“Yep,” I said, smiling for the first time since this whole damned raid had begun. I grabbed the tank by its end and hauled it out of the wreckage of the Clary house as the room shifted behind it, the roof collapsing in as I removed one of its supports. Once the tank was out in the light of day, I reached for the handle and tugged on it. No dice.
I went around to the other side and ran a flaming finger down the two hinges, melting them to slag. Then I settled myself and yanked hard, tossing the metal top into the air behind me. It went flying off and dragged three flat-paneled computer monitors with it. They made a hell of a racket as they came to their landing.
“Whhhhaaaaat—” the officer said as I crept up on the tank, looking inside.
And there she was. Pale as her mug shot, eyes closed against the harsh light of day, hands up and trying to protect her face from that which was bound to assail her. She adjusted a little, enough to blink them open and see me, and I got the feeling she’d known I was the one pulling on her tank by the lack of reaction when she saw me.
“Hello, Cassidy,” I said, probably just about leering at the small, thin stick figure in the tank. “I think it’s time we had a meeting of the minds.”
27.
It took all my restraint not to bust Cassidy’s face into a messy, bloody pulp right there in the Nebraska dirt, or to just pop her like a zit right there in the salt water solution that smelled like there might have been a little pee in it. I dragged her out of the tank screaming and flailing her pale, scrawny limbs. She was wearing something like a one-piece bathing suit, and I hauled her up as she writhed.
“Holy mercy—” the cop nearest me said.
“I’ll take it from here,” I said and caught Dr. Zollers’s eyes before twisting my grip on Cassidy even tighter and lifting her straight up into the air with me as I took off.
She screamed and screamed and screamed as I carried her higher and higher, trying to writhe out of my grasp as though she had a death wish. “You might want to simmer down,” I told her helpfully as I got her up to about five thousand feet, “because I’m not sure you can survive a fall from this height, and my grip’s not exactly infallible, knucklehead, especially after the shit your friends just pulled.”
She stopped squirming and stiffened up. She didn’t say anything, just hung there in her swimsuit onesie. I suspected she’d already run the percentages in her head and knew she wouldn’t survive impact if she broke loose. I also didn’t fancy her chances of survival if she expected me to catch her after tearing her way out of her swimsuit, because I’d have to grab her wet, slippery skin with my bare hands and get her to the ground before my powers caused me to absorb her soul.
I’d just maneuvered Ms. Super Smartypants into a no-win scenario, and she damned well knew it.
I flew her out to a freshly mowed field with nothing around for miles in any direction and swooped down, dropping her squarely in the middle of an exposed patch of tilled earth. The air was already turning cold around us, and when I dropped her I knew it was going to sting a little. I was cool with that, and she obliged me with a cry as she landed. Not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
I doubled around and came flying back for effect, looming over her as she tried to get to her feet. “How fast can you run, Cassidy?” I asked, letting my mood cloud my face darkly.
She plopped back down on her skinny ass, black dirt all over her wet legs. “Not fast enough,” she said with a sullen scowl of her own. It looked like the mug shot all over again.
“Your friends left you behind,” I said, playing a hunch. “Did your boyfriend even tell you he was going to collapse the house?” Her sullen face wavered, and I knew in that moment that Zollers had the measure of her. All the brains in the world, not enough emotional maturity to handle a rebuke from a stranger. She pulled her knees close and wrapped her arms around them, still dripping beads of water onto the dirt. “He left you, did you know that? Ran off with the entire Clary family without even a word of warning.”
She pulled her knees tighter to her chest, like she could put a wall between us. I felt a cool satisfaction roll through as my jab hit home. Her lower lip quivered as she tried to hold it together. This was the girl who’d tried to get the inmates in my prison to rise up and murder me, the person who’d been feeding my secrets, my sadnesses, my personal emotional tragedies to the press for months in order to prey on my insecurities.
