The Neverman had accelerated its pace upon seeing them, and was bearing down on them at a trot, snarling. Crystalline knobs stuck out all over its body, including jagged claws protruding from its fingers and knuckles. It reached for Retroactivity with these edged weapons, but he slipped deftly beneath its grasp and punched it once in the stomach.
It stumbled, losing its momentum, and he was upon it like a whirlwind. He kicked it in the back of the knee, taking a leg out from under it, then followed this up with a sharp uppercut to its chin which spilled the Neverman over onto its back. He stomped it in the stomach and dropped to one knee to deliver a punishing blow to its forehead, driving its skull onto the roadway with a wet, cracking sound.
Then, stepping quickly back to his feet, Retroactivity moved gracefully behind Replix, taking Halflife by the hand to pull her with him.
“Brace!” he cautioned Replix, carefully positioning himself and Halflife.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Replix, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to make himself as big as possible.
Moments later, he was blasted by tiny, stinging shards of rock as the Neverman detonated. They tore through his skin in a hundred places, his nerves shrieking their alarm as the pain radiated from everywhere at once. Replix gritted his teeth to keep from shouting aloud, and pictured himself undamaged. In a flash, the pain was gone.
“Thank you,” said Retroactivity, stepping out from behind him. He was, of course, unhurt, having been in the correct place to avoid being hit by the shards.
“Man, look at my clothes,” complained Replix, running his fingers over one of the dozens of tiny holes now pockmarking his shirt and shorts. “And I’ve got this—what is this? Like, black blood?—all over me.”
“Your hands,” said Halflife, and Replix immediately looked at his hands before he realized that she’d taken Retroactivity’s hands in hers and was staring at them with delight.
“I’ll need to be restored by the end,” Retroactivity said, directing his comment to Replix. He pulled his hands back from Halflife and began walking down the freeway again, heading for the ramp that the Neverman had ascended.
“What? You’re fine. You mean you are going to get hurt? Mess up your nice suit?”
“I’m not damaged, but I am radioactive. Everything here is, and we’ll be getting concentrated doses through contact with the Nevermen. As I said earlier to Halflife about the suit, I’d like to avoid passing the radioactivity along to any of the newsmen.”
“Wait, am I going to be on camera looking all torn up? ‘Life, can you fix my clothes, too?”
“I’m not a tailor,” said Halflife. “You should have dressed for the occasion.”
“You’re in a sleeveless dress!”
“I’m also not you.”
“Man!” complained Replix. “This sucks.”
“Don’t worry,” said Retroactivity as they reached the end of the on-ramp and started down the city street. “Here’s something you’ll like better.”
He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “EMISSARY!”
As the echoes faded, they were replaced by the sounds of dozens of feet running toward them. Moments later, Nevermen began to pour into view.
“I didn’t like the first one. What could I possibly like about a herd of these?” asked Replix.
“A whole crowd attacking and no restrictions on you? What could you possibly not like about this?” asked Retroactivity.
Replix looked puzzled for a moment, and then his face lit up. “Oh! Oh, yeah.”
He cracked his knuckles, stepped forward and lowered his stance, one shoulder forward, ready to take a charge. “All right. This is going to be fun.”
“Look at them,” Halflife said, gazing enraptured at the onrushing horde. “They’re like fireflies.”
Retroactivity took Halflife’s hand and pulled her gently backward. “Slightly greater distance, please. Ah, Lacuna’s online.”
“Drone’s up,” spoke Lacuna’s voice from the earpiece of Retroactivity’s overlarge glasses. “You see us?”
“I see you,” said Retroactivity as a ghostly image appeared in the right lens of his glasses, overlaying the bloodthirsty rush of Nevermen. “Enjoy the swamp.”
“Everyone having fun in sunny, radioactive Miami?”
“It’s about to get very interesting,” said Retroactivity.
