Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I had to refocus. The one in immediate peril here was me.

  I considered waiting for the fire to weaken the floorboards before leaping over the foam and plunging down to the lower level, then dismissed that idea. I wouldn’t last that long, for one thing, and there was too much chance of me being injured.

  There was only one real way out of the room, and that was the window. I’d have to ignore the men stationed outside for now. I considered using my knife to try to pry the board free of the wall and the frame. I doubted I had the strength, with my chest hurting like it was, and I doubted I could pry enough boards free in time. He’d put three screws in at each point of contact. Hell, I had suspicions that Calvert had considered the knife when he’d ordered that the windows be boarded up.

  I drew my gun. I wasn’t sure how much information Calvert had, but he hadn’t seemed to care about the possibility of me opening fire on him while he’d been here. That, or he figured his power would give him an out if he happened to get shot in one reality.

  It was hard, not just moving and aiming the gun while I was coughing and still reeling from the hit to my chest, but aiming at the targets I needed. I had only so many bullets, and there were too many planks to use several bullets to remove each one. No, it was better to angle the shot so I was hitting more than one plank at once, both the ones that had been nailed up on the outside of the building and the planks inside the room.

  The recoil of the shot was so fierce that it made the pain in my chest flare up. I dropped the weapon, suppressing coughs. Even behind the lenses of my mask, my eyes were starting to tear up. Not that it particularly mattered, given how I couldn’t see, but it was one more distraction. Bending over redoubled the pain and brought me to the point where I nearly collapsed, coughing to the point that I was seeing spots.

  The floor was warm enough that more sensitive bugs were dying as they touched it. Finding where I’d dropped the gun was a combination of guesswork, fumbling with my hand and using more durable bugs to feel it out.

  I picked it up and shot twice more. Fighting the pain in my chest, I reached up and pulled down on a board. It was splintered in three by the gunfire, two on the left and one on the right, and I managed to use my body weight to get the necessary force to tear it free.

  Three more bullets and I was able to remove one more from the inside. I used the removed board and wedged it into the crack between the two boards on the far side, leveraging one free.

  The gunfire had attracted attention. Someone called out an order, and a dozen machine guns pointed to the window. I went low, hiding not at the base of the window, but near the corner of the room, lying with my feet pointing towards them, my hands over my head, all too aware of the flames on the wall, within arm’s reach.

  Bullets punched through the exterior walls and interior walls both. One clipped through the floor to hit the armor at my back. The impact prompted another coughing fit, worse than any of the ones before.

  I needed to get out, and soon.

  They knew I needed to get out, and they weren’t giving me the opportunity. There was a momentary pause as the soldiers ejected magazines. Or clips. Whatever I was supposed to call them. Guns weren’t my thing. They replaced the clips and opened fire with another barrage.

  I couldn’t lie there, waiting for one to get lucky and hit me, for the smoke to get to me, or for any of the other possible fates I faced.

  My bugs had gathered around the exterior of the building, called to me by my power, clinging to the roof and outside walls near the room. I took note of the cockroaches, then directed them to the trucks that had the building surrounded.

  Cockroaches retained the ability to eat virtually anything. I could have used more, but I’d have to make do. They began eating through wiring.

  My own situation was getting bad, now. The floor was quickly going from warm to hot. The containment foam was stopping the spread of the fire across the floor, but it wasn’t stopping the progression of the flames beneath the floorboards. If the floor caved in beneath me, I’d be as dead as anything.

  Commands went out, and the soldiers switched to firing at me in shifts, only a few firing at a given time while the others stood at the ready. It made for a relentless, unending barrage. The second shift was just starting up when the first of the headlights went out. The cockroaches had found the right wires.

  As the truck headlights started flickering out, I commanded my bugs to gather at the base of the window. No less than five bullets tore through the mass as the bugs collected. The soldiers had only the light of the fires to go by, now, and they’d spotted the anomaly at the window.

  The lump of bugs dropped to the ground, and more bullets penetrated the heap that landed at the base of the building. When the bugs rose, they rose in the general shape of a person, of me.

  I desperately wanted to be out of the room. I was coughing more than I was breathing, and I worried that the next serious coughing fit would see me blacking out before I sucked in enough oxygen.

  But I had to wait. I gathered more swarms and dropped them from the edge of the window. Every bug in a three block radius contributed to forming decoys.

  Each decoy, in turn, had to act like it was sustaining gunfire. They moved slowly, stopping when the bullets hit, some flattening out to mimic falling to the ground. It made for slow progress as they advanced to the fence.

  I couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I knew I should make one or two more decoys before going ahead, but the conditions of the room were going from unbearable and dangerous to critical. I approached the windowsill as the next mass of bugs gathered, submerging myself in the midst of them, my hands on the window frame. I tried peeking through, but my hazy, ruined eyesight only offered me a glimpse of one blot where a single truck far to my left had a working headlight. I faced a small army; I was about to drop two stories to what had once been someone’s garden, now a muddy mess of dirt and detritus, and-

  One bullet hit me in the forearm, not too far from where Brutus had bitten me, months ago. I slumped onto the windowsill, cradling my arm. More out of desperation than anything redeemable, I forced myself forward between the broken planks and let myself drop to the ground below.

