Flashbang. Wire. Space blanket. Decoy. Smoke cloud. Stink pellet. One by one Matt withdrew the items from the bug‑out bag, placing them gingerly on the Armoury bench beside him, checking back on his phone with each one he removed so as to cross reference with the user guide. He wriggled his arm around into bag’s depths, feeling for anything he’d missed. This was like a Christmas stocking for psychopaths.
“Yes, I can hear you,” Azleena’s voice buzzed in his clear plastic earpiece. Matt could almost see her up in the lab sitting in front of her computer, speaking into a little microphone tucked beneath her chin, her dry hands and dark‑ringed eyes continuing to scan back and forth undistracted by what Jane was saying on the other end. “Check, check, check. No, Herd has the coordinates.” Standing at attention a few feet away from him, Will flashed them both a nod and stiff grin. “Satellite looks clear whenever you’re ready. No hostiles on approach.”
Laser pointer, Matt counted out, ration bar. Remote-detonated explosive, oh good. A pair of metal ice cream cone shaped stabby things. Wall climbers? Wall climbers.
“You know me having to climb anything is just synonymous with me falling to my death, right?” he said, holding up the cone‑stabbers to show Jane.
“Pack that away,” she snapped back at him, already on her feet. Matt couldn’t tell if the tension in her voice was giddiness or nerves.
They were in the Armoury, the Legion’s underground arms depot and one of the few things to survive Klaus Heydrich’s mansion‑levelling blast half a year ago intact. Aboveground, a small molehill of a bunker led down to a long low concrete hall, which inside was lined with Legion body armour in its custom crimson and gold. The whole place stunk of disinfectant spray and cold. Matt hadn’t liked it the first time he’d come here, and he sure as heck didn’t like it any better the second.
At least this time he got to wear civilian clothes. Jane was suited up as Lady Dawn, obviously, and Will was wearing his standard gloveless Legion armour, the only change to which since Matt last saw it was that someone had painted on the front chest plate a black eagle clutching a banner saying ‘F‑‑‑ Nazis’. Matt on the other hand was wearing jeans, a grey t‑shirt and a brown leather jacket, which made him look as if he was on his way to the hardware store and very effectively hid the bulletproof vest he was wearing underneath. The only indication that he was in any way connected with the Legion of Heroes might have been the earpiece nestled in his right ear, although that was clear and difficult to see from a distance. Well, that and the fact that he was a very white man about to teleport into a very North Korean warzone.
Trying to reassure himself this was the only way and only temporary, Matt re-packed the contents of Azleena’s goody bag, which the genius had assured him dismissively back at the computer room would not go off or explode no matter how much it jiggled around. As he did, Will moved away from the entrance towards the tunnel leading out of the Armory and beyond the range of Morningstar’s Disruptances.
“Ready when you are,” the teleporter said, slipping Matt a somewhat sad, sympathetic grin.
“Wait,” Azleena’s voice came suddenly, “Hold.” Matt saw Jane frown and both her and Will’s hands go to their earpieces. “Wait, wait, wait. Abort. Abort, abort, abort.”
Matt’s stomach fell – because for the first time since he’d known her, Azleena’s voice rang with something resembling panic.
“What?” Jane demanded, “Is there a problem with the landing?”
“No. Hold on.” Matt heard furious typing. “I’m getting reports… you’re being re-directed. Giselle’s coming. Wait. Will, I’m going to need multiple trips.”
“Az?” the teleporter asked, voice laced with concern, “What’s happening, what’s going on?”
“Priority alert. Multiple calls from New York. I’m scrambling everyone. It’s Ana Bloodbane.”
Beside him, Jane’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “What?”
