Writing Prompt Responses

[Bag o Fruit]

Miles peeled off I-695 onto North Point Boulevard, going a leisurely 50mph, when he noticed the police cruiser in his rearview, the unattractive white chassis and dormant lights on the roof signaling all the calm threat of a wasp which has landed a few inches from one’s hand. He grunted, downshifting from fifth to fourth to drop his speed gradually down to the limit without flashing brake lights. Let the cop think he hadn’t been made. Just an ordinary citizen, dropping out of highway mode at a normal pace for a busy Thursday afternoon. There there, Mr. P’licman. Just l’il ole me, never make no nevermind for you. Shhzhsh. He smiled and made a gentle right hand turn onto Bethlehem. The cop stayed firmly behind him. Not too close, but not far enough for comfort. Before long, another cruiser turned left out of Wharf Road and followed behind the first. It did not escape Miles’ notice.

That tears it. Won’t be making it to class today after all. “Ready girl?” he murmured, and she growled a low and throaty assent in reply. Popping down to second gear, she roared and leapt forward. Quickly and smoothly he brought her up through third fourth and fifth, hitting ninety by the time the lights went on behind him. He held ninety. Let them get close. One came up alongside while the other hugged their bumper. Ten seconds. Twelve. Impossibly close to the 695 northbound ramp, they braked hard and drifted around the corner, peeling up grass on the left shoulder before getting tires back on the pavement.

Back in third, he babied her up the ramp at just over forty miles an hour. Impressively, the cop on his tail actually avoided bumping him and made the turn without wiping out. Closing distance fast, sirens blaring and yelling something unintelligible over his PA. The hornets were angry. The other cop was backing up fast and spun out like a pro to bring the nose around for the ramp just a few hundred yards behind.

Miles smiled faintly. Then the concrete barrier ended, and they made a sweeping U-turn into oncoming traffic. Rush hour commuters laid on their horns and swerved unpredictably left or right to avoid them. They weaved back and forth with the grace of a boxer dodging wild haymakers. The cruisers behind them did not do so. The passing cars, some now ruined against the median and all thoroughly in shock, created an impassible maze for the police.

Miles giggled happily, just the cheerful side of maniacal. There was no way he’d get as far as the Key Bridge though, and even if he did, being 200 feet off the harbor would limit options. Pulling a hard left, he smashed through a joint in the guardrail a hundred feet before the Peninsula Expressway overpass. He winced in pain as her paint job was ruined. In sympathetic reaction, his ribs bruised spontaneously and his left arm began to bleed freely from a nasty abrasion.

Together they scampered merrily down the grass slope, dodging bushes and small trees. They burst through a stand of dogwood trees, raising welts and scratches everywhere as well as a mild allergic reaction. Skidding to the left to avoid the guardrail, they skewed around to the right and back onto Bethlehem drive. Not for long. Quickly and calmly, as if they were the most law-abiding pair in the city, they turned onto the expressway, passing the point of no return just before spotting a roadblock in the last stages of set up about 600 feet ahead.

“What the hell did I do?” he muttered. This kind of fire, in his experience, was usually reserved for bank robbery, not grand borrowing automobiles. Unfortunately for the cops, they had set up within sight of the flat patch after passing under 695. Not only was there no guardrail, there were the remains of an access road, choked with weeds but still sound, that led across to the interconnection ramps between the expressway and 695 south.

Another couple of shocked commuters and a quick U-turn and he was back on the expressway, north of the roadblock. By the time he could see the confused police behind him, he was already nosing up towards a hundred miles per hour, giving him a comfortable and rapidly growing lead. Fearing further blocks on the bridge over Bear Creek, he slowed slightly for a long sweeping turn onto Reservoir Road. A two-lane secondary road, it was lined with foliage which would help to cover against the possibility of helicopter surveillance (which he was beginning to worry they might actually have). It was also, of course, a dead end. Unlikely they’d have road-blocked it. But what they forgot was that it was just across the railroad tracks from Grays Road.

Once he’d sped down Reservoir, slipped through a gap in the barriers to the long-neglected railroad, and came out on Grays on the other side, he began to relax a little. There was no sign of cops ahead of him, none behind him. He couldn’t even hear sirens, and the foliage cover was still thick. Up ahead was another railroad bed, which he could easily drive down, and which led to a parking lot where he could trade out his current ride for something shiny and new. It looked like smooth sailing from here on out!

But as he neared the turn for the railroad, they felt an instinctual fear. It shivered up from the wheel wells, through Miles’ spine and into his scalp. It was the fear of a rabbit, sensing the downdraft of a hawk. And before he had time to react, the hawk landed, with a THOOM, on the hood of the car. A man in a tech suit, with some kind of wing attachments spread wide, knelt on his mewling engine block. He peeled back the lid, pointed his electrically charged wrist downwards, and declared with megaphone intensity: “Stop, or I fry the engine.”

Miles braked as hard as the tires would allow, but of course the man easily maintained his grip. Fearful for his friend, he raised both his hands off the wheel and willed her to cut the engine. Quietly he said: “Please don’t hurt us anymore.” He rubbed his sternum gingerly, and with one hand applied as much pressure as he could stand to his clavicle, to stanch the fresh flow of blood from a small incision .

The metal-clad man reached into a compartment on his thigh with one hand, and produced a pair of handcuffs. “Miles Adam Prior, you have the right to remain silent…”

Spoiler

 

[Bag o Fruit]

This is your only warning. The note read. Should you open this box, what is inside becomes your problem. Chris read it carefully, again. What the fuck?

He tested the weight of the box. Even he couldn't tell what was inside. He considered shaking it, but, what if it was a bomb or something? He set the box down on the ground where he found it, took a few steps back, and watched it. He crossed his arms, then wrapped his thumb and forefinger around his chin.

Maybe it was a prank. Maybe it was a weighted box, with nothing inside. Or maybe it was some supervillain's idea of a prank and there was a jar of fucking anthrax inside or something. Or...

"Should you open this box, what is inside becomes your problem." Alright. That must mean it was something that needed tending to. Something with responsibility behind it. Something someone could leave behind, but that someone who came across it could never... No. There absolutely was not a baby in there. He would have been able to tell. Probably.

He threw up his hands. Whatever it was, the note wasn't likely kidding. It would be his problem once he opened the lid, and if he already had enough of anything, it was problems. He stuck his hands in his hoodie pocket and kept walking.

After all, there wasn't anything living in there. He'd have been able to tell.

Probably.



Cursing himself, he came back down the street, took a deep breath, and opened the lid.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

With a blindfold and noise-canceling headphones, Miles was taken on such a circuitous route that he wasn’t quite sure which block of the city he was in. But he did have it narrowed down to three. He was taken from the vehicle by two men, marched into an elevator and taken to a room where he was forced into a chair. One of the men unobstructed his senses while another handcuffed him to a rung on a table in front of him, and both of them left the room.

The AC in the building was more than a little extreme and the room felt like a meat locker, which made him think of Alexa. He imagined zer slipping under the door and rising up behind him with that cat-like stretch ze always made when retaking solid form. Draping zerself over him with a sardonic comment like “Probably too late to apply for a blue card now, lover boy. You bucked the system, now you’re in the system.”

He shivered, hunched into himself. He’d been in the system before. They were not as bad as gangs at any rate. Nothing to do now but wait.

Across the table was another chair, and a television was mounted in the right corner of the wall he was facing. A news channel, covering a debate. A stuffed suit and a stuffed pantsuit jawing at each other ineffectually. The television was muted, but captioned by black boxes with white text, lagging increasingly behind the actual conversation. Miles, however, was able to read the speakers' lips, ignoring the distracting and frequently badly autocorrected captions with some difficulty.

Doesn't anybody remember facility one-ten, the suit rhetorically opined. A building we made, and filled up with weapons of mass destruction… we built this in our nation's capital, taxpayer money- the camera cut to the pantsuit as she clarified that Facility 110 was in Maryland, thirty miles from DC, but it was clear that the suit was still talking over her, and now they were in split screen and the lower third identified them as Senators Taylor and Mulhern.

It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, Taylor was mouthing, gesturing dismissively toward the woman across from him as if she were the personification of abstract nonsense.

“What an asshole.” Miles muttered.

Taylor’s lips kept flapping. Bleeding-heart supers and- and sweaty comic book nerds took taxpayer money to make another building to house weapons of mass destruction… in a populated American city, and now we're shocked that it exploded, killing- how many people? How many hundreds of people died?

The camera cut back to Mulhern, appalled, saying no one, no one died, twenty-five people were injured but thanks to the actions of registered blue-card holders-...

-not what I heard. That's not what I heard. That's not what I heard. You know, taxpayers- you know, the money already pays for our prison system…

“Well let us all go then. Letting us go is free. So to speak.” Miles smiled faintly at his own joke. Alexa would have laughed at it. He sighed wistfully, torn between wishing ze would waltz in here to keep him company and simultaneously very grateful ze was far away and safe.

He made himself as comfortable as he could in the hard plastic chair, splayed out his arms around the chain anchor on the table, lay his head on his left arm and closed his eyes. Enough from Senator gofuckyourself and Senator sputteringprotestations. Politics was plenty depressing enough without having to listen to the bastards talk.

A few minutes went by, during which time the temperature seemed to drop even further, until the door opened behind him. Two men, not the ones who had escorted him in but nearly indistinguishable, walked in and stood to either side of him. After them a smaller man, thin, pale and angular, with a head of dark hair in tight curls, walked slowly around the table, reading from a tablet. As he sat down in the chair opposite Miles, he began.

“Miles… Adam… Prior…” Finally he looked up from his tablet and into Miles’s face. He had impressed expression on his face, looking almost fatherly, but there was a dead and predatory element in his eyes. “You’re quite a difficult young man to find. But that’s exactly why I had to find you. Letting you roam free, go to school and so on, a young man with your talents, well…” He went back to his tablet, scrolling over the file it displayed. “That would just be wasteful.”

Miles considered this a moment, trying to gauge the size of the file by the length of scrolling involved. After some time had passed he presumed it was quite a bit.

“Your intel is crap.”

The man's eyes flicked up. “Is it now? What makes you say that?”

“I don’t go to school. Haven’t since I was twelve. That’s when I started applying my talent. A while back I met someone who convinced me to stop before I got in real trouble over it. “

“And then more recently ze convinced you to go back to school did ze not? If you consider 108 a school. Maybe you don’t. Nonetheless, our intel is quite thorough. We know all about your friend as well, you see? Certain things ze might prefer be kept secret. But it would be better, I think, to leave zer out of this, don’t you?”

Miles looked down, cheeks flushed, ears burning. His jaw clenched and unclenched. Tightly, he said “You probably better had, yeah.”

The man smiled wolfishly. “Mister Prior, I have a proposition for you. A young man of your talents, I’m sure you understand what is entailed.”

“Mister, I been doing wheelman jobs since I could see over the steering wheel, and that was sitting on a phonebook. I can pretty well fucking guess.”

“Yes, Mister Prior, I know. Only I don’t think you fully understand. I need more than your average performance.” The man scrolled through his tablet. “Houston… Jackson… Memphis… Savannah… Atlanta… Jacksonville… Barely a tenth of the incidents on this particular list, but the common factor, as I’m sure you know, is you making a daring getaway. I have no time for your eccentricities about cars, Mister Prior. I’d like to make sure you understand that.”

Eccentricities. That’s how they saw it. Like that freak in the tech suit threatening to fry the engine. Like it was nothing. Just an object. No spirit. No soul. It was how they all moved through the world, treating technology as playthings to be tossed aside when broken. No understanding and no connection. Which of course bled over to the way they treated people. Like him. Just a tool. Something useful to them. And Alexa, just a lever to move him for them. He trembled, suppressing the urge to take a swing. The chain would stop him at least a foot shy of the man’s chin and the attempt would put him on guard, ending any future opportunities. He closed his eyes, collected himself. The burning of his cheeks faded and his blood cooled. There would be a teachable moment between them. But not just yet.

He opened his eyes.

“I understand. You have my full attention, and you will get my very best. You understand I’ll need to pick my ride to do that?”

The man smiled. “Of course. I can get you whatever car you want.”

“No, you misunderstand me. I need to get her. You can’t just bring her to me, she needs to be willing.”

His smile faded into something more cruel. “Then I suppose it’s time to go shopping.”

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt, July 28th, 2017
Last Rites

Spoiler

February 11th, 2040
ᛖᛚᛚᛖᚠᛏᛁ ᚠᛖᛒᚱᚢᚨᚱ ᚨᚱ ᛏᚹᛟ ᚦᚢᛊᚢᚾᛞ ᚠᛃᛟᚱᚢᛏᛁᚢ

The blood had ceased to flow from the headless body on the pavement. Scorch marks still scarred the sidewalk where Spitfire had fled the scene, riding lightning. Police had strung caution tape around the perimeter earlier, but only now, at long last, coroners emerged from the Mercy Medical Center to take the body of Erik Sigurðardóttir.

No sooner had one taken his feet to load him into a body bag than the sidewalk was shaken by a blast like a thunderclap. The first of the police officers to regain awareness saw two men in the road. One stood next to a horse, the other was just dismounting. “Uh… Excuse me?” He turned on a flashlight and pointed it at the two men as he began to approach. “Horses aren’t allowed on, uh… What- what the hell is wrong with that horse?”

The standing man, who was much taller and larger than he first realized, reached into his shirt pocket and produced a small metal object, which he held between his thumb and forefinger. He shifted his grip on it as he walked towards the officer, and as if by some trick of perspective, it became large enough to hold in his whole hand. He drew back to strike, and the officer dropped his flashlight to draw his gun…

And then he stopped.

The coroners lost their balance in mid-stand, and fell to the ground, still in the stiff positions in which they froze. Many police officers had their pistols halfway out of the holsters, but no further. A look of terror remained plastered on the face of the closest one. The city block was taken by a great silence, and only the flashing lights of the police cruisers and ambulances disturbed the peace.

The large man put his hammer back in his shirt pocket and smirked at the unmoving man in front of him. Chuckling, he picked up the broken flashlight from the ground and put the handle in the man’s mouth. His companion was not amused.

“Stöðva það.”

The larger man’s laughter died on his lips. “Því miður, faðir. Hann var svo ókurteis…”

The old man grunted. He didn’t disagree.

“Ætti ég að taka líkamann núna?” The large man asked.

“Ekki enn.” The old man sat down on the sidewalk, assisted by his staff. “Við erum að bíða eftir vinum hans.”

The large man scratched at his massive orange beard. “Ég hélt að hann hefði enga vini…”

“Einn mjög gamall vinur.” The old man corrected. “Hann mun vera hér fljótlega.”

After a moment of contemplative silence, a limousine broke the stillness in the city block and pulled up next to them. An old, short man in a crisp black suit emerged from the back. “Uh… Hi. I guess you’re… who I think you are?”

Odin nodded.

“Right. Well, I’m Bernard. Bernard Algren. I’m… you know, I guess. I-” He cleared his throat. “I don’t really believe, well… He always talked about it, so, I just need to… is he, he in Valhalla?”

Odin smiled, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “We are here to send him on his way.”

Bernard nodded, blinked hard, sniffed. “Right.”

Odin grabbed Erik’s head by the hair and placed it in a sack, then slotted his helmet in with it, and the two of them made their way to the horse. Thor threw his body over one shoulder, and grabbed his shield with his other hand. When they had all mounted the horse, it turned around with a flurry of hoofbeats. At Odin’s command, the world blurred around them and they rode out of Baltimore at speeds not yet achieved by modern science.

The policeman drew his gun and aimed at the empty space in front of him, and the nature of his surprise changed dramatically. He spat out his flashlight, and then like every other cop, coroner and civilian witness, decided the best thing to do would be to go home, have a drink, and forget anything had happened at the Mercy Medical Center.



By Bernard’s reckoning, it was about three minutes later that they arrived on the beach. “Where are we?”

“This is the land of the gods, Bernard Algren.” Odin said as he and Thor dismounted. “You are one of very few mortal men to come here.”

“Okay. But, where are we?” Bernard hopped off, and Sleipnir trotted away.

“We are here.” Odin reiterated. He turned to look Bernard in the eye, with the kind of face that belonged to people who would not reiterate often, willingly, or in the near future. Bernard resolved not to ask too many questions.

On the knoll that rose above the sand of the beach, they were met by twelve others, who parted for Odin and Thor as they brought Erik’s body into a stone arrangement.

A woman approached him, Bernard would have guessed in her sixties if he had seen her anywhere else. She graciously held out a cloak of furs, long and wide.

He was about to refuse, but then realized very suddenly that the cold was more than the brisk chill he had thought it was when they arrived. It was, as it turned out, cold. He took the cloak, already warm and unexpectedly heavy, and wrapped it around his chest like a towel.

She smiled, as if to a child, and moved behind him to adjust it. It sat precisely on his shoulders without showing any inclination of sliding off. She spoke. “Welcome, Bernard Algren.”

He lost a moment to surprise, then replied “Uh, thank you… Frigg, I presume? Err, L-Lady Frigg?”

She nodded, amused. “You presume correctly.”

“You speak English?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“I do.” She replied. “I learned it long before you were born.” Bernard nodded, feeling a little stupid. It made sense, he should have realized. They walked a little ways towards the stone arrangement, before it occurred to him to ask.

“How did you fit this cloak so well? I can’t even find a blazer that fits right without going to a tailor, and this…” He tremulously turned his torso to the left and right, and jostled his shoulders a few times. The cloak stayed solidly on. Frigg laughed, a sound like happy music.

“I knew you would be cold when you got here, and so I fashioned you just what you would need.”

Bernard mulled over her meaning for a second. “Did… did Odin find my measurements, or are you…?” They exchanged a look, one that said all Bernard needed to know. “My god…” he said. “Precognition at that scale is theoretically possible, but hasn’t been documented in… Do you see time as a- a fixed track, or the probability of outcomes? Or- or- or something else entirely?”

“I see only need.” Frigg replied. “Your need of the cloak, Thor’s need of a dry cloth, and my husband’s need of a hygenhund.”

“His need of a what?” Bernard asked, but there was no reply. He stopped and turned to see that she had walked off, heading back towards the beach. It was a moment before he turned back and kept going with the funeral procession.

He came to stand next to Odin, as he placed Erik’s helmeted head in the stone ship, onto a bed of sticks with the body Thor had already set down. Odin picked up Erik’s hand, as another man picked up his right hand from the other side of the stone ship, and each of them produced a small knife, with which they trimmed his fingernails.

“Hei, Algren.” Bernard felt a large hand on his shoulder, and turned to see Thor, smiling. In his other hand was a mug, which he offered.

Bernard reached out a hand, but as he grasped the mug, his hand was taken by a tremor, and it spilled on either side. “Sh-shit!” He let go. Beer had spilled on Thor’s hand, and on his shirt. “I-I’m so sorry, here, l-let me…”

Thor smiled and waved his free hand dismissively. “Don’t you worry about it, Algren.” He switched the mug into his right hand and sucked the beer off his left, then took a small swig from the mug and handed it to Bernard. Having been offered a drink by a god, although Bernard had given up drinking a few years back, he thought it best to make an exception. His hand still shook, but the drink now sat low enough that it didn’t clear the sides.

“Thank you.” He said. When he looked up, Thor was holding a horn the size of Bernard’s arm and patting his shirt with a white cloth. Frigg stood next to him, holding the leash of a dog. He took a careful sip of the beer, finding it was the best he had ever tried, then asked “What are they doing?”

Thor finished his horn and said “Father and Heimdall? They’re cutting his nails, what’s it look like?”

He nodded, taking another sip. “Fair enough.” Thor grinned, and left to refill his horn. Bernard moved to stand next to Frigg, and a moment’s silence passed between them as they watched Erik’s body being prepared. Bernard sipped his drink a few times, carefully, so as not to spill.

A woman standing on the other side of the stone boat stepped back and made her way around the front, next to where Bernard and Frigg stood. She smiled at Bernard as he looked up, and asked “You have tremors?”

The directness of the question caught Bernard off guard, but he nodded and said “Yeah. Parkinsons. I take C-CBD oil and some other treatments, b-but what you see is after the medicine.” He chuckled.

“I can help you.” She said. She held out a beautiful carved wood box, and opened the lid. Inside were about half a dozen apples, only… they were more than apples. Bernard gingerly picked one up, as if his fingers could bruise it, and pored over its every inch.

“Y-you’re saying this will… cure me?” She nodded warmly, and he went back to examining it. It was, in every way, perfectly, an apple. It was the ideal apple. And somehow, its perfection made it… alien. He shuddered a little, and put it back in the box. “No. I-I think… I don’t think I want that.” She looked a little hurt, and he almost wanted to change his mind just for that. She closed the lid and sadly went back to her place at the other side of the ship.

Bernard took an unsteady breath in and let it out slowly. It had been a long time since he had accepted the immutability of his condition as part of himself. To question it now was… hard. Frigg put her hand on his shoulder, made eye contact, nodded reassuringly.

Thor approached them, another horn full of beer. Bernard took a gulp of beer, and gestured to the horn. “Could I p-please have some of that?” Thor happily poured him a mugfull, which sloshed over the sides, but Bernard quickly threw it back. Thor, obligingly, finished his horn in about as much time, and belched loudly.

It suddenly hit Bernard that he hadn’t had a drink in seven years, a decision made partially to preserve his aging liver, and had perhaps had a bit more than he intended. The stone ship began to bob, ever so slightly, in his vision.

Odin and Heimdall completed their work, and Odin handed the nail trimmings, in a box, to Heimdall, who took them down the hill. Bernard didn’t see where he was going.

Odin spoke. “It is ready. Let us gather.” Frigg handed him the dog’s leash.

“Am I the only one?” Bernard suddenly asked Frigg. “I mean… the only, uh, g-guest?”

