Twig

by wildbow

  The two in the grey coats moved far enough along the hallway for the trap to spring.

  The maneuver was coordinated. The extras I’d brought along, people I’d known were brave enough on the battlefield to pull triggers or actually get involved in a fight, well, I hadn’t been able to assign them to Helen alone, so I’d told them to support all three of us as much as they could without getting in the way.

  Jessie struck with surgical precision, going after the woman in the grey coat with the fireplace poker. Her movements were remembered rather than practiced, deft, keeping her low to the ground, and the knife she planted in her target’s midsection served to catch her right at the core of the body. The grey-coated woman was in the midst of bringing the poker around to hit Jessie, using the end closest to her two hands rather than the hooked tip, and the injury and impact together took the strength out of the hit. Jessie was able to roll with the hit; maybe she would bruise, but it was far better than a cracked skull.

  Helen, for her part, was almost the inverse. She found a good moment to act, but the action was clumsy. She threw herself at the man at the tail end, and she landed low, tangling herself up in his legs.

  She lacked the strength to stay firm while tripping him up, but she didn’t utilize strength. She positioned herself, so that her seven stone body was in places the man’s legs wanted to be.

  He sprawled, and a knife slid away from his hand as he did so. Helen crawled toward his upper body as he lay on his back, reaching up and over for the weapon.

  Meanwhile, I simply rushed the man with the gun. He turned to pay attention to what was happening behind him, and as he did so, I threw myself up the stairs with both hands and feet, and I pulled him back onto the stairs and onto me. He landed partially across my good shoulder and back, and I helped him in a tumble down the stairs, grabbing his collar as I did so so I could control his fall.

  Just like that, it was more or less over. Combat drugs, yes, combatant, no.

  It would make them inconvenient to deal with in the coming hour or two, however.

  I just wished I had a better feeling about this whole scenario.

  I made sure to collect the gun and others followed me down the stairs.

  Passing custody of him to the rebels I’d brought along, I hurried up the stairs.

  Helen sat astride the man’s collarbone and on top of one of his arms. Her back bent in an impossible way, so her face was very close to his, and her tongue had stabbed into his mouth and down his throat, while he made gagging sounds. He was trying not to vomit as she used her tongue to provoke his gag reflex.

  Her arms were limp at her sides, her legs folded at either side of his shoulders. It was only weight and a low center of gravity that she used. He moved his hand, pulling at her, reaching for the tongue, and she interfered, batting at his hand with hers, until he finally managed a grip.

  Her counter was to let him grab her tongue, hauling nearly a foot of it out of his mouth, and meanwhile, she deployed her next attack. She heaved, vomiting what seemed like a bucket of blood on his face, nose, and into his open mouth.

  His struggles took on a different tone. He clutched at her, tried to push her off, and tried to turn his head so he could spit out the blood. Her knees and inner thighs hugged either side of his face. His breath formed bubbles in the pool of blood. I heard a gasp as he managed to somehow find a way to breathe with a long length of tongue and a bucket of blood on his face.

  Helen, for her part, simply heaved again. It was bile, this time.

  His hand reached for his waistband.

  “Knife!” I called out.

  He grabbed the knife that was at his waist and under his shirt, and he drew it. The others near Helen weren’t fast enough to grab it before the man stabbed her.

  He coughed or gagged, and there was a spurt of air exploding through the thick fluids.

  Helen took the stabbing in stride, arching her body up and away so the knife pulled free of the man’s hand. She left the knife embedded in her side, and grabbed it with one hand.

  He fumbled blindly for the knife, and found only her hand. He grabbed her wrist, trying to pull it away, and she let him, moving her body to control the positioning of everything while being quick to grab the knife handle before he could.

  “I told you you’d get hurt,” I told her.

  I saw her visibly sigh.

  “Satisfied?” I asked.

  She didn’t immediately respond.

  I had one eye on the man we’d brought along, who watched the scene in abject horror.

  “Jessie, Mister Bystander. We should have a word with the professor.”

  “The stab wound?” one of our rebels asked.

  I’d wanted to go, and now we’d have a short discussion, and we wouldn’t go. Slightly annoying.

  “She made sure it was placed so it was almost exactly where she got shot earlier,” Jessie said. “Presumably under the assumption that the damage is already done.”

  Helen, her tongue still buried in the pool of blood and bile, and in the man’s face, nodded.

  The man in the grey coat coughed again, and then the amount of fluid increased, bubbling up. Vomit.

  The fight slowly went out of him, and I could watch Helen’s back as she visibly relaxed, a weight lifted off of her shoulders, something proven, a fear resolved or a problem solved.

  She had needed this, I supposed.

  She turned to look at me over one shoulder, through the curtain of hair, as she slurped her tongue back into her mouth. She spat the fluids onto the floor to the side of the man’s head.

  “Satisfied,” I said, making it a statement this time.

  She gave me a nod.

  We left her behind as we descended the stairs.

  The students had moved the professor away from the stairs and against the wall. He still struggled with the strength of someone on combat drugs, but there were three of them, and it looked like one of his hands was injured.

