Fissures

A dozen inmates in orange jumpsuits shuffled down the dark gray corridor of Belle Reve Penitentiary, flanked by four prison guards, maintaining the correctional facility’s policy minimum of one guard per three prisoners. The inmates moved slowly due to the chains binding each one’s ankles to the prisoner ahead and behind in line, and they held their hands, encased in heavy power-dampening cuffs, low in front of their hips. The cuffs were also connected from one inmate to the next to the next, with heavy promethium-vanadium cables. The correctional officers wore black uniforms including Kevlar vests and black ballcaps, and each one carried a standard-issue Mossberg 590 riot shotgun.

The third prisoner from the end of the line turned his head slightly and said over his shoulder, “Don’t forget you still owe me your French fries and your dessert, Ritchard.”

“What?” the man behind him said. “What for, Bivolo?”

“For that tattoo I designed for you,” the first man, who was better known in criminal circles as the Rainbow Raider, hissed.

“That?” Ritchard scoffed. “That was months ago. I knew you was color-blind, but I didn’t know you was obsessive, too.”

“Not my fault they rotate who eats with whom so much,” Bivolo insisted. “This is the first chance I’ve had to remind you. And you’ll still owe me one more after this, and I won’t forget!”

“You best forget,” Ritchard, who had been the assassin-for-hire called Provoke, snarled back. “Shut up about the damn fries and dessert, or I’ll shut you up!”

“You don’t want to cross me,” Bivolo warned.

“You? Please. You’re a joke,” Ritchard spat. “And I ain’t laughin’.” Ritchard raised his metal-sheathed hands, his eyes glinting cruelly at the prospect of smashing the back of Bivolo’s head. He jerked his arms forward, but found there was no give in the cables running from his power-dampening cuffs toward the end of the line.

The last prisoner in the human chain of twelve was holding his arms out to the side, denying Ritchard the range of movement needed to strike Bivolo. Ritchard turned around with fury storming across his face, but it was quickly replaced by a diffident acceptance as he saw his fellow inmate staring placidly back at him. Benjamin Kellogg, the seven-foot-three-inch powerhouse codenamed Minotaur, stood rooted in place like a stone colossus, waiting for Ritchard’s next move.

Kellogg’s lack of movement anchored the entire chain of prisoners, who all came to a halt in the middle of the corridor. Some of the inmates never even looked up, their heads bowed and eyes downcast as if an invisible alloy chain weighed down their necks along with their wrists and ankles. But several prisoners looked backwards nervously: Bivolo, the were-hyena Jivan Shi, and the massive rock-creature at the head of the line known only as Quarry.

Officer Brent Garrity positioned himself between Kellogg and Ritchard, looking back and forth at both in turn. “What’s going on here, boys?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Kellogg answered implacably, keeping his eyes keenly focused on Ritchard.

Garrity turned his attention on Ritchard. “OK, you wanna tell me why Kellogg decided to hold things up? Was he, maybe … provoked?” the guard asked, giving in as he often did to his weakness for taunting the incarcerated supervillains with their own codenames.

“Beats me,” Ritchard shrugged. “I just want my dinner.”

“Well then let’s get a move on,” Garrity called out. Ritchard faced forward as the line of prisoners began to once again trudge along the corridor, with Kellogg quietly falling into step at the rear. Garrity followed a few paces behind the inmates.

Officer Craig Elkins paused, allowed the prisoners to file past him, and began walking again beside Garrity. “Sometimes I think the freaks are more scared of Minotaur than they are of us,” Elkins whispered.

“They probably are,” Garrity acknowledged.

Elkins shook his head, flexing his fingers around the stock and barrel of his Mossberg. “I don’t like it,” he grumbled.

“Hey, it works in our favor,” Garrity pointed out. “Kellogg’s a model prisoner, and he keeps the others in line.”

“I know,” Elkins said grimly. “That’s the part I like least of all.”

Surrounded by numb and stilled darkness, a pentaptych of entities gathered around a central stygian void. Every one of the five was nameless, although each had its voice. Every one lacked a proper body, yet each had substance. And every one was potent beyond reckoning, but each knew its own unease. The Prelates of the Unperceived abided in their domain, beyond the farthest reaches of actuality.