The first of the Nevermen, a man wearing the tattered remnants of a business suit, reached Replix. Spittle and ichor flew from his mouth as he launched himself forward, his crystal-edged hands flaying open Replix’s shirt and digging furrows down his chest. Replix grabbed the Neverman’s wrists even as the blood gushed forth from his torso. After a split second, it dripped away to reveal unbroken skin beneath the shredded shirt. Replix bared his teeth in an expression that was half-pain, half-triumph.
The Neverman, on the other hand, shuddered as Replix gripped his wrists. His skin wavered and flexed as if parasites were moving below the surface. In a flash, the motion spread across the Neverman’s entire body. The crystals dissolved, the arms of the shirt popped at the seams, and the skin lost its purple hue, then lightened still further. The Neverman straightened up as its face writhed, twisted and resettled into an exact copy of Replix’s. Staring into the face of the original, the new Replix grinned unpleasantly.
“Let’s rock,” said Replix.
“Let’s roll,” said his clone simultaneously. It spun around and tackled the next Neverman with a dive, bearing him to the ground. The original Replix rushed forward on the other side, meeting another incoming Neverman with a kick to the stomach. That Neverman folded forward with the force of the blow, changing even as it fell, and by the time it straightened back up, it was a third Replix.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the same thing had happened to the one that the clone had tackled. Pushing apart, the two on the ground rolled to their feet with eerie synchronicity and let the incoming wave of Nevermen slam into them. The Nevermen’s claws, horns and teeth tore through the Replices, but every gash and broken bone healed as soon as it was inflicted, and seconds after contact each Neverman churned and bubbled into another duplicate of Replix.
“Left,” said Retroactivity. Halflife looked at him quizzically, but saw him looking straight ahead.
“Left. Go,” he added.
“He’s ruined all the lights,” said Halflife somewhat petulantly.
Ahead of them, a crowd of dozens of blood-soaked copies of Replix turned to look back at Retroactivity. “What now?” they chorused.
“We move. Those last few exploded before they could close the distance to attack. They’re not smart enough to do that on their own, which means that she’s nearby. These won’t last long. Fan out.”
The Replices spread out, kicking aside the spattered corpses of the few Nevermen that had exploded. Purple crystals crunched under their feet and shimmered in the sunlight as they swung doors open and swarmed into buildings, heading for the rooftops to get a better vantage point.
“Stop,” said Retroactivity. Halflife stopped, as did the Replices within range of his voice. Retroactivity waved them on impatiently, never breaking stride. “Look up. Good.”
Ahead of him, several blocks down the street, a Replix suddenly collapsed. Moments later, another tumbled from a roof to land in the street with a wet crunch.
“Nothing gold can stay,” remarked Replix, shrugging. He keeled over mid-step, his legs giving out and dropping him gracelessly to the asphalt.
“Wait, was that him?” asked Halflife.
“Not the original,” Retroactivity said, nudging the corpse in the ribs with his foot. “Check the clothes. This one’s in pants and a graphic tee. Ours was in shorts and a plain shirt.”
“Then where is he?” Halflife asked, scanning the buildings as they walked.
“He’ll be the one coming back in a few minutes, unless he hit the jackpot. In that case, he’ll be—tell Molt duck—one of two coming back. Or unless he found the Emissary, in which case he won’t be c
oming back, and we’ll need to go get him.”
“Don’t you know?” asked Halflife, surprised. More Replices ahead of them tumbled to the ground, a grotesquely comic scene.
Retroactivity grinned. “Not yet. We’re on a first pass here. I always like these the best.”
“But you said our success—”
“I say that in every timeline,” said Retroactivity, waving his hand. “I’m always confident, even when I haven’t seen the path. Because if I’m wrong, I can just start over before I ever said that. You don’t know how many times I said I was certain we could win a war against Canada.”
“Almost a hundred and sixty,” said Halflife. “That’s what you told Taunt. What was the problem, anyway?”
