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part #38 of Out of the Box Series Series
“Did Sienna Nealon have something to do with the mass breakout from the Cube this morning?” a reporter shouted. Another person for me to hate.
“We're looking into that, but at the moment we suspect the events are connected,” Mann said. “Next question.”
I hit the mute button. “I'm saving your lives,” I whispered.
They'll never know, Brianna said. And you need to be prepared for that if you want to carry this on. Because you haven't opened a can of worms here – you opened a hydra in a burlap sack. You want to kill your way through these escapees? Get ready for the worst. Because when you finish...they're coming after you. And there's going to be nowhere for you to hide. You've already seen to that.
I rubbed my face, my eyelids already threatening to close on me. How long had I been awake? Over twenty hours. And my powers? I'd been using them like crazy, and they weren't an infinite ocean for me to constantly drink from. They wore me out, and I was definitely feeling it. With a glance, I looked at Akiyama, who might have been worse off than me since he was continuously using his.
“Whatever it takes,” I muttered to myself, and looked up at the TV. “No matter what.”
The scene had changed, and I hurriedly hit the mute button, allowing the anchor's voice to assail me once more. “...reporting an incident at the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in St. Paul...”
“Huh,” I said, staring at the screen. “That's where we met.” I looked back at Akiyama.
He didn't move, except barely to say, “It's not where I met you.”
I rolled my eyes. Our temporally crossed first meeting was hardly worth quarreling about. “I bet I know who's stirring the shit over there.” Pushing to my feet, I tested my strength. It was...well, I was tired, but good enough.
Priscilla. Queen of the Animals.
“We've got to move,” I said. “You want to wait here? I can run over there and–”
I froze.
The squeal of tires out on the street had gotten my attention.
Ariadne's house was my last known address in Minnesota. There was roughly zero doubt they'd come here looking for me.
But when you get tired you get stupid, and I'd gone and been as idiotic as I could.
“We have to go,” I said, grabbing Akiyama and hauling him unceremoniously to his feet. He didn't resist, but he stumbled a bit as I pulled him forward, his concentration on maintaining time's hold and not on piddly matters like putting one foot in front of the other without tripping and falling over.
I managed to get him out into the backyard and under the clear, gray sky, snow crunching beneath our feet. Wrapping my arms securely around his chest, I muttered, “Hold on,” and rocketed into the sky.
Below me, on the street, a dozen cars with flashing lights waited. The crack of bullets being fired into the air was covered over by the sound of my sonic boom as I turned north and east, leaving that trouble behind me in favor of something potentially much worse lurking somewhere ahead.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Priscilla
Como Park Zoo
St. Paul, Minnesota
10:15 A.M.
It was her second jailbreak of the morning, and Priscilla Lentz was feeling foxy.
Literally. She was in the arctic fox pen of the Como Park Zoo, calling out to the fluffy little shits to get them to come to her, then, when they were gathered close, she snapped their little necks and laid them out. She had a knife and a plan, and everything was coming together.
“What are you doing?” some traumatized mother screamed through the thick plate glass separating her and her children – two fat, overfed kids in a double stroller and one toddling along behind – from the most dangerous predator in the place. “Those are innocent animals!”
“They're predators, my dear,” Priscilla said idly, answering as she went to work with her knife. The pelts were quality, and though they'd take some drying, she'd make a nice coat of them yet. “But not at the apex, no, and thus unworthy of survival.” She tore the skin free and stuffed it into her bag. She'd need some tanning supplies, but yes, they'd make a good, quality coat. None of that garbage synthetic. “Here merely to serve our needs.” She turned her head and smiled, listening to the screams outside draw closer. “Like you and your little fatlings.”
The woman cocked her head as though she'd never been so insulted.
Which was how she missed the polar bear wandering along the sidewalk behind her.
Those had been Priscilla's first stop, the first soldiers in her army before she'd come in here to skin some foxes. Sure, she'd debated making the bison into her coat, but ultimately the foxes had a much better aesthetic about them.
Next was going to be the lions and tigers. There was something about having the proverbial Dorothy hat trick at her disposal – lions, tigers, bears – that just appealed to Priscilla.
The mother spun in time to see the bear coming at her, and Priscilla watched, thrilling to the sight of a true predator on the hunt. “Eat up, my friend,” she said, in the voice of the bear.
A roar of assent was her answer, something in the vein of, Mmmmmm, I never get to try the food behind the glass, before the polar bear raised a mighty paw and swung it down at the mother human and her cubs–
STOP!
The voice was loud and thunderous and the sound of an animal, speaking the language of the bear, and it hurt Priscilla's ears it was so harsh. She looked up from her work and–
“Oh, dammit,” she said, stuffing the latest fur into her bag, because–
Sienna Nealon was there, glaring down the polar bear.
And she looked quite upset.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Sienna
Como Park Zoo
I told the polar bear to stop, and he listened.
White fur matted by the winter winds outside, he'd left paw prints in the snow and the scent of the fish that they fed him in the air, easy enough to follow through the near-abandoned grounds of the zoo. Even now, people were wisely fleeing for the exits.
