Chapter Text
Maybe finally they have forgotten about me, maybe I can just pass this year being ignored if I try my hardest to not stand out
Taylor thought on that grey day, in the future she would see how much she jinxed it. Well, if she could remember anything about that day that wasn't her cries for help, of course.
It was a typical day of Autumn, the sky of Brockton Bay was covered in gray stormy clouds, the image made it look like the whole city was cast in a concrete coffin.
Taylor waited for all of the students of Winslow high to get inside the building for the classes. Even if she got late to her classes every day because of that habit, she had learned that it was a little gesture that reduced the chances of harassment from Emma and her friends by a lot.
She looked up to admire the high school’s silhouette, with the architectural style they chose for it and the little to no maintenance it had suffered since its creation; it looked more like an asylum than the “home of knowledge” they named it on their website.
Taylor actually wasn’t that scared like she was when the bullying started or kept escalating. They had stopped teasing and bullying her a couple of weeks ago, and she could take a calm breath.
She was really optimistic, enough to let her mind be happy, to even think of the possibility of having friends.
Taylor kept thinking about how things were getting better and how she even could get her normal life back maybe as she opened her locker to get her books.
Suddenly she felt two people, or a person with the strength of two, abruptly pushing her into the locker, so hard she got shoved in.
Before she could try to even react, they slammed the door closed behind her back.
She immediately panicked, screaming with all her lungs, trying to turn herself around to face the locker door, and starting to punch the door with clumsy backward punches when she realized the attempts to turn were useless.
After a frenzied moment of fighting, when her lungs and throat started to hurt, she gave up and tried to relax and think of another plan.
The first thing she realized was how much her hands and arms hurt, she could barely lift her arms again.
The second thing she realized was the darkness. It was pitch black in there, the only light that could get inside was blocked by her own body.
The third thing was the stench.
God the stench.
Very few people could say they’ve smelled the combination of a bunch of condoms, toilet paper, and used tampons.
Taylor was one of those people.
She tried to breathe with her mouth, but it reeked so hard that she could feel it in the back of her mouth.
It was even worse than shit, the stink was so deep and strong Taylor couldn’t think about anything, only that she would have never been free of that smell, no matter how many years and showers passed.
She prayed for the giant pile of trash to be, at least, from a day before, but when from pure fatigue she rested her hands in the pile of shit, she could feel how wet it really was.
She didn’t know what made that wetness, and she didn’t want to know, she raged again, thinking that maybe while fighting for it she would hit her head in a part of the locker and fucking get knocked out.
Anything would work.
She started to cry as the revolting stench made so deep in her mouth and nose that she could swear her saliva had the taste of the foul mix she was trapped with.
She ended letting her saliva build up in her mouth as she tried to breathe in short, fast wheezes.
After a while, she drank her saliva, and she swore she felt something solid in it. It was so disgusting that she threw up, adding a brand new stench to the locker.
She started sobbing, completely crazy, she could only think that they wanted her dead. That for whatever she did, whatever they found in her appearance was enough for them to want to kill her, and this was their way to do it.
And hell, she was sure she was dying. The poor silly Taylor dying in a locket full of fucking shit because a bunch of people, including her childhood friend, thought it would be funny. She was truly pathetic, wasn’t she?
She tried to call people from time to time, but none answered.
After half an hour, Taylor stopped thinking she was gonna die here and started to wish for it to happen.
It didn't matter what death was, it was much better than this. She could feel something wet and squishy in her cheek where she was resting her face, but she didn’t even know if it was real or a hallucination.
That gave her an idea: all of this was a nightmare, nothing was real. Of course, if it were real someone would have released her from that prison, be a teacher or janitor, any student with the littlest of empathy for the human race, or even her bullies, to see how pathetic and gross Taylor looked while covered in shit.
Of course, it was a nightmare, and so it didn't matter what she did in this realm. So she started headbutting the door with the back of her head. She knew how delicate that part was, but at worst she would wake up with a minor headache.
After all, she would do anything, literally anything to just get over with this, even if it ended being real and she died by banging her head against metal like a frenzied idiot.
