Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I didn’t finish my sentence. Something constricted around my throat, fingertips digging into the windpipe, and the air ceased to flow. I struck behind me, hoping to catch my attacker, but there was nobody there.

  I realized what was happening too late, when my feet were hauled off the ground. In the span of a second, I soared up six or seven stories, the counterweight to a nine-foot tall man in featureless white armor who plunged downward to land in a heap on the ground.

  Mannequin.

  He’d repaired himself this fast? Did he have spare parts lying around?

  I reached up and tried to wind my arm, wrist and fingers around the chain, to alleviate the pressure on my throat, and to give me a grip in case he decided to let go.

  Mannequin hauled himself to his feet and the chain that stretched from his arm to the rooftop and back down to me made me bounce with every small movement. He advanced on Amy, who backed away.

  I had to do something.

  Calling on the bugs that had covered Lucy, I stirred up a cloud to grab Grue and Bitch’s attention, then pulled all of the bugs into the alleyway where Panacea and Mannequin were.

  The way I was hanging, with Manneqiun gripping my neck from the back, I had a vantage point to witness what came next. If my bugs weren’t enough of a signal to the others, Amy’s scream of pain was. Mannequin caught up to her and plunged a knife through her hand, pinning it to the wall.

  He left her like that, in enough pain that she couldn’t stand, but unable to drop to the ground because her hand was impaled. Turning, he faced the incoming stampede of Grue, Bitch and the four dogs.

  While I struggled to escape, drawing my knife with my free hand while gripping the chain with the other, I sent my bugs in to assist. Same tactic as last time. My bugs drew out lines of silk and plastered them around him. I focused on his free hand and his legs, aiming to hamper his range of movement.

  Something was different from last time. I wasn’t sure if I would have known just going by the naked eye. But I knew almost right away by the lengths of the silk I was drawing around him. His arms were bigger, and the weight of them was making his body hunch forward a fraction.

  I tried to scream, to call out a warning, but I couldn’t breathe to do it. I would have used my bugs to draw words, but the pair were moving too fast to read anything I threw their way. I drove the knife at the hand that held me instead.

  Bitch ordered Bentley to pounce, Mannequin raised his arm, and the deafening boom of a gun firing filled the alley.

  The shot was powerful enough that Bentley was knocked off course. Mannequin simultaneously leaped and retracted the chain that still stretched to the rooftop, swinging across the alley and escaping collision by mere fractions of an inch.

  Bentley and Bitch sprawled on the ground.

  I hacked at the hand that held me again while Grue threw darkness over the pair of them.

  My swarm-sense gave me a picture of what happened next. Grue dodged to one side, and Mannequin followed him, his arm unerringly moving to follow his target. My bugs were then blown out of the air as another shot was fired at Grue and Sirius. I could feel it spread out, hitting multiple points on the pair of them. A shotgun?

  Lucy pounced from where she’d been moving in Sirius’ wake, and she landed half-on top of the chain that held me. I surged another three or four feet up, and the hand caught where it fixed on a loop of metal that had been sunken into the corrugated metal of the roof. This was where the chain was threaded.

  I hacked at the hand again, while gripping the metal loop. The knife caught inside a joint, and I worked at it, trying to bend it or pry the joint apart. I couldn’t really see what I was doing, and the bugs I had on the surface of the hand weren’t as useful as I’d hoped.

  Below me, Lucy and Mannequin fought, the smaller Bastard dancing around the edges, trying to find an avenue for attack, or hampering Mannequin’s movements. Lucy managed to get on top of him.

  A third gunshot sounded. There was a long pause, where nothing and nobody moved, and then a fourth gunshot. Lucy slumped over, crashing on top of Bastard.

  Mannequin stood, taking a moment to use a knife to cut at the threads that wound around his arms and legs. When he was done, he disconnected the chain that ran to the hand that held me aloft. I was left hanging from the metal ring.

