“Very Kent State, wouldn’t you say?” Karma asked with a laugh. “Not my usual use of power, but an effective demonstration nonetheless. Get it? I said ‘Kent State’ and ‘demonstration’ in the same sentence.”
“How is this helping?” Drake demanded, ripping the rose free of the barrel and jamming the pistol back into its holster.
“I am showing you how to reach your own potential.”
“What potential?”
“You can be so much more than what you are, brother. Are you satisfied with your life?”
“I tell you what,” Drake said, folding his arms across his chest. “You call me brother one more time, and I’ll be satisfied to take a leak on your carpet.”
“But we are brothers,” Karma said with a sad tone. “Besides, what carpet?”
Drake glanced down at his feet to discover that the fine red carpet upon which he had been standing was now a writhing mass of snakes. He recognized corals and cobras at first glance, following a second later with asps, mambas and even rattlesnakes. His head slowly rose to look at the satisfied smile on the face of Karma.
“Shoulda chosen your audience better for that trick, slick. You’ve got a dragon and a man who can’t be hurt, and you give us snakes?”
“It was a try,” admitted Karma. The carpet returned in a shimmer of scarlet. “So do you want my help or not?”
“Of course we want your help!” Drake shouted. “Why the hell else would we sit here while you go all Copperfield on us?”
“Then I want yours.”
“As I said earlier, what do we have to offer you?” Calder asked.
“What is it you want most, Ian? To be free of the horrors of your past? To sleep peacefully? To forget?”
“No. I can never forget,” Calder said flatly. “To forget them all would be the worst thing I could ever do. All I want is to control what I am so that it never happens again.”
“Sold,” Karma said. His eyes rolled back for a second and his eyelids fluttered madly. A moment later, he began to cough violently, doubling over on the floor. A glowing blue crystal spat from his lips to lay on the carpet. Wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand Karma retrieved the crystal and handed it to Drake.
“Break this on Patriot’s forehead,” he said. “It will cure him.”
“That simple?” Drake asked, looking doubtfully at the item he held in his hand.
“If you call it simple, then it is. If you make it harder than it should be then it is not.”
“Okay, that’s it. We’re out of here,” Drake said. “Thanks for your help, but we ain’t hanging out in the crazy crib no more.”
“True, you are returning to Patriot’s side, brother, but Ian is remaining here with me,” Karma said. “He and I have an arrangement. You see, the one thing I do not have is a student who actually wants something besides raw power. Well, until now,” he added, sweeping a hand to indicate Calder.
“Wait a minute,” Drake demanded. “You ain’t telling me he’s -”
“He’s right,” Calder said, cutting off the reptilian booster in mid-rant. “I’ll stay here. If he can teach me how to control The Voice inside me then it is worth it. If not, what have I lost? Meantime, you go back to the lab and cure Patriot. That was the mission anyway.”
“I am sorry,” Karma said, looking sadly at Drake and shaking his head. “His deal was made first.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Drake asked.
“He will be my new student and not you.“
“Yeah? So what?”
“I see it in your thoughts,” Karma told him. He raised his arms and then suddenly shot them forward toward Drake. “You wanted me to help your brother.”
The world receded around Drake and faded to black.
Chapter Twelve
The last words of Karma were still ringing in Drake’s ears as reality - or the version to which the reptilian booster was more accustomed - reasserted itself. The first thing Drake noted was that everything was much darker than it had been in Karma’s sanctum. He was standing in the center of a deserted stretch of cracked pavement. Buildings rose around him, their features only dimly illuminated by the single yellow-orange streetlight which fought valiantly against the shadows from some eighty feet away.
“What the…” Drake muttered, glancing around to make some sense of his surroundings. He took in a quick breath through his nostrils, catching the scents of gasoline and smog intermingled with rotting garbage and stagnant water.
The crystal he held in his left hand pulsed with an inner energy, and Drake snarled down at it.
“I knew it was too easy,” he grumbled, tucking the stone into one of the pouches on his belt. Leaping from the ground, he spread his wings and worked them mightily to grab at the air. In seconds he was airborne. Straining against gravity, he slowly began to rise until he came to the top of a nearby building. His feet gripped the stone at the edge of the roof and he turned around to crouch there, looking for all the world like a recently-updated version of a medieval gargoyle. Yellow eyes scanned across the area, looking for any landmark or sign of life that might establish his whereabouts. The sounds of vehicular travel and shouted voices drifted in on the night air, and he was comforted to know that he had not been transported to some alternate reality where everyone was simply gone.
A thought struck him and he reached for his pocket, mentally berating himself for not having considered it before. The tiny cell phone snapped open, its face glowing with a bright blue luminescence. Drake pushed the speed dial setting for Colleen Hart. The phone rang on the other end and Drake held the device to his head, gnawing at his lip as the second ring sounded. His claws tapped impatiently on the concrete as he listened through the third.
“Hart,” came the sound from the other end. It was such a sudden release of tension that Drake nearly dropped his phone.
“Drake,” he reported. “Got the cure.”
