Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Sirius let out a long, mournful noise, somewhere between a whine and a howl, loud enough that I had to turn my face away and cover my ears.

  When I was sure he wasn’t about to do it again, I dropped my hands. I asked Bitch, “Have you done this before?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve used my power on most of them, but only a little, to keep them healthy. Sirius is the only one I’ve made this big since Angelica, Brutus, Judas and Rollo.”

  I almost asked who Rollo was, but I kept my mouth shut. It was a habit of mine, I found, that I usually pushed a conversation with Bitch too far, gave her an excuse to get pissed at me. I could prioritize other things over my curiosity.

  Besides, as I thought on it, I realized Rollo might’ve been the first dog she used her power on. The one with the body count.

  “Time?” She asked.

  I found my cell phone, fumbled with it to press a button and display the time. “Nine minutes past eleven.”

  “We’ll give it fifteen minutes,” she reached for the chain and held it. “Takes about that long for it to wear off.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t need you here. If you want to be useful, there’s a shovel by the door. You can go pick up the shit in the short grass over there.”

  “Fuck you,” the words spilled out of my mouth before I could censor them. I wasn’t positive I wanted to censor them, but it bugged me that I’d done it without thinking it through.

  “What?” she growled at me.

  “Fuck you,” I repeated myself, “I came to help. Thought maybe I was helping, by pointing out what was wrong with Sirius. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be your slave, or that it’s an excuse to give me the worst jobs. You want me to pick up the poop? Cool, but I’ll do it when you’ve got a shovel in your hand too, and you’re working beside me.”

  “You told me I could hit you, free and clear, if you pissed me off,” she threatened me.

  “Yeah, but if you do it here, for this reason, I’m hitting back,” I didn’t move my eyes away from hers, even as every awkward part of me twitched to look away and leave. If she really did default to interpreting social interactions in dog terms, then eye contact was important. I didn’t know much about animals, about dogs, but I did know that it was the submissive dog, the dog lower on the totem pole, that backed down.

  “I’ve got Brutus, you wouldn’t win the fight,” she told me.

  Almost definitely true, I thought. But I couldn’t give in. I resisted the urge to look at Brutus and told her, my voice low, “You want to go there? Try it.”

  She set her jaw, stared at me for several long moments. Then Sirius made a noise, a smaller version of that whimpering howl he’d made earlier, and she turned her head.

  I waited a minute, watching as Sirius got the strength to struggle again, nearly standing up, before the weight of the other two dogs pressed him down again.

  “Bitch- Rachel. I’m getting the impression you might be here a while, to keep an eye on Sirius, give him some attention after he’s back to normal so he knows everything’s okay?”

  “What about it?” Her voice was hard, and she didn’t look my way.

  “Do you want me to pick up something for lunch, so you can stay here with him?”

  “…Fine.”

  “You know this area better than I do. Where-” I stopped. I needed to convey more self confidence than simply asking her for the info. She might even see it as begging. I told her, “Tell me where to go.”

  I was crossing my fingers she wouldn’t go nuts over me giving her an order.

  She was too preoccupied with watching Sirius to argue with me. “There’s a Greek food stand if you walk in the direction of the Boardwalk. You’ll smell it before you see it.”

  “Okay. What do you want?”

  “Anything with meat.”

  “I’ll be back,” I told her.

  She didn’t reply, leaving me to make my way through the crowd of dogs to the front door. I stuck my shaking hands into my pockets and headed off to grab our lunch, leaving Bitch with the monster in chains.

  7.03

  I was nervous, returning to Bitch’s spot with lunch in hand. It wasn’t just that I’d left her alone with an uncontrollable beast composed almost entirely of fangs, nails, bone and muscle. It was that it was lunchtime.

  Between countless run-ins with the bullies, getting in contact with the Undersiders and the bank robbery, it felt like stuff seemed to go down around noon.

