Post By Fin Fang Foom Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:43:16 pm EDT	Subject Scorched Earth #3: Perpetual Midnight in New America
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We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

Well, I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

--The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

-------------------------

Witnessing the end of the world had been horrific enough, for Susan Albrecht: but knowing that it was going to end again, and being unable to warn anyone about it, was something else entirely…

For as long as mankind had existed, there had been mirage apocalypses--exotic, destructive events that seemed perpetually over the next hill, but had the potential to materialize at any moment. Humanity had become strangely comfortable with this veritable oasis of catastrophes that was waiting for them. There were so many different species of armageddon (ranging from the spiritual to the scientific to the social, not that they didn’t overlap, with holy wars and other religious turmoil, lethal weather, new diseases, global warming, overpopulation, limited resources, cultural identity crises, economic struggles, genocide) that, whenever something major happened, it was bound to inadvertantly tie into one of the predicted disasters. It would have a certain number or involve a certain region or phenomenon. And now that civilization had survived a major attack, everyone was left frantically waiting for the next one. Life had become centered around both a single, all-powerful doomsday that had already happened and the horrifying possibility of more. All religions and cultures and political machines were slaves to this terrible new idol.

Deep within the hollow center of New America were the remains of the Great Plains. The landscape looked different, now, for a variety of reasons. For instance, the sky was trapped in a straitjacket of grey clouds--when the Swarm’s ships had surrounded the planet and opened fire, pounding the face of the earth with mile-wide columns of energy, so much dust had been kicked up that the atmosphere was now clogged and threatening another ice age. (For the moment, it was just perpetually cold, but that was liable to worsen.) Cities had become empty craters rimmed with drooping architecture. There were hill-sized burial mounds in which hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of corpses had been placed. A huge amount of nanotech had been released by the government, to ruin America’s resources and thus prevent the aliens from getting them, just as citizens had set their own crops and cities on fire in times of war, long ago. So the soil was coarse and unfarmable, while trees were rubbery and withered, unable to be burnt or used for building. It had also polluted the water and killed the livestock.

Even worse, the Swarm had dropped climate-bombs everywhere, turning the American southwest into a marsh, giving constant tornadoes to Africa, and flooding most of Europe, thus extending the Atlantic to Turkey and turning high ground into thousands of islands. The Great Plains were now a windtunnel of a tundra, with frozen-solid ground and constant rain or snow. Like the planet itself, America now had less than one-twelfth of its original population.

In what had once been western Kansas, one dominant structure stood out…a jagged spike of black technology was in the middle of a huge, flat, deadgrass field. It looked like one of the old skyscrapers--albeit a militaristic one--which were now an endangered species. Sickly yellow squares of light covered it, with tiny, moving silhouettes in them. There were no animals nearby, as the ecosystem had been destroyed, thanks to the nanotech. (The lack of healthy plants killed the herbivores, the lack of herbivores killed the carnivores.) A glossy, silver-and-black river, which had been created by the destruction, reflected the clouds. Modified humvees and hovertanks patrolled the region, even though humanity was essentially extinct in this part of New America. There was no land or animals to live off of, no electricity or heat or running water (save for a few Safe America bases), limited long-distance communications--the Swarm had destroyed our satellites, and even if they hadn’t, the climate-bombs had left a static aftertaste, screwing up electronic signals of all kinds. This area had no strategic value. Yes, there were insurgents, but they’d die off eventually, with some help from the weather. Still, the Safe America troops that guarded this complex didn’t like being this deep in the bombed-out continent, as the Old American insurgents had certain allies.

(The coasts were where it was at. With the vast majority of the world’s planes--civilian and otherwise--having been destroyed in the attacks, the seas were vital once again. After the economic and infrastructure collapses that had been brought about by the Swarm’s attempted invasion, most surviving American citizens had gone to one coast or the other, looking for work, food, and shelter. A population-map of the country would look kind of like a giant U, going from Washington down to California, across to Florida, and then up to Maine. The weather was much worse in the “midnorth” and midwest, and the government had declared it a no-man’s-land. However, in the coastal states, Safe America presence was strongest, and the refugees would arrive only to be “selected” for President Wertham’s Labor Initiative. Many had expected a military draft after the attack, but, instead, he’d decided that physical labor was needed more than soldiers. If the country was going to be rebuilt, we couldn’t have people picking their own jobs, there needed to be top-down organization. Outside of the insurgents, none dared call it slavery.)

While mental hospitals had once existed to cure insanity, this facility had the opposite task. Out here in the middle of nowhere, those who’d offended the New American government were sent to be taught a lesson. They were injected with psychotropic cocktails and left to mentally rot away in empty, cinderblock rooms. But they weren’t important…no, the high-value prisoners, the Sabrina Lewises, were sent to West Coast or East Coast “hospitals”. These were the people who’d leered at the Secretary of State’s assistant, or been a little slow in picking up garbage when the Presidential limo had driven by, or prepared the wrong meal for a general. The casual abuses of power that went on every day, just to prove a point. Likewise, the staff had also been banished to this place--being assigned to this unimportant, frigid region was punishment. Susan had a more glamorous reason than most, however. Instead of sleeping with a superior officer’s mistress or getting drunk on leave, she’d been blindsided by a superhero. One second she was doing sentry duty outside of a storage complex; the next, an impossibly hard and fast fist had hit her in the back of the helmet and knocked her unconscious. She’d woken up in her current post, as they’d had her unconscious body shipped as cargo, barely patching her up.

Currently, Susan was doing lookout duty on the roof with two other (male) soldiers, who were smoking homemade cigarettes and staring out at the desolation. They all wore the standard Safe America uniform: midnight blue body-armor, gloves, boots, and helmet (with goggles and gasmask), with crimson markings that detailed rank, specialty, and so on. There weren’t that many female soldiers, but, Susan had felt that it was a better bet. It was the only guaranteed way to get decent room and board. Many of her female friends had been extremely stupid and made themselves available to the Labor Initiative (where they’d often end up becoming some middle-management goon’s sex-slave), or been slightly less stupid and pinned their hopes on marrying a promising Safe America officer and getting a Motherhood Exemption. But they usually turned out to be abusers, or drunks, or cheaters, or they didn’t want to have sex with them, as they were closeted gays who were terrified of being outed…homosexuality had been outlawed, along with living together outside of marriage and all forms of birth-control, thanks to the Ten Moral Precepts that had replaced the Bill of Rights.

Susan had three secrets, herself--one was relatively harmless, one would have caused her to be executed for treason, and one had to do with the literal fate of the world.

First, she actually liked her current post. It was far safer than going overseas and fighting in one of their doomed wars. (After the attacks, order had broken down internationally, and New America had been quick to jump in and “save” various countries that were allegedly in disarray.) Second, she’d gone from being a Wertham apologist to secretly hoping that the Old American insurgents and their super-allies would win. The fact that Wertham was wasting time with unnecessary wars, instead of rebuilding society and going after the aliens that had attacked them, had been her last straw. Though she wasn’t yet in a position to actually help the insurgents, she wanted to. And finally, Susan had been a psychometric for all of her life--someone with the ability to absorb information about an object or person with a touch. When the superhero had attacked her, she’d found out that he had an agenda that no-one else knew about. And if she couldn’t warn his allies in time, the world would go from the frying pan to the fire…

The roof was black and windswept, with only one entrance to the building, a docking bay and helipad, and no fire escape. It was big enough to play full-court basketball on. Susan yawned, half-listening to her comrades’s conversation. In her experience, Safe America soldiers fit in three categories: some were like her, doing it because they feared the alternative, others had been on mindless autopilot ever since most of humanity had been wiped out, and a demented few actually believed the propaganda; that this was the best American era ever, that prosperity and freedom were everywhere, despite the fact that they had horrible living conditions and were routinely mistreated by their superiors and had no real rights.

“--gonna come after us, eventually. They want our generators and all that crap.”

“Yeah, right. What kind’ve approach could they make? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not exactly a lot to hide behind, out here. Plus, we’ve got long-range security cams, motion-sensors at the fifty-yard perimeter, hovertanks, armored doors...”

“Supers’ll help ‘em. And it’s not like we can call for help, right? We only have enough anti-static charge for, what, one long-distance wireless transmission a day, and Price usually uses it for himself. This whole setup is typical ‘military intelligence’. The nearest base is down where New Mexico used to be--even if we got a signal out, by the time they got here, we’d all be dead.”

“Oh, come on, we’d fight it off.”

“Hey, there’s being tough and there’s being stupid, okay? I couldn’t care less about some half-starved insurgent teenager with his dad’s hunting rifle, but if we’re talking about an invulnerable alien that can punch you into the next territory…”

“Should’ve put those freaks in camps when we had the chance.”

“I’m more worried about Price. The supers, they’ll kill you and be done with it--but that guy’ll turn you into a lunatic and experiment on you for the rest of your life.”

“Freezing up here. Only have to do it one more day this week, though, and then it’s back to warm, comfy cam duty.”

“I don’t know, man. Sometimes, when we have to supervise the nurses giving the doses…I don’t know. I’ve worked in other psych torture wards, and it’s just not the same. It’s like there’s a pattern or something. ”

“I check out the nurses, not the meds. But I have wondered about that guy’s story. He used to be some big advisor to the President, right?”

“No idea. Maybe Albrecht knows, she used to be in DC.”

“For god’s--don’t ask her, you moron! Yeah, let’s just naïvely hope she doesn’t tell him that we’re asking questions about him. Asking questions is how I ended up in this hellhole. For all you know, she could be Military Affairs.”

“Okay, okay. Geez. Anyway…I always assumed Price was like us, y’know? That he got sent here against his will. But now, I’m not so sure. You ever do bodyguard duty in your rotation?”

“Are you kidding? I’d die of shock if they assigned me anything higher than the tenth floor.”

