Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (11 page)

“This will be dicey. And fun,” she told herself. “But mostly dicey.” She took a deep breath and then pushed a hand toward the nearest corner of the building.

It took her a few minutes to set up the channels the way she thought it would require. She’d only had the powers for a few months, but she’d practiced in that time, trying to learn everything she could about how they worked. Her gravity channels were only as strong as whatever they were anchored to; in this case they were anchored to her, and she was anchored to the nearby buildings.

“Here’s to the sturdiness of the modern building code,” she murmured. A second after she set her plan in motion, she realized that a lot of these buildings probably hadn’t been built to modern codes, but it was a little too late.

Jamie reversed the flow of gravity on all the channels she’d just tethered to the burning building, reeling them toward her. She could hear brick and wood straining and breaking, and watched carefully as pieces started to fall off toward the street below. She threw wide, weak gravity channels down over the street like nets, and watched as brick and wood was caught in them, suspended in place over the streets.

Jamie turned up the power of the channels below, closing her eyes as she balanced many more channels than she’d ever dealt with simultaneously and with more power than she’d ever put out at one time. The top floor of the burning building broke apart in eight pieces, and she slipped a hard edge of gravity like a blade below them to its connection to the rest of the building. That was new, too, though she’d experimented with a gravity blade a few times at the place she’d used as her training ground on Staten Island.

She pulled the top floor of the building off as neatly as if she’d taken apart a doll house. The flames were visible within, burning in the walls and halls and apartments. There were four or five bright, blazing spots, and she could see them through the smoke.

“And now for something completely different,” she muttered to herself.

She set up channels directly to the spots where the fire was burning brightly, circling about a ten foot square; it was plain to her from this distance that the top floor wasn’t fully engulfed yet, that the fire on the fourth was just starting to burn through in these spots, and maybe, just maybe, she could contain it here if—

“Oh, damn,” she said, as she caught the first signs of motion in the labyrinth of exposed rooms beneath.

She could see a family, three or four people, one with a cat in their arms, waving from one of the apartments that was yet untouched by the blaze. She reached out and caught them all in a gravity channel, lifting them up, then tethering them to a building down the street. Gently, she slid them down, their screams of terror at being picked up in the air like children crackling through the city night over the sirens wail. She let them drop the last few feet to a gentle, wafting landing.

Jamie was sweating furiously, and it was getting harder to concentrate. She felt like she had a hundred different irons in the fire, like she was multitasked to the maximum and had almost no concentration left to give. She caught sight of a body in a hall and lifted it, dragged it up, then brought it down on 55
^th
behind a parked ambulance. She saw the paramedics rush toward the fallen form, casting their gaze skyward to her as they did.

“Fire, fire, fire,” she muttered, sweat cascading down her forehead from beneath her mask. It was in her eyes, it was burning, and the wind seemed to be shifting direction, because now she was getting more of the smoke. Holding up the pieces of this building was a burden, threatening to pull her down at any moment. She threw down three more heavy gravity channels using the fire trucks as her anchors to fight against the increased weight as she ripped the flaming segments out of the top floor of the building. She lifted them high, to her, and then looked west, to the river.

“I have … to get rid … of some of this … weight,” she said, unable to even muster the strength to close her mouth when she finished speaking. She anchored the pieces to her and set the channels toward the river, letting them roll west with all the power she could give them, which wasn’t much. The fragments of the building looked like they were ziplining toward the river, still aflame, smoking like falling meteors as they sizzled across the sky.

An anchor slipped as a fire truck moved beneath her, and Jamie’s little pyramid suddenly felt unstable. She felt a surge of panic, like she’d fallen out of bed in a deep sleep, and thrusting out an emergency channel to stabilize her. It hit the building down and behind her, and she felt the facade crumble. She threw out another broad-based net, but it was weak and flimsy, and she could feel the pieces threatening to tumble out of it like it was bare threads straining under the weight of tons.

