Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change (3 page)

Not that she remembers our relationship
, he thought with more than a little bitterness, the reflected glare of the sun off the front of the office building nearly blinding him.

He didn’t quite realize what he was doing when he yelled out, “KAT!” at the top of his lungs, booming and heavy enough to jar her out of her artificially posed walk. She missed a step in surprise and looked at him through giant sunglasses that covered her below her cheekbones. Her forehead looked … puffier?
What the hell …? Did she
Botox? She’s a meta … we don’t age like normal people … what the …?

She whispered in the ear of another man who came up to her side, loud enough he could almost hear her even over the crowd of paparazzi, loud enough that he realized she was playing to the boom microphone that had been swung over her head like a branch with mistletoe at Christmas.

Kat made her way through the crowd and the paparazzi moved aside for her two mountainous bodyguards. They cut a path through at the behest of the guy who she’d been talking to. He locked eyes with the older man and caught a surprisingly buoyant smile from the fellow, who followed a few paces behind Kat with another woman in his wake. Scott took in the little entourage with a glance and landed back on that guy again. He looked … amused? Pleased? Something uncomfortable that was causing some smile lines to crease up the side of his acne-scarred face.

“Scott,” Kat said as her two bodyguards shoved a photographer out of the way to make room for her to stand about a foot from him. The boom mic that followed her swung down perilously, so close that Scott wondered if he needed to duck his head. A man with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed his way up to film them, perfectly positioned about ten feet away, putting them in the middle of the frame. Scott gave him a look, a very distinct
What the f—?
sort of look of combined horror and disgust. “What are you doing here?” she asked, sounding like she was a little horrified herself.

“Uhm, I had a meeting over there,” Scott said, pointing his finger over his shoulder. He looked for Buchanan Brock, figured maybe the man would back up his story, but he was gone, probably back into his office and out of the damned dry heat.

“Really,” Kat said, making clear she was not exactly convinced.

“It’s been a while,” Scott said, feeling more than a little on-the-spot and painfully aware that the camera and microphone combo were recording this awkward and uncomfortable interaction for broadcast to … well, the entire world, really.
All eyes on you and the only thing you can come up with is that?
He stopped short of smacking himself in the forehead.

“It has,” Kat said, looking more than a little tense. “I’m a little surprised to see you in LA.”

He frowned. “Because?”

“It’s not really your sort of scene,” she said airily, still hiding behind those dark glasses. Her voice sounded strange, more stilted than he could recall it ever being before.

“Well, I’m only in town for a couple days—the meeting, maybe some lounging by the seashore,” Scott said, feeling his discomfort rising but trying desperately to get it under control.
Remember, she doesn’t recall any of our history. Not a thing
. Yep, this was just as uncomfortable as he’d recalled it being every other time he’d tried to talk with her before the war had ended. “I’ll be gone before you know it,” he said, wishing that moment were here now.

“I heard you and Sienna were hanging out again,” Kat said, a little softer.

Scott let out a slow breath. “I helped her and Reed a couple months ago, yeah.” His mind flitted through possibilities associated with that question.

“Are you two dating?” Kat asked, coolly.

“What?” Scott stifled a laugh. “No. We didn’t—”

“Uh huh,” Kat said, making a face that played directly to the camera without her once looking at it.
What the …?
Scott thought for the dozenth time in the last few minutes.

“Need to wrap this up,” the sun-glazed guy lurking behind her said quietly enough that Scott barely heard it over the crowd noise. The flashes of cameras in his peripheral vision were blinding. Wasn’t it the middle of the day? “Can you get an angry confrontation out of this?”

“What?” Scott looked at the guy, aghast. “‘Angry confrontation’?”

“Oh, that’s right, he’s a meta,” the guy said.

“This is Scott Byerly,” Kat said, her voice loud and staged. “He thinks we dated once upon a time.”

“Because we did,” Scott said hotly.

“Yeah. Okay,” Kat said, swallowing visibly. “There’s no need to get violent.”

“I’m not—what?” Scott’s facade of control degenerated. “I’m not violent. What are you talking about?”