“Again they elude our traps. Again!” one of the entities snapped, with a skittish clacking of a muzzle full of tiny, sharpened teeth.

“At least their sanctuary was destroyed,” another entity answered, each word a murky bubble that slowly swelled and burst on the surface of an unwholesome mire. “A small victory.”

“Bah,” the bestial counterpart scoffed.

“The Green will still demand payment, will they not?” the third member of the convening asked, in a voice that echoed the whine of a million starving mosquitoes.

“Dey been paid,” the fourth asserted, its voice layered and recondite, as old as the roots of mountains.

“What did we part with?” the puling, insectile Prelate asked.

Guillaume answered impatiently, “A Ring of Porphyry, nothing of consequence.” His voice had an added barbedness in addition to its usual keen edges of suffering and sorrow. “But even if it had been our most valuable relic, its dispensation would already be in the past. We must not dwell on the past. Our concern is the present … and the fact that Bad Blood has passed beyond our collective senses.” In the lightless space, there arose a vague impression of Guillaume gesturing at the midpoint of the Prelates’ gathering, where images of their adversaries should have been, but instead only empty, immutable blackness held sway.

“Have they found a way to mask themselves from us?” the liquid voice asked in a seething spume.

“Obviously they have,” Guillaume rejoined.

“It must be an unfortunate coincidence,” the rat-like voice insisted harshly. “They can know nothing of us.”

“And at the moment, we can know nothing of them,” Guillaume pointed out acidly.

“De mask will slip,” the loamy, telluric voice stated. “Til den, we wait.”

The members of Bad Blood stood on a twisted tangle of metallic remains of the Riverboat no more than ten feet in diameter, the small size of the artificial island forcing them to stand in a tight circle. Ember’s skin was aflame, and most of his teammates gathered as close to his radiant warmth as they could, Sojourn and Hangfire to his left, and Karnival, Valence and More to his right. Pierce and the new, robotic incarnation of Clotty positioned themselves opposite Ember.

“OK, so, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Hangfire said. “Some metahuman hackers took it into their heads to kidnap you, and you got away by downloading yourself into a robot and cutting yourself off from all networks.”

“Pretty much,” the robot nodded, plucking the briar smoking pipe from the corner of his lips and tapping the stem against his lips thoughtfully.

“And you decided the best robot host body would be one that looked like the man behind the wheel in an ad for a ’53 Cadillac?” Hangfire pressed.

“Do I need to point out again that I was being chased by metahuman hackers?” Clotty growled. “I couldn’t exactly shop around. I was lucky to find Dr. Shanner’s old warehouse as it was.”

“So was Dr. Shanner, like, obsessed with the Cleavers or something?” Sojourn asked.

“How do you even know who the Cleavers are, kiddo?” Ember interposed.

Sojourn threw a withering glare at Ember. “I’m aware there was TV before I was born,” she sighed, crossing her arms more tightly across her chest as she turned away again.

“I guess you could say Dr. Shanner longed for a simpler time from his childhood,” Clotty offered. “A time before nuclear proliferation. And that’s why he made his robots so … retro. Also why he gave them all radioactive attack powers, to scare people that much more about the nuke threat and maybe get a groundswell going for turning back the clock.”

More, Valence, Karnival, Ember, Sojourn and Hangfire all took one step backwards, away from Clotty’s mechanical manifestation, edging their heels dangerously close to the perimeter of their platform.

“Oh, relax,” Clotty grumbled. “I’m perfectly well-shielded. This frame was just lying in a wooden crate for years.”

“Yeah, well, your escape plan was clearly brilliant and flawless,” Valence noted. “Are you sure that those hackers won’t come after you again?”

“Pretty sure,” Clotty nodded, chewing thoughtfully on the pipestem again. “Seemed like opportunists to me. If I stay off the grid for a little while, and get the right spoofing camouflage when I do connect again, it should be all right.”

