Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  This wound – there was no way he could have had it when he came into the ambulance. It was fresh. All three of the people here had been executed. It had been done in cold blood, clean, and I hadn’t even noticed with my bugs on watch.

  Which left me very concerned for the people I’d left in the warehouse. I hopped down from the back of the ambulance, checked my surroundings, and then ran across the street.

  I was a single step inside the door when I saw him. Tall, faceless, featureless, but for the chains and ball joints that connected his ceramic-encased limbs. One hand was raised, a single finger raised, ticking from side to side like a metronome. Like an old-fashioned parent scolding an errant child.

  The other hand was folded back, a long telescoping blade extended from the base of Mannequin’s palm. The blade was pressed to the neck of the gray-haired doctor, so she had to stand on her tiptoes, her head pressed back against his chest.

  I didn’t have a chance to move, to speak, or to use my power before he retracted the blade. It slid across her throat, shearing through the skin, and arterial blood sprayed forth to cover some of the ground between us. She collapsed to the ground.

  Mannequin’s knife hand went limp, dangling at his side. His other hand remained in position, finger wagging, as if admonishing me for what I had been doing. Saving people from the Nine, tending to the hurt and scared.

  I should have anticipated this.

  I stepped forward, almost without thinking about it, and he dropped his other hand while taking three long steps to back away from me. His movements were ungainly, as if he was about to collapse to the ground with each one. No sooner had I wondered why when I saw his feet. His ‘toes’ pointed at the ground, and blades had sprouted from slots at the front of each foot. He was perched precariously on the honed knife points, walking on the blades.

  Reaching behind my back, I drew my baton and knife. I tensed as he moved in reaction, closing half the distance between us, lurching three or four feet to the right, then back again.

  I caught on immediately. He was evading the bugs that had been hovering in the air between us, the knife-stilts that extended from his feet delicately avoiding contact with the bugs that were on the ground. The contact he did make with the bugs was gentle, sliding against them like a brush of wind. I only noticed because I was paying attention.

  He didn’t need to avoid my swarm. He was taunting me. Letting me know exactly how he had gotten so close without me realizing it.

  I flicked out my baton to its full length. He responded by doing the same with the telescoping blades that unfolded from his arms. His weapons were longer, both sharp.

  Not taking my eyes off him, I used my bugs and my peripheral vision to track the other people in the warehouse. Too many were too hurt to move, and those who could move had backed into corners and to places where they had cover.

  Still, this was his battlefield. He had far too many hostages at his disposal. He was faster than me, stronger, tougher.

  I was pretty damn sure that his power was as complete a counter to mine as anyone could hope for. Anyone who had paid attention to the news in the past five years knew who he was, what his story was. Mannequin had once been a tinker who specialized in biospheres, terrariums and self-contained ecosystems. A tinker who specialized in sustaining life, sheltering it from outside forces; forces that included water, weather, space… and bugs.

  The only difference between then and now was that he was using his power to help and protect himself and himself only.

  “Motherfucker.” Even without intending to do it, I used my swarm to carry my voice. His head craned around, as if to look at the swarming bugs who had just, for all intents and purposes, spoken. Eventually his ‘face’ turned back to me.

  “I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to do it,” my voice was a low snarl, barely recognizable as my own beneath my anger and the noises of the swarm. ”But I’m going to make you regret that.”

  12.07

  Mannequin lunged for me, his bladed toes biting into the ground for traction. He moved fast enough that his arms trailed behind him like twin ribbons in a strong wind.

  He stopped several paces away from me, turning his body to swing at me with his right arm and the three foot long blade that was attached to it. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he’d fall well short. But his arm extended on a chain, giving the swing just enough reach to put the blade on a collision course with my head.

  I parried it with my baton. The hit was heavy, more like trying to fend off a sledgehammer than what I’d expected. I almost lost my grip on my weapon.

  As the blade bounced off my baton, he reversed the direction his upper body was turning to start spinning like a top. His one attached arm hurtling around him, he sprung at me. I threw myself back and away, escaping by a mere two inches.

  His spinning upper body had, with his right arm spooled out, caused the chain to wind around his body. He began reeling it in, the arm and blade drawing a lazy circle around him. I backed away, thinking I finally had a chance to get my bearings.

  As his detached arm reeled in, the fingers folded backwards around the end of one of his feet, gripping it. He retracted the blade at the toe of the other foot and dropped that foot flat on the ground. The motion seemed to unbalance him, and he teetered, almost falling over. Then in one sudden motion, he righted himself and thrust out with his other leg and the three-foot blade that was now attached to it.

  I didn’t have time to get out of the way, to bring my baton up to defend myself or even to do more than belatedly realize his near-collapse had been a feint. He caught me in the stomach with that same surprising strength as before, then slashed up toward my collarbone with enough force to lift my feet up off the ground. I landed hard on my back, my armor absorbing the brunt of the impact. The sides of my armor panels bit into the ribs of my back where they curved toward my body.

