Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Thank you,” the girl sobbed into my shoulder.

  I hugged her back, reflexively, a little shaken. Why had it taken this long for someone to say that simple thing to me? I’d wanted to be a hero, once upon a time.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I managed to get the words out.

  “Thank you,” she repeated.

  I stood, letting the girl rest her hands on my shoulders to get to a standing position herself. I glanced at Senegal and Minor. No problems there.

  “Oh my god.” I wasn’t sure who it was.

  It was the girl we’d rescued, staring at me.

  “What?”

  “You go- you went to Winslow High.”

  “No,” I stepped back, pulling my shoulders out from beneath her hands.

  “Yes. You’re the locker girl. I almost didn’t recognize you without the glasses, but everyone at school knows who you are. You’re with the Merchants now?”

  “You’re thinking of the wrong person,” I said, with a note of irritation in my voice.

  “No, I’m almost positive. You were that girl that got shoved in that rank locker with all that stuff they carted away in biohazard bags. The girl who went so mental they had to have a group of cops and paramedics haul you away for the first month of the semester.”

  “Enough!” I shouted, suprised at my own temper. The group of teenagers who were having drinks by the bathroom turned to look at us.

  Seeing my burst of anger, the girl did a complete one-eighty, from awe and surprise to desperate apologies. That didn’t necessarily improve things. “Oh god, I’m sorry. You know, I didn’t think about how it would bother you, saying that. I really did want to help, you know, to do something back then, but-”

  “But you didn’t,” I growled at her. “Just like everyone else, you left me in that locker. You didn’t go get help. You didn’t report the people who did it, not even anonymously. You felt bad? You wanted to help? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Is it supposed to be some consolation? You were too lazy or cowardly to step up and do anything about it, but hey, at least your heart was in the right fucking place, huh?”

  “No, that’s not…” there were tears in her eyes, and she was having trouble stringing words together. I should have felt bad, for going off on someone who was probably in a pretty delicate emotional state, but I wasn’t feeling particularly gentle.

  “You obviously heard the story about me being hospitalized, you probably helped spread it.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. She startled as Brooks passed Minor and Senegal and approached us with a brisk stride. It threw her off her stride, and she stumbled over her words as she tried to pull her excuse together. “Um. It, um. It was Emma Barnes, she-”

  Brooks had reached Lisa’s side and informed her, “Found him.”

  “Emma Barnes what?” I asked the girl, trying to bring her focus back to the conversation we’d been having.

  She looked from Brooks to me, and I could see how lost she was.

  “Nevermind,” I cut her off before she started stumbling over her words again.

  “What’s going on?” the girl asked.

  “We came here for an errand,” Lisa answered her, “Up to ‘locker girl’ here to decide if you can tag along.”

  “You can’t- you can’t leave me here,” the girl said, eyes widening. She looked to me, pleading.

  I sighed. “She can come.”

  “More dead weight,” Brooks frowned.

  I raised an eyebrow. “For someone with the primary job of giving people medical care, you’re pretty dead-set against helping others.”

  “I have a low tolerance for people who get themselves into an ugly situation and then expect others to bail them out.”

  “That’s fine,” Lisa said. “Just so long as you do your job.”

  “I always do,” Brooks retorted.

  “What’s going on?” the girl said, for the second time, “Who are you?”

  “Just shut up and keep up,” I said. We joined Senegal and Minor at the entrance to the hallway, then followed Brooks’s lead as he strode across the mall. We got bogged down once more in the press of people dancing, jumping and grinding in the center of the mall. We would have lost sight of Brooks, but he hopped up onto the side of the water fountain by the collapsed stairwell to get high enough for us to see him. Minor and Senegal cleared the way for the rest of us.

  “I’ll do the talking?” Lisa offered.

  “Sure,” I said. It made sense. If we did rescue Bryce, I didn’t want either him or his sister making a connection between Skitter and the girl in his rescuer’s group.

