Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (31 page)

“Yeah, you’re old hat at this,” the voice said in the rushing wind. “Too bad you can’t remember, thanks to her.”

The street below rushed up at him, and Scott threw his hands out as if to catch himself. The memory came back to him again, the feeling of water spraying out of his hands, draining him, hitting the ground enough to—

Break my fall
, he willed, shooting out his hardest spray. It bounced against the concrete, the solid, coherent stream splashing against the pavement. It was like a cannon out of his fists. His arms jerked from the impact, slowing him …

He drifted to the ground in a cloud of dust as the hotel smashed to the ground behind him. The screams in the night were lost in his own, which faded to the sound of sirens, and he stood there, in the dust, in the cloud, lost in himself, his own thoughts, trying to remember a memory that had been stolen.

I hovered over the wreckage of the Luxuriant with a steadily growing fury, an anger that compounded the longer I stared at the ruin of the building below. I could have gone and checked on the people I’d thrown in the pool, could have gone down to talk to emergency personnel, could have studiously avoided Scott, who was milling around on the street below with the other survivors, could have given an angry interview to the local TV news that was showing up on the scene—I could even have started the fruitless rescue attempts, trying to pry survivors out of the concrete and rebar coffin that the hotel had become, but I didn’t feel remotely qualified to do that. They had cranes for that sort of thing, and the odds were good I wouldn’t have been a very effective team player at the moment, since I didn’t want to play as a team.

What I wanted to do was find Redbeard and pull his heart out through his ribcage. Not like he did it, with an insubstantial hand, but my way, where I busted through skin and bone with superior, furious force and just ripped his heart out in a very literal sense.

I watched the streets, hoping he’d show up. I had a feeling that even with what Steven had done to him, he’d made it out somehow. He’d hit the detonator, after all. For some reason, I didn’t think he’d made this building his gravesite. Probably because I didn’t think he had the decency or the balls to just end it. I mean, when you want to kill everybody, start with yourself, asshole, because odds are good that’s going to solve the problem. Don’t inflict your baggage on the rest of us. That’s just selfish.

But then, people were selfish, weren’t they? I was staring out at a smoldering monument to selfishness, watching the firefighters set up to douse it with water in the spots where fires had broken out in the collapsed rubble.

I swung around and looked at the pool deck behind me. It was filled with soaking refugees too stupid to clear out, to get the hell away from the epicenter of a disaster that had nearly claimed their lives. They stared on in stunned silence like sheep, maybe counting themselves lucky and trying to avoid going into shock. There was a little jockeying for position at the edge of the railing, and it made me sick.

Kat was near the front, of course, Guy Friday and Butler lingering behind her, presumably doing some gawking of their own, too caught up in the spectacle to see with clear eyes that she should be escorted far, far from the scene—and now. I drifted down until she noticed me. She looked more than a little stunned herself, but unlike her fellow partygoers, she at least wasn’t dripping water.

“What are you still doing here, Kat?” I asked, my voice raw with emotion.

“I’m …” she searched for an answer like she was giving it in front of a camera. “… I’m just taking a moment for the fallen—”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” I said, snapping at her so hard she jerked in surprise. “Why did you come here tonight?”

“I was … being brave,” she said, finding her spine about halfway through her answer. “I was doing what you would have—”

“I wouldn’t have come to a crowded public place unasked if there was a mad bombing meta after me,” I shot at her, remorseless. She flinched. “It’s not brave to expose other people to your danger. It’s the opposite. It’s chickenshit. And if you have to keep telling yourself how brave you’re being when you’re really acting selfish and self-laudatory, it kind of makes you a pathetic human being.”

“Hey,” said a guy in the front row with a soaking plaid jacket, “who are you to judge her?”

“I’m the one who just saved your life,” I said, glaring at him so hard he took a step back from the edge, “in case you’re as short on memory as she is on reason.” I turned my gaze back to Kat. “You got a lot of people killed tonight and earlier today because you were so damned focused on being famous, on making yourself look better and not caring about what happened to anyone else. This guy wants to kill you, publicly, and instead of being a human being and keeping yourself away from danger, from giving him opportunities to kill you and lots more people, you keep showing him your ass and daring him to come after it.” I lurched closer to her. “Well, it’s not happening again.”