  I wanted to say something pithy, show off a little, and ensure that the bystander’s mind could be taken off of the scene upstairs.

  But I looked down at the professor, and I felt that deep unease that had been sitting with me for a little while now.

  I stooped down, reaching forward, and my injured shoulder with the flesh carved away seized up. It took me a second attempt to grab the man’s chin. I moved my fingers over his mouth before he could spit on me, and dug my fingers in there for leverage, staring.

  “What is it?” Jessie asked.

  “Look at him,” I told her. “What do you see?”

  She bent down so she was on my level. She tilted her head one way, and then the other.

  “Symmetrical.”

  “Is that what I’m seeing?” I asked.

  She moved her hand, holding it up so it was flat, dividing his face to the left and right sides.

  Then, abrupt, she moved forward and pulled his head down, so his chin touched his collarbone, and ran her fingers through his hair.

  “No real part,” she said. “No whorl.”

  “I don’t understand,” the bystander said.

  “He’s not a professor,” I said, straightening. “He’s an experiment. Clone, vat baby, they dressed him up as a professor, gave him pretensions of being one, and gave him a supply of combat drugs to cloud the picture. The soldiers outside…”

  “An odd bunch,” Jessie said.

  “United only in that they were expendable,” I said. “It’s a trap. The entire thing. Neph, the giant… he’s too big a target to pass up. He finds them or they find him. The city… it’s entirely unimportant, it’s expendable too.”

  “They want him to lose the fight against Cynthia,” Jessie said.

  “Or against us, or Mauer, or Fray,” I said. I looked at the bystander. “We need to evacuate the city. Now.”

  Previous Next

  Gut Feeling—17.18

  “Alright,” I said, the second I was outside, addressing the crowd. “They’re plann
ing on blowing up the city. Or something.”

  That caused an uproar. Alarm, fear, concern. Anything else I would have said was drowned out in the ensuing reaction, not all of it from our side. A small handful of the experiments and combatants we’d taken hostage were being just as loud or louder.

  But I’d known that would be the case. Had to break the news somehow, and delivering it like this meant that there was a moment to digest while the others extricated themselves from the house.

  The next thing I did was to check on the situation with Helen’s big brother.

  When we had first come across him, he had been navigating the city with a degree of delicacy. He had avoided stepping on things, moving with deliberation. If Helen’s indications about him sniffing out his prey were right, he would have been pausing as often as he did to get a sense of where they were.

  He wasn’t doing that anymore. Not the caution, not the deliberation. He was building up steam, burning up every abstract resource that he had been conserving. Twisting his face to one side, he swung his arm out wide, slapping the face of one building, to catastrophic effect. The thunderous crack followed, as did the rumble of a good quarter of the roof tumbling to the ground some eight stories below.

  His next action, flowing less than gracefully from that, was to lunge for the opposite side of the street. The skyline prevented me from seeing exactly what was going on, but I could see his head and shoulders, and I could make out the general idea of it. He didn’t stumble to the building so much as he stumbled into the building, his chest and belly colliding with the building face. His arms reached up and over, sweeping everything and everyone off of that rooftop. He was more cautious with one arm, protecting one wrist.

  That duty done, he pushed himself away from the building so he could stumble into the next target, doing some significant damage to the structure in the process. All of this took only a few moments. There was no real point where he stopped moving now, and every action caused some significant damage to his surroundings, almost purely by accident.

  My small army was halfway watching the scene and halfway to watching me. They wanted my verdict, not just on the success of the mission, but on all of this.

  I, for my part, turned to look as Jessie and the others emerged from the building. They were bringing the ‘professor’. Helen trailed behind, sticking at the rear of the group. It looked like she’d cleaned herself up a tad.

  “Where do we stand?” Jessie asked.

  “Credit where credit’s due, Cynthia’s men are putting up a good fight. I can even imagine how.”

  “How?” Gordon Two asked.

  “He’s dumb—” I said. I paused momentarily as I heard the spitting sound from the rear of the group, the declaration of indignation. “—and they’re exploiting that fact. They figured out the amount of resources they need to commit to draw his attention, and they’re forcing him to zig-zag. Group one finds a place to set up with an escape route, draws his attention with sustained fire, noise, targeting sensitive areas, whatever, and flees the moment that he starts toward them. Meanwhile, groups two and three are doing the same. They probably have a lot of groups. Some are probably setting up traps.”

  “What kind of traps work for something like that?” the Treasurer asked.

  “Wagon full of something that will go up in flames, or something that might damage his feet,” I said. “If a building looks like it can come down, maybe try to get it to fall on him. Not that felling a building is easy, but it’s what I would look to do.”

  Helen was shaking her head.

  “…I have it on good authority that his feet aren’t that vulnerable, though,” I said. “But it’s looking more and more like Cynthia’s side is going to extricate a win, and that’s a problem.”

  “The blowing up?” Gordon Two asked.

  “The blowing up,” I said. I indicated the big guy. “That swollen belly is filled with something that’s going to remove this entire city as a consideration.”

  “Very probably,” Jessie said, quiet.

  “Very very probably,” I said.

