Ripper frowned as he stood beside the wall he was about to pass through for the hundredth time. He was an assassin. A spy. He could kill anyone, anywhere; the only real way to evade him was to be constantly on the move; the moment you went to bed... he could slip through the floor, the wall, the bed... and then quietly pull a chunk of their heart into another dimension with himself on his way out. A particularly terrible heart attack would follow.

In an in-person fight, he could simple fade into the ethereal and back to avoid a punch... and then send the enemy's arm there. He solidly believed that if it came down to it, he could kill Spike or Valkyrie that way; or at the very least, strand them in the ethereal with no way back. But.. Director Thomes had forbidden him from trying it unless they tried to kill him; no dragging them there just as a test.

Maybe he wasn't big, flashy. He couldn't pick up a train, or wipe out an army. But when it came to a one-on-one fight, he could kill anyone on the planet. And while all of these people were fighting, and people were dying... he was playing delivery-boy.

For the past couple days, he had been making regular trips; others were grabbing supplies and raw materials, and he was phasing through the wall, dropping into an otherwise inaccessible tunnel, walking two miles, and phasing through a giant mass of solid rock... to reach a bunker full of worthless old idiots trapped in a bunker who, without him, or one of a tiny number of other metahumans like him, would be doomed to starve to death. And as far as he knew, he was the only surviving one with his particular powerset; the others weren't even in the US.

His duffel bag was full of MREs, flash drives that the occupants could load up with whatever they wanted... and more components for the transmitter. Right now, reception in and out of the bunker was spotty, difficult. Detailed messages were all hand-carried as flash drives by Ripper himself. He dropped the duffel bag beside the wall; he'd be coming back for it in a few minutes.

He was risking exposure to radiation. To toxic chemicals. To bio-weapons. And why? So these morons could be safe and sound inside their bunker issuing orders.

Heck, he could only see a vague shadow of the real world from the ethereal, so every time he passed through all that rock, there was a tiny chance he'd come out embedded in someone else... swapping bits and pieces of them to the other side. He'd done it before. It was... an unpleasant experience, and even worse, he'd inhaled people's blood on multiple occasions.

Director Thomes had given him intel to pass to the President, asking him to return as soon as McCarthy responded... and told Ripper to do what he believed was best for the country. There had been a strong implication that he should sabotage the transmitter and just find that his services were urgently needed elsewhere, so that he could smoothly take over and prevent the idiot in chief from starting world war three when they were already living in an apocalyptic hellscape... if the president didn't see reason.

As Ripper carefully moved through the rock, he changed course from his usual path to a storage room that was usually unoccupied; here in the ethereal, thought was action; he simply willed himself in a direction and he could, slowly, float there.

He thought this was the right place. The tunnel he had pulled through every time he entered was part of the what was supposed to be the massive ventilation system for the bunker; CO2 filtration, air circulation in the bunker could keep it running for months. If the tunnel hadn't collapsed, it would have been able to pass air in indefinitely; and of course, served as an escape route. As it was... if the filtration system were to break down, everyone inside the bunker would suffocate within hours.

So, he'd been ordered to do what was best for the country. Not to sabotage any equipment, specifically. Not to go do some other job. What was best for the country. He could drag anyone over two hundred pounds out of that bunker, through the rock, and into the tunnel. Smaller kids, he could do two at a time.

The President was not less than two hundred pounds. Nor were any of the fat, stupid old men that were in charge... or, unfortunately, most of the secret service agents. Most of them were on the bigger, heavier side. He'd already pulled out a few of their families on earlier trips, though most had wanted to remain in the bunker.

Ripper wasn't sure if McCarthy would do the right thing. Frankly, it didn't matter. Thomes's idea of solving the problem was temporarily taking over until the crisis was passed, then letting the politician handle things. Probably why he'd talked about what would happen if an EMP hit the transmitter, and with Ripper gone off on whatever important errand, lost all communications for a while.

The only real solution to saving the country was for the contents of that bunker to kept safely away from any sort of leadership... permanently. Congress had died from the nukes. The supreme court. This was a perfect chance for the country to have a clean slate, start over in a new world without all the old baggage...

