Issue # 14

"It Came From the Gulf!"
By Dale Glaser

This is so kickass, Jack Fenris thought for the hundredth time at least in the past few months. He sat in his quarters on the Riverboat, really no more than a bare room eight feet on a side, with a cot and two crates as its only furnishings. Jack had added a few personal touches, mainly news clippings tacked to the wall. What occupied his attention at the moment, however, was the deep green object resting atop one of the crates, directly in front of Jack as he sat on the edge of the cot. The alien metal casing was cool under his fingers as he ran them along the perfectly symmetrical lines of the device - flared top, spherical body, and flared base. A Green Lantern power battery. The energy source for the greatest weapons in the universe. I keep expecting it to feel like the hood of a car with the engine running, heated up and vibrating. Or like one of those silver balls in the science exhibits that make people's hair stand on end when they touch it. But the thing is perfectly mellow. I know it's got some juice inside it though. I can feel it ... somehow.

Jack Fenris owed his life to a Green Lantern. His identity as Valence was directly inspired by the same emerald champion. When he had happened upon the battery*, it had taken root tenaciously in his mind, becoming a need almost instantly. Now he regarded it with the reverence due a sacred relic, as if it were his sole memento of his early, other-worldly childhood. He had no idea to whom the battery had actually belonged before finding its way to the pawnshop. He chose not to think about it, instead basking in the feeling of satisfaction which possessing it brought him.
(* It was back in issue #6 - DWG)

A quick, syncopated knock on the door to his quarters startled Valence from his reverie. Instinctively he willed the power battery to disappear, and the device faded into invisibility. It was a built-in security feature of the power battery which apparently did not require a Green Lantern's ring to function. Just as the battery became completely undetectable, More strolled in through the door without waiting for Valence's answer. "Hey, Jack, whatcha up to?" he opened conversationally, a ready smile on his face.

"Nothing much," Valence replied nonchalantly.

"Really?" More insisted. "Just sitting in here, doing nothing?"

"Well, I was working on something ..."

"What's that?" More pressed.

Valence gestured toward a corner of the small room, where the steel cables he utilized as field equipment were coiled. From the nest of metal loops rose the large hammer Valence had obtained on the Cobra Cult satellite.* The heavy tool glided through the air along a magnetic field and met Valence's hand.
(* Don't even tell me you don't remember last issue! - DWG)

Valence ran his hand along the steel handle of the hammer. "I was personalizing this a bit ... like so," he explained, holding the tool by its head and displaying the handle to More. Along the handle, Valence had magnetically furrowed out the word "SNAKECHARMER" in block letters.

More grinned and nodded. "Sweet. Kinda like, what was it, Lightning Boy in 'The Natural'."

"I guess so," Valence shrugged, smiling himself now at More's amusement. "So how are you?" he asked, his tone clearly requesting an update on the status of More's recent injuries.

"Good as gold," More assured him. He mimed digging his nails into his chest vigorously and added, "Worst part is that it itches like hell."

"Bummer," Valence said sympathetically.

A burst of static emitted from a small intercom panel on the wall drew both men's attention to it. Ember's voice followed, saying, "Guys, we got something going on. Meet up on top of the Boat."

The intercom was one-way, originating at the communications console and broadcasting to several speakers around the Riverboat, so Valence and More made no reply. More simply nodded once and left the room en route to the upper deck of Bad Blood's headquarters. Valence stood up from his cot, caught himself in mid-step away from it, and turned back. He extended his hand until he could feel the handle of the Green Lantern power battery. While invisible, it was nearly weightless as well. Valence attached it to his belt, quelling the irrational anxiety he had been feeling more and more often when he left the device behind. Then his body lifted off the flooring planks and he was in flight out of the quarters.

Hangfire spread his boots wide to brace himself atop the hull of Janissary's spacecraft. The team had had no contact with their mysterious benefactor since the end of the Kobra mission, and per his instructions they had kept the vessel for themselves. Hangfire stood astride it, adjusting a heavy canopy of camouflage netting intended to conceal the spacecraft, at least from a distance. The gusting winds and heavy rains of a tropical storm a few days before had left the vehicle's swamp-mask in a disheveled mass around the tail and one wing, but the weighted edges of the net had saved it from being completely swept away. Hangfire had covered the spacecraft yet again the next day, and was now fastening it to the hull at various points to minimize such maintenance in the future.

A shimmering red disc opened in the air above the camouflage netting, and Enigma stepped out. Hangfire nodded curtly to acknowledge his teammate's presence while wrapping a line around the ship's nosecone and through the weave of the netting. Enigma waved in response and moved toward Hangfire.

