Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Hello, My Name Is Herman

Chapter 2: Ravaged

Chapter 3: Prelude To: Devolution

Chapter 4: Devolution, Part One

Chapter 5: Devolution, Part Two

Chapter 6: Devolution, Part Three

Chapter 7: Devolution, Part Four

Chapter 8: Devolution, Part Five

Chapter 9: Devolution, Part Six

Chapter 10: Devolution, Part Seven

Chapter 11: Devolution, Part Eight

Chapter 12: Devolution Finale

Chapter 13: Prelude To: Avatars

Chapter 14: Avatars, Part One

Chapter 15: Avatars, Part Two

Chapter 16: Avatars, Part Three

Chapter 17: Avatars, Part Fantastic Four

Chapter 18: Avatars, Part Five

Chapter 19: Avatars, Part Six

Chapter 20: Avatars, Part Seven

Chapter 21: Avatars Finale

Chapter 22: Paranoid

Chapter 23: Prelude To: Everything Is Lies

Chapter 24: Everything Is Lies, Part One

Chapter 25: Everything Is Lies, Part Two

Chapter 26: Everything Is Lies, Part Three

Chapter 27: Everything Is Lies, Part Four

Chapter 28: Everything Is Lies, Part 5: the Siege

Chapter 29: Everything Is Lies, Part 6: the Siege 2

Chapter 30: Everything Is Lies, Part Seven

Chapter 31: Everything Is Lies, Part Eight

Chapter 32: Everything Is Lies, Finale

Chapter 33: Naked

Chapter 34: Avenged

Chapter 35: United We Skulk

Chapter 36: Bonus Round

Chapter 37: The End

Chapter 38: Epilogue

the Shocker: Legit

by Max Landis

Hello, My Name Is Herman

I slip the mask on, and take a small measure of comfort in the fact that I’ve finally worked out the fabric to the point that it’s near to lighter than air, and the mask feels like a breathing silk web over my face. Outside, there’s a roar, and I watch as a Honda goes flipping end over end past the window of my car.

My name is Herman Schultz, and I am not going to jail today.

I’ve been arrested 37 times. I’ve been convicted 34 times. I’ve escaped from prison 37 times. I’ve fought over 15 different superheroes, most notable among them, Spider-Man, who has handed me my own ass 26 times. It isn’t fair, of course. He’s got superpowers, and I’m just … I’m just a guy. It’s not like I’m even a very tough guy, but I still can’t seem to get arrested by the normal police. No simple cuffs and the back of a wagon for me. I always get to have my jaw broken and get hung upside down in webs from a street light.

I am the Shocker, and recently numbers have become very important to me; I just turned 35. I’ve held, in my entire life, two legitimate jobs, and they were both at separate Burger Kings. This was before I started safe-cracking. This was before I invented the gauntlets.

I have had ribs broken twelve times. My left arm has been broken twice, and my right arm has been broken once. I broke both legs and permanently damaged my left knee after getting kicked off a building by Daredevil. I have the honor of being able to tell other villains that Captain America himself nailed me in the chest with a straight right that cracked my sternum in half. I couldn’t breathe right for the better part of two years.

Today is an important day for me. Today I’m not going to jail.

I’m unmarried, I haven’t had a girlfriend in over eight years, and the escort service no longer returns my calls. I have only one close friend, and I think he might be a little retarded.

His name is Aleksei, but everybody but me calls him Rhino.

He and I have something in common: we’re both what you would call “second-string.” The second string isn’t so much a tangible thing as it is a concept. Guys like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Daredevil and Thor, they’ve got what’re known as “rogue’s galleries.” Early in their careers, they bump into a criminal, usually superpowered, and that criminal, for better or worse, becomes a recurring clown in the media circuses that are their lives.

Of course everybody knows the big names, the clown acts that really stay with you: Green Goblin. Bullseye. Carnage. The Red-Fucking-Skull. These are seriously crazy dudes, and that’s why people remember them. The Goblin claims to not only have killed Spider-Man’s girlfriend, but also to:

– Know his secret identity

– have killed his clone

– have buried both him and his aunt alive at two separate junctures, and

(I like this next one best of all,)

– be his father

And I believe all of them but the last one. Osborn is a crazy son of a bitch.

When I first showed up, it was early in Spidey’s career. He had only been around a year or two. The gauntlets were still in their first stages, and I was still very much a kid myself at the dapper age of 25. I thought I was king of the world, and no insane gymnast in faggy spandex and an arm-sling was going to stop me from taking the loot that was rightfully mine.

Boy, was I fucking wrong.

But that’s another story. That’s a day I went to jail. Today, I am not going to jail.

All in all, I exist in Spider-Man’s world, in the world of heroes, to be a patsy.

A joke. A laughing-stock in a yellow-and-brown pineapple suit.

And I know why. It’s not like it’s a secret. Think of the big boys, hell, just think of Spider-Man’s big boys. Scorpion, Doc Ock, Hobgoblin, Carnage, Sandman, Green Goblin … What do they all have in common? Come on, think about it, I’ll give you a second.

Ready?

They’re all murderers. They will do anything to achieve their goals. Kill anyone. Destroy the world if it stands in their way. Now think about guys like me and Rhino and Grizzly; we’re crooks. We’re criminals, not killers. Think of us as illegal opportunists looking to make a quick buck.

That’s my main problem with superheroes, man; they don’t differentiate. If you just killed thirteen people blowing into the food court at a shopping mall, you’re going to get punched in the face. And if you just stole two million but managed not to seriously harm anyone, guess what? You’re still gonna get punched in the fucking face. And then, jail.

Not today. Today, I’m not going to jail.

The car shakes again as I put on the gauntlets.

Your average gamma mutant is around eight feet tall, green, and ready to destroy anything that gets in their path. I know this only because the general public knows this. Back when the Hulk first started showing up, there were specials on gamma mutants 24/7. Any Joe-Shmoe was suddenly Reed-fucking-Richards when it came to gamma radiation. Not that I’ve got anything against Reed-fucking-Richards (I’ve based some of my best designs on his work in vibronics), but honestly, at this point I doubt he knows more about gamma mutants than your average T.V. watching child of the Eighties.

The gamma mutant that most directly concerns me is the one I can see out the window. He’s easily ten feet tall and green, and looks almost exactly like the Hulk. But I’ve seen the Hulk up close, taken a hit from him, and this ain’t the Hulk. Firstly, he’s got a beard, and I’ve never seen the hulk with a beard. Secondly, he’s a different color. I seen Hulk green and gray, but never olive. This guy is olive.

“RAVAGE SMASH!” the Olive Hulk screams, and the sound rattles some spare change across my dashboard. So, apparently this guy is “Ravage”, which is a good start; I cross reference “Ravage” with “gamma” on my hacked 1994 S.H.I.E.L.D database, and get nothing. I try again, just “Ravage” alone this time, and still come up dry. Which means he’s post-1994, which means again my modest budget has failed me. Ravage picks up a woman and bites her in half, spraying gore all over the street, and then hurls her body at a passing police helicopter.

It’s only a matter of time until someone gets here: Spider-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four … New York is probably the one city in the world with more heroes than villains. Ravage clearly doesn’t know this, ’cause with the mess he’s making he’s liable to get the New Avengers on his ass, and then it’ll be game over for him. Hell, anybody versus the New Avengers is basically a squash match.

Ravage is getting closer now, and, as a creature of habit, I check the parking meter out of the corner of my eye. Fifteen minutes left. And I’ve been sitting here, putting on the costume for twelve already. I’m procrastinating, and I know it; a whole chunk of my body is telling me to start the car, turn it around and motor down the street into Manhattan where I’ll have Spider-Man to protect me.

“Spider-Man to protect me.” I can’t help but gag a little when I say that out loud.

That’s the wonderful/terrible thing about New York these days; drive around the city long enough and you’re bound to encounter some sort of metahuman event. And that’s why today was special; I was trolling for a disaster. I was searching for a catastrophe. Ravage stomps past my car, not even noticing me, and his knee knocks off my driver’s-side mirror. I guess that seals it.

I set the gauntlets up to maximum; a high-pressure vibrating air blast with a 90-ton impact. Even with all the noise Ravage is making as he tears into the school bus, the click of my seatbelt and the creak of my car door are both deafening. The boots clack on the pavement, and my throat feels dry. I raise my arms at Ravage’s eight-foot-wide back, and squeeze the palm-triggers.

Now close your eyes, click your heels together three times and try not to let your voice shake when you say it: “Super Hero.”

Ravaged

I worry for one pants-pissing moment that he didn’t even feel the blasts, and then Ravage stumbles forward, letting out a deep howling sound, a sound I recognize from the Hulk. I’d like to think that it’s pain, but experience tells me it’s just confusion, and I instantly regret getting out of the car. Ravage’s stumble stops when he catches himself on a street light, which uproots itself under his weight.

God, he’s fucking HUGE. He didn’t seem this big from inside the car.

“Um,” I say loudly, to nobody.

Ravage turns on me, hurling the street light like a javelin. I guess it’s luck that he’s too out of his mind with insane fury to aim accurately, the sort of shitty tainted kind of good luck that only us villains have, for example “He’s too busy stabbing me to notice me reaching for my gun!”

“RGGRAAAAAAA!” screams Ravage, and yes, now I know this was a bad idea; the thrown streetlight impales my car through the windshield, and the force of the impact flips it upside-down onto the roof of the Porsche parked behind me. And all I can think is: He broke my fucking car! So of course I say:

“My car! You broke my fucking car!” My shrieks of anger and sorrow nearly rival those coming from the sidewalk to my left, where a father is kneeling next to his crushed son. The police sirens are getting louder now, and again, my body tells me: Go! Run! Forget the car! Just go! But I hold firm, and raise my arms again as Ravage starts to stalk towards me.

I hear someone scream “The Hulk! It’s the Hulk!”, and I’m slightly disappointed they don’t mention me; hell, they don’t even get Mr. Olive’s name right. For a moment I wonder if this is some new incarnation of Banner, but clear the thought from my head. No Hulk I’ve ever seen has been this violent; destructive yes, violent and murderous? No.

“Ravage SMASH!” he says. Oh, that’s wonderful; I haven’t heard shit like this since the old days with the Hulk, before he got smart. Did you know that? The Hulk talks like a normal person now. He’s a bit of a bastard, but other than that he’s basically just another hero now; no more random Hulk-Smashing. The public sort of lost interest in him after that, but it’s looking like Ravage is into being retro.

It also looks like he might possibly eat me alive; he’s practically frothing at the mouth, now maybe only ten feet away, as he swats a mailbox into the air for reasons known only to him, and here I am still standing in the middle of the street like a jackass. I can smell him now; sweat and burnt hair, the smell of the Hulk. I choke a little; throwing up inside the mask would be so truly fucked up I can’t even ponder it. My mouth is covered, so the fabric would force the vomit back into my mouth and …

Okay, I’m panicking now. Take a breath. The direct blasts from the gauntlets aren’t going to work, so you’ve got to change tactics; easy-peasy japanesey. So, change tactics to … Change tactics to … Um …

I yelp and leap behind the smoking heap that was my car as he grabs at me with a hand the size of a beer-cooler. He doesn’t skip a beat, just brings an enormous fist down on the wreckage, folding it in half, and leaving me squatting on the sidewalk in open view of view of anyone interested seeing a grown man in what looks like a heating blanket get smashed to chunks by a giant, furious olive.

Between him and me: the parking meter. He’s leaning down at me. Too easy. It’s just too easy. I raise an arm and hit the squeeze trigger, and the parking meter explodes into his face. Lucky me, it’s nearly full; traveling at one hundred and twenty miles an hour, coins makes pretty effective shrapnel, even against this guy.

A penny flies into his mouth and severs his tongue, whilst a nickel hits him squarely in the left eye. It pops like a balloon, and I’m sprayed with a healthy amount of green blood as Ravage recoils, swinging his head away.

“Grrrrraaahhh!” he yowls, and I feel a brief moment of victory before he blindly me bitch-slaps me, a solid backhand that would easily break every bone in a normal man’s body. A normal man not equipped with my suit. As it stands, a non-direct hit from this guy feels like an intensely strong shove; my gear dissipates the impact almost immediately.

Which sounds all fine and dandy, but now I’m rolling at forty miles an hour down a city street. Hitting the tree is an impact worthy of global extinction. I bounce off like a rubber ball and smash through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a pawnshop.

I wish I didn’t feel it, but I do, and now I can’t move; everything hurts. This is not going as I planned. The plan was so simple, too; find a super-villain in the midst of a super-villainy-related outing, blast him with the gauntlets, get some pictures taken of “The Shocker-VICTORIOUS!” and pow, I’m a hero. I thought I’d gotten lucky by bumping into this guy; I was dreading having to take down one of my … ahem … “friends”, like Aleksei or … or … shit.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t lucky.

More banging and booming, coming down the street. Ravage has recovered from the parking meter, and he’s coming to give me a very stern talk about the dangers of vigilante behavior in the modern world. My eyes are doing that fun thing where everything fades to a violently bright white, and nothing is focused; just a faded mess of colors.

A gigantic olive green blob appears, blocking out everything else.

“RAVAGE SMASH PUNY HUMAN!” it roars, and lifts up a gigantic foot; he’s going to stomp me like a cockroach. This is NOT how I wanted to die. But then again, maybe it’s fitting; what was I in life but a cockroach? An insect crawling across the sleeping face of humanity, not biting or stinging, just being vaguely annoying to anyone who took the time to notice me.

Obit: Herman Schultz: the Shocker. Petty Super-Criminal. Squashed by a huge half-naked olive man.

For a second, it seems kind of beautiful. I’m at peace. And then …

As per usual, I heard it before I saw it. You always hear it before you see it because of that damn little noise it makes, like a loose wire suddenly being tightened and snapping back into place: “thwip.”

Please, God, no. Please, dear fucking God, don’t let this happen.

But when I see the red and blue flash pass by behind the olive blob, there’s no denying what’s going on. It’s burned into my brain. It’s something I’ve seen so many times before. That faggy spandex. That perfect body. Those stupid, stupid, STUPID big white eyes.

It’s motherfucking Spider-Man. Great. Hallelujah.

“Hulk, you look different; have you lost weight?”

Oh, he’s sooooooooooo funny. Ravage grunts, and turns away from me, looking out at the street. My vision is clearing up now, and I see that there are two enormous purple bruises on his back from where I hit him with the gauntlets. Score one for the Shocker, I guess.

“New hair? New tan? I like the beard, very Grizzly Adams-chic.”

He does this to everybody. Never shuts up. So funny. So fucking funny.

“RAVAGE SMASH JUMPY MAN!”

“coughripoffcough” I hear as flesh impacts against flesh again and again, those solid THWUD sounds. I’m being rescued.

Rescued. By Spider-Man.

NO.

I start crawling out onto the sidewalk; nothing’s broken, but everything hurts. He’s riding around on Ravage’s back, repeatedly punching him in the back of the head. Ravage grabs hold of him, and instead of just crushing him to death with his bare hands (what I would’ve done), he throws him up and punts him like a football.

Well, I guess that’s good, too, but the crunching sound the Webhead’s bones would’ve made would’ve been worth more to me than any heist.

But no. Spider-Man does that horrible twisty thing of his in mid-air and lands on his feet; he must notice me out of the corner of his eye, because he turns, and those big white eyes are completely blank.

“Sh–… Shocker?” he says, and I hear it; something I’ve never been able to instill in him before. It’s a sort of manic confusion; he suddenly has no idea what’s going on. My mere presence has thrown him so entirely off his game that not even his goddamn spider-psycho-senses can prevent Ravage’s fist from hitting him straight in the face.

I let out a little cheer before I can stop myself; fuck, look at me, now I’m rooting AGAINST the guy who saved me.

Spidey flies like a superball, and goes through a wall down the street. Of course, a normal human couldn’t have survived either of the impacts, but Spidey will. That fucker will NEVER die.

“RAVAGE KILL YOU! RAVAGE WILL …” He falters, and stumbles forward, touching his head. “Ravage will … Ravhgah … Rah … Rrr …” His remaining eye rolls up into his head, and he collapses forward. I don’t need to be a doctor to tell you he’s deader than Dickens. I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know why it happened, but it’s all I need. I drag myself to a sewer hole, vibrate off the hub and drop in. The smell and the sensation, that slippery, chunky, slick sensation can make you pass out. Hell, I passed out the first time I had to escape into the sewers. And the second.

But not now, on the tenth. Now, with the bugs and the leeches and the rats and the filth, I’m right as rain.

I belong here.

Prelude To: Devolution

“I just wish I could’ve been there,” Aleksei says, looking mournfully at his oversize pitcher of beer. His little beady eyes look ridiculous in that giant head of his, especially when he’s got his face all scrunched up; what is that expression? Disappointment? Regret? It’s impossible to tell.

That thick, mushmouthed way he speaks mixes up all his words. “Could’ve” becomes “cudda.” “There” becomes “derh.” Most people think it’s an accent, but I don’t; I’m convinced Aleksei is a high-functioning autistic.

I’m one of the few people who knew Aleksei Mikhailovich Sytsevich before he was the monster, the atrocity called “Rhino.” Sure, Aleksei thinks it made him special. The only reason people know who he is, is because of one stupid, stupid decision back in the Eighties.

Aleksei was a small-time thug, a goon, a henchman at best. I was a safecracker, and the Kingpin, our main employer back then, used to put us out on jobs together. I’d started inventing already; it was a constant, addictive thing. When I wasn’t out on a job, I was in the workshop, tinkering with my picks, trying to make them better, quieter, quicker … and Aleksei was right there with me.

Then one day, everything changed. These two Russians, old-school KGB Mafioso creeps, show up in the Kingpin’s office, asking to “borrow” his biggest guy. Of course, Aleksei, their countryman, signs right up.

He vanishes for a while, and in that time I manage to get myself locked up. While I’m in, there comes my one true inspiration, the one thing that’s made me different from everyone else.

The suit. The gauntlets. My children. My only real family.

And I built them right there in the workshop at Southgate Correctional; the idiots watched me, the stupid fucks, as I built tools powerful enough to blow any safe. Coincidentally, they’re also quite useful when it comes to smashing through the walls of Southgate Correctional.

And that’s always been the beauty of my technology, in my eyes: it’s so goddamned versatile. My suit dispenses both vibration and impact, and, to a degree, friction. It can’t get dirty, it can’t get wet, and you need a hell of a powerful impact to tear the damn thing.

And the gauntlets … oh me oh my, the gauntlets. They throw vibrations so hard they can shake apart almost any conventional wall, and knock down any conventional person. At a midlevel setting, they’ll shake you so hard the next day your teeth will still be chattering. Maybe some broken bones, maybe a little nerve damage, and definitely a sour mood, but nobody dies.

And that was the beautiful thing about it; nobody had to die. No more guns in hold-ups. Hell, no more guns at all! I could sell them to armies, and just think, a vibronic war, a bloodless war, a …

And then Kingpin called me. And I’m back to doing bank jobs.

Pathetic.

Then he told me about Aleksei.

See, Aleksei wasn’t Aleksei any more. The Aleksei I’d known was 6'5", maybe three hundred and fifty pounds. The Aleksei standing behind the Kingpin in his office was 7'7", over seven hundred pounds and covered in what looked at first like thick gray leather. I later found out that this strange, hard covering was permanently bonded to all the skin on his body except his face, which was now just a minor distraction from the enormous curved horn protruding from his forehead.

They’d disfigured him, and he was happy about it. Ecstatic even.

So this was supposed to be a Russian “super-soldier?” This was their low-rent Captain America? They’d taken some poor slag without a brain to his name and turned him into a walking tank.

It’s this walking tank that sits across from me in the bar. He’s “naked”, as per usual, and though it’s getting some weird looks, nobody’s gonna say shit; this is a Villain Bar. In comparison to most of the folks here, we’re normal.

“You couldn’t have changed anything, Aleksei. Don’t sweat it,” I say, and try a smile. Christ, even smiling hurts.

“I would have smashed his face in, that Ravage guy wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

I can’t stop myself smiling, now that I know that Ravage “wuduna stuhd chance.”

“Aleksei, how many times have you fought Hulk now?” Aleksei thinks for a moment, and his face scrunches up again. He even cartoonishly scratches his head, and I wonder if he can feel it through that armor of his.

“Ten, I think.”

“How many times have you won?”

“Uh … One.”

“This Ravage guy, he was at least as strong as Hulk. Maybe more.”

“It don’t matter. S’long as you were there, we could’ve taken him.”

This does that horrible thing to me that only Aleksei can do. It makes me feel … Cheery. It makes me feel like someone believes in me, and it’s fleeting, and it’s infuriating.

Because whenever it happens, I have to remind myself that it’s Rhino.

And Rhino only believes in me because I talk to him. He’d be undyingly loyal to Ghost Rider if he was willing to have a drink with him.

Here’s Aleksei in a nutshell, or a Rhino-shell if you will: You know those nine-hundred numbers, (900)CUM-GIRL, (900)LIC-DICK?

Ninety cents a minute, right?

Rhino makes about a hundred grand a year on commissions; bodyguard work, robberies, etcetera, etcetera …

I write his checks, do his bills and all that.

Last year? Thirty grand on those damn sex lines.

Now, he’s my friend, so I call his favorite one, (900)HOT-FUCK, and ask to talk to a manager. They all know Aleksei by name. I ask them about him, and they give me a piece of information that I think will help you understand him:

He just calls to talk. He talks about all sorts of things; the shell, his life, Spider-Man … He even talks about me.

“Maybe. This guy was pretty big.”

“I’m telling you, Herman, you gotta make me your sidekick. I could help you out.”

Oh, great, this again. Aleksei’s face lights up; the face of muddled inspiration.

“You could stay the Shocker, and I could be the Vibrator.”

Oh, sweet Jesus.

I manage not to laugh, but Aleksei spoke a little too loudly, and I hear Boomerang and Critical Mass chuckling. Aleksei notices, but doesn’t make the connection.

“I don’t think so, Aleksei.”

“Nah, you just don’t get it; when I stomp, or hit things, they vibrate, right? So I’m the Vibra–”

More laughter from Boomerang and Critical Mass.

“I get it, Aleksei.”

“So, are you still gonna try?”

Aleksei does this sometimes; just randomly switches topics without cause or warning. You’d think after a dozen years with the guy I’d get used to it, but I haven’t.

“Try what?”

“You know.” He leans across the table and whispers loudly. “The … hero-thing.”

Wow. He cuts me right down to the quick. I’m silent, and Rhino repeats himself, thinking I didn’t hear him, but then realizes I’m thinking and shuts up.

Is this me? What the hell did I do today? No money to show for it. No glory. Ravage killed eight people. Did I stop him? Did I even slow him down?

Did me making a change … Did it even make a difference?

“I don’t know,” I say, and I’m being completely honest. Aleksei frowns.

“Well, I think you should. I think you’ll be good at it.”

There’s that feeling again.

“You think so, Rhino?”

“Herman, you’re smarter’n me. Do you think you can do it?” A moment of clarity from a cluttered mind. I’m touched.

“I … I hope so.”

Aleksei smiles; that big-toothed, gentle smile.

Someone turns the volume up on the TV.

“— autopsy shows that the creature called Ravage died when a nickel sunk into his brain, hemorrhaging him beyond repair. It’s thought to be an injury sustained in the battle with Spider-Man, and J. Jonah Jameson is calling for a manslaughter investigation. Earlier today, he —”

They didn’t even mention me. THEY DIDN’T EVEN FUCKING MENTION ME!

“Hey,” Aleksei says. “You won.”

I have no idea what he’s saying to me.

“You saved the day.” I laugh out of confusion; You saved duhday, he says. What the hell is he …

Oh, my God.

Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

My legs stiffen, and my body stands without my permission. I saved the day. There was no way Spider-Man could’ve beaten him alone, no way, no how.

I did it. I won and I didn’t even know it.

No one did.

But for some reason, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need the fame. I don’t need the glory. This is just like crime; all that matters is that I got away with it.

But it’s different from a heist, just a little. Suddenly I’m playing out all these scenarios in my head; Ravage, unhindered, takes out Spider-Man and storms through the city. How many would be dead? Ten more? Twenty more? Fifty? One hundred?

Oh, my God.

I’m filled with this sort of weird glow, a kind of nauseous euphoria, and I don’t know what to do with it. Aleksei has this look on his face, like a dog watching a human laugh, unsure of how to react. I let out a harsh, barking cry, sort of an ecstatic-yelp laugh, and everyone in bar is suddenly looking at me. I slowly sit down.

“Congratulations,” Doctor Octopus says from a dark corner booth. “You’ve just killed a brilliant man.”

When I get home, it’s still sinking in.

It’s not that Octavius knew I was there, and that I was responsible; that doesn’t surprise me at all, really.

What gets to me most is that he’s right.

I’m a murderer.

Panic attacks aren’t fun. You can’t breath, you can’t move.

I’ve gone on the internet, done some research.

Professor Gregory Crawford. Born November 12th, 1945.

Every muscle in your body just contracts up into immobile steel bands, heavy and rusty under your skin. You feel like you’re falling both up and down at once.

Professor Gregory Crawford, advanced physics at Desert State University. Considered a genius, especially after his revolutionary paper on gamma mutation’s effects on damaged DNA.

I lie on my bed. There’s no furniture in the room, just me and the computer. I want to go back to the computer, but I can’t. I lay down thirty minutes ago, and I haven’t moved an inch since.

Professor Gregory Crawford, who, through some insane teleportation device he cooked up, spliced his own DNA with that of Bruce Banner and turned himself into Ravage.

And that’s what finally gets me up off the bed:

TV says he was a Smart Hulk.

They said he could talk, that he retained his human personality; drunk with power and on a destructive and homicidal rampage, but still smart.

That wasn’t the creature I saw today. I mean, it was, but this thing was a grunting, roaring monstrosity, not a college professor.

They say if you spend enough time in this business, the super-villain business, you get a sixth sense for when another villain is at work.

My Shocker-Sense is tingling.

Something stinks.

I sit up, wipe my face, snort up some of my tear mucus, and take a moment to think.

“Ravage SMASH!”

Something stinks. Something definitely stinks.

Devolution, Part One

Breaking into a police morgue isn’t easy. It’s even harder in New York; the NYPD precincts have all of these crazy security systems designed by Tony Stark. To get through those, you’re going to have to shell out some major dough, money I don’t have.

So getting a look at the body is out of the question. That right there is a major obstacle; if I can’t see Ravage’s corpse, then how am I supposed to gauge what’s different about him?

Come to think of it, he’s a two-ton green man; would I be able to tell anyway? I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, I’m an engineer. He’d just be a big green lump of dead flesh to me.

I’m trying to be a detective now. First a superhero, then a murderer, and now, two days later, a gumshoe. Who says a midlife crisis doesn’t lead to any real change?

I’m up on a gargoyle, twelve stories above the Tenth Street Precinct, and suddenly I realize I’m posing; once you start up, this superhero bullshit comes natural.

So where do I go from here? Should I just go home, jerk off and go to bed, wait for the next call from Tombstone, or —?

And then my problem solves itself: Venom drops past me from above.

I don’t know if you know this, but Venom ain’t Venom no more. The weird goop that used to cover that hapless schmuck Eddie Brock? It’s changed hosts; now it’s on unrepentant scare-the-fuck-out-of-you-psycho Mac Gargan, formerly known as the Scorpion.

So now he’s this sort of Lovecraftian-nightmare; imagine a lithe Venom with a scorpion tail.

What he’s doing here, I don’t know; last I heard he got a building dropped on him by Spider-Man, and it served as an example to the rest of us: No matter how much stronger you get, no matter how much you improve, no matter how many new weapons you buy, the Webslinger is still gonna kick your —

There’s an explosion from below, followed by the pit-pat-pow of gunfire.

Holy hell. He’s ATTACKING the police station. I actually laugh out loud at the sheer balls-to-the-wall insanity of the situation, before I realize that laughing is not really the superheroic thing to do.

I need to go help. Because if I go help, in the chaos I can probably get to the morgue. Everybody wins. I smash through an apartment window, jump over kid playing with a toy train, shove aside a stay-at-home mom, blast their door off the hinges, run out into the hallway and ring for the elevator. And I wait. And I wait. And I wait.

And I wait.

Fuck this.

I jump down the stairs four at a time, and I’m already winded by the time I get down to the sixth floor. By the lobby I’m drenched with sweat, and panting through the mask. I race through the lobby, ignoring the terrified shouts from those around me. I blow the revolving door to pieces, and skid on my heels out into the street.

It’s a war zone; Scorpion, pardon me, VENOM has torn the front of the station apart. He’s taking his time, too, killing every officer who engages him. The black glop makes him bullet-proof, and he knows it; he’s not even attempting to dodge, just standing there and taking it, striking out with the tail and with goop-blades.

He doesn’t seem to notice me; none of them do. No big surprise there, but it still stings a little.

The scorpion tail whips out at a young officer as he runs past me, and I instinctively yank him out of the way; Gargan’s tail is easy enough to predict if you’ve known him long enough, it’s all in the geometry of the thing, the arc of the whip.

“It’s the …” The young cop’s face sort of blanks out for a moment; the same thing I saw with Spider-Man during the fight with Ravage. “Shock…er?” I toss the cop aside as Gargan tears his way into the front office of the station. Behind me I hear that old standard:

“FREEZE, SHOCKER! DROP THE WEAPONS AND —” I turn, instinctively raising my gauntlets, but I’m just in time to see the a cop tackle his superior.

“Williams, lay off, he just saved Freedman!”

“What?” Williams the Trigger-Happy Sergeant says. Again, that dead blank face.

I think I’m starting to enjoy it.

I skip over an eviscerated cop groaning for help and through the smashed front doors. It’s like a butcher’s shop; blood and raw meat are everywhere. Gargan is destroying everything; breaking windows, smashing ceiling fans … It doesn’t make sense. This isn’t his style; he’s a one-hit, one-kill type; just like a scorpion. He’s coming at this place like a wrecking ball, and …

A low, eerie hiss from down a bloodsoaked hall to my left. A primal, guttural sound. A Venom-sound.

I charge up the gauntlets.

“GARGAN!” I shout. Nothing. There’s a creak from behind the booking counter, and I hit it with a low-level burst. It’s just enough to shatter apart the wood and plastic, revealing a crouched-down cop. In his hands is a shotgun.

“Oh, sorry bud, I —”

BLAM.

The slug hits me in the stomach, and almost immediately slides around and off the suit; the impact is akin to being squirted with a water gun. On instinct I raise a gauntlet and blast him into the center of the room.

Wow. Blasting a cop; minus fifty points for the Shocker: Super Hero.

The hiss comes again, and I follow it. Evidence room one. Evidence room two. Decapitated body. It’s all about following the gunfire at this point, and there’s less and less of it. I go through two sets of doors, make a left, step in intestines, and now there’s just one gun firing. A scream from up ahead, and then silence. A harsh ripping sound. Another. And another.

MORGUE: ROOM 1.

Do I even want to know what’s behind this door?

Hey, what the hell, right?

I let of a short one and shatter the door to splinters. I immediately regret it.

Venom sits crouched on top of Ravage’s body, which lies on top of an oversized examination table. He’s tearing him apart, tossing aside organs, bones and muscle tissue. The smell is awful; Venom’s smell, that sickly sweet sugary smell, mixed with the charred body odor of hulk, mixed with that general hospital-chemical-dirt smell of a morgue.

I speak before I can stop myself.

“Mac, what the FUCK are you doing?”

Venom’s head whips up at me, and I realize immediately that Mac can’t hear me; I might as well me talking to a chainsaw.

“Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmunnnn …” it says, and leaps up off Ravage’s corpse to the ceiling, where it sticks, Spider-Man style, staring down at me. The tail floats around in the air, waiting to strike.

“Mac … Venom … I …”

What do I say? That I have to ask him to leave? How do you explain that you’re suddenly on the other side? It hisses at me, questioning, and suddenly the tail tenses. I skip the gauntlets up to Maximum power.

“Mac, don’t even try.” Yeah, real tough, Herman. “I’ve never had the gauntlets powered up this high before …” That’s a lie. “… and I have no idea what they’d do to you.” That’s the truth; even with the black gloop, venom is still an average-sized person. They might just implode him, and two murders in three days isn’t the —

The tail smacks me in the face so hard that for a moment I see stars. The impact would’ve killed a normal person; lucky me, the mask knocks my injuries down to what feels like a broken nose. I howl and stumble back, one hand grasping at my face like a wounded child, the other raised.

Even with an injury, I still have no problem aiming my shot; at this point, it’s like the gauntlets are part of me. It’s all intuitive.

Venom gets this wonderful “OH FUCK” look on his face right before the blast hits him; what I wouldn’t have given for a goddamn Polaroid camera right then.

The hit doesn’t just throw Venom off Ravage; it smashes him through the wall, through a storage room, through another wall and out onto the street. It also shatters every glass item in the room, and manages to flip dead Ravage off the table, spilling his organs all over the place, and …

Wait, what is that?

Still clutching my nose, I go over and kneel down next Ravage’s enormous head. Plain as day: there’s a spot on the back of his head, a simple black circle with a circumference of maybe eight inches. Is that oil, or paint, or paper, or … I reach down to pull the spot off (it looks like it might be removable, and hey, if it wasn’t, he’s dead anyway, right?), but before I can touch the damn thing there’s a shattering sound above me. A web of thick black glop hits me on the arm, and I’m yanked through a hole in the ceiling, my shoulder making an adorable little “pop” sound as it tears itself free of the joint.

“JEEEESUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSSSFUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK!” I shriek like a little girl as Venom takes me from sea level to two hundred feet in a matter of seconds.

I’ve taken trips like these before, with Spider-Man. He yanks you up to the rooftops and shakes you a round a bit, you know, intimidation. But after the first time, you know he’s not gonna drop you.

This guarantee doesn’t apply with Venom. I feel my ears pop as he lets go of one organic black web and fires another.

“Weeee!Kkklll!youuuu!” he says, and sinks those enormous fangs into the side of my head. It feels like he bites right through my skull, but that’s not possible, right?

…

Right?

I twist around and vibro-punch him in that drooling, tooth-filled mouth. The effect is rather more gruesome than I’d intended: I literally knock out ALL of his teeth in a spray of what looks like normal, human blood. Poor Mac. He lets go of me for an instant, and I take the opportunity to shove off him with my legs, sending me into a diagonal freefall, that idiot part of my brain that always takes over during fights telling me that this was somehow a good idea.

I start taking potshots at him with my good arm as I fall, but he easily swings around them, just the way Spider-Man always does.

Let me tell you, getting football-tackled out of freefall into the side of a skyscraper by a super-powered glop monster ain’t much fun. It shows what a strange world we live in when you realize that I probably ain’t the only one who’s had this experience.

God, I hope that’s just a fracture and not a break. The lucky thing is, I think the impact fucked him up worse than it did me; I was vibrating him the whole way, and he looks dazed. At least, I hope that’s dazed, because it also looks a hell of a lot like “hungry.”

He tries to hit me with the tail twice, and, thanks to some impressive “cowering like a hurt kitten” work by yours-truly, he accomplishes nothing but busting up the concrete.

Still pressed against the building, I duck down and vibro-elbow him sharply in the stomach and shove my entire fist into his mouth. I can’t think of anything Superhero-Witty to say, so I just shriek: “FUCK OFF!” in a distinctly girlish way, and press the trigger.

The sheer force of the hit ripples the air, and it blows that black-glop-costume right off him; it splats against the face of the skyscraper on the other side of the street. Mac’s out cold, and, scarily enough, butt-naked.

At first I feel this kind of perverse victory, and then it strikes me that I’m now unsupported, with one functional arm, something hurting like a bitch in my back and a broken nose, holding a naked psychopath, twenty stories up.

Well … shit.

Devolution, Part Two

As a super-villain, you get used to heights; on a regular basis you’re getting punched into the air, thrown from rooftop to rooftop, thrown OFF rooftops, dropped out of helicopters …

It’s a hard-knock life past one hundred feet up, and you’d think I’d have gotten used to it.

I haven’t.

Mac must weigh at least two-fifty, and holding on to him while trying to balance on the ledge is a game I won’t be able to play long, especially not with only one good arm.

Since the suit can’t get wet, all the blood from my nose is being forced to pour down my chin, down my neck. I keep instinctively licking my wet upper lip, but the taste of my own blood makes me gag; I’ve always had a weak stomach.

“Come on Mac, come on …” I say, leaning against the building and trying to swing Gargan up onto the ledge, but it’s no good; my gimp arm seizes up. The wind blows.

Down below, I hear all the sirens of the cop cars from other precincts, arriving eight minutes too late.

A little part of me is proud; my second outing as a superhero, and I took out fucking VENOM. Granted, this is Venom Three (I heard the costume was with Angelo Fortunato as well before he died), and Venom Three acting really strange and kind of animalistic, but shit, that shouldn’t matter; I just took out a Name!

The wind blows harder, and I sway against my will; I’m not going to be able to hold onto Mac much longer. My shoulder is really starting to ache, now, and the balancing act isn’t going to —

“What, exactly, are you doing?” Spider-Man says, scaring the bejesus out of me. He’s crouched right above me, sitting on the wall, hanging down so his upside-down head faces mine.

“Fuck off,” I grumble, and frantically try to move my useless right arm; he’s so close, he’s SO CLOSE, if I blast him at this range there’s no way he could dodge, right? But it’s useless.

All trying to move my arm accomplishes is an explosion of pain; I crumble forward, but Spider-Man puts a finger against my chest and pushes me back against the wall.

“Seriously. What’re you doing?”

“Get the fuck away from me.”

“Such language!” he says, waggling his finger. I hate him, I hate him, I HATE HATE HATE HIM.

Spider-Man can’t just beat you up; no, that’s far too dignified. He has to embarrass you, make a joke out of you, beat you spiritually as well as emotionally, and he does this because he’s a fucking sadistic sociopath with no morals or compassion. I’ll take a punch from Luke Cage over Spider-Man any day; at least he’s fucking QUIET.

Think of metahuman combat as a debate:

ME: “I want this money.”

SUPERHERO: “You cannot have this money. It is against the law to take this money.”

ME: “I shall take this money regardless of the law, because I want it.”

SUPERHERO: “That is aberrant behavior. We shall fight.”

ME: “Have at thee!”

Granted, I always lose. But with Spider-Man it works something like this:

ME: “I want this money.”

SPIDERMAN: “YOU GOT A STUPID HEAD!”

ME: “What?”

SPIDERMAN: “I’M GONNA PUNCH YOU A LOT!”

ME: “What?”

SPIDERMAN: “HERE COMES THE PAIN FISTS POO-BRAINS!”

ME: “Wha–?”

POW!

SPIDERMAN: “HAHA I HIT YOU STUPID GUY YOU GO TO JAIL NOW!”

“The hell does it looks like I’m doing?” My version of a clever retort; things always sound so much more eloquent in my head.

“It looks like you’re on the side of a building molesting naked Scorpion.”

“I …” — Realizing I have no response to this — “Fuck you.”

“Herman …” Spider-Man says, slowly, thinking. “What happened down there?”

“Why the fuck should you care?”

“People are dead, Herman, and you’re wasting my time with this tough-guy shtick.”

A pause.

“Venom —”

“Who?”

I nod at naked Mac.

“Ah, right.”

“Venom attacked the station.”

“Why?”

I ponder telling him, but then realize I don’t really know myself.

“Who knows? He’s crazy. Don’t help much that he’s covered with that black glop.”

Spider-Man nods. “So, Schultzy, Schultzmeister, the Fabulous Schultzmo, how do you figure in?”

A pause.

“I was trying to stop him.”

Spider-Man webs Gargan to the side of the building; the cops’ll get him later. Shame he doesn’t do the same for me, because the blood loss from my nose is starting to make me dizzy, and dizzy is not a good thing to be right now.

He drops down next to me on the ledge.

“Why did you try to stop him?” he says; I can tell he’s confused because he’s finally talking straight and simple. No more wise-ass shit now. I don’t answer. I don’t need to. “For the same reason you tried to stop that thing down town?”

And I have a small epiphany; Spider-Man hasn’t noticed the discrepancies in Ravage’s behavior. And he didn’t see how nutzoid Gargan was acting in the station. Hell, Spider-Man probably doesn’t even know this is where Ravage’s body is, probably doesn’t even see a connection between the two incidents. After all, this is everyday shit for him; if his life were a story, this wouldn’t even be a subplot.

It’s still my case. I’m still the only one who —

“This conversation isn’t over, Schultz,” Spider-Man says, and leaps down out towards the street.

“Huh?” I say out loud, just before the first whiff of smoke touches my barely-functional nose. The police station has started burning. And off goes Spider-Man, big hero, to save those still trapped inside the building.

How heroic. How noble.

Something in me wants to let myself fall, because, honestly, I would NEVER do what he’s doing now. The idea of putting my personal welfare at risk for ANYONE has always been a big no-no for yours truly, though I’d never say that.

When you’re as selfish, as genuinely shallow and empty as I am, you have to keep your mouth shut.

I edge along the ledge, and kick through a window, startling several cubicle workers who’d been watching the chaos below.

By the time I get home, the flow of blood from my nose is little more than a trickle. When I finally take off the mask in front of the mirror in my too-small bathroom, my face from the nostrils down is that turgid red of dried blood, running down my neck and under the torso piece of the costume. It’s revolting.

My body hurts.

Nothing new.

The shoulder is killing me; my right arm is completely flaccid. Occasionally the fingers twitch from the pain. I press in the unlock code on the back, and the whole deal pops off.

God, I’m out of shape. Not fat. Yet. I need to stop existing solely on cheeseburgers. Maybe exercise. I’ll need to start riding a bike anyway, now that my car is out of commission.

A bike? Fuck that. I need a bonified, certified ride.

Note to Self: Call Tinkerer, see what kind of transportation he can give me for under ten grand. He’ll probably just give me a unicycle and we’ll call it even, but there’s always a chance Phineas might have something useful laying around. The old guy’s got a soft spot for me; he says I’m a “fellow engineer.”

The purple-black ring of hematomas around my shoulder is horrific. I have to stare at it for a couple of seconds before my brain can even comprehend it’s my own body I’m looking at.

I wash off the blood from my nose, crack it back into place and then call Aleksei; I’ll need him. And I think to myself, so this is being a hero.

“It fucking sucks,” I say aloud. Rent is due. Electric is due. On TV, they’re saying a fight between two super-powered criminals spilled into a police station downtown today, costing sixteen lives, until Spider-Man swung down and blah blah BLAH blah BLAH.

Sixteen people. Sixteen sets of parents. Sixteen childhoods. Sixteen lives.

Of course, I’m pissed that I got blamed instead of thanked. There goes more glory. And more credit for the Sticky Contortionist, amazing, spectacular.

But at the back of my brain that number jumps out at me, and I don’t know why. It’s definitive. Being a hero, both money-wise and morale-wise, was the worst decision I’ve ever made.

On the wall next to my bed, my She-Hulk 1997 Playboy Centerfold looks like it’s laughing at me.

Aleksei shows up a half hour later, all smiles until he sees the state of me.

“Ah, jeez, Herman, look at you,” he says, his big mouth shrinking and inverting into a harlequin frown. “What happened?”

“You know what happened, Aleksei, I told you on the phone.”

“Oh, right, right, the Scorpion.” O, ride ride, dah Scorepeeon.

“He’s Venom now.”

“Whatever. He’s still Gargan, right, the same old shit with a new name is still the same old shit.”

He doesn’t know this, he couldn’t know this, but his words hurt me. I am, after all, the Same Old Shit. And what have these last few days been, if not me trying to give myself a new name? Sometimes Rhino can be very Zen like that.

We sit on the bed, and he puts one of those lunch tray-sized hands on my shoulder.

“You ready?”

We’ve done this before; he knows to ask now instead of just going ahead and maiming me. I grit my teeth, but then remember that you’re not suppose to do that, and then just sit there, sort of grimacing like an angry ferret.

That’s the animal I always compare myself to, a ferret.

That or a weasel.

I wonder if that says anything about my self esteem?

“I’m ready.”

POP.

“FUCKATRUCK!” I scream, and fall off the bed into one of the mammoth piles of dirty laundry that fill my apartment.

The window, one of my only two windows, shatters inward, and a fork, a fucking FORK, wisps through the air where my head just was, and hits the wall, burying into the cheap plaster. Rhino blinks a couple of times.

And suddenly, if only for a moment, I believe in fate.

Aleksei picks his huge body up off the bed, and pulls the fork out of the wall; he notices something I didn’t, a sheet of paper neatly tied to the stem, complete with an ornamental bow.

“What’s it … What’s it say?” My voice is shaking. It was a fork. A fork through a fifth story window into what would’ve been my left ear. Only one person could’ve done that. Aleksei puzzles over the note for a moment, and then reads aloud.

“Schultz/Sytsevich — How’s that ear doing?”

“Cute.” My voice is still shaking.

Rhino continues: “You haven’t even scratched the surface, but you’re already in way over your head. Back off, and maybe one day you can die old and alone. Keep it up, you die young and alone. Same goes for you, freak. Kisses and Hugs …”

Rhino stares directly at me as he says the word.

“Bullseye,” we say together.

I am seriously outclassed here. We both are.

And for the millionth time today, it runs through my head:

Why was Ravage going crazy?

What was wrong with Gargan, and why was he trying to destroy the body?

What was that thing on the back of Ravage’s head?

Who started the blaze in the police station? There was nothing going on that could’ve lit up when I went through, and shit, isn’t that black Venom-goop supposed to be afraid of fire?

And for the first time, ever, I think, I feel … I don’t know, interested. Exhilarated, maybe. Sure, there was just an attempt on my life by arguably the best assassin in the world. Yes, I’m beaten, bruised and thoroughly demoralized. And yeah, I’m more than a little scared shitless.

But I feel alive. It’s these weird electric feeling, again, almost like crime, but better.

“What do we do, Herman?” His one square of uncovered skin twisting into a nervous sob. “What did you do to make Bullseye mad at you?”

I stand, rotating my right shoulder a few times to make sure it still works. It does; hurts like a bitch, but it can support a gauntlet.

“I don’t know what I did, Rhino, but I’m going to find out.” Rhino nervously wrings his enormous paws.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Herman.”

“I don’t care if it’s a good idea.” I take out my cell phone.

“Who’re you calling?”

I dial the Tinkerer.

“We’re going to need more firepower.” I allow myself a small smile. “Nobody fucks with my windows.”

Devolution, Part Three

Looking at the Tinkerer, you wouldn’t think he was a mass murderer.

He’s a little guy, maybe five foot, all stooped over from age and years of hunkering down over his work tables, with little grandfatherly wisps of white hair, so thin that you can see his mottled, liver-spotted scalp. He wears glasses, but I think they’re just a ruse; the guy’s eyes are way too sharp to need them, and you can tell; they look it, the kind of emerald green that can cut straight into you.

He speaks in a soft, lilting voice, everyone’s favorite teacher, the old man you just can’t help but spill your soul out to.

He’s more or less responsible for the deaths of over five thousand people.

Sometimes I shiver uncontrollably when he smiles at me; that’s not an old man smiling. That’s the smile of a shark.

“Herman, my boy! I was wondering when you’d visit a lonely old man again, I’m so tired of outfitting psychopaths …”

You’re a psychopath yourself, goddamnit, you freaking monster.

“Nice to see you, too, Phineas. Been a while.” I run my fingers along the side of a new Goblin-Glider he’s designing; once Osborn gets out of prison, he’s going to use this thing.

And people are going to die.

On maximum power the gauntlets blew the Venom-symbiote entirely off Mac Gargan. And for a very dark moment, I wonder what they’d do to someone as old and unprotected as the Tinkerer.

“It’s a Goblin-Glider, old friend,” he says, beaming. “I’ve upped the ammunition stores; he can shoot those razors of his at two hundred times more efficiency, no more weight imbalance for our pal Norman.”

“That’s incredible,” I say, imagining that insane laughter as razor-bats tear through a crowded intersection. The shivers again. “How’ve you been, Phineas?”

“Hard times,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder, a grandfatherly smile, crow’s-feet bunching up by his eyes. “Hard times. So many heroes in New York these days, and fewer and fewer fiscally responsible villains.”

His workshop is what I always imagined the prop-warehouse at a movie studio looked like: every flat surface is covered in weaponry, everything from conventional guns to what looks to be a large assortment of explosive Easter Egg grenades.

“So, a new pair of gauntlets? An upgrade to the suit, perhaps? Or maybe …” The Tinkerer lifts up what looks like a steel tennis ball. “I call it the Unfibrulator; it sets off an electronic pulse that stops the beat of every human heart in a twenty-five yard range. That suit of yours would surely make you immune, so —”

“No, no, nothing like that,” I say quickly.

“Are you sure? Your compatriot Killshot used one just the other week, and managed to take out half of the Sin-Cong royal family.” I remember the picture in Marvel Knights, an underground super-villain newsletter. A child, his heart having torn itself in half, his eyes bulging out of his head. That horrible shiver comes again.

“I need transportation,” I say quietly, imagining Phineas choking the life out of the child with his bare hands.

“Transportation, eh?” He sounds disappointed. “You know, we could add an acidic gas feature to those gauntlets and —”

“No,” I say, maybe a little too loudly. Please, God, don’t have a device that detects negative thoughts.

I’ve only been really truly frightened three times in my life. The first was when my father locked me in the basement for three weeks.

Long story.

The second was when I first saw that Galactus ship in the sky, before I realized that the Fantastic Four could own his ass any time, day or night.

The third was of the Scourge of the Underworld. A couple of years back this underground organization was killing villains and … Why’m I explaining this to you? Look it up yourself.

“I just need something simple,” I say. I want this to be over, but Phineas, lonely old guy that he is, is trying to drag it out.

“Simple?”

“Something cheap,” I clarify.

“How cheap?”

“VERY cheap. Stiltman-cheap.” Phineas laughs a geriatric’s warbling, throaty laugh.

“What kind of cheap transportation are you looking for, Herman?” he says, starting to lead me towards the back of the workshop, where his larger projects reside. “I mean, surely they still sell roller skates down at the local five and dime, yes?”

I force a smile that, when I see it reflected in the shining chrome surfaces of a nearby Ray-Gun, looks borderline psychotic.

I stop the smile.

“I was hoping for something that flies,” I say without thinking. Flies? Me? I hate heights, why am I volunteering to … wait, why’s he smiling like that?

“Cheap and flies. Lucky you.”

“Lucky me?”

“I’ve got just the thing. Finished overhauling it last week, as a matter of fact. It’s still got a bit too much boost on lift-off; that’s why the original owner gave it to me.”

“Gave it to you?”

“Mr. Osborn said he’d rather stick with his own technology.”

“The Goblin?” I whisper, and Phineas nods. Whatever he’s going to show me, it was good enough for the Green Goblin, if even temporarily.

My excitement level rises.

He hobbles over to something hidden under a tarp, cylindrical, maybe a foot in circumference and six feet long. The excitement level rises again.

“I call it …” he says, yanking off the tarp in a dramatic manner. “The Flying Broomstick!”

My excitement drops through the floor and into hell.

The … thing, yes, the THING in front of me appears to be a big piece of steel piping, possibly solid all the way through. It’s got goofy little handles up on the front of it, not much bigger than the “oh, shit” handles on the ceiling above the door in a car. The back of it seems to be just one big jet engine, and a saddle is kind of haphazardly soldered onto it. The saddle looks if you sit on it wrong there’s a chance it could take your virginity, male or female.

There are three buttons on the right handle, and a lever, like a bike-brake, attached to the left. The front tapers off into a rocket-ship-like spike, at the tip of which is a little red lightbulb.

It’s the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

You can almost hear me swallow my pride.

“How much?”

“It’s free.”

“Free?”

“What good is it taking the money of a dead man? It’s as good as stealing.”

I open and close my mouth a few times before I can even speak. “What’re you —”

Phineas laughs that friendly old laugh again, but now it’s not friendly, if only by its context. “Herman, you think I don’t know why you’re here? Your little superhero adventures?” He shakes his head, smiles that shark’s smile.

“You’ve been watching me?”

“I watch all my customers. And you haven’t been hard to keep track of … You’re making people very angry, Herman. Important people.”

“But I haven’t even done anything!” It comes out as a plea, a whine, a complaint, when I meant it to be an angry declamation. I can’t even get inflection right.

“Ah,” Phineas says, raising a finger. “But sometimes all one needs is to THINK about doing something, and they are condemned.”

“Condemned?”

He does that thing where you pull your thumb across your throat and make a “schhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiip” sound. Normally, when someone does this you just laugh at them. When the Tinkerer does it, it’s shake-shit terrifying.

Fifteen minutes and five years off my life later, I’m standing in an alley out back of his warehouse, trying to figure out the controls on my new … God, it makes me sick to say it … “Flying Broomstick.”

I didn’t bother talking any more to the Tinkerer; it was clear that he wasn’t going to say anymore on the subject of my apparently very imminent death, and he dropped most of the “kindly old Phineas” act after the throat-cutting-thing. Had a robot help me take out the glider and then slid closed the doors, leaving me alone in the most heavily mutant quarter of the Bronx.

So, the green button starts the engine; the thing runs silent and apparently heatless, the only sign that it’s on at all being the faint blue glow from the jet engine. Pressing the lever down gives it gas, or whatever the hell it runs on, and the blue glow brightens up.

The purple button dims the blue glow; I guess that’s a brake.

The orange button pops open a panel on the left side of the front, revealing what looks like a Gatling gun. If I don’t press the button again, the panel closes after fifteen seconds. I assume that if I press it within those fifteen seconds …

I don’t want to think about it.

I straddle the Broomstick, and try to think positive thoughts; at absolute best, I’m climbing onto a free-flying jet engine.

I take a deep breath and start to pull down my mask when the first kick hits me, gets me square in jaw before I can get the mask over it. Smart move. The impact knocks me off my Flying Dildo, pardon me, Broomstick, and I land in a pile of torn-up trash bags. I immediately start to sit up, and get kicked again; this time it’s a swing as opposed to a straight, and something yanks the mask entirely off my head.

“What do you know about FPS?” a voice says, and something lands on top of me, but my concentration is a little blurred from the pain; it’s not the kicks that did it to me, it’s my fucking nose. When they yanked off the mask, they yanked off the bandaging and now I am jacked the hell up. I start to raise my gauntlets.

“Kiss my grits you fucking —” And suddenly my hands are pinned down with bolos. I close my eyes and concentrate on shrinking the pain; put it in a box, and then shrink the box until it crushes all the pain away. It’s a technique I learned from an old friend of mine, Fancy Dan.

Put the pain in a box, and then shrink the box until it crushes all the pain away.

“What do you know about FPS?” the voice says again, a note of anger now. My vision is clearing. I suppose it’s a testament to my loneliness and absolute base-state of mind that I immediately pop a hard-on.

Squat-straddling over me is a buxom woman in skin-tight black latex, blue-white hair hanging down around her face, like a halo in the street-lights, the tips of it tickling my cheeks, lips and forehead.

It smells good; like vanilla and cinnamon.

I didn’t think it was possible, but my luck just got worse.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Black Cat.

Devolution, Part Four

Felicia Hardy isn’t just beautiful.

She’s a goddess.

She’s just … Jesus. And I’m sure she knows it; she’s straddling me, pressing her entire body against me. If I leaned forward even an inch we’d bump noses.

A headbutt isn’t a bad idea.

Or I could squeeze the button on my palm to vibrate the suit, that’d probably knock her out, give me time to get away on the Broomstick and …

… Nah.

“What do you know about FPS?” she says for the third time.

“I have no fuckin’ clue what you’re talking about.”

As far as I know, Black Cat isn’t a meta, just a normal human like me or you. If the Kingpin wasn’t bullshiting, he was the one who gave her the suit, which he says amplifies her agility, strength and flexibility; I don’t see how the suit could have that much power, though, as now that I see it in person it just looks like near to paper-thin latex, the sort of stuff you see in bondage porn.

I half-heartedly try to get out from under her, and she shoves me back down, not that I mind. I doubt she’d be pressing the physicality if she knew this was the closest I’ve come to sex in two years.

“Don’t play stupid with me, Herman,” she says, the R in “Herman” a weird sort of growl.

“Look, I’ll say it again, I have no fuckin’ clue what you’re talking about.”

“If I get up, will you try to run?”

“Please don’t get up,” I say before I can stop myself.

Okay, this is awkward.

She starts to say something but then stops, and gives me this kind of cock-eyed look.

“For both of our sakes, I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she says slowly.

“Felicia … You look great.”

“Well, this is going well,” she murmurs to herself, and stands up.

GODFUCKINGDAMNIT! STUPID, STUPID STUPID! I just had to let it slip, didn’t I?

“What’s FPS?” I say, picking up my mask and wiping some of the garbage off it. She groans.

“That’s what I was here to ask you. I thought you’d know.” She pulls a strip of burnt paper out of her cleavage, and hands it to me. “Take a look.”

It’s wax paper, the kind they use in cash registers for receipts. Half of it is burned away, but the intact pieces read:

COMPLETE REFUND…e The Shocker’s Interf…Resch…$4,000 Credit…The Griz…power li… 240 Harding Street, 9:…AM…

And then down at the bottom, which is the least burnt bit, in big, red letters:

F.P.S.

“What’s this?” I say, feeling a little dumb.

“I think it’s a receipt.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know, Schultz, it’s got your name on it, I thought you’d know.”

“I don’t. Where’d you get it?”

“Does it matter?”

There’s a pause. This is what it sounds like when two people very suddenly realize they have nothing to say to each other.

“It matters to me; like you said, my name’s on it. If I’m interfering in something I’d like to at least know where it is so that I can interfere in it properly.”

Her breasts are like volleyballs.

“A client brought it to me.”

“A client?”

They can’t be real. She’s got like 2 per cent body fat, all lean muscle. Would she be able to do all that flippy-dippy stuff with boobs that big? No, no way. Were they that big back in our vault-snatch-and-grab days?

Felicia and I used to work for the Kingpin together, before when she was just starting to train to become the Black Cat. She’s Walter Hardy’s (RIP) kid; great guy, Walter was. I went out on my first job with him. The guy had a way with alarm systems, almost like a mutie with them, although I doubt any mutants have a skill as specialized as “Always Cuts The Right Wire.” Felicia was such a tiny thing, delicate even.

Of course, she was just a kid back then, we both were, so maybe she had a growth spurt.

A growth spurt of silicone.

“I’m a private investiga–… Wait, why am I telling you this?”

“As I recall, you were the one who kicked me in the face. Twice, if memory serves. New at the private investigator thing? Because last I checked, the ass-kicking comes AFTER you ask questions, not before.”

“So, by virtue of me kicking you, I’m now trapped into talking to you?”

“That’s about the size of it. Besides, we’re old friends. I mean, you could spend some time on an old friend, right?”

“We were never really friends, Herman.”

“Coworkers, then.”

“You must be a very lonely person.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not the main reason why I’m interested.” It’s your enormous tits. They’re hypnotic. “I just think I might know more about this than I originally thought I did.”

She smiles, if ever so slightly. “So I should ditch the kicking method?”

“Nah. I’m guessing it just improved my face anyway, so …” The smile doesn’t go away; it doesn’t get bigger, but it doesn’t go away. “Look, can we talk about this, you know, minus masks, not in a dark scary alley?” She just sort of stares at me. “It’s okay. I’m a superhero now.”

“Really,” she says, monotone. “Since when?”

“Since, uh …” I think back. “Since Tuesday.”

When I was nine years old, my father locked me in the basement for three weeks. He’d gone on this rant to my little sister Elaine the day before about how I was going to grow up to support the family and be the man of the house, and how she’d never have to worry about anything, and that night he’d snuck into my room, stripped little me naked, taken little sleeping me downstairs, down into the basement.

No, nothing like that, you fucking pervert. Worse than that.

When I woke up, I was alone, cold and naked. There was one light bulb in the center of the box I was in, plugged into a floor-jack that came up out of a hole in the floor. I didn’t even know where I was; my entire world had been cut down to this four-foot-high 4×4 box. There was only one feature on the walls: a type-one combination lock.

This was easy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, at this point I’m panicked, I’m scared, fuck, I’m nine years old. I have no fucking clue what’s going on, but I know how to work a combo lock, and, thank Christ, I’ve got the presence of mind to start trying combinations. First I try my combo at school: 3, 4, 5. No luck. So I try my birthday: 8, 8, 71. Nothing. Dad’s Birthday: 4/23/24. I sit there trying random combinations for an hour until I develop this little system that I think I invented. The way I did it, I’d later find out, is called “The Contact Point” method

After the first hour, I’d noticed that when I brought the dial past the “3” there was this little click. I started making notes on whereever I’d find clicks, graphing my results in the sand. Eventually I combined my results; 3, 8, 3. I’ll find out later that it’s my grandmother’s birthday.

The door opens.

Into a very slightly larger box. No light bulb here; it’s built directly onto the original box, the walls less than an inch away from the outside of the first one. And this one has a type-three combo lock, a note from Dad, a little package, a bottle of water and a sandwich in Saran Wrap. The note says:

“CONGRATULATIONS, HERMAN — ONLY NINETEEN MORE TO GO — I LOVE YOU”

Sure. He loves me. Good.

I open the package; inside is a doctor’s stethoscope.

I still have it; it’s in the one safe house I never ever go to, for fear of it being found by the cops. It’s sentimental, yeah, but it saved my life.

Because that’s all what my dad called “The Safe Game” was. It was a murder game.

A survival-of-the-fittest game.

An evolution game.

“I don’t understand; like a hole, or —”

“No, not a hole,” I say again, sipping my root-beer. “A spot.”

When put into a normal environment, an everyday setting (in this case, a Taco Bell) Felicia looks, put simply, ridiculous. She’s one of those many women roaming around the superhero-subculture that are just too sexy for the real world.

“Well, that’s the Spot’s trademark, right?” She licks some Fiesta Sauce off her lower lip. I’m going to have to close my eyes if I want to coherently continue this conversation.

“Jon?” I say, amazed at having not thought of this. “Maybe. But I haven’t seen him in, jeez, six or seven years. Word was he just permanently slipped into that subdimension of his, got lost between spots.”

“Did it look like one of his?”

“I don’t know. I never saw him do the spot trick in person; around us, he was just plain old Jonny Ohnn.”

“I didn’t know you two got along,” she says, smiling the knockout smile. “Matter of fact, I’m amazed you even know his name.”

“Hey,” I say, trying to be charming. “Just ’cause I don’t have friends, it doesn’t mean I don’t have ears. I keep up on the Gossip of Evil.”

“Why would he put a spot on Ravage’s HEAD, though? I mean, wouldn’t that mean —”

“That he could move through it? Yeah, if I understand the powers right.” I fiddle with one of my gauntlets nervously under the table. “Look, we’ve already been over my story. What’s yours? Where’d you get the receipt?”

Felicia sighs and looks out the window.

“On Wednesday, a woman contacted me about the death of her husband. It seems that he’d been acting very strangely recently, and then one morning his buddy shows up, all smiles, and they drive out to the fashion district for no apparent reason and Ravage kills the husband.”

Huh.

“Nothing too suspicious about that. Happens all the time in New York, right? He was probably just going to buy his wife a gift or —”

“A-ha,” she says, raising a finger. “That’s what I said. But then the friend —”

“The one that drove him?”

“Yeah. The friend starts acting strange. Instead of being devastated, he’s ANGRY. He gives her an angry phone call saying that her husband ruined everything, and then four hours later she gets a call from the friend’s wife, saying she’d found this mysterious receipt in the trash of her husband’s office.”

“So … Wife With Dead Husband and Wife With Weirdo-Asshole Husband come to you to find out … What?”

“To find out why Dead Husband and Living Husband would take out a combined total of four thousand dollars from their bank accounts just to get one of them killed by a super-villain.”

“Huh?”

“The four thousand on the receipt. It left their accounts on Monday night, and was returned, probably along with this receipt, on midday Tuesday, just after Dead Husband became, well, dead.”

I suddenly feel out of my league again, and a little lost. I volunteer a theory, and immediately regret it.

“So … the Asshole Husband … Shit, I dunno, hired Ravage to kill the Dead Husband?”

“You’re forgetting the post-death ‘he ruined everything’ phone call, and the prompt return of the cash.”

“Right.” Now I feel stupid. Her tits alone are smarter than me. “Besides, Ravage didn’t seem in the state of mind to be a hired gun. He just seemed … Berserk.”

Felicia nods, her white bangs falling over her eyes. “It really was very brave of you to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Take on Ravage like that. I didn’t think you had … well … guts.”

Should I be swelling with pride over a half-hearted pseudo-compliment like that?

Because I am.

“So, what do we do now?” I say, setting down my empty root beer and dropping a two-cent tip; hey, shut up, money’s tight.

“We don’t do anything. Not as a team, at least.”

Why did she have to clarify it like that?

“Okay,” I say, trying again. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stake out 240 Harding Street. I’ve got a feeling that come nine AM tomorrow morning, something interesting is going to happen.” There it is again; the “R” in “interesting” is rolled on the tip of her tongue, like a cat’s purr.

She doesn’t even say goodbye when she leaves; just shoots me that smile that could stop a bullet, stands up and walks away.

I’m left sitting there in Taco Bell with a hard-on.

That night, post Felicia-based masturbation, I get a call from Aleksei. A while back I sat on my phone and busted the ringer, so now it just makes this kind of low, mooing sound when somebody calls, and since Aleksei is pretty much the only person who calls, it sort of fits him.

“I got a job!” I gud a jub.

“Oh?” I say blearily, and roll over so that the draft from my shattered bedroom window doesn’t hit me so hard.

“Yeah; it’s a big one, the pay off is thirty-three thousand.”

“Wow,” I say, trying to sound impressed instead of furiously jealous. “What is it? Bodyguard? Bank job?”

“Nah, nah, nothing like that,” Aleksei says, that big slow chuckle of his rumbling through the receiver. “It’s a testing job. I go to this warehouse and meet up with a guy and he’s going to do some tests on my suit to see if he can make one of his own.”

“Great, Aleksei. It’s sounds fascinating.”

“Don’t it?” Aleksei says, brimming with enthusiasm. “So, what’re you doing?”

“Aleksei, it’s four AM. I was asleep.”

“Oh, right. You sleep at night now, I forgot.”

Good old Aleksei.

Harding Street is nice this early in the morning. Back when I was a crook (i.e., last fuckin’ week) I didn’t go out much during the day, so hearing the birds and feeling the fresh air on my face is kind of a welcome change. I feel that weird electric feeling again; like every muscle in my body wants to go, move, do, say, just be more me than I already am.

God, I’m talking like a total fag now. Great. Welcome to SuperHero-Dom.

At first, nothing. Fifteen minutes goes by. No sign of the Black Cat, but she’s around here somewhere, probably in a better venue of surveillance than I am; I’ve basically been leaning against the same newsstand for the past half-hour, wearing a trenchcoat over the costume, my hand on my mask in my pocket, thoroughly creeping out the little Indian guy who runs the place.

“Can I help you?” he says for the eight-hundredth time.

“I’ll eat your brain,” I say. There’s a silence. He gives up, and goes back to nervously eyeing me from behind the counter.

That’s when I see the van, and the feeling comes again; that “super-villain sense.” It’s a normal van, blue, no passenger windows. Parallel parked between a truck and a little Datsun.

I think of the Flying Broomstick sitting unused on the floor in my apartment, and feel a pang of shame.

Then the back doors of the van FLY OFF.

“Jesus!” I shout to nobody, yanking the mask down over my face. A massive shape, nearly as big as Aleksei, tears its way out of the van.

Oh, my God.

“Max!” I scream as the thing that looks like a cross between the Abominable Snowman and a Kodiak bear tears into a passerby, ripping his chest open like a blood-filled plastic bag. “Max, what the hell are you doing?”

I take off across the street towards my old friend the as he claws his way through the ribcage of a startled soccer mom. This doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make any sense at all.

This isn’t happening.

I put my hand on his fur covered shoulder, and he turns, flecks of thick saliva flying from his mouth.

“Max, what’s wrong with y–?”

“RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!” says Maxwell Markham, former World Wrestling Alliance champion, then harmless super-villain “The Grizzly,” and currently a murderous berserker.

It isn’t a human noise.

“… Max?” I say, barely above a squeak.

The paw hits me so hard I flip before I hit the ground, and everything goes black.

Devolution, Part Five

Maxwell Markham was never a little guy, even without his monstrous “grizzly” exo-skeleton. He used to be a pro-wrestler; I was never a big fan of wrestling to begin with, but everybody, fan or not, knew about Max.

Most people these days know that wrestling is fake, you know, choreographed. Back then it wasn’t common knowledge, and Max did everything in his power to protect the business. His way of doing this was to not pull punches, to really slam the hell out of his opponents, whether he was supposed to win the match or not.

J. Jonah Jameson, that pillar of morality, targeted Max in the eyes of his conservative asswipe readers as kind of pariah of professional wrestling, got his ass banned from the business.

Guys like Max only know how to do one thing, and once you take that away from them, chances are they’re going to end up as criminals. He met up with this creep named “The Jackal”, who hooked him up with the Super-Strength-Big-Ass-Claws-Exo-Skeleton, and started up as the Grizzly.

He and I got along real well; I was one of the few guys who was more successful than him when it came to crime. Poor guy couldn’t even rob a bank without that suit of his malfunctioning and sending him flying through a window. For a while he was pitching this bullshit story that he’d broken Spider-Man’s back, but last I’d heard he’d given up crime entirely.

He was a sweet guy; dumb, but not STUPID dumb. I always thought that if he’d just spent a little more time planning and less time smashing he could’ve eventually made it up to my level, as pitiful as that level is.

The thing standing over me when I roll over onto the asphalt isn’t Maxwell Markham. I look into its eyes, and I know that Maxwell Markham is dead. And it scares the hell out of me.

“Max!” I shout anyway, a little punch-drunk from the whack-to-the-face. I’m just now getting to my feet, and I can feel that my nose has starting bleeding again. “Stop! Snap out of it!”

Max doesn’t even respond; he just roars again and grabs a jogger by the head. There’s a sickly egg-crack CRUNCH sound, and brains spill through Max’s claws. I gag; the damn weak stomach again.

“RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHRRRRRRRRR!” Max says; it’s as though he’s not thinking, not processing the world around him, just lashing out and destroying. He shatters the doors of the bank he’s standing in front of and rampages in.

I stumble after him, charging up the gauntlets. I watch as Max grabs a loan-agent, picks him up and powerbombs him through his desk, which cracks in half. The guy is dead before he hits the floor.

“RRRRRRRRRRGRRRGGRRRRRRR!” Max mumbles, turning and grabbing hold of a woman who, in a fit of panic, has pressed her entire body up against an ATM. She screams again and again as Max spins her up into the air, and then cracks her back over his knee, bending her into a mushy V-shape.

“Herman, you idiot,” Felicia shrieks, shoving me out of her way as she sprints towards Max. “Do something!”

I don’t. I can’t. I’m frozen.

So, this is what happens when I’m NOT the one in danger. I just stand and stare, watching as Felicia leaps into the air, whipping one of those long, lithe legs into a roundhouse kick to the back of Max’s head.

“MRMRRR,” Max grumbles, and turns on her, big bear claws snapping together as her grabs at her face. Felicia easily glides back along the smooth marble floor of the bank, throwing kicks and punches into Max’s midsection, and he trundles along after her, roaring, swinging blindly.

Still frozen, and my mind is wandering. It said Grizzly on the receipt; someone hired him to do this, or at least knew he would be here. Why? As a distraction while they robbed the bank? Then why would they need him insane, why would —

Max grabs hold of Felicia by the neck, and smashes her up against the wall, through one of the bullet-proof glass bank-teller window. She lets out this distorted scream, like an animal being hit by a car.

“SON OF A BITCH!” I shout, and act without thinking, without planning, without intent other than to cause grave bodily harm. I run forward, jump up onto Max’s sizeable back, put a fist on either side of his head and hit my palm triggers.

That beautiful sound as the gauntlets fire; vshVRRMMMMM.

Max’s body shakes so hard it throws me off, but I land on my feet. Max has dropped Felicia, and is stumbling around drunkenly, clawing at his own head, tearing off chunks of exo-skeleton and flesh alike. A double blast from that distance, even at a low power setting like the one I used, will FUCK YOU UP. His eardrums are burst forever and are currently filling with blood, his skull is cracked in a dozen places, most if not all of his teeth are shattered, his eye sockets are shifted out of shape, a hundred different injuries all administered in the course of a single second.

“ROAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!” Max howls, so loud I can feel my eardrums vibrate. He turns back to me, his face a mask of insane rage, and spits out a pulpy, bloody ball of saliva and shattered teeth. I raise both of my gauntlets and blast him again; the impacts blow him into the air and through a display on Safe and Reliable Home Mortgage. He slides across the marble, and lies motionless.

“Felicia!” I yelp in an absurd Mickey-Mouse voice, and dive down next to her. Max’s claws sunk pretty deeply into her neck, shoulder and chest, and for once I’m not staring at her tits. “Felicia, are you —”

She points at something behind me, I turn and catch a frying-pan sized paw-punch to the stomach; it lifts me off my feet and for a moment I get a look at that insane, warped face, and then I go crashing into a row of SimpleBank computer monitors, which shatter under my weight.

Max starts to stalk towards me, and I notice something genuinely scary; the point-blank blasts I gave him have completely shattered his face-plate, cheek-bones, jaw, nose and orbital bones, and the architecture of his face slides loosely around, no longer in any concrete configuration, now just a wet flesh bag of torn muscle and shattered bone.

“Jesus,” I say, trying to get to my feet and slipping a few times on the remains of the SimpleBank monitors. The suit dispelled most of the impact from the punch to the gut, but it didn’t do jack-shit about my crash landing on the computers, and my back feels like it’s been sledge-hammered in three different places.

“RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAOOOORRRR!” Max screams, and I think that chunk that falls out of his mouth is his tongue. He grabs me by the arm and yanks me into a clothesline; again, the impact itself is dispersed by the suit, but the momentum from the blow pancake-flips me face-first into the edge of a loan-desk; I hear a soft, squishy “craak” from my already broken nose, and then I see stars.

I suppose I’m lucky; the impact could’ve killed me, driven the cartilage shards right up into my brain.

I fire off several random shots at Max, blinded by my pain, and miss every time, though I do manage to do a rather amazing amount of damage to the building itself. Max stands over me, and lifts his claws for another blow, and then Felicia hits him in the back of the head with a chair, so hard I hear the screws in the chair pop.

Max roars and turns on her, and I roll over, taking the opportunity to try to get my shit together. I pull myself up to my feet, and watch as Felicia frantically ducks and dodges around. This is what a superhero fight looks like when nobody involved has powers; it isn’t pretty.

Unable to breathe through my mouth anymore, choking on the blood from my nose, I pull off the mask. Big mistake; something hits me across the back of the head, and I sink down onto all fours. I feel that weird, cold feeling of a sudden impact across my skull, and then drop down onto my stomach, my limbs ceasing to obey me from the pain.

“Guhhhhhhhh …” I say, trying to sit up. “Guhhh … whuuuhhh …” Someone shoves me back down; he’s a guy in his early forties, with one of those big, thick, Magnum P.I. mustaches that makes a person look automatically ridiculous, regardless of all other features. Not to say that this guy wouldn’t look ridiculous anyway; he has an almost perfectly round head, and big, bug eyes that seem to slide right out of his face.

“Stay down, asswipe,” he says, and he hits me squarely in the side of my unprotected neck with what, as it blurs by my face, looks to be a piece of rusted rebar.

I feel like I’ve been beheaded.

Shouldn’t have taken off the goddamn mask.

Felicia hits Max with a series of kicks that rocks him onto his heels, and he lets out another one of those low, pained murmurs. She picks up the leg of a shattered table and lunges at him when Mustache guy grabs her butt and squeezes.

Felicia turns, more shocked than anything else, and Mustache Guy catches her right across the temple with a home-run swing with the piece of rebar. The impact spins her down onto her hands and knees, and I push myself up, raising a gauntlet at the apparently homicidal Mustache guy.

Eat this, asshole.

And then I miss.

Wonderful. Whether it was the blood loss, the combined beatings of the last few days, or the steel-rod shot to the head from the Murderous Mustachioed Maniac, it doesn’t matter. I just had one shot, and I missed.

The blast goes up and into the already battered south wall of the bank, blowing a window clear out into the street.

“What the fuck did I tell you?” the Mayhem Mustache Mudfuck screams, and smashes my raised left hand with the rebar; the suit takes most of the impact, but my arm is still knocked down to my side, leaving my face unprotected for the follow-up kick in the forehead.

I go flat on my back and for what feels like forever I can only see a kind of milky red-black blanket, floating just in front of my eyes.

When I was fourteen I lost my virginity to a mutie girl named Alison Tole. She had purple skin, smooth under my fingertips, and one of her arms was a tentacle that could shapeshift back and forth into a paw, a blade and an approximation of a human hand.

I remember she told me how funny it was that I always identified everything by smell.

I told her about the basement. About the Safe Game.

She never looked at me the same again.

I remember she smelled like ginger, but her hair smelled like blood.

A couple of years back I heard she’d moved to Genosha.

Then Genosha was destroyed by those fucking Sentinels.

No more ginger. Only blood now.

When the red-black blanket lifts, I see Felicia, out cold, maybe dead. I glance up at the bank’s big clock, and am relieved to find that only six minutes have passed.

And then I smell it; even through the thick blood of my destroyed nose I smell it: burnt hair and roasted flesh.

I know that smell. I remember it from the jobs I used to do with Maxwell Dillon, probably better known to you as Electro. It’s the sickly, death-smell of an electrocution.

I stand up and find the bank empty aside from the dead folks, Felicia and myself. I hear sirens outside, and the red-blue-red-blue of police cars flashes in through the destroyed front doors.

Getting up is a chore; I try three times before I manage a shaky sort of zombie-walk over to Felicia.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times; being a superhero minus the “super” part isn’t very fun. I’ll have to find a healer-mutie somewhere in the ghetto and …

Christ.

Mustache-Mcgee must’ve hit Felicia at least two more times; her scalp is split, and the bright red blood leaking out into her silver-white hair is rather beautiful. I stare at it.