“Wait,” said Matt, frowning, “I know her. The corpse lady?” He turned to Jane. “Didn’t you just have some girl a few weeks ago who was-”
“This isn’t a copycat. We’ve got hundreds of dead in a ten-block radius, and I…” The genius’s voice abruptly stopped. “No,” Matt heard her murmur, “That’s not right. I…” Azleena’s voice snapped back into focus. “Go, go! Will I’m re-sending you coordinates. As soon as Giselle-”
She didn’t get a chance to say anything further, because at that moment the Armoury doors exploded back on their hinges and something too fast to see shot inside. In the space of half a second Giselle Pixus was standing beside them, breathless in her Legion colours.
“Run,” she urged, and together they sprinted towards the tunnel.
*
They popped into existence in the streets of Manhattan, stomachs churning as the world re-oriented itself. Beside her, Jane saw Matt lean over a little, coughing and rubbing sulphur from his eyes, but otherwise he seemed unaffected. She turned back to the city they’d teleported into.
“What the hell…?”
Before them lay a shattered, twisted world. The streets were in ruins – buildings broken, cars overturned, fires burning, craters in the pavement, shattered glass – everywhere signs of devastation. Yet far from being abandoned in the wake of some disaster, the city before them churned with movement. Jane took an involuntarily step back. Her eyes widened, and for a few moments she could do nothing but stare as her mind reeled, struggling to take in simultaneously not one but three impossible sights.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Mother of God,” Giselle whispered.
The first thing Jane saw were the people. Men and women and children of every race and age and attire filled the streets in front of them, lurching from side to side, spasming, seemingly stuck in place. For a moment Jane’s mind marked them as zombies – reanimated bodies, stumbling with that stereotypical zombie stagger of a corpse under someone else’s control. But an instant later she was hit by the screaming. Horrible, delirious screaming, howling from thousands of mouths, not some sort of undead moan but the shrieks of living people, a cacophony of agony, broken fingernails drawing bloody down a blackboard. And something else was wrong. These people weren’t decaying. There was no rot, no mortification of truly dead creatures – save for the hundreds of bodies lying motionless on the asphalt around those still standing, rotting or reduced to husks.
And then before Jane’s horrified eyes, one of the stumbling people erupted with power. Then another, then all of them, each person firing or arcing or slamming out around them with an ability as if a pulse had suddenly raced through the city, freeing the tormented from their paralysis for a single, solitary moment to move, unleash and destroy. Some staggered forward, some stumbled backwards, some shivered in superspeed, while others swung wild arms billowing fire or ice or acid or screamed and smashed their hands into the pavement. Yet as quickly as the movement had came it ended, the devastation flinching, the delirious, shrieking people freezing in place once more as if some great gravitational weight had suddenly reasserted itself. Their powers faded to twitches and dribbles, dripping from eyes or mouths or fingertips. And then came another pulse. Every few seconds, the deranged superpowered horde moved again, only to immediately stop, paralysed – and all the while their voices wailed in torment, the sound of it howling between the buildings, a horror wind curdling her very blood.
Second, Jane saw the monsters.
Because the screaming people did not stand alone. Amongst them, interspersed between them and the corpses, no less paralysed and no less deranged, stood warped figures five, ten, twenty feet high. Abominations. There was no other word. Creatures with multiple heads, multiple arms, splattered with scales or spurs or tufts of hair, whose flesh bulged wide and rippling and blubberous or taunt and sinewy and laced with veins. No two were the same – some spilled out as broad as they were tall, some teetered on multiple crooked legs, some were a uniform colour, some a patchwork of different flesh tones, some with skin stretched or bleeding or pierced by protruding bone spikes. Jane saw a monstrosity of skinless red muscle, fifteen feet high and scaled in what looked like human teeth; an armless creature with a dozen long beige tentacles hanging loose across the ground, ending in bone‑white blades; a ten‑foot, midnight horror crawling spider‑like across the asphalt on seven crooked, spindly limbs, body spiralled in rapidly blinking eyes; a bulbous heap of pale flesh wider than a truck, its vast sides splitting again and again in gigantic gnashing mouths.
