21.0 - Remember, page 12
part #21 of Girl Out Of The Box Series
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “On my own and all that.”
“Your celly skated for her part in what happened, too,” Owens said under her breath. “So you maybe have one ally, if you sweet talk her.”
“You’ve known me for a few days, now, Owens. My talk is all sour. Maybe occasionally trashy. Never sweet.”
“I think you’re underselling yourself with ‘occasionally’ on the trash talk.”
“I’m a subtle person.”
“I doubt that,” Owens said, as we reached the door of my cell. “Good luck.” She nodded, and then she was off.
Looking across the room, Gert and Clara were still just staring at me. I couldn’t decide if they thought I was coming to them, or if they were waiting for an opportunity to come at me when there were fewer guards present.
Haha. Joke was on them; the guards were going to ignore it all. If they hadn’t been so intensely focused on murdering me last time, they might have noticed the guards pulled back behind the big doors to let nature—or at least the law of the jungle—run its course.
“Welp, might as well get this show on the road,” I said. Raising both hands high, I flipped a double bird to Gert and Clara. That done, I didn’t wait for their reaction; I ducked into my cell.
“How you doing?” June asked, hanging out on her bunk, cool as if I’d just stepped out for a minute instead of spending the night in the infirmary healing from a near-deadly battering.
“I figured out I want to live,” I said, “but conversely, I just flipped off Gert and Clara, so …”
June raised both eyebrows but did not get up. “You’re still suppressed, right?”
“Yep.”
“I’m not sure your behavior is consistent with wanting to live.”
“I’m a hot mess,” I said, looking at the bed she was lying on. “Those things move at all?”
She looked down at the bed. “Uhm …”
“Never mind,” I said, and ripped the sheets off my bed.
“Nealon!” Gert’s voice. She was just outside. “Come out and face us, you chickenshit!”
“Big talk from the big lady,” I called back, taking my sheets and quickly dumping them in the toilet hole. They splashed when they hit the water, which was about four or five inches from the top.
“Are you nuts, starting a fight with these two again?” June asked, hissing as she rose off the bed.
“The fight was going to start regardless, I just maybe moved up the timing a little,” I said. My sheets were now doused in toilet water. And probably more sanitary than they’d been after going through the prison laundry, sadly.
“Okay, unlike you, whose words are at odds with your suicidal actions, I actually do want to live,” June said, “so please, keep me out of—”
“Yeah, yeah, stand back,” I said, waving her off. “Your grandmother would kill me if I got you murdered in prison.” True story. Grandma Randall was not a pushover. I kinda wished she was here now, though it’d be pretty iffy that she’d be on my side. She’d likely be standing back like June, trying not to get killed.
Oh, who am I kidding? Any sane person would be.
Starting fights with metas in jail when you’re not powered is sheer crazy. But when you know they’re coming for you, it makes more sense to start the fight than to sit back and wait for death to take you from behind.
That probably wasn’t a Sun-Tzu quote, but it really should have been.
I got up next to the door frame with my sodden sheets and put my back to the wall. Neither Gert nor Clara were in sight, which meant they were hanging out, apparently planning to ambush me the moment I stepped out of the cell.
Good move. I was planning to do the exact same, except I was going to lure them in.
“Come out, chickenshit!” Gert called.
“There’s two of you and one of me,” I whispered, trying to disguise my location by not yelling and giving them a chance to echo locate me. “And I’m depowered, so … who’s the chickenshit here, Gert? Is it Gertrude? Gerty? Girth-uh—”
Gert, unfortunately, came around the corner right then, and I was left with no choice but to deploy my shitwater net—a.k.a. my toiletwater-doused sheets. They covered her over, and she didn’t quite manage to escape. It was a distraction, nothing more, but I followed up by slamming into her and knocking her over. She let out a shriek of panic and I rode her to the ground, following up with a single punch and then rolling off her, aikido style.
Holy smokes, was I slow without my powers. Sooooo slow. And I almost tripped rolling back to my feet. If I hadn’t practiced these moves about a billion times, I would have been so much worse off.
