Diced expectations

“I don’t think we were in danger back then. But when I heard what they were saying on TV, when I heard what some of them could do, it seemed that the IHI was the only thing that protected us from the apocalypse.”

Once again, I was anxious. The events of last week were still fresh on my mind, and the prospect of doing it again soon was elevating my blood pressure by an unhealthy amount. On top of that, I had no idea what to do with the 4000€ that Alison had given me. At first, it had seemed like an incredible compensation for the service rendered, but now it somehow felt like both an undeserved gift and blood-soaked hush-money.

Alison hadn’t said anything about it, so I didn’t know if I could safely transfer the cash to my bank account. Hell, I didn’t even know how you were supposed to put money in a bank account. My only income, aside from past summer jobs, was the monthly allowance from my mom.

I didn’t know whether the money was like drug money or something—it looked clean enough—but I felt that bringing 15k at the bank in a sketchy manilla envelope would probably raise some questions. So in the meantime, I had chosen to spend the 100€ bills sparingly. I made an effort never to spend more than a couple at the same location so that people wouldn’t start asking questions, or worse, mugged me.

Tonight though, the thing that had set me on edge the most had been a random interaction with a cop while walking back home. The exchange had been brief and otherwise mundane, but the mere possibility of being a suspect had given me a deep sense of unease I couldn’t shake out of.

Along with the feeling of angst that I carried in the back of my mind came an unexpected boon, though. I hadn’t thought about anything else.

At first, this might seem like a bad thing, but it turns out that since I was usually worried about so many other things, being worried about only one helped me focus on other things. My usual demons simply weren’t there. I had managed to clean my flat for the first time in months. I had also started drawing again, for pleasure this time. I had come up with the beginning of a piece that I felt could become an actual art piece.

The scene depicted a female warrior on a cliff, facing an immense cloudy figure. She held a long silvery sword in her right arm while her left ended a few centimeters away from her shoulder, in an ugly scar. Her clothes and figure were covered by her ankle-length hair, and on her head sat a soldering mask, with the front panel lifted upwards.

I had barely started drawing her adversary, so it was little more than the outline of a gigantic humanoid covering the clouds right now. The only other defined shape in the picture was a massive wrench-shaped rock jutting out of the grassy field next to the girl.

I sighed, details from my surroundings often bled into my drawings, but this one had been especially unsubtle. With a steady hand and tired eyes, I reached for the can of beer sitting on my desk and drew a lazy swig.

I hadn’t slept in more than twenty hours, but between my anxiety, the current circumstances, and the fact that I was currently on holiday, my internal clock had simply given up.

I glanced at the bottom right corner of my laptop screen. It was currently 06:55. Fuck. I should probably lay off the coffee for now.

I set the pencil of my drawing tablet down and took a deep breath. I should get some rest.

Instead of tossing and turning in bed like I usually did in these situations, I chose to whip out my phone and do some research.

I had been checking periodically ever since I came back home. Oddly enough, I didn’t manage to find anything too worrying about our last ‘operation.’ Our little arson act had been depicted as a “tragic accident.” Although it felt reassuring to know that the public eye wasn’t onto us, the fact that I had been involved with it didn’t sit well with me at all. Although this seemed to corroborate Alison’s theory about the Scanner, monitoring the story closely couldn’t be a bad thing.

After my paranoid research had yielded no more relevant information, I decided to educate myself on the current Impacted scene.

Predictably, the internet was ripe with false information, crazy theories, and insane fandom about the superpowers. After a short inspection, it seemed that the most accessible information outlet regarding super-abled individuals was a particular forum.

The information presented about the Impacted was usually relatively shallow. European law had made it illegal to publicly display specific individuals’ personal information without explicit consent, especially when superpowers were involved. The constant need for people to congregate around new topics and the globalized tendencies to try and document everything compulsively had led to a bizarre battle of contradicting wiki articles and other sites dedicated to listing “superheroes and villains” of our world getting created and taken down. Or so I gathered. I had been disconnected from that world for too long, and I wasn’t quite sure whether I was missing something or not.

