Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  The metahuman loomed over her. “Let’s send these commie bitches home to daddy!” Before she could react, he seized her hair and pounded her face into his thick knee. Nose cartilage crunched even more. Bats and fists fell on her back and legs.

  The pain and disorientation began to draw her down into unconsciousness. How did she drop her guard? She would never have let this happen in Russia—it was her homeland, her turf, where she and CCCP had kept the peace with an iron fist. Yet most of CCCP had died protecting her countrymen from the Thulians. Why had she survived? To experience further humiliations, like being beaten by a pack of ignorant Americans and their smelly leader? Was this the fate of those who fought for international socialist brotherhood?

  Nyet.

  She blocked out the pain and gathered her energies for an explosive burst. Such a sudden release could injure her, she knew, but her head swam too much to zero in on the dancing targets around her.

  “Now hold on there!”

  The beating halted.

  It was Hensel. He had waded into the fray and interposed himself between the Rebs and her prone form. He swatted at a gangster with his clipboard.

  “I am not going to stand here and watch you goddamn hicks whip on a woman. No way, Jack.”

  The metahuman screwed up his face in outrage. “You ain’t from around here, boy.”

  “Brooklyn born and raised and damn proud of it.”

  “A Yankee.” He raised his arms to his gang. “We know what to do with carpetbaggers, don’t we, boys?”

  The gang surged around him, those who Red Saviour had blasted still wobbly but fired up by their leader. They hollered back at him incoherently.

  Hensel narrowed his eyes. “You jerks just keep on yammering. You want a piece of the Commissioner here, you gotta go through a union man.” He stood straight and tall in the midst of the predators.

  The filthy metahuman burst out laughing. “If that don’t beat all! All right, union boy, you’ll get your wish. I’m a-gonna show you why they call me Rebel Yell.”

  He drew a deep breath. Hensel raised his clipboard as a shield. The Rebs behind him scrambled to get out of the way.

  Rebel Yell opened his mouth. The merest exhalation before his vocal cords took hold of the air had the basso, thundering quality of an onrushing tornado.

  But no sound emerged except for a surprised squawk. His eyes flew wide and a red droplet leaked from his lips—then he vomited a mouthful of blood.

  A slender, inhumanly sharp blade jutted out of his chest: Jade Emperor’s Whisper.

  Fei Li withdrew it swiftly. Rebel Yell clutched at his chest and turned to look at her in shock. His breath wheezed out from a gaping jaw.

  “You—you stabbed me—” he gasped.

  Her smile had no sweetness. Fei Li’s delicate features had subtly changed to project a cold, superior and impersonal harshness. For a moment, Red Saviour could not even recognize her friend and teacher.

  This—this was Shuai: the General Shen Xue himself.

  Rebel Yell fell to his knees, blood seeping out from his fingers.

  And then the People’s Blade—Natalya could not think of her as Fei Li just then—put a tiny hand to her ear and tilted her head.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  The southern metahuman plopped facefirst onto the street.

  Hensel offered a hand to Red Saviour. Standing, she saw that the Rebs milled about, angry to see their leader incapacitated—possibly killed—by a mere woman. Their numbers still gave them confidence.

  Horosho, she thought.

  “Comrade Hensel, you have convinced me that you are the man for the job. You’re hired.”

  The union man chuckled. “Thanks, lady. But these rednecks don’t look too happy about their boss.”

  “He will survive,” People’s Blade said, soft and sweet again. “Metahumans heal quickly.”

  Hensel picked up an aluminum bat. “I think we still got work to do.”

  “Oh no.” Red Saviour cracked her neck. “We are off the clock now. This is play.”

  Back to back, they raised their weapons—fist, bat and sword—and faced their enemies.

  Interlude:

  Remember when I said that the divide between the haves and the have-nots had never been deeper? The actual destruction was relatively “minimal.” For those of us actually in it, it didn’t seem that way; it felt like we were living in the Apocalypse. But for most of the rest of the US, within weeks, it was business as usual. The destruction corridors had mostly marched around or through low-income and slum neighborhoods; for the rest of the population, after the supply situation sorted itself out and there were goods in the stores again, the only difference between then and now was the perception of Echo, and the news stories. After all, no one like them, no one they knew, no one they could connect with, had really suffered.

