Sturm und Drang

Lyle Finneran had never expected to become a research pioneer. In high school he had done well in Biology class mainly to impress a cheerleading co-captain, Becky Gattone, when they had been assigned one another as lab partners. Despite his intense focus, no sparks had flown over the microscopes and dissected frogs, but the academic subject matter imprinted itself deeply enough that, upon reaching college, Finneran quickly determined that majoring in Bio would be the path of least resistance. Similarly, when commencement had drawn near and Finneran realized that he had forged few personal relationships and fewer professional contacts, he decided to continue with graduate work in genetics almost entirely for lack of anything better to do.

Just as Finneran had been about to embark on his doctorate, the Earth had been invaded by the Alien Alliance, and the force of extraterrestrials ultimately repelled, yet not before the detonation of their Gene Bomb. In the immediate aftermath it became manifestly clear that most metahuman powers had a genetic component, specifically one which could be artificially manipulated. Not only that, but human DNA’s capacity for propagating the so-called metagene had been the impetus for the Dominators' masterminding of the invasion all along. Almost overnight, research into metagenetics became the hottest field in academia, and Lyle Finneran had been positioned at the forefront. After a few years which seemed to fly by in a nearly sleepless blur, Finneran had his PhD. Still, he had no more ability to envision his future than he had possessed at age 17.

Perhaps because he had never needed to rely on his ability to plan ahead, and perhaps also because he had slowly but surely descended into a living stereotype of an anti-social scientist spending every waking hour isolated in laboratories, Lyle Finneran had been open-minded to the extreme in his career pursuits following the completion of his post-doctorate studies. He accepted an offer to conduct experiments for LexCorp involving capuchin monkeys exposed to radiation emitted by salvaged Khund equipment, and later left that position with no notice to take a role overseeing an entire lab dedicated to measuring the effects of Promethium injections on human organs being maintained in specimen tanks. Finneran had been told the various hearts and lungs, livers and kidneys and even eyeballs had once belonged to organ donors who later contracted blood-borne diseases which made transplants impossible, but he had never looked deeply into verifying those claims. He had never really identified who ultimately funded the lab, for that matter.

All of that had been mere prelude, however, to his work at the Belle Reve penitentiary, where he was given access to live metahuman prisoner subjects for "open-ended experimentation." The work had been fascinating in all respects, although most of the cases paled in comparison to his research on Simon Ecks, the infamous Doctor Double X, who had manifested one of the most bizarre metahuman powers ever documented. Ecks possessed the ability to project his mental aura in the form of an independent energy duplicate which in turn displayed new powers of its own, including metahuman-level strength, flight, and projectile power bolts - all despite the fact that the flesh and blood Simon Ecks exhibited none of those traits himself. Finneran's curiosity had been aroused immediately: if the DDX-effect, as Finneran would come to call it, could produce a powerful psychic projection of an otherwise unpowered man, what effect might it have on a metahuman who already had physical powers?

Ecks had been somewhat uncooperative at first but Finneran had ultimately been persistent enough to overcome all resistance. The reward for his perseverance had been vindication of his theories; the punishment for Ecks' recalcitrance, admittedly, had been indiscriminate pain and suffering. First, Ecks had been forced to relearn to use his powers in order to enhance the mental auras of creatures other than himself. Then animal specimens with artificially activated metagenes had been subjected to the DDX-effect and the results had been nothing short of spectacular, with some energy duplicates retaining the body's powers while acquiring new ones, other energy duplicates experiencing an increase in the intensity of the body's initial powers, and a rare few falling into both categories. Finneran had rushed to publish his findings, even before determining the precise metagenetic differences which accounted for the variable effects. He became a minor celebrity in scientific circles almost immediately.

Those heady days seemed faraway now that everything had changed, as of the moment when Simon Ecks had been abducted from deep within Belle Reve by persons unknown. It had never occurred to Finneran that the wide dissemination of his research conclusions might lead to the information's discovery by a party intent on realizing a real world application. But now, as he paced the floor of his condo's living room and took frequent slugs from a sloshing glass of whiskey, he could not envision any other scenario.

