The River King 6

The River King 6 Taylor Hebert I ducked out of the way as a folding chair sailed past my head. The guy who swung it was about my age, with e

The River King 6

Taylor Hebert

I ducked out of the way as a folding chair sailed past my head. The guy who swung it was about my age, with enough acne scars to draw out the constellations on his face. He watched way too much pro wrestling; someone should have told him chairs were awful blunt weapons.

Then again, that implied the rest of them didn’t worship pro wrestling and cage fighting like a religion. Really, it was par for the course for Hookwolf’s faction in the Empire.

I read on PHO that Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket used to be cage fighters themselves, which must have been true because their mooks were at once more ferocious than the others, and also more showboaty. They tended to do that macho-man thing where they wore wifebeaters, puffed out their chests, spread their arms wide, and went, “Ya wan’ sum? Come at me, foo’!”

At some point, someone smarter than them would let them know that goading a brute into a fistfight wasn’t a good idea. Or maybe someone already had. These guys didn’t exactly strike me as the type to listen to advice.

This was the fourth group from Hookwolf’s faction that I’d hit this week. It wasn’t even on purpose. Yes, I had a grudge against Cricket, but I wasn’t petty enough to take it out on her mooks exclusively. No, I was more than happy to share the love to all the Empire.

What happened was that the rest of the Empire wised up.

Nowadays, the goons patrolled their territory like they were Wards, or some kind of neighborhood watch. They kept to a strict buddy system, walking around in groups of four so that I couldn’t just dive out from a puddle and gank one or two before vanishing. Hell, some of them even had honest-to-god whistles like a baseball umpire.

When I first saw a grunt reaching for it, I was giddy with joy. I even only broke two of his fingers. It felt like I was making a difference. The more they were afraid of me, the less time they had to harass that Jewish bagel place dad liked.

Still, I had to give it to that one grunt. The whistle worked, kinda. It was shrill, loud, and attention-grabbing. I could never be sure if the whistle was a bluff or if there really was a cape nearby to reinforce them. Sometimes, the noise drew enough bystanders that I was forced to be more careful.

I kicked the guy with the chair in the chest, hard enough to make his ribs creak. He let out a strangled wheeze as he was launched across the office floor. A second later, he crashed into the wall and brought down a rather tasteful photograph of a blonde model overlooking a beach scene.

That was the last of them. Walking over, I stomped on one foot, right on the joint of his ankle, until I heard a loud pop. I was so much stronger than I’d been even a few weeks ago. Each time Tahm and I renewed our contract, I could feel my strength growing. I still didn’t think I was much of a brute, but normal humans really weren’t a challenge anymore.

I found this office during my investigations. While the Empire ran around like headless chickens, I was free to send in my insects, sometimes from blocks away, to scope out a building or business. This one masqueraded as a privately owned storage company. It was located between the trainyard and the business district and offered storage containers that people could rent out for a monthly fee. 

For the most part, the mask was genuine. Most of the storage spaces in their lot were filled with patio furniture and the like, stuff people left behind when they moved or when grandpa died that they hadn’t gotten around to selling. However, one of these containers was full of weapons.

My bugs weren’t very good at transmitting visual cues to me. Tahm gave me a brute package and hydrokinesis, he didn’t improve the power I’d triggered with, but scents and sounds were a different matter. I’d gotten very good at sniffing out the chemical signals. Gunpowder had a distinct, acrid scent that several of my insects could distinguish.

I looted the keys and a few tanks of gasoline, already scouted of course, and made my way to the storage. I left the other containers alone. None of them had anything worth taking and I was a hero; it wouldn’t do to mess with other people’s things when they weren’t gangsters.

I opened the container, a large, fifteen by twenty space filled with plywood crates. I saw quite the collection, from sawed off shotguns to pistols and even a few semi-automatic rifles. Some of these looked like they’d been redirected from the kind of gear sold to SWAT teams.

I was on a time crunch. Being a hero, I didn’t kill, not even Nazis. One of them undoubtedly called someone by now. From experience, I could guess that I had a few minutes at best, because the fucking Nazis had better response times than the cops in this city. Still, I found myself smiling like a kid in a candy shop. I had a limit to how much I could carry, but I had the pick of the pile.

I quickly snagged a pistol, a rifle, and a large box of their corresponding ammunition before pouring a gallon of gasoline over onto the remaining bullets. A second gallon quickly followed. With the remaining oil, I formed a little trail on the floor, just like in the movies. It reminded me of a snail.

