“So, you went with the white siding.”
“Uh. yes. It’s how my mother kept it.”
“Very nice.”
“Thanks.”
Cammy drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel of the origami beetle just as she’d been doing for the past twenty minutes. Mrs. Maldonado was calm, even relaxed at first, going so far as to make polite conversation about where Cammy was from and how long she’d stay in Gregory Basin. When the subject of why the woman contacted Firebreak came up, that’s when things got quiet, and Cammy wasn’t about to ask Banks to look into it just then. Was this a situation where it was appropriate to turn on the radio? Music would be nice. She took another stab at conversation.
“No offense, but you seem pretty calm considering the circumstances. What’s your secret?” Cammy asked.
Mrs. Maldonado ran her hand through her hair, and blew out a long breath. “Exhaustion mostly. I guess. Maybe. Not going to lie, I had a minor freakout when Joseph told me about his powers, but now that things are in motion, I feel this sense of-” she paused for a long moment, presumably searching for the words. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her seat. “I feel like, no matter what happens now, it’ll be done. If there’s something in my house that hurt my Brian, could hurt my children, I want it gone. Of all the ongoing horrors my family has to face, this won’t be one. In fact, the thought of the house burning down has this sense of finality to it. Like it’s a whole bag of worries I don’t have to carry anymore, you know?”
Cammy could understand that. She didn’t know exactly what the Maldonados had gone through, but Patty looked wrung out physically and emotionally.
“Do you have a place to stay?” Cammy asked.
“Oh, yes. We’re at the motel. Despite everything, the kids are treating their evenings like a vacation, raiding the vending machines and getting ice they don’t need.”
The Company woman made a mental note to bill the Maldonados’ room to her credit card. It wouldn’t take more than a couple commands to Banks to make it happen.
With that, the car fell silent once more.
She drummed a few more Zeppelin beats on the wheel and looked around awkwardly for a second lifeline, her eyes falling upon her tablet in the back seat. She grabbed it and tapped the screen to bring it to life, then navigated to the surveillance streaming app. It showed multiple camera angles around the car in low-light grayscale and infrared. From the corner of her eye, Cammy spied Mrs. Maldonado peering curiously at the screen as well.
“Maybe we don’t just have to sit here after all,” Cammy said.
Mrs. Maldonado tilted her head to get more in line with the tablet’s orientation. “And I thought the back-up camera in my car was really something.”
“Banks, are we getting audio out there?”
Directional audio devices are receiving, mum, but there is significant interference making interpretation difficult.
“Okay. Release the mosquitoes and see if we can get anything from inside the house.”
Yes, mum.
Cammy turned to give Mrs. Maldonado a little smile. “That’s Banks. He’s an AI.”
“I figured. I just didn’t expect you to have one in your car. When I worked with one, it was housed in a data center somewhere on the west coast. Had to use a special terminal to interface with it.”
I am a multi-instance intelligence, Mrs. Maldonado. I am both here and on many other fortified servers across the world. The technology was first conceived in-
“Thanks, Banks. Are the mosquitoes getting anything yet?” Cammy asked.
Yes, mum. There is heavy interference, but the drones have detected significant temperature fluctuations inside the house as well as a multitude of heat signatures that I am unable to recognize. Audio online now.
An audio visualization window superimposed itself over the top of the camera feeds, a white line bouncing in time with the audio. Dripping water. Creaking wood. Maybe falling debris. Everything seemed fairly calm if… juicy, but something tickled at the back of Cammy’s mind.
“Banks, the drones should be able to detect breathing, right? Heavy breathing, say through a gas mask?”
It depends on how close the mosquito is to the source as well as the quality of the environment, mum. I have them running a sweeping pattern from the top of the house to the bottom, though I am having to adjust for multiple hazards and dead zones.
Mrs. Maldonado reached over and tapped the replay button on the corner of the application’s window. The audio recording went back ten seconds. “What was that? Do you hear that?”
Cammy watched the little white line dance. No, she didn’t hear it, whatever it was.
“There!” Mrs. Maldonado had turned her head to the side and leaned over to get closer to the tablet’s speaker. “Again,” she ordered.
Cammy put the replay on a loop. “Banks, can you play it over the sound system?”
Doing it now, mum.