In my understanding, the internet had developed various ways to bypass the law, including the hosting of the aforementioned websites in countries where laws didn’t apply.

The forum I had ended up on, uninspiredly named ‘The Impacted Compendium,’ had simply banned using the physical description of Impacted as a whole. As a result, most of the posts read like some kind of weird fanfiction. Still, this was the place where I would most likely find what I was looking for.

In the past few years, the forum dwellers had taken upon themselves the task of meticulously documenting and sorting all recorded impacted by power type, danger, and approximate geographical location. While it was a little bit scary, the result wasn’t as bad as it sounded for me. The descriptions were usually vague enough that most of the posts just listed the power type and level, as well as the presumed country of residence of the individual.

To both my relief and satisfaction, there was no new Impacted recorded in my region. Overall only two had been reported in the whole country in the last few weeks.

I took a cursory glance at the articles on my fellow countrymen and found it somewhat reassuring that they were both in Paris and had pretty tame power abilities.

I tried exploring some more of the website when I stumbled into quite the interesting section: ‘Unregistered Impacted—SPECULATIVE—discussions.’

The exchanges there were mostly centered around the potential sightings of Impacted throughout the world. Most of the posts were random fan theories on miscellaneous topics. Some of them even implying the Impacted were secretly governing the world from the shadows, but otherwise, I found it overall quite well moderated and sensible, if sometimes a tad obsessive.

I looked carefully at some of the posts, one of them mentioning a newly sighed Impacted in Lyon, not that far from here, that could break down walls with their bare fists.

Considering it’s spread in fiction, most people assumed super-strength and flight would be the most common superpowers. It wasn’t. Turns out most abilities were beyond the simple “you’re strong” or “you’re fast” classic formula. It wasn’t a surprise then that whenever one of those “simple powers” came to light, it usually gathered quite the interest, as people tried to find its flaws, caveats, or quirks.

A few more swipes of the finger brought me to a more interesting article in the approximate geographical vicinity.

‘The toolshed murderer strikes again!’ the title claimed. Oh shit, I hope this is not what I think this is.

I quickly scanned through the article. The poster claimed a non-registered Impacted, a Rampant, had been sighted in town and had been behind some local crimes. As proof, they had attached pictures of familiar-looking metal rods stuck into plaster walls as well as sledgehammer head-shaped impact marks in concrete walls.

To my relief, though, most people had discarded it as random ramblings and usual conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. Still, I would have to talk to Alison about her ‘cleaning’ methods.

After a good hour scurrying all I could find about Impacted sightings, I felt confident that I hadn’t been discovered yet. The mere possibility of ending up on the internet and having what I did—or what I helped doing—sent a cold chill down my spine.

I sighed and closed the browser. I checked the message that had kept me up this whole night.

“We move tonight. Meet me at Le Radieux at 16:00. Don’t be late.”

This time, Alison had been the one waiting for me. She sat down at the terrasse of a café at the corner of the Gambetta boulevard. Le Radieux was an otherwise ordinary and casual establishment, but seeing the crazy girl in her leather vest casually smoking while sipping on coffee gave me an odd sense of excitement.

“Hey,” I said as casually as I could muster. “What’s up?”

“Many things,” Alison replied as she stood up from her table.

She dropped a 10€ bill on the table and nodded at me to follow her. She led me to a nearby park and sat on a bench that was a good 50 meters away from the nearest people

“A got a tip from an informant. Our man is on the move tonight. We have to act now,” she said resolutely.

“What’s the plan this time?” I asked.

“Get in, do our thing, get out. We’ll have to fight.”

“That’s it? Aren’t operations like that supposed to be well planned or something?” I asked skeptically.

“No time, plus we don’t have too much info on the situation, aside from where he’s going to be and that he’ll be quite well protected. On top of that, one of his goons is likely to be an Impacted,” she said with a frown.

“Oh shit, isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until he’s surrounded by fewer people?”

“I told you he usually hangs out in cops. I think we forced his hand, so he’s going to try hiding some of his stuff before we find out about it. This is the only shot we have.”

