Power (10 page)

I felt our return to acceleration as I was thrust against my seat. I was twisted at the waist to fire backward, and as the sound of my last shot faded, I realized Kat was screaming next to me. I glanced at her, and saw flecks of blood on her face. “J.J.?” I asked, leaning over Kat to get a look at the computer geek.

He was huddled, bent double at the waist, with his arms wrapped around his backpack, head shaking and his eyes clenched shut. It reminded me a little of a child in total fear, because the motion made him look so … small. “J.J!” I yelled again. “Are you all right?”

His right eye cracked open a sliver and he saw me leaning over Kat. “Nothing a fresh change of underwear won’t fix.”

“Kat!” I shifted my attention to her, grasping her by the shoulders and shaking her once. She blinked. “Are you all right?”

She swallowed visibly. “No.” She was more than a little pale.

Klementina
… Gavrikov’s voice in my head whispered. He would have been more than a little pale and shaking, too, if he’d been corporeal.

“Where are you hit?” I asked, tearing at her jacket, trying to find where the blood splatter had come from.

“Look out!” Reed shouted from the front seat, and I ducked hard, forcing Kat down along with me then reaching over to yank J.J. down as well. I folded all three of us at the waist, knocking J.J.’s backpack out of his lap.

Bullets whipped into the space above us. I hadn’t even noticed the side windows shattering, probably in the seconds before the crash. Or during the crash. Hell, it was all a jumble.

I thrust my Sig out the window and fired blindly twice along the direct axis outside our window. The sharp whistling of bullets over my head was unmistakable, a frightening sound even to me. I may have picked up Wolfe’s adaptability when I had him front of mind where I could use his power, but it’s not like I could think about him all day, every day.

And even if I could, my skin hadn’t gotten as tough as his had. Not yet. There were only so many bullet wounds my body could handle before dying. In the case of a head shot, it might only be one. It’d be tough to focus on Wolfe and his power with most of my brain splattered outside my body.

I realized with relief that the side panels of the SUV must have been armor plated. The volume of fire from either side of us was simply astounding, submachine guns roaring at full auto into our vehicle. I didn’t dare lift my head to check on Reed’s driving (I knew he was doing it blind anyway). The sound of a pistol discharging out the passenger window in front of me told me that Li was still in the fight, too.

I heard something land with a
thunk
, followed by J.J.’s dull proclamation of, “Ow,” and I nearly broke Kat’s neck clawing for the object I knew had to be in the floorboard beneath one of them. By sheer luck and I tossed the object—an ovoid piece of rippled metal—out the window next to me.

I heard the grenade detonate with a low
WHUMP
half a second after I got it out of the SUV, and the SUV rocked to the left. Reed was struggling for control of the vehicle, driving with his head down as he was, sneaking the occasional glance at the road in front of us from his hunched over position.

It was a formula for one of the gunners in the van to put a bullet in his head any second. A good sniping shot would send us into a certain wreck. It might not kill us all, but it’d probably kill J.J. and Li, and put a desperate hurting on myself, Reed and—

KLEMENTINA!

The voice was like someone sent a bolt of lightning through my head, filled with fear and desperation of a sort I’d only felt a few times in my life.

It was the fear of a man who knew he was seconds away from losing someone he loved.

Help her!
Gavrikov said, and his voice was so utterly different from the Aleksandr who had been in my head this last year and a half. I’d heard him proud, whiny, defiant and even indifferent.

Now, he was half a heartbeat from losing his shit.

“I’m kind of limited in what I can do, Aleksandr,” I muttered as I fired my pistol out the window over J.J.’s head, thanking the heavens above for the ten-round magazine. I used Kat’s back to steady my hands to fire, and she stayed down for it. I painted one of the gunmen with a headshot, and watched him go boneless as he toppled out of the side door of his van. Another replaced him and forced me to duck again as he sprayed the space I’d just been occupying with a hailstorm of lead. “I’m not invincible, you know, and I can’t exactly move from this spot. Not with the car roaring down the freeway.”

You can fly
, Gavrikov said, and as he spoke in my mind I felt a strange tingle run over my scalp at the thought.

