Boxed In
2-4

We had gone as far as we could across the roofs before reaching a gap that was too large for us to clear without being able to fly. Well, that is, we could try, but I wasn't keen on attempting it with one of my wings tied up.

Thankfully, whatever effect had been pulling us towards the docks seemed to have given up for now, and we were somewhere between the bay and the hospital. The roof we were on had a number of large holes on it that opened into darkness that gave me vertigo. Heights didn't bother me, not anymore, but a deep dark hole where I couldn't even see the bottom? That was still creepy.

Thankfully, there was an old fire escape on the side of the building that led down into a narrow alley between buildings, with one end opening onto the main street.

Between the fog and the running, I'd completely lost track of time, but the dry itch of my eyes and cloudy sense of detachment told me it was late.

"I'd kill for a cup of tea," I muttered and stretched my back with a groan. Checking my pack, I pulled a small bottle of water and some dried meat from my bag, offering some to Aisha as I chewed on a strip.

"Hn," Aisha muttered, taking some food. "Caramel Cream Frappuccino, with chocolate sprinkles and marshmallows."

Just the thought of all that sugar made my teeth ache. "God, you and Madison both… she was obsessed with those drinks, always using that coffee machine Dragon gave us to make bigger and bigger drinks, packed with cream, sugar, syrup and anything else she could get her hands on. Especially when she realised we apparently can't get fat…"

I trailed off as a sob tried to force its way out of my throat. It had been hours, and I had no clue where those monsters had gone or if Madison was even alive.

Aisha put her arm around my waist with a muttered "You're too fucking tall," and pulled me to a one sided hug.

"She means a lot to you?"

"I… I don't know?..." I choked back a laugh. "I know how stupid that sounds, but she made my life hell, y'know? Back before all this happened, she and some friends bullied me..."

I sighed, slowly repeating the story of what Madison had helped Emma and Sophia to do and how I'd been at the boardwalk when the 'monster' in the bay had just suddenly appeared.

##

[Day of the attack]

Huffing, I watched as my breath rose in front of me like a cloud as I leaned against a railing. In the distance sat the Protectorate base that floated in the middle of the bay. I'd seen it so often that it had just become part of the background. I'd even toured it once, years ago with Emma. She'd begged her Dad into taking us both.

My hands tightened on the cheap styrofoam cup I was holding. Even that memory was tainted now.

Trying to distract myself from that thought, I glanced at the people around me as they went about their lives. Spotting a pair of girls that were close to my age giggling together about something, I felt another pang of loneliness that was tinged with anger as I recognised one of them as Madison.

It wasn't like I didn't want friends anymore, but it was hard to make them when Emma had seemingly poisoned the whole school against me.

I pushed the thoughts of Emma away. I'd come here to try and lighten my mood, not drown myself further. I decided to do some window shopping in an effort to distract myself and put my hand on the rail in front of me.

There was a crack of static, the shock powerful enough to make me yelp, quickly stepping away from the metal. My face flushed as a few people turned to look at me, staring in confusion at the 'screaming lanky girl', and I quickly hunched my shoulders and made to walk away.

Except something didn't feel right. My skin tingled with goosebumps, and I could feel the hairs on my arms and neck rising. The air around me felt charged, like the moments before a lightning storm, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

I almost thought I was imagining it, but I could hear the people closest to me comment about it.

That was when I heard the first rumble of thunder, a sound so deep and loud that I felt it in my chest, the ground shaking under my feet. Another followed it almost immediately.

The flow of the shoppers marching up and down the boardwalk changed as people started to move close to the buildings, likely hoping to duck inside in an effort to duck inside and avoid the sudden downpour.

Except the sky was still clear.

There was another rumble, this one even louder than before and accompanied by a flash of lightning. For just a moment, I saw the jagged line as it split the sky, striking a building in the distance, then the whole world went white.

I dropped my tea, uncaring as I quickly rubbed my face, trying to clear the spots from my eyes.

"What the fuck was that?!" someone screamed. "Did they hit eighty-eight miles an hour?" another voice shouted, the absurdity of it almost making me laugh.

I glanced up at the clear blue sky, ready to run if anything else happened. The afterimage of the lightning bolt was still burned into my vision. After a few more moments of nothing, I started to relax.

Out in the bay, I could see the glowing bridge that connected the Protectorate HQ to the boardwalk flicker into life, dark shapes already moving across it as the heroes came to investigate.

"Well," I muttered to myself, "at least I'll have something to tell —"

The building that had been struck by lightning exploded, a large shape bursting through the walls and stumbling to the ground. It was a woman, nearly two stories tall and growing, her skin stone white. Her wild, curly hair was shot through with fading streaks of black and obscured her face as she climbed to her feet.

