Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury

"So what did you say to her?"

"What do you think I said to her?"

"You know, it kind of bothers me to admit this, but I have no idea. Could have been any number of things, I guess."

"I told her that we all do the best we can and try not to let the times that we're not sure if our best is good enough stop us from getting out of bed in the morning."

"That's true."

"Not really. If I had been going for truth I would have said that sometimes we do the best we can and sometimes we do things that we know aren't our best but we do them anyway and then we live with them. And if I had been going for even deeper truth I would have said ... well I wouldn't have said anything at all because trying to make sense out of our lives is an exercise in futility at best. But I wasn't going for truth, I was trying to reassure a scared little girl."

"Hm. I would have at least told her that we all fall short but we also get plenty of chances to make up for our mistakes."

"Well, you are the one who grew up in a Catholic orphanage. Steady diet of sinners and saints and forgiveness and atonement and all that."

Jack Fenris cocked an eyebrow at Ed Baird, sitting beside him on a well-worn wooden bench in the gallery of the New Orleans Courthouse. "And Delaina goes to a Catholic high school," Fenris pointed out. "So maybe she could relate."

"Maybe," Baird shrugged. "The point is both of us would have said some variation on 'don't give up', and that's what I actually did say."

"But do you believe it, yourself?" Fenris pressed.

"I think it's important the she believes it," Baird replied. Before his friend and teammate could ask him to elaborate, the doors at the back of the courtroom opened. Two Orleans Parish bailiffs led Benjamin Kellogg, the metahuman criminal known as Minotaur, into the courtroom.

Kellogg stood over seven feet tall, and was dressed in a fashionable charcoal gray suit that had obviously been tailored to his massively muscular frame. His hands were bound before him in power-dampening cuffs which reduced his inherent strength to normal human levels. He moved calmly and deliberately down the center aisle of the courtroom, his eyes fixed straight ahead. The bailiffs escorted Kellogg through the wooden railing that separated the gallery from the rest of the courtroom. Twelve men and women in the jury box watched Kellogg take his seat beside his defense attorney, and all twelve seemed as fascinated and close to terror as audience members just before King Kong's rampage.

"All rise," a third bailiff called out from beside a door in the far corner of the courtroom. The jury, lawyers, Kellogg and the onlookers all stood as the black-robed Judge Clarence Vartan entered, climbed the steps behind his tall, mahogany bench, and sat.

Baird looked around the courtroom as the judge settled in at the bench and the rest of those present seated themselves again. Except for Delaina Teague, confined to the Joan of Arc Catholic School for Girls for the day, the rest of Bad Blood was in attendance for the trial of Minotaur. Rob McDowell sat just behind the prosecutor's table, occasionally exchanging smiling comments with a pretty brunette beside him, his tan suit and his blond hair both immaculate. Baird and Fenris were on the same side of the aisle, several benches back, in more modest street clothes: Fenris in blue jeans and his ever-present black biker jacket, and Baird in a polo shirt, slacks and tweed jacket. On the opposite side, Johnny Chancellor stroked his salt-and-pepper beard a few rows behind the defense table, his clothes as non-descript as imaginable, while Pierce – always Pierce to Baird, whether in costume or not, disguised or otherwise – sat near the back of the gallery, his face half-hidden by aviator sunglasses and a large cowboy hat, while the gaudy silver clasp of his bolo tie drew attention further from his features. Les Ample stood against the back wall of the courtroom, arms crossed over his broad chest, clad in well-worn construction coveralls.

"Think we'll be enough?" Fenris whispered, as the assistant district attorney began her opening statement to the jury.

"Enough for what?" Baird countered.

"You know, for whatever comes next," Fenris said. "Somebody's bound to try something. LocoForce, maybe Kobra, hell for all we know the Monster Society of Evil is recruiting."

"My point," Baird nodded. "We don't know what's going to happen next, or who's going to be behind it."

"But we're here," Fenris pointed out.

"Which means we'll be enough," Baird said. "Because we'll have to be."