Snap out of it Herman. You’ve got a concussion, don’t let it run you.

“Fuhlika,” I say, kneeling down next to her. “Fuhlika … Ah oo awlife?” My words are coming out fuzzy; here’s to hoping I don’t have brain damage.

“SHOCKER!” says a voice over a loudspeaker outside. “COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP! WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! THE GRIZZLY IS DEAD! YOU ARE ALONE! CODE-BLUE UNITS ARE ON THE WAY! COME OUT WITH THE TOP HALF OF YOUR SUIT REMOVED AND YOUR GAUNTLETS DEACTIVATED, AND —”

Oh, great. That’s wonderful.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

Oh, my sweet Aleksei, there are no words big enough to describe my love for you as the already damaged south wall of the bank flies apart.

“Hey, Herman. I saw what was happening on the television, and I thought you could use a lift.” Hey Hoiman. I saw wud was happenin’ on da tell-vishun, I thought you cud use a lift.

“You are my god, Aleksei,” I say, collapsing onto one of those steel-girder arms.

“I know,” he says, and laughs the big retard-laugh.

“Get Felicia,” I say, pulling back on the discarded mask despite my nose’s immediate scream of pain.

“Felicia?” he says, and then notices Black Cat on the floor. He swoops her up over his shoulder, puts me under his arm like a little baby, snorts heavily through his nose, and then charges, smashing straight out through the front of the bank, straight through the police barricade, flipping two squad cars with his horn.

I notice two things in the charge, through all the chaos, gunfire and screaming:

The first is the way Aleksei instinctively tucks Felicia down to his chest, protecting her from bullets meant for him. He really is amazing sometimes.

The second is the Mustache guy; he’s being interviewed by dozens of reporters, and seems annoyed that their TV cameras have momentarily turned towards us.

I don’t have time to do anything about it, as Rhino slams down through the pavement and into the subway tunnels, and from there into the dank underbelly of the city I know so well.

A couple of minutes go by, and Rhino’s heading down a poorly lit tunnel when Felicia turns to me and whispers through a veil of pain.

“That guy,” she says to me from where she lies on Rhino’s shoulder. “The guy with the Mustache.

“Yeah?”

“That was Asshole Husband.”

And for the first time since I started to try to be a superhero, something clicks in my head.

Things are starting to make sense.

Devolution, Part Six

The TV shows Mr. Mustache come out of the bank, scared looking, holding the rebar. He stumbles out onto the sidewalk, and poor old Max charges out after him. Mr. Mustache lets out a scream, something along the lines of, “Come on! Come get me!”

Max did the one thing I’d never seen him do in all the years I knew him: He followed orders.

The rest happens very quickly; Mustache Guy hits Grizzly a couple of times with the rebar, not the same kind of brutal whacks he gave me and Felicia, more like love-taps. Then he jumps over the hood of a Buick and starts shimmying up the rungs on the side of a telephone pole. The Grizzly, so scary, such a hideous creature, follows.

A telephone pole? Open-air electrical lines in the middle of New York City?

This had to be the one corner, the one pole.

It stinks. Everything about it stinks.

The TV shows the monster Grizzly, the terrifying heartless thing that was my friend, chase Mustache up the pole. Mustache reaches the top, and appears to frantically pull at one of the transistor batteries; in reality, if you watch in slow motion, you can see that the rig was already loose. He barely had to touch the thing for it to come flying off. In the same, tugging movement, he throws/drops the transistor into Max’s face.

That enormous, poorly insulated suit lights up like a Christmas tree. Arcs of electricity jump from place to place as the faux-fur pops and fizzes, revealing the outdated 1980s cybernetics underneath, and, as that melts away, Max’s sagging flesh. He sparks and bubbles like a piece of raw meat being cooked in a microwave.

The blood is fizzling and turning to steam as soon as it comes through his now translucent skin. I think I can hear him screaming, but it’s hard to tell over all the noise from the exploding generator.

That and the interview.

They’ve been playing the interview over everything.

See, Mr. Mustache turns out to be quite the effusive fellow once there’s a camera on him.

“I just did what anybody would do,” he keeps saying, and then giving this sickeningly phony “All American Male” smile that Felicia says makes him look like a mannequin of Burt Reynolds.

“But surely you went above and beyond —”

“Well, you know, I was raised in a patriotic household. I defend my own, and the people of New York are my family.” He says this last part extra-loud, and the crowd around him cheers. He knew they would.

People love shit like this. They love the idea that you don’t have to be some superhero or a mutie in order to take down some big scary super-villain. That’s the main reason New York has Code Blue: to prove that with enough training, anyone can take down somebody like Carnage, or the Mole Men.

Of course, they never can; that’s why the roster is constantly changing for those poor fucks. A machine gun, no matter how big, ain’t gonna do jack shit against the Juggernaut.

That’s why they gotta take my advice and do what I always say they should do; just start copying off villain’s designs. You think somebody like Cardiac is gonna fuck with you if you’ve got Doc Ock’s tentacles? Or one of my Shocker gauntlets? Hell, no.

I’m getting off on a tangent.

By the time Max falls, he isn’t a person anymore; not even a corpse. Just a mess of sticky red-black goo in the tattered remains of a grizzly bear costume. I can barely make out his face in it, fused in a macabre scream to the campy fake-bear head of his suit.

“Heroes don’t always wear costumes,” one reporter says.

Aleksei makes a muffled sobbing sound. The big, dime-sized tears have finally stopped, and, with enough cajoling, I’ve got him up and moving around. Which is more than I can say for myself; that hit in the neck from the rebar did more damage than anything big Max did to me. See, I wear this Star of David on a chain around my neck at all times. It had fallen out from under the nape of my suit, and the rebar practically implanted it in my shoulder; I’m going to have a neat little star-shaped scar.

I lie on Felicia’s couch, and I feel like my body is dropping apart. Aleksei putters around in the next room, tending to Felicia, mumbling to himself.

I have no idea how I got here. Last I remember, we three stooges were underground, at 10 in the morning. Now it’s clearly near dark, the room that soft yellow-gray of dusk. I awoke to hear Felicia make the “Burt Reynolds Mannequin” comment in the next room; I could see the TV, but nothing else.

Aleksei was a mess; he was closer to Max than I was (there was even a weirdo-gay rumor for a while, but that’s bullshit and honestly who the fuck cares). It took a lot of convincing for Aleksei to finally (temporarily) buy that Max had gone to a better place.

A lot of convincing, especially since the TV keeps showing that burnt corpse that was our friend.

Short-term memory loss, dilated pupils, nausea, disorientation … That’s a fuck of a concussion. I’d rate it a seven out of ten, with an honorable mention for that persistent, jarring throb that runs down the back of my head and into my neck.

But baby, it’s all good; I figured something out. I don’t totally have it yet, not totally, but I’ve got a piece.

And if I’m going to get the rest of them, we’re going to need the corpse of “Mad” Maxwell Markham.

It takes me a minute to realize I’m no longer wearing my Vibrosuit; now I’m in my boxers and some kind of XXL shirt, a sleep shirt; I look down at it and realize that the shirt features Spider-Man prominently; it’s that famous picture, him swinging with some creep under his arm, looking all noble and heroic and …

Fuck him.

The shirt hits the floor.

“Felicia,” I say, rolling off the couch onto the floor. Rhino’s wrapped about two hundred layers of gauze and padding onto my nose, or more accurately onto the blob of blood, skin and snot that once was my nose. The muscles in my back feel beat to shit from my crash landing on the computers, and standing up straight is a painful and ultimately pointless endeavor.

So I crawl. I crawl like a goddamn wounded animal into Felicia’s room, grunting and moaning.

“What’re you doing down there on the floor?” Whud’re you doin’ down dare on duh floor?

“Herman,” Felicia says from her bed. “You’re up.”

Silk sheets, of course, of course.

Blank and white motif, of course, of course.

Everything over two thousand dollars, smooth and sexy, what else, of course.

Felicia’s doing well for herself; God knows how she managed to keep all the money over the years; whenever I used to pull a heist, that shit just dissolved itself.

Of course, Felicia doesn’t have an obsession with forever upgrading her costume. Some people have gambling. Some have booze, and some have drugs, but me? I have my gauntlets. They’ve been a work in process for the last twelve years.

She’s wearing this little silk camisole that’s probably illegal in most Middle Eastern Countries/Southern States. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, she’s mostly covered by her comforter, a big fluffy thing that looks like it’s made out of baby’s kisses and marshmallow love.

“He hired him.”

“Who hired who?” Aleksei says thickly as I pull myself up onto the foot of the bed. He starts to rise from where he sits on an oversized love seat, but the chair makes the sort of noise chairs make directly before they collapse, and Aleksei settles back down.

“Mustache guy …” I glance over at the TV, and read his name aloud. “Brian Cordwell. He hired the Grizzly.”

Aleksei’s face twists oddly, a sort of harlequin confusion. “That don’t make no sense.”

“It DOES make sense, at least partly. Look at all the attention he’s getting, he’s loving it. He wanted this. That’s what the receipt meant; it was a receipt for a villain. He bought himself a super-villain.”

Aleksei starts to talk, but Felicia shushes him. “Go on, Herman.”

“I don’t …”

I don’t know. I start to say it almost out of habit; I’ve never been the brains of an operation. I’m always the muscle these days, ever since the gauntlets. But for once, I do know.

Sort of.

“I don’t think Max knew what he was getting into. What I …” I try to organize my racing thoughts with little success. “I mean, I think there was a third party. I think that, jeez, I, uh, fuck, um —”

“Herman,” Felicia says, purring the R in a distinctly sensual manner. “Just concentrate. Tell us from the beginning.”

“Okay,” I say quietly. “Okay,” I say again, mapping out what I’m going to say. “First, Dead Husband, the guy you were talking about Felicia, him and Brian Cordwell contacted somebody. This person contacted Ravage, brainwashed him somehow, and put him under lock and key. They then found a time and place where superhero interference would be minimal, informed Cordwell and Dead Husband, and then set up some method by which they could kill Ravage and look like heroes. Ravage was supposed to be essentially a big green homicidal target shot at point-blank range.”

Felicia raises her eyebrows.

“What went wrong?”

“I think I did,” I say, shrugging, which hurts like a bitch and is totally not worth doing ever a-fucking-gain.

“I don’t get it.” Aleksei, of course. “What do you mean, ‘you did?’”

“I mean, Aleksei, that when I attacked Ravage I threw a wrench in the whole process. Somehow, my interference ended up getting Dead Husband killed. And then I accidentally kill Ravage, and …”

Felicia nods, and smiles. “And every party has a pooper and Cordwell’s was you. You ruined the act. Thus the angry phone call.”

“Exactly,” I say, smiling, which painfully shifts the mess of bandages on my nose. “But you’re missing a piece. Whoever the third party is that screwed with Ravage, they get scared; they know that the police will spend a lot of time on a corpse like his; in fact, I’m guessing however they planned him to die would’ve destroyed the corpse.”

Aleksei speaks up in another one of his occasional moments of clarity. “Like Grizzly; that way, the police couldn’t see what they’d done. That’s why they sent Venom to rip up Ravage’s body.” I give him a smile and a thumbs-up; I love it when Aleksei gets something right. It makes me … shit, I don’t know. Proud.

Hey, fuck you, too. Don’t laugh.

Felicia motions for me to continue.

“But only half the money was returned, see, Dead Husband’s half. Because whoever the third party is, we’ll call him or her the Villain Dealer, is still willing to fulfill his part of the bargain; he figures he’s got me scared with Bullseye, and there’s no chance of me showing up again, so he spends his time finding the perfect place, the perfect villain, the perfect climax, in this case Max’s electrocution. I’m guessing the Villain Dealer then contacts Cordwell, lets him know the new plans and, bada-bing bada-boom, Cordwell shoes up and …”

“Slays the dragon,” Felicia says, quietly, maybe a little angry.

“Well, he has to take us down first, but in the state Max has got us, that’s easy.”

Aleksei snorts indignantly. “So he didn’t even care that his friend got killed the first time around? What an asshole.”

“He didn’t care about his friend. He didn’t care about you or me or Ravage or the Grizzly. All he cared about,” Felicia says quietly, “was that he got cheated out of the glory.”

This is not only true, but also obvious, so it’s strange that hearing it out loud makes me a little sick. But it also opens a door to a question in my head. The cobwebs that’ve covered the analytical parts of my brain for so long are being peeled away. So many heists, so many “DIE, SPIDERMAN!”s, so many punches in the goddamn face.

Being defeated shuts down your brain after a while; all you can do is go out and get beaten again, convinced that this time, THIS TIME, you’ll win, this time, you get away.

It’s all linear. You really don’t THINK much.

But now I’m thinking.

“Why would someone with the power to brainwash a villain as powerful as Ravage bother with two-thousand-dollar payoffs from Regular Joes? It seems kind of petty, doesn’t it?” Aleksei shrugs, but Felicia nods. “I mean, where’s the Villain Dealer, FPS, whatever … Where’s he making the real money?”

Rhino starts to talk, but then a rocket hits him in the chest.

I blink.

Fire fills the room, and the impact launches him, that confused look locked on his face, through the wall, through a crawl-space and into the apartment next-door. He moans, sitting up, clutching the scorch mark on his wide gray chest, breathing hard.

The explosion knocks me stupid, rolls me across the floor like a bowling ball. A pair of open handcuffs flips through the air like a boomerang, one cuff catching Felicia’s wrist and the other snapping shut around one of her bedposts.

Oh, bite my bag and tell me I’m pretty. There he is.

“So,” the World’s Deadliest Assassin, the man known only as ‘Bullseye’ says, balancing a knife, blade down, on the tip of his pointer finger. “Who’s first?”

Devolution, Part Seven

I number everything, if you haven’t noticed. I rank everything, chart everything, because that’s how I grew up, that’s what makes it easy for me. We all have our little systems to make things less sharp, to numb the pain of an overwhelming world.

My most common number for ranking and charting is five, with one always being the least and five being the most.

Even my gauntlets have five settings, with one being stun and five being … Well, you saw what happened to the Grizzly. Five will blow the door off a vault.

It only bothers me to a level three that I’m about to die, most likely in a rather painful manner.

It bothers me on a level four that I dragged Aleksei, my best friend, into this with me, and now he’ll die, too.

What bothers on a level five is that I have:

1) no idea when Bullseye actually entered the room, and

2) no idea where the rocket that hit Aleksei came from.

But I suppose those sort of questions are commonplace when you get up to Bullseye’s level. This is one of the Big Guns, a super-villain on an international scale; guys like Green Goblin, Sabretooth, Abomination, they might be seriously scary dudes, but Bullseye?

Bullseye?

Statistically, you’ve got a better chance surviving a one-on-one throwdown with Galactus than fucking Bullseye.

Let’s start on the assassination street cred, first off: forty-nine politicians, five dictators, thirty-nine superheroes, a rumored tally of over nine hundred military and law enforcement officials worldwide over the past twenty years.

How, you say? How’s he gone so long without getting caught?

Well, he hasn’t. He does get caught. Gets caught a fair amount, really.

But then he just kills everybody and leaves.

He’s got adamantium-laced bones, a black belt in just about every form of martial arts, and, did I mention, anything, to him, is a weapon. Anything.

I heard he once killed a guy with a paper clip.

Like I said, a seriously scary dude.

And he won’t miss. He NEVER misses. Never has. Not once. Ever.

At least, that’s what everybody says.

Everybody he HASN’T killed.

Aleksei coughs and starts to stand up.

“RHINO!” I scream. “COVER YOUR FUCKING FACE!”

Aleksei does as he’s told, and not a second too soon; five knives hit the back of his hands as they go over the front of that big gray head of his.

Bullseye laughs, and then hurls a knife through Felicia’s palm as she reaches for something in her bedside dresser drawer, pinning her hand to the wall. Felicia screams, and a torrent of red starts to leak down the wallpaper.

I stand up, and he punches me right the fuck back down. My nose feels like it’s splitting my face in half.

Bullseye laughs again.

It’s not a crazy laugh, like the Green Goblin’s. Or a hollow, victory laugh like Doc Ock’s, or even a cruel laugh, like Kingpin’s.

No, not at all.

It’s completely sincere. A laugh of simple, childish glee. He loves this. Loves it.

“You guys are feistier than I expected,” he says, pulling a handful of steel ball-bearings out of one of the pouches around his waist. “Schultz, why don’t you just save me some by giving up. Punch yourself in the face once for yes, twice for no.”

“Don’t do it! It’s a trick!” Aleksei yells helpfully from the next room. Bullseye laughs again, and I throw all my strength into diving at him; he easily side-steps, and then kicks me in the ass, sending me tumbling into the bathroom. I hit the shower door; she’s got one of those free-standing porno showers, all glass, and I feel it shatter on my forehead. Bullseye smiles at me from the bedroom as I lie there in the shards, beaten in three fucking moves.

“Be right with you, buddy.” He slams the door closed.

I hear Felicia screaming.

Here is what’s going to happen. He’s going to murder Felicia in some absolutely horrific manner. Then he’s going to kill poor Aleksei, because he’ll drop his hands, somehow, he’ll drop his hands, and then, he’ll come in here and kill me, too.

What is FPS?

Back when I was a super-villain, I had a kind of neat thing going; no matter how many times people would shoot at me, try to stab me, hit me with shit, I knew I wasn’t going to die, I KNEW it, and I’ll tell you why: Because if you’re a super-villain, and someone takes you down, 99.9 of the time it’s going to be a superhero. And 99.5 of superheroes won’t kill you.

Not counting the X-Men teams, of course, because those fuckers are positively homicidal.

But in general, a superhero will only give you pain. Lots of it, but you’ll still be alive to know who hurt you.

That’s not true when you’re dealing with super-villains.

Ravage? Venom? Grizzly? Those motherfuckers were trying to KILL me.

And now, Bullseye is going to murder me, and no one will —

I glance to the left, rubbing glass fragments out of my eyes, and stop dead.

Look at that. Another one of those moments where I think God might exist, before logic wins out: Sitting on the sink, neatly folded in Aleksei’s characteristic obsessive style, is my VibroShock torso and mask.

He must’ve been trying to wash it in the sink, the big stupid beautiful — Oh, my babies, my babies, they look so beautiful there on the black tile.

There’s an enormous crash and the whole apartment building shakes, and I know that Bullseye just put a hurt on Aleksei.

Felicia screams again.

The mask, the suit and the gauntlets are on in six seconds flat.

Adamantium bones. Adamantium. If I pull this off, it’s gonna be fucking classic.

On maximum power, the blast doesn’t just blow the bathroom door off its hinges.

It blows out the whole fucking wall.

I’m starting to value that “What the hell?” look; I used to only see it geriatric bank guards, but now I’ve seen it on cops, villains, hey, even Spider-Man.

On Bullseye it’s absolutely gorgeous, his frantic, last-second attempt to hide it just makes it even better, and the fact that he’s covered in broken bits of plaster and insulation from the destroyed wall puts the cherry on top. He pops up from where he was sticking long needles into Felicia’s throat, and hurls the ball-bearings at me; they all hit me in the neck, but the suit shakes off the impacts. I throw a hand out behind me and hit a low-level blast off the marble, using my other hand to switch off my stabilizers.

The intended result was a “shock-jump;” when I’m lucky, I can use the gauntlets to throw myself dozens of meters through the air. My idea was to tackle Bullseye, but in my haste all I accomplish is sending myself flying into the wall above Felicia’s bed. I bounce off, and try to make it look intentional, but Bullseye is already up, unsheathing a machete.

Felicia kicks him in the wrist, and his hand pops open. He drops the machete, but then snatches it out of the air, slices the tendon at the back of her ankle, all in one smooth motion, and then smashes the blade into the side of my head.

It bounces off like a kid on a trampoline, vibrated right out of his hand.

“No dice, asshole,” I say, and try to vibro-punch him in the face. He ducks under it, and kick-sweeps my legs out from under me, flipping me flat on my back.

The bruises from the computer-fall scream in agony, and I’m back on my feet in time to get whacked in the jaw with a telescoping billy-club. As always, the impact is dissipated almost instantly, but the push of the blow knocks me back into one of the room’s two remaining intact walls.

Bullseye’s arm waves out in front of him, and I see a handful of small, shiny objects flash through the air, landing all over my torso. Bullseye yanks his hand back, closing it into a fist.

I notice dozens of thin, metallic wires going taut between me and the World’s Deadliest Assassin.

“Wh–?” I say, and then I feel a bizarre tugging sensation; it’s like the skin of my upper body is trying to pull itself off. The tug yanks me face-first into the ground, and Bullseye stomps the back of my head, my forehead coming down so hard it tears the carpeting. But the suit handles that. What it doesn’t handle is my … ahem … “nose”, which again explodes in agony; he’s cracking my head into pieces. I feel the tug again, lifting me up, but he stomps me back down.

“You like ’em?” Bullseye says, laughing. “Tinkerer made then for me. He calls them ‘null hooks,’ he said they’d go through your suit, and lookee here.” He yanks them again, and I feel them sink into my skin beneath the suit. “Looks like the old guy’s still got it, eh?” My first instinct is to vibrate the suit, but I know that’ll only make it worse; maybe vibrate them straight into my organs.

“At first,” Bullseye says, smiling, standing on my back and pulling as hard as he can on the hooks. “At first, old Phineas was a little hesitant, but once we’d given him the challenge of cracking through that suit of yours, he warmed right up. Said he’d been waiting for a challenge, and —”

Felicia smashes him in the face with the bedpost she’d been handcuffed to, and then wraps the cuffs around his throat, using her superhuman strength to swing him to his knees. Within seconds Bullseye slides through her legs, pops up behind her and buries two screwdrivers (from his pouches, of course) down into her shoulders, and it must screw up some muscles, because her arms suddenly go limp.

Using the screwdrivers as handles, he swings her around from behind and smashes her face into the wall, cracking the plaster.

I shout something that sounds like “GRAWL” and tackle him around the waist. He slides out like a goddamn fish, and grabs a handful of the cords, attached to the hooks, still lodged in my suit.

Goddamn it, forgot about those.

He swings me around, me stumbling haphazardly like a roped cow, and then yanks me up off the ground by the hooks.

I feel them rip through my skin, my suit, my (few) muscles.

As you can imagine, it’s not pleasant.

Bullseye laughs, but abruptly stops laughing when Aleksei comes crashing through the remaining interior wall, and shoulder-tackles Bullseye’s cocky ass through the fucking wall out into the air above the street.

At first I’m like, three cheers for Rhino, right?

And then I remember the hooks.

I’m yanked up into the air, out the enormous hole in the wall, a few of the hooks tearing themselves free as I fall twenty-five feet out of the second floor of Felicia’s brownstone apartment into the rose bushes.

Ouch.

I struggle into a kind of gorilla half-stand, and watch as my friend gets his ass handed to him by a man less than half his size.

It’s a sickening thing to watch; while I was in the bathroom, Bullseye must have done something horrible to Aleksei’s eyes, because they’re dripping blood and tears, and Rhino is swinging like a drunk elephant, hitting everything BUT Bullseye.

“Come on, you bloomin’ idiot!” Bullseye says, tapping the bulls-eye symbol on his forehead. “RIGHT HERE! It’s easy! RIGHT HERE!”

Aleksei roars in rage, throwing all his weight into a haymaker. Bullseye ducks out of the way, and Rhino ploughs into a moving truck. The assassin pops up and buries a knife into my friend’s face, right down through the size of his nose, through the roof of his mouth.

That motherfucker. Nobody hurts Aleksei like that and gets away with it.

Nobody.

Not even bad-ass rocketfuck bleeding-edge Bullseye.

I charge.

“Hey, donkeypunch!” I scream at him. Bullseye turns, and somehow manages to dodge seven consecutive shock-blasts, rolling, ducking and dodging like an acrobat; the blasts end up eviscerating the street, doing hundreds of thousands in property damage and even managing to vibrate a couple of pedestrians out of their shoes.

Bullseye lands on his feet in front of me, still smiling that crazy smile.

“Say, Herman …” he says, juking and jiving around more of my impotent attempts to punch him. “I don’t suppose that suit of yours is fireproof?”

He smashes what looks like a tinsel Christmas ornament against my chest, and suddenly my entire body is ablaze.

I smile.

“As a matter of fact,” I say, cocking back a fist, “it is.”

I feel the auto-coolants spray out Freon from their pads under my armpits and around my waist.

Bullseye starts to reach into one of his pouches, and …

Finally, I land a punch, a good one, too; fist vibrating on a level two, spins him around like a goddamn top.

But he grabs one of the hook-lines from hanging from my mask (the hook itself in my left earlobe) he tugs it with him as he falls.

I hear the rip almost inside my eardrum, and the reality of what’s just happened overtakes me.

Not only am I now maskless, leaving me completely vulnerable to Bullseye’s twisted array of armament.

I also am minus one ear.

I just lost an entire ear.

I only have one ear now.

I’m still stuck on this when Bullseye hits me in the face with that damn telescoping billy club again, and I go down to my knees. On my left is Aleksei, gargling out moans through a swamp of blood and tissue, clutching at the knife in his face, his big eyes wide.

My head swims from the concussion.

This is going to be my only chance.

I’m sorry, Aleksei.

I yank the knife out of Aleksei’s face and swing it up into the upper part of Bullseye’s left arm, vibrating the blade like an electric razor, allowing me to slough off a good half-pound of flesh.

Blood sprays everywhere, but Bullseye just lets out a sour little grunt. His bone is exposed, and something in me can’t believe it.

I just won. The fight is over.

“What was that, Shocker?” he says, sneering. “What were you trying to prove?”

“I was trying …” I say, breathing hard, “to break your arm.”

He laughs.

“Adamantium bones, idiot,” he says, tapping his exposed metallic humerus bone through the wound on his arm. “They don’t break.”

I grin, though he can’t see it through the mask, and at this point my face is so swollen up it’d be hard to tell what my expression is anyway.

Time to give him a lesson in vibronics.

“Byron MacLain invented Adamantium in 1941 on commission from the U.S. government, which was looking for a new super-metal with which to fuel the soon-to-be-needed American war machine.”

Bullseye laughs, and squats down next to me.

“I guess you beat me at Trivial Pursuit, Schultz. What’s your point?”

“They turned it down,” I say, my head spinning, every single thought struggling to focus through the concussion on what I’m about to do. “See, even though it was practically indestructible, it had a weakness. A big, fat, glaring weakness.”

Bullseye looks at me, and then smirks.

“Oh?” he says slowly. He’s loving this. He thinks I’m just ranting.

He thinks this is funny.

“Adamantium is based on a rare composite metal called Wakandan Vibranium.” I look up at him, squinting in the midday sunlight. “Can you guess why it’s called Vibranium, fuckwit?”

Bullseye’s body suddenly tenses up, but it’s waaaay too late.

Sorry, Charlie.

I jump up and grab him by the arm, digging my thumb into the wound, pressing it against the cool metal bone.

“No,” Bullseye says, his eyes wide.

“Oh, yes,” I say, and toggle the suit’s vibrate function to Level 4.

Welcome to the shake, you evil bastard.

“GRZKRIZTHGVRMAOZZRZITKZZZDXOERIPQUZCZ.” Says Bullseye, the World’s Greatest Assassin.

His bones vibrate like blunt jackhammers inside his body.

There’s a weird visual distortion around him, like he’s a dozen places at once, like spring snapping back into place. BOI-YOY-YOY-YOING!

After five seconds I let go, and Bullseye drops face-first to the ground, convulsing, vomiting like a fountain. I crawl on top of him, and tear off that stupid black mask of his. Turns out Bullseye is a weasely, pale guy with too-sharp features and a white-blond crewcut.

He looks like a jackal.

I kneel there staring at him, and then notice he’s going for a buzzsaw blade on his belt.

Enough of this shit.

I take a handful of the white-blond hair, and smash his face into the pavement while I vibrate his head at level 3; the result is a Bullseye’s-Head-Shaped crater about four inches deep.

He rolls over, lets out a crazed growl-grunt and haphazardly swings a knife up out of his sleeve, slicing me on the cheek.

“You missed! RIGHT HERE! RIGHT HERE, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” I say, tapping my forehead, and punch him in the face as hard as I can.

Again.

And again.

And again and again and again and again and —

Aleksei grabs my arm, and it’s like it’s caught in a vise.

“Hrmun,” Aleksei says thickly. “Stuhp, yur kuhling him.”

Herman, stop, you’re killing him.

He’s right, I am; his face is just a swamp of blood and torn skin. His right arm looks like spaghetti, the bone shattered into millions of needle fragments. His shoulder doesn’t look much better. The occasional geyser of bloody vomit still rushes out of his mouth; apparently he had eggs for breakfast. Aleksei pulls me off with one hand, the other cupping the blood gushing out of his face.

Even losing blood by the gallon, the big jerk is still my conscience.

“Wuh guhda ged owda hurh.” Aleksei moans, and points at the distant glare of red and blue lights, visible even in the day.

“You’re right.” At this, he sets me down. The puncture on his face is genuinely horrific; we need to get him to a Villain Doctor, pronto.

Felicia. Oh, God, Felicia.

“Rhino, get the Black Cat,” I say, harsher than I mean to. Aleksei complies anyway, lumbering off towards the destroyed brownstone; taking orders, he always says, is what he does best.

Son of a bitch, I hurt. The FPS thing will have to wait, I can barely fucking stand.

I notice Bullseye’s mask on the sidewalk, and pick it up, showing it him through his two black-eyes.

“See this?” I say, as the sirens get louder, and turn the vibro-unit on my glove up to five, shaking the bullet-proof fabric apart, dissolving it into dozens of thin strands. I drop them on his face. “Don’t you FUCK with me. Got it?”

Bullseye makes this kind of hacking sound, and it takes me a second to realize it’s a distorted version of his gleeful, happy laugh.

He’s laughing at me.

Even if I beat him, I’m still a joke, I’m still nothing nobody pathetic stupid sick little Herman Schultz down in the basement of my father’s house, and he’s laughing at me.

Like the cops laugh at me.

Like all the other villains laugh at me.

Like Spider-Man laughs at me.

I snap.

“STOP LAUGHING AT ME!” I scream, again in a child’s pleading way rather than a rage-filled adult’s.

He hikes up the laughter.

I act on impulse, but it’s an intentional impulse, something I’ve thought secretly about doing to a person ever since I first started looking into the science of vibration at age ten.

I grab Bullseye’s crotch and hit a level three through my glove.

The pavement under his ass cracks like a jackhammer just hit it, and for a second Bullseye’s legs spasm straight up in the air.

The laughter stops, and Bullseye’s eyes nearly pop out of their sockets. He’s doing this crazy silent scream thing, the muscles on his neck so tensed they look like they’re going to snap.

I stand up, looking down at him.

All in all, he’s handling this better than I would; I mean, shit, if someone vibro-exploded my penis and testicles, I’d probably just die.

He’s managing this whole sort of traumatized-child roll-around that’s really pretty entertaining.

Rhino reappears, holding Felicia, and I climb up onto his back.

I just beat Bullseye.

The Shocker Versus Bullseye. The Shocker wins.

Man, FPS doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

Devolution, Part Eight

And life goes on, with or without an ear.

Let’s talk about Aleksei.

People often ask:

“Why, if you’re going to cover a man’s entire body with impenetrable armor, would you leave his face entirely unprotected? Doesn’t that leave his most valuable asset, his brain, entirely vulnerable? What’s the point of being bullet-proof if you can still get shot in the head?”

Well, that’s simple. See, what most people don’t know is: Rhino’s brain isn’t in his head.

Yes, you read that right; when the Russians modified Aleksei, turned him into Rhino, they surgically removed his brain and compressed it down into his neck, just behind his trachea and in front of his spinal cord. I’d like to say that this is the reason for his … ahem … “unique mental processes,” but fact is, I knew Aleksei before he was Rhino and he hasn’t changed a goddamn bit.

How’d they do it? You’ve got me; I’m an engineer, not a surgeon. As I understand it, though, they moved around a lot of his bones, added muscles and tendons, maybe even added bones. That certainly would explain how an eight-hundred-pound man can pull nine miles an hour on foot, right?

Make no mistake, buddy, the transformation from Aleksei to Rhino was no simple slap-and-spray job. The original intent was for him to be a prototype Russian Captain America, a new soldier for the already long dead Cold War. If Aleksei was a little smarter, Spider-Man and the rest of those bums would be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Did you know he hasn’t seen his penis in twelve years?

He pisses through this little drill hole.

Not that Aleksei would have much use for his penis other than for pissing, but still, it’s a sad state of affairs.

There. Now you know shit not even Spider-Man knows.

Don’t you feel special?

I’m cleaning my apartment; I’m not afraid to say it, it was a shithole. But I’ve got energy, I’ve got this kind of insane manic feeling; the kind of feeling that comes from winning a fight.

And winning a fight with Bullseye feels especially good. I’m dancing around like a goddamn idiot, piling more and more filthy clothes Old Superman cartoons are playing on AMC, and I’ve got the volume up all the way. It’s the one where he fights the Tyrannosaurus, and I look up at the screen to see the left hook he hits the Rex with that crashes him through Times Square (in Metropolis, no less).

The thing that makes me most worried is that I keep finding food items; no bugs yet, but underneath the garbage, dirty clothes and porno mags, I’ve found three slices of pizza, one Egg McMuffin and six, yeah, six half-eaten (and now crunched into an orange mess) bags of Cheetos.

So far, six bags of trash. Three more already have had more than they can take, but I’m still shoving crap in; if I can finish without using more than nine bags, then I’ve still got two left over.

It’s been two days since the Rhino, the Black Cat and the Shocker took on Bullseye, smashing up a residential area in Manhattan.

The headline of the Daily Bugle lying on the table has a great picture, taken by someone named “Parker,” who’s way too good to be working freelance.

It’s me, all on fire, punching Bullseye in the chest, while Aleksei is sprawled out on the pavement nearby, his face blurred so that the horrific details of his wound can’t be seen.

It’s from a couple of seconds before I lost my ear and half my mask, and I’m lucky they didn’t use any photos from after it. Even though that’s when I started winning the fight, and even though the fuzz already know who I am and what my face looks like, it’d be best if the whole city of New York couldn’t point me out in a line-up.

I’ve been out for the majority of my time at home, and it’s only just now that I’ve noticed Felicia laying butt-naked on the couch in what passes as my living room. She’s got a gauze head-wrap, big bandages on both shoulders where Bullseye stabbed screwdrivers through her levator scapulae muscles, and casts on her left hand and right ankle, where he sliced her Achilles tendon.

Her body is like a joke; every muscle is sculpted and hard; her shoulders are broad, and without a shirt it puts her breasts in better perspective, makes them look less balloon-freakish. She’s got this great, long neck that segues seamlessly up into her head; I dated a girl with a fadeneck, one that fades into the chin, in high school and I’ve never forgiven myself. Her legs are long and elegant, muscular but not masculine, every part of them lovingly crafted by some higher power.

Maybe a plastic surgeon, but an amazing one. That and a superhuman body-sculpting routine.

Waxed all over, of course.

Her stomach is a smooth plane, a tiny bit of thin white peach-fuzz on her paunch and on the center of her chest, her bellybutton pierced with a little ornament of … Spider-Man. Who else.

He ruins everything else, so why not have him ruin my hard-on, too?

Aleksei must’ve put her there after whichever villain doctor he got patched us up; there are bloodstains all over the kitchen table. She’s sleeping peacefully now; I reach out a hand, towards her face, but then stop myself, and trace the hand through the air just over her body.

“Jesus,” I say quietly.

She stirs, grunts a word that sounds like “Peter,” and rolls over, and her ass is just boom, right there.

I have to go to the next room, lest I do something stupid.

I finish cleaning the kitchen (i.e., windexing the hell out of everything), and go reset the alarm system.

See, ever since Bullseye first shattered my window, I’ve been tightening up security round my place. Its all vibration-based (go figure), but since I figure they’d be counting on that, I’ve added a bunch of laser and mechanical stuff; I even got Otto to loan me one of his old torn-up tentacles to automate for the hallway outside my front door, plant it in the wall and as soon as somebody tries to break through, they’re going to have some serious problems.

Cold as ice, man. Cold as ice.

I’m walking back through my once over crowded now positively desolate kitchen/living room when, for the first time, I notice the headline on the Daily Bugle and stop dead.

There it is, in big white type.

THE SHOCKER: LEGIT?

I stand there frozen; the Shocker. Legit?

Ten minutes and forty read-throughs of the article later, I still don’t get it. How did J. Jonah Jameson, who penned the article himself, turn a foiled assassination into something so much bigger. Suddenly I’m not just trying to save myself and my friends; I’m purposely targeting Bullseye.

Jameson posits that Rhino and the Shocker attacked Bullseye before he could execute a hit on Senator Daltry, a liberal who, nonetheless, is one of the most vocal supporters of Proposition 318, which would fund the creation of a device to track teleportations throughout New York State to try to put a lid on Mutant Crime.

How they paint Aleksei and me as heroes in this baffles me, considering we did more damage than Bullseye ever could have. They talk us up by calling us “outclassed and outgunned.” Outclassed, I understand, it’s true. But outgunned?

Aleksei has unbreakable skin and can bench-press a mail truck.

I have gauntlets that can throw vibrations that, when over-amped, can literally shake a person apart.

Bullseye … Bullseye throws stuff.

Outgunned? Fuck outgunned. We were OVERgunned.

See, apparently since the fight outside Felicia’s brownstone apartment, they found Bullseye’s hide-out, where there was a pay-off from something called “First Person Shooter” to put a walnut through Senator Daltry’s brain.

First Person Shooter.

FPS.

Thank you J. Jonah Jameson.

Ever since I was little, my brain’s done this weird thing; I call it overclocking. It happens when I’m picking locks, or cracking safes, or working on the VibroSuit. Everything around me blurs away, and all that remains is the problem.

And my entire brain focuses on the problem, heats it up, spins it around, and then shakes it shakes it and vibrates it and twirls it until it tears itself apart.

The black spot.

Brian Cordwell and his goddamn piece of Rebar.

The destruction of the body.

Senator Daltry.

The dead husband.

Ravage SMASH.

First Person Shooter.

Proposition 318.

Rigged super-villain fights.

And out rolls the answer.

And suddenly I get it. I totally get it. I’m not sure how it works yet, but I understand the basics, and they’re ugly as sin.

I know where the big money is coming from. I know how First Person Shooter supports itself.

I’m going to need bigger gauntlets.

I dial the phone without even looking at the pad.

“Huh?” Aleksei says. This is his version of hello, how he always answers the phone, like he’s not sure exactly how it works.

“Aleksei, I know what FPS is.”

“Oh, hi, Herman.”

“Aleksei, I know what —”

“I heard you the first time.”

“It’s a video game,” I say, but I say it so quickly I’m not even sure what it means. I think as I talk, words spilling out of me. “The money doesn’t come from the people paying to fight the villains, they’re just a device.”

“A device?”

“Yeah; the real money comes from people paying to control the villains. FPS is an acronym for First Person Shooter, a type of video game where the player sees through the eyes of the person or unit they control. That’s why they act so crazy; they’re acting the way people think they should act; Ravage says smash, like Hulk, because people see Ravage and they think Hulk, and Grizzly roars, because people see Grizzly, and they think grizzly bear. It’s just people playing the part, getting into the role. That’s why the Grizzly didn’t seem to be feeling pain; because, when your character gets hit in a videogame, you don’t feel it. Somewhere, someone is paying the Spot to keep a portal open to the villains’ minds, and they’re somehow sending commands through the subdimension and … Jesus, Aleksei, don’t you see the implications of this?”

There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the phone.

“But … Herman … Remember on the receipt, it said ‘power lines.’ Why would they tell Cordwell how to kill the Grizzly if someone is paying to control him?”

Well, that’s a damn good question, Aleksei. I hadn’t thought of that.

“I don’t know.” I hear that big, deep chuckle over the phone.

“You will soon, buddy; you got such a brain in your head, there ain’t nothin’ you can’t figure out. You want me to —”

There’s a click.

“Aleksei?”

No response.

“Aleksei, big guy? You there?”

Silence. And then:

“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial aga–”

I hang up.

This happens sometimes with Aleksei; he shifts the wrong way and crushes the receiver, or sits down on the phone line, or stretches the cord until it snaps. Nothing new. He’ll either come over or call back, so I might as well just — Thwip. Thwip thwip thwip.

Godfuckingdamnit.

I’m pinned to the fucking wall. Pinned to the wall, crucified by that sticky grey glop.

“Hiya, Herman,” Spider-Man says, flying in through my shattered window.

“Get me down, you fucking asshole!” I scream at him. He smiles underneath the mask.

“I saw your little throwdown with Bullseye. You must’ve found a penny.”

“Huh?” I’m always so thick when I talk to him, it’s like my brain slows down.

“I mean you were lucky. Bullseye was aiming on killing you, you and Rhino both.”

“Yeah, lucky,” I mutter.

“What’re you up to? Who’s paying you?” I blink and shake my head.

“Paying me for what?”

“To be a superhero.”

“Ain’t anybody paying me.”

“Oh,” he says, laughing under the mask. “So you just up and decided ‘Today is the day I’m going to play Captain Justice?’ I don’t buy it. People like you don’t change, Herman. You’re all about you, and you always will be. Whatever this little mission you’re on is, Ravage, Scorpion, Grizzly … My advice to you, if you genuinely want to stop being an asshole, is to just give up the meta world entirely. Go make vaults in Sweden or something. ’Cause sooner or later, you’re going to realize there’s no money in being the good guy, and you’re going to go right back to crime to pay the bills.”

“Whatever,” I say. What a brilliant conversationalist I am, especially considering that what he’s saying is probably right.

“Just stay off my radar, Schultz, or I will take you down.”

Ooh. He’s being scary Spider-Man.

“It’s so adorable when you go all Luke Cage on me,” I say, finally coming up with a somewhat witty response. Those big white eyes narrow. He smells like woodchips, cotton and pepper. It’s actually pretty nice.

“Are you sniffing me?” he says.

I have no response to this.

Felicia steps out of my bedroom, still entirely naked.

“Herman, you’ve got to … oh, Spider-Man.” She stops short, and then a very interesting thing happens, something that merits more thought when I have the time.

Spider-Man deflates.

His body sags and his face clears, the mask going smooth; he looks like he just came home to find his wife fucking the dog.

Are Spider-Man and Black Cat together? I know they were during the Eighties, but …

Felicia doesn’t even seem to notice, or, if she does, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even look at him, just goes back to talking to me.

“Herman, you need to get in here and see this.”

I look at Spider-Man, who still seems to be in shock.

“Well, asshole?”

Spider-Man mumbles something and tears the webbing off me. I drop down and jog merrily into the bedroom, past naked Felicia.

I don’t know what just happened, but it upset Spider-Man, and that feels good.

The good feeling stops as soon as I see the TV.

Jesus Christ. This isn’t happening.

I yank my closet open and practically leap into a VibroSuit. It takes me a second to figure out where I left my newest set of gauntlets (under the kitchen table) and then I run past naked Felicia and still stunned Spider-Man to grab them.

They lock around my wrists and my forearms, and the squeeze triggers pop into my palms.

“Hey …” Spider-Man says weakly as I charge back into the bed room, past naked Felicia, to get another look at the TV.

I watch as Aleksei, no, not Aleksei … I watch as the Rhino impales a police car on his horn, flips it, then grabs one of the fleeing officers and tears off his leg, laughing an insane, high-pitched cackle.

“Get out of my way, jackasses! I’m the freakin’ Rhino!”

I feel vomit rise up in my throat, but push it back down, charging up the gauntlets to five.

They’re uptown. No time to get on the subway, or a cab.

I need to be there NOW.

How do I …

My eyes drift to the Flying Broomstick, sitting in the next room next to Spider-Man, who still hasn’t moved.

I almost jump onto it, kicking a leg after, grabbing hold of the ridiculous “OH SHIT” handles. I press the Green Button down with my thumb, and then turn to Felicia. “Don’t let him steal anything,” I say, nodding at the Spidercreep.

“Under control,” she says. Felicia can handle herself. I just hope she’s still here when I get back.

I shove down the lever, and suddenly I’m out the window, streaking across the New York sky.

Hold on, Aleksei. I’m coming.

Devolution Finale

Remember before how I told you I didn’t like heights?

Well, it turns out that extreme speed doesn’t actually lessen the fear, the way I’d hoped it would. In fact, it intensifies it.

A lot. It intensifies it a lot.

I understand why Osborn opted for the glider now; this thing is all speed, no control, while the glider is a perfect combination of both. Everything around me is a blur, the sky, the clouds, the city, it’s all one color, a sort of unpleasant grey mess.

I’m going too fast.

I try to use gravity to slow down, leveling out so the rocket is pointing towards the sky, and I’m left squeezing the shit out of the handles. This isn’t working out.

This isn’t working out at all. The little gauge on the rocket says I just passed one thousand feet

I hit the blue button, and suddenly I’m dropping backwards over Madison Avenue, dozens of feet in seconds. The rocket levels out, and then the front plunges forward, so now I’m heading down face-first.

Okay, nix on the blue button.

I hit the green button, and push the lever a tiny bit, but it’s too late. The Broomstick turns upside-down and hits ground level, and, as pedestrians, bikers and cars swerve out of the way, I’m dragged along the pavement at seventy miles an hour.

Thank Christ for the suit.

I push down on the handles a little, and I go tearing through an American flag in front of a bank, just slow enough to see a couple of cameras flash.

That’s gonna be great publicity.

The Shocker: Terrorist?

I level out at about fifteen feet, and it takes me a second to realize that I’m now trailing a cloud of hats, burger wrappers and newspapers.

I pull up, trying to lose the cloud, and push the lever just a little further down; the wind is deafening now, but at this low height the speed feels a little bit more manageable. Everything is a blur, but not a scary blur. Just a kind of hyper-intense blur, like being on ecstasy, but without any positive feeling whatsoever.

So, where am I, where am I … Wilson Avenue.

They said Pacific on the TV. So that’s, what, fifteen blocks east, yeah?

I lean my weight to the left, and suddenly I’m rocketing off down Highmont Boulevard.

A bus flies out in front of me, and I see the screaming faces of the people inside for an instant before I go smashing into the side of it, the impact bending the entire bus in half.

Me, the bus and the flying phallus go smashing into the side of a men’s fashion store, sending pants and shirts everywhere in a great cloud of cloth carnage. We collide with a wall, and come to a stop, the engine of the Flying Broomstick impotently raging away behind me. I hit the blue button, and it shuts off.

Inside the destroyed bus people are screaming for help; I’d guess less than half of them will survive their injuries.

The Rhino goes charging by outside.

I ponder trying to help the bus people for a moment, but then think, fuck’em; the paramedics will handle it. That is their job, right?

I can come back and get the Broomstick later.

I need to stop Rhino before someone hurts him.

That’s what’s most on my mind as I run out onto the street; there must be someone in my immediate vicinity with the means and the method to take down Rhino; that’s what they paid to do, after all.

The black spot on his neck is barely visible on the dark gray skin, but if you’re looking for it, it’s plain as day.

“Gotcha!” the Rhino says in that awkward, high pitched voice, grabbing a dog that’s run free of its master in the chaos. It yowls, and he rips it in half.

All right. That’s enough.

“ALEKSEI!” I scream. No response. “RHINO!”

The Rhino, the Not-Aleksei, turns, a sort of manic grin on his face. The grin fades once he sees me; not exactly the “Oh, Shit” response, but still pretty satisfying, and it takes away from the fact that, covered in the blood of the dead and bits of rubble, the Rhino is a surprisingly terrifying sight.

“You,” he says sourly. There’s maybe fifty feet between us, which means I have the range advantage. But will the gauntlets even work on Rhino’s hide? I’m pretty sure it’s got at least a primitive vibro-dampner, which means he could shake off maybe up to a level three, and do I really want to hit my … Shit, I’ll say it, my best friend, with a level four vibration?

“They warned me about you, jackass,” the Not-Aleksei says, wiping someone’s blood from his face. “Man, I’m gonna smash you up real good.” He flexes a giant gray biceps. “See this? I can tear cars in half.” The Not-Aleksei starts stalking towards me. He swats a parked motorcycle into the air. “I can break through a concrete wall,” he says, and punts a dumpster.

Only thirty feet away now. I need to get this situation under control. I need to start breathing.

“I am pure freakin’ power! I can do anything I want!” To illustrate this, he smashes both fists down into the asphalt, sending out cracks in all directions. “And you,” he says, pointing at me to let us all know who he’s talking to. “What can you do?”

I flip the gauntlets up to level four.

“I can shake things.”

The first two blasts hit him in the chest, the next one in the stomach, then two more in the chest, one in the stomach and a last one in the head that knocks him back onto a Mazda, which buckles under his weight.

He vomits, but then smiles.

No way.

This is fucking ridiculous; at the rate the gauntlets made him shake back and forth, he must’ve been pulling about fifteen G in a field of motion only two inches long. He shouldn’t even be moving, let alone smiling and cackling that horrible laugh, that laugh that sounds so wrong coming out of Aleksei’s big, dumb, friendly mouth.

“Jesus,” I say aloud, a little louder than I meant to. I realize, with what feels like grief but might be anger, that some of Aleksei’s bones are probably already broken, but this asshole doesn’t give a shit.

He’s going to keep moving no matter what.

And yet, even as he picks up the crushed Mazda and hurls it at me (an easy dodge at this range; it flips a couple of times and crashes down in the playground of a public school), I’m still searching the area, going over everyone again and again.

Who’s it going to be?

The police officer still crouched behind his squad car, holding a riot shotgun, even after all of his compatriots have fled?

The woman holding, what is that, an umbrella, staring vacantly at Rhino when she should be running?

How about the guy up on the scaffold, who was cleaning the windows, but now is just watching all this like a goddamn mov–

“Hit him again, Shocker!”

What?

I’m so shocked my body literally freezes, and I feel my stomach lurch.

I turn towards the voice, and see that a crowd has gathered, the kind of highly cautious, very mobile crowd that always shows up for a good superhero fight.

Is that what this is?

A superhero fight?

Jesus Christ, am I a sup–

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

“Shocker! LOOK OUT!” A woman in the crowd screams, and I turn back in time to get a chest full of horn; the Rhino gores me, and then flips me twenty feet into the air. The suit disperses the blow instantly, and I feel no pain, but hitting the ground is going to be a bitch.

But suddenly I realize that isn’t going to be a problem yet; the Rhino leaps up into the air, and nails me with a giant overhand palm slap, spiking me like a goddamn volleyball. Again, the suit takes the hit for me, but doesn’t to a goddamn thing about the stop sign I bounce off, or the sidewalk that comes next.

Ow.

I roll three times, bounce off a curb, land on my feet and then fall over.

Brilliant.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

By the time I stand up the horn is already only a couple of feet away, and I don’t have time to do anything but get flipped into the air again. This time he runs up the fucking side of a building to my left, and drop-kicks me at an apartment building on the other side of the street.

If I hit that wall at this speed, I will die.

Hit him again, Shocker.

I spin mid-air and hit two level-threes off the building, two more at an angle on the asphalt, and land on my feet, earning a respectable cheer from the crowd, and hey, I earned it.

That was pretty fucking impressive.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

This time I turn to do something about it; I charge my right-gauntlet and catch him with an uppercut that staggers him.

This gets another cheer, and again, I understand; seeing a six-foot-tall guy knocking back an nine-foot-tall guy with an uppercut is just goddamn cool.

I press my advantage, hitting him with six low-power blasts; left arm, right hip, right knee, left shoulder, head, chest. He’s knocked around like a pinball, but it’s not doing any real damage. I just need to keep him busy until the assassin makes their move.

“Son of a bitch, stop it!” the Rhino howls, standing up again. He turns to his left, and appears to talk to himself. “Damn it Mr. Seratta, you said this would be easy! Can I buy extra time?”

Seratta, remember that, Seratta. Keep that locked up.

Rhino reacts to something, grunts, and then turns and screams at me. “You’re ruining everything!” He tears a fire hydrant out of the ground and flings it at me, but again, I dodge, and hit him with three more level threes, all to the head. He topples backwards, tripping over a bicycle.

And again, he does something so Not-Aleksei that I wonder if maybe Russia had been on the right path all along with the whole Rhino-Suit idea. He grabs a tree, cracks it in half and throws both halves at me separately, one to my left and one to my right. There’s no room to dodge, so I choose the smaller half and catch it right in the shoulder.

I fly with it, and for a moment I think that maybe I should’ve just let Spider-Man handle this.

No.

I vibrate the tree in half with one hand and brace my impact with the other, then roll and pop up, firing off a single level five that hits Rhino straight in the chest, blowing him into the side of the public school, through the wall, and into a chemistry lab.

By the time I get there, he’s got a kid, pinching him between two giant fingers around the shoulder, the kid’s legs hanging limply, like a lynched man swinging in the breeze soft breeze of a Georgia afternoon and you can hear the slaves singing down on the plantation singing swing low sweet chariot swing l–

I’m panicking.

A hostage situation?

I’m not built for this.

I freeze again.

“Get away from me, man, I swear I’ll crush him into jam.”

So, where do I go from here?

The kid can’t be more than ten years old.

He’s not screaming or shaking or anything, he’s frozen, just like me, little Asian kid, his eyes huge, staring up at the Rhino.

“Uh …” I say emptily. “I … uh …”

Something splashes up onto Rhino’s arm, and he screams, the stuff sizzling straight through the “impenetrable” armor and into the pale skin underneath.

“Rahhh! What the fuck?” Rhino spins towards the source of the splash, hurling the kid past me out into the street.

If only I had fucking webbing, I could —

Wait.

Stop.

Time slows down.

The problem is: a child, maybe seventy-five pounds, is flying through the air at an upward angle. He’s going about twenty-five miles an hour, and is around eight feet in the air; he’s going to go slamming into the pavement face-first in less than two seconds, so what do I do. What do I do.

What do I —

And the problem shakes, and vibrates, and tears itself apart.

In one jerky, painful motion I bend my torso into almost a one-eighty, my toes pointing at Rhino but my chest towards the street. I flip the gauntlets down to setting zero (yes, I have a zero setting), and squeeze off four shots under and around the kid, harmlessly flipping him further into the air, then turn back and fire off two level fives right at my feet, launching me backwards like a skyrocket.

I nab the kid by the wrist in mid-flight, turn and fire three level ones at the pavement below us, which cracks it badly, but also manages to slow our descent enough so that the kid and I land with only a gentle thud. I smile, proud of myself, until I notice that the kid’s arm is bent at a weird angle.

“MY ARM!” the kid screams hysterically. “YOU BROKE MY ARM!”

I must’ve grabbed onto his wrist a little tighter than I meant to.

Whoops. Minus another ten for the Shocker, Superhero.

“GRAAAHH! Mr. Cerada, what the fuck is this?” the Rhino shrieks as he stumbles out onto the street; he’s covered in patches of sizzling shit now.

And he said the name differently this time. Seh-Rah-Duh.

Cerada.

Wait. Cerada.

Something wrong with that name.

The Rhino spins and punches me in the head, flipping me to the ground a dozen feet away, cutting off any further thought on the subject. He starts to stalk towards me, ranting about being ripped off and the time-limit being all wrong, but then another splash of the acid-shit hits him and burns into his arm.

“Jesus freakin’ Christ!” he screams, staring at the melting spot on his arm.

And there he … no, she is; the assassin is a woman this time.

A little old lady probably never recognized for anything more than being an above-average grandma, holding a vial of acid in one hand and a snub-nose revolver in the other.

She turns and takes a pot-shot at me, shouting “Stay away! I paid fair and square!”

I shove the screaming kid behind some garbage bags, and the crowd cheers; I’m guessing they don’t realize that I broke the kid’s arm, or, if they do, they don’t care.

And hey, he’s alive, right? That’s a step up from where he would’ve been had I not pulled that neat trick with the gauntlets.

So fuck him if he can’t take the heat. He should be thanking me, instead of screaming and whimpering like a little ki–

Oh.

Right.

Rhino roars and charges at the little old lady, who hits him on the side of the head with more of the acid, and then shoots him in one of the burning patches on his arm; the bullet goes through, and red bubbles out through the sizzling gray.

He roars, and swats her like a goddamn bug, palm hitting her in the head and squashing her entire body down into the pavement with a loud combination “CRUNCH-SPLAT” sound.

So the folks who pay to be heroes aren’t as invincible as they seemed.

Good to know.

Just what I needed: his back is to me.

Time to test a theory.

I jump up onto him, kick off his thigh and hook an arm around that enormous neck, shoving my other arm into the black spot. I sink in up to the shoulder and start waving my arm wildly, squeezing off dozens of level five shots at random.

Rhino lets out an insane scream, and I hear shouting from the other side of the spot, wherever that may be.

“CLOSE THE TUBE, OHNN! HE’S GOT AN ARM THROUGH! CLOSE THE TUBE!”

“No, wait! Don’t close it!” Rhino shouts angrily. “I can take him! I can —”

The Rhino suddenly lurches forward and falls flat on his face, throwing me to the ground. I lie there for a second, breathing, and then the Rhino slowly pushes himself up.

“Oy, Herman,” says Aleksei. “My arm hurts.”

“Aleksei!” I shout, my voice cracking awkwardly. I hug him around his enormous waist; my arms can’t even get all the way around, and for some stupid reason I’m breathing all hard.

“Hey …” Aleksei says slowly, looking around. “We ain’t on the phone anymore.”

Thank God. Aleksei’s back.

“Aleksei, get underground, now.”

The sirens, as always, are getting louder, but I hear a much worse noise rapidly approaching; the engine of a 1950s muscle car.

That’s probably Luke Cage.

That’d be very bad.

“I don’t understand, Herman, what’s going on? I was at my place and now —”

It’s here that Herman notices the blood all over his suit, and sunken, beady little eyes go wide.

Scared, all white, almost no iris to be seen.

He looks like a cartoon; it’d be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

“Herman, what did I do? What did I …” He reaches around and pulls the black spot off the back of his head, and it crumbles apart like burnt paper. Amazingly, Aleksei immediately understands.

“FPS,” he whispers. “Somebody was in my head.” There’s a quiver in his voice that rattles me a little.

“Aleksei, GO. Get into the tunnels, find a doctor and get that bullet out of your arm, but whatever you do, keep out of sight.”

“There’s a bullet in my arm?” Aleksei says, and I can tell he’s losing it a little. He touches the wound, and winces. “It hurts, Herman. What did I do? What happened? Did I … Did I kill all these people, or —”

The muscle car sounds like it’s practically on top of us.

“I’ll explain everything later, but Aleksei, you need to go before …” A 1959 street-racer skids around the corner up the street; it’s all black.

Huh.

All black?

Who drives a —

And then I see the white skull logo on the hood.

“ALEKSEI, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” I scream, my voice cracking all the way now as I squeeze off at least twenty rapid-fire Level Five pulses at the oncoming car; the street around and beneath it explodes in a cataclysmic eruption of asphalt, concrete, car parts, parking meters, street signs and uprooted trees.

The car goes flipping fifteen feet into the air, and comes down with a brutal smash upside-down on the pavement around twenty yards away.

See, now you’re thinking, whoa, overkill.

You don’t know this guy.

With him, there’s no such thing as overkill. I just bought myself forty seconds, tops.

“Jesus, Herman!” Aleksei yelps.

“GO!” I scream, sounding completely panicked rather than cool and in control, but Aleksei, as always, does as he’s told. He smashes those two enormous fists down through the pavement and drops into the sewer, and I hear him rumblerumblerumblerumble away.

The crowd is silent now; they don’t have the slightest conception of what’s going on. I raise my arms at the wrecked car, and wait. Ten seconds. Twenty. I’m sweating like a goddamn ape.

Man, fuck this. I’m gone.

I sprint into the men’s clothing store where I crashed the Broomstick (and the bus), and vibrate the piece of crap out of the wreckage; it’s unharmed, of course. I should expect that anything made by the Tinkerer would be impervious to a collision under three hundred miles an hour.

People are still screaming inside the bus.

I power up the Broomstick and prepare to tear ass, when someone shouts my name; not my real name, of course, but still my name.

“SHOCKER! HELP ME!”

Something inside me shifts in a weird way that I’m not used to and not at all comfortable with. I stick my head inside the bus, and immediately regret it.

The crash has not been kind to the passengers. They’re shmeared and shredded all over the place; of twenty-five, maybe nine are alive, all badly injured.

I start acting without thinking, forgetting all about the angel of death who, at this time, is pulling himself out of the destroyed classic sportster outside, bringing all manner of hell with him.

I start pulling people out and haphazardly throwing them out onto the plush carpeting of the men’s clothing store, throwing out a quick “Shut the fuck up” when anyone tries to thank me, or talk to me at all. I think I’ve got them all, when I turn to find a black guy in his forties, his leg pinned between a torn seat-bench and the bent-in side of the bus.

I kneel down next to him, and he doesn’t say anything, just sort of sits there staring at me.

His leg is so fucked that it looks like roast beef, and his blood has formed all kinds of little waterfalls in the crags of the crumpled metal.

“You’re the Shocker, right?” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Shut the fuck up,” I say; it’s becoming my catchphrase.

“I really admire you for doing this,” he says as I struggle to fit my fingers between his leg and the seat-bench; maybe I can vibrate it apart, or … Wait, what the fuck did he just say?

My face must give me away, because then the guy says:

“I know you’re scared. And I admire you staying here and trying to help me.”

“What?” I say in a small voice. He smiles a strangely calm smile.

“I know you’re a villain, and I know you don’t have to do this, but you staying behind and helping me, risking yourself, it shows character.”

I have no idea what to say to any of this, so I just keep trying to get my fingers between his leg and the wreckage.

“I’m a journalist,” he says, and for the first time I hear the pain in his voice; the guy is in total agony, and is still … well, what the fuck is he doing? Just praising me for the sake of praising me. “I’m with the Daily Bugle. My name’s Robertson, Robbie Robertson.”

He holds out a shaking hand.

“Look, dumbshit,” I say to the first person aside from Aleksei who’s given me a compliment in fifteen years. “Just, just shut up. I’m in a hurry.”

“Do what you need to do, Herman.” Robbie Robertson, Daily Bugle Journalist Whatever says. I hate that he knows my first name, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Inspiration strikes, and I dip my fingers into a pool of his blood, and then slide them into a crack in the seat-bench.

Bingo.

“Try to stay still,” I say, and vibrate the bench to pieces. Robertson laughs a weak laugh, then his face goes white, or at least as white as it can go.

“Castle, wait!” he shouts at something behind me.

Castle wait? The hell is he talking about n–

Something knocks me hard in the back of the head, sending me face-first into the bent metal, and, for the first time since I was a kid —

I dream of Felicia, her hair glowing white in a world of darkness, and the name, Cerada, echoes around in a strange, sing-song voice. And for some reason Max is there, my old friend, Max Markham, posing in the center of a wrestling ring, holding up a golden championship belt.

“Do you see, Herman?” he says. “Do you see what I won?”

“You didn’t win, Max, you died. You died a horrible, painful death.”

Max grins, revealing that the entire bone-structure of his face is shattered as it slides around soupily under his skin.

“But, Herman, look, I have the belt.” He shows me the belt; it’s engraved with the letters FPS.

For some reason I say “All the pies in the world still won’t cure cancer.”

“Yeah,” Max says. “But I’ll eat ’em anyway.”

We laugh as Max’s skin melts off.

It lights up high above the ring, in vibrant neon:

THE SHOCKER: LEGIT?

The ring is empty.

And then I see it, slow but fast, quiet but deafeningly loud.

A devolution, from man back to ape, from ape back to rodent, from rodent back to lizard, from lizard back to fish, from fish back to amoeba, from amoeba back to slime, and from slime to nothing.

Aleksei, Max, Mac Gargan, Professor Crawford, devolved from people into a toys, action figures to play with.

Tools of destruction.

My ear devolved into a mangled lump.

My nose devolved into a warped mess.

Spider-Man.

Spiders everywhere, laughing at me.

“I’m the freakin’ Rhino!”

Then I’m in the basement again, inside of the safes, unlocking them one by one, and I come out to see my father standing on the cool sand, his face a plain white skull with no jawbone.

And he’s laughing at me, laughing and laughing and laughing and I want to take him by the throat and vibrate him until his face melts off from the heat, vibrate him until he’s dust, devolve him into nothing the way he devolved me into this shit of a human being I am today.

All his fault.

Nobody’s fault at all.

Cerada.

My fault. Nobody else’s.

But I will evolve.

I will change.

Felicia’s lips, whispering “Wake up, Herman.” That strange, sexy growling R.

And I wake up.

I look around.

Godfuckingdamnit.

I’m out of the suit, face-down, wearing only my boxers, hands cuffed behind my back. I’m in the trunk of a moving car; it’s hot, sticky, and dark. It smells like vomit, blood and sweat; I’m not the first tenant, not by a long shot. I try to move my legs, and find they’re separately handcuffed to something that looks like a shotgun; if I’d moved them an inch more, my head would’ve been history.

Sweet Jesus.

I’m hogtied in the Punisher’s trunk.

I am totally, unequivocally fucked.

But the name still echoes in my head.

Cerada.

The name of the man behind FPS, or at least one of the men behind FPS.

Something definitely wrong with that name, even worse now that I’m concentrating on it.

The problem starts to shake.

Dacera.

Radeca.

Decara.

Edraca.

The problem starts to spin.

Ardace.

Arceda.

The problem tears itself apart.

…

Oh, shit.

…

Arcade.

Man, if I ever get out of this trunk, I might be in some serious trouble.

Prelude To: Avatars

“I know you wanna leave me,” Otis Williams of the Temptations croons. “But I refuse, to let you go.” A fluorescent lightbulb flickers to life in front of me, hanging off a chain. “If I have to beg and plead, for your sympathy,” Otis sings, and I realize that not two inches away from my face is another face, but this face is upside-down. “I don’t mind, ’cause you mean that much to me; I ain’t too proud to beg.”

If a Colt Peacemaker had a face, that face would be the face of the Punisher.

“Baby, baby, please don’t leave me, girl.”

It’s all hard-lines; even the parts that should be rounded off are squared away into angles; I know it’s ridiculous, but I’d swear that even his eyes aren’t round.

They’re hexagons.

Cold, blue-white hexagons that show no emotion; the iris and the pupil look painted-on, like the orb itself is made of marble.

“If I have to plead, baby, baby, please don’t leave me, girl.”

He smells, surprise surprise, like gunpowder and blood.

Gunpowder, blood and something else … What is that?

Oh, that’s right. He smells like ballpark hotdogs: ketchup, mustard and relish.

Damned if I know why.

Of course, I can’t smell much with my nose in the shape it’s in anyway; the blood I smell is probably my own, leaking through my sinuses. I must’ve passed out in the trunk again, and when I woke up, I was in the position I am now, which, now that I’ve gotten my bearings, is not a pretty one.

I’m hanging by my feet upside-down from a ceiling pipe in the dank basement of what must be a low-end housing project, converted into what appears to be, plain and simple, a torture chamber. Spikes, drills, razors, stretch-racks, electroshock rigs …

This place is a nightmare. A living, breathing nightmare.

And oh, it is breathing, it is very much alive. Much more so than the man in front of me in the vest adorned by that enormous white jawless skull. This place hisses and screams and bleeds and sobs; this place has become him, and he has become merely a tool, a piece of scenery.

I’ve heard stories about this guy.

The Kingpin, Wilson Fisk, said that the Punisher has no soul.

At the time, I thought, haha, hypocrisy, irony. Now, looking at those dead blue hexagons, I think I’m starting to understand.

He seems to notice I’m awake for the first time, and he smiles. But it’s not a human smile, not an expression of joy or satisfaction or even cruelty. It’s just another configuration of his face, another dead, cold mask, like somebody painted a smile on a skull.

He’s dead inside. Rotten. A decomposed soul.

“Hello.” He doesn’t actually say the word so much as mouths it. “Do you know who I am?’

“I know you’re —”

He runs an electric current through the chain, and my body buckles upward. I vomit, and it goes up my nose and into my eyes.

“MRPH!” I scream, and Punisher smiles the dead smile again.

“One-word answers only, please.” He wipes the puke off my face with what looks (and smells and feels) like a used garage rag. “Now. Do you know who I am?”

After spitting out some puke, I say “Yes.”

“Excellent.” He goes around behind me, and I hear him screwing around with something. There’s a whirring sound. “Do you know what FPS is?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an orga–”

Another electric shock, and my body spasms a few times, leaving me swinging loosely. I’m bad at this game.

“One word, remember?”

“Yes.”

“What is FPS?”

I think for a moment.

“Game.”

There’s a silence, and Punisher stops whatever he’s doing.

“What kind of game? Your cooperation has upgraded your vocabulary to two words.”

I try to think of the two most effective words in the English language to say “A game in which super-villains and paying volunteers are pitted against one another by telepathically controlling aforementioned super-villains, probably devised by the sadistic madman called Arcade with help from the Spot and someone with a mind-control technology, and assisted by numerous dangerous criminals, at least some of them on Bullseye’s level.”

I come up with:

“Death game.”

Punisher reappears, holding what looks like a long, thin needle, glowing with heat. It must be around 170 degrees; metal only glows like that when it’s beyond hot.

“A death game. Well, seems like you’ve got the idea, Schultz.”

He moves scary fast, and then the back of my neck feels cold, my body writhing away from it out of my control.

“AAHHHFUUUUCKKKKYOOOUUUU!” I scream, and I hear the Punisher laugh. He pulls away and wipes some blood off the needle, and then smiles at me and hits a winch which slacks the chain holding me up.

I drop to the ground on my shoulders, and my legs flop down over my head for a minute before I shake my body straight.

“Uuughhhh …” I say, the back of my neck starting to feel very hot indeed.

“So, Schultz …” His thin lips curl into a smirk. “You must be pretty confused right about now.”

“Yes,” I manage through the heat that’s now leaking from the back of my neck and into my head; he burned me deep. He’s completely psycho, the sort of schizoid freak who would’ve ended up as a closet murderer, poisoning traveling salesmen or chopping up teenage girls.

But fate had other plans for him.

The story behind the Punisher, as I’ve heard it, is that he went to Sin Cong, and came back fucked in the head. Things only got worse when somebody (I’ve heard everybody from the Kingpin to the High Evolutionary) whacked his family.

Shot the hell out of his wife and kids, right in front of him.

Since then he’s been like a disease that crime syndicates can catch; Punishillis. Punishitis. The Punishment Syndrome.

He kills without mercy, hesitation, or even thought, really. If you get in his way, you are very much a dead man.

And he’s right. I am confused, namely because I am still alive.

“What’re you thinking about right now, Herman?” He squats down along side me, dabbing something cool on my neck. I start to speak, but then he raises a finger. “You’re back to one word.”

For some weird reason, I choose the word “Rhino.”

“Rhino?” Punisher says, and this weird look comes into his eye. “Aleksei Sytsevich, your friend who I watched smash sixteen people to death yesterday. You’re worried about him?”

Christ, yesterday? How long have I been here?

…

Am I worried about freaking Rhino? Why did I say that? Why did I …

Man, I’m a mess.

“Don’t,” I say, hoping he’ll take the bait.

“Don’t what?”

“Hurt.”

“Don’t hurt who?”

“Rhino.”

Punisher pauses for a moment, and then shakes his head.

“Why would I hurt Rhino? When a person is killed, you destroy the murderer, not the murder weapon.”

A moment of understanding through the pain: Punisher knows.

Punisher knows about FPS, or at least the mind-control aspect.

I’m not alone in this. Someone else has figured it out.

Which begs the question …

I point at the back of my neck. “WHY?”

Punisher smiles the dead smile, pulls down the lycra collar of his uniform, and displays a nasty burn on the back of his own neck. Okay, so he’s got one, too. Great, now, what, we’re blood brothers?

“Think of it as a vaccination against unwanted parasites.” He dips the needle into a bowl of murky water, and it sizzles. “Ohnn’s spots can’t project the music through scar tissue.”

This stops me dead.

“Ohnn?”

“Yes, Jonny Ohnn, you know him?”

“Spot.”

“That’s right.”

“Music?”

The Punisher nods. “If you can call it that; sort of a cacophonous noise, like an electric guitar. It comes through the spots Ohnn lays down; if you’re listening for it, you’ll hear it, but don’t listen too hard. I used a KMP Hearer while Markham was going nuts, and I ended up stumbling around a deserted office, flailing my arms and going ‘RAAAH.’ Mind control, eh?” He lights a cigarette. “Scary shit.” He takes a drag, and blows the smoke out up into the thick air of the basement.

“Friends?”

Punisher laughs, a strange barking sound that’s barely human. “Friends? Who, you and me? Fuck no. Would your friend do this?” Again, he moves too quick to see; he shoves the lit end of the cigarette into my left temple, searing deeply into the skin.

“YARHG!” I say, extra-coherently, and slap a hand over the burn as he pulls away.

“Guys like you disgust me, Schultz. Spend your whole life stealing, and hurting, and cheating others, and then one day, poof, you have a revelation. No! Oh lordie lordie lordie, forgive me for my sins, I was misled.” Punisher leans down next to me. “Let me ask you something, ‘friend’: Do you think those shits you saved on the bus, do you think they make up for all the people you’ve hurt? The people you’ve killed?”

“I haven’t killed anybo–” He slaps me across the face; it feels like a punch. The guy is made of stone.

“Haven’t killed anybody, my ass. You’ve been in the Sinister Six; one of its more pathetic incarnations, but still deadly. You stood alongside killers, and did nothing to stop them. And as long as you stand by, you’re as guilty as they are.” He stands up, and goes over to a table full of guns. “So, no, Herman. You and I are most definitely not friends.” He loads a pistol, and about now I’m looking for a way out.

Why would he burn me just to shoot me? Fuck it, I don’t care. My hands are unbound, but my legs are still chained; the chain has about seven feet loose on the floor, and then goes through an electric motor (with a handy crank on the side), run between winch and pulley, up the wall, across the ceiling and through another pulley, down to where I was hanging.

On the floor, carelessly discarded less than two feet away from me, is an Allen wrench.

Huh.

The Punisher’s back is to me. Because he’s the Punisher, and I’m the Shocker.

His mistake.

I reach for the Allen wrench, and I hear him load a pistol.

“Don’t try it, Shakes.” Punisher turns, pistol raised. “I’m not going to kill you, and there’s no point in making me give you a flesh wound.” He shakes his head. “You and I are on the same side. Neither of us like FPS; actually, in your case, it’s more that they don’t like you.”

“Oh?” I say quietly. They don’t like me? That’s probably bad.

“Yeah. You put a fly up their ass something fierce. I can’t tell you how many messages I’ve intercepted with the byline ‘Eliminate The Shocker’ or ‘Such and Such canceled due to Shocker’s interference.’ It’s charming, really.”

He leans down and unbuckles my ankle-cuffs. I stand up and then immediately shrink away from him.

“I even intercepted a personal communiqué from Slug reading ‘Why hasn’t anyone killed that stupid fuck?’ High honors, Schultz.”

The Slug. A superhumanly obese fortysomething with his sausage fingers in everything from drugs to white slavery. Figures he’d have a fat pinky in FPS.

“Arcade,” I say.

Punisher raises his eyebrows, then nods.

“Cerada. Arcade. Heh, he must be running the machinery of the damn thing; I’m amazed I didn’t think of that. Good call, Schultz. C’mere.” He beckons me with one white-gloved hand, and I inch towards him. “Hit me.”

A pause.

“Come on, asshole. Hit me.”

I’m so scared right now it’s ridiculous. My brain keeps flashing me the image of me hitting him, and then him bringing up the pistol and blowing my brains out all over the floor. I fight through it, and I hit the sunuvabitch.

It’s a no-joke punch, either; a straight right into his face, hard as I can.

He doesn’t even blink.

“I like it,” he says, and nods approvingly. “You’re gonna do fine.”

“Fine?” I ask, still a little shaken by the fact that I just hit this guy as hard as I could and he didn’t move, at all. Not even a little bit. Didn’t even take a step back.

“Yeah. You and I are going to be working parallel.”

“Uh … huh?”

“Parallel. You just keep going at FPS your way, and I’ll handle them …” He clicks off the safety on his pistol. “My way. Eventually, if all goes well, we’ll meet up again when we’ve chipped away till there’s nothing left. You should have some extra incentive, now that they’ve fucked with your friend and torched your place.”

My eyes go wide.

“Torched my place?” I yowl. Punisher smiles, a real, genuine, sympathetic smile.

BAM. A punch to the face, and everything is darkness.

When I wake up I’m floating face-down, and I can hear Punisher’s muscle car motoring away through the lapping of Atlantic Ocean in my ears. I splutter bubbles and yank my head up out of the water, the salt water stinging the burn on my face and the open wounds that are my nose and my ear.

I’m in a wharf, a sea-eaten old place probably abandoned for not under ten or fifteen years. I pull myself up a ladder onto the dock I was most likely thrown off, and find the Flying Broomstick, newly decorated with a single small Punisher Skull on the side. The vibrosuit is sitting on top of it, along with the gauntlets and a yellow piece of note-paper.

“SHAKES — THE SYMBOL SHOULD KEEP PEOPLE FROM FUCKING WITH YOUR RIDE. PEOPLE SEE THAT SKULL AND THEY SHIT A BRICK. DON’T BLAME THEM, MYSELF. GOOD LUCK. DON’T DIE BEFORE I CAN KILL YOU – P.”

Don’t Die Before I Can Kill You. I guess that’s version of “Kisses and Hugs.”

Twenty minutes later, I’ve got my clothes on, and I’ve almost managed to drag the Broomstick all the way down the dock to the boathouse; the thing is heavier then it looks.

Thwip.

Tell me I didn’t hear that.

There’s a silence, and nothing happens. No Spider-Man. Which means the thwip was probably, no, definitely the water splashing up against the dock. It’s getting dark, puffy gray rain clouds covering the last vestiges of sun.

Christ, I’ve got a fucking headache.

So. My place has been torched; if Punisher said it, it’s true. I shouldn’t go back; they’ll be watching for me. I’d show up and boom, they send someone like Deadshot, or Taskmaster, or Deadpool.

Deadpool would be a fucking nightmare.

And I just cleaned house. Figures.

