Volume 8: Telophase
Issue 1: Red
Jannette Adrian Churchwell
By Nova
Below us, a line of cars miles long clogged the interstate. Their thousands of glittering glass windshields caught the dim, red light of the late afternoon sun, filtered through the smoky sky. It almost looked to sparkle orangish-red, like a river of burning cinders. Even through the headset, I could hear the powerful thrumming of the helicopter’s blades above my head. I clung to my seatbelt, desperately trying to ignore the turbulence, the flashes of gunfire or worse on the ground, the fact that Holly never picked up… There were more serious manners to attend to.
Redding was burning.
I woke up just a few hours ago to my phone exploding from messages and calls from pretty much everyone I knew. They all said the same thing: that there had been an attack at the Extinction Refuge in Northern California… and the First Way had taken credit for it.
I was already in costume by the time Ramirez had called me. “You’re deploying,” he told me. “Get your ass to SFO in twenty minutes.”
I think Ripple picked me up, though everything between leaving my apartment and getting on Starlight’s hyper-advanced aircraft was a blur. I kept looking at the last thing Holly sent me: a picture of her posing with some dodos, taken just an hour or two before I woke up…
She had told me that a few Chapel High students had won some kind of free trip to the Extinction Refuge, and she was asked to chaperone. I had joked that it must had been a bribe to keep her happy after the whole doppelgänger situation, that she should enjoy the paid vacation…
And now my calls went straight to voicemail. All I could think about was Holly choking on sarin, or worse, eaten by a fucking dinosaur since that was also a thing now?
I only realized we had landed when I saw the soldiers out the window, marching in formation. The sight shocked me back into reality, struck me with the scale of the situation. They told us then that the Extinction Refuge was only the beginning; that the First Way had attacked towns all around Northern California, and most terrifying of all… Red Queen herself, the Red Queen—the terrifying leader of the First Way—was commanding an assault on Redding…
We weren’t going to the Extinction Refuge, not yet. Something about “saving the people we can save now” or whatever. It was a logical move: defend the most important city in this part of the state, protect the hundred-thousand-or-so residents… It was logical. Very logical.
I felt sick with how logical it was. It made sense—it was the right thing to do. But every cell in my body screamed to charge headlong into the Extinction Refuge. It was barely a month ago that I had nearly lost Holly. I couldn’t let something happen to her again.
Kelly told me to load up on a helicopter. The First Way had a small army of villains on the ground, and an unknown number of gun-toting militiamen. We had to deploy, to stop their advance, push them back. “We don’t have a choice,” Kelly had said in the briefing room. “We have to draw the line here.”
Maybe Ripple knew what I was thinking because—before she and other more mobile types left to clear landing zones for the helicopters—she grabbed me by the arm and leaned in close. She whispered, “We really don’t have a choice.”
Somehow, it didn’t make me feel any better.
“Glad I didn’t drive today. Gridlock looks downright unbearable,” Mr. Mystery said as he looked down at the traffic jam below us, his voice crackling in over the headset. The other passengers—a few heavily armed and armored FBI operators alongside unarmed paramedic types, squeezed between boxes of supplies—shot him glares. Mr. Mystery’s face was unreadable under his white morphsuit, but by the way he fidgeted with his tophat in his lap, his discomfort was apparent.
“A-apologies,” he muttered, “just trying to lighten the mood.”
“We have a job to do,” the biggest of the FBI guys said, leaning forward in his seat. He was the leader, and had told me his name multiple times but I honestly just… couldn’t remember it. “We’re guessing there’s gonna be around twenty to thirty thousand civilians trapped in the combat zone. That’s a lot of potential casualties. We need you two to be ready to operate at one-hundred-and-ten percent.”
“I would have guessed they all would have joined the jam,” Mr. Mystery said.
Big FBI guy shook his head. “Don’t count on it. Most of the city never got the chance to evacuate.”
“So what’s the situation on the ground?” Mr. Mystery asked.
“I don’t know anything else except,” Big FBI guy pointed at a hillside to the west, “be ready for a lightshow in-”
As if to interrupt him, a trio a fighter jets swooped in from above us. They pulled up at the last second, rocketing into the smokey clouds and out of sight. The hill suddenly blossomed in massive ruptures of fire as three huge explosions ripped through the thick wooded hillside. A second or two later, a shockwave hit us in the helicopter alongside a banging noise that—even through the noise-canceling headset—rang in my ears.
