Worm

by wildbow

  “So I throw a punch like I’m aiming to put my fist through them?” I confirmed.

  “Right,” Brian said. “Instead of just trying to make contact with the point where your hand meets their body.”

  “What about when they’re attacking me?”

  “Best bet? Don’t give them a chance. Stay aggressive and keep them on their heels. If neither of you have formal training, then that’s going to give you the best odds. They won’t be able to turn the tables on you unless you make a mistake or they can guess what you’re going to do as you do it. Which is why you mix it up. Rights, lefts, punches, jabs, elbow, knee, kicks and if you’re bigger and stronger than them, you can try tackling them to the ground. With all of that, you stay on them until they aren’t in a position to fight back.”

  “Are you formally trained in anything?” I asked. I suspected he was, since the only other way for him to know as much as he was demonstrating was to have actually been in a good number of fights, and I wasn’t thinking that he seemed the type to fight without reason.

  “Ehhh,” he hedged. “Some. My dad was a boxer when he was in the service, and he taught me some when I was little. I moved on to other stuff on my own—Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Krav Maga—but nothing really held my interest. I only took a few weeks or a month of classes for each. I know enough and keep in shape, which is enough to hold my own against anyone who isn’t a black belt in whatever, which is the important thing, I think. Keeping up with the more serious martial artists is a full time job, and you’re still going to run into people who are better than you, so I don’t see the point in stressing too much over it.”

  I nodded.

  We moved on to key areas to attack.

  Brian pointed to the body parts in question as he explained, “Eyes, nose, temple, chin and throat are the areas above the shoulder. Teeth or ears if you can hit hard enough. I can, you can’t.”

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t offended by his bluntness. He was stronger than me, so he had more options. Tip toeing around it didn’t do either of us any favors.

  “Below the shoulders, diaphragm, kidney, groin, knee, bridge of the foot, toes. Elbow is a good one if you can do anything with it,” he took my wrist in his left hand and my shoulder in his right, extending my arm straight as he brought his knee up to gently tap the outside of my elbow. I could see how he would have screwed up or broken my arm if he’d done it full strength. He went on, “But in my experience, it doesn’t come up often enough to worry about.”

  It was a little disquieting to hear Brian methodically describing how to break a human being. I saw him as a nice guy, if I ignored his career choice.

  Not entirely by accident, I changed the subject, “I was thinking about investing in a weapon for hand to hand. When I was fighting Lung, fists were no good and I found myself really wanting a knife or a baton or something. Don’t know if they would have been any good against his armor, but you know…” I trailed off.

  Brian nodded, “Makes sense. You don’t have a lot in the way of upper body strength, no offense.”

  “None taken. I tried to get something like a push-up routine going, but I got sick of it fast. At least with running, there’s that sense of going places, you get the scenery.”

  “Push-ups get repetitive, yeah. Well, the boss is good about supplying us with gear. Lisa’s the one who talks to him, she’s talking to him right now, in fact. Put in a word with her if you want something like that. It’s untraceable too, so the good guys aren’t going to be tracing any serial numbers or whatever from your weapon back to your purchase.”

  The fact that Lisa was talking to their boss made me very curious, all of a sudden. That said, I couldn’t really traipse in to eavesdrop without being suspicious. Instead, since Lisa was out of earshot, I thought I’d seize the opportunity to ask, “So who is this boss of ours?”

  Brian and Alec exchanged a look. When they didn’t immediately say anything, I wondered if I’d pushed it too far. Had I been too nosy?

  “Figured you’d ask,” Brian said. “Thing is, we don’t know.”

  “What?” I asked, “We have an anonymous sponsor?”

  “It’s really fucking weird, yeah,” Alec said, then he hammered a button on the game controller, “Boom! Triple headshot!”

  “Alec, stay focused,” Brian sighed the words, with a tone suggesting he didn’t expect to be listened to.

  Alec bobbed his head in a nod, his eyes not leaving the television, before adding, “It’s weird but it’s basically free money, a good team, contacts, access to everything we need for stuff, and pretty much no drawbacks.”