“You are the only one coming, yes.”

“Huh. I guess he never had many p-people. Wait… Wasn’t there a g-girlfriend once?”

“There was a woman, yes. There was even a child, and later a man.” She nodded.

“And they, wh-what, couldn’t make it?”

“None but Hermod have ever gone past the gates of Hel and returned.” She sighed. “Not even my darling son.”

When Bernard pieced together what she meant he fell into a deep hole in his head. It was a stupid question of him to ask, but what shook him even more was that he had always thought of Erik as a kid. A kid, not yet of the age where you start to watch people go, one by one. Bernard had passed the threshold long ago, but Erik having passed it too made him realize just how long it had been.

Odin stroked the dog’s fur as two other gods came up the hill, one with only one hand clutching the reins of a horse, and the other leading a cow. The man leading the cow… Bernard had never truly seen anything that made him question his sexuality. He thought he had. He had seen some very attractive men in his time. But none of them had ever actually shaken his faith in his identity. This one, though…

Taking the reins of the horse and the cow, as the other two took their places around the ship, Odin spoke as if chanting: “We dedicate these animals to Erik Sigurðardóttir...” he placed his palm on the dog’s head, and it immediately crumpled, as though sleeping. Bernard knew that it was not. “For companionship…” Odin said. He placed his palm on the cow’s forehead. Its eyes rolled back, and it tipped just shy of the edge of the stone ship. “For wealth…” Lastly he placed his palm on the horse’s head, and it too fell to its knees. “And for the journey ahead.”

He placed the dog in the ship, curled peacefully at Erik’s feet. Thor hefted up the cow, the one-handed god the horse, and each was placed to either side of Erik, legs folded up neatly. Bernard felt as though the act should have sickened him. Maybe it was the beer, but he felt it was… somehow right.

One of the gods walked up to the ship, and stuck his hand in the stick pile underneath Erik. It quickly blazed, and the fire began to consume the four bodies. Bernard sighed, unsteadily. Erik… Erik was gone. Across the stone ship, another god plucked at a string instrument and began to sing.

“Kvöööldið er oookkar... og, vor um... Vaglaaskóg…”

The fire reached the other end of the ship, all its contents burning. “Erik was a warrior. He died by the axe.” Odin proclaimed. “He goes now to Valhalla.” Thor gasped, weeping. He clapped a heavy hand on Bernard’s shoulder, and smiled at him.

“This is what he would have wanted."

“Yeah.” Bernard nodded. “But I r-really miss my friend.”



At the end of the night, when the embers had died and the ship filled with soil, Bernard and Odin walked down to the beach. The sky was clear, like nothing Bernard had ever seen before. It seemed as though there were more stars than darkness. He thought, maybe, he saw Erik’s face in the clouds of the milky way.

“It is time to go.” Odin said. “We will be seeing you, Bernard Algren.”

“Seeing me, yeah…” Bernard slurred. “Won’t be seeing you though, will I?”

Odin uttered “Not til Ragnarok.” and placed his palm on Bernard’s forehead.

 

[Gus]

Spoiler: Last Rites Part 2

Spoiler: Last Rites Part 2

The cloaked figure pushed the stolen gurney through the crumbling stone archway into one of the many abandoned cisterns beneath the city. During the mid nineteenth century , they had been part of the defense against flooding, an all too common problem in port cities. The modern age had no more use for them, having raised the problem of flooding to an art form. New techniques were required. There were no longer even relevant enough to disassemble, and were instead simply being forgotten. But not by all. Some found them quite useful.

Upon reaching the center of the chamber, the man collapsed the gurney down to its lowest height, removed his slouch hat and stood over it for a moment, head bowed respectfully.

"It is not exactly a viking funeral, my friend, but then, you were hardly a viking really, were you? A distraction. A trick worthy of Loki, if I must say so myself."

"I presume you are listening, wheresoever you are. I did as you asked. The bit with the axe threw me off a little. The decoy had his head attached, originally. I wish you had let me know in advance what the boy would do to Erik's body. Nobody noticed, but in the interests of craftsmanship... Ah well."

"As I said, nobody noticed. People see what they expect to see. Call comes in of a decapitated old man dressed in 7th century armor. Something impossible happens, and nobody sees it. Nobody can let themselves see it. But then later, the ambulance brings in a decapitated old man in 7th century armor. Thus, all is well."

"Then, that body is stolen from the morgue! A mystery for all to ponder! Everybody watching the hand that holds the card. Nobody watching the hand doing the trick. Nobody questions whether the man from the call was the man in the ambulance. Everybody wants to know: how he was stolen from the morgue?! Nobody even suspects he never made it there. Nobody saw the vanishing. And nobody will look, because everyone thinks they did."

"But I knew. I knew where to look. And when. I couldn't see what happened, of course, it was an impossible thing. To witness such a thing would be to go mad." He giggled madly.

He leans down and picks up the helmet, peering into the strangely bright blue eyes of the head inside.

"Of course... there were other eyes on the trick. I'm sure you'll understand, Allfather. Some small sacrifices are necessary for the satisfaction of curiosity, mm?"

There is a soft squelching sound and a soft 'plop' before the helmet is dropped back onto the gurney beside the body. He pulls off his cloak with a bit of a flourish and spreads it over them both, his hat joins it, and then, seemingly his face and hair. A much younger man now douses the cloak with lighter fluid and steps back, leaving a trail back to the archway. This, he lights and sets a small explosive charge in the top of the arch. He starts the timer, then strides swiftly back up the tunnel, whistling a merry tune. And rolling a small blue marble around in his left hand.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt: Kobayashi Maru

"C'mon!" Anneliese chided, setting up a flimsy folding table. "You said you would!"

"I did... But at the time... Well, I thought it was more of a hypothetical." Aaron explained.

"And what, now you're scared?" She grinned.

"For you, a little, yes. Why are you so intent on this?"

She tilted her head to one side, innocently. "Partially curiosity." She tipped it the other way. "Partially obligation. You know, Red and Wolf have money riding on this! Allen too, although I think he was just following their lead."

"And which put money on you, if I may ask?" Aaron asked, confused.

"I did!" She laughed, adding mentally: Not to mention Joey bet Guy $50 I couldn't, and I still owe him from last month.

Aaron sat down at the table. "I see. Well, I don't know why this has suddenly come into question, but I suppose it would only be sporting to settle the matter for them." He held up his hand.

Anneliese sat down across from him and met his grasp, but held up a finger with her other hand. "Before we begin..." She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. As she sat back, his face darkened, but was clearly shocked. It shifted to a hesitant smile, then a moment of contemplation.

Finally, he smiled and said "Your point is made."

She smiled. "One... two... three!" She pushed against Aaron's arm, which ceded ground until it lay flat against the table.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt, February 16th, 2018

The old grandmother sat in her comfortable loveseat. The time was 2:27 PM, the sun had just begun to shine through the window like a gentle caress to warm the back of her head, and there was nothing more to do than crochet. She smiled to herself.

The television had been on for most of the day, quietly, across the room. News. It reached the inevitable update on Volodimiria: the diplomatic attache, missing in the country for some weeks, was now officially presumed dead. The UN had entered talks over whether to take action. It put a foul taste in her mouth, and when her needle was free she picked up the remote and turned it off.

For a while, she listened to the whisper of wool sliding past wool, mingled in with periodic groans of yarn threads tightening. Soon, in the silence, she ran through imaginary conversations in her head. What she'd say to her husband when he came home. To the cashier on her next grocery run. To her grandchildren the next time she saw them.

She was just about to win an argument with the man two doors down when she heard someone coming up the front steps, whom she thought to be her husband until the doorbell rang. She frowned. Visitors? It had been a long time.

She gingerly set her tangle of yarn down on the arm of her chair, and stood up, cursing at her joints. The bell rang again as she approached the door. "Ja, ja, ik kom eraan..." she called.

She opened the door to a tall man, six-foot-two or three, perhaps five years younger than her. He held a briefcase in front of his lap and beamed with a glee that, she noticed, exceeded the standard cordial cheeriness of what would otherwise appear to be a door-to-door salesman. "Hallo mevrouw!" He began "Ik vraag me af of ik je kan interesseren in een mooie reeks encyclopedieën? Vol interessante informatie?"

Encyclopedias? In 2077? She gawked a little. She barely remembered encyclopedia salesmen coming to the door when she was a very young girl, and after the success of Wikipedia she thought the trade had gone extinct. At a loss for words, she defaulted to "Nee, nee-dank-u meneer, Ik ben best in orde zonder..." She began to close the door.

"Are you sure?" the man asked, and she froze in place. She could already tell he wasn't a native Dutch speaker, and it wasn't the sudden switch to English that gave her pause. Rather, it was the weight of his question, of the word 'sure'. He wasn't asking about the encyclopedias.

She opened the door again and gave him a hard look. Still smiling, his mismatched eyes sparkled. "Absolutely positive?" he asked.

"What are you talking about?" she noticed a catch in her voice, as did the salesman. He grinned wider, making her feel a little sick.

"You can feel it, can't you? No one else can, only you and me. They changed something. The world is wrong."

She blinked hard. Her higher functions all told her he was insane, that she should close and bolt the door, call the police or something, but his words touched deeper in her mind. She wasn't sure he was wrong.

"I suspect the origin of the change happened long ago…" he continued. "That is, backdated in our biographies. This iteration of reality can't be more than a few minutes old. That's why I had to find you before it was too late, before more had been established."

Her face contorted with dismay, she shook her head and implored him "What in God's name are you saying?"

He grimaced in sympathy. "Let me show you. Think of your grandchildren. What are their names?"

She reacted as if slapped. "Their names… I'm not going to tell you my grandchildren's names!" She searched for their names, unconsciously, and to her horror she realized she had no idea.

"Too easy to justify not knowing anyway." He quickly dismissed. "Let me try another one. Your husband. How did you meet? Where did you marry? What's his name?"

She felt as if her brain was being drained of dregs that weren't there. "I think I'd like you to leave now, sir." She whispered.

He nodded sadly, tipping his cap. "Very well. But if you change your mind…" he produced a small glass block, with a holographic skyline etched inside. "... I believe the answer is to be found in Baltimore."

She took it limply and closed the door on him, breathing heavily. As an afterthought, she flicked the deadbolt closed, and cautiously put an eye to the peephole. The man was just stepping out of view. She breathed a sigh of relief, but she still felt a weight on her chest.

What was her husband's name? She found herself thinking of a list of common Dutch names, but it didn't feel like trying to remember so much as trying to decide. She staggered forward to the sink, retched, spat. How did they meet? Where did they get married? She hadn't the faintest idea.

Alzheimers, something spoke in her mind. Dear God, was she going senile? Her father had it, but neither of his parents ever had. Or did they? She no longer trusted her memories. Perhaps they did.

She stared into the glass paperweight. Landmarks of Baltimore, compressed into a few inches, set behind a large crab, crawling along the prominent name of the city. Why Baltimore? And why the little knickknack... Knickknacks! She dropped the block on the kitchen counter and scrambled up the stairs to the attic.

Bursting through the little door, she began pawing through boxes of keepsakes. Where was… where was her daughter's first soccer trophy? She found it, just under the surface layer.

The little glossed pinecone, from when she and her husband went hiking while expecting, and she went into labor? Where was that? There. It was there, bits broken off, but still recognizably a pinecone.

Where was her grandson's baby blanket? She pushed a few handfuls of things around, and there it was. There was the stain no amount of detergent ever got out.

More assured, she went looking for the letter opener her mother left her only a year before she passed. She nearly pricked her finger on the end, but there it was, never used, her maiden name printed on the handle.

It was all here. Her whole life, proof of her reality. She could find all of it…

…

The crab shell. She thought. When my son found a crab shell on the beach and… built a little sandcastle to guard it. Where's the shell?

She dug through the box, and in no time at all pulled out a crab's discarded shell, half caved in. Her heart fell through her stomach.

"That never fucking happened." She said aloud. The temperature in the room suddenly fell five degrees. She felt as though she was not alone.

It was a lie. Everything she remembered… or everything she had been made to remember was a lie. The world was wrong. Her vision blurred. She began to hyperventilate. Was she real? Was she simply the invention of some demented omnipotence? Was she even the one thinking her thoughts?

She fell to her side, dropping the ancient crab shell, which crumbled to ash and then dust. She felt dizzy, sobbed, and threw up. Twice. Nothing was real. Nothing was real. Nothing-

The doorbell rang. "Hallo!" Her husband called. "Anneliese? Waarom is de deur op slot?"

She blinked the sting out of her eyes, and carefully set her crocheting on the arm of her chair as she stood up. "Sorry! Ik ben er zo…"

The door unlocked with a clunk, and she opened it to her husband, confused, both hands under a bag of groceries.

"Ik denk niet dat ik dat op mijn weg naar buiten heb gesloten…" he thought aloud, then smiled jokingly. "Bezorgd over inbrekers, of wel?"

She chuckled, "Ja ... Ik veronderstel dat ik dat moet zijn geweest." She took the bag of groceries and set it down on the kitchen counter. But it didn’t sit right on the surface. She held it away and checked where she had set it down, and found an odd little glass paperweight. And she picked it up.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt: Meet the Parents

"You can go in to see him now, ma'am, but... well, he hasn't had a good day in a while. I doubt he'll recognize you."

"Are you new here, young lady?"

"Yes ma'am. Just started a few days ago."

"Here as part of the CNA program at the university, yes? And you want to work in trauma care some day?"

The nurse blanched a little. "I... Y-yes ma'am. How...?"

Anneliese gave her the fakest smile she could conjure. "Keep studying, dear."

As she walked into his room, she noticed the smell of cleaner and urine stains become more potent. He sat in his wheelchair, facing the window. He seemed enraptured by the birds in the tree outside, his head darting this way and that as they pursued each other in an airborne game of tag.

"Ya! Git 'im! Show 'em how it's done! ... SHIT! They've shot Jessi's fuselage! Giv' 'im some support, fellas!"

She walked over slowly, and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Vadi? It's me, it's Anneliese."

He didn't react at first, but slowly turned to look at her hand on his shoulder, following her arm up to her face. "Oh... Camille... Good to see you!" He smiled, and gave her hand a few firm pats.

She had run out of tears to mourn her younger sister many years ago, but to hear her name again, especially in this context, still made her eyes sting. She pushed it down, and smiled back. "I came to say hello before I go on my trip, vadi." She felt over the plane ticket and the paperweight in her pocket again. He won't make it. I won't see him again before I get back she thought. Why am I doing this? Why am I leaving my father like this to go on some half-imagined wild goose chase?

She pushed the thoughts away, which she'd gotten much better at doing in the last few days. She was learning only to trust her stray thoughts, her gut. The more she tried to uncover the truth, the more her active thoughts felt like they came from someone else. A cold intrusion in her brain.

"How have you been, vadi? Are you eating well enough?"

"Oh yes..." His gaze had strayed to the birds again. "Don't let up, Jessi! Altitude's goin' down... Try t' land in th' corn field!"

She took her hand off his shoulder, her smile greying slightly. "Vadi, I... I wanted to talk to you about what I'm doing. You were always... You were the one I'd come to talk to whenever it got to be too much. And I think it's gotten to be too much, vadi." Much too much. This whole thing has gone past the point of insanity. What am I doing?? "I've been thinking about things, and I... I just wanted to come to you. One last time."

His eyes stopped straying. She followed his gaze to one preening sparrow on a twig outside, and shook her head. "I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, vadi." Yes I do. It's because of that strange encyclopedia salesman. Did he mess with my head somehow? "I just know that I have to do it. And..." She took her time over her words. She'd always been good with words, but there wasn't any kind way to say something as horrible as what she suspected. How can I say something like this to my own father? His head darted off again. She saw no sign that he registered her words. Taking a deep breath, she continued.

"Vadi, I- I don't think you're real." Tears began to well in her eyes, and her voice broke. "I love you so much, and I always h-have, but I think you d-died. I think you died a long time ago, vadi." She sobbed, and searched for her handkerchief in her purse.

"... Didja really realize? Ya figured it out, after all this time?"

She looked up in shock, and her father's eyes were fixed on hers. He was smiling, and once she caught his gaze, he began to grin. "You did. You did!" He reached out and clasped her arm. "I always knew it was you, Anneliese. Always knew it would be you. They've been telling us what's what for a long time now, but I knew if anyone could see through it..." He blinked at length, nodding his head down to the floor and back up before opening his eyes. He gave her arm a few squeezes, and reached out with his right. "C'mere, girl!" Flabbergasted, she bent down to meet his embrace. He sighed happily, and sat up when they parted, beaming. "And now you're off to Baltimore, a' course."

"Y-yes. I leave this evening." She wasn't sure what to think, but knew that thinking wouldn't do her any good anyway. Something deep inside her danced with a childlike joy.

"You'll want to find Guy, then. Or maybe it's Gus in this one... Either way, he'll know just what to do. With any luck, he'll even find you. He's got a knack for it..."

She shook her head. "Vadi..." She implored "I-I'm so confused..."

"We all are, girl. Right up to the end." He felt over her hand in his. "But you're doin' the right thing, and I'm proud of you. Always. Now go make it right."

As she left, the young nurse waiting outside went in the room. Halfway to the door, two more nurses hurried past her and, as she turned to watch, ran into her father's room. She lingered, but after a moment, turned again and made her way to her car.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt: Oh, It's YOU.

Whenever anyone complained in hyperbole about D.C. traffic, Detective Walker just smiled and shook his head knowingly. They didn't know D.C, not really. Not the way he did. He knew her personally, like a lover. He knew her streets, her alleys, her dark secrets. And he knew that most winter nights, at 2:00 AM, her streets were bare and empty as a country backwood.

This was one such night. Not one bicycle had passed under his extensive gaze. On a fifth-story rooftop, he had been kneeling, watching, for three hours. The cold cut him to the bone, but a thermos of warm espresso kept his fingers from going too numb, and periodically warmed his gut, whenever his eyes drooped, or when the night started to penetrate his black trench coat. He had almost run out of espresso, and worse, run out of patience, when he saw his mark coming up the street.

Jan Murdock. Straw-colored hair, unkempt. Patchy beard. Heavy boots. Khakis. Plaid coat. His right hand was buried deep in his pocket, and in his left he held a dark briefcase. He glanced over his shoulder. Again. A third time. Walker shut his eyes and pushed his hearing down to the street and over to Murdock. He heard a fight a few floors below him, some steam coming from a grate in the sidewalk, and finally Murdock breathing. Haggard. Tense. Worried. He exercised his fine control, and put his hearing in Murdock's right pocket. Brisk shuffling, as his gait was quite fast. Then, there it was. There was a slight clunk. A glock, Walker would have guessed. He moved his hearing to-

Suddenly, there was a hand in front of his face, and his hearing snapped back to his own ears as he whipped around. "Son of a-"

"Greetings, Dark Eye! It is I, The-"

"Josh, what the fuck? I'm in the middle of something!" Walker hissed. He made another mental note, tallying up to thirty or more at this point, to get a form to change the codename he picked when he was fourteen.

"Dark Eye, please! It is common courtesy not to use a vigilante's alter ego in public! Call me The Peacock!"

"Everybody in D.C. knows who you are Josh. You don't- you barely wear a damn mask." Josh frowned, confused, behind what looked for all the world like a blue-green pair of briefs. "And keep your voice down! What the hell are you doing here?"

"Why, I saw a fellow vigilante up here and thought I could give you some assistance!" He spread his stance and put his hands on his hips. It still didn't look heroic, but Walker could tell he had been practicing. "Also, I must make sure you are not trespassing! Have you cleared your activities with the owners of this building?"

"Yes." He lied. "Listen, I'm in the middle of a stakeout. That guy down there, Murdock, he's got money for what I think is a weapons deal. I'm trying to-"

"Dark Eye, look! Murdock, he's stopped!"

Walker glanced down, and Murdock was now indeed leaning against a wall near the loading dock he'd been watching. "Alright. Any minute now, the dealers should-"

The Peacock planted one foot on the edge of the rooftop, pointing, and clearly getting ready to leap off. "That sign down there says 'No Loitering'! We've got to stop him! EeeyA-"

Walker clamped a hand over his mouth. "NO. No... ugh, no 'peacock cry'. Not yet. Listen, more guys are coming. Guys with guns. If I can listen in on them, or follow them, I can find out where all the guns are coming from, and keep them off the streets. This is military-grade we're talking, here. Trust me, if I... If we can stop these people, we'll save a lot of lives. But you've just got to wait a minute."

The Peacock mulled this over for a minute. "Very well, Dark Eye! We'll do it your way this time! But by the end of this, we need to make sure we give this Murdock fellow a proper telling-off!"

"Yeah, sure. Just keep your voice down, for chrissakes."

After a few moments, a black van came trundling down the street. "Gotcha..." Walker sent his hearing off, sidling uncomfortably past the couple on the third floor who had resolved their argument and were now in the midst of another equally loud exchange. As it entered the van, he caught the latter half of a sentence.

"... sending us out here to deal with Jan? Why are we going for small potatoes? We could be making it big!"

"We are selling to Mister Murdock because that is what Mister Grigori said to do." Walker shuddered, and not for the cold. He recognized the dulcet tones of Adelram White. He had had his suspicions that White was part of this, but it had been a worst-case-scenario suspicion. And Grigori... He took out his notepad and jotted down 'A. White' and 'Grigori?' as White continued.

"If you think you have a better business plan than Mister Grigori, I can patch you through to him. Or better yet, to the people he represents?"

"I-I... N-no sir. Sorry."

"Smart choice. They are n-"

"The fuck is that?"

Walker, writing 'representative' next to Grigori and drawing an arrow above to where he had circled 'Employers???', listened a little closer. He heard a squack, ever so faint through the walls of the van.

