by Hondo Jinx
“Great job, darlin,” Brawley said, hurrying toward the hub. “You did it.”
“I did,” Luna said, beaming. Her smile was comically huge on her tiny face, and her oil-drop eyes glittered with excitement. “I really did it!”
Then, all at once, she seemed to realize that she was stark naked. Her mouth dilated in an O of surprise, and her face turned bright red. Her skinny body hunched into itself, one hand covering her crotch, her other arm hiding her tiny breasts. She half-turned, showing him her ribs.
Brawley hurried past her, releasing a squeeze of comforting juice as he brushed his fingertips over her bare shoulder. “Go ahead and shift back if you want, darlin.”
And then he was examining the board.
“Thanks,” Luna squeaked.
He was aware that she was shifting behind him but didn’t bother to glance in her direction.
He was busy scanning the controls and reading their story.
It was a good story.
The guards had not triggered an alarm or sent for help. He’d killed them before they’d had the chance.
And there…
He pressed a button covered in blood and wiped his finger on his jeans, which were going to need one hell of a laundering when this was all over.
“We’ve got power,” Remi called from beside the elevator, which groaned, rising.
“Your work is done, Luna,” Brawley said.
He turned to see the girl in her fused form for the first time. She was about three feet tall and covered in soft-looking brown fur. She had a long, skinny tail, and her head was distinctly mouse-like, big Minnie Mouse ears and all.
Brawley reached out to stroke her chin with his thumb and gave her a quick smile. “Great work, darlin. Now head on back to the RV and get safe.”
“I can still help,” Luna protested.
“No,” Brawley said. “You’ve done enough. Get in there with Frankie. She might appreciate some help. If I need you, I’ll call.”
He didn’t have to tell her twice. Luna squeaked gratefully and sprinted out of the building toward the lot, where the gunfire had died down.
Crossing the lobby, Brawley keyed his mic and pinged Frankie. “You all right, darlin?”
“I’m all right. Things have quieted down out here. We have the towers. Oh—someone’s knocking.”
“It’s Luna,” he explained. “Let her in. Gotta go, darlin.”
“Be safe, Brawley. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Frankie,” he said, and cut the connection.
The elevator doors slid open.
Brawley killed the onboard security cams.
Without a word, he, Remi, Callie, Braxton, and Talia slipped inside.
Brawley hit the button marked SB, and the doors slid shut.
The elevator started a maddeningly slow descent. In a surreal touch, an upbeat muzak version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” chirped from the speakers.
The elevator stopped at the basement. The doors slid open, and a terrified-looking FPI scientist in a blood-stained white lab coat surged forward, whimpering.
His features barely had time to register shock before Remi lashed out with her knife, burying it all the way to the hilt in the man’s forehead.
Her boot shot out, nailed the dead man in the pocket protector, and sent his corpse sailing back into the basement lobby, where Scars following Brawley’s directions were carting computers and filing cabinets into the stairwells.
The doors slid shut, and the elevator resumed its slow descent.
Without speaking, everyone went about their business, checking firearms, swapping out mags, and chambering rounds. They inspected their gear, adjusting knives and grenades and sidearms as the tinny muzak persisted cheerfully.
Glancing at the dead security cameras, Brawley grinned. If those things were working, this would make for one hell of a weird music video.
The thoughts one has while riding in a slow elevator, waiting to kill people.
Down and down and down they rode.
The Duprees waited with blazing eyes, weapons at the ready.
Brawley felt Callie’s soft fur against his arm as the deadly cat girl pressed into him. “Why does this elevator have to be so slow?” she hissed. “I hate being locked in small spaces.”
He gave her furry arm a little squeeze, said nothing, and checked his strands.
His Carnal and Bestial strands were still fully charged.
His beast clamored, wanting out, but shifting into a super bison or fifteen-foot-tall minotaur would make no sense inside the Chop Shop, let alone this elevator.
