She hadn’t left Newfoundland unscathed, I was almost certain. Brain problems, body problems… I couldn’t be sure. Probably both. She had no doubt integrated herself with technology to cope, enhance and expand her capabilities.
Except that her technology was failing. The way she’d collapsed at the school, the speech problems she’d suffered, the slow recovery, now this… It was the only theory that made sense.
She’d pushed herself too far, something had gone wrong, and now Defiant faced losing the one person on this planet who could tolerate him for more than ten minutes at a time. No small wonder he was out of sorts.
I considered how I’d feel if it was one of the Undersiders.
“Defiant,” I said. “I’m going in alone. Send Golem in after me if he wants to come, reinforcements can hang back or come with, depending on your judgement. I’ll handle things on this end. You focus on what you need to. Focus on Dragon, focus on damage control.”
A pause. “There’s nothing I can do for Dragon right this moment. The best I can do is maintain the momentum and keep things coordinated, and hope that Dragon’s substitution can maintain the back-end.”
I didn’t respond to that. I was already getting ready to go.
“Thank you, Weaver.“
It was uncharacteristic of him to thank me. A pleasantry. How upset was he?
I couldn’t spare another thought on the subject. I was out of the Dragonfly at the first opportunity, making my way towards the quarantine control and filtration building. It was squat, concrete, hardly pretty. As I got closer, I could hear an alarm.
The front doors had been torn apart. It might not have been so impressive, but these were the same vault doors we saw with the shelters that studded every likely target around the world.
The gouges were narrow, a finger’s width, as though someone had dragged their hands through the steel like I could drag my fingers through half-melted butter. Siberian.
Jack had brought protection.
My bugs flooded into the facility, past the second dismantled vault door. The alarm was louder as I ascended the concrete stairs and made my way into the building.
The emergency lighting was on, casting the area in a red glow. My bugs searched and scanned the area, in case any members of the Nine were lurking in wait. So many ugly ways this could go. So many threats that Jack could have on hand. Cherish? Screamer? Nyx? Ways to fool my senses, ways to shut me down or defeat me. My only recourse was to get them before they got me.
Hey, passenger, I thought. Do me a favor. If I get taken out of action and you step up to fight, work on taking out Jack, alright?
My bugs stirred, moving further down the hall. It was so far from a conscious direction that I wondered for a second if the passenger had listened.
No. I’d tried hypnosis, I’d tried other things. Some in Mrs. Yamada’s office, other times in the PRT’s labs, after dark, off the record. Nothing brought the monster to the fore.
Just my subconscious.
Just. Like that wasn’t something I couldn’t help but wonder about.
But I’d made peace with it. I couldn’t barter with something that wouldn’t talk back, but I could accept it, test and acknowledge my limits as far as they pertained to the entity that was apparently granting me my abilities.
I wouldn’t turn away from it, wouldn’t tell it to go away or hold back in my abilities.
My bugs marked the area, giving me the information I needed to navigate the facility. It proved easier than I might have expected. Rather than follow the winding corridors and make my way to the security checkpoints, I followed the path of casual destruction Siberian had left in her wake. She’d knocked down walls to create the shortest possible route from the front doors to Ellisburg.
No casualties that I could detect. No nonhuman life.
Had Dragon ordered this place evacuated before she was incapacitated, or had Nilbog gotten here first?
My bugs started to scan the area beyond the facility, inside Ellisburg. They made it about ten feet before something like a frog’s tongue began snatching them out of the air.
I withdrew the swarm back to myself, hiding my bugs beneath my cape and skirt, and I made my way through the opening into Ellisburg.
A goblin wonderland. It was clear he’d altered it from its original layout, likely over the course of years. The remodel had been more aesthetic than functional. Floorboards had clearly been dug up and moved to the exteriors of the buildings, creating roofs and building additions that spiraled or twisted, with more boards propped up flat against the building faces on one side, painted or modeled in the same way the towns had been put together in old western movies.
The walls that surrounded Ellisburg had been painted as well. To look from a distance, Nilbog’s kingdom extended to every horizon, with crooked, impossible landscapes at the periphery of it, like an ocean frozen in time, grown over with grass and trees. Oddly enough, they had painted the sky as an overcast one, where it was visible above the lush, unpredictable fields and forests.
Within the city, the trees had been immaculately cut and trimmed, and the shapes were just as strange; trees that were perfectly round, cubes, cones. Where new trees were growing on lawns, as dense and close together as trees in an orchard might be, I could see heavy wires wound around them, guiding their growth into twists and curves. The art of bonsai taken to a bigger scale, cultivating each tree in form. Already, some of the largest ones were properly set up, meshing together with counterparts on the opposite sides of the street, forming lush, living wooden arches.
The grass had been cut, and I could see the attention to detail there, even. There were innumerable flowers growing across lawns, but the grass was neatly cut beneath and around them, as if someone had taken shears or scissors to the blades that grew between the flowers. I couldn’t make out any rhyme or rhythm in how the flowers or plants were laid out and how they grew. It was an injection of color in the same way a random splash of paint from a palette might be applied to a canvas.