"EeeyAAAAhh! EeeyAAAAhh! EXCUSE ME GENTLEMEN!"

Walker looked up to the now empty space next to him. He looked down to the street, where Josh now stood. Inside the van, he heard general noises of confusion from the passengers, and from Josh:

"YOU HAVE FAILED TO MAKE A FULL AND COMPLETE STOP AT A RED LIGHT! THIS IS AGAINST THE LAW!"

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..." Walker glanced over to Murdock, who was now running the other way down the street. The van peeled around Josh and shot off down the empty street.

"WAIT! COME BACK! I HAVE TO WRITE YOU A TICKET!"

Walker fumbled through his bag for his tracker gun, but by the time he had it ready, the van was already out of range. He pulled his hearing back from the spot on the street where the van had gone further than he could send it, and began to pack up his things. Of all the people I could have gone to school with... Fucking Josh...

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Chris hadn’t been kept long in the hospital, but longer than he’d have liked. He only had a few minor burns and scrapes. Could have been much worse. It was much worse for a lot of people. Every second the doctors wasted on him was a second they weren’t treating anyone else who’d been gassed or shot on test day. He couldn’t help but be reminded that, if he hadn’t been being saved, the Hamasaki’s could have been saved instead.

He shuddered with the thought as he pushed open the door of the Dundalk Group Home. “Hey, Greta.” He called down the short hallway as he kicked off his shoes. “It’s Chris. Back from the hospital. Where I was. Thanks for calling…”

A moment’s hesitation made Chris’s heartbeat increase a little bit. Ever the nosy old woman, Greta normally dashed to the door as soon as he entered to squeeze him for every detail between his arrival and his last departure. But this time, there was a pause before she replied.

“Ah, Chris! What good timing!” she sounded relieved. Chris only knew what she sounded like relieved from overhearing her on the phone after she clocked out. “There’s someone here to see you!”

Chris thought for a moment before stepping out of the mudroom. Greta sat on the couch facing him, her hands perched in her lap. Opposite her was the back of a man’s head, with dark hair in tight curls. Greta fixed Chris with a nervous smile. “Chris, this is doctor, ah… Well, this man is here from Commonwealth. He’s here to check up on you!”

The man waited until she’d finished to turn, giving Chris an appraising look. After a second, he smiled hungrily. “Kravitz, C, in the flesh… Hi, Mister Kravitz. Pleased to meet you.” He slowly swung an arm over the back of the couch to offer a handshake.

Chris glanced at his hand, but said nothing, and didn’t move. Visions of torture ran through the man’s eyes, his arm fell limp and slid back over the couch.

“Miss Schafer…” he turned around and continued, affecting the voice of a red-blooded American dad straight out of the 1950s. “I wonder if I could have a moment to talk with Chris here… y’know, man-to-man.”

She glanced at him, and at Chris, who was shaking his head no behind the man’s back. “Uhm… sure, sure. The younger children are down for a nap anyway… I’d better go check in on them…” she stood, and left the room down the hall, sparing the two of them one last glance before disappearing through the door at the end. Chris held his hands out as if to say what the fuck, Greta?

Without turning to look at him, the man purred. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mister Kravitz?”

“I’d prefer to stand. What do you want?”

His head tilted and fell back a little. “I want you to take a seat while we talk.”

“And I don’t want to talk that long.” Chris snapped back. “What do you want?”

The man sighed, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small radio. “You have the shot?” he asked it. It beeped. A harsh voice replied a simple yes sir. “Execute in twenty seconds, mark.” It beeped again.

Chris blinked in surprise. He almost didn’t believe what he had heard for a moment, although he didn’t understand why it was such a shock to him; he’d known his whole life that Commonwealth were all fascist sons-a-bitches. But most of the ones he’d spoken to had stayed behind a veneer of formality. Honesty from Commonwealth, he supposed, was unexpected.

But he avoided any outward sign of his thoughts. Something primal, deep in his brain screamed show no weakness. Surprise was weakness, and so he just scoffed. “You think I can’t lose a sniper shot with twenty seconds warning?” He glanced out the edge of the front window that was in his line of sight, but couldn’t see any rooftops.

“Of course you could, Mister Kravitz. I don’t believe London, Jordan, or Greta would perform as well, though. Sit the fuck down.”

The blood drained out of Chris’s face. He moved around the man’s couch and sat down facing him. The man smirked, held the radio to his mouth, and paused for a brief, torturous moment before saying “Cancel execution.”

Chris listened to his heart thump in his ears for what seemed like hours. All the while the man said nothing. He simply stared at Chris, like a sadistic child examining a bug caught in a jar, wondering how best to tear off its appendages, and in what order.

I could yell for Greta or London, but… he probably has contingencies. Maybe if I got his radio away from him fast enough… Chris glanced out the front window, and noticed the glint of a rifle that was now certainly trained on him. As he looked back, he thought he saw the man’s faint smile creep up ever so slightly.

“Al-Alright.” Chris finally said. “You’ve… got my attention. What d-do you want from me?”

The man blinked, and stretched a little. “You know, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for some time, Mister Kravitz. You made quite an impression, the way you find such novel solutions to overcome obstacles. Or, occasionally, drop obstacles from great heights to overcome your enemies?” Chris felt his body temperature drop as the sensation of a human being crunching underneath him played through his memory again. The man, watching him, grinned. “What’s your current body count, again?” He pulled out a tablet and began scrolling through it. “Lots of potential for growth, to be sure...”

“What do you want.” Chris said, again. The back of his throat tasted like bile, and he didn’t dare put any strength into his words for fear of throwing up.

“You would almost remind me of myself, except for that-” he gestured, disgustedly, towards Chris. “-that thing right there. You have all this… rebellious affect, but now you’re- look at you! You’re absolutely shitting yourself! What, is it the killing? After that whole unsolicited rant you gave Ward in the hospital, you don’t have the stomach for dirty work? Really? Or is it the gun?” He pointed out the window. “You stand up to challenge ‘the full arsenal of the mighty Commonwealth’, and one rifle puts you back in your place?”

Part of Chris snapped out of his fugue, and his eyes narrowed. ‘The full arsenal’... He remembered saying those words, but not when he’d said them.

The man continued. “Honestly, Mister Kravitz, as glad as I am to see that you can be brought to heel, I’m a little disappointed. Still…” He sat forward. “You’ve sold yourself with a merciless, effective persona, and I’m going to hold you to that. I have a job for you, you see.”

Chris felt as if his train of thought had abruptly kicked into reverse. “A… job? You’re trying to hire me?”

“Does this seem like the kind of arrangement that involves a salary for you?” The man asked, with the mirth-tinged exasperation of dealing with someone very, very stupid. Chris spared another glance out the front window, and the man followed his gaze. "Ah, yes, it would be rather inefficient to have to keep you constantly in our crosshairs. Fortunately..." he began tapping keys on his tablet. “I have a few associates in prison administration, as well as a few acquaintances in… well, prison…” he turned the tablet around. As Chris recognized his mother on the screen, his breathing started coming short.

It was live feed. She was just lying on a bench in her cell. “One word from me, Mister Kravitz…” the man explained “... and your mother dearest finds herself at the center of a riot with a target on her back. A tragic fate, but hardly comparable to what might happen to Miss Beckett... or Miss Crane... or Mister Brahn." Each name hit Chris like a dagger in the chest, and although he couldn't take his eyes from the screen, he could see the man's grin widen each time in his peripheral vision, as if he was telling the funniest joke he'd ever heard.

Chris felt a tear roll down his cheek, and let out a shaky breath that had been trapped burning in his lungs, he didn't know how long. "I’ll do whatever you want.” The man stuck out his hand, and steeling his nerves, Chris shook it.

“Welcome aboard, Mister Kravitz.”

 

[Bag o Fruit]

PART TWO

CW: gore

Spoiler

“Is tere a message ye'd like me to pass on to 'im?"

"No. Thanks though, Mister Farrell."

"Ye're wel- What!?"

Danny chuckled. When Page got her feathers ruffled, she really did sound like a chicken. But a quick, firey-eyed glare from her, and he turned away, silent.

After a minute, he pulled out his phone. Farrell… he didn’t actually quite get the reference, but it was on the tip of his tongue. He tried ‘Mr Farrell’ in Google, but the results were mixed. He tried ‘Farrell Irish’, still got nothing helpful. He glanced off towards the front window, but the guy had already left.

He thought over what else he could search, but not caring that much, soon got distracted and lost himself in thought. How he could get revenge on Jamie, mainly. After a little while he noticed a ticking sound, like a few metronomes all set at different tempos. He figured the heating was coming on, but something about that didn't seem right; the heater didn’t usually turn on at Facility 108 until halfway through January.

As it started to confuse him more, he realized he knew exactly what it was. Almost all teenagers his age religiously kept the keyboard sound on their phones turned down, but Danny, as an avid practitioner in the occult arts of pissing people off, kept his at maximum.

He glanced down at his screen, and nearly threw up. Where only a moment ago there were Irish soccer players in his Google tab, there was now... possibly the most repulsive pornography he had ever imagined existent. He closed the tab and glared up, flipping off the nearest security camera.

He looked back at his phone to message Penny, and Google had reopened to a gif that was, somehow, even worse than the last one. He closed the app and opened messenger to start composing a novel way to say ‘go fuck yourself’.

Wait, he realized, Penny should still be in class right now. In Mallory’s class. She should have her hands full, literally. Did she… How?

Maybe it was you, Danny…

Danny stood bolt upright. “Who the fuck said that?”

“Said whot? Whot are ye talkin’ about?” Page hissed, holding a hand over her phone’s receiver.

“Didn’t you…? Somebody…”

She pointed declaratively at him. “Sit back dun, Mister Travis. Stay dere and don’t ye shout, or so help me God…” So saying, she went back to her conversation with Anneliese.

She can’t hear me, Danny. The voice resumed, a deep, growling facsimile of his own. It’s just you and me here, in your head. I’m your conscience, Danny.

“... Shut the fuck up.” Danny muttered, careful to stay out of Page’s hearing range.

You’ve been telling me that a lot, haven’t you Danny? Suppressing all the bad thoughts. But they’re still here, Danny. Here inside of you, waiting to be let out. That’s why you searched for those horrible things without thinking about it, isn’t it, Danny?

“Bullshit, I didn’t…” Wait, did he? No, it had to have been Penny… but how?

Yes you did, Danny. Yes you did. These thoughts came from deep inside you, Danny. Deeeeeep insiiiiiide…

“Wait a second…”

You have to let the thoughts out before they destroy you Danny. Kill Page. Kill your friends. Kill them all!

“You’re that invisible guy, aren’t you?”

"Uhhhhhh yes. That's what a conscience is. Keep up."

"What did they say your dumbass name was? Poultry-something?" Recalling what Penny had told him, he waved his arm back and forth in a small arc. A spark of static burst on the back of his hand, and was promptly absorbed into his energy reserve.

"Ohoho, that tickles!" The voice said, now at the pitch of a puppet in a children’s show, and at full speaking volume. Page startled in her seat, and mumbled something about 'forgot ye were dere…' "Yeah, names Poultry-Tights. Wanna know why?" The voice asked excitedly.

"Not even a li-"

"Hehehe, it's 'cause I've got a big cock in my pants!" The voice chuckled.

"Hilarious."

"Do you get it? It sounds like you don't get it. It's fu-"

"I get it." Danny groaned

"-nny because poultry means birds, usually chicken, an-"

"Yeah, I got it, you don't have to explain."

"-d male chickens are called cocks, but cock also means p-"

"I GET IT, HOLY FUCK! IT'S FUNNY, ALRIGHT? STOP!" They spent a long moment in silence. Danny opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it. The more the silence dragged on, the more awkward and tense it grew. Somewhere, deep in Danny's mind, he started to feel a little bad for Poultry-Tights. He tried to figure out how to apologize...

"... penis."

For a second, Danny did not react at all. But soon he started to giggle. Poultry-Tights giggled with him.

Then they heard the siren from the city.


Earlier

“Serve me. Kill.”

Felix shook a little in his straps. “I-it’s done. It’s transmitting on a loop… everywhere but Baltimore.” In confirmation, the chant began to echo from the intercom throughout the chamber.

“Good. Leave it on loop, but reroute control of the transmission to my ph-ohh…” Toussaint clutched at his head, feeling the power of his words spread out over the globe and occupy billions of minds. He had anticipated this, but just how bad it would be was anyone’s guess. He fell to his knees and offered up a hasty prayer to any deity that might still be listening before the empty pain overwhelmed his mind, and he toppled down on his side.

“Wait a minute,” one of the men guarding the room, who until now hadn’t been paying much attention, snapped out of his stupor and raised his rifle. Several others followed suit. “What the hell is going on here? Why did-” he was interrupted by the sprinkler system bursting above him. Then, with a series of cracks, the control panel nearest the men shot out several successive bolts of electricity. The guards convulsed, screaming, and fell to the ground, only to stand up after a few seconds.

“Serve… kill…” they rasped, with scorched vocal cords. As one, they limply raised their rifles and squeezed the triggers until their clips were emptied.

As low as he was to the ground, Toussaint avoided most of the bullets. Two tore through his left leg, but he was already in too much pain to take notice. As he writhed on the ground, his slicked-back black hair greyed, whitened, and finally crumbled off his scalp. The flesh beneath his skin began to weaken, thinning. His eyes sunk in his head, his lips withered and peeled back past his gums. His nose, bleeding profusely, decayed into a clump of eschar on his face. He stayed there, shrieking, for what felt like an eternity.

When he came to, his recorded voice still echoed through the chamber around him. He lay in a pool of blood, with some clear and red-tinged fluids swirling through it like oil in water. The ringing in his ears slowly subsided, and he heard a few weak voices repeating his commands.

At length, he rolled over and saw a continued skirmish between three of the guards. Or rather, their remains. Two lay on the floor, the others evidently having managed to damage their brain stems. The three still walking were riddled with bullet holes, and most of the flesh had been scratched off their upper bodies, but still, they bludgeoned each other to the best of their ability. Only one of them had an arm left. Whether the others’ had been shot or torn off Toussaint didn’t bother speculating.

He pulled his right leg underneath him and sat up. The effort was torturous, but his definition of pain had been revised to the point that it was simply a nuisance. “Stop that. Come help me up.” He wheezed. He had to repeat it a few times, louder, until his thralls were able to hear him. They staggered over, and he pulled himself up by the only intact arm among them. Pain radiated from his bullet wounds as he put weight on his left leg, and he grunted. “You, stand here. You, hand me that gun.” He put a hand on the shoulder of the first thrall as he took the gun from the second, using it as a crutch.

Once he had gotten his bearings, he noticed Felix, still strapped to the enhancer. “Serve… kill…” he moaned. His words, or rather Toussaint’s words, whistled through several holes in his lungs. Toussaint checked his phone. It was dead, soaked in blood. He dropped it. “Felix. Stop the transmission.” Felix stared blankly for a moment, and the recording stopped playing. Toussaint felt his headache start to subside.

He searched through his new thralls’ coat pockets and found one functioning radio. “Now, Felix, open a channel to every speaker in North America. Connect it to this transmitter.”

“Serve… open… connect…” Felix mumbled. The radio bleeped, and Toussaint tested it, finding that static sound played over the intercom.

He smiled, and readied himself to speak into the receiver. “Everyone. Go to Baltimore. Kill everyone in the city.” The thralls left him, turning and making for the elevator. He felt his words go out into the world, put the radio in his pocket, and waited for the second effort to kill him.

After a moment, a wave of discomfort spread from his kidneys up his spine, and settled in the back of his neck, but nothing else seemed to happen.

“... Interesting.” He mused. “Alright. Time to get cleaned up.” He hobbled back to the elevator, leaving Felix strapped in the enhancer, repeating “Serve… Go… Baltimore… Kill…”


By the time Tamara passed the Virginia state line, she been speeding for about seven hours. The sun had come up at some point. She couldn’t remember when. Didn't know how long it had been since she'd slept. Didn't care. She had to get to Baltimore.

Anneliese Van Can. Anneliese Van Can. A-N-N-E-L-I-E-S-E-space-V-A-N-space-C-A-N. She burned the name into her memory. If anyone was going to resolve this situation, it would be her. Leroy had history with her. Somehow, his plan to end the world centered around getting back at her.

More importantly, although she wouldn’t have admitted it, she had no idea where to go to find him now. This Amelie, though, she would probably… wait… Was it Amelie? No, started with an Anne… Anne-marie? No…

She noticed too late that the car ahead of her was coming up on her hood deathly fast. She slammed on the brakes, and her car shrieked along the road, scraping a layer of rubber off her tires. As she rear-ended the minivan ahead of her, the hood of her car crumpled, and she hit her knees off the steering wheel as she flew through the windshield.

She came to on the hood of her car. There was a paramedic shining a flashlight in her eyes, and she had a headache like a hangover from a gallon of liquor. She grunted, couldn’t hear herself, realized her ears were ringing. She felt over her chest. “Two r’bs crack’d, one brok’n…” she told the paramedic, who heard her and began speaking. She still couldn’t hear.

The ringing started to subside, and she noticed the driver of the minivan she’d hit rambling angrily behind the paramedic. A police officer stood between them, seemingly keeping him from coming over to do her any further injury.

She tipped her head back, to much of an increase in the aching. Through the glass of the back window of the minivan (which she would have remarked seemed perfectly fine from her angle) and noticed two small faces watching her in earnest. She weakly raised a hand and waved at them. The smaller one waved back.

As the ringing subsided further, she noticed a sound it had been masking. Something repetitive. Something coming from inside her car. She frowned, and listened more carefully.

“Serve me.” said the radio. “Kill.”

“T’chnol’gy these days…” she muttered aloud.

After a second she realized what was happening. She pushed the paramedic aside and sat up, the pain of doing so no worse than the knot in her stomach. “Shit. Shit shit shit shit…” She pinched the bridge of her nose and willed the ringing in her ears to go down further. Her fears were confirmed as she heard the chant not only in her car, but from inside the minivan in front of her, from all the cars stopped on the right, and from all the ones passing slowly on the left. From the police officer’s radio. From the minivan driver’s cellphone.

Serve me. Kill. She ran the words over in her mind. Why those words…

“Where did you come from!?” She frantically asked the paramedic.

“Ma’am? You need to calm down…” The officer instructed, his hand on his pistol.

Tamara fixed him with a quick glare and brought him to the courtroom. He panicked for a minute, but she was able to explain to him what was going on. When she released him, he released the grip on his pistol.

“I-I was in the ambulance treating the crash up the road. We heard your windshield shatter, so I...”

Tamara pushed the paramedic aside and looked up the road. Through the wall of cars, she could see flashing red lights and smoke from about 100 yards. A piece of vehicle debris. “Were there any fatalities?” She asked the paramedic.

“I- I’m not supposed to-”

“There was a woman in critical condition when we were over there.” The officer interrupted.

The minivan driver, looking around angry and helpless, demanded “What the fuck is going on!?”

From the direction of the ambulance, piercing through the chants of “serve me” and “kill”, there was a horrible scream, followed shortly by gunfire.

In horror, Tamara brought first the paramedic and then the minivan driver into the courtroom to explain. When she had finished, she gestured to the cars that were stuck motionless. “We need to get these people moving or get them running back the other way.”

The paramedic began knocking on car windows and pleading with people to run. The minivan driver told his wife to take their children back down the road. Tamara watched as they ran. The younger child, being carried by his mother, stared back at her. Before they passed out of sight, he waved goodbye.

Tamara turned. The officer had held up a hand to stop traffic in the left lane, allowing the cars trapped ahead of the minivan to escape. The paramedic was arguing with the driver in the car to the right of the minivan, both of them yelling to be heard over the radio. Sighing, she walked up next to the paramedic and explained the situation to the driver in the courtroom. As soon as they reentered reality, the driver got out of his car and ran back down the road.

“Serve… Kill!”

Tamara looked up the road. Now clear of cars, she could clearly see the ambulance, the remains of the crash, and seven corpses staggering towards her. She turned to hurry her evacuation.

“Can’t you… shoot them!?” the paramedic asked.

“Didn’t work last time.” She grunted.

“Wait, wait… Aim for the brain stem!”

Tamara turned to look at him questioningly. “... The where?”

“Uh, aim…” He tried to visualize his college textbook. “Aim just under the nose!”

She checked the ammunition in her revolver, pulled back the hammer and fired. Her bullet caught the closest attacker, a former EMT, square in the upper lip. He fell on his back, and she waited a second. He didn’t get up. “Well I’ll be damned.”

The paramedic, trying not to think of the walking corpse as his former friend, ran off. “I’ll keep getting people out of here!”

Tamara fired again, dropping the next closest corpse. She next one she shot through the top of the head, and it staggered before continuing forward to fulfil its purpose. She shot it again, this time missing entirely “Dammit…” she muttered. She hadn’t realized how much the world was spinning. How long had it been since she’d slept? It had already been over twenty-four hours when she first confronted Leroy… two or three days ago. Shit.

She took careful aim, and this time dropped the stubborn corpse for good. Three down… She shot the next one, and it fell. She took aim at the next... and the gun clicked. “Shit… Shit… Shit…”

She grabbed at her coat pockets for more ammunition, but found none. She turned to go search her car, but felt something tug at her hair.

“Serve! Kill!” It hissed. She heard its mouth open, felt its cold breath on her neck.

Directly behind her, there was the sound of a gunshot, deafening her. She felt some blood spatter on her coat. Two more gunshots. She turned to see the police officer next to her. One of the further corpses had dropped, bleeding. He shot once, glancing the last one’s clavicle. Another pierced its forehead, but the third struck home, and it fell.

As she caught her breath, he turned to look her over. “You alri-” He began.