  I was relieved when I got back and there wasn’t any carnage. A dozen or so dogs greeted me, many poking their noses into the paper bag I held. I navigated my way through them to Bitch, who was sitting on a pallet of concrete blocks by the open back wall. Sirius was lying beside her with his head on her lap.

  “Food?” I offered.

  She reached down, so I got a chicken souvlaki wrap and a coke out of the bag and handed them up to her.

  As she peeled the paper away from one end of the wrap, I found myself a spot to sit on a part of the wall where it was incomplete or damaged. The weather had worn at the concrete blocks, and some greenery had managed to grow in the cracks, making for a not entirely uncomfortable seat. Outside, behind the building, there was a field of uncut grass surrounded by chain link fence. As they lost interest in the food, dogs wandered out there, chasing one another or baiting others into playing, trampling that long grass flat enough that we could see them. The view of their playing was accompanied by a soundtrack of endless barks and snarls.

  A white dog with a nub of a tail and chestnut colored patches on its body and over its ears approached me, sitting to stare at me as I took my first bite of my wrap.

  I swallowed, and I told the dog, “No. This is too good to share, and it probably wouldn’t be good for you anyways.”

  The dog cocked its head quizzically.

  “You are awfully pretty, though,” I told it.

  I heard a scoffing noise from Bitch’s direction. I turned her way just in time to see her glance away.

  “What?”

  “You should never own a dog.”

  That was fairly harsh, especially coming from her. “What are you basing this on?”

  “Most dog owners are retards, and the most retarded are the ones who pick a dog because it’s cute, or because its pretty, without knowing anything about the breed, the temperament, the dog’s needs.”

  I sighed, “Fuck off, Rache. I can say it’s a pretty dog without saying I’m going to take it home.”

  “Whatever,” she didn’t take her eyes off the dogs in the back field.

  “No, don’t brush me off. You want to start something, fine. But if you do, you gotta hear what I have to say. Listen to what I have to say. Acknowledge me, damn it.”

  She turned to glance at me. She wasn’t frowning or glaring, but her gaze was so dispassionate it made me uncomfortable.

  “Come on, you know me pretty well. All the others describe me as careful and cautious, though I’m not entirely sure why. Do you really think I’d pick something as important as a dog, a new addition to my family, without researching, first?”

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she turned her attention back to the dogs outside.

  “Right,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  I didn’t press things any further. We finished our wraps, I dug one piece of the foil-wrapped baklava out of the bag, set it down on the paper from my wrap and bunched up the foil around the remainder to throw up to Bitch. When I was done eating my dessert and licking my fingers clean, I hopped down from my seat on the wall, found a ball and started throwing it for the dogs.

  “Here,” Bitch told me. I turned around, and she handed me the blue stick that had been jutting out of the zipper of the backpack. It was plastic, molded to have a handle with finger-holds on one end and a cup on the other. As a dog brought the ball to me, I experimentally pressed the cupped end down on it, and the ball snapped into place.

  When I whipped it forward, the ball went flying, five
times as far than it had when I’d used my hand. Most of the dogs stampeded after it, racing to be the first to grab it or chasing after the ones in the lead.

  It was nice, enjoying the sunshine, playing with the dogs, having no responsibilities or pressures for the moment.

  I turned to look over my shoulder. “Can you tell me about some of them? The dogs?”

  Bitch frowned, but she didn’t refuse me. “This is Sirius. He was bought as a puppy for some twelve year old, then grew too big and unruly to stay in the house. He was caged outside and ignored, his nails grew too long, and he wound up with an infection in his foot. They decided it was easier to leave him at a shelter than pay for medical care. Since he wasn’t trained or socialized, he came off too wild and excitable to get adopted. I got him in the week he was due to get put down.”

  “That’s fucked up,” I looked at Sirius, who was sleeping. “How do you know the story?”

  “I know some people that volunteer at shelters, from when I used to. They let me know if there’s a dog that deserves a second chance. Not that many don’t.”

