Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  When I realized what Genesis was planning, I shifted my bugs to follow. She headed straight for the kitchen window and crashed through the plywood there. She was followed shortly after by my swarm, spilling into the room to spread over windows, ceiling and floor, only a small few darting around the people.

  They turned to run, naturally, running for the door that led to the kitchen and to the hallway. They were met by the remainder of my swarm, a thick cloud of flies, dragonflies, moths, roaches and beetles. I could feel them backing away, four adults, two children.

  “Police are on their way. Gonna swap them with us the second they get to the house. Warning you in advance so we can look confident.”

  Damn.

  “Appreciate that line of thinking, but there’s one small problem,” I said.

  He looked at me, then frowned. “I can’t get a grip on you. You’re doing what you did when you were talking to Legend and Miss Militia.”

  “A little more refined than that, but yeah.”

  “Fuck,” he said. Then he groaned. “And now I’ve lost sight of the cops.”

  “I can deal with them, if you want.”

  “Just find them and I’ll handle that. Where’s your real body?”

  I hesitated. Then I had my clone turn and point to another clone. Just in case he decided to go on the attack.

  “I see you. Right. And the cops?”

  “Over there, but don’t teleport me,” I said. “I’ve got something else in mind, and the visual effect will be stronger.”

  “If I don’t teleport you, I have to fight whichever cop I’m not teleporting,” he noted.

  Cope, I thought. I deigned not to respond, and dismantled the clone that was standing next to him. I did draw an arrow pointing him to where the two officers had circled one corner of the property.

  Rather than visit the house myself, I gathered some of the bugs I’d sent to the room and began forming a clone there. From what I’d seen of the process, it was sort of spooky in its own right. A person materializing from vermin. I carried the small camera and microphone towards the swarm, using the video feed to remotely see the clone from a short distance so I could match the finer features and body shape. When I was done, I added the remaining bugs to the swarm, the camera and microphone hidden in their midst, and shifted the camera into place.

  I recognized our mayor. Never someone I’d paid a whole lot of attention to, given how I wasn’t exactly a voter, but I recognized him in a general way. His face tended to pop up in advertisements and media. If the city wasn’t in the state it was in right now, it would be on every TV channel, well into the swing of things for the imminent mayoral elections. He was fifty or sixty, with horseshoe-pattern baldness on a round head and large ears that sort of stuck out.

  The woman next to him would be his wife. She had the look of someone who had purchased their good looks, with stylish clothes, an expensive haircut and top-notch makeup and skin care. She was clutching her husband, who was holding his two twin daughters.

  There were two young adults there too. Older teenagers or young twenty-somethings. The guy looked seriously well-built, the girl statuesque; I got the vibe of an athlete and his cheerleader girlfriend more than I got the impression of a brother and sister with good genetics. The guy stood a little in front of his parents and girlfriend, as if he wanted to protect them. Genesis and I stood on the other side of the dining room table.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “A conversation,” Trickster spoke. He had hopped up to the ledge of the ground-floor window and was now hopping down, one hand on his hat. He adjusted it. “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”

  The mayor looked at each of us in turn. Well, at Trickster and the fake-selves that Genesis and I were producing. “To what do I owe this questionable pleasure?”

  “We hear you’re going to Washington tomorrow.”

  I saw the son turn to look over his shoulder at his dad. I also noted that he was discreetly drawing a phone from his pocket, concealed by the way he’d turned his body. If I couldn’t sense movements through my bugs, I would have missed it.

  I could have said something, but I stayed quiet. Instead, I drew Atlas to a point near the window and began uncoiling and stretching out the lines of pre-prepared silk I’d already drawn out for emergency use.

  “I am.”

  “Well, I think it would only be fair if you heard from all of your constituents,” Trickster remarked. “Before you come to a decision.”

