“I’m sure we can find you a ride home. Or we can probably get you a room for tonight somewhere.”
Great, Sam thought, I can’t even afford new underwear. Where am I going to find the cash for a hotel room and a bus ride home?
“Walter, you there?”
Walter grabbed his walkie-talkie and walked a few steps away, “Roger.”
“Be on the lookout—one suspect has escaped custody. He may be on his way to the girl—”
Escaped custody? Someone got away? How? Sam had seen the police cuff them, watched as they searched them and locked them in the car before driving off—how the hell had one escaped?
Stepping back, Sam did a quick survey of the gift shop, noting exits, hiding places. Fran noticed her anxious look: “Relax, honey, Walter’s calling in backup. You’ll be fine. Besides, if someone escaped, they’re probably high-tailing it to the next county—not coming back for you.”
Rubbing her temple, Sam nodded. Despite having subsided earlier, the slow throbbing in her head signaled a clear return to skull-splitting agony. At this point, Sam had to acknowledge the headaches as a reliable indicator that she was about to get slammed with a great big mess of trouble.
“All the same, we should probably move into a back room or someplace out of sight. At least until backup arrives.” Fran glanced at the manager, who nodded and led them towards the back of the store. Meanwhile, Walter moved in the opposite direction, stationing himself near the front door.
They passed through a swinging door into a large room that served as both office and storage closet. The manager took a seat on a swivel chair. Nonplussed, he yawned and looked at his watch. Fran smiled at Samantha reassuringly and subtly unsnapped the holster of her gun, leaning against the wall, her foot propping the door open so she had a good look at her partner on the other side of the store.
Standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, Sam switched her weight from one foot to the other. Lane, Al, Harry? Weird, yes. Actual threats to her life? The jury was still out on that count.
Suddenly, Fran’s radio erupted in a burst of static—shouts, threats, gun shots—then the noise stopped.
OK, Samantha thought, now I’m scared. She looked to Fran for guidance, but the woman was otherwise occupied. She’d stuck the top half of her head out of the swinging door, asking Walter what they were going to do.
“Stay put,” Walter called out, “Backup’s on its way. There’s some man in a suit coming up the street.”
Oh, shit, Sam knew a man in a suit. What had Lane called him, again? Stone? Sam grabbed Fran’s shoulder, shaking it to get her attention, “Fran?”
“Not now, sweetie.”
“But the guy in the suit—”
“Get under the table!”
Glancing back towards the table in question, Sam discarded Fran’s suggestion. No way in hell was she going to huddle there, a target in plain sight.
Walter’s voice cut through the palpable silence of the room: “Put your hands up, sir, and stop—”
Walter’s remaining expletive went unspoken, his yell cutting off in a gargle. Pushing forward, Sam tried her best to look over Fran’s shoulder and through the crack in the door. It was difficult to tell, but from her perspective it looked like he was plucked from his feet and rammed against the ceiling. Just like an invisible hand had grabbed him and tossed him around as casually as a sack of potatoes. The same way she’d been thrown into the wall earlier.
“Geez Louise,” Fran said, “What the hell is going on here?” She slid back into the room, picking up the radio, “Where the hell are you guys?!”
Sam stayed, possessed with watching as Walter picked himself up, crawling towards their door. Only to do an abrupt face-plant, as a cookie jar shaped like a Harley Davidson hit him solidly on the back of the head.
“Close the damn door!” A hand clamped around her shoulder and yanked Samantha back into the room. Fran glared at her, “Hide! We’re waiting for backup!”
Right. Stay here with the cop who had a gun. Except those guns sure hadn’t helped the other cops outside. The sanctuary of the back room began to feel more like a deathtrap to Sam. Besides, Sam was what this guy wanted. Maybe if she drew him out, he’d leave Fran alone.
Without further ado, Sam slipped out the door, ignoring Fran’s hissed protests. At the end of the day, Fran wasn’t much of a hero, letting her go when it became clear she’d have to risk her own neck to bring her back. Crouching low to the ground, Sam made her way to her right, towards an emergency exit that led to the side of the building.
“Is that you, Miss Gibson?”
