Worm

by John McCrae

  I could have said something, but I stayed quiet. Instead, I drew Atlas to a point near the window and began uncoiling and stretching out the lines of pre-prepared silk I’d already drawn out for emergency use.

  “I am.”

  “Well, I think it would only be fair if you heard from all of your constituents,” Trickster remarked. “Before you come to a decision.”

  “You pay taxes?” The son asked, shifting his position again so his right hand was hidden behind his girlfriend. I could feel him adjusting his grip on the phone. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t actually done anything to it. I waited for him to stop moving his hand, and then threaded a series of flying bugs between his fingers and the device, winding the thread around it.

  “Rory,” the mayor spoke, his tone a warning. He turned his attention to Trickster. “And? Which outcome are you hoping for?”

  “I think it would be excellent if the city kept on going. Things are getting better.”

  “And you’re putting yourselves in charge,” the mayor noted.

  “We’re just keeping the peace,” Trickster said. ”Doing a better job than your local heroes.”

  “If you have a liberal interpretation of ‘peace’, maybe,” the mayor said.

  Rory moved his fingers, tapping the screen, and I had Atlas fly away from the window. The phone was torn from his hand and bounced off of the window pane before landing outside. Atlas reeled it in further while Rory looked around in confusion and alarm.

  “No phone calls,” I spoke, buzzing through my swarm.

  “Give that back,” he said.

  “Is your phone really a priority?” Trickster asked.

  “Yeah,” Rory said. “Yeah it is.”

  “Then you should have known better than to use it here,” Trickster said, shrugging.

  “Give it back,” Rory turned to glare at ‘me’. At my swarm-double.

  Trickster chuckled, “Never really got that smartphone craze. People go gaga over the things.”

  No, I thought. Something’s off.

  What I wouldn’t give for Tattletale’s power. Or even to have her present. How would she pull the pieces together, fill in the blanks? She could have looked at the big picture here and known exactly what was going on, while I was left to guess.

  The obsession over the phone? I couldn’t draw any conclusions. What else? The family dinner with the son bringing his girlfriend over? Nothing too strange.

  They weren’t scared.

  The little girls were glaring at us as they clutched their dad, Rory was too focused on his phone when his family was in imminent danger, and Rory’s girlfriend was staying very still. Topping it off, the mayor was too casual in how he was addressing us.

  Ah.

  “I think it would be in everyone‘s best interests if Brockton Bay kept going. Not quite fair to judge the fate of the city at its lowest point,” Trickster said.

  “Are you being ironic on purpose?” The mayor asked. “You’re making a very strong case for why the city shouldn’t continue down the path it’s been going down, just by being here.”

  Again, that confidence. One didn’t trade banter with someone who was implicitly threatening them and their family with bodily harm. Not if they didn’t have some measure of security their would-be assailants weren’t aware of.

  I considered the various possibilities. Not too hard to narrow down the options, with the process of elimination.

  I drew the words against the wall, above and behind the gathered family.

  Trickster didn’t seem to notice. “I’m surprised you aren’t showing us more respect. You’d think we’d almost be equal on a level, current guy in charge of the city talking to the aspiring rulers.”

  “I earned my position through hard work, dedication and by convincing the people that it was in their best interests to vote for me. Which it was. You three? You’re criminals. Thugs. You didn’t earn anything.”

  “Thugs? Do Thugs take on the Slaughterhouse Nine and walk away?”

  “All you have going for you is violence and intimidation. You can’t accomplish anything but destruction that way.”

  I made the words on the wall bigger. Trickster didn’t see them, or he didn’t care.

  “Trickster-” I started, speaking through my swarm. I need to have a word with you.

  “Well,” Trickster said, cutting me off, “If you insist, who am I to argue?”

  In an instant, one of the two twin girls was replaced by one of the dining room chairs on our side of the table, and vice versa. Trickster grabbed her hair and pulled her close, drawing a gun and pressing it to her head.

  “Trickster,” Genesis said, in the same second I moved forward to stop him.

