Worm

by John McCrae

  More than anything else, though, the two of them had the look of people who had seen half their immediate family brutally and senselessly torn apart over the course of one terrible hour. As though they’d had their hearts torn out of their chests and were somehow still standing. It wasn’t that I had seen anyone in those circumstances before, but that look existed, and they had it.

  It was painful to look at. It reminded me of when my mom had died. I’d been in a similar state.

  Lady Photon – Photon Mom to Brockton Bay residents and the local news media – bent down by Armsmaster. She created a shaped forcefield tight against his shoulder, lifted him with a grunt.

  “Take him,” Lady Photon’s voice was strangely hollow, though firm.

  “No. I’m a better flier, and more likely to hurt that thing in a fight. I’ll take the girl and help against Leviathan.” Laserdream had a little more life in her voice than her mother did.

  The girl. Like I didn’t warrant a name, or it wasn’t worth the effort to remember. A part of me wanted to stand up for myself, a larger part of me knew this wasn’t the time or place.

  After a long few seconds of deliberation, Lady Photon nodded. She looked like making that decision aged her years.

  Laserdream and her mom looked at me. I felt like I should say something. Give condolences? Tell them that their family had died well? I couldn’t think of a way to put it that didn’t tell them something they already knew, or anything that wouldn’t sound horribly offensive or insincere coming from a villain.

  “Let’s go get that-” I stopped, both because I suddenly felt that something like motherfucker was too crass, and because I wanted to bend down to pick up Armsmaster’s Halberd, the one with the disintegration blade, grabbing the pole of it with my good hand. “Let’s go get him,” I stated, lamely.

  It took some doing for Laserdream to lift me without pressing against my broken arm or touching the blade. She wound up holding me with an arm under my knees and the crook of her elbow at my neck. She held the Halberd for me. I resigned myself to being cradled – there was no dignified way to be carried. She had morning breath, a strangely mundane thing – she’d likely been woken up at half past six in the morning by the sirens, hadn’t had time to brush her teeth or eat before coming here.

  She took off, smooth. It felt like an elevator kicking into motion, except we kept going faster, had the wind in our faces.

  My first time flying, if you discounted the experience of riding a mutant dog as it leapt from a building, which was sort of half-flying. It wasn’t half as exhilirating as I’d thought the experience would be. Tainted by the sombre, tense mood, the sting of the rain and the bitter chill that went straight through my damp costume and mask. Each time she adjusted her hold on me, I had to fight that deep primal instinct that told me I was going to fall to my death. She was adjusting her grip a lot, too – she didn’t have superstrength, and I couldn’t have been easy to carry, especially soaking wet.

  My power’s range was almost double the usual, and I had zero clue as to why. I wasn’t about to complain. Using Laserdream’s armband and my right hand, I passed on details.

  “He’s at CA-4, heading Northwest!”

  The roads beneath us were damaged, shattered. When Leviathan had shifted the position of the storm sewers, he’d gone all out, and he’d gone a step further than just the storm sewer – he’d also torn up the water supply network for the city. The occasional pipe speared up between the slats in the sidewalk, fire hydrants were dislodged, and the water that poured from these was barely a trickle now. That might have meant too much was leaking from the damaged pipes to give the water any pressure.

  As he’d beaten a path deeper into the city, he had found opportunities to do damage on the way. A police car had been thrown through the second story of a building. A half block later, as he’d rounded a corner, he had elected to go through the corner of a building, tearing out the supporting architecture. The structure had partially collapsed into the street.

  We passed over a gas station he’d stampeded through, and Laserdream erected a crimson forcefield bubble around us to protect us from the smoke and heat of the ongoing blaze.

  “BZ-4,” I reported. Then I saw movement from the coast, called out through the armband’s channels, “Wave!”

  I was glad to be in the air as the tidal wave struck. The barrier of ice and the wreckage at the beaches did a lot to dampen the wave’s effect, but I watched as the water streamed a good half-mile into the city. Buildings collapsed, cars were pushed, and even trees came free of the earth.