  He watched me for several long seconds, his head raised. He abandoned his grip on the back of my neck, and his arm dropped into his waiting hand. The chain fed through the metal loop, running over my fingertips, before it was gone.

  A few seconds passed, and I realized he was still staring up at me, one finger pointing at me.

  Me? He wanted something from me?

  No, he turned away, striding past Amy, who was still impaled to the wall by her hand, and stopped when he stood over Bitch.

  Drawing another knife from a point I couldn’t see on his body, he stabbed Bentley in between the eyes.

  He turned to look at me one last time, and then he was gone.

  My hands were tired from riding the dog, and while my gloves afforded me some traction on the metal loop, the fabric seemed to slide under my sweating fingers. I tried to haul myself up enough to get one leg over the edge of the roof, and nearly lost my grip.

  My hands wouldn’t give me enough of a hold, and I didn’t trust my knife to bite deep enough into the concrete to serve any better. I let it fall and raised my other hand to the metal to get a better grip.

  Again, I tried to swing one leg up. This time I got it over the roof’s edge.

  I ran pell-mell for the door that led into the crowded building below me, using bugs to get the general shape of the hallways and find my way. Some people shrieked as I ran into and through the crowd, out the front doors and back to the alley.

  Grue was standing, pulling the knife free from Amy’s hand so she could slump to the ground. Bitch knelt on the ground beside Lucy, while Bentley lay on the ground, the knife still embedded in his skull, and both Sirius and Bastard hung back, limping as they moved, blood leaking from a dozen dime-sized wounds in their flesh.

  A low growl tore free from Bitch’s throat. But I knew before I looked that Lucy hadn’t made it. Two shotgun blasts directly to the chest cavity.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You led him right to me!” Amy accused us, sounding more than slightly hysterical.

  “I… he slipped past the silk tripwires I put around the area. And they can find you,” I said, the words clumsy, made worse by my sense of disorientation over the surprise attack and the distraction of the pain in my neck. “Anyways. They can find you anyways, with Cherish.”

  “My hand. Hurts,” Amy said, ignoring my fractured explanation.

  “Heal yourself,” Grue said. He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on the knife he’d pulled from her hand.

  “I can’t! I’m immune to my own power.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “Panic won’t get us anywhere.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you all!” Amy said. Then she ran. I didn’t have the air in my lungs or the heart to chase her, and both Grue and Bitch were too hurt to give chase. I could run and catch up, sure, but what would I accomplish?

  For now, it was better to be here, with my teammates, and make sure they were okay.

  “She’s dead,” Bitch said, quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “We’ll get them, okay? We’ll fuck them up.”

  She looked at me, and the anger and hatred that had colored her expression before was gone. She looked forlorn.

  Grue handed me one of the knives, then handed one to Bitch.

  It was short, only four and a half inches long, and there was a word inscribed on the steel with a smoky texture, so the six large capital letters and the row of smaller characters were pale against the gleaming, bloodied steel.

  CHANGE.

  2200/2012164

  “Bitch has her deadline for her test, and Amy does too. Ten in the evening, and I think it’s for tomorrow. Jack
said his test always involved someone changing themselves in a way that costs them something.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Bitch growled. ”Fucking tests. Killing Lucy, stabbing Bentley.”

  A minute passed as we pulled ourselves together, checking our injuries.

  “He left me alive,” I said, as the realization dawned on me. ”He didn’t kill any of us, but he had an excuse and the ability to kill me. Why didn’t he?”

  “The world revolves around you, doesn’t it?” Bitch snapped.

  I was trying to think of how to reply to that when the thought struck me. The world, my world. My people. Mannequin had been nearby when I was in my territory.

  “He’s going to hurt me by going after my gang.”

  13.x (Donation Interlude; Aisha)

  “Sam! Sam!” Celia’s voice was grating and nasal.

  “I’m coming!” The heavyset man grumbled, as he made his way into the living room. Celia sat on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The white of her t-shirt and panties was a stark contrast to her dark skin. Sam leered at the woman. She was good-looking for her age, slim, though her breasts sagged behind her shirt without the benefit of a bra.