Behind him, the last corpse that she thought she’d dropped for good wrapped its hands around his neck. “Serve…” it whispered. It dug its fingertips into his throat, piercing the skin and ripping his flesh. “Kill!” He screamed, then gurgled.

Blood from his throat sprayed into her face, blinding her. She wiped her face off and grabbed his gun from his hand just as the corpse descended on her, knocking her on her back. She put the gun to its head and pulled the trigger, blasting a hole in it. It stopped moving. She took a moment to breath, listening to every car nearby repeating the same words over and over.

“Serve…” the corpse moaned on top of her. She sighed, put the gun in its mouth, and pulled the trigger. It clicked. The corpse kept coming.

She looked up at the sky. Fine. she thought. At least I don’t have to hear this prick say the same three words anymore. See you soon, Johnny.

She closed her eyes, and momentarily, the chanting stopped.


Page buzzed Aaron and Urial into the building, and they led their classes to the stairwell. Danny filed in next to Penny.

“Fuck did you do now?”

Penny grabbed the fingers of one of her hazmat gloves, as if threatening to remove it. “You better shut that mouth before I give you ass cancer, Travis.” Between them, a pair of sandals tiptoed down the hall.

“Y’know, I haven’t been able to come up with any good radioactive sex puns. Kinda embarrassing not to be able to perform like this…”

Aaron stopped and held up a hand, signaling the class to wait for Political Powers. Denzil stepped off onto the first-floor landing next to him.

“Orderly line, everybody, keep going until you get to the shelter.”

“What’s going on?” Aaron asked, quietly.

“I don’t know, but the phone lines seem to have been disabled somehow. I can’t get through to my parents.” He held his cellphone up in a gesture of its uselessness. “Did you see anything outside?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Aaron checked his own phone. There’d been no superhuman activity alert, or call for aid of any kind. “Definitely disabled. By a professional, no less.” He looked up, sharing an expression of worry with Denzil. “Alright, Collateral Damage and First Aid, lets go. Two-by-two, no crowding.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Anneliese and Klaus stood just inside the shelter doorway, one on either side. Past them, the rest of the facility had gathered under the fluorescent lights.

“Why are the sirens going off??” Isabelle implored, breathing heavily. “M-mister Ursler, my phone won’t send texts… can you talk to my dad with telepathy?”

I’m sorry, Miss Chase, but my powers cannot extend that far. Urial explained. He trotted over and brushed her knee with his head, for reassurance. I’m sure your father will be alright.

Danny shoved his way through the crowd, followed closely by Penny, to where Jamie was lurking at the back, leaning against the wall and scraping at her teeth with an unfurled paperclip. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Bishop, know that?”

Without looking at him, Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh. You’re really spookin’ me by being such a tough guy right now. Reaaaally worried for my safety.”

Danny opened his mouth to say something, but his words failed him. Penny, having just caught up, interjected. “Did I miss shenanigans while I was in class?”

“They done fucked!” Poltergeist whispered to her, very audibly.

“Ugh, god, don’t make me sick.” Jamie shot back, looking up for the first time, only to remember there wasn’t any of Poltergeist to be looked at. In his place she saw Penny, and, brows raised, purred: “Well, hello there... you new? Haven’t seen you around before, or I’d remember...”

“... You mean ‘cause of the fucking HAZMAT suit?” Danny muttered.

“She’s not new, you haven’t seen her cause she lives in the basement and cyberstalks everybody in the bathrooms!” Poltergeist excitedly explained.

Jamie scoffed. “Poltergeist, do you ever spout off your ridiculous lies with, like, a purpose?”

“Oh, all the time! They’re way more chill than elephant seals.”

At the front of the room, Ophelia kept close to Minah, who was keeping close to Klaus.

“Pernahkah kamu mendengar dari Ibu? Atau Arya?” Minah asked.

Klaus shook his head, grimly. “Jaringan telepon mati. Mereka seharusnya baik-baik saja, tetapi Anda bisa mengirim burung.”

Minah nodded, closed her eyes. After a moment, a crow swooped in through the shelter door, landing on her shoulder. She whispered to it, and it grunted assent before flying back out. Klaus pulled a lever on the wall, and the thick doors slid shut behind it.

Ophelia touched a tentacle to Minah’s hand, and Minah gripped it tightly.

“A-alriiigghht evervybody! Remain c-c-clam, please!” Lazarus extended Allen’s arms out in what was meant to be a calming gesture. “Rrremember how wwwe hhave practiced remaingin cla- calm!” Allen smiled contentedly. Sort of.

“Why?” Jordan snarled, looking up from rewiring his phone. “Easier to slaughter us if we’re docile?”

“Whhat!” Allen exclaimed.

Jordan set his project down. “The world could be ending out there! For all we know, it’s your doing... robot!”

“Ahhhahhahhahh! Thhat is a rreferrrrence to our c-c-class, where wwwe talked about ROBOTS!” He grinned. With the faintest, tiny sound of slurping, Lazarus yanked a couple drops of sweat back into his pores before they gave them away. “Classs? Remember whhen we talked about robots?” Kennith raised his hand a little, but put it down when no one else was.

Jordan turned. “Yeah, hey, class, remember when we talked about robots? In fact, remember any class we’ve had with this thing? Never struck you as unusual? Sinister at all?”

“Look, Jordan…” Kendrick finally spoke up. “He’s just a… strange old man, okay? You really need to leave him alone. Especially right at this moment, seeing as we have much bigger concerns than your theory.”

“IT IS A HYPOTHESIS, TOY-BOY, GET IT RIGHT!” Jordan clenched his hands into fists and hopped up and down with rage as he spoke. “But I stand by it! I’ve seen what ‘McNabb’ can do with technology, and his weirdly skilled fingerprints are all over this clusterfuck of a system crash! I know he disabled our phones, and I’m gonna keep saying it even if you can’t pull your head out of your ass!!”

“Ōi!!!” Manami shouted, pointing “Stop-pu being mean to Kendi-kun!!”

“Oh, go poach a whale, you-”

L.A.R.R.Y laid a heavy hand on Jordan’s shoulder. “Mister Brahn. That’s enough.” Jordan deflated a little.

“Please, everyone.” Aaron projected. “This is exactly the kind of scene we need to avoid. I know, alright? I know this is scary, and we’re down here in a small space. Tensions are high for everyone, myself included. But the last thing we need right now is a panic, so take deep breaths, keep a cool head, and we’ll be back out of here as soon as it’s safe.”

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Kyle asked.

“We don’t know that yet.” Denzil explained. “As many of you have noticed, our phone networks have been disabled, so we haven’t received any word on what exactly the siren is warning us about.”

“Oh…” Kyle mumbled. He had more been asking ‘how and when did we get down here?’ but Mister DeKlerk mostly answered his question.

Klaus, conferring quietly with Minah in Indonesian, reached a conclusion and stepped forward to address the students. “If any of you would like to contact your families, you may write a message to be sent by bird.” He opened the shelter doors as roughly a dozen crows landed in the doorway and waddled forward, ready to act as messengers. Taking her cue, Page pulled a pad of paper from her back pocket and passed it around.

“What if we’re needed, though?” Lara asked. “I could go have a look around…”

“Absolutely not!” Page sternly declared. “Dere could be all sorts of tings hurtling trough te sky! It’s much too dangerous.”

Danny, struck by a thought, straightened up. “What if we sent someone out who couldn’t possibly get hurt?”

“Danny, if this is the set-up to some kinda joke…” Josephine left her threat to implication.

“No, no, I mean Poultr- uh, Poltergeist could go scout the whole city and be back in like a second.”

Poltergeist chipperly piped up. “Ohhhhh yeah, good idea!” With a rush of static charge, his two sandals shot out of the shelter door. Perhaps five minutes passed before they returned

“Well?” Someone asked.

“Well what?”

“What did you see, Poltergeist?” Anneliese pressed.

“Oh, right. Okay, yeah, great. So, right, I’ve got good news, bad news, weird news, worse news, even worse news, and just absolutely terrible news. I’ll tell you all the news for free, but I’ll interrupt a couple times to ask that you support me on Patreon. It’s only like, twenty-five damn cents for exclusive content but you just won’t do it cause you’re all a BUNCH OF-”

“Poltergeist!”

“Right, yeah, okay. So I checked Baltimore and everybody’s fine, totally good. Went a little further though, and boy is everybody dead. Like, everybody, just completely murdered and becorpsed.”

“That’s not funny.” Klaus snapped.

“Oh yeah? Well, what if I sayyyy ‘Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!’?”

Klaus balked. “What!?”

“You heard me. Anyway yeah,” Poltergeist continued nonchalantly “- everyone I saw was either definitely dead or in mortal peril. No joke totes legit facts.”

It took a second for the reality to sink in for the students and staff. There were intermittent gasps. Some silently wept. No one said anything.

“... wwwwweird news though. Everybody who’s dead? Still walking around. So that I would say is unusual and newsworthy.”

“Is he fucking serious?” Josephine muttered to Anneliese.

“I’ve never actually been able to tell with him.” she admitted. “How could you tell they were dead, if they were still walking?”

“Oh, it was super gross.” Poltergeist explained, affecting hyperbolic effeminacy. “They were like, grey and bleeding and bits missing and all that.”

“Like they had a disease?” Denzil ventured.

“I’m shaking my head no right now. You can’t see it. Trust me, they were dead. This one guy? Top half of his head was off. I don’t know where it went! Couldn’t find it! But he was just like, half-brain hanging out. Like he had a bowl of brain cereal for a head.”

Kendrick threw up. The smell quickly permeated the small space, and there was a crush as everyone backed away. Fortunately, L.A.R.R.Y removed the mess with a fluid vacuum and sprayed odor-neutralizing chemicals on the spot on the floor.

“Sorry…” Kendrick groaned, red-faced.

“No way man, live your truth!” Poltergeist responded “That was only like, in the top five grossest things out there. I’d have totally chucked my cheese if I had any cheese. Lemme tell you, this one-”

Page interrupted “Ye said dere was more news?”

“Yeah, yeah, so… it seemed like this was just a certain distance from the Baltimore area, so I went out further, right? And… this is going on almost everywhere.”

“How far has it spread?” Aaron asked.

“You don’t understand.” Poltergeist was uncharacteristically somber. “Almost everywhere. Not just Maryland, not just the East Coast or North America. There are dead people walking around in almost every city, town and village in the world.”

As one, the students paled at this information. Some who had been weeping went into shock. Others wept even harder.

“Almost?” Denzil asked after a moment.

“Yeah there’s like nine or ten little families in the arctic who seem pretty much fine. Except it seemed like a few of them had broken radios. That was odd.”

L.A.R.R.Y turned, ever so slightly. “Mister Brahn?” he said quietly. “Have you made any progress on the phone system?”

Jordan looked up, his face pale and eyes red. “-uh? Uh, n-no. No, I- I stopped working on-n it…” he whispered, sniffling.

“Let me help you…” L.A.R.R.Y knelt down.

All was silence in the shelter. Ten minutes may have gone by.

Finally, Chris broke the stillness. “What… What do we do?” he asked.

The staff said nothing. At length, Aaron helplessly said “I don’t know. I don’t... know.”

For a long while, the only sounds in the shelter were students weeping, being consoled.

Then Jordan’s phone beeped.

It caught the attention of a few students nearby. Jordan gasped. “I think… I think we got it? We broke the block!”

“Everyone. Go to Baltimore. Kill everyone in the city.” his phone said. Then it beeped again, and shut off.

Anneliese’s eyes widened. She looked over at Klaus, who returned a fiery stare. “Toussaint…” she whispered.

Lazarus noticed some odd physical input, which led them to discover unauthorized brain stem activity. Outwardly, Allen glanced at his now outstretched arm and put it back down. No! Lazarus affirmed themselves. No murder!

“That was Toussaint. No doubt.” Klaus said to Anneliese. She nodded. “He’s actually done it.” He said. She nodded again.

“And now he’s coming for us.” Anneliese finished. “But… now we know how to fight it. His thralls need his orders to act, they can be shut down with the right use of telepathy, and their weakness is the brain stem.” Allen looked sidewise at their conversation, grinning in terror.

“When the hell did you get so optimistic?” Klaus snarled. “How? He just killed… everyone in the world!”

“Listen.” She addressed the entire shelter. “The situation is grim, but now is not the time for grief, or fear. It cannot be. There are still over half a million people in Baltimore. The dead will be coming here, which means those people are in danger. And we?” She gestured to the students gathered around her. “We are superheroes. We have a duty to protect them.”

“But how?” Kennith wailed.

“It’s the whole rest of the world coming at us.” Josephine added.

Anneliese was silent for a moment. “No… not coming at us. They’re coming at Baltimore. We need to evacuate the city. Here’s the plan. Jordan, Larry, were you actually able to get communications back online?” L.A.R.R.Y looked up and shook his head. “Alright, then first, Manami and Lara: go find the Momo-taro. Between you two and the Hamasakis, you’ll have to go bring as many big ships as you can to the harbor. Aaron, Tabitha and Larry, stay here to unload cargo when the ships start coming in. We’ll need as much room as we can get. Jordan and Penny, keep working on communications.”

“In the meantime, we’ll need to lead people out of the city as fast as possible. The facility will be a good place to gather, it’s nearly the furthest safe place from the mainland, and… if all else fails, the building is as secure as it gets, and we can fit about 100 people inside.” she shuddered, and went on. “I’ll go out and help lead people back here. Mary, Jamie, Mitch, Sam, Ioana and Poltergeist, you’ll go and carry or lead people from the city limits. Minah, Kendrick, Wolf, Hannah, Luci and Kennith, spread out into the city and help as many people as you can to get here.”

“Even after we gather everyone,” she added “- the dead will get here before we can get them loaded on ships. Unless we can hold them off.”

“There are… there were about as many people in DC as Baltimore. If they’ve started walking, we have probably... nine hours before they start getting here.” Aaron pointed out. “That will be far too many to fight, but the Patapsco River might slow them down. We’d just have to take out about a half-dozen bridges to keep them from getting across.”

“You’re right. Mitch Tabitha, change of plans. The two of you smash some bridges. Start with… Hmm. Jordan, do you think you could rig up something that could take down the Key Bridge?”

“Are you fucking kidding?” He chuckled, mirthlessly. “I have bigger charges than that in my book bag.”

“Alright. Assuming we all survive, you and I are going to have words about that. For now, Mitch and Tabitha, start at the bay and work your way up the river. When you’re done, head towards Owings Mills and stomp any of the dead you see heading this way. Poltergeist, did you see anyone on the Key Bridge?”

“Yeah, I think so. Living people? Like, real ones? Yeah.”

“Then Ioana and Jamie, you start helping people across. We can’t destroy it with survivors on the other side, but if the DC horde can’t get here that way we could buy ourselves a few hours, so when everyone’s safely across or when the dead start coming, plant the charges and we’ll take it down. Hopefully, they will walk right off and into the Chesapeake.”

“Alright…” Anneliese considered for a moment. "Denzil and Josephine, you take Danny, Chris, Izzy and Ophelia. Arm yourselves and head towards White Marsh. Remember their brain stem is their weakness. Urial, you take Allen, Alexis, Cecelia and Kyle. Head towards Towson, and try and use your telepathy to tell the dead to ignore their orders; activity in the frontal lobe should override their external programming. Klaus and Page, you take Viola, Cherie-Amour and Victoria. Head towards Owings Mills. As soon as any of you encounter the dead, fall back to the best defensible position and hold it as long as you can. Mary, Jamie, before you start evacuating the city, get all of them in position.”

Some were nodding, others confused. Most were scared.

“All of your training has been leading up to this moment, and there is no doubt in my mind that we can win this. Remember, today we are fighting to save all of humanity. The telepathic effect on the dead wears off after a few weeks, but humanity will one day regrow. If we save the people of Baltimore, we save the world.”

The assembly straightened up, some even grimly smiling.

“You all know your jobs…” Anneliese pulled the lever to open the door. "Let's go be heroes."

Jamie and Mary got outside ahead of the rest of the facility. Jamie grabbed Mary, and teleported as far as possible, straight up. With the view, Mary opened a quarter-sized portal where they’d been standing, connected to the closest spot she could see to Owings Mills. Jamie teleported them both back down, and began taking members of Anneliese’s first group, one by one, through the portal.

Eden grabbed the sleeve of Anneliese’s sweater as she cleared the door. “What about me? You didn’t give me a group.”

“It’s too dangerous to risk you, believe me. Stay here, Larry and Aaron will look after you.”

“What? But… what if someone’s injured in the city?”

“It’s. Too. Dangerous. Please, Eden, just take my word on this one. Go into the shelter, and stay safe.” She turned and jogged off into the parking lot, alongside Luci and Kennith.

He watched them until they left his view. On some level, he was relieved he didn’t have to handle the situation. But his heart was in his throat as he turned around to go back inside, and he saw three of his childhood bullies by the door, jeering, calling him a useless org’. “Shut up…” he croaked back.

When Anneliese got to her car, she was greeted by Derrick, sitting on the hood of his mostly-annihilated vehicle. He held his phone in both hands. “So.” He began. “There would seem to be a problem. ‘Everybody’ is coming here to kill us?”

“Soon, yes. Everyone in the world, save Baltimore, is dead. Their cadavers are coming here to finish the job. I know this is a lot to take in, but I don’t have a lot of time to explain further.”

Derrick nodded. “So it’s a zombie apocalypse. Got it.” He stood up off his car and stretched. “You have a game plan?”

“Ah... yes.” She pointed back to the facility. “If you want to help, go tell Jamie Bishop over there to send you with the Owings Mills group. Tell Denzil I sent you.”

“I mean…” Derrick shrugged and started walking towards the facility. “I literally could not have anything better to do.”

Anneliese started up the engine. Kendrick, Luci, Wolf and Kennith piled in. Hannah, in her arachnid form, crawled up and sat on Anneliese’s shoulder, and soon, they were heading into the heart of the city.


One by one, Urial, Allen, Alexis, Cecelia and Kyle appeared on the grounds of the Country Club of Maryland, briefly accompanied by Jamie. She saluted them with two fingers, offering a brusque “Good luck”, before putting an eye to the tiny portal and disappearing. The portal squeezed shut behind her.

They took a moment to get their bearings, then began running across the green towards Towson, Allen and Kyle lagging considerably behind.

Crashing through some brush into the Wiltondale suburb, they found no dead attackers. A few confused and frightened civilians wandered through the street. Urial projected his thoughts as far as they would reach.

Attention everyone! Baltimore is under impending attack! Please evacuate the area in an orderly fashion, as soon as possible! Take only vital necessities! We are gathering in Sparrows Point! Spread the word!

He repeated his message as they ran through the community. Behind them, people began to trickle out of their homes and into their cars. After about twenty more minutes broadcasting the evacuation order, the supers made it into the center of Towson.

“I feel something… weird…” Cecelia ran forwards, into the traffic circle at the heart of the town. She pointed up York Road. “There they are! They’re coming!”

Up the road, a horde of dead, too thick to count, staggered southward as one moving mass. “Serve… Kill… Baltimore… Serve… Go… Baltimore… Kill... Serve!”

Urial stared up the road. Alright. He turned to point out the roads to their left and right. We’ll set up our front line here. If we plug up the streets leading south, we can let the buildings do most of our work stopping their advance for us. Kyle?

Kyle nodded, and collapsed onto Allen, who also collapsed. Shortly, an entire legion of dream-construct Roman soldiers manifested near them and lined up along the crosswalk, forming a shield wall that stretched from Souris’ Saloon on the right to the mall on their left. More marched off to form a line between the mall and the movie theater on the other side, and many more proceeded down Allegheny Avenue to find more streets to plug up.

“Hold on.” Cecelia warned. They gathered close, and she created a whirlwind that carried the five of them up to the roof of the mall. There they watched the undead horde slowly close in.

As they cleared the edge of the traffic circle, groaning their objective, Alexis nudged Cecelia. “Start up a little wind against them, will you?” She obliged, and a gale, weak but wide, whistled through the dream phalanx and blew into the horde, slowing their advance just a little. Alexis took a step back from the rest of the group and burst into flame. Rising off the roof, she descended into the traffic circle.

The wind blew her flames forward like a cloak. She raised her hands and projected a sustained sheet of fire into the intruders. When she lowered her arms, most of the dead at the front were enveloped in flames, although seemed to take no notice until their muscles were too burned to keep themselves upright. The gale spread the fire through their ranks as they burned. Alexis returned to the roof.

Urial looked left and right, noticing a few scattered dead in either direction. Alexis, Cecelia, he ordered. Head off down to the left and set more of these things on fire. I’ll go handle things over to the right. Alexis and Cecelia flew off down Allegheny Avenue, and Urial trotted across the roof in the other direction. A few of the thinner crowd of dead coming down Dulaney Valley Road were branching off, heading the other way around the mall. Let’s see if this works… he thought. Projecting to the dead down below, he began. Err… Hello! Don’t listen to the supervillain! Just fall down properly dead, and don’t try and kill all of Baltimore! Don’t even kill anyone at all!

Several, down on the street, stopped, seemingly confused, but continued after a moment. However, a few halted completely, then fell to the ground. Urial took this as a good sign. Stop! He projected, as forcefully as he was able. Immediately, ten or twelve of them sank to their knees and tipped over, faces to the pavement.

Meanwhile, beneath the other corner of the roof, the fire had spread some five rows back into the horde, and disabled perhaps thirty of their number. They had made very little progress through the traffic circle. Kyle had his legionnaires draw longbows, and begin to loose volley after volley into the crowd.

“Ready?” Alexis asked from the ground, a horde of dead coming to kill her.

“Ready.” Cecelia motioned, and a strong wind blew from behind them. Alexis opened her mouth and exhaled a blast of fire, which caught in the wind and ignited dozens of dead.

“C’mon, more to do…”


“There are four people in a safe room on the 35th floor.” Kennith reported.