So, first thing, I go to one of my back-up places; either the Tube or the Olmec.

Then, Rhino.

Then … Who? Felicia? No, she’d never … Would she?

Phineas already sold me out, making those fucking hooks …

My hand touches where my ear used to be, and I wince.

So, who then, who, who, who …

“Sir?” a voice says, and I jump nearly out of my skin. A guy almost my age, maybe thirty-one, thirty-two, is standing just up the dock from me. He must’ve come around the boathouse from the street.

I think about blasting him, just out of habit, but manage to stop myself. I smile at him; I’m lucky I didn’t put on the mask, along with the suit.

“Yeah?” I say; I’m a guy in a yellow and brown vibrosuit, dragging what looks like a miniature 1950s Moon-Rocket. “Yeah” seems the only appropriate response.

The guy laughs awkwardly, then scratches his head.

“I heard you from the street, you know, cursing and dragging that thing. I thought maybe you could use a hand.”

This is too good to be true. And there’s something likeable about the guy, something friendly that predisposes you to trusting him; if he’s an FPS assassin, he’s a damn good one.

“Do you know who I am?” I ask in a tone that sounds more retarded than menacing.

“You’re the Shocker, right? I saw you on TV yesterday, saving all those people from the Rhino.”

“TV?” I say quietly. “No shit?”

“No, man, you’ve been all over. You used to be a bad guy, right?”

A pause. Punisher’s words echo in my head.

“I still am a bad guy,” I say quietly.

“Well, you did right by me,” the guy says, and walks over. “So, Shocker, you need a hand with that or what?”

I look up the dock where I started dragging the Broomstick; that was twenty minutes ago, and I’ve maybe moved it eight feet.

“Yeah. I could. But don’t call me Shocker; when I’ve got the mask off, I’m Herman.” I stick out a hand, and the guy takes it; he shakes hands like an excited kid, clenching my wrist with his free hand.

“I’m Peter,” the guy says. “Peter Parker.”

Avatars, Part One

“Holy crap, man …” Parker says, tugging fruitlessly on his end of the Broomstick. “This thing is heavy.”

Poor guy; it’s painful to watch him try to move it; he’s weak as a leaf, more of a hindrance than a help, really.

And by the way, if any of you are chuckling about the “tugging fruitlessly on his end of the broomstick” bit, cut it out. We’re all adults here.

Well, except maybe the guys dressed as Scorpions, Spiders, Octopuses and Vultures, demons from hell and aliens from the vast darkness of space.

Because that’s all this sad superhero world of ours is in the end. A bunch of little kids (you “normal” types) watching a minority of adults playing dress-up games to decide who lives and who dies, sometimes even deciding the fate of the planet itself. Look at it objectively; if you were in a galactic council or something, how ready would you be to admit that yes, your planet was the one regularly saved by grown men in spandex?

Uh-huh. I knew you’d understand.

“Just try to get the tip,” I say, and lean forward on the back of the Broomstick, scrape-sliding it along the asphalt; we’ve been moving it from parking structure to parking structure, trying to keep out of sight, which is rough with Parker; he’s sick, some kind of cancer maybe, and he keeps coughing and stumbling.

I asked him about it; he said, “Work related.”

And what work it is; apparently he works for Tony Stark, even lives in the building uptown with his wife, get this, Mary Jane motherfucking Watson.

That’s right. Lobster-Man Mary Jane Watson. Mary Jane on freaking magazine covers throughout the country Watson. Mary Jane I-used-to-beat-off-to-her-Vogue-shoots Watson.

As if that isn’t mind-blowing enough, Parker also happens to be the guy who photographed me and Rhino going toe-to-toe with Bullseye, though he says he’s not a professional photographer.

Which is ridiculous, by the way; I’ve seen his stuff. He makes me look …

Heroic.

And to make a guy like me look like a hero, that’s talent. That’s fooling your audience.

“Just get your hands around the shaft, Herman …” Peter says, and heaves up the back end of the broomstick, suddenly surprisingly strong. And we’re off; two guys carrying a rocket down the street. After a couple of blocks Peter asks if I know where we’re going, and I realize I don’t.

Heading back to my apartment would be suicide; Punisher said it was gone, so it’s gone, and they’re probably having it watched.

Which means the Tube or the Olmec, my two best hide-outs.

But for now: Food. I haven’t eaten since what I hope was yesterday morning, and I’m fucking famished. Peter and I drop the Broomstick noisily on the sidewalk outside of a McDonalds, and go in; Peter doesn’t order anything, but he does pay for me. A nice and necessary gesture, since it seems the Punisher stole my wallet.

The Olmec is in the back of the Smithsonian, above the long closed “Legacy of the Olmecs” exhibit, shut down after a tangle between the Morlocks and the X-Men smashed the place up. They keep saying they’re going to repair it, but I’ve got inside sources that say the whole room is mildly radioactive, and the half-life doesn’t end until 2010.

Not like I’m worried about a little radiation poison; diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and depression. Hell, nothing I’m not accustomed to already.

The hide-out itself is inside of a 1/50 scale Olmec Pyramid Building; in a space the size of most people’s closets I’ve got a computer, a full set of tools and scraps, a wall-bed and a radio. On the wall is a framed news-photo of myself, in Shocker gear, being led away by police after a sound beating by Spider-Man.

I don’t know why I framed it. Hell, I don’t know why I even put it up in the first place; just looking at it makes me sad. But sometimes I think I enjoy being sad; that’s fucked, I know, but it’s there, in my head and it won’t go away. Whenever I talk to Aleksei about this sort of thing he always says something along the lines of ‘Jeez, Hoiman, mebbe you shud see a sigh-shyatrist.’

Yeah. Right. A shrink.

Back when Leonard Samson was doing his series on the minds of super-villains for the New Yorker, a sign-up sheet was passed around the Metahuman Block in Morricone-Correctional Facility. By the time it got to me, it already had some pretty heavy hitters on it.

Otto Octavius. Probably signed up thinking he could outsmart Samson and make an escape. His interview went down without a hitch, however; in the New Yorker, Samson describes him as “a brilliant but megalomaniacal loner, forever isolated by his own arrogance.”

Adrian Toomes. Oy vey. The Vulture will talk to anyone who’ll listen. My best guess is that he treated this as a kind of half-assed appeal hearing: “Oh, look at the poor old man! He looks so sad in prison! A sad little caged bird! All he wants to do is fly!”

And of course, we’re all supposed to forget the fact that less than five years ago the guy had de-aged himself to twenty and was slashing his way through the NYPD like a lawnmower on a layer cake.

Cletus Cassidy. A fucking head-case of the highest order, better known to the public as Carnage, Cassidy was most definitely just scouting an opportunity to kill some people, probably Samson if he could.

I heard about a month ago that he’s been killed by the Sentry, and honestly, good fucking riddance. All that stuff about honor amongst thieves? Well, sorry, jackass. I don’t apply it to serial killers, metahuman or not.

I signed the sheet at the bottom: Herman Schultz. And then in the second column, where it said “ALIAS”, I wrote in ‘The Shocker.’

I’m not sure why I signed up; I guess it was because I’d been in the hole so long any opportunity to get out was to be arbitrarily taken; hell, I’d have signed up for Massaging the Morbidly Obese if it would have gotten me out of that cell.

Two weeks later they called out who they’d need to report to C Block for transportation to a SHIELD operated security station, where they’d be interviewed by the oh-so-fucking-prestigious Dr. Leonard “Probably-Has-Green-Pubic-Hair-Too-Bet-You-Never-Thought-About-That” Samson.

Out goes Otto.

Out goes Toomes.

Out goes Cassidy, grinning all the way.

And poor old Herman sits alone in his cell.

I escaped later that day; set off a vibro-bomb that damn near blew up the whole D-Block. But sometimes I wonder what would’ve been better in the long run: spending two days out in New York City before getting caught, pummeled and incarcerated by Iron Fist and Luke Cage, or spending two hours with Dr. Samson.

I know you probably think I’m stupid, but shit like that bugs me late at night.

Needles me.

It shakes me.

“So,” Peter says, putting down his coffee. “Why the change?”

“What change?” I say, almost whispering. People are passing by, pointing at me and smiling, waving, saying, “Hey, Shocker!” or “Rock on, Shocker!” or even “I love you, Shocker!” I shrug. “I ain’t changed.”

“Oh?” Peter says, raising his eyebrows. “Because I don’t hear many people shouting out ‘I love you’ to any of the other third-rate super-villains.”

“I wasn’t third-rate, I was …” Peter does this ‘oh, really?’ thing with his eyebrows, and I laugh. It’s hard not to laugh when you’re around Peter. “Okay, so maybe I was third-rate.”

“You were. You know that photo of you pantsed, hanging upside-down, webbed to the front of the Sheridan Plaza? I took that.”

“Oh, did you?” I say quietly.

“Hey, Herman, it’s strictly business. I don’t take the pictures for fun; it’s not a hobby.”

“Then how’d you start? I thought most photographers started out doing it for fun, and then —”

Peter laughs.

“No no no, not me. For me, photography was always about the money. That and the memories; I’d imagine it’s about just the memories for most people, but Jonah Jameson says I have ‘the eye’, so …” Peter shrugs and smiles. “Really, photography was just a way to fund my real hobbies.”

“Like?”

Peter shifts oddly in his chair, and looks out the window.

I don’t know what that means, but it means something, and it’s worth remembering. He wasn’t on that dock by accident, that much I’m sure of. He’s not going to try to kill me; he would have already, and he probably knows that in a straight-up fight, I’d beat him easy. A spy for the Bugle? Maybe.

Maybe someone Felicia sent to keep an eye on me. Or maybe I’m flattering myself.

“Like what were your other hobbies?” I say again.

I feel like I’m on a date.

“Science, mostly.”

“Really? What science?”

Peter laughs, but still seems uncomfortable. “Does it matter? I was a dork.”

“Hey, you ain’t a dork unless you tell yourself you’re a dork. You can be a failure, a success, or you can tread water. Those are the only three classifications people can have, Peter. Someone calls you a dork, or a nerd or a fuck-up, that’s them talking.”

Peter blinks. “Were you a dork?” he asks in a way that sounds like he wants me to say yes.

“I … I wasn’t anything, really.”

I tell him about high school, what a bundle of laughs that was.

High School Picture: a dumpy, unpleasant boy with brown hair parted straight down the middle. His eyes are squinted shut from the flashbulb, his long, narrow nose wrinkled up, his mouth half open in an attempt at a smile that seems to have died on the way to his face.

Take that kid and put him in a cafeteria. He sits and eats on the floor, because he doesn’t know who to sit with. He’s madly in love with his science teacher, Ms. Rickles, who’s twenty-three, blond and probably fucks like a bunny. He’s been in her class for three years, but she still doesn’t know his name.

He’s obsessed with an old out-of-tune banjo someone threw away behind the school, and during the breaks between classes he just sits outside the library, plucking the strings, listening to the sounds and watching the steel cord vibrate.

Some of his teachers think he’s a little retarded, maybe because his parents did drugs or because he got fucked in the gene-pool. The only class he really talks in is history, and that’s because he always has to go to the bathroom by fifth period, two hours after lunch on the floor in the cafeteria.

On the way back from the shitter he always breaks into every locker in the hall. It comes easy to him, almost as easy as fighting, which he’s gotten used to in his household, where his father regularly invites neighborhood thugs in to brawl with his son in order to “toughen him up.”

One day, the father says, one day his son will be a master criminal. Everyone will fear him, yes, but he will have everyone’s respect.

Respect.

This is what he shouted to his terrified son as he worked out of the maze of safes in the basement of the house, the lock in the series requiring the use of a blow-torch, sucking away the boy’s air and permanently burning his unprotected hands.

The school administration never did find out who’d break into all the lockers in the third floor hallway almost every day from 1987 to 1991. But it certainly wasn’t unobtrusive little Herman Schultz. Not fat, not thin, not smart, not dumb, not handsome, not ugly, just … there.

All my life, the only really impactful thing I’d ever done up until a couple of weeks ago was invent the gauntlets and the suit.

Being the Shocker was everything to me; even before “The Shocker” existed.

Spider-Man once said to me: “Everyone’s life is hard. That’s not an excuse.” And he was probably right, but there’s something wrong with me; people like me, Aleksei, Otto, hell, Charles Xavier, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark.

We’re destined to lead extraordinary lives.

Not good lives, necessarily, I’m proof of that.

But some of us are just … different. Usually we’re born that way, I think.

You could call us Premature-Metas when we’re young.

Freaks-in-waiting.

And then what happens to us happens; we invent something, we’re exposed to radiation, we join a government program …

And things start to make sense.

Well, usually.

Otto becomes Doctor Octopus. Steve Rogers becomes Captain America. Tony Stark invents Iron Man. Xavier founds his school, and makes the world a hell of a safer place.

But me?

I become the Shocker, joke of the week on the cover of the Daily Bugle: “Shocker trounced again!”

So you want to know why?

Well, fuck you, you’re asking the wrong question: the question is WHY NOT?

What have I done as the Shocker?

Hell, let’s be honest, what have I done as Herman David Schultz?

Nothing. I was long overdue for a change.

When I finish speaking, Peter looks like he’s going to cry.

“Herman … I didn’t know,” he says, a little shakily.

It’s weird. He almost looks … I don’t know, ashamed.

“Calm down, man. I know I got a little soupy, there, but —”

Peter raises a hand.

“I’m cool,” he says. “You know, you’re smarter than you have any right to be, Herman.”

“Oh?” I say, laughing.

“Yeah. You went outside of yourself, looked at your situation, and made a call. I just hope it doesn’t kill you.”

“Huh?” I say, not feeling very smart at all.

“I heard about this thing, this ‘FPS’ thing. I’m just saying, it’s a pretty big fish for someone new to the game, isn’t it?”

I laugh again, but it’s a choked, nervous sound.

“Parker, you don’t know jackshit about what it means to be a superhero,” I say, only half joking.

He takes this in, and then says something very simple but very profound all at once.

“I know one thing: with great power, comes great responsibility.”

After we’ve paid the check and we’re just sitting around, Peter and I have one more little back-and-forth I feel is worth mentioning.

“So, you and the Black Cat, are you guys an item?” There’s too much interest in his voice.

“What, you mean, like, fucking?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, dropping his eyes.

“No. I wish man, I wish.” Peter laughs, but it’s not a “ha-ha” laugh. It’s a laugh of relief.

There’s something really weird about this kid. I think he might be gay.

Two hours later Parker and I have said our goodbyes, after exchanging cell numbers, and I’m dragging the Broomstick along through the sewers, towards the abandoned subway stop I call the Tube. I’m feeling good, bad, great and awful all at once.

Good: I made a friend. I didn’t even think I knew how anymore. Granted, he and his wife are apparently headed to Latveria for a while, part of some kind of world trip, but Peter Parker is a good guy, and it’s nice to know that I have someone in the Stark building on my side, in case Spider-Man and the “New” Avengers get on my case.

Bad: My whole body hurts. Mind-Controlled Rhino + Fun With My New “Friend” the Punisher = A whole lot of hurt for poor old Herman.

Great: I’m free, at least momentarily, of people in my direct vicinity trying to kill me, and any moment now I’ll pass through the quadruple-locked-doors to my favorite hide-out, where I can watch a Marx Brothers flick on VHS, make myself a salami sandwich, jerk off, and go to sleep.

God knows, I need it.

Awful: My best friend, as of now, is missing, last seen tumbling down the side of a nervous breakdown after committing multiple homicides. I’m completely alone in the superhero world (aside from my new buddy IWILLKILLANDEATYOU Punisher), so there’s no way for me to communicate to anyone that Aleksei wasn’t himself. Which means people like Solo, Luke Cage and their ilk will be trying to use deadly force, and they’re probably gunning for him pretty hard right about now; as I understand it, the second-stringer heroes haven’t liked it that I’m getting more press than them with only three weeks of hero-ing under my belt.

Add to that the ever-present thought gnawing at the back of my head that when I shoved my hand through the spot on the back of Rhino’s head and opened fire, I seriously fucked with FPS.

Which means they’re probably going to seriously fuck with me right back. Bullseye, the world’s deadliest assassin, was just their first shot. Do I even want to know what else Arcade’s got up his sleeve?

If Arcade is even the one in charge. For all I know, he could just be another pawn; totally untraceable and utterly complete mind control is a definitely hot commodity, and honestly, I’d think the method itself is beyond Arcade’s understanding. I’m thinking he’s just the one who came up with the application, not the technology.

A list: People implicated in FPS so far.

Arcade.

The Spot, Johnny Ohnn.

Bullseye.

Three people who have no connection I can see whatsoever. I shake the problem, and nothing. Just blank space.

Shit, it hurts my head to think about it.

“Dewey, Cheatum and Howe,” I say to the vault door at the end of the sewer tunnel, and then punch in a thirty-digit combination, quickly scroll through three twist locks, draw out my key and open it up.

The Tube is, as always, beautiful.

Beautiful walls. Beautiful carpeting. Beautiful chandelier. Beautiful lighting. Beautiful furniture. Beautiful enormous gray man on the couch. Beautiful —

“Hello, Herman,” Aleksei says quietly, not looking up from his child-in-the-corner slump, his head hanging between his giant knees.

The Tube was built around 1927, as near as I can figure. Its main feature is the foyer/lobby, where I now stand. It’s an enormous, coliseum-shaped room, with hallways, offices, boarding rooms and engineering posts honey-combing the walls. It was built to be the central hub of a vacuum-based subway system, funded by the Rockefellers. But after a fight between the Human Torch and the Norseman spun out of control, most of the tubes themselves were wrecked, and some way, somehow, the Tube was abandoned.

Yes, that’s right, abandoned. All pathways to it were closed off, all the remaining tubes cemented shut. All the furniture, machinery, electrical wiring and plumbing was untouched.

One night, I get into a tangle with Tombstone, a deeply nasty albino motherfucker Spider-Man’s probably never even seen before. I’m minus my suit, so it’s a pretty one-way affair, with the exclusion of one nasty shot I got in, a straight brass-knuckles punch to the face.

They were his knucks, and I only got them away from him for a second, but it was still a brutal hit, and worth remembering.

Anyway, he kicks my ass and shoves me face-first into a cement crevice under the Brooklyn Bridge, about eight inches high and three feet across. I can’t pull myself out, because my arms are trapped above my head. It’s dark, I can barely breathe, and it smells like mold. I lie there for a day, realizing that I’m either going to suffocate or starve to death, when a boat light shines on me; no, they don’t see me, and I’m not rescued, but the light does shine down past my body further into the crevice, revealing it to be deeper than the tip of my grimy, sweat-covered nose.

It’s an eight-inch-tall cavern.

I start to use my fingers to drag me deeper, deeper and deeper into the darkness.

I wasn’t trying to escape. I was trying to entomb myself utterly and completely, so that when I did die this sweltering, cramped death, no one would ever have to know.

I remember very well the way the grit of the concrete tore off my fingertips, cracking and peeling away my nails.

I remember the stinging, and picking the gravel out of my wounds later with tweezers.

But what I remember most is that, after nearly two hours of dragging, how surreal it was to go smashing through rotten plaster and onto a king-size bed. Dust went everywhere.

Since then I’ve fixed the Tube up; got running power, StarkLimited Cable Internet, over two thousand television channels, and an eight-by-eight-foot digital TV that I’ve yet to turn on.

Aleksei has taken care of that, though; the TV is on, showing the Rhino tear through two police officers; this must must’ve been before I arrived. All the gore is blurred and censored, but it’s still very clear what’s going on.

Aleksei shifts on the couch, and I hear one of the legs crack a little.

“Hello, Aleksei,” I say quietly, taking a tentative step towards him. He doesn’t move much, just lifts one of those enormous hands and points at the TV.

“Did you see that, Herman? I just stabbed one of those policemen with my horn.”

He looks up, and I get a look at his rectangle of a face.

He is, put gently, a fucking wreck. His eyes are swollen and red, with large purple circles under them from lack of sleep. His eyes, cheeks, brow and nose are still a little swollen in places from the level-three hits he took straight in the face during our tussle. There are primitive bandages on his arms, chest and back where the acid hit him, all stained the brown-red color of dried blood. There’s some gauze on the side of his head where the acid hit him; it actually looks pretty nasty.

“Aleksei, we have to get you to a hosp–” I start to say, but he just slowly shakes his head.

“I ain’t never stabbed anybody with my horn before. Never ever.” He’s quiet for a moment. “You remember, you remember when Kingpin tried to send me out to kill that pretty mob lady, what was her name …”

“Rosalie Carbone,” I say quietly.

“Yeah, her. Remember what I said to Kingpin?”

Yes, I do remember. It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen anyone do; Aleksei stood in front of Kingpin, looked him dead in the eye, and said no.

“I told him I don’t kill people. I told him that ain’t what I do, that I just smash things, I wreck things, and, if you pay me enough, sure, I’ll hurt somebody, break a couple of legs or whatever. But I don’t …” His voice cracks. “I don’t kill nobody.”

There’s a pause, and he looks at the TV; we’re at the fun part where he rips the dog in half. He speaks again, even quieter now.

“I ain’t never killed anybody.” He glances at the TV again, and then mumbles, “Never killed anybody.”

“That’s not you, Aleksei,” I say, but I don’t think he hears me. “How long have you been here?”

Aleksei looks up again, finally.

“Two days. I used the secret entrance you showed me. And I hope you don’t mind, I drank all the beer and ate all the Cookies and Cream. I am very upset and when I am very upset I drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of ice cream, and —”

“Aleksei, stop,” I say, and somehow I’m laughing. Not a polite laugh, or a sarcastic laugh, or a bullshit laugh for the sake of laughing.

I’m laughing because Aleksei, no matter what state or I may be in, makes me happy. I plop down on the couch next to him, and the entire left side gives out, followed by the right, dropping the bottom of the couch onto the floor.

I start laughing again, and Aleksei laughs a little, too, but it’s that shocked, empty kind of laugh that comes from someone who’s recently lost all hope. I try to put an arm around his enormous shoulders, but it’s useless, so I sort of pat him awkwardly on the knee.

Ladies, trust me. It’s not easy being a guy.

“I can pay you back for the ice cream, but —”

“Aleksei, I already said no worries. You and me are completely square, yeah?”

“Yeah.” His voice is so pained it hurts to listen. We sit there in silence, watching on TV as he and I, as the Rhino and the Shocker, battle it out in midtown. “I ain’t never killed anybody,” Aleksei says again.

“I know, big guy,” I say, and pull off my boots, kicking them out into the center of the lobby, where they sit like tiny, steel-toed monoliths. “That wasn’t you out there.”

There’s a pause.

Aleksei lets out a low, baritone sob, and I pat him on the back. I never really thought about what being mind-controlled would be like before, but now that I am thinking about it, I wish I wasn’t.

“Then who was it?” Aleksei says, touching the bandage on his arm that covers not only an acid burn but also a bullet wound.

“I don’t know,” I say, looking up at the enormous mural on the domed ceiling. “But, after I get you to a hospital, my first order of business is going to be finding him, and smashing his weaselly little face in.”

Aleksei looks up at me, those beady little eyes big and soft.

“You sure are a good guy, Herman,” he says, and starts crying like a little kid.

Yeah, he thinks I’m a good guy.

Something tells me that after I pull all the crazy shit I have planned for FPS tomorrow, Arcade will disagree.

Avatars, Part Two

The wind blows her hair back, and I get a good look at that long, slender neck.

Getting an erection in the Shocker suit has never been comfortable. There was a long period of time where I would try desperately to rework the groin of the suit, you know, to make it roomier; I mean, the suit isn’t as tight as it looks to begins with, so I thought it would be easy.

Wrong.

A casual fantasy of mine is that Spider-Man, whilst saving a little girl or something, pops an accidental boner. Peter Parker or whoever gets a picture of it and pow:

SPIDERMAN: SEX PERVERT?

Because honestly, there is NO WAY that suit could hide a woody.

“Are you sure that’s his house?” I ask loudly, talking over the L-train rumbling by above us; we’re staked out in the underbelly of a train-bridge. We’re on the edge of the city; this far out it’s either fancy or it’s a slum.

“Yeah, that’s him; Jordan Farrell. Unmarried, lives alone. He’s a file clerk at Branson Savings and Loan; age twenty-four, college dropout. Thirteen twenty-one, Southwest Twenty-seventh Place.” She hands me the receipt so I can double-check it, and our hands touch for that extra four seconds that can mean either everything or nothing. “I’ve never seen you like this before, Herman,” she says quietly.

“No one’s ever seen me like this.”

I pull the mask down over my face.

The door to his apartment flies apart with a single level two, revealing Jordan Farrell sitting on his couch, watching television.

He’s worse than even I’d imagined. By his voice I knew he’d be a little guy, maybe five foot; in person, he’s around five foot four. He’s got that nasty blond hair, the kind that’s not quite reddish but not quite brownish, and it swirls in all directions. Not curls; swirls. Flecks of dandruff hang very visibly on nearly every strand. And one of those beards, those revolting, bizarre shave jobs where there’s only hair on the underside of the jaw; in high school, we called them “neck-beards.”

It’s good to see him. It’s good to put a face to the hate.

He tries to stand up, but I’m already on him; his face goes through the glass coffee table, and when I drag him into the kitchen, little slivers of glass fall out of his forehead and clink on the tile floor.

I slam his head against the counter a few times, grab the side of his face and turn the gauntlets on, a neat little interrogation tactic I’ve never had a chance to try out. About now the mini-vibrations are making his inner-ears ring; I turn it up to level one, he’s going to be on the verge of a concussion.

“Get the freak away from me!” he shrieks, high pitched, easy to despise, as he pushes on my face pathetically, not even punching, just sort of slapping at me. And there’s that substitution, too; “Freak” rather than “fuck.” That seals it.

“Hello, Rhino,” I say, hissing out the words, and smash his head against the refrigerator.

Felicia contacted me early this morning … funnily enough, exactly eight hours to the second after I sat down on the couch with Aleksei; God knows how she got my cell number. While I was out having a grand old time with the Punisher, she was doing some research on FPS’s financial dealings.

“It’s funny,” she said. “It’s like they’re so convinced people will never figure it out, they don’t even bother hiding the paper-work.”

I have a list, now. I have a list of everyone who’s ever done it; who’s ever mind-raped one of my esteemed colleagues in the world of super-villainy.

The saddest thing is, most of the crooks on here are pretty decent guys. All dead now, though; the ones that aren’t killed by the people who pay to be heroes end up killing themselves by over-exertion.

The people who control them can’t feel their puppet’s exhaustion, or agony …

They just keep working the body until it stops.

The night in the tube was beautiful; my bedroom was just as beautiful as ever, and, after a quick dusting, the place smelled like old leather and wood polish, the kind of smell that makes you happy inside.

Of course, after Felicia called, that big, big bed felt very empty.

Aleksei slept in a bedroom I cleaned up for him downstairs; he’s so heavy that when he lay down on the bed, it collapsed almost immediately, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just lay there, prone, arms at his sides, staring at the ceiling.

I put on an old Laser-Disc copy of Arsenic and Old Lace for him, and went to sleep, but I heard him crying late at night, and moving around; not touching anything, just wandering the halls.

I remember Aleksei once said: “It’s tough to be big. I got big, thick fingers; everything I touch just falls apart.”

And I remember thinking that Bruce Banner has it good. As I understand it, he goes back and forth, from Bruce to the Hulk, from the Hulk back to Bruce. Guys like Aleksei aren’t afforded that luxury; they are, for lack of a better word, cursed.

But this, this little piece of shit in front of me …

“You don’t want the curse. You just want the gift, and then, when you’re done … When you’re done you just crumple it up and throw it away.”

“WHAT THE FREAK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Jordan Farrell shrieks, and I slap him across the face.

“DO NOT SHOUT AT ME!” I scream at him. “YOU WILL BE SILENT!” I pull him to his feet, and then hurl him against the kitchen counter; I do it harder than I meant to, and he actually flips up and over, landing flat on his back in the living room.

I notice a radio sitting above the fridge, and flip it on. Elton John’s deceptively heterosexual anthem “Saturday Night’s All Right” booms out. God knows what station he had it on, but hey, it’ll work in case things get loud.

“It’s getting late I haven’t seen my date, so tell me when the boys get here,” Elton John says on the radio.

I round the counter, drawing the little metal spray bottle out of a pouch on my belt.

This is going to be nasty.

“It’s seven o’clock and I wanna rock, want to get a belly full of beer …”

I made a kind of primitive diagram this morning before I left Aleksei with Doc Feingold, a villain-friendly doctor in Manhattan, and I take this diagram out and consult it before spraying some raw battery acid onto Farrell’s left arm. He screams and grabs his wound, but promptly pulls his hand away in revulsion and pain after his fingers sink deeply into the bubbling flesh.

“That’s one,” I say, and look at my haphazard map of Rhino’s burn wounds. “You’ve got eight more.”

Elton continues:

“My old man’s drunker than a bar full of winos, and my old lady she don’t care …”

Farrell realizes what I’m doing, and crawls frantically away across the carpet, trailing blood and melted flesh.

“My sister looks cute in her braces and boots, a handful of grease in her hair …”

“Help!” he screams. “Somebody freakin’ help me! He’s cra–”

I spray him on the side of his face. His hair fizzles, his cheek burns away and his ear drops off in a gloppy mess. I can see his teeth through where his cheek was, and I watch as his tongue darts instinctively away from where a tiny droplet of acid has landed on his gums. He shrieks again, high-pitched, real agony.

“Don’t give us none of your aggravation, we had it with your discipline …”

I smile.

“Saturday night’s all right for fighting, get a little action in …”

“Thtay away!” he splutters, his speech garbled by the burn. He forces himself up to his feet, and throws himself to a cabinet next to the television, opens it, and pulls out a can of mace.

He starts to fire it, but I hit the stream with a level zero as it heads towards me, and it’s blown back onto him.

“Get about as oiled as a diesel train, gonna set this town alight …”

He does one of those beautiful Elmer Fudd reactions, where his eyes get really wide, and I can actually watch as the red veins rapidly cobweb over them.

“ ’Cause Saturday night’s the night I like, Saturday night’s all right, all right, all right!”

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGHHHH!” Farrell screams, and slaps both hands to his face; when his hands touch the acid burn, gloppy flesh sprays everywhere.I spray him in the arm again, and he actually leaps right up and runs for the door. I grab him by the collar of his bathrobe and slam him against the framed picture of James Dean on the wall as the radio blares on.

“Packed pretty tight in here tonight, I’m looking for a woman to treat me right …”

A woman. Sure Elton, whatever you say.

“I could use a little muscle to get what I need, I’ll drink a fifth of jack and scream out ‘She’s with me!’”

Who the fuck frames a stock photo of James Dean?

Oh, it’s autographed.

Fuck it; have some acid, Mr. Dean.

“A couple of sounds that I really like, are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike, I’m a juvenile product of the working class, whose best friend floats from the bottom of a glass …”

I press him up against the wall, and spray him on the thigh, the left hip, the underside of his ribs and the top of his right shoulder, and then throw him into his television, and there’s that wonderful loud “pop” that comes when you shatter a vacuum tube. He lies there and grunts and moans for a little while, whilst I pace back and forth in his apartment, smashing things, breathing hard.

Elton John comes back in on the radio.

“Don’t give us none of your aggravation, we had it with your discipline …”

“You … you crashy fuck!” Jordan hisses, and throws a DVD copy of White Chicks at me.

I pull out the snub-nose .38.

“HOLY FREAKING CHRIST,” he screams. “Don’t kill me!”

“Buddy,” I scream over the music, “dying is the least of your problems.”

“Saturday night’s all right for fighting, get a little action in …”

I don’t even both aiming, really; I just point the gun in the vague direction of his left arm and pull the trigger.

BLAM.

Blood splatters up onto the wall behind him; I got him right in the melted biceps, and he lets out this insane banshee scream.

I guess it’ll kind of surprise you to learn that this is the first time I’ve ever shot someone. Firing a gun does a crazy thing to you; it’s like snorting coke, or cumming; as soon as you do it, you want to do it again.

“Get about as oiled as a diesel train, gonna set this town alight …”

So I do. I put three in the wall next to his head while he screams and cowers on the ground.

“You piece of shit! You worthless piece of shit!” I point the gun at his head, and cock back the hammer. He hurt Aleksei, not just bruises and scrapes, like Spider-Man always gives him, but really hurt Aleksei. He damaged him.

Unacceptable. No no no. Unac-fucking-ceptable.

“ ’Cause Saturday night’s the night I like, Saturday night’s —”

Felicia jumps on me from behind and puts me in a half-nelson.

My gun goes off into the side of the radio, and Elton John is abruptly silenced.

“Herman, for christsakes!” Felicia screams; she really screams it, too. There’s a note of desperation and panic in her voice that catches me off guard.

Jesus fuck. What am I doing?

…

I breathe in, and then out, and I feel my body deflate, everything rushing out of me all at once. I stumble back and trip over a discarded empty milk carton; my weight falls onto Felicia, and we crash to the ground. She doesn’t let go of the half nelson, and I don’t try to fight it. We lie there on the dirty carpet, surveying the topography of a filthy floor.

“He … he hurt Aleksei,” I say. I can’t really say anything else. I feel Felicia’s lips brush the back of my ear.

“I know, Herman, I know. Just breathe.”

So I breathe in vanilla and cinnamon, that wonderful smell that hangs around her.

I feel her breathing behind me; she must’ve sprinted the whole way here once she saw what I was doing. Down off the bridge, across the street, through the door, up the hall, up the stairs for three flights, down the hall, through the door.

How sweet of her, protecting poor little Jordie Farrell.

Farrell, for his part, has at least stopped screaming. He’s just lying there, twitching and moaning now. I guess Felicia’s presence pacifies us all.

“If I let you go, are you going to drop the gun?” she says, again directly into my ear.

I stay silent, listening to her breathe.

“If I let you go, Herman, will —”

I drop the gun, and she lets me go; I practically shove her away, and stand up, doing a quick pace around the apartment. I finally flop down on the couch, staring at Farrell as he pulls himself into the bedroom, leaving a slug’s trail of blood and slagged muscle and skin tissue.

Felicia comes around the couch and kneels down on the floor in front of me, resting her chin in her hands and her elbows on my knees.

The last time I was in this position with a woman it was 2002 and I was about to get a blowjob.

Somehow I doubt I’ll be as lucky this time around.

She looks at me in silence for a little, those cartoon-beautiful green eyes, reading me. I groan and pull off the mask.

“What?” I say, breaking the silence.

“I thought you said you were going to interrogate him,” she says, and glances over to the door of the bedroom after a particularly loud moan.

“I changed my mind,” I say, and hand her the Rhino-Diagram.

She glances at it casually, and then looks again.

“Fuck,” she says quietly.

“Felicia,” I say, and drop my head. “I think I’m losing it.”

Felicia stands up, and pulls me to my feet. She pulls a little too strongly, and our bodies touch.

Felicia instinctively takes a step back; that kind of touch is reserved for the Spider-Jerk.

“Herman, it’s not that you’re losing it, it’s just that —”

“Wait,” I say, and abruptly move away.

Something’s wrong. I can feel it.

Call it whatever you want; a bad vibe, Shocker-Sense, women’s intuition …

“Felicia,” I say, tuning my gauntlets up to level five. “Get down.”

“What?” she says blankly.

“Get,” I say, putting a hand on the back of her neck and shoving her to the floor. “Down.”

Nothing happens.

I feel a tad foolish.

Felicia looks murderous as she starts to stand back up, but, perhaps luckily for me, the Gibbon comes crashing through the wall of the apartment and I am instantly vindicated.

Oh, boy. The fucking Gibbon.

Martin Blank and I have never been close; not like me and Max (the Grizzly, in case you forgot), which is sad, because Max and Marty were tight. They even thought about going legit for a while as a Dynamic Duo; Max always used to say that he wanted an action figure.

Christ, I miss him.

It’s funny, even if you don’t see someone often, when they die, you still miss them. Missing someone you never even see … Humans are funny animals.

Marty is a mutant, one of the few mutant criminals who’s managed to avoid fighting/joining the X-Men. He was born a normal kid, like most mutants, but at fourteen he sprouted hair all over his body and became quite a bit stronger and more agile than the average eighth grader.

Now, this was back in the early Seventies, so mutants weren’t exactly commonplace yet. Back then, each mutant was regarded as an individual phenomenon, not part of a larger trend. And this didn’t work well for Marty, who was disowned by his parents and had to hook up with a circus freakshow as Gibbon, the Marvelous Monkey Boy.

You’d be surprised how many of my friends, at one time or another, have worked in a freak show.

Actually, you probably wouldn’t be surprised. You’d probably smile smugly and say something droll. You fucking prick.

After the freak show went bankrupt, Marty ended up wandering around New York with no direction, and, let me tell you, being a meta with no direction in New York in the Eighties? Bad times: the Sentinel Program, Galactus’s second and third visits, the Green Goblin’s reign of terror, Ghost Rider, the Scourge of the Underworld, the Avengers going from seven members to seven hundred (I think I could’ve joined and they wouldn’t have even noticed) …

Yeah, the Eighties sucked in the Big Apple.

I first met Marty after he’d started in as a leg-breaker. He had a pretty good thing going for him; he didn’t like violence, but when you look like an anorexic Sasquatch, people generally just hand over the money without a struggle. They just assume you’re this chest-thumping, banana-eating mongrel mutate who’ll just as soon crush their skull as wipe his nose.

In reality, Marty was a soft spoken guy who drank maybe a little too much. I understood the drinking though; he had bad arthritis in his hands, and a worse back from one too many tussles with the cops. People don’t realize how much of a toll this strange, strange life takes on your body. I’m lucky that I’ve got my father’s “I REFUSE TO FUCKING DIE” genes; they’ve foiled two suicide attempts so far, and …

Oh, I haven’t told you about the times I tried to commit suicide?

And failed?

Miserably?

Oh. Silly me.

The last time I saw him was during the summer of 2004; he’d started up working at a local mutant bar, waiting tables. No more “Gibbon.” Just plain old Martin Blank.

The thing in the apartment with Felicia and me, of course, is not Martin Blank.

“Oo oo ee ee!” the Gibbon hoots, turning to us, his eyes wild. “Me am gonna kill you, humans!” He grins, baring a mouth of jagged, sharp, monkey teeth.

Looking at him, I’d believe it. Martin was strong, really strong. Not Spider-Man strong, but close; fast, too.

I’d say the voice coming out of him is that of an Asian man in his late forties, maybe early fifties. The pitch and tone clearly indicate that he’s having a wonderful time.

I start to raise my gauntlets, when I hear a noise from the entrance to the apartment behind me.

It’s water.

Tons of water, starting to pour in like a dam just burst.

It stops. Pulls together and forms …

Morrie Motherfucking Bench.

Why am I not surprised.

“Did you see that?” Morrie, or rather, whoever has control of Morrie, says, while they nod his head at the door. “It’s incredible!”

I point a gauntlet at him, so I’m now standing crucifix style, one gauntlet aimed at the Gibbon, the other aimed at the new guest at my little funeral party.

You’ve seen Morrie on the news dozens of times, I’m sure, but on TV they call him “Hydro-Man.” Oh, don’t get me wrong, he calls himself that, too, but I want to draw a clear line between whoever’s controlling his body right now and the Morrie I’ve known and hated for years.

The ocean-blue eyes, the light brown curls, the face that looks almost exactly what Cary Grant would look like if you hit him with a waffle iron …

That’s all Morrie.

But posture is all wrong; I can’t imagine Morrie would be caught dead standing up straight.

Without that characteristic “I’m A Huge Asshole” slouch, Morrie looks like a whole different person.

Which is funny because, in this case, that’s exactly what he is.

Morrie’s old-school Spider-Man foe alma mater; he was around way back in the beginning, with me, Otto, Adrian, Flint, Max, Quentin and, of course, Aleksei. I’d include Norman Osborn in there, too, but: a) I didn’t know Green Goblin was Norman Osborn until I read as much in the Daily Bugle last year and b) the Goblin is a sadistic, murdering fuck, and was never much of a team player to begin with.

That isn’t to say, of course, that Morrie is some kind of saint. He’s one of what I call “The Long Reach, Short Mind” breed of super-villains: guys gifted with genuinely incredible powers, but sadly unable to use them to their fullest extent due to being absolute fucking morons.

Let’s look at Morrie’s powers for a moment here, just so you can understand how unequivocally fucked Felicia and I are:

He can turn into sentient water.

Sounds simple, yeah?

No.

See, Morrie can not only control himself, move himself freely in any and all directions whilst in this form, he can also take on and control an unlimited amount of new water, as long as it’s reasonably uncontaminated.

Yes, that’s right. Starting to see the potential, here?

No?

Okay, let me nudge you along. I want you to imagine Morrie sitting next to a swimming pool. Morrie sticks his foot in. Suddenly the pool is empty. Morrie is the same size, BUT THE POOL IS FUCKING EMPTY. Where is the water from the pool? Well, it’s inside Morrie.

And he can shoot it out, morph into it or into a water-molded shape of roughly the same volume, put it under pressure inside of him (God knows how he does that) and use it to launch him into the air …

You’re starting to see it now, aren’t you?

Now I want you to imagine Morrie sitting next to a fresh-water lake.

Uh-huh. That’s right. “Whoa” is indeed the correct response.

Good. You get it. And you know what this guy does with this power, this insane ability that disregards all physics and liquid science in favor of sheer, golly-gee-wow effect?

He robs banks.

Welcome to New York.

When Aleksei was under FPS’s control he did gymnastics, ran up fucking walls …

And now, with Morrie’s potential …

In case you’re wondering:

The answer is yes. I’m very scared right now.

I think about just firing now, blowing them both away, but then there’s a crash from the bedroom, and a thing that looks like a bipedal, winged white lion smashes through the doorframe, letting out a long, howling “Whooohoooo!”

It stands about eight feet tall, easily as big as Aleksei, and wears what looks like a red unitard.

I have absolutely no idea who this guy is, but the beer-coaster sized black spot on his forehead guarantees that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.

You see, he’s not feeling like himself today.

“Back off, boys!” the lion-monster says in the voice of a woman in her early twenties. “That replay is mine all mine!”

“Herman …” Felicia says quietly, drawing her body up into a tight crouch next to my legs.

“We’ve been set up,” I say, and drop one arm towards the ground, wrapping the other around Felicia’s waist.

I fire off a single level five straight down at my feet, and feel grateful that Felicia has the good sense to pull her legs up and wrap them around me.

At such close range, the sheer power of my gauntlets on their maximum setting is rather mind-blowing: the floor seems to melt apart, drooping down like candle wax before rippling and then exploding into thousands of individual pieces of debris. We hang there, held up by the force of the blast in a cloud of vaporized plaster and wood, and then the drop starts.

The level five blew a vertical shaft through the building, straight down three stories into what must be an administrative office. We fall past a janitor’s store-room, a vacant apartment, and a very startled woman watching Jeopardy in her living room before I fire off a level one to slow our decent and we go crashing down onto some guy’s desk.

Correction:

I fall straight onto the carpet, bounce off and hit the wall. Felicia, however, does land directly on the guy’s desk, her yoga-firmed behind smashing his keyboard. The guy sits there, staring at her, as the rubble settles around us.

He looks up through the tunnel to the third floor, and then looks at Felicia again.

“Thank you, God,” he says quietly.

Felicia smiles and winks at him; it’s shit like that, the little stuff, that I’ll never be able to master. Being a superhero, one of the good guys, is rather like being an actor; success relies in nuance, and subtlety.

My life has always been, very much, measured in extremes. Subtlety is a hard thing to master when you wear a bright yellow quilt as a costume.

I grab Felicia by the arm and all but carry her out the door as the commotion starts upstairs. We’re in an administrative hallway; to my right is a long corridor lined with doors that ends in elevator, to my left is an emergency exit.

I practically kick the door off its hinges, and drag Felicia into the ground floor of the building’s dingy parking structure. Most of the halogen bulbs are faltering or completely tapped, giving the parking lot a sort of hobo-piss yellow tint, everything looking seamy and poor.

“What’re you doing?” Felicia hisses, yanking her arm away from me, and I remember how strong she is. Stronger than me.

“We …” I say loudly, indignant, “are running the hell away.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but then thinks better of it and takes off. “Follow me,” she shouts, and we’re running.

We turn a corner in the structure and run down a car ramp towards the street, but halfway down the two figures step out to block us.

“No no no, Herman,” Eddie Lavelli, alias “The Eel” says, charging up his Volt-Suit. Blitz, an Amazonian Indian woman in golden armor, steps out from behind him, punching her fist into her palm. “Nobody gets past the New Enforcers.”

Felicia doesn’t even miss a beat; she turns on her heels and grabs me by the wrist, and we’re running back up the ramp.

“Hey!” Eddie shouts after us, his voice raspy and unpleasant. “Leaving so soon?”

“Come on,” Felicia says, and pulls me towards the stairwell, but I resist, and end up being dragged along with her anyway.

“Wait! Felicia, we’ve got to get back to the bridge; we can take the Broomstick and —”

The concrete wall to our right crashes inward, and the Gray Gargoyle trundles through, the black spot on his forehead sticking out like a neon tattoo.

Felicia yanks me behind an SUV, pulls me down on top of her and puts a finger to her lips.

“Raaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! I am the Great Gray Gargoyle!” the Gray Gargoyle bellows in the voice of a middle-aged man. There’s a moment of silence. “Uh, hello?” he says, and I hear him moving around. “Aw, come on!” the man controlling Gray Gargoyle whines. “I want that fucking replay! Can’t you even give me a hint?” Silence, and then: “Shit man, that’s not fair.”

He starts flipping cars.

The crashing noises start to get closer, and I take the opportunity to furtively whisper to Felicia. “When I get up, I want you to make a run for it. Don’t try to fight any of them; they want me more than you anyway. Get to the bridge, get on the Broomstick, hit the green button, push up the lever and get the hell out of here.”

To my surprise, Felicia doesn’t argue. She sticks her hooked fingernails under the hem of my mask, pulls it up over my nose, and kisses me softly on the mouth.

Time freezes.

The world breathes.

Am I ready to take on six super-villains?

I think I am.

Felicia pulls away.

“For luck,” she says. The SUV goes flipping into the ceiling, and comes down on the other side of us, revealing a pleasantly surprised Gray Gargoyle.

“Gotcha!” he says, proud of himself.

I roll off Felicia, and scramble between Gray Gargoyle’s legs. He turns around, cursing in frustration. I watch as Felicia dives off an open terrace, out into the street, and then turn back to the monster looming over me.

“You’re worth ten thousand bonus points and a free replay,” the Gargoyle says, and smiles.

I lick my lips, smelling, no, tasting that sweet cinnamon-vanilla smell.

I pull down my mask, and smile a perennial loser’s smile.

“Come get some.”

Avatars, Part Three

Fighting is different from anything else.

Anyone who’s fought, really fought, can tell you that.

A lot of people, they get into a scuffle with a mugger, they get drunk and fight a stranger, suddenly they’re Captain America.

No. They don’t know what a fight is.

But then again, neither do I; not anymore.

Once you have a superhero battle, all other physical altercations are ruined for you. It’s like listening to a TV with the volume turned too low. You’re just going through the motions.

As a super-villain, when you fight a hero, everything changes. The world isn’t real anymore; you’re disconnected from it. That’s one of the reasons we wear the costumes; I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, the superhero game is just that.

The world’s most deadly game of dress-up.

Cars, trees, buildings, hell, even people become props, to be thrown, knocked down or completely destroyed as you please. Even your opponent sometimes blurs into fantasy; you think I ever thought, “Gee, I better not kick up the gauntlets too high, I might hurt someone!”?

No, I didn’t. Protecting civilians was Spider-Man’s job. Granted, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to hurt people, and in that way, I suppose, I was “better” than the other villains, but hey, if causing a car accident will prevent me from going to jail, I’m going to go ahead and vibrate that Camaro into the Honda.

They can sort out the hospital bills later.

I’m sweating. Badly. I can feel it pressed against my skin under the mask, soaking my hair; I’m a pig in the mud, trapped inside the suit with my own juices, stewing like a Thanksgiving brisket.

Eddie Lavelli was, is, and always will be a creep. He’s one of those meta-criminals who, prior to their own personal “transformation,” was just as bad as he was after it. He used to identify himself as a “Pro-Beater” when we both worked for Kingpin, before all the costumes and craziness.

What’s a Pro-Beater?

Well, Eddie was never a tough guy. A mean guy, sure, mean as hell, but not the kind of person you’d expect to work for the Kingpin; you’d think he’d be too busy at home beating his wife and screaming at his pathetic drugged-out kids.

He saves all that for his off-hours.

No, when he was on the job, Eddie was strictly business.

And his business was pain.

See, “Pro-Beater” was Eddie’s neat little euphemism for professional torturer.

But then the Eighties began, the heroes started really cropping up in droves, and being a six-foot, hundred-and-seventy-pound weirdo just wasn’t going to cut it if you wanted to inflict some serious hurt on, say, Daredevil.

So Eddie adapted; bought himself the suit of the original Eel, Leopold Something-Or-Other, and set about finding some seriously horrific uses for electricity.

Eddie is only good at one thing: hurting people. Emotionally, physically, it doesn’t matter, he will maim you and leave you for dead.

In this respect, on Edward Lavelli, the Tinkerer’s Volt-Suit was a perfect fit.

The suit is brilliant, but it’s nothing the villain world hasn’t seen a hundred times before. It’s skin-tight, with some sort of crazy generator system that allows him to fire bolts of electricity out of the palms of his hands.

Eventually, he broke off from Kingpin and went off on his own, teaming up with six feet, six inches of super-strong bitch that calls itself “Blitz.” They formed, “The New Enforcers,” and started taking contract work from folks like the Rose and the Arranger.

It’s an amateur name, “Blitz.” Verbs usually signify small-timers.

Eddie is a friend of mine.

Eddie is also currently intent on killing me, hired by the live-action-video-game-cum-murder-weapon called FPS, run, presumably, by the twisted inventor slash mercenary slash millionaire who calls himself Arcade. Unlike the rest of FPS’s unwilling participants, Eddie has no organic powers; without the suit, he’s like me: Normal.

Human.

Mundane.

His presence here, along with his goon-bitch, means only one thing: Arcade does not intend for me to leave Jordan Farrell’s apartment building alive. Sure, the mind-raped villains are the ones who’ll do the dirty work. But the New Enforcers are the insurance policy.

But I don’t need to worry about them yet.

My current problem:

Paul DuVall.

The Gray Gargoyle.

I’ve never met DuVall personally; only seen him on the news. He’s one of Iron Man’s baddies, and, as weird as this is going to sound, we don’t intermingle much.

The way Gray Gargoyle’s powers work: he turns to granite, which makes him super-strong. And then he’s got this Midas Touch thing, where he can turn anything he touches to granite.

Which is why he keeps trying to fucking grab me.

“Fuck!” I yell at him, turning and diving out of the way as he hurls himself my way, arms swinging closed in an empty bear-hug.

“Damn it!” he shouts, and lands hard on the asphalt, cracking it with his concrete chest. I hit him with three level threes, rolling him through the parking lot like a kid rolling down a hill. He hits a curb, bounces off and lies still for a moment. I stand waiting for him to move, and as soon as his finger twitches I cut out at a breakneck pace back towards the entrance to the tenement.

Blitz pops out from behind a support column, and I duck under a haymaker before turning around, grabbing her by the hair and bouncing her head off the column.

Still holding her by the hair, I slam her face through the driver’s side window of a Lexus, and then vibro-kick her right in the stomach. It’s a street kick, not any fancy karate shit, just a plain old boot to the gut, but the vibration, as usual, has a marvelous effect; Blitz bends in half and crashes to the ground, spitting out blood.

The Gray Gargoyle is up, and he makes a childlike series of scrambling grasps at me before I let loose a level three right into his face. He’s driven across the parking lot, straight into the path of an SUV speeding to escape the metahuman fracas.

It hits him like a battering ram, the front end folding entirely around his hyper-dense granite body, and then picking him up with its momentum and careening around the corner.

I run into the building, but before I even get all the way through the door, water spills starts spilling down out of all the fire sprinklers.

Not spraying.

Spilling.

Pouring.

Shit.

I turn and take off down a maintenance hallway that looks like it hasn’t been used since 1975. Left, right, left, right, left, more yellow light, more dusty surfaces; this place is either a maze or I’ve already accidentally wandered into another building. Eventually I come to an exit, marked by one of those old neon “EXIT” signs; you know, the ones with red lights instead of green.

I run out into the daylight, but no sooner do my eyes adjust than something heavy comes down on my shoulders, driving me to the ground.

“Oo oo ee ee!” the Gibbon howls, and claws at my mask, trying to pull it off. I roll over and try to shove him off, but it’s no good; he’s too strong. He gives up on the mask and just starts beating on my chest and head; the suit dispels the impacts, and I activate the suit vibe on level three.

Vibrating the whole suit has never been pleasant; my limbs spasm and bounce around, and even though I’m insulated against it, the shakes still make me spasm and shake like a scarecrow in the wind. The concrete of the sidewalk cracks around me, making a respectable “Herman Schultz” imprint. The Gibbon, for his part, is thrown off.

Marty Blank’s body leaps up almost as soon as he falls off, and does a kind of boneless dance out into the middle of the street. A taxi screeches to a halt, nearly hitting the Gibbon, who looks more annoyed than anything else.

“Why don’t my arms work?” he squeals, and twitches his very clearly broken arms. There’s a pause, and then he says: “Broken? What the hell do you mean they’re broken! I paid thirty thousand dollars for this!”

Thirty grand, eh?

Steeper than the two thousand paid to be a hero. Being a villain runs high.

I start to stand up, but the Gibbon turns and smacks me across the face with one of his limp arms, knocking me backwards into a bear-hug from the Eel, pinning my arms to my sides. I immediately vibe the suit on a level five.

Aside from the pavement shattering under my feet, nothing happens.

“Oh, Herman.” Eddie coos. “You’re shivering.”

“How?” I say, my so loudly my voice cracks.

“Phineas based my suit on your designs. You can’t shake me off, old buddy!”

“No?” I say, and my brain screams at that demon in an old man’s body called the Tinkerer. It figures he’d take what little I’ve told him and use it against me.

My brain races; what’ve I explained to Phineas, and what haven’t I?

Vibronic-Insulation? Yes.

Fire-proof? Water-proof? Yes, yes …

Impact displacement?

…

Impact displacement.

“How about this?’ I say, and mule-kick Eddie in the nuts. He drops away like a leaf in the fall. The Gibbon bounces at me, wildly waving his broken arms, and I jump out of the way; The Gibon goes crashing through an electronics store, his face lodging in a digital TV.

Okay, so far this is going well.

Most of the people around us, the “innocent bystanders” you might call them, are running. Not even for their cars, just running; the braver ones among them, the ones who’ve lived in NYC for a while, they don’t bother trying to get away. They just take cover, and if you die, you die. That’s New York.

The big white-lion-thing from Farrell’s apartment comes down next to me.

“RAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!” the woman’s voice says with the lion’s mouth. Two level fours not only shut the lion’s mouth, but also pick it up and send it flying backwards into the side of a Pepsi truck.

And then I feel it; ten, yes, I think ten hooks sunk into the mask.

Those same fucking hooks that Bullseye used.

The mask slides up over my nose and I grab at it, but it’s up and over my head before I can do anything but stand there and say “… Hey!”

And then Blitz punches me straight in the face; it’s like getting bitchslapped with a two-by-four. I stumble backwards and bang into a mail-box, nearly falling over. I fire three blind shots at Blitz, and one must hit, because I hear a noise that sounds like a bunch of sticks snapping and Blitz say this wonderful little yelping word that sounds like “Eip!”

I touch my face, and it’s already swelling; I don’t think anything’s broken, but next time around I need to make a note: DO NOT GET PUNCHED STRAIGHT IN THE KISSER BY PEOPLE W/SUPER STRENGTH.

Something clamps down on my forehead, and it takes me a second to realize I’m in pain. The fucking Gibbon again, biting into my face. I instinctively vibro-uppercut him away, and he tears off a good portion of my skin in his jaws; my entire right eyebrow is now just a bloody mess. I hit him in the face again, grab him by the neck and shove him into a street light, face-first.

I hear a few of the teeth crack in his mouth, yank him back by his monkey fur, and shove my fist into his broken maw, vibrating on level two; his jaw breaks nearly off, and I kick him away, pushing my foot as hard as I can into his hip, which cracks like a saltine cracker.

“Damn it!” the Gibbon shouts, in no noticeable pain. He tries to get to his feet, and the shattered hip tears through his skin. He looks down at it, and furiously shakes his monkey-head. “Why’d I get the monkey? I wanted the water man!”

The Lion-Thing swoops past and hits me square in the ribs with an enormous paw, lifting me up and sending me soaring at a vertical angle.

My body turns in a slow arc, with me doing a full 180 before I realize that all is not well; my head isn’t covered. If I hit it, it will crack like a ripe watermelon. I throw my arms out uselessly in front of my face, then think better of it and hit the side of the building I’m heading towards with a level four; the plaster and steel comes apart like confetti. I hit the carpet of a second floor office space and smash head-over-feet into a copy machine.

Ooh. Stars. Pretty.

By the time I force myself to get up, the Lion-Thing is inside the office, and something clicks in my head.

This is the Griffin. I’ve seen him on the news fighting Namor and Captain America.

Okay, I’m well out of my league.

“Come out and fight, faggot!” the woman’s voice shouts, and the Griffin’s huge spiked tail whips around and smashes a fleeing secretary, squashing her like a bug against the wall. One of those big paws swats the head clean off a neatly-dressed guy still sitting at his desk. “I paid out my ass for this, make it fun!”

I start quickly crawling away, towards the elevator. Felicia must be safe by now; if I can get back to the sewers, my beloved sewers, I can get the hell out of here.

I hear a man scream and then a wet, squelching sound. The smell of raw shit fills the office. Someone’s stomach just got torn open.

Fuck him. Fuck them. Let the Griffin tear through this whole damn place looking for me, I don’t care. I want to go home. I want to bandage my face. I want to take a shit and jerk off thinking about that kiss.

I want to see Aleksei. Christ, I only hope he made it back to the Tube all right.

I want —

The Griffin grabs a fleeing fat woman by the arm, and she screams.

I stand up.

“HEY, ASSJACK!” I scream at the Griffin, who turns, the spiked tail whipping through a row of file cabinets. He drops the fat woman, who scrambles away.

“There you are,” the Griffin says, smiling.

“Here I am,” I whisper, and raise the gauntlets. Clear, this thing is impervious to the vibro-blasts; he doesn’t have a scratch on him, all my earlier shots did was knock him around; if I’m going to keep the Griffin down …

The Griffin drops his jaw and roars, shaking the entire office.

There it is. That’s my plan.

I run at the Griffin, and he does this wonderful thing where he actually takes a step back; the woman controlling him didn’t expect this.

“Hey, what’re you —” she says, and then I jump at the Griffin and shove my arm down his throat to the elbow and let off a single level three.

The Griffin explodes.

Just plain explodes.

Blood and organs spray everywhere. I let out a little gasp as the now-bodiless head slides down off my arm, and a bit of bloody fur gets in my mouth.

“YAGH!” I say, and then vomit all over myself.

Before I’m even done throwing up, the elevator dings and the Gray Gargoyle runs out.

“Flulck!” I say, spitting vomit, and start to raise a gauntlet, but the Gargoyle, or whoever is controlling him, is too quick. He throws a punch that I duck under, and then snatches at my face. I jerk my neck back and his fingers close on nothing.

He swings again, an open-palm slap at my chest, and I jump out of the way again; he overbalances and both his hands come down on a desktop computer, which rapidly turns into granite. I grab a computer monitor with both hands and smash it over his head, screen first.

It immediately turns to granite.

He tries to get it off; can’t.

“Hey!” he says loudly. “Hey, that ain’t cool!” He stumbles to the left, then the right. I kick him square in the chest, and he goes down flat on his back.

“Hey! He tricked me! Somebody help! Help!”

Like a little fucking kid.

Blitz kicks off a door from the stairwell, and comes charging at me. I try to pull a Matador and sidestep, but she grabs me by face and slams me against the wall. My vision blurs, my throat seizes up, and my face feels numb.

That’s called a concussion, kids.

“Hold him still,” says Eddie Lavelli, Pro-Beater extraordinaire, adjusting the power controls on his wrist. “We’re gonna have some fun with my old friend, Herman.”

I act without thinking; I grab a stapler off the desk next to me, pour the staples into my hand and vibrate them into Blitz’s face. She screams so loud it hurts my ears, and I headbutt her in the nose once, twice, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times.

Blitz starts to fall, and I kick her into Eddie, who shoves her aside.

“You stupid fuck!” Eddie screams. “You think that’ll help you?”

He lets loose a burst of bright blue energy that carves a line in the wall where I just was.

“Eddie, please!” I yelp, scrambling between the cubicles. “We’re friends, we’ve had some good times, me you and Aleksei, remember?”

“Fuck you!” Eddie screams, firing off another blaze of blue energy, cleaving apart a desk as I crawl/run past it. “Fuck you and your retard friend!”

“Aleksei is not a fucking retard!” I scream. I stand up and take a wild shot at him; he dodges, and the level-three gets nothing but a printer, which it drives through a wall into a bathroom.

Eddie jumps up from behind a water cooler and fires a blue stream of electricity at me. I start zig-zagging through the cubicles, throwing level threes off at him wherever I can. I finally catch him with one, a clean hit right in the shoulder.

It knocks him down, but the vibro-dampeners in his suit diffuse the impact.

“Cocksucker!” he screams.

“Lavelli you prick!” I shriek. “Stay down!”

I fire another shot off, but he rolls out of the way. The carpeting warps and explodes upward in a tumult of shattered marble.

“It ain’t gonna help you, Herman! Ain’t nothin’ gonna help you!”

Eddie fires off a blast of the blue energy that catches me square in the chest; I’m lucky it doesn’t hit a centimeter higher, or it would catch my unprotected skin and I’d be barbecued. As is, it just feels like an enormous hand grips my chest tightly for a few seconds, and then I’m shoved backwards. I manage not to fall, and hit Eddie with a neat level three as he starts to stand up. It smashes him back through a glass meeting room partition, and I tackle him onto the long table, repeatedly punching him in the head.

I tear his mask off, vibrating it on a level one so all the insulation tears apart easily. There he is; the sadistic beaver-faced bastard I once called a friend. He spits out some blood and smiles at me. Turns out I knocked his front left tooth out, too.

“They’re gonna kill you, Herman. They’re dragging it out because you still ain’t their number one priority, but it’s comin’, man, it’s comin’.”

“I already know about Arcade,” I say, trying to shock him. Instead, he just laughs.

“Arcade?” He makes a fart sound with his split and bloody lips. “Arcade is just the tip of the ice berg, you stupid shit. You have no idea how deep this goes.” I feel all the hair on my body stand up.

Oh, fuck.

He’s charging.

“You have no idea,” he says again, and lets off an immense burst of blue energy. It knocks me off him, but it doesn’t kill me, like he thought it would.

The suit is built too good for that.

Rock beats Scissors.

I tackle him as he’s standing up.

My feet leave the floor; I got overzealous.

We both go through the floor-to-ceiling windows, fall six feet, bounce off the back of the Pepsi truck I saw earlier, and then fall the remaining ten feet to the ground.

Somewhere nearby, there’s the sound of rushing water.

I stand up hurriedly, and my ankle gives out a little; I must’ve twisted it when we landed on the Pepsi truck.

Turns out there was no need for me to hurry; Eddie hasn’t moved an inch.

The fall must’ve knocked him out.

I turn, and my legs give out; I fall against the Pepsi truck and let it hold my weight.

BLAM.

The gunshot is so loud my ears ring; the barrel was practically next to my head.

“JESUS!” I scream, raising a gauntlet, but I stop myself just in time.

It’s a cop.

A kid maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, blond hair, built like a brick shithouse; one of those guys who could either go varsity or be a cop.

He’s shaking like a leaf.

At first I think that he was firing a warning shot over my shoulder, but then I turn around and see Eddie on his knees, clutching his bleeding shoulder. His suit sparks a few times; the bullet must’ve broken some vital connections.

Eddie was faking me out.

Which means …

This kid just saved my life.

“You … you okay, Shocker?” the cop says, slowly lowering his gun.

Did the cop … did the cop just …?

Yeah. The cop just asked me if I was okay.

“I’m fine,” I say, and then add for good measure: “Nice shot, man.”

The cop smiles this befuddled, nervous smile, and holsters his weapon.

“Is that all of them?” the cop says quietly, looking around to where the Gibbon writhes in the middle of the street.

Is that all of them?

Well, the Gargoyle is stuck, the Gibbon is out of commission, Blitz is probably in a coma, I fucking liquefied the Griffin.

That sound of rushing water is getting louder.

There’s something very obvious here, something that I’m missing.

…

Liquefied.

“Piss,” I say loudly.

“What?” the cop says.

I’m so scared I can’t even express it.

“You need to run,” I say, and a fire hydrant behind me explodes. A manhole cover up the street launches into the air. A sewer drain erupts with clear blue water. Another fire-hydrant explodes further up the street.

I duck behind the Pepsi truck, trying to get out of sight; wherever this version of Hydro-Man’s eyes are, I want them off me.

“I’m not fucking with you, kid. Run.”

The cop takes one long last look at me, and then takes off down the street, screaming at the remaining civilians to run.

An enormous stationary wave, a wall of water ten, now twenty, now thirty feet high is forming in the street, filling it up from building to building like some kind of biblical flood, the side facing me a rippling brick wall.

The Gibbon lies out in the street, pulling himself along with his chest.

“Damn it, Carlton!” the Gibbon shouts at the wall of water in that weird Japanese accent. “This isn’t fair! You got the most powerful one, and I’m stuck with monkey man!”

A laughing mouth forms about ten feet up.

“Oh, come on, Hiroki, all’s fair in love and war. I’m gonna smash this whole fuckin’ street flat, you included, to get to Schultz; the cambots say he’s still here, right under our noses. Brace yourself; they say the Death-Disconnect is a little jarring.”

If I run now, cut through the shops in front of me and just boogie-woogie through back hallways till I reach a side street, I know I can get away.

I know it.

…

Wait.

…

Death-Disconnect.

There are no Hired Heroes this time, no-cut off. Nothing to stop him.

Death-Disconnect.

It flashes into my head, against my will.

The Bar With No Name, the Bronx, 1997.

Max sits across the table from me, smiling that World Heavyweight Champion smile; simple and unassuming, with a glint of intelligence and wit behind it that so many people didn’t catch.

His best friend Marty sits to my left, hairy face grinning out from under a New England Patriots baseball cap.

Max has just posed a question.

“Kids?” Marty says, and laughs, a very human laugh from such a strange creature. “I dunno. I’ve never put a lot of thought in it. How about you, Herman?”

I shrug.

“I could never be a father, not in this life. I’ve done too many bad things, way too quickly. I got absolutely zip when it comes to Karma. The kid would probably be a retard.”

“Or worse, a mutant,” Marty says, and Max and I laugh.

“Easy there, you rascist prick,” Max says. “Some of my best friends are mutants.”

Marty laughs, and eats a pretzel.

“So I’m twenty-seven, a former super-villain.”

“Super-villain is a bit generous,” I say, and Marty chuckles.

“Okay, a former criminal …” he corrects, smiling.

“Much better,” I say.

“Bravo, bravo! Long live the criminals,” Max says, his voice as big as his body.

“A former criminal, who, for all intents and purposes, looks exactly like a great big monkey. A damn sexy monkey, but a monkey nonetheless. I’ve got seven hundred dollars to my name, and I haven’t a fucking clue how I’m paying next month’s rent, or even putting food on the table. I’ve been a carnival freak, a bodyguard, a cat burglar and a janitor, and I’ve failed at every single one.”

He smiles, and looks up at us with those black and yellow monkey eyes.

“My kid would make Norman Bates look like Beaver Cleaver.”

We laugh.

Marty is a funny guy.

A good guy.

…

Something in my head snaps like rubber band, and I go running out into the street.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I scream out loud at myself as I kneel down next to the Gibbon.

“CARLTON!” the Gibbon screams. “He’s here, he’s right —”

I shove my hand into the hole in the Gibbon’s head, and start firing at random.

“NO!” the Gibbon screams. “YOU SAID THIS COULDN’T HAPPEN! YOU SAID-VRMRMRMRMRMLLELLELLLL.”

The sound someone makes when they’re hit with a level four.

I yank my arm out, and the spot closes.

Marty Blank screams in unimaginable pain, and writhes in agony, his broken arms spasming violently as the muscles come back under his control.

“Be cool, Marty,” I whisper. “You be cool. I’m here.”

He lets out a long pained moan, and then hisses out a single word.

“H–… Herman?”

“Yeah, buddy,” I say, hearing the wall of water come crashing down behind me in a great torrential flood. I pick Marty up in my arms and hold onto him tightly as I’m hit by what feels like a brick wall, feeling cans and street trash rush by in a great tidal burst. For a second we’re above water, and I see a car come flying at us, swung on a great liquid tentacle.

I duck under it, and the water wrenches at me supernaturally, thousands of hands yanking in different directions, trying to tear me apart. I feel clumps of my hair torn out, my nose rebreak, my face split open in several places from the stress.

A single level five stops all that bullshit right quick.

The water sprays away from us and we’re left bleeding on the asphalt. I’m hurting in so many places the shock has numbed the pain, and I know it, which makes even worse.

Nothing broken, though; my damage seems to be all superficial.

I’m going to have some interesting scars.

“Marty, you still with me?” I say, spitting out water. He lets out a hacking, choking cough, and some bloody water-vomit pours out of the side of his mouth.

An enormous water-whip flies at me, and I hit it with a level five; it explodes apart, and slithers back into the enormous mass. Two more replace it, and two more level fives take them out, but then the mass swirls up into an insane conical vortex fifty feet high, swirling around me like a liquid tornado.

I scream, and start randomly firing off level fives, blowing holes in the twisting water walls for mere seconds before they’re sealed, and closing in, shrinking the circular space where I now kneel, holding Marty with one arm, fruitlessly blasting away at the force of nature that is Hydro-Man with the other. The water hits, crushes in on me, and then I’m flying.

At first I think Hydro-Man must’ve thrown me.

But then I get the balls to open up my eyes, and everything changes.

I’m two hundred feet up and rising, the enormous flood vanishing below me.

My arms are wrapped around Marty, who’s spluttering harshly, but an arm covered in black latex is wrapped around my chest.

Felicia sets the Broomstick down on the second tier of the Empire State Building.

She doesn’t say anything, just smiles sadly at me, and vanishes into a roof access doorway.

I’m shell-shocked, still shaking, but I know what I have to do.

The Flying Broomstick looks ridiculous parked alongside the bicycles outside of the Stark building.

“PETER!” I scream as I stumble into the lobby. “PETER PARKER!”

I drop to my knees, setting Marty down on the floor.

“I need Pedahh …” I say to no one and everyone, my words mushing in my mouth. The concussion is actually setting in now.

One of the security guards, armed with some kind of futuristic cannon, approaches me and starts to speak, but I shout dazedly in his face.

“PETER PARKER! HE LIVES HERE! CONTACT PETER PARKER AND TELL HIM I SAID, I’m the Shocker, I SAID YOU NEED TO PROTECT THIS MAN!” I shout, and point at Marty, who actually looks dead at this point. “YOU NEED TO PROTECT THIS MONKEY MAN! HE NEEDS …” My brain seizes up for a moment. “Um … He needs … Hoppy? Hoptowel?”

The word finally arrives.

“HOSPITAL! HE NEEDS TO BE HOSPITALIZED AND PROTECTED, BECAUSE … because …” I turn and walk shakily out of the lobby, straddle the Flying Broomstick and take off. It’s all I can do without passing out.

It’s all random images after that; I string them together later.

Flying on the Broomstick.

Dragging it down into the sewers.

Going through my security measures.

Aleksei standing in the kitchen, drinking chocolate milk.

Hoiman, you dun look so gud.

And then a solid twenty-four hours of sleep.

…

An hour after I wake up, I’m on the couch, going through my SHIELD Criminal Database.

I’ve managed to undress myself, and redress in a 1980s “Avengers: Assemble!” T-shirt and sweatpants.

After an hour of searching, I find the file.

His name was John Horton.

Alias the Griffin.

He was the product of a genetic experiment by the subversive organization known as the Secret Empire; old-school stuff, 1940s. I think he might’ve gone up against the Invaders.

And I killed him.

The panic doesn’t come as strong this time. In fact, after eight vodka shots it disappears completely.

Is this it? Am I becoming a killer, now? Is this me as a superhero?

Am I the Punisher? Or am I something even worse?

Sprawled out on the big plush couch in the lobby, and I’m drunk now, definitely and totally drunk. I hear Aleksei laugh in the next room; I set him up with some old Looney Tunes, and he’s loving every second of them.

But in between the cartoons, I can hear him crying.

A sound at the vault entrance; long, sharp scratches. Like a dog pawing at a door.

Or a cat.

I stagger over to the huge circular hinged block of steel, and numbly go through the motions of unlocking it.

I don’t even check the security cameras.

Probably a bad move, something to avoid in the future, but eight shots of Jager will do that to you.

Felicia’s slumped against the wall, a bullet-proof vest strapped over her usual outfit. Her eyeshadow, which she always over-applies (it’s the only make-up she wears, I think), is running down her face in translucent black tears.

“Felicia …” I say, and accidentally burp as I’m saying it, so it comes out as “FuURPlisha.”

She looks up at me, and says:

“It’s Pederman.”

Pederman? What the hell is Pederman?

“Spider-Man,” she says quickly. “I just saw on TV; this guy Morlun beat the hell out of him and tore his eye out. I don’t know where they took him afterward, but he was ripped apart.”

Tore his eye out?

Like, out of his head?

Tore his eye out?

…

GO MORLUN! MORLUN AND HERMAN, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER!

“Oh, Jesus,” I say loudly, maybe too loudly. “That’s terrible.”

She shakes her head.

“Herman, stop that, I know you don’t care.”

Well, there goes that.

“I just came because … Well, to be honest, I’ve got nowhere to stay. I heard that FPS has people looking for me, and with New York in the state it’s in …”

“Do you want to stay here?” I say, way too quickly.

I’m so smashed I have to lean on the doorframe.

“No,” she says, equally quick.

And there goes that.

“I came here to give you this,” she says quietly, and holds out what looks like a formal invitation, stark white, with a simple blue engraving on the front cover.

A thick blue 4.

“It’s for you,” she says.

“Is this for real?” I say thickly.

“Delivered personally to Spider-Man by the Human Torch.”

“And Spider-Man gave it to … You?” I say, my brain free floating in the alcohol.

“Yeah. This morning. Just before he was attacked.”

There’s a silence, and then I take the card; it’s fancy paper, real high-class stationary shit.

Inside, in meticulously neat handwriting, is written the following: “Mr. Schultz: I would be most appreciative if you would come to the Four Freedoms Plaza at 8:15 AM tomorrow. I believe we have much to discuss. I also recently got this enormous bin of pistachios as a gift, and you can have some.

Reed.”

Reed. Reed who?

I don’t know any Reed.

Wait.

My drunken brain catches up to my drunken eyes, and I shiver so hard I nearly drop the letter.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

Oh, my God.

Reed motherfucking Richards.

“Felicia?” I say, looking up, but she’s gone. I sigh and close the door, flipping back on the security toggles.

I turn, and receive a very pleasant surprise:

Felicia is lying, half asleep, on the couch; she must’ve snuck by me while I was reading the invitation.

I kneel down alongside her.

“Thank you for coming back for me,” I say. “You saved my life.”

She half opens her eyes at me and smiles.

“That was a very brave thing you did, Herman,” she says, a sleepy mumble. “For Marty. A very brave thing.”

Brave? Bullshit, it was just selfish, wasn’t it? I mean, the only reason I saved him is because I liked Marty, and …

I mean, if you save someone who you like, that doesn’t count, does it?

This woman is sexually involved with Spider-Man. Fucking SPIDERMAN.

That’s brave.

I’ll say what I will, but he’s the fucking brave one, not me …

I’m not a hero. I CAN’T be a hero.

“Herman …” she says, her voice so quiet I have to strain to hear it. “Will you … Would you stay with me?” I’m silent. “Just for … Just for a little while.”

I stand up next to the couch, and look down at her.

Even now, at her worst, she’s the most stunning woman I’ve ever seen.

I let out a long, loud, drunken sigh that lasts for about six seconds longer than I mean it to, and then climb over Felicia and wedge myself in between the cushions of the couch and her back, and then stretch my body out, framing hers.

She presses into me, and, maybe for the first time in my life, I’m intimate with a woman and not thinking about sex. She’s all muscle, and she could break me in half, but she feels so …

Small.

The way I always feel.

I put an arm over her, and she doesn’t move, doesn’t push it away.

I feel myself drifting away into sleep, listening to her breathe, smelling that wonderful smell in my broken nose.

I took on six super-villains, and I won. I fucking won.

Tomorrow morning I have a meeting with the smartest man on the goddamn planet.

And here, holding the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known in my arms, while my best friend’s loud snores resonate from the next room …

I feel Big.

Avatars, Part Fantastic Four

It’s 6:05 AM.

“Did you have to shave it all off?” I say, my voice a pleading whisper.

Felicia laughs.

“You looked ridiculous with the big clumps of it missing.” She runs her nails over my newly shaved scalp, and the sensation makes me shiver. “Don’t worry, Herman. It’ll all grow back; besides, I think you look sexy.”

And, with one word, I’m completely okay with the shaved head.

I’ll shave my skin off if it’ll make her think I’m sexy.

“I think you look beautiful, Herman.”

I tink you look boodaful, Hoiman.

Aleksei shifts on the waiting couch, and it cracks badly under his weight. He takes a bite out of his Eggo Waffle, slowly, thoughtfully.

“I think it works ’cause you got a really round head.”

“Great.” I sigh. “I’m an eight-ball.”

