Cannon leaps after Tay, a ribbon of expletives streaming from his mouth like a magician from a Tarantino movie, but Hoodie reaches out an arm to stop him. For a moment, he’s filled with rage. How dare someone try to stop him from carrying out divine retribution on the Marauder girl who was so nonchalant about not only condemning innocent lives to roam the earth as tortured bugs, but also about condemning a different yet no less undeserving group of innocent lives to burn alive in their own homes? That anger is a flash in the pan, though, as it immediately gives way to nausea. There’s something about Hoodie’s arm that feels... Horrible. Every muscle in his body tenses up and he feels simultaneously like he had been locked in a meat freezer and like he’d done a few too many loop-de-loops on a roller coaster.
Hoodie seemed to sense this unease and removed her arm from Cannon. She looked at him, her gray eyes the only hint at what she might be thinking. That, along with the fact that she very plainly said, “I’m angry, too. But there are people upstairs who need us.”
“Fuck who needs us, man! I’m sick and tiyahd of it! I didn’t come heah to be Mistah Always Do Good Stuff For People. I came heah to be Mistah Get Paid Get Drunk And Get Out. If I don’t staht doin’ what I wanna do instead of what othah people want me to do, my eyeballs ah gonna pop outta my head. And what I wanna do is go whip the shit outta that Maraudah kid. I don’t even wanna do it to save that crybaby kid. I just wanna do it cause these hands get real antsy when these eahs heah too much bullshit in one place.”
Hoodie closes her eyes. “I understand. Barely. But I understand. Help the people upstairs, then we deal with Tay.”
“No! Fuck you! Who ah you, my ma? I know you’ah not, cause she doesn’t have gray eyes or weah a big ovahsized sweatah and also she’s dead.” His eyes went wide. “Wait. Unless she’s not. No. No, it can’t be. You’ah not.” He slinks towards her as if she’s just told him the ending of the Sixth Sense. “Ah you... Ma, is that you?”
“What? No.”
“Oh. Yeah. Duh. I know. Wait. Yeah, I know, that was my whole point. You’ah not my ma, which means I don’t gotta listen to you. I’m gonna go kick the shit out of Maraudah kid and you can’t stop me.”
He turns to run down the stairs, but Hoodie again puts her arm on Cannon’s shoulder. His bones melt into jelly. He turns to face her like a sad little Jabba the Hutt. Hoodie glares at him. “Upstairs. Now.”
Cannon nods so fast he feels like his head might pop off.
The top floor of the building looks like a worse version of the second floor. Downstairs, the gang had just cleared out two or three dozen bugs. Up here, the sight is enough to make Cannon’s jaw drop. There appear to be at least twice that number. They don’t seem to notice Cannon and Hoodie yet. Instead, they’re all pounding and gnawing at all of the closed doors up and down the hallway. The buzzing roar made by all of the bugs makes it feel like they’re in an active construction zone.
He shouts, “Hey, so, uh, Hoodie kid. I guess you and Maraudah kid go way back or somethin’, but I nevah met you befoah. You good in a fight? Cause this... This is a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I could handle it with my eyes closed and both ahms tied behind my back. I’m just that kinda guy. But, you know, if you wanna piece of the action too, I don’t wanna hog it all. Even though I could.”
Instead of responding with words, Hoodie responds with actions. She leaps - and truly, it is a leap, she clears enough distance that it would be an insult to her to call it a jump, and she punches a nearby bug’s head clean off its body. Despite Cannon shouting (or, as Cannon likes to call it, speaking) his soliloquy to Hoodie just a few seconds ago, the bugs didn’t seem to hear over the ear shattering roar of their collective buzzing. Now that one of their kin has been unceremoniously decapitated, though, the nearby bugs are starting to take notice. Then, similar to how a flock of birds chain reacts to copy the first bird in the flock who turns a certain direction, all of the bugs in the hallway stop buzzing and stare at Hoodie and Cannon.
There’s a brief pause. No buzzing noise, no pounding. People can be heard screaming and crying for help behind their closed doors, but the sound is muffled. Cannon regards this pause as being extremely bizarre. Bugs don’t pause to investigate. Bugs switch from one stimulus to the next. They don’t proverbially turn down the music in the car so they can get a better look at a far off sign. They don’t stop buzzing so they can get a clearer picture of the scene. They look for prey, and once they find prey, they act immediately and ceaselessly until that prey becomes food.
And yet, here in this seemingly infinite second of calm, that’s exactly what the bugs seem to be doing. Cannon can’t believe it, but the bugs seem to be almost inspecting Hoodie and himself. Actually, although it’s hard to be sure of because about half of the eyes in the room are compound bug eyes, but Cannon is pretty sure that the bugs are solely inspecting Hoodie. Looking at her, sniffing in her direction, trying to figure her out. Whatever it is about her that so easily unnerved both Cannon and Tay, it seems as though the bugs are able to pick up on it. And so they all stand there, frozen by experiencing the phenomenon of confusion that they likely haven’t felt since before they were turned into bugs.
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That sweet, blissful second of near-silence comes to an end. Every bug in the building cocks their head back and screams. That sickening buzzing roar echoes off the cramped walls of the hallway. It fills Cannon’s ears, ricochets around inside his lacrosse helmet, seems to ring around inside of his head. He’s heard bugs buzzing plenty of times, but never in this quantity in such an enclosed space. For a split moment, he’s terrified. He sees with perfect clarity the chomping mandibles, the pincers lined with razor sharp hairs, the thick carapace covering parts of their body. He visualizes his intestines being slurped out of his belly like ramen. He visualizes turning into a bug and walking around the world for eternity, all the while screaming in pain. He visualizes someone coming by and chopping him up and baking his body in a brick oven at 800 degrees so he can become a pizza topping. No. Uh-uh. Fuck that. That’s not how Cannon’s going out. The fear passes. He bellows out a war cry and gets down to business.
