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.”
Colt “Peacemaker” SAA .45
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.
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.
Graham received this revolver from Jak. Bigger kick and bigger wounds, though two less shots than the Taurus he had previously.
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