Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

“—sure is nifty, isn’t it? See, these are the advantages of working with Blacksnake; you get all of the best toys. This servomotor exoskeleton gives me the strength of twenty men; slow and somewhat ungainly, but very fine for power work, don’t you think?” John didn’t want to move; he could hardly breathe, and his vision was dark around the edges if you didn’t count the stars swarming in front of his eyes. He was done, and done for. He couldn’t defend himself effectively anymore, and this smarmy and smug middle-management flunky was going to be the end of him. “The real shame is that it didn’t have to be like this.” Chuck paced slowly towards where John was lying, not in a great hurry to finish off his opponent. “I would offer you a second chance, but I have an appointment downtown. I’ve got to pick up a new suit before then, so I’ll make this quick. Open or closed casket, John?”

  “Fer me or you?” John croaked out, blood seeping from his mouth. It clicked for him right as he finished delivering what he thought were going to be his last words, again. He knew what to do. Smith smiled, raising a foot to crush the life out of John—

  —and then the air inside of his protective force field ignited into plasma, which in turn ignited his clothing, skin, and what little hair he had in the first place. Chuck couldn’t scream, because all of the air in his lungs was on fire, and the lungs themselves were seared in an instant. John lay there watching as Chuck Smith did an odd sort of dance, cooked alive silently in his own force field. For one moment, the memory of the kid in New York, ramping up until he was nothing but a man-shaped thing too white-hot to look at, flashed across his memory. After a few seconds the Blacksnake recruiter fell backwards, and not even smoke came from his body; there was only a wispy veil of combustion, inside which polyester, skin and exoskeleton crisped. Then, whatever device that had been powering his force field malfunctioned and died. There was an instant of charred corpse against the ground, its mouth wide open, and then with a whumpf, it flashed over from its own intense heat and burned openly.

  John didn’t have the strength or the willpower to stand. He crawled over the rubble and grit, crawled up the stairs to his flat, and then crawled into bed. After that, the world stopped for John Murdock as unconsciousness took over.

  * * *

  Seraphym watched the man below her crawling towards the entrance of his building. It would be a long crawl up, with no working elevators. Solemnly, she sensed the terrible pain he was in, how he had been reduced to mere animal instincts. Only once had there been any kind of moment of feeling in this fight, and it had not been for the man who had called himself “Chuck Smith,” and who was, in fact, actually Roger McSkye, a senior recruiting agent for Blacksnake, operating under the code name “Hardbody.”

  No, John Murdock had felt nothing for this man, even at the moment that John was killing him. When someone became an opponent for John, an attacker, a threat, they ceased to be human. The brief rush of emotion had come with the memory of that poor child in New York: guilt, anger, bewilderment and anguish that John had been unable to help him. And that had been over in a moment.

  John Murdock was a brutal and dispassionate fighter, divorced emotionally from the killing and the need to kill. He had begun the fight with what should have been a murderous blow. He had ended it with another.

  But she sensed a terrible void in him, and mourning, far past conscious thought, that this was what he had become. He recognized what he was, and hated it. This, perhaps, was the root of his self-hatred. Somehow…somehow he had to come out of this. Somehow he had to heal, or be healed, if he was to grow, to become…whatever it was that was on the other side of that blank spot in the futures.

  There were other futures where, presumably, he did not change. Sera could only see them now as they turned up from the man’s maddening blind spot, because now they could not happen. One suddenly appeared and ended here; Blacksnake would send another operative, and John would die. One, already aborted and withering, and seen like a glimpsed reflection in glass—he had accepted the offer and gone on to join the mercenaries. That one ended when he was sent to kill her and she showed him the inside of his own mind. Where that would have led, she could not see, for already that future was crumbling, back to the origin points of passing moments. There were those where he ran, those where he joined Echo and was then forcibly reclaimed by his Program, others where he became a kind of half recluse in this building, emerging only at night, to scour the neighborhood for things to kill.

  But most of those were withering too. He was already changing. He could not stop the change. That was just as well; those futures all ended in apocalypse, the thing she had been sent to prevent.

