Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You are under martial law,” the leader said, his voice sounding a little shrill. “I’ll have you know I have the authority to arrest anyone I suspect of harboring an unregistered metahuman and incarcerate them for as long as I care to.”

  Mistake. The only thing that could have been worse would be if he had started firing into the crowd with a sidearm. The residents started protesting loudly, some of them a little bit more aggressively than was comfortable for the officer. He realized his mistake too late; what had been a gawking crowd standing around waiting peaceably was turning very ugly. The man’s own squad exchanged incredulous glances.

  “You can’t do that!” someone protested, but the man next to him elbowed him viciously.

  “He’s a cop,” someone else said, with a resigned sneer. “He can do whatever he wants to.”

  John stepped forward, holding up a hand to quiet everyone. He settled his gaze on the Echo leader. “Cut the crap, fella. Whaddya want?”

  “Are you the unreg—”

  John interrupted him. “Yeah, yeah, save it. I’ll repeat myself: whaddya want?” John crossed his arms in front of his chest, waiting for a response.

  The man started to sweat. “I’m authorized to order you to come in for registration and recruitment into Echo. Failure to do so—”

  “Bull, pal. You’ve got no such authority. You never did before, an’ nothin’s changed since. The Constitution is still around, I’m assumin’, so unless y’got me doin’ somethin’ wrong, you’ve got no right to drag me in. If y’wanna ignore that, I doubt that you an’ yer Boy Scouts here could do the job.” John casually pointed a finger at the group of three Echo SupportOps behind the leader; they were huddled together, almost defensively. The shocked looks on their faces told him that their putative leader had stepped far, far over the line. “They’re green, and you’re so full of it I’m surprised that yer eyes aren’t brown.” John took a step forward, igniting his flames so that they sheathed around his right arm as he moved. “So, y’wanna make an issue of it, or can I go back to helpin’ out another law-abidin’ citizen?”

  It was a no-win situation and the leader knew it. Whatever his powers were, they could not possibly equal John’s; even with his flames out of the picture, John had several “modifications” that would still put him over par with these chumps. What was more, the crowd was still looking ugly; they were firmly in John and Jonas’s camp to begin with, and more so now that the Echo leader had opened his mouth.

  The man turned red with fury, but at least he finally had the sense to realize when he was whipped. “I’m going to report this!” he sputtered, pointing an accusing finger at John, and then Jonas. “And when I do—”

  “It’ll go in a big old file drawer that nobody ever opens, along with everything else about this neighborhood,” Jonas said. “Y’all can talk, and when y’all are down here actually doing something for us, maybe we’ll listen.” The Echo leader looked as if he wanted to retort with another snooty comment, but thought better of it. Still red in the face, he turned on his heel and marched back through the crowd, his squad in tow. The crowd jeered and hollered as the uniformed meta left, but their attention turned back to John and Jonas after the Echo personnel were out of sight.

  “Jonas, y’ready t’get back into business? Looks to me like y’got plenty of customers here waitin’ on ya.” John shut off his flames again, setting his fists on his hips.

  “There is nothing I would like better, my brother,” replied Jonas with a smile. John threw him a lopsided grin in return, and set about prying off the shutters. He didn’t like the fact that Echo had heard that he was in the area, and knew he was a metahuman. Any time something like that had happened in the last few years, John had gotten the hell out of Dodge as fast as he could. He’d been careful not to let his name slip during the conversation with the Echo stooge just now, but that wasn’t much comfort. Despite the home-team support from the neighborhood, he didn’t doubt that there’d be someone who’d be willing to talk, whether through being bribed or under duress. So far, the neighborhood only knew him as John the Welder.

  Ah, shove it. He’d stay put for now, and see what more he could do. If things went south, he could fade away into the background chaos of the city. He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind. Right now, all he wanted to worry about was whether Jonas had any beer left in his shop.

  * * *

  John stumbled through the open door of his squat in the old industrial loft, a day’s worth of sweat and grime covering him from head to toe. He shut the door behind him, latching it shut, securing deadbolts he had installed there himself; there were more security devices on that door than there were on most people’s cars.

  Feeling a modicum of safety, John stripped out of his “work clothes.” When he was done, a Kevlar assault vest, a pair of tactical boots, and two armored shoulder pads lay in a messy pile at the foot of his mattress. All of them were well worn, with various disfigurements marring their once new exteriors. An acid burn here, a tear from a knife there, a rip caused by sheer bludgeoning; these wounded garments were a reflection of the past experiences of their previous owners. John still didn’t have a great deal of money, but when a person knew where to look, there’d always be bits and pieces of equipment lying around just waiting for someone to snatch them up right now. He’d once thought himself to be above scavenging, much less looting the dead, but necessity and time had worn away at some of his scruples.

  Still soaked through with sweat, John stood panting with his back to the door, surveying his apartment. This inspection was to make sure that everything was how it had been left. Not that there was much that could have been tampered with.

