Chương 131: Naphtali, Part 1

Bombs. August 11th was now the day I would associate with bombs. Because of course, it had to be bombs. The good news was, it wasn't ADU. The bad news was it was some guy who put out a manifesto on fucking Facebook of all places about how "this divorce was the last one" and linking a website that was just a random timer. Every time a timer hit zero on the page, a bomb went off somewhere in Charlottesville.

We figured out pretty quickly that these timers were preset and the timer just updated us on the timing of one specific bomb each time. According to the police he had a history of being found with bomb-making supplies but because he never assembled anything, no charges could be pressed. They couldn't prove what he would be doing with the materials, and the arrests were for things like public disturbances where he'd shout threats at random passersby. Well, the answer was hiding bombs all over the goddamn city.

Interrogations failed until Tancred came in. And according to Agent Richmond, he was very, very thorough. I did overhear at one point over the comms the words "You ever know you can circumcise a man twice!?" which probably was horribly illegal to do but I had no way of proving he did anything unless the bomber came out with it. The interrogation from Tancred's end did bear fruit, at least.

For years, since his first divorce, he would just start obsessively putting together bombs with radio receivers in them and hiding them in random parts of the city like a squirrel hiding acorns every week or so. That first divorce was in January of 2002. Math-wise, that meant somewhere just north of five hundred explosive devices had been planted across the city. When the latest divorce finalized, he triggered a radio signal that set them all off. They all had randomized timers.

We were dealing with casualties already. No one dead, these bombs seemed largely concussive, but sharp debris cut a lot of people up, one person had a broken knee. Some were embedded in structural systems. Scaffolding from a construction site fell down because of a bomb, though thankfully no one was under it. But the problem was that was only maybe ten bombs that had gone off out of half a thousand.

"You're gonna want to take a left on this street, Hercules," Betsy dryly stated over my ear. She was handling it well at least. The task division was pretty simple. Chris was investigating the bomber's home in hopes of finding absolutely anything that could help with bomb disposal. Sam and May were coordinating on bomb detection. Sam was running multiple, simultaneous instances of the timer website to get as many countdowns as possible. She pointed out a correlation in electromagnetic frequency and timers.

An easy way to design a bomb would just be to have it detonate when no more power was coming towards some sort of relay. No more battery power to keep the relay up, detonator kicks off. Batteries have a change in EMF as they lose power. This meant May had to focus entirely on detecting electromagnetic fields and helping correlate them with the timers, and pushing her power to its limits to see any radio communications for the bombs to start or control their timers. How she was managing that, I was uncertain.

This left Jairo and I on bomb duty. Since Jairo's monstrous form let him see electromagnetic frequencies, he was able to handle precise tracking on his own, and at his speed he was doing fine. Me, however, I was stuck playing leapfrog. Since I was slower, I was pointed towards the bombs that had more time left. Speaking of left, I took the turn Betsy indicated. Led to a cul-de-sac.

"Minute-fifty. The spot Spectroma marked off is sixty feet to your eleven o'clock, Hercules." Lunging in that direction, I ended up on a lawn… full to the brim with garden gnomes. Some on little stone platforms, some gathered around little fake plastic tables. One had a glass violin. There was a sign dangling from the lawn's tree branch that said THE GNORE THE GNERRIER.

"Do you have any more precise a direction from my current position?"

"No, it's about a five square foot area. Why, what do you see?"

"No bomb, just a lot of fucking gnomes!"

"Cool down. Minute twenty." That wasn't helping.

"They're garden gnomes. Ten dollars from any gardening store. Your insurance will cover them. Minute left. Just start clearing house." Very easy of her to say when she's not the one having to figure out how to get rid of every single gnome at once without destroying the entire property. And potentially traumatizing whoever would have this many fucking gnomes. My first plan was simple. Just break open gnomes to see if any of them would have the bomb inside.

I had a minute, and I could slap through them faster than I'd have to rear back and throw them. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty. One was solid glass all throughout. Empty. One had a wad of cash in it. I quickly stuffed it into the mailbox so it wouldn't get lost.

"Thirty seconds, Herc." There were a handful left. I just started picking up as many as my hands could hold.

"Twenty five." This was a lot more complicated than it looked.

"Twenty." And the rushing wasn't really helping.

"Fifteen." Once I got as many as I could, I just whipped my arms up, and sent the entire array zooming into the air. Some shattered from wind resistance.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four…" Bible studies with Chris didn't make me a praying man, but at that moment I hoped God was on my side for once.

"Three, two, one…" A flash in the air as the bomb went off, high up enough nothing was disturbed. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Bomb dealt with," I radioed in.

"Amazing work. Take a breather, the next shortest timer is twenty." Didn't even need her approval as I took a deep breath of air, tainted by the smell of my mask. The front door of the house creaked open and suddenly my attempt at a break was interrupted by the voice of an elderly woman.

"What did you do to my gnomes!?" She shrieked out. Looking back up, I sighed.

"Some idiot put a bomb in one of them but I couldn't tell which one."

"So you broke all of them!?"

"Not all!" I assured her, digging into my belt to reach for an insurance card.

"Look, I've got insurance, take my card. They can replace your gnomes."

"Get your damned hands out of your pants, you little pervert!" She yowled at me, causing me to flinch my hand away. Wait, pants?

"Ma'am, this is a one-piece suit. I don't have pants." I lifted the belt a bit to show no seam for pants.

"Now can I please give you my insurance card to replace your gnomes?"

"Put it in my mailbox, don't come near me, filthy exhibitionist!" Thankfully she couldn't see me roll my eyes as I moved back to her mailbox, slipping the card in. Right as I slapped the lid of the mailbox shut, Jairo zoomed into view, chest and back heaving with exhaustion.

