Worm

by John McCrae

  With that, she disappeared in a blur, the water parting in her wake.

  With her gone, the rest of the crowd swooped down on the remaining supplies. People maintained a respectful distance, but oddly enough, they weren’t acting as scared of me as they’d been before I attacked the Merchant and before I’d talked to Battery.

  Had her leaving me alone given me a measure of legitimacy? More importantly, had it been intended to give me legitimacy as ruler of the area? She hadn’t needed to step in right then. Probably. I had to admit I wasn’t sure if I would’ve gone through with stabbing the guy.

  “Listen up!” I shouted. I used my swarm to give me more volume, and to stand out against the noise of the crowd. People went silent, and every set of eyes turned towards me. I stepped up onto the truck, hiding myself briefly in the swarm as I hopped up.

  I addressed them, “Not everyone will get a box today. That is not an excuse to take what others have already claimed. As I said, I will not tolerate stealing or theft among you. If you try it, I’ll treat you the same as I treated him.”

  As I pointed, the crowd parted slightly to reveal the Merchant who was still crawling away, simultaneously struggling to douse himself in the one or two inches water on the street and to crawl with three limbs – he was favoring the hand I’d stepped on. His buddies were gone. They’d left him.

  “If you do not get a box, stay. I want the head of each family or group to raise their hands. This will help me ensure you get something before the day is over.”

  It took a minute before the last of the boxes were claimed. There were some resentful looks as the last of the people left. I had thirty or so remaining people, and after some brief discussion, seven of them raised their hands.

  I concentrated on the swarm, and found a collection of ladybugs. I piloted a group into each set of raised hands, and watched as people lowered their hands to look.

  “Each of you now has three ladybugs in your hands. Keep them, and I will use them to find you later today to drop something off for you, with a small gift to each group of you for being patient.”

  Slowly, they began to peel away from the group and leave. I began letting the swarm disperse, but I used the fact that I had the bugs all together to direct a mass towards my lair. The cream of the crop – the good ones.

  As Coil’s men got back in the truck, my swarm-sense told me that one person had stayed behind. I turned to get a better look at her.

  She was twenty or so, and her red hair had been set into long dreadlocks that she must have been growing for years. I wasn’t sure on the effect – white people didn’t grow good dreadlocks. She wore rain boots, a calf-length skirt, and had a colorful bandanna around her forehead. She was pale, and she fidgeted nervously, not making eye contact. High or afraid?

  Then she saw I was looking and she met my eyes.

  “Yes?” I asked her. “You’ve got the ladybugs. I will get you a box.”

  “No. It’s not that.” She looked at her hand where the ladybugs were.

  “Then what is it?

  “You said we were your people, that you were protecting us. Does that mean you’re going against the other groups?”

  “Yes.”

  “My kid brother. I- he needs help. My parents are sick and they’re in the hospital and I can’t tell them because I told them I’d take care of him, um, and I asked the cops but they’re so busy and there’s no way they can help, and I was going to ask that hero, Battery, but then she disappeared so fast-” The words spilled out of her mouth, less and less intelligible as she kept talking. She only stopped when her voice cracked.

  Breathing hard, out of breathlessness or emotion, she stared at the ground, clenching her fists. I could feel one of the ladybugs get crushed in her grip, fading out of existence as far as my power was concerned.

  “Stop,” I told her, without using my swarm to change my voice. “Breathe. What happened?”

  She looked up at me, then she swallowed hard.

  “The Merchants took him. My kid brother. I want you to get him back. Please.”

  11.03

  I sat cross-legged in my chair on the second floor of my lair. A mug of tea was warm in my hands, and the room was dark. Only a faint light filtered in through the slats at the top of the metal shutter that covered the window. My mask rested on one knee.

  My attention swept over my territory, with an emphasis on the centermost area near where I’d held my speech. The reach of my power wasn’t quite good enough to extend to the outer edges of my territory, which left me anxious. I was craving one of those moments when my power would go into overdrive and increase its range. Minutes passed as I followed my ‘subjects’ and did what I could to get to know them. My bugs remained on the backs of people’s elbows, at the small of their back, and I’d maybe put a small fly in their hair if it was long enough that they wouldn’t feel it. Not enough to bother anyone, or that anyone would necessarily notice, but enough for me to track their movements.

  Two groups arrived within a minute of one another, each at different points of my territory. Thirty-two people in all, with eight in the first group and twenty-four in the other. Both groups reacted, jumping and backing away as my swarm swept over them. I could feel the vibration in the air as one in the second group laughed. The others joined him. I’d held off on attacking, just using the bugs to get a headcount and a sense of who was there. There were men and women, young and old. Each of them had weapons of some sort, and fifteen in total had guns.

  The Merchants were responding to my bid for control. Good.

  I sipped my tea and found it was lukewarm. I took big gulps in the hopes of finishing it before it got cold.

  One of the Merchants in the first group shouted something, loud enough for it to carry down the street, and fired a gunshot. Impulsively, I tried to tune into my bug’s hearing and interpret what he was saying, but the strangeness of the noise stopped me. It didn’t translate from a bug’s ‘ears’ to mine.

