Worm

by wildbow

  I couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I knew I should make one or two more decoys before going ahead, but the conditions of the room were going from unbearable and dangerous to critical. I approached the windowsill as the next mass of bugs gathered, submerging myself in the midst of them, my hands on the window frame. I tried peeking through, but my hazy, ruined eyesight only offered me a glimpse of one blot where a single truck far to my left had a working headlight. I faced a small army; I was about to drop two stories to what had once been someone’s garden, now a muddy mess of dirt and detritus, and—

  One bullet hit me in the forearm, not too far from where Brutus had bitten me, months ago. I slumped onto the windowsill, cradling my arm. More out of desperation than anything redeemable, I forced myself forward between the broken planks and let myself drop to the ground below.

  The landing wasn’t as hard as it could have been, but it wasn’t gentle either. I was left writhing, dry heaving, much of my attention on keeping from screaming in pain and keeping the bugs all around me.

  I used all the residual willpower I could manage to turn over, putting my back with the armor of my utility compartment and the added fabric of my cape towards the ongoing gunfire from Calvert’s personal army. I covered the back of my head with my hands and fought the urge to cough. I doubted anyone would hear if I did, with the constant gunfire and the sound of something collapsing inside, but I couldn’t risk a coughing fit that left me blind to my surroundings or passing out.

  Now I was left with the task of passing through the perimeter. One of my swarm-decoys had reached the fence, and was apparently doing a good enough job of selling the possibility that it was me that they felt compelled to double-check with the occasional burst of machine gun fire. I commanded it to start climbing.

  I had six decoys now, with another in progress at the window. I’d planned to crawl, to get to the fence and find my way through, but with my wrist like it was…

  One of Calvert’s men lit another molotov and tossed it at the base of the fence where the decoy was climbing. It was obliterated in an instant, and Calvert’s men were forced to back away from the resulting bonfire.

  If Thomas Calvert was using his power to guide his men, to give them an advantage and give them directions that would help narrow down the decoys, then I’d inevitably face the same fate as the decoy had after I got to the fence.

  But he wasn’t giving directions. He was in the truck, watching. No radios were sounding with instructions, not yet. He had to protect his perimeter, keep me from getting to freedom… but he was in a reactive position, not an offensive one where he could command an attack and then make it so it never happened if the attack went awry. No, I’d weathered that initial attack.

  I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d weathered it, but I had.

  I crawled with three limbs, while my decoy formed a standing figure above and around me, then I joined the other decoys that were advancing on the fence.

  Another molotov sailed over the fence to strike the lawn on the other side, incinerating one decoy that had ventured too close. Again, I noted, the soldiers backed off.

  That wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The more they backed up, the thinner the defensive lines were.

  But I still needed to get to the fence and get over it without getting shot or set on fire.

  I still had more bugs arriving from the extent of my range. Being trapped like I had hadn’t given me a second trigger event. I wasn’t so lucky. But it had extended my range. I tallied the resources I had at my disposal, considered how many more decoys I could create…

  Then I reconsidered. No, I needed a distraction, and these slow-moving decoys weren’t that.

  The bugs I still had in reserve swept into the ranks of the soldiers, and I went flat for my own safety, covering my head.

  “Behind you,” one collection of bugs whispered to a soldier, my swarm-speak forming the necessary words. He whipped around to see nothing there.

  “I’m going to eat you alive,” another swarm spoke, somewhere nearby.

  “Crawl inside your body and lay eggs.”

  Calvert’s voice sounded over a dozen radios in the area, “She’s playing mind tricks. She’s still near the house, and she’s never killed or tortured before. Maintain the perimeter and do not use grenades.”

  Again, with the refusal on the subject of grenades. A reminder, even, this time. Was this a point where he’d split the timelines, bombarded the house with grenades in one reality and stuck to the guns in another?

  Or had he already verified that I had a counterattack in mind for the grenades? He could have employed them in an earlier scenario and had things go catastrophically wrong on his end. There had to be a reason he wasn’t using them instead of molotovs. Grenades would have been faster, given more immediate, definite results.

  Then there was the possibility that this tied into his alibi, that he didn’t want the Undersiders or even the Travelers to know he’d gone after one of them, and the use of several grenades would be too easily traced back to ‘Coil’. He would stick to an over the top arson, maybe hide the police reports and suppress the media. If I was in a territory owned by the Travelers, maybe they’d accept a price for keeping this quiet from the Undersiders.

  Or any combination of those things.

  Then I remembered how I’d escaped from the hospital bed after the Endbringer attack.

  The bugs continued whispering as they went on the attack, but their attack wasn’t a headlong rush with stingers and pincers. As I lay flat on the ground, arms shielding my head, I took a different tack. I raided.

  Bugs swept into pockets and pouches, searching the contents. First aid supplies, no. Gun magazines, almost too heavy.

  I noticed the bandoleers of the grenades that Calvert had alluded to.

  The decoys had forced the enemy to spread out gunfire. The soldiers were further diverted as my bugs tried to divest them of possessions, pushing at the gun magazines and attempting to slowly nudge them free of pouches. Spiders wove silk cords, and I chose my target, a soldier by the fence, between me and Coil.

