This is a fanfiction story that takes place in the world setting of Worm. Worm is a Supervillain serial story, with a serious amount of work, world-building, and character depth built into it. You can find it with an appropriate google search, probably by including the keywords "worm", "parahumans", and "wordpress".

Worm is the property of its author, a person who goes by the alias of Wildbow. I intend no infringement upon his property, nor profit from this story. I write this only for fun.

Thin Blue Lines

0659, 05/21/2012 SANCTI PD

It was only seven in the morning, and Officer Maria Navarrez could already tell that the day was going to suck.

Lieutenant Daniel cleared his throat, as he pointed at the whiteboard. It was old and cracked, with faded marker stains on it from years of use. Much like the rest of the room, it was substandard equipment. The drop-ceiling tiles were stained with tobacco from back when smoking had been allowed indoors, the linoleum tiled floor was sagging in spots, grimy in others, and the weighty metal desks they were sitting at had probably been liberated from some high school closing or the other. The more obese members of the force were standing. They couldn't fit in the desks.

Maria didn't have that problem, though she was a long way from the thinness of her high school days. At the age of thirty, her hair was already starting to show wisps of silver, her figure reflected the fact that she'd had two children early on in life, and her hips were JUST shy of a smooth fit in the cracked plastic seat. She shifted, constantly, when she was sitting. Still, it was better than standing... After that injury two years ago, her ankle had never quite recovered. Limited mobility was normally a consignment to desk duty in the department, but she'd pled and fought and worked through therapy, to show that she was still fit for patrol duty and street response.

She couldn't fly a desk. It would kill her. The street was where it all went down, and Sancti PD was short-handed enough already.

Short-handed, underfunded, and outgunned.

Thanks to the oil strike fifteen years ago, money had come to town, and with it the big corporations, the tech firms, the industries. Jobs boomed again, and what had once been a fading, sleepy little town had taken off into one of northern Texas' biggest success stories. Development had been swift and thorough, and it was a rare day that the sounds of construction weren't heard in the city limits, or in the 'burbs outside.

More work for the SPD, and more problems. The old mayor had been generous with tax breaks to try and keep people and businesses from moving on. But then the oil boom had changed things, and tax revenues hadn't changed at all. As such, the public services, the firefighters, the police were all underfunded, and working at pre-boom levels. It would have been rough even without the other factors at play.

Because with the jobs and population growth and money came corruption, and crime. Drugs, and gangs, and all the other joys of a newly-big city. Worse, there were CAPES.

And so, whenever a new one came onto the radar, the Captain got to go have a meeting with the local PRT director, and after that he had a meeting with HIS lieutenants, and the normal morning briefing was cancelled, replaced with a facts session about the latest threat. They were almost always a threat. It was very, very rarely good news.

In this case, she didn't know how much the facts session was needed. And it cut into the day's job allocation, eating up time which was short enough already.

But she stayed put, choked back her restlessness, played the good little cop. She'd made enough waves in the department already, and her career didn't need any more ill-will from up top. Nothing she hadn't been doing for years. When you're a woman AND a minority in what was, until recently, a good-old-boys club? You learn real fast not to be bitchy or whine. Or do anything that could be seen as such.

Brad, her partner who had only one such setback to his name, leaned over from his own teeny desk. He whispered "This blows. We know all this already."

She made a little shutup gesture at him as Lt. Daniel cleared his throat again, and used the marker to trace down the bullet points.

"All right. Gentlemen. Lady. This is what we know. The cape known as Devil Dog, real-name Raymond Callahan, was taken down recently in Nacogdoches. It was a bloody business, and there was a fair amount of collateral. Roughly twenty-two hours later, yesterday night in fact he turns up again in a truck stop outside Abilene. Takes down three members of Los Verde easy as shellin' goobers. Walks outta there. No collateral, by the grace a' Jesus."

Collateral, in Daniel-speak, meant bystanders down or dead. It was a nicer way of saying "there were injuries and corpses" from an incident. Scanned better in the local news cycle. It was telling that Lt. Dante didn't count the mostly-hispanic members of Los Verde among the collateral. She wondered if he even noticed he was doing it. Probably not.

"As most of y'all probably know, Devil Dog surfaced in 2001. He didn't have his name, then, he was Staff Sergeant Raymond Callahan, USMC, retired. Desert Storm Veteran. Decorated, too. Bronze star, several other honors. By all accounts a good man. Settled into his hometown, Elllisburg back in the 90s with his wife, son, and daughter. Started a garage, did work customizing and repairing trucks."

