Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  It took her only a moment to realize what that meant. She climbed off Skitter, moved to run. The darkness was oppressive, sluggish in moving through her, unlike ordinary air. She was slower, wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. Against her will, her power instinctively adjusted, shifted her into a middle ground between her regular self and her shadow state. It left her slower, heavier.

  She baited me.

  A massive shape tore through her, dissipated her entire body. She pulled back together, but it was hard, painful and uncomfortable on an unspecific, fundamental level. It left her breathing hard, feeling like she’d just put her body through five hours of the hardest exercise of her life. Enervating, was that the right word? Bugs were gathering inside and around her body, making it a little harder and a little more time-consuming to pull together.

  Then, before she had succeeded in pulling herself all the way together, it happened again, another large form striking from another direction, passing through her lower body.

  She sagged. Gasped out in pain as another shape passed through her head and shoulders. The darkness absorbed her cry so it barely reached her own ears.

  It was only seconds later that the darkness dissipated. She was on her hands and knees, barely had the strength to move, let alone fight. She tried to raise her right crossbow, but her hand seized up, no longer under her own control as it bent to a pain like a bad Charlie horse. Her fingers curled back, and the crossbow tumbled from her fingers. She still had one in her left hand, but she was using the heel of that hand to prop herself up.

  Her opponents were revealed as the shadows passed, arranged in a rough ring around her. Hellhound and her dogs took up half the clearing, in front of Shadow Stalker. She held a metal ring in each hand, with two chains extending out from each ring. The chains, in turn, were connected to harnesses around the heads and snouts of the ‘dogs’, each animal only a little smaller than a refrigerator. They were monstrous, with scaly, horned exteriors and exposed muscle. Not as big or ugly as they could get, Shadow Stalker knew. The smallest one was barking incessantly. Three of the four were pulling on the chains, hungry to get at Shadow Stalker, clearly intent on tearing her apart. Hellhound’s sharp pulls on the chains contracted the bindings around their snouts, which made them stop before they could get too close.

  Grue stood to her left, arms folded, almost indistinguishable from the darkness behind him. After her first humiliating loss to him, she’d made it a mission to drive him out of this city. He’d stubbornly refused. A girl Shadow Stalker didn’t recognize stood just behind him, wearing a black scarf and a pale gray mask with pointed horns arching over the top of her head. The eyes of the mask had lenses that were black from corner to corner, stylized to look fierce, more animal than human.

  Rounding out the group were Tattletale, Regent and Skitter. Tattletale smiled, her hands clasped behind her back, while Regent twirled his scepter in his fingers. Skitter stood between the two of them. The bug girl bent, then crouched until she was almost at eye level with Shadow Stalker.

  A laugh escaped Shadow Stalker’s lips, building until she couldn’t balance her upper body on her weakened arm. She bent so one shoulder hit the ground, rolled onto her back, arms at her sides. She looked up at Skitter, “All that drama, all that fucking nonsense about allegiances, betraying your team, was it a trick, some joke?”

  Skitter shook her head slowly.

  Shadow Stalker tried to rise, but the growling of one of the dogs intensified. It was the only one that wasn’t pulling on its chain – the largest and most monstrous of the four, with one empty eye socket. Between the threat of the dog and the lack of strength in the arm that Regent wasn’t fucking up, Shadow Stalker gave up and let herself slump down.

  “Well,” she spoke, her tone sarcastic, “How wonderfully fucking nice for you, that you guys patched things up. You even have a new member, congratulations. I guess everything’s back to normal for you freaks.”

  “No…” Skitter spoke, and the bugs around her chirped, buzzed and droned to match the pitch and tone of her words. The villain hadn’t done that when the Undersiders attacked the fundraiser, she remembered. Her voice was quiet, which only made it more eerie. The girl held out her hand, and Regent passed his scepter to her.

  “…Things are different now,” Skitter finished.