Finneran had spent the first few days after the Belle Reve breakout going through the motions of a semblance of normal life in and around the neighborhood, as if they were little different from a brief vacation from work. Then, as time passed and Ecks was not recaptured, Finneran stopped leaving the condo altogether, alternating between trying to distract himself and looking for new information via the television and the internet. At present both the t.v. and the laptop were dark, and Finneran was a disheveled mess. His graying brown hair, unwashed, stuck up from his head at odd angles. His eyes were anchored in unhealthy dark circles. His unimposing frame was covered by a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants, both items bearing various crusts and stains. He could no longer remember the last time he had slept more than half an hour without waking up to the pounding of his own heart, nor the last time he had eaten more than a handful of something while standing at his kitchen island, eyes roving back and forth between his deadbolted and chained front door and the large picture window in the living room which afforded him a fortieth-floor view of downtown New Orleans. All he felt capable of doing now was wandering in loops over his plush carpeting and trying to drink enough whiskey to smother his fears.

So when the picture window exploded inward, it was very nearly a relief. The interminable waiting was over.

At that moment Finneran was on the far side of the condo, with enough distance between himself and the window that the blast knocked him down and showered him with tiny fragments of broken glass but did him little harm. He stood up, gingerly brushing shards from his arms and expecting to see the spectral aura duplicate of Simon Ecks through the gaping hole where the picture window had been. Yet although the figure hovering in the night sky was a familiar shade of glowing, ephemeral pale blue, it was not Doctor Double X. The face was completely obscured by a riveted skull-helmet, but the physique was too athletic to belong to the haggard Dr. Ecks, even in psychically projected form. The caped costume was also different, with its imperial trappings which elicited only vague recognition in Finneran; he had never been a particularly accomplished student of world history.

“History is being written anew tonight, Dr. Finneran,” Baron Blitzkrieg’s energy form declared, as if he had been reading Finneran’s thoughts. “Despite the ignominy you deserve, your name may well live forever as the first corpse upon which the glories of the future were built.” As Baron Blitzkrieg spoke, he was joined in mid-air forty floors above New Orleans by other apparitions, a monochrome flying squadron including an old woman, a young woman, three men including one who was surrounded in a full halo of crackling electricity, a monstrous ogre and a giant wolf, rising up and forming a curtain of blue-white haze before the hole in the condo’s wall.

Finneran was frozen in place when the assault began. Optical energy beams, fired from the eyes of Baron Blitzkrieg’s psychic duplicate, rammed through the interior walls of the condo. Slashes of ghostly lightning arced from the duplicate of Deathbolt into the researcher’s home, detonating appliances and light fixtures in every room. The claws of the Son of Kung’s wolf-form and the oversized knuckles of Troll’s fists shattered more of the exterior walls of the condominium tower, and the shockwaves collapsed to ceiling above Finneran’s head. Cyanotik’s psychic projection waved an arm, and all the air was instantaneously sucked out of the thirty-ninth, fortieth, and forty-first floors, violently imploding them.

And then, amid the terrifying shriek of fraying steel and the roar of avalanching brick, the Bridgewater Heights tower collapsed.

Bad Blood rushed across the night sky, magnetically airlifted by Valence, in a silent formation. The initial reports of physical destruction, massive injuries and loss of life were appalling, and yet clearly only the opening salvo in a brutal attack on the entire city of New Orleans. As the team approached the leading edge of the devastation in City Park, Pierce broke the silence with three terse words: “There they are,” which rang in the minds of his allies like a clarion call to battle in righteous defense of their home.

Baron Blitzkrieg and his cohorts, or the psychic projections of each of them, were clustered amid the smoldering ruins of what had once been the New Orleans Museum of Art. The façade of the building was nothing but a pile of random chunks of masonry, while the sculpture gardens behind it had been cremated, leaving only a blackened pit. Scattered around the demolished structure were uprooted oak trees, centuries old colossi which now resembled casually discarded yard clippings at a giant scale. The spectral villains standing at the epicenter of the carnage turned in the direction of the incoming Bad Blood and braced themselves for the attack.