  It could have caused an internal war of the sort that Marx and Lenin predicted and hoped for. Instead, it was the destruction corridors that saved the haves. The have-nots couldn’t reach them, and were, in any case, too busily focused on basic needs and defending those basics from each other. Were the Thulians planning on a class war to follow their initial blitz? I’m betting on it. But they undid themselves with their own plan.

  Chapter Nine:

  Hoods

  Cody Martin and Mercedes Lackey

  John Murdock had been in Atlanta just about two weeks, and this was rapidly becoming the most surreal experience of a life stuffed full of unreality—at least by the standards of Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soccer-Mom.

  He’d found a squat: a couple of rooms in an abandoned industrial building. He had the feeling it had been some sort of lab, or maybe it had once been for a live-in caretaker. It had two rooms. The first room was a bare concrete box with a single, heavily barred window, but plenty of electrical outlets and marks on the floor that looked like the outlines of cabinets or benches. The second was a smaller concrete box, but this one had a shower, sink, and toilet in it. For some reason, the electricity and water were still on; maybe this had been overlooked. Maybe it was on for whoever was trying to sell the place. He was surprised that no one else had claimed it, except that it was on the top floor and the door was almost hidden behind some piled-up sections of movable partitions. He had only found it because he’d been looking for someplace he could secure against the looters. There had already been a hasp on the door. He only had to get a padlock, and install more locks on the inside, in order to secure it.

  It was grim, grimy, but it was private and, for now, it was his. Slowly he had accumulated some possessions besides the ones he’d carried in his backpack when he’d arrived. All of them were things that had been discarded, but were still useable. A two-burner electric hot plate of which only one burner had worked until he’d fixed it. He had an old mattress to sleep on now—he’d poked over quite a few of those before he found one that hadn’t smelled of urine or cat spray. Instead, it smelled like Eau de Old Lady, a kind of mingling of musty lavender, cheap soap, and dime-store perfume; it looked like it was probably fifty years old, battered and lumpy, with some blued-cotton batting spilling out of a popped seam. A couple of plastic cartons served as tables supporting scavenged lamps with bulbs just bright enough to read by, a cheap windup radio-flashlight he’d been given as part of the CERT pack that gave him thirty minutes of music for a minute of cranking, and a TV that had an apparently unfixable orange tint across the top with an antenna made from a coat hanger. A couple of boards and some bricks made a bookshelf he was slowly filling with whatever he could find. Best of all, he had a tiny refrigerator that he had pulled out of the same abandoned RV he got the TV from—a rusted-out Winnebago with a stopped-up toilet that had smelled like a dozen winos had been living in it. He had carefully cut a thick piece of cardboard to fit over the room’s window at night, to prevent any light from showing. All in all, it was a dump, but it was more home than he’d had in a while. And it was free, a big plus.

  He stil
l was not sure why he was here. He’d initially thought he would go straight to Echo HQ and sign up, but one look at that half-wrecked place had raised the hackles on the back of his neck. Partly it had been the way he’d been treated by the uniformed SupportOps guarding the entrance to the site—like he was a nuisance, but potentially a dangerous one, one that they eyeballed warily, with hands hovering too near their weapons for comfort. Partly it was the feel of the place; it reminded him of a bivouac that had just been shelled, full of grass-green troopers who had never seen a fire fight in their lives and were trying to sort out their nerves while still under the gun. Echo had been whipped, whipped good, and the metas were still in shock, disbelief, and fear. That was simply not something he wanted to get tangled up in the middle of. If they found out where he was really from, as opposed to the cover story he’d concocted, they’d probably turn him in, what with the mood that they were in.