Sam froze in her tracks. It was him, all right, Armani, no, Stone as Lane had called him. And there was the emergency exit door, only twenty feet away to her right. Dispensing with theatrics, Sam straightened and ran, heading towards the door in a flat-out sprint.
Only to slam into it, full speed. Sliding to the floor, Samantha gripped her head, which rang with the impact. Stuck! The door was stuck shut!
Behind her, Armani laughed. As he crossed the room, various trinkets, knick-knacks, and doodads began to lift off their shelves, drifting along behind him, as though caught in his current. He grinned, “So, how would you prefer to have your head bashed in: Bugs Bunny telephone or candy juke box?”
Standing, Sam pressed backwards against the exit door in vain. The thing wouldn’t budge.
“I’d prefer Bugs,” she said, only stuttering a little bit. “Maybe his regenerative powers will wear off on me.”
“Clever. Trying to stall, hoping to draw me into conversation and give yourself time to—”
Bang! The force of the gunshot dislodged a ceiling tile, which crashed to the floor. Surprised, Stone spun around. Concentration broken, the accumulated hovering souvenirs crashed to the ground with the tile. And Sam felt herself pitch backwards as the door suddenly, blessedly, swung open. Taking a few stumbling steps into the parking lot, she turned back to see how Stone was going to respond.
But Stone wasn’t paying attention to her. Instead, he was looking at Fran. She crouched outside the door of the storage room, her gun drawn. “Shoot him!” Sam yelled through the door, “Shoot him now!”
Fran ignored her, “Put your hands on your head and lie down!”
Stone laughed, shrugging, “Should have listened to the girl.” He smiled and the gun flew out of Fran’s hand and into his own. Cursing, Fran turned to run back to the storage room—but now she was the one locked out.
“You put your hands on your head.” Fran obeyed. “Great. Now duck.” Stone fired twice, hitting Fran squarely in the chest.
Oh no, oh no, oh no. Please let her be wearing a flak vest, Sam thought. Please let her be alive.
And then Stone turned back to her.
Sam ran. Her tennis shoes slipped and slid on the pebbly concrete of the parking lot as she raced away from the diner. She made it to the other side of the lot as he blasted through the back door. Sliding to the ground next to a pick-up, Sam wiggled under the car, wedging herself as far under as she could.
Stone took his time walking over to her this time. Crouching, he peeped under the car. “This was the best you could do?”
He leaned towards her, and another jolt of pain went through Sam’s mind: a sign of building pressure.
Something was there, getting stronger, fueled by terror, and the intense desire to fight back. It felt like power, the way the air felt before a lighting storm. She could sense it, hovering at the edge of her vision, rippling around them like the air rippled in a heat mirage, but almost palpable. It surrounded Stone, stronger, more distinct, and fueling him somehow.
Stone reached forward, grabbing her right ankle. Sam twisted, pulling away, “Get away from me, you freak!” She kicked out with her left leg, nailing him square in his pretty face. Taken by surprise, Stone fell backwards onto the ground, holding his bloody nose.
“Bitch!” he said, “You want me to—” And then the world went white. Literally, white, as lightning a
rced down to the ground, enveloping Stone in a flash so bright it seared Sam’s eyes.
From the safety of the dirty, oily undercarriage of the pick-up, Sam watched, eyes wide, as Stone’s body twitched in shock. Still, he sat up straight, wobbling, looking at her with his mouth hanging open in some strange parody of a sneer. Then, a sudden squeal of tires as another car pulled up on the other side of the truck. Turning, Sam saw the tires belonged to the bottom half of a familiar blue sedan. Crawling out from under the pick-up as fast as she could manage, Sam reached up, gratefully, into the pair of arms that pulled her up and into the safety of their car.
“Floor it!” Lane yelled, falling back into the car, clutching Samantha. Al, in the driver’s seat, threw the car into reverse and peeled out of the parking lot. The force of the acceleration shut the still-open car door, and Sam would have been thrown to the ground if not for the steadying grip around her middle.
“You ok?” Lane asked, sounding slightly out of breath.
Her arms were wrapped around his neck, and his were around her waist. She lay on top of him, none too gracefully sprawled in the back seat. For a second, Sam wanted to stay there. To sink down against his chest and just close her eyes.
