The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3

by Nicholas Erik

  “A clever Rabbit.” A modified charge, twice the power, with an added electromagnetic pulse. Enough to scramble nearby electronics, render them useless for a few minutes. It wasn’t catastrophic under normal circumstances.

  Except when a facility was about to fill with water, and all electronics needed to perform in perfect synchrony. That was difficult to do when half of them were offline and rebooting.

  “And our other friends in the town car, how are they doing?”

  “No confirmation.”

  “They have escaped.” Hawk grimaced. The whole operation was sloppy. She should have dispatched them personally, or at least attended to the explosive with more care. But the Rabbit problem had forced her to hurry, control two volatile situations at once.

  And now, Kip Keene and Samantha Strike were loose again, and surely coming.

  Hawk’s swirling thoughts finally settled on a single thread.

  Atlantis.

  Rabbit’s grenade was not powerful enough to destroy the ancient city, although Owens’ deep-water facility was destined to soon be rubble. But despite its elaborate capabilities and brilliant mind, the city remained defensively weak, prone to being wiped out by a focused offensive. The self-destruct charges had been countered, but if someone knew where to penetrate its walls, it could be defeated.

  That was not an option.

  Atlantis needed to survive.

  “Prepare the deep water submarine.”

  “We need to abandon the facility—”

  “I am,” Hawk said. “Do not worry.”

  The technician tapped a few buttons on screen and said, “Done.”

  Hawk ran out the door, down the hall, to her waiting ride.

  She strapped into the machine and tapped deploy on the sub’s navigational controls.

  The submarine submerged beneath the water’s surface and shot into the dark, thousands of feet below the sea, straight to Atlantis.

  21 | Problems and Solutions

  “Jesus Christ, slow the fuck down!”

  Keene jammed his foot on the brake so hard the pedal almost snapped in half. The town car lurched forward and then jerked back, screeching to a halt.

  “How’s that?” He glanced at the clock. Nine minutes. Good time.

  Strike fumbled for the door handle, unlatching it just in time to vomit on the sidewalk.

  “Oh my God,” she said between gasps and dry heaves, “never…again.”

  Keene looked in the rearview, to make sure Wade wasn’t going to paint the backseat. The kid looked a little white, but didn’t seem like he was at risk of destroying the upholstery. Not that it would be a big deal, since the ride was borrowed, but there was still one leg of the trip left.

  The most important one.

  Strike slumped against the dashboard, breathing heavily.

  “You mind closing the door?”

  “Too hard,” she said. “Still sick.”

  “Before this becomes a situation would be good.” Blue lights flashed around the corner. According to the car’s GPS, Precinct 21B was located around the bend.

  And it seemed like Lorelei had made quite the stir.

  “Already a situation,” Strike said. She brought her face a few inches off the dash and looked at Keene. “Too late.”

  “I meant an impossible situation.”

  Strike flailed at the door and finally managed to get it shut with a weak yank. “There. Happy?”

  “Yeah.” Keene revved the engine and gave her a smirk.

  “No, not again.”

  “It’ll all be over soon.”

  The tires spun, burning rubber spewing through the vents before the midnight black town car slingshotted around the corner, straight towards Precinct 21B.

  Keene turned on the radio and cranked the volume, death metal pouring from the speakers.

  Thinking her way out of this predicament had not proved fruitful for Lorelei Keene.

  Pinned down in the corner cubicle nearest Chief Inspector Hernandez’s office, she hadn’t gotten far. Her escape plan hadn’t gone nearly as smooth as what she’d pictured in her mind. All told, she and Derek might’ve made it about fifteen feet—from inside the Chief Inspector’s office to just outside it, where bullets could find them easier.

  In the midst of the phone call, a crazy idea had seized her. Escape. Left to their own unattended devices in Precinct 21B for a moment, which was in something of a code red state from the spiking crime wave across the city, Derek and Lorelei had hunkered down and dug in.

  “It wasn’t like we were going to make bail, I guess,” she said over the panicked shouts.

  “Guess not.” Derek threw a balled up piece of paper in the air which was immediately perforated by a series of crisscrossing gunshots.

  He frowned and rubbed his injured shin, which was bound by a dirty makeshift tourniquet.

  Lorelei stared at the pistol she’d taken from the desk.

  Maybe going rogue hadn’t been a great idea. Bail sounded pretty good right now, even if it would’ve come in a couple days or a week.

  The police officers whispered commands to each other in hushed Spanish, trying to corral the suspects. Lorelei blasted a shot into the ceiling, and the footsteps and discussions stopped.

  A barrage of return fire peppered the particle board and vinyl siding of the cubicle, raining down shreds of family photos and intramural football schedules on their heads.

  Lorelei tried to press her chin further against the floor.

  “Where are you Kip?”

  She still clutched the precinct’s ancient landline, her fingers absentmindedly playing with its tangled cord. This had been a terrible idea. Now she was as far from the front entrance as she could get, armed only with the service pistol she’d found in the desk. Every time she heard footsteps approaching, she had fired a few shots into the particle board ceiling.

  That kept them at bay.

  But it also meant that, if they got close enough, she was probably going to end up dead.