He had depleted his other strands to one degree or another.
His Seeker strand remained at eighty percent despite heavy use because he’d grown increasingly economical with truth juice.
He’d spent a similar percentage of Gearhead power and blown a quarter of his telekinetic force.
Most depleted, however, was his blue Bender strand. A new telepath, he’d already burned through sixty percent of his juice.
He drew his arms full of Unbound force and rapidly shaped an ammo belt of telekinetic rounds in his mind.
Next, he called up his Gearhead powers. Like the hub, the subbasement had its own power source and comm lines. Once the doors slid open, he would need to locate and sever the comm lines pronto.
The elevator groaned on. Brawley stood front and center, AA-12 at the ready. He pushed Callie behind him, meaning to shield the cat girl, who was the only non-Carnal in the car.
Remi stood to Brawley’s right, the MDR shouldered and pointing at the silver doors.
To his left, Braxton and Talia exchanged a quick kiss.
Tears streamed down Talia’s fierce and beautiful face—and also down the rugged face of her husband.
“We’re gonna take our baby home,” Talia said.
“You’re damn right we are,” Braxton said.
No one else spoke. There was no need. The two parents had already said everything worth saying.
Drawing a length of Unbound force, Brawley shaped it into a curved shield just narrow enough to sit between the elevator doors.
“Don’t shoot until I give the word,” he told his fellow passengers, “or ricochets will tear us up.”
Everyone nodded. Callie squeezed tight against his back.
“I got a feeling they’ll be waiting on us down there,” Brawley said.
“A Seeker feeling?” Remi asked.
“If it ain’t a Seeker feeling, it’ll do till one gets here. I reckon, even if they didn’t hear the explosions, they might probably have noticed the dead elevator cams.”
Braxton nodded. “Then they would’ve tried calling upstairs.”
“Right,” Brawley said, “and nothing doing there. So I reckon they’re waiting for us, fingers on their triggers and ready to call in the cavalry.”
A second later, the elevator bottomed out.
They had reached the belly of the beast at last.
28
The doors opened onto a lobby Brawley recognized from Hazel’s rendering. Only in the images she had shared, there hadn’t been a pair of assholes crouched behind the big check-in station bracing automatic rifles across its paper-strewn desktop.
Both men opened fire. Inches from Brawley’s face and upper torso, bullets sparked off the shield.
Brawley drove the shield forward, jamming it between the doors, which tried to close but couldn’t.
The guards raked their weapons back and forth, filling the room with a deafening roar and the whine of countless ricochets bouncing off the telekinetic barrier.
Targeting their minds with no great precision, Brawley cranked his Bender strand and shouted at the attackers through his telepathic bullhorn.
Heads down! Take cover!
The men dropped as one, their brains accepting his reasonable suggestion without reservation.
Before they could pop up again, Brawley dropped the shield and unleashed a telekinetic wrecking ball that smashed the
check-in station to splinters and fluttering sheets of paper.
Within the debris, three figures, the riflemen and some other asshole, thrashed awkwardly.
Before Brawley brought the AA-12 to bear, weapons to either side of him lit up, riddling the guards with holes and painting the walls red.
Brawley moved forward, sensing no additional threats in the lobby. No living, breathing threats, anyway.
With a flick of his mind, he severed the bleating comm line tucked within the wall beside the obliterated desk.
“Shit,” he said. “We didn’t kill them fast enough.”
“That was pretty fast,” Callie said.
“Yeah, but one of them slapped that panic button,” he said, pointing to a red button on the wall. “I’m guessing that goes out to state and local cops, maybe even the National Guard. Anyway you cut it, we’re about to have company. And I’m guessing the Order monitors distress call lines 24/7.”
“Let’s go then,” Braxton growled, rushing forward.
They pulled swipe cards and hobble keys off the dead men.
On the wall across from the demolished check-in station hung a wide-screen television.
