Worm

by John McCrae

  The distraction afforded Miss Militia time to prepare and fire a mortar straight into Hookwolf’s chest. As he collapsed backward, his chest cavity gaping open, her gun shimmered, split and transformed into a pair of assault rifles. She unloaded clip after clip into the enemy ranks; rubber bullets, most likely. The innate issues of the nonlethal ammunition were almost negligible in Miss Militia’s case. She could reform the gun in a second if a gun jammed.

  Shadow Stalker watched a crowd of Hookwolf’s Chosen move to flank, moving along the sidewalk, where the crashed truck blocked the view of the PRT forces. Shadow Stalker raised her crossbow, hesitated. She could jump down, take them down in close quarters combat. It had been her entire reason for going out, after having to deal with the irritation of Vista. She craved that catharsis.

  She holstered her crossbow, prepared to dive into their midst, and then paused as she saw the Chosen stagger back, lashing out with their hands. One shouted something, which was odd given how they had been trying to be stealthy only a moment ago.

  What?

  Then another figure stepped out of the alleyway closest to them. A girl, skinny, but not in the attractive way you saw in magazines. Spindly. Was that the right word? The girl was hard to make out in the gloom – there were no lights on the street, and the only light was what filtered from the moon and through the rain clouds. The girl glanced left, around the back of the truck, then glanced right, where she might have seen Shadow Stalker if she looked up just a little. The lenses of her mask caught the moonlight, flashing a pale yellow.

  Skitter.

  A feral smile spread across Shadow Stalker’s face, beneath her mask.

  Shadow Stalker resisted the urge to jump down, watched as the shadow of the bug girl’s swarm moved over the Chosen, almost obscuring them from view. The bug girl drew her combat stick, whipped it out to full length, and dispatched the Chosen one by one. Shadow Stalker couldn’t see the hits, between the darkness and the obscuring mass of the swarm, but she saw the splashes and movements of the Chosen as they fell to the ground, clutching their faces, knees, and hands.

  Some of the bugs flowed out to pass over the PRT forces and the Chosen. The thugs started recoiling and slapping at themselves, but Shadow Stalker couldn’t see much reaction from the PRT forces. They were made of sterner stuff, in a way, and their uniforms covered them thoroughly enough that the bugs wouldn’t do nearly as much damage, if they were even attacking.

  Skitter emerged from the center mass of the swarm, carrying a bag of supplies from the truck. It was green canvas, large, not dissimilar to a gym bag. Pulling the strap over one shoulder, she briskly retreated back into the alley, the bugs trailing after her like the tail of a slow moving comet, or the steady trail of smoke from a candle.

  “Hungry, are you?” Shadow Stalker murmured to herself. She shifted into her shadow state, moved along the rooftop to follow the girl. Shadow Stalker was almost entirely silent in this state, virtually impossible to see, especially in this light, unless someone was actively looking for her. She was a gray shadow against a background of black and shades of gray.

  You saw my face. Shadow Stalker thought, Records say you’ve got no team, now. Operating alone between the old Boardwalk and the east end of Downtown.

  She leaped to the next rooftop, and the movement carried her a little ahead of her target, helped by the fact that the bug girl was moving a little slower with her burden. Shadow Stalker paused and reached up beneath her cloak and between her shoulder blades. She withdrew a cartridge for her crossbow, each bolt loaded in at a slight angle, so the aluminum ‘feathers’ at the tail of each bolt stuck out. She popped out one bolt to examine it, then turned it around so the barbed, razor sharp arrowhead caught the moonlight. As Skitter passed beneath her, she turned the bolt’s point so her perspective made it appear to be at the girl’s throat.

  Operating solo means there’s nobody to miss you.

  She entered her shadow state and moved further along the rooftop, only to feel a group of flying insects pass through her body. A fraction of a second later, Skitter was running, abandoning the bag, disappearing around a corner, not even turning to look Shadow Stalker’s way.

