Grendel
Broiling sun over the drum line, head buzzing as the beat of the base drums hammers my ears and pushes my blood. The wave of screams strips away my in-the-zone focus and rips our final dance routine apart. At the edge of the field, Mister Carplin takes three deep breaths, face purpling, and attacks Misty. He pulls out chunks of her bottle-blonde hair before she bites a finger off. All up and down the drum and band and dance lines, they’re trying to run away or kill each other, but I’m running for the stands, my family. I see the first whacked-out breakthrough erupt into a mass of shrieking bloody razor ribbons and start killing. Half the crowd ignores him, too busy tearing into each other like ferrets on PCP... My scream drops two octaves into a bone-shaking roar.
I worked on my fighting form all the way there: claws that cut steel, frame stripped for speed, muscle bulk for strength — basic assault form plus the extra horrors I’d pulled out of my drugged and rage-crazed brain the day of my change. My neck swelled until my skull sat on a broad cone of muscle over my shoulders and I couldn’t turn my head more than forty-five degrees, my back hunched as my spine thickened, and short bone spurs pushed themselves through the skin over my wrists. Changing everything so fast left bones and muscles aching, but my hot blood rose anyway.
If I was going to meet the Ascendant, I had to look my best.
Watchman got us there fast — I was still changing when I felt us slow down and then we dropped hard. The roof of the prison was a huge lawn inside the surrounding walls, buildings no bigger than maintenance sheds. Watchman brought us all down beside one of the smallest, its door marked by a flashing green light. The floater roof popped open, everyone exiting into the bright sunshine as Variforce, Watchman, and I kept an eye on everything.
The place looked like a treeless park, like there should be running kids and dogs and picnic blankets, and Artemis just looked wrong, holding a pistol in each hand, sweeping around to cover half the floater’s circumference. But then, I didn’t match the setting, either.
“We are now in a dead zone,” Blackstone said like he was observing the weather. “Which makes it more likely that the Wreckers are indeed behind this, and means we will not be able to communicate with each other or Dispatch. Chakra will do her best to keep track of you, but be careful.”
Lei Zi nodded sharply, pointed at the nearest building with two fingers, and Watchman and I stepped up. Watchman opened the door under the flashing green light, and the hatch buried in the floor of the single room inside cracked inward. Lights came up to show a deep shaft.
I expected Watchman to drop into the open shaft. Instead he grabbed my shoulder, leaned in.
“I’ve read the action report on the LO Stadium attack,” he said. “And I know you sparred at Hillwood. But you’ve had no serious fight training yet, so listen: heavies like you and me go against other heavies, but that’s just half our job — we also take the first hits, block, move forward to break up attacks so our teammates can respond to what we meet. And since we have no idea what we’ll find down there, we’re the point of the spear, the head of the hammer, and if the others catch up to us, we’re not doing our job. Got it?”
I nodded.
“Good. Follow me.” He stepped off into the air and dropped.
Open shaft, bad guys of unknown power and nastiness at the bottom, and the promise of payback...I’ve seen this movie, and I like how it ends.
I dropped after him.
The shaft couldn’t have been deeper than four or five stories, and Watchman slowed himself down so gravity could catch me up and we hit the bottom together. And kept going — the shaft floor didn’t give way, it exploded and we fell through into the space below. The smoke and dust cleared to show a big empty room with a hatch in one wall.
“Nice back door,” I coughed, waving dust away from my face. So much for my clean college-prep look. Above us, the shaft filled with Variforce’s golden fields as he brought the rest down after us.
Watchman chuckled.
“Trust me, if anyone tries to open it in the other direction, bad stuff happens. The choke point we need to control first is through that hatch and two intersections away. If anybody’s out there, we need to push them back past that. Assume anyone not in a guard uniform or superhero costume is an inmate — orange jumpsuits are a clue.”
When he threw the lever by the hatch, the light over it turned flashing red and a voice started counting down: ninety nine, ninety eight, ninety seven ... At last, the hatch unsealed.