“That’s good,” Taggert said, whispering softly. Scott anchored his gaze on the man’s acne-scarred face. “Just ignore me,” Taggert said to him, just out of view of the camera that was fixed on Scott and Kat. “Pretend I’m not here.”

“If only I could,” Scott snapped. “Kat, what the hell is this?”

“I asked you to stop stalking me,” Kat said, voice in a low quiver. The flashes of bulbs, the click of cameras were blinding lights to Scott, but he held his eyes painfully open as his jaw dropped. “I know you’ve got powerful connections, and I’m a just a girl who—”

“What the actual—?” Scott let his head slump in disbelief and disgust. “I’m not
stalking
you. I saw you, and I thought I’d say hello—”

“You’ve made up all these details of a relationship that never happened,” Kat said, shuddering slightly on camera. She adjusted her sunglasses and wiped a single tear off her cheek—her right cheek, perfectly positioned where it would be in frame.

Scott felt himself hit hard boil and his fists clenched. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“You don’t need to be so abusive,” Kat said, taking a step back, her voice quivering.

“Abu-WHAT?” Scott boggled. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in years!”

“I know you’ve been following me,” Kat said.

“I’ve been in Minnesota!” Scott sputtered. “It’s hard to follow you from Minnesota, unless you count watching the occasional interview, or your TV show—”

“You’re stalking me,” she said quietly, and her bodyguards closed ranks, positioning their enormous frames between her and Scott. “You’re unhinged, Scott, and this has to stop. All these things you remember about our supposed relationship—they’re all in your head.”

“Uh, no,” Scott said, “they’re just not in yours, unfortunately, because of your powers draining your memory—”

“You need professional help,” Kat shouted from between the two towering bodyguards as they protectively shuffled her away. “You need to talk to a psychiatrist, Scott!” Her voice was all insipid concern, so filled with worry. “You can’t keep living like thi—”

A spatter of blood hit her sun-glowing white blazer and drenched her tastefully exposed, bronzed upper chest. The dark crimson was like ink on her browned skin, barely visible between the linebackers who protected her from Scott.

“What the—” he mouthed, and then another splatter of crimson liquid bathed her blond hair, running down the side of her face in beads as her own mouth dropped in surprise. A little blood hit her exposed, bleached teeth.

Her bodyguards fell, leaving Kat exposed between the two of their corpses. Wounds gaped on their sides, holes a few inches wide. A tall, lanky man stood next to Kat. He was pale as snow but freckled, and he had long red hair and a ragged beard that stretched down the middle of his chest. He grabbed Kat by the wrist, fingers sinking into her golden skin and squeezing, hints of white showing around the edges of his fingers as he squeezed and then shook her. She flapped like a paper being waved, dragged by his superior strength as she stared at him in stunned horror.

“Do you know what you do to people?” the man shouted, right in her face, his voice thin and ragged as he was, in danger of breaking. He had sunken eyes, a skeletal, malnourished look. He looked a little like a ginger skeleton, some sort of vagrant who had wandered in from somewhere far up north. Kat’s horrified gaze was locked on her bodyguards’ fallen forms, blood rushing out of the wounds in their ribcages where something had torn through them. “Do you have any idea?” the man asked with a steadily rising voice. “Do you know?” He sounded deranged, furious, and then Scott noticed the phone clenched in his other hand, the camera pointed right at Kat’s horrified face, capturing her emotions with its glass eyes glinting in the California sun. “You kill them,” he said, shoving her roughly to one knee and letting her loose as he raised a hand high to strike at her in the same way he’d struck at her bodyguards, his phone still aimed at her, the crowd breathless and still at the spectacle playing out before their very eyes. “And I’m gonna show the world what it looks like when it happens to you—”

Tara Garcia had been on planes most of the day, starting her morning in New York City with a quick run to Orlando that took off at local 8 a.m. and now finishing her last flight from Chicago to Milwaukee now, local time 9:06 p.m. Midwest Airlines was a mostly regional carrier that had been expanding rapidly the last few years thanks to rock bottom prices. She’d signed on as a flight attendant eighteen months earlier and found it to be mostly enjoyable. There were always a few assholes on any given day, but she’d worked retail before this during the holiday season, and so dealing with only one or two a-holes at a time was a refreshing break given her prior experience.

