Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “E-Eraser?” he answered, making it a question.

  “Like the puny pink nipple on the end of a pencil? Fuck that,” Skidmark snarled.

  “Um,” the boy drew out the noise, all too aware of his audience, probably unable to think straight.

  “Scrub!” Skidmark shouted, and the crowd roared.

  How in the hell was Scrub better than Eraser? In what insane reality?

  Skidmark waited until the noise of the crowd had died down before he raised the vial, “No point in you having a drink of this shit. Wouldn’t do sweet fuck all. Pick someone.”

  The boy stared at Skidmark, processing the words. He flinched as another flash occurred near him. A hand clutching one elbow, he turned toward the crowd. When he spoke, his voice was shaky, “R-Rick! Doug!”

  Two people emerged from the massed people who stood around where the audience had been. One had blood running from his scalp to cover half his face, while the other was coughing violently, blood thick around his mouth and nose.

  “Can… Can I give it to both? Can they share it?” the boy with the glowing hair asked.

  Skidmark chuckled, and it was a nasty sound with very little humor to it. “No, no. You definitely don’t want to do that. Pick one.”

  “Doug. Doug can have it.”

  The boy who was coughing looked up, surprised. The one with blood on his face, Rick, suddenly looked angry. “What the fuck!?”

  A flash of white high above and to the right of the boy with the powers made everyone nearby cringe. It tore away a chunk of a metal beam that was helping to support the damaged roof. People were giving a wider berth to the boy with the powers. I suspected his abilities and his apparent lack of control were the only things keeping Rick from running up and punching him.

  Was this division & the hard feelings on purpose? If it was intentional, if Skidmark was dividing his allies from their former groups and cliques so they couldn’t gang up against him, I’d have to adjust my estimation of him. Not that I’d like him any more, or even respect him, but I’d give him credit for intelligence.

  “You didn’t help me when I got pulled into the ring,” the boy with the powers told Rick, “Doug at least tried. He gets my prize.”

  As Doug approached the stage, taking the long way to keep his distance from his newly empowered ‘friend’, I became aware that my bugs were dying on the roof, where I’d gathered a swarm in preparation during the chaos. A patch here, a patch there.

  No. Not dying. They were stunned, their senses obliterated by bursts of chaos and false sensations. I had an idea of what it was. I’d felt the same thing before.

  I turned to Lisa. Moving my left hand from the scratch on the back of my upper arm, I discreetly pointed up and murmured, “There’s company on the way. We should go before there’s trouble.”

  She looked up, then nodded assent. Tapping Minor on the shoulder, she gave him a hand signal, and he notified the others. We began moving.

  The person on the roof was joined by others. Some bugs died beneath their footfalls. More bugs were stunned as the first individual crawled forward on all fours, around the lip of the roof and onto the ceiling of the mall, hanging off of it by his hands. With the building largely unlit, I couldn’t make him out.

  Newter was here, and the rest of Faultline’s crew.

  We reached the first exit, and no sooner had we reached for the door than the handle disappeared. The gaps separating the door from the wall filled in, as though wax matching the color of the door was dripping through the gaps. There were similar things happening at the other entrances, I saw, the doors fading into the walls, becoming little more than discolored blotches. Nobody else had seemed to notice, with their attention wholly focused on the woman who was making her way down from the stage with the vial for ‘Doug’.

  When the fighting had started, Lisa had dissuaded me from using my power, out of a concern that the ensuing riot and chaos would get people hurt, and that the mob might start to hunt for strangers in their ranks.

  I had no idea why they were here, but it seemed Faultline was about to crash the party in a far more direct way than we had. We were about to see that bad scenario unfold, and our escape routes had vanished.

  11.07

  Newter dropped from the ceiling. The main part of the mall had only the one level to it, but the roof was arched slightly, and he was dropping from one of the higher points. I was bad at estimating distances, but what was that? Fifty feet? Sixty?