  “You pay taxes?” The son asked, shifting his position again so his right hand was hidden behind his girlfriend. I could feel him adjusting his grip on the phone. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t actually done anything to it. I waited for him to stop moving his hand, and then threaded a series of flying bugs between his fingers and the device, winding the thread around it.

  “Rory,” the mayor spoke, his tone a warning. He turned his attention to Trickster. “And? Which outcome are you hoping for?”

  “I think it would be excellent if the city kept on going. Things are getting better.”

  “And you’re putting yourselves in charge,” the mayor noted.

  “We’re just keeping the peace,” Trickster said. ”Doing a better job than your local heroes.”

  “If you have a liberal interpretation of ‘peace’, maybe,” the mayor said.

  Rory moved his fingers, tapping the screen, and I had Atlas fly away from the window. The phone was torn from his hand and bounced off of the window pane before landing outside. Atlas reeled it in further while Rory looked around in confusion and alarm.

  “No phone calls,” I spoke, buzzing through my swarm.

  “Give that back,” he said.

  “Is your phone really a priority?” Trickster asked.

  “Yeah,” Rory said. “Yeah it is.”

  “Then you should have known better than to use it here,” Trickster said, shrugging.

  “Give it back,” Rory turned to glare at ‘me’. At my swarm-double.

  Trickster chuckled, “Never really got that smartphone craze. People go gaga over the things.”

  No, I thought. Something’s off.

  What I wouldn’t give for Tattletale’s power. Or even to have her present. How would she pull the pieces together, fill in the blanks? She could have looked at the big picture here and known exactly what was going on, while I was left to guess.

  The obsession over the phone? I couldn’t draw any conclusions. What else? The family dinner with the son bringing his girlfriend over? Nothing too strange.

  They weren’t scared.

  The little girls were glaring at us as they clutched their dad, Rory was too focused on his phone when his family was in imminent danger, and Rory’s girlfriend was staying very still. Topping it off, the mayor was too casual in how he was addressing us.

  Ah.

  “I think it would be in everyone‘s best interests if Brockton Bay kept going. Not quite fair to judge the fate of the city at its lowest point,” Trickster said.

  “Are you being ironic on purpose?” The mayor asked. “You’re making a very strong case for why the city shouldn’t continue down the path it’s been going down, just by being here.”

  Again, that confidence. One didn’t trade banter with someone who was implicitly threatening them and their family with bodily harm. Not if they didn’t have some measure of security their would-be assailants weren’t aware of.

  I considered the various possibilities. Not too hard to narrow down the options, with the process of elimination.

  I drew the words against the wall, above and behind the gathered family.

  Trickster didn’t seem to notice. “I’m surprised you aren’t showing us more respect. You’d think we’d almost be equal on a level, current guy in charge of the city talking to the aspiring rulers.”

  “I earned my position through hard work, dedication and by convincing the people that it was in their best interests to vote for me. Which it was. You three? You’re criminals. T
hugs. You didn’t earn anything.”

  “Thugs? Do Thugs take on the Slaughterhouse Nine and walk away?”

  “All you have going for you is violence and intimidation. You can’t accomplish anything but destruction that way.”

  I made the words on the wall bigger. Trickster didn’t see them, or he didn’t care.

  “Trickster-” I started, speaking through my swarm. I need to have a word with you.

  “Well,” Trickster said, cutting me off, “If you insist, who am I to argue?”

  In an instant, one of the two twin girls was replaced by one of the dining room chairs on our side of the table, and vice versa. Trickster grabbed her hair and pulled her close, drawing a gun and pressing it to her head.

  “Trickster,” Genesis said, in the same second I moved forward to stop him.

  Was she trying to stop him as well, or had she seen the words?

  She settled one talon on his shoulder. I wasn’t sure what signal she gave, but Trickster paused.

  Whatever it was, he must have looked up at the words I’d written, because Rory noticed. He whipped his head around to see, and I couldn’t disperse the bugs fast enough.

  ‘Triumph’ written on the wall with bugs with a triangle beneath, pointing at his head. Above his ‘girlfriend’ were the words ‘Prism or Ursa’.