“I can’t—” I said, but stopped midway through. “I can?”

I give you my power,
he said, urgently.
I will help you. Just … save my sister, please.

I blinked, and the hellish chirps of shots passing over my head caused me to duck down lower, involuntarily. “I—”

PLEASE
, he begged.
Please
. His voice lowered.
I will help you.

Please
.

I fired my last round blindly out the window over my head at the van just outside then ejected the magazine. I reloaded it with the spare from my holster and jerked the slide as I heard return fire blasting at me from outside. I glanced toward what I could see of the front seat. Reed was hunkered lower than before, and I felt him ease off the gas, and then felt the hard jarring as the van behind us—now presumably under someone else’s control—slammed into us again. The sound firing from the van beside us receded slightly as it continued down the freeway, no longer pointed directly at us for the moment it would take their shooters to readjust their aim.

It was now or never.

Taking a deep breath, I ripped at the door handle and pushed. The SUV’s door resisted for only a moment, the momentum of the car and the speed of the wind pushing back. I opened it just enough and lunged forward. I saw the pavement blurring beneath me as I hurled myself out of the relative safety of the vehicle and into the open freeway beyond.

And a half an inch before my skin met pavement with deadly force, gravity seemed to just … switch off. I hung there for half a heartbeat until my thoughts caught me and told me to go up, up, up. And I did.

I flew.

Chapter 16

The freeway and the ground raced away as I shot up into the air. It was a weightless sensation, like I’d bounced really high, but without the feeling that the ground was going to come rushing back up to me anytime soon.

I paused for a second above the fray. It was a fray, too, a free-for-all taking up all three lanes of Interstate 494 heading north. Cars were pulling away wildly, hugging the shoulders of the road as the vans spewing bullets out of their open hatches continued on, sliding back into place on either side of the SUV that carried my friends.

I caught my breath for a beat, wondering if anyone had seen my exit from the car. I stared down at the spectacle below and realized I had no time to think about it.

The van on the passenger side of our car was lining up to shoot again, and I doubted my brother would survive another round of it. As if to punctuate that thought for me, I watched as one of the shooters lined up his shot, holding off on opening fire as he aimed his gun barrel into the SUV, the driver easing them across the dots between lanes and closer to our speeding car.

I darted down with a thought, my body flying through the air, wind tearing at my jacket’s sleeves. I dove forward and found myself suddenly pacing along with the vans and then catching up to them. I changed my body’s position, slinging my legs down, and with a thought I willed gravity to come back to me.

It did.

With a vengeance.

I dropped from ten feet above the van on the right of our SUV and slammed into the roof with all my weight. I felt the metal crumple beneath me as I kicked upon landing, trying to do some damage.

I sunk a good half-foot into the metal of the van’s roof, creating a small impact crater that caused the vehicle to swerve to the right. I jumped, wanting to be able to fly again, and it happened with only my will. My feet lifted into the air and I was flying along again, fifty miles per hour over the van’s roof.

I glanced to my left and saw the van on the opposite side lining up for a shot. “Reed!” I shouted. “Out your window! Let ’em reap the whirlwind!”

I didn’t hear him answer back, and for a second I wondered if he’d heard me over the roar of the highway. Then I saw the hood of the van on the side jerk violently to the left and crash into the concrete divider that separated the lanes of the highway. The van tipped upon impact and crashed onto its side, skidding to a stop as we blew past.

I didn’t dare breathe a sigh of relief yet, though. All it would take is one of the two remaining vans getting a good shot at Reed and the whole SUV would come to a sudden, violent stop. The only question at that point would be who would die, because death would be certain for at least one of them.

I arced into the air above the van that was still holding on the right side of our SUV. I was pacing them, just above the dented roof where I’d landed on them. I could see some metal scars where shards of the grenade had exploded. I wondered if it had hit any of their gunmen, and realized that if it had, the evidence was either inside in the form of wounded, or somewhere along the freeway about a mile back in the form of a corpse.