  “You said you were five minutes ago, asswipe. Takes you five minutes to find your wallet?”

  “Needed to piss. Your fatass friend was in your bathroom, so I pissed in your sink.”

  Celia kicked under the coffee table to strike his shin.

  Sam just smiled and stepped back. ”Kidding. I went off the fire escape.”

  “That’s not any better!”

  “It’s all water and shit down there. Any place that doesn’t smell like hot garbage smells like a toilet. Here. Stop bitching.” He threw a plastic movie rental card at her.

  She cut open a plastic wrapped block of powder and shook a small amount of the powder onto the coffee table. She used the laminated card to cut it into lines, a set on each side of the table, with none in front of her.

  “You’re not having any?”

  “I told you. I’m pregnant.”

  “You’re too old to be pregnant,” Sam commented. She kicked him again.

  “Not that old!”

  Jennifer emerged from the washroom and stopped in the doorway, staring at the scene.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually use any of the stuff.”

  “Jen, hon,” Celia said, “We’ve got enough to go around. Even if we only sold half, we’d be made in the shade for five or ten years.”

  “And you just took it?”

  “Leaders of the Merchants got killed, everyone else decided to run off with what they could carry of the stockpiles. Sam and I decided to play it smart. Sam got his truck, and I guarded the stash from the other assholes. Paid off.”

  “I… what is it?”

  “Little bit of everything. Come, sit. Try some.”

  “What is it?”

  Sam seated himself at the table, by one set of the lines of powder. He picked up a pinch and put it on his tongue. ”H.”

  “No way,” Jennifer said. She dropped into one of the felt-covered chairs at the far end of the room.

  Aisha had to hop out of the way so she didn’t get sat on. She watched the dialogue between her mother, her mother’s boyfriend of the week and her mother’s new friend with a dispassionate expression. Seeing this scene, she didn’t really feel much. A little disappointment. Embarrassment. Disgust.

  No, it was less this scene and more the discovery that her mother was pregnant that nailed her in the gut with a profound kind of sadness.

  The first place her mind went, before joy at the idea of having a brother or sister, before anger at her mom for letting it happen and not using protection, was hope.

  “Sam, do you have any papers?”

  “Rolling papers? I thought you were going clean.”

  “It’s just weed. I need to have something.”

  “Isn’t that bad for the kid-in-progress?”

  “It’s weed, dumbass. Nothing they tell you about it is true. Kid isn’t going to wind up addicted from birth or anything, ’cause it’s not addictive. Right?”

  “Sure,” he reached into his back pocket and slipped a packet to her, along with a dime bag.

  Aisha bit her lip. Maybe hope was the wrong word, because she didn’t really feel anything on the subject. But she knew it would probably be better if her mom miscarried and the kid was spared this shit.

  How much of Aisha’s problems were because of her mom’s lack of self-control and how many others were because of this environment? She’d grown up with a mom who’d never mentally or emotionally aged past fourteen or fifteen. A new man in the house every week or two, with his own idea of how things should work, Celia generally content to let him run things however he wanted.

  Aisha tried not to think about the men. It was like having a broken arm; so long as she didn’t move it, so long as she didn’t think about it, it was okay, a dull throb in the back of her mind. Something she could ignore. But even a stray thought could remind her that the arm was broken, and then it sometimes took days before she could get out of that head space. There was no distraction that worked, because the fact that she was consciously looking for a distraction only reminded her of what she was trying to distract herself from.

  Of course, there was no way to avoid the countless reminders in everyday life that would remind her of Guy, or Bridge, or Darren, or Lonnie. Thinking about a broken arm was one such reminder.

  Being ignored by her teammates and told to go to her room and play along for everyone else’s sake was another. How many afternoons had she come home from school, only for her mom or one of her mom’s boyfriends to shoo her off or bribe her to leave the apartment for a bit?