“When we first opened, they put me on bodyguard duty for him. He was just insanely bitter all the time. Snarling at everybody for no reason, stuff like that. But last year, when they put me back on him--to fill in for Willis--he was like a new man. All focused and motivated. He’d hide in his lab for like ten hours at a time, and we’d just have to sit outside the door and think of ways not to be bored to death.”

“You think he’s workin’ on something in there?”

“I try not to think. Safer that way.”

A loud burst of static erupted over their helmets’s comm-units, scaring the two guys half to death. Someone said something on the frequency, but they couldn’t make out more than a few words--interference, of course--and Susan walked over. They scanned the horizon, seeing the same old nothing.

“What was that all about, Albrecht? You weren’t exactly surprised…”

“You’ve never been up here for a drop-off?”

“Uh, no.”

“The skycarrier that comes once a week? It always comes today, sometime in the afternoon.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Hey, I thought you knew.”

A grey, boxy, decidedly awkward-looking skycarrier sank below the clouds. It made more noise than an earthquake, and was roughly the size of two football fields. Though both the conventional Air Force and SPUD’s more high-tech hoverfleet had been all but wiped out, several dozen skycarriers had been sitting in a city-sized underground hangar in Idaho, essentially decommissioned from active use. Though a few were designed for battle, most were for transportation of troops, equipment, supplies, and ground vehicles. The psych-torture complex mostly got the middle two of those.

“So, what do we do?”

“We give two long bursts of static to the hovertanks, followed by a short and another long. They have to be near the building for this, it’s procedure.”

After doing so, Susan went to open the roof’s docking hatch, leaving them alone. “The last time I saw my brother, it was on one of those things. He took the original Safe America contract--the one where you got a house, instead of an apartment, before they stopped offering it--and they shipped him off to Iraq. He was hoping for Venezuela or the Caspian Sea, but…”

“Well, yeah. Everybody’s getting posted to those oil-rich places. Somebody’s gotta be in charge of securing it and deciding who gets what, might as well be us.”

“I heard they’re calling it Sumeria, again. Iraq, I mean. That’s what they called it back in, I don’t know, ancient times or something. I read this book that said that a lot of important stuff happened there, way back when--they say it’s the cradle of western civilization.”

“Western?”

“Yeah, western. Anyway, it was Sumeria, it was part of these huge city-states like Babylon and Ur, it was part of a lot of empires…Persia, Britain, whatever Alexander the Great called his, and now America, I guess. It had the Tower of Babel, maybe the Garden of Eden, it was where Abraham was born, it was where the first real system of law was created, and the wheel, and writing…lots of stuff. I know the war slogan is ‘Order and Oil: Good for New America’, but, since Wertham is really religious, and Messenger is supposed to be an angel or something, and everybody’s fighting over this region that--”

“Wait, what the--”

They only saw it for a second: an orange streak that looked like a tiny comet, with a dark, dash-shaped spot near its tip. It was headed directly for the skycarrier at a high rate of speed. But instead of hitting the hull, it phased right through. A split-second later, the jetboosters in its rear exploded, the resulting wave of force knocking down the three Safe America troops on the roof and making the building sway sickeningly. The hover-engines on its underside suddenly weakened, and the craft jerked and wobbled, taking less than a second to crash to the ground. Secondary explosions went off, but the overall structure of the carrier remained intact.

“INSURGENTS!!!” Instinctively, all three drew their sidearms, which were conventional semi-auto handguns. (Only Safe America troops in more important locales got energy-weaponry.) One of the male guards darted for the alarm-box next to the rooftop entrance, breaking the glass with his gloved fist and hitting the pinball-bumper-like button. They each took a different side of the roof--since there were only three of them, one side had to be unattended--and pulled out their mini-binoculars, scanning for enemies. They didn’t see any. Nor did they after checking the fourth side.

They’d already been shouting to be heard over the carrier, but now, they had to scream at the top of their lungs, as the explosion was still ringing in their ears. “Maybe it was just a hit-and-run thing!”

“Why would they take out the carrier instead of us?!”

“Oh, god, what if they have more of whatever that--”

“Rooftop to comm, do we have approaching hostiles? Repeat: do we have approaching hostiles?” As usual, static drowned out the answer.

The hovertanks, which they’d summoned minutes before, were just now arriving. All four of them were camouflaged the same decaying-green as the remains of Kansas. They went into a standard formation, surrounding the building, aiming outwards, and sweeping their cannons right and left in a coordinated pattern. Then, without warning, their cannons swung inwards, repeatedly firing plasma shells at the base of the building. After a moment, they put more distance between themselves and the building, arcing their cannons up and firing more shells in the process.

“--hijacked!! They were--AGGH”

The bodies of two Safe America troops hit the ground…Susan had shot both of them in the back. She’d had no idea that this was going to happen, but, now that it had, it was a perfect chance to escape, and she couldn’t let them get in the way. Warning the insurgents about what she knew was her main priority. The entire building was shaking, and she kept falling over because of it. Smoke was blasting into the air from all four sides. She tried to get back inside, but the electronic lock wouldn’t work--a lockdown was in place. And the door was more than bulletproof. She put her hand on the keypad next to the lock, hoping her psychometric powers could pull the override code off of it. But nobody had ever needed to use the code, and the people who’d built and installed the lock hadn’t known it, either; it had been programmed in from a remote location. “Dammit!”

One of the plasma shells hit the retaining wall that went around the length of the roof--a chunk of smoldering metal ricocheted off the side of Susan’s helmet. As soon as it did, her powers gave her a quick overview of the wall’s history: how the alloy had been made in a foundry in Parodiopolis, how a vat of it had been shipped on a carrier, how one of the last birds in the region had landed on it, how a patient had hung onto it for dear life while being raped by a guard. It didn’t knock her out, but, she laid flat on her back for some time, dazed, staring up at the stormy grey sky. When she eventually remembered that she needed to get up, flames were everywhere. Thankfully, she had her gasmask on, and no-one had come up to discover the bodies. (For a split-second, she forgot that there weren’t any security-cams on the roof, and panicked.) After carefully running over to the side of the roof and looking down, she saw white-clad dots--mental patients--streaming out into the plains. They must’ve used the distraction to riot. Darker-clad dots swarmed around the downed carrier, it had to be insurgents raiding it for supplies.

She needed to get to them. She needed to surrender and warn them. They’d probably think it was disinformation or psychological warfare--that was Dr. Price’s specialty, after all--but she had to try, nonetheless. While she was figuring out exactly how to get off the roof, the entire building collapsed. A cocktail of fire-weakened architecture and gravity caused the floors to accordion down on top of each other, crushing the hundreds that were still in the building, and sending out a rippling ring of powderized debris each time a level was flattened. A similar chaos was going on far below. Safe America survivors shot into lunging crowds of patients and insurgents, only to be overwhelmed moments later. The fire fell in on itself and increased in strength. Many of the patients were searching for Dr. Price, desiring revenge…but his body couldn’t be found. Insurgents stole weaponry from dead Safe America troops, while patients stole their uniforms. (Wearing a hospital gown in twenty-degree weather, with a windchill below zero, wasn’t particularly pleasant.) Generally speaking, the insurgents and patients regarded each other warily, ultimately going their separate ways.

Some time later, snow began to fall on the still-burning hill of wreckage. The site was all but emptied of living beings. One lone patient continued the hunt for Price--under normal circumstances, he was barely lucid, but an odd wave of focus had swept over him. The patient was wearing a bloodstained Safe America jacket that was far too large for him, blinking at what little sunlight made it through the cloud-cover. During one of his torture sessions, one of the guards had mentioned that Price had a bunker, so he’d probably survived this. But the ferocity of the fire was preventing him from getting into many areas. Then, several dozen feet away from him, something rumbled…a room-sized chunk of concrete went flying through the air, landing on some of the many corpses that littered the area. Before the patient could worry that his brief sanity might be slipping away, there was a bizarre, high-tech noise, and a rush of wind and motion. A hand grabbed him by the throat, lifting him cleanly off the ground.

It was a strangely-dressed man on some sort of hovercycle. Both the hovercycle and its rider were covered in dull white armor, which had something of an oily sheen to it. The overall look was a cross between an alien, an insect, and a skeleton. Some of the ridges and “veins” in the suit were black. Though he was choking the patient, he didn’t seem to pay any attention to him; he was too busy silently scanning his surroundings.

“My babies…they’re gone. They’re all gone.” The rider turned to look into the patient’s eyes. “No, you’ve got one of them in you.” Mental energies tore the patient’s brain apart, as certain information was forcibly downloaded from it. After that, the rider looked over the effects his “baby” had had on the patient’s mind. “Moderately-effective doomsday seed. Have to take the subject’s resistance to the drugs into account.” He snapped his neck and dropped him right on top of Susan Albrecht’s corpse.

Like Susan, Dr. Christopher Price had three secrets. The first was something he’d initially thought of as a problem, but it had actually turned out to be his saving grace. The second was that, despite his demotion, he’d still been trying to help New America--but it had required carrying out certain experiments, which he wasn’t authorized to do. Because of how they’d been changed, the escaped patients could very well put the national security of New America at risk. Thankfully, they all had trackable microchips in their brains, and he knew he could deal with them without revealing the truth and wrecking his career. And third, Price had stumbled onto a theory that, if correctly applied, could cement New America’s power for ages to come. That theory was why he’d created this new identity for himself, and why he’d been experimenting on the patients.

No backup or assistance was coming: when Price had called for help, the administration had cut him off. He’d expected as much. They weren’t important, after all; so what if a few dozen maniacs froze to death in the plains? But Price planned on making himself vital. The Pale Horseman gunned his hovercycle and took off into the wasteland, his soul on fire with a strange breed of righteousness. With a little effort, humanity would have what he considered to be a golden age, and it was all thanks to him…



Scorched Earth #3
Building a Better Apocalypse



When it came to the intertwining personal narratives that made up life, the very concept of tragedy had been defanged. It was something that was memorialized and sanctified and put in a realm far away from the everyday world, or it was something that had its silver lining glorified and put on a pedastal, as people repeatedly stated how this would ultimately make us stronger and bring us closer together. While the former was necessary as a show of respect for the dead, and the latter was thankfully true (albeit not as much as we’d like to believe), the elephant in the room was that tragedy, obviously, shattered things, sometimes beyond repair. There were straws that broke the camel’s back, and then there were grand pianos dropped from on-high. Even before the attacks, so many people had been just barely hanging on in life--one paycheck away from bankruptcy, one breakup away from suicide, one bad day away from becoming someone unrecognizable--that a minor disaster would send them over the edge, while a major disaster would have incomprehensible effects.