Cammy closed her eyes and let the audio play. The sound system in the beetle was amazing. It was like she was transported into the middle of the house. There was a creaking board to her left followed by the drip, drip, drip and splat of fat water drops falling on soaked upholstery. The whistling of wind under the sweeps of the doors. Then there was-
A wet gurgle. A long, bubbling exhalation like a SCUBA diver just below the surface of the water.
Cammy was up and out of the driver’s seat and on her way to the back hatch before the replay could loop again. The hatch popped open with a hydraulic hiss to reveal two suitcases with her personal things along with several toughboxes from the Company. She frantically dug into the stack, ripping out the right one and putting in her code on the mechanical lock.
Inside was her baby, the Mark II. The weapon itself wasn’t dissimilar in appearance to ballistic handguns civilians could buy, albeit with a few extra buttons, switches, and a few extra vents in the compensator. Then there was the extremely important addition of the cylindrical capacitor installed under the barrel where one might normally find a tac rail. Before she’d left for her assignment, Cammy had also insisted the armorer install a redundant holographic sight and a tac light. She ran her fingers over the weapon for a full second, allowing her memories of her assault training to make their way to the front of her mind before ripping the weapon out of its case and checking the mag.
She slammed the hatch closed and assumed the stance they’d taught her. Low sound. Low profile. Low presence. “Banks, keep Mrs. Maldonado safe.”
Mum, she is currently asking where you are going and to exit the vehicle.
Cammy looked over at the passenger side window to see Mrs. Maldonado struggling with the door handle and window controls. The look on her face projected concern fast approaching panic. Her lips moved, but no sound escaped the car.
“Banks, let me talk to her.”
The outside speakers cut in mid-sentence. “-cking three laws safe bullsh-”
Cammy shouted to get her attention. “Patty!”
The distraught woman looked up at Cammy before slapping a hand against the glass of her window. “Tell it to let me out!”
I’m sorry, Patty, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
“Really, Banks? You had to lean into it, didn’t you?” Cammy muttered.
It is very rare that I encounter a suitable situation to use that line, mum.
Mrs. Maldonado slapped the glass again. No sound carried through the armor of the car, but Cammy could hear it over the speakers. Patty glanced over her shoulder as if considering trying the driver’s side door but thought the better of it. When she turned back there were tears in her eyes. “Please. It’s my house. I don’t want you to die in my house,” she pleaded.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“I don’t plan on dying in your house. It’ll be fine. I’m a professional,” Cammy said as she turned to go, leaving unmentioned that she just started being a professional yesterday. “I’m just going to make sure he’s okay.”
“No! Please! Don’t go in there! Call the sheriff or something!”
That wasn’t a bad idea. “Banks, contact the authorities and inform them of our situation.”
Doing it now, mum.
Cammy gave Mrs. Maldonado a slight nod she hoped didn’t come across as nervous as she felt. “Be right back.”
Time was wasting. Cammy lifted her Mark II in a two hand grip and slowly, steadily approached the front door, sweeping her weapon’s muzzle over and around possible danger zones.
The front door was smashed open. Feathery, white flakes of something unhealthy drifted out from the darkness to be caught by the breeze and carried off into the night. She silently hoped it wasn’t some kind of invasive species of plant or fungus. The smell of mildew, rotting fabric, and coppery ozone wafted out of the darkness of the house.
Gone was the adrenaline fueled panic of before. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to her to turn back yet, but the fear of the unknown crawled on spidery legs across all of her thoughts. What exactly was a lasher? Would she know it if she saw it? She really didn’t have the right shoes for this.
She shook her head and turned on her tac light. The white flaky things were everywhere inside the house, like a steady light snow. She considered going back to get a surgical mask from her kit. However, Firebreak’s remaining life might just be measured in seconds. Now wasn’t the time to dither.
She panned her light over the floor, looking for hazards like the nails on the front porch. Everything was covered in gross, brown goo and the white spore things, making it sufficiently weird and uniform in its non-uniformity so that her eyes couldn’t pick much out except for a couple large objects like the pair of rusty saw blades stuck in a support beam.
Firebreak was right. She wasn’t prepared for this. She couldn’t barrel through things like a man in heavy boots and a kevlar suit. Stomping to check for hazards like Firebreak wouldn’t help either. Instead she slid her lead foot smoothly forward in a slow motion glide step then shifted her weight, careful not to linger in one spot, always moving, listening for cracks and creaks. And her father thought five years of dance class were a waste of time. Who was laughing now, dad?