“So, we just, like, barge in tools in hand?” I asked with a frown.

“We’ll devise a strategy when we get there,” she replied, tone final.

Our target was currently in what one would probably say if asked what a ‘mob den’ would be like. The bare-concrete block in front of us looked like so many warehouses did in movies. Dull, big, and creepy at sundown. The large bay door was wide open, and a dirty white box-truck was parked in the opening, facing away from it.

From our vantage point behind a discrete bush, Alison and I could see a dozen people in coveralls loading a metal cage into the truck from inside the building. My skin crawled as I saw a limp hand jutting out from between the metal bars.

This is definitely bad. I thought somberly. I wasn’t going to try and rationalize what we were about to do, but this needed to be addressed.

After assessing our current whereabouts, Alison turned to me and spoke.

“Okay, so, we have to find out what is in those crates, then dispose of De Sevin. Who’s most likely currently inside,” she said.

“What do we do, though? There’s too many of them, and this time they’ll definitely see us coming. Honestly, I’m no expert in this, but I’m pretty sure they have guns,” I said in worry.

“Same as last time. You distract them, and I take them out. You can take a few more bullets, right?” She asked, handing me a familiar-looking soldering mask.

“Yeah… Right,” I meekly said, accepting the heavy accessory.

“So, this time, you’ll circle around the back, wait for my signal, and then do something flashy to attract their attention. I’ll take the ones who come here out, then you go back to the front, making sure to take that corner there, she said, pointing at a nearby passage between the main hangar and the tall fence bordering this side of the property.

“You’re sure this is going to work?” I asked tensely.

“Yes, if things go south, they can’t call the cops, so they have to take us on, and I’m pretty sure I could take them all by myself even without you,” she replied confidently. “Alright, let’s roll.”

I carefully slipped out from behind cover and sneakily made my way towards the hidden side of the building. I carried the now familiar weight of Alison’s chainsaw as close to the floor as possible so that it wouldn’t be too noticeable from afar.

Adrenaline pumped in my veins as I ducked into cover behind a large blue dumpster in the lot behind the building. I hadn’t seen anybody while making my way there, which was already a small win.

I carefully peeked around to look at the back door in case somebody came out, but after a couple of beats in silence, I let out a sigh and steadied my breathing.

I glanced in every direction as often as possible while making my way towards the bare metal door. I crouched on top of the stairway and waited for Alison’s signal.

A few tense instants later, my phone buzzed with a message. ‘Go.’ It simply said.

I sprang up to my feet and started the chainsaw. I slammed the roaring chain into the doorframe, spraying sparks with a horrifying screech.

It took a few seconds before something happened. The door violently opened, not before I could jump back, thankfully, and I was greeted with the sight of a gun. I thought quickly and slammed my chainsaw down before the attacker could get his eyes on me. The chain’s motion sent the gun flying away in the parking lot while the man looked at me with surprise growing terror.

“Help!” He called out as he backed away from me. “Somebody come fucking deal with this maniac!”

I reenacted my previous performance of utter silence as I walked towards the man while trying to look as threatening as I could. A fraction of a second before I could set step inside of the building, a bullet ricocheted on the corner of my mask. I steeled my resolve, mostly thanks to the surge of fear-juice currently flooding my body, and kept moving forward. The man shot again two and then three-time. This time the bullets all hit me in various places in my body. I yelped in agony under my mask but kept moving forward. As I advanced, the wounds quickly stopped bleeding, and I could see a nascent feeling of terror growing in the face of my opponents.

“Come at the back, quick, we got a fucking Rampant with us here. Send in the big guy!” One of the two men yelled at a walkie-talkie in his hand.

I took the opportunity to press on the trigger a bit harder and advanced faster towards them.

When I was but a mere meter away, the shooter started firing again, and the unarmed man grabbed a plank that he placed in front of himself.