  “You want to run? I don’t mind a bit of a chase,” Shadow Stalker smiled behind her mask, loading the cartridge into her right-hand crossbow. She leaped after the girl, gliding down to street level, rebounding off a wall to turn the corner and give pursuit.

  Skitter had turned around, was waiting as she rounded the corner. The bug girl sent a mass of insects out to attack.

  The bugs passed through Shadow Stalker’s body, slowing her momentum. She suspected that if there were enough of them, they could even carry her aloft, push her back. But there weren’t – the swarm wasn’t quite big enough. As the stream of insects passed through her, reoriented in preparation to flow through her again, she pounced.

  The residual bugs threw her off, slowing down her power. Her body had to push them out of the space it wanted to occupy, delayed the change back to her normal self by a half-second. Her hand passed through Skitter’s throat, but she caught her balance, drew her rearmost foot up and back in a half-spin. Her heel collided with Skitter’s mask.

  Skitter went down, and Shadow Stalker turned her crossbow on her fallen opponent. She was about to fire when the combat stick lashed out. She lifted the crossbow up just in time - had she been a second slower, the stick might have broken her weapon. Acutely aware of the bugs clustering on her, she dropped into her shadow state before they could crawl beneath her mask.

  The stick passed through her head, once. She resisted the urge to snap back to her normal form and retaliate. The girl was powerless here. Shadow Stalker could afford to hound her, drive her to the brink of desperation, wear her down.

  The bug girl switched to a one-handed grip on her baton, flying insects clustering around her to mask her movements as she backed away a step. She used her free hand to push the wet hair out of her face. Then she adjusted her costume, reaching to tug her shoulderpad forward a bit, then reached behind her back to do much the same with the armor there.

  “You really want to fight me?” Shadow Stalker asked her opponent, a note of incredulity in her voice. She raised her right crossbow. The one with the lethal ammunition.

  Skitter didn’t reply.

  Whatever else Shadow Stalker might think of the bug girl, how the girl was creepy, a freak, she had to admit Skitter had demonstrated enough viciousness to date that she could almost respect the girl as a fellow predator. An idiot, for wanting to fight her, but kindred, in a fashion. “Alright, fine.”

  Skitter gripped her weapon two-handed again. The grip was strange. Something in her left hand?

  Shadow Stalker realized what it was. She simultaneously moved back, gripped her cloak with her left hand and shifted to her solid state to raise the fabric as a barrier. The pepper spray spattered her cloak.

  When she was sure the spray had dissipated, she threw her cloak back over one shoulder and shifted to her shadow state to escape the bugs that were crawling on her, taking advantage of her solidity. She lunged after Skitter, who was running, already turning a corner at the other side of the alley.

  Good runner, but I’m faster.

  Shadow Stalker didn’t need to slosh through the water, but she knew she would be faster than the other girl even if she did. It wasn’t just her shadow state eliminating wind resistance, or the lightness of her body. She was a trained runner.

  She bounded from one wall of the alley to the one opposite, staying above the water, pursuing her target.

  Skitter was going up the steps of a fire escape. Shadow Stalker aimed and fired a bolt – the girl ducked, and the shot clipped a railing instead.

  Good reflexes. Shadow Stalker brushed away at the bugs massing around her. Or do your bugs help you watch what I’m doing? Disturbing little freak.

  Apparently deciding the fire escape wasn’t a great option, Skitter climbed over the railing and leaped a half-story down to
the pavement, putting a chain link fence and some accumulated trash bags between herself and Shadow Stalker.

  Moron. I can walk through that fence. She loaded her crossbow, aimed, and fired through the fence at the girl.

  A flash and spray of sparks erupted as the shot made contact with the fence. Skitter stumbled as the bolt hit her, but Shadow Stalker couldn’t see if it had done any damage.

  No, what concerned her was the flash. She ignored the fact that Skitter was disappearing, entered her solid state and touched the side of her mask.

