Hero Read online

  HERO: OUT OF THE BOX 22

  The Girl in the Box, Book 32

  ROBERT J. CRANE

  Ostiagard Press

  HERO

  The Girl in the Box, Book 32

  (Out of the Box 22)

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2018-9 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  2nd 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

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Teaser

  Author's Note

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  Acknowledgments

  This one is dedicated to my long-standing editor, the great Sarah Barbour, who is no doubt going out a hero after editing over fifty of my books. Happy trails, Sarah, and may you manifest your destiny.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “If I wanted to get my ass kicked on an airplane, I would have flown United,” I said as I woke to the familiar thrum of engines as we sailed through the sky.

  “You were a prisoner up until a few hours ago.” Doctor Helen Slaughter—a name that I knew was total bullshit—was a study in calm, sitting in the seat across from where I lay, bound to a stretcher. “You’re supposed to be sitting in a cell right, now. You weren’t going to be flying anywhere for the rest of your life, remember?”

  I tested my bonds. They were … not breakable. Even with my super strength, which I noted, had returned after a long drug-imposed absence. “Actually, I was always destined to come to Revelen.” I looked around the plane, trying to get the lay of the land.

  Smooth, white surfaces were everywhere, broken by the occasional upholstered seat with fuzzy cloth. Dark windows looking out into an impenetrable night. Jones, the prison guard who was actually a multi-time felon and probably a mercenary, waved at me from a seat a few feet away.

  I’d learned only just before I was rendered unconscious for this flight that she was a metahuman with the ability to rearrange matter at the molecular level via her touch. Once upon a time she’d crashed the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan into a pile of shards. Similarly, she’d killed a prisoner I’d been having a kerfuffle with during my recent stint in the pokey by turning her into glass and then shattering her to pieces.

  Hey, that’s a theme. No wonder they called her The Glass Blower.

  “How you doin,’ Owens?” I asked. “That’s not your real name, is it?”

  “Owens” shook her head. “Why would I use my real name on a job to infiltrate a metahuman prison? That’d be crazy.”

  I let my gaze flit on over to “Doctor Helen Slaughter.” “Anyone want to exchange some real names? Maybe some real talk, too? I’m Sienna—”

  “We know who you are,” the “doctor” said. See, I used scare quotes there because she was a murderous doctor. Like Harold Shipman.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Though I’m sure you’re aware of my fearsome reputation. I am death, and all that jazz.”

  She turned in her seat to face me, still maintaining her icy facade but at least doing me the dignity of turning her full attention my way, as though I were an actual threat. “We’ve gone to the trouble and expense of using our hackers to create entirely new identities in order to place the two of us in your prison … You think we’d do that for someone we don’t know?”

  “I think you might do that for someone you truly loathed,” I said, “or maybe someone you’d like to recruit for your cause. Whatever that is.”

  She chuckled. It was light. “You were serving a life sentence. A true one, not one of those that results in your parole in eight years. We got you out in three days.”

  “You could have done it sooner,” I said. “Do you know how bad the food is there? I mean, of all the traumas I’ve bee
n through the last few years—”

  “We weren’t planning to get you out this soon,” she said, looking right at me. “But you had to go and cause a riot that would have almost certainly resulted in your death if we hadn’t intervened.” She shook her head. “You think we don’t know who you are? I know who you are. You’re an idiot, marching into the fires of stupidity without a thought—”

  “Actually, I thought very carefully about what I was doing,” I said. I was bound over just about every square inch of my body south of the neck. It wasn’t exactly bungee cords, either, because there was no give in whatever they’d trussed me up with. “I was doing the best I could with a really bad hand. Poker hand. Not actual hand.”

  “You’re pure chaos,” the “doctor” said. “You’re the worst—” She cut herself off and turned away.

  I waited to see if she was going to finish her thought. “What the hell? Am I not even worth the breath? Go on and say what you need to say there, Sigourney.”

  “Stop calling me that,” she said but did not look at me.

  “Give me your real name, and I won’t call you Sigourney anymore.”

