safetied. He’d told me about Jules and his thugs, how they’d caused this whole messy finish to Brance’s story. I’d thought Jules was smarter than that, but it just reinforced my beliefs about anyone deciding crime was the best way to make their fortune being irredeemably dumb.

  “Well, he’d just fallen off a damned radio tower,” I said, “and I’m pretty sure he and I knocked the breath out of each other—in addition to him trying to choke me, so...” I shrugged. “He’s honestly lucky to be alive.”

  Chandler nodded. “I should get him to lockup.” He glanced around the crime scene with great significance. “You sure you’re okay?”

  My head was a fuzzy mess, and I don’t just mean my hair. My brain was spinning from the climb and the fall, the adrenaline and the sudden comedown once it was all over. I glanced at the white sheets draped over the bodies of Jules’s criminal sidekicks behind the first silvery Brentwood PD car. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said at last, then forced a smile. “I made it, after all. Not everyone was so lucky.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

  Reed

  “Messy,” Ileona Marsh of the TBI opined, reading over the transcription of mine and Mills’s statements about what had happened. She had a furrowed brow as she looked at it. “So you think these two guys were the only ones from the labor group involved in the attacks?”

  “I think so, yeah,” I said. “They were just mad, and acted out. I don’t think they crossed the line into even being homicidal until the last.” I shrugged. “Mills’s revelation that he was actually broke sent them over the edge.” I looked over the twin Murfreesboro police cars where Angelo and Bert respectively cooled their heels, suppressant already dosed in. “My question is—where did they get their powers?”

  “It comes from a drug now, doesn’t it?” Marsh asked. She had a pen in hand, hovering over the clipboard.

  “It does,” I said, “but that drug supply was cut off before Revelen fell. My group saw to that. We’ve noticed a marked decrease in the number of new metas the last couple years.” Which had really hit my wallet, obviously. “Where did these guys come from?”

  “We’ll question them about it,” Marsh said, then proffered a hand. “We don’t need this kind of
trouble in Tennessee, but we sure do appreciate you coming down here to deal with it. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, shaking her hand gingerly. She walked off without another word, still reading the report in her hands.

  “So,” Logan Mills’s quiet voice reached me. I turned and found him strolling up, one of those emergency blankets wrapped around his shoulders. “You’ve got a failing business too, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Mills just nodded, slowly. “What do we do now?”

  “That’s a great question,” I said. “I wasn’t really ready to fully admit, or talk about it until—well, you know.” I smiled at him tightly, and a slow realization dawned over me.

  “It was easier once I heard you say it out loud,” Mills agreed. “Like a revelation from the heavens. I couldn’t deny it anymore.”

  “Yeah, I had to hire consultants to break it to me,” I said. “And even still, I am—was—in denial, sort of.”

  “Because you think if you just get the right break—just a small one—maybe you can turn it around, right?” Mills asked. Now he was smiling wanly. “Oh, man. How do I even tell everyone...any of this?”

  I looked over at the fence that ran along the edge of the Lotsostuff property. Beyond it was a crowd of spectators—some of them the protesters, but buried in there I could see Alan Kwon and Yolanda Biddle. I pointed them out. “You mean the press? I’d suggest, if you’re just looking to do a hard-hitting, fair interview? Talk to him. And avoid the hell out of even letting her overhear you.”

  Mills chuckled. “Yeah. I guess step one is admitting the problem. Getting the word out there. Then maybe I’ll wind these things down and...figure out what comes next.”

  “It’s all about the steps,” I said. “One after another.”