  He should have moved on from Atlanta. Yet he had stayed. Part of it was because it was easy; there was money to be picked up in odd ask-no-questions day-labor jobs, enough to buy food and coffee. He had a squat. And it felt like he should be here, although he couldn’t have said why; besides, where else was there to go? Every major city had been hit, just about. Small towns were no good; he’d stand out. And he wasn’t sure his bolt-hole in Minnesota was reachable right now.

  His building was on the edge of one of the neighborhoods, old and run-down, red brick and wood frame, two- and three-story buildings. It was mostly intact, and bounded by two of what the government reps called “destruction corridors,” swaths of war-zone wreckage where the Nazi war machines had just plowed through, blasting everything in their path. Minimal power and water had been restored very, very quickly here—nobody wanted blackout rioting—but after that, it was as if the city promptly forgot about them.

  Maybe they had.

  There was plenty to be done in the neighborhood, and with a blanket here, a T-shirt there, a book; it added up to more comfort. Some of the locals knew about his powers after a while; he kept it very low-key and so did they. Still, the people of this area were fairly tight-knit, and word spread. Having a unique ability put him in high demand; after all, he could weld without needing a rig, and he could lift and haul more than three men his size. It might have been taking slight advantage of these folks when they were in need, but they couldn’t complain too loudly; they were getting help that they couldn’t get anywhere else. Sure, truckloads of donated clothing and household goods had been dumped here, but nothing else. Forget about getting any handymen in here to fix things; they were all on high-paid jobs in the richer parts of the city. Echo hadn’t been seen in this area since the attacks; it seemed to the residents that they were too busy looking after their own hides to spare any time for people that didn’t have flush bank accounts.

  Today, the job was helping a local bodega owner to get into his store. It was located on the east side of the neighborhood, right on the edge of one of the destruction corridors that had turned this area into an island. The owner’s name was Jonas; he was an elderly black man who had a kind way about him. John liked him immediately upon meeting him.

  Jonas sighed, looking to his right, at what John could only compare to the bombed out ruins of the cities of Bosnia. “Y’know, it seems to me that when things like this happen, the only people really hurt bad are the ones that just happened to be in the way. Maybe this wasn’t the best part of town, but…a lot of good folks lived out there. A lot of them are dead now, and they never hurt nobody. Only the Lord knows where the rest of them are.”

  John shook his head, walking past a large pile of rubble. “There’s never any rhyme or reason to things like this. At least no good reason.”

  “I’m old enough to remember the peace marches in the sixties, because, hell, I was marching with ’em.” A wry expression passed over Jonas’s face. “Funny how it seemed like there was an awful lot of black and brown faces in Vietnam all out of proportion to the population, you know? We had that chant—‘War! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHIN’!’ And I don’t see anything here to make me change my mind.”

  “Well, now we just need t’get ya elected, Jonas.” John grinned. They had arrived at their destination. The bodega was located right on the corner of the street—what used to be a street, anyhow. Part of the building above the entrance had been collapsed, somehow; stray weapons’ fire, more than likely. Tons and tons of twisted rebar, bricks, and building refuse prevented anyone from even seeing the door. Corrugated steel “riot shutters” were pulled down and locked over the windows. That was what John was to remove.

  “The smell in there is probably enough to choke a mule,” Jonas observed ruefully. “But the canned goods should still be good, and Lord knows that there is an acute shortage of diapers around here. If I can just get the store running, I might be able to get someone to bring in stock for me.”

  John nodded, pulling back the sleeves of his shirt. “Just show me where t’cut, and we’ll get ya back to runnin’ this joint.”

  “The locks first, then the hinges, there and there—” Jonas pointed. “The shutters should just fall off.”

  John relaxed, focusing on his breathing and untensing his muscles. Once he was sure that he was concentrating on what he had to do, he spoke. “You’ll wanna look away for this; it’s gonna be pretty bright.” He waited a heartbeat before he started the flames. Small at first, no bigger than what a Zippo would produce. That was always the hardest part—keeping from releasing all of the energy at once. The flames started a few inches in front of his fingertips; they coalesced, and then intensified. A few seconds later, the fire was white-hot and steady. John willed the flames to where they were needed in a rigid stream, sending sparks into the air each time he contacted metal.