  Both of them were going to end up very dead.

  She heard low voices snaking from around the corner, down the hall. The tones were low and forced. Shuffling footsteps. Lorelei fired another shot into the ceiling, showering the minimalist desk with gray dust. No telling who was approaching. Best to ward them off.

  The footsteps didn’t stop this time, though, and everything was closing in on all sides. They’d gotten wise to her plan, or they’d busted out the riot gear and weren’t worried about her pulling off a series of incredible headshots.

  She couldn’t see anything, pressed against the floor, but it felt like a black hole was closing its cosmic jaws around her.

  Shit.

  “Put the gun down, Lei,” Derek said. “It’s over.”

  “No.” She fired two more shots into the ceiling, pumping the trigger.

  Click, click, click.

  Empty chamber.

  Double shit.

  The sound of someone getting strangled overlaid on top of angry guitars overtook all the other ambient noise. What idiot was blasting this crappy music? Hurried shouts and panicked voices fought to be heard over the incessant double bass and distortion.

  “They’re going to—”

  Glass shattered and the entire precinct shook, like a bomb had gone off.

  Lorelei peeked over the shaking cubicle. Two fiery husks of metal sat near the front of the building, near where Esperanza had first welcomed her in. Scattered officers rolled around on the ground nearby and limped away, dazed and confused by the sudden intrusion.

  “Get away, get away,” one man said in Spanish, “it is about to blow.”

  Lorelei ducked down, just as a large explosion shot towards the ceiling, bathing the room in an orange halo of light.

  Strike vomited again. “Make it
stop. Just make it stop.”

  She rolled over on the sidewalk and rubbed her elbows.

  Keene looked at his own arms. Scraped and bleeding. No broken bones. Good. Wade moaned and coughed. Maybe he had busted something. A rib would be good. Then again, the kid had helped save everyone’s ass with the bomb.

  But Wade said, “I’m okay, I think.”

  Damn. Even a flesh wound was too much to ask for.

  Staggering to his feet, Keene put a hand up to his forehead and peered down the street. The blue lights from the single police car in the middle of the street had been overpowered by the furious orange glow of the flaming mess outside the precinct.

  “Let’s go get them,” Keene said. He reached down and offered Strike a hand. She swatted it away and got up, then promptly fell to one knee. “Suit yourself.”

  “Still sick. Going to be sick forever.”

  “You think they’re dead, Keeney?”

  “There’s no one left on the entire block after hearing that shitty music,” Strike said.

  This wasn’t true. A couple intrepid neighbors had peeked out their doors to catch a glimpse of what was going on. But most of the houses stayed locked and dark.

  Any officers outside had fled for safety at the sight of the out of control automobile barreling down the road.

  Keene shrugged and walked up the street. “I like death metal.”

  “You’re insane, you know that?”

  “You going to help or just whine?”

  “Fine.”

  Keene smiled as he heard the two of them hurry to catch up.

  No one paid much attention to Lorelei Keene, given that the road outside Precinct 21B had exploded into a fireball only moments before. There was another concerning development for the officers: the fire was spreading inside. The sprinkler system had doused the entire office in a steady stream of water at the first sign of flame.

  The general tenor of the office had changed significantly thereafter.

  A strange sensation overtook Lorelei’s mind. Derek was pinned beneath a slab of wood, broken off from a nearby desk. She lifted it with ease, like picking up a toothpick.

  “Lei,” he said. “I don’t feel right.”

  “I know.”

  They staggered forward, past the ruined front desk. The fire still burned, but traveling past the searing embers was somehow bearable. Hot, but bearable.

  The front doors no longer existed, replaced with a blackened hole about one and a half times as wide. Lorelei and Derek fell forward, into the charred street.

  Lorelei heard someone say, “Oh shit, they’ve been exposed.”

  She said, “Thanks for coming, Kip.”

  Then the world went dark.

  22 | Yachts

  “Goddamnit,” Keene said. He banged his palm against the plastic wheel as he whipped through Barcelona’s narrow streets in the boosted family sedan. Swerving at the last moment, he narrowly missed erasing a bicyclist from the land of the living.

  In the rearview, he saw a guy clad in tight yellow pants give him the finger.

  He tore at his white shirt, ruined by grime, Rabbit’s blood and all the vestiges of a hellish twenty-four hours. The collar ripped, and he struggled to remove it as he drove.

  “Cool it,” Strike said. Her hand steadied the top of the wheel, but Keene’s fingers fought her grip loose. “Turn up here.”

  “I can hear the GPS.” He tossed the ruined shirt out the window and glanced in the rearview. Lorelei and Derek looked almost peaceful.

  But the truth was far more sinister.

  “I know,” Strike said.

  “Then shut up.”

  Strike fell silent in the passenger seat. No one else spoke. Lorelei and Derek were each cuffed in the backseat with handcuffs stolen from the burnt out cop car in front of Precinct 21B.

  The steel had proven quite resilient to explosions.

  Everyone agreed that it wasn’t safe to have Lorelei and Derek loose, after what they’d seen on the cracked drive. They’d been exposed to the toxin in the water supply. Best case scenario was an outcome like Rabbit, but the chances of that were slim. Painful death or insanity were far more likely scenarios.

