Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  He stared at me; I stared back at him.

  Then I flexed my hamstrings with all the force I had while maintaining my grip on his wrist.

  I deadlifted his arm with all the strength of my beautiful, thick thighs. The ones assholes on the internet liked to mock, along with my ass, for being a little disproportionate to the rest of my body.

  The dawning horror ran across Grendel’s face about a quarter second before his body took the path of least resistance and tore at the shoulder. The sick sound of tendon, muscle and skin giving way beneath the powerlift of one of the strongest people on the planet was probably among the most horrifying sounds a person could hear.

  To me it was like a sweet symphony.

  I tumbled to the ground, still clutching his arm, which had separated at the shoulder joint. Rolling to my feet, I brandished my trophy like Beowulf of old.

  Grendel just stared at it, and me, with uncomprehending eyes. “What...how...huh...?”

  “Guess they didn’t make you read your own myth in school, huh?” I snugged my hand against the bony protrusion on his amputated elbow and did a little leering of my own at my foe. “Hey, question for you—that nigh invulnerable skin you’re wearing, the one that seems like it’s immune to bullets and whatnot. Do you think it stops your own bones?”

  Grendel blinked at me. Thrice. “Wh—”

  I rammed his own severed fist, bone-claws first, into Grendel’s guts and he let out a fearsome scream as I buried it in up to the wrist.

  “Yeah, you like that, you sonofa—” I started to say.

  Grendel raised a knee as he turned to run, and it planted me right in the gut. I don’t think he meant to do it, but it damned sure happened, and I lost all the breath in my body and went flying into a wall.

  Water poured down on my face from the overhead sprinklers running madly at full clip, and when I coughed, it came out in a spray that looked like a cloud of mist. The sound of Grendel mewling and running, crashing through a wall in the distance and then through the glass of the Socialite pyramid reached my ears over the falling water, and I knew I was out of danger.

  For the moment.

  53.

  Friday

  Wheeeeeeeeeze.

  “Oh, man,” Friday managed to get out, choking down the pain. Oh, the pain. Had he been kicked in bofa? Felt like it. And the water was just coming down endlessly, still like one of those detective novels. Except he hurt all over, and felt much less grim and cool than he should have.

  “That yella fella just made a break for it,” came the voice of the funky black chick, from somewhere out of the dark.

  “Awesome—I must have scared him off,” Friday grunted. “My last attack clearly savaged him.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” the metrosexual guy’s voice came out of the falling grim rainwater of dark foreboding.

  “You should talk,” Friday shot back. “I saw you, standing around, waiting for actual men with real greatness to do all the fighting while you let your genitals be constrained by those skinny jeans.”

  “I was changing the odds around him the entire time,” the metrosexual fired back. “How do you think your girl ripped his arm off?”

  “She ripped his arm off?” Friday coughed up a little blood. “So gruesome. So graphic.”

  “And gutted him with it.”

  “Wow,” Friday said. “That’s even more fierce. Where is she now?”

  “Over here,” Sienna’s voice came, a little faintly, somewhere across the rainy darkness of the room.

  “You okay?”

  “Getting there. Maybe,” she called back.

  “Oh, good.” He ran his hands along the front of his shirt. “I just want to say, I’m not okay, you guys. But not because of Grendel. I think I wailed on my glutes too hard at the gym last night.” He shifted, putting a hand on his ass. “My hammys are really aching, too.”

  “Probably from getting your big ass kicked,” Funkadelic chick said. Her voice echoed in the rafters as she taunted him.

  “That’s a lie. I totally didn’t get my ass kicked,” Friday said, settling back in the puddle. It felt like it was warming up. Also, he no longer felt the pressure on his bladder from all the coffee he’d brewed this morning in the hotel room. Probably the two were unrelated, but even if they weren’t, who was going to notice in all this? “I was an integral part of this operation, I’ll have you know.”

  No one argued with that. Smartly.

  So Friday just settled back and let the rain fall like his vengeance. “We showed him,” he muttered, drifting off in the haze, secure in the knowledge that they’d won this round.

  54.

  Sienna

  “So how’d you fare?” Willis Shaw’s voice was a little washed out, probably from the ringing in my ears at the concussion I’d suffered during Grendel’s parting kick. I’d been lucky he’d caught me with skin, not bone, or I’d have been split in half during his retreat instead of just sidelined. Bastard.

  “We thwarted him,” I said, taking a length of my hair and wringing it out as I stood outside the flooded auditorium. The fire department had gotten the sprinklers shut off a while ago, and now the local cops were crawling all over the place. I glanced out the busted window where Grendel had made his escape, admiring the blood trail that led up to it. And yes, it looked like pee. “He left a fair amount of DNA evidence behind this time.” I shuffled to the side as one of the CSI people gave me a dirty look for being too close to the evidence. And dripping, presumably.

  “How’d you make that happen?” Shaw asked.

  “Took a page out of the myth and ripped his arm off,” I said, “then returned it to sender via his belly.”

  There was a long pause. “You pulled this thing’s arm off? This invulnerable thing that doesn’t take damage from bullets or punches or any of that—and you tore its arm off?” I could imagine him in his office in New York, scratching his head. “How?”

