Badder (Out of the Box Book 16)

by Robert J. Crane

  Okay, well, that gave me something to work with. I might be able to outrun most of them if I could just get rid of this guy.

  I decided, screw it, and vaulted the wall, finding myself landing in the Waverly Station carpark. That seemed like a fine option for a game of hide and seek, which was what I was planning to play with Mr. Blonde. I knew the next train to York was leaving in twenty or thirty minutes, but that was a long time to try and dodge him.

  I cursed when I landed, because not only did it hurt, but this wasn’t actually a car park at all. I must have misread the sign, because instead I found myself in a passenger drop-off zone. I could even see a damned train, though it was just behind a fence.

  Shiiiiiiit. This did not help at all, really.

  Deciding there was not a lot of point in being coy, I broke for the train and sprinted. With a short, controlled leap, I made it over the fence into Waverly proper, and found myself not on a platform. I was on the damned tracks, and there was a train in front of me, pulling slowly into the station, driver gawking at me open-mouthed.

  Getting run over slowly might have been a metaphor for my life of late, but it wasn’t really going to work for me, so I sucked it up, ignored the pain in my ankle, and leapt again, skittering over the roof of the train, staying below the arched glass that made up the ceiling to the station, and slid off onto the platform on the other side.

  I almost landed on a guy who looked at me with visible alarm. “Where’d you come from?” he asked in thick Scottish.

  “My mom said heaven, but everyone else says hell,” I quipped, and started to walk away like my little leap over a train was nothing. “Actually, my mom probably agreed with everyone else, now that I think about it.” I turned and started to run down the platform. This was not the train I was looking for. This one was heading for Inverness.

  A grunt behind me caused me to turn from my run. The blonde man had landed, and he’d done so on that poor, unsuspected Scot who’d asked me where I’d come from. Mr. Blonde was up in a hot second, grimacing in pain from landing his ass on the pedestrian’s head or something, I imagined.

  For my part, I suspected the getting was about as good as it was going to get, provided I wanted to finish this incident quickly and not start another. I leapt over the next train and Mr. Blonde followed, about ten yards back from me. As I slid over the roof of the carriage, I knew what I was looking for–

  An empty aisle or space between trains where I could pull out my old ass-kicking skills and put old Blondey down hard so I could catch a train. Maybe I’d even change up my look by borrowing his shirt. My hoodie was probably well-identified by this point, after all, so it wasn’t going to function as an effective disguise for much longer.

  I came sliding off the train and down onto the tracks below. I landed with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, but Mr. Blonde didn’t do much better. I wondered if there was a third rail here, brimming with electricity and ready to bring this fight to a shocking close. I resolved not to touch any of the rails, though that would be a hard resolution to enforce if I got into a scuffle. I’d been shocked to death before though, and had no wish to reprise that particular exit from the mortal coil.

  Blondey landed a little more solidly than I did, letting out another grunt as he pulled himself to standing. He was staring at me with a look of such intensity that I couldn’t help but comment on it.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling a little tingle in my heart, in my legs, in my guts, but unwilling to show it to one of Rose’s flunkies. “They don’t make laxatives in Scotland?” I mimed his expression. “I mean, you look like you need to sit down and pop a squat, really take a load off, bro—”

  He glared at me, then cast a look over his shoulder at the purple- and blue-painted train car behind him. I followed his gaze, because when you’re fighting a meta and you don’t know their power, it’s not wise to look away from their eyeline, cuz odds were—

  Yep. The train wall flexed and bowed, metal squealing in a loud echo through the vast open spaces in Waverly Station. The side of the train started to swell like a pimple, growing larger and more distorted the longer he stared at it. Within a few seconds it looked like it was ready to explode. “Uh oh,” I said, and waited until the last second before—

  It popped like a zit and shrapnel came shooting at me, little fragments of metal that filled the air like buckshot. I threw myself back up on the platform, but that wasn’t exactly cover. I was gonna hoof it to one of the nearby benches, but a quick look back over my shoulder made it obvious that Mr. Blonde had now taken control of these fragments of metal and was steering them like tiny bullets.

