Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  Whatever it was, I'd probably seen and done worse.

  The Firestarters had been expanding. They'd taken over another couple of blocks, though that hadn't won them any friends in the Blooddrops. The Blooddrops were a fairly standard band of one-offs, as far as those things went. Everyone had their own thing, the strong ruled the weak, and once in a while someone truly dangerous --- perhaps with some real super villain potential --- would crop up to take over. Under the rule of one such individual, the gang had once expanded to cover about a quarter of the city. Luckily for the norms in the city, though, a passing hero with a scorching case of the clap had dropped in for some semi-anonymous treatment at one of the better-funded free clinics. He had been in the right place at the right time and the threat was ended, though not forgotten. Last I'd heard there were still some buildings over on Fifth that were still unsafe to go into without a radiation suit.

  The Blooddrops had barely survived it, so they chose to dig in and make life miserable for anyone nearby. When the Firestarters moved in, though, they didn't really stand a chance and had been losing ground fairly quickly. Still, enemy of my enemy and all that.

  I ignored the crude graffiti that marked the building as Blooddrop territory and stepped inside without disturbing the sleeping guard. Judging by the way his fingernails looked like cat claws and the striped fur covering his entirety of his head and neck, it was a no-brainer to guess what his abilities might be. I made sure The Rat was downwind of the guard before I motioned for him to come in. Coincidentally he was downwind of me, too, but that wasn't planned. Ask me again and I'll still deny it.

  "You are going to take a bath tonight," I hissed in his ear. I sank my fingers into his upper arm, incredibly tough muscles giving with no more resistance than a marshmallow. "Or I'm going to know the reason why."

  He hissed in pain but nodded. I released him immediately.

  "You don't gotta do that every time, do you?" he whined.

  "Yes, I do. Now get your ass upstairs and clean it before I do more than squeeze your arm."

  I probably didn't need to threaten him, but getting The Rat to bathe was only marginally easier than trying to breathe underwater without gills or an air tube. Reminding him that Brick wasn't the only one he palled around with that could snap him in half was always a good start.

  "Okay, okay. Geez."

  I tapped one of Posey's safer petals to get her attention. "You and I need to talk. When you find a room and get Brick settled in come find me. I'll be on the third floor trying to get one of the TVs to work."

  She cocked her head slightly. "What makes you think there's a TV on the third floor?"

  I shrugged. "If there's a guard there's something worth guarding. My guess is it's being kept ready for people to sleep in if the 'Drops go to war. At least it used to be. Doesn't look like anyone's been in here in months, though. Probably cat-boy over there's been holding his post since Matilda, or whatever the hell her name was, bit it during her bid to take over the city. A flophouse implies recreation, recreation implies TVs, and judging by the neglect I'm seeing it's doubtful it'll work right away. I figure the third floor will be far enough away we won't be disturbed." I cringed internally at what I figured might be coming out of Posey's sewer mouth. "Or overheard."

  She nodded, petals of many different hues flopping gently as her head moved. "Sounds good. I'll try to be quick."

  Normally I wouldn't have risked the elevator if it was working, but the beep and whoosh were probably less likely to wake up sleeping beauty than the heavy tread of petrified feet on metal stairs, especially since someone had ripped the door off the stairway. In a building like this the echoes would go on forever.

  I noticed the elevator didn't stop till it hit the sixth floor. Posey or The Rat was being careful. Probably The Rat. For all his faults, he was a survivor.

  I looked at the stairs and did some quick calculations. I could jump and catch the railing, pull myself up, wash, rinse, repeat till I was on the third floor. The problem with that approach was I didn't know what I'd find when I got past the first landing. If I jumped and there was no railing I'd either land and make a hell of a racket or, worse, I'd have to exert myself and put myself on the landing the other way. Worse because if I did that it'd trip whatever detectors were nearby and leave a traceable residue. Then again, walking up the stairs silently was going to be about as boring as waiting for linoleum to curl.