We’re in the long-abandoned barbershop at the back of the Tube, by the walled-in entrance. On the other side of those double doors is sixty feet of solid concrete in all directions, and then the base of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Everything in here is covered in dust, and the room is lit by two primitive yellow light bulbs, showing the mirrored walls on all sides. It’s an old place, really classy; everything is red leather, untouched for over fifty years.

And now Rhino’s big gray ass is sitting on it.

That’s fate.

I probably would’ve slept right through my appointment if Felicia wasn’t there; she must be one of those people with a built-in clock, because she was up at five-thirty, dragging me out of my hang-over and to the barbershop.

After I’ve gotten out of the shower, shaved, and toweled off and into my boxers, Felicia brings me a suit, a ruddy brown tweed thing that just oozes School Principal.

“Where’d you get this?” I say, less of a question and more of an accusation of a personal affront.

“There’s an old Brooks Brothers up by the entrance,” she says, lifting up a yellow flannel button-up shirt. “Everything’s still in there; even some crazy looking flapper dresses I fear I might have to abscond with.” She pauses for a moment. “Herman , do you have any idea why they abandoned this place?”

“The Norseman and the Human Torch fought through the subway,” I say, pulling the surprisingly comfortable brown slacks up over my legs. “Destroyed everything they passed; apparently, all the subway exits and entrances got smashed to bits, so they just —”

“Just skiddadled and poured concrete over the whole thing, leaving everything behind?”

Well, when she puts it like that, it’s a little shifty, yeah.

“I’ll look into it,” I mumble.

“I think —” She starts to say, and then her cell phone rings; her ring-tone is “Like A Virgin.”

She takes it out, flips it open, makes an unreadable face at the caller ID, and then puts it up to her ear.

“MJ?” she says. “What’s …” Her face goes pale. “I’ll be right there.”

She looks at me for a whole, silent minute. Aleksei does this kind of adorable thing where he looks back and forth from me to Felicia and back, like a little kid around two arguing parents.

But the only argument here appears to be taking place inside Felicia.

“Herman …” she says slowly. “I have to go.”

“Why?” I say immediately, childlike, whining. I’d hoped her boobs would give me strength during my meeting with Reed Richards.

“Something came up,” she says, with such authority that I don’t even try to question it.

At the door, I touch her arm and tell her to be careful. She shrugs me off like a layer of dirt and says she needs to hurry.

I suppose last night’s “Hold me, Herman” bit was a matter of necessity, rather than choice. Stupid me, taking an act of emotional desperation as a romantic overture. This is the fucking Black Cat, not some low-rent pity-case. The idea of a guy like me and a woman like her is patently absurd.

I finish getting dressed, and put on the brown derby-hat Felicia had picked out for me over my newly bald head.

Looking at myself in the mirror in this suit provokes a revelation; Felicia purposely chose the tweed-brown, flannel-yellow and brown-and-yellow-striped tie because it makes me look like a White Collar version of the Shocker. I can’t believe I didn’t catch this before.

And, looking at it now, I kind of like it.

On the subway uptown, Aleksei keeps giving me this big loopy smile.

“What’s up?” I say finally.

“Oh, nothing,” he says as the subway car takes a turn especially hard thanks to all his extra weight. “I’m just happy you let me come along. I never been to the Four Freedoms before.”

“Hey, something this important, there’s no way I’d leave you behind.”

Aleksei looks absolutely overjoyed, going so far as to wipe a tear from his eye.

Though what I just said is true, there’s a second, more important reason Aleksei is with me: put simply, protection.

Granted, the odds of FPS trying anything are pretty low, because of what I call the the “Day Job Rule.”

Let me explain a rather complex and bizarre phenomenon to you: If two super-people are fighting, and one of them dies, there will most likely be no official investigation. Even SHIELD will generally stay away, the idea being that because most vigilantes are technically villains, their deaths were comparable to the deaths of criminals during gunfights with the cops, and if there is any kind of mystery to be solved, other superfolks will handle it.

Fucked up, I know.

But.

If a meta-criminal attacks and kills someone who is known to be a Super-Person “by night”, as it were, there will be a backlash, and often a very rough one. The murdered person usually becomes a martyr, and their alias, let’s say, in this case it was Daredevil, becomes more than a person, it becomes an Icon, a Symbol.

People, the general public, realizes hey, if they could kill Matt Murdock, they could kill me, too! And suddenly there are all kinds of police investigations, private detectives hired, and all manner of fame-seeking fad-riding vigilantes gunning for whoever killed this post-mortem superstar.

So Herman Schultz: Safe.

Shocker: In mortal danger.

When I said protection, I meant his, not mine. Aleksei doesn’t have a choice but to be Rhino; his costume doesn’t come off. And even though it might be more practical just to leave him back at the Tube, what I said before is true: It means a lot to me that he’s going to be with me when I meet Reed Fucking Richards.

Reed Richards. The man who discovered and applied Unstable Molecules. The guy who dreamed up the Molecular Re-Integrator, the Encephalograph, the Brain-Patternizer, the Beta-Ray Gun. The mechanic who created H.E.R.B.I.E., the chemist who cooked up Fire-Proof Plastic, the visionary who designed E.T.S.A.L. (extendable tactile sensory artificial limbs) and forever changed the lives of amputees all over the world.

Reed Shitting-My-Pants-Right-Now Richards.

As we get off the subway at 42nd Street and Madison, an old woman yells something across the platform and starts running towards us.

I’m a fucking idiot; the Rhino is a wanted man after his rampage downtown, and it’s not like any of the cops realize he was being mind-controlled. I’ve led him out into the open, and now this lady is going to blow everything.

“Shocker! Mr. Schultz, Mr. Schultz!” the older woman shouts. “Shocker!” she hollers as she catches up with us. She grabs onto my sleeve and my hand instinctively goes to my father’s old blue switchblade, which I’ve tucked into my coat pocket.

I stop, and turn to her, ready for the worst.

She embraces me, crying.

“Ma!” someone shouts further up the platform. “Ma, don’t bother him!”

I look to Aleksei, who shrugs and shakes his head.

The old lady pulls away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I don’t mean to trouble you, I don’t mean to embarrass you, it’s just …” She takes hold of my wrist. “You did a good thing, you know, you did a very brave thing.”

I’m lost. A young cop, the smiling, blue-eyed jock-type, comes up the platform, smiling at me apologetically. He’s familiar, but I can’t place him.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Schultz,” he says. “She saw you and just took off.”

“Don’t talk that way about me Michael, I’m not a child.” She turns back to me. “You saved my boy, you know that?” She says the words with such a strength behind them it shakes me a little.

That’s when I recognize the guy; he’s the cop I pulled out of the way when Venom/Scorpion was attacking the police station.

The first person I ever saved.

“I …” I say, completely speechless.

“You’re a good man,” she says, and slaps an open palm on my shoulder. She’s completely overcome with emotion. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, you hear? You’re a good, good man.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I feel like I’m going to explode. How did I fool this woman? How did I fool all these people? I’m not a good man; I’m a fucking crook! And here she is crying and shaking like I’m some kind of fucking saint, she should be fucking ashamed of herself.

A good man.

Why does it hurt so much to hear that?

She nods a few times at me, wipes the tears from her eyes, and heads off towards the escalators. The cop stays for a moment, and looks at me, smiling.

“Thank you.” I let out this kind of choked chuckle, and he looks to Aleksei. “You feelin’ better big guy?” he says, and slaps Aleksei on the arm.

“I …” Aleksei says, confused.

“You keep on slugging, okay?” He shoots me one last smile, and then heads off after his mother.

Aleksei and I stand there, mortified and exuberant at the same time.

“Why was he so nice to me? He’s a cop, Herman, I saw his badge.”

“I know, Aleksei,” I say quietly, heading over to a newsstand.

“I ain’t never had a cop be nice to me before …” he says, muddling it over in my head. “He said I should ‘keep on slugging.’ What does that mean? I ain’t slugging anybody, not right now. So what did —”

I pick up their current edition of the Daily Bugle, and do an actual double-take; it’s yesterday’s copy, and the cover is divided into three different photographs. The first shows Rhino charging at me on the street; a small yellow circle has been drawn around the black spot on the back of his head. Then there’s me on the street fighting the Gibbon and the Griffin; they too have little yellow circles drawn around their black spots.

The final picture is a text block: WHO IS MANIPULATING THE SUPERVILLAINS OF NEW YORK? HOW DOES THE SHOCKER FIT IN? ROBBIE ROBERTSON RETURNS FOR AN EYE OPEN INVESTIGATIVE REPORT EVERY NEW YORKER MUST READ!

Robbie Robertson; that’s the old black guy I helped out right before I got kidnapped by the Punisher.

Everyone reads the Bugle.

Everyone.

I buy a copy, and read it out loud to Aleksei as we head up onto the street.

It pretty much fellates the hell out of me, portrays me as some kind of cult hero fighting against a vast conspiracy. Sort of a Robin Hood treatment, the X-Files and all that shit.

Everything it says about FPS is stuff I already know, but near the end it lists two things I didn’t: prior to Ravage’s rampage, eighteen other low-level meta-criminals had acted “out of character” and “gone haywire” before being taken out by “innocent bystanders.”

It abdicates Aleksei of all blame, though it does implore both him and me to come forward with any and all information we have to a legitimate crime-fighting organization.

Yeah, Robertson. Like who?

I toss the Bugle into a garbage can, and walk out onto the street.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

We’re here.

“It’s … Big,” Aleksei says quietly.

Hell, yes it is.

At a hundred stories, the Four Freedoms Plaza towers over all the other buildings around it. They built it right on the site of their former headquarters, the Leland Baxter Paper Company Building (I have fond memories of it from my childhood, in between being dragged uptown to meet with my father’s gangster friends and then dragged back home for another lock-cracking session in the basement), after it was dragged into space and destroyed (don’t ask).

The Four Freedoms Plaza looks, for all the world, like an enormous temple in which to worship the number 4, down to the four gargantuan 4-s lining the top.

Aleksei and I go into the lobby, and I’m immediately floored by how fucking huge everything is. The FF have been sued so many times I’m amazed they still have money for all this shit. I walk over to the front desk, Aleksei lumbering along behind me, and I’m immediately addressed by some bitch who up until now was nose deep in a leather-bound copy of the Count of Monte Cristo.

“Herman Schultz?” she says, without looking up at me.

“Uh, yeah,” I say.

“Elevator on your right will take you straight to the 88th floor. That’s the seventh floor of Mr. Richards’ laboratory.”

I stand there waiting for further instructions, and the girl sets down her book and points to her left, my right. I nod nervously, and lead Aleksei into the elevator.

Eighty-seven floors later, I’m face to face with Reed Richards and Tony Stark.

Or rather, face to back.

Neither of them seem to notice Aleksei and me as we wander out into the lab, all gleaming steel surfaces, electronic equipment and stuff I can’t even start to identify. They’re too busy looking at one of my old suits; maybe the third one I built. They’ve got it rigged up to all manner of analytical machines; one of the sleeves is almost entirely ripped off, from where the chunk of rubble hit me after Spider-Man dropped the building on me.

One of my gauntlets has been dissected like an insect, spread apart on an operating table near the back of the room.

Stark, multi-billionaire and genius inventor of the Iron Man and War Machine suits, is wearing some kind of Armani suit tailored to him so well that when he turns to look at me it ripples organically and the sheer stylishness of it nails me to the spot for a moment.

“Oh,” Stark says. “He’s here.”

Richards turns, and his presence hits me and nearly knocks me down.

It’s not like he’s insanely charismatic or anything; he’s not. In fact, he seems downright dorky. But there’s some kind of weird vibe flowing off him, like pure unbridled energy.

“Mr. Richards,” I start, and then it pours out. “Ive-always-been-such-an-admirer-of-your-work-and-I-just-want-to-take-this-opportunity-just-to-say-how-much-youve-helped-me-Ive-read-your-thesis-on-the-theoretical-effects-of-concentrated-sound-waves-in-a-zero-gravity-environment-and-I-want-you-to-know —”

He raises a hand, and I stop.

“Where did you buy this?” he says, and points to the suit. I stop, stumped. Aleksei speaks for me.

“He didn’t buy it,” Aleksei says, proud of me. “He made it.”

“Ah. Hah,” Stark says, and smiles at Richards. “What did I tell you?”

“Mr. Schultz.” Richards starts slowly. “Where did you buy this? The Tinkerer?”

I let out a choked laugh.

“No?” Richards says. “Who then? Otto Octavius? Adrian Toomes? A Red Skull yard sale … Victor Von Doom, perhaps?”

“I …” I start, and then stop. I try again. “I built it.”

“Reed,” Stark says, smiling and shaking his head. “You’re not going to get it out of him with a telepath. Guys like this are all the same.”

“Hush, Tony,” Richards says, and takes a step towards me, friendly, comforting. “Mr. Schultz, I have a file on you; I’m aware of the extent of your formal education, and, after hearing that you’ve attempted to legitimize yourself and seeing the capabilities of your suit on television, I decided to contact you. I acquired an older copy of your suit from the NYPD evidence lock-up, and contacted you to ask after its original designer.”

He takes a breath, and smiles at me.

“Now, I’m almost ninety-seven percent certain you didn’t build this. Tony here is one hundred percent. It’s very important to me, personally, to talk with the man who did, so please, please, can you just be honest with me?”

There’s a pause, and then I say again, weakly: “I built the suit.”

Richards sighs, and his arm suddenly shoots off to the left, across the room, winding like a snake around a desk and a chair, lifting them up and setting them down in front of me.

Seeing him do the stretching thing in person isn’t cartoonish, the way it looks on TV.

In person, it’s really kind of amazing.

Stark motions for me to sit down in the chair, and I do.

Reed lets out a very heavy, disappointed sigh.

“I want you to write down everything you know about the suit, with a focus on how you believe it works. For this, I will pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

My jaw drops a little; he’s not even asking me about the gauntlets, just an older, inferior version of the suit.

“In cash?” I say quietly.

“In cash,” Stark says, and pushes a briefcase across the desk they’ve sat me in. “Right in here. For you to put everything you know,” Stark puts his finger on the paper on the desk. “Right here.”

“Oh, wow, Herman,” Aleksei says. “That’s a lot of money. You could buy like a truck load of Tootsie-Rolls.”

Ladies and gentlemen, my financial counsel, Aleksei Mikhailovich Sytsevich.

“Deal,” I say, and start writing.

Richards nods, half-satisfied, and heads out the door into another part of the lab.

I pick up the pen.

The Problem Is: Explaining the suit to someone new.

It pops into place in my head, and it starts to shake.

I start writing, and the problem shakes harder.

Stark grins at me, the sort of grin certain people have while they watch the Special Olympics.

Aleksei starts to hum “Hotel California.”

I try to ignore them, and continue scribbling down what I’d always thought was basic vibronics; occasionally I throw in equations and formulas of my own design to simplify the teaching process.

“Hey, Herman …” Aleksei says over my shoulder.

“Yeah?” I say, still writing.

“Reed Richards is really stretchy.”

“I know, Aleksei,” I say, erasing a grammatical error and then continuing on to the portion on the sub-physical dynamics of impact energy displacement using simple practical spatial terms.

“Do you think he can stretch every part of him?” Aleksei says. He’s clearly been giving this a lot of thought.

“I don’t know,” I say, maybe a little harshly.

“Hm,” Aleksei says. “Do you think he can stretch his … you know …”

There’s a pained pause, and then Aleksei says, in an almost pornographic whisper: “Do you think he can stretch his belly-button?”

I drop my head to the desk, trying to control my laughter; writing has suddenly become impossible.

“I know, I know!” Aleksei says, enthusiastic. “Imagine him with a belly button like three feet long! It would be incred … incredulous!”

Stark, clearly holding back less friendly laughter himself, steps forward.

“Do you want me to take the Rhino outside so you can concentrate, or —”

Stark notices something on the paper in front of me, and snatches it away. He reads for a moment, and then looks up at me. “Are you saying that you’ve chemically reapplied orbital physics on a microscale in order to allow for absolutely zero transmission of inertia from particle to particle?”

“Well …” I say slowly. “Yeah.”

Tony Stark swallows, and his face goes a little pale.

“You built the suit,” he says; it’s a whimper of words that comes out all at once.

“That’s right,” I say, and smile my best smug-asshole smile at him.

“Reed,” he says, at first a whisper, and then louder. “Reed, come in here.”

A hand comes through the doorway and makes a waving motion. “Just give me a couple of minutes, I’m working on —”

“ REED,” Stark says, louder. “Get the hell in here!”

Richards’ head floats in, looking affronted.

“Tony, I don’t see what could be so important that —”

Stark sticks my paper out in front of Richards’ face, and his nose stretches out and grabs hold of it. He looks at it for less than a second, and then lets it go, ignoring it as my five minutes worth of hard work falls to the ground. The head snakes over to me, and after a moment, the body walks in from the next room, connects with the head, and sits down across from me.

“Herman, I think I misunderstood,” he says. His voice has this incongruous light baritone that makes him impossible not to listen to; it’s the voice of a patient father. “When you came in here, I thought you were some thug taking credit for another person’s creation.”

There’s a pause, and he looks uncomfortable and overjoyed all at once.

“I clearly didn’t understand the extent of …” He stops, and seems to think. “Simply put, by what’s written on that paper, it’s clear that I have vastly underestimated you.”

I don’t know what to say, but it’s all right, because it looks like Richards doesn’t know what to say either.

Stark, for his part, is just kind of staring at me cock-eyed, like I suddenly grew another head or something.

I guess in his mind, I kind of did.

“I want you to explain it to me.” Richards says. “No paper. Just words.”

So I start talking.

I tell him about safe-cracking, and the principles of vibration in the discipline.

He nods, and then asks questions about how I got into crime.

Family trade, I say. I continue on about going to prison, and then sketching up schematics for the suit and the gauntlets on napkins. I tell him about pilfering materials from every possible resource: transistor radios, microwaves, ceiling fans, mattresses, televisions, telephones, guards’ walkie-talkies, boom-boxes, dead inmates’ pace-makers, the wiring in the boiler room, a shotgun I managed to steal from the armory, pieces of washer-dryer I managed to get during a particularly nasty riot …

And this whole time, he’s listening. Really listening to me, you know? His eyes are clear and bright, he laughs when I make jokes, asks questions whenever I stop talking for more than three seconds …

He’s not studying me like an animal any more.

Now he’s treating me like I’m something entirely new.

I tell him how I put the first gauntlet together in the metal shop where we were supposed to be making license plates. I tell him how originally I only had materials to build one sleeve of the costume, so I could only use one gauntlet; if I try to fire the gauntlets without the suit, they’ll break my wrists on a level two, my whole arm on a level four and I don’t even want to know what they’d do on five; probably shake my arm clean off.

I tell him about the break-out and the first full version of the suit, with the simplistic onboard computer.

I tell him about inventing Scilonium, the material that most of the suit is made of, at five AM, high out of my mind on some pill given to me by Wilbur Day (who you probably know as Stilt-Man). I tell him about how I couldn’t dye it any other colors than yellow and brown, and about how I wired the whole thing on the basis of what I call “The Schultz Theory of Unified Vibronics,” which, up until now, I just thought was me bullshitting around.

He asks me to explain the way the suit works, how it displaces and reinterprets the energy of motion, particularly vibration.

I start to talk, but after twenty-five seconds he stops me, and laughs this strange, friendly, excited laugh.

“My God. This is fantastic.”

Is that a joke?

“Uh …” I say; that’s me, eloquent, well-spoken, debonair …

“I’m in over my head,” Richards says, holding his hands out, palms towards me.

“But —” I say, unsure of how else to respond.

“No, don’t you understand?” he says, his voice getting higher, happier. “I don’t understand a damn word you’ve just said; I know the words, I know you’re not just spouting gibberish, but I don’t understand.” He knocks his fist against his forehead.

“I’m … sorry?” I say slowly.

“Don’t be,” he says quickly. “This is the most excited I’ve been in years.” His head snakes over to the door. “Sue!” he shouts. “I’m stumped!” he yells gleefully, putting a slightly odd high-pitched yelp on the word “stumped.”

“Congratulations, honey,” a soft, female voice says from somewhere in another room.

His head whips back. His mouth curls into this childlike, ecstatic smile.

“I want you to show me,” he says, eyes wide.

Twenty minutes later I’m in the suit, standing in the center of a barren steel room.

Ben Grimm stands to my left.

A kid who I’ve seen one too many times on MTV stands to my right; it’s Johnny Storm, “The Human Torch,” in all his dubious glory. I’m just glad he’s wearing street clothes, instead of that ridiculous blue get-up he wears in all the posters plastered on the walls of fourteen-year-old girls throughout America.

I still have trouble calling him “The Human Torch;” whenever I hear the name, my brain shows me old black-and-white newsreel footage of Captain America and the Invaders. The bright white streak in the sky behind Cap and Namor … that’s the Human Torch.

Not this twentysomething pretty-boy punk-ass.

He grins at me.

I smile.

“So. I hear you’re a big brain, like Reed up there.”

“Like him?” I’m suddenly a yelping teenager. “Did he say that? Did he compare us? Did he say that —”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Storm says, holding up his hands. “Cool down there, Ritalin Kid. Don’t go Elvis Fan on us.”

“Hehe,” says Grimm. “We wouldn’t want him to get too excited, fall down and get arrested.” Grimm laughs again. “That’s a hobby of yours, ain’t it? Gettin’ arrested? Right up there with stealin’ things and hurting people?”

“Easy Ben,” Reed’s voice says over the intercom. “I want you to treat Mr. Schultz with respect.”

“Respect?” Grimm says, looking to Storm. “We gotta respect ‘Mr. Schultz?’ You gotta be jokin’; Reed, this guy’s a stain on the world’s undawear!”

“That’s an unfair comparison,” Storm says, smiling. “Not everyone’s underwear stains are as big as yours.”

“It’s understandable; he probably shits fossils,” I mumble.

“What’d you say?” Storm says, turning on me.

“I said …” I say, a little louder. “It’s understandable, because he probably shits fossils.”

Storm smiles.

“See? I like him already.”

At first Reed just has me do simple stuff; he has Grimm hit me a couple of times, and runs tests as the suit absorbs and disperses the impacts. The last one is a punch right to the chest, and it sends me flying right into the wall.

Grimm and Storm think this is funny as all hell.

I’m lucky I don’t break anything.

Then he has Grimm leave, and Storm turns up the heat in the room to well over five hundred degrees. The suit finally starts to singe at the seams, and Reed calls Johnny off, but he’s overjoyed to hear that my newer suits can handle up to 2,000 degrees, easy.

He makes an appointment for me to take what he calls the “Richards’ Standard”, some kind of IQ test, and then ushers me out the door; he actually comes down to the lobby with Aleksei and me, prattling back and forth with me about Vibronics the whole way.

Once we’re back on the subway, Aleksei starts giggling uncontrollably.

“What’s that all about?”

“What, Herman?”

“The giggling. What’re you on about?”

“Nothin’. It’s just … Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Are you like Mr. Fantastic said to me?”

“Aleksei, you’re going to need to form a complete sentence.”

He pauses, thinking.

“Are you a ree-vo-loosh-on-ary? Revolutionary?”

My eyes nearly bug out of my head.

“He said that? Did he say that?”

“Yeah, while we was up in the booth watching the Thing smack you around. He said you was a revolutionary.”

It hits me like an orgasm; suddenly I’m covered in a wave of euphoria.

It dies quick, though. Revolutionary. Little Hermie Schultz. No, no, Reed will have the suit figured out by Monday and I’ll be long forgotten. Two months from now I’ll be robbing banks for food money.

I remember the suitcase sitting by my feet, and the euphoria comes back.

Fifty thousand dollars. Holy hell.

“Come on, Aleksei.”

I say, standing up.

“Herman, what’re you doing, our stop’s not till the bridge.”

“I know,” I say, and smile at him. “First we’re going shopping.”

By the time we get back to the vault it’s five PM, six hours with the Fantastic Four and two hours of buying everything I could get my hands on in Midtown.

I reset all the security systems, unload Aleksei (he was carrying over three hundred pounds worth of loot; we weigh it on a luggage scale after we get it off him, and have a good laugh), and unpack our new big-screen TV. It’s a digital so big that when we put on our copy of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (one of our two hundred or so new DVDs), the Warner Brothers music booms out so loud even Aleksei covers his ears.

He smiles, though, and it makes me happy. He hasn’t smiled much since what FPS did to him.

My big friend looks so small there, sitting on the floor, holding his new Stuffed Black African Rhinoceros from Toys’R’Us tightly to his chest, watching Jimmy Stewart in black and white on the enormous screen.

I head up to the room I’ve designated as my own, plopping down in a bed I haven’t slept in in the better part of five years.

I listen to Aleksei laugh along with the movie downstairs, and I think about Felicia.

It just brings me down, so I try to stop, and I find I can’t.

She’s everywhere in my mind.

That’s when I notice the spot appear on the ceiling. It doesn’t form or grow or swirl, it just blips into existence like a cut in a movie.

I freeze, and then a single, torn sheet of paper falls out, and floats gently down to land on the bed alongside me. I very slowly reach out and pick it up.

On it, written in what looks like blood, are the following words.

“HErmAN — ITS JOHNNy. wHy Is a rAVeN lIke A wrITING DesK? HelP me”

Johnny Ohnn, once a close friend of mine.

The Spot.

A man who, up until about five seconds ago, I believed to be a willing participant in FPS.

And this is so damned confusing, it has to be a clue.

Avatars, Part Five

When I was fourteen years old, my father told me that if anyone ever hurt my sister, I was supposed to beat some sense into them. Later that week, my father caught my sister wearing eyeliner and lipstick and he beat the shit out of her.

Paradox, right? Wrong. Not to little beaten, angry Hermie Schultz.

I snuck up to my father’s room in the middle of the night, around three AM, when he’d finally gotten too drunk and passed out. I think that was the same night he was doing lines of coke on the couch with a few of the boys from the bar, but I can’t be sure. I reached into the drawer by his bed, where he kept his pretty blue switchblade, took it out, popped it out and stabbed him right in the ribs.

He woke up.

And then he stabbed me seventeen times.

I remember, when he took me to the hospital, he said told the nurses that some neighborhood kids had mugged me, and even though I was dying of blood-loss, I remember that I laughed.

Because after what my father had put me through the last eight years, those neighborhood kids were too scared to look at me, let alone mug me.

Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?

Good question, asshole.

Lewis Carroll, mathematics professor, LSD freak, pedophile and well-known author, first posed the question, or rather he had his character, the Mad Hatter, pose it.

It’s a riddle, left unanswered, in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, thrown out amidst the flurry of words at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party.

There’s been a ton of speculation since then; I searched around on the internet, but most of the answers I got reeked of bullshit. Carroll himself put forth the following answer:

“It can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!”

Yeah, that’s hilarious.

Fucking jackass.

But even he said that it was just speculation; originally he wrote the riddle with no answer in mind.

So why, I ask you, would a guy as smart as Jonny Ohnn choose an answerless riddle, written in blood, as the only clue towards his rescue?

It’s 8:15 PM, and I’m at my workbench, thinking. Aleksei is pacing back and forth behind me, throwing out the occasional theory. He smiles widely, and spits out stuff along the lines of:

“Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk? ’Cause both of them are things you might see during the day!”

When I greet this with only a stubborn silence, the smile slowly fades from his face.

“Well, geez, Herman,” he says, sighing a big Aleksei sigh. “You could at least try to put out an answer of your own. You know I’m no good with riddles.”

My mind flashes back to a painful memory; riding the train with Aleksei from Florida to New York (Kingpin Business), with only a big book of word puzzles to keep us company.

We traveled for three days.

I completed three hundred and seventy-eight puzzles.

Aleksei, with ample help from me, completed three.

“It’s hard, Aleksei. I mean, he clearly doesn’t mean us to take it in literal context, as the riddle from Alice In Wonderland, but at the same time it’s hard to apply it to anything else. Ravens and Writing Desks don’t make for a simple metaphor.”

Aleksei looks at me blankly, and then slowly says: “What’s a metaphor?”

This is useless; I’m trying to hit the problem head-on, and it’s not budging. I’ve got to stop thinking in flat circles and get three-dimensional.

The problem settles into place in my head, and starts to shake.

What do I know about Jonathan Ohnn?

Jonny and I are old friends; I actually met him about a year before I met Aleksei. We were both Kingpin’s technical guys; I was the safecracker, and Ohnn was the scientist. He’d had to go to Fisk after Roxxon fired him for what they called “dangerous and futile” experiments, the details of which I’ve never fully heard.

Ohnn was a self-titled “Dimensional Scientist;” he had this nutso theory that, by slipping between atoms (without splitting them), one could easily phase in and out of our reality; not into an alternate dimension, per se, but instead into a kind of “sub”-reality. You’d travel in real-space, just kind of “under” everything else,S like you were only the “red” in a 3-D movie.

Then, when you’d traveled to your desired location, you’d open another “portal” and hop out into the “real” world.

It was all based on the metahuman powers of the teleporting vigilante “Cloak,” half of Cloak and Dagger, two lame-brains swimming amidst the already crowded sea of New York superheroes.

The Kingpin got interested in this after he realized that, using Jonny’s theoretical technology, someone could effectively sneak into anywhere in the world.

Of course, at first we all thought Jon was crazy, we being me and a bunch of two-bit goons who couldn’t get through sixth grade chemistry if they were being tutored by Hank Pym.

Not for long.

With Fisk’s money behind him, Jonny invented what I was convinced was simply the world’s most menacing-looking blender. But then he turned it on, and any doubts I ever had about Ohnn blew away like dust in the wind.

The thing started spitting these flat, black spots all over the room. Everybody but Ohnn and the Kingpin panicked; a few people actually got hit, and having an inter-dimensional portal open up on their bodies was more than little disconcerting. Once the room calmed down, Ohnn took out a baseball, did some mathematical equations out loud to himself, and then hurled the ball into a Spot on the wall.

The ball popped out of a spot on the Kingpin’s desk, now traveling vertically instead of horizontally. The Kingpin snatched it out of the air, and smiled. And when the Kingpin smiles, trouble is never far behind.

Two days later, Ohnn did a very foolish thing; he attempted to use his “Spot-Machine” to teleport a human subject: Himself.

Dumb sack of shit. You don’t see me blasting myself with the gauntlets, do you?

… At least, uh, not on purpose.

Ohnn’s Amazing Teleporting Blender blew up in his face while he was in transit from one spot to another, trapping him halfway in the subdimension, and half in ours. The result was a clearly human creature with no discernable human features. Ohnn’s skin had turned stark white, and all of his features had melted away, leaving him looking rather like a colorless, designless, less-buff version of Spider-Man.

With one exception.

Ohnn’s body was covered in the spots; it secreted the dimensional gateways like sweat. At first, Ohnn was horrified: his face, hair, and lest we forget, penis, were all things of the past.

But it didn’t last long;

Once Ohnn realized that he could manipulate the gateways, stretch them and move them in any way he pleased, he immediately decided to strike out on his own as a super-villain.

Since then, Jon just rolled down hill. After a few rather ill-fated encounters with Spider-Man, he simply dropped off the radar and started working behind the scenes, helping out with simple bank robberies and larceny of a more innocuous variety.

Seeing Jonny in a suit was always laugh-out-loud funny, but it didn’t stop us being friends. He even helped me run a few scams on Osborn Chemicals back when they were big.

Before Osborn went totally ass-fuck-your-grandmother psycho.

Of course, this was back when the Frederick Dodson was investing, so —

Wait.

Frederick Dodson.

“Shit!” I say aloud, and Aleksei yelps.

“Jesus, Herman, you surprised me!” There’s a pause, and then Aleksei leans close to me, smiling. “You got it. You got the answer, didn’t you?”

“One second.”

Frederick Dodson, aged industrialist and primary investor in Osborn Chemicals back when it was big. Frederick Dodson, who was so desperately lonely that he picked up what most people call a “trophy wife,” a wealthy young society girl by the name of Vienna Houston.

Vienna Houston, the daughter of Paul Houston, a father who secluded her from the world as a child, watching by as she buried herself in books.

Vienna Houston, who gives a great blowjob. Trust me, I know, she’s the second to last woman I fucked.

Vienna Houston, who, after murdering her husband, took on a costumed criminal alias.

Vienna Houston, who was so taken by, so deliriously obsessed with the work of Lewis Carroll.

Vienna Houston. Ohnn, you clever bastard; who better to ask for the answer to the Mad Hatter’s riddle than his best friend?

Vienna Houston. The White Rabbit.

Aleksei and I come up out of the subway on Fifty-third and Maine, and then walk the remaining seven blocks down to the Super-Duper Upscale Cheshire Estate (formerly the Dodson Estate). The neighborhood is strangely decrepit and empty; it’s as though it’s been …

Shit, I don’t know.

The word that keeps popping into my head is “cleared out.”

But that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

To buy out a fancy block like this you’d need millions … no, hundreds of millions of dollars.

The last time I was at Cheshire Estates, about six years ago, it was for what had been quaintly titled “The Mad Tea Party.” Put in simpler terms, it was a Villain’s ball.

The Prom of Evil.

Vienna got smashed and we got it on on a black-and-white pool table. With those long legs and that tight little yoga butt, she’s probably to date the most conventionally attractive woman I’ve ever fucked.

Luckily, I wasn’t too drunk, and I believe I managed a respectable sexual performance. Better than the shit I throw out usually, at least.

It was a pretty sad affair; no big guns showed up, just us small-timers.

The heaviest hitter there was Jack’O’Lantern. What does that tell you?

The gates are covered in caution tape, the kind police leave behind after investigating a particularly gruesome murder.

I’m still out of costume, so I have Aleksei smash the gates down, and we head in. Originally, this enormous courtyard housed a number of ridiculously intricate topiary sculptures depicting scenes from Alice and Wonderland.

Now, however, it’s worn and gray, as dead as the enormous manor-house that used to loom over the neighborhood like a malevolent queen. Now it totters and creaks like a hungry ghost, angry and tired in its unending thirst for souls.

Several of the windows have been shattered, and there’s graffiti across the front porch detailing the sexual exploits of one “T-Money.” Apparently, T-Money gets all the big booty bitches in the butt.

Hurray for T-Money and his mastery of alliteration.

I pick the lock on the front door, and it creaks open with a high-pitched whine that sounds more like a sound effect than anything you’d hear in real life.

The foyer is empty.

Not dingy-smelly-crack-house empty; instead, it’s the big, wide, white-marble kind of empty you only get in places that are very rich. And very dead.

Everything seems vacant and hollow; all the furniture is covered in sheets, and a thin layer of dust sits on everything. Adding to the unease is the way the house is built; Vienna had the architecture ape that of “Wonderland;” everything is slightly askew, everything is just a little bit off. Lots of dark red and chalk white.

“It feels like we’re being watched by the eyes of a skeleton,” Aleksei says, another one of his strange bits of poetry.

“Come on, Aleksei,” I say, stepping inside.

“Herman, I wouldn’t go in there if they was handing out blowjobs and lemonade.”

A pause, and then I grab him by the horn and drag him in.

Of course, if he set himself against it, there’s no way in hell that I could move him. Luckily, I’m me and he’s him, so he shuffles along like a scared little puppy, as I walk ahead, not doing much better.

The electricity is still on; I can hear it buzzing. That’s weird; New York is usually pretty studious about this sort of thing.

“Are we looking for anything specific …” Aleksei says as we walk through the grand dining room, the table, formerly the Caterpillar, now a long, curving ghost under a succession of eight-by-eight sheets. “… Or are we just wandering around scaring the shit out of ourselves for no reason?”

I laugh, and Aleksei loosens up a little.

“We’re looking for Vienna, Aleksei.”

“Who?”

“The White Rabbit.”

“Ooh. Well … I don’t think she lives here no more, Herman.”

“I’m getting that impression, too, yeah.” I peek into a closet, and find only rat shit and the dead rat who made it. “But this is where Ohnn told us to go, so here we are.”

We head across the hallway towards the double doors to the ballroom

“But I mean, Herman, how do we even know Jonny wanted us to come here? Maybe we was supposed to find the White Rabbit somewhere else, or —”

I open the doors to the ballroom, and Aleksei shuts the fuck up right quick.

The smell hits you first. Blood, sweat and shit. Deep, raw shit; the kind that comes out when you split open someone’s bowels.

I flip on the lights, and dozens of pastel neon pinks, blues, yellows, oranges, purples and greens light up on the walls, forming murals from Wonderland, now decayed from neglect.

Everything is lit in an awkward fuschia glow, and Rhino instinctively takes a step back.

The ceilings in here used to be thirty feet high, but they’ve been effectively been lowered by the addition of an enormous hanging scaffold; on it sits the remains of some kind of enormous computer bay. All of the (probably very interesting) hardware has been cleared out; all that remains are dozens and dozens of monitors. All the cords lead down to this enormous generator, which hangs down like a sword of Damocles, connected to some kind of large device at the center of the room.

The device itself is one of those things that as soon as you look at it, you get a chill. I can’t imagine what it was used for, but I’ll try to describe it for you.

Okay, imagine the meanest looking crucifix you’ve even seen, made out of computer parts that look like they’re from about three hundred years in the future. But imagine that, instead of laying against the vertical bar of the cross, the person who’s crucified is actually jacked into it by a number of … I guess the proper term would be “penetrating plugs.” Into the back and into the …

You get the picture.

There are four more penetrating plugs on the arms, and all manner of hooks and restraint chains. Hooks that sunk into skin. Chains that went under muscle and wrapped around bones.

This is one sick fuck machine.

“Schultz,” a cold, gravelly voice says from behind me. “You got any idea what the fuck that thing is?”

I turn, and even though I knew the voice, the Punisher’s ice-blue eyes still give me a little chill of surprise. Aleksei drops into a three-point stance, and I immediately throw a hand up in front of him before he charges. Aleksei stops, and grunts in frustration.

“Sorry, Herman. I forgot he’s our friend now.”

Friend. Right.

Rhino Versus The Punisher might seem like an easy one to call, but I guarantee you that Rhino would be dead in seconds. There’s a reason guys like him and me are the lowest of the low on the villain totem pole.

The Punisher smiles a skeleton’s smile, and steps ahead of us, running his white-gloved hand along the side of the … device.

“Looks like a fun little toy for Saturday nights, yeah?”

“I don’t know,” I say quietly. “But I’m guessing it’s nothing pleasant. That up there looks like some kind of energy converter, but all of these dangly things are intravenous tubes, and they’re hooked up to that in-out sixty-one, which would mean they were just … just vacuuming out bodily fluids. And that thing on the pylon, that almost looks like … Shit, I don’t know, a marionette rig.”

“Marionette …” the Punisher says slowly. “Like a puppet?”

“No, more like a wire rig. Like they used to work animatronic monsters in Eighties movies. Those tensile cords —”

“The ones with blood on them,” Punisher adds.

“Yeah. Those usually ran throughout a puppet’s body, and then they’d manipulate it using a control panel, tensing and loosening the wires.”

There’s a pause as the implications of this sink in.

“You’re saying …” Aleksei says quietly. “The guy on this thing had wires in him? Like inside him?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “And they’d move him around on this pylon here —”

“Which was inserted into his spinal column and anus,” Punisher says helpfully.

“Right,” I say, glancing at Aleksei, who shudders.

“This is scary, Herman.”

“I know, Aleksei. We’re dealing with very scary people.”

Punisher notices something at the base of the device, and kneels down; it’s so small, miniscule even, half concealed by blood splatters, that I would’ve never noticed it.

“Huh,” says the Punisher, and beckons me to kneel beside him.

There, inscribed at the base, is the following:

PROPERTY OF ALAMAGORDO, CSA

I read it out loud.

“CSA,” Punisher says, annunciating each letter. “Now what the hell is that?”

I shrug, but then Aleksei speaks up.

“I know what that is,” he says, almost monotone. “It’s the Commission for Superhuman Activities.”

“The what?” I say, baffled.

“The Commission for Superhuman Activities. General Haywerth is on it. He was there when they put the suit on me.”

“Haywerth,” Punisher whispers. “I know that name. He’s part of the Trust.”

“The what?” I say again, feeling quite stupid right about now.

“The Trust.” Punisher stands up. “The organization that first had me freed from Ryker’s Island. I’ve never been able to find out anything about them, no matter how hard I look, save for the fact that some top military geeks were involved. I’ve got names, but no real details: General Slinkard, Colonel Harrison, General Haywerth, General Ross —”

I do the unthinkable. I interrupt the Punisher.

“Hold up. General Ross? Like ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross?”

Punisher lights a cigarette.

“Yeah,” he growls.

“Yeah, that’s them,” Aleksei says. “Them’s the guys who put the suit on me.”

He’s got this odd, hollow tone; his eyes are blank, too.

“Wait, wait …” I say, throwing up my hands. “I thought the KGB put the suit on you?”

“They did,” Aleksei says, and then pauses. “I mean, I think they did.” Another pause. “My head hurts.”

I look to the Punisher, who stays quiet, looking evenly back at me.

“Schultz …” he says, and touches his temple. “This is getting very interesting.”

Avatars, Part Six

Millipedes are vegetarians.

Centipedes are carnivores.

Did you know that if a grasshopper is hungry enough, it’ll eat the paint right off your house?

I learned all that from Aleksei.

“Snails have teeth,” he says as we exit Vienna Houston’s dead house.

It’s like this information piles up inside him; some time back, he must’ve read a book on bugs, or more likely, seen a TV program, and the knowledge is just kind of rattling around in that thick head (or neck, as the case may be; that’s a joke for folks who’ve been paying a-goddamn-ttention) of his. And if he tips the wrong way, the information spills out.

Punisher steps out of the door behind us, and flips me a silver dollar which I fumble, but manage to catch just before it hits the dead grass.

“Buy Aleksei ice-cream,” he says, and starts to go back into the house.

“Wait!” I practically scream, and he stops.

“What?” It pops out of him like he wants to bite me.

“What about the … machine?” I have to know.

“I’ll take care of it. I’m going to burn this whole place to the ground.”

“But —”

“No. Listen to me, Schultz; if they left it behind, it means we can’t get jack shit out of it. We’re not dealing with amateurs. All we’ve got in there is a faded picture of something very bad. You can see the shape, but you can’t know its face, not really.”

“But —”

“Tell me …” the Punisher says, his voice dropping to a dead calm, with a thousand years of silence after every word. “Do you want to fight about this, Schultz?”

My fists spastically clench and unclench.

Do you want to fight about this, kid?

That’s what my dad always used to say.

The equipment in there could tell us lots of things, couldn’t it? I mean, that rig, that crucifix thing, that must mean something, that must be how they control the FPS Avatar Villains, or …

No, that doesn’t make sense. Who would pay to have that horrible thing put on them? Put IN them?

Well, I mean, I could take it to Reed, or —

“I know what you’re thinking,” Punisher says, taking out a cigarette. “Take it to your new buddy Richards.” He grins. “Oh, yeah, I know about that. Well, cut those thoughts right out of your head. You know how that freak got his powers?”

“Yeah,” I say, a little too aggressively. “The Pocket Rocket.”

“Right.” He smiles. “And you know where the Pocket Rocket was built?” There’s a silence, and then I shake my head. Punisher smiles and lights his cigarette. “Alamogordo. He’s got heavy ties to SHIELD, got his business all tangled up with Tony Stark’s … For all we know, your stretchy buddy could be in on this.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say slowly, realizing how stupid what I’m saying is before it even gets all the way out of my mouth. I don’t know Reed Richards. For all I know, he keeps little boys tied up in the basement; half of those super-freaks are probably perverts as it stands, what’s to stop him from being one of them?

For all I know, the whole “Herman Schultz is a genius” bit was him just schmoozing me for FPS … or the CSA … or … Jesus Christ, Herman, what’ve you gotten yourself into now?

“So the choice is yours, Schultz. Fight past me to get to junk that won’t help you anyway, bring it to your SHIELD friends and catch a bullet in the face, or go get your friend ice cream. Your call.”

I groan, and, as usual, back down.

“You think SHIELD is involved? In FPS?” Aleksei looks to me, confused. “But SHIELD are the good guys!”

“No,” Punisher says, as thunder booms cinematically in the night sky above us. He nods to me. “We’re the good guys.”

We? Us? He’s a cold-blooded murderer who’d shoot through a loaded school bus if that was the only way he could hit the Kingpin, and I’m a sleazy crook with daddy issues whose only friend is a two-ton retard. We’re the good guys? Man, the world is in a shitload of trouble.

Punisher says he’ll be in touch, and we head down the street.

When we’re halfway up the block, the Cheshire Estates explodes.

Little chips of debris rain down on us, and Aleksei looks sad.

I ask him why over a bowl full of hot-fudge sundae at a Baskin Robbins in Coney.

“It’s just …” He heaves a sigh. “I don’t like it, Herman. I feel like everyone is the bad guy all of a sudden, and … Couldn’t you just be you again?”

“Eh?” I try to ignore this, hoping he’ll drop it.

“I mean, couldn’t you just be, you know, the Shocker. Rob a bank or something, or even, you know, me and you could go to the Kingpin and ask if he needs anybody roughed up —”

“The Kingpin is human scum, Aleksei! He tried to have you killed!”

Aleksei shrugs.

“That was eight months ago, I’m sure he’s gotten over it.”

“Yeah, I am, too,” I grunt. Fisk forgets easy when you can do something for him, and Rhino, even though he’s been beaten by everyone from Spider-Man to Iron Fist, is still a very hot commodity when it comes to leg-breakers. Unbreakable skin and a level five on the metahuman strength charts will do that for you.

“Then let’s just do it! Drop this thing, this FPS thing, and you and me can go back to the normal life.”

The “normal” life. So that’s what I was living; subsisting on Doritos, self-hatred and a keg-can of Heineken. That’s the normal life. Blasting cops with level threes while they’re just trying to help people is the normal life. Knowing I’ll never really get anywhere, be anybody, do anything … That’s the normal life.

“Fuck the normal life,” I say. “Aleksei, these fucks got inside your head, took you over and made you do horrible, horrible things. That doesn’t bother you? You don’t want, you know, revenge?”

“You told me you found the man who did it —”

“But not the people who gave him the means!” I’m talking pretty loudly now, probably above recommended Baskin Robbins volume. Fuck it. “Aleksei, we’re onto something here! Something REAL, something that means … Something! You don’t see that? You and me, man, we’re cracking into a situation much bigger than us. That doesn’t excite you? That doesn’t yank your crank, just a little?”

Aleksei looks at his ice-cream, playing with his spoon, ridiculously tiny in those giant hands.

“Well … Herman … I’m just … This is so different from what I’m used to. I’m thinking I’ll just go to the Black Tarantula, or Silvermane, get some smashing work. And look at you, Herman, you ain’t meant to be a superhero; you ain’t even any good at it! You wasn’t supposed to live this way, it’s making you crazy.” For some reason, this hurts me. Really hurts me, the kind of emotional pain you actually feel seize up in your chest. And yet, he continues. “I mean, I ain’t never —”

“Aleksei.”

“Herman, I —”

“ALEKSEI.” It comes out of me like the Word of God.

He falls silent. Good, because now I drop the bomb on him.

“Aleksei, how long has it been since you were in jail?”

“Well, I …” Aleksei stops short, thinking, the big, clunky gears in his head turning. “I guess it’s been about a month now. Maybe a little more.” Aleksei’s eyes suddenly widen. “A month! A whole month! Hey, Herman, that’s a long time!”

I smile at him.

“Okay, and how long have I been legit?”

Another silence, and then his eyes get even bigger. “You been … Keeping me out of jail?”

I slap a hand to my forehead.

“No, listen, Aleksei, just listen to me, okay? Think about your life, think about our lives … In and out of jail constantly, waiting for the day we’re too obscure to get bailed out, too tired to break out? Too fucking bored with our lives, too broken, too hurt … This business is hell on us, Aleksei, it’s hell on you. And you’re not the smartest guy, sure, you’ll tell me that, but even you must be getting sick of it. I know you, Aleksei, I really do know you, and I know that you’re better than this, this stupid, petty shit!”

I take a breath. These are the thoughts that have wanted to climb out of me since I started this superhero shit, and now they’re just parading out like there’s no tomorrow.

“It’s not being a ‘superhero’, whatever that is, that’s driving me crazy; it’s being me. I don’t know if you know this, Aleksei, but when I was working for the Kingpin with you, I was miserable. I tried to commit suicide; that time the gauntlets blew up, that wasn’t a mistake; I was trying to bring the goddamn building down on us! I hated the world that much, I was ready to kill everyone I knew, you included, just to, fuck, I don’t know …”

Aleksei’s eyes are wide. He almost looks scared. I hope I’m not going down, no, sprinting down the wrong path here.

“Aleksei, I feel more alive, more clear-headed than I ever have before. I’m headlining the Daily Bugle, and palling around with Reed Richards, I’m … I feel like I’m about to make a difference, like something in my miserable, stupid, small life might mean something, and …”

I’m crying, and it’s clearly getting to him.

Fuck. I hate crying. My father used to say crying was your brain leaking out, because as soon as you started crying, the things you said only got stupider and stupider.

Time to test that theory.

I put a hand on his.

“We don’t have to spend the rest of our lives fighting Spider-Man. We can do something that matters, here; FPS is just the tip of something, something huge, I know it, I can feel it.” I pat my chest. “I feel it here. It’s something big and dark and horrible, and I want you by my side when I face it. I need you. Please don’t piss out on me now.”

There’s a pause, and the expression on Aleksei’s face is blank and unreadable.

“Are we … Do you really want me around?”

Oh, for christsakes.

“Aleksei. Why the hell do you think I buy you things all the time? Why do you think I invite you everywhere with me? Why do I let you stay at my place, and stick by me all the time even though you got that stupid suit on? Why do you think I read to you, and explain movies to you, and always ask for your opinions about shit? You’re my best friend, Aleksei. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

I had my eyes closed for the last bit, really concentrating, forcing the words out; it’s always been hard for me to express emotions, you know, do the “sharing feelings” pussy bullshit, but … you know … sometimes you got to do what you got to do. And fuck you if you’re gonna judge me for it.

When I open my eyes, Aleksei is crying.

Weeping, really.

Sobbing.

He swings his arm and swipes the table between us up into the air, through the plate glass window that serves as the store’s front, and then embraces me in those enormous gray arms. The table bounces off the front of a Toyota Camry driving out on the street, and it swerves and crashes into a tree.

“I love you, Herman!” Aleksei says, still sobbing, my bandaged nose aching as it’s shoved into his rock-hard chest, the air squeezed out of me.

“Aleksei. Can’t breathe.”

“I’m sorry I said those things! I think you’re a great superhero!”

“Crushing me.”

“I don’t want you to commit suicide again!”

“Aiiiirrrrr.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Aleksei sets me down, and I gasp in air. He just sits there smiling at me, then sniffles, and wipes his running nose.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m ready. What do we do now?”

That’s the Aleksei I know; always up for the next step. Now, let’s hope he agrees to what I want.

Better approach this gingerly.

“I want to get your mind read.”

Okay, so operation “Approach Gingerly” is officially a fucking failure.

“What?” Aleksei says, nervous. “Why?”

“Aleksei …” I say, plotting my words; I have to lay this out reasonably. It is, after all, a pretty big favor to ask. “You’ve said some very strange things recently, and I want to try to understand. I feel like a mind reader might help me do that. We don’t have to do it, but I feel like it would probably be for the best. What do you think?”

Aleksei ponders this, stirring his melted ice cream. He loves being asked what he thinks; loves being asked questions of any type, really. In his life, he hasn’t had a lot of that. People usually just order him around, and he usually just listens.

But now that I’ve gone and spilled the beans about him being my best friend, ordering him around ain’t going to fly anymore.

Fuck.

The guy who was driving the crashed Toyota Camry shouts at us from out on the street, at what he figures is a safe distance.

‘“HEY! WHO THE FUCK IS GOING TO PAY FOR —”

“GUTS!” I shriek, leaping towards him. “DELICIOUS GUTS! GIVE ME YOUR WARM INSIDES!”

The guy turns and starts to run towards his car, but I give chase.

“I WANT TO DRINK YOUR BLOOD! EAT YOUR SKIN! MAKE A NECKLACE OF YOUR FINGERNAILS!”

The guy tries to get in his car, finds that it’s locked, and tears down off the street, no destination in mind, just hauling ass away from the Crazy Bald Cannibal Jew From Baskin Robbins.

“RAAAAAAAAAAAH! INTESTINES! LIVER!” I shout after him; I want to say more, but it’s all I can manage before Aleksei’s infectious rumbling laughter spreads to me, and I start cracking up out in the middle of the street.

“Okay,” Aleksei says after I’ve recovered and plopped back down across from him in the now empty shop; even the “metacelebrity” gawkers fled after Aleksei put the table through the window.

“Okay what?” I say, baffled.

“Okay I’ll get my mind read. I ain’t never had it done before, so it should be fun, right?”

“Right. Fun,” I say, smiling.

That night in the Tube, I make an appointment with a mutant woman in the Bronx I find in the Yellow Pages for twelve o’clock the next morning, and go to bed.

I sleep fitfully; I keep having dreams of a dragonfly, elegant and beautiful, landing on my face. But the legs are hypodermic needles, and they sink into my skin and inject me with something, and then I’m up on that horrible crucifix thing, penetrated in dozens of places by those hideous rods, screaming for help.

But no one comes, of course.

And I hear my father laughing.

At one point I get up to go to the bathroom, and I see Aleksei shuffling around in the darkness down in the lobby. It takes me a moment to realize what he’s doing; he’s gone to another room, gotten a small lamp, and now he’s spooling out extension cord to the outlets in the lobby. He goes back into his dark room, and I see the faint yellow glow of the old lamp click on. There’s a noise of happy contentment, and then I hear his enormous body fall down onto the huge stack of mattresses I’ve set up for him as a bed.

A night light. I should have known.

The next morning, I wake up tired. The walk down the grand spiral staircase to the lobby and the showers seems like a stumbling eternity, and when I reach the bottom I’m tempted to just go back to sleep on the couch.

The showers of the Tube are always a little creepy; there’s no single shower, just an old-style big communal room with faucets set high on the walls. I turn every faucet on high, and let the whole place steam up. There’s never any water pressure, so I always have to sit on the floor and let the water just pour down onto my head.

I pack up the Shocker suit in its quick-draw case (special made by the Tinkerer, originally for the mobster metacriminals of the 1940s), and wake up Aleksei.

I try to make him bacon omelets but only end up with a burnt, smelly mess.

Which Aleksei eats anyway, of course.

We’re very quiet throughout all of this, or at least I am; I’m still trying to regain some dignity after yesterday’s outpouring of emotion. That was a seriously long-ass day; Reed Richards and a shaved head to start, and weeping openly in an ice cream store to finish.

That’s the problem with time, with temporal continuity in general in the life of a meta-person (though I suppose I’m only a meta by proxy). Sometimes everything lasts forever, every minute an epic, every second six sentences long. But then other times hours, even days might pass with nothing even vaguely interesting happening, and they speed by under your nose.

Keeping track of time’s passage relative to your life becomes impossible.

For example: I woke up at nine fifteen this morning. Now it’s twelve o’five, and we’re probably going to be late for our appointment with the mutie lady.

But look; from the sentence “The next morning, I wake up tired,” it’s been three hundred eleven words.

That’s three hundred and eleven words for nearly three hours.

But earlier, my whole conversation with Aleksei in the coffee shop was one thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven words.

And you know how long that was? Ten minutes, maybe twelve. Maybe even less.

Starting to see what I’m saying here?

And it’s not just me. Otto Octavius and I actually had a pretty lengthy discussion about this back when we were still palling around, before Otto finally went totally nutzoid.

Sometimes I wonder if Spider-Man ever wakes up and wonders how old he is; how much time has passed since he became Spider-Man.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us can.

Before we head out the door, I open my quick-draw case and detach one of the Shocker suit’s sleeves, sliding it over my left arm, vacuum-sealing it on and then pulling on the gauntlet.

Despite my whole “Herman Schultz is safe, the Shocker is dangerous” theory, I can’t take any risks. I kept getting the chills yesterday whenever we hit surface streets; I don’t think it was so much that I wasn’t in costume.

I think they just liked to watch me squirm.

In all seriousness, I can’t figure out why I’m not dead yet as is. I mean, if FPS is so powerful, if it’s “so much bigger” and goes “so much deeper” than I know, why can’t they just have some sniper put a neat little hole in my head as soon as cross the street?

The problem starts to shake.

There wouldn’t be that much fanfare for a fad fifteen minutes of fame Super-Villain-Turned-Hero, would there?

And as we’re heading out onto the street, I come upon a very probable answer to all this: I’ve been making waves. If they kill me in such an untidy manner, or even try to “disappear” me at this point, people will be asking questions.

People like Robbie Robertson, J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker, Tony Stark and, lest I forget, Reed fucking Richards.

People who, with the exception of Parker, can’t be disappeared very easily. Sure, you’re giving the Shocker and Rhino a hell of a time, but I dare you motherfuckers to go head-to-head with New York’s most widely read newspaper, Iron Man, War-Machine, and the Fantastic freaking Four.

Let’s see how “deep” you shitkickers go then, eh?

The woman grimaces, blinking all three of her eyes at us.

We’re in the waiting room of the private office of “Miss Peelo Petrillo,” the mind-reading mutant who I found in the Yellow Pages. Lucky me, the place looks like it’s going to be pretty cheap; the “waiting room” is really just the foyer of her large (but very cluttered) two-room apartment. The “private office” which the little three-eyed troll of a woman just emerged from must be her living room.

Ooh, how mystical.

“Herman Schultz and Aleksei Sytsevich?” she asks.

“Unfortunately,” I say, and stand up; Aleksei, who’s been leaning against the wall, moves away to reveal that he’s left a fair-sized “Alekseiprint” in the plaster. “It’s okay,” I say as the woman starts to speak. “I’ll pay for that.”

She sighs, and beckons us into, surprise surprise, her messy living room. Aleksei plops down on the couch, whilst I remain standing, nervously fiddling with the cuffs of my jacket. Miss Peelo wanders into the next room, tidying something up into a different sort of mess, and my big friend clears his throat loudly.

“This isn’t going to hurt,” Aleksei says, making the statement loudly and boldly. There’s a pause as his words settle, and then he fidgets and booms out: “This isn’t going to hurt or be very scary at all.”

He keeps a look of macho bravado on his face, but his little eyes nervously flick to me for a moment, and I realize what he’s looking for.

“That’s right,” I say, smiling at him. “This is just gonna be fun. No pain, no fear; it’ll be like riding a roller coaster, or trying a new kind of food.”

“That’s right!” Aleksei booms theatrically. “A new kind of food! A new kind of experience!”

We both fall silent, and I see that Aleksei has been gripping the arm of the couch so hard it’s now permanently bent into a kind of surrealist sculptural commentary on the nature of violence. Miss Peelo enters the room, shutting the door behind her, dims the lights, notices the damage to the couch and starts to speak, but before she can get a word out I bark, “I’ll pay for that.”

She smiles at me; it’s a weird, hesitant smile, like we’re on a blind date.

“A lot of people have been thinking of you, Mister Schultz.”

“Oh?” I say, totally unprepared for this conversation.

“Oh, yes.”

She smiles.

“Nothing bad, I hope,” I say, trying to be charming.

She just goes right on smiling as she says:

“Well, it seems an awful lot of them want to kill you.”

“Sucks for them,” I say, and force myself to relax. “Can we get down to business?”

Miss Peelo nods, and sits down at the table, motioning for Aleksei to sit across from her. He does, and to my surprise the chair, less than half the size of his ass, holds up.

“How’s this gonna work?” I say, asking Aleksei’s questions for him.

“Well,” Miss Peelo says, taking out a contract. “First the subject, that’s you, Aleksei, signs here, and then I sign here. Read it over if you want.”

I read the contract; it’s all pretty standard stuff, the sort of thing they make you sign when you see a shrink in prison, mainly focusing on the fact that, if Miss Peelo breaks confidentiality in any way, we can sue her.

Although I’m sure she realizes that, as super-villains at large, we have little time for court cases.

We have much quicker, if perhaps less savage, methods of revenge.

Aleksei signs, Peelo signs, and then she takes his hand, smiles at him warmly and looks to me.

“All right, here’s how this works: I’m what’s commonly referred to as a Class Two Telepath, meaning that I can witness, review and examine nearly any thought or memory in my subject’s psyche, including subconscious catalogues of dreams, daydreams, repressed memories and distant memories, though I cannot influence them in the slightest. I am incapable of planting false memories, effecting decisions, altering real memories, or even controlling motor functions. You won’t feel anything while I’m in your head, Mr. Sytsevich, but you may hear a very strong humming in your left ear, and faint voices in your right. You may also experience temporary but complete loss of vision, and a strange taste in your mouth. I’ve been told it’s rather like copper. Do you understand everything I’ve said so far?”

She waits, and after a moment Aleksei glances at me. I shoot him the thumbs-up. The side of that big, thin-lipped mouth twitches in a partial smile, and he turns back to Miss Peelo and nods.

“Yes. I understand.”

She continues.

“It would help me if you could give me some specific words or images to search for, as this would allow me to move with purpose.”

I take the list I made on the way here out of my pocket; they did something like this to me when I was in the Archimedes Center For Extraordinary Criminals (TACFEC, better known to the underworld as the Tuck’n’Fuck), so I’m familiar with the process.

The List Reads:

CSA

Commission for Superhuman Activities

Ross

Haywerth

Slinkard

FPS

First Person Shooter

KGB

Arcade

Suit Analysis (RECENT MEMORY)

“Oh, excellent,” she says, glancing over the list. “This’ll make it much easier. Shave four hours off at least.”

“Four hours?” I blurt out. “How long is this going to take?”

“Well, eight is the standard, but now, probably about four, maybe three, maybe five. Depends on how deep this stuff is hidden.”

There’s a silence, and then Aleksei speaks up.

“Whenever he asks me questions about it, it gives me a headache. After you walk on my brain, does that mean I won’t have a headache brain anymore, and now I’ll like, get headaches in my stomach?”

There’s a silence, and then Aleksei adds: “Because those wouldn’t be headaches. Those would be stomach aches.”

Miss Peelo stares at me, and I shrug. Aleksei is Aleksei, and there’s not much anybody can do to change that.

“I’ll get started, then,” she says, fixing her hair. “Try to relax.” Miss Peelo closes her eyes, furrows her brow, and then a very strange thing happens:

A tendril of what looks like pink energy begins to extend from her forehead.

“Ooh, Herman, look at the shiny thing,” Aleksei says, truly dropping into toddler mode. Shiny things often have this effect on him.

The tendril wavers, whips about a bit, and then dives across the table and into the corner of Aleksei’s left eye. He grunts, his eyes roll backwards up into his head, and he passes out.

The room is quiet.

I stand there staring at the two of them for well over an hour before my antsiness gets the better of me. I set a Vibro-Mine down on the table; if anything in this room moves over nineteen miles an hour, like say an intruder, a fist or a bullet, the mine will fire out sixteen level ones in all directions. More then enough to take down a normal person, but to Aleksei it’ll just be a wake-up call.

Thinking better of it, I set six more.

I am not losing him.

Two walks around the block, an issue of GQ and a Scientific Weekly Digest and exactly two hours later, I head back to Miss Peelo’s offices on the fifth floor of her Bronx apartment building.

The elevator ride up is uneventful until it stops at four.

I groan; all of this was supposed to go quickly; I mean, I didn’t think this chick would be Charles Xavier or anything, but come on, five hours? Aleksei’s brain can’t be that big of a place; I imagine, if minds were houses, it would look somewhat like double-wide trailer.

The elevator doors open, and an enormous metal scorpion tale whips in; I duck, and it buries its enormous scythe blade in the wall behind me.

The sheer fact that I managed to duck it amazes me for a moment, just long enough for a steel-toed boot to kick me straight in the shoulder, knocking me on my ass.

“FUCK!” I scream, and grab the boot, yanking as hard as I can, dragging my assailant into the elevator with me, even though I’m still on the ground.

My attacker is a blur of black and silver, as blades on both her wrists and elbows slice through my clothes and tear my skin.

This is Elaine Colls.

Scorpia.

Assassin, street thug and cold, hard bitch.

“Elaine, Christ!” I scream, and shove my forearm up under her jaw and use my leverage to spring up from the ground and drive the back of her skull into the elevator panel.

The doors close, and I duck around her, giving her a solid punch in the back of the head, and then shove her forward as hard as I can, knocking her into the wall her tail is still stuck in.

The elevator starts going up, and Elaine rips her tail free of the wall and flicks it at me, but we’re in such tight quarters it just sparks off the closed doors, and I juke around it and catch her with a hard left in the nose, following it by shoving both hands on top of her head and banging her jaw off my knee.

I feel the teeth crack against one another, even through my clothed knee-cap.

She drops to her knees, clutching her face, and whips the tail at me again; it cuts me pretty good this time, leaving a three-inch gash on my left thigh.

“There you go, pigfucker!” she screeches in her Hell’s Kitchen accent. No FPS here; Elaine is doing this for the cash.

“Aghh!” I say, always the poet, and drop to one knee, hitting her with a pretty serious haymaker as I fall. She topples over onto her back, and her tail comes flying up from between her legs like some kind of nightmare penis, and I manage to jerk my head back before she can turn me into Herman the Headless Wonder.

It’s at this point that I pull back the left sleeve of my jacket, revealing the very distinct yellow quilted pattern underneath.

I grab the tail as it lunges at me again, kick both legs into it and pin it against the wall with my feet, lying on the floor of the elevator nearly on top of Elaine, who snarls and slashes wildly at me with a wrist blade. I roll out of the way, but it forces me to release the tail, which curls backward into an S-shape.

The classic Death-Strike position.

It comes at me so hard that, had it hit my flesh, it would’ve punched straight through my body, leaving me shishkebabed.

Instead, I lift my left arm, and the Shocker-sleeve absorbs the impact.

I can’t believe that worked.

No pause this time, though: I wrap my arm around the tip of the tail, grapevining it, and vibrate the sleeve on a level three. The tail spasms violently as the vibration travels down it to Elaine, who’s hit so hard by the vibe that she’s actually slammed against the opposite wall of the elevator. I yank as hard as I can, and under the stress of the vibrations, the tail rips in half.

Boofuckinyeah, bitch! Mess with the bull and you get the —

Elaine throws herself onto me and punches any kind of bravado out of my head, leaving me with only a vague recollection of back when she and I served on a particularly pathetic version of the Sinister Six. I remember her saying the suit enhanced her strength by five hundred percent.

That was probably an exaggeration, but not by much; I feel like I just took a punch from Spider-Man. And trust me, that’s no fun.

Seeing stars, I go into auto-pilot as she presses the attack; I’m barely dodging the blades now, and she finally shoves me against the wall of the elevator and swings in with a wrist blade, aiming to perform a rather unprofessional lobotomy. Instead of ducking or trying to dodge, I lift the severed scythe blade-tip of the tail I still hold, and, vibrating it on level two, slice off her arm at the elbow.

The result is a hot spurt of blood directly into my face, and I fall out of the way as Elaine’s momentum carries her forward, causing her to drive her new, spouting stump into the wall. The impact is hard to watch.

She collapses forward, leaning heavily on the bronze safety railing, staring numbly through those stupid goggles at her severed arm, not comprehending. The walls of the elevator are splattered with blood, and the floor is starting to flood a little. I stand up, retreating three feet to the other side of the elevator, biting my lip and putting pressure on the slice on my thigh, breathing hard; I’m not used to super-combat like this without the suit.

All things considered, I think I did pretty fucking well, yeah?

The elevator dings, and the doors open, revealing two old ladies.

They look at us, their eyes wide behind Coke-bottle thick glasses.

I grin bloodily at them.

“Bitch wouldn’t cook me dinner,” I say. One of the old ladies faints, landing on her back so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if she broke something. The other just quietly says:

“We’ll take the next one.”

The doors slide closed, and the elevator starts to ascend again. We go past fifteen, the highest floor, which means somebody pressed the button for the roof.

Which probably means more trouble.

I look to Elaine, who hasn’t moved or spoken in at least the last thirty seconds.

“You’re feeling pretty fucking stupid right about now, eh babe?” I say, gloating a little. I do an imitation of her accent, to drive home the point: “Ooh, lookame, second version villain, blades all over me, looking hot, Shocker’s gonna be easy pickings — whoops, my arm!”

Elaine just stares at me, her face paling from blood loss, and she slowly sinks to her knees.

On a hopeful whim, I press the “Lobby” button. If we can get down there without any trouble, I can get Elaine to a hospital before she —

The doors explode inward in a blue blaze, knocking us both on our backs.

Blue light.

Great. Eddie the Eel and his gargantuan girl-pal. Just what I needed.

Daylight streams into the elevator, and Blitz is framed quite elegantly by the blue sky. She grabs me by the collar and hurls me out onto the roof. I land flat on my chest, in the process making the unpleasant discovery that the roof is one of those old-fashioned deals where the top is tarred and covered in loose gravel, some of which rips through my shirt and into my skin.

“Nowhere to run now, Herman,” Eddie says from where he stands atop an air-conditioning unit. I pick up a handful of gravel and roll over. “Nowhere to —”

Ever seen two dozen tiny, awkwardly shaped stones vibrated into a man’s face and chest?

Well, I just did, and let me tell you, it’s a thing of fucking beauty.

Eddie flies off the air-conditioning backwards into the concrete ledge on the side of the building, bounces off with his already bullet-wounded shoulder and crashes headfirst into the gravel, his Eel-suit sparking and burning now that the gravel has penetrated the insulation.

I’m pretty proud of myself for a moment, and then Blitz picks me up and punches me in the stomach. It feels like a miniature sledge-hammer connecting with my guts, and I feel my organs shift agonizingly around her fist.

“Urgle,” I say, and then throw up all over her.

She takes a pause to wipe the vomit off her face, and then cocks back a fist and goes to punch me in my already very broken nose. This will drive splinters deeply into my brain, killing me, if my face doesn’t just fold clean in half around that super-strong fist.

And I’m too goddamn disoriented to do anything about it.

Well …

Shit.

Blitz smiles, but then flinches as a lasso closes around her punching arm, tightening into a knot on her elbow. Another flies up and goes around her neck, noosing her, and then both are pulled violently backwards.

“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-haa!” a shrill male voice screams as Blitz is lifted up and away from me, across the rooftop, past a little guy in a cowboy hat (who’s holding the lassos) and into an enormous fist to the face, which flips her twice in the air before she goes tits-first into the roof.

Ronnie “Ox” Bloch, owner of the huge fist, sends an equally huge boot into the side of her head, knocking her out, and then smiles at Jack “Montana” Brice, owner of the lassos.

Eddie forces himself to his feet, wrecked costume and all, and throws himself at me, only to get a neat series of snap-kicks into his exposed chest from “Fancy” Dan Brito. Who then leaps into a crescent kick that knocks Eddie down, and I’m pretty sure out.

“Moron,” Fancy Dan says, cracking his knuckles. “If anyone is picking up this bounty, it’s us. The real Enforcers! We’ll be the ones to kill Herman Schultz!”

He says all this loudly, theatrically, which is weird considering I’ve always known Dan to be a pretty soft-spoken guy.

I take off towards the elevator shaft; trying to take on old pros like the Enforcers without my suit would be suicide.

A lasso lariats around my legs, and I’m thrown onto my back, and dragged into the utility staircase, where Montana is already waiting. Ox and Fancy Dan are heading across the roof to join us inside, but Montana just stands there, staring at me, and I take the opportunity to hit him with a clean level three in the chest, which picks him up and throws him down the flight of stairs behind him.

“Oh, son of a bitch!” Ox shouts, sounding strangely frustrated as he dives into the stairs-shed and catches a level three in the shoulder; it flips him up over the security railing and he drops ten feet down to the next floor, landing with a nice loud THUD.

Fancy Dan is next, and I’m launching level fours at him; you can’t take any risks with this guy.

I can’t keep this up for long. So, this is how it ends, murdered by men I used to consider as some of my best friends.

“Herman,” Dan shouts as jukes and jives around my blasts. “Will you please —” He pops up in front of me, swings up a leg and pins me against the wall by my neck, his leg extended in one of those crazy Bruce Lee positions. “— calm the FUCK down!”

We stand there like that, me panting and sweating, him looking more annoyed than anything else.

“Jack?” He calls over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off me. “You okay?”

Montana groans from the bottom of the stairs as he stands up.

“Christ, Herman, what was that? One of your level threes?”

“Yeah,” I whisper.

“On an unarmored guy?” He rubs his back, pained. “Jesus. And down a flight of gawdamn stairs, it just ain’t right, buddy.’

“Ronnie?” Dan shouts over the terrace.

There’s a pained grunt from below.

“Damn it all to hell!” Ronnie’s British accent moans. “My teeth are still chattering in my bloody head, and I think I twisted my ankle.” I hear the seven-foot-two, four-hundred-and-fifty-pounder stir down at the landing. “Damn it all!” he says, louder, but less angry and more amused.

Dan slowly lowers his leg, and then smiles at me, his pencil-thin mustache curving in the way all pencil-thin mustaches should. He claps me on the shoulder.

“Herman fucking Schultz!” he says, and then embraces me, and I find myself hugging him back. “It’s been too long, you crazy Hebrew Hellion!”

The Hebrew Hellion. The sad thing is, in this world, I’m sure there’s someone out there who calls himself that and thinks it’s the baddest shit on the planet.

“Now tell me, man …” Dan says, still smiling. “Why is it that every skeezy criminal jackwipe in New York City wants you dead?”

Thirty-five minutes and a great deal of explaining later, we’re chowing down on a pizza we ordered from a shop up the block, sitting around in the “waiting room” of Miss Peelo’s apartment.

“I still don’t get it,” Montana says. “If he can open spots anywhere, without even being there, how come they don’t just open one up next to you, throw some dynamite through and blow y’all to smithereens?”

“I don’t know,” I say through a mouth of pepperoni, and then, after swallowing: “Thing is, I don’t remember Jonny even being able to do that. They must have found a way to enhance his power, but maybe they can’t send physical objects through anymore … Only energy.”

“Is that how you think they’re doing it?” Fancy Dan, always the smart one, says. “Transmitting some kind of short range mind-control beam through the Spots?”

“That’s my theory, yeah,” I say, and Dan nods.

“Makes sense.”

“American pizza tastes like rat-bollocks,” Ronnie says, taking another bite of his pepperoni. “If we could get out of here, maybe go to Manhattan, we could get some real food.”

“Then why don’t we?” I say, smiling. “Aleksei’s got at least another hour in here.”

It would be good to get out with the guys again, like the old days. Back before I realized how unhappy I was. Back when I was still a soft-spoken, safe-cracking street thug.

I first met Fancy Dan, where else, under the employ of the Kingpin. When I told Fisk I wasn’t willing to kill anyone, though I had no problem with non-lethal violence, he laughed and said that everyone these days was trying to be a superhero, and brought in Dan Brito.

Dan’s a slim Southerner with a penchant for dressing like a 1920s dandy and drinking a little too heavily. He’s got a rather unique back-story: see, much like me, Dan was raised by a father who was determined that he learned to … ahem … “defend” himself. But instead of hiring gang members and hobos to beat him down on a regular basis, like my father did for me, Old Man Brito took a different approach.

Through years of rigorous, abusive training, he forced his son to very literally invent a style of martial arts. Dan calls it Mississipi Fu, and it’s the kind of flip-kicking, neck-chopping, pressure-point shattering shit that allows a normal human like Dan to take on a freak like Spider-Man.

You might not believe it, but I’ve seen him in action against heavy rep hitters like Iron Fist, Task-Master and even the Ghost Rider, and let me say flat-out:

“Fancy” Dan Brito is not the guy you want to fuck with.

Kingpin hooked us up because we had something in common; we both refused to kill. Oh, Dan’ll beat you down all right, kick you within an inch of your life, but he’s got this weird thing about killing; not so much a moral thing, more physiological.

Let’s say this plain: Whenever Dan sees a person killed, he pukes.

Like a fountain.

He says it’s his nerves.

Dan and I tooled around doing the protection racket/mansion burglary/bank robbery thing, but Dan always wanted more.

He had a vision.

The idea was a well-balanced, tightly-knit group of mercenaries who could quickly, easily, and most important, very brutally carry out any job a paying party asked them to.

Just as long as it didn’t involve any body’s heart stopping.

At first, no one took him seriously. But then one cold blustery night in June, Dan took down a super-strong, sword-wielding, energy-blasting hero named El Aguila (The Eagle) in hand-to-hand combat, and the crime families of New York stopped looking down their noses.

Two weeks later, Dan and lasso-savant Jackson “Montana” Brice fought off the Punisher when he tried to pull a hit on Kingpin’s consiglieri.

Now, keep in mind, they didn’t beat the Punisher by any stretch of the imagination.

But they fought him, and managed to keep up with him and stay alive until he ran out of bullets and retreated.

And that was more than enough.

That day, street legends were born.

The Enforcers had stepped onto the scene.

Ronnie didn’t join till later; originally they had a big brute of a guy named Raymond, who got high on LSD one night and tried to fight Captain America.

Things didn’t work out too well for Raymond.

“Sorry, Herman,” Dan says, stroking the side of Aleksei’s big unconscious head. “I’m afraid we can’t. Can’t go anywhere with you, as a matter of fact.”

I reach under the table and flip on my gauntlet; I should’ve known, I should’ve fucking known. They didn’t want to take me head on, wanted to toy with me a little and …

Dan smiles at Aleksei, a smile so sincere and so sad I actually go ahead and turn the gauntlet off. Liars don’t smile like that at Aleksei; not even the very, very good ones. He turns to me.

“Nothing like that, don’t worry,” he says. “We just can’t risk being seen. As far as we know you’re not being followed, but we know that Hammerhead sent some guys to keep an eye on us.”

“Wait, Hammerhead? How’s he fit in?” I say, confused. Hammerhead’s a mob guy; I thought FPS was a rich boy’s game … Or maybe a government conspiracy, or … It’s hard to keep it all straight.

“Well …” Dan says, smiling. “That’s a little awkward.”

Ox smiles. “He hired us for some guy named ‘Cerada,’ a bigwig, tons of bread.” He chuckles. “We got a contract on your life, mate. We’re supposed to be killing yah.” He laughs, but the neurons in my brain are firing, vibrating the problem. “Doing a piss-poor job of it, if you ask me.”