“Wolf?” prompted Anneliese. Wolf reached up to the tenth floor window and climbed her way up. “Kendrick, how’s the situation in the subway?”

He grimaced. “It seems these people don’t trust a PERFECTLY TRUSTWORTHY action figure to lead them to safety… with only pantomime…”

“Alright, can you show Luci where they are?” He nodded, and motioned for Luci to follow him.

Anneliese turned. Sam appeared next to her, holding a teen boy. “How are we doing?” she asked.

“We’ve cleared out most of Carney, and Jamie and Mary have started on Parkville, but the dead are starting to come down 147."

Somewhere in Carney, three of the dead had cornered a small family in their garage. “Serve… Kill… Baltimore!” They hissed.

The father of the family, holding his two girls behind him, brandished a hacksaw. “St-stay back! I-I’ll…”

“Hey. Hey, guys. Hey.” Came a loud voice from behind the dead. They turned.

“... Kill…”

“Hey!” the voice continued. “C’mon guys! There’s an ass-eating party this wayyyyy… Any spoopy zombies who like eating ass better follow the sound of my eminently killable voice! Don’t miss out on the ass feast of your un-life!”

“Serve… Go…” The dead stumbled back out of the garage.

The family silently panted, confused, until a blue-furred girl appeared in front of them and carried each of them off in the blink of an eye.

Meanwhile, back in the city proper, Hannah came out the front door of a very tall building, leading quite a lot of people. “Sparrows Point! Head that way!”

Anneliese crunched some numbers in her head. If they kept evacuating at this rate… they’d still need a lot more time.

“‘Scuse me…”

Anneliese turned to see five twenty-somethings. “You supers?” she asked.

The one in the front nodded. “Codename Improv. Thought we could be of assistance.”

Raising her brow, Anneliese reexamined the group in front of her. She’d heard about these five… “Of course. Double Jump, we need to get people out of these buildings as fast as we can. Chop Shop, quick transportation to Sparrows Point would be immensely helpful. Magnum, Tilt, Improv, I have people holding off invasions on multiple fronts. Owings Mills could probably use your assistance the most.”

They blinked in surprise as she rattled off their codenames as if she’d known them for ages. A beat passed in silence, until Improv turned around. “Well? C’mon, everybody.” snapped out of their stupor, the five of them went to their respective tasks.

Luci and Kendrick came up out of the subway, followed by a long crowd of people. Kendrick pointed the way for them, and came over to talk to Anneliese.

“Hey!” he was interrupted by a man in military uniform running up to them. He wore a rifle on a strap around his shoulders. “What’s going on here? Where are you leading all these people?”

“We need to evacuate the city. We’re gathering at Sparrows Point.” Anneliese explained.

“Who the hell are you to make that call?” The soldier demanded. Two more in similar uniforms caught up behind him. Anneliese pulled her wallet from her pocket to show him her blue card, then flipped it up to another card. It was off-white, unimposing, with only four letters emblazoned across it. He looked it over, and his eyes widened. “You’re shitting me.”

“I am not.” She put her wallet away. “And since communications are down you can either send a runner to confirm it with your superiors, assuming any are still alive, or you can help me save the human race.”

The man turned to one of the soldiers behind him, who had a robotic implant over his eye. “Whatever she’s saying, she’s not lying, sir.”

“Oh honey, you’d need more machines than that to ever catch me lying…” Anneliese said under her breath.

The man at the front thought for a second, then came to a full salute. The two behind him followed suit. “Captain Amadi Okafor, National Guard, ma’am.”

“At ease.” Anneliese caught them up with the apocalypse situation. They were professionally stoic, but she could see that all of them were distraught. “I’ve got people holding off the invasions in Owings Mills, Towson, and White Marsh. The dead have started coming down 147, and undoubtedly through some other gaps. We need busses taking people to Sparrows Point, or we’ll never evacuate in time. The closest to the city limits should be the highest priority. Two of mine are taking down the bridges over the Patapsco River, but the southern front will still be vulnerable. I will leave the military operations to your people, but instruct them to aim for the brain stem. It’s their only weakness.” She dismissed them, and they ran off.

Kendrick stood next to her, open-mouthed. “What the bloody hell was that!?”


Manami flew out of the waters onto the deck of a freight ship. She had already told the sailors on one to head for Baltimore, and she could see that her parents had turned another around on the horizon. Kohai Lara had already gotten to two big ships and a yacht! Manami was very embarrassed to be outdone when it came to the ocean. She had to hurry up!

“Hello?” she called, splishing across the deck. “My name izu Manami… Ah… really bad problem! Haftu turn around!” She opened the door into the cabin. “Where iz everybody??”

As she came down the stairs below decks, she noticed she could smell blood. The lights were off, and the hallway below decks was only illuminated by a red klaxon. “Oh… No good…”

Suddenly, a sailor threw itself on her back. “Serve! Kill!"

“Oi, kujirakuso!” She slammed the corpse onto the floor. “Yamate!”

Standing up, she looked back the way the sailor came from. There was a lot of movement in the darkness of the hall. Many, many voices were chanting.

“O. Hijō ni waruidesu.” She sprinted back up the steps and onto the deck, keeping an eye out behind her, and ran into three of the dead that had congregated between her and the edge of the ship. They grabbed at her, one of them jabbing a finger in her eye.

“Waaaa!” She brushed its arm aside and jabbed a stinger in its throat, piercing through the back of its neck. It stopped chanting.

The other two started wailing on her with clenched fists. She jostled this way and that, but blocked most of their wild swings. She dropped another with her stinger, and was about to knock the third overboard when the crowd from below caught up with her. In the light, their faces were waterlogged and bloated. One bit her on the arm, and she cried out and pulled it away. Teeth ripped her stinger. She pushed the dead aside and tumbled over the guardrail into the ocean.

A moment later, she came back up, much, much larger. She grabbed the one who’d bit her by the head, which now fit in one of her hands, and crushed it like an egg. Another limply flung both its fists onto her back. Barely turning, she smacked it all the way to the other end of the ship, where its neck hit the guardrail with a mortal ‘krak.’

Inhumanly she growled, and made her way down into the ship.


Hours later

Come on, Kyle! Push harder!

“I caaaan’t…” Kyle mumbled in his sleep. The phalanx was failing again. They’d been pushed back nearly as far as route 45. As many of the dead as they burned or speared, ten more kept coming. By now, the mass of fallen corpses did more to hold back the horde than Kyle’s dream soldiers. “I can’t… hold ‘em…”

“No!” Alexis shouted.

The dream soldiers melted into goo, and the dead surged forward through it, chanting their creed.

“Dammit!” She activated her flame form and incinerated the first row of the horde, lighting the next few rows back. Urial stirred up as much frontal lobe activity in the horde as he could, dropping a handful here and there.

There are too many! We’ve got to run!

“Help me get Kyle!” Cecelia shouted. She and Alexis grabbed him by the arms and legs and hobbled down the road, barely faster than the encroaching horde, Urial trotted alongside them. They heard a very specific thump from behind them. Urial turned, and Cecelia looked up.

McNabb had fallen, just a few feet from the horde. “O-oh dear!” he exclaimed. The burning dead started to drop to their knees to attack him.

Allen! Urial stopped, turned, and reached out with his metal arms to drag Allen out of harms way. One of the dead caught his arm. Oh no. No no no. He started getting dragged towards the horde, his paws not offering much traction on the pavement. Stop! the hands pulling him went limp, but more took their place. STOP! He looked around for a dog, or a cat nearby… even a mouse or something…

“Urial!!” Cecelia screamed. She tried breaking off his assailants with a gale, but by now, the horde had advanced over Allen and within reach of Urial. They smashed Allen’s body, now burning as well, as fast as it could regenerate, and a few lunged for Urial's throat with gaping maws.

Suddenly, with a clang and a crunch, the corpses furthest forward collapsed underneath a metal suit. Riot foam encased the first row of the horde, and Rasmus stood up. “I don’t know what you freaks did this time, but know that you’ll be hearing about it when this is all over.”

He sprayed one of the dead that had started to climb over the mass of foam blocking their way, then spun around and broke the neck of one that had come up behind him with his elbow. He grabbed its body and heaved it into the next closest one, then delivered a kick to its midsection that sent three flying backwards, all in a row.

Meanwhile, Urial had dragged the remnants of Allen out from under the riot foam and away from the battle. Rasmus leapt over, slung Allen over his shoulder, and took Kyle in his arms. “Run.” he advised, and flew off towards Sparrows Point.


“C’mon y’all! Folla’ one a’ me!” the bald boy pointed, five of his clones motioning the direction to safety.

Anneliese finished helping a civilian onto an ostrich, which eyed her distastefully, and took off running to 108. “Minah? How many more do the birds say?”

Minah shook her head. “A lot.”

“Alright. Let-”

They both heard a boom from the south. Anneliese even thought she felt a shockwave. A moment later, Ioana skidded to a stop in front of her, panting. Her eyes were red, the pupils milky. “Di- h- didn’t- have ti- h- time to check- with you. They were cuhh- coming across the bridge… They got… as fahhh- far as the charges...”

Anneliese grasped her shoulder. “Did everyone get across?”

Ioana just panted. After a second, it didn’t sound so much like panting, and she looked up at Anneliese, telling her everything she needed to know. She helped her up and pulled her into a hug.

“It’s okay, Ioana. You did what you had to do. Go and take a breather.”

“I- hhh I can’t. I can’t, there are, there are stillhh- more people-” She pushed Anneliese’s arm aside and disappeared.

From the direction she ran, Anneliese saw Cecelia and Alexis flying down towards her. “They’re coming!” Urial bounded up behind them.

We couldn’t hold them off any longer. I’d estimate they may be here from the north in thirty minutes.

“Alright. You did well to hold out this long.” Kyle and Allen?

Taken back to the facility.

Oh, thank god. “I’ll rally more supers to go-”

A humvee pulled up next to them. Denzil got out of the driver’s seat, breathlessly. “Between Owings Mills and here is mostly evacuated but we… lost our position.” Chris, Tilt, and Improv got out of the car as he spoke.

“Ophie?” Minah whispered. Chris lowered his eyes. Her expression darkened, and there was a fluttering of heavy wings.

“Minah. I’m sorry, but I need you to check the area. Where still hasn’t been evacuated?”

She breathed deeply, quickly, and heavily.

“Minah.” Anneliese leaned over to look her in the eye, put a hand on her shoulder. “Make it mean something. I need to know where we still need to get people.”

She closed her eyes. “I’ll have the birds circle when they find someone in the suburbs.”

“Thank you. Please send a bird to your father as well…” she scribbled ‘recoup @ green mount’ on a pad of paper and held it out to Minah. A crow, swooping by, snatched it from her hand. “Thank you, Minah. You can take a break. I’ll have Terrence cover you.” Minah walked off.

"Did you see Tabitha and Mitch?" Anneliese asked Denzil. He shook his head. She looked around. Double Jump and Chop Shop had found Tilt and Improv, and shared in a silent moment. Chris sat on the sidewalk, his head in his hands. Denzil and Urial looked to her for direction.

“Gather your strength.” She said. “We will make our stand here.”


To be continued

 

[Bag o Fruit]

December Prompt #18, December 18th, 2017

Spoiler: November 26th

The two elderly men sat by a small smokeless fire. The calm waters of Lake Ladoga stretched out before them to the south, and to the east, the first pink hints of a sunrise grew over the horizon.

They had been watching the lake for long enough that they had seen it transition from a dark void to a crystalline reflection of the grey sky. Now, Ullr broke the silence. “Hyvä nähdä sinut, kaikkien isä. Siitä on kauan.”

The elder was a moment in responding, then he snapped “Why do you speak their language to me, boy? These are not our people.”

Ullr sat back, breathing in slowly. So the old man was getting right to the point this time.

“You’re damn right I am.” Odin responded, a little calmer this time. Perhaps a moment went by, or perhaps it was ten. “Why are you doing this, Ullr?”

In his imagination, Ullr watched a reindeer scamper down a hill on the other side of the lake, then out across its surface. He drew a bead on it, but reconsidered, and dismissed his bow from his mind. He met the reindeer in the middle of the lake, held out his hand to it. Steam billowed from its nostrils like a teakettle. After more than one thousand years, the majesty of animals still overwhelmed him.

“Stop that. Just tell me. You know I can just read deeper, and see for myself.”

Ullr spent another second with his reindeer before turning to poke at the fire. “Then why haven’t you, Allfather?” Ullr looked up into his eye. “Why ask? Why not just take my thoughts?”

Odin lowered his head, and said nothing. Ullr went back to the fire before Odin replied. “What you said… when last we spoke. You were right.”

Ullr was honestly a little surprised. He hadn’t heard his grandfather admit anyone other than himself was right, save for grandmother Frigg. Odin’s eye flicked up as he thought this, and he chuckled.

They looked back to the lake. After a few minutes, Ullr stood up, grabbed a small kettle, and went to fill it at the water’s edge. Odin watched as he sat back down and placed it over the fire.

“I could… leave an apple for you, somewhere safe. If you don’t want to see anyone.” Odin ventured.

Ullr contemplated this for as long as it took the water to boil. “No.” He finally declared. “I shouldn’t eat the fruits of Asgard if I don’t return. You’d hold others to the same standard.”

Odin tried to come up with an argument, but ultimately found Ullr wasn’t wrong. “Will you return then?" He said instead. "Not now, not if you don’t want. But, perhaps someday?”

Ullr felt Odin’s eye glance at his grey hairs, and he felt his resolve slip. He did, from time to time, struggle with the idea of aging this much. Of the risk of aging to death. He could sense his grandfather’s relief at being understood, and for a moment, considered returning. But, aloud, he said only “Don’t know yet. There will be much to do here.”

Odin sat up. He glanced into the forest. “Here. Of course. And why, again, are you here? This war isn’t any business of ours. Is it?” Slowly, he leaned forward. Ullr made eye contact and took a gulp of boiling water, singing his tongue and the roof of his mouth. It burned all the way down his throat and into his belly, but he watched as Odin flinched and sat back in empathy. If he wanted answers he could wait for Ullr to speak them out loud. Odin sucked at his tongue and sighed.

Ullr looked back to the lake, and sipped at his drink as the winter air cooled it. Odin stared into the fire.

“What about a game?” He said. Ullr looked back at him. “A wager. Your word you’ll return- … return before it’s too late, at least.”

Turning back to the fire, Ullr frowned. “You’re playing on my nature and you know it, grandfather.” He pulled a board from a small pack by his seat. “If I win, your word you won’t come to ask me again?” Odin mulled this over, and assented. “I’ll play white.” Ullr declared, beginning to set up the pieces. A row of five black at each edge, with one more in the center. A diamond of twelve white, and a king in the very center.

Odin moved his first piece to begin blocking off a corner. Ullr positioned a white piece to hold either of two others open.

"There hasn't been as much meat at our feasts since you left." Odin mentioned, a few moves in. "Tyr and Heimdall are decent hunters, but even between the two of them, not as good as you alone. Their problem is, while they are on the hunt, their minds are on war..." He moved a piece, capturing one of Ullr's.

There was silence for a few moves. “Tell me, grandfather. When you spoke" Ullr lifted his longbow from the snow next to him, with no interruption to his question, "with the völva," he knocked an arrow, "regarding the final battle," he held the bow out to his left, seeming to aim for the sky, "what did she say" he loosed his arrow, "would be my fate?"

Somewhere very, very far away, a Russian soldier fell to the ground dead.

Odin frowned as he pondered his options on the board. "Hrym is to throw his spear at you. Before it lands, you will fire three arrows, and they will pierce the artery in his neck and kill him. Then his spear will land high of its mark, but will create an avalanche. There you will meet your end." He moved a piece to threaten one of Ullr's, then looked up. "I've told you that before, haven't I?"

"You have." Moving a piece from the other side of the board, Ullr captured two of Odin's, including the one he'd just moved. "Only last time his blood became the avalanche, and the time before that my arrows pierced his eye, and the time before that his spear hit my chest."

Odin ran his hand down his beard. "Well... I suppose my memory isn't what it once was..." He moved one of his pieces out of harm's way. After a moment he realized Ullr hadn't moved at all, and he looked up to see him staring into his eye. He matched his gaze for only a moment, then glanced away, and looked down in shame.

"I'm not needed in Asgard, grandfather. I'm needed here." Ullr moved a white piece into the gap Odin's last move had left open, making it all the more difficult for the corner to be blocked.

Odin moved one of his pieces in behind Ullr's in the corner. "It's not a matter of need." he pleaded. "We want you back, Ullr. We’ve missed you. Your father, esp-”

“He’s not my father.” Ullr put his piece down, a little too hard. A black piece fell over, and Odin gingerly righted it.

“Thor, especially, has missed you.” He concluded, making his next move. “He is… difficult, to me even as he is to you. But he is my son, and I have always loved him as he loves you.”

Ullr clenched his jaw, unmoving, for a while, then nodded. He moved another piece. Odin blocked his next move, but he then moved the same piece into an even better position.

Odin began to play defensively, sealing up the corners that he could with impregnable diagonal walls of black pieces. Ullr began spreading his remaining pieces out into safe positions around the board. Odin successfully completed his formations at three corners, Ullr's pieces remaining a disruption around the remaining one. Many turns passed, their moves now motivated less by strategy than the necessity that a movement be made every turn. Odin's defenses began to slip.

"I have a son here." Ullr said, finally. Odin nodded. He had thought as much. "He signed up to fight the invasion. I decided to help as much as I can." Ullr moved his king close to an edge.

"You could take him back to Asgard... or I could bring him apples... or-" Odin started to take hold of one of his pieces to block Ullr's king getting into a space next to the corner, only to realize the other corner on the right was open to the king as well. He had no way to block both movements, and no way to stop Ullr from winning if he made either. He let go of his piece, and looked up. "So... that's it then."

"Your word is given."

He nodded, a tear beginning to well in his eye. "I won't come to see you again..."

"No. We only agreed you wouldn't ask me to return." Ullr reminded him.

Odin sniffled, wiping his face on his sleeve. "Of course."

"I... may decide to return, someday. If my son is taken to Valhalla. Or if I decide to take him with me."

"You will both be welcome. Always." Odin assured him.

Ullr smiled. "Thank you, grandfather. I hope to see you again soon."

"Perhaps another game in a few days." Odin nodded, smiling. "Goodbye for now, Ullr. Good luck." With that, he faded like an afterthought, and disappeared.

Ullr began to pack up his game pieces.

 

[AllHailDago]

July 15-21, 2016: Deserted Island Prompt

Andreas Spencer​

The gentle crash of a wave over Andreas' snout woke him from his pleasant dreams. He blinked his eyes several times in confusion as he lifted his head from the....sandy beach he somehow found himself on. That didn't make any sense to him. The last he remembered he was going to sleep on the rooftop of one of the DC skyscrapers. How in the world did he end up here? He wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper, and he hadn't ever flown in his sleep before. Could someone have brought him here? If so how in the hell had they managed that?! He was damn difficult to drug and even if someone managed that somehow, they would've had to transport a twelve ton dragon hundreds or thousands of miles out to sea....

The whole situation left Andreas scratching his head in confusion. However, Andreas was not one to remain idle for long, confused or otherwise. Letting out a huff, which was accented by a few curling embers from his nostrils, he examined the rather gorgeous beach around him. It extended hundreds of feet in both directions, unbroken by any form but his own and a small backpack that sat near one of his talons. There was a line of trees a short ways behind him where he could hear signs of small animal life rustling amongst the foliage. All in all, it was rather confining for a creature his size, but perhaps he was meant to live here in human form.

Curious, he used his talon to tear open the backpack and spill its contents onto the warm sands. Lowering his head, he eyed what appeared to be a collapsible tent, a box of matches, and a fair amount of food for an average sized human. He did not have the words to express his exasperation. If someone was going to go through the trouble of plopping him down on a small deserted island in the middle of the sea, you would think they'd have done enough research to know literally all of this was useless to him. He slept outside, could breathe fire, and would eat most if not all of this food in a day tops.

Brushing aside the backpack, which held nothing of interest to him, he unfurled his wings. A pleasant sensation as always. He gazed at the sky with a startling amount of concentration considering this was Andreas. After what would feel like an hour to someone else he made a motion akin to a shrug. He could only mildly figure where he was if the stars had been out, but it was the middle of the day and he had no clue. So picking a direction and going with it was his decision. Eating what food was gathered in a single mouthful, along with a copious amount of sand, he prepped to take off.

He had no clue where he was or where he was going, but that hadn't stopped him before. It wasn't like this would be his first flight possibly at intercontinental distances. He'd just have to descend to the sea now and again to eat a shark or a school of fish or something. Easy as pie. As odd as this was, he couldn't wait to get back home and tell the odd story to his friends!

 

[Gus]

Riddles in the Dark​

B Bag o Fruit
​

Kathryn was beginning to think the whole series of puzzles had been a hoax, or a prank. Honestly, it had smelled a little fishy from the start. What were the odds that a bona fide super-villain had the time or inclination to put that much effort into salting the city with clues purely in an effort to get a hero to foil their plan. Who had that kind of time? Not even Lars would do that. He played to win, not to impress.

Well, not to impress anybody real anyway. ​

"That's a fair point." she murmured to herself.

Thank you dearie, we thought so.
Still. This doesn't seem like him.​

No. This trail pointed to a lost soul crying out for attention. A pathetic emblem of 21st century life: the 'look at me, world, acknowledge my cleverness' creature of the internet. These hothouse flower types never did well in the real world. Too much bumping and jostling for comfort out here in meat space.

And we'll bump and jostle them good, we will​

"Until they scream for mercy, yeah."