  Jumping would leave a small amount of residue, true, but it shouldn't trip a detector even if they'd planted one on the top of the building. It'd also clip about a minute off my climb. Besides all that, it'd be fun to do something like that again. Even so little an amount would be better than doing everything as mundane as possible. I wasn't sure why I wanted to, other than the background urge I always face, but it was there. Maybe it was the fight I'd just been so close to. It didn't really matter.

  So I jumped. I flexed my legs and pushed and launched myself into the air. The sheer joy of not holding back almost overwhelmed me and I closed my eyes, relishing the sensation of pure power flowing through me. I opened them a moment later and nearly cursed, throwing my hands out to stop myself from crashing into the suspended ceiling. I'd over-jumped by about ten floors.

  I brought myself down as quickly and quietly as I could but while exerting myself as little as possible. I cursed myself for being a fool. After so long of keeping it tamped down of course I was going to overdo it.

  The question is, how much residue did I leave? And did I exert enough to trip the nearest detector? Damn it, why didn't I just walk up the stairs like a frigging norm?

  I tasted the air and relaxed a little. The metallic, ozone-like tang of my exertions was noticeable but not overpowering. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet. At that concentration the detector would have to be within half a block and there'd have to be an open window in direct line-of-sight. It'd fade to imperceptibility to the hand-held units within six hours, unless they'd found a way to up the gain on the sensors since I'd last seen them by a factor of four. As it was, they'd been pushing the limits of carbon-doped silicon when I'd escaped. I had my doubts they'd mastered anything else since then. Still, better safe than sorry.

  I humped it down the stairs as quietly as possible. I'd have been better off riding the elevator, for all the time it took me.

  The door to the third floor was locked, but that didn't even slow me down, really. I just twisted till the lock broke and the door opened. Having enhanced muscles could be useful at times.

  The hallway the door opened onto was a disaster area. A pipe must have burst at some point and run wild for days before the water was shut off. The reek of mildew and rust was a sickening double-punch to my nose. It made me angry. Still, there was a chance that the damage was fairly well contained.

  I spent a few minutes hunting through the damage before I found an area that hadn't been destroyed. Sure enough, there was a TV that didn't work in an otherwise-empty room that bore the marks of having had the furniture removed in a hurry. I didn't want to guess as to the intent in removing it. Keeping it safe from the oncoming flood was just as likely as theft, not that it mattered either way.

  Time for a change in plans. I had no way of contacting Posey, but I figured my appearing on the sixth floor would probably be announcement enough.

  So much for privacy, though. I didn't want The Rat overhearing anything because it directly affected him and I didn't know how he'd react.

  Probably badly.

  As far as those things went, The Rat wasn't a bad sort, really. The problem as it stood was he needed to start behaving more human if we were going to keep on putting up with him. Bathing habits were foremost. True, I was the only one who really suffered, but the worse he smelled the less he could interact with normal society, which meant that sometimes Posey and Brick had to go without. On top of that, I was sick of his constant double entendres and dirty jokes at Posey. She didn't complain, much, but since she was without any way to, well, physically return his ad
vances --- and even someone with Posey's mouth wouldn't put it anywhere near his---

  I didn't even want to think about it. That image made me feel queasy.

  Besides. Just touching Posey was a risk. One night she decided she needed something from a store, so she dressed up in a heavy coat we'd found behind a thrift store and went to go get it. I had a bad feeling, so I told Brick to stay where he was, The Rat to watch him, and I followed her at a safe distance. Crowds were pretty heavy that night, so nobody really paid her any attention till someone bumped into her. A particularly long and nasty thorn poked through the coat and scratched the man's arm. He cursed, rubbed it, and about twelve seconds later he collapsed, frothing at the mouth and swelling. He was dead within thirty seconds, his lungs filled with fluid and his eyes hemorrhaging black.

  I'd grabbed Posey's coat and pulled her off the main drag. A trail of dead bodies wasn't worth whatever it was she felt she had to do.