  “Ah.”

  “The one you were talking to a few minutes ago is Bullet. She’s the smartest in the group. Her breed craves exercise, they’re meant to run around all day with hunters… except she was used as a beta to warm dogs up for one of the dogfighting rings around here and her shoulder was torn up pretty badly. Even with the shoulder healed as well as it’s gonna get, it hurts too much for her to run as much as she needs.”

  I spotted Bullet in the crowd. Sure enough, she was lagging behind the rest. I thought maybe she was favoring one leg.

  “If your power heals, why doesn’t it help her? Or Angelica’s eye and ear?”

  Bitch shrugged. “Lisa said it has something to do with me making a ‘blueprint’. It’s babble to me. All I know is that it doesn’t help older health problems. It gets rid of disease and cancer, and parasites, and most damage they take when they’re big. That’s all.”

  “I think I get it,” I told her. I looked at Bullet, who had stopped running and was sitting in the middle of the field, watching others run. “Do they all have stories like that?”

  “Most.”

  “Damn,” I felt a pang of sympathy for the animals.

  The herd of dogs returned to me, and a shaggy dog dropped the ball at my feet.

  “Good dog,” I told it. I threw the ball, aiming to get it near Bullet, and the herd of dogs rushed off again, with more than a few excited barks.

  Bitch and I weren’t conversing, but neither of us were conversation people. I was too socially clumsy to maintain small talk for any length of time, and Bitch was… well, she was Bitch. So we sat, minutes passed between each exchange of dialogue, and it somehow didn’t bother me. It was letting me pick and choose what I was talking about very carefully.

  “It’s too bad dogs can’t have trigger events,” Bitch mused aloud. “If they did, some people might think twice.”

  I could have argued the details, pointed out that most people weren’t aware of the ins and outs of trigger events, I could have argued that some things could get worse if dogs could get powers. It didn’t feel necessary.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  That was the extent of that dialogue. We enjoyed another long silence and the dogs competed with one another to fetch the ball.

  The sound of a breaking bottle and very human shouts disturbed our peace.

  “These guys again,” Bitch snarled, moving Sirius’ head from her lap and hopping down from her seat on the pile of concrete blocks. The black lab turned his head to watch as she stalked towards the front of the building. Bitch whistled for her dogs and Brutus, Judas and Angelica rushed to her side.

  “What’s going on?” I called after her, moving to follow.

  “Stay inside,” she told me.

  I did as she asked, but that didn’t mean I didn’t try to get closer, to get a better picture of what was going on. I approached one of the boarded up windows at the front of the building and peeked through a gap in the plywood.

  Bitch had her dogs standing around her, and she stood opposite a group of seven or so people. They ranged from thirtyish to twelve in age. It wasn’t hard to figure out who they identified with. Half of the guys were blond or dyed blond, and the others had shaved heads. The youngest was a twelve-ish girl who’d taken a razor to her scalp, too, leaving only her bangs and the hair hanging around her ears and the back of her neck. The detail that confirmed my suspicions of their affiliation was the number eighty-three that I saw etched on one of the guys’ t-shirts in permanent marker.

  The white supremacists loved codes in numbers. If you were suspicious about whether a number was one of their codes, the number eight was a good clue, since it cropped up a lot. The eight referred to the 8th letter of the alphabet, H; Eighty-eight stood for H.H. or ‘Heil Hitler’, while eighteen pointed to Adolf Hitler in the same way. The eighty-three wasn’t one I’d seen before, but I knew it would have stood for H.C… Heil something. Heil Christ?

  In any case, these numbers had been a way to keep one’s racist feelings on the down low, around those that weren’t already affiliated, until Kaiser’s predecessor formed Empire Eighty-Eight here in Brockton Bay. The move had pushed an ultimatum on the more secretive racists in the area, forcing them to either join the aggressive, active group in the public eye or retreat further into hiding. It had also drawn crowds of the more diehard white supremacists from the surrounding regions to Brockton Bay. When people with powers, Kaiser included, started to congregate in the group, Brockton Bay became something of a magnet for those sorts. One of the bigger collections of racists above the bible belt. Quite possibly the biggest congregation of racist supervillains.