I did my best to appear threatening and scary. I lifted the chainsaw above my head when a searing pain in my shoulder sent me tumbling forward onto the man in front of me. To both our horror, the chainsaw was just in reach to cut his wooden weapon in half and keep going down. The chainsaw blade neatly separated most of the man’s fingers from his hands, spraying both of us in blood.

I managed to pull the blade back before it did worse to the man as the man at my back opened fire again.

“Die, you fucking monster!” he shouted as he pressed the trigger.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.

BANG. BANG.

Click. Click. Click.

Only two of the bullets hit me. One of them lodged themselves in my abdomen and the other in my thigh. The pain was excruciating but not debilitating. I gritted my teeth as the scream came out. The sound that came out was closer to that of a faulty engine than a real cry.

I turned around while two of the three men looked at me in horror, the third one busy moaning and whimpering while trying to tuck his finger stumps under his armpits.

The two men were either too shocked or out of bullets to act, so I turned around and rushed at the man that had shot me in the back. I grunted again as the last wounds in my body closed, making the man visibly flinch. He turned heels and rushed towards the front of the building, taking the exact path Alison had indicated.

After a split second of hesitation, I heard footsteps coming from inside of the warehouse. I thought it wise to follow the next part of Alison’s plan and ran after the man.

As he rounded the next corner to where the truck was, an impact sent him flying the opposite way, splattering the concrete below with brain matter and a spray of blood.

I could see the telltale mark of one of Alison’s interventions in the form of a massive steel bar embedded in the dead man’s head. I followed his steps and carefully called out to Alison.

“It’s me, don’t shoot!” I called out, panting.

The fast run, coupled with the recent blood loss, had taken quite the toll on my stamina.

“How many more?” she asked as I caught my breath.

“I don’t know, at least two or three, one of them is out of commission. Be careful, though. I think they called for their Impacted,” I replied.

As I uttered the words, I took in the carnage Alison had wrought. A dozen corpses littered the entrance of the hangar—some riddled with nails and others straight-up decapitated. The gory display sent a chill down my spine.

“Brace yourself. There’s going to be more,” Alison said coldly.

A sound of activity and muffled voices proved her theory as a tall bald man in a navy-blue coverall jacket and dark jeans rushed towards us.

He didn’t seem to be wearing any weapons and simply ran to close the distance. I tensed up at the unexpected display as Alison took a battle stance and summoned a massive circular blade that she immediately hurled at the running man.

He casually deflected the blade with a punch, sending it flying towards the back of the hangar with a clattering sound.

“Shit, that one looks like trouble,” Alison cursed.

She didn’t balk, though, and kept throwing sharp projectiles at our attacker, each being deflected casually as the man kept running.

I decided it was time for me to act, so I started running towards the man too. I raised the chainsaw with a grunt and slammed it onto the crossed arm of my opponent.

Surprisingly, the blade seemed to bite into his arms without being simply deflected like the previous stuff. Although it didn’t seem like it was faring much better. The power tool screeched as its blade got slowly slowed down by the man’s unnaturally thick skin.

To my horror, the man suddenly grabbed the blade in his hand and crushed it. The chain snapped and hit me in the arm. I recoiled in surprise, clutching at the laceration.

The flesh quickly knit itself closed as the man chucked the broken tool behind him.

“Oh? That’s interesting,” he said with a grin.

I didn’t know what to do at the sudden loss of my only weapon, so I simply tried to punch him in the nose.

I yelped in pain as my hand collided with what felt like solid steel. The man immediately grabbed me by the arm and unceremoniously snapped it like it was a twig.

I cried out in agony. The pain was immense, substantially worse than the bullet wounds, somehow. I tried clutching at my arm as the man threw me to the ground. I could feel the bones somehow trying to realign themselves, the flesh inside of my broken arm twisting in creepy spasms.

With a resounding snap, my limb set itself back to its original position, sending another wave of seething pain radiating through my whole upper body. I jumped back and stared at my opponent in the eyes, the pain helping me focus on his moves. Instead of attacking me immediately again, he seemed to cautiously study me as if I were an actual threat to him.

“A fellow super freak, eh?” he asked in a defiant voice.

