Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  Down in the basement, laden with basket and soap, she pushed at doors until one gave—

  Victoria jumped back against the wall with a screech that was not quite covered by the sound of the washing machines.

  “Whoa!” Bella dropped the basket and put out both hands placatingly, and concentrated on putting out a soothing vibe. “It’s just me. I’m your new neighbor. Thanks for the fat ’net pipe, by the way.”

  Vickie’s pupils were as big as coat buttons and she was shaking. And for once there weren’t any gloves on her hands. Bella deliberately did not look at them directly, but she had excellent peripheral vision and what she saw definitely gave her food for thought. The skin was horribly scar-seamed and tight-shiny, the fingers skeletal. She knew that look. Burns, bad ones. Things began to fall into place. She wondered how much Echo knew.…

  “Steady. Deep breaths. You know the drill, right?”

  The tiny blonde nodded, and without taking her eyes off Bella’s, began taking deep, shuddering breaths. Slowly her pupils contracted. Slowly she stopped shaking. Finally she peeled herself off the wall. “You’re—my neighbor?”

  “Right next door. I’m pretty sure our bedrooms share a wall. I don’t snore.”

  Vickie managed a ghost of a grin. “Yes. Yes, well. Good. As long as you don’t get into knockdown drag-out fights with your boyfriend. Or at least, if you do, I get the right to record everything you say, and use it in a book later.”

  Bella rolled her eyes. “Now I know why that apartment was going cheap. Okay, since I don’t have any boyfriends, done deal. It’s worth it for the T1 line.” She kept her tone light. Vickie had endured a very rough time of it from the look of things. Panic attacks that fierce, coupled with obvious burn scars and severe body-shyness—well, it was safe to assume whatever did that to her wasn’t the common, garden variety of domestic violence that Bella was so familiar with from the ambulance runs.

  Maybe someone decided to burn the witch, she thought, with a shudder she took care not to show. At a very young and impressionable age, she had watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and the image of the young woman being burned for heresy still came back to haunt her nightmares. And certainly Red Saviour seemed only too willing to take that route with Vickie.

  “Anyway, I am all moved in, so don’t freak when you hear someone next door tonight. And I sing, so if I get too loud, don’t hesitate to bang on the wall.” She grinned. “Sorry about barging in like that. I figured, it was Friday night, who’d be doing laundry?”

  “The person who has panic attacks leaving her apartment,” Vickie responded, with a bitter-sounding laugh. “Who else?”

  Time for a peace offering. “Look, if you’ve decided to try and beat this thing, you go, girl. But it doesn’t have to be all at once. I can do your shopping for you. And I can do your laundry when I do mine. How much stuff can two women filthy-up in a week anyway?” Bella grinned. “Save your strength for the battles that count, don’t wear yourself out in the skirmishes.”

  Vickie looked at her, dumbfounded. “I—I’m not sure what to say—”

  “Say ‘Thank you, Bella,’ then go upstairs. I’ll babysit your underwear. I owe you that much for scaring the whey out of you.”

  The blonde let out her breath in a long sigh that seemed to let a lot of tension out of her as well. “Thank you, Bella.”

  “De nada,” Bella replied, with a casual wave of a blue hand. As Vickie scuttled out, she loaded up the other two machines and made herself comfortable, propping up her feet, opening her book, and sticking her MP3 player earbuds in her ears. And wondered what the cits would think to see a an OpTwo meta parked in a laundry room.

  * * *

  The Hog Farm Commune had been established back in the sixties. Forty years later it was, somehow, still going strong. Perhaps it was the ethic, or perhaps the fact that the founders managed to embrace every alternative lifestyle there was without making anyone feel excluded or picked on. Although its head and home were in Mendocino County in California, it had branches all over the country, and one of those branches was outside of Atlanta.

  Red Earth Hog Farm had been—no surprise there—completely untouched by the Nazis. And in the tradition of Hog Farmers everywhere, even before the last of the big fires had been extinguished, Hog Farmers had loaded up their psychedelically painted vans and headed for the inner city, laden with food and help.