  The day Empire Eighty-Eight had gotten its name hadn’t been a good day for our city.

  A guy, thirty or so, was holding a carton of empty beer bottles. He held one by the neck, tossed it into the air and caught it again, then whipped it in Bitch’s direction. I flinched more than she did as it shattered explosively against the front of the door.

  “We told you to get of here,” he sneered at her.

  “I was here first.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’re claiming this neighborhood, and that barking is driving me up the fucking wall.”

  “You’ve said so before. Try earplugs.”

  He grabbed another bottle and threw it, hard. Bitch had to lean out of the way this time, to keep it from hitting her shoulder.

  “Can’t do business wearing earplugs, you dumb whore,” the man put his hand on the head of the partially bald girl, who made a face at Bitch.

  “Then don’t do business. I don’t care.”

  He reached for another bottle, then stopped. A slow smile crossed his face as he looked to a teenage boy that was standing just beside the bald girl, “Thing about something as goddamn irritating as that barking, is it gets us talking about how we could deal with it. Tom, here, had my favorite suggestion. He said we could soak hot dogs in antifreeze and throw ‘em into the field back there. Whaddya say?”

  Fuck. I looked around the inside of the building for something I could use as a mask, but there wasn’t anything. Why hadn’t I brought my costume? The situation was a hair away from devolving into a bloodbath, and my civilian identity was plain to see. I couldn’t even work from inside the building, without risking that someone might have heard about my power or how I operated, and come in after me.

  I could only see Bitch from behind, but I saw her turn her head to evaluate the group. Maybe sizing up how long it would take her dogs to murder them all.

  “If you were going to do that,” she said, “You would have done it before now, and I’d kill you for it. Either you’re too scared to really do something about it, which you should be, or Kaiser told you hands off.”

  It was the last attitude I would’ve expected from her. Bitch, being level-headed?

  The man with the bottles sneered, “Nah. See, we heard that howling earlier. So
did some of our neighbors. Kaiser did tell us to play nice, but way I figure it, if we tell Kaiser you started this shit, and he asks around to check our story, he’s gonna hear there was howling before there was fighting.”

  “You know who I am,” Bitch threatened them, “You know my abilities. You’re really going to fuck with me, here? With my dogs around? Really?”

  I heard, rather than saw, the sound of a gun cocking. The teenage boy, who I identified as Tom, raised a gun in Bitch’s direction.

  “Still think you’re tough?” the man mocked Bitch, “Guns are the great equalizer, y’know? My son here wants a place in the Empire, and to do that, he’s gotta earn his stripes. Killing you would be a good way to go about it, I’m thinking.”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest of the dialogue. There was no way this wasn’t going to come to violence, now. I pulled off my shoes, then ran in my sock feet across the concrete floor, keeping as low as I could. I found the knife that Bitch had used to open the bags of dog food, then stuck it in my back pocket. Still nothing I could see that would work as a mask. I wasn’t even wearing a sweatshirt or enough extra layers to use a piece of my clothing for a mask. It had been too warm a day.

  Which left me one very unpleasant option.

  I exerted my power, and was glad to find that the grassy field and the half built building had a fair supply of bugs to work with. Grasshoppers migrated my way, and I emptied a wasp nest that nestled in the wall above the unfinished second floor. Blackflies that had been enjoying the copious amounts of dog waste flew my way, and innumerable ants and spiders formed the remainder of the swarm.

  All together, they streamed my way to gather on my skin, crawling up my legs and torso, some turning downward to cover my arms. As one, they covered every inch of my body, even creating a mass over my mouth and glasses to obscure everything. It didn’t tickle as much as I thought it might, but I did shudder.