World Wonders

by James Perrone

  I felt my hand twitch as the adrenaline started pumping. This man had killed people just because they had the misfortune of being on the same floor as where I was supposed to be. Shooting him would be wonderfully cathartic but not the only thing my brain wanted to do. I wanted vengeance for his victims.

  I shook my head and reasserted logic and training. Voigt was stronger and tougher than the three of us put together and we didn’t have nearly enough ammunition to make a dent in him. I bit my lip, using the pain to bring my attention back to the present and refocused on the hallway.

  “Thankfully,” he said, then the air filled with a pregnant pause. It took me a moment to realize what was going on, but with my refocusing I could hear him chewing in the background. He was still eating people and talking to us between the bites. I took half a step forward before I realized what I was doing and stepped back into formation. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder, McCoy was still in her trance and Miles was still watching the doorway but had turned a few shades paler. The chewing stopped, and he finished the sentence, “you’re here now, and we can play!”

  The PA clicked off. Fuck this, we were out of here. I moved backwards, grabbing the concentrating McCoy and tugging her towards the stairwell. That apparently, broke her out of her fugue and she immediately started moving forward. “No, not that way,” she cautioned.

  “We’ve got to move before he comes down that hallway,” I argued in confusion.

  She just shook her head, standing firm. “He’s not on the floor. I was trying to find him.”

  I blinked in confusion, letting go of my grip on her arm, “Well then, where is he?”

  Miles answered for her, “Contact in the stairwell.”

  “Oh, fuck me,” was all I could say.

  Voigt’s honeyed voice carried calmly from the cracked doorway, “If you insist, but normally I have dinner before sex.”

  Chapter 14

  Voigt

  Miles apparently did not approve of Voigt’s wit and opened fire into the stairwell. He seemed determined to burn through his full drum of ammo and I wasn’t about to stop him. I turned from the hail of fire to McCoy, signaling her to scout for an exit ahead, not daring to hope the barrage of gunfire would kill Voigt. We’d need to beat a hasty retreat at some point in the near soon. She nodded and I moved towards Miles, waiting for him to run dry.

  After several seconds, Miles ducked behind cover having spent his thirty-round drum. My hearing reasserted itself as I hazarded a glance into the stairwell. Amidst the smell of cordite and splatters of blood, Voigt stood there on a bent metal step in his shredded clothes and mountain man beard, looking vaguely disappointed. He caught my eyes and flashed his teeth at me in a slasher smile, muscled chest unflinching, breathing calmly and completely unmarred by the sustained fire. “No foreplay then?” he inquired. I slammed the door shut and telekinetically twisted the door frame in on the door to lock it in place. Holding my telekinesis close, I pulled Miles up from his reload and started to run down the hallway, looking for McCoy.

  After a dozen steps, I heard a whump and slam. I couldn’t help myself and looked over my shoulder. The metal door and frame were across the hallway embedded in the wall and Voigt was casually strolling onto the floor. He saw us, waggled his fingers hello, and started walking towards us in a methodical and predatory manner. I turned back and moved from a run to a sprint.

  I tried to stop in the hallway just past the nurses’ station to figure out which way McCoy had gone. I say try because with the blood on the floor, I slid past the hallway. Still, McCoy was down that way slamming her shoulder into a door. I gave Miles and myself a telekinetic push to get us moving in the right direction and opened up my stride to get to her asap.[82]

  McCoy saw me coming and cried out, “It’s jammed. He must’ve done something to the doors to pin us in here.”

  Keeping my telekinesis active was tiring at best, but spared me the seconds it took form the arms. Pulling the telekinetic around me, I formed a battering wedge and worked into a sprint towards the door. “Move!” I cried as an afterthought.

  She hurried to the side and I started to push the telekinetic barrier forward. At the moment of ‘impact’, I shoved the barrier into the door and blew it out of the frame. Not quite as impressive as Voigt, but just as effective. I heard the door clatter over the railing and started running down the spiraling stairs with Miles and McCoy right behind me.

