Emergence

by Various

  Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when my conscience kicked in.

  I spent a split-second weighing my options. Here was a guy who’d threatened to kill me minutes before and was using children for some scheme I still had no clue about. He deserved whatever happened to him at the end of the fall. He deserved to die. Right? Didn’t he?

  I leapt off the roof with a growl.

  He might deserve it, sure. It wasn’t my place to make that judgment. I darted down alongside him and grabbed his arm, waiting until we were just a few feet above the ground. I changed our angle, shooting us off horizontally down between the buildings, my power absorbing most of our momentum. I let him go then. He careened to the ground as if he’d only fallen a few feet, bouncing through the rubbish that littered the alley. Monger let out a pained groan after he’d come to a stop, and I let out a relieved sigh he wasn’t dead.

  “Where’s all that shit talk now?” I pulled him up by his shirt and thought about clocking him again.

  “You should have let me fall,” he coughed, wet and reedy, then slammed his shin into my knee. It buckled under the force, my power not there to protect me. I stumbled to the side and caught my balance against the wall. My leg throbbed.

  Monger scrambled to his feet and held something to his mouth, wisps of dark smoke spilling through his fingers. It lasted only a moment before he pulled his hand away, the same scent as before reaching my nose. He came at me right after, as if he weren’t hurt at all, arms extended to grab me. I couldn’t let that happen. To stop moving was death.

  He neared and I ducked, driving an elbow into his ribs as I cannonballed past. Monger hissed, and when he spun to come after me again I spied blood staining the white of his mask around his mouth. I surged left to avoid him, but he must have predicted that.

  His fist thudded against my cheek and sent me tumbling through the air. It was a hammer blow, and I was grateful to my power for saving me from it. Still, he’d redirected me in mid-surge, and that scared me. The power he possessed was godly.

  I shifted direction before he could get his hands on me, darting upward while he closed, leaving him behind to spew out a line of curses that would make a sailor blush. Another surge set me down on a balcony a couple stories above the alley where I could catch my breath. My leg shuddered, pain radiating from the joint. It was hard to stay on my feet without holding the railing.

  “What’s the matter, Whiplash?” Monger shouted. “Lost your nerve so soon?” He struck the wall. Pieces of masonry exploded and the balcony swayed under me, my leg threatening to collapse. He laughed mockingly, the sound filling the alleyway and echoing about.

  I’d said I wasn’t good at running, but I’d always been real good at trying new things. He struck the wall again, but I wasn’t on the balcony to feel it that time. A surge sent me careening straight up into the air, where I spied red and blue lights flashing and closing in on our area. A second surge and I sprang over the rooftops, away from Monger. I kept surging from there until I found my way home.

  Inside, the sliding glass door locked behind me—the illusion of safety is important—I collapsed on the couch and cried until I could find the strength to hobble to the bathtub and soak away the pain that made my leg damn near useless. After that, I swallowed a mouthful of ibuprofen.

  There weren’t enough painkillers in the world to make me feel better.

  FIVE

  Evening rolled around and, to my surprise, I felt a little better. Only a little, though.

  After the long, scalding hot bath, more ibuprofen, and enough ice to lower the ambient temperature in my apartment by a couple of degrees, I was able to walk without crying. I whimpered a bunch, mind you, but I didn’t cry again.

  My leg was one solid mess of red and black from the calf up to mid-hamstring. It felt as if someone had taken a bat to it. Just looking at it hurt, and I shuddered every time I did, wondering how much damage Monger could have done to me had I not been surging when he’d punched me. There hadn’t been much room for him to build momentum with the kick, yet he’d nearly crippled me. Imagining the possible damage set my head to swimming and my heart to thundering. He could have followed through with his threat to kill me with just one blow.

  Just one.

  The newscaster on TV reported about sniper attacks on chimeric victims in Anchor City, said something about the murder of an old marine, then segued to talking about the day’s drama in Port Haven and the DCD’s response to it. I watched dumbly, trying to ignore my leg. Evidently, no one had seen Monger and me going at it, but there was plenty about a fourth chimeric in as many days robbing a check cashing joint and a Walgreens ATM to boot. One of Monger’s kids had apparently gotten away, despite the local DCD on high alert and arriving much sooner than the last three times.

  I grew tired of listening to the guests prattle about chimerics. Aisha Cordell, of course, came on screen and added nothing to the discussion except for her usual ‘look-what-we’ve-become’ crap. I stabbed the off button on the remote. Wonderful silence filled the room. I didn’t need to hear a so-called expert’s opinion on this mess. The architects of our new evolutionary track had told me directly.

  Well, maybe directly was misleading.

  They phoned it in from the past.

  Kind of like that guy on the History Channel with the crazy hair claiming everything we couldn’t explain in the world was done by aliens. Well, in this case, he was right.

  I dozed off a little, lucidly remembering waking up in the hospital after the plane went down. The stress of the crash had decoded my abilities, and while I couldn’t remember what happened or even how I’d ended up outside of it, as Hero claimed I was before it went down, I do remember perfectly the ‘voice’ inside my head.

