Rabid 4.5
When I was drunk, my bugs tended to find walls to hunker down. It was because they conveyed sensations, they did things, and when I was drunk I couldn't deal with it, I didn't want to. They'd kept watch, if I had wanted to pay attention to that, but they'd been as sluggish as I was.
I remembered giggling, I remembered being in a good mood at some point, but the morning after, when I suited up clumsily and went out on an empty stomach, I could not remember the details, I could not imagine them either. It was all a bit of a blur, in ways that were mostly bad.
Being drunk hadn't been all bad, I remembered the talk we'd had, and that was something. I just needed to nail it down, to make it official. Maybe I'd do so when I didn't feel that bad?
My head felt like someone had beaten it about for a full hour, and I was aching, tired, crabby. I knew that I wasn't much of a friend or girlfriend that morning as we went out, but I was active at least.
For now I wanted my bugs agitated, going everywhere and doing everything, so that I could slowly divorce myself from my own body, so that I could ignore the sickness. It was a surprisingly effective tactic. I wondered how much I could throw away, cast aside in focusing on other things. It helped calm my mind, and it helped ease pain, if only in the same way reading a book eased boredom. It allowed me to devour the pain, the stress, the uncertainty, in a way that I realized was effective in its own way.
A little distance could change a lot, I thought, though thinking was still hard through the headache.
But I could still feel for blocks and blocks around. The dogs were coming with us, and that in itself called us out. Rachel didn't have any leashes, and that itself was a problem, though with as many dogs as there were, the leashes would have gotten tangled before too long. It slowed us down, though, having to call them back and call them around.
It really was going to be hard work, getting them all to one place, but once we all settled down, it'd be better.
The city looked new, but not in a good way. It was just as transformed today as it was before, but now the lack of activity was obvious. We saw people, or rather my bugs did, but they moved carefully. There were no cars on the road, and so we walked at the side, or right in the center, because my bugs were spread out in case someone hurried through.
There were parts of the city that were still intact enough that people still had to drive, but there was no work after all of this, I bet.
The people moving through and around were Merchants, some of them, but plenty of them were just survivors. I knew that eventually the city would have to come back to life, but at the moment it was hung over like me, tired and annoyed and trying to get through the day. We went towards the docks, because it was a work-day, so if we were going to find Dad, he'd be that way.
It was a long walk, so we were going to be spending a lot of time out in the sun. At least it wasn't raining, and at least we could count on plenty of time to look. Even though I'd been hung over, my body had forced me to wake up at only a little after five. So even after all of that time trying to get ready and to ignore the gross way I felt, it still wasn't much past seven.
It was going to be real summer soon, summer on the Bay. It was a lovely time, and I'd loved it even more because it was always respite from the trio. I supposed that in theory I could have to see them again. Sophia, Emma, Madison, they were like bad pennies, of course they'd turn up, and then I'd have to turn up for school if I didn't want to be a bad person.
Except I'd get a GED. I'd leave no marks, no tracks for them to sniff out. I'd disappear, and reappear, if I could afford it--probably not, but we'll see--in college, when the time came. It would be that simple, a vanishing act, and they'd be left to oppress someone else.
I knew that Emma would find someone, she was always like that, and I'd never met a person more inclined to bully and hurt and hound someone than Sophia. She'd chase someone down if kicking them gave her sport, and so I was clear, and yet not clear. I wondered if the book of deeds was still there, the one I'd been writing. Perhaps I could still try to go against them: but then, would the Principal care?
I wondered, had Sophia been pressed side by side with Greg, in whatever shelter they had hurried off to? It couldn't be far, and yet we'd passed an empty shelter or two.
Shelters were going to give way to camps for a while, I knew, to camps where people would crowd together and try to figure out what next. And then one by one they'd leave, once the insurance came in, if it came in, and if it didn't they'd either move out or find somewhere small and new, with cheap rent.
I didn't know how many people that Brockton Bay would bleed, just from people moving away, but I knew it was more than the city would be able to afford. People were dead whose skills were needed, and money didn't come from nowhere. But what else was there to do? People had to make a living, they had to have a job, or if not, they needed help. And how long could the city afford to help people, with all of the money that was going to be pouring out?
I didn't know.
I understood what was going to happen, and it was a strange feeling, because I felt a little like my Dad. Helpless and resigned. But I wasn't Dad. I couldn't stop the… what would one of his impact papers (or restoring the Ferry have called it? I couldn't stop the "Macroeconomic factors" but I could fight the Merchants. I could protect the city from the gangs that would spring up to take advantage of Brockton Bay's state.
I hoped I could.
So as I was going along, eventually I started noticing scenes. People running away from other people. People threatening others, not even aware I could see them. I sent my bugs after the attackers, unless I could make out details that indicated it was a bad idea. Both the attackers and the people attacked ran away in terror when a swarm of wasps, or bees, went after someone. It was only natural.
At some point, I was going to have a fight that didn't feel like no effort at all, but compared to the impossibility of doing anything with Behemoth, fights that were over before I'd gotten within two blocks of them were just fine with me.