The helicopter shuddered in the shockwave, but remained in the air as it swayed back and forth. “Jesus fucking Christ,” FBI guy said through the ringing of my ears. “We’ve lost control of this entire fucking situation.”
“D-do you think they got them?” I asked, a sudden surge of hope welling up. Maybe we could go straight to the Extinction Refuge now…
“I would certainly hope so,” Mr. Mystery said.
“Not a chance,” FBI guy said. “Military’s not telling us everything… but from what I’m hearing that was targeting a-an… escape route or something. Our mission hasn’t changed.”
I nodded, distantly, and turned to look back out over the burning city. We were descending now, toward what looked like a parking lot flanked by buildings that belched smoke. “The LZ should be clear,” FBI guy said. “Apparently they hit the area with some mortar fire a few minutes ago.”
I didn’t ask who hit the area with mortars, but hoped it was the military. The thought left me sick, like shelling a city was somehow okay if it was my team that was doing it…
With a sudden drop that left my stomach in my throat, the helicopter lurched downwards—covering the last few hundred feet in moments. The ground approached us with shocking speed before—in an equally shocking jolt—the helicopter hooked up and rapidly decelerated. We were on the ground in moments. Upon landing, we scrambled out of the helicopter, pulling out boxes of medical supplies, fresh water, food, and other resources to establish a supply point for our operation.
“Alright!” FBI guy shouted over the whirling din of the helicopter’s blades. “Let’s get this all set up, and then we’re gonna start clearing the buildings in this sector!”
I set a box of first aid kits on the ground and took a moment to glance at our surroundings. The smoke was thicker on the ground, and—between that and the dust kicked up by the helicopter’s blades—visibility wasn’t great. Still, I could tell we were in some strip mall’s parking lot. The parking lot was mostly empty. Although a few abandoned cars were scattered around, almost all of them had shattered windows. I hoped that their owners had managed to evacuate, or find shelter… Maybe in the dollar store and clothing retailer nearby. On the other side of the street, I made out a line of fast food joints burning.
“Secondary objective is to rendezvous with any survivors of Redding PD or the local hero and villain groups!” FBI guy continued. “They have a better lay of the land than we do, they’ll be needed to clear the Firsties from the city.” I nodded, during major crises, everyone needed to work together. That included villain groups, since the only reason most of them were allowed to operate their criminal enterprises without a cruise missile knocking down their door was because they helped out during times like this. “That means you need to confirm your targets before opening fire! We don’t want any friendly fire on our hands.”
I wondered how the military was “confirming” their targets before bombing the city, but knew better than to dwell on it.
“Ripple will be here soon. Hopefully she’s done some recon of the area, and can point us in a good place to start,” Big FBI guy said. The helicopter, just as quickly as it had descended, rose into the air. “Next one should be here in ten minutes,” he continued, “it’s going to bring some reinfor-”
A few hundred feet into the air, the helicopter exploded—ripped in half by a ring of gleaming golden light as big as a person. The ring spun through the air, arcing backwards. “Fucking move!” FBI guy shouted as the helicopter’s flaming wreckage rained down on us, “Find cover!”
The helicopter’s burning tail rotor smashed to the ground behind me; I was only barely able to scramble out from under it. White-hot shrapnel peppered my back as I ran, and I cast my gaze around—scanning the horizon for the flying ring. I spotted it dipping behind the dollar store. Where was it going? Where did it come from? I desperately searched the chaos for a source, but through the smoke I could barely see anything. All I heard was screaming.
The crash had left our little supply point in shambles. Half of our supplies were on fire; a fire which was quickly running out of control, spreading out from the helicopter’s still burning fuel tanks. About ten or twenty feet away from me, I saw an arm—with no sign of its owner. I had no idea how someone had lost their arm in the past few seconds. Maybe lopped off by one of the helicopter’s blades? Behind me, there was someone on fire—futilely beating their fists against a section of fuselage that had landed on top of them. I was by their side in a moment, my powers tracing through charred skin and seared muscles. His pelvis was crushed, his body covered in still burning third-degree burns. As the screaming faded, I realized he had seconds left before an unstoppable cascade of organ failure would overtake him.
With one hand, pushing with all my strength, I was able to wedge the fuselage upwards by just a few critical inches. With the other hand, I set to work. And, as I pulled him from the wreckage, I focused on pushing back against the worst of the damage. I regenerated overheated tissues in the most important organs first: the heart, the brain, the lungs… But his skin remained burning. I tore off my lab coat and covered him with it. It was made out of flame resistant material… In a pinch it could serve as a fire blanket.
