by wildbow
Brian sighed, “Fine. We go. But no direct confrontation until we have a game plan, especially not before we reunite our two groups. Where are you guys?”
“Holed up on the far side of the Trainyard, with the dogs,” Lisa answered. “Not a bad spot. Better than the building Purity tore down. Don’t know why she was set up there instead of here.”
I heard a voice on the other end that was probably Bitch’s, though I couldn’t make out the words.
“So. We meet?” Lisa asked.
“We meet,” Brian replied. “I’m going to call Coil for a vehicle, and to ask him a few questions, hear for myself that he talked to Kaiser. However long it takes for the ride to get here, it should give me time to stitch Skitter up.”
I winced.
“Patch her up? Why?”
“Not relevant to the current situation. We’ll explain later,” he said.
“Later then. Take care of yourself, Skitter.” Lisa hung up.
Brian held up the needle and thread, “Let me apologize in advance.”
* * *
“You see kids get their ears twisted in the movies and on TV all the time. What you don’t get is how much it fucking hurts,” I touched the part of my mask that covered my bandaged earlobe. It was throbbing, due in part to Brian’s ministrations.
“Just leave it alone. The painkillers will kick in soon.”
“Alright.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. I stared out the small window at the back of the vehicle. Very few cars were going in the direction we were.
The interior of the vehicle that Coil had procured for us was filled with medical equipment. There was a gurney, which I sat on, a second smaller type of gurney that could be disassembled and reassembled as required, up near the ceiling. The interior was efficiently packed with medical supplies: an oxygen tank underneath the bench where Grue sat, a heartbeat monitor, lifejackets, tubes of all shapes and sizes, lockers and drawers with pills, splints and bandages.
It was, to all appearances, a real ambulance. I couldn’t say whether it had originally been an ambulance, and Coil had added extra compartments for weapons and for my bugs, or if he’d gone the other way and built the vehicle from scratch, to accommodate his additions.
We slowed down, and Grue leaned towards the front of the ambulance, “What’s the holdup?”
“Blockade coming up,” the driver spoke. He and the woman in the passenger seat were Coil’s people, decked out in paramedic’s uniforms. “No sweat.”
He flipped a switch, and the siren blared. Seconds later, he was revving up and moving without difficulty. I looked through the rear window, and saw a line of police cars and PRT vans behind us, moving to close the gap they’d just opened in their formation.
“Hey, are we okay?” Grue asked me. He was outfitted in costume, helmet on and visor down.
“Hm?”
“I get the feeling you’re angry.”
“If I’m angry at anyone for that thing outside the mall, it’s myself. Can we just drop that topic forever and forget it ever happened?”
“No, no. I mean, are you angry that I didn’t jump out of my seat to go fight Empire Eighty Eight, before we knew everything that was at stake?”
“Oh,” I flushed, and my ear throbbed in response to the rush of blood. Could’ve kicked myself. “I honestly don’t know. I wasn’t expecting it. I see the lengths you go through to take care of your… family member, I think of you as a pretty honorable guy, you know?” This was veering closer to the conversation-that-was-not-to-be-spoken-of than I’d like. I deliberately left that thought hanging.
Grue rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not sure I’m as good a person as you’re making me out—”
An impact rocked the ambulance, tossing Grue out of his seat and nearly knocking me heels over head. The ambulance veered out of the driver’s control, tipped, and landed on its side, bringing Grue against the underside of the stretcher I’d been sitting on. The spare gurney and the contents of drawers and lockers around the interior spilled free and scattered around us.
“Fuck!” the driver swore. “Fuckshit!”
I pulled free of the tubes and the half of a gurney that had fallen around me, and crawled toward the front to look between the two front seats.
It didn’t look so different from Bitch’s dogs in general shape. It was a little larger, too, maybe, but that was a hard call to make. It was hollow, its limbs were thinner than the dogs, and I couldn’t really draw a line between what was the actual ‘meat’ of the body and what wasn’t, because the entire thing was a chainsaw whir of serrated blades, hooks and needle points, shuffling and shifting around one another, rising and falling, all moving too fast for the eye to follow. Altogether, it maintained a general quadruped shape with a tail and elongated snout.