  When we hit the second-floor landing, I saw a blur whiz past us followed shortly by the slam of something hitting the ground hard enough to make the stairway shudder. From behind me I heard McCoy yell, “It’s Voigt. He jumped down!”

  “Are you fucking shitting me?” I yelled in frustration. Seriously, what the fuck were we supposed to here?

  “If she is, it’s an awful joke,” Miles deadpanned before opening the door onto the second floor. I wanted to chastise him as I back peddled from the stairs down, but realized his snarky commentary was probably one of the only things keeping him from pumping out panic. Once McCoy dashed through the door, I followed, slamming the door shut behind me, and bent the frame in place around it.[83]

  As we ran through the blindingly bright hallway[84] I started thinking long term. We couldn’t run forever. Eventually we’d run out of ammo or places to run and then Voigt would catch us. Unfortunately, all that was running through my brain was Terminator 2 reruns. The scene in Sarah Connor’s mental hospital in particular. It was less than helpful. “What I wouldn’t give for a vat of molten steel,” I lamented.

  “The fuck are you smoking?” McCoy growled at me, her voice dampened by the ongoing fire alarm.

  Miles, god bless his soul, caught my reference, “Seems unlikely,” he said with a single shake of his head. There was a pause and his face brightened, “How about a pressurized boiler?”

  Cogs turned in my mind, running through my mental archives. Desperate and stupid, but it might work. Well, at the very least, it could buy us time. “Basement,” I stated to Miles.

  “The fuck?” exclaimed McCoy.

  “Basement,” he agreed with a nod.

  McCoy looked like she was about to blow a gasket, “Would someone fucking explain what’s going on to me?”

  I was about to explain the elegance of James Cameron to the unenlightened, but the door behind us went clattering off its hinges, and I decided running would be a better use of my breath. I could enlighten her later.

  ✽✽✽

  Five minutes later, we were in the basement of Lovell Health Center and were looking at the hospital’s industrial grade water boiler. You see, my father was an E.O.D.[85] for the US army and a career military man, which meant a variety of things.[86] Most relevantly, it meant that both Miles and I had been treated to numerous stories about how situations had gone sideways and my dad had to improvise a solution. The one Miles had been referring to was the story about how my dad earned his Purple Heart for putting shrapnel in his own leg.

  The details change every time, but the general gist is thus. When pinned down at one point in his military career, he decided the best option was to remove all the safeties from a water heater, over pressurize it, and use it to blow through the wall and the enemy forces. Unfortunately, dad caught some shrapnel in the leg. Which had gone through the solid concrete wall to get to him. The idea here was to replicate that with a hospital sized water boiler in the hopes of stopping Voigt.

  McCoy had taken to our plan the same way I had the first time dad had told this story, “Are you fucking nuts?”[87]

  “Well, clearly,” Miles quipped. The false positivity, while necessary, was really starting to grate.

  “Oh, shut up,” I rebutted, “I just don’t like the idea of being a chew toy for the rest of my life.”

  Miles looked at the boiler contemplatively, “I don’t think we have enough time to rip all the safeties out. Hell, I don’t even know where to begin.”

  I pursed my lips in consideration, “I’ll just clamp the output valves and ho
pe for the best. Not like I have the training to do the full on job dad did,” I started locating pipes while asking McCoy, “Where’s Voigt?”

  She paused and tilted her head in a gesture I now associated with her accessing her telepathy. “About 500 meters away, still walking towards us. We’ve got maybe thirty-five seconds,” she bit her lip in concentration before adding, “Building seems to be otherwise clear though.”

  I nodded towards the door, “You all get going. I’m going to stay behind and make sure this goes off.”

  Miles went to argue, but McCoy just grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the maintenance stairwell out.[88] I dug down and started doing some of the most prolonged telekinetic work I had ever done. First thing I did was crimp all the outtake pipes, which would cause the internal pressure to skyrocket. I could almost see the strain as the pressure gage started creeping towards the red. Looking to control the blast, I wrapped the full strength of my telekinesis around the boiler, looking to reinforce the walls, funnel the inevitable blast, and stop the trap from springing too soon. It took so much of my mental energy, I almost didn’t hear Voigt enter the room over the klaxon of the fire alarm. I strained my teeth and waited for him to get further into the room.

