Chapter Four Monika #3
“According to the map, the main breakers are in a room a tenth of a mile down that tunnel,” the driver says.
He points down the left-branching train tunnel.
It’s pitch black until Taranis illuminates the light bulbs recessed into those walls.
Still, there aren’t many of them. I can’t see more than twenty, thirty feet, maybe, down the tunnel before it curves away.
“Let’s get this done quick,” the dickwad says.
“I’m not a fucking electrician,” Taranis spits. “I can restore power to the grid surrounding the station, but as soon as it trips again, it’ll just go back out. And I’m not gonna fucking come down here every goddamn day to reset it.”
“Nobody gives a shit,” dickwad continues, approaching the edge of the platform. “This is for a PR stunt you requested: Taranis gives light to the people living in darkness. Your girl is gonna snap a few pictures, and then we can go. Nobody cares if the Gallery doesn’t have power tomorrow.”
My sneakers plod quietly over dusty tiles as I follow the trio.
I capture Taranis’s angry look as he glares at the SDD men, and capture as the two men jump off the platform down onto the concrete between the tracks.
As I take their picture, I frown, noticing something odd.
I double-check the viewfinder. Huh. In the photo, I can see footprints in the dust on the ground between the tracks.
Fresh footprints. Fresh ones not left by either SDD goon or Taranis.
I open my mouth, then snap it shut, debating whether to speak up or not.
I’m not an operative on this mission. I’m only a photographer.
It’s a difficult position to remember to be in.
Press is there to see and record, not change.
Watching people brutalized by police during riots.
Watching gangs burn down schools. Watching the Wyvern carry bodies through those icy tunnels .
. . struggling. It’s hard not to help. But that’s not my role.
“Got something to say, pip-squeak?” the dickwad says, looking up at me over his shoulder.
I didn’t realize I’d made a sound. I hesitate, then eventually ask, “Are there people living down here?” My voice echoes.
“Nobody down here but us.”
“What about those footprints?” Standing at the edge of the platform now, I gesture ahead of the men. They go quiet as they examine the disrupted dust between the tracks.
Taranis hasn’t said anything at all for the past several moments, but he abruptly cuts in now. “Where are the rats?”
The question confuses me, though I don’t voice that confusion. Instead, the driver asks, “What?”
“Is this a trap? Did the SDD put you up to this?”
“What are you talking about?” the driver says with a sharp shake of his head. “Do you see something?” He draws his gun. I take a picture as he points it down the tunnel.
Taranis stands a few feet down the platform from where I do, and ignores the SDD guys in favor of shouting down the tunnel, “Do you want a show? Is that what this is about?” His face roars with brilliant color, the lights in his eyes and under his skin beaming like lavender sapphires.
The lights lining the tunnel crackle. So does the electric third rail.
Orange sparks fly off it, causing both men to jump.
The driver hisses between bared pearly white teeth, “Stand down, Taranis!”
But Taranis isn’t listening. Instead, he’s rising into the air, floating like he’s suspended by strings. “You want a show, I’ll give you a fucking show! Come into the light, you duplicitous freak!”
I drop my camera bag, pull out my other Z9, quickly set up a tripod, and start capturing video from the platform.
Nothing happens. Taranis continues to hover there, staring angrily down the tunnel.
Leaving my bag behind and proceeding with only my primary camera and the backup in my Kevlar, I drop down from the platform onto the tracks and wait . . . and wait . . .
Just as I start to think Taranis may, in fact, be a total and complete crazy person, I hear it. A faraway sound that sends chills crawling from the crown of my head down my shoulders, to my spine. It’s a giggle. A woman’s giggle, so light and innocent it makes her sound like a child.
Taranis flies forward, moving with a speed that would shock me were I not built as battle hardened as a tank.
Instead, I move forward at the fastest speed I can.
I shove past the two idiots, slightly concerned at being shot from the back and hoping to high hell this vest protects against machismo and stupidity as well as bullets as I dart into the darkness.
The purple lights still glow against the walls but are spaced so far apart I have to pass through rings of darkness to reach the next.
It eerily feels like I’m descending into Dante’s inferno as I blast forward, stale air stroking my face.
