Plans and Plots and Stolen Kisses
THEY HAD ABANDONED the armory and the brownstone. Both would be known to Vector, if not already, then soon enough.
Edilio, with some assistance from Simone, found them an empty apartment ten blocks away. It wasn’t hard finding abandoned property; the city was half-empty already, and the only traffic still on the streets was heading away. Video of the horrors at City Hall and One Police Plaza and the Federal Building had broken the city’s courage. It was one thing to face a Knightmare or a Napalm; they could be fought, and the worst consequence of losing was death.
Death was far better than what Vector threatened.
The memory of the pus-draining, rot-reeking, diseased, agonized Williams was fresh in Dekka’s mind. The memory of reducing him to hamburger . . . that was fresh, too.
The new apartment faced Central Park, just a few blocks from the Markovic home, though somewhat less luxurious. It was an anonymous location, a well-furnished apartment that had belonged to an elderly couple who, should they suddenly decide to come home, would be rather shocked by what they saw.
Everyone was in morph. No one was human. They thought, hoped, prayed that Vector’s disease-bearing minions couldn’t infect a morph. And they were very damned sure they didn’t want to take the chance of remaining vulnerably human.
The Watchers were having a field day, access to all of them, all the time, eight little nodes through which they could watch. Eight minds for them to occupy.
Edilio did not have a morph and refused any suggestion that he consider taking the rock. He did, however, insist on what they each had agreed to: if any one of them was taken by Vector, the others would end their suffering in the only way possible: they would be killed. Killed, Dekka knew, by her if she was uninfested herself. A suicide pact. Or was it a murder-suicide pact? Yes, she supposed that’s what it was.
That at least is not something Sam ever had to face.
Simone and Shade had made regular scouting trips to Grand Central to see whether Vector would emerge to hunt them down. But Vector showed no signs of launching his insect army for the final blow. Yet. Possibly their move had left him with a cold trail, and he didn’t know where they were. Or possibly he no longer considered them a threat.
Yet.
“I’ve restocked with flamethrowers, but these are even more primitive than the first round,” Edilio said. “I piled them in that closet there. But the real weapon we have is in the truck down in the parking garage.”
“That’s a hell of an object to have stuck in the back of a pickup truck,” Simone said.
“Better than bringing it in here,” Sam pointed out.
They were in the unfamiliar living room, Dekka feeling like a burglar. Just another felony—what else is new? Two sofas faced each other across a dark carved Moroccan-style coffee table piled with food. They sat looking like costumed extras from a Star Wars movie taking a lunch break on the set.
Cruz and Armo were off raiding adjacent unoccupied apartments and had already rounded up an impressive larder of cookies, crackers, cheese, hummus, canned beans, and soup before deciding to continue their explorations rather than sit in on yet another planning session.
So the plan for round three with Vector was hatched between Dekka, Shade, Malik, Simone, and Sam, with Edilio confining himself to questions of logistics. Francis napped in one of the bedrooms.
“Vector hasn’t moved yet,” Shade said, forcing herself to slow her speech to be understood. “We have to hit him fast, before he makes plans.”
Dekka felt a rush of wind, and Shade was gone. Seconds later a sandwich appeared on the table, minus one bite.
“We’re relying a lot on Francis,” Malik pointed out. He was the one most used to the irritant of the Watchers and was the least agitated now. Everyone else who had morphed, especially Sam, for whom this was a new feature of life, seemed distracted and on edge.
“Yes, we are relying a lot on Francis,” Dekka agreed. “You have a better way?”
Malik thought hard, then admitted, “No. I don’t. Not yet, anyway.”
Sam said, “I’m new to this Watcher thing. Are we sure they don’t pass information along to Vector?”
“They may,” Malik said. “We don’t see any evidence of it yet, but it could happen. They seem more like lurkers watching a game rather than active players.”
“I worry about that Mirror person,” Shade said too rapidly. “He says he can mimic any Rockborn, which would mean he could be me, or Malik, or you, Dekka.”