“So we add Bug and Byte to the list of lower priorities, along with Zyl’yrag and the Ultra-Humanite,” Pierce asserted. “Higher priorities are whatever LocoForce is up to with Minotaur inside Belle Reve, whoever’s behind the Manticores in Houston, and Sojourn’s … ghost story.”

“Hey, you don’t wanna believe me, fine,” Sojourn shrugged.

“Nobody said they don’t believe you,” More assured her. “Just … take it from the top again. Help us understand.”

Sojourn stared down at the mangled metal shards snaking beneath her feet. “I’ve been having these bad dreams for a while now, about all the ugly stuff that’s ever gone down in New Orleans. The slave trade, the yellow fever outbreaks, voodoo queens, pirates, gangsters, all of it. I didn’t know what it meant, and then the other night I got an explanation.”

“From a ghost,” Ember said.

“Well he was all floaty and white-skinned,” Sojourn explained, “except he wore a red circus costume, and he called himself Deadman. I guess I could call him an incorporeal spirit, but you know, yeah … a ghost.”

“I think I’ve actually heard of this Deadman,” Karnival confirmed. “So what exactly did he say?”

“He said that New Orleans is an evil cesspit,” Sojourn recalled. “Some of that’s because it’s at the mouth of a river and bad vibes float downstream, and some of it’s just bad luck, but that’s the way it is and the way it has been for a long time. Except now there’s us and we might actually make a dent in how evil our city is.”

“That’s the general idea,” Valence observed.

“Right, but there’s some … I don’t know, big bad boogey-men, Deadman wasn’t super-clear about that … there’s things out there that want New Orleans to stay the way it’s always been. So they’re going to try to take us out.”

“Did Deadman happen to say who exactly these evil-lovers are, or how we can take this fight to them?” Hangfire asked.

“Take the fight to them?” Clotty repeated skeptically. “Based on the current condition of my former mainframe, I’d say that’s a boldly suicidal idea.”

“He doesn’t know,” Sojourn admitted, cutting the robot off. “It’s on the supernatural grapevine is all.”

“Great,” Ember shook his head. “That’s pretty much useless.”

“Not entirely,” Pierce stated. “More info than we had before. Better than nothing.”

“So we just keep on keepin’ on?” More asked. “Hope that eventually we figure out who’s out to get us and how they’re gonna do it, before it’s too late?”

“Isn’t that fairly standard for us?” Karnival pointed out.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Hangfire acknowledged.

“Meeting adjourned?” Valence asked.

Pierce nodded decisively. “Take us down,” he indicated.

Valence had been feeding magnetic energy into the circular junk platform to anchor it in position. Now he altered the polarity of that force and the platform began a smooth descent from its height some eight thousand feet above New Orleans. The thin, cold, high-altitude air rushed past as Valence piloted the magnetic raft downward toward the night lights of the city.

“I assume we’re pretty safe being spied on when we’re this high up,” Karnival said, “but we’re definitely going to need a better long-term solution to the headquarters issue.”

“One thing at a time,” Pierce said.

The flat, floating scrapheap skimmed over the tops of buildings, and the sound of alarm bells reached the ears of the heroes. Valence immediately banked the magnetic platform and headed in the direction of the uproar, bringing the ten-foot-wide metal disc down in the middle of Magazine Street. A small jewelry store called Objects of Adornment was missing its front door, and three costumed figures were emerging.

The leader appeared to be male, his form encased entirely in a powersuit that resembled a nuclear radiation suit down to its yellow and orange color scheme, his face obscured by a smoke-dark glass shield. Following close on his heels was a woman dressed in black and white, including a white wimple framing her face which would have made her entire outfit reminiscent of a nun’s if not for the way the black spandex clung to her youthful breasts and hips. The last member of the trio was a heavy-set man in blue and magenta armor and helmet, a masked dome which left the lower half of his face exposed. All three were carrying canvas bags that had been stuffed nearly to bursting with jewels.

“Now this just cannot be good,” Hangfire commented.

“Back off, heroes!” the leader of the three barked, holding up a warning hand. His entire body began to glow with throbbing red light. “It took long enough for us to track these Zandian emeralds to this fence, and we’re not about to give up the score that’s going to make the rep of the Fearsome Threesome!”

