Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I pursed my lips. “The Doctor?”

  “Probably downstairs. Look at the way the group at the rear is set up. They’re watching to make sure nobody comes upstairs. I think they have the Doctor trapped down there.“

  They have us trapped here too.

  I didn’t say it out loud. Canary looked scared, and both Lung and Rachel looked restless.

  “There’s this guy that looks like he’s in charge. You see him?”

  It was a voice over the earbuds, but it wasn’t Tattletale.

  “You’re an idiot,” Tattletale said. “I love you for this, but you’re an idiot.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Imp,” Tattletale said.

  Imp? It took me a second.

  Imp. Damn it. Grue would kill me. She was close enough to overhear, and this many parahumans… so many ways she could be detected.

  “Mister beautiful,” Imp said. “He’s saying they’re free… oh, whoop. Here we go.”

  The cells emptied. It was almost like the order being given was a stone dropped on the water’s surface, the movement of the cell’s occupants the ripple, the ones who didn’t hear the man speak reacted to the others’ movement, and the chain reaction continued. Hundreds of people.

  Hundreds of victims.

  The roar of the crowd increased in volume. I could feel the floor vibrating. No power at work. Just a lot of people, stomping and cheering.

  The Custodian moved a little, then stopped. I could sense her more than before, a disturbance, agitated.

  She was the one that had been enforcing the peace, keeping people contained in cells without doors. Now… either Mantellum or the strange case fifty-threes were keeping her at bay, preventing her from seeing to her duties.

  The lights flickered, a little worse than before.

  “They’re going to come here,” Shadow Stalker said. “I spent time in juvie, if someone had a nice toothbrush, cookies from mom, there was jealousy, retaliation.”

  I nodded a little.

  And a cushy cell like this…

  “They will come,” Lung said. The irises of his eyes were orange, and hive-like lumps were standing out on his skin, where scales threatened to push forth. “I can win, but you will all most likely die in the time I require.”

  “I need all the people who can bore through solid steel, he says,” Imp spoke over the comms.

  “Lung’s plan can be plan A. Let’s hear plan B,” I said.

  “We run,” Shadow Stalker said. “Door’s right there.”

  “I could make barriers,” Golem said.

  The roaring dimmed. The man was speaking. The cupboard door beneath the large television seemed to rattle with more intensity.

  “Custodian says… door?”

  She stopped.

  “Barriers,” Tattletale said. “We’d have to get past more security doors, ones the Irregulars haven’t dealt with. Quite probably other security measures.“

  Imp spoke up, “Pretty guy’s saying… traitors to our kind. See they get the justice they deserve. Oh… hey.“

  I looked at the phone.

  Weld, mangled to the point that he looked more like scrap metal than a person, was heaved forward, thrown to the ground.

  A sphere rolled forward. Something coiled within, behind the colored transparent pane. Someone in the crowd grabbed it, then made their hands glow. Fire? Heating the material? I couldn’t tell from this distance, but I could see the movement within accelerate in fits and starts.

  Weld reached out for the sphere, but his arm was so badly damaged it couldn’t hold his weight. It bent the wrong way, breaking off. When he rolled over onto his back, the forearm was stuck to his upper arm, hand to his shoulder and neck.

  If he’d been a human, if half that much damage had been done, there would be no way he’d be alive.

  “Doesn’t get much worse than a crowd this mad,” Shadow Stalker said, her voice low. “I can probably make a break for it and get away. Not usually my thing to be nice, but… you want me to pass on any messages? Last words? My memory is shit, but I can try.”

  The crowd was reacting, the contents of the room shaking with the sound. Out there, it would be deafening.

  Then they moved. People were parting the way. Opening a path to our end of the hallway.

  The camera gave us a view of the central gang. A spiky boy with yellow skin. A man with exaggerated masculine and feminine features, a caricature, burdened with muscle. There was Gully, the muscular girl with the shovel, braids and severe overbite who’d helped out against Echidna, looking ill at ease. A boy with red skin. Sanguine.

