Paralysis gave way to a bitter cold. Guy was the first to rise, cold concrete floors below him stung at his elbows, his side, his knees. Sitting up he felt too light, feeling behind him he found that his rifles were gone, and the bulging holster of his Desert Eagle was left with the scared weightlessness of a missing stair. He looked around. The room was all of concrete, dusty, and devastatingly cold. No windows, one door, and littered with still paralyzed bodies. All the men that had fought alongside Guy were in the room but Eli was absent, and there was one new addition, a woman Guy had not previously seen. She seemed not paralyzed but unconscious, as she tossed about in her sleep. All the men seemed stripped of their weapons, just as Guy had been. He wondered what had become of the Don’s boy.
He shook his brother, he could not respond. Salomone, however, rose slowly sitting up briskly and stretching. As soon as his eyes were fully open a blinding motion brought his Taurus into his hands, aimed straight at the woman. Guy turned a disgusted look onto Salomone, “What are you doing? It’s a woman.”
“Bad feeling about this, I think she’s the sniper.”
“She’s a woman!”
“So was Rosemary West.”
“How old are you?” Guy drew his brows in a furrow.
“You wouldn’t believe.”
“If she’s the sniper, why’s she in here with us?”
“Merda! I don’t know. You’re going to have to trust me.” Salomone never lowered his weapon, not until Guy attempted to wrestle it out of his hands. Lunging at his arm Guy found quickly that prying the gun from Salomone would be like wrestling one’s hand from their wrist, so was his gun an extension of his body. Falling back angered, Guy leaned back against the wall, and caught his breath. He realized that though Salomone may never become as great a sniper as he was, he knew that the revolver he held an extension of his soul.
Richard rose and not without his customary headache. Flipping up his eye patch he removed the diminutive flask and took a small drink, the hair of the dog that bit him. Guy looked disgusted, Salomone near laughed at this but kept his gun level with the woman’s head. “Keeps the cold out,” Richard said.
Salomone nodded over to the woman. “Come here and bind this woman.” Richard raised and eyebrow and smiled luridly.
“No, don’t!” Guy had become desperate again.
“You know this woman?” Richard asked as he moved behind her and clasped her arms together behind her back.
“N-no, but that doesn’t matter.”
“Look, we’re not going to hurt her . . . What was your name?” Salomone attempted a change in conversation.
“Guy. But…”
“Salomone Delluci, pleased to meet you, this is Richard.”
“Yes, and—”
“We’ve met,” said Richard.
“Right, but—” Guy started again.
“And these are Graham Abbot, and a man named Luke, and a man I haven’t met…”
“Hamilton, my brother, he—,”
“Hamilton? Alright and the last is Eli… Wait, where is that coglione?”
“Invisible, I would wager.” Richard said with a resentful bite. Suddenly, Guy lunged at Richard, who at that moment lost his grip on the woman’s arms as she woke suddenly and scattered backwards sitting against a concrete corner attempting to look threatening.
Guy smiled subtly, as Salomone ran his hand over his slicked back hair, and Richard shrugged lazily.
“Where are we?” She said between breaths of panicked awakening.
“We’re not sure,” Guy said as Salomone said, “A cold, concrete room.”
The woman slapped her hand over the side of her neck suddenly and grimaced. “What happened to your friend?”
“Eh?” Richard asked.
“The one you shot.” Her lips curled cruelly in a cute pitiable smile.
“What!?” Richard made a motion to her and was blocked by Guy’s arm.
“You’re curly haired friend snuck up behind me in the air duct. Seems he's the fellow nursing the wound from your shotgun, cupcake," her smile was bitingly smooth.
Salomone fought something within him, the feeling that this woman was right, “Don’t listen to that, Richard.”
"Bitch!" Richard spewed, spittle flying from his mouth.
"Watch it!" was Guy's defense.
Salomone fought something within him, the feeling that this woman was right, “Don’t listen to that, Richard.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Richard spat, “He was as much a murderer as any other I’ve killed.”
Her eyebrows rising suddenly she said, “Well this is news.”
“News you won’t be leaving with.” Salomone kept his gun steadily threatening. A warm suddenly washed the room, soothing body and anger. Luke sat up in the corner staring at his hands that glowed a soft pink.
“What am I?” Luke met none of the rest’s eyes.
Salomone spoke, “According to Eli, you’re one of us.”
“And I say, you’re better than that,” the woman spoke. The eyes floated back to her, who smiled devilishly. “I say you’re a Ghost.” Guy stopped, and turned to the woman and saw her in a new light.
“Asp?” he tried.
“Oh, good boy. You do remember.”
“The Ghosts were disbanded.”
“Before you could be fully trained right? Just like your brother, and Mr. Romanov here, oh and you too Mr.Kala—”
A guttural yell drown her words out as Richard through barred teeth growled, “Bob Robertson!” Richard nearly believed Richard Cory to be his real name and thus yelled out the first name to come to his mind to disguise identity. Why the alias of Sergio Leone came up, he was not sure.
“Oh is that the name now? You were always ashamed of it. Pity you don’t remember me though, I was only in on the training for the elder Reinoso here.”
“Why’d you attack us?” Guy asked looking personally offended.
The woman took a moment to settle into the corer and eye each man threateningly. “I didn’t want you dead, Guy, most obviously. Same with the rest of the Missing Children. I would have killed the rest of you, but I didn’t want to risk shooting the wrong target with the thermal goggles. So I decided to use some of my paralytic contact poisons on non-lethal rounds, and beat the chaff from the wheat later.” She kicked Hammy over onto his side with her foot. “I don’t know what this dreg did, but he wasn’t down the first time I shot him, got me with a tranq round. I had to call in for help, and seeing that near all of you are here, and that the Missing Children haven’t already been put through training, I’d say that either Bird or Hunger is out there.” She nodded to the door.
At this point all the men had suspicions of all others, and Eli was unavailable to calm or control any of them. Even then the men thought that without Eli they were no longer bound to heroism, no longer blackmailed into doing the good work.
Still, amongst the arguing voices of the room’s occupants, Hammy and Graham had not stirred but in their sleep. Breaking his angry gaze from the woman called Asp, Richard put a hand on Salomone’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll take you through this wall.” A suggestion that would shake any other man slid contemplatively off of Salomone’s face, who nodded.
“Alright, I suppose she kill’s Guy, it’d be a lesson for him.” Nevertheless, Salomone took a stride over to Asp and placed the gun barrel on her head. For a moment the two held each other’s gaze menacingly. Guy launched at him and Salomone pulled the gun away as he approached. Still Asp and Salomone held each other’s gaze.
“Oo, you tensed,” spoke Salomone in a false lurid shade. He turned and walked back to Richard at the wall and spoke to the team, “That means she’s armed.”
“Why weren’t you a Ghost?” she spoke.
“I was probably dead.”
“Death never stopped a ghost.” Salomone got chills, his intuition twisting within his entrails and pulsing down his spine. Richard stuck his head through the wall and presently pulled it back.
“There’s an old woman in the room. Feeble looking, but she has a revolver,” he spoke floating between disbelief, caution, and suspicion. Salomone opened his mouth to speak, but was jolted as Richard gripped him by the shoulders and shoved the both of them through the wall. As the passenger, Salomone decided he would later describe the sensation as having your insides bathed in soda water.
Stumbling into an only slightly more inviting furnished living room, Salomone had his gun’s sights on the woman’s head easily. He opened his mouth to speak and was shot.
Salomone collapsed to a kneel, his knee bleeding and pulsing warm raging pain. “Troia!” He spat onto the ground and shot the woman in her foot with a pained grimace.
Richard watched as the woman before him began a series of violent spasms, he supposed the scene gave “seizure” a much more literal meaning. Suddenly, she made a motion as if to throw, and Slim’s body which for a moment was regaining the persona of Slim Medici and not Salomone Delluci, fell back again and Salomone emerged.
“Sorry, Slim,” he said under his breath. Salomone looked shocked that the woman could exorcise him. It had happened before, with extremely strong willed personalities, he just didn’t expect it from her.
“Bird, then,” Asp spoke, leaning a bit more comfortably against the wall processing the comment of the occupant of the next room being “an old woman.”
Guy took on a bit of worry. “You really armed?” he said cautiously, as if he were addressing authority.
“You’re friends here are really out,” Asp spoke, “Obviously everyone’s had the drug reapplied, but they got a stronger dose. They were the last two for me to get, so I’m supposing that Bird didn’t want them to know about Eli’s being shot,” Asp looked up at the ceiling for a moment then said, “And I don’t think Bird was there, so she must have talked to me when she was amping the dose of anesthetics for everyone else.”
Guy smiled as he remembered a small portion of the briefing for Ghost training, “But Ghosts are trained under hypnosis to only give the ‘big four’ under truth serum or torture.”
Asp looked despairingly at Guy, who interpreted this look as one of confusion over the definition of “big four.”
“Name, date of birth, rank, and service number. The only required information for POW’s by the Geneva convention.”
Asp now looked indignant, “I know what the big four are! Think, Guy, how hard would it be for the founder of the Ghosts to work a failsafe into a hypnosis program?
“Bird’s the founder?” Two shots rang out in the next room.
In the nicer room, Richard reacted as quickly as the shots were fired. He took a few running steps and lunged in a slide tackle at the woman’s feet. Despite her injury, the woman seemed able to dodge, but Richard had other plans, instead phasing through the woman’s leg as he slid across the floor then turning on his belly to grab her leg from behind and pull them from under her.
A brief moment the woman was on her hands and knees. In that moment, Salomone gripped the sides of the old woman’s head and brought his knee crashing into her face. Blood poured out of her nose as she rolled unconscious to the floor.
“Shit, Salomone. She’s an old bird,” Richard said with a bit of disgust at how quickly Salomone had been prepared to use such force on the elderly.
“I’m much older,” but he did feel bad, not for battering an old lady, but something felt wrong. He lifted the gun from woman’s hand, which was thoroughly wrinkled but still youthfully strong. The room had a couch, a TV, a few scattered chairs and a small table with a chessboard. There were two doors; one on the wall they had phased out of, one to their left. There was also another room, without a door that seemed to lead into a kitchen.
“Hey!” Salomone called to the concrete room, “We killed your grandmother.”
Eyes lighting menacingly, Asp smiled and it was then she reached down the small of her back and drew out a long thin knife. Guy was stunned, and Luke who had been introspectively isolated the whole time found himself on his knees as Asp stepped on the back of his knees and brought her knife to his throat. Paralyzed, Guy stood in shock.
“Now, sweetie, I’m going to need you to open that door,” she spoke into Luke’s ear.
One cannot feel betrayal that has just been born. Luke raised his hand and reaching some arcane knowledge within him brought the air to combust in front of his hand, a conical flame consuming the door. The door charred easily under the continuous flame and as its brown wood turned to black ash, soon the door way opened.
“Great,” she smiled and plunged the dagger into Luke’s leg. Luke felt a numbness creep up his leg and soon could no longer kneel on liquid leg, falling forward into the ground.
No average man could then have blocked Asp’s path to the door. Guy, however, impeded her way in a blink. Asp wrapped her arm lightly around Guy’s neck and brought her knee sharply into his groin, collapsing him to the ground, despite his jerking attempt to dodge. Asp strode into the next room and without hesitation Salomone fired upon her. Cart wheeling away from the door Asp stood confidently before Richard who threw his fist at her. Leaning away from the punch, Asp then lunged forward on Salomone and drove her knife into what would have been his gut should he not have jerked to the side.
Guy entered the room in a breakneck gait. He drew attention as Salomone fell, Richard caught him, and the two stumbled into the small kitchen area. Guy moved in front of another door which he assumed to be the exit and attempted to block Asp’s path.
“It’s okay, I know first aid,” spoke Richard, taking a towel from the sink and a bottle of bourbon from a cupboard. He took a swig of the whiskey, poured the majority over Salomone’s wounds, and then finished off the dregs. Then, he cut the towel to shreds with a kitchen knife and bandaged the wounds with them.
Meanwhile, Guy became a blur as he sidestepped Asp’s knife casually, and made feint attempts to retaliate. Asp moved quickly too, and started making way; a close shave of his side, his throat, his gut.
“Here, give me that new gun,” Richard said, extending his hand.
“Why?” asked Salomone, though he handed the revolver to Richard.
“Compensation.”
Salomone groaned as he got to his feet and said, “It’s an old Single Action Army, remember to reset the hammer each shot.”
A nod, and Richard leaned around the corner and fired off three rounds in quick succession slapping his left hand over the hammer each time. Asp lunged backwards and downward, ending in a pushup position. “Depth perception not the best?” she spoke with cruelly curling lips. Thrusting forward she dug within the unconscious Bird’s jacket for something that looked like a detonator. Standing confidently she called for the firing to stop.
“This detonator is wired to each of your necks. Move if you hate your lives,” she spoke less jocularly and more severely than before. Guy noticed that blood was steadily trickling down Asp’s neck.
Emerging with a limp, Salomone entered the room. He had his gun leveled at Asp though he was bent over his wounds. Luke also entered from his doorway, the numbness still present but manageable. Feeling surrounded, Asp plunged the detonator. Instantly, a buzzing flaming pain galvanized each man, Luke fell to the floor in convulsions, Richard cried out, Guy twitched about violently, and Salomone felt his wounds doubly. In a blind reaction, Guy flew forward and attempted to wrestle the device from her hand, only receiving a second shock for the team. Finally Guy managed not to pry the detonator away but rather Asp away from the detonator, throwing her forcefully yet harmlessly across the room. Her flak jacket came off in his grip and he remained with it in his hand.
Silence for a moment, broken sporadically by staccato breathes. Asp held her knife above her head threateningly, Guy held her vest in one hand and his eyes twitched manically, Richard stood with his revolver’s single remaining shot ready and threatening, Salomone looked despairing, and Luke lay stunned on the floor.
Suddenly, Salomone moved. He threw up his hands innocently and marched to the door. “If you’ll excuse me,” he spoke.
Richard emitted spite through his single eye at the back of Salomone’s head. Asp made a move to stop him, but Salomone jumped forward and Asp reflectively twitched backward, and hated herself for doing so. Looking betrayed Guy mouthed an angry “what?” Salomone stepped out the last door and a blast of cold entered and Luke was too stunned to do make much of it. Salomone slammed the door behind him.
The air suddenly hung thick with the rising tensions and the cold. Richard had one shot, and should that miss, Asp was the only one armed, and knives have no ammo. Salomone had left.
Asp smiled as she looked out the window, but still stood catlike and ready to pounce, “Nothing but snow for miles.”
Salomone took a good look around and thought better of his actions. White met his eyes everywhere; nothing but cold, merciless, abundant white. Salomone clicked his teeth for a moment in a manner of saying, “Yeah, bad idea.”
Asp spoke bitingly, “Seems like you’re friend is—” Three hole erupted in her torso. As she fell Salomone stood, his barrel smoking, the door swung open. Something bothered him, he fired his last two rounds into the woman to assure that death truly stopped ghosts. The sound of the hammer clicking on an empty chamber was heard for several seconds after Asp stopped moving. Something ate at Salomone that the others couldn’t understand, and silence was dominant as blood expanded across the floor. He looked at his hands, much like Luke, but more frantic.
“I’m still Slim,” he said. A moment more, and the men were startled as Bird rose frailly and drew an injection from her pocket that she jammed into her thigh. At this she gained strength.
She looked around and saw that Bird had died and her anger at being knocked out faded to sadness. “We’re a dying breed,” she mourned. She took Bird’s shoulder radio and held it contemplatively.
Salomone spoke, “Who are the Ghosts?” Bird looked at the mic in her hand and did not respond. “Who are the Ghosts!?” He spoke again stepping forward in aggress.
“We’re a special unit, developed for infiltration during the Cold War,” Bird spoke and the room’s tension drown in a storytelling wonder that the men emanated. “We were trained to be invisible, invincible, and lethal. So extraneous were the exercises we were put through that we began to develop new abilities, much like those the lot of you exhibit. The human mind has established within itself mental blocks that inhibit the brain from ever using its other ninety-percent. We called such obstacles ‘Calypsos,’ and once a trainee overcame this they were ready to be a Ghost. Of course, you should ask the Reinosos here, or Mr. Kal—”
“Me,” Richard interjected.
“Yes. Or even Luke Romanov here,” she gestured to Luke. “You were all in the entry level Ghost training before the Ghosts tore themselves apart in the Lesotho Conflict. You lose men when the objectives are unclear. The reason the Ghosts come for you now—and I say Ghosts meaning not only Asp— is that Oracle, a recently initiated Ghost, who my intensive training drove to heroine, began to prophecy about these so-called ‘Missing Children.’ These are though to be the lost trainees within the Ghost program. She said who controlled them could meld the world.”
