by James Maxey
I spread my arms and legs to control my tumble. I was falling toward the Doom Raptor’s distended belly. I twisted at the last second to land shoulder first, my body in a ball, rolling with the impact. I was grateful to the tree climbing portion of my ancestry for instinct kicking in to help me survive the fall. I made it to my feet in time to see Elsa Where only a few dozen yards overhead. I prayed she was too dizzy to be using her powers at the moment and was exactly where she seemed to be. I lunged forward, arms stretched wide. I caught Elsa and clasped her to my chest as momentum carried me over the curved slope of the Doom Raptor’s belly. I landed with a splash in the river, losing my grip on Elsa. I kicked my way back to the surface and found she was already floating there.
She looked at me with a worried expression. “I can’t believe we survived that fall. Are you okay?”
“Except for the internal hemorrhaging,” I said, trying my best to grin.
“If you can crack jokes, you can’t be too damaged,” she said.
“I tell myself that every day.”
I heard clanging footsteps above.
“You two all right?” Smash Lass called out, looking over the edge of the robot.
“Harry saved my life,” said Elsa, swimming toward some dangling cables and pulling herself up.
“I’ve been hurt worse,” I said as I also found a loose cable to climb.
“What happened to Technosaur?” said Smash Lass.
“She escaped in a flying eyeball,” said Elsa Where. “And before you ask, no, I haven’t hit my head. That’s an accurate account.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” said Smash Lass.
The sounds of sirens grew louder. Boats with flashing lights converged on the Doom Raptor.
“You should get out of here, Harry,” said Elsa Where.
“I thought I was under arrest.”
She crossed her arms. “You’ve earned yourself one favor by saving my life. Just one. Don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t.” I looked at Smash Lass. “You’re okay with this?”
She smiled. “I never saw you come back up after you landed in the river.”
“I promise you won’t regret this,” I said, before taking as deep a breath as my aching ribs would allow and diving back into the water. I swam beneath the surface as far as I could, then rose amid the shadows of dock pilings. I had open wounds where the Doom Raptor’s lasers had cooked me and the polluted waters of the river burned so fiercely I wondered if this would be my new origin story. Of course, with my luck, staying in the water any longer was more likely to lead to sepsis than new superpowers. I climbed onto the docks and made my way into the city.
Despite Elsa and Mica looking the other way, my odds of getting to any sort of safety seemed bleak. The general chaos of lower Manhattan provided me cover to move about for the moment. No one on the streets was engaging in casual people watching. There were cops, paramedics, and firemen everywhere, but they had their attention focused on the swath of damage left by the Doom Raptor. The few civilians on the streets had their necks craned upwards, looking at the shattered buildings and numerous flames. I wasn’t exactly invisible, but the few people who did look at me quickly looked away, not trusting their eyes amid the smoke and shadows.
Unfortunately, the same confused atmosphere that gave me a few moments of breathing room to find Jenny or the reverend also thwarted my efforts at spotting them. The Doom Raptor hadn’t made it all that far into the city, not even half a mile, mostly along a single street. In some cities, that wouldn’t have made for a very large search area, but in lower Manhattan the sheer verticality of the city worked against me. The damaged buildings on each side of the street loomed a thousand feet or more. Searching even one would take hours.
I picked a building at random and started climbing, hoping to get some perspective on the situation from a higher vantage point. Out over the water, the sky had turned an ominous shade of bloody orange as the sun crept over the horizon and illuminated the seemingly endless plume of smoke and dust blowing out of the city. I reached the top floor of one of the shattered financial services buildings. Except for the missing glass of the outer walls, the floor looked intact, save for overturned chairs and reams of loose papers blown about by the winds that howled among the broken buildings.
I swallowed hard. This destruction was all my fault. I’d had options. The second the reverend had revealed he wasn’t really an attorney, I could have notified the cops and placed myself back in their custody. Really, I’d screwed up even earlier. When I’d joined the Lawful Legion, Tempo had taken me aside, explained the logic of the Butterfly House, told me how it all made sense in the bigger picture. Every day, young teens discovered that they were bulletproof, or could walk through walls, or could melt steel by staring hard. While an optimist might assume that most of these super-powered individuals would use their powers for good, a more realistic view was that there was nothing keeping these people from hurting others, intentionally or not. Given how many people I’d hurt with my strength before going into the Butterfly House, I had to agree with him. I hadn’t been evil, but being born inhumanly strong hadn’t automatically imbued me with some superior sense of right and wrong. The Butterfly House was designed to make sure its graduates entered the world prepared to be heroes.
So why had I backed Val? Why had I agreed to help promote her book, to blow the whistle on a program I more or less thought was an okay thing?
Because it was Val. No one else was going to stand beside her. In the end, loyalty to a friend overrode everything else. If I had to do it all over again, I’d still stand by her side.
Which didn’t make it any easier to look down at the destruction left in the Doom Raptor’s wake. I’d fucked up big time. The responsible thing to do would be to turn myself in to the authorities and spend the rest of my life in prison. Which I could totally do, if not for the fact that someone had killed Cut Up Girl and tried to pin the blame on me. Until I fixed this injustice, I needed to be free.
