The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything

by Phillion, Matthew

  Titus pulled the USB stick out of its port and threw it in the air. Jessie blasted it with a bolt of blue-white light, shattering it.

  Leto walked in, her movement eccentrically fast but not hurried.

  "What's wrong, Titus?" she asked.

  "Broadstreet's portable drive was bugged. We could be looking at another incoming bombing raid," Titus said. "We've got to go."

  Finnigan staggered in, helping one of the younger werewolves who had been sent out on patrol to stay on his feet. A teenager named James, he was bleeding badly from a deep slash in his side, his face pale and eyes sunken from blood loss.

  "What happened, boy?" Finnigan said, covered in the younger man's blood. "Where's the rest of your patrol?"

  "Wiped out," James said.

  Finnigan guided the younger werewolf to the floor, laying him gently on his back. Leto rushed to him and examined the wound in his side. Titus caught sight of other injuries, clearly sustained from a fight. They appeared to be knife or sword slashes.

  "What do you mean? Where are they? Stay with us, lad," Finnigan said.

  "They came out of the dark. . .knew how to fight us. . .silver. . ." James said. Titus watched as the light in the werewolf's eyes flickered and faded. And then he was gone. Older than Titus is now, but only by a few years, a life that wouldn't begin until long into the future. Titus wondered if, because of what they did here, James would never exist at all. If this was his one life, in all the timelines, and if it were now over.

  "They can't all be dead," Jessie said.

  "Hunters," Leto said. She placed her hand upon the bloody face of James and whispered something in a language Titus didn't understand.

  "They can't all be dead," Finnigan said.

  "If it's the hunters, they could be. These children never had to fight real hunters before," Leto said.

  "There's another patrol out there," Jessie said.

  Titus looked at Finnigan. They both jumped to their feet and started running.

  "Find Solar. Both of them," Titus said to Jessie. "Tell them we'll need help. Leto—"

  "I'll find Whispering," she said. "Go."

  Titus transformed, faster than he'd ever done before, tearing his sweatshirt to shreds as he doubled in size. And suddenly he was on the run, the world rushing by, awash in heightened senses, the smell of the blood of his future family in the wind.

  * * *

  It's been too long, Titus thought, from a quiet place in the back of his mind. I've been caged up too long. Cool night air flowed through his silver fur, every sound, every sight, every scent, a thousand times clearer. This is how to experience the world. The muscles in his shoulders and quads felt fluid and potent as the urban decay around him faded into a blur.

  The smell of blood and metal surrounded him, familiar and unfamiliar, the blood of friends he barely knew, of friends he would someday know. He could hear the fighting already, the roars of pain and fury, the whisper of blades sinking into muscle, scraping across bone. His people were dying.

  Beside him, he could barely make out the squat shape of a red-furred werewolf tearing along as well, Finnigan in full transformation, baying like a tracking hound, calling their enemies out.

  Titus tore into the first of their attackers before the man ever saw him, three hundred pounds of werewolf crashing into a black-clad man, one swipe doing cataclysmic damage to his body. Two more men turned to attack, but Titus, his mind so clear time itself seemed to stop, dispatched both of them. Their silver swords spun in the air and tumbled like falling leaves.

  During moments like this, Titus was never sure if he was in charge or if the beast was. During moments like this it didn't matter. Because, during moments like this, his rage and the beast's were one in the same. This was pure vengeance.

  He saw a flash of rusty red as Finnigan dispatched another black-clad warrior. Titus, his momentum carrying him forward effortlessly, left yet another combatant trying to hold his severed guts together with his hands.

  More screams of the dying echoed and bellowed. The patrol had been ambushed. These men in black knew the damage they could inflict if they could catch werewolves unaware. He heard a shuffle behind him. Another of the attackers, this one moving with greater caution, approached him, a silver katana in his hand. Titus circled him, his opponent clearly more prepared than the others.

