“Whoa,” Steven said. “Hold your horses—you just got over being dead.”
“You’re right,” she said brusquely, “I just did. I am over it now. I am not, however, over Redbeard, not by a long, Chris Kyle-type shot.” She looked around the darkened tunnel. “Where is he?”
“There was a train wreck—” Steven said.
“You got that right,” Sienna said, all self-righteous fury waiting to be unleashed. Her shoulders slumped and she deflated a second later. “Oh, damn. You mean a literal train wreck, don’t you?”
“Back that way,” Kat said, pointing down the tunnel. “It hit the debris on the tracks that fell through the hole in the—”
She was gone in a flash, in flight, shooting back down into the darkness the way Kat had pointed.
“Damn,” Steven said with admiration. “She really is a hero, you know?”
“Hero, monster,” Kat said, staring into the darkness where Sienna had disappeared around the light curve, “I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, really.”
40.
Karl
The rage had lasted through the whole train, had fueled him through every horrible thing he’d done to every living person on that train. It had carried him down the tunnel, back to the station on a slow walk. It had led him to kill eight people on the platform, a few of them before they’d even realized what was going on. He’d murdered two police officers who had already been on the scene, trying to contain and assess the disaster area. Their blood was on his hands, the seething anger fueled by the slick feeling on his fingers. He could have let it drop off if he’d wanted; could have gone insubstantial but let the blood stay physical, and it would have slid off and hit the ground.
He kept the blood on his hands, though. It was a reminder, it was fuel, it was what he needed to keep going. This was his rage, his fury against the machine that had been set up against him, against so many of the sheep. The whole thing was the slaughterhouse, really, and he was supposed to be a sheep, like the others. Karl didn’t like being a sheep, but the slaughterhouse, like any slaughterhouse, wasn’t run for the benefit of the sheep. They didn’t get an opinion that counted, did they?
He walked up the stairs in MacArthur Park Station and found the world shrouded in mist. It was a nice little metaphor for the lack of clarity most people were living with. Shrugging, he made his way over to the cop car that was running just a few feet away, doors locked, and slipped inside. He wiped the blood on the passenger seat and put the car in gear. He even signaled his turn as he drove off, sirens blazing, back toward the Elysium neighborhood, back to his bolt hole, where he would upload his newly made videos while he watched the day’s events unfold on the news. Yes, that would be fun, watching the videos show up on TV. Virality was his way to reach the masses. He would sit and watch the horror and ready himself for the next phase of the plan, laughing all the while as they struggled to reconcile his seemingly random acts of violence.
41.
Sienna
I flew back down the tunnel, expecting the worst. When I’d gone out, everything had been flooding, after all, and it wasn’t like water would just U-turn and buck gravity to go the hell back to where it had come from.
So imagine my surprise when I got to the hole in the tunnel and found nothing but some residual hints of water on the tunnel floor, like maybe it had rained a little through its new sunroof, and that was it.
I paused to look up, and saw a thick, heavy mist that was starting to clear, hanging like a pall over MacArthur Park above. There was no sign of a lake, though, which normally I would have found worrisome.
There was, however, a commuter train wrecked not fifty feet away from me, and so I had other things on my mind besides seeking out the source of miracles like an amazing evaporating lake, especially when I had a member of my team that was able to control the flow of water. For all I knew, he was still desperately holding back the tide, and I had minutes to rescue the passengers on the train before we’d all get washed away.
Urgency. I had it. Always. Especially, apparently, after I’d just died.
I flew over the rubble, which had knocked the train rather soundly off its tracks, and I peered into the darkened compartment. I could see more compartments down the train, all jammed up and crooked in the small tunnel, like a zigzag pattern from their sudden stop.
It didn’t look like a terrible crash, as far as these things went. It wasn’t like any of the cars was lying on its side or anything. They were all still upright, though the lead engine had certainly been smashed in.
I flew above the first and second car and found a really minimal gap there. Someone as skinny as Kat might have been able to fit through, but there was no chance I was going to be able to, not with these hips. I decided to take another tack and flew all the way to the end of the train, the last car in line, and it was there, as I was about to rip the back door off, that I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.
There was blood splattered on the windows. Like, many, many of the windows. I’d seen car wrecks that had done things like that. I’d actually seen a lot of blood in my time (hold your surprise). My mind raced to fit what I was seeing in the rear compartment with the evidence of the crash. It hadn’t exactly been a delicate stop into a cushion of pillows, but it wasn’t a plane crash, either. The train was probably only going twenty or thirty miles an hour, tops, when it slammed to a halt. Maybe less.
So why were the rear compartment windows covered in blood?
I ripped the door off and found my answer and wished I hadn’t.
The holes in the passengers within were almost perfectly hand-shaped, as clear evidence of Redbeard at work as I needed. I hovered above the crime scene—because now that’s what this train was—careful not to touch anything, or anybody. When I was certain that there was no one alive in that car, I carefully made my way to the next one, and the next one, with greater and greater urgency, simply opening the doors between carriages where I could, smashing my way through a window where I couldn’t.
There was not a single survivor on the entire train. Every single one of these people was dead at the hands of a madman.
