Worm

by wildbow

  Even before the syringe of tranquilizers was jammed into her neck, Paige Mcabee fainted.

  * * *

  Paige woke up and enjoyed five seconds of peace before she remembered everything that had happened. Reality hit her like a splash of cold water in the face, somewhat literally. She opened her eyes, but found them dry, the world too bright to focus on. The rest of her was damp, wet. Beads of water trickled down her face.

  She tried to move, and couldn’t. It was as though something heavy had been piled on top of her. The paralysis terrified her. Paige had never been able to stand being unable to move. When she had gone camping as a kid, she had preferred to leave her sleeping bag unzipped and be cold rather than be confined inside it.

  It was that foam, she realized. The restraints weren’t enough, they’d sprayed her with the stuff to ensure that everything below her shoulders was covered. It gave a little to allow her to exhale, she could even shift her arms and legs a fraction, lean in any given direction. The harder she pushed, however, the more resistance there was. The second she relaxed her efforts, everything sprung back to the same position with the foam’s rubbery pull. She felt nausea well in her gut, her heartbeat quickening. Her breathing increased, but the mask made even her breath feel confined. The water made her mask damp, so it clung to her mouth and nose. There were slits for her nostrils and mouth, but it was so little. She could not take a deep breath without drawing water into her mouth, and with her tongue depressed, she could not swallow easily.

  The room lurched, and she had to stop herself before she lost her breakfast. Puking with the mask on, she might choke. Dimly, she realized where she was. A vehicle. A truck. It had passed over a pothole.

  She knew where it was taking her. But if she couldn’t get free, she was going to lose her mind before she got there.

  “The little bird’s awake,” a girl spoke, with a hint of a nasal Boston accent.

  “Mmm.” A man grunted.

  Paige knew the ‘bird’ reference was due to the stray feathers that stuck out of her scalp. Her powers had come with some extremely minor cosmetic changes, turning her hair the bright yellow of a banana or baby duck. It affected all the hair on her body, even her eyelashes, eyebrows, the fine hairs on her arms. The feathers had started growing in a year ago, the exact same shade as her hair, only a handful at a time. At first, alarmed and embarassed, she’d clipped them off. Once she’d realized that no further changes were occurring, she’d relaxed and let them grow in, even showed them off.

  Paige turned her attention to the two people in the vehicle with her, glad for the distraction from her burgeoning panic. She had to force her eyes to stay open, painful as the light was, wait for her eyes to focus. Sitting on the bench beside her was a girl about her own age. The girl had an Asian cast to her features. Her eyes, though, were a very pale blue, betraying some Western heritage. The girl wore the same orange jumpsuit as Paige, and every part of her except her shoulders and head were covered in the yellow-white foam. Her straight black hair was plastered to her scalp by the wet.

  The man sat on the other bench. There was more foam around him than there was around Paige and the other girl combined. Topping it off, a cage of metal bars surrounded the foam, reinforcing the setup. The man was Asian as well, no less than six feet tall. Tattoos swept up the sides of his neck and behind his ears, into the midst of his wet black hair; red and green flames, and the head of what could have been a lizard or dragon, drawn in an Eastern style. He was glowering, his eyes hidden in shadows, oblivious to the endless spray of mist that sprinklers in the truck’s roof were generating.

  “Hey, little birdy,” the girl sitting across from Paige spoke. She was staring at Paige as if those cold eyes of hers could look right through her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You lean to your right as hard as you can, then shove yourself left on my signal. But you keep facing the back door there, alright?”

  Paige glanced to her right. The back door of the truck looked like a vault door. She quickly glanced back at the Asian girl. Did she really want to turn her back to this person?

  The girl seemed to note Paige’s hesitation. She lowered her voice to a hiss that made Paige’s skin crawl. “Do it. Unless you really want to gamble on the chance that I’d be able to find you in the prison, if you don’t do as I say?”

  Paige’s eyes widened. This was the sort of person she was going to be locked up with. She shook her head.

  “Good, little birdy. Now lean to your right, look at the door.”

