by wildbow
Parian and Foil were hugging. Odd, to see Foil hunched over, leaning on Parian for support, her forehead resting at the corner of Parian’s neck and shoulder. The crossbow had fallen to the ground, forgotten.
I wanted something like that. To have a team close, to hold someone. I hadn’t had something like that in a good while.
Chevalier was a distance away, his cannonblade plunged into the ground so he didn’t need to hold it, a phone to his ear. He was talking, giving orders, and demanding information.
Revel was stock still, not far from him. I watched as she stepped back, leaning against a wall, then let herself slide down until she was sitting on the street. She placed her head in her hands.
I’d never known her to show any weakness. She’d always been on the ball, always the leader. I knew how much concussions sucked, and I’d seen her carry on and contribute to the Behemoth fight when she was reeling from one.
It hit me harder than I might have expected, to see that.
Tecton was standing a distance away, almost frozen, his eyes on the screen of his armband. Golem did the same, but he wasn’t still. He paced, looking around for guidance and finding none, then turned back to the screen, watching.
Glancing at the images from a distance, I could see the figure, the speck visible on the long range camera, surrounded by a golden nimbus.
I wasn’t close enough to make out details. Only staccato flares of golden-white light. On the third, the screens fizzled, showing only brief gray static, then darkness.
Another target hit. He’d taken his time on that one, measured the attacks.
I took out my earbud before the report could come in. Not my focus right now.
Instead, I reached for my phone. I dialed the Dragonfly.
Would the A.I. be able to cope? Saint had apparently pulled something.
If there was any hint he fucked us here, he’d pay for it.
The phone responded with a message. An ETA.
My eyes turned to Rachel. She was more agitated than Golem, her attention on her dogs. She used a knife to cut away the excess flesh and retrieve the animals from the placenta-like sacs within their bodies, and the actions were aggressive, vicious, savage. Her expression was neutral, but I could see the way the muscles shifted in her back, beneath the sleeveless t-shirt she wore, the tension, the way she was hunched over.
The attitude fit the Bitch I’d been introduced to, way back when I’d first joined the Undersiders, not the Rachel I’d come to know, who’d found a kind of peace.
Angry, defensive, bewildered. Scared of a world she didn’t comprehend. Aggressiveness was the default, the go-to route when there weren’t any answers.
It dawned on me. I sympathized. Given a chance, given something to do in that same vein, hacking through dead meat with a knife for some defined purpose, I might have acted exactly the same way.
She flinched as I approached, as if I were invading her personal space. When she turned and glanced at me out of the corner of one eye, glowering, the tension faded.
I drew my own knife and started helping. Bugs flowed into the gap and gave me a sense of where the sac was. I was able to cut without risking cutting the dog inside. It helped that my knife was sharp.
We were both sweating by the time we finished. Rachel had already been sweating from more physical exertion, and her hair was stuck to her shoulders at the ends. The German Shepherd got free, walked a polite distance away and then shook herself dry.
I looked at my phone, my gray gloves crimson with the dog’s blood. There were incoming messages. Updates on the damage, the disaster, and on Scion’s current location.
I ignored them, looking for the Dragonfly’s status.
Minutes away. It had already been headed into the area by default, tracking me by my GPS, ready to maintain a constant distance until I was prepared to call for it.
That was fine. I started walking down the length of the street, my back to the others, to the Azazels and the heroes. Rachel fell into step just a bit behind me, her dogs and Bastard accompanying us.
Parian and Foil were still hugging. I paused as we passed them, tried to think of how to word the invitation.
Parian’s eyes weren’t visible, hidden behind the lenses on the white porcelain mask she wore. I hadn’t thought she was looking at me, but she shook her head a little.
Good. Easier. I left them behind.
The Dragonfly started to land in an open area, an intersection of two streets. Moments later, the ground began to crumble. The craft shifted position, coming perilously close to striking a building as it avoided falling into the hole that had appeared in the street. A trap.
Rachel boarded the craft. As I waited for the dogs and Bastard to join us, I looked into the pit. As deep as a six or seven story building was tall.
I turned away, boarding the Dragonfly. I plotted a course, then took manual control of the craft.
The A.I. was better at flying than I was, but flying meant I didn’t have to think. Didn’t have to worry about what I was about to find out.
Rachel didn’t seat herself at the bench along the wall, or even at the chair behind mine. She sat down beside me, on the floor of the Dragonfly, her back against the side of my seat, the side of my leg, staring out the narrow side window. It was physical contact, reassurance, seeking that same reassurance from me. Her dogs settled on either side of her, Bastard resting his head on her lap.
We had the whole country to cross. Every few minutes brought more visuals, more reminders of what had occurred. Highways grew choked with cars. Countless vehicles had stopped at the sides of roads, at the edges of fields and at the fringes of small towns.
Innumerable people running, seeking escape. Except there wasn’t anyplace good to escape to.
No. That wasn’t true. There was.