“Who’s going to jump in the bubble?” Malik asked. “I would, but I’m not strong enough. It will have to be Armo or you, Dekka.”
“I’ll do it,” Dekka said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be the one,” Sam suggested. “You’re the general; you should be out of the action.”
“Oh? Like you always were?” Dekka retorted drolly.
“You’re strong in morph, Dekka, but that gas shell is more than two and a half feet long and weighs just about a hundred pounds,” Sam interjected. “Is Armo stronger than you?”
“This could be a suicide mission,” Dekka said. “I’m not sending Armo. I’ll manage.” She ended with a hand chop signaling the matter was decided. No one argued further.
“So, let’s walk through it again,” Malik said. “I do my thing, just a one-second blast, just enough to scare the hell out of any unmorphed humans with Vector. Shade zooms in and issues the warning. Hopefully any humans in there make a run for it. Then Sam does his thing. Francis takes Dekka and our new toy. In and out. The timer is set for six minutes. Bang.”
Dekka nodded. Vector Plan #3. Maybe the third time would be the charm.
Or maybe this was the last round. She closed her eyes and saw Williams, except now it was her, Dekka, her flesh erupting . . . her tongue swelling . . . her throat torn by screams of pain.
Dekka. Herself. Begging for death.
Two defeats. A third would very likely be the end of the Rockborn Gang.
“Oh, my God. That’s an entire red velvet cake.” Cruz stared at the object, all covered in white frosting, kept fresh beneath a glass bell jar. Untouched perfection.
“We should bring that back for everyone to share,” Armo said doubtfully. “Right?”
“Well,” Cruz said, “I am a little worried that it might be stale or taste bad. So we should probably sample it first.”
They were an extremely unlikely pair of burglars. A seven-foot-tall mass of muscle and white fur, and Jennifer Lawrence, Cruz’s morph of choice at the moment. JLaw seemed like a good choice; after all, what red-blooded male didn’t like her? But Armo had not seemed terribly impressed, and of course why would he? He knew who Cruz really was, and she was not Jennifer Lawrence.
“Let me get plates and forks.”
“I can’t eat with a fork,” Armo admitted, holding up one of his big claw-tipped paws. He grinned and gleefully stuck his rail-spike black claws into the cake at roughly the middle and scooped a huge piece into his other paw and began eating.
“Yeah, okay, I can do that, too, if we’re going all barbarian.” Cruz dug JLaw’s hand into the cake and scooped out a smaller piece, red crumbs falling to the floor, icing smearing her fingers. She licked the icing one finger at a time and looked up to see Armo watching her. Then she laughed because a cupcake-sized chunk had fallen to his chest and was now sliding down his white fur.
Cruz snagged the escaping piece, and without thinking about it, really thinking only that Armo’s claws were not much good for delicate work, she fed the cake into his muzzle.
He looked at her through big gold-and-black eyes and licked her hand with his bluish-pink bear tongue. And then, time just seemed to stop. Cruz knew time had stopped because she was no longer breathing. He towered over her and she looked up at him.
Then he said, “I would kind of like to kiss you someday.”
And that did not help Cruz’s breathing issue at all.
“I mean, not now because, you know: bear.” Armo sounded flustered, as if thinking he’d embarrassed her. “I don’t quite have lips right now. Also you’re not you.”
A squeaky laugh came from her. “I should be JLaw all the time. I get the nicest compliments.”
“What’s JLaw?”
“Jennifer Lawrence. JLaw. The actor. You know. She was in Silver Linings Playbook.” Nothing. “Or American Hustle.” Still nothing. “She was in The Hunger Games.”
“Oh, yeah, I saw that.” He nodded his big shaggy head. “That girl. She had a bow and arrow.”
“That’s her. I thought maybe you’d . . .” She shrugged, not quite sure how to finish that thought. She’d thought what, exactly? That he would be attracted to a movie star and forget that she was really just Cruz? She finished lamely. “She’s gorgeous. You know, like you.”
