“Crimson October”

The first moments of each new Vengeance are always the same.

The disorientation...as if returning from far, far away, no idea where I am, and not quite even knowing who I am.Then, just as I’m remembering myself, the visions begin.There, in the red, red mist, I meet the next wrongly killed innocent I must avenge.I see their life in an instant.A camera flash inside my head, an entire person driven like a spike into my mind.I know who they were, and I see their memories.

And then I live out their deaths.I die again with them, and in excruciating detail.With slow-motion dread, I turn to face it, knowing the general shape of what comes, and I die all over again, as I must.

Usually I’ve never met the cast of characters involved – the victim, the loved ones, the killer or killers – although that never lessens the agony and the anguish that I feel on their behalf as I go about my work.This time, though...this time is different.

This time, I know the dead.The dead are actually several dead, which has been rare, and I know them.And I know their killers.They are many, but I have nothing if not time, and I shall visit them, each and every one.

I feel the guns in my hands, their terrible weight.

And there in the red, red mist, like always...I take my very first step...

In September, we could do no wrong.

It was an unusually warm month throughout the northeast, temperatures and humidity percentages both consistently in the nineties for weeks, but while that seemed to inflame the minds and spirits of both law enforcement and the general populace – rendering them sloppy, quick to anger, and just as quick to tire – it seemed to bring out the very best in the new Injustice Society.

A tangled group with a tangled history, we had been through several incarnations by the time Johnny Sorrow gathered up a dozen members, old and new alike, to stand alongside him, and to actively challenge the authorities...the authorities in general, and the Justice Society of America specifically.

I can still envision the planning sessions with almost aching clarity – Sorrow insisted I not record them, but I have been delighted to find that despite my metamorphosis into one who dwells largely on the cybernetic plane, I still possess that which humans refer to as a “mind’s eye”...and in that mind’s eye, I can see those meetings unfold in the finest detail.

Again: we were at the top of our game.Sorrow had me to hack the defense systems of the JSA’s brownstone headquarters.We had infiltration specialists in Tigress and Shiv to pore over my scenarios, searching for flaws, refining the plans, perfecting them until we knew beyond certainty that our initial invasion wave would get us inside.We had Steven Sharp, the notorious Gambler, who helped in running down countless probabilities, calculating the odds of hundreds of factors, both great and small – Sharp added an almost astonishing grasp on things such as the random element, and human intuition, things I myself could account for well, but to an admittedly limited degree if pushed past a certain threshold (I was forced to allow that Sharp had a rather remarkable mind for one who was made entirely of meat...).

We had matchless surveillance to supplement my own once I had commandeered the JSA’s computer systems, what with Blackbriar Thorn’s ability to see the world through the “eyes” of all plant life, including even microscopic spores in the air (and not even Mr. Terrific’s filtration system skimmed out everything down at those levels), and whatever Thorn could not discern, Sorrow himself could add extra reconnaissance, peering in at the heroes from his own sideways dimension without ever manifesting himself solidly enough on the earthly plane so as to trigger any alarms.

And once we were ready to go, we had the troops to send in, several more waves’ worth of them.First, the quiet ones, the ones to follow the leads of Tigress and Shiv: Count Vertigo, floating like a malevolent leaf on the wind; Rag Doll, folding and rolling and unfolding himself along silent corridors, creeping along with perhaps only the faintest rustle of old cloth to mark his passing, if one even knew to listen for him; Killer Wasp, held aloft and whispering in stealth on the most gossamer of wings.And once these were in, and ready, and called into action against the first of the heroes to be encountered, we had the muscle to back them up, the brawn squad.The demolishers: Icicle, freezing the heroes’ little world to brittle subzero; Geomancer, earth-mover and –shaker, rattling the brownstone to pieces; the Fiddler unleashing his physics-bending sonic attacks; and our “clean-up batter,” as the departed Sportsmaster would have put it, the lumbering, indestructible wrecking machine of a creature known as Solomon Grundy.