“You know, there really aren’t enough references to ‘threesomes’ in the super-villain community,” Valence muttered.

“Preaching to the choir,” Ember agreed. “Wrong ratio here, though.”

“Ew,” Sojourn put in.

“We don’t have time for this,” Pierce announced to both his teammates and the robbers before him. “Do yourselves a favor. Drop the goods and stand down.”

The irradiated figure shook his head. “Looks like we’ll just add taking you Justice League rejects down to our resume,” he crowed. “Deuce, Charger … show ‘em how the Threesome rolls.”

“You got it, Neutron,” the female accomplice, Deuce, smiled wickedly. In a matter of seconds her image had multiplied until there was a line of eight identical women in black and white, slowly fanning out and approaching Bad Blood.

“Whatever you say, boss,” the armored Charger assented. He lowered his bags to the street and approached a nearby streetlamp, punched a hole in its base, and pulled out the power cables within it, sparking with current. The man was instantly transformed into a surging fountain of electricity.

Neutron clenched a fist, incandescent with crimson radiation, and aimed it at Bad Blood. “Say goodbye …” he began to gloat loudly.

“Goodbye,” Pierce said. He fired a sonic blast from his gauntlet, as Valence simultaneously loosed a bolt of livid green lightning and Hangfire fired snapped off a quick succession of bean bag rounds. All three attacks struck Neutron in unison and lifted the villain off his feet, propelling him backwards several feet before he collapsed, unmoving, on the ground.

More leapt off the platform and ran at Charger, barely slowing down as he threw an uppercut at the fulminating man’s exposed jaw. The electrical maelstrom engulfed More for a moment, but quickly faded as Charger lost consciousness and dropped heavily onto his back, leaving More standing over the villain with a wisp of smoke rising from his bald head.

Karnival generated an illusion of a giant eight-headed dragon with jagged scales of purple, yellow and green. Each head sat atop a long, serpentine neck and was dominated by a ravenous beak filled with sword-like fangs. A different head lunged ferociously at each of the eight versions of Deuce, and the villainess shrieked in terror before passing out. The duplicates faded as Deuce swooned, and only one version actually slumped to the sidewalk.

“And there’s more where that came from!” Clotty shouted, snapping the brim of his fedora smartly.

“Yeah, way to dish it out, Clotty,” Ember rolled his eyes.

“I’d say I contributed about as much as you did,” the robot retorted.

Before any more could be said, the sounds of approaching police sirens split the night air, drowning out the alarm bells still ringing inside the Objects of Adornment store. Four New Orleans PD cruisers, white with blue stripes, turned onto Magazine Street and squealed to halts, their lightbars spinning red and blue pools across the pavement and storefront walls. Officers quickly stepped out of the cars, two uniformed patrolmen from each of the first three, all with Heckler & Koch pistols drawn and trained on Bad Blood. The last car was driven by another uniformed officer, but the passenger was a plainclothes detective, who sauntered toward the heroes with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat.

“Evenin’, boys,” Detective Koelemay said wryly. “Fancy runnin’ into y’all here.”

“If you’re here to pick up the trash, they’re over there,” Valence indicated the prone forms of Neutron, Deuce and Charger.

Koelemay spared a quick glance at the fallen villains, then drawled, “Doesn’t look like they’d be much for conversation. Who do you suppose we ought to bring in to talk about this here property damage?”

“I repeat, we do not have time for this,” Pierce said flatly. “Valence, take us out.”

The platform began to rise off the surface of the street, rocked slightly as More bounded up onto it again, and then accelerated upward under Valence’s magnetic control. The policemen kept their service pistols trained on the metal aggregate disc, and the one nearest Koelemay tersely asked, “Sir?”

“Naw, hold your fire, boys,” Koelemay said as he watched Bad Blood retreat. He ran his thumb over the irregular surface of the coin-like charm in his pocket. “Hold fire … for now.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

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NEXT ISSUE: LocoForce returns! At last, Minotaur’s allies make their move – but is this entirely the same group of mercenaries Bad Blood has encountered in the past, or have they increased their ranks for their latest assault? Be here to find out!