A shout, a scream, the smell of desperation and fear (they smelled a little like urine), and then the fight was done, and onto the next one. I felt powerful, in control, as if I was making a difference, and if I hadn't had as much practice, it might have been hard to keep a smile from my face. We were looking for Dad, but it felt like the more we saved people, the more likely we'd run across him.
Which didn't make sense, but there it was.
Instead, I found someone else.
"Uhh," the voice said, as my bugs swarmed around the area discreetly. He was backed up against a wall, and three people were currently glaring at him, each of them dressed in a ratty sort of way that had probably been part of their costume even before the city had been hit by an Endbringer. They weren't Merchants, though, not unless Merchants were white men covered in tattoos that I couldn't make out well with my bugs--except for, on one shoulder, what vaguely looked like an 88.
Which kinda settled it.
"You fucking crossed us," one of them said, and I realized that he'd been at school too. In fact, he'd been at school the day before. He still had the bug bites on him, from when we'd driven him out of the trailer and away and further away.
"Rachel," I said, three blocks away. "We need to rescue someone."
"Huh?"
"Three blocks away. It's.Greg," I said, breezily. "My friend, you know?"
Why was Greg there? I was trying to sound breezy, when honestly my heart was racing and I was already starting to sweat.
"Oh, him?" Rachel didn't ask what he was doing there, which was a good thing, because I had no idea why. Shouldn't he be at a camp?
In fact, shouldn't he be out of the city by now? Because his Mom was the sort of person with the money and the mindset to drag him out of Brockton Bay at the first sign of trouble, even if she'd eventually have to come back because of her job.
The thought spread slowly, a sort of clamminess in my hands at first, as my body and my subconscious seemed to realize it before I'd made the connection.
Greg's Mom, who worked in the business district. Maybe she was okay, but maybe she was dead, and even if she was okay, she was probably in no state to pick him up. She could be hurt, or she could be herded up into one of the disaster camps, but either way he was probably something like on his own.
But that didn't explain why he was here, rather than huddling in some shelter or temporary camp and wishing he had brought his cards with him.
If he had risked harm and danger just to get a bunch of trading cards, then I was going to be very angry with him. As it was, I was more angry at the skinheads who were about to beat up my friend. One of my only friends, which meant that it was especially heinous.
A part of me wanted to gather the bugs in front of him. The boy that I'd stung before would realize what was going on, and then he'd probably run away, and it'd save everyone a lot of pain and suffering.
But as we began to fast walk along towards the scene, and as Greg began to blubber and beg, clearly desperate and out of sense:
"Uh please! Please don't! Uh! P-ple… I am defenseless!"
Wait.
He seemed afraid, but not afraid enough, his voice not quavering enough. I'd watched scary movies with him this one time, when we'd gone together to see a new movie. As friends.
Plus, he was a really bad actor.
So I wasn't surprised when he didn't react to a sudden swarm of wasps I'd been moving into position, as they went straight for the E88. They screamed, but I was headed towards them, so I knew they weren't going to escape.
I grit my teeth, baring them to the world, thinking that they deserved it. They deserved it, for crossing me twice in as many days. I didn't stop stinging them just because they huddled on the ground, smelling even more of… desperation. I didn't stop until they'd either run away or passed out, and Greg just watched it all, trembling more now than he'd been when he was faking like he was a damsel in distress, when the truth was that he had to have noticed the bugs and made a guess that I was here to save him.
Though not here anytime soon. The whole 'fight' took a few dozen seconds, and it'd still probably be quite a few more minutes until I reached him. I saw him give a vague thumbs up in the direction of my wasps. One of the people was still there, unconscious, but the other two had run.
My bugs stuck around, buzzing, because I didn't want him to leave. I wanted to talk to him. He wasn't safe on his own, that much was pretty obvious after what had just happened.
Rachel didn't question it, didn't say anything about Greg. She'd never met him before, and I wondered what she'd think of him. Or what he'd think of her. Certainly, neither of them was exactly… well, they weren't each other's sort of people, as far as it went. Then again, I was a girl who read books and talked about sci-fi and played video games, so it wasn't as if she wasn't used to dealing with those sort of people.
Or at least one of them.
As for Greg? I knew he meant well, but I could imagine him blurting out stupid things, or smiling way too much, even if I found a way to explain to him why it was a really bad idea. That was just how Greg was, and maybe it should change, but it wasn't going to do so anytime soon.
People changed, but rarely in the simple, easy way that I might have wanted. I'd changed, Dad had changed, Emma had changed. I'd seen far more negative change than positive change, in my life.
"Rachel, I'm sorry for dragging us out of the way, but he can't be left alone, anymore than you'd leave one of your dogs to fend for himself on these streets," I said.
"Yeah," she agreed, as if she understood that logic, or maybe just how I'd presented it.
It was then I realized that I'd been wearing my mask the whole time. I could have smiled if I'd wanted to, or… so I couldn't see her face, of course, and know whether she was really as cool with it as she sounded.
So we walked along, the dogs having to be herded the whole way, and I tried to calm down, to not feel like it was the moment before a trap sprung. But how could I not feel that, at least a little.