  “Well, I pulled like my life depended on it. Because it did.”

  “Huh,” Shaw said. “And why couldn’t you have done that before it killed West?”

  “I was still exploring the studio space on how best to hurt it, that’s why,” I said, tucking an arm across my belly. I was bruised from groin to throat thanks to that kick, so I immediately jerked my hand away with a cringe. “Plumbing the depths of a creature’s invulnerability is like doing science. It requires experimentation. Except during the experiment the subject is trying to kill you, and is really well equipped to do so.”

  “Your fearlessness and dedication will surely carry mankind across new frontiers,” Shaw said dryly. “How’s things going with your brand new, shiny, government-approved sidekick?”

  “Just let me lean on you,” Friday said from behind me, putting his hands all over an ambulance attendant who let him fall after his hands went somewhere they really, really shouldn’t have.

  “Slightly better than when you paired me with Holloway,” I said, watching the ambulance attendant stalk off.

  “I’m okay,” Friday said, waving a hand like a white flag. “Just give me a minute.” I had no idea who he was even talking to at this point, because he didn’t seem to be looking at me and there was no one else near him.

  “Don’t think I haven’t seen what that dumb shit is doing online,” Shaw said. “The only reason I’m not chewing your ass right now over it all is that you brought home a perceived win, finally.”

  “If this is what winning feels like, I really don’t want to lose,” I said, feeling the ache of my long bruise and the feeling just starting to return to my right arm. Using it against Grendel during my arm-ripping had done it some additional damage, I was pretty sure.

  “You really don’t,” Shaw said. “Chalke called me a little bit ago, all flush with congratulations for you on this deal.”

  I looked suspiciously around the Socialite building’s wreckage. “Not that I’m not grateful, but why exactly does the Director think this is a win?”

&nbs
p; “The man who runs that place, Jaime Chapman—”

  “Come on, boss, I’m not stupid. Everyone on the planet knows Jaime Chapman.” The geek. The billionaire. Not nearly as cool as Tony Stark, but probably the tech geek overlord our dystopian world deserved.

  “He’s connected,” Shaw said.

  “Hilarious pun considering he runs the largest social network in the world.”

  “Hm,” Shaw said. “Wasn’t aiming for it, but you’re right, that was a good one. Anyway, he’s got big friends in Washington, one of whom appears to be our esteemed director. Ergo, you get plaudits for not tearing up his entire operation, I guess.”

  “I suppose as far as greatest hits goes, this is pretty low on my list, damage-wise,” I said, giving the Socialite office another once-over. “Still, not sure I’d be ecstatic about it if I were him.”

  “He can afford to rebuild the building twenty times over. Chalke seemed to think he was most worried about his people.”

  “Oh, a real humanitarian,” I said. “I so rarely deal with those.” I paused; there was a quiet footstep behind me. I turned—

  And found myself face to face with the man in question.

  Jaime Chapman.

  55.

  Him

  He’d barely dragged himself back to the lair, his own arm hanging out of his guts, afraid to change shape because if he did—

  Hell, he’d die. That was what one did as a human when your guts were hanging out. Died.

  He collapsed into his usual chair, and the chair collapsed beneath him in a grand crashing. It was only a minor miracle he hadn’t been seen. Getting back to his fallback safe house in East Palo Alto—East Paly—had been hell, a crushing marathon of pain, hiding behind...well, anything he could. Covering up his yellow blood with sand as he went so they couldn’t track him.

  Keeping down the mewls. Dragging himself step after step until finally he reached here, no one hot on his trail, but enemies surely on it, shortly. There was no way to cover up that much blood, and it was near impossible to hide his hideous figure and face from all observers. And there were so many.

  He almost broke the keyboard logging in, and as soon as he was in the chat, he caught hell—

  I told you not to tangle with her. What were you thinking?

  Typing was nigh impossible with these fingers. He tapped with the bones hanging off his hands, crying quietly the whole time. The pain was still agonizing but had faded a little to a chorus of numbness from a symphonic agony.

  she hurt me

  was all he could manage to get out.

  Are you going to listen to me next time?

  His own cries sounded so pathetic echoing in the quiet of the former office space. The tech startup that had been housed here had gone out of business six months ago. No one had even noticed he’d moved in. The place was a nice little fallback spot, with decent Wi-Fi. He typed:

  yes

  And hit return, the entire keyboard rattling atop the holder.

  The answer came:

  Good. I used the distraction you provided to sneak into Socialite’s systems and install a back door.

  He stopped crying for a moment as that sunk in. Then:

  I got it.

  He cried again, this time relief.

  They weren’t lost. They’d won after all—in spite of her.

  what next,

  he managed to type. The answer came in the midst of his tears and choked sobs, and made him cry for an entirely different reason.

  We finish this.

  56.

  Sienna

  “Hi,” I said, letting my phone slip away from my ear, a few stray droplets of water from my hair dripping down onto my hand as I hastily did so, disturbing it. It felt a little cool to the touch, as I looked up—barely—on one of the wealthiest men in the world. “I’m Sienna.”

