by Alex Raizman
Bast didn’t care. She knew what to do. A small part of her screamed in protest, but Bast wanted this. She yanked her hand out of Liam’s chest and brought his heart to her lips.
It was sweet. It tasted better than any food Bast had ever known, and it was more than just a taste. The sensation of coursed through her body, better than drugs, better than sex. It was like squeezing her nanoverse for the first time. She groaned as she took another bite.
Grace’s eyes were wide, and she was making little whimpering noises, too terrified to scream. Her knees knocked together and she sunk to the floor. Tears began to stream down her face as she tried to find her voice.
“That was perfect,” Bast said as she put the last scrap of heart in her mouth. She could hear Grace’s heart now, beating like a snare drum. She laughed. “Looks like I picked up a sixth Hunger. Just like old Vlad.”
That was enough for Grace to find the strength to scream. Bast blurred, and the cry was cut off with a splatter of blood.
The second heart was as good as the first, and Bast devoured it all, licking the blood and viscera from her fingertips. She couldn’t hear any heartbeats, now, but there would be more. How many before I’m full?
She felt a wave of nausea. She’d eaten two hearts.
Anthropophage. She shuddered at the word. Gods who fell prey to a new Hunger, one that overpowered all others. In another life, she had hunted them.
I should destroy my nanoverse, she thought, but without conviction. That was what young gods were taught to do if they became an anthropophage. Better that than become a plague upon the world.
Bast had never heard of any anthropophage actually taking that step. She understood why, now. Why would she want to die when she felt more alive than she ever had before?
Now everyone in this base right about you. You are a monster.
Bast stood, cracking her neck. That might be true. However, none of them would live long enough to savor being correct.
Bast twisted, and the air began to flood with a thick, cloying mist. She could kill everyone in this base if she wanted to. An instant, a thought, a single command to the elements, and the base would flood with water, or poison gas, or flame. It’d be easy now - she could wipe out every single person in this damn building now that they’d sealed it up all nice and tight. Part of her wanted to. Wanted to punish them for what they’d done to her.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
Fear had made their hearts race, and Bast could hear them now in the distance.
There were two reasons Bast held back. The first was a base, primal reason. Their hearts, their damned hearts, sang to her. A deep bassline, a beautiful cacophony, each beat calling to her. If she just killed them from a distance, all the hearts would stop.
She’d have no new food.
And then there’s the Cassandra. If Bast went for wholesale slaughter, Cassandra would die.
I’ll never let that happen.
Bast grabbed Grace’s body by the neck and stalked out into the hallway, another twist silencing her footfalls. No one would see her coming, but with their hearts serving as beacons, Bast would have no problem finding them.
There were three heartbeats at the end of the hallway, growing closer. Bast could make out muffled footsteps and a slight metallic clatter beneath the constant throbbing. Three soldiers. Bast had to assume they had rounds made from her stolen ichor.
She ran her fingers over Grace’s face, closing her lifeless eyes. What she was about to do had been beyond her once. But now…now she saw more.
“You will serve me,” she whispered in Grace’s ear. The soldiers at the end of the hall were advancing cautiously. Soon they would be able to see her through the mist. They were coming for a fight, but they had it wrong. This wasn’t a fight. This was a hunt.
And they were prey.
Her work finished, she tossed Grace’s corpse down the hallway.
Jimmy Creighton had signed up for the armed forces the day he graduated from high school. He had seen some things over the years that made him lie awake at night. The kind of things that waited for you when you went to sleep. Dark things. He’d even done a few himself, and he’d come to the conclusion long ago that the real monsters were all men.
Now, he was rethinking that conclusion, as he walked down a hallway full of unnatural mist to check on a real monster that lay strapped to a table. Or at least, he hoped she was still strapped to a table. The two soldiers with him were trembling, and Jimmy kept his own hands steady through sheer force of will.
Then he heard a loud thump, followed by dozens more. The sounds grew closer, and Jimmy brought up his gun. “Don’t shoot until you see what it is!” he barked before either of his companions could start a round of panic fire.
A figure emerged from the mist, crawling spider-like along the ceiling. When it saw them, it wailed like a banshee.
Jimmy raised his gun and squeezed the trigger. The hallway erupted with the sound of gunfire as bullets designed to kill literal gods tore into the monster. Part of Jimmy was dimly aware that this thing looked like Grace. Most of Jimmy was focused on one thought: Kill it kill it kill it.
The corpse’s movements became erratic. It started to tumble and roll across the ceiling – like it had fallen, but in some kind of reversed gravity.