On the other hand, Tara had never really felt as imperiled working retail as she felt right now, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat on this DC-9 that was just about empty of fuel.

“Shit shit shit,” the man in the pilot’s seat said. His name was Neil Ericson, he looked about mid-forties, and she’d just met him for the first time two hours earlier, under less-than-ideal conditions. He was fighting fatigue and stress of a sort she was feeling more than a little of herself. It had been just that sort of stress that had caused Captain Michael Donowitz to have a heart attack, slipping into unconsciousness about fifteen minutes before their scheduled landing.

Of course, it might also have been slightly aggravated by having the co-pilot, Jason Treadway, pass out into a state of unconsciousness so complete that they’d had to summon a doctor from the passenger section into the cockpit. Captain Donowitz had looked a little white before that, but watching his co-pilot, a man in his early thirties, dragged insensate out of his seat had seemed to push the captain a little more. When he’d gone down just a few minutes later, Tara hadn’t panicked exactly. She hadn’t had time to. Instead, she’d calmly gone to the back and asked if anyone had had flying lessons, stepping over the unconscious bodies of both pilot and co-pilot to do so. Now this Neil Ericson was now at the controls, a man who had taken three flying lessons some
six years ago …
was the best-qualified person to sit in the captain’s chair. When they’d realized the autolanding systems were not functioning properly only a few minutes later, that was when the first icy tingles of panic had started running down Tara’s back.

Since then, Tara had had almost two whole hours of watching the fuel gauge steadily sink to work herself into a complete panic, but she had not ever reached it. She talked low and calmly to Milwaukee tower in the exact same way she’d heard the pilot do on the occasions she’d been in the cockpit, not letting a hint of the panic she should have been feeling creep into her voice.

“Milwaukee tower,” she said cheerfully, as if she was putting on her best customer service voice when dealing with one of those inevitable a-holes that seemed to find themselves in her side of the plane, “this is Midwest 404. We are pretty much out of fuel and are going to have to try a landing soon.” She looked at Neil Ericson laboring at the controls and wondered if he was going to suffer a heart attack as well. She didn’t rule it out, based on the pasty look on the man’s face.

There was a pause before Milwaukee tower responded. “Understood, Midwest 404. We have you on vector—what the hell was—” There was a crackle of static. “Midwest 404, are you still there?”

Tara felt a chill run down her skin as she looked at Neil over in the pilot’s seat. The man looked stricken. It was getting to be a usual sensation for both of them. “Why wouldn’t we be, tower?”

“Uh, sorry, Midwest 404 … saw a blip on radar moving toward you fast, thought maybe—never mind. We have you at five thousand feet, ten miles out, but your approach to runway one-zero-niner is a little off. Could you adjust and try again?”

The frustration mingled with fear in Tara’s throat. They’d been trying for an hour now to line up properly, and Ericson couldn’t quite get the plane to do what he needed it to. “We’ll try, tower, but—”

THUMP
.

“JESUS!” Ericson shouted, coming to his feet before he hit his head on the roof of the cockpit and slammed back down into his seat. Tara lunged for the co-pilot controls to steady the plane as Ericson came back down in his seat clutching his head, blood running down from beneath his hairline.

“What is it?” Tara asked, wrestling hard against the controls. Disengaging the autopilot had been the start of the downward spiral. If you didn’t count the pilot having a heart attack or the first officer passing out.

“Look!” Ericson said, his voice ten octaves higher than it had been even when it was panic soaked and exhausted a moment earlier. His finger pointed at the window, which Tara hadn’t looked out of for some time, since she was trying to talk with tower and make sense of the instrument panel in case of—

Holy hell.

There were two faces pressed against the front window, perched there like they’d been suction-cupped on like a Garfield cat on a minivan. Both female, both of them with hair blowing ridiculously hard in the wind. One of them, the terrified-looking one, wore the shoulder boards of a pilot, its golden tassels the same color as her hair. She was mouthing the words that Tara herself had been saying only recently, but inside her head.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh please please please
—