And from these monsters too flared powers. But not just one. Lightning arced between bone spears erupting down a twisted spinal column as clawed hands clutched balls of fire. Mutant flesh shimmered and shifted to metal, to rock, to crystal, air or water, blurred unrelenting with superspeed or sunk intangible into the ground. Twin mouths drooled with acid as the head beside it howled with hyper‑sound as bodies bristled with wings or fur or antlers. Abominations grew in size and divided. Some floated in mid-air, ashen limbs dangling like seaweed, while others clung to buildings or shattered the streets around them, their own feet slamming and breaking and regenerating with every shuddering step.
Like the people, the monsters stood stuck in place, only able to twitch and surge free in a sudden pulse of movement every few seconds or so. Like the people too, every mouth they had, the ones not gurgling with some substance or power, screamed without pause. The noise coming from the creatures was more inhuman, reeling from high‑pitched piercing shrieks to low guttural rumbles. Every sound was pain, and it underscored the cacophony of human screaming like a vast, demented orchestra erratically crashing their instruments beneath a terrible acapella song. The whole scene was a nightmare of twisted flesh and power, devoid of sanity or reason, and it awoke in Jane an existential terror she had never before felt, not once in her entire life.
The third thing she noticed was the bubble.
“What the hell…?” Matt whispered. And it was all Jane could do to rub her eyes.
The world they were watching – the twitching mutant monstrosities, the screaming paralysed people, the shattered streets, the devastation – all of it loomed before them like they were looking through an old broken television. Everything, from the air to the buildings to the people to the freaks shimmered behind a patchwork of grey and colour, shifting and changing as though encased in a giant monochrome soap bubble. It was as if someone had dropped a giant mirrored lens across the street in front of them, and it was through this shifting looking glass that Jane and the rest of the rapidly appearing Legion now viewed reality – or at least reality in one direction. They were a few hundred feet away from the barrier, surrounded by untainted police barricades and squad cars, and here all colour remained normal. It was only ahead, beyond some clear yet invisible line, where the colours of the world warped and twisted – a ring of desaturation extending horizontally in either direction where inside lay the trapped people and abominations, rippling in patches of grey and technicolour and unceasing in their screams.
“Yo,” said Will to Jane’s left, his voice shaking, uncharacteristically high, “Could Ana Bloodbane do that?”
“Hey!” someone called, before anyone had time to answer. With great difficulty, Jane tore her eyes away from the impossible scene and looked behind her to see a police officer waving frantically at them. “Get back!”
Then she heard it. From inside the bubble, the world of patchwork monochrome, a sound hummed forth like the ringing of a bell or a great hammer striking an anvil. Suddenly, a ripple raced through the surreal world in front of them, and everything shifted. The dead bodies, the ones that moments ago had lain motionless, desiccated or dismembered between the living, suddenly began moving, crawling, their limbs repairing, flesh flowing back and reattaching, stumbling to their feet as their unpeeling mouths abruptly opened into cries from resurrected vocal cords. Powers erupted, and all of a sudden the dead were whole again, old again, young again, a myriad of ages, all screaming – and around them the living twisted too. Some shrieked and shrivelled, falling on their knees, disintegrating into corpses, others gasped for air as their bodies rapidly aged – yet before her disbelieving eyes Jane saw others getting younger. Adults sobbed as lines sucked back into their faces, as their limbs shrank, as they reverted to children, then babies, and then for some, nothing. Awake yet trapped in a terrible fever dream, Jane could do nothing but watch as hundreds upon hundreds of people collapsed into pools of blood and viscera, while around them others rose from nothing and corpses struggled back to life. And all the while, the monsters around them shuddered, continuing to mutate further and further, growing ever more twisted, ever larger.
There was no explanation, no reason, no pattern – only horror. Ten thousand denizens of New York City staggered through the streets in front of them engulfed in waking hell, shifting between life and death.
And then the bubble of corruption pushed out.