“ANYBODY, ANYTHING, PLEASE FUCKING HELP ME, I BEG YOU, IM GONNA FUCKING DIE HERE, ILL DO ANYTHING, IM BEGGING YOU” she broke down another time when one of those headbutts made her face hit the pile of shit hard, she didn’t even know if that had filled her mouth with it.
She was fucking losing it.
And then the darkness changed.
She was not in a claustrophobic locket anymore, it was larger, and also there was no pile of trash.
And where it was pitch black, now there was a gloomy gray, dark enough to not let you see anything but the profiles of some objects in the room.
A single table accompanied by two chairs.
And of course, them.
Taylor couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there.
One of them was in one of the seats and the other one was clinging to a wall like an insect.
Whenever she looked directly at them she felt an uneasiness that devolved to pure dread, so intense she had to look away before some horrible scenes started flashing directly into her brain.
Scenes like slavery, wars, and prisons; but also hordes of locusts terrorizing whole empires, necrotic wounds, and giant prehistoric insects.
The scenes were painful and filled her with such fear she was trembling. Guess near-death experience hallucinations weren’t the “haha I watch all my life appear in front of my eyes” shit people say, but fucking nightmares.
As crazy as it was, she was starting to miss the locker.
“Taylor Hebert” One of them called her, its voice totally neutral in tone, made of hundreds if not thousands of human voices at the same time.
“Do you know me?” She said, looking at the entity who talked; it was the one on the chair. Now it was bearable to look at it and in between blurriness and flashes of light and darkness, she found two eyes like nothing she had seen in her entire life, both fixed on her.
“Does it matter? You called for anyone, well anything, and we answered” It said now with a cheeky tone like it was just playing with her. “You wanted a way out of that hell and so we offer you a contract to obtain the power to carve your own way out of it.”
“I-in exchange of what?” Taylor felt the air getting heavier and heavier in her lungs, so much she started to hyperventilate.
“Does it matter? We answered your pleas, no one wanted to hear or help you out” the voices didn’t try to sound harsh, more like: well, that's how things were, and that was the truth.
She was completely alone, it was eldritch shit or well, literal shit.
She took a deep breath, and before she could say anything the two entities talked at the same time, with a song that Taylor could not hear, listen to or comprehend; but she could understand its meaning.
Contract signed, Taylor Hebert, we expect good things from you, but there’s no pressure. Well, it isn’t like you are gonna remember anything about this meeting.
She woke up in a bed that wasn’t hers and in a room, she didn’t recognize. And with the greatest headache of her entire life.
Her head felt like it was gonna fucking explode from the most inside part of her brain, and it didn't help that she could feel something invisible in the floor, walls, and the ceiling of the room.
She couldn’t explain what were those things other than sensations coming into her from places that she couldn’t reach. It was confusing and it just worsened her pain.
She tried to ignore them with no results and angrily just tried to move them away from her mind, and she could feel the sensation of movement as those things were started to distance themselves from her.
She periodically drifted off whenever her headache allowed it. In between, she started experimenting on the things she could feel; she could give simple orders to whatever those things were and in return, she felt simple sensations such as pressure, or the location and airflow if there was any.
She couldn’t do too much since between the pain of her head and how she waved between being conscious and falling asleep, she preferred to just close her mind to everything, and the experimentation was enough to distract herself from more important and anxiety-inducing questions like where she was or what happened.
She supposed she was in a hospital after whatever had happened to her in the locker, as she was probed in the right hand and had bandages in the head and the arms, probably from all she struggled inside the locker.
The door in her room suddenly opened and her father ran to her side suffering from a mix of a panic attack and a rush of anger. He started to ramble about legal consequences, about how he was gonna drag everyone and the school to the courts. Before he could finish, a nurse appeared to ask Taylor how she was and to give her some pills.
The only thing Taylor remembers about that nurse was how her eyes were very unique and yet very familiar.
She didn’t usually like to remind herself of that day, in fact, she was usually capable of successfully ignoring it... Maybe it was because today was her first night out as a cape?