“I was in the Ghosts?” Luke asked, looking up with cold blue eyes. Bird nodded.
“Who are they?” Richard now spoke and Salomone eyed him shiftily. “Name them.”
“You’ve met Asp, she had a fetish for toxins, a special rapport she had with nature allowed for even more potent combinations of venoms and poisons.
Also deceased is Haunt, Asp killed him when he defected to the Soviet Union. He had the ability to possess others and was very skilled as a medium, raising extra troops from the deceased.
Hunger is still alive, and as old as I am. He could strand and starve entire forces by interfering with their coordinates, jamming communications, and waiting them out. He developed a photosynthetic body.
Rat also is alive, he was trained in the wave before you, his limbs are double jointed and his fingers able to grip to near any surface.
Flair was trained with Rat, he enjoys killing in the most flamboyant style. He can sense fields of agression around people, giving him a ‘danger sense’ to speak of.
A Ghost named Spear trained with my group, but like Asp showed little signs of aging. He was based entirely on practicality, the opposite of Flair.
Clay, developed an elastic face and can mould it into any likeness.
Arrow, was an amazing sniper, able to split his eyes’ vision and track two targets simultaneously.
I’ve told you of Oracle, and I have the ability to telecommune with others. The last would only be Hero, the paragon Ghost, the perfect soldier, able to manipulate raw forces such as Greed, Fate, and Chance.”
The men took a moment, reflecting over the words. Salomone inscribed it on his memory like he had done with information of his other hundred lives. Bird strode briskly over to the TV, and threw it to the side, revealing that it had been a disguise over a vault. Entering the combination, Bird opened the door and took out a white parka textured somewhat like a ghillie suit, and threw this over her shoulder, she also took another SAA on a holster and buckled it around her. During this she spoke, “You did a number on Asp, back in the lab. She had to call in for help, luckily I was the only one who knew she was going after you Missing Children, otherwise that lab would have marked the end of the Ghosts in the cruelest firefight ever seen. Lucky too, that I don’t want to kill you, I’m looking forward to resuming your trainings.”
She strode to the door turned, and threw Guy the radio that had been Asp’s. “Call me on frequency 141.45. All the equipment I compensated is in that safe, though it seems I missed your revolver, Salomone. Oh, and your two friends should wake up soon, I gave them a slightly stronger dose of anesthetics. Also, I had Eli flown to Sacred Heat of Chicago, ” she looked almost mournful for a moment. “He was shot-up pretty badly.” Eyes shifted between Richard and Bird. "And still, all he would mumble of was that I needed to return the Don's boy." Salomone hoped for everything that she had.
Speaking again, Bird chipped in, “First test: hike southeast ten miles to the Snow Dog Camps.” A small salute and the woman was out the door in a blinding speed. All eyes turned to Salomone, which Richard was thankful for, all seemed to ask what she was after.
“Nothing but snow and cold out there. Don’t think I came back to save you sorry coglioni,” Salomone spoke, placing his gun back into his jacket. However a blasting sound was heard and the team threw open the door to see a harrier jet take off behind a snowdrift.
“Alright lets go.” Luke had spoken. The men turned to the man who was wavy like a mirage, comforting heat pulsing about him. “Lets wake the others. We save our strength, I feel men like us can manage it.”
Friday, August 10, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Episode III – The Hidden
Before the drive to the anti-biotic lab, Eli shared his second vision with the other men. Graham acted with concern but shook off the visions as nothing more than nightmares, Richard nodded drunkenly, but Salomone looked deeply concerned, a man who lives the lives of many knows all their demons. When the team arrived at the lab – a white paint peeling brick building with second story windows, glass doors in front, and a chain fence encircling– the visions were the least of their problems. A bright blonde, blue-eyed man with sharp trimmed beard stumbled blindly and confusedly from the building naked.
Eli looked up suddenly, “It’s him!”
In a dank alleyway plagued by Chicago’s cold winds two men awoke. They heard the pacing of soft footfalls and a scampering of a rat amongst the garbage. The two men had not spoken in years and had planned never to again. One was accustomed to the street, wearing dirt stained black t-shirt and jeans, his face had a mischievous twinkle through its dirty composition, this man was Hamilton Reinoso; a soldier by birth, a thief by circumstance.
The man next to him would be shocked to find himself awake on the street. His face was strong and sharp, with a cleft chin and a well-kept collection of stubble. Dark clean cut hair sat on his head and his eyes moved shiftily about the room taking in the surroundings speedily. This man was Guy Reinoso, and he had sworn never to speak to his brother again.
Hammy sat up casually and smiled slyly at his brother, “Hello, Guy. Been a long time.”
Guy positioned himself sitting quickly, still appraising the events around him. He said, with a disconcerted nod, “Hammy.” The younger brother seemed to take this comment well, as his smile widened. Watching Hammy, Guy saw his brother rise in a slow motion. In only a couple seconds Guy had all possible explanations brewing calmly in his mind as the world slid slowly about him.
“Youmissmetoomuchhammy?” Guy’s words came out fast and singular. Hammy took a big smile now with a bit of conceit welling in his cheeks.
“Whoa, whoa, normal people speed,” Hammy chuckled checking his belt for one of the knives he kept on him.
“You miss me enough to bring me out here?” Guy’s eye shifted quickly like a strobe light pulse. He was starving, he was every morning. He could not imagine that he slept in his clothes, but there he was fully clothed in a gray heather sweater and dark khakis. He felt in his pocket for a squished and melted protein bar. Groaning, he would have preferred a customary dish of steak and eggs, but he bit lazily into the bar. Greasy chocolate unsuccessfully sweetened the chalk taste of protein, his stomach braced for the coming nutrients and felt full of sand long before the bar arrived.
Hammy watched as his brother’s hands flew over the protein-bar like a mad pianist in double-time and he stuffed it into his mouth even faster. He himself was absentmindedly padding himself down for all his knives, two on his belt, one in each boot, one in each sleeve, one in a special sheath behind his neck, and the last in at the small of his back.
Caught in the amusement of his brothers actions, Hammy took a moment to speak, “What, me? No, no, I didn’t.” A figure paced angrily in the mouth of the alley. Smiling again hammy spoke, “Ah, but I may have an idea as to who did.”
Guy jerked his head to the entrance and stood quickly, he felt an immense weight at his back. Reaching behind him, Guy realized that his two sniper rifles from the war were strapped across his back, a PSG-1 and the even heavier Barret .50 BMG. This, he decided, was impossible; it would be torture to sleep with the guns at all and he always kept them in a safe.
The figure at the entrance may have been much more concerning, however, as what had appeared silhouetted as a small thin child was indeed hardly human at all. The figure muttered to itself, “My train… I’ve been betrayed, dammit!”
Hammy rose, stretched, and addressed the being, “Chance.”
Turning about to face the brothers the being in the mouth of the alley was evinced to be a black, white-mittened cat walking on two legs, no taller than three feet, wearing clothes that a face card in an average playing deck might wear, colorful and elaborate. “Ah Hammy, you’re up! And who’s this, you know him?” he said gesturing with an animated paw to Guy. “I think I decided to move him, and he ended up here with you. Great for irony! However, however, I’m not sure this isn’t another trick of Fate. Is it ironic I brought him here? Tell me!”
“Well, he is my brother, and it’s quite possible he hates me.”
“Ah! A wonderful twist of Fate, and of totally random origins,” suddenly Chance looked sad his feline face showing human emotion. “Well, I wonder if I can even say ‘twist of fate.’ If that means that Fate gets its way, then surely not. However, if it means that Chance twisted Fate, then its spot on!”
Hammy spoke through a laugh, he knew this creature, the Avatar of Chance, they had been allies since he was dishonorably discharged from the Special Forces, “What would you have of me, Chance?”
“Ah, yes. You’re in danger. Fate is raising knights. My train was stopped, and Fate will be after you next. Oh, and I’ve been betrayed!” He looked like a stricken animal. “Dream, my closest of allies, my brother and my son. He’s gone to Fate, I’ve walked his realm and I’ve seen him forming the army. You and … you and your brother included!” Suddenly a thought hit him and he stared into the distance with a furrowed and focused brow, “Of course, Dream has been dead for years.”
Hammy looked back at Guy with an expression of one whose child had done something naively adorable. Taking a deep breath Guy turned back to Chance, “So what follows?”
“Oh, I’m sending you away. Someplace random, away from Fate’s meddling.” He took out a map of America from a fold in his jerkin and unrolled it by casting it out across the floor. As the map unrolled it produced a shower of dice that went scattering across the alley’s ground. Watching as the dice bounced about he snatched quickly the squeaking rat which he shoved into his mouth. The clattering of dice subsided and Chance ran his paws above the dice in a divining matter.
“Where then?” asked Hammy.
A claw stuck a hole into the map, “Here.”
Men appeared in the windows of the second story at the anti-biotic lab. They shouldered AK-47s and began firing rounds after the escapee. Salomone seeing this, spat out the window and shouted a loud, “Hang on!” He floored the van and sent it careening through the fence pulling sharply around to intercept the line of fire between the gunmen and the escapee.
“What the hell!” Richard exclaimed sour from the force the van put on him combined with waking from a drunken sleep.
“Why save him?” Graham asked severely, ducking as bullets pinged against the armored van.
“Call it intuition,” Salomone responded, checking that his Taurus was loaded and unbuckling his seatbelt.
Eli spoke struggling to take command of a disband, “Salomone, stay in the van, this is evacuation, we’ll need you to escape.” Offended by such a young man’s command, he hesitated before following orders. It did make sense.
The men poured out of the door opposite the gunmen, Graham brandishing his revolver, Richard holding his shotgun casually with one hand by the barrel, Eli tightening the baldric of his sword, drawing it as he had room.
“You using that relic, kid?” Richard spoke between the impending rings of bullets.
Eli smiled absently, “No, just for looks.”
The naked man ran further, into a place no longer protected by the armored van. However he was then turned around, he looked forward and no longer saw the long road that would take him from the lab, but rather the entrance to the lab again. He turned and ran back to what he thought was the road.
Eli stood with his left hand outstretched to the naked escapee. “What’d you do?” Graham asked flattening himself to the van.
“Basic illusion.”
Richard smiled at this and removed sadly the robe he had been wearing over his fatigues he tossed it over a very confused escapee as he approached. “You’re fighting now, kid.”
“Luke,” the man replied, slipping into the robe in the shelter of the van.
“Oh, guess we’re best buds now,” Richard said shouldering his shotgun, he made a small salute and fell back through the van and ran straight for the building passing easily through the doors.
Eli concentrated briefly and the room one man fired from burst into flame. Flames curled around the man and he cried out as he fired desperate rounds at Eli. A shot hit his shoulder. Eli fell to the ground, but before anyone could reach him, he dissolved into a swarm of flies.
Spinning out from the shelter of the car, Graham made a move for the door. This time the second gunman was waiting, and he shouldered his rifle briefly to aim. A gunshot.
Graham flinched but saw he was unarmed, rushing against the doors of the building. The air around his readied revolver began to turn on itself, as though seen by an inverted lens. He wondered why the man had not hit as well as why he had been so rash.
A man stood with a Desert Eagle drawn, a shorter man beside, and a yellow cab speeding away behind him. The sentry turned to the pistoleer and fired a straight burst from his AK. Watching in disbelief, Graham seemed to see that the man had been able to move out of the bullets path at breakneck speeds even after the bullet was fired. He soon turned, however, when his gun felt heavy enough. With an axe-like motion he brought the gun down on the sliding glass door shattering a way through.
As his partner batted at flames that would not extinguish, the window gunner took his aim now at the younger man who had arrived and seemingly was unarmed. However, a quick flick of the wrist changed this, and a knife appeared in the now smugly smiling man’s hand. A second fling of his arm sent the knife carelessly wafting into the air making lazy circles as it spun with little force. So trivial a gesture it seemed that the man who had called himself Luke stifled a cry when the knife drove itself with a bullet’s force into the leg of the gunner. The man fell down in agony, out of the window’s vantage.
The gunner on fire continued screaming and stopping, dropping, and rolling to no avail. He was like a man in Hell begging for a touch of water. Oblivious entirely of the shotgun that rose from the floor like Excalibur from the lake, the man rolled about on the floor. A blast, and the shot disfigured an area consisting of the man’s face, shoulder, and much of the wall behind him. Rolling finally to a stop, the man could now feel nothing. The shotgun rose further from the floor preceding Richard who, once on solid ground, took a brisk walk into the next room. He noted that neither the room nor the man was ever on fire.
The men below took deep panicked breaths in, staring into the window that the flames had been doused by shot. The sharp scrapes of adrenaline fueled heart rates filled the air for a long moment before Graham gestured with his revolver and spoke, “Oy, you all, in here!” Luke obeyed, and after a moments hesitation so did the two new arrivals.
“Guy,” spoke the man with the Desert Eagle, as he flew in a speeding walk past Graham.
“Hamilton Reinoso, pleased to meet you,” spoke the next shaking the unwilling Graham’s hand.
Chaos invaded each pillar of the operation, eating away at the granite and festering insane sea life to sprout coral and anemones in the crevices of failure. Three men joined without question, without reason, and everything forged a fated end. The balance was a cosmic struggle that the heroes, even the most cosmically attuned could not yet see.
“Good, you wait in here,” Graham nodded as Hammy passed, “and I’ll look for a gunner on the roof.” Before Hammy could ask how he planned to go about this, Graham’s feet lifted above his head and he fell towards the sky. At a gymnasts arc he turned lightly back over and landed softly on his feet, on the top of the roof. Taking a quick scan, Graham noted only that the air duct had recently undergone repairs or such doings as it has been hastily screwed back together. A slow dreamy descent through the air and Graham landed back on the ground. A shotgun blast rang out followed by a second more disturbing sound, one of gas rushing out of a pressurized container.
Turning attention to the second story window where the shot was heard, the men saw a billowing sickly off-white cloud rapidly expanding from the building. Richard, up in the room, now knew why the man with a knife in his leg had reached for the canister on his shoulder. He realized with raced clarity that both men’s jumpsuits had canisters on the right shoulder with drawstrings attached to them. His next moment was spent holding his breath and sinking through the floor. Emerging in a locker room, all brightened by dull steel and white walls, Richard took a demanding lunge through the one door and stepped into a lobby.
Guy, Hammy, Luke, and Graham, turned with alarmed quickness when the door to their left flew open, Richard charging out of it. Soldier’s reflexes had Cory slinging his shotgun into a readied position as he barked, “Who in hell?”
Guy already had his Desert Eagle out, aimed and steadied while Hammy had his hands taught with a knife-grabbing anticipation. Suddenly, the leveled gun of Richard was facing an inanimate area of the floor. The next moment a thick collection of flies congregated and Eli was evidenced to be in their midst, pushing the shotgun’s barrel away.
“Shoot, and you’ll know exactly who in hell. They’re of us,” Eli spoke gravely his usual squinting smile a piece of knife-edge severity in this moment. Like this Eli remained until his flesh melted into the swarm of flies and dissipated within the wind.
Falling back a few stumbling steps Luke breathed heavily catching his breath. Graham laughed at this as he took in the room; a crescent desk for the receptionist, a sign above reading “1F – Factory, Employee Lockers. 2F – R&D, Management,” an old computer at the desk a small couch against the wall with a table sporting magazines, a door to the right wall, a door to the left wall that Richard had entered from, and then two doors against the back wall to the right and left of the desk.
Hammy took a smooth stride to the receptionist’s desk. Wishing for a weapon that would not be limited to eight shots nor the throwing range of a knife, he closed his eyes and plunged his hand into a random drawer.
Graham spoke once the rush of the initial storming subsided, “You mind if I call that throw back there luck, Hamilton.”
“Hammy,” Guy spoke to Graham quietly, and with his rare streak of joke.
“Hammy,” Graham corrected.
Smiling at his brother’s assertion of his nickname, Hammy still searched blindly in the desk. “Yeah, call it luck,” he pulled his hand up with now holding a pistol with a long barrel for a customized silencer and a locking slide, “Just not once in a lifetime.” Ejecting the clip, Hammy examined the rounds. “Tranquilizer rounds,” he spoke, “Just what I was in the market for. I just wish it had been in chrome instead of black.”
Luke stood shivering in his robe, shiftily eyeing the circus that had built itself around him. The robe felt heavy and began wearing strains on his neck, he plunged his hand into the deep pocket of the robe built for an oversized man and drew out an aged bottle of whiskey.
