Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I count two on this facing,” I said, looking around to see if any were going to come wandering out from behind the building. The warehouse was a corrugated metal design, two stories high, no other building close by, so we weren't going to be able to leap over to it. The guards stood at the front entrance, on the short side of the warehouse. No entry doors and no guards were along the long side visible to us from where we were hiding.

  “Likely there's a loading dock on the back of the building,” Lethe said, ducking back behind the building with me. “We should probably scout the whole place before we move on them.”

  “You see any security cameras?” I asked. She shook her head. “It's going to be tough to move past those guards without them noticing us. Too much space between buildings here.”

  “You want to take them out first?” she asked. “That's dangerous. What if someone comes to check on them while we're scouting the rest of the building and finds them gone?”

  “The Omega crew inside snaps to alert and makes our job that much harder,” I said, shrugging. “I don't see how we cross to check the rest of the building without them seeing, though.”

  “I don't know how we approach them without them seeing,” Lethe said. “This is a wonderful defensive position. There must be a hundred feet of open ground between us and them, it's broad daylight, and we have to cover all that territory to hit them because we don't even have a gun.”

  “And if we did, it'd make a hell of a noise,” I said, “once more giving away the game.” I sighed. “Yeah. This is not great.” I looked back around the side of the building. “Maybe we can go around them? Enter the building elsewhere? Try and stealth this mission?”

  “We're rescuing a five-year-old,” Lethe said. “They're not quiet, especially when scared. If little you wakes up, she's going to cry, and it will blow our so-called stealth mission.”

  “Right,” I said, coming back behind the building. “Okay, well,” I said, “come on.” I hustled back down the long wall of this warehouse, away from the Omega facility.

  “Where are we going?” Lethe asked, following me.

  “Taking the long way around,” I said, running the entire length of the building, then crossing the street and going two more warehouses away. I hooked long around, detouring past about five warehouses, weaving in and out of the buildings block by block at a light jog (for me) that looked like a sprint to anyone watching. I was relying on the vacant nature of this warehouse district, hoping that any Omega watchers were sticking close to their warehouse.

  “You weren't kidding about this being the long way around,” Lethe said as we circled back to the rear of the Omega warehouse. We'd probably run over a mile to cover a hundred yards, as the crow flies, from where we'd been at the front of the building. Here, on the short, rear facing of the building, there was a loading dock with eight big garage style doors for semi-trailers to pull up to, complete with the sunken ramps that allowed them to put the trailer loading door at ground level to the warehouse.

  Two tractor-trailers were parked at the loading docks, the warehouse doors wide open, but the trucks parked close enough that there was only a few feet of space between the back of the trailer and the warehouse. I couldn't see into either trailer, and visibility into the warehouse was similarly poor from our vantage point. Because of the narrow gap, any vantage point, short of sticking our head inside, was going to be of limited utility.

  “This is the blindest blind mission I've ever been on,” I muttered, cowering behind a stack of rotting pallets about a hundred feet away. No guards patrolled outside the dock, probably because hanging out inside was a way smarter play. They could bushwhack anyone coming in pretty easily.

  “I think we can both agree this entry point sucks,” Lethe said next to me, her hands squeezing the edge of the pallets, white-knuckling them.

  “Yep,” I said. “It's a two-story warehouse, and there are high windows on the long sides. Maybe enter there? Break the glass, quietly, hope for a catwalk? Or a steel support beam? I mean, we could just drop to the ground, if there's cover down there...”

  “It really is a black box,” Lethe said, chewing her lip. “I think we need to take out the guards out front.” She raised a hand. “Grab some memories, get an idea of what's waiting inside.”

  “Yep,” I said. “If we run along the side of the building, we'll be thirty-forty feet from where they were hanging out when we last saw them. Better than covering the distance between the next building and them, right?”

