Scales of Judgment

Tommy Cheswick slunk away from the back door of the speakeasy and crept down the littered French Quarter alleyway, hoping that the jaunty melody of Dixieland trumpet, bass and drum would effectively mask the sounds of his departure. Tommy had spotted "Gator" Gattone as soon as the oily gangster had entered the establishment, and he had every reason to believe that the man hadn't seen him. The speakeasy was crowded, and a new moll was holding tight to Gator's right arm. Still, Tommy wouldn't relax until he had put several miles between himself and the gangster, at least.

He was only a few yards from the mouth of the alley when another figure, large and immovable, blocked the egress. The big man was a shadow, except for his fedora, tie and spats, which gleamed impossibly bone white under the moonlight. "Goin' somewhere, Tommy?" the big man asked.

Tommy recognized the voice as Little Lou, an ironic nickname for a mountain of a man with no sense of humor. Little Lou was one of Gator's chief enforcers. "I'm not goin' anywhere," Tommy shook his head, slowly backing up. "I mean, I ... I'm just goin' home, is all."

"Nah, you got it right the first time," Gator said, materializing right behind Tommy, so close that Tommy had almost backed right into the gangster's chest. "You ain't goin' nowhere."

Tommy turned sideways in the middle of the alley, not wanting to offer his back to either Gator or Little Lou. "Whatta you guys futzin' with me for?" Tommy demanded, his voice shaking. "I ain't done nothin' wrong."

Little Lou and Gator closed in on either side. "You won some heavy sugar at the dice game the other night," Little Lou said.

"You think I cheated? I won fair and square!" Tommy insisted desperately.

Gator shook his head sadly. "Doesn't matter. Can't have anyone take too much mazuma. Gotta send a message about knowin' when to quit."

Tommy tried to bolt past Gator, back towards the gin mill door, but Gator lashed out with a kick that sent Tommy sprawling along the alley floor. That was enough time for Little Lou to reach him and begin beating Tommy to a pulp, with a non-stop barrage of meaty punches that broke bones and drew blood.

A girl stood at the end of the alley and witnessed the assault. Just as it seemed that Tommy Cheswick must be dead, his eyes flew open, large and terrified, and locked on the girl's. Tommy's mouth opened, showing more teeth missing than still rooted in place. His tongue was bloody and ragged; he had bitten through it when Little Lou had smashed his jaw. Still, he managed to form two words that reached the girl's ears: "... ba-a-a-d ... pl-a-a-a-ce ..."

Delaina Teague tore herself from sleep, her heart racing, her breath short, her pulse pounding in her temples. She realized she had only been dreaming, but took absolutely no comfort in that fact.

"So do you think it means something?" Sojourn asked, sitting on the one couch in the Riverboat lounge that had survived the altercation with the Ohyn relatively unscathed.

Vic Wagner shrugged. "Dreams always mean something," he began to explain. "What you're really asking me is what I think it means."

"Fine, right, so what does it mean then?" she pressed.

"I don't know, kid," Vic admitted. "I assume you've already done some research on your own...?"

"Uh-huh," Sojourn confirmed. "When I dreamed about the slave ships I spent some time reading online to check the details. When I dreamed about the cop killing the girl in the bordello, I looked through old newspapers at the library and found the story. I haven't looked into the one from last night yet but I have a good idea what I'll find."

"So you have these disturbing dreams that aren't just your brain recycling your own thoughts," Vic nodded. "They all contain historical details that you didn't know about before you had the dream but that you confirmed after the fact. We rule out the natural kinds of dreams and we're left with the supernatural."

"Yeah, I know, Vic," Sojourn sighed, rolling her eyes. "And you're the guy with experience with the supernatural. So tell me why I keep having these dreams about how messed up New Orleans is."

"I still don't know," Vic said apologetically. "It could be something like a dream-haunting, that doesn't really mean anything, it just happens, like the weather. It could be a mystical manifestation of the spirit of the city, reaching out to you for help. It could be a warning from someone trying to show you how easy it would be for a similar fate to befall you. Or a hundred other things."

