Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “You said it yourself, a while back. It’s a mistake to underestimate me. You want another shot at it, it had better be really damn good. Because if it isn’t, I’m going to survive, I’m going to get away. And then I might break your jaw for real. For starters.”

  I stood, removing the baton from her mouth and stepping away, to give her room to stand. Leaning against the wall, I pressed the button and collapsed the baton into the handle. I stared at her.

  Working her jaw, she stood and glared at me. She either didn’t have a response for me, or she did and her jaw hurt too much for her to try giving it. None of the others were jumping into the middle of this.

  In the face of the silence, I offered one final comment, “I think I’ve already covered what happens if you want to continue this vendetta. Now I’m going to offer you a deal. Number three, I think, and my deals with you are usually pretty fair, if I may say so myself.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “I fucked up, you fucked up, whatever. Insult for insult, blow for blow, I’d like to think we’re even. So now I’m going to trust you to have my back. I’m going to put myself in more situations where you have a prime chance at fucking me over, backstabbing me, catching me at my most vulnerable. Because we can’t function as a team any other way.

  “I’m going to treat you like a damned teammate, Rachel, but I’ll go one step further. You think you can put this behind you and satisfy yourself with what you tried to pull earlier tonight? Cool. Because if you’re willing, I’ll come with you to help take care of your dogs. I’ll bring fucking lunch, if you want it. That’s the deal I’m offering you, pissed as I am right now. I’ll be your damn friend.”

  She looked away, down at the ground, scowling.

  “Take it or leave it.”

  She decided to leave it, apparently. Bitch stomped away, slamming the door the moment Bentley passed through it, leaving the rest of us standing there in the rubbish-strewn apartment building.

  Grue sighed audibly and looked over our group, “We’d better go. We should decide what we’re going to do with Shadow Stalker, now.”

  “We could keep her,” Imp spoke.

  Regent shook his head, “Nope. There are drawbacks to this, and one of them is that I lose control of anyone I’m controlling while I sleep. Better to get rid of her on my terms than have her trying to shoot me in the throat while I take a nap.”

  “And it’s kind of fucked up,” I spoke.

  “I thought you were all-in,” Regent said.

  “I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” I retorted. “This kind of mind control-”

  “Body control,” Regent interrupted, his tone bored, “Her mind still belongs to her.”

  “Semantics. This kind of mind control is pretty high up there on the scale of fucked upness. People are going to respond to that. It might be the nudge they need to start responding to us with lethal force. Think of how different tonight would have played out if Dragon and Miss Militia hadn’t held back.”

  “Sure,” he shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t know why you’re arguing with me. I agree, we should get rid of her.”

  “What did you do, back in the old days?” Tattletale asked.

  “Kept three people I used regularly, with my sister’s help. But this is fine. Look, watch.”

  Shadow Stalker stood, lowering her hands and arms from around her head, and walked over to the door. She faced Regent.

  “I’m letting you go,” he spoke.

  And then he did. She dropped to all fours on the ground, grunting. A second later, she was loading her bolt, spinning to point her crossbow at him. She stopped before firing.

  “There’s a catch,” he spoke. “My power? Once I’ve figured someone out? It’s a lot easier to control them, after. Any time you come near me, I can do this. I can use my power and retake control in the blink of an eye.”

  He had her raise her crossbow and point it at her temple. It was a tranquilizer dart, but the meaning seemed pretty damn clear.

  “Next time I get control? I’m keeping you for a full day. Maybe two, if I feel like pulling an all-nighter. And here’s the funny part,” there was no humor in his voice, “I’m going to do it even if I’m in civilian clothes, if my power tells me you’re in range. You won’t even know when it’s coming. You’re now a liability to the Wards, and you won’t ever know when or where I’m going to get control again…

  “Unless you leave. Skip town. Join another team.”

  She nodded, slowly. The movement was jerky, which was peculiar. Was he giving her limited control of her own movements?