  Hard as it was to imagine when you looked at the destruction corridors, life for the wealthy had gone pretty much back on track by this time. In the gated communities, and in the whiter suburbs, the grocery stores were being supplied again with most of what people had come to expect and plenty of luxury goods. In the ’hood, grocery trucks were coming a lot less frequently even to the big chain stores. Plenty of people were cut off from those by destruction corridors, and as for the mom-and-pops and corner bodegas that people depended on…as might be expected, the chains got first priority, since they had their own supply fleets, and the indie distributors supplied them first because they were more of a guaranteed paycheck. That didn’t leave a lot of deliveries for the small stores. As for folks that had once had jobs, sad to say, a lot of them either didn’t anymore, or couldn’t get to them. That meant no money for supplies anyway.

  Hog Farmers to the rescue, with food and anything else they could scrounge up that might need passing out. They showed up by the tie-dyed score, with tools and expertise and seeds to help people turn even tiny lots into gardens. Bella knew all about the Hog Farmers from her parents, who’d been activists in the sixties. As soon as she knew they were in the ’hoods, she signed up as a medic. Or actually, not “signed up” as such. The Farmers weren’t big on paperwork and paper trails. Technically she was practicing medicine without a license, but AMA doctors were in short supply, and not inclined to set up free clinics. No, officially she was along to “guard the food.” And if people happened to get better when she was around, well, wasn’t that a miracle, praise Chee-zus!

  She was very careful not to keep anything desirable in her little jump bag on these jaunts. Nothing expensive—in fact, nothing a school nurse wouldn’t have, and no drugs of any kind. She and the Farmers were very clear about that to everyone that came looking for medical help—just as she was very clear that there were some things she could not help with. Recent injury, most disease, yes. Cancer…maybe. Genetic defects, old injuries healed wrong, heart disease, diabetes—maybe sometimes, but it was chancy. There were a lot of things she just couldn’t do anything about, though it made her want to cry or throw things when she had to turn people away. Echo would have had a fit if they had known about this. She was already doing long shifts—they all were—but she had never needed much sleep, and this…this was important.

  But it seemed that not everyone had gotten the memo about what she didn’t carry.

  Bella was just packing up her bag, and Zeke, Moonfairy and Brown Derby were folding up the cardboard cartons, now empty, that had held the diapers the commune made from discarded T-shirts, and the cans of formula and condensed milk. This one had been a special “baby run” scheduled ahead of time. A lot of moms here had been caught short by the Invasion; they were used to running to the bodega for disposable diapers, and most of them had never seen a cloth diaper until now. Bella had her hands full with unhappy babies of all shades over the past hour. She’d had to keep a firm rein on her temper a time or two when it was obvious that some of these women were keeping fretful kids quiet by feeding them booze. But she had a canned answer for that, one she’d gotten from another of the paramedics in Vegas. “You know how you feel with a hangover? Well, that’s what your kid has. A spoonful is a lot of liquor for a baby, and giving it to him to quiet him down is only going to give him a hangover when he wakes up. Then you get to listen to him cry for a whole day instead of only an hour.”

  She was thinking about the kids as she packed up, satisfied that she had done just about the best that she could, when suddenly that silence descended that made
all the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  She finished packing her bag, and only then did she turn around, slowly.

  Six of them. Gang-bangers without colors, the kind of gang that forms from bangers kicked out of other gangs. All buff, all packing. And oh, how she regretted that her .45 was still in the headboard…

  “Whatcha got in the bag, bitch?” The leader—oh, she got bad, bad vibes from him. There was something very cold about his eyes. Whatever was looking out of them was only remotely human now. Before she could reply, he jerked his head at one of his boys, who snatched the bag out of her hands. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Moonfairy, who had his cell phone out, dialing 911. But help was not going to come very soon, if at all.

  “Please don’t do that,” Zeke said carefully. “All we’re carrying is diapers and baby form—”

  The thug had already emptied her bag on the ground, and was pawing through it, looking for drugs. What he found was her speculum, blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, packets of bandages, tongue depressors, swabs, sample tubes of ointment, alcohol wipes, plastic gloves and not much else.