  As we reached the side of one grouping of stalls, I spotted Jaw standing in front of Bryce. He had one steel-toed boot planted on the same wooden bench that Bryce was seated on, his broad gut almost in the boy’s face. Beside Bryce was a teenaged girl with bleached blond hair, who was almost lying across the bench in her attempt to keep back from Jaw. There was nobody near enough to Bryce to be his kidnapper, nobody with a weapon, no handcuffs or chains.

  Shit. I didn’t like what that suggested.

  “This your boy?” Jaw asked, as he noticed us.

  “Yeah,” Lisa said, without even glancing at me. “What happened, Brycie? You join the Merchants and neglect to tell your sister, go to stay with her, and then give all the info on where she’s staying to your new friends? You that big a scumbag?”

  Bryce scowled. I could see him trying to look confident in front of his girlfriend. “Not what happened.”

  “Then tell me a story, kid. Keep in mind, what you say plays a big role in what happens in the next few minutes.”

  “There’s no story to tell,” Bryce glared at her. “Our house falls down, my family moves in with my dad’s friend. Everyone else goes to work, I’m left with two of the lamest fucking families ever. I was doing more chores in a matter of days than I’ve done in the rest of my life combined.”

  “Poor baby,” Jaw rumbled. Bryce looked up at the man and then looked away, angry.

  “Got sick, then when I get better my sister drags me to this church, same fucking thing. Lame people, lame place, and I just know I’ll be doing more fucking chores to ‘earn my keep’. Fuck that. Some people came to trash the church, and I figured, hey, there’s a way out. Have some fun.” He cast a quick glance at the bleached blond girl next to him.

  Fuck.

  “Got a reality check for you,” Lisa told him, stepping closer, “Those people who ‘trashed’ the church? They hurt your sister.”

  “What? No-”

  “She’s in ICU, bro,” Lisa lied.

  I didn’t get a chance to see where she was going from there, because Lisa was interrupted by a booming voice that rang through the entire mall. “Hey Sisterfuckers!”

  The music had died all at once, and a slow roar spread through the entire mall, rising to a climax. Cheering.

  All heads were turning to look the same direction. I followed their line of sight.

  A crude platform had been pulled together at one side of the mall, where the rubble was piled highest. The leading figures of the Merchants stood at the front, just behind a railing of metal bars that had been haphazardly welded together.

  Skidmark held the microphone and wore his traditional costume, dark blue and skintight, with the lower half of his face and the area around his eyes exposed. As costumes went, it was pretty lame, even with the cape that he’d added since the last time I’d seen him. Especially with the cape. There were people who could pull off that sort of thing, like Alexandria. Skidmark wasn’t one of them.

  His girlfriend was at his side, her shoulder touching his. Squealer was streaked with oil stains, with some even in her hair. She wore a white top and jean shorts that were each so skimpy that she was more indecent than she’d be if she had been naked. She had a remote control in one hand, and her makeup was practically caked on. Not so dissimilar from the girl we’d just rescued, in that respect.

  Beside Skidma
rk, opposite Squealer, was Mush. He bore a resemblance to a particular pink skinned, scrawny goblin of a creature from those fantasy movies. His hair was so thin he might as well be hairless, his large eyes were heavy-lidded with dark circles beneath them, and his skinny limbs were contrasted by a bulging pot-belly. All of the worst features of an old man and a malnourished child thrown together. Except he was real; just an ugly, ill person.

  Behind them stood their subordinates. I recognized Trainwreck, but there were five more I couldn’t place. Five who, for all I knew, were new to the cape scene.

  Trainwreck’s presence was interesting. Was he still with Coil? On our side?

  “That’s more capes than they had a month ago,” I spoke, leaning close to Lisa and pitching my voice low.

  “They’ve been recruiting,” Lisa muttered.

  When Skidmark spoke, his voice carried through every speaker and set of headphones in the building. “You quim-jockeys up for tonight’s main event!? They don’t get any better than this!”