  Having decided that his sanctum, if you could call it that, was still inviolate, John went straight to the bathroom and stood in the cold shower until he felt marginally clean. Pulling on tattered pants and a shirt, he walked over to the mattress. He flopped down on it hard, sighing heavily as he did. He figured he still had some time to steel himself for the shakes that always came after a night of “work.” He sat up straight, then pulled his knees to his chest. His teeth clenched, he tried to regulate his breathing a little. Then the shakes started.

  Every day, John Murdock would wake up, put on his work clothes, and be one more set of hands putting the neighborhood to rights. Every night, he would put on the other set of work clothes and go out to put things to rights in other ways. And then, when he got “home,” he’d fight himself. It was an uphill battle, getting steeper each day. And at the end of every night, every bout of shakes, he’d clean up, and swear he’d never do it again. Never run down an alley, only to meet a chorus of shotgun blasts. Never plod through a dank, abandoned building, wondering which shadow wouldn’t really be just a shadow. Never have to listen to the cries of some innocent schmoe, waiting to die or worse, someone at the wrong place, at the wrong time, screaming for help. Save me. Please. Help.

  But then he’d think about what he’d done. Before the Nazis. Before the invasion. What he’d done, and what had been done to him. And her.

  Then he’d slowly stop shaking, and turn on the television. Pick up a book as he absorbed the yammering of some bright smile with haunted eyes, gibbering about the latest news as if the invasion had never happened, or as if it didn’t matter as long as people absorbed their babble, and bought what they advertised. There was something especially sickening in how a news announcer’s voice would be full of strain and fatigue, and then it would be followed by a recording made months before in an ad agency’s perfect little recording booth, when nothing could be so awesome and right in life as having their product. And then, back to the newsreader’s soul-weariness in eerie contrast. John’s life was like that too, and maybe that was why it bugged him so much. He’d get his fill of giving people a little bit of hope, and then fight some of what took their hope away, and never quite do enough. He’d maybe eat, and then he would sleep. And repeat it all the next day.

  After running into the
Echo patrol—Echo press-gang would have been a more fitting term—it hadn’t taken long for the locals of this isolated neighborhood to accept that John was more than just another refugee or drifter. Things started to quickly ramp up, after the confrontation, and now his metahuman nature was well-known in the area; a local grocer needed protection from the gangs, a building full of concerned tenants that were tired of the drug dealers using the abandoned apartments of their home for deals, and so on. John was all they had. And he was finding it hard to say no.

  It was against his best interests to do anything high-profile; just running around at night and taking care of the worst of the criminal element was already plenty stupid, by his estimation. But…there was still something that wouldn’t let him ignore these people. It went against his instincts, honed after the last few years of surviving all alone, but the small-timers that were preying on the remains of the destruction, like carrion feeders—they irked him on a personal level.

  He’d started working on a better plan, though. There were two gangs in this neighborhood that had banded together after the attacks, for mutual protection. In truth, they were closer to militias, which gave John something to work with. He had talked with the leaders of both groups; they were criminals, all right, but he wasn’t exactly a saint either. His plan was to organize both groups around the neighborhood they shared, with the purpose of taking care of the area’s basic needs. This would afford the groups a measure of responsibility, which was close enough to power to water the mouths of the gang leaders. Initially, they resisted John’s plan; that quickly faded after he had properly demonstrated his powers on a ruined car during one of the first joint meetings he’d held with the gang leaders and a council of some of the more prominent neighborhood residents. There was one thing that always made sense to criminals, and that was violence, or at least the threat of it. John hated doing it, but it was a necessary evil in order to get them to listen.

  Now things were happening; space was being cleared for a guarded community garden, classes were being organized for children and adults alike, a minor clinic had been set up one day a week by some hippies called Hog Farmers, and they had even managed a rudimentary sanitation service. Between the two destruction corridors, the neighborhood looked like it might get close to normalcy. It was akin to how the Black Panthers had made neighborhoods self-sufficient back in the 70’s; the key difference being that this neighborhood had banded together in the face of shared hardship and recent horror, instead of against racial discrimination.

  That night, John was reading Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart, when he actually bothered to pay attention to the television. A group of metas, wearing red uniforms, were displayed in a video clip, fighting the Nazis against a background of what looked like the Russian version of the Invasion. The newscaster offered his sardonic commentary about a group of radically leftist heroes, calling themselves the something unintelligible and Russian, which seemed to have the initials “CCCP.” Then, another shot, of some of the same people arriving on the concourse of Atlanta Hartsfield, escorted by Echo personnel, warily avoided by the civilians, over whom most of them towered, Especially one striking woman, dark-haired and stunning, with cold eyes that measured everything and found it substandard.

  Apparently they had come to help.