Then she remembered where she was. Who she was. With a tight smile, she pushed herself up. Lane grunted at the impact of her hands on his diaphragm and stomach and her knee in his thigh as she righted herself in the back of the car. Sam reached for a seatbelt, plugging it in with a definitive click to emphasize their separation: “I’m fine.”
Pulling himself upright and fastening his own seatbelt, Lane gave her an inscrutable look. Sam ignored him, craning around and trying to catch a glimpse out of the back window. The diner was already out of sight, though, and Al was pulling the car onto the freeway. Sirens wailing, several police cars passed them, heading in the opposite direction. Too late to do any good, even if they could.
“Don’t worry,” Lane said, “Even Stone can’t face down that many kilowatts. He’ll be down for a while.”
“Then why are we running?”
“Because he’s not working alone,” Al said. Sitting in the front passenger seat, Harry leaned against the window, eyes closed and withdrawn. His freckles popped out in stark contrast to his skin, which had a greenish cast to it.
“What happened to him?” Sam asked.
“Lightning bolts aren’t exactly easy. All that energy has to come from somewhere,” Lane said. Sam took a longer look at Harry. She had trouble reconciling the quiet, shy guy with the freak of nature she’d just witnessed. He’d made lightning? No, that kind of thing should come from people in colorful unitards, with white hair and exotic features. Not pudgy twenty-somethings who spent too much time on the internet.
“She still doesn’t believe us,” Al muttered. Lane shrugged, as though to say there wasn’t much else they could do about that.
But Al was wrong. Sam did believe. She’d seen it with her own eyes, after all, and this time she couldn’t blame it on a lack of oxygen. She wasn’t dumb enough to keep denying, not when she herself had been on the verge of the same discovery. It wasn’t belief that was the problem.
It was the heavy feeling of dread when she realized another, related truth: in a few short hours, the world had changed from something solid and practical, something she knew and understood, into something strange and unpredictable. A new place she had no experience with.She was out of her depth. And until she had a better idea of how things worked, she was actually going to have to rely on the three Hardy boys to show her the way. Taking a deep breath, Sam turned to Lane: “Tell me everything I need to know.”
Chapter 5
“We call ourselves Talents,” Lane began, “We aren’t superhuman, nothing like that. Our brains work differently, and because of that we have special abilities. But it’s a genetic trait, like red hair, or the ability to run fast. It’s passed down through families.”
“But when someone’s good at sports, they’re on the news. Why haven’t I heard of this before?”
“We’re organized. You ever heard of the Inquisition? Early on in history, we recognized that being a Talent was...a liability. So we learned to keep things to ourselves. Quiet self-governing organizations set the rules; the rest of us follow. The U.S. Government knows, of course. At least, those with security clearance. But for the most part, we keep a low profile. Accidents like yours don’t happen that often.”
“You mean the bus crash? I had nothing to do with that. Honestly, I don’t know why you, Stone, any of these people are using that as a reason to fixate on me.”
This was the truth. About a week ago, Sam had been taking the bus home from visiting the Santa Monica pier. They’d been heading east on the I-10 when a car ahead of them cut off an SUV. The SUV broke too fast and spun out of control. Since the rule on all California highways was to drive as close as humanly possible to one another, this had set off a chain reaction nightmare of crashes.
Sam had been sitting in the back of the bus, helpless, watching as the disaster unfolded. The driver cursed, slammed on the breaks, but even he couldn’t defy the laws of physics and then—the world went black.
She woke up with paramedics hovering over her, telling her not to move. But she was fine. Everyone on the bus was fine, actually. In a thirty-something car pile-up, everything had somehow managed to wreck around them. It was a strange occurrence, but of course the news had to make something out of it and call it a miracle.
Clearly, Lane didn’t quite believe her, but rather than looking skeptical he looked sympathetic: “It’s common for Talents in transition to go through a period of denial. Your abilities aren’t fully formed yet, and—”
“Transition?”
“It’s like—think about growing an extra arm, you know? Your brain would have to figure out how to use it. This is similar,” Lane explained, “Most Talents go through it younger than you. Around puberty. Which really makes puberty suck, believe me.”