  Was she trying to stop him as well, or had she seen the words?

  She settled one talon on his shoulder. I wasn’t sure what signal she gave, but Trickster paused.

  Whatever it was, he must have looked up at the words I’d written, because Rory noticed. He whipped his head around to see, and I couldn’t disperse the bugs fast enough.

  ‘Triumph’ written on the wall with bugs with a triangle beneath, pointing at his head. Above his ‘girlfriend’ were the words ‘Prism or Ursa’.

  The mayor’s son was the civilian identity of Triumph. Enhanced physical prowess and a concussive shout that could punch holes through concrete.

  He whipped his head around and stared at Trickster. Before the teleporter could pull the trigger or do anything else, Triumph shouted. His sister was untouched, but Trickster was sent flying into the wall hard enough that he was half-buried in the drywall.

  “Duck, Kyla!”

  The little girl threw herself to the ground as Triumph lunged forward, kicking the dining room table. It slid halfway across the room, over ‘Kyla’ and into the wall. The side slammed into Trickster’s midsection, and the table’s contents flew into the villain and the wall around him. Trickster went limp, his upper body flopping over the table.

  I mobilized the swarm, but Triumph was already shouting again, slamming Genesis into a wall, much as he’d done with Trickster. A third bellow annihilated my swarm-clone, and he turned to start eradicating my spread out bugs while his family ran for the hallway, led by the superheroine.

  Couldn’t get a serious number of bugs together in one place to mount a serious attack without Triumph obliterating them and he was either too angry or too stubborn to surrender to the stings and bites I was managing to inflict. The superheroine had her phone out and I wasn’t able to tug it from her hand like I had with Triumph’s. They would be getting reinforcements shortly. Even if I took all of them out of action, I’d still have to get Trickster out of there and escape with my own hide intact.

  “Damn it,” I cursed. I broke into a run, accompanied by my swarm-doubles, hurrying for the house. I couldn’t leave him there, not without jeopardizing everything. He struck me as being disloyal enough to offer information for his own sake, or information about the Undersiders, at the very least. And leaving him behind would leave a permanent rift between our team and the Travelers. It could even mean being dropped by Coil, an excuse for him to separate me from my teammates.

  That said, I couldn’t save him or mount a serious attack with just my doubles. He was hitting too hard, handling my bugs too effectively. I could have killed or critically injured his family with the few bugs I did have, brought them down with the more dangerous insects, but I wasn’t willing to go that far. Not with people who didn’t deserve it.

  Atlas wouldn’t be strong or versatile enough to carry an unconscious body to safety. If I was going to haul Trickster out of there, it would have to be with my own two hands.

  I could only pray I wasn’t exposing myself to whatever assassination ploy Coil had in mind. Or worse, that I wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted me to do.

  15.09

  I had two different heroes to deal with, one of whom I couldn’t identify yet. That posed something of a problem: each likely possibility for the heroin
e’s identity made for a very different scenario in how this fight could play out.

  Process of elimination had told me that Rory would be one of the local heroes, because there weren’t any prominent male villains who I couldn’t identify with their masks off; Coil had outed Empire Eighty-Eight, which had split into the Chosen and the Pure and everyone else had been eliminated or driven out of the city. I’d identified him as Triumph from his build. Assault and Cache weren’t as muscular, the Wards were younger and smaller, and the remainder of local heroes were women. That had been easy enough once I’d pegged him as a cape.

  His ‘girlfriend’ was harder to pin down, both as a cape and in terms of her costumed identity. I’d read her confidence and judged that she wasn’t terrified enough to be ignorant about Rory’s secret. She probably wasn’t a civilian in the know, either, because she hadn’t been cowering behind Rory.

  Going by her appearance, I didn’t think she could be Miss Militia or Battery. Her blonde hair didn’t fit, for one thing, and she was too tall, too muscular. She had to be one of the two female capes who came to Brockton Bay with Legend. It was critical that I figure out which of the two she was before getting into a fight with her. Prism was a duplicator who could consolidate into one body to get a temporary boost in strength, speed and durability. Maybe other areas too. Fighting her would mean staying out of close-quarters combat at any cost.