  I turned to the older man we’d brought along as a tag-along. “That’s why they don’t give a damn about the buildings being knocked down, it’s why you were being told to stay in your homes, it’s why these guys, these experiments and stitched, are all of the expendable sort.”

  “Which might not be something our rebel army or the locals will grasp,” Jessie said. “It only makes sense if you’ve done the tour of duty a few times.”

  “No,” one of the experiments that was sitting on the ground spoke up. He had a country drawl. “We were. Never had them drop us off, tell us to stay put and keep them safe, and leave.”

  He was indicating the false professor.

  I wasn’t sure the bystander we’d brought along was entirely sold. He probably thought something was fishy, but was reluctant to buy into the idea that the Crown would do something like this. Which was entirely fair, because I had a hard time reconciling the long-term strategy and play involved in this.

  “We should split up and rendezvous,” Jessie said.

  “Agreed,” I said. “West of the hotels?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “We’re going to do our damndest to evacuate this city!” I called out. I looked over my shoulder at the giant. “We have…”

  “Twenty minutes,” Jessie supplied. “Maybe thirty.”

  “Twenty minutes!” I called out. “Get ten minutes out, knock on doors, shout, ring fire bells, spread the word. You’re going to lie. Tell them whatever you have to. The rebels have a bioweapon. No—Just say bioweapon enough times that it sticks. Say science stuff. Tell others to pass it on. Then get as far away from the giant as you can. We all meet again at the hill overlooking the city, where we all saw the giant.”

  “What about the hostages?” one asked.

  I looked down at the experiments who were sitting on the ground, many with hands on their heads. There were some of the women with tendrils on their arms who had the tendrils gripped behind them.

  “Evacuation is a priority,” I said. “Hostages… I’ll offer you a deal.”

  The one who’d spoken a short while ago looked up at me. Fluid-filled sacs hung off of his face like a beard, with more at one eye socket and arm. Others had already burst, doing mild damage to his own skin.

  “I’ve got a good eye for trouble,” I said. “If you’re willing, I’ll pick out the troublemakers, and let the rest of you go. If you need a place to go, we’ll offer you one. Food, clothes, work.”

  Behind me, Jessie was starting to urge some of the rebels to hurry and start with the evacuation. The bystander we’d brought along ran across the street to talk to the other bystanders, who still had Davis.

  The experiment grit his teeth, looking down at the ground.

  He would say yes, but it would take a precious minute.

  This was another kind of transaction. I’d rolled the metaphorical dice with the lives of the people who worked for me, weighing gain against risk to life. Now I was doing much the same. I could stand here and negotiate, and it meant I wasn’t elsewhere, mitigating risk, talking to people, convincing them to evacuate.

  I could reduce it down to a simple gain of a half-dozen experiments, assuming only a few would actually stay, at a risk to what, forty to a hundred people, depending on how I communicated and how many people were in nearby buildings?

  A guttural voice cut in. One of the long-haired Brunos. “What if you eye trouble?”

  “If I think you’re going to be a problem?” I asked.

  Long hair draped from the man’s head, chin, and spilled out of the ‘v’ of his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves. It was all blond and very fine, curling at the ends, where the weight of the rest of it didn’t pull it straight. His eyes were dark, given how pale and blond the rest of him was.

  “Yeah. If you think we might be trouble,” he said, and he looked like trouble indeed, going by the look in his eyes.

&nb
sp; Simply saying ‘a bullet in the head’ didn’t really resolve anything and caused possible ruckus. Better to leave that for later, when I’d played my game of duck duck goose and could quickly eliminate the geese without all the ducks thinking they might be done for.

  I wasn’t sure I liked the analogy. I didn’t like birds in general, and I could prejudice myself by thinking of my potential recruits as ducks.

  It wasn’t Jessie or I that gave an answer, however. It was Helen, who had stalked along the back lines of the group, who sidled up behind the big guy. She reached out to him.

  “Don’t touch the hair,” I said.

  Confused, unaware there was anyone reaching out to do any touching, the big guy twisted around to look, and then startled, flipping around a hundred and eighty degrees before sprawling on his back, hands behind him.

  Helen had paused, meanwhile, to look at me. She gave me a roll of the eye, where I could see a sliver of her eye through the hair.

  “I’m just saying,” I told her.

  She continued moving, reaching out with a shaking hand, and she touched fingers to the hairy guy’s cheekbone.

  “She smells like blood and death,” the hairy guy said.

  “Yeah,” was all I said.

  Helen smiled, and her hair hid a lot of the smile. She bared a lot of teeth, and it looked very alarming.

  “He’s your responsibility if we’re keeping him,” I told her.

  She looked up at me, and the smile was one intended more for humans than for… I wasn’t even sure what label to slap the big guy with. I almost wanted to say gladiators. Fighters, scrappers, people who had been taken from bad and hurled into worse, and who had somehow worked out that the only way to keep going was to fling themselves into worse things still. People who had a vicious edge that might never be tempered.

  I looked back in the direction of the giant. Where Cynthia was, if she hadn’t already been killed.

  Cynthia was one of them. Not an experiment, but someone who had started out in violence and who would conclude in violence.