"Just wanted to let you know I'll be on my way shortly," Enigma informed Hangfire as he closed the distance between them.

Hangfire straightened up and rested his hands on his hips. "You're really taking off, huh?"

Enigma nodded. "I'm afraid so. The truth is I'm much more at home conducting research at IMHS than doing half the adventuring that most of the metahumans I study can't seem to live without. I wanted to help Pierce exorcise some of his demons, and I believe he's done that. Now it's time for our paths to diverge again."

"Yeah, which means you leave us on the same path with the crazy bastard," Hangfire scowled, but without any real rancor. "I always thought you were the only one Pierce really trusted, Dirk. You were our in-house liaison to him, and now ..."

"Believe me, Johnny, you're underestimating the whole situation - Pierce's side and the rest of the team's. What you just said may have been true several months ago, but not now," Enigma assured him.

"Yeah, maybe," Hangfire agreed grudgingly. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. "I gotta tell you, though, there's something else bums me out about you bailing."

Enigma made no sign of taking offense at the implication, and asked, "Which is?"

Hangfire sighed, "Gonna miss your level head around here. Valence and Ember act like teenagers trying to outdo each other for Joe Cool points half the time. Karnival and More get pretty headstrong, too. Exorcised or not, Pierce pushes himself like a man possessed. Used to be you and me were the rational, calm ones. Now it's just me."

Enigma contemplated Hangfire's words for a few moments, then said, "I'd like to tell you that once again you're underestimating a changing situation ... but I can't. Sorry."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me how sorry you are when trying to rein in these kids put my geriatric butt in a sling sometime."

"That, my rapidly-becoming-crotchety friend, is not likely to happen, and you know it."

Before Hangfire could answer, Ember, Karnival, More and Valence appeared on the upper deck of the Riverboat, two hundred yards away from the resting place of the spacecraft. Karnival signaled Hangfire back to the listing, moss-clad structure with an illusion of a gigantic, skeletal hand curling its index finger beckoningly.

"Something's up," Hangfire surmised. He turned to Enigma and asked, "One last go-round?"

"If I say yes," Enigma replied didactically, "you'll expect me to agree every time. Here, though, I'll warp you over to the ship. Then I'm off." A red disc appeared before Hangfire, its twin spiraling open atop the Riverboat. Hangfire shook Enigma's hand appreciatively, and stepped through.

"I'm telling you, I've got some friends who can work wonders. Some of them are almost as good as me, which means that working together we could get the upgrade done before you even notice ..."

"Ember, will it shut you up if I say 'Fine'?" Pierce asked distantly, his first verbal response since Ember had introduced the subject of augmenting the communications console's capabilities.

"Only if you mean it," Ember shot back rakishly.

"Fine. Now shut up," Pierce answered without hesitation.

Bad Blood floated through the air above the Mississippi River. In preparation for Enigma's departure from the team, and to compensate for the loss of their primary means of rapid transit, he and Pierce had designed electromagnetic belt buckles for More, Karnival and Hangfire. More's, by far the largest, was a broad blue circle with a cobalt casing, Karnival's a yellow letter K with steel casing, and Hangfire's a utilitarian, iron gray block. The buckles, as well as Pierce's armor, generated a weak magnetic field around each hero, allowing Valence to levitate them and approximate flight, with extremely limited maneuverability. So the team soared at a respectable pace, Valence and Ember under their own power, and the rest of Bad Blood in magnetic tow.

"Cops are comin' in," Hangfire announced, pointing upriver. Two speedboats in black and white emblazoned with the seal of the NOPD roared across the water, converging on the Bad Blood's destination: the Natchez.

The Natchez was a floating tourist attraction, an expansive steam-powered paddleboat that offered passengers a Mississippi cruise with gambling, dining and live entertainment. The Natchez was also, currently, under siege by a large, unknown but apparently hostile creature.

"Cops won't get there fast enough," Pierce insisted. "This is our show. Let's get down there."

"I'm on it," Ember assured his teammates, falling into a steep dive toward the back of the paddleboat. Valence accelerated in an effort to keep pace, but was slowed by the effort of towing the other four.

Ember glided over the railing of the uppermost deck of the Natchez, into a dining room area. Several round tables had been knocked askew or overturned completely, tablecloths, plates and silver in tangles on the floor. Chairs, too, were scattered pell-mell across the carpeted deck, along with prone, sprawling bodies. The people lying on the deck were alive, but either unconscious or moaning in agony. At the far end of the room, more people were huddled together fearfully, hiding behind buffet tables.