  The first group started running down the length of the street. They scattered, with smaller groups of two people each heading to different buildings. Finding the windows boarded up and the doors locked or barricaded, they started tearing at the plywood and planks. Some struck at the doors with their improvised weapons.

  There were people inside two of those buildings. Not many, but still. Those were my people.

  Using my swarm on them would have been easy, but this wasn’t just a question of taking the Merchants down. I needed to do it so effectively and undeniably that they would hesitate to come back. If I did it well enough, ideally, word of mouth would help keep others from trying anything similar.

  Why did that line of thinking sound so familiar?

  It dawned on me: Bakuda. She’d said something similar when she’d been doing her monologue and pretending to be the new leader of the ABB.

  Well, that was disquieting.

  Still, my reasons were different. I wanted to protect my people. Bakuda hadn’t been motivated by an interest in anyone but herself.

  I dismissed that line of thinking and gathered the swarm into a vaguely humanoid shape with a head, arms, and a torso. I tried to balance it on two columns like legs, but I erred in favor of dissolving that into one column for the lower body over risking having it fall over. A good thing the ground was mostly dry, there, or I would have required far more bugs to maintain the shape with the lowermost critters constantly drowning or being pushed away by the motion of the water.

  I piloted the swarm-figure slowly towards the first group. Someone noticed and turned away from the door he was trying to smash down with his makeshift club. He shouted and laughed, drawing the attention of others.

  Running forward, he swung the club at the swarm like he was trying to hit a home run. The head was scattered, dashed to pieces, and he laughed again.

  Until the rest of the swarm dogpiled him. Then he started screaming.

  Roughly half of his ‘friends’ laughed at him. Lots of laughter. Were
they all on something? The remaining four people hurried to his side and tried to claw the masses of bugs away from him. As they got bitten and stung in retaliation, they backed away, brushing the bugs off of their arms and legs, leaving him to his fate.

  The bugs I had in the area coalesced into another vaguely humanoid shape. Then another. In moments, I had a half-dozen figures in a loose ring around the group. I moved them forward, and my enemies backed away from them. I used this to herd the Merchants until they stood back to back in a tight circle, surrounded. They had their weapons raised, but they had to know how ineffectual the baseball bats and guns would be.

  Then I waited, keeping the swarm-figures remaining as motionless as possible. If it weren’t for the man still thrashing on the ground, screaming, it would have been eerily still and quiet.

  The second group was oblivious to the events a few blocks away as they roamed through my territory. A woman in the group was singing, loud enough that her voice would be carrying to nearby residents. She was letting them know that trouble was near. I noted that she was holding a plastic tank of gasoline, if the topographic map I was getting from my swarm-sense was right, and the box in her other hand could easily have been matches. That wasn’t good.

  Still, her group had yet to do anything. I kept an eye on them and waited.

  Someone in the first group made a run for it, rushing for the space between two of the swarm-figures that surrounded his group. He didn’t make it. The swarms both intercepted him, and he went down, howling in pain.

  Unease gave way to panic as the group realized they were trapped. A woman shoved a man into the nearest swarm, trying to use him to clear the way, but she only got two more steps before the wasps, black flies, mosquitoes and hornets caught up to her. She violently swung her arms around herself in a futile attempt to fight off the bugs, and succeeded only in throwing herself off-balance and falling to the ground. The spiders, ants, centipedes, millipedes, beetles and all of the other crawling parts of the swarm rolled over her, burying her beneath their mass before she could stand.

  The remaining four Merchants in the first group exchanged muttered words, some kind of plan. Then three of them broke for it, each headed in a different direction. I wasn’t sure what outcome they expected. A mass of bugs caught each of them, and they all went down, limbs flailing, screaming.

  That left only one. He dropped into a crouch, his hands on his head, and looked frantically around for some kind of escape route.

  So I gave him one.

  The swarm-figures parted enough that he had a chance to retreat. It took him ten seconds to notice it, and another few seconds to build up the courage to make a run for it.

  He bolted. Seeing the general mass of insects down the road, he decided to turn into a series of alleyways. I let him run for a minute.

  He was halfway down an alley when I drew the ambient bugs from the vicinity into a loose humanoid shape, not as dense as the others. Still, seeing it stopped him in his tracks.

  He turned to retreat the way he’d come, only to find another swarm coalescing into a second figure at the other end of the alley. His head whipped around as he realized he had no escape routes left, and then he screamed, a primal, despairing sound.

  The swarm figures moved towards him at a glacial pace, with more bugs joining them every second, to give them more mass and more raw attacking power. His composure cracked before they even reached him, and he charged headlong into the swarm that had been at the far end of the alley. Bugs tore into him, pinching and stabbing him, and he made it nearly to the edge of my power’s range before his legs buckled. He landed on top of a pile of the trash that the nearby building’s residents had been stacking in the alleyway, and the swarm started mauling him.

  Group one down.

  I finished my tea, then made a face. The teabag had leaked grit, and some had settled into the bottom of my cup. Bitter.

  I put the empty cup down at the base of my chair, and then I turned my attention to the second group.