Then, just as I heard shouting and the stomping of feet, I lit the end and allowed the River to ferry me away.

X

Two weeks after Tahm and I made our new agreement, I finally found another chance to take out Cricket. I’d learned the gist of her habits by now and I felt reasonably sure I could catch her off guard. The real trick was doing it while she was still technically in costume, and so in accordance with the silly rules capes swore by.

There was a nightclub called Club Albion several blocks from the college that catered to younger Nazis, or even just the “white but not serious” crowd. College kids went in and out with an unspoken understanding that the cover charge rose based on how brown you were. Though it was a known Empire haunt, no one dug too deeply. I was pretty sure the cops were just happy to keep the morons in one place on the weekends.

Albion was closed on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, ostensibly because that was the slowest time of the week for a club. In reality, they were open, but to a different sort of entertainment. They rolled down the shutters, kept watch over the doors, and turned the dance floor into a hold nothing back fight pit. There was gambling, booze, and harder drugs than they typically served any other night.

This was Cricket’s show. I sometimes saw Stormtiger or Hookwolf pay her a visit, but she was the main Empire cape here. She took the lion’s share of the cut from the fights and had an apartment upstairs that she used as her main base.

Each night, at about three in the morning when the fights wound down, she’d take the night’s earnings and head upstairs to count out her cut. That was my chance. She had her mask, and that was good enough. It wasn’t my fault if she was tired or distracted by her greed.

I struck as she made for the stairs. She had the drawer of the cash register in hand, headed to put the bills in the safe beneath her bed. The swarm came first. I’d been gathering them above the ceiling panel right above the stairs for over three hours now and I had quite a sizable swarm.

They descended like an inky tide, covering her in seconds. The moment they landed, I loosened my grip on them and let their instincts come to the fore. Individually, they were as confused as Cricket was, just as panicked. They stung and bit like their little lives depended on it, covering her in thousands of little wounds. Sure, none of them were deadly, or even venomous, but a hundred thousand biting mouths couldn’t be ignored by a non-brute.

Cricket wasn’t an amateur. I heard her let out that rasping cry in shock and pain, but the surprised didn’t last. She immediately dropped the cash register and launched herself backwards, back towards the main floor.

The extra room diffused the bug cloud, if only slightly. This gave her a split second to catch her breath. Then, she chirped. It was that same, high-pitched noise that completely incapacitated my swarm the first time, the thing that made her a perfect counter to my non-Tahm powers. Once again, my swarm became a disoriented mess.

But that was okay. I never planned to take her down with just my bugs. I just wanted to force her to start chirping.

Back when I first met her, I only had PHO and rumors to go off. I thought she was a combat thinker of some sort. Now I understood her power better: She was a skilled pit fighter, but that had nothing to do with her power. She was a sonic shaker who could either chirp to give people  headaches, or use the sound to echolocate like a bat.

She couldn’t do both at the same time. It was probably because she didn’t have the biology for it; humans just weren’t built that way. Hell, I was pretty sure she couldn’t talk like this, either. And that meant I could take her.

The bugs were in a frenzy, but they still fully occupied her attention. With her power occupied, she had no way to see me ride the River into the club. The sonic attack gave me a migraine the moment I came in range, but that was preferable to losing the element of surprise.

I’d felt it before. I’d moved under it before. I knew it could be done so I grit my teeth and bore through the pain. It was much easier if I wasn’t right next to her so I emerged from the River about fifteen feet away.

A whip of water lashed out. Before she could react, it wrapped around both knees and knocked them together, sending her crashing to the floor. I whipped her into the air with all my strength. 

The air was driven from her lungs in an audible wheeze. Her chirping stuttered for a moment, something that itself almost felt like an attack. The disorienting sound had been a constant drone and the sudden interruption added a discordant element that made it harder to get used to.

Then, I did it again. I lifted her into the air with my water whip and allowed gravity to take care of the rest. It was an undisciplined thing, barely a tactic at all. Despite my brute status, I was having trouble lifting her at a distance, much as a sledgehammer of the same weight was harder to handle than a dumbbell. The migraine definitely wasn’t helping.

The sonic attack got louder. My head throbbed with pain. I tried to pull her closer but the noise drove me to my knees. It was all I could do to maintain the grip on her legs.