“Hoorah!” Jimmy shouted, turning towards the other soldiers.
They weren’t there. Instead, he found himself face to face with Bast. Jimmy screamed and tried to bring his gun around. Bast lanced out with one hand and caught it by the barrel, holding it away from herself. He squeezed the trigger, and bullet holes appeared on the wall. He screamed, and she stared at him coolly until the gun clicked empty. Then she reached out and put a hand against his chest.
“Please...please don’t kill me,” he begged, tears coming to his eyes.
“Well...since you asked nicely…” Bast said, and Jimmy’s eyes widened with hope. Then she smiled and rammed her arm into his chest. “No.”
The last sight Jimmy Creighton had was the other soldiers, lying dead on the ground, their necks twisted one hundred and eighty degrees.
“Hoorah,” Bast echoed, before taking a bite out of his heart.
Bast didn’t stop to savor this meal. The mist might favor her for now, but mist did not stop sound, and there would be more soldiers coming soon. Just a few more bites…
She stuffed the heart into her mouth. The two that lay dead at her feet would have to wait. Their hearts are going to spoil.
Not that she regretted that too much. That rush of power, that heady sensation made regret impossible. But it was a distraction, and she couldn’t afford that right now. Instead, she grabbed some of her new power and shifted her body into a black cat. With a few quick steps, she reached the shadows behind some pipes.
Soldiers enhanced with her Ichor, baby Myrmidons who did not yet have harnesses, charged into the hallway. A woman and two men. One of the men turned green when he saw Jimmy Creighton’s heartless body.
“Does anyone have eyes on her? Over.” Bast knew that voice coming from the radio. Admiral Dale Bridges, US Navy, head of project Myrmidon. Just thinking his name made her want to hiss.
“Hallway C reporting in sir. We missed her. Over.” The male. His heart pounded with a rapid, staccato burst of fear.
“You can say that again,” the woman said. The tag on her vest said “Johnson”, and Bast noted the name.
The other man swallowed as he looked at the empty eyes of Jimmy Creighton. “Shit,” he said, a southern drawl turning it into sheeeeeit. “Are we sure we can take her? I mean-”
Gunfire. Bast let out a satisfied purr as the thieves looked towards the sound. Johnson raised her hand to keep the others from moving.
A good call. Based on the direction, Bast assumed those soldiers had stumbled upon Liam. She waited...
An explosion rocked the building. Walls shook, doors rattled, and glass shattered. Bast’s mouth contorted into a smile.
Liam’s corpse had been �
�wandering” back and forth on the hallway’s ceiling. The bodies hadn’t been truly reanimated, just caught in a complicated gravity equation that kept them moving. The scream had been a touch Bast added to cover the sound of her own motion. Before turning Liam loose, Bast had twisted his stomach, intestines, and liver into TNT, which had been set off by the gunfire.
“Damnit, Hallway C. We’ve got people dying out here, find her.” The Admiral was almost screaming.
The first man swallowed hard and reached for his walkie-talkie with a trembling hand. “Yes, sir.”
Johnson spat. “That asshole’s held up in Operations, he doesn’t have any more idea than we do.”
The leader started to respond, but Bast didn’t listen, darting through the cover of mist and darkness and shifting to her human form. She sent out a quick twist as she leaped, a blade of air severing the southern man’s head from his body.
She slammed into Johnson, the force snapping the woman’s neck. Then she ripped out the leader’s heart while he still lived.
They’d told her what she needed to know. The Admiral, the leader of this whole mess, was in Operations.
It was time to say hello.
***
Smoke was filling Jacqueline’s home. At least they still don’t know we don’t need air, Ryan thought. “Everyone, outside!” he shouted. Maybe they could do this without destroying the house as they had the office in Ghana.
Bullets begin to tear through the walls, and Ryan hit the floor. The rounds tore into Jacqueline’s couch, sending puffs of stuffing flying. Ryan gestured and threw the door off its hinges, sending it flying out into the street. He twisted again, turning it from wood into a solid block of potassium.
Every window in Jacqueline’s house burst from the explosion. Shards of glass flew across the room in a deadly hail. Even through the ringing in his ears, Ryan thought the gunfire had stopped.
In a single bound, Athena came flying out of the hole in Jacqueline’s floor, holding a gladius in one hand and a large, round hoplon shield in the other. The equations around the shield told Ryan it wasn’t an ordinary hunk of metal, but sheets of steel over a carbon nanofiber core, strong enough to stop bullets.
