Collateral Damage Pt 4 (Patreon)

Part Four: Payback

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

“Oh, Emm-mmaa,” sang Taylor, dragging the hammer behind her by its handle. It danced and skipped over the vinyl flooring, every tiny impact sending traceries of cracks spreading out in all directions. “Come out and plaa-aay …”

Cold fury roiled in her guts and arced out to the bugs that surrounded her on all sides, converting more and more every second to tiny glowing sparks of pure destruction. She couldn’t believe how long she’d just rolled over and let Emma and her toxic little coterie push her into the dirt. But now, that was done. Now, she was back. She was pissed. And payback was gonna be an absolute cast-iron bitch from hell.

Taking up the hammer, she tested the weight thoughtfully. Emma wasn’t in the classroom beside her, but she knew who was. If she hadn’t been in the hospital, she would’ve been in this room. Learning absolutely nothing useful from Mr Gladly, while he played up to the popular kids and ignored the rest.

She’d already used the hammer to blow in a few walls of empty classrooms, just to get the feel of its heft, so she was pretty sure that people knew she was there. But there were no students clogging the hallways, which meant they were trying to lie low rather than get away. Which wasn’t surprising, given that every single attempt at an evacuation drill had led to utter chaos, wasting half the day.

Bringing the hammer up and around, she hit the wall just beside the door. The wall blew in, along with the door, leaving a hole several yards across.

“Heeere’s Taylor!” she carolled as she stepped over the rubble of the wall and what had once been a desk. Her eyes, burning indigo, searched the students huddled on the far side of the room and stopped on one pair. “Oh, hey, Madison. Julia. Long time no murder. Guess what. I woke up with powers, and I’ve got absolutely no reason not to get me some serious payback. So, you want it fast or slow?” She began to swing the hammer back and forth, back and forth.

“Y—you can’t do this!” shouted Madison. “It’s murder! They’ll send you to the Birdcage!”

Taylor started to laugh. It wasn’t the fun, friendly sort of laughter, or even the mirth that comes about when one hears a good joke. It was the sort of laughter that accompanies a good solid dose of schadenfreude. “Oh, Madison. You ignorant little twerp. You really don’t know, do you?”

“Taylor?” It was Mr Gladly. “You don’t really want to do this … do you?” He approached her; hands held out to the sides in an attempt to appear harmless. “Think about it. Once you do this, you can’t go back.”

“Great little speech, Mr. G,” she snarled. “Love the sentiment. But you’re saying it to the wrong person, and you’re saying it about twelve months too late.” She rested the hammer on the floor and pointed at Madison with her free hand. “She really did want to do it, her and her friends. She did do it. And you’re right. There is no coming back from what they did.”

“Look, even if they did do something to you,” he tried, patting the air between them. “If you take revenge now, you won’t be any better than you see them to be.”

He was close enough now to try to make a grab for the hammer. Taylor saw the intent in his eyes, clear as day. She had to admire his guts in trying to defend his favoured students, but she wasn’t going to let that fly. So to speak.

“You’re assuming that matters to me,” she shot back. “Now, fuck off.” As he lunged for the haft of the hammer, she met him halfway with a palm-strike to the chest. The gem on her necklace glowed momentarily; with a thunderous crack and a burst of indigo light, he was blasted backward through the air until he hit the window. The glass shattered but the bars beyond held with a metallic thunngg. Slowly, he fell forward to the floor.

Amid the screams from the others, Taylor turned to look at Madison and Julie. “Now that the useless adult is out of the way, let’s see about you two.”

“Y—you don’t dare touch us!” shouted Julie. “They’ll Birdcage you for sure!”

“Birdcage, Birdcage, Birdcage,” Taylor retorted, rolling her eyes. “Everyone keeps saying that like I should be scared of it. But do you know why I’m not?” She lifted the hammer in two hands, and took a practice swing.