The smiling face of Arch Mage Payter Janusian filled the screen. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is an historic day, a glorious new dawn.”
That son of a bitch needed to die.
Brawley still had to sort out what had happened tonight. Why hadn’t Janusian’s node been in the milk tanker? How had the Tiger Mage appeared so quickly? And what the hell had happened to the Order’s rapid response team?
He needed to warn Jamaal pronto. Warn of what, precisely, he did not know, but his gut hollered, insisting he call his intrepid friend with a heads-up… before it was too late.
As Brawley crossed the lobby to the yellow metal door to the cell block, he accessed his phone with his mind, hopped to recent calls, and dialed Jamaal.
It went to voice mail on the first ring.
Brawley didn’t bother to leave a message because at that moment, Braxton threw open the heavy door. Talia and Remi opened fire and rushed into the corridor.
“The family that slays together, stays together,” Callie joked and started after them with the muzzle of her Desert Eagle safely averted.
But Brawley blocked the cat girl from following the Duprees into the corridor.
“Watch our back trail, darlin. Jam the elevator open. Same goes for the cell block door. I’d hate like hell to get locked in here.”
Callie nodded and jammed the door wide, big-ass pistol at the ready.
Brawley slung his shotgun over his shoulder, drew his Peacemaker, and followed the Duprees into the hallway.
Braxton sprinted into the lead, bellowing, “Winnie! Daddy’s here to take you home! Where are you, baby?”
A guard stepped from a room at the end of the hall and threw his hands overhead, begging for mercy.
“Hold your fire,” Brawley shouted to the Duprees.
The guard froze in place, blubbering louder.
Brawley sensed no deception, only terror and the stink of cowardice.
“Where’s Winnie Dupree?” Brawley asked.
The man pointed to a cell near the end. “#43. Right there. She’s in there!”
“That works,” Brawley said, and was just about to knock the man unconscious when he recognized him. It had taken Brawley a second because the guy looked so different with his face all twisted up and sobbing for mercy.
In Hazel’s renderings, the son of a bitch hadn’t been crying. He’d been sneering with sadistic pleasure, getting off on torturing none other than Brawley’s sister-in-law… who also happened to look exactly like Brawley’s wife.
Brawley raised the Peacemaker and pulled the trigger.
The man’s head jerked. A red-black hole had opened between the guard’s piggy eyes. The back of his head grew a mouth and puked blood and brain matter on the wall behind him.
Braxton hammered on door #43, calling for his daughter.
With a trickle of Gearhead juice, Brawley located the general buzzer and unlocked all the doors at once.
He watched for a second as the Duprees barged into Winnie’s cell, mobbing a startled girl who looked like an emaciated, spirit-broken version of Remi.
Talia tore away her daughter’s hobble with professions of love.
The haggard girl straightened, and her face brightened with new health and color, wiping away her drawn prisoner’s mask. But even if Winnie was once again buzzing with Carnal energy, her traumatized eyes rolled wildly, regarding her family with the reeling terror of a horse trapped in a burning barn.
Understanding that his sister-in-law was on the edge of total collapse, Brawley blasted her with waves of calm and trust and love.
Winnie’s haunted eyes finally closed, and her hands appeared on the backs of her family members, returning their emotional embraces.
“Daddy? Mommy? Remi?” she sobbed. “I couldn’t believe it was really you, but it is, it is. You came for me.”
“Yes, baby,” Braxton howled with ferocious emotion. “Daddy’s here for you.”
“We’re taking you out of here, sweetie,” Talia said. “We’re taking you home.”
Remi, apparently speechless with emotion, could only sob and reach past her parents to stroke her twin sister’s shocked face.
Brawley left them to it and rushed back into the hall, where confused men and women in blue jumpsuits were emerging tentatively from their cells.
Seeing Brawley, many jerked back into their cells.
Others stared as if deeply sedated.
A few stepped forward, hopeful looks lighting their faces.