"Great." Sojourn slumped back on the couch. "And don't think I'm all impressed that you can use words like ‘befall' and such. You have no idea why the dreams keep coming back."

The streetwise mage smiled. "Look, keep me posted via e-mail, give me as many details as you can, and if anything more insightful occurs to me, I'll share," Vic offered, as he hoisted a large backpack onto his right shoulder. "You know something's up, and that's as good a start as any. Stay alert. You'll be all right."

Before Sojourn could say any more, Pierce entered the lounge room, dressed in his red and white armor and helmet. He crossed the floor to within a few feet of Vic and said, "Looks like you're about ready to go."

"That I am," Vic said. "Fun as it is to see all of you, and much as I appreciate your hospitality while I was healing up, I'm past ready to head back to the west coast."

"Not sure it counts as hospitality when you were healing up from wounds inflicted when you got attacked in our base," Pierce observed.

"Yeah, well, hopefully you won't have any more maulings of people you bring around, now that I've had time to put a few more wards on the Magna." Vic shook his head. "I still don't really get what the Ohyn were doing here."

"Trying to kill us?" Sojourn suggested wryly.

"Oh, sure," Vic agreed. "They're absolutely capable of that. But it's not their style. They're bottom-feeders. They eat the dead. Sometimes they might kill someone who won't put up a fight, if they're hungry and impatient. But usually they're lazy. The Magna of Illusion made them go nuts, but that only explains it halfway. What were they doing in the Riverboat, getting that close to the Magna in the first place? What would compel them to leave their comfort zone like that?"

"What, or who," Pierce added.

"Right. I still say keeping the Magna here is insanely dangerous, by the by," Vic said.

"We'll take our chances," Pierce responded.

"It's a trouble magnet. And it's a great big shining supernatural beacon for any other-siders looking for you," Vic admonished.

"If the Spectre drops by, we'll give him your regards," Pierce deadpanned.

"Freaking hilarious," Vic retorted.

"Pierce said something hilarious?" Sojourn asked, eyes widening as she sat up straight. "I don't believe it."

"On that note, I'm out of here," Vic said, extending his hand toward Pierce; the Checkmate Knight shook it firmly. Vic pointed at Sojourn. "Don't be a stranger," he insisted. Then he turned and began walking toward the wall of the lounge, yet appeared to be receding into a great distance, as if traversing an invisible tunnel. In a few moments, he was simply gone.

Alone with Sojourn, Pierce asked, "Everything all right with you?"

There was something almost militaristic in the unemotional way Pierce voiced the question, as if he were looking for a tactical status report and not interpersonal insight. Sojourn shrugged. "Yes, no, I don't know. Vic didn't seem too worried about it. I'll figure it out."

Satisfied, Pierce turned toward the doorway of the room. "Come," he said.

"Where?" Sojourn asked, already falling in step behind him in response to the command.

"Comm-con room," Pierce answered. Together they navigated the Riverboat's halls to the central communications and computer control room.

The rest of Bad Blood were arrayed around the large, multi-monitored computer: More, Hangfire, Ember and Valence standing behind Karnival, who sat at the keyboard in the driver's seat. Enigma had returned to his laboratory at the Institute for Metahuman Studies the previous day; Vigilante had departed some time in the night. With Vic Wagner on his way back to San Francisco, the team had reverted to its core roster.

"Where do we stand?" Pierce asked.

"Almost done," Karnival answered.

"Speak for yourself," the CLOTI avatar interjected gruffly. The animated icon, a blood-red teardrop shape with small arms and hands sticking out from its sides and a centered, noseless face, was scowling down from the upper right monitor, a pixilated cigar clenched in the corner of its mouth.

"Clotty's gathered all the info, and I'm almost done going over it," Karnival corrected himself.

"Don't encourage him," Ember warned.

"What's going on?" Sojourn asked.