While decelerating most of his teammates and lowering them to the ground, Valence shot forward and was met almost immediately by Deathbolt’s fulminating blue projection. Frenzied flails of raw current whipped in all directions, Valence’s shedding emerald illumination as Deathbolt’s burned in furious wraith-white. Valence’s personal electromagnetic field prevented any of Deathbolt’s lightning strikes from scoring his flesh; Deathbolt seemed all but immune to Valence’s powers. Finally Valence reached out to polarize the twisted wreckage of an abstract neodymium statue, and hurtled it at Deathbolt, knocking the villain’s aura form through the air.

More landed on the scorched lawn of the museum and leapt toward the most physically imposing member of the opposition, Troll. More joined his fists into a single, huge club as he came down toward his grotesque foe. Troll hesitated, expecting the direct attack to be a feint, waiting for More to commit to his true strategy before attempting to counter it. The feint never came, and More pounded the bridge of Troll’s nose with his doubled axe-swing. Troll’s luminous projection was rocked several paces backwards, but appeared otherwise unfazed by the blow. In two steps Troll had closed on More again and delivered a bone-rattling haymaker to More’s midsection.

Ember, blazing incandescently, flew into the fray as Nebel rose into his path. The aged villain grinned with a manic superiority and beckoned the flaming assault closer with open arms. A heartbeat before the two would have collided, Nebel’s glowing pale blue body dissipated, becoming an amorphous vapor from the neck down. His head laughed smugly as Ember passed through the aura-cloud. Executing an immediate hairpin turn, Ember returned and aimed at Nebel’s head. Nebel condensed his right arm out of the formlessness and backhanded Ember, sending him wheeling through the darkness.

With her fingers moving along the fringe of Legba’s cloak, plucking at the various bits of gris-gris attached there, Sojourn approached the gargantuan lupine form that the Son of Kung’s psychic manifestation had assumed. The nightmarish wolf, in response, growled a primal wordless threat. Sojourn pulled a small glob of red wax from the thread holding it to the cloak, and flicked it toward the wolf. The wax flared briefly as it struck the beast just above its heart, and the wolf projection barked viciously. Sojourn had a moment to ponder the implications of a mental aura operating at such a remove from its corporeal home, which limited the impact of her spirit-magic on its true life-essence, and then she was forced to flatten herself on the blasted park grounds to avoid the snarling muzzle of the spectral animal lunging for her.

Privateer unsheathed her rapier and charged toward Cyanotik. The weapon’s energy discharge and augmentation capabilities had been designed to be used at range, but Privateer wanted nothing more than to get within arm’s reach of the villainess. The brutally punishing rampage that had already been visited on New Orleans made Privateer feel as though she were reliving one of her nightmares about the Superior Five in Pittsburgh, with two differences. The Superior Five had been attempting to annex Pittsburgh, while the fiends before her seemed bent on wiping New Orleans off the map; and Bad Blood had succeeded in limiting the damage done in Pittsburgh, while New Orleans was on its way toward obliteration. Bad Blood had not failed Privateer when she had begged for their help, and she had no intention of failing them now. She cut and stabbed at Cyanotik with well-practiced technique, but each swipe of the blade was blocked by the thin armor plate of her opponent’s forearms as she parried. Then, with a cruel glint in her eyes, Cyanotik made a single fanning gesture toward Privateer. Immediately the newest member of Bad Blood felt all the air rush out of her lungs, replaced with an agonizing vacuum. Privateer fell, choking, to her knees.

A flock of bat-winged imps swirled around Karnival’s head and shoulders, darting in and out of the phantasmagoric flames that rose from the fissure bifurcating his demonic skull. Setting his sights on Megrim’s psychic projection, the illusionist dispatched his horde of hellspawn in a riotous flurry. The glowing form of Megrim cowered momentarily, as if trying to withdraw turtle-like into the layers of mismatched clothes, and one second later a wave of petrifying dread flooded through Karnival’s mind. The terror was as maddening as it was baseless, a gruesome certainty of imminent deadly peril with no source, nothing to confront and overcome except the undeniably icy fingers plunging into Karnival’s brain as he fought hopelessly to control his too-shallow breathing and too-fast heart.

