Road

There were fires all over the city.

Whatever Bakuda had used for her final bomb was limited in area; if it had been a conventional explosive, the entire city would be gone. However, the bombs she had placed in people's heads had resulted in hundreds of explosions all over the city.

I flew over areas where people had turned into crystal statues. Other areas had small piles of dust where people had stood. There were people who were screaming and on fire, and nothing anyone could do would put them out.

The paramedics of the fire department and ambulance services were overwhelmed, and there were people who were just abandoned.

I saw triage tents set up all over town, mostly in parks and places where there were clearings large enough to bring a lot of people. Strangely, there weren't many of these in the poorer parts of town.

Cities had invested in triage tents when the Endbringers had begun attacking cities. Unfortunately, no city could keep enough medical staff to adequately deal with this level of damage. The only reason the tents would be out was that the hospitals were filled to capacity.

During the aftermath of an actual Endbringer attack, teleporters would be bringing medical staff from all across the world, unless it was an attack by the Simurgh.

However, there hadn't been time to bring anyone in; even Boston would likely only just now be sending medical staff.

Flying over the city at a slow pace, I saw a large white tent set up in a park. There were vehicles surrounding it on three sides, with one side reserved for vehicles to enter and leave.

The Empire section of town, which tended to be middle to upper class was much better served, but even there, people were getting left behind.

In the couple of hours since I had left, they had begun setting up triage centers, large tents with makeshift cots where people could be treated.

Those being treated had to go through decontamination tents; apparently some of Bakuda's bombs had had nasty secondary effects, and they'd spread some kinds of bioterror agents.

People were screaming in pain, and others were being pushed away by bystanders as they tried to get paramedics to examine their loved ones before anyone else.

There was a sickly smell of voided bowels, of vomit and other bodily fluids, and the overwhelming smell of blood. The tarp on the floor was saturated with blood in places, and no one seemed that concerned, even though the paramedics wore protective gear.

"Let me help," I said to a beleaguered fire fighter, landing beside him. He was working on a woman at the edge of the tent, the sun warming his back even as his face was in shadow.

"Who are you?" he asked, barely looking at me as he worked to put a tube down a woman's throat.

I touched her leg, and immediately her color improved and she grabbed for the tube in her throat.

"I'm a healer," I said.

The woman choked and gagged as the tube came out, but the wounds on her side were gone, and she looked much better.

"The ones in black are dead or dying," he said, looking up at me. "The red are the next worse off, then the yellow, then the green."

They had paramedics assessing people before they found a bed, and they'd mostly put people in rows by color, although there were reds in both the black and the yellow aisles.

Other people were removing people from the black aisle as they died, and placing them on a tarp with sheets covering their bodies. There had to be at least fifty bodies under the sheets, and another fifty in the black aisle.

I went there first, and I heard gasps as the man sat up.

"Help the paramedics," I said.

He pulled the tags off his toe, and although he looked dazed, he got up to help.

I saved half the people in the black aisle, those who had simply been injured. There was nothing I could do about the woman whose lungs had turned into concrete or the man who had begun turning into a fish.

I walked through the triage center, healing as many people as I could. Some were beyond my help, like the man whose arm had been turned to crystal when he tried to help his wife, and the woman who had her skin converted into tree bark.

Hopefully Panacea would be able to help at least some of them.

"I've got a list of the other triage centers," the fireman said as I finished dealing with the last of the greens. People were still coming in, but the trickle had slowed. He handed me a list of centers; there were at least a dozen of them, and I'd just finished healing two hundred people here.

"I'll head out right away," I said.

I went to the second center, and completed my business there in ten minutes.

My healing leveled up again; now I could heal 64 HP at a time.

At the third center, a paramedic approached me.

"You should be careful," he said. "I've heard the PRT has issued a kill order against you."

"I'm not worried," I said. "But you should tell everyone not to mention what I'm doing so that Lung and Hookwolf won't interrupt the party."

He nodded, but pointed to people who had cell phones pointed at me.

I scowled under my hood.

People were idiots. I'd hoped to be able to finish before what was left of the gangs got wind of what I was doing.

I expected someone to be waiting for me at the next center, but there was no one.

My Healing leveled up again, to 72 HP.

As I landed at the fifth center, I heard screams. I sighed.

"Give us the drugs!" a man shouted, pointing a pistol at the head of a nurse. She cringed, but held onto the box.

"People are dying," she said. "You can't just…"

He slapped her in the face, and grabbed the lock box on rollers. There were four other men with him, all of whom were aiming weapons at the paramedics around them.

