Mocking laughter serenaded me to sleep.
CHAPTER 10
I’d tell you about my dreams that night, but they were horrific… some in ways I still don’t want to think about. So, let’s take a bit of a breather instead. Most of you have probably kept up just fine so far, but I’m guessing a few of you lived your lives pre-Break, and wouldn’t know a Cat One from a Five, a Shifter from a Spark, or even what I’m talking about when I say things like “pre-Break.”
The story goes like this; eighty-some years ago, a guy had himself a dream. Less awful than mine, I’m guessing, but strange nonetheless; he dreamed of a world where people had powers like those he’d read about in comics, a world of bright and shiny possibilities far beyond the usual day-to-day rat race.
No idea why they raced rats back then, but it does seem like the sort of thing to drive a man to dream of something new.
Anyway, nothing too weird about any of that, right? Guy goes to sleep, guy has a dream, guy wakes up. Happens all the time. Thing is, when this guy woke up, his dream had become reality. Across the world, people—not all of them, just a percentage of a percentage—had been granted powers. Flight, strength, invulnerability, laser-fucking-eye-beams… you name it, it made an appearance, bestowed on a random sampling of strangers across the globe.
The aspect of his dream that didn’t become reality was the bright and shiny part. Turns out, most people are dicks. Even the ones that don’t have dicks. Give those people powers and… well, shit goes down.
The world changed forever in the course of a single man’s dream… but the Break itself took longer. Can’t speak for countries on the other five continents, but according to the history books, the United States of America tore itself apart over the course of several bloody years. The government fell. New regimes sprouted up like weeds, and all the while, new people kept developing powers, and everything kept getting worse.
Most people are dicks, sure enough… but the corollary to that rule is that some people aren’t. None of us would be here if it weren’t for one of the first Powers, a guy who won the metaphysical lottery and decided not to use it to shit all over his own species. He called himself Dominion, and as the rest of the world fell into chaos, he fought to save one small piece of it. Others came to join him, the handful of Powers who chose to protect rather than enslave. Collectively, they helped what was left of the military eke out a territory encompassing California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona with pieces of Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. The new country called itself the Free States, and the Powers who chose to defend it became known as Capes.
East of us is the Badlands, a sort of free-for-all where nothing rules but chaos and fear. Past that, you start getting to the more established regimes; Steel and his fascists up in what used to be New England, Legion lording over Old Baltimore, and the procession of warlords that come and go in the dirty South. Places that make the Badlands look good. Places that make Bakersfield seem like paradise. A shithole, yeah, but still paradise.
In the early days, some scientist had the bright idea of grouping Powers by class and magnitude. Class is mostly self-explanatory; Flyboys fly, Druids grow stuff and obsess over trees like nature-loving stalkers, Necromancers do… whatever the fuck it is we do. Others are less obvious; Stalwarts and Titans both have combat gifts, but manifest them in different ways. Shifters… well, shift… sometimes into beasts, sometimes into minerals. Never heard of one that could do what Her Majesty did, but… we’ll get to that, eventually.
As for magnitude? Even before the Break, there were legends of a Weather Witch named Mother Nature, the sort of bitch that loved to watch the world go pear-shaped. She got sad, rivers flooded. She got irritated, droughts and quakes happened. And when Mother Nature got well and truly pissed… well, then she unleashed holy hell in the form of earth-fucking storms. People called them hurricanes and scientists measured their strength from Category One to Category Five.
I can see some of you nodding your heads already. Yeah, the post-Break eggheads looked at those old-world rankings and decided what worked for hurricanes would work just as well for Powers.
It’s an imperfect system—which is why those categories are further broken down into Highs, Mids, and Lows—but it stuck anyway. Don’t blame me for that; I wasn’t around when decisions were made, and nobody would’ve asked my opinion even if I had been. Likelihood is, I’d have been born somewhere else, and wouldn’t have survived long enough to learn all the ways my life had been fucked by one man’s dream.
As for the dreamer himself? He’s the only Cat Six Power the scientists have ever classified… and nobody knows for sure who he was, if he’s still among us, or what the hell he was thinking. All we have is a name—not his real name, but something the newspapers coined, back in the days before the world finished breaking.
They called him Dr. Nowhere.
CHAPTER 11
While I was asleep and dealing with dreams we still won’t be discussing, Her Majesty was off looking for our attackers’ car. My first clue that she’d found it was when she parked the fucker right next to my head and leaned on the horn like it was some kind of toy.
I was halfway to the other side of the road—and three quarters of the way to pissing myself—before I fully woke up.
“Up and at ‘em, Bakersfield.” The yellow smiley face across Her Majesty’s visor looked a little bit more maniacal than I remembered… but it’s possible I was projecting. “We’ve still got a drive ahead of us.”
“Is that thing safe?”
The vehicle Smiley had found was
