Exterminator
1.
A car pulled up, and another three guys got out and joined the crowd. I couldn't make out their faces in the glare of the front lights. Shortly after, the group – twenty or twenty five in total – started walking north, passing below me as they walked down the street.
I was out of time to consider my options. As much as I didn't want to face it, there was really only one option that I could have no regrets about.
I shut my eyes and focused on every bug on the neighbourhood, including the sizable swarm I had gathered on the way into the Docks. I took control of each of them.
Attack.
It was dark enough that I could only tell where the swarm was with my power. That meant I couldn't even tune out the swarm if I wanted to have any idea about what was going on. My brain was filled with horrendous amounts of information, as I sensed each bite, each sting.
As the thousands of insects and arachnids swarmed over and around the group, I could almost see the outlines of each person, just by sensing the shapes of the surfaces the bugs were crawling on, or the areas the vermin wasn't occupying.
My concentration was shattered when a few hundred bugs of all sorts simply disappeared, only to pop back into my power's range in the open air high above me.
Shit!
Oni Lee had been on site after all, and now I had to fight not only one impossibly strong parahuman, but a freaking teleporter too. I still controlled the insects which had gotten under Oni Lee's clothes though, so maybe all wasn't lost yet.
Inspiration struck and I directed the dozens of spiders hanging on to Oni Lee while he was falling back to earth to crawl in the direction of his face.
Blinding someone by injecting spider venom into their eyes was an extreme measure, but I had to get him out of the fight as fast as possible to concentrate on his even more dangerous boss.
It was too little too late - I felt him teleport again through my bugs, and this time he appeared on the roof beside me, just twenty feet away and blocking the fire escape. My spider attack squad had reached his face by now, but he was furiously wiping them away with his left hand while his right fumbled for something in his pockets.
Maybe he was going for a gun, maybe for something even more sinister, it didn't matter.
I had to act now and my power reached out to every flying insect of the swarm, ordering them into kamikaze attacks. I would pump up his hands with wasp and bee venom until he couldn't even put a finger on the trigger of a gun, but the bugs would need precious time to reach us up here.
Down in the street, a fireball erupted from Lung, and hundreds of my insects, many of whom I had just recalled to my aid, were burned to crisps, distracting me for a decisive second by falling out of my perception.
When I turned back to the foe at hand, I realised my mistake- Oni Lee had found what he was searching for and he didn't hesitate to use it. It was a grenade, shining ominously in the orange light of Lung's pyrokinetic eruption as he tossed it in my direction.
I threw myself backwards with all the leg strength I had built up through months of running, desperately hoping to get out of the blast zone. Then I was basked in white light and knew no more.
I came back to consciousness a mess, wet from head to toes and shivering from an all encompassing cold. The ague was terrible, locking up all my muscles and making me a prisoner in my own body. I could see nothing but darkness and the only sounds besides the clattering of my teeth were irregular animal calls I couldn't identify.
I must've drifted back into a near coma, because the next time I opened my eyes, I was blinded by the intense rays of a summer sun standing above me. The shivers had fallen away, probably due to the warmth from the life spending orb in the sky.
I felt as if a train had hit me and when I remembered the actual events, I realized that the metaphor wasn't that far off, with Oni Lee's grenade and all. I concluded that I should be happy to still be alive and even without crippling wounds, as far as I could tell. I contemplated that thought lazily and quite happily, ignoring the irritating wetness still clinging to my costume, until the meaning of „sunshine" and „daylight" penetrated my still hazy thoughts.
Dad! He would be worried to death about me when he found my bed at home empty and not even a note from me about „leaving early" or something. I had to get back as soon as possible!
My body rejected any commands to rise up and jog home rather insistently though, going as far as giving me black spots in my field of view for my struggles. I fell back to the wet and spongy ground, exhausted and terrified by the thought of my dad calling in the cops to search for me.
How would I explain the costume, the mask? Could I deal with my dad and random police officers knowing that I was a parahuman? Would they expect me to join the Wards, throwing me from one cage - highschool - into another?
To distract myself from those wretched possibilities I couldn't do a thing about at the moment, I tried to focus on the here and now. Where exactly had I ended up following the explosion? And why was I still alive at all, after provoking two ruthless villains?
The answer to the first question might entail the one to the second, but I grasped that only much later, after I had fought back the shock I got when my still addled senses revealed the reality of my situation.
I found myself in a vast, stinking landscape of mud, grass, moss, stunted trees and ponds, with no hint of civilization in sight. No traffic noise, no contrails in the air, nothing.
It must've taken me more than a few minutes to fight back the utter confusion at the sight in front of my eyes, but before I managed it completely, thoughts of my dad, the cops and my utter helplessness returned, throwing me into another loop of anguish.
Tears streamed down my cheeks under the mask and my body shook with random but painful hiccups. Dad, the foul wasteland around me, my weakness, Lungs firestorm, the cops, a white hot flash, all formed a horrible kaleidoscope of emotions, impressions and shreds of rational thought that made me feel as if I was a pinned down insect on a wheel of fortune, spun by unimaginable forces.