  He had managed to get the door to his apartment open now, and crawl inside. She considered this. Considered helping him. Animals, wounded near to death, would crawl off alone to heal or die. Which would he do now?

  She opened her mind a little and let other thoughts brush against hers. The child. The grocer. The old woman who was knitting John socks from yarn saved from ruined sweaters, who fed him soup and thought about him as a kind of surrogate grandchild. Those would do.

  Gently she suggested that something was wrong. John had not been seen for hours. Someone should look in on him.

  Satisfied that the suggestion had settled into their minds, she sighed and turned her thoughts further outward.

  There. Another one to save.

  She was away in a flash of fire.

  * * *

  John was angry. He was actually waking up, which wasn’t precisely what he had expected to happen. And waking up carried with it all of the burdens of being conscious and alive after the fight with Chuck Smith. Namely, various types and degrees of pain. It took him a long time to be able to pry his swollen eyes open, widening them until the thin slivers of light leaking through became smeared and over-bright shapes. His head pounded as if Smith was still hammering on it, his mouth was as dry as sandpaper, and his entire body felt as if it had been passed underneath a steamroller.

  He’d felt worse. But not much worse. And not often.

  Eventually, his vision focused again after much effort. He made out the ceiling of the room that he usually slept in, with peeling paint and water stains from leaks in the roof. With Herculean effort he was able to turn his head to the right, seeing Jonas the shopkeeper snoozing quietly in a battered lawn chair. The TV was playing silently, and there were a few bags of groceries littered around the room. Looking down at himself, and immediately regretting doing so, John saw that his midsection was completely bandaged, as well as most of his arms and what he could see of his legs. Straining to reach up with his hand, he felt his own face; more bandages, sticky and itchy against his pulped and ruined skin.

  With a start, Jonas woke up, blinking several times as he looked about the dirty and dim room. Spying John and seeing that he was awake, he smiled kindly, his yellowed teeth gleaming in the single lightbulb’s glare. “I was wondering when you would wake up. I was starting to get tired of feeding you and changing your bandages, kid. Figured I’d let the cockroaches and rats take over for me, in a bit. I don’t need to ask, but how’re ya feeling?”

  “Like hammered shit. You?” John managed to prop himself up on an elbow, a feat in and of itself considering how badly damaged his arms were.

  “I’m dandy. Couple folks are looking after the store while I’ve been up here babysitting your sorry rear. Some of the younger fellas that you were working with took over keeping the ’hood in check. They’re not bad kids, once they have something to put their minds to.” Jonas passed his hand over his mostly-gray salt-and-pepper hair. “Kind of funny; I used to watch a lot of nature shows, and I always figured they were like those young bucks butting heads over girls and territory. Turns out I was right. Now that they can do just that, and get praised for it, they’ve just settled right down.”

  John nodded. He wasn’t terribly sure as to what to say next. “Thanks,” he mumbled, “for keepin’ me breathin’. I’ll actually start buyin’ some of the junk ya have
at the store now, maybe.”

  It wasn’t much, but Jonas recognized it for the compliment and sincere thanks that it was. “Anytime, fella. I figure that you’ll live, for now. Who was that guy that you had it out with? There wasn’t much left of him when Toby came to fetch me. To be honest, there wasn’t much left of you, either.” John was silent, looking off into a corner instead of meeting Jonas’s gaze. After a few long moments, Jonas spoke again. “Fair enough. Talkers are usually only talk when it comes to that sort of thing, anyways.” He sighed, standing up with an effort. “Now that it looks like you’ll at least live for a little while longer, I’ve gotta get back to the store. I’ll have one of the kids come up here tomorrow to check on you.” Jonas rubbed his apparently-arthritic hands and looked down at John. “We moved the remains of that guy you fought. Didn’t seem like the body oughta stay near where you live. We put it in an old fridge and it kinda got lost somewhere.” Jonas looked troubled by that, but then stepped to the door. “You heal pretty quick, so it shouldn’t be all that long before you start pitching people out of windows. ‘Defenestration,’ that’s called. There’s a word for you. Make you a Scrabble champ.” Still quiet, John nodded, and the conversation ended. Jonas left the building, and left John with his thoughts.