We played according to Sharp’s odds when we went in, and did not try to engage the JSA’s complete roster, which numbered in full even greater than our own.There were seven heroes all told when we invaded on yet another gloriously hot and humid evening – seven heroes when we went in, and only two still breathing when we departed before a volley of reinforcements could sour the endeavor for us.The veteran Wildcat was surprisingly difficult to dispatch, rising anew after several blows in succession that should have been fatal...but ultimately, Geomancer crushed him between a literal rock and a literal hard place (which was, actually, another slab of rock), and the Wildcat finally took his leave of the fray, and of this world.Tigress put a crossbow bolt through the brainpan of the explosively-powered young hero called Damage, and then did the same to his size-changing ally, Atom-Smasher.Shiv defeated the young Stargirl, using her beloved pike to impale the not-quite-agile-enough teenager, and Grundy literally crushed the boy, Jakeem Thunder, to paste beneath his massive, steamroller fists.It has been said that the glowing and powerful entity that the lad commanded is a “magic genie,” but such claims garner my disdain – I persist in my staunch belief that any form of “magic” is merely a less penetrable form of science that we have not yet come to understand – and regardless, “magic” or no, Jakeem Thunder’s glowing entity was bound to the limits of its master, and the Thunder boy wilted in the face of our crushing force of nature, blanking at exactly the wrong moment when Grundy appeared before him in all his terrible glory, and failed to utter a single word of command that might have saved his young life.Only the extremely canny Mr. Terrific and the ever-resourceful Dr. Mid-Nite managed to elude death long enough that we were forced to withdraw before we could issue them their respective demises.Terrific’s survival was especially vexing for me, as the man had somehow transformed himself into a walking blind-spot for all things technological...meaning, he was forever invisible to me.I was able to somewhat monitor the effects of his actions during the battle – for instance, when, from my point of view, absolutely nothing at all visible to my senses went and knocked the Fiddler onto his posterior and then shattered his violin, simple deductive reasoning implicated Terrific immediately – and the others could of course see him with their own organic eyes to later confirm my conjectures, but he was frustratingly beyond my own perceptions, as I am nothing but technology at this stage of my existence.

Still, despite two survivors of the massacre, we managed to slay nearly half a dozen Justice Society members, and in their own stronghold.Especially demoralizing to them was the loss of the veteran Wildcat, apparently held dear by all, for whatever unfathomable reasons.There was also some outcry at the fact that we took the lives of some of the younger heroes, including two still in their teens, yet we remained unbothered; if the little pests insisted on going into battle like adults, then they should be treated as nothing less by those they had chosen to confront.

We took our leave after the bloodletting, my escape plans functioning flawlessly, and then went our separate ways for a time, so as to confound any pursuit.My schematics for the battle had been things of beauty...for was I not the Thinker?Thinking and planning were the very essence of what I was, and at last the world knew it.

Overnight, we became the toast of the villainous community.Even Lex Luthor sent along his begrudging admiration, and we delighted in our exponentially increased notoriety.

One week to the day after the slaughter, we convened for a sort of conference call in cyberspace, each of the other members jacked into a virtual boardroom I had created, attending from various points around the globe, their avatars lounging about inside my illusory construct with every appearance of a gathering in three dimensions.

We congratulated each other, and gloated.We compared notes, and boasted.The media’s coverage of the event adopted the dramatic label of “Black September” when referring to our murderous invasion, and we all loved the overly dramatic and ominous sound of it.“Black September.”Only Count Vertigo failed to appear for our meeting, but we had suspected his own inner-ear cochlear implants might have interfered with the technology I had provided for jacking into the meeting anyway, and so we had little concern over his absence; we would contact him off-line when we were ready to reconvene in person to discuss our next maneuvers.

The Injustice-friendly month of September passed, and we entered October, and with it, a surprisingly chilly autumn.I kept my focus in New York, as did a few of the others, and cold winds seemed to blow down from the northern Canadian reaches with the turning of the calendar page...and this somehow seemed to bring with it a brisk cooling in our fortunes...

I see them in my inner visions: the perpetrators. Gleefully killing a collection of selfless heroes, all but turning cartwheels of joy at the successful mayhem they accomplish.I see them, and I know them – I know things about them from the perspective of the dead, information not available to the living.Secret data, their lives laid bare.It sickens me in a distant way, but it is almost as nothing when compared with the need for Vengeance, my constant, overriding directive.