  No cape casualties announced from Laserdream’s armband, at least.

  We passed over the Weymouth shopping center. It had been devastated by Leviathan’s passage, then had largely folded in on itself in the wake of the most recent wave. From the way the debris seemed to have exploded out the far wall, it didn’t look like Leviathan had even slowed down as he tore through the building. That wasn’t what spooked me.

  What spooked me was that I’d been through the Weymouth shopping center more than a hundred times. It was the closest mall to my house.

  When I sensed Leviathan turning south, towards downtown, I didn’t feel particularly relieved. There were enough shelters and enough space in the shelters to handle virtually every Brockton Bay resident in the city proper. From what I remembered, not everyone had participated in the drills that happened every five years or so, choosing to stay home. It was very possible that some shelters near the residential areas might prove to be over capacity, that my dad, if he arrived late, might have been redirected to another shelter. One closer to downtown, where Leviathan was going. I couldn’t trust that he was out of harm’s way.

  “He’s at or near BZ-6, heading south.”

  The area we were entering had been further from the heroes with the forcefields, where waves hadn’t had their impact softened or diverted by the the PHQ’s forcefield or the larger, heavier, blockier structures of the Docks. Entire neighborhoods had been flattened, reduced to detritus that floated in muddy, murky waters. Larger buildings, what I suspected might have been part of the local college, were standing but badly damaged. Countless cars sat in the roads and parking lots with water pouring in through shattered windows.

  Laserdream changed course, to follow Lord street, the main road that ran through the city and downtown, tracing the line of the bay.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “The wreckage goes this way,” she responded.

  I looked down. It was hard to tell, with the damage already done, the water flooding the streets, but I suspected she was right. One building that looked like it should have stood against the waves thus far was wrecked, and mangled bodies floated around it. It could have been the tidal wave, but it was just as likely that Leviathan had seen a target and torn through it.

  “Maybe, but he might have been faking us out, or he detoured further ahead,” I said. I pointed southwest. “That way.”

  She gave me a look, I turned my attention to her armband, tried to discern where Leviathan fell on the grid. Around the same moment I figured it out, I felt him halt. “BX-8 or very close to it! He’s downtown, and he just stopped moving.”

  “You sure?” came Chevalier’s voice from the armband.

  “Ninety-nine percent.”

  “Noted. We’re teleporting forces in.”

  Laserdream didn’t argue with me. We arrived at the scene of the battle a matter of seconds later. Familiar territory.

  I had been near here a little less than two hours ago. The skeleton of a building in construction was in view, a matter of blocks away, an unlit black against a dark gray sky. Beneath that, I knew, was Coil’s subterranean base of operations.

  Parian had given life to three stuffed animals that lumbered around Leviathan. A stuffed goat stepped forward, and sidewalk cracked under a hoof of patchwork leather and corduroy. A bipedal tiger grabbed at an unlit streetlight, unrooted it, and charged Leviathan like a knight wit
h a lance couched in one armpit. The third, an octopus, ran interference, disrupting Leviathan’s afterimages before they could strike capes and wrapping tentacles around Leviathan’s limbs if he tried to break away. Parian was gathering more cloth from the other side of a smashed display window, drawing it together into a crude quadruped shape, moving a series of needles and threads through the air in an uncanny unison that reminded me of my control over my spiders.

  Leviathan caught the streetlight ‘lance’ and clawed through the tiger’s chest, doing surprisingly little damage considering that it was just fabric. After three good hits, the tiger deflated explosively.

  The octopus and goat grappled Leviathan while Purity blasted him with a crushing beam of light. By the time he recovered, Parian was inflating the half-created shape in front of her, so it could stumble into the fray. She turned her attention to repairing the ‘tiger’.

  I was curious about her power. Some sort of telekinesis, with a gimmick? She had a crapton of fine manipulation with the needles and threads, that much was obvious, but the larger creations she was putting together – whatever she was doing to animate them with telekinesis or whatever, it left them fairly clumsy. Did her control get worse as she turned her attention to larger things? Why manipulate cloth and not something stronger, sturdier?

