Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Take that, jagoff!” I shouted, wondering if Vansen could hear me through the cockpit. Hoping that he could, I added, “That’s for calling me Friday’s girlfriend!”

  Vansen smacked the shattered cockpit out of the way as he started to bring the F-35 around again. “I’ve shot at you twice today and that’s what you’re upset about?”

  “How about I kick your ass and make you his girlfriend, then we’ll see how you like it?” I shouted, tossing a ball of flame at the right-side air intake. It shot in and flamed out the rear, hard, turning Vansen’s supersonic jet aircraft into a glorified helicopter in one shot. And not a very good one, either, since it relied heavily on the rear engine for thrust.

  The F-35 bucked hard as the engine flamed out, the rear sinking as the thrust nozzles designed to help keep it steady when aloft in vertical flight mode became the only thing holding it up. Vansen’s eyes got wide as he feverishly worked the control panels, but he wasn’t a stupid guy. He got, pretty quickly, that his aircraft was doomed, and within a couple seconds I watched him hit the eject. He was catapulted out of the plane and then disappeared about a hundred feet up, almost like he’d just vanished out of existence with his ejection seat.

  “Huh,” I said, wondering if he was going to reappear. I glanced back at Friday and Jon, figuring that Wiegert would have taken care of the problem of his old buddy falling out of the sky and heading toward death on the mountains below.

  Nope.

  Friday was still plummeting, and Wiegert was nowhere to be seen. I shot after Friday (instinctively, I swear), scanning for Wiegert, wondering if maybe Vansen had somehow teleported over to him and killed him.

  I found him hot dogging his way down, doing extreme tricks with his snowboard and trying—and I do mean trying, since I knew the bastard could fly as fast as I could—to look like he was making an attempt to save Friday. He was a few hundred yards back by now, though, Friday having somehow outpaced him in the fall, which presumably Jon was going to use as an excuse to justify not helping. He deployed his parachute while I watched, the sudden arresting of his downward momentum yanking him so hard that his snowboard jerked before it disappeared beneath the rainbow parachute. “How could I possibly have caught him? He was so far ahead,” I imagined him telling anyone who dared question his version of events. And there’d be at least two cameras with a record to back him up.

  Zooming down in a dive, I realized Friday was about five hundred yards from hitting the upper slopes of a snowy mountain. When he did hit, I imagined his insensate body was pretty well going to disintegrate on impact, because … well, that’s what bodies tended to do when they hit hard surfaces at terminal velocity.

  It was going to be a near thing, and I needed to be careful, because if I caught Friday at full speed, it would technically be worse than him hitting the slope below. Terminal velocity was about 200 miles per hour when traveling down with your arms all tucked in, after all, and I was traveling much, much faster than that in my attempt to save his big, dumb ass.

  I got close and matched velocity as best I could, with only a couple hundred yards to go, then grabbed Friday under the arms, snaking mine beneath his in an attempt to end this as gently as possible. I applied my version of the brakes, then shot hard down the slope of the mountain, intending to ride it down as much as I could before I brought Friday to a complete stop.

  It didn’t take as long as I thought it would have.

  “Gyahhhhh!” Friday woke up like he was coming out of a nightmare, waving his arms so hard he broke my grip, escaping me like an angry bull. He dropped twenty feet to the earth and landed squarely on his ass, producing an “OOOOF!” and the sound of a tailbone cracking as he struck the snow-dusted slope. He was already bleeding down the front of his chest and out of his gut, so I circled lower and figured I’d take a peek at the damage. Friday hit a tree in a way that would have played well in an old episode of The Three Stooges, stopping when he grabbed the thin trunk to arrest his further downhill momentum.

  “Are you—” I started to ask as I came in for a hover close to him.

  Friday vaulted to his feet like a drunk, staggering a few steps while dusting off the small amounts of snow he’d gathered to himself in the landing. “I’m okay! I’m okay, everyone! Nothing to worry about here.” And then he promptly fell over and damned near went tumbling down the slope.