But I know them, and I feel them.Visions become reality: I step through the red, red mist as if through a swinging door, and there is the European nobleman, gliding imperiously through the air on a cloud of arrogance and pomposity.The guns are in my hands, spitting a mad barrage, and though I can feel the fingertips of his mind groping at mine, trying to destroy my sense of balance, he is ineffectual.His fingertips find no purchase, and the guns sing the harshest of songs in response…

…and then the first of their female assassins…I step back into the world from behind her as she relaxes in a small cabin in the Ontario wilds.She is meditating on the porch, her halberd leaning nearby, meticulously cleaned, but to my strange vision, still tacky with the spilled blood of young Courtney Whitmore.The guns allow her time to open her eyes and rise to her feet…and then they explode into action in my hands, splashing the rustic log cabin with her red life essence…

…and the evil, grinning doll.His bizarrely flexible joints render him proof against much in the ways of constraint, and even impact.He has grown smug and overconfident due to long associations with large groups, their safety-in-numbers benefits allowing him to believe himself untouchable.His joints, however, are of little defense against the screaming violence of the guns.A merciless hailstorm of bullets not only shatters many of those joints completely, but also perforates vital organs and opens up crucial blood vessels, the torn conduits streaming his mortality out onto the stone floor of the old church he has desecrated with his presence.A score of his followers share his fate, and if the guns were capable of it, they would laugh with coldest delight…

…and on to the next.A South Pacific resort…an elder gentleman, courtly almost, but for the ingrained streak of murderous will, if one only knows how to see it.His odds of survival when pitted against myself and the guns are all but negligible, and he, more than any other, understands…

…and our work continues on apace…

Shiv failed to check in as she was supposed to during the first week of the new month, and soon thereafter, so did Rag Doll.It was almost a relief not to have to deal with the latter’s grating personality – Merkel had been extra-obnoxious after our successful campaign, repeatedly crowing “Injustice for all!” in what he thought was a show of great wit, and acting the strutting peacock despite having actually contributed little to the battle itself – however, between Vertigo’s continued silence, now unexplained once we had moved beyond the cyber-conference and into a period when he could have used more conventional means to make contact, and then Shiv’s apparent disappearance, I had my first moments of uneasiness.

As the second week of October dawned, things took a turn for the worse.Sharp, the Gambler, failed to report in, but this time there was a concrete reason: he was found dead in a Polynesian hotel room, evidently victim of a colossal gun battle.His own signature Derringer had been emptied of all ammunition as he tried to defend himself, and meanwhile his body, as well as the walls of his lodgings, had been absolutely riddled with bullets.The attack upon him had occurred in the late night hours, and none of the hotel staff or guests had witnessed anything of aid in determining what had happened; some were alerted or awakened by the clamor of gunplay when the carnage began, but being garden variety civilians, they were understandably hesitant to approach the scene for a better look until the din had faded.The only scrap of evidence was a weak chuckle heard from Sharp by a bellboy entering the death zone after the shooting had stopped, and the Gambler’s unhelpful dying declaration that “Red ain’t usually supposed to be a house number”...whatever that might have meant.

Sharp’s death was a turning point of sorts for us, and I knew it even before I received word from Blackbriar Thorn.

“They are dead, friend Clifford,” said the plant-man, when he spoke to my holographic projection from out of the bole of a huge oak tree in Central Park.It was now a mere ten days from All Hallow’s Eve, and the twilight cloud formations looked like the curving blades of sickles.“All of them: not just the lamented Gambler, but lovely Shiv and proud Rag Doll and the dashing Count Vertigo as well.All dead.”

“How do you know that, Thorn?I haven’t been able to learn anything of them myself, even with all of my technological prowess.”

“The greenery tells its tales, Clifford, and Blackbriar Thorn gives audience.”

“Meaning, plant life that was near our teammates has played the informant for you?”

“Just so, my friend.And the green reveals that we are being hunted.The green counsels a strategic withdrawal, and Blackbriar Thorn sees wisdom in this.Blackbriar Thorn agrees.”

“Withdrawal?We’ve already split up and scattered ourselves across multiple continents for the time being – how exactly does Blackbriar Thorn propose we withdraw any more than that?”

“I shall withdraw into the green itself, friend Clifford.I shall disperse my own consciousness out among the collective mind of the green and growing things, the leaves and the ivy, the creepers and the roots, the tendrils of—“

“Thorn!You’re saying that you plan to forego any physical manifestation now?To just let your mind drift out among the group consciousness of the plant world, all diffuse and ethereal?”