The dogs were hard to keep all together, but I left that to Rachel, and when I finally saw Greg with my own eyes, he perked up. "T--!" he threw his hands over his mouth. "Arachne!"
That was better, I thought. "What are you doing here, Greg?" I asked.
Rachel stepped in just behind me, and with her, the dogs. Sirius, who was always excitable, started barking at Greg.
Greg flinched, as if it were an attack. It wasn't, really. He'd know what an attack was like. But once Sirius started barking, a few of the other dogs decided they needed to get in on it.
"I… uh. My Mom. I was going to try to look for her. She was… working. When the Endbringer came. I don't know if she was able to evacuate or anything." He bit his lip, looking terrified. "I heard that the whole area got destroyed."
"We saved the shelters in that direction," I said. "I'm sure she's fine." I had to say that, of course, because the alternative was to tell a boy that his mother might be dead. But I believed it, sort of. She and her whole office weren't dead, that much was obvious, but it was always possible for something to go wrong.
The death toll, for the civilians, was less than it might have been with some of the other Endbringers, when we had time to evacuate people, but… it existed, and it was far too many. I looked at Greg for a moment. His clothes were ruffled and worn in, and he stank as bad as both of us probably did.
"I… I hope so! Um, is this… Bitch?"
"Yeah," Rachel said, crossing her arms as the dogs kept up the racket. They weren't moving, they'd been trained when and when not to attack, even the ones that weren't ready to fight with her yet.
"Uh." He cleared his throat. "Thank you for saving me. And… uh. Thanks for being nice to my friend." Greg flushed, looking down, shuffling his feet a little. "She's really happy because of--"
"Greg," I said, glad that my face was covered, since I knew that I lit up like a stop light whenever I was really blushing.
"Oh, sorry." He waved his hands in front of him like he was about to fly off, and looked away.
"Oh," Rachel said, then shook her head.
"Okay, so, you two have met. Now, Greg, we can't exactly…" I had to pause, as the barking got too loud for us to talk over it, and Rachel turned to shush the dogs. "Where were you going?"
"I thought, maybe, if I could find my Mom's house, then I could grab stuff and then… maybe she'd." He stopped, and I realized what he'd been about to say, before he realized how dumb it was. Maybe she'd be there? Even if she was completely okay, she wasn't going to be able to make it back to her house today. But he'd just been hoping that if he showed up, she'd be there, the same way she'd always been, sooner or later.
Pity twisted at my stomach, tugged at my forebrain, though it was dulled by the fact that my father was under the same kinds of risks. I didn't know what I'd do, but now I had someone else to look after, on top of Dad.
Greg looked like someone who needed the help, and I was driven in part by pity when I said. "Come with us. Temporarily. Rachel, can we swing by his house? And mine? Just so we can… no. We need some way to carry it."
I sighed, annoyed. With enough time, I could make some sort of saddle or pack so that a dog amped up by Rachel could serve as a pack mule. I knew that it might be a little undignified, but considering how the roads and the city as a whole was not going to be seeing a ton of car traffic anytime soon…
It made sense. But it was yet another thing that I couldn't begin now. I wanted to go and check on the house, I wanted to do a lot of things.
"No?" Greg asked.
I looked over at Rachel. "Well, the next step would be to go to the dog shelter. If you want to tag along, I promise we'll find somewhere safe for you to stay."
"Oh?" Greg asked.
"Rachel," I said. "I'm sure we can find something, and it's not safe for him out here."
She shrugged, and I wondered at her thoughts, behind that mask. But at the least, she seemed to be agreeing, because I knew that in this case a shrug was enough.
"Great! I promise I won't be too loud and won't talk too much, though I have a few questions."
"Such as?"
"What was it like? What happened? What did you do? I was so worried about you, you know. Um, uh… oh! The shelter. It was pretty bad. All of the people were stuffed in there, including Emma and her hanger ons… actually, I didn't see Sophia."
Greg frowned, looking baffled, and I tried to think about why he hadn't seen her.
"Did you look for her?"
"Heck no! I was sorta glad, but Taylor, I think they guessed at some of it."
"Some of what?" I asked.
"Um, they kept on guessing, and I might have reacted to what they said when Emma started…"
I took a deep breath, trying not to be too frustrated with him, and said, "Please explain while we walk. We're going to a dog shelter to see if we can get help for our dogs. Maybe find somewhere to stay temporarily. Anything you know will be really important."
******
So he told me what happened. I stuck close to Rachel, who was leaning against me as we continued our endless quest to keep the dogs from sniffing everything or running off in the wrong direction. I didn't feel comfortable doing more than being close to her, as long as there was company.
I should have been continuing on down to the docks, but now that I'd found Greg, I didn't want to force him to march around in our wake. Surely if nothing else, the shelter would agree to let Greg just sit in their office for a little while, safe and sound, while I figured out what to do next. There was still plenty of day left, though because we were walking with so many dogs, and on foot ,the morning was really starting to wear down.
It was silent, other than his talking, and then babbling. I occasionally saw capes passing overhead, but without cars to go on the road, there was an odd sort of peace and quiet. I wasn't used to it, and I didn't like it.