Ripper reappeared in the real world, hearing a brief shriek of metal; and grimaced as a fan blade smacked into his arm as the structure fell apart; he'd actually popped out inside the air circulating mechanism itself, and likely everyone in the bunker could hear the shrieking of it starting to come apart.

He shifted a few more times; popping in and out; making sure that the filters were ruined, the entire system broken beyond repair; and casually jabbed one of the broken fan blades through the filters. An in-depth examination would reveal the cause; but for now... well. If this wasn't enough, he'd have to take further steps. Time to go back for the bag.

***

Bobby was... horrified by what he was seeing. Uncle Nicky had given him a nice, solid red friction-resistant suit, an air-tight breather; and they'd even given him a radiation-resistant outer coating that they warned him would eventually wear away; and need to be reapplied with every trip.

When he'd first started recovering from decades of malnourishment and mistreatment, he'd been exilherated at the experience. Running at hundreds of miles per hour, he could literally walk on water now; and up walls, within reason. Learning to fight, to move properly... it was getting better with every day. He'd been looking forward to the fight with the Jotun; as one of the speedsters that could be expected to be faster than the aliens, he would get to use a rifle and a plasma sword! It looked like a lightsaber, sort-of! Just... shorter.

He was gonna fight aliens! He hadn't picked out a codename yet, like his sister, but maybe he could be... SwiftStrike? But... that didn't pan out. The Navy did the heavy lifting.

And... here he was. Checking the irradiated ruins of New York, running down a list of addresses looking for people off of a list... with a counter ticking away telling him how much radiation he was receiving, and how long until he needed to back off.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He'd seen thousands of corpses, maybe even millions. The ones in the city weren't too bad; they were mostly just skeletons or ash. The ones outside the city... they'd died hard. Many of them had clearly spent their last hours crawling, blind, suffering from far beyond lethal levels of radiation sickness. One corpse was laying at a wall, fingers ruined, scratch marks running down the wall... maybe ten feet from a doorway he'd clearly been trying to reach.

The doorway was one of the ones on Bobby's list. He grimaced, as he stepped over it, opening the front door.

The counter slowed almost immediately. Inside the home was... not safe, but far better than the outside. He could see the warping; he was moving too fast. The door was going to fall apart and collapse once he was gone. He circled the floor, as he checked the database. This house belonged to... Oh. The folks who had adopted Jasmine. There should be another one of his cousins, here, if they lived, and her adoptive parents.

Judging by the body outside, they were likely down one.

He noticed the windows starting to crack; good lord, they'd withstood a nuke and the overpressure he was making was finishing them off? He needed to... well. The house seemed to be empty, not like anyone would care about broken windows now.

Except... there. A basement. As he descended the steps, the clicking slowed even further; it would take days to reach a lethal level down here; and saw... hope. An older woman. A teenager. The woman was crying, tears leaking down her face. The teenage.. boy? Honestly, Bobby couldn't tell; the hair was cut short, and the face looked... familiar... was tracking Bobby.

Bobby was moving so quickly that the old woman hadn't noticed his arrival, but the kid had, and was reaching for... a brick, probably, to throw at him. Not bad.

He chuckled to himself as he unfolded a tarp from his bag; deftly avoiding the brick as he tossed it over the duo; slowing down as much as he could to do as little damage as possible while he covered them up. The old woman still hadn't noticed; the kid was struggling.

He started up the stairs; and down the street. The old woman was starting to struggle; she'd realized something was wrong, but the kid had stopped; apparently realizing this was a rescue.

Bobby could stop pretty fast; and the kid might survive it, too; but not the woman. As he saw his target approaching, and the clicking from the outdoors slowed to a more survivable level, he slowed down; and stopped, beside the train; gently opening the tarp, laying it out... and then heading to the tub of radiation-refracting paint to smother himself in it again... before sprinting back to the northeast.

As the woman looked around at her surroundings; from her perspective, she'd been in her basement, a hundred miles away, just a minute ago, and now, she was... somewhere else? A train, sitting on a track, amidst a crowd of people?

A man in a radiation suit was standing there, directing people onto the train. "If you could please board the vehicle in an orderly fashion. We're scanning everyone to make sure nobody's infected, then the train will be headed west. We expect fallout to be in this area in a few hours. We've got a whole team of people out doing search and rescue, every speedster that the US government could convince to help, so don't be surprised if things just appear or disappear on you. Right now, the train is mostly empty, but I'm hoping that won't be the case by the time we leave, so try to think small."