Cricket reached for the sickles on her belt loops. She tried to cut the tether but the blade passed harmlessly through the water. We reached a bit of a stalemate: She couldn’t free herself with strength alone, but I was having a hard time doing more than making her flop around like a fish.

Then, I noticed something. In the chaos, some of my bugs had gotten caught up in the water tentacle. They weren’t aquatic, and they were in a panic, so they drowned. But before they drowned, I noticed the sound cut off when they submerged themselves.

That gave me an idea. I called some of the water back to me and formed a set of earmuffs over my head. 

I felt like a clown but grinned as the headache immediately diminished. My stupid idea worked, and as they said, if it worked, it wasn’t stupid.

Now that my head didn’t feel like it was about to split in half anymore, I could put a lot more oomph into my water manipulation. I yanked her to me with a mighty tug. She sailed through the air and I charged to meet her.

The point of my shoulder met her solar plexus. Half a breath later, I felt her ribs give in from our mutual momentum. A rasping wheeze tore through her throat, along with a few droplets of blood that spilled past her cage-helmet-thing to splatter across my cheek.

That was it. That was the fight. Footing was everything to a fighter like her and I’d stolen that the moment I arrived. Sound was her whole power and she couldn’t use it if she could barely draw breath.

Being the stubborn bitch she was, she’d still kept her grip on her sickles. She probably thought it was a point of pride or something to never lose them. She tried to swipe through my achilles tendon while I loomed over her, but I stomped down on her wrist, breaking it and drawing another muted croak from her.

I kicked the sickles from her hands before tying them together. With her wrists to her knees, she looked like a curled up spider. I hoisted her up like a sack of potatoes.

“You know, I prepared so much for this. You were the first cape to ever give me trouble, to force me to run,” I told her. My own voice sounded almost foreign to me with the water over my ears.

She grunted something, probably an insult. I couldn’t hear her and didn’t want to drop my earmuffs. I nodded along as if I could. “Yeah. It’s a little embarrassing how much I thought about that night. I studied your power, your weapons, everything. And you know what? I don’t even feel like I accomplished something great. This turned out to be so… boring.”

She thrashed limply, probably cursing me out. But as satisfying as it was to watch her flop around like a dead fish, I wasn’t gloating just for the sake of it.

The River was Tahm’s gift to me. Teleporters were a big deal, especially teleporters who could take other people with them. The Empire no doubt suspected I was a mover by now, but I was loath to show them exactly how I’d been running circles around them for weeks.

The worst part was that it took time to call the River. Like a swampy bayou, the water rose steadily but sluggishly. It took longer if I transported other things and I couldn’t move from my spot while I called the River. Rather than reveal this vulnerability, I wanted Cricket to think that I was a bitch, that I just wanted to take a few seconds to gloat in private before whisking her away.

Then, the waters rose and my vision became a corona of murky browns and greens. When I could see the world again, I found myself in the alley between a cafe and a souvenir shop. It was only four blocks away from the PRT building near the Boardwalk; I occasionally passed by on my morning runs.

I slung Cricket over my shoulder like a sack of rice. I could tell by the vibrations that she was using her power as loud as she could, not that it affected me in any way.

I was halfway to the PRT building when I felt a thud. Something had struck Cricket’s backside. Seconds later, her body drooped; she was out like a light. Turning, I found a miniature arrow, one of those carbon fiber ones sold in sporting goods stores. 

“Wha–”

Before I could say anything else, a dark cloud drifted down from a nearby building. It coalesced into the shape of a young girl, probably about my age. Her outfit was a lot more put together than mine, with a black cloak, body armor, and a dark scarf wrapped around her face.

She landed a dozen feet away, far enough that she probably thought she’d be safe from me. In her hands were a pair of crossbows, wielded with careless familiarity. It took me a moment to put the pieces together, but I recognized her: Shadow Stalker, one of the Wards.

“You’re out late, Shadow Stalker,” I pointed out dryly. My water-based earmuffs flowed down. “And missing your mask.”

“Fuck that mask,” she shot back. “And fuck you for dragging that banshee around.”

“Oh? I didn’t realize anyone was close enough to hear her. It stopped bothering me so I didn’t even notice she was still chirping.”

“Fucking brutes… You’re Monarch, right? That new vigilante?”

“Yeah. How long will she be out?”

“A few hours, long enough to stick her in a cell and lose the keys.”

“Cool, thanks,” I said as I continued towards the building.