People screamed, running as the giant climbed to her feet, demolishing a shop in the process. She was lashing out wildly, knocking into buildings or slapping them with her hands, growing bigger by the second.

A large man slammed into me in his effort to get away, knocking me to the ground. My head bounced off the rail with a dull thud that resonated through my body as I fell.

I rolled as I hit the ground, pushing myself closer to where the rail met the pavement, a conditioned reflex to make myself less of a target. The moment my head stopped ringing, I used the rail to lift myself upright.

Others hadn't been so lucky; I could see others who had been trampled by the crowds as panic filled the air.

The woman demolished another store, each step she took shaking the ground now that she was nearly four stories tall, and every movement of her arms sent a wave of force like a strong wind down the streets and carrying with it a faint mist that was beginning to emerge from her body.

She was facing away from me when she threw her head back and 'screamed'. The sound was a long drawn out wail that was painfully loud and dug deep into my brain, making my head feel like it was in a vice.

My legs, apparently smarter than the rest of me, started to move, following the crowds in an effort to get away.

Ahead of me, I could see a small body struggling to rise. There was blood on her hair and the pavement, and her clothes were filthy. I didn't stop to think about what I was doing, I just knew I couldn't leave her.

Barely slowing down as I passed, I reached down and pulled the girl upright, adrenaline or fear giving me the strength needed to hold her up.

"Taylor!?" Madison gasped, and for just a second, I very nearly dropped her as she leaned heavily on me, one of her legs apparently too injured to take her weight.

"Shut up and run!" Gritting my teeth, I took more of her weight on my shoulders, thankful the girl was so much smaller and lighter than me.

We had barely gone a few feet when a large blue motorbike shot past us, the driver just a blur of blue and silver power armour. In the distance behind him, I could see a large jeep with the PRT ensignia on the hood, and my heart leapt. The Protectorate had arrived!

"Holy shit!" Madison gasped, and I found myself silently agreeing.

Part of me, the part that would always be the small ten-year-old who ran around pretending to be Alexandria, wanted to turn and watch the battle, to see the heroes in action, but the more sensible parts won out. If I stuck around now, I was likely to get caught in the crossfire.

"Move!" I snapped, shifting Madison's weight on my shoulder slightly.

We had barely made it to the end of the street when the Endbringer sirens started to scream, and I glanced back to see that while the woman was being driven towards the ocean, she was still growing.

##

[now]

"We spent the night in the Endbringer shelter," I said to Aisha. "Madison was taken off by some EMTs. It was the last I saw of her until… well… this."

I waved a hand at myself to indicate my transformed body.

"Fuck… I thought you were just a couple who had a bad breakup or something.." Aisha shrugged and took another swig of her water. "I'm surprised you bothered helping her. I would have left the bitch on the ground, or at least handed her off to the heroes."

"No!" Aisha flinched at my sharp reply. If I was honest, it even startled me just how quick the answer came. "She was a bitch, but I couldn't just leave her..."

'Yes you could.' I squashed the thought as quickly as it came. Yes, I could have dropped Madison and carried on running.

Then what? Spend the rest of my life knowing I left her to die?

"There's a difference between living and living with yourself..." I muttered, and we fell into silence, both lost in our thoughts as we finished our 'meal'.

"So…" Aisha said eventually to break the growing tension. "What happened afterwards, I mean, you two were outside the city?"

I shook my head with a bitter chuckle. "When the all clear was given, Dad took me outta the city."

After barely talking to me since Mom died, I came home that night and found him at home, half-drunk and crying. "He said we both needed to relax, so we went to visit an old friend of his that owned some land south of Brockton with his family…"

Of course, no one had known at the time about the virus, that it could lay dormant for long periods. Not until people had started getting sick. Madison and I had ended up in a facility run by Dragon, our every move watched and recorded.

I'd been horrified, of course, to realise we ended up in the place, but —

"Madison was… different. She kept being nice to me… she even tried to kiss me once, before we both transformed, and now I just don't know what to think, but I know she only came back to the city because of me."

That made her my responsibility, and anything that happened was my fault.

"… y'know…" Aisha gave me a salacious grin, "maybe you should have taken her up on it? Hate sex is supposed to be great for working out stress."

"And how would you even know?"

"What? I've had sex," she said just a little too fast, a slight blush on her cheeks.

"Suuuure," I drawled, amused despite myself, and one of Madison's comments emerged from my mouth before I could stop it. "You realise hand-jobs don't count, right?"

"Oh fuck you!" Aisha's face was glowing now, her ears and tail sticking straight up, making her look even more comical. "I —"

There was a crash nearby, and we both spun around. The sound echoed through the dark and quiet streets, making it hard to judge the direction, but I had a sinking suspicion about it.