"But in 2001, things went to hell. A new Cape surfaced in Ellisburg. Real monster named Nilbog."

Maria really, really hoped they wouldn't show the tape. As a mother herself, that footage was painful to watch.

That hope was dashed as the secretary, Laney, wheeled an old-fashioned bulky television into the room on a cart. God, this was going to be depressing. At least the DVD player was new, so they could see this whole, messy clip in high-definition blu-ray.

"On February 2nd, 2001, Nilbog surfaced. He started makin' freakshow-type monsters, overran Ellisburg. Took over the town. And everyone that didn't get clear, died. Includin' capes."

"Raymond wanted to get his family clear, too. And he was a hell of a soldier, so he grabbed his guns and loved ones, loaded them into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and tried to get outta town. Couldn't. 'Bout the time he found that out, his radio caught an emergency broadcast. The National Guard had set up an evac for the survivors they could see. Got a few Chinooks to airlift civvies out, but the window was short and shrinking. So Ray fought his way back to the nearest evac point, got them up to the top of the school, with the other refugees."

"Problem is, it wasn't just civilians that wanted out. The local villains had heard the evac orders too. And they didn't want to stand in line. Laney, could y' be a dear?"

Laney put the DVD into the player, and shut off the room's lights.

The feed cut in abruptly. A shakey-cam, held from one of the transports above, viewing the scene below. An old-fashioned school, two stories and orange brick, with a crowd of maybe thirty people on its roof. Women, children, a few men. A few were carrying infants. The crowd was staying way clear of a flare-marked LZ, waiting for the transport to land. Then motion at the peripheral of the camera's view, and it panned down to the area around the school.

Beyond the roof, down on the ground, monsters filled the view. Things the size of an SUV that were all head and muscular legs, picking up small cars in the parking lot and shaking them, trying to get at people trapped within. One monster managed to shake his Yugo so hard that a bloody, battered form came crashing through a windshield, and it dropped the car in a heartbeat, opening an oversized maw and scooping up the body to swallow it whole. In the school's playground, small, children-sized naked things with bits of fencing, torn-apart playground equipment, and other improvised weapons chased fleeing people down, swarming them like piranha, and tearing them to shreds. One hoisted a bloody spinal column to the sky, mouth open in a soundless shriek of triumph.

Then a flash of light from above, and the camera panned up quickly to settle back on the roof. The crowd was fleeing to the corners in fear, as a man in a red costume wearing metal gauntlets fired what looked all the world like a laser beam into the air, and pointed at the chopper, beckoning it down.

The chopper held position, and she watched the camera pull back as two guardsmen moved to the door, readying assault rifles. A third pulled out a megaphone, and started saying something. Then the three twitched, convulsed... One of the riflemen fell through the open door, and was gone.

The other two managed to pull back, and the unseen camera man pushed the camera out, holding it even more shakily, probably at arm's length.

The man in red had been joined by a woman in a black jumpsuit, who was pointing at the chopper. Some kind of mist flowed between her and the open door, the camera could detect the mist as a haze in the air, thick and poisonous looking. She'd held back from dosing the full helicopter, just catching the men at the door.

As they watched, the man in red strode over to the edge of the crowd, grabbed the nearest person, a red-haired woman wearing a simple dress and a windbreaker, and dragged her over to the landing pad.

As he did, a tall man with a high-and tight haircut and an assault rifle in his hands stepped out of the crowd. The feed was jerky, it was hard to make out details, but he was talking with laser-guy, threatening him with the rifle.

The two seemed to be at a standoff... And then the rifleman dropped, clawing his face. Half the crowd around him went down as well... The mist had shifted away from the chopper, the woman was pointing towards the rifleman now.

Daniel spoke. "The punk in red called himself Beam Saber. Basically, his power was laser beams. The woman was Macetress, could generate a cloud that was like extra-strong teargas."

Beam Saber gestured again at the chopper, jerked his arm desperately, trying to wave it down. The chopper started to move away, and his beckoning got more and more frantic. Finally, he grabbed the screaming woman and lifted her up, walking to the edge of the roof.

"And that was Callahan's wife."

By now the cameraman had moved up, and steadied things as best he could. He panned down, revealing the first wave of crawling horrors that were slowly, inevitably, climbing the walls of the school.

And the feed caught, in full color, what happened when Beam Saber threw the woman down over the side.

