Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I gathered my bugs to me, sent some to him, to better track his movements. As he climbed up, I gathered the swarms into decoys that looked human-ish, sent them all moving in different directions, gathered more around myself to match them in appearance.

  With the effects of my slash of the Halberd combined with the damage Armsmaster had already done, Leviathan didn’t have the mobility with his tail he otherwise would. When he attacked my decoys, he did it with slashes of his claw and pouncing leaps that sent out afterimages to crash into them. A swipe of the claw’s echo to disperse one swarm to his left, a lunge to destroy one in front of him. Another afterimage of a claw swipe sent out to strike at me.

  Water crashed into me, hard as concrete, fast as a speeding car. I felt more pain than I’d ever experienced, more than when Bakuda had used that grenade on me, the one that set my nerve endings on fire with raw pain. It was brief, somehow more real than what Bakuda had inflicted on me. Struck me like a lightning flash.

  I plunged face first into the water. My good arm on its own wasn’t enough to turn me over – the road just a little too far below me. I tried to use my legs to help turn myself over. Zero response.

  I’d either been torn in two and couldn’t feel the pain yet or, more likely, I’d been paralyzed from the waist down.

  Oh.

  Not like I really should’ve expected any different. Neither case was much better than the other, as far as I was concerned.

  My breath had been knocked out of me at the impact, but some primal, instinctual part of me had let me hold my breath. I lay there, face down in two or three feet of water, counting the seconds until I couldn’t hold my breath any more, until my body opened my mouth and I heaved in a breath with that same instinctual need for preservation, filled my lungs with water instead.

  The lenses of my mask were actually swim goggles, it was a strange recollection to cross my mind. I’d bought them from a sports supply store, buying the useless chalk dust at the same time. Durable, high end, meant for underwater cave spelunkers, if I remembered the picture on the packaging right. Tinted to help filter out bright lights, to avoid being blinded by any fellow swimmer’s headlamps. I’d fitted the lenses from an old pair of glasses inside, sealed them in place with silicon at the edges, so I had 20/20 vision while I had my mask on without having to wear glasses beneath or over it, or contact lenses, which irritated my eyes. I’d built the armor of my mask around the edges of the goggles so the actual nature of the lenses wasn’t immediately apparent, and to hold them firmly in place.

  Even so, when I opened my eyes, looked through those lenses for their original purpose, all I could see was mud, grit, silt. Black and dark brown, with only the faintest traces of light. It disappointed me on a profound level, knowing that this might be the last thing I ever saw. Disappointed me more than the idea of dying here, odd as that was.

  Through my power, I sensed Leviathan turn, take a step back toward the shelter, stop. His entire upper body turned so he could peer to his left with his head, turned the opposite way to peer right. Like a dog sniffing.

  He dropped to all fours, ran away, a loping gait, not the lightning fast movement he’d sported when he first attacked. Still fast enough.

  My chest lurched in a sob for air, like a dry heave. I managed to keep from opening my mouth but the action, the clenching of every muscle above my shoulders, left my throat aching.

  Two seconds later, it hit me again harder.

  Two blocks away, Leviathan crashed down into the water.

  Another lurch of my throat and chest, painful. My mouth opened, water filled my mouth, and my throat locked up to prevent the inhalation of water. I spat the water out, forced it out of my mouth, for all the good it would do.

  I’d left the fat cape to die like this when the wave was coming. Was this karma?

  Something splashed near me. A footstep.

  I was hauled out of the water. I felt a lancing pain through my midsection, like a hot iron, gasped, sputtered. Through the beads of water on my lenses, I couldn’t make out much.

  Bitch, I realized. She wasn’t looking at me. Her face was etched deep with pain, fury, fear, sheer viciousness, or some combination of the four.

  I followed her gaze, blinked twice.

  Her dogs were attacking Leviathan, and Leviathan was attacking back. He hurled two away, three more leapt in.

  How many dogs?

  Leviathan pulled away, only for a dog to snag his arm, drag him off balance. Another latched on to his elbow, while a third and fourth pounced onto his back, tearing into his spine. More crouched and circled around him, looking for opportunities and places to bite.