“Just so.”

“If something is truly hunting us down, it might go on for a long while before it’s over, Thorn.You might have to stay in hiding for a very long time.”

“I have been alive for centuries, my friend – what are centuries more?”

“There’s no guarantee that whatever you say is hunting us won’t be able to find you even there, you know.”

“Quite true.And yet, what life lasts all the days of the earth, yes?Even the individual voices of the green itself must rise and fall, and finally subside like waves spent upon a shore, yes?”

“I...suppose.But even if you are correct, and such a withdrawal is our only option – and we have far too few facts as of yet for me to even agree – but just for the sake of argument, even if your idea is the best course of action...you are the only vegetable life-form we number among our ranks.The other Injustice Society members can’t just withdraw into some other non-earthly realm.Have you forgotten that?”

“Ah, but even if many of our cluster cannot so withdraw, as you say, there are exceptions.Some may yet survive this torrent of vengeance we have brought down upon ourselves.Johnny Sorrow may step into his sideways land and close the portal behind him as he goes.Johnny Sorrow might so evade retribution.And so might you, friend Clifford.”

“What...?Do you mean let my mind disperse out through cyberspace?”

A cold wind whispered through the branches of the mighty oak, but Thorn said nothing.

“It is possible, I can grant you that, Thorn...but I’ve never retreated too far from the physical world.If I were to remove myself too completely, I...am not certain I could ever pull myself back together enough to return.I might be lost in cyberspace forever.”

“Blackbriar Thorn would advise you to weigh that possibility against what may be only darker options, friend Clifford.And now I must go.Fare you well, clever one.May we meet again in this world.”

“Thorn, wait!Thorn!”But he was gone.The patterns in the bark of the great oak no longer resembled a gnarled old man’s face – they were just random striations caressed by ever-colder fingertips of wind.

I let my holographic form abate, and I manifested in a Soho loft-space I had been renting.What I had said to Thorn was true: I no longer had a physical form, and in theory, did not need to restrict myself to an existence rooted in the physical world of my birth...but I had to admit to myself that while I had indeed done some exploring of deeper cyberspace, more removed from this solid world around me, I was not yet ready to abandon the earthly plane entirely.And the more I thought about it, the angrier at Thorn I became.His retreat struck me, upon reflection, not as pragmatic or strategic, but more as simple cowardice.Thorn was running from a fight before we were even sure there was one.True, he claimed that the local flora in each case had informed him that our teammates had been tracked down and killed by some unknown party, but that did not necessarily make it so.For all I knew, Thorn himself was just a doddering old Druid, senile after centuries of literal tree-hugging and dirt-munching, badly garbling whatever real kernels of information might have been actually reliable in and among what he believed the plants were telling him.And even beyond all that...I didn’t believe Thorn would have been quite as vulnerable as he had feared, not given his odd nature, and I didn’t believe I had anything more to worry about than he did.Honestly...what could walk a trail into cyberspace and hunt me down as I now was?A Justice Computer-Virus?

I decided to contact Johnny Sorrow, our leader, to compare thoughts...and upon doing so, received my next evidence that October was growing even colder and more inhospitable than I had thought.

Sorrow was not taking calls.He proved unreachable at every point of contact I had for him, and only when I began checking my own intake sources for contact, my e-mail accounts and drop-boxes, did I find word from him.

Word that was brief, and rushed, and rather vague.It amounted to: he would be back, possibly, at some point, and was, for the time being, somewhere...

...and that was all.

Like Blackbriar Thorn, Johnny Sorrow was beating a hasty retreat, stepping sideways out of this world, and into the strange, Lovecraftian plane where he had been transfigured into the multidimensional, faceless creature he now was.I had no way to contact him now, and the rest of us were on our own.

I no longer had a “spine” as such, a tangible human backbone, not as I once did, and yet nevertheless, I was feeling a chill creeping up that place where one would have been had I still retained a physical body.The sensation was unmistakable, and decidedly unpleasant.

