Black Box Inc.

by Jake Bible

  I didn’t know what to do as I watched Travis’s lifeless body morph and change as he collapsed onto the ground. I was beyond shocked.

  “Chase!” Lassa and Teresa yelled.

  “Come on!” Harper said as she turned and emptied her shotgun into a mob of Fae enforcers that were running around the side of the mansion right at us. “Get in the fucking limo!”

  She had to shove me in. I fell across Teresa, then tumbled to the floor as Harper slammed the door closed and scrambled up over the divider into the passenger’s seat. Lassa was already speeding us away from the mansion as dozens of hexes, and good old-fashioned faerie bullets, began slamming into the trunk of the car.

  “Where am I going?” Lassa shouted as he swerved to avoid a rhododendron that had uprooted itself and was attempting to block the driveway. Lassa clipped the bush, and the windshield was covered in bright purple flowers and dark green leaves. “Harper!”

  “Take a left out of the driveway!” Harper yelled as she struggled to reload the shotgun. “Then take a right at the third street!”

  “Where does that lead us?” Lassa shouted.

  “Away from here!”

  “Works for me!”

  “Chase, get up,” Teresa said, bending over me and offering her hand. “Come on, now. Get up.”

  I took her hand, and she pulled me up onto the seat next to her.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said.

  “I am sorry about Travis,” she said.

  She may have said more, but I didn’t hear her. I was busy creating a box. A mental box to hide the memory of Daphne holding Travis’s heart, her fist sticking out from his back, blood dripping everywhere. I couldn’t deal with that right then. Goddammit, Travis . . .

  “Chase!” Harper called.

  I came back to reality and turned to look at her.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you have a gun?” she asked.

  “A what?”

  “A gun, goddammit, a gun!”

  “Um, I don’t think so,” I said. “No, wait.”

  I fished in my pocket and pulled out the .38.

  “That won’t do,” Harper said. “You’ll need a .45 at the least to take down a dryad.”

  “Dryad?” I asked.

  “Look around, Chase,” Teresa said and turned my head toward the window. “The land has come alive.”

  It wasn’t only rhododendrons we had to deal with. All the trees and bushes that dotted the landscape of the faerie dimension had become animate and were closing in on the speeding limo. Lassa was doing his best to weave around angry oaks and pissed-off pines, but there was too much greenery in the dimension. The faeries liked their forests and woods.

  “Right!” Harper yelled when Lassa almost passed our turn.

  He yanked the wheel hard, and I slammed into Teresa, knocking her off the bench seat. She was about to yell at me, and I had a feeling the sound was going to be loud and painful, when she stopped and focused her attention on the seat.

  “Grab that end,” she said, taking a hold of the seat. “Grab it, Chase!”

  I grabbed my end of the bench seat and looked at her, eyebrows up and questioning.

  “Lift. Hard,” she said and yanked up on her end of the seat.

  The cushion came free with a loud pop. I yanked up on my end, and that came free too.

  We both stared at what had been hidden under the seat.

  “Hey, Harper?” I said as I reached in and grabbed a very large rifle. I turned and showed the weapon to her as she was about to open the sunroof and get to shooting with her shotgun. She froze. “Is this big enough?”

  “Give me that,” she said, her voice thick with hunger like a ravenous predator. “Oh, Chase Lawter, you better hand that to me right now.”

  I didn’t have a clue what kind of rifle I was holding, except that it was big. I had to use both hands because of the awkward size, and getting the rifle to her without dropping it wasn’t easy. Harper ejected the huge magazine and smiled at the heavy-caliber cartridges inside. Then she looked at Teresa.

  “Will the rounds work in this dimension?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Teresa replied. “They will work in any dimension. You aren’t the only one with weaponry tricks up her sleeve. We have some very ingenious gnomes working for us.”

  “This has been under there the whole time and I’m only finding out now?” Harper asked.

  “We’ve been preoccupied,” Teresa said. “And I forgot. It had been mentioned in a memo last year sometime, but none of the partners have ever had to defend themselves on this scale. Usually a good wail settles matters.”

  “Yeah, well, this thing will certainly settle matters now,” Harper said and opened the sunroof. “Chase. Hold my legs.”

  I grabbed her legs once her upper half was out of the sunroof. I couldn’t quite see what she was doing, but I sure as hell could hear the results. My ears rang after only one shot from that rifle. Harper’s entire body rocked back against the sunroof’s frame.

  Behind us there was a long, pained howl, then a massive thud we could feel even from inside the speeding limo.

  Harper fired twice more before dropping back inside the limo. She was careful of the smoking-hot barrel of that huge rifle. With good goddamn reason. The heat from the barrel burned a hole in the limo’s carpet when she set the rifle down.