  “Now let’s walk you off to the other end of the city before I release you. I don’t think you’re quite stupid enough to try and follow us, but I think my teammates would be more comfortable if they were sure.”

  Shadow Stalker turned and walked through the door.

  Regent looked at us, shrugged. “Good enough?”

  “She might be mad enough to come after someone else in our group, but yeah. Good,” Grue said. “Let’s go deliver the stuff.”

  ■

  We didn’t meet Coil in the underground base, and the people surrounding him weren’t all the same uniformed mercenaries that had made up his entourage in our prior meetings. The meeting place was at the south end of the Docks, near the border to the downtown area, and it was closer in appearance to the refurbished, ramshackle building where I’d reunited with the Undersiders than anything else.

  The building was an old quadruplex, and it had been reinforced with metal panels, sandbags and plastic sheeting to keep the interior crisp and dry, much as the other building had. Small rooms with bunk beds filled half of the lower level, with a bathroom, kitchen and living room taking up the rest.

  Finding the lower level empty, we headed to the second floor and found an open space supported by two metal pillars. There were a half-dozen mercenaries with Coil, as well as a collection of people who looked like they had come from every walk of life. Teenagers, professionals, and two guys that might have been capes – one thin, short guy with brown skin and a tattoo around his mouth, depicting a mess of sharp teeth penetrating the skin of his cheeks and lips. The other was burlier, shirtless, and wore a rusty, old fashioned looking mechanical rigging around his hands, with a bear-trap jaw plate. The frame seemed set up to hold metal claws around his fingertips while allowing his hands the full range of motion. He had a spiked collar of much the same style.

  Coil sat in a black leather armchair, with a laptop set on the table beside him. Dinah was there, too. She sat at the base of the chair, on a cushion just beside Coil’s feet, picking at the threads of her white dress with a dazed single-mindedness that told me she had probably received her ‘candy’ pretty recently.

  “Undersiders. Tattletale informed me you were successful, despite complications. May I see it?”

  Tattletale stepped forward and handed Coil the USB thumbstick. He plugged it into the laptop, then turned the computer so the middle-aged man to his left could type away.

  “Data’s corrupted, sir. Looks like the download was interrupted at the ninety-seven percent mark.”

  “Can you fill in the blanks?” Coil asked him.

  “Probably. Will take some time. There’s encryption. Good encryption. Maybe a few days, with the full team working on it?”

  “Most likely it is Dragon’s work,” Coil spoke. “Let’s assume it’ll take a week, minimum. Perhaps Tattletale will be able to assist.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Priority number one, I want the data on the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

  I felt a chill, but didn’t say anything. Was he intending to hire them? It would be a huge mistake in my book, if he was.

  Regent asked the question for me, “The Slaughterhouse Nine?”

  “At least some of their members have been seen in town, preying on the locals, disrupting recovery efforts. The recent chaos makes the city a playground for them,” Coil spoke. “One of my teams is bound to run up aga
inst them soon.”

  “How likely is it?” Tattletale asked. She tilted her head in Dinah’s direction. “Can you ask her?”

  “I suppose.” Coil put his hand on Dinah’s head, stroked her hair, then slid his hand down the side of her face until he could place his fingertips under her chin, raise her head to look at him, “Pet?”

  It was disturbingly intimate in a way I’d rather not think about. No, not intimate. That was the wrong word for the impression I was getting. Possessive. I looked away.

  “Yes?” Dinah asked.

  “Likelihood that one of my groups encounters the Slaughterhouse Nine?”

  “Who?”

  He moved to take the laptop, and the middle-aged man stepped back to let him. He typed for a few seconds, then turned it around so Dinah could see. It was a gallery of images.

  “Bonesaw.” he spoke. The girl on the screen looked barely older than Dinah, maybe the same age as Aisha. The image showed her wide-eyed, a spray of dried blood painted her face at a diagonal.