  As they got closer, I could feel my power changing, to tell a lie. No people in the area. A conspicuous clearing in the gap. There were enough people to push my insects around, wherever they were, but my brain was revising it to make sense of the scene. It was unusual enough to grab my attention, though, but not accurate enough for me to use it.

  “Feel up to singing?” I asked Canary.

  “They’d hurt me before I got anywhere,” she said. “Probably. I’ll try.”

  I closed my eyes. I could feel my swarm out there, both inside and outside of Mantellum’s power, but I couldn’t do anything meaningful to the crowd with it.

  “Satyrical’s out there,” I said. “His people…”

  Tattletale spoke. “Probably happen to be the ones who stayed behind to dig for the Doctor. Nobody there, in Satyrical’s group who’re going to be able to deal with this mob. Probably nobody in the Doctor’s group, either.“

  I nodded, drawing my knife. The one Defiant had given me.

  Not enough to cut our way to freedom. Judging by the gravel outside the double-pane window, we were sitting beside layers of rock. The knife could get us into the next cell, maybe the cell next to that… but it wouldn’t let us get anywhere fast enough to outpace the crowd.

  “Plan A, then,” Lung spoke, somber. “For your sacrifice, I will grant you a favor. Tell me if you want me to kill someone, an enemy you want gone.”

  “We’re not going to die,” I growled the words. I began forming the swarm into a decoy.

  A distraction. If I could get the crowd’s attention, lead them upstairs-

  The pretty man outside spoke, and I could see his lips move on the camera. There was no need for translation.

  Revenge.

  This time, the jeering was just outside our cell. The mob advanced.

  29.05

  Prisoners and case fifty-threes flooded into the narrow corridors, making their way into the special cells.

  I gestured, urging others to move. They shifted until their backs were against the wall. Golem and Cuff even stepped onto the bed, to get out of the way.

  I found myself by the door. Mantellum wasn’t close enough to blind my bugs, so I could track the people as they came around the corner, approaching the doorway. A gang of them.

  I drew my second knife, then activated the knife Defiant had given me. Safety… and the trigger.

  One… two…

  The guy at the head of the group made it into the doorway. He stopped as he saw Bastard. I pressed my old knife’s blade against his throat, saw him back away, only to bump into the people behind him.

  three… fo-

  The knife finished forming the gray blur around it. Roughly three point seven seconds. Good.

  He didn’t look worried. So I reached out and dragged the blur against the wall, gouging out a groove a few inches deep. Smoke expanded.

  He froze, his eyes flicking down, as if he could see past his cheekbones, face and chin to the knife I had against his throat.

  I nodded slowly.

  “Move it, asshole!” one of the captives said.

  He didn’t move. I saw his eye shift, until it settled on me. My arm moved, not wholly steady when fully extended, a weight in hand, and I felt the blade rasp against the scruff on his neck.

  Not a case fifty-three. Just an ordinary guy.

  ‘Ordinary’. He was here, he
would have powers.

  “Move!” the guy in the hallway ordered.

  “Dim byd yma,” my hostage said, without breaking eye contact with me. Then he added, in a heavily accented voice, “Is nothing here.”

  The cheering reached a climax outside. My bugs could sense the people in an adjacent cell. They had someone, and were dragging him out as a group.

  “Something’s going on,” one of the guys in the corridor said.

  “Don’t care. Move, motherfucker. I want to see if there’s any shit in there.”

  “Is no shit,” my hostage said. “Empty.”

  I nodded slowly. Oddly enough, he looked more concerned at that.

  An issue in translation? A cultural problem?

  The roaring reached a climax. They had a man with no arms or legs, not fat, but with a goiter-like mass around his neck… hairless. A case fifty-three.

  “This one,” Imp said, repeating what the mob’s ringleader was saying. Shouting, judging by the way he was acting on camera. “This traitor, he is how they controlled us. How they planned to control you. He was going to brainwash these ones into a private army… he’s pointing at the weird looking ones they brought from downstairs. This traitor was going to send the rest of you out without any memories, without identities, as Cauldron’s trash.“

  “We’re missing it,” the one further down the corridor said.

