Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Read online

  Small Things

  Out of the Box #14

  Robert J. Crane

  Small Things

  Out of the Box #14

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2017 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1.

  “Any last words?” Greg Vansen asked, wagging his finger at Percy Sledger. Sledger stood at the edge of a precipice that overlooked the Columbia River and Interstate 85 several hundred feet below. Greg figured that in daytime it was probably a stunning natural overlook, for those who were interested in such things.

  For his purposes, though, Greg saw only its utility as a perfect place to corner the running man in front of him.

  A light breeze rustled the trees around them in the cool, Oregon night. Rain was in the air, but Greg hoped he would be on his way home before it started coming down. May rains in Oregon were not typically very warm affairs, and while Greg did have a poncho secreted away on him, he had no interest in deploying it and working around the rifle clutched in his arms. He had it pointed carefully at Percy Sledger’s heart, and Sledger had his hands raised high, his thinness making him look like a particularly wretched scarecrow.

  Greg had looked him over carefully; unless Sledger was hiding a secret like Greg’s—which Greg felt calmly assured that he wasn’t—the man had no weapons on him, and was thus no threat at all. He was just a man standing cliffside, his mop of brown hair drenched with sweat from his run, a look of fear twisting his long, skinny face as he pondered the drop ahead or the bullet that had his name on it as surely as if it had been carved into the lead.

  “Please …” Sledger said.

  Greg sighed. “Disappointing. I tracked you from Georgia to Oregon and the best you can muster is ‘Please.’ How trite. These are your last words, you could at least try to make them mean something. You will die, there is no escape, no point in pleading.” Greg felt a cool blossom of anger in his breast, wishing Sledger would just get on with saying something that had some meaning. The ones who begged only annoyed him, refusing to accept their fate. “I suppose next you’ll mutter some irrelevancy about how you don’t deserve this.”

  “I—I don’t—” Sledger started.

  Greg made a show of checking his watch without moving the muzzle off his target. “I don’t care whether you deserve it or not. I get paid either way.” His timing was precise as ever; he had gauged down to the minute without even checking his watch. Still, it was nice to have it in case he needed a more definite measure, perhaps down to the seconds.

  Sledger stared at him, gape-mouthed, eyes twitching back and forth as he apparently tried to come up with something to say in response to that. Greg cut his juddering thoughts short. “Since you have nothing coherent or interesting to say, let’s be on with the business at hand. It would be in my best interest if you jumped, landing on the Interstate below and ending your life and my problems all at once. If however, you wish to inflict further discomfort upon me …” Greg adjusted the gun slightly in his hands for dramatic effect, keeping it trained on his target. “Well, there is a distinct possibility that the fall will cause enough damage to your corpse that the coroner may not notice the bullet hole.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Percy Sledger said, his shaking hands still aloft.

  “I don’t particularly care what you want,” Greg said. Sledger was actually shorter than Greg, which was no mean feat. “It’s not as though you’ve respected my schedule these last few days.”

  Sledger made a face at that, all bawled up as though he might cry. Greg felt a prick of annoyance. He was tempted to make a show of checking his watch again while evincing his distaste. Hopefully Sledger would see the futility of his delaying actions soon and jump, putting an end to this annoying endeavor once and for all.

  “Well?” Greg tapped his finger along the side of the rifle. “We don’t have all night. Make a decision.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Reason should compel you to recognize the inevitability of your death,” Greg said, impatience bleeding through. “I’ve pursued you to the edge of a cliff. Two options remain—I shoot you or you jump. Both end in a fall and your death. Choose which you prefer. I will give you to the count of five. One.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Two.”

  “Aughhhhh!” Percy Sledger let out a primal scream, but his feet stayed anchored at the edge of the cliff, unmoving. It was a sad display of misdirected rage, and Greg would have rolled his eyes at the sheer silliness of it were he not otherwise engaged.

  “Three.”

  “Please … I’ll give you whatever you want,” Sledger said. “I’ll give you everything I have. Just—don’t—”

  “Four.”

  Sledger wobbled on his legs, looking suddenly downcast. “Oh, God.”

  “Fiv—”

  Before Greg finished the word, Percy Sledger looked up at him, eyes seemingly wider than his thin body, and took a step back. He started to slide, foot catching on the face of the cliff.