Baron Blitzkrieg sat in a darkened room, at an antique desk lit by a single lamp. The desk had once belonged to Heinrich Himmler, and Blitzkrieg usually found it extremely soothing to be in proximity to the same furniture which had once served the needs of the Reichsfuhrer-Schutzstaffel. Now, however, troubling news had reached the Baron, which even the polished wooden surface of the great SS officer's desk could not easily assuage.

Blitzkrieg held a dossier in each orange-gloved hand, both emblazoned with the Shadowspire insignia. In his left hand was a clutch of files and reports related to a covert research facility in Houston, Texas. The laboratory had been dedicated to reverse engineering the Manticore technology, with mixed results. It had been a lower tier project for Shadowspire, one which Blitzkrieg hoped would prove fruitful in the long term, even if the Manticores had no role to play in his designs at the moment. But the benefits would never come to pass. The dossier now contained a memo explaining that the facility had been shut down and abandoned, and the Manticore creatures had been wiped out. The parties responsible for compromising the facility and destroying the Manticores were a band of vigilantes known collectively as Bad Blood.

He knew little of this Bad Blood team, but he knew their superhero ilk well enough. It mattered little to the Baron if they gathered as a small army of Punchinellos such as the fabled All-Star Squadron, or operated singly and in the shadows, as the Batman of Gotham was whispered to do. Blitzkrieg knew that all superheroes served the corrupt and protected the weak, and were ultimately unfit themselves. He could vanquish them all at a time of his choosing, and could safely ignore them until such time came to pass. However, this Bad Blood had intruded on a small corner of his domain. Retribution demanded to be considered.

Blitzkrieg's opposite hand clutched an unrelated communiqué. Its contents were brief, summarizing multiple sightings in and around Midway City of an individual wearing the gold, orange and purple attire of Baron Blitzkrieg. The imposter apparently displayed none of Baron Blitzkrieg's powers, employing a crude handheld weapon instead. Still, the intent to invoke the image and authority of Baron Blitzkrieg, illegitimate though it was, was unmistakable. This, too, was an affront to the Baron. This, too, was something which his honor could not easily set aside.

Baron Blitzkrieg laid the two dossiers side by side on the mellow sheen of the desk. He stared at both for a moment, then brought his fists crashing down between them. The antique desk splintered and collapsed, and the papers of the reports fluttered down the suddenly pitched surface. Baron Blitzkrieg shot to his feet and glared at the dossiers, his eyes projecting incandescent energy beams which caused the reports to burst into flames. The dossiers were incinerated and flames charred the edges of the jagged break that had bisected the desk. Blitzkrieg raised his hands to his face, claw-like, as if he meant to sink his fingertips deep into the acid-etched scars that crisscrossed his visage.

After a moment, Baron Blitzkrieg calmly lowered his hands. He reached down for his golden, skull-like helmet, which had been knocked off the desk when his fury had erupted. Placing the helm on his head, hiding his countenance behind its pure perfection once again, Baron Blitzkrieg turned his back on the ruined furniture with a fluttering of his purple cloak. All would be settled in time. He would not allow these petty indignities to go unpunished, but neither would he allow them to distract him from his true purpose.

One People.

One Empire.

One Leader.

Benjamin Kellogg rested his power-dampening cuffs on the surface of the table before him. He calmly watched the current witness – a patrolwoman who had been an early responder to the scene when Minotaur and the rest of LocoForce had first arrived in New Orleans* – as she testified, and the serenity on his face in profile was easy for the members of Bad Blood in the gallery to read. Kellogg showed no reaction to the incriminating testimony being given, except for a general boredom. His attorney leaned over and whispered in Kellogg's ear; Kellogg shrugged and nodded.
(* - This was recounted all the way back in Bad Blood #4 – DWG)

"Now, Officer Finlay, it is my understanding that concurrent with the events you've been describing, there was an unnatural darkness over the entire city," the assistant district attorney was saying. "So can you claim with certainty that this man was in fact the one you saw at that time?"

"Yes, I ..." the police officer began to answer when an insistent rumble began to shake the entire floor of the courtroom. The assistant district attorney staggered back towards her table as a spiderweb of cracks opened up in the marble floor in front of Judge Vartan's bench. An instant later it was as if a bomb had gone off under the floor, sending shards of black and white tile flying through the air. Screams filled the gallery, as the bailiffs reached for their sidearms and converged on the newly gaping hole in the floor.

