Quantum wrath, p.10
Quantum Wrath, page 10
I pushed the thought aside, though, because anyone talking about their supervillain “calling cards” immediately grated on my last nerve.
Fucking supers.
“So,” I said. “Given your whole super-hearing shtick, we’re going to be staying near these Screaming Peaks. But first we’re going to figure out what the fuck was going on with that guy.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lu gave me a puzzled look. “He was a bum.”
I sighed. “I think he was on drugs. That might be what ‘Tress’ meant. But I didn’t see any track marks. It might be something you snort, though. His nose was running like hell, even besides the blood. Or something else. Who the fuck knows.”
“Why does it matter?” My blonde companion shrugged. “Drugs are fun.”
“I’m not talking about that sugar-coated shit you would claim is Molly,” I said. “I mean actual hard drugs, which can already be bad. But depending on the dimension, it can be outright horrible. Worse than anything you could ever imagine. You wouldn’t believe the shit some of these places have cooked up. If you encounter it, even once by accident, you can get hooked and wind up wasting away in some random dimension for longer than you’ll ever realize. Like, you’re a fucking slave to this substance. If something like that exists here, I want to know what it is so we can avoid it. It could ruin everything, despite us having supers’ metabolism. We’re not from this place, and you’d be surprised how much that can influence the way strange substances affect us outside our own dimension.”
Finally, the seriousness of my words seemed to penetrate her skull, and she nodded.
“How will we find out?” she asked.
“I will find out,” I corrected her. “You will focus on watching our backs and not causing any trouble.”
“Ooookay,” she sighed. “So, we’re back to the ‘no fun’ zone. Got it. Sir, yes, sir.”
She sent me a limp-wristed salute, and I started off again.
“If there’s anything like that in a dimension, it’s usually obvious right off the bat,” I said. “So for our plan, I’m thinking we’ll find out where these Screaming Peaks are, and then–”
I cut off as we rounded another corner and the landscape opened up in front of us.
Ahead, the city towered even taller than it had seemed to from the outside. The land sloped steadily down into a shallow bowl, but the buildings loomed higher and higher despite the drop in land elevation. They were interconnected here and there at all different heights, so the streets all shared the same tunnel-like appearance. The slopes of the valley had been terraced, and a wild variety of odd-looking crops sprouted from the soil. But the city had been built up and over the crops like a network of twisted, metallic branches. Half the plants seemed to be wilting, but others were thriving under the glow of light orbs hanging from the bottoms of the buildings that arced over them in a bridge-like fashion.
On the far side of the bowl-like valley, there were three stunted volcano peaks. Even from far away, I could see the buildings were different there. They were metallic and round, with chimney pipes in their centers that gave them the look of giant pumpkins. Some of them were tiered like wedding cakes, with the higher levels getting progressively smaller.
“Snowman houses,” Lu snickered. Her pink eyes rolled dramatically. “Cute.”
“That’s where we’re headed,” I said.
“But look at all the pretty lights over there,” she pointed out with a sigh.
Her finger stretched off toward the more populated side of the bowl-like valley to the left. There was a region that was full of neon lights, twisted buildings, and even light shows that might’ve been either drones or silent fireworks.
“Nope,” I said calmly. “Plus, half of those buildings look like they’re in danger of falling over at any moment.”
“Fiiine,” she grumbled. “I guess dangerous volcanoes are exciting enough for a Tuesday. And at least we’ll be far away from the smell.”
“Ideally.”
My other objective was to learn more about the ‘Unit’ I’d heard mentioned several times now, and always with dislike.
For now, we kept our eyes open for any more murderous drone-bug clouds. There weren’t any, but we did see plenty of pretty weird stuff.
Night was falling in earnest now, and the city was coming to life around us. We ducked around the glowing vines that lit the streets here and stepped over what appeared to be dried out stream beds that crisscrossed the road in places.
On each side of the road, the stream beds either joined up with the gutters or stretched off into alleyways whose crooked paths seemed built to accommodate them. That’s where things got grim.
Without fail, these alleys were all home to shapeless huddles of people on the ground.
Soon, we came to an area where several people were right on the road crawling along these stream beds. Some of them were crammed together licking the dry stone with a sort of exhausted franticness. One was doggedly chipping away at the stone with a hammer and chisel. He shoved the larger bits of stones into his pockets. As I watched, he popped one into his mouth and sucked on it like it was a gobstopper.
“Whaaaat the fuck is this?” Lu breathed.
“No idea,” I muttered. I strode forward and raised my voice to be heard by the crawlers, although I was on the alert just in case any of them tried to jump me. “We need to get through.”
A few people raised their heads blearily and squinted at me with rummy eyes. One of them did a halfhearted shuffle across the ground to clear a small path.
“Right,” I said gruffly as I stepped through.
The sound of my voice so close seemed to finally penetrate the chiseling man’s rabid concentration. He jerked his head up and crouched protectively over his little work site.
“Stay the fuck away,” he snarled. “This is mine, you hear me? Unless you’re willing to pay–”
“I don’t want it,” I interrupted. “But just out of curiosity, what is it?”