"Some recent murders on the outskirts of Houston," Valence said. "Mostly homeless people and drifters, which is strike one against the local cops looking into it, and off-the-charts brutality, which is strike two."

"And which is why we're looking into it," Hangfire added. "I'd bet my eyeteeth that it's a metahuman killer."

"No need for anyone to take that bet," Karnival said, leaning back in the comm-con chair. "I found the match we were looking for."

"Do tell," More said, crossing his massive arms in front of his chest.

"When the second body was dredged out of the White Oak Bayou, the Houston medical examiner found some unusual tissue samples in some of the victim's deeper wounds," Karnival explained. "This was before the investigation got scuttled, obviously. But by the time some lab work came back on it, the scuttling was underway."

"So what kind of tissues were they?" Ember asked.

"Orange scales," Karnival answered, tapping on the keyboard to bring up a graphic on one of the main screens. A highly magnified photo appeared, showing a jagged, leathery triangle of skin, with notations indicating size, weight, chemical composition and other properties superimposed. "I'll spare you all the biology lesson, since honestly a lot of it is over my head, too. But long story short, most of the proteins making up the scale are the kind you only get in labs."

"Genetic engineering," Pierce nodded.

"Right," Karnival agreed. "We're talking about a man-made metahuman, here, and if anybody were looking into this they'd probably realize that there aren't that many precedents for orange-scaled man-made metahuman killing machines out there."

"But there are precedents?" Sojourn asked skeptically. "Not many, but some?"

"Just one, really, that I know of," Karnival answered, minimizing the display of the scale discovered by the coroner and bringing up a file that seemed to belong in a military database. A small photo showed a monstrous face with vaguely human features: its eyes were blood red, its lips twisted in a feral snarl full of sharp fangs, and its skin covered in orange scales. A wild mane of straw-yellow hair surrounded the visage. Beside the photo, the accompanying text identified the subject as Manticore, a member of a group called the Onslaught.

"A little bit of bio-engineering, a little bit of cybernetics, a whole lot of ugly," Karnival continued. "Onslaught built themselves two Manticores. The second one was a replacement for the first, which was dispatched by Deadshot on a Suicide Squad mission. When the second one got killed by Duchess on a subsequent Suicide Squad mission, I think the Onslaught gave up."

"What's a Suicide Squad?" Sojourn asked.

"A covert government team," Hangfire supplied. "Which really begs the question, how did you get the classified info on who killed what on which mission?"

"Hey, you ask me to connect the dots, I connect the freaking dots," Clotty's electronic voice snarled, affronted, from his corner monitor. "If it's on a computer somewhere ..."

"The point is," Karnival interrupted, "the Onslaught didn't crank out any more Manticore's, but their research and methods could have been discovered by someone else. Say, some maniac with a secret lab somewhere in the greater Houston area. There's two possible scenarios. One, the creator lost control of the new Manticore and it's moving on instinct and killing at random. Or two, the killings aren't random at all. They could be practice, field tests, or something we're just not seeing."

"Does it really matter which it is?" More asked.

"Negative," Pierce asserted. "Either way, we're going to Houston."

The three-story building on the outskirts of the Texas Medical Center in Houston was completely dark when Bad Blood arrived. In the middle of the night, a lack of blazing lamplight was to be expected, but the structure's inner shadows were absolute, devoid of a single illuminated exit sign or even the faint glow of a computer or other device's power indicator. The laboratory was utterly lifeless and inert.

"Looks like nobody's home, and we're dealing with the unsupervised Manticore scenario," Valence observed.

"If this is even the right place at all," Ember countered.

"It should be," Karnival replied. "This facility is at the approximate epicenter of the killings, or the locations where the bodies were found, at least. It was acquired by a legal entity that doesn't seem to actually exist outside of said acquisition, and that was a couple of months before the first killing. Pretty shady."

"Good enough for me," Hangfire nodded. "Let's move in."

Pierce led the team up the front steps of the building; More brought up the rear, looking up and down the street for signs of trouble. The front door was locked with multiple deadbolts, but Pierce quickly detached a small plasma-torch from his gauntlet's cache of tools and cut through the locks. The door swung open into the blackness, and Bad Blood entered.

