Powerless (The Girl in the Box Book 40), page 18
But not totally impossible. And probably hilarious.
I let him get a little speed going, then I dashed off a quick blast of arctic freeze along his runway. He hit it like a dumbass, and started to slide. I shot another blast right in front of me, making a quick mountain of ice, like a lumpy rock stretching eight, ten feet out of the ground in the gap between cars. Then I hardened it, and made a little addition–
Icicle spikes. Three feet long, hard as I could make them, a bed of murderous pikes attached to my impromptu backstop.
Moose was sliding madly, trying to change his course without a single ounce of traction. I'd reached my endpoint with his bullshit antics. I stepped aside, out of his slide path, and waited. I was pretty sure a couple things were going to happen...
One, Moose was going to halt before impaling himself on my murder trap. I mean, I would have liked to see him just end my difficulties with him by dying to it, but I wasn't counting on it.
Two, his buddy Squirrel was going to show up real soon. And that was going to be a tragedy. Mostly for him. But also for my boots, because I was already icing the ground around me to a distance of fifteen feet in all directions. It was shiny and black under the bright light of the sun, and the drag coefficient on it was going to be enough to render that moron airborne.
I heard him before I saw him coming. A low hum just louder than the engines idling around me, than the horn honking furiously in the distance, giving voice to some impatient twat's road rage at being delayed getting to his little honeybear's pre-kindergarten music program.
Squirrel zoomed toward me and hit the ice trap at several hundred miles per hour. I barely saw him as he lost control, legs blurring in a circular motion like a cartoon, and he went by wildly, spinning out and landing on his head and shoulders, doing a full body flip from trying to get traction and failing. He cartwheeled into a tractor trailer with the Amazon logo on it, making a Squirrel-sized indent in the truck and sticking there, buried in the aluminum like he'd splatted into wet concrete.
“Hi Squirrel,” I said, “bye Squirrel.”
I turned my attention back to Moose just as he was coming to a sliding stop inches from my spike trap. He was coasting in now, momentum slowed to a few miles an hour and a sneering grin on his face.
What a prick. By which I mean...
I stomped my foot like Elsa and five more ice towers leapt up around him, the same height as the one he'd come up against. Like a fence of ice, they penned him in, big and strong and not easily dispensed with. Hands extended, I started to grow spikes from each of them, points and a latticework that covered him on all sides, pushing him into the middle of my impromptu prison.
“Now that I've got your attention,” I said, making one of the spikes elongate right to his eye as five others pushed against his head to keep him stuck in place, “maybe we can have a heart-to-heart.” I made a show of moving my hand, glowing with blue, as spikes bit into his skin on all sides of his torso. The closest, I could see pushing into the center of his chest. “Otherwise, in about five seconds we're going to have an ice-to-heart. You want that, Moose?”
He went through a range of emotions very quickly. Denial, anger, then to bargaining. “Yeah, okay, whaddyawant from me?” The anger did stay, though. I could tell I'd gotten under Moose's skin. Probably why he'd gone for me now rather than just snatch Traverton and run.
“I want you to go to jail, honestly,” I said. “For a good long time. Rest of your life would be nice. Attempted kidnapping has a nice, long sentence.” I tossed a look over my shoulder at Squirrel, who was still buried in the side of the Amazon truck, and I threw a freeze blast his way to cement him into his metallic coffin. It spread over the side of the vehicle, covering him over with several inches of ice.
Moose's piggy eyes moved quickly as he contemplated my desires. “Yeah, okay. But what else do you want?”
“Who do you work for?” I asked.
“None of your business,” he answered reflexively.
I inclined my head at him, then moved my hand.
The ice spears poked into his chest on all sides, and another protruded toward his ass. He jerked, and his head bounced around between the six points that imprisoned his face and skull, blurring slightly as they found nowhere to go, momentum forcing his powers inward. When he managed to turn off his powers to prevent them from shaking him to a fine powder, his eyes rolled, and panic infused his voice. “Omega! I work for Omega!”