As I contemplated this, I heard a woman scream, “Dios mio!” Jenny almost never spoke Spanish, but it sometimes came out in times of stress. I craned my neck, trying to figure out where the voice had come from. The woman cried out again, a long, quavering wail I could pinpoint as coming from the building across the street. I leapt blindly into the smoke, losing altitude as I flew across the broad avenue, trusting I’d find a handhold once I reached the other side. My faith was rewarded as I grabbed hold of a piece of rebar twisting out from the edge of a broken floor. I climbed swiftly, until I was back to the height I’d been when I first leapt.
“Jenny?” I called out.
“Help me!” a woman cried from the floor above. It wasn’t Jenny, I could hear that now. But looking for Jenny would have to wait. I leapt and grabbed the edge of the floor above me, swinging up, though as I did so the concrete slab tilted. I spread my fingers wide, reaching blindly for a handhold, finding purchase in a crack in the concrete. I pulled myself higher and saw that the whole floor was tilted at about a twenty degree angle. In the upper corner of the room was a woman in a housekeeper uniform, clinging tightly to a door frame, looking absolutely terrified. I could tell she thought if she let go she was going to fall into the abyss, though from my vantage point it seemed like it wouldn’t be difficult for her to climb to a more secure position. Still, when you’re terrified, it’s hard to see the best path forward.
As frightened as she was of falling, she screamed even louder as I came toward her. Her eyes had a strange expression, mostly fear, but also surreal confusion. I have that effect on people.
“It’s okay,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” She responded by screaming louder, though that probably wasn’t because of me. At that moment a three foot slab of concrete from the floor above us broke free and bounced against the outer edge of the tilted floor we stood on, causing it to creak as it tilted another degree or two.
I sighed. There was no time to calm her. Instead I ape-han
dled her, grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a good yank to break her grip on the door frame. I tossed her across my shoulder. She kicked and screamed and scratched at the open wounds on my back. I grimaced and trudged up the slab, fighting the temptation to drop her. The Doom Raptor had damaged the street side of the buildings. I hoped the interior was still fairly intact. I reached a stairwell and found the air within full of dust, but the stairs looked okay for as far down as I could see. I jumped down the stairs a flight at a time, terrifying my passenger into silence, though that hadn’t been my intention. I was in a hurry and we had a lot of floors to cover. It took me a couple of minutes to make it down to about the tenth floor, where I spotted a crew of paramedics giving oxygen to an old guy in a suit who’d collapsed on the landing.
“Got another one for you, guys,” I called out, setting the woman down. The paramedics looked at me with bulging eyes as the woman ran toward them. I gave them a salute and said, “Thank you for your hard work and dedication,” then charged through an open door, heading back to the missing windows. I clambered along the outer ledge, looking around. The sun was up now, though the smoke and dust created a haze that cut visibility down to a couple of yards. I was never going to find Jenny and the reverend in this mess. It was time to stop trying. Jenny had proven time and again she could take care of herself. She could blend into the crowds to make her getaway once she was done helping people. From what I knew of the reverend, he was more than capable of making his way back to Texas on his own. It was time to think about how I was going to escape.
Just then, there was a loud, familiar whoosh overhead. I slipped back into the building, pressing my back against the wall as the dust swirled past the shattered windows in a sudden vortex. I never saw him through the haze, but two seconds later, from below, I heard the name I expected to hear as a dozen people at once cried out, “It’s Golden Victory!”
“Shit,” I whispered, my heart shifting into high gear. I took a deep breath. He obviously hadn’t seen me. He probably wasn’t here looking for me, and was only here to rescue people. Honestly, though I was responsible for this mess, Golden Victory was far more qualified to clean it up.
Looking down the street I saw a subway entrance. I was pretty certain the trains would have been shut down because of the attack. It was time to take part in the only superhero travel more clichéd than running across rooftops and escape through tunnels.
Before I could make my move, a woman’s voice from behind me said, “You’re not easy to track down.”
I turned to discover a woman standing in the doorway, wearing a hooded cloak that concealed her face. I frowned. She was too short to be Jenny, barely four feet tall, and the voice, though feminine, had a growl to it that sounded as if the speaker smoked a dozen packs a day. My nostrils flared as I caught the scent of an animal I couldn’t quite identify.
I clenched my fists and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“My friends call me Bobbie,” she said.
“And what should I call you?” I asked.
“Your ticket out of here,” she said.
“I haven’t had much luck placing my trust in mysterious figures of late,” I said.
“You haven’t had much luck, period,” she said. “Not since you were taken away from our mother.”
I furrowed my brow at the words ‘our mother.’ “What are you talking about?”
“You know who I mean,” said the woman. “Our mother. Anastasia Moreau.” She pulled back her cloak, revealing a face covered in fine tan fur with dark stripes across her cheeks. Her eyes glowed orange with cat-like pupils. Aside from the fur and eyes, her face was mostly human. She spoke again, revealing sharp canine teeth. “Pleased to meet you, Harry. If you haven’t guessed from the family resemblance, I’m one of your sisters.”
