Capítulo 2515: 98
Chapter 98: Interlude 10-d: Name of God
Interlude 10.d: Name of God
July's summer heat swept into Brockton Bay like a wildfire. It came in suddenly and without much warning, and it filled the city with a stifling wave hot enough to bake a Thanksgiving turkey. Calling it the hottest day on record that the city had ever seen might not have been much of an exaggeration at all.
And yet, Squealer huddled in her makeshift workshop, hands working frantically to complete her latest monstrosity of a vehicle, and shivered.
Sweat beaded on her brow and stained her clothing — what wasn't already blackened by grease or motor oil — and a small office fan blew somewhat cooler air towards her body. Her wet, sticky hair clung to her head and about her face. Every now and again, she had to reach up and rub away the fog that built up on her goggles or the visor of her welding mask.
And still, Squealer shivered.
Not, as it were, from the cold, because even with her dinky little office fan to provide relief, the inside of her makeshift workshop was still sweltering. Neither did the rundown shack have an air conditioning unit to drive away the oppressive heat, so there was no vent of cool air blowing directly down the back of her shirt.
Squealer shivered and shook because it had been nearly two weeks since she'd last had a proper hit.
"Gotta finish," she muttered to herself, rocking on her heels slightly. "Gotta finish, gotta finish, gotta finish…"
She said the words as though they were a mantra, like they were the only thing that allowed her to focus enough to keep working. It was as though she feared she might lose her train of thought — the plans floating murkily in her head for the vehicle she was making — if she let herself stop saying them.
Her sudden abstinence, of course, was not a decision of her own making. Squealer would've been quite happy hanging out with Skidmark and shooting up a batch of the good stuff. In fact, she missed those days very badly and wished more than anything she could go back to them.
The reason Squealer was on the wagon had everything to do instead with the fact that everyone she knew was dead.
And if she didn't come up with something fucking yesterday, then she was next.
"C'mon, Sherrel, you useless cunt," she muttered to herself. Something hot dribbled down her face; she wiped it away with the back of one greasy hand, tried to ignore the shaking in her fingers. "Get that fat ass in gear."
She didn't know when it had started, the folks disappearing. Folks disappearing wasn't that strange, considering, not in the Merchants. Some of them got pinched by the cops, some of them got whacked by the ABB or the Empire (although somewhere along the line, the Empire had become the only other gang in town), and some of them just plain OD'd.
Sometimes, the missing folks got found — face down in the bay, bled out in the alleyway, or in a pool of their own puke. Sometimes, they just stayed missing, and Squealer had no idea what happened to them or where they went. Maybe some of them got frightened and fucked off to a rehab center to get clean. Who the fuck knew?
But then people — Merchants — started disappearing right quick. Sometime in May, maybe, or June. After Leviathan came to town and wrecked some shit, she was pretty sure, although she and the others had been so high for those few weeks that she wasn't one-hundred percent. Days kind of bled together when you were that high.
Squealer hadn't really cared about the folks vanishing, though. Skidmark had, especially when it brought production down and their supply had started drying up — and Skids with it. A dry Skids was an angry Skids, and an angry Skids had a short temper, which meant he was a lot less forgiving when Squealer screwed anything up, too.
Squealer knew how to handle that, though. It just meant getting on her knees a few more times a week than usual and calming him down the way only she could. Didn't make Skids any happier, exactly, but it helped calm him down a little and tire him out some more, and that meant he spent less time shouting and screaming and smacking. Skids was much easier to deal with when he didn't have the energy to get out of bed and start hollering up a storm.
Squealer choked on a sob. "Oh, Skids," she said mournfully.
But eventually, the people disappearing had gone too far and they'd lost too many. Squealer's secret technique for dealing with an angry Skidmark only worked if Skids was willing to let her use it, and once their supply really started running low and the number of boys for him to yell at got even lower, he wouldn't let her do it, anymore. Whenever she started tugging at his belt, he'd slap her hands away and start shouting at her.
No amount of shouting fixed anything. Squealer took more than her fair share of lumps, those days, but that didn't fix things, either. They were just losing too many people, and once folks figured out that someone or something was coming after the Merchants, well, not too many were so desperate and so down on their luck that they'd risk the Reaper coming after them.
Yeah, haha, fucking hilarious, right? Squealer had thought the same thing, when the boys started whispering about it. What kind of edgelord fuckwit got called the Reaper? Almost as bad as that guy who called himself Genoscythe or whatever. Had to be a stupid kind of special to walk around thinking something like that was a "cool" name.
