Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  The pain in my head faded into the background quickly, for which I was glad, but a slow burning started running the length of all four limbs as the first sign of sensation returning. Soon thereafter I found I had limited control, though they were all very weak. I was willing to deal with the pain if it meant I was going to be able to walk soon.

  Raymond glared at me, though with the pain he must have been feeling I doubted he'd be cracking jokes any time soon.

  "Well," I risked saying after I could wipe the sweat off my forehead. When I didn't immediately pray for death I pushed onwards. "That was a treat. What the hell was it so I can start using it at parties?"

  Amazement pushed through the pain on his face long enough to register, then he returned to his death glare briefly. Then he turned to stare at another wall.

  "Wildcard," I said, a wave of nausea making my tongue feel very thick, "go get Venom and bring her back here fast."

  "Yes, run," Raymond spat through gritted teeth. "Run and fetch the whore to fix Massa. Run, boy. Go and show him how much of an Uncle Tom you really are."

  "You really are a racist fuck," I said to him. "Go get Venom," I repeated, turning my head to look at Wildcard. If green bubbles ever looked concerned, these did.

  He gestured wildly, the majority of which were in Raymond's direction. My guess was he wasn't sure I could handle him if he tried anything, which made me realize I might not be able to.

  I looked around, flopping my head from side to side like a dying fish, to see if anything was moving. Sure enough, a cable waved side to side in a downdraft from the ventilation system. I focused on it and, after a second, it stopped moving. As soon as I stopped concentrating it started waving again.

  "Yes, I can handle him if he tries anything. Yes, I'm sure." I heard him leave quickly, though not quite at the dead run I'd hoped for. It was a big house.

  Raymond waited till the echoes of his footsteps had died before he struggled to his feet. I could still only barely move, but I could move enough to give him the one-fingered salute he so richly deserved.

  "I wouldn't try that, Ray," I cautioned.

  "I don't know how the hell you lived through that, but I'm going to finish the job if it kills me."

  "Kills you?" I tried to laugh and instead coughed and gasped. "It won't, but I will."

  "And how are you going to do that," he said, limping forward slowly with a murderous glint in his eye as he fumbled with something in his pocket. "I have another dose of Dragon Breath in my pocket. What do you have?"

  Dragon Breath. Its use had been outlawed in every country with a functioning government. Its manufacture was so highly toxic the byproducts alone were considered weapons of mass destruction. It was highly poisonous, highly unstable, highly expensive, only a handful of people knew the formula, and the total brewing process required a class-four or higher manufacturing facility, of which there were fewer than a hundred funded and functioning worldwide.

  It also only had one known antidote and that was almost as hard to find as the gas it was to counteract --- and usually twice as expensive.

  Forgetting that for a moment, not only was it a miracle I was still alive and recovering function in my limbs, but the amount he'd sprayed should have made the whole damn room pernicious until the ventilation system could take care of it, and even then at the rate of air exchange it'd take at least four hours to get all traces of the gas out.

  Different people would react to different levels of the gas, too. Some people were fatally-sensitive to concentrations lower than one part-per-billion and others could take two parts-per-million with little more effect than losing bowel and bladder control.

  It wasn't shit to mess around with unless you wanted to make sure someone or several someones were very, very dead.

  "I have your movement," I said as casually as I could before slamming the brakes on him.

  I was in worse shape than when I'd been trying to hold The Justice Fiend in place, but Raymond wasn't anywhere near as physical. I'd call it an even match.

  "You see," I said, gritting my teeth and regretting the bravado that made me taunt him, "if it moves, it's mine." I almost lost him for a moment as a wave of pain lashed up my arms and stabbed into my brain, but I held on. Barely.

  "Even like this --- poisoned, hardly able to move, possibly dying --- I can stop your movement with a thought." I coughed but I was expecting it and clamped down even tighter on him. "Perhaps my control is a bit off, what with the pain and all, but perhaps not. See, when I'm really feeling it, I can limit what I stop moving. Bullets, water droplets, they were easy. I've never tried to just stop the air going into someone's lungs, though. Shall I? It sounds like fun."

