Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  She entered a small grocery store.

  “Good morning,” the man at the counter said. Thirty-two or thirty-three, to judge by his appearance. His hair was too long in the back, just starting to recede in the front, his stare intense, but he wasn’t unattractive otherwise.

  “Good morning,” she responded, upbeat. Don’t talk to me. It would be messy if I had to kill you. She corrected herself. I’ll fix your hair and then I’d kill you.

  “We don’t get many new people here. Kind of out of the way.” He smiled.

  “Driving through,” she said. “My mom is shopping down the street.”

  “Dollar store or the boutique?”

  “Boutique.”

  “Don’t blame you for not wanting to go,” he said. “Let me know if you need help finding something.”

  She made her way through the store. Lemon juice, vinegar, sugar, salt, a box of Frooty Toots, some milk, pancake mix. Nutrient slop was great when she needed to work without cooking, but it was still slop.

  Glancing up, she could see the man at the counter looking at her in the mirror that had been positioned to give him a view of the aisle.

  She wondered momentarily if he’d recognized her. No, the reaction would be different.

  A distrust of outsiders? No, he seemed too at ease for that.

  Something else, then.

  She felt more at ease, realizing what it had to be.

  She deposited the things on the counter, then paid. He bagged it and she waved goodbye as she left, offering him a winning smile.

  She’d need to stop by a library, there were a few things she needed to look up. There wasn’t enough information on Harbinger, for one thing. King’s background was another blank. People Jack didn’t talk about much, even if he talked about them fondly.

  He’d be so pleased, she could imagine, if she hit the right notes with them and got their basic personalities right.

  Then she could buy clothes and sheets. If there was a good hardware store, she could imagine some tools that would serve. Her scalpels were getting dull.

  This little bumhole of a town didn’t have much, and she’d seen maybe one car on the road since she had arrived, but still, she looked both ways before crossing the street.

  A pale, dark-haired woman stepped out of the bank, wearing a black suit.

  Her attitude, her demeanor, casual. Nothing combative in the slightest.

  Bonesaw still felt a twang of alarm. The timing with which she’d appeared, the way the clothes didn’t fit the area…

  Better to guess and be wrong. “Are you picking a fight with me?”

  “No,” the woman replied. “No I’m not, Bonesaw.”

  Gosh darn ding darn… golly. Jack was going to be maaaaad if he found out about this.

  “Because if you kill me, it doesn’t change anything.”

  “You worked a biological key into the transporter device. Unless you are alive, calm and holding the device, it won’t work. It will only transport you. We can’t use it to get inside, and killing you wouldn’t stop the stasis period from ending.”

  “Yeah. That’s why.”

  “I understand. But I wasn’t sent here to assassinate you. We could. We could even reach Jack, I think, now that we know where to make an entrance. Still, that’s a dangerous prospect, putting powerful parahumans in the same space as a man who’s been prophesied to end the world.”

  “I’m not a pushover, you know,” Bonesaw said. She stabbed a finger in the woman’s direction.

  It would be so easy to fire a poison needle into her throat.

  “I only want to talk. I’ll ask a favor, then leave you alone,” the woman said.

  “You don’t know how the Slaughterhouse Nine work, do you? We don’t do favors.”

  “You’ll do this one. The Slaughterhouse Nine you’re mass producing, you’re going to install a control switch. You’ll give that switch to me. Not soon, but later. Later than you think.”

  Bonesaw laughed, high and shrill. Then she laughed some more.

  The woman only waited patiently.

  “Silly! You couldn’t be more wrong,” Bonesaw said. “Betray Jack? Betray the others?”

  “You will.”

  Bonesaw laughed again, not for quite so long. Through the giggles, she said, “If you’re going to try to mind control me, I can tell you you’ve got another thing coming. I’ve got safeguards. You’ll only activate my berserker mode.”

  “No mind control. There’s a great deal at work here, and this is the best way to go about it, even with the blind spot looming.”

  “That’s the best argument you can give me?”

  “No. I can tell you two things.”

  Bonesaw raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Two things?”

  “Breadth and Depth.”

  “I don’t get it. Those are the things?”

  “No. There’s another. Each of these things is a sentence, an idea. The second sentence is simple. Say goodbye.”

  Bonesaw bristled. Mechanical traps, spring-loaded needles and venom venting systems readied throughout her body. She let the bags drop to the ground.

  The woman didn’t attack. Instead, she turned to leave.

  An empty threat?

  She debated firing her hollow needles at the woman’s back. But if she missed, she’d be largely unarmed. She’d have to get even closer to use a venom spray, or poison spit, or her telescoping humerus with flesh dissolving acid capsules beneath her fingernails.

  The woman entered the bank, and Bonesaw hurried across the street to follow.

  But her quarry was gone.

  ■

  January 20th, 2005

  Riley panted for breath. Her body wasn’t listening, now.

  She reached her mommy’s room, then collapsed on the floor, head turned towards the foot of the bed.

  The carpet was stained with blood. On it, just beside the bed, her mother lay face down, head turned to one side just like Riley’s was. She was covered in stitches. There wasn’t a place where Riley could have reached out and placed a hand down flat without touching one of the marks.