  Paige did, straining her body to move as close to the door as she could.

  “And back!”

  She heaved herself the other way, eyes still on the door. Something heavy cracked against the back of her head. She tried to pull away, sit upright again, but was stopped as the mask caught on something.

  When she felt hot breath on the back of her neck, she knew what she’d caught on. The other girl had gripped the strap of the mask in her teeth. There was a tug, then the girl lost her grip, and the two of them were pulled back to their individual positions by the rubbery foam.

  “Shit,” the girl growled, “Again.”

  It took two more attempts. On the first, the strap came free of the buckle. On the second, the girl gripped the mask itself and pulled. Paige turned her head in the girl’s direction so the pacifier-cage on the inside of her mouth could be pulled free.

  Tendrils of drool extended down from her mouth as she worked her jaw and tongue, trying to swallow properly. She let out a little whimper as sensation returned to the parts of her face that had gone numb.

  “Two qweshionsh,” the Asian girl mumbled, her teeth still gripping the mask’s leather between them, “Youh poweh?”

  Paige had to work her jaw and mouth a second before she could speak, “My power? I sing. Really well.”

  The Asian girl frowned, “Whaf elth?”

  “I… it makes people feel good. When I get going, I can affect them, alter their emotions, make them susceptible to following instructions.”

  The girl nodded, “Teh collah?”

  Paige looked down at the heavy metal collar around her neck, “It’s set up to inject tranquilizers into my neck if I sing or raise my voice.”

  “Okah,” the girl mumbled, “Take teh mahc.”

  “Why?”

  “Take ih!”

  Paige nodded. They leaned away from each other, then swung together, the girl passing the mask to her. She clenched it in her teeth, feeling her jaw ache.

  “Drop that and I’ll turn you inside out,” the girl spoke, “Lung. Hey, Lung? Wake up.”

  The man sitting opposite them raised his head a fraction, opened his eyes. Maybe. Paige couldn’t quite tell.

  “I know it’s hard with the stuff they pumped into you, but I need your power. Birdy, lean forward, show him the mask.”

  Paige did her best to push herself forward against the foam that was layered against her chest and stomach, gripping the strap in her teeth, the mask dangling below her chin.

  “I need you to heat the metal, Lung,” the girl spoke. “Get it fucking hot.”

  Lung shook his head. When he spoke, there was no Boston accent in his voice. The accent that was there made his words clipped, clearly not the voice of a native English speaker. “The water. Is too wet, too cold. And I cannot see it well. My eyes have not healed entirely, and it is hard to see through this spray. Do not bother me with this.”

  “Try, you miserable fucker. Failure of a leader. It’s the least you can do, after getting your ass kicked by a little girl, twice.”

  “Enough, Bakuda.” he growled. He slammed his head back against the metal of the truck’s wall behind him, as if to punctuate his statement.

  “What? I couldn’t hear that,” the girl, Bakuda, grinned with a hint of mania to her expression, “Your voice is too fucking high pitched for my range of hearing! You pathetic… halfbreed… eunuch!”

  “Enough!” he roared, again slamming his head against the wall of the tr
uck. “I will kill you, Bakuda, for these insults! I will tear your arm from your socket and I will shove it—”

  “Pissed off?!” she interrupted him, practically screeching, “Good! Use it! Heat the motherfucking metal. The metal strip around the edges!”

  Still panting with the exertion of shouting, Lung turned his attention to the mask. Paige winced at the blast of heat against her face, started to pull away, but stopped as Bakuda spoke.

  “Focus it!” Bakuda shouted, “Focus on the edges!”

  The radiation of heat ceased, but Paige became aware of a stringent, smoky smell.

  “Hotter! As hot as you can get it!”

  The smell was too strong, too acrid. Paige coughed a few times, hard, but she didn’t lose her grip on the mask.

  “Now, birdy! Same maneuver as before, but don’t let go!”

  Paige nodded. She leaned away, then swung in Bakuda’s direction. What followed surprised her more than when Bakuda had bitten into the strap of the mask.