  I shifted my focus, refined it. I hadn't stopped him from breathing when I'd stopped him from moving. Frankly the idea hadn't even occurred to me before.

  "I think I shall."

  I released the rest of him but slammed the door over his mouth and nose. His reaction was, to say the least, interesting.

  First he put his good hand on his chest and his rate of blinking increased. Then his eyes bulged. Next up he started to gasp like a fish, except nothing was going in or out. He stumbled forward a step and reached for me, but his weak leg wouldn't support the awkward angle he'd shifted his torso to and he fell. He desperately pulled himself forward, but he was too far away, and the movements used up what was left of the oxygen in his blood.

  I watched, dispassionately, as he slowly lost consciousness. But I had one more thing to say before he went out.

  "If it moves, it's mine, Doctor Raymond Hypnotico. No matter how subtle or gross, if I'm aware of the motion I own it. Even if you'd held your breath and stood as frozen as a block of ice, your body would still betray you to me. It's your heart. Every beat it makes, every change in blood pressure, makes your body twitch. The carotid artery in particular pulses beautifully, but I don't need anything so strong to use against you. Ever try to hold your hand still while you're working on something delicate? The muscles twitch and shift your position constantly even as your body tries to maintain its place.

  "That's all it takes. That's all I need."

  He finally stopped moving. I waited another two seconds before I let the air flow again. He gasped a few times but when he stopped it was the regular, deep movements of unconsciousness.

  I let out a deep breath and let my body relax. Redirecting movement was always so much easier --- and always created less residue --- than just plain stopping it, though it took less mental agility to stop it cold. It was a tossup. Consider taking a sledgehammer to a boulder versus drilling a hole and using a set of feathers. Both do the job, but one requires a lot more brute force while the other takes more planning.

  I watched Raymond for a few seconds to make sure he was going to continue breathing. Satisfied, I took internal stock again and realized that my arms and legs were quivering uncontrollably again. Funny, really, that I'd missed that.

  A wave of lethargy washed over me and I had to stifle a yawn. Damnation but I was tired. Sleep sounded really good.

  The sound of running feet in the hallway sounded even better.

  I stifled another yawn but I couldn't get enough air to shout, so I spoke as loudly as I could. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't much.

  "Watch out for the Dragon Breath."

  I think I got it all said before I passed out.

  Returning to consciousness was a slow, painful process, though much aided by a feminine voice urging me to "Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey! Don't you want an ice cream shakey?", seemingly without break, until I got so disgusted with whoever it was I came back to myself just to snap her neck.

  Intent, however, failed to live up to reality. Peeling my eyelids open resulted in a knife-stab of pain that murdered any hostile intent on my part. I moaned quietly and tried to turn my head away from whatever light source was torturing me but, no matter where I shifted, it was equally intense. I gave up. Instead I turned in the direction of the voice and tried t
o force my eyes open enough to see the face of my new mortal enemy.

  "Welcome back to the land of the living," she said, slowly beginning to swim into focus. "You've been out for two days straight."

  "Then it hasn't been long enough. I feel like I could sleep for a week." Familiar contours, highlights, and eye color all triggered memories that slowly trickled down my synapses until they reached my tongue. "Jessie?"

  "Thank you for the compliment, but try again, sweetie."

  "Venom, then. Whatever you gave me seems to have taken, but could I get a little more, please? I feel like a college dormitory."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Like I have about fifty hangovers and a worrying rash."

  "Yes, that will ease in the next few hours. Your body had to process the poisons somehow, and the concentration of metabolites in your urine were fantastic. Initial analysis alone put this so far above your head at the moment that I won't bother to tell you." She smiled kindly. "You need more rest, but at the rate you heal and process things I expect you to be up before the sun sets."

  I grunted and put my hand over my eyes to try to block the light.