“That’s mine,” said Richard snatching up the bottle, “It came with the robe.” Directly from the bottle Richard took a swig and his face smiled up to his eye patch. “Mm, fine stuff.” Luke looked in disbelief over the man, he felt the weight of another bottle in his opposite pocket but decided to leave it be.
Luke despairingly threw his shoulders to outstretch begging hands and asked, “What’re we doing here?” Richard stopped in the middle of a swig, Guy stiffened quickly, Hammy halted in his examination of the gun, and Graham cocked an eyebrow.
“These men are holding a friend hostage, we’ve come to get him out,” Graham spoke at length. Richard looked at him in minor appreciation then resumed his drink. “I want to know why these two are here,” Graham spoke jerking a finger in the Reinoso brothers’ direction without turning to them.
At this point Guy looked stunned, but for a moment too brief to be noticed, Hammy smiled as if offended but unwilling to show so. The younger opened his mouth, “We—”
Shouts and footfalls were heard above. Rushing at an excuse to avoid such, Hammy clamped his hands over his new weapon and opened a door to the side of the reception desk. The rest of the men followed, even the shaken and confused Luke clad only in a robe he had received from a single-eyed drunk.
Entering the room, the men saw that the ceiling there rose to the second floor. Large machinery for producing anti-biotic filled the room with mixers, conveyer belts, sorters, vats, and a large tank of something that claimed to be flammable. The machinery was not on, but seemed like it had been more recently than the factory had been “abandoned.” Cat walks formed a maze above the works, and it seemed that there were rooms in a ring around all the equipment on the second floor. Elevator doors stood next to them and while the others still took in the environment Guy entered them and sent himself to the second floor. Hammy, planning on entering the elevator only hit the door and then took himself storming up a nearby flight of stairs.
Graham, Richard, Luke and possibly an invisible Eli stood stayed on the ground and readied their weapons as a soldier in a tan jumpsuit caught sight of them, stepping from behind a piece of equipment. “Company on the factory floor,” he spoke into a radio he had on his shoulder opposite the canister. Graham with a switch of gravity fell sideways to the wall, out of the guard’s range. The man still was not ready with his rifle when something like a spear sculpted out of ice ran through this forehead. Turning quickly the men watched as Luke threw two more of these spears into the man’s torso. A gasp of disbelief and even Luke looked stunned he pushed his bleach blond hair back, hair that made Graham’s look brown. Gazing down at his hands Luke marveled at the white layer of frost that had formed and was now fading away. Metallic sounds of leveling guns brought all attentions to four other guards similarly dressed scattered about the factory equipment.
Above, the elevator opened for Guy to a guard with a needle sticking into his forearm. Turning, Guy saw that Hammy stood with his gun leveled waiting for the tranquilizer to set in. A burst from the gunman’s rifle and his brother dropped onto the ground bleeding out all over the floor as his target fell of the drugs in the tranquilizer round. Guy made a motion to his brother before watching the world around him suddenly be shuffled like a deck with alternate realities of differing outcomes. A reality surfaced and there Hammy stood the bullets harmlessly burying themselves into the wall around him. No blood lay on the ground. As Hammy passed his brother confidently, Guy noticed that a Marquesean tattoo design shone bright blue through the back fabric of Hammy’s shirt. The next moment it faded.
In a walk faster than most men’s runs Guy passed Hammy and holstering his Desert Eagle that he recently realized he had also awoken with, removed the PSG-1 from his back. Laying down upon a spot in the catwalk he adjusted his scope and set his bipod. Hammy held his gun readily and proceeded to check the other rooms; one held a stairwell at the top he heard arguing voices but thought of more pressing issues, Graham had already checked the roof in any case. One room held a conference table and nothing else of interest. Another was a lab with empty cages that claimed to hold baboons, many cages still had mice within them and chemistry equipment lined a wall, in this room a man dead of shotgun wound lay crumpled with a knife lodged into his leg. Retrieving his knife, Hammy walked into the last room finding a gas exposure chamber that looked higher tech than the rest of the lab, the room was filled with microscopes and test tubes, and with a quick scan of the papers on clipboards in the room, Hammy decided that the latest project must have been a new Haz-Mat suit. He ignored the man dead in the window’s lighted square upon the floor.
Below, a guard dropped dead with a dramatic explosion of skull and a celebration of brain matter confetti. This brought attention to the sniper who had positioned himself on the cat walk. However, so quick was the readjustment of the rifle that none could react before the guard closest to Richard’s knee blew out. Before the sniper could take a more lethal shot, Richard rushed to the falling man, plunged his arm and shotgun through his head and fired his shotgun at another guard whose shoulder was torn to ribbons. The last unscathed guard fired desperately at Guy, but the bullets were too frantic. Luke rushed over to this man, whipping out his robe’s belt and snapping it against the man’s body, when contact was made the jumpsuit burst into flames. As this man reached for the canister on his shoulder through deep burning screams a PSG-1 round was put through his chest. The guards were all down when suddenly a sound like a mortar launching was heard and the men saw that the man Richard shot had activated his suicide canister and the room was an explosion of white gas.
In the confusion Graham had floated back into the lobby to double check the rooms for the Don’s relation. Throwing open each locker in the locker room he suddenly came to a shocking stop when he met a badly bruised Italian man with ties and a gag. Shaking his head at Richard’s passing of the same place, Graham unbound the man as sniper rounds rang out. “Its back to the Don’s with you,” Graham spoke as he escorted the man still gagged.
Salomone waited anxiously in the van, drumming the steering wheel violently. He allowed a half smile as their target was let into the car but still worried at the safety of the others. “The rest?”
“They’ll be coming,” Graham spoke in fatigued voice. Dashing through the broken door and into the lobby, Graham took up the PA on the receptionist’s desk and announced, “We got him, boys,” in a false military overtone. He moved into the doorway waiting for the others and he saw the menacing cloud.
With the swiftness of a man unaware of the world, Luke dove into the cloud. As he did the gasses separated and dissipated where he stood. His fists clenched and his brow furrowed in the center of the gas, he seemed to clear it all away by his own thoughts.
Guy above, however, saw how he did it. The area around him was now dewy and the room temperature had dropped significantly. He had condensed the gasses. Packing up his rifle the danger gone Guy suddenly felt something lodge itself in his calf. Crying out Guy crumpled to the floor. With another reaction unknown even to himself, Luke launched up onto the balcony by a mysterious force. Taking hold of Guy, Luke cast an arm to the roof and a cone of flame sparked into existence burning an orange hole to the roof. He then, too felt the attack, and saw that his arm had was bleeding from a bullet wound. No longer could his arm move, then his shoulder, the infection spread through his body. Mustering his strength Luke created an immensely low pressure area above the two on the roof and they were sucked out of the room with thunder’s force.
The men below searched the second story for a sniper, and none could be found. Richard cried out, “Where is he!?” Suddenly three shots rang out and Graham fell turning to the van for help, Salomone gripped the steering wheel tightly and remained without blinking.
Richard had seen there origin, someone was firing from inside the air-duct, and seemingly not blindly. Phasing the tips of his fingers and toes into the nearby wall, Richard scaled the wall and entered the air duct, all dark except for the streams of light from the occasional grate and from several bullet holes which he moved towards, and lazily fired with his Benelli. A body fell, clamoring against the air duct. The next moment a muzzle flash and a bullet pushed itself through his shoulder.
Hammy had rushed down the stairs to aid the others; he saw the bullet holes in the air duct and flung a knife towards it. The knife pierced the metal miraculously and blood ran out of the hole after several second. Rushing now to Graham Hammy heard the shot that burrowed into his bicep. He felt paralysis creep forward, but then it stopped. The bullet never hit his arm, it had missed. This was the reality that surfaced. Smiling covertly, still feigning paralysis, Hammy tightened his grip on the pistol he had switched briefly to his left hand to throw one of his knives. He heard a small explosion and one of the supports of the air duct blew open by some planted charge. The air duct section swung down and one end crashed against the floor, Hammy heard the sniper sliding down, he readied his shot. A woman in her thirties with slight wrinkles at her eyes and rich brown hair emerged, her mouth was covered in blood and her pinky on her left hand had been bitten off and still bled profusely. She threw off a pair of thermal goggles and saw then that Hammy was not paralyzed. The two fired at the same time. Her rifles bullet drove finally into his thigh, she was struck in the crook of her arm with a tranquilizer dart.
The woman spoke bitterly and desperately into a tiny radio she had on her shoulder, “Asp, activating Ghost beacon.” She went under the effects of the tranquilizer. Hammy’s paralysis crept over him else he would have jumped at the sound he heard next. Something else was sliding down the air duct.
It was Eli, blood pouring out of a shotgun wound in the chest.
Eli looked up suddenly, “It’s him!”
In a dank alleyway plagued by Chicago’s cold winds two men awoke. They heard the pacing of soft footfalls and a scampering of a rat amongst the garbage. The two men had not spoken in years and had planned never to again. One was accustomed to the street, wearing dirt stained black t-shirt and jeans, his face had a mischievous twinkle through its dirty composition, this man was Hamilton Reinoso; a soldier by birth, a thief by circumstance.
The man next to him would be shocked to find himself awake on the street. His face was strong and sharp, with a cleft chin and a well-kept collection of stubble. Dark clean cut hair sat on his head and his eyes moved shiftily about the room taking in the surroundings speedily. This man was Guy Reinoso, and he had sworn never to speak to his brother again.
Hammy sat up casually and smiled slyly at his brother, “Hello, Guy. Been a long time.”
Guy positioned himself sitting quickly, still appraising the events around him. He said, with a disconcerted nod, “Hammy.” The younger brother seemed to take this comment well, as his smile widened. Watching Hammy, Guy saw his brother rise in a slow motion. In only a couple seconds Guy had all possible explanations brewing calmly in his mind as the world slid slowly about him.
“Youmissmetoomuchhammy?” Guy’s words came out fast and singular. Hammy took a big smile now with a bit of conceit welling in his cheeks.
“Whoa, whoa, normal people speed,” Hammy chuckled checking his belt for one of the knives he kept on him.
“You miss me enough to bring me out here?” Guy’s eye shifted quickly like a strobe light pulse. He was starving, he was every morning. He could not imagine that he slept in his clothes, but there he was fully clothed in a gray heather sweater and dark khakis. He felt in his pocket for a squished and melted protein bar. Groaning, he would have preferred a customary dish of steak and eggs, but he bit lazily into the bar. Greasy chocolate unsuccessfully sweetened the chalk taste of protein, his stomach braced for the coming nutrients and felt full of sand long before the bar arrived.
Hammy watched as his brother’s hands flew over the protein-bar like a mad pianist in double-time and he stuffed it into his mouth even faster. He himself was absentmindedly padding himself down for all his knives, two on his belt, one in each boot, one in each sleeve, one in a special sheath behind his neck, and the last in at the small of his back.
Caught in the amusement of his brothers actions, Hammy took a moment to speak, “What, me? No, no, I didn’t.” A figure paced angrily in the mouth of the alley. Smiling again hammy spoke, “Ah, but I may have an idea as to who did.”
Guy jerked his head to the entrance and stood quickly, he felt an immense weight at his back. Reaching behind him, Guy realized that his two sniper rifles from the war were strapped across his back, a PSG-1 and the even heavier Barret .50 BMG. This, he decided, was impossible; it would be torture to sleep with the guns at all and he always kept them in a safe.
The figure at the entrance may have been much more concerning, however, as what had appeared silhouetted as a small thin child was indeed hardly human at all. The figure muttered to itself, “My train… I’ve been betrayed, dammit!”
Hammy rose, stretched, and addressed the being, “Chance.”
Turning about to face the brothers the being in the mouth of the alley was evinced to be a black, white-mittened cat walking on two legs, no taller than three feet, wearing clothes that a face card in an average playing deck might wear, colorful and elaborate. “Ah Hammy, you’re up! And who’s this, you know him?” he said gesturing with an animated paw to Guy. “I think I decided to move him, and he ended up here with you. Great for irony! However, however, I’m not sure this isn’t another trick of Fate. Is it ironic I brought him here? Tell me!”
“Well, he is my brother, and it’s quite possible he hates me.”
“Ah! A wonderful twist of Fate, and of totally random origins,” suddenly Chance looked sad his feline face showing human emotion. “Well, I wonder if I can even say ‘twist of fate.’ If that means that Fate gets its way, then surely not. However, if it means that Chance twisted Fate, then its spot on!”
Hammy spoke through a laugh, he knew this creature, the Avatar of Chance, they had been allies since he was dishonorably discharged from the Special Forces, “What would you have of me, Chance?”
“Ah, yes. You’re in danger. Fate is raising knights. My train was stopped, and Fate will be after you next. Oh, and I’ve been betrayed!” He looked like a stricken animal. “Dream, my closest of allies, my brother and my son. He’s gone to Fate, I’ve walked his realm and I’ve seen him forming the army. You and … you and your brother included!” Suddenly a thought hit him and he stared into the distance with a furrowed and focused brow, “Of course, Dream has been dead for years.”
Hammy looked back at Guy with an expression of one whose child had done something naively adorable. Taking a deep breath Guy turned back to Chance, “So what follows?”
“Oh, I’m sending you away. Someplace random, away from Fate’s meddling.” He took out a map of America from a fold in his jerkin and unrolled it by casting it out across the floor. As the map unrolled it produced a shower of dice that went scattering across the alley’s ground. Watching as the dice bounced about he snatched quickly the squeaking rat which he shoved into his mouth. The clattering of dice subsided and Chance ran his paws above the dice in a divining matter.
“Where then?” asked Hammy.
A claw stuck a hole into the map, “Here.”
Men appeared in the windows of the second story at the anti-biotic lab. They shouldered AK-47s and began firing rounds after the escapee. Salomone seeing this, spat out the window and shouted a loud, “Hang on!” He floored the van and sent it careening through the fence pulling sharply around to intercept the line of fire between the gunmen and the escapee.
“What the hell!” Richard exclaimed sour from the force the van put on him combined with waking from a drunken sleep.
“Why save him?” Graham asked severely, ducking as bullets pinged against the armored van.
“Call it intuition,” Salomone responded, checking that his Taurus was loaded and unbuckling his seatbelt.
Eli spoke struggling to take command of a disband, “Salomone, stay in the van, this is evacuation, we’ll need you to escape.” Offended by such a young man’s command, he hesitated before following orders. It did make sense.
The men poured out of the door opposite the gunmen, Graham brandishing his revolver, Richard holding his shotgun casually with one hand by the barrel, Eli tightening the baldric of his sword, drawing it as he had room.
“You using that relic, kid?” Richard spoke between the impending rings of bullets.
Eli smiled absently, “No, just for looks.”
The naked man ran further, into a place no longer protected by the armored van. However he was then turned around, he looked forward and no longer saw the long road that would take him from the lab, but rather the entrance to the lab again. He turned and ran back to what he thought was the road.
Eli stood with his left hand outstretched to the naked escapee. “What’d you do?” Graham asked flattening himself to the van.
“Basic illusion.”
Richard smiled at this and removed sadly the robe he had been wearing over his fatigues he tossed it over a very confused escapee as he approached. “You’re fighting now, kid.”
“Luke,” the man replied, slipping into the robe in the shelter of the van.
“Oh, guess we’re best buds now,” Richard said shouldering his shotgun, he made a small salute and fell back through the van and ran straight for the building passing easily through the doors.
Eli concentrated briefly and the room one man fired from burst into flame. Flames curled around the man and he cried out as he fired desperate rounds at Eli. A shot hit his shoulder. Eli fell to the ground, but before anyone could reach him, he dissolved into a swarm of flies.
Spinning out from the shelter of the car, Graham made a move for the door. This time the second gunman was waiting, and he shouldered his rifle briefly to aim. A gunshot.
Graham flinched but saw he was unarmed, rushing against the doors of the building. The air around his readied revolver began to turn on itself, as though seen by an inverted lens. He wondered why the man had not hit as well as why he had been so rash.
A man stood with a Desert Eagle drawn, a shorter man beside, and a yellow cab speeding away behind him. The sentry turned to the pistoleer and fired a straight burst from his AK. Watching in disbelief, Graham seemed to see that the man had been able to move out of the bullets path at breakneck speeds even after the bullet was fired. He soon turned, however, when his gun felt heavy enough. With an axe-like motion he brought the gun down on the sliding glass door shattering a way through.
