The night is bedlam. As the group of Cannon, Tay, Lex, Warden Morgan, and Rach exits the prison complex, they’re greeted with a Guernica-esque plateau of townspeople being terrorized by bugs. Here in the southern district of Camp Trin, the streets are littered with half bug, half human monsters, human corpses with rapidly reanimating bug parts, and living humans trying to weave between the former two things. We’ve seen people deal with bugs before, but those have been by expert fighters like Cannon and Taran. For those who don’t live their whole lives slinging weapons around - which is most people - being close enough to a bug to see it is a death sentence. They’re fast, they’re relentless, they’re deadly. Old and young alike are getting carved up and gorged upon, only to come back a few minutes later to keep the feeding frenzy going strong.
While Morgan and Rach start tankard-punching and keyring-flailing their way through the mobs of bugs that are busy gorging themselves in the southern district, Cannon Tay, and Lex head towards the central district to evacuate the apartment complex there. When they come upon it, they can’t help but be in awe. It really is beautiful. The long brick apartment building that, along with the sloping green quad, flank the central walkway. Then, of course, there’s that brilliant stone chapel on the far northern side of the district. It stands like an ancient sentinel, somehow protecting the city of Camp Trin. Beautiful. Also there are people screaming and jumping out of windows and being visibly eaten alive inside their homes. Our heroes find that their collective pool of awe soon runs dry.
Seeing all of the chaos, specifically watching families being wood-chippered by the bugs, hits Tay particularly hard. Last night when Tay came into town, she was practically mesmerized by the thought that so many people could live so happily in such a nice building. The place was so full of fun and family and laughter - so full of all of the things that she barely knew existed - that seeing it in its current state is difficult to process. She doesn’t know exactly how to feel. There’s a tiny bit of schadenfreude. Mother always said that the Marauders’ way of life was the only way, that trying to capture the stagnant laziness of the Good Ol’ Days was poison. This is Camp Trin’s comeuppance for daring to have all of the things that Tay never had. She powerfully feels that this is an act of cosmic justice, but she is also aware of how inhumanly horrible that feeling is. Just because Mother and May would feel that way doesn’t mean that she should. Plus, she knows this is no divine retribution. She knows why the bugs are here.
“I don’t know about this,” Tay says.
Lex asks, “Don’t know about what?”
“This,” she says as she gestures generally at the crescendoing chaos all around them. “Running into a building full of bugs just so we can supposedly get some slack from Morgan. We should just leave now.”
“Well, no, because leaving now would mean you taking me out as your hostage. Am I right about that?”
“Yep.”
“Right, and I’m still not super jazzed about that plan. Also, I trust Morgan, and I happen to be a very good judge of character.”
“You said that about me when you first met me.”
“And I stand by it.”
“Kid,” Cannon butts in, “You gotta be the single fuckin’ worst judge of charactah I ever sawr. The wahden sucks ass, this Maraudah kid sucks ass, I’m the only person heah who doesn’t suck ass. Do you just say that about everyone you meet?”
Lex smiles. “Yeah, well, most people are generally pretty good. You two included, and same with Morgan. We all stand to gain by helping him out, and I think he’ll honor our agreement.”
Tay says, “Pretty sure the terms of his agreement were to give us quick and painless executions.”
“Yeah, true, that he did, but I took that as more of a figure of speech.” Lex nods in approval of his own interpretation. “I think he’ll let Cannon go back to Old Boston and make all the pizzas he wants, I think he’ll let me go on with my super secret mission, and I think he’ll give you some sort of arrangement here so you don’t have to go back to your family--”
“--Don’t talk about my family,” Tay says. Her face darkens.”
Lex puts his hands up. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. Just, saying that, you know, maybe helping out the people here might also help you out.”
Cannon crosses his arms. “I don’t really like the fact that I gotta add this, but, you know, sometimes savin’ peoples’ goddamn lives from bein’ eaten by bugs is somethin’ you do just because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, am I speakin’ fuckin’ Greek right now? Those people up theah in theiah apahtments, they’ah not like us. They’ah softah than baby ass. Believe me, I know people like this, they’ah my best customahs. So people like us, we gotta step in and help ‘em out when shit goes south. You, you’ah a Maraudah, I know you know how to kick some ass. Me, well, I’m shuah you know it by now but I’m the goddamn kid. A stallion, a beah, a bonafide ass kickin’ machine. Gimme fifteen seconds in theah and I’ll have the bugs runnin’. I don’t even need your guys’ help, but you’ah already heah, so we may as well all go in theah togethah and kick some ass.”