If they show themselves.
How could they resist after all that effort?​

She unfolded herself from her perch and dropped lithely down to the street. It was nearly dawn. The riddles had been very specific as to location, but a little vague on the timing. Perhaps she'd have to try again tomorrow night. Annoying though, to waste another whole night just to satisfy...

"Hello..."

That package definitely hadn't been there a minute ago. White paper. Black ribbon. This wasn't a randomly dropped package. It had to be them.

"If this is just another puzzle, I'm going to kill somebody."

Slowly.
And not especially particular as to whom.
Wouldn't touch it if I were you.
But you are...
I don't follow
...oh skip it.​

Three brilliant shards of light leapt from her fingertips severing the ribbons neatly. As they fell away, the lid of the package trembled slightly, and she faded back into the shadows of the alley to see what would happen. After a moment the box top flipped back and the whole package seemed to unfold and reshape itself in a rather spooky demonstration of self propelled origami. In a moment, it had become a hand holding aloft what appeared to be a small business card. Kate leaned forward slightly to read it.

What it said was: Behind you.

*****
​

Kate's eyes flutter open and the first thing she notes is that her wrists are chained securely to the table in front of her. Shortly after this, the pounding headache begins to register. The bright lamp shining in her eyes doesn't help, so she lets her head droop down onto the cool metal table and rolls her forehead back and forth, carefully stretching her neck muscles. That helps. A little.

"Dear god, Kathryn, what ever have you gotten me into this time?"

Don't look at us, man.
We didn't do nothing
Twice, in fact.​

The sound of the space is hollow, with a metallic sort of echo. The air is close and stale, and there is a faint sound of surf and seabirds. Best guess, an empty shipping container. Not great odds for rescue; no cell signal to trace. Also, no sunlight, which means it could take hours to build up enough strength to break the chains, if she can at all, even after the sun is fully up. She could feel the dawn just breaking, the sun's presence bathing her soul even through layers of steel. Probably still in Baltimore then, unless she'd been out over 24 hours.

"ahem."

Kate rolls her head onto one side to squint towards the affected cough. Nothing but a dark blur visible beyond the bright light between them, but resting flat on the table at eye level are two smallish hands sheathed in elegant white gloves. And a deck of cards.

"Is this the part where you tell me all those clues were viral marketing for your private magic show?"

"Sadly, no. I have little talent in that area."

The voice is soft and mellifluous and while it hints at youth, does little to reveal gender.

"Bummer. Sad to say, Lars does the "trickster villain" schtick better."

"Mr. Magnusson is a cheat. He does not play the game fairly. He acts on inside information, not true intellectual brilliance. Any idiot can run circles around you people, if the proper strings are pulled on their behalf. He's practically a Mary Sue. He thinks that makes him untouchable. What it makes him is a puppet, and at best only half clever for seeing the strings. It does not make him interesting, whatever his hack writers might think."

There is a slight edge to the voice now. Too soon to say if that will be useful leverage, but it is informative to say the least.

"At least he can do card tricks."

"Indeed. I am afraid you will be the one doing the card tricks here today, Kate. Or perhaps you won't. If you can solve my puzzle, you will prove worthy to play on in my little game. If not, you will be the first clue for my next playmate. I am already composing a riddle for them to discover where to find your body."

"Mm. Maybe run with something like: 'Who has no powers in the morning, super strength in the afternoon and..."

"Hush. You have less time than you think, and your little jests are beneath us both."

"...wait, is that a riddle? 'little' jests... 'beneath' us both... Is it... ants?"

There is no answer. The hands pick up the deck of cards and deal out twelve of them, face up. The remainder of the deck is then spread out across them and they are thoroughly mixed together before being swept back together and squared up. The deck is cut into two piles and the hands gesture to them, palms spread out, as if offering something wonderful.

The light goes out.

The voice comes again now, seemingly from far off.

"There are twelve cards face up between those two piles Kate. You have five minutes to produce two new piles of cards, each of which has the exact same number of face up cards as the the other pile. If you do so, I will release you. After five minutes, this compartment will begin to flood. After perhaps fifteen minutes, you will drown. Mmm. Well I suppose I should say you would have had five minutes but for your little jokes. Now you have just three."

Kate sits up.

Rolls her shoulders.

Gingerly she reaches out and takes the two piles. Sets the one on the other to make a square deck.

Twelve face up... That's the only information she has been given, so presumably the only information she needs. She idly flips twelve cards off the top of the deck into a pile and considers. There are two extreme case possibilities. On the one hand, she may have just dealt all twelve face up cards face down, in which case, mission accomplished! There would then be two piles, each with no face up cards. Not likely, but you never know. On the opposite extreme, she might have dealt none of the face up cards out which is considerably more likely, but again, would solve the puzzle, since the deck would still have twelve face up cards left, and the twelve she turned up are now all face up as well. What if she only got eleven of the face up cards? Well that would mean one left in the deck and one in the pile. Ten? Two and two. And so on.

"Done."

There is a brief pause, then a clank as the chains are released from the table, followed by a thud as the door unlocks. The door creaks open and sunlight floods in, along with seawater. The shipping container immediately heels over on its side spilling her out of her chair and scattering the two piles of cards into the surf. Kate has a brief impression of two white gloves on the ends of what appear to be robotic arms attached to the other side of the table as the container begins rapidly to sink. Then she is kicking her way past them and out into the open ocean, sputtering and gasping.

As she treads water, waiting for enough charge to fly home, she thinks Seems a bit much for a prank, all told.

Still part of the 'acknowledge me' generation though.
Oh we'll acknowledge them.
To death?​

If only more Zillenials had really properly hugged their children. Did you want super-villains? Because this is how you get super-villains. Apparently.

 

[Bag o Fruit]

Writing Prompt: I Was Just Trying To Help…

CW: Vigilante brutality

Spoiler

The energy of a tiger, wound up to pounce, overflowed the man’s chair in the hospital hall. Only close inspection could confirm he wasn’t actually a statue, but fortunately, no one had yet been brave enough to inspect him closely. His measured breathing did not disturb his chest. His eyes were fixed on the safety mirror a few doors down the hall, where there was a left turn. He watched everyone coming his way, played out dozens of different scenarios per potential attacker.

One such suspect had been standing behind him for about twenty seconds, her arms slack and hands clasped together in front of her. Not a typical stance preceding a surprise attack, but exactly what she’d do to affect that impression. He had run through about fifty responses for whatever she did next.

“Um, excuse me...” She chirped.

He had not run though a response for this. He slowly turned his head, and gave her a glance up and down, one brow hinting at mistrust. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, brown hair with one or two grays, 5’4”, too pale, too thin, pastel blue blouse and khaki slacks. Her hands separated and sat at her sides when he turned, and she breathed in, clearly nervous. They held the silence.

“I- I just wanted to say, thank you for your service.” She gestured to his left hand, a dark metal imitation. He narrowed his eyes. “My brother l-lost his arm, in the marines.” she added quickly, then trailed off. “He has a prosth-... I thought...” She brushed her hair behind her ear. His wife used to do that a lot before they dated, because he never told her how much it annoyed him.

Eventually, the woman walked off, deflated. He kept a sharp eye on her for as long as she stayed in the safety mirror, watchful for any sign of a concealed weapon.

A nurse called his name. After a beat, he stood up, and followed her down the hall.

“He’s only been awake for about forty-five minutes, and he may be a bit hazy from the painkillers, but he has agreed to answer some questions.” She leaned down on the handle and pushed into the hospital room.

He caught her other arm. “Alone, if you don’t mind. Open investigation.”

She hesitated, blinked at him, not entirely understanding what he meant. “Sir, I’m afraid you can’t be-”

“Look.” He demanded. “We both have better things to be doing. If you’re present, you put my case in jeopardy, so either you wait here for three minutes while I ask him one question, or we wait here for three hours until my superiors pull rank on yours. Either way I get what I need, so it’s your career on the line if you pick wrong.” his glare went right through the back of her head. Her mouth was too dry to swallow, but she did anyway, and coughed a little.

He nodded, and stepped into the room, closing the door fast behind him. He checked the blinds, and with his foot, shifted a chair half an inch, so it stood in the way of the door’s arc. Not enough to stop it, but enough to give him a bit of warning.

As he turned around, he slipped on his glasses and pushed his left sleeve up a bit, uncovering a touchscreen on his wrist. He swiped the option to run his surveillance program and hit confirm, then crossed his arms. “Mister Richardson.”

The boy in the hospital bed roused a bit, wincing at the motion. Eighteen. Still more a boy than a man, his visitor would have said. At least, this boy was. His left cheek and arm looked soft, pristine, but that was it. Everything else looked like meat. “Yeah, what?” he croaked. “‘ready toldju fuckers everythin’...”

“What’s your favorite color, Mister Richardson?”

“... What?”

“Your favorite color.” The man repeated, deadly serious.

“This a fuckin’ joke?” the kid asked, disbelieving. After a moment, he added “What the fuck. Blue.”

“You have any pets, Mister Richardson?” He asked, checking his wrist.

“Man, the hell are you doin’?” Richardson whined.

“Waiting for enough footage.” He swiped the secondary program, and the camera in the corner of the room went blind.

In a room on the other side of the hospital, on a screen no one was paying attention to, the video flickered for just a second before it began to play looped feed.

“You what?” The kid sputtered.

The man swiped yet a third function on his wrist, and his left hand began to whirr. He walked to the bedside as he spoke. “Your gang’s been working in this city for a long time, Richardson. So have I. I know the rules you play by, and your bosses know that, but some of your little friends think I’m an idiot, tried to bullshit me, so here I am.” He made eye contact with Richardson. “I’m not here for bullshit, got that? Bullshit pisses me off.”

By now, a small white fog emanated from his left hand, much like what poured from an open freezer. Richardson, staring, nodded. “Yeah, man.”

“Your bosses keep constant surveillance on all their employees. I know there’s footage of the attack on Tuesday night. Where is it?”

“Hey, listen…” he said, in the voice of one who knew they were making a mistake. “I really donno whatcher talking about, we don’ tape-”

The man pressed his right palm on Richardson’s mouth, blocking his nostrils with the meat of his thumb. His left hand, now at -20 centigrade and dropping, hovered just a hair away from Richardson's scorched right bicep. Fear played across his half-mutilated face as he felt the freezing cold on his raw arm, and Richardson began breathing faster

“You were the supervisor for your crew. You set up the camera yourself.” he growled. He brought his left hand back, and waited for a beat. “Where is the footage?" He made hard eye contact, ensuring Richardson knew what would happen if he called for help, and slowly removed the hand from his mouth.

"Arright, arright, I- I set up the camera but I jus’ connected it to a server. I donno where- waitwaitwaitwaitwait..." the man had raised his metal hand, but stopped short. "I donno where they keep the video, I swear. I sweartagod. Me an' my guys, we were newbies. They din't tell us shit."

“What server?”

Richardson squinted, straining to think. “Uhh, all the names an’ passwords an’ stuff were just big strings of numbers an’ hashtags, I- I don’t remember any of’m. An’ they prob’ly changed ‘em all by now.

The man kept his hands where they were, glaring. "You'd better think of some information I can use, Richardson. Five. Four."

"Whoa whoa, okay, uhh, th-the guy that gave me the camera, right? He never gave me his name, but uh, he was kinda short? Like five-threeish? Uhh, hispanic I think... short hair, no beard or nu'n... Oh, a scar! He had a scar, like, from his eyebrow to his ear."

Keeping his eyes fixed on Richardson between a few quick glances at his wrist, the man typed a name into the touchscreen. A small node on his forearm lit up, projecting a mugshot onto the wall. "This guy?" Richardson side-eyed the projection, and nodded. "That all you got?" he swiped down on his touchscreen, and the projection disappeared. His hand continued to emit white fog, and seemed to inch closer to Richardson's arm.

"Yeah, man, we jus’... we were only at it for a couple days. They jus’ gave us the camera an' the recipes an' shit, we didn' know nothin’ about the higher-ups." His one open eye strayed from his interrogator, focusing on nothing in particular. "I know they said we had guns an' bombs an' heavy-duty shit, but we just had drugs, man. They didn' trust us with nothin' else... Dun' matter. Nobody gonna believe jus’ me."

The man studied his face for a moment. He swiped on his wrist, and his hand powered down, the last of the freezing mist falling and dissipating. He stepped back into his former position between the door and the bed, and deactivated the surveillance program. Turning, he pushed the chair out of the way of the door and opened it a few feet. Paused. "Almost nobody."




The streets of Baltimore played out over eight different screens, each blinking from one shot to another every few seconds. Spread across two tables, they ranged from a decent flatscreen, to a few laptops, to an old white monitor, which was condemned to replacement as soon as funds were available. A cable ran from the back of each one to a dark metal helmet, sat atop the monitor, eyes glowing red.

Facing the screens, Rasmus hung from a wooden pole on a ten-foot frame. Fully extended, his toes just scraped the ground, while his arms were just slightly bent. In one motion, he pulled his head up over the bar and lifted his legs, straight out, above a ninety-degree angle to his torso. Then he let himself back down. Back up. Back down. All the while, his eyes flicked from one screen to another, glaring like a bird of prey.

Then, he stopped. Swinging slightly, he landed on his feet next to the table, shoved his glasses on his face. A few keystrokes on his suit’s detached wrist and the video froze. Six screens switched off, and Rasmus watched one of the two remaining. Gabriel Serrano, the man with the scar on the side of his head, had stopped in a convenience store. He came out with a few bags. As he moved out of the camera’s view, Rasmus tapped on his touchscreen to bring up another one, further down the street, on one of the laptops. Serrano walked through it a moment later, and Rasmus brought up another, even further, back on the flatscreen.

Serrano’s eyes never strayed from his path, never glanced over his shoulder, but Rasmus saw in his face that he was actively wary of pursuers and observers. Unfortunately for him, Rasmus’s cameras were very discreet.

A rectangle of light appeared on the wall in front of him. In it, the silhouette of a small child. He took no notice. “Dad? I’m hungry.”

“Get your mother.”

“It’s Fursday, she’s at work.”

“Bread in the freezer. Make toast.”

“I can’t reach da freezer!”

“Get a chair.” Serrano came up on the flatscreen, and he brought up the feed from another camera on the laptop. The rectangle of light receded.

The man walked off the edge of the laptop, and Rasmus turned back to the flatscreen. A moment passed. He didn’t appear. Rasmus frowned, shut his eyes, and imagined the last time he had been down that street. An alleyway on the right. “Shit.” He brought up the camera nearest the other end of the alley. No one. “Stupid, stupid, stupid…” he furiously tapped at his touchscreen, bringing up an array of eight possible places his quarry could have gotten by now. Nothing. He watched the screens for a full fifteen minutes, in case Serrano was laying low, but there was no movement. That narrowed it down, at least.

He reached for his helmet.




Although his suit’s propulsion wasn’t exactly quiet, it wasn’t as loud as its full weight landing on the rooftop would have been. He hoped for the best, activated the amplifier in his palm, and pressed it into the concrete roof.

“You hear that?” a man’s voice played in his ear.

“Probably a vig on their way someplace else.” Serrano. This was the place.

“You think it was a vigilante?? Shouldn’t we…”

“Shouldn’t we what? Besides, y’got a buffet out there with supervillains, knights, buildings falling down… y’know, glamorous stuff. Nobody’s got time for us, trust me. Nobody ever does.”

“What about those kids last Tuesday?”

“Richardson’s punks were noisy dipshits. We knew that even wh-” The voices faded into murmurs as they walked away. Rasmus figured they must have been directly beneath him until just now.

He crept to the rooftop access door, tried the handle, which didn’t turn. He selected a few options on his wrist, and a thin probe extended from his left forefinger. He inserted it into the key slot, where it whirred for a second until the bolt clacked. He opened the door, slid through, and shut it.

As he made his way down the first set of stairs, he activated his infrared sensor. Three people on the first floor. One on the second floor, right near the stairs. He assessed his options.

A moment later, there was a slight clanging sound, followed by bursts of light, like a klaxon. The guard on the stairs leaned over the railing to look. Something was flashing bright white on the landing, halfway to the roof.

He grabbed his rifle where it was leaning against the doorway, leveled it, and proceeded slowly up the stairs. When the source of the light came into his view, he had to shield his eyes. It was almost blinding. He reached the landing, lowered his rifle. When it flashed, it was too bright to see, and when it paused, the stairs seemed pitch black. He reached out to hold his hand over the light source, which proved small enough to cover with his palm, but still bright enough to shine through his flesh, making his whole hand glow orange-red. He thought he could even see his bones through the back of his hand.

When he set down his rifle to search for an off-switch with his other hand, Rasmus swung the gag over his head. Soon, he was left on the roof, hogtied with two pairs of handcuffs.

The other three still appeared on the first floor in infrared. Rasmus turned off his lightshow device with his touchpad, and returned it to its receptacle on his waist. Then, slowly, he made his way down the stairs. As heavy as his suit was, the joints were expertly designed to make no sound in motion. All he had to be wary of was his thudding footsteps, which just a bit of patience mitigated nicely.

There were four rooms on the hallway of the second floor, one about twice the size of the others. He checked the large room first. It looked like an open office space, and Rasmus wondered if the building had been owned previously by a more legitimate corporation. He noticed a closed laptop on one of the desks, and crept over to it.

Upon opening, it asked for a password. Even the username was a string of sixteen digits and symbols, confirming Richardson’s claims about their digital practices. Rasmus swiped on his wrist, and a small USB plug popped out of a node near the touchscreen. He pushed it into the laptop, the screen blinked a few times, and the lock screen gave way to the desktop.

He grabbed his right hand with his left, twisted, pushed, twisted back, and pulled the gauntlet off his armor to access the laptop’s touchpad. The files were not helpfully named, or organized with any rhyme or reason he could determine, but after a few moments, he found what he was looking for. An unmistakable bright spot on the video thumbnail. He turned the volume down low and double-clicked on the file to be sure.

The video opened on Richardson and four others, chattering about recent sexual escapades while they cooked up hard drugs. Rasmus hit the right arrow key several times, and a loading icon appeared over the screen.

When it disappeared, the room on the video was instantly destroyed, as if a bomb had gone off. In the low volume of the laptop, Richardson was screaming. “-y god! Oh my god! Oh my gohod! Oh-”

Rasmus hit the left arrow, about half as many times as he had at first. The room was restored, and Richardson’s friends were looking uneasily towards the door on the right side of the screen.

“-as that? Jake, what the fuck WAS th-”

“I donno! Shut the fuck up!” A simultaneous thud and crack, the door flew open, a figure stepped in. Bingo.

“Hey hey hey, wait a minute… man, WAIT! Stop, we give up! DON’T-”

The video went white for a second. There were skeletons in the flash. The figure walked out.

A few seconds went by before Richardson gasped. “hHHH… Hhh… Ohh… ohhh my god. Oh my god! Oh my g-”

Rasmus closed the window. A swipe on his wrist, and a folder appeared on the desktop. He dragged the video file onto it, pulled the USB out of the laptop, shut the lid.

“Hey wannabe!” he was greeted. Shit.

Rasmus glanced up, without moving his head. Serrano stood in the doorway. Eight feet away, his helmet told him. No weapon, but infrared showed someone else in the hallway behind him, probably armed.

“Why don’t you put that thumb drive on the table and walk out of here, yeah?” Serrano offered. “Nobody says nothing, nobody gets hurt. Easy. Maybe we can even get it back to you after we empty it.”

The proximity alert flared up in the top left corner of Rasmus’s vision. His rearview camera showed another man behind him, a pistol leveled at his head.

“I need this. You don’t.” he replied “I don’t give a shit about your business, and there’s nothing on this tape that incriminates you anyway.”

“Maybe not. Even so, it’s ours.” Serrano declared. “And we don’t like people taking our things.” The man with the pistol was only a few feet away, and Serrano nodded.

Rasmus spun, smacked the man’s wrists down and grabbed his right with his own right hand, still bare. The pistol went off, but the bullet ricocheted off his left shin. He pushed his shooter’s shoulder so that his back was facing him, barring his arm behind him. Pulling him close, Rasmus extended the wings of his suit.

Just in time. A spray of bullets hit Rasmus’s back like hail on a tin roof, but his body and the wings shielded the man he still held in a pin. When the barrage ended, Rasmus saw his attacker reach for another clip in his rearview. He twisted the pistol out of the first man’s hand and gave him a shove, sending him staggering. As he turned, he pulled out the clip and tossed it across the room. He shot the round from the chamber into the floor, then threw the empty pistol into the other gunman’s hand, making him drop the new clip before he could get it into his rifle.

In a few strides, he reached his second attacker, who had stooped down to retrieve his ammunition. He made a fist with his right hand, grabbed the manual operation on his right forearm and sprayed riot foam on the clip, sticking the man’s left hand to the floor. Then he grabbed the rifle and yanked it out of the man’s grip. The first shooter, in his rear view, had drawn a switchblade, and charged forward for a downward stab. Rasmus turned to the right, batted the knife aside with the butt of the rifle, and grabbed the back of the man’s neck with his left hand. His struggles were in vain against the artificial strength of Rasmus’s suit, and Rasmus placed his face on the floor, trapping him there with a liberal application of foam to the torso.

He stood up and assessed the situation. Serrano was nowhere to be found, even on infrared, but one man was stuck prone, and another was unarmed and in an awkward position with his hand glued to the floor. Rasmus approached the latter and peeled up the small mass of foam. The man on whom it had hardened swore profusely, and tried punching Rasmus with his free hand, as Rasmus pulled him by the arm to the stairwell railing and cuffed him there.

He retrieved the flash drive from the table and stashed it back in his suit’s left arm, then executed a program in his touchscreen to send one of his pre-recorded messages to the police station. He examined his right hand, burned when he grabbed the rifle, and slipped the armor back on it, gritting his teeth. Then, he opened a window, and leapt out into the night.




