Worm

by John McCrae

Without me, even.

  The Undersiders had made it for a year and a few months with their original strategy, avoiding fights, slipping away, staying off the radar. They would fight when they had to, but they didn’t make it a thing. The fact that they didn’t have firepower meant they couldn’t make it a thing. If anyone got into trouble, it was the dogs.

  And then I joined. Starting with the bank robbery, I pushed them to switch up tactics, catch the enemy off guard.

  If I’d never joined, what would have happened? Maybe the bank robbery wouldn’t have worked out, and one of them would have been picked off and arrested. Maybe they would have taken a different direction with the robbery.

  Bakuda might have killed them, Coil might have pushed them to be more aggressive as he scaled up his plans. Or they could have found a way, could have continued going the way they did, less violent in general.

  Some good, some bad. Rachel might never have reached the point she was at now. Grue wouldn’t necessarily have gone through what he did. Regent might be alive.

  I glanced again at Cozen, saw her looking at me in turn. Catching me looking, really.

  “What?” she asked.

  You don’t need to be here. You’ll be happier in the long run if you aren’t.

  “Nothing,” I responded. She looked annoyed, but she didn’t say anything.

  There was a kind of art to the setup. No doubt at all that it was a display, a showpiece. Trails of blood, ash and other substances marked where bodies had been moved. They were spaced out just enough that we would run into a fresh one just as we left the last behind.

  I might have missed it if not for my swarm-sense. The bodies were placed at positions high and low, the methods of death differing here and there, but there was a pattern to their distribution. The kind of pattern that might become clear if one were to set up a map and note the location of each body on it. A spiral.

  I pointed the way to the central point of the spiral. I could see a plume of smoke in that general direction. Not the middle of Killington. Skewed off-center.

  “Weaver, report,” Revel’s voice.

  “I’m here,” I responded. I kept a finger at my ear to make it clear that I wasn’t talking to myself.

  “Killington?“

  “Yes. Progress is slow. I’m sweeping the area for traps and potential ambush, and I’m marking a path to travel for when the others get here.”

  “We saw the two traps at the outset. There are more confirmed?”

  “Yeah. I’m not touching anything. Pass on word that any capes entering the area should be hands off. I activated one and it was only a decoy, a prelude to a gas attack. One of Bonesaw’s, I think. Grue warded it off. No casualties.”

  “I’ll make doubly sure to pass on word about the traps and about the route you’ve cleared. I would have warned them anyways. The initial casualties were enough, with the helicopter and first responders. Give me a second.”

  I led the way as our group rounded a corner, and saw the smouldering wreckage of the helicopter, smoke still streaming skyward.

  The collision apparently hadn’t been enough to topple the corpse that stood upright in the middle of the intersection, desiccated. A number was drawn on the mummy’s chest in blood. Number thirty-six.

  I could make out a tripwire strung between him and another corpse, a woman. She had apparently been shot execution style, propped upright on her knees. A number, again, had been drawn out in the midst of the blood spatter from the original wound. Number two-sixty-five.

  The tripwire was almost obvious, coated in congealed blood.

  Red string, I thought. In Japanese superstition, it was the string that bound lovers.

  The pieces suggested Crimson and Winter. Neither was Japanese, but the idea of mingling romantic imagery with violence in that way fit them. The red knight and the soldier.

  “I’ve got the feed open now,” Revel said, “Seeing what you’re seeing.“

  “Only part of it. The way the bodies are laid out, it’s a spiral. I think it all points to something. Making our way in.”

  “Technically you aren’t. You’ve stopped.”

  “Tripwires,” I said. “Being very, very careful.”

  “I like being careful,” Imp commented. She’d only be hearing one side of the conversation. “Careful is good. Keeps us alive.”

  “Being too careful gets you killed,” Rachel commented. Of everyone present, she seemed least concerned with the amount of death that surrounded us. Then again, that didn’t surprise me. “Have to act when you see the chance.”