“He abandoned you,” I said, easing closer to her. I was careful not to get too close, not because I feared for anything she could do to me, but because if she took a swipe at me I’d probably break her hand on general principle. “He left you behind the moment things got tough.”
“You’re lying,” she said, shaking slightly. “We didn’t even know you were coming.”
“Oh ho ho,” I laughed. “He didn’t even have to pick between you and saving his own skin; Clyde Junior shot at me for five minutes before I made it in the door.” My jaw tightened as I remembered the blood flooding out from between Scott’s fingers. “He left you behind because he didn’t want to take you with him. Ma busted the house’s supports out while Junior distracted us, and Eric waited out back until she told him to drop the place around our ears with a custom-made earthquake.” I moved to look her right in the eyes as she turned her head to avoid me. “Face it. He left you behind … because he wanted to.”
She shook her head back and forth in a tight, almost muscle-spasm driven way. Her eyes were fixed open and red, the tears already starting to stream. I blinked and looked at her, my surprise escaping before I could restrain it. “Is that … are you … crying? There’s no crying in super villainy.”
That got her to look right at me with those puffy eyes. Her lip quivered. “I’m not the villain. You are, and you don’t even realize it.”
“I’m the villain?” I pulled back my hand and put it on my chest like I was offended. “If I was the villain, Cassidy, I would have ripped the thoughts I needed out of your swelled head and left your carcass in the middle of this field for the crows to have a meal that fit their diet plan.” I lurched toward her and she cowered away.
“You’re the strong,” she said, voice oozing contempt, “I’m the weak. You prey on the weak, it’s what you do.”
“I enforce the law,” I said, feeling a little burn inside. “You and your boyfriend tried to rob the biggest bank in the country, in case you forgot, and then Simmons crashed a commuter train full of people in a vain attempt to escape the consequences of that act. He put the lives of innocent people at risk to save himself from jail. You’re Bonnie and Clyde, if you’re self-aware enough to recognize that makes you nothing more than petty, two-bit losers and not Hollywood-glamorized martyrs to the cause.”
“I know what I am,” she said, and turned her head away like she was denying me a kiss or something, “and I know who you are, and I’m not telling you anything.”
“I never needed you to,” I said, “and you know that.” I stood up and loomed over her pitiful frame as she quaked in my shadow.
“You’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you?” Her voice shook a little, but she refused to look at me.
“More than you know,” I said.
“You’re a psychopath,” she whispered. “You like to hurt people. You like to kill people.”
“I’m neither going to hurt you nor kill you, Cassidy,” I said, and grabbed her by her onesie as we both lifted off into the air. She let out a squawk of surprise as we surged back up to five thousand feet and I hit a cruising pace that was only a couple hundred miles per hour, well below what I was capable of. I didn’t want to strain her swimsuit, after all. If I splattered her all over the countryside, it wouldn’t achieve anything but fill the air with her screams for a few seconds before she came to an abrupt stop at the bottom.
“What the hell are you doing?” she cried out.
“I’m taking you to jail,” I said as the wind whipped past my face and I headed north and ea
st, toward the darkening sky. “Where you’ll get to spend the rest of your life thinking about what you’ve done.”
“You—you were supposed to take my memories!” she shouted. “You were going to—”
“You don’t know anything,” I said, firmly convinced I was right. “I don’t need to read your mind to know that your friends betrayed you and didn’t even give you a clue about where they were going.”
Even in the looming haze, I could see her redden in fury. “I know more than you think I do.”
“Twice as much, I’m sure. Maybe even three times as much, but unfortunately for you, thrice zero is still zero.”
I flew on into the approaching night slowly, and the whole way back to Minnesota I got the satisfaction of watching Cassidy burn in silence—and I didn’t even have to use Gavrikov to do it.
28.
Ma
The house was outside Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the state line from Omaha, but it might as well have been across the world for Ma’s purposes. They’d skirted the edge of civilization, watching the skies all the while, worrying that Sienna Nealon might coming swooping down from above at any moment. Well, Junior, Denise and Simmons had worried about it, anyway. She hadn’t so much as cast a look in concern.