  “Yes,” Lethe said, and grabbed a chipped piece of concrete from the ground, tossing it to me. I caught it, looking at it blankly for a second before I got it. “Easier if we have a distraction, though – something else they can focus on.”

  I nodded, and she broke out of cover first, running to the side of the warehouse and sprinting along it at blazing speed. I had a hell of a time keeping up with my grandmother because – damn, she could move for an old lady.

  We made it to the corner and stopped, and she let me take the lead. I clutched the chip of concrete in my hand. It was rough, about an inch long, and I gave it a quick squeeze, trying to feel my way around weight, angle, doing the geometry and physics problem instinctively in my head. “Ready?” I asked, and she nodded.

  I stepped out first and heaved my rock. It made the flight between the corner and one of the guards, the one farthest away in about a second, cracking him in the back of the head like a gunshot. He took the hit and it ripped him off his feet. He came crashing down on his face, legs whipsawing up behind him as he landed.

  “What the hell?” Lethe ripped at my arm, and when I turned to look at her, her eyes were wide and her face was flushed. “You were supposed to throw it past him!” She was speaking meta-low, but the urgency in her voice was apparent to me.

  “Oh,” I said, looking at my handiwork. The remaining guard was stooped over the fallen one; he must have thought he tripped. “I thought we were throwing rocks to knock them out.”

  “No, it was supposed to distract them while we crept up and knocked them out!”

  “Well, they look pretty distracted to me,” I said, and burst into a run. She followed behind, leaping past me at the last in time to crash into the back of the standing guard's head. He slumped, probably on his way to dead from blunt force trauma to the skull. Lethe caught him as he sagged, forcing her bare palm against his slack face.

  I stooped to retrieve the guard I'd pelted with the rock. He was breathing steadily, and I mimicked Lethe's motion, pressing a hand to the side of his neck.

  She stared at me in pure annoyance. “Next time, distraction. Don't go charging in like a young bull.”

  “Hey, I'm not a bull,” I said.

  “So you're a cow?” Lethe asked, lips pursed.

  “In this analogy, yes,” I said. “I like how you maneuvered me into accepting that as the lesser of the two evils offered, though.”

  “Rhetorical trickery is one of my lesser-known skills,” she muttered, eyes flitting from side to side, then rolling straight up. I recognized the look on her face as similar to the look Rose got when she absorbed memories from me – part ecstasy, part blood rush.

  I hit the same feeling a moment later and my eyes rolled up in my head as I slid right into the guard's brain. I had to be a little selective, jacking the info about the warehouse and leaving aside other, less-useful stuff, like his childhood memories of being bullied into having tea parties with his older sisters. The guy was awash in resentment for that one, and I tiptoed around them, figuring it'd probably go easier on him if I removed them, and why the hell would I want to make anything easier for an Omega dipshit?

  “Okay,” Lethe said, letting her guard slip to the ground as I started to come out of my own memory-stealing trance. I dropped my guy with slightly less grace, but he was already out from the rock so he didn't even grunt as he hit the concrete.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was...”

  She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

&nb
sp; She didn't even need to say it. I knew. We both did.

  There were guards scattered all throughout the warehouse. About thirty of them, all armed.

  Wolfe and Henderschott were inside as well. Wandering as they pleased, though Wolfe was more the one to wander. My guard didn't even know where he was, exactly, because when last the guy had been inside, Wolfe had been mobile, pacing around. Henderschott was mostly hanging out in the warehouse office, upstairs.

  “We have less than an hour,” Lethe said. “And they're moving them.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “My guard didn't know where they're going next. Did yours?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We're completely outnumbered,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “This warehouse is a hardened target,” Lethe said, breathing deeply. “We attack, they dig in, and send the trucks out sooner. Once they're mobile...if we lose them, they're gone.”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Lethe looked up at me with watery eyes. “So... are you feeling as desperately hopeless about this whole situation as I am?”

  I just stared at her. “No.”

  She looked back, blinked twice. “...What?”