***

Hundreds of miles to the southwest, six soldiers were lined behind a barricade that crossed a bridge over the Sabine river; national guardsmen who hadn't really expected to see a war, after the Afghanistan pull-out, then the Ascension incident which settled down so quickly... and never really got to be involved in this one. Corporal Grey was in charge at the moment; he had one of the new scanners that were being mass-produced like mad in every fabricator that could make them, and with New Orleans and the entire state of Louisiana... and everything to its east... written off as a loss, his people were one of thousands of checkpoints preventing possibly infected people from getting across the border into Texas.

Complicating things were the chemical weapons attacks; plenty of seemingly deathly ill people didn't have a disease at all, and could recover without a problem if they just had access to clean food and water... and time. Or the right counter-agents.

He didn't have any of those counter-agents here... but he did have a scanner that, in theory, could use a tiny blood sample to give him an answer in thirty seconds as to whether a subject had any of the warning signs some egg-head had chosen as indicators of a bio-weapon. It wasn't a guarantee; but it was better than just trapping everyone together and letting them all die.

Grey could have told them it was hopeless. Someone could be swimming across the river beneath them right now, and likely get away with it. But some general had decided to cover every road and known crossing with a handful of troops and try to use the river, and the toledo bend lake to the north, as a natural barrier... they didn't even have a vehicle, the truck had dropped them off on the way to its other stops further south.

He looked up from the barricade; they had been chatting quietly about the Jotun, about the nukes. Three vehicles were approaching the barricade... he glanced at his men. "Rifles up. If they rush us, shoot." He took a deep breath; and pulled on his mask, turning on the O2, before approaching the first vehicle. "Alright, folks. By order of President McCarthy, the state of Louisiana is under quarantine and martial law. Anyone crossing the border is subject to a blood test. Refusal and attempt to cross regardless will be met with lethal force. Do we understand this?"

He sensed danger before he even looked at the man. From the gun rack to the confederate flag labels, this didn't look like someone that was about to listen... and sure enough, the man gunned it, charging for the barricade, almost running over Grey.

One of the soldiers fired a single shot; a barely visible spike strip in front of the barricades popped the tires.. and the truck swerved out of control, slammed into the guard rail, not too fast; but fast enough to send the driver through his windshield, over the rail... and into the river below. The passenger seemed... stunned, and Grey sighed as he walked around to the other side. "Did you hear me?"

The young woman reached out her hand. "Blood test? Thats... thats fine. Can I.. can I go ahead if I pass?" He pressed the scanner against her finger, and looked at her. She looked... manic. Afraid. After a few seconds, he sighed. "Yes ma'am, you're clear. Rice, Levi. You two get this truck off the road. If one of these other folks is fine with giving her a ride west, we'll let them. If not, we'll call her a ride."

He walked on to the second car.. an immaculate escalade that looked as if it had just driven off of the showroom floor... which hadn't moved an inch during the incident. "By order of President McCarthy.." A white hand reached out. A soft russian accent emerged. Inside the vehicle, there were a pair of men... one of them wearing a surgical mask.

Chain smiled at the man. "Feel free to test us all. If you don't mind, most of my people prefer to keep masks on under the circumstances; but a blood test would be fine."

Grey calmly checked both of the men; they looked and acted eerily similar to each other... but that wasn't his problem. He waved the second car through, and moved on the the third. A single black man driving a pickup truck... with what looked to be eight more probably teenagers like the two from the escalade in the back. All pale. All fairly slim. None of them spoke a word, simply kept their masks on, extended their arms...

Grey tested them each, one by one; and then nodded at the barricade. As Private Rice drove the truck with its mangled tires off the other side of the road, the others pulled the barricades aside; and Chain calmly crossed the border. From it's estimates, Texas would likely fall as well; that one lunatic who had gone over into the river might very well be contagious for all it could tell, and if so, might just swim up on the other side... and spread whatever horrific illness he had acquired in Atlanta on to Dallas.

Chain did, of course, have more samples. If need be, they could be spread further... but for now, that would be counter-productive. This was most of the surviving bodies Chain had in north america. If it were going to use them for anything other than simply starting a new hide-out, it needed to be for something big.