Robert Crane - Omega

I batted a few stray pieces of floorboard off Scott, then pushed three medium sized slabs of the subfloor off him before rolling him to the side and off me. He was still breathing, but it was shallow, slow, and there was blood soaking his clothing, a piece of rebar jutting out of his back. “Dammit,” I breathed, still unable to hear myself talk. The only light in the basement came from above us, and most of that from the hole where the front door had been, the gray soft light of the overcast day visiting what it had upon us. Scott’s eyelids fluttered as I slapped him lightly, and he coughed blood that ran down his cheek and chin. “Dammit all to hell.”

The crunch of a foot behind me signaled the presence of someone else and I launched myself back, the only direction I was conveniently poised to spring—and right into a pair of tree-trunk like legs. I knocked my enemy off balance as I saw a shattered face, split with rage. I caught the flash of a crow in my mind’s eye as he fell upon me, his upper body landing on my lower, and I brought a knee up to “cushion” his landing, and it caught him full in the face. He tried to return the favor, jerking his legs as though to kick me with them but I knocked one of them aside and punched him in the groin. Twice. For luck. And possibly spite.

I kicked him in the face and rolled him off me as I pulled a glove off my left hand with my teeth, spinning around and lunging to land on top of him, bringing a knee into his groin again. There weren’t going to be any points awarded for the cleanliness of this fight, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to survive it. I got astride his abdomen even as I wrestled to get the glove off my fingers; the moment they were free I jammed my bare hand against the skin of his neck, choking him as hard as I could. With the other, I slammed him with punch after punch, driving his already broken nose into his face. “What…” I said, forcing my words out even as I evaded his hands, which were reaching for me, “…is…Operation…Stanchion…?”

I counted the seconds as he writhed after every hammer blow I landed. “What…is…Operation…Stanchion?” I felt my knuckles crack but I hit again, ignoring the pain, smashing him down with one hand while draining his life with the other. “Answer me!” I felt him go limp in my grasp, his body slack underneath me, and I held on for just a few seconds longer before I let my ungloved hand release him. I hit him in the face a few more times, just to be safe. Maybe more than a few.

I let out a long breath, a sigh, and slid from him, laying my head against the ground. All my strength was gone, completely and utterly, as though it had disappeared with nothing more than a dozen pains to mark its passage. “You son of a bitch,” I said, and kicked at him, hitting him in the arm. I took another breath and forced myself to my feet. “What the hell is Operation Stanchion?”

There was a sound behind me of rubble shifting, and I prepared myself to deliver another attack to my downed foe if necessary when I heard a familiar voice. “Damn, that sucked,” came Clary’s stupid baritone. “What the hell was that?”

“Our enemy, you brain-dead jackass,” I said. “You’ve successfully almost gotten us killed, you unbelievable moron. I just have one question for you—are you working for us? Because I honestly don’t think Mormont or Zollers could have made worse choices for us than you just did.”

Clary’s husky figure emerged from the shadows and rubble in the corner of the basement. “Well, yeah, I’m working for the Directorate,” he said as he stepped over Scott’s body to stand next to me. “I mean what do you think—”

I grabbed him with my bare hand around his neck and heard a GURK! “You. Idiot. You almost got Reed and Scott killed—not to mention me—and you’re so damned oblivious you don’t even realize it.” I watched his piggy little eyes move back and forth and I saw the pain emerge on his face as he felt the first stirrings of my power working on him. He didn’t resist, even as he began to grunt. I threw him loose and let him fall in a pile of broken boards. “If you…ever…come on a mission with me again and fail to follow my orders when I’m in charge, do you know what I’m going to do?”

His double chins obscured his neck, but I saw the bob of his Adam’s apple. “You’ll…uh…kill me?”

I leaned down, and wondered for a beat why he didn’t turn to rock before I realized that he was afraid of me. “I won’t kill you, Clyde. I’ll drain so much of your mind that what’s left will have all the cognitive ability of a pumpkin.” I narrowed my eyes to glare at him. “Which, in your case, will be nothing but the sharpest of improvements.” I brought my hand around and patted him gently on the cheek, which he flinched from. “Clear?”

“You…” his voice wavered as he regained his capacity for speech, “you can’t talk to me like that!”

I grabbed him again around the neck and lifted him up. He was taller than me by a full head, so I tilted my back at an angle so that he was above me and his feet couldn’t touch the ground. I felt the swirling start in my head, and he shrieked, so I let him go, and he fell back into the refuse pile he had landed on a moment earlier. “I can. I will. You will listen to me while you’re alive or I’ll make you my slave after you’re dead.”

There was a moment of glare between us, and then I raised my voice. “Kat! KAT!” I kept watch on the space where the door had been when we had first come to the house, and I saw a blond head peek in from the porch, her face waxy pale, as though the life had been drained out of it. “Get Reed in the van,” I said. “We’re moving in five, just as soon as Clary and I can get our prisoner and Scott up there.” I looked down at Scott, who was still bleeding on the floor. “And I hope you saved some of your strength for your boyfriend.”

It was an operation, and I cursed Clary a dozen times over the next few minutes for cutting off our easy exit by destroying the stairs. The clouds of dust had cleared, and Clary gave me a boost up to the front of the house after I asked him only once. He was strangely silent, cowed into submission at last, no trace of guile or anger on his face; he reminded me of a shamed child, someone bullied into submission and broken in their will. I didn’t have time to feel bad about it, though, because Scott was still bleeding profusely. With Kat’s help I got him up and into the van as the sirens became audible in the far distance.

“Dammit,” I said under my breath. I looked back to the house to see a body ejected out of the basement, hitting the second of the four supporting pillars that held the roof off the porch before taking a slow arc and landing on the same Honda that the van had rammed into my opponent during the fight.

“Oh, God,” Kat said, wavering, as though she might fall at any moment. Against the backdrop of the gray skies and leaf-strewn wet street, she looked like a leaf herself, ready to wilt and fade. “Do you think anyone noticed that?”

“I think we’re pretty much out of time and luck if we want to get clear of this ridiculous turkey of a mission,” I said grimly. “And I hope like hell that the body that just flew out of there wasn’t Clary, because we have no time to subdue that other jackass again before the cops get here.”

“You don’t have your FBI ID?” Kat asked me in slight surprise.

“I don’t think an FBI ID is going to explain us out of this disaster.”

She looked for a moment like she was going to answer, then paled and promptly got sick on the road, hitting her knees.

“Are you gonna be okay?” I asked as I trotted over to the wrecked Honda. I cast a look at the house, where I saw Clary climbing out of the wreckage, then to the road, where Kat was on one knee still retching, and the Honda, where the Omega stooge was laying limp. In the distance, the sirens drew closer.