“It’s Tress, you moron,” he snorted. “Sort of. So maybe it’s dried up, who cares? And unless you’re looking to buy, you’d better clear the fuck out of here. I got ties to Alvari. Close ones.”
At the name ‘Alvari,’ the crawlers on the ground all whipped their heads up to stare. Their eyes were filled with a combination of fear and excitement.
“Where?” one of them slurred.
I just straightened up, raised my hands in a conciliatory way, and walked on.
Lu cleared the whole line of crawlers with a flying leap. They didn’t even notice. Their faces were already plastered to the pavement again.
The sound of their raw, dry tongues scraping against the stone was audible even to me, and a visible shudder went through Lu. I wondered what the noise was like for her with her apparent super-hearing.
More importantly, the people in the streets over here were definitely either on something or withdrawing pretty damn hard, by my estimate.
We passed through more areas that were crumbling from the presence of the tiny, burrowing Gnasher drones. Then, a few steps later, we found ourselves in a region that seemed weirdly bougie in comparison to what we’d been walking through so far.
Instead of bioluminescent plants, there were clear glass lanterns hanging from lamp posts. There were no light bulbs or flames inside, though. Instead, they were filled with water and teeming with brightly-glowing fish. Their shimmering scales cast flitting panels of colorful light in every direction.
The buildings here were the same sprawling towers of interconnected metal as the others, but there was way more color and far less rust and grime. Zero dried-out stream beds crossed the street.
Lu’s hand flew to my arm.
“Crawler,” she said softly, and she nodded her head over my shoulder.
I glanced back and saw a man shuffling slowly after us. He had the same glassy-eyed, dazed, emaciated look as the people we had seen crawling on the ground earlier.
“Guess that’s what we’re calling them,” I snorted. “But I don’t get the feeling that he’s following us. Look.”
I pulled her into the shadows between one of the street lamps.
The shuffling man was moving slowly toward one of those lamps like there was a gravitational pull. He stood on his tiptoes and stretched his fingertips toward it, but the thing was high enough to be out of reach even for me. He panted with effort and then moved to the lamp post like he was going to try and climb it.
When his hands were a few inches away, the pole abruptly took on a baleful red glare like a hot oven.
“What the…” Lu hissed.
The man let out a muffled yowl of pain, but he didn’t give up. Instead he ripped his scarf off and stuffed it between his teeth to bite down on while he scrambled to climb the pole.
He was about halfway up when his body spasmed so hard that he couldn’t hang on anymore. He was so out of it that he didn’t even flail or panic on the way down. He just thudded to the ground like a sack of rice and rolled over groaning.
When he hobbled to his feet, I spotted puffy red blisters lining his arms.
“Jesus,” I sighed. Then I gave my head a shake. “Let’s go.”
Lu was unusually quiet as we strode on down the now-serene, colorfully lit street.
We hit a crossroads that was even more well-lit. The street to our right was barred by a gate of pure palladium. It was sharpened to wicked points at the top, and Lu stretched out a curious finger toward it.
It rattled threateningly, and the metal glowed red-hot.
I squinted through the bars and saw the street led to a tiny courtyard that opened up between buildings. The buildings were plated with palladium tiles, and the courtyard had a fancy marble gazebo at the center that was home to…
“Is that a well?” Lu asked.
“Looks like it,” I murmured. Then I tensed. “Oh, shit.”
I yanked Lu past the street with me.
“What is it?” she whispered.
I propelled us quietly into motion again.
“The well was surrounded by marble statues,” I said in a low voice. “Statues exactly like the ones that were attacking when we warped here.”
“So?” she snorted. “We could take ‘em easy.”
“That’s not the point,” I sighed. “I’m not sure if they have surveillance abilities. And hell, they could just be statues, not more robots. But still… Without knowing who the assholes in charge of those things are, it’s better to keep a low profile for now. And we sure as hell didn’t enter this dimension in a low-profile way, so…”
I sent her a pointed look that she completely ignored.
“So they were all statues of the same person?” she asked with her head tilted. “Like the ones that attacked us?”
“Yeah.” I frowned and shook my head, and then a snort of laughter escaped me. “Other than ominous, it just seems incredibly cringey to me.”
“We actually agree on something,” Lu said with a giggle. “Who the fuck has such an inflated ego that they plaster statues of themselves around the city to just lurk around and jump people?”
“Maybe someone from the mysterious Unit,” I guessed. “Whoever it is, they’re most likely sending a message that those wells are guarded.”
“Yeah, why are they guarded, anyway?” she asked with a puzzled look.
Then something clicked into place in my head.
The guarded well and the watery lamps in the upscale area. The dried-up stream beds and groveling people in the poor regions.
“The rich people hoard the water,” I said slowly. “And the poor people are forced to drink…”
“Tress,” Lu whispered. She shot a disturbed look back in the direction we’d come from. “Guess we found your mysterious, highly-addictive substance. Only it’s not exactly a drug. It’s…”
“The only liquid available for people to drink,” I said grimly. “Or was, anyway. The streams all looked dried up.”