She needed it. Athena used the shield to cover Dianmu and Anansi as the gunfire resumed. Dianmu leapt out, wielding a long spear that ended in a curved blade, and Anansi held a pair of his daggers in inverted grips.
With a single bounding leap, Athena soared over Ryan and braced the shield again. “That was quicker than we expected,” she said as bullets rang against the barrier. Horus emerged then, crouched low and holding an assault rifle.
Ryan stood, careful to stay behind the shield. “They must have been standing by. Let’s get this outside?”
As they hit the street, Ryan had to gulp for air. Stupid, he chided himself. He’d burnt through a chunk of power at the beginning of the fight, and now he was paying for it. Already needing air, and they’d just gotten started. Remember the plan, Ryan. Don’t blow it.
Ryan reached into his nanoverse and pulled out a sword. It was larger than he expected, almost five feet from hilt to tip, and must have weighed fifty pounds. He very much wanted to meet the beings that typically wielded this weapon. If not for divine strength, Ryan didn’t think he’d be able to hold it upright, let alone swing it.
“Incoming!” Athena shouted, leaping into the air. Ryan took the cue and threw himself to the side as Anansi flipped away.
Only Dianmu didn’t move, leaving herself straight in the path of an approaching RPG. She smirked and held out her free hand, twisting threads of reality. Her changes latched onto the RPG.
With Dianmu’s twist, it arced upwards and headed back the way it had come. It was a small twist, but the super-soldiers met it with a blunt force response. A solid wall of air appeared in front of the RPG, which detonated in a sudden flash that illuminated the street.
There, Ryan thought, tracing the original path of the projectile. Horus, obviously making the same deduction, started shooting in that direction. One of the soldiers tossed aside a long tube and dove out of the way of the gunfire.
Horus’s tracer rounds followed him right back to the others, who had taken firing positions between two houses. “Munoz, Palmer. Focus fire on the Antichrist,” one of them snapped. “Ross, give us some cover.”
Ross? Ryan thought, rolling back behind Athena’s shield. “That bastard came back for round two!” he shouted.
“Which bastard?” Athena asked as bullets once again rang against her shield.
“Ross! The one that shot my face off!”
Athena’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. That bastard.”
Athena’s anger was almost a physical force, and for a moment, Ryan wondered if he’d have to remind her to stick to the plan. She shook her head, clearing it. “Go,” she snapped.
Horus broke from the cover of the shield, running across the street. He continued to fire his gun in short bursts, keeping the pressure on the super-soldiers. Anansi broke in the other direction, hurling a glowing orb just behind the enemy.
The soldiers pushed forward into the street milliseconds before it detonated, rattling windows and sending streams of colored sparks flying in all directions. The leader cursed. “Take them down!”
“Dianmu!” Ryan shouted, but he didn’t need to. The thunder goddess was already gripping threads of reality, twisting to create a barrier of flowing air in front of Athena’s shield. A burst of flame washed over the top of the shield, deflected by the sudden wind, and lightning strikes fizzled against it. Ryan’s heart was racing. If she’d been a second slower, they might have lost Athena.
He twisted and slammed his equations into the ground. A fissure line raced through the asphalt. It encircled the super-soldiers and detonated behind them. He didn’t put much force into it, so while it was flashy and loud, it was ultimately low impact.
It served its intended purpose, though, forcing the soldiers further forward and together.
“Damnit, Evans, we’re getting overwhelmed,” Andrew Palmer snapped.
“No. We’re not.” Evans sent his own twist into the ground and turned the asphalt beneath his feet to steel. It rose around them, forming a barrier with convenient firing slits.
That has to be draining, Ryan thought. Using a single twist to both reshape matter and change its state took a ton of energy.
Horus’s gun clicked empty, and he tossed it aside and sprang to the roof of a nearby house. He pulled another gun from his nanoverse mid-flight and opened fire from this new vantage point, allowed him to shoot over the steel wall.
Diane Munoz whirled to face Horus, sending a high-pressure shockwave toward him. It dispersed his automatic shotgun fire but only sent him staggering back a few steps.
“The primary target is hugging the ground like a little bitch,” she snarled.
“Right. We’ll handle that in a second. Take out the shooter,” Evans said.
They started to twist, and Ryan saw that they were grabbing onto equations for gravity and - oh no. “Horus, look out!” Ryan screamed.
Horus had started to create his own barrier, but when he heard the warning, he leapt into the air, turning into a falcon and gaining altitude. Where he had been standing, a perfect sphere was ripped out of the roofing materials and condensed into a ball only a couple inches across.
Horus flapped harder, but he’d stopped moving away and was sliding backwards towards that center point.
