Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (30 page)

The red carpet was lit up like a landing strip, and I made use of it as such. The crowd on either side had a skittish feel, uncertain. They’d clearly heard the noise and had a feeling about what it was. Gunfire was a universal sound that tended to set people on edge, after all. Then I heard something else—sirens, klaxons, a fire alarm at work, howling somewhere in the hotel.

I touched down as the doors to the hotel’s main lobby opened up and Steven Clayton spilled out, a Glock 17 clutched in his hands, pointed in low rest at the earth.

“Sienna!” he called, breaking into a run as he headed toward me. He looked like a cop, like a really well-dressed cop but without a badge and—you know—hotter. Worry lines creased his face and lips. “He’s here.”

“Is that yours?” I asked, nodding at the pistol in his hands.

He glanced down at it. “Yeah. I took a few shots at him. Think I mostly missed.”

“Where was he?”

“Sitting on a couch in the lobby,” Steven said, his mouth a stiff line. “Like he owned the place, wearing a beanie and sunglasses, just waiting, looking at the elevators. He saw me as soon as I stepped out.” The corners of his mouth turned upward. “I don’t think he was expecting me to start shooting, though. He went through the floor in a half second.”

“Damn,” I said, rolling that one over in my head and coming to the obvious conclusion. A mad bomber running loose around the foundation of a massive hotel—

“He was wearing a trench coat,” Steven said, back to worried. “Could have been carrying anything with him. I pulled the fire alarm, but—”

“Yeah,” I said and shot upward again without waiting for him to spell out the rest. I zoomed up the intervening floors to the balcony, knowing full well what I had to do.

This hotel wasn’t going to evacuate itself, after all.

“Wow,” Flannery said, voice dripping with irony right after Sienna had left them behind, “that was a scene. So embarrassing.”

Kat knew she was lying, knew that she’d probably enjoyed it in a way that Kat couldn’t have, but saying so wasn’t something her character would do. Because that was really what she’d become—a character she played for the camera. Like that movie script she had been reading when all this had started. What was the girl’s name? Bobbie? She’d come to California with hopes and dreams, figuring with luck and hard work, she’d make her name, become famous. That was why Kat had come here, after all, wasn’t it? She tried to remember the arguments with Janus before the end. What had he said about fame being fleeting but power lasting?

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she delivered her lines and hit her mark, and right now she had a very definite mark to hit. “Sienna thinks she’s in charge of everybody,” Kat said, and then the sound of the fire alarm howling cut her off.

“What the hell?” Scott asked, looking around with everyone else in the party. Heads were swiveling. Not that there was much to see, just white lights flashing on the walls where the red alarm stations were mounted.

“That was gunfire, wasn’t it?” Butler edged in close to them.

“Yep,” Guy Friday said, appearing out of the crowd, bowling over one of the premiere agents in all of LA as he did so. “Time to leave, people.” He grabbed Kat by the waist before she had a chance to protest.

“Whoa!” Kat said as she was lifted into the air over Guy Friday’s shoulder. “What are you doing?” The crowd started to surge around them. Someone screamed.

Sienna flashed into view over the balcony again, shattering windows as she blasted into the room. “We’ve gotta get everyone out of here!” she shouted over the already-beginning-to-panic crowd. She swooped down and grabbed Guy Friday by the waist and yanked the both of them along, Kat struggling.

“What the—” Kat started to say, and then she felt Guy Friday’s feet touch solid ground again, the shudder of a hard landing running through his body and into hers. She blinked and looked around; they were on the pool deck of the hotel on the opposite side of the street.

“No time to chat!” Sienna shouted as she blasted across the street again, disappearing back over the balcony a story or two above them. She reappeared a moment later with two more people, one under each arm, dropping them in the pool and then zooming away again.

“Well, at least she didn’t drop us in there,” Guy Friday said, looking on the bright side.

“Probably didn’t think of it,” Kat said, sullenly. Why did Sienna always have to ruin everything?