“So what’s different about me?”
“No telling. But usually the later you go through transition, the stronger your powers tend to be. So that’s good,” he said, giving her a reassuring smile.
Sam didn’t buy it. That smile never met his eyes, which meant he was leaving things out. But she decided not to press him right now. She had a whole list of questions to be answered, but she had the feeling that if she wanted total honesty, she’d have to wait until she could catch him off-guard.
“So,” Sam said, looking towards Al, “Do we have a destination in mind, or are we just running aimlessly?”
“We’re going to Vegas, baby, Vegas!” Al exclaimed, “And I’m going to double down on black, whatever that means.”
“My supervisor is in Vegas,” Lane said, “On vacation. He won’t appreciate the interruption, but I’m sure he’ll understand when we explain what happened. He can help you, protect you.”
So at least someone here knew what they were doing. That was a relief.
“We just have to find him,” Al said, “Shouldn’t be too hard in Vegas.”
Maybe not such a relief after all.
#
Sam sat up abruptly and realized she had been napping. She blinked at the neon lights, trying to remember where they were.
“We’re here!” Al said.
Looking around, she realized they were parked in front of a convenience store. Pretty plain and standard for a convenience store in a strip mall. But what was hurting her eyes was the enormous neon sign sitting on top of the otherwise nondescript building—and the dozen or so others crowding the street. The glamour of the sign belied the crappy stucco of the row of shops built in the 70s, before everything in this area had been taken over by mega corporations. Situated as it was, a low-rent place in the highest valued block in Vegas, it was clear that the strip mall was only biding time before it was swallowed up and knocked down to make room for another one of the gauche hotels taking over the strip.
“How’ll we find Jacobs?” Harry
asked, peeking through the window and up at the hotel/casino shadowing them. “This place is insane.”
“One step at a time,” Lane said, “Though I’m sure a few phone calls wouldn’t hurt.”
Harry shook his head, clearly not happy with this answer. At least he looked more awake, Sam thought, and healthier. That was one thing to check off her guilt list.
Sam stretched her arms over her head, working out the cricks in her shoulders caused by a combination of stress and sleeping unnaturally. She couldn’t stretch away the pressure in her skull, which was starting to build again. Like her brain was a battery—no, a generator, that had been flipped on and was looking for a place to put all of the excess. Only she had no idea what to do with it.
Climbing out of the car, she took a step towards the convenience store only to find Al blocking her way with an awkward smile. A strong hand gripped her shoulder, and she turned to find Lane looking down at her. Oh. Right. That whole police thing.
“I believe you now. Talents. Telekinetic powers. Really cool. I understand,” Sam said. Fat lot of good it did her. Lane’s hand loosened up; it didn’t let go. Sam sighed, “I’m not going to be left alone any time soon, am I?”
Lane cleared his throat, looking down on her, “It’s for your safety, really.” He inclined his head towards Harry, who stepped forward: her new honor guard. And so you don’t try to sabotage us again, Lane had the good grace not to mention. Which is the price you pay for being sensible, Sam reasoned to herself. And since you still don’t know what’s going on, you’re sensibly going to ignore any unpleasant confrontations with the three weirdos who have twice saved your behind. Two weirdos, one weirdo in a cute and undeniably appealing package. At least for now. At least until she figured out how to regain control over the situation and get out of this mess.
Giving Harry a sidewise look, Sam left the car, heading into the store. Harry followed, blushing bright red as he recognized the beeline she was making for the ladies’ room. Sam held the door open wide before she went in, illustrating that there was no escape from the windowless room. A few minutes later, having taken care of urgencies, she leaned on the single pedestal sink attached to the wall and frowned at her reflection in the cracked mirror. Hair: Messy. Face: Dirty. Clothes: Also dirty. Eyes: Red-rimmed with dark circles. Nose: Slightly crooked, but there was nothing she could do about that; it’d been like that for years. Self: Smelly. This, all told, was a lovely picture. The greenish cast of the fluorescent light bulb didn’t help her, either.
Chasing Power (Hidden Talents) Page 4