It stopped being funny the first time she saw the blood splatter. No sign of a person or the guy it belonged to, just a metric fuckton of blood, enough that even at her most addled, Squealer could tell there was no way the guy survived it.
Reaper. The guy who came, killed, and left no body behind. Suddenly, that shit was a lot harder to laugh at than it was before.
Even Skids got spooked. He stopped getting high as much, started only shooting up when the shakes got so bad that he couldn't sleep, and even when he did sleep, it was in fits and spurts, because he didn't want the fucking Reaper to drop in on him when while he was sleeping. He pulled the Merchants in, dragged all the sorry carcasses he could manage into their little hidey hole, and they hunkered down while Squealer tried to build a tank for them to drive, because that was the best she could come up with to keep them all alive.
It didn't save him.
The Reaper came in the dead of night, all shadows and cloak and death. Two of Skids's bodyguards were dead before anyone knew what was happening. The rest died one by one, like a stack of dominos falling, before they could grab their guns and start shooting back. The Reaper went through them like wheat before the scythe.
And then Skids… Skids…
Squealer choked on another sob.
She hadn't even seen what happened to him. Just…one second, he was there, and then there was nothing but a giant blood spatter painting the walls of their abandoned warehouse office red. Just like that, Skids was dead. He hadn't even gotten the chance to use his power.
And all Squealer had been able to do was hop in her half-finished tank and drive away as fast as she could into the Trainyard. Away from Skids and his blood, away from the husk that was the Merchants, away from the Reaper who was pulling them apart member by member.
Sherrel, people used to tell her, those drugs'll kill you.
Mom and Dad and Auntie and Uncle and Mister Henderson had all tried to tell her that, years back. Only place those drugs will take you is an early grave, they said. You're better than this, they said. It's not too late to come back, they said.
Well, ha, joke was on them. It wasn't the drugs that were going to kill her, it was some nutjob in a cape with a murderboner.
Squealer's hands fumbled with a sparkplug, but she managed to keep her grip on it as she set it in place and started affixing it to her jury rigged cannon.
Not like it was going to make much of a difference, even if she did manage to finish this beast. She could hope that it would be enough. Maybe it wouldn't scare off the Reaper, maybe it would, and maybe it packed enough firepower to blow the bitch to kingdom come. She only had enough time and supplies for two shots.
She wasn't holding her breath, though.
Squealer knew this whole thing was a longshot. Had been from the start. Even if she got this tank of hers to a place she could call it "finished," it was still going to be the most barebones, half-assed thing she'd built in forever. Fucking thing had a cannon with two shots and a bunch of cobbled together armor, plus the rails that formed her "railgun" were going to be all but melted slag after the first shot, so she really only had one shot that would count. The second probably wouldn't even make it out of the barrel.
If she didn't land the first shot, that was it. Game over.
Who would've thought? The Merchants were supposed to be the safe gang. Sure, if you were stupid, you might get yourself killed on an overdose. And sure, it wasn't like the boys didn't sometimes jump idiots who ran around in the wrong side of town and get them hooked on some of the good stuff. But most of the Merchants were just folks who had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, people running away from something, and it wasn't like they went around shooting up ABB storehouses or Empire pit fights on the regular. The Merchants were the safe gang because they didn't go starting shit, even if sometimes they got dragged into it.
Not so safe anymore, huh? Now they had a whacko coming after them and turning folks into chunky salsa.
Squealer choked on another sob. "Skids woulda laughed…"
No, no, no time for moping. Had to finish this baby so that she wasn't totally helpless whenever the Reaper caught up to her.
…done. The cannon should be ready to go. Just had to test it, now, and make sure it worked all right and proper.
Squealer reached for the repurposed handheld game console, flicked the power switch to turn it on, and waited for it to boot up her cobbled OS, built on the back of whatever the original company had programmed into it. A moment later, she was looking back at her own face, pale, drawn, washed out from the dollar store camera mounted on her tank, complete with the smears of black grease. When she fingered the left joystick, the turret of her bastardized tank swerved and spun.
In spite of herself, Squealer's face broke out into a smile.
And it froze there as the sound of groaning metal screeched through her abandoned little car garage. With a clang, the doorknob that she'd locked on the other side of the shop clattered to the floor, now utterly useless. As Squealer whirled around towards it, the door it was attached to creaked open, and standing in the doorway was the figure who had haunted Squealer's nightmares for the last two weeks.
