Apex Read online

  APEX: OUT OF THE BOX 18

  The Girl in the Box, Book 28

  ROBERT J. CRANE

  Ostiagard Press

  APEX

  The Girl in the Box, Book 28

  (Out of the Box #18)

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2017-9 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

  Epilogue

  Teaser

  Author’s Note

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  Newport News, Virginia

  She was going to be called “Big E” like her predecessors, though Eric Simmons didn’t know that. All he knew was what he could see, what he could hear, and what he could taste … and that was mostly fear.

  He could almost feel it oozing out of every pore, hard-spiked adrenaline on his tongue as he walked toward the big graving dock where they were building the ship. He was sweating even though it wasn’t particularly hot, his armpits soaked in the cool Virginia air.

  “I have to do this,” he whispered to himself. And he did. There were no other choices for him.

  The dock was immense, and he wasn’t even that close. He didn’t have to be, not for his purposes. He wanted to be a nice distance away, especially given that President Gondry himself was coming here for this dog and pony show. There were signs everywhere, telling Simmons that the ship being commissioned today was the USS Enterprise, ninth of her illustrious name in the US Navy. He didn’t care, though, because of …

  Man, the fear. It was just eating at him. Simmons tried to keep his eyes from darting left to right, but it was tough. There was security everywhere. The smell of the crowd was heavy, all the activity making people perspire. Who were these people? Navy families, probably, right? His gaze flicked over the crowd. Yeah. Men in uniform; some women, too; lots of wives; a few little kids.

  Simmons let his eyes rest on the ass of a pretty young lady, probably twenty. Maybe a Navy wife? Time was, Simmons would have been all over that. He mopped his brow with a hand, pushing the sweat off, and looked away quickly.

  Not anymore. No time for that.

  If he did this thing right, maybe he’d have time for that again. But now …

  Now he had work to do.

  He swallowed hard and walked over to a fence, taking in the big blue sky overhead. It should have been wintery, it being right smack dab in the middle of January, but it wasn’t. A freak heat wave had put the temps clear up into the low seventies, and Simmons even saw some people in shorts. He’d never spent much time in Virginia, preferring New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Aspen, Portland, Seattle—pretty much anywhere more happening than this, but at least this weather wasn’t bad. It was no LA, but this he could deal with.

  Simmons put his hands on the fence. To his right, a security checkpoint was forming up. They couldn’t just let anybody into these parties, after all. What if someone walked their ass right onto the deck of the USS Enterprise and set off a bomb?

  That’d be terrible, Simmons reflected with dark humor, shivering a little in spite of the heat.

  But it probably wouldn’t be as bad as what was about to happen.

  Simmons tossed another look over the crowd, the bitter taste of adrenaline in his mouth. Working for someone else was bad enough—he’d done a team-up, he and Cassidy, with that dumbass Clary family a few years back, and that had ended in disaster and imprisonment, thanks to Sienna Nealon. Once he’d gotten himself clear of that mess, courtesy of a Supreme Court decision that opened the gates of the prison he’d been stuck in, Simmons had vowed to never be caught again.

  And that resolution had lasted until some black-ops assholes had bagged him just after his release. He hadn’t even done anything to deserve it, really.

  His nerves were still stinging, clanging from that day. The door to his hotel room kicked in, strong, metahuman arms dragging him out of bed as he was snoozing next to a pretty little midwestern girl, some kind of portable bugzapper on a stick shoved into the small of his back so he’d danced like he’d done the splits on a barbed wire fence.

  Man, even Sienna Nealon hadn’t done anything like that to him.

  Simmons clutched the chain-link fence and looked through. He was detached from the crowd now, all the serious, invited guests separating into neat queues in front of the security checkpoint. Ahead, he could see the ship in question, big and grey, stretched out of the dock like a skyscraper laid flat.

  Simmons had brought down buildings before. It wasn’t exactly the hardest thing in the world for a man who could shake the earth—and not just for the ladies he was with, was the old joke he used.

  He didn’t use that joke anymore. Something about being completely consumed with terror… it really sapped the humor out of you.

  A few security guards were eyeing him, but Simmons didn’t care. He wasn’t going to do anything fancy, just kneel down in a minute, maybe tip over after sending a shudder through the earth, give the security boys a reason to think he tripped or something before he actually keeled over.

  Heh. Keeled over.

  There’d be more “keeling over” soon.

  A whole lot more.