One, a beautiful young woman with a long braid of silver hair draped over one shoulder, stepped boldly forward and said, “If you aren’t here to rescue us, boss, I am going to be all kinds of pissed.”
“We’re here for your neighbor,” Brawley said, hooking a thumb toward Winnie’s cell, “but y’all can hitch a ride if you want.”
An excited burble rippled across the inmates.
Someone asked Brawley to remove his hobble collar.
“We’re leaving the hobbles on for the moment,” Brawley announced. “I don’t know you and don’t have time to deal with anybody who loses their psionic shit right now. We’re heading upstairs. There’s a bus waiting for you up there. But I got a feeling that’s not all that’s waiting.”
A voice from the shadows of an adjacent cell shouted that it was all a trap.
“If that’s what you think, stay here,” Brawley said.
“Pull your head out of your ass, Stanley,” the silver-haired girl growled, and Brawley realized that it wasn’t just her hair that was silver.
The silver-eyed girl darted into the cell and dragged a horrified middle-aged man into the hallway, telling him, “Stanley, you’d be fucking crazy to stay in this hellhole.”
Brawley pointed to a young Asian woman standing near Callie and said, “You hold the door. Callie, come with me.”
He called the Duprees forward and gestured for them to load Winnie onto the elevator first.
“Don’t leave us!” someone bugled.
“We won’t,” Brawley said. He counted thirty-nine inmates. He reckoned the oversized elevator car would carry half of them at a go.
His Gearhead and Seeker strands nodded in agreement.
Moving rapidly, he pointed, calling prisoners forward.
The silver-haired girl bounced on the balls of her feet, trying to catch his eyes. “Trust me, boss. If you’re expecting trouble up there, you want me on your side.”
“I appreciate that, darlin,” Brawley said, “but right now, what I need is somebody tough enough to keep the rest of these people together until I can send the car back down.”
“Piss up a rope,” the silver-haired girl laughed bitterly. “Just my fucking luck.”
When the elevator was packed tight as a Tokyo subway car, Brawley squeezed in and told the remaining inmates to wait.
<
br /> People cried out, begging that he take them along, as if he might fold them up like tissues and tuck them in his pocket.
Ignoring them, he called to the silver-haired girl, “What’s your name, darlin?”
“Stokely,” she said, holding her chin high. Whatever they had done to the silver-haired beauty here in this nightmare burrow, they hadn’t managed to break her.
“Everybody listen to Stokely,” Brawley said. “She’s in charge for now.”
As the doors were sliding shut, he heard Stokely shout, “Everybody calm the fuck down. Show of hands now—who wants to see the sun again?”
29
The Emerald Parrot was packed for this hour. On one side, a singer sat on a stool and did his thing. On the other, Senior Agent Jamaal Whittaker was trying to help Xander Mack extract his head from his ass.
Xander waved him off again. “I already talked with the Order.”
“You already talked with me.”
Xander sighed, glancing across the bar, toward where the trio of women he’d been schmoozing now danced in front of tonight’s Buffet imitator. “What’s the difference, man? You are the Order.”
“The Order is changing,” Jamaal said.
Easy, old man, he cautioned himself. Tread lightly.
He was tired and frightened and desperate. It would be easy to fuck up and say too much.
Stick to the plan. Try to save Xander before it’s too late. But don’t endanger yourself by saying something stupid.
“Changing how?” Xander asked, inviting Jamaal to stick a foot in his mouth and choke on it.
“This,” Jamaal said, pointing to the TV.
Xander frowned at the screen. “Janusian again. Guy sure likes to talk.” He wiped his mouth, suddenly surly.
That’s when Jamaal realized Xander was more than a little buzzed.
Xander snarled, “When I think about that son of a bitch putting a bounty on my little girl…”
Jamaal leaned forward and snapped his fingers crisply, rousing the Bender from his angry slouch. “Hey, if you want to help Nina, come with me.”
