Ultrahuman 01 - Ugly

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Yes. Synthetic fibres interfere with my powers, as well as making me itch.’

  ‘What about rubber?’ June put in, her voice a little drowsy.

  ‘Natural latex is fine, synthetic is not. I prefer wearing nothing, however, and latex clothing is particularly constricting. The animals I care for don’t need clothes, I don’t need additional protection from the weather, I don’t see why I should indulge this odd prurience humans have for their bodies.’

  ‘There’s a historic and cultural aspect to it,’ June said. ‘It’s not just that Americans are prudes, it’s that they’ve had hundreds of years of cultural conditioning to the effect that sex is bad, and nudity is sex. Also, outdoors isn’t air conditioned.’

  ‘She walks around our apartment half-naked a lot,’ Penny said. Then she frowned slightly. ‘Not so much recently, but still…’

  Ever smiled. ‘There is another, more practical, reason for my lack of clothing. When I step through the ground, I can’t take anything with me. If I did wear clothes I’d lose them fairly quickly.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s how you just appear out of the water.’

  ‘Yes. As long as I’m touching the soil, I can drop into it and emerge… more or less anywhere within the Everglades. I can see anywhere within them too. It lets me keep an eye on things since I can’t be everywhere at once.’

  ‘Useful,’ Cygnus commented.

  ‘This is idyllic,’ June said. ‘I mean, I never thought I’d say that about a swamp, but it’s really lovely. Perfect weather, it’s quiet…’

  A loud crack echoed past them as though someone had heard her and decided to disturb the mood. Ever’s head went up and her eyes lost focus as she projected her senses out in the direction the sound had come from.

  ‘Did that sound like…?’ June began.

  ‘A gunshot,’ Cygnus finished. Her eyes scanned ahead for a waterway heading in the right direction, though she was unsure she could navigate without Ever’s help.

  Ever blinked. ‘Continue ahead for half a mile and then turn left.’ There was a cold, angry edge to her voice. ‘Someone has killed an alligator. I was unable to find them before they hid.’

  ‘You don’t like hunters much, do you?’ Cygnus said.

  ‘Hunting for food, even for skins if done in moderation, I have no problem with. Animals kill for food, or in self-defence. Humans are animals with a greater brain capacity, I cannot deny them something I would accept from an alligator. Those who hunt for sport… Animals don’t murder for the pleasure of it.’

  ‘Can’t understand it myself,’ Cygnus replied.

  June sat up and crawled across the deck as the boat picked up its pace. When she reached the cockpit she looked at Ever. ‘What are you going to do if you find him?’ Everyone had heard stories about Ever’s first year and how she had terrorised sport hunters in the Glades.

  ‘I used to sink them up to their necks in the mud at the bottom of a river,’ Ever replied. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the stories.’

  ‘I’ve heard you set a monster of some sort loose on them a few times.’

  Ever smiled, if rather maliciously. ‘A monster of sorts, yes. That is reserved for when I am especially angered. These days I generally leave them wrapped up in tall grass and call the Rangers.’

  They twisted and turned through smaller and smaller rivers for around twenty minutes before they found the dead reptile, half-hauled out on a mud bank. Ever was over the side before they reached it, but she did not sink. Moving quickly, she ran ahead of the boat, across the surface of the water, to guide them in.

  ‘How did she do that?’ June asked, sotto voce.

  ‘No idea,’ Cygnus replied. ‘Though I think she has some control over the water in the Glades.’

  ‘What doesn’t she have control over?’

  ‘Hunters, apparently.’

  With their boat pulled up onto the bank, Ever turned to the corpse. ‘Let’s see what we have,’ she said, starting toward the animal.

  June turned to look, took two paces forward, and stopped. ‘Oh God… I can’t…’

  Ever looked back at her. ‘Stay with the boat, June. This is… particularly unpleasant.’

  Swallowing back bile, Cygnus steeled herself and walked alongside Ever to the gator’s body. The reason that June had stopped was that it was just a body. The head had been blown apart, almost destroyed by something impacting it on the left side, just behind the eye. The right side was just gone, ripped open and scattered across the mud.

