Contagion 1.10
It's amazing where you can go with just the right outfit and attitude. Of course, wearing someone else's face helps, but if anyone had actually known this person I'd have been screwed. Still, casually sauntering up to the sex dungeon in the red-green of the ABB, I fist-bumped one of the guards and headed inside.
The entire place reeked of smoke and sweat, and everything was coated in a thick layer of shame. The girls on the platforms gyrated and ground against the poles, but their eyes were dead. They did this to survive: not to make ends meet, but literally to avoid being killed. The ABB treated human beings like livestock, and those who refused to be boxed into a mold were unceremoniously murdered and dumped on the beach.
I felt the deep bass thrum through my body, vibrating my essence – not forcefully enough to shake any parts of me loose, but I could definitely feel myself jostling. One girl in a booth steeled herself to not show her fear and revulsion as a "client" tore off her top and roughly groped her. My hackles rose and I wanted nothing more than to snap his jaw wide open, plunge a tendril of myself inside, and rip him apart from within. But that would start a fight. The girls would be caught in the crossfire. I scanned the room and formed a plan.
Passing a column, briefly removed from line of sight (and thanking god for the heavy smoke), I liquefied and slithered behind the bar. There wasn't a tap, so this would be less convenient, but the dark red mood lighting worked in my favor. Hiding on the floor, pressing myself into the seam of the wall and liquor rack, I extruded a tendril up the wall and reached the first bottle. Thinner and thinner I made my little pseudopod, until it was small enough to force its way under the sealed cap. A few drops of me leaked inside, and I repeated the process. It took a long time, but I eventually infected each one of the bottles. I honestly had no idea if this would work, but considering I'd been splattered and diced up, apparently I could survive in some pretty hostile environments.
I slithered out and took solid form again, plopping down in a booth and pretending to watch the dancers. A couple of them still had enthusiasm in their motions: I didn't know whether to chalk that up to denial, the hope of becoming a lieutenant's kept woman, or if this was a fetish for one or two of them, but I did know that they were the vast minority. Out of roughly twelve girls, at least eight that I'd tracked with my eyes were just going through the motions like robots – pivot, pelvic thrust, stick out butt... The ABB didn't really care, of course. This was just eye candy for them. Considering how out-of-the-way this place was and how it had no advertisement or any real way of identifying it, I figured this wasn't a strip club or brothel for profit. The ABB were well-known for human trafficking, stuffing into trucks those who refused to join or were of no use to them and shipping them out to be sold as slaves or toys to sick people across the country. Most likely, dancing here and entertaining the grunts was the only way these girls avoided the even worse fate of outright slavery. Then again, from my perspective, there wasn't much difference between the two. I scanned the room through the smoke, watching as more and more bottles were passed around.
"First time here, isn't it?"
I glanced over to see an older ABB member – mid thirties, maybe? – with a glass eye, a green bandana fastened around his arm. "I can usually tell," he smirked, "you've got that 'awkward virgin' air. If you want a girl to pop your cherry, I'd recommend Nicole there," he gestured to one of the more mechanical dancers. "She does good work, doesn't talk too much."
Yeah, I'm about done with this. "They don't really look...happy," I commented. "Why do we make them do this?"
My uninvited companion shrugged. "Somebody's gotta do it. We all have a part to play, and if you step outta line somebody smacks you down. Our smackdown just happens to be more literal than most." He clapped me on the shoulder. "You get used to it."
"And if there was a way to avoid getting smacked down?"
"There's always a bigger fish," he replied. "If you're not the biggest, then you make it too much trouble for somebody to force you back in line. Like Lung: you can't take him in 'cause he'll cause too much damage to be worth it. But good luck getting that kind of rep with just a gun and an attitude. Plus, trust me," he sat down beside me, "with the Nazi trash out there, we're all safer here. Might not be fun but it's better than the alternative."