The hunting is good.It goes so well, in fact, that several of their more capable members begin to withdraw, to remove themselves entirely from the field of play, to places where even the guns and I cannot follow.The plant creature allows his mind to drift out among all the world’s vegetation, so far-flung and diffuse he all but ceases to exist.The faceless one follows suit, stepping out of this world utterly, into a dimension where only the most damned or the most unbearably foolish would ever willingly tread.And then the powerhouse, the engine of destruction, chalk-white in its moldering black rags, withdraws also, back to the darkly enchanted swamp from whence it came – like the plant-creature, the destroyer submerges into its own field of green, releasing its hold on consciousness, embracing a long sabbatical from this plane.And there yet remains one other who might conceivably follow suit, who might scatter his thoughts and his self far and wide across the infinite digital planes of the cyber-sphere…although this one is proud, and stubbornly set in his refusal to allow for the possibility that harm might one day track him down in his immaterial neon kaleidoscope world.This one, we may yet have the chance to track down and face, if we can reach him before anything changes his mind, and convinces him to completely flee this land of here and now.

And the guns shrug in my mind, and whisper to me that if these departing villains never return, none of them, then our dread purpose is still served.Banishment and exile are not quite as satisfying forms of Vengeance as crimson death, but they will suffice if death cannot be brought to bear...

And meanwhile…there is yet more work to do.The guns throb in my hands, and I see again the visions of the rest of them, those who haven’t the power to flee these dimensions at all.They don’t understand it yet, but they are trapped here with the guns and I, and their hours of reckoning draw ever closer…until they are but a breath away…

If Thorn was even partly correct, who, or what, could be hunting us?We had committed many wrongs, of course, in our pasts, both as individuals and as a group, and there were countless reasons outstanding for which someone might have wanted vengeance upon us...but the answer seemed clear enough: this had to do with the “Black September” invasion.Something was hunting us down and killing us as revenge for our having done the same thing to the Justice Society.But who would do such a thing?The JSA themselves would want their vengeance, that much was beyond question, but they were no killers.Their idea of vengeance for such as us would equal apprehension and incarceration.They did not cross certain lines, and never would.Even the now-deceased Steven Sharp, when rattling off his Gambler’s odds, would have concurred with that.So if not the JSA, then who?Some admiring vigilante, unaffiliated with them, but claiming their vengeance for his or her own, knowing they would not properly do so themselves?Some criminal using our escapade as an excuse to slake a general blood-thirst under some flimsy, false adopted pretext?Or a rogue member, a Justice Society stalwart pushed too far, finally made to snap and turn his or her back on all JSA principles?

Difficult to envision any of them doing such a thing.The more temperamental members had been thinned out, what with the demises of Atom-Smasher and Damage...perhaps the more militant Hawkman?He seemed like the only truly viable candidate, but even then, the Gambler had clearly been dispatched with a vigorous hail of bullets, and Hawkman was just not one to rely on firearms unless deprived of all other options.It made no sense that I could see as yet.

I decided to monitor as many of the remaining Injustice Society members as I could.

I quickly learned that Solomon Grundy had returned for the time being to Slaughter Swamp, the fell place where his odd half-life had originally been bestowed upon him – I had to wonder if Sorrow and Grundy had themselves chosen to retreat, driven on by some internal imperatives, or if Thorn had convinced them to do so.Both were nearly indestructible in their ways, and yet both seemed to be willing to run from whatever it was that was unfolding around us now, which brought that chilled spine feeling back again, only multiplied.

I set up surveillance on the last few, and rotated my observations on each, constantly watching and then moving on to the next at regular intervals.

Unfortunately for him, the Fiddler received a visit not long after I had skipped forward to monitor Geomancer.While the twenty-fifth was rolling over in New York to the twenty-sixth, my attentions were elsewhere, spying on Icicle through the closed circuit security camera system in his Reykjavik safe-house, and Isaac Bowin, the Fiddler, was literally ventilated, shot through with nearly three-dozen bullets as he lounged in a hot tub in a Brazilian penthouse.I felt time beginning to ratchet more tightly around me.

Another day slipped past, and then Killer Wasp’s death afforded me several much-needed clues...although of course the Wasp, had he been asked, would likely have considered the price of the information a tad steep.