I was grabbing people by the arms and legs and hauling them into the air, dragging them over the gulf between the Luxuriant and the tower across the street, chucking them into the swimming pool and flying back for more.

Yes. That’s right. I was grabbing some of the most powerful people in Hollywood by the suit jackets and expensive nightgowns, flying them across the street, and tossing them into a swimming pool as quickly as I could.

In spite of the shitstorm going on at the hotel, it was probably the best night ever.

“Don’t leave the camera—!” Kat’s cameraman barely got out before I dragged him and the sound guy out of the penthouse and across the street. They made a satisfying splash—minus the camera, which I had made sure he dropped by “accidentally” running it into the balcony doorframe on the way out. Oops.

Sometime after I tossed Grant Gustin into the pool (which I actually felt bad about, because he seemed nice—still, TAKE THAT, FASTEST MAN ALIVE, shown up by a woman), I realized I hadn’t grabbed Scott yet.

I made a conscious effort on my next pass to try and find him, but when I was halfway across the street I heard the first explosion go off.

There was a sharp pain running through Karl’s backside, worse than the other wounds he’d suffered in the last couple days. Those had been mostly superficial, that last layer of flesh he’d made whole to keep him from falling through those surfaces, through earth, ripped open. A centimeter of epidermis at most, a tear in the skin. It hurt, definitely, but it wasn’t agony. Even the punching Sienna Nealon had inflicted on his face had been extremely painful, but was nothing compared to this.

This was agony. He’d caught the full impact when he’d fallen through the floor of the lobby, landing in the first sub-basement parking garage. He hadn’t landed on his feet, either, it had been a hard, crushing landing where everything but his skull bounced against concrete floor. The impact had reverberated, his whole body bouncing a foot up before coming down again. After he’d settled, he’d lain there for a minute, taking stock of the pain.

The sound of dripping in the distance was a reminder he was in an underground garage. There was no sound of cars moving, no engines running, just the quiet solitude of being underground. Not as quiet as the time he’d spent months in the earth, but not nearly as loud as the gunshot- and chatter-filled lobby he’d left behind.

The pain ran the length of him, from ass to the top of his spine and spread up into his skull, bouncing around in there like someone had fired a bullet that had gotten trapped. He tasted blood in his mouth and wondered how hard he’d hit.

He grunted and it echoed in the silence. He turned his head and saw one of the big concrete pillars that supported the hotel standing there, looming in front of him. He’d walked past it only an hour earlier, planted one of his bombs in it, it and five others like it. He’d done all he could to make sure that this building was going to come down when the moment was right.

And the moment? As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t get any righter.

He strained against the aches in his body and fumbled for the detonator on his belt. Raising it up, he fought his way to his feet, drawing in a sharp breath of the damp air, and pushed the button, running toward the wall, nothing but the soles of his feet making contact with the ground, the sound blotted out by the explosion echoing through the garage behind him.

Flannery Steiner’s perfectly manicured nails ate into Scott’s arm as the panic swept through the party. People were crowding the elevators, crowding the balcony, and Sienna was flying in and out at a blurry speed, almost like an afterimage of her was present for a second then gone, a couple more people removed from the thinning crowd with every appearance.

“What do we do?” Flannery asked, drawing a sharp breath, voice barely above a whisper. “Should we go for the elevators?”

“That’s a fight to the death.” Scott looked over his shoulder. It was a grim sight, people in formalwear shoving, elbowing, nearly throwing punches every time one of the elevators dinged and people scrambled to get on. The shouts, the cries, the squeals of triumph—they all blended into cacophony. It was too loud by half for Scott, and it was almost drowned out by the screamed pleas from the masses of people on the balcony who were begging for Sienna to save them. “Balcony,” he decided, without even having to give it much thought.

“There are like a hundred people out there,” Flannery said, nails gripping deeper into his arm, drawing blood, “there’s no way she’s going to get them all.” She looked at him with horrorstruck eyes. “Is she?”