  The man lunged, a classic thrust of his sword. Titus felt the silver blade skim along his shoulder, drawing blood, burning in that way that only silver burned, but he let the pain wash over him long enough to force the claws of one his hands up into the man's underarm, tearing apart muscle and tendon. The sword dropped from the man's now useless hand, and Titus sunk the talons of his other hand into the man's neck.

  This violence should bother me, Titus believed, cloudy and safe in the far reaches of the werewolf's mind. What I'm doing, the actions I'm taking, should horrify me. But these men are killers and so am I, we're all killers here at the end of the world . . .

  He spied one of the black-clad men standing over the body of another younger werewolf—Titus didn't know his name, had never learned it—but before the man could plunge a sword into his fallen comrade, Titus was upon him, tearing through his opponent's body armor like wrapping paper. Titus didn't check to see if the prone wolf was all right. No time. And nothing he could do to help him if he was bleeding to death. Nothing he could do but keep killing, destroy them all before they hurt any more of his kin.

  A furious howl caught his attention, and Titus ran towards it, deeper into the urban sprawl. He discovered his future self set upon from all sides by sword-wielding attackers. Whispering held them off like a martial arts master, spinning a long spear—my spear, Titus thought, the one I left in the past—like a helicopter blade, knocking the attackers back, gutting them, cracking their skulls with the butt-end of the weapon. But there were far too many, and the big, scarred wolf was losing ground.

  Titus joined the fray, attacking from behind those who were trying to kill his future self his mind a blur of red anger. Together, Titus old and Titus young fought, howling, roaring. We are monsters, Titus thought. We are beasts. We are fury. We are the Whispering.

  But still they were outnumbered. He heard yips and yells of pain, sometimes in the distance, sometimes close. He knew they coming from his own mouth.

  And then Leto arrived.

  She was unlike anything Titus had ever seen. Taller, leaner, with close, jet-black fur, Leto looked more like a jackal than a werewolf, the head of Anubis set defiantly on the body of a monster. She moved like a ghost among the men in black, a blur of long limbs and golden claws and sprays of arterial blood. One man desperately tried to run, and Leto gestured to him in a movement Titus had seen Doc Silence exercise many times, and a bolt of reddish light flashed from her hand, catching the man between the shoulder blades and sending him sprawling to the ground.

  Her arrival gave both younger and older-Titus a second wind, a reprieve. Together, they finished the fight in a cloud of claws and fangs and glowing eyes. Together they became murder at its most primal.

  And then, as quickly as it started, it was over. The bodies of men and wolves littered the street, splattered blood dripped down walls ten feet high. Finnigan limped in before transforming back into human form. Titus tried to let himself revert back to human shape, but the wolf was too much in control, his blood was too high, he was too close to the edge. Breathe, he thought, breathe and return, let go and come back home . . .

  He caught his future self inspecting him curiously. They stared at each other a moment, and then the elder Titus stormed away, searching for survivors.

  Among the carnage, Leto had changed back to human form as well. She pinned one of the men in black, still alive, to the ground. She drove a long, dark-bladed knife into the soft flesh of his shoulder. It was then Titus focused on the patch the man wore on the sleeve of his shirt, a stylized red rose. All of the attackers had them.

  They can't be hers, Titus thought. He felt hims
elf coming back down again, his blood no longer boiling. As the rage melted away, so did the beast, his body slowly returning to its human shape. He caught Leto's voice raging at the survivor.

  "We let you live," Leto said, her voice more angry than Titus had ever heard it. She was always as impassive as the moon. "You will return to your mistress, and you'll deliver a message to her from us. You'll tell her she should have stayed among the dead. And she will regret this day."

  Finnigan put a hand on Titus's shoulder. Titus turned and slipped an arm under Finnigan's to help the red-headed werewolf stay on his feet.

  "Took a knife in the leg, lad," Finnigan said. "Help an old man, would you?"

  Together, Finnigan and younger-Titus watched Leto drag the surviving man in black away, effortlessly. They disappeared around a corner.

  "I've never seen her fight before," Titus said.