I ground my teeth for a moment and then propelled myself into motion again.
“Isn’t that so lame of them?” Lu snorted as we walked along. “The Unit, I mean. Just think about it… There are endless ways to torture people when you’re in a place of absolute power. I can name like fifty ideas just off the top of my head. So why just refuse to give them water and get them addicted to weird shit? Whoever these idiot overlords are, they clearly have no imagination.”
I stared at her for a second.
Jesus, this chick was a trip.
“Riiiight,” I said. “So, having your life taken from you by those in power in slow, incremental ways that leaves you helpless, confused, and alone in the streets is totally not a big deal. Gotcha.”
Her lofty smirk flickered, and then she shrugged and turned her eyes away.
“I just think these bad guys should try to be a liiittle more bad,” she hedged. “You gotta earn that name.”
We passed into another decrepit area with dried-up stream beds. The transition was just as abrupt as before. By the nearest stream bed, several more people were crouched and licking the stone desperately. Next to them, a ragged young boy sat and stared up into a window of one of the rich, colorful buildings nearby.
I looked up and glimpsed a room full of richly-dressed people with drinks in their hands. One was smoking a cigar. He cracked the window open, and the scent of smoke and cooking food wafted out.
Down on the street, the boy’s eyes widened. He stared up at the window like he was watching a gripping TV show. His face was full of both wonder and despair, like he was watching some magical, mythical land he wished was real.
Then he looked down and started licking the fucking dry stones as well.
I set my jaw and wove my way through the crawlers to pass on. Lu was a silent white shadow at my side.
“Yeah, I guess this kinda sucks for them,” she mumbled. “Or whatever.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“I thought your little baby villain star was rising,” I pointed out. “It shouldn’t bother you.”
“It doesn’t.” She scowled. “But you’ve gotta admit, it’s… fucked up, the way those people are living. That little boy…”
“Yeah.” I turned my gaze back to the city ahead. “It is.”
Seeing bleak shit like this didn’t shock me anymore. This was how people existed in so many dimensions I’d been to. Even Earth had its grimmer moments nowadays.
It still disturbed me, but there was nothing I could do. Especially not here.
“I’m just saying,” she barreled on when I never responded. “It’s bullshit, is all. Kinda annoying, actually.”
“Hmm,” was all I offered because I could feel her pink eyes burning through the side of my skull.
What did the baby villain expect me to do? Somehow feed and nourish an entire population of starving people, cure them of their addiction so they were strong enough to fight, and then stage an uprising against the rich people with their blatantly superior technology?
And if this place was anything like the other dimensions I’d been to, then this ‘Unit’ that I’d heard so much about was likely the controlling force that shaped the land. The government, such as it was. And odds were, they were working hand in hand with the rich.
Lu might’ve been a villain, but she was also incredibly naive.
And easily influenced.
I found a stony, switchback stairway that led down between the crops. The fences that surrounded them took on a sullen red glow as we passed. It was the same glow that had lit the street lamp when the crawler had tried to climb it.
I sighed and wondered how hard it was going to be for us to get a good meal in our stomachs.
Lu seemed to have the same thought.
“Maybe we’d be better off out in those glowing trees,” she said in a gloomy voice. “Eating those toxic pinecones for dinner.”
“Maybe,” I said evenly. “We’ll see what volcano-town is like before we make that judgment.”
Soon, we reached the flat bottom of the valley. The buildings towered overhead taller than skyscrapers, but were still shaped into a convoluted, interconnected clusterfuck of metal. Glowing plants and vines lit every street along with neon signs in a way that made it look like nature was battling with technological progress all over the place here.
We passed by a sign that was full of glowing pink hearts, and Lu slowed her pace.
A rare sheet of glass fronted this building, and inside it there was an endless smorgasbord of pink. Pink-haired mannequins like sex dolls sat astride glossy pink mopeds or stood on electric pink roller skates. Pink dresses, pink clocks, pink twinkle lights… There was even a selection of pink weapons: A long-handled axe with a pink blade. Twin pink pistols made of similar shiny metal to the one I’d shot before. Pink hand grenades covered in hearts. There was even a pink chainsaw-like thing.
A feral little smile lifted the corners of Lu’s mouth as she looked at it.
“Not today, Satan,” I said firmly. “Let’s go.”
She tore her eyes away from the pink anarchy inside the window and moved on.
“We’ll be back,” she said confidently.
I shook my head silently.
In the heart of the valley, there were no dried-up streambeds or crawlers at all. We passed by more storefronts, along with open courtyards where people in glowing, neon clothes bounced to the frantic beat of a drum and nothing else.
Lu’s head turned to watch the churning mass of people. She looked a little tempted and a little disgusted by the whole thing as she turned back to me and raised her voice to be heard over the sounds.
“This is like something from the most boring dream I’ve ever had,” she said with a shake of her head.
“I believe you,” I snorted. “This is probably like soothing white noise for you, huh?”
She just scowled and flipped me the bird in response.
I didn’t even want to know what type of dreams took place inside that twisted brain. Every single one was probably like a fucking fever dream of pink and blood.
