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part #38 of Out of the Box Series Series
But my choke hold was locked in, and I was determined to drag the life out of this son of a bitch with my bare hands, even if he was sapping my powers. It wasn't like I hadn't killed people unpowered before. It just made more work of it, that was all. Powers were an aide.
I could kill a man unaided. The will, the desire to watch the light in their eyes fade, to hear their death rattle ring in my ears? That wasn't a function of me being a metahuman.
It was a function of me being a twisted, angry, vengeful woman with a goddess complex.
“There is no peace on Earth,” I whispered in his ear as he tried again to buck me, unsuccessfully, for I left my forearm locked in, hard across his throat. “Thanks to asshats like you. So I'm going to send you elsewhere, maybe get us an inch closer.”
Oberheuser stopped, just stopped in his crazed bucking, the drowning reflex paused, and I wondered if he'd died of a heart attack.
But he hadn't, and I realized that in the harshest way possible as he flipped over on his back, treating me like a turtle shell and landing atop me with all his weight. I heard things crack as light flashed in front of my eyes from the sudden, unexpected skull trauma.
I came back to myself gasping, flat on my back, Oberheuser on all fours a few feet away, choking. I was in a staggering amount of pain along my spine and flank, and it felt a little like that gunshot wound in my side had reopened. I lifted my shirt to confirm, and a pencil stream of blood running down my side told me yes, I had just reopened that old wound. Again.
“I don't want to kill you anymore,” Oberheuser said, turning his haggard face to look back at me. In his eyes I saw a familiar admixture of self-loathing and pity, the eyes of a survivor–
And I hated him even more.
“Because you'd rather I live with this shit on my conscience?” I said, sweeping a hand before me to indicate the burning ruin of Minneapolis. Two more buildings were on fire now, and a chopper moved in the distance, sweeping the wreckage, seeking survivors that I knew they would never find.
He shook his bald head slowly. “We were supposed to kill you. That was the plan. That was why we stayed. To cause enough havoc to summon you back, where the team was waiting in the oil refinery, or somewhere along your flight path, to stop you, to...”
“To end me, yes, I know,” I said, looking at him with all my hate. “But I found out what they were doing and I killed them before they could kill me. And I slaughtered Moose and Rocky and Stub downtown, and killed Priscilla at the zoo, and Sherman and Schmidt at the airport.” I didn't take my eyes off him, but I felt myself sag, the pain was just...incredible without my metahuman hardiness. “But I missed Scout and Drusilla, and apparently that made all the difference.”
“This was not the plan,” Oberheuser said, and he looked almost tearful as he waved a hand in front of me. “Some destruction, sure, to bring you here. But not...” He actually did tear up, a big one sinking down his cheek. “...Not like this.”
“This was always your plan, Otto,” I said. “This was what the world looked like if Sovereign won.”
“We were meant to change this world,” Oberheuser said, shaking his head furiously. “To smooth the inequities. To see justice done, on an equal basis.”
I laughed, loud and bitterly. “Nothing is ever equal in the world, you fool. I have powers that others don't. Lebron James has the height and talent to be a pro basketball player, but none of the brains of Thomas Sowell. None of us are equal, and we never will be. Imagine if I whined about my lack of talent at crochet instead of just getting on with the business of killing slugs like you, which is what I'm actually good at.”
“But you stopped them before,” Oberheuser said, closing his eyes. “You stopped them at the refinery, and their plan was perfect. You knew, and I think I know how.” He turned his face to look at Akiyama. “You traveled time to do it, to make right what you got wrong before.”
Akiyama was splayed out, looking quite sick, turned on his side, head sagging as though gravity were hitting him particularly hard today. “We tried,” he said. “We failed.”
“But you can try again,” Oberheuser said, lifting himself to a knee. “I will leave.” He pounded his chest. “I will leave you be, and you will have your powers and can go once more, and this time make it work.” The tears were just coasting down his cheeks now. “Please. I beg of you.”