"Hello, Squealer," said the Reaper, voice as cold as the winter wind. She dropped the other end of the doorknob and it bounced and rolled unceremoniously across the floor. "Finally decided to stop running?"
The Reaper seemed almost to glide into the room, hem of her cloak fluttering about her ankles, trimmed in gold.
"Or maybe you just realized you actually deserve what's coming to you."
Squealer let out a wordless shriek, a scream that packed together all of the pain, fear, and despair she'd been suffering ever since Skidmark died, and thumbed the joystick of the console in her hands. The turret of her tank swiveled and took aim, the rails of its barrel crackling as they charged.
The Reaper actually took a step back. "Whoa, what the fuck —"
BOOM
The thunderous retort filled the room, echoing off the walls as a five pound slug welded together from whatever Squealer had been able to find was shot at three times the speed of sound at a target barely twenty feet away. If it hit, it had enough oomph behind it to turn even the Reaper into a meaty mess of hamburger, even with a glancing blow.
It missed.
By a fucking mile.
Because she'd been fucking rushed to all hell, so she'd forgot to account for the drift in the turret that might occur if the rails of her rail gun weren't close enough in length to maintain equidistant magnetic charge the whole way down, plus she'd been aiming from the hip instead of using the camera she'd installed just for this purpose. Squealer, you fucking moron.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Squealer shouted it at herself, but she couldn't hear it over the ringing in her ears from being that damn close to a fucking rail gun firing.
The Reaper, who'd been bowled over by the wake of the shot, looked back at the grapefruit sized hole that had been bored into the wall by the five pound slug. What was going through the little cunt's head, Squealer didn't know and she didn't intend to stay and find out, because she wasn't stupid enough to sit there and stupidly wait for the bitch to get her head back on straight.
She thumbed the joystick and the turret swiveled again, and with another press of the button, the second slug exploded out of the barrel and punched a hole into the garage door. Squealer wasted no time climbing onto her Frankenstein monstrosity as she used the controller to compel it forward.
The garage door never had a fucking chance.
The sound of it being blown off its hinges would've been loud enough on its own, if Squealer's ears weren't still ringing, but the Reaper probably wasn't any better off, so she didn't bother trying to be stealthy or sneak away, she just burst her way through the front door and clung onto her tank for dear life as it carried her out of the garage. It trundled along at a steady thirty miles per hour.
The Trainyard was just ahead. If she could just make it there, she might be able to disappear into the maze of abandoned train cars and hide away until the Reaper got fed up and left. That was her best shot, now.
Ping
Something small hit her tank's armor and bounced off. The sound of the impact was barely audible over the still fading ringing in her ears. Squealer looked down at it as it rolled along the ledge of one of her welded armor panels and fell to the ground.
A ball bearing? Or…maybe a pellet from a BB gun?
Ping
Another one bounced off the armor, just a few inches away from Squealer's hip. There was a small dent in the armor where it had hit.
What?
She looked back towards the garage, where the Reaper was trying to chase after her. Little metallic glints floated around her cloak, bobbing as she ran, and then the girl gestured with one of her hands —
Crack
And Squealer shrieked as her handheld game console suddenly gained a new hole right in the center of its screen, surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks. Surprised, Squealer dropped it and it sparked and died, and so did her tank.
"FUCK!"
Ping — Ping — Ping
Squealer threw herself off of her tank and scrambled to her feet, then took off running. Her tank was useless, now, and she didn't have enough of a head start to take the time to climb into it and strap in to drive away. She'd be a sitting duck, and she didn't want to find out if the inside of her tank would look good painted with her fucking guts, thank you very fucking much.
But she wasn't too far off, now. The Trainyard was in sight, the maze of train cars was there, and all she had to do was make it there and disappear like a fucking chameleon.
She could figure out what to do after that later. For now, she just had to escape and live to run away.
Finally, lungs burning, legs aching, heart pounding, Squealer made it to the Trainyard. The gravel crunched under her feet, and the nearest abandoned train car was just up ahead, so close that she could almost reach out and touch it —
CRACK
Something hot bit into Squealer's calf, and she let out a cry as her leg crumpled under her and bore her to the ground. Agony ripped up her knee and her right thigh, sending jolts of pain rocketing into her brain as searing heat radiated out from the meat of her calf until she couldn't even tell exactly where she'd been hit. Her scraped palms and elbows were just a pleasant tingle by comparison.
The shock of it took her a second to push away, but the adrenaline surging through her veins managed to drive her to her knees and hands as she tried to stand back up and limp away as quickly as she could.