  At me.

  I dodged them as they shot by. Well, most of them. A few little shards caught me on the arm and shredded my hoodie sleeve like it was nothing. I sucked in a pained breath, realizing that no, the good times were indeed not going to roll right now. I was going to roll, though, and I did, going low and sliding under a bench before coming up on the other side, breathing a little heavily.

  The bench slid away along the concrete with a screech as Mr. Blonde worked his power on it. It skittered away, revealing me lying flat on my chest. “Oh, man,” I muttered, popping back to my feet in an improvised flip that left a trail of blood on the concrete floor.

  Blondey grinned and then brought the flotilla of makeshift bullets at me again, hard and fast, and this time I flung myself backward, just fell and caught myself in a bridge, hoping that he’d gotten them moving too fast to steer them into me.

  He had, more or less. The “more or less” being two or three fragments that sliced across my exposed midriff and made me fall out of my bridge. I landed on my back, and propelled myself back to my feet with a quick shoulder roll.

  “I want your blood,” Blondey said, grinning like a shark who smelled—well, blood in the water. He was advancing on me, and I’d been in enough fights to recognize a distraction when I saw one. He still had that angry swarm of shrapnel, after all, like his own personal squadron of bullet bees, and unfortunately they did not buzz.

  “A lot of people have wanted that over the years,” I said, trying to get control of my breathing. The run, the jumps, this fight…none of it was proceeding as well as I might have hoped. I looked around the platform, hoping for something, anything I could use as a weapon. There were green-painted steel poles holding up the electronic screens to announce the trains, and a few advertisements on those big, back-lit screens. Everything in sight had metal in it, and thus would make a poor weapon against this guy. “You guys should consider just scheduling a blood drive and inviting me. I’d totally donate, since it’s for a good cause—”

  I heard the shrapnel rather than saw it, since it was coming in hot at my six o’clock, and I threw myself forward. I had high hopes that he’d have to stop it before it completely perforated him—actually, I hoped he’d suck at controlling it and that would solve my problem for me by ripping him to shreds with his own petard—and thus lose track of me for critical seconds wherein I would—

  Coming to my feet, I was ready to make my attack. Except I’d executed a forward roll, and hadn’t been able to plot out my approach exactly. I wasn’t going to come at him directly, because I didn’t want to step into the path of the shrapnel, so I’d gone sideways left, at a forty-five-degree angle, figuring I’d come back at him hard from just outside the shrapnel cloud—

  Except he’d stopped the shrapnel cloud and spread it out above me, something I didn’t realize until I started to come to my feet and felt a mighty stinging right at the top of my head—

  I’d jumped right into the metal shards, hanging perfectly immobile right above me like a minefield.

  Blood sluiced down my face and I stopped my upward movement as soon as I felt the sharp pain. It was a little too late though, because I hit another shard with my shoulder, another with the side of my ear, and another sliced right down the back of my head.

  I hit the ground hard, blinded by both my blood and the ast
ounding level of pain that comes from a partial skull fracture. I’d heard the bone crack upon impact with the shard I hit most directly, and it had done some serious damage. I landed on my tailbone, adding another element of agony, which ran up my back like someone had pulled the pain fire alarm and it was ringing all up and down my body.

  I didn’t even realize how badly I’d been hurt until a few seconds later, when Blondey was already on top of me, a dozen other people around him. The mob had caught up to us while I’d apparently been stunned out of my senses.

  They surrounded me, swarming me, and Mr. Blonde and his grin were the most frightening part of it all. They closed in, and all I could see were shadows blotting out the sunlight coming in from the windows above as hands started to grab at me, angry, like the shrapnel, intent on tearing me apart.

  31.