  Long seconds passed as bullets hit the earth only a short distance from me. I waited, prayed that the next thrown molotov wouldn’t land near me.

  At my instruction, flying bugs carried a cord out, connecting a grenade on his bandoleer to the fence. Another connected the same grenade’s pin to the soldier next to him.

  “Lose the grenades,” my swarm buzzed, right next to him. “I’m pulling a pin.”

  The man next to him heard, stepped away, and the cord went taut. The pin slid free.

  He had the grenade free in a second, but he simply held the bar at the side of the grenade down.

  Damn.

  “Think fast. Pulling two more,” my swarm spoke. A benefit of speaking through the swarm was that it was hard to hear a lie in the tone.

  He realized that he had only the two hands to hold down the bars for three grenades, and tossed the one in his hands towards the house. The cord connecting it to the fence halted the grenade’s trajectory and it swung straight down into the waterlogged lawn on the far side of the fence.

  When it detonated, it ripped through a section of fence and sent soldiers scattering for cover.

  Be patient, I thought. I could have made a run for it then, but there was no use.

  “She’s pulling the pins!” the soldier who’d been near my target shouted.

  They began retreating, and the defensive line thinned out further. Some soldiers were standing on the far side of the neighboring property, now.

  “Need a visual!” someone shouted.

  A flare sailed through the air to land on the lawn, fifty feet to my right. The light it provided would let them see through my decoys. If they put one too close to me, they’d see my silhouette.

  More sailed my way, and I set to moving them before any landed too close to me.

  I maintained the pressure, an indiscriminate attack that Calvert couldn’t necessarily counter
. I repeated the process, roughly, that I’d used to get the one soldier to throw a grenade, aiming to knock down the fence on the opposite side of the property. I made the cord tying it to the fence too thin, however, and the grenade landed closer to the base of the house. The fence remained standing, but the soldiers backed away in the face of the dust, smoke, and hot air that billowed out from within the building.

  “I’m pulling your pins next.”

  “Crawl up your asshole and leave you some tapeworms.”

  “I’m behind you.”

  “I can have centipedes crawl beneath your eyelids. Chew your eyes out at the root.”

  “Ever wonder if a mosquito could pass on the H.I.V. virus?”

  The psychological pressure was important, too.

  “Do not throw the grenades,” Calvert’s voice sounded over the radios.

  The drawback of the psychological pressure was that many soldiers were now shooting indiscriminately at the property, and I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling cover. I began belly-crawling across the grass, using my one good arm and my knees.

  I felt an impact across my face. The briefest shriek escaped my lips before I remembered to clam up, managed to convince myself that it was only a clod of grass and dirt that a stray bullet had kicked up.

  Someone had heard. A female soldier, she was on the other side of the fence, not five feet in front of me, and her head had snapped in my direction as I’d let the sound escape.

  I barely had any of the pre-prepared silk cord left. I split the swarm around me into two, and sent one to my left. The soldier held her machine gun in one hand and fired at the running swarm, drawing a flare with the other hand. In the meantime, I was getting my feet under me, lunging.

  Dragonflies carried the silk cord between the wires of the fence. I didn’t go for the grenades on her bandoleer, but the can at her waist. They circled the pull-tab, and I held the other end of the cord, pulling.

  My first guess was that it was a flashbang, in which case it could leave my bugs stunned and me exposed. My second guess was that it was incendiary, in which case I’d be murdering someone.

  When it went off, I felt only relief. Smoke billowed around her as she called out to others, telling them I was near. I sensed her backing away, getting the canister free of her belt and tossing it aside, and had my bugs collect it and cart it her way. I crawled in the direction she wasn’t walking, using my power to identify where the soldiers were moving and using the smoke for cover.

  Scavenging used silk from previous attacks, my bugs arranged to pull more pins for smoke canisters.

  The end result was chaos. It was the best result I could hope for. With the smoke at the open area of the fence and the possibility that I had climbed over where the smoke masked things, they couldn’t be sure of my location, and they couldn’t shoot into the midst of their allies, so they were forced to retreat further.

  I sensed Calvert’s truck pulling away.

  Calvert could use his power to prune away possibilities that didn’t work for him, but only if he was aware of me, aware of my movements and how I was mounting my attack.

  His retreat left me wondering if he’d deemed this situation unsalvageable. Had he deemed this a loss?

  Was there another maneuver he had in mind? A bomb, a parahuman underling that he could sic on me?

  Or would he seek leverage elsewhere?

  My dad. The others.

  I suddenly felt the urge to get away, and get away quickly.

  My bugs hefted the items they’d successfully scavenged from pockets and pouches, carrying them to me. As the soldiers moved to cover the weak points in the perimeter, I struggled to my feet and walked through the smoke to the point where two of the temporary fences joined together. I used the keys my bugs had found and tried them, attempting to find the right key for the lock that linked the chain.

  There were only so many possible keys, especially when I narrowed down the options to the three from soldiers nearest this lock. It popped open on the second try, I removed the chain as quietly as I could, and then I bit my lip to keep from crying out as I shifted the two sections of fence far enough apart that I could slide through.