Then the creatures began to pour forth.

In the first chaotic moments of the creatures' appearance they might have been mistaken for a throng of nearly naked human beings, as a swarm of pale flesh and dirty rags erupted from the pit in the courthouse floor. But as the creatures spread out across the floor, their distinctly inhuman shapes became clearer. The courtroom invaders were grotesqueries, composed of unnatural combinations of human and animal body parts. One creature was squat and muscular with no arms descending from its shoulders but a single, oversized limb protruding from its chest. Another was tall and gaunt, the upper half of its head composed of a cluster of independently swiveling eyeballs of various sizes and colors. Another creature was shaped like a tailless dog but had four human legs and a brutish human face. Yet another creature was hunchbacked and lopsided, left leg and left arm emaciated, right leg and right arm massive and crocodilian. And yet another was perfectly proportional except for lack of a chin, and an impossibly distended mouth which stretched from its nostrils to its belly and extruded a pointed, slimy tongue. Dozens of the misshapen, freakish creatures scrambled out of the hole and began to attack the people nearest to them.

The bailiffs bore the brunt of the initial assault. The reports of guns being fired echoed off the courtroom walls, mingling with the panicked yells of jurors and observers trying to flee the scene, but the bullets seemed to have little effect on the monstrosities. One of the police officers was tossed over the prosecutor's table and crashed through a bench, while a second was dragged screaming into the hole in the floor.

More skidded on his knees to the edge of the blasted crater and plunged his arms into the hole. He hauled the bailiff up in one hand, and yanked a monstrosity with shortened arms and legs and elongated fingers and toes back with the other. More set the bailiff down on the floor, then used both hands to slam the creature into the floor with enough force to rattle the damaged black and white tiles. The creature twitched, then laid still.

Pierce vaulted over the gallery railing and drove the sole of his boot into a creature's face, which was broad but nearly featureless: two narrow eyes, no ears, no nose, and a dark slit mouth. The creature staggered backwards and Pierce followed up with a devastating uppercut that reduced the monstrosity to unconsciousness.

It had taken More only a few seconds to slap on his blue domino mask and strip out of his coveralls to reveal the blue singlet underneath, and Pierce had leapt into the fray immediately, safely anonymous in his everyman disguise. Ember, Valence, Karnival and Hangfire had all taken extra time to make the transition to battle readiness – Hangfire ducked between benches to tie on his swashbuckler mask, as Valence did the same to don his green and gray headpiece; Ember ran out through an emergency exit, sacrificed his suit to sheathe himself in flames, and flew back into the courtroom through a window; Karnival literally flattened himself against the paneled wall, then re-emerged in the illusory guise of his black-clad skeletal alter-ego – but now the entirety of Bad Blood was ready and able to combat the freakish creatures.

Valence glided into a stationary position hovering above the hole in the floor and reached out towards the either side of Judge Vartan's bench. An American flag stood in one corner of the courtroom, and the state flag of Louisiana stood in the other. The metal base and crown of each flagpole responded to Valence's magnetic commands, and the shafts flew through the air like harpoons, stars and stripes fluttering from one, a pelican and her nest on a field of bright blue streaming from the other. As they approached the grotesqueries, the flagpoles swung like pendulums through the air. The base of the flagpole supporting Old Glory struck a hulking, pinheaded monstrosity between its beady eyes; the shaft of the Union, Justice and Confidence shattered across the back of a gangly creature crouched nearby.

Karnival focused his attention on the jury box. Three jurors were huddled in the center of the back row while four misshapen assailants surrounded the wooden pen, feinting at the captives like cruel children taunting caged animals. Karnival's jagged eye sockets narrowed, and the jury box appeared to transform into a colossal serpent with scales of brilliant purple, green and gold, its coils encircling the jurors. The head of the illusory snake wove sinuously through the air, fangs glistening in its cavernous mouth, until it struck lightning-fast at one of the misbegotten creatures. The freak – a bow-legged, top-heavy brute armored with a fleshy carapace – unleashed an inhuman howl of fear and imagined pain as the fangs seemed to drive through its flesh. The other three monstrosities backed warily away from the phantasmal serpent.