  He landed in a crouch, a hair behind the girl who was carrying the vial down the pile of rubble to the base of the platform. As she turned, dust, papers, cigarette butts and fragments of rock stirred around her. They moved in a counterclockwise orbit, rising, increasing in intensity over a span of one and a half seconds. Whatever her power did, Newter stopped it, smacking her in the forehead with his palm, almost gently. She stepped back, as if she’d lost her balance. The building whirlwind around her dissipated into a billowing cloud of dust and her legs turned to rubber beneath her as she tried to step back once more. She fell.

  Newter’s tail encircled the vial before she could drop it, and he flicked it into his left hand. An instant later, he was racing for the stage, almost casually finding stepping stones as he made a beeline for Skidmark and the rest of the group. He was going for the case and the vials.

  Much of the crowd was running after Newter, rushing for the base of the stage and climbing the heaps of rubble to follow. In doing so, they were vacating the center of the mall where the casualties lay. I hated to get closer to the chaos, but I suspected it would be a long time before I had a better chance to find and retrieve Bryce.

  “I’m going after the kid,” I said.

  “Minor, Brooks, escort her,” Lisa ordered.

  On the other side of the mall, Newter had reached Skidmark and pounced for him. In reaction, Skidmark used his power to coat his cape in a layer of his power. He raised it between himself and Newter. Newter was already airborne, unable to change course, but he had the presence of mind to hock a loogie into Squealer’s face. He bounced off of the cape, knocking Skidmark back, and fell to the ground.

  Skidmark used his power to saturate Newter and the ground around him. As his power took hold, Newter was launched through the rungs of the metal railing and down into the midst of the crowd at the base of the stage. Skidmark shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out over the noise of the other Merchants.

  I tore my eyes from the scene and we hurried toward the heaps of unconscious, bloodied and wounded that lay where the arena had been. We were halfway there when the entire mall began to brighten. The barred windows were expanding, and massive torches were lighting on the far sides. Shafts of orange light extended into the mall’s interior, patterned into diamonds by the meshes of bars Labyrinth had erected.

  The wall behind Skidmark and the other ‘upper circle’ members of the Merchants began to bulge inward. Features took form: a face, ten feet tall. Protrusions below it, near the floor of the platform, marked emerging fingertips.

  Labyrinth wasn’t stopping there. Minor had to catch my arm and pull me back to keep me from being caught in the path of another effect in the mall’s floor. The ground cracked and bulged upward as though a mole was tunneling at high speeds just beneath the tile.

  “Get back!” someone shouted behind me. I recognized Lisa’s voice and took her advice, backing away from the hump. Minor stopped me from backing up into another hump that had appeared behind me.

  Stone walls heaved upward from the mounds of broken tile, blocking my path and stopping at a height of twelve or more feet. As more walls rose around me, I saw a door form to my right, and the corridor to my left had a bend in it.

  A maze. She was living up to her name.

  The walls at the outside edges of the mall were altering, now, more faces and body parts making themselves apparent. Like statuary or reliefs. Limbs intertwined and nude figures decorated the interior walls of the mall, each tall enough to extend from flo
or to ceiling, animated so that they moved with a glacial slowness. With a surprising speed, the interior of the mall was coming to resemble some kind of temple.

  I had to admit, I was spooked. That girl’s power was intimidating when she wasn’t on my side. She wasn’t all there, mentally, so the only thing holding her back was the person telling her what to do. If she could make those giant torches, she could set the floor on fire. Or she could have created spikes instead of walls, without leaving the rest of us any place to run. That nobody had been hurt was purely by her choice.

  Stone poles speared down from the roof. Looking up, I saw that the edges of the crack in the roof had fanged teeth, and that figures were sliding down the metal poles. Two female, one obese male. Spitfire, Faultline and Gregor the Snail?

  Not quite. Faultline and Gregor, yes. I didn’t recognize the other woman, and she was too tall to be Spitfire with her mask off. Red haired, slender, older than Spitfire or Labyrinth had been.