  “We’re good,” she said.

  I crawled back to get a view out of the rear window. Two oaks and a fir tree were sprawled across the road, and all the other dryads were busy retreating, leaves and needles floating lazily to the street in their wake.

  “Damn,” I said.

  “I’m keeping this rifle,” Harper said to Teresa. “And you aren’t billing us.”

  “Can’t see why we wouldn’t bill you,” Teresa said.

  “Maybe because your lack of informing me you had this, when I’m head of security for Black Box Inc. could be construed as negligence,” Harper said.

  “Construed as negligence,” I said. “Fancy.”

  “Been cooped up with a banshee lawyer for three days,” Harper said.

  “I believe there were extenuating circumstances such as you playing the part of a traitor, but I’ll have billing negotiate a fair price for the weapon,” Teresa said. “Giving it to you outright could be construed as improper.”

  “I’ll make sure Sharon gets that price down as low as possible,” Harper said.

  “I won’t stop you,” Teresa said.

  “When you two are done measuring dicks back there, would someone care to tell me where I’m going?” Lassa shouted.

  “Two lefts and a right, then floor it,” Harper said. “Do not stop no matter what happens.”

  “Ms. Kyles,” Teresa said. “Do you know how to get us out of this dimension?”

  “Yep,” Harper replied.

  “And how will we do that?”

  “Lassa?” Harper said, not taking her eyes off Teresa. “I am serious when I say do not stop for any reason. No hesitation. This is exactly like the Starloft job. You hear me?”

  “Starloft?” Lassa asked.

  “Starloft.”

  “I hear ya,” Lassa said.

  Lassa drove like mad. A bat out of Hell. A man with the Devil on his heels. The real Devil.

  We came around our last turn, and the roadway was blocked by several armed faeries. They had sparkly rifles pointed at us.

  “Not stopping,” Lassa said before anyone could yell at him.

  He aimed for the faeries and didn’t flinch.

  They flinched, though, and jumped out of the way right before they were to become faerie pancakes. That’s when I saw where we were headed.

 
Straight at the portal.

  “Do you know where we’re going to end up?” I yelled.

  “Yeah!” Lassa yelled back. “And you ain’t gonna be happy!”

  26

  WE STOPPED FOR a brief rest so Lassa could stretch his legs and Harper could use a tire iron to break the armor off the car. Ever since we’d gone through the portal into another dimension, the armor had been trying to crush the limo. Harper put an end to that.

  I decided to stay in the limo, since the temperature was about zero degrees outside and I was not a fan of heights.

  Turned out, Lassa drove us directly through the portal and into his dimension. He was able to do that due to the extradimensional treaties that governed all dimensions. When a being was in severe, indisputable danger, they could enter any portal and be instantly transported to their home dimension.

  Lassa’s dimension was nothing but snow and Himalaya-size mountain ranges. There was absolutely no flat ground, which meant we’d been winding through ice-covered mountain passes for hours. Not so great for my already-tortured stomach.

  “Finally!” Teresa exclaimed as she put her phone to her ear. “A signal!”

  “Must be the altitude,” I said, refusing to look out my window at the ten-thousand-foot drop-off to the right of the limo. “Can you call in a chopper to pick us up?”

  Lassa hopped back in the car, and I flipped him off as a blast of frigid air whipped in at me. He had been right, I didn’t like where he took us. My ass was frozen, and my insides were churning from the never-ending twisting and turning of the roads. Plus, I finished all of the food and needed to use a crapper. And soon.

  “Oh, good, Teresa got a signal,” Lassa said. “My turn next.”

  “Who are you going to call?” I asked.

  “My cousin,” Lassa said. “My cousin runs a sightseeing company about twenty miles from here. He’ll let us stay with him until we know we can go back to Earth without a Fae kill squad waiting for us.”

  The limo rocked as a gust of wind hit us side on.

  “Are we going to make it there in this weather?” I said, pointing at the swirling snow and ominous dark clouds above.

  “What? This?” Lassa laughed. “Chase, this is summer. I could drive us on this road blindfolded, dude.”

  “Don’t you goddamn dare, pal,” I said.

  My patience was lower than my energy, which was painfully low. Keeping my eyes open was getting harder and harder. The pull of the Dim trap was bringing me down hard. I think the severe stomach cramps were the only reason I hadn’t passed out. They were brutal. When I’d mentioned them to Harper and Lassa, neither blamed the immense amount of food I’d gobbled down. They’d seen me eat more than that before.

  No, I could tell they were worried about what that Dim key was doing to my insides.

