“Why didn’t it bother you to know that?” I asked, staring at him. “Why wouldn’t you run away, if it’s that bad? Shouldn’t you be afraid to, I don’t know, get burned or see the leash break or … something?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “because I never made the mistake of viewing you as a tool rather than a person. See, to Cordell Weldon or the president, you’re just a cog in the machine rather than an agent in charge of her own life. You’re useful insofar as you can get them something they want—power, money, whatever. I knew who you were inside all along, and while I certainly wanted you to help protect the world, I wasn’t pushing you against your own aims. That sort of pressure could be … unhealthy.”
“They’re pushing now,” I said. “Hard. Weldon’s pushing every button he’s got. I’ve had mercenaries come at me. The guy I’m working with had his house burned down.”
Foreman blinked. “That’s … interesting.”
“What do you mean, ‘interesting’?” I asked.
“A man like Weldon wouldn’t move hard and openly unless you had him over a barrel somehow,” Foreman said. “He’s a cautious guy, lives in the shadows with his illicit activities. If you didn’t have him on the run in some way, he wouldn’t have come at you like that.”
“But how do I have him on the run?” I asked. “None of this makes any sense at all.”
“Mysteries seldom do until you get all the pieces in place,” he said. “So … why did you come to me?”
“Power protects power,” I said. “And I don’t … I just don’t ‘get’ power, not the way someone like you, who’s in it, would. I think I was just … hoping you had some insight. Some direction I could go. Something.” I lowered my head. “Anything, honestly. I’m kind of at the end of my rope.”
“No friends, no public support, no family,” Foreman said, and there was a strikingly mournful quality to the way he said it. “Your merry war band is on the outs, and now you’re down to pretty much yourself, it feels like, based on what I’m getting from you. You sure it’s not the ‘lonely’ part that’s eating at you?”
“It’s the … ‘entire world arrayed against me’ part that’s causing the most consternation at the moment.”
“It’s not the whole world,” he said. “I know that sounds funny, but it’s really not the whole world. It’s the loudest voices shouting you down, though, because the press is against you, and I know that feels like the whole world, but it’s not. You can’t get the majority of people anywhere to agree on almost anything, so …”
“I know you were aiming for reassuring, but—”
“Not reassuring,” he said, “I’m trying to help you. Not everyone is against you, however it might feel. You get out of the ivory towers of Manhattan or out of the beltway in D.C. and get down to the street level in a city or town, and there are plenty of people who still support Sienna Nealon and think she’s a hero who saved the world.” He cringed. “I might take it a little easier on the people you run across, though, because that support is fading, and there are only so many more logs you can toss on that particular fire before you run out of fuel.”
“I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but so what if some of the people are with me?” I asked. “That doesn’t help me against Cordell Weldon. It feels like he’s holding all the cards at this point.”
“Well,” Foreman said, “I can’t offer much, but I can offer you this: if you can get even close to bringing him down, throw up a cloud of suspicion, I can promise you I’ll put everything I have into kicking the hell out of him while he’s kissing the dirt.”
“You’d kick a man while he’s down?” I asked, joking just a little.
“I’m a politician,” he said, “I have no shame in kicking my opponents while they’re down, in the nuts, while simultaneously extolling my own virtues and making it seem like I’m doing the nation a favor. This is what we do.”
“So all I’ve got to do is drag him down a few pegs and your self-interest will allow you to step in and do the rest,” I said, feeling my shoulders slump. “I gotta tell you, though … it still seems impossible.”
“It’s not as impossible as you’re making it out to be,” Foreman said, and here I could see his smile. “It’s not as if he’s not a criminal, after all, and a nervous one at that. If you’re right, he’s made a half dozen illegal, desperate moves already.” He held up a lone finger. “Desperate men act in haste, and haste doesn’t allow a lot of time to cover tracks. And you just need to catch him one good time with his finger in the pie …” He shrugged. “I can call Governor Hill of Georgia. She’s supposed to be campaigning with me in a couple weeks, maybe I can persuade her to climb on the opposite side of Weldon on this. I know she doesn’t like him, but she doesn’t really want to be tarred by him or his allies, either. She might at least be able to take the state-level heat back to a simmer. She’s got no control over Atlanta, though. Weldon owns that town. I—” He froze, like someone had poked him in the back, and stood up, ramrod straight. “Something’s happening.”
“A lot’s happening,” I said. “Starting with my ass being in a big damned sling—”
“No,” he said, and moved at meta-speed to the TV remote and turned it on. “My whole staff just responded to some external stimuli in shock. There’s breaking news of some kind—” The TV screen coalesced into a news channel, and the picture stabilized into footage that took my breath away.
I recognized the scene. It was Augustus’s street, and it was in chaos. The crack of gunfire filled the air even as the camera swayed wildly. Flames and water and lightning and earth all swirled madly in the background, an insane dance of metahuman powers that moved at such a speed that I could hardly tell what was going on. An Atlas-typed stomped his way through the urban battlefield at a height of twenty feet, like a giant striding through a playground. I caught a flash of earth formed into a shield as Augustus stepped into view for a split second, embattled, flame and water coming at him in tandem and destroying his line of defense as he hastily threw up another. Lightning shot past and hit somewhere offscreen, causing a flash that temporarily blinded the camera as the gunfire picked up again.