But the degree of the damage done was becoming clear. Before we even reached the east coast, I could see the damage done to the landscape. Smoke was only just settling around the cracks and fissures, fallen bridges and ruined highways. People were making concerted attempts to move, to leave, but every step of the way brought more difficulties, more forced detours. Some had abandoned cars altogether, wading or swimming across rivers to make their way.
Every step of the trip revealed more devastation, successively more vehicles choking roads and highways, forging paths around impassable roads. More and more people were forging ahead on foot, in crowds, because walking was faster than travel by car.
More helicopters, marked with red crosses, had taken to the skies. Travel by ambulance wasn’t doable.
This was one place. One moment’s attack. The display in the cockpit was showing more locations hit. Libya, Russia, France, Sweden, Iran, Russia again, China…
Time passed. Forty-five minutes from the point in time I started paying attention to the clock, searching for a yardstick to try to track the scale of what I was seeing on the surface. How much worse did things get in five more minutes of traveling? In ten? It all seemed to get exponentially worse as the Dragonfly took flight. It wasn’t just that we were getting closer to the point where the attack had hit. Enough time had passed that people could react, now, realizing just how severe this was. All of the power of Behemoth, mobility almost on par with Khonsu.
The psychological toll of a Simurgh attack.
These were the people with a strategy. Doing just what I’d be doing if I were one of the unpowered. The world was doomed, so they sought to flee to another world. Problem was, there were tens of millions of them, and the escape routes were scarce at best.
The best known escape route: Brockton Bay.
I felt my heart sink as we approached the coast. Mountains I’d grown up with weren’t there. I let the autopilot take over as we got closer, approaching an airspace choked by rescue aircraft.
I didn’t trust my own hands.
It had collapsed. The blast had only struck the northern edge of Brockton Bay, then changed orientation, striking through the bay itself to
slice through the very foundation the city sat on. Everything had been dropped a solid thirty or forty feet. Tall buildings had collapsed and only the squatter, sturdier structures and those fortunate enough to come to rest against other buildings were still mostly erect.
Folding and collapsing, the entire city had been shattered, no section of the ground more than twenty-five feet across remained fully intact. The landscape rose and fell like waves, petrified and left frozen in time.
The portal tower had fallen, but the portal remained there, oddly bright, too high to reach on foot. Work crews were struggling to erect something beneath, so the civilians could finish their journeys. The new arrivals were alternately joining in with the construction and making their way inside by way of rope ladders.
Elsewhere, there were capes and rescue crews trying to contain the fallout around the scar. A structure had been raised to seal it off, but the collapse of the city had released the contents. A lot of containment foam was being deployed to slow the spread of a pale patch of earth, and there was one spot of fire that didn’t seem to be going out.
But the most eye-catching thing was a thin, scintillating forcefield that was holding off the water. It was taller than any building that had stood in the city, an artificial dam. Every few minutes, it flickered for a tenth of a second, and water would flood through to seep into the gaps and fissures. In time, I suspected, the water would cover everything in the area but the tallest buildings and the hills. Arcadia High might stick around. Maybe.
I recognized the rainbow hues. It was the same force field that had been intended to protect the Protectorate headquarters. Leviathan had torn the structure apart at the roots, and the tidal wave had knocked it into the city proper. In the time since I’d left, they’d repurposed the fallen structure and the forcefield setup.
Not, apparently, to try to block Scion’s attack. No. This was more to stop the water, to break that initial wave, so it wouldn’t simply sweep the ruins out to sea.
I could only hope they’d done similar things elsewhere, to minimize the damage.
We circled the city twice before I gave the go-ahead for the A.I. to start descending.
My second sense extended through the area as we approached the ground, extending out to the bugs that were scattered throughout the ruined, shattered city. I immediately set them to work, searching, scanning, investigating.
I changed the course, dictating a final, slow, sweep of the city.
Not everyone had made it. Stupid to think they might.
My dad’s house was gone, collapsed. Nobody inside.
Winslow High, gone.
The mall, the library, Fugly Bob’s, the boat graveyard, my old hideout, gone.
My old territory, unrecognizable. The Boardwalk was underwater now.
It didn’t even take him seconds to do.
Too many dead, not enough who were merely wounded and unable to walk. Humans were so fragile in the end. I stopped the Dragonfly and stepped out to seek out the first wounded. My bugs signaled rescue teams to get their attention.
The wounded here could have been my dad’s coworkers. People he went out to drinks with. They could have been Charlotte’s underlings.
So easy, in the midst of it all, to lose track of the fact that these were people. People with families, friends, with dreams, lives and goals.
Golem had said something like that, hadn’t he?
How many people had simply been erased in the wake of something this random, so instantaneous? So inexplicable? I still wasn’t sure what had happened. Tattletale was supposed to fill people in, but she hadn’t gotten in contact with me.
Or had she? I’d taken my earbud out. I looked to my phone, looked for transmissions.
A burst of messages, following just after takeoff. From the Chicago Protectorate, people who might have been my teammates if I’d ever been inaugurated. More messages, from Chevalier and the Brockton Bay teams.