A madman I couldn’t stop.
42.
Scott
“I don’t know where Sienna or Kat are, exactly,” Scott said to the jaded, slightly exasperated Detective Meredith Waters. The scene was a disaster area, the mist finally starting to clear and revealing a scope of wreckage that Scott wouldn’t have guessed at. On the far side of the lake, where the bomb had gone off, it looked like a series of storefronts had been ripped open by a giant’s fingers, their flat roofs and internal structure exposed to the light of day.
“You didn’t see anything?” Detective Waters asked, one eyebrow slightly above the other.
“Well, they went down there,” Scott said, waving toward the hole in MacArthur Lake, “but I haven’t seen them since. I was a little busy trying to keep them from drowning.”
Detective Waters eyed the still-damp air hanging around them suspiciously. “You did this?”
“You think a whole lake evaporating is a natural phenomenon?”
“Could have been the drought for all I know,” Waters shot back, “I don’t get down here all that often.”
“Explains the state of the neighborhood, I guess,” Guy Friday added, standing with his arms folded just behind Scott. As if to punctuate the point a homeless man in an overcoat went strolling by just then, rolling a shopping cart filled with ripped-up, dried brown grass sod.
“What happened here?” Waters asked, her notepad open. The sun was shining through the light mist still hanging over them.
“A bomb,” Scott said, “another bomb buried in the lakebed, the lake started to drain into the tunnels, and then a train wrecked down there. There was also metahuman-on-metahuman action taking place throughout all of that.”
“Hot metahuman on metahuman action,” Guy Friday added, still not helpfully.
Waters seemed to def
late. “Well, you got the train wreck part right, at least.” She shot a glare at Guy Friday. “Why are you wearing that mask, sir?”
“That just what he does,” Scott said with a sigh.
“It’s eighty-seven degrees,” she said. “And sunny.”
“I’ll vouch for him,” Scott said. “He’s a federal agent, and he’s with me.”
That did not seem to appease Waters. “That may be, but as I understand it, you’re not a federal agent. When did you last see Sienna Nealon?”
“When she went down there,” Scott said, pointing at the hole again. “Well, not exactly there. She got dragged through the ground—”
“Never mind,” Waters said, now holding her head, pen dangling loosely from her grip. “Just … don’t leave yet. I need officers to get statements from both of you, once we have this scene secured.” She let out a ragged breath. “It could be a while.”
Scott took it all in with a look. The crime scene, if that’s what you could call it, stretched from the site of the first bombing all the way over to him. MacArthur Park was filling up with lookie loos. Between the park, the bomb site, the tunnel and the train crash, it was miles of scene to sift through. He didn’t envy the LAPD today. “You don’t say.”
At that moment, movement out of the crater in the lake drew Scott’s gaze. He turned to see Sienna rise out of the empty remains of MacArthur Lake, her hair frizzed and ragged, hanging off her in twisted locks, slightly wilder than if she’d taken a high-speed flight. Kat and Steven Clayton were both holding each of her hands, ripped material from Kat’s dress—which looked torn and awkwardly worn—wrapped around their hands to keep them from touching Sienna’s skin. She brought them up and let them both loose a foot over the concrete. They both landed adroitly, though Kat stumbled slightly on her bare feet.
Guy Friday spoke first. “What happened to your dress, Blondie?”
“I had to take it off for a while,” Kat said, brushing her hair back like it was no big deal.
“Go on,” Guy Friday said.
“Shut up, Guy Friday,” Sienna snapped.
“Hey,” Guy Friday said in plain annoyance, “my name is Yancy, okay?”
Sienna blinked. “I can see why you go by Guy Friday, then.”
“Are you all right?” Scott asked before Yancy Friday had a chance to reply.
“I’m fine,” Sienna said, a little too abruptly even for her.
“She died,” Kat said, “but other than that, she’s right as rain.” Kat puckered her lips. “Which doesn’t really fit here, does it? Because it doesn’t rain, I mean.”
“Did you check on the train wreck?” Waters asked, pushing forward, bumping Scott as she did so.
“It’s … bad,” Sienna said, her face paler than normal. “Really bad.”
“How bad?” Waters asked. Her walkie-talkie beeped, interrupting her, and she held up a finger to silence Sienna. “Go for Waters.”
“We have eight—repeat eight fatalities at MacArthur Park Station,” the voice over the radio said. “Two officers on scene. No need to hurry on ambulances.”
“Son of a—” Waters said, and let her finger off her walkie. “What the hell happened down there?” She fixated on Sienna.
“The bad guy,” Sienna said with a visible gulp that showed on her thin throat. “The train? He killed everyone on it.”
A stunned silence fell, broken only by the sound of sirens, the flashing of lights that surrounded them, the voices of emergency workers and a crowd that was barely being held back by the all-too-few officers currently on scene. Detective Waters’s walkie-talkie beeped again. “Go for Waters,” she said as she clicked the button once more.
“Detective,” the voice came, “Chief requires your presence at headquarters.”
“I’m managing a disaster scene right now,” Waters said, voice straining to break out of the calm inflection she was clearly trying to layer atop warring emotions. “What the hell is so important?”