  “You can call me Sophie,” she said.

  “That’s not your real name.”

  “How would you know?” she asked, turning irritated eyes upon me. “You don’t even remember that we met before this.”

  “I remember in January that you pulled my ass out of the fire,” I said, thinking carefully about what she’d just said.

  “That was not the first time we met.”

  I stayed silent, maybe for the first time in my life. I’d lost a number of memories last year in Scotland to a very angry succubus named Rose. At the time, I’d thought the souls she’d taken from me had been the worst of her thefts.

  I was beginning to wonder if that was true. Over a period of months, she’d leached … dozens? Hundreds? Of memories from me.

  I didn’t even know. It was a lot, as evidenced by this encounter with “Sophie.” Whose actual name I was no closer to unearthing.

  “When did we meet before?” I asked. I let my gaze wander over to “Owens,” whom I was never going to get used to thinking of as the Glass Blower.

  “If you don’t know, I’m not telling you,” she said.

  “Hey, man, I didn’t just slip up and forget you,” I said, struggling against the bonds again. “It’s not like I’m trying to be rude—”

  “I know your memories were stolen by Rose.” She was dead calm as she said this. Still didn’t look at me.

  “How did you know that?” I stopped struggling.

  “Word gets around.” Her smile was both faint and fake. And she still didn’t look at me.

  A female voice came on the speaker, a little husky. “We’re twenty minutes out.” English. Not the primary language of Revelen, as far as I knew. Accented, too, like it wasn’t her native tongue. It lacked the crisp precision of a commercial pilot, along with the friendliness.

  But it was also very, very familiar.

  “I know that voice,” I said under my breath.

  “You know lots of people,” “Sophie” said.

  “Am I just going to stay this way?” I asked, nodding at my trussed-up self. “Straight out of the plane and into the dungeon?”

  “We’ll let you out when we land,” Owens said, sounding surprisingly reassuring. She’d clearly been given the good cop role to Sophie’s very, very annoying one. “Can’t have you tearing up the plane mid-flight.”

  “I generally don’t cause massive havoc when my life is on the line,” I said.

  “That’s a lie,” “Sophie” said. “You always cause massive havoc, especially when your life is on the line.”

  Okay, that was a reasonable point. “Nuh-uh,” I said anyway. Because hell if I was going to admit I was wrong.

  “Just shut up for a few minutes until we land,” she said, concentrating on the carpeted floor. “And we’ll see what he says when we get there.”

  I didn’t gulp, but only from long practice.

  He was Vlad. As in, “the Impaler.” Of Dracula fame.

  And it appeared … I was going to meet him very soon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Passerini

  Situation Room

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  “They came over the border in the night,” Secretary of Defense Bruno “Hammer” Passerini said, using a laser pointer to draw the red dot across the map projected onto the biggest screen in the Situation Room. “On trains, for the most part, though trucks brought in some of the smaller components—”

  “What am I even looking at here?” President Richard Gondry asked, his glasses catching the glare of the projection and making his eyes look like puddles of white light. “I don’t need a geography lesson. You said this was important—sum it up.”

  “I’m trying to explain, sir,” Passerini said. Five nights of this, of watching and waiting as the nation of Revelen did their thing with Russia. Now this, and he was lecturing to a college professor who was maybe the biggest idiot he’d ever met. Proving once again that education didn’t equal intelligence. “Last night, Russia trans-shipped their SH-08 Gazelle missiles over the border—”

  “I don’t know what the hell any of that means,” Gondry thumped a sheaf of briefing papers onto the table in front of him. “Do you even realize what troubles we have domestically at the moment? Wildfires in California. A hurricane churning toward the east coast. And this—this—Minnesota prison nonsense—” The president gritted his teeth together at the last.