  It’s only the three, now. The rest backed out to check out the scene.

  “I think I know what we’re missing. It’s not worth seeing. But first dibs at whatever’s in this cell? If this fuckhole doesn’t move out of the doorway, I’m going to slide a foot up his rectum, and pry open a new doorway.”

  I glanced around the room. I could see how tense the others were. Even Lung was rigid, bristling with scale-points. Primed for a fight.

  Imp’s voice came over the earbuds. “Oh, hey, fun fact. You can apparently crucify someone without arms or legs, if you try hard enough, and have the right powers. He’s getting the crowd worked up, trying to start up a witch hunt. Um. He’s shouting, who wants to kill the real monster, the monster who did this to us?The bloodthirsty cries of the crowd made it through even the soundproofing of the cell. I could sense the emotion, the anger.

  “Look to your neighbors, the ones next to you. Are they shouting loud enough? Are they angry enough? Because we aren’t going to brook any traitors.“

  My hostage looked like he was going to have a heart attack. Caught between two very dangerous people.

  I relented, easing up on the knife, then I beckoned for him to enter the room.

  Slowly, he obeyed.

  The guy behind him spat. “Fucking liar. I knew you were lying. Trying to keep all this shit to your… self…”

  He trailed off as he got far enough into the room to see me and the others.

  I gave my hostage a push, with the idea that he’d get put off balance for the others to deal with. Except I failed, completely and utterly, to budge him. He started to turn, and I left him behind, hurrying forward to slide behind the second man and confront the third before he could catch on to what was happening and alert others.

  The others folded in on the first two.

  I could see the third man’s eyes go wide as I approached, my bugs swarming. I had a knife in each hand.

  He had other powers.

  Fighting capes I don’t know, unfamiliar powers.

  A sphere of light surrounded my right hand and knife, more spheres lighting up to surround the largest clusters of my swarm, turning each of them into fireflies in the darkness.

  Which put me in the awkward position of figuring out what his power did and counteracting it. The obvious solution, a solution to most powers, was to hit him before he could hit me with whatever it was he did.

  I tried moving bugs outside of the sphere, and the sphere moved with them. I moved individual bugs in different directions, and I felt them distort, coming to pieces, as if they were blobs of ink and I was pushing them against a hard surface.

  Bugs made it through his perimeter, biting and stinging, and he reacted with the appropriate pain. But the bugs surrounded by light didn’t manage to bite into flesh. They were soft, their mandibles bending like putty. Where he swatted his hand against them, both spheres and bugs were distorted and crushed by the movement.

  I moved the bug-spheres out of the way, thrusting with the knife-hand he hadn’t yet affected, to cut off his retreat. I felt the effect surround it as I got closer. Another sphere.

  I pulled back, instead. I moved my body to block his retreat, and then drove my knee into his stomach.

  He staggered back, then cast out more lights, surrounding my elbows, knees…

  My head, too. My vision went… not blurry, but the colors smudged, like bad watercoloring.

  Breathing became more difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.

  The bugs who’d bent their mandibles or distorted in the course of making their way outside of the spheres weren’t going back to normal. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hit this guy with any of my body parts, if they wouldn’t bounce back to their normal shape after the fact.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted him to hit me, either. If my face proved that pliable and he punched it…

  He charged me, and I was forced to move out of the way. He stumbled for the other end of the corridor and for the crowd, a hand pressed to his stomach. I unspooled lengths of silk cord from the dispensers at my belt and beneath my armor, dragonflies lancing past him to encircle his throat and feet.

  I braced myself, ready to try and arrest his forward momentum, but one of the threads was shorter than the others, and he only tripped. He glanced over his shoulder, then cast out his spheres, so they covered my feet.

  I threw myself forward, my flight pack kicking into action. I lost my orientation, fighting to activate the individual panels in such a way that my hands, feet or head wouldn’t slam into a wall.