“Excellent,” Hart said. Her tone was more relieved than Drake could ever remember hearing. There was a rushing noise suddenly in the phone as Hart covered the mouthpiece with her hand, followed by the muffled sound of Hart announcing his success to whoever else was present in the room with her. The sounds of cheering filtered through.
“What’s your E.T.A.?” Hart asked, the noise requiring her to raise her voice slightly.
“That depends,” Drake said.
“On?”
“On me figuring out just where in the hell that asshole Karma dropped me.”
“What?” Hart asked. All pretense of pleasantry vanished from her voice as it returned instantly to the icy tones with which Drake was so intimately familiar. “What are you saying?”
Drake sighed and rolled his eyes. “What do you think I’m saying? I’m saying I don’t know where I am. He sent me somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where. It’s a city or a town or something, but I’m on the outskirts. It’s dark and I can’t see any of those cute little signs that say ’You Are Here’. Run a track on my phone for me.”
Hart shouted orders on the other end of the line and Drake could practically see everyone jumping up to carry out those commands. He waited a moment for the trace to initiate. His phone made a loud chirping sound
“That’s it,” he whispered. “Come and find -”
The line went dead.
Cursing volubly, Drake stared at the screen as a tiny message danced across the screen.
“Signal lost. Battery low.”
Drake threw the device to the concrete of the roof and ground it under his foot. Circuitry and plastic gave way beneath the massive crushing foot with a high-pitched squealing sound. When next his foot lifted, all that remained was a smear of multicolored particles.
“Cheap-ass government crap!” he said, spitting on the pile of debris for good measure. His spittle smoked when it struck the ground. He leaped from the roof and spread his wings, angling for the nearest flicker of light.
Every beat of his wings brought him cl
oser to what Drake would describe as signs of civilization. He noted more and more vehicles in motion, lights in storefronts and an ever-growing number of major buildings. His initial landing point had obviously been far on the outskirts, but the city proper was growing beneath him at a rapid pace.
As he made his way deeper into the settlement, passing over roadways that were packed with cars, Drake looked down to see the strobing red-and-blue lights of a police cruiser moving at speed through one of the streets. It was pursuing a late-model Camaro running without lights. Blinks of fiery orange light were seen coming from the Camaro, followed by the sound of gunshots.
“Now there’s something I can deal with,” Drake said. His wings pulled back into a sleek triangle alongside his body and he arrowed straight down. Seconds before impact, he snapped out his wings and fought against the force of his descent. His feet thudded onto the pavement with surprising intensity, sending shocks of pain through his ankles and knees Ahead of him, still careening toward him at breakneck speed, was the blacked-out Camaro.
“Federal Agent!” Drake bellowed. He held out his badge in his left hand. As expected, the announcement had little effect on those inside the car. The only thing he really noticed was that the gunman in the passengers’ seat switched his aim toward the new threat. A scattering of shotgun pellets spat a glittering path of sparks across the pavement at his feet.
The nose of the car was only a few feet away from his legs when Drake threw himself to the side, dropping his badge and using the long claws of his left hand to rake across the wheels as the Camaro passed. Both tires on that side exploded raggedly, spattering the area with bits of rubber. The car slewed to one side and arced round in a wide circle. The exposed metal of the wheels sent showers of sparks into the night. Inside the car, the men screamed in terror as the vehicle spiraled through two complete spins. The sound of the engine had long since fallen to nearly nothing as the driver released the accelerator in his fear.
The police unit screeched to a halt behind the Camaro as it stopped moving. Drake regained his feet and advanced without waiting for the police. He gripped the frame of the drivers’ door and ripped it completely free of its attachments with a shriek of tortured metal. As the uniformed officer stepped from his cruiser, Drake leaned his face into the Camaro and opened his mouth in his most terrifying grin.
“I said ’Federal Agent’, dumbass!” he shouted as he grabbed the driver by the left shoulder and prepared to throw him from the vehicle.
The passenger leered at Drake from over the frame of a cut-down shotgun, grinning just as wildly as the booster. His finger tightened on the trigger and the vehicle rocked with concussion as the shotgun fired. Drake’s face was battered with pellets that ricocheted from his armored plates and shredded the interior of the vehicle as well as tearing through the exposed skin of both criminals. For his own part, Drake screamed in agony as muzzle blast scorched his eyes. He felt a spike of intense pain envelop the entire left side of his head as at least one of the pellets made its way past the ridges of armor surrounding those tender orbs and buried itself there. Multiple swirling images of the vehicle interior swam in his vision as tears and blood cascaded from his eyes. A second later, and he saw nothing at all through the left eye.
Drake’s head lifted as he arched his back in pain. The unleashed strength of the booster drove his skull through the roof, ripping through the thin metal. Another roar escaped his throat, accompanied by a roiling spurt of flame that lit the night sky as though it were midday. The supporting columns snapped with a screech as his shoulders rose. Great sobbing cries wracked him as he fell free of the car, dropping to one knee onto the pavement. His hands slapped over his aching eyes, and though he could not see it, he could feel that both palms were slicked with blood.