Maria forced herself to watch, though it disgusted her. Her partner looked away. He could get away with that, she couldn't. But she didn't grudge him that, after all they'd been through. After he'd saved her life.

Ahead of her, Berman made a choking noise. He looked away, and she could tell he was fighting not to hurl. Poor kid, fresh out of the academy. The others would rib him for this, toughen him up, and he'd come out better for it, hopefully. Either that or find another line of work.

Back on the screen, the chopper was pulling away, as the cameraman caught the last shots. Beam Saber grabbing another civilian from the crowd, the rest of the crowd gathering their courage and trying to fight, as Macetress gassed them down. Then the view rotated, and the camera man pulled back, closing the door with a grim finality.

The DVD ended. The room full of hardened officers sighed in relief. That had been... No. Even ten years later, it was still a pretty horrible thing to see.

"Ray Callahan was presumed dead. This state prevailed until June of 2004. Beam Saber and Macetress turned up again in Chicago, briefly. Guess they managed to fight their way out of Ellisburg, after the school thing. Not that it mattered. Three days after he showed up in Chicago, Beam Saber was the victim of a car bomb. The next afternoon, Macetress got a face full of buckshot while walkin' out of a public restroom. She was in her civvies at the time."

"Both of 'em were found with an ace of spades playing card on their body, or somewhere on the scene."

"Couldn't a happened to nicer perps, but when the PRT investigated, they found a trail leading to a fellow who was damn near the spittin' image of Ray Callahan."

"CPD tried to apprehend him. Couldn't. Local capes stepped in, tracked him down, and damn near died when he triggered six bricks of plastique to drop the building he was in, rather than be captured."

"They dug up the remains, confirmed the DNA, and it made for a fuckin' media field day. The Marine that wouldn't let his wife's killers get away. Devil Dog, someone started callin' him, and it stuck. And Ray Callahan got himself a closed-casket funeral."

"Six weeks later, he turned up again in Sacremento. Took down Pusher, a cape whose power was bleeding meth. Took down Screamthief. I ain't gettin' into what HIS powers did, that's another nightmare if you want to look it up on your own time. Point is, they were some seriously nasty villains, and Callahan dropped them. Left the ace of spades, again, each time."

"This time the Protectorate went after him. He died in the fight, after killing Lifeline, a new graduate from the Wards. Again, the body was retrieved. Again, DNA testing and every procedure they could find verified that this was Callahan. This was the guy."

"One week later he surfaces in Vancouver. The PRT fails to catch him before he burns down a warehouse with the local crime kingpin, Grandmaster, holed up inside. This time he escapes before the Protectorate can get to him. Leaves an ace of spades pattern burned into the rubble of the warehouse before he goes."

"Since then, he's surfaced repeatedly. Over the last nine years he's accounted for the direct deaths of forty-six capes, one-hundred and six civilians, and the injury of many, many more. He has committed property damage well into the high millions, is guilty of so many other felonies that his rap sheet takes five minutes to download on our mainframe, and that is just the crimes that we KNOW about."

"And he's turned up twice in Texas in the space of less than a day. So every police department in the whole damn STATE is getting some variation on this briefing at this very minute, or earlier."

The room was quiet. The rookie, Berman, raised his hand. "Sir?"

"Officer Berman."

"The... I'm not quite sure. What kind of powers does he have?"

"As I have stated Officer Berman, he can FUCKING DIE and show up again later, clearly not dead. This seems to be a pretty serious power."

"But... I mean... All those capes, how is he killing them?"

Daniel sighed. Maria could see him fighting to keep from showing his disgust. The kid WAS new after all. Finally, the lieutenant answered. "Bullets, explosives, traps, at one point commandeering an industrial crane and dropping a twenty-ton load of girders on a supposedly invincible cape, incindiaries, suffocation, and at one point hijacking a truckload of liquid nitrogen to FREEZE one poor bastard to death. I mean hell, there's damn few invulnerable capes out there 'cept them endbringer fuckers and he doesn't go after those."

Huh, liquid nitrogen? That was one she hadn't heard. But she hadn't really been following Devil Dog, to tell the truth. She tried to stay out of cape business, and besides, the online fandom for that particular vigilante was kind of creepy.

"So he's just a normal guy?" Berman wasn't taking the hint. She could see some of the older bulls in the back of the room exchanging looks. The kid was going to catch some hazing later, they'd see to that.