  “Tired of running?” he called out.

  I could feel the boiler bulging against my telekinetic fist. I couldn’t hold it much longer. I hazarded a glance at Voigt, who was slowly making his way down the catwalk. Just a few more seconds.

  If he found my lack of talking weird, he didn’t comment, but just kept going. “Ah, I see. Torn up by the fact your friends abandoned you. I get it, these things can be disheartening. It’s okay, I have a perfect place for you.”

  I twitched at the thought of where that ‘place’ might be and nearly lost my hold on the boiler. I mentally scrambled and pushed back on the boiler hard. If it started bulging it might give away my plan. He was only five steps away, I didn’t need to hold it for long. “I told them to run,” I managed, hoping to keep him focused on me instead of the odd quietness.

  Four steps, “Oh. a sacrifice,” he nodded, with a tone of understanding. Three steps. “How noble.”

  Two steps, “Not getting them away from you.”

  One step, “Oh? Then from what?”

  He paused, and where we stood buckled underneath his weight. I let the telekinetic hand go, collapsing it into a shield on my body. I was too focused to throw down the appropriate one-liner, but the boiler answered for me, hissing and starting to erupt the moment I let go.

  Voigt’s eyes went wide for half a second before one of the pipes I had missed ruptured and blasted steam into the air, venting pressure, and stopping the explosion I was hoping for. He both stared dumbfounded at the steam that was billowing into the ceiling for a second, before turning to look at one another.

  Voigt spoke first, “I take it that wasn’t your desired result.”

  I shrugged sheepishly.

  Before Voigt could start moving again, I snapped out with my telekinesis, grabbed the pipe, and bent it towards Voigt. His smug grin was rapidly scalded away by the torrent of pressurized steam, showing for the briefest moments muscle and bone. Then, his Wendigo nature asserted itself, presenting a fully healed face only for it to be peeled away again, flesh and muscle flayed away. I’d have time to be horrified and contemplate the information later. For now, I turned and ran.

  The doors at the top of the stairs were open, which meant that I could hear the sirens from Slate’s backup finally arriving. The joy was cut short by Voigt’s screams echoing behind me, filled with rage instead of honeyed words. “I’M GOING TO MAKE THIS HURT, TENNANT!” I double timed it up the stairs as Voigt started stomping up the stairs and actually moving at an increased pace, as opposed to the confident prowl he had the entire hospital chase.

  I was too scared of the undying monster to count that as a victory as I broke free of the tight hallway into the open area between the two campuses. I paused for half a second to figure out which way the sirens were coming from and headed that way. That half second was too long however, as a metal door came flying from the basement hallway and clipped my right leg, causing it crunch and pop as it broke beneath me and I fell to the ground, screaming in pain. I hazarded a look at my leg and saw the bone poking against my pants leg and blood rapidly matting against my leg. Adrenaline was numbing the pain, but not enough. I couldn’t concentrate enough to move away or use my telekinesis to push the bone back into place to facilitate faster healing. I tried to muster my concentration, but that ended when I saw Voigt standing over me.

  The brain has three responses to a situation given adrenaline: fight, flight, or freeze. I couldn’t run and freezing had been largely trained out of me, which meant I went for my gun. Voigt just stood there as I pulled out my borrowed sidearm and emptied a full magazine into his chest. Every couple of shots the damage just faded away and the bullets fell to the ground. Some logical part of my brain concluded that I had killed him at least three times based on the regenerations, but it wasn’t enough. He just stood there, confidently staring down at me.

  When I clicked dry, I went for a reload. He stepped forward and grabbed my wrist. Without any visible effort, he crushed my wrist to powder and the gun to slag. Once again, I screamed in pain. Still holding onto my wrist, he looked me dead in the eye and smiled evilly, “Good thing you can heal.”