Overhead, Clotty’s rocket heel jets propelled him toward Nacht. As the aged villainess floated languidly against the night sky, her hair began to undulate in a widening fan around her head, simultaneously lengthening and darkening from a limpid pale blue to a more opaque sapphire color. The deep blue miasma continued to spread as if with a volition of its own, wrapping myriad tentacles around Clotty’s limbs. Mechanical joints in the robotic arms and legs seized, paralyzed by the murky blue darkness.

Pierce strode toward Baron Blitzkrieg, who had mounted a crossed pair of felled columns from the museum’s demolished façade and folded his arms imperiously over his chest, content to observe his underlings as they battled the recently arrived heroes. The leader of Bad Blood detached his collapsed bo staff from its gauntlet housing and grasped the central segment in both fists before triggering its extension to full length. He held the staff out two-handed at chest height, parallel to the debris-littered ground, and fired a pair of sonic blasts from his gauntlets at Baron Blitzkrieg’s legs.

Baron Blitzkrieg rose into the air and immediately returned fire, optical energy beams of blazing blue lancing down through the air and forcing Pierce to leap and tumble to the side. Pierce braced one end of the staff on the ground as he rolled upright and vaulted into the air, sending himself feet first at Baron Blitzkrieg and smashing the Nazi madman’s midsection with the soles of his boots, then bouncing away. Baron Blitzkrieg followed in a steep dive through the air and drove a swinging fist into the back of Pierce’s helmet; the blow sent him sprawling but Pierce quickly skidded to a halt and came up firing once again, aiming a barrage of multiple sonic blasts at Baron Blitzkrieg. While his opponent looped through the air to avoid the assault, Pierce threw a hand in the direction of Privateer and launched a small grappling hook from the underside of his wrist. The hook snagged Privateer’s belt, and the line mooring the hook to Pierce’s armor retracted, pulling Privateer out of the airless pocket Cyanotik had created. Privateer took a ragged, gasping breath as Baron Blitzkrieg reoriented himself on the pair of heroes.

Deathbolt closed to just beyond arm’s reach of Valence, and Valence spun aside in mid-air, blanketing Deathbolt in green sheet-lightning as he flew past like a toreador passing a cape over a charging bull’s horns. The electrification gave Deathbolt a temporary magnetic charge potent enough to tear Clotty’s metallic chassis free of Nacht’s miasma. The robot collided forcefully with Deathbolt’s psychic projection, stunning the old villain just as Clotty began to regain control of his limbs. Clotty wasted no time dropping almost straight down, slamming Megrim’s luminous aura-form into the ground. In the respite from mind-numbing horror, Karnival returned the favor by projecting an illusory American flag in shining gold and silver directly in front of Nacht. The dazzling light caused the blinded villainess to recoil violently.

Karnival, Valence and Clotty all fell back toward Pierce and Privateer. Sojourn, Ember and More regrouped with them a moment later. “Kinda wish Hangfire was here,” Valence admitted.

“I kinda wish the Justice League were here,” More suggested.

“We’re getting nowhere,” Ember cut in. “Sooner or later these jerks are just gonna get bored and go back to knocking down occupied buildings.”

“Suggestions?” Pierce asked. Before anyone could answer, a shrill, distant keening filled the air: sirens, several dozen in an overlapping electronic cacophony that echoed off the New Orleans streets. As they approached, they were accompanied by the basso heavy metal rumblings of engines gunning, and the intermittent squeals of rubber cornering on pavement. Like an oncoming runaway train of warbling bedlam, the sounds seemed the shake the earth itself.

“Cops, finally,” Privateer croaked.

“I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing,” Karnival pointed out, a sentiment which Sojourn shared with a sullen nod. Inexplicably, as if in direct response, the blaring noise began to Doppler downward in pitch and recede in volume, as the police convoy moved past and then away from City Park.