  The landing wasn’t as hard as it could have been, but it wasn’t gentle either. I was left writhing, dry heaving, much of my attention on keeping from screaming in pain and keeping the bugs all around me.

  I used all the residual willpower I could manage to turn over, putting my back with the armor of my utility compartment and the added fabric of my cape towards the ongoing gunfire from Calvert’s personal army. I covered the back of my head with my hands and fought the urge to cough. I doubted anyone would hear if I did, with the constant gunfire and the sound of something collapsing inside, but I couldn’t risk a coughing fit that left me blind to my surroundings or passing out.

  Now I was left with the task of passing through the perimeter. One of my swarm-decoys had reached the fence, and was apparently doing a good enough job of selling the possibility that it was me that they felt compelled to double-check with the occasional burst of machine gun fire. I commanded it to start climbing.

  I had six decoys now, with another in progress at the window. I’d planned to crawl, to get to the fence and find my way through, but with my wrist like it was…

  One of Calvert’s men lit another molotov and tossed it at the base of the fence where the decoy was climbing. It was obliterated in an instant, and Calvert’s men were forced to back away from the resulting bonfire.

  If Thomas Calvert was using his power to guide his men, to give them an advantage and give them directions that would help narrow down the decoys, then I’d inevitably face the same fate as the decoy had after I got to the fence.

  But he wasn’t giving directions. He was in the truck, watching. No radios were sounding with instructions, not yet. He had to protect his perimeter, keep me from getting to freedom… but he was in a reactive position, not an offensive one where he could command a
n attack and then make it so it never happened if the attack went awry. No, I’d weathered that initial attack.

  I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d weathered it, but I had.

  I crawled with three limbs, while my decoy formed a standing figure above and around me, then I joined the other decoys that were advancing on the fence.

  Another molotov sailed over the fence to strike the lawn on the other side, incinerating one decoy that had ventured too close. Again, I noted, the soldiers backed off.

  That wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The more they backed up, the thinner the defensive lines were.

  But I still needed to get to the fence and get over it without getting shot or set on fire.

  I still had more bugs arriving from the extent of my range. Being trapped like I had hadn’t given me a second trigger event. I wasn’t so lucky. But it had extended my range. I tallied the resources I had at my disposal, considered how many more decoys I could create…

  Then I reconsidered. No, I needed a distraction, and these slow-moving decoys weren’t that.

  The bugs I still had in reserve swept into the ranks of the soldiers, and I went flat for my own safety, covering my head.

  “Behind you,” one collection of bugs whispered to a soldier, my swarm-speak forming the necessary words. He whipped around to see nothing there.

  “I’m going to eat you alive,” another swarm spoke, somewhere nearby.

  “Crawl inside your body and lay eggs.”

  Calvert’s voice sounded over a dozen radios in the area, “She’s playing mind tricks. She’s still near the house, and she’s never killed or tortured before. Maintain the perimeter and do not use grenades.”

  Again, with the refusal on the subject of grenades. A reminder, even, this time. Was this a point where he’d split the timelines, bombarded the house with grenades in one reality and stuck to the guns in another?

  Or had he already verified that I had a counterattack in mind for the grenades? He could have employed them in an earlier scenario and had things go catastrophically wrong on his end. There had to be a reason he wasn’t using them instead of molotovs. Grenades would have been faster, given more immediate, definite results.

  Then there was the possibility that this tied into his alibi, that he didn’t want the Undersiders or even the Travelers to know he’d gone after one of them, and the use of several grenades would be too easily traced back to ‘Coil’. He would stick to an over the top arson, maybe hide the police reports and suppress the media. If I was in a territory owned by the Travelers, maybe they’d accept a price for keeping this quiet from the Undersiders.

  Or any combination of those things.

  Then I remembered how I’d escaped from the hospital bed after the Endbringer attack.

  The bugs continued whispering as they went on the attack, but their attack wasn’t a headlong rush with stingers and pincers. As I lay flat on the ground, arms shielding my head, I took a different tack. I raided.

  Bugs swept into pockets and pouches, searching the contents. First aid supplies, no. Gun magazines, almost too heavy.

  I noticed the bandoleers of the grenades that Calvert had alluded to.

  The decoys had forced the enemy to spread out gunfire. The soldiers were further diverted as my bugs tried to divest them of possessions, pushing at the gun magazines and attempting to slowly nudge them free of pouches. Spiders wove silk cords, and I chose my target, a soldier by the fence, between me and Coil.

  Long seconds passed as bullets hit the earth only a short distance from me. I waited, prayed that the next thrown molotov wouldn’t land near me.

  At my instruction, flying bugs carried a cord out, connecting a grenade on his bandoleer to the fence. Another connected the same grenade’s pin to the soldier next to him.

  “Lose the grenades,” my swarm buzzed, right next to him. ”I’m pulling a pin.”

  The man next to him heard, stepped away, and the cord went taut. The pin slid free.

  He had the grenade free in a second, but he simply held the bar at the side of the grenade down.