“Ready?”
I nodded, made sure Nox still clung like a limpet on my back beneath my vest, and followed Watchman. Out through the hatch, he turned us left.
The place had no cross corridors, just T-intersections with recessed doors opposite the off-halls. It was all white walls painted red by silently strobing emergency lights, seriously secure-looking doors. Every thirty feet or so, we stepped through hatches that should have been sealing each corridor section.
But there was no sound. This was a prison in the middle of a breakout? I could hear my blood singing in my ears and not much else. That changed when we hit the first T.
Aaaaarhkrhkrhkrhkrhkrhkrhk! The grinding shriek went beyond sound and threw Watchman back as barely less painful echoes bounced off the walls. Behind us, Variforce pulled up a field to block off the corridor between us and everyone else — good call, the shriek was shredding paint, vibrating the walls like drumheads. Watchman climbed to his feet, dazed and bleeding from his ears.
“Sonic attack. Beta Block is that way — go get him.”
I gathered myself, stepped out into the off-corridor, and charged.
Aaaaarhkrhkrhkrhkrhkrhkrhk!
A thousand hammers pounded me, sound solid as falling anvils as I sprinted down the hall, but even bulked up I could move faster than an Olympic runner. The screamer’s eyes went wide in the same moment I recognized her: Cocytus, the wailing river, named for one of the rivers in mythical Hades. Three years ago, she’d used her sonic-projection breakthrough to kill a couple dozen of her classmates at a team pep-rally and two of the capes who came to stop her. Her scream climbed, but my ears had already shut themselves down and my eardrums would regrow.
She turned to run and I roared, reached, captured a skinny arm to pull her back around, and dug the bone spur in my other wrist into her neck. Her eyes went wider, face white, and she collapsed in a twisted wreck of spastically locking muscles.
Spinning in a crouching circle while my hearing came back, I looked for targets but she’d been alone in the corridor except for the bodies of two guards in shattered armor. Watchman ghosted up beside me and then ahead to the next T-junction. Rush appeared beside me, squatting beside Cocytus.
“Jesus H. Christ, what did you hit her with?” His voice sounded tinny and hollow.
I grinned through my fangs. “Venom. Locks up every muscle in her body. She can barely breathe and forget about shrieking.”
“Okay...” He checked her pulse, pulled back an orange jumpsuit sleeve, put some kind of patch on her arm and she went limp. Safety first — I was already moving up again.
Halfway to Watchman’s position, the ceiling came down on me.
Chapter Thirty: Astra
It’s funny that canes made a comeback as an executive status-marker. Blackstone carried a cane and made it look good, so was it his fault? Fashion is set by the popular and powerful. I heard somewhere that President Kennedy killed men’s hats — before he was president, gentlemen wore hats outside, but he didn’t like them. So now it’s a rule; the boss gets a cane. It says you’re rich enough to eat in places that check your coat and cane so you don’t have to prop it against your chair at the table, or something. At least capes never came back as street fashion.
Astra, Notes From a Life.
* * *
Reading Blackstone’s Threat Summary made me want to go back to bed and pull the sheets over my head. The Green Man was a “life force or nature spirit?” The DSA still had no idea who he was — Deep G
reen disclaimed any knowledge of his activities and their known membership was all accounted for — and his attacks were evolving; The Potowatomi Woods attack had just used local fauna, but the O’Hare attack had been seeded for that extra nastiness with the mutant kudzu and thorns.
And it looked like all the Green Man needed was a still body of water. Like, oh, Lake Michigan. A notation of Blackstone’s suggested that small bodies of water might be required, but since both targets had been pretty far from the lake to begin with there was no way to know.
There was no commonality in attack duration, and Blackstone and the DSA experts agreed that the attacks had both continued until they accomplished their goal or were stopped; the Green Man hadn’t run out of juice, so we had no idea how long an attack could continue or how far one could spread.