So the CSA, or someone with access to equipment from the CSA, has hired Arcade to run FPS. When I show up and things start going off the tracks, Arcade uses Venom to destroy the body, and I fuck that up, too. Arcade starts trying to off me, first using FPS villains, making it part of the game, trying to keep things running smoothly.

But when I fuck things up further by being more than some rich Video-Game kids can handle, and end up with a front-page cover on the Daily Bugle, Arcade gets desperate, and starts going through Hammerhead to hire pros like the New Enforcers to take me out.

Why Arcade doesn’t go to the people above him, whoever they are, I don’t know.

How he got involved, I don’t know.

How the Spot fits in, I don’t know.

How the spots work, I don’t know.

How CSA is involved, I don’t know.

The list goes on.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Montana raises his can of Dr Pepper. “Here’s to a piss-poor job.”

We all knock cans, and then a thought strikes.

“How’re you going to explain it? What’re you going to say happened?”

Dan grins.

“Well, we had him, right?” he starts, an angry look on his face, gesturing wildly. “We beat out Lavelli and his big bitch, and we chased the Shocker into the building, and the fucker just opened up on us!”

“I got hit square in the chest!” Montana squeals, lifting up his vest to reveal the massive purple-blue welt forming on his solar-plexus.

“Bugger hit me in the shoulder and knocked me off a balcony!”

“By the time I got in there,” Dan continues, “he was already gone. We must’ve searched the building, thirty, forty minutes, couldn’t find a damn thing.”

He smiles.

“Isn’t that right, guys?”

“Damn straight,” Montana says, and growls. “I get my hands on him, he’s a dead man.”

“He’s a clever bastard, he is,” Ronnie says, and winks at me.

Dan checks his custom watch fob, and grimaces.

“And on that note, we better get kicking, kids. They’ll come in looking for us soon.”

The Enforcers head out, and again I’m left sitting with an unconscious Aleksei and the still-silent Miss Peelo, who must be in some kind of psychic catatonia, the shimmering purple tendril stretching between them.

After fifteen minutes, Aleksei stirs, and the tendril shatters apart. Miss Peelo opens her eyes, and blinks a couple of times.

“Kitchen appliances!” Aleksei shouts, snapping awake, and then immediately claps a hand to his forehead, locking the other one on my shoulder for support. “Oh, Herman. I got such a fucking headache …”

Miss Peelo hasn’t moved, just sits there, staring straight ahead.

“Answers?” I say to her, my voice a little high with anticipation.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” she whispers. Really whispers, the kind of tone people use when they’re being stalked in the dark. She looks at me, blinking all three of her eyes. “But I’m pretty fucking sure you won’t like what I’ve got.”

Here we go.

I’m practically holding my breath.

Avatars, Part Seven

They say you only use ten percent of your brain.

Some people claim that geniuses, like Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom, use up to thirty.

I always thought Aleksei used about four, leaving the remaining six percent open for those bursts of clarity he sometimes has.

I was wrong. He was using the rest for storage.

In a single hour, Miss Peelo tells me more than I ever wanted to know about Aleksei Mikhail Sytsevich; a lot of it is stuff I had inclinations of already, but then there’s oddball shit that throws me for a loop.

For instance:

Did you know that last year, while I was doing high-pay vault jobs in Europe, Aleksei underwent a brain surgery that boosted his intelligence by five hundred percent? He beat Spider-Man, turned into a crime-lord, read all the classics of Russian literature and poetry in less than three weeks.

The operation went bad, though; Aleksei began to go through fits of depression, sometimes pushing him near to suicide. So Aleksei did the Aleksei thing to do and had the operation reversed, dropping his IQ down like a barometer in an ice storm.

Everyone believed the depression to be a side-effect of the operation, but Miss Peelo’s reading of Aleksei’s mind tells a different story.

Apparently, Aleksei did some kind of high tech CAT-scan on himself, and uncovered a portion of his brain had been locked off; psychically blocked. Aleksei, with his new super-genius brain, opened it up.

Apparently, he didn’t like what he found.

Miss Peelo says that he hit himself with some kind of home-made neurochemical Molotov cocktail; a good portion of these hidden memories, and even the memories regarding them, were physically scorched out of existence.

Then he went under the needle, and he was plain dumb old Aleksei again.

No memories of being a genius.

No memories of whatever he found in that thick gray brain of his.

Just shreds.

“All lies,” Miss Peelo says, her eyes closed, focusing, as though reading from a book.

“Excuse me?”

“It says ‘All Lies. Everything is a lie.’ It’s just a shred, but mentally it’s hooked into a good three-fourths of the destroyed memories.”

Huh.

Well, that helps.

“Miss Peelo, I can’t help but say that ‘it’s all lies’ is a pretty fucking average thought. Everyone thinks that at some point; about society, about love, or —”

“No,” Miss Peelo says simply. “Not like this.”

“Um … Oh?” I say, chastised.

“This thought, this single slice of comprehension, it meant something very important to your friend Aleksei. I told you; it has silent links to almost every worthwhile memory that’s been wiped.”

“Silent links?” I say. “You can see that? Like connections between thoughts?”

She smiles.

“To me, a psyche is laid out like a computer interface; there are deleted files, but nothing is ever gone. Not really gone.”

Mutants are so fucking cool sometimes.

“What’s it linked to that you can see? Can you recover anything?”

She’s silent for a moment, concentrating.

“One thing.”

“Yeah?”

“An image.”

I wait, give up, and say “… Yeah?”

“Here,” she says, and presses a finger to her forehead. The shimmering pink tendril snakes out of her eye again, and widens into a kind of soft-light projection beam onto the wall; it’s like she’s showing me slides of her summer vacation.

The image itself is so blurry and marred that at first I can’t tell what’s going on at all. Then the image tightens up a little; it’s like a photograph with a wavy line down the middle, taken through a smudged lense. So, this is what a memory looks like.

I can’t say I’m terribly impressed.

The picture shows a very bright light shining directly at the viewer, almost totally concealing the figure of a man who appears to be a professional surgeon, holding some kind of hose. The hose disappears off to the right edge of the picture, and looks to be either pumping or draining something gray-black.

“The suit,” I whisper, louder than I mean to.

“What?” Miss Peelo says, and the image flickers for a moment.

“That thing, that gray thing on his skin,” I say, waving a hand at the still slumbering Aleksei. “This must be a memory from when they were putting it on … Wait … What’s that?”

It catches my eye, and I realize that it’s exactly the sort of thing most people wouldn’t give a second thought; in the protective glasses of the surgeon, a small white reflection stands out.

“What’s what?” she says, and opens her eyes a little.

“That thing in the glasses. The white thing.” I tap its place on the wall. “Here. Can you magnify that?”

“Mr. Schultz, you have to understand, I can only enhance the memory so much; it is damaged after all, and —”

“Can you do it or not?”

I say it so quick and hard that she stops dead in her tracks.

“Maybe. Give me a minute.”

The image warps, twists, and then rapidly zooms in, shaking back and forth; it’s as though the picture isn’t a picture, but instead a ten-millisecond clip of a movie.

The white thing in the image is clear; it’s a list, lying on some kind of desk or medical table off to the side of the room, past the arms of what must be several other doctors.

From what I can see of the blurred writing, it reads:

---

OP. CHECKS TODAY:

CREEL, C

BLAZE, J

BANNER, B

VAN DYNE, J

KILLGRAVE, Z

WILLIAMS, S

SALLIS, T.

---

TODAY DIRECT:

SYSTEVICH, A

Codename: BLACK AFRICAN

Proposed Pseudonym: “RHINO, The”

Planned Direction: CRIMINAL

---

“Any idea what that means?” Miss Peelo asks, but my brain is a million miles away, vibrating so hard I actually feel the skin on my face heating up.

“When is this memory from?” I hiss, my teeth clenched together involuntarily.

“Oh, it’s an old one. Fifteen years ago, maybe ever more.”

“Eighteen,” I sputter. “Eighteen years. The day he got the suit.”

Well, I don’t know who J. Blaze or T. Sallis are. But the names I recognize are enough to set dozens of alarms off in my head:

Zebediah Killgrave. Purple Man. The sociopath with the ability to vocally hypnotize in a single sentence.

Carl “Crusher” Creel. The Absorbing Man. Another case of insane power with little ambition, I’ve seen him change to steel and go toe-to-toe with the Hulk without breaking a sweat.

And speaking of the fucking Hulk, there’s Bruce Banner. Everyone’s seen the TV specials, the archival websites; poor Dr. Banner was caught in the radioactive shockwave of the gamma bomb he invented, and thus transformed into a Jekyll-and-Hyde monstrosity, who, still at large, is essentially Public Enemy #1. With over fifty billion dollars worth of property damage behind him (and more than a few lives), the Hulk is one of the A-List players on the metahuman scene.

Janet Van Dyne is one I’m more familiar with from her features in Redbook and Us Weekly than the news. As far as I know, she’s only around because she married Hank Pym, Ant-Man and absolute fucking genius, and he turned her into a superhero who could shrink. Wow, big whoop. Somehow this entitled her to be on the Avengers (but this was back when anyone could join), but she left when the group disassembled.

And I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that S. Williams is none other than Simon Williams, the superhumanly strong Hollywood darling and corporate mouthpiece formerly known as Wonder Man.

These people have nothing in common.

These people have everything in common.

They are not mere mortals. But nor are they gods.

The public sees them as either lovable celebrity freaks or terrifying inhuman monsters. The press sees them as cheap meal tickets, real-life special effects. The assholes who pay FPS see them as avatars, because really, that’s what they are.

The ability to do what others can’t. The ability to invoke a power.

The chance to be relatively unique.

Strip away all humanity, and the power remains.

That’s how FPS sees them; simple avatars for manipulation.

Action Figures.

But whoever’s behind FPS, whoever put the suit on Aleksei …

They view metahumans as something very different.

Not as Avatars.

Maybe not even as humans.

They’re lab rats.

I don’t know what this means.

But it means something, and that’s a goddamn start.

I jot down the entirety of the list on my notepad, and, though she moves on, my brain doesn’t.

“No memories of the night he had his suit analyzed, and no memories of his subsequent rampage. His mind seems to just sort of shut off after arriving at a warehouse in Yonkers.”

“You got an address?” I say.

“Yes, but it won’t help you much. He was just meeting a car.”

“A truck?”

“No, a car.”

A car that could transport Aleksei. That’s a sight to see.

“Show me,” I say, and the pink energy tendril splays out onto the wall again.

I see a dark street through Aleksei’s eyes, and watch as a car approaches; a black sedan, the standard government looking scary-mobile. It pulls up, and I hear what sounds like a faint recording of my friend’s voice saying:

“I dunno if I’m gonna be able to fit in there …”

The back door on the right side swings open, and there is only darkness inside. A voice from beyond says, “Get in.” A big gray arm reaches into the blackness, and everything goes black.

My God. It was a Spot. He stepped into some kind giant spot.

“What about the names I gave you? Did the names get anything at all?” There’s a silence as she thinks, and I do a little sort of retard half-prance around the room.

The Absorbing Man.

The Wasp.

Wonder-Man.

The Hulk.

Purple Man.

The Rhino.

Op. Checks must mean Operation checks, or maybe operative checks? “Proposed” Pseudonym; I thought Aleksei chose Rhino? And as for “Planned Direction” … Jesus. Whoever these people are, when they gave him the suit they knew he was going to use it for his own gain.

Doesn’t quite match up with Aleksei’s story of a KGB experiment gone wrong.

Just what the hell is going on here? When Lavelli said it was “big,” I didn’t take him seriously. But the Incredible Hulk? The Wasp? These aren’t FPS nobodys. These are big kids on the playground.

“Nope,” she says. “The names got nothing. Whoever originally wiped his brain got it spick and span clean; must’ve had absolute professionals. A dozen telepaths, maybe more, working in conjunction with machines and chemicals. It’s only because your friend is a little mentally impaired that I managed to find anything at all. Had we searched another person, a mentally average person, who’d undergone the same treatment …”

“We’d be shit out of luck,” I say, and start forking over the cash.

As I’m ushering a still very groggy Aleksei out the door, a thought strikes me.

“Uh, Miss Peelo …” I say, grabbing onto her list a little too hard as I hand her one hundred thousand in cash. This whole FPS thing has been hell on my Swiss bank accounts. “You might want to … Shit, I don’t know, leave town for a while. There are a lot of people looking for me, and …”

“Shh. It’s okay; nobody is looking for you.”

“Ohrly?” I say, crashing three words together in my spurt of idiot confusion.

“No. These minds that seek you, these very guarded minds, covered in psychic blocks, security locks, and even some mind wipes … Well, they make one thing clear: they don’t need to look; they know exactly where you are at almost all times. They’re just not sure how to go about killing you without causing too much of a fuss.”

Well, that’s not boxer-browning horror-movie shit right there.

Nope, not at all.

She smiles, and her top eye seems to wink at me.

“But I don’t think you’ll need to worry about me, Mr. Schultz. If anyone comes to visit me beckoning after you, I’ll tell them everything I know. Which is really nothing at all, correct?”

It’s nice to know people like Miss Peelo exist.

“Correct,” I say, and try to give her a “good-guy” smile; it comes out as my standard super-villain sneer, and I actually blush a little, ashamed. She just keeps smiling, and gently closes the door.

Aleksei stays quiet on the way home, occasionally peeking at me out of the corner of his eye. I’m thankful for this, because it gives me time to think.

After particularly “stressful” sessions of ritualistic torture thinly disguised as criminal training, my father always used to tell me that the world was changing.

“Herman,” he’d say. “The fish are going to get much bigger and the pond is going to get much smaller. People like you and me, the normal people, the boring people, the insignificant people, we’re coy in a pond of sharks and piranha. You seen those mutant kids on TV? Soon they’ll be robbing banks and killing cops. Soon they’ll own the underworld.

“Soon every mob head, all the old families, will be at the mercy of superhuman criminals. It’ll be mixed for a while, and then, when the shit really hits the fan, people like you and me are going to be obsolete. It’ll just be puppets and puppeteers, more even than now.”

At this point he’d usually give me his drunken grin and say:

“Now stop crying and get me another pack of Luckys. We’ve got a busy day.”

Just how much has the world changed?

There was no “superhero community” when I was born. Just individuals; Captain America and the Invaders, the occasional enemy super-soldier.

And then, boom. Almost overnight, the world is flooded with heroes and villains, cartoon archetypes battling for the fate of humanity, letting humans sit on the sidelines.

As we go down into the sewers, Aleksei speaks up.

“What did you see in there?”

“In where?” I drop down off the ladder, my boots splashing into the raw shit.

“In my head.”

“Well …”

At first I ponder not telling him anything, but then I rethink it; I mean, it is his head, right? And it ain’t like he’s got Down Syndrome or anything; he’s just a little slow.

He listens to me, his big face frowning the whole way.

And when I’m done, to my surprise, he doesn’t ask any questions.

“So you didn’t … I mean, Aleksei, you never even wondered —”

“Herman,” he says, using a tone I’ve never heard Aleksei use before. “When something’s not in your head, feels as though it’s never even been there at all … You can’t question its absence.”

Whoa. Aleksei just correctly used the word “absence.”

“What do you think the list means?” he asks once we’re in the foyer.

“I don’t know yet, Aleksei. I need to think.”

“Do you think it’s connected to FPS and all that?” I roll my eyes, and Aleksei nods, happy, vindicated. “I thought as much. I knew having my mind read was the right thing to do, Herman. I knew it all along!” He smiles about this for a second, and then inspiration strikes him. “I’m gonna go count all the tiles in the downstairs men’s room!”

He notices my reaction, and looks ashamed. “I’m sorry. You wanna help?”

“No, Aleksei,” I say, tossing my jacket onto a vast, empty coat-rack. “I think I’m gonna catch some Z’s. Have fun.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure!” he says, and trundles off towards the smashed doorframe of the men’s room; I had to shatter it to allow Aleksei easy access.

Every once and a while, he has to drain his shit and piss through this tube that he puts in his gooch.

And again it hits me, and it burns me: Who did this to him?

The KGB story at least made sense; looking for an untraceable test subject, they outsourced an American goon, had their fun experimenting on him and, when the results where less than satisfactory, they left him twisting in the wind.

But that list … that doctor …

It changes everything.

Three new messages on the 1980 Sony Box. That’s an all-time high for the Herman Hotline.

I turn on my messages; I don’t actually have a ground-line down here, just an old eight-track answering machine. I guess it’s just me watching my ass, but nonetheless, I got to update the damn thing. It’s not voice-mail; it’s the Voice-Shout-At-One-Another-Across-A-Canyon.

I listen to my messages as I start undressing.

BEEP.

“Herman? I hope I got the number right.” I smile immediately at the voice. That’s Peter Parker. “Look, I’m back in town; I got a little sick, but I’m over it now, and I’m just trying to reconnect with everybody. My number in the Stark Building is 555-138-1212, so just give me a ring and let me know what’s happening. I was thinking maybe we could catch lunch, play spin the bottle, mug an old lady, you know, whatever. Get back to me.”

BEEP.

“Uh, yes, Herman!” Reed Richards practically shouts. “I’m sorry, I’m not terribly used to phones, or leaving messages. I guess that’s ironic in some way but …” The voice fades away for a moment, and then comes back, talking to somebody else, frustrated. “Well I thought we had some kind of speaker phone on the darn thing, Sue, I didn’t know I had to hold it right up to my mouth. Is this close enough?” A silence. “I’m not being sarcastic, I’m just frustrated by this whole, this whole telephone venture.” Another silence, and this time I can clearly hear a woman’s voice faintly talking. “Oh, right! Damn it all! Herman!” He’s back to talking to me, thank God. “I’m just calling to let you know that I’d very much like to give you the test I mentioned, within the week if possible. These gauntlets of yours, the suit; it’s exciting stuff! Sincerely, Reed.”

He signed his answering machine message.

Fucking awesome.

BEEP.

“H … m …” Silence, and then Marty Blank’s lilting, monkey-voice comes through the phone. He’s clearly on enough pain killers to take down Juggernaut, but he’s making a noble effort to speak clearly. “I hope thisss is the right number … Schhuuuuulllltz. I should’ve known, maaan, that when the shit hit the ffffan you’d show up to saaave the day.”

My face is turning red; for some reason I’m getting angry, really truly angry.

Stop it, Marty. “People like yooouuu, Herman … They don’t make many, y’know? You got … something spessshal.”

The only thing I’ve got is apathy, Marty. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

“You’re brrrave. Like a knight. I remember …”

He drifts for a moment, and I pray he drops the hospital phone, or passes out, anything to shut him up.

“I remember,” he continues, and something inside me feels like it’s on fire. It’s like I can’t face the fact that I saved this guy; like my emotions, the ones I’m not supposed to have, are breaking apart. “I remember Max always used to say about you … most of the guys, you know, the boys, they kept going back and fighting Spider … Spider-Man, cuz they were stupid … You know, stupid, and they always thought it was about him and them. And Max said you … You were different. And I met you and he was right. You were like … Like a goddamn … shit, I don’t know. You were so different from the resssssht of us. So fucking … smart.”

Stop it, Marty, stop it. I can’t take it. My fists are squeezed so tight they hurt.

“I saw videossss, man … you were a friggin … machine out there. You saved my life, Ssschhhullltz.” There’s a weak, monkey-chuckle. “I owe you one.”

It beeps, and I’m left, shaking in what feels like anger, shame and panic combined.

It slowly fades, and I start getting ready to sleep; as I pass the big wall mirror in the VIP overnight suite I call my room, I stop dead.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never liked my own naked body. I’m not as heavy as I once was, not as ugly either. But what I see in the mirror is a new low:

The right side of my face is black and red from where Blitz punched me three days ago.

My nose, which I’d hoped was starting to heal, looks rather like a flattened cabbage attacked to my face by a mass of bruises.

My left ear is little more than a ragged lump of torn skin; you can practically see right into my eardrum.

I had put bandages on the gash Elaine left on my leg when I was still in Miss Peelo’s apartment; when you’ve a super-villain, you learn to start carrying heavy bandages everywhere with you. Now they’re dark red and crusty; I can’t tell if the slice underneath has scabbed over, but I doubt it; that tail was sharp, and I worry for a moment that she may’ve hit an artery.

There’s little scabs on my face, chest and arms from where Bullseye hit me with the hooks, and little pale gray bruises cover my torso like polka-dots from the various hits, kicks and falls I’ve taken since going legit. The worst of them is, by far, the one on my stomach from where Blitz punched me when we wound up on the roof.

It’s a warped purple, blue, red and yellow thing that looks like a sort of twisted triangle; there are little red wavy lines coming off it like when someone’s really mad in the comics.

There’s another bad one on my shoulder from where Elaine kicked me, but it can’t compare, and the cuts from where Hydro-Man tried to tear me apart criss-cross my head like a patchwork quilt.

It takes me three seconds longer than it would for any average person to realize that, with my bald head and my new injuries, I look a hell of a lot like a grotesque flesh version of the Shocker mask.

I remember making that thing, hiding it behind the cinder-block walls of my cell, staring at the double-sided lenses over the eye holes, back before I had them bullet-proofed. I remember thinking; this is it.

This is me.

This is the man my father meant me to become.

And now, seeing it inadvertantly torn into my skin, I have no doubts.

Criminal or not … I’m still the Shocker.

Christ, I must’ve looked like a fucking lunatic to Reed Richards; no wonder he didn’t take me seriously. I look like a train wreck.

“Nice butt, Herman,” Felicia says, and I let out this little scream and hop three feet to the left, effectively swinging my flaccid penis at her like a salute. Both hands drop to my crotch, and I stand there awkwardly knock-kneed and suddenly very cold.

“Aleksei let me in. Sorry if I scared you,” she says, playing with her hair. She’s got a long slice up the right side of her face, held closed by a dozen sutures. There’s also a large dark red contusion on her chest, just above her left breast, and a thin laceration that runs from the side of her neck down out of sight under her costume around her armpit.

“Sorry, Herman!” he shouts from downstairs. “I saw her on the screen, and I thought —”

“It’s okay,” I shout.

Felicia smirks, those thick, soft lips parting to reveal just a bit of pearly white teeth.

“I thought you’d say that,” she says, closing the door. “You look like shit.”

“You don’t look much better,” I say, nervously turning my body, trying to somehow make myself less naked. “Felicia …” I say. “What’re you doing here?”

“I told you the other night; I don’t have anywhere to stay.” She looks at the satin king-size and shakes her head. “You’ve been holding out on me, Herman. I didn’t know you had a bed up here.”

“I’ve got a couple of beds, actually. You can have your own room if you want.”

“It’s cool,” she says. “I don’t want. You’re a pretty cuddly guy, sleeping with you should be fine.”

It’s getting harder to hide my penis.

I tuck it between my legs and awkwardly shuffle over to the dresser, where I hurriedly put on a pair of “Thunderbolts!” boxers I stashed here last year.

At this point, they don’t help much.

She rolls over onto her stomach and goes into a glamour girl pose: head supported on her palms, cleavage up so that I can see down the canyon between her breasts, her legs crossed. She reaches into a pocket on her skin-tight suit, and draws out a small white box.

“Get over here, kid,” she says.

“Uh, Felicia, are you …”

She just smiles, and for some reason I’m a little scared.

I mean, I’ve been dreaming about this since … Well, since I met her.

Then she opens the box and most of my hopes fall apart; it’s a medical kit. She peels off the destroyed bandage on my thigh, and starts in on me with the needle.

As she works, she tells me about the last two days.

She hasn’t slept.

She hasn’t eaten.

She’s just been running, rooftop to rooftop; apparently, without a fortress like the Tube to hide in, New York has become a very dangerous place for people who get on the wrong side of FPS.

The wounds are all from a single bout with an assassin called Razorfist. No hands, just blades, apparently. She says she barely got away with her life, and I believe it.

She asks how my meeting Reed went, so I tell her. I tell her about the money and Ohnn’s clue, the White Rabbit and the Punisher. I tell her about Miss Peelo and Elaine, the New and old Enforcers, Hammerhead and Aleksei’s brain.

I tell her the list, and, thank God, she’s got something to say.

“I know who J. Blaze is.”

“You do?”

“Sure. He used to be big in the extreme sports crowd; he was a stunt motorcycle guy, pretty hot shit for a while, and then he just sort of … Vanished.”

“Why would he be on this …” She tucks in the last suture, and I hiss through my teeth. “List?

“Well, that’s the thing; after he disappeared, there was a lot of speculation that he was Ghost-Rider. I guess his name being on the list kind of proves it.” She leans forward so that her entire head is in my groin, and gently kisses the stitches. “All better.”

She flops her body backwards so that her head hits the pillows, and, in one supine motion, wriggles out of her suit, leaving her in a white bra and a thong. Again, it shows how fucking retarded I am that I don’t even look at her body; I’m too busy looking at the gray-blue splotches all over it.

“Jesus, Felicia …” I say, sitting down on the bed next to her and stroking her shoulder a lot more intimately than I’d meant to. “You are fucked up.”

She laughs, and sniffles a little. Her eyes are wet, but not crying.

“Yeah, well, I’m not the one with the nose that looks like a broken puzzle piece.” She’s silent for a moment, and then says quietly: “Herman, could you turn off the light? I mean, I don’t mean to impose, I know it’s only ten, but I —”

“No, it’s cool,” I say, and flip off the lights. “I’m tired anyway.”

I slip under the covers, and feel her climb on top of me, resting her chin on my chest; I can just barely see her hair in the light that comes under the door.

“Herman …”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I left like I did … I feel like I gave you the wrong impression. I wasn’t bailing on you, it’s just —”

“Let me guess: Spider-Man.”

There’s a silence, and she turns her head and rests her ear on my chest.

“I can hear your heartbeat.”

“Yeah. Probably deafening right about now.” I blush a little in the darkness; it’s like she’s carved of soft, smooth stone, and she’s straddling me and pressing her body into mine.

“No …” she says, and sighs happily. “It’s slow. You feel calm.”

“It’s you. I guess you just relax me. It’s funny, ’cause this is the closest I’ve been to a woman in a while.”

I chomp down furiously on my own tongue. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Luckily, she lets it pass without comment.

There’s a silence, and then:

“You ever think we’re in the wrong business?” she says quietly. “So much hatred. So much violence. So much death. So much goddamn drama.”

I smile up into the darkness.

“Felicia …” I say, smelling her hair. “Tell me: Would you rather be in the thick of it, standing in the line of fire … Or would you rather be one of those hapless schmucks blown away by energy-blast cross fire, or running screaming from the Hulk, or realizing that no matter how much TV you watch, no matter how many newspapers you read, you will never, ever, really know what’s going on?”

“You know what?” she says as we both start to drift off to sleep. “Aleksei is right: you are smart.”

The Absorbing Man.

The Wasp.

Wonder-Man.

The Hulk.

Ghost-Rider.

Purple Man.

The Rhino.

Smart, maybe. But not smart enough.

Avatars Finale

My sister and I sat on a park bench, and looked at the gorillas in the Central Park Zoo.

I was twelve.

She was seventeen.

“Do you think Dad is crazy?” I asked her as we watched my father throw baseballs at the gorillas.

“No, Herman,” she said as a ball bounced off the forehead of a furious-looking silverback. “He’s not crazy.”

My father came over, grabbed me under the arms and dragged me screaming towards the edge of the enclosure. “Okay, Herman. Super-strong guys coming at you from all sides. Now, remember, don’t try to fight them, just try to —”

“What are you doing?” I screamed, but not too loudly, my mind already fragile from the “fun” in the vaults of the basement.

“Think of this as a pop-quiz,” he said, laughing merrily.

“General Schultz …” a security guard said, nervously appraising the situation. We never heard “General” back home, so it was always strange when someone would say the full title in public. My father hadn’t been in any wars, had never faced active combat; as far as we knew, he was a crook, a street thug.

At best, a wise-guy.

“Is anything wrong?” the guard said.

“No,” he said. “Everything here is fine.”

One of the gorillas below howled in rage and pain, still clutching its face from where it had been struck by a baseball.

The guard looked from me to my father to the apes and then back to my father, nodded weakly, and began clearing people from the area.

Just before he tossed me over the gates into an enclosure housing eight furious gorillas, I remember my sister saying, very clearly:

“He’s not crazy at all. He’s the devil.”

New York mornings are gray and joyless, the sun boxed out by sky-scrapers, only faint rays of light coming through the buildings, illuminating things you never really wanted to see in the first place.

Hammerhead’s current residence is one of these places.

Last time I saw Hammerhead, he was face-down after a punch from the second-tier superhero called “Darkhawk,” one of Spider-Man’s butt-buddies from back in the day. Hammerhead always was the type to go down easy; I remember one time Spiderfuck webbed his eyes and he actually fled out into the middle of the street and got hit by a car.

This is not Einstein we’re dealing with here.

But it’s not Aleksei either.

Hammerhead (no alias, no “real name”) was always a cold-blooded killer; that much is clear. But at one point in his life, someone, for some reason, thought it would be a good idea to replace the top of his skull with a three-inch-thick, ten-by-ten-inch square of titanium.

I’ll be fucked blue if I know why; sometimes, when I’m meeting these guys, hearing their stories, I just have to sit there and bite my lip.

Because sometimes asking, “Why?” is more trouble than it’s worth.

Whoever did the surgery didn’t care much for the aesthetic aftereffects; the skin of Hammerhead’s face is grotesquely stretched, leaving him looking like he’s had about a million face-lifts. The sides, tops and bottoms of his eyes are pulled back, showing some of that gooey red tissue under the eyelids. His mouth is yanked down into a soft-edged rectangular grimace, the veins to his lips and gums exposed and chapped. His perfectly flat head is covered in stained, strained white skin, with a thin layer of oily black hair prickling up from aggravated follicles.

Bet you’ve never heard him described like that before, eh?

Yeah. The news pretties shit up real nice.

Hammerhead asserted himself as a hit-man and mob enforcer, but, in time, ended up as a prominent figure himself. He was never the head of any important gang, but rather functioned as a kind of facilitator to make a posse run smoothly; always a lieutenant, never a general. What most superheroes don’t realize is that Hammerhead is easily one of the richest “street” villains out there; dude barely ever spends a dime, just piles it into secret accounts, occasionally splurging on 1930s gangster clothes.

The place looks to be just a normal warehouse office, but its vibrant green and white paint feels like live skin stretched over dead flesh.

Bad shit has gone down here.

Not as bad as whatever mind-raping nightmare happened in the White Rabbit’s house, but dark stuff, for sure.

You can feel the death creeping along just beyond the walls.

The gauntlets click on with a warm, welcoming little “vrm.”

Felicia fades into the shadows, and Aleksei and I head to the front door.

“Hold it right there, faggots,” the muscle-bound guard says, raising his Uzi.

Aleksei chuckles to himself.

“Hey, Herman, wanna see something funny?”

“Now isn’t really the time, Aleksei,” I say, trying to keep the we’re-here-to-kick-a-whole-bunch-of-heads-in vibe going.

“No, wait, just watch,” Aleksei says, and steps up to the guard. “Hey, you know it’s two seconds till.”

The big muscle-bound goon cocks his head, confused.

“Two seconds till what?”

Aleksei grabs him by the leg and swings him like a fly swatter, smashing the other guard and taking them both down for the count. Then he swings them both up and through the door, which is smashed

He then turns and gives me a big gray thumbs-up.

Okay, I have to admit; that was pretty fucking funny.

I blast the door off its hinges with a level four, incidentally taking out the three guards rushing towards it from the inside. Seeing non-metas, normal folks, getting vibed by the gauntlets is always a little rough; imagine a person getting hit by a car, minus the car. The bodies bounce and twist aside like they got skimmed by a wrecking ball.

A point-blank blast is even nastier; they just wipe the fuck out. Primarily because getting hit with an fresh blast, rather than one that’s traveled like twenty or thirty feet, won’t knock you back.

It’ll just shake the living shit out of you.

Not pretty.

Just ask Bullseye.

We’re in the open-room two-story foyer of Hammerhead’s HQ, now, and I’m blasting everything in sight. He’s actually got a pretty sweet set-up here; he’s pulling in major cash from somewhere. Everything is felt and old wood; old gangster stuff, very classy, so seeing it fly apart is all the better.

A guy with a pistol pops out of a door to my left, and shoots me in the head; the bullet slides around my head, frictionless, and drops to the floor. I start to raise a gauntlet to blast him, but a giant gray fist flies in and catches him in the left shoulder.

The effect is immediate and devastating: he sails backwards, his shoulder crumpling in on itself as he goes, hits a wall, and falls to the ground, unmoving.

“Ain’t nobody shoots my friend in the head.”

A hail of bullets bounces off his back, and he turns, allowing me to hit his three AK-47 wielding attackers with a series of level twos. One of them, a big black dude, manages to stay standing, and I walk towards him, firing off the gauntlets like six-shooters, hitting him with at least eight or nine level ones.

Needless to say, he drops like a rock.

As we tear deeper into the building, I look back over my shoulder: with all the level fours I’m throwing out, and Aleksei just smashing and ripping into anything everything, we’ve created a massive, rubble-strewn tunnel through the superstructure of the warehouse, plunging through like a diamond drill.

It’s been a while since I’ve been out wrecking with the Rhino, and I’d forgotten how good it feels. When Aleksei hits his groove, he’s like Hulk Junior; a goddamn tornado, the Black African Rhino smashing through the savannah.

A goon throws a grenade, and Aleksei catches it and closes his fist around it.

There’s a muted “bomf,” and a wisp of smoke comes out between his knuckles. Aleksei laughs the big, booming Aleksei laugh, and the goon turns to run.

I catch him with a level one in the back of the head, and he stumbles twice before dropping to his knees, clutching at the air in front of him and then collapsing unconscious. Aleksei slams an elbow through the wall into a little kitchen area, and then throws his massive body through the room, horn first, crushing everything in his way.

We finally come to a broad, oaken door, and I blast it off its hinges.

Hammerhead stares at me, sitting calmly on his desk, wearing a blue and white pinstripe suit and spats.

“Come on, Herman!” Aleksei says, trying to barge past me. “Let’s crush ’em!”

“No,” I say, throwing up an arm in front of my big friend’s face. He stops, but eyes me with an avarice and frustration that Aleksei is only capable of in the heat of battle.

Hammerhead walks around his desk, and chuckles uncomfortably.

“So, someone told you about the contracts. I knew I shouldn’tve hired those damn Enforcers, they’re outdated, and —”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I scream at him, and he goes quiet, but suddenly seems more placid, cooler. He’s adjusting to the situation, exactly what I didn’t want him to give him time to do. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to fight you. Just give me an address where I can find Arcade.”

Hammerhead sighs, and sits down behind his desk, perfectly calm; not fake calm, either.

He actually seems a little bored.

Where’s that “oh, shit” look I love so much?

“Herman, Herman, Herman …” Hammerhead says, smiling that strangely stretched, square smile at me. “When are you guys gonna learn? There’s no money in the street-villain business any more; no room to grow! There are too many heroes these days, and some of them are way too strong. Guys like you and Rhino; you’re obsolete.”

“Hey, you watch who you’re calling obsolete, jerk-off. Your power is that you’ve got a funny-looking head.” I take a step towards the desk, and he rolls his eyes.

“Don’t you get it, Herman? If this was a movie, you’d be the bad guys the hero beats before he fights the real danger! You’re throwaway thugs, cut-rate creeps bought cheap and beaten easy. Take off the cartoon costume and get yourself a suit; the only way to get anywhere in crime these days is to rise above all that super-strong, super-fast crap. Network; learn to sell yourself. Find friends with real power, not ‘super-powers.’ Understand what I’m saying?”

“Is that what you’re doing, flat-top? Is a sociopathic, video-game-loving billionaire ‘real power’ now?”

Hammerhead laughs.

“Hey buddy, from what I understand you know more about all this than I do. Shit, I’m just here to take you out. Arcade calls me a ‘mini-boss,’ can you believe it?”

Aleksei growls at him and starts to move towards the desk.

“They went inside my head, you jerk! I ought to smash your face!”

Day went inside my head, you joik. I odda smash yer face.

Hammerhead sighs and shrugs.

“You Halloweeners are all the same; you think because you’ve got a costume and some super-powers, that means that you’re part of some kind of special club where we all help eachother out and wife-swap and give eachother handjobs at two AM talking about the one time we were thiiiis close to beating Daredevil. Herman … Aleksei … Even if you get out of here, do you honestly think you’re going to get anywhere with whatever’s going on over my head? No. You’re not, because doing something significant isn’t in your natures. You … Both of you … Are born failures. Just … give up. Let go.”

“Give me an address,” I say, my voice shaking a little. But I could care less; I like when things shake.

“I’m just trying to help you out here; you know, advice from the living,” Hammerhead points at himself. “To the dead.” He points at me. “Oh, well. Nice chatting with you, Herman, but —”

“Give me an address,” I say again. It comes out so fucking ominous I give myself the chills, but sadly has absolutely no effect on Hammerhead.

“Enough of this.” He nods to someone behind us. “Kill them both.”

Aleksei suddenly tumbles forward, some kind of metal band wrapping his ankles together, tightening rapidly.

“Hey, what the hell is this?” Aleksei yowls, more afraid than angry. Another metal hoop hits him, wrapping around his left arm and looping over his back and then tightening at sickening speed, wrenching him into a half-nelson.

I turn to the source of the constricting rings, to find, who else, the Ringer.

Or at least, the Ringer Two. I was present when the original Ringer, Tony Davis, was gunned down by the Scourge of the Underworld in a Bar With No Name in 1993. Which means that someone bought the ridiculous orange and green suit, and it’s that asshole who we’re dealing with now.

I raise my gauntlets, but he tosses a hoop around my wrists and they’re suddenly buckled together, the pressure steadily intensifying on my humerus bones as the ring tightens. The weight of the damn thing pulls my arm down, so I can’t get a good shot at him, and he tosses another ring, this one neatly lassoing my head, shrinking tight around the top of my head, crushing in on my temples like a sadistic headband, squeezing the mask so tight I feel the ring’s edges cutting into my flesh beneath the fabric.

I vibe the suit on a level two, and the rings stop actively contracting. I jerk my head around violently, trying to shake the ring loose.

No dice, and then, stupid me, I’m distracted while the Ringer tosses another hoop at me, which I duck, but only barely. He whips a smaller ring off his belt, slides around behind me and pulls it down over head and around my shoulders; it contracts inward instantly, pressing my biceps into my ribs, squeezing the air out of me.

“Gahdahmuh!” I bellow, but there’s not enough air in my lungs to form the word properly. He kicks me in the back and the shove knocks my already unbalanced body over onto the plush red carpet, face-down.

“There,” the Ringer says, sliding a ring down onto my neck, which immediately contracts around the suit, crushing onto my throat, my adam’s apple trapped at the back of my mouth as I try frantically and unsuccessfully to swallow. “Got’em both. Told you I could do it, Hammerhead, you’ve got to have more faith in me.”

I try to gasp in air, but it just swirls around in my mouth, not going anywhere.

“Yeah, well, this is gonna do wonders for yah, kid,” Hammerhead says.

I’m dying. I’m choking to death on the floor.

Beaten by the fucking Ringer. Is there no end to my long list of failures?

“I got this shit down. I’m —” There’s the sound of a window breaking, and then gunfire and swearing, followed by a crash. I roll over and watch as Felicia punches and kicks the Ringer repeatedly in the face, slowly knocking him across the room. She’s really clobbering him like a punching bag; Felicia’s super-strength is a very minor facet of her abilities, but her punches feel like bricks breaking on your face; trust me, I know.

Hammerhead, who’s wiping blood out of his eyes from where Felicia must’ve sliced him on his forehead, is picking up a tommy-gun he must’ve dropped on the floor.

He’s going to shoot her. He’s going to shoot her in the goddamn back.

No.

I wrench my left arm outward, vibrating it on a level five. It cuts through the rings on my shoulders and my wrists, but this is accompanied by a sickly “popping” sound; something in my elbow just went seriously haywire, and it’s sending off little fireworks of pain up and down my arm; like I just got hit in the funny bone with a hatchet.

I use my good arm, vibing on a level five, to tear the ring off my neck, and stand up, firing off a single level three at Hammerhead, who tosses aside the gun and dives behind his desk, his face still a mask of ambivalence.

My first breath hurts so bad I nearly fall back down.

Felicia turns at the sound of my gauntlet, and this gives the Ringer the chance he needed; he drops a ring over head, and contracts onto her neck so tightly that the flesh at the front is almost compressed against the spine. She makes a sound like “gak” and falls forward, clutching her throat.

He turns, and throws a handful of rings at me but I blast them out of the air. He ducks towards me, and tries to get a ring over my hurt arm, which is dangling conspicuously at my side, but I slap it out of his hands. He pulls another ring off my belt, some kind of bladed boomerang, and hurls it at me; it slides off the suit, and I punch him in the face on a level two.

He’s knocked back, so I grab him by the shoulders and repeatedly knee him in the gut, and then slam my good elbow down onto the back of his neck. He falls onto his chest, and I sit down on his back, straddling him. I tear off his helmet and toss it aside; it’s just as I thought, he’s some thug kid, Latino, bulldog-faced, with a little blue tear tattooed under his right eye.

I grab a hand full of hair, pull him up a little and then punch him in the back of the skull, driving his face down into the ground. I do this one, two, three times.

The Ringer stops trying to get up, and just lies there, moaning.

I practically leap on top of Felicia, vibing my gloves on a level five to tear the ring off her neck. It falls back into its normal shape, but a thick line of red-black bruises is forming even as she takes in her first few gasps of air.

“Felicia.”

The name comes out of me all sideways, different from anything I’ve ever said before. Our eyes meet, and, even though she’s on the verge of passing out from asphyxiation, there’s a connection so intense I have to look away.

I rush over to Aleksei, and yank the rings off him.

Someone starts clapping.

I stop dead, and turn to the source of the sound.

“Bravo,” Hammerhead says, sitting in his desk chair, looking mildly amused by the proceedings, politely applauding.

“The fuck are you clapping about?” I say, and Hammerhead stops the applause, but the smile stays. “ONE GUY?” I scream at him, still spluttering and trying to catch my breath. I feel like my neck has been compressed into a drinking straw, and whenever I swallow it feels like I’m trying to shove a bowling ball down my throat. “One fucking guy. That’s it? That’s all?”

I wipe some of the Ringer’s blood off my mask, and help Felicia up, but something inside me is still vibrating.

Still shaking out of control at Hammerhead’s even, calm gaze.

“I want you to watch this,” I say to Hammerhead, who stays quiet.

“Herman …” Felicia says weakly, rasping, but a single look from me silences her.

I pull the Ringer to his feet, vibrate my glove on a level two, stick my fingers into his nose and tear it off his face, releasing a high arcing splash of blood.

He screams, and I hit him point blank in the chest with a level two that sends him flying backwards into the side of Hammerhead’s enormous desk, bouncing off with a hearty snapping sound, and when he lands his body is bent awkwardly, contorted into a sort of broken fetal ball.

He groans and starts to reach for a ring on his belt, but I vibrate my boot on a level three and stomp his hand so hard it’s permanently mangled into what resembles a bloody, flattened artichoke.

He shouts in pain, and slowly drags himself over to the wall, pulling himself to his feet, and starts limping pitifully away, so I turn and blast him in the back with a level four; he’s thrown forward a little, skids off the wall and then smashes down onto his face.

I hear his bones crack.

It sounds like fucking music.

I start towards him, but Felicia puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Herman. Enough.” There’s a sweetness and concern in her voice that’s completely alien to me. All I hear is the harsh command, and I shrug her hand off.

“Yeah, whatever,” I say, suddenly a lonely, angry fourteen-year-old boy again. I look to Aleksei, who’s standing up, rubbing his shoulder. “You okay, bud?”

Aleksei smiles.

“No problem. He just caught me by surprise, any other time I could’ve pounded him flat.”

I turn to Hammerhead, my hurt arm dangling loosely at my side, little lightning bolts of pain jetting up to my shoulder and down to my finger tips every time I move it.

I stand there staring at him; he remains seated, his perfect, still silence having changed to a sort of frozen catatonia.

“Schultz,” he starts shakily, but I cut him off.

“I am God’s Solution to over-population. I am the last surviving dinosaur. I am the scariest man alive. Make no mistake: If you do not give me what I want, right now, I hit you so hard your mother will feel it.”

There’s this kind of hollow silence where I realize how absolutely and completely fucking silly what I just said sounded, and then Hammerhead reaches into his desk, takes out a sheet of paper, scribbles something down on it and slides it across the desk.

The “oh, shit” look is finally here, torn onto his face like an open wound.

And it’s fucking beautiful.

“Excellent,” I say, and then smash his desk in half with a level two.

“Hey, I gave you the address, what’re you —” Hammerhead warbles, and then I grab him by the jaw and slam him against the wall, drawing out my father’s old blue switchblade, vibrating it on a level one so it slides through the flesh of his scalp like butter. He screams, and I scream over him.

“YOU THINK YOU KNOW ME, MOTHERFUCKER? YOU’RE GOING TO TRY TO GIVE ME ADVICE?” I scream, the words pouring out of me like the blood that pours down Hammerhead’s face as I saw away at his cranium. “YOU DON’T KNOW ME! YOU —”

I vibrate my fingers and stick them into him.

“— DON’T —”

I rip upwards, and there’s a wet cracking sound. I hear Felicia gasp.

“— KNOW —”

I yank as hard as I can, and there’s another splintering crack before it gives and I tear it off.

“— ME!”

Hammerhead falls onto the carpet, hemorrhaging blood from the wound on his head, the wound that is his head. I lift the three-inch-thick, ten-by-ten-inch square of titanium up in front of my face, and wipe some of the bloody hair off it, flicking off some of the bloody, stringy flesh.

“Nobody knows me,” I whisper, and I hear my voice shake.

Hammerhead whimpers, and I hear Aleksei gag a little in revulsion, and maybe fear.

… What the fuck did I just do?

“Aleksei,” I say, tossing him my satellite phone. “Call an ambulance.”

He does, and I turn to the woman of my dreams.

Felicia is staring at me in a kind of disgusted, terrified and completely raw shock.

I ponder saying something to her, but figure it’ll have wait until we’re out of here.

“Let’s roll,” I say, and exit through one of the enormous holes I’d blown in the wall. Aleksei follows, still glancing nervously at Hammerhead’s writhing form, giving the address to the paramedics. After a moment, Felicia, to my surprise, follows us.

I drop the blood-soaked chunk of titanium on the street on the way out.

Cartoon that.

Comic book that.

Show that in the Daily Bugle, Robertson, see who thinks I’m a hero then. Show them the real me, see if they still root for the Shocker: LEGIT.

I am nobody’s toy. I am not an archetype. I am not a cartoon, I am not a joke, and I sure as hell refuse to be just another fucking avatar.

FPS, CSA, whatever the fuck you are, you better watch your back.

Because the Shocker is officially on the offensive.

Paranoid

When you start a day by brutalizing one man and ripping part of the skull out of another, you’d think the day has nowhere to go but down.

Maybe you’d be right.

As I’m pinning the address of what might be Arcade’s home base to the grand clipboard in the lobby of the Tube, Felicia clears her throat behind me. I turn to her, smiling, but it’s a strange, skewed smile. I don’t even really know how it got on my face, come to think of it. Ever since I tore open Hammerhead’s skull I’ve been kind of numb and spinning inside.

I think I might have anger problems.

“Herman,” Felicia says, her voice a tiny rasp, the enormous black and purple bruises shifting as her throat muscles work. “I think I’m going to go away for a while.”

“What?” I say, freezing in place, my whole body letting loose a little tremble.

“I was … When I got into this, I … It was a private investigation, one woman checking out the strange death of her husband. But once you clued me in on all the other whacky shit going on, I sort of just got yanked in … This isn’t the sort of thing I’m equipped for, Herman; I’m a detective at best and a thief at worst. The stuff you’ve gotten yourself into, it isn’t even superhero fare, it’s something bigger, something darker. And you, Herman …

“Oh, Jesus. I don’t even know what to think about you anymore. You’re better, more brilliant than I ever knew you were. You’re funny, sweet, gentle, and let me remind you I saw none of this when we were working together for Fisk … But then you’ve got this edge, this very scary side. I think I saw a little of it when you went after the creep that took over Aleksei. And I know I saw it this morning; Jesus, Herman, what were you thinking? You could’ve killed him!”

“He would have deserved it, he —” I start to say.

“Cut that shit out!” she says, pointing a clawed finger at me. “That’s not you talking, that’s your anger, that’s your hate! That’s the same guy who’d flip out and fumble everything while fighting Spider-Man!” She takes a breath and practically shouts her next words. “That’s The Shocker! You lose control and let it guide you, like …” She looks at me plaintively. “Like a super-villain.”

Something inside me crumples.

She pulls off her tiny raccoon robber’s mask, and furrows her brow, staring at me.

“I’m Felicia Hardy,” she says, and shakes her head at me. “Who the hell are YOU?”

There’s a long pause, and then I start to speak, and she shushes me.

“I don’t know. I need to think. Just … Just give me some time, Herman. I’m going to disappear for a while. Don’t try to find me.”

And I stand and watch in frozen silence as I watch the woman of my dreams walk out of my life.

“Well, fuck,” I say, and swallow back my tears for the thousandth time.

Two hours later, the doctor is wrapping my arm as I twitch and groan, and Peter Parker watches, amused but empathetic.

“How’d you say you found this chick again, Pete?” I say, eyeing the lady doctor as menacingly as possible as she hooks what looks like a splint to the side of my left elbow. She smiles at me, completely unafraid.

“Spider-Man uses her,” Peter says. “Well, not ‘uses’ her, but goes to her. Sees her. No, wait, not ‘sees’ her like ‘sees’ her, but —”

“Spider-Man is a patient,” the doctor says. “And not always a very cooperative one. You, Mr. Schultz, at least manage to sit still.”

Hah! Doctor Patient Courtesy: Shocker: 1. Spider-Man: 0.

Booyah!

…

Hey, I take what I can get.

“Is my arm gonna be okay?” I say. The whole left side of my torso is aching by now; it feels like someone bent my arm backwards at the elbow.

“It’ll be fine. It’s just some kind of massive contusion due to it being wrenched at an unnatural angle.” She looks at me or a moment, and then leans in close, examining my face. “I’d like to get a better look at your nose, though; I’d be —”

I wave her away.

“It’ll be fine. Ain’t no point in fixing anything until all the breaking’s done.”

Peter laughs. “So, more breaking in the immediate future?”

“Christ,” I say, smiling at him. “I hope not.”

As a special treat, I take Peter to the Bronx “Bar With No Name” for a late lunch. A guy as curious as him should enjoy being around this many metas at once; I’d imagine it’s a bizarre and wonderful experience for a civilian, like Peter.

There are no big names there; the toughest hombre aside from me is Boomerang, and he’s so drunk he can barely walk.

I start telling him about the events of this morning, skirting all the bits about FPS and what I think might be a massive conspiracy, and by the time I get to the part where I repeatedly and mercilessly blasting the Ringer, Peter’s got this weird, stern look on his face; like he’s disappointed in me.

Everyone is disappointed in me. The reason Aleksei isn’t here is because he went and hid in his room in the Tube as soon as we got home. When I asked him if he wanted to go out, I heard a single, muted “no.” And then the radio started blasting Queen songs from beyond the door, and I gave up.

I tell Peter about what I did to Hammerhead, and he lets out this strange, high-pitched laugh. Like shock, horror and approval, all at once.

“Why?” Peter says, more flummoxed than angry. “I mean, what was the point? It’s not like he was a threat.”

“I think that’s why I did it,” I say, staring into the murky yellow depths of my Heineken. “All that shit he was spitting about ‘cartoon heroes’ and ‘rise above,’ it tore something in me, really struck deep down. I think it reminded me of my father.”

“Bad relationship?” he says. This actually makes me laugh, and he grins, embarrassed. “Bad relationship doesn’t nearly cover it, eh?”

“He was pretty much Satan,” I say, and take a sip of my beer. It’s not often I actually talk about Dad, so this feels weird for me, but Peter’s a damned good listener; he always seems likes he’s taking in what you’re saying. “Dad was a military guy, corrupt as all hell, and he had his fingers in all this weird shit … You know, the sort of high-level classified stuff they only let the really corrupt and scary guys near to begin with.”

“Right,” Peter says, eating a peanut.

“Anyway, Dad became convinced, once the superheroes started showing up by the dozen, that the only way I was ever going to survive in the world was by being a super-villain.” Peter laughs in shock, but I raise a hand, silencing him. “No, Pete, you don’t get me; he used the term ‘super-villain.’ Like fifteen years before I ever heard it on TV; and he’d put me through these ridiculous exercises, just blatant abuse, really, where I’d be put in simulations of super-villain scenarios, and I’d have to figure a way out of it.”

“Wow,” Peter says quietly.

“Yeah. Anyway, when I was about fifteen, Dad disappeared. No letters, no notes, no psychotic farewell attack, just poof. General Adrian Schultz vanished. My sister and I were bounced around foster homes for a while before we ended up on the streets. I made my way as a safe-cracker for a while, abandoned the super-villain thing entirely. Then one day I started working for this British weirdo, Wilson Fisk, and … Well, you know the rest from there, right?”

Peter’s silent. He’s doing that weird thing he does to me; his face is stuck in a strange cycle of expressions. In fact, now that I look at it, I can nail down the emotion behind it: It’s like you were looking at someone you’ve worked with for years, and they’ve just told you they were never the person you thought they were, but rather a different person entirely.

I guess that comes from his only prior contact with me being watching me on television screaming “DIE SPIDERMAN!” while getting kicked in the head.

Peter suddenly shoves back from the table, milliseconds before a katana buries itself in the table between us. I flinch like a startled monkey, and make a little “Yogwap!” noise.

It isn’t a very dignified noise.

The woman who stands to my left, is, as most super-villainesses are, breathtakingly sexy. She’s an Asian, maybe Japanese, wearing a skin-tight black spandex/latex body suit with an enormous vertical slit down the middle, showing off the sides and bottoms of her enormous, clearly artificial breasts.

“I am the Dragonfly, Master Assassin of the True Believers. Are you Herman Schultz?” she says.

“Uh,” I say, and look to Peter, who looks terrified, and vehemently shakes his head. “No, I’m not. I’m Sylvan Swankmeir, the Masked … Angry … Laser-gun … Dude.”

Peter slaps a hand against his forehead.

There’s a pause, and I shrug.

She yanks the sword out of the table and swings it at my neck in one smooth, clean motion, but I kick off the side of the table and drop onto my back,

I feel the blade wisp inches above my face as I fall, draw my single gauntlet (I’m doing the “one sleeve” thing again) and blast her in the chest with a level three that lifts her into the air and bounces her off the ceiling. She lands hard on a table, smashing some beer mugs, and rolls off, drawing a wakizashi out of a sheath on her back, her body twitching a little, still vibrating.

“Whoa, whoa!” Peter shouts, raising his hands protectively.

“Aiiiii-ya!” the Dragonfly screams, and hurls the wakizashi at Parker, who somehow ducks under it; the guy must be on Ritalin or something, because his reflexes are through the roof. She throws an even smaller sword at me, and I dodge around it and hit her with a level two that slams her backwards against the bar.

Something suddenly hits me in the face, knocking me down, and I lie there trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Two small, circular points of pressure poke against my back, preventing me from making any fast movements.

That’s when I hear it; the clicking of hundreds of metal joints.

“You should both know the rules; no fighting,” a nasal, angry voice says. The sort of voice that belonged to every nerd in the Math club. The sort of voice that comes prepared with a calculator, four neatly sharpened pencils and a pocket protector.

The weak, laughable voice that conceals one of the most dangerous men on Earth.

“Otto …” I say, starting to get up, my head clearing. “I didn’t start this …”

“You think I’m unaware of that, Herman?” says Otto Octavius (better known to you clowns as Dr. Octopus), lifting the struggling Dragonfly with two of his tentacles, holding me back with the others. “I’ve been watching you since you came in. You and …” He looks at Peter, and smiles. “Parker …” Peter nods, and looks nervous and scared, but I can tell he’s faking. “My prize pupil. What’re you doing here?”

Well, shit, this is getting weirder and weirder every second, ain’t it?

“I came with Herman, Dr. Octavius. We’re friends.”

“Not perhaps thinking of pursuing a career in villainy, are you?” Otto says hopefully. Peter shakes his head.

“Afraid not.”

Otto laughs softly. He’s capable of this bizarre transformation, and performs it often; the radical switch between psychotic, egomaniacal madman and tender, funny, somewhat fatherly science professor, the kind of guy geeks like me would switch our high school schedules around to work in.

Geeks like me, and, apparently, Parker.

“Different strokes, eh, Peter?” He sighs. “Oh, well,” he says, and brutally smashes the still-struggling Dragonfly into the wall, knocking her out. “At least you’ve found yourself in good company. Herman here is quite the engineer; a bright mind, like yours.” He glances at Dragonfly. “And now, both of your bright minds should be moving on. You know the rule; if there’s a fight, we have to remove everyone involved. As always, nice to see you, Parker.”

As we’re heading out, a tentacle taps me on my shoulder. I turn, and Otto leans close to me.

“Watch your back, Herman. There are some very nasty sorts of people gunning for you. And, may I add, I am not talking about ‘super-villains.’”

“Can you gimme a little more on who these people might be?”

Otto looks around, and then says: “No.”

The door to the Bar With No Name closes.

Peter loved the whole ordeal. He prattles on about it on the subway uptown, to the Four Freedoms Plaza. Apparently, Otto was his teacher in high school, just before the “incident.” Peter even says he was there when the reactor blew; that I have a little trouble believing, but Peter doesn’t seem the type to bullshit for the sake of bullshitting.

The brunette girl with the Count of Monte Cristo is still behind the counter, but she actually seems to be earlier in the book than she was last time I was here. Which means she either is reading the book backwards or she finished and started again.

I’d believe either.

“Reed isn’t in,” she says before I even ask a question. She closes the book and give me this weird, half-fake, half-real smile that you usually only see on bartenders. “Oh, hello, Mr. Parker,” she says, noticing Peter.

Huh?

“I’ve been here before,” Peter says quickly. “On interviews and photoshoots and stuff, back when I was full-time for the Daily Bugle.”

“He left a message for you, Mr. Schultz,” the girl says, and slides a small piece of paper across the table.

HERMAN —

IF YOU CAME TODAY, I’M SORRY. THE FAMILY AND I ARE ON A WILD, FANCIFUL ADVENTURE INTO AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION, WHEREIN I’M SURE WE’LL SEE MANY AMAZING AND BRIGHTLY COLOURED THINGS. I’LL CALL WHEN WE GET BACK.

REED

“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” Peter says, taking a bite out of his pizza at dinner.

“Done what?” I ask. “Pizza?”

“No, you know, just hung out with someone all day. I don’t really have any friends; I mean, I’m usually busy with my job these days, and when I’m not I’m in the spandex, so it’s not like I have much time to …”

There’s a looooooooooooooooooong pause, him staring at me with this kind of frozen loopy grin on his face.

“Spandex?” I say, setting down my slice of pizza.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I … uh … teach a dance class.”

I knew he was gay. I just fucking knew it.

“That’s cool,” I say, and sip my Coke. “More power to you, man.”

Peter laughs.

“Uh … hey, guys … you mind if I sit with you?”

Aleksei’s enormous body looks so out of place in the pizza joint, it’s impossible to look at him without laughing.

“Of course you can, Aleksei.”

I go through the normal custom of pulling up two chairs for his enormous gray butt, and they buckle a little under his weight. I notice a bizarre “clack” as he sits down, but I don’t say anything; he looks miserable.

“Hey, Herman,” he says, without looking up.

“Hey, there, big guy. You doing okay?” I rub his big gray shoulder.

Parker watches all this with that weird “I don’t know you at all” look on his face.

“I was … You really scared me this morning, Herman. I thought you went nutso.”

I wuz … You really scared me this mornin’, Hoiman. I thod you went nuzzo.

“I did, Aleksei, but only for a second.”

“You can’t do that, Herman. You make me too scared. I don’t want you to be … You know … Like the Punisher or nothing …”

“Is that what I was like?” I say quietly.

“Jeez, I dunno. You were just so angry, Herman. I ain’t never seen you that angry before, except maybe at Spider-Man.”

“I just … I just don’t like it when people treat me the way Hammerhead was treating me. I don’t like being talked to like I’m a nobody.”

“But that don’t give you the right to hurt him, an’ rip his head open …”

“Aleksei, he was trying to kill us! Doesn’t that give me some leeway?”

There’s a silence, and then Aleksei says: “I don’t know what leeway means.”

A thought strikes me, and I raise both my hands, silencing Aleksei.

“What’re you doing out of the house? Didn’t I tell you not to leave the place unless I was with you?”

Aleksei looks embarrassed.

“I, uh … I had an accident.”

Aleksei’s retelling of the catastrophe that befell him shortly after my departure from the Tube is so skewed and rambling that I’ll have to give you the condensed, simple version lest this entry take up fifty pages, twenty-five of those pages entirely comprised of the words “uh” and “um” and “and then.”

Aleksei’s Devastating Toilet Trauma:

Aleksei has to go to the bathroom.

Aleksei goes to the bathroom and gets his “urine/feces” tube hooked up, and sticks it down the toilet, as per usual.

The old, rusty pipes of the tube jam up, and Aleksei panics.

Unable to find a plunger to unclog the rapidly flooding toilet, Aleksei picks one of my old gauntlets.

His big, fumbling fingers set it to level five, and aim it at the toilet.

The subsequent shitsplosion lodges half of cracked toilet seat, which was still vibrating on a level 5, in Aleksei’s big gray left buttock.

Aleksei, after several unsuccessful attempts, sets all the alarms and leaves the Tube, seeking my assistance.

Peter is holding back laughter to the point that it actually looks like it’s hurting him.

“I would’ve asked Felicia …” Aleksei says slowly. “But, you know … she …” Aleksei looks sad. “She left.”

Peter looks from me to Aleksei and back.

“Wellllll …” he says, and looks around. “I think I’m gonna skedaddle. See you sometime next weekend, right, Herman?”

“Yeah,” I say, a little embarrassed. “Sounds good.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m standing in an alleyway, braced against a dumpster, using my one good arm to try to tug a piece of molded plastic out of my best friend’s ass-cheek.

Welcome to the glamorous life of a reformed super-villain.

After about ten unsuccessful tries, I end up literally standing on Aleksei’s back, vibrating my hand on a level one, pulling like I’m trying to get Excalibur out of the stone.

“FUCK!” I say as I lose my balance and fall face-first into the dumpster, getting an eyeful of half-eaten Big Mac. I sit up, cursing, when a cool euphoria washes over me.

Herman, a voice says in my head. I have something that might interest you.

It’s Miss Peelo. And at this point, anything she says interests me very much.

On the subway headed east, Aleksei blushes.

“I don’t like havin’ this thing stuck in my butt. I feel like everybody is looking at me, Herman.”

“Well, Aleksei, don’t you think that might have something to do with you being an eight-foot-tall guy in a Rhino suit?” Aleksei laughs a little. “See? What you see isn’t always what you see,” I say, trying to forget the fact that everybody is, indeed, staring at the very conspicuous chunk of toilet poking out of Aleksei’s butt.

-----------------------

The slice of moist, spongy strawberry cake looks positively organic under the layer of white frosting. Like a tooth torn out by the gum.

I take a bite anyway, and within seconds, realize it’s the single best dessert I’ve ever had. I look to Aleksei, who, although we’ve only been here a minute and a half, is already on his fifth slice, squirming awkwardly in his chair like a toddler who has to go to the bathroom, trying to find a comfortable position. I rub his back a little, and, whether he can feel it or not, the gesture calms him down.

Miss Peelo comes out of the kitchen with two glasses of pink lemonade, and sets them down in front of Aleksei and me before sitting down in the luxurious rocking chair set up on the other side of the table. The money from our last reading is evident in the room; the couch that Aleksei destroyed has been completely replaced, with a larger, softer model, on which we sit now.

I smile privately inside as I notice that she’s “Aleksei-Proofed” the side he’s sitting on; the arm-rest is covered in a sturdy plank of oak.

“Herman, Aleksei,” she says, and smiles at us both, and it’s here I see again how … well … eerie this odd little woman is; for example, her mutations stretch farther than I’d originally thought. I see now something I didn’t see before: She’s got about three times the normal amount of teeth, but they’re so small and cramped together the illusion of normality holds up.

Her third eye catches me staring and winks at me.

“I was reviewing Aleksei’s carbon copy in my mind, just because I found your case so interesting, and I came around another little tidbit I thought you might find useful.”

“What is it?” I ask. “Another picture, or …?”

“Better,” she says, and smiles. “It’s an audio file. Recent, too, from just before his rampage last week.”

“No shit,” I say quietly. “I thought you said all that was blocked off?”

“It was,” she says, and daintily sips her cup of maroon tea. “I’ve been … Oh, what’s the word? Ah, yes, ‘hacking.’”

Aleksei’s beady eyes widen.

“You’ve been hacking? On my brain?”

“For lack of a better term, yes,” she says. Aleksei turns to me, and squeezes my shoulder in excitement.

“Oh, Herman! That’s so cool!”

“So, this ‘audio’ thing … Can you play it for us?”

“Of course,” she says, and sets her tea cup down. “But you must remember, this data is highly corrupt. There might be some distortion, static and whatnot.”

I smile at her.

“Lady, the fact that you even got it is amazing enough. We can handle a little static.”

She closes all three eyes, and the pink energy tendril appears again, extending out until it floats just above the table until the end of it widens into what looks like a gramophone funnel. First, there’s only white noise. And then, after a moment of pops and buzzes, two voices begin to speak.

One of them is a young, tired-sounding guy.

The other is vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.

“So, theoretically, when does he give up?” the young guy says.

“He’s different; he’s not going to off himself like Beck, or retire like Brown. Herman’s like a goddamn fruit fly; once he starts after us, he’s not going to stop until we swat him.”

Oh, dear God.

It’s my father.

Prelude To: Everything Is Lies

“That’s my dad,” I say, the words coming out in a soundless mumble.

“I thought you said your dad disappeared?” Aleksei says, and I shush him. On the psychic recording, the young man’s voice speaks up again.

“So what’re you saying we should do? We can’t kill him, not directly, and Arcade is botching the hell out of this; his Nine-Twenty-Ones are dying left and right, and the Ditko-42s are going to start to take notice.”

“God,” my father’s voice says tiredly. “I wish we could just put a bullet in his head. Make things so much simpler.”

“Gee, thanks, Dad,” I murmur. Inside me, something shakes.

“I’ll say again, it’s undoable. I mean, as soon as we kill him, Parker will start looking for answers; he doesn’t like it when people go missing. And once he’s involved, he’ll drag in every Ten-Twenty-One out there.”

“What the fuck?” I say aloud, but Aleksei, embittered, puts a finger to his lips and exaggeratedly goes “SHHHH!”

Peter Parker. What the fuck. Peter Parker. What the fuck.

“I say we kick it up a notch if Sytsevich can’t take him out. I say we bring in contractors; have Arcade contact someone in the mob, get some meta-hitmen swarming him.”

Thus entered Hammerhead.

The young man pipes up.

“I’ll get right on it. But once the Shocker is dead, someone might trace it back to Arcade, and —”

Dad laughs, really laughs, and if there was any doubt in my mind that it was him, it’s gone. It’s Dad’s deep, friendly laugh, unmistakable even through the static of the neuron-record.

“Please, Hughes, be serious. Once we’ve violated Sytsevich like this, if Herman ain’t already dead, he’s going to be on a goddamn mission; the mercenaries are only going to slow him down. If they kill him, more power to them, but I’ll put ten-to-fifty odds against it. You should contact Control and give them an update; with him rooting around down there in the sewers right on top of the Flim-Flam, it’s only a matter of time before he finds it and figures out what it is. And then the shit will really hit the fan. I suggest we —”

The recording abruptly cuts out with a burst of static that startles both me and Aleksei, and both of us jump a little, Aleksei managing to take out a lamp. It shatters on his armored elbow as though it was made of dust, and Aleksei looks at it for a moment, and then shrugs. Miss Peelo falls back into her cushioned chair, exhausted, the pink-gramophone dissipating into nothing.

Nine-Twenty-Ones.

Ditko-42s.

Parker dragging in the Ten-Twenty-Ones.

The Flim-Flam in the sewers.

And then there was that word: Control.

No, “Control.”

He said it the way religious Christians say “God.”

What does any of that mean?

“Hey, Herman. I know part of that,” Aleksei says, trying to distract me as he sweeps the remains of the lamp under the couch while Miss Peelo recovers. “I think I’m a … a ‘Nine-Twenty-One.’”

“What does that mean?” I say to him, only to get another one of those big dumb shrugs.

“I dunno. But when I heard it, I just knew: Hey, nine-twenty-one. That’s what I am. Like a type of car or something; some people are nine-twenty-ones. Some people are ten-twenty ones. Like, uh, Luke Cage. I think he’s a ten-twenty-one; or maybe, wait, no, he’s a ten-twenty.”

“Luke Cage?” I say, baffled, and then I realize that it’s happening again: I’m hearing something terribly important, it’s sitting right in front of me, but it’s starting to unfold so quickly I’m getting left behind. “Aleksei, how did you know that?”

He shrugs again.

“I dunno,” he says, and smiles his big dumb disarming Aleksei smile. “I think it’s like there’s a safe in my head, and it’s opening up.”

“Well said, Aleksei,” Miss Peelo says, smiling weakly. “Now, gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave. That took a lot out of me.”

As we’re leaving, I ask her how much she wants, and she just laughs; this light, tinkling grandmotherly laugh that I’ve never heard out of her before.

“Be serious, Herman. You and darling Aleksei have got my mind percolating for the first time in twenty years.” She smiles her fat, goblin smile. “There’s no charge.”

On the way back to the tube, I buy Aleksei a jumbo lollipop and get to mentally vibrating.

Who are these people? Why would they give Aleksei the Rhino armor? Control must be some kind of super-high-level government organization to monitor super-people, but then why would they finance FPS?

Why would they hire Arcade, of all people? Why use Johnny Ohnn; surely they have some kind mind control better than opening a portal directly into someone’s head, and somehow inputting a complete control over them?

Why make it a business? Why bring in the rich and powerful, and where does that money go? Surely these people have money behind them … Why would they need pay-offs from goons to mind-control villains?

And why won’t they just have a sniper gun me down from the roof of a building while I’m walking down the street? Parker would “drag in all the Ten-Twenty-Ones,” what the hell does that mean?

My father, my insane, evil father, where does he fit in? Who’s the twentysomething kid he was talking to, Hughes? What about Generals Ross and Slinkard? That torture device made in Alamogordo; what the fuck does it do? And who does it do it to? Ohnn? The people controlling the FPS’d villains? No, no, no …

Where does “The Trust” fit into this? Why would they pay to free that psychotic fuck the Punisher from prison? Does Control control the Trust, or is it the other way around? Why hasn’t Reed Richards discovered all this, I mean, shit, I have and I’m THE FUCKING SHOCKER! I don’t even have powers, I just —

My mental rant stops dead, remembering something my father said on the recording.

Something to the tune of “he’s not going to off himself like Beck, or retire, like Brown.”

Beck.

Brown.

No powers.

Beck.

Brown.

Quentin Beck. Mysterio.

Hobie Brown. The Prowler.

Neither of them had any metahuman powers; they were just humans with gadgets playing dress-up, like me.

Quentin Beck was a hot-shot special effects man with a talent for using technology to make people whole-heartedly believe that whatever he wanted them to believe was totally and absolutely the only thing to believe.

See “Green Planet, Red Sky.” That alien thing is uncanny.

But Quentin tired of Hollywood, and moved on to bigger, more nefarious things. He got in contact with Phineas, and, after upgrading his arsenal of special-effects tricks, put a fishbowl on his head and went after Spider-Man.

No alternative motives here. No interest in money, power, none of that.

Just:

“Hey, you know what would be a good idea? If I put a purple cape on and just slipped into this green jumpsuit and went and tried to fight a super-strong, super-fast guy who can climb walls, dodge bullets, shoot adhesive webbing out of his wrists and detect danger a good fifteen minutes before anyone’s even thought about harming him. Dangerous, you say? Foolish? Hah! He can’t harm me; you see, I’ve put this fishbowl over my head, and …”

Remember how I said sometimes asking why is more trouble than it’s worth?

And there you have Mysterio.

Well, the first Mysterio, anyway.

Hobie Brown was just another bright-eyed kid with very little dough but a lot of ambition when he (very accidentally) created “The Prowler.”

Hobie was a window washer on high rises, and also a bit of an amateur inventor. To make his job easier, he created three deceptively simple-looking devices:

Hydraulic steel claws for climbing concrete, plastic or wooden surfaces.

Hydraulic clawed boots for much the same.

Wrist and ankle bracelets to quick-deploy cleaning fluid.

But, after being fired from his job, Hobie found a new use for his toys. Those claws could tear flesh. Those boots could send him leaping over twenty feet. Those bracelets could quick-deploy a hell of a lot more than cleaning fluid.

I met Hobie just before his first (and only) outing as a super-villain; he was buying potent sleeping gas pellets off the black market.

Hobie wasn’t a bad guy, really; just kind of disenfranchised with the world around him. He didn’t fit in from the start; us super-criminals are mostly angry white boys with an ax to grind, and a tendency to become verbose and theatrical whilst maiming anyone in our way. Hobie’s quiet, black face and ferocious adherence to a policy of minimal violence set him on the outs from the get-go.

One encounter with Spider-Man later, and Hobie’s criminal career ended. He still threw on the suit occasionally, joining up with a group of “good guys” (creeps if you ask me) called ‘The Outlaws.’

These days Hobie is fully retired, living happily with his wife, subsisting on the money he makes from the revenue on his patents.

Work in any high-rise these days, and you’ll most likely eventually see a minimum-wage guy wearing toned-down versions of the Prowler’s gear, wiping birdshit off a sparkling glass window.

A lot of less-psychotic super-villains, myself included (usually), feel like Hobie is living the dream. Of course, Hobie got lucky; he quit before he got himself in too deep. Me trying to take out a patent on the gauntlets or the suit would be ridiculous, especially with (get this) seventeen outstanding warrants on my head.

I’m just lucky Richards and Stark didn’t ask about that, because that’s a seriously uncomfortable conversation that I don’t know if I’m ready to have.

Especially not around Richards; I get giddy as a little girl around that motherfucker.

It radiates off him, like it’s infectious.

So, what’ve we got: We’ve got the Shocker, Mysterio and the Prowler all lumped in together.

None of them have powers.

All of them were (or, in my case, are) considered direct threats to FPS, but Beck and Brown no longer.

Wait, why not Hobie? He’s alive, isn’t he? Not chasing FPS around New York like I am, but alive, so what … What is it that makes him a “non-threat?” Just because he doesn’t put the costume on, or …

Or is it that he doesn’t interact with metas anymore?

Yeah, wait, there’s something to that.

The number of metas I interact with, when put alongside any average Joe, is simply fucking staggering.

I know that Control/FPS/The CSA caused Aleksei Sytsevich to become the Rhino.

…

How many metas have they …

…

I mean, surely they can’t have tabs on every single meta, so how do they know everyone’s secret identity? I mean, shit, some of the accidents/incidents/experiments that gave these guys powers messed them up so badly even they don’t know who they are anymore … How could the CSA possibly …

This is giving me a headache. I turn to Aleksei.

“Aleksei, do you think —”

There’s a blue burst of light, and then an explosion goes off so loud and so hard that the subway car we’re in is thrown off the tracks, and goes smashing up against the left side of the tunnel.

Aleksei shrieks, grabbing hold of a sturdying bar and effectively ripping it apart; he rocks at the center of the car, trying frantically to balance himself, like a dog trying to stand up in the back of a car.

The subway train continues its mad slide, and one of the impacts must cut some kind of electronics cable, because the all the lights on the train shut off, throwing us into a shaking, humid, pitch-black hell.

The friction is too much for the sheet metal of the subway train to stand, and it peels away in a shower of sparks on my left, one of which lands in my eye. I yelp in pain, but manage to hold it together well enough so that when a forty-something woman in an orange sweater is thrown towards the tear in the side of the car by a particularly vicious bump, I reach out and hook an arm around her waist, throwing her out of out of harm’s way.

Who the fuck am I kidding, we’re on a crashing subway train, there is no “out of harm’s way.”

The train comes to a turn and begins to full-on crash into the embankment. Aleksei’s giant body loses its balance, and he stumbles forward, his left arm going between the train and the wall, passing us at sixty miles an hour. It yanks him forward, up to his shoulder, and I realize I’m screaming.

“Herman! Help me!” Aleksei shrieks, and then he’s dragged out of the car. I watch the metal siding of the car bend inwards as his massive body is rolled along the outside of the car, crushed against the wall of the subway tube.

I jump into the air, still screaming, and fire a level five straight backwards; we’re only two cars from the back, so the car blows apart and I’m pitched out onto the tracks, along with three or four other people. One of them hits the third rail, and lights up like a Christmas tree before his skin turns black and he stops moving.

I roll once over the rails, bounce against the wall, and then press myself as hard as I can, gripping an older man against me as the two remaining cars go crashing by, mushing a black woman who only has time to sit up and scream.

I’m bleeding from two dozen places; jumping out of a subway car going sixty-five is never a good idea. The older man is in shock; either that or he’s having some kind of attack, shit, I don’t care.

I get to my feet, and do this stumbling crazy-legged towards Aleksei’s crumpled body, curled into a gray fetal ball.

“Arhekslo!” I screech; that’s what “Aleksei” sounds like after you’ve fallen out of a train; I trip a little; there’s something wrong with my right leg, maybe my hip. It aches all the way from my knee to my waist, shooting little jets of pain any time I put pressure on it.

I fall a little, and then a little more as the entire subway tunnel shakes with an enormous series of crunches and bangs; it’s the subway train we were on going full-throttle smashing into 5th Street station, probably crashing right up onto the platform.

When I manage to get to my feet again, Aleksei is stirring.