  "I hope you never do again," Finnigan said. "Although, it's a specter of terrible beauty."

  "How bad did we make out?" Titus said. "Who did we lose?"

  "Too many, son," Finnigan said. "This is the sort of day that ends wars."

  Chapter 38:

  The limits of gravity

  Keaton Bohr checked his readings again, and again. He went for a cup of coffee, paced around the near-empty lab, ignoring his few remaining minions, and returned to his workspace to review the results from scratch.

  He hoped he was wrong.

  Bohr got up, abandoning his coffee, and went down to visit her. He did this more often than he liked to admit, and never told the White Shadow how many hours he spent talking to the girl in the bubble, waiting for her to answer him back. Maybe he thought the Shadow would be angry with him. Or think Bohr was starting to lose his mind. But in the end, Bohr thought, he didn't tell the Shadow because he wanted these conversations to be private. They were none of the vigilante's business. They were between scientist and subject, between jailer and prisoner.

  Between failed father and distant daughter. No, Bohr thought. You just think of her that way, because she's been in your care for so long. Because she's your responsibility, and because all of this is your fault. Everything that went wrong is your fault. And this latest news, this latest data, this tragedy . . . this is your fault as well.

  She was sleeping when he arrived, but she was always sleeping these days. That was part of the problem. If they'd worked harder, if they'd taken better care of her. But they always needed more from her. She could change the world with her powers, but only if they had her on their side, only if they could take that irresistible force and make it functional.

  "We didn't make it useful," Bohr said, looking at the girl inside the sphere, old before her time, too thin, purple bags sagging beneath her eyes. The latest readings were quite terrifying.

  They never understood her, Bohr thought. Not really. Theories about matter and anti-matter, about Hawking radiation and particles and anti-particles . . . All we ever did was take advantage of what she was capable of, the scientist thought. All we did was see a tool, an infinite engine, a thing to be exploited to remake the world in our image.

  But she was just a little girl when they took her, and they wasted her life.

  "And now you'll have your revenge," Bohr thought. "And we'll deserve it. Oh how we'll deserve it."

  He put his hand against the sphere, wondering how many days they had left before their own personal event horizon.

  "We wanted to save the world, and we've destroyed it in the most spectacular fashion," Bohr said. "I'm so sorry, Emily. I wish there was some way you could know that."

  Bohr turned and slowly walked away, heading back up into reality, toward the surface. He strode absently past the eccentric young people who still thought they were on Heaven's side, who truly believed in the White Shadow and his plan.

  We're the villains, Bohr found himself thinking. We did so well at first, he reflected. We performed good deeds. Together they eradicated the Children of the Elder Star, wiped them from the Earth and from all memory, a brutal war the Children never stood a chance of winning. They put the Atlantean uprising to rest before the governments of the world even knew it was happening. An alien invasion waiting in the wings, a century in the making, and with the power Emily provided, the White Shadow shut it down.

  But that wasn't enough. Without enemies to fight, without someone to go to battle with, they started making their own wars. Enforcing peace, the Shadow called it. Babysitting the planet because the planet couldn't babysit itself. And when heroes rose up to stop them, well naturally, they couldn't be trusted either. You were either for us or against us, and before long, everyone was against us.

  And still people flocked to their banner, to fight for a world without conflict. Without realizing that they were rushing to join the conflict just by doing so.

  He located the White Shadow in the place he often found his friend, in an apartment replete with aging, splintered wooden chairs and a couch with worn springs, a generation too old to be much use. The Shadow always camped in places where things were slightly old-fashioned, not antiques, not vintage, simply weary and out of time.

  Out of time, Bohr thought. Everything is out of time these days.

  "We've got a problem, Shadow," Keaton Bohr said. He couldn't tell if the Shadow was awake or asleep, sitting perfectly still on the dusty couch, but the vigilante straightened and turned to him as if he'd been waiting for his arrival.

  "The world is full of problems, my friend," the vigilante said. "What's wrong?"