  I wondered if she was one of the capes that thought of what she did as being ‘magic’. Her power was esoteric enough.

  A slash of Leviathan’s tail brought down two of the stuffed entities, and Hookwolf tackled him to ensure the Endbringer didn’t get a moment’s respite. Leviathan caught Hookwolf around the middle with his tail, flecks of blood and flesh spraying from the tail as it circled Hookwolf’s body of skirring, whisking blades. Leviathan hurled Hookwolf away.

  Browbeat saw an opening, stepped in to pound Leviathan in the stomach, strike him in the knee Armsmaster had injured. Leviathan, arms caught by Parian’s octopus and goat, raised one foot, caught Browbeat around the throat with his clawed toes, and then stomped down sharply.

  Browbeat down, BW-8.

  Leviathan leaned back hard, making Parian’s creations stumble as they maintained their grip, then heaved them forward. The ‘octopus’ remanied latched on, but the ‘goat’ was sent through the air, a projectile that flew straight for Parian.

  Her creation deflated in mid air, but the piles of cloth that it was made of were heavy, and she was swamped by the mass of fabric. Leviathan darted forward, held only by her octopus, and the afterimage rushed forward to slam into that pile of cloth.

  Parian down, BW-8.

  All of the ‘stuffed animals’ deflated.

  The girl with the crossbow and Shadow Stalker opened fire, joined by Purity from above. Laserdream dropped me at the fringe of the battlefield with the Halberd before joining them, flying above at an angle opposite Purity’s, firing crimson laser blasts at Leviathan’s head and face. Leviathan readied to lunge, stopped as a curtain of darkness swept over him, the majority dissipating a second later, leaving only what was necessary to obscure his head. It took Leviathan a second to realize he could move out of that spot to see again, a delay that earned him another on-target series of shots from our ranged combatants. Grue was here, somewhere.

  It wasn’t much, I didn’t have many bugs gathered here yet, but I was able to pull some together into humanoid forms. I sent them moving across the battlefield towards Leviathan. If one of them delayed him a second, drew an attack that would otherwise be meant for someone else, it would be worth the trouble.

  I looked around, trying to find Brandish, Chevalier, Assault or Battery, or even someone tough. Someone that could take the Halberd and make optimal use of it.

  One of crossbow-girl’s shots, like a needle several feet in length, speared under the side of Leviathan’s neck, out the top. Shadow Stalker’s shots, at the same time, failed to penetrate Leviathan’s hard exterior.

  “Flechette! I’m getting closer!” Shadow Stalker called out, looking back at her new partner.

  “Careful!” the crossbow-girl – Flechette, I took it – replied, loading another shot.

  Shadow Stalker timed her advance with a pounce on Hookwolf’s part. Empire Eighty-Eight’s most notorious killer latched onto Leviathan’s face and neck, blood spitting around where the storm of shifting metal hooks and blades made contact with flesh. Shadow Stalker ran within twenty feet of the Endbringer, firing her twin crossbows. The shots penetrated this time, disappearing into Leviathan’s chest, presumably fading back in while inside him.

  Flechette fired a needle through Leviathan’s knee, and the Endbringer’s leg buckled. He collapsed into a kneeling position, the knee striking the ground.

  Leviathan used his claws to heave Hookwolf off his face, tore the metal beast in half, and then threw the pieces down to the ground, hard. One landed straight on top of Shadow Stalker, the other almost seemed to bounce, rapidly condensing into a roughly humanoid form before it touched the ground again, landing in a crouch. Hookwolf backed away, the blades drawing together into a human shape, skin appearing as they withdrew. He brought his hand over his head and pointed forward at Leviathan. A signal for the next front-liner.

  Shadow Stalker down, BW-8.

  I didn’t recognize the next cape to charge in to attack. A heroine in a brown and bronze bodysuit. She flew in low to the ground, gathered fragments of rock and debris around her body like it was metal and she was the magnet, then went in, pummeling with fists gloved in pavement and concrete.