“Alehei!” I shout, coming closer this time, but still not quite getting it. My head must’ve bounced off the steel during my bail-out, and I’m just not feeling it yet; these kind of verbal disruptions are characteristic of a concussion.

Or brain-damage.

And I’ll never speak properly again. Doomed to a life of “Arhekslo” and “Alehei.”

“Aleksei!” I force it out, just to prove to myself that I haven’t been knocked retarded. It’s at this point I realize that I’m still not seeing fully out of my left eye, where the spark hit me. It’s starting to itch terribly, and I realize with a little twinge that the spark probably wasn’t a spark at all, but rather a small piece of metal or plastic that tore free of the side of the subway and is now embedded in my cornea.

Great, that’s, that’s fucking beautiful.

I stagger further towards Aleksei, who’s starting to stand up.

“ooo,” Aleksei says, rolling over, clutching his ribs.

I notice, without a bit of irony or humor, that the shard of toilet seat has been torn free of Aleksei’s butt, and now rests a couple of dozen feet up the track.

I kneel down alongside him, and my right leg screams in protest, dropping me backwards onto my butt; there’s also something terribly wrong with my already hurt left arm. It doesn’t seem to be responding to my commands any more, instead having decided to take a vacation to Dangling Limply World.

“What hurts, Aleksei?”

“ooo,” Aleksei says, and his big eyes pop open, wild and scared.

“Aleksei, just be cool, and —”

Aleksei grabs me by the (unhurt) leg and flings me aside, throwing himself to his feet, swinging all his enormous weight into a haymaker punch straight to the jaw of someone behind me.

I roll, moaning in agony, and watch as Aleksei is hit by a flurry of punches from none other than Calvin Zabo.

You’d know him as Mister Hyde.

Well, not the Mr. Hyde; not the one from Stevenson’s story.

Calvin Zabo was once a plain old dork scientist, like so many of these creeps are, but he had this brilliant experiment, something went wrong, blah blah blah. It all melds together after a while, doesn’t it?

Everyone devolves into avatars, general ideas of what a villain should be.

Bottom line: He’s now six hundred pounds and nine feet tall, with a face like roadkill and a body that looks like it was carved from pink silly-putty meant to look like the Hulk.

He’s usually got on this ridiculous green over-coat deal, but apparently he left it at home, or FPS didn’t feel it was “appropriate.” Because, as it stands, Mister Hyde is buck naked.

Except for the helmet.

He’s got on some kind of weird-ass bondage helmet, very literally bolted onto his head.

It takes me a second to figure out why, but then it hits me: this is their very practically minded way of preventing me from reaching into the spot. They just whipped out a heavy-duty nail-gun and pow, easy as pie.

The sick motherfuckers.

I stand up and raise my gauntlet; or rather, I try to raise my gauntlet. The one sleeve of the Shocker suit I’m wearing is on my defunct left arm, and all trying to move it does is trigger a sunburst of pain throughout my body that drops me onto my knees, my teeth biting into my tongue, blood rapidly filling my mouth.

Hyde just keeps hitting Aleksei, no form or style, just wailing on him like a little kid having a tantrum. Normally I’d think Aleksei could handle these hits no problem, but in the condition he’s in, he’s fading fast, and after that first punch it’s just been a beat-down.

Hyde grabs Aleksei by the horn and uses it like a handle, drag-slamming his head against the subway wall, one, two, three times, and then Aleksei elbows him right in the sternum and then the nose, knocking him back.

I realize, with a blurry pride, that I was the one who taught Aleksei that move.

Aleksei gets to his feet as Mr. Hyde charges at him again, and manages to dodge a left punch that then shatters a crater in the concrete wall of the subway tunnel. He comes back with a sort of crazed jumping uppercut; his giant gray fist catches Hyde where his jaw meets his neck, and drives him upward; Aleksei threw so much of his body into the jump that the punch carries Hyde up to the low ceiling of the tunnel, his head being abruptly smashed between Aleksei’s bull-dozer knuckles and prefabricated concrete laid over fifty years ago.

Hyde’s head rattles so hard he’s actually thrown out of the crushing, momentary vise, landing on his chest on the tracks a few feet away. Aleksei lands, but then stumbles; he’s hurt, something inside him is broken, probably more than one something.

Hyde springs up, his jaw completely shattered, hanging at a bizarre right angle. He grabs Aleksei by the neck and smashes him to the ground, Aleksei rolls them so he’s on top, but Hyde doesn’t let go; applying even more pressure to Aleksei’s throat with those thick, subhuman fingers.

Aleksei’s eyes have gone watery, and I realize that Mister Hyde is, in effect, crushing his brain.

I try frantically to think of a way to help him as Hyde rolls Aleksei onto his back, and straddles him, still choking him but now also occasionally smashing his head against the tracks for good measure.

Aleksei’s eyes go wider. Christ, the motherfucker is going to squash his brain up out of his mouth.

I grab my left wrist with my right hand, yank it up, aiming it like a gun, and use my right hand to squeeze the pressure trigger in the palm of my left hand.

It happens in three stages:

First, I feel all the fingers on my unprotected right hand break, bending and cracking at a variety of unnatural angles.

Second, my left arm convulsively jerks back due to the vibration, and causes my body to bang against the wall of the subway tunnel in a way that hurts so bad I actually pass out for a couple of seconds.

And third, though I only see it through a painful red-haze, a level five blast hits Mister Hyde straight in the face.

He flips like a football punted for the field goal, flying an easy forty feet down the subway tunnel, one of his eyeballs, his tongue, his remaining teeth and a good portion of his skin abruptly abandoning ship with a with a single loud “VRMRMRMRGRGLE.”

He lands and skids on his back, but whoever’s controlling him forces him to his feet yet again.

I’m screaming. I’m screaming so loud and so hard it hurts my throat. I’m not even saying words as he lumbers towards us, and suddenly Aleksei is on his feet. He lets out this long, guttural growl, and falls into a three-point stance.

Oh, God, it’s been so long since I’ve seen him do this.

Even through the pain, I force out a little chuckle; of all the amazing shit my big friend can do, this is by far the most heart-stoppingly incredible. This is a “power.”

Someone at FPS headquarters must tell the person controlling Mr. Hyde what’s about to happen, because he suddenly turns and starts running up the tunnel, away from Aleksei and me.

Yeah. Right. That’s gonna help you a whole hell of a lot, pal. You keep going with that.

Aleksei lets out that trademark nutjob yell, and launches.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

Watching nearly a ton of giant gray man accelerate to seventy miles an hour in the space of thirty feet is nothing short of heart-stopping. This is his trademark, and with good reason.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

This is the Rhino’s Charge.

He hits Mister Hyde horn-first, something I’ve never actually seen him do before; usually he catches them on his right shoulder, a sort of insane football tackle. He must realize how dire the situation is, because I can’t imagine him doing it otherwise.

I feel the ground beneath me shake with the impact as the horn blows straight through Mister Hyde’s chest, practically cracking him in half, and then the two of them go careening into an engineers service stairwell, the concrete and metal bursting apart like an ice-sculpture hit with a sledge-hammer.

There’s a thunderous “BOOM” as they hit the wall behind the wreckage of the stairwell, and little pieces of dirt and dust fall down from all over the ceiling of the tunnel.

I lie there in silence, and wait.

And wait.

Fifteen minutes later, the pain is so bad I’ve pissed my pants, vomited and am now on my sixth fit of tears, but still no Aleksei.

If only fucking Felicia was here.

I … I think maybe I love her.

But that’s probably just my cock talking.

Talking over the pain. Talking under the pain.

Jesus, Aleksei, please be all right.

And then, footsteps.

I’m having some trouble turning my head, so I’m relieved when whoever it is squats down in front of me.

The relief switches abruptly to terror as I realize who it is.

“Herman,” Eddie Lavelli says. He’s wearing the Eel suit, but his mask is off, held limply in one hand. He’s pale, and his eyes are sunken, red-rimmed and framed by dark blue bags. He’s sweating badly, greasy, slimy sweat. The kind that only someone either very high or very afraid drips with.

I try to talk, and find I can’t. I hurt too much.

“I figured it out, Herman,” he says, his voice high and strange, like a person just coming out of a horrible car accident. “I didn’t mean to; I’m not smart, not like you. I didn’t mean to, but once you overhear enough, it’s pretty easy to put together. And you would’ve figured it out, too, and you would have ruined everything. I … I know now, Herman. I know why I have to die, and why you have to die. You don’t … You can’t understand … Herman … Everything is lies. Everything is lies.”

He’s completely fucking lost it, that much is clear.

“Eddie …” I force out. “The hell are you … talking about?”

He raises a fist so that it hangs just in front of my face.

“Everything is lies,” he says again, faintly, like someone in a trance.

He’s going to blast my head off.

Fuck.

Don’t lose your shit. Don’t lose your shit.

…

I’m losing my shit.

And then all I see is bright blue light.

Everything Is Lies, Part One

Theoretically, the blasts that jump out of Eddie’s suit, emitting from between his second and third knuckles, move at the speed of light. They’d have to; I mean, they’re electricity, pure-energy blasts flung from miniature transconductor-coils, wired into a tiny gyro-electric generator set up at the back of Eddie’s neck.

There’s barely any tell before he fires; there’s a faint hum, and then the guided blue lightning crackles out at whatever he’s pointing at; you’d have little warning if he was about to zap you, maybe none if he were to sneak up behind you.

That’s one of the many small beauties of the Tinkerer’s Eel Suit: No warnings, just POW and you’re stir-fried.

How the old man knew to push me out of the way, I guess I’ll never know.

He throws his creaky old body into a shove that lifts me up out onto my feet, my right leg spasming wildly. Eddie’s blast hits the wall, and leaves a huge black scorch mark.

“Run, Shocker, run!” the old man says, and I do, as best I can, limping and staggering into the darkness of the tunnel. Behind me, I hear a scream, a loud hum and then silence, but I keep running, if you can call it that.

Why would that old man do that for me? He must’ve known that the Eel would kill him, why save me when I’ve got shit chances of getting out of this anyway?

As I get deeper into the darkness, I put the problem in my head and start vibrating it.

Parts of me that are out of working order or severely damaged:

Entire left arm.

Right hand, wrist.

My tongue; no real idea how bad that is; I can still talk, but it’s bleeding like a sunuvabitch.

Left eye.

Right leg from the knee to the hip, which sprays neon red pain every time I put too much pressure on it.

Okay. Okay.

I huff and puff and knock open a maintenance door in the tunnel, hurling my body in, moving on my own inertia, and stumble along, panting and cursing. The hallway is brightly lit, the white lights casting me, in my rumpled brown trenchcoat, plain black t-shirt and baggy brown khakis as a pathetic, broken figure, staggering like a drunk, doomed to an inevitable death rapidly catching up to him, its hands glowing blue, wearing a Royal Purple suit of electronic equipment.

Current Materials Available:

My father’s blue switchblade, located in the left front pocket of my pants.

A pen I found in the Four Freedoms Plaza, located in right front pocket of my pants.

A sleeve and glove of the Shocker suit, vacuum-sealed onto my useless left arm.

A single v2 Shocker Gauntlet (I knew I should’ve taken out a v4 today, I just fucking knew it), currently strap-locked onto my left wrist and hand.

Two shoes, a pair of socks, a pair of pants, a shirt and a trenchcoat.

A cheap brown leather belt with a metal buckle.

Thirty-seven cents.

My wallet.

Okay, Okay.

So I’m completely fucked.

Excellent.

I shove through another door, and find myself in a subway repair bay, five identical subway cars parked motionless side by side on single stretches of track. I’m up on a walkway above it all, with ramps down to the roof of each car.

To my left is a circuit box.

I slam the door to the hallway, lean against a railing and start repeatedly kicking the circuit box with my left leg until it cracks open, and then starting flipping the breakers with my right elbow.

The room turns black.

The only light now is coming down through grates in the ceiling. Down below me, I hear a radio playing; Creedence Clearwater’s “Rollin’ On the River.” I feel my way forward, and pull myself up onto a higher catwalk, using my chest and my left leg; trust me, it looks as ridiculous as it sounds.

Using my shoulders to pull myself along, I get about ten feet down the catwalk before I hear the door to the repair bay burst open.

It slowly creaks closed, and I listen as Eddie walks down the catwalk under me, muttering to himself.

“I know you’re in here, Herman. I know you’re in here.” I hear the gauntlets hum, and a flash of blue light, casting the room in an eerie aquamarine glow for a couple of seconds, before everything goes dark again. Slowly, as quietly as I can, I start dragging myself on my belly further down the catwalk; I have no set destination other than “AWAY FROM EDDIE.”

“The bomb, Herman,” Eddie says from somewhere below me, mumbling like a madman. “The bomb, don’t you see? They already had it. They already knew. It was a set-up. They’re all set-ups. They always knew what would work and what wouldn’t, and they’d change it. The bomb. Don’t you see? Alamogordo. I didn’t believe it so I went and saw it myself, only stayed a day there, but that was enough. The crater.”

I try to pull myself along the edge so I can get a look at Eddie, figure out where he is, and I hear him shuffle aside and let out a weird little giggle.

There’s a silence, and then I hear the smile in Eddie’s voice as he says:

“Oh. There you are.”

There’s a faint hum, and I roll myself out of the way as a blast of blue electricity scorches the catwalk where I just lay; this new position puts a layer of plate wood in between myself and Eddie.

“Stop running, Herman. Stop. You don’t want it. You don’t want to know.” There’s a silence, and I hear him moving around. “No one should ever have to know.”

Another hum, and then another blast of blue electricity, this one blowing apart a gantry-way up ahead of me. Good; he’s off the scent, at least for now. I double back and drop painfully (and way too noisily) down to one of the lower catwalks, my single uninjured eye open as wide as I can get it, scanning the darkness for any trace of that sinister purple costume. I catch a glint of blue out of the corner of my eye, and jump/fall off the platform, seven feet down onto the tracks.

I land, and almost crumple immediately, my right leg telling me exactly what it thinks of its current working conditions. Now I’m down at the dark, dank floor; everything smells like half-chewed, half-vomited cheeseburger and mildew. Up above me, I hear Eddie walking down steps, still grumbling to himself.

“The lab explosion,” he murmurs. “The beach and the radiation. The radioactive waste on the street. The Darkforce. Darkforce dimension. You’ll see. You can’t see. You need to die, Herman, before you ruin it. Everything is lies.” I hear a loud hum, and watch as, somewhere above me, Eddie blasts a shadow that he must’ve thought was me.

I try to get up, but find I can’t; my right leg has stopped working entirely. Instead, I roll over and drag myself under one of the subway cars.

It’s actually pitch black under here; I can’t see my hand in front of my face.

That is, if I could lift my hand in front of my face.

For a time, there is silence. Maybe thirty seconds, maybe a minute. And then I hear Eddie, maybe two feet away from me, standing alongside the subway car. I look over, and, squinting through my good eye, I can see his purple feet.

“Herman. Come out.”

I lie there for a moment, breathing, thinking, and then bring up my shattered right hand, and stare at it. If I try hard enough, squeezing tears out of my eyes from the pain, I can close my fingers into a fist.

Okay.

Okay.

I can do this.

If I shake it hard enough in my brain, I can do this.

“Herman, please, don’t make this harder than it —”

I reach into my pocket with my broken hand, pull out my father’s switchblade, pop out the blade and slam it into Eddie’s left foot. He screams, and I use my still-working left leg to kick him in the right knee; there’s a crack, and his knee snaps, his leg bending backwards, and he falls forward, hitting his face on the side of the subway car.

I roll out on top of him, head-butt him once in the face, and then bite deeply into the side of his throat, tearing a good chunk of flesh out as a jet of blood sprays into my face. I roll off him before he can zap me, and just charge headlong down the side of the rail car, finally throwing myself behind a cart full of power tools.

There’s a pause, a hum, and then the cart goes blue and flips aside. I use my still-working leg to springboard me into the side of the subway car on my left, shoulder-first.

The “pop” is deafening, a nuclear explosion inside my chest, and suddenly my left arm works again. I swing it up and hit Eddie right in the sternum with a level one, knocking him back. He falls against a tool table, and then raises his arm, and blue light fills the room. I feel my chest seize up, and the shock actually flings me onto my back, twitching convulsively, stomach acid spraying out of my mouth now that I’ve vomited out all the food.

I flip over, and a series of spasms smashes my face on the floor. My body is jerking so hard that when I pull myself up onto one knee I’m literally flung back down onto my chest. I grunt and fall forward, passing out.

When I wake up, my watch says it’s fifteen minutes later.

It’s still dark. It’s still silent, except for “Rollin’ On the River”, which must be playing on loop.

But I’m still alive. Something’s wrong there; Eddie should’ve killed me. He wouldn’tve hesitated a goddamn second, he would’ve fried me like a fly in a bug-zapper. There’s no way in hell that …

Unless …

I force myself up on one elbow, and then force myself onto my knees. My right leg is still aching, but the fifteen minutes of undisturbed electrocuted slumber seem to have given it a little more life.

“Okay,” I say aloud, and turn, squinting into the darkness where the last blast had come from. “Eddie?” I call out, my swollen, dry tongue heavy in my mouth. “Hey, Eddie, you down there?”

Silence.

I stagger forward, my now semi-functional left arm held out in front of me, feeling through the darkness like a blind man.

My foot hits something, and I stumble, nearly falling flat on my face. I turn, and get a look at what I tripped on; it’s Eddie.

He’s slumped against the side of one of the subway cars, sitting on his ass, his legs out. Even in the darkness I can see how pale he is; at first I think he’s dead, but then he looks up at me and blinks, and speaks in a faint, weak whisper.

“I feel a little better … Those vibros of yours … have a … way of clearing your head …” He blinks, his bloodshot eyes haunting in the darkness. “Herman. You bit me.”

I fall forward, and slide down the side of the subway car, sitting next to him.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

He wheezes out this long, dead man’s laugh that chills me to the core.

“Bit my neck right out. Like a goddamn … like a goddamn vampire.” Eddie rolls his head to face me, and smiles weakly. “What a stupid fuckin’ way to die … And you’ve got … What, a broken hand, a broken leg, a fucked-up arm, your eye’s all bloody and shot to shit … And I was A-OK, and you still got me, you son of a bitch.”

“Come on, Eddie,” I say, nudging him a little. “Let’s get you to a hospital, before —”

“Before nothing,” he says, louder than I thought he was capable of. “Blood loss; you got the jugular. Just let me go. I’d … I’d explain it to you, man, really I would, but I don’t think I have that much time left … They’re scared of you, Herman. They know you’re going to figure it out. You are going to, aren’t you? You’re going to blow it wide open.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, tipping my head back and looking up into the light from the grate. “I’m going to shake shit up.”

“Hey, Herman …” he says, and weakly rests a hand on my leg. “We’ll do each other a favor, for old time’s sake. Me … fe first … You go to New Mexico, Herman. Alamogordo, New Mexico. There’s a military base there, but … but that’s not important … A couple of miles outside of town, there’s a valley … You look at that valley, Herman, take a … take a radiometer … Look at the rocks and the … just … just look hard. You got that?”

“Got it.”

“Okay … here’s the favor you do me … you tell Lucille and the kids … I love them … and you find Blitz, man … When they found out I knew what was going down … they took her … They took her for that FPS thing … You find her, and get her out of the country … but … if she’s got one of those … rich faggots … in her head … kill her.”

“Done,” I say, and then there’s a long empty silence, where we’re both very quiet.

“With a fucking … a busted hand and … a fucked-up leg …” That weak, sorrowful laugh again. “Jesus.”

And then Eddie becomes quieter than quiet, and I look into his unblinking eyes.

“Goodbye, Eddie,” I say, and force myself to my feet.

Six minutes later, I’ve forced myself, stumbling and staggering, back into the tunnel where it all started. I pass the old guy who saved my life, now just a blackened, still-smoking pile of burnt flesh.

Now that some time has passed, I can hear the first-responders starting to move around up at the station; tons of shouting, screaming moving metal around.

I reach the rubble where Aleksei and Hyde hit the wall, and find Aleksei sitting quietly by Hyde’s body, rocking back and forth.

“Oh, hey, Herman. Sorry I didn’t come and get you. I had a … a kind of attack.”

“Right, it’s …” I lean heavily on Aleksei. “It’s okay.”

“I heard noises up there in the tunnel. There wasn’t another meta, was there?”

“Yeah. The Eel.”

“Eddie? Oh, cripes, Herman, I should’ve —”

“I told you, it’s okay. I handled it.”

Sirens in the distance are getting louder, closer. Aleksei squints at my face.

“You got blood all over your face, Herman, what’s —”

“It’s okay. It’s not mine. I … I killed Eddie, Aleksei.” I feel it’s politic at this point that I remove the section where I bit out his throat.

“Cripes; we kill a whole lot of people.”

“Don’t worry, Aleksei. Hyde ain’t dead.”

And, indeed he isn’t; though his torso is split almost entirely in half, his body a writhing, crushed mess of blood and gore, he is indeed still writhing, snatching at Rhino with his one unbroken arm. The mask that was bolted to his head is torn, so that a single, furious eye is visible, bloodshot and menacing.

“Raah!” he screeches, and I wonder if that’s some rich kid still playing make-believe, or if they’ve somehow severed the connection, and I’m looking at a very confused, very in-pain Calvin Zabo.

And then I realize that Zabo, a mass murderer, probably had this coming in the first place.

Aleksei carries me out; we go through the sewers, and walks me on the surface streets five miles back to the doctor Peter brought me to; Carolyn Landau.

Her face shows only a kind of vague surprise as I stagger in.

Twenty minutes later, she’s wrapping my aching hand.

“I thought you said all your fingers were broken?” she says.

“I thought they were …” I say quietly.

“No. Just your pointer and your middle. Your knuckles are all pretty badly damaged, and you’ve got some pretty severe bruising; you weren’t trying to use your hand after the initial injury, were you?”

“Uh …” I say, still very quiet. “Uh … no?”

“Hm,” she says, setting my bone with a loud crack that makes me let out a dog’s yowling scream. “No, I think you’re lying to me. Your bones are all chipped; they wouldn’t be that screwed up unless you’d been trying to use the hand. What’d you do? Was this in a metafight, or a skirmish with the cops?”

“No, I don’t do that anymore; don’t fuck with the cops. It was an …” I decide to be honest. “An assassination attempt.”

“Hm,” she says again, a tiny noise of derision. “Mhm. Since when does the Shocker rate an assassination attempt? The entire Fifth Avenue subway station, destroyed, forty-three people dead? And a metacriminal called the Eel …” she says, sliding a splint-press around my fingers

“Yeah, well,” I say. “Times, they are a’changin’.”

When we walk into the Stark Building, I am a pirate.

The doctor has turned me into a fucking pirate.

She says I have corneal abrasions. They’ll heal, but she says my eye might look funny for the rest of my life; like it’s got six little cartoon lightning bolts drawn up and down the pupil and iris of my left eye.

Her answer to this was to put some kind of fluid in it, shine a blacklight on it, put some more fluid on it (this time stuff that smells like pure ammonia) and then drop an eyepatch on me. And not some modern-medical eyepatch; I’m talking a full on Captain-Hook-Arr-Me-Matey-Homosexual-High-Sea-Hijiinks eyepatch.

On top of that, she couldn’t just give me a crutch for my cracked kneecap; oh, no, that’d be too easy.

Instead, she hooked up some kind of weird knee-brace that starts at my thigh and ends at my calf; it clicks loudly as I limp along the polished marble, leading Aleksei by the hand. He’s nervous, scared even; you can see it in his little black eyes, darting around from place to place like a frightened kitten.

“Be cool, Aleksei,” I say, and he lets out this long, sorrowful moan.

Ever since Stark joined the Avengers, his building has become a sort of Mecca for the metas of New York. On the twenty-third floor, there’s a hospital wing with some of the most advanced medical technology in the world, open for free to the injured metahuman vigilantes of New York.

The thing I’m worried about now is whether or not the Rhino has done enough heroing to be considered eligible. Ever since the tunnel he’s been leaning; on walls, against tables, on the sides of cars … Like a ship that’s hit an iceberg, he’s listing. He’s been trying to hide it, but it’s getting worse and worse.

Parker lives here.

Peter Parker who showed up to be a friend when I needed one.

So convenient.

Peter Parker who my father said would drag in the Ditko-42s.

Peter Parker who doesn’t really offer a job description. Peter Parker who lives in the Stark Building. Peter Parker who’s married to an actress.

As the good Doctor Landau says, “Hm. Mhm.”

So here’s my guess about Peter: He’s SHIELD. Some kind of undercover operative, maybe part of a task force following me as I follow FPS. Or maybe he’s a free agent? An information broker maybe, that wouldn’t surprise me. What’d Otto say; “a former student.”

Well, one thing’s for sure; on some level, at least, Parker is a genuine ally. According to my father, he’s one of the only things saving me from a sniper’s bullet, and these days any enemy of my father’s is a friend of mine.

In the elevator, Aleksei falls against the wall so hard the entire elevator rocks.

“Oh, Herman … Oh, jeez … It hurts, Herman …” He’s rhythmically rubbing his chest, like a toddler with a tummy ache. “I think I broke my organs.”

“Almost there. Almost there …”

The door opens on the twenty-third floor, Aleksei manages to take three steps out and then collapses flat on his face, the impact shaking a coffee mug off the desk of the check-in nurse.

“Aleksei!” I hoot, my voice cracking on the “k” so that the “sei” comes out in a high-pitched squeal. I turn to the nurse. “You’ve got to help him!” I scream at her, but then get a hold of myself via the most psychotic-looking means possible, in this case violently shaking my head. “Look,” I start again. “I’m Herman Sch–”

“Herman David Schultz. The Shocker, right?” she says, with a cute little candy-striper smile. “Mr. Parker said you might drop by.”

“He … did?” I whisper. How much power does Parker have around here?

“Oh, yes. On top of that, we’ve got a personal message from Mr. Stark in the system for you.”

“You … what?”

Three of the orderlies have managed to get a hydraulic-forklift-style hospital bed under Aleksei, and they’re setting up some kind of portable X-ray device. A doctor approaches, looks through a pair of bizarre night-vision-type goggles, and then turns to an orderly and says, “Three broken ribs, and his pelvis is cracked clean down the middle. One of the ribs punctured the left lung. We’re going to need a phase-meta to reach through this … Armor stuff. Looks to be some kind of pliable concrete compound, can’t get a handle on the exact chemical build-up.”

And then off goes my big friend, doctors on all sides.

For a moment I’m hesitant to let him go off alone, but then I remember that this building is the headquarters of the New Avengers. And as much as social pessimists would beg to differ, I just can’t believe four people as different as Spider-Man, Captain America, Luke Cage and Wolverine could all be on the same bribery-payroll, as far as a massive conspiracy is concerned.

Fuck, man, wasn’t Wolverine involved in that Weapon X thing? There’s no way he’d play ball with something as sick as FPS.

Unless he didn’t know. Or maybe he … or maybe they …

Fuck, I need to stop thinking about this.

“Mr. Schultz? Did you hear me?” the nurse says. Apparently she’s been talking this whole time.

“No, sorry, I zoned out.”

“It’s all right,” she says, with a charming Valley-girl laugh. “The message from Mr. Stark is: ‘Herman, don’t let Reed hog it all; give me a look at one of your earlier gauntlet designs, just a peek, I promise, and I’ll make it very worth your while.’ And then he leaves a number …” She jots it down, and then does a little double-take. “This is Mr. Stark’s private office line. You must be a real big-shot.”

I start to respond to this, but then a permanently hoarse, but still somehow cheery voice answers for me.

“Big-shot? He’s the fucking biggest. This guy took down six hardcore super-villains at once without even breaking a sweat.”

I turn, and feel something I’m very not used to feeling, especially these days.

Especially today, when I learned that the face of the enemy is also the face of my father.

What I feel is Joy.

Martin Blank stands on crutches, his broad, simian face smiling, his left arm hanging in a techno-sling.

“Marty, you hairy motherfucker!” I yell at well above hospital-appropriate volume, and embrace him.

I hug him.

I hug my friend. My friend who isn’t Aleksei. It’s …

Shit, I don’t know. I’m getting all sentimental and shit now.

“Herman, how the hell are you doing? Jesus, your hand! Your leg! Your eye!” He lets out a little “ooo-AH!” monkey noise of amusement. “What happened? You go on a hot date with She-Hulk?”

“Hey, man, I wish,” I say, and smile. “More of the same, Marty; the people who got in your head, they’re after me, after me big-time. They’ve got more mercenaries rolling around than cripples in an earthquake, plus the metacrims they’ve brain-fried.”

“I assume I fit into the latter category,” he says.

“Yeah. Look, it’s pretty … It’s pretty fucking complex. I’d tell you about it, but I think maybe I should stay with Aleksei, because —”

“Aleksei’s in here?” Marty says quietly. “Shit, is the big guy okay?”

“I …” I decide to answer with the truth. “I fucking hope so.”

The nurse butts in again, still smiling, either not listening, not understanding or not caring about our bizarre discourse. “Sir, actually, if you’re not being treated I’m going to have to ask you to go. Fill out a contact form, and we’ll let you know when your friend is okay to leave.”

“Shit,” I whisper.

“Hey, uh … Herman, can I ask you a favor?” Marty says as I fill out the contact form; he sounds embarrassed, like a once-wealthy man begging a loan from a friend. He takes my silence as a yes, and continues. “Look … I got a call from my neighbor in the tenement I’ve been living in; he saw on TV that I’d been admitted here, and then the next night goons showed up, and they wrecked my place. Burned everything. So … what I’m sorta driving at here is —”

“You wanna stay at my place?”

He smiles the ape’s smile, showing sharp little monkey teeth.

“Well … yeah, Herman. You caught me.”

“Sure,” I say, sliding the contact sheet to the nurse, who gives me the flirty smile she’s paid around forty bucks an hour to give schmucks like me.

“That easy?” he says.

“Marty …” I say, and shake my head, smiling. “Buddy, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Is that so?” he says, his thick brow rising.

“Oh, yeah. Big-time crazy. I’ll tell you all about it on the plane,” I say, limping briskly towards the elevator.

“Wait, what? What plane?” Marty says, limping after me.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you.” I smile and hit the L for Lobby button. I put my fucked-up hand on his fucked-up furry shoulder and grin. “Monkeyman, we’re headed to New Mexico.”

Everything Is Lies, Part Two

On the way through the lobby of Stark Towers, I stop at the front desk and borrow a paper and a pen. I scribble down the chemical formula for solid-state Scilonium, the stuff the suit’s made out of; it’s pretty basic, and I don’t include the fact that you can only dye it yellow and brown, and I’m careful to stick to my first version, minus the improvements I’ve made since that night in my cell when I jotted it down on a napkin.

Twenty minutes later, on the subway home, I get a call from Stark. He’s practically doing backflips; I can hear that, even over the phone.

“You did this in prison? In fucking prison?” he shouts. “This could take phase-ten blasts from the Iron Man suit, easy; if any of my enemies got a hold on this, I’d be in an ocean of shit, you know that, don’t you?”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I haven’t exactly shopped it around. The formula is mine, and only mine; ’course, that’s the most basic version …”

“Basic?” He practically shrieks the word. “There are … Wait, Reed said you’d made improvements, but … Jesus!” He shrieks this last word so loud the other people in the subway car glance over at me. There’s a pause, and I hear him muttering to himself, and then he speaks up again. “Has Reed seen this?”

It’s the voice of a child, nervous that a respected (but greedy) playmate has been playing with his new toy.

“Not in so many words, no,” I say, preoccupied by the looks people are giving Marty; traveling with a mutant is harder than traveling with a costume-freak like Rhino. People don’t just stare; they whisper. They don’t just glance; they glare.

There was a lot of good will towards mutants in the days after the destruction of Genosha a little while back; I guess it showed the more, shit, I don’t know, “delicate” side of the mutant problem. That being: even though they’re not a single race, when you start targeting them, it’s still genocide.

It brought home the fact that the mutations that started in the Fifties and haven’t stopped since aren’t just another minority that can be shopped aside in the Gallup polls. They’re universal; more so than race or religion. “Mutant” is a truly new category, and when the world at large saw a million of them incinerated by the Super Sentinels on the evening news …

Let’s just say it brought that message home.

But these days, the honeymoon is over. Magneto came back for the millionth time, mutant crime rates bounced back up, Charles Xavier and his X-Men were rocked by scandal and dozens of seemingly random regime changes, and people remembered that no matter whether or not you can relate to him as a person, a dude who can fly and shoot fireballs out of his eyes is still pretty fucking scary to have sitting next to you on the bus.

Marty, for his part, must be used to it; he doesn’t even seem to notice the young Asian couple nervously eyeing him from across the subway car, or the old white guy with a catch-as-catch-can scar across his cheek looking like he might just try to jump him.

“Well, goddamn, Herman, how am I suppose to pay you for this?” Stark says, his voice booming in my ear.

“For what?” I say, snapping out of a haze.

“Scilonium. Or even better, how about we call it Schultzonium? Once the patents come in, I mean.”

“Schultzonium?”

Is he fucking kidding? That sounds like a blood disease.

“Uh, I think I’ll stay with Scilonium. I named it for my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah. Scilia.”

There’s a silence.

“Ooooooookay. Your element, your name. But I want Stark Industries to have that patent. And I want you on the goddamn payroll.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know, Herman, being you. You’re already my most valuable new asset; Jesus, can you imagine bullet-proof vests being made out of this stuff? The SHIELD casualty rates would drop below zero. I mean —”

“NO,” I say, booming the word out, godly over my own creations. “I don’t want any of my stuff mass produced, understand? None of it.”

“Well, Christ, how’re we supposed to make money off this?”

“I don’t want to make money off it,” I say. “I didn’t think that’s what this was about.”

Jesus, I’m some kind of fucking idealist now? Where’d this come from?

“With Reed it’s never about money, Herman. I was just hoping you were a little less naďve; I mean, hell, you did spend your entire life as a career criminal, yes?”

Okay, he’s got me there.

“Well, yeah, but that was just a job. These … these are my babies, Stark. You have to understand that if I’m going to give you any more. You can build it into the Iron Man suit, you can replicate it to your heart’s content, but I don’t want some pissant prick in Compton ripping off a police car and earning himself an authentic Shocker vest, you got me?”

There’s a silence.

“Okay. Deal.”

Marty mouths the word “contract,” and I nod.

“I want it in writing, Stark. I want it looked over by Reed’s lawyers. The good ones.”

“You’ll have it. I’d like to meet with you in person sometime later this week; is that doable?”

“Sure,” I say, then give a poignant pause and add: “If I’m still alive.”

Drama! Action! Intrigue! The Shocker has it all.

A thought strikes me.

“Hey, Stark, you think you can do me a favor?”

Sixty-five seconds later, I’ve got a private jet chartered for Albuquerque, New Mexico, departing from Kennedy at seven forty-five tomorrow morning. I better get my ass in high gear.

On my way out of the subway train, the sliding door nearly takes me out; my pirate-patched left eye doesn’t see the door closing, and it bops me in the ribs, nearly knocking me off my one good leg.

If Aleksei was here, he’d say ‘O jeez, Hoiman, are you okay?’

But he isn’t here.

Marty gets a pretty good laugh out of all this, and, after a moment of swearing and glaring at the door, I do, too.

As we enter the Tube, Marty has the standard reaction; shock, followed by silent awe.

“Jesus, Herman,” he says, limping further into the room. “You’ve got an authentic super-villain pad going on here.”

“Super Hero Headquarters,” I correct him.

“Home base?” he says.

“Base of operations,” I add.

“Big-ass abandoned subway station,” he concludes.

I point him to a room on the second floor.

“That’d be you,” I say, smiling as his brown eyes go wide.

“What, there’s a bedroom up there?”

“There are overnight rooms all over this goddamn place. I’m in 405. You’re gonna be in 203; it’s what I call the Library. The walls are all bookcases, and they’re all filled up with stuff published in the Twenties and Thirties; if I remember correctly, you’re a reader.’

“Yeah, man, hell yeah.” Marty looks like he’s in heaven. “Man, how the hell did you find this place?”

I remember Tombstone’s concrete fists slamming down onto me, and shiver convulsively.

“Luck, I guess.”

“No, man,” Marty says, heading up towards his room. “Not luck. Fate.”

I barely sleep at all that night; I’m too busy rigging up the security systems, setting everything up just right; if I’m leaving for more than twenty hours, I want this place fucking air-tight.

The security systems on the Tube have always been the best on any of my hide-outs, primarily thanks to contributions and purchases from other meta-criminals; here’s the short list:

From Phineas —

Automated Gatling guns with facial recognition technology.

Fire-Bats, little hovering droids that deploy in less than three seconds and chase you around with a flamethrower. One of these went after Aleksei the first time he came in here; him screaming, it chasing, him smashing into things in raw terror from an item roughly the size of a golf ball; it’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Thermal, key-code, and laser-light grid-based systems.

From Otto —

An automated wall fixture which can deploy a single thirty-five foot tentacle, ending in a jagged spike. Anyone who sets off the DNA detectors in the door gets a most unpleasant surprise.

A solid Iridium vault-sized door, nine inches thick. He generously donated it after I broke him out of Gransworth Home for the Criminally Insane; during that escapade, I saw it take a direct hit from a tank; the result was a minor dent.

Stolen from the (old) Avengers —

A pressure-based toxic-gas system, modified by myself to deploy in this order:

Tear Gas

Air-Borne Laxative

Cervia (the knockout gas given to me by Kingpin)

And that’s not to mention the mines, Bouncing Betties, laser trip-lines, fifteen different alarm systems, an electroshock unit I built into the entire lobby, and (my personal favorite) what I call a Level 6 vibration unit built up on the ceiling of the main concourse; I’ve never turned it on, but when I do, shit is gonna get messed up.

I get to bed at around midnight, and dream of Felicia.

Let me say this now: I am not a telepath, or a precog, or a psychic of any kind. But what I dream seems so damn profound, so goddamned obviously important, it’s worth mentioning. I guess everyone has that single shining moment that they’re granted insight into the inner fabric of the world, beyond time, beyond petty physical things.

I guess tonight is my night.

I dream of her walking in a desert, searching for something. She’s crying and bloody; her costume is torn and one of her breasts is hanging out in the least erotic way possible. She looks more confused than sad, but also scared, like if she doesn’t find what she’s looking for, she’s in serious trouble.

Finally she comes to this enormous device, made of flesh and bone. It convulses and expands, like a rib cage, and all of a sudden bursts into a blinding flash of emerald green light. And then, the strangest thing starts to happen:

It starts shitting heroes.

They go flying out of it, left and right, flying like shrapnel. Spider-Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, She-Hulk, Ant-Man, Ghost Rider, Sleepwalker, and dozens, maybe hundreds more, flying off in all directions.

“Herman,” Felicia says, and then everything goes suddenly black, and I hear dozens of whispering, insane voices, screeching horrible things, begging for death, begging for murder and violence.

I wake up the next morning to loud rap blasting through the entire Tube.

“What the fuck?” I say quietly, then go to the door of my room. “WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKK?”

“Hey, be easy man,” Marty shouts up to me from the ground floor, where he’s clearly just showered; his fur hangs down like a wet dog.

I take a second to get myself a little more aware and try to remember more of my dream, but my thoughts are interrupted by the line “I’ma creep on up behind ya, tell ya that it’s time ta, let a player like me get in that vagina.”

“You actually like this crap?” I shout down to him, wiping some sleep boogers out of my eyes.

“Hey, yeah, I’m black, it’s my people’s —”

“You’re black?”

There’s a pause. Marty stares at me.

“Well, yeah.” We look at each other quietly. “You didn’t know that?”

“Marty … you’re a gibbon.”

There’s a pause, and then Marty nods.

“You win.”

I pack a full Shocker suit, along with V4 gauntlets; can’t be too careful, might as well bust out the good china, as my father would say.

We head out at 6:03 AM, but before we can even catch a taxi, we’re intercepted by Miss Peelo.

She bustles up to us, and I do mean bustles, just as we’re climbing out of my most frequently used manhole.

“Oh, Herman, good, I’m glad I caught you,” she says as though she just bumped into me at a PTA meeting.

“The hell are you doing here, Peelo? This is Wildboys territory; you’ve practically got a target on your face, with that third eye.”

“What about him?” she says, nodding to Marty. “He’s a mutant, too.”

“He’s with me,” I say, realizing how stupid this sounds.

“Well, now I’m with you, too. Soon as I heard you were headed for New Mexico, I —”

“How the hell did you hear tha–” She shushes me and taps me on the forehead.

“In here. I set up a standing, exclusive up-link to your consciousness once I heard that people were after you; this way, I’m the only one who can poke around in your head.”

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with —”

“Hey, who would you rather have poking around in there, me or your father? With my direct hook-up, it’s a single line; no one else can enter without me knowing, and unless they’ve got some serious psychic muscle, I can probably shove them out.”

She gives me a second to think all this over, and then adds:

“Don’t worry, dearie. I promise not to dig too deep.” She adjusts the traveling duffel hanging over her shoulder and smiles, flagging down a cab. “Now hurry up boys, or we’ll be late for that beautiful jet Mr. Stark booked for us.”

Marty shoots me this wonderful Who the hell is this crazy goblin woman? look that makes me laugh out loud.

I sleep most of the flight; Marty listens to headphones and reads Al Franken’s new book, “The Truth,” and Miss Peelo knits. You might laugh if I told you this was only my fourth time on an airplane, and, if you did, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself. The sad lack of travel in my life was never my intention; I’d always get out of prison and get caught up in something new, some new idiot scheme to put me right back in prison again (after a properly savage beating from Spider-Man, of course).

When I was little, I always used to pretend that the reason my dad was … well … the way he was, was only because he intended one day to suddenly, shit, I don’t know, turn good. Take me all over the world on this whirlwind tour, maybe even take me into space, and that all of the hell before had just been training like he always said it was.

That somewhere inside him, he was just this wonderful person waiting to come out.

That dream is dead now, of course, long dead and buried and getting deeper.

My other airplane trips were pretty routine; my first was when I was nineteen, being transferred from Bare Hill lock-up in upstate New York down to Great Meadows Maximum Security prison down to the south. It was one of those bizarre, mostly hollowed-out prison planes; this was before meta-crime became common, so I remember really well the way they marched Ulysses Klaw, better known now as just “Klaw,” up to the front of the plane.

He was all piss and vinegar, howling out, “Richards, damn you, Richards!” in that thick Norwegian accent of his, his right stump-arm (devoid of its sonic blaster cannon) waving wildly at the guards trying to restrain him.

And I remember thinking: That ain’t never gonna be me.

Well, the next time I rode on a plane, it was me.

“Damn you Spider-Man!” I remember hearing the words coming out of my mouth, helpless to stop them as I struggled with some poor, underpaid prison guards; again I was being transferred, this time from a newly set-up SHIELD “metahuman lockdown” in New York to Sing Sing prison.

And again, the hollow plane with no windows, the smell of sweat and fear and urine …

Next time was a little nicer; economy class to Puerto Rico for the big AIM weapons auction; I flew down with Otto and Adrian. We’re lucky as hell Otto got us out before Captain America and USAgent busted up the party.

The last time I was on a plane was visiting my little big sister in Jersey; I drove back after, due to severe inebriation.

Seeing my sister always gets me a little down.

Two hours into the flight I get the following text message on my cell:

HERMAN I AM HERE IN THE HOSPITUL THEY SAY THEY CANT CUT THROUGH MY SHELL SO THEY USING A SIGHKICK NAMED LIZA TO GO INSIDE ME AND FIX MY BONES AND ORGUNS BUT ID LIKE TO GO INSIDE HER. THAT IS A SEX JOKE I KNOW SOMETIMES YOU DON’T GET JOKES TOO GOOD BUT ID WANT TO BE INSIDE HER LIKE HAVING SEX WITH HER AND THATS WHY ITS FUNNY. OKAY NURSE JANE SAYS I HAVE TO GO OFF THE SELLULORE FONE I MISS YOU

That “I MISS YOU” at the end really gets me, you know?

Poor sweet big guy.

I’m not going to bother you getting into all the details of landing, renting a car and getting our shit together. I’ll just start you off from our entrance to the long deserted town of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

“Did everyone just leave?” Marty whispers, his face pressed against the window.

It’s almost like the 1800s; everything is wood, no plaster, no metal I can see. Just a main street, an empty main-street sitting out in the middle of the desert. And it is, very much so, in the middle of the desert. It’s my first time in the desert, and I’ve got to say, it’s as miserable as everyone says. Arid, empty heat in all directions, and no rolling sand dunes like in the movies, just flat, cracked earth, like yellowed chapped lips, spreading in all directions.

Driving here was crazy; as we left the city, it was like watching all the color drain out of the world, which only got worse and worse as we neared Alamogordo.

The location of the town is weird, too; it’s like they purposely set it as out of the way as possible. On the way here, there were like a hundred signs directing you back to the main roads, meaning that unless you were specifically looking for Alamogordo, there would be no real way to get lost and end up there.

It’s on all the maps, though; it’s even mentioned in Miss Peelo’s enormous “SCENIC NEW MEXICO: The Land Of Enchantment” guide book, which she reads from out loud occasionally.

The least suspicious and the most suspicious thing I’ve ever seen.

Totally innocent, completely sinister.

“It says here,” Miss Peelo reads, “that Alamogordo was a military town; there was a base twenty-five miles outside of town, and all the officers’ families lived here; it’s even built on government land.”

“Jeez,” Marty says, wiping his nose. “What happened?”

“They bulldozed the base after an accident created ‘The Armageddon Man.’ It says the whole area is irradiated.”

“Weird. I didn’t see any signs.”

“And no one’s tried to stop us,” I add. “It’s weird; I’m looking in the windows of the shops, but I don’t see furniture, I don’t see light fixtures, I don’t even see wallpaper. It’s like a movie set; like they only —”

“Herman, look out!” Miss Peelo screeches into my ear, and I just barely manage to swerve the rental car around an enormous lizard crossing the desert road.

“Holy crap, woman,” I say quietly, and glare at Miss Peelo, but then take another look at the lizard the rear view mirror as it runs back out into the desert.

What is that?

An iguana?

A gila monster?

Shit, no, it’s way too big; it looks like a fucking Komodo dragon.

Marty chuckles, looking out the window as we drive away from the lizard, and points out the other strange thing about our narrowly-avoided-roadkill-victim.

“That is the greenest freaking lizard I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know they came in neon.”

Green. Hm. Why is that sticking with me so hard?

We stop once we’ve driven past the main street, and I scan the desert with my eyes; the valley that Eddie Lavelli told me about isn’t hard to pick out; maybe four miles outside of town, there appears to be some kind of enormous rock-wall formation. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you the land must dimple in on the other side of that, meaning it’s some sort of big crater.

We drive out to it, and park right against the edge of the hill of boulders and cracked dirt and sand. As we get out of the car, Miss Peelo speaks up.

“That’s odd.”

“What?” Marty and I say in unison.

“It’s dead air; no one has been here in a long time, except of course your friend Eddie. I’m not detecting any thought residue since …” She focuses. “Nineteen thirty-nine.”

‘Yeah,” Marty says, sniffing the air. “On top of that, this place smells off. Like … like a cemetery.”

I’m about to try to say something clever to bring them both down a peg, but then the wind howls, and there’s this eerie sound, like screaming. It makes me convulsively shiver in the desert heat.

Probably for the best; I’m no good at being clever anyway.

“So what do we do?” Marty says. Both he and Miss Peelo look to me; it’s weird, being the leader of anyone other than a thousand-pound man in a rhinoceros suit. It’s so weird, in fact, that I don’t even try to answer; I just start climbing the wall of the crater.

I want to see what Eddie saw.

“Herman, I’m telling you, this place smells wrong,” Marty mumbles to me. We pull further ahead, making good progress up the slanted rock-face, Miss Peelo gingerly picking her way along a little way behind us.

“Smells wrong?” I say. “Since when are you a bloodhound, Kong of the Wild?”

“Hey, man, give me some credit,” Marty says, monkey-climbing his way up the boulders ahead of me. “I took one of those Xavier tests back when he was giving them out in the Eighties. My base senses are level nine on the mutant anomalous register, the MAR. That’s higher than Sabretooth, Wild-child … even Wolverine.”

“You’ve got a better sense of smell than Wolverine?” I say; this feels like bullshit, but Marty’s not the type to lie.

“No, not better, really,” he says, monkey-flinging himself up onto the edge of the crater. “I can just interpret the information better than …” He takes a long look into the crater, and I pull myself up alongside him.

“Herman …” he says slowly. “What the fuck are we looking at here?”

I start to speak, but then stop myself and take another, harder look. From ground level, this looked to be some kind of raised valley-wall around an enormous crater, like that of a meteor impact. But from up here at the edge, it’s a very different picture.

“It’s … in,” I say; alone, that statement is incoherent, but put into context, I feel it’s very insightful.

Marty nods.

“All … in,” Marty agrees.

The wind howls again, and again I hear those distant, muted screams.

The crater isn’t a crater. It’s got a crater around it, sure, but where the huge indent should be, there’s instead a massive, inverted whirlpool of land, a raised upside-down funnel, maybe eight miles in diameter, eleven in circumference. The upward grade of the land is so subtle that most people wouldn’t notice it, but when you’re already looking for something to be strange, it sticks out like a severed head in a bowl of strawberries.

“Come on, bobo,” I say, starting to walk uphill towards the center of the ‘crater’.

“They didn’t explode something here …” Marty says, loping along on all fours alongside me. “They imploded something. Everything got …” He makes a ‘whoosh’ sound with his mouth. “Sucked up.”

“What the fuck did we have that could do that in 1939?” I say, and for a moment I hope that Marty will have an answer. Marty shrugs (something’s wrong bring the atom rotator down by five degrees)

“Maybe this is the result of time travel? Heroes are always bouncing all over time and space,” he says (jones stop the test before we), running out ahead of me a little. “Maybe someone went back and …”

Marty stops.

(oh my god my eyes it sucked my eyes out)

“Do you hear that, Herman?” Marty says, his eyes narrowed to slits. “That’s black noise.”

(michael shut it down shut it down before it)

“What?”

(jesus the field is widening it’s over two miles now)

“Black noise. Sounds below the range of human hearing; not above it, like dog whistles or hypersonics. So low, so vague that even I can’t usually pick them up.”

“We need to shut it down before it sucks the whole town in,” I say aloud. “Wait, what?”

Both Marty and I stop dead.

(hold onto something it’s out of control)

“Marty … something’s wrong here,” I say, rubbing the side of my head.

(no no I don’t want to die no)

“Yeah, no shit,” Marty says. “I can’t stop thinking about something sucking my organs out.”

“It’s the Black Noise,” Miss Peelo says, finally catching up, her teal parasol shaking in the desert winds, pulling her skirt up to her nobbly knees so as not to dirty it any more than it’s already been soiled. “Like subliminal messages; nasty ones, at that. Here …” she says, putting a finger to her forehead. “Give me a moment and I’ll block them out for us …”

(no help no help I can’t hold on my bones are coming through my skin)

A delicate purple tendril extends from the inner corner of her left eye, and then whips out and stabs into my forehead, then Marty’s, then sucks back into Miss Peelo’s little goblin face. My head feels tingly for a moment, and then there’s what feels like a cold breeze in my ear canals, and the whispering, angry voices go silent.

“There,” she says. “That should last us until we leave here, I hope.”

“What the hell were those?” Marty says, scratching behind his ear with his left foot.

“They sounded like voices. Like people whispering,” I say, and turn to Miss Peelo. “Localized to the inverted crater, too. Maybe a psychic trap?”

“No.” Miss Peelo, of course. “It was physical; auditory. If it’s a trap, then it would have to be some kind of recording, played twenty-four hours every day of the year. And if anyone was going to upkeep that, then they —”

I finish her thought.

“Most certainly would have had the balls to come and stop us before we could ever trigger the trap.”

I look over the empty anti-crater, and say something as it occurs to me:

“This is a forgotten place. We’re standing in one of the world’s loose ends.”

We walk further in silence, passing a couple more of those insane giant green lizards, too preoccupied with chasing strangely large bugs to pay us much mind. I’m not sure exactly what we’re looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.

“Hey, what’s that?” Marty says, monkey-running over to something sticking up out of the sand; we’re almost at the center of the funnel, the epicenter of the explosion, and the ground is starting to be speckled with big rocks, chunks of unidentifiable crumpled metal and what looks like plain wooden planks, cracked apart by an unimaginable force.

Marty yanks the object up out of the sand, and shakes it off.

“What is it?” I shout to him, but he’s still messing with it down by his chest.

“Boo!” Marty says, turning around suddenly, and actually pretty effectively scaring me; he’s got something on his face, over his eyes; a second, less “scared shitless” look shows me that they’re bomb-goggles, the old type where each individual goggle looks like half a soup-can. Marty looks pretty goddamn cool in them, too; like a kind of Mad-Monkey-Scientist.

“Where’d you find those?” I holler to him, trying to hide the fact that he just almost made me swallow my own tongue.

“They were attached to this,” Marty says, and holds up a human skull, cracked into three pieces.

“My word,” Miss Peelo says, going a little pale in the hot desert sun.

Marty keeps the goggles on, and we walk in further, finally reaching the highest point, where whatever happened … happened.

And there’s nothing. Just a dimpled plateau of land.

Or wait, is that …

I jog over to the dead center of the anti-crater, and stare at what hangs in the air.

“Oh, no way,” Marty says, circling it, flipping open the lenses on his bomb goggles. “Is that what I think it is?”

To call it a “spot” would be wrong, but it’s certainly something of the same variety: a rip in reality hanging in the air, maybe two feet long and eight inches wide, so black that it seems to suck the light in all around it.

“Oh, dear,” Miss Peelo says, going right up to it and peering in. “Oh, dearie me.”

I instinctively pull her back, protective, and then something vibrates into place inside me.

“I know what it is. I know what happened here. I —”

I get no further, because a shuriken throwing-star zips by my face and embeds itself into Miss Peelo’s cheek. She screams, clutching her face, and falls to her knees, all three of her eyes wide.

The assassin with the big fake tits, Dragonfly, the one who attacked me when I was with Peter, stands not twenty feet away from us, stumbling closer; something’s wrong with her. She’s staggering, her eyes squinted nearly shut and filled with tears, mumbling under her breath.

“How the fuck didn’t you smell her?” I whisper to Marty; there’s no way I can run all the way down to the car and get the Shocker suit, not with my bum leg.

“I don’t know; she must be wearing one of those psychic blockers the kingpin had a while back; I didn’t hear her either. Shit man, what do we do?”

“The undying ones! They scream in my ears!” Dragonfly wails and her voice trembles badly. “Screaming! They are screaming!”

So, this is what we would’ve looked like if we hadn’t brought Miss Peelo along.

Maybe Marty was right. Maybe it is all about fate.

“Dragonfly, calm down,” I say in my best ‘It’s All Good’ voice. “You’re sick. You need to —”

“I need nothing from you! My skin! My flesh is being sucked from my bones!” she screams, and I back away from her as slowly as I can.

“Marty …” I say out the side of my mouth. “Get Miss Peelo the hell out of here. I’ll handle this.”

Now, normally the sidekick is supposed to say, “Herman, no!” and valiantly join the fight. God, I guess I’m still not an actual superhero, because Marty grabs the still whimpering Miss Peelo by the arm and starts dragging her down the anti-crater.

“You must die, Herman Schultz,” the Dragonfly says, stumbling towards me.

I draw out my father’s blue switchblade, and flick it open.

She pulls out her katana.

I feel a little stupid.

Out here in the hot desert sun, in the middle of nowhere, with my injuries and her psychosis, only one thing is for sure: this is going to be quick, brutal and bloody.

Everything Is Lies, Part Three

Here’s a quick one for you:

A woman is giving birth. She gives this huge push and the baby pops out, all gooey and covered in placenta. The doctor picks up the baby and slaps its ass to start it crying, but it stays quiet. The doctor lets out this crazy scream, and starts punching the baby in the face, and then picking it up and smashing it against the wall, and then just throwing it on the ground and stomping on it. The mother is screaming and screaming, but in her condition, she can’t really do anything.

The doctor lets out this great last war-cry, and then hurls the bloody lump of baby through the window, sending it tumbling four stories to the ground below. He laughs, calming down, and turns to the mother.

“Just kidding, miss; it was dead when it came out.”

The moral is this: Things are never as bad as they seem.

Usually, they’re worse.

The Gamma Bomb was a brilliant idea. Conceived by General Thaddeus Ross, brought into reality by Doctor Robert Bruce Banner, the concept itself was flawless. Using gamma rays, the bomb would, in theory, snap the underlying fabric of the universe on an infinitely microscopic scale. Then, in theory, there would be an enormous burst of radiation, incinerating everything in a perfectly contained one-hundred-mile radius, leaving no radiation, no buildings, no life.

The fusion, the beautiful, emerald-green fusion of the gamma bomb was the starting point for the creature people call the Incredible Hulk, born inside of Dr. Banner on the fringes of the first and only Gamma Bomb test.

That light, that shining, perfectly clear light, was meant to be the next evolution in tactical weaponry. It was meant to end the Cold War, and establish the U.S. as the ultimate world power.

It was meant to eviscerate all who would stand in its way.

The only problem was: it didn’t work.

(we can’t stop it the reaction is already starting)

Except it did work. I know that now.

(my god its beautiful the light)

This conspiracy that I’ve been following, it’s much bigger than I ever could have thought. It’s not just national, not just international; this anti-crater alone means whatever kind of scum-fuckery my father, Arcade and FPS are into has big, no, global implications.

Maybe even bigger than that.

Everything is lies. How deep does it go?

Dragonfly swings the katana at me wildly, and I back-step.

“You have to listen to me —” I shout at her, and she just keeps coming, waving the thing like a cheerleader baton.

“You must die! Your hair will be torn out of your skull, your eyes sucked from their sockets, your tongue ripped out of your mouth!”

(what’s that sound sounds like a vacuum)

This is bad. Miss Peelo must be getting too far away; her auditory block is wearing off.

“Dragonfly, you can kill me later; we need to get out of — Jesus!” The sword nearly takes off my head, and dodging it throws me off-balance on my bad leg, causing me to drop face-down into the sand. The sword is raised high, catching the light of the desert sun. I roll out of the way, and she buries the blade in the sand.

(turn off particle accelerators five and eight, it’s going into overload) “Bastard!” she screams, and I slam my knife into the side of her right knee; I hear a crunching sound as it breaks through the cartilage. She screams, and I try to yank my knife out, but I can’t; it’s stuck. She screeches and karate-kicks me in the side of the head so hard it flips me over. One of my dozens of concussions acts up, and I’m suddenly woozy, dizzy, under-and overbalanced as I scamper blindly away from her.

She limps along after me, swiping the katana at me like a kid playing at sword-fighting.

“Kill you! The green light!”

(wait something’s wrong)

“Get away from me!” I scream at her, my crawling hands finding a big plank of wreckage sticking out of the sand.

(test is scheduled for today with all project heads in attendance) She swings the katana at me, and I knock it out of her hands with the plank of wood, then swing it back around and smash her over the head with it. The voices of people long dead are starting to take their effect on me; that constant mumbled undercurrent is disorienting me, throwing me off rational thoughts.

(higgins you look in the pink how’s the wife)

Dragonfly fell back, but now she just shrieks like a banshee and dives at me, drawing out a wakizashi short sword. She slices me right across the shoulder blades, cutting through my shirt and skin like butter, and I feel hot blood start to rush down my lower back. I scream and spasm, but this actually throws me forward, landing my hand on a nice, weighty rock.

I roll and throw it as hard as I can, and miss.

Terribly.

I’d like to blame it on the voices,

(all power online)

but truth is, I’ve just never been very good at throwing stuff.

Dragonfly doesn’t even seem to notice, as she slashes the wakizashi at me like a madwoman. This forces me into a kind of crazy backwards-crawl-run-stumble that has to be seen to be believed, and, lucky me, I look desperate enough that she doesn’t even notice me slip on the brass knuckles.

When you catch someone just right on the side of the head with knucks, there’s this wonderful “whomp” sound, like throwing a soccer ball against a brick wall.

I don’t get this sound when I catch Dragonfly with a killer right-hook just above her right-temple; instead I get this meaty “crashk” noise, like someone hitting a frozen steak with a meat cleaver.

And suddenly my arm jerks away from her; she goes down, but so do I.

“EEEEEEEEEYAAAAAHHHHHHH!” I scream, the world a red torrent of pain.

Lesson learned: if you’re going to punch someone with brass knuckles, punch them with the hand THAT DOESN’T HAVE FOUR FUCKING BROKEN FINGERS.

I fall onto my knees, screaming so hard I don’t actually make any real noise, just this tiny squeaking sound. Dragonfly hits the sand, clutching her head, while I just hold my hand out in front of me like it’s on fire, staring at it, screaming. I shoved the knuckles on so quick I didn’t even notice; that’s what adrenaline will do to you.

(starting reduction coil five shift the particle accelerator into phase three) “Feeeeyyyyyuuuuuck!” I shout at the world empty desert, and throw myself back to my feet, staggering towards Dragonfly as she starts to get up, blood gushing down my back and into my ass-crack. I yank my knife out of her knee, and stab it into her back, right below and to the left of her neck. She screams and rolls, and something wisps past my cheek, leaving a thin, stinging line from my jaw to my chin.

Blood splashes out onto the sand, and I see the gleaming tanto dagger-sword in Dragonfly’s left hand.

“Dah!” I yelp, and grip the new slice in the side of my face, turning away, but then let out a scream and slam the knife up into her armpit. Her arm spasms and she drops the tanto, and I fall on my butt, pulling the knife out of her.

(higgins start reactor one)

She rolls in pain, murmuring, “The voices, the voices …”

I limp over to her and yank out the knife, wipe it off on her hair, fold it, and stick it back in my pocket. My whole right hand is throbbing so hard it feels like its going to jump off my wrist, but the pain doesn’t stop me from kicking her as hard as I can in the side of the head.

The murmuring stops.

She’s a lot lighter than she looked; I would’ve thought all that muscle would weight her down. Dragging her out of the anti-crater, this nightmare of science, one of those big emerald-green lizards starts following us.

Eventually, it gets bolder, and starts pulling at Dragonfly’s shoe. I kick it with my good leg, and it hisses at me and charges.

Okay, this is bad; in my current condition, I’m not sure if I can fend this thing off.

It swipes at me with its tail, and I barely manage to lean out of the way; I hear the WHOOSH sound as it passes me, and the last of my doubts about this anti-crater are erased.

The lizard, I said it was emerald green.

No.

It’s Hulk green.

The lizard roars at me and pounces, but mid-air it’s intercepted by a flash of snarling brown fur.

Marty looks like an animal; not just a mutant, but an actual animal, snarling, frothing at the mouth; he must’ve run all the way back up here.

He bites off part of the lizard’s head, and then snaps its neck, all in one quick motion, and then lies there panting like a dog while the lizard twitches beneath him.

He spits out a piece of the lizard’s rough skin, and smiles at me. “Sorry I couldn’t be here sooner, man. That rock wall is a bitch on broken hips.” He glances at Dragonfly. “Looks like you didn’t need me all that much.

“Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving, Marty. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig out the cut in my back. We need a hospital.”

Marty helps me make my way down the rocks, while we drag the Dragonfly behind us like a roll-away suitcase. We stuff her in the trunk, and then head for civilization. Miss Peelo drives, still holding a huge, bloodstained-brown wad of tissue paper to the wound on her face.

The voices fade as we get farther away, and I start my Gamma-Bomb rant. When I finish, Miss Peelo is the first to speak.

“I don’t understand, dearie,” she says as we turn back onto the highway. “How can you be so sure it was a gamma bomb?”

“Well, normally I wouldn’t be. But when you look at it in context, it’s pretty much certain; this is a spatial collapse scenario, as described in Banner’s paper on side-effects of a gamma explosion. I’m guessing these guys were trying for something completely different; it could’ve been anything from an atom bomb gone woky to an experiment in temporal distortion.”

“What? Time travel? We’re dealing with time travel?” Excited and squatting on the front passenger seat, Marty looks more like a monkey than ever.

“No, Marty; we’re not. But I’m saying the guys who set off the implosion, that might’ve been what they were going for. We’ll probably never know; regardless, whatever it was imploded so hard it caused a shower of gamma rays to cut through the fabric of reality, creating that rip we saw.”

“And?” Miss Peelo says, clearly a little impatient with all of this after having her face torn open.

“And it went from blow …” Marty makes a rather convoluted motion with his hands. “To suck.”

I nod to him, feeling a fresh flood of blood seep out onto the fabric of the car seat. “That’s right. Everything around it, for miles and miles, got sucked right the fuck in.”

There’s a long pause.

“And then?” Marty says, turning down the radio.

“And then they tried to shut it down. Too late; the whole town got sucked in, the testing base included. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, died; got yanked into the Darkforce Dimension.”

“The what?” Marty and Peelo say in unison.

“I don’t know,” I say, rubbing the bleeding wound on my cheek. “I don’t know yet. It’s still vibrating in my head, you know? Something Eddie said before he died. I think it’s what’s inside the Spots; a sort of … between place.”

“So … it’s like a location?” Marty says, rubbing his sweating brow.

“No, I don’t … I don’t know yet. I think it’s like the ocean; like a place, but also a thing; the ocean is made of water, the Darkforce Dimension is made of … Darkforce Dimension.” I sigh. “Our problem isn’t whoever orchestrated the test. Our problem, or problems, are the people who came to clean it up. The people who rebuilt a fake town three miles north just so planes flying over wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“The people …” Marty snarls. “Who got in my head.”

When Marty growls like that, it’s not Monkey-Funny. It’s a little Monkey-Scary.

“We’re jumping to an awful lot of conclusions here, aren’t we?” Miss Peelo says, muttering a curse under her breath as she presses on her wound.

“Hey, Peelo,” I say, smiling despite the pain from my wound. “At this point, jumping to conclusions is all we have.”

There’s a silence, and we hear Dragonfly curse in Japanese from the trunk; she’s waking up. There’s another pause, and then we hear her voice.

“Schultz? Is that you out there?”

“With some friends, yeah.”

“Where am I?”

“In the trunk of a car.”

“You have defeated me in combat, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I fear I was undergoing some … difficulties.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“Did you retrieve my swords?”

“Sorry, Slick,” I say, patting the unsheathed katana sitting on the seat next to me. “Only got the big one. I was gonna keep it as a souvenir.”

“I need it … I’m going to need it back, Mr. Schultz.”

Her muffled voice from the trunk sounds ridiculous; Peelo and Marty and I are barely holding back laughter.

“Yeah, well … we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

While the ER Nurse is stitching my back up in Albuquerque, my phone buzzes; I’ve got one new message.

Her voice is like cool raindrops on my sun-burnt face.

“Hey, Herman, it’s me … I just, I want to let you know I’m waiting for you in the Tube when you get back; your security system just let me walk right in, I hope it was supposed to do that.”

Actually Felicia, yes, it was. My heart is skipping beats left and right.

“I’m just here because, well … Jesus … Herman, I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear right now, but we’ve got problems. Someone is buying up every meta-mercenary in the city; everyone. The contract is, surprise surprise, on you; Octavius came and told me. He says that the hire has approached Adrian, Max, Wilbur, Flint and Mark, but they all refused. A shit-load of bad, bad guys have signed on, though, and it’s getting pretty scary out there; I even heard someone rented out the Crimson Dynamo armor. Everyone’s looking for me; they know that they … Well, they know that you’ll come for me.”

The way she says that touches me oddly, and I smile inside.

“Be on your guard when you get back to New York, Herman. Things are going to get messy.”

It’s okay, Felicia. With you, I think I might like it messy.

Everything Is Lies, Part Four

Well, this fucking blows.

They told me five days bed rest before I get back to New York; I’m guessing they know there’s trouble waiting there for me. Me muttering about it constantly probably wasn’t helping, but it’s easier to blame others than take any kind of direct responsibility.

So, as it stands, I’m stuck listening to Marty laugh at reruns of Full House in a cut-rate motel room, watching Miss Peelo read Great Expectations, and spending my days in a seedy little shit-hole called the Low-Down.

It’s one of those seedy little train-wreck dives, where most of the light comes from reflections glinting off the bottles and even the water tastes like smoke. This is the lower levels of the world, populated by the dead and the dying. This is a neon hell.

Marty seems to be having a great time, though; he found some Slick Rick, Doug E. Fresh, LL Cool J and Schooly D in the juke-box. He’s happy as a clam.

But when Marty’s not around, my brain is deadened by the Garth Brooks, the Creed, the endless chatter of the beaver-toothed bartender, and the too-loud volume of the television. I feel the air hot and sticky on my face, the polluted fumes of a thousand Daves and Johns and Larrys who have come before me. My body is twitching and jumping with energy; I want to get the fuck out of here. I want to get back to New York and kick some ass.

I want to get back to Felicia.

Hours pass, but time stands still. I’m in the bar, I’m in the room, I’m sitting outside looking at the desert sunset, I’m in the room again, I’m in the bar again … My whole body aches, and life moves so slow down here you lose track of how fast it’s slipping away from you. I guess that’s what …

Now what the fuck is that?

That’s not normal.

I’m sitting on the porch of the motel looking out into the desert when I first see it. In the beginning, it just looks like a figure, a little black figure silhouetted against the orange sunset, marching slowly towards me out of the desert.

At first the shape is so vague, the movement so stumbling and awkward, that I don’t recognize it as a human. I figure it’s a lost horse, or maybe a cow from one of the cattle ranches up to the Northeast.

It gets closer, the figure becomes clearer; it’s not a horse, or a cow. It’s a man.

But as it gets closer still, not even that is certain; it’s too big to be a man, too lanky, its knuckles dragging on the sand in front of it.

It’s not a man. Or is it?

Getting closer now; maybe thirty feet. I feel glued into my lawn chair, the motel silent behind me, the sounds of the desert stifled by a thick humidity that seems to emanate from the creature.

The thing’s body looks to be completely composed out of algae, mold and fungus of some kind; it’s so thin in some places you can see straight through. On its face (if you can call it that), it has two enormous red orbs that must be eyes, and then … No mouth, really. Just a bunch of looong tentacles, no, roots, dangling down from the bottom of its face, one of them longer than the others, like the trunk of an elephant.

A mutant?

No, too strange. Too different. Too … not human.

It’s not a man.

It’s a man-thing.

Saaaalllliiiiis.

A voice in my head. Too many of those recently.

Saaaallliiiiiiiisssss …

The Man-Thing lumbers up onto the porch, and looms there in front of me, the red lantern eyes swaying inches away from my face.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe. Marty has to come out sometime, and Miss Peelo, shit, surely Miss Peelo can hear me psychically screaming my head off.

Saaaalllliiiiissss …

Wait.

That name is familiar.

The Man-Thing lurches backwards, collapsing onto its haunches, glowering at me with the big red eyes. It must be seven and a half feet tall, eight hundred or so pounds of moss and wood packed onto some kind of flesh endo-structure. I’m betting any kind of direct attack on him would be pointless, especially at this distance (around three feet); that muck he’s made out of would probably just fly apart and reform. How the fuck else could he have made it this far? that shit on his shoulders looks like swamp grass, and there sure as hell aren’t any natural swamplands in New Mexico.

Which means this motherfucker walked here from somewhere down south. Walked all the way out here to talk to me.

“What …” I say, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “What do you want?”

The Man-Thing stays still, the reeds and blades of grass growing from its back blowing in the desert breeze. One of the root-things growing from the bottom of its face, the big one that almost looks like an elephant’s trunk, twitches fretfully, and somehow, I understand:

It’s feeling my fear. And it doesn’t like it.

Sallis, Sallis, where the hell do I know that name from?

Wait.

Wait.

And in my head, the name vibrates into place.

Doctor Theodore Sallis; he was one of the names I couldn’t identify on the list of heroes and villains I saw in Aleksei’s head.

What does that mean? What does that —

The Man-Thing lurches forward, and I press myself back into the chair, turning my head, scrunching up my nose, trying to overcome the meaty, earthy smell: like raccoon roadkill mixed with a vegetable compost heap.

I feel a wave of euphoria come over me; like everything in the world is going to be okay.

It’s not. I can feel it’s not.

But the Man-Thing is forcing it into my brain that it is, so I don’t have much choice. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to fight. Just stay still, and everything will be fine.

The Man-Thing rocks back on its heels, and resumes staring at me. Very slowly, I start to speak.

“What do you know about Doctor Theodore Sallis?” I say. Let’s keep this real fucking simple for swamp-noggin.

The response is instantaneous, and booming; I feel it behind the skin of my forehead, bouncing painfully around my skull.

BETRAYED

The word rings in my ears as though it was just blasted over a loud-speaker, even though I know the Man-Thing didn’t make a sound.

“Who betrayed him?” I say quietly, trying to bring down the tone of the ‘conversation,’ if you want to call it that.

The sad thing is: Sitting around all day and then being harassed by a Swamp Monster with a BO problem is my idea of a pretty laid-back day.

That is, if the creature doesn’t end up eating me alive.

Lover. His secret formula. Super-Soldier. A.I.M.

“He was working on the super-soldier serum?”

Project Gladiator. SHIELD. His secret formula. BETRAYED.

The word blasts out again, and I use my heels to loudly scrape my chair back, across the porch, a few more inches away from Man-Thing. It leans forward, negating the distance.

“Did he die? Was it the CSA?”

He found … The secret … Ingredient … DARKFORCE …

It blows out so hard I actually clap both hands to my forehead, trying to squeeze out the pain like pus from a pimple. It doesn’t work.

“Dark force what?” I scream at Man-Thing, and it turns, looking up at the sky.

When the voice in my head speaks up again, it’s more coherent. Slower, more even, as though it’s really forcing the words together, forcing its thoughts into a formation that makes sense.

Sallis recreated … 1942 Erskine super-soldier serum … Using original … ingredients … one of them was … liquid Darkforce materia … acquired it on trip to New Mexico after researching … development process of original … serum by Emil Erskine … but … His lover betrayed him … to AIM … and he destroyed his notes … so that no one would ever know …

“What?” I whisper. “No one would ever know what?”

Alamogordo … gamma bomb … experiments with Darkforce physics … He injected himself … but serum was not ready … he fled into the swamplands … and died … You seek … truth … I have given you … my piece.

The Man-Thing sways to its “feet,” and trundles down off the porch, back out into the desert. I’m frozen for a little while, but then I jerk myself to my feet, and shout at its distant form as it begins to fade back into the horizon.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU?” I scream, sure there’s a better question to ask it but not sure what the hell it might be.

The shape disappears into the fading sunset, but then I hear it, just a whisper in my head.

I … was … Theodore Sallis …

I don’t sleep too well that night. My dreams are filled with that rotten smell, those big red eyes, and that strange feeling of dead, frozen calm the thing exuded.

The next morning, I tell Miss Peelo and Marty all about it over breakfast at IHOP. It doesn’t go over too well.

“Why in God’s name didn’t you tell us?” Miss Peelo whispers, slapping down her tea so hard a little lick of it splashes up over the edge of the mug.

“You’re a psychic. Why didn’t you just read my mind?” I spit out without thinking.

“Herman, I told you we had an understanding; I said I wasn’t going to delve, and I meant it, but this, this creature approaches you ten feet from where I’m sleeping and you don’t even tell me until fourteen hours later? That’s unacceptable, Herman!”

All right, this is pissing me off.

“Don’t you —” I start, all piss and vinegar, but Marty cuts me off almost immediately.

“What if it had been a mercenary, Herman? A mutant or something —”

“This was no fucking mutant,” I say flatly.

“Now, how the hell can you be sure of that, man? I’ve seen a mutant that just looked like a floating lump of green shit with little arms on the side. There is no way to tell —”

I slap my hand down on the table, just in front of Marty, and it effectively shuts him up; he even looks a little hurt.

“It was not a mutant, Marty, and it wasn’t there to hurt me. This thing … it felt like it was from a whole different … a whole different world or something.”

“Could’ve been an alien merc, then, Herman. There are some wandering around, or are you one of those Bible Belt idiots who still denies that the Skrull and the Shi’Ar exist?”

I grimace at him, a little angrily, and he grimaces right back.

“All I’m saying is that, if any weird shit goes down, you got to keep at least one of us in on it. I mean —”

And then Marty goes silent. All three of Miss Peelo’s eyes open painfully wide. And I feel him sitting next to me in the booth.

It’s the smell that hits me first; ball-park hot dogs, ketchup, mustard and relish.

“Both of you should consider yourself volunteers, and ask for absolutely no more than Herman is willing to give you,” the Punisher says, picking a sausage up off Marty’s plate.

“Oh,” Marty says in a tiny voice. A wispy pink line appears between the heads of the Punisher and Miss Peelo, tentatively, as though she’s hoping he won’t notice.

“Mr … Castle … it’s a pleasure to —” Miss Peelo says, but then the Punisher slices a knife through the pink energy cord, and Miss Peelo jerks away as though scalded.

“You cut that shit out. Either of you try anything funny and I shut this freakshow down right here, right now.”

Marty and Miss Peelo both look ready to soil their pants.

“Herman,” the Punisher says, turning to me. “We’ve got problems. I assume you’ve been told about the debacle in New York.”

“The contract on my head, I heard, yeah.”

“And you understand the magnitude of the bounty?”

“Shit, I don’t know, do I?”

The Punisher sighs.

“It’s an open contract with a call-in number; anyone can claim it, superhumans and non-meta lowlifes alike; all they need is a good hacksaw, and pow, seven hundred million dollars.”

Marty gasps at the number and starts to speak, but I cut him off.

“Wait, a hacksaw? Why do they need a hacksaw?”

The Punisher either grimaces or grins; on him, it’s hard to tell, but I think it’s a mix of both.

“The contract is on your head. And just your head.”

Dear old Dad. Always could count on him to surprise me.

“Who’s signed up?” I wheeze.

“The Locust, Anarchy, Styx and Stone, Blue-Bird, Gunmetal Gray, Speedfreek, Joystick, Recoil, Man-Ape, Razor-Fist, Boomerang, Quicksand, Stilt-Man —”

“What?’

“I thought I was being pretty damn clear, Schultz.” His eyes narrow; he doesn’t like being interrupted.