  Skitter drove the scepter into Shadow Stalker’s body. It was everything Shadow Stalker could do to stay solid as she felt the tines of the crowned stick biting through the fabric of her costume and into her stomach. She resisted the instincts that two and a half years of exercising her powers had lent her, because she knew what came next. It’ll be worse if I’m in my shadow state, maybe lethal.

  Being tased didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected. It was like being doused in ice water, her entire body seizing, straining, and refusing to cooperate, the pain almost secondary. What hurt most was the way she involuntarily clenched of her jaw. The strength with which her teeth pressed together made her worry she might crack a tooth.

  It only lasted a moment, but her body wasn’t any more cooperative after the current subsided. She lay there, huffing small breaths, every limb unresponsive. A deep, furious rage grew inside her chest, but she was impotent to do anything to release it.

  A pair of hands seized her, sat her up. Her arm dangled limp to her side.

  Grue spoke from behind her. “Skitter, lift her legs. Regent, support her midsection. Imp? Give me a hand with her upper body, take the other shoulder. We lift on three, alright?”

  “Right,” someone said.

  “One, two, three!”

  Arc 10: Parasite

  10.01

  Creepy crawlies riddled the building’s interior, and I hadn’t even used my powers to bring them here.

  No power meant the building was dark. The city, and consequently the building, were flooded, which meant it was moist. With exceptions for some of the luckier areas, pretty much every service was suspended, which meant no mail and no trash pickup. Trash bags were accumulating anywhere that people lived, here included, and when they had run out of trash bags, people had started littering, throwing their trash out the windows or leaving it in hallways instead. To top it off, the weather was getting warmer.

  For bugs, all of these converging details made the city into a paradise.

  I walked in the lead of the group, with Imp a step behind me and to my right. The two of us held flashlights, but Imp was barely paying attention to hers. She held a knife much like mine, and she dragged the point against the wall as we walked down the hallway, carving a groove into the paint. Her flashlight spent more time pointed at her feet than in front of us, leaving me the burden of lighting our way.

  I stopped, turned the flashlight on an open apartment door. “Here, maybe?”

  Grue grunted, adjusted the position of the unconscious body he had draped over one shoulder, “Scout it.”

  Bitch nodded, letting Angelica off the chain, pointing at the door. Of the four dogs she had with her, only Angelica was still under the influence of her power, standing three times her usual size. Despite the invigorating effects of Bitch’s attentions, the dog moved slowly as she loped into the apartment. It was painful to look at her – she was moving as though she were ten years older than she was.

  The other dogs pulled at their chains, wanting to follow. Bitch made angry clucking noises, then ordered them to sit. They were slow to obey, but I think something about the look in Bitch’s eyes told them they’d better listen. One of them reared back as I sent more bugs into the interior to investigate.

  Bitch had been short-tempered lately. The loss of two of the dogs she was closest to? It played a large part in that. She’d lost eight dogs in total, and Angelica had only lived because she had been too hurt to be brought along. Problem was, Angelica wasn’t recovering from those injuries, and from what I gathered, she might not ever recover completely. Bitch was forced to rely on a single crippled, obedient dog and three dogs that were in the peak of health, but i
mpatient and untrained.

  Of course, I couldn’t deny that a big part of her attitude was me and the fact that I was here.

  Angelica returned to the doorway, looked up at her owner, and then returned to the apartment.

  “No problems,” Bitch spoke, translating Angelica’s body language for everyone present. Grue looked at me, and I nodded confirmation.

  I led the way inside, using my flashlight to scan the area.

  The apartment had been ransacked, but it wasn’t the kind of ransacking that suggested the looters had gotten to it. No, it was the very thorough removal of everything valuable that could be carried away by a family of three or four. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with room for a small table and accompanying chairs. There was a smaller bed in one room and a king sized bed in the other. Dresser drawers, cabinets and bedside tables were all open, clothes strewn around the rooms. The occupants had left in a hurry, and I was guessing they probably hadn’t expected to come back or find much of their stuff here when they did.