Then, I threw up everything left in my stomach - luckily only bile, it could seep from my mask without suffocating me - and passed out for the third time in a day.
There must be some truth to the proverb that „One gets used to everything", because the third time I awoke from a blackout, I stayed that way. My body felt frail, but the shivers hadn't returned and the sun was still up, although much less warmth reached the ground than before.
I sat upright with some difficulty, fought down the spinning motion my distorted sense of balance produced, and finally managed to stand up firmly, or at least as firmly as the soaked ground permitted. I had to get to my house, try to do some damage control, everything else was secondary.
But where to go? The area around me was so full of undergrowth, muddy ponds and other features strange to a city girl like me, that I couldn't make up my mind. While I turned around on the spot and pondered my options, a mosquito landed on the left lense of my mask and tried to jump its sucker into my eyeball.
I slapped it away reflexively, but it had given me an idea. I was a cape after all, maybe not with a very impressive power, but still. I stretched out my „sixth sense", and immediately uncountable tiny bulbs lit up in front of my „inner eye".
The number of invertebrates around was humongous. Nothing I had ever felt in Brockton Bay, even after gathering huge swarms for my cape work, could compare to this sensation.
There were literally millions of mosquitos in my range, and an unbelievable number of other bugs: Horseflies, bees, spiders, dragonflies, all kinds of beetles, wasps and hornets living off them, even some strange crustaceans under the murky water.
I struggled with mental overload for a moment, but my new multitasking abilities were up to the challenge, sorting the most useful bugs out, giving me a feel for their location relative to me and ignoring pointless things like earthworms and crabs.
My understanding of the environment improved by leaps and bounds, but my mood took the opposite direction. There was not a single sign of human habitation in the range of my power, no people, no houses, no cars, nothing artificial at all.
I was stranded in a huge tract of wilderness where Brockton Bay should be, and there was not even a hint which direction would lead me home or at least to the nearest village.
The part of me clinging to rationality as if it was a life belt started to analyse the data I'd gathered and came up with several scenarios that could explain my current situation. Maybe Oni Lee's weapon had just been a stun grenade and he deposited me in this miserable swamp to die? Or had I manifested another power in my moment of need, transporting me to the largest aggregation of insects within reach?
I speculated and hesitated for an eternity of torturous indecision, until I resolved that I simply had no choice but to start walking in the direction from which my swarms reported less water and more firm ground. This was a swamp after all, and I felt no desire to end up as an especially curious bog woman for future archaeologists.
Luckily, the summer heat - I decided to ignore the fact that it should be a cold January day in North America - must've dried the marches considerably, because I could traverse most areas without being sucked into bottomless mud.
From time to time I decided to take detours around especially ominous looking patches of so called „land", but I could hold to a surprisingly direct route. I utilised my bugs to prevent me from walking in circles, following straight chains of dragonflies I formed in front of me and stretching them out constantly to the limit of my power's range.
I had to take rests every few minutes, a combination of my general weakness, the difficult terrain and the emotional mess I was constantly battling down slowing me to a crawl. When the sun finally dipped behind the horizon, I hadn't hiked more than five miles, but felt as if I'd been on a forced march of thirty.
With the twilight came a feeling of being constantly watched, reminiscent of long forgotten childhood fears about monsters hiding under the bed. The tactile senses of my bugs showed no threat, nothing bigger than some pheasants and other swamp dwelling birds were near, but my uneasiness didn't go away.
I pushed on, grimly determined to use any last ray of light I could to get out of the mess I found myself in. Half an hour later, I regretted my thoughtlessness very much, when the solid surface I was walking on suddenly vanished and my next step threw me into a slimy pond of disgustingly smelling fluid.
It wasn't deep, the brackish water only coming to my shoulders, but I felt with bone deep fear how my feet were sinking into the mud on the bottom. As if the earth itself wanted to suck me in.
Maybe I would've drowned there in my exhausted state and wearing my armoured costume, never to be heard about again, but my flailing arms caught hold of the solid branch of a bush that protruded over the edge of the water.
I struggled, my heart pounding rapidly, trying to keep my nose above the water line. An adrenaline rush gave me additional power and I started to simultaneously push into the mud enclosing my feet and to pull on the lifesaving plant.
The hold on my feet lessened and with the most powerful pull I could manage, I got myself onto save ground again.
I lay in the dirt, spent beyond anything I'd ever experienced. It took long minutes until I could drag myself a few feet away from that damned hellhole, roll myself into an embryonic position to preserve body heat, and fall into an uneasy sleep.
My empty stomach woke me up. It was growling like an angry bear and for a few moments, I imagined how I would feed it with a nice cheese sandwich and bacon while dad was drinking his coffee. With that thought of my father, reality caught up with me.
When I opened my eyes, I found that I was still lost in an unknown and much too boggy part of the world, without any idea how I came here and where I could find the nearest outposts of civilization. With the light of day, the horrible anxiety I'd felt yesterday returned in full force.