  ‘This is not normal,’ Ever commented, her tone calmer than Cygnus had expected it to be.

  ‘Uh… no, it’s… it’s horrible.’

  ‘I refer to the extreme damage. Someone used a very large-calibre weapon and destroyed the skull. That is the part most hunters wish to keep.’

  ‘Oh.’ Something about that pulled at a memory, but it refused to surface. The shot had come from the left… She peered out across the scrub and mud in that direction, but there was no way she was going to be able to spot a hunter… A hunter with a big rifle… ‘Fuck! Get down, it’s a…’

  It felt a bit like someone had rammed a red hot poker into her stomach very hard. She staggered back, clutching at her abdomen to the left of her navel and, for a second or so, she was not really sure what had happened. She heard June screaming, and Ever shouting something. The green woman grabbed her and tackled her to the floor, and then began dragging her toward the boat.

  Cygnus’ head cleared and she turned over, grabbed Ever, and powered across the short distance to where June was waiting, low to the ground. Then she grabbed the front of June’s shorts and yanked her down behind the hull.

  ‘Conrad,’ Cygnus said. ‘It’s Conrad. He set a trap. He hunts Ultras, and with that gun…’ She took her hand away from her stomach and looked down at the wound. ‘Shit! I guess we know I can be wounded.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ June squeaked. ‘Oh shit, oh shit! We have to get you to a hospital.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cygnus grumbled. ‘Damn bullet’s still in there. I’m alive. I don’t think I’m even badly hurt. Not too badly anyway. Another shot like that…’

  Ever’s eyes were unfocussed again as she stared off in the direction Conrad had fired from. ‘I don’t know how he’s doing it, but he’s vanished. Is this man an Ultra?’

  ‘A normal, but an exceptional stalker.’