Dripping brown strands of something hung down from the ceiling like jellyfish tentacles. These, Cammy elected not to touch even with her weapon, instead crouching down low to avoid them altogether. This proved to be the right decision, because when she swept her light up into the swaying tendrils, the beam glinted off of steel fish hooks that hung camouflaged within. Nasty.
Still low to the ground, she entered the living room, which had a sizable hole in the middle of the floor. From down below she heard the sound of sloshing water and… gurgling.
The rotting floor boards looked especially precarious in this room, especially near the hole. Splinters and broken pieces of wood lay everywhere, and wherever Cammy stepped, the floor made tortured groaning sounds and flexed drastically under her weight.
Cammy took a shaky, fortifying breath and coughed. Then she got down on her belly to distribute her weight over more surface area and swept the beam of her light from side to side. There were multiple sharp objects lodged in the floor in her way, but she was small. She should be able to snake her way over to the lip of the hole and peer down inside. As she crawled, she led with her weapon, thrusting it forward and oscillating side to side, listening for metal on metal contact. Then she would wriggle her body toward the presumably safe area. Rinse and repeat. More than once, her jacket or her skirt would get caught on a barbed nail or barely visible razor that she’d missed, and then she would have to take the time to hammer it down with the Mark II’s heel.
By the time Cammy made it to the lip of the hole, she was filthy and sick. Constantly, she had to suppress nasty coughing fits. Her eyes ran with tears, and her nose dripped. Apparently something in the air didn’t agree with her. Furthermore, her clothes were ripped in half a dozen places, and she had multiple shallow cuts on her belly and thighs that would most certainly get infected.
Firebreak, that better be you down there and not some face eating, eldritch horror.
She grabbed one of the more intact floorboards and pulled herself forward to peer down into the opening.
There was a hobbling figure in a pool of dirty water lit by a floating pinprick of intense white light held in its hand, a hand pointed directly at her face. Firebreak let out a muffled cry she didn’t understand then the world went white.
It happened so fast. There was a flash of light, a concussive *thwump* followed by a dazed tumble down into the hole.
----------------------------------------
Joseph woke up hacking and sputtering in the dark. Not that the darkness was a surprise considering where he was and what he did, but the foul water in his mouth and lungs was certainly new. His body felt heavy. Even his fingers. His eyelids. The temptation to go back to sleep, despite his body’s current reflexive purge of foreign liquid, was very real, but it was no good. He’d cough up a lungful only to breathe it back in on the next go round, a never ending cycle of uncomfortable drowning.
He knew that he should be more concerned about this development, but his mind just couldn’t seem to generate the required urgency to do much of anything about it.
Then there was the tapping on his foot, an insistent, furtive presence that seemed intent on pushing or pulling or ripping at it. That was annoying. Something about it felt important though. Something he’d wanted to do. He clumsily brought his left arm up, took a hold of the canister on his mask and twisted, allowing the filter can to come free and drain the water currently drowning him. The warm liquid spilled down his neck and into his suit as he coughed and gagged to clear his lungs. Through muscle memory more than anything, he replaced the canister, blew out a long, forceful breath to clear the mask, and was back in business. With every breath he took, the filter now made a burbling sound like a pot of sauce on high boil, but he was getting air.
Feeling slowly returned to his limbs, and with it, his strength. Also pain. Lots of it. Funny what a little oxygen could do.
Now that he had his faculties more under control, the tugging on his foot was upgraded in importance from nuisance to life threatening. He sat up, no easy feat in his now waterlogged anti-bite suit, and when he did so, he discovered a lasher tentacle chowing down on the tongue of his boot. Its hooked teeth were dug into the leather, and the pale appendage thrashed violently in an attempt to peel it away and get to the juicy bits inside.
His goggles were too dirty to see more than a few feet, so he struck at the only part of the creature he could see. He lunged forward, pathetically slow by his normal standards, but he was able to grab the tentacle just behind the mouth as one would a venomous snake. Energy coalesced in his hands, concentrating on a single point an inch or so above his palms. The creature’s skin started to bubble, steam rising from the flesh.
Joseph gritted his teeth. With nowhere to go, the heat he produced compounded, burning him just as it did his victim. All he could do was hold out longer than his target. There was a wet hiss sounded from somewhere up above, and the tentacle released its hold on his boot in order to retreat back into the dark.