As his partner batted at flames that would not extinguish, the window gunner took his aim now at the younger man who had arrived and seemingly was unarmed. However, a quick flick of the wrist changed this, and a knife appeared in the now smugly smiling man’s hand. A second fling of his arm sent the knife carelessly wafting into the air making lazy circles as it spun with little force. So trivial a gesture it seemed that the man who had called himself Luke stifled a cry when the knife drove itself with a bullet’s force into the leg of the gunner. The man fell down in agony, out of the window’s vantage.
The gunner on fire continued screaming and stopping, dropping, and rolling to no avail. He was like a man in Hell begging for a touch of water. Oblivious entirely of the shotgun that rose from the floor like Excalibur from the lake, the man rolled about on the floor. A blast, and the shot disfigured an area consisting of the man’s face, shoulder, and much of the wall behind him. Rolling finally to a stop, the man could now feel nothing. The shotgun rose further from the floor preceding Richard who, once on solid ground, took a brisk walk into the next room. He noted that neither the room nor the man was ever on fire.
The men below took deep panicked breaths in, staring into the window that the flames had been doused by shot. The sharp scrapes of adrenaline fueled heart rates filled the air for a long moment before Graham gestured with his revolver and spoke, “Oy, you all, in here!” Luke obeyed, and after a moments hesitation so did the two new arrivals.
“Guy,” spoke the man with the Desert Eagle, as he flew in a speeding walk past Graham.
“Hamilton Reinoso, pleased to meet you,” spoke the next shaking the unwilling Graham’s hand.
Chaos invaded each pillar of the operation, eating away at the granite and festering insane sea life to sprout coral and anemones in the crevices of failure. Three men joined without question, without reason, and everything forged a fated end. The balance was a cosmic struggle that the heroes, even the most cosmically attuned could not yet see.
“Good, you wait in here,” Graham nodded as Hammy passed, “and I’ll look for a gunner on the roof.” Before Hammy could ask how he planned to go about this, Graham’s feet lifted above his head and he fell towards the sky. At a gymnasts arc he turned lightly back over and landed softly on his feet, on the top of the roof. Taking a quick scan, Graham noted only that the air duct had recently undergone repairs or such doings as it has been hastily screwed back together. A slow dreamy descent through the air and Graham landed back on the ground. A shotgun blast rang out followed by a second more disturbing sound, one of gas rushing out of a pressurized container.
Turning attention to the second story window where the shot was heard, the men saw a billowing sickly off-white cloud rapidly expanding from the building. Richard, up in the room, now knew why the man with a knife in his leg had reached for the canister on his shoulder. He realized with raced clarity that both men’s jumpsuits had canisters on the right shoulder with drawstrings attached to them. His next moment was spent holding his breath and sinking through the floor. Emerging in a locker room, all brightened by dull steel and white walls, Richard took a demanding lunge through the one door and stepped into a lobby.
Guy, Hammy, Luke, and Graham, turned with alarmed quickness when the door to their left flew open, Richard charging out of it. Soldier’s reflexes had Cory slinging his shotgun into a readied position as he barked, “Who in hell?”
Guy already had his Desert Eagle out, aimed and steadied while Hammy had his hands taught with a knife-grabbing anticipation. Suddenly, the leveled gun of Richard was facing an inanimate area of the floor. The next moment a thick collection of flies congregated and Eli was evidenced to be in their midst, pushing the shotgun’s barrel away.
“Shoot, and you’ll know exactly who in hell. They’re of us,” Eli spoke gravely his usual squinting smile a piece of knife-edge severity in this moment. Like this Eli remained until his flesh melted into the swarm of flies and dissipated within the wind.
Falling back a few stumbling steps Luke breathed heavily catching his breath. Graham laughed at this as he took in the room; a crescent desk for the receptionist, a sign above reading “1F – Factory, Employee Lockers. 2F – R&D, Management,” an old computer at the desk a small couch against the wall with a table sporting magazines, a door to the right wall, a door to the left wall that Richard had entered from, and then two doors against the back wall to the right and left of the desk.
Hammy took a smooth stride to the receptionist’s desk. Wishing for a weapon that would not be limited to eight shots nor the throwing range of a knife, he closed his eyes and plunged his hand into a random drawer.
Graham spoke once the rush of the initial storming subsided, “You mind if I call that throw back there luck, Hamilton.”
“Hammy,” Guy spoke to Graham quietly, and with his rare streak of joke.
“Hammy,” Graham corrected.
Smiling at his brother’s assertion of his nickname, Hammy still searched blindly in the desk. “Yeah, call it luck,” he pulled his hand up with now holding a pistol with a long barrel for a customized silencer and a locking slide, “Just not once in a lifetime.” Ejecting the clip, Hammy examined the rounds. “Tranquilizer rounds,” he spoke, “Just what I was in the market for. I just wish it had been in chrome instead of black.”
Luke stood shivering in his robe, shiftily eyeing the circus that had built itself around him. The robe felt heavy and began wearing strains on his neck, he plunged his hand into the deep pocket of the robe built for an oversized man and drew out an aged bottle of whiskey.
“That’s mine,” said Richard snatching up the bottle, “It came with the robe.” Directly from the bottle Richard took a swig and his face smiled up to his eye patch. “Mm, fine stuff.” Luke looked in disbelief over the man, he felt the weight of another bottle in his opposite pocket but decided to leave it be.
Luke despairingly threw his shoulders to outstretch begging hands and asked, “What’re we doing here?” Richard stopped in the middle of a swig, Guy stiffened quickly, Hammy halted in his examination of the gun, and Graham cocked an eyebrow.
“These men are holding a friend hostage, we’ve come to get him out,” Graham spoke at length. Richard looked at him in minor appreciation then resumed his drink. “I want to know why these two are here,” Graham spoke jerking a finger in the Reinoso brothers’ direction without turning to them.
At this point Guy looked stunned, but for a moment too brief to be noticed, Hammy smiled as if offended but unwilling to show so. The younger opened his mouth, “We—”
Shouts and footfalls were heard above. Rushing at an excuse to avoid such, Hammy clamped his hands over his new weapon and opened a door to the side of the reception desk. The rest of the men followed, even the shaken and confused Luke clad only in a robe he had received from a single-eyed drunk.
Entering the room, the men saw that the ceiling there rose to the second floor. Large machinery for producing anti-biotic filled the room with mixers, conveyer belts, sorters, vats, and a large tank of something that claimed to be flammable. The machinery was not on, but seemed like it had been more recently than the factory had been “abandoned.” Cat walks formed a maze above the works, and it seemed that there were rooms in a ring around all the equipment on the second floor. Elevator doors stood next to them and while the others still took in the environment Guy entered them and sent himself to the second floor. Hammy, planning on entering the elevator only hit the door and then took himself storming up a nearby flight of stairs.
Graham, Richard, Luke and possibly an invisible Eli stood stayed on the ground and readied their weapons as a soldier in a tan jumpsuit caught sight of them, stepping from behind a piece of equipment. “Company on the factory floor,” he spoke into a radio he had on his shoulder opposite the canister. Graham with a switch of gravity fell sideways to the wall, out of the guard’s range. The man still was not ready with his rifle when something like a spear sculpted out of ice ran through this forehead. Turning quickly the men watched as Luke threw two more of these spears into the man’s torso. A gasp of disbelief and even Luke looked stunned he pushed his bleach blond hair back, hair that made Graham’s look brown. Gazing down at his hands Luke marveled at the white layer of frost that had formed and was now fading away. Metallic sounds of leveling guns brought all attentions to four other guards similarly dressed scattered about the factory equipment.
Above, the elevator opened for Guy to a guard with a needle sticking into his forearm. Turning, Guy saw that Hammy stood with his gun leveled waiting for the tranquilizer to set in. A burst from the gunman’s rifle and his brother dropped onto the ground bleeding out all over the floor as his target fell of the drugs in the tranquilizer round. Guy made a motion to his brother before watching the world around him suddenly be shuffled like a deck with alternate realities of differing outcomes. A reality surfaced and there Hammy stood the bullets harmlessly burying themselves into the wall around him. No blood lay on the ground. As Hammy passed his brother confidently, Guy noticed that a Marquesean tattoo design shone bright blue through the back fabric of Hammy’s shirt. The next moment it faded.
In a walk faster than most men’s runs Guy passed Hammy and holstering his Desert Eagle that he recently realized he had also awoken with, removed the PSG-1 from his back. Laying down upon a spot in the catwalk he adjusted his scope and set his bipod. Hammy held his gun readily and proceeded to check the other rooms; one held a stairwell at the top he heard arguing voices but thought of more pressing issues, Graham had already checked the roof in any case. One room held a conference table and nothing else of interest. Another was a lab with empty cages that claimed to hold baboons, many cages still had mice within them and chemistry equipment lined a wall, in this room a man dead of shotgun wound lay crumpled with a knife lodged into his leg. Retrieving his knife, Hammy walked into the last room finding a gas exposure chamber that looked higher tech than the rest of the lab, the room was filled with microscopes and test tubes, and with a quick scan of the papers on clipboards in the room, Hammy decided that the latest project must have been a new Haz-Mat suit. He ignored the man dead in the window’s lighted square upon the floor.
Below, a guard dropped dead with a dramatic explosion of skull and a celebration of brain matter confetti. This brought attention to the sniper who had positioned himself on the cat walk. However, so quick was the readjustment of the rifle that none could react before the guard closest to Richard’s knee blew out. Before the sniper could take a more lethal shot, Richard rushed to the falling man, plunged his arm and shotgun through his head and fired his shotgun at another guard whose shoulder was torn to ribbons. The last unscathed guard fired desperately at Guy, but the bullets were too frantic. Luke rushed over to this man, whipping out his robe’s belt and snapping it against the man’s body, when contact was made the jumpsuit burst into flames. As this man reached for the canister on his shoulder through deep burning screams a PSG-1 round was put through his chest. The guards were all down when suddenly a sound like a mortar launching was heard and the men saw that the man Richard shot had activated his suicide canister and the room was an explosion of white gas.
In the confusion Graham had floated back into the lobby to double check the rooms for the Don’s relation. Throwing open each locker in the locker room he suddenly came to a shocking stop when he met a badly bruised Italian man with ties and a gag. Shaking his head at Richard’s passing of the same place, Graham unbound the man as sniper rounds rang out. “Its back to the Don’s with you,” Graham spoke as he escorted the man still gagged.
Salomone waited anxiously in the van, drumming the steering wheel violently. He allowed a half smile as their target was let into the car but still worried at the safety of the others. “The rest?”
“They’ll be coming,” Graham spoke in fatigued voice. Dashing through the broken door and into the lobby, Graham took up the PA on the receptionist’s desk and announced, “We got him, boys,” in a false military overtone. He moved into the doorway waiting for the others and he saw the menacing cloud.
With the swiftness of a man unaware of the world, Luke dove into the cloud. As he did the gasses separated and dissipated where he stood. His fists clenched and his brow furrowed in the center of the gas, he seemed to clear it all away by his own thoughts.
Guy above, however, saw how he did it. The area around him was now dewy and the room temperature had dropped significantly. He had condensed the gasses. Packing up his rifle the danger gone Guy suddenly felt something lodge itself in his calf. Crying out Guy crumpled to the floor. With another reaction unknown even to himself, Luke launched up onto the balcony by a mysterious force. Taking hold of Guy, Luke cast an arm to the roof and a cone of flame sparked into existence burning an orange hole to the roof. He then, too felt the attack, and saw that his arm had was bleeding from a bullet wound. No longer could his arm move, then his shoulder, the infection spread through his body. Mustering his strength Luke created an immensely low pressure area above the two on the roof and they were sucked out of the room with thunder’s force.
The men below searched the second story for a sniper, and none could be found. Richard cried out, “Where is he!?” Suddenly three shots rang out and Graham fell turning to the van for help, Salomone gripped the steering wheel tightly and remained without blinking.
Richard had seen there origin, someone was firing from inside the air-duct, and seemingly not blindly. Phasing the tips of his fingers and toes into the nearby wall, Richard scaled the wall and entered the air duct, all dark except for the streams of light from the occasional grate and from several bullet holes which he moved towards, and lazily fired with his Benelli. A body fell, clamoring against the air duct. The next moment a muzzle flash and a bullet pushed itself through his shoulder.
Hammy had rushed down the stairs to aid the others; he saw the bullet holes in the air duct and flung a knife towards it. The knife pierced the metal miraculously and blood ran out of the hole after several second. Rushing now to Graham Hammy heard the shot that burrowed into his bicep. He felt paralysis creep forward, but then it stopped. The bullet never hit his arm, it had missed. This was the reality that surfaced. Smiling covertly, still feigning paralysis, Hammy tightened his grip on the pistol he had switched briefly to his left hand to throw one of his knives. He heard a small explosion and one of the supports of the air duct blew open by some planted charge. The air duct section swung down and one end crashed against the floor, Hammy heard the sniper sliding down, he readied his shot. A woman in her thirties with slight wrinkles at her eyes and rich brown hair emerged, her mouth was covered in blood and her pinky on her left hand had been bitten off and still bled profusely. She threw off a pair of thermal goggles and saw then that Hammy was not paralyzed. The two fired at the same time. Her rifles bullet drove finally into his thigh, she was struck in the crook of her arm with a tranquilizer dart.
The woman spoke bitterly and desperately into a tiny radio she had on her shoulder, “Asp, activating Ghost beacon.” She went under the effects of the tranquilizer. Hammy’s paralysis crept over him else he would have jumped at the sound he heard next. Something else was sliding down the air duct.
It was Eli, blood pouring out of a shotgun wound in the chest.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
The Armory
Colt “Peacemaker” SAA .45Single action revolver. One of the longest used and most trusted handguns. The favored gun of Bird. Jak also values this gun highly and has a highly customized version. Right now Richard uses one that he received for giving first aid to Salomone who had disarmed it from Bird. Fires one shot then the hammer must be reset by hand.
Colt “Python” .357 Mag
Double action magnum revolver. The Python was Salomone’s first when he joined the Knights. A big gun with a big kick, the Python’s intimidating ribbed barrel unnerves those unlucky enough to be threatened by it.
Benelli Super M3 90, 12g
Richard’s shotgun, used since his depth perception is severely crippled. A light and effective weapon the Super M3 became the favorite of police
forces. The shotgun can be fitted with a folding stock or pistol grip, or a pistol grip with a shoulder stock for a rifle-like fit, but Richard’s has the common grip.H&K PSG1, 7.62x51mm NATO
One of Guy’s sniper rifles. Though less powerful than his Barret, the PSG1 is half as heavy, can fire of more shots quicker, and has about half the kick. The PSG1 is fitted with a x6 scope and a tripod.
Barret Model 82, .50 BMG
An impressively destructive sniper rifle
that Guy uses. This gun is twice as heavy and twice as powerful as his H&K sniper. Guy has recently fitted the weapon with a 16x thermal scope.Desert Eagle, .50 AE
A large, difficult to conceal handgun, with a lot of kick, a lot of power and a lot of noise. Guy uses this in close combat.
Taurus M608, .357 Mag
A revolver famous for its eight round cylinder. Used by Graham until he received a Colt “Anaconda” a weapon with about the same amount of power, but with less rounds and bigger wounds.
Colt “Anaconda” .44 Mag
Graham received this revolver from Jak. Bigger kick and bigger wounds, though two less shots than the Taurus he had previously.H&K USP, .45 ACP+T “Hushpuppy”
A heavily modified pistol used to shoot tranquilizer rounds. Hammy found it by chance discarded in the bushes near the thought to be abandoned anti-biotic lab.
Robe Tie
Used as a makeshift whip by Luke until he set it on fire.
Bullwhip
A long leather whip, good for grappling and causing pain. Luke received it from Jak and uses it to convey heat and cold to targets.
The Don’s Sword
A saber that Eli admired in the Don’s mansion. Eli took the sword and never had a chance to use it before he was shot by Richard.
Chance’s Knife
Hammy uses knives issued to him by Chance to throw blindly at targets. As long as the results of the throw are based on chance and not skill the knives always hit their marks.
52 Card Pick-up
A deck of cards given to Hammy by Chance. When thrown the cards become razor sharp and lacerate skin. When the entire deck is bent and then scattered across the room a la “52 Card Pick-up” the cards buffet the enemy with multiple lacerating wounds. Chance, when giving this deck Hammy, said “52 card pick-up is a childish prank, but with this deck its no game.”
Kevlar
All the Knights are now equipped with Kevlar Vests. Guy, however, has secured a plated vest from Asp.