  Looking back down, Ever nodded. ‘He may be waiting for another shot, but we have to risk it. There is a first-aid kit in the cockpit. June, if you would drive. Try to keep low. I’ll try to patch this wound until we can get you somewhere where they can deal with it properly.’

  ~~~

  ‘I feel fine, honest,’ Penny said. ‘Now that they’ve taken the bullet out anyway. I’m afraid I won’t be much use for anything other than shots of my back for a while though. Sorry.’

  Dom looked at her as though she had gone mad. ‘I’m more concerned that you get better than that we may not be able to use you for shooting for the rest of the week.’

  ‘Well… I heal fast. They want to keep me in here overnight and check how I’m doing in the morning. Really, it’s not as bad as it looks.’

  ‘It did look a lot worse when it happened,’ June put in from the chair in the corner she had been sitting in since Penny had been brought back from surgery.

  ‘Bullet wounds often do,’ Dom replied. ‘The UID took the bullet. They are liaising with Ever to search the swamp, but they think Conrad has probably vacated the area having failed.’

  ‘I guess we can hope so,’ Penny said. ‘I could do without getting shot again this week.’

  New Millennium City, MD.

  ‘I was surprised to get your message,’ Dannon said. ‘You usually just break into my bedroom.’

  Bryant, standing beside him, gave first him and then Twilight a look. ‘Not sure I want to know.’

  ‘I thought we could keep this relatively official,’ Twilight said, ignoring the other woman.

  ‘And that’s why we’
re meeting in the docks instead of the office?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘I don’t like offices.’ Twilight produced a smartphone and popped up a picture of the salesman from the night before. ‘Any idea who this is? Sounded foreign, maybe Spanish, or Brazilian.’

  Dannon squinted at the picture. Bryant pulled out her own smartphone, tapped it a few times, scanned through something quickly, and then said, ‘Yup, I thought I’d seen him. Hernando Vasquez, Brazilian national. The FBI has him on a watch list and he was flagged coming into the country two days ago. Left today.’

  ‘This is why I like my partner,’ Dannon commented dryly, ‘she remembers everything.’

  Twilight gave them a slight grin. ‘Well, Mister Vasquez met with David Tonaldo, and then with someone calling himself “Ghostfire.” He was trying to sell them a drug, Excelsior. From what I heard, it has some nasty effects on Ultras.’

  ‘You saw Ghostfire?’ Dannon asked.

  ‘Well, no. Neither did Vasquez. Guy’s invisible. He’s got some way of terrifying people and… He had this thing with him.’

  ‘Thing?’

  ‘Smelled like a corpse, looked like a corpse, but it was walking around and it had a lot of tech built into its skull.’

  ‘That sounds vaguely familiar,’ Bryant said, frowning. ‘It’ll come to me.’

  ‘So,’ Dannon said, also frowning. ‘Ghostfire is real, and deals in drugs, which I suppose we knew. Invisibility and some sort of terror… It’s not ringing any bells.’ He glanced at Bryant, who shook her head. ‘He’s stayed off the radar then. I’ll put this Excelsior thing in the file on Vasquez and see if anyone comes up with anything. Oh, did you hear about Cygnus?’

  Twilight blinked. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Conrad took a shot at her while she was out in the Everglades with Ever.’

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘Apparently it takes more than a six hundred Nitro Express round in the guts to put her down. Doctors say she’ll be fine.’

  Twilight frowned. ‘He shot her in the guts?’

  ‘Yeah, lured them there by shooting an alligator in the head and then…’

  ‘You don’t think that sounds just a little odd?’ Twilight interrupted.

  Miami, FL, 13th November.

  ‘I don’t think I understand,’ Penny said. ‘The guy shot me, but you don’t think he was trying to kill me?’

  The man she was talking to, sitting in the lounge of the hotel, was UID Special Agent Patrick Norris, a senior agent in both rank and age. He was greying around the temples, which added a hint of authority to what he was saying. He nodded, sagely.

  ‘It fits the facts well. Actually, one of our people in New Millennium was talking to your partner, Twilight, and she suggested it. It makes sense of some peculiarities about the shooting.’

  ‘Peculiarities?’

  ‘Conrad usually uses armour-piercing rounds when he knows he’s facing an Ultra who can bounce bullets. We checked the round they dug out of you and it was a standard, jacketed round. He hit you in the stomach when a headshot would have been a more likely kill.’

  ‘And he’d already shot a gator in the head from the same distance, so he probably could have made it.’ Penny took in a breath and let it out slowly. ‘Okay, if he wasn’t trying to kill me, why shoot me at all?’

  ‘That we don’t know. I was asked to ask you to let Twilight know how you’re doing, by the way.’

  ‘I’ll drop her a message.’ Well, it was nice to know the girl was worried enough to ask. ‘Actually, I’m mending pretty quickly. I’m supposed to check in with the hospital tomorrow. They think I might be healed by then.’

  ‘You get shot with an elephant gun, and you’re fit for work a couple of days later?’

  Penny gave him a smile. ‘I’m originally from New Jersey, they make us tough there.’

  New Millennium City, MD.

  ‘I thought you wanted her alive,’ Ghostfire said. ‘So you have Conrad shoot her?’

  Kopf looked up from the reports he was reading. ‘We needed to determine the extent of her abilities. Mister Conrad,’ and he nodded toward the tall, blonde man sitting across from him cleaning a large, double-barrelled rifle, ‘managed to penetrate Cygnus’ skin with a known weight of metal, fired at a known range, with known energy. I have the ballistics report so I know the deformation the projectile underwent. I can determine the protective value of her skin, within a factor of five per cent.’

  ‘And when she’s recovered, we’ll know how fast she heals,’ Conrad added, not looking up from his weapon.

  ‘We have already established that she does not regenerate exceptionally fast,’ Kopf went on. ‘If she did, she would not be recuperating in her hotel.’

  ‘Huh,’ Ghostfire grunted. The German scientist and the Austrian hunter got on far too well for his liking. ‘Have you decided how to capture her?’

  ‘It won’t be difficult,’ Conrad replied. ‘It would be even easier if we had managed to identify her real identity, but she is inexperienced, not likely to see the trap until she is in it. However, some preparatory work is always wise. The death of a friend or lover would disorient her. I believe you want her discredited as well?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Not my department, but Professor Kopf has had some very promising ideas based on my research.’

  Even though they could not see it, Ghostfire smiled. ‘When will we be ready to proceed?’

  Miami, FL.

  June was all concern as she walked into the hotel room and found Cygnus reading news on her laptop. ‘How are you doing, Pen?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Penny replied, turning and giving her friend a broad smile. She pulled up the hem of her camisole. ‘Look, barely a mark left. I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Susan says that if I pass my medical she’s got a bra and thong with my name on it.’

  June walked over and ran her fingers over the red patch of skin where the bullet had entered. Cygnus gave a little shiver. The skin was a little distorted, like thin scar tissue, but it had been worse that morning.

  ‘You had me worried, you know?’ June said, ignoring the shiver.

  ‘I know, but look, I’m still alive. I feel kind of stupid. I should have guessed it was Conrad. I should have warned Ever.’

  ‘Ever’s immortal, as far as anyone knows. You can die until proven otherwise.’

  ‘Well… not this time. Being an active Ultra isn’t particularly safe, June.’

  ‘I know that. I just don’t want to see it. Which is stupid. I suppose… I suppose having the fact you might get hurt thrown in my face like that…’

  Penny stood up and pulled June into a tight hug. ‘I’m fine. I’ve been good all day. I’ve rested and let myself heal properly. I stopped a really huge bullet, which is not something I’d need to do most days. You’re safe, which is the main thing. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you just because you knew me.’

  June hugged back. ‘I wasn’t hurt.’ Just from what her friend was saying she knew that she was talking to Penny, just Penny without any of the Cygnus baggage that seemed to come with the body. That, she thought, was a good thing.

  14th November.

  ‘Are you sure a corset is a good idea?’ June asked, watching as Susan struggled to get Cygnus into the black leather garment.

  ‘Technically,’ Dom replied, ‘it is a waist cincher.’

  ‘Details, she did get shot a couple of days ago.’

  ‘They did everything short of cutting me open to check,’ Penny said, ‘and there was no sign of any remaining tissue damage.’ She was bracing herself against a massage table while Susan pulled the laces tighter and showing no sign of discomfort. ‘I’m just not sure I’m cut out for this look. It’s more your style, Dom.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the Russian replied. ‘With the boots and your hair in a ponytail, you will look perfect. We shoot beside the pool. You must look most serious, imagine Jon is unfit to lick your boots. He is the worm, yes?’

  ‘That’s
me,’ Jon said from behind them. ‘I’m ready when you are.’

  Susan gave up. ‘Dom, if you want this any tighter, you’re going to have to do it. She’s super-strong, for God’s sake!’

  Laughing, Dom walked over and took the long laces from Susan.

  ‘Just don’t break any ribs,’ Penny suggested.

  ‘I try to only break the small ones,’ Dom replied.

