Free Omega by Robert J. Crane Page B

first—”
    “Well, we gonna investigate right now.” He smiled at me with that gap-toothed idiot look of his and slapped his hand against the screen door, hard, rattling it on its flimsy hinges. He swung it open, then smacked his palm against the interior door five times, loud enough that I was sure that they could hear it at Omega HQ, wherever it was, even if they didn’t have any microphones anywhere in the state. “Hey!” Clary shouted. “Open up, Omega! It’s the Directorate. We’ve come to kick y’all’s asses, so get on out here.”
    I closed my eyes and placed a gloved hand over them, as though I could blot out the horror of what was happening as easily as I could cut out the light around me. “Did you really just tell them we’re from the Directorate?”
    “What’s wrong?” his voice came around my hand, though I wished it didn’t. I wished I had an invisible wall or a happy place I could flee to that was as far from Clyde Clary as Pluto was from the sun. “Fine, I’ll be subtle. Girl Scout cookies! No, wait, I got it. Avon calling!” He raised the pitch of his voice on the last one, turning his normally deep timbre into something horrific.
    “Oh, dear God, kill me now,” I whispered. “Please let Chris Hemsworth answer the door, and then let him smite me with lightning and abs.”
    “I think it’s working,” he said as I took my hand away from my eyes. “Someone’s moving around in there, I think they’re coming to the door.”
    Before I could brace myself (or call him an idiot, because I was going to do both) the front door blasted off its hinges and Clary vanished behind it. They flew through the air, off the steps, and down the ten or so feet to the street below, where he came to land on an old-model Ford that flipped when he hit it. He fell behind it and was obscured from my view.
    I turned back to the doorframe, which had become a cloud of dust and fragments, and looked within. A man stood at the aperture, taller than me by a head, hair brown and short, flecked with white from the demolition he had just perpetrated. He was big, big enough to make Clary look small by comparison. I took an involuntary step back, placing myself into a more moveable stance. The man looked at me with eyes that were so light blue that they almost seemed white. A few scars dotted his face as he emerged from the gaping hole in the front of the house.
    “Umm, hi,” I said. “Sorry about my associate. He’s an idiot.” I glanced back to where Clary had landed, and saw not even a sign of movement. I wanted to curse and scream, but since I had darted out of the van so quickly I hadn’t put in my earpiece, no one but Omega would hear it. “Umm...we were just wondering if you’d like...” He stared at me, angling his head as though he were pondering me, “...some Girl Scout cookies?” I heard the lameness of my words and wished I could just flip a switch that would shut me up.
    I heard him let out a breath all at once, deep and throaty. “I’m about to pulverize you, Thin Mint.”
    I blinked at him. “Thin Mint? You really think so?” I felt myself perk up a little. “You know, I have been working out—” He charged at me, shoulder first, and I threw myself through the porch rail backwards as he stormed through the space where I had been standing only a moment earlier as though he were a rhinoceros coming across the African plains. I hit the terraced step below and caught myself as I saw him burst through the support beam for the porch and fly over me to land on his feet on the sidewalk. The earth itself shook, I swear it, as I rolled to my feet. The narrow strip on which I stood allowed me to look at the back of his head as he came to a landing, and I knew if we were going to fight, which we were, there was no better opening than the one I had right now.
    I jumped, leading with a front kick, my leg extending as I caught him perfectly in the back of the skull. He staggered and caught himself on a