Making things even worse was the fact that society had been spoiled by fiction’s familiar pattern. They believed, in those rare moments when life climaxed, when The End seemed near, that things would become clear, that events would be finalized, and that leaders would step up and put aside personal agendas. Instead, after the fact, everyone was more confused than before, a catastrophic ending had become an even more catastrophic beginning, and leaders were engaged in event-hijacking, gleefully using their newfound power to send others on grandiose, Quixote-like suicide missions of questionable purpose. In the case of America specifically, there was a feeling that things had gotten off-track…this wasn’t how we’d reacted in previous times of crisis. This wasn’t how we’d pulled together, clung to the Constitution, and put aside reactionary impulses, protecting both ourselves and innocents around the world, fighting evil without hypocricy or double-standards and ultimately winning the day. The twin turmoils of a horrible attack and a horrible reaction had knocked the entire planet off its feet.

Five and a half billion people had been killed over the span of four days, thanks to the Swarm. Needless to say, human response to this had been strong and varied. Some had become galvanized in their previous belief-system (religious or otherwise), while others had rejected it entirely. Insanity was widespread. There were people in utter denial and people who were utterly obsessed with what had happened. Doomsday cults were spreading like viruses, as charismatic leaders claimed that we’d done something to deserve it, causing people to sacrifice each other and repent so it wouldn’t happen again. Though it was no longer possible to measure these things, the suicide rate was estimated to be at just under twenty percent. Similarly-hopeless people had adjusted the best, ironically…they’d never believed that they had a future, anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a change. Their feelings about life now matched the reality; they felt they’d been right all along. And a select few acted as if everything was truly over, with their survival being a meaningless technical detail. Full extinction seemed to be a foregone conclusion.

St. Louis, Missouri hadn’t been hit that hard: one beam on the second day, one indirect beam (it had been targeting a government bunker in the suburbs) on the fourth day. Those two hits alone had wiped out the vast majority of its population and architecture, of course, but a surprising amount of the city was still standing. A nomadic tribe of roughly a thousand people were currently staying there, surviving on black-market food (Canada and Mexico’s resources were intact) and jerry-rigged water filters, to screen out the nanotech-created pollution. Shortrange wireless communication was easier, here, as the climate-bombs’s effect didn’t seem to be as strong. The remains of buildings made for good burning, so they were keeping warm in the never-ending winter. They were all in hiding, of course…anyone who wasn’t registered with either Safe America or the Labor Initiative lost their citizenship status, making them illegals and criminals. The nauseating choice between fighting in one of many dangerous wars or working virtually nonstop in horrible conditions had caused these people to stay holed up in one of the countless, seemingly haunted ground zeroes that now made up the face of the planet.

But, as mentioned, they were nomads: their destination was a bit further west. Kansas City was said to contain one of the largest free communities left on the continent, which had allegedly fought off several Safe America attacks and actually found a way to farm the land, somehow. This rumored oasis was apparently protected by several superhuman freedom fighters, the foremost among them being a modern-day legend. They’d seen his symbol, which was also his name, spraypainted on buildings from South Dakota to Louisiana, a sign that others had seen him in action in those places. They just knew that if they could get close enough to Kansas City, he’d find them and take them in. Covertly moving such a large group of people, with minimal supplies and adverse conditions, had been difficult enough…but it also required dodging Safe America patrols every week or so. Thankfully, with their various international conflicts, they were stretched thin, in terms of manpower. And their vehicles’s longrange scanners were interfered with by the unnatural, climate-bomb-induced weather.

Today, however, one Safe America contingent was more desperate than ever to find them, as they’d gotten themselves into trouble.

A convoy of several hovertanks, Apache helicopters, and half-a-dozen canopied personnel-carrying trucks (each one containing 25 troops) made their way towards St. Louis. The group was led by five airborne men in blood-red suits of armor, with black, metal-winged harnesses strapped to their torsos: Falconers, their suits’s technology derived from the suit of a now-dead government agent. Black equipment and weaponry were hooked to their bodies, and black “American Eagle” silhouettes (just the head and straight-pointing wings) covered their helmets like domino masks, with their eyes clearly seen through their helmets’s lenses. Their suits had limited superstrength and were mildly invulnerable (producing several dozen suits had been expensive, so the quality had been watered down), with weapons like lasers, mini-missiles, and forcebeams.

This group’s original task had been to guard a remote site in Texas, where Labor Initiative workers were building a warplane factory, with the aerospace engineers to be brought in after the facility was completed. Unfortunately, the Falconers had gotten drunk off of what was essentially moonshine and killed most of their workforce, the week before. (They’d only been seriously drunk for a few hours, but with the suits, a few hours was all it had taken.) They’d been lying to their superiors ever since, searching for a new group of slaves to finish the job and make up for lost time. However, there were slim pickings--the largest bastion of “free range” people they’d found had numbered just over two hundred, and that wasn’t nearly enough. (They’d planned to put them to work anyway, but they accidentally killed them in the process of capturing them.) Finding a bigger bunch meant going deeper and deeper into this insurgent-ridden country, farther away from their coastal home turf. They generally avoided this region, as they also knew of the stories about its protectors…but what choice did they have? (Well, the Falconers had a choice, but their underlings didn’t. They weren’t happy at all about this cover-up and wild goose chase, but speaking out meant ending your life, as the Falconers were still drinking like there was no tomorrow.)

The Falconers hovered alongside the choppers, looking out over the color-drained city. Grey buildings, black sky, white snow. “Anybody got anything other than static on their scanners?”

“Nope.”

“No.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Yeah, right…”

“God, I thought the weather was supposed to be better, up here. What do we do, then? Have the noncoms run a sweep-pattern?”

“Screw that, there’s still a lot of city left--it’d take forever. We’ve gotta hurry up and find some bodies.”

“Let’s just flush ‘em out.”

“Won’t work again, Tom…no dams around here.”

“No, I mean, not literally. That one runaway said there were a lot of ‘em, so they’ve gotta be hiding in a big building. I say we blow up the stuff right next to the big buildings, and see if we get a reaction.” There was a silence. “What, any of you got a better idea?”

They apparently didn’t: sixty seconds later, hovertanks and Apaches were firing warning shots at the remaining malls and half-gone skyscrapers. When a missile created a crater next to a massive high school, they heard a chorus of screams, and saw pale faces coming to the windows, only to be quickly pulled back.

“Got ‘em! Thank god…”

“Move in, move in!!”

“Wait, what do we do after they’re captured? Can they make the march back to Texas?”

“They don’t need to, we’ve got some friends on a skycarrier, they’re gonna pick ‘em up.”

The convoy approached the campus, kicking up dust and making everything shake. Ground troops left their trucks and went on-foot. Instead of running, the illegals stayed in the building, preparing for what was most likely their last stand. Hovertanks easily smashed through buildings that were in their way--in the process of going through one, they found a spotter. One of the drivers hopped out and actually chased her down, pistolwhipping her. She was in her late teens--pretty, unfortunately for her.

The driver, who was bucking for a promotion, waved up to the Falconers. “You want her?”

“We’ve got a new workforce to secure, soldier--where do you think you’re gonna put her until then?”

“I can probably stuff her in our storage compartment. Ain’t nothin’ else in there.”

“Okay, fine. And if she’s a virgin, take care of it, that always creeps me out.”

A split-second later, there was a purple blur, and the driver’s head plopped onto the ground and rolled into a ditch. The girl (now covered with his blood) was too frightened to move. She was waiting to be shot or re-captured or something equally horrible. After the most tense ten seconds of her life, she opened her eyes, realizing that nobody was looking at her. It was a miracle, like they were all hypnotized or something. She literally ran through an entire crowd of Safe America infantry soldiers, all of them so petrified that they didn’t even notice her; or if they did, then they had far larger concerns on their mind. Right before she started to head towards their fallback location, she looked over her shoulder, and understood.

He was standing on a cornice on the foremost building of the campus, blocking their path. His uniform (a single-breasted jacket and cloak, pants, gloves, boots, and a mask that covered his head and neck, but not the very top of his head, so his hair stuck out) was dark purple, while his uniform’s buttons, piping, and belt, in addition to his hair, were an almost-metallic silver. No skin showed. Two small silver letters were monogrammed on his lapel, with a line going both over and under them, like a Roman numeral: HV. The suit was made of some durable, futuristic-looking material. His eyes glowed with a silver energy. They’d all heard the conflicting origin stories…that he was the last disciple to have come from a radical sect of the Knights Templar; that he was the keeper of the modern Alexandrian Library, the contents of which had actually survived the fire; that he was the first superhero of the modern age, first appearing in the mid-30s, only to have ended up in some sort of statis, returning shortly before the invasion. The truth was far more powerful, and far more frightening. He was also known as one of the “Final Five”, the small bastion of heroes that had appeared on the last non-government TV broadcast, which showed the battle that had driven off the Swarm.

HV crossed his arms, his cloak flowing in the permanently-winter wind. “Turn back.”

The Falconers knew that they were expected to fight him…but they didn’t particularly want to take the risk of battling another super. They weren’t getting paid that much. Glaring at the choppers, one of them said, “Don’t just sit there, blow him away, for god’s sake!”

They did. Missiles rained down on the building he was standing on, sprouting orange-black clouds and creating stinging waves of smoke. A minute later, as the air cleared, HV was still there. He stood on the ground, now, untouched by the destruction. An ambiguous murmur went through the Safe America ranks.

