by wildbow
It was only when she got close that she saw the badge clipped to the front of one of their jackets. A detective. There was blood on the door that led into the apartment lobby.
The elevator wouldn’t be working. She headed for the stairwell, only to find more blood. It was as though a body had been dragged.
Going forward was a stupid idea, she knew. Brian and Skitter had gone into way too much fucking depth about the risks. Still, that hadn’t stopped her before.
She got her taser and knife from her bag and made her way upstairs.
Third floor up, blood on the door leading into the hall. More blood trailing down the hallway, stopping at one apartment.
She double checked that her power was active and pushed her way inside.
Only a few of the Nine were present. Crawler slept with his ponderous head on paws that were crossed over one another, his back rising and falling with each deep breath. He was large enough that the highest part of his back rose nearly to the ceiling with each breath he drew in through his nostrils. Only half of the eyes on his body were closed, covered with thick, dark gray lids.
Shatterbird and Burnscar were on the couch, Burnscar stretched out with her head on the armrest, her feet propped up on Shatterbird’s lap. She held a graphic novel on her stomach with one hand and created flames in the other, shaping them to match the people she saw as she flicked from page to page. Shatterbird was sitting upright, a novel in her hands.
Bonesaw stood over the dining room table, with a mechanical spider-thing on the opposite side of the table, assisting her. A young man was on the table itself, his wrists and ankles tied down. His torso was open from collar-bone to crotch, his ribs splayed apart. Bonesaw and her mechanical spider were elbow deep in the contents of his torso.
The spiders.
Aisha moved quickly aside as a spider moved from the kitchen, past her and to the table. Whatever cameras or artificial intelligence it used, it didn’t seem to notice her. It handed Bonesaw a diet cola that the little girl opened with bloody fingers and drank.
With a little more confidence, Aisha moved further inside, giving a wide berth to Crawler and Burnscar’s foot-high images of flame.
Holding her weapons, Aisha stood next to Shatterbird, at one end of the couch.
Aisha had never killed anyone, but here she was, holding a lethal weapon. She could slice Shatterbird’s throat and they wouldn’t even realize she was there.
They would, she suspected, realize that Shatterbird was dead or dying. There was a fifty-fifty chance, anyways, that it would force them out of whatever effect her powers had on their brains. It had happened to her before.
Except that Shatterbird would kill her in her last moments, using the glass that had been swept to the corners of the room, or one of the others would. Burnscar or Crawler could deal a hell of a lot of damage, even if they didn’t know who they were attacking.
Slowly, she walked over to Bonesaw, navigating around the drones. Could she kill the kid?
On the one hand, Bonesaw was the one who kept the other members going. Removing her would take a lot of problems off the board. She could finish off Bonesaw and run for cover in the kitchen, out of Burnscar and Shatterbird’s line of fire. From there, it was only steps to the front door and safety.
On the other hand, it was still murder, and it was a kid. A kid that had a hundred kills under her belt.
A squeaking sound distracted her from her thoughts. It was like air being let out of a balloon, but in shorter spurts. Bonesaw? No, the girl wasn’t making any noise. The mechanical spider? No. Not the spider either.
Stepping as close to Bonesaw and the spider as she dared, Aisha investigated the sounds. Where were they coming from?
Bonesaw smiled, “You’re going to have to speak up if you want me to hear you, Jonathan.”
Jonathan?
Aisha looked down at the body, and realized the heart was beating inside Bonesaw’s hands. The man’s eyes were moving, and his lips moved as he struggled and failed to make words come up through his windpipe.
The surge of horror and disgust gave Aisha the strength to cast aside her doubts.
“Sorry kid,” she said.
She plunged the knife into Bonesaw’s bare throat.
Bonesaw screamed, shrill and loud, which caught Aisha off guard. With a knife in her throat, the girl was screaming?
Reacting more on instinct than wit, Aisha pulled the knife out and then slashed it horizontally across Bonesaw’s throat.