“Hey—!” Butler said, making a grab for me as I came over the rail toward them.

I snatched up Kat before he could do anything to stop me, lifting her kicking and struggling into the air. “I’m sick of you acting like a child,” I said, wrapping my arms around her waist and streaking into the heavens. “No one else is going to die for you, Kat.”

The air whipped past both of our faces, and I felt her go still in my grasp after she realized that if she broke free of my hold, she’d plummet to her death. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked, voice quivering.

I didn’t answer her as I altered our course to carry this albatross, this selfish infant, this negligent murderer away from Los Angeles. Far, far away from Los Angeles.

Somewhere that she’d never be found.

Karl walked through the wall of the burger joint without stopping, passing through and ending up in the deep fryer, grease spitting from the boiling surface. He didn’t even feel the heat as he moved. The kitchen was all streamlined metal surfaces and ugly brown tile, like this place might have been a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s before shutting down and returning to life as a boutique locally owned establishment. The employee uniforms, polo-style shirts and no hats, were a half step up from fast-food chain standard,. He couldn’t smell the food, not when he was out of phase, so he made his nose solid for a second and took a deep whiff.

Oof. Truffle oil. He took a deeper sniff and caught all the little aromas—mushrooms, Swiss, maybe some pineapple from a Hawaiian-style burger, he wasn’t entirely sure. It was a sweet, sharp aroma. Karl closed his eyes for a second, his crotch buried in the middle of the deep fryer, the scent of fries permeating the air, and he just took it all in.

Yeah. This was the place.

Karl opened his eyes to see a young woman in the restaurant uniform staring at him in openmouthed horror, her jaw down at about her ankles. He locked eyes with her, stared right back, and smiled. “I want one of those mushroom and Swiss burgers, and one of the ones with pineapple on it, plus a standard, good ol’ fashioned one with lettuce, tomato, mayo, onion, cheddar or American cheese, whichever goes best, and fries—you listening to me?” He wobbled his head to look at her, break her out of her trance.

She took a sharp breath that sounded like someone had hit her in the gut. “You’re him,” she said after a moment of struggling.

“Yeah,” he said with a careful smile. So this was what it was like to be known.

“You … you killed those people,” she said.

“Yeah,” Karl said, and angled his head toward the wall he’d just walked through. “I just blew up the Luxuriant hotel, too. Probably hundreds dead there. Can’t believe they named it that.” He smiled. “Yeah, that was a good time.” He let the smile fade. “You gonna get my order?”

Tears ran down the girl’s broad face. She had blondish brown hair and a pug nose. “I … are you going to kill me?”

“Get my burgers and throw in some fries and you’ll be fine,” Karl said, stifling a yawn. His ass still hurt where that stupid prettyboy actor had shot him. “Hurry about it, will you?” He looked to the side; whatever renovation this place had experienced after its start as a fast food joint had caused them to cut off the kitchen from the restaurant itself. He couldn’t see the dining area, leaving his encounter with this employee pretty private. He looked at her nametag. “You gonna help me … Amy?”

She snapped mechanically into motion, going toward the fryer and then stopping herself, staring at him, standing in the middle of it. “The—the fries—I need to—they’re done cooking …”

“Oh,” he said and stepped to the side. Now he stood with a griddle in the middle of his chest, three all-beef patties sizzling somewhere inside him. He imagined them in his belly, and it felt weird, even though that’s where they were sitting. Amy lurched toward the fryer, still watching him in horror, pulling the fries out of the vat. They dripped grease, stuck in their little wire-frame cage.

He watched her do her work, ignoring the sounds in the front of the restaurant. It sounded like patrons, like people, like cattle, like meat—they
should
serve people here, like they were the main course, he thought. No, wait, that was society’s job. People were the product, and they never even realized it. That was the funny part of this whole thing.