  It was cold and distant, the words coming to me through the ages, from the dawn of humanity as it would tell me. For all its insanity, there was a sincerity to it I couldn’t deny. There was no doubting it. The voice washed over me and numbed my pain at the loss of my family, my mom and dad, little Nita, soothing me so I could hear and understand its missive.

  We chimerics—a term coined by humanity after the first of us came online—were the progeny of an ancient race of beings: aliens, truly.

  The Dahhnathra.

  Possessed of a means to fold space, they were travelers, explorers. Their voyages had taken them far from their homeland and had brought them in contact with many other beings across the universe. Sadly, most of those they encountered were cruel and driven to destroy that which they did not understand, that which was not like them.

  When the Dahhnathra discovered Earth, a planet whose offspring were barely in their infancy, simple, weak, and vulnerable, they became fearful these helpless creatures might be visited by the intergalactic and more warlike species. So, the Dahhnathra embedded a trigger in our DNA, a kind of a genetic time bomb, within humankind, those that populated Earth way back when, at least. It was kind of a gift, meant to prepare us, to circumvent a slow evolution, so that we might have a chance should cruel beings stumble across us before nature had time to evolve us.

  This was the message. The voice of something otherworldly, explaining my purpose to me. The reason for my new existence. But, just like we always do, humans are screwing the pooch.

  Whereas our powers were gifted to us to save humanity, to preserve our world against an inevitable enemy invasion from space, we’d yet to see an alien, had yet to encounter anything but empty space in our countless years of screaming into the void.

  Despite the voice that spoke to each and every chimeric as they manifested, despite the trials and tests and experiments that proved over and over that chimerics were a different breed of human—Humanity 2.0—the world buried its head in the sand of denial. Here we were, right back to where we started: fighting one another on our tiny, inconsequential planet, while the dangers of the universe loomed.

  A sharp knock startled me, pulling me from my drowsy musing. I hadn’t been exp
ecting anyone. My pulse raced, and I pulled myself to my feet, and then I heard a key in the lock. I groaned.

  Steve.

  The door eased open. “You here, babe?”

  I flopped back down on the couch with a grunt. There’d be no running away from this like I had Monger. “Yeah, I’m here.” One day I’d have to take that key away from him.

  I heard the cheery smile in his voice and immediately felt bad for thinking that. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t a good one, either.

  “Cool,” he said, shutting the door and coming over to where I sat. “I was thinking maybe we could—” He caught sight of my face and froze, mouth working soundlessly until he could force something out. “What the hell happened?”

  “I fell down the stairs,” I told him, avoiding any details. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure don’t look okay.” He came over and kneeled down beside me, between the couch and the coffee table, staring at my leg that protruded from my shorts, and then up at my face. The heady, earthen scent of weed hit me, and I exhaled to clear my nose, it was so strong. “Well, you don’t smell okay.”

  He stood up and snorted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  He put his hands on his hips. “We’ve discussed this a hundred times, Viv. As long as I don’t smoke here, it’s none of your business, remember?”

  “It is when you come here reeking like you just got off the boat from Jamaica. I’m getting high just sitting here.” I raised my hands in surrender. My head was already starting to hurt and his dope stench wasn’t helping matters, worrying the splinter of my anger. “Never mind. I don’t want to fight.”

  He shook his head. “Fuck it, I’m out.”

  He stomped off, and I sighed, but not loud enough for him to hear me. I hadn’t meant to piss him off so fast. It was just the pain and thoughts of Monger filling my head with ugliness, all looking for a way out. It was still for the best that Steve left. I didn’t have the patience for him right now, so I stayed quiet, and he took that as acknowledgement that he keep going. He slammed the door, shaking the apartment walls. It was good I didn’t have any real neighbors, just a tattoo shop below my apartment, or I’d have been kicked out a long time ago. Steve and I had this same conversation—such as it was—at least once a month for the last eight years.

  I moaned as I got up to lock the door behind him, sliding the chain into place to keep him from coming back in, then grabbed my laptop. Sitting on my ass and doing nothing might have felt good, but Monger was still out there, using kids and plotting something nefarious. Or something. Whatever it was that villains did.

  Since I’d half-ass predicted the general location of the most recent robbery attempt, and there was nothing obvious tying everything together, there had to be something about the locations themselves that was important. Or maybe I’d just watched too damn many CSI shows and was full of shit. Either, likely.

  I loaded my computer and opened up Google Earth, pinpointing the four places Monger had directed the kids to hit. Just like I’d noticed before, it was vaguely a square with each point being within the boundaries of downtown Port Haven.

  It hit me then; I hadn’t bothered to ask Serpentine how many kids had manifested recently. Seemed a whole bunch, though. Knowing how many had come online might have helped me figure out if there was some other crime coming and possibly tell me where. At least I knew the general area she and the others had come from, having passed the groups of street kids hanging out on South Vine a hundred times on my way to work. As a last resort, I could head over there and see what I could find out.

  According to the news, the last of the kids got away despite the faster police response, though I didn’t imagine he would be throwing a huge party in celebration or buying a mansion anytime soon. He’d likely be laying low; these kids didn’t know much more than the streets they grew up on. That’s where they were most comfortable. And where all their friends were. I’d bet that’s where they’d be found, unless they hit the lottery, and maybe even then.