  “Where’s the stuff, bitch?” The leader smashed at her instruments with his boot. She seethed. Ointment squirted out of the mashed tubes.

  “Please don’t do that,” Zeke said again. “We don’t have drugs. Miss Parker is a meta, she—”

  “I wasn’t talkin’ t’you!” The leader nodded at another of his boys, who backhanded Zeke into the side of the van. “I asked you, Blue. Where’s the stuff? You craphead hippies always have stuff. You meta freaks, we know what you could get aholt of.”

  She shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. Don’t have any.”

  “Wrong answer.” He grabbed for her.

  The instant he touched her—she knew. Knew that his boys were edgy from doing without. Knew that the Hog Farmers’ usual please-and-thank-you routine was not going to work.

  Knew that the hand clamping down on her bicep belonged to someone who had murdered over thirty people, all of them up close and personal. He liked to kill. He had his own addiction to feed—he never had any intention of going away quietly, even if he had gotten drugs from them. She saw in his mind what he was going to do to her, and then, what he was going to do to the others. While they lay bleeding, he was going to take the last survivor, force him to drive the van full of his boys back to the Farm, and he had a plan for what they were going to do there.…

  There was never any question in Bella’s mind of what she was going to do.

  She let him haul her into his grasp, let him get his arm around her throat, let him get his gun to her temple. She let her anger and outrage and fear build to a lethal level.

  Then she reached inside his brain; she found the control centers she wanted. She seized them and twisted. Fatally, with a dual jolt of psionic power to exactly the right places, paralyzing him, then short-circuiting the breathing center.

  He stiffened, unable to move, choking, dying as he stood there. She reached up and snatched the gun from a hand that couldn’t stop her, ducked and writhed out of his hold even as he began a slow toppling to the ground, and whirled, training the gun onto the one nearest Zeke.

  “You want a piece of me?” she snarled, as they stared, first at her, then at their leader, on the ground, his eyes desperate but the light already starting to fade from them as he died by inches, suffocating, suffering only a fraction of what his own victims had suffered. “Didn’t you cretins pay any attention? I’m a meta. And I don’t need this to kill you!” She flicked the gun into the van, where it landed with a muffled thud among the diapers. “I can kill you by touching you! I can kill you without touching you!” She took one step forward, hand outstretched, mouth twisted into a savage parody of a smile. “You want a piece of me now?”

  The leader shuddered, and died at her feet. That was enough for the thugs. They scattered, pelting away from the crazy metahuman, as fast as their legs could carry them.

  She turned to the Farmers. They all stared at her, wild-eyed. Zeke recovered first.

  “Bella, wha-what did you—”

  “Never piss off a healer,” she said hoarsely, feeling her gorge rise, as her entire self revolted against what she had just done. “We know how to fix you—and that means we know how to take you apart. Now, excuse me—”

  She made a dash for the alley, to heave up her guts again, and again, and again, and still she could not vomit up her horror, and the sick loathing she felt for herself. The cops that finally arrived found her there, sagged against the brick wall, with her victim not ten feet from her.

  * * *

  For being the subject of this hearing, Bella had been given remarkably little opportunity to say anything. Spin Doctor was handling most of it; all he required of her was that she stay calm and stick to the facts—the facts being what she had seen in the gang leader’s mind.

  It was taking place on the Echo campus, and not in a courtroom or a judge’s office, because no one really wanted this to get out. Or even rumors of it to get out. So, for the audience of a judge and the DA, first Zeke had testified to what the Farmers had witnessed. Bella stated exactly what Spin Doctor had told her to, then sat down.

  The judge looked at her skeptically. “So. The claim is, she read his mind?” he demanded of Spin Doctor.

  “That’s what she does, Your Honor,” the Echo meta replied, evenly. “The validity of what a psion reads is already established in the courts.”