Walking on either side of it were two people. There was a pale, tall man with the sort of muscle-heavy build you only saw on cons and bodybuilders. He wore black slacks that were in tatters around his feet, had chains wrapped around his forearms, hands and calves, and a blue-white tiger mask. On the opposite side of the metal beast was a twenty-something girl with a gymnast’s build and scars criss-crossing her exposed skin. Her hair was shorn to a bleached blond buzz cut, and her face was covered by a metal cage.
The blender of dangerous looking metal bits dissolved, each of the hooks and blades retracting into the skin of the man at the center of the thing’s chest. As the front legs withdrew into his shoulders, he dropped into a crouch on the street. He wore a wolf mask of sheet metal that had been crudely bent into place, framed by long, greasy blond hair. Hookwolf.
Rumor had it that Hookwolf, back in the day, had been one of the top fighters in a parahuman fighting ring in New York. He’d grown greedy, killed the man that ran it for access to the vault with the night’s earnings, and had made a good number of enemies in the process. It had been a group of white supremacists local to that area that had given him shelter and support, happy to side with him because the man he’d killed had been an ‘acceptable target’. Maybe the ideology was real for Hookwolf from day one, maybe it was an act that had become reality when he found he enjoyed having people celebrate him for enacting his most twisted impulses and racking up a body count. Either way, I suspected that there were few things he wouldn’t do for his ‘Empire’ nowadays.
Stormtiger, the man with the chains and tiger mask, and Cricket, the girl, apparently tied back to the same circles of parahuman prize fighters that Hookwolf had once been part of. I couldn’t begin to guess their motivations for following him, but I suppose it hardly mattered. Hookwolf was dangerous enough on his own. With friends?
“We run,” I muttered. Hookwolf and his buddies had their backs turned to us and were walking toward the police barricade. Stormtiger flexed his hands, and the air blurred around them, congealed into a half-dozen pale, translucent blades that jutted from each hand.
“We have guns,” spoke the driver, “We shoot them from behind.”
“No,” Brian spoke. “It won’t hurt Hookwolf, and I suspect Cricket and Stormtiger could do something about it, or they wouldn’t be so brazen about walking towards those cops. Skitter is right. We retreat. Ready?”
Grue blanketed the back doors of the ambulance in darkness to mute the noise as he cracked it open to cover the outside as well. Noiselessly, the four of us backed out of the ambulance.
Grue flooded the block with darkness, and I scattered my bugs out from the surrounding area and the compartments in the ambulance’s interior to follow in the wake of the darkness, spacing them out to cover the ground and the other objects around us, giving myself a swarm-sense of my surroundings. I grabbed the hand of the woman ‘paramedic’ and pulled her away from the middle of the street, toward the sidewalk. Brian brought the driver in the same general direction.
My bugs felt someone come after us, fast. I didn’t have time to get out of the way and lead Coil’s faux paramedic to safety as well, so I shoved her in one directio
n and leaped in the other. The man leapt into the space we’d vacated, and I felt a rush of wind set my hair to whipping around my face.
There was an explosion of sorts, a blast of wind powerful enough to lift me off the ground and push away a fair share of Grue’s darkness. Stormtiger stood in the epicenter of the clearing, reforming the translucent ‘claws’ around his raised left hand.
He used one of the translucent blades on his hand to tap the side of his tiger mask’s nose as he turned to look down at me. When he spoke, his voice was deeper than Brian’s, “Don’t need to see you, sweetie.”
I was really, really growing to hate enhanced senses.
Buzz 7.8
Stormtiger raised one hand in the direction he’d come and created a blast of wind to clear a path through Grue’s darkness and reveal Hookwolf and Cricket.
“Fancy this,” Hookwolf chuckled, looking down at me, “We decide to attack the blockades and avoid being hemmed in like the ABB was, and we happen upon you?”
“Not looking for a fight,” I told him.
“Stormtiger, find the others of her group.” Hookwolf snarled, apparently not considering my words worth responding to.