  Ursa Aurora, by contrast, summoned ghostly ‘bears’ onto the battlefield. On a level, she’d want to fight like I preferred to, relying on her minions while staying out of the thick of things.

  Two possibilities, each requiring very different tactics to handle.

  I set my bugs on her and her alone in the hopes of forcing her hand. Atlas had returned to my side, and I made sure to collect Triumph’s phone before climbing on.

  Triumph had picked up Trickster’s limp body and was mounting a fighting retreat in the direction the heroine and his family had gone. He shouted again and again, controlling the magnitude, force and breadth of each strike to hit the maximum number of bugs with just enough force that he was killing or crippling them without destroying the house.

  Walls of bugs pressed against the exits of the house. If they escaped before I got there, I wasn’t sure I’d catch up. Triumph would be able to run faster than I could, Ursa Aurora could presumably ride her bears like Bitch rode her dogs, and Prism had the ability to move faster after consolidating her clones into one person again; if she didn’t run faster than me, the little boost she got there would keep her far enough ahead.

  There was the family holding them back, yes, but there was also the possibility that there was a vehicle they could all climb into. I could maybe keep up while riding Atlas, but I wouldn’t be able to mount a serious attack while doing so.

  I suspected the makeshift bug-barriers wouldn’t hold up. They wouldn’t stand up to Triumph’s shouts, and Ursa Aurora could summon her ‘bears’. That was if they didn’t choose to just charge through.

  I needed more redundancies. More fallback plans. I began drawing out lines of silk at the lower half of the doorframes, while gathering the bulk of my bugs in the upper halves.

  The question was, would they go through the doors or would they settle for the windows? Would human habit triumph over slightly more abstract thinking?

  The heroine led the way, already under attack from hundreds of bugs. She grabbed a coat from the nearby rack and draped it over herself for cover against the swarm as she threw herself headlong into it.

  Her legs caught on the tripwire and she tumbled down the stairs. I rebuilt the barrier of bugs behind her, condensing it to the point that they couldn’t see through.

  I directed fly-borne spiders to extend threads around the heroine’s arms and legs, as well as her fingers. After a moment’s consideration, I started packing them in her pockets, sending bugs crawling beneath her clothes.

  Right. A gun at her ankle. I set spiders to the task of binding that up too.

  Maybe she’s a PRT officer? Gun, no apparent powers?

  None of the rest of the family seemed willing to try exiting by the same door after she’d disappeared into the cloud of bugs and promptly shrieked. Okay. That meant I’d separated the family from the woman. Triumph would catch up to them in a moment, so I had to make the most of this advantage if I was going to slow them down further.

  I began moving the bugs from the door towards the family, simultaneously bringing more bugs in behind them.

  They quickly realized they were cornered and backed into the nearby closet, closing it behind them. I could sense them throwing coats and boots down at the gap between the bottom end of the closet door and the ground, trying to block my bugs from getting in.

  Not quite good enough to stop the bugs, but I could leave them where they were.

  As I was arriving on the property, the heroine was partially disabled and Triumph was en route. Genesis would be pulling herself back together in another body, I supposed, but that wasn’t so reassuring – the heroine had made a call to the PRT and there would be reinforcements on the way.

  Okay. How was I supposed to do this? I had to deal with Triumph, but he was shutting down my swarm. I’d probably lose in a straight up fight as well. Whatever damage my bugs were doing with bites and stings, it wasn’t enough to bring him down. He’d kicked a long oak table that had to weigh six hundred pounds at a bare minimum, sent it skidding across the room. There was no doubt he had some superhuman physique. That same advantage might be giving him the ability to hold out against what my bugs were doing.

  I was forced to scale up, to start injecting more than the trace amounts of venom, and I was all too aware of how easy it was to go too far or go over the top.

