Worm

by wildbow

  Leviathan struck at one of the remaining dogs with a broad swing of his tail, caught it across the snout. It dropped, neck snapped. A short leap and a slash of the claw dispatched the last.

  Scion raised one hand, and a ball of yellow-gold light slammed into Leviathan from behind, sent the Endbringer skidding across the length of the street, past Bitch and I.

  Leviathan leaped to his feet, reared around, swung his claws at the air ferociously. Water around him rose, rushed towards Scion, a wave three times as high as Bitch was tall. Three times as tall as I might be if I could stand.

  Scion didn’t move or speak. He walked forward, and ripples extended from his footsteps, soared past us with some strange motive force. The ripple touched the wave, and the tower of water collapsed before it got halfway to us, dropping straight down. Liquid as far as the eye could see was being flattened out into a disquieting stillness by the ripples of Scion’s footsteps, like a great pane of glass.

  Leviathan lunged up to the side of a half-ruined building, leaped down to a point three-quarters of the way between himself and Scion. His afterimage slammed into the hero.

  Scion turned his head, shut his eyes, let the water wash over and past him. When the attack was over, he squared his head and shoulders, facing Leviathan head on, raised a hand.

  Another blast of yellow-gold light, and Leviathan was sent sprawling.

  I saw the ripples and waves of Leviathan striking the ground wash past us. Saw, again, how the ripple of Scion’s footstep seemed to wipe out and override that disturbance, returning the water to a perfect flatness.

  Leviathan grabbed a car, twisted his entire upper body to toss it in the style of an olympic hammer-throw. The car hurtled through the air, and Scion batted it aside with the back of one hand. The vehicle virtually detonated with the impact, falling into a thousand pieces, each piece glowing with golden-yellow light, disintegrating as they splashed into the water.

  Scion raised one hand, and there was a brilliant flash, too bright to look through.

  When the spots faded from my vision, I saw that one of the damaged buildings was emanating that same light the pieces of the car had, was toppling, tipping towards Leviathan. Scion, fingertips glowing, started his slow advance as the structure was pulled atop the Endbringer. The ripples of his footsteps erased any disturbance in the water from the building’s collapse.

  Leviathan heaved himself out of the rubble, turned to run, only for water to rise and freeze solid in one smooth movement, forming a wall as tall as Leviathan was, a hundred feet long. He paused for a fraction of a second, to gauge which way he might go, poise himself to leap over. Scion caught him with another golden-yellow blast before he could follow through.

  The movement of the water and the creation of the ice hadn’t been Scion. Eidolon approached, flying close, raising one hand to create a ragged mess of icicles where Leviathan was to land. Some impaled the Endbringer, but by and large, they shattered beneath him, left him scrabbling for traction and footing for long enough that Scion could shoot him again, send him through the barrier of ice as though it were barely there, tumbling.

  Scion paused, turning to look at Eidolon, his eyes moving past Bitch and me like we weren’t even there. His eyes settled on the hero, the most powerful individual in the world staring at the man who was arguably the fifth.

  His expression was so hard to read. I knew, now, what people had meant, when they said they thought his face was a mask, a facade. Though it was expressionless, though there was nothing I could point to to explain why I felt the way I did, somehow I sensed disgust from him. Like nobility looking at dog shit.

  Scion turned away from Eidolon to focus on the enemy once more. He blasted the Endbringer again. Floated up and moved past Bitch and me faster than I could see, to strike the Endbringer a fraction of a second after the blast of light struck, stopping there in midair to blast Leviathan a second time as the Endbringer was still flying through the air at the punch’s impact. Everything about Scion and his actions was utterly silent. His movements or attacks didn’t even stir the air. Only the effects, Leviathan striking the water, the breaking of ice, generated any movement, shudders or sounds.

  Eidolon froze the water around Leviathan’s four claws, giving Scion the opportunity to land another blast. Leviathan turned, raised a spraying wall of water to cover his retreat. Scion sent out one blast of his golden light to strike the wave, following up with a second blast before the first even made contact with the water.

  Seeing the second blast coming, Leviathan leaped to one side. No use—the blast of light curved in the air to head unerringly for him, struck him down. Edges of the Endbringer’s wounds glowed golden yellow, drifted away into the air like flecks of burning paper caught in the updraft of hot air. A fist imprint near the base of Leviathan’s throat glowed with edges of the same light, the wound continuing to spread and burn as I watched.

  A tidal wave appeared in the distance, at the furthest end of the street, near the horizon.

  Scion sent out a blast of golden light the size of a small van, darting to the center of the wave, disappearing into a speck of light before it made contact with the distant target. The middle third of the wave buckled, fell harmlessly into a splash of water, all momentum ceased. The other two sides of the wave curved inward, bent, to bear unerringly towards us.

  Another blast of golden light, and one side was stopped, stalled. A third blast was spared for Leviathan, who was getting his hands and feet firmly on the ground, crouching in preparation to run. The Endbringer was knocked squarely to the ground.

  Scion stopped the third wave in its tracks with a fourth blast, but the water was still there, and it still bowed to gravity. The water level around us rose by a dozen feet, momentarily, slopping as gently over us as physically possible, like a lap of water on the beach.