  Damn.

  “Think fast. Pulling two more,” my swarm spoke. A benefit of speaking through the swarm was that it was hard to hear a lie in the tone.

  He realized that he had only the two hands to hold down the bars for three grenades, and tossed the one in his hands towards the house. The cord connecting it to the fence halted the grenade’s trajectory and it swung straight down into the waterlogged lawn on the far side of the fence.

  When it detonated, it ripped through a section of fence and sent soldiers scattering for cover.

  Be patient, I thought. I could have made a run for it then, but there was no use.

  “She’s pulling the pins!” the soldier who’d been near my target shouted.

  They began retreating, and the defensive line thinned out further. Some soldiers were standing on the far side of the neighboring property, now.

  “Need a visual!” someone shouted.

  A flare sailed through the air to land on the lawn, fifty feet to my right. The light it provided would let them see through my decoys. If they put one too close to me, they’d see my silhouette.

  More sailed my way, and I set to moving them before any landed too close to me.

  I maintained the pressure, an indiscriminate attack that Calvert couldn’t necessarily counter. I repeated the process, roughly, that I’d used to get the one soldier to throw a grenade, aiming to knock down the fence on the opposite side of the property. I made the cord tying it to the fence too thin, however, and the grenade landed closer to the base of the house. The fence remained standing, but the soldiers backed away in the face of the dust, smoke, and hot air that billowed out from within the building.

  “I’m pulling your pins next.“

  “Crawl up your asshole and leave you some tapeworms.“

  “I’m behind you.“

  “I can have centipedes crawl beneath your eyelids. Chew your eyes out at the root.“

  “Ever wonder if a mosquito could pass on the H.I.V. virus?“

  The psychological pressure was important, too.

  “Do not throw the grenades,” Calvert’s voice sounded over the radios.

  The drawback of the psychological pressure was that many soldiers were now shooting indiscriminately at the property, and I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling cover. I began belly-crawling across the grass, using my one good arm and my knees.

  I felt an impact across my face. The briefest shriek escaped my lips before I remembered to clam up, managed to convince myself that it was only a clod of grass and dirt that a stray bullet had kicked up.

  Someone had heard. A female soldier, she was on the other side of the fence, not five feet in front of me, and her head had snapped in my direction as I’d let the sound escape.

  I barely had any of the pre-prepared silk cord left. I split the swarm around me into two, and sent one to my left. The soldier held her machine gun in one hand and fired at the running swarm, drawing a flare with the other hand. In the meantime, I was getting my feet under me, lunging.

  Dragonflies carried the silk cord between the wires of the fence. I didn’t go for the grenades on her bandoleer, but the can at her waist. They circled the pull-tab, and I held the other end of the cord, pulling.

  My first guess was that it was a flashbang, in which case it could leave my bugs stunned and me exposed. My second guess was that it was incendiary, in which case I’d be murdering someone.

  When it went off, I felt only relief. Smoke billowed around her as she called out to others, telling them I was near. I sensed her backing away, getting the canister free of her belt and tossing it aside, and had my bugs collect it and cart it her way. I crawled in the direction she wasn’t walking, using my power to identify where the soldiers were moving and using the smoke for cover.

  Scavenging used silk from previous attacks, my bugs arranged to pull more pins for smoke canisters.

  The end result
was chaos. It was the best result I could hope for. With the smoke at the open area of the fence and the possibility that I had climbed over where the smoke masked things, they couldn’t be sure of my location, and they couldn’t shoot into the midst of their allies, so they were forced to retreat further.

  I sensed Calvert’s truck pulling away.

  Calvert could use his power to prune away possibilities that didn’t work for him, but only if he was aware of me, aware of my movements and how I was mounting my attack.

  His retreat left me wondering if he’d deemed this situation unsalvageable. Had he deemed this a loss?

  Was there another maneuver he had in mind? A bomb, a parahuman underling that he could sic on me?

  Or would he seek leverage elsewhere?

  My dad. The others.

  I suddenly felt the urge to get away, and get away quickly.

  My bugs hefted the items they’d successfully scavenged from pockets and pouches, carrying them to me. As the soldiers moved to cover the weak points in the perimeter, I struggled to my feet and walked through the smoke to the point where two of the temporary fences joined together. I used the keys my bugs had found and tried them, attempting to find the right key for the lock that linked the chain.

  There were only so many possible keys, especially when I narrowed down the options to the three from soldiers nearest this lock. It popped open on the second try, I removed the chain as quietly as I could, and then I bit my lip to keep from crying out as I shifted the two sections of fence far enough apart that I could slide through.

  My bugs carried the fuming smoke canister a short distance ahead of me, giving me some added cover to slip through the point where the enemy lines were thinnest.

  Their radios crackled with instructions from their captains, and the soldiers started tossing their canisters of smoke towards the house before they could be used against them. It didn’t matter. I’d already slipped past the worst of them. I approached one of the trucks that was furthest from the conflict. My bugs were on the soldier’s helmets, and I knew which direction they were facing, allowing me to stay behind them, using the soft soles of my costume to move in near silence.