  The cheering swelled again, that ear-splitting sound you got when hundreds of people all tried to shout louder than the rest.

  Skidmark raised his hands, and then swept them in a downward motion. Twin shimmers not dissimilar to the heated air you saw above a hot road blasted towards the crowd. Where the shimmers touched the ground, they changed the color of the flooring, creating bands of glowing ground six or seven feet wide. After swirling for a moment, the colors settled into a gradient, stretching from violet on one side of the line to a pale blue on the other side.

  The people who found themselves in the middle of the effect were dragged towards the blue side, as if they were standing on a steep slope. The crowd roared, and began pushing people towards the effect. Anyone who touched the purple side was caught with a greater force, dragged through to the blue side and cast towards the bulk of the crowd, sliding on the ground with enough force to stagger anyone they ran into. The blue side seemed weaker, with anyone stepping on it finding strong resistance, as if they were trying to move against a strong headwind on oil-slick ground. Only a handful of people made it out without being pushed back by the effects of Skidmark’s power or by the crowd that ringed the area.

  Skidmark repeated the process to draw what I realized was a crude square in the middle of the mall, the ‘blue’ sides facing inward. As he layered his power over the same area, the colors of the effect became darker, the ground below less visible and the effects on the people were all the more violent. The blue sides had become dark blue, and instead of simply pushing against those who touched them, they threw people back towards the center of the ring.

  “You piss-licking losers know what the red armband means!” Skidmark crowed, “Bloodshed! Violence! We’ve got ourselves a free for all brawl!”

  The noise the crowd made reached a peak it hadn’t even approached before.

  “Last five standing in the ring get a prize!” a mean smile spread across his face. Even from where I stood on the other side of the mall, I could see how bad his teeth were. “No rules! I don’t give a shitstained fuck if you jump in at the last second or if you use a weapon! Anything goes!”

  People howled, hooted and jeered, but I could see some of the faces of the people trapped in the ‘ring’. Most of them weren’t cheering.

  “Fuck me,” Lisa whispered, “He’s trying to get people to have trigger events. That’s how he’s recruiting parahumans.”

  “Our contestants don’t seem to be too excited!” Skidmark shouted. “Need an incentive? Let me tell you cockgarglers what you stand to win!”

  He snapped his fingers, and one of his powered subordinates, a woman with long hair covering her face, hurried forward. She held a metal box.

  Skidmark placed the case on the railing and popped it open. He placed what looked like a metal canister on the railing, then withdrew the next. By the time he was done, five metal cylinders were spaced out in front of him.

  He picked up the center canister and began unscrewing it. “Before, we gave our winners the pick of the pick, the best stuff our boys and girls have been able to grab from the rich assholes with their fancy-as-fuck houses and jobs!”

  Every eye in the place was on him.

  “But tonight is fucking special, because we won the lottery when we found this shit!”

  He withdrew a stoppered glass vial from the canister and gripped it in his right hand. With his other hand, he held the stainless steel canister. He thrust both hands over his head, each object clenched tight.

  “Superpowers in a can!”

  11.06

  “Is he for real?” I looked to Lisa for an answer. “Can they do that?”

  “Don’t think he’s lying.”

  The crowd roared, and I turned to see why, just in time to see the aftermath of the first attack. One of the Merchants in the ring had just bludgeoned someone with a length of pipe. Backing away, he found someone he knew, and through some unspoken agreement, they drew together, each protecting the other’s back.

  Others were having similar ideas. Groups of friends were banding together, leaving others alone. One of the loners found another guy without any friends around, shouted something I couldn’t hear, and they drew together. His new ‘friend’ turned and struck him down from behind not two seconds later. The traitor got his just reward when three young men and a grungy looking old man tackled him to the ground and started beating him.

  At the corner nearest to us, a woman got smashed in the nose. The spray of blood landed in the area of Skidmark’s power and shot straight back into the melee.