Headset Radio with Throat Mics
The Knights are also recently equipped with shortwave headset radios complete with throat mics. Guy, as the Tactical Leader, has used these to full potential.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Episode II - Mutual Benefit
The four men stepped from the bomb squad’s van and into the street in front of the the Winchester. The bar was a contrast of neon and dull brick, the lights flickering for dominance then fading away again to dull. Inside was not much different, flickering of spirits within bland shells. A bar tender wiped down his bar lethargically, and watched with dumb anticipation as a man bought a woman at the bar a drink. Another woman sat alone and smoked at the bar. Six other women had pulled up chairs to a high table to lean in and chatter like schoolgirls, their presence being some of the only life the smoke heavy air birthed. In the corner booth an off-duty cop sat with his wife and a friend couple nibbling on chips and chicken wings. Slow mandolin plucks through the air with an Italian timbre and seems never to push thoroughly through the smoke. An Italian man hair pomaded back slumps drunkenly against a jukebox, paying for the same song each time it stops. A group of men play a game of pool while others watching lean against the wall and collect bets.
“That man there,” Salomone whispers, “against the wall. That’s Zizza Medici, we have close mutual friends.”
Eli eyes him attentively and nods slowly, looking for underlying meaning, while Graham and Richard head for the bar. Richard takes a vodka while Graham sidles up nest to the lone woman and begins a conversation. Salomone arrives at the jukebox as the song ends and places a coin in the slot.
“How are you friend?” Salomone asks.
“Oh, wonderful. Peashy. You axe me dat, later, no?” His head rolls limply about his neck and he nods slightly to the tempo of the music.
“Well, I need information now,” Salomone lift his shirt to reveal the marking.
“Shite,” Zizza murmurs, “Salomone, wathca need?”
“What do you know about ‘the man that opened Hell’?” Salmomone gripped Zizza’s chin to keep eye contact.
“Hell? The whole worldsh going to hell!” He raised his voice as if to toast the occasion and was indeed reciprocated by Richard with an elevation of his glass. “I tink, your axing the wrong queshions, friend.”
“I need to know.”
Zizza swayed his head sleepily to the music. “Mushics bout the only thing makes shense any more.”
“Zizza.”
“Jacob Aasimov, he’z your man,” he smiled dopily at Salomone, “Talk to the Don about ’im.”
“Aasimov. Thank you Zizza.” Salomone kissed Zizza on the forehead and turned to leave.
“ ’Eh, Salomone, when you sees the Don, tell him I di’int mean to, I di’int mean to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He hung his head heavy with tears, as Salomone walked to collect the rest of the team. “Tell ‘im! Zizza says ‘is sorry! Tell ‘im, Salomone, tell ‘im!”
The crack of the pool balls had ceased. Turning around, Salomone met an impressively large man with his nose blacked out by tattoos. He brandished his pool cue like a weapon, while two men covered his flanks, one with a pistol, another with a knife.
“Askin’ the wrong questions, methinks,” the man says punctuated by his pool cue tapping his hand. “Whatca need to know about Aasimov?”
“Don’t think he needs to know nothing,” the knifeman smiles broadly to say, his nose also blacked by tattoo. Salomone looks calmly over the group and smiles with a big flash of white teeth and slowly draws his gun. Eli raises from his seat at the bar, and Graham puts an apologetic hand on the woman he was sitting with as he turns around to watch and stiffens for action.
“Gentlemen, this is so kind of you to humor me in my old age.” Salomone reached across his belly with his free arm as he gestured loosely with his gun arm. “You see I’ve been really stressed lately, and I just haven’t had a good time take out some of that aggression with a few easy targets.” He raised his shirt revealing the alchemical marking, his identity.
“Shit!” The leader exclaimed, and fell back against the other two grunts, who went scrambling for the door with cries of “Salomone!”
Silence followed the gangs scuffling away until Graham stood from his chair and said, “Alright, resume people.” Eli motioned for him to come over to Salomone. Graham nodded and left with a quick nuzzling of the woman’s chin before raising completely, she grabbed his arm and jotted down her phone number.
“Call me when your done with this manhunt,” she said, more professionally than attractively.
Salomone took the wheel as the other men entered the car. Richard slowly entered the vehicle following the other three men and sat in the back with his head leaned against the side, dreaming of the snows of Russia and the savannahs of Africa, a warmth coursing through his veins.
“So, what’d we get?” Graham asked with a casual gesture but an eager manner.
“A name: Jacob Aasimov,” Salomone said into the rear view mirror.
“A name and we move on?”
“A name, and we ask the Don,” Salomone said casually.
“What the hell! You’re mafia?”
“I have friends, Graham. And it seems now they’re coming in handy.” Silence, then drove the car through the night as the clouds burst then mellowed in the dusk light on a drive through the Illinois countryside. Salomone drove the car with the intense focus of a man who cares little for the task but much for avoiding everything outside of it. Eli rest with his head against the window letting the cool air flood his forehead. The backseat held Graham who was sticking cards to the roof by changing their gravitational pull and having them fall upward, and Richard whose drunken state had him slumped smilingly against the side of the bomb squad van.
An hour into the drive Eli suddenly snaps up from a car ride dream. His eyes wide and otherworldly, he so startles Salomone that the car is driven into off the road and parked while Eli drinks heavily from the air. Graham leans forward with concern, “What is it, Eli?”
Eli could not speak through so dry a mouth so instead waved his hand in the air which rippled and darkened. When the air subsided all the men could see was an event that had been, or would, or could never be. It was a dark room, smelling of damp cement and cool confinement.
A man took a drag of his cigarette angrily yet with contemplation. He stared into the darkest corner of the room, something stared back. The ember light of his smoke danced steadily across his sharp brow. Smoke hangs about his shaven head. He breathed out a thick cloud not from a nose but from two holes in his face not unlike those of a skull. He took his cigarette in two fingers and stared again into the blackest corner of the room. His face twisting viciously he laughs silently, a shaking of his shoulders and irregular puffs of smoke. He mutters into the corner, “Sonovabitch.” He seemed to be in an internal debate.
Hurried footsteps bring a lanky man into the room, opening a chipped white door, and being unaccustomed to the darkness flips the switch to turn on the singular naked hanging light the room was allowed. No sooner had the light come on, than had the skull-faced man yanked the light to the ground. Everything sparked blue then developed light a reverse picture into black.
“Sir…” the shaking and startled man started. And that was all Eli had seen.
A few hours passed and the men arrived at a colossal gothic mansion. Tall and arching spires, stone and solid turrets, jagged and beautiful windows, all within this home. The van pulled into the circular drive. Two men stood at the door, both were in suits, wore dark glasses and were equipped with head set radios. Eli phlegmatically exited the car and walked behind Salomone whose gait was that of a man who might own the mansion. Graham fidgeted with his deck of cards as Richard stumbled to the doorstep.
Stepping swiftly forward, Salomone’s approach to the door was halted suddenly by the arm of one of the security guards. Spinning madly to meet him, Salomone raised a hand as if to strike him. “Vaffanculo!”
The second guard’s hand hovered nervously about the offenders’ shoulders, “Bobby,” a deep yet shaking voice spoke, “this is Salomone.” The man then turned to Salomone, “Go on ahead sir, you know you’re always welcome here.”
“At least I know that,” Salomone popped his arm downward to shake his sleeve back into position and threw open the door while saying, “These men are with me.”
Graham’s indignant disinterest with the mansion faded as his eyes wandered within it. The place was of an earthy and wooden quality that seemed to have absorbed and nursed the a cigar smoke aroma that alienated the place into a realm of wonder. Halls and rooms formed a labyrinth of dining, sleeping, socializing. Guests could be seen in all directions, yet still one felt sole and alone in the immensity of the manor. Despite its extensive guest list the place was kept monastically quite by the enormous space and the sense of fragile antiquity.
Marching triumphantly through the halls Salomone lead the men into a large chamber much like the throne room of a king, the Don upon the throne. The Don was a large man with several chins to speak of and an expensive suit with the bowtie loose and the shirt unbuttoned half way down his chest. His eyes were sharp and his hair was silver and slicked back, he quietly excused a cuddling broad from his lap with a large and powerful hand as Salomone near kicked open the door and the people of the court fell silent.
“Salomone, you know I don’t like being disturbed in my chamber,” he spoke gesturing for his cigars at the time.
“Forgive me, Don Medici. But I need a favor,” Salomone said approaching and kissing the Don’s ring. Graham and Richard nervously hung by the door, and had not even meant to enter but had been sucked in by the powerful charisma that the Don possessed and the door shut behind.
Looking around, Graham elbowed Richard and asked, “Where’s Eli?” Richard, squinting and smiling, shrugged his shoulders.
In fact, Eli was in a hall admiring a saber that the Don had hung upon the wall. It was a beautiful craft of silver and gold. His hand made a motion towards it, when he heard footsteps and froze there in an admiring and appraising manner. When the guest had passed Eli took the sword and tied its baldric around his waist. Drawing the sword, Eli noticed the fine condition of the blade and the meticulous care it must receive. Balancing it on two fingers, Eli smiled widely and sheathed the sword again. However, he then felt something wrong the blade hummed violently within Eli's head.
Eli touched the sword lightly and as he did his eyes flew back into his head leaving only the whites exposed. His head moved back and forth as if reading an invisible page written in the clouds. When he had finished his eyes rolled back forward and he smiled brightly at the sword. He had the next chapter of the story; he would have to tell the others.
“Sir…” the shaking and started. The ember turned to look at the grunt. “Sir,” the man stuttered again, “Some men have been asking about you. About you and… and well, that corner.” Chills rose even as he said it. It was as if he was a child who felt that when his mind dwelt on monsters, he was attacked.
The smoking man smiled, “Have they met Helslocke?”
The shaking man seemed to believe he misheard the other, “Um, we’re not sure. We haven’t seen Helslocke since the last council you called.”
The smoking man’s head twitched to the grunt. “John’s gone rogue!?” He puffed his cigarette violently, illuminating the skull visage of his face.
“Ah, sir, we just haven’t heard from him is all. I—I can send for Chesir to arrange for his return.”
“No!” the boss snapped, “I want Bactum.” He smiled wickedly, victoriously into the corner. “I want a mess.”
“Sir!” The grunt answered as he scrambled up what became stairs after enough falling and grasping at air in the dark.
The skull faced man stared into the corner long after the door slammed shut and at length said, “How do you like that, bastard?” He flicked his cigarette away and began to light another. “Chaos?” He spoke to the corner.
Eli snapped conscious, he would tell the others of this in the car.
With a cigar lit and now with a tool to gesture, the Don spoke to Salomone, “You have friends now, Salomone?” He said pointing at the two men.
“Why?” Salomone’s back bristled.
“Makes me nervous. You never had friends before. Makes me as nervous as those cops you talk to,” the Don’s voice rose to a passion then fell with a heavy exhalation.
“These men need to know how to find Aasimov,” Salomone spoke and it became clear to Graham then that Salomone must have already known this name.
“Hell. Aasimov?” The Don sank back in his seat deflated, “Your in deep shit now.”
“Word has it he has a new weapon,” Salomone spoke from his gut.
Taking a breath into his massive chest the Don shook his head. “Salomone, last report I heard of Aasimov had to do with an old factory. I sent a man to investigate and haven’t heard of them since. I—” he paused his head ticking and his mouth moving, “I need a favor as well.”
“Name it,” Salomone said to a jump from Graham.
“My nephew,” the Don paused with sadness tainting his face. “My nephew, Guido, I sent him. I need you to get him back. Last we heard of him was in this old anti-biotic lab four hours from here. Frankie can get you a map.”
Salomone looked solemnly at the don then reached into his coat pocket to retrieve a cigar and waved it as a baton as he spoke, “I won’t smoke again, until Guido and I smoke with you.”
The Don nodded as the silence built, he broke eye contact and began looking about the room uncharacteristically uncertain. Salomone turned to leave and Graham and Richard went straight for the door. “Oh, Don Medici, I spoke with Zizza, he says that he’s sorry.”
The Don nodded firmly and finally, “Thank you,” and was silent till Salomone reached the door.
“Salomone!” the Don suddenly spat. The three men turned to face the big man and as they did he spoke again, “Wassa matta with you? Niether you two’s name’s Salomone, niether of you have a dreg of Italian blood!” Graham hovered between an acquiescent fist and a salute and then turned hurriedly to the door as Richard followed silently behind. Salomone came right to the Don’s seat at the boss’s gesture.
“Listen, Salomone, there’ve been whispers of a man working with Aasimov. I believe you know him, a man named Darius.” Salomone leaned back with surprise and hate combating in his eyes and said nothing. The Don placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and said, “Look, I have a gift. You know Slims, my cousin? He’s ready to keep our pact.” Salomone looked up suddenly and his eyes flared with excitement.
A tall, muscular and square Italian man in a trench coat pushed past Richard and Graham who were standing silently watching Eli mumbled to himself about the sword. “Come one, we’re leaving,” he said. Graham and Richard looked at each other confusedly.
“Whersh Shalomone?” Richard asked with a comically raised brow. They noticed now that at some point Richard had slipped away and was now wearing the Don's plus-sized satin red robe and was clinking about as if he had bottles stuffed into the pockets.
“Come on, dumbass, I am Salomone,” he said, craning his head to show a swirling symbol of star tissue blooming out of a bullet wound nick to the side of the neck.
Eli suddenly stirred, “Wait, what? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
“That man there,” Salomone whispers, “against the wall. That’s Zizza Medici, we have close mutual friends.”
Eli eyes him attentively and nods slowly, looking for underlying meaning, while Graham and Richard head for the bar. Richard takes a vodka while Graham sidles up nest to the lone woman and begins a conversation. Salomone arrives at the jukebox as the song ends and places a coin in the slot.
“How are you friend?” Salomone asks.
“Oh, wonderful. Peashy. You axe me dat, later, no?” His head rolls limply about his neck and he nods slightly to the tempo of the music.
“Well, I need information now,” Salomone lift his shirt to reveal the marking.
“Shite,” Zizza murmurs, “Salomone, wathca need?”
“What do you know about ‘the man that opened Hell’?” Salmomone gripped Zizza’s chin to keep eye contact.
“Hell? The whole worldsh going to hell!” He raised his voice as if to toast the occasion and was indeed reciprocated by Richard with an elevation of his glass. “I tink, your axing the wrong queshions, friend.”
“I need to know.”
Zizza swayed his head sleepily to the music. “Mushics bout the only thing makes shense any more.”
“Zizza.”
“Jacob Aasimov, he’z your man,” he smiled dopily at Salomone, “Talk to the Don about ’im.”
“Aasimov. Thank you Zizza.” Salomone kissed Zizza on the forehead and turned to leave.
“ ’Eh, Salomone, when you sees the Don, tell him I di’int mean to, I di’int mean to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He hung his head heavy with tears, as Salomone walked to collect the rest of the team. “Tell ‘im! Zizza says ‘is sorry! Tell ‘im, Salomone, tell ‘im!”
The crack of the pool balls had ceased. Turning around, Salomone met an impressively large man with his nose blacked out by tattoos. He brandished his pool cue like a weapon, while two men covered his flanks, one with a pistol, another with a knife.
“Askin’ the wrong questions, methinks,” the man says punctuated by his pool cue tapping his hand. “Whatca need to know about Aasimov?”
“Don’t think he needs to know nothing,” the knifeman smiles broadly to say, his nose also blacked by tattoo. Salomone looks calmly over the group and smiles with a big flash of white teeth and slowly draws his gun. Eli raises from his seat at the bar, and Graham puts an apologetic hand on the woman he was sitting with as he turns around to watch and stiffens for action.
“Gentlemen, this is so kind of you to humor me in my old age.” Salomone reached across his belly with his free arm as he gestured loosely with his gun arm. “You see I’ve been really stressed lately, and I just haven’t had a good time take out some of that aggression with a few easy targets.” He raised his shirt revealing the alchemical marking, his identity.
“Shit!” The leader exclaimed, and fell back against the other two grunts, who went scrambling for the door with cries of “Salomone!”
Silence followed the gangs scuffling away until Graham stood from his chair and said, “Alright, resume people.” Eli motioned for him to come over to Salomone. Graham nodded and left with a quick nuzzling of the woman’s chin before raising completely, she grabbed his arm and jotted down her phone number.
“Call me when your done with this manhunt,” she said, more professionally than attractively.
Salomone took the wheel as the other men entered the car. Richard slowly entered the vehicle following the other three men and sat in the back with his head leaned against the side, dreaming of the snows of Russia and the savannahs of Africa, a warmth coursing through his veins.
“So, what’d we get?” Graham asked with a casual gesture but an eager manner.