Baron Blitzkrieg and his allies had massed together at the same time as Bad Blood, and were preparing to advance in a unified, phantasmal front when the howling police cruisers had rooted them all where they stood. The Nazi mastermind, far from relieved that the throngs of law enforcement specialists presaged by the chorus of sirens were no longer incoming, rose swiftly higher into the night sky. He flew in approximately the same direction as the police cars’ fading sirens, trailed closely by his ethereal followers.

“Are they headed after the cops?” More asked skeptically.

“And if so, where are the cops headed?” Karnival added.

“Their bodies,” Clotty stated decisively. All eyes turned to the AI’s fedora-wearing, pipe-smoking housing, and Clotty demanded, “What? Did we not just see multiple villains showing off the same energy-aura projection routine as Doctor Double X? Crap on toast, don’t any of you even bother to read the research I compiled?”

“I skimmed the bullet points,” Ember insisted. “So we’ve been fighting a bunch of out-of-body experiences here?”

“Yeah, welcome to the conversation, genius,” Clotty retorted. “Shadowspire financed the jailbreak that got Doctor Double X out of Belle Reve. Blitzkrieg’s big behind the scenes in Shadowspire. Now Blitzkrieg and those other scumbags have Double X’s powers plus their own, and that means while they’ve been out playing rampaging poltergeist stormtroopers, their empty bodies have to be somewhere else. What else could get them hauling out of here so fast?”

“It makes sense,” Valence admitted, “with the possible exception of how the police could know all that and exactly where the bodies are, too. When the cops are one step ahead of us, that is disturbing.”

“Either way,” Pierce cut in, “We go where they went.”

Two SWAT vans and more than twenty NOPD cruisers were arrayed haphazardly in the concrete yard of an unassuming warehouse, red and blue dome lights still spinning and bouncing surreal flashes off the metal surfaces of massive crates around the container facility like a demented outdoor rave. The assembled police were just stepping out of their vehicles as Baron Blitzkrieg and his cadre soared to the warehouse roof. Some of the officers were beat cops in dark blue uniforms, while others were plainclothes detectives, including Lou Sonesta and Doug Koelemay. A few higher-ranking members of the department made up a segment of the show of force as well.

Bad Blood reached the riverfront warehouse moments later, in time to witness the mute brinksmanship between the ghostly psychic projections of Baron Blitzkrieg and the other villains atop the corrugated zinc roof and the larger mass of policemen and women on the ground below. “Man, I don’t get it, I thought Blitzkrieg would fly in here all hellzapoppin, blowing up cop cars like firecrackers,” More noted.

“Blitzkrieg wants answers,” Pierce answered.

“Probably,” Karnival agreed. “If he had charged in leading the slaughter then his body and everyone else’s would still be secure, but he’d never know how they got discovered in the first place, or when it might happen again.”

“This is deeply weird, but I’m with the goosestepping jackwad on that one,” Privateer opined. “How did the cops know to come here?”

“Magic,” Sojourn stated. “Look.”

In an eerily synchronized motion, all of the police officers raised their left hands directly over their heads. It suddenly occurred to the members of Bad Blood, hovering overhead in Valence’s magnetic field, that none of the police were armed; from the detectives to the SWAT team members, not a service revolver nor an assault rifle was anywhere to be seen. Empty right hands hung at the officers’ sides, while the upraised left hands held virtually identical small objects, which looked like coins with holes punched in their centers. Some of the police pinched a coin between forefinger and thumb, while others clenched their fists around ribbons, strings or leather thongs that had been fed through the central apertures, but without exception each one brandished a disc the size of a silver dollar, the circles dark even in the pulsing red and blue lights.

“Nazi-detecting coins?” Valence asked in disbelief.

“No, I think that’s what you’d call a side-effect,” Sojourn clarified. As she spoke, all of the police began to grow, gaining height and mass, sprouting claws and fangs, and twisting into fiendish configurations which bore little kinship with humanity …

TO BE CONTINUED …

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

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