I stared at the tableau of Minneapolis and, on the other side of me, St. Paul, in a similar state. Skyscrapers were burning, not a light was on anywhere in the city, because those who provided the power were dead. Corpse disposal would be a thriving business in this city for years, the whole place a dead zone and a monument to the time that Sienna Nealon had failed so grandly as to doom a whole city. “We only had one shot at this,” I said. “I threw my whole life away and failed to do a damned thing to stop you pieces of shit.”
“But you have all the chances you could want,” Oberheuser said, inching closer to me, his voice carrying those notes of hope that had died in my own soul somewhere in the last day. “You can simply roll back time, take another stab–”
“It is not as simple as that,” Akiyama said. “To roll back time again would be to give the people who have died the most unsettling experience of deja vu for repeating their deaths. Doing it once gives one a manageable situation. To do it again...that would entail great mental discomfort.”
“They can survive anguish. There are counselors for that sort of thing,” Oberheuser said, and threw an arm out to indicate the ruin of the cities. “But they cannot survive this.”
I looked over the ruin of what was once my own cities, and that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach mingled with the pains, throbbing, aching, stabbing and otherwise that echoed through my whole body. “Could we even go back again, Shin'ichi?” I looked at him, laid out on the ground, barely moving, as though only a breath away from death. I'd drained his soul before this started, and he'd had a grand total of six hours or so of sleep in the last two or three days. I was well-rested by comparison, which was no mean feat because I felt like I had been dragged through the back alleys of hell and had the shit beaten out of me every five paces along the way.
Akiyama took a long breath, closing his eyes. “I could not do what I have just done for very long. I am so weary, any attempt would need to be short and focused.”
“Which is impossible, because I have no idea where Drusilla and Scout even were,” I said, looking out over the ruin, exhaling what felt like the last piece of my living soul.
“But...there are ways,” Oberheuser said, and he pointed to a small dot in the sky. A rescue helicopter. “Surely by now they have discovered the epicenter of this destruction, whatever it is, whatever caused it–”
“It's radiation,” I said, and he looked befuddled. “A massive, saturating radiation burst that causes near-instant – and painful – death. Power outages follow, then uncontrolled fires because no one's around to keep the lights on or put out the flames.”
Oberheuser thought for a moment. “Surely your government has traced the origin point of this radiation surge by now?”
“Probably,” I said, almost laughing, “but no one in my government is going to tell me where the radiation came fr...son of a bitch,” I said, sighing, “or in this case, daughter of Godzilla, given how tall she is.” I hesitated, thinking of Sherri Terborg, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team member I'd worked with in Los Angeles to save the city. “Okay. There might be one person in the government I could ask...”
Chapter One Hundred Seventeen
Sherri Terborg
NEST Office
Los Angeles, California
December 23rd
8:46 A.M.
It was not shaping up to be a peaceful day, nor a peaceful week, nor, really, a peaceful finish to the year. Sherri Terborg sat in front of a computer monitor, and had been for the last sixteen hours straight, eyes bleary and watering, the tinsel of cheerfully nonspecific holiday decorations hanging from the ceiling glittering every few seconds as it blew in the AC, distracting her tired brain from the work she was doing.
With a low moan, she pitched forward, dropping her head into her palms. “I would just like a nap. Not even my vacation back. Just a nap. A few hours of shut eye where I can dream about the beach and...”
A buzzing disturbed her. Her phone lay on the desk next to the computer, an unknown number staring back at her from the screen.
Cocking her head at it, Terborg frowned.
A Minneapolis number.
Hmm. How oddly timed.
Still, lots of people had Minneapolis cell phone numbers. Sure, the city was dead, but not everyone who lived there had gone along.
The problem was...Sherri really only knew one person from Minneapolis. And given what was going on there, it seemed unlikely a random solicitor would be calling her from there just now.