The sky seemed broken, the city humbled and humiliated, and yet Greg kept talking as if nothing had changed.
We picked our way around broken glass and shook up intersections, and I kept on noting who was there and who wasn't. Anyone fighting someone else, I tried to see who they were. If they weren't gang-bangers, I always sided with them. It wasn't hard, really. Most people, though, were huddled up, either in shelters or in their homes, which were very run down in this area, just about shading into the apartments and tenements that were this area's main architectural contribution.
We passed liquor stores and convenience stores, their windows smashed, their stock already looted by the time we reached them. They looked a little sad, the neon light halfway broken, or all the way broken, but advertising alcohol, or sales, or… all sorts of things.
The buildings were sad, small things, overshadowed by the apartments in the distance, and I tried not to pay too much attention to the people cowering in some of the buildings, some of the small houses. There was someone in what looked like a very, very small approximation of an apartment in the back of one of the small, local stores, the door locked, holing up fearfully.
There were so many people, and a lot of them were in a bad way, and it wasn't likely to get much better soon.
But we couldn't do anything. Even if we had a way to carry it, all of the food and supplies we'd found at Winslow wouldn't do more than tide them over. They'd have to kick their own way out of their problems, at least until the Protectorate get involved. I wondered where they were, what they were doing. The people flying overhead seemed to imply that there were non-local capes still hanging about, but for how long?
I knew that in the aftermath of an Endbringer, there was help provided by out of town people… but I also knew there were limits. Most people had their own homes to protect, so I didn't know how long a bunch of flying capes would be around to help out. Certainly their mobility would have been really nice right about now.
But the ability to monitor everything within three blocks was certainly worth a lot, so it wasn't as if I was being robbed, just because I couldn't sail through the air majestically.
When we got closer to the shelter, that's when I noticed that yet again, things were wrong. More people were brandishing weapons and talking to a closed door. Yelling at it in fact.
The shelter, seen through the eyes of bugs, was this huge, blocky thing, square and squat and ugly, with a chain-link fence around back and plenty of ground for dogs to run and romp. But from the people who were trying to force their way in around the back, it was pretty clear that the people of the shelter had basically locked themselves in when trouble came.
The windows had all broken, and at places so too had the concrete, but against expectations, that square, squat building had mostly stood up to the aftershocks. At least enough that I didn't think it'd be coming down, even if it'd was even uglier now.
The dogs were all howling and barking, almost drowning up the demands.
"Open up! It's tax time!" a young man yelled, pounding on the door. "Just a dozen, and we'll go for now."
For now.
"Rachel," I said, having realized that I'd stopped paying attention to Greg's stream of words, which had switched at some point to talking about video games with Rachel. Or rather, talking about video games
at Rachel. "There are Merchants at the gates of the dog shelter. I'm going to try to work on clearing them out."
"Got it." Rachel glanced over at her dogs, and called out, "Brutus. Come."
The other dogs turned, but it wasn't their name, and so Brutus approached her. She was going to charge up some of her dogs anyways, just in case this became a real fight. I knew I could take them out before I even arrived, though it was still a little way before I'd even be able to see them. That was one of the weird parts of my powers.
The flies got there first, as I tried to get the wasps and the bees into the area. I was spread thin, and that meant that they had time to reaction.
I bit and stung at them, while they shouted and gunshots filled the air, one after another, as if I was anywhere nearby.
We marched forward, three people and a lot of dogs, towards a fight that was going to be finished before we even arrived.
The details were boring, and rather typical, honestly. It bored me so much I almost wanted to be more directly involved in the fight.
To summarize: dozens of stinging insects, including bees, vs a few gangbangers who had absolutely nobody to attack, and nothing they could do. It was entirely one sided and of no consequence one way or the other.
Except that at about the end of the fight, when they started to run, one of them collapsed.
My bugs had seen something coming towards him, and a moment later, she entered my range.
It was Pelter, the cape I'd saved from before. She advanced steadily on them, still in her costume from what the bugs could tell, and they scattered. They'd already been going to be getting out of there as fast as possible, but her presence probably helped.
What was she doing here? I began to speed up, because I wasn't sure if she wouldn't just run away, when I really wanted to talk to her. I assumed she was trying to fight crime, and the Merchants, but was there somewhere nearby that she was staying?
There was only so fast I could go, but luckily she moved towards the door. She knocked on it once, twice, and the door slowly opened to reveal a thin, almost skeletal woman holding a handgun up as if she was still learning how to use it.
She had thin, blonde hair, and watery blue eyes, and she shuffled forward. If she'd had any sleep in the last day, I'd be surprised. "Are you…"
"Pelter," the girl said. "A hero. I'm… thinking we're going to have company soon."
The other woman tensed, but didn't slam the door. "Who?"
"Those bugs," Pelter said. "There's a hero called Arachne who has to be pretty close, if her bugs are here. I think? She can control them." She turned around. "If you're here, come out!"
I shook my head. Of course Pelter didn't know how far away I could be and still attack. She only knew I controlled bugs because that was common knowledge, and she'd seen me do so.
"What?" Greg asked.
"Nothing. We need to get there in a hurry."