The video had been sent in. The warrant had been issued. Rasmus had memorized the area of likely activity on a map of downtown, stocked up on relevant equipment, and gone on patrol. He regularly scanned over rooftops, and the street level around building after building after building. He set out at dawn, and was still searching at dusk. It was dark when his infrared picked up the gout of flame.

A running jump and his boosters took him to the edge of a roof two buildings away, overlooking the spot where two more blasts had been detected in the time it took him to get there. He peered over the edge.

His quarry shot off a fourth blast of flame, which was deflected by a hovering trash can lid. A woman on the other side of it gestured with her hand, and the lid, now glowing orange, went flying into her opponent. He knocked it aside with one arm, which shot out a fiery whip as it moved. She ducked out of its arc, reached both hands into the alley next to him, and pulled. As he turned to see what she was gesturing towards, a dumpster slid out of the alley and knocked him to the ground.

“I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch! I will!” She raised both hands, trembling with effort, and the dumpster rose up fifteen feet, moving over her downed and dazed enemy.

Rasmus was pissed. Partially that he hadn’t anticipated this woman, and had little to no idea what she was capable of. Mostly, though, that he had to rescue the guy she was fighting. He ran to the left edge of the roof, overlooking the alley where the dumpster had come from, and jumped, orienting his body with his head facing the combat. When he was at about fifteen feet from the ground, he engaged his boosters.

The woman brought the dumpster crashing down, but Rasmus sent it well off target, landing on his hands and knees just in front of the large dent. The would-be killer screamed with rage, and Rasmus felt himself rising. He checked his boosters for an instant before he realized what was going on.

The woman turned him to face her, and his arms moved to stick out straight behind him, one hand almost touching the other. Her face was the image of hate. “You should have stayed out of it, asshole.” She almost whispered, tremulously. Then his arms began to pry upwards. He felt his shoulders and his back strain, and tried to get the suit to resist. It was all he could do to keep his arms from dislocating. He groaned through gritted teeth.

Then he fell. Their mutual enemy had sent a blast of flame at his torturer, and she instinctively turned, held out her hands, dropping Rasmus. The flame stopped no more than a foot from her outstretched arms, folded into a roiling ball for a second, and burned itself out. Her attacker blinked, processing how she had just survived. She seemed to be equally shocked.

Rasmus, not so. Using his boosters, he closed the distance between him and the woman in an instant. She held out her hands to grab him, but he activated the lightshow device he was now holding. She yelped, and her hands moved to shield her face. Dropping the light, he stepped behind her, took her elbow in his left hand and her wrist in his right, and turned them, so that her arm straightened out level to the ground, forcing her torso to follow.

Fortunately, it seemed his guess about her reliance on her hands was correct. She waved her free left hand wildly, and a few loose objects flew around in his rearview camera, but nothing effectual. He held her arm to her back in his left hand, allowing no movement. His right hand, the motions of which were now monitored in his gauntlet, he closed into a fist and angled forward, sticking her hand to the small of her back with foam. Then he grabbed her left hand and did the same. She roared in frustration, as he cuffed her forearm to the nearest light post.

Her former opponent began to walk towards him, and Rasmus realized the situation had been an advantage. He thought they were friends now. Rasmus grabbed the hose that ran into his suit’s right elbow and applied it to a fire hydrant nearby, where the end automatically attached itself and unscrewed the valve.

“Good fight, man! Thanks for the assist.” His quarry held out his hand. “What do I call you?”

Rasmus reached into a receptacle on his thigh and produced a pair of handcuffs. “Codename Solar Flare. You are under arrest for unwarranted use of lethal force and falsification of vigilante reports. You have the right to remain-”

Rasmus got one cuff on one wrist before Solar Flare realized what was going on and jerked his hand back. “What the fuck? Fuck is this? Who the fuck do you think you are?” His hand was engulfed in thick flames for a moment, and when they subsided, the glowing metal ring dripped off his wrist. “You think you can take me, asshole? I’ll fucking fry you!”

“That a threat, Flare? On top of resisting arrest?” Behind his helmet, a smile played at Rasmus’s cheeks. Solar Flare began to say something, pointing at him for emphasis, and Rasmus took that as enough excuse, making a fist with his right hand. A jet of water erupted from his suit’s forearm, hitting Solar Flare square in the chest and knocking him on his ass.

He caught his breath, sputtering. “Fffuck you!” A beam of fire seared out of his chest, which Rasmus countered with another, sustained blast of water. The two contested for a moment, but the fire hose won out, knocking Solar Flare on his back. He grunted and stood up, now enveloped in thick white steam on all sides. Rasmus was nowhere to be seen. Breathing heavily, he turned this way and that, finding no sign of him. “Where are you!?” He shouted. Thinking he heard something, he sent a quick blast of fire in an indiscriminate direction. Then another, somewhere else. Another.

He turned a fourth time, readying to make another potshot, and the inside of a garbage lid hit him in the face with the full force of Rasmus’s right hook, knocking him out cold.

Rasmus stood over him for a moment, satisfied, before kneeling down to cuff him and say his due diligence. “Codename Solar Flare. You are under arrest for unwarranted use of lethal force…”

 

[Bag o Fruit]

WIP

Happy Halloween!

Spoiler: Part 3

The blood was mostly dried, and the soaked clothes sat stiffly in the pile on the bathroom floor. A red pool grew bit by bit from the edges. Nearby, Toussaint sat in the shower. Whose shower, in whose bathroom, he didn’t know exactly. They didn’t offer up their names.

He felt over his face and body, slowly, feeling as though he’d overtaxed every one of his muscles. His newly bald head was crusted with something difficult to fully scrub off, and there were mainly scabs where he’d once had a nose and ears. He couldn’t quite bring his lips together anymore, and coppery-tasting water streamed through his teeth. Worse, it got into his nostrils much more easily. Still, he did his best to clean up, on some level remarking disdainfully about his hosts’ choices in grooming products.

When the long effort of washing and drying was done, he peeled plastic wrap off his leg and unwrapped the hastily-applied bandage beneath. Both of his injuries had clear exit wounds, so the bullets weren’t still in him, but all four distinct holes were actively bleeding again. He assuaged that with a fresh towel, while wiping off as much of the smeared blood around the area as he could. He found some antiseptic, poured it on a cloth, and dabbed at each of his wounds. The pain of doing so was, all things considered, nothing. But he still sucked at his teeth as he did it.

Still using the rifle as a crutch, he stepped into the nearest clean pair of shoes and limped back out of the house, clad in nothing else. The streets of the small city smelled of death. They were empty, and silent. He could hear his captive writhing and thumping in the helicopter he’d put down in the street, and he stuck his head in the door.

“Baltimore! Go… kill! Serve! Kill… Baltimore!”

“Hey! Settle down! Il n'est pas encore temps!” In the straps and duct tape, his captive slowed a little, but went back to thrashing after a second or two. Toussaint sighed. “Serve me. Hold still.” These words seemed to get through his head. The writhing subsided, and the chant changed from Baltimore to stillness.

Toussaint stepped back out of the helicopter and made his way down the street, limping in his stolen shoes. Before long, he found what he was looking for: a clothing store.



Baltimore

Wolf strode through the upper floor at high speeds, legs extended to almost seven feet. She inflated her lungs like a balloon, called out: “Hello? Who’s still up here?”

A voice called out, weakly, in reply. “Oh! Oh, here! We’re here!” Wolf picked up speed, slung around the corner where she’d heard it. A woman, her greying blonde hair done up, but coming apart, knelt clinging to the arm of a full-backed electric wheelchair. There was another woman seated in it, younger, Wolf thought. Neither her head nor her face moved, but Wolf saw her eyes drift in her direction, propelled by relief and gratitude. “Th-they all just left…” the older woman reported. “The elevator won’t… they all left and no- no one helped us! No one helped-”

“I’m here now. I’m here to help.” She held one hand out, gently, over the woman’s shoulder. “Come with me, we’ll get you both out of here.” The woman exclaimed, breathily.

Wolf went ahead of them, arms stretched out, hands spread wide, sweeping aside obstructions. The older woman pushed the wheelchair behind her, and the three arrived at the open window. She waved a hand the size of a flatscreen at the street below, and stepped back.

Widening quickly from a pinpoint, the view out the window changed, as if a bubble was being blown full of elsewhere. Muted sounds turned instantly to the clamor of a crowd. When the road on the other end of the portal met the floor at the edge of the drop, Wolf directed the two to enter, and they hesitantly complied.

As the borderless edges of the portal squeezed shut, the woman turned back to meet Wolf’s eye. She simply said “Thank you.”... but there was more than that to her voice. Wolf didn’t know what to say. She only nodded as the portal closed.

Her brow furrowed at the unobscured skyline. “Lots of birds still circling out that way,” she announced to the now empty room. “That’s… northwest. Druid Ridge. Best let the boss know. I’ll be over there.” She pointed to a building across the street. Grabbing both frames of the window, she ran backwards fifteen feet, stretching her arms, and slingshotted herself into the open air. As she neared the next building on which she would land, she reached out with her feet to slow her fall, and contorted into a perfect sphere on impact, rolling her momentum out.

Ten stories down, leaned against the side of the building, Kennith blinked awake, repossessed by his own soul. He pulled himself up and took off running, dodging at the edge of a crowd of evacuees going the other way. He came to a stagnant line of city busses, navigated left down the edge of one and past the back. There, past a thin crowd of supers and other public servants, he saw Anneliese, fervently arguing with a teddy bear. Their contention became clearer as Kennith got closer.

“I wouldn’t care if it was four, three, or two of them, either! We need communication, and they’re the only psychics on hand without serious range limitations!”

Ted shook his head, swept a rounded paw out in front of himself as though he was clearing off a desk, then flicked it up, as though tossing salt over his shoulder.

“And why the hell won’t they!? Do they understand their ship isn’t leaving unless we-”

“Miss Van Can!” Kennith shouted, closing the distance. “Miss Higgins says there’s still a lot of people towards the zoo!”

She frowned at the news, but grimaced in appreciation. “I’ll get someone on it, thanks, Kennith. You’d better go and find her again, in case she needs help.”

“Y-yes ma’am. Um…” He hesitated. Anneliese turned to face him more directly. “I heard Mister Ursler and Mister McNabb’s group c-came back. Is…”

“She’s fine, Kennith.” She smiled. “At least as fine as usual.” Kennith grinned, relieved, and ran off towards the building Wolf had pointed out. Anneliese turned again to Ted. “Now, will you tell them- oh, hold on!” With a blue flash, Sam had appeared. She deposited a little girl, and disappeared before Anneliese could react. “Sam, we ne- dammit...” she sighed. “Poltergeist?”

“Yeah boss!” His voice rang, a little too loud to be accidental, right behind her head. Keen not to encourage him, she only startled inwardly, and turned around. For propriety, if nothing else.

“I need you to go find- wait…” Noticing the line of immobile busses in the street, she ran through Poltergeist and up to the door of the closest one. “Are you full up?”

The driver gestured to the crowd of people in the seats, and many sitting in the aisle. “We’ve been full for five minutes, I don’t know what’s going on.”

She came back down the bus steps. “Poltergeist! Go and find out what the hold up is!” There was a streak of sparks. After a moment, it returned.

“Whatcha got is a bad case of street constipation! One of the bus engines was too nervous to perform while they were navigating through some abandoned cars.” His voice became commercially deep and suave. “If only they’d used via-”

“Go find Sam or Ioana, tell them there’s a lot of people still coming from the northwest.” The pair of sandals rocketed away. Anneliese felt a tapping on her shin, and looked down.

Ted pressed together both his mitten-like hands, then separated them downwards to make circles, clockwise on his left and counterclockwise on his right, meeting back in the center where they’d started. He then separated them again to spin them in opposite directions, this time following right angles to draw a square in the air. He shrugged. So did Anneliese.

“We can’t make them be heroes. Tell them if we all die, they can blame themselves. Don’t tell them that.” She relented mid-sentence, and reached down. Ted clung to her arm like a wristwatch. “Find Mister Mallory and tell him he’d better start heading over. We’re gonna need him.” She began running up the street towards what would soon be the front lines. “Chop Shop!”

The young man looked up from transforming a Buick into a barricade. “Trouble?”

“We need cars cleared out and engine maintenance up the road that way!” She pointed down the string of busses.

“Got it!” Chop Shop stood up into a sprint, both hands trailing a stream of warped metal, wheels and engine parts. He whipped them out into his path, as if spreading a blanket over a bed, and they coalesced into a rudimentary motorbike. He jumped on, and it took off.

Anneliese walked the rest of the way to where he’d been working. A dozen or more police officers and soldiers were going through a stockpile of weapons and ammunition, making sure everything was fully loaded and ready for battle. Many more, and a lot of civilian volunteers, stacked up sandbags and debris alongside the automotive sculpture of a wall Chop Shop had been putting together. The barricade connected the wall of Green Mount Cemetery to the chain link fence of the parking lot across the street, and similar barriers were going up between buildings all up and down E. North Avenue. Anneliese had never been happier about Baltimore’s thin alleyways and long, long stretches of brick row houses.

Denzil stood on the cemetery wall, both hands grasping one of the trees that ran alongside it. Under his influence, the tree was visibly growing fruit. Sat beneath the tree was a young bald boy, snatching at its crop, consuming almost constantly. A perfect image of himself had made it halfway out of his bare torso, and a brigade of about a dozen such fully formed clones brought him off-white ceramic plates of lo mein and chicken tenders from a take-out place down the street. Anneliese got Denzil’s attention, and he nodded, then looked across the street. Anneliese followed his eyes.

In the empty parking lot, Chris crouched up against the wall of what was once a Rite-Aid, arms crossed over his knees in the foetal position. He stared, blankly, down the road to the north. Anneliese nodded back to Denzil, and plucked Ted off her arm. “Stay with Mister de Klerk. Let me know if anything important changes.” The bear held out a hand in a thumbless thumbs-up, and toddled off towards the grotesquerie of human mitosis.

Chris’s eyes didn’t move, but she knew he noticed her as she approached. After a few seconds to think, she sat down on the sidewalk, about four feet from him, looking across the street. She let a moment pass, and turned to look at him, shifting her body on the sidewalk a little. He was still looking the other way, but she knew he could hear that.

He tightened his arms around his legs, and Anneliese soon turned to look back across the street. After a beat, Chris relaxed his arms a little, and then, turned his head, looking down between his knees.

Anneliese looked over at him, this time just with her head. A few minutes may have passed. Then Chris, haltingly, looked up, and met her eye.



Hours ago

Jaime grabbed Mister de Klerk by the shoulders, turned to look through the tiny portal hovering at eye level, and disappeared with her distinctive 'vwoomp'. A second later she reappeared and made to grab Nurse Cross the same way, but she swatted Jaime’s hands aside, seemingly by instinct. There was an instant of hesitation, and the nurse held out a hand as if to shake. Jamie rolled her eyes, grabbed it, and disappeared again.

No one warned Chris he was next.

Jaime teleported out with her hand already on his shoulder, and before even his reflexes could register that, he was suddenly almost ten miles away. Jaime let his shoulder go, and he lost his balance, had to take a step forward not to hit his face on the street. This was his third time being teleported, by Jaime at least, but never so far with so little preparation.

The portal being nearby somehow made the experience even worse. In one second, he was hearing the bustle to get out of the facility. The road noise on the other side, being as it was transmitted through a nickel-sized hole and nothing else, was only just audible. Then, suddenly… it was switched. The road was loud, the facility soft.

And not just that, but the airflow was different. Slower. Wrong direction. A little warmer. Chris didn’t quite realize how aware of that he was until he was dropped instantaneously, unceremoniously, inside a different one. It was like… like he was listening to a different track in each ear, and someone was messing with the left-right balance. And the thermostat. And he was having an existential crisis. He stumbled forward and sat down on the sidewalk, pressed his palms to his face until his system settled a little.

Mister de Klerk and Nurse Cross, he realized, were telling people to head for Sparrows Point. It occurred to him that he should probably help with that, but he reasoned, what could he say that they weren’t?

After another few seconds, he took a deep breath, and looked up. What had been more like nausea consigned itself to dizziness. He could hear just fine, and could see that Izzy and Ophelia were through the portal, although an afterimage of his field of view kept drifting clockwise and snapping back to where it came from, as though he’d been turning circles for a few minutes. He stood up, and slowly made his way over to them.

“It’s been a minute. Are we all through?” Ophelia asked.

“Not yet…” Denzil replied, puzzled.

A second later, Jamie appeared, six feet above the road, holding Danny. She disappeared without him, and Chris heard another 'vwoomp' from next to the portal before Danny hit the ground.

“Oww! Fucking bidch godfugging dabbit! Shid!” He spat as he sat up, and confirmed with a finger that his nose was starting a hell of a bleed. Nurse Cross sighed, produced a flat box of tissues from her bag, and chucked it at him. Chris wondered idly if she knew about his bleeding condition. If anyone should know, it would probably be her. Maybe tissues were all he needed. Or maybe she just didn't care that much.

“Alright, team, let’s get going! We need to find some weapons before we run into the dead.” Denzil waved them forward.

Ophelia pointed up the road. “I think there’s a shopping mall up there! Maybe they’ll have knives or something.”

“Wait…” Izzy began.

Chris heard a 'fwoomph' and a 'vwoomp' in quick succession. Turning back, he saw there was now another man behind them. He was tall, and Chris sensed a lot of strength in his bearing. More strength than his muscles should have had. “Uh, hey…" the stranger called out. He checked a business card. “Anne… uh, Ann-leaze said to tell Denzil she sent me.” He looked up. “One of you is Denzil, right?”

“That’s me…” Mister de Klerk confirmed. “To be clear, you know what’s going on? Reanimated dead? Brain stem? You ready to fight?”

“Pretty much always. I’m Derrick.” The man, Derrick, nodded in greeting with a hand pressed to his chest in mock etiquette.

“Fine.” Nurse Cross muttered. She started running, slow but gaining speed. “C’mon, we don’t have all day!”

"I'll fill you in on our capabilities on the way..." Chris heard Mister de Klerk begin, falling in next to Derrick.

When they arrived at the shopping mall, Nurse Cross and Mister de Klerk started directing people to evacuate to Sparrows Point, turning the students loose to look for weapons. The problem was, Chris had no idea what he should be looking for.

Guns? He'd never actually shot a gun before, and he wasn't certain, theoretically, that his powers would be any help. He might be able to estimate where to point the barrel, but he had no intuitive sense of how fast bullets went. Fast, for sure. Should he aim high to adjust for gravity? Or low for recoil? How low? As far as his intuition went, a shell casing was like Schrodinger's exploding box. In any case, none of the storefronts seemed to suggest the sale of firearms.

He noticed Izzy had found a rope somewhere, and was trying to think of a gentle way to ask what she thought she was going to accomplish with it, when Ophelia called him over from a few stores down.

The store her voice had come from had several unpleasant lights from wall to wall, yet still managed to seem poorly lit. Chris couldn’t quite make sense of their selection, but like many other mall stores, it seemed to generally cater to people who were too edgy to interact with normal society. Near the entrance was an illuminated glass case, one half filled with various glass pipes and paraphernalia, the other half with switchblades and knives of all impractical sorts. Chris supposed that was what caught Ophelia’s attention, but where…?

Most noticeable in the reflections on the case, there was the barest shift in the fluorescent lighting. Chris blinked. Then he grinned.

As soon as he felt the downdraft, he ducked into a roll, shifting as he spun to face Ophelia, who landed where he’d just been standing.

She swung wide with a dagger, pommel first, blade out. He knew better than to block; the knife would have coiled around for a nick. He leapt over the attack, catching her tentacle just next to the hilt of the blade and landing behind her swing.

He pulled his hands together, enclosing the working end of her tentacle in his full grasp. She coiled around his hands and tugged, pulling him forward, but he landed in a stronger stance. When she tugged again, he didn’t budge. Her right tentacle, up to now coiled behind her back, snapped forward with another knife, but he put his hands in the path of her attack, blocking with her own left tentacle. She stopped short of stabbing herself, whipped the knife back and struck at another angle, but he’d already moved his hands to block again. She halted her strike.

For a moment, they stood perfectly still. Then Ophelia half smiled, dropped the knife in her right tentacle. Chris let her left go, and she uncoiled from his hands.

“You can have that one if you want. The balance isn’t right for me.” Chris assumed she meant the knife she’d dropped, and he picked it up. It certainly didn’t look balanced by any definition; there were open curves and hooks on both edges. He knew it wasn’t a Tolkien replica, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t Star Trek either, but it was definitely a creation of someone’s fantasy. He put it back down on the floor and went to raid the counter, where Ophelia had retrieved another knife and was now running through ninjutsu forms.

Looking over the knives in the case, it seemed most of the longer ones were variations on the fantasy… item. He picked out a few switchblades and folding knives and set them on top of the case for closer inspection. Examining his choices, he idly picked up a butterfly knife, thumb and first two fingers on the end of the hilt. He singled out a box for a blow-up doll on the back shelves, and imagined himself throwing the knife right in the middle.

Unconsciously, his grip shifted. Then it shifted back. He brought the knife up to his eye level, ready to throw. The right grip changed again. He feinted a throw a few times. First his arm went one way, shakily. When it went forward again it changed position by several degrees. It felt like staring at a multiple choice question in a test he hadn’t studied for. Finally, he shook his head, folded the knife closed, and set it back down on the counter.

He picked up a fairly aerodynamic-looking switchblade, popped it open. Bringing it up in a ready position, his fingers immediately found the grip. He focused on the box, made the motion of throwing without letting go. He brought his hand back, threw again. Again, and this time he had to consciously keep himself from letting the blade fly. His hand followed precisely the same arc each time. There was no hesitation in his arm. A fourth time, he imagined throwing it, and there it was. The blade dug into the box completely, precisely in the center. He smiled, and walked to the end of the store to retrieve it.

