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.

Don't Look Back

1512, 05/22/2012 Route 557 east from Sancti

It wasn't sight. It wasn't hearing. It wasn't touch, but some combination of the three, indescribeable to any who couldn't experience it directly. Maria could stretch out her mind, and tell with complete accuracy just where any significant electrical activity bigger than a watch battery was at any given time within a two-block radius of herself. The cruiser's battery was a low purr, and the car's wiring pulsed with a steady heartbeat, lighting up the dashboard and the various other systems of the vehicle. The dashboard camera was truly an inert lump, though occasional sparks tried to tease at its connections, and her partner's cell phone was right where he always kept it, in his pocket. Maria's own cell phone was a familiar hum against her thigh.

Outside, the power lines traced out to her sense against the sky, crackling with strong, steady THRUMS. The occasional building they passed was a hodgepodge of criss-crossing streams, flowing around and through before linking back to the lines. The passing vehicles on the route glowed with minor power, the lightning within caged and ready to be set free.

There were other uses to her power, but this was the most subtle and passive, the least likely to draw notice. Often the most useful. More than once she'd used it to check a building with it before entry... The fact that almost everyone carried cell phones these days had saved her some trouble in a few tense situations.

And as they got further out into the dusty bowl and faded farmhouses that were the eastern side of Sancti, she crumpled up the empty Tapas bag, and dropped it at her feet.

"Hey! Don't get sauce on the floor. I might put my feet there later." Brad mock-snarled but didn't look over, focused on the road ahead.

"Chill, ese." She opened her eyes, and let her power fade. "Okay. I think I remember how this goes."

"Isn't it like riding a bicycle? Always thought stuff like that you don't forget. Everything I read on Parahumans Online said that's how it goes."

She shrugged. In truth, it had been easy to use the electricity sense. Even felt a little good. But she wasn't about to admit that to him, he'd just push her more on it. She'd made her choice years ago.

"I don' know how it works for others, just how it works for me," she muttered. "You go get powers then you tell me how it works."

He snorted. "Yeah, that'd be great. With my luck I'd gain the power to summon rainbows or become the perfect interior designer or something stereotypically stupid."

She punched his shoulder. Lightly, because he was driving. Then she checked the landmarks again, and sighed. "Almost there. Please, please Jesus let the place be empty."

"Gravel road, right? We got a key for the gate?" Brad asked. She shook her head. "Gate rusted out years back. It's a popular make out site these days. We'll just stop and push it open."

She counted her blessings when they pulled up to the swinging gate, at the end of the winding gravel road, that there weren't any cars parked nearby. School was just letting out so it was unlikely any of the local pushers would be using this place yet. Too early.

Around them, the wind howled through the hills. The gravel road wound down into a series of dug out hollows, and mounds of dirt and rock. Back in the sixties, the stone quarry had been a major employer for Sancti. But it had fallen upon hard times, and a few union disputes with a fairly ruthless management had put it deeply into the red by the seventies. The final straw came when they'd dug into a network of caverns under the place, and collapsed a third of the existing digs. The company had walked away from it, and the city had neither the funding nor the inclination to do anything with it beyond salvage what they could from the equipment left behind.

Brad parked the cruiser at the base of the gravel ramp leading back up, and they got out. Sand shifted under Maria's feet, as she looked over the place. Empty, as far as she could see. The remnants of an old crane hanging from a half-collapsed derrick, the girders creaking in the wind, and the hook swaying slowly like a pendulum dowsing water. A couple of aluminum shacks in the process of falling down, and a few slabs of cut granite, waiting for trucks that were long gone. Mounds of dirt breaking up the view here and there, and the occasional burn-mark where some vagrants or trespassing students had built a camp fire.

As they walked, they moved past the detritus of decades of illicit deals, vandalism, dumpers, and tourists. Broken needles glinted around some of the old campsites, and broken glass bottles glittered like gems at the side of one of the sheer cliffs up. Plastic bags and scraps of paper and fast food containers were pushed about by the wind, and old, junker cars with the tires long gone sprawled like lizards basking in the sun. A single couch, gaping tears in its cushions, was propped up in the back of a tilted pickup truck, a throne for some would-be king of the ruins. There was not a soul in sight, and Maria was relieved.

The feeling lasted all of two minutes, until she picked up a tremor at the edge of her power.

"Fuck." She squeezed her eyes shut and felt, moving slowly toward it. Just a few steps.

