Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  So, yeah, I backpedaled as quick as I could as Snarl came rushing on all fours, barking aloud, right at me. I dropped into a low crouch as she dug her claws into the abused floors of the coffee shop one last time and vaulted herself my way, muzzle-first. I stood between them in the frame of the shattered storefront, and I waited.

  Then, at just the right time, I leapt.

  She crashed right through where I’d been, and right into the space where Gatorina was coming up behind me. The pair of them smashed into one another. They were the dumb muscle of their group, and their packmates valued them for their brawn, not their brains. The two of them tangled up in a snarl with one another, blood up, hackles raised, good and mad, and I just let them go at it. Bloodthirsty pack instincts riled up against bestial alligator predation, and the Womenagerie’s two most feral members fell on each other, a tangled, wrassling, hissing, biting mess, scrapping with one another to see which one got to fight me.

  It was a time-honored superheroic tradition to use a bigger, dumber opponent’s aggression against them. It was practically a lesson out of Protectors 101, and I was feeling pretty good about myself for pulling it off!

  Right until Stripe tried to claw her way to my belly button from behind me.

  “Oh,” I managed to get out, grunting in pain and lurching off of her claws, twisting, kicking the ground to leap upwards and away from her. I landed awkwardly—and please trust me, it’s been ages since I landed awkwardly—but on my feet and scrambled away faster. Out here, in the Quad, I’d have space to move, space to breathe, space to fight. I was lucky, and Stripe paused to tear at her teammates.

  Stripe’s instincts for rulership, her bio-programmed need to establish dominance over her fellow predators, made her stop and pull her packmates apart, claws digging into them and yanking at them by the meat of their shoulder. She was stronger than they were. She roared, and their scrapping stopped.

  Instincts.

  I thought about those instincts while I felt warm redness flowing down my back and saw my own blood trail, clear as day, on the sidewalk. Those meat-eater instincts. Combat-bioengineered-mutate instincts. Carnivore instincts.

  Those instincts were gonna really do a number on me at this rate.

  “This…doesn’t feel like it’s going well,” I admitted to myself, and then, because the universe hates me, it went a little worse.

  “Campus security,” I heard over a tinny megaphone, two of the dumbest words I’ve ever heard put together in a single sentence.

  Great. A civilian going the wrong way. Anyone armed with, at best, pepper spray and polite-but-stern warnings was a civilian, whether they had on a short-sleeved shirt with a badge on it or not. Incredibly, our well-intended security mook wasn’t the only taxpayer standing and staring instead of screaming and sprinting.

  I saw a student in a Northwestern U hoodie over on the grass, jabbering a play-by-play into their phone and recording instead of hoofing it. I wondered if they were working up ‘superhero fight’ as their excuse for missing class, or if they were just wanting to make a quick buck selling a meta-fight to the internet. Kids these days!

  The security guy got my attention again, as the Womenagerie got slowly, menacingly, to their feet. They composed themselves. They stared at him in mild disbelief. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m, uh, I’m going to have to ask you to leav—”

  Stripe’s roar rattled the world as it interrupted him, a potent, wild, thunder rolling from her mouth. My heightened senses picked up the scent of her fury, hints of the raw meat—lamb, maybe?—she’d devoured for lunch, and, a heartbeat later, the acrid stink of an underpaid campus security guard’s urine as he wet himself.

  I understood, they were scary gals. But I had to help him, anyways.

  “Get outta here, man!” I leapt clean over Stripe, Snarl, and Gatorina, twisted as I arced overhead, and put myself between them and the guard. They hadn’t noticed the student nearby, but I figured nobly interposing myself between them and the guard would buy his well-intended-but-maybe-not-tactically-brilliant self to beat a hasty retreat.

  I didn’t hear his keys jingle-jangle as he sprinted, though. I didn’t hear an acknowledgement from him. I didn’t hear his feet slapping sidewalk and fading into the distance.

  Ugh. That meant he had to be frozen. Stuck. Locked up. It happened sometimes. Hard to blame him.

  I knew I had to keep the blood-crazed ladies’ attention on me, instead of him, though. The Protectors would pull my communicator bracelet and reservist ID card for sure if I let someone just straight up get eaten. I dropped into a combat-ready crouch, nice and low, and I prepared to fight back with two of the greatest weapons in my arsenal: kicking people in the face and making fun of them.