"Officer Berman, as I said before, and you have not LISTENED, he can FUCKING DIE and turn up again later, and he KNOWS THIS. As such, he does not seem to care much about preserving his life, and that gives him a huge FUCKING ADVANTAGE. Add to that the fact he is a bonafide decorated war hero who survived the sandbox and was GOOD at his job, can use just about any type of firearm or conventional explosive that you can imagine, and we have a REAL POTENTIAL FUCKING HEADACHE here."

Berman nodded. "So it's on par with the AMM, got it."

Daniel looked like he was going to burst a vein. Brad, bless his heart, decided to save the kid any more pain. He raised a hand and asked without waiting.

"Okay Ell-Tee, what does the chief want us to do if he starts murderlating folks rounda bout these parts?"

Daniel's face moved from anger to mild irritation. "Well, Officer Kent, we are to observe and report, and attempt to keep Collateral out of the line of fire. We are to notify the PRT at the earliest opportunity, and move to minimize damage to non-parahuman bystanders."

The officers around the room were looking at each other and nodding, and a low murmur of conversation started up. This was a sane response, a good one. They could do this. Better if they didn't have to, but if he turned up, yeah. Lord knows this town had plenty of villains, if he took a few out it wouldn't be so bad.

"Quiet," Daniel commanded. The room hushed. He wasn't done, and Maria felt her heart sink as his mood soured. This wasn't going to be good news. "We're also on notice for another thing. A special order. See, every time Devil Dog turns up, he's using different types of equipment and arms. Most of it that's been taken as evidence seems to have been acquired during the 2001-2004 timeframe. The PRT's working theory is that he used those three years to build up caches around the country."

Maria frowned. That... Sort of made sense? But he'd died what, twenty, thirty times or so over the last nine years? That was a lot of cached equipment. Especially for a former garage mechanic, who probably didn't have trust funds from wealthy, dead parents to fall back on.

"So we're going to check a few potential cache sites, that COULD have been created during that time frame."

Ay dios mia, she saw where this was going.

"As such, regular patrols will be on half-time until further notice, and for at least the next few days, we're going to be using the time saved to check a number of abandoned and/or wrecked sites around the city and the surrounding region."

She felt her stomach slowly turn over, reached for her roll of antacids.

"Our primary objective is to locate and confiscate any hardware located. In the event of resistance or encountering Callahan, we are to fall back and call in support. Now, here's a list of the sites we'll have to go through before thursday..."

The screech of the marker on the whiteboard didn't interrupt her gloom, as she watched him assign different teams to different sites. This was bad. VERY bad.

Later on, she sat with Brad in the lot, and waited for the mechanic to finish working on their cruiser, number 17. The oil leak wasn't getting any better... It was probably the cylinders, but the department couldn't afford a fix, there. The best they could do was a quick patch on some of the trouble spots.

The rookie, Berman, stopped on his way out, looked them over. "Hey. Why's everyone so glum? It's not like this is a death sentence."

Brad snorted, shook his head. "No. But it's still gonna suck. Poking into all those nooks and crannies."

"What? We run a few bums out, maybe find some drugs or guns, make the PRT happy for once. Collar some gangers, if we get lucky. Sounds like an easy deal." Berman smiled. Maria tried to remember if she had ever been that naive. Maybe before she met her ex-husband. Maybe.

She sighed. "It is not so simple," she explained. "Think about it. The Graveyard Gang, the Serpent Lodge, the Faithful, where do they have their lairs?"

"Well no one knows, they're hiding some-" Berman stopped. Berman's eyes went wide. "Oh." His voice was very, very small.

"Precisely. The Alamo pendejos, they at least have their damn compound, but the rest? And the independent villains?"

"We're not actually hunting weapons." Said Brad, serious for once. "The PRT's using this to get us to flush out villains. Director goddamn sisterfucker Tate needs some good PR, and we're the excuse. We're getting sent out into the most likely locations as cannon fodder, mine canaries... Bait."

Berman's face went pale, and he sat down, too. "I... How could Marshal be okay with this?"

Maria snorted. "You think he knows? They probably have him and the rest of the team out looking in different places, or investigating something else. He won't know anything is wrong until some cops get hurt or killed, and call in the PRT. Then they send in his team, and they get to ride in. Big damn heroes, like always."