Puzzle piece the first: I was able to hack into various government databases and e-mail systems to recover transcripts of post-mortem ballistics and metallurgical reports, and the analyses of the bullets recovered from the scene contained repetitions of phrases such as “like nothing I’ve previously encountered” and “defies scientific description” and “baffled.”Recommendations were made in couched terms, to the effect that perhaps practitioners of more esoteric fields of study might be more likely to shed light on the nature of the odd bullets – in essence, “Round up experts in the occult if you’re desperate enough to consult with self-proclaimed wizards and warlocks – there isn’t much more that science can tell you about these things...”And while I myself did not believe the projectiles were any more “magic” than Jakeem Thunder’s now-masterless minion was, I at least had a better idea of which groupings of paranormals to focus my energies on.

Puzzle piece the second: the Wasp was slain while inside a heavily-fortified installation, yet his killer was able to infiltrate not only the fortress-like outer layers of the premises, but even managed to kill both the Wasp and his hostess inside private chambers that were locked from the inside by physical and mechanical means, and the killer never disturbed the locks while either coming or going.All of this suggested an agent operating with the power of intangibility, the power of teleportation, or both.That narrowed the list of suspects considerably.A “supernatural” teleporter or “ghost-type”...?

My thoughts went unbidden to the Injustice Society’s sometime co-conspirator, and potential recruit (his name had actually been bandied about at a recent meeting, not long before the inspirations for “Black September” had taken hold), “Gentleman” Jim Craddock, otherwise known as the Gentleman Ghost.That nagged at me, though, for while Craddock could be treacherous, his patterns marked him as too deeply entrenched as an ally with us at this point for it to have been of any real benefit to him to suddenly eliminate us.Still, he could, in theory, have committed the deeds as I understood them, and I even more reluctantly admitted to myself that among Craddock’s chosen weapons, he did at times make use of a set of flintlock pistols...I didn’t want to believe it of him, though, and in his favor, I had never heard tell of an incident in which Craddock was able to coax forth from his guns such prodigious amounts of ordnance as our villain-hunter had proven capable of doing on multiple occasions.But whether it was Craddock or some other...I at least knew to be on the lookout for a teleporter or an intangible type.

Puzzle piece the third: the installation in which the Wasp met his end was actually one of the most primary H.I.V.E. colonies currently in existence, and his hostess had been H.I.V.E. supreme commander, Zazzala – the Queen Bee herself.The Wasp and Zazzala had been carrying on a sort of tentative courtship for several months now – wasps and bees are closely related creatures, and the parallels went strong enough with their humanoid counterparts that their physical and emotional equipment seemed to make for a close enough match to warrant exploration by the two.The killing force that had been tearing its way through the Injustice Society’s ranks since the end of September had appeared in the Queen’s own quarters, and slain both of them in the middle of their tryst.H.I.V.E. was thrown into incidental disarray.Lex Luthor, ever the opportunist, and close associate of Zazzala’s of late, had moved in troops immediately to take up the reins of the disintegrating organization.I held a cyber-conference with he and several of his advisors all jacked in to another of my constructed virtual boardrooms.The killer had not been captured on any of the more conventional security systems, and the non-Earth gear employed by the Queen Bee and her drones had proven useless: the alien tech that Zazzala and her species used had indeed had opportunity to record the intruder, that was not the problem – the problem was that it had simply been unable to do so, falling victim to the same sort of blind-spot phenomenon with respect to the uninvited party that plagued me whenever I tried to perceive Mr. Terrific.Even the surviving drones – and quite a few of them had been terminated by the killer as well – had been unable to sense the invading assassin...and Luthor had a theory as to what all of this meant.“They can’t see the color red, Mr. DeVoe.”Luthor’s avatar crossed its legs in rather prissy fashion, and presumed to lecture me in my own virtual meeting room.“Zazzala and her drones are of an alien species with a visual system that differs somewhat from our own, and one of the characteristics of that species, irrelevant as it might seem at almost any other time, is that they cannot physically perceive anything that is of the color red.”

I stand up straight, and take stock, even as the fresh blood drains from the bodies of the fallen.He is still with us, the cybernetic one, the computerized man who so vainly believes himself immune to trespass on the digital plane.Even as he so late in the game begins to grudgingly allow for the possibility that the force which hunts his associates might be something beyond what his beloved science can quantify…he still refuses to consider that he is vulnerable in his current incarnation.