“Maybe it's a ghost,” she whispered hopefully. But in her heart of hearts, she knew there was no chance of that. Because she knew who it was, surely.
With a cringe, she lifted her phone. What was the right thing to do here?
And with a sigh, she answered. “Hello?”
“Terborg,” came the exact voice she expected, blunt and right to the point. “You on this thing?”
“You're the FBI's number one fugitive right now, you know this, right?” Terborg said, looking around. The lab was abuzz with activity, and no one was paying one jot of attention to her.
“Yeah, and I'm fine if you want to report this call, just answer me a question first,” Sienna Nealon said. “What is the point of origin for the Minneapolis event?”
Terborg felt serious internal tension, like there were gears of some great clock in the middle of her that were supposed to be spinning. But something – a metal rod, stick, clot of glue, her own body thrown on the works, something was stopping them turning. She grimaced tightly. Questions were all that came to mind. “Weren't you there? Don't you know?”
“If I was there and I knew, I would have stopped Drusilla,” she said. “Can you tell me where it started? That's all I need, and then I'll leave you alone and you can call the FBI.”
Terborg stared at her computer screen and sighed once more. It was all over the news already, anyway. “Yeah. All right, fine. It started at the top of the IDS tower, and from what our search teams have found...yeah. Drusilla's body was up there. So...”
“Thanks, Too Tall,” Nealon said, causing Terborg to grimace. A click at the other end of the line heralded the end of the conversation.
“Now I gotta call the FBI,” Terborg said, letting her phone sag back to the desk. “And fill out more paperwork, probably, reports...”
She let her head pitch forward again. At this rate, she'd be lucky if she made it out of the office by next Halloween.
Chapter One Hundred Eighteen
Sienna
“It's the IDS tower,” I said, cursing as I threw the phone I'd stolen from a desiccated corpse back to the ground. Apparently we were adding stealing from the dead to my list of sins today.
“You sound displeased about his location,” Oberheuser said, still lurking way too close to me for my comfort. My ability to make him get the eff back was limited right now, though. He had dried his tears and was looking at me earnestly. Which was annoying from a villain.
“One of my first real battles with metahumans happened at the top of the IDS tower,” I said. It was where I'd absorbed Aleksandr Gavrikov in order to save Minneapolis from his threat to blow it up completely the way he'd already done to a small town called Glencoe. “I just hate retreading old ground, and saving Minneapolis these days feels like very old ground. Like ancient burial grounds, maybe some haunting going on there.”
Oberheuser put a strong hand on my shoulder. “We have to do this, though.”
I gave him a searing look. “There a mouse in your pocket? Because I don't know what you're going to do to help, other than get me killed.”
He straightened up. “I can save you, don't you see? If I get close enough to Drusilla, she cannot do this thing.”
“Yeah, and if you get close enough to me, I'm powerless,” I said. “How about you stay on the ground and let me go kill Drusilla and, I suspect, Scout.” The fact that Terborg had mentioned Drusilla's body being found at the scene struck me as the best evidence of Scout's involvement in this whole mess. It wasn't as if Drusilla's powers could kill her, though that's probably what our idiot government was thinking. I looked into the gray and black sky, the sun battling desperately to show its face from behind those ugly clouds. “All I need is you taking a wrong step in my direction as Scout's hurling a plasma ball or blast of electricity and it's game over for me.”
“If you are close to me, I cannot turn back time,” Akiyama said. He seemed to be dragging with every step; I guess we'd woken him up in the middle of a long-deserved nap.
“Can you take me back with you at a distance?” Oberheuser said. “I wish to help.” He looked right at me. “And with respect to you and your abilities, will you not have your hands completely full with the succubus?”
He knew Scout was a succubus? That was interesting. “What do you know about her?” I asked.
“That she hates you terribly,” Oberheuser said. “So much so that she spearheaded this attempt, first to volunteer, though you could see by her eyes that her plans were her own, not those handed to her by the men who aided the escape.”