  I’d save that for last. It wasn’t as if they’d open up to me all that easily, but then again, given my face and leg and all my tats and piercings—which I’d managed to put back in since the swelling had receded a bit—I’d fit in. Still, it was a long shot.

  I scanned the Market Valley district, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to what Monger was doing there. There were tons of little shops and companies that operated out of the area. A couple banks, a bunch of lawyer’s offices, about ten bail bonds offices, a satellite office of a pharmaceutical company, a couple of neighborhood grocery stores, a few fabric shops, a dozen corporate business offices ranging from dollar stores to big retailers, and a whole bunch of office spaces that were either vacant or Google wasn’t up to date on what was in them.

  After a couple hours, the screen turned into a blur of names and addresses and I slumped back onto the couch with a grunt. The movement stirred the air, and I could smell Steve’s pot stink all over again, as if he were still in the room.

  I fanned my hand in front of my face. As open-minded as I was toward people’s habits, live and let live and all that, I’d never gotten into dope. Never understood the need to medicate myself, aside from cigarettes. Especially after I’d manifested. My power needed a tight leash, or I could kill someone. Hero could attest to that. I’d put a hurting on him early on when he’d come to check on me. Wasn’t my finest hour, but it made it damn clear just how dangerous I could be when I cut loose. It was safer to avoid booze and dope and anything else mood-altering that could potentially let that genie out of the bottle. There’d be no coming back from murder.

  Cigs were another matter. At least for a while. I’d become a fricking smoke stack for about year after the crash, giving my hands something to keep them occupied, I guess…to keep them from shaking like they used to. Fortunately, I broke that habit. Seemed a sad excuse to blow more money than I had, the result literally ash. That was a lot of cash I was burning up that I could have used on music, my one true drug…or rent. That popped up often enough to be a pain ever since my grandmother died. I shook my head at the foolishness of the past and had a thought come to mind as if I’d shaken something loose.

  I bolted upright and stared at my monitor again, a smile springing to my lips. My eyes traced the locations once more, my head nodding all the while, settling on one I’d discounted early on, seeing it now through new eyes. I scanned the information once more. It made perfect sense.

  To me, at least.

  SIX

  While I’d been going over maps and racking my brain for answers, the Department of Chimeric Defense had been busy; just like I had expected, they’d picked up on the area Monger was sending the kids to and had set up a perimeter of chimeric enforcement. That meant DCD officers and the PwP suppression teams, called P.O.N.E., which I think stood for ‘Powered Offender Neutralization & Enforcement’ were posted at every corner around the imaginary square of the previous attacks, giving everyone the electronic stink-eye. The DCD carried heavy weapons; pulse cannons, meant to subdue or delay any chimerics they came across, and the smaller P.O.N.E. units were usually comprised of really low-level chimerics or highly-specialized ‘normals.’ These guys were usually the tactical responders until the real enforcement arrived; in this case that meant two chimerics designated specifically to defend Port Haven: Willow and the Wisp.

  The twins—one male, the other female—had been stationed in Port Haven about two years back when it became clear there were too many chimerics manifesting locally to be contained by traditional law enforcement. When S.W.A.T.’s on the ropes, it’s time to send in the big guns, and rather than bring in the National Guard to stir up all sorts of bad feelings, the President had decided it best to assign posts across the country to TCA-licensed chimerics. This allowed for a powered response sufficient to the task, yet didn’t carry the stigma of martial law. The Chimeric Agency did
one thing really damn well, and that was public relations.

  Born and raised in Port Haven, Willow and the Wisp seemed a natural fit, having only been gone the few years since they’d manifested while they underwent TCA training on the use of their new powers. More like brainwashed to be good civil servants, but whatever. They’d made their presence clear, beating inexperienced chimerics back into the shadows or sending them off to research farms. The pair had been oddly absent during the last few incidents, but the persistence of Monger’s cannon fodder brigade had forced their hand, it looked like. The siblings could be seen patrolling the skies of downtown, two angelic white streaks soaring against the backdrop of the pale blue sky.

  Neither of the twins possessed super vision as far as my research told me, so it was pretty simple surging over the roofs to end up inside the containment field the DCD had set up. It was too easy, to be honest. That bothered me.

  Willow and the Wisp had gotten lax since they’d taken part in quelling the Covenant Uprising last year. Chimerics still operating in the metro, and not blatantly committing crimes other than violating the accords of the Patriot Act, had been left mostly undisturbed; were they to catch me there, there’d be consequences. It wasn’t as if they were really looking though, apparently presuming the overt presence of the DCD would deter chimeric activity.

  I didn’t believe that.

  Monger was looking to stir something up just like Covenant had, using kids who had pretty much nothing to lose. According to Serpentine, the money he’d been offering was a modest fortune. They were blinded by it. They’d do whatever Monger wanted, the opportunity to make their lives more comfortable for the foreseeable future was a hell of a carrot. A little show of force wasn’t going to stop these kids, since each and every one of them had deep-seated anti-authoritarian complexes. The DCD would have better luck telling them to conform than they would stopping them from doing what street rats like this had always done: survive.