Do all the capes think of their trigger event right before going out in costume? or is it just the first day?
She really hoped it was a first-day thing only, she could feel her stomach drop to the floor just by remembering the smell… She shook her hands and took a deep breath before hitting the streets.
It was a humid night, that fact added to the habitual coolness of Brockton Bay’s nights during this time of the year. Taylor was feeling chilly in her cape costume even if it was, in theory, somewhat insulated, she couldn’t ignore the coldness she was feeling in her inner thighs.
Better to end it fast, a bit of reconnaissance and then I’ll go home. Nothing out of the ordinary. Taylor thought.
She thought for a moment that she would regret these thoughts before shaking those doubts off.
Today was special, today was the first night out of… of… OF WHATEVER SHIT NAME SHE WOULD HAVE IF SHE COULD COME UP WITH ONE.
She stepped into the shadows of the docks, looking for anything that seemed shady. From what she had searched on the internet, this was mostly ABB territory, but some independent capes still used some warehouses as a neutral point of meeting to make business.
Speaking of which, she could feel with her swarm a group of seven people at one of those warehouses. Using the flies’ touch she localized their positions inside the building, six of them were surrounding the other one, who was holding an objec- no, an animal, she could feel its breathing, maybe a small dog? She thought as she approached what she supposed to be a mugging attempt.
Not if I can stop it She bravely proclaimed as she sneaked into a hole in the side of the building, she had mapped the whole place using simple cockroaches and she knew she was getting inside a small room that gave to the part of the warehouse full of empty wooden boxes and broken metal junk, using the darkness around that part she could get a view of what was actually happening.
Just by watching who it was she understood by her flies didn’t disturb them on the slightly, it was Zombieman and his henchmen or better said his slaves. As his name proclaimed, Sigh Taylor actually hated names like that, too on the nose, his power let him turn anyone that drank; his blood or saliva or even eat his flesh into mindless zombies that followed simple orders.
She couldn't see the man who was surrounded by them but she identified by his voice that he should be a teenager.
“Come on dude, don't fuck with me, I’ve done my part I have killed whoever you wanted” He sounded desperate and angry, he was still holding the animal but she couldn’t make out its form, she swore she could see some metal shining on its head.
“Yes and I’m very grateful for that, I love obedient dogs but obedient dogs are only meant to do their job and nothing more, when they have no use there’s no need to have them around” Zombieman said while making his horde raise their weapons, crude butcher knives.
Before Taylor could react they pounced on the kid, she put her hands over her mouth to silence the screaming that wanted to escape from her throat, she was ready to fight some drug dealers over here, some burglars over there, to be a small vigilante that would make the city safer.
She always thought of Zombieman as a wacky character from Brockton Bay, not a murderer. Then she thought about his power, about how it literally creates human slaves for him that slowly rot while being conscious the whole time.
Taylor’s first day out turned out to be an eye-opener. Or well, worse. She wished she could open her eyes and discover this was just a nightmare.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck, I don't even have a mobile phone, the fuck I can do? She started to think about her possibilities while trying to fight the urges of puke or sob. Someone that should be around her age had just been murdered in front of her and she couldn't do anything.
She couldn’t call anyone, and even if she could she couldn’t do it right here anyway, she didn’t even have any change to fucking pay for a call in a random phone booth. She had gotten too excited and hadn't thought of all the things that could happen outside even if it was just a “simple” scouting night.
She didn't even know how to stop Zombieman. For all, she knew his quirk made him and his zombies mostly immune to any pain, and he was really durable. That, added to the fact that she didn’t know if his zombification worked on animals, put her at a disadvantage.
Still, she tried to gather the biggest swarm available in the area while watching how they threw the poor kid into a dumpster. Zombieman was calling someone by his phone as she started to speak.
“Yeah, I’m done with the trash, do you have the stuff” He spoke so calmly like he didn’t kill a kid a few minutes ago.