“Kill order!” shouted Madison. “If they can’t Birdcage you, they’ll put a kill order on your head!”

Taylor snorted. “Like fuck they will.” She pulled the hammer back and sighted on her target. Madison and Julie, belying their brave words, were huddled at the far side of the classroom. The rest of the students, showing a remarkable sense of self-preservation, had managed to sidle well clear of the pair. Taylor was pretty sure more than one had pissed themselves. “Because if they even try, much less succeed, my dad’s gonna be real pissed. As it is, with what you already managed to pull on me, he ain’t happy. And when he’s not happy, the Protectorate finds a hole and pulls it in on themselves.”

“So who the fuck’s your father that he can tell the Protectorate to step off?” asked Madison. “I can’t see the Dockworkers’ Association having any sort of pull there.”

A thoroughly evil grin crossed Taylor’s face. “Oh, the Association’s got nothing to do with it. Turns out my dad’s a cape. You may have heard of him.” Her expression hardened. “Ragnarok.”

The penny dropped with an almighty thud for every kid in the room at once. Just observing the expressions of pure enlightened terror was almost worth all the crap she’d gone through. Julia went dead white, and she looked like she wanted to faint. Madison’s eyes opened wider than Taylor had ever seen them before, even when she was putting on the innocent act for the teachers. “Fuck,” she whimpered. “Fuck, fuck, fuuuuck.”

“Language, language, language,” Taylor said, showing her teeth again in what might have otherwise been a smile. “Madison, Julia … as of this moment, you’re expelled.”

Five desks separated Taylor from the pair. Pausing just for a moment, she swung the hammer at the first one, putting everything she had into it. The head of the hammer, already glowing indigo, struck the desk like a Mach 5 homing missile. With a BOOM that echoed through the building, the desk exploded into a myriad of tiny shards that blasted away from Taylor at transonic speeds. The attendant kinetic shockwave that accompanied them hit the second desk, demolishing it in a fraction of a second. In pieces scarcely larger than those of the first desk, it hit the third desk along with the ongoing kinetic wave of destruction. That one came apart as well, and it just kept going from there.

Madison and Julia didn’t even have time to scream.

When the dust and smoke cleared, there was a broad swathe of destruction right across the classroom, and a hole had been smashed out through the wall. Pieces of the desks were embedded in the wall around the hole, which had taken out part of the floor. Of the two girls, there was no sign.

Humming to herself, Taylor hoisted the hammer on to her shoulder and strolled out into the corridor through the hole she’d entered by. Now, if she remembered correctly, Emma was attending English class just down—

“Hold it right there!”

Casually, Taylor turned around, hammer still over her shoulder. A hooded figure stood twenty feet away, aiming a crossbow at her. The figure was female, black, about her height, and was wearing gym clothing along with a mask portraying a stern-faced woman. “Help you with something?”

“You’re gonna stand right there or I am gonna put an arrow through your eye,” the hooded girl continued, ignoring her words. “Put the hammer down. Slowly.”

“Fuck off,” Taylor said carelessly. “No, I mean it, Shadow Stalker. Fuck off. You’re not even a real hero. You’re a second-rate vigilante turned edgelord Ward, and you’re since not the one I’m looking for, do yourself a favour and take your skanky ass back to gym class before someone misses you. Or before I don’t.”

“I can’t do tha …” Shadow Stalker blinked as her voice trailed off. She leaned forward, staring at Taylor. “Hebert? Holy fuck, is that you?”

“I dunno who told you my name, but I’m not interested.” Taylor deliberately turned her back on Shadow Stalker. “You can fuck off or you can die. Those are your choices.”

She’d taken two steps down the corridor before she heard the twang of the crossbow. The gem in the necklace flared briefly and she heard the scream of pain from behind her. Turning her head, she saw Shadow Stalker lying on the ground, her right arm missing from about halfway between shoulder and elbow. Gore was sprayed over the corridor behind her, revealing where the missing limb had gotten to. As the vigilante thrashed in agony, her mask came off and rolled across the corridor, revealing her face.

