Worm

by wildbow

  I didn’t have time to get out of the way, to bring my baton up to defend myself or even to do more than belatedly realize his near-collapse had been a feint. He caught me in the stomach with that same surprising strength as before, then slashed up toward my collarbone with enough force to lift my feet up off the ground. I landed hard on my back, my armor absorbing the brunt of the impact. The sides of my armor panels bit into the ribs of my back where they curved toward my body.

  Keeping the lessons I’d learned from sparring with Grue in mind, I tried to scramble back and away while Mannequin righted himself and put the forearm and hand he had connected to his foot in the right place. Before I could get to my feet, he started striding toward me.

  I drew my bugs around me to conceal my movements as I rolled to one side, set my feet under me and sprinted to his left.

  While still beneath the cover of my bugs, I was struck from behind and knocked face first to the ground. The surprise was as bad as the pain.

  Through the swarm, I sensed him approach until he stood with one foot on either side of me. I felt him wind his fingers into my hair and pull my head up and back. I struggled, trying to catch him in the knee with my baton, but he wrenched me to one side, and I felt a blade press against my throat.

  As he’d done with the gray-haired doctor, he pulled the blade hard against my throat in one long, smooth motion, adjusting for the curvature of my neck.

  In one heartbeat, I formed and initiated a plan. I grunted and made a choking sound, which was all the more realistic because he’d just pulled a length of metal hard against my windpipe; I did want to grunt and I did choke. Then I went limp and had every bug in the area cease moving. Like snowflakes, the flies began drifting down from the air.

  He let go of my hair, and my mask clacked hard against the floor. I heard a girl scream, heard noises and shouts from everyone else.

  I swallowed, partially to check that my throat really hadn’t been cut. My costume had saved me. I wished the gathered onlookers hadn’t witnessed the scene. It would have been better if the bugs had blocked their line of sight, as their noises of fear and alarm were going to get his attention.

  I just needed a second to think. Mannequin could press an assault indefinitely, until he succeeded in cutting my throat open or delivering that mortal wound. It was like sparring against Brian, but worse in every way. Mannequin was stronger, faster, he had more reach, he didn’t get tired, he was good and he was out to kill me. He was versatile in a way no ordinary human could be. He couldn’t be caught in an arm-lock—his limb would just come free or bend in some screwed up way.

  He could sense me somehow. How? It had been reckless of me to assume that he used sight to get by, especially when he didn’t have eyeholes in his mask. The fact that he hadn’t noticed I was faking meant he wasn’t relying on sight, or his sight was limited enough that he couldn’t make out the lack of blood through the cloud of bugs around us. If he wasn’t hearing my breathing, I doubted he had super hearing either.

  Did he use radar, like Cricket? It would be my first assumption, except my bugs hadn’t heard anything of the sort.

  No. This line of thinking wasn’t accomplishing anything.

  I heard him sharpening his blades against one another with the sound of steel on steel. I could sense the movement, from the bugs that were drifting down onto him. A man in the crowd whimpered, and Mannequin turned towards him.

  The metal singing in the pauses between the scrapes of blade on blade. Mannequin was standing still, observing.

  I had to come up with a plan of attack, or others would pay the price. My deadline was the point, I suspected, that someone lost their nerve and tried to run.

  If I was going to attack, I needed to find a weak point. But he was smart. Before the disaster that had turned him into this, he had been on the brink of solving many of the world’s crises. Overpopulation, renewable energy, effective recycling, world hunger. Even with tinker abilities offering the means, it took someone special to manage that and actually make progress.

  It was a given that he wouldn’t have any blatant weaknesses. Any measure he didn’t think of himself, he would have shored up by now, by virtue of being a longstanding member of the Nine. He’d fought heroes and villains better than me, and he’d learned and improved in the process.

  In that respect, perhaps, he and I weren’t so different. I’d developed in much the same ways. The difference was that he had years more experience. That, and he was batshit insane.