  “No, I'm not feeling desperate or hopeless at all,” I said. “On the contrary. We just got handed the keys to the kingdom.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She stared at me as though I were about to sprout a demon out of my nose. “I just laid out what we're up against – thirty armed guards, Henderschott in armor, Wolfe. A solid defensive position. An available and mobile escape means, with an easy route to leave, less than an hour before they're gone.” She looked right in my eyes. “How is any of that 'the keys to the kingdom'?”

  I smiled. “Because now...I know exactly what to do.” And I started to explain.

  37.

  When you're up against impossible odds, it helps to boil the problem down to its simplest essential elements. That had been a formula for success – or at least not dying – in my life. Facing off against Century, the most powerful metahuman army in the world, led by the most impossibly difficult and powerful meta? Divide them into their component parts and they're – if not easy, easier to destroy than trying to take them all on at once.

  I'd killed tons of Century operatives piecemeal before I'd invaded their final meeting and blown them all up. After that, I'd taken on their boss, Sovereign, all by his lonesome. Divide, conquer. And furthermore, hit them when they're at their weakest, when they least expected it. I'd wiped out a bunch of Century people at one of their safe houses by kicking down their door and going to town with an automatic shotgun. They hadn't even seen it coming.

  When you've done stuff like killing Wolfe or his brothers, mopping the floor with an Achilles, breaking a pack of mercenaries guarding a quarry or even busted up the nation of Revelen, the challenge of plowing your way through thirty guards and two strong metas to get to your objective starts to sound a little like child's play.

  Which it is not. But still. One could get overconfident, especially since I'd killed the two most dangerous guys in the building before.

  “You are a little cocky about this for my taste,” Lethe said, clearly latching onto my attitude.

  I didn't give voice to the reasons behind my well-founded confidence. “We'll get this done. No sweat.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You're out of your damned mind.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But I live by that old St. Francis of Assisi quote: 'Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible'.”

  Lethe just stared at me. “Well...you certainly got the last part right.”

  “No,” I said, “breaking into the building and beating all the guards is impossible. This thing we're about to do? It's going to be easy, comparatively.”

  My grandmother shifted in the driver's seat of our purloined car, taking hold of the steering wheel and adjusting her grip so that she was holding on a little tighter. “Seems you've had an interesting life.”

  “I have indeed,” I said, taking hold of the, “Oh, shit,” bar just above the passenger door. I think it was actually called a stabilizer bar, but the only time most people grabbed it was either to hang their arm there or when they were in a situation that demanded the use of the phrase, “Oh shit!” “Let's make it a little more interesting, shall we?”

  “More interesting than being transported back in time to fight an evil, superhuman criminal empire with your mother and grandmother in order to save your childhood self?” The trace of a smile lit her lips, and we peered out from behind the building to where the two semis sat, parked, several blocks away.

  “Admittedly, that one's hard to top,” I said. “But I've got a story or two that might come close.”

  “And someday I'm going to get to hear them?” There was a flicker of emotion in the way she looked at me.

  “Someday,” I agreed.

  A slight nod. “Okay, then.”

  “Movement.” I turned my attention fully to the scene a couple blocks ahead. We were parked in the shadow of a nearby warehouse, and someone had just come out of the loading dock and started to hop up in the cab of the second truck. They didn't quite make it before realizing that the cab was sitting a little low.

  It was tough to judge faces or hear much at this distance, but there was a sound of distress, and something called out to people in the warehouse, something on the order of, “Hey, you guys!” Then the guy disappeared behind the truck and, presumably, back into the warehouse to tell his Omega squad boys he'd picked up a nail in his tire.

  Which he had. I'd driven the damned thing in with my own bare fingers, and boy was that a chore. I'd had to rip the nail out of the wall of a nearby, disused warehouse, and my fingernails were still caked in blood from that particular labor, which was nowhere near as glorious as any Hercules had ever performed. Except the whole “cleaning out the Augean stables,” thing. Bloody fingernails probably beat that.