It worked, but—before I could celebrate—he, almost instantly, went into shock. “No, no, no, no…” I muttered, reopening capillaries, veins, sealing open arteries. It wasn’t enough; he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I put my powers into overdrive, maximizing the capacity of his lungs, redirecting blood flow to his most critical organs… As the smoke pressed in on us, I resorted to building ATP at the atomic level in his brain. Anything, anything, to stave off the wave of death that seemed one step ahead of me.
He coughed, taking a deep breath of his own volition. He was still unconscious but… breathing. He wasn’t stable, not by a long shot. The upper layer of his epidermis was mostly burnt away, his less important organs were toast—literally in a few cases—and I hadn’t done anything about his shattered pelvis. However, if we got him to a hospital within the hour, he’d probably live even without my assistance. Satisfied, I pulled my lab coat off my patient. Donning it, I tried not to think about what made the soot that now coated it…
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“Open fire!” FBI guy screamed over the chaos. I looked up from my patient just in time to see four agents raise their rifles, and—in a deafening staccato—fire in unison at the sky. I turned to follow their tracers and saw, rising above the strip mall, who was undeniably their target… and our assailant.
He was naked, but hung in the center of two spinning, golden rings of shining energy—the same rings that had torn through our helicopter like it was made of cardboard. He was completely hairless with marble skin, and golden gleaming eyes… But it wasn’t right. His skin had an inhuman texture to it. It wasn’t like marble, it was marble; hard and shining. His eyes, too, shone like metal reflecting light. Inside the rings he was unmoving—static as a statue, to the point I couldn’t even see his chest rise and fall with each breath. His head didn’t turn to face the FBI gunmen. Instead, his whole body did, rotating through the air to align himself with them. He looked like some sculpture from the Renaissance in almost every sense—even down to his musculature, which appeared an image of perfection, hewn from marble rather than flesh.
No one really understood how powers worked, except they had something to do with the third helix. If you could activate the third helix—get it to bond with a subject’s DNA—they manifested powers. Beyond that, it was mostly conjecture. People had a tendency to develop powers after some kind of accident, like I had, and those powers tended to reflect the accident in some way. Likewise, children born to people with powers had powers that resembled, but did not match, their parents’. Even with decades of research, “natural” powers remained very poorly understood. The hows and whys of the way they worked were pretty much entirely unknown.
However, naturally developed powers almost never hurt you. Sure, you had cases like mine where they changed some physical feature, like the way my powers turned my hair gray. And everyone had heard the occasional horror story… about how someone’s powers had turned them into slime or whatever. But even those people were functional, albeit warped.
Powerchems though… Those could fuck you up. Even the most carefully crafted ones—the ones that were brewed in the labs of the world’s most powerful countries and corporations—had mixed results. Everyone liked to remember the success stories, like Champion, but no one wanted to think about how half of Champion’s rogue’s gallery was made of the escaped experiments of those early powerchem trials. Even today, the best brewed powerchems could kill you—or turn you into a mindless monster.
I had to imagine that the First Way did not have the best brewed powerchems and—as the man-in-the-rings had no outward signs of life—I also suspected that his dose had some lasting consequences.
The FBI’s bullets riddled the man-in-the-rings, who didn’t flinch as they ricocheted off his marble skin. The only sign that he was even aware of the FBI’s assault came when the rings’ spinning intensified—swirling around him at a terrifying speed, encasing him in a semi-transparent golden sphere. The spinning rings caught the bullets as they came, shattering or deflecting them in little bursts of sparks.
“Reloading!” one of the FBI agents shouted, tossing her spent magazine to the ground. There was no sign of it, but the man-in-the-rings must have heard her—or sensed the drop in gunfire—as, without warning, one of the rings suddenly flew off of him. It arced, parabolically, through the air, towards the ground. Towards the agents.
I shouted something at them. A warning. Fruitlessly and pointlessly. They were quite aware of what spun through the air towards them. They scrambled every which way, but the ring seemed to turn to follow them… homing in on its target. It had descended hundreds of feet in seconds, and was within reach of one of the FBI agents, when I heard it. A distinct snap, surprisingly clear over the chaos.
A translucent blue rectangle, as large as a semi-truck, appeared in the air between the ring and the agent. The ring screeched against it, spinning into it like some golden, shining saw blade. While cracks ran through the shield at the point of contact, it held.
“Stitch!” Mr. Mystery shouted. He emerged from the other side of the burning wreckage, donning his top hat in a flourish. “To me!”