“Well, fuck.” Taylor came to a halt and turned around again. Unbidden, the hammer came off her shoulder; she bounced it up and down in her hand a couple of times as she took in the sight before her. “So Shadow Stalker is Sophia fucking Hess. And you’re a back-shooting coward. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

By now, Sophia had more control over herself, and was wrapping her cloak around the stump of her arm to curtail the bleeding. “I wasn’t … shooting you … in the back …” she managed through gritted teeth. “Disarming … shot … only.”

The sound that came out of Taylor’s throat was almost but not entirely unlike laughter. “Disarming shot. Right.” She looked down at Sophia and wondered why she’d ever been scared of someone so small, so utterly pathetic. “You’ll keep, Lefty. I gotta go find Emma.”

This time, as she walked away, she tagged Sophia with a couple of her non-explosive bugs. If the idiot even survived the attempt to shoot her from behind, Taylor didn’t want to have to waste too much time or effort hunting her down.

It didn’t take her too long to find Emma’s classroom, but just as she was coming up to it, some of her roaming bugs found another person sneaking toward a fire exit. She couldn’t be certain, but they seemed to think the person had reddish hair and was about Emma’s height. Briefly, she formed a large arrow from bugs outside the school, pointing in toward the fire exit in question. Then she hustled.

She got around the corner just as Emma arrived at the fire exit. Taylor almost had to hand it to her; if it weren’t for the warning from the bugs, her ex-best friend might even have gotten away. Or at least, made it much harder to catch up with her.

Emma hit the escape bar and pushed the door open, only to stop and look up at Ragnarok as he stepped into the opening.

Tall and imposing in the leather and metal armour, with the indigo sphere in the chest-piece spinning and fluctuating in an unsettling manner, Taylor’s father would’ve been a scary figure even if he hadn’t been the cape who had been asked not to show up to Endbringer fights.

Not that the remaining Endbringers attacked anywhere except Perth, Australia anymore. The city was more or less abandoned by now, along with the surrounding communities. Taylor didn’t know of any capes who even bothered to show up anymore, except for Eidolon.

“Going somewhere?” asked Danny. He placed one hand on the door and stopped it from opening any farther.

“M—Mr. Hebert?” squeaked Emma. Apparently, she hadn’t gotten the memo until now. No doubt Sophia had messaged her, but Sophia didn’t know about Ragnarok. “Is that you?”

“No.” Taylor had never heard anyone else compress quite so much menace into a single syllable. “Not anymore. Not since you hurt my daughter.” He looked over her head toward where Taylor was advancing down the corridor and nodded. Then he pushed the door shut once more.

The interlude had been useful, in its way. It had given Taylor time to think about what she was going to do next. Her swarm of explosive bugs rolled forward, enveloping Emma as she turned around. The redhead’s shriek of realisation that Taylor was right there hit an entirely new peak of terror when the bugs settled all over her, covering her in a soft glow of indigo light.

“T—Taylor!” she yelped. “Y—you have to understand! I was doing it all for you!”

Setting the hammer down and placing one foot possessively on the head, Taylor leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “Oh, this ought to be good,” she said, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

“It was all about making you strong,” Emma babbled, apparently emboldened by Taylor’s attitude. “We were pushing you to fight back, to stand up for yourself. And now look at yourself! You’re strong again! It worked! We can be friends again!”

Mentally, Taylor ran through half a dozen situations where she’d tried fighting back or standing up for herself, none of which had turned out well for her. “Well, you’re right about one thing,” she drawled, straightening up from the wall. “I’m strong. The rest of it … not so much.” Picking up the hammer, she rested it over her shoulder. “I’m not strong because of you. I’m strong despite you. I’m not sure if you comprehend just how fucked this makes you.”

“But why are you taking this personally?” whined Emma. “It was all for your own good! You were weak and now you’re strong!”