Clara didn’t come at me, so I bolted to get clear of Gert, who was now swinging for the fences, rustling and fighting to get free of my shitwater net. It should have been easy but based on the gasping and shouting and guttural noises, she might have been experiencing a claustrophobic response, which I was pleased to observe. Lucky me, for once.
“Okay, hot stuff, let’s get this thing going,” I said to Clara plate face, realizing I had not a single weapon on me and was about to face off with someone who outclassed me in every physical domain. And could also shoot fire.
Damn.
Out of luck again.
23.
I ran for it, because standing my ground against someone who could beat me to death with her pinky finger and then burn my corpse was a terrible, stupid idea. I dodged around a pillar and Clara shot a blast of fire that burned it, scorching through the steel and setting the tips of my hair alight.
“Thanks, that’s really taking care of my split ends!” I shouted over my shoulder as I ran for the tables in the middle of the room. Sturdy, steel construction, damned shame they were bolted down, though, given my human strength, I might not have been to lift them anyway at this point.
The prisoners were scattering—some of them, at least—and Clara was standing her ground, hurling fire at me. That was sort of predictable; she didn’t seem to have a very solid grasp of her powers, probably because they were new. That was the curse of most of the people in this room, their abilities almost certainly having come from a serum in the last few years rather than from being long-time metas who’d lived through the “gods rule” phase of the world.
It was kinda sad that I was one of the “old timers,” but it did give me an advantage or two.
Clara’s “stand-and-fire” approach was one of them. A well-practiced meta could have walked and chewed gum at the same time—or run and gunned, rather. But she was stuck in place, angry look plastered across her plate-like face, like a turret in concrete, secured to the ground as she fired at me.
She led me by a foot with her shot, I dodged and went sideways as the burst of flame hit a table and burst on the two prisoners sitting at it, staring dumbly as it went off like a blast of napalm, blanketing them. They screamed, flames billowing off their bodies, and I cringed as I slid over a table and ducked behind it, finding myself face to face with a really scrawny girl with dark, lank hair and some pits in her complexion that hinted at a history with meth that predated her meta healing powers.
“Hey,” I said, pointing at her, “aren’t you Belle McEvers? That mass killer that destroyed a whole church out in Wyoming?”
She just blinked at me. She was taking cover, which meant she wasn’t completely bereft of brains, like those two that had been burned alive sitting at the table. “Yeah. But they was asking for it.”
I blinked. “A whole church filled with people was asking for it?”
“Damned right.” Her eyes danced, and she smiled. “They were shitty to me. All of ’em. Gave me a raw deal. Wouldn’t help me none after I asked ’em.”
“They … didn’t help you?” I asked, peeping up to see where Clara was. She was aiming a blast at me, so I ducked back down and hoped the table would work the way I thought it would. Cuz I was winded and needed a second anyway. To confirm something and execute a plan I was formulating. “Ever?”
“Well, they helped me for a while, then they stopped,” Belle said, pitted face rippling as she tried to deal with the contradiction she was spouting. I’d read the press reports on her, but I didn’t really trust the news anymore since I’d read their reporting on me. Small town papers, though, tended to get it righter on these things than the big national ones, who would dip into a local crime story like this only if it was sufficiently horrifying to generate a little interest. “So they might as well not even have helped me at all.”
“Damn, girl. You think that’s justification for killing an entire church of people?” I asked, waiting for the fire to land. What the hell was Clara waiting for? Rain? “I mean, I kill people, but here’s how I justify it—they’re trying to kill me, or have killed other innocent people in the past. Not ‘They’ve stopped enabling me by giving me charity with which to buy drugs.’ See the difference?”
“You’re just like them,” she said, and turned away, started to scoot off.
“We’re about to get fire shot at us,” I said, clapping a hand on her shoulder, stopping her retreat. “You don’t have your meta powers, right?”
She listened to reason and stopped, scowled. “No.”