And then, as if to remind me that this wasn’t friendly territory, there was a scarecrow in one garden. The clothes were brightly colored, the pose one of a dancing figure, but that wasn’t the eerie thing about it. The head was a skeletal one, a dog’s head stripped of all flesh, turned skyward with its mouth opened in joy. The hands that clutched the rake and watering can were held together by wire. A very small human hand.
For all the signs of careful tending, the entire place was still. A town that could have been taken from a storybook, desolate. There wasn’t any sign of chaos, nor the destruction that would follow from an attack by the Slaughterhouse Nine.
But more than anything, what threw me was the absence of insect life. No spiders spun webs. Even the ground had little in the way of ants or earthworms.
A trap? I looked behind me to see if they were planning on walling me in, and came face to face with one of Nilbog’s creations.
It hissed, its breath hot and reeking of bile. Fangs like a viper’s parted, the distance between them great enough that it probably could have sunk some into the top of my head and the underside of my chin as it closed its mouth. I stepped back out of reach, then forced myself to stay still and wait.
The mouth closed, and I could see how the creature’s head was smaller than mine. It wasn’t more than four feet tall, covered in pale brown scales. The reptilian face could have been in a children’s movie, if it wasn’t for the eyes. They were dark, black, and cold.
It clung to the wall, its feet placed higher up than its hands, opposable toes gripping the frame that had been around the vault door. I noticed it was wearing white shorts, with one suspender strap over a shoulder. A taloned claw held a softball-sized chunk of the wall.
Was it fixing the wall?
“I’m not a threat,” I told the lizard-child.
I felt hands touch my belt and jumped, seizing the wrist of the offending hand in an instinctive motion before I’d even looked to see who it was.
A girl,
five or so feet tall, her face mottled with purple veins that spiraled across her perfectly round, puffy, hairless head. Her eyes were tiny and piggish, her fingers blunt, barely a half-inch long, her mouth too small for her face. She wore a sack that looked like it had been sewn to work around her oversized head. Her hand was on my knife.
The lizard boy had extended frills at his arms, neck, and the edges of his face, colorful, brilliant, and held out by a framework of needle-fine spines. His mouth hung open, viper’s teeth revealed.
I looked beyond this pair, and I could see signs of others. Eyes reflected light in the shadows beneath steps, from windows. There were large, bulky silhouettes in the windows, some holding smaller figures on their heads and shoulders. I couldn’t make out much, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
That was twice now that they’d snuck up on me. Quiet motherfuckers.
“I’m sorry for grabbing you,” I said. “You wanted my knife?”
She took it, her tiny black eyes glaring at me from the midst of her oversized head. The lizard-boy eased his frills down somewhat, but his mouth remained open.
“I’d like to see Nilbog,” I said.
She ignored me, her pudgy, blunt-fingered hands fumbling through the pouches at my belt. With painful, clumsy slowness, she divested me of my taser, the pepper spray, and the spools of silk, both conventional and Darwin’s spider silk.
I winced as one spool fell to the ground and unwound partially, dirt getting caught up between the strands. That would be a pain to fix.
I could see more of the things making appearances now, getting close enough for me to see as they took interest in what was happening. Eyes appeared in the windows, reflecting the light in curious ways. Eyes from within the trees, between the slats of stairs… some faces. They ranged from artistic and beautiful to horrific.
Every single one of them was a weapon. Going into this situation was a repeat of the information gathering and problem solving issues one faced when going up against an unknown cape. If it came down to a fight, I’d have to figure out how they operated, and the full extent of their capabilities.
Trouble being that there were a hell of a lot of these things. Hundreds, even thousands.
I waited patiently. No use complaining, even if every second counted, and Jack was no doubt having words with Nilbog.
“Nilbog is in danger,” I said, trying a different tack. “The man with him, he has dark hair, a beard? He’s with a striped woman. Bad people. I think they’re going to try to hurt Nilbog, hurt the man who made you, so you get upset and leave this place.”
Her hands fumbled with my flight pack. I felt her touch the arm at the side of the pack, with its narrow arm. She took hold of it and pulled.
“I can take that off,” I said.
She grunted, and I started to move to oblige, only to get a protest. The frills on the lizard boy extended, and her own head swelled, the skin getting thin enough in the process that I could see a fluid filling the lower half of her head. I moved my arms away from the straps, and I watched them both relax over long seconds.
When she was sure I wasn’t trying something, she grunted again, louder, a frustrated, constipated sound. A communication, but not one meant for me.
Her friend emerged from a garage, lifting the door to lumber forth. He was big, fat, and moved on four limbs that each had opposable digits. His massive belly swung right and left as he loped, so distended and so close to the ground as it swung that I worried it would hit something and split open. His genitals were almost bigger than I was, and they were, along with his sensory organs, the only way I could really tell his front from his back.
The sensory organs consisted of slits running top to bottom from a ridge at one end of his body. There was no room for a brain, no eyes present.
This organ granted him enough awareness to approach, probably by way of scent, but it didn’t give him the fine tuning he needed to find us, specifically. The round-headed creature approached him, took hold of a fistful of chest hair and led him my way.
I backed up a little as they approached, and received a hissed rebuke from lizard-boy.