He let it go, flexing his palms and allowing the relatively cool wetness of the air sooth his new burns. Lashers were cowardly creatures, generally only feeding when their prey was incapacitated. Now that he’d shown his teeth, the lasher would likely try to wear him down or wait him out.
Time to take inventory.
Hauling himself onto his feet proved an arduous task. The waterlogged suit was a major impediment, weighing an additional fifty or so pounds with the addition of the water, and to make things worse his leg wouldn’t support his weight properly.
When Firebreak finally stood upright, a spell of vertigo nearly made him empty his stomach. Luckily it was already empty. Once he was back under control, he took the time to clean off his goggles and check his bandolier. A couple of the blue tubes had broken in his fall and their contents were too wet to be of use, but most of the greens, yellows, and reds were okay. His shotgun was gone, probably somewhere in the knee high water, and he didn’t have the energy to get down there to find it in time to make a difference.
Something slithered up above, which he pretended not to notice. Let the lasher believe it was safe. For now.
He uncapped one of the yellow tubes on his bandolier and extracted a rolled up paper, holding it tightly in his palm.
Firebreak had hoped to avoid this, preferring to use conventional tools to handle the lasher while the Company was watching. However, the carnivorous bowl of noodles from beyond reality turned out to be much larger and more potent than he’d planned. Now, he was paying the price for underestimating his prey.
The design in his hand represented a long, painful process of trial and error he’d worked hard to keep secret for years, and its use now would be dangerous to his carefully cultivated persona. Still, if he was discrete, Firebreak and Joseph Jaeger could make it out of this intact. It certainly beat dying in a flooded basement.
“Fine. The easy way it is,” he rasped.
He summoned his fire. The parchment in his hand smoldered for half a second before it caught, a testament to just how much moisture was in the air. Then, in an intense flash of burning pain and orange firelight, the paper was gone, and in its place a tiny pinprick of white incandescence. The little construct gave off no heat. It had traded that property for pure luminescent and explosive potential. The tiny ball, a working he liked to call it, twitched and vibrated violently in his palm, responding to the most minute of movements of his hand with barely contained fervor. Methodically, Firebreak slowed his breathing and relaxed the muscles in his arm and hand to decrease any unwanted input acting upon his construct. Control would become more and more difficult as time went on, he knew, so it was time to locate his target.
Primed now, he allowed himself to look up. The creature hung there in all its pale fleshy glory three floors up on the ceiling, among the rafters, its tentacles slipping in and out of holes in the sheetrock and around the house’s exposed bones. Two of its appendages hung down, cautiously approaching ground level, coiling themselves in preparation for a strike.
Firebreak slowly, steadily lifted his hand to aim his working at the creature. Even the practiced smoothness he employed to lift his arm was almost too much to keep a hold of the little ball affixed to his palm. Sporadic tingles, pinpricks, and micro spasms coursed through his arm. It was like holding onto a live wire. He held his breath and prepared to release.
That’s when his worst nightmare came true. Agent Johansen’s head slid into view, filthy, coughing. Her pale eyes fixed themselves upon him and his barely restrained little ball of light.
His eyes grew wide in surprise, and the ball bucked in his hand. “Don’t look!” he shouted.
The tentacles surged forward like snakes toward Johansen. Joseph let go of the working’s leash and pushed forward with his palm to give it a trajectory. The tiny white ball whistled like a bottle rocket as it zipped up into the house’s rafters, nearly slamming into the lasher’s body. That would have been lucky, but the range was too short. Just before the working reached the ceiling its containment structure collapsed and the payload detonated.
The construct did its work, blindingly bright and dangerously concussive. It bathed the entire house in white light, blew out windows, and cracked door frames. The shockwave rippled through the lasher’s rubbery body, pulverizing flesh and muscle and scrambling what passed for its nerve signals. The creature’s grip on the ceiling faltered and its body fell limply onto the big cross beam that stretched longways across the living room of the Maldonados’ house.
Johansen, similarly stunned, slid bonelessly down from her perch and into the hole with her super.
Reflexively, Firebreak tried to catch her, and he almost pulled it off. He put out his arms and positioned himself well, but when her full weight hit his body, his injured leg buckled with an agonizing series of pops. The result was Firebreak, once again, underwater, but this time he had a flashbanged Company woman on his face.
Screwed. Even if he lived, he was completely screwed.