“Can’t,” Stormtiger spoke, from where he stood above me. “Not smelling them.”
“You smelled her.”
“And I smelled the two uniforms from the ambulance. Other one’s bleeding, sitting near the ambulance somewhere over there. Darkness boy isn’t around anymore or I’d be able to smell him.”
He was wrong. My bugs could feel Grue out there. If the driver had been injured, that might account for why Grue had lagged behind. But Stormtiger couldn’t smell Grue?
Hookwolf turned to me, “The dog girl. Where’s Bitch?”
“Not here.”
“I know that,” he growled. His hand dissolved into a mess of knives, hooks and spearpoints, then solidified into an oversized claw with fingers as long as his torso. He flexed them experimentally. How did you even classify that? Ferrokinetic shapeshifting?
I crawled backward a few feet, trying to maintain distance between us. Stormtiger reached down and blocked my retreat with one blade-covered hand.
I looked up at Stormtiger and spoke, “We split up earlier today. One of our members had a source, we heard about the email that went out when the news stations and papers did. Decided it’d be better to back off, just in case.” No harm done by admitting that much.
“Don’t believe you,” he snarled. “Doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“That’s because—”
I stopped as the two of them turned away. The ‘paramedic’ a few feet from Stormtiger had bolted, and was drawing a gun as she ran toward the closest patch of darkness. As she got close to her destination, still running, she turned on the spot and raised her gun to fire at Stormtiger and Hookwolf.
Hookwolf barely reacted as the bullets punched into his chest, and even that was just the inevitable force of being shot. Stormtiger raised one arm as if to protect himself, but the bullets were already veering off before they could hit him, leaving a trio of hazy trails in the air where they had turned.
“Handle her, Cricket,” Hookwolf spoke, pressing a hand against his collarbone where a bullet had struck him. The scarred girl with the buzz cut dashed forward, reaching behind her back to draw two scythe-like weapons, each only about as long as her forearm.
Coil’s soldier turned to fire at the incoming villainess, but Cricket ducked to the right, then evaded left, in time with the noise of the gunfire. The distance between them closed rapidly. I didn’t see what happened next, as Coil’s soldier disappeared into the darkness and Cricket followed her in.
Hookwolf turned back to me, “Suspiciously competent for an ambulance driver. Pretty fucking sure that’s one of Coil’s people. What are you doing with her?”
I didn’t answer.
My bugs reacted to a funny noise from the direction of Cricket and Coil’s woman, but I couldn’t hear it myself. Grue’s power did strange things to sound. I had more immediate concerns.
Hookwolf dropped his hand to his side, and I saw how the bullet had penetrated skin, but had failed to get any further than the interlocking grid of metal that sat in place of Hookwolf’s muscle. He smiled. “I was hoping you wouldn’t answer. It means we get to interrogate you.”
Options, options, what were my options? Bugs? They were around, but I got the impression that Hookwolf wasn’t going to suffer that much if I swarmed him, and Stormtiger had some kind of aerokinesis, which was bound to be pretty effective against the lightweight bugs. Knife, baton? Not much better. These guys were capable in hand to hand. I wasn’t.
Where was Grue? I felt out with my power, and found him at the back of the ambulance with the driver. Whatever he was doing, I hoped he would do it soon. I needed his help.
I looked for Cricket, and found her in the blackness, dragging Coil’s soldier back toward us. I saw her emerge from the darkness, one of the miniature scythes buried in the woman’s upper arm, the other buried in her thigh. With a full-body effort, Cricket swung the woman forward and pulled the scythes free. Coil’s soldier rolled onto the ground before Cricket. If her powers didn’t give her an edge in fitness, she was pretty damn fit for her frame.
Was Coil’s woman dead? No. The woman was breathing. She was making lots of short, fast breaths, not moving, but she was breathing.
Hookwolf watched for a second before turning back to me. “Maybe I’ll give Stormtiger some practice at getting answers out of people. Those claws of his? They’re compressed air. Every second, he’s drawing in more air, shoving it into that claw shaped space, to make them denser, harder. And when he releases it…” he offered me a low chuckle.
