Worm

by John McCrae

  As we made our way into the building and the others headed up the stairs, I stayed behind to look at the factory area on the first floor. If I could maybe secure some plywood to the frames where there had been treadmills, it would mean I would have several long countertops for my bugs to work on. Add some sort of cage at the back, to house them… but where would I find the sort of grid of cages or containers that could house thousands of individual spiders?

  It was something I could figure out. Whether I settled on egg cartons or built the entire thing with the help of bug labor, I knew it was doable somehow.

  The question was, did I want to do it?

  I made my way upstairs, deep in thought.

  “Where’s Rachel?” Brian asked, as he returned from the other end of the loft, Brutus and Angelica trotting behind him, tails wagging. “Only two of her dogs are here.”

  “We’re twenty minutes later than we said we’d be,” Lisa pointed out, “Maybe she went ahead?”

  “You guys get ready,” Brian directed us, “We told our employer we’d hand the cash over at some point tonight, and if we take too long, it’s going to reflect badly on us. I’ll take care of calling Rachel to see what’s up, since it doesn’t take me as long to get my stuff on.”

  Alec, Lisa and I headed towards our individual rooms. After shutting the door, I got my costume from the bottom drawer of my bedside table. I laid it out on my inflatable mattress, then gathered and lined up my arsenal for my utility compartment: pepper spray, knife, telescoping combat baton, notepad, Epipens, a change-purse with some spare change and a twenty inside and an unused, disposable cell phone. Everything I’d been able to think of, for what I’d want to keep with me.

  Pen, I realized. It was a little thing, but a notepad did me little good without a pen. I headed for the dresser and stopped short.

  On top of the dresser, there was a crystal. Except crystal was the wrong word. It was a teardrop shaped piece of amber, polished smooth, almost a foot tall, set into a stone base so it stood upright. Inside was a dragonfly. The dragonfly was so large it almost didn’t fit – it wouldn’t have fit, even, if the wings hadn’t curled inward at the tips as the amber set. Where the light from the loft’s windows touched the crystal, it cast the top of the dresser and some of the wall in deep shades of yellow and orange, with hints of dark blue where it passed through the dragonfly’s translucent wings.

  There was a note beside it. ‘Saw it, seemed very you. Consider it a belated welcome present. Brian.’

  I was stunned. He must have left it while I was still downstairs. I hurried to get into my costume, found a pen in the dresser and put the contents of my utility compartment in place. When that was done, I pulled on some jeans, a sweater and a jacket over top of the costume, finishing up with a nearly empty backpack to cover the slight hump of the armor on my back.

  It was only after I was totally ready that I headed out of my room and found Brian on the couch. While I was sure he’d be gracious either way, I was assuming he would appreciate it more if I got ready first and then thanked him, instead of the other way around.

  He was still in the living room, pulling on his leather motorcycle jacket over a protective vest.

  “I-uh, don’t know what to say.”

  His forehead creased, “Is it okay? I was thinking, maybe giving you a rock with a dead bug inside it wasn’t the nicest-”

  “It’s perfect,” I interrupted him, “Really. Thank you.” I never knew what to say when getting a gift. I always worried my thanks sounded false, forced or sarcastic, even when they were genuine.

  Impulsively, I gave him the briefest of hugs. It seemed like the only way I could make my gratitude clear.

  “Hey!” a voice from behind me startled the wits out of me, “No romance in the workplace!”

  I turned around to see Alec and Lisa standing in the hallway, grinning. In Lisa’s case, grinning more than usual.

  I must have turned beet red. “It’s not, no, I was just thanking him for-”

  “I know, dork. I was with him when he bought it.”

  Mercifully, Lisa changed the subject, “Any word from our resident sociopath?”

  Brian frowned, “No. Her phone is out of service, which it shouldn’t be, since I was the one who turned it on, activated it and gave it to her earlier today. Something’s up.”