The bugs gathered together, flying in the air, those that could, and Pelter shrugged. "I… I don't know where she is. But… I don't think she's hostile. Tell me what happened."
"I was at the shelter, trying to help the dogs. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, if Behemoth hit, but--"
"You wanted to help the dogs that much?" Pelter asked, sounding incredulous, her intonation rising. "You could have died. But.."
Pelter's voice sounded a little more thoughtful. "If Arachne's with who I think, you might have friends." She let out a sigh. "So, you have dogs in there, what else?"
"Uh, well, it's just me and two other assistants. And a lot of dogs. I… they wanted the dogs."
"Why?"
"Dog fighting," the woman said. "I'm, I'm Shelley."
"Dog fighting? Isn't that the E88's…"
"Okay, there's another cape there," I said, as I listened to them talking.
"Who?" Rachel asked.
"Pelter. And there's a girl, Shelley, there with herself and two others and a bunch of dogs," I said.
"Pelter?" Greg asked, sounding confused.
"Cape we met and saved," I said, absently. "Apparently the Merchants were trying to muscle in on E88 territory."
Rachel tensed, and I could almost hear her growling as she considered that. "But they've been run off for now. And now they're talking about the E88 and the Merchants."
"So, I guess so…" Shelley admitted. "Maybe I should leave, but then what happens to the dogs? And all of us agree, it's too important to just leave up to the kinds of people here…"
"I know you feel that way, but…" Pelter began.
I had my bugs begin to make a little more noise as we got within a quarter block of them, and when we rounded the corner, Pelter turned in that direction and saw us.
She was still dressed in her rough, clearly homemade, costume, though compared to Shelley, she looked positively all-together.
Behind me came Rachel, Greg, and the dogs. I'd taken the lead, by a little bit, and I strode forward, my bugs sweeping around to hover in the air above me as I advanced.
"Pelter," I said. "Good to see you. Sorry, it takes time to get here." I glanced over at where the unconscious Merchant was lying. "But we had them well in hand."
"Arachne! It's good to see you," Pelter said. I could almost imagine the smile, though luckily her costume hid it, so perhaps she wouldn't accidentally unnerve Rachel. "And you too, Bitch."
"Bitch?" Shelly asked, and then saw the dogs. "What's going on?"
"We were headed this way," I said. "To ask if we could keep our dogs here for a while." I gestured towards them, and then towards Bitch. "We had to evacuate them after Behemoth came our way, and we have something that you need."
"What?" Shelly asked.
"Muscle," I said, a little dramatically. "If we're staying here, or our dogs are, then it gets a lot harder for people like that to attack you." I listened to the dogs barking and added. "Plus, Bitch is pretty good with dogs, she could probably help out at the shelter."
"Oh," Shelly said. "Well, maybe. We'd have to talk about it, but we have room for more dogs. At least for now. If we go out to rescue some of them, we're going to wind up overcrowded, but we have plenty of room. This was meant to be… well, the idea is that we were going to take on more dogs once we busted up the E88's dog-fighting ring, but… it didn't happen."
"That's these dogs," I said, gesturing backwards. "We took care of that last month."
"Yeah, well, the Protectorate hinted to the mayor that they were going to crack down on the E88 a year and a half ago, and this was meant to be one of the bene-whatnots." She shrugged, rubbing her eyes, her voice dragging itself downward with every phrase, as if she was struggling to stay awake.
"Benefits?" Pelter offered.
"Uh, yeah." Shelly sighed. "So, you want to stay here?"
"For a little bit, at least," I said. "If it'd be possible without causing too many problems. We don't need much, just some pillows and a blanket or two. Or a couch." I shook my head. "Either way, we need somewhere for our dogs."
"Well," Pelter said. "If you want somewhere to stay, about… three blocks away, there's a camp. Sort of. It's not official, but Legend did come around and give us a communication device. They might evacuate us later, but I had to help them out. Who else is going to?" Pelter shifted a little, uncomfortably.
"Not official?" I asked.
"There's no camps near here, but… a lot of the old buildings were messed up," Pelter said, shaking her head. "And, uh. There's this camping supply store that this old guy owned. He just took all the stuff off his shelf and took it home with him, because…"
She shrugged, and I read a story in that. "Uh, and he agreed to share it out?"
"Yes," Pelter said, firmly. "He agreed. So, I'm looking after a sorta-camp for the moment, and…"
"What?" Rachel asked, clearly tired of all of the talking, and wanting us to get to the point.
"If you could visit, we might let you stay there. Or… well, you can keep some stuff there, and nobody will take it, and then you could live a little lighter here." Pelter looked nervous, at least what I could see of her face, but I guessed that it wasn't a trap.
If she were a Merchant, she wouldn't have been out and about trying to save the day when it was so clearly useless. Or rather, it was very clearly the kind of heroic senselessness that was honored, but not among gang-bangers.
I could imagine exactly why having two other capes to protect the camp could help.
"Maybe," I said. "What do you think, Bitch?"
"Couldn't hurt to look. Once we have the dogs hunkered down," Rachel said, firmly, because of course those took priority. It'd be bizarre if they didn't. Even if I didn't know her, and didn't agree, I'd understand that.