  “You want to hop on your dog’s back and charge ahead?” Imp asked. “Go activate every trap between here and wherever?”

  Rachel frowned. “No.”

  “I like careful,” Imp restated, for the record. “Let’s be careful.”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  I pointed to indicate. “Obvious tripwire here. Covered in blood. Connects to the two bodies and… I think claymores, at the base of that building over there. There are other tripwires around it. Look too hard at it, miss the others. I think there’s a pressure plate, too. I’m not sure what to call that.”

  “I don’t see anything that could be a pressure plate,” Grue observed.

  I pointed at a pane of glass at the base of a pile of rubble. It was broken, with a narrow thread of wood still attached along the one edge that was straight and unbroken.

  “Maybe. Kind of hard to believe,” he said.

  Because we could see through it? Yeah. But it was situated beside a pile of rubble, and the balance of the glass with the surrounding brick and concrete seemed too convenient.

  Was there something attached to the edge of the glass where we couldn’t see? If the glass was broken, would the wood weigh the remaining fragment down and pull something?

  “Let’s play it safe. We avoid the tripwires, we avoid the glass.”

  “Whatever you say. I’m all for playing safe,” he responded.

  I led the way around the trap. I left a trail of dead bugs behind us as we made our way to the center, murdering them with larger bugs and mashing them into the ground. A path.

  I wondered about Grue. Couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t note his tone either. Was he thinking about the same thing I was thinking?

  We’d already fallen for one trap. Not here, but back in Brockton Bay. Back then, when he’d had his second trigger event.

  It had been the Nine, back then, and though he wasn’t giving me any clues there was something wrong, he wasn’t indicating that he was his old self, from back in the good old days. I suspected he hadn’t fully bounced back, even after all this time, might never.

  We circled around eight teenage girls, sitting in a circle, crowns of splintered wood nailed through their skulls. One had fallen over in response to the wind, but the others were still upright, propped up with wooden planks nailed into their spines. Less blood than the head wounds, I noted. Some pre-death, others post?

  The numbers were on the pieces of wood, registration numbers or something from the crate that had been smashed for materials. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine.

  I looked up. Number eight sat on the bulb of a street light, a long dress blowing in the wind, directly above the circle. Her crown was the tallest, and for her to be so rigid, there had to be a whole assortment of planks nailed to her.

  “Nine Kings,” I said.

  “A woman king?” Imp asked.

  “She’s the victim,” I said. The killer is her… husband, for lack of a better word.”

  “They’ve resurrected all of the old members. Cloned them,” Revel said.

  Clones, I mused, agreeing. My suspicions were confirmed, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d hoped for different, but the reality of what we faced had been hinted at early on, when it had been revealed that the Nine had hit a tinker’s laboratory and made off with materials that could be used to mass produce lifeforms.

  King. The leader, the founder of the group. Were the numb
ers in an order corresponding to when they had joined, then? Would the second member of the Nine be ten through eighteen?

  “Got a live one!” Imp called out, interrupting my thoughts. “…Kind of alive.”

  I turned to look. A fat man was shifting in a restless way, his chest rising and falling quickly in unsteady movements. One arm jerked.

  “Leave him,” I said. “Don’t touch.”

  “He could be a witness,” Rifle said.

  “Or a trap,” I responded. “I doubt he’s in a state to fill us in on anything. We’ll move on, wait for heroes to follow the path I’m marking. They’ll handle medical care for wounded.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Rifle said. “We could at least put him out of his misery, then.”

  “I’m not willing to get close enough to check,” I said. “And I’m not willing for you to get close either.”

  “I-” Parian started.

  Then she stopped. The fat man deflated in an instant as a small collection of what looked like trilobites found their way out of his rear end. Slick with gore, they darted forward a short distance on their hundreds of little legs, then turned our way, bristling with spines. Tails trailed behind each of them, twice as long as the foot-long creatures, narrow, with stingers on the ends.