  Stripe came at me fangs first, and I sprang into action. My soccer kick turned into a backflip as I leapt along with it, a metahumanly powerful attack with my whole body dedicated to it, a flashy Gainer-kick that was also brutally effective when it landed just right. My foot clipped her jaw just so, slapping her mouth shut and sending the tip of her tongue flying in a spray of red as she reeled backwards and fell, out cold.

  “What’s’a’matter?” I cartwheeled away from Gatorina and Snarl as they hissed and snapped and rushed me in a crimson fury. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Now, I get it. It wasn’t my best work, but, really, the trick to a good combat quip isn’t the quality of the material, it’s the tone. You’re not out to, y’know, actually impress anybody with your rapier wit—they wanna kill you either way, right, or you wouldn’t need to be combat quipping!—you’re out to infuriate them, distract them, make them sloppy.

  And then you’re out to be fast enough they miss you. Barely.

  “Kill you,” Snarl roared, hot spittle flying as her jaws snapped shut inches from me.

  “Gut you,” Gatorina’s tail narrowly missed me, breaking pavement.

  “Hate you,” Snarl barked and swiped with her claws, catching the trailing tatters of my shirt.

  “Hate you,” Gatorina agreed, teeth clacking together with more strength than a steel trap.

  They rushed in unison, and I pinwheeled away, trying not to think about how much blood I was losing. As their claws dug divots into the sidewalk for them to scramble and turn to give chase, they both got suddenly blindsided and doused with a cloud of orange-dyed pepper spray.

  “Oh no oh jeeze oh no oh man oh jeeze oh heck.” The security guard shook his can and winced away from it as he thumbed the top of the spray canister again, sending another wave their way.

  Even at my distance, having just tried to make myself a little breathing room, I felt my eyes burn and mouth fill with fire. I knew those two had senses as sharp as mine, and I knew they were getting it point blank. The whole world held its breath for a second, waiting to see if they’d turn and tear him limb from limb. I did trigonometry in my head to figure out if I could intercept them, if they tried. Ugh, trig.

  Instead, we got lucky. The pair of them went berserk again, lashing out blindly at the nearest thing they could: each other. Not just a short, predatory tussle this time. Not just an indignant Gatorina, mad that Snarl had leapt on top of her clumsily, no. This was a fight. Pure instinct, pure anger, pure confusion and blindness. Fur and blood flew.

  The security guy held down the button until his canister was empty, then squinted at his handiwork, still holding the can gingerly, like it might blow up. He peered through one hand to see what he’d done with the other, then, beamed, wide-eyed. I scrambled his way, and figured I’d sweet talk him, put hands on him, guide him away, and then go deal with the nearby student, too, if they hadn’t high-tailed it outta here yet.

  “Hey, buddy,” I gave the guard a broad smile. “Getting those two to fight each other is a grade-A, genuine, superhero move. Nice work. I think you’re an honorary member of the Prote—hngh!”

  That wasn’t what I’d meant to say. I mean, not the last bit. It was just the sound that came out as a fist thumped into me f
rom behind, accompanied by an under-the-breath snarl of exertion. A big fist. A strong fist. A metahuman fist, hitting me as hard as any metahuman ever had (and I’d been hit by more than my fair share, if you ask me), the type of punch that sent me flying sidelong through the air.

  In all the ruckus and noise of Gatorina and Snarl going at it, I hadn’t heard Flicker blink back in, and I hadn’t heard her reinforcement rushing me from behind.

  My sloppiness went through my mind while my mind almost went through the dumpster next to the campus coffee shop. I slammed into it face-first rather inelegantly, did my best to scramble out of the way of their follow-up on instinct alone—nobody has a reason to hit you that hard and stop at one punch—and narrowly managed to get underneath, and away from, said follow-up. As my attacker’s fist punched through the side of the dumpster and left them stuck, even if only just for a moment, I gaped up at them where they loomed over me.

  “SmiloDonna?!”