Ember flying-tackled a towering four-armed grotesquerie, wrapping its muscular neck in a headlock and pulling the creature off the dazed assistant district attorney. The freak flailed at Ember, landing a few harrowing punches on the sides of Ember's head and ribcage, but suffering blistering burns with each second. The monstrosity was soon overwhelmed, and Ember tossed its smoldering form to the damaged floor and cast his gaze around for his next target.

Hangfire had not even attempted to smuggle any guns into the courthouse, but felt confident diving into the brawl nonetheless. He smashed his elbow into the solar plexus of one of the rampaging malformed creatures and was pleased to find that, despite the irregular anatomy of his opponent, the freak doubled over in pain just as any person would. Hangfire brought his knee up savagely into the creature's lowered face for a knockout blow. He was about to turn around when a pair of rough hands with webbing between the fingers wrapped around his neck.

Hangfire immediately dropped to his knees, hoping to slip from his attacker's grasp with the sudden movement, but the leathery chokehold did not slacken. His next thought was to throw himself onto the ground, but the considerable power in the creature's arms now held him in place as it increased the pressure on his windpipe. Hangfire pulled at the freak's wrists with all of his fading strength as his vision swam and his ears began to ring ominously.

A heartbeat later the inhuman hands were gone from Hangfire's neck. He gasped for breath, coughed as the air stung his throat, and turned around to thank Pierce or More or whomever had delivered the assist. Instead he found himself looking up at Minotaur.

"Oh, hell," Hangfire groaned. His eyes flicked to the right as a bony freak with eyes protruding on fleshy stalks and hands like insect claws came barreling towards them. Minotaur noticed the shift in Hangfire's attention and turned towards the onrushing monstrosity, swinging for its chest. The movement was graceless, as Minotaur's forearms were tethered to one another by a prometheum flexcable, but the blunt end of his manacles connected with the creature's breastbone. Despite the metagene neutralizing properties of the dampening cuffs, Benjamin Kellogg was still a stalwart figure, and although he could not punch through steel in his current condition, he could utilize his brawn to brutal effect. The bony freak was lifted off the ground and flipped over by the blow, and landed in an ungainly pile on the floor.

"What, you don't like the types Headhunter's sending to break you out of here?" Hangfire asked as he regained his feet.

Minotaur arched an eyebrow at the marksman. "These ... things ... aren't here for me," he insisted. He held up his power-cuffed hands demonstratively. "And I'm not going anywhere."

Hangfire tried to judge the truth of Minotaur's words. The freaks were on the verge of being routed, as Pierce, Ember, one of the bailiffs and a colossal illusory Cyclops courtesy of Karnival herded several of the still-conscious creatures toward the rupture in the center of the courtroom floor, while Valence and More picked off a few stragglers seeking other escapes. Minotaur made no effort to run toward the hole in the floor, or to any of the doors, or to move at all. A second bailiff came up beside Hangfire, service pistol drawn and trained on Minotaur. "I'm going to escort this prisoner back to the holding cell until we get this all sorted," the bailiff announced tensely. Minotaur shrugged passively, and walked slowly up the center aisle of the courtroom.

A few minutes later, paramedics and New Orleans police had arrived on the scene, tending to the injured and surveying the damage. The members of Bad Blood had slipped out and regrouped in the darkening shadows behind the courthouse.

"That was the most completely botched rescue attempt I've ever seen," Ember stated.

"If that's what it was," Hangfire countered.

"What else could it be?" Valence asked.

"Random insanity," Hangfire suggested. "Or someone trying to attack us, assuming we wouldn't be able to stay away from Minotaur's trial. Or someone trying to send a message to Minotaur, or to LocoForce. Or to us."

"So it could have been anything," Pierce surmised. "Any one of those seem more likely than the others?"

Hangfire shook his head, remembering the eerie calm in Minotaur's eyes earlier. "I have no idea," he admitted.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

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NEXT ISSUE: Bad Blood needs answers, and will go anywhere to find them. But will they turn their backs on an ally in need in the process? Be here to find out!