  Behind him, he heard people congregating. Not many, and they were quiet. One kid piped up with “Mister Jonas? You guys gonna open the store? Ma says if I don’t come back with laundry soap she’s gonna make me wash them diapers!”

  A couple folks chuckled at this. “We’ll help you clear out the garbage, Jonas, if that’ll get you goin’ faster.”

  John was just about finished with the last hinge on the shutters when company showed up in a nearly silent sedan that probably cost more than any ten houses here, put together. The doors scissored up, and four men stepped out. Their distinctive Echo uniforms were unmistakable. Tight black pants and form-fitting jackets with little Nehru collars, looking as if they had come straight from a 60’s sci-fi show about the future—one in which these guys were the storm troopers. Over the right breast was the Echo logo in red. Knee boots of shiny stuff that was not exactly leather completed the image of the sci-fi flashback; all they lacked to make the image complete was a perky little cap. Now, supposedly the reason for the color, or lack of it, was the special fabric—“nanoweave” it was called—and it didn’t take dye. This was its natural color. That knowledge didn’t help.

  Goon squad. John extinguished his flames in an instant; even though the molten metal from the locks and hinges was still cooling on the sidewalk, he didn’t want to be too obvious if he could help it. The Echo squad made its way through the crowd, which parted readily. Folks around here had grown to mistrust anything in a uniform after years of being targeted for “routine policing,” and with the neglect of this ’hood, Echo wasn’t really a home-crowd favorite.

  Jonas stepped in front of John, fists on his hips, looking the Echo patrol up and down before he spoke. “Anything we can do for you boys?” he asked, with perfect diction and pronunciation, making sure that his gray hair and age spoke for him as well. “Or do you think you can give us a hand getting into my store so I can start serving my neighbors here again?” He cast a sidelong glance at one of the little kids. “Seems Jamel here is going to have to wash diapers unless I can sell him some soap for his mama.”

  One of the Echo operatives stepped to the front of the group, a distinctly displeased look on his face. He was a thin man, in good p
hysical shape like almost all of the Echo personnel, but with a look of irritation so ingrained in his features that it probably never left his face. He could use a perky little 60’s cap to cover his bald spot, John thought. Normally, he would have laughed right in front of the man, but this wasn’t a particularly good time to show his disdain for uniforms and the folks that wore them. “I don’t suppose you have any proof you own this business?” the leader, an OpOne by the insignia, said through gritted teeth.

  “Sure I do. In the store.” Jonas jerked a single thumb back towards the inaccessible bodega. This caused more than a few people in the crowd to chuckle; they were definitely not on the Echo leader’s side, and he knew it.

  “Hey,” said one lanky bystander. “Use that head. That store’s been a wreck fer two weeks. Stuff’s been rottin’ in there. Who’d break in there when even my dog knows old Jonas ain’t never kept no cash past closin’ time an’ there ain’t nothin’ in there now but stink an’ soap an’ canned beans?”

  The Echo leader frowned even more, which John hadn’t thought was possible without the man’s face splitting in half. “Right. I can only guess that I’ll find plenty of folks in this crowd that’ll vouch for ‘Jonas’ here, so I’ll save my time. I’ve got more important things to do than contend with this.”

  “Like get the bastards that torched my car?” called someone.

  “Or the jerks that’re sellin’ crank in the next block?” asked another.

  “No. With the primary attack from the invaders being centered on Echo Headquarters, we’re understaffed. We lost a lot of good people, and need to refill the ranks to meet the demand for security around the city. We’ve received reports of a metahuman in this area, an unregistered one. We’re willing to offer a reward for anyone that wishes to cooperate.”

  Dead silence followed his words. Jonas scowled.

  The metahuman looked over the crowd, looking down his nose at them in a way that reminded John of a middle-management type that had shown up to “inspect” a worksite he’d once done day labor at. The man exuded an “I’m better than this” attitude, and it was apparent to the gathered crowd.