“I’ll tell you what,” a Falconer said nervously, speaking into the convoy’s static-y shortrange frequency, “Why don’t you infantry guys help morale by proving that one squad can take down a super? We’ll hang back and get the thing on tape. It’ll be great propaganda.”

“Um…”

“Shut up and do it. That’s an order, jerkoff.”

So, a squad of twenty-five men hesitantly approached HV, getting within two dozen feet of him. He leapt into the air, flipping and landing silently, right in their midst. This caused them to panic, and they raised their weapons at eye-level, aiming at him, unsure of what to do next.

It didn’t faze him. “You don’t have to be ruled by them--I can give you your freedom back.”

They opened fire at close-range.

As part of the HV bloodline--a genetic meme that passed down through a sort of scientific reincarnation, rather than reproduction--the Greek-American Hadrian Villas (pronounced VEE-uhs) had an instinctive, intuitive knowledge of many arcane things; information and skills that mainstream humanity had long ago lost. The HVs were wise men and savants, empowered by a secret enlightenment. Ancient, powerful forms of martial arts had laid dormant in his mind and body ever since he was born, eventually coming to fruition, along with brilliance in regards to history and alchemy and healing and philosophy. However, there was one esoteric skill that he and he alone had mastery over, which he was now forced to use.

The bullets, of course, bounced right off him. HV was able to change the density, texture, temperature, and polarity of his aura--or his biometric field, as modern scientists called it--the most obvious and immediate application of which was creating an invulnerable, silver silhouette around his body. In truth, it was impenetrable 24/7, his subconscious only letting safe things filter in and out. (He’d been doing it so long, it was now automatic.) HV further altered his aura to be resistant to gravity, thus increasing his speed and strength, and he tore through the Safe America soldiers. Punches and kicks sent people flying or hit pressure-points and incapacitated or killed them on the spot. He moved faster than they could think. When they’d attempt to overpower him, he’d cause his aura to be razor-sharp, and they’d fatally cut themselves trying to grab him. He’d also reverse his aura’s magnetic polarity, repelling them and making them crash into nearby buildings. He even used his cloak (which his aura extended over) to slice off limbs, snapping it like a whip. Finally, one last soldier was pointing a weapon at him, theoretically a safe distance away.

While the man shot pointlessly, HV said, “Remember: I gave you two chances.”

HV held out a hand, magnetically yanking the gun away and catching it, then melting it in his grip. He blurred forward, grabbed the soldier by the neck, caused the temperature of his aura to drop to -200, and froze the man’s head and upper torso, ending his life painlessly and quickly. Twenty-five men in twenty seconds.

After that, the remaining Safe America troops (all 125 of them) reluctantly surrounded HV, backed up by the hovertanks and choppers. Their next order had to come from the Falconers. So, they waited. And waited. Despite the odds being on their side, the Falconers had decided that they liked being alive a lot more than being loved by their Safe America superiors. Forget the factory--they could survive on their own just fine. Unfortunately for them, they’d never get the chance.

The helicopters’s blades suddenly deteriorated, and they plummeted to the ground, exploding on contact. Something was smashing through the hovertanks, shrugging off point-blank plasma-shells. A wave of invisible, rumbling sonic force swept many of the ground troops off their feet, and into a destruction-made urban pond. Carefully-placed sniper shots took out the squad leaders. The Falconers were so surprised by this that they didn’t see HV run straight at a wall at superspeed, alter his aura to be strangely rubbery and bouncy, and then ricochet into the air, headed right for them. They just heard a rush of wind, the rustle of a cloak, and repeated invulnerable-aura-on-armor impact, turning to see HV clinging to and pounding away at one of their aerial comrades.

“GET HIM OFF ME!! GET HIM OFF ME!!!”

As they were trained to do, the Safe America troops scattered, heading into doorways or behind piles of debris. They weren’t sure about who or what had just hit them, but, being in the open wasn’t a good idea, at the moment. Hovertanks were firing and high-tech rifles were cracking. The fire from the downed helicopters was spreading, while dust was springing up from where bullets hit the ground. One group of soldiers darted into a building and smashed their weapons through the windows, setting up firing positions, while making sure there wasn’t any company in the place. It had been apparently been a clothing store of some kind. They tried not to think about the fact that they were up against what had to be multiple supers, near a huge illegal (insurgent?) camp, and soaking wet and cold. With the weather worsening, their shortrange radios were getting fuzzier. But they still had the Falconers, and there was a skycarrier coming for them, right? Or hadn’t the Falconers called it in? Could they even do it, in this weather?

The ranking officer took another look around. Unsurprisingly, most of the clothes had been looted, and there was nothing but empty racks and summer-clothing-filled crates. “We’ve gotta--okay. We’ve gotta block the doors.”

“You saw what that purple guy can do, there’s no point in--”

“Shut it, Jenkins. It’s urban warfare, we go by the book. Push some of those crates up against ‘em. Tommy, you and Steve check out the back, and block the other way in. I’m assuming there is one, anyway.”

Ten seconds later, Tommy and Steve were going through the barely-lit rear section of the clothing store. They cleared each side-room as they went; they were all empty offices or closets. “I can’t believe this. I’m gonna die fighting for the country that made my dad and my sister a slave…”

“Yeah, let’s defect and starve to death in the middle of nowhere.”

“Okay, but, after we get medals for this, I’m demanding that they--hurrk--”

Both of them fell dead, silently. Their hearts had disintegrated.

In the front of the store, the Safe America troops were firing out of every available window, alternately shooting and pulling back. Most of the time, they were shooting at the aftereffects of whatever a super had done. The captain, however, was lamely trying to help a hovertank. He kept blasting away at something that didn’t even seem to notice his attacks.

“What is that thing? Some big, black--”

Suddenly, his gun turned into powder, and then nothing. He jerked his head around, only to see that the same thing had happened to everyone else in the store. A young woman cleared her throat. They were all shocked to see what looked like a living statue: she had literally white, marble skin, which was darker white in some places than others. A tangled mop of burgundy hair sat on her head, and she wore a black leather trenchcoat, a bright, tie-dyed shirt, a braided silver belt, and black jeans with all sorts of colorful patches on them, with no shoes or socks. She looked like a cross between a goth and a hippie. Her blue eyes smiled at them, and she was incredibly beautiful, with an unrealistically-perfect body--which fit, given that she wasn’t actually real.

“Don’t look so shocked, guys…not all of us rock-monsters are hideously ugly.”

Lilith had started out as a seemingly-normal statue, an artist’s attempt at combining the beauty of both life and death. But the marble he’d used had come from an unusual source, and when the attacks took place, the substance had reacted to the biological, material, and environmental destruction. Though she wasn’t quite as superstrong and invulnerable as a certain other member of their group, she was faster than him, and her entropy powers made her even more formidable. (They worked on both organic and inorganic substances.) As such, it was easy for her to kill everyone in the room in a matter of seconds, reducing them to biological dust. Afterwards, she sighed--she didn’t like what they had to do, but, it wasn’t like they had a choice. Knocking down a wall, she walked outside, ready to help the others. (Unfortunately, she couldn’t use her ability on the Falconers’s suits, as they were charged up with any number of energies, which interfered.) Ground troops swarmed her, but she flung them aside easily, or dematerialized them.

One of the Falconers had broken off from the HV struggle, and was now using his wrist-lasers to strafe the black thing that was tearing their hovertanks apart. It was humanoid, roughly nine feet tall and resembling a medieval version of a robot. It had anvils for hands, anvils for feet, and even an anvil for a head, with no eyes or mouth or anything. The lasers were having no effect on Anvil Man, but he was shredding hovertanks like they were nothing. Lava-colored veins shone through his obsidian metal skin, but they weren’t exposed. (He was powered by a mystic furnace.) Though he was certainly effective, he was mainly being used as a decoy, to draw fire. While the hovertanks and the Falconer and the Safe America infantry were wasting ammo on him, they didn’t notice that the “illegals” were streaming out from their building. Anvil Man recognized his flying attacker as the Falconer that was going to make a sex-slave out of that teenage girl, and when he next smashed an anvil-hand into a hovertank, he flung it at the Falconer in the same motion. The tank hit him and exploded, knocking him into one of the few intact skyscrapers.

High above the conflict, four Falconers were taking on one HV. It was almost a fair fight…for them. They kept trying to get loose of him or fling him to the ground, but he twisted and swung and jumped from one to the other, essentially using them as pommel-horses. He kept his aura impossibly-sharp, forcing them to activate their own forcefields, as they were afraid of losing their limbs. But they couldn’t use their offensive weaponry, when their fields were on. His invulnerable fists and feet battered them relentlessly. They tried to remember their own training, but they were pilots who weren’t used to hand-to-hand combat, while he’d been schooled in it for the vast majority of his life. And their shields weakened with each attack. Not showing a particular amount of loyalty, three of the Falconers ditched the one that HV was currently hanging on to, deciding to win the war instead of the battle--they set off to help attack Anvil Man and Lilith. (The more they’d thought about it, the more they realized that they couldn’t just take off, the higher-ups would hunt them down and make them pay the price for their failure; they had to somehow salvage the situation.)

Then, HV saw an old man running across the battlefield. His pale skin and shoddy clothing testified that he was an illegal. A hovertank shot that had ricocheted off Anvil Man nearly hit him, sending him sprawling. The blast weakened a nearby building--debris would be hitting him in a matter of seconds. HV disengaged from the Falconer, made his aura weigh several dozen tons to get down in under a second, and then rubbery, bouncing when he landed, aiming for the old man. He wrapped him up in a surprisingly gentle tackle, moments ahead of the wreckage…his cloak furled around him, and the debris streamed off. But the Falconer turned off his forcefield, landed, and started firing mini-missiles at them from a distance. HV stood still, keeping the man underneath his cloak and easily taking the damage. A hovertank tried crashing into him at a high rate of speed, but it blew up upon hitting his aura, the dust and smoke temporarily blinding the Falconer who’d been attacking him. (His scanners still couldn’t pierce the strange climate static.)