  Tattletale grunted as she dropped one box beside the couch, where it landed on something with a crunch. “City’s trying to restore order one area at a time. May be doing more harm than good. This building’s been declared uninhabitable, which isn’t exactly doing anyone any favors, because most places in the city are just as bad or worse, and a lot of people don’t have anywhere else to go. Anyways, they’re kicking everyone out, trying to clean up as best they can, get rid of that trash, do what they can about the infestation of rats and bugs. Might still be a few people around, but I doubt anyone’s going to be poking around enough to find us before eleven or so tomorrow morning.”

  “Then we have time to do what we need to do,” Grue spoke. He used one foot to drag one of the dining room chairs out from beneath the table, placing it in the center of the kitchen. I hurried to his side to hold the seat in place as he hefted the limp body from over his shoulder and set it down. Shadow Stalker nearly tipped over, but together we caught her and leaned her back. Her head lolled.

  Regent put down a second, smaller box next to the one Tattletale had brought. I switched positions with Tattletale – she began searching Shadow Stalker, removing crossbows, cartridges of ammunition and two small knives. She found a phone with a touch screen, then reached beneath the unconscious girl’s hood to pluck a wireless earbud from the girl’s ear. After rubbing it on Shadow Stalker’s cloak to clean it, she put it in her own ear and started fiddling with the smart phone. After a few seconds she pronounced, “GPS hasn’t been activated. They probably won’t turn it on to look for her until she fails to return from patrol.”

  “Can you stop them from activating it?” Grue asked. “Or maybe we could have Skitter’s bugs or a dog carry that piece somewhere else?”

  Tattletale shook her head, “I can turn it off. Give me a minute.”

  Regent and I had already started hauling extension cords out of the box Regent had been carrying, untangling them and feeding them over to Grue. He began winding a cord around our captive, starting with loops around her wrists and arms, going up her arms to her chest, then back down to bind her body to the chair. We handed him the next cord, and he did much the same thing with Shadow Stalker’s legs. As he worked the bindings up her extremities, he kept his index and middle fingers on her, wrapping the cord over top of them. When he was done with the loops at one spot, he moved his hand up further, then repeated the process.

  “Copping a feel, Grue?” Imp mocked, as she let herself half-spin and collapse lengthwise on the couch.

  “Making sure it isn’t tight enough to cut off her circulation.”

  “Ah. You an expert on that stuff? I didn’t take you for a bondage freak,” she stretched.

  He sighed, “Just get the generator.”

  “I just lay down.”

  “So stand up and then get the generator,” he ordered.

  She made a show of slowly standing and, with exaggerated motions, dragging herself over to the box Tattletale had brought. She retrieved a black plastic portable generator that wasn’t much bigger than a microwave oven. She acted like it was ten times heavier than it was as she hauled it over toward the spot where Sophia sat.

  Grue, for his part, ignored her.

  Once the wires were in place, he used duct tape to secure them, then he got two more chairs, laid them on their sides and taped them to her chair. He was almost done when Imp finally concluded her charade with the portable generator. The LEDs at the ends of the extension cords lit up as we plugged each cord in to the generator, glowing a dim orange. Grue stood, then pushed the refrigerator away from the wall so he could unplug it and plug the appliance into the generator. I couldn’t be sure if it was to ensure a steady current through the wire or because he wanted a working fridge.

  I’d finished unpacking the wires, so I picked up the empty box and entered the living room to put one box inside the other to minimize the mess.

  Bitch had claimed the sofa for herself, reclining with two dogs up beside her. She was rubbing her forearms, which were probably strained from controlling the more unruly dogs with the chains. She glared up at me, and there was something ugly in her expression.

  I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Her dogs, some of her closest friends in the world, had died because she had been saving me, only for her to find out shortly afterward that I had been a traitor. Maybe saving me hadn’t been her primary motivation, but it seemed she’d used the past week and an unhealthy dose of simmering anger to revise her perception of things so I was to blame for what had happened. It wasn’t getting better, either. She seemed to get angrier with every hour spent in my company, and I was worried I’d have to face the brunt of it very soon.