I was a useless „hero", a loser who had botched her first fight. For a moment, I thought I could almost hear snickers and whispers, Emma and her friends gossiping about stupid Hebert, who thought she could play hero, but would only drive her father into an early grave, as she'd done with her mom. I shook my head to get rid of such self- defeating fantasies.
Still, I had no doubt that dad would be out of his mind with worry by now, he would surely have called the police and given a missing person report. Maybe he had already mobilised his friends in the union to tape search posters on street lamps with my bony face on them.
My eyes teared up again, but I forced the guilt, fear and hopelessness back. I couldn't dwell on such feelings if I wanted to get out of here. It was no use. If I wanted to survive this swamp, which had nearly killed me already only hours ago, I had to concentrate on the practical side of things.
Like food. After three months of intense running, I had no fat reserves left on me and I didn't carry any eatable – or otherwise useful – items in my costume.
If I didn't get enough calories into my still weakened system, I would only get worse until my body went into lock down and I died a horrible death out here. What could I do to prevent that? I started to list options, every new idea less palatable than the last one.
I could try to find eatable berries or mushrooms, sure. But how did I know they were actually not poisonous to humans? Trial and error might end deadly.
Or I could simply use my powers and hunt a few birds... only to pluck and butcher them with my bare hands and eat their raw meat? Or even find the species of bugs that tasted best uncooked? I shuddered.
Finally, I decided that I should take a look at the crabs which were living in the ponds of this trice damned swamp. I'd remembered from a TV show that raw seafood was a delicacy in parts of the world, especially Japan. Maybe I could bring myself to kill and eat crabs?
When a small group of the animals followed my command and marched up to me for inspection, I gave up the thought. They looked disgusting, with mud everywhere on their tiny bodies and not enough meat to actually bother. It might well be better to go hungry today in the hope that I would find other people in the next 12 hours. Yes, that would surely be better than cracking crab armor and picking out the flesh.
Water was another, even more pressing problem. My throat was parched and I felt an intense thirst, even stronger than on that one occasion in my early running days, when I'd forgotten to hydrate myself beforehand.
Looking at the swamp water in the nearest ponds, I had the terrible thought that I would have to drink this stuff before long. Not only disgusting to look at, but guaranteed to be full of germs and parasites. The only alternative to imbibing that was to find flowing water in time.
I started todays hike without further ado.
Finally some luck! After three or four hours of walking and wading through the seemingly endless swamp, I stuck gold in the form of a small river, maybe a dozen feet wide, that was meandering across my way. The water wasn't moving fast, but the current was visible and the water less murky than that of the ponds. I didn't hesitate to drink from it, using the useless paper from the small block I carried in my costume as an impromptu filter against suspended matters
I drank my fill and felt much better, at least until I realised that I had nothing to carry the relatively clean water with me. Maybe it would be prudent to change my direction for the first time since I began my hike and follow the little stream, instead of crossing it? Who knew how long it would take to find another source of (barely) drinkable water?
I was sitting on the riverbank, resting in the shade of a stunted birch tree, and tried to make up my mind, when a deep humming sound entered my consciousness. I stood up, closed my eyes and threw my focussed perception into my power, but the insects around me weren't encountering anything unusual.
The sound grew louder, until I suddenly knew what it must be- a massive airscrew plane had to be flying in my direction. I hadn't identified it at first because those planes were very rare today and their noise was unfamiliar. Elation and hope surged through me- if I could somehow get the pilot's attention, I was as good as saved.
Stepping out of the birch's shadow, I faced the direction from which the engine sounds approached. Nervous energy flooded my whole body. I simply had to make them see me, and my powers were the best bet to achieve that, regardless of problems that might arise from being outed as a parahuman.
I clenched my teeth, closed my eyes once again and called upon every flying insect in a radius of 200 feet. They rose from the ground, the swamp water, the undergrowth, first thousands, than hundreds of thousands, finally more than a million bugs of all species.
I formed them into three titanic spherical swarms and had the individual insects fly close together, to make the mass as opaque as the globes of living chitin had formed, I ordered them to rise into the air above me, stopping them at a height of about 300 feet.
It took all my concentration to control so many bugs in such a precise way, but I somehow managed and started the next stage of my plan: Let the balls, with a diameter of more than 20 feet each, dance around each other in a complicated pattern that had nothing in common with the usual ways insects moved. Yes, that should do the trick.
I didn't have to wait long until I could see the plane in the distance, speeding towards me with droning motors. On the current route, it would pass maybe a mile to my right. It looked quite peculiar, with a very short hull which was reflecting the sunlight from dozens of windows and hung suspended between two long nacelles, that ran backwards and formed a rectangle with the elevator.
I instructed my swarms to dance even more energetically around each other, providing a bizarre spectacle that looked as unnatural as I could make it.
If the pilot missed this, he should be fired for incompetence, I thought.
He didn't.
The plane changed course and dived down, until it was flying as low as 600 feet when it passed overhead.
From this distance, the huge, white coloured swastikas on the wings were impossible to miss.