  You could tell, almost right away, the woman didn’t have much training or experience. She was used to enemies that were too slow to move out of her way, who focused their attention wholly on her. Leviathan ducked low to the ground, letting the heroine pass over him, then leapt for Flechette. In the very last fraction of a second, the girl flickered, and was replaced by the brown-suited cape, who took the hit and stumbled back, fragments of rock breaking away. Flechette dropped out of the sky where the cape had been, landed hard. It took her a few seconds to recover enough to fire another bolt at Leviathan, strike him in the shoulder. Trickster had just spared brown-suit from making a fuck-up that got someone killed.

  The boy with the metal skin formed one hand into an oversized blade, as long as he was tall, managed a solid hit at Leviathan’s injured knee as the Endbringer whirled around to face Flechette.

  Leviathan slapped the teenage hero down, swiped at one of my swarm-people, then was forced down onto all fours as Purity struck him square between the shoulderblades with a column of light. A metal shelving unit shot from the interior of a store, Ballistic’s power, I was almost positive, and made Leviathan stumble back.

  We had the upper hand, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. More than once, in the past hour alone, the Endbringer had demonstrated that any time the fight was going against him, he’d pull out all the stops and do something large scale. A tidal wave or tearing up the streets.

  We did not have what it took to withstand another wave. No forcefields, no barriers.

  I had one of my gathered swarms explode into a mass of flying insects as they got close enough to Leviathan, make their way against the drenching rain to rise up to Leviathan’s face. Many clustered in the recessed eye sockets that looked like tears or cracks in his hard scaled exterior. Others crawled into the wounds other capes had made.

  Briefly blinded, he shook his head ponderously, using his afterimage and one swipe of his claw to clear his vision. He scampered back as his sight was obscured yet again by one of Grue’s blasts.

  He lunged forward, stumbling into and out the other side of the cloud of darkness. A swipe of his tail batted the metal-skinned boy away. Another strike dispatched Brandish, who was moving in to attack with a pair of axes that looked as though they were made from lightning.

  Brandish down, BW-8

  Flechette fired one needle into the center of Leviathan’s face, between each of his four eyes. It buried itself three quarters deep, speared out the back of his head.

  H
e reared back, as if in slow motion, stumbled a little. His face pointed to the sky. He teetered.

  Yeah, no. Much as I’d like to to be, there was no fucking way it was going to be that easy.

  That top-heavy body of his toppled forward, and it was only his right claw, slamming down to the pavement, that stopped his face from being driven into the ground. The impact of his claw striking the ground rumbled past us.

  The rumble didn’t stop.

  “Run!” I shouted, my cry joining the shouts of others. I turned, sloshed through the water to get away, not sure where to get away from, or to.

  Leviathan and the ground beneath him sank a good ten feet, and water swirled and frothed as it began pouring to fill the depression. He used his arm to shield himself as Purity fired another blast from above. As the ground beneath him continued to sink, the water lapped higher and higher around him.

  The Endbringer descended, and the area around him quickly became a massive indent, ten, fifteen, thirty, then sixty feet across, ever growing. The force of the water pouring into the crater began to increase, and the ground underfoot grew increasingly unsteady as cracks spread across it.

  I realized with a sudden panic, that I wasn’t making headway against the waves and the ground that was giving way underfoot. The growing crater was continuing to spread well past me, rising above me as the ground I stood on descended.

  “Need help!” I screamed, as water began falling atop me from a higher point, spraying into me with enough force that I began to stumble back, fall.

  The ground in front of and above me folded into a massive fissure. The movement of the cracked sections of road created a torrent of water that washed over me, engulfed me and forced me under. The impact and pain from the force of the water on my broken arm was enervating, drew most of the fight out of me when I very much needed to be able to struggle, get myself back above the surface. I tried to touch bottom, to maybe kick myself back up, but the ground wasn’t there. Feeling out with the pole of the Halberd, I touched ground, pushed, failed to get anywhere.