“A name: Jacob Aasimov,” Salomone said into the rear view mirror.
“A name and we move on?”
“A name, and we ask the Don,” Salomone said casually.
“What the hell! You’re mafia?”
“I have friends, Graham. And it seems now they’re coming in handy.” Silence, then drove the car through the night as the clouds burst then mellowed in the dusk light on a drive through the Illinois countryside. Salomone drove the car with the intense focus of a man who cares little for the task but much for avoiding everything outside of it. Eli rest with his head against the window letting the cool air flood his forehead. The backseat held Graham who was sticking cards to the roof by changing their gravitational pull and having them fall upward, and Richard whose drunken state had him slumped smilingly against the side of the bomb squad van.
An hour into the drive Eli suddenly snaps up from a car ride dream. His eyes wide and otherworldly, he so startles Salomone that the car is driven into off the road and parked while Eli drinks heavily from the air. Graham leans forward with concern, “What is it, Eli?”
Eli could not speak through so dry a mouth so instead waved his hand in the air which rippled and darkened. When the air subsided all the men could see was an event that had been, or would, or could never be. It was a dark room, smelling of damp cement and cool confinement.
A man took a drag of his cigarette angrily yet with contemplation. He stared into the darkest corner of the room, something stared back. The ember light of his smoke danced steadily across his sharp brow. Smoke hangs about his shaven head. He breathed out a thick cloud not from a nose but from two holes in his face not unlike those of a skull. He took his cigarette in two fingers and stared again into the blackest corner of the room. His face twisting viciously he laughs silently, a shaking of his shoulders and irregular puffs of smoke. He mutters into the corner, “Sonovabitch.” He seemed to be in an internal debate.
Hurried footsteps bring a lanky man into the room, opening a chipped white door, and being unaccustomed to the darkness flips the switch to turn on the singular naked hanging light the room was allowed. No sooner had the light come on, than had the skull-faced man yanked the light to the ground. Everything sparked blue then developed light a reverse picture into black.
“Sir…” the shaking and startled man started. And that was all Eli had seen.
A few hours passed and the men arrived at a colossal gothic mansion. Tall and arching spires, stone and solid turrets, jagged and beautiful windows, all within this home. The van pulled into the circular drive. Two men stood at the door, both were in suits, wore dark glasses and were equipped with head set radios. Eli phlegmatically exited the car and walked behind Salomone whose gait was that of a man who might own the mansion. Graham fidgeted with his deck of cards as Richard stumbled to the doorstep.
Stepping swiftly forward, Salomone’s approach to the door was halted suddenly by the arm of one of the security guards. Spinning madly to meet him, Salomone raised a hand as if to strike him. “Vaffanculo!”
The second guard’s hand hovered nervously about the offenders’ shoulders, “Bobby,” a deep yet shaking voice spoke, “this is Salomone.” The man then turned to Salomone, “Go on ahead sir, you know you’re always welcome here.”
“At least I know that,” Salomone popped his arm downward to shake his sleeve back into position and threw open the door while saying, “These men are with me.”
Graham’s indignant disinterest with the mansion faded as his eyes wandered within it. The place was of an earthy and wooden quality that seemed to have absorbed and nursed the a cigar smoke aroma that alienated the place into a realm of wonder. Halls and rooms formed a labyrinth of dining, sleeping, socializing. Guests could be seen in all directions, yet still one felt sole and alone in the immensity of the manor. Despite its extensive guest list the place was kept monastically quite by the enormous space and the sense of fragile antiquity.
Marching triumphantly through the halls Salomone lead the men into a large chamber much like the throne room of a king, the Don upon the throne. The Don was a large man with several chins to speak of and an expensive suit with the bowtie loose and the shirt unbuttoned half way down his chest. His eyes were sharp and his hair was silver and slicked back, he quietly excused a cuddling broad from his lap with a large and powerful hand as Salomone near kicked open the door and the people of the court fell silent.
“Salomone, you know I don’t like being disturbed in my chamber,” he spoke gesturing for his cigars at the time.
“Forgive me, Don Medici. But I need a favor,” Salomone said approaching and kissing the Don’s ring. Graham and Richard nervously hung by the door, and had not even meant to enter but had been sucked in by the powerful charisma that the Don possessed and the door shut behind.
Looking around, Graham elbowed Richard and asked, “Where’s Eli?” Richard, squinting and smiling, shrugged his shoulders.
In fact, Eli was in a hall admiring a saber that the Don had hung upon the wall. It was a beautiful craft of silver and gold. His hand made a motion towards it, when he heard footsteps and froze there in an admiring and appraising manner. When the guest had passed Eli took the sword and tied its baldric around his waist. Drawing the sword, Eli noticed the fine condition of the blade and the meticulous care it must receive. Balancing it on two fingers, Eli smiled widely and sheathed the sword again. However, he then felt something wrong the blade hummed violently within Eli's head.
Eli touched the sword lightly and as he did his eyes flew back into his head leaving only the whites exposed. His head moved back and forth as if reading an invisible page written in the clouds. When he had finished his eyes rolled back forward and he smiled brightly at the sword. He had the next chapter of the story; he would have to tell the others.
“Sir…” the shaking and started. The ember turned to look at the grunt. “Sir,” the man stuttered again, “Some men have been asking about you. About you and… and well, that corner.” Chills rose even as he said it. It was as if he was a child who felt that when his mind dwelt on monsters, he was attacked.
The smoking man smiled, “Have they met Helslocke?”
The shaking man seemed to believe he misheard the other, “Um, we’re not sure. We haven’t seen Helslocke since the last council you called.”
The smoking man’s head twitched to the grunt. “John’s gone rogue!?” He puffed his cigarette violently, illuminating the skull visage of his face.
“Ah, sir, we just haven’t heard from him is all. I—I can send for Chesir to arrange for his return.”
“No!” the boss snapped, “I want Bactum.” He smiled wickedly, victoriously into the corner. “I want a mess.”
“Sir!” The grunt answered as he scrambled up what became stairs after enough falling and grasping at air in the dark.
The skull faced man stared into the corner long after the door slammed shut and at length said, “How do you like that, bastard?” He flicked his cigarette away and began to light another. “Chaos?” He spoke to the corner.
Eli snapped conscious, he would tell the others of this in the car.
With a cigar lit and now with a tool to gesture, the Don spoke to Salomone, “You have friends now, Salomone?” He said pointing at the two men.
“Why?” Salomone’s back bristled.
“Makes me nervous. You never had friends before. Makes me as nervous as those cops you talk to,” the Don’s voice rose to a passion then fell with a heavy exhalation.
“These men need to know how to find Aasimov,” Salomone spoke and it became clear to Graham then that Salomone must have already known this name.
“Hell. Aasimov?” The Don sank back in his seat deflated, “Your in deep shit now.”
“Word has it he has a new weapon,” Salomone spoke from his gut.
Taking a breath into his massive chest the Don shook his head. “Salomone, last report I heard of Aasimov had to do with an old factory. I sent a man to investigate and haven’t heard of them since. I—” he paused his head ticking and his mouth moving, “I need a favor as well.”
“Name it,” Salomone said to a jump from Graham.
“My nephew,” the Don paused with sadness tainting his face. “My nephew, Guido, I sent him. I need you to get him back. Last we heard of him was in this old anti-biotic lab four hours from here. Frankie can get you a map.”
Salomone looked solemnly at the don then reached into his coat pocket to retrieve a cigar and waved it as a baton as he spoke, “I won’t smoke again, until Guido and I smoke with you.”
The Don nodded as the silence built, he broke eye contact and began looking about the room uncharacteristically uncertain. Salomone turned to leave and Graham and Richard went straight for the door. “Oh, Don Medici, I spoke with Zizza, he says that he’s sorry.”
The Don nodded firmly and finally, “Thank you,” and was silent till Salomone reached the door.
“Salomone!” the Don suddenly spat. The three men turned to face the big man and as they did he spoke again, “Wassa matta with you? Niether you two’s name’s Salomone, niether of you have a dreg of Italian blood!” Graham hovered between an acquiescent fist and a salute and then turned hurriedly to the door as Richard followed silently behind. Salomone came right to the Don’s seat at the boss’s gesture.
“Listen, Salomone, there’ve been whispers of a man working with Aasimov. I believe you know him, a man named Darius.” Salomone leaned back with surprise and hate combating in his eyes and said nothing. The Don placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and said, “Look, I have a gift. You know Slims, my cousin? He’s ready to keep our pact.” Salomone looked up suddenly and his eyes flared with excitement.
A tall, muscular and square Italian man in a trench coat pushed past Richard and Graham who were standing silently watching Eli mumbled to himself about the sword. “Come one, we’re leaving,” he said. Graham and Richard looked at each other confusedly.
“Whersh Shalomone?” Richard asked with a comically raised brow. They noticed now that at some point Richard had slipped away and was now wearing the Don's plus-sized satin red robe and was clinking about as if he had bottles stuffed into the pockets.
“Come on, dumbass, I am Salomone,” he said, craning his head to show a swirling symbol of star tissue blooming out of a bullet wound nick to the side of the neck.
Eli suddenly stirred, “Wait, what? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Episode I - Genesis
The screens announce the advent of the train in the Chicago subway. People churn like the night sea, black and apprehensive. The air smells of plastics and salts, and of raw metal as if the screeching of the rails were hammers in a forge.
The train arrives and consumes the people, but still the people hear the train, bellowing through the tunnel. A second car is coming, its brakes disconnected by chance, who is also closing the doors on the second train. The screens are mute. Two trains are borne to collide.
Four strangers step from the crowd: a one-eyed soldier, a homeless man, a magician, a prophet. All are dressed in black, the last even pulls a black mask, goggles sewn in, over his head. In a gestured command the prophet directs the men forward. The soldier bounds onto the tracks, he sets his arms for impact. His flesh ripples like a pond and then seems to fasten into place.
In an unearthly bound, as if gravity took a looser grip upon him as it would an astronaut, the magician landed beside the tracks his fingers outstretched. The tunnel howled with the force of the train. The homeless man lay down upon the tracks, and drew a Colt Python from his sleek and seemingly expensive black coat, drawing a mark on the axel beneath the coming train.
The prophets words are lost in the husky breaths and soprano screech of the train, the homeless man takes his first shot. A spark of metal, nothing more. He stifles the instinct to fire rapidly and aims again at a blur of metal, now entering the station, he squeezes the trigger. A long shot, an impossibility, the bullet then severs the axel. But the train has still its momentum, and years of physics can be disputed but the empiricist would not deny the still speeding train. The train now runs through the station, its collision’s end sits inert and expectant. The magician runs the tips of his fingers along the alacritous smooth metal sides. The air around his hands seems inverted, as if bulging and turned in on itself. The screeching of the rails grows louder as if the train is being bore down upon by an invisible hand, and it begins to slow but not to stop.
A gasping breath as his heart forgets a beat and the train passes within inches of the homeless man’s face, throwing his disheveled hair about his head. The train collides with the solider. His arms bend the metal, but the train throws into him and he slides backward towards the first train, the tracks bunching up like ribbons beneath his feet. The metal beast now has a snack between its too meals, it presses the soldier against the second train and he give out a suffocating cry. The crowd collects their breath as the nearly stopped but still crushing train clamps down upon the solider. The magician now has two hands upon the train and is beading sweat. The homeless man has a grimace and a wince. The prophet dons apprehension.
Then with a gasp appropriate for diving, the solider passes through the second car as easily as if iron were air. The two trains did collide, but with the force to jostle its passengers and nothing more. The soldier passes through the train’s metal sides as the gunman crawls out from beneath the train and the thankful passengers torrent from the now opening doors.
An engulfing crowd surrounds the men, slapping the heroes on the back, shaking hands, smiling. Though not all share their sentiments, a woman yells for her husband. “Steve! Stephen! Anyone, anyone, please! My husband, he—he’s a larger fellow. My husband! Anyone seen Steve!” Her hysteria is the underscore for which the limelight of heroes is furthered.
The people clap and clap and clap. Their applause is endearing, their applause is enduring, their applause becomes acrimonious—the buzzing of an alarm clock. The strangers awake to a new ceiling. The beds are evenly spaced and against one wall. A TV plays the news. Two trains on the verge of collision were stopped earlier this morning by a group of uncanny humans in black. Thanks to these heroes, the only casualty was Steven Clide, who was found dead on the tracks , thought to be suicide. Who are these heroes? The men the bystanders are quickly calling the Black Knights. The scene shifts to a hefty dark skinned man with remnants of a moustache. You know der Dark Knights for Dark Times, he says a blank stare into the camera, but with an excited shake of his head.
The brick of the walls feels intentionally rustic. The odor of omelets seeps into the room. A smooth metal pole stands in the corner of the room with a hole in the floor beneath it. The homeless man rose, no longer in his black jacket but in the hodgepodge of discarded clothing he would be accustomed to. He was of black and spotty skin, with long ratty hair, unkempt. He had a voluminous curling beard and walked as if one leg were bolted into place.
The magician turned quickly to the man, “What’ve you done?” He was a tall thin sandy-haired young man with hair bordering on the idea of curls. His eyes were bright, young, and uncorrupted. He wore a pinstripe suit greatly disturbed by sleep.
“Ollie don’t do nuthin’,” The homeless man replied, with a firm click of his teeth.
The solider threw off his sheets stiffly and sat in the edge of his bed rubbing single eye, he took a deep husky breath and started into the next room. His face was heavily adorned with lines of worry and despair, and his skin with bristly from infrequent shaves. He wore a black patch over his right eye, and his hair had become gray around its temples.
“Then, you,” said the magician to the soldier, “you kidnapped me.”
The words bristled the man’s spine and he barked, “Quiet!” as he gripped his temples. “You speak quite in the morning, kid. Besides, of all the people I stole in their sleep, not one of them was a man.” He had a faint Russian accent apparent in his punctuation of words and his overall timbre.
“What then? I sleep-walked here?” The magician, still furrowed asked.
“Ollie gonna eat him some eggs,” said Ollie as he marched out the room.
The soldier started after Ollie but the magician caught his arm, “We’re just going to march around here?”
“Listen, kid. The world’s going to hell, you don’t ask questions any more.” The magician felt a tingling sensation in his hand as the solider pulled his arm out of the grip without ever moving the magician’s fingers. “You sleep in your suit?”
“You sleep in your old fatigues?” The magician retorted with a smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Fair enough.”
When the pair entered the next room, they found an old kitchen and dining table, plates set with omelets on each one, a pitcher of orange juice and glasses at each seat. Ollie was already inhaling his omelet as the prophet from the strange morning sat at the table watching him with a daze. The man is shorter than most his age, with squinting a piercing eyes, cat yellow and winged by small sun wrinkles. His smile seems always pained yet always ready, thick downward lines trace from his long thin nose to his lips. His hairline sits high on a contemplative forehead spilling over with long wide loose curls, soft brown mingling with occasional blacks and salted whites.
The magician opens his mouth. “Never sleep-walked before?” the yellow eyed man spoke instead. “Somnambulism is actually quite common and can appear at infrequent stages in life, perhaps brought on by stress, lack of sleep, a strong archetypal desire Jung might argue.
“You kidnap us?” The solider asked warily eyeing the table.
The yellow eyed man cocked his head and looked near disappointed at the remark. “You give yourself too little credit, Mr.—”
“Cory,” the man interjected, rather than suggested. “Richard Cory.”
“Yes, you give yourself too little credit Mr. Cory, surely you would wake should someone move you all the way from your apartment to this old fire station.”
“I could have been drunk.”
“Sounds like a safe bet.” The yellow eyes were squinted such that it seemed the man may be half seas over as well, though his speech was unaffected.
“And you,” the squinting eyes focused on the magician, “Graham Abbot, no?”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, lucky guess, of course.” The man threw up his hands defensively and near casually, something flippantly angering.
The solider spoke, “What the hell have you done?” Ollie looked up from his plate with eggs filling his mouth.
“Killed a man,” the prophet faced the opposite wall to say it, “You need to understand, I’m under some extreme circumstances, and only three of you arriving is immensely troubling.” He reached into a small pouch as he was turned from the group, took a deep breath, and spun sharply on his heel spreading a fine mist of sand through the air. Three thuds announced the falls of the three men, each instantly asleep. The prophet observed this then exhaled deeply and fell asleep upon the floor.