Berman was quiet. The three of them watched the mechanic finish up under the hood of cruiser 17. She and Brad looked at each other, nodded, and stood. Berman stood shakily. "Hey. Uh... Thanks for explaining it. I... I know I'm kind of new to all this, and I appreciate-"

"Skip it." Said Brad, slapping his shoulder. "This is how you learn, huh? Don't be afraid if they make fun of you back in there. Roll with it. They're TRYING to get a rise out of you now, so they see how you handle when there's stress but no danger. That lets them see how you handle when there's REAL danger."

Maria nodded. "Take it with good grace, keep asking questions," she advised. "Always have their back, and don't complain even if things are unfair."

Berman nodded. "I better get back. Saul should be done with his injections by now."

Maria winced. There were crosses to bear, but that particular one always made her sad. Also made her thankful that she'd survived the same incident that had crippled Officer Saul. She'd managed to miss any of the complications that he had to deal with for the rest of his life.

Well no, that wasn't accurate. There was ONE problem, of a sort, and it wasn't going away. Though it had the silver lining of being occasionally useful, at least.

She piled into the car, took the wheel. Brad slipped in next to her, smiling. "Good kid. Hope he survives the next few days."

"You just think he's hot," she said. The ignition took a few tries to turn over. Brad shook his head. "Nah, he's straight. No pings on my radar, Mare." When she'd first joined, it took her a few weeks to figure out why Brad was one of the few unmarried men (or married men for that matter,) who didn't hit on her. She felt fairly stupid when the obvious answer turned out to be true. Then she felt annoyance that the good old boy crew had paired the only woman on the force with the only gay man on the force. After she got over that, she realized that she was actually pretty damn lucky... Officer Brad Kent was a good cop, one of the best she knew. Since then, he'd also been the best friend she'd ever had. Well, the best white one, anyway.

She pulled out onto the street, started up the patrol. The real work wouldn't come until after the patrol was done... Their first site was an old rock quarry, with a few freestanding buildings. Probably safe, but it was remote enough that it needed checking.

Brad interrupted her train of thought. "We might need you to uh, not hold back this time, if things go south."

She flicked her eyes at him. "We talked about this."

"Yeah, I know. But I'm saying, this has the potential to blow the hell up, Mare."

"Camera," she warned. But she knew before she flicked her eyes to it, the dashboard cam light was off. The department hadn't fixed it after the last "malfunction."

"I'm just saying, we could be in some serious shit here if things go wrong. You shouldn't hold back if shit goes down."

She kept her mouth shut.

"At least use it to help search. Can you do that?"

She grimaced. Thought of Jenny. Thought of Ellisa. Her two beautiful daughters... Ellisa would be four next week. Maria still hadn't gotten her a present, yet. Hadn't called the other mothers, figured out where to hold the party. Her apartment just wasn't big enough... And now THIS, to worry about.

"I... It's complicated," she said. Brad snorted. "It's only complicated because you WANT it to be complicated. It could be simple. Would it really be so hard to go up to the PRT, to MARSHAL? You can trust HIM, you know. Would it be so hard to say "Hi, my name's Maria Navarrez, and I have parahuman pow-"

She jerked the wheel, pulling into a parking lot and hit the brakes, sending the car to a screeching halt before turning on him, her anger full on her face.

"You were there. You made your choice. I made mine." She said, quiet and intense.

Brad closed his eyes. "Sorry," he replied. "I didn't want to see you die."

"I know. But... Too much time has passed since then. There would be questions. Lots of them. And I've made my choice. If it was just me hurt if things go wrong, maybe. But it's not just me."

Brad nodded. "The perils of being a working mom, I know. Believe me, I know. But... Ah, I don't want to fight. It just seems to me that if you're going to be going into danger anyway, as a cop, why shouldn't you be famous and getting paid for it? You allergic to spandex or something? Or does money make you break out in hives?"

She put the parking brake on, kicked it to neutral. "Look. I'll use it to help search, okay? That should be pretty small. It shouldn't hurt."

"Now we're talking. Come on, I'll drive." He opened his door.

"Not only that, you're buying lunch. Get me tapas! The good kind, from Juan Two Many." She growled, in mock rage, as they swapped spots.

"Juan's? Again? Jesus... Crazy lady thinks I'm made of money..."

She ignored his grumbling as she settled back in her seat, closed her eyes.

"Uh, you know we're not at the quarry yet," Brad smirked.

"It's been a while, I'm practicing. You wanted me to work, let me work."

And as the car rolled on through the dusty streets, she settled back in the seat and let her power roll out from her...