"Since you brought up Nazis, I propose a third alternative." I put my arm through his chest. In that moment I reached out with my mind to all of my essence, commanding it to eat. I felt the hunger, but it wasn't just from me as I consumed my guest: it came from all around, a multitude of out-of-body experiences all happening at once. It was...well, I'd never experienced it myself, but the memories of others I'd eaten suggested that the experience was orgasmic. All around the room, ABB members screamed and convulsed before liquefying into red puddles. I couldn't will the puddles to come to me or otherwise control them, but I shuffled over to the nearest one and was able to slurp it up like a vacuum cleaner.
Terrified out of their wits, the girls scattered while the remaining men drew their weapons and looked around for their attacker. "Shit," I yelled, moving toward the center of the room. "Did anybody see what killed everyone? Anybody fucking see it!?"
"Nuh-uh," one of them whimpered. "Shit, man, I joined up to keep from getting killed by some fuckin' nutcase cape." We all gathered in the middle, watching the dark corners of the room, weapons drawn. The whiny one shouted out into the room, "H-hey! You don't have to fight the rest of us! Just...just leave, huh, and we won't chase you! Live and let live, uh? What do you say?"
I turned to the rest of the group. "I prefer Wings' saying." I held up my hands, letting them transform into those massive claws. "Live and let die," I finished the phrase while slicing through the remaining ABB. Shifting to a Merchant's appearance, I headed to the back room where most of the dancers had fled. "Hey," I shouted through the door, "they're all dead. Any of you want to get free, I suggest you get what clothes you have and figure a way to get out of town. For what it's worth, good luck."
I was slowly processing the haze of memories, getting glimpses of ABB safehouses and other locales. Glass-Eye had been right: the gangs retained their power through being too dangerous to topple. E88 had the most raw power, able to overwhelm almost any challenger, and Lung was an army unto himself. As long as both sides had this kind of power, the cowards in the Protectorate would prefer to leave the innocents to die so long as they themselves would live to see another day.
The biggest roadblock was Lung: he'd driven off Leviathan, he'd beaten the entire local Protectorate, and he was a living natural disaster when riled. He needed to die. Lung's death would create a power vacuum and the Empire would jump at the chance to expand their territory and influence. The Protectorate would be forced to take meaningful action, rather than just making token efforts, and perhaps they'd call in backup and actually fix the Nazi problem themselves. I doubted it, of course, but it could happen, however unlikely it was that it actually would happen.
More likely the Protectorate would turtle up and declare the city lost. Maybe they'd build a wall around the place, or maybe they'd carpet-bomb it. Either way, if the damn heroes didn't do their job, I would. I'd tear the spinal column out of every damn Nazi in the city and string them up like Christmas lights.
Shifting back to my first disguise, I left through the front door and let it hang wide. People would see the gore, hear the terrified screams, and know what they ignored every day.
(BREAK)
When people are directly confronted with horror, and shown that they've been ignoring it since time immemorial, there are two types of reactions: the first is astonishment and shame, culminating in the determination to do something about the situation, somehow make things better. The second is complete denial, doubling down on falsehoods and platitudes to avoid confronting the nightmarish truth.
For me, the truth I could no longer deny was that I'd been more than bent – I'd been twisted. I hadn't quite snapped, or broken down, or anything in that particular vein, but I'd been irrevocably changed by my experiences, my torture at the hands of Emma, Madison and Sophia and the further abuse heaped on me by the school system and, tacitly at least, the PRT. I felt no remorse at ending the lives of gang members and villains, because they were either complicit or active participants in evils committed against innocent people. If I'd gained my powers some other way, and not been tormented non-stop for almost two years, I would likely have never willingly killed someone.
It was due to this epiphany that I decided to pay a visit to my father – not in my own body, of course – and see how he'd dealt with my actions.
I first swung by the docks but his office was empty, which was distinctly odd. The rest of the union boys sat around doing very little, as dockworkers were rather useless without functioning docks. What stood out as even more strange was that Lacey's food truck was nowhere to be seen. She was almost always at the Union, offering lunch and snacks at a discount for the dockworkers, yet neither she nor Kurt were present.