  Passerini didn’t want to touch that one. He’d heard the rumors that Sienna Nealon, the metahuman criminal and apparent full-time bee in Gondry’s bonnet, had somehow escaped the metahuman prison complex outside Minneapolis last night. “Sir,” Passerini said, trying to manage up, “I assure you, I wouldn’t be wasting your very valuable time if this weren’t incredibly important and urgent. Revelen has installed missile batteries to protect against—”

  “This is an allied country, yes?” Gondry asked, pushing his glasses down the bridge of his nose. In the semi-dark, Passerini could see the president’s eyes. They looked like beads of black.

  “Sir,” Secretary of State Lisa Ngo spoke up from down the table, “we have a few nominal treaties with Revelen—the usual boilerplate—but that’s all. They’re not what we would consider an ally. And as Secretary Passerini is trying to inform you, they’re presently making moves, along with Russia, that suggest that they are anything but friendly.”

  “We’ve been at peace with Russia for years,” Gondry said. “The Cold War is over, people.” He chortled. “I swear, the military is always looking to fight the last war again.”

  Passerini suppressed the urge to sigh through long practice. “Sir, I wasn’t in the Cold War for the most part. I joined up in the last decade of it, and my experience is mostly in fighting the War on Terror. So while you think that I’m just looking to pick a fight that I understand … believe me when I tell you, sir, this is not a fight I would go looking for. Russia possesses more nuclear weapons than any other country on the planet. Getting into any sort of conflict with them is not on my priority list on any given day—”

  “Now that’s just blatantly false.” Gondry chuckled. “You’re the military. Of course you’re looking for a war to fight. It’s the reason for your existence.”

  Passerini’s blood ran surprisingly cool. Normally in moments of insult, it tended hot, the Italian in him rising to the surface along with the desire to throw a choice expletive at top volume, the way his father did at times of stress and challenge. He didn’t do that now, though, because he was standing in front of his boss, the Commander in Chief.

  And the man had just told him, in the midst of what looked like a terrible geopolitical conflict on the rise, that he thought Passerini’s job and disposition was to make war.

  “Sir,” Passerini said, voice falling to a low register that it seldom hit, “my job is not to mak
e war. I’m the Secretary of Defense. My job is to defend the United States. If that means prosecuting a war, so be it. But I’d be a lot happier if I could do my job and never fire a shot.”

  “Sure you would,” Gondry snorted. Good God, the man was an arrogant prick.

  Passerini gathered himself and turned the laser pointer back on the new emplacements around Revelen’s capital, Bredoccia. “They’ve also taken these Russian anti-missile systems, which normally take months or years to install, and they’ve emplaced them overnight.”

  Gondry might have been looking at him, or he might not have been. His glasses were back up, the glare preventing Passerini from gauging where the president’s attention was.

  “How did they do that?” National Security Advisor Bethany Cantrell asked. Passerini had seldom had contact with the National Security Advisor, which was a pretty decent indicator of how importantly Gondry viewed that role. Cantrell was a cheerleader for the administration, her national security bona fides about as serious as Passerini’s interest in gardening, i.e., not remotely.

  “They appear to have used metahumans to move the earth and lift the emplacements,” SecState Ngo answered for him. He gave her a nod, and she nodded back. In his opinion, she was the only competent one at the table.

  “Good for them,” the president said. “Using metahuman labor to simplify things is the wave of the future. Too long these people have stood in the shadows, afraid to show their faces—”

  “Sir—” Passerini knew full well he was risking incurring the wrath of this former academic, who, he knew by experience, hated to be interrupted mid-lecture, “they may be slave labor, for all we know.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Gondry said, eyes flaring to life as the glasses slipped down his nose again. “This is Eastern Europe. There’s no slavery remaining there.”

  The fragment of some old quote about trying to be the coolest head in the room floated through Passerini’s mind, somewhat dousing the heat of his rising temper. “The point remains, sir, that in one night, Revelen has emplaced anti-ballistic missile defenses. They are now prepared in the event that someone launches on them.” He debated whether to whack Gondry over the head with the facts, then realized if ever there was a person who needed whacking with facts, it was the academic Gondry, with his massive, arrogance-driven blind spots. “Sir … they’re preparing for war with us.”