"I think we made too much noise!" I hissed, glaring into the shadows around us, ears straining to hear anything over the pounding of my own heart. "We need to get off the street."

Running across the street, we stopped at the first building we reached. There was no convenient way up, so Aisha was forced to climb onto my back, holding as tightly as she could with only one arm while I drove my claws into the brickwork.

She was holding so tight that I could barely breathe, my lungs screaming for air as we reached the roof, and I slumped to the floor, gasping.

Weakly, I lifted myself up so I could see the street below. One of those spider flowers emerged from an alley, its pedipalps twitching as it looked from one direction to the next.

"Think it was following us?" Aisha whispered from the empty air next to me. Must be nice, having a stranger power in this city.

Before I could say anything, there was another crash, and the dark figure from the docks walked out into the streets, a dozen of those spiders following him.

Either he was ignoring them, or he just didn't care. Either way, he marched up the street, his pace slow but with the steady unyielding quality of a glacier.

Chirping, the spiders went on ahead, vanishing into the gloom.

"We should follow him…" Ashia droned, her voice flat.

"We need to find Mad—"

"No!" She hissed, visible once more. Her pupils were narrow slits, lost in the bright purple of her eyes, her tail twitching. "Listen, we need to follow him. It's important!"

'Her power let her know things', she'd said that when we met. It sounded like a weak precognition ability, but she couldn't control it.

"Do you know why?"

She shook her head. "It doesn't work like that. I just get vague feelings or pictures… I just know, we want to be where he goes!"

"...Alright, fine… but we stick to the roofs, and if he spots us we run. Okay?"

"Deal!"

Running across the roofs with only one wing wasn't going to be fun, but the height would at least give us a chance to escape if spotted.

##

Madison almost praised God as Victoria skidded to a stop. Her wild run through the city had put even the fastest rollercoaster to shame. The girl was seemingly immune to harm, jumping from roofs without a care, cracking the ground as she landed, and running down the streets without slowing, an almost feral grin on her face.

All the while, the flower-spiders followed along, the distance between them gradually growing until they vanished into the gloom.

Any other time, Madison might have enjoyed it, but between the nausea, her growing fever and the pain of her ribs, it was hell.

"Shit! You okay?" Victoria asked, finally snapping out of whatever trance she had been in.

"I've been better," Madison groaned.

"I'm sorry! Sometimes I just —"

"It's fine." She poked Victoria's stomach, noting with glee both how firm it was and how Victoria gasped. Apparently, someone was ticklish. "Where are we?"

Lifting her head slightly, Madison tried to look around, but saw nothing but another empty roof.

"About a block away from the hospital. I didn't think they would like it if I suddenly showed up, sprinting for the gate and well… if I get you closer, do you think you can make it alone?"

"...Victoria?" Madison said sweetly.

"Yes?"

"If I could lift my head, I'd bite your fucking tit!" she hissed. She'd been painfully aware of them the entire time they had been moving. They were large enough that she'd almost brained Madison with them at one point.

"Okay, okay! Fuck, are you always this snappy?"

"Only when I'm dying!" Madison smiled in an effort to lessen the sting. They were only a block from the hospital, she could finally relax and —

"Oh fuck me!"

Her eyes snapped open, and Madison looked around as quickly as she could in her current state. "What? What's going… oh… fuck!"

There, in the streets below, were hundreds of flower-spiders. They filled the street, with some even forced to run along the walls, as they rushed with a single-minded drive that led them to apparently ignore the two girls.

"Where are they going?" Madison's voice was barely above a whisper. She was getting used to Victoria; she was at least 'human'. But those things were a whole new level of nightmarish.

"The hospital," Victoria gasped. "This road leads straight to the hospital… they're going to attack it!" Her eyes were literally glowing with emotion, a deep violet light coming from deep inside her pupils. "Amy's still at the hospital!"

Without warning, Victoria took off, sprinting across the rooftops and clutching Madison tightly.

"Doesn't the hospital have guards?" She had seen them, after all, taking shots at the flying monsters that had carried her off.

"A few people with guns won't stop an army!" Victoria hissed, leaping to the next building, her clawed feet carving lines into the roof.

Unable to argue, but also unable to help, Madison forced herself to stay quiet despite the pain the rough treatment was causing.

Seeing the carpet of spiders and the conviction in Victoria's eyes, Madison felt not only a pang of longing for Taylor, but the faint stirring of determination in her chest. She wasn't sure how much she could help when they got to the hospital, but she was going to at least try.

She hissed as Victoria cleared another building, the landing jarring her ribs, and the thought rose up.

'Assuming I'm still alive when we get there!'

AN: Chapter written under commission

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