  “Shatterbird.” A dark-haired, brown-skinned woman with a helmet covering the upper half of her face, in a beak shape. I was reminded of Iron Falcon, the boy I’d tried to help, who’d died in the Endbringer attack. From what I’d read, Shatterbird usually used her power as the Nine arrived in a city, to maximize panic and terror. I supposed they were flying under the radar for now. Fuck, I’d have to do something about my costume, just in case.

  “Crawler.” No portrait, this time. It was a still from a surveillance camera, a misshapen silhouette, not even humanoid, in a shadowy area. I’d come across stories about him when I’d been researching possible superhero names for myself. Not pretty.

  “Mannequin.” Another long-distance shot. The figure was standing by Bonesaw in the photograph, with other hulking figures within the shadows of the background. He stood almost twice her height, and he looked artificial. His body was in pieces, each section wrapped in a hard shell of ceramic or plastic or white-painted metal – I couldn’t be sure. His joints were a mix of loose chains and ball joints. A Tinker with a body-modification fetish. I couldn’t say how much of the transformation was his own power and how much was Bonesaw’s work.

  “The Siberian.” A woman, naked from head to toe, her body painted in alternating stripes of jet black and snow white. She had gone up against the Triumvirate – Legend, Alexandria and Eidolon – on a dozen occasions, and she was still around to talk about it. Or around, at least. From what I’d read, she didn’t talk.

  “Burnscar.” Younger, maybe an older teenager or a young-looking twenty-something. She looked almost normal, with her dark hair badly cut, but then I saw the vertical row of cigarette burns marking each of her cheeks, and a faint glow to her eyes.

  “Hatchet Face.” This was one I hadn’t even heard of. The man didn’t wear a mask, and his head was shaved. He looked like he had been beaten, burned and just plain abused so often that his face was as much scar tissue than flesh, and he didn’t look like he’d been handsome to begin with.

  “Jack Slash.” Jack looked like someone on the attractive side of average, his dark hair cut short and styled with gel. His beard and moustache were immaculately trimmed so that each had a serrated edge, and his shirt was wrinkled, only half buttoned so his hairless upper chest showed. He had kind of a Johnny Depp look to him, though he had more of a widow’s peak, a longer face and lighter eyes. Good looking, if you looked past the fact that he was a mass murderer. He held a small kitchen knife in the photo.

  There were parahumans who were fucked up before powers entered the picture, like Bitch, and there were parahumans who became monsters after they got their powers, like Bakuda. Then there were the really dangerous ones, the people who had probably been monsters before powers were even on the table, and then they got worse.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, you had Bonesaw, who was like some kind of artist, as psychopaths went. The sort of person that drew other lunatics to her, just because they wanted to see what she would do next. Even that wouldn’t normally work as a dynamic, but as I understood it, Jack somehow managed to play them off one another and keep the group more or less intact. He was familiar enough with the psychology of his group and just plain charismatic enough to keep them from killing one another.

  Which wasn’t to say they didn’t. There were only eight members in their group at present, and the turnover rate was pretty damn high, because they had a tendency towards recklessness, infighting and showy displays. They thought nothing of descending on an elementary school, just because they could. When the heroes came for them, they came with lethal force.

  “Mmm,” Dinah said.

  “What is it, pet?” Coil murmured.

  “It’s him.”

  “Who?”

  She pointed at the screen, at Jack Slash. “Him.”

  “You’re going to have to explain it to us, pet. What about him?”

  “He’s the one who makes everyone die.”

  I shivered. What?

  “Everyone here?”

  Dinah shook her head, her hair flying out to either side. “Everyone. I don’t understand. Can’t explain.”

  “Try,” he urged her.

  “Sometimes it’s in two years. Sometimes it’s in eight. Sometimes in between. But if he’s alive, something happens, and everyone on Earth starts to die. Not that everyone doesn’t die anyways but they die really fast when that something happens, all one after another, and in a year almost everyone is dead. So I said everyone, if that makes sense and a few live but they die pretty soon after anyways and-”

  “Shh, pet. I think we understand what you’re saying. Quiet now, unless you think of something important. We need to consider this.”