Except for the cops. They were coming in force. I'd seen their lights flashing outside the visitor's center, pulled up right out front, a dozen boys and girls in blue rushing into the chaos against the fleeing crowds.
Which meant...I didn't have a ton of time.
Priscilla was behind the glass in the arctic fox cage, and given the abundance of blood and small, skinned corpses, I had a feeling that she'd already culled the herd in here, bag slung over her shoulder suggested she'd gone full Cruella De Vil on the wildlife. And not the gentle, sanitized Emma Stone version, either. “What the hell...?” I muttered, looking past the polar bear at her.
Cold for you furless apes, the bear said. She need fur.
“I don't remember asking you,” I said to him. In a battle of persuasion with a bear, I knew I was destined to lose against Priscilla, because I'd only absorbed a fractional amount of her power.
“You like your new skill?” Priscilla asked. “Really opens up the world, doesn't it?” She was talking like a bear.
I answered her as such. “Breaking out of prison opens up your world, Priscilla. I'm about to close yours again.”
The polar started to push up on his hind legs. I will stop y– he started to say.
That was as far as he got before I shot at him in flight and punched him right in the jaw.
To say the polar bear had a glass jaw would be an insult and dead wrong. I hit him hard enough to kill a human, enough to shatter a man's mandible.
His got somewhat out of joint, and I felt the shock radiate through his bone structure and all 1,500 or so pounds of him as he began to tip over backwards.
“Aiiiiiiieeeee!” Mother Karen, almost his victim, screamed as she saw the immensity of the bear threatening to land on her.
But I caught him, because of course I did, and redirected his bulk sideways, so as to keep him from crushing her and any of her children. She watched me with wild eyes until I said, “Get your kids and get out of here.” Then she stared at me stupidly for another two seconds until I said, “GO!” in my loudest voice, and she grabbed her stroller with one hand and her toddler with the other and went screaming for the exit.
“Sorry, pal,” I said to the fallen polar bear. He was going to be feeling that punch tomorrow, but his breathing was steady and the rise and fall of his chest suggested he'd have nothing worse than a headache to show for our encounter. “Couldn't let you get between us.”
I looked up; Priscilla was gone from the fox enclosure, the door swinging open to the employee area.
Smashing through the plexiglass, I followed her into a dim corridor that ran across the back of the building. Other doors were open, and a bison stood blocking the hall.
“Get back in your cage!” I shouted at him, and he looked at me with mild shock before shuffling backward into his enclosure. A reindeer behind him bolted, running ahead of me at top speed until I overtook him a second later.
AHHHHHHHHHHHH! he said and took off in the opposite direction as I flew over him.
“Back to your pen!” I shouted at him. He almost gored himself on the bison's horn, only steering away at the last second.
Steering through the door, I burst out into the snowy walkways of the zoo, preparing to follow Priscilla's tracks wherever they led.
But they stopped about ten feet outside the door, because she was standing right there, back to me, hands in the air.
And half-circled around her were almost a dozen cops with their guns drawn, pointing at her...
...until I showed up...
...and they pointed them all at me.
Then they started shooting.
Chapter Forty-Nine
I caught two bullets before I managed to use my magnetic powers to push as hard as I could in all directions. It was pure panic given form, a hard shove that sent the gun barrels inches off course and locked the slides in place as they fired, jamming the guns by leaving the empty cartridges in the chambers.
But those bullets hurt like fire. One stabbed me in the right shoulder, ripping and tearing through the meat and slicing a gouging wound a half-inch into the muscle. The other hit me in the side, impaling me through the left kidney and sending me back a staggering step.
“I have nothing to do with her!” Priscilla ran, head down, hands up, as the gunshots roared through the near-empty zoo. Her bare feet slapped against the residual snow dotting the walkways and she broke hard left, keeping herself looking like a non-threat while offering me up as a sacrifice to the cops. She ran metahuman fast, and in seconds had disappeared behind an enclosure.
Leaving me to deal with the police.
“Aw, shit sandwiches,” I said, and went to work.
There were ten cops by my count, and I saw at least two dart guns, which left about eight real guns pointed at me. Those were the most immediate threat because I'd heard the whiff of the dart guns firing with their puffed CO2 charge and knew it would take a few seconds to manually reload them.
The guns? Those could fire as soon as they were cleared and brought to bear.
“Eve!” I shouted, not sure why I said it out loud, but I did, and every one of the cops blinked in surprise at the sound. I started blasting away with faerie light webs and pasted six of the cops to the ground in six seconds.
Then...I had to do some dodging, because a couple of them had cleared their guns and swung their pistol barrels around.
“Nobody appreciates my help,” I said, zooming behind the building and pasting another cop with a light web as I did so. He had been coming up from behind me, ready to give me a hell of a surprise in the form of a bullet to the back of my head.
Instead he got bound in delicate webs of light against the side of the building housing the arctic foxes, the bison, and the reindeer. He seemed genuinely surprised about it, as if he'd expected to just sneak up and blast me with no problems.