She heard Brad drew his service pistol, flick the safety off. She raised a hand. "No. It's a generator, is all. A generator and... Heat-lamps."

"Must be a quiet generator. I'm not hearing anything. Still, heat lamps? Someone's growing herb, I reckon. Probably not our man, think we should turn around and leave?"

She gnawed her lip, surveyed the direction her power was tugging her towards. A half-boarded up hole was there, at the bottom of a cliff. It looked like it slanted into and under one of the hills, judging by the darkness. "We better check it out. Besides, if it's stoners, they ain't gonna be here now."

A short walk back to the car, and Brad retrieved the flashlight. She took the shotgun from the trunk, just in case, loading it as they moved up to the hole.

Peering down into it, it descended at a gentle slope of scree and gravel to what looked to be one of the natural caves. Just one hole among the many others around here. It had several nailed wooden boards around the edges, but more were lying at the base of it, clearly weathered by age and knocked loose long ago. A nearby sign was stuck into the ground at an angle, the lettering on it informing passerby to KE P UT.

Brad looked at her. "Your power doesn't detect, oh say, sinkholes yet, or anything that might kill a couple of amateur spelunkers, right?"

She shook her head. "Relax. It's like twenty feet back in there. We go to the entrance, we shine the light in, we leave."

They got there without incident, the slope wasn't too bad going down. Picking their way past rusty-nailed chunks of wood, they peered through the slats.

Sure enough, that close, Maria could hear the quiet chugging of the generator. A small one, then. The flashlight revealed a small diesel rig, painted black. Cords lead from it to what appeared to be three wooden crates, and a reddish light shined from within the slats.

She looked at him and frowned. He was frowning back.

"This isn't weed. You don't put the heat lamps IN the box." He said.

She took the flashlight from him, played it along the cave floor, walls. Sandy and dry. A few scorpions scuttled for cover, but the beam revealed no significant dangers. Beyond the crates, the cave went back and curved into the darkness, swallowing the beam with no effort at all. Her power didn't sense anything else electrical back there at all.

"No. Not weed." She offered him the shotgun. "Cover me while I check it out?"

He shook his head. There was a chauvinistic streak to the man, not a big one, but it showed up whenever she offered to do something dangerous like this. He blamed it on too many John Wayne movies back in the day. "No. You're a better shot anyways. Give that flashlight back." She did so, and took the shotgun, switching out its buckshot for a couple of slugs from the cartridge sling. Impolite to catch your partner in a spray of shot, they tended to get annoyed by that sort of thing.

Brad took the flashlight, and crept forward, inch by inch. Holding it up next to his head, arm cocked, so that anyone firing for center of mass would miss. Theoretically.

He got to the crates without trouble, leaned over them, shone the flashlight down on the contents. Frowned. "They're... Full of straw? I think the lamps are below them. Hang on."

"Hey, don't get stupid now." She glanced around, checking out the part of the quarry she could see from the bowl-shaped pit. Nothing.

"Relax." He tucked the flashlight under his arm and reached into a pocket. Judging by the motions she could see him doing, he was sliding a glove onto his hand. Finally he finished, juggled the flashlight back to a useful position, and knelt down. Shining it in the box, he carefully started removing the straw. After a few seconds, he paused.

"There's some kind of bag in here. Leather? Maybe. Got a lot of straw on it, I think I can..."

He lifted it, and shone the beam on it. It looked all the world like a wobbling, hairy testicle with straw instead of pubes. The straw obscured it so much it was difficult to see, and he shifted the flashlight again as he used his mostly-free hand to pull straw from it. "Fuck, this is sticky. I don't know what-" He stopped.

"Brad?"

"I got some of it on my hand. Shit." He pulled his free hand loose... Or rather, he tried to. The bag came with it. He pulled harder, used his gloved hand to grab the straw, give it a good wrench, and most of it gave way, as the bag suddenly snapped against his bare forearm, with a SQUELCHING noise as it stuck.

"The hell?" He reached for it again, paused. "Well, okay. This is weird." He took his flashlight carefully out from the crook of his arm with his gloved hand, shined it on the gooey, whitish/translucent lump adhering to his right arm. Black flecks were sprinkled throughout it, each of them roundish and about the size of a speedball. "Okay, I don't know what this is."

Maria's eyes went wide.

"Brad."

"What? Give me a minute. I think I can pull this loose." He reached out for the lump, grabbed a roll of it, and pulled. The glove ripped off of his hand, now attached to the mass as well.

"Brad. Get back here. Now."

"Alright, alright, I... Wait. Did you hear that?"