  I was being grabbed by a hundred hands, roughly, angrily, fingers digging in, and somehow I knew that when they delivered me to Rose, it didn’t necessarily guarantee I’d be conscious or in good condition. I might have pieces missing, because Rose would have told them I could heal from just about anything they did to me.

  Unfortunately, this knowledge of my healing ability was not as much of a consolation to me as you might think.

  There was so much blood in my eyes I could scarcely see. It ran down my face, covering my vision like a crimson cloud, finding my nose and pooling on my upper lip, a metallic scent I couldn’t gag away from. My body hurt everywhere, but the top of the skull in particular was screaming from what had happened to it.

  Someone kicked me, and that set the whole ball of the mob beatdown rolling. I had just started to come back to myself when the punches began to land, and none of them were what I would call gentle. They were hardly the practiced blows of a professional boxer, but there were a lot of them, and what they lacked in quality they damned sure made up for in quantity.

  I wasn’t the type to lie there and take a beating though, so I swept out an arm, blindly, but with all my strength, and heard the satisfying crack of someone’s knee joint bending in a way it shouldn’t have. I heaved out in the other direction and was rewarded with another cry as I caught another knee and turned it wrongside-right, probably sending their kneecap to the back of their leg in the process.

  That lessened the assault on two sides for a second, because the two people whose knees I’d broken fell back into their mob brethren, probably surprising them or knocking them off balance. I didn’t care which, so long as they stopped for a freaking second.

  Lashing out with my feet, I did a little breakdance maneuver just as someone kicked me hard in the thigh. It kinda sent a numb tingle down my leg, but I didn’t need to feel it in order to dish out harm with it. I swung my legs around in a high-speed, vicious sweep, and was rewarded with grunts as I took the legs from under three or four people. The thud they made as they landed was a satisfaction all its own, and I swirled my legs up above my own head, kicking another couple people and forcing them to step back, giving me enough room to leap, somewhat blindly, to my feet.

  I wiped the blood out of my eyes and got probably sixty percent of it, if that. I got enough of it that I could see again, albeit not well. My head was woozy from the skull trauma, I was still surrounded by a mob, and I’d mostly just made them take a step back, not driven them off. Driving them off was going to be harder, especially if they were somehow mind-controlled by Rose.

  Even the injured were pulling themselves back up, looking at me with loathing and fury, angry and ready to attack. They were about a quarter of a second from surging at me like a rising tide.

  I threw myself into their midst and swung with everything I had. Not one to wait for the attack to come rolling in, I seized the initiative and started dishing out skull fractures of my own. Screams of pain cut the air in Waverly Station, and I was back in the beatdown business, selling but taking no returns. I popped one guy in the jaw so hard he’d be drinking through a straw for a while, caught another one in the stomach so hard he bowled over the three people behind him.

  Spinning because I sensed others closing on me from the rear, I caught two eager beavers with a spinning kick, my heel just about sheering their faces off and sending them flying to the side and into a clutch of assholes swarming at me. This wasn’t a fair fight—for them—but if they kept at me in a zombie horde, I wasn’t going to be able to put off the pain that was closing in on me forever, and they’d notch a win by sheer numbers alone.

  I caught a glimpse of Mr. Blonde behind a couple of these jobbers that were coming at me in waves. He was lifting his hands, and I didn’t like the look of that, so I kicked the only non-metallic weapon on the platform at him—one of his mob co-conspirators.

  Mr. Blonde’s eyes got big right before this dude with a bowl cut went sailing into his face. As a succubus, I was still faster and stronger than most other metas, and I could send a bastard at him pretty quick. He didn’t quite dodge in time, and ended up catching a shoulder to the nose, which slowed his roll.

  “This has been fun, guys,” I said, hearing a train squealing a couple rows over. I slapped a big guy right in the face and shoved him, hard, against a little crowd behind him, bowling them all over. “Let’s never do this again.” I hurled myself forward and back down onto the tracks, wiping blood again as I heard the cries of the mob, a kind of guttural screaming, rise behind me.