"We got a break, finally!" He called out, reaching out and putting a hand on my shoulder.

"I just went through clearing like three bombs in a row. I don't think I can go much faster than I did." We ended up walking away from the rambling older lady and her collection of destroyed gnomes, giving me frankly a much more reliable distance to speak at so she wouldn't interrupt with insults.

"I got rid of one but it took me like two minutes to find it in a big pile of garden gnomes. Crazy gnome lady came out and called me a pervert for trying to give her my insurance card." Jairo burst out laughing, which always came out as this series of croaking noises whenever he did it.

"No matter what we do, we can't make every single person grateful. But how are you holding up on trying to go as fast as me?"

"No one's as fast as you, man. How does your body even do it?"

"A lot of it is just… letting the parasite do the physical pushing for me. It still really burns me out, though." I nodded.

"Do you need me to take over? If we've got twenty minutes on the shortest timer, I could easily cross that gap and get us a head start on the bombs after that." Jairo stared at me as I made that suggestion. I couldn't really discern his reaction through his helmet. I know why he had it on but I really did wish there wasn't such a big hang-up over how his face looks when he transformed. He reached up to the side of his helmet, belching out a question.

"Hey, do we have any rough numbers on the remaining bombs? I lost count on the ones I did." A voice, not Betsy's, another woman's. Must have been Jairo's handler. Never did meet her.

"We're looking at least four hundred and seventy." He took a deep breath.

"Okay, thank you Peggy." Taking his hand from his helmet, he looked at me.

"Might as well get a head start on it, if you want." I nodded.

"Alright. Relax for a minute. If we can get ahead enough maybe Tancred can terrorize the guy into giving us a way to disable the bombs remotely. There's gotta be a way for that." He returned the nod before I lunged off, reaching up to my earpiece.

"Betsy, I'm off break, can you start mapping me towards that twenty minute timer bomb? And has Flowstate found anything yet in that guy's house?" It took a minute before Betsy deigned to reply to me.

"You're going in the right direction for now, but in about a quarter mile you'll want to start moving more to your two o'clock. And Flowstate has yet to find anything. He's presently trying to get access to the bomber's computer. Dr. Way's coaching him right now, but she can only do so much while she's monitoring timers and maintaining bomb-tracking with Spectroma." The concrete roof of the building I landed on gave just enough way to leave two impressions of my feet in it.

"Okay. And anything new at all from Tancred's interrogation yet?"

"No. Just keeps ranting about how awful his latest ex-wife is, same as before. Seems to be in some kind of panic-loop. Tancred's letting him cool down in hopes we'll get something when he's tired out from the loop." I sighed, taking another lunge in a more adjusted direction towards the bomb.

"Got it. Time left on the bomb?"

"Seventeen minutes."

"Think that's enough time for bomb disposal to get to the location while I dig it out?"

"CPD doesn't do bomb squad. They rely on the state police who are deployed in Chesapeake for a similar divorcee-induced bombing situation."

"You're fucking joking."

"I wish. Just a guy in a suicide vest at least, so we-" Silence for a moment.

"Need a minute, Hercules. Keep going to the location. Seems to be a bus depot." I kept moving as requested, hoping that wasn't an ill portent of things to come. In my last lunge, I could see a crowd gathered around something by a bus parked in the middle of the depot. They must've found the bomb already. Landing about forty feet away from the crowd, I started approaching.

"What's the matter here?" I inquired, making sure I actually was dealing with a bomb issue and not something else. The crowd parted, revealing they were surrounding a PVC pipe full of wires and God knows what else just laying on the ground. Same as every other bomb this weirdo was making.

"Don't touch it. Where did you find it?" I asked, glancing across the faces in the crowd. A thin, short woman answered in a scratchy voice.

"I was doing an inspection on my bus and I just found it under the wheel-well!"

"Just now you were inspecting it? How often are you supposed to do it?"

"Comprehensive inspections are once a year! I could've been sitting on that for a year, oh my God." She said, holding onto her chest and stumbling back, a couple people behind her catching her. I shook my head.

"Don't think too hard about it, just keep your hands off while I handle it." Keeping mental track of the time, I knew it was too long for me to just… let it go off in the air. If I threw it up into space, it might break a satellite or something important. What was another method of disposal… Oh. Of course.

"Shivvy," I muttered out, his felid head poking out from the collar of my suit and looking at me with an expectant pair of nonexistent eyes. Holding the bomb up to his face, I spoke out an "Eat." He just stared at it for a few more seconds, before his head expanded and flowered out to wrap around the improvised PVC pipe full of explosive material and swallowed it down.

I couldn't make out any shape of the bomb in his form, which gave me the confirmation I needed that I could just have Shivvy handle eating the damn things. Wish I thought of it sooner.

"Good work, kitt-" A plume of light and concussive force came out directly in my face, making me stumble back. I didn't know Shivvy could burp, but apparently explosives did that for him as he blasted me with whatever was left over inside him. It seemed weak enough to just scare the Hell out of me, at least. Didn't feel any injuries or burns. A few chuckles came from the crowd. Glad they could take merriment in my suffering. Reaching up to my earpiece as I walked away from the crowd, I spoke.

"Another bomb disposed. Looks like Shivvy can eat them. You all set, Betsy?" Nothing, for maybe a minute or so. Suddenly, her voice came on, the sound of struggle and gunshots in the background.

"Clowncar-" Betsy finally said, with the most emotion in her voice I'd ever heard. My skin went cold." Clowncar? In the base!?"

"All over, we're fighting all of his copies off! Focus on helping find the bombs, we're armed, we can handl-" A thumping noise and a shout from Betsy, before giggling could be heard over the comms. Then, clicks. Finally, a familiar voice." What a great time for me to be getting my revenge, Hercules." Fucking Technofiend.