"Brad. Back out of there. Slowly. That's an egg sack."

Brad had froze. "Oh shit. I've seen this movie. Oh shit, I'M THAT GUY!"

"Brad, you need to GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!"

He sprinted to the entrance, as a weird, wailing hiss burbled from deeper in the darkness. Rocks shifted, sand ground, as SOMETHING made its presence known. Brad bolted from the tunnel as a distant Tak, tak, TAKTAKTAK noise started up back in the cave. The sound of many monstrous legs, moving in a staccato step.

Brad burst into the light, the white mass wobbling on his arm as he dropped the flashlight and hit the side of the pit, using his hands to claw himself up. Dust and grit billowed around the mass, coating it and adhering to the stickiness. Probably a good thing, Maria thought as she threw the shotgun out of the pit, then followed behind Brad, clawing and climbing and praying, PRAYING that she wouldn't fall.

They struggled to the top as IT surged out of the cave mouth, ripping through the boards as if they were balsa wood and straightening up in the light of the sun. Dark brown chitin gleamed as a tail that could punch through concrete blocks straightened out, and presented a three-foot-long stinger to the world. It balanced itself on four chitinous legs, and twisted a somewhat human-like torso around to face them.

Maria scrambled back, retrieved the shotgun, and the thing took three fast steps forward, its eyes tiny in proportion to its frame but human nonetheless, and full of anger. She held her arms up, holding the shotgun in her hand, and shook her head. "We're sorry! We're sorry! We're going! Just let us go! We don't want trouble!"

It stood there for a second, lashed its tail. Considering, pondering. Then an arm came up and a clawlike hand pointed at her, pointed up and out of the quarry. The message was simple.

Go.

She turned and ran, pushing Brad in front of her as she went... Taking care to keep herself between Brad's junked up arm and the horror from the cave. She knew how this would go, and if they didn't get FAR, FAR AWAY, before the monster realized what they'd done, then they were going to die.

"Oh jesus, oh jesus, oh jesus..." Brad chanted as he ran, probably unaware he was even doing it. "I didn't know it could lay EGGS."

"Me either! Keep running!"

It was a testament, to the sick sense of humor that appeals to mankind in general, that the mute and terrifying parahuman that had surfaced years ago in Corpus Christi and caused a hell of a lot of property damage, had been given the name that it had. The media had given it the name "Scorpus Christi", and it had stuck. It was good for a snigger to folks who never had to get within arm's reach of the damned thing.

Scorpus Christi wasn't fazed much by bullets. It could shred steel and concrete with its bare claws, move WAY too quickly with those skittering legs, and had no real compunction about killing or crippling anyone who tried to stop it. It could dig through dirt and sand at a decent clip, probably didn't need to breathe, and was fairly aggressive in stressful situations. It had surfaced now and again throughout the region, usually stealing things or causing destruction for no reasons anyone could tell. Local heroes had tried to stop it, but it would usually scuttle off at top speed or burrow away when it started losing.

But worse, perhaps the most horrible thing of all, to Maria? Eggs. There was a female in there, somewhere. A woman. She'd been someone, before she got whatever cursed power had twisted her into THAT.

They'd just passed the couch, when Brad started to slow. Maria kept going, started past him. "KEEP MOVING!"

"What? It's letting us go!"

"KEEP MOVING!" She grabbed his free arm, pulled until he got the notion. Maria knew that the trouble was NOT over yet.

And as they reached the car, she piled into the driver's side, and barely waited until Brad's ass hit the seat before she peeled out, leaving him to swear and shut the door. And sure enough, as they ground their way up the ramp out, a horrible, chittering CRY rose from back in the quarry.

"You took an eggsack," Maria said. "You took her BABIES."

Brad looked at the gooey, dusty, mass on his arm. He tugged on the glove sticking out of it, it didn't budge. "It was an accident," he whispered. He'd gone pale.

"I don' think she cares!" They hit the road out, as a cloud of dust rose behind them. Maria hit the gate out full on, sending it flying back and probably denting the hell out of the front grille, but she was beyond caring. Sure as hell, a brown, jagged collection of limbs and bug-like bits and anger was charging down the road after them.

"Call it in," she told him. She needed her full attention on the road ahead.

Brad grabbed the radio and made the call, as she whipped the cruiser into a screeching drift onto the main route, and roared back towards Sancti.

It didn't stop when they hit the main route.

It didn't slow down, either.

And slowly, it started growing in the rearview mirror.