Lacrosse balls fly down the hallway, sprouting fresh new holes in the heads of various bugs as they charge towards Cannon and Hoodie. Hoodie takes the front line, leaping around the hallway like a monkey and landing kicks and punches from all sorts of angles. If Cannon wasn’t so haunted by the idea of someone turning him into a pizza, he’d be watching the Hoodie show. You and I have heard this song and dance before, we’ve seen Hoodie be freakishly, superhumanly strong before during her fight with Tay back when she first met Lex. For Cannon, though, this is all new.
She jumps up and kicks herself off the wall, allowing her to get in a good overhead ax kick on a cluster of bugs. She leaps into the air and spins around, performing an immaculate Street Fighter Tatsumaki Senpukyaku and knocking out a ring of bugs. Cannon is no slouch here, either. He’s firing off lacrosse balls in flurries that take out multiple bugs at once. He’s hacking and slashing any bugs that make it past Hoodie’s whirlpool. And yet, as focused as he in on his own work, he swears he sees Hoodie’s left arm unnaturally and bonelessly snake itself around a bug before she uses its body as a blunt force trauma weapon.
“Yo, Hoodie, what’s your deal, huh?” He thinks about asking her about her weird arm, but in one of the few moments of tactful foresight in his life, he opts not to. “I nevah seen bugs, like, you know, pause befoah.”
“Hmm?” is all she manages, still swinging around one of the bugs like it was a club.
“When we first got up heah, aftah you karate chopped that one bug’s head off, all the othah bugs looked at you. I nevah seen a bug look at someone without immediately tryin’ to eat it.” He pauses for thought while releasing another torrent of lacrosse balls. “And honestly, no offense, cause you seem like you’ah a good guy like me, but you creep the shit outta me.”
Hoodie throws her improvised bug weapon down the hall way, knocking down a handful of charging bugs. She leaps on to each one, punching craters into their faces. “Look at the doors,” she says, ignoring his line of questioning. “None of them have been punched down yet.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess.”
“It must have taken the bugs long enough to get up to this level that they haven’t gotten to any of the people who live up here yet.”
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, guess so. Good thing, too. People on the second flooah could’ve jumped out if they had to. Broken a couple of legs on the way down, but that’s bettah than the alternative. But from up heah? That fall could break moah than just a tibiar and fibula.”
For a brief moment, Hoodie stops her rampage.
“Their what?”
“Their tibiar and fibula.”
“Tibia.”
“Tibia.”
“And fibula.”
“Yeah, and fibula.”
“Tibia and fibula.”
“Tibiar and fibula.”
“What? In all my travels, I’ve never heard-- never mind. We have business to take care of.” She leaps back into action, suplexing and clotheslining the incoming bugs. “You don’t strike me as the type to know what a tib-- what the bones in the body are called.”
Cannon digs the edge of his lacrosse stick’s net through a bug’s neck, slicing its head off and loading it up as a projectile that he then slings into another bug’s torso. He smiles. “When you’ah in the pizza biz, you get into the nitty gritty of bug biology pretty quick. Heah, watch me fuck up this dude’s zygomatic bone.” He flips his stick around and smacks the blunt end of it into an unsuspecting bug’s zygomatic bone, which I don’t need to describe in any more detail because I’m sure you know what that means.
Hoodie, who also obviously knows where the zygomatic bone is and is well aware that Cannon made good on his promise of fucking up that one bug’s zygomatic bone, gives the pizza boy an approving nod. They carry out the rest of their work without much conversation. Cannon does call out a few more of the cranial bones similar to Babe Ruth calling his shot above the wall in the outfield of Wrigley Field (a reference that Cannon wouldn’t get, but if explained to him, he would start slipping into conversation at every opportunity), but that’s about as much conversation as they get into. Finally, at long last, the hallway is empty. Well, it’s covered wall to wall with a carpet of freshly slain bug bodies, but it’s empty of immediate threats. Slowly, the doors up and down the hallway open and people start to come out of the woodwork. When they see what Cannon and Hoodie have done, they clap and cry and scream and cheer.
Cannon is more than ready to bask in the moment. He opens his mouth to deliver a monologue of how everyone and theiah goddamn mothah should get on both knees and kiss his feet because he’s a fuckin’ champion, but Hoodie tugs at him before he gets the chance. He pushes her back, stuffing down the queasy feeling he gets when he touches her. “What the hell? We deserve a little praise, no?”
She points at the stairwell back at the far side of the hallway where they started clearing this floor. It’s a long way away -- this building is really long, like a hundred yards or more -- but he sees what she’s pointing at. “Oh fuck, that’s right, I totally forgot. Good call.” Some of the other people, particularly those whose rooms are on that end of the hallway, see it as well. They start to scream and run towards the near end of the hallway where Cannon and Hoodie are, doing their best to avoid tripping over the rigor mortified bugs strewn all along the floor.
Plumes of smoke and tongues of flame start to reach up from the far stairwell. In all of the mania of killing bugs and wondering what the deal is with Hoodie and talking about tibar and fibula, Cannon forgot that Tay had lit a fire downstairs. “Listen up!” he yells, his voice booming through the hallway, “Everybody follow us! Get your asses outtah heah! Don’t waste time grabbin’ dumb shit from your rooms, just get your asses out! Let’s go!”