Resistance

by Samit Basu

  “He must have broken out of whatever zoo they were keeping him in,” says Uzma. “And now he’s come home.”

  What had Utopic wanted with the insect-man? Had they planned an army of super-insects? What horrors had they subjected the professor to? Why were they trying to destroy a city they owned large parts of?

  Another giant bee-man is caught on the hoverjet’s windscreen, stabbing in vain at the figures seated behind the unyielding glass. Uzma shudders as she watches its horrible torso twitch as it slides off, human hair fused with striped bands of bee fur, now splattering everywhere as the hoverjet’s cannons rip it apart. What other monsters did Utopic have locked away? And what would happen if they all escaped?

  Wingman’s communicator comes online, and Uzma watches through his feed as he slices his way through a man-termite infestation on the balcony of a boutique hotel in Mala Strana. He’s a killing machine when he gets going, but with every plasma burst that takes out the wriggling, squirming, utterly disgusting man-grubs chewing their way through the old building, he’s blasting out the walls and woodwork as well: there will be very little left of the beautiful neighbourhood when he’s done.

  “Are we just on pest control duty here, or is there something I’m supposed to be looking for?” asks Wingman.

  “Is there a central nest?” asks Uzma. “You should work your way towards that.”

  “I’ll know when I find it,” says Wingman, as an empty-eyed grub rears up in front of him and gets blasted into a fine shower of bug-bits. He shuts down his communicator and gets back to work.

  They’d spent the last week knocking super-heads together. A trip to the Ultradome in Las Vegas, where fake superpro-wrestlers (usually down-on-their-luck supervillains looking for a showbiz career) went through the motions for cheering audiences across the world, had proved satisfying in terms of violence, but fruitless in terms of leads. They’d gone to underground super-combat tournaments in Mexico, beaten up super-warlords in North Africa, and broken up an upper-class British secret super-society of human-hunters in Soho. But no one Uzma had Asked knew where this particular apocalypse was coming from, or who was behind it. What was the point of this sabre-rattling from Utopic? Was the insect invasion just a rogue superbug gone crazy, or was it part of some larger, more sinister plan? If this was what one Utopic creature could do, what would happen the day they threw the doors to the whole zoo open?

  Jason comes online. “Uzma,” he gasps, “there’s a problem.”

  “You think?” asks Uzma.

  Through the swirling shield of bricks and metal Jason’s built around himself, she can see he’s running up the path to Prague Castle, leaping easily over lumps of insect wax that have split the cobbled street. As she watches, a caterpillar that appears to be made of several people sewn together bursts out of an antique shop. Jason leaps and rolls as it charges at him, and his viewscreen tilts and swirls crazily. He’s back on his feet in an instant, and a shower of wood and brick torn from the buildings around him sends the caterpillar scuttling back, looking for shelter.

  A series of green power-blasts lights up the street through the cloud of dust, and as Jason looks up Uzma sees Anima arrive, her giant anime eyes glowing and sparkling. A volley of green power-shuriken, and the caterpillar writhes, rippling horribly, and then bursts, scattering bone, blood and insect goo all over the Unit’s heroes.

  “I’m waiting,” says Uzma.

  “I don’t know where we’re staying tonight, but I’m calling first shower,” says Jason. “Anyway, listen, these creatures – it’s not just eggs.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Ellis.

  “Well, they’re not just hatching. There’s also some kind of undead scene going on – if they eat your brain and spit into it, you turn into one too.”

  “That’s sweet,” says Uzma. “Kill them all, please?”

  As Jason disconnects and goes back to carving a path uphill towards Prague Castle, Ellis gets another call. Uzma hears the sound of distant thunder over the noise of the insect-men buzzing around the hoverjet. Looking back, she sees Wu in the distance, bathed in a bright white glow, directing bolts of lightning into rooftops.

  They fly low over Wenceslas Square, already largely empty: Jai often has that effect on public places. They see him, a tiny dot below them, surrounded by attackers, and Uzma is filled with horror. Hundreds of bodies are piled up in the square, human, monster, and others that are so mangled it is impossible to tell. Jai is on the warpath, notching up an incredible death count with horrible ease and unearthly joy. These are the only times he’s absolutely free, and Uzma never wants to look into his eyes when he’s done.