The guns radiate their cold and silent satisfaction for me, sharing it as if bestowing a gift, and even as they transport me through the red, red mist to our next appointment, they are also turning their unblinking black eyes toward the realm known as cyberspace, scrabbling at its boundaries, and concocting a sorcerous means of entry for us…and though I am by no means as fanatical as the guns in the performance of our duties, in this case, I find that I, too, want to catch up with him before he has the opportunity to flee as several of his former cronies have done in such cowardly fashion.

The guns are well-pleased to note this, and pulse in my hands in a show of reassurance.They tell me, still with their frozen approximation of laughter flooding my mind…that retribution will be ours…

So: a “supernatural” predator capable of teleporting or becoming insubstantial, who presented itself almost entirely in the color red.On the face of it, if rigidly applied, that fact seemed to clear Jim Craddock; Craddock did generally present as invisible, it was true, but his clothing did not...and Gentleman Jim Craddock always wore a white suit with matching top hat.White, not red.Unless he was suddenly altering an appearance he had consistently maintained without exception for over a hundred years, our perpetrator was not he.Keeping all of the above in mind, I made some headway in my investigations on my end, information-surfing and collecting and cross-referencing data, but for once, the Icicle was quicker than I at problem-solving.First-hand knowledge often will of course go a very long way toward trumping a full-scale investigation mounted from scratch, no matter how brilliant that investigation’s orchestrator might be...

“Dammit, Think – sometimes I really am as stupid as you say we all are.I don’t know why I didn’t come up with it before.Hell, the bitch even kicked me in the teeth once.How do you forget something like that?”

Icicle and I were chatting in yet another of my cyber-boardrooms, his avatar emanating a thin aura of frostlike graphics about itself as we discussed the just-discovered corpse of our recent comrade-in-arms, Geomancer.Again, copious amounts of “bulletry,” as Icicle put it, were in evidence, and again, it was another locked-room scenario.Geomancer had been engaging with a lady of the evening in a private and very exclusive sort of brothel in Bangkok, and the killer had again materialized somehow inside the locked chambers to perform the evening’s ceremonies.The red-clad hunter left our fallen teammate in a veritable lake of his own blood, embracing the earth he so dearly loved.

“She’s a black chick, Cliffy,” said the Icicle.“Thin and mean.You weren’t a part of it, so you don’t know.Even us, the ones who were awake for it, we don’t even remember it all.Sandy the Golden Boy, he came to talk to me in the slam afterwards a couple of times, and some of the things he said...I could tell he didn’t remember it all, either.I don’t hardly talk about it, ever, ‘cause what’s the point, right, but me and her, we helped a couple of the JSA boy-scouts take down the Ultra-Humanite while the rest of you were catching Z’s in the Humanite’s cold-sleep tubes.And she was one hard-assed broad, let me tell you.”

“Cameron, what are you talking about?”

His avatar grew agitated, kinetic, gesticulating more animatedly.“She could teleport, is the thing, and she could turn all ghost-like...like Jim Craddock, except she was never invisible, and she was more solid than Gentleman Jim more of the time, but teleported more than he does.He’s better at the intangible stuff, and she’s better at the teleporting.Never thought of that until now, you know that, Think?Never thought to compare.”

“Cameron, will you please start at the beginning?Who are you talking about?”

“The Avenger, Think.Try to keep up, huh?She’s black, like I said, with braids she ties back.She’s got a big bloodstain on the front of her shirt that’s always fresh somehow, and a matching one that’s even bigger on the back of her jacket – yeah, she’s always wearing a long black trench-coat and a white t-shirt.Half-shirt, actually, like she ripped off the bottom to show off her abs (pretty show off-able, too, to be honest).Black jeans and black boots.Always.And she’s got a red bandana tied around her eyes, even though she somehow can still see.”

And then another voice spoke out.Impossible that something in Icicle’s room not jacked in should carry through to me there in our virtual meeting place, impregnable without my invitation...and yet I heard it most clearly.

“Why do you assume it’s red, Icicle?” asked the voice.It was a horrible voice, colder by far than anything even the Icicle himself could create with his subzero set of powers.Cold as death, which beats ice every time, as Steven Sharp had liked to taunt the Icicle on occasion.

“I got a visitor here, Cliffy.Hold the line, and I’ll be back.Gonna attend to this here and now.”

His avatar disappeared, but I could still hear both Cameron Mahkent and his uninvited guest, which should also have been impossible.