  Greg took a step forward, rushing the edge of the cliff as Sledger slid down the edge a foot, bending his legs in the process.
The second before he vanished over the edge completely, Sledger shoved off against the vertical surface of the cliff with extreme force, doing a backwards swan dive out of sight.

  Greg stopped at the cliff’s edge with precision, using his metahuman strength to halt him just before he slid off the overlook. Sledger was airborne below, but he was not angled to land on Interstate 84, as Greg had hoped. No, his last minute maneuver had been calculated, a shove-off to try and give him enough distance to land beyond the interstate, to come splashing down in the Columbia River beyond.

  “Damn,” Greg said mildly and then drew up his rifle. He acquired his target in a quarter of a second and fired three shots in rapid succession. The muzzle flash lit up the night, the gunshots cracking over the Columbia River Gorge.

  The shadow of Percy Sledger bucked in midair, twisting, and Greg knew at least one of his shots had hit true. Probably more than one; Greg was very efficient with a variety of weapons. As an assassin, it paid to be good at your trade.

  And few, if any, were better than Greg Vansen.

  Percy Sledger landed in the waters of the Columbia River, a splash about twenty feet off shore swallowing him whole. Greg did the mental calculus—Sledger’s speed, angle of impact, force of the water—it only took a few seconds, and he was mathematically certain that Percy Sledger was, in fact, dead.

  “Good,” Greg allowed himself, watching the water for signs of a disturbance. Something about the fall bothered him, but the math was certain. No human could have survived that, the probabilities, especially given Sledger’s angle of entry, prohibited it.

  This matter was settled.

  “But it shouldn’t have been necessary,” Greg muttered to himself as he secured the rifle, putting it away carefully. How had Sledger been sure-footed enough to—

  “It doesn’t matter,” Greg said, shaking his head. The math was certain, so he was certain. The clouds above were hiding the moon. They suggested that the rain was indeed coming.

  Patience was a game of picking one’s battles, and Greg had no interest in wasting any more time now that Percy Sledger was out of the picture. And so he scuffed his feet along the forest floor, making his preparations. He could be home in just a few short hours. Greg Vansen was done wasting his time.

  2.

  Augustus

  “Wait for me,” Reed Treston said, voice crackling into the earpiece I had couched in my right ear. “I’m en route.”

  I was standing on an overlook in Steelwood Springs, Colorado, heart of the mountains, a town of ten thousand nestled in a valley surrounded by peaks, trying to decide whether to take the boss at his word. He probably was on his way, but that could mean he’d be an hour—or five minutes. A wise man might ask for clarification. A smaller man might meekly accept his fate, waiting for help and the cavalry and the forces of truth and justice to arrive before charging blindly into battle.

  But was I a smaller man? Ohhhh hell no.

  “They’re coming up the road,” I said, just riding right past his previous statement like I hadn’t heard it. “They’ve got five cars of local cops on their tail.” There was so much red and blue flashing beneath me that you could have mistaken it for a K-Mart back in the day. Blue light specials, yeah. I don’t know what a red flashing light would have meant, other than the cops, though. Maybe a nuclear meltdown? So it was like a K-Mart blue light special crossed with a nuclear plant going boom.

  Yeah.

  What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of cops, and they were chasing up a mountain road after a new-model Chevy Acadia with two guys hanging out the window and firing energy shots at the cops in pursuit. I couldn’t tell whether the blasts were coming out of the eyes or the hands or what, because it was dark and they were down the mountain from me, threading their way up the switchbacks trying to escape the Steelwood Springs valley, but they were definitely throwing some metahuman hurt at the pursuing cops, who were wisely keeping their distance.

  They were doing their job.

  And I was about to do mine.

  “Do not engage,” Reed said. “I’m coming to you.”

  “And by the time you get here, they could be up the pass and gone,” I said. I needed to lay a little groundwork to justify what I was about to do. This wasn’t government service or anything, but Reed was still my boss.

  And he thought of everyone on his team as kids he was in charge of, so …

  It was time to show him differently.

  “Augustus—” he started to say, but I thumbed my earpiece, rocking it back and forth in my ear canal, messing with the slight vacuum it created in there.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said, moving it back and forth. “Reed, are you there?”

  “Augustus, don’t—”

  “I’ll catch you when you get here, Reed!” I said, and then pushed the button to turn off the earpiece. Once it was off, I said, “Alone at last,” and stared down the mountain at the approaching car.

  This was going to be over long before Reed got here.