  She answered by kicking me, and harder than she’d punched me. It took every bit of reaction time I had, every ounce of metahuman strength, to halfway block, halfway roll with that punt. It sent me flying in a big, lazy arc this time, giving me an opportunity to reflect on our complicated relationship as I blacked out.

  She was like me. Hell, she’d been like me before I’d been like me! She’d practically written the book on turning over a new leaf.

  SmiloDonna had been Ligress’ most devoted follower, and the bravest of the Womenagerie when it came to speaking up, guiding her decisions, steering the group towards more than just vicious survival. When Stripe had challenged and killed her, SmiloDonna hadn’t stuck around to watch them turn meaner, and she hadn’t killed Stripe in turn; she’d left.

  She—an eight-foot tall, bio-engineered, anthropomorphic sabertoothed tiger mutate—left behind her lab-crafted brood mates, turned away from the only family and way of life she had ever known, and she’d left.

  She had shown up at Teen Protector HQ, their big, dorky, clubhouse with the flags and the statues and the training facility and the FlashJet landing pad, and she had knocked on the door and turned herself in. It was the bravest, dumbest, thing I could imagine. A known international fugitive from justice, a bestial outlaw wanted for a hundred crimes in a dozen countries, a girl who’d grown up knowing only meanness and a fight for survival and the brutal realities of racism, manipulation, inhumanity, and tooth and claw…had given herself to the authorities. It didn’t matter that she could never have a normal life, she didn’t want a life of brutality and preying on the weak, so she had reinvented herself.

  She’d promised never to claw again, never to bite again, never to kill again. She’d trained herself, trained hard, trained alongside Protectors and Teen Protectors like Southpaw and Bushido, to overcome her primal instincts and feral fighting style, to teach herself discipline and finesse, to teach herself how to protect others with just her strength and speed, not her predator’s weapons.

  She’d opened the door for a no-good alley cat like me to try and be better, too. SmiloDonna’d spoken up for me when Catseye went straight and took me with her, when I found myself leaving behind a life of crime, when I tested the waters of doing good for others and trying to get the shining knights of the world to trust me, bandit or not.

  SmiloDonna, who the world had only ever mistreated, including with her creation itself, was one of the best people I knew in a world filled with shining paragons of justice and righteousness. She was my hero.

  And—this occurred to me as I landed on the roof of an environmentally-friendly hybrid, good for four grand, tops, that was parked at the charging station right up front, as the glass shattered and the metal crumpled and the car alarm brought me all the way back to wakefulness with a sad little squawk before it died—now she was running with the Womenagerie again and trying to beat me to death for some reason.

  “Smiley, what’re you doing?” I rolled out of the wreckage of the car just as she landed on it, fists first, and punched the engine block out the bottom of the car.

  “Why are you back with the—woah!” I bent over backwards as she flung the hood of the car at me, Frisbee style, and it missed me by a hair and skipped off to chonk into a wall somewhere behind me.

  She pounced again, and I rolled sideways to avoid it, sprang to my feet, and was gratified to—at least—see the security guard high-tailing it in the distance. Stripe was still more out of the fight than not, slowly getting herself to hands and knees at best. Snarl and Gatorina were twisted around each other. Flicker was blinking from one side of their fight to the other, tugging when she could, trying to break them up, flashing over to check on Stripe. I knew my biomonitor wristband had to be going crazy, and some small part of me, in the back of my mind, found relief in knowing The Protectors were on their way. Things could be worse.

  SmiloDonna smashed into me again, a freight train with fur and oversized fangs, sending me reeling away, skipping like a stone and tumbling, flailing, to a stop.

  Oh, right. Things could be better, too.

  I shook my head and got shakily to my feet. I knew I was concussed because I was being sloppy and feeling distracted, and I knew that being sloppy and distracted was going to get me more concussed. I was in a failure spiral, and I didn’t want to be. Especially not a lethal one. Especially not to a friend.

  “Smiley, would’ja just, friggin’, say something?” I let my frustration and fear come out as exasperation instead. Being snarky helped me focus.

  “C’mon, what’s your manifesto?” I ducked, dipped, sidestepped, and slipped a flurry of punches, every one of them a wild, furious, haymaker.

  “You gals here to rob the campus bookstore?” I cartwheeled away from another two-fisted groundsmash.

