Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37) Read online

  I trusted Holloway watching mine, though, so I followed after Leif as he reached the stairs and started to climb. We made it to the top and voila, here was a functional, built-out office building.

  That was still completely empty.

  “Well, you at least have the walls here,” I said, looking the place over. It had a glue smell that presumably came from installing carpet. “No desks or people, but walls. It's progress.”

  Leif just shrugged, mouth and brain not exactly working in concert to provide me...well, anything.

  “Is there anyone here?” I asked. I was standing in an open reception area. Ahead the room gave way to corridors, walls and offices. An empty elevator shaft lay to my left, just a gaping and swift path back to the first floor for anyone dumb enough to step into it.

  “I don't think so,” Leif whispered.

  Holloway had made it up to us just then, the other guard a pace in front of him. “How do you not know? There's one entrance and you're guarding it, aren't you?”

  “Sometimes,” Leif said under his breath. “But we take breaks and leave, and sometimes...people...come in while we're gone. Also...we're not allowed on the second floor.”

  “Do you abandon the security gate?” I asked. “Leave it open?”

  “No!” Leif said. “That has to stay manned. During the day, at least.”

  I exchanged a look with Holloway. “Rough luck for Brett. He has to hang here while you guys head to the local bar, huh? When was your last excursion?”

  Leif looked helpless, but the other guard answered for him. “We got our sandwiches over at Jersey Mike's.”

  “How long were you gone?” I asked, keeping a very close eye on him.

  Leif sagged; the other guard got a guilty look. “Uh...an hour or so?”

  “This is a really sweet gig, guys,” I said, looking around the white walls of the empty office. “You're security guards who don't actually have to do much in the way of guarding. Why, you could drink on the job, shoot heroin, have strippers over–” I caught a stiffening movement in Leif's posture. “–You've done that, haven't you? Wow.” They both reddened visibly. “I guess the only downside to working here is that you've occasionally got to file a fraudulent stolen weapons report.”

  They both went quiet, and I knew I'd hit my mark.

  “Where did the guns go?” Holloway asked. “Really, this time.”

  “We went out,” Leif said, finally finding his voice. “When we came back...they were gone.”

  “And...?” I asked, just knowing there was something more to it, and that we were close on this one.

  “We were told when to leave, and what to leave in the lockbox,” Leif's shoulders slumped. He looked on the verge of tears.

  “Dude, no,” the other guard said, doing some sagging of his own. “You should have talked with a lawyer first.”

  “Well, I've got good news and bad news for you boys,” I said, taking Leif by the arms and snapping on the cuffs. “Filing a report for stolen weapons you allowed to be stolen? Under federal firearms laws, that's illegal.” Holloway was cuffing the other guard. “The good news is that our prosecutors and judges don't really take these laws seriously, even for twats like yourselves who traffic in guns, so you're probably going to get off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Holloway said, by rote, as his eyes swept the far end of the room. There was a whole floor up here that we hadn't cleared, after all. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.” He shifted his attention to me. “How you want to handle this?”

  “The sweep?” I asked, gently(ish) taking Leif's legs out from beneath him and lowering him onto his face on the carpet. “You guard these yahoos, I take a look around while you call in backup?”

  “Uh, why don't we call in backup first?” Holloway asked, lowering the other guard – much more gently – into facedown position. Having seen my move with Leif, the other guard was eagerly cooperating.

  “Because I'm all about efficiency,” I said, drawing my pistol and starting for the nearest hallway. “Make the call, will you?”

  Holloway sighed, but pulled out his phone and started dialing. “This is Holloway, Metahuman section. I need forensics at...”

  I tuned him out as I stepped into a hallway darkened save for the exposure it received from the windows in the open room and shafts of light beaming out of open office doors to my right. Motes of dust hung in the air in those beams, and it made me wonder how long ago this place had been constructed. And why hadn't they bothered building out the bottom floor, too? If you're going to set up a maskirovka, as Gavrikov used to say, do it right.