  The Asian girl set about savaging the red hot metal with her teeth, digging into it even as they had to pull away. Softer with the heat, the thin metal strip pulled free of the mask itself. The metal that ran along the strap cut Paige’s lip as it came off. She almost—almost—dropped the mask, but managed to snap her teeth to catch the buckle in her teeth before it could fall to the floor.

  As the strip came free, Bakuda pulled back and jerked her head to one side, hard, impaling herself in the shoulder with one end of it. She screamed, and blood ran from one of the burns on her mouth.

  Paige looked at Lung. The huge man did nothing, remaining silent. He only watched dispassionately as Bakuda’s chest heaved with the exertion and pain, her head hanging down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Paige breathed.

  “No hands, have to make do,” Bakuda panted. “Again. Before my body realizes how badly I’m hurting it.”

  Paige nodded. She wasn’t about to argue with the supervillain that was threatening to turn her inside out.

  The ensuing attempts weren’t any prettier or easier. The second long metal strip was freed and Bakuda impaled that one in her shoulder as well. The metal grilles from the exterior and interior parts of the mask were next to be pulled free. Paige was left holding only the leather portion of the mask, the straps and the covering that had gone over her mouth and nose. Seeing Bakuda gingerly balance the metal grilles on her free shoulder, against the tacky foam so they wouldn’t slip down, Paige did the same with the leather of the mask.

  “What did you do to get sent here?” Paige asked.

  “Last I heard, before we lost power to our neighborhood, the body count was almost at fifty.”

  “You killed fifty people?”

  Bakuda grinned, and it wasn’t pretty, with her lips as ravaged as they were. “Injured more, too. And there were those who got brain damage, one or two might’ve gone homicidally insane, and I know a bunch got frozen in time for a hundred years or so… it gets blurry. Crowning moment was the bomb.”

  “Bomb?” Paige asked, eyes widening.

  “Bomb. They said it was as powerful as an atom bomb. Idiots. They didn’t even understand the technology behind it. Philistines. Sure, it was about that powerful, but that wasn’t even the real damage. Amazing thing would’ve been the electromagnetic wave it generated. Wipe every hard drive, fry every circuit board for every piece of machinery over a full fifth of America. The effects of that? Would’ve been worse than any atom bomb.”

  Unable to even wrap her mind around that, Paige glanced at Lung. “And him?”

  “Lung? He’s the one who told me to do it. Man in charge, he is.”

  Lung’s head moved fractionally, but with the shadows under his brow, Paige couldn’t tell if he was watching.

  “You?” Bakuda asked Paige. “What’d you do to get sent here?”

  “I told my ex to go fuck himself.”

  There was a pause, then Bakuda started cackling. “What?”

  “It’s complicated,” Paige looked away and down.

  “You gotta explain, birdy.”

  “My name’s Paige. My stage name was Canary.”

  “Ooooh,” Bakuda spoke, still cackling a little as she gripped one of the metal strips that was spearing her shoulder and pulled it free. Holding it in her teeth, she spoke, “That’sh no good. You calling yourshelf Canary in prishon?”

  “I didn’t intend on going to prison.”

  “Who doesh?”

  “I mean, I’m not even a supervillain. My power, it makes me a fantastic singer. I was making a lot of money doing it, there was talk of record deals, we were moving to larger venues and my shows were still selling out… everything was perfect.”

  Bakuda let the strip swing from her teeth until it dangled, then carefully maneuvered it until she was gripping the far left side of it. She leaned back, her head facing the ceiling, as she slid the other metal strip, the one impaled in her shoulder, into her mouth as well, so she was holding one end of each strip in her mouth. Pausing, she asked, “Whaf haffen?”

  Paige shook her head. It was the testimony she’d never been able to speak out loud, at her trial. “I’d just finished my biggest show yet. Two hours on stage, a huge hit, crowd loved it all. I wrapped up and went backstage to rest, get a drink, and ran into my ex. He told me that since he was the one who pushed me to get out on stage in the first place, he deserved credit. Wanted half the money.” She laughed a little, “Ridiculous. Like I’m supposed to ignore the fact that he cheated on me and told me I was never going to make it for real when he left.”