  Pissed her off. She didn’t need that from her brother, too.

  “Come on, Jennifer,” Celia urged her friend. She took a long draw from the spliff she held in her fingers. “Oh fuck! Sam, you jackass! This isn’t just weed, is it?”

  “Thought it was.”

  “There’s a kick to it. Amp or something.” Celia took another puff. ”Amp. Hey, Jen, join in. Have some of what Sam’s having.”

  “But H is fucking scary,” Jen protested.

  “So you hear. But why is it scary?”

  “It’s addictive.”

  Aisha tuned out the sound of her mother and Sam cajoling the woman and walked over to the table. Her mom didn’t notice her. Nobody ever noticed her, and they noticed even less ever since she’d gotten her power. It was like a dark joke, a grim comedy. Just when she’d started to figure things out, grow up and catch people’s eye, the world went to hell and she got her powers. Now she became invisible if she lost her concentration.

  Not that it was invisibility, really. It was memories. People forgot her as soon as they saw her, to the point that they didn’t register her presence. She could feel it, her power rolling over her skin, jabbing outward, invisible to sight, touch and anything else, making contact with the people around her and pushing those memories away.

  And like her metaphor comparing her memories to a broken arm, her power seemed to respond to the attention of her subjects; the harder they tried to remember and focus on her, the faster she slipped through their minds.

  The metaphor applied in another way, too. Her power operated on its own, doing its thing, and if she very casually noted what it was doing, without pushing it forward or holding it back, she could feel it doing something else. As if it was ready to push away memories that didn’t relate to her, exactly. It never did. Any time it built up enough that it came close to doing anything, she noticed, and it retreated like a turtle pulling its head into its shell.

  Frustrating. Her power didn’t do anything because she wanted it to. It worked only if she surrendered to it, let it act on its own. Pushing it to work harder had the opposite effect.

  How easy would it be to just carry this stuff away? She could hand it to Coil for some brownie points, and he could decide what to distribute. It wou
ld be out of her mother’s hands, and money would become a limiter on her mother’s habit. If the drugs weren’t around, maybe Sam would leave.

  Maybe, if Aisha got rid of the drugs, her mom would have an excuse to get things back on track, somehow. The city was paying people who joined the clean-up crews. Three square meals, simple and bland but they gave the essential nutrients, and they gave you twenty dollars for nine hours of work. Fuck around or slack off, and they just kicked you off the crew for the day, no pay.

  Idle hopes. Aisha had spent long years wishing her mom could pull it together, dating back to just after the divorce, when a bad day was still better than most good days were now. Or maybe that was nostalgia and a child’s eye view.

  No. If she got rid of the drugs, it was more likely that someone would erupt in anger. Sam or her mom, getting violent, verbally or otherwise. It would do more harm than good.

  She sat down on the coffee table, directly opposite her mother. Reaching forward, she plucked the spliff from her mother’s lips and dropped it, grinding it under her toes.

  Her mother blinked a few times, then reached for her rolling papers.

  Aisha used her hand to cover the papers and whispered, “No.”

  Again, the dazed blinking. Her mother asked, “Sam? Got any more papers?”

  “I just gave you a full package.”

  “The hell? Maybe that hit me harder than I thought,” Aisha’s mother giggled.

  Aisha stared her mother in the eyes. She didn’t deactivate her power. ”Mom. You gotta stop.”

  “Where are the rest of the papers, Sam?” her mom asked, oblivious.

  “Kitchen.”

  “But I don’t want to get up. I’m comfy,” Celia whined.

  “You keep going down this road, your kid is going to be born without a face or something,” Aisha said, her voice quiet. ”You know how hard school was for me? Even as far back as kindergarten, I couldn’t sit still. Teacher tells me three things, and by the time they’ve gotten to the third, I’ve forgotten the first. And Brian doesn’t have any of that.”

  “Go get some papers, Sam. Sam McSamsam. Sammy-sam. Samster-”