  Inspired by this sight, a man who stood outside the ring grabbed a piece of rubble and threw it down at the edge of the ring. The chunk of concrete flew into the massed people, striking a man who was crouching and trying to avoid the worst of the fighting.

  This act started a chain reaction. The audience turned on the man who’d launched the chunk of rubble, clustering around him, punching and kicking him, and shoving him to the ground. Others were inspired by his idea, and did much the same thing, using Skidmark’s power to pelt the people in the arena. One man helped by a kid who might have been his son upended a trash can on the glowing ground to send rotted food and other rubbish flying into the ring. Others moved to stop them or shove anyone who got close enough onto the colored ground. The violence was escalating and it didn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon.

  “We should go,” Lisa said. She turned to Jaw and ordered, “Bring the boy.”

  Jaw grabbed Bryce by the shirt and hauled him to his feet. He pointed at the girl who had been sitting next to Bryce, “And her?”

  “Leave her.” Lisa called out, raising her voice to be heard over the screams and cheering. She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out.

  The crack of a gun being fired went off somewhere. Instead of stopping the crowd, it seemed to provoke them, pushing those who hadn’t been participating into action, like runners who’d been waiting for a starter’s pistol. It was as though the Merchants felt more secure with their hands around people’s throats than they did trying to get away.

  Skidmark gripped the railing as he hunched over it, grinning a smile with teeth that seemed to be every color but white. His eyes were almost glittering as he watched the chaos he’d set in motion.

  We moved as a group, Lisa’s soldiers in a tight circle around us with Bryce, Lisa, the rescued girl and me in the center. We made our way toward the nearest exit, but our way was barred by an unfolding brawl between two groups a good distance from the main spectacle. Rivals? Enemies seeing an opportunity to exact vengeance for some past event?

  The girl who’d been on the bench with Bryce ran for the thick of the melee surrounding the ring. She was shouting, almost screeching, “Thomas! Mom!”

  Bryce struggled in an attempt to go after her, but Jaw held him firm.

  I almost missed what happened next. A woman from the group fighting in front of us ran, and a band of young men charged after her, which brought
them just in front of us.

  We collectively backed out of the way, but Bryce had other intentions. The boy wrenched out of Jaw’s grip and threw his shoulder into the small of Senegal’s back. The man was only barely able to keep from stumbling forward into the charging Merchants, but with his attention elsewhere, Bryce managed to slip past.

  I joined Minor and Brooks in giving chase, and though Minor was bigger and stronger, I had the advantage of a slight build. I ducked between the people and followed Bryce into the thick of the ‘audience’.

  Bryce had reached his girlfriend, and wrapped his arms around her. Still holding her, he turned to see us approaching. I was in the lead, and Minor close behind me.

  He looked the other way, past the glowing perimeter of Skidmark’s arena, and I followed his gaze to where a middle-aged woman with bleached blond hair and a taller black man with a scar on his lips stood.

  I recognized them from Sierra’s description. They were the same people who had attacked the church.

  The man -Thomas?- beckoned with a wave of his arm, and Bryce and his girlfriend ran, dropping to the ground as they touched the border of the ring.

  “No!” I shouted, as the effect of Skidmark’s power sent them careening into the ongoing free-for-all. My voice was lost in the cacophony of the screaming, shouting, hollering crowd.

  I stared helplessly at the unfolding scene. The two teenagers managed to get to their feet and gather together with Thomas, the mother, and one or two others. They were soon lost in the jumble of people that were all punching, kicking and strangling one another, spurred on by adrenaline, self-preservation, alcohol, stimulants and greed. There was little enough room that when someone fell, they were trampled by those that were still fighting.

  Minor reached me and ushered me back to the others, and we backed as far away from the fighting as we could.

  The moment I saw Lisa, I asked her, “Should I-” I left my question unfinished. Should I use my bugs?

  “No. The moment an enemy makes their presence known, Skidmark might try to break this up and send the crowd after any unfamiliar faces. Not saying they’d get us, but they could, and there’d be other victims too.”