The four men gained consciousness high above the earth which seemed composed entirely of water. Their feet rested on a black cloud, wind rushing about them and lightning in the distance. “I need you to see, what I’ve seen,” said the yellow eyed prophet, and the three others broke the cloud beneath them and began to plummet. They fell through the storming night of ozone crisp blacks and ubiquitous shocks of lightning. A rush consumed each as they fell towards the black and storming sea. A voice, elderly and distant speaks clearly to each, “The ages of myth are reemerging.” Richard snapped his head up, the voice was familiar, but then splashed into the sea as the rest.
The three’s feet land softly on polished stone, a staircase, and all breath and move as if in air, though the water ripples around them. The magician looks up and soon to the rest to see an infinite expanse of upward spiraling stairs, where before had been the surface of the sea. The voice again speaks, “The world again has become malleable. The time when heroes wove themselves into the thread is cycling.”
“Will you ascend?” the voice speaks again after a pause. The three men by a silent and instant agreement began running up the circling stairs though they feel no progress to be made. Up and up and up, round and around, an exhaustion sets in, and the fatigued mind is welcomed by only spinning stairs.
“Ambition ill-directed destroys; a man has opened hell,” the voice speaks and as the last word is pronounced the stairs end, the men find themselves on a large multihued disk of stained glass depicting jumping harts. Trees of golden green leaves and magisterial trunks border the disk and grow naturally though beneath the water. The deep blues of ocean are stifled by the brilliancy of the a strange gold light that floods all like dawn.
The prophet looks mournfully into the distance at the edge of the trees. “You want to know what happened?” he speaks to the men slowly as if in a daze, though not turned around, “the train station?”
The scene shifts and the men see the reality of the morning venture. The men watch as the prophet steps from the crowd and no other, they watch as he casts an illusion over all the bystanders an illusion of the homeless man, the soldier, the magician. The magician moves his mouth in uncomfortable disgust as he watches the prophet push an obese man onto the tracks, his flesh grinding to a paste adhering the train to the tracks.
“You bastard!” Graham exclaimed, the words bristling the prophet’s spine, the magician stepped forward.
“It all made sense,” the prophet began shaking, “I chose for him to die, just as we all choose each day to take a walk past the alley and unwittingly avoid the woman being cornered. Why then, does consciousness turn the tide?” He took a step forward and split into two, one stepping forward left and the other forward right. “Then I felt the hope to survive, how every instant I plead for life in every atavistic fabric of humanity.” His voice was oddly harmonic in the dual tongue of his twin bodies. The sound of unsheathing steel was heard as two blades appeared in the hands of the two prophets. “Logos and Eros will always fight.” The two engage, sword striking sword in mirror-image collision until finally both thrust, and the mirror no longer can parry, both slide forward on the blades and spill to the ground connected by steel. A prophet steps casually over his two other bodies now addressing the men face on.
Suddenly Ollie is sober, “Are we dreaming?”
“Yes, this is the Dreaming, Alcheringa, the Everywhen,” the prophet extends his hands about the watery air. “Here hopes are beautiful, and memory is nightmare.”
A loud shattering crack is heard, like shards from an iceberg in temperatures too warm. The stained glass breaks into its individual pieces a mosaic scattered. The prophet arms extended and falls backwards through the glass. As he does the debris of glass begins flapping its wings and scatters away as butterflies. Again the men fall, this time landing more forcefully upon the top of a colossal stone pillar. Ollie watched the sky as the prophet himself became the butterflies and dissipated into the air. “Figlio di puttana,” he near laughed.
A heavy set man, with multiple chins and half a face dripping with sagging and torn flesh, menacingly glares over the men, his teeth exposed in a demonic smile. In his titanic hands he wields several yards of train track and is able to snap it like a whip. Ollie turned round and spat on the ground, he drew a gun from thin air, but looked gravely upon his own actions. “I can’t kill a martyr,” he spoke.
A pistol was conjured in Graham’s hand and he drew a bead on the nightmarish interpretation of Steve. Reaching behind himself, Richard snatched a shotgun from thin air and whirled to fire it when the steel tracks collided with his gut and sent him sliding off the edge of the pillar. A quick drop to the ground saved Graham and Ollie. The fall over the edge was infinite, and Richard seemed always inches away from the pillars grooved side. Reaching to his arms potential he willed himself further, his arm grew several inches as burning sensations of heated tendons shot through his arm, the fall engulfed him.
Above, Graham fired a shot into Steve’s shoulder and black blood spilled from the wound. “This isn’t Steve,” Graham reasoned to Ollie, “This is nightmare.” The masquerade Steve screeched in pain while his blood hung heavily about his arm and swarmed like piranhas devouring his own flesh.
Suddenly, Ollie was no longer himself, but a middle-aged Italian man in renaissance garb. The homeless man known as Ollie appeared beside this Italian man who addressed him, “Is this the man that saved the train for my failure?”
The man in question now heaved the length of track in an arch above his head crushing the flesh and bone of Graham to the stone tile and sending cleaved stone about the pillar.
Below, the tips of Richard’s fingers pushed themselves through the stone then became solid. A terrible force of stopping brought Richard to a hanging stop, and the terrible force severed his shoulder bone from its socket. He cried out in pain as he begged for an escape. He imagined a ladder in front of him; nothing appeared. He focused his mind, sweat beaded down his forehead, his face turned red. Nothing, then a blur, then nothing.
“No,” the true Ollie replied, “dis is your fear.” A nod of consensus between them and they stepped into each other again becoming the homeless man Ollie again. He leveled his gun to the assailants arm and shot it to pieces, his revolver unlimited to its usual six shots. The demon again screeched as its arm burst into a seething bacteria of darkness, and it dropped the deathly whip. Ollie rushed to Graham’s side and supported him with his arm, the boy badly broken and bleeding slightly from the mouth.
“I need to touch him,” Graham managed and Ollie nodded. About five meters separated the men and the beast. As quickly as stumbling and injured legs went the two advanced on the monster, still screaming in agony. Four meters, Steve squirmed against the blackness devouring his right side. Three meters, his right side began to convulse. Two meters, Graham reached out his hand. Then, a sound of bursting flesh as an immense bat-like wing sprouted from Steve’s wounded shoulder. A second later an arm, long anorexic, black and tipped with claws on he fingers and elbow, burst from the stub. Steve lunged forward when a blast reduced his head into a cloud of black blood. As he fell, Ollie and Graham could see Richard gripping the top rung of a ladder with one hand, holding a smoking shotgun with the other. He smiled slightly, but panic set in with the others as black chords began knitting a new head for Steve.
Graham forced his hands beneath Steve’s chest as he charged his body with a sort of energy, when he released gravity seemed to suck the fiend off the edge of the pillar and down into the abyss. Richard hopped onto the pillar as draconian screeching echoed around the pillar.
A deep breath for all, but a bit too soon, as the sound of beating wings was heard. Turning to the edge the three saw a long black reptilian head on a black skinned bony frame with a long dark mane and thick neck, two demonic bat wings flapping against immense gravity. The creature opened its mouth and spewed a cloud of swirling and green mist before fatigue brought it crashing into darkness.
Seeing the gas rise, Graham gripped the other two men and suddenly all were falling towards the sky safely away from the gasses. He concentrated to conjure a mirror image of the pillar below, though this one upside down and on the ceiling. The three landed on the reverse pillar upside down but affected by gravity so that they seemed right up.
The men snapped awake. The prophet seemed already to be awoken and stared intently at the men. “Now the truth is yours. I would ask all of you to become heroes, but you, of no choice of your own, all are. I would ask you to join me then, find the man that opened Hell. Though already you all join me, the only difference in your corporal presence is that men like Steve need no longer to die.”
Graham nodded contemplatively then more piously and acquiescently, “Yeah, I’ll join, but things need be run differently now, I want no more innocents dead.”
The prophet nodded solemnly and found it hard to meet Graham’s eyes as they shook hands. Then, turning to the homeless gunslinger, the prophet asked, “And you, Ollie?”
“Salomone Delluci,” replied the erstwhile Ollie. “Maybe one day you’ll get the full story, but for today know that I possess bodies, and that this…” Salomone lifted his bundles of clothing over his stomach to show a old bullet wound with strange alchemical symbols spiraling outward from it. “…is my identity, the only thing I consistently have in my physical appearance.” He let go of his shirt. “And yes, I’d feel more blood on my hands should I refuse.”
Graham looked condescendingly over at Richard, he felt this may would refuse.
“We save the world from Hell?” Richard sounded near sarcastic in tone.
The prophet smiled painfully, “Yes.”
“Then I’ll join you,” Richard said flipping up his eye patch and removing a diminutive vial from the socket his eye had once occupied. He took a small sip of the everclear that was within it and said a bit delayed, “And I’ll drink to it.”
“Then, you, what’s your name?” Graham asked as he shuffled a deck of cards he removed from a pocket in his suit.
“Eli Manoah,” he smiled.
“Eli, then?” Graham said eyebrow cocked, staring into the deck. He drew a playing card and saw it to be the Jack of Spades. “So what do you do?”
“Pardon?”
“We’re all here because we’re different, modern Herculeses and Beowulfs. I manipulate gravity’s effects on objects through touch. Salomone claims to possess others, Mr. Cory here seems to be able to pass through walls and stop trains.”
“I change my density at will, kid,” Cory snapped.
“Right, so, Eli, am I safe in the assumption that you create illusions and send people to bed?” Eli’s shoulders laughed while his smile remained set.
“Essentially, all through the medium of the Dream Time.” Graham focused on his shuffling of the deck and never met Eli’s eyes, instead simply raising a brow with a half interested “hm.”
Tension grew within the room as only the sibilance of the shuffling deck spoke.
The tension finally snapped as Eli set his hands on the table and spoke, “Well then, omelets are still lukewarm I’m sure. You will all need the energy if we’re going after a man who opened Hell.”
Richard and Graham sat down at the table that Salomone already occupied, Richard slipping the vial back into his socket and placing the patch back down over it.“How do you expect to find this man, kid?” Richard asked Eli.
“A visit to the nearest bar,” Eli’s smile crept up only half his face, “If anyone’s seen Hell they’ve surely been through the Winchester.”
The train arrives and consumes the people, but still the people hear the train, bellowing through the tunnel. A second car is coming, its brakes disconnected by chance, who is also closing the doors on the second train. The screens are mute. Two trains are borne to collide.
Four strangers step from the crowd: a one-eyed soldier, a homeless man, a magician, a prophet. All are dressed in black, the last even pulls a black mask, goggles sewn in, over his head. In a gestured command the prophet directs the men forward. The soldier bounds onto the tracks, he sets his arms for impact. His flesh ripples like a pond and then seems to fasten into place.
In an unearthly bound, as if gravity took a looser grip upon him as it would an astronaut, the magician landed beside the tracks his fingers outstretched. The tunnel howled with the force of the train. The homeless man lay down upon the tracks, and drew a Colt Python from his sleek and seemingly expensive black coat, drawing a mark on the axel beneath the coming train.
The prophets words are lost in the husky breaths and soprano screech of the train, the homeless man takes his first shot. A spark of metal, nothing more. He stifles the instinct to fire rapidly and aims again at a blur of metal, now entering the station, he squeezes the trigger. A long shot, an impossibility, the bullet then severs the axel. But the train has still its momentum, and years of physics can be disputed but the empiricist would not deny the still speeding train. The train now runs through the station, its collision’s end sits inert and expectant. The magician runs the tips of his fingers along the alacritous smooth metal sides. The air around his hands seems inverted, as if bulging and turned in on itself. The screeching of the rails grows louder as if the train is being bore down upon by an invisible hand, and it begins to slow but not to stop.
A gasping breath as his heart forgets a beat and the train passes within inches of the homeless man’s face, throwing his disheveled hair about his head. The train collides with the solider. His arms bend the metal, but the train throws into him and he slides backward towards the first train, the tracks bunching up like ribbons beneath his feet. The metal beast now has a snack between its too meals, it presses the soldier against the second train and he give out a suffocating cry. The crowd collects their breath as the nearly stopped but still crushing train clamps down upon the solider. The magician now has two hands upon the train and is beading sweat. The homeless man has a grimace and a wince. The prophet dons apprehension.
Then with a gasp appropriate for diving, the solider passes through the second car as easily as if iron were air. The two trains did collide, but with the force to jostle its passengers and nothing more. The soldier passes through the train’s metal sides as the gunman crawls out from beneath the train and the thankful passengers torrent from the now opening doors.
An engulfing crowd surrounds the men, slapping the heroes on the back, shaking hands, smiling. Though not all share their sentiments, a woman yells for her husband. “Steve! Stephen! Anyone, anyone, please! My husband, he—he’s a larger fellow. My husband! Anyone seen Steve!” Her hysteria is the underscore for which the limelight of heroes is furthered.
The people clap and clap and clap. Their applause is endearing, their applause is enduring, their applause becomes acrimonious—the buzzing of an alarm clock. The strangers awake to a new ceiling. The beds are evenly spaced and against one wall. A TV plays the news. Two trains on the verge of collision were stopped earlier this morning by a group of uncanny humans in black. Thanks to these heroes, the only casualty was Steven Clide, who was found dead on the tracks , thought to be suicide. Who are these heroes? The men the bystanders are quickly calling the Black Knights. The scene shifts to a hefty dark skinned man with remnants of a moustache. You know der Dark Knights for Dark Times, he says a blank stare into the camera, but with an excited shake of his head.
The brick of the walls feels intentionally rustic. The odor of omelets seeps into the room. A smooth metal pole stands in the corner of the room with a hole in the floor beneath it. The homeless man rose, no longer in his black jacket but in the hodgepodge of discarded clothing he would be accustomed to. He was of black and spotty skin, with long ratty hair, unkempt. He had a voluminous curling beard and walked as if one leg were bolted into place.
The magician turned quickly to the man, “What’ve you done?” He was a tall thin sandy-haired young man with hair bordering on the idea of curls. His eyes were bright, young, and uncorrupted. He wore a pinstripe suit greatly disturbed by sleep.
“Ollie don’t do nuthin’,” The homeless man replied, with a firm click of his teeth.
The solider threw off his sheets stiffly and sat in the edge of his bed rubbing single eye, he took a deep husky breath and started into the next room. His face was heavily adorned with lines of worry and despair, and his skin with bristly from infrequent shaves. He wore a black patch over his right eye, and his hair had become gray around its temples.
“Then, you,” said the magician to the soldier, “you kidnapped me.”
The words bristled the man’s spine and he barked, “Quiet!” as he gripped his temples. “You speak quite in the morning, kid. Besides, of all the people I stole in their sleep, not one of them was a man.” He had a faint Russian accent apparent in his punctuation of words and his overall timbre.
“What then? I sleep-walked here?” The magician, still furrowed asked.
“Ollie gonna eat him some eggs,” said Ollie as he marched out the room.
The soldier started after Ollie but the magician caught his arm, “We’re just going to march around here?”
“Listen, kid. The world’s going to hell, you don’t ask questions any more.” The magician felt a tingling sensation in his hand as the solider pulled his arm out of the grip without ever moving the magician’s fingers. “You sleep in your suit?”
“You sleep in your old fatigues?” The magician retorted with a smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Fair enough.”
When the pair entered the next room, they found an old kitchen and dining table, plates set with omelets on each one, a pitcher of orange juice and glasses at each seat. Ollie was already inhaling his omelet as the prophet from the strange morning sat at the table watching him with a daze. The man is shorter than most his age, with squinting a piercing eyes, cat yellow and winged by small sun wrinkles. His smile seems always pained yet always ready, thick downward lines trace from his long thin nose to his lips. His hairline sits high on a contemplative forehead spilling over with long wide loose curls, soft brown mingling with occasional blacks and salted whites.
The magician opens his mouth. “Never sleep-walked before?” the yellow eyed man spoke instead. “Somnambulism is actually quite common and can appear at infrequent stages in life, perhaps brought on by stress, lack of sleep, a strong archetypal desire Jung might argue.
“You kidnap us?” The solider asked warily eyeing the table.
The yellow eyed man cocked his head and looked near disappointed at the remark. “You give yourself too little credit, Mr.—”
“Cory,” the man interjected, rather than suggested. “Richard Cory.”
“Yes, you give yourself too little credit Mr. Cory, surely you would wake should someone move you all the way from your apartment to this old fire station.”
“I could have been drunk.”
“Sounds like a safe bet.” The yellow eyes were squinted such that it seemed the man may be half seas over as well, though his speech was unaffected.
“And you,” the squinting eyes focused on the magician, “Graham Abbot, no?”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, lucky guess, of course.” The man threw up his hands defensively and near casually, something flippantly angering.
The solider spoke, “What the hell have you done?” Ollie looked up from his plate with eggs filling his mouth.