Maybe there was a reason the poorer areas had fewer triage tents.

"Put the medicines away," I said. "And I'll let you go. Don't, and I'll break your legs."

"Why should listen to some bitch in a hoodie?" the man asked.

He was swaying a little, clearly on something.

"Everyone is having a bad day," I said. "I'd hate to have to make yours worse."

"Why don't you get on your knees in front of me where you belong?" he said.

I shrugged, blinked next to him, and then I kicked him hard in the knee. I could hear the snap even as I pulled the gun from his hand.

I blinked around collecting the other guns before the other four could react, and then I proceeded to break their knees as well.

They all screamed and moaned and fell on the floor.

"Put them with the blacks," I said. "I probably won't heal them till after the cops show up."

I proceeded to heal as many people as I could.

Police cars pulled up, and I saw policemen pulling their guns on me.

"Get down on the ground," they said.

"I'm healing people," I said. "If you want to try to collect whatever bounty the PRT has issued, go ahead and try to shoot me. If you hurt one of these other people, I'll break your legs and leave you with those four that tried to rob these good folks."

I could see the crowd rumbling; people were starting to step between me and the police. I didn't take it as a personal endorsement of me; these were the relatives of the people I hadn't healed yet.

The head paramedic stepped forward to speak with the officers in low tones.

I could hear what they were saying, and it seemed that the police had gotten reports of a robbery attempt and had mistaken me for one of the Merchants.

Did I look that bad?

Glancing down at myself, I noticed that there were suspicious bloodstains on my hoodie. I hadn't been the laundromat since I'd left home, and I'd destroyed any number of hoodies.

A quick check and I realized that all of my clothes had weird bloodstains on them, or they'd been shredded or destroyed.

It was no wonder the cops had pulled their guns on me. They wouldn't have done it if they'd realized I was a cape.

"Does anybody have a hoodie I can borrow?" I asked.

A heavyset man pulled his hoodie off, showing a t-shirt underneath. I inventoried the garment and then replaced my hoodie with it.

It was warm, and despite his weight, it smelled clean.

"You have a bounty on your head?" the paramedic beside me asked.

"The PRT and I have a disagreement about how to handle the gang problem," I said. "I don't hurt regular people."

"Oh," he said. He was silent. "I thought you had metal skin."

I switched Armored Skin on as I healed another patient. "Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't."

Switching it off again, I watched the cops hauling the Merchants away.

"How bad is it out there?"

He shook his head.

"I'm not sure how we'll recover from this," he said. "There's thousands of people dead, but the water is out, and that's going to cause all kinds of diseases. A lot of cops are dead because they were the ones trying to take the suicide bombers in, and they were the first to die."

"Which means the criminals who are left are going to have a field day," I said.

My Dad had loved the Bay, and I'd been the one to destroy it. There was a weird sort of irony about that.

Even if I could have Panacea revive him, what was he going to think when he woke up? I'd killed hundreds of people, and I'd been responsible for the deaths of thousands.

I didn't have any powers to make things better, other than the healing.

If I'd had Kaiser's full power, I might have been able to make temporary repairs to the plumbing.

Why was it that parahumans mostly had powers designed to destroy, and yet you hardly ever saw any who had the power to make things better?

Could I go planewalking to find people who would be able and willing to help?

Mostly I'd found hell worlds, but what if I asked my power to find a place where things could be made better?

Would the PRT quarantine them and not allow them to do what had to be done?

Maybe I needed to beat up Leet and gain a version of his powers. He could build anything once, right?

The fifth triage center went more quickly; some of the paramedics had called ahead.

The sixth went well as well. My Healing leveled up again to the tenth level and 80 HP per healing.

At the seventh, I found most of the Protectorate waiting for me.

"Turn yourself in," Armsmaster shouted.

"You aren't going to stop me from healing these people," I said calmly, pitching my voice so that I could be heard by the people in the tents and their relatives outside. "You already failed to stop Bakuda, and now you're trying to distract people from your own failure!"

Armsmaster grimaced, and I could see cell phones lifted. People were recording this, and they knew it.

"You can't stop me," I said. "Which is why you want me dead. But I notice that New Wave isn't here this time. Is that because they believe you're in the wrong?"

"We are authorized to use lethal force," he said.

I shook my head.

"You aren't even in my league," I said. I gestured, and a moment later, every hero was staring at a dozen daggers pointed in their direction.

The daggers were there for the civilians as well, but I deliberately had them pointed away from them.

"I won't let you kill these people for your petty political bullshit," I said.