I put down my epad and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. My shoulder was starting to throb dully, and David had called up five minutes ago to tell me that the team was now out of radio-contact — more evidence the Wreckers were behind the prison break, if that was what it was.
So, we really didn’t know where the next Green Man attack would come from or how far it would go if we couldn’t stop it. And the DSA was no closer to figuring out who the Green Man was, hadn’t been able to follow his Viewtube-broadcast ultimatums back to a useful source. The villain was a counterterrorism task force’s worst nightmare.
I was surprised any civilians were left in Chicago.
“Shelly? Tell me you and Vulcan have something we can use on the Green Man?”
“How optimistic do you feel today?”
“Shell...”
“We’re fitting a rack of incendiary missiles — magnesium fuel, other hot-burning alloys and accelerants. Vulcan thinks he can use The Stuff as a catalyzer to get a microsecond flash of superheated burn, and his numbers look good.”
“When can we test it?”
“We can’t — not without EPA approval.”
“You’re jok — Really?”
“Yep. No joke.”
“Then how can we use it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Shell!”
She wasn’t laughing, but I could hear it in her voice anyway.
“Illinois law allows the governor to ‘waive environmental and safety regulations applying to Verne technology when significant danger to civilian life is present.’ He’s extended that to a blanket waiver for emergency situations.”
“Seriously? We can only test a new superheat-bomb when people are already in danger?”
“Adults, right?”
I covered my eyes. “We’ll just have to hope the Green Man waits until everyone’s back and we have more options.”
“Um, we can hope...”
Outside the office, the lights in Dispatch went red and alarms began wailing. My insides turned to ice.
“The Green Man’s heat-signature just showed up, didn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
* * *
The alarm didn’t sound any better from the Dispatch floor. The big screen showed an aerial view of Monroe Harbor just off Queen’s Landing with a thermal imaging overlay. Inside the harbor walls the water was heating up and turning into green soup.
Riptide. We could have dropped Riptide out there to tear apart any concentration of “Green Man” that formed — watch it try and regenerate from that. The missed opportunity made me want to cry.
“David, go to evacuation protocols. From the lake to the river.” This time, the Green Man was coming for the city; through Grant Park and the Dome, across Michigan Avenue, right into the heart of the Loop. If we let it get that far. “And would you please get me the superintendent?”
“On it, boss.”
“Thank you.” I keyed the general Dispatch line while the chapters and sections of procedures Blackstone had been drilling me on marched through my mind like a troop of origami soldiers. “Mobilize all CAI teams and reserves. Sifu to join Crash and Sprints in clearing the park, pull all bystanders between us and the lake into the Dome. Tsuris to clear the water over and around the Green Man of morning sailors. Galatea to arm up and stand by. Megaton to report to the east doors and prepare to repel incoming green. CAI teams and reserves to assist in evacuation of the city and the defense of designated hold points.”
I closed the line. “Shelly, from the previous attack, how long have we got before the attack begins? And is Blue Fire available?”
“She’s still on the injured list and couldn’t light a match right now, and we have less than five minutes, more than three — this is a wider green plume, so maybe five.”
So no easy fix, but we had enough time to clear the park, maybe not all the boats. “Dispatch line for Safire, Red Robin, all other close fliers. First priority, join Tsuris and insure Monroe Harbor is cleared of bystanders. Get them to whatever Vulcan calls a safe distance.”
The screen in front of me scrolled the visual confirmation of my order, tagged each flier’s response. One, two, three, four, five close enough to be useful in the time we had. The town had a lot of flyers.
“I’ve got the superintendent,” David said.
“Thank you. Screen here, please. Hello again, sir.”
He didn’t look any happier than earlier. “Hello again, Astra. I’ve seen the feed. Do you know the Green Man’s target?”
“If we’re lucky, sir, it’s the Dome. But I don’t think so.”