  “Wow, you guys, that was crazy!” Jon shouted as he came in for his own landing. He unslung the snowboard neatly from his feet, and I figured he must have missed his preferred landing zone and decided to feign helpfulness, because there definitely wasn’t enough snow on the ground here for him to do his boarding. Tracts of exposed earth lay between tiny little patches of melting snow that was barely an inch thick. I looked up the mountain and could see long, perfect stretches of white, the sort of zones he was probably looking to hit before his jump went all to hell. “You all right?”

  “I’m good,” Friday said, staying firmly anchored on his ass instead of trying to stand once more. I didn’t really know where a Hercules lay on the power scale; I only knew that the higher up one was, the faster the metahuman healing tended to work. Friday brushed at his chest, and a piece of glittering metal caught the sun as he flicked it out of one of his wounds, a three-inch gash between his ribs.

  Since Friday didn’t appear ready to call his buddy out on what just happened, I figured I would. “What the hell was that, Jon-boy?”

  Jon shed his helmet and a wave of golden hair came flowing out, matted a little by sweat. He used the flourish of his move to delay his answer, and when he finally did, he gave me a kind of California pretty-boy smile. “What was what?”

  “I asked you to save him,” I said, jerking a thumb at Friday, “and you totally bailed on him. I get that he’s an idiot—”

  “Hey,” Friday said, sounding a little wounded.

  “—but you were going to let him die to avoid exposing yourself as a meta. Or maybe because you have your own axe to grind, I dunno—”

  “Hey, shhhh,” Jon said, looking around furtively and then zipping closer to us in a very short, one inch off the ground example of his flight power. “No one can know about that, okay? I’m in competitions sometimes, you know? Pretty sure the rules forbid metahumans in the—”

  “Oh, I see,” I said without bothering to disguise my disgust. “If someone has to die so you can continue to cheat in your little games—”

  “It’s not cheating!” Jon said, but he was looking a little guilty. “There are others who do it, too. It’s, uh … you know, kind of an … un-talked about, kinda common practice …”

  “Shut your mouth, Lance Armstrong,” I said, shaking my head. Something was buzzing faintly in the distance, over the steady breeze running over the mountains around us. “I just have one question, and you will answer it.”

  Jon swallowed heavily. “Or … you’ll kill me?”

  “No,” I snapped, “I’ll tell everyone you’re a cheating meta asshole chickenshit who’s been gaming the system.”

  Jon pursed his lips tightly. “Ouch. Some real talk there. Harsh.”

  “Gentler than death, though,” I said. “Now steady yourself, surfer-boy, because here comes the $64,000 question: Do you have any idea why Greg Vansen is trying to kill Friday—Bruce—whatever his name is?” I pointed at him, just so I could make sure Jon was clear on who I was talking about.

  Jon shrugged widely. “I have no idea, dudes.”

  That buzzing sound was getting louder now, and I was having a hard time deciding where the hell it was coming from. It sounded like it was behind me, but the slope down was thick with trees—another argument for why Jon would have been an idiot to snowboard here. Though I suppose with meta reflexes and the ability to fly, he was unlikely to end up kissing a trunk and dying spectacularly.

  “Hey, do you guys hear something?” Jon asked, looking into the sky like a dragon was going to come down on us all at any time. I could only hope it would eat him first, because he
was annoying me.

  “Yeah, what is th—” Friday didn’t even get out the full sentence before something roared down the slope, a black, shadowy shape appearing as if out of nowhere.

  It was an RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, an unapproved American design that incorporated stealth technology into an attack helo. Designed to exterminate the hell out of ground-based targets, it was a project that had never been brought into production because it was just too damned expensive for a redundant function. There were, after all, lots of ways for the military to kill the shit out of people on the ground without sending a hovering helicopter to hang out just overhead.