Even in the foyer, the abandoned lab building smelled faintly of decay, of organic waste left to molder and rot. Pierce snapped on a flashlight, and the team followed the narrow beam of light deeper into the lab, through a heavy but unlocked door that separated the entryway from a main lab. The long, workbench-like tables were uncluttered, the wire racks lining the walls held only a few empty test tubes and beakers here and there. Two white refrigerators at the far end of the room stood with their doors hanging open, but no light came from the tiny bulbs within, and no sound of running compressors could be heard. Pierce ran the halo of the flashlight over the work tables, the wire shelves, and finally the floor, bringing the circle of light to rest on smeared tracks the muddy maroon color of dried blood.

"You all right?" Ember asked, turning toward Sojourn.

She snorted. "I been hanging out with y'all for how long, and you think some bloody footprints are gonna bother me? Please."

The tracks led to the corner of the room, where several cardboard cartons had been stacked haphazardly. Valence reached out one hand and magnetically separated a single rack from the wire shelving near the boxes, then used the metal screen like a flying cowcatcher to shove the boxes aside. A trapdoor in the floor was revealed, which More approached and yanked open. He loomed expectantly over the opening, but the dark silence remained undisturbed.

More shrugged and lowered himself through the trapdoor, and his teammates followed in turn. In moments they found themselves in an underground level of the building, its floor and walls composed of rough concrete, its ceiling obscured by pipes and cables. The dried-blood tracks continued down the gray corridor, growing more and more indistinct but still present.

The heroes navigated the corridor, passing several doors and side passages. They noted the damage done to the walls and floor, excoriated claw marks on every surface like a primitive, chaotic kind of writing. Soon the end of the corridor was in sight, opening on a much larger space beyond. Animalistic grunts could be heard in the obscured depths of the den.

Pierce turned off his flashlight and shared his strategy with his teammates. "Flare gets thrown in first, but won't last long," he said. "We follow, locate Manticore, and hit him fast and hard. Be ready."

The erstwhile Checkmate knight yanked a cord on the flare, setting off a chemical reaction that gave off a lurid, scarlet light, and lobbed the flare into the room beyond the corridor. The heroes entered the room themselves a moment later. Red and black shadows danced all around them as the flare burned in the middle of the floor.

Manticore came at Bad Blood from the right, padding toward them with wolf-like steps, its back slightly hunched, its segmented orange tail twitching from side to side, the glow of the flare glinting off a steel harness covering its shoulders and chest. And Manticore came at Bad Blood from the left, this one somewhat larger, rangier, with a mohawk of yellow hair rather than a full mane. And Manticore came at Bad Blood from directly in front of them, smaller and stockier than the other two, with long yellow hair that reached its waist, and clawed fingers flexing menacingly. And Manticore came at Bad Blood from behind, gangly, its face more bestial and vicious than the others, a few scattered plugs of yellow hair poking out of its orange scaly scalp.

From all the shadowy corners of the den, more and more Manticores emerged, penning Bad Blood in on all sides. The heroes arranged themselves in a tight ring, back to back to back, facing the predatory bioengineered lifeforms as they slowly, relentlessly approached. As the flickering red light of the flare began to sputter and die, Hangfire muttered, "Not exactly what we were ready for."

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

Send e-mail correspondence to badblood51@hotmail.com

After Donny Ortega posted a message on the HEROES list singing the praises of FDC, and I sent him an email thanking him for his support, I got a nice note back from him that I wanted to share (that's what this space down here is for, after all):

Hey Dale,

No problem. I've always dug the stuff at FDC and I was suprised the name didn't come up more in the conversation. And keep up the good work on Bad Blood, because I love that title.

-Donny

Thanks, Donny! I will keep it up – in fact, I'll keep it up very soon, as in ...

NEXT ISSUE: Manticore Madness! A Melee of Murderous Mayhem! And More! Be here!