Taylor shook her head. “You fucked with me, sunshine, and now you have to wear the consequences. You see those bugs I’ve got on you? The glowing ones? They explode. Not a big explosion; just about enough to take a finger off. But here’s something I’ve found out. If I have more than one on a target, the force of the explosion’s not additive. It’s exponential. Two bugs explode like four bugs. Three bugs explode like nine bugs. On you … I have one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven bugs. Feel free to do the math in your head.” Unless Emma had suddenly become a mathematical prodigy in the last couple of years, that wasn’t going to happen. “Oh, and if you try to sweep them off, crush them, make loud noises, move violently, or basically do anything to disturb them … they explode, and you die.”

There was a little more to it than that. The bugs could also direct the explosive force in any way Taylor saw fit. Half of these ones would direct the blast inward, while the other half would explode in all directions at once. Emma would become the epitome of ‘pink mist’ while the rest of the explosion would do a lot of damage to the structure of the school around her.

Emma bit off a sob, apparently only just now getting exactly how far up shit creek she was, with no paddles in sight. “So you’re just gonna straight-up murder me? Give me no chances at all?”

Taylor barked out a laugh. “Like the non-existent chances you gave me? Dream on, bitch.”

“But we never tried to kill you!”

Taylor considered that for half a second. “True. So, tell you what. I’m leaving Winslow once I get back to Sophia and finish fucking her day up. Once I’m out of range, these bugs will go back to normal. It’ll take about an hour. If you don’t move, speak or otherwise disturb them in that time, you get to live. Got it?”

“O—okay,” the redhead whimpered. “I’ve done six-hour model shoots. I can do this.”

“Bye, Emma.” Taylor didn’t look back as she walked away. At the same time, she relaxed the control over the bugs on Emma. They couldn’t leave the girl’s body, but now they were free to roam wherever they liked. At the same time, Taylor set the explosion requirement to ‘only if disturbed’. It was out of her hands now.

Emma lasted longer than Taylor had thought. She was almost back to where she’d left Sophia when Emma broke and started frantically trying to evacuate the various bugs from under her clothing and in her hair where they’d been exploring. She must’ve realised her fatal error when they all started heating up at once. There was time for one brief scream before the bugs all detonated at once.

Taylor weathered the shockwave and looked around with interest at the massive cloud of dust and smoke that billowed down the corridor. There was a distant—and not so distant—rumble as stuff started collapsing. Good. She had no further use for Winslow, or anyone in it.

Now people started evacuating. Or rather, herding frantically down the corridors in search of a way out. Taylor ignored them; anyone who bumped into her was thrown bodily across the corridor in a burst of indigo light, so they soon learned not to bump into her. The bugs she’d left on Sophia were still in the school, but one floor up.

Taylor took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the way students who jostled her were shoved brutally aside or even (in extreme cases) hurled over the rail. They’d get down to ground level one way or another, and she really didn’t give a shit about any broken bones. They’d messed with her, or they’d allowed Emma to mess with her, for over a year. Everyone in the building was complicit, even if only by inaction.

She tracked Sophia down to a supply closet. As she closed in, she heard the girl’s voice, obviously speaking to someone over the phone.

“—gone kill-crazy! She’s tearing the fucking school apart! Send your biggest guns! Send the Triumvirate! Send fucking everyone! I dunno how many people she’s killed so far, but you’ve got to take this bitch down hard!” She sounded close to hysteria.

Taylor paused outside the closet. Sophia didn’t speak for a moment, then resumed, clearly in an answer to the person on the other end. “Yeah, I got a name. Hebert. Taylor fucking Hebert. The biggest loser in the school. And now she’s got some power, she’s … what? No, don’t fuckin’ say that. Do not say that. Why can’t you send anyone?”

There was another pause. Taylor put her hand on the door handle.

When Sophia spoke next, her voice was hushed. “Oh, no. No. Fuck me, no. Not him. He can’t be her father. Tell me you’re joking.”

