06 - Vengeful (18 page)

I dove left and Cousin Blimpy sprayed. He had a smaller turn radius but I was faster; it was a race, so I dodged low as I flew, forcing him to correct up and down rather than just spin. When I made it behind his van, the gunfire stopped after I heard him chew up his side mirror and break both the driver’s side window and the front windshield. If Reed’s insurance wasn’t picking up for car bombs, I had to believe that Cousin Blimpy was definitely going to be out more than his deductible for self-inflicted automatic weapon damage.

Idiot.

Janice was gawking at me from where she stood next to the passenger door of the van, so I pumped her full of voltage and didn’t stop to watch her squirm. While I was just as fascinated as everyone else to find out what kind of meta she was, I would have been a lot happier doing so while watching her on the other side of a prison cell, where I could flood her with ten thousand gallons of energy dampening gel and watch her switch from uppity to struggling to keep her head afloat. Humility usually set in shortly thereafter. It was fun to watch.

“Get her!” Ma hectored, probably pretty uselessly. I couldn’t see Cousin Blimpy, but I had to guess he wasn’t so sanguine about the idea of ripping holes in his van with a machine gun while blindly trying to kill little old me. Sure, he was in for murder of a federal agent, but destroying his own property was where he drew the line.

“She’s over here!” Junior shouted, like it was some big revelation where I was hiding, as if they hadn’t all just seen me dive behind the damned van. The hardest thing I’d had to do in this battle so far was to keep from rolling my own eyes so hard they’d do permanent damage to the inside of my head. Meta strength and all that, you know.

I heard a whine in the distance and for about a quarter second I wondered if Cousin Blimpy had finally decided to stop screwing around and just waste me through the van with the beltfed, but like a cornfed idiot, the answer was no.

It was the Beetle, rolling through the crater at top speed, looking like a rally car way out of its damned element, like Reed was going to end up turning the damned thing over before he could reach me and be of any actual use.

“What the hell?” Junior asked, spinning around and leaving the back of his empty, metal head exposed only eight feet away. I seized on this fine opportunity by dropping the spark gun and grabbing him in a big hug and then twisting him as I flew into the air at supersonic speed.

“Whut—the—” he got out as I took him up, up and more up, about a mile, then, before he could get a solid grasp on either of my arms, I released him and gave him a good shove back toward the crater. “Your dad used to say ‘Geronimo’ when he did this, which I always thought was kind of racist, but—” I shrugged. He looked a little panicked, arms pinwheeling as gravity took hold of him.

I didn’t stick around to see the cascade of emotions that were probably setting in on his face as he began his journey back to earth. I’m sure it would have followed Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages closely, and while it would have been fun to see him try and bargain with an uncaring me before accepting he was going to slam hard into an even more uncaring earth, I had shit to do that didn’t involve watching Clyde Clary, Jr., faceplant into dirt.

Blimpy had apparently decided that I’d flown off for good, because he was taking aim at the orange Beetle when I came back down. I didn’t waste my time going for the spark gun; I landed on his back with all that supersonic force with a front kick right to the base of his spine. If he was going to try and kill people, I knew where I stood on the matter, especially since those were my friends in that car.

I couldn’t exactly feel the compression wave run up his spine, because my nerves weren’t sensitive enough to detect that sort of thing through muscle and bone and whatnot, but I did see his back ripple like an alien was snaking its way through his overalls, and his head lifted off from his body like it was launched from Cape Canaveral. I’d never really seen that before, and it was really gross. You can imagine what followed, and I dodged back, not really super excited to get covered in a geyser of his bodily fluid, and watched the remainder of his corpse topple, machine gun still clutched tightly in his dead hand.

“What the hell?!” Ma screamed, one shoulder dropped as she took in the spectacle of me hovering over the corpse of another one of her kin.

“Did you think I was fucking around here?” I asked her, all my patience for her bullshit as gone as Cousin Blimpy’s head.