  The mayor’s son was the civilian identity of Triumph. Enhanced physical prowess and a concussive shout that could punch holes through concrete.

  He whipped his head around and stared at Trickster. Before the teleporter could pull the trigger or do anything else, Triumph shouted. His sister was untouched, but Trickster was sent flying into the wall hard enough that he was half-buried in the drywall.

  “Duck, Kyla!”

  The little girl threw herself to the ground as Triumph lunged forward, kicking the dining room table. It slid halfway across the room, over ‘Kyla’ and into the wall. The side slammed into Trickster’s midsection, and the table’s contents flew into the villain and the wall around him. Trickster went limp, his upper body flopping over the table.

  I mobilized the swarm, but Triumph was already shouting again, slamming Genesis into a wall, much as he’d done with Trickster. A third bellow annihilated my swarm-clone, and he turned to start eradicating my spread out bugs while his family ran for the hallway, led by the superheroine.

  Couldn’t get a serious number of bugs together in one place to mount a serious attack without Triumph obliterating them and he was either too angry or too stubborn to surrender to the stings and bites I was managing to inflict. The superheroine had her phone out and I wasn’t able to tug it from her hand like I had with Triumph’s. They would be getting reinforcements shortly. Even if I took all of them out of action, I’d still have to get Trickster out of there and escape with my own hide intact.

  “Damn it,” I cursed. I broke into a run, accompanied by my swarm-doubles, hurrying for the house. I couldn’t leave him there, not without jeopardizing everything. He struck me as being disloyal enough to offer information for his own sake, or information about the Undersiders, at the very least. And leaving him behind would leave a permanent rift between our team and the Travelers. It could even mean being dropped by Coil, an excuse for him to separate me from my teammates.

  That said, I couldn’t save him or mount a serious attack with just my doubles. He was hitting too hard, handling my bugs too effectively. I could have killed or critically injured his family with the few bugs I did have, brought them down with the more dangerous insects, but I wasn’t willing to go that far. Not with people who didn’t deserve it.

  Atlas wouldn’t be strong or versatile enough to carry an unconscious body to safety. If I was going to haul Trickster out of there, it would have to be with my own two hands.

  I could only pray I wasn’t exposing myself to whatever assassination ploy Coil had in mind. Or worse, that I wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted me to do.

  15.09

  I had two different heroes to deal with, one of whom I couldn’t identify yet. That posed something of a problem: each likely possibility for the heroine’s identity made for a very different scenario in how this fight could play out.

  Process of elimination had told me that Rory would be one of the local heroes, because there weren’t any prominent male villains who I couldn’t identify with their masks off; Coil had outed Empire Eighty-Eight, which had split into the Chosen and the Pure and everyone else had been eliminated or driven out of the city. I’d identified him as Triumph from his build. Assault and Cache weren’t as muscular, the Wards were younger and smaller, and the remainder of local heroes were women. That had been easy enough once I’d pegged him as a cape.

  His ‘girlfriend’ was harder to pin down, both as a cape and in terms of her costumed identity. I’d read her confidence and judged that she wasn’t terrified enough to be ignorant about Rory’s secret. She probably wasn’t a civilian in the know, either, because she hadn’t been cowering behind Rory.

  Going by her appearance, I didn’t think she could be Miss Militia or Battery. Her blonde hair didn’t fit, for one thing, and she was too tall, too muscular. She had to be one of the two female capes who came to Brockton Bay with Legend. It was critical that I figure out which of the two she was before getting into a fight with her. Prism was a duplicator who could consolidate into one body to get a temporary boost in strength, speed and durability. Maybe other areas too. Fighting her would mean staying out of close-quarters combat at any cost.

  Ursa Aurora, by contrast, summoned ghostly ‘bears’ onto the battlefield. On a level, she’d want to fight like I preferred to, relying on her minions while staying out of the thick of things.