  “We’re going to have to suppress the casualty figures on this one,” Ellis says beside her. “But all the powers that be are demanding executions – don’t bother capturing the leader alive when you find him.”

  “Yeah, he might know things we shouldn’t,” says Uzma. “Killing him is clearly our only option. You know, I find Utopic’s hold over the UN even scarier than what they’re doing here.”

  “Do what you think best. We have to bring in the team now – we’ve found the central hive.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the Kafka Museum. Where we should have started looking, really.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. This is going to be a publicity nightmare, by the way.”

  Uzma glares at him. “You think I care about that?”

  Ellis shakes his head. “I know you don’t,” he says. “That’s part of the problem. I shouldn’t have brought you here today. You’ve probably saved many lives, but still.”

  They send out the signal.

  A minute later, the hoverjet shudders as Jai launches himself off the Bata headquarters and lands neatly on the hatch; Ellis slides it open. Everyone in the hoverjet covers their noses as Jai strides in, dripping ooze and blood. He squelches into his seat. There are no words to say.

  The hoverjet speeds over the Old Town; the pilot has flown them before, and knows exactly where to turn and swerve. Wu doesn’t even look as the jet spins in mid-air behind her. She releases one final bolt of lightning, shuts her eyes and then lands on the hoverjet’s floor quietly as they draw her in.

  Jason and Anima streak over broken rooftops towards the Kafka Museum. Wingman is already there, killing time, shooting monsters. Ellis gets a priority call from New York and retreats to a corner of the hoverjet, muttering into his phone.

  The red sloping roofs of the museum and the buildings around it have been covered in river mud and an ugly grey-brown resin. Worker insect-men swarm all over the complex, too busy to gape at the hoverjet as it flies in. Uzma is closer than she wants to be; she sees beasts with human heads and large, grubby white insect bodies, and cannot decide whether they’re worse than the ones with insect bodies and fleshy hind limbs. She doesn’t have to study them too closely, though; the hoverjet revolves, spraying the roofs with bullets, and scores of mutant bodies fall to earth.

  In the centre of the museum courtyard, where the first gregors had broken out, is a large crack in the pavement that’s been coated with wax. Maggot-men crawl out of it in large numbers, ignoring their impending doom, slime trailing out of their hindquarters.

  Jason, Anima and Wingman fly into the hoverjet.

  “Someone has to go in there and grab the main bug guy and destroy all the hive eggs,” says Uzma. “Any volunteers?”

  There are no volunteers.

  “Well then,” says Uzma, “Jai?”

  Jai nods. “The rest of you should stay safe,” he says. “None of you are invincible.”

  “Hang on there, friend,” says Jason. “We’ve killed as many of these bugs as you have.”

  “Which brings us to an interesting question,” says Ellis. “UN HQ is saying that this mass murder of Prague’s citizens needs to stop right now. We need to find a way to negotiate.”

  “These are the same people who tried to give zombies the vote,” says Uzma.

 
“Well, it might sound ridiculous to you, Uzma, but they are people,” says Wingman. “If baseline humans have accepted us in their social and legal frameworks, other altered humans must—”

  “You were the one out there shooting them, Wingman,” says Uzma. “Now suddenly you’re Mr Peaceful Resolution?”

  “The situation’s changed,” says Wingman, his voice exuding compassion.

  Uzma wishes she had the strength to beat the condescending smile off his face.

  “All right,” says Uzma. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

  “You couldn’t have told us this before?” Jason squares up to Ellis.

  “I’m sorry I brought you here,” says Ellis. “But now they’re talking standing commissions, years in court. Look, we didn’t know what the body count was when we brought you in. A few dozen insect monsters is one thing. They’re ugly, too, and it looks good on camera when you squash them. But now we’re talking about thousands of people in one of the world’s major cities.”

  “I say we leave,” says Wingman. “These people have rights. Let the EU teams take the blame for their murder. I say they deserve to live in peace.”