Dark eyes fringed in white fur contemplated her. “I don’t like when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you have to hide, or be some famous movie star.”
Cruz sighed shakily and looked away. “It’s just, I know what I look like to people. I look like a guy trying to pass himself off as a girl. I mean, in my head . . . But what’s in my head isn’t what people see.”
“I’m not people.”
“I mean, when this is all over I can start on the hormones and then, you know, maybe, if I have the money, I can do reassignment surgery. Then I’ll look more like how I feel inside my head.”
He waved all that away. “Whatever, that’s up to you. I don’t tell anyone what to do.”
“But what if you could?” Cruz blurted. “I mean, if somehow it was up to you?”
“Up to me?” He scooped up what was left of the cake—no one else was getting any part of it—and thought about it. “Look, you’re Cruz. Right? I mean, that’s who I know, I don’t know some other person you might be, or I don’t know . . . it’s all confusing.”
Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I know. It’s confusing for me too.”
They fell silent for a while as Armo licked up icing. Then he said, “We could try.”
“Try what?”
“There are no Bug Man bugs here. We could stop being Berserker Bear and Transit. Just for a minute, but you can’t tell Dekka because she’d give me that look of hers.”
“You want to de-morph.”
“For a minute.” And already Cruz saw the changes begin. The face that had been an uneasy melding of the human and the ursine became more human. The fur that covered him seemed to be sucked into him like a million strands of spaghetti. He shrank from absurdly large to merely very large.
And then, there he was. And there she was, still hiding behind her false face.
This could go so wrong.
Yes, it could. But we could both be dead an hour from now. What the hell are you scared of?
She dropped the mask, resuming her normal appearance. “So,” she said with forced nonchalance, “are we going to do this kiss thing?”
They were.
And nothing went wrong.
Many blocks south, Markovic waited and expanded. He had no way of counting his individual parts, but he definitely felt the damage the Rockborn Gang had done. He’d played it cool and confident, but the truth was their attack had shocked him.
He’d overlooked the fact that all his human supporters would be knocked out of the action right from the start by Malik. He hadn’t imagined the gang would have flamethrowers. He’d underestimated just how hard it was to cope with Shade Darby’s speed. In fact he was fairly sure the speed demon had been in and out of Grand Central at least once more and no one had even seen her, let alone been able to stop her.
And the skinny little girl, the one who looked like she was twelve, what she had done to one of Markovic’s few useful mutant recruits, the guy who’d called himself Bengal Tiger, had been scary. Tiger had not returned, and Vector had no idea what she had done with him. Another of his recruits, Knightmare, had gone to the bathroom just before the battle and had not returned, and Markovic suspected that little girl had somehow taken him out of the game, just as she’d done with Tiger.
What was it she was doing? She’d grabbed a handful of Tiger’s fur and he’d disappeared. A second later the girl was back. And nothing more was seen or heard of Tiger or Knightmare.
The little girl has big powers.
Markovic did not like making mistakes. Mistakes rattled his self-confidence. He knew, deep down in his bones—well, his figurative bones—that he should attack now and take out the Rockborn Gang. But unless they were damned fools, they’d have relocated, and he didn’t yet know where they were.
Worst of all, Markovic had one great mystery hanging over him like his own personal sword of Damocles: he did not know where he was, him, the mind, the thinking part, the identity. Was he equally present in each of his thousands of parts? Would the gang have to kill all of his insect cells in order to kill him? Or was there some critical number beyond which he would not survive?
“We’re not going after them?” The middle-aged black man who called himself Mirror was now Markovic’s most powerful remaining ally. But he, too, had a problem: he could only become—mirror—a mutant when in their physical presence. He’d gotten lucky being able to morph Shade Darby, but she would be unlikely to give him a second chance to catch her moving slowly enough.
“Don’t like it here?” Markovic asked in his sinister, reedy voice.