  ■

  I didn’t even need to think about it.

  “I’ll do it,” I told the redheaded girl with the dreadlocks.

  She looked surprised. Odd. She’d asked me, but she hadn’t expected me to help? Or had she expected me to demand something from her in exchange?

  Should I have demanded something in exchange?

  “Stay here. I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I turned and walked to the front of the truck, knocked, and the driver popped the door open for me.

  I spoke in a low voice, “We’re done here. Tell Coil I need more supplies. Seven cases at a minimum, by the end of the day. And tell him I think you guys did a good job, so if he’s up to giving you any kind of bonus, it would be a good time.”

  He gave me a tight nod, then closed the door. The truck drove off, leaving me with the girl. I approached her, and I could see the effect I was having on her. She was unwilling to meet my eyes, and her fidgeting stilled as I turned my full attention to her.

  “Your name?”

  “Sierra,” she answered me.

  “Let’s walk, Sierra,” I said. “I need details if I’m going to help. The more you can tell me, the better.”

  She joined me as I headed towards the sidewalk, and after taking a moment to compose her thoughts, she started telling me what had happened. “Three weeks ago, everything was so normal. I was finishing up at college. Bryce, my brother, went to Arcadia High. My uncle was staying with us because he was down on his luck, as my dad put it. I’m almost positive it had something to do with his drinking.”

  I nodded.

  “Then Leviathan came. The sirens woke us up early in the morning, we hurried to the shelter, and by the time it was midday, we were standing in front of what used to be our house. Flattened, everything we ever owned was gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  From the look on her face, it seemed like I’d surprised her again. What kind of image did she have of me?

  “Thank you. We- we stayed in a family friend’s basement, and they had another family there as well, on the upper floors, so it was crowded. But it was better than the shelters, or so we thought. My dad, my uncle and I worked with one of the cleanup crews. Trying to get things normal again. Until word got out that one of the crews had been attacked, the women assaulted. Um. So they told me I couldn’t work with them. I worked for one of the shelters instead. Handing out sheets, making beds, keeping track of names and passing on requests for stuff like insulin or other meds that people needed. Long hours, thankless…”

  She put a hand to her face, “I’m rambling.”

  “It’s fine. Better that you give me too much information than not enough. Keep going.”

  “My uncle got sick fast. He had a cold just days after Leviathan came, and it got complicated after, became pneumonia. The hospital sent him out of town for medical care, and we got word he’d died just two days after that. Respiratory distress or something. Drowning in his own lungs. Less than a week from the time he got the cold to the time he died.”

  She stopped talking, and I didn’t push her, giving her time to compose herself. Had she been close to her uncle?

  “By the time we heard the news, Mom and Dad were sick too, and Bryce was showing symptoms. It wasn’t a cold. It was more like the flu, but with what happened to my uncle, we didn’t want to take any chances. None of them could keep anything down, sinus problems, pounding headaches, tired… we went to the doctors and they said it could be toxic mold exposure. The moisture, always being cold and damp, and not having enough to eat, being in that basement, with the foundation possibly cracked or the mold disturbed by the vibrations and damage in the attack… Um.”

  I wondered if this was pertinent to what happened to her brother, or if she was just really wanted someone to talk to. I didn’t want rush her, but I did try to get her on track, “So your parents and brother got sick.”

  “And I was left alone. I guess I was saved by the long hours at t
he shelter, I wasn’t spending half as much time in the house where they got exposed to the mold. I had to find a new place to stay. A guy from the shelter heard my story, offered to give me a room in the church. Near here. I was grateful, I took it. My brother got out of the hospital, and he came to stay with me. He got the cot, I got the floor. A day and a half later, they came.”

  “The Merchants?”

  She nodded. “They attacked the church. Nine or ten of them. We outnumbered them, but they had weapons, and they caught us by surprise. One of them threw a molotov cocktail through a window. There were other families there, families with kids, so I grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to stop it from spreading. Spraying around- I couldn’t put it out, didn’t want to try in case I just spread it around, so I just contained it, for all the good it did.”

  She shook her head, “They came through the doors and began attacking people, one of them grabbed my brother, I- I panicked. I used the extinguisher to spray towards them and tried to pull him away. I couldn’t, and others were approaching, so I left him and I escaped through the broken window where the bottle had been thrown inside. When I got back an hour later, there were fire trucks and police and ambulances there. My brother was the only one missing. The others were there, but badly hurt. Burned or cut up, beaten. Derrick, the man who’d invited me to stay there-”

  She broke off, and she stopped walking, turning away so her head was facing away from me.

  I waited patiently. When she’d turned back so I could see her face and started walking again, I gently asked, “Dead?”

  She shook her head. Quietly, she said, “They cut him up with a broken bottle. The doctor said they bent him over and shoved it between- he’ll have a tube running out of his stomach and into a bag for the rest of his life. And he might never walk again. You understand?”

  “I think so.” Not that I wanted to.

  “Not about what they did, I mean, do you understand what I’m saying about these assholes, these… I don’t even have words to describe them… to say how much I hate them. God!”