Taylor was burning with anger and helplessness, she wanted to show that scum what happened when you played with the lives of the innocents in Brockton Bay, that not even a rookie wannabe cape like her would let such an act be left unpunished.
She already had a huge swarm composed of cockroaches and ants as her main force. She theorized that since poisons wouldn’t work against him or his minions, it was better to rush him with a storm of maws that could deal actual damage, most of them won't even put a slight scratch on him but she hoped that with enough numbers and the advantage of surprise, she could at least try to subdue him for long enough and get his phone to call the PRT.
For the love of God, I’m begging you, tell me bugs aren’t affected by him She thought as she gathered the courage necessary to start moving her horde into their location. The least she and the city wanted was a plague of zombie cockroaches.
But right before she could make them swarm the warehouse, a sound came out of the dumpster.
She stopped in her tracks, she would have thought she was imagining things if it weren’t for Zombieman’s reaction.
“The fuck? there was a raccoon there or what? Didn’t I tell you the container shouldn't have animals? I don't want some fucking vermin to alert anyone of the corpse inside” He raised a hand to his face, as the zombies started a shambling walk towards the container.
“Sometimes I miss when you were humans” He spit out with an overdramatic melancholic tone “Then I remember when you tried to argue that I was getting too much money in my share” His shrieks of laughter echoed with a metallic reverb through the entire building.
And then it happened.
The container’s top blasted off, so far away it passed Taylor and crashed into the wall with enough force to make it rebound.
And popping off the container there was… Taylor didn’t believe in demons, she knew “monsters” existed, as endbringers and Cases 53.
But still, the word her brain screamed into every cell of her body was “demon”, even though the body of the creature was fairly human, there ended the similarities. To begin with, its head was crowned by a giant chainsaw that popped in the middle of its forehead, the upper head was protected by a metallic red piece with grooves in place of its eyes. The rest of its head was totally mechanical, except its teeth, which looked like kitchen knives in length.
The monster shouted in a voice formed by thousands of chainsaws working in unison, Taylor didn’t comprehend how she was able to understand it, but she did it.
HAHA! WHO WERE YOU CALLING TRASH? RIGHT NOW ALL OF YOU LOOK LIKE WEAK SCUM TO ME!
The monster lunged at the pair of nearest zombies and with a lateral slash of the chainsaw in the right arm it maimed their heads off in a shower of gore.
It used its own momentum to cut in an ‘x’ in another zombie’s torso, making his head, arms, legs, and guts fall in different gory parts.
Before the other two living corpses could react, the creature was already jumping at them and hacking at them before stomping their bodies until they turned into an unrecognizable disgusting mass.
“What the fuck are you? some type of freak from the nazis?” Zombieman shouted with his rotten face and didn't show any type of emotion but his voice full of dread was betraying him.
Taylor could understand why he came out with that conclusion. Empire 88 had Kaiser and Hookwolf, a dude with the power of… What she was looking at didn’t look so far off the mark, powers-wise.
But something that ticked off now that the dude stopped for a moment enough to have a clear look at it, she swore the pants the cape was wearing were the same that the kid they killed had been wearing.
After a pause and without answering, the unknown cape jumped straight at Zombieman not before he raised his metal bat to protect himself from the impact.
It didn’t matter.
The best way to explain it was that while jumping, Chainsaw started to rotate like a tornado, and just… Pulverized Zombieman, leaving his remains, if what little remained of him could even be called that, spread all across the floor.
Taylor held her breath as she fought another wave of nausea, Fucking Christ, why is it always me? I just wanted to try out my suit, I never wanted a tour of the Chainsaw Texas Massacre.
Slowly, she started backing away from her hiding place into the room where she came from, on all fours and only stopping to look at the cape to avoid any rubble that could produce the smallest sound if pressed or moved.
Then she heard the hellish voice chuckle.
You know that I can smell you, right?
Taylor didn't panic for some reason, maybe the immediate death that she knew would come was more comfortable than dreadful. She just cursed herself with all the blasphemies she knew. Every time that she thought positive and didn’t prepare for everything going wrong, was the time where, well, everything went wrong.