It was war, and Augustus was right in the thick of it.
I turned to Foreman, and I knew my face was probably as pale as it had ever been. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He nodded, and I knew in that instant that he was fully aware of what I was about to do. “Go on—” he barely got out before I smashed through his window and flew faster than I’d ever flown before, hitting supersonic speed before I’d even cleared the broken glass.
39.
Augustus
I thought about signing up for the Army after high school. The G.I. Bill had been appealing, college paid for after a few years of service, but the job at Cavanagh had come along and the carrot of college being paid for by them without ever getting shot at in a war zone had been even more appealing.
That dream had died a nasty death earlier today when the dudes ambushed me in the middle of the street, but I’d say the final nail went into the coffin about two seconds after the damned war broke out on my street.
War was the only way to describe it, too, because man, they came at us full-force. Metas. Badasses, too, with enough fury to convince me they weren’t here to play tiddlywinks.
Taneshia and I were separated almost instantly, with a fire-flinging guy driving a wedge of flame between us. She went right, I went left, and I only caught a glimpse of her through the flames as the heat seared my cheek when the line of fire shot past. It darkened the wall of the house behind me and flared upward, catching the roof on fire as it was refracted up by the ground and brick.
I instinctively threw dirt right out of the ground in a clump, like throwing a punch at someone who takes a swing at you. I heard the chatter of guns and ripped more ground up to defend myself before realizing that the gunfire wasn’t pointed at me.
It was pointed at the cops down the street in front of my house.
Aw, hell.
I saw a giant man leering down at me from above, some hundred feet away. Dude looked like he was about to go storming through the neighborhood, wading into houses in order to cause some havoc. He threw something at me and I realized it was someone’s barbecue grill as I dodged it. I’m not talking one of those George Foreman ones, either. It was a full-on patio grill, looked like it weighed a few hundred pounds. It shattered on the wall behind me as I moved the hell out of its flight path.
A blast of water caught three of my impromptu shields and splattered them out of the air. I ripped up some more dirt and tried to get the shields that had just been blown away back, but the water guy was carrying them away with his currents, and I couldn’t seem to get enough mental grab on them to get them to buck the flow. The spouts he was shooting were going at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, I thought as one raced past me. I knew if I got hit with one, I’d be feeling it tomorrow.
The only good news was that these guys were coming at me and Taneshia in a bum rush. They didn’t seem to be coordinating very well, which looked like the only break we were likely to catch. I’d never been in a fight like this before, but I had a theory that my only hope was to do this guerilla-style: keep moving, don’t stop, and try and take them out one by one.
As far as plans went, it wasn’t a good one, but it was all I had time for as I dodged a blast of ice from a big white dude with frosty blue eyes.
“Taneshia!” I called. “Keep moving!” She didn’t answer, or at least I couldn’t hear her over the sound of the gunfire down the street. It sounded like the cops were getting a full-court press, too, which was a bad sign. There hadn’t been that many of them at the fire, after all, maybe a half-dozen. It was mostly firefighters and crowd, and that wasn’t a good place for a war to break out. Lots of civilians meant lots of chance for casualties. I was torn on whether I should work my way in that direction or not. If I did, things might get worse because I’d be dragging however many asshole metas with me.
On the other hand, if I didn’t … who knew what was going to happen over there. The mercenaries had the cops outgunned, that was for sure.
This sure had gotten hot awfully fast, I thought as another burst of flame came my way.
But screw it, I figured. Heroes didn’t just beat the damned odds; they flew in the face of them. They fought against the odds, fought the enemies no matter how many—and they always protected the innocent.
Whatever else Sienna screwed up by punching down with full and furious force, she did protect the innocent. She just tended to hit the guilty like a runaway train was all.
Well, I couldn’t hit as hard as she could, but maybe I could do my part until—God willing—she showed up to pull a cavalry and help save the day.
I started ripping the ground so that it would rise up to meet me with each step, little segments tearing off and throwing up a continuous shield as I sprinted back across the lawn of the corner house. I had about four houses to go until I got to mine, but right now those guys with guns were probably counting on their meta friends to put up a defense for them. If I got there, maybe I could sucker punch them from behind. It wasn’t really a sucker punch when they had you outnumbered like twenty to one, was it?
Momma would probably say—
Aw, hell. I forgot about Momma. Oh, man. I hoped she was okay.
I ran about three feet off the ground, ripping up the ground at my side in a thin shield as I went, a spray of dirt and grass exploding out of the earth like a fountain effect, tracing a curtain of earth in front of me. It was sloppy as hell, and when all this was over, I vowed to practice like mad to get better at working with the powers I’d been given. I doubted it’d stop much, that thin shield I’d thrown up, but a spatter of earth from the impact of a bullet convinced me it was better than nothing.