  “While the name would imply a closed membership of Ruskie hard-liners,” the frozen-bright smile and empty eyes blathered, “the group declares that it welcomes anyone willing to fight for the greater good of the working class. And I’d thought all that was so last century.” The bleached-and-teased newscaster smiled and laughed with his bleached-and-teased co-anchoress. Disgusted, John shut the television off. His interest had been piqued, though. Maybe if he had time tomorrow…

  * * *

  There were several places in the city where Seraphym took up perches; she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and one place was as good as another to her. The Suntrust Plaza Building was the most obvious. But there were others. When she tired of being stared at, there were places she could go to be unnoticed, to sort through the futures, sifting through the threads of what-might-be. It was difficult to do this when you were being gawked at or shot at. The gawking wasn’t so bad, but the bullets were annoying. The tug on the lines of the present would disturb her and she would have to deal with the would-be killers, sometimes losing her train of thought for an entire minute.

  Even if she had not been very close to omniscient, it would not at all have surprised her that there had been people trying to kill her. It was not just the two metacriminals that had made the first attempts on her life; those she had left in fetal curls after exposing their innermost thoughts and revealing to them every darkest secret they attempted to deny. After seeing on the news what she could do, she still could not imagine why they had thought they could take her. Humans were unfathomable sometimes.

  There had been one televangelist whose empire had come crashing down in the wake of the Thulian attacks. He blamed her for not saving his elaborate church complex from the Thulian troopers. His motive she could at least understand, and his anger had been fueled by self-righteousness to the point where he was, as she understood the term, insane.

  She had melted the barrel of his shotgun, and exposed him to all of the pain he had caused others by taking the money they could have used to support themselves in exchange for his false promises of salvation. He had not been left in a fetal curl; he had collapsed and crawled away on hands and knees, passing out of her sphere of interest. However he chose to redeem himself, or if he simply died, did not matter to the futures.

  There had been contract killers—a mercenary group called Blacksnake for two, a freelance for one—who had been hired by other “religious” men, because she did not act as they felt an Angel of the Lord should: to wit, to act for them, as “God’s personal enforcer” of what their narrow view of morality encompassed. Therefore she must be Fallen. As if they had any notion just what the Fallen were like. The contract killers she had dealt with simply; she allowed their victims access to them, or rather, the spirits of those victims, those who had not forgiven and gone Home, that is—which was quite a few. Chased by the haunts they themselves had created, again she dismissed them. They had no impact on the futures and thus no further impact on her.

  Still, the interruptions were annoying. So she had a perch or two that no one knew about, where she had never let anyone catch sight of her. This was one, this rooftop on an abandoned industrial building. It was the one that she most often chose, not only because she could sit here unobserved, but because this was a place that ate at her. It was a blank spot in the futures, a hole in the intricate threads she was trying to sort. She could not yet understand its importance, so she would come here to try and make some sense of it, prowling mentally around it and sniffing suspiciously, like a cat around something that might be a coiled snake, or might only be a coil of rubber hose.

  She had come here tonight just after midnight, wearying of the everlasting gawkers trying to take pictures of her. She could go about her rescues just as easily, and less visibly, from here. Things slowed just after midnight, leaving her to settle, wings close-furled, in the chill, damp air of predawn, to blank her mind and wait for direction.

  But it was not a clear direction that came.

  It was a man.

  He strolled casually from the roof access door, bringing a bottle of beer to his lips as he walked. Seraphym could see his physical body clearly, even in the gloom; he was dressed simply, with a sweat-soaked A-shirt and a pair of ratty jeans. In another instant, she scanned him, trying to determine the futures and threads connected to his existence—and was surprised to find that she couldn’t. Recognition replaced the novel sensation of astonishment almost as quickly as it had come over her. This was the man she had seen a few weeks ago, when she had saved one particular soul that had the misfortune of being ambushed by looters.

  And another surprise: the Infinite was still not going to reveal his futures to her.
He existed for her only in the present, and an unfamiliar sensation sizzled quietly through her. After a moment she recognized it.

  Fear.

  She tasted the sensation; it was very new to her. Never in all of her long, long existence had she personally felt fear until she had been made incarnate here. She’d fought some of the darkest entities in existence, and braved horrors that would have shattered a mortal mind. But never had there been this sense of dread. She knew why she felt it now, of course; she was made in Man’s image and when humans encountered something they did not recognize, that was alien to them, they felt fear.

  Why could she not See him?

  He stopped, bottle forgotten in his hand, and stared at her.

  Who are you? she asked, fixing him with her gaze. The novelty of this sensation, this fear as well as the uncertainty itself, had her slightly unbalanced. Now that she had him in her physical sight, she knew his name. It was there, in his mind, in her memory. John Murdock. And this was not the first time he had made her feel fear, and for the same reason. She knew him only through emotions. Doubts, fears, horrors—but no hopes, no dreams; he had given those up long ago. To read anything more, the things that were not in the front of his mind…that was hard, harder than it should have been. She could not actually see his past unless he chose to think about it, which was the last thing he wanted to do. And he was the nexus of a surprising number of paths leading to him. Yet none that she could perceive led away from him.

  She did not know what he would do, what he could do, what he would be, not in the futures, not in a future, not in the next minute. The hole in the futures was not this place. It was him. And she had been brought to him; even now she felt in herself a connection to him that, in the context of what she herself knew, made no sense.