The billowing cloud of black smoke shifted, and she caught it full-on, the darkness enveloping her. It burned her eyes, blurring her vision with darkness and pain. A great racking cough welled up within her, rolling up from deep within her lungs and hacking out, fresh air gone and replaced by something painful, like knives in her chest.

“Oh … hell …” Jamie said, sweating, her arms and legs in agony from all the weight, her mind sluggish, a hundred gravity channels thrown up around her. She could feel them now, like they were rats gnawing at her paralyzed body. She couldn’t move, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t breathe—and she couldn’t let a single one of them go, or else people below her would die.

I was carrying the dog across my shoulders like a furry, whimpering scarf. It was fortunate that my powers didn’t affect animals because if they did, I would have absorbed this poor fella already. At least he would have been better company than Wolfe, I thought.

Grr …

There he went, proving me right again.

I coughed again, the air thick and heavy, smoke clouding the little apartment. I fought my way through the darkness and felt into the bedroom, my blazing hand casting a little light. Thick wafts of smoke curled in front of me, and I peered into the darkness.

There was someone on the bed. I could see them in the shadow, bedcovers all piled up in a human shape. I hurried over and ripped them off to find a woman there, her features in shadow, wearing some pretty classy silken pajamas. I nudged her, then felt quickly for a pulse. It was there, but damned slow, so I put her on my shoulders as the building seemed to shake and dust came falling down from the ceiling, flecks in the hazy air.

“Ruh roh,” I muttered as I hurried back the way I’d come, darting out into the hall above the staircase. I listened for that pounding noise, the sign that someone was in need of help, but I couldn’t hear it. The dog whined meekly on my shoulders, and I had a bare arm against the silk pajamas of the unconscious woman. This was not good; there was someone else here that needed saving, but I was already loaded up and in danger of touching this poor woman’s skin if I held out much longer. Not to mention she desperately needed first aid and treatment for smoke inhalation.

Damn.

I made my choice in a heartbeat, lunging toward the front of the building where I’d entered. I could see the fire starting to crawl its way back into the room where I’d entered, restarting the embers where I’d extinguished it. There wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, however, with my hands occupied with the pup and the lady.

I eased my way out the window, the street cloudy with black smoke, and floated down to the first floor. I darted a glance back and saw ice everywhere, like Captain Frost had just shot first and asked questions later, hints of flames melting their way out from behind his handiwork. He’d covered every surface that looked like it had been burning in a sheen of glassy frost, and now sat next to an ambulance, an oxygen mask over his face, eyes glazed over as I stumped up with the dog and the woman.

“Hey,” he said, nodding, looking completely wiped out. His eyes were dull, his face was black from the smoke, and he moved aside the oxygen mask to speak. A couple paramedics watched him humorlessly, kind of resentfully, actually, as he huffed oxygen to recover from whatever the hell stupidity he’d done. “How did you do?”

“I got a dog and a woman, but there’s at least one other person trapped inside.” The street felt really dark from all the smoke. I gave him a once-over as I set down my burdens and the paramedics came forward to do their thing. “Did you clear the first floor?”

“I got overwhelmed,” he said, the huskiness of his voice reminding me of Lego Batman’s imitation of Christian Bale.

“And I’m underwhelmed,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know whether the person I heard is trapped on the second or the third floor, but here’s an idea for you—don’t try and ice everything. Just put out the fire where you have to and clear the damned rooms.”

I turned to leave but Captain Frost stood up behind me. “You’re not actually going back in there, are you?” There was a note of disbelief in how he said it.

“I said there was someone else trapped, numbnuts,” I shot back, sliding him from the useful idiot column into the one without the “useful” appellation. “I’m not leaving them in there.”

“Did you not see what’s going on up there?” He pointed skyward, and I finally looked up.

“Whoa,” I said under my breath. Because it was a
whoa
kind of moment.