"Ah, of course. I mean…" Pelter trailed off. "Should I wait here? It's about four blocks away."
Which was a little annoying. If it was somewhat closer, I'd be more able to see it from the shelter even on the days when my range was worst. It seemed to be hovering somewhere between two and three blocks, roughly speaking. Today? Today it felt like I was almost there, almost stretched out far enough that I should be able to see the camp.
With my bugs, that is. I began to spread them out in that direction, as carefully as I could, because I didn't want to spook anyone.
"Yeah," I said. "It's just slightly outside my range, right now." I shrugged, and added, "My range varies, some days. Sometimes it's even less than this, sometimes it's more. I'm not sure what causes it."
I wasn't, though I had started to realize that whenever I was feeling bad, my range increased. Not just bad, whenever I was trapped, whenever I was scared and… alone, I guessed?
That was just a feeling, just something you noticed if you started to spend time thinking about when your range was good and when it was bad.
Honestly, considering the Endbringer, my range should still have been as high as it was back then, but Rachel being there… it helped. Even when it didn't help. Typical.
"I understand," Pelter said. "I think? But anything you could do to help would be appreciated."
I nodded, glancing over at Rachel. "So, Pelter, if you stick around for a while, we'll try to hurry. Though… we'll be needing lunch. Is there food at the camp?"
"We have some. Just stuff from apartments that we're pooling, and we think that they might drop us some rations and supplies while they try to figure out what to do with us. The streets aren't good, but they probably want to evacuate us, eventually, because we're right in Merchant territory," Pelter said, sounding as if she was reciting from a list. She shifted on her feet, nervous and clearly wanting to make a good impression on me.
I let out a breath, and nodded in her direction. And then I glanced over at Shelly, to see if she was still following along with this. The woman looked overwhelmed, but she wasn't objecting to any of this, and hopefully she understood that as long as we were that close, we could probably help out with the shelter as well.
Plus, knowing Rachel, she'd spend as much time as she possibly could with her dogs. So would I, for that matter, both because I liked caring for them, and was too used to it by now, and because I wanted to be by Rachel.
So we just needed to get settled in.
*******
The shelter was a spartan place, all cold angles and lines, at least when it came to human living, though there was a hard tile center room filled with barking dogs and more than that, dog toys of all descriptions, and it seemed like the dogs had a decent run of things. They were locked in their crates at night, which wasn't going to do for Rachel's sensibilities, but she didn't start a fight over it.
The smell of dogs was so overpowering that it made Rachel's own former home seem like it was nothing at all, and the dogs were enthusiastic, if a little scared.
"Any of them hurt?" Rachel asked.
"N… not that we can tell," said a gangly, nineteen year old boy--Frank something-- whose Adam's Apple bobbed up and down with every word. "But they've been agitated, and--"
"How's their shits?" Rachel asked.
Which threw Frank for a loop, certainly. But I'd heard her expound her ideas on this fact, so I just nodded, feeling amused as she began to roll right over him, and soon enough enter the area itself.
Watching her from a distance, with her mask off, leaning down to receive the attention of the dogs--almost twenty of them, plus the dogs that she was going to put into circulation as well--I wondered at her skill with them. She split her attention wonderfully, moving with an easy grace, rubbing bellies and scratching ears and throwing toys, firm and caring, and then I wondered whether Frank felt something like the same.
Shelly, Frank, and Cindi. Cindi was an older woman, clearly some sort of volunteer, and she liked dogs, if in the kind of way that Rachel probably suspected hid incompetence. A dog enthusiast, someone who thought dogs were cute and silly, rather than someone who saw dogs the way she did.
There'd be plenty of room for our dogs, that much was true. My bugs were spreading out, and luckily it seemed that none of the dogs had worms, or anything like it. Whether that meant they were in a decent condition was anyone's guess, but I at least worked on clearing out the bugs and the fleas (those they had in abundance), and there were places to stay, sort of. There was a small office which had the medical records for the dogs, the extra medical supplies for emergencies, and all of those sorts of things.
And there were a few couches in the lounge, which seemed to exist mostly as a setting to meet a dog one on one. They were always trying for adoptions, Shelly explained, and so if someone saw a dog they liked, they could go and sit on the couch and the dog would be brought in and they'd see how the dog acted on their own.
I thought it was a good idea, though from the way Rachel was frowning, she realized exactly what the owners would be looking for. I wondered… but was I allowed to? Rachel had been a dog that was too vicious and wild to be adopted, and I knew she hated the kinds of policies that killed dogs just because nobody wanted them.
Still, she'd been planning to work at a shelter, so clearly she was at least aware of how things went. She'd even worked at the shelters for a short time, before Coil, as it turned out, had found her.
There was another thing I needed to do: he still had an innocent girl under his control, and I didn't know what to do about Dinah, at least at the moment. If I was going to go up against him, I'd be going up against the Undersiders, too, and if he paid one group to work for him, why not others?
It made me suspect that he was going to be very hard to take down. It wasn't as simple as finding his base and then just using overwhelming force, and what if I told the Protectorate and they botched it?