  Lenses snapped into place, showing a blurry image of the alley in shades of dark green and black. The chain link fence, however, was lit up in a very light gray. Similarly glowing, a wire was stapled to the brick of the building next to the fence, leading to a large, pale blob inside the building. A generator.

  The fence was electrified.

  Shadow Stalker snarled at what had almost been a grave mistake, entered her shadow state and leaped up and over the fence, being careful not to touch it.

  One of the reasons she couldn’t move through walls at will, beyond the huge break in her forward momentum and the excruciating pain that came with stalling in the midst of a wall, was wiring. She remained just as vulnerable, maybe even more vulnerable, to electrocution. The people in the PRT labs couldn’t tell her if she could be killed by electrocution – traditional organs were barely present in her shadow state – but it was one of those things that couldn’t be properly tested without risking killing the subject.

  End result? She had to be careful where she went, had received tinker-made lenses to help her spot such threats.

  Skitter had known the fence was electrified, judging by the route she’d taken through the fire escape. The area here didn’t have any power, so the question was whether it something this area’s inhabitants had set up to protect themselves… or was it a trap Skitter had put in place well in advance? No. More likely the girl had studied this area before carrying out any crimes.

  Still, it troubled her that the girl had thought to use the fence like she had. She really didn’t like the idea that the villain had not only seen her face, but that she might have figured out one of her weaknesses. Two, if she counted the pepper spray. Being permeable was a problem when she absorbed gases, vapors and aerosols directly into her body. It wouldn’t affect her if she was in her shadow state, and it would eventually filter out, but if she were forced to change back, she’d suffer as badly as anyone, if not worse.

  Shadow Stalker caught up to the girl yet again, saw Skitter running with her swarm clustered tightly around her. Was the girl wanting to make herself a harder target?

  Hardly mattered – Shadow Stalker loaded and fired another bolt.

  At the same instant the bolt fired, the swarm parted in two. Two swarm-wreathed figures covered in bugs, each turning at a right angle to round a corner. The bolt sailed between them. One was a decoy, just a swarm in a vaguely human shape.

  She checked the sides of the alley and the recessed doors. Could they both be decoys? She couldn’t see any obvious hiding spots that Skitter could have used at a moment’s notice.

  Shadow Stalker closed the distance, placing herself at the intersection between the two bug-shrouded figures. Holding each crossbow out in an opposite direction, she fired at both targets at once, snapping her attention from one to the next in an attempt to see which reacted to the hit.

  One slowed, began to topple. She lunged after, in pursuit, loaded her crossbow and fired two more shots into the center mass of Skitter’s body while airborne, then kicked downward with both feet as she landed, to shove the girl into the ground.

  Her body weight dissolved the blurry silhouette into a mess of bugs. A trick.

  Snarling, Shadow Stalker wheeled around, ran in the direction the other half of the swarm had gone Had the girl’s armor taken the bolt? Had the crossbow shot missed?

  More bugs were flowing from the area to join the swarm, bolstering its number enough for it to split again. She wasn’t close enough to be sure of a hit, and she didn’t want to waste her good arrows, so she delayed, leaped forward to close the gap.

  The swarm split once more, making for four vaguely human figures in total, each cloaked in a cloud of flying insects.

  Shadow Stalker snarled a curse word.

  One figure turned on the spot, moved as if to slide past Shadow Stalker. She lashed out, striking it in the throat, failed to hit anything solid.

  She loaded her crossbows, fired at the figure on the far left and the far right of the trio. No reaction. She dove after the remaining one.

  She made contact, drove the bug girl’s face down into the water. She shifted into her shadow state, straddling Skitter. The girl turned over of her own volition – easy enough, as Shadow Stalker was barely solid, but when Skitter tried to stand, Shadow Stalker resumed her normal form for a second – just long enough to force the girl back down.

  Picking one of her non-tranquilizer bolts from the cartridge, she held the point of the ammunition to Skitter’s throat like a knife, “Game over, you little freak.”

  Skitter cocked her head a little, as if analyzing Shadow Stalker from a different perspective.