Chapter Fifteen
Inhuman ShapeS
FAMILY RESEMBLANCE?” I asked. “You’re not even the same species.”
“We’re both half human,” said Bobbie. “And our human half was contributed by Anastasia Moreau.”
“Right,” I said, scratching the back of my head, trying to think of an objection to her claim. She was probably telling the truth. Like her Victorian ancestor, the current Dr. Moreau had been obsessed with creating human/animal chimeras. While the first Dr. Moreau been limited by the technology of his time, Anastasia Moreau had all the modern tools of genetic manipulation. She earned her PHD at the age of sixteen and went on to produce the most accurate map of the human genome to date. This accomplishment could have made her wealthy and famous, but, in classic supervillain fashion, she began daydreaming of creating the human/animal hybrids she thought of as masterworks and that everyone else thought of as monsters. Her genius had given her little reason to accept the common wisdom of lesser minds. If the world couldn’t see the advantage of creating chimeras, there was no reason to let small things like laws hold her back.
“Golden Victory is already here,” said Bobbie. “With a disaster of this scale, every superhero in the country will be heading this way. We need to get to safety before they hunt you down.”
“Why would they even know I was here?”
“Because you grew to the size of King Kong and fought a giant robot in the financial capital of the world?”
“I knew it was a stupid question the second I asked it.” I sighed. “Since you found me, do you also know where Jenny is?”
“Not a clue,” said Bobbie as she led me into the dark interior stairwell. “I’ve no idea what she smells like. After your fight, it was easy to follow your scent. You have a distinguished musk.”
“That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.”
“No diplomacy intended,” she said, her eyes glowing orange in the darkness. “You smell nice.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? I’ve never had anyone tell me that before.”
“You haven’t been hanging out with the right people,” she said, motioning for me to follow as she leapt down to the next landing, fluid as a cat.
“Why were you looking for me? How’d you know I’d be in New York?”
“We were already in New York,” said Bobbie. “We live here.”
“We?”
“My family,” she said. “Your family.”
“There are more of you?”
“Of us,” she answered. “And Mother has been wanting to speak to you for many years. When she was imprisoned, she said she sent messages through official channels requesting that you visit her. I guess they never reached you.”
“Yeah, they reached me. I ignored them. Moreau really had nothing at all to do with my life, and I thought it was better to keep it that way.” I was panting hard, trying to keep up as she zipped down the stairs. Adrenaline had shielded me from the pain of my injuries, but my body was shifting out of fight mode into time-to-lie-down mode. Every time I jumped to a new landing I worried I might collapse.
“When she escaped from prison and returned to us, her first command was that we should find you and bring you to her.”
I leapt down to the next landing and stopped as Bobbie ran on. I looked back up the stairs. We’d come down twenty floors, at least, maybe thirty. I didn’t want to go back up. On the other hand, I definitely didn’t want to follow Bobbie if she was leading me to Moreau. How could I elude her if she could follow my scent?
It took Bobbie only a few seconds to realize I wasn’t on her heels any more. I was still catching my breath when she emerged on the dimly lit landing below. “Are your injuries so great?” she asked.
“Not great,” I said. “Though we might be using that word differently.”
“We have facilities to treat you,” said Bobbie, climbing the steps. “The House of Love has everything you’ll need to be whole.”
“I see she’s better at branding. The first Dr. Moreau’s operating room was called the House of Pain,” I noted. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not eager to pay a visit.”
“You can’t turn yourself over to the old
-men,” she said. “Even if they treat your injuries, they’ll put you in a cage.”
“Maybe that’s where I belong,” I said, I swallowed hard. “Half of New York’s destroyed because I let myself get snookered by Technosaur.” I shook my head. “Go on without me. I’m turning myself in.”
“I can’t let you do that,” she said.
“I don’t think you’ve got much choice,” I said.
“If I have to use force to bring you to with me, I will.”
“Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re dumb enough to fight me. I’m sure you can run rings around me, but if I land one punch, you’re going down.”
“I sincerely doubt you could land one punch,” said Bobbie, moving closer to me, almost as if daring me to try to hit her.
“Whatever,” I said. “Let’s say you somehow knock me out. You sure as hell can’t carry me.”
“Not alone,” she said.
“You’re not alone?”
“Not for long,” she said. “When I first spotted you, I called my siblings.”
I clenched my jaw and took a long, slow breath. Of course she’d have reinforcements. They weren’t here yet, though, and Bobbie was only an arm’s length away.
“I guess I have no choice,” I said, softly, trying to sound as defeated as possible to put her off guard. Then, I swung with all my might, intending to coldcock her with a blow to the side of her head.
My fist passed through empty air. She ducked my blow easily, and answered it by leaping forward and raking my eyebrows with razor sharp claws.
“Fuck!” I cried out, in shock and agony, clamping my hands to my face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, calmly. “If you won’t come willingly, I must make sure you are unable to injure my siblings when they arrive.”
I pulled by hands away, but could barely see through the blood that flowed into my eyes. I wasn’t completely blind, but the whole world was dim, blurred, and tinted red.