  The good natured mood from moments before was gone. We exchanged looks between us, and nobody was smiling now.

  “I think…” Brian said, weighing his words carefully, “It would be a very good idea to check on the money, ASAP.”

  4.05

  Sunsets are always best after a spell of bad weather. Today was no exception. Following the day and a half of heavy rain we’d just suffered through, the sky was turning vivid shades of orange and crimson, with purple highlights on the thin clouds that were moving briskly in the strong wind. It looked especially amazing as we approached the water of the Bay, but none of us were really in a mood to appreciate it.

  It was like we were an entirely different group of people from the group of friends that had walked from the market to the loft. There was no conversation, no joking, no bonding. We were all thinking the same thing: that something was wrong, that something had happened. Nobody voiced their suspicions, though, as if there was the unspoken agreement that we would only make it come true by saying it aloud.

  In silence, we caught the bus at the ferry and got off at the Trainyard, the part of the Docks that sat opposite to the Boardwalk.

  As a group, we walked a half block from the bus stop, around the back of a derelict building, and stripped out of our civilian clothes. The storage facility was just a block from the Trainyard. Just past the chain link fence, I could see long abandoned boxcars sat like oversize, crumbling tombstones, overgrown with weeds, surrounded by discarded bottles and makeshift shelters. The entire area was desolate, empty. It was hard to say why the bus even came this way. I supposed maybe there was a skeleton crew of employees maintaining the rail for the trains that happened to pass through.

  We descended into the maze. Each storage locker was only about ten feet by ten feet across, but there were hundreds of them, each one joined to the one beside it, organized into disorganized rows of ten or twenty brick shacks. It was a common enough sight; places like this were scattered all over Brockton Bay. Decades ago, as unemployment rates skyrocketed, people had started using the storage lockers as a place to live. Some enterprising individuals had caught on and storage blocks much like this one had appeared in the place of dilapidated warehouses and parking lots. It was, in an off the books sort of way, the lowest budget living accommodations you could find, a way for people who’d had apartments and homes of their own to keep their most cherished possessions and sleep on a bed at night.

  But things turned sour. These storage facilities became drug dens, gathering places for gangs and areas where the crazies would congregate. Epidemics of the flu and strep throat had swept through these ‘neighborhoods’ of closely packed, unwashed and malnourished groups of people, and left people dead in their wake. Some who didn’t die to sickness were knifed for their belongings or starved, and corpses were left to rot behind the closed doors of their rented storage lockers. In the end, the city cracked down, and the lockers fell out of favor. By then, the local industry had crashed enough that the homeless and destitute were able migrate to the abandoned warehouses, factories and apartment blocks to squat there instead. The same general problems were still there, of course, but at least things weren’t so densely packed into a volatile situation.

  That left these sprawls of storage lockers scattered over the city, particularly in the Docks. They were largely unused, now, just row upon row of identical sheds with faded or illegible numbers painted on the doors, each with a corrugated steel roof bolted securely on top, slanted just enough that people wouldn’t be able to comfortably walk or sleep on top of them.

  “We’re looking for thirteen-oh-six,” Grue spoke, breaking the silence that
had hung over us for half an hour. It took us a few minutes to find. There wasn’t really any rhyme or reason to the layout of the lockers or the numbering. Probably, I guessed, the lockers had been set down where there was room, and given the first number that was available. The only reason we found the locker as fast as we did was that Brian had been here before with Rachel. The vastness of the space and the disorganization was a large part of the reason we had stashed the money here, of course. If we had trouble even when we knew where we were going, then someone who knew the number and got the key from us would find it even more time consuming.

  While Grue fiddled with the lock, I glanced down both ends of the alley we were in. Except for a forklift parked a short distance away, it was eerily quiet. A ghost town, I thought. If ghosts existed, they would reside in a place like this, where so much misery, violence and death had occurred.

  “Shit,” Grue said, as the door swung open. My heart sank.