“I want to talk about those men at some point,” I said, tearing my eyes away from him. “Because I owe them, and I'd like to see Wil Waters get ripped to pieces for what he did letting everyone loose. But for now...” I cursed under my breath, because as annoying as I found Oberheuser, and as much as he might be a liability at my back, he had an excellent point.
Taking care of Scout in a battle would be a full-time job. Trying to deal with her at the same time Drusilla was threatening to go nuclear?
Talk about a nightmare.
“I could do it,” Akiyama said, looking at me with his dazed eyes. “Your distance from me is irrelevant, I can pull you back with us. But it will strain me greatly, regardless.”
I walked through the most probable course in my head before speaking it aloud into the silence. The silence of four million dead people. “We'll get to the tower first, then leave you across the street, Shin'ichi. You can roll back time, and all he'll have to do is ride the elevator to the top floor while I fly up and kill Scout and maybe Drusilla, too.” I kept my look cool, but I had this planned even further.
“All right,” Oberheuser said, nodding furiously. His enthusiasm cloyed at me, and sincere or fake, I didn't really care anymore.
Because either he'd help me kill Scout and Drusilla, and then I'd leave, beginning my new life as a fugitive...
...Or he'd betray me, and I'd die...
...and none of this would be my problem anymore.
Chapter One Hundred Nineteen
The IDS tower was on fire.
This was a fact I'd known long before we'd driven through the dead streets of Minneapolis, taking Oberheuser's stolen car up on sidewalks and down alleys in an effort to avoid the stalled vehicles with their owners slumped over the steering wheels on every street surface. Past burning buildings and piles of snow turned black from the falling ash, we'd gone into the heart of downtown.
It was eerie as hell, maybe one of the eeriest things I'd ever done. The city was dead, not a heartbeat, not a breath being drawn anywhere in its limits.
Except for, I suppose, us.
For now.
Akiyama, Oberheuser, and I looked up at the IDS tower burning from the far side of Marquette Avenue. Flames were surging out of every floor above the tenth, a chemical scent apparent even to my now-human senses, the cold wind offset by the heat of the flames.
Part of me – almost all of me, actually – wished that Oberheuser was standing across the street so I could feel my powers working.
A nearby police car had run into the side of the parking garage, and I hustled over, breathing a lot heavier than I usually would have for such a short run. Finding the window down, I chambered my elbow back, then snapped it into the glass.
“Owwwwww,” I said, rubbing the bone. “That really hurts without my powers.”
Oberheuser jogged across the street to join me. “Please,” he said, indicating I should step aside. I did, and he shattered the window with his own elbow. Unlocking the door, he threw it open to reveal a police officer slumped over the wheel.
“Thanks,” I said, still clutching my aching elbow. My side was on fire again, too, leaking blood constantly, unwilling or unable to heal. And I was really regretting having not healed my busted hand before I'd passed out, because it was now properly shattered and un-healable. Always nice to go into a fight in less-than-peak condition.
Leaning into the car, careful not to aggravate my wounds too much, I gathered up the fallen officer's gun and slid it into my waistband behind my back, then did the same with his dart gun. All that weight threatened to drag down my jeans, so I pulled the pistol – a full-frame Glock 17 – and carried it in my left hand, leaving the dart gun back there as an emergency backup.
“You are ready now?” Oberheuser asked, looking at me with great seriousness.
“Sure,” I said, keeping the plastic grip of the Glock firmly in hand. Looking across the street to Akiyama, I called, “You set?”
Akiyama nodded once, slowly, then put his back against the glass-windowed building across the street. Sagging down, I could sense that he was getting ready to turn back time. Ash flaked down from stories above, but we were protected by the skyway bridge that stretched over the entrance, connecting the IDS tower with the building Akiyama leaned against.
Slipping out from beneath the bridge, I looked up once more at the burning building. As I watched, it started to change.