“Ma,” Junior said, taking a break from looking out as they thumped up the driveway to the old house, “why ain’t you worried?”
“The girl’s suspended,” Ma said, certain as she could be. “And we know what she’s dealing with. She’s got no access to anything at this point.”
“Well, she found us somehow,” Junior said, raising a decent point. “You don’t think she can drone strike us or something?”
Ma pondered that. “You got a point there. Could be that computer geek figured out a way back to us. Cassidy wasn’t nearly so smart as she thought she was, I reckon, being as she got caught flat-footed. But we stayed off the main roads, took the long way around, not a camera in sight and none of us have a cell phone, so …” She shook her head. “If she’s gonna get us, she’s gonna get us. We’ll make our stand here, and this time we won’t run.”
“If that’s way the way it’s gonna be,” Junior said, and she knew he was resolved now. Moment of weakness passed, he threw open the van door and got out.
Ma followed, hanging by a nervous Simmons. The boy looked washed out. “Just relax yourself, Eric,” she said, and put a meaty hand on his shoulder. He quailed at the touch. “You just stick with us for a bit, and when we get all done with this, you’ll be knee deep in some pretty little stick figure on the coast before you know it.”
“Do the girls out there really have more plastic parts than a Barbie?” Junior threw out.
Simmons just blinked at him as they walked toward the front porch. “Uh …”
“What the hell are you doing here?” The voice was all challenge, greeting them from the porch. “Ma Clary over here in Iowa, as I live and breathe.” The man who stood there wore overalls, the stereotypical sonofagun. He looked like a farmer even though he damned sure wasn’t. “Never thought I’d see the day your clan came a callin’ again, not after last time.”
“Y’all don’t know how to do a Christmas dinner, Blimpy,” Ma fired back. His name was Dirigible Jim Clary, but everyone had called him Blimpy since he listened to the Hindenburg go down on the radio and jumped around like a maniac. His parents hadn’t even named him until then. His mother was human and from the old school, when infant mortality was so high you didn’t give a kid a name until they hit two; made it easier to part with them if you didn’t get too attached. “You don’t even think about having a squabble until after everybody gets fed.”
“That was all on your boy,” Blimpy said. He wasn’t fat, that was for sure. Looked like he had wrought-iron limbs under his overalls. “He picked that fight, and I finished it for him.” Blimpy turned and opened the screened door, shouting inside. “Janice! Buck! Get out here! We got kin come to visit.”
Ma took the lead, sauntering up to the bottom railing of the porch. “Sorry to come calling out of the blue.”
“It ain’t a problem,” Blimpy said as the door flapped open to admit a boy who would have been more aptly named if he’d been Blimpy instead of Buck. Buck wore a stained t-shirt with a Coca-Cola logo on it, holes all around the armpits to give a beautiful view of stray hairs sticking out. He didn’t have a single one to spare on his head save for the sides, but he certainly had plenty to stick out of the armpits of his t-shirt. “Just so long as you didn’t come looking to finish up that brawl. How long ago was that?”
“Eight years,” Ma said. She threw out an arm and thumped it again Junior’s arm as he stopped at her side. “Junior here was just a boy, didn’t even have his power yet.”
“No, nor did Denise,” Blimpy said, eyeing the girl. “What are you now, girl?”
Denise didn’t answer, but her hair shot out and hung in front of Blimpy who eyed it in surprise before grasping it and giving it a shake like it was a hand. “Medusa, huh? Well, all right then. Didn’t know we had any of your kind in the family.”
“Comes from her mother’s side, I think,” Ma said. “Listen, Blimpy, we got a problem.” Janice brushed through the door behind her dad, looking like hell, hair out in every direction. That was the nice thing about being a Medusa, Ma supposed; she never saw Denise looking like that.