The answer was a moment in coming. “Apparently the perp has uploaded video footage of massacring an entire train and those people at MacArthur Station. It’s going viral as we speak.”
43.
Karl
The hateful chaos caused by the carrion birds who were the media was like a feast for Karl’s senses. It fed the righteous rage, gave him a warm sense of accomplishment, even delight, as he watched the stunned reactions start to pile up. Even the news anchors—ghouls if ever there were any, people who practically prayed for a tragedy in order to make their names—were stunned into silence after watching his videos live on air.
“All the ‘Graphic Content Warnings’ in the world can’t prepare you sheep for what you’re seeing now,” Karl crowed into the silence of the nearly empty living room. He sat on the floor, his laptop set up on a coffee table. His mattress was in the corner, out of the way, and the bathroom down the hall. Other than the bedroom he used to store his explosives, the house was empty. Just a three-bedroom in the Elysium neighborhood that would have gone for over a million dollars if it were a mile to the east or west. But instead, he was here, in Elysium, where it was “only” worth a half million dollars.
The system was plainly rigged.
That was the best part of all this. The power structures of the day fawned over each other in a self-perpetuating system of reinforcement. The party he’d broken up the other night, with its elites lording their importance and superiority over the common people, they were watched like hawks by the media elites, who also fawned over the political elite, yet all of them were incestuous with each other—loving to cross paths, to measure their own excellence by all the famous people they knew. They had to confirm their own importance because without that confirmation, they’d just be impotent little weasels preening self-importantly without anyone to watch them.
Karl hated them all, hated all they stood for, and was hard pressed to decide who he hated most of all of them. Everything bad flowed from them—it was all just one lock-step theater show, Kabuki on parade, a show for the people who thought they had a say but didn’t realize that really, when it all came down to it, their vote counted for less in the world than their viewing habits and internet clicks. Money ruled all, but the elite provided the distraction that enabled it.
But this … this play of Karl’s, of his benefactor’s … this was going to reverse the course. This was going to pull things in a different direction, make noise of a sort that the chattering classes wouldn’t like. It would take the gaze off the distraction and put it firmly where it belonged—on the elite, the ones who needed to die in order for this grotesque system of oppression to pass.
And who were better symbols of that power, that elitism, than the world’s foremost guard dog—bitch, really—Sienna Nealon, and the most-loved meta celebrity in the nation, Kat Forrest?
Their tangential connection to Augustus Coleman was just the cherry on top, really. He wasn’t the power behind it all, anyway, he was just a guy who got caught up doing what Sienna Nealon had ordered him to do. He was a soldier, a sheep. These two were the real problem, the face of the enemy. It didn’t matter how pretty it was; once you destroyed that face, people would sit up and take notice.
Change was coming, Karl reflected, a smile twisting his pale face. Oh, yes, it was coming. And every step he took closer to the goal was like a return to that happiness he didn’t even think he could feel any more.
44.
Sienna
Disaster scenes weren’t the sort of thing that you could easily walk away from, especially if you were heavily involved in their creation. I was tired, ragged, and looked like shit, I was sure, but unfortunately the LAPD did not want me to leave MacArthur Park until I’d given a full statement. They didn’t even want me to see if I could help with rescue efforts—which I couldn’t, really. The shops that had been bombed had been hit with a pretty straightforward explosion that originated under the sidewalk outside. It had collapsed the storefronts, but most of the people caught in that h
ad been killed straight up. I could see them dragging the body bags out and piling them up on the street for transport, leaving the ambulances sitting there with lights flashing, hoping for survivors they weren’t finding.
It was grim as hell, so I found a bench and sat down, waiting for my turn with the police. They’d assigned one officer to take statements, probably because that was all they could spare. The whole place was crawling with LAPD, enough to make me think the rest of the city was probably like Candyland for criminals today. I’d seen SWAT descend into the subway station, followed by a bunch more cops and emergency workers, and now I could hear their voices faintly as they surveyed my findings in the tunnel below.
Steven Clayton was giving his statement to the lone officer assigned to watch my little carnival, and I was just sitting on a bench, staring out at the muddy floor of the lake that was already starting to dry in the sun. The mist was gone, clearly evaporated enough that the air barely felt humid anymore. This place needed rain like it needed Redbeard to die: desperately, urgently, and as soon as possible.
Scott was positioned at a bench about a hundred feet from mine, Guy Friday lurking behind it, still standing, arms folded, in his most serious bodyguarding posture. He was watching Kat pace back and forth at the edge of the lake, as though he was worried she was going fall off and end up in the mud below. Personally, I wasn’t worried about that. I would have welcomed it because I’m petty. If she came close enough to me, I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t have given her a good shove myself.
“Stop looking at me that way,” Kat snapped, orbiting closer to me on her next pass. Her green eyes were narrowed, and I didn’t even know she’d seen me. She was pacing furiously, her feet leaving the occasional bloody stain on the concrete path ringing the empty lake.
“I’m supposed to watch you,” I said mildly, “you know—in case someone tries to kill you. Again.”
Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change Page 17