“Good,” I said, and slugged her across the jaw as the fireburst hit.
It didn’t spread like actual napalm, fortunately, just went up like a bomb. Belle wasn’t a very big girl, thankfully, more like a Marta-type slip of a person, so I rolled under her and hid my face beneath her small frame. She didn’t cry out as I used her for a human shield, and as soon as the initial burst was done, I grabbed her around the neck and dragged her up, keeping her between me and where I assumed Clara would be.
What? She was a mass murderer who’d killed fifty people who had given her charity. They didn’t even cut her off cruelly, from what I’d read—they politely declined to continuing paying her to go buy drugs and she lost it, killing them on a beautiful Sunday in September, then promptly going to someone else’s house, robbing them and buying drugs with the proceeds. Chase and Veronika had caught up with her at her house, and she was so high she hadn’t even put up a fight. On the contrary, she’d giggled about how that flock had died—which was at her hand, one by one. Even the children.
So I didn’t feel bad about using her this way and neither should you.
Holding Belle in front of me, looking over her shoulder, through the flames, I saw Clara taking slow aim at me. My arm was going to get a little singed where it was, but that was better than the entirety of me getting burnt to a crisp. Belle as my shield, I charged at Clara, who, thankfully, had somewhat closed the distance before loosing her last blast. She must have been at least dimly aware of how bad she sucked with powers.
“You know what your problem is, Clara?” I shouted as I ran at her, Belle held in front of me like a ragdoll, still slightly on fire.
Clara, being not swift of mind and busy taking aim, did not answer.
“It’s that you were a dumbass before you got powers, and you’re a dumbass after.” I kept up my charge, slowed a little by the dead weight of my meat shield. Gyah, I could have used meta strength. Belle was a dead weight and getting heavy.
Clara unleashed a blast, and I ducked behind Belle as best I could. I knew it was coming at some point, and I’d kinda hoped she’d miss clean because of my insult.
Nope.
Belle McEvers caught the full heat of Clara’s attack, with only a little break where my left arm had been holding her up. It was screamingly bad, lighting across my forearm and left hand, nerves flash-frying and skin melting. I didn’t want to look at how horrific the damage was, but I suspected it was the sort that was going to send me into catastrophic shock within a minute.
Which meant I had that long or less to kill Clara.
“Heads up!” I shouted, and Clara looked at me, horrified. I was probably the first person in her life—other than maybe whichever of my meta friends had arrested her—who’d not been so impressed with her powers that I folded the second I was exposed to them.
I’d had my skin burned off more completely and horrifically than this, though, and although it effing HURT, my mind was on priorities first, pain later.
Faster, pussycat. Kill, kill.
Clara froze, full deer-in-the-headlights as I charged her down, tossing the limp and burnt body of Belle McEvers at her—or more like heaved it when I was less than a foot from colliding with her.
The Belle carcass hit her, the stink of burned flesh and barbecue overwhelming, and I slammed into the body a moment later, knocking it into Clara, and Clara off her feet. Again.
We tumbled over in a crush of limbs, her panic rising as she hit the ground, a burnt, lifeless ragdoll atop her and me atop Belle. Reaching around Belle’s head—which was completely black and mostly hairless at this point, like Anakin Skywalker just after he burst into flames—I punched Clara in the face.
She was shocked. Shocked that anyone would dare to hit her in this way.
That wouldn’t last. It never did, unless someone was super weak. But I used my fist to drive the cartilage of her nose up into her skull, squirting blood everywhere. The shock in Clara’s eyes was replaced by dullness. I’d done enough damage to concuss her, drive her close to unconsciousness.
I hit her again. And again. Now was not the time to let up.
“You … bitch …” A scratchy voice reached me, and I looked around to find the source. Gert was staggering about twenty feet away, coughing a little hint of pink mist and struggling for breath. She was not heading for me, but was trying to get the hell away from June, who was standing by the entry to our cell, next to a bundle of soaked sheets, looking innocently indifferent, a bystander to all the action. It didn’t take a Cassidy-level genius to figure out she’d done it again, gassed Gert while she was down, thus buying me a little time to deal with her sidekick.