  ~~~

  ‘I thought we didn’t have any more time booked in the spa?’ June said as Penny changed into a too-small bikini and found her wrap.

  ‘Me too, but Dom said to go down there in this and she’s the boss. She wants it done before dinner, so…’

  ‘Well, ask her what she’s got planned for tomorrow. It’s the last day and I want to know what I should prepare for.’

  Pulling on her wrap, Penny nodded, put on her Cygnus attitude, and headed for the door. ‘Will do. See you later.’

  In the spa, everything looked as normal. A few guests were in the pool, and the signs on the door of a couple of massage rooms indicated that they were in use. Dom had hired the entire spa to shoot lingerie in, but now it was back to normal and Cygnus had to ask where to find Dom. She was directed to one of the rooms toward the back. The sign on the door said ‘Relaxation Room 2,’ which told her nothing, so she knocked and stepped inside.

  Dom was lying in a hot tub in the middle of the tiled floor, looking relaxed. There were two glasses of white wine sitting beside her, one slightly lower than the other. There was, however, no sign of Jon or Susan. Penny decided she had been duped; Cygnus decided she did not care, but should play along.

  ‘This doesn’t look like a clever idea for a picture,’ Cygnus said as she slipped off her wrap and hung it on a peg beside Dom’s.

  ‘This,’ the Russian replied, not opening her eyes, ‘is the serious talk in the not serious environment.’

  Cygnus slipped into the water, the heat sinking quickly into her skin and the water turning her bikini almost transparent very quickly. ‘That sounds serious.’

  ‘Dah. Drink, then we talk.’