She’d expected a spray of blood or gurgling. Neither happened. Bonesaw screamed again.
So she pulled the knife free and stabbed Bonesaw in one eye. The blade scraped against the bone of Bonesaw’s eye socket.
Flame erupted and pieces of glass came to life around Aisha. She backed away quickly as a wall of flame rolled over Jonathan on the table and divided her from Bonesaw. There was a rumble and the sound of falling furniture as Crawler stood.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow!” Bonesaw shrieked. “It hurts!”
Why isn’t she dead?
Aisha yanked the knife out and then gripped her taser.
“Is it Jack?” Burnscar asked, looking around, then turning to the window, “What the hell?”
“It’s not Jack,” Bonesaw said. She snapped her fingers, and the mechanical spider leaped on top of her, beginning to suture the wounds in her neck. “I gave Jack the same safeguards I gave us, he would have succeeded if he tried it.”
Shatterbird scowled. “Then who or what was that? Crawler, do you know?”
Aisha backed toward the front door. She stopped as Crawler appeared in the doorway that led from the kitchen to the front hall, looking through to see his teammates on the far end. His voice was a mangled mess of sounds that only barely approximated anything like speech. “I don’t smell anyone.”
Smells can’t find me, then, Aisha thought. Still, she didn’t have her escape route.
“Torch the apartment and make a break for it?” Burnscar asked. “We can meet up as a group later.”
“No. Cherish has a hard time tracking Mannequin, and he won’t know how to find us,” Shatterbird said.
“I’m okay,” Bonesaw piped up. She held one hand to her eye socket, which had trails of smoke rising from it. “You don’t need to worry. I can put my throat back together easy, after I get my kit out to check the sheaths for my vitals to make sure there’s no abrasions, and I’ve got spare eyes. I could go with green eyes. Or one green and one blue, or if I alter them, I could have—”
“Quiet,” Shatterbird cut in. “It’s less about you being hurt and more about the fact that someone had the audacity to attack us here. Burnscar, put out those fires. We don’t want attention.”
The wall of flame shrunk and faded away.
“Really hope you don’t have another way of sensing me, big guy,” Aisha said to Crawler, ducking between his legs and stepping towards the door. “I’m gonna make my exit now.”
None of the Nine reacted as she shut the door behind her.
Lesson learned. The more ‘vulnerable’ members of the Nine weren’t as vulnerable as they looked. Sheaths, Bonesaw had said?
Stepping into the lobby, she stopped in her tracks.
One of the detectives who’d been standing by the door was dead, his throat slit. He laid in the center of the lobby. Two more blood trails ran to the side of the lobby opposite the stairs.
Manager’s office?
Her weapon drawn, she reached for the doorknob, and collided with Jack as he strode out of the office.
“What’s wrong?” Cherish asked.
Aisha backed away.
“Nothing,” Jack said. “You grab the last body and then find a mop.”
“Me?”
“I think I’ve been exceedingly generous, giving you a second chance. You can repay me by doing the heavy lifting.”
“Ever the gentleman.”
“Go on, now. I’ll wait here.”
Aisha watched as Cherish walked past her,
grabbed the heavyset detective and began dragging him inch by inch toward the office.
She only remembered one other time when her heart had pounded this hard. It had been when the fledgling Merchants had attacked her and her father. It was another chance. While they were separated, she could go after one. But which?
She held the taser and the knife, adjusting her grip so she was secure.
Jack was the key figure. Aisha knew she could attack him, knew she maybe should, but would she succeed any more than she did against Bonesaw? Cherish might be able to lash out with some kind of blind fire, affecting the emotions of everyone nearby.
No. Cherish was the newest member, wasn’t she? There were better odds that Cherish didn’t have the protections that Jack and the others did.
Exhaling slowly, Aisha followed behind Cherish as the girl tugged the body into the other room. She stepped inside and shut the door.
“Put the weapon away,” Cherish said, her voice quiet.