  “Lisa knows, I think,” Brian grumbled. “But she says that when she joined the Undersiders, she made a deal that she was going to keep quiet on the subject. I’m not sure if that means she knows who he is or if it’s just to keep her mouth shut if her power tells her.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “This guy gathers you all together, offers you a salary and what? Doesn’t ask for anything in return?”

  Brian shrugged, “He asks us to do jobs, but most of the time it’s stuff we’d do anyways, and if we say no, he doesn’t make an issue of it.”

  “What kind of jobs does he ask us to do?” I asked.

  Lisa’s voice just behind me startled me, “This. Pull up your socks, boys and girl, because we’re robbing a bank.”

  Agitation 3.3

  “No,” Brian intoned. “Such a bad idea.”

  Lisa still had the phone in her hand. Bitch had arrived just behind her, and stood in stark contrast to Lisa’s jeans, sweater and tight ponytail, with an army jacket, and virtually no attention paid to her hair. The littlest of the dogs, the one-eyed, one eared terrier, trailed after her.

  “Come on,” Lisa wheedled. “It’s a rite of passage for dastardly criminals like us.”

  “Robbing a bank is moronic. We’ve been over this,” Brian closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, “You know what the average haul is for hitting a bank?”

  Lisa paused, “Twenty thou?”

  “Exactly. It’s not millions like you see people getting away with in the movies. Banks don’t keep a lot of loose cash on hand, so we’d be pulling in less than we would for most other jobs. Account for cost and the fact that this is Brockton fucking Bay, where banks have a little more reason to keep the amount of cash in their vaults to a minimum, and we’d be bringing in twelve to sixteen thou. Divide five ways and it’s what, two or three thousand bucks each?”

  “I could do with an extra three thousand dollars to spend,” Alec said, putting down his game controller and shifting his position on the couch to follow the conversation better.

  “On what?” Brian asked. When Alec shrugged, Brian sighed and explained, “It’s a horrible payoff for the amount of risk involved. There’s three big superhero teams in this city. Figure there’s another dozen heroes that fly solo, and we’re almost guaranteed to get into a fight.”

  “So?” Bitch spoke for the first time, “We win fights. We won before we had her.” She raised her chin in my direction as she said that last word.

  “We won because we picked our battles. We wouldn’t have that option if we were cooped up in the bank and waiting for them to come to us, letting them decide how and where the fight happened.”

  Lisa nodded and smiled as he spoke. I thought for a second that she was going to say something, but she didn’t.

  Brian continued, getting pretty passionate as he ranted, “We won’t be able to slip away like we have when things got a little out of control in the past. Can’t avoid the fight if we want to get away with anything worth taking. The bank is going to have layers of protection. Iron bars, vault doors, whatever. Even with your power, Lise, there’s a limit to how fast we can get through those. Add the time we have to spend managing hostages and making a safe exit, and I pretty much guarantee that there will be time for a cape to get wind of the robbery and slow us down even more.”

  Alec said, “I kind of wan
t to do it anyways. Hitting a bank gets you on the front page. It’s huge for our rep.”

  “The runt is right,” Bitch said.

  Brian grumbled, “Not fucking up is better for our reputation in the long run.” His deeper voice was really good for grumbling.

  Alec looked at me, “What do you think?”

  I’d almost forgotten I was a part of the discussion. The last thing I wanted was to rob a bank. Hostages could get hurt. The fact that it would potentially put me on the front page of the paper wasn’t a high point, either, if I ever wanted to drop the supervillain ruse and become a hero in good standing. I ventured, “I think Brian makes a good case. It seems reckless.”

  Bitch snorted. I think I saw Alec roll his eyes.

  Lisa leaned forward, “He does make good points, but I have better ones. Hear me out?” The rest of us turned our attention to her, though Brian had a frown that made it seem like it would take a lot to convince him.