  “Twenty miles?” I asked as my stomach gurgled so loud that Teresa stopped talking on her cell phone to watch me carefully.

  “Are you going to be all right?” she asked, scooting away from me.

  “I’m not going to puke or shit everywhere, so relax,” I replied. Both of those things could happen at any second, so I was totally lying.

  “The twenty miles,” I continued, ignoring Teresa and focusing on Lassa. “Does that equate to twenty minutes’ travel time? I can make it twenty minutes.”

  “You are going to make a mess, aren’t you?” Teresa asked. “Let me call you back.” She hung up the cell phone. “Chase? Do not make a mess in this limo.”

  “Yeah, because everything is so neat and tidy in here,” I said as I nodded at the piles of empty food wrappers, shell casings, and other debris that had accumulated during our ordeal.

  “I can get us to my cousin’s place in about thirty minutes,” Lassa said. “As long as we don’t hit any tourist traffic.”

  “Who in the goddamn hell wants to sightsee in this place?” I asked. “There’s nothing but snow and rocks and clouds.”

  “Screw you, dude,” Lassa said. He held out a hand, and Teresa gave him the phone. “I’ll make my call outside.”

  He got out and slammed the door after him. But not before a stabbing wind hit me in the face. My entire body shivered, and I doubled over as yet another wave of cramps tore through me.

  “Chase, you really do not look good,” Teresa said.

  “Yeah, don’t feel so goddamn hot,” I said.

  “Let’s get you outside,” Teresa said.

  “To hell with your limo, Teresa!” I shouted.

  “Chase, it’s not about my limo,” she said. “Your face is flushed and I can feel the fever coming off you from where I’m sitting. Something else is going on besides that Dim key.”

  I took a few deep breaths and used whatever rational thought I had left to parse what she was saying. Yeah, I did have a fever. And there was something else going on. More cramps hit me, and I cried out. I tried to breathe through them, but I couldn’t.

  “Come on,” Teresa said and opened her door.

  She pulled me, basically dragged me, out of the limo and into the snow. Despite how painfully cold it was, the snow against my feverish body felt so good by numbing some of the pain. Some.

  I cried out again as my insides spasmed. I didn’t need a crapper (I did, but that was beside the point) because the pain had moved from my guts to my lower back. I thought my kidneys were going to rip right out of me and try to escape.

  “What’s going on?” I heard Harper ask.

  I couldn’t open my eyes to look at her. Everything was excruciating, even that simple movement.

  More spasms, and my back arched like I was having a seizure.

  “What is that?” Teresa asked. “Do you see his shirt moving?”

  “Oh, shit,” Harper said.

  I felt hands on me, and the back of my shirt was yanked up, exposing my skin to the snow.

  “Dammit, I was afraid of this,” Harper said.

  “What?” I tried to ask, but the sound was more like a wordless grunt.

  “Oh, dear,” Teresa said.

  “Okay, my cousin has a cabin we can use,” Lassa said. “Hey, what the hell is Chase doing on the ground? What’s wrong with . . . Oh. Shit. It’s back.”

  There was a high-pitched scream, then the pain stopped. Completely stopped. And the scream wasn’t from my mouth.

  “It’s fucking cold out here!” Back Chase exclaimed. “Jesus Christ, someone get me inside that limo now!”

  Hands lifted me and carried me back into the limo, then set me facedown on the carpet.

  “That’s better,” Back Chase said. “Damn, will you look at all this trash? Someone had the munchies.”

  That was the last thing I heard before passing out.

  When I awoke, there was sunlight leaking through my eyelids, and I was in possibly the warmest, most comfortable bed I had ever woken up in. I didn’t open my eyes, not wanting to break the spell, but I did roll over onto my back to get a little more comfortable.

  “Hey! Asshole! Belly only!”

  Goddammit.

  My eyes opened, and I rolled back onto my stomach.

  “You,” I said.

  “Me,” Back Chase replied. “Miss me?”

  “No. Not for a second.”

  “Well, screw you, then.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here. On your back. Right above your ass. Not my first choice of locations. Everything smells. The view is horrible. Your stomach makes the worst noises and keeps me awake. But rent is cheap and transportation is provided.”

  “You suck.”

  “Possibly, possibly. But nothing I can do about that. I’m an offshoot of you, Chase. If you don’t like me, then that says a lot about your mental state, pal. Self-loathing much?”

&nb
sp; “You are not me.”

  “An offshoot of you. I didn’t say I was you. We both can’t be you. I just happen to know all your deepest, darkest secrets.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re the by-product of a murdered changeling. You don’t have a single one of my memories.”