I hurried beside him, standing behind the cracking shield. “Find cover!” Mr. Mystery shouted at the FBI agents, who—without even muttering a thanks—scurried off. “I’ll hold him off,” Mr. Mystery said, turning to me. “You, my dear, just… do what you do best.”
“A-alright,” I said, hoping my lack of confidence wasn’t apparent in my voice. Mr. Mystery was strong, but his powers… He could make spaces where the laws of physics went “strange,” in his own words. It was a great power, and gave him a diverse utility that I wish I had, but if bullets didn’t scratch the floating man, there was nothing Mr. Mystery could do to stop him.
But his shields could at least buy us time. Give me space for triage. I doubted the man I healed just a few moments ago was the only person hurt in the crash.
“Hopefully Ripple will be here soon,” Mr. Mystery said, casting his gaze upwards at the man-in-the-rings. I couldn’t make out his expression under his blank white morphsuit, but I had the sense it resembled something like steely determination.
“Go!” Mr. Mystery shouted as the spinning ring pulled back from his shield. It hurtled backwards, up high into the air, and encircled the floating man again. Mr. Mystery snapped his fingers again and the blue shield disappeared. Without warning or sign that anything was about to happen, both rings split off from the man—hurtling down at us at opposite, mirrored angles. As I turned to charge back towards the wreckage, I heard Mr. Mystery snap his fingers twice and—out of the corner of my eye—I saw two shields appear to intercept the rings.
I didn’t see the rings smash into the shields—but I heard them struggling against each other, making a sound like a car crash mixed with nails on a chalkboard. I reached the wreckage, throwing burning hot metal plates aside as I dug through the debris looking for survivors. Any survivors.
Behind me, I heard the struggle cease suddenly. Mr. Mystery snapped his fingers, then snapped again as the rings returned again and again. I stole a glance at him, his coattails flapping in the heat of the fire. He clutched his tophat to his head, his hands trembling as he did—clearly he couldn’t keep it up forever. And, as I found two corpses in just as many minutes, I knew we had run out of time.
I tore myself from the wreckage, choking on smoke and burning fumes. At the same time, the floating man pulled his rings back from Mr. Mystery’s shields, spinning them around himself. As I braced for yet another attack, I noticed the man pause. He must have noticed it before I did; a black shape hurtling toward him, silhouetted against the red, smoky sky. The shape spun suddenly, a thin black line extending from it and striking the man’s rings with an earsplitting, unnatural crack.
Between coughs, I sighed in relief. Ripple had finally arrived.
Ripple flipped backwards from the man-in-the-rings, landing on top of one of the burning fast food joints. Before he could react, Ripple was back into the air in a booming leap that made the fast food place collapse in on itself. The man floated backwards—maybe trying to escape—but Ripple was far too fast. She swung her spear like a baseball bat, striking the spinning rings. They struggled against the spear, spinning even faster, like they were trying to carve right through it. A terrible screeching emanated from the clash, which intensified as the rings spun faster and faster…
I managed a smile under my mask. The floating man, assuming he was even aware of anything after his powerchem doses, clearly had no idea who Ripple was. Anyone who did would never, ever let her charge up like that.
Once, Ripple had confessed to me that she sometimes felt like a battery. She absorbed kinetic energy and could spit it out again with no harm to herself. She could even steal a little bit of energy from the Earth’s rotation around the sun if she had to. And, naturally, she could let it out again. Her powers made her immune to most forms of damage, able to leap high into the air, and the more energy she built up…
The more devastating her strikes were.
Ripple let it all out at once, in a strike that—in a blink of an eye—shattered both of the man’s rings. She carried through the rings, striking his side with the length of her spear. A deafening boom emanated through the air as the man jerked sideways. He hurtled downwards, towards the helicopter’s wreckage. Like a marble comet, he smased to the ground with a shattering sound that left a deep crater in the pavement.
“Marvelous, marvelous!” Mr. Mystery said, practically dancing as Ripple gently landed on the street a few hundred feet away. I hurried to the crater, where the man lay. His body was bent at a ninety-degree angle, and his skin was, quite literally, cracked. He stared, blankly, up at the air with those metallic, golden eyes. He wasn’t breathing, but I wasn’t sure he was before either…
“Stitch, Mystery!” Ripple called, striding towards us. “Sorry I was late.”
Mr. Mystery shook his head. “Tardy or not, you are here now. Thank you. That strange man was… a force to be reckoned with.”