I didn’t plan to waste it.
I hit Clara around the corpse of Belle, again and again, trying to drive that nose cartilage up into her brain. If I could just kill her, I’d be down to fighting one overgrown giant pile of shit one-on-one rather than this bullshit overwhelming odds thing.
I mean … considering I was depowered and Gert was stupid, it’d almost be a fair fight.
Clara’s eyes were rolling back in her head, and I knew I was close. If I’d had my powers, she’d have been dead ten hits ago, brains dashed out all over the floor. As it was, I was having to really work for the kill. My burnt arm and hand hurt, was getting weak. It was tingling, numb with a side of pain. Shock was starting to set in.
“Stand down, Nealon!” someone shouted behind me, but I did not obey. I punched Clara again, throwing everything I had into it. If she survived, Clara was going to continue to be a threat to me.
I had to kill her, even if it was literally the last thing I did. Because if I survived this encounter … there was no way I was going to survive my next with her. She’d be way too wary to ever let me get close again, and I doubted there was any other prisoner the size of Belle McEver that I could physically lift and use as a human shield while not feeling guilty about using her in that way.
“Die already,” I said, raising my hand over me and driving it down into Clara’s face again. Her nose was just about gone, her cheekbones crushed in. But my hand was also numb, and I’d probably broken just about every bone in it doing this. My punches were turning into wet smacks of meat on meat, little force behind them and little impact from the sad state of my fist.
I couldn’t clench my hands, ruining my secondary plan of lifting her head and slamming it into the ground until her skull popped open like a piñata, but with less candy and maybe more delight (from me). Pain, my old friend, my old enemy, was physically shutting down my body in a way that normally never happened. I had fought on through incredible damage before—losing limbs, being burnt, having every bone broken …
But now … I was numb and tingling and yet the pain was still slipping in. Something heavy impacted across my back and knocked me off of Belle and Clara. I hit the ground face-first and rolled through momentum, no control of my own, coming up on my side.
I couldn’t move.
One of the guards was there, baton raised high. Like Burke, but not him, because he was dead. The baton rose and fell, and the impact—shit, the impact—hurt, yet … felt far away. Like it had happened to someone else. I jerked from the hit, but the pain was distant.
I felt the next even less, and the one after that …
My eyes closed … and I barely felt it at all.
24.
Sophie
Four Years Ago
“What the hell is going on here?” Sienna asked as they parked on the downtown street, right in front of a mom-and-pop café that could have been torn out of any small town in America.
“Life,” Sophie said, slamming the car door. “Life is happening here.”
“Really?” Sienna asked, looking around. It was warm, but not as warm as outside the mirage. And humid. “Cuz it seems quiet—oh, wait, no. There’s a mob gathering.”
Sophie followed her gaze. There was a small crowd heading their way, a half dozen people led by a dark-haired woman at the fore. “I know you’ve been through a lot in your short time … but that’s more of a welcoming committee.”
“Until they get angry there’s a succubus in their midst,” Sienna said. “Are they all metas?”
Sophie raised both eyebrows. “Yes. Why did you assume that?”
“You’ve got a Rakshasa putting the mirage up,” Sienna said, a jaded look on her face. “That takes a lot of juice, so … they’re powerful. Old, too, I’m guessing. And the greenery? In the middle of the Texas plains, which are basically a desert? That’d take a hell of a Persephone to pull that off.”
“Indeed,” Sophie said. The committee was almost to them, crossing the street.
“Hey there,” the woman in the lead said. Her smile was warm, her skin tanned. Dark hair fell loose around her shoulders, and her green eyes sparkled like shining emeralds in the midday sun. She wore a thin smile, the tired kind that had faded from years and years and decades of hard wear on the soul. Sophie regarded her with an indifferent eye, because she knew the formulation of that smile. The woman looked young, in her late thirties at most, though that was obviously a deception. “My name’s Penny.”