  Or another Hawk.

  Keene tried not think of that.

  Wade sat huddled in a cluster of blankets and coats, a sullen expression on his face as he tried to avoid touching either prisoner.

  Keene glanced in the rearview and made eye contact, giving the kid a weak smile.

  “Need something, Linus?”

  “Oh, uh, nothing. All good, Keeney. Rocking, dude.”

  “You got everything you need?”

  “Say what?”

  “To get us to Atlantis,” Keene said. He jerked the wheel and made a hard right, two of the car’s tires leaving the ground. They settled back onto the asphalt with a rocky crunch. Keene flipped the car up a gear and accelerated. “I don’t wanna waste a goddamn second, because we don’t have any.”

  “Uh yeah, I think Mira—Mrs. Strike, she uh, provided everything I need to help out.”

  “And the schematics Rabbit sent?”

  “Snapped photos with my phone. Got it covered.”

  “Anything else we should know about this Hawk character?”

  “She’s bad news, dude,” Linus said. “Like, the files say stuff like most impressive specimen and unparalleled abilities. Oh, and Rabbit trained her.”

  “Great,” Keene said. “Just great.”

  The ride continued in silence until they got to the marina.

  Keene fiddled with the radio knobs, scanning through the stations.

  “We interrupt our coverage of the Barcelona riots to bring you breaking news,” a man’s baritone announced in fluid Spanish, “large waves pummel the coastline after witnesses claim seeing an explosion in the Mediterranean Sea. An entire building is believed to have suddenly disappeared into the water. The cause is unknown, but amateur video footage can be found on our website.”

  Keene threw the car into park, pulling up next to the yacht.

  “Boat looks fine,” Strike said. “Figures that Mom’s assets would escape. It’s like fate or something, I swear.”

  “Not fate.” Keene stepped out of the car. “Owens’ facility is a couple miles down the coast. Or was.” Rabbit had apparently taken care of that. But the threat of Hawk—and this suddenly sentient city—still remained.

  And he needed to find a cure.

  Strike followed, and Wade crawled out the front, avoiding contact with either Lorelei or Derek. Neither had said much after awakening in the middle of the ride, but each bore a fearsome and crazed expression.

  It suggested that giving them both a wide berth was a wise call.

  Then again, they could have been pissed because their friends had cuffed them.

  Keene glanced in the back window. Lorelei glowered. He turned to catch Wade tumble headfirst on to the dock.

  “I think I got a splinter. Ow.”

  Keene ignored him and said, “The drive say anything about reversing the process?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t get that far before our furry friend stole it,” Strike said.

  “Think it’s curable?”

  “What am I, a biologist?”

  “Wade?”

  “I don’t know, I’d have to look at the schematics Rabbit sent over about the nano-stuff, dude. Didn’t look promising, though.”

  “Do it.”

  A man approached them on the dock. His neoprene diving suit concealed a small pistol tucked in the waistband. He wore shades—despite the weak morning light—and a pair of well-shined dress shoes.

  “I’ve been waiting hours for you lot to show up.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and without stopping said, “Boat’s ready. Sub’s docked on the side.”

>   “That’s it?”

  He slowed down for a beat, his back already to them, and said, “Yeah. Don’t break her. And clean shirts are down below.”

  Then he kept walking, past where the dock met the parking lot. A black limousine pulled up, and he disappeared inside before the car drove away at a leisurely pace.

  The yacht was a hundred feet, bow to stern, with an all-white paint job, SS Bank of Legends emblazoned on the side. And all the throw pillows on the deck furniture.

  The owners were clearly not concerned about hubris.

  Keene kicked a wicker footstool over the side of the craft, into the water.

  Wade called up from beside the car, “What about these two?”

  “Keep them company for a little while,” Keene said. “We got a little work to do.”

  His mind focused on what had to be done. The final piece of the puzzle.

  We will meet again at the Ruby Rattlesnake.

  He had to find Fox.

  A woman he barely knew—who had chopped off Derek’s pinky 200,000 years ago and exiled Keene and his crew to this backwater dump—was his only hope of saving his sister and former best friend.

  Oh, and apparently the world.

  There was always that.

  23 | Atlantis Rising

  Hawk maneuvered the submarine through jagged chunks of concrete and metal. The darkness gave her little time to react, but the submarine’s halo of light and sensory cameras granted her the precious milliseconds she needed.

  She stared into the inky black beyond the submarine’s bubble shaped windshield. Almost nothing separated her from the endless depths. A red light flashed, and she jerked the controls downwards, sending the submarine into a nosedive.

  A girder sailed past before being devoured by the sea.

  It was unsurprising that Atlantis had rested undiscovered for so many years in this type of absolute darkness. Part of that, too, was that it had shifted along the sea’s bottom from tectonic displacements, gradually drifting from the Greek coast all the way to Spain over two hundred thousand years.

  “Ping surroundings,” Hawk said.

  The submarine replied with a series of beeps, displaying a few faint dots on the radar projected on to the front glass. She had escaped the debris field.