She wouldn’t get a better entrance line than that. Pulling open the closet door, Taylor gave Sophia a crooked grin. “They’re not joking.”

Sophia screamed in pure terror and dropped the phone. She kicked off from the floor of the closet, going shadow at the same time. Taylor watched as she vanished through the back wall; unlimbering the hammer, she brought it around to smash into the wall. The resultant shockwave blasted a huge hole in the wall, revealing a classroom beyond as well as the corridor above. The bugs she had on Sophia blinked back into being, another floor up.

Standing on her tiptoes, Taylor clustered bugs under her feet and then set them off, directing all the force upward toward her. The floor beneath her was obliterated from the blowback, but she was propelled upward and forward, on to the next level of the building.

She started running, zeroing in on Sophia. Any time a wall or a door got in the way, she smashed her way through with the hammer, leaving a trail of utter devastation behind her. When Sophia tried going up again, Taylor was ready for her. Under the impetus of more explosive bugs, she burst out onto the roof in a cloud of dust and smoke, making a small crater where she landed.

Winslow was more than half collapsed by now. It appeared that setting off multiple explosive blasts in confined areas in an already-unsafe building hadn’t gone well for it. The section of roof upon which she currently stood wasn’t very large.

Sophia huddled near the roof edge, the makeshift bandage around her arm stump soaked through with blood. In her shaking left hand, she held a crossbow, pointed at Taylor. Tellingly, she didn’t shoot. It appeared that she could learn.

“You killed the others, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

Taylor nodded briefly as she paced toward Sophia. A distant rumble signalled another part of the structure deciding that enough was enough. “They fucked with me. You fucked with me. Guess what. You all fucked up.”

Sophia eyed the hammer, then her eyes slid up to Taylor’s face. “You’re gonna kill me, too.”

The grin that stretched Taylor’s face made her lips hurt. “You tell me, bitch.” She hefted the hammer, raising it to shoulder level. “How do you want this? Fast or slow?”

Sophia stood up, her eyes on Taylor. “Fuck you. You do not get to kill me.”

Taylor’s grin never left her face. “Like you’re gonna stop me on your best day.”

“Watch me!” screamed Sophia, and for a moment, Taylor thought she was going to shoot the crossbow anyway. But instead she tucked it up under her own chin and pulled the trigger. The string didn’t even have a chance to go twang as the razor-edged arrow lodged itself up inside her brain.

Slowly, Sophia tottered backward and fell off the roof. A second or so later, there was a dull thud, three stories below.

“Well, fuck.” Taylor snorted. It was one thing to kill her enemies. When they committed suicide rather than face her wrath? That was another thing altogether. Stepping forward, she looked over the edge of the roof. Sophia lay sprawled untidily in death, the shattered crossbow lying near her left hand.

With a shrug, Taylor looked around. Picking a spot on the corner of the roof, she braced herself and swung, hard. The hammer impacted with the wall, sending a shockwave down through it, spreading out in all directions. She felt the collapse beginning, the final demise of the institution that had once called itself Winslow High School. As the roof subsided, she rode it down, then stepped off the pile of rubble that had become Sophia Hess’ impromptu burial mound. Would they even bother retrieving the body? She didn’t know, and didn’t care.

Her father came to meet her, his shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Nicely done, honey. Got any more business here?”

“Nope.” Taylor smirked and held out the hammer. “Thanks for the loaner. It was fun. What are we doing now?”

“Keep it for the moment,” he said. “Now that the minor annoyances are out of the way, it’s time to go deal with the bigger fish.” Slinging his shotgun over his shoulder, he cracked his knuckles. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

She cast a sideways glance at what remained of Winslow. “Pretty sure that’s already been achieved.”

He rolled his eyes. “Now who’s pulling the dad jokes?”

Taylor’s smirk widened. “I learned from the best.”

 Part 5