The Spiral Begins #3
Bishop zapped his own neural space with electrical static, distorting the landscape till it was unreadable.
The migraine maneuver gained him a second to build a containment around the anomaly at Sinrik’s adrenal axis.
Bishop used the same architecture design he had for Handy’s body—a living, adaptive maze that regenerated dead ends.
Two layers into the job, Sinrik pattern-matched the noise itself—finding the signal underneath the static. It reached the containment lattice Bishop had just built and tore through it like fucking paper.
Bishop threw a cellular shutdown code at Sinrik’s death grip, buying him enough seconds to work on the containment layers around that fucking anomaly. On the third layer, Sinrik blasted him with mimic-terror, flooding Bishop with adrenaline and forcing his system to re-route before he could finish.
This motherfucker!
Beatrice turned her tiny body into a battering ram to break the connection while Bishop redirected Sinrik’s power back through itself, forcing his system to receive its own input and output. The feedback staggered him.
Bishop quickly rebuilt the third lattice. Then the fourth.
The anomaly at the adrenal axis pulsed and destroyed the feedback loop taking the fourth lattice with it.
He was back to three layers—all cracked and holding by nothing.
Bishop’s neural space hemorrhaged static and his fucking blood ran hot with the architecture at this speed. One more hit and his system would need to eat itself for more processing power. This fuck was cornering himself for a suicide.
Bishop wrote a script for a fatal blow, but his system released something else entirely. A gamma wave that jolted through him and dropped a two-hundred pound Sinrik to the ground. Instant shutdown—lights out—system offline.
“Oh!” Beatrice screamed, out of breath from all her efforts. “Oh no! What happened?”
Holy. Fuck.
Bishop stood over him, his body shaking as he identified the power he’d unleashed. It came from his blood but it wasn’t his. It was a fusion. Him, his wife, and something else.
…. His son.
“Is he dead?” Beatrice shrieked, dropping and pressing her ear to his chest.
“No,” Bishop said, winded with awe as the remnant of that power settled, leaving a crystal clear signature. “He’s… asleep.”
One blow. One massive sleeping pill. To protect his father.
And Sinrik.
“What do we do?” the nun worried, looking up at him then hurrying to her feet. “I’ll go get help.”
Before he could think, she cut out across the parking lot, white robes flying like a fearless dove in a storm.
Bishop pulled his phone out, gaze locked on the two-hundred-pound anomaly at his feet. He found 8-Bit’s number, wondering how long before the problem woke up or worked through whatever he’d done to him.
“Eveque.”
“Come to the parking lot, I’m on the—”
“We know where you are, we’re coming.”
He pocketed the phone and lowered to Sinrik, his adrenalin far from done. He pressed along his neck, looking for data as pounding boots grew louder behind him, matching his pulse.
Nothing.
He pushed into muscle, searching faster. Why the fuck can’t I see anything?
“What happened?” 8-Bit hurried, hunger blasting out with his vapored breaths.
His brothers formed a circle around them as he moved his touch to his temples.
“Shiiiit, you put him out?” Hurricane wonder-marveled.
“Hope you put a neuro round in his ass,” Bullets muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Shank asked as Bishop gave up with a shake of his head.
“You need assistance?” Lesion asked.
“Yeah, get him in restraints.” Bishop stood, his muscles doing an odd calibration dance under his skin. “Patches.”
“Right here,” he said, stepping forward.
“Call the Triplets.”
Traps knelt at Sinrik’s feet, pulling something from his coat. “I got a cinch-sack we can hold him in for now. Bacon. Come roll ‘em when I say.”
“Where we taking him?” 8-Bit asked as Spook studied the ground around Sinrik.
“What were you looking for?” Seer asked quietly next to him. “When we came?”
“Does he need a chemical restraint?” Lesion asked.
Bishop shook his head, locking gazes with their medicine man. “I don’t know what he needs.” He looked at Seer again. “Because I don’t know what he is. And that’s alarming given my ability, oui?”
Seer eyed him for many seconds. “Did he cause this?”
“What he do?” Nitro asked, pushing his way closer.
“I… I don’t know what he did or if he even did it.”
“What does that mean, if he even did it?” Seer pressed.
“Roll ‘em,” Traps told Bacon.
“Just what the fuck is this cinch sack made of?” Bacon demanded, suspicious.
“Possum bones and dried animal intestines.”
“What the fuuuuuck!” Bacon complained.
Lesion lowered and inspected the disgusting weave with a reverent glide of his fingers.
“So, did you do it?” Nitro’s quiet hunger scraped along the question.
“That piece of shit is out good,” Spar determined after close inspection.
“Pull on the knot at his shoulder,” Traps instructed.
“I did, but didn’t,” Bishop answered a waiting Nitro.
“Where we taking him?” Shank asked.
“Get Harlow,” Bishop remembered, wanting every kind of eye on this problem.
“I believe he’s gone get his brother,” Seer said.
Lesion knelt at his head and scraped a blade along his hairline before slipping it carefully into its sheath.
“Fetch texted me back,” Patches said. “They’re all enroute to get Augustine.”
“Zodak,” Seer said, looking at Bishop. “He can help.”
“What about that fortress room they use for him,” Bishop remembered.
Seer nodded, already calling him.
“Ready for transport,” Traps announced, standing.
Bishop looked, finding Sinrik perfectly fitted from neck to ankles in Trap’s guts and bones sack.
“You feeling okay, Eveque?” Seer asked, phone on his ear.
He looked at him, realizing his brother was seeing something.
“You need anything from me, Ma Eveque?” Nitro asked. Quieter. Hungrier.
Bishop met his gaze, finding his crazy simmering. “When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.”
Nitro leaned in, mouth at his ear. “I can help clear out clutter. Create just about any concoction I want. After biting Lesion, I gained quite a few of his skills.”
Everything in Bishop froze at that fucking news.
Fuck. What were they all becoming?
The dread in his bones hummed in his blood. They were in a spiral. Between humanity and whatever the fuck this was, what they’d tapped into. The bat bites, the fucking concoction Lesion made, now him being whatever the fuck he was.
He needed to unravel it all. Understand it. And fucking contain it before it couldn’t be.
“Zodak said bring him,” Seer announced, hanging up his phone. “He’s getting ready. Whatever’s happening, he’ll learn it. And he doesn’t need to touch him to do it.”