A crazy-sounding voice came from behind the Falconer: “You’re screwing up Harmonic’s favorite country. Harmonic doesn’t like that. America is Camelot and Atlantis without the ugly endings, not 1984 with an irony overload.”

The Falconer in question--Jerry Robinson--had always believed that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. In his case, he didn’t know that, in the late 1860s, a secret society of radical Christian abolitionists had created a contingency plan, in case America ever went off the rails again, as it had in the Civil War. They wanted to create the next Great American Document, a la the Bill of Rights and Constitution, which would embody all that was good about America, and thus be able to restore reason and glory to it, in the event of another emergency. But who would be able to sell the American people on this document? Jerry didn’t know that they’d broken into the Secret Archives of the Vatican, thus finding out about the Messengers, and their mixed legacy. They decided to keep their message as unfiltered as possible, by cutting out the middleman. Jerry didn’t know that, in the 1920s, their archeologists had discovered heavenly OmniScience, which they eventually used to design a sentient signal--a message that walked like a man. This living datastream was created and uploaded to a cloaked, intangible satellite in the 1960s, until he was activated in 2 AI. (After Invasion.) Though he looked human, he was actually an angelic binary code, made up of millions of different hard-sound energy, heaven-dialect characters. (i.e, letters.) He was a literal product of the last two ‘60s--a psychadelic, counterculture American gospel that both walked and talked.

The smiling man that stood behind this Falconer was hairless and Arabic, with a digital accent, wearing a pristine white suit, a long, flowing white coat, and white wraparound sunglasses. He had a gleaming, black gun in each hand. “Time to wake up and join the 21st century, neo-Benedict. Looks like your consciousness could use an upgrade.”

The Falconer barely paid any attention to this utopian-jingo-spouting lunatic. “I’m bulletproof, moron.”

“Harmonic is killing you with information, genius.”

Streams of white, angelic hard-sound characters blasted out of the dataguns, cutting right through the Falconer’s armor and killing him instantly. Harmonic then glanced at an approaching hovertank, and a tidal wave of invisible sonic force bowled it over, turning it upside-down. He temporarily converted the old man to the same angelic binary that he was made of, teleporting him to safety, and then teleporting himself into the most explosive part of the battle. (Each time he teleported, he briefly looked like his true self: a 3-D, roughly-humanoid silhouette made of alabaster-colored angelic-language data.) Attacks went through him as if he were a ghost, and he lashed out with his dataguns and more sonic force. Then, he ran straight up a building, letting one of the hovertanks try to shoot him. It ended up collapsing the building on itself. He teamed up with Lilith to take on the Safe America troops. For someone who referred to himself in the third-person and spoke exclusively in futurist, subversive, nationalistic buzzwords, Harmonic had a surprising lack of ego and virtually no sense of self, claiming that he was just a John the Baptist who was going to help pave the way for the leader of the hopefully-upcoming America 3.0.

A few blocks away, Safe America soldiers that had nearly been killed in the explosion of a convoy truck (thanks to Anvil Man) had taken shelter in an underground garage. Stripped cars and murdered, partially-decomposed skeletons were everywhere, so they had to be careful not to trip. It was pitch-black--and their cheap nightvision goggles weren’t much help. The battle outside was shaking the garage, making cement pebbles and powder sprinkle down like precipitation. Some of the more nervous soldiers looked up.

“Uh, is it safe to be in here?”

“Gotta be safer than out there.”

“What exactly are we doing, down here? Just regrouping, so we can go back out again?”

“Yeah, right…okay, you go shoot at the bulletproof supers, or maybe the one where the bullets go right through him, and you come back and tell us how that’s workin’ out for you.”

“You don’t mean--”

“Of course I do. Look, let’s cut this naïve crap, okay? What do you think we’re gonna accomplish, if we head back out?”

“Well, um, maybe we can help the Falconers beat ‘em?”

“It’s over. I saw one of the Falconers get killed, and the others are probably dead by now, anyway. Somebody needs to survive, so command knows what happened--about the Falconers losing it, about how we got into this nightmare. I’m appointing us.”

“We should call for backup. There’s an anti-static gadget in one of the helicopters, in a black box kinda thing, I bet it survived the crash.”

“We’re out here in no man’s land, they aren’t gonna bend over backwards to save us! This isn’t even an official mission. And we sent all our reserves overseas, you idiot, so it’s not like there’s this big cavalry just waiting to be sent in. Do they pull guards away from some important facility that cost half a billion to build and send ‘em to help, or do they just let a hundred minimum-wage soldiers die?”

“No, our country wouldn’t betray us like that. Wertham isn’t as bad as--”

Short bursts of automatic gunfire interrupted the conversation, followed by the slice of metal. Explosive shells pierced their bodyarmor. The pessimistic (and unfortunately correct) ringleader of the group felt a booted foot impact his throat, crushing his larnyx. They returned fire as best they could, but, their attacker was quick and as yet unseen. One of the troops stepped on a detached limb and landed flat on his back, only panicking when his fuzzy nightvision made out the fresh blood and Safe America patches on the arm’s sleeve. Suddenly, several soldiers screamed to remove goggles, right before a few flares lit the room. They could see her, now: Japanese, in her mid-30s, with neck-length black hair. She wore an olive green Army jacket, bluejeans, a black shirt, and black combat boots. In one of her hands was a katana, in the other was a weapon that looked like a cross between a handgun and an uzi. She had an eyepatch and a fierce disposition. Akiko Masamune had been one of the top mobsters in Parodiopolis, running a high-tech cartel out of Mangatown. Now, with her native homeland destroyed, and her adopted homeland in ruins, she was simply sick and tired of pretty much everything.

They aimed their weapons at her, but weren’t panicking, as they didn’t recognize her. Some even laughed. “Relax, everybody, it’s just an insurgent. And a sexy one, too--it’s our lucky day, guys.”

One started to approach her from what he thought was her blind side, given her eyepatch. Instead, she glanced at him, and a bright blue beam fired through her eyepatch, hitting him right in the chest. For a moment, it seemed to have no effect, but then, he not-so-spontaneously combusted. While they were shocked by this, she took the opportunity to turn her sword into a mace (it was liquid-metal, the handle notwithstanding) and struck out with it, firing both her gun and her matter-accelerating eyebeam at the same time. Though she looked perfectly normal, Akiko was now a cyborg, and the near-death experience she’d had had turned her into something even more violent and dark than before. Akiko ran into the thick of them--converting her liquid-metal weapon into a katana sword once again--and maimed and fired and kicked. One of them had broken away from the main group, trying to get a line of sight on her. She used her computer-quick reflexes to somersault behind a concrete pillar, which the bullets hit, and then lashed out with shurikens, embedding them in his chest and face. Akiko was quite disappointed to see that she’d already floored the lot of them. After giving a derisive snort, she liquified her sword and retracted it into its handle, then firing it out and up in grappling-cord-form. It pulled her to the ceiling hatch she’d used to enter the garage.

Outside, a crane fell on one of the Falconers--thanks to Lilith’s entropy ability--slamming him to the ground, and giving Anvil Man the opportunity to get one good punch in. It crippled the suit, and the Falconer stumbled back, dazed and feeling ice-cold air on his face, as his helmet had cracked. Lilith was waiting for him: she punched him in the back of his head, killing him as soon as her fist made contact. Harmonic had teleported the drivers out of the last hovertank…it was good to salvage a few vehicles like that, for the insurgents. HV was attacking the three remaining Falconers in the middle of a street (he’d magnetized his aura, they couldn’t get the momentum to escape his pull, so they were groundbound and close to him), while a smattering of Safe America troops wasted bullets on him. Out of nowhere, HV grabbed one of the Falconers’s wings, freezing them until they shattered. (Their forcefield batteries had run out--they were in the process of recharging.) He then leapt into the air and did the splits, kicking the other two Falconers in the face. The Safe America troops attacking HV became empty, collapsed uniforms with piles of ash in them, while a blue beam blew up the piles of debris near the Falconers.

No longer distracted by hovertanks or sheer numbers, the heroes picked off the remaining soldiers easily enough. They then surrounded the last two Falconers, who were firing every weapon they had (lasers, forcebeams, mini-missiles), desperately trying to survive. HV gave them yet another chance to surrender--which they, of course, ignored. Harmonic then hit one in the shoulder with his dataguns, while Akiko’s matter-acceleration beam took out the other’s winged harness, the resulting explosion causing the Falconer in question to bleed from his smoking back. With the latter’s suit having a gaping hole in it, Lilith was able to turn the pilot inside to dust, while the former was taken out by a double-team from Anvil Man and HV. (Anvil Man swung and purposely missed, so the Falconer ducked right into HV’s whipped, Mercury-hot cape, slagging his suit, which in turn boiled his skin and killed him.)

The group of five scanned the battlefield, and then did a quick sweep of it, making sure their enemies were all either dead or not a threat. (HV had expanded awareness, Lilith saw the world in terms of life and death and the large middle-ground between the two, and Akiko’s cybernetic eye, underneath her patch, had special capabilities.) They gathered the bodies and divided them into two categories--alive, and not.

Harmonic looked the living ones over. “What are we doing with ‘em?”

Akiko holstered her guns and pulled out her sword, as she didn’t feel they were worth wasting ammo on. “Um, maybe this makes too much sense, but, how about making sure they don’t enslave anybody else?”

“They’re aren’t much more than slaves, themselves,” Lilith said.

Anvil Man--who couldn’t speak--nodded at that.

HV agreed. “We only kill in battlefield situations--and the battle’s over. But we can’t have them reporting back to their superiors, either. The less intel they get, the better…Harmonic, pick a country without any New American forces in it.”

“Harmonic has heard that the ice-desert of Central Korea is quite nice, this time of year.”

“Do it.”