Pin drop. Or rather, jaw drop.
“...The hell did you just say?” I pushed the ice spikes that encircled his groin and buttocks hard into their targets, and Moose shrieked as one of them iced his chocolate starfish, two others spiked into his butt cheeks and drew blood, and another started to prick his prick.
“Omega Omega omega omega omega I said OMEGA!” he shouted, top of his lungs. I had a feeling at this moment I could have gotten a full confession from him for everything wrong he'd ever done, probably down to pieces of candy he'd swiped in grade school.
“Who runs Omega?” I asked, turning down the intensity with which I was pushing the ice spikes into him, but only a little. Six of them poked into his chest, spots of crimson appearing against his shirt.
“I work for the local franchise in New York!” he shouted. “I don't know who runs the whole cannoli, just who runs the local branch!”
I stared into his panicked eyes. “...Name?”
“Brewster!” he shouted. “Erwin Brewster!”
“Tell me about Brewster.”
“He's a long-timer,” Moose stammered. “Hid before the war, like me! Took the deep freeze! Came out when the big boss revived us once it was over!”
“Which war?” I asked, peering at him.
“The big one!” he shouted. “With the...Sovermonkey guy!”
I cocked my head at him. “You...froze yourselves?” I waved my hand, and from the spike grew a block of ice. “Like...literally froze yourselves?”
“Yeah, 'literally,' as you kids say nowadays,” he said, eyes wide and panicky. “All the fricking time. It was the only way to avoid the telepath seekers, y'know?” He looked like he wanted to shrug, but failed.
I tried not to show how rocked back on my heels I was by this information. I had been certain that Omega had been wiped out in the war with Century. The fact that they still existed, that some of them had gone into hibernation...well, this was news.
And it also led me to a disturbing suspicion about what Moose meant by the 'big boss' who had revived them.
“Where's Brewster now?” I asked, letting the malice in my voice be my guide.
“Back at home in New York!”
“I thought for sure you were going to say 'New Jersey,'” I said. “With that accent.”
Moose shook his head, and it triggered another round of blurring as his powers bounced him off the spikes one by one, trying to maintain a distance between the lethal projectiles. He got it under control, though it looked like it jarred his brain being shook like that. “Jersey...” he mumbled, almost drooling, “...that's Hightower's territory.”
I leaned in. “How many territories are there in the US?”
His eyes were rolling from the self-inflicted damage of his own powers. “...I don't know. Fifteen? Twenty? I'm not on the conference calls. They...they divvied it all up...so no one steps on each other’s toes.”
“Who's in charge of Minneapolis?” I asked, leaning closer.
“Don't know...don't know there's even a branch here...Erwin would...he'd talk to whoever was in charge...clear our way. Let us...operate here...without any problems...” Moose's eyes were drooping, and I sensed he was seconds away from passing out. The blurring thing had applied enough centrifugal force to his brain to turn it into a carnival ride from hell.
The thud of footsteps behind me forced me to whirl to deal with this new threat. I turned in time to see someone rushing up, at meta-speed. Not Aniya, not Traverton, not Olivia–
He was slight of figure, young, his features aglow in the sunlight. His face was creased with anger, and as he entered the pocket of space between cars where I stood with Moose, he threw off something heavy and cloth-like. It fluttered like a cape as it left his hand, and separated so I could see sleeves. A jacket of some sort. Suit jacket.
The man – though he was young, more like a boy – stood opposite me, his small shoulders squared, shirt fluttering in the wind. “You shouldn't be telling her these things,” he said, clearly speaking to Moose.
“You shouldn't be charging in here like you're going to save the day,” I said, “but here we are. I take it you're the driver?”
He didn't answer that. “Let him go.”
“I'm not letting the Moose out of his cage,” I said, just barely keeping myself from laughing at him. “And you're kind of a dumbass to expect it. Also, since he's Moose, and that's Squirrel–” I gestured toward the tractor trailer, whose trucker was now stupidly out of his vehicle and gawking at the iced-over damage to his trailer, “I'm going to call you...Mouse.” I smiled at the stick figure of a boy. I mean, he was probably my age, but he just looked so small by comparison to Moose.