“Crimson,” he said, although I couldn’t quite fathom why.“Long time, lady.So what are you sayin’?”

“Why do you assume the bandage around my eyes is red?That’s what I was saying.”

“Beeeecause...I’m lookin’ at it, and it’s red?”

“Soaked through with red now, but maybe it started out white, no?Maybe this bandage was white when I first shot out my eyes with these guns, and then tore off a strip of my white shirt – not, as you surmised, to simply show off my torso, but to try to stem the flow of a bleeding that I now know will never stop – and maybe my white bandage has since been stained with my blood so as to appear red.But the bandage itself, under the red appearance...is white.Is that not possible, Cameron Mahkent?”

“Sure.Sure, okay, that’s possible.Though I fail to see what difference...?”I heard a strange slithering sort of sound, again and again for quite a few seconds, the sound of the Icicle freezing moisture in the air in order to create jets of frost, and Arctic battering rams and flying daggers and all manner of weaponry made of ice.I heard hissings, as of steam somehow being released, and grunts and muttered curses from Cameron.I heard the sound of a blow, hard, and an answering cry of pain from the Icicle, and a pair of thumping noises, as of a body hitting first a wall, and then the ground.“Dammit, y’miserable ghost – stay still and stay solid!Always kickin’ me in the teeth...”

“I am here to avenge the Justice Society members you and your friends so happily murdered, Icicle.That job is nearly complete...or as complete as I can make it at the present time, since several of your accomplices have fled this entire mode of existence.”

“Fled...?Oh.Sorrow.”

“Yes, Johnny Sorrow.And Blackbriar Thorn, who takes up a cowardly hiding by spreading his mind out far and wide among the plant-world’s consciousness, so thin now he may well never be able to reintegrate himself.And Solomon Grundy, who has returned to his swamp.”

“But you got all the others, is what you’re saying.”

“Not quite,” said the voice.“But almost.”

And there came a sound of gunfire then, huge, a fury of it, a thunder of exploding cordite voices shrieking vengeance.I heard every shot.

The demon addressed me, and I could almost hear its guns smoking.

“Clifford DeVoe – do not think I am unaware of you.Will you run and hide forever, like Blackbriar Thorn?Will you bolt from this hour in an effort to escape your demise, only to spread yourself so thin you need not have bothered?Thorn may as well have bowed to the guns – he’ll never return from where he’s gone.Vengeance is still served.And your own choice?”

And then the greatest impossibility yet: she appeared in my virtual boardroom.Stepping blithely past all of my safeguards, fast-forwarding herself beyond pass-code junctures and firewall checks, she was simply there.And even in my neon green cyber-construct, she appeared as red.Deep blood red.

She appeared in a red and swirling mist, and she was just as the Icicle had said: an African-American woman, thin and intense, trench-coated, and bearing what looked to be a fresh wound in her chest, soaking her thin, torn t-shirt as she strode forward, a pair of Colt pistols in her hands, gripped with such longstanding, ancient familiarity, they seemed to be a part of her.

“I see you, Clifford DeVoe...Thinker.You were a part of the bloodshed, I dream of it, even now.Their spirits tell me, cry out of your part in the treachery.I can see it all, and I can see you.”

“How?!How can you even be here, and how can you see me?!You’re blind!!You said it yourself, you shot out your own eyes!”

She held aloft her guns for me to see.

“These are my eyes now, Clifford DeVoe.And with them, I see everything.I see the world, and everything in it.”

She raised her guns, reorienting them at me, or maybe they moved themselves, drawing her hands and arms along with them as they did...and why was I trembling so, when I had no real form here, and she should have had even less.To affect me here, and in this way, she would have to be...

“Magic, Clifford DeVoe.I am magic.I am the Crimson Avenger, and I have come to put an end to the crowings of you and yours about this ‘Black September.’These guns are Vengeance, and their time has come around again.‘Black September’ is past, I am a ghost in the machine…and the guns and I welcome you to ‘Crimson October.’”

The guns quivered in anticipation.

“Happy Halloween, Clifford DeVoe.”

The guns exploded, my virtual chamber phasing in the instant from green to red, and all the 1’s in my binary world turned to 0’s, all was errors and anomalies, and the mathematical constructs of myself and my realm faded from existence in a shower of sparks, and a static-drenched squall of deepest Crimson...