  Listening as I walked, I stuck my head – briefly – into each office. They were – no surprise – empty. The ones on the left side of the hall were dark, because they backed to other offices in a similar corridor on the back of the building. The ones on the right were sun-soaked, though. Also empty, with only the occasional carpet scraps left behind or unfinished wiring sticking out of the wall.

  “Find anything?” Holloway called after me. His voice echoed a little.

  “Other than some substandard construction? No,” I said, ducking my head into the next office. Ahead, I could see the end of this corridor – or at least a spot where it took a left turn, presumably horseshoeing around to eventually rejoin the lobby. Follow this grey carpet road and I'd end up right back where I started. Not exactly the most imaginative office design, but then, who used imagination in designing suburban office buildings?

  As I turned back, something sent the hairs on the back of my neck to prickling. I slowed, started to react–

  But I didn't have enough time.

  The wall ahead of me exploded and something launched out of it, a dark shadow flying at me–

  With glowing, fiery red eyes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I had about a second to react to Firebeetle flinging himself through a wall at me. My gun wasn't up, and I definitely wasn't expecting my opponent to crash through a wall and attack me when I hadn't heard a single sound to indicate he was even up here.

  Didn't matter. Reflexes won out.

  I managed to get a hand off my gun and throw a weak palm-heel strike, slamming the meat of my hand into the jaw of my opponent. If he'd been upright and on his feet, charging me on churning, metahuman-powered legs, it would have done jackety-squat.

  But Firebeetle had flung himself through the air, counting on his strength on the initial lunge to carry him through his attack. Even now he was reaching out to do me harm, ready to wrap his armored arms around me, getting me in a bear hug. Or beetle hug, as the case might have been.

  My palm-heel caught him in midair, on the downside of his jump, and snapped his head back.

  It also arrested his momentum and sent him flying sideways, outreached arms denied a chance to wrap around me in a hug I neither wanted nor needed. From him, at least.

  “What the hell is going on back there?” Holloway shouted from down the hall.

  “Contact!” I shouted back as Firebeetle crashed into the wall to my left. Not very hard; his legs went into the drywall but his upper body stayed out, and he was left suspended there, getting his bearings. Every inch of him was dark, shell-like armor. “It's our guy!”

  “Shit!” Holloway said. “HQ, we have hostile metahuman contact, request immediate backup.” He blurted the address after that, along with a few choice expletives. “You! Stay right there! Either of you run, I will shoot you dead, you hear me?”

  The weak replies of Leif and the other guard followed, but I only barely heard them over Firebeetle extracting himself from the wall.

  I fired a couple rounds at him – okay, maybe five, maybe ten – but they were ineffective, so I holstered my pistol. Then I drew my Cobra-tec knife and flipped the switch.

  The blade sprung out, and Firebeetle stared at it with thos
e glowing eyes. He made a hissing noise deep in his throat, and now I could see his mandible had undergone some sort of change in development as well. It really matched that roach theme he had going on.

  “Gonna squash you like the thing you look like,” I muttered as he came at me. His fingers had changed, too; now he had two of them, wider and fatter, plus a bigger thumb. He balled them into fists, ready to throw some hurt my way.

  Not knowing his capabilities made me uncomfortable. I tossed a look over my shoulder; Holloway was covering me with his pistol, watching this unfold. I cursed. Having him watch was worse than just brawling it out with Firebeetle.

  The beetle came at me with a hard punch, and I stepped back, lowering my knife in a hard, hacking slice, like I was cutting through some underbrush with a machete. I caught him across the wrist and cleaved into the armored shell that he'd sprouted over him. He hissed and jerked back. The knife with meta power behind it wounded him where a gun couldn't.

  Good. Maybe I could slide this thing between the plates that girded his abdomen and gut this roach.