  Unfortunately for us, the Comanche being weak as shit was not one of the reasons the project got cancelled. In fact, from what I remembered, it was a pretty damned efficient killing machine.

  And it was pointed right at us.

  20.

  Augustus

  The slope above the cabin was a disaster-area-level mess, and I was in no position to do any kind of clean up, even after I awoke to the sound of the Great Wall of Augustus groaning in strain under my back.

  So I did what I always did.

  I called the cops.

  “Hmmm,” Chief Smithson said, standing with me and about fifty other cops about a hundred yards below the wall, listening to the creaking and cracking of the rocky bulwark as it resisted the weight of snow and tree and other debris. (I’d replaced the other rock that had broken loose back into the earth. It helped.) “Is that thing going to come busting down?”

  “Nah, it’s under control,” I said, stretching. My back should have been knotted after sleeping on a rock for hours, but I was feeling surprisingly good. Rested, even. “It’ll hold it all back until the snow melts and probably even after it evaporates. I might need to drain a little here and there, though.” As the idea occurred to me, I immediately popped open a few more pits in the earth behind it. Smaller ones, this time, to drain off some of the fluid that was accumulating at the bottom of the snow pack.

  The wall creaked its reply to the sudden relief of stress, and the cops all took a step back, led by the chief. “Well, all right, then,” he said, sounding pretty skeptical about the whole thing.

  “Did you catch any sign of Omar the Bubble Man?” I asked.

  Smithson didn’t bother to tear his eyes away to answer me. “Someone reported seeing something like that on the west highway out of town. Smashed two cars as he crossed the pass. Be pretty difficult to track him now that he’s out.”

  I hid my disappointment well. “It’s better you didn’t get a chance to cross paths with him,” I said. They were in no way ready for what Omar brought to the table. He would have left a bunch of crushed-up, soaked-out police cruisers in his wake.

  A roaring sound above made me look up, and then the clouds parted and the late afternoon sun shone through for just a second as a figure descended from the heavens. One of the cops shouted something about the second coming, and I almost snorted, because I knew it wasn’t that.

  “What happened?” Reed asked as he set down, pants legs flaring as his vortex cut out. The effect would have been a lot cooler if he’d been wearing parachute pants, but given the dark look on his face, I doubted he was in the mood to hear that suggestion.

  “I’m gonna suggest that you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know,” I said, trying to keep some of the snide out of my tone.

  “You could have called,” he said, way more gently than I was expecting. “You could have asked—”

  “Mother, may I?” I shot at him as Chief Smithson sauntered off, a little too casually.

  “—for help,” Reed said. I doubted that was what he was originally going to say.

  “Help and permission are starting to feel real close to the same,” I said, and I might have let a touch of resentment drip out.

  I watched him take a couple extra breaths, composing himself and his reply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you got an iron-fist thing going, Reed.” He cocked his head in confusion, so I went on. “You’re a good boss, Boss, but you’re kind of a micromanager. Get fixated on the small details of ops that you’re not even running. Like this.”

  When he answered, his voice was so full of irony it could have been his sister talking. “Nearly getting a town destroyed by an enemy meta’s avalanche is not a small thing, Augustus.”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting that,” I said. “And I don’t think you were expecting it either when you said I could pull on this thread. This guy I found, the one who helped make our troublemakers from last night? He was sipping his own cocktail, if you know what I mean. And not just the regular version, either.”

  Reed shook his head. “No, you’re right. Pulling down the ice off a mountain? Your garden variety frost giant couldn’t do that.”

  “He wasn’t a Jotun,” I said, and Reed frowned. “Or I should say … he wasn’t just a Jotun.”

  Reed froze. “You’re telling me—”

  “I think he was using both the enhancement formulas we know about,” I said. “The boost to grow his regular power, the one Harmon gave us … and the other one, the one Sienna discovered in that lab in Portland, the one that unlocks your secondary abilities. Whatever you want to call it. Because this dude? He attacked as a Poseidon at first.”