  Imp said something, reciting a comment, but my focus was elsewhere.

  The flight pack cracked against a wall, and I came to a dead stop. For long seconds, the two of us were stuck. I was unable to walk, because my own body weight would crush my feet, with this softening effect. I couldn’t touch anything without turning my hand or whatever into mashed potatoes.

  For his part, the guy was caught on the ground, his feet bound by cords too thick and strong to break with his own raw strength.

  The lights flickered out. I could see him using his power. An orb of light, surrounding a length of the thread. He could counter that, while I wasn’t so lucky as to be able to counter him. He pulled his legs apart until the thread had stretched out to the point of snapping.

  He started to climb to his feet, finding other threads and using his power to break them. He was screaming, but nobody seemed to hear him over the noise of the crowd, and all eyes were on whatever was going on in the Mantellum blind spot. He wasn’t getting any help, but I couldn’t stop him.

  Not with the thread.

  So I controlled the swarm, driving bugs into his nose and mouth.

  You want to play hardball, Softball?

  He collapsed, choking. Some would have capsaicin, but few of the laced insects would be alive, covered in hairspray and a toxic chemical, so long after I’d last refreshed them.

  Slowly, in the order he’d created them, the spheres disappeared.

  “Need help?” Cuff asked.

  “No,” I said. Forty seconds ago, yes. Not now.

  “Right,” she said. She looked at the choking man. Her voice was a little different as she said, “Okay.”

  When the spheres around my feet and hands had faded, I let myself drift to the ground. I hit the safety and trigger to remove the blur, then sheathed my knives. Once my hands were free, I clenched and unclenched my hands to make sure everything was in working order, and then grabbed the threads that still remained. I pulled on the threads until he was in a position where Cuff and I could get our hands on him and drag him back towards the ot
hers.

  There were cheers. I looked at my phone, and I could see the weirdly pretty man. Chains stretched out from the armless, legless figure’s stumps, extending to the high ceiling and the floor, suspending him fifteen or so feet in the air. Dead, or close enough it barely mattered.

  I could also make out Mantellum, at the center of the crowd. He stood beneath the guy they’d strung up, blood running off of the shroud that seemed to flow from his back and the edges of his face. His expression was hard to read, but the fact that he seemed to be luxuriating in the blood rather than avoiding it… it didn’t put him in my good books.

  “It looks like we’ve got a full-on riot here,” Imp commented. “Armless dude’s good as dead, they’re splitting up the crowd, so anyone that’s not inside the circle has a few guys who can deal with the ghost janitor.”

  “The Custodian,” I said, as I rounded the corner. I shoved the still-choking prisoner to the ground. The one I’d held hostage was pinned to the wall, arms and legs held fast to the surface by Golem’s projected arms and legs. Lung stood with his face just a foot away from the man’s. Bastard stood with his paw on the chest of the remaining prisoner.

  Three dealt with, no alert given.

  The pretty man and the spiky, yellow guy were holding a prisoner’s hands up the air between them, like they were celebrating a prize fighter. I could hear the noise of the crowd, as if it were far more distant than it was. My bugs, outside of Mantellum’s effect, could hear it at full force.

  “Her. Right,” Imp said. “He’s getting them hyped, saying they’re going after the Doctor, but they need to dig. Picking out the people who have the best powers for the job. They’re shouting out what they can do. I think they’re leaving soon.“

  The small army we were faced with aside, I found myself smiling a little behind my mask. The situation evoked memories. Except this time, I had a cell phone. I had the pepper spray. I had a weapon.

  I’d changed. I was more prepared to do what needed to be done.

  “Less to fight,” Lung said. “If you are scared, children, you can stay here. In a moment, I will go.”

  Taunting? Mocking? No. Not really his style. Confident in his superiority, now that he’d changed as much as he had. Not full changes, not even full coverage with his scales, but he seemed to think he could throw himself into the crowd just outside the corridor and survive.