It was true, though, that if I could get in the area, I could probably find the base. My bugs meant that it'd take being airtight to keep me from getting in, and anyplace that was air-tight and bug-proof was probably someone's lair, because otherwise who would go through all of that work when most capes couldn't do anything with bugs.
But for all of that, I'd need to know where to look, first.
It was something I could do, though, and as soon as we were settled in, perhaps it was something I would do.
It took an hour or two before Rachel was comfortable leaving most of her dogs behind, and she still took Angelica and Brutus with us.
I carried my backpack, but we left behind enough other things that it wouldn't be so hard to lead them all around, so I stood over Rachel as she hunched over and pushed her power into the dogs. We'd ride in style, Greg on Rachel's dog, Pelter on mine. Slightly crowded, but it should work.
I was already imagining saddles, and of course I'd need terrariums for the bugs, but surely it'd be possible to create saddles with attached bags for transporting things.
It'd cost some money, but I could at least make the bags and some sort of covering with the spiders and their silk. Of course, maybe it'd be easier to just find cloth and quickly sew something together.
Pelter watched all of this slightly uncertainly, glancing at me again and again. For some reason she seemed to believe that I was the authority here, and whenever she had questions, she directed them to me, as if she was afraid of Rachel. It couldn't be that, though, she was a hero now, and besides that Rachel had saved her life.
Of course, I was also biased.
Greg, who had been quiet and retiring, had found a place to sit and then curled up into himself, looked nervously at the dogs, in their monstrous forms. "Is it okay?"
"Of course," I said. "Buck up, Greg. It's just like riding a Warg, or whatever it was." There was this video game he liked to play that involved, like, riding a giant monster and doing races and jousts and mounted combat, basically no foot-fights at all, but with RPG style…
The name escaped me. Something Riders. It had numbered sequels. Tamer Riders? I knew it wasn't Monster Riders.
"Yeah. Yeah," he said, nodding to himself. Pelter seemed not to buy this line of reasoning, but what was she going to do.
I smiled and mounted my dog. "Kneel," I ordered Angelica, leaning in to speak into her ear.
"Man," Greg said when he got on. "It smells of…"
"Dog?" I asked. I'd long since gotten used to what her dogs smelled like in monster form. It was about the same as they smelled normally, but far bigger, because there was a lot more fur, and a lot more flesh. It was dog expanded until it was overpowering and omni-present.
"Well, yeah."
"Them's the breaks," I said, turning to Greg. "I can't make them smell like cat."
"...True," Greg admitted, biting his lip and gripping onto the dog harder, as if he was going to be shaken off at any moment.
Pelter held on tighter than that as she climbed on. Our dogs took off at roughly a slow jog, which was still enough that every time we turned or a corner or had to jump a little to get over some glass or fallen bit of debris, Greg squeaked. As if he was about to tip over.
Of course, with my bugs I saw the camp long before I saw it. They were spread out over the center green and the parking lot of a set of apartment buildings that at least hadn't collapsed, but certainly did seem as if they were in bad repair.
Tents and tents and tents, one person and two person and three people tents, and all of them clustered in strange combinations. And there were people coming in and out of the apartments, so the camps were just the overflow, the people who couldn't fit in one of the apartments that wasn't ruined… but then, that was most of them.
The electricity was flickering at places, out at others. No phone lines, probably no internet, and I wondered if anything was going to happen with the water supply. My bugs couldn't figure that out, but I had to assume that as a whole, the apartments had gone from run-down to basically hard to live in.
So the people, several hundred, clustered in the lower floors of the apartments where they were closer to the camps.
The above floors were basically empty… more than that, they were looted, the food taken out, the batteries, the alcohol. Everything, and my bugs viewed a pretty barren landscape up there. That's of course, the places where the floors weren't entirely unsafe to walk on. But the apartment here had stood up a little better than many of the others in the area.
Which was probably because the building as a whole seemed newer. Some of the older buildings, without the mandatory, government required work, were basically collapsed in on themselves: if people hadn't been in shelters, there would have been dozens if not hundreds of deaths just from apartments that weren't up to code or standard.
The camp as a whole was vibrant and filled with people, and bugs could only tell me so much. For instance, when I finally turned and saw it with my own eyes, I'd forgotten just how colorful the tents would have been to human eyes. And how clashing. Orange tents next to blue tents next to white tents, with no real pattern. It didn't even make a flag at the distance, or from above. Just whatever tents worked, and people milling about, talking to other people or trading goods.
When the nearest set of people saw the giant dogs, they gaped and stared as I slipped off, Greg behind me, and then Pelter and Rachel.
"So, Pelter. Is there somewhere Greg can stay for now? Is he going to be safe?" I asked.
Pelter pointed to a corner, where there was a two-person tent. "That's mine. They let capes get big ones. Bigger than they need. You can get a big one too from… Rick. I think it was. The outfitter."
"What else do we have here?" I asked, as people continued to stare, though I saw the basic pattern. First, they were alarmed, and then they were relieved that if Pelter was there and talking, then clearly they weren't enemies.