  And, the same as every night when “it” happened or that he bothered to think about it, the shakes came again.

  It was all about what he had become. Conditioned to fight effectively, to kill reflexively when his mind and all of the things that should have made him a man, made him human, told him not to, John was a dispassionate predator. Distance helped; targets at the end of a rifle scope were just empty uniforms that needed to be filled with neat holes. Once you got closer, it got harder. You could see human expression, how old the “target” was, if he had looked like someone you had known in the “real world” back home. Most of the time, working with a unit of like-minded asskickers, the responsibility was diffused. You didn’t precisely know, truly know, who had fired the fatal shot. In the latter part of John’s career, that had changed; all of the killing was up close and extremely personal; you knew where the rounds went when you sent them downrange, and there was a high level of aggression there. Knife kills, with a long blade or bayonet slipped into someone’s kidney from behind—since slitting throats was a terrible idea; John had known too many that had cut their own hands doing it, instead of “getting it right”—were the worst. You could feel exactly what you were doing to the person. You could feel the heat from their body, their sweat evaporating into the air, the breath leave them as they slumped to the ground. The paradox was that the easier it got, the worse it felt.

  “Back home” became more and more remote, something that had little relevance to who and what you were now, and what you might find yourself becoming. Back home, they didn’t understand. They lived shallow, easy lives where no one ever had to think about killing, and dying was only something that happened by accident, or at the end of an illness or long life. Death was something easily meted out by Hollywood, racked up on console games by thumb actions, or it happened off-screen in slaughterhouses. After a while John realized that it was only the men he’d worked and trained with, his buddies, who understood. But even that only helped so much. There was still the guilt, the horrible realization that you’ve done the worst thing possible to another being of your species. And then when you had quiet moments to think, you looked at your buddies and you saw one of two things back from them: either equal guilt that made you flinch away and avert your eyes—or utter lack of guilt, which meant they were no longer human. “Two-percenters,” those last sort were called—guys that liked to torture small animals in their spare time because it was cheap and easy practice. Two-percenters were few and far between, and John honestly, earnestly hoped he wasn’t drifting in that direction. Despite his stern exterior and professional cool, they scared John. It nagged at him that he had shared beers with them, and often. They wore the same uniform, ate the same MREs, and stood watch while he slept. He shook to wonder how far down their road he had already gone, and to realize he could not take that measure. He took it as a bad sign that he simply couldn’t tell.

  It always took a few hours for him to get himself under control. Alcohol didn’t help much, but it was something to steady him once he was done sweating and convulsing uncontrollably. Gingerly changing into a fresh shirt and grabbing a beer out of a case that Jonas had generously left for him, aching with every move, John headed out to the roof to think. The case of beer made him frown, because a post-disaster area was automatically a destabilized economy. Things were done by sweat, barter or violence now, and that case of beer was a genuine treasure. Yet, it’d been left for him after he’d mercilessly murdered someone. Was it a thank you from the neighborhood, or was it, in fact, a backhanded peace offering to appease his wrath? John found himself hoping the community wouldn’t turn on him.

  It was a decent Southern night: sticky-hot and clear, with the stars doing their best to shine against the city lights. The air was practically alive with green smells again, thick and pungent. All of the fires since the invasion had gone out, and much of the haze had dispersed, so you could actually see the stars and moon at night. John, no matter all of his public posturing, liked to think of himself as a romantic at heart, despite his failings. Leaning with his forearms against a railing and a precious beer cradled in his hands, John lived in the moment. He wasn’t particularly thankful, but he was there, and he was alive, and that’s what mattered. For what it was worth.

  There was a sound behind him that he couldn’t identify. A sighing sound, as if something parted the air gently, and slipped down from the stars. Turning as fast as he could, which was terribly slow in his current condition, John looked to see what had surprised him.