“What kinda problem?” Blimpy asked, pausing and spitting off the porch. He got a distance with it.
“We got a feud with the feds,” she said. “We went after the one that killed Clyde—”
“Huh,” Blimpy said, spitting again, “I told him before he went off to that job that it sounded like a government deal.”
“Well, Sienna Nealon was the one that killed him,” Ma said, “and now we got a feud with her. She wrecked our house.”
Blimpy calculated that about a second. “Well, come on in, then.”
Ma nodded as he opened the door. “You sure?”
Blimpy looked at her shrewdly. “You think I don’t know what it means, opening the door to you? You got a feud with a federal officer. I know damned well what it means.” He leaned toward her. “But you know what else I know? All the stories my daddy told me about the days when gods could damned well do what they wanted, when power was the ticket. Way I see it, that Sienna girl, she’s the—whaddyacallit—the last bastion, the refuge of that agency—she’s all they got, is what I’m saying.” He smacked his lips. “I reckon we take her out, times are gonna be changing around here.” He tugged his door open a little more and Buck made way, stepping off to the side. “So come on in … let’s talk about how we go about ending this feud.” And they did.
29.
Sienna
I came barreling into headquarters with my prisoner twisted up in my grasp. Cassidy had taken the moment of our landing as an opportunity to throw a shit fit, probably because she knew there were security cameras all around the lobby just waiting to capture her temper tantrum and the Sienna-clubbing-a-baby-seal reaction that would likely result. That film would sit in an archive somewhere, waiting for her or someone affiliated with her to someday hit it with a Freedom of Information Act request, and who knew, maybe it’d even be granted. We’d been lucky in that regard so far.
But I could see how she probably pictured it, and it had all the makings of being the next great YouTube hit video. Because it’d get millions of hits, plus the one where I knocked her unconscious and dragged her insensate body to her cell.
Rogers wasn’t on duty now. Instead it was two guys, neither of whom I recognized. I suspected we’d suffered another mass culling of security personnel while I’d been comatose recently, but I hadn’t had anyone confirm it for me. I was suspended, after all, so informing me as department head probably wasn’t high on their priority list.
“Hi,” I said, dragging Cassidy screaming across the floor. She was bucking her back against the tile, thumping her skinny ass up and down. “Got another one.”
The two guard
s looked at me like I had toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe instead of a slightly damp, pale-as-milk skinny Minnie in tow. Her butt was actually making sucking sounds against the tile floor as I dragged her up to them. Her onesie was strong, and I was thankful for this, since she was clearly the biggest infant on the planet at the moment.
“Uh … we can’t take that,” the one on the left said, clearly speaking for both of them in this matter.
“You might want to,” I said, “she’s a federal fugitive, wanted in connection to the jailbreak that took place here in January.” Just threw that out there, waited to see what effect it had.
The guards looked at each other, clearly not super happy about being in the middle of this. They cradled their M4s for comfort. Or something. “We, uh … you know what? The boss is on his way down,” one of them finally said.
“Oh, good.” I twisted tighter on Cassidy’s onesie as she bucked against the floor and screamed. “We’ll just wait for him to get here, then.” The two guards stared at her as she continued her toddler act. “So,” I said, making conversation, “how’s things? Enjoying your jobs so far?”
The one who’d spoken earlier looked like he was in a trance, watching Cassidy. The other looked right at me. He was middle-aged. His nametag said “Thorsen.” “Been quiet up till now,” he said, looking back to Cassidy as she tried to roll face down and punch the floor. “You know, my two-year-old does that when he gets really mad.”
I nodded sympathetically. “How do you handle it?”
“Just ignore it,” he said, shrugging. “Sooner or later they quit.”
“She’s not doing this for us,” I said, “she’s doing it for the cameras.” I sensed Cassidy as she stiffened like a board. Apparently her emotional immaturity extended to having her plans foiled as well.
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