  He clubbed one away with a crude movement of his tail, used his free claw to grab it by the throat, tear a chunk of flesh away. The dog perished in a matter of seconds.

  Bitch howled, a primal, raw sound that must have hurt her throat as much as it hurt to listen to. She moved forward, pulling me with her, lifting me up. When I sagged, she gave me a startled look.

  I looked down. My legs were there, but there was no sensation. Numb wasn’t a complete enough term to explain it.

  “Back’s broken, I think,” the words were weak. The calm tone of the words was eerie, even coming from my own mouth to my own ears. Disconcertingly out of place with the frenzied, savage tableau.

  Leviathan wheeled around, grabbed another dog by one shoulder, dug a claw into the dog’s ribcage and cracked it open, the ribs splaying apart like the wings of some macabre bird, heart and lungs exposed. The animal dropped dead to the water’s surface at Leviathan’s feet.

  Bitch looked from me to the dog, as if momentarily lost. In an instant, that look disappeared, replaced by that etching of rage and fury. She screeched the words, “Kill him! Kill!”

  It wasn’t enough. The dogs were strong, there were six of them left, even, but Leviathan was more of a monster than all of them put together.

  He heaved one dog off the ground, slammed it into another like a club, then hurled it against a wall, where it dropped, limp and broken.

  With that same claw, he slashed, tore the upper half of a dog’s head off.

  “Kill!” Bitch shrieked.

  No use. One by one, the dogs fell. Four left, then three. Two dogs left. They backed away, wary, each in a different direction.

  Bitch clutched me, her arms so tight around my shoulders it hurt. When I looked up at her, I saw tears in the corners of her eyes as she stared unblinking at the scene.

  Scion dropped from the sky. Golden skinned, golden beard trimmed close, or perhaps it never grew beyond that length. His hair was longer than mine. His bodysuit and cape were a plain white, stained with faded marks of old, dirt and blood, a strange juxtaposition to how perfect and unblemished he looked, otherwise. There was no impact as he landed, no great splash or rumble of the earth. Leviathan didn’t even seem to notice the hero’s arrival.

  Leviathan struck at one of the remaining dogs with a broad swing of his tail, caught it across the snout. It dropped, neck snapped. A short leap and a slash of the claw dispatched the last.

  Scion raised one hand, and a ball of yellow-gold light slammed into Leviathan from behind, sent the Endbringer skidding across the length of the street, past Bitch and I.

  Leviathan leaped to his feet, reared around, swung his claws at the air ferociously. Water around him rose, rushed towards Scion, a wave three times as high as Bitch was tall. Three times as tall as I might be if I could stand.

  Scion didn’t move or speak. He walked forward, and ripples extended from his footsteps, soared past us with some strange motive force. The ripple touched the wave, and the tower of water collapsed before it got halfway to us, dropping straight down. Liquid as far as the eye could see was being flattened out into a disquieting stillness by the ripples of Scion’s footsteps, like a great pane of glass.

  Leviathan lunged up to the side of a half-ruined building, leaped down to a point three-quarters of the way between himself and Scion. His afterimage
slammed into the hero.

  Scion turned his head, shut his eyes, let the water wash over and past him. When the attack was over, he squared his head and shoulders, facing Leviathan head on, raised a hand.

  Another blast of yellow-gold light, and Leviathan was sent sprawling.

  I saw the ripples and waves of Leviathan striking the ground wash past us. Saw, again, how the ripple of Scion’s footstep seemed to wipe out and override that disturbance, returning the water to a perfect flatness.

  Leviathan grabbed a car, twisted his entire upper body to toss it in the style of an olympic hammer-throw. The car hurtled through the air, and Scion batted it aside with the back of one hand. The vehicle virtually detonated with the impact, falling into a thousand pieces, each piece glowing with golden-yellow light, disintegrating as they splashed into the water.

  Scion raised one hand, and there was a brilliant flash, too bright to look through.