I didn’t reply. I was still clutching my formerly broken arm. My power had worked yet again, but this time it seemed that the pain wasn’t keen on going away. So I gritted my teeth and breathed as deeply as I could as I stared at my opponent with all the focus I could muster.

Alison hadn’t been idle in the meantime. During my standoff with bark-skin guy, she had quickly dealt with two goons that had come from whence he entered the garage. Due to the way we had been circling each other, my super-foe and I were currently standing at a 90° angle from where Alison had gone. So I could see out the corner of my eye that she had taken out ‘Grindy.’

The bald man seemed to have noticed this as well, as he took it as a cue to rush at me. Thinking quickly, I tried dodging his incoming blow by jumping to my left. The burly man tried correcting his trajectory at the last possible second, missing my head but hitting me square in the shoulder in the process. The impact sent me spinning and falling to the ground.

I let out another cry of pain as the blow smashed the insides of my upper arm to bits. My left shoulder and clavicle were both definitely broken.

This last barely a few seconds, but it was enough for Alison to finally reach us. Instead of throwing stuff at the man, she chose to hurl her angle-grinder at him.

Unlike the objects she had thrown before, the blade immediately bit into the bald man’s forearm, producing an awful metal-on concrete sound and eliciting a horrifying howl from him.

The man snarled threw his arm out, hitting Alison in the stomach like a freight truck. She rolled a few meters on the ground before coming to a stop. I didn’t know how much that hurt her, but it looked like she wasn’t bleeding, and her helmet was still on, at least. Instead of calling out to her, I swallowed hard and took the opportunity to quickly grab the angle grinder she had dropped.

I rushed at the man, the blade of my weapon whirring in front of me, and hit him square on the neck.

He barked out a pained roar and threw his arm towards me, the impact sending me tumbling to the ground.

As I slid on the smooth concrete floor, I fumbled and dropped the angle-grinder. The reinforced concrete-hard man grabbed me by the neck as he spoke again.

“You two are getting on my nerves. Why are you here?” he asked as he lifted me a few centimeters from the ground. As the man spoke, he reached for my soldering mask, intent on removing it from my face. Thinking quickly, I kicked hard as I could between the legs.

“Ow,” the man let out between gritted teeth.

That wasn’t a smart play. Turns out the man’s jewels weren’t of the squishy kind. I distinctly felt my feet hitting what felt like a marble statue’s… well, marbles. I felt the pain of the impact on my foot like somebody had dropped a cannonball on it.

However, the blow seemed to have some effect, as the man immediately loosened his grip on my neck to grab at his crotch. I fell and backed away from the man in an awkward roll.

“Did you seriously just do that?” he asked in an incredulous tone. “Did you seriously kick a guy in the fucking nuts while… Fuck!”

I didn’t reply as I stood up to face him again. The man’s foul mouth didn’t have the effect he probably thought it would. For once, my social anxiety had proved to be somewhat useful as it seemed to drive the guy man. And angry people tended to make mistakes.

“Why are you just staring like a fucking idiot? Answer me, you son of a whore!” the man seethed as he still clutched his groin.

I didn’t reply to this either. I still didn’t quite understand how and why a simple kick to the balls could hurt him so bad after seeing buzzsaw blades failing to pierce his skin. Maybe the man could protect himself against external wounds… but not internal ones? No matter how sturdy the material, his brain wouldn’t probably fare too good after being shaken. Even if I didn’t break his skull, I reckoned that a good hit on it might knock him out.

Eager to test the only theory that had some shred of a chance of getting me out of this, I quickly scanned my surroundings for a blunt weapon but only found a thin piece of rebar about the length of my forearm. I quickly grabbed it and rushed at my opponent.

As I raised the makeshift weapon like a tiny golf club to hit the man in the head. To my surprise, the man quickly lifted his forearm up and simply blocked the blow with it. I dropped the bar in surprise when the vibrations from the impact sent a wave of pain through my arms.

I yelped, but the man had barely let out a grunt when I hit him.