  Life would be so much easier if I didn’t give a damn about other people’s well-being.

  But I wouldn’t be able to step up my attack without getting more bugs on him, and I wouldn’t be able to do that without a different tactic. I began pulling my bugs out of the house and gathering them. By the time Triumph found his way to the hallway where his family was hiding in the closet, the bugs were almost entirely gone.

  There were too few bugs there for me to catch it, but someone in the closet must have made a noise, because Triumph made a beeline right for them. He stopped when he saw the heroine outside the door, lying on the ground under a carpet of bugs.

  He said something to his family that was probably along the lines of ‘stay there’ and headed for the door. He could see the human shaped figures I’d molded out of bugs and positioned around the lawn and proceeded to gun them down one by one. His shouts were short, on target and devastatingly effective.

  The heroine was starting to get free. Two additional versions of herself had appeared next to her, quickly searching out and cutting the silk cords that bound her. At least I knew who I was up against, now.

  Damn it. Unlike Oni Lee, Prism didn’t materialize her duplicates along with whatever additional baggage her original self had. None of the restraints and none of the bugs hampered her copies. Not to mention that her guns were probably free as well. I quickly directed Atlas to the roof and took cover in case she spotted me and decided to open fire.

  “Sam!” Triumph shouted.

  One of the duplicates turned to look at him, her eyes widening. She shouted, “Careful! Tripwire!”

  He jumped at the last second, hopping over the tripwire.

  Perfect.

  He landed on the stairs and stumbled. The entirety of his focus was on the tripwire, on the stairs beneath his feet and on his attempt to keep from falling down the stairs with his unconscious burden. During the Slaughterhouse Nine fiasco, it had come up that our species was pretty bad at looking up.

  I’d pulled bugs out of the hallway and from around the backyard and gathered them above the door, with airborne bugs helping by ferrying the slower moving ones up to a higher vantage point. I gave the command at the same time that Prism shouted her warning, and the bugs dropped down onto Triump
h’s head.

  Bugs tended to be very durable when it came to falling from high places. It had something to do with the amount of air resistance when compared to their surface area or mass. Something like that. Either way, it barely did any damage to my swarm when they fell to the ground.

  For Triumph, on the other hand, he was dealing with the sudden appearance of enough bugs that I could have formed three or four densely-packed swarm clones from their number, on top of the fact that he was carrying Trickster, who had to weigh one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty pounds. It probably didn’t help that he was standing on a staircase and was already somewhat off-balance.

  The timing proved to be lucky for me. As strong as Triumph was, a strike at the right moment could still knock him off-balance. I’d seen Alexandria do something like that to Leviathan, knocking something as big and horribly strong as the Endbringer to the ground.

  Blind and struck at an opportune moment, Triumph fell. I swept the bugs over him. There was no room for holding back or playing nice. I sent bugs into his nose and mouth, into his ear canals and biting at folds and crevices below the belt.

  I could have been squeamish about that, but that would require thinking in too much depth about what I was doing.

  I attacked his more sensitive areas, including the insides of his mouth, the sensitive edges of his nostrils and the insides of his ears. Others stung and bit at his eyelids. Some of my capsaicin-laced bugs flew from my cover at the roof’s edge to Triumph and Prism. I directed them to the vulnerable mucus membranes of the eye, the nose, the mouth – and again, beneath the belt – the urinary tract and anus.

  The most important thing was to keep him from getting his bearings and dealing with the bugs. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to catch him by surprise a second time.

  There was a secondary goal, too. We’d come here for a reason. If it came down to it, the mayor might change his tune once he’d seen his superhero son brought low. This was leverage.

  Prism was back on her feet, alongside her two copies. I was forced to split my bugs among them. What rules did she follow in terms of consolidating? How did she pull back together, and what happened to injuries? I knew she could survive if one copy was taken out of action. If she had a knife wound on one body of the three she had active, did it stay? Or did the damage get divided to only a third of what it should be?