It didn't help. She made it another step or two, hopping on her remaining good leg, before she tripped and fell back into the gravel.
The only thing she could do was crawl. Crawl, and hope she could escape like that, like a bug scurrying away from a predator, too pathetic to be noticed. Her right leg throbbed in time with her racing heart, and every time it got dragged across the ground, a new burst of agony poured acid on her nerves, but she couldn't stop, because stopping meant death.
So she crawled. She crawled and pleaded with whoever might be listening that she would make it out of this. If she could just get behind cover, hobble her way deeper into the Trainyard, then maybe she could get away. Maybe she could find somewhere to hide until the Reaper lost interest and left.
CRACK
Something bit into the gravel ahead of her, missing her fingers by bare inches and sending a spray of rocks and dirt into the air. Squealer flinched back from it, knowing she was trapped.
"Squealer of the Merchants," said the Reaper ominously. Squealer turned around, flopping onto her back, because there was nowhere else to run. "You have been weighed, measured, and definitely found wanting."
She held up a hand, and the white glove she wore was shockingly immaculate, like it hadn't seen even a single drop of blood, despite the body count this cape had to have racked up, by now. With that pure, white glove, she reached out towards Squealer, and it seemed to loom, menacing, over her.
Against all reason, when it came to rest on Squealer's head, it was gentle and not violent at all.
"I'm going to give you the salvation," the Reaper went on, "that you really don't deserve."
Squealer swallowed, gathered as much spit as she was able, and told her killer, "Fuck you."
The loogie she tried to hawk fell pitifully short. It seemed to offend the Reaper anyway.
"You know what?" the girl said. "I was trying to be kinda nice about this. Send you out with some class, you know? Not like you Merchants have much of that to begin with."
The fingers resting on Squealer's skull tightened and dug in. This was it, Squealer thought as her heart pounded and her pulse roared in her ears. This was the end.
"But if that's how you want to go, then that's how you're going to go, you useless —"
A meaty squelch cut her off, and the Reaper let out a breathless scream as her arm was wrenched back and away from Squealer's head at the last second. She whipped around, cloak fluttering, choked out, "Y-You!"
"Yes," said a new voice. It belonged to a goddess, a beautiful, wrathful figure with sharp features and black wings spread out behind her that glowed with arcane light. The sun haloed her head like a crown, and right then and there, Squealer was willing to believe. "Me."
The buzz of electricity punctuated the word, and the Reaper threw herself to the side to avoid some kind of grappling hook, one arm flopping uselessly at her side.
"But why?" the Reaper shouted, sounding utterly lost. "I'm just doing the right thing! I'm cleaning up this city, just like you wanted! I'm saving these people from the scum like the Merchants and the Empire!"
"No," the goddess said coldly, "you're not."
She held out a hand as though grasping for the Reaper's soul, and a sound cut through the air like a knife, a word that wasn't a word that twisted the fabric of reality like the hand of God. The Reaper was caught, frozen in midair like someone had pressed the pause button on the universe and captured her leapt mid-moment — and then the zap of an electrical discharge crackled and the Reaper gasped, convulsed, and finally fell to the ground, unmoving.
Squealer watched her, wide-eyed, waiting for her to get back up and keep going. The boogeyman (woman, whatever) that had haunted her nightmares for nearly two straight months couldn't have been brought down that easily, could she?
But after several seconds, nothing happened. The Reaper just stayed down, defeated.
Squealer turned to look at her savior —
"Oh, fuck me," she whimpered.
And standing there, halberd raised, was Armsmaster. The bare chin and mouth were drawn into a scowl, and the end of his halberd sparked and crackled. His navy blue armor gleamed in the midday sun, all heroic and shit.
The goddess floated down to land next to him, and her wings folded against her body, except, no, they weren't wings at all, they were a black cloak, trimmed in gold.
Armsmaster stepped forward, and Squealer tried to scramble backwards and away, but he ignored her and went to the Reaper; with a whir and a click, the head of his halberd changed and out popped the needle of a syringe. He jabbed it into one cheek of the Reaper's ass, held it there for a few seconds, and then withdrew. With another whir and click, his halberd changed back to normal.
"Should keep her out for a few hours," he said gruffly.
"Long enough to gift wrap her for the PRT," said his companion, and fuck, was that a voice that could convince Squealer to convert. She only glanced in the Reaper's direction for a moment. "It seems we arrived at the perfect moment, too."
Armsmaster's head swiveled to look at Squealer, and he grunted. "Not a moment too soon, as Tattletale would put it."
"Indeed."