  Simmons felt a clutch of heat under his collar. The moment was at hand. He’d been waiting for this for a long time, waiting for his chance at freedom, at getting out from underneath everything that had come his way these last few months. The fear came down on him again like a hard weight on his back, and he stooped, breathing heavily. He was still sweating, more profusely than ever. He felt it trickle down the back of his neck, down the small of his back into his skinny jeans, and Simmons squatted on the pavement and touched the hot asphalt with one hand, making it look like he was just steadying himself.

  “What are
you doing over there?” a security guard asked. Military police. He was making his way over, suspicion clouding his dark features.

  “Did you feel that?” Simmons asked. “I just took a break from the line and—man, do you feel that?”

  He didn’t actually feel a thing, but he damned sure would in just a second.

  Grabbing hold of that fear that was worming around in his guts, Simmons touched the power that was waiting inside him. He pushed it down into the earth and felt the ground move subtly.

  “Yeah, I felt that,” the MP said, unsteady legs rocking him back and forth. “What the hell?”

  “I think it’s an earthquake,” Simmons said, not bothering to throw in too much irony. Of course it was an earthquake. On the coast of Virginia.

  Because he was causing it.

  Simmons let it rip, pushing more of that stomach-churning fear into it. Months of it, pent up with no outlet for release. They hadn’t let him have booze. They hadn’t let him have a smoke, they hadn’t even let him surf or ski or even go for a bike ride.

  Months of waiting for this moment, doing nothing but fearing—fearing them, fearing him—and waiting for the day he’d be told how he could buy his way out of that hell with one good act of service.

  This was it. Walk up to this graving dock at Newport News Shipbuilding, on this day …

  And bring the place down.

  The crowd was screaming, a thousand decibels of madness in his right ear. People were running, grabbing their kids and trying to get the hell out of here, though there was nowhere to run. The earth was quaking under his feet, but Simmons felt it only in a detached way.

  Everyone else was scared witless because the ground, that hard rock that they relied on every day of their lives to be steady, was suddenly not so steady. Clearly not many of these folks had ever been stationed in Southern California. This was only like a 4.1 so far.

  It was time to amp things up.

  Simmons poured it on, letting that fear out into the ground in waves that caused the tectonic plates deep beneath him to shudder. The earth shook, and shattered, a wide crack in the pavement forming about thirty feet to his right. The crowd was so loud he couldn’t hear anything else except that MP through the fence shouting, “Holy shit!”

  Concrete was splitting in the distance. Simmons was pushing the quake forward, toward the graving dock and the big ship within. That sucker was shaking, the tower stretching out of the deck rattling metal against the hull. Simmons was cranking up the power, pouring it all into the earth.

  He’d sleep well tonight, one way or another. He’d either sleep the sleep of a free man, or he’d sleep the sleep of a dead man, but either way … he’d be free.

  Free from this fear.

  Something buckled and burst under the ship as it rocked to the side. It crashed into the wall of the dock, upended off whatever was beneath it, and Simmons could hear concrete shattering from the force of the blow. They’d told him what to do and how to do it, how he had to pour every bit of effort he had into it, and—man, he was doing it.

  He was giving the USS Enterprise hell. People slid off the deck sideways, dropping off the sides like crumbs skimmed off the edge of a plate. Simmons looked at the ground. Ants were welling up from one of the cracks in the pavement beneath him.

  People. Ants. They all kinda looked the same to him at these respective distances.

  The sound of metal tearing was like a louder, more fervent scream in his ears, worse than anything the crowd—what was left of it, anyway, that hadn’t run off—was doing to his right.

  The USS Enterprise pitched over, capsizing in its own dock. The entire side of the ship clanged again, striking against the reinforced concrete wall. It had a nasty list, forty-five degrees or worse, and it suddenly rocked back the other way, some serious sliding-water-in-a-bathtub action going on in that dock. When it rose to tilt the other way, he could see the jagged scar down the side of the ship, ripped wide, where it had been pushed violently against the sides, violently enough that the side of the ship had actually buckled.

  That was all Simmons needed to see. He was only looking for a sign she was out of commission for the near future, and this damned sure looked like it.

  He didn’t even wait for anything else.

  Simmons ran.

  And behind him, he could hear the MP—damn, he should have sunk that guy into his own personal hole—radioing for help:

  “—We have a possible metahuman incident! Repeat, we have a possible metahuman cause for this incident, I have white male fleeing on foot, long blond hair and, wearing a vest and a beanie hat—”

  Simmons didn’t wait around to hear the rest. He ran for his getaway car, thinking that—yeah, they’d come for him, probably, but this? Having the US government chasing him? He’d done that before. He feared it, but not irrationally, especially not now that Sienna Nealon was gone from their service.

  And having all of them—even her, maybe—after him?