“I don’t like waiting for them to come back,” Mirror, whose real name was Frank Poole, said. He was standing on the top level of the balcony beside Vector. He assumed he had a right to that position, and the truth was that Markovic couldn’t afford to alienate him—he was a bit short of effective allies. Flying Fish might be of some use if she’d carry a gun, but she had refused thus far. Which left Batwing, who, as far as Markovic could tell, was capable of nothing but growing awkwardly large wings.
My gang sucks.
“I like it just fine,” Mirror said. “But I want more opportunities. I want to morph Lesbokitty. I want to see what that’s like.”
“Yes, well, I have greater ambitions,” Markovic said, unable or unwilling to disguise his condescension. “Do something useful: go out in the streets and find me hostages.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“I don’t give a damn!” Markovic snapped. “Just get me some warm bodies. Children, if you can find any.”
With Mirror gone, Markovic returned to his thoughts. This was just like any business expansion. He had to think it through to understand the perils and the possibilities. He owned New York City, aside from the Rockborn Gang. He could consolidate his control here and then move against nearby targets—New Jersey, Philadelphia. But that was a mere geographical proximity model. The real target, if he wanted to really take control, had to be Washington, DC.
“Problem,” he muttered, thinking aloud. “How far does my reach extend? Can I have parts of me at long distances?” He had sent small swarms around the immediate vicinity and had maintained contact, seeing through their eyes, hearing what their antennae picked up. Had it been a degraded signal, though? He searched his memory and said, “How about you, Watchers? Any suggestions, oh silent ones?”
But of course the Watchers offered nothing. He’d not quite gotten used to these unseen and maybe unreal observers constantly looking over his shoulder, but he had experience being watched: government regulators from Washington and Albany had been in his face for a long time. Then, too, local media every now and then got the clever idea of attacking him, and he’d heard through the grapevine that 60 Minutes was preparing a piece on Markovic’s Money Machine. He was used to being watched.
Still, damned if they weren’t distracting. And worse, they were vaguely humiliating. He wasn’t some plaything; he was Vector. Vector, Ruler of the Big Apple.
There will be a reckoning with you, too, Watchers. Mark my word.
Had there been a signal loss when his parts were farther away or not? He wasn’t sure. Even a small degradation would mean that he had geographical limits, and that made the prospect of aiming for Washington problematic. Expanding too quickly was a common mistake of businesses. He knew this from personal experience. When he’d tried to expand Markovic’s Money Machine into California, state regulators had made life impossible, and he’d had to retrench, losing half a billion dollars in the process and watching his stock price drop 8 percent.
And yet, if he didn’t take Washington, some politician or general was sure to get the bright idea to nuke New York. They’d be nowhere near such a drastic move, not yet, not while they still had the Rockborn Gang.
And that realization was the deciding reason for his hesitation: as long as the gang was in business, the government had hope. If he destroyed the gang, he might be looking at a mushroom cloud sooner rather than later. The thing was, New York was paralyzed. He could slip out of town, make his way to Washington, and take the national government down. He could infest every congressperson, every senator, the president and his cabinet. But he would keep enough alive and well to be useful hostages.
And then?
The “and then” part had him baffled. He had never played this game before, and he wasn’t entirely sure what a victory would look like.
“I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
In the meantime, he needed transportation, and in a small irony he was actually in a train station that had no trains running. The Acela Express that ran from Boston to Washington no longer stopped in New York. It was running from Stamford, Connecticut, to Boston, and from Newark south to Washington. The middle of the route—New York—had been cut off, isolated.
Rather like the PBA, the so-called FAYZ that had isolated the far smaller Perdido Beach. But unlike the prisoners in that dome, there was nothing stopping Vector. Newark was just over the river.
Yes, he decided, that was the plan. Attack, but not where the enemy expected it. His numbers were vast. His power terrible. The fear he represented broke even the strongest wills.
This expansion would not be shut down.