  I could hear a hissing, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the creatures or the way the spines rubbed against one another.

  “Oh… god,” she said. She took a step back, with Foil stepping forward, as if to defend her.

  “Breed’s power,” I said. “They’re mostly harmless, for now.”

  “For now?” Rifle asked.

  I watched as they made their way up the side of a building to a corpse that was hung there. The corpse had been cut into sections, the arms and legs each severed at the joints and reconnected with lengths of chain. Breed’s creatures found their way into the body through the holes in the neck, mouth and rear end. It jerked a little as they worked bodies the size of footballs into apertures only a fraction of that size, then went still.

  “For now,” I answered Rifle. “They start off the size of a lemon, lurk in spots where they can get access to orifices or sites of injury, or like you see here, corpses. Inside beer bottles, in toilet bowls, bedcovers, on the underside of kitchen tables, even inside food. Then they burrow inside, wait until the target is still and quiet for an hour or two, paralyze the target, and emit pheromones to call others of their kind to them. They devour the target from the inside out, molt once or twice as they digest the fats and proteins they ate, then find a new target. It’s a process that takes a week to two weeks, depending on the availability of food sources.”

  I could see Getaway shift position, folding his hands behind his back, as if he could shield his rear end. His mouth had shut into a firm line.

  His nose was still unprotected, I noted.

  Even Rachel seemed a little concerned. She glanced at her dog.

  “They aren’t a danger to us,” I said. “Probably. They choose easier targets over harder ones, and there are enough corpses around here that we aren’t worth the trouble. What we should worry about is the later stages. When they’re about the size of a full-grown human being, they’ll do two or three major molts with big physical changes, gaining some natural weapons, including a pellet-spit that kind of acts like a shotgun blast with fragments that dissolve into flesh-melting acid.”

  “Um.” Rifle said.

  “You know this how?” Imp asked.

  “Read his file,” I answered.

  “Shouldn’t we kill them before they get big?” Foil asked.

  “Not worth the time it would take to track them down,” I said. “We don’t have any strong offensive powers, they’re durable against stuff like conventional ammunition and physical blows, and he generally produces about nine or ten per day.”

  “That was ten,” Getaway said.

  “Even assuming it’s only been one day since Breed woke up,” I said, “The scenes they’ve left behind suggest there are nine clones of each copy of the Nine. Going by the numbers-”

  “Twenty-nine copies, at least,” Revel said.

  “Twenty-nine copies,” I said. “Two-hundred-and-fifty-plus members of the Nine currently active. Nine Breeds among them, meaning there’re probably nine other clusters around here, taking advantage of abundant food.”

  “Breed’s creatures. Can you control them?” this from Revel, taking advantage of the stunned silence.

  I glanced up at the body the things had invaded. I tailored my response so both Revel and the Undersiders could make sense of it. “I can’t control those things, and I can’t sense them either.”

  “A shame. That would simplify things just a little.”

  It would. I wouldn’t have minded the firepower, either, even with their particular diet.

  “Let’s keep moving,” I said. “If we stop for every horror show, we might be stuck here a while. My gut’s telling me time is of the essence.”

  “I’m feeling a little out of my depth,” Getaway said, his voice quiet, as he fell into step to keep up.

  “That’s a good instinct,” I replied without looking at him. “Trust it.”

  “You’re telling me to leave?”

  “I can’t make you do anything,” I said.

  “But you think I should leave?”

  “If you feel like you should, yeah.”

  “And does that extend to me and Rifle?” Cozen asked, her tone cold.

  “I don’t know. Yeah, if your instincts tell you to go, then get going now,” I said. I pointed at the ground around a hose. There was a puddle that had spread beneath the hose’s opening. My bugs had died on contact with it. “Acid, not water. Don’t walk in it. Rachel, watch your dogs.”