  She slid down the pole, up until the moment Trainwreck leaped from the stage and caught the base of the pole with his shoulder. He was built like a football player in a quadruple-thick layer of cast iron protective gear, steam billowing behind him as he tore past the stone pole like it was nothing. It cracked in four places, and the girl dropped out of the air.

  One section of the pole hit the ground in an upright position, and she landed atop it with one foot, wobbling briefly. Controlling the angle the pole fell, she angled her fall toward a nearby wall of the maze.

  It wasn’t enough. Trainwreck smashed the pole from under her, sending her flying through the air to land in the midst of Labyrinth’s maze.

  Labyrinth created a short pillar below the metal case and canisters, and began to extend it towards the gap in the roof. Skidmark used his power to force the things off the top of the pillar and onto the platform, where they rolled. A few stray papers fluttered from the case.

  There was a crack of gunfire, and I saw the momentary light of the shot to my right. I couldn’t see over the wall, but I saw Trainwreck lumbering forward, one oversized metal gauntlet raised to protect his head, the only vulnerable part of his body. I directed some bugs to the scene, and realized that a woman with the exact same proportions as the red-haired woman was firing at Trainwreck. She’d made it through the maze and back to the skirmish with Trainwreck so quickly?

  There was a brief pause in the gunfire, then a single shot fired. Sparks marked the ricochet between his shoulder, the back of his hand, and the armor that rose behind his head. He dropped to one knee with a suddenness that suggested he was wounded.

  I hurried to the wall. I could use my bugs to find my way through the maze, getting a sense of the layout, but I needed something faster. Labyrinth was using her power and adjusting the battlefield with every passing second. The way things were, given how she wasn’t aware of who I was, I was included among her enemies. If I didn’t go now and the battle resolved one way or the other, I might lose my window of opportunity to get Bryce.

  There was no way I was going back without him. The intensity of the emotion I was feeling on the subject surprised me.

  I hated the idea of going back to Sierra and telling her I’d failed. Hated the idea of that conversation on top of the news I had about Bryce joining the same Merchants that assaulted her friend with a broken bottle. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be leader of a territory and know that someone out there was maybe telling others I hadn’t followed through, fighting that constant nagging doubt in the back of my mind that wondered if ‘my’ people were whispering or laughing at me behind my back.

  And maybe a small part of it was that my meeting with my father had been a reminder of how important family was. Bryce was the errant youth, his sister the anxious family member. Were my emotions here tied to the parallel between them and my father and me?

  “Help me over,” I ordered Minor. There was a crash not too far away as Trainwreck tore through one of Labyrinth’s walls.

  “Can give you and Brooks a boost, but not sure if I can follow,” Minor told me, “Maybe if I find a place with something to stand on-”

  “That’s fine. Look,” I drew an arrow on the wall with my bugs, “I can give you directions.”

  There was little surprise on his face at the demonstration of my power. He gave me a curt nod, dropped to one knee, and wove his fingers together to give me a stirrup for my foot. I sheathed my good knife, stuffed the spare between the sheath and the strap that attached it to my midsection and stepped inside the bridge of Minor’s hands. He heaved me up, almost throwing me.

  The cut on the back of my arm burned as I found a grip, then hurt twice as much as I hauled myself onto the top of the wall, my toes scrabbling on the untextured surface for traction. I reached down for Brooks, but he shook his head and waved me aside. He wanted to come up on his own.

  Fine, whatever.

  I hopped down into the next corridor. The far left had an archway leading into one of the more open areas, a circular area that was serving as a clearing for Trainwreck and the red-haired girl to fight.

  I crouched down as I reached the doorway, peeking out and trusting my bugs to give me the fuller story of what was going on. Brooks appeared behind me and crouched, gun raised, his back to the wall. His breathing was quiet and controlled even after his recent climb and jog.