He had to bite back the anger that came from even thinking of Sienna. “If anyone can …”

A hard smell of fear had settled over the party, the parting of the two sides—one bound for the elevator and stairs, the other to the woman flying every person she could to safety—left an enormous gulf, a no man’s land that Scott stood squarely in the middle of. For now, it looked like an even divide, the elevator and stairs swallowing just as many people as Sienna was evacuating via the balcony.

What is going on here?
Scott wondered. The fire alarm screamed.
Because this doesn’t just seem like a fire. The sprinklers aren’t even going.

“Screw this,” Flannery said, bolting from his arm. “You may trust that crazy bitch, but I don’t.” She stared at him for a split second, eyes wide with fear. “I’m saving myself.” And she was off, kicking off her heels, shouldering her way toward the crowd for the nearest elevator.

“I …” Scott faltered, like his mind clouded in that instant.

Do I trust Sienna?

If it comes down to it … is she going to save me?

Or would she leave me behind?

Before he could get to the answer, the first explosion rocked the hotel, shaking the ground beneath his feet and spelling out for him exactly what was happening here. The second followed a moment later, then a third, and the walls and ground started to crack all around him.

The explosions came one after another, like gunshots in the night, but louder and more forceful. I could tell they were happening somewhere beneath the hotel; maybe Redbeard had been an architectural engineer in a previous life. A cloud of debris washed out of the first floor, and I knew that nobody had survived down there.

Worse than that, every single staircase in the building had just been cut off. The ground floor had just ceased to exist, and the rippling shockwave was now running up the facade of the old building.

The art deco tower shuddered under the force of the explosions running through it. Plaster cracked, dust came flying off like billowing clouds, windows shattered on the first four floors in quick succession. The sound of metal straining was faint, but audible somewhere beneath the stunned silence brought on by the explosions spilling out onto a Los Angeles street.

The tower started to buckle, and I surged into motion. With no time to waste, I shot back to the balcony. I put all thoughts of the lower floors out of my mind. I had seconds to rescue as many people as I could, and anyone who wasn’t within grabbing distance was—tragically—out of luck.

I swept back to the party balcony and found screaming chaos. People had been pleading to get my attention before, but now desperation was setting in. It would have been impossible not to feel the shocks from the explosion, and no one—I don’t care how many earthquakes they’ve been in—likes to have the ground beneath their feet get unsteady.

I dropped low and snatched up two people immediately. More grabbed onto my thighs, and for the first time I wasn’t sorry that they were a little wider than standard. Screams filled my ears, and I realized one of them was a guy clutching tightly to my ankle. It was Mr. Snuff Film, and as I jetted back off the balcony, I reflected that truly, saving lives was my business, because apparently I was saving this douche, and I’d already saved Kat.

I dumped them in the pool and shot back for the hotel. The tower was crumbling now, splits running up the plaster, the last moments heralded by all the damage that was showing in the exterior lines. I froze for a second above the balcony as I dipped low, my eyes locking on Scott’s, way at the back of the crowd, his look one of stricken disbelief.

My hands were full, though, and I had six people clinging to my legs and my pants, making me really glad I invested in that leather belt this afternoon. I flew over the edge of the balcony, not losing his eyes as I went.

The hotel started to fall behind me, the top floor collapsing onto the one beneath it as I flew away, carrying as many complete strangers as I could, and leaving behind the man I had once loved.

There’s no one coming to save you
, the voice came again, a surprise like before, though at least this time he recognized his own voice, unlike at MacArthur Park.

The balcony was falling, the whole building coming down, and Scott had just shoved to the head of the crowd, right there with a front-row view of the whole thing as Sienna flew off, people hanging from her. There were probably thirty people still on the balcony, and now their screams were almost deafening, the screams and the sound of a building falling around them.

“If only you’d faced this kind of thing before,” he said. “Maybe jumped out of a plane or something.”

With a flash, Scott saw tumbling skies around him, felt the weightless sensation of falling, saw Sienna in front of him, the ground racing up—

“I’ve done this before,” he said to himself and vaulted over the balcony, flinging himself clear of the falling building.