“Secret Aug-5,” said Retroactivity. “Name of Jonah. Bender, subclass Bridge. Large-scale portals, movement capability. So you didn’t have to walk into them. He could chase you. He swept up entire battalions and dispersed them. If he had a maximum range—they’re behind you—we never found it. Dumped people back in the States, in the ocean, even dropped them out of the air eventually. I never even found out where he was, or what was giving him visibility of the field. It’s tough to win a war when your troops—”
With a crash, the entire front of a deli they were passing gave way, showering the street with glass and concrete. Tumbling forth from the shattered remains of the building, an enormous chthonic hatchling emerging from its egg, came the Emissary.
Her gelatinous bulk reared large against the sky as she stretched free of the collapsing building. Even as she drew herself out, she lashed forth a pseudopod, encircled Halflife and crammed the hapless woman inside her mass.
Halflife’s eyes were wide with shock and pain, and at first she simply struggled for purchase in the translucent gel, her arms and legs making feeble motions without progress. But as the first of the crystals began to extrude from her skin, trailing thin streams of blood in their wake, her eyes sharpened and her movements gained purpose.
The growth of the crystals ceased, halted by some unseen process. Even as the crystals stopped, twin air bubbles began to form inside the Emissary, centered over Halflife’s hands. They grew rapidly, seeming not to displace her bulk but to absorb it. The two bubbles expanded, met, merged into one and continued growing. When it reached Halflife’s face, she took a deep, convulsive breath.
The Emissary, meanwhile, shuddered as if she had been struck. Inside the still-growing air bubble, her cilia quested forth, but where they touched Halflife they turned rigid and unmoving, thin lines of metal reaching back into the Emissary’s fluid body.
Halflife smiled and grasped two of these metal cilia. Jagged, poisonous streaks of grey shot out into the Emissary, discoloring her purple form. The Emissary shrank back from this new attack, withdrawing her body and dumping Halflife unceremoniously into the rubble. The branched metal spears that had been cilia were spit out as well, clattering loudly to the ground.
“—forward,” Retroactivity was saying from his vantage point across the street. “Go dark and unleash her. He’s below you.”
“You might have helped,” said Halflife, standing and brushing herself off.
“I did the first time,” said Retroactivity. “But then we were both pulled in, and I saw what you did to her. I think it’s the first time in her life she’s been hurt.”
“Want me to finish her off, then?” asked Halflife.
Retroactivity shook his head. “She’s grabbed some sizeable slabs of concrete. You make a threatening move towards her, she ejects them out onto you. You don’t survive.”
Halflife took an involuntary step backward. “You said this was the first pass,” she accused.
Retroactivity sighed. “It was, yes. Everything’s first once. Then things happened, and I re-happened them. Do I need to go back to before I told you this was the first pass to make this easier on you?”
“No, but—” She suddenly flinched as the Emissary lurched forward, but the monster’s movement was toward one of the corpses of Replix littering the street. The Emissary dragged the corpse inside of herself and began the process of re-converting it to a Neverman.
“Hey, she can reanimate the dead?” Replix called from the doorway of a nearby building, one hand on the door jamb as he leaned into the street. He had stripped off his torn shirt and used it to wipe away the worst of the blood. Clad only in his board shorts, he looked more than ever like a tourist displaced from the beach.
“If you lose any more clothes, we won’t know if you’re the original!” Halflife called back.
“I’m the one who’s still alive, so that should be a hint!”
With a squelch, the Emissary spit forth her new Neverman, which awkwardly wobbled to its feet. It snarled and took an uncertain step forward as it struggled to focus its eyes.
“Okay, the one who’s alive and not studded with crystals,” amended Replix. He broke from the cover of the building and trotted across the street toward his compatriots. “Speaking of, you need to hide behind me before this guy detonates?”
Long cilia shot forth to pierce the Neverman’s face and neck, and it spoke, puppeted by the Emissary.
“What do you want?”
“To kill you,” Retroactivity said, simply.
“Why?”
“Look around! You declared war on humanity. Surely you didn’t think that would be one-sided.”
“I was wronged. I fought back.”
“And now we, too, have been wronged, and are fighting back.”
“We can find common ground,” said the Neverman.
“It’s much too late for that.”
“You cannot kill me.”