His squared shoulders seemed to broaden, shirt flapping in the light breeze as he stared at me hatefully.
Then his shirt ripped apart, and two giant serpents appeared on scaly necks, heads the size of a cantaloupe, one from behind each shoulder, rising up three, four, six feet above his head, wavering before me like he was a two-headed hydra.
I stared at him, trying to control my surprise. “Or...I guess I could call you Snake?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Snake came at me, his snake heads extending and snapping at me with inches-long fangs bared and ready to take bites out of me. Whether they were venomous or not seemed incidental; I didn't want to get bitten regardless.
The first snake made me duck. The second smashed into my ice prison with suicidal fervor, shattering two of the pillars.
“Aw, shit,” I muttered, leaping to the side as I attempted – badly – to repair the damage done with an outstretched hand even as I hurled myself through the air.
No good. Moose, addled but knowing an opportunity when it came his slothful way, was already vibrating furiously within his prison. I saw the bleeding increase around his groin as he willingly violated himself, streams of crimson sluicing down his pants leg, his head and upper body vibrating madly–
My ice prison shattered on the two weakened sides and Moose tumbled free, bleeding profusely from his crotch, his chest, and probably his anus, though I couldn't see that from where I was coming down.
I landed into a sideways roll and used my Gavrikov powers to flip back upright, coming to my feet and firing three quick ice blasts in succession at Snake.
His serpent limbs dodged, twitching and moving with uncanny speed. He advanced on me, twisting his body to avoid the ice blast I'd sent straight up the middle to freeze his heart, slow him down.
It didn't slow him much at all, he came at me, both heads of the snake hissing and snapping.
“So, do those curl up inside your body when you're not using them?” I asked. “Are they like a...y'know?” I gestured vaguely at his crotch. “Do they just inflate when needed...?”
He didn't answer my perfectly normal and not-at-all-weird question, instead sending his snakes at me again.
“Franklin,” Moose said, teeth chattering. “We need to get outta–”
I sent a dash of ice at him. It shot straight for his chest and stopped right in front of him, halted by his powers. Hanging in the middle of the air.
“You dumb bit–” he started to say.
The ice blast exploded into a rapid growth, like a chest hugger alien. It extended ice limbs quickly around his torso and started to grow and squeeze, compounding as I focused on two things: making it expand and avoiding getting snake bitten.
Also, maybe making a quip: “Are the snakes growing out of your shoulders, or are you growing out of their asses? Inquiring minds want to know.”
Snake did not reply, instead putting his focus on sending his serpentine minions after me. He was grimacing, expression riven with anger.
“Usually I ask a guy to buy me a drink or two before I'm cool with him taking his snake out and coming at me with it,” I said, executing a backflip as a snake zipped past me with mouth open. There was roughly zero chance of me catching one of them; their speed was uncanny, their reflexes preternaturally fast. When I landed one zipped at me and I flung up a hand, throwing up a shield of frost. “Also, I generally limit myself to one snake at a time. Sure, some women are more adventurous in that regard, and good for them. I guess I'm just a little old-fashioned and prefer to make my dating life less crazy than my professional one.”
The snake ducked around my hastily-constructed frost shield, snapping at me and almost sinking those fangs into my wrist. I barely moved my hand away in time; fortunately it reached full snakey extension and ran out of rope. Didn't stop it from trying to clamp those fangs, though. Luckily it got nothing but a mouth full of air for the trouble, but the moment I sent an ice blast its way it was gone again, retracting back toward its owner faster than I could take aim and fire.
The not-so-sweet sound of sirens in the distance heralded the arrival of trouble for them, maybe more trouble for me, and a sudden desire to beat feet on the part of...well, all of us, probably.