  When the spots faded from my vision, I saw that one of the damaged buildings was emanating that same light the pieces of the car had, was toppling, tipping towards Leviathan. Scion, fingertips glowing, started his slow advance as the structure was pulled atop the Endbringer. The ripples of his footsteps erased any disturbance in the water from the building’s collapse

  Leviathan heaved himself out of the rubble, turned to run, only for water to rise and freeze solid in one smooth movement, forming a wall as tall as Leviathan was, a hundred feet long. He paused for a fraction of a second, to gauge which way he might go, poise himself to leap over. Scion caught him with another golden-yellow blast before he could follow through.

  The movement of the water and the creation of the ice hadn’t been Scion. Eidolon approached, flying close, raising one hand to create a ragged mess of icicles where Leviathan was to land. Some impaled the Endbringer, but by and large, they shattered beneath him, left him scrabbling for traction and footing for long enough that Scion could shoot him again, send him through the barrier of ice as though it were barely there, tumbling.

  Scion paused, turning to look at Eidolon, his eyes moving past Bitch and me like we weren’t even there. His eyes settled on the hero, the most powerful individual in the world staring at the man who was arguably the fifth.

  His expression was so hard to read. I knew, now, what people had meant, when they said they thought his face was a mask, a facade. Though it was expressionless, though there was nothing I could point to to explain why I felt the way I did, somehow I sensed disgust from him. Like nobility looking at dog shit.

  Scion turned away from Eidolon to focus on the enemy once more. He blasted the Endbringer again. Floated up and moved past Bitch and me faster than I could see, to strike the Endbringer a fraction of a second after the blast of light struck, stopping there in midair to blast Leviathan a second time as the Endbringer was still flying through the air at the punch’s impact. Everything about Scion and his actions was utterly silent. His movements or attacks didn’t even stir the air. Only the effects, Leviathan striking the water, the breaking of ice, generated any movement, shudders or sounds.

  Eidolon froze the water around Leviathan’s four claws, giving Scion the opportunity to land another blast. Leviathan turned, raised a spraying wall of water to cover his retreat. Scion sent out one blast of his golden light to strike the wave, following up with a second blast before the first even made contact with the water.

  Seeing the second blast coming, Leviathan leaped to one side. No use – the blast of light curved in the air to head unerringly for him, struck him down. Edges of the Endbringer’s wounds glowed golden yellow, drifted away into the air like flecks of burning paper caught in the updraft of hot air. A fist imprint near the base of Leviathan’s throat glowed with edges of the same light, the wound continuing to spread and burn as I watched.

  A tidal wave appeared in the distance, at the furthest end of the street, near the horizon.

  Scion sent out a blast of golden light the size of a small van, darting to the center of the wave, disappearing into a speck of light before it made contact with the distant target. The middle third of the wave buckled, fell harmlessly into a splash of water, all momentum ceased. The other two sides of the wave curved inward, bent, to bear unerringly towards us.

  Another blast of golden light, and one side was stopped, stalled. A third blast was spared for Leviathan, who was getting his hands and feet firmly on the ground, crouching in preparation to run. The Endbringer was knocked squarely to the ground.

  Scion stopped the third wave in its tracks with a fourth blast, but the water was still there, and it still bowed to gravity. The water level around us rose by a dozen feet, momentarily, slopping as gently over us as physically possible, like a lap of water on the beach.

  When the flow of water was past us, I could see a fifth blast of light following Leviathan, who had used the cresting water to swim away. He was making his way to the coast. Scion rose, flew after his target with a streak of golden light tracing his movement. Eidolon followed soon after.

  Ten, fifteen seconds passed, Bitch holding me, averting her eyes from the corpses of her dogs, jaw set, not speaking or moving.

  A teleporter appeared beside Laserdream, a distance away. He looked at us, startled, glanced at his armband.

  “You okay?” he called out.

  “No,” I tried to shout back, but my voice was weak. Bitch spoke for me, “She needs help.”

  “Bring her here, I’ll take her back.”