As he returned up the aisle, he could hear Danny shouting “Gravidz! Where dhe fugg you ad?”
He realized Ophelia was no longer in the storefront with him, and he stuck his head out of the entrance. The rest of their group had apparently gathered, and Mister de Klerk called out. “Chris! C’mon, we’ve got to get going!”

“O-okay!” He stammered. “One second!” He could hear Danny muttering ‘jezud vuggin grise…’ as he returned to the front counter, closing the switchblade and stuffing it in his pocket. “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit…” He looked over his initial selection, trying to judge which were worth taking. Finally he grabbed everything that looked vaguely like the one he’d picked, including a few he’d left in the case at first, and ran back out with two handfuls of knives, some clattering to the floor behind him.

“Alright, that’s everyone…” Mister de Klerk said, as Chris hastily tried to get his ammunition into his pockets. If he knew Mister de Klerk, he knew he wasn’t sniping at him with that remark, but it still felt a little like it, and his cheeks burned hot. Especially with the ridiculous-looking bulges in his pockets. A professional super would probably have a utility belt for throwing knives… or better yet, bandoliers! He hadn’t seen anything like that for sale…

“- only on my signal. If we’re gonna work together as a unit... and we’re gonna have to... we need to stick to that plan. Got it?” There was a consensus of agreement as Chris debated whether he should ask for a quick recap. “Alright!” Mister de Klerk straightened. “Let’s get out there!”

The group took off towards the north exit, and Chris followed. It was probably fine. He’d just… watch what everyone else was doing and throw a lot of knives. What could go wrong?



Now

Even as hard as he fought them, tears rolled down Chris’s cheeks, and he trembled with every breath. There was a glossy streak down Anneliese’s face as well, as she held his gaze.

Chris slumped, leaning towards her just a few inches, and in that very instant she was there. One hand on his back, another on the back of his head, his face in her shoulder. He put his arms around her limply, and tried with what was left of his conscious will not to blast snot on her sweater.

“I’m sorry, Chris.” She whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” He sniffed, sharply, and exhaled slow. After a moment, they broke their hug. “You’ve done… more than you should have ever had to do. More than I should have asked of you. I’m so sorry.” She caught his shoulder, made sure he was looking. “And I won’t ask you for any more. If you’re ready, catch the next bus to Sparrows Point and board a ship. No one will think any less of you, I promise. You’ve done more than your part in this.”

He was taken aback processing her offer, and her assurances only compounded his confusion. His instinct was caution; in his experience, this sort of proposal was sometimes bullshit. Some kind of trap laid by adults, his teachers especially. But from Miss Van Can… it wasn’t just that there was no sign of deceit. It actively appeared that she was telling the truth, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Still…

His lips had dried together, and they peeled apart as he began to speak. “No… I… I don’t think I could do that. This isn’t over yet.” He glanced at a few volunteers rolling a derelict car into place as a barricade.

“I know the feeling.” She stood up. “Alright. If you’re ready, follow the road down that way…” she pointed west down E. North Avenue, to where the sun was just starting to turn the sky red. “The wall should turn south after about five or six blocks. We’re trying to get all the way down to the aquarium, but since Tabitha and Mitch are taking out the bridges over the Patapsco, we probably won’t need to be so thorough.” Chris nodded, and fell in behind the barricade work crew as they ran off west.

Anneliese watched them go before she turned, heading back over to the tree where she’d left Ted. Noticing her approach, the teddy bear hopped off the graveyard wall and toddled over to meet her. “What’s the word from Aaron?” she asked.



Facility 108

Penny scanned through the facility code for any sign of what was suppressing communication. Again. She knew just enough about real heavy-duty hacking to know that whoever did this was way, way better. She couldn’t find any trace of intrusion. She couldn’t even find what was wrong; obviously something was different, since the system wouldn’t connect to anything, but otherwise it looked for all the world like everything was exactly as it always was. She sighed, her head sinking as her elbows slid further apart on her desk.

Then she blinked. She highlighted a line of code. That… had not been there a minute ago. She was almost certain. She opened a menu, ran through a couple options… and there was an IP address. “Huh.”

As she watched, the code kept building, adding new conditions and subroutines. She was about to start deleting it, but it didn’t seem… malicious. It certainly didn’t seem to be being written at the speed it would take to shut down worldwide communications. It appeared, she realized on closer inspection, to be an attempt to reopen connection through a new route… a new method entirely, bypassing the block without even having to find it. Clever. Fuck, it was genius. At least it would take a genius to make that work.

She switched windows, brought up the camera feed in the cafeteria, where a few dozen volunteers with any degree of computer skills were doing the same thing she was. She typed up a message to L.A.R.R.Y in his code notes: Hey is one of you fuckin nerds messing with my files? because I thot we came to an understanding but maybe theres some part of total atomic annihilation you need me to define.

She could see L.A.R.R.Y look up, and several heads turned to look at him. Most of them then shook. His reply came through: It’s not us.

“Unless…” Jordan glared up at Allen, who had reconstituted everything from his head to his knees. Lazarus became aware of the observation, and Allen’s eyes flicked up from his computer screen. After the time it took to process, his mouth grinned.

“It’s not. Us.” L.A.R.R.Y reaffirmed, and Jordan glowered back to his computer. Eden slammed another platter of the facility’s baked beans next to Allen, and stalked off sullenly even as Allen’s head turned to show off his grin.

At the end of the other table, Pritchard decided he had a better idea of what was going on with the computers than he did of what the hell was going on between these people, and he buried his nose a little further in his laptop.

Well somebodys in our system writing code that might fix this shit, Penny typed.

Jordan, having been spying on their chat, pulled up the file she was looking at, and watched the code changing. He could have thought of that, at least, he told himself so. But the kind of skill needed to make that all work…

“Who the fuck is this?” He groused.



The Docks

On the deck of one of the cargo ships, a little girl sitting cross-legged tapped away at her smartphone. She chuckled around the hard candy in her cheek.

Aaron nudged a stack of four wide boards over to the last shipping container on the next ship over. He lay down, slowly, with his back on the boards, then got his fingers under the edge of the container and brought it up, slowly, getting as much of his arms underneath it as he could. He could hear the boards creaking underneath him, and he imagined he could feel the ship’s deck warp underneath them. The ship’s integrity was his highest priority, but if he did accidentally blow a hole through the bottom, he would be more likely to drown than to survive. Mathematically. He’d run the numbers one night, a few months ago.

As quickly as he could without punching through the shipping container, he walked his forearms along the underside, scraping one end over the deck with a horrifying sound. When he got near enough to the middle to fully lift it, he called out as loud as he could manage: “EVERYONE CLEAR?”

From below him, two voices faintly replied in confirmation. He planted his left arm, and slowly lowered his right, tilting the container up into the air. The bottom began to bend inward, and the whole thing swayed dangerously. As fast as possible, he turned it around with one end over the rails, and gave it a toss. It crushed the railing as it slid over the side.

In the water below him, Manami grabbed her new partner, a boy in a red suit of armor, and dove down beneath it. It was difficult getting him that far below the surface, as buoyant as he was, but she was as strong a swimmer as they came, and he clung to the bottom of the container when she let him go. She resurfaced on one of the narrow ends, and began to push it out of the way for the ship to get through.

Aaron gently bent the railing back into place, and came down the gangplank as soon as he could. The sooner he was off that ship, the better it was for everyone. Once he got to the end of the dock, two national guardsmen who’d been sent down from the city motioned for the crowd gathered to board the ship. Kendrick was there waiting for him.

“That’s the last of them?” he asked.

“The last one we’ve found a while, but Lara is still out looking for more.” Aaron turned to watch the stream of people move down the dock. “God, I hope it’s enough…”

Kendrick nodded, grim. “Well. Anneliese says we’ll likely need you in the city…”

Aaron frowned. “That’s… a four hour run…” He looked out at the ocean and sighed. “Kyle’s been in the infirmary for a good while. Why don’t you two take one of the Facility vans into town, and I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes?”

Kendrick blanched. “I, er… I can’t drive.”

“I don’t expect you’ll hit much traffic if you go up the Wise Avenue bridge. Brake pedal’s on the left, gas on the right, so I’m told. Drive in the right lane.” Aaron caught Kendrick’s disbelieving eye, and he shrugged. “Hey, it’s armageddon…” An impotent smile played beneath his event horizon. “If you want, I can write you a ticket as soon as we rebuild society.”



Greenmount Avenue

Ted pointed vaguely southeast with one paw. Then, with both paws, he drew an arc in the air, swinging out from his stomach to his collarbone, looking on landing as though he was affixing a miniature bow tie.

“Good.” She put Ted back on her wrist, and climbed over the barricade into the street. It took her longer than she expected it to; perhaps her image of herself hadn’t yet gotten as old as she had, she thought. Once in the street, she examined what had been built. It looked sturdy, at least as sturdy as they’d need it to be. She pressed against it, here and there, and it seemed to hold.

She stood back, put a hand over her chin. Was this enough? She imagined how Toussaint’s minions would try to get over it from where she stood, or if they would really try. Were they that capable? They were dead, after all… but they were humans. Driven by nothing but his words… The only thing left in their minds, his voice: Serve me. She straightened, her arms fell to her sides.

“No, no!” She snarled, shaking her head in a blind fury. She stalked to the barricade, reasonless, picked up a sandbag and hurled it into the street. Then she kicked the pile, twice, three times before turning, falling against it and slumping down to sit on the street. She put her hands to her temples, breathed. She was Anneliese now. Anneliese.

Something tapped her knee. She opened her eyes to see Ted. He cupped a paw in front of his belly, ran the edge of the other over it, pointing towards her. He tilted his head.

“Yes… yes, it’s alright. Did I drop you? I’m sorry.” She pet his head a few times, which he seemed to appreciate. Kendrick’s Commonwealth files said he constructed the personalities of his toys in a partitioned corner of his own psyche, which made sense to Anneliese, but sometimes it really did seem like Ted was his own little bear.

Ted pointed to the barricade, tilting his head again. “No, the wall is fine. More than fine.” As the adrenaline wore off, she realized her ankle really hurt. “Christ. I knew sandbags weren’t pillows, but you always think…”

She heard a car honking down the road, stood up, brushed herself down. It pulled over across the street from her, and Klaus put his head out the window. “Slacking off, Miss Van Can?”

Anneliese normally made a point to ask that she be called ‘mizz’, not ‘miss’, which Klaus somehow kept forgetting. But, he was one of the only people she knew that pronounced her last name the way her family did, so she kept letting it slide. “Just taking stock of our battlements, Klaus.” Klaus normally made a point to keep his first name out of students ears, and more importantly, their mouths. But this was turnabout, and they both knew it. He grinned, annoyedly.

“Well, we bear some good news. We won’t be having any unwelcome visitors from Delaware or New Jersey today.” He purred.

“You sound certain. How…” She followed Klaus’s thumb back the way they’d driven, to where a monstrous plume of smoke was rising from what must have been miles of wildfire. “Ah.” She glanced in the backseat, where she could see Cherie seemed disquieted and Viola… well, disquieting.

“How’re the groups fer Towson and Owings Mills?” Page asked, getting out of the passenger seat. Anneliese took a deep breath, considering her response.

Klaus figured it out when she took too long to reply. “Oh.”

“Ayah!” Minah called out, running towards the car. She clambered over the barricade and fell into Klaus’s arms. “Ayah, Oppie, dia ... dia tidak akan kembali!” She sobbed.

Klaus looked up at Anneliese, understanding and blame both flashing across his face. “Saya ikut berduka cita, burung kecil. Semoga Tuhan memberikan dia tempat yang layak disisi-Nya.”

Page silently bade their students out of the car, over the wall. Anneliese, a moment later, followed them. Klaus would be along soon, she knew.

Not far down the street stood a man in a metal suit. Urial had mentioned his involvement to her, and she knew him by reputation. As Page took Cherie, Victoria and Viola to the front lines, Anneliese prepared herself, and approached him. “So, Aaban, is it? Or Iron Angel?”

“Not important. I’ll admit I’m impressed with the scale of your operation, but twice now I’ve run across someone’s cyborg dog. Why haven’t the rest of you evacuated it yet?”

“Mister Ursler is currently overseeing the evacuation.” Anneliese clarified. “Because the dead are vulnerable to telepathic stimulation, he will be at the forefront of our defense when they arrive. He could have explained that to you himself, if your helmet wasn’t proofed against psychic communication…”

“Too bad it is.” he interrupted. She sensed even more agitation than she would have expected from him… something personal, although she didn’t take him as the personal sort. “These walls.” he went on. “You should be building them further back. If we can get-”

Her turn to interrupt. “Get the dead into cul-de-sacs we can catch them in a crossfire. It did occur to me, and it’d be smarter if we had any chance of ever depleting their numbers. Given that it’s the rest of the continental population on its way here, our priority is keeping them busy until we can evacuate, not putting them down.” As she continued, she noticed something change in his posture, even if she couldn’t see his face. He must not have realized how far this went. Which meant he didn’t bother asking anyone.

“If we wanted to stop the horde dead, these barricades would never do; enough pressure and they would break through, even if their front lines got pulverized in the process.” In all honesty, that hadn’t occurred to her either until Ted explained it on Aaron’s behalf, but that didn’t really need to be admitted in this situation. She turned, pointed at the roofs of nearby buildings. “That’s why we’re going to be stationing up there. We want to draw their attention to the strongest points, center the horde’s pressure where it won’t do any good. I have-”

“Alright.” he snapped. “Sounds like you have everything well in hand.”

“Would you like to know where you can be most helpful to us?” Anneliese probed. “Or would you rather continue acting on your own?”

He took a moment to answer, but it wasn’t just anger. “I have something I need to take care of. When that’s done, I might come take orders from you. And only until all this is over.” he began to turn.

“We’ve already evacuated everyone between here and Carroll Park. Your family is safe.”

He stopped, then turned back and took a few threatening steps towards her. “How the FUCK do you know-”

“Because, Mister Hellström,” She took a few steps forward of her own, putting her face mere inches from his helmet. She could feel him flinch. He hadn't been expecting resistance, and now she had the tiger by the tail. “I am a better goddamn team player than you can comprehend. Now, are you gonna do something rash and put your daughters back in danger, or set your pride aside and work with us ensure their safety?”

A tense moment passed between them. They’d both felt tenser.

“Fine.” He finally relented. “What do you-”

There was someone behind her, it was in his face. “Get down.” He growled, holding out both arms as at least seven different kinds of armaments activated on his suit. It took her a second to figure out who it was.

“Wait. Let me handle this.” She murmured.

“Handle it while I cover you.” He countered. “Quickly.”

She nodded, and turned, inch by inch. Nine… ten of them. About half with rifles trained on them both. She held out her own hands, palms up, to show she didn’t have any weapons. Not that it mattered, since Rasmus was better armed than the pack of them.

“I take it Raguel didn’t send you?” She began.

The lead knight shook his head. “Most of our brethren went with her into hiding. She says this invasion is your doing. Some kind of trick.”

She had expected as much. “I would tell you it isn’t, but it seems like you already know.”

“When we realized what was going on, we… broke away. We wanted to find our families.” he explained. “Your people had already ‘evacuated’ most of them.”

“If you… don’t trust that we’re bringing them to safety, I can have someone bring them back to show-”

“There’s nothing you could say to convince us of anything, demon.” One of the knights towards the back spat. Their leader turned, and he backed down.

“If you’re here for a fight, we’re wasting time…” Rasmus shot back. Anneliese moved a hand to pacify him, not wanting to take her eyes off their new company.

“We weren’t supposed to leave. Raguel doesn’t want us contacting our families at the best of times, not when she hasn’t ordained it.” Their leader continued.

“You can’t go back.” Anneliese realized aloud.

“So we agreed, we may as well fight these… armies of darkness.” he reaffirmed his comrades. “Even if it is a trick. And even if it is alongside the likes of you.”

“Any help is welcome...” She decided. She turned her head enough to glance at Rasmus. “Now, we’d better not point weapons at each other if we’re going to work together?” He hesitated for a few seconds, then sighed. His weapons slid back into his armor, and he put his arms down. The knights slung their rifles over their backs, although they lacked the unison she had noticed whenever she’d seen knights before.

“We’re setting up rooftops to the north and west.” Anneliese told them. “But I don’t have a good way to tell everyone you’re on our side…”

A few of the knights exchanged glances. After a moment, one of them reached up to the sides of her head, twisted her helmet, and lifted it off. The rest of them, hesitantly, did the same.

“That will probably do.” She nodded, checked behind her. Rasmus shook his head dismissively. “The only weak spot the dead have is the brain stem.” She pointed under her nose. “Here, if you’re standing at the same level. From the rooftops, probably the best you can do is aim for the head. The goal is mainly to draw their attention anyway, and with any luck they’ll crush themselves against the buildings trying to reach the top.”

Many of them seemed uncertain, but their leader barked “Knights! To the roofs!” and they made their way into position.

When they were surely out of earshot, Anneliese let out a shaky breath, leaned forward with her hands on her knees. “Holy shit…” She whispered.

“That team playing you’re so proud of…” Rasmus warned. “that might well get you killed.”

She chuckled. “You know, you might be right. It’s at the bottom of the list of things that might kill me in the next few hours though.” He grunted, and as Anneliese caught her breath and slowed her pulse, she began: “There are still people needing evacuation to the northwest, towards Druid Hill…”

“Are you sure that’s not them?” Rasmus pointed out the approaching crowd. Two busses were at the head of the procession, and many younger evacuees rode on a flock of ostriches. Urial trotted ahead of those on foot, and Jaime, Mary, Ioana and Sam periodically appeared next to the crowd, spiriting away individual evacuees.

Anneliese! I reached out telepathically, and we gathered together everyone who heard. This should be the last of the evacuation past the barricade.

Good. Thank you, Urial.

The dead were almost right on our tail when we left, though. Fortunately we were faster, but I I expect they should be here in a matter of minutes. And… were those knights?

Defected knights. Mostly. They’re with us at least until we save humanity, I expect they may turn on us afterwards.

Urial yapped. Sounds about right.

“Are you talking to the dog?” Rasmus intoned.

“I’m talking to Urial.” She corrected. This is Aaban… by some accounts. He can’t hear you.

I’ve noticed.

“Alright!” she called out. “Evacuation, head that way, fighters, let’s get to the roofs! We haven’t got long!”



The Docks

Cursing himself for not knowing the population of Baltimore on hand, Aaron did a quick estimation of the number of people already gathered to embark, and the rate at which new evacuees were coming in. The numbers certainly made him nervous, especially if they'd have to spend a significant amount of time offshore. The last empty cargo ship was filling up; people were now gathering on the deck instead of going below. The influx of new people wasn't slowing down either. He tried not to think about what might happen... what they might have to do if they ran out of space.

He stared out at the Chesapeake. The sun was obscured by the city now, and the waters were starting to go dark. Conceptually, it made sense that the ocean scared him worse than the vacuum of space; both could kill him, it was just a matter of exposure. But it did still seem a little silly to him.

Then he squinted. Was that a cloud? No, it was Lara, definitely Lara! She was coming back. He stepped forward, peered into the distance. "Please God," he whispered "send us just one more..."

Yes! YES! There was a ship beneath her! They were saved for sure. He let out a sigh of relief.

Of course, that meant he'd probably have to unload it when it arrived.

Anneliese could do without him for another forty-five minutes or so, couldn't she? This was the heart of the mission, after all.



Baltimore

From on top of the roof, Anneliese could see the hordes approaching. As close as they were, she was surprised she hadn't spotted them, or at least heard their garbled chanting, even before now. It was... breathtaking, on some level. She'd seen what Toussaint could do with corpses before, but... she had never imagined he could create so many until that afternoon, and until now she hadn't really visualized it. So many people...

"And it just would be Baltimore, wouldn't it?" She mumbled.

"What's that?" Klaus asked, standing next to her.

"Baltimore." She said, aloud. Then she shouted, so as many people could hear as she could manage: "It would be Baltimore, wouldn't it!?"

She felt a few eyes, on adjacent roofs, turn to her. Urial started broadcasting what she said as far as he could reach. Some others, she supposed, were questioning if their leader was losing her mind. She was certainly wondering herself, on some level, but she went on.

"While I was learning English, I learned a lot of songs!" She hollered. "I learned The Star Spangled Banner! I didn't understand what it was about, so I looked into the Battle of Baltimore! The defense of Fort McHenry!" She pointed south. "The fort just a few miles over there, where over two hundred years ago, American soldiers held off an invasion, enduring naval bombardment for over twenty-four hours! Here in Baltimore! Here in Maryland, The Old Line state! So named when the Maryland 400 held off a force ten times their number in the Revolution! Now, on this day, it's our line once again! On this day, we defend not only America, but humanity itself!" There were a few shouts, a few cheers.

She continued: "You may be fighting beside people you don't know today! Some of you, beside people you considered enemies yesterday. But all of us have Maryland in common! We have Baltimore in common! This city, which was forged by siege! We, Baltimore, have said no further! We have drawn our line! By God, we're gonna hold it! And the dawn's early light will break on humanity, triumphant!

From roofs all around, the defenders of Baltimore shouted in inspiration, whooping, pumping fists into the air. Some repeated things she'd said or variations, although they were too many and too far apart to hear what they were.

As the cheering died down, she nudged Klaus. "How was that?"

"Ehh..." he smirked.

She chuckled. "You can have a turn next time we save the world."

The dead encroached, and the furthest outliers stepped into the road ahead of them. "Aim carefully! Save ammunition! Make noise, and draw them towards you!" On rooftops further to her left, Luci began glowing as brightly as he could sustain, and Alexis entered her flame form.

"Readyyy!" She shouted. "And... FIRE!"