  “Okay, so Brian said similar stuff before, before we hit that casino a few weeks ago. So I was kind of expecting this. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. The boss wants us to do a job at a very specific time. I got the sense he was willing to offer a fair bit if we went the extra mile, and I negotiated a pretty good deal.

  “The bank robbery was my idea, and he liked it. According to him, the Protectorate is busy with an event on Thursday, just outside of town. That’s part of the reason the timing is so important. If we act then, there’s almost no chance we’ll have to deal with them. If we hit the Bay Central, downtown—”

  “That’s the biggest bank in Brockton Bay,” I interrupted her, half-disbelieving.

  “So everything I said about them having security and being careful is doubly true,” Brian added.

  “If we hit the Bay Central, downtown,” Lisa repeated herself, ignoring us, “Then we’re hitting a location just a mile away from Arcadia High, where most of the Wards go to school. Given jurisdictions, New Wave won’t be able to jump on us without stepping on the Wards’ toes, which pretty much guarantees we go up against the team of junior superheroes. With me so far?”

  We all nodded or murmured agreement.

  “Figure that’s happening in the middle of the school day, and they won’t all be able to slip away to stop a robbery without drawing attention. People know the Wards are attending Arcadia, they just don’t know who they are. So everyone’s constantly watching for that. Since they can’t have all six or seven of the same kids disappear from class every time the Wards go off to foil a crime without giving away the show, chances are good that we’d go up against a couple of their strongest members, or one of the strongest with a group of the ones with less amazing powers. We can beat them.”

  “Okay,” Brian begrudged. “I’ll accept that we’d probably do alright in those circumstances, but—”

  Lisa interrupted him, “I also got the boss to agree to match us two for one on the haul. We bring in fifteen grand, he pays us thirty. Or he gives us enough money to bring our total up to twenty five, whichever is more in the end. So we could walk away with two thousand dollars and he’d pay us twenty three thou. So as long as we don’t wind up in jail, we’re guaranteed five thousand dollars apiece, bare minimum.”

  Brian’s eyes widened, “That’s insane. Why would he do that?”

  “And,” Lisa grinned, “he’ll cover all our costs, just this once. Equipment, information, bribes if we want ’em.”

  “Why?” I echoed Brian’s earlier question, disbelieving. Lisa was throwing around sums of money that I couldn’t even wrap my head around. I had never even had more than five hundred dollars in my bank account.

  “Because he’s sponsoring us and it stands to reason he doesn’t want to fund a team of nobodies. We manage this, we won’t be nobodies. That, and he really wants us to do a job at that particular time.”

  There was a few moments of silence as everyone considered the deal. I was frantically trying to think of a way to try to convince these guys it was a bad idea. A bank robbery could get me arrested. Worse, it could lead to me or a bystander getting hurt or killed.

  Brian beat me to it, “The risk to reward still isn’t great. Five grand each for hitting what may well be the most fortified location in Brockton Bay and an almost guaranteed confrontation with the Wards?”

  “Second most fortified location,” Lisa countered. “The Protectorate Headquarters is the first.”

  “Fair point,” Brian said, “but my argument stands.”

  “It’ll be more than five grand for each of us, I guarantee you,” Lisa told him, “It’s the biggest bank in Brockton Bay. It’s also the hub of cash distribution for the entire county. Said cash gets transferred in and out by armored cars on a regular schedule—”

  “So why don’t we hit one of the cars?” Alec asked.

  “They have ride-alongs or aerial cover from various members of the Wards and the Protectorate, so we’d be caught in a fight with another cape from minute one. Same problems that Brian’s talking about, as far as getting caught up in a fight, difficulty accessing the money before shit goes down, yadda yadda. Anyways, the Brockton Bay Central has cars coming in twice a week, and leaving four times a week. We hit on a Thursday just after noon, and it should be the best day and time for the sheer size of the take. Only way we’re getting away with less than thirty thousand is if we fuck up. With what the boss is offering, that’s ninety thou.”

  She folded her arms.