“It’s just … you’re sure Stilt-Man signed up?” Punisher nods, but I press on. “My friend, Wilbur Day? Old Willy? He signed up to cut off my head?”

“You catch on quick,” Punisher growls, and lights a cigarette. I don’t know how I feel; betrayal? Despair? Shock? I can’t tell anymore.

What’s that old saying about honor amongst thieves?

“I wasn’t done, either; that’s just the list as it stood when I left New York to come looking for you. I thought you might want the raw data before you headed back into town.” There’s a pause, and he takes a puff on his cigarette. “Add to that maybe sixty or seventy non-meta hit-men, thugs, and crack addicts, maybe more, and that’s a whole army on your ass. Your butt-buddy Sytsevich checks out of intensive care tonight; if we leave now, we could make it in time to pick him up outside the Stark Building, maybe give him an escort back to your place. I’ve got a vehicle that could move him.”

I hesitate.

This is the Punisher, after all; who’s to say that when they come for me — and oh, they will come for me —l he won’t just set off eight pounds of C4 and wipe all of us scum off the face of the Earth?

This guy once nearly beat a guy to death for stealing a woman’s purse; his name’s Stevie Lawrence. He lives uptown now; he used to just be Steven Lawrence, but that was before; these days he’s Stevie and he has trouble completing sentences.

“What’s in it for you? Why would you do this for me?”

Punisher sighs; a real deep, long sigh, and then turns to me.

“You’ve done right by me, Schultz. You’re smarter than anyone like you ought to be and you’ve been leading me through this maze of shit by the seat of my pants, and I’m lucky I’ve been able to keep up with you this far. So maybe we should both just count our blessings and shut the fuck up, how does that sound?”

“That sounds great,” I whisper.

“Good. I’m paying.” The Punisher gets up, and heads over to the register.

Miss Peelo and Marty are both in nervous silence, but there’s something I simply have to know. I lean across the table to Miss Peelo.

“What did it look like in there? In his head?” I whisper to her, and she gets very serious, her face a little pale.

“There was nothing in there, no thoughts I could read, nothing … Just an image and a sound; blurry crows flying against a gray winter sky, and their screams, echoing out over fields of dead yellow grass, echoing forever, back and forth, the flock never moving, just flapping in place on that bright gray sky. It was …”

“Fucked up,” Marty posits, and Miss Peelo nods.

The Punisher walks back to the table, dangling the keys to our rental on his forefinger. He must’ve picked them off me when he sat down next to me; this motherfucker is slick as snot.

“I’m driving,” he says, and starts to walk out, but then turns back. “And, just a thought, you folks should probably let that Dragonfly woman out of the trunk. She ain’t sounding so good.”

Everything Is Lies, Part 5: the Siege

The night burns me alive.

Nobody drives in New York.

But if you have to drive in New York, driving with the Punisher is definitely the way to go; he doesn’t drive around cars, he drives OVER them. He doesn’t take short-cuts; he takes short-crushes. Of course, the car helps.

The car, if you feel comfortable calling it that, is a modified old Army truck; the thing’s chasis is like four feet off the ground, mounted on enormous all-terrain tires; they look like they could crush the Hulk. It’s got an eight-foot flatbed, where Miss Peelo and Marty now sit, and where we’ll hopefully put Aleksei, if we can make it to the Stark building without getting taken out by one of myriad of mercenaries after my head.

The air is electric; the moment we step off the plane I can feel eyes on me, and Marty is twitching and jumping like a dog held back at the end of a leash. The walk to Punisher’s truck was like a run through No-Man’s Land; every person around us was suddenly the boogey-man, every shadow was an invisible meta ready to jump out at me with a hacksaw.

I’ve got his head!

I’ve got his head!

This isn’t very fun.

This is fucking scary.

I put the suit on as soon as we got in the truck, and that helped my nerves a little, but only a little; the impact deadening of the suit is only going to help so much with more than twenty guys on my ass, and who’s to say they won’t be coming at me with lasers, or spacial distortion waves, or any of the other seemingly infinite vulnerabilities of my stupid yellow and brown piece of shit, oh, my God, what if they’ve got those hooks that Phineas made, or what if — “Herman,” Miss Peelo says, putting a hand on my shoulder from where she sits in the truck bed. “Relax.”

“You were reading my mind?”

“I couldn’t help it, really,” she says quietly, smiling a gentle smile. “You were screaming.”

I frown, and go back to watching the road. The Punisher is just straight-up driving on the sidewalk, now, slow enough for people to get out of his way, but fast enough that they have to fucking dive like Olympic swimmers.

“Yeah, relax. Easy for you to say; you haven’t got ten million criminals looking to separate your head from your neck.”

Miss Peelo starts to speak, but Punisher interrupts her.

“That’s right. She’s only worth four million, so I doubt they’ll be focusing on her.”

Miss Peelo turns white.

“What?” she whispers.

“What?” I practically shout.

“There’s a bounty on all of you freaks, Herman. I thought you were smart enough to understand that; you, Blank, Sytsevich, Hardy, Peelo. There’ll probably be one on me, too, after tonight.”

The way he says those words, “after tonight,” makes a chill run up my spine.

“Then I want to drop Miss Peelo off.”

“What?” she whispers again.

“I want to leave her in the lobby of the Stark building.”

“Shit,” Punisher says, and sneers at me. “Why don’t we all just stay in the nice clean lobby of the big shiny Stark building, where Iron Man can protect us if the bad men come —”

“She’s not like us,” I say, hard, final.

Punisher shoots me a little you watch your fucking tone, punk look, but then nods.

“Then the lady goes. But you better hope we don’t live to regret it; I’ve found psychics come in very handy in this type of scenario.”

“What type of scenario is that, exactly?” Marty pipes up from the back.

Punisher grimaces.

“A no-win scenario.”

“I’m sorry I asked,” Marty says quietly, and Punisher smirks, reaching over my lap and popping open the enormous glove compartment; dozens of clips of ammunition and pistols drop out onto my lap; he’d packed the thing to at least twice its normal capacity. He grabs one, a nine-millimeter, and tosses it back to Marty.

“Here you go, Mighty Joe.”

Marty holds it out in front of his face, pinched between two fingers.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with this?”

Punisher smiles.

“It’s scum repellent. You point it at the bad men, pull that trigger down there, and poof, they go away.”

“Very funny …” Marty murmurs, setting the pistol down.

“You pick that up,” Punisher says, cold as ice.

Marty does as he’s told, and Punisher nods.

“You ain’t with us, you’re against us. That’s how it has to be.”

Marty sighs, and tucks the gun into his belt. “Fine,” he murmurs, huffily making it as clear as possible that it’s not fine at all.

“Peelo,” Punisher barks as we roll onto Madison Avenue, the Stark Building looming like a giant down the street. “While you’re still here, I want you to send out a message. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I think so. Who do you want it sent to?”

“Everybody in a two-mile radius who’s thought the words Shocker, Rhino, Schultz or bounty in the past twenty-four hours. Can you disseminate ’em out like that?”

“No problem,” Miss Peelo says, squinting her eyes shut.

“Very impressive, Miss Peelo. Now look into my mind and you’ll find the content.”

A thin pink tendril goes from Miss Peelo’s forehead to the base of Punisher’s skull.

“Oh, my,” Miss Peelo whispers.

“Send it,” the Punisher says, and smiles at me, a weird, skeleton smile. “Surprise, Herman.”

Dozens of tendrils burst out of Miss Peelo’s face, rocketing off in all directions; one of them hits me in the forehead, and I receive Punisher’s “message.”

It’s him and me, sitting in the front of the jeep. He points at his eyes.

“Look,” he says, and then we pan down to the area under my chair, revealing two fucking pounds of C4. The Punisher speaks up again.

“Attack us in public, and your money goes boom.”

The Punisher symbol. It winks.

I snap out of it, and immediately reach under my seat; nothing.

“Oh, thank Christ,” I whisper.

“Other side,” Punisher says.

“What?”

“Other side,” he says again.

I reach down around the other side of my chair.

…

Ah.

…

Ah-hah.

There it is.

Two pounds of C4.

“You —” I start to say, but then the Punisher shakes his head and laughs.

“Honestly, Herman, what’d you expect?” he says, and leans over. “Of course, what they won’t take into account is that with your suit on, you’re the only one in this truck who could survive the explosion.” He slams on the emergency break, sending the truck into a suicide spin-out which stops just short of the glass front doors of the Stark Building.

It’s nine fifteen PM, but the Stark building is as busy as ever; dozens of men and women in business attire come and go, blue suit, black suit, brown suit, big, big gray suit …

Aleksei.

Seeing him lumbering gingerly through the crowd towards the exit hits something inside me, and suddenly I’m grinning like a madman; I’m lucky that my mask is on, or I’d undoubtedly be getting some less than flattering looks from the Punisher.

Just as Aleksei reaches the exit, they appear.

It starts with the roar of a motorcycle, which screeches up alongside us. On it sits one of the biggest guys I’ve ever seen, natural, non-meta I mean. He’s wearing this bizarre vest that looks to be made of denim and spare parts of some 1950s Robbie the Robot nightmare. His hair is a greasy explosion of dead black bristles, his face a deeply creased mass of scar tissue.

I recognize him from the SHIELD Database.

He smiles at me and flicks his tongue.

This is Gunmetal Gray.

Then a faint buzzing sound; a single glance upwards reveals the Locust passing from building to building, his ridiculous suit of armor making him look like a much smaller, green Juggernaut.

Professor August Hopper was always a bit of a joke in the super-villain community; guys like him, and Grizzly, and Gibbon, and … Well … Shocker, were never taken seriously. Of course, with that crazy gray Van Dyke beard, his borderline fanatical obsession with bugs and one of the stranger technology sets available on the market, Hopper gave people more than enough reasons to think of him as nothing more than a harmless nutcase.

Harmless, however, is not the appropriate word; dude has some kind of disintegrator ray wired into the pointer finger of his right hand; I saw it vaporize a police officer once; one second he was there, ready to fight off one of the cockroaches Hopper had blown up to the size of tanker trucks. Then Hopper passed that ray over him and poof, no more cop. No more cop car, either, now that I think back on it.

Aleksei passes through the doors, and I hear Punisher cock his pistols. I flip on the gauntlets, and hear that neat little whoosh-hum of them charging up.

A good sound; a solid sound.

It’s been too long since I heard that sound.

And damn it, the yellow and brown looks good. I haven’t worn the suit in a week and it feels like it’s been years; this is a mark five, too, my most recent model, the one that breathes with me like a second skin. The gauntlets are mark V-4.0s, no bullshit ass-kickers, capable of level 5s that once took down Thor.

Only for eighteen seconds, but those were a beautiful, beautiful eighteen seconds.

“Hey, Herman.”

Hay Hoiman.

I reach out the passenger-side window and hook Aleksei’s horn, lean out and kiss him on the forehead.

“Oy, Herman, don’t be gay!” he says, nervously looking around, as though the gay police are going to run up on us with leather handcuffs.

“I missed you, big guy,” I say, and I mean it. I really do. Aleksei makes a motion like he’s going to climb into the front with me and the Punisher, and I laugh, despite myself. “Aleksei, you won’t fit.”

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, right.”

“Go around back,” Punisher says, a little harsh for my taste. I don’t like it much when people use tones like that with Aleksei; it only confuses him. “You lie down on the flat bed, on your back. Cross your arms over your face, and try to stay still.”

Aleksei nods, and vanishes from sight; a moment later I feel the truck rock as it takes on his weight.

“Miss Peelo,” I say, turning back to her. “I … you’re just … you’ve been more than helpful. You’ve been like … Super-woman or something. I need you to know … I want you to know that … Shit, I’m no good at this,” I say, and lower my head.

She puts her hand on my shoulder, and smiles, her third eye watering a little.

“You be careful tonight,” she says quietly.

“Careful …” I say, in my best action hero voice, “is not on tonight’s menu.”

She disappears into the lobby of the Stark building without another word.

Punisher starts up the truck, and starts to head towards the Brooklyn Bridge.

I hear an old muscle car rev its motor behind us, and glance in the rearview mirror. It’s red with black stripes, and the front license plate reads “BUGSBUNY.” Through the windshield I can see the driver, a man in his early forties with wild red hair. He wears what look like flight goggles, strapped so tightly to his face they seem to be biting into his skin, and a big ruddy olive-green trenchcoat that’s all bushled around him in the sportster’s bucket seat.

This is Recoil, world renowned hit-man and Looney Tunes enthusiast.

Punisher practically growls at him, and when I look at him, he responds simply and eloquently, as is his style: “I thought I blew him up.”

Thank you, Punisher, you dashing wordsmith you.

Marty leans up in between us.

“I smell plasma burners,” he says quietly. Punisher reaches out and turns a mirror up towards the sky, revealing a small red shape as it streaks by, silhouetted against the blank black New York night.

“That’s the Crimson Dynamo!” I almost scream, and Punisher looks back at Marty, not smiling but certainly without his usual scowl.

“Good call,” he says, simple as usual, but the fact that it’s positive input means something, and Marty knows it. “You smell anything else?”

“Nothing you guys can’t see,” Marty says, nervously touching the gun-butt sticking out of his belt.

A big voice pipes up from the back.

“Hey, Herman, the floor smells like dental floss!”

I don’t laugh; everything is vibrating now, nothing is funny.

Everything is shaking in perfect tune.

The world is on a thin, unspooling line; the pitch and tone of the universe is a simple vibrational frequency. Nothing can touch me.

They say when you think you’re going to die, your life flashes before your eyes.

I suppose this is my version of that; I feel like I can se the infrastructure of reality, vibrating in perfect tune, the universe one gentle but chaotic humming tone.

Punisher pulls the truck up alongside the big sewer gantry I usually use to get down to the Tube when I’m with Aleksei. He reaches under my seat, yanks out the C4 and presses it to my chest.

“You hold this like a goddamn teddy bear until we’re in your clubhouse.”

“Punisher —” I start, but he silences me with a glare.

God, what I wouldn’t give to kick this guy in right in the balls.

“Aleksei, we’re going to make a run for the sewer gates. You up for it?”

“Yeah, yeah, Herman, no problem.” The truck shakes and shifts as he sits up in the back. “What’s goin’ on? Why’s Wilbur coming?”

“Wilbur?” I whisper.

Marty turns and looks out the open back of the truck canopy.

“JESUS SHIT!” he monkey-shrieks, and I turn just in time to see the Punisher dive out of his door.

“Hey —” I squeak.

There’s a flash of red light, an earth shattering ZAP, and the truck bucks forward, end over end, throwing me through the windshield and out onto the pavement.

Here we go.

I roll three times, hit the curb and then jump to my feet, throwing my back against the side of a Cantonese restaurant.

Wilbur Day, the Stilt-Man, stands before me, smoking particle-beam blaster at his side.

He’s got on the Stilt-Man armor he built in his garage; a simple strength-enhancing Tinkerer rip-off with the gimmicky pneumatic stilts that can take him two hundred and ninety feet into the air, to, well … Get knocked down by Daredevil. If he has any regrets about betraying me, me who’s been his friend for — shit, must be going on ten years now —l his metallic faceplate doesn’t show it.

“Hot damn, you’re fast, Herman!” he says, and again, he’s emotionless.

“Wilbur —” I say, not sure if I’m scared or angry.

He starts to raise the blaster, and I whip up my arms; two level fours point-blank to the chest don’t knock him back, but they whip him around inside that armor like a bug in a jar; I hear at least one bone break, and ah, there we go, he collapses to his knees, clutching his chest.

And then Wilbur surprises me; he drops back onto his butt, and fires the stilt on his left leg at me; it extends out at what must be a good sixty miles an hour. I duck, and it rushes by like a train over my head, smashing straight through the wall behind me.

The truck, for its part, finally finishes its flip, going upside-down and backwards into the front of a Walgreens. Seconds later Aleksei comes smashing through a wall about twenty feet to the right, looking none too happy.

“You sonsabitches!” he screams at the world, shaking off a coat of dust and rubble from the plaster walling.

It’s as though his scream presses an invisible button, built solely for the purpose of every goddamn window, door, and car on the street. People who I thought were frightened pedestrians are pulling out snub-nose revolvers; there’s even a guy up the street, normal-looking guy in a Red Sox hoodie and jeans, coming running down the street at me holding what looks like a small hand-ax — I think they call that a hatchet.

You wanna hear something really out there?

Around twenty-five bullets just hit me in the face, arms, legs and chest, and the thing that most bothers me is the noise level; I mean, you’d think most everybody would’ve started using silencers in an urban assassination. Wrong.

The bullets slide off like water; the suit functions perfectly, as always.

Nonetheless, I duck behind a ’66 Buick, which is instantly Swiss-cheesed. I need to hide; number one, there might be people scoping me with energy weapons, and number two, once people with guns realize their bullets don’t work, they generally try again with something bigger.

A car drives through the hailstorm of bullets and slams into my Buick, which slams into my back and flings me about seventeen feet diagonally into the wall of the building to my left; I land hard on my elbows, and every injury I’ve received in the last two and a half months flares up at once.

“YAFRAPA!” I scream; coherence isn’t a priority at this point.

Rumblerumblerumblerumble.

The car full of gangbangers flips up into the air as Aleksei nails it, full speed. He grabs it in mid-air and hurls it into a storefront that’s been serving as a bunker for several non-meta gunmen. Someone fires a laser at him from the roof tops, and he grabs a mailbox and throws it like a football; there’s a loud THUNK and a guy in a cut-rate suit of power armor falls ten stories into asphalt.

Wilbur’s started to stand up, so I hit him with a level three; coming from ten feet away, it rolls him like a bowling ball. His left leg’s stilt malfunctions, and launches him sideways into a dumpster, which folds around him like cardboard.

There’s the roar of a chopper, and Gunmetal Gray comes zooming up the street, pulling a shotgun from a harness on the side of his bike. Aleksei turns to him and BOOM, catches a shot right in the face.

I act without thinking.

Motion based only on emotion.

“Cocksuuuuckkkkeeerrrrr!” I scream, and jump up, use the hood of the destroyed Buick as a springboard, and tackle that white-trash piece of shit right off his Harley as he rides by. I shove my forearm between his jaw and his neck in mid-air, so that when we hit the street, he lands right on his head.

CRACK.

That’s a sound I’ll never get tired off.

Up close, he smells even worse than he looks. I roll him over on top of me, and within seconds he’s filled with more bullets than an NRA member’s basement; even with all that lead in him, he still shoves me off, and stumbles a couple of feet away, before falling face-down in a Olympic-sized swimming pool of his own blood. As I stand up, I start shooting level fives at wherever I see muzzle flares.

The sixty-year-old architecture of Barker Street comes apart like butter when you vibrate it at ninety miles a second, and the sky is a torrential downpour of bricks, cement, plaster and glass.

Not to mention falling bodies; if there are fatality figures for the last ten seconds, I don’t want to see them. Ever.

“Jesus, Herman!” Aleksei yelps.

Wait.

Aleksei is yelping?

A brick bounces off my big friend’s head, and I he lifts a car up the way some people lift newspapers up to shield their heads in a rain storm.

His faces is a bloody mess, but when I really look at him, I realize why he still has a face; Gunmetal Gray was using buckshot. Actually, that’s a pretty ingenious plan; so many small impacts on one section of the suit might short it out.

Good theory.

Shame I thought of it ten years ago.

“ALEKSEI!” I scream. “Hit the sewers!”

“Screw that, Herman, I’m staying up here with you!”

“Aleksei,” I say, trying not to lose my temper as a bullet slides over my eye. “I’m running away!”

“Oh. All right then,” he says, and smashes straight through the pavement. I jump down next to him, and bang, the Punisher and Marty are right next to me.

“Move,” says the Punisher, and then he hurls a bandolier of grenades up to street level. Aleksei and Marty look to me, and I take off running, the sewage splashing up around my knees.

“Run, you crazy motherfuckers!” I yell back at them, and they do. The Punisher lingers for a moment, firing a Kalashnikov up into the street, and then someone jumps down and tackles him down into the shitwater; a second glance reveals it to be none other Anarchy, a red-haired witch of a woman who’s made her name out of cutting the throats of low-level superheroes.

She’s best known for taking down the Punisher. And Moon Knight. At the same time. Unarmed. In public.

I stop dead in the sewage, letting Aleksei and Marty breeze past me.

“What’re you doing?” Marty practically shrieks at me; even down here in the dark, his big monkey eyes gleam with hysteria.

“Herman,” Aleksei says, somewhat thoughtfully. “They’re all looking to kill you.”

“I know,” I say, turning around.

“HERMAN HE’S THE GODDAMN PUNISHER!” Marty howls at me.

“I know!” I howl right back at him, my voice cracking so bad it sounds like I’m foruteen again. “Get to the fucking Tube! Tell Felicia I’m on my —”

There’s an enormous explosion from up on street level, and the sewer ceiling above my head disappears, replaced by the night sky, and, most notably, a man in a massive suit of gleaming red armor.

The Crimson Dynamo.

‘Holy shit’ doesn’t quite cover it.

The first suit of Dynamo armor was created by Ivan Vanko, a Soviet scientist who I pretty much worship when it comes all matters relating to electronics; the guy was an absolute revolutionary. He defected to the U.S. and went to work for Stark (don’t they all), and was killed saving that rich alcoholic self-absorbed bastard from an assassin wearing, get this, a suit of Crimson Dynamo armor.

Since then, there’ve been a slew of assholes to call themselves the Crimson Dynamo, as the armor changed hands and was modified and tricked out like an old car. Who knows who’s wearing it now; maybe ex-KGB, maybe just some schmuck who had a few million dollars to spare and now is looking to make it back.

With my head.

The suit itself is your basic flying/super-strength set-up with a wicked twist: instead of coming equipped with onboard weaponry, it has instead two equilarian-style mega-conductor coils on the palms.

Those among you familiar with Reed Richards’ revolutionary work with Equilarian-micro-coils will know what this means.

For those who don’t, lemme make this blood simple: the Crimson Dynamo suit can throw electricity.

He hovers above me there for a second, and I hear this gentle VZZM as the palm conductors recharge.

“Poo,” I whisper. I’m not sure why I say it, but for some reason, it causes an instant reaction: a bullet sparks off the helmet of the armor, and the Dynamo turns.

Marty is walking towards me, closer and closer to the Dynamo, the pistol raised in his hand.

“Run, Herman, you crazy fuck! Run!” He fires again, and I think I hear the asshole in the Dynamo suit laughing.

He fires off what looks like a bolt of lightning down at Marty, and, for what seems like the hundredth time this week, Martin Blank surprises the living hell out of me.

He tosses aside the gun, kicks off the wall and bull-tackles the Dynamo around the waist; this throws the Dynamo off balance, his leg jets kicking out and driving them both back down into the sludge, bolts of electricity zig-zagging every which way. Aleksei goes to help, but it’s too late: the Dynamo has worked out his thrusters, and he launches up, through the hole in the street, into the night sky, taking Marty with him.

“Marty?” Aleksei whispers.

“Aleksei, go!” I yell.

He does as he’s told. Good man.

I turn and run back towards where I saw Punisher get taken down; it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light, but when they do I see Anarchy and Punisher brawling like lunatics, slashing each other with knives like they’re playing marker-tag. She slams her blade into his shoulder, and he doesn’t even react, just boots her in the stomach, punches her in the face, rips the knife out of his shoulder and goes to stab her with it.

No dice; she slashes him across the throat, and he staggers back, his eyes wide.

I want to say now, for the record, that I don’t think Punisher can be afraid.

I don’t think he even knows what fear is any more.

But that look in those dead eyes, it’s alive; too alive. Too aware; not just the cold killing computer I’m used to.

He’s not afraid, but he knows something’s wrong; that computer analogy helped me out, because that’s exactly the thought I see in his eyes.

SYSTEM ERROR – DOES NOT COMPUTE.

“HEADS UP, SHE-BITCH!” I shout, a bit melodramatically, and hit her with a single level four right between the shoulder-blades. She flies forward, bounces off a slime-covered wall with a nice loud CRACK-POP.

Shooting women in the back in a sewer.

So this is what being a superhero is all about.

Punisher stands up holding his throat with a white-gloved hand, and tosses a grenade onto Anarchy’s back as she tries to stand up.

Boom goes Anarchy.

“Jesus —” I start, but he walks right past me, not even looking at me, and but I can feel it; the DOES NOT COMPUTE is gone.

SYSTEM REBOOT: PROGRAM DIRECTIVE/MURDER.

I wipe some Anarchy off my mask, and follow after him. A few thugs have started climbing down through the hole Aleksei made in the street, and the Punisher shoots each one of them in the head, one two three four five six, like swatting flies.

“FUCK!” I scream at nobody as we round the corner, revealing Aleksei pounding on the vault door to the Tube.

“Herman, she won’t open it until she sees you!” he yowls, like a scared dog.

“FELICIA OPEN THE FUCKING DOORS!” I scream, and begin frantically waving my arms at the cameras. “OPEN THE —”

The door creaks open, revealing Felicia standing there with what looks like an elephant gun. She fires almost immediately, shooting between me and the Punisher, causing all of us to do a comical “UH DURH?” turn around.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!

“IN IN IN IN!” I scream at … well, myself, I guess; Aleksei and the Punisher are already inside, and I dive in after them.

The vault door slams shut behind me, and I hear as all fifteen of the locks slide into place.

What I saw out in the hall will stay with me for the rest of my life: dozens of men, and a few women, some in armor, most in street clothes. Almost all of them holding weapons, some armed only with a crazy look in their eyes.

Mutants, metas, tech-users, and just plain old assholes out for a quick decapitation followed by a six-million-dollar payoff.

I stand up and start to speak, but then stop dead.

I stare at Felicia.

She stares at me.

That wonderful smell fills my nostrils. It’s like … it’s like she’s surrounded by this white halo of light.

“Herman, I thought that you might —”

“Shut up,” I say, not even listening to myself, and I yank off the mask, throw her up against the wall and smash my mouth onto hers.

There are a hundred ways to kiss someone.

There are ten thousand ways to do it wrong.

I suppose, in my life, first kisses have marked pivotal changes in my psyche; they’ve never gone smoothly, never been very good (save one), and, strangely enough, were always in awkward locations; a bathroom, a bar against a dartboard, the back room of a courthouse, things have been very strange for me in the affairs of the mouth.

But I can safely say that this … This is perfect.

I’m not even angry when the Punisher yanks me off and throws me on the ground; the best part, I think, is that Felicia stays right where she was, her eyes wide, just smiling.

Then Punisher smacks me clean across the face, and that … that makes me mad.

“What the fuck?” I shout at him, right up his nose.

Yeah, that’s right, I just shouted straight in the face of the Punisher.

Kissing Felicia will do that for a guy.

“Hey. Assclown,” the Punisher says, monotone. “Two-hundred-some lunatics on the other side of that door, looking to cut our heads off. Now is not the time for thinking with your dick, unless your dick has some kind of nuclear capacity that I am not aware of.”

Humor from the Punisher. I guess the chaos brings out the best in him.

“No,” I say, pissed and panicked. “Go to the ticketing booth; there’s medical supplies in there, and I want you to goddamn patch your neck before you bleed to death.”

The Punisher nods and immediately does as he’s old.

Whoa.

So I’m in charge.

I … I didn’t really figure on that.

“Felicia,” I say, turning to her. “Go to the cafeteria; in the kitchen you’ll find my main security rig. I want you to hit every goddamn red button on the panel, take the remote out of the charger, and then tear-ass with it back out here.” Felicia nods once and takes off running. “Aleksei, I want you to —”

BANGBOOMBANGBOOMBANGBOOM.

They’ve started on the door; we couldn’t hear them when it was just gunshots and people pounding; it’s too thick, and the whole place is sound-proofed; that’s either a super-strong meta or a big-ass projectile weapon.

“Aleksei,” I start again.

“Hey, you kissed Felicia!” Aleksei says. That shuts me up for a minute.

“Yeah, Aleksei, that must’ve been a full minute and a half ago.”

“Well, sure, but I only just thought about it now.”

I’d hug him if I wasn’t about to throw up, pass out and die.

“Aleksei, go up to the second floor, head down the hall into the old subway tubes.”

“But they’re all filled with concrete, Herman —”

“On track three, you’re going to find a very odd-looking thing. I want you to reach into it and pull the green lever, then push the whole thing forward up onto the caution tape. You got that?”

“Right, track three, gray lever —”

“Green lever.”

“Track three, green lever, push it onto the caution tape. I got it.”

He stands there smiling at me.

“FUCKING GO.”

He gives me the thumbs-up and stomps off up the grand staircase to the second floor.

I stand there, breathing. Just letting it all flow down onto me, the beauty of the place, the wonder of the place I’ve tried to call my home. The wonderful woodworking. The beautiful lighting system, the way light seems to trickle down the walls of the grand lobby, leading you freely and easily to the shops, the overnight rooms and the subway stops. The marble work is fucking beautiful, too, limestone, copper railings … I don’t … I don’t know how I’m going to say …

BOOOOM. CLANG. BOOOOM. CLANG.

They’re stepping it up out there.

God, I hope Marty’s all right.

For a moment, I completely identify with Adolf Hitler in his final hours, trapped in a bunker as the Russian forces bore down on him, panicked, his world crumpling rapidly into nothing.

How’d he handle it? He committed suicide.

I flick the gauntlets back down to level three; if I’m gonna go out, I’m gonna take all these sad, greedy shitheads with me.

Everything is lies. I want to know …

No, I need to know what it all means.

As for Hitler …

Hitler was a fucking pussy.

Everything Is Lies, Part 6: the Siege 2

I tear down the address for Arcade we got off Hammerhead and shove it in my suit’s belt; I’ve got three little slots for just such an occasion.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

BOOM.

The pressure on the door is building.

The insanity outside is intensifying; even through the soundproofed walls I can hear them hooting and hollering. Felicia runs back out into the lobby, holding my security remote, a bulky thing covered in switches, knobs and buttons. She’s slipped on her bullet-proof vest over her usual outfit, not that it’s going to do much good, but I suppose it’s for more for psychological safety than anything else.

“There are at least two hundred of them out there, Herman; your thermal scan was screaming off the dial; it registered one-ninety-three, but from the camera’s I’m sure there’s more, I’m sure of it, Herman —”

I grab her by the shoulder with one hand, and put the other one up under her face, cradling her jaw.

“Felicia. We’re going to be fine.” There’s a pause, and then I add: “I just lied. I’m sorry. I have no idea if we’re going to be fine or not. In fact we’re probably going to die. Horribly.”

She cocks her head and smiles at me oddly.

“You’re so … Not him.”

“What?” I say. “Not who?”

“Who do you think, dummy? Spider-Man.”

And for some reason, that makes me feel real, real good.

BOOM.

And there that feeling goes, right out the window.

“Okay, kids,” I say, turning back to the vault door, my remote raised. “Time to shake things up.”

I flip a switch. There’s a moment of silence, and then a faint hissing sound.

“What is that?” Felicia says, looking around.

“Tear gas. I’m flooding the whole sewer system out there. And now …” I press a button, and there’s the distant sound of air blowing through a vent. “Viaquin 3. An airborne laxative.”

“Laxative?” Felicia says, wrinkling her brow.

“Laxative,” I affirm. “These are all meant to be traps, to slow people down; they were never meant to be used offensively like this.”

“But, Herman … Laxatives?” Felicia giggles nervously. I nod to her, and grab her by the wrist, marching her back towards the security room.

“Fuck, yes, laxatives; if they want their seven hundred million, they’ll have to work for every single fucking dime. And if they do it with debilitating stomach cramps and chunky liquid shit running down their legs, well, I don’t know about you but that puts a smile on my face ten miles wide.”

“You have a point.” Felicia laughs, and slides her wrist out of my grip, replacing it with her hand.

Again, through the panic, the little boy inside me is smiling.

BOOM.

Some crazy motherfucker is still beating on the door. Time to kick out the big guns. I flip two switches, and press a blue button. There’s a ZNNN sound, and Felicia takes notice.

“What now?”

“Three automated Gatling guns out there in the hallways. It must be a fucking slaughterhouse out there.”

“Herman …” she starts, maybe to protest. She must suddenly remember about the fourteen million her head is worth, because she goes silent. We turn into the Tube’s cafeteria, and are faced with my mammoth monitor set-up; fifteen screens, each one displaying a different video feed from inside and outside the Tube.

I knew what I would see, but it still hits me hard.

The Gatling guns have run out of ammo, and they’re spinning on empty; the flowing sewage is red with blood, a swampy sea of bodies and body parts. The bullets were high-caliber enough that they actually split a lot of the unarmored folks in half; those that weren’t actually blown apart were riddled with bullets, and lie either dead or dying in the muck or on the ground.

I guess the stuff that would catch most people’s attention are the selection of eight or ten guys who were smart enough to wear bullet-proofed armor but too dumb to have any kind of air-filters installed. They’re frantically tearing at their armor, something of them just spasmodically twitching and clawing at their bodies, as the laxative and tear gas takes effect.

The guns worked a hell of a lot better than I’d expected; the new thermal scans show less than sixty people moving around out there; from what I can see, most of them are either metas or tech-users.

BOOM.

I check the door cams; I’ve been both eagerly awaiting and dreading this moment.

“Reggie?” I say aloud, and Felicia almost immediately answers;

“Reggie fucking Shappe.”

Reginald Shappe. The Speedfreek.

Armed with a chromed-out suit of armor with rockets on the boots, a long, thin adamantium blade on each arm, and a dangerous addiction to the drug called “Snap,” Reggie was never a guy to be taken lightly. He thought of himself as a world-class assassin, and was hesitant to hear otherwise; this was particularly comical, considering every dime Reggie got went to buying more drugs.

He’s always been known for crazy shit; for instance, his method of attack on my vault door is pure kamikaze genius. He’s zooming all the way up the sewer tube, and then rocketing back down it at full speed (around two hundred and eighty miles an hour), and rocket-dropkicking the thing right at the left corner; his rockets are sputtering and fucked up from the impacts, but it’s looking like they’re going to hold out longer than my door. Drugs will give you that retarded kind of ingenuity.

Snap is a nasty one, too; it’s a pheromone excreted off a mutant of the same name, who the Kingpin caught a couple of years ago, shot in the head and put into a milking tank. The tank keeps him in a kind of permanent coma, while tubes milk him for the pheromone, like some kind of grotesque human puppet —

Grotesque … human … puppet … mutant … machine … milk … tank … coma … Darkforce materia, the secret ingredient … super-soldier serum … the eel … spider-man … white rabbit … my father … FPS … Rhino … the Spot … gamma bomb … gamma bomb … gamma Darkforce FPS paranoia conspiracy avatars devolution …

Oh, God.

Vibrate.

Click.

Vibrate.

Click.

Vibrate.

Click.

“Felicia,” I squeak. “I just … I just figured out a whole bunch of shit at once.”

“Herman, Reggie’s gonna —”

“I know what the machine in the White Rabbit’s house was. I know how they use Jonny Ohnn. I even know why they kept the gamma bomb secret, I know now —”

Felicia starts talking, presumably to try to refocus me, but then she stops for a moment, and for the hundredth time that night, I’m reminded why I missed her so damn much.

She’s pondering whether or not she should just let me keep talking; she wants to know the answers just as much as I do.

BOOMclank

It jars her out of her reverie, mainly because this time we can actually hear the vault door shift on its hinges a little.

I set off the bouncing betties.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “bouncing betties” are devices invented for the limited trench warfare that took place during World War II. A particularly nasty breed of land mine, betties are buried about two feet under the world, and when pressure sets them off, they spring-jump four feet vertical and set off a shrapnel charge.

Yeah. Evil shit.

I have them set up in the walls of my front tunnel; as soon as I flip the switch, there are a bunch of twanging sounds, and then all of my cameras goes to static.

“What happened?” Felicia asks quietly.

“The shrapnel from the mines must’ve hit the cameras —”

“Mines?” Felicia whispers. “You set off mines in the tunnel? Herman, how’re we going to get out of here?”

“I’m working on it,” I grunt, and run out the door, back down the hall.

BOOMclank.

Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Punisher’s waiting for me out in the lobby; he’s done a combat stitch on his throat that looks like kids could hang a swingset off of. He’s got an M16 in one hand and a pistol in the other; God only knows where he got the assault rifle, I didn’t see it with him when we came in.

“Schultz,” he says, and nods towards the door; the thing has shifted in its frame.

Stupid, stupid, stupid of me; what good is a super-strong door without an equally strong frame?

Amateur mistake. I’m so fucking useless sometimes.

“You got more of your traps in here?” Punisher says, his eyes searching the enormous room.

“Only one. There’s a vibration unit set up under the floor in here that’ll shake this whole place into rubble.”

BOOMclank.

RattlerattlerattleTHUD.

The enormous door hits the marble so hard it cracks in all directions, and smoke floods into the room; the tunnel beyond the door is completely fogged out. I hope the fucking laxatives have dissipated.

Something stirs.

Punisher winks at me.

I think I just peed a little.

“HERMAN! WHAT A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU AGAIN!” Reginald screams in his cracking junkie-voice as he flies in, roller-blading on his rocket skates. He smacks Punisher out of the way, uninterested in him, and soars at me. I try to raise the gauntlets but he rocket-kicks me in the jaw; the impact is dissipated, but the momentum knocks me onto my back.

All of this happens in under a second. The word “Speed” is in his name for a reason.

“So, Herman,” he says, a smile in his voice. “Can I borrow your cabasa for a minute?” He swings one of his arm-spike blades at me, and just before it hits me, I notice something odd about it; it’s serrated.

Well, that’s new.

PAIN

PAIN OH JESUS

The blade of the arm-spike bites into the flesh of my shoulder; if I’d been an inch to the right it would’ve taken off my head.

“Fuck,” I say helpfully, and hit him with a level three; it barely knocks him back.

“Phineas has been working overtime since you went hero, Herman,” Reggie says, kicking me like a soccer-ball into the ticketing booths. “I went and got myself a few …” He hovers down close to me as I try to stand, and talks through his smiling, rotten junkie teeth. “Upgrades.”

“Up yours,” Felicia says coolly as the tip of her whip loops around Reggie’s ankle.

“Hey, what’s —?” is all he has time to say before Felicia yanks his left leg out from under him; the rockets suddenly pull in two different directions; Reggie tries to regain balance, but only makes it worse, and then goes smashing, full speed, into a newsstand which folds around him and then collapses inward.

Felicia flicks the whip above her head, and there’s a loud CRACK sound, which coincides almost exactly with the entrance of an enormous black man who appears to be wearing nothing more than a loincloth and the fur of an albino gorilla. He’s at least nine feet tall, nearly as tall as Aleksei, and almost as broad.

Punisher opens fire with his M16, blowing holes in the man’s arms, chest and face.

It doesn’t seem to bother him much.

Others are pouring in, too, now; the Locust, his green armor easily setting him apart, buzzes in and flies up the concreted-in skylight, and Razor-Fist, an Asian Kung-Fu assassin with blades where he should have hands, just cut one of the few remaining “normal” hit-men in half to get past him.

Punisher’s just unloading on all of them, not caring that it doesn’t seem to be doing all that much actual harm, and when the big black guy goes to punch him, I worry for a moment, before Punisher dodges the punch, and then uses the big guy’s weight against him to flip him flat on his back, and, in the same motion, shove a grenade into the black guy’s mouth and take off sprinting towards me.

“You got a fall-back point?” Punisher shouts over the wet explosion behind him.

“A what?” Punisher reaches me and grabs me by the shoulders, ignoring the fact that one of them is already wounded, and screams directly into my face as a laser of some kind cuts a jagged stripe in the floor behind him.

“A FUCKING FALL-BACK POINT!”

“Oh, oh yeah!” I say, and point upstairs. “The tracks are —”

The Locust fires his disintegrator ray, and the wall next to us explodes outward, knocking both of us down. Punisher grabs me by the wrist and pulls me towards the stairs while simultaneously shooting several of the closer goons in the head.

“On your feet, Schultz!” he shouts, and I listen, hurling myself up the first few stairs on all fours. I hear the disintegrator ray charging again, roll over and hit the Locust with a level 4, knocking him out of the air.

“Herman!” Felicia shouts as she runs past me, tossing me my discarded security remote. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The lobby of the Tube. So beautiful and serene, so …

So much my home.

There’s the roar of a motorcycle’s engine, and Gunmetal Gray, back on his Harley, comes sailing through the destroyed vault door and through the lobby.

I thought he was dead, I thought —

Oh, right, duh, healing factor.

“Goodbye,” I say solemnly to the Tube, and press the tiny Skull-And-Crossbones button on the remote.

Nothing happens, and Gunmetal Gray’s Harley comes hauling ass up the stairs at me.

I turn, scrambling frantically on the red carpet, pulling myself onto the second-story landing, and then everything jumps a foot to the left and explodes.

Level 6.

Trying to describe it in words is almost impossible; it’s like the vast marble flooring jumps apart, like every single molecule spins off in a different direction. The stairs beneath Gunmental Gray’s motorcycle break apart like glass, his body flipping up onto the landing like a rag-doll, tackling my ass down into the felt carpeting.

Behind us the vibration shockwave passes up through the air, and the walls start to come apart as the wave moves over them. I see the ancient light fixtures, the beautiful wood sculpting on the walls, the ticketing booths, the shops all burst apart like burnt paper, coming apart into little more than flakes and dust. The ten or fifteen human mercenaries still in the running are carried up with the rippling wave, some all the way thirty feet straight up into the glass skylight, which blows inward, the millions of tiny particles of glass spraying through the hit-men, reducing them to red mist and shattered bones.

“Holy shit!” I try to say, but the world is vibrating so hard no sound comes out.

The roof caves in, car-sized chunks of broken concrete falling down into the destroyed lobby and crushing people left and right; it’s no longer recognizable as the Tube, just a massive disaster area, coming apart like it’s being bombed. The rest of the roof comes down, and the whole place implodes, the subsequent shockwave throwing myself and Gunmetal Gray deeper into the hallway.

Everything from the words “Level 6” until this sentence here happens in under three seconds. That’s it. That’s how quick home dies.

The air is thick with dust and plaster, the hallway dark. I hear the structure creak on its foundations, and I stand up, slowly at first.

Gunmetal Gray is waiting for me, shotgun raised. There’s a silence, and I watch out of the corner of my eye as the Locust, Speedfreek and Razorfist pull themselves free of the wreckage.

“Gray …” I start, raising a pleading hand, wondering if I can manage to fire my gauntlet before he pulls the trigger. “It’s only seven hundred million dollars, right?”

“Right,” Gray says, and pulls the trigger. I have time for a single thought before the gun goes off.

That thought is: It’s just buckshot. I’ll be —

And then the buckshot hits the open wound on my shoulder, and I scream and stumble backwards, throwing up my left arm and hitting him with a level three that hurls him into the rubble, his ribs and left arm breaking, his muscles rupturing under his skin. I turn, stumble, and lean against the wall.

“Gah … fuuuuh-uhhck …” I turn around, and, it must be fucking fate saving my ass, because I have enough time to get my arms up before Razorfist manages to hit me in the shoulder with one of his hand-knives.

What kind of fucking idiot has his hands cut off and replaced with knives? What kind of backward-ass thinking is that?

His knives slide off my suit, harmless; apparently he didn’t get the same memo as Speedfreek. I grab one of the blades, vibe it on a level three and tear it out of his arm lengthwise, his bone, apparently welded to the steel, tears through his skin. For a moment it looks like he has three arms; one made only of bloody, slimy bone and a steel blade, one made of sagging, blood-covered flesh, one complete one.

He makes a little whisper of a scream and falls on back as Gunmetal starts to get up behind him, and I just take off running.

I’m halfway down to the tracks when the Locust smashes into me from behind, knocking me down a flight of stairs. He lost his disintegrator when the lobby … disintegrated, and now he’s gonna try to take me on mano a mano.

Stupid old coot.

I turn over and fling three level ones at him, blowing off those fucking hypersonic wings of his. He drops onto his chest, but gets up before I have a chance to press my advantage, lifts me up and smashes me into the banister, spraying a silky, sticky fluid all over me from some kind of goo-gun in his wrist, the same sort of shit Spider-Man uses, but white and thin.

As usual, I can vibe right out of it. I grab him by the neck and vibrate his head; his legs give out, and I drop him, following it up with a kick to the back of his noggin that knocks him into a push-up position.

“Damn you Schultz,” he murmurs as I’m getting ready to run away.

And, as always, like an idiot, I stop, and kneel down next to him.

August pulls off his helmet, revealing his insane lion’s-mane of white hair and his ridiculous little Rasputin beard. He’s bleeding heavily out of his nose, and his pupils are dilated to all hell; having your head vibed, even on a level two, is no laughing matter.

“Ah, Jesus, Hopper,” I practically whisper. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I need that money, Schultz,” he says as I help him up. “Please, please, I need that money, can’t you just … all I wanted to do is to be with the insects.”

“I know,” I say.

“And, you know, the world doesn’t understand people like you and I; remember back when we were in Wisconsin, that night, when you told me about the vibrations?”

I do. Considering how drunk I was, that’s kind of incredible.

“I remember.”

“I … my insects, I just needed more money to … to understand them, and —”

“Outta my way you old faggot, that money is MINE!”

SHLWCH!

August Hopper’s head splits in two, and I’m splattered by his brain, and then a rocket-boot hits me in the face, knocking me the rest of the way down the staircase leading to the subway tracks.

Reggie laughs and zooms down after me; I try to stand up too soon, and he slashes my right forearm deeply as I try to guard my neck. He knocks my hand away and grabs me by the throat, but then a black combat boot hits him in the side, knocking him off me.

“Hey —” Reggie starts to say, and then Felicia’s talon slashes him across his exposed face, and he ends his sentence, “Eyargh!”

BAM.

Aleksei’s fist hits him like a freight train, driving him down with a sixty-mile-an-hour impact into the cheap concrete floor of the old subway platform. Felicia jumps and throws a perfectly executed low-dropkick, sliding him off the platform, down onto the tracks. Punisher shoves me aside, hops down onto the tracks, puts one hand on Reggie’s jaw and the other on his brow; one loud CRASCK later, Reginald Shappe is dead.

Punisher spits on him, and then looks up to me.

“What now?”

Without a word, I jog over to track three; excellent, right where I left it.

The thing in front of me looks rather like an enormous steel bucket, which is, in essence, all it is. A number of steel cables connect it to what looks like a massive tarp on the ceiling; to the unseasoned eye, I suppose this would look like some sort of renovation equipment; well, except for the Flying Broomstick, my jet-powered dildo, which sticks awkwardly up out of the side. I loaded it in here before we left for New Mexico; I had a sneaking suspicion it might come down to something like this.

I climb into the bucket, and, to my immense relief, find that Aleksei has already pulled the green lever and moved the whole mechanism onto the caution tape, placing it just under what looks just like any other piece of ceiling tile.

Wrong.

I slap a red button on the control console, and the roof slides aside, revealing a forty-foot tunnel up to the surface; the failing architecture of the Tube shifts again; it’s going to collapse completely any second now.

“Everybody in!” I shout, and my posse takes heed; I think I’m getting used to this.

“Herman, what is this thing?” Aleksei says, his voice small and scared. “Are you sure I fit?”

“You fit fine, Aleksei, this thing was built for you. Sit down, close your eyes and hold on.”

Aleksei sits down into a child’s protective-ball stance, his hands over his ears. I’m lucky he pressed the right lever, otherwise we would’ve had to wait seven minutes for the helium to get flowing. As it stands, we only have to wait thirty seconds, and that’s just enough time for me to make the correct adjustments for weight to the computer’s gyroscope. Felicia realizes what she’s standing in and lets out an excited, girlish laugh, covering her mouth.

“Herman, it’s brilliant!” she gasps, looking up at the huge tarp above us as servo motors rigged into the ceiling move it into position inside the tunnel.

Brilliant? No. Clever, maybe. Not brilliant. Just a new permutation of my cowardice.

“I don’t understand,” Punisher says. “Schultz, what are we standing in?”

“Don’t you see?” Felicia says, gesturing at the steel cables on all sides of us. There’s a gentle hum as a metallic rod with a single gas-feed tube extends up from the center of the room. I take off my left gauntlet, and set it down around the rod, plugging the gas-tube into a female-link up on the wrist of the gauntlet. “Herman’s gauntlets don’t actually shoot anything; they just throw vibrated air. So if he hooks it up to a helium feed …” Felicia makes a “figure it out” hand motion to the Punisher, who suddenly grips the side of the bucket very tightly.

“Everybody hold on tight,” I say as the ceiling leading to the hallway caves in. “This is going to be a little bumpy.”

I push the green lever all the way forward, and then squeeze the trigger on the gauntlet hooked up to the gas. We launch.

The dirt walls of the tunnel race by so fast that they’re just a black blur before we’re out in the night sky, swinging gently under the egg-shaped canopy of a huge hot-air balloon. Traffic down on the bridge doesn’t even react; if you live in New York, this sort of shit is kind of commonplace; two hundred feet, three hundred, we’re really gaining height quickly.

And then I see it; over next to Felicia’s arm; one of the weight cords is drawn taut. I lean over the side of the balloon to investigate, and something hits me in the face. I stumble backwards, and Felicia turns. A biker-gloved hand grabs her hair, and pulls her up and over the side.

“No!” I scream, and, without thinking, I almost jump after her. I stop myself at the last minute, and see her whip fly up and lock around one of the balloon’s support cords. I second look over the side of the balloon leaves me staring right down the barrel of Gunmetal Gray’s shotgun.

BLAM.

I stagger backwards, dazed; he’s replaced the buckshot with some kind of explosive round. It takes me a second, but I realize with more than a little bit of shock that part of my mask is blown off; must’ve been some kind of acid. I’m lucky that I still had my eye-patch on (bet you almost forgot about that, didn’t you?), or the shit would’ve gotten in my eye. As it stands, my face is sizzling in several different spots, but I’m mostly unharmed.

Gunmetal Gray has pulled his entire upper body up onto the bucket, now, and Punisher turns towards him, looking pissed, drawing a knife. Gray seems to register the Punisher for the first time, and blinks, reassessing the situation before dropping out of sight; without a second’s hesitation, the Punisher dives after him.

“Aleksei,” I howl over the mounting winds. “Grab the whip!”

Aleksei grabs hold, and starts pulling Felicia up, but then a shotgun blast explodes through the floor and hits my guidance console.

Pow.

Fizzle.

Fuck.

The cradle pitches forward, spilling Aleksei out into the open air. I see his frightened, bloody face for a moment before he drops out of view, tumbling down four hundred feet into the East River.

“Aleksei,” I whisper, barely even a sound. And then I see the whip come untied, and catch it at the absolute last possible second. Felicia can’t weigh more than one-thirty, but trying to handle her swinging weight is too much, and, as the balloon pitches wildly again, taking us in between the walls of buildings over the streets, I’m pulled almost entirely overboard. I hook my leg over one of the suspension cords, and I’m hanging there, upside-down, watching Felicia swing beneath me, and far beneath her, the street.

“FELICIA!” I scream. This at this speed, this high up, everything is a scream, if only to counter-act the wind.

“HERMAN, LET GO!”

“ARE YOU INSANE?”

“LET GO! YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME!”

Sure, some people would say that love makes you do crazy things. But wouldn’t those crazy things involve PROTECTING one you love?

Not, say, dropping them out of a hot air balloon forty stories up.

Which is exactly what I do.

She falls, falls, falls away from me, becoming smaller and smaller in my vision until she’s just a speck, and then I see a thin suspension line fire out to hook onto one of the buildings. It figures; this chick was trained by Spider-Man. Who the fuck do I think I am to protect her?

The air balloon buckles to the left again, and I swing like a marionette. My knee injury screams at me, and I do an impromptu pull-up, tossing myself back into the bucket. Another shotgun blast comes through the side of the bucket, and I see Punisher and Gray beating the shit out of each other. I reach through and hook my arm around Gray’s neck, surprising him and allowing Punisher to knife him a dozen times in the ribs. Gray headbutts me in my exposed face, and then punches the Punisher in the face; he swings up the shotgun but the Punisher bats it away, and it blasts into the balloon canopy. The thing deflates in record speed, and all three of us go crashing into the roof of the Met-Life building.

The bucket rolls twice, and I’m thrown out. Gray stands up first, then Punisher, then me. Gray draws out two pistols, one on me and one on the Punisher, smiling.

“Well,” he says, cocking both guns. “Nice to know that’s finally over with.”

Punisher shoots a glance at me that says “This is a lame-ass way to die.”

I just nod.

“Nice to have met you, boys; you just made me a millionai–”

An arc of electricity flies in out of nowhere, picking up Gray and lifting him into the air. His skin glows red with energy as two more steady streams of electrical energy join the first, coming up from off the edge of the building. Gray twitches and jerks spasmodically, bright white spittle flying from his mouth, and then the electricity carries him back, over the edge.

The electricity dissipates, and Gray drops out of sight.

So he’s gone.

But now we have a new problem.

A bigger problem.

Punisher pats his arms and legs, searching for any weapon he can get his hands on.

He comes up dry.

The Crimson Dynamo floats into sight, electricity crackling above his head.

“Jesus …” I say. If I even start to raise my arm, he’ll fry me.

“This is … this fucking SUCKS!” I shout at the Dynamo, the red armor glimmering in the night. The electricity arcs out and crackles into shapes; letters. They read:

YOUR MOM SUCKS.

“What …” I whisper as the Dynamo floats down to the roof. Punisher gives me this wild-eyed look; I think he’s getting ready to try to tackle one of the most powerful suits of armor ever made.

“Kneeeeeeeel!” the Crimson Dynamo’s metallic voice roars. “Before the great and powerful Oz!”

Wait. I know that voice.

And suddenly I’m laughing.

Martin “The Gibbon” Blank slides the face plate of his helmet up, his fur matted down with sweat, but he’s all smiles. And then the Punisher’s laughing.

The Punisher, laughing.

A harsh barking sound that is most reminiscent of a car backfiring; it’s not a laugh that’s been used much, but this just makes Marty and me laugh harder.

All three of us chuckling like morons up onto the roof of the Met-Life building, while the wreckage of my hot-air balloon rolls back and forth in the wind.

Everything is lies, but that’s okay.

Because I’m alive, Marty’s alive, Felicia’s alive, Aleksei’s most likely alive, the Punisher is the Punisher, but, like it or not, I’m starting to figure things out.

Here. Let me explain.

Everything Is Lies, Part Seven

Two hundred and forty-eight men are laying siege to the Tube.

But that’s about four hundred feet above what concerns us currently.

What concerns us currently is the battle going on four hundred feet above the tube, where a man in bulky red armor is frantically trying to shake a … well, I was about to say “monkey off his back,” but that’s ridiculous. He’s trying to get one of my most valued associates to let go of his head. There. That’s the way I wanted it to come out.

See, Marty’s strategy was simple; grab onto the Crimson Dynamo’s head, interlace his fingers over the facemask of the armor to form a furry blindfold, and then … Not let go. No matter what.

That was the extent of his plan.

There’s something very beautiful about that, because, in and of itself, it shows the sort of intense, mind-bending bravery that guys like me aren’t capable of. See, in this plan, there’s no “out” for Marty. The moment he and the Dynamo blasted up out of the sewers, his plan had succeeded. No further effort required.

So once he was racing around the New York skyline, forming a new plan had become his prerogative.

And what a plan it was.

See, the Dynamo suit can’t generate electricity, it just manipulates it. Anyone who’s watched “From Colonel Russia To Omega Red: the History of the Soviet Super-Soldier Program” on the History Channel would know this.

Lucky for Marty, he and I watched that together.

So Marty’s strategy was this: he hooked his opposable monkey-toes in behind the Crimson Dynamo’s rocket boots, sticking them between the joints, forcing the Dynamo to fly straight up, up above the buildings, up where there’s absolutely no electricity to for it to play around with. Then he pulls out his toes.

The Dynamo, who’s been trying to level out this whole time, is thrown off balance, and they go plummeting back down towards the streets. Marty monkeys around so that he’s face to face with the Dynamo, who, like the amateur he obviously was, tries to punch him off.

And ends up punching himself straight in the face, knocking his dumb ass out.

Goddamn wannabe super-criminals; they make the rest of us look like idiots.

As if men in yellow-and-brown suits with names like “Doctor Octopus” and “Mole-Man” needed help.

Marty says they slid across the roofs of three buildings before they hit a penthouse and the rocket boots shut off. Getting the armor off him was easy; the suit has a disengage just inside the faceplate that clicks the whole thing off. It’s an auto-fit natural response system, so once Marty programmed in his height and his weight, the thing wrapped around him like a shiny red prophylactic.

From there it was just a case of “Follow the Crashing Hot Air Balloon.”

The Punisher thumps his fist on the table and lets out another one of those harsh, barking laughs, slapping Marty very hard on the back; Marty gags on his beer a little, but then smiles.

“It was pretty incredible, wasn’t it?” Marty says, grinning like an … well, an ape. Felicia nudges me under the table and I nod.

“Unarmed, unarmored, and he still takes down Crimson Dynamo,” I say, raising my Heineken. “To Martin Blank, may the wonders never cease.” Everybody clinks their glasses; the Punisher isn’t drinking, but he flicks our cups anyway.

Ever since Marty showed up on the roof and the siege officially ended, the Punisher has been a transformed man. He’s not … well, it’s …

It’s hard to explain.

Remember the Punisher/Computer analogy? Well, down there in the sewers, the Punisher was in full operating mode, blowing people away left and right. Now, it’s like he’s, I don’t know, on Screen Saver. He’s not smiling; I don’t even know if the Punisher can smile. But he’s not frowning anymore either; he looks sort of merrily apathetic, if that’s possible.

What’s clear, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to read on this guy’s face, is that we impressed the living hell out of him. I think he expected to die tonight due to our incompetence; instead, not only did he live, but I actually saved his ass. I don’t know if he appreciates it, or is grateful, but there is one thing for certain: He noticed.

The night is cold, the bar is warm and Felicia smells like vanilla and cinnamon. I should know; she’s sitting practically on top of me, her right thigh sprawled over my lap under the table, an arm around my shoulders, smiling widely, talking animatedly to everyone like the chatty theater girl in high school.

Come to think of it, she probably was the chatty theater girl in high school.

Aleksei, for his part, hasn’t spoken much; he’s wrapped in terrycloth towels we bought at a department store five minutes before closing. We bought them in uniform. It was kind of like a joke:

The Shocker, the Black Cat and the Crimson Dynamo walk into a Home & Garden Aisle.

Even though Aleksei’s Rhino skin might feel like concrete, it’s actually pretty absorbent. By the time he managed to pull himself out of the East River, he was soaked to the bone. Now he just sits there, making a scowly, sour face and sort of half-glaring at Felicia.

Remember the first time your best friend had a girlfriend in kindergarten? Remember how much you hated that bitch?

Yeah.

Right now we’re in a Bar With No Name just east of Coney Island; the place cleared the hell out as soon as we came in, H-List villains scattering like bugs from under an over-turned rock; the bartender, Sam Griggs, is an old pal of mine from my Kingpin days, and he’s had the news footage of the left-over chaos from the siege on the Tube playing on every TV in the place.

Miss Peelo arrives, flanked by one of Tony Stark’s massive red-and-yellow security droids, and hugs me so tight one of my healing ribs cries out in protest. After a little bit of small talk about property damage and Miss Peelo and Felicia going back and forth about how beautiful Stark’s ass is, Felicia puts her mug down on the table, quiet hard.

“Ahem.” Everybody who was talking falls silent and looks to her. “Back in the Tube, just before things went crazy, Herman said he figured something out.”

“About the conspiracy?” Marty says, setting down his mug. I nod, and Aleksei leans forward, speaking loudly.

“GOOD, BECAUSE WE SHOULD KNOW THINGS ABOUT THE CONSPIRACY AND THE CSA AND FPS AND WHATNOT, I KNOW THESE THINGS.” Any other person it’d be obnoxious, but on Aleksei, it’s just endearing; he’s trying to remind us all that he’s still here, and yes, he’s been paying attention.

“That’s great, Aleksei,” Miss Peelo says, and pats him on his enormous right shoulder. He looks to me and I shoot him a serious smile, and he leans back contentedly; he’s said his piece.

I lay it out flat for everybody, in very abridged format; everything that’s happened since the day I stepped out of my Nissan (which was destroyed seconds later), and faced down with the mind-controlled monster called Ravage on Dufresne Boulevard. After I’m done, I sort of wait for it to settle in, and then start up anew.

“I’m going to set this out on the table from the beginning: at least ten percent of well-known metahumans, including the Hulk, were intentionally created through the machinations of my father and the organization called ‘Control,’ which, though it isn’t now, once functioned as an arm of the U.S. government.”

There’s a silence. Marty’s eyes are very big, and Felicia’s frozen in place, Miss Peelo is quietly looking down, Aleksei looks deep in thought and the Punisher … he’s back in computer mode.

“You’re serious?” the Punisher says, very quiet. Dangerous quiet. “You’ve run this all through that mega-computer of a brain of yours?”

“I am, and I have.”

Felicia shakes her head, and then speaks, equally quiet as the Punisher, but anger has been replaced with a kind of restrained shock. “Why would the U.S. government … Why would they create the Hulk? That thing has killed thousands of people, and it’s not like they’ve been using it as a weapon; half of the people it kills are always soldiers trying to stop it!”

“I’m coming to that, Felicia,” I say, and for once my words come out as warm and inviting as I mean them to. “Any other questions?”

Marty raises his hand.

“Marty?”

“What about mutants? Did they make mutants, too?” The question is totally sincere, and I answer it seriously.

“Maybe some of them. I’m not sure yet; the mutant phenomenon has been around since at least Biblical times, so there’s no way it goes back that far. But post-1939? Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past them to have had some kind of hand in the mutant baby-boom twenty-five years ago; that was really when they started kicking into gear in the first place.”

This gets another stone-cold silence.

“Were all the villains FPS tampered with created by Control?” Miss Peelo asks, and I nod. “Oh, dear. Oh, dearie me,” she adds, pressing a finger to her pursed lips.

Aleksei speaks up.

“So then it’s totally for sure that I —” he starts, and I cut him off.

“Yes. You were, Aleksei, and that’s okay. It doesn’t make you any less of a person, any more than being in a car accident would make you less of a person. It’s just an outside event that changed the course of your life. All in all, you’ve enjoyed being the Rhino, right?”

There’s a pause, and then Aleksei nods.

“Right. And that’s good; you haven’t caused too much damage, killed anyone, or even really hurt anybody. But that’s what had struck me so odd before, it was the variety of metas they’d created. I mean, it was everything from the Absorbing Man to the Grizzly; it didn’t feel like there was any kind of specific qualifiers. But now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that there couldn’t be any specific qualifiers, it had to be as random and bizarre as it was.”

“Why?” Felicia says almost before I’ve completed my sentence.

“Because,” I say quietly, “when you’re building the most powerful army the universe has ever known in total secrecy, you can’t have guys like Reed Richards catching on. It throws a serious fucking wrench in the gears, which look to have been falling apart already. We’re dealing with some seriously smart dudes, here, seriously smart and seriously ruthless. I’m talking best of the best of the best of the best, the sort of military minds that are only in the military because it would be too dangerous letting them out on the street. People like my father.”

There’s another pause.

“Army?” Marty says quietly. “An army of what? Freaks?”

“No,” I say, gulping down the last of my beer. “An army of Grade-A All-American Super-Soldiers.”

“You’re … you’re kidding,” Felicia says.

“No. No I’m not. And I’m using the term ‘super-soldier’ very literally here, kiddies; I’m going to state for the record that, if we test them for it with some kind of specialized scanner, every one of Control’s … experiments will test positive for having some of Erskine’s original Super-Soldier serum in their blood. Not nearly as much as Captain America, maybe only an infinitesimal trace of it, but I’ll stake my name that it’ll be there, plain as day.”

“No no no, that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

No no no, that dudn’t make any sense adoll.

“Why not?” I say, already knowing the answer. It’s weird suddenly realizing you can plot out an entire discussion; there’s no way in hell I’m as smart as Richards and Stark seem to think I am, but maybe … maybe I am a little above average. But it’s probably just that I’ve been planning this conversation since Marty took off the Crimson Dynamo helmet on the roof of the Met-Life building.

“Because …” Aleksei starts slowly. “Because a bunch of stuff. Like, see, the Super-Soldier serum they gave Captain America makes him super-strong, super-fast, makes him all real flexible and well-coordinananated … If I’m one of these, these Control experiments, how come I’m not like that? And what about, like, the government? Hasn’t SHIELD been trying to remake the Super-Soldier serum for the last fifty years, isn’t that what the Weapons program was all about?”

“You raise some very good questions, Aleksei,” I say, and Aleksei smiles so wide it looks like it hurts his face. “And I’m happy to say, I have answers.”

Everyone leans towards me at once, like a cartoon; even the Punisher looks interested.

“The first thing you should know about the Super-Soldier serum is that it’s a mutagen. Administered by itself to a subject whose DNA won’t reject the serum, it will quadruple your strength, speed, stamina, physical endurance, your reflexes and all five senses. One in five hundred people will react positively to the serum. The other four hundred and ninety-nine will die horribly; I’m not making this shit up, remember, this is stated fact.”

“We trust you, Herman,” Felicia says, putting a hand over mine. “Go on.”

“So that’s your basic serum’s effects, occurring within twenty-four hours on an unstressed subject undergoing minimal physical activity. But we come back to the law of secrecy through eccentricity; two hundred super-folks with identical abilities show up in the space of a year, people will ask questions. So Control tampered, and fished around, experimenting with introducing X factors into the Super-Soldier equation, injecting people in secret and then throwing them into bizarre situations.

“They put an experimental Soviet armor on you, and they get the Rhino. They expose Banner to severe gamma radiation, and they get the Hulk; shit, they already had the gamma bomb, that whole program was just one long set-up to get Bruce Banner out on that test site. They knock Morrie Bench into the ocean with the Zeta-Ray generator, and splish-splash, they’ve got Hydro-Man. Using energy from the Darkforce dimension, they can open the human genome up to all kinds of impossible sequencing, maybe even stuff that defies the physical laws of our reality. Felicia, what’s Spider-Man’s origin?”

Felicia pauses for a moment, wondering whether or not to tell us, then sighs.

“He was bitten by a radioactive spider.”

“There you go!” I say, clapping my hands. “What’re the fucking odds of that happening, Felicia? Do many people you know get bitten by radioactive spiders?”

There’s a silence.

“Radioactive motherfucking spiders? It’s fucking ridiculous!” I throw my hands up. “It’s absurd! You’d either get cancer or a seriously swollen hand, but to be jumping from roof to roof fighting crime three days later, I think most definitely fucking not.”

Everyone’s quiet, mulling this over.

“Jesus,” Marty whispers. “So Spider-Man is a —”

“Hey,” I say, raising a hand. “I’m not giving guarantees, here, I’m just saying.”

Felicia nods, but that example hit home.

“To answer your second question, Aleksei,” I start, but Aleksei stops me.

“I don’t remember what my second question was anymore, Herman,” he whispers loudly.

“Why the government would start the Weapons program and hunt for a super-soldier serum if they already had one.”

“Oh,” Aleksei says, interlacing his fingers on the table thoughtfully. “Yes.”

“Well, the answer there is a little more complicated. See, after they created all their metas … Shit, maybe even before they started creating metas, something went wrong. I don’t know if the government realized what they were planning, or maybe it got too expensive, but Control broke off from the government, became its own separate entity.”

“So that’s what FPS was,” Felicia says, putting her hands up to her forehead. “Independent fund-raising.”

“Yeah, that and …” I go quiet. Everybody is staring at me, waiting. “I just … I want everyone to know that the next part is all theoretical.”

“As far as I’m concerned, this is all theoretical,” Marty says, frowning at the table.

“No,” I say, hard, final. “No, it isn’t. But this part is: I think FPS, along with being an easy way to get money, has a grander purpose, a scarier cause. They siphon Darkforce materia off Ohnn with that … thing we found in White Rabbit’s house; I think they trigger something in his spine to force him to generate spots, and then they … drain them, somehow, and they use that energy to connect to the tiny amounts of Darkforce in their metas’ blood. And then, once they open a portal … Okay, here’s the conjecture.

“I think the reason they had it set up in that room in the White Rabbit’s house was because it was a … recording studio.”

Another one of those silences, but this one is confused, instead of shocked.

“I think whatever they’re using to control the FPS’ed villains is auditory, not a real form of mind control. I think that’s why you’ve been having so much trouble figuring out how the mind control works; because it isn’t. It’s some kind sound, or tone they play. That’s why they chose the White Rabbit’s ballroom; those walls are soundproofed. They had a gantry set up above the machine, they probably pumped the sonic stuff down through the Darkforce on a frequency below the capability of normal human hearing; Black Noise, like we heard back in the crater. Hell, that’s probably where they got the idea.”

I wait for almost a full minute, and then realize what’s happening.

“Uh … I’m done,” I say quietly. Everyone exhales, and the Punisher stands up.

“Can’t. Sorry.”

“Can’t? Can’t what?” I almost shout at him.

“I can’t go into this any further. It’s passed the point that it involves me, the purpose I fulfill isn’t present any more. This isn’t crime; this is a global conspiracy involving hundreds, maybe thousands of individuals, and from the way you make it sound, only ten or twenty even know they’re participants. You find someone for me to shoot, you get them in a room, and hell, I’m all for it. But as it stands, you’re going to be swiping at shadows. I have targets to take out who’ve been put on hold during the time I’ve spent on this; crime is slowly regaining its death-grip on this city. The streets are arteries, clogged with sin and depravity and perversion. I am a bypass. Without me, the city will die.”

There’s a silence, and I realize, once and for all, that the man who calls himself the Punisher is truly, genuinely and rather frighteningly psychotic. He hands me a card, on which is a simple picture of the Punisher skull and a phone number.

“If you need me, really need me, call that number.”

We all sit in silence, and watch as he walks out of the bar.

Eight rounds of beer later, we’re in the lobby of the Stark Building, drunk off our asses. Even Miss Peelo is tipsy; she went a little heavy on the Mojitos, and one of her pink tendril things is waving around absently from her left eye. Aleksei looks sleepy, blinking his eyes like the lids weigh three tons each. Marty is running around on all fours, the Dynamo armor in a garbage bag slung over his shoulder, yelling “I’M THE NEW MOTHERFUCKING CRIMSON DYNAMO!” at anyone who will listen.

I’ve got three Shocker-Suits, three sets of gauntlets, five shirts, three pairs of socks, four pairs of boxers and a toothbrush in a leatherbound suitcase held in my left hand. Until I can get to one of my dozens of stashes all over the city, that’s all I’ve got to my name.

Thinking back on it, wandering drunk through New York with hundreds of millions of dollars on all our heads probably wasn’t the best idea. But, again, now that I think about it, the night turned out pretty goddamn good.

“I’m the guest of Tony Clark! Stark!” I shout at the guy behind the main check-in desk. “I wanna have a hotel room! I’m the fucking Shclocker! Did you hear I beat up Bullseye? It’s true. It’s true, isn’t it, Felicia?”

Felicia, who’s hugging my arm like a banister, leans over the desk

“Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s true. He beat up Bullseye … Ballseye … Herman, how awesome would it be if his name was Ballseyes? Or like, just BALLS?”

“That would be awesome!” I shout. “High five!”

Felicia and I go to high-five each other, and I end up falling down, while Felicia falls against the desk, letting out a little chuckle of glee.

It’s four fifty-five AM, and Tony doesn’t look totally thrilled to see me.

“Herman. What an … interesting … surprise. I heard about your little debacle by the Brooklyn Bridge, and —”

“YOU HAVE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL MUSTACHE, TONY,” I say, leaning very close to him. Aleksei totters, and then collapses onto a potted plant, crushing it completely.

“Mr. Schultz …” Tony says quietly. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, or —”

“TONY,” I say, grabbing him by the lapel, and pulling a sharpie-marker out of my pocket. “TONY TONY TONY, YOU ARE A HANDSOME MAN. YOU REALLY ARE. AND WE NEED A PLACE TO SLEEP FOR THE NIGHT, JUST ONE NIGHT. HERE, WAIT, CAN I … I’M JUST GONNA SHOW YOU THIS, HERE …” I start scribbling equations on the sleeve of his pajama shirt. At first he jerks away, but then he sees what I’m writing, and there’s a pause.

“So …” Tony says quietly. “Do you want one room for all of you, or a room apiece?”

Felicia hits the covers first, and she’s naked before I even have my pants off. The problem being, she’s asleep before I’ve taken off my boxers. I tuck her in, and go and sit by the window, looking out at New York through an exhausted, drunken haze, in Heart-Pattern boxers and an Offspring T-shirt. The city really is a maze; one big labyrinth, but with a million different minotaurs, all of them growling my name.

I’m out cold before I can even close my eyes.

I wake up at ten-ten, still in the chair, to the sound of the shower turning on. I’ve got a splitting headache, but however bad my head might feel I know I smell much, much worse. I stand up and stagger over to the bathroom; the room is a standard hotel suite. The news wasn’t kidding; the Stark building really does have everything.

I go into the bathroom, drop my shorts and shake out of the Offspring shirt, and get into the shower.

Felicia stares at me, and then sort of chuckles, her long white hair stringy and soggy in the water, hanging down like vines over and around her face.

“Well. You’re forward, Herman, but I can’t say I expected any less.”

She stands there naked, being unbelievably gorgeous, and I’m just totally unsure what to do.

“I want to touch you,” I say, realizing how insanely creepy that sounds a millisecond after it’s out of my mouth, but Felicia just smiles, taking a step closer; it was already crowded in the shower, so now her breasts are pressed up against me.

I’m having a little trouble breathing, and she notices, and just smiles wider.

“Then touch me,” she says.

I bring my hand up to grope a breast like a twelve-year-old at a titty-bar, but then stop. The water on both of us is running in these hundreds of intricate patterns down our bodies, and it distracts me to the point that I instead touch her shoulder, just with my fingertips, tracing the water flows down her arm to her hand, from her hand across that washboard stomach of hers, down over her left hip and up the sides of her ribs and oh my God we’re kissing how did that happen?

No, sorry, that’s all you get. My life may be rated a hard R, but it’s not X.

And what happened next was very, very X.

And right in the middle of it all, a whispered thought slips into my head.

What in the hell is a goddamn “Flim-Flam?”

Then Felicia pumps her hips, and the Flim-Flam disappears back into my subconscious. It’ll have to wait for later.

God, I hope these walls are soundproofed.

Everything Is Lies, Part Eight

A simple fact: one of the things most villains fail to realize about Spider-Man is that he’s got some kind of half-assed psychic power. I wouldn’t call it a sixth sense; hell, to even say it’s a preternatural telepathic ability is stretching it. It’s more of a reflex thing; like he can react to things before they happen, like he can tell when he’s in danger.

A less simple fact: the few villains who have come to recognize the webschmuck’s little “Spider-Sense” often take for granted that they can no longer attempt surprise attacks; that the only way to confront a foe who can sense danger is head-on, because otherwise he’d take actions to circumvent you.

I am not one of these villains. Because the next little piece of trivia I’m going to give you is a tasty one indeed: the asshole can’t differentiate.

It’s that simple, and that complex, all at once.

Let’s say you have a device that tells you when something near you is going to explode, and it tells you this by making a loud beeping noise. That’s a pretty handy device, right?

Wrong. Because it doesn’t tell you what is going to explode.

Remember what I said about it being a reflexive thing, and not a psychic thing?

See where I’m going with this?

It’s my little secret weapon; the reason I, a relatively out-of-shape schlub with no powers, no magic, no mutations, am one of the few choice bastards who can land a solid punch on Spider-Man.

Here. Come into my office.

It’s all about sleight of hand; distraction, pulling your punches. If you cock back for a punch like an idiot, he’ll go to dodge it, because hey, you’re an idiot, right? You’ve never seen Spider-Man on the news, and hey hey hey again, this is your night! You’re Fangbreed/The Raven/whatever retarded fuckhead name you’ve come up with, and you’re not going to let Spider-Man stop you from taking that money/killing that guy/doing whatever retarded fuckhead thing you’re trying to do.

So you go to punch him, he glides past your fist like you’re moving in slow motion, something red flashes up to your face and you see stars. Two hours later the police are picking little bits of web off your costume, giggling while they read your Miranda rights.

Now watch how the Shocker rolls.

Cock back like an idiot, because even though I’ve done this to him a dozen times, he still thinks I’m that stupid.

And then I stomp on his foot.

I wear heavy-soled vibro-insulated work boots.

He wears what are essentially reinforced socks.

Spider-Man yelps, and now I’ve got him pinned down, if only for a second, vibrate my right hand on a level four, POW, uppercut, and I get the hell out of there; I’ve never been one to stay and fight when I don’t absolutely have to.

See what I did? His danger sense is wigglin’, but his EYES tell him about the punch.

Naughty, naughty eyes, Spider-Man. Look what happened.

I remember, back in the day, there was a lot of talk about Spider-Man being an alien, or a government agent, or a super-spy. It’s moments like the one I mentioned above when I know for certain that that’s all a load of crap.

Spider-Man is just a guy in spandex with some nifty little powers.

A smart guy, but still just another super.

And a supreme, supreme asshole of one at that.

Peter Parker cocks his head at me, unfolding his umbrella as it starts to rain.

“I don’t see why you’d want to go back down there, Herman,” he says, tossing me an umbrella he brought along. “It’s all just wreckage. Anything you might’ve had down there crushed like my dreams on Prom Night.”

“Wasn’t Mary Jane Watson your date on Prom Night?” I say, taking the first step into the enormous crater in the street that used to be my home.

“Well … yeah,” Peter says, hesitantly following me down.

“Well, then, how about you shut the fuck up?”

There’s a moment of awkward silence, and then I smile at him, and he smiles back, laughing a little.

“You really need to learn to monitor your tone, Herman. I thought you were going to go all super-villain on me.”

You know something?

I really like this guy.

Peter starts down after me, holding his umbrella out over his shoulder in an unusually dainty fashion that makes him look like a Southern belle.

Add another point to the “Peter Parker: Homosexual?” column.

The Tube isn’t the Tube anymore.