The staccato burst of gunfire from the van’s door galvanized me into action at last. I could hear the singing of the bullets bouncing off the metal sides of the SUV. There was almost no paint left on them, the outside surface of the car’s exterior a crumpled, shredded mess. Steel girders from the inside structure of the doors were exposed, and from my bird’s eye view I could see Li and Kat huddled inside the car. Li’s suit was a darker shade at the shoulder than the rest of his ensemble.

He was bleeding.

I flew forward and down, turning in a slow arc so that I could get in front of the van below me. I spun and threw my legs out in front of me and then halted my motion and just hung there. I waited for less than a second, legs extended like I was about to toothpick into water below, arms crossed over my chest, pistol clenched in hand.

When I hit the van’s windshield, feet first, it exploded inward like a rain of glass falling sideways. I used my newfound powers of flight to halt me in midair, canceling the fifty plus mile per hour impact of my body against the moving van.

But not before I kicked the living hell out of the first guy to get in my way.

He’d been standing in the middle of the van, probably shooting out at my friends, when I hit him with both feet. I felt all my momentum transfer down my legs and into him as I forced him into motion and halted my own at the same time.

He hit the back doors with his body and sheared one of them off as he spun limply out the back of the van and hit the ground below. He went ragdoll and bounced twice before I lost track of him.

My feet hit the floor of the van and I swept out with a hand, hitting the man nearest me in the neck with a quick chop. His hands went to his throat instinctively and he failed to keep my blow from costing him his balance.

He was nearly under the tires of the van before he even tried to reach out and grab something in the vain hope of hanging on.

Too late. The impact of his body under the rear tire caused the whole van to jump and shake, skidding slightly as it tried to regain traction.

I realized that there was another man in the back with me, one last shooter. His reactions were quicker than the others, and as I sent a kick in his direction, he dodged to the right without losing his footing.

Meta.

Shit.

He had a hand still on his submachine gun, a lovely HK MP5. I’d used one myself from time to time and I knew how much lead they could spray in a short amount of time. They were beyond deadly at close range, and he and I were at point blank.

He made a move to swing the barrel toward me and I slapped it away, toward the back of the van. The gun belched involuntarily but he kept it perfectly level and it cut off after three shots.

If I hadn’t already suspected he was a meta, his strength and control of his weapon confirmed it. He went for something on his tactical vest and I would have slapped his hand away, but I had something in my right hand that didn’t make it possible.

My gun.

I tried to line up a shot instead, and he jerked his hand away from whatever he was grabbing to slap mine back. He caught me on the wrist with a stinging blow that wrecked my aim a second before I had it pointed at his head.

This guy was good. He was a meta and a fighter. He’d had training, he had experience, and he wasn’t some weak-fisted slap fighter, either.

Apparently, as Zollers had tried to warn me, Century
had
been saving the best for last.

I whirled my gun hand ’round again, trying to go low, but he blocked me again. I knocked aside his submachine gun again. No accidental discharge this time (I know how it sounds—but this was potentially much messier) unfortunately, because I’d been hoping to make him fire off stray rounds until he ran out of bullets.

He was fast. Fast enough to keep up with Wolfe-speed, which I was channeling with a vengeance. Most metas can’t claim that level of power, and it worried me that I was facing someone of that level in a white-knuckle freeway assassination attempt. It suggested that there might be more trouble waiting for me in the last van.

If I even made it to the last van.

There was a sharp sound of gunfire from out on the freeway, and I realized it was coming from the last van, the one that had boxed us in from behind. They were firing full out, straight into the back of the SUV that had my friends in it. I could barely see Reed’s back as he hunkered down, and J.J. was just gone, as if he’d vanished into the floorboard. He had to have been down so low I couldn’t see him.

A fist came roaring at me, and I barely dodged it, falling backward and lashing out with my foot at the same time in a bizarre contortion. I managed to knock aside my assailant’s submachine gun again as I caught myself with my palms. I arched my back in order to throw myself to my feet, and made it just in time to see my opponent draw a short-bladed knife from his tactical vest. He must have been going for it a moment before when I came at him, and my fall had finally allowed him to get it drawn.