Lex and Tay exchange glances before Lex says, “Yeah, I got maybe about half of that but I’m pretty sure I agree with the sentiment.” Tay nods in assent. Without another word, they run into the apartment building.
The whole structure is essentially one long, skinny rectangle. When the trio enters, they see that this means that the building is basically just one very, very long hallway punctuated by doors on either side that lead to the various apartments, as well as the occasional stairwell to allow travel between stories. Tay turns to Lex and Cannon and motions with her hand for them to stay where they are and keep quiet. Slowly, she starts down the hallway, effortlessly making zero noise on the rough carpet flooring. The first room on her left is open. She pokes her head in and does a quick sweep. It isn’t big or luxurious, but it’s pleasant. A small kitchen that doubles as a living room, and a bedroom attached to either side of it. Toys on the floor, food on the stove. Lived in. Empty. She retreats and pokes her head into some of the other nearby rooms, all of which look the same.
She slinks back to Lex and Cannon. “They’re all empty.”
Lex furrows his brow. “What, nobody lives on the ground floor?”
Cannon romps down the hallway and looks into the abandoned rooms. “We’ah too late,” Cannon says grimly.
“I don’t think so,” Tay says. “Look at the windows. Most of them are broken.”
“Yeah, and most of these doors ah busted, too,” Cannon says inspecting the hinges. “Poor sons of bitches livin’ heah got attacked on both sides.”
Lex frowns. His lower lip quivers. “So, what, all the people living here, they...” he winces and mimes his thumb moving across his throat.
Cannon nods. “They nevah had a chance.”
Cannon’s face is dark, and Lex looks like he’s about to break into alternating fits of sobs and vomit. Tay looks at the room again, then runs to Lex as if she’s about to catch the tears and yak before they have a chance to fall. “Look at the windows again. The glass. Most of these rooms - maybe all of them, actually - there’s almost no glass on the inside. The windows weren’t broken from the outside.”
Lex looks at her quizzically. “So the bugs broke them from the inside? Why would they--”
“She means that everyone heah escaped,” Cannon says. “Check it out. Lotsa shit on the flooah, lotsa stuff thrown around, not a lotta blood.”
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“Almost none,” Tay adds. She and Cannon lock eyes and give each other a quick nod. “Who knows what happened here, but let’s keep it light for the kid,” they silently say to one another.
“Yeah, almost none,” Cannon repeats. “The people heah got out. Bugs came into the buildin’, they came crashin’ down on people’s front doors, the people got out while the gettin’ was good and punched out through the window. Probably ran down to the southahn district wheah Rach and Morgan ah cleanin’ shit up right now.”
Lex looks up at both of them, tears welling up in his eyelids. “So, you think these people made it out okay?”
“At least on this flooah, yeah,” Cannon nods. “As for the othah three flooahs, who knows. Fall from that height would break ya legs if ya not caehful, then you’ah just sittin’ duck bug food.” As soon as he says that, Tay glares at him. Cannon isn’t the world’s best lip reader, but he can pick up that Tay is mouthing something along the lines of “Why the fuck would you say that?”
Lex is about to rupture into a puddle of grief and tears, but he’s stopped by a thumping sound upstairs, followed by a scream. The three of them look at each other, then immediately dart up the staircase to the second story.
The layout of the second floor is identical to the first: One long hallway with rooms on either side and a few stairwells sprinkled here and there. Unlike the downstairs hallway, though, this one is filled wall to wall, end to end, floor to ceiling with bugs. Gray skinned humans with varying degrees of compound eyes, pincers, mandibles, and horns, dozens of them in one section of hallway alone. Further down the hallway, some of them pound endlessly at closed doors, the sound of the banging not quite drowning out the frenzied cries for help coming from within. Halfway down the hallway, a handful of bugs are feasting on bodies that have been dragged into the hallway, bodies of fathers, mothers, children. In the section of hallway closest to our heroes, though, our heroes see that there are a dozen or so bugs that are looking right at them.
Immediately, the bugs unleash a hellish chorus of buzzing. They charge at Lex, Cannon, and Tay, foamy pus spraying from their jaws. Tay is shell shocked. She’s been in plenty of fights, but those fights have almost always been with humans. Humans fight with fear. Doubt. Self preservation. The horde in front of her, she knows, has only one desire: Feed. Tay’s feet feel nailed to the ground. She’s frozen in fear.