  “Holy hell,” Reed whispered. “Then this is—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s not just some little rinky-dink conspiracy to swell the meta ranks in the US with Edward Cavanagh’s serum.” I took a deep breath. “They’ve got access to everything—absolutely everything that’s been developed that we know about. And it looks like to me …” And I cast a glance over my shoulder, as though I could see, far off in the distance, Omar rolling over the hills as he made his escape, “… that they’ve got a hell of a lot of cards up their sleeve that they’re not playing yet.”

  21.

  Sienna

  “Any last words?” Greg Vansen asked, voice amplified by some artificial means, like he had speakers mounted on the outside of the chopper.

  “You know, I had the actual military hunting me last year and they didn’t deploy half the cool toys that you have,” I said to Vansen, staring up at him in his badass Comanche chopper. I admit, I was kinda jealous.

  “Thank you,” Vansen said with a sort of sincerity. “Now … any last words?” I counted at least a dozen missiles ready to light us up. Even I couldn’t move fast enough to retrieve Friday and get the hell out of Dodge before they started landing on us. Not at this range.

  “Why does he keep asking us that?” I wondered.

  “It’s his thing,” Jon Wiegert said, and then waved at Vansen in the cockpit. “Uhh, Greg? Bruce here says you want to kill me, maybe?”

  Greg peered down at him. “What? No.” He sounded a little offended about it. “I have nothing against you, Jon. I only want to kill him.” He looked a little pointedly at me. “Only him.”

  “Well, cool then,” Jon said, very California dude and sounding pretty relieved. “Cuz, uh … I got a filming to finish and then, later, a calendar shoot, so …” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll just go, if that’s cool with you?”

  “Yes,” Greg said. “We’re good.”

  “Awesome,” Jon said, and then waved his hands at the two of us. “Good luck, guys.” And then he flew off into the trees, backwards, snowboard under his arm.

  “I should warn you, I have my finger on the firing mechanism,” Greg said. “Any further attempts to distract or incapacitate me with the Warmind will result in immediate death. Any hint of your flames, and—well, I’ll fire, obviously. I know your other tricks as well—light nets, flight. Even a hint of your Quetzlcoatl straining at the edges of your skin and I will saturate the area around you with so much destruction that even you won’t survive, Ms. Nealon.”

  “You’re talking an awful lot for a guy who’s supposedly holding my life in the palm of his hand,” I shouted up at him. “Why not just pull
that trigger and be done already?”

  “My employer did not contract me to kill you,” Vansen said a little archly. “He specified some unnamed girlfriend—”

  “You keep calling me that and I’m going to go to Quetzlcoatl form up your ass, Vansen.”

  “—not the most dangerous meta on the planet,” Vansen said, ignoring my completely sincere threat. “I don’t believe that my earlier failure to kill Bruce here compels me to do something for free that many of the best and worst in my profession have already failed to do for considerable recompense. Therefore … you may go, provided you give me no more trouble in my endeavors. If you persist in this … well, I think you know where we stand. I know you. I know what you have available to you. Now … without further ado … any last words?”

  “Friday,” I said, “tell the man your regrets.” And then, in my own head, Harmon … I need to pull a hidden ace.

  Gerry Harmon sighed. Fine. I'm not one of your servile souls, but...just this once. What did you have in mind?

  “Uhmm …” Friday started, still lying flat from his fall and cringing, both from the pain and being put on the spot. “I feel really bad about that time I peed in the baptismal font. I didn’t know what it was, and I couldn’t find a bathroom …”

  Ignoring him as he started to ramble, I thought, I have in mind that I need to know what Vansen has in mind—and if there are any paths out I can’t see.

  There are always ways, Harmon said. You want to know what it feels like to read a mind? Here, have at it—

  I suddenly felt like someone had inserted an umbrella in my ear and opened it, releasing a flock of wild monkeys high on amphetamines who promptly went tearing through my skull, smashing everything they could get their filthy ape hands on.