I remained still. The safest course.
The girl-thing moved the brute’s hand towards me, and I stayed still as she gripped the arm and placed it in the hand.
He closed his fist around it.
“Wait,” I said.
He hauled on it, clearly intent on tearing it free. I was thrown, sent rolling until I landed in one patch of grass, dazed, startled, just a little hurt.
The brute approached, the round-headed girl hurrying after.
Before I could rise, he’d already fumbled for me, and seized hold of the mechanical arm. This time, he managed to pull it free. I used the antigravity panels to control my flight as I was thrown, controlled my landing, and hurried to get my hands to the straps.
There was a wail behind me, a warning sound. I saw the others react, but kept working through the straps. Two at the shoulders, one across the chest, beneath my armor-
The pack fell free. I chanced a look over my shoulder, and I saw a number of Nilbog’s creations gathered, close enough that they could have lunged for me. One was a very tall, long-limbed man with skin that looked like a Siamese cat’s, covered in a very fine fur. His face was split by a wide, toothless mouth, his eye sockets little more than indents filled with fur. He held a makeshift spear with a flag on the end, which had been painted brilliant colors, and wore a matching loin cloth. Probably the most dangerous one in my immediate vicinity, just in terms of how fast he could probably close the gap and murder me.
“Safe,” I said. “No danger. I’m safe, the pack’s off.”
I waited, tensed, as they studied me. Enemies on all sides.
Jack was invincible, I wasn’t. But if I was going to achieve anything here, it couldn’t involve destruction. I’d read the files on Nilbog, I had a sense of him, in the most general terms. I was banking everything on his megalomania overriding his desire to collect just a little more in the way of resources.
I kept my voice level and calm, “I’d like to see Nilbog now.”
Were they hungry? If this became a fight, I’d have to defend myself with the bugs in my costume and the bugs in the quarantine and filtration facility. I could use the swarm to equip myself with the stuff that had been dumped on the ground, but that required that I survive long enough to do so. Were there ranged attacks here? Assassins?
Desperate situations called for risks. This was my gamble.
“I have a gift for him,” I said.
Something seemed to ease in them. I watched as some turned away, finding their way to resting spots. The tall man with the loincloth worked his overlong body under a porch, where he could rest in the shade.
I didn’t receive an escort, but the ones along one road moved aside, sitting or standing on the sidewalks.
I walked with my head high, and sent a handful of bugs forward. More than a few of Nilbog’s creatures took the opportunity to snap them up.
A soft rumble sounded above. Lightning. Rain began to patter down, light.
My surviving bugs gave me ears on the scene before I arrived.
“Lipsy? Tell the cook to serve us something. I fancy a salad, and something robust. I think it should taste sweet.”
The alterations to the surroundings only grew more focused and extreme as I found my way to the center of Ellisburg. Building faces were covered in wild plant growth, and there wasn’t a single building without more extreme modifications made to it. Glances indoors showed little more than barren exteriors with the floorboards pried up, or clusters of Nilbog’s creatures lurking in the unlit gloom within.
“I’ll look forward to this, god-king.”
“You should, you should.”
“Your hospitality astounds me. I’m unworthy.”
“Hardly.”
So Jack was situating himself as someone subservient, even servile, so as not to challenge Nilbog’s alpha status. He was playing nice,
even.
If I tried the same, I’d only be working to catch up, to earn Nilbog’s trust.
I approached the town center, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of Nilbog’s creatures. Goblins and ghouls, muppets and horned moppets. Big, small, thin and fat. Each was exaggerated, twisted, as if Nilbog had gone out of his way to insert traits and qualities that separated them from humanity.
The creatures stepped out of the way as I made my way closer. Nilbog sat at the center of a long table, and two more tables extended from the ends to form a loose ‘c’ shape. Checked tablecloths in eye-gouging color contrasts covered each table. Jack sat at the end furthest me, and a man with white and black stripes sat beside him.
Bonesaw was only a short distance away, sitting on the shoulders of what looked like a flayed bear. The thing had claws two or three times the usual size, it’s mouth yawning open like it had been broken.
Nilbog was immensely fat, easily four hundred pounds, and sat on a throne that had apparently been cobbled together from dismantled furniture. His face was covered with a paper mask. Other creatures sat on chairs to his left and right.
The arrangement of the tables created an open space that could host their entertainment. I looked, then wished I hadn’t. A bloated, coarse-looking creature lay on the ground, almost like a potato made of hair and flesh. Smaller things were busy carving gouges and holes into it.
The resulting wounds regenerated, but not before the smaller creatures inserted body parts into the openings, allowing the regenerated flesh to close tight but not close completely.
I averted my eyes from the scene, content with not letting my brain register which parts were being inserted and what they were doing after the fact.
“Another guest!” Nilbog cried out. He spoke like he had a bad accent, but it wasn’t. He’d affected strange and overdramatic tones for so long that his voice had warped, and he’d had no ordinary people to hear or talk to and measure his voice against. “A friend of yours, sir Jack?”
I could see Jack’s eyebrows raise in interest. “Not at all. Skitter, was it? Except you’re going by another name, now.”
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