  “Bet that hurt,” I said, taking a step back, dancing on the tips of my toes. “I wouldn't worry too much about it, though. Where you're going, you'll only need those hands for scooping food, fighting off other inmates, and maybe masturbating.” I pretended to give it some thought. “Actually, I guess you'll really need 'em. Hope you're a righty, for your sake.”

  He feinted at me, then sagged back to a neutral stance, scanning me for weaknesses. I didn't know how much I'd hurt him with my knife thrust, but I had to guess it wasn't insignificant. A little whitish-gray liquid was welling out of the wound.

  No response, though. Either he was incapable of speech in this mode, or he didn't want to dignify my insults with a response. If the latter was the case, he was way more dignified or restrained than 99% of the criminals I dealt with, who always seemed to rise to my bullshit provocations.

  Firebeetle, too, danced back and forth on his feet like a boxer. He had martial arts experience, I could tell by his stance. Now that he'd failed to fully get the drop on me, though – unlike the furniture store and in the row house – he was wary. Or lulling me. Either way, I wanted him to make the next move.

  He did, finally. Lunging at me with reckless abandon, he apparently decided to go all-in on his attack. He charged – a bit less aggressively than last time – but led with his head and fists.

  I'd been bull-charged by the best of them, though, and saw him coming a mile off. I took a slight step to my right and let him go by, pincering him with a knee to the gut – typical response to this sort of attack, and did nothing but ding my knee with pain at striking his shell – and then I brought my knife down into his exposed back.

  The tip of the blade slammed home in his heavy, dome-like shell. It thudded in, and then stopped about an inch in. Stabbing him like that was a reflexive response, and I realized about a second too late where I'd screwed up.

  He looked at me with those flame eyes, burning in triumph.

  The bastard had just disarmed me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Gulp.

  Firebeetle had just tricked me into burying my knife in his back, then stood up and slipped right out of range of me, neatly ripping my only effective weapon out of my reach.

  He knew it, too, dancing just outside arm's length, biding his time, contemplating his victory. Motes of dust flashed in front of me from his smashing into and through various walls during his ambush and my response. Light flooded in through those same holes, giving me a perfect look at his beetled carapace.

  His was a visage that was not going to be fronting any kissing booths anytime soon. He really did look like a cross between a demon and a cockroach, taking the worst attributes of both for his own. I started to vocalize this in hopes I could hurt him with my one remaining weapon – my assholery.

  But he interrupted by lunging at me again, roach arms extended, grasping. Each three-fingered appendage gave me the heebie jeebies, and I lashed out with a standing kick that greeted his jaw as he rushed in at me.

  My kick plowed him off his feet, reversing his momentum and booting him through the air with metahuman force. His red eyes widened in surprise, and he blasted through the glass window and down, down to the ground below.

  “Did you get him?” Holloway called down the hall at me.

  “I kicked him, yes,” I said, “did I defeat him? No.”

  “Well, get on that, will you?” Holloway asked. “I'm not excited to be standing around here with these two yahoos while a meta battle is going on down the hall.”

  “Imagine how I feel being in the middle of it,” I said, staying frozen in place. “Did you see him shrug off those bullets?”

  “Yeah,” Holloway said. “Any chance you think the armorer at the Hoover Building would let you check out another Gatling gun?”

  “I kinda doubt it given what happened last time, but remind me to make a visit and plead my case, cuz...” I closed my eyes, just for a second. “Aw, shit.”

  “What? What is i–”

  But he must have found out before I could answer him, because Firebeetle smashed into the facade of the building below, hitting at least one load-bearing column in the process. The ground shook beneath my feet, then gave way–

  A ten-by-ten foot segment of the floor suddenly dropped beneath my feet, leaving me plunging down a sudden slope. I landed roughly, and managed to roll out of it, coming to my feet on the grass outside, stumbling a little.

  “For the sake of f–” I started to say, but got pounced on by a certain Firebeetle who came flying out a window about twenty feet away, spraying toward me in a flurry of sparkling glass mixed with an enormous roach.