  I leapt the next train, landing on the roof and sweeping a quick look over the entire station. Apparently, station personnel had been oblivious to the rumble going on in their midst, because everywhere else in the station, business looked like it was proceeding as usual. A train was pulling out, and I was a little too disoriented at first to figure out which way it was even going.

  Hell, I didn’t care. I needed to be anywhere but here.

  Vaulting to the next train and then down onto the platform beneath, I realized I had about fifty yards and two more trains to leap before I could get there. I didn’t know what Mr. Blonde’s recovery time was, but I had a bad feeling it wasn’t going to be forever, which would have been a nice change from the way my luck had been running these last few days.

  Screams from the mob got my attention as I dismounted and hustled across the wide platform ahead of me. They got louder when they saw me, like tiny, angry ferrets when they—I dunno, saw ferret food. They came streaming after me, a little too slow, thankfully.

  I jumped the last train and started to hop over to the one pulling out when something whistled behind me. I threw myself down and a glittering swarm of metal bees shot over me. That damned shrapnel cloud again. It hovered there, closing slowly down, inching toward me where I lay, flat, against the train roof.

  The son of a bitch had just imprisoned me; I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t get up, and couldn’t even roll to the side without ripping myself to shreds on his immobile minefield.

  Dammit.

  “STOP!” a woman’s voice cracked through the station, and it had that aura of command that expected to be obeyed. It also had an accent, and I damned near had a cow right there, because I thought it was Rose.

  The metal fragments came tinkling down around me, dropping in my face and on my arms, sprinkling me like a metallic rain. Gently, too, not like bullets at all.

  I looked up and found the little minefield gone, the train’s rattling loud in my ears as the one next to me continued to chug its way out of the station. There were only a few cars left and then it’d be gone, leaving me behind to face the mob, as well as Rose—

  I sat up and looked across the platform. Most of the mob had stopped moving, a flow of people that had congealed in a mass, now looking back toward the origin of the shout, seeking direction. I stared across the platform and saw a woman standing there, just a thin slip of a girl, strawberry blond—

  Not a redhead.

  Not Rose.

  She was standing next to Mr. Blonde, who looked like he was about to drop to one knee and propose. Other guys from the mob were there too, standing before her
as though she were Queen Guinevere and they were about to swear their swords to her.

  A woman’s face, purple with fury, popped up over the edge of the train nearest me, screaming as she clawed her way up to me, and, without thinking, I punched her in the nose. Not too hard, but she plummeted off the side of the train and thumped to the concrete ground below.

  I stared at the blond woman in the distance, and she stared back at me. She raised a hand, and that was all I had time for.

  I leapt onto the departing train, catching the last car right before it pulled out of the station, clattering down the tracks to a destination I didn’t even know.

  32.

  I didn’t ride that train for very long, because it became quickly apparent that I was heading west, the opposite of where I wanted to go. My stolen cell phone had been wrecked during the great Sienna beatdown back in the station, which left me with only the knowledge I’d Googled before I lost it—that the train to York went east, through Berwick-upon-Tweed and Newcastle upon Tyne (seriously, these names).

  That meant I was in the wrong place, heading the wrong direction, so as soon as I saw a train passing in the other direction, probably only a mile from the station, I hopped over immediately, as lightly as I could, and lay as flat as a pancake upon the roof of the carriage.

  We pulled back into Waverly a few minutes later, and the place was all abuzz. I rolled over as the train doors whooshed open and people began to stream out. In the distance I could see a big, black sign with yellow LED bulbs telling me where each train was going. To get to York, I’d need a different train, probably on the other side of the station given my luck.

  When I studied the list, and then my platform number, I realized I had gotten a break—a very small one; the platform I was seeking was only two down, and the next train to York via Berwick and Newcastle was only ten minutes from departing.