Aisha gulped, realizing the trap she’d just stepped into. “You can hear me?”
A second passed, and there was no response.
“Put it away, or I’m going to leave you quivering in a corner, shitting your pants.”
“You can’t hear me.” Aisha gripped her weapon and stepped closer.
Cherish whirled around, her eyes flitting right and left, searching for Aisha. “I’ll scream. He’ll come in here, and a couple swings of his knife, he can cut you down, invisible or no.”
“It’s not invisibility,” Imp said, uselessly.
“Put your weapon away,” Cherish said, her voice quiet and carefully measured, “We only have a few seconds before Jack gets suspicious. Listen. I want to strike a deal.”
Snare 13.3
How the hell was that motherfucker that fast?
He wasn’t even trying to avoid my bugs, so I had a sense of where he was as Grue, Bitch and I tore down the street on our dogs. I rode behind Grue on Sirius, my arms on his shoulders, while Bitch rode Bentley, Lucy’s corpse lying across her lap.
We’d lost a couple of minutes as we helped Bitch retrieve Lucy’s real body. It was eerie to see. When the dogs grew, they really appeared to be adding mass, literally growing and stretching. Somewhere in the transformation, after they weren’t recognizable as the animals they had once been, their real bodies were reformed inside a placenta-like sac. Mannequin’s gunshot had opened a hole in Lucy’s chest and penetrated that membrane to kill the real dog within. We’d used my knife and Grue’s raw strength to help pull the dog free in a grim sort of anti-childbirth.
It might be seen as a waste of precious time in a crucial moment, but I doubted we would have had Bitch in our corner otherwise, and without her, we wouldn’t have a ride, so to speak.
I’d consoled myself with the fact that we had a pair of massive, muscular steeds that could outpace any car you’d see on the street, and Mannequin was limited to his two legs. The thing was, somewhere around the point where he stopped trying to evade my tripwires and my bugs and picked up speed, when he really started moving, I realized he was actually faster than the dogs.
Mannequin covered a lot of ground with his long legs and seemingly endless energy, and he didn’t have any injuries. The dogs, Bitch and Grue did. Mannequin had been aiming at the animals more than he’d aimed at Grue or Bitch, so the damage to my teammates was more or less limited to a few flecks embedded in the legs, buttock and feet. The injuries were small, but one in Bitch’s stomach worried me. There were way too many vitals that could be hit with that location, and it was bleeding worse than any of the others.
She wanted to press on, and I wasn’t about to try and change her mind. I wouldn’t be able to stop her, for one thing, and I did want to help my people.
Mannequin moved in a straight line, onto rooftops, down to the ground, or halfway down and through windows that had been stripped of glass, emerging from the far side. My bugs swarmed him where I could get them to, trying to snag him with lines and threads of silk and hamper his movements, but I could only get him with a small few at a time. He was approaching the edge of my effect’s reach, and I knew I’d lose track of him shortly.
Once I did, I wasn’t sure I’d catch him again. He could apparently see my bugs and since our last confrontation he’d gained the ability to see the spider silk I was placing on him or in his vicinity. It was remarkably high-resolution vision for someone who hadn’t been able to notice that I didn’t have a pool of blood spreading out beneath me during our last fight. Or was his inability to see that because he was calibrated to see the small things?
It wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t find him or catch up to him.
“He’s veering left!” I shouted to my teammates, “Faster, Sirius! He’s getting away!”
I could feel a tremor in Sirius’s body, like the momentary tremor of a twitching muscle, but in every muscle. My legs spread a fraction further apart as he grew larger, his ribs expanding further in either direction. The increase in his speed was small but noticeable.
I cast a glance over my shoulder at Bitch. Her mask had fallen off at some point when we’d been retrieving Lucy or during our ride. She looked drawn, the lines of her mouth and the bones of her face that much more prominent. Had I failed to notice she was like that before, was it pain from her injuries that did it, or was it anger?
Whatever it was, I suspected this use of her power was drawing on reserves she didn’t have.