  I stood on my toes to get a look inside. The locker housed only a broad smudge in the thick layer of dust on the floor, a single lightbulb dangling from a power cord, and a dark stain in the corner. No money.

  “I vote we kill her,” Regent said.

  My eyebrows went up, “You think it was Bitch? Would she just take the money and run?”

  “If you asked me five hours ago, I would’ve said no,” Regent replied. “I would have told you, sure, she’s a loose cannon, she’s reckless, crazy, she’s easily pissed off and she’ll hospitalize those people who do piss her off… but I’d have said she’s loyal, that even if she doesn’t necessarily like us-”

  “She doesn’t like anyone,” I interrupted.

  “Right, she doesn’t like anyone, us included, but we’re the closest things she has to friends or family, besides her dogs. I wouldn’t have thought she’d throw that away.”

  “She didn’t,” Tattletale spoke, “It wasn’t her.”

  “Who was it?” Grue asked. The haunting echo of his voice had an edge of anger to it.

  “A cape,” Tattletale replied, almost absentmindedly, as if she was focusing on something else, “Someone who can pick locks. That door wasn’t forced.”

  “A villain?” I asked.

  “A villain,” Tattletale echoed me. I couldn’t tell if she was clarifying what I’d said or if she was just echoing my words while she paid attention to something else. “More than one. And they’re still here.”

  A soft clapping answered her. It was slow, unenthusiastic to the point of being sarcastic.

  “Brilliantly deduced,” the same person that had been clapping spoke out. As Tattletale whipped her head around, I took a few steps back from the storage locker, to get a better look at the two people who stood on the roof.

  They were standing with one leg higher than the other, to keep from sliding off the angled roof, and both were wearing identical costumes. The costumes sported blue man-leotards with broad belts cinched around their waists, skintight white sleeve and leggings. Their hoods were elastic, clinging to their heads so they left only a window for the face, and each sported a single white antenna. Of all colors, their gloves, boots and the balls at the top of their antennae were bubblegum pink. Their faces were obscured by oversize goggles with dark lenses.

  Other than their costumes, though, they couldn’t have been more different. One of the figures was scrawny, with a weak chin and a bad slouch. The other had a sculpted physique, broad shouldered and tall, the lines of his muscles clearly visible through his skintight costume.

  “Über and Leet,” Tattletale greeted them, “I can’t tell you two how relieved I am. For a few seconds, I thought we had something to be worried about.”

  “Rest assured, Tattletale, you do,” Über proclaimed. He was the sort of person who proclaimed, announced, broadcasted and declared. Just like Grue’s power altered his voice to make him sound haunting and inhuman, Über’s power made him sound like the guy who narrated trailers for action movies or late night commercials. Overdramatic, intense about everything he said, no matter how mundane. Like someone overacting the role of a gallant knight in a kid’s movie.

  I looked around for what I thought of as the snitch. I finally spotted it as a small round shadow against the backdrop of the sunset-red sky, just above the glaring sliver of sun. It was a camera, mounted in a golden sphere the size of a tennis ball. It was capable of moving like a hummingbird, staying safe, always recording. Über and Leet streamed all of their costumed activity online, so people could tune in whenever to see what they were up to. I was pretty sure they had a time delay, so events that the camera recorded would play out online in a half hour to an hour.

  I could admit I had watched myself, a couple of times, which was how I knew about the ‘snitch’. Each time I’d tuned in, I had been surprised to see there were thousands of viewers. I’d stopped because it wasn’t feel-good watching. They were real underdogs, struggling to succeed, which made you feel sorry for them, made you want to root for them, until they did something despicable. Then you found yourself looking at them in a negative light, looking down on them, cheering whenever they failed. It felt a little too much like I’d been looking at them in the same way Emma, Madison and Sophia looked at me, and that had been a major turn-off.