  Chalk it up to blinking from being hit in the eyes by the flying glass, or just slow reflexes from my fall, but this time I failed to react to Firebeetle in time, and he crashed into me in a tackle with some martial arts pizzazz attached.

  He pummeled me with a couple tenderizing blows to the torso (ow), then got me a good one in the kidney (double ow), and finally wrapped his arms around me in a giant roach hug, lifting me off the ground as he came down in a perfect landing.

  “Urgh,” I muttered, his arms trapping mine, my feet off the ground by several feet, all my leverage gone. He squeezed me tightly, and my ribs – still tender after yesterday's ambush – protested the strain. “...Crushed...by a damned cockroach...” I groaned. “...what an...ironic...reversal...of roles...”

  I tried to squirm out of his grasp, but he had me solidly. Jerking left, then right, throwing myself against his arms, it didn't even unsteady him. I caught a little chuckle under his breath as the pressure increased on my ribs and my breath left me.

  He was braced against side to side motion, I realized, giving up after one last flail to the left. But...

  Was he braced against forward and backward motion?

  I flung all my weight forward, keeping my head about me as I lost my breath under his pressure squeeze. I tried to remember my training, which was a little something I'd picked up from Navy SEALs I'd worked with a couple months ago. Trying to keep your wits when you're drowning was paramount. Being oxygen deprived activated that instinct, and I needed a cool head to prevail now.

  Firebeetle took a staggering step, but managed to keep my feet off the ground at my maneuver. Points to him; I was flinging every bit of my weight behind that move.

  But now I had him at least a step off balance, so I followed up and flung myself back, doing the pendulum swing with the weight of my head and upper body, driving it backward.

  That got him. Firebeetle went tumbling over backward, arms still wrapped around me.

  My body weight landing on him shouldn't have done much. Not with that armor plating. But...

  The smart guy had gone and appropriated my weapon...in his back.

  When the two of us landed on the ground, our combined body weight hitting the ground, the knife absorbed all of it first.

  Firebeetle le
t out a bizarre scream, and I realized what happened when he jerked his arms off me and automatically redirected them toward the thing causing him pain. Unfortunately, his carapace really restricted his mobility, and he couldn't get at the knife.

  While I was enjoying my newly rediscovered ability to breathe, I was still in almost full control of myself. Following up on my minor victory, I rammed an elbow into his armored side. My arm went numb from the forearm down, but Firebeetle, driven into the ground once more, let out another screech of pain as I drove the knife a little farther into him.

  I sprang to my feet and spun, delivering a stomping blow to his midsection that almost sprained my ankle, but made him writhe even more wildly. Adjusting my kick, I prepared to strike again–

  Some small noise behind me tipped me off that trouble was coming even before Holloway shouted, “Watch out!” from the giant hole in the upper floor.

  I didn't even look. I threw myself out of the way on Holloway's warning alone.

  Something swept past in a blur of white, just missing where I'd been standing a moment earlier. It took my brain a moment to make the identification:

  A tiger.

  A white tiger.

  “What the hell?” Holloway offered his opinion from the upper floor. “Did you go make friends at the zoo or something?”

  The tiger was ripping into Firebeetle with a fury that looked like something out of Animal Planet. Firebeetle was making that screeching noise, being jerked around by the leg as the tiger tore at him.

  I watched, uncertain of what to do for a nice, long moment, and then–

  Firebeetle lashed out with flames from his eyes, blasting the tiger and sending it mewling away. It staggered, on fire, rolling in the grass–

  I stared, unsure what to do. Firebeetle was my collar, and I needed to arrest him, but this fire eyes thing? That was new. Or at least new to me, and it added an element of uncertainty to an already uncertain battle.

  Firebeetle must have sensed my hesitation, because he stared at me, bleeding that whitish fluid from his leg, then flared his eyes at me before entering a hobbling sprint. He plunged into the nearest window, and I heard him running through the empty office building before hurling himself out the other side.