  “She’s awake,” Tattletale called out. I hurried to the kitchen, leaving Bitch where she was.

  Our captive hadn’t budged an inch.

  “She’s sitting there, pretending to sleep in the hopes that we’ll say something. It would be clever, might even work, if I wasn’t here,” Tattletale said, with a bit of a wry tone.

  Shadow Stalker’s head rose and swiveled as she surveyed the full extent of her bindings. Then she glanced at us.

  After a long pause, she spoke, “Electrical cords.”

  “Strongly advise you to avoid using your power to pass through them,” Tattletale answered, “And in case you’re thinking of dropping straight down through the floor, don’t. We’ve got extra lying under the chair.”

  The heroine leaned hard to one side, looked down. “Hm.”

  “You’ll be a little groggy,” Tattletale grabbed the last remaining chair from beside the kitchen table to sit down opposite the vigilante ‘heroine’. “The fight took a lot out of you, and we tased you, and I took the liberty of sticking you with one of your own tranquilizer bolts.”

  “You don’t hold back,” Shadow Stalker commented, seemingly unfazed by her circumstances. She tested the strength of her bonds, experimentally.

  “Says the person who tried to slit my teammate’s throat,” Regent spoke.

  Shadow Stalker looked at me, the eyes behind her mask moving to my throat. “Tough costume.”

  She doesn’t even deny it. I can’t believe I’ve gone to high school with this lunatic. I resisted the urge to respond, shrugged instead. Too easy to get into an argument, too easy to let something slip and reveal who I was.

  “Well, you fuckers got me,” she cocked her head to one side, “What’s next?”

  We all turned to look at Regent. Regent, in turn, gave Shadow Stalker a serious look. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. Tattletale stood from the chair, and Regent sat, putting himself four feet away from the heroine. His mask was a plain white, a half-smile perpetually frozen on the smooth, unadorned face.

  Her eyes went wide behind the eyeholes of her mask, and she pulled hard against her bonds, “No! Fuck! Have you seen his files? You don’t know-”

  “We have an idea,” Tattletale interrupted.

  “Fuck you!
” Shadow Stalker shouted.

  “Guys, do me a favor?” Regent asked, not taking his eyes off Shadow Stalker. He smacked his scepter into the palm of one hand, “Gag her, then give us some privacy?”

  “You sure?” Grue asked, as Tattletale moved over to Sophia’s side, bent down to get some excess cord, and lifted up her mask just enough to wind the cord into her mouth. The duct tape made a tearing noise as she freed a length from the roll. I could still make out the swearing on Shadow Stalker’s part as she tugged at her bonds and rocked her seat. The setup Grue had created by duct taping the other two chairs to her helped ensure she couldn’t throw herself to the ground and maybe break the chair in the process.

  “I’m cool.” Regent shifted the position of his stool a half-foot to his left, so he could lean back against the corner of the refrigerator. He brought one of his feet up onto the seat of the stool and rested his chin on his knee.

  “Just as long as you’re sure,” Grue spoke. “How long?”

  Regent glanced at Grue, then looked to Shadow Stalker, “Depends on her. Could be fifteen minutes, could be three hours.”

  Shadow Stalker grunted, long and loud.

  Grue began ushering us out of the room, and we obeyed, except for Imp, who seemed to need a little bit of an extra nudge – Grue blocked her view of Regent and our captive with his body and put a hand on her shoulder to push her toward the door. Following, I cast a backward look over my shoulder, saw Shadow Stalker’s arm twitch. She winced, mumbled a swear word around her gag.

  Grue shut the kitchen door behind us, and for a moment, all was dark, quiet and still.

  Bitch and her dogs were all lying together on and around the couch, Bitch’s hand on Angelica’s head, where the dog lay just below her. Only Angelica’s eye was open – Bitch and the other three dogs had their eyes closed. Angelica’s excess flesh had been shed and deposited on the floor as she shrunk down to her natural size. It looked like Bitch had kicked most of it one corner of the living room; blood and other fluids streaked the carpet between the base of the couch and the corner.