Blows didn’t necessarily work, then. That or he either couldn’t protect his whole body, or it had something to do with his skin and flesh. As Alison’s prior hits had easily gauged a small incision into the former, I thought the latter was what was protecting him, which also explained why a kick to the groin had had such an effect.

I stepped back as he straightened up to his full height. This time all traces of pain were gone from his face. He only bore a tired frown as he lunged towards me. My feeble attempt to dodge ended in failure, as he grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and lifted me up in the air again.

“Alright, you’ve been fucking around for long enough,” the man spoke as he yanked on my soldering mask.

I gasped for air while simultaneously trying to kick and strike at my opponent’s arm with my new weapon, to no avail.

“Let’s see who’s hiding behind this mask!” he drawled in a lousy imitation of a cartoon character.

“Wait, what the- how old are you?” he asked in surprise as he dropped my soldering mask on the floor. “No matter, you shouldn’t have come here anyway. Please die,” he said as he broke my spine.

A sick crunch and a quick stab of pain resonated through my whole body as I was dropped to the floor. I could catch a flash of a piece of steel tubing out of the corner of my eye as my mind drifted into oblivion.

I woke with a start and a cry of pain.

Everything hurt.

Wait, everything hurts. I’m not dead!

The mixed feelings I felt at my situation were soon mellowed by the creepy snap of my vertebrae realigning inside of my neck. Oddly enough, the sensation wasn’t too displeasing. The moving bones inside of my body sure felt disturbing, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. Maybe I was out during the worst of it?

I cracked open my eyes to see Alison breathing heavily through the slits on the bottom of her helmet. She held a bloody metal pipe in her hands, and a small pool of blood was forming near our former assailant’s head on the ground.

Great timing. I thought bitterly. A little earlier, and I wouldn’t have had my spine broken.

After catching her breath, Alison bent down and grabbed my mask. She then walked to where I was lying and dropped it next to my head.

“You alright?” she asked, not a trace of caring in her voice.

“Yeah, no,” I wheezed. “Been better, to be honest.”

“I didn’t see what he did. How bad is it?”

“I don’t know. Fucker broke my spine. I think it might be fixed now, though,” I croaked as I wiggled my toes in my shoes to make sure I could still feel them.

Everything seemed to be working in order, to my immense relief, and the pain I had felt was already manageable.

“Is he out?” I asked apprehensively.

“Yeah, skull cracked for good, good thinking on the blunt weapon. Was that on purpose?” she asked with a hint of genuine respect.

“Yeah, when I kicked him in the balls, it seemed to have a really strong effect, so I conjectured that hitting him in the head would yield similar results,” I replied with a wince as I struggled to get up.

It was odd. I was a bit shaken, and my neck felt numb, and the amount of punishing I had taken here was way worse than last time, but all in all, I still felt fine. Maybe because this time I didn’t lose any blood?

“A kick to the nuts? Good boy,” Alison said with a cackle. “Always go for the noggin. Or the balls. Or both.”

“So, should we wait inside or—” I was about to finish when the clicking sound of a cocking gun cut me off.

A man in a dark blue wool sweater and dark jeans stood behind Alison, a gun trained on her back. He had an empty holster strapped on his torso, and his stance suggested he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot if we gave him a reason to.

“Alright, love,” the man spoke in a deep voice. “I’m going to need you to drop the helmet—no sudden movement. No turning around, or you’re dead. Understood?

Alison slowly reached up to her own soldering helmet and unstrapped it from behind, and proceeded to lower it.

“Good evening, Arnaud,” she spoke confidently.

How was she not losing her cool right there? The man had a fucking gun to her heart.

“Who gave you the permission to speak?” the man spoke again, tone grown frigid.

Alison clicked her tongue in annoyance. She even rolled her eyes at me, the madwoman!

“You, put these on,” the man spoke to me in a commanding tone as he tossed a pair of manacles at me.

“And you…” the man trailed off as he punched Alison’s skull with the handle of his gun faster than I could react.

Alison fell to the ground like a bag of leather-strapped potatoes.

“Now, grab your little friend and follow me,” the man spoke, tone final.