In the center of the devastation stood a figure easily ten feet tall, thick limbed but without sharp definition of its musculature. In fact the skin of the creature seemed gelatinous, a pale purplish white, shining with moisture. The legs broadened to flat bases with no resemblance to human feet, and the arms terminated in proliferations of dangling tentacles, long enough to nearly touch the floor. The creature had dark red eyes and a slit-like mouth, but no discernable head; a wide, broad dome of flesh spanned shoulder to shoulder.

The creature's predatory gaze was roving about the room as Ember made his entrance. A sudden series of light flashes popped on the far side of the dining area, and Ember could see the photographer peeking up from behind a table. The massive man-beast shaded his eyes from the lights and whirled around to face Ember; the two locked eyes. "All right, gruesome, time to feel the burn!" Ember shouted as he barreled toward the beast. The creature made no move to avoid Ember's fiery form, but spread its arms wide as if in welcome.

Ember rammed his blazing fists into the soft, yielding surface of the creature's torso. As he struck his opponent, Ember could hear it groan and feel it wince in pain, but the creature still wrapped its tentacles around Ember's waist and thighs. Immediately a sickening pain inflamed Ember's skin, and poison seemed to slice murderously through his veins. Ember slackened in the grip of the creature's tentacles, and was unceremoniously tossed aside a moment later. He barely had the presence of mind to lower his exterior temperature to normal before crashing off the wall and through a table.

"Feel MY burn," the creature exulted in an inhuman voice that sounded like a man shouting underwater, "the burning venom of Man-of-War!"

Valence flew into the Natchez dining room, magnetically pulling the rest of Bad Blood over the railing with him. "Hope we didn't miss ..." Valence began, but stopped short at the sight of Ember trying to pull himself up from the splintered wreckage of table. Ember attempted to put his weight on one arm, then the other, but all of his limbs were useless dead weight.

"All right, you roughed up Ember, now it's personal," More growled, advancing on Man-of-War.

"No!" Ember cried through teeth clenched in pain. "Don't let ... touch you ... stinging ... poison!"

More stopped in his tracks uncertainly. Pierce, Karnival, Valence and Hangfire formed a wide circle around Man-of-War, who turned slowly to evaluate new prey.

"Karnival, think you can take this slimeball down without touching him?" Pierce asked.

"That's why you guys pay me the big bucks, right?" Karnival's hellish skull's grin widened ferociously, and a green-scaled sea serpent issued forth, growing rapidly to fill the room and dwarf Man-of-War. The monstrous illusory leviathan hovered before the confounded Man-of-War, and then the sea serpent flicked its tail, which was actually a colossal, rusty hook that slashed through Man-of-War's fleshy midsection. Man-of-War staggered backwards.

Suddenly, from the front of the room, another rapid succession of camera flashes strobed the room in dazzling white light. Man-of-War instinctively covered his eyes with one arm against the bright flashes, and when his visual contact with Karnival's illusion was severed, the image lost its power over him. Man-of-War lashed out with an armful of nettles at Karnival, who shifted to his two-dimensional form a split second before the tentacles would have snared him. Pierce vaulted half the length of the room to herd the remaining passengers, including the photographer, out of the dining room.

"Plan B, then," Hangfire shrugged, dropping to one knee as he retrieved two guns from their holsters. As he began firing at Man-of-War, Valence rose to the ceiling of the dining room and uncoiled a length of steel cable, then magnetically directed it to lasso Man-of-War around the tops of his arms.

Man-of-War ignored the slugs from Hangfire's guns, which sank into his gelatinous flesh without doing any damage. As Valence tightened the noose of his steel cable lariat, Man-of-War simply oozed out of the coil, batting the cable aside after slipping under it.

More scanned the room for a weapon, and saw that Ember was now not moving at all. Quickly More rushed to Ember's side, and shook him by the shoulders. "Ember! Rob! Are you ...?"

"Ca ... mo ..." Ember struggled to speak. One arm flopped out to the side numbly, lay still for a few seconds, then flopped back against Ember's stomach. The paralysis from Man-of-War's venom was not complete, but Ember was nonetheless incapacitated.

An electronically amplified voice echoed up from the river's surface. "THIS IS THE POLICE. CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES AND COME TO THE RAILING WITH YOUR HANDS UP."