I saw a flash of lightning rip past and knew Taneshia was still in the fight, somewhere behind me. I hoped she was giving them hell, but I was afraid for her life. These were the tough choices, trying to decide who to save first, where to go. The numbers against us were insane, but at least she had powers. Those people in front of my house had a whole lot of nothing working for them, just a few cops without nearly enough bullets for what was heading their way. Those mercs had body armor and rifles. The cops had handguns and a prayer. Their backup was minutes away. The mercs had superpowered backup that was ready to swoop in as soon as they’d finished mopping up me and Taneshia.
Something burst through my shield just in front of me like Kool-Aid Man crashing through the wall. It took me a second to dodge instinctively and a second more to realize it was a damned bear. Its giant paw slashed through my little shield and almost got me. I saw the head and massive body, shrouded in the earth I’d thrown up to protect myself.
“Ahhh!” I said before I got control of myself. I threw a hand at the ground below his feet and blasted it skyward.
It was like I’d launched that thing from an ejector seat. It shot into the air like Sienna taking flight, arms and legs pinwheeling as it turned back into a human being. I saw panic in those eyes for the half-second until he flew out of sight, scared about witless. He landed somewhere on the other side of the road, probably pretty hard, and I knew I was at least down one enemy for a couple minutes. Hopefully longer.
Also, I’d just figured out a pretty quick way to dispense with enemies. Ejection seat! Boom. I was definitely going to need that. Along with maybe the asphalt shotgun thing I’d learned earlier. It may not have been pretty, but lives were at stake. I couldn’t chance these dudes getting back up again with odds like this. It didn’t make me happy, but on this I was with Sienna all the way. Protecting people was the most important thing. I didn’t want to kill anybody, but if one of those dudes got up again and started ripping through a crowd of my neighbors, I don’t know that I’d be able to forgive myself.
I was going to put them down hard from here on out. I wasn’t going to kill if I could avoid it, but I needed to make sure they stayed down at the least.
I could see the big guy, Mr. Giant, leering at me from above my curtain of dirt. I doubted I’d be able to ejector seat him, assuming he was even standing on the earth. I doubted he was; he looked far enough away to be out in the street. He also looked … taller?
I saw him throw a car at me and I froze. I was fortunate that I did, because he was leading me with it and my sudden stop saved my ass from getting crushed under the van. It was one of their vans, I saw once it got closer, a white one that looked new. It had giant finger dents in it, I noticed as it flew about twelve inches from my face. The giant’s clothes were gone, his mask was gone—all because he’d grown too big for them. I could see him, leering at me as he lifted another van and prepared to throw it at me. I felt a flash of anger that it was going to be like this. This wasn’t a fair fight.
So I wasn’t going to fight fair.
I sprayed a hard column of compacted dirt right into his face from a distance. I knew it wasn’t going to do squat to hurt him, but I didn’t even know how to go about hurting a dude that big. I just knew that like Sienna said, you can’t punch someone in the face if you can’t see them.
He let out a bellowing, agonized scream that sounded like one of those flying monster dragons from Lord of the Rings. I’d let him have a good amount of that dirt, and I’d aimed it perfectly. Now you see me, now you don’t, asshole.
A splash of water swept through my shield and punched into my side, knocking me toward the house to my left. They had some bushes planted in front of their windows. Prickly ones, I realized as I landed in them, branches gouging into my back on impact. The landing knocked the air out of me, and it felt like something cracked hard, like a rib or something in my right side. It hurt like a mofo, but I didn’t cry out. I threw up a hand to drag as much of a shield up as I could, which turned out to be well timed, because another geyser of water came spraying at me, just over my head, washing down on me as I lay there in the bushes.
I didn’t have long to assess my situation, either, because after a moment I realized the water wasn’t going away. It was pooling, unnaturally, around me. I came to a quick realization—that this dude with the water power could control it like I could move dirt, and that meant he could control its boundaries. Apparently he was aiming to use it to create a water entombment for me.
I had a feeling I’d be able to sense him if I had a little better refinement of my abilities, but that wasn’t something I had time for at the moment. The water was rising, and it seemed the pressure was on. It was harder somehow, like he was compacting the molecules together to try and crush me. I didn’t have long, either. Once it had me in its grip, I was going to be done.
I reached out and could feel little droplets of water falling from his spray to the dirt all along the path of his jet. It was subtle, but it was there, and I could feel the place that it stopped. If he could control the density of his zone of water the way I could do it with my earth, it meant he was dragging that moisture out of the air and giving it form so he could do this, and it also meant … maybe I could do the same, messing with the density of my element.
And now I knew where he was standing.
I pulled earth from underneath him and made it surge out of the ground, swallowing him up to the waist like a monster coming out of the depths. I heard a sharp scream and then the tightness of the water pressure stopped suddenly, and the spray halted a moment after. I used that grip I had on him like a mouth and let it ripple, dragging him down further and further, creating a little chamber for him in the ground. It swallowed him right up and the screaming stopped. I kept myself from using the power of the earth to just straight-up crush him, though I knew I could have. I just dragged him down a good five feet and figured he could spend a little time digging his ass out of that.
Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) Page 21