  After spotting the camera, which was no doubt positioned to catch a view of us looking up at the two villains, our shadows long behind us, I turned my gaze back to the pair. With my power, though, I sent a collection of flies to congregate around the camera. It didn’t take long for the camera to start going spastic in the periphery of my vision, as if it were trying to shake them off. I smiled behind my mask.

  Leet frowned and turned to the camera, “Is that really necessary?”

  “You fucked with us,” I replied, “I fuck with your subscriber base.”

  Tattletale and Regent grinned and chuckled, respectively. Only Grue stayed quiet. He was standing very still, but the darkness around him was roiling like a stoked fire.

  “What’s the theme tonight?” Regent called out, “Your costumes are so terrible, I can’t look directly at them long enough to try and figure it out.”

  Leet and Über glared at him. Their entire schtick was a video game theme. With every escapade, they picked a different video game or series, designing their costumes and crimes around it. One day it would be Leet in a Mario costume throwing fireballs while Über was dressed up as Bowser, the two of them breaking into a mint to collect ‘coins’. Then a week later, they would have a Grand Theft Auto theme, and they would be driving through the city in a souped up car, ripping off the ABB and beating up hookers.

  Like I’d said. Despicable.

  Über approached the edge of the roof and stabbed his finger in Regent’s direction, “You-”

  He didn’t get to finish. Regent swung his arm out to one side, and Über lost his footing. I joined the others in stepping back out of the way as he fell face first onto the pavement at the base of the locker.

  “Too bad you’re fucking with the camera,” Regent commented, tilting his head in my direction, “I would have liked to see how many hits that clip would have gotten on Youtube.”

  “Give me some advance warning next time,” I told him, “Maybe a hand signal?”

  We had backed away from the locker as Über fell, and we retreated another few steps as he stood. Leet hopped down to stand beside him.

  “The money,” Grue spoke, “Where is it? How did you find it?”

  “Your fifth team member led us straight to it. Lucky happenstance, really,” Leet grinned, “As for how we found her…” he trailed off.

  Grue spoke in a low voice that wouldn’t carry to the pair of villains, “They did something to Bitch, they’ve got the money. If we don’t get a decisive victory here, our reputation is fucked.”

  “No holds barred?” Tattletale murmured.

  “Leave one of them in a state to be interrogated. Make it Leet, since Über’s powers make him annoying to keep contained. Give him a chance and he can figure out
how to do anything like he’s a goddamn expert at it, and that probably extends to escaping from ropes or handcuffs. Alright?”

  “I’m game,” I answered. I was surprised at how excited I was. This was the sort of thing I had put on a costume to do. Sure, the context wasn’t what I would have chosen, but going up against bad guys?

  I smiled behind my mask and reached out for my bugs.

  4.06

  We weren’t the only ones who were discussing strategy. As I turned my full attention to the pair, I saw Über and Leet were muttering to one another.

  When they realized I was looking at them, they stopped talking. Über wiped again at the blood under his nose and took a step forward. “Enough talking.”

  I wished there were more bugs in the area. The storage facility made for a disappointing selection. Bugs had to live off something, and there was little around here except pavement, concrete and brick. That left me only cockroaches and moths that had lived off of the contents of the lockers they could access, and spiders that dwelled in the dark corners. However lame the pair of them were, I wasn’t happy about going up against two supervillains with so little at my disposal.

  I didn’t get a chance to dwell on it, because Über charged us. I hurried to get out of his way. Über’s power made him talented. It didn’t matter if it was playing the harmonica, parkour stunts or Muay Thai, he could pull it off like he’d been working on it for hours a day for most of his life. If he really focused on it, the way I understood it, he could be top notch.

  In short, there was no fucking way I was going to let him get close to me.

  Grue had the opposite perspective. He stepped forward and then disappeared as darkness swelled around him. A second later, Über stumbled out of one side of the cloud, landed on his rear end, and then did a fancy spinning kick maneuver to bring himself to his feet again. The juxtaposition of clumsiness and technique was outright bizarre.