  An entire row had been cut open, the stitches severed, from temple, down the side of her throat, along the side of her body to her pelvis.

  Too much blood loss. Her mind leaped into action, reaching for knowledge she hadn’t had earlier in the night, knowledge of how to fix people. She took in details, grasped everything from the amount of blood her mommy had to heart rate and the amount of air she was breathing, just from the clues in how fast the blood flowed and the color of the skin. She knew the order she’d have to fix things. Ideas fired through her mind, telling her how to close the wounds, to draw the blood out of the carpet and clean it, or even making something that would do the same thing blood did, out of water and some junk from the kitchen, all with the exact right amount of electricity, to fill the veins and carry a low amount of air throughout the body, staving off the shut down of her brain long enough for Riley to figure out something else.

  But she was too tired.

  “Hurry,” Mister Jack’s voice was almost gentle. “You have time. You can fix her, can’t you?”

  She could. Maybe she even had the strength to do it, to get downstairs and climb up onto the kitchen counter to get the things she needed out of the cabinets, and get back up here. She could cut the lamp cord and use the frayed end with… with a lot of salt, to get the right frequency.

  But she was too tired. The moment she was done saving her mommy, she’d have to run to the bathroom and save daddy. Then she’d have to run downstairs and save Drew. After that she’d save Muffles, and hurry back to mommy. In each room, one or two scary people waited for her. Waited and watched while she worked, then undid her work or came up with worse things to do.

  She knew because she’d been doing this for hours.

  “Come on,” Mister Jack whispered. “You can do it. Don’t you love your mommy?”

  She stared across the room at her mommy. They were lying
with their heads pointed in different direction, so her mommy’s face was upside down, almost covered with as many stitches as skin.

  She’d done a bad job, she knew. She couldn’t even cut a straight line with the scissors in school, how was she supposed to do this?

  Mommy mouthed some words, but the stitches pulled her lips in funny directions.

  She thought maybe she knew what mommy was saying.

  “No,” she told Mister Jack.

  “No?”

  “I don’t love her,” she answered. She blinked, slow, so she wouldn’t have to look her mommy in the eyes, and tears were squeezed out.

  “Alrighty,” Mister Jack said. “Say goodbye, then.”

  Say goodbye.

  “Goodbye, mommy,” Riley said, obediently.

  Silent, her mom mouthed a reply.

  It took a long time.

  A long, long time, watching the blood volume tick down, seeing how the breathing rate changed, and the heartbeat slowed. Knowing how the brain would be affected, knowing what the organs were doing, and the order they were shutting down.

  At some point, it ceased to be mommy, became something else. A moment when her mommy became only a dying thing, a machine of flesh and blood that was winding down.

  It was easier.

  Didn’t make her chest hurt as much.

  Lips that had been fixed up with imperfect stitches mouthed one final sentence.

  “There we go,” Mister Jack whispered. “…There. That’s it.”

  For a little while longer, the three of them rested on the floor of the room. Mister Jack, Riley, and her mommy.

  Others appeared in the doorway, casting the room in shadow.

  “She done?”

  “She’s done,” Mister Jack said, standing. He stretched. “As for what we do with her, we-”

  He broke off as the clown in the hallway laughed, an eerie, offbeat sound that seemed to be missing something most laughs had. It seemed to take Jack a moment to gather why the clown had laughed.

  When he looked down, Riley was looking up at him, smiling. It was a forced expression.

  “What’s this?” Jack asked. He smiled back. “Something funny?”

  “No. I just… I wanted to smile.”

  “Well,” he said. “Me too. Let’s smile together.”

  She looked momentarily uncertain, but kept the strained smile in place.

  “Yes. Come with us. We’ll keep you safe.”

  She didn’t want to. She wanted nothing less.

  But she had nowhere else to go.

  “Yes please,” she said. “That… that sounds nice.”

  Her mother’s final words rang through Riley’s head, the last words she’d before she had become a machine that had stopped working.

  Be a good girl.

  She’d be good. She’d be polite and cheerful and she’d do her chores and she would mind her manners and she’d eat all of her dinner and she’d keep her hair nice and she wouldn’t swear and…

  ■

  November 15th, 2011

  She woke from a nightmare that was becoming all too familiar. Usually it was only a few times a week, fragments. Now it was more distinct, more cohesive.

  She didn’t like it.

  As was her habit, she reached across the bed, holding her companion close.

  Not enough. Not warm enough, not responsive, not caring.

  He wasn’t family.

  She pushed her covers away, annoyed.

  Blasto lay there, unmoving.

  “Up,” she said.

  The hardware worked throughout his body bid him to move.

  She stared at him, unfamiliar feelings warring inside her. The dream was fresh in her mind and she couldn’t banish it, just like she hadn’t been able to banish it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that.

  It was just a little harder every day.

  She felt a flare of anger, but pasted a smile on her face instead. Think happy.

  Be good, she thought, and the thought was too close to an idea in her dream. It had the opposite effect, dashed her resolve to the wind.