“What’s the status of our baseliners?” Ripple asked, turning to me.
“A-ah… Two casualties…” I said, unable to keep myself from glancing back at the man in the crater. “One person in critical condition…”
Ripple nodded, carefully surveying the wreckage, the red flames reflected in her glossy black helmet. “And the rest of them? I heard we had more than three agents and medics with us.”
“They’re-” I started, but stopped myself. I looked the way I had last seen the FBI agents run—down the street towards what looked like a gas station in the distance. “They should be somewhere over there…”
Ripple suddenly gasped. I spun around. “What is-” I began to ask, but—as I followed her gaze—I saw it.
She stood on the other side of the parking lot, staring down at the crater. She was a strangely imposing figure; though imposing in the same way a dictator might be—almost purely from reputation alone. Indeed, she wasn’t scary-looking or anything like that at all. In fact, it was almost the opposite. Down her shoulders flowed long black hair, which starkly contrasted against her pale white skin. She wore a gray vest over a white, short-sleeved button up which she—for some reason—had paired with a black skirt and black loafers. The only thing she wore that struck me as “villainous” was a red mask that looked like a sneering demon. If it wasn’t for the crimson aura which clung tightly to her body, shimmering like heat over a hot blacktop, she’d look pretty much like a normal middle-aged woman doing a low-effort Halloween costume for her office party.
Red Queen, leader of the First Way.
The sight of her made me want to throw up, especially when I noticed—in her hand—she clutched one of the paramedics by the head. When had she gotten to him? He was still alive, struggling futilely against Red Queen’s aura-wreathed grip.
Instinctively, I took half a step forward—but stopped myself as her crimson hand tightened around the medic’s scalp. Could I even make it over there before she killed him?
“Ophanim,” Red Queen sighed, her voice surprisingly shrill. “You really turned out to be nothing after all. Such a disappointment.” I followed her gaze back into the crater. Was that the name of the marbled man who now laid there?
Ripple lowered her spear towards Red Queen. “You’re outnumbered!” she shouted, her voice edged with something unfamiliar… Was it fear?
Red Queen didn’t respond, instead she lifted the paramedic by the head to her eye level. He beat his fists against her, but if she even noticed, she gave no sign of it. “So fucking weak,” Red Queen said, inspecting the paramedic closely. “So fucking weak.”
“N-not in the mood for your Goddamn manifesto right now,” Ripple snarled.
“They’re rats. Why do we still let rats pretend like they’re still in control,” Red Queen said, apparently ignoring Ripple. “We rule the world, from finances to war to entertainment to science… We rule. All I’m doing is pointing it out, and you think I’m crazy because of it.”
The red aura around her fingers suddenly extended into the shape of wicked-looking claws, which dug deeply into the paramedic’s skull. He screamed in pain, flailing, as Red Queen’s claws dug deeper into his brain. The paramedic went limp. Then, suddenly, the top of his skull ripped off from the bottom, and his body toppled to the ground—blood gushing from his open cranium.
And I just stood there, eyes wide in terror, not even trying to attack. None of us did. Beside me, Ripple and Mr. Mystery remained rooted in place. Why couldn’t we just… do something? Anything?
A chorus of gunfire broke the silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the muzzle flash of a full-auto rifle—underneath one of the abandoned cars—ripping bullets straight toward Red Queen. Over the din, I could barely make out a voice screaming, “Fuck! You!”
My shoulders slumped. I had hoped the FBI agents had gotten away. And, even if they hadn’t, I had hoped that they would have been smart enough to not try to attack Red Queen. And if they were dumb enough to do that, I had hoped they would use something higher caliber than an assault rifle. Her power, that red field that wreathed her… It just didn’t interact with matter and physics. When it was active, she was pretty much invincible, and it let her leap through the air and lift more than what was humanly possible.
Didn’t the agent know better?
The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the crimson field that clung to Red Queen. She glanced at the direction of the gunfire, and—while bullets continued to bounce off her—strode towards it. She moved at a leisurely pace, clearly unbothered, and reached the car around the same time the agent ran out of ammo.
He was still screaming as Red Queen wrenched the car off him, tossing it across the parking lot. It was FBI guy, the one in charge of the operation, the one whose name I wasn’t able to remember… He pulled out his pistol and—still screaming—emptied it, point blank, into Red Queen. As she reached a crimson-wreathed hand towards him, I saw him grasp desperately for his radio.
“Red Queen on my position!” he screamed into it. “I need immediate support! I repeat, Red Queen! She’s here!”