So, the few dozen survivors were teleported halfway around the world, just as the “illegals” began streaming out of the high school, looking around warily. They’d seen most of the fight--from HV’s initial smackdown of a squadron to the final battle with the Falconers--but they didn’t have the courage or energy to cheer. Not in this America. They just seemed shellshocked and exhausted, with most of them limping or shivering or both. Most had had loved ones killed by either alien attacks or the very military that was supposed to defend them. Seeing superheroes calmly standing around after what had nearly been a disaster struck a familiar chord in them, and they felt relieved. What must have been a leader in the group pushed to the crowd’s forefront, searching out HV, trying to run despite his poor physical condition.

He arrived panting and covered in patchwork clothes, looking at them like a man might look at God. “Are you--are you--I mean, is it true? Everything they said about you?”

HV nodded. “We have a place we can take you. You’ll be safe and cared for.”

This news spread through the multitude in minutes, and as they got everything organized--making sure they were all accounted for (including the girl who’d nearly been captured), gathering up what few possessions and supplies they had, etc.--the leader asked how they were planning on getting to Kansas City.

Harmonic smiled almost glowing white, his sunglasses reflecting sky. “That skycarrier they called to pick you up? Well, right before the fun started, Harmonic kind of borrowed it…”

-----------------------------

His coming and life had been foretold by artists and dreamers and radical visionaries, as they were more in-tune with the collective unconscious than most: a New Wave drummer in London had seen his birth (with some help from a particularly eventful acid trip), which, he discovered, would take place in a special fountain, in a stone room patterned with both symbols and symbolism. The years in which he became accustomed to the information-overload in his brain were unknowingly documented by a painter living in San Francisco; she suddenly felt the urge to use excessive amounts of negative space in her paintings, a sort of visual white noise that had yet to be sorted out, while alternately creating works with rich, thick, almost claustrophobic atmospheres, giving them so much detail that a magnifying glass was needed to appreciate it all. The bodily power and ease he felt bubbled into the subconscious of a German performance artist, who, out of seemingly nowhere, felt tireless and disciplined and in perfect control of her body, in everything from her work to walking down the street to lovemaking.

A similar peak (and pique) was experienced by a famous, secretly utopian political columnist, who no longer feared neither the deadline nor the constant perfection that was expected of him. As a certain other individual doled out portentious advice on a regular basis, this columnist felt like he was an endless source of wisdom and insight, anxious for the chance to prove himself anew each day. Years later, when he (the other he) struggled to make a decision that would impact the future of civilization, an otherwise-talentless action movie director felt waves of tense, confrontational inspiration wash over him, which produced some of the all-time best war sequences in film history, even if the plot and characters written around them weren’t particularly impressive. And finally, when he reached out and felt an equal-but-opposite emptiness in both his own soul and infinity itself, it affected an artist-turned-graphic-designer who was working on a logo for a cola company…no matter how hard he tried, all the designs he came up with were complex versions of the yin-yang principle, always something that was ultimately half purple and half blue. Thinking nothing of it, he scrapped the whole thing and went back to the drawing board.

A secret society known as the Crescent Key had also been aware of what was going to happen, thanks to a quantum algorithm that combined both astronomy and astrology. They, however, were far more than unaware witnesses. Their organization had helped create modern civilization in the land between the rivers, using social magic and politics and other forms of manipulation. With some difficulty, they sought out the parents of Hadrian Villas--in fact, they arrived at their apartment only days after the Villases learned that they were going to have a son, for whom they already had a name picked out for. They were informed of the truth, and soon convinced of it, thanks to the sheer amount of evidence. After being appropriately bribed and manipulated, both were whisked off to the Crescent Key compound in the Middle-East, where Hadrian’s mother eventually gave birth, spent a few days with him, and then, regretfully, left, along with his father. This was how it had to be. They knew they weren’t equipped to raise him, given the issues he’d face in life. And they thought--or at least hoped--that their sacrifice was for the greater good. As they exited the room, robed, hooded men surrounded Hadrian’s torchlit crib, blocking it from sight entirely.

Hadrian was raised in silence…his choice, not theirs. They gave him the tests and taught him the fundamentals, jumpstarting what was already in his head. He became used to the Crescent Key’s underground lair--how it was ancient on the surface and high-tech underneath, how it had massive libraries and weapons-caches and tombs. Instead of playing with toys, he’d wander into important meetings and listen in. It was clear that he was intelligent, but his lack of communication unnerved the higher-ups: not only were they afraid that they might be wrong about his true nature, but the opposite possibility, that he was a timebomb of a superhuman, was equally scary, as he seemed unimpressed with their indoctrination, and might prove impossible to control. They soon found him experimenting with alchemy and other ancient sciences; bringing mostly-smashed bugs back to life; using crayons to draw table-sized pictures of historical events that even they had no awareness of. Then, on his seventh birthday (a powerful number), Hadrian, eating silently as usual, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and spoke:

“I know what I have to do. I’ll need thirteen years to prepare. Until then, you have me at your disposal--please, make the most of it.”

From there on in, he was like a Dalai Lama, his every word recorded and obsessed over by a secret group of Crescent Key philosophers whose lives consisted of interpreting his remarks. The most important men and women in the world sat at this child’s feet, as he imparted several milennia worth of wisdom. Since he was busy preparing for his task, he had a limited amount of time to just sit around and talk, so even fifteen minutes with him was ridiculously expensive--the Crescent Key put the money to good use, of course. But some of the people he gave advice to were quite questionable, or at least they wanted help in achieving questionable things. They weren’t happy when Hadrian told them that if they continued down a certain path, they’d ruin themselves, if not others. Two or three years later, the smart ones would come back…they’d been destroyed in one form or another, and were now ready to actually listen to what he had to say. (The dumb ones blamed others and kept trying.)

Likewise, instead of educating and training Hadrian, his Crescent Key father figures found that they were the ones being schooled. Whenever they’d try to (benvolently or otherwise) influence or control him, he’d simply smile, making it obvious that he saw right through it, and either agree and phrase it in a far more eloquent way than they had, or show why they were wrong in a way that was so powerful that they couldn’t disagree. He repeatedly assured them that he appreciated their support and hospitality, just as he loved the parents he’d never really met, but the thing that had truly created him was his bloodline, and he let nothing distract him from being about its business. Still, the Crescent Key disciples thought they had things to offer him--for instance, they brought in other children, hoping to help him learn to socialize. He wasn’t particularly good at this, but, it wasn’t entirely his fault, as his world was so different from theirs. (And though he was far superior to them in terms of intellect, he always treated them as equals.) Getting him to relax was impossible. Instead of sleeping, Hadrian would be up all night writing lengthy essays about wars that had been forgotten, ancient cultural trends and patterns, and theories on the nature of the HV bloodline itself.

If the normal human body was a temple, then Hadrian’s body was a neverending tomb on the scale of the pyramids, thanks to the long-dead ideas and skills that resided in him. His physical abilities came about because of self-discovery, rather than being trained by someone else. This side of him really kicked in as he became a teenager--he was suddenly faster than any Olympic runner, able to outfight masters, capable of increasing his awareness to a point that would have induced an aneurysm in any normal human. Though he experimented with many different weapons, both traditional and high-tech (including combinations of the two), he ended up taking a radically different approach to the subject, by rediscovering a certain ancient aura technique, which had only been mastered by two others, in a time when the global population was still under ten million. Though he knew how to weaponize his alchemy research, the only extra object he felt he needed on the battlefield was a cloak, which could act as both a shield for others and a weapon, thanks to his aura.

His original plan had been to continue the work of the HVs: using what he knew and what he could do to strengthen humanity, and fighting those who chose ignorance and fear over knowledge and reason. The HV line was more about being a wise man than a warrior, offering guidance and expertise to both those who needed help and those in a position to positively affect a situation, such as groups of superheroes. Sometimes, that required obvious action, but usually, it involved behind-the-scenes work that very few people would ever notice. Hadrian, however, would be doing his work in a different way. During his time of theorizing about the HV bloodline, he’d come to an insight that, at first, seemed like a stroke of genius…only it led to a realization that seemed completely insane, even if it had to be true.

The actual origin and purpose of the bloodline was, quite simply, still unknown. There were many theories, but nothing concrete. The consensus was that the collective unconscious wasn’t willing to let certain powerful ideas become extinct, so it regurgitated them, en masse, in individuals. Having studied history extensively (in addition to simply knowing much of it from birth), Hadrian came to a slightly different conclusion…he saw and learned that the HV skillset had its origins in a number of truly-ancient societies, with some being briefly-lived utopias, and others being flawed, but having one near-perfect institution, which the bloodline somehow ended up borrowing from. Hadrian had come to believe that the HV line might be history’s way of assembling, over time, a patchwork heaven on earth, slowly gathering the pieces and presenting them as an unfinished puzzle. It was a sort of ultimate natural law, a collective race-memory that held the key to what could be the greatest civilization ever. And if one person could remember it, why not many? Why not everyone?

The idea was optimistic, and arguably reasonable, considering their bizarre world. But its implications were anything but. Hadrian had to believe that something was interfering, keeping the genetic meme from becoming widespread. Maybe the reason it was so strong in him was because it was being repressed in everyone else. As he looked around the world from his distant perch, he realized that every civilization had either failed or was in the process of failing. Manmade law simply didn’t work…in many cases, it even made things worse. But the HV natural law was another matter entirely. You couldn’t legislate morality or institutionalize the best parts of life, but personal experiences (such as being an HV) were far more powerful and lasting. Inch by inch, Hadrian decided that the only way for wisdom to rule was to get the interference out of the way…namely, mankind’s faulty, artificial governments and institutions. Anarchy had to clear the way for a more perfect, personal order. If humanity wasn’t poisoned by ideas that had never been successful, letting things get worse as they hoped the status quo would eventually prove its merits, the race-memory of these various utopias would surely wash over the collective unconscious. Not as powerful as it was in Hadrian, but enough to save the world, he hoped. Instead of external order (the concept of government) and internal chaos (the human soul), there’d be internal order, and thus no need for any external order. It would be the ultimate enlightenment, the biggest leap of faith in human history.