  Brian sighed, long and loud, “Well, you got me, I guess. It sounds good.”

  Lisa turned to Alec. There wasn’t any resistance to be found there. He just said, “Fuck yeah, I’m in.”

  Bitch didn’t need convincing any more than Alec had. She nodded once and then turned her attention to the scarred little dog.

  Then everyone looked at me.

  “What would I be doing?” I asked, nervously, hoping to stall or find holes in the plan that I could use to argue against it.

  So Lisa outlined a general plan. Brian made suggestions, good ones, and the plan was adjusted accordingly. I realized with a growing disappointment and a knot of anxiety in my gut that it was almost inevitably going to happen.

  Arguing against the bank robbery at this point would hurt my undercover operation more than it helped anyone. With that in mind, I began offering suggestions that—I hoped—would minimize the possibility of disaster. The way I saw it, if I helped things go smoothly, it would help my scheme to get info on the Undersiders and their boss. It would minimize the chance that someone would panic or be reckless and get a civilian hurt. I think I would feel worse if that happened than I would about going to jail.

  The discussion went on for a while. At one point, Lisa got her laptop, and we debated entrance and exit strategies while she sketched out a map of the bank layout. It was uncanny, seeing her power at work. She copied a satellite image of the bank from a web search into a paint program, then drew over it with thick bold lines to show how the rooms were laid out. With another search and a single picture of the bank manager standing in front of his desk, she was able to mark out where the manager’s desk was. That wouldn’t have been too amazing, but without pausing, she then went on to mark where the tellers were, as well as the vaults, the vault doors and the enclosed room that held the safe deposit boxes. She noted where the fuse box and air conditioning vents were, but we decided we wouldn’t mess with either of those. That stuff was cool in the movies, but it didn’t do much good in real life. Besides, this was a robbery, not a heist.

  While we worked, Alec got restless and went to make an early lunch. Of the four of us, I got the impression he had the least to contribute, at least strategically, and that he knew it. I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t have a very tactical mindset or if he just didn’t care that much about the planning stage of things. My assumptions led to the latter, as he seemed more willing to go with the flow than Brian or Lisa.

  He brought us a plate of pizza pockets along with assorted sodas, and we ate as we wrap
ped up the plan.

  “Alright,” Brian said, as Lisa shut her laptop, “I think we have a general idea of what we’re doing. We know how we get in, we know who does what when we’re inside, and we know how we want to get out. Keeping in mind that no plan survives contact with the enemy, I think the odds are still pretty good.”

  “So, the enemy,” I said, resisting the urge to wince at the realization that I would be up against good guys, “My only experience fighting in costume… or even just fighting, is against Lung, and that didn’t go well.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Brian said. “You did better than most.”

  “I’ll rephrase,” I said. “It could have gone better. We’re going up against the Wards and they aren’t pushovers.”

  Brian nodded, “True. Let’s talk strategy and weaknesses. You know who the Wards are?”

  I shrugged, “I’ve researched them. I’ve seen them on TV. That doesn’t mean I know the important stuff.”

  “Sure,” he said, “so let’s go down the list. Team leader: Aegis. You’d think he has the standard Alexandria package, flight, super strength, invincibility, but that isn’t exactly right. He does fly, but the other two powers work differently than you’d expect. See, he isn’t invincible… he just doesn’t have any weak points. His entire biology is filled with so many redundancies and reinforcements that you just can’t put him down. Throw sand in his eyes and he can still see by sensing the light on his skin. Cut his throat and it doesn’t bleed any more than the back of his hand would. The guy’s had an arm cut off and it was attached and working fine the next day. Stab him through the heart and another organ takes over the necessary functions.”

  “Not that we’re stabbing anyone through the heart?” I made it a hopeful half-question, half-statement.

  “No. Well, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stab Aegis through the heart just to slow him down. If you did it with something big enough. The guy’s like a zombie, he gets back up within seconds of you beating him down, keeps coming at you until you’re too tired to fight back or you make a mistake.”