  “I know that,” Jaime Chapman said, barely keeping in a grin. It pulled hard the corners of his mouth, though, his geeky, minimalist haircut like a crown atop the king of Silicon Valley’s head. “And I’m—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, taking the hand he offered and shaking it once. He didn’t linger on it, slipping his hand right back into the pocket of his cargo shorts where he—I think—wiped it on a cloth therein. Germaphobe or just disgusted by me? By his facial mannerism I guessed germaphobe, but maybe he was really two-faced. “Sorry about the mess.” I didn’t bother surveying the damage again.

  “I’m just glad you managed to stop this before anyone else got hurt,” Chapman said, doing a quick look-around himself. He had a small nose and soft features, though he’d plainly lost weight and put on a little muscle since he’d gotten his start. The then-and-now photos of him painted a lot more flattering picture of his ascent than, say, mine. After all, while I’d lost a little weight, it was nothing compared to the sculpting he had done, and I was still laboring through life without a professional stylist or makeup artist, to say nothing of a personal trainer.

  “Well, unfortunately our villain isn’t dead,” I said, “and he doubled back to hit Inquest yesterday after—”

  “I know,” Chapman said, holding up a hand. He talked fast, clearly a lot on his mind. “Walk with me, will you?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, falling into step beside him as he started to jet off down the concourse-like environs.

  “We built this building from the ground up, you know?” Chapman had a brisk stride, a man on the move. Which was unsurprising given he was the CEO of something like ten companies, Socialite merely the best known of them. He’d bought out of a bunch of vertically integrable businesses and was now consolidating them into the corporate puzzle that was his network, and while Socialite was the best known of them, he also owned the world’s third-largest internet search site, FindIt, Instaphoto, and Cash-Fer, the money-transfer app and service that was rivaling PayPal, plus others.

  He walked like he was managing all of them right this minute, too, executing a dozen to-do list items in his head with each step.

  “I didn’t figure there was a spare glass pyramid just sitting around in Silicon Valley,” I said. “Though part of me did wonder if you just bought out the Luxor and transshipped it from Vegas.”

  He chuckled. “I get that a lot. But I was trying to make a statement about architecture, about the things we leave behind.” He shot me a look as he strode up to an elevator door and pushed the button. For the first time I realized there were about twelve guys hanging within thirty feet of us, not so casually watching me for intent to kill their boss, presumably. Since I assumed they weren’t looking at me for fashion tips. “The solar panels, the glass, it’s more eco-friendly than having these closed up, unlit spaces that you have to pay to light. Plus, when you look at a traditional office here in the Valley, there’s a very conformist nature to it, you know? We don’t build distinctive things that are meant to last anymore. They’re all square boxes and bland colors.”

  I thought about that. “I’m guessing you share a mind with the Inquest CEOs then, when it comes to design.”

  Chapman adopted a pained look as the elevator dinged and opened. “That’s pushing it a little. Not sure I can quite get on board with the Tesla-esque feel of that place—”

  “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it.” I nodded.

  Chapman coughed, looking a little pained for a second as he stepped into the elevator, though he tried to cover it. “Well, I suppose it’s a fairly obvious comparison to draw.”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? The door closed behind us, leaving his security personnel on the concourse floor as we shot up the pyramid, the hum telling me we were moving very quickly indeed. “Well,” I said, facing forward, taking his lead, not making eye contact, “if you were aiming for distinctive you certainly hit it. Additional pluses to your architectural style: they can probably bury you right in the basement after you die—”

  He chuckled under his breath. “Nice one.”

  “—and if you ever decide to sell, you
just need to find the nearest Bond villain, and boom, you’ve got a buyer. I mean, you might need to renovate by putting a faux volcano or a rocket launch facility in the middle of the building, but it’s got real fixer-upper potential—”

  The elevator dinged as Chapman bowed his head and chortled along. “Well played.” The doors slid open and he led me out, such a gentleman. “Right this way.”

  “What’s up here?” I asked, noting from the shape of the walls that we’d definitely reached the top of the pyramid.

  “The rocket launch pad, of course,” Chapman said, utterly deadpan and without a smile to show me he was joking. But the room we were in was a pretty standard waiting area, with double doors at the far end that opened when one of his receptionists pushed a button.

  Jaime Chapman’s office was about what you’d expect from a particularly opulent billionaire. “Hm,” I said as I followed him into the enormous space.

  “What?” Chapman half turned, walking backward toward his desk, which was the size of three cars put together. More like a conference table, except it was clearly for his own use mostly based on the articles strewn about it. “I can hear you judging me. Do share.”

  “Just admiring your swag,” I said, glancing around. The building tapered to its natural point about fifty feet above our head, and I glanced at Chapman, then up, probably not subtly. Yeah, I could totally plant his face in the top corner if I had to.

  He looked up, too. “Sweeping, huh?”

  “It really is,” I said. Now we were standing off, a few feet from the desks. “So...what’s on your mind, big man?”

  He did the power-lean, butt against the side of his desk. “I wanted to thank you, personally, for what you did here today. I know you’re getting some heat from other sectors here in Silicon Valley for this problem, but I know it’s not you that brought this Grendel thing down on us.”