  My bugs carried the fuming smoke canister a short distance ahead of me, giving me some added cover to slip through the point where the enemy lines were thinnest.

  Their radios crackled with instructions from their captains, and the soldiers started tossing their canisters of smoke towards the house before they could be used against them. It didn’t matter. I’d already slipped past the worst of them. I approached one of the trucks that was furthest from the conflict. My bugs were on the soldier’s helmets, and I knew which direction they were facing, allowing me to stay behind them, using the soft soles of my costume to move in near silence.

  “Behind you,” my bugs whispered. The soldier ignored them as he’d ignored the taunts and threats that were echoing through the neighborhood, without cease.

  I slipped behind him and pulled his helmet off. He drew in a breath to cry out an alarm and only choked on the flood of flying insects that flowed into his nostrils and mouth. I was already dropping the helmet, switching my baton from my injured left arm to my right hand and striking the handgun out of his hand. I had to strike him in the head five times before he collapsed, blind, gagging and choking on the bugs.

  Maybe he was faking, maybe he was unconscious. It didn’t matter. My bugs swept over him and checked every pouch and pocket. I found his keys, then hurried over to the nearest truck.

  I found the right key and started up the truck.

  I’d turned sixteen without realizing it, not long ago. It was fitting that I’d be teaching myself how to drive right about now.

  Driving slowly so I wouldn’t call too much attention to the fact that I barely knew what I was doing, I pulled away from the scene.

  * * *

  I pulled over, pulled the emergency brake because I wasn’t sure how to park, then checked my satellite phone. No service. It made sense Coil would cut my lines of communication. I tossed it out the window. No use giving him a way to track me.

  We’d moved towards the beach from Coil’s place. It made sense the other Undersiders would be heading north, to their individual lairs.

  I was struck by an ugly connection between two thoughts. Calvert had mentioned he had other matters to attend to, and if Chariot’s teleportation device mimicked Trickster’s power, they’d had to swap something or somebody in. If he’d replaced me with a body double, he would want to stay in contact with her and help ensure things went her way with the other Undersiders.

  On the other hand, if Calvert was looking for a way to get leverage over me, my dad was one very vulnerable target that he was aware of.

  I was left to decide if I would go check on my dad or tackle the bigger, cape-related issues. It was a decision I’d had to make too many times in recent weeks.

  It would have to be the Undersiders and Dinah. I hated to admit it, but if my dad was attacked and I had the Undersiders there by my side, they could only help. If the opposite were true, my dad would hamper me.

  I disengaged the emergency brake and eased the truck into motion, fighting the urge to cough, knowing it would lead to wracking fits that forced me to stop in the middle of the street.

  I’d seen how involved Calvert’s maneuver had been at the debate. He had a grand plan, and it wasn’t necessarily the one he’d shared with us earlier. I was now a glitch in his system, threatening to unravel everything he’d put together.

  He had no reason to hold back, and he knew more about me than anyone I’d fought yet. He’d tried to strike at me directly, and I’d only barely escaped. I had little doubt he had other plans in mind, failsafes, traps and safeguards, and I had little choice but to run headlong into the thick of them.

  Monarch 16.12

  Finding my teammates wasn’t hard; Calvert was telling me where they were.

  He didn’t tell me directly. No, this was more a cas
ualty of being too careful, of putting too many secondary measures in place. He’d stationed soldiers to serve as lookouts at a wide perimeter around the Undersiders. I noticed one group, turned the truck to drive around them, and then noticed the second and third. They were three blocks away from the Undersiders, effectively surrounding my team, staggering their movements so only half were changing position at a given time.

  I wondered how much battlefield experience Calvert actually had, or if it had been too long ago to matter. Had he forgotten what it was like to actually be in pursuit of a target in the midst of a sprawling urban environment? He probably could have tripped me up a fair bit more by dropping the perimeter and leaving me to try to track down my teammates.

  No less than three radios for one squad buzzed with the noise of voices. The three soldiers picked up their radios and replied. Okay, so he was checking in with each squad. So maybe it was roughly as inconvenient as trying to find my teammates in the middle of nowhere.

  Calvert had dropped me in Genesis’s territory. It was about as far away as I could be from where I wanted to be, about ten minutes drive down Lord Street and then a ways towards the water, if someone was driving quickly. I wasn’t driving quickly; I spent far too long in the wrong gear, for one thing, I was clumsy with the car’s controls and I was forced to drive even slower because the roads were treacherous. Damage to the road was hidden in the areas that were still flooded, where my bugs couldn’t necessarily see them. Other roads were slick where there was just enough water to raise the oils up from the crevices of the road’s surface to the point that tires would slip on them.

  On the plus side, driving while blind wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be. I was relying on my swarm, of course, but even then I figured the lack of sight would be more of an impairment.

  After noting where the squads were deployed and coming to the conclusion that Calvert was using his soldiers to track the movements of my team, I had to stop to contemplate the situation and finally got around to the coughing that had been looming for a few minutes.