  She was just alighting, weightlessly, one foot outstretched with infinite grace and poise, to touch the rooftop, fire wings extending upwards. Not hammering or fluttering down like a bird. Whatever those “wings” were for, they had nothing to do with how she managed her flight.

  The Seraphym.

  “Hello, John Murdock.” Her voice was a low alto, throaty, with five or six under- and overtones, as if a chorus spoke with her voice.

  “You, again. The meta with delusions of divinity. Care for a drink? Friend of mine was kind enough to gimme a few cold ones for recuperation purposes.” John gestured casually with his beer bottle, despite the pain it caused him to move at all. One must keep up appearances, after all.

  Her eyes were the yellow-gold of the heart of a fire, and they had no pupils. The seemingly blind gaze settled on the bottle in his hand. “But it is not cold,” she replied. The bottle abruptly chilled in his hand, acquiring a sudden bloom of condensation.

  “Is now,” John said matter-of-factly, taking a long pull from the bottle. “Thanks, by the way. You’re full of surprises.”

  “Am I?” She tilted her head to the side, looking oddly birdlike. But not a pretty little songbird, no matter how beautiful she was. This was a falcon gaze, the look of eagles, sizing up a lesser animal. “And yet you strive so hard to seem unsurprised by anything.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a jerk. What’s new?”

  “Perhaps you can tell me. It is all old to me. The same cycle, endlessly repeating.”

  John chuckled mirthlessly. “Sister, it’s all always been the same play. Don’t mean it hurts any less with each iteration.” John took another long drink from his bottle. “Men proving that they’re men, society humming right along, the best and the brightest runnin’ with the flow, an’ the rest of us stuck with the bill.”

  “The sun striking warm on a winter afternoon. The pure scent of the first honeysuckle in spring. A child’s laugh. A lover’s kiss. Joy, John Murdock.”

  “Sorry, but I’m feeling morbid. Trifles, to those of us that’ve taken everythin’ an’ lost it all in the same act. Poetry…folks, the boy wants to be a poet.” John laughed again, mostly amused with himself.

  “So be a p
oet.”

  “There’s no money in it.”

  “But much joy. Food for the soul.”

  John sighed. “Even in Atlanta, soul food ain’t enough. Joy doesn’t pay the bills. Blood an’ sweat, however, do.”

  “You can do both.” She waved a hand dismissively. “One does not negate having the other. Millennia of artists have proved that. And millennia of dreamers, philosophers, mystics. You think they did not toil and sweat? Your self-imposed limitations are crutches, John Murdock. You think they support you. You can walk with them. But you cannot run, nor fly, with crutches.”

  John paused for a moment, leaning back against the railing on his elbows. “Y’know,” he said, mock-seriously, “If you keep callin’ me John Murdock, you’re just my middle name away from soundin’ like my mother. ’Sides. Killin’ is different. Spendin’ the blood of others is different. An’ there ain’t no good to come of it.”

  Again, that eagle look. “Your soul is sick. Surfeited and sick with death.” Where anyone else he knew would have looked away at that moment, somehow those fierce eyes bored into his. “Death is what it is. Not an ending. Only a changing. The question becomes whether you have the right to be the instrument of that change.”

  “Forgive me if I’m skeptical. I’ve been too busy workin’ at my profession to be ponderin’ the philosophical implications.” John grimaced, chugging the rest of his beer. He looked at his empty bottle in confusion, then turned to the supposed angel in his presence. “Can y’do anything about this?” he said, holding up his bottle. “Gettin’ sloshed is a lot harder with runs to the fridge.” She blinked once, and the bottle in his hand chilled again, growing heavy. He nodded, drinking from the now-full bottle again. “Much obliged.”

  “You…intrigue me.” A ripple passed through the fire of her wings. “The depth of your despair is a challenge.” Another ripple. “It was Pride that created the Fallen, but it is Despair that keeps them in hell. I should not like to see you in a hell of your own making, John Murdock.”