  "Emily," Bohr said. "You need to check out the latest readings."

  "What is it?" the Shadow said.

  "At first I thought she was sick," Bohr said. "We've seen fluctuations in her power output before when she's ill. But I looked deeper, and her output is neither up or down—it's different. She's changing."

  "And what's that mean for us?" the White Shadow said, standing up to look Bohr straight in the eyes.

  Bohr wondered, as he always did, why his employer insisted on wearing the mask so often. I want to look you in the eye when I tell you this, he thought. I want to see your face when I inform you that we've killed the world.

  "The sphere isn't designed to contain the new energy she's giving off. I really can't predict what's going to happen next. Either she's going to release enough radiation to obliterate everything on this entire continent, or she's going to create a spatial vacuum significant enough to destabilize the planet. Shadow, she's going to die, and she'll take all of us with her."

  "Didn't we always suspect this might be a possibility?" the Shadow said, far more calmly than Bohr was comfortable with.

  "A possibility? We always knew she was dangerous, but Shadow, we're talking about an extinction event. Worse. Worse!" Bohr said. "This will be the end of everything. There won't be any moles to rise up and evolve to inherit the Earth after we're gone. There'll be no Earth. We've got to do something."

  "No, we don't," the White Shadow said.

  "What?"

  "Do you know how to fix it?" the Shadow said.

  "No. I need more time. Maybe if I had more time . . ."

  "Keaton," the Shadow said, putting a hand on Bohr's arm. "It's okay. Everything will be fine."

  "It won't be okay," Bohr said. "You're not listening to me. Why aren't you hearing me?"

  "Because this is the outcome we've always wanted," the Shadow said. "We understood people didn't deserve this world. And so, we'll simply take it away from them."

  Keaton Bohr nodded incredulously, and took a couple of steps backwards.

  The White Shadow returned to the lumpy couch and his somnambulant state.

  Bohr turned and walked away, heading for his lab with a growing dread in his heart. He had signed on to this expedition, to this mission—all those years ago—to change the world, not end it. And now, he didn't have a clue how to stop it.

  Chapter 39:

  Everyone has a job to do

  Emily, Billy, and Annie found their friends miles away from
where they left them, at an impromptu base camp in an abandoned apartment complex. Billy had to ask Dude to reach out with his alien senses to locate them because everyone knew that the evacuation of the strip mall hideaway meant something terrible had happened.

  After finding so few familiar faces when they arrived, Billy realized the worst had occurred while they were gone.

  "What's going on?" Annie said, reaching a hand out to take Leto by the arm as they landed.

  "We were ambushed," she said. "The hunters have returned."

  "Hunters?" Billy said.

  "Predators we thought we drove away a long time ago," Leto said. "Slayers of monsters. Killers of our race."

  Billy and Emily exchanged a quick, terrified glance.

  "Titus?" Emily said.

  "I'm right here," younger-Titus said, looking beat up but whole.

  "Fido!" Emily said, throwing her arms around him. "You look like someone dropped you off a building."

  "Near enough," Titus said.

  Billy extended a hand for him to shake, but the young werewolf pulled him into a hug instead.

  "What. Was that?" Emily said.

  "Just happy you guys are okay," Titus said. "Any word from Doc and Kate?"

  "We're here," Doc said, materializing nearby with Kate in tow. "What the hell happened?"

  "Trouble," Titus said. "Don't worry, Jane's patrolling the area with Jessie right now looking for signs we might have been followed. I think we're okay."

  "Except we're not," Titus's older counterpart said, stomping toward them. "We lost a third of our people back there."

  "We're going to kill them all," Finnigan said. The red-haired werewolf was covered in someone else's blood. "We just lost another one. Amy. The girl from . . ."

  "I know who she is," Whispering said. "I know the names of everyone we lost tonight."

  Doc rubbed his eyes beneath the red-lensed glasses. "They'll come again," he said. "Do you have a plan?"

  "I think so," Whispering said. "Follow me."