  Bitch carried me, dragging me by my collar to where Laserdream lay. I grunted and groaned in pain, felt those hot pokers through my upper back and middle, but she wasn’t the type for sympathy or gentleness.

  The teleporter touched one hand to my chest, another to Laserdream, who turned her head to look at me.

  There was a rush of cool air, and we were in the midst of chaos. Nurses, doctors, moving all around us. I was lifted and placed on a stretcher, hauled up by four people in white. There were shouts, countless electronic beeps, screams of pain.

  I was placed on a bed. I would have writhed with the pain of being shifted if it weren’t for my general inability to move. There was a heart monitor on one side, a metal rack with an IV bag of clear fluid on the other, thick metal poles beside each, stretching from floor to ceiling. Curtains loomed on either side of me, making for a small room, ten feet by ten feet across. The emergency room, triage or whatever was in front of me, past the foot of the bed, a dozen more cots, doctors doing what they could for the massed injured, civilian and cape alike.

  All around me, nurses moved with a rote efficiency, to put a clip on my finger, and the heart monitor started beeping in time with my own heartbeat. One put some sticky glue on my collarbone, pressing an electrode down there.

  “My back, I think it’s broken,” I said, to no one in particular. Nobody in particular replied. All of them too busy with set tasks. People seemed to approach my bedside and leave to go attend to another patient elsewhere.

  “Your name?” someone asked.

  I looked to the other side of me. It was an older woman in a nurse’s uniform, pear shaped, gray haired. A man in a PRT uniform stood behind her, holding a gun on me.

  “Skitter,” I replied, confused, feeling more scared by the second. “Please. I think my back’s broken.”

  “Villain?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “Are you a villain?”

  “It’s complicated. My back-”

  “Yes or no?” the Nurse asked me, stern.

  “Listen, my friend, Tattletale, do you know-”

  “She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand. “Designation Master-5, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis. No super strength.”

  The nurse nodded, “Thank you. Handle it?”

  The man in a PRT uniform holstered his gun and stepped up to the bed. He grabbed my right wrist, clasped a heavy manacle around it, fixed it to a vertical metal pole by the he
ad of the bed.

  “My other arm’s broken, please don’t move it,” I pleaded.

  He gripped it anyways, and I couldn’t help but scream, strangled, as he pulled it to one side, clasped a manacle down on my wrist, hooked the other side of the manacle to the second pole.

  “What-” I started to ask a nurse, as I forced myself to catch my breath, stopped as she turned her back to me and pulled the curtain closed at the foot of the bed, walked past it.

  “Please-” I tried again, looking to the PRT uniform, but he was pushing his way past the curtain, leaving my company.

  Leaving me chained up. Alone.

  8.06

  All of the adrenaline, emotions and endorphins that had been building since I first heard the sirens, maybe even before them – when I learned about Dinah Alcott – made for one hell of a rush. More relevant to the present, it made for one hell of a mental wipeout as I came down from the rush. A low point to equal the ‘high’.

  The background noise of screams, shouted orders of doctors and nurses, a hundred heart monitors beeping out of sync and my ‘cell’ of three curtained ‘walls’ cutting me off from everything else? Didn’t help.

  My arm hurt, and hanging from the manacle made that ten times as bad. My back was the worst thing, a slow, steady, pain that terminated in my midsection. It seemed to build in intensity every second I paid attention to it, settling into a dull blistering of pain when I focused my attention elsewhere. If I didn’t focus on keeping my breathing steady and deep, I found that I unconsciously held my breath to minimize the pain. That only made it worse when I did have to breathe again, because it brought tightness in my throat and chest, along with agonizing coughing fits.

  None of that was even touching on that growing terror over the fact that, hey, I couldn’t feel my legs, and it wasn’t getting better.

  If my back was really broken, it could mean my best case scenario was surgery and years of physical therapy, years of crutches and wheelchairs. My worst case scenario would be never walking again. I didn’t have a power that would help too much on that front. It would mean the end of my career as a cape, never having sex with a boy the natural way, and never going for another morning run.