  What would I do in his shoes, with his power?

  I wouldn’t leave any vital openings uncovered. That was a given. My focus—Mannequin’s focus—would be on designing way to make himself a completely closed system. It wasn’t just sensible, it was the whole point of his transformation. He’d have perfect recycling of all waste, dissipation of excess energy by diverting it to mechanical movement, intake of energy by absorption of heat.

  Could that be a clue as to how he sensed the world around him? Heat? Or was it something completely different? Radiation? Radio waves? Electromagnetics?

  Putting myself in his shoes, I had to think of his motivation. Why this form? I’d make myself resemble a doll or a store mannequin because… it was an eternal reminder. Didn’t his wife and kids die when the Simurgh attacked? There was a story there.

  But what else? Why resemble a human?

  To mislead? Maybe the configuration of ‘my’ organs and parts wasn’t human in the slightest. I might have gone the Aegis route and built-in redundancies for everything I could spare. I wouldn’t need a heart, kidneys, or a conventional digestive system, bone marrow or any of that stuff. Everything I could strip away would be more room for equipment, more room for all the pieces and parts that help turn ‘my’ individual body parts into perpetually self-sustaining systems.

  His torso was the biggest section of his body. It wouldn’t have his heart, lungs or any of that, because he didn’t have a circulatory system. More likely, it contained his brain, his sensory organs/system, and whatever mechanism he was using to remotely control his arms, legs, hands and feet. Unless he didn’t want to put all his items in one basket. It was easily possible for some of that stuff to be in his thighs and forearms.

  If I were him… I would have spent hours carefully balancing the ‘ecosystems’ of each individual part of my body. Something that exacting and that fine tuned would be sensitive, fragile. They’d be resistant to impacts, I wouldn’t go around getting into fights if they weren’t. But heat and cold? A crack in that exterior of his? It could wreak havoc.

  Okay. I was getting a sense of him, maybe. That said, none of that mattered if I couldn’t hurt him in the first place. Maybe I was thinking about this all wrong.

  Bugs dealt with threats that were encased in hard shells all the time, didn’t they? They dealt with other species of bugs. There were a hundred solutions there, if I was willing to look for them.

  That was the spark of inspiration I needed. In a matter of seconds, I had a plan.

  It wasn’t a good plan, but it was something. As a just-in-case measure, I could try some other smaller plans, on the off chance that they might distract or even work. Having those options, if nothing else, would make me feel better. Mannequin had just brutally and unquestionably kicked my ass in the span of fifteen seconds, and it was going to be at least two minutes until I could even begin my plan, judging by how long it had taken my bugs to deliver the supplies from my lair.

  The same instant I had that thought, I started everything in motion. Every flying insect near my lair headed indoors to gather what I needed.

  I made a mental note to make a more easily accessible opening to my lair, so I could do this faster in the future.

  I made another mental note to set up a clock with ticking hands, so I could have bugs ride the three hands and have a precise way of tracking time when I was in my territory. I supposed it would have to be an old-fashioned clock, since Shatterbird had screwed up everything else.

  I
had to guess. Roughly two minutes until I could start my plan.

  As I lay face down on the floor of the factory, I tried to control my breathing so he wouldn’t notice I was still alive. The beat of my heart in my chest was so intense I was worried it would give me away.

  Staying still was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do, and I had done some hard things before. Knowing that he might leap for someone and end their life any moment, it had me on edge. Every second I could buy here counted because every second I didn’t have to fight him was crucial.

  “Mommy,” the word was drawn out. Had to have come from someone young. A toddler? “I don’t want to be here!”

  The rhythm of steel rasping against steel ceased. Mannequin went still.

  Shit. So much for my reprieve.

  I pulled myself to my feet and stirred all of the bugs in the area into action. They rose from the floor like a dark whirlwind. I sheathed my knife and gripped my baton in both hands.

  “Mannequin!”