“She can,” said Retroactivity, motioning to Halflife.
“She could have. As soon as I realized that, I began to disperse myself. I have sent away a portion of my mass, split into pieces, all still one being. I am hidden in the rubble and lurking beneath the streets. You will never find all of me, and a single piece is enough to grow back into my original might in the fullness of time.
“I knew you would not watch for this. Your separateness is ever your weakness. You cannot truly conceive of the beauty, the perfection of a complete whole working as one. You think always in terms of strife and competition, never cooperation. It is this that—”
Suddenly and without warning, the Emissary collapsed. She did not fall over as the Replices had. Instead, her entire body fell apart, each piece ceasing to hold on to the others. She disintegrated into a tremendous splashing tide of purple goo, cascading downward as if from an emptied bucket. Replix, Halflife and the Neverman were all heavily drenched. Retroactivity, who had hopped nimbly up onto a parked car as the unbinding began, was spared.
“Gross!” sputtered Replix, spitting out a purplish wad to join the rest in the street.
“Focus! If you would?” asked Retroactivity.
“What? Oh!” said Replix, turning to see the Neverman springing toward Halflife. “No, you don’t.”
He tackled the Neverman to the ground, wincing as its crystals painfully pierced his neck and chest. Blood spurted for a moment, but seconds later two versions of Replix rose to their feet.
“Bad news, man,” said the original to the clone. “We already know your body’s gonna reject the change.”
“Unless it’s different the second time around,” agreed the clone. “Never had a chance to find that out before!”
Together, the two turned to Retroactivity. “So: we won?”
Retroactivity smiled and tapped his glasses. “We did.”
XVI
“Ah, but how?”
Lacuna fiddled with the controls of the drone, raising it into the air and focusing it to look down at their small group. Her duffel bag lay discarded at her feet, its purpose served.
“Drone’s up,” said Lacuna into the mouthpiece of the headphones she wore. “You see us?”
“I see you,” came the answer. “Enjoy the swamp.”
“Everyone having fun i
n sunny, radioactive Miami?”
“It’s about to get very interesting,” Retroactivity told her.
“All right, we’re online and in view,” she said to Taunt and Molt. She unclipped the microphone from the headphones, storing it in a pocket of her pants. “Let’s go.”
Taunt climbed up onto Molt’s shoulders and seated herself against Molt’s neck, her legs dangling on either side. Lacuna reached up and handed her the controls to the drone.
“Make sure to keep us in the shot.”
“I know what to do,” snarled Taunt, snatching the controller from Lacuna’s hand.
Lacuna shrugged and donned a pair of thick leather gloves. “Then let’s get moving.”
She stepped lightly forward, the purple grass shattering beneath her feet. Molt walked next to her, her footfalls shaking the ground. Taunt’s eyes darted back and forth as she rode, scanning the ground in front of them for pitfalls or other hidden dangers.
The first few minutes passed without incident. In addition to being covered in sharp-edged grass, the ground was also marshy, causing Lacuna to choose her steps with care, occasionally leaping slightly to pass over larger puddles. Molt simply tromped forward heedless of the terrain, leaving deep depressions slowly filling with water in the soft earth behind her.
They were passing by a narrow, muddy channel of water when, with a hiss, a half-dozen sizeable snakes sprang forth, writhing across the ground in a complicated, twisting pattern that made the individual snakes difficult to follow. The mass split apart as it reached the intruders, striking out in several different directions. Each snake was wrist-thick and four or five feet long. Their mouths were edged with serrated teeth, and their scales glistened with the tell-tale purplish-blue tint of all of Seed’s creations.
Lacuna stepped back quickly, swinging a machete downward at the neck of the closest snake. The blade connected with its neck but skidded off of the crystalline scales, merely knocking the snake aside rather than severing its head.
Lacuna frowned, twisted and stomped downward, catching a second snake beneath her boot. It hissed and lashed at her, trying to free itself, but she brought the machete down in a hard chop and successfully penetrated its rocky exterior, driving the blade through its neck. The snake went limp.
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