  “What are you looking at?” Shadow Stalker spat the word, “Nothing to say? No last words? No begging? No fucking apologies?”

  Skitter went limp, letting her head rest against the ground, the water lapping over most of her mask. Dark curls fanned out in the water around her, swaying as the water rippled.

  “Guess I don’t need to worry about the villain who saw my face, now.” Shadow Stalker went solid and drew the razor-sharp tip of her bolt across Skitter’s throat.

  The fabric didn’t cut.

  Skitter struggled to get free, but Shadow Stalker’s body weight was too much for her to slide free. She gripped the girl’s wrists with her hands, pinned them to the ground.

  “Irritating,” she spat the word. She could always go into her shadow state, stick the arrow inside the girl and then return to normal. The problem with going that route was that it left a very characteristic imprint in the victim. She would need a way of covering up the evidence. Something she could hit Skitter with afterward that would make the wound too messy to analyze for evidence.

  While she craned her head to one side to the next to search for something useful, her surroundings were plunged into darkness.

  It took her only a moment to realize what that meant. She climbed off Skitter, moved to run. The darkness was oppressive, sluggish in moving through her, unlike ordinary air. She was slower, wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. Against her will, her power instinctively adjusted, shifted her into a middle ground between her regular self and her shadow state. It left her slower, heavier.

  She baited me.

  A massive shape tore through her, dissipated her entire body. She pulled back together, but it was hard, painful and uncomfortable on an unspecific, fundamental level. It left her breathing hard, feeling like she’d just put her body through five hours of the hardest exercise of her life. Enervating, was that the right word? Bugs were gathering inside and around her body, making it a little harder and a little more time-consuming to pull together.

  Then, before she had succeeded in pulling herself all the way together, it happened again, another large form striking from another direction, passing through her lower body.

  She sagged. Gasped out in pain as another shape passed through her head and shoulders. The darkness absorbed her cry so it barely reached her own ears.

  It was only seconds later that the darkness dissipated. She was on her hands and knees, barely had the strength to move, let alone fight. She tried to raise her right crossbow, but her hand seized up, no longer under her own control as it bent to a pain like a bad Charlie horse. Her fingers curled back, and the crossbow tumbled from her fingers. She still had one in her left hand, but she was using the heel of that hand to prop herself up.

  Her opponents were revealed as the shadows passed, arranged in a
rough ring around her. Hellhound and her dogs took up half the clearing, in front of Shadow Stalker. She held a metal ring in each hand, with two chains extending out from each ring. The chains, in turn, were connected to harnesses around the heads and snouts of the ‘dogs’, each animal only a little smaller than a refrigerator. They were monstrous, with scaly, horned exteriors and exposed muscle. Not as big or ugly as they could get, Shadow Stalker knew. The smallest one was barking incessantly. Three of the four were pulling on the chains, hungry to get at Shadow Stalker, clearly intent on tearing her apart. Hellhound’s sharp pulls on the chains contracted the bindings around their snouts, which made them stop before they could get too close.

  Grue stood to her left, arms folded, almost indistinguishable from the darkness behind him. After her first humiliating loss to him, she’d made it a mission to drive him out of this city. He’d stubbornly refused. A girl Shadow Stalker didn’t recognize stood just behind him, wearing a black scarf and a pale gray mask with pointed horns arching over the top of her head. The eyes of the mask had lenses that were black from corner to corner, stylized to look fierce, more animal than human.

  Rounding out the group were Tattletale, Regent and Skitter. Tattletale smiled, her hands clasped behind her back, while Regent twirled his scepter in his fingers. Skitter stood between the two of them. The bug girl bent, then crouched until she was almost at eye level with Shadow Stalker.

  A laugh escaped Shadow Stalker’s lips, building until she couldn’t balance her upper body on her weakened arm. She bent so one shoulder hit the ground, rolled onto her back, arms at her sides. She looked up at Skitter, “All that drama, all that fucking nonsense about allegiances, betraying your team, was it a trick, some joke?”