  Silence reigned for a few long seconds. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “His power isn’t all that, I don’t think,” Grue spoke, slowly, as if considering the words as he spoke. “Space warping effect, so any blades he’s holding have an edge that extends a horrendously long distance, all with the optimal force behind the swing. Swings his knife, cuts through an entire crowd. Doesn’t make sense that he’d be able to murder everyone on Earth.”

  “Unless he somehow cuts the planet in half,” Tattletale mused.

  That was disquieting.

  “No,” Dinah spoke. “He doesn’t.”

  “I think we need more numbers if we’re to understand this, pet. What is the likelihood that he succeeds in this? To one decimal point.”

  “Eighty three point four percent.”

  “You said if he’s alive. What if we killed him? Now? To one decimal point. If I use my power.”

  “Thirty one point two percent chance someone kills him before he leaves the city, if you use your power. It doesn’t happen until fifteen years from now, if you do.”

  “So it still happens?” Coil asked.

  “Yes. Always happens.”

  Tattletale spoke up, “He’s the catalyst for something else, then.”

  “Is it always successful, pet? This something that kills everyone on Earth?”

  She shook her head, “Not always, not all the way. Sometimes more people live. Sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands, sometimes billions. But millions or billions always die when it happens.”

  “If I were to send the Travellers? How likely would they be to kill him?”

  “My head hurts.”

  “Please, pet, this is important. To one decimal point.”

  “Twenty two point six percent. Thirty point nine percent chance some of them die.”

  “And the Undersiders?”

  “Eleven point nine percent chance they succeed. Fifty five point four percent chance they die if they fight those people.”

  Coil sighed, then straightened. He looked at the middle-aged man, handed him the computer, “I strongly recommend you get what information you can on the group. Any detail in the PRT records could be invaluable. Lose sleep if you have to.”

  The man took the laptop, swallowed, and then
offered a quick bob of his head. The others in the assembled group around Coil looked just as alarmed by what they’d overheard.

  “We should contact the local heroes,” Grue spoke. “Let them know what’s up.”

  Coil nodded, slowly, “I’ll look into it. That said, I think the numbers illustrate one thing. You are not equipped to fight that group. If you encounter them, you-”

  “Sixty percent,” Dinah muttered.

  “Sixty percent, pet?”

  “Sixty percent chance the Undersiders encounter some of those people.”

  Coil turned to look at us. “So you’re likely to encounter them. When that happens, you run. Cede any territory, abandon any job. I would rather you were alive than successful in a job.”

  “Got it,” Grue spoke.

  “In the meantime, we move on to the next phase of my plan,” Coil spoke. “You may be wondering about this location, how it is similar to the new headquarters I provided you. I have outfitted these areas to be your stations, points from which you will operate, work to seize and keep territory. I have several more. If you’re amenable, I would have each of you take one of these stations for yourself. Grue, this would be your station, shared with Imp, which I assume is alright?”

  Grue looked around, “Big place and a lot of beds for two people.”

  “More on that later. Rest assured, I can provide staff, help. I expect you’ll wish to find and recruit people of your own. Contact me about funds – I will ensure that anyone you hire is paid well.”

  Grue nodded.

  “Regent? Your territory is near Grue’s, close to the water.”

  Regent nodded.

  “Bitch is absent?”

  “Interpersonal stuff,” Grue replied. “She’ll be back.”

  “A shame. Your other headquarters, where I moved your collective belongings, that will be her station. Barker and Biter here showed up for the Endbringer fight, and I got in contact with them. They, alongside these three young individuals,” he gestured to the two parahumans, and three college-aged kids who looked rather intimidated, “Will work under her. Barker and Biter profess to be fearless, and should have little difficulty managing the dogs, even when Bitch’s abilities are at work. The men and the young lady I’ve provided have some degree of training in veterinary medicine or handling dogs. Let her know this. She is free to accept them or refuse them as she sees fit.”