  “Mad about tuition getting hiked last semester?” She tried to grab me and wrestle me down. I slithered and wriggled and twisted free, grappled her back.

  “Protesting unfair adjunct pay?” I clambered around behind her as she flailed, trying to go for a chokehold. I wove my limbs around her extremities, clung to her neck, and remembered Bushido’s jiujitsu training and the hours atop hours spent at Teen Protectors headquarters, sparring, drilling, and working…on…submission…moves…waitaminute!

  Several things hit me at once, and, for a change of pace, it wasn’t fists.

  One: Smiley’d been at most of that training and sparring and drilling, herself, and she sure as spit wasn’t fighting like it today.

  Two: even fighting savagely, she wasn’t fighting savagely. She was brutish and sloppy, but she wasn’t using her claws, wasn’t using her teeth, wasn’t as blood-mad as Snarl, Gatorina, and their predatory leader, Stripe.

  Three: holy crap you guys I feel a collar under here.

  Right there, around her neck, invisible where her mane of golden-brown hair meets her thick ruff, SmiloDonna had on a collar. A collar that was noticeably warm to the touch. A collar that buzzed softly against my hands and forearm. A collar that held—I knew all too well—black-market, supervillain-style, technology.

  A collar like I’d worn, like all the Teen Protectors had worn, not that long ago.

  Mind control.

  Sweet, brave, SmiloDonna was trapped. Trapped in her own body, forced to obey some outside force’s commands, but not quite entirely lost to them, not to the point she’ll take a life or bloody her claws. Listening for it, tailoring my metahuman hearing to filter out distractions, ignore SmiloDonna’s snarls and heavy breathing, to ignore the snapping and hissing of Snarl and Gatorina’s fight, to ignore Flicker’s increasingly manic attempts to stop them, I heard it. High-frequency. Well past the edges of what human hearing could pick up. The unique signature, the unique tone, of the mind control devices L.E.G.I.O.N. used.

  Smiley flailed, unable to dislodge me. I held on and looked around, glared around, angrily; indignant on their behalf, pissed off just thinking about my own collar, about the lack of autonomy it brought, both figuratively and very, very, literally. I remembered the di
stinct whine of their localized control projectors, the villain-mounted units that had reinforced the beams. I remembered the awful things I’d had to do when L.E.G.I.O.N. had pulled the strings and the Teen Protectors and I had been their puppets.

  Time froze for a second as my baleful gaze landed on the nearby student. The one standing in place. The one who hadn’t run away. The one giving a commentary and videoing the whole mess from their smartphone.

  That was a field coordinator, or I’ll eat my hat. Signal boosting as a comms relay, while also keeping their L.E.G.I.O.N. bosses apprised of the situation, real-time.

  “Hey!” I hollered in my best Protector voice, which, I’ll admit, isn’t very great. “Hey, you!”

  That’s not how, I mean, that’s just not, y’know, how any of the Protectors talk. But sue me. I’m a reservist.

  Holding onto Smiley’s ribs with my legs, left arm wrapped around her neck, I sat up straight and pointed dead on at the hoodie-clad “civilian” and their studious camera.

  “You! Freeze! You hear me?! Don’t you friggin’ move!”

  So, of course, they moved.

  For a gun.

  The agent yanked a sleek pistol from their voluminous NWU hoodie and opened up. Laser beams began to sear at me, leaving dazzling afterimages and that tell-tale L.E.G.I.O.N. stink in their wake.

  SmiloDonna’s instincts carried her to juke this way and that, shying away from the too-bright light, presenting a hard target, turning herself into an indignant cat dodging water-bottle squirts. I rode her like a rodeo bull, and never quite got laser tagged.

  Instincts.

  L.E.G.I.O.N. and their tech couldn’t change who the Womenagerie really were, not deep down inside. They hadn’t been able to make SmiloDonna a killer, hadn’t been able to keep Gatorina and Snarl from going bestial-bloodthirsty and tangling each other up, hadn’t stopped Flicker from being a bit of a flirt. Just like with the Teen Protectors, they could bring out the worst of us, they could order us around up to a point, but they couldn’t wipe us out entirely, couldn’t truly reprogram us.