  Bakuda nodded. She pulled away from the strips, where she’d managed to tie them in the semblance of a knot. She used her teeth to bend the now-joined strips into an L-shape. With the end that wasn’t impaled in her shoulder now in a position in front of her, she closed her mouth on it.

  “We argued. Then I told him to go fuck himself. He left, and I didn’t give it a second thought… until the police showed up at my door.”

  Bakuda pulled her mouth away from the end of the strip. She’d bent it into a loose ‘v’ shape. She frowned at it, then glanced at Paige, “And?”

  “And he’d done it. I—I guess I was still amped up from my performance, and my power’s effects were still empowering my voice, or he was in the audience and was pretty heavily affected. So when I told him to go fuck himself, he, um, he did. Or he tried, and when he found it wasn’t physically possible, he hurt himself until…” Paige closed her eyes for a moment. “Um. I won’t go into the details.”

  “Mmmm, shucks to be im. Oo ’oo,” Bakuda raised her eyebrows, still working the metal strip inside her mouth. She pulled away, verified the end as being in a rough ‘o’ shape, and then gripped the strips in her teeth to pull the entire thing out of her shoulder with a grunt. She placed the end she’d just reworked against the bench and slid her mouth down the length of the metal, so she could get a grip on the other end.

  Taking hold of it in her teeth, she turned her attention to the wall of the truck between herself and Paige. There were locks placed at regular intervals against the wall, meant to secure the chain of standard handcuffs in place, for those not doused in foam. She began feeding the metal strap through the loop of the lock. Beads of sweat mingled with the water running down her face as she worked.

  The knot joining the two straps jammed in the hole. Bakuda pushed a little harder, and wedged it firmly in place. The L-bend in the metal placed the closed ‘o’-shaped loop of metal close to Paige’s shoulder.

  “Any bets on Oni showing up?” Bakuda asked Lung.

  “I would be surprised,” he rumbled his response.

  She gripped one of the metal grilles in her mouth and began working at it with her teeth. It was all one thin piece of metal, bent and woven like chain link fencing, albeit a tighter mesh. Now that it was no longer held securely in place by the metal strips, Bakuda was free to start unwinding and straightening it.

  When it was almost completely unwound
, she adjusted her bite on it and clenched the second mass of wire, the one that had been in Paige’s mouth, in her jaws, bunching it together into a cylindrical mess about four inches long and one inch across. Still biting it, she turned her head so the mostly straight four-foot length of wire was pointing at Lung, not two feet away from his face. Her mouth still around the tangle of wire, she mumbled, “Need end hot.”

  Lung growled, but he did as he was asked. When the end was white hot, Bakuda quickly adjusted her grip, letting go and biting again until the tip was near her mouth. Lips pulled back, she bit down on it.

  “How can you do that?” Paige asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “No uffing hit ih urhs,” Bakuda growled. She pulled away, set it so the handle was against the bench, the length of wire against her shoulder, and examined her handiwork. “But tooth enamel is tougher than you’d think.” She spat a measure of blood out onto the floor of the truck, then bit down twice more, pausing between bites to turn the length of metal with her teeth, lips and tongue.

  When she extended the length of wire in Paige’s direction, sliding it through the ‘o’ shaped end of the metal strip, Paige realized what Bakuda had spent this much time setting up. She didn’t even need to be asked to bend down against the foam restraints and crane her neck to one side, to put her collar in reach of the overlong makeshift screwdriver. The metal strip with the loop in the end served to hold the portion closest to Paige up, so Bakuda could direct it more easily.

  It wasn’t fast work. Bakuda had to use her teeth, jaw and a turning of her head to rotate the screwdriver, and it was a chore to get it back in position if she lost her grip on it. Ten long minutes of silence and grunting were broken only by the sound of two screws dropping to the metal bench, before Bakuda stopped to take a rest and ease her jaw.

  “You won’t be able to do anything to my collar without setting it off,” Paige spoke.