But, before he ever got the chance to jump, the Swarm beat him to the punch.

That, of course, was why Hadrian could never tell anyone the truth: he was only helping the insurgents because, once the New American government (the last truly-powerful one on Earth) had been knocked off, he planned on doing whatever it took to stop them from replacing it with a new one, so his “HV World” theory could have time to work. Though he hated to think it, the Swarm might have helped humanity in addition to hurting it, by destroying what was already broken…unless he was wrong, in which case he was pretty much bringing about the end of civilization itself for no reason.

At first glance, Kansas City looked like most other cities, after the attacks. It was now an ash- and debris-filled crater, somewhere between one and two dozen miles wide, with a saturnine ring of urban and suburban structural skeletons…this halo seemed likely to slide off its shaky ground and into the deep hole at any moment. The sky was darker, in this part of the midwest, and the weather was worse than in St. Louis. Snow blasted down full-force, as gusts in excess of a hundred miles per hour knocked over hollowed-out buildings. But even if the weather had been calm and the air crystal-clear, it would have been easy to miss it--a flat patch of relatively undamaged buildings, on the edge of the crater. It was a worn-down industrial neighborhood, full of warehouses and garages (for both repair and underground parking) and refineries and even a seed and grain storage facility. They sat in fenced-in asphalt lots, with ramps, multiple garage-style doors, and huge, locked squares ten feet off the ground, for semis to back their trailers into. Men and women in dark winter clothing patrolled the grounds, clutching handguns or rifles.

In this case, the industrial area was just the tip of the iceberg…a network of tunnels connected the buildings, which were less buildings than fortified entrances to an underground world. Remodeled sewers and hand-dug tunnels all linked up, leading to several thousand (usually apartment-sized) rooms, spread out both horizontally and vertically. Building it had taken three and a half years, with thousands of people working seven days a week. But when your only other option was to freeze in poorly-insulated aboveground buildings, filled with more people than they could hold, you had motivation to work constantly. Of course, the surviving citizens who’d gathered in Kansas City had had help. In 1 AI, Hatman had made the decision to send groups of heroes to other parts of New America, branching out their efforts. HV had been put in charge of the region that most now called “Central America”, or just Central. When the heroes had found them, they were just a few thousand strong, living off of canned goods and what few animals were left. Cannibalism seemed to be just around the corner. But they’d helped them plan and build their tunnel-city, in addition to giving them a few other essential things.

For example, the rooms had wiring, and a few even had plumbing. They had an average of ten hours of electricity per day, in addition to a very limited amount of heat and hot water. This was thanks to the endless power-supply known as Anvil Man--or rather, the so-called “infinite furnace” in his chest cavity. Akiko had provided a sort of intangible IV, which hooked to a device that translated his molten energy to electricity, which in turn went to a supply of generators. How much power they had depended on how long Anvil Man was able to just sit around and be hooked up to their system, every day. If the heroes were away--scouting, fighting for an extended period of time, etc.--they had to tap into their reserves or just do without. And as for food, Lilith’s entropy ability had a flipside: she could grow bizarre fruits and vegetables that seemed to be from some sort of gothic afterlife. (She could also make exotic non-food plants, and she’d actually decorated the entire place with them, as they thrived in the nocturnal conditions.) They had to buy their meat from the black market, however, and it was unclear as to where they got the funds for that.

So, some tended Lilith’s haunted-looking, cavern-bound trees and fields, while others were maintenance workers, toiling to keep their primitive technology going. But their main need was for soldiers. HV and Akiko selected and trained a smattering of lieutenants, who in turn trained guards and other fighters…though barely any of them had any previous police or military experience, their training-level was surprisingly high. (Small numbers were the main factor in this--the training couldn’t get too diluted, as there was only only degree of separation between the masses and the masterminds.) HV also coordinated what little medical personnel they had, helping them teach others how to heal through both conventional and unconventional methods. And finally, he set up a very basic school-system, letting Harmonic--whom the kids loved--instruct classes in “True America”, while others taught them reading, math, science, etc. Akiko was their organizational genius, helping to create an administration infrastructure--someone had to oversee the transport and distribution of food and water, the guarding and maintenance and teaching schedules, the building, the operation of the well, the power-process, etc.

Now, there were around 11,000 of them, all hunkering down in an ever-expanding labyrinth. Though most of it had been manmade, it intersected with large caverns and even an underground river. No-one above the age of fourteen was just standing around and doing nothing. Wheelbarrows and shopping carts full of supplies were being pushed around--winter clothes, sleeping bags, wood and concrete from damaged or destroyed buildings, and pink insulation wrapped in plastic. Guards that looked more like accountants and grandfathers leaned against walls, with rifles hanging from their shoulders. Men and women lugged plastic jugs of water up from below. They were busier than usual, as a thousand new citizens had arrived last last night…they’d slept on tightly-packed cots and mattresses in the parking garage’s multiple levels. Though new rooms were constantly being added for just such a hopeful occasion, they’d only be able to house about a third of them underground, immediately. The rest would have to stay in the newly-insulated garage until the latest round of expansions were completed. But with another seven or eight hundred people working (not counting kids), they’d be able to finish it ahead of schedule.

Two people were walking through one of the “crosscaves”, which connected various areas to each other. Compared to how claustrophobic most of the place was, the crosscaves were expansive…enough to fit a few dozen people in. Anne Taylor had been a sporting goods company CEO, before the invasion--now, this blonde fortysomething was the elected head of their local government, which HV had designed. (Ironic, of course, but he had to stay in-character.) Each region of the labyrinth got to choose a representative to speak for them on the council, which decided the various issues that came up each day. The young man she was walking with was tall and lean, with no visible aura or shiny silver hair…it was now black, and he had olive skin. Hadrian Villas always wore black, lightweight, short-sleeved clothing, as he didn’t need anything to keep him warm, thanks to his perpetual forcefield. (Others needed the winter attire far more than him.) He was soft-spoken and overly-serious, looking too young to be a leader, let alone a legend.

Ignoring the “Hey, is that him?” looks that people kept sending their way, and studying her clipboard, Anne said, “We ran out of room in the freezers, so we had to put some of the meat aboveground, on the top floor of the refinery’s office. With half the roof missing, keeping it cold won’t be a problem. But it’ll take forever to drag it down to the freezers, once we clear up some space--not really a good long-term solution.”

“Do you need Harmonic to find another freezer? There are still some nearby restaurants he hasn’t tried…”

“No, we can get by, for now.”

“Where are we on checking out the new arrivals?”

“Your docs got through about a quarter of ‘em before they had ‘em get something to eat. For the most part, it didn’t look like anything too serious. A few sprains, the usual colds, some pregnancies...”

“Speaking of which, any progress on the maternity ward?”

“No, the builders keep getting interrupted with other stuff. We had a minor cave-in in the east wing, and now we have to start branching out even more, to hold the new people…”

“We’ll need the scroungers to go on another bed-raid--we barely had enough extras to hold the St. Louis crew.”

“What, another thousand, you think?”

“At least, yeah. Call me an optimist, but, I think we’ll be able to bring more people in from the cold.”

“Any ideas on where to get ‘em?”

“There are some suburbs that haven’t been looted, over in Joplin, and there used to be a mattress warehouse in Topeka, from what Glasser has told me.”

She nodded, jotting it down on her clipboard. “The council’s been fighting about food-distribution, again…the builders in the southwest wing want extra rations, because of how much trouble they’re having with the structural-supports. They deserve it, and they need it if they’re gonna stay healthy, but the council is afraid that other people will get jealous and--”

“I’m sure the council can figure something out.”

“Yeah, but it’ll take us a week, and it’ll be some compromise that doesn’t make anybody happy…whereas you could pull a King Solomon and figure out the perfect solution in five minutes.”

“Anne…”

“C’mon, I had to try.”

“It’s just like I told you when we were first starting out--the Lair Legion, or whatever you want to call us, can’t be in charge. The regular humans have to elect their own government, and we’re just here to help and advise.”

“So, your advice would be…?”

Hadrian sighed. “Set up an extremely specific policy, one that explains when citizens can get temporary extra rations. Only in certain circumstances. Pregnancy, sickness, extra work, that kind of thing. The builders will qualify for a while, and then not.”

“That way, they can’t accuse us of playing favorites or being unfair…”

“Exactly, because you won’t be.”

She went back to looking at her clipboard. “Akiko is guest-training the 3rd division, today--showing ‘em how to use explosives.”

“Oh, god…”

“Don’t worry, she’s doing it outdoors. At least, that’s what she told me.”

“I’ve got the 10th, in hand-to-hand combat, in a few hours.”

“You should’ve seen the looks on everyone’s faces when you flew that skycarrier in. They knew it was you, but, geez…that’s like Christmas in, uh, whatever month it is, now.”

“It’s July. Not that you can tell.”

“You got rid of the transponders and the other tracking-tech in it, right?”

“Yeah, and Akiko and I gave it the once-over after that, too, just in case.”

“Do we need a guard detail for it?”

“We changed the keycodes and the override codes, so, it should be okay, even if--by some miracle--they find it.”

“And where exactly did you hide it, anyway? Thing’s huge, and it’s not like we have a lot of extra space lying around…”

“Need-to-know only, sorry. If anything happens to us, don’t worry; the scroungers know where it is. They’ll start using it next week.”

“Annoyingly secretive as usual. Fair enough. Well, it’ll make transportation a lot easier for the scroungers. Instead of trips lasting for days, and only being able to carry a little at a time, they can get the whole thing in one quick shot. What about fuel for it?”

“Akiko can configure it to feed off of Anvil Man’s power, just like she did with the trucks.”

“Will he need some extra seat time?”

“Unfortunately, yeah, but we were already headed in that direction. The power-grid just keeps expanding. I talked to him, he seemed to be fine with giving an extra hour per day. I think he’s over there, now, actually.”