He chewed his mustache, scowling ferociously. “Agreed. Do what you can to slow it down, and we are prepared to try and stop it east of Michigan Avenue.”
I felt stupid; of course the CPD would have been working with the DSA to develop its own countermeasures.
“Understood, sir. Thank you.”
“Thank you, and good luck.” He cleared his screen and I took a long breath. Time to stop panicking instead of thinking.
“David, reroute all CAI heroes with green-effective powers to Grant Park. We need to hold the line here as long as we can.”
“On it, boss.”
How many more mistakes was I going to make?
Grendel
The concrete slabs breaking themselves on my back felt like styrofoam movie-set pieces — but now I had to decide: forward or back?
Back, a voice like wind-blown petals whispered in my head. Chakra? Back, they are being attacked!
I heaved my way out of the pile and into a nightmare — the Sentinels were fighting shadows, black holes in human shape. Too many moving too fast to count, they squeezed out of seams in the walls and threw themselves at the circled team.
“They’re projections!” Lei Zi shouted when I pulled myself out of the rubble. “No restraint!”
They certainly weren’t using any. The emergency lights dimmed as Lei Zi drew power and blew swarming shadow-figures apart with bright sparking explosions, Riptide pulled water from somewhere to saw pieces off them, and Seven and Artemis tapped them with syncopated center-of-mass shots while Variforce kept them back. Worked for me; I waded into the freezing, inky swirl of dancing, screaming phantoms and they were solid enough. Rush staggered by me in a blur, Cocytus over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and shadows hanging off them.
The things were so light they bounced away when I punched at them, so I flailed, grabbed, tore my way through the screaming, gibbering tide — not that the other guys needed much help; they made a ring of death around themselves and the shadows broke on it. I fought my way into the ring behind Rush and we moved back together, away from the blocking deadfall and back down the junction.
The shadows bled away before we’d retreated to the end, leaving the two dead guards, bone-white and frozen solid by the shadows. Watching the frost melting in their hair and from Cocytus, I realized I was growling, fangs growing; it was the stadium all over again — twisted breakthroughs tearing at each other, at everyone, no sides, no reason, just out-of-their-minds rage and killing.
&nb
sp; Empty clips chimed on the floor as Artemis swapped in full clips, and she looked up at me, eyes shining from the skull-shaped half mask she wore. Most people at least got careful when my eyes went red and my fangs got so long I couldn’t talk. The vampire didn’t flinch.
“Easy, big guy. Remember: You’re still human. It’s a choice.”
“Watchman is waiting,” Lei Zi said. “Artemis, go see and report.”
She holstered her guns and vanished into mist, flying ahead to disappear into the deadfall.
Lei Zi nodded, looked at me. “Grendel, can you clear the way? Watchman is engaged up there, or he would have come back.”
I looked at the rubble. It wasn’t quite floor-to-ceiling, which meant that it wasn’t a complete structural collapse with all the tons of earth on top of it; moving it wasn’t likely to bring the place down.
“Yes,” I growled and turned away. Back up the corridor, I threw myself into the pile to toss concrete chunks aside and rip fallen support beams away. Artemis blew by me before I’d gone far, wet chilled fog in the air. Her transformation from sweeping mist to solid black-clad vamp was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen, even after two years at Hillwood. “Watchman is engaging prisoners in some kind of equipment bay, and there’s plenty of room to join in!” She disappeared again, and this time Riptide went with her in a spout of water.
“Nox?” I whispered.
“Her Highness directed that we be within fifty feet for the compass to scent our quarry. We are not yet.”
I dug faster.
Megaton
I remembered closet-geek Tony telling me once that when the City of Chicago first sponsored the Sentinels, city planners wanted to build a tall shiny headquarters in one of the cratered and burned out properties in Miracle Mile. Blackstone, an ex-Marine, had words with them and instead we got the Dome — a low-slung bunker of a building in the middle of an open park away from other structures, with lots of open firing lines and avenues for fast civilian evacuation.
Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) Page 27