“Hold up,” I heard. She reached out and plucked her bolt from Cricket’s backside. “If anyone asks, you choked her out or something. Don’t fucking tell them I helped you.”

“You’re not wearing your mask. The PRT don’t know you’re out tonight?”

“No shit, Sherlock. What? You gonna snitch on me?”

I shrugged dismissively. “Nah, not my business.”

“Good. Those pussies will give me shit for tying my shoelaces wrong. Word to the wise, new girl: Don’t join up. They’re a fucking drag.”

“Is that why you’re on a solo patrol?”

“Something like that. Sometimes, you gotta vent.”

I thought about the last time I stormed out of school with fruit juice soaking my sweater. “Yeah, I get that. So why are you still with them? The heroes.”

“Probation. Beat the shit out of some Nazi and the heroes didn’t like that, tried to feed me some bullshit about not going too far,” she scoffed. “Fair warning, they’re talking about the same shit with you.”

“Me? What did I do? This is the first cape fight I’ve been in in weeks!”

“So what? You’re hitting them too hard, too fast. The Empire’s getting restless and Director Piggy’s saying they might do something stupid.”

“And… And what do you think? Why are you telling me this? Should I go focus on the ABB for a bit?” I asked hesitantly. I wasn’t against the idea on principle, the ABB was just as bad in my book, but I didn’t like the thought of leaving things half-finished.

“Hah! Fuck no! Stir up the ABB right now and you’ll definitely light a powderkeg,” she laughed. “Besides, why the fuck would you pull back when those Nazi fucks are just starting to feel the heat? Want my advice, Monarch?”

“Sure, shoot.”

“Hit ‘em hard. Harder than you’re going now. Fuck ‘em. Fuck Kaiser and fuck Piggy, too. Personally, I think she doesn’t like the Protectorate being shown up by a solo indie.”

I frowned at that. The idea of the local PRT director being that petty stuck in my craw. She was supposed to be better than that. I hadn’t paid much attention whenever she made speeches in the past, not like I had with Armsmaster, but she always came off as a no-nonsense, tough-on-crime kind of leader. 

Shadow Stalker was on an unsanctioned patrol. She also admitted that she was on probation, though I had no idea why anyone would object to her being rough with Nazis. She could be lying, maybe not intentionally, but she definitely wasn’t biased.

Then again, just the fact that I was here, talking to a Ward at three in the morning on Wednesday night, told me the program wasn’t perfect. If nothing else, I was even more sure that joining them wasn’t the right call. Tahm and I were fine; I didn’t need another partner.

“Thanks for the tip,” I told Shadow Stalker neutrally. “You’ve given me something to think about.”

“What’s there to think about?” she said, shrugging. “Just keep my name out of your mouth. If anyone asks, you never saw me.”

“I wasn’t planning to stick around to answer questions.”

“Even better. You do good work, Monarch. A real fucking hero is the one that makes a difference. You’re doing that.”

So saying, she turned into a plume of smoke and faded into a nearby building. 

Author’s Note

Taylor is at once becoming more sophisticated, and also more brutal. She’s also becoming quite the rules-lawyer. “It’s okay to jump Cricket as she’s getting ready for bed because she still has that stupid cage on her face.”

Animal Fact: Okay, here’s an NSFW one for you. 

Care to name the only known species (besides humans) that regularly practice fellatio as a part of sex?

If you said bonobo, you’re wrong. They do suck dick, but it’s usually as play among young males, not sex itself.

The answer is fruit bats. Females will lick the penis for about twenty seconds in approximately seventy percent of sexual encounters. Scientists observed that this prolonged sex for an extra minute or so. 

As for why they do this, there are several hypotheses:

First, longer sex means more chances for impregnation. Easier penetration, females produce more beneficial fluids over time that is conducive to fertilization, etc.

Second, longer sex could be a way to monopolize the male. Bats are not monogamous. This could be a way for a female to “hog” the sperm of a fit male.

Third, oral sex might help the female pick up chemical traces that tell her if the male is a fit mate. They’re having sex anyway, sure, but females have rejected males after the fact, or have sought to displace the male’s sperm with that of another.

Fourth, it could be that the female bats are cleaning the males. Saliva is antiseptic and this could be used to remove parasites and fungi, lowering the likelihood of sexually transmitted diseases.

These are all hypotheses. Because bats are hard to observe, it could be that other bats do this, not just fruit bats. Regardless, you may leave my presence knowing that “bat voyeur” is apparently a valid career option.