  Keeping the lessons I’d learned from sparring with Grue in mind, I tried to scramble back and away while Mannequin righted himself and put the forearm and hand he had connected to his foot in the right place. Before I could get to my feet, he started striding toward me.

  I drew my bugs around me to conceal my movements as I rolled to one side, set my feet under me and sprinted to his left.

  While still beneath the cover of my bugs, I was struck from behind and knocked face first to the ground. The surprise was as bad as the pain.

  Through the swarm, I sensed him approach until he stood with one foot on either side of me. I felt him wind his fingers into my hair and pull my head up and back. I struggled, trying to catch him in the knee with my baton, but he wrenched me to one side, and I felt a blade press against my throat.

  As he’d done with the gray-haired doctor, he pulled the blade hard against my throat in one long, smooth motion, adjusting for the curvature of my neck.

  In one heartbeat, I formed and initiated a plan. I grunted and made a choking sound, which was all the more realistic because he’d just pulled a length of metal hard against my windpipe; I did want to grunt and I did choke. Then I went limp and had every bug in the area cease moving. Like snowflakes, the flies began drifting down from the air.

  He let go of my hair, and my mask clacked hard against the floor. I heard a girl scream, heard noises and shouts from everyone else.

  I swallowed, partially to check that my throat really hadn’t been cut. My costume had saved me. I wished the gathered onlookers hadn’t witnessed the scene. It would have been better if the bugs had blocked their line of sight, as their noises of fear and alarm were going to get his attention.

  I just needed a second to think. Mannequin could press an assault indefinitely, until he succeeded in cutting my throat open or delivering that mortal wound. It was like sparring against Brian, but worse in every way. Mannequin was stronger, faster, he had more reach, he didn’t get tired, he was good and he was out to kill me. He was versatile in a way no ordinary human could be. He couldn’t be caught in an arm
-lock- his limb would just come free or bend in some screwed up way.

  He could sense me somehow. How? It had been reckless of me to assume that he used sight to get by, especially when he didn’t have eyeholes in his mask. The fact that he hadn’t noticed I was faking meant he wasn’t relying on sight, or his sight was limited enough that he couldn’t make out the lack of blood through the cloud of bugs around us. If he wasn’t hearing my breathing, I doubted he had super hearing either.

  Did he use radar, like Cricket? It would be my first assumption, except my bugs hadn’t heard anything of the sort.

  No. This line of thinking wasn’t accomplishing anything.

  I heard him sharpening his blades against one another with the sound of steel on steel. I could sense the movement, from the bugs that were drifting down onto him. A man in the crowd whimpered, and Mannequin turned towards him.

  The metal singing in the pauses between the scrapes of blade on blade. Mannequin was standing still, observing.

  I had to come up with a plan of attack, or others would pay the price. My deadline was the point, I suspected, that someone lost their nerve and tried to run.

  If I was going to attack, I needed to find a weak point. But he was smart. Before the disaster that had turned him into this, he had been on the brink of solving many of the world’s crises. Overpopulation, renewable energy, effective recycling, world hunger. Even with tinker abilities offering the means, it took someone special to manage that and actually make progress.

  It was a given that he wouldn’t have any blatant weaknesses. Any measure he didn’t think of himself, he would have shored up by now, by virtue of being a longstanding member of the Nine. He’d fought heroes and villains better than me, and he’d learned and improved in the process.

  In that respect, perhaps, he and I weren’t so different. I’d developed in much the same ways. The difference was that he had years more experience. That, and he was batshit insane.

  What would I do in his shoes, with his power?

  I wouldn’t leave any vital openings uncovered. That was a given. My focus -Mannequin’s focus- would be on designing way to make himself a completely closed system. It wasn’t just sensible, it was the whole point of his transformation. He’d have perfect recycling of all waste, dissipation of excess energy by diverting it to mechanical movement, intake of energy by absorption of heat.

  Could that be a clue as to how he sensed the world around him? Heat? Or was it something completely different? Radiation? Radio waves? Electromagnetics?

  Putting myself in his shoes, I had to think of his motivation. Why this form? I’d make myself resemble a doll or a store mannequin because… it was an eternal reminder. Didn’t his wife and kids die when the Simurgh attacked? There was a story there.

  But what else? Why resemble a human?

  To mislead? Maybe the configuration of ‘my’ organs and parts wasn’t human in the slightest. I might have gone the Aegis route and built-in redundancies for everything I could spare. I wouldn’t need a heart, kidneys, or a conventional digestive system, bone marrow or any of that stuff. Everything I could strip away would be more room for equipment, more room for all the pieces and parts that help turn ‘my’ individual body parts into perpetually self-sustaining systems.

  His torso was the biggest section of his body. It wouldn’t have his heart, lungs or any of that, because he didn’t have a circulatory system. More likely, it contained his brain, his sensory organs/system, and whatever mechanism he was using to remotely control his arms, legs, hands and feet. Unless he didn’t want to put all his items in one basket. It was easily possible for some of that stuff to be in his thighs and forearms.