“Killed a man,” the prophet faced the opposite wall to say it, “You need to understand, I’m under some extreme circumstances, and only three of you arriving is immensely troubling.” He reached into a small pouch as he was turned from the group, took a deep breath, and spun sharply on his heel spreading a fine mist of sand through the air. Three thuds announced the falls of the three men, each instantly asleep. The prophet observed this then exhaled deeply and fell asleep upon the floor.
The four men gained consciousness high above the earth which seemed composed entirely of water. Their feet rested on a black cloud, wind rushing about them and lightning in the distance. “I need you to see, what I’ve seen,” said the yellow eyed prophet, and the three others broke the cloud beneath them and began to plummet. They fell through the storming night of ozone crisp blacks and ubiquitous shocks of lightning. A rush consumed each as they fell towards the black and storming sea. A voice, elderly and distant speaks clearly to each, “The ages of myth are reemerging.” Richard snapped his head up, the voice was familiar, but then splashed into the sea as the rest.
The three’s feet land softly on polished stone, a staircase, and all breath and move as if in air, though the water ripples around them. The magician looks up and soon to the rest to see an infinite expanse of upward spiraling stairs, where before had been the surface of the sea. The voice again speaks, “The world again has become malleable. The time when heroes wove themselves into the thread is cycling.”
“Will you ascend?” the voice speaks again after a pause. The three men by a silent and instant agreement began running up the circling stairs though they feel no progress to be made. Up and up and up, round and around, an exhaustion sets in, and the fatigued mind is welcomed by only spinning stairs.
“Ambition ill-directed destroys; a man has opened hell,” the voice speaks and as the last word is pronounced the stairs end, the men find themselves on a large multihued disk of stained glass depicting jumping harts. Trees of golden green leaves and magisterial trunks border the disk and grow naturally though beneath the water. The deep blues of ocean are stifled by the brilliancy of the a strange gold light that floods all like dawn.
The prophet looks mournfully into the distance at the edge of the trees. “You want to know what happened?” he speaks to the men slowly as if in a daze, though not turned around, “the train station?”
The scene shifts and the men see the reality of the morning venture. The men watch as the prophet steps from the crowd and no other, they watch as he casts an illusion over all the bystanders an illusion of the homeless man, the soldier, the magician. The magician moves his mouth in uncomfortable disgust as he watches the prophet push an obese man onto the tracks, his flesh grinding to a paste adhering the train to the tracks.
“You bastard!” Graham exclaimed, the words bristling the prophet’s spine, the magician stepped forward.
“It all made sense,” the prophet began shaking, “I chose for him to die, just as we all choose each day to take a walk past the alley and unwittingly avoid the woman being cornered. Why then, does consciousness turn the tide?” He took a step forward and split into two, one stepping forward left and the other forward right. “Then I felt the hope to survive, how every instant I plead for life in every atavistic fabric of humanity.” His voice was oddly harmonic in the dual tongue of his twin bodies. The sound of unsheathing steel was heard as two blades appeared in the hands of the two prophets. “Logos and Eros will always fight.” The two engage, sword striking sword in mirror-image collision until finally both thrust, and the mirror no longer can parry, both slide forward on the blades and spill to the ground connected by steel. A prophet steps casually over his two other bodies now addressing the men face on.
Suddenly Ollie is sober, “Are we dreaming?”
“Yes, this is the Dreaming, Alcheringa, the Everywhen,” the prophet extends his hands about the watery air. “Here hopes are beautiful, and memory is nightmare.”
A loud shattering crack is heard, like shards from an iceberg in temperatures too warm. The stained glass breaks into its individual pieces a mosaic scattered. The prophet arms extended and falls backwards through the glass. As he does the debris of glass begins flapping its wings and scatters away as butterflies. Again the men fall, this time landing more forcefully upon the top of a colossal stone pillar. Ollie watched the sky as the prophet himself became the butterflies and dissipated into the air. “Figlio di puttana,” he near laughed.
A heavy set man, with multiple chins and half a face dripping with sagging and torn flesh, menacingly glares over the men, his teeth exposed in a demonic smile. In his titanic hands he wields several yards of train track and is able to snap it like a whip. Ollie turned round and spat on the ground, he drew a gun from thin air, but looked gravely upon his own actions. “I can’t kill a martyr,” he spoke.
A pistol was conjured in Graham’s hand and he drew a bead on the nightmarish interpretation of Steve. Reaching behind himself, Richard snatched a shotgun from thin air and whirled to fire it when the steel tracks collided with his gut and sent him sliding off the edge of the pillar. A quick drop to the ground saved Graham and Ollie. The fall over the edge was infinite, and Richard seemed always inches away from the pillars grooved side. Reaching to his arms potential he willed himself further, his arm grew several inches as burning sensations of heated tendons shot through his arm, the fall engulfed him.
Above, Graham fired a shot into Steve’s shoulder and black blood spilled from the wound. “This isn’t Steve,” Graham reasoned to Ollie, “This is nightmare.” The masquerade Steve screeched in pain while his blood hung heavily about his arm and swarmed like piranhas devouring his own flesh.
Suddenly, Ollie was no longer himself, but a middle-aged Italian man in renaissance garb. The homeless man known as Ollie appeared beside this Italian man who addressed him, “Is this the man that saved the train for my failure?”
The man in question now heaved the length of track in an arch above his head crushing the flesh and bone of Graham to the stone tile and sending cleaved stone about the pillar.
Below, the tips of Richard’s fingers pushed themselves through the stone then became solid. A terrible force of stopping brought Richard to a hanging stop, and the terrible force severed his shoulder bone from its socket. He cried out in pain as he begged for an escape. He imagined a ladder in front of him; nothing appeared. He focused his mind, sweat beaded down his forehead, his face turned red. Nothing, then a blur, then nothing.
“No,” the true Ollie replied, “dis is your fear.” A nod of consensus between them and they stepped into each other again becoming the homeless man Ollie again. He leveled his gun to the assailants arm and shot it to pieces, his revolver unlimited to its usual six shots. The demon again screeched as its arm burst into a seething bacteria of darkness, and it dropped the deathly whip. Ollie rushed to Graham’s side and supported him with his arm, the boy badly broken and bleeding slightly from the mouth.
“I need to touch him,” Graham managed and Ollie nodded. About five meters separated the men and the beast. As quickly as stumbling and injured legs went the two advanced on the monster, still screaming in agony. Four meters, Steve squirmed against the blackness devouring his right side. Three meters, his right side began to convulse. Two meters, Graham reached out his hand. Then, a sound of bursting flesh as an immense bat-like wing sprouted from Steve’s wounded shoulder. A second later an arm, long anorexic, black and tipped with claws on he fingers and elbow, burst from the stub. Steve lunged forward when a blast reduced his head into a cloud of black blood. As he fell, Ollie and Graham could see Richard gripping the top rung of a ladder with one hand, holding a smoking shotgun with the other. He smiled slightly, but panic set in with the others as black chords began knitting a new head for Steve.
Graham forced his hands beneath Steve’s chest as he charged his body with a sort of energy, when he released gravity seemed to suck the fiend off the edge of the pillar and down into the abyss. Richard hopped onto the pillar as draconian screeching echoed around the pillar.
A deep breath for all, but a bit too soon, as the sound of beating wings was heard. Turning to the edge the three saw a long black reptilian head on a black skinned bony frame with a long dark mane and thick neck, two demonic bat wings flapping against immense gravity. The creature opened its mouth and spewed a cloud of swirling and green mist before fatigue brought it crashing into darkness.
Seeing the gas rise, Graham gripped the other two men and suddenly all were falling towards the sky safely away from the gasses. He concentrated to conjure a mirror image of the pillar below, though this one upside down and on the ceiling. The three landed on the reverse pillar upside down but affected by gravity so that they seemed right up.
The men snapped awake. The prophet seemed already to be awoken and stared intently at the men. “Now the truth is yours. I would ask all of you to become heroes, but you, of no choice of your own, all are. I would ask you to join me then, find the man that opened Hell. Though already you all join me, the only difference in your corporal presence is that men like Steve need no longer to die.”
Graham nodded contemplatively then more piously and acquiescently, “Yeah, I’ll join, but things need be run differently now, I want no more innocents dead.”
The prophet nodded solemnly and found it hard to meet Graham’s eyes as they shook hands. Then, turning to the homeless gunslinger, the prophet asked, “And you, Ollie?”
“Salomone Delluci,” replied the erstwhile Ollie. “Maybe one day you’ll get the full story, but for today know that I possess bodies, and that this…” Salomone lifted his bundles of clothing over his stomach to show a old bullet wound with strange alchemical symbols spiraling outward from it. “…is my identity, the only thing I consistently have in my physical appearance.” He let go of his shirt. “And yes, I’d feel more blood on my hands should I refuse.”
Graham looked condescendingly over at Richard, he felt this may would refuse.
“We save the world from Hell?” Richard sounded near sarcastic in tone.
The prophet smiled painfully, “Yes.”
“Then I’ll join you,” Richard said flipping up his eye patch and removing a diminutive vial from the socket his eye had once occupied. He took a small sip of the everclear that was within it and said a bit delayed, “And I’ll drink to it.”
“Then, you, what’s your name?” Graham asked as he shuffled a deck of cards he removed from a pocket in his suit.
“Eli Manoah,” he smiled.
“Eli, then?” Graham said eyebrow cocked, staring into the deck. He drew a playing card and saw it to be the Jack of Spades. “So what do you do?”
“Pardon?”
“We’re all here because we’re different, modern Herculeses and Beowulfs. I manipulate gravity’s effects on objects through touch. Salomone claims to possess others, Mr. Cory here seems to be able to pass through walls and stop trains.”
“I change my density at will, kid,” Cory snapped.
“Right, so, Eli, am I safe in the assumption that you create illusions and send people to bed?” Eli’s shoulders laughed while his smile remained set.
“Essentially, all through the medium of the Dream Time.” Graham focused on his shuffling of the deck and never met Eli’s eyes, instead simply raising a brow with a half interested “hm.”
Tension grew within the room as only the sibilance of the shuffling deck spoke.
The tension finally snapped as Eli set his hands on the table and spoke, “Well then, omelets are still lukewarm I’m sure. You will all need the energy if we’re going after a man who opened Hell.”
Richard and Graham sat down at the table that Salomone already occupied, Richard slipping the vial back into his socket and placing the patch back down over it.“How do you expect to find this man, kid?” Richard asked Eli.
“A visit to the nearest bar,” Eli’s smile crept up only half his face, “If anyone’s seen Hell they’ve surely been through the Winchester.”
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Ghosts
The Ghosts are an elite group of soldiers trained during the Cold War to be invisible, lethal, and invincible. They use techniques such as poisoning water, setting fire, etc. They utilizes uncanny reflexes in battle, and when two Ghosts find themselves on the opposite side of a battlefield the resulting combat can take hours between only two combatants.
Affected by a sort of stress-atavism, the vigorous training a Ghost receives “breaks” part of their minds allowing the trainee to access more than the average human’s ten percent of brain power. This power manifests itself differently in each Ghost, ranging from mild “danger sense” to the ability to raise actual spirits on a battlefield. Though many Ghosts have existed during the Cold War, some have shown no signs of aging.
Bird, when injured and intimidated, gave a list of the Ghosts, though some have been encountered already.
Hunger
An elderly Ghost whose favorite technique is starving his enemies. He developed a photosynthetic body.
Rat
A nimble, lanky Ghost who is an expert climber. He uses a lightweight .50 cal. Developed double joints and a “clinging” grip.
Asp
An Egyptian woman know as a master of poisons. Has a special rapport with nature.
Asp had attacked the Knights in the Anti-Biotics lab and planned on killing all but the “Missing Children.” Bird intervened and Asp ended up dead by Salomone’s revolver.
Jak Spectre claims that Asp was possessed by Haunt. Asp was also revealed as the woman in the Winchester from whom Graham had received a number.
Flair
A middle-aged man who keeps a feather in his cap. He is known for his creative and flamboyant kills. Has a danger sense.
Bird
The original Ghost, and still considered the leader since she taught all the rest. She loves the Colt SAA “Peacemaker” and developed long distance telepathic communication.
Bird has agreed to train Guy and any other Knight. Jak calls her “one of the last good ones.” Bird is also a contact for the team.
Haunt
Died in a battle with Asp during the Cold War. Had power as a medium, able to raise actual ghosts from a battlefield.
Jak claims that he possessed Asp, and was in Salomone’s body (“Slim” Medici’s body at the time). Slim ran escaped after Salomone left him and when the team came to hunt him down, was able to summon the ghosts of suicide victims and the ghost of Steve Clide in the subway. He is now tranquilized and captured.
Spear
A practical Ghost with an impressively large build. He uses whatever weapon would make the most sense. Bird did not reveal his power.
Arrow
An impressive sniper who Bird killed when he refused to kill her and take her place. He had a compartmentalized mind and independently moveable eyes.
Clay
A Ghost master of disguise. Wears complex make-up, masks, prosthetics and suits. He Developed an elastic face as well as a mimicry vocal chord.
Hero
The most feared Ghost. Instinctively knows things; enemy strategies, location, and plans. He is immensely charismatic and people bend to his will. He cares for battle and feels not much else. He has been killed before but always returns. This characteristic earned him the moniker “Hero the Immortal.” He is the ideal Ghost and the paradigm to which all other Ghosts were conformed. Hero uses psychokinesis and the manipulation of raw forces (Chance, Fate, elements, Greed, etc.).
Oracle
A Ghost trainee that never developed a power until her strict training drove her to heroine. She then began to have visions that came true. It was Oracle who started the entire “Missing Children” phenomenon, claiming that the Ghost that controlled the Children “held the Earth by the throat.”
Affected by a sort of stress-atavism, the vigorous training a Ghost receives “breaks” part of their minds allowing the trainee to access more than the average human’s ten percent of brain power. This power manifests itself differently in each Ghost, ranging from mild “danger sense” to the ability to raise actual spirits on a battlefield. Though many Ghosts have existed during the Cold War, some have shown no signs of aging.
Bird, when injured and intimidated, gave a list of the Ghosts, though some have been encountered already.
Hunger
An elderly Ghost whose favorite technique is starving his enemies. He developed a photosynthetic body.
Rat
A nimble, lanky Ghost who is an expert climber. He uses a lightweight .50 cal. Developed double joints and a “clinging” grip.
Asp
An Egyptian woman know as a master of poisons. Has a special rapport with nature.
Asp had attacked the Knights in the Anti-Biotics lab and planned on killing all but the “Missing Children.” Bird intervened and Asp ended up dead by Salomone’s revolver.
Jak Spectre claims that Asp was possessed by Haunt. Asp was also revealed as the woman in the Winchester from whom Graham had received a number.
Flair
A middle-aged man who keeps a feather in his cap. He is known for his creative and flamboyant kills. Has a danger sense.
Bird
The original Ghost, and still considered the leader since she taught all the rest. She loves the Colt SAA “Peacemaker” and developed long distance telepathic communication.
Bird has agreed to train Guy and any other Knight. Jak calls her “one of the last good ones.” Bird is also a contact for the team.
Haunt
Died in a battle with Asp during the Cold War. Had power as a medium, able to raise actual ghosts from a battlefield.
Jak claims that he possessed Asp, and was in Salomone’s body (“Slim” Medici’s body at the time). Slim ran escaped after Salomone left him and when the team came to hunt him down, was able to summon the ghosts of suicide victims and the ghost of Steve Clide in the subway. He is now tranquilized and captured.
Spear
A practical Ghost with an impressively large build. He uses whatever weapon would make the most sense. Bird did not reveal his power.
Arrow
An impressive sniper who Bird killed when he refused to kill her and take her place. He had a compartmentalized mind and independently moveable eyes.
Clay
A Ghost master of disguise. Wears complex make-up, masks, prosthetics and suits. He Developed an elastic face as well as a mimicry vocal chord.
Hero
The most feared Ghost. Instinctively knows things; enemy strategies, location, and plans. He is immensely charismatic and people bend to his will. He cares for battle and feels not much else. He has been killed before but always returns. This characteristic earned him the moniker “Hero the Immortal.” He is the ideal Ghost and the paradigm to which all other Ghosts were conformed. Hero uses psychokinesis and the manipulation of raw forces (Chance, Fate, elements, Greed, etc.).
Oracle
A Ghost trainee that never developed a power until her strict training drove her to heroine. She then began to have visions that came true. It was Oracle who started the entire “Missing Children” phenomenon, claiming that the Ghost that controlled the Children “held the Earth by the throat.”
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