“C'mon!” Moose shouted, still straining with a growing mountain of ice swaddling his chest and expanding onto his limbs. He raised his hand and slammed a ham-like fist into his sternum, shattering some of the ice and knocking the wind out of himself. Apparently he liked it so much, he did it again. This time he almost doubled over from his own efforts.
I wanted to stop him from breaking out of my ice trap, but I wanted to not get bitten by oversized snake heads more, so I kept dodging and ducking and dipping and diving and yes, dodging (I know I said it twice, go watch Dodgeball). The snapping of fanged mouths was quite distracting, keeping me from turning Moose into an ice sculpture.
“I'm comin'!” Snake shouted as Moose charged off, disappearing behind the Amazon truck. The human-shaped dent in the trailer suggested Squirrel had already limped away.
“Sorry you couldn't last more than a minute or so,” I said. “With two snakes at your disposal I figured you'd have more endurance.” I made a very theatrical sigh as I ducked another snake head coming at me. “But I guess you're just not that good. Or very big, either, to be brutally honest. I mean, I've seen bigger snakes.”
“Oh?” His face burnet bright scarlet. “Well, have you ever seen...this?”
I started to make a quip that would turn him even redder, but he sent one of the snake heads under a nearby Kia. It stayed under there for about a quarter second, the long neck quivering and then–
The Kia flipped in front of him, separating him from me with a flash of metal and the crash of car smashing into the vehicle behind it. I ran up and grabbed it before it could completely fall over, seizing hold of the driver's side door and front quarter panel, keeping it upright and gently, gently rolling it back to its starting position.
“You okay?” I asked the driver, a girl with blue hair and a face tattoo, when I set it back down.
She stared out at me, eyes slightly wide but otherwise seeming all right. “Um...yeah. Yeah, I think so.” She was a little muffled with being inside the car, but she flashed me a weak, shaky thumbs up.
To my utter lack of surprise, Snake was gone. That was a three-fer; three losers up to bat, and all three rabbited.
The sirens were getting closer. I turned to find a cop car riding the shoulder. It came to a stop next to the wreckage of Olivia's Chevy, and out popped two cops, their eyes already alighted on me.
I sighed. One of them already had the dart gun out, the other was covering with a real pistol.
“All right,” I muttered, “let's get this over with.” I turned my back, laced my fingers behind my head, and sank to my knees.
Oh, and I also created about a quarter-inch crust of ice over every single inch of the back of my body that was covered with clothing. A little ice armor as a hedge.
The dart landed just between my shoulder blades and stuck in that shield of ice.
I smiled. “You got me,” I called, hoping that'd keep them from darting me again, somewhere I wasn't protected.
It did. But it didn't stop them from bowling me over and cuffing me. “Guess you guys lost the memo about 'Minnesota nice,' huh?” They must not have found that as funny as I did, though, because they tossed me in the back of the cop car unceremoniously and left me to stew while they secured the scene.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“So you didn't start it?” Lt. Mann stared at me smokily – by which I meant if her eyes could have been on fire, they would have been – and waited for my inevitable and snarky reply.
“Exactly,” I said. “And I would have finished it, but unfortunately you guys are holding in limbo my permit to purchase a gun, so...yeah. Bad guys got away. Also, I got darted and cuffed.” I rattled the cuffs behind my back. “Still am, actually. Your hospitality is not so much the stuff of legends. You're kinda like the Dick's Last Resort of your field.”
“You're an active danger,” she said, looking at the preliminary report one of the local cops had handed her when she'd arrived at the scene. God only knew what they'd written, since I'd done nothing to resist arrest and had been generally polite if a little snarky. For me, that's best behavior.
“I've been sitting cuffed in a cop car for the last hour; I'm not an active anything.”
She glanced up at me, and I could just see her sheer annoyance at even having to deal with my sparkling personality. “Tell me, then – why do I keep running into you?”
“I don't know,” I clapped back, “why do you conduct ninety percent of your conversations during the day with suspects and other cops? Do you think it has anything to do with the nature of your job?”