  “All right, let's see if they decide to change the tire,” Lethe said, peering ahead.

  “Driver moving to the main semi,” I said, catching a flash of motion as someone hopped up on the running board of the undamaged semi, mostly hidden from our view. He seemed to be looking down at his front tire. He shouted something back toward the warehouse, then circled around his vehicle, performing an inspection. Once he'd finished, he shouted back something akin to, “Good to go!” because I'd spared his tires. And my fingernails.

  “He's getting in the cab,” Lethe said. And he was. A slight rumble clued us in that he was starting it up, and suddenly we had our target.

  “I'll watch for movement on the second semi,” I said, “but for now, it doesn't look like they're in a hurry to change the tire.”

  “They're lulled,” Lethe said, starting up our own car as the semi started to pull out of the loading dock, ever so slowly in order to keep him from ripping up the sides of the trailer coming up out of the dock's ramp. “They think they beat us back in the animal hospital.”

  “Well, in fairness to them, they did,” I said. “Beat the damned hell out of us.”

  “Beating us is not ending us,” she said.

  I nodded along solemnly. “Damned right. Ain't no stopping the Nealon girls. And the people who try seem to end up real dead.”

  With a nod, Lethe waited until the semi had finished pulling out before shifting our car into gear, then she took us slowly around into a turn, matching the truck’s trajectory, but two warehouse blocks over. I kept an eye on the Omega safe house but saw no other sign of activity. We disappeared behind a building, and I said, “We're clear.”

  “Good,” Lethe said, taking the next turn and pushing the pedal down. She blazed us down the next block at about 50 miles per hour, then took a sliding left turn that had me both holding onto the bar and saying, “Oh, shit!”

  My grandmother smiled as she slewed the car back into a straight line, once more parallel to
the semi, but now with only a block between us. I could see the top of his trailer, about a hundred feet ahead of us, across the wide, flat-open parking lot to my right. “I have eyes on target.”

  “Bully for you that you're not blind,” Lethe said, keeping us on course, but keeping that block between us. This was going to be the dicey part. There weren't a lot of ways that we could keep the driver from spotting us if he decided to look in this direction. Hopefully he'd keep his eyes on the road.

  We passed behind another warehouse, and when we came out from behind it, we were almost to an intersection when Lethe damned near stood on the brakes, the car coming to an abrupt halt. I let out a small cry, feeling like I was about to go through the windshield.

  The semi was making a right turn, and Lethe slammed the gearshift knob into reverse, squealing tires as she took us back ten feet and then threw the car into drive again. She put the pedal down, and we sped up, the tractor-trailer in front of us still making its lazy turn at about ten miles an hour, no part of the cab visible because of the twisting, snake-like turn of the trailer behind.

  “Hurry up and get in behind him tight,” I said. “If you can't see his mirrors, he can't see you.” I was repeating something I'd seen on the back of countless semis, but it seemed likely true.

  Lethe didn't waste time acknowledging what I'd said; she sped up to what felt like Ludicrous Speed, and then tapped the brakes a few times to keep from squealing the tires coming to a stop almost at the trailer's back bumper as it completed the turn and started to slowly chug forward again.

  I waited no more than a second before it dawned on me that this was the time. I clicked the button to undo my seatbelt, and Lethe shot me a sidelong look.

  “He's never going to go any slower than he's going right now,” I said, and caught her nod as I slid out of my rolled-down window head-first. I was up on the hood in seconds, my grandmother keeping the speed matched to the trailer's.

  Wind was rushing through my hair, not too much at first, but increasing as we sped up, the driver taking advantage of a long, straight road ahead. He needed to get out of this industrial park and onto a main road, but based on the long stretch of road ahead it looked like I had some leeway, and so did he, and we'd both take advantage of it. Him by nosing the speed up, me to do...