Man-of-War heard the police demands and began lumbering toward the railing. "Oh, this can't be good," Valence muttered. Reaching out magnetically, he gathered all of the silverware throughout the room and hurled it in one sweeping barrage at Man-of-War's back. The attack was as ineffective as any of the previous ones.

Man-of-War reached the railing and stared down at the police boats, where half a dozen officers stood with weapons drawn and aimed at him. Man-of-War raised both arms over his head. The tentacles at the ends of his appendages began writhing and flailing like pennants in the wind. The next instant the surface of the river exploded in a rush of clear globules with violet hearts. Jellyfish, bursting out of the river in numbers that threatened to bury the officers and their vehicles, swamped the police boats.

Man-of-War turned from the railing and regarded Bad Blood, an expression of cruel delight evident on his rudimentary facial features. "Man-of-War has known pain ... so much pain. Man-of-War will show the world such pain!"

"Hangfire, Karnival, More, shut this psycho down," Pierce ordered, returning from the far side of the room. "Valence, you and I are bailing out the boys in blue."

"Aww, save the cops, do we gotta?" Valence asked with exaggerated disdain. He raised a hand in Pierce's direction and the two floated out over the river together.

"Morrre ..." Ember slurred. "Nee ... heh ..." Ember closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then slowly forced the words to come. "Need ... your ... help."

"You got it, buddy," More nodded. "Just tell me what to do."

Karnival and Hangfire closed the distance between themselves and Man-of-War. Karnival gestured and summoned an illusory swarm of imps with leathery wings, clustered around Man-of-War's head. Man-of-War batted at the attacking images, while Hangfire retrieved a taser gun from the back of his belt. He fired the weapon at Man-of-War, sending small wire-tethered spikes at the massive creature's body. The spikes embedded in the purplish white flesh and Hangfire triggered the flow of electrical current.

Man-of-War roared in pain and flung his tentacles savagely at Hangfire. His aim limited by the cavorting imps before his eyes, Man-of-War only wrapped a single slender appendage around Hangfire's right arm. The contact was still enough to tear a cry of anguish from Hangfire's throat, as he dropped the taser and fell backwards, just out of Man-of-War's reach. Hangfire's arm hung paralyzed at his side.

Outside the Natchez, Valence spread his arms and took both police boats into a magnetic embrace, lifting them up fifteen feet out of the water. At the same time, he released his hold on Pierce's armor's magnetic field, allowing the Knight to drop into one of the boats as it rose. Before his boots hit the inside of the hull, Pierce was firing sonic blasts from his gauntlets. His left gauntlet emitted low-powered blasts to brush the jellyfish off the bodies of police officers, while his right fired higher frequency waves into the hull of the boat. Jellyfish at the blast's point of impact exploded immediately, while the force of the amplified sound waves pushed more of the fist-sized invertebrates back over the sides of the boat. When he had cleared the first boat, he turned his hands toward the second boat and evacuated it of jellyfish similarly.

"Set 'em down now, Pierce?" Valence asked from above.

"Not until the rest of the school goes away," Pierce called back. "Should happen as soon as the others finish Man-of-War."

More approached Man-of-War slowly, taking the measure of the towering beast. Man-of-War waited patiently for More to come within reach. With unexpected speed, More dove past Man-of-War, sliding face first along the deck just below his foe's stinging nettles. More reached the railing at the back of the room, grabbed hold of the gilt iron top rail, and yanked it cleanly off the spindles. He spun on the lurching Man-of-War and lunged, driving the iron rail through Man-of-War's stomach.

Man-of-War looked down at the end of the rail, sticking a few inches out of his flesh. Behind him, several feet of rail extended from his lower back to the floor. Man-of-War raised his baleful crimson eyes to More and uttered a gurgling sound that seemed distantly related to laughter. "This cannot hurt me," Man-of-War proclaimed defiantly, wrapping a set of tentacles around the end of the rail and pulling it through his amorphous side.

"Maybe not," More agreed readily. Behind Man-of-War's back, Ember struggled to move his right hand toward the end of the iron rail resting on the floor. With a rolling jerk, he positioned his fingers atop the metal cylinder. His hand began to heat up, taking on a dark orange hue as the air around it shimmered and the gilding beneath his fingertips became flaked and scorched.

Man-of-War yanked his tentacles away from the end of the rail as it became superheated, and howled in pain and surprise. Steam rose from Man-of-War's form as the heat from the rail impaling him was conducted through his entire body. Man-of-War started to turn around to face Ember, but in doing so paid no attention to More, who brought a haymaker crashing into the quivering side of Man-of-War's head, stunning him. The rail moved slightly with Man-of-War's motions, but Ember maintained a death grip on his end of it, channeling as much thermal energy as he could into the metal. Man-of-War's howls reached a crescendo, then stopped abruptly as the behemoth collapsed, overwhelmed by the searing assault.