“I do not have time for your bullshit!” I shouted, making him flinch as I flew past, around, and over the building. Cresting the roofline, I lifted both hands and rained down light webs on the cops remaining below. Each shot took them off their feet, pinning them to the snow-dusted concrete, so tight their arms were wrapped around their rib cages.
“Stop right there!” one of them shouted, apparently not satisfied with having been pinned to the ground by light webs. “You're under arrest.”
“Yeah, I'll be surrendering any second now, I'm sure,” I said, brushing my hair out of my eyes and heading for the enclosure where I'd seen Priscilla flee. “You just wait here and I'll be back lickety-split to do that.”
“The hell are you thinking, Nealon?” A black female cop asked me from her position anchored to the ground, her arms wrapped tight around her. “You were out, free and clear. Why would you come back?”
“To save you idiots from certain death,” I said, floating past and picking up speed. Whether she believed me or not, I was well past caring.
I came around the corner of the enclosure and found a door open, the lock busted. “Why not just hang a sign saying 'Priscilla was here?'” I muttered under my breath.
“Don't have a marker,” Priscilla's voice came from within. “Or paper. Or skill with calligraphy to make it pretty as you deserve.” Her voice echoed, and I wondered what kind of environs would produce that effect.
I kicked open the door and found out.
A small, dimly-lit service hallway gave way to another busted door, this one opening on what looked to be an artificial cave. The smell of blood and meat was strong here, and I noticed an industrial walk-in fridge standing behind me.
A predator lived here. A feeding door beside the fridge provided a place for the zookeepers to add meat for the beast without getting themselves eaten.
But Priscilla had bypassed that and opened up the real door, stepping right into the den of...well, whatever.
“Here, kitty kitty,” I said in animal voice, because I had a feeling, based on my prior visits to the Como Zoo, which animal I was about to be faced with.
“Mrow,” Priscilla said, voice echoing again. She'd moved farther away, deeper into the predator's den, but was still mocking me.
“Shit,” I muttered, edging closer to the door. The walk-in fridge kicked on behind me, and it was LOUD. Like an industrial air conditioner. I guess the zoo hadn't bothered going with a quiet model here. I mean, why not go with something that completely killed your sense of hearing while you were in proximity to murderous predators?
“What's the matter?” Priscilla called, high and mocking. “You afraid?”
“Afraid I'm going to kill an endangered species,” I said, hanging close to the entry door. There had to be a better way to do this. Priscilla was clearly waiting for me, and she sounded confident. If I had to go through a pack of lions in order to get to her, charring their bones or freezing them solid was likely the only way I'd be able to win. I doubted they'd be held down by light webs. At least for long.
There was another way in, too. All I had to do was head back the way I came, and I could fly right into the enclosure from outside.
Deciding against plunging ahead into a trap, I headed for the door. Just as I was reaching it, it swung open and I found myself face to face with a St. Paul cop.
With a gun raised.
I heard the pfft! as it fired and blasted him with a light web that sent him flying back. He landed with his arms bound, trapped to the sidewalk. A pile of mush fell off the overhang above and onto his face, which he promptly spit into the air, but otherwise he was fine.
I, on the other hand...
“Aw, shit,” I whispered, taking a staggering step back.
I hadn't healed the two bullet wounds I'd taken in the fight with the cops. I'd meant to, but they'd been so tangential, I just hadn't dedicated the mental resources to summoning Wolfe's powers forth to do so. I tried now, and felt them pulling closed, one of the bullets spitting out of my arm and clanking on the floor.
And then...
...the healing just...stopped.
Pain surged through me from both wounds, my metahuman hardiness leaving me and the searing, stabbing pain threatening to bring me to my knees.
I fell back against the wall, smearing blood against the surface, and I held myself there, trying to catch my breath, the pain threatening to take me down to my knees.
The growling meow of a cat much bigger than Emma made me turn.
In the open door to the predator's den was a female lion, her yellow eyes on me.
She was but a leap away from taking me out.
And I was powerless to stop her.
Chapter Fifty
I rushed out the door, ignoring the pain in my arm and side as best I could and trying to slam it closed behind me.
It didn't work. The lioness leapt before I even made it out, ramming into it with her entire body weight. I didn't know how much a lioness weighed, but it was more than me, and the shock of the door's impact transferring from her to it to me rattled my bones and made my dual bullet wounds scream from maltreatment.
I landed on my side next to the cop I'd pinned to the ground with the light webs as a cackling sound came from somewhere on the other side of the building, echoing through the lion's den:
“Hey, Nealon, did you really get darted?” Priscilla's voice was infused with genuine mirth.
“How did she know that?” the cop asked, his arms pinned but his face almost in mine.
“She can talk to the animals, you dipshit,” I said, and gave the door a mighty kick. It slammed shut again, the lioness within momentarily bounced by my effort at keeping it shut before. That said, I had no faith it would hold against a concerted effort by her to get through. Which I suspected we were about to see.
I forced myself to my feet and reached for the cop's pistol. Fortunately he'd been bound above the waist, not below, because without my powers there was a zero percent chance I could have broken the light web to retrieve it.