  He stopped and turned his upper body to face me. His head cocked to one side.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You didn’t get me.”

  He turned back around and started walking toward the mother and the little boy. The pair were huddled between an empty metal frame and a workbench.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Come on! Fight me! Don’t you have the balls to take on a teenage girl? Or are they one of the things you cut away!?”

  He didn’t slow or hesitate at my words.

  “Bastard!” I ran for him. It was a hundred percent possible he was baiting me, forcing me into a situation where I had to do something stupid or let the mom and the little kid get hurt. Maybe if I’d been a harder person, I could have let him hurt them, knowing it was smarter in the long run. But I wasn’t capable of doing that.

  What could I even do? I had to make the call in the three or four seconds it took me to cross the floor of the factory. He was more than half-again as tall as I was, and my weapons couldn’t do anything to him.

  I threw myself at the backs of his legs, colliding with the back of his knees and his calves. Not all of his precarious balance was an act. He teetered and collapsed backward onto the floor, his legs on top of me.

  “Go!” I screamed at the mother. “Run!”

  She did. Mannequin reached out to extend a blade into the back of her leg, and she fell, but someone else hurried forward to help her.

  Mannequin’s left leg snaked around my throat in an impromptu headlock. I tried to slip out, to force his leg apart. Even though I could move it, I couldn’t squeeze my head through the gap.

  Not counting the time I’d spent lying on the ground, buying time, how long had I lasted? Less than thirty seconds?

  Four blades sprung from the calf of his right leg. He extended it high above me, and they began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster, like the blades of a fan. Or a food processor.

  He had me in a headlock, but the rest of me was free to move. Gripping my baton with both hands, I swung it into the whirling blades with as much strength as my leverage afforded me.

  My baton went flying out of my grip, but the blades stopped. My heart sank as I saw them begin to rotate again, slowly.

  They didn’t return to the same blurring speed they’d been at before. A few seconds passed, and they retracted back into his leg.

  I might have been relieved, but I was still in his grip.

  He heaved me upward, positioning himself with two hands and one leg on the ground, the other leg holding me up high. My toes scrabbled to touch ground and fell short. The grip on my neck wasn’t perfect: it wasn’t cutting off my blood flow, it barely impacted my breathing, but it still hurt, and my neck strained with the weight of the rest of my body.

  I drew my knife and gripped the handle. Then I drove it at my throat. Or at Mannequin’s leg, which was folded around my throat. Same idea. I aimed at the ball joint, striking a mere two or so inches from my own face. Once, twice, three times.

  I was swinging for a fourth hit when he shifted positions. I couldn’t be sure if he had hoped to gradually strangle me, to leave me dangling until I started begging or if he’d been poised for something else, but he’d apparently changed his mind. He turned over, his leg unfolding from my throat at the same instant one large hand closed over my face.

  He whipped me around himself in one tight circle, then let his arm go free from the socket, the whirring sound of chain feeding out swiftly becoming distant as I hurtled across the room.

  I crashed into a pile of wooden boards that were riddled with nails and screws. The metal points jabbed at me but didn’t penetrate my costume. I tried to get my feet under me, but the boards only slid underfoot. His hand was still attached to my face.

  He began to pull me forward, no doubt to repeat the process. Half blind under the grip of his hand, I reacted in a heartbeat, slamming the point of the knife into the gap between his hand and my face.

  Tattletale had said it was strong enough to serve as a crowbar. I was glad to discover she was right. Between the pull of the retracting chain and the leverage of the knife, I freed myself from his grip, his fingertips scraping hard against my scalp. Flying back to him, his arm clicked back into place. I tried to blink a blurry spot out of my vision, only to realize I had a scratch on the right lens of my mask where I’d hit it with the knife’s edge.

  The pain from being thrown around was belatedly making itself known. Bruises, I could deal with. Just so long as my body moved where and when I needed it to. I felt the dull ache of a building headache. From where I’d been gripped in the headlock?