  Maybe it was the way he was more proud of the rat part of his being than the human part. It bothered me. I couldn't identify with an animal like he did and I sure as hell didn't care to try; I didn't need to to have an identity. He did. It was a common coping mechanism among his type. Blends, the scientist types had decided to call them. You take a little gene material from group A and mix it with group B and kill off all the mistakes. What you have left are mostly human, slightly something else, and rarely a good idea. What the science types couldn't explain was how some of them happened without a laboratory. They especially couldn't explain how some of them came about only at the onset of puberty.

  Imagine a man-sized rat that walked on two legs, spoke with an affected accent to make people think he was stupid, acted like a garbage disposal, had opposable thumbs and all the dexterity of a human, and you pretty much had The Rat. Thankfully he seemed to be unique. I'd hate to think of a litter of these things being born every couple of months. They'd be a worse plague than boy bands.

  The way he acted sometimes, it made me think he'd be happier without the rest of us tagging along. Then again, rats are social creatures. He probably liked having someone to talk to more than he disliked us. Loneliness, at least, was universal.

  I decided to take the stairs on this side of the building rather than navigate the debris field again. It wouldn't have been a problem, really, but the stairs on this side were closer than the elevator on the other. The TV was an awkward bundle against my chest that would have made things interesting with all the crap I'd have to get through to get to it, anyway.

  The door was intact but opened to slight pressure from my foot. Whoever had been through last hadn't bothered to close it completely.

  Three flights, moving silently, with a bulky TV clutched against my chest. Child's play. Felt good to move, to be honest. Skulking around the city, hiding from everyone and everything I could, knowing what I knew, sleeping in alleys, reeking of garbage and stale food and days-old sweat because I couldn't bathe regularly all added up. It wasn't me, but it was how I'd had to survive.

  As for why I wanted the TV, well, that was a different story. I'd seen something during the fight, while the Weather Witch was throwing lightning bolts around, that made me desperate to catch the evening news.

  A helicopter was lowering something sinister-looking onto a building near the fight. That one was flying at all during that kind of weather didn't bode well. Only a military pilot would be up during that maelstrom. The implications of a military pilot flying through that hell and delivering something to the top of a nearby building were extremely bad. If not for me specifically than for a whole lot of other people. There had to be some kind of cover story, even if it was hidden in one of the other stories, to waylay the citizenry's fears. Even if the citizenry didn't know they were supposed to be afraid, you had to cover it somehow. Leave things totally alone and you got crazies muttering in the background and going underground. Make it public and the crazies got a lot louder. You could see them, then, and that gave you some kind of control.

  Maybe it'd be easier to buy a newspaper to get the news I wanted. Then again, maybe I didn't want to risk the radioactive isotopes they put in the ink to control our brains.

  I got a good chuckle out of that one. A guy I'd known when I was younger was convinced the government was putting radioactive materials in the ink they used for newsprint in an effort to control our minds. He ended up killing himself by a very ingenious method involving two pudding cups and the underwire from a stolen bra, but until then he'd kept me entertained with very paranoid fantasies. Some of them had been very original.

  The door to the sixth floor was shut. I hoped it wasn't locked. Breaking in the way I'd done on the third floor might leave traces I didn't want followed. Maybe I was being paranoid, but better safe than sorry. Not all the tools were technological and not all the traces I'd leave would dissipate after a few hours.

  The knob turned and the door opened with an annoying creak that announced my presence to the world at large. The world at large being six large men, two of whom had obvious powers they were showing off, I wouldn't have been happy if I'd had time to think.

  The six of them had surrounded Posey and Brick. The Rat was nowhere to be seen, though I could smell him and feel his presence.

  Four pairs of eyes turned towards me, another four watching Posey and Brick warily. The green-skinned specimen had four multi-faceted eyes that glinted in the flickering fluorescent lights. I could feel the power radiating off him. He'd be tricky, so he'd have to go first.