  Two possibilities, each requiring very different tactics to handle.

  I set my bugs on her and her alone in the hopes of forcing her hand. Atlas had returned to my side, and I made sure to collect Triumph’s phone before climbing on.

  Triumph had picked up Trickster’s limp body and was mounting a fighting retreat in the direction the heroine and his family had gone. He shouted again and again, controlling the magnitude, force and breadth of each strike to hit the maximum number of bugs with just enough force that he was killing or crippling them without destroying the house.

  Walls of bugs pressed against the exits of the house. If they escaped before I got there, I wasn’t sure I’d catch up. Triumph would be able to run faster than I could, Ursa Aurora could presumably ride her bears like Bitch rode her dogs, and Prism had the ability to move faster after consolidating her clones into one person again; if she didn’t run faster than me, the little boost she got there would keep her far enough ahead.

  There was the family holding them back, yes, but there was also the possibility that there was a vehicle they could all climb into. I could maybe keep up while riding Atlas, but I wouldn’t be able to mount a serious attack while doing so.

  I suspected the makeshift bug-barriers wouldn’t hold up. They wouldn’t stand up to Triumph’s shouts, and Ursa Aurora could summon her ‘bears’. That was if they didn’t choose to just charge through.

  I needed more redundancies. More fallback plans. I began drawing out lines of silk at the lower half of the doorframes, while gathering the bulk of my bugs in the upper halves.

  The question was, would they go through the doors or would they settle for the windows? Would human habit triumph over slightly more abstract thinking?

  The heroine led the way, already under attack from hundreds of bugs. She grabbed a coat from the nearby rack and draped it over herself for cover against the swarm as she threw herself headlong into it.

  Her legs caught on the tripwire and she tumbled down the stairs. I rebuilt the barrier of bugs behind her, condensing it to the point that they couldn’t see through.

  I directed fly-borne spiders to extend threads around the heroine’s arms and legs, as well as her fingers. After a moment’s consideration, I started packing them in her pockets, sending bugs crawling beneath her clothes. />
  Right. A gun at her ankle. I set spiders to the task of binding that up too.

  Maybe she’s a PRT officer? Gun, no apparent powers?

  None of the rest of the family seemed willing to try exiting by the same door after she’d disappeared into the cloud of bugs and promptly shrieked. Okay. That meant I’d separated the family from the woman. Triumph would catch up to them in a moment, so I had to make the most of this advantage if I was going to slow them down further.

  I began moving the bugs from the door towards the family, simultaneously bringing more bugs in behind them.

  They quickly realized they were cornered and backed into the nearby closet, closing it behind them. I could sense them throwing coats and boots down at the gap between the bottom end of the closet door and the ground, trying to block my bugs from getting in.

  Not quite good enough to stop the bugs, but I could leave them where they were.

  As I was arriving on the property, the heroine was partially disabled and Triumph was en route. Genesis would be pulling herself back together in another body, I supposed, but that wasn’t so reassuring – the heroine had made a call to the PRT and there would be reinforcements on the way.

  Okay. How was I supposed to do this? I had to deal with Triumph, but he was shutting down my swarm. I’d probably lose in a straight up fight as well. Whatever damage my bugs were doing with bites and stings, it wasn’t enough to bring him down. He’d kicked a long oak table that had to weigh six hundred pounds at a bare minimum, sent it skidding across the room. There was no doubt he had some superhuman physique. That same advantage might be giving him the ability to hold out against what my bugs were doing.

  I was forced to scale up, to start injecting more than the trace amounts of venom, and I was all too aware of how easy it was to go too far or go over the top.

  Life would be so much easier if I didn’t give a damn about other people’s well-being.

  But I wouldn’t be able to step up my attack without getting more bugs on him, and I wouldn’t be able to do that without a different tactic. I began pulling my bugs out of the house and gathering them. By the time Triumph found his way to the hallway where his family was hiding in the closet, the bugs were almost entirely gone.