  Okay. Still in one piece, more or less. How much time had I bought? One minute? One and a half? Could I hold out for long enough? Could the bystanders? The moment my bugs arrived would be the moment I could begin my plan. I’d still have to survive after that, and there was no guarantee it would work. In fact, my gut was telling me it was a long shot.

  Thirty seconds to a minute. I was panting for breath, counting every second that he silently stared at me as something I should value.

  What was going on behind that expressionless mask? Was he coming up with a battle plan? Maybe, maybe not. He didn’t really need one. It could be that he was calculating how best to destroy me: not just killing me, but ruining me. There were enough ways he could do it. Inflicting lifelong scars and injury. Or he could go down the opposite road and murder the civilians, leaving me as the only one standing. Both were very real possibilities, both devastating in their own way.

  Or maybe, behind that hard shell, he was in the throes of mental anguish. Maybe he was spending every second of every day reliving the day he lost his family and his dreams to a nigh-unstoppable, malignant force.

  There was nothing I could do about his past. Whoever he had been before, he was a monster now. I had to pull out all the stops to try and stop him from hurting anyone else.

  It was time to enact battle plan number one, one of the two ideas I had in mind that almost definitely wouldn’t work. I set my swarm on him. Up to this point, I had kept them largely at bay, using only the bare minimum necessary to keep track of my surroundings. Now I smothered him, piling them on every available surface.

  It didn’t accomplish a thing, of course. He started running toward me, weapons at the ready. He wasn’t impeded in his movements, nor were his senses—sight or otherwise—impaired.

  I ducked beneath his first swing as he closed in, but I couldn’t avoid the follow-up hit. His second swing scraped off the armor on my shoulder and struck my chest. Beyond the momentary pain, I was almost grateful for it, because the strike knocked me further out of his reach.

  Some of my bugs managed to squeeze inside the slots where his weapons had emerged. The spaces didn’t perfectly match the bases of the blades, and the bugs were small. There was nothing organic inside the sheaths. Even the interior was completely sealed off. Still, I managed to get bugs into the mechanisms, lodging their bodies inside the finer workings or killing one another t
o spill ichor and their bodily contents onto anything that felt sensitive.

  Mannequin stepped back, and I watched as he retracted all of his blades, the slots they’d speared out of sealing closed behind them. A wave of pressure and heat killed off every bug and likely most of the gunk I’d managed to smear inside.

  Yeah, I hadn’t figured that would work. Plan one down.

  For plan two, I needed my baton. I could only hope it was in one piece. I used my power and my eyes to search the factory floor, while keeping my head still, so he couldn’t see what I was doing.

  My bugs were almost here, arriving in droves.

  I found my baton lying against the wall near where I’d been pinned by Mannequin. I’d have to get by him to get it.

  Fetch. I ordered my bugs, as Mannequin lunged for me again. I didn’t have a second thought to spare as far as telling them how. For now, I needed to survive.

  This time, his attack was frenzied. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was irritated. I hopped back out of reach of the first swing, then quickly backed up as he followed that up with a series of rapid rotations of his upper body, momentarily becoming a blender-whir of whirling blades.

  I was so busy trying not to get hit by the blades that I missed it when he tilted. He balanced on one leg and kicked out wide with the other, letting the chain out so it could stretch the seven or eight feet to me. I was knocked back onto the wood pile a second time, landing on the edge and falling to the ground a second later.

  He stopped spinning and retracted his leg, apparently unfazed after the dizzying act of spinning like a top. I saw my bugs tugging the baton, but Mannequin spotted them at the same time. He stepped back and placed one foot on top of it. With a kick, he sent it sliding across the floor, away from me.

  Fuck. I’d have to take the slightly less efficient route. I grabbed a stout two-by-four as I stood. It was old, dusty, damaged by years of exposure, and the screws that clustered in one end were rusted.