  The judge looked sour, but Spin Doctor was already handing him a fat file folder. “Furthermore, preliminary investigation by the police, together with DNA and fingerprint matches, places the deceased at the scene of at least seven unsolved and very brutal murders, three of them involving sexual assault. They expect more to come in as they search further back. So what Belladonna Blue saw in his mind is accurate.” He raised an eloquent eyebrow. “It appears she not only apprehended a serial killer, she prevented a massacre.”

  “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” the judge growled. “She didn’t apprehend him, she executed him!”

  “Echo metas are authorized to use lethal force under the appropriate conditions.” Spin Doctor could not have looked more bland.

  “And what made this appropriate?” The judge looked ready to explode. But he would not look at Bella.

  “Perhaps the gun to her head?” Spin Doctor put both his hands on the table, leaned over, and looked hard at both the DA and the judge. “Bob, give this one up, you can’t win it,” he said softly. “The minute word gets out of the kind of animal she put down, and trust me, I will make sure that it does, you’ll have people wanting to pin a medal on her, not lock her up. Look at her! She was out helping distribute baby formula and diapers! No one is going to believe she’s dangerous to the public!”

  For the first time, the judge did look at her. Bella met his eyes steadily. He was the first to look away.

  “All right,” he growled. “We’ll put it through quietly. But keep a damned leash on her.” He stood up, shoving away from the table, and stomped out, the DA right behind him.

  When they were gone, Spin Doctor turned to Bella, and his expression was not encouraging.

  “Now, regardless of what I just did, you know, and I know, that you could have used less-than-lethal force. That thug would have been collected by the cops, he’d have been linked back to those previous crimes, and he’d have gone to jail for seven life sentences at least—”

  “Maybe I could have used sublethal force,” Bella interrupted, feeling her face flush. “And maybe I couldn’t have. I didn’t think I had a choice then, and I don’t think I did now. And maybe he would have been convicted, and maybe he wouldn’t have been.” She stood up, and faced the meta across the table. “All I know for sure is that he had a gun to my head, and what I saw in his mind, and I don’t know enough about my own powers yet to be sure of just stopping someone in a case like that.”

  Spin Doctor frowned. It was obvious that he couldn’t contradict he
r. It was also obvious that he didn’t believe her.

  “I appreciate what you did for me,” she said, holding back what she wanted to say. Even though what she had done still made her sick to think about, she would not have changed it. Where she came from, you didn’t try to rehabilitate mad dogs, you shot them, before they could bite someone.

  And it was true—her powers were growing and changing so fast she wasn’t sure what she could and could not do anymore.

  But dear God, how she sympathized with that Russian nutjob, Red Saviour, at this moment.

  Spin Doctor nodded curtly, and left her alone in the room. He didn’t have to say “We’ll be watching you.”

  They both knew it. It didn’t have to be said aloud.

  They’d given Bella two days off as “medical leave.” She was very tempted to spend it drunk. Instead, it occurred to her that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go have a look-in at CCCP HQ. She’d heard they were running a soup kitchen; maybe they could use a street healer too for a couple days.

  Interlude:

  Here’s a dirty little secret. Do you know what Hollywood was doing in the days immediately after the invasion? Once they crawled out from under their desks…the big studio execs sent crews into the destruction corridors in and around L.A., armed with catering trucks and wardrobe trucks…and they filmed. They filmed thousands of non-SAG, non-BAG extras—gathered up from the isolated neighborhoods, paid in food and cash—to crawl through the debris, fight each other, migrate from one place to another, gather in torch-carrying mobs, in every sort of costume that could be pulled out of the trucks. While rescue crews were still pulling out bodies, while the fires still raged, they were filming, getting footage virtually free, for every conceivable movie that they might want to make someday that would involve mobs in wreckage.

  And that sort of thinking was typical. So if these stories seem kind of schizophrenic, well, that’s why. Schizophrenic thinking was endemic. There were thousands of conspiracy theories. There were people saying that the Thulians had crawled away somewhere to die. Then a single patrol of armored suits would pop up somewhere and wreak some havoc and all the paranoia would start again. We think now, that was the Thulian backup plan—appear, terrorize, and vanish, until we were eating each other in the frenzy caused by fear and paranoia.