I gestured and the daggers shot through the Armscycle, completely destroying it.

"I could do that to all of you at the same time, but I don't hurt heroes or civilians."

"You can't keep doing this," Battery said.

"It's almost over," I said. "Lung, Hookwolf, and two hundred followers are all that's left."

I stepped between them, and I proceeded to heal people. I kept my arcane eye staring in their direction, in case they tried something, and I made sure that there were enough daggers around Velocity that he couldn't move. They probably had some tinkertech device small enough for him to carry.

"In the meantime," I said, "I'm going to help this city as well as I can."

I reached down to heal another person, and the moment I touched him, I realized my mistake.

They'd dressed Clockblocker up as one of the black patients, probably because they knew that I usually started with them, and the moment I touched him, the world shifted around me.

They'd sprayed me with layer after layer of containment foam, likely hoping that the line of sight issue would keep me from blinking.

The moment I woke, I twitched, and I felt a dozen long metal prods suddenly pierce my skin.

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

-10 POINTS ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

-9 POINTS ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

-9 POINTS ELECTRICAL DAMAGE

+12% ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE!

ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE IS NOW 25%.

They were trying to electrocute me to death!

"Plane shift!" I subvocalized; with the amount of confoam they had sprayed me with, I couldn't speak out loud.

I fell to the ground, and I let myself rest. I was down to two hit points.

A truck pulled up to me, and I heard footsteps.

"Damn, she's a fat one," I heard a voice say. "You think she found an old stockpile?"

Opening my eyes to slits, I saw six emaciated men staring at me.

They grabbed me, and they struggled to pull me up in the truck. I was curious as to what they had planned, and I was regenerating, so I allowed it to happen.

"Damn," one of them said. "She should be good for a few days."

Cautiously, I mumbled, and turned the Empathy back on.

All I could sense from them was hunger and anticipation. It wasn't sexual at all. It was as though they had been starving for years.

"What's going on?" I asked.

One of them hit me in the head with a crowbar.

-4 HIT POINTS

I sighed and didn't react. Instead I inventoried the handcuffs they'd put on me, and I stood up in the back of the truck.

I was distracted for a moment by the scenery around me.

There was ash floating in the air, enough that the sun itself was blotted out.

I lashed out, punching them one after the other until they fell over bleeding.

Usually I only got planar affinities for unique individuals. I received planar affinities for all of them for the blood on my hands, but no powers.

Did that mean that no one on this world had powers?

They cowered on the truck bed, staring up at me as though I was some kind of monster. One of them fumbled with a gun, but I lashed out and took it from him.

He only had a single bullet.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Wha…what do you mean?"

"Why are all the plants dead?" I asked. "What's with all the ash?"

He stared at me like a was crazy.

Grabbing him with mage hand by the throat, I lifted him into the air.

"What happened here?" I asked.

"A comet," he gasped. "Hit the planet. Sent up enough dust to blot out the sun."

"How long ago?" I asked.

"Ten years," he said.

"So you've been surviving without food for the past ten years?" I asked "How?"

He looked down.

Oh.

I wasn't sure how I felt about cannibalism; would I rather die than eat human flesh?

Of course, there was a difference between eating the recently dead, and killing people to make them your food.

"How many people are left?" I asked.

"Not many," he said. "The cities were destroyed in the firestorms, or there wouldn't have been enough food to last even this long.

"And where were you taking me?" I asked.

He looked down again.

"We've got a place about ten miles down the road."

I could sense that he was telling the truth.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," I said.

I blinked into the air after destroying their engine with a far strike. It was likely that as cannibals and raiders they needed the truck to find food.

Blinking down the road, I found an old farmhouse.

I felt terror coming from the basement. Blinking inside while looking through a window, I quickly found a trap door.

There were ten people in the basement. The cannibals had been emaciated. These people were skeletal.

Stepping inside, I began to inventory chains. There were ten people here, and I could only take two in my inventory and two more with plane shift.

I looked at my Planar Affinity note. I now had sixty percent affinity to this place, which meant I could come back as often as I wanted.

I'd drop them off in Paradis Island; even the threat of the giants would be less than simply starving to death. Even though they didn't speak the language, I was sure I could get someone to nurse them back to health.

Then I'd go home.

This would be the perfect place to give some heroes a well- deserved time out while I finished what I had to do. By the time I came back, maybe with Pizza, they'd be happy to see me.

If they weren't happy to see me, well, that was just too bad.

Staring out at the house, I decided that I'd have to leave them a note to stay on the road so I could find them again. The last thing I needed was a reputation for starving people to death.