I found them, and my father, back at my house. Well, I presumed they were there because Kurt's truck was out front, along with a black sedan I didn't recognize. It really stood out to me that I didn't immediately think of it as 'home'. In truth, it seemed that I didn't really have a home anymore. In that moment, I felt a crushing weight on my ribs, and in my heart. I didn't have a home; I'd given up everything to go on this crusade, and I was killing people almost indiscriminately. I...needed some semblance of normalcy to keep me from going feral.
I liquefied and snuck in through a crack in the siding. We'd kept patching it, and coating it with bug spray when the bay's humidity would cause the crack to pop back open, but I was able to slither inside. Kurt and Lacey were seated on either side of my father for emotional support, while two authority-types sat across from them.
"...ymore. Once I heard what happened with Alan's family – what they think happened, at least – I realized that's where the money must have come from. I can't...I can't have blood money like that. I don't know what happened or what drove her to this, but my daughter is not a cold-blooded killer. She had to have snapped, and it's my fault for not being there for her, and now she's out there alone and probably scared and she has blood on her hands but the blood is on my hands because I left her alone to wallow in my own self-pity–" By the time one of the agents cut him off, he was babbling a mile a minute, tears streaming down his face.
"Look, Mr. Hebert," the dark-skinned man on the right (was he Indian? Arab? Israeli? It was hard to tell when you were a puddle) interrupted my father's word vomit, "all of the circumstances in this case point to something other than a teen going on a rampage. We believe your daughter is a parahuman and somehow killed the Barnes family with her powers. This is..." he grasped for the right phrasing, "a very slippery middle ground. Trigger events – the circumstances that cause people to develop powers – are always exceedingly traumatic. They're commonly known as the absolute worst day of a person's life, when they hit rock bottom and somehow keep going. Due to this, and the fact that psychotic breaks or even full-blown dissociative episodes are common, there is a chance that none of this is truly her fault."
"Unfortunately," the pale agent built like a linebacker cut in, playing the bad cop, "the note she left you and the money suggests a level of planning not typically associated with the typical vengeful rampage we see from trigger-event trauma. There's a possibility that she fixated on the Barnes family as some sort of crusade, needing for some reason to kill them in order to find peace, but the fact remains that this was almost certainly premeditated. That's four counts of murder in the first degree, and the deaths of a minor and a child are definite sticking points."
"If you can somehow convince her to come in peacefully," the 'good cop' continued for his partner, "there may be an opportunity to plea-bargain for leniency, especially if her power is significant enough to do some real good in the world. She'd basically be paying off her karmic debt rather than stewing in the Birdcage. That said, the most important thing is that we get her off the streets. Nothing turns a hurt, lost parahuman into a villain faster than having to see the darkest side of life. Especially in the Bay, a girl like her will most likely get press-ganged into the Merchants or Empire 88, and from there the indoctrination is pretty swift. We need some way to contact her, get her to turn herself in."
Fat chance of that happening, I snarled in my mind. The Protectorate took care of their own while leaving innocents to die, and the PRT helped to cover up my abuse and god-only-knew what else. They were far from any sort of 'proper authority' and I wasn't going to let them pressure me into servitude any more than I would the gangs. Because truly, what were they if not a self-serving gang with government backing and good PR? Privateers were more noble and genuine.
Disgusted with the whole charade, I slithered back out, already forming a plan. The first ones to go would be the Merchants, because they filled in the cracks. If they weren't taken out, when the gang wars started they'd go to ground and just infest more people with their drugs and sex slavery. I had a better idea of how to handle them now, and I'd rely on my brain instead of just trying to hammer my way through everything.
After them, Lung would be next. If I weakened E88 first, he'd go on a rampage to claim new territory and I'd never have a shot at taking him out: I wasn't anywhere near arrogant to think that I could take down the Dragon of Kyushu when he was at full power. With Lung gone the Nazis would make their move and wage endless war to dominate the city, but they were all human. I could pick them off one at a time and tear down their organization. Then, when the city was free from the gangs' tyranny, we'd have a reckoning with the Protectorate, see if they could actually be heroes after all.