  The getaway car was rolling closer to its inevitable intersection with the rock beneath my outcropping. It was a straight shot for me down the mountain, a ninety-degree cliff face that dropped down into oblivion.

  I stepped off.

  Rock reached out and caught me lightly, touching my wingtip shoes as it surged out from the cliff face, riding me slowly down like a living elevator of stone. It rippled its way down the vertical face of the cliff, an escalator that made way for me. I hunched over, leaning forward in my guided descent.

  It was a real shame no one could see me right now, because I was pretty sure I looked cool.

  I raced toward my rendezvous with the getaway car, still snaking its way up the S-curved road, energy blasts hurtling out the side windows at the cops behind it. The police were receding in the distance, the criminals slowly getting away from them.

  My little segment of rock intersected with the getaway car’s hood, two tons of stone T-boning its way through a Chevy’s engine block and holding its ground. My new, expanded powers allowed me to treat earthy elements like rock and stone as though I had telekinesis. I could hold rock in a wall shape, and I did, causing that Chevy to rip damned near in half.

  The Chevy’s hood crumpled like cellophane wrap, and the windshield shattered, sending glass flying at me. Using my power over sand, I guided it gently around. Not that it would hurt me much, but the last thing I needed was one of those little pebbles getting caught in my eye and blinding me.

  About a half second behind the glass came two of the criminals who’d prompted this manhunt. I couldn’t see them very well because the car headlights—the only source of light up on this winding road—had shattered when I’d sheared them off in the collision. Still, I watched two astonished, fearful faces go flying by, arms pinwheeling, screams echoing in the night.

  This, kids, is why you should always wear your seatbelt.

  They both made a soft landing on rock as I caught them, gently as I could given what I was working with. I molded the rock around their arms, their heads, their faces, giving them room enough to breathe and little else. I locked them into squatting positions, like large gargoyles in the middle of the road, and then swept away the excess stone I’d used to pin their smashed car right to the cliff face just as the first cop car was pulling up.

  I held my hands up and waved. “Hey, yo.”

  The first cop came popping out with his gun drawn, but had the decency not to point it at me. “You get ’em?” he called to me. I could see his face in the streaky blue and red light his car was casting over the accident scene, and I recognized him as Officer Duc. I’d met him earlier in the day, when we’d confabbed with the Steelwood Springs PD before this all unfolded.

  “I got ’em,” I said even as a whirling wind rolled over me, making me blink away. The sound of feet landing lightly behind me was like an alarm over the roaring police sirens as the cops started to swarm into the scene.

  “You didn’t wait,” Reed s
aid accusingly as he stepped out of his landing. Dude could walk out of the sky now like he was stepping off a city bus. He was looking a little petulant, too, like he might be about to give me a hard time about my failure to comply with his orders.

  “I must have lost signal in these mountains,” I said with a shrug.

  He extended a hand, and a tiny wind sucked my earpiece right into his grasping fingers. He gave it a cursory look then tossed it back. I caught it. “You turned it off,” he said.

  “Hey, man, they were driving up a mountain road at night,” I said. “I had this.”

  Reed gave the shattered car a wary once-over. “Looks that way.” His voice was laden with doubt, like I hadn’t just handled it.

  “You don’t have to worry about us, you know?” I tried to give him some confidence via our shared look, but he’d been pretty enigmatic lately. Leadership had changed Reed. Or maybe it was his time in the clouds that had done it. “You put together a great team. You just need to trust us, you know? Let us do our thing.”

  He looked at me with smoky, inscrutable eyes, then looked past me, his face alight with red and blue. “Tell you what: why don’t you go do your ‘thing’ with the press, who are crawling their way up the mountain right … over there.” He pointed down the mountain, at an onslaught of cars slowly working their way up the switchbacks toward us.

  “You want me to … talk to them?” I asked, straightening my shirt. I was wearing a suit, because that was the dress code, but … suddenly I wondered if I was done up enough. I started to adjust my collar self-consciously.

  Reed never let anyone else talk to the press. Not that they had shown up much at our scenes until recently, but it was starting to happen more frequently. “Sure,” he said, though I was having a hard time telling whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Give it a shot.”

  “Thanks, man,” I said, picking past him, waiting for him to say something, to call me back, tell me he was just kidding …

  He didn’t. So I headed toward the cop cars and beyond, where the police were already starting to set up a cordon, and a few people were already out of their cars gawking up the mountain, cameras in hand.