The goddess stepped forward — not towards the Reaper, but towards Squealer, gazing down at her with a cold expression. She stopped right next to Squealer, looking her over as though she was a bug and trying to decide whether it was worth it to squish on her or not, and Squealer froze, hoping that she was too small and too unimportant for this goddess to smite.
Then, the goddess knelt down and reached out, and Squealer flinched, but couldn't stop her from laying one gloved hand on her face. The goddess's lips drew into a tight line, and she muttered something that Squealer couldn't make out; in an instant, all of the aches and pains that she'd never realized she'd gathered, as well as those she'd just forced herself to live with, disappeared as though they'd never been.
Including the hole in her leg from where the Reaper's ball bearing had ripped through her calf.
The gloved hand caressed Squealer's face and moved down under her jaw, forcing her chin up firmly but gently. Squealer couldn't help but look into the goddess's electric blue eyes. There was something hypnotizing about them, something that made it hard to even think about turning away.
"You will find the nearest rehab center," the goddess said, and Squealer found herself agreeing immediately, because that sounded like the best idea she'd ever heard. "You will get clean, stay clean, and move on with your life as though all of this was nothing more than a bad dream. Squealer of the Merchants is dead. Sherrel Bailey has a new lease on life, and she's going to make something of it."
"Make something of it," Squealer…Sherrel agreed dreamily.
It seemed only natural. The Merchants were dead. Skidmark was dead. Mush and Trainwreck and all the rest were dead, too. Of course Squealer was dead with them. Sherrel could go to the rehab center and get herself clean, and then she could bury the Merchants and all of this in her past and seize her second chance with both hands.
What she was going to do with her life, now… She didn't have an answer to that. But she was sure she'd find something. If a goddess told her so, it must be true.
The goddess let her go and stood, leaving Sherrel on the ground to stare after her. Armsmaster turned to her as she approached, having crouched down next to the motionless Reaper.
He tilted the Reaper over, pulling back the hood of the cloak to reveal a young girl. A trail of blood leaked from one ear, where that first rail gun round had blown out her eardrum.
"Katrina Herren," said Armsmaster, "alias —"
"Rune," the goddess concluded, "of the Empire Eighty-Eight. Or formerly, as it were. Quite the busy bee she's been since handing in her resignation to Victor and Othala."
"Our initial supposition was incorrect, it seems," said Armsmaster. "However, the Disintegrator's MO doesn't match her power's known limits. It's likely that sometime shortly before or after Leviathan, she experienced a Second Trigger."
"And got it into her head to use me as a symbol of her crusade. We can't be sure yet whether she was working alone, she might have an accomplice, another cultist…"
They continued to talk, but Sherrel had stopped paying any attention.
Rune. So, she was the one who had been going around killing everyone. Mush and Trainwreck, Skidmark, all of the boys and girls who had been Squealer's…friends was as good a word as any. All those people who had only left behind a red stain had been victims of Rune.
Sherrel thought she should be angry. She was sure she should be, since the Reaper — Rune — had ripped away everything she cared about, but somehow, she couldn't find it in herself to be upset. The Merchants and Squealer were a part of her past, now, which meant that everything the Reaper had done was something that had happened to the person she was before, not the person she was now. It was all water under the bridge.
She had a new lease on life, after all.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
There're are couple of things here that could probably stand to be ironed out, a few rough edges that might need polishing, but I was just done with this chapter and wanted to be done, because I'd been sleeping awkwardly for about a week when I finally got this finished, and none of them were important enough that they absolutely needed it.
Like Squealer missing that first shot so badly. Or the barrels of her cobbled rail gun being unequal in length. Or if they were, her power not helping her to automatically compensate for it. If you want to, you can look at all of that as her shard punishing her for building this war machine for the sole purpose of running away and hiding, to stand her ground only if absolutely necessary.
EDIT: Since I don't have any plans to cover it later on, I'll put it here. Rune's Second Trigger occurred during the Leviathan fight. I'll let you guys go back and find the moment yourselves. Her Shard, at the time, took what it could observe of Excalibur's attack and the data it had and brought her power in closer. Her range and weight limit were drastically reduced, and I do mean drastically, but the cap on the number of items she could control, their velocity, and her Manton Limit were all shattered. What she started figuring out with Victor and Othala was that she can consider the human body multiple different items at once and violently separate those items - at the cellular level, now, although it took her a little while to manage that. She doesn't have the resolution to go to the atomic level. She still requires touch, however, hence why she needed to actually put her hands on Squealer.
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