Despite admonishing those in the dining room to stay as far away as possible, Pierce had only succeeded in forcing the passengers down the flight of stairs to the deck below. After his departure, the bolder among them had slowly ascended the stairs again, and as Man-of-War slumped to the deck, spontaneous applause broke out from the front of the room. Camera flashes exploded again, and More waved and smiled for a moment before moving to help Hangfire back to his feet. Valence and Pierce glided back into the room, and Valence wrapped Man-of-War's motionless body in a section of chainlink fence he had borrowed from a factory yard on the riverbank. Pierce moved to Ember's side and administered a dose of antitoxin to combat the paralysis in his teammate's limbs.

As the passengers slowly began to leave the dining room, meeting the police as they boarded the Natchez, Delaina Teague lingered at the top of the stairs. She watched as the members of Bad Blood checked on one another, helped each other and assessed what had gone right and what had gone wrong that day. When a police officer climbed the stairs to the dining room and found Delaina, he tried "Excuse me, miss?" three times before shaking her by the shoulder and finally getting her attention. The officer explained that Delaina would have to leave the room, and although she complied she moved as slowly as possible down the stairs, never looking away from Bad Blood, even as they flew over the dismantled railing and out into the blue sky beyond.

Bad Blood was without a doubt the answer Delaina Teague had been looking for.

Two weeks later ...

A magazine lay spread open across the polished black desk, like an unfortunate fowl's entrails exposed for divination. The bright, glossy colors of the photographs and layout design took on a hard edge under the hot white light of the single gooseneck lamp poised inches above. Higher still than the source of illumination was a face of bleached bone, enshrouded in a halo of cigarette smoke. The exposed jawbone was set in such a way that the skull's grin seemed more of a sneer, while the unfathomably black eye sockets were aimed directly at the magazine, and its photo spread, its vibrant still shots of a rogue Checkmate Knight, and a red-hot man, and a muscular specimen noteworthy even in Mr. Bones' line of work.

Mr. Bones was not prone to talking to himself. If he were, he might begin to muse aloud about these self-styled heroes, their motivations, their intentions. If he were given to soliloquy he might verbally remind himself that his organization had precious little information on 'Bad Blood', so little that it might be classified as a weakness in their knowledge base. A serious weakness. If he were so in

clined, he might tell the darkness that further study of Bad Blood would be required immediately, or he might tell the flat images on the glossy paper to enjoy their autonomy while it lasted. But Mr. Bones was not so inclined, and the silence within his darkened office in the headquarters of the D.E.O. was undisturbed for some time.

Finally, Mr. Bones tore his cavernous eye sockets away from the magazine, and plucked the cigarette from between his bare teeth with his thumb and finger bones. The cigarette's glow was swallowed by crumbling black ash against the bottom of a crystal ashtray, and Mr. Bones pressed the intercom button on the desk's phone.

"Get me Zmeck," he ordered.

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

In lieu of any direct e-mail messages (ahem. ahem. Badblood51@hotmail.com . ahem.), we now present an excerpt from ye olde FauxDC message list, written by the one and only Doc:

The review: Bad Blood issue 13 claims to be "epic," and it delivers the goods. This one has it all - space travel, stopping a world-destruction class weapon, thunder and lightning, and of course, KOBRA.

Dale's apparently a fan of large-scale superhero battles (as seen in the GL series, but to better ends here) and he treats us to a few before the bad guys get the kicking they deserve. Plus, we tend to learn a bit more about the Bad Blood characters in battle than we do elsewhere, IMO.

So, my big question is - how's Dale going to top it? I mean, this story ends up being a lot like the movie "Armegeddon" crossed with the 1930s style Flash Gordon. It's a wild, wild ride, with characters getting injured and burned, time travel, weird alien-type mystery men... and any book where the doomsday device gets delayed by a character deliberately head-butting a control panel gets high marks in my book.

Truly "different" characters fighting a classic DC menace, big-scope drama, and well choreographed fights make this issue a keeper.

Thanks, Dave. Hope you liked this issue, and even more, hope you come back for ...

NEXT ISSUE: Bad Blood: Targets of the D.E.O! Stalked by a force to be reckoned with! The consequences will be anything but minor! Be here!