Amy was putting the burgers in buns, putting the condiments on them, then shoving them, wrapped in paper, into a brown paper bag. She carefully scooped fries out of the cage and dumped them into a large cup, dusting them with a salt shaker as she did so. She was torn between watching what she was doing and looking at him, and she made no effort to look anything other than scared witless the whole time. Karl didn’t mind that any more than he minded having the griddle hissing somewhere in the middle of his crotch. It didn’t bother him a bit.

“H-here you go,” Amy said, curling up the top of the bag and offering it to him.

“Thanks,” Karl said, taking it from her and immediately unrolling the top. He picked one of the burgers and unwrapped it, the one that had the strong smell of onions wafting off of it. “Where are you from, Amy?” He took his first bite. Greasy goodness, a little drip rolling down into his beard, crumbly pieces of the perfectly toasted, buttery bun got caught in his mustache.

“Uhmm …” she looked around as though the answer were written on a wall. “I’m from, uh … Montana?”

Karl studied her as he chewed his burger. His stomach was empty, rumbling, furious. He was used to it by now; it was nothing like what he’d gone through after that Augustus bastard had locked him in the earth. “Where in Montana?” he asked. Talking to her felt … weird? But all right. Little flecks of the burger came out as he spoke, but not enough to lose the flavor, thankfully.

“Uhm, Great Falls,” she said. “It’s … it’s …”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Karl said, taking another bite of the burger and then wrapping it back up. He opened the next one, the one that smelled of pineapple, and took a bite. The slight tartness of the fruit went perfectly with … was that teriyaki sauce and mayo? He chewed experimentally, decided he liked it, and then took another huge bite before he’d even finished chewing the first. “What brought you to LA?” His words came out garbled by the food in his mouth.

“I’m sorry?” She really did sound apologetic. “What … I didn’t … I didn’t understand, I’m so sorry.” Fresh tears spouted from her eyelids, running down her face like tiny rivers. He could see grease on her face, the rivers rolling around some of the thicker patches. It wasn’t the sort of detail most people would have noticed, but he was meta.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Karl said and waved at her with the hand that held the bag of his food. She made a face like she still didn’t understand, so he chewed faster. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.”

The more he spoke, the redder her face got, the more she squinted, crying now, her face balling up with her cheeks stretching out. She started to hang her head, her eyes pressed closed, scared to even look at him.

He didn’t like the look of that at all, so he turned around and walked through the wall, leaving her right where she was.

Karl walked on, into the night, with a slight limp, still nursing the wounds done to his feet and his ass earlier. Those would still be a while healing, unfortunately. Yeah, he needed a car, and he’d probably find one soon. Then it would be time to go home, to plan for the next—hopefully the last—phase, and bring this show to its bloody conclusion. He chewed his burger as he contemplated it. The pineapple really elevated this concoction to the next level.

The street was chaos, as one might expect after a meta attack and a building collapse. People were milling around, emergency personnel were scrambling to and fro. Firefighters were still trying to put out some of the fires that had sprung up in the wreckage of the Luxuriant, police officers were trying to get witness statements and keep the press from over-running the scene, and EMTs were trying to tend to all the wounded. A pretty tall order considering how many people were walking around covered in dust and blood, looking like they were in shock, faces grey and eyes wide.

Scott felt a buzz in his pocket and looked down. He fumbled and came up with his phone, eyes catching on the scratch marks Flannery had left on his forearm before she’d gone for the elevator. That hadn’t gone so well for her, he guessed, though who knew how long it would be until they found a body. She’d been too far up to survive without a miracle, after all. All of them had.

He stared at the glowing screen, the caller ID pronouncing that Buchanan Brock was calling him. Not really sure what else to do, he answered. “Hello?”

“Scott,” Brock said on the other end of the connection, booming voice deep with concern. “How are you?”

“I’m standing in the middle of a rubble-strewn street surrounded by bloody and scared people,” Scott said, his words coming out in a rush like he’d shot them from his finger in a stream. “How are you doing, Mr. Brock?”

“Better than you, I’d say,” Brock said. “Glad to hear you’re keeping your head about you, though. You look a little less ragged than the others wandering around the scene.”