Lex is not shell shocked. He’s not frozen in fear. He’s absolutely shed any modicum of humanity that he’s ever had His ego and superego have, upon seeing and hearing this tidal wave of bugs, vaporized instantaneously, leaving only his id sitting at the wheel, and his id is saying, “Oh shit,oh fuck,oh shit, fuck, fuck shit, holy shit, fuck, oh fuck.” The volume of his internal monologue has escalated with such rapidity that he isn’t sure if he’s saying it all out loud, and he really doesn’t care because he has no concept of anything right now other than the fact that he is going to die and it is going to be the worst imaginable death that anyone could possibly conceive of, his brain is basically playing his future death scene out in front of him Clockwork Orange style, all he can see is just how impressively dead and agonized he is about to be and he is just screaming and crying and fetal positioning and probably shitting himself.
Cannon is pretty fine. For the others, this is a once in a lifetime, endlessly traumatizing event. For Cannon, this is just Tuesday. As I told you back in chapter one, this is a little diddy that Cannon has played more times than he can count - yadda yadda he can’t count very high, but seriously he’s been in this kind of situation a lot. This is what he does. Day iEven if you weren’t being overly flowery or poetic, you would still describe it as his job because it is quite literally his jobn, day out, find bugs, kill bugs, chop em up, make em into delicious pizza pies for all of New England to enjoy. There’s very little about this situation that feels out of the ordinary to him. If anything, he’s happy to be doing this in a confined space where he’s at one end of a hallway and bugs can’t sneak up on him. Well, theoretically there could be bugs on the third floor who could potentially come down the staircase behind him, but he’s too excited to think about that.
He’s about to have a damn fine game of baseball.
Lacrosse balls streak down the hallway like lightning bolts, crashing into three bugs and boring holes through their skulls. The rest of the horde has closed the distance fast enough that he doesn’t have enough time to loose another volley, but that’s just fine by him. He takes to the melee with his lacrosse stick, parrying blows and using the net to scoop heads off of shoulders and use them as projectiles. He’s doing his thing and he’s doing it well, but the whole hallway is buzzing with Cannon-killing anticipation and he’s got a long way to go before its all taken care of.
Tay, seeing Cannon taking control of the mayhem, snaps back to her senses. Instinct takes over for her. Using Cannon as something of a human meat shield, she stays behind him, launching volley after volley of her sharpened cards into the fray. She’s hitting all her marks, embedding the cards into hearts, lungs, and spleens, but she is having frustratingly little effect. Usually all it takes is one or two cards to vital spots and her target is down, but these things are hearty, persistent, completely oblivious to pain.
“Stop hittin’ so many of ‘em,” Cannon barks between parries.
“You want me to stop helping you?”
“No, I want you to fuckin’ listen to me, and I’m tellin’ you to stop hittin’ so many of ‘em. Just hit one until it’s down. You can’t peppah these things. ah not like us, they don’t staggah. You gotta just pummel one until its all the way busted, then move on to the next.”
“Got it. How’s this?” She sends five cards in rapid succession, turning the face of the bug that Cannon is fighting into sliced ham. It falls backwards, dead.
“Fuck, yeah, that’s good, but maybe aim for one that isn’t right fuckin’ next to me? I think you took off a dreadlock.”
“Believe you, if I hit you it’s because I’m aiming for you.” She lets another volley fly, downing another bug.
“Okay. Point taken. Listen, we gotta start takin’ some ground heah. Every second we spend on defense is anothah second the bugs down the hall spend gettin’ theah fix on civilians.”
“And every time they do, that means one more bug for us to deal with. Got it.”
“Yeah, also it means that innocent people get dead, which I guess I gotta remind you is a bad thing that we should try to avoid.”
“Yeah, I know, okay? Can we not do this now? I’m on your team and making me feel bad about the life I was born into isn’t really helping my aim.”
“Okay, point taken again. But, you know, not for nothin’, you’re nevah really born into any kind of life.”
“Um, yes, you literally are.”
“Okay, yeah, you literally ah. But you’re not, you know--
“Yeah, I get it. Thanks. Believe me, if I’m alive and not getting actively burned at the stake by the end of tonight, I’m gonna take a good look at things.”
“And that maybe means not fuckin’ with our little crybaby back theah?”
“You don’t understand what’s waiting for me at home if I don’t have him with me.”