Mannequin disappeared into the penthouse floor of an apartment building, and I positioned bugs at the very periphery of my range to prepare lines of thread and to gather so they could land on him as he emerged.
Somehow, I couldn’t say how, he emerged from a lower floor, mere seconds after he’d entered the building. He brushed past a small handful of insects, and then he was out of reach of my swarm.
“He’s out of my range!” I shouted.
Nobody responded. I had to double-check that Bitch hadn’t fallen from Bentley’s back. She didn’t look any better than she had a moment ago, and she looked out of breath. I expected the pain of her injuries was taking its toll. As for Grue, I couldn’t really see anything but the back of his head and his shoulders while I clung to his waist. I didn’t get the sense that he was about to pass out, either.
No use in responding when you couldn’t spare the breath and everyone knew what the answers would be. We’d search for him at the last place we’d seen him. My territory.
Giant paws pounded on the wet pavement as we raced for our destination.
How the hell were we supposed to fight him? If we could even find him?
He’d have some countermeasure for my bugs and my cocoon strategy. There was no way he’d let himself get caught up in the same trap twice. Grue’s power didn’t affect him. Bitch’s dogs did affect him, but they weren’t bulletproof.
That was without factoring in any additional weapons he had.
One arm around Grue’s waist, I drew my phone from my utility compartment and dialed Genesis from my contact list.
“Genesis here. What?”
“Mannequin en route to my territory for some kind of revenge against me for our last fight. How fast can you pull a body together?”
“Two minutes.”
“He’ll be there in five. Clear people out of the way, and put together a form that can take a beating and hamper him.”
“On it.”
Sierra was the first and only contact I’d entered into the phone beyond the ones Coil had put in prior to giving them to us. I contacted her next.
“Sierra here, boss.”
“Clear people out of the area, and contact everyone you gave a phone to, telling them to hide and take cover. Mannequin’s coming back to make trouble.”
“Got it.”
I hung up. With the jostling movement of the dog’s running, I didn’t trust my ability to put the phone away in the compartment, so I held it in one clenched fist.
During the six or seven minutes it took us to cr
oss from Ballistic’s territory to my own, my teeth were clenched so hard I thought I’d break something, my neck and shoulders so tense they felt more like stone than flesh.
I valued my ability to come up with answers, but my mind was empty. I wasn’t sure how I’d deal, and the worst part of it was that it wasn’t me that was necessarily going to pay the price.
As we entered my territory, I felt strangely composed for the anxieties that tore through me, a little detached from things.
My bugs swept through the territory, and I did my best to recall where tripwires had been set and figure out which had been broken. I checked on my people, using bugs to make sure they were standing and that they were somewhere safe.
Could I sweep through my territory using squadrons of flies with dragline silk stretched out between them, to the point that he couldn’t slip past them? It would take time to set up.
No. There was no need. As I approached the heart of my territory, near my barracks, I found him, standing in the middle of the road.
“There!” I called out to my team. We changed direction and charged toward the street in question. We stopped when he came into our view.
Mannequin stood in the center of the road, his back to us. Half a dozen of my people were lying on the road, unconscious or dead. I couldn’t see any blood. There were a couple more people in nearby buildings that had fallen as well. How had he reached them? Why hadn’t Genesis and Sierra been able to get everyone out?
A quiet horror ran through me like ice water.
Genesis, too, was on the road, in the process of dissolving. She’d taken on the form of something like a stegosaurus crossed with a scorpion, all brawn and armor plating, with a long, prehensile, wickedly spiked tail. He’d beaten her.
Very little of the silk I’d laid on him was still intact. My bugs settled on him, and began to draw out more silk, binding him.
He turned our way, and his mouth opened like a ventriloquist dummy or a christmas nutcracker. It jiggled up and down, silently, mocking. Laughter without sound.
“Fucker!” Bitch screamed. Then she whistled, with a volume and pitch that could make crowds stop in their tracks. Bentley charged.