  If I were him… I would have spent hours carefully balancing the ‘ecosystems’ of each individual part of my body. Something that exacting and that fine tuned would be sensitive, fragile. They’d be resistant to impacts, I wouldn’t go around getting into fights if they weren’t. But heat and cold? A crack in that exterior of his? It could wreak havoc.

  Okay. I was getting a sense of him, maybe. That said, none of that mattered if I couldn’t hurt him in the first place. Maybe I was thinking about this all wrong.

  Bugs dealt with threats that were encased in hard shells all the time, didn’t they? They dealt with other species of bugs. There were a hundred solutions there, if I was willing to look for them.

  That was the spark of inspiration I needed. In a matter of seconds, I had a plan.

  It wasn’t a good plan, but it was something. As a just-in-case measure, I could try some other smaller plans, on the off chance that they might distract or even work. Having those options, if nothing else, would make me feel better. Mannequin had just brutally and unquestionably kicked my ass in the span of fifteen seconds, and it was going to be at least two minutes until I could even begin my plan, judging by how long it had taken my bugs to deliver the supplies from my lair.

  The same instant I had that thought, I started everything in motion. Every flying insect near my lair headed indoors to gather what I needed.

  I made a mental note to make a more easily accessible opening to my lair, so I could do this faster in the future.

  I made another mental note to set up a clock with ticking hands, so I could have bugs ride the three hands and have a precise way of tracking time when I was in my territory. I supposed it would have to be an old-fashioned clock, since Shatterbird had screwed up everything else.

  I had to guess. Roughly two minutes until I could start my plan.

  As I lay face down on the floor of the factory, I tried to control my breathing so he wouldn’t notice I was still alive. The beat of my heart in my chest was so intense I was worried it would give me away.

  Staying still was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do, and I had done some hard things before. Knowing that he might leap for someone and end their life any moment, it had me on edge. Every second I could buy here counted because every second I didn’t have to fight him was crucial.

  “Mommy,” the word was drawn out. Had to have come from someone young. A toddler? ”I don’t want to be here!”

  The rhythm of steel rasping against steel ceased. Mannequin went still.

  Shit. So much for my reprieve.

  I pulled myself to my feet and stirred all of the bugs in the area into action. They rose from the floor like a dark whirlwind. I sheathed my knife and gripped my baton in both hands.

  “Mannequin!”

  He stopped and turned his upper body to face me. His head cocked to one side.

  “Yeah,” I said. ”You didn’t get me.”

  He turned back around and started walking toward the mother and the little boy. The pair were huddled between an empty metal frame and a workbench.

  “Hey!” I shouted. ”Come on! Fight me! Don’t you have the balls to take on a teenage girl? Or are they one of the things you cut away!?”

  He didn’t slow or hesitate at my words.

  “Bastard!” I ran for him. It was a hundred percent possible he was baiting me, forcing me into a situation where I had to do something stupid or let the mom and the little kid get hurt. Maybe if I’d been a harder person, I could have let him hurt them, knowing it was smarter in the long run. But I wasn’t capable of doing that.

  What could I even do? I had to make the call in the three or four seconds it took me to cross the floor of the factory. He was more than half-again as tall as I was, and my weapons couldn’t do anything to him.

  I threw myself at the backs of his legs, colliding with the back of his knees and his calves. Not all of his precarious balance was an act. He teetered and collapsed backward onto the floor, his legs on top of me.

  “Go!” I screamed at the mother. ”Run!”

  She did. Mannequin reached out to extend a blade into the back of her leg, and she fell, but someone else hurried forward to help her.

  Mannequin’s left leg snaked around my throat in an impromptu headlock. I tried to slip out, to force his leg apart. Even though
I could move it, I couldn’t squeeze my head through the gap.

  Not counting the time I’d spent lying on the ground, buying time, how long had I lasted? Less than thirty seconds?

  Four blades sprung from the calf of his right leg. He extended it high above me, and they began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, like the blades of a fan. Or a food processor.

  He had me in a headlock, but the rest of me was free to move. Gripping my baton with both hands, I swung it into the whirling blades with as much strength as my leverage afforded me.

  My baton went flying out of my grip, but the blades stopped. My heart sank as I saw them begin to rotate again, slowly.

  They didn’t return to the same blurring speed they’d been at before. A few seconds passed, and they retracted back into his leg.

  I might have been relieved, but I was still in his grip.

  He heaved me upward, positioning himself with two hands and one leg on the ground, the other leg holding me up high. My toes scrabbled to touch ground and fell short. The grip on my neck wasn’t perfect: it wasn’t cutting off my blood flow, it barely impacted my breathing, but it still hurt, and my neck strained with the weight of the rest of my body.

  I drew my knife and gripped the handle. Then I drove it at my throat. Or at Mannequin’s leg, which was folded around my throat. Same idea. I aimed at the ball joint, striking a mere two or so inches from my own face. Once, twice, three times.

  I was swinging for a fourth hit when he shifted positions. I couldn’t be sure if he had hoped to gradually strangle me, to leave me dangling until I started begging or if he’d been poised for something else, but he’d apparently changed his mind. He turned over, his leg unfolding from my throat at the same instant one large hand closed over my face.