“Um…about Anvil Man…”

“Yeah?”

“How much do we know about him?”

“Well, he’s loyal, if that’s what you’re asking. Sorceress did some kind of mystic check on him, before we left Gothametropolis. Nice guy, really. Just showed up one day and started helping us out. No idea what made him switch sides, though.”

“This isn’t anything important, but, uh…is he gay? I just ask because I thought I saw him checking out Harmonic’s a--”

“Um--”

“I’m not making this up, I swear.”

“He doesn’t even have eyes, how could you tell what he was looking at?”

“Well, his head was kind of co--uh, tilted in that direction. And he can obviously see and hear somehow.”

“I’ll take that question to mean that we don’t have any more serious business to discuss.”

“Your girlfriend’s a statue, and her face doesn’t crack when she laughs…I’m sure yours wouldn’t, either.”

“Very funny.”

“I thought so.”

While they’d been talking, they’d been going through former sewer tunnels, up steps that had been carved out of natural stone, across wooden ramps that had child-high railings, and around cobbled-together support columns. Most of their underground city was quite tight and hard to move around in, with the occasional wide-open room or cavern that was used for some public function. They’d passed Harmonic, who’d been preaching about the space race and the now-unfortunately-dead American Ingenuity, his audience children under the age of five who’d never seen the moon, thanks to the dust-choked atmosphere, and thus could only imagine it. Guards occasionally saluted, though they were by no means required to. Parka-clad technicians worked on power cords that were duct-taped to a cobblestone ceiling. They ended up at an art class that Lilith was teaching--she was creative in many different ways. In truth, the main purpose of the class was to give people a chance to unwind, rather than actually draw. Hadrian had always said that spending a half-hour with her would make you forget that the world had arguably ended.

“You don’t visit her much when she’s at her farm,” Anne commented.

“Yeah, I still can’t get used to thinking of her that way.”

“Is there some rule that says farmers can’t wear thongs?”

The classroom itself was a stone-brick affair, with easels and stools that had backs on them, just like chairs. Her students ranged from age eight to eighty, all clad in sweaters, thick jackets, stocking caps, earmuffs, and jeans, with long underwear underneath. As always, Lilith’s unusual style shone through…she wore black leather pants and a tight, rainbow-colored top. (Short-sleeves--like Hadrian, she didn’t feel the cold.) She was clearly happy and relaxed, painting abstract things that somehow combined into a recognizable (if skewed) form of reality. Upon seeing him, she smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Class, Hade. Hade, class. You may have heard of him.”

Hadrian got the uncomfortable look he always did, when being regarded by others--he’d never been comfortable with the public’s idea of him. They held him up to be some sort of charismatic, rebellious uber-leader…whereas he’d had very little interaction with normal people, and been trained to act mainly in a private, advisory capacity, rather than a public, commanding one. Plus, his secret made things even more complex. His plan hadn’t just involved bringing down corrupt individuals in governments, it meant taking down the entire global structure, good or bad, using any means necessary. Innocent people would surely have died. He’d been ready to be thought of as a villain, but because of how the Swarm had changed the circumstances, he was a hero, at least for the moment.

“Glasser said you wanted to see me…”

Lilith gave him a “This is something we need to talk about in private” look, which Anne noticed. “I have a council meeting in twenty, so I should start heading that way. And with Kyle’s new girlfriend, well, I can only take so much young-couple-cutesiness per day.”

After she was gone, Lilith dismissed the class. Small children walked by Hadrian, proudly holding up whatever they’d drawn--not because of who he was (they were too young to recognize him), but because they wanted to show off to a grownup. As the people filtered out, one girl hung back, in the rear of the classroom. She was dark-haired, petite for her age, and painfully thin. Her clothes were in horrible shape. Hadrian’s first thought was that she didn’t look like one of their own citizens…none of them were in good shape, but, they had at least two meals a day, and better clothes than that.

Lilith waved her closer and closed the door, which was more of a slab. “This is Chrissy. She’s one of the St. Louis people we just brought in.”

Hadrian did a double-take. The newcomers were exhausted and in need of food and water; they needed rest, not walking clear across the city. “Why aren’t you eating with everyone else?”

“She didn’t want to,” Lilith answered, just forcefully enough for Hadrian to know that she had a good reason for this. “Chrissy, tell him what you told me.”

Her voice was weak, as if she’d been screaming a lot, recently. “Well, see, m-my brother was caught in a Labor Initiative sweep, last year. They put him to work in San Diego. I guess he ticked off some government guy or something, ‘cause they sent him to the ‘hospital’ here in Central.”

“The one bandits took out, right.” (While the New American government classified all “non-loyal” citizens as insurgents, in truth, there were many different kinds, with Old America nationalists, bandits, territorial tribes who warred with each other, foreign fighters, black-marketers, and so on.)

“Yeah. And last week, he came driving into our camp in a stolen jeep--St. Louis is where our parents lived, so after the attacks, we both went there. That’s where they caught him in the first place. Anyway, uh, when we met again, he was really different…I think they made him crazy.”

Hadrian nodded. “That’s what they do, unfortunately. I’m sorry.”

“He just, he couldn’t stop talking about this idea he had. He was convinced that the aliens were gonna ram asteroids into the planet or something.”

This wasn’t particularly unusual. Many had simply gone insane in response to the end of civilization as they’d known it, and become “doomsday prophets” of sorts, unable to stop reliving a fictional, apocalyptic moment. While this came from a different cause, it certainly seemed similar.

“A few days ago, he got killed. By one of y--by a super, I think. His head was, um…” She’d begun shaking violently, her face frozen and emotionless, but with tears streaming down nonetheless. Lilith put an arm around her.

“He was decapitated, but bloodlessly. Some kind of energy-weapon,” Lilith finished for her.

“It was like these two black stumps. It was--it w--oh, god…”

Hadrian didn’t immediately understand why Lilith had called him over here for this. While this sort of murder was tragic, it was also common, even considering that a superhuman of some kind was involved. They’d obviously do everything they could to track down the perpetrator, but the way Lilith was acting, it was like--suddenly, Hadrian’s mind sorted through the plethora of intel they received on a daily basis (which included a ton of bizarre sightings and incidents), making the connection.

“The Iowa tribe. One of the doomsday prophets. Last month, same MO.”

“Exactly. Glasser thought he was that way because of the attacks, but it’s not like they could do an autopsy. He might’ve been from the same hospital.”

Chrissy blinked through her tears. “Wh--? He wasn’t the only one they killed? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Hadrian told her. “But I plan on finding out.”

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Follow-Ups:

* SE #3, continued in here... - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:44:55 pm EDT * Continued, again... - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:46:51 pm EDT * Still continued. - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:48:10 pm EDT * God help me, there's more. - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:50:15 pm EDT * Last one! Yay! - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:51:37 pm EDT * Great stuff. Here's hoping for a sequel, spiritually if not chronologically.... (no text) - Nitz the Bloody - Sun Aug 21, 2005 at 09:25:36 pm EDT * This seriously just made my year. I'll get right on this. - anonymous - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 11:28:21 am EDT * You do that, slacker. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:34:57 pm EDT * And, if you want to reply, you can reply to this post, just for simplicity's sake... (no text) - Finny - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:53:14 pm EDT * Hey, what a cute surprise!!!... (no text) - Yo - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:39:38 pm EDT * Alas, it's not as cute as you, Yo. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:02:23 pm EDT * You forgot to mention sexy. - anonymous - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:26:22 pm EDT * Give me some time to print this out and digest this. And I hope this means you're sticking around. :) (no text) - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 04:28:24 am EDT * I'll be sticking around if the tree-spirits don't kill me for causing everyone to waste all that paper... (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:00:27 pm EDT * I'm afraid if I start to read, I will be unable to stop, and thus miss my plane, so shall wait to read this when I return home. (no text) - Al B. - Thu Aug 18, 2005 at 06:37:05 pm EDT * Very good. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:58:00 pm EDT * So, FALL. - anonymous - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 04:20:18 pm EDT * Thanks, of course. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:57:01 pm EDT * It'll take me seven years to read all this, but it's good to see 'ya in any regard. ;) (no text) - G-Eyed - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 03:09:29 pm EDT * *cracks whip!* (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:52:42 pm EDT * This board does have an Edit feature you know. :) (no text) - Anime Jason - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 09:35:40 am EDT * Compared to the amount of words, I think I had relatively few typos...granted, I don't use spellcheck, as it doesn't like my various made-up words. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:48:52 pm EDT * Welcome back, Finster. Stick around. (no text) - Dancer - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 08:45:20 am EDT * My favorite cheerleader! *ducks, runs away* *nt* (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:45:35 pm EDT * I detected some slight political satire in the first two parts of this story. (no text) - killer shrike will finish the rest tomorrow - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 09:28:30 pm EDT * *looks around innocently* (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 09:42:37 pm EDT * It's good to have you posting again! Welcome back! (no text) - ag - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 07:52:19 am EDT * It's good to be back. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:32:50 pm EDT * First Impressions - HH - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 06:53:55 am EDT * Re: First Impressions - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:29:19 pm EDT * Yeah, okay. So where's FALL? - Nats - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:08:22 am EDT * Four times the nipplage, I say! (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:15:02 am EDT * That's very, very, very, very, very long. (no text) - Visionary - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:07:12 am EDT * It's quite short, really. Only 160some pages in Word. For me, that's a short story. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:16:08 am EDT * So long as you're pacing yourself. Anyway, an interesting tale... - Visionary - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 10:53:13 am EDT * I could describe that scene too, dammit! (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:30:57 pm EDT * Holy crap, I'm a bum right now and I don't know if I have time to read this! :) I'll get to it tomorrow...sometime (no text) - Hatman - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:05:08 am EDT * No rush, obviously--I don't expect anyone to be as obsessive as I am and get through it quickly. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:17:11 am EDT

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