  Rachel grunted acknowledgement.

  “Don’t change the subject. You want us gone,” Cozen said.

  “No. All the help we can get is appreciated,” I said. I glanced at her. “At the same time, if push comes to shove and you can’t hold it together, it’s going to hurt us all.”

  “You don’t think we can hold it together?” Cozen asked.

  “You’re an unknown quantity. Anyone else that’s here, I can trust them to hold their own because I know how they operate. I don’t know you. I don’t know how you react in a crisis, how you’ll respond if you’re pushed to the edge, one way or another. Grue and the others are vouching for you, so I’m shelving those concerns and trusting they have a good sense of your abilities. I’ll maintain that trust until you give me an indication I shouldn’t. Getaway saying he’s spooked is an indication.”

  “I’m spooked,” Imp said. “Can I go home and sit on the couch in my underwear, eating cake? I’ll cross my fingers for you guys, if you want.”

  “You’re talking like you’re in charge,” Cozen said. “Grue leads the Undersiders.”

  “I’m not an Undersider,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m in charge anyways.”

  And Grue can speak for himself, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud.

  I could see her reacting to that, even without the extra quip. I watched expressions cross her face: irritation, anger, indignation, and a trace of fear.

  “Grue is a good leader,” I said, “But this is my project. Something I’ve been working towards and thinking about for the last two years. Leaving the Undersiders, making contacts, helping hold things together, maintaining the peace and eliminating possible issues. Everything I did, it’s been to prepare for this in some fashion.”

  “A little unilateral, don’t you think?”

  “It’s her project,” Grue said. “My orders are to follow her orders.”

  I could see how little she liked that.

  But she maintained a professional demeanor. “Accepted. You realize we don’t have to follow your orders?”

  Grue nodded, silent.

  Cozen seemed to come to a decision. “We will anyways. As Weaver pointed out, this is unfamiliar ground for us. We’ll defer to your experience.” />
  “Thank you,” Grue and I said, almost in sync.

  I turned away to hide my smile, in case it could be made out beneath the fabric of my mask.

  Progress was slow. The traps seemed to accrue in number as we drew closer to the center, as did the corpses. More than once, we were forced to take the long way around, as traps or pools of acid barred our paths.

  We passed an area with rows of identical looking cabins, then ran into the Protectorate. Chevalier, Exalt, and others, examining the area, a block and a half away.

  I got their attention, then pointed in the direction we were headed. It wasn’t much more effort to mark out traps around them as well. I made sure to mark each with a cluster of bugs, and bug-letters spelling out the nature of the danger. Less trouble to move in parallel directions than reunite.

  The center of the spiral wasn’t the center of the town in a geographic sense, but in a sense of where the town’s heart and focus were. We closed in on the front steps of what looked to be a town hall. Empty ski racks stood to our right, two draped with corpses that had been flung and broken over them.

  By the time we were halfway through the plaza, navigating a maze where we tried to find a path that didn’t force us to tread on potential traps or corpses, Tecton and the others had caught up, reaching the edge of the area.

  “Thoughts?” Revel asked. “Before you reach the center of the display?“

  “He wanted to present this for effect,” I said. “It’s why he set up Pyrotechnical’s stuff to blow any aircraft out of the sky. The traps are to force us to take our time, force us to savor it.”

  “Savor?” Grue asked.

  “Everything Jack does is for effect. The same way a dog sort of raises its hackles to look bigger, tougher, or the way we used our reputation to seem more unstoppable than we were, Jack keys his actions for psychological effect. All of this is to scare, to drive us to hesitate when it comes to confronting him, push us to think of ways to avoid dealing with him instead of ways to catch up to him and beat his face in. Or, conversely, some personality types might get pushed to be reckless, to deal with him so he couldn’t bother them anymore.”

  I glanced at Rachel as I said that last bit. She’d instructed her dogs to stay, so they wouldn’t trip any of the traps in our way.