  Then Voigt’s head exploded, followed by the sound of something breaking the sound barrier. I spared a glance to the side and saw a pair of Humvees each mounted with recoilless rifles pointed at Voigt. I managed to get through the pain well enough to state to his reformed head, “I could say the same to you.”

  At which point he staggered back two steps towards the maintenance doors before a second shot ripped his entire arm from his body, snapping him back to fully healed. The third shot took out his leg, sending him tumbling down the stairs into the bowels of the health center.

  Safe from immediate threats, I let myself fall down. The blood pumping into my broken wrist gave it a faintly solid shape, which would speed the healing. The leg, however, was going to take far longer than I cared to think about if someone didn’t push the bone back in. I started thinking of ways to do it myself when McCoy and Miles entered my vision. Miles was concerned and just this side of frantic, but McCoy looked bemused.

  “This is twice I’ve pulled your hobbled ass out of a sticky situation in less than a day Tennant,” she quipped.

  Miles looked as if she had slapped the Pope. I, despite the crushing pain, laughed my ass off. It was perfectly irreverent and just what I needed to take my mind off the process of slowly healing and the pain that would come with it.

  “And I’m very grateful. But, since you’re making wise cracks, mind pushing my bone back into my body? Makes the healing go faster,” I asked with the momentary clarity laughter brought.

  McCoy cocked an eyebrow at me, then at Miles. I nodded, he bent over, and shoved the bone back into my body.[89] I think there was a crack, but I don’t really recall since I passed out from the pain and stress.

  Chapter 15

  Back on the Hunt

  When I came to again, I was at a different hospital and it was early morning. McCoy and Miles were keeping watch over me, though Miles looked like he was really fidgety and bored. McCoy handed me food, this time pasta from Rosati’s. Once I started eating McCoy started talking.

  “After you passed out, I pressed the Hoorah[90] boys into a posse[91] and we went hunting for Voigt.”

  I snorted around my garlic bread, “I bet that went well.”

  “Oh, it went swimmingly once I made it abundantly clear that the thing in there was likely to hurt people if they didn’t get to work and this was the legal method of getting to work.”

  I shook my head but understood. There would be hell to pay on the legal and administrative side, but that was Slate’s job. I didn’t envy whoever tried to argue with Slate.

  “Anyways,” McCoy said, dragging us back to the
retelling, “We went in with the Navy and their ammunition and tracked down Voigt.” I cocked my eyebrow inquisitively as I slurped pasta.

  “Oh, tracking him is easy once I know he’s in the area. He’s got a very distinct mental pattern. Just means I have to be actively looking which is dangerous when there’s more people in the area. Also means that I can’t do it and move”

  I nodded and filed things away for later, while Miles jumped in. “Which is how Voigt was able to ambush us. Came through a wall and clubbed one of the seamen. McCoy was able to keep him distracted by alternating between eyes and groin.”

  “Immortal doesn’t mean painless,” McCoy chipped in.

  “Right,” Miles conceded, clearly flustered at having been interrupted, “Which gave us enough time to fan out and start opening fire. We focused on head shots, which seemed to have worked.”

  I held my hand up, “Why headshots?”

  Miles' eyes lit up and McCoy’s rolled. Apparently, Miles had been chewing on this for a while and using McCoy as a sounding board.

  “It was a guess based on observations. We had emptied multiple rounds into Voigt previously, but he hadn't retreated. It wasn’t until he lost body parts to the recoilless rifles that he stopped pursuing us. We theorized that doing large scale trauma, such as removing body parts or cranial trauma would push him to regenerate more frequently and actually discourage him from pursuing us. Which begs all sorts of interesting questions about his regenerative abilities and the conversion between flesh consumed and….”

  I put my hand up to stop him, “Could you not? I’m trying to eat here.”

  He winced apologetically but bounced quickly back to smiling. Thankfully, McCoy jumped in while I resumed eating. “Anyways, apparently that did something. He got pissed, but really couldn’t make a move. Looked me dead in the eye, declared,” she paused and affected a John Kassir Tales of the Crypt Voice “I Will Enjoy Consuming You!”