I didn’t read them all. My eyes on the phone, I pointed the search and rescue to the next batch of wounded. I knew it was cold, but the corpses would have to wait. There were living people to find.
There were no shortage of corpses. The number of living people, by contrast, well… we’d see what happened in the next twenty-four hours.
The number of messages declined about thirty minutes after takeoff, then stopped altogether. Everyone who might have wanted to talk to me had found other things that needed doing. Other priorities, personal or professional.
Which was exactly why I was here. I’d just arrived at that conclusion earlier than they had. I put my phone away.
My mouth was pressed into a firm line as I helped the rescue workers.
We lifted a corner of a second floor’s floor, making room for someone get under and start retrieving a pair of women. Rachel whistled and pointed, and her German Shepherd seized the floor in its jaws.
The rescue workers seemed to hesitate with the dog’s presence, so I took the lead, crawling inside on my stomach. I used my hands with the arms on my flight pack to move enough debris that we could slide the second woman out.
There were more. Almost without thinking about it, I let myself slide back into the mindset I’d held for the past two years. Sublimating what I wanted to do in favor of doing what needed to be done.
Minutes ran into one another as we worked. I could see Rachel growing progressively more short-tempered, slower to give the orders, hanging back, rushing with the jobs.
That ended when we rescued a child that had a puppy wrapped in her arms. She clutched the limp animal like it was a security blanket, not crying, not speaking. She only stared at the ground, coughing hoarsely whenever she had to move. Her parents had been on either side of her, and neither had made it.
The paramedics fit her with an oxygen mask, but they failed to pry the animal from her arms.
I looked at Rachel, but she only shook her head.
Rachel’s power healed animals, but this one was gone.
From the moment we left that girl to be loaded onto a stretcher and carried off to firmer ground, Rachel moved a little more quickly, a little more decisively.
We finished with one site where the ground had collapsed and people had fallen into a depression, and then moved on to the next area. Some heroes were working alongside the authorities to try to rescue people from a building that had partially tipped over.
Clockblocker was there, along with Vista. I joined my powers to theirs in finding people and opening the way. Frozen time was used on panels, which were subsequently layered, so that one could offer support if another stopped working prematurely. Vista reinforced areas, then opened doorways, as I designated rooms where people were trapped within.
A golden light streaked across the sky in the wake of Scion’s flight, just along the horizon. A thinner beam being directed from Scion to the ground as he passed.
The aftershock of his passing took time to reach us. Steam started to billow, but the forcefield absorbed it.
The shuddering of the ground was more problematic. The entire city rumbled in response to the distant attack, a blow that was no doubt slicing deep into the earth’s crust, forcing everything to resettle.
The building we were working on was among those things that resettled. I watched as the building started to slide where it was resting against the building beside it, slowly descending, building speed.
My flight pack kicked in, and I flew through a window. I could feel the glass scrape against my scalp and the fabric of my costume.
I found one person, a twenty-something guy, took hold of their wrist, and pulled them behind me, running and using my flight pack at the same time.
Tearing him through the window meant slashing him against the shattered glass, and the weight wasn’t something I could manage with my flight pack. The building fell down around the people on the ground as I fell too far, too fast.
The wing on my flight pack was still broken. Couldn’t trust the propulsion.
I let him
fall into a tree instead, from a solid two stories above, and then focused the rest of my energy into pulling out of the plunge.
The building was still crumbling as I landed a distance away. The rumble brought other, smaller structures down. I stood and watched as it continued its course.
There’d been seven more people to rescue inside. The other buildings in the area that had been caught up in the domino effect had contained three more. That was just in my range. How many more were dying as he continued towards the mainland, cutting deep into the plate of land that the landmass was perched on?
He hadn’t even been near us. Closer to New York or Philadelphia than anything. More lives taken, purely collateral.
When the dust settled, I moved in to help the people who had been on the ground. Vista and Clockblocker had protected most, between a dome and a shelf of land to provide shelter. Rachel, for her part, had helped others run in time, snatching them up with her dogs, but I counted three more dead, one dying.
Seeing them like that, bleeding, still warm, it caught me off guard. A kind of anxiety rose in the pit of my stomach, like an impulse to do something coupled with the frustration of knowing that everything I could manage to come up with was futile, hopeless. I either couldn’t do anything or I couldn’t think of what to do. It put me in mind of being back at high school, before I had my powers. Of being a child, powerless and unable to act.
I saw the image of Parian holding Foil in my mind’s eye, and it was joined by an almost sick feeling of mingled relief and fear. I knew exactly what I wanted and I was terrified to seek it out.
I could feel that same impatience Rachel had expressed earlier, but I couldn’t turn my back on this. I got the guy out of the tree and found him okay, but for a broken arm. He didn’t thank me, but I let myself chalk that up to him being in shock. I almost stumbled over to the latest injured and I attended to the wounded until the medics pulled themselves together, got organized and relieved me.