  The extra pressure on my eyes hurt. Bad.

  "Wait a sec. You didn't give me anything?"

  "Nope. I was going to, once I got a taste of the antidote in the second ampule, but you didn't seem to need it." She patted me gently, but on a part of me that was covered with cloth. "You'd already survived longer than anyone else exposed to Dragon Breath, especially in such quantity. That sample I tested was almost entirely pure."

  "How did I survive, then?"

  "I don't know. You aren't immune to poison, that much is clear from how you reacted to getting doped and dosed and gassed. Somehow, though, your body processes things very quickly. Speedsters don't do it that fast. In fact, a true speedster is extremely sensitive to poisons. Their metabolism goes so fast it literally kills them before they realize what's going on --- sometimes before they feel the prick of the needle."

  "Harsh," I said without much feeling. Futher reflection made me wonder if my lack of concern was because I didn't really care or didn't really care and was soaking up the whole "not immune to poison" thing.

  "Oh, hush." She stood up and I saw, peeking through my fingers, how form-fitting even her lab coat was. "However, I did brew up some antidote if you needed it. I must say, my way is a lot faster and cheaper than the method they use over in Toronto. That's where Raymond got the stuff he used on you, incidentally."

  "How did you..." I trailed off. It didn't really matter, but some part of my brain was curious.

  "We'll talk more about it later. In the meantime I'm leaving you in the capable hands of someone you know better than any of us thought you would."

  Wildcard popped into view above me and waved cheerfully. I groaned again.

  "Go back to sleep. Doctor's orders," Venom said gently. "We'll monitor your vitals and if we think it's needed we'll dose you with the antidote. If you suddenly feel worse, let whoever is watching you at the time know and we'll give it to you." She patted me again, gently, and in a rather matronly way. "And don't worry about Ray. He's been taken care of."

  "Thanks, Mommy."

  "Don't ever call me that again," she said, but without a hint of venom in her voice.

  I was up and about and feeling halfway normal a few hours later, though going to the bathroom was a trip and a half. I'd have sworn on a stack of bearer bonds thicker than my thigh that a rather important part of me had caught fire and started squirting lit napalm.

  At least I didn't hit my shoes.

  I wasn't hungry. Just the thought of eating made me feel even worse, so I stayed away from the kitchen and dining room as I wandered the house.

  I wanted to be alone. I had a lot to think about.

  Jackhammer and Steamroller were nowhere to be seen as I stalked around. Venom I heard in the kitchen banging some pots around and Wildcard appeared a few times in various parts of the house. Well, parts of him did. He seemed to be having a ball stretching around.

  What a clusterfuck.

  Not just the situation I was in. No, that went without saying. My whole life.

  I found a small room with cleaning supplies and a commercial-grade mop bucket --- complete with a smelly mop rotting away happily in a volume of rank liquid that occasionally, and reluctantly, let a bubble ooze its way up and out with a rather disgusting pop --- and shut the door behind me. I needed to meditate and this was as alone as I was going to get. Period.

  There were still some toxins floating around my system, trying to do me harm, but I could feel my body going to work on them. It'd probably be another twenty four to seventy two hours before I had purged all the poison, but what was left wouldn't hurt me. My body had surprised me yet again. While it's true that supers were almost always highly resistant to toxins that weren't tailored to them, barring the suicide pills that Alpha Zulu made up, Dragon Breath was invariably fatal without the antidote. Yet there was, figuratively speaking, hardly a mark on me.

  I wished the headache would go away, though.

  It was time to start unscrewing my life. If I wanted to be left alone to live the way I wanted to I was going to have to get some major monkeys off my back.

  The Heroes' Guild supposedly wasn't going to punish me for killing those three assholes in Reno, but that didn't mean that all was forgiven. The thought made me grit my teeth, but I was probably going to have to run some favors for the Titans before I could say I was free from them. Of course, that didn't mean The Justice Fiend was going to kiss and make up, especially after I embarrassed him like that. No, one day that was going to come to a head and, like the boil he was, I was going to have to lance it.