  The rest might be troublesome because I had to keep them from hurting Posey and Brick, but they wouldn't be any problems for me.

  Violent times and violent men demand violent answers. And violent answers were something I'd been good at before I'd been trained to be even better.

  "I'll give you the TV and leave if you let the flower and the rock come with me." I didn't put much into it but I knew my voice carried. I wondered for a moment why they were so close to this door when they'd gone up on the other side of the building but, since it didn't really matter at that precise instant, I didn't give it any thought past that point.

  "Get him!" someone shouted. That's all it took. Adrenaline or whatever my body produced hit my system and instinct took over.

  The TV flew from my arms and crashed into the bug-eyed green guy with enough force to shatter. I saw him going down as I threw myself at the next-nearest thug.

  I noticed this one was wearing the red-and-green mark of the Grenadiers; the gang from the west side with that snake-headed bitch at the helm. I used the bloody shamrock tattoo on his cheek as the target for my flying tackle, snapping his head around until his neck gave that satisfying crack of breaking vertebrae as we smacked into the wall. I pushed myself off, targeting the next thug. This one was denuded of whatever gang colors he normally flashed, if any. He'd started to swing his arm around so I grabbed it, twirled inward, smashed my elbow into his solar plexus, drove the back of my head into the bridge of his nose so hard I felt it give, and dropped to my knees. I snapped his arm, flipping him over and into the wall, smashing the wall tile.

  The third thug had begun to turn, pulling a large-bore revolver from his waistband. I hadn't seen it before because he hadn't turned to face me when I'd opened the door.

  It's the little surprises in life that keep living interesting.

  I stepped forward, snagged his wrist, pulled his arm straight, and drove my fist through his elbow. When I say through I mean through.

  Blood spurted, a scream started to pierce the air, and I had an extra arm to deal with.

  I whirled, throwing the loose limb in the face of another thug. I kicked backwards, sending the now one-armed man to the floor and reassessing the situation.

  Less than twenty seconds had elapsed since I'd opened the door and half the threat had been neutralized. The other half was disorganized and shocked, but recovering.

  The one with one arm had fallen silent, hopefully unconscious. The green-skinned prick was either unconsci
ous or dead, and the one with the broken neck wasn't going to do anything. The one I'd hit with with my freed hand was already reaching for what looked like a micro-uzi tucked into a cheap leather belt. The other two were doing something similar.

  I didn't have enough time, but I had to try.

  I threw myself at the first one, knocking him to the floor and the submachine gun flying. I grabbed his hair and smashed his head into the carpet twice, the second time sounding suspiciously wet. I rolled off him, kicking off the floor into an upright position and snatching the gun out of the next-to-last thug's hand. A backwards hammerfist knocked some teeth loose and put him on the floor as well. I used the momentum to spin myself around so I was facing the last thug, my gun pointed rock-steady at the last thug's face.

  "Don't try it. Nobody's that fast," I said quietly. His gun was half-drawn... or pointed at Posey purposely.

  "You sure about that?" he asked, the muscles in his neck tensing. I respected the fact that he was still cool after what I'd just done to his friends. I also recognized the slight tremor in his hand.

  His arm blurred as he brought the gun to bear where I was standing and his finger snapped the trigger down. Bullets flew out of the barrel as it climbed, the deafening explosions abusing my eardrums even as the slugs rent the air in their search for my flesh.

  Speedsters all had the same signals they were about to do something fast. Once you learn to recognize it they cease to be a problem --- as long as you can counter. This one wasn't even that fast, as far as speedsters went.

  "Looking for me?" I said after he realized I wasn't there anymore.

  I grabbed his head and twisted until his neck popped. I let him slump to the floor as I gave Posey and Brick a once-over. They seemed to be okay, if a bit stunned, so I nodded in their direction before attending to the one-armed and toothless thugs. The area of wet carpet around the other one told me all I needed to know about his condition, though I did consider pulling the one stuck in the wall tiles out before dismissing it. Let him hang.