  He still didn’t fear it nearly as much as what would have happened if he hadn’t just delayed the launch of the USS Enterprise by years.

  He didn’t fear it at all like he feared the man in Revelen …

  … The one who’d made him do this.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sienna

  Panama City Beach, Florida

  Waking up to bad news sucks, doubly so when it’s around noon that it happens.

  I opened my eyes when I heard forced whispers through the walls. You know the kind; hushed but loud, lots of emotion behind them. The speaker can’t quite keep it bottled up so it bursts out, like an acrophobic skydiver shoved from the back of a plane.

  That was what I heard when I woke in my bed in the vacation condo. White walls, white ceilings, beach décor. There was an olden wooden oar with the words “Mike’s Beach Place” painted on it in white letters. Seashells dominated the decorating scheme, printed on a strip of wallpaper border, embroidered on the towels, and glued into a box that hung on the wall.

  Which made sense. I was only a block from the beach, after all.

  I was staying outside Panama City, on the Florida panhandle, that little stretch less than a hundred miles from Alabama. If the rest of the state was a dangling peninsula bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other, the panhandle was the piece that kept it from breaking away and floating off to party in the Caribbean, a haven for retirees, visitors from the midwest, and vacationers from the southern US. I was staying along a strip known as 30A, a colorful locale filled with lots of screaming kids and sunburned parents.

  Or it usually was. It was January now, so there wasn’t a lot of sunburning going on, and it was beach weather for no one, except maybe this Minnesotan.

  I sat up in bed, a hangover announcing its presence now that I was up. Light streamed in through white blinds and the curtains that bordered them. I’d gone through a bottle of scotch last night—again—and it was plainly going to punish me this morning.

  I was getting pretty used to this feeling by now.

  I listened, trying to figure out what was going on with all the whispering. I couldn’t hear it all that well, because it seemed to have stopped, but I listened anyway. I thought I could hear some intrepid soul using the pool in the off-season—crazy; it was probably fifty or sixty degrees outside—but there was no sound from the main room.

  Squinting my eyes to try and block out some of the pain streaming in with the light, I put my feet over the edge of the bed and stood, tentatively. The world didn’t sway around me; I guessed that meant I was sober now.

  “Ugh.” I made my way to the bathroom on unsteady legs, did my business, and then headed for the door. There was no problem that anyone could have been dealing with this morning that couldn’t wait until I was done peeing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been whispering.

  I slid open the pocket door and light blazed down the hallway. Turning left, I shuffled my way toward the condo’s living room to find Reed, Eilish, Aug
ustus, and Taneshia all sitting on the couches and wicker recliners that made up the sitting area. Beyond them was a sliding glass door to the balcony, which overlooked the pool. And yep, there were a couple crazies in there this morning, splashing it up. I could almost see the blue lips from here.

  “What’s going on?” I asked in the middle of a hell of a yawn. It probably came out more like, “Waaaaaaas gooooooin onnnn?” Didn’t even cover my mouth. Ladylike, I know.

  Reed gave me this look he’d been sporting a lot lately. I called it the “mom combo”; it had guilt, a little worry, and a faint whiff of judgment. He didn’t say anything, though, just nodded at the TV, which hung over the mantel above the fireplace.

  Yes, our condo in Florida had a fireplace. And we’d been using it, too.

  Taneshia and Augustus were so cuddled up, it took me a second to steer my eyes away from their overwhelming cuteness, but eventually steer them away I did, and sure enough, on screen …

  “Wow,” I said.

  It wasn’t the wreck of the Hesperus, because only a few people died in that. This was the capsizing of the brand new USS Enterprise in its dry dock, and the chyrons at the bottom of the news screen told the tale: Hundreds feared dead after metahuman incident at ship christening ceremony. President Gondry scheduled to attend, missed attack by minutes.

  “So Gondry’s okay?” I asked, feeling a little surge of patriotic worry, even though I didn’t know Gondry and he hadn’t gotten my vote. Honestly, who even really knows who the VP is? I’d voted against the guy at the top of his ticket. Gondry had been an afterthought until President Harmon died. Now he was the big cheese.

  Still, I didn’t want him dead. And the accusatory “metahuman” tag in that chyron was a bit worrisome.

  “When do you think they’ll call us in?” Augustus asked. He was already twitching, and Taneshia had a look on her face that told me she wished he’d settle down.

  “I don’t know,” Reed said, still watching me with mom eyes. “But when they do, it’s going to be the three of us and Scott, I think. Just for ease of getting there.”

  “Scott’s in Minnesota,” I said, trying to suppress a yawn and failing. “Along with the rest of your team. Which means if you can pull him, you can pull anybody you want.”