Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,28
backflipped again to the topmost level, landing on his two-foot stretch of “lawn.” “You should criticize; you’re pretty chatty for a guy whose face is hanging off. Maybe you want to explain this Operation Stanchion to me now, so we can get on with our lives—me to mine, you to a cell in the Directorate prison in Arizona for the rest of yours?”
He stared up at me from the sidewalk, his jaw clacking together as though he were trying to speak; I didn’t even want to think about how much pain it was causing him to talk. I wanted to inflict more of it.
From my elevated position I saw Scott on the street below next to Clary, who was sitting up. The car next to Clary was destroyed, oil leaking all over the pavement, coating him in black liquid that it took me a moment to realize wasn’t blood. Reed was bleeding next to Kat, though he was looking better than he had when last I saw him. Kat was paler than I could ever remember, her wool coat looking like black granite next to her complexion, which was drained of all color.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked him. “We could give you all the things your heart desires—three square meals a day, reconstructive surgery for that face—you know, for after it heals, and you go back to looking the way you did before?” He took a leap up the terrace in one bounding jump and I veered sideways and up, clearing the porch steps and landing back at the open hole where his front door had been. “We could give you a nice, quiet place where you’d never have to worry about some annoying strangers knocking on your front door again—you know, because that sort of thing seems to stress you out...”
With a bellow of fury he jumped up to the porch and charged again, tearing through the rail as he raged ahead. I turned and sprinted into the house and up the staircase inside the door as he crashed through the wall behind me. The foyer was sparse, old dark wood faded to a light brown, aging plaster and wallpaper that wouldn’t have looked out of place fifty years ago.
I paused at the landing as I heard his feet hit the first steps behind me. “You seem to have some anger management problems, too,” I said from above him, and launched off the stairs in another kick that hit him in the face. “Unless you think it’s healthy to act like a bull in a china shop all the time.” I heard more bones break, he let out a howl of pain, and I flipped myself by pushing off his head with my foot. I came to a landing on my feet in the middle of the square foyer. “Like a cat,” I whispered to myself. “Always landing on my feet.”
My foe let out a roar of rage and I watched him double at the midsection; he brought both hands down and hit the floorboards, causing the whole room to shake. There was a calm, a quiet, and then a cracking noise as my enemy disappeared through a hole in the floor. Just a second later, the splitting of wood reached my ears and I jumped, a moment too late, as the floor crashed down around me and I fell to the basement.
The shock of the landing snapped my head back, my head hitting the boards that I had fallen with. A dazed sensation overwhelmed me, as though everything in my vision had taken a mighty sway, like it was all jerking around me. “Apparently, I don’t always land on my feet,” I said, and felt a sharp pain in my back. “And more’s the pity for it...”
The dust was thick in the air, choking me with the smell of the wreckage. Particles of wood, plaster and concrete, oppressive and thick, coated my tongue and nasal passages. I coughed, trying to expel it, even as I tried to sit up. The floorboards of the house were all around me, at odd angles from the landing, and the dust was so thick I couldn’t see much of anything, even if I’d had my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a stretch without them filling with tears. I could taste the foul stuff that hung in the air, a dry, awful flavor like the oldest bread on the face of the earth