“What I don’t understand is why you keep callin’ those people home. I swear to the gods you were never fuckin’ taught English.”
“You can barely even speak English.”
“What do you mean I can baehly speak English?”
“Barely.”
“Baehly.”
“Baaarrrrely.”
“Baaeeehhly.”
“Right. It’s just-- It’s complicated, okay? You telling me you don’t have any sort of complicated family stuff?”
“I-- Yeah. Okay, yeah, I hear you.”
They start making some actual progress. Not with their mental health, not yet at least, but rather with their actual, physical predicament. They start pushing forwards, knocking and slicing and ultimately decimating the first chunk of bugs in the hallway. Their job is, of course, very far from over. They’ve cleared out about a third of the amount of bugs on this story, and the rest of the bugs are starting to take note. But Cannon and Tay just keep on pushing forwards. Cannon gets into a solid groove of blocking attacks and finding openings to get in a good swipe, jab, or thrust, and Tay gets better and better at flattening bugs with single volleys. As they gain more ground, she collects her cards from the bodies of her slain bugs and rinse, repeat.
Lex, who has been following the other two very closely down the hallway on sheer jellyfish instinct alone, eventually snaps out of his screaming stupor and looks around. Despite every neuron in his brain screaming to him that this would be his end, he realizes that things are actually going kind of, dare I say, well? Now that it seems as though death might not necessarily be something imminently and immediate waiting for him, he decides he wants to help. Taking care to not meander too far from the advancing front of hurricane Taynnon, he knocks on one of the doors that the bugs had not yet managed to beat down. “Hello? Anyone in there? If there is, come out now! We’re here to rescue you, there may not be much time!” He waits at the door for a moment before it creaks open enough for a mother and two children to peer out at him.
“What’s going on?” one of the children asks. “Are we going to die?”
In a surprisingly powerful display of courage, Lex manages a smile. He kneels down so he can look at the kid eye to eye. “You’re gonna be just fine. My friends and I are clearing out the building. Stay inside. You’re safe.” He stands back up and looks at the mother.
“Thank you,” she mouths to him. He smiles again and nods. The two children spend about a half a second admiring the way that Cannon and Tay are working to mow down the cloud of bugs down the hallway, but no longer than that. In a heartbeat, the door slams in his face and he hears the sound of a clicking lock and a happy family.
As Cannon and Tay continue to make progress, Lex continues to assure as many survivors as he can find. He offers each one a kind word, a smile, a hug, or whatever else they may need. For the first time in his life, Lex feels the way that he always imagined Daggers McCall must feel when he’s saving peoples’ lives. It feels good. Really, really good. This is what he always hoped his life as royalty would entail. Helping people of his kingdom, relieving their fears, making them feel safe. He never had a chance to actually do that back inside the palace of New Boston. He almost laughs at the irony that here, as far away from the palace as he’s ever been, surrounded not by the royalty of home but by commoners and fighters, is the most princely he’s ever felt. None of the survivors even know who he is, but he can see in their eyes that all of them are so deeply appreciative. In spite of the calamity and violence unfolding around him, Lex can’t help but smile.
It isn’t long before the trio emerge at the far end of the hallway, which has been entirely cleared of bugs. For all of the survivors whose doors have been rendered unusable by the bugs, he ushers them into rooms where they’ll be able to safely hide until everything is over. Cannon and Tay, both exhausted, give each other a knowing nod. Their eyes meet. Then, as if a bomb was set off, they both burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. They exchange hugs, high fives, and even a little victory dance that Lex joins in for.
“Nevah thought ya had it in ya, Maraudah,” Cannon smirks.
“Never thought a pizza boy could fight so well,” Tay pokes. “And Lex,” she says, trailing off. She smiles at him and nods. “It’s really cool what you did with everyone.”
Lex grins. He starts walking towards the stairwell in front of him. “Work isn’t over, yet. There’s still an entire floor upstairs to--”
He bumps into something. Something soft and fleshy. Oh, shit. Not something. Someone. Panic flares up like a rising tide before he realizes that it isn’t a bug that he’s bumped into, but a person. A person who he’s seen before. A person wearing an oversized gray hoodie, her skin entirely covered in bandages and other miscellaneous pieces of cloth wrapping. Lex recognizes her immediately, as does Tay when the woman’s piercing gray eyes lock on to her. Cannon and Lex step aside as the woman stalks towards Tay.
“Tay. Your family is here.”