Come on, Grue. I couldn’t handle this alone.
“Want to see what happens when one of them is buried inside you when he turns it into one of his blasts of wind?” Hookwolf asked. Again, the low laughter at my expense.
Grue was moving toward me with purpose, now. I stirred bugs from the ground around him to place them on his body, get a sense of what he was doing. He was carrying something three and a half feet long, nearly a foot wide, a rounded off shape that was all smooth metal.
Shit.
I flipped over and scrambled away. Stormtiger was behind me, and he kicked me in the back as I tried to rise up and start running, shoving me back to the ground, hard. I was glad for my mask as my face bounced off the pavement.
Go with it. Remembering the tips Brian had given me during our sparring session, I used the fact that Stormtiger had created a bit more distance between us and continued to move away as fast as I could manage.
“Running?” Hookwolf laughed, “You can try.”
“Gun oil,” Stormtiger called out, whipping around to face Grue. “I smell gun oil.”
Grue hefted the long metal object back with both hands, then flung it forward. He didn’t drop both his arms as he let go. Instead, he used his left hand to follow up with a directed blast of darkness to cover it as it rolled into the clearing.
I clamped my hands to my ears, painful as it was with the bandage on my right ear.
Grue’s right hand was already withdrawing a gun from his jacket pocket as he backed up.
His arm jerked twice as he fired the gun at the oxygen tank he’d fetched from the back of the ambulance. The first shot missed. The second didn’t.
It was so quiet I thought I’d been deafened by the sudden explosion. Hookwolf’s delayed scream of pain and rage was a bittersweet relief.
Wasting no opportunity, Grue marched forward, gun in hand. Stormtiger had been farther away, and lay face down on the ground, bleeding badly but intact, from what I and my bugs could see. Grue stopped, aimed, and shot him once in each leg.
“Hey!” Cricket’s voice was strangled, strained. I wondered if one of the injuries that had given her one of those scars had done something to her vocal chords. She lowered one of the scythes toward Coil’s soldier. “I got a—”
Grue
covered her and her hostage in darkness and turned toward me and Hookwolf. The message was clear. He wasn’t negotiating. I was pretty sure I couldn’t have made that call, even knowing that stopping for the woman’s sake was almost inevitably going to lead to a worse situation.
Hookwolf staggered to his feet. He’d taken more damage from the blast than anyone, and his skin hung off in tatters around the arm he hadn’t yet transformed, most of the trunk of his body and his thigh, with lesser damage over the surrounding area. Beneath the tatters of skin, as I’d seen with the bullet wound, there was only blood-slick bands and blades of metal. Hooks and knives all laid side by side in the general shape of human musculature.
Hookwolf thrust his damaged arm out to one side, and the muscles unhinged like a swiss army knife, revealing still more blades and hooks that unfolded, swelled and overlapped to cover and patch the injured area. His arm grew with the use of his power, and the resulting limb was three times the normal size, ending in what looked like a two foot long fishhook.
“Skitter,” Grue called, “run!”
I climbed to my feet and hurried toward him. Hookwolf turned to face me, then lunged my way, closing more distance than I might have anticipated. I abandoned my attempt to rejoin Grue and headed to my left, straight into the darkness.
My bugs dotted the surface of a mailbox, three paces into the blackness. I ducked around it as Hookwolf blindly followed me in. Swinging blindly, he struck a fire hydrant, but no water was forthcoming. He lunged left, gouging chunks of brick from a wall, then he leaped right, striking the mailbox and cleaving it in half.
I was already scrambling in Grue’s general direction, the mailbox well behind me.
I felt a surge of relief at realizing that Cricket had abandoned her hostage in favor of going after Grue, to initiate a brief exchange of blows. Unfortunately, my relief was short lived, because the combat wasn’t brief in a good way. Grue fired the gun twice, and twice she dodged the bullet, standing only ten and seven feet away from the barrel. It wasn’t superspeed, either, though she was quick. Her movements were simply too efficient, and if there was any delay in her reactions, I wasn’t seeing it.