  When the flow of water was past us, I could see a fifth blast of light following Leviathan, who had used the cresting water to swim away. He was making his way to the coast. Scion rose, flew after his target with a streak of golden light tracing his movement. Eidolon followed soon after.

  Ten, fifteen seconds passed, Bitch holding me, averting her eyes from the corpses of her dogs, jaw set, not speaking or moving.

  A teleporter appeared beside Laserdream, a distance away. He looked at us, startled, glanced at his armband.

  “You okay?” he called out.

  “No,” I tried to shout back, but my voice was weak. Bitch spoke for me, “She needs help.”

  “Bring her here, I’ll take her back.”

  Bitch carried me, dragging me by my collar to where Laserdream lay. I grunted and groaned in pain, felt those hot pokers through my upper back and middle, but she wasn’t the type for sympathy or gentleness.

  The teleporter touched one hand to my chest, another to Laserdream, who turned her head to look at me.

  There was a rush of cool air, and we were in the midst of chaos. Nurses, doctors, moving all around us. I was lifted and placed on a stretcher, hauled up by four people in white. There were shouts, countless electronic beeps, screams of pain.

  I was placed on a bed. I would have writhed with the pain of being shifted if it weren’t for my general inability to move. There was a heart monitor on one side, a metal rack with an IV bag of clear fluid on the other, thick metal poles beside each, stretching from floor to ceiling. Curtains loomed on either side of me, making for a small room, ten feet by ten feet across. The emergency room, triage or whatever was in front of me, past the foot of the bed, a dozen more cots, doctors doing what they could for the massed injured, civilian and cape alike.

  All around me, nurses moved with a rote efficiency, to put a clip on my finger, and the heart monitor started beeping in time with my own heartbeat. One put some sticky glue on my collarbone, pressing an electrode down there.

  “My back, I think it’s broken,” I said, to no one in particular. Nobody in particular replied. All of them too busy with set tasks. People seemed to approach my
bedside and leave to go attend to another patient elsewhere.

  “Your name?” someone asked.

  I looked to the other side of me. It was an older woman in a nurse’s uniform, pear shaped, gray haired. A man in a PRT uniform stood behind her, holding a gun on me.

  “Skitter,” I replied, confused, feeling more scared by the second. “Please. I think my back’s broken.”

  “Villain?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “Are you a villain?”

  “It’s complicated. My back—”

  “Yes or no?” the Nurse asked me, stern.

  “Listen, my friend, Tattletale, do you know—”

  “She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand. “Designation master five, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis. No super strength.”

  The nurse nodded, “Thank you. Handle it?”

  The man in a PRT uniform holstered his gun and stepped up to the bed. He grabbed my right wrist, clasped a heavy manacle around it, fixed it to a vertical metal pole by the head of the bed.

  “My other arm’s broken, please don’t move it,” I pleaded.

  He gripped it anyways, and I couldn’t help but scream, strangled, as he pulled it to one side, clasped a manacle down on my wrist, hooked the other side of the manacle to the second pole.

  “What—” I started to ask a nurse, as I forced myself to catch my breath, stopped as she turned her back to me and pulled the curtain closed at the foot of the bed, walked past it.

  “Please—” I tried again, looking to the PRT uniform, but he was pushing his way past the curtain, leaving my company.

  Leaving me chained up. Alone.

  Extermination 8.6

  All of the adrenaline, emotions and endorphins that had been building since I first heard the sirens, maybe even before them—when I learned about Dinah Alcott—made for one hell of a rush. More relevant to the present, it made for one hell of a mental wipeout as I came down from the rush. A low point to equal the ‘high’.

  The background noise of screams, shouted orders of doctors and nurses, a hundred heart monitors beeping out of sync and my ‘cell’ of three curtained ‘walls’ cutting me off from everything else? Didn’t help.

  My arm hurt, and hanging from the manacle made that ten times as bad. My back was the worst thing, a slow, steady, pain that terminated in my midsection. It seemed to build in intensity every second I paid attention to it, settling into a dull blistering of pain when I focused my attention elsewhere. If I didn’t focus on keeping my breathing steady and deep, I found that I unconsciously held my breath to minimize the pain. That only made it worse when I did have to breathe again, because it brought tightness in my throat and chest, along with agonizing coughing fits.

  None of that was even touching on that growing terror over the fact that, hey, I couldn’t feel my legs, and it wasn’t getting better.

  If my back was really broken, it could mean my best case scenario was surgery and years of physical therapy, years of crutches and wheelchairs. My worst case scenario would be never walking again. I didn’t have a power that would help too much on that front. It would mean the end of my career as a cape, never having sex with a boy the natural way, and never going for another morning run.

  I made myself take a deep breath. It shuddered as I exhaled slowly, and not just because it hurt to breathe.

  I couldn’t do anything about my back, in the here and now. My arm? Maybe. The metal pole was fixed to the wall at every foot or so by horizontal bars, and the end of the manacle was stopped from descending any further by one of the bits that extended to the wall, three feet or so above my head.