  “Well, if it’s time for negotiations,” says Uzma, standing up, “then I guess we’re lucky the world’s best negotiator is right here.”

  “It’s really not safe for you,” says Wingman. “Let the situation stabilise, and then local teams—”

  “Take the jet down,” Says Uzma.

  As the hoverjet’s pilot tries to find a landing spot amidst the squelching filth and swarming human-insect monsters in the Kafka Museum’s courtyard, Uzma subjects her teammates to a quivering, incandescent gaze.

  “Ellis and Wingman have managed to steer me into a position where anything I do is wrong,” she says, ignoring all attempts at protest. “Now I didn’t spend a lot of time in the film industry, which is really where I wanted to be in the first place, eleven years ago – but I never made the mistake of trusting anyone again. I don’t know who you’re loyal to. I don’t know if any of you are on Utopic’s payroll. And I honestly don’t care. But I do know one thing – I’m not anyone’s pawn. And if we’re going to go ahead – with this monster hive, or the next – I need to know, very clearly, how many of you are in my team. My team. I’m going to do what I think is right, with or without the UN. With or without you. Not because I want to fix the world, but just because I’m here and I’m mad as hell. I know Jai is with me. He doesn’t have a choice. Who else?”

  “I am,” says Anima, smiling for the first time in days.

  “Me too,” says Jason.

  “We’re all on the same team, Uzma,” says Wingman.

  Wu blinks in an encouraging sort of way, her mind clearly elsewhere.

  “I’ll take that as a yes all around,” says Uzma. “I don’t like using my Voice on any of you. Now we’re going to go and have a chat with this literature professor and see what he has to say for himself. Any questions?”

  There are no questions. The loudest sound that can be heard is the ominous buzzing of a swarm of bee-men flying out of the crack in the ground, ready for battle.

  The Unit goes to work.

  They storm their way through the bee-monster attack, Anima, Jason and Wu doing most of the damage. Jai stands at Uzma’s side, chopping down any attacker with silent, deadly precision. They enter the gregor hive and make their way deep underground. Wingman carries Uzma.

  Danger waits at every turn: centipede-men, bright and deadly wasp creatures, strange and slimy larval beings that fit no known description. But there is no room for doubt now, and the Unit acquits itself magnificently. Jason’s protective cloud of whirling shields is now made entirely out of insect body parts. Anima shows no fatigue whatsoever, her laugh growing more cheerful with each burst of glowing green energy, the patterns on her flying daggers turning more intricate as her dying enemies’ bodies build bridges across gaps in the hive for her teammates. Wu floats above them, a strange hum emanating from deep within her body, her eyes wide open and unseeing. The shadow-spirit that rides her now is slow and delights in death; Wu curls her fingers, and attacking insect-men choke and fall dead, a macabre puppet-show like no other.

  The gregors have found an old city that lies buried deep under the foundations of Prague, and turned it into their hive. Ancient statues poke their heads out of tapestries of wax and slime, there are rows of broken pillars, walls that show their aged bones in between earthen mounts and nests full of cracked eggs and moulted gregor skins. Cocoons dot forgotten arches like stalactites. But the Unit has no time to solve the mysteries of this buried city: they are only here to hunt, and kill.

  After what seems like hours, they find Roman Novak. He sits, a monstrous cockroach-wasp-termite creature, bloated and grotesque, covered in filth, in what must have been a throne-room in some forgotten age. The once magnificent hall is lined with warrior termite creatures, lined up and ready for battle. But they stand no chance against the invaders. There is one tricky moment when a termite-man lunges straight at Uzma, but Jai is faster; he catches the beast’s pincers in his hands and rips it apart in one smooth motion.

  In a few minutes, Roman is the only insect-man left alive. He makes no attempt to attack, it is not clear if he even knows they are there. His insect face has grown out of the middle of his human one; his human eyes and ears hang in useless bits of skin at the base of his antennae.

  “Tell us how this happened,” Uzma Tells him. “Tell us what Utopic did to you.”

  Roman’s body flops to one side, and dozens of little feet emerge from under a wing. They wiggle uselessly, too weak to take his bulk anywhere.