The volume ahead increases, as do the sounds of running feet at my back.
Behind me, I can hear Tweedledee and Tweedledum struggling to catch up, and ahead, I can hear the sounds of a battle beginning.
Taranis’s cries are punctuated by a woman’s wild laughter, and I know before I round the next corner exactly who’s making a sound so haunting.
Taranis hovers at a fork in the tunnel, brawling with another hovering superbeing—a villain who is one of the most feared—while a second villain, the one who’d been making that awful giggling sound, stands on the ground, looking up at the pair with a smile. Bia.
Bia was among the first unaffiliated Forty-Eight that the Champions and villains actually campaigned over in a real battle of the brands.
With power over animals, the COE called her Aja, named after an orisha associated with nature.
They offered her millions and millions of dollars, but whatever the VNA gave her she liked better.
In less than a week, she dropped the name Aja and announced herself to the world as Bia, who in Greek mythology is the personification of violence.
The news never was able to unveil what exactly the Marduk had offered her to join the VNA, but she’s been one of his closest allies ever since.
I come to a dead stop, drop to one knee, and snap her photograph.
That’s when I notice that while she’s just standing there, she’s not doing nothing.
There’s a sound . . . a horrible tittering, clattering, scraping sound—a subtle white noise behind the much louder sounds of violence coming from the villain and the Champion tearing each other to pieces thirty feet from me.
All around Bia’s feet, an army of rats is forming. Mi-chi-nyeon.
I lower my camera from my right eye just in time to catch Bia’s maniacal gaze.
She has curly brown hair and dark-brown skin, and is looking at me with bright-green eyes that shine light onto her cheeks.
She’s considering something, and I don’t want to know what it is.
When she finally waves at me, too slowly not to terrify, I don’t need further instruction—or warning.
We must have arrived at the service room with the electricity boxes Taranis was originally looking for, because there’s a door hanging ajar in a little recessed area halfway up the tunnel wall.
Flanking it is a short ledge lining the tunnel walls, barely wide enough to shuffle down sideways. Whatever. I’ll take it.
I spot a short ladder that will bring me up to the ledge.
It’s closer to Bia than I care to be, but with no other choice, I dare to run toward it.
Bia stands there watching me with an amused and utterly sinister expression as I haul myself up onto the high ladder, spin around on one knee, and crouch on the short foot-wide ledge, gripping the edge for dear life.
Bia simply watches me, and I take a chance. I show her my camera. Snap her photo. She grins even wider. The Forty-Eight are all alike, at least in this. They all love having their picture taken. It’s so strangely human.
Bia turns her attention away from me down toward the tunnel, and I whip out my backup Zfc, setting it to record from the edge of the platform. I use my 50mm to capture everything else I can in photographs.
While Bia stands below, a horde of what must be tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of rats amasses around her feet while, hovering over her head, Taranis fights the villain parents tell naughty children stories about that are sure to haunt them in their sleep.
The Meinad is a white woman with olive skin, curly black hair and bloodred lips. Her eyes shine red in every photograph of her ever taken, just as they do now as she attacks Taranis with massive claws that are taupe at the base and black farther along—red at the tip now, wet with his blood.
Electricity shoots off his skin as he throws a punch that hits her square in the jaw.
She shrieks and the sound . . . the sound is nauseating.
Literally. My stomach punches up into my throat and I hurl over the edge of the platform.
Even Taranis is thrown back. He hits the concrete tunnel wall a dozen feet to my left above my head.
I manage to get one single photo of him trying to shake off the sound as the Meinad closes back in and scores his chest with her claws, cleaving gashes into his perfect skin that look deep and painful. Bright-red blood weeps down his uniform.
“Hey, you fuckers!” a voice shouts to my right. I don’t know if it’s driver or dickwad. What I do know is that it’s a mistake.
A short hail of bullets blaze, several of which smack the Meinad in the side and in the leg.
She screeches again and the bulletfire is cut short when both men fall to their knees.
I take their photos, horrified and nauseated myself, this time because of the sound, but also because I can sense what’s coming.
Bia lifts both of her long-fingered hands above her head, palms facing the sky, and says so very sweetly, “Time to dine, my sweets.”