  She was left only with a mingled sense of unease and frustration.

  No mind control? My fanny! The darn woman in the suit had put a mind-whammy on her!

  It made her upset, which was a terrible way to start the day. Most days, she could cuddle with whoever was sleeping beside her. Blasto wasn’t so good at that.

  It didn’t help that Blasto had died a week ago. A stroke, no doubt from stress, in the midst of a refrain of the Love Bugs theme song. The only thing that let him move now were the control mechanisms she’d set up.

  Not so good for snuggling.

  Most days, if snuggling didn’t quite cut it, Jack would keep her busy, give her something to do, and entertain her. Always, his voice in her ear, always ushering her forwards, praising her for being a good girl, for her art, for her talent. Others were interested. Her family.

  Now she was alone.

  She left the closet that was her bedroom, with Blasto standing beside the fleshy mattress, and she approached the cases.

  The third draft, still in a foetal state, nine of each. She had a good feeling about it. There were a few more brains to create, more personalities to research and draw up, but she felt fairly confident about her ability to piece it all together.

  The only rub was the Bonesaws. A whole row, empty.

  They didn’t need as long to gestate, but she had yet to begin figuring out how to create them.

  She could have scanned her own brain and copied over the results, but the setup was awkward to manage, best done with a sleeping subject. She could have set Blasto up to manage it, but… that was tricky in its own way.

  She wasn’t used to feeling a lack of confidence. The thing about art was that one could create anything, could incorporate mistakes. But art needed an audience and she had none here.

  She’d set herself the task of having everything ready for when Jack and the others woke up, and now she felt she was unraveling, coming apart in the quiet and the solitude.

  She stared at the seeds of the Bonesaws that hadn’t grown and wondered if she really could look long enough to see the real her, to fabricate anything like herself. Her test runs with the others had all worked. They were close enough to feel familiar, even if little details were off. Their personalities, their approaches, all would be close enough. Here and there, she’d fixed things, corrected the most detrimental personality traits that had been turned against them and allowed them to be captured or killed.

  Sighing, she turned away. She took the time to dress in the clothes she’d bought, and then used the remote to teleport to Earth Bet.

  “Our regular is back,” the man at the counter said. “You get out a lot, with that home schooling.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She folded her hands on the edge of the counter and rested her chin on them. “Your haircut looks good, Eli.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He looked genuinely embarrassed. She smiled a little at that.

  “See any good movies lately?” she asked.

  “You like horror movies right?”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “The Darkness. You’d like it, it comes from a good pedigree. It’s about a mafia-”

  A woman entered the store, and Eli jumped as though he’d been caught doing something wrong.

  “Can I- can I put up a sign in the window?” the woman asked.

  “I’d have to see it first,” Eli responded. “Might have to ask my dad. He owns the store, even if I run it. If there’s any question, it’d be his call. He gets back this Monday.”

  The woman’s face was grave as she handed over the paper.

  Eli took the time to read it. “I think everyone in town knows about this, Mrs. Hemston.”

  “Can I put it up anyways? If someone passes through and sees it-”

  Eli shifted, uncomfortable. “I don’t see any reason you couldn’t. My dad wouldn’t say no.”

 
Without responding, Mrs. Hemston set about taping it to a spot at eye level on the back of the glass door.

  She glanced at Bonesaw. “You shouldn’t be out without a guardian. Go home.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Bonesaw replied, smiling.

  And then the woman was gone.

  Bonesaw opened the door and held it open so she could see the sign. A missing person sign, with a picture of a girl. She let the door swing closed.

  Eli hesitated. “Riley, I was thinking, if you wanted to come over and watch that movie…”

  “No.”

  “No? Why?”

  “You know why,” she said. She walked down the aisle to grab some snacks. Gummy candies, more Frooty Toots, some more milk.

  “I wouldn’t, you know I-”

  “You’d be a gentleman, I’m sure,” she replied. The funny thing was, she was sure. She knew her monsters.

  He struggled to recover. “I… you’re talking about the home schooling. Strict parents?”

  It was feeble. She knew it was feeble.

  “Exactly,” she responded, setting the stuff on the counter. “Sorry.”

  “Eight ninety-five,” was all he said.

  He was hurt. He’d recover. She collected her things, gave him a small wave, and then made her way back. She glanced at the woman who was making her way into the next store.

  She stepped out of sight, then used the remote to exit back to the pocket realm.

  She felt a growing sense of unease as she set the milk in the fridge and put the Frooty Toots on the counter with the candy. Not an unease with what had happened with Eli. That would resolve itself. She’d see him in two or three days, and it would be awkward. Then she’d see him after that, and things would be okay again.

  No. That wasn’t what was resting heavily on her heart.

  She called for Blasto and then entered one of the other closets.

  Melanie, the girl’s name was.

  A week and a half ago, it had been so commonsense. A solution to her problems. The girl had been right there. So easy to approach. A tranquilizer shot to the neck, calculated on the fly to fit with body weight and overall health. Recalibrating the teleporting remote with the unconscious girl in the back lot had been a little riskier, but it was a quiet town.