“I think you’re dead!” she screamed, rage clearly overcoming whatever sense she had left. “DEAD! DEAD!
DEAD!
”

Before I could respond to that, Junior came crashing back to earth, landing on her very own van and turning it into a pancake. She looked, I looked, and when the dust settled, two big old legs were sticking up in the air, steel vanishing back to flesh, and all four tires popped as the frame came to rest right on the crater’s ground. “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh …” Junior moaned, not looking like he was going to get up real soon.

I looked at Ma, and she looked back at me, her jaw hanging open. “You were saying?” I asked coldly as the orange Beetle came to a stop a few feet away and my friends started to pile out into the brisk autumn air, the odds already tilted way in our favor.

Ma

This wasn’t going the way she’d planned it, not at all. Denise, Janice, Buck and Simmons were already sidelined, Junior looked to at least be out for the next few minutes, and Blimpy was dead as a damned doornail, missing his head like it had been blasted off with a fourth of July firework. Ma found herself wanting to scream at Sienna Nealon, to get a good hold of her and just squeeze the girl’s head until it made a satisfying pop and she looked like Cousin Blimpy, God rest his soul.

Ma wasn’t left with too many options, though. She darted a look at the approaching vehicle, a whole load of men already pouring out of it like a clown car. She saw the brother, the partner, the ex-boyfriend—how many guys did this girl have in her life? This was just unseemly. And who was the man in the black mask, looking like he was about to go for a ski?

“Quit while you’re only slightly behind, Ma,” Sienna said from just behind her, and Ma swiped as she came ’round, missing taking the girl’s head off by only a few inches. Sienna blurred right back to where she’d been hovering before and the movement of air was enough that Ma felt it. “Nobody else has to die.”

Ma could feel the steel move in lines on her face. “I think one more person needs to, at least.” She stared at Sienna, breath coming hard, nostrils flaring, and all she wanted was to smash the smug face right off her. She made to take another swipe, but Sienna dodged again, well in advance of her even getting close.

It was gonna be like this, that was obvious. Well, all right then.

Ma turned her head as she charged at the Beetle and the men surrounding it. If she couldn’t make Sienna Nealon pay by taking the smug look off her face by personally crushing it … she’d just crush someone the girl cared about and watch her face fall as that someone died in front of her.

Sienna

I saw what she was planning to do play across her steel face before she even started moving and … yeah, no. That was not going to happen.

She sprinted for the orange beetle, and to my surprise, Guy Friday charged out to meet her, swelling as he went. He looked like one of those inflatables that someone was blowing air into, going from an ordinary-sized guy in a black shirt to the incredible Hulk, but without shredding his clothing. I was actually kinda impressed, and was tempted to ask, “Do you lift, bro?” But it seemed like inappropriate timing.

He and Ma Clary clashed, and I have to admit, I didn’t think he was going to hold as well as he did. He took a thunderous punch to the chest, hard enough to break a sternum, I would have figured, maybe chop up some ribs and make them shortribs (har har—at least I find myself funny), but he was already punching back, hitting Ma in her non-glass jaw with enough force that it sounded like bones cracked. They were probably his, I figured, until he hit her again, and again, so if he was breaking his knuckles in the process, this dude was fearsomely stupid or had a pain threshold of the sort I didn’t want to mess with.

Ma came around with her feet planted and grabbed his arm, throwing him forward in a neat little jiu-jitsu move. Guy Friday lost his balance and stumbled, staggering away as Ma resumed her run toward the car.

Augustus and Scott teamed up next, hitting her with a furious wave of dirt and water like a fire hose of the mixture was being sprayed right at her. She stuck out a hand to defray some of the impact, and it blew off her like it was being shot from a sandblaster. She leaned in and kept charging, slightly slower against the resistance.

Reed stepped up, and I caught his eye just as he added his own wind force to the spray hitting her. It was enough to break a building’s facade, but it didn’t stop Ma Clary in her state of rage.

But that was all right, because I was just waiting for her to remember that I was hovering behind her anyway.

Augustus, Scott and Reed ceased their attack and scattered in three different directions. Zollers stayed put, presumably because he just didn’t think he needed to worry about Ma for whatever reason. Ma lurched forward with her bulky arm still extended, and it took her a second to realize she wasn’t being sprayed with three of the four elements any longer. When she realized it, she blinked and removed the impromptu shield she’d thrown up in front of her eyes to find the space around the car empty save for a telepath standing there calmly, leaning against it like he was waiting for his ride.