"Well, there's food, there's water. People barter and trade things. Josie, this old lady, can sew well, and so she's started to sew up everyone's torn clothes, that kind of thing," Pelter said, shaking her head.
I knew, given enough time with my bugs, I could figure this whole place out, listen to all of it, and get a pen and paper and write down quite a story.
"Well, I need to talk to Josie too, then."
"Oh. And we have some sort of Tinker phone or something that lets us call the Protectorate. It only holds so much charge a day, and it'll probably break down before too long…"
"Tinkers," I said, glancing over at Rachel, who seemed to be paying us no mind as she led her two dogs around.
Greg, on the other hand, was hanging on every word.
"Exactly. I think?" Pelter said. "I've never really talked to one, but you know what they say online…" Pelter said.
"What?" Rachel asked.
"Uh, well. I mean…" Pelter trailed off. "Their tech breaks down. Doesn't it?"
"I think so," I said.
Pelter shifted a little on the balls of her feet, slowing down for a moment to look around the camp. "So, can you stay here?"
"What do you think, Rachel?" I asked.
"Why not?"
*******
Josie had hands that anyone would envy. Long, thin fingers, and dark eyes. Her skin was the color of tree bark, wrinkled enough that you'd think that she'd not be good at what she did. But she was great at it, and she talked to me the whole time while I tried to explain what I wanted.
"So could you do that?"
"Honey, so it's good that you got through all that. You know how it is with Endbringers, better than I do, and so getting through it is the Lord's Blessing, and make no mistake about it, child, but I think of all the people that died and I pray for their soul, and I think about providence, 'cause you're here now and protecting us."
"That a yes?" Rachel asked. Greg had found a place to stay, but it wasn't with us. It was a small, one person red tent, and I knew he was going to regret the complete lack of modern amenities. But join the club. Still, if I had the phone, I could contact the Protectorate, maybe see if I could get it known that Arachne was at this camp.
Dad knew the truth, so surely he'd track me down if he was fine, sooner rather than later. I'd look for him if he didn't, but that was at least a better strategy than wandering around. I thought so at least.
"Of course, dear…"
"Good."
********
There are many joys in life, even life interrupted by disaster. I didn't look too much into the camp, or rather I had other things to do than monitor their lives, but I wanted to get to know more about them, if I was going to devote my time to protecting this area.
But I also needed a tent up. We'd been given a big, six person tent. There were only two of us, but perhaps they counted the two dogs as two people each. Or maybe it was like Pelter said. Parahumans got more space. As it was, the joy was watching Rachel try to put it up.
A minute into her attempts, it was clear that she both hadn't wanted to read the instructions, and had never camped even a day in her life. But she just kept on trying to do it without reading the instructions.
Pelter and I watched on, and if I were in other company, I would have started grinning, because she was really working at it. She was stubborn.
"She never knows when to quit," I muttered to myself. Another minute, and I called out, "Hey, Rachel. Can I help out?"
Rachel almost growled at me, but then shrugged, and I walked over to pick up the instructions. "See, here. You need to put that, there, if you want to get this thing up." I leaned in close to her, and said. "You can just let me do it. I'm very good with my hands, Rachel, and I've done it before."
I had no mask, so I leaned in to say it to her low. "The sooner we get this set up, the sooner we can do other things."
"Well," Rachel said.
I smiled and held up the instructions. "Why don't we read through these together? I'm sure you could do it on your own, if you just wanted me to help." I leaned into her, and then tugged at her gloves. "We don't have masks, nobody cares, so why don't we get those gloves off, so you can really work with your hands." I pulled them off, looking at her hands, and smiling with my eyes. "Can't do anything except be clumsy with gloves, you know?"
"Maybe," Rachel said, looking up at me.
"So…" Pelter said. "Uh, um, I should probably be going?"
"Why?" I asked, confused, as I looked at Rachel's hands for a moment.
"Just feels like I'm intruding on something, or…"
"What?" I asked. "We're just putting up a tent."
"I'm not sure," Pelter admitted, but she was looking away. "But, see you later."
"What's with her?" Rachel asked.
"I don't even know," I admitted.
*******
Ever had instant mac heated up on a cheapo portable stove? After finishing that up and then hurrying back to the shelter to check on things, and then right back where we began, that's what we had for dinner.
The dogs needed to eat too, and we were keeping the two of them with us, in case we needed to get into a fight.
The camp wasn't really setup for group dinners, at least not without trying, so it'd been just the two of us, asking around until we got food, and then eating it.
I washed my face in a restroom, though most people were using this sort of pit that had been dug out in a corner, to add to the bathrooms around here, and hurried into the tent with Rachel by the time it got dark.
It was the first time we'd really had a moment to breathe since the Endbringer fight.
So we went to bed an hour or so later than we might have otherwise, and when I turned away from her I hid a smile.
I regretted that hour when we were woken up in the middle of the night by Pelter pounding on the 'door' of the tent.
"Guys! Merchants are attacking!"
"How many?" I asked, though my bugs were already moving to see.
"A lot. And they all seem to have powers."
Oh. Well.
Great.
*******
A/N: So it turns out that I was setting things up. Who knew? Thanks to
@NemoMarx