  Raymond was taken care of. That was good. I didn't know if that meant he was dead or not and that as a result things were different with Jackhammer, Steamroller, or Venom. That was bad.

  Wildcard liked me. That was good.

  Alpha Zulu was going to make a move soon to try to get me back. That was very, very bad.

  I was in no immediate danger, obviously. If Alpha Zulu knew where I was cooling my heels they'd have bull-rushed the compound by now. But they knew that the Guild had me somewhere, and that meant a move against them was very likely. Some form of saber-rattling or maybe even a small strike against an outpost somewhere. If the security in Reno was any kind of indication, if they did strike it would probably succeed.

  Of course, in some places attacks on Guild properties were still somewhat common. In areas of general unrest any authority image was considered a target, even if the authority in question had nothing to do with the corrupt government that had been squeezing the population dry. The small Guildhall in Tehran, installed under the request of the Shah and permitted only under sufferance by the ayatollah, had been torn apart a couple years back by an angry mob claiming anti-American sentiment, though there were still accusations of Revolutionary Guard involvement. Seven of the eight supers stationed there, including three Iranian citizens who had joined up, had been executed --- horribly, publicly, and with much fanfare. The sole survivor was one of only two hundred known healers in the world. She had been burned at the stake for more than three days before order could be reestablished and the government allowed another Guild member to get her. Her body had healed, but the pain had shattered her mind.

  Still, actually attacking a Guildhall was ballsy. While it was true that heroes in residence were public knowledge, and once a hero is known their abilities and power levels aren't that hard to learn, traveling big-wigs showed up randomly, and usually there was a bigger garrison nearby with some potent fliers who could get there in under seven minutes.

  Seven minutes sounds like a very short period of time, and it is for a lot of things, but in a close-quarter firefight it's an eternity. Once the bullets start flying and the first screams hit your ears, time's measured in heartbeats and orders, metered out by the size of your magazine and the number of grenades you can throw before the all-clea
r or retreat sounds.

  Would Kinsey risk exposure on the scale he'd be opening himself up to by allowing such a thing to happen?

  More important was how the Guild would react to such a provocation. Would they throw me to the wolves? Or would they recognize the threat and fight back? Odds were not in my favor of the latter, but even the Guild must know that you don't give in to threats. Once you start you can't stop. Once you start, the threats just start to grow.

  Anything I would say by way of warning would fall on deaf ears, given my history and recent events. Worse, if I said something was coming and it didn't materialize quickly, any credibility I had would suffer. It was also quite possible that if I warned of something and it happened I'd be viewed with suspicion, like I was working with Alpha Zulu. That had to be avoided at all costs because my current good standing was a form of parole and I'd be a fool to think otherwise.

  I could just cut and run. That option was always available to me. But at what cost? Kinsey was still on my ass, the Guild would be hounding me, and The Justice Fiend would take it personally. He took everything personally. That was one mad dog I didn't want off the chain and sniffing my trail.

  Jackhammer would also take it personally, unless I missed my guess. The old man had spirit. I could respect that.

  Wildcard would be disappointed if I ran, I could tell. I didn't especially want to do that.

  Venom... I wanted to spend a little more time with if I could. There was something there I wasn't quite understanding, but I liked it.

  The question, then, had changed. Fundamentally it was still the same, but the flavor was different and the scope had narrowed.

  My stomach had settled enough that I didn't think having something to drink would cause an instant refund, so I worked myself free from the lotus position and went in search of some cider. I didn't want to risk solid food quite yet, but my body was telling me some calories would be good.

  Besides. Cider was yummy.

  I passed Wildcard and Corrine in the sunroom, she sitting across from him with some knitting she'd forgotten about, he gesturing wildly as if telling some tale. She nodded and chuckled before resuming her knitting without even looking down. Neither so much as glanced in my direction as I walked by so I didn't draw their attention.