Badder by Robert J. Crane

Author:Robert J. Crane [Crane, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ostiagard Press
Published: 2017-09-11T18:30:00+00:00

22.

I awoke to the gunfire of a dozen Texas cops pouring it on, huddled behind cruisers and shooting at Peter. My head was against a curb, and the sound of the gunshots was like a heralding of the apocalypse. I blinked into the bright sunlight, shining down on me with the intensity of a heat beam, or maybe one of Peter’s lasers, and something shook me, shoving my shoulder.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Angel said, smudged with sweat and some other black substance across her forehead. “You know what you were saying about a peaceful resolution…?” She looked significantly, almost theatrically at the chaos unfolding around us. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

My head was hard against the curb, the endless blasts of gunshots painful to my meta ears. I blinked a few times into the sun, trying to recall what had just happened in the dream, way more vivid and real than this battle I found myself in. The police cruiser next to me, that I was hiding behind for cover, was scorched and blacked. A few more were on fire, flames crackling quietly, unheard under the gunfire.

Peter was out there somewhere, blasts of red giving away his position behind me. I sat up, the ruined cruiser acting as cover between me and him, and I rolled to my knees, my dream now coming back to me, afresh.

My sister was afraid. Scared. On the run. In a strange, foreign land.

I had to save her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Angel asked as she stared at me. “You must have taken a harder hit to the head than I thought. You should lie back down while I take care of this.”

“Peacefully?” I asked, rolling to my knees and shaking my head. I couldn’t get the image of Sienna out of my mind. She just looked so…

Afraid.

“Like I said, I don’t think it’s going that way.” Angel was not trying hard to contain her distaste for this situation. “I’m going to try and flank him—”

“Stay right where you are,” I said, reaching out with my powers. “I’ll settle this.”

“Peacefully?” Angel said with a fair amount of mocking.

I found what I was looking for on the side of the house: an air conditioner unit, intact, and several hundred pounds of steel and internal components.

“To hell with peace,” I said, and concentrated.

Creating a vortex was a tricky thing. I did it all the time, of course, with varying levels of strength. Before I’d been super-empowered—boosted, I guess you could say—I could create a hell of a tempest when pressed: walls of wind that moved a hundred or two hundred miles an hour in a pinch, sustained over the course of a few minutes. Maybe even create the kind of tornado that could lift a car.

But since I’d gotten my power boost, that had become old news.

Now, the new hotness was creating massive tornadoes, F5, F6 and over, a thing that didn’t exist in nature, and even—once—dispelling a hurricane before it landed on Haiti.

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