The top floor of the building looked like it had been deconstructed, pulled apart and left strewn in midair above the street. There were pieces of it everywhere, visible through the clouds of smoke draped over the street, pouring out of the fourth floor windows. Brick and glass just hung there, threatening to fall like a rain at any moment, and I could see rescue personnel edging clear of the debris zone as best they could. The fire trucks weren’t moving, probably because they needed to be close. I could see the firemen watching warily as they charged their hoses, trying to prepare to unleash on the blaze. It was probably coming soon.

Way up above us, barely visible through the edges of the cloud, I could see Gravity Gal, hanging like a goddess above the scene. She was moving her arms like a puppeteer as she drifted in and out of the cloud of smoke—or the smoke cloud drifted over her. She was breaking apart the building piece by piece, clearly trying to save lives and demolish the fire as best she could. I cringed, not really sure this was the best approach, but it was probably better than just running in, icing everything and hoping for the best. After all, anyone trapped on the top floors was probably screwed unless they could get to a window. She was opening things up, making it more likely someone—either the firemen or me—could save those people. I saw a hook and ladder moving into place with a few firemen in big yellow coats and their gear moving to take a look at the exposed top floor.

“I have to get back in there,” I said, feeling like I’d hesitated long enough.

“Are you insane?” Frost called after me as I started to take off.

“No, I’m not in a river in France,” I shot back, and watched as his face clouded over in confusion as my lobbed softball of a pun sailed past unappreciated.

I shot back into the window I’d just passed through, zipping down the hall where I’d rescued the last two survivors. I listened, hoping to hear the pounding and the screaming of the man I suspected was still in here. There were a few doors open down the hall, which seemed to me to herald the departure of those residents who’d realized in time and gotten out. There were also three closed doors, and my problem now was figuring out which one the yelling man was behind.

There was nothing for it; caution was going to have to go out the window. I smashed down the first door, busting into an apartment that was totally empty. I swept through the phone booth sized bedroom just to be safe, and then shot back into the hall. I burst through the next door and found an apartment that looked like it had come right out of an episode of
Hoarders
. “Hell,” I muttered, wondering how hard I’d have to search to find a person in here. If there was anyone, they were probably hidden somewhere in the back, just past Ravenclaw’s Lost Diadem.

“Hello?” I shouted, almost knocking over a stack of newspapers or something as I surged through an all-in-one kitchen and living room no larger than a commemorative postage stamp. I went into the bedroom and sure enough, there was another figure in here. By the torchlight I could tell it was a woman, but when I pulled back the covers to rescue her, I got hit with a smell that overpowered the smoke and fire, and I thought for a minute I’d discovered a corpse.

I gagged, and then she stirred, making me sad, because I knew I’d have to pick her up in spite of the fact that she was plainly not into that whole personal hygiene thing that I held so dear. “The things I do for you people,” I muttered, not for the first time noting the irony of me going out of my way to rescue people when more than one person had commented on my apparent misanthropy.

A study in contradictions, that’s me.

I situated Stinky upon my shoulders and she did a full body writhe while trying to get in a more comfortable sleeping position. “Knock it off!” I told my unconscious passenger as she threatened to upend my balance, and I tried to cover my nose with my free hand. I was ready to weep, and not just because of the noxious fumes; she had been unconscious in her bed, and therefore was not the man I’d heard screaming and pounding at the walls.

Which meant I was probably going to have to carry her until I found him. I thought about just leaving her on the ground near the hallway where I was going to exit, but she might wake up and wander and that would be bad, so I just resigned myself to gagging quietly as I flew through toward the last door.

I kicked it down carefully, and of course hit something behind it, because naturally that would be where my unfortunate guy looking for salvation passed out. I pushed the door back slowly, moving the insensate body out of its path while doing my level best not to break bones in the poor soul trapped behind it. Once it was open wide enough, I snaked a hand through and grabbed a bare ankle, yanking the person out of the apartment and heaving them over my shoulder.