  Uzma asks him more questions, but the gregor has no answers. Finally, Anima cannot take it any more, she leaps into the air with a shriek, a katana of light blossoming from her hands, and cuts off the beast’s head with a single stroke.

  The heroes stand, heads bowed, in a room full of corpses. On the ceiling, a few white grubs enter the hall and skitter about.

  “I thought when you killed the boss monster the other ones would die,” says Jason. “What should we do, Uzma? Clear out the hive? There must be thousands left.”

  “I used to watch my brothers playing video games a lot, when I was a kid,” says Uzma. “This was just like that. Except the bloody smell. I don’t feel anything. Do any of you feel anything?”

  “I feel dirty,” says Anima. “Not, like, spiritually. Just covered in shit. Can we go home?”

  “We’re going home,” says Uzma. “Wu, can you do some kind of spirit blast thing and take out all the eggs?”

  “No,” says Wu.

  “I suppose someone else will,” says Uzma. “Right. Everybody out.”

  * * *

  The interior of the hoverjet is a mess by the time they’re all seated. Ellis sits at the rear, communicating in urgent, angry whispers with his superiors at the UN. The Unit’s heroes skip the traditional post-fight camaraderie, but their ordeal is not over yet. From a seat in the hoverjet that Uzma could have sworn was empty a minute ago, That Guy breaks into enthusiastic applause.

  “This was one of our best cases, people,” he says. “One for the history books! Ellis, could you get a picture?”

  Ellis does not get a picture. But some time later, when the hoverjet has entered German airspace, he holds the phone out towards Uzma.

  “I really don’t want to talk to your bosses right now,” Uzma says. “Later, Ellis. Later.”

  “It’s not the UN,” says Ellis. “Wait, I’ll transfer to holo-screen.”

  Tia’s face appears on a floating window in the hoverjet.

  “What do you want?” snaps Uzma.

  “Hi,” says Tia. “You look good.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk to any of us again.”

  “I didn’t have anything to say then. But I’ve got some information for you now,” says Tia.

  “I really don’t want to do this, Tia,” says Uzma. “If Aman is alive, and wants to
talk to me, tell him to get in touch directly. But not now.”

  Tia looks at her warily. “You know that Rowena girl you’re looking for? The power remover?”

  Uzma is puzzled, but feels a wild excitement growing within her. If Tia knows about the Unit’s top-secret search for Rowena, it can only mean…

  “Say yes quickly, love,” says Tia. “This call isn’t cheap.”

  “Maybe,” says Uzma. “What about her?”

  “I’ll tell you who has her, if you promise to give me first crack at him when you find him,” says Tia.

  “Done,” Uzma says, lying blithely. “Who is it?”

  “A young Japanese billionaire,” says Tia. “Human. His name is Norio Hisatomi.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “You know what your problem is?” Aman asks Norio.

  “Yes,” says Norio.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Norio’s back is turned, and there’s a styrofoam cup of tea in his right hand. Aman looks around the hall they’re in, searching for an escape route, weighing his options. A quick dash could get him to the door, but he’s still drowsy from the drugs, and doesn’t know if he can make it, or if there is security outside the door. So he shifts his weight and tries in vain, again, to go online.

  Aman has no idea where in the world he is, or what time of day it is. They’re in an empty hall, with lots of closed windows. An office? An empty house? There’s no furniture apart from a few revolving chairs. They look unused; one is covered in plastic.

  “Well?” says Norio.

  “What?”

  “What’s my problem?”

  “You’ve read too many superhero comics. Seen too many films. You were the wrong age when they went mainstream. In fiction, and then in real life,” says Aman. “I recognise the signs. Fellow victim.”

  Norio listens to Aman’s words echoing through the empty hall. He turns, smiling.

  “And why is that a problem?” he asks.

  “Well, it just means that once you become a super, you start acting like your favourites. Sometimes people don’t even know they’re doing it,” says Aman. “I mean, I had a suit of armour once. Gadgets everywhere. It seemed like I only had it for a few minutes, but it was a few months before Tia could get me to stop pretending to be Robert Downey Jr. And you clearly—”