  I couldn’t really believe they were going to arrest me. Like Tattletale had said, there were rules. Largely unspoken rules, but still more important than anything else in the cape community. You didn’t profit from an Endbringer attack, you didn’t attack your nemeses or take advantage of undefended areas to steal. You didn’t arrest a villain that came to help.

  Because when people started doing that, the truce broke and things became ten times easier for the Endbringer.

  The manacle on my wrist made me wonder. I’d made some enemies with the good guys. Maybe I was getting some rough treatment because of it.

  One ominous idea nagged at me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was that I might not get any treatment at all—for my back, specifically—because of grudges against me and capes who could ‘suggest’ that maybe the doctors’ resources could be better directed elsewhere.

  If they went that route, one hundred percent deniable, excusable, then there’d be nothing I could do about it.

  If that was what was going on, being manacled like this would be something of a slap in the face, a way of letting me know it was intentional, while keeping me from contacting anyone to complain.

  My arm shifted involuntarily as I cringed at a painful intake of breath, swinging a little, and I clenched my teeth.

  I turned my head, gripped the fabric of my pillow with my teeth, tugged and pulled my head forward at the same time. It moved to my left. I did it again, bumped my shoulder, making my arm swing on the chain once more. I suppressed the noise I might’ve made at the pain, choked back the gorge that rose in my throat.

  Whatever was going on with my back, it prevented me from sitting up, denied me the use of my abdominal muscles. I could only work with my shoulders, my head, my teeth.

  Shifting the pillow over several long minutes, I managed to gingerly ease it under my shoulder and upper arm. Provided I didn’t move—which I couldn’t, really—it gave my arm something to rest on, prevented all of the weight from dangling off of my cuffed wrist.

  Of course, I was now absent one pillow for my head and neck, and the propped up shoulder and arm made my back twist slightly, which only intensified the pain there. I closed my eyes, focused on just breathing, tried not to pay too much attention to how slowly time was passing by, or the cacaphony of noise from the rest of the triage area.

  I hated this. Hated not knowing, not having any information about what had just happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.

  Roughly half of my nightmares about being bullied took place in the classroom, knowing that a class was just about to end, or that a teacher was about to assign us group work. That some group of faceless bullies were waiting to pull the worst ‘prank’ yet. It was the idea that I was about to be put in a situation where something bad was about to happen, that it was inevitable. Being helpless to do anything about it.

  Maybe it was stupid, but I’d never failed to wake up drenched in sweat after that, even when I woke up before the follow-through. The dreams had come less often after I got my powers, but they still came from time to time. I had suspicions they might come even years after I left high school behind me for good.

  But that state of mind in the nightmares? I felt like that now. Trying to keep from panicking, knowing that no matter what I did, I was counting on luck and forces beyond my control to not ruin my day, my week, my month. Ruin my life.

  I’d done the heroic thing. Drawn Leviathan away from those in the shelter who were still alive. A part of me was proud of myself. The rest of me? Faced with the idea of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair? I felt like an idiot of epic proportions. I’d bought into the idea of the grand, noble gesture, and in the here and now it felt like I had to convince myself that what I had done mattered. It sure as shit didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

  The chain of my manacle clinked taut as I yanked my right hand forward angrily. The pain that caused me in my midsection stopped me from doing it again.

  A girl in a nurse’s uniform pushed the curtain aside to enter. I identified her as a girl rather than a woman because she barely looked older than me. Bigger in the chest, for sure, but baby faced, petite. Her brown hair was in a braid, and the lashes of her downcast eyes were long as she stepped to the foot of my b
ed, picked up a clipboard. She was very carefully not looking my way.

  “Hi,” I spoke.

  She ignored me, turned her attention to the heart monitor, made a note on the clipboard.

  “Please talk to me,” I spoke. “I have no idea what’s going on, and I feel like I’m losing my mind, here.”

  She glanced at me, looked away hurriedly the same reflexive way you’d pull away from a hot stove with your hand.

  “Please? I’m—I’m pretty scared right now.”

  Nothing. She took more notes on the clipboard, noting stuff from the screen the electrode ran to.

  “I know you think I’m bad, a villain, but I’m a person, too.”

  She glanced at me again, looked away, returned her eyes to the clipboard and frowned. She stopped writing as she glanced up to the monitor, as if she had to find her place or double check her numbers.

  “I have a dad. Love him to death, even if we haven’t talked lately. I love reading, my—my mom taught me to love books from the time I was little. My best friend, it wasn’t so long ago that she helped pull me out of a dark place. I haven’t heard how she’s doing. If she’s dead or if she’s here too. Have you seen her? Her name’s Tattletale.”

  “We aren’t supposed to talk to the patients.”

  “Why not?”

  “While back, some cape sued the rescue workers after a battle much like this. Hadhayosh, I think.”

  “That’s one of the other names for Behemoth. Like Ziz is for the Simurgh?”

  “Yes, some heroes got hurt badly enough they wouldn’t recover, they knew they had no more income from their costume career, so suing, it was a way—” she stopped, closed her mouth deliberately, as if reminding herself to stay silent.

  “You can’t tell me if my back’s broken or not?”