“What the—” she said, and swung her head around, taking in the three men who had zipped off in different directions. It was like they’d planned it, except they hadn’t, and it had looked like a Three Stooges moment as they all bounced off one another and the car figuring out which direction each was going to run.

“What are you thinking right now, Ma?” I asked, calm as I could be. If she broke for any of them, even Zollers, I’d have some time to react. She may have been the Woman of Steel, but she wasn’t exactly golden at the moment. If I needed to, I could even do to her what I’d done to Junior, though probably less effectively since I was sure she was expecting it now. That was all right, though, because I had another plan in case of emergency.

“She’s ready to kill the next one of your allies she comes across,” Dr. Zollers said, and there was a mournful quality to the way he said it.

Ma’s head swung around and locked on him. The message was clear: target acquired. She bolted for him, and I knew she wouldn’t let the car get in the way. Her steel-clad footsteps thundered against the ground with the fury of a piston pounding a steel support into the earth on a construction site. She had about ten yards to get to him.

And I had ten yards to stop her.

Dr. Zollers just stayed there, content to let it all play out.

“I’m gonna make you pay!” Ma Clary shouted, clearly pissed beyond pissed that she’d gotten so damned thwarted. She’d walked me right into her ambush at a time when I should have been blinded with rage, and here I was, cool as a winter’s day while she’d had the picnic tables turned right over on her, a big bowl of egg salad on her face.

But hey, at least she still had a face.

For a few seconds, anyway.

I shot in front of her, interposing myself between Ma and Dr. Zollers. He knew what he was doing standing there, and he knew just enough about her intentions to know what she was going to do, even without reading her mind, presumably. It was as obvious as the rage on her face.

And he knew what I needed to do, too, and he put everything right into place to make me do it.

She didn’t let up when I flew in front of her, and I didn’t force a clash by running into her. It wouldn’t have stopped her; it would have just hurt us both. I could see the rage in her eyes, squinted and furious under steel lids, and there was no reasoning with the mind beneath them. She was going to kill, as sure as I was going to breathe, and she wouldn’t let a puny punch or a simple distraction stop her.

She was going to murder Dr. Zollers simply to spite me, and there was no way to stop her save for one.

“Gavrikov,” I whispered as she surged forward into the last few feet between us and Dr. Zollers. I didn’t wait for the reply.

I stuck my hand out and blotted out my vision of those hateful, furious eyes and waited as my palm started to glow. A blast of fire hotter than any simple flame flew out of my fingers and superheated the air between us as it shot, unerring, into her eyes.

It didn’t stop there, though. Just blinding her wouldn’t do the trick, and I knew it all the way to the core of me. She’d still strike out in a rage.

No, this was something else. This was a burst of fire so intense that as it hit her eyes, which were still organic, it immediately boiled the fluid they rested in, transferring the heat through her entire socket even as the fireball continued forward. It vaporized the soft tissue upon contact, so quickly that she couldn’t even feel it to scream. The flame traveled through the cavity where the ocular nerve stretched into the brain. It didn’t let a little thing like spare organic tissue stop it, though, and so a burst of heat that ranged up into the four figures, Fahrenheit, wormed its way into Ma Clary’s brain cavity. As much as I might have wanted to mock her and say her brain didn’t exist, it did, and in less than one second it reached way-beyond-boiling temperatures, then the solid became gas and—

You know what? I’ll spare you the technical detail.

Claudette “Ma” Clary died so fast she didn’t even know what hit her.

Her massive steel body seized up and I gave her a kick to the chest that turned her momentum away from Dr. Zollers. The metal surfacing that coated her flesh was already disappearing, returning to skin, and what was left of her head was—well, it was gross. It wasn’t quite Cousin Blimpy, but it was yuck to the max. She rolled to the side and came to a halt, facedown, thankfully, smoke rolling out from beneath her thick mane of her.