  Trainwreck and the new girl on Faultline’s team were facing off on the far side of this area. Behind Trainwreck, I saw a section of wall toppling, spotted Faultline dashing through the obstruction as though it were barely there. She ran up behind Trainwreck and slashed her fingertips across his heel as he was stepping forward.

  As he set the foot down on the marble floor, his ankle shattered and his foot broke free of his calf.

  He caught the ground with the stump of his mechanical leg, and she darted in close to cut through the knee of his other leg. He fell onto his back as she slipped between his legs, and she quickly turned to begin using her fingertips to cut down the wall, like a jungle explorer using a machete to hack through brush and vines. The red-haired woman joined her.

  The ground rumbled as sections of the black marble floor rose to form into broad, shallow stairs, leading from the two young women to Skidmark’s stage. The capes in Skidmark’s group were struggling to find ground to stand on, as they were crowded back to the edges of the platform by the statue that was still emerging from the wall. A head and two forearms with reaching hands, all in dark stone.

  It was eerie, to see the changes that had occurred in our surroundings in the time it had taken me to cross the wall and wait for the fight to pass. If the attentions of the Merchants had erased any familiarity I had towards the Weymouth shopping center, Labyrinth had cremated the remains and erected something else in its place. It was a cathedral, dedicated to a goddess that was very real and having a very active hand in current affairs. Labyrinth.

  Which reminded me of the fact that I needed to get through this maze. Labyrinth’s power was drawing many of the crawling bugs down into the ground as it refurbished the floors and consumed the piles of trash or rubble. I still had the bugs on the ceiling, but I didn’t want to give our presence away. Of the relatively few bugs I was willing to use, a share were being used to direct Minor and placing them in strategic locations to get a sense of the layout. As the maze took shape in my head, I showed Minor the way.

  I stepped into the clearing and, double checking nobody was in earshot, I approached Trainwreck. Brooks followed just behind me, watching my back.

  Trainwreck didn’t look like much, just going by the face. He had a round face, small eyes, greasy hair tied back in a ponytail and scarred cheeks. He looked like a homeless guy who hadn’t had a shower in a long time. The only thing setting him apart from the Merchants were the gunshot wound near the corner of his jaw and the steam-powered armor that rendered him strong enough to pound the crap out of Armsmaster.

  I asked him in a low voice, “Trainwreck. Are you still working for Coil, or did you le
ave?”

  He tensed, and his eyes turned my way, though he couldn’t turn his head with the hardware around it. I stepped back as he used one arm to prop himself up and get a better look at me.

  “No idea what you’re saying,” he said. He gave me a level stare, and I was almost convinced. But I’d seen him in the parking garage when I first found out Coil was the Undersider’s employer.

  “Right, total nonsense, sorry,” I said. I tried not to show fear as he tried to get to a standing position with his ruined mechanical legs, looming over me. “But if you were working for the man, maybe you could find some excuse to knock over that wall over there…”

  I pointed at the nearest section of wall.

  “You’re fucking nuts,” he told me. He raised his arm, and my legs tensed, ready to leap towards him if he took a swing at us. As big as he was, without him being able to use his legs, being in close would be safer than trying to leap back out of his reach.

  He brought his hand down on the wall I’d pointed at to heave himself to an upright position. The wall fell as he rested his weight on it. Using his other hand to help balance himself, he gripped the wall in his heavy gauntlet and flung the section of wall at Faultline and the red-haired girl. The girl turned and stepped out of the way as the wall rotated in the air, bounced between her and Faultline with mere inches gap between them, and slid back down the stairs. He didn’t pay any further attention to us as we ran for the gap he’d opened.

  My power let me get a general map of the people who were still unconscious or prone, and the bugs wouldn’t stand out too much as they checked the bodies. I went by body types, trying to find people of Bryce’s height and build. The path Trainwreck had opened gave us avenues to two people who could have fit the mark, with a third over the next wall.

  Good news? The first of the prone bodies I went to was Bryce.

  Bad news? He was injured.