More shots rang out around him. The shotgun’s bass thunder was joined with the sharper barking sound of two separate pistols. The thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotors drifted in, accompanied by an ominous shrieking sound reminiscent of a jet aircraft. Pushing himself to his feet, Drake tottered unsteadily as he used the talons of his right hand to force open his right eye. He was desperate to get some sight of what was going on around him. The nictitating membranes that protected his eyes had snapped shut, and he saw the world around him as a blur of flashing lights and motion. A brilliant flare, accompanied by the deafening blast of the shotgun, gave him a clue as to the shooter’s position, and he threw himself forward as he lashed out with a fist.
The solid impact of his fist let him know he had scored a hit even before he heard the agonized cry of the shooter. He slapped down his hand, fumbling for the driver as he fought to regain his sight. A trio of shots cracked loudly from a position much closer to him, and he felt the hammer blows of the rounds slamming into his chest. The force of the shots drove the air from his lungs in a sulfurous cloud, and past experience told him he would have some severe bruising to deal with, but the armored nature of his skin prevented the bullets from penetrating to his organs.
Blindly, he snapped with his teeth, jaws opening and closing rapidly as he roared his frustration and rage. A scream of horror came from the driver, followed by his shout of surrender. Drake stopped trying to bite and let his hand go to the sound, wrapping the massive mitt around the head of the driver and holding the man steadily with painful force. His left hand went back up to cover the injured eye.
“Back away from the car!” shouted an amplified voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the police car, but with the echoes from surrounding buildings, Drake could not be certain. He had no wish to put himself at further risk from a police officer who had no way of knowing who the big booster was, though, and released the driver, taking a step back and raising his right hand over his head. In the background, he was aware of the sounds of sirens closing in on the scene.
“Federal Agent!” he called in response to the challenge. “Two in custody! Start me a medic!”
“Stand your ground,” ordered the voice. “Move and I’ll spread you across the street.”
“I ain’t moving,” Drake assured the speaker. “My ID’s in my pocket. Right front.”
“Get it,” said the voice, and it was much quieter now. Drake could tell even without opening his aching right eye that the speaker was standing before him now. “Real slow.”
Drake complied, removing his credentials from within his pocket and extending them. “Francis Drake, Department of Justice. I had a badge, but I dropped it just before the car almost hit -”
“We’ll find it,” the voice said. “Sit down, Agent Drake. EMS is on the way. I have a first aid kit if you would like me to check -”
It was Drake’s turn to cut off the speaker. He waved in the general direction of the wrecked Camaro. “I hit one of those guys pretty hard. Check him out first.”
“The police are tending to them.”
“The police? So who -”
As the question tumbled from his mouth, Drake reached up a hand and forced open the right eye again, blinking back the membrane with more than a little effort. He was looking into a wide, rounded metal face. Black crystalline eyes stared back with no hint of emotion. A quick glance down before he let the eye close again showed Drake that his rescuer was a humanoid machine in form. Only a couple of inches shorter than Drake, the machine would stand a full head taller than most people. It was made of a softly polished grey metal, and was obviously designed to anatomically mimic a human female form, albeit a very muscular copy of one. A sleek box was mounted on each shoulder, and the tips of two cylindrical objects extended from the front of each such box. The arms were heavy things, with wide powerful fingers, and stubby gun barrels that protruded from the top side of the wrists. Around the waist of the machine was a belt festooned with pouches. The legs were sculpted in much the same way as the rest of the machine, and while the whole thing radiated raw power, there was a hint of feminine grace to the manner in which it stood and moved. Once that element fell into place, Drake recognized
that the voice was that of a woman.
“—are you?” Drake finished as he closed the eye again. It still burned and stung with the aftereffects of the partially-burned cordite that had entered it when the shotgun went off. The left side of his head was now a solid, burning mass of torment in response to the optic injury. He stumbled a bit and then sat as the machine had bid. He felt the pressure of air from above as the police helicopter settled into a pattern above the scene, using its powerful spotlight to illuminate the area. More sirens could be heard approaching.
“Call me Soundstage. Sponsored booster. What brings you here to Austin?” asked the machine. Drake felt a gentle but strong hand ease his own away from his left eye. A cool sensation told him his eye was being irrigated with something, but he could not tell any more than that beyond the constant throbbing pain.
“Austin? As in Austin, Texas?” Drake asked, his voice cracking with surprise.
“Sure ain’t Canada,” Soundstage said with a laugh. The metal hands eased open Drake’s right eye, letting in the lights of the street. A second later, cool water flowed across the agonized orb.
“That should hold you until EMS can take a look at you,” Soundstage declared, letting the lid close.
“Just get the pellets out,” Drake said through gritted teeth. “I’ll heal. I always do.”
“No offense, Agent, but I’m going to let someone with a better knowledge of medicine deal with that,” came the reply.
“Fine. Whatever. Tell ’em to hurry, though.”
“We sure as hell don’t tell ’em to slow down,” laughed Soundstage.
Despite the pain, Drake managed a chuckle at her quip. A moment later, the sounds of booted feet running to his side, accompanied by the rolling noises of an EMS cot, announced the arrival of the paramedic crew. The boots squeaked on the pavement as they came to an abrupt halt.
Firedrake - Volume 1 Page 14