Instead, it’s a kind of massive, rubble-strewn hole on Doughty Street; it’s so wide that it’s swallowed almost an entire block, and some of the buildings on either side have tipped in. Luckily, the main lobby and shopping area of the Tube was centered under a parking lot, so, aside from the crazy bastards down in the lobby, there were no casualties from the massive vibrational shock.

As I’ve mentioned before, the whole exo-structure of the tube was covered in almost sixty feet of concrete; this is no longer true. The cement was from the Forties, so when the Level Six hit it, it just kind of, well, exploded. Everything in a three-block radius is covered in thin white powder.

When I blow something up, I blow it up real good.

The whole area is blocked off with yellow caution tape and police cruisers. There isn’t much activity; a couple of blue-suits hanging out on the hoods of their cars, eating donuts and holding back the crowds.

And hoo-boy, are there crowds.

See, me not paying attention to the news is coming around to bite me in the ass. Seems I’ve picked up a bit of a cult following ever since Robertson’s article in the Bugle. Mostly sad sacks, the same type of people who became fascinated with Moon Knight when he first showed up.

You know: nerdy types, living alone. The girls have lots of cats and stories about their imaginary love affairs with Johnny Storm, the guys have lots of posters of girls and a fast internet connection.

But there sure are a lot of them. I suppose that’s what caught me off guard.

Ever since someone in the Bar With No Name uptown leaked that I was responsible for the chaos by the Brooklyn Bridge, the crowd by the wreckage of the Tube has been growing. They’ve got signs that say “THE SHOCKER WILL NOT DIE” and “SCHULTZ IS GOD.” They’ve got yellow and brown quilt-pattern T-shirts. They’ve got Shocker plush dolls.

They’ve got the ability to make me feel super-humanly uncomfortable.

Marty and Aleksei, however, are loving every second of it; Marty is doing little fly-bys over the crowd in the Crimson Dynamo armor, and Aleksei is just standing there grinning and letting everyone hug him. Felicia is down ahead of us, expertly picking her way through the disaster area. She insisted on putting on a “repair worker” disguise before we came out, maybe to avoid attention, but of course, with Felicia, any kind of disguise is just a waste of time. She’s disguised as a librarian? World’s Hottest Librarian. She’s disguised as a plumber? World’s Hottest Plumber. It’s all pretty circular when it comes to her.

So you’re probably wondering, how was sex with Felicia?

Keep wondering.

-----------------------

What happened in the shower, on the bathroom floor, on the carpet and in the bed is between me, Felicia and God. And possibly Tony Stark; it wouldn’t be a terribly big surprise to me if he or one of his guys was watching in.

Then again, I sort of like that. Is that sick? It’s just that when Felicia drops me like a hot potato for someone more interesting once all this conspiracy stuff blows over, it’s nice to know that there’s someone out there who knows that I did, in fact, have incredible sex with the most beautiful woman in New York, and possibly the world.

Yeah. Maybe that is a little sick.

But I could care less.

Reed Richards gave me his little intelligence test-deal this morning, and I have to say, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined. He put this big, silly helmet deal on my head, and then gave me the six standard five-hundred-question multiple-choice tests they give to SHIELD Agents: Mathematics, Engineering, English, Logic, Physics.

Then things got a little strange. He started giving me these random spoken questions about theoretical physics, quantum physics, string theory, all sorts of random shit like that, and the whole time he’s grinning at me like a madman; I’m not sure if he was aware of it, but he was stretching his lips, jaw and teeth wider and wider, so his face had devolved into this terrifying insane clown configuration. I was a little bit weirded out, but I kept my cool.

Then came a series of reading comprehension tests, a few basic doctor’s-office reflex tests, and finally a simple and strange question.

“Do you consider yourself smarter than the people around you?”

There’s a silence.

“Not smarter, exactly …” I start, but then falter. “Not smarter. Just … different.”

“Different?” Reed says, leaning his chin on his palm. “How so?”

“Well … yes, then. Yes. I’m smarter.”

Reed nods, and then sends me upstairs for breakfast with Felicia and Aleksei.

“I’m just saying, Herman, you can’t be down on yourself forever.” Felicia picks one of the blue berries up off her waffle and pops it into her mouth. “I mean, once they show that you’re super-smart on that test you took, it’s going to be kind of hard for you to do your ‘Aw, I’m just a stupid thug’ routine.”

“Ha!” I say, setting down my orange juice. “Felicia, there are two of the smartest men in the world in this building.” I tick them off on my fingers. “Reed Richards. Tony Stark. You know who they are? Richards is the millionaire inventor of all kinds of whacky world saving shit, and lives happily with his wife and two kids at the top of a fucking PALACE dedicated to his family and his best friend. Tony Stark is the billionaire inventor of even more whacky world saving shit, CEO of Stark Industries AND Stark Enterprises, has built several multinational corporations from the ground up, AND is an internationally revered playboy who does what he wants when he wants.”

I’m getting really worked up now. Other people in the restaurant are looking at us.

“I, me, Herman Schultz, am a technically homeless ex-con with a super-suit. I am unmarried, pushing forty, I have no college degrees of any kind, shit, I don’t even have a high school diploma. My father is trying to kill me, and I’m at the center of a vast universe-spanning shitstorm which will eventually undoubtedly kill me, you, Aleksei, and who knows who else by the time the dust settles. Now, may I ask you, does that person I just described sound like one of the smartest fucking people in the world?” I really shout the last part, and bang my fist on the table, making Aleksei flinch. Felicia looks at me evenly.

“Herman, do you even listen to yourself?” she says, and there’s a pause.

“I …” I start, but she just keeps staring at me with those green eyes, and I stand up.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, and practically run all the way there.

In the bathroom I start sobbing, and I don’t know why, so I slap myself repeatedly until I stop. I stand there at the sink; the stalls are empty. The white tile is immaculate. The bathroom is silent. I stare at my face in the mirror; scars and haggard, tired eyes. My hair has grown in a little since Felicia shaved my head, but purple bruises are still visible under the thin field of brown stubs.

“Stupid stupid stupid …” I murmur under my breath, and splash some water on my face.

It freezes in mid-air.

Time stops.

I stare at the floating water for a second, and then spin, whipping out my switchblade; this must be a mutant, or a meta, how they got in the Stark building I don’t know, but …

But …

Where did the bathroom go?

I’m floating in space. Like actual outer-space; I see moons and stars and planets floating around. I scream.

No sound.

I can still feel the tile under my boots, so I take a few tentative steps forward, and bump into what must be a bathroom stall door. Which means, thank Christ, I’m still actually in the bathroom in the Café Laerjú on the forty-seventh floor of the Stark Building; I’m just seeing this around me, like a hologram. The time-stop, however, is still unexplained.

Silence. Space. Even the sink has disappeared now.

There’s a sound behind me, and I twirl on my heels, raising my knife.

“Is this the one?” the thing in front of me says.

It’s a man, or at least, man-shaped; it’s a uniform color of gold, not actual golden metal, but like a soft putty, formed into a simile of a human form, awkward and headless.

Well, not exactly headless.

A head, or at least, a head object, floats above its shoulders, disembodied. There is a face in the front, undistinguished, nearly featureless, and then two more on the sides. A purple hat … thing … is draped over the top and back of the head … thing, but other than that, the thing in front of me is completely nude.

Bright, white light shines out of its three sets of eyes.

And I know immediately that what I’m dealing with isn’t from Earth. Maybe not even our universe. Maybe not even our reality.

So, now that I’m sure I’m dealing with some sort of otherworldly god-creature, I do what anyone in my position would do.

I shove the tip of my knife right up against the center face’s left nostril.

“You stay the fuck away from me, crazy head!” I scream.

See, now that right there is a pretty decent argument against Herman Schultz: Super-Genius, right?

The thing doesn’t move, but its eyes shift to look over to my left, where stands the silliest-looking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And this is coming from a guy who’s seen the Rhino super-glue his face to his hand.

I guess you could say it’s basically just a pretty big dude with a really, really big head, but that just doesn’t do it justice. His head isn’t just really big. It’s like really, really big. I don’t know, I’m not a writer, so I’m not the best with words, but his head is … it’s momentous. It’s titanic. It’s gargantuan. Here, let me give you an image: Without the head, he’d be around eight feet tall. With it, he’s nearly fifteen.

That’s seven feet of head.

And here’s the part that’s the most jarring; he only has like three feet of face. And no hair. So it’s like this giant, pendulous globe hanging there on top of his slender body, held up by an impossibly thin neck.

And he’s wearing a fucking toga.

If there is, after all, a universal creator of all things … what the fuck is he smoking?

“Yes, Tribunal,” Big-Head says in a soft, lilting voice, nodding his ridiculous noggin gently. “This is him. Herman David Schultz of Earth-616.”

I’m not liking this one bit.

I shove my hand into my left pocket and yank it out in one smooth motion, a Quick-Draw mini-gauntlet now wrapped over the knuckles. I point it at Big-Head, keeping the knife pointed at Three-Face.

“I’ll fucking waste both of you!” I shout, fully realizing that neither creature is paying me any attention. “I will! Don’t test me!”

“Feisty one, isn’t he,” a third voice says, and I twist around, firing the gauntlet without hesitation. The little Quick-Draw can only fire up to level two, but I don’t think it would have mattered anyway; this new entrant swats way the blast like a pesky fly, and the ripple of air disappears into the darkness of space.

The new guy at least looks vaguely human, if still very strange; he’s a bald dude, maybe six-foot-three, with an absurd divided-down-the-middle black and white color scheme going on with both his skin and this sort of weird tunic thing he’s wearing.

I hurl the knife at him, an over-the-shoulder stinger-style throw, really a beauty, but the black and white guy raises a hand; the blade goes straight through, and Black-and-White reacts with surprise, rather than pain or shock.

“Oh, my. Powerful energies attached to this knife; destined for bigger things.” He yanks it out of his palm, folds it closed and tosses it back to me. His hand does not bleed.

“Again, as I’ve said before, up until recently he was not an integral part of the timeline,” Big-Head says plaintively, almost by way of an apology to Three-Face and Black-and-White. “A petty criminal, who —”

“SILENCE,” Three-Face booms in a voice so big it nearly knocks me down; it sounds like a low-flying plane. Black-and-White and Big-Head both stagger a little, too; this dude is even bigger than them, and they’re pretty big, so …

Is that what this is?

Am I looking into the face of God?

“No,” Three-Face says. “We are the Living Tribunal.”

Great. He reads minds. I slowly put my knife back into my pocket; I’ve gotten over the initial fight-or-flight response, and now I’m just trying to get my shit together.

“Herman Schultz. Your recent actions have led your reality to the brink of a very treacherous chasm,” the Living Tribunal booms at me.

“Yeah, that’s great. Who the fuck are you again?”

“We are the Living Tribunal. We —”

“And how about dickhead and Clownus Maximus over there?”

“They are Uatu the Watcher and the In-Betweener.”

There’s a pause, and then I blurt out: “Jesus, does everyone at every level of this fucking universe choose their names in kindergarten?”

They’re all silent for a moment, maybe in shock, maybe in pity or disgust or whatever, and then the Living Tribunal speaks once more.

“Uatu is a member of a race of beings who live outside of true time and space, whose sole purpose is to watch and record the events of reality. The In-Betweener is the messenger of magical cosmic beings far beyond your comprehension, avatars of Order and Chaos. Both are sworn against direct interference in your reality. As am I.”

“Great,” I whisper. “Fanfuckingtastic.” I sigh more heavily than I ever have, and look from Uatu the Watcher to the In-Betweener to the Living Tribunal. “So … what is this? Is this … is this a hit?”

There’s a silence. Too long, if you ask me. Maybe a full minute.

“Is that what you guys are doing? You’re here to kill me, erase me from reality or whatever, to prevent me from figuring out the end-point of whatever my father has set up?”

Another silence.

“ ’Cause if that’s what you’re doing, get it over with.”

Another silence. Uatu looks to the Living Tribunal, and then to the In-Betweener, and seems about to speak, but I cut him off.

“Erase me!” I shout. “Get it over with, you fucking pansies!” They don’t do anything, and I’m really manic now. “Do it now, because if you wait any longer I’m going to start thinking of ways to hurt you!”

This time, the silence is shocked, and I have to say I like it better than the sort of indifferent contemplation that came before. The Living Tribunal speaks.

“We are not going to deter you in any way, Herman Schultz. It had been discussed at great length, but Uatu maintains that you will make the right decision, and I have great faith in his judgment. We merely wish for you to understand that your choices in the coming days can disastrously affect the outcome of your world, indeed, of all worlds.”

A pause, and then I whimper out “All worlds?”

“All worlds,” the Living Tribunal says, and vanishes into nothing.

For some reason, this really strikes a chord with me. Because when something that looks like that tells you that you might accidentally destroy all reality, you don’t just laugh it off. You take it with a grain of salt, because this could still be some mutant telepath playing games with me, but you do not laugh it off.

I look to Uatu McBighead, who apparently has my back.

“What decision? How do I make the right decision?”

“You will know when the time comes,” Uatu says, and wisps into nothing. Now it’s just me and the In-Betweener, floating in the Invisible Space Bathroom. The In-Betweener puts a friendly hand on my shoulder.

“When looking for something very well hidden, it’s often easier to find it by looking for what isn’t there, as opposed to contemplating what is.” He winks, and then disappears.

For some reason, my brain goes to the Tube.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

I get it.

Vibrate. Click.

“The fucking septic tank!” I say aloud, and the bathroom rapidly reappears around me.

Ten minutes later I’m beating on the door of Marty’s room while Felicia and Aleksei wait for me in the lobby. The door opens, and I almost choke on my own laughter. Marty has clearly just finished drying himself off, and I’m guessing he used a big hairdryer or something, because now he’s all … poofy. He’s wearing a blue flannel and black khakis, but his head is just this huge poof of fur sitting on his shoulders; his eyes look like they’re staring out of miniature furry caves.

“What’s funny?” he says, his teeth locked together.

“You’re … you’re a Pomeranian,” I say, wiping a tear from the corner of my eye.

“There were little conditioners in the shower! It said soft, lustrous hair, and —” I start laughing. “Hey, man, fuck you!” he barks, and starts to close the door. I shove my foot in and manage to stop laughing.

“Marty, I need you downstairs.”

My tone stifles his indignation.

“What’s up?”

“Remember that thing ‘the Flim-Flam?’”

He nods his poofy head. “Yeah, the one that the guys in Aleksei’s memory said was down by the Tube?”

“Right. I think I know where it is.”

His eyes widen. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

He scratches his poof. “Shit, Herman, this feels … Big.” I nod. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know yet. Meet me in the lobby in ten minutes, armor on. Got it?” Marty nods his poof again.

I bump into Peter on the elevator; I strongly doubt that was a coincidence.

-----------------------

Back in the crater, Felicia disappears down into the wreckage leading to the station’s platform.

“I don’t get it,” Peter says for what seems like the thousandth time. “What are we looking for?”

“The Tube doesn’t have a septic tank,” I say, dropping down five feet onto what used to be the marble floor of the lobby.

“So?” Peter says, jumping down behind me. “The pipes probably led out to the sewers —”

“Nope. They just went down, underneath the actual structure.”

“To where?” I grunt.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Peter laughs. “You’re telling me you had running water down here and you didn’t even know where it came from?”

“Shit, Peter,” I say, turning down a wrecked corridor towards the caved-in track-station. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a super-villain. When you find a place like this, sure, you question it a little, but mostly you’re just fucking grateful. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know?”

“If you say so,” Peter says, stumbling over some rubble. “Where do we think the pipes lead?”

“Behind the concrete on the subway platform.”

“Behind the what on the where?”

I take a long look at Peter; he has no idea what he’s getting himself into. Everyone out there in the real world think that FPS was just some small-time criminal business that I shut down. Nobody but nobody but nobody knows about the … greater … conspiracy, outside of my inner circle.

“Pete, maybe you should hang back; the structure’s pretty brittle up here after the explosions, and I don’t want you to get caught up in a collapse, plus —”

Felicia appears at the end of the hallway.

“Herman!” she shouts. “You should see this!”

I pat Parker on the shoulder, and he nods hesitantly and goes back out into the lobby. It’s probably for the best, regardless of secrecy issues; he and Felicia act all weird around each other, and it’s the kind of weird that, after becoming sexually involved with Felicia, I’m not all that comfortable with. They’re snippy, half friendly and fifteen percent flirty and thirty-five percent harsh.

Like ex-lovers.

Like I said: Weird.

I walk down to the end of the hallway, where Felicia stands, looking over at the area where the concreted-shut subway tunnels used to be.

They’re gone now; they’ve been replaced by a thirty-foot drop into a massive underground chamber.

And, sitting in the center of that chamber, is what must be the Flim-Flam.

Everything Is Lies, Finale

“I don’t get it,” Marty says, squatting down alongside the Flim-Flam, running his hand alongside its translucent surface. “This thing definitely isn’t man-made, but it’s been down here untouched for at least fifteen years. That’s before the Kree, the Skrull, the Shi’Ar, any of those motherfuckers.”

“Marty,” I say, swatting his hand. “Don’t touch it. The last thing we need is some kind of alien mega-bomb going off because Curious George didn’t read the Do Not Disturb sign.”

So there we are; Martin Blank, sitting by the device. Felicia Hardy, going from computer panel to computer panel in the room, grunting with frustration each time before moving on. Herman Schultz, helpfully standing still, being snippy and staring dumbfoundedly at everything, and Aleksei Sytsevich, who’s helping me out in the “staring dumbfoundedly at everything” department.

“Why do you automatically assume it’s a bomb?” Felicia says. “It doesn’t look like a bomb.”

“Felicia, what, pray tell, does an alien bomb look like?” I say, snippy again. Something about this room is really getting to me; nothing physical, nothing metaphysical, I guess you would just call it … Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m going to say this:

This place has a bad vibe. Something seriously uncool went down here; it’s not unlike the feeling I had walking into the crater in Alamogordo, or entering the White Rabbit’s ballroom. There’s this unbelievably sinister aura hanging over everything like a layer of dust.

The Flim-Flam, strangely enough, is the least ominous thing in here. It’s maybe ten feet tall, cylindrical, and nearly featureless. Its most distinguishing trait is that it’s made entirely out of some kind of translucent, green-tinted metal, cold to the touch, through which onlookers can view its inner workings. Those being what looks like a massive, three-dimensional cobweb on which hundreds of cubes, squares and pyramids are caught.

It’s flat on the top, but a single, thin wire extends up about three feet. At the end of it is what appears to be the head of a spoon. About three feet up the side is a single, small slot, maybe four inches wide.

Felicia frowns at me, annoyed, from her vantage point up on a catwalk lined with computers that look about a hundred years old.

“I’m just saying that not everything has to be out to kill you, Herman. I doubt this thing is a bomb; I mean, if the CSA —”

“Or whoever,” I chime in. She rolls her eyes.

“Or whoever had some kind of secret super-bomb, don’t you think it would be protected just a liiiiittle better than this?” I stay quiet; she’s got a point. “No,” she continues. “This thing is a … a device of some kind, a device with one specific application. They left it behind because it had outlived its usefulness; that’s my theory.”

“And, what, they just assumed nobody would be smart enough to figure it out?” Marty says, kicking on the jets of his boots to fly up alongside her.

“Marty, look at us; we’re the ones who finally found the goddamn thing and the best we’ve done so far is to have you sniff it and surmise that we have no idea where to start. I think Marty is right,” she says, looking down at it, leaning on the rail in that pin-up pose which seems to come so naturally to her. “This thing is alien tech. But look at this …” she says, and tosses something down to me, nearly smashing me in the head, so I flinch wildly and only barely manage to catch it. “Smooth,” she purrs, and goes back to the computers.

Marty swoops down next to me, looking over my shoulder.

It’s a clipboard, clipped to which is a detailed blueprint of the Flim-Flam, which apparently was once called the “MOEBIUS EMITTER.” It’s a pretty standard layout, every thing is in plain drafting language. I’d even go so far as to call it primitive; 1980s stuff, maybe even Seventies.

Wait a minute. Wait a fucking minute. I recognize the labels on this schematic. I’ve seen it before; sure, they’re all out of order and it’s a whole new physical design, but the parts, the basic components are the same. I’ve definitely seen it.

The problem begins to vibrate in my head, rattling my brain around and seeing what drops out.

Not in any super-villain’s lair, not in any top-secret government lab, not with Phineas … No. Mr. Frederickson’s electronics class. Ninth grade.

Vibrate. Click.

“It’s a speaker,” I say, quietly, taking another glance at the green monolith in front of me.

“What? What’s a speaker?” Marty says, snatching the plans away from me. “I don’t see a speaker.”

“No,” I say, and lean my face up against the translucent metal, looking in at the electrical cobwebs. “The Flim-Flam. The Flim-Flam is a huge, alien megaphone.”

“You got all that from the clipboard?” Felicia calls down to me.

“Yeah. Plus I took ninth grade electronics.” Felicia smiles. “Felicia, if there’s anything up there that looks like an information unit, bring it down. Aleksei —”

“WHAT?” Aleksei squeals, and then takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Herman; I was daydreaming about nachos.”

“Well that’s —”

“Terrifying nachos,” Aleksei adds, wide-eyed.

I wait a moment, seeing if he has anything else to say, and then continue. “Aleksei, remember when the Kingpin used to let you play Oregon Trail on his receptionist’s computer?”

Aleksei’s whole face lights up. “Oh, yes, yes!” he says, then he furrows his brow. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Remember that big disk you had to put in?”

“Sure.” He nods.

“Do me a favor and search around here for one of those, will you?”

“You got it,” he says, and ambles over to a row of computer panels.

“What about me?” Marty says, and I nod.

“Go gather up as much of a charge as you can, and once you’re filled to capacity, head back here; don’t short out anybody’s systems, just leech a little off everything, power lines, car batteries, cell phones, whatever. Anyone notices, you claim it’s an international emergency and you’re, shit, I don’t know, Iron Man Red or something.”

Marty laughs and drops the visor down on his suit. “Oh, my,” he says in that bizarre, mechanical voice. “The Avengers would not approve.”

“The Avengers can choke on cat shit,” I say curtly. “Guys, I’m going up to the surface. I need to make a call.”

Peter follows me up from the wreckage, chattering the whole way.

“Just let me down there for one second, Herman, one second! At least let me see what all the fuss is about!”

“Peter, back off,” I grumble. “What’s down there is of no concern to you.”

“Oooh,” Peter says, nodding knowingly. “So you managed to recover your porn collection?”

“Cute,” I growl at him. I like Peter better when he’s being dorkily helpful and optimistic; this weird, smarmy, “funny” side of him doesn’t appeal to me much. He reminds me of the bullies that I dealt with in high school. And someone else. Someone much closer.

That little piece in the back of my mind that’s been bothering me since I met Peter vibrates just a little bit harder. I’m close. I’m very close.

There’s a big cheer from the crowd when I get topside; there are less folks out there than when we first got here a few hours back, but it’s still more than would show up for an Iron Fist autograph signing, and still just enough to make me self-conscious and fidgety.

“Fuck off, all of you!” I shout at the crowd. This gets a huge cheer. I groan and take out my cell-phone.

“I love you, Herman!” screeches a surprisingly thin and attractive girl out front in a “SCHULTZ FOR PRESIDENT” T-shirt.

“You!” I point at her. “You specifically! You fuck off!”

“OH MY GOD!” she shrieks, and nearly collapses onto a nearby policeman. I hear her squeal to one of her friends: “Oh, my God, Thomas, he pointed right at me!”

Great. I’m a rock-star.

It’s strange, standing out here in public with the suit on like nothing’s wrong, in front of the police, in front of the world, just dialing up Reed Richards on the old cell phone.

“Bugs?” Reed says; apparently that’s hello. “Oh, I’m sorry, Herman, I was just talking about bugs, and then you called, and, heh, I lost the word ‘hello’ for a moment.”

So this is what people call “eccentric.”

“Reed, I need you down here.”

“At the Tunnel?”

“The Tube.”

“Yes, yes, the Tube. What’s up?”

“I found something I think you might like to see.”

I leave it at that, hanging up as soon as I finish the sentence. That should stir him up a little, get his juices flowing. Stretching. Whatever.

Back down with the Flim-Flam, Aleksei’s found something. It looks for all the world like one of those old hard disks they use to have back when personal computers were first becoming popular: a big, thin square with a film-lined hole in the middle. It’s one of what turns out to be a set of three. They all have labels; the first one reads “QUIKSILVER,” the second reads “MAKOKAM” and the third reads “FFIC – Final For Broadcast.”

“Well, I’m going to say straight up that I don’t think this one has anything to do with the Quicksilver,” Felicia says, tossing it to me. “Just a hunch. What’s ‘Makokam’ mean?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Sounds Japanese,” I toss out, hoping that helps. “It’s a palindrome, if that means anything.”

“A what?” Aleksei asks, staring down at the “FFIC” disk, tiny in his giant hand.

“A word spelled the same way forward as it is backwards,” I say, and press the edge of the “QUIKSILVER” disk up against the slot in the Flim-Flam. “Which one do we put in first?”

“Put in first?” Felicia says, raising her eyebrows. “Herman, we can’t even turn it on.”

“That’s gonna change,” I say, and, as though on cue, Marty floats down behind me.

We mainline the electricity straight into the Flim-Flam — I figure if it’s going to work, it’s going to work; why fuck around with power cords and batteries. It takes us nearly thirty minutes to figure out which end of the damn thing to plug the Crimson Dynamo’s power conduit into, but once we get the juice flowing, it’s easy enough. Apparently Marty managed to black out a whole city block before the suit’s power stores filled up; the Russians built this thing to last.

Every computer in the room chirps and lights up, plain black screens with bright white font, classic early-computer-age style. The Flim-Flam lights up bright green, and for a moment, just a moment, my old “IT’S A BOMB!” theory pops back up in the back of my mind. Marty laughs.

“I can’t believe that worked!” he says, and slaps Aleksei on the back as a jet of sparks rockets out of a computer upstairs; one by one the computer screens blip off, some of them even cracking or melting apart, but the Flim-Flam keeps glowing, silent, ominous. The fluorescent lights up top turn off, and the room is left in the eerie green glow. Felicia looks to me.

“Herman?” she whispers.

“It’s all good. Unless it explodes and incinerates us. That … That would be bad.”

“I —” Marty starts in a high-pitched shriek, and, before he can finish, I jam the “QUIKSILVER” disk into the slot. It seems like nothing happens, but Marty goes silent in a wholly strange way; he cocks his head, looking around.

“What’s up, Marty?” Felicia says, touching his shoulder.

“You guys … you guys don’t hear that?” he says, looking from Aleksei to Felicia to me. “The music; you guys can’t hear it?”

“Black noise,” I say, and Marty nods, his eyes wide.

“Oh, gosh …” Aleksei says, staring at the Flim-Flam. “Wouldya look at that.”

The things that looked like cobwebs inside of the Flim-Flam have turned an impossibly glowing black, flowing like liquid from pyramid to cube to sphere.

“Darkforce materia,” I whisper. “This thing runs on …”

Vibrate. Click.

“Marty,” I practically shout, poking the “eject” button next to the slot on the Flim-Flam. “When I put in that disk, you heard music, right?”

“Right …” Marty says slowly.

I shove in the “MAKOKAM” disk, and we all look at Marty.

“What do you hear now?” I say, my whole body shaking in anticipation.

“I hear a man’s voice,” he says, and then stays quiet for a moment, before continuing: “He says: ‘This is a test of the Project Hungry Man technology codenamed Flim-Flam.’ Then there’s a pause, and he says it again. It’s on a loop.”

“Project Hungry Man?” Aleksei says. “We ain’t never heard of Project Hungry Man … Have we?”

“A test record,” I hoot; my eyes are wild under the mask as I pop out the disk and snatch the “FFIC” disk out of Aleksei’s hand, sliding it into the slot.

Stop giggling. This part is important.

“What do you hear?” Felicia says, looking anxiously to me.

“It’s not …” Marty says, squinting his eyes. “It’s not English. It’s a human voice saying it, but I don’t even think it’s a human language.”

“Tell us anyway,” I say, and Marty nods, starting slowly.

“It says something like ‘Om birnit eilo burno norrin vico om birnit wekwam hurbo.’ And then it loops, and starts again.”

“This is it,” I say. “This is the one, this means something.” I repeat the words out loud, and Reed fucking Richards steps up beside me, pale.

“I’m …” he whispers. How he snuck in here like that I’ll never know, but that’s not my concern; my main boggle is that Reed looks fucking traumatized. “You were right, Mr. Blank; it isn’t an Earth dialect.” He takes a deep, gulping breath. “It’s alien, an ancient language from a planet called ‘Zenn-La.’ A planet I have more than a passing familiarity with.”

“Why’s that?” Felicia says, beating me to the punch.

“Because it’s the homeworld of the Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd, the former herald of Galactus. Herman —” He turns to me, his eyes wide as silver dollars. “What is this? Where did this come from?”

I ignore him.

“What does it say?” I practically scream at him.

“It says …” Reed says, and takes another one of those deep breaths. “It says, if Mr. Blank has accurately repeated it: ‘Norrin, bring him here. There is no life here.’ And it says this in the most commanding way possible.”

“What?” Felicia says, looking to me. “I don’t get it.”

My brain is exploding now, along with Reed’s; we’re staring at each other like two people who’ve just witnessed a horrific murder.

“Why?” Reed murmurs. “Why, Herman? What’ve you found here? My God …” Reed drops his head. “To doom a whole planet … Who would … why would they —”

Felicia stomps her foot.

“I know you guys are having fun doing the whole shocked super-geniuses bit over there, but can you fill it in for the rest of us?”

I take a deep breath. I get it now. I know why the cosmic beings bum-rushed me in the bathroom. I know why a guy as smart as Reed Richards had never figured out that he has Darkforce in his bloodstream.

Because he doesn’t.

I start talking.

“This device, when fully charged, sends out a Black-Noise broadcast, a post-hypnotic subconscious suggestion aimed specifically at one individual. I suppose they powered it on a nuclear generator or something, must’ve been big to blast this thing loud enough to hear it out in space.”

“Space?” Aleksei says, looking up. “Why would they want to play music in space?”

“They didn’t play the music, Aleksei. They played the message for the Silver Surfer.”

“But why would the CSA want to bring the Silver Surfer here?” Marty blurts. “That’s suicide!”

“It’s more than suicide,” Felicia says, her eyes blazing in the green light. “It’s murder. It’s a plot to murder every person on the planet.”

“Wrong,” I say. “I mean, that makes sense if you look at it in the context of the average joe on the street, but —”

“I beg to differ,” Reed says, stern. “There is no way they could’ve known that I would invent the Ultimate Nullifier to scare off Galactus, and without it, there was no technology on Earth that could’ve challenged him.”

“Wrong again,” I say, and Reed goes quiet. Everybody’s listening, staring at me, and for once, I roll with it. “Felicia’s right; this was a murder plot. But it wasn’t against anybody on Earth. It was a plot to kill Galactus.” Reed starts to talk but I just keep going and bulldoze right over him. “Reed, this may come as something of a shock, but the United States invented the Gamma Bomb in 1939, had perfected it by 1945, and started using a by-product of it to artificially create hundreds of superheroes and villains just over twenty years ago.”

There’s a loooong, silence. Reed nods. “That is … something of a shock … yes.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “You’re not one of them. You are, in fact, besides me, the biggest pain in the ass to the conspiracy that there is; you’re the reason everything went wrong. You and your team, the space mission, the cosmic rays … That dealt them a wild card. I think, no, I’m pretty sure, their plan was to lure Galactus to Earth, weaken him with the heroes, and then hit him with a gamma bomb; that shit will kill anything, Galactus included, agreed?”

“Theoretically …” Reed starts, then rethinks. “Yes. If a real, functional gamma bomb were produced, the dimensional implosion would certainly be enough to destroy Galactus.”

“And then, these fuckers, these psychotic, murderous, fuckers,” I continue, tactful as ever. “They were going to loot his corpse, his ship, whatever he had. But then you, Reed, you, fucked everything up. You invent the Nullifier, avoid a direct confrontation, bing bang boom bye bye Galactus. This causes some kind of radical shift in the infrastructure of the CSA division called Control; it fractures and splits, some folks go off and form what will eventually be FPS, some of them set up the organization called the Trust; it’s a fucking train-wreck. That’s what happened; when the murder of Galactus failed, it broke the chokehold. Now they’re stuck operating out of condemned houses and feeding off the pathetic, low-level metas that they manage to snatch up in the night, torturing poor Johnny Ohnn to use his Darkforce gates, scrambling frantically to regain some semblance of control.”

“How can you … how can you know all this?” Reed says, looking at his hands.

“I’ve been at this shit for months, Richards,” I say, sounding quite suave indeed thank you very fucking much. “Didn’t you get the memo? Everything is lies.”

I turn to my band of merry men while Reed just stands there shell-shocked

“Suit up boys and girls. We’re taking down Arcade. FPS ends tonight.”

Naked

“This is absurd!” Arcade roars, slamming one of his fists down on the desk in front of him. Actually, “roars” is probably a bit of an exaggeration; his strange, pinched, nasal voice is incapable of roaring; instead it’s a kind of distorted yelp. Dandruff falls out of his hair as he shakes his head at the phone. “You can’t just, you can’t just leave me here alone!”

“You’re not alone, Arcade,” my father says on the speaker phone. “You have Jesus to guide you.” His voice is, as always, chummy, sweet and friendly; the uncle you always wanted.

But never the father.

“Jesus?” Arcade splutters, stalking around the control-room of the warehouse. Out in the main area, another one of the nightmare machines we found in the White Rabbit’s house looms eerily under the fluorescent lights. Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man, is unconscious in the next room; we saw him on our way in. He was strapped down tight, with three technicians in hazard suits working on him; they had a spot sitting on the back of his head, and, working together, they were stretching it tight like an undersized shower cap.

“JESUS!” Arcade screams. My father lets a little chuckle slide through.

“Arcade, it’s just the Shocker, and there’s not even any guarantee he knows where you are.”

I should mention, at this point, for ironic effect, that I am standing less than five feet from Arcade.

“I don’t care about a damn guarantee! Ever since that piss-and-shit-colored nutjob hit Hammerhead, I’ve been sitting on pins and needles, looking over my shoulder every ten seconds thinking I’m going to see pineapple man sneaking up behind me!”

Piss-and-shit colored. Pineapple man.

Arcade is digging himself in deeper and deeper.

“The least you government buffoons could do is send me a guard, send me anyone but these low-rent Mafia goons you’ve got guarding me now! Anyone could just walk in here and —”

I flip the toggle marked CRIMSON on Reed’s device, and Arcade’s voice gradually slows down and then stops completely.

Marty goes visible, the Crimson Dynamo in full glory, and Arcade stops dead in the middle of his sentence, and turns to go for the door; Aleksei goes visible.

The door is no longer an option.

Arcade stands there looking from Aleksei to Marty and back, his face frozen in this kind of “DAMN IT TO HELL” grimace. I touch him on the shoulder, and he turns; the reaction has come full circle now.

He actually gasps as I go visible.

“You …” he whispers. “Oh … oh, dear.”

“Arcade?” my father says over the phone. I shove him back into his desk chair, and it rolls back a little on his impact. “Arcade, you still there?” I start to reach for the receiver, but then think better of it. “Oh, I understand,” my father says, a laugh in his voice. “Herman! Herman, you there, boy?”

“Yeah, I’m here you son of a bitch.” I spit it out, and then immediately regret it. My father laughs again, and I can feel him shaking his head in mild irritation.

“Didn’t come alone I assume. Who else is hanging around? Your big dumb bulldozer, of course.”

“That’s me!” Aleksei says proudly. Oy.

“Hello, dear,” my father says, and Aleksei frowns at the phone, and I can see the gears in his head working: he knows my dad is the bad guy, BUT HE SOUNDS SO NICE! Shit like this won’t fool Aleksei; he’s not that dumb. But it certainly does put him off a little. “And who else?” my father continues. “The monkey, of course.”

“Of course,” Marty says, grinning a somewhat psychotic sapien grin at Arcade. “You and I need to have a talk, Adrian.”

The first name catches my father off-guard; it’s almost imperceptible, but a son sees these things. Score ten points for the Crimson Dynamo.

“Sure thing, Marty, sure thing. Who else … I don’t suppose Felicia’s there, is she?”

Felicia prowls up out of the darkness; this little invisible thing Reed has going is a hell of a neat trick. She starts to speak, but I raise a hand, and she stops. Let’s see how well he’s got us covered; if he’s watching, I’d like to know.

“No, pops, Felicia couldn’t make it.”

Then he says something that makes my brain stop.

“Ah, off doing something. Parker I suppose.”

I reflexively spit out a single word.

“What?”

“Parker. Her boyfriend. You know Peter Parker, don’t you, Herman? Peter Parker? The amazing, spectacular, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?”

Time. Stops.

Pedarman, Felicia said when she woke up. Said it again when she came in the room and saw him there. I heard, I remember just before I met Peter, I heard the thwip on the docks. There’s more, and more, and it all … It all adds up so cleanly.

So cleanly.

It all adds up so cleanly.

Spider-Man.

Peter Parker.

Spider-Man.

Peter Parker.

My mind isn’t vibrating. It’s rattling.

My head sort of twitches to the left, out of my control, and see Felicia looking like she’s just watched an orphanage collapse. I twitch right and see Aleksei blinking, no, twitching.

“Peter Parker, that … that jerk-off, that stupid asshole, that lying son of a bitch!” Aleksei says; this is some of the worst language I’ve ever heard him use. He lets out a roar, a real old-fashioned Aleksei rage scream, and smashes his hand through Arcade’s desk, then punches through a file cabinet.

In the next room, I heard the thugs mobilize; we’d been keeping it cool up until now, but the temperature just went up. Way up.

That jerk-off.

That stupid asshole.

That lying, lying, LYING son of a bitch!

“Who’s Peter Parker?” Marty says. “That teacher guy? What’s he —”

Aleksei howls and tears through the wall, plaster and industrial wiring coming apart like butter under his breadloaf-fingers.

“Peter, you big liar! You jerk! You trick … trick man!” Aleksei crashes into the main body of the warehouse. That liar. That evil fuck. That treacherous fucking bastard, I’ll —

“Herman —” Felicia says, grabbing my arm. Without thinking, I swat her across the face and shove her backwards into the wall.

“Don’t fucking touch me, you lying bitch!” I scream at her. “YOU KNEW!” I say, pointing at her and charging a gauntlet. “You were laughing at me the whole time, you and him, laughing at me!”

It’s like my whole body is on autopilot, but autopilot is broken. I can hear my father laughing on the speaker phone. The laughter is a shrieking, screeching sound in my ears. He knew I was with Parker. He knew this whole time. Felicia knew this whole time. And Reed, he must’ve known, too. Everybody knew. Everybody was laughing. They all think I’m some kind of fucking joke, ever since I was a kid, everybody laughing, making jokes, well it’s not so funny now, is it, you sons of bitches, is it?”

“Herman,” Felicia says. “Just please —”

I level-three her into the wall.

Bam. She drops like a rock.

Everybody is a fucking lie.

“Rhino,” I scream to Aleksei in the next room. “Destroy everything! Everything!”

An affirmation comes in the form of a roar, and I hear things breaking and people screaming in the next room. Good. Crush them, smash them, I don’t care, Aleksei, what you leave I’ll finish off. I’ve never seen a level five hit someone with open wounds before; it’ll probably shake their muscles clean out of the cuts.

“Gibbon,” I say, shaking with anger, pointing at Arcade, who’s struggling in Marty’s arms. “Fry his ass!”

“Uh … no?” Marty says, shoving Arcade face-down into the wreckage of his desk. “Herman, what the hell is going on, what’s wrong with you? You’re acting crazy —”

“I’m not FUCKING CRAZY!” I shriek at him; how dare he fucking challenge me, laughing at me like the rest of them. I blast him with dual level fours; the Dynamo suit takes the brunt of the impacts, but the force carries him through the wall and out onto the street; cars swerve in all direction, crashing into storefronts, wrecking their way into hot dog carts and newsstands.

Arcade, in the meantime, has pulled himself to his feet.

“Schultz, help! Creel!” he screams. “Let someone take control of Creel! Save me!”

There’s another crash from the warehouse room, and I watch as Felicia struggles to her feet. She moans.

“Herman, I understand —”

I scream at her. “STAY DOWN! I WILL FUCKING SHAKE YOU AGAIN! YOU STAY THE FUCK DOWN, WHORE!” It’s now, and only now, that I realize I’m crying under the mask. I grab Arcade as he tries to run out of the room, and then slam him up against the wall, pulling out my father’s blue switchblade, vibing it on a level four. “I’m going to cut you now, Arcade!”

“No! Oh, sweet Christ no, stay away from me! Someone! Anyone, help me!”

“I’m going to cut your face off now.” I shove the vibrating blade up inches from the side of his neck. “I’m going to cut your face off and make you watch. I’m —”

Aleksei comes smashing through the wall; he lands on his back, bam. He’s got a bloody nose. Now they’ve hurt Aleksei. Now they’ve really done it.

I make one quick cut across Arcade’s face, through his cheeks; his jaw drops open, the muscles cut. He lets out a wide-mouthed shriek, and blood sprays everywhere, so I turn him around and smash his head into the wall. He slumps down, unconscious, blood spreading out over his white suit.

“Rhino,” I say, walking towards him.

“Herman, he hit me,” Aleksei says, dazed as he stands up. There’s a familiar laugh from the next room.

But that’s impossible. It can’t be possible. It’s impossible, it’s …

“Herman my boy, you seem to have lost your temper,” my father says, stepping through the hole in the wall.

But it’s not my father.

Carl “Crusher” Creel; the Absorbing Man.

Remember maybe a hundred pages back I was telling you about villains who’ve got these amazing, world-bending powers and they just use the same three tricks again and again, never trying to really, you know, explore their abilities?

Creel is one of these guys.

The worst part about Carl is that he’s not a half-bad guy; drugged up to the eyeballs on pain-pills half the time, but very careful about the innocent bystanders, and never really for himself, not like the other psychos with incredible power like Dillon or Bench; they’re sadists, killers. But Carl is just muscle.

He had a thing going with Mary McPherran, “Titania” to you; they even got married, but that all fell apart after a while. His powers, in the meantime, just seemed to grow; he’s got the ability to turn into anything he touches.

Think about that for a moment.

Anything this guy touches, he turns into, absorbing its strength, its mass, its density, sometimes even its size. Creel can do it with people, too; in that respect, he’s kind of got a half-ass version of that little skunk-haired minx from the X-Men. Except I hear she can’t touch anything without absorbing it, so I guess Creel got off easy. He carries this big ball-and-chain around with him that does basically the same thing; it’s a mystical gimmick, the kind that lets you go toe-to-toe with the big boys like Thor and the Hulk.

But he’s always been too stupid to use it to any great effect.

My father, however, is not stupid at all.

“Herman,” he says, snapping Creel’s big, thick fingers. “Eyes up. I think you’ve lost yourself in your anger.” He steps forward; Creel’s huge, shirtless body, moves with that easy swagger so familiar from my childhood. “Aw, look at poor Felicia,” he says, waving a hand at Felicia’s tight little form, curled up, half-vomiting on the floor.

Jesus Christ.

What’ve I done?

LIAR! FUCKING LYING SLUT GOT WHAT SHE DESERVED! SHE FUCKED ME! AND SHE KNEW! SHE KNEW ABOUT HIM THE WHOLE TIME! LAUGHING AT ME!

My father yanks Creel’s massive ball and chain into the room and smashes me with it, driving me into the warehouse. The suit takes the impact easily, and I roll twice before I grind a heel into the ground and spring to my feet. Creel, guided by my father, leaps out the hole I made in the wall and disappears into the city, the wrecking-ball melting into his leg. Never seen that trick before.

Superhero logic would dictate that I go after him; run down the villain, follow him to my archnemesis and proceed with the final showdown.

But I’m not a superhero. I know that now. I just violently struck down the woman I think I love and blasted one of my only friends through a wall.

Idiot. Creep. Scumbag.

Who am I kidding, I don’t know what love is, I don’t know what it means to be someone’s friend; all I know are vibrations, and those are all I need, all I’ll ever need, because criminal deviant fucks like me always die alone.

But I can do one thing. I can do one, glorious thing for everyone to remember.

I flip open my phone and dial Peter’s number.

“Peter?”

“Yeah, Herman, what’s up? I heard from Reed that you —”

“Peter, I need to see you, I need to see you right away; things here spun out of control. They got Felicia; I don’t know where they took her, and they … They got Marty, too, and I can’t even find Aleksei; things went to shit, Peter. I need your help.”

“All right, where are you, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” His voice isn’t Spider-Man or Peter Parker; it’s the person that lives underneath; a person stronger than either of them, more capable, more REAL. The sort of person I’m not.

“Meet me at the hamburger joint on Third and Highland; no costumes, I’m trying to lie low.” My voice is a picture of amicable desperation, a friend in dire need trying not to outright beg for help. And Peter, being the good guy he is, is eating it up like candy.

I close the phone and wander through the warehouse; Aleksei is only just now getting up, rubbing his head.

“Herman, what’s —”

“Stay here, Aleksei.”

“Herman, I —”

I put a finger in his face, startling him.

“You stay here.”

Aleksei looks sad; I don’t deserve his friendship.

Ten minutes later I’m looking at Peter as he sits waiting for me in Maude’s Big’N’Beefy. I’m across the street, in an alley, classic old-school super-villain style. He looks nervous. He looks ready. That line about Felicia really caught his attention; I suppose the “spider-sense” can’t detect lies. And it’s not even telling him I’m watching him. Or is it? He’s a liar, a born liar; he knows how to pretend. So why take risks?

I start level 3ing the living hell out of the place.

I think he started to stand up just before the first vibes hit, but it was pointless; he had nowhere to go, and without that stupid costume of his, he couldn’t pull anything flashy. So that’s the first step, step one of three for the simple strategy I’ve always had if I could ever figure out just who Spider-Man was: catch him off guard, out of costume, in public.

Maude’s Big’N’Beefy starts coming apart like it’s made of frosted flakes, millions of tiny pieces spraying in all directions; pedestrians scatter; some of them are caught in the blasts and thrown violently aside. I walk across the street, still in full costume, blasting away, keeping my eyes locked on Peter as he’s bounced backwards through the restaurant, smashing through the Fifties art-deco furniture like a bowling ball.

I step through the destroyed part of the restaurant, picking up a stray salt shaker as I go and yanking off the cap.

“All of you,” I say, waving a gauntlet at the terrified customers. “GET THE FUCK OUT!”

They do as they’re told. Smart folks.

Peter is shakily standing up over by the bar; I must’ve hit him eight or nine times.

So that settles it. Parker is Spider-Man. Spider-Man is Parker. No normal human could stand after eight or nine level threes; they’d be lucky to be alive at all.

I walk purposefully over to him, grab a handful of his hair and try to smash his face into my knee.

He throws his forearms up and blocks my leg. Classic Spider-Man move; blocking before you even knew you were going to attack. But poor Peter, listening to his Spider-sense, stops the knee but never sees the salt coming; I jerk the shaker right into his face, and the white grains spray into his eyes, nose and mouth.

Step Two: Fight as dirty as possible.

“Agk!” he says, and tries to kick me away; it’s a blind kick, though, and wild, easy to dodge. I snatch a fork off the bar and stab it into his leg, vibrating it on a level five; it slides through his flesh like butter, and he yanks his hurt leg back close to his body. I attempt to punch him in the face; he dodges, sending him forward right into my foot, which kicks him square in the balls. He makes this wonderful exhale sound, like “oog,” that I will treasure forever.

I grab him by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and throw him over the counter, into the kitchen; he starts to stand up, but I vibro-punch him in the side of the head and he falls down onto his hands and knees, so I just start kicking the bastard in the ribs until something over to my right catches my eye.

I grab the French fry tray out of the grease fryer and dump the bubbling oil onto the back of his head; Parker screams and clutches at the sizzling skin on the nape of his neck.

“WHERE’S YOUR GODDAMN JOKES NOW, SPIDERMAN!” I scream, spit flying from my mouth inside the mask, hoarse, the voice of a madman. “WHY CAN’T I HEAR YOU LAUGHING?”

He raises an arm at me, and I sidestep a jet of webbing, grabbing a pan of frying eggs and bashing his hand as hard as I can. He grunts and jerks the arm back close to his body, giving me a beautiful opportunity to kick his prone, stupid, evil self square in the face; so I do.

“Herman …” he moans when the dizzies from the kick wear off. “Herman, this is ridiculous. This is stupid, stop before I have to —” It’s the “before I have to” that sets me off. Something about the idea that he’s been going “easy” on me when his retarded arachnid ass is near to laid out on the dirty floor of a cut-rate diner. That stupid smugness that never goes away, that fake-humble-but-still-better-than-you-poor-stupid-super-villain thing.

“BEFORE YOU HAVE TO WHAT, SPIDERMAN?” I shriek, and vibro-punch him in the spine, knocking him flat on his stomach. “Before you have to DIE, because that’s what’s happening now, you know that, don’t you? You’re dying here, in this shitty little place, without your stupid spandex, without your friends, because you —”

I’m not quite sure how he got up that fast, but he did. I don’t feel the punch, really, not at first; I’m just suddenly flying through the air, and then BANG, head-first into the soft serve ice-cream dispenser. It explodes, a tidal flow of vanilla soft serve flooding out onto me. I shake my head violently, trying to get all the vanilla off my eye-lenses, and see him running towards me through the kitchen, tearing his shirt open as he goes, revealing that goddamn red and blue underneath.

Things are about to get serious, and, for the first time, I realize that I might end up back in jail.

No.

Not happening.

Not an option.

It’s my sanity or his life.

And I value my fucking sanity.

The Spider dies today.

Parker lunges at me, yanking on the mask as he does so, and connects with a series of punches that function exactly as they were intended to, that is, they knock me backwards. He shoves me over onto a stove and tries to web me up to it; if he can get the webs attached to the stove instead of me, he can probably jack up the heat and damage my costume, if only a little.

And that would be the end.

But not here. Not now.

I roll off the stove and grab a bubbling pot full of … something, and hurl it straight down onto him.

Turns out it was hotdogs.

I hear him scream, and it feels good, it feels like everything is going really well, and then this red boot comes out of nowhere and he’s on the offensive again, punching, kicking, wild; he’s focusing his blows on my gauntlets; smart fighting, as usual: my gauntlets are the only part of me not covered by my suit.

No! It was another fucking distraction so that he could web my eyes; I vibe it off quick, but he’s already gone, and then BAM, dropkicked from behind. I flip through the air and hit a wall way too hard, the suit not taking a damn bit of it.

The fight is over, and Peter knows it.

“I don’t know why you did this, Herman …” he says, unable to mask the pain in his voice. “I thought you were —”

“Step Three,” I say, still out of breath from the impact against the wall, and then hurl myself up onto him, wrapping my arms over his, a kind of bear-hug, pressing my fists against one another. “Overload the gauntlets.”

I flip off the gauntlets’ power modulators and fire dual level 5s; each level five travels about an inch before it hits the gauntlet opposite from the one of its origin, and there’s a strange sound.

“What did you —” Peter shouts, but whatever else he says is lost as the fabric of reality around us starts shaking.

VvvvvvvvvvvvBOOM.

I remember back when I was building these things, trying to explain to myself how exactly they worked, how they sustained the quantum reaction that allowed for the vibrations.

And then everything shakes apart.

When I finally manage to open my eyes and stand up, it’s nearly six minutes later, and the entire diner has come down on top of us, so I’m now effectively standing outside. The thing is, there’s no rubble; just an enormous mound of multicolored (but mostly gray) powder. Indeed, even the ground I’m standing on is made of billions of individual grains; a sand of dirt, asphalt and concrete. The effect gravitates out in all directions for about thirty yards.

The gauntlets are just twisted hunks of metal; I slide them off and let them fall with soft thuds into the granulated earth. I pull off my mask, and stare at in my hands. What is this? What does this mean?

An odd silence has fallen over the block; people are still everywhere, but they’re just staring now, silent. Whatever just happened, it must’ve been a pretty fucking impressive visual. It looks like no one was caught in the blast, and I surprise the hell out of myself by feeling an immediate and overwhelming sense of relief. As I turn to look around, a few layers of my costume simply fall away into yellow and brown powder; it even tears in a few places.

He lies completely still, limbs splayed at awkward and broken angles, his body bent into a near fetal position: the Amazing Spider-Man.

I grab him by the neck with both hands, and as I lift him onto his knees his costume falls away into blue and red dust.

So here we are; me, disoriented but still filled with hate, my costume torn and my gauntlets destroyed, tears streaking down my cheeks. And him, his body twisted and his bones broken, bleeding in some places, already swelling and turning black, purple and red in others, naked as the day he was born.

I feel his adam’s apple move under my thumb, and draw out my father’s blue switchblade.

I look around again, taking in the sun, the easy heat of an early summer New York Tuesday, a small breeze coming in from the North, bringing with it the cool mist of the nearby ocean. I press the trigger button, and the blade flips out, catching the sunlight. I look at it for a second, and then, holding Peter Parker up in a slumped sitting position with my left hand, I put the knife in my right, and press the edge against his throat.

“Time to die, Peter. No one to save you now,” I say, my voice shaking a little with rage. “It’s over now. You’re done.” I press the blade in harder, cutting through the skin but not into the throat, and a little bit of blood leaks out over the knife, dripping down onto my fingers.

His life is less than one millimeter away from being over. Nothing could save him, nothing. No one could jump up and take me out, no one could teleport me away, nothing could get rid of me without me first getting rid of him.

I’m going to kill him, and there’s nothing anyone can do.

This is it.

I won. I won, definitively, I won.

I beat Spider-Man. I beat Peter Parker, and I did it without magic, or powers, or any help at all. I did it myself. And it only took ten minutes.

He’s helpless now.

I won.

I … won?

The word is suddenly meaningless.

Time stops again.

I feel my hand open on my father’s knife, and watch as it falls out of my fingers. It tips end over end and then lands in the dust that used to be the tile floor of the kitchen. I fall down to my knees, wrapping my arms around Parker’s limp form, sobbing tearless sobs.

I see them floating in the air around me; the Living Tribunal, Uatu the Watcher and the In-Betweener. They’d been here the whole time, invisible to me but probably not to anyone else; that must’ve been one of the reasons the bystanders were so shitcanned quiet.

The In-Betweener vanishes, and then the Living Tribunal, but Uatu stays for a moment, and nods at me, the faintest trace of a smile touching the side of his mouth, before he, too, disappears into nothing.

I see dozens of cop cars and SWAT vehicles racing up the street. I see the Fantasti-Car zooming in, Johnny Storm flying alongside it. Iron Man lands to my left and easily shoves me face-down into the powder, wrenching my hands behind my back, shouting in my ear. I don’t hear any of it though. In my head, I’m writing a letter.

Dear Daddy,

I’ve taken out Bullseye. I fought off over a hundred men. I just now took out Spider-Man. And as soon as I get out of this, and oh, I WILL get out of this, I’m coming for YOU.

Love, Herman.

Avenged

Felicia gazes at me evenly across the table, and I stay quiet, staring down at the handcuffs. They’re the big, bulky, whole-fist kind they give to low-level metahumans; I guess that’s flattering, in a way. But my plain white shirt and white pants look like they belong on an inmate at a mental asylum, not a prisoner.

They’re treating me like your standard metahuman creep; they even gave me my “one phone call” this morning. It feels ridiculous. It feels familiar.

Those green eyes dig into me; out of costume, in a simple white business suit, she’s even more intimidating than when she’s in it. I try to distract myself with the frightening thought that Stark’s finally got his greedy little paws on copies of the costume and the gauntlets, but it doesn’t work. The costume was trashed, and the gauntlets were so scrambled they might as well get melted down for silverware.

The room is plain white, featureless, some little cavern in the underbelly of Stark Towers, where just a few days ago I was living the high life. I’m not sure how long I was unconscious after Tony zapped me; hopefully not more than a day, I can’t let my father have time to regroup. These handcuffs — arm-cuffs, really — are electrically powered. Inside each of the glove-mitts, there is a single screw-head. Your fingers have about three inches of movement space.

Cracking the nail off my left pinkie was easy. Using it to unscrew the screw in my left cuff was harder, but not by much; these are the restraints they usually give to less-power super-strong guys, thus the lazy interior-screw design. It opens up into the glove’s wiring system; I’m working it blind and with only two fingers, but that’s going to have to be good enough for now. What were they thinking giving me access to anything electrical?

Their mistake. Their big mistake.

“Herman,” Felicia says, snapping my attention up to her again. “Why?”

“Because,” I say, trying not to focus on the stinging, torn-flesh pain from my pinkie.

“Because?” She’s suddenly angry. “Because what, Herman?” She’s got this immense presence; it sucks the whole room in around her when she’s mad. Super-people need this; Felicia, while not a true superhuman, has more than enough.

And for the thousandth time, it replays in my head; the look of shock on her face as I blasted her. Not betrayal, not pain, not even anger; just raw shock. I can only imagine what she thinks of me now, only imagine what —

“Herman, cut that shit out.” Curt, quick.

“What shit?” I say, genuinely baffled.

“That sad puppy shit. I can see it in your eyes, ‘oh, wa wa wa, Felicia’s mad at me.’ You can stop it now; I’m not mad.” Okay, that one genuinely caught me off guard. “I’m used to violence from men I’m involved with; hell, I don’t know how many times Peter’s punched me out.”

Okay, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

“What scares me, Herman, is your anger. I knew you were complicated, boy, I knew that. But when you found out about Peter … Herman, you looked CRAZY. I mean, really genuine straightjacket crazy; I could even see it through the mask. Your eyes didn’t even blink, you just lost it, snap, like that. That’s not the sort of thing a sane person does. I had no idea you were so … screwed up inside. I —”

“No!” I say, not shouting but certainly not quiet. “I am not crazy.”

“Herman, I —”

“No! No! You listen to me now!” It feels like a damn bursts inside of me.

And it all just comes pouring out.

“Do you know, do you know how much time I used to take to plan heists? Days! Weeks! Do you know how much effort, how much fucking workwould go into making sure I could minimize casualties, minimize property damage, maximize profit, plan a safe escape route, make sure everyone got a fair cut so there wouldn’t be any backstabbing, the organization, the fucking hours upon hours of mapping and strategizing every possible scenario? And then thwip thwip thwip, joke joke joke, it’s over! It’s over and I’m in prison. Do you know what happens in prison, real prison, Felicia? I’m not a meta, I don’t get my own special cell; you get beaten in prison, you get stabbed in prison, you get raped in prison, and every second of it you’re hearing his fucking jokes in your head!

“And how did he do it? How did he beat me? Is he smarter than me? No, no, he’s not fucking smarter, or more clever; he didn’t fucking plan, or put forth any real effort. He’s just stronger. FASTER. And he knows it, and that’s why he does it. Do you think for a moment, for even a fucking moment, that creep would take on a foe he wasn’t sure that he could beat? I don’t think he would; he’d leave it to the Avengers, or Daredevil; they’re the ones who handle the real challenges. You know why he’s always fighting the same fifteen or so guys? Because he knows he can take them down, because he knows he’ll be able to crack at least one joke at their expense. You think he ever tries to, to talk to these people? You think he ever tried to talk to Aleksei? No, and you know why? Because he’s a fucking bully.

“That’s all he is, another fucking bully, like my father, like the Kingpin, another asshole with fucking low self-esteem and an attitude problem; if you think he does this shit for anybody but himself, you’re wrong, he does it out of, there must be some kind of, some kind of trigger, some kind of event that made him feel like a bad guy, or a victim, maybe he was a nerd in high school, maybe something worse, but it fucked his head up for life. So now he feels this need to melodramatically martyr himself at the expense of others; all the tragedies in his life that he moans about on the rare occasions that we, his clowns, his victims, challenge what he’s doing, that Gwen Stacy woman Norman Osborn killed, every single one of them are his fault. And he knows it, and oh, he cries about it, but he doesn’t care, not really, because he keeps putting on the mask, keeps cracking jokes. You honestly think with all the superheroes in New York we couldn’t live without Spider-Man? WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

“What do you think he’d do, Felicia, if he knew what we knew? That the accident was all planned, that none of it was fucking destiny, that it was all my father and some other jackass generals trying to build an army to kill Galactus with? What then? He’d fucking fall apart, because he needs, he needs, he needs to believe he’s the most important person in the world, that he’s the ‘main character,’ the protagonist! That he’s the one who the audience loves —”

“The audience?” Felicia says, raising her eyebrows.

“In life, there is always an audience!” I nearly scream. “And at least when you fight Captain America, when you fight Daredevil, when you fight Iron Fist or Luke Cage or any of them, they treat you like an opponent, like a threat, and, if you’re not being a fucking evil asshole, they’ll even show you a little respect. They recognize the work, the fact that hey, maybe our lives aren’t a fucking cake-walk, that we’re not international celebrities with our own action figures, and that yeah, we’re people, too. That I’m a person, too! That I’m not just that costume, that costume that took me three years to build and that he laughs at, but that there’s a person under there.”

There’s a distant boom. Felicia looks around, confused, but I slam my cuffs down on the table, drawing her attention.

“Well, I was fucking sick of it! Sick of his bullying me, and hurting me, and laughing, and being a fucking smart-ass because he knows he’ll win! He told me, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ and that’s true. But he doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. He doesn’t have a sense of morality, he doesn’t have a fucking soul! And I needed to show him, show him that I was better, and I did, I did it for myself, I did it because I had to do it if I wanted to stay sane. And now it’s done; I’m rid of him, I’m almost free. But there’s one more boogeyman, Felicia, one more that has to go down if I’m ever going to fucking get a sound night of sleep again, and not you, not Spider-Man, not Tony Stark, not Reed Fucking Richards himself is going to get in my way.”

Another distant boom. Felicia just stares at me.

“Herman. I think you’re completely insane. But I also think … I don’t know … I think I … I might be in love with you.”

I smile, and start to talk, but then the three-inch-thick door at the other side of the room slides open, and Wolverine steps through, claws out, shirt riddled with bullet holes over rapidly healing wounds. Felicia stands up.

“Sorry, Cat, but Schultz has to go,” he says, slightly out of breath. “Someone let the word out that we were holding him in here, and we’ve got something like six high-level metas up there trying to get in here for the bounty.”

“But isn’t he safer —” Felicia starts to say, and then I kick the table between us into her legs, and she lands flat on those great big wonderful breasts of hers. I kick off the chair and dive towards Wolverine, who raises his claws; I bend mid-air and land right infront of him, allowing his claws to slice apart the link between my cuffs. My right cuff, now without a power-source, unlocks and clatters to the floor.

“Hey —” he manages to say, and then I trigger the wire on my modified left cuff; the inputs cross, there’s a spark and the cuff falls off, but not before emitting a powerful electric shock that knocks Wolverine on his ass.

I’m not tempted to press my advantage; that was a fluke, albeit a carefully planned one. I was terrified that once the siege started Tony might send Luke Cage, and then I’d be shit out of luck; I needed those claws. But if I stick around here for even a second more, Wolverine will kill me.

I grab Felicia by the wrist and take off running, and to my surprise, she follows, giggling uncontrollably.

“Herman, this is amazing! This is amazing!” It’s the out-of-breath, joy-filled voice of a little girl on a roller coaster. We make the eight lefts and rights I memorized on my way down here, and reach an elevator door with an access panel. “What now?” Felicia says, but it’s more anticipation than anything else; it’s like she’s watching some great television show.

“Now, uh …” I say, staring at the code-keys on the panel, wondering what the hell I’m going to do. There’s a distant boom, then a series of approaching thuds and I can hear a muffled “ow, oof, ow” rapidly approaching from above. I smile so hard it hurts.

BAM. An enormous gray fist smashes the elevator doors open, and then Aleksei peeks through, looking very much like a curious puppy.

“Herman, is this sublevel b5?” he says slowly. “Because that’s where you’re being held … Oh, no, that’s a dumb question, because you’re right here, so this must be —”

I kiss him a dozen times all over his face, and then jump into the elevator shaft, climbing onto his massive back, surprised to find myself sharing space with a huge backpack. Felicia climbs on, too, grinning, wild-eyed.

“You’re breaking out of the Stark Building!” Felicia nearly shrieks as I open the backpack, and pull out the soft brown and yellow suit inside. She squats in a perfectly balanced, feline manner on Aleksei’s other shoulder, beaming at me as I pull off my prison-whites.

“Good call on the suit, Aleksei!” I holler to the back of his head as he begins to rapidly climb back up the elevator shaft, King Kong on the side of the Empire State Building. I pull on the lower half first, then stop; above us, I hear gunshots, plasma blasts, fighting. But below us …

“Trying to sneak up on me, you sonofabitch!” I howl down into the darkness as I pull the top of the suit on and feel it vacu-seal shut. Wolverine, who’d been pulling himself up by his claws, pounces up onto Aleksei’s left leg; his claws dig in, but not nearly deep enough for him to feel it.

“RAR!” Wolverine “says,” flipping himself up onto Aleksei’s shoulder-blade and taking a wild swipe at me. I yank the gauntlets out of Aleksei’s backpack and jump out onto the elevator cables at the center of the shaft. I yank on the mask, and it’s around this point that an express elevator passes, switching over a connector on the cable I’m hanging on, which means I’m abruptly flipped upside-down, and yanked upwards and smashed into a rafter.

So much for my smooth, secret agent escape.

I grab the rafter and pull myself up onto it, fastening on the gauntlets as I stand up. Wolverine dives off Aleksei, and lands with animal-grace on the rafter, smiling.

“Slick move down there, bub. Real, real slick.” He raises the claws.

Most people shit themselves when they see those claws.

I, on the other hand, feel like a million bucks.

“Wolverine,” I say, raising the gauntlets, letting out a breath of relief. “You lose this fight before it starts.”

Another explosion, and some dust and plaster falls down past us.

“Oh,” Wolverine says, edging towards me. “Why’s that?”

“Your bones are made of adamantium, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye,” I say, and hit him with a single level two.

“GAH!” Wolverine screams, clutching as his bones vibrate against his muscles, his skull vibrates against his brain; they’ll be ringing like that for at least three more seconds, ample time for me to place my hand on his chest and gently push him off the rafter. He tumbles down into the darkness, and I leap back onto Aleksei. Felicia grabs me by the neck and kisses me on the mouth; it’s not a very passionate kiss, considering we’re separated by the mask, but the message is clear.

It hits me a little, and I sort shiver: I just ganked Wolverine. Ganked the hell out of him. Ganked him like a fucking punk.

… He’s going to be pissed.

Aleksei yanks us up through an exploded lobby door, and into what could most accurately be called a war zone; the whole front wall of the lobby has been blown off, and the mercenaries are flooding in. Bullets and energy blasts fill the air, but I can immediately tell I’m dealing with a higher quality crop of evil bastards than I faced at the Tube; Task-Master, the absurdly high-rate mimickry-based assassin, is going toe-to-toe with Captain America, while Sabretooth is brawling with Luke Cage. The Bushwacker, a hit-man with a Gatling gun for a left hand, is holding off a wave of Stark’s guards; they’ve got little Iron Man suits of their own, minus all the neat stuff. Stuart Clarke, in his old blue and black Rampage armor, is similarly engaged; I watch as he twists the head off one of the mini-iron-men.

I barely have time to get myself situated before I hear a booming, “Comrade Schultz!” and I’m suddenly lifted up into the air by my neck, my breathing choked by an adamantium tentacle.

No. No, that distinctive copper-like odor.

That’s not Adamantium.

That’s carbonadium.

And I feel tired … Weak.

Which means …

Oh, dear.

He smells like sea-salt and the geriatric wing of a hospital.

“Schultz my boy, it has been years!” He smashes me against the bronze wall of the lobby; my body, already weakened by that goddamn death stink his skin gives off, takes the hit like I got slammed by a truck.

After Aleksei, the Russians got serious with their super-soldier program; in retrospect, their jump was so big they probably had help from daddy dearest and his beloved “Control.”

They took the psychotic serial killer Arkady Rossovich, and they turned him into Omega Red.

“Arkady, what a surprise,” I say, trying to hide a pained cough as I stand up; I think the sound of gunfire does it for me. He’s approaching rapidly, those tentacles whipping all over the place. His chalk-white skin exudes some kind of toxin into the air that weakens (and can even be deadly to) all those around him; it’s doing its magic on me right now; I can barely move. “Working on your tan much lately?”

Red whips out the tentacles at me again, and though I manage to dodge the first slash, the second one trips me hard onto my back. He starts spinning me like a dervish, then uses the tip of one of the tentacles to flip me up into the air; I come down on a reception desk, and roll off onto the ground.

There’s good news and bad news: the bad news is, Arkady’s worked with me before on jobs for the Kingpin. He knows about the suit’s paradoxical weakness to self-momentum-based impacts; he’s not trying to whip or hit or impale me, just juggling me into the air and letting gravity do all the hard work.

The good news is I’m now about twenty feet away from him, out of range for his little body odor problem. And now that I’ve had a little time, albeit in pain, I’ve managed to jack the suit’s vibe-level up to 1; that ought to shake away his deathfart spores. Twenty feet is just out of range for the tentacles, too.

But well within range for the gauntlets.

I throw myself up onto the desk, standing like a fuckin’ monument to myself, gauntlets raised.

“All right, Arkady!” I shout over the chaos. “Let’s go!”

I’m standing in the middle of a war zone. I thought I could get away with a cliché line like that, but suddenly Red is all over me, those tentacles zipping around me like snakes underwater; it takes every ounce of concentration I have to dodge them, so much so that I only just manage to slide out of the way of a punch.

That’s when I notice them, on his knuckles; tiny, razor-sharp hooks. He’s gone to see the Tinkerer.

Well, that … sucks.

I dodge another punch and fire off a Level 4 at him, but he tentacle-lashes the gauntlet and the blast goes stray, punching a huge hole in the mirrored ceiling of the lobby. The vibration ripples over the mirrors, and suddenly the entire lobby is caught in a violent downpour of shattered glass; I see Felicia take cover under Aleksei, and, glancing around, take a kind of smug satisfaction that I’m the only one (other than the Iron-Guards) who isn’t taking any kind of cover; even Cap and Luke Cage are shielding their eyes.

BAM.

Wrong of me to have taken that look around, stupid of me, dangerous stupid; why would Red, with his KGB-granted healing factor, give a shit about the glass, he just let it sink into him and his flesh healed right over it.

Hm. KGB might want to give that one a look-over.

Long story short, he got me with a hook fist in the face; it was a wild punch, and it barely caught me, but the side of my face is bleeding, the mask is torn. As the glass tinkles and explodes all around us, he dives in for the kill.

I jerk my arms up, and, vibing my hands on a level two, I grab his face and shove both thumbs into his demon-red eyes; they pop like ripe blueberries, and yellowish-white fluid spurts out over my knuckles.

This guy is one of the most dangerous mercs out there. But he made a mistake I’ve found to be my greatest strength in my limited time as a “superhero:” these idiots are used to fighting heroes.

I don’t fight like a hero.

“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeYAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” Red screams, the tentacles whipping wildly; a clean level three to the chest sends him flying backwards, into the open elevator shaft. His scream fades, barely audible amidst the chaos. Back in the fray, Stuart is down, his Rampage armor damaged somehow. Luke Cage has knocked out Task-Master, and Sabretooth is trying to heal from all the glass. Cage is currently wrestling down the Bushwacker, which leaves …

He smells like fresh-cut grass and clean cotton sheets.

“Shield!” I hear Felicia shout, and, God knows how I do it, but I bend backwards under the Star-Shield as it swipes past me, level 2 my fist, turn and punch Captain America straight in the face.

Nice little POW.

He just stands there, staring at me, those blue eyes hitting me like laser beams. A little trickle of blood drips out of his left nostril.

“Oh. I … uh …” I say. Classic, quotable dialogue here, as usual.

Captain America wipes his nose, and then looks at the blood on his red glove.

“Hm,” he says.

“Um …” I say.

Felicia leaps onto him, still in her simple white business suit, and he elbows her in the throat, dropping her. Aleksei throws a huge punch, and Captain America ducks under it and smashes him in the face with the shield, sending him stumbling off. I jerk both gauntlets up, but he swats them both away, sending two level threes smashing off into nothing, sticks his fingers up into the torn part of my mask, yanks it off, grabs me by the throat, and cocks back a fist.

Well, I tried, right? That’s what matters. That’s what —

The scream of a 1959 muscle car echoes throughout the lobby, and then I see it, that black demon with a white skull on its hood, roaring up the front steps of the Stark building.

If you’ve only got one phone call, make it to the Punisher. One word: “Help.”

This is how the Punisher does “Help.”

I have to admit; it’s pretty fucking good.

Captain America turns to look. Hell, everybody does. Everybody but me.

I rest all my weight on his hands at my throat, pull my legs up, plant my feet on his thighs and launch myself free. He looks back and has time to say, “Schultz!” in a voice that almost makes me piss my pants before I level 3 him clear across the lobby.

I don’t know why I didn’t go for a higher level; I really don’t. I guess in my heart I knew it wouldn’t stop him for long no matter what I did.

The muscle car plows into Luke Cage, and he bounces up over the hood and onto the ground behind it, landing on all fours, a little frazzled but unhurt. The muscle car jerks to a stop, parking on top of Sabretooth, and Punisher pops out of the sun roof, holding a grenade-launcher.

&#Luke Cage’s eyes widen. 147;Hey, man, we’re —”

The grenade hits him straight in the face; in the mouth, in fact, and the shit flips him so good he actually lands outside, in the street. Punisher turns to me, and gives me this terrifying wide-eyed smile.

“Herman! Now how’d I know you’d already be out of the cell?” He drags something big and silver out of a bag. “Brought your ride. Instructions on where to meet inside.”

He drops the Flying Broom-Stick out onto the floor.

My joy at seeing the damn stupid thing is hampered by the arrival of Iron Man, zooming in like a rocket from the outside; he must’ve been over at Reed’s building, or he would’ve been here sooner. My head is uncovered, naked, defenseless; I’m fucked

Clink. Shwip.

A grappling hook line I hadn’t noticed caught on Iron-Man’s boot suddenly goes taut, and he’s abruptly swung around by his own rockets, straight into a fucking bolt of lightning.

Felicia, who was the one responsible for the hook, looks absolutely stunned.

It smashes him through the wall into a security room, and he lies there motionless for a moment before groggily starting to stand up. Marty floats down, armor crackling with electricity, and his visor pops open.

“OH, SNAP!” Marty monkey-howls. “BOO-YAH!” He holds up the sparking palms of the armor-suit. “COURTESY OF MOTHER RUSSIA, BITCH!”

I straddle the Flying Broomstick and kick it into gear; Felicia hops onboard behind me, I twist the throttle and I’m yanked across the floor and then out, up, into the open sky. The wind stings my face and sucks tears out of my eyes, and below me I hear Aleksei rumble off down the street and the Punisher’s death machine rip back into traffic.

“Where are we going?” Felicia shouts in my ear.

“We’re going to war, Felicia!” I shout back, choking on the wind. “It’s time to rally our army.”

United We Skulk

“Again, this is the only footage available of the escape of the vigilante Herman Schultz from the bowels of the Stark Building this morning.”

Do you see that, there? Not meta-criminal, not super-villain. There is apparently enough Shocker-Love out there that now I’m “Vigilante Herman Schultz.”

It’s a shot from outside on the street. The battle is already nearly done; we watch Iron Man fly in, and Marty comes up right behind him. It’s actually a pretty hilarious visual, considering that all Stark had to do was turn his head slightly and he could’ve avoided the whole thing.

Iron Man gets zapped, and then the Black Cat and the Shocker zoom out on the Broomstick, closely followed by a stampeding Rhino, who takes the time to flip over a cop car before trundling into the sewers, and then Marty zips off, and of course, Punisher’s demon-car flies out last, hitting Luke Cage again just as he’s recovering from the grenade to the face out in the middle of the street.

“The Avengers were conflicted in their responses. Captain America had this to say.”

The Captain does not look happy. He’s got a little wad of Kleenex stuck in his nose; this footage was clearly taken directly after my escape.

“Captain, how do you feel about the Avengers, America’s premiere superhero team, taking a loss to a group of such relatively low-level metahumans —”

The Captain stares blankly at the reporter.

“One: They were not a group of metahumans. There was only one metahuman among them, and one mutant. Two. We did not ‘take a loss.’ They didn’t beat us, didn’t come close; the entire thing was a rear-guard action organized to keep us off our toes until Schultz and his accomplices could escape. In that respect, yes, they accomplished their goals; it was an extended retreat, not a battle. Had they stood their ground, they would’ve been destroyed.”

He turns away from the reporter, looking directly to the camera, and I realize with a little shiver that he’s talking to ME.

“They would’ve been utterly, and totally, destroyed.”

“Aw, bullshit!” Marty says, sipping his beer. “We had their number, and they know it!”

“Mr. Blank,” the Punisher says, sighing. “If we’d stayed, they would’ve killed us.” He eyes Marty. “All of us. Fancy suits or not.”

An interesting note about the Punisher: before he kidnapped me and hung me upside-down from the roof of a warehouse, I’d only seen him in person twice. One was when he gunned down the entire Bertinelli crime family outside the wedding of their youngest son. The other was when he basically came into the Kingpin’s headquarters, catching us all off guard, walked up to the Kingpin and demanded five million dollars.

And the Kingpin gave it to him.

Quietly.

And then he left.

But if there’s one thing I always took away from it, it was that this guy was completely dead inside. Psycho, sure, but worse than that: darker. His body wasn’t a tool for expression, it was an engine of destruction. Think the Hulk, but meaner, smarter, and a hell of a lot more cold.

But when he’s around me, Punisher smiles; he smiles a lot. It’s a weird, somewhat uncomfortable, jagged expression on his face, but there it is, and there’s no denying it. I finally asked him about it earlier today when we all met up at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge (one of the coolest things about being involved in the Metahuman World is that entire cities pretty much become your secret tree fort). “What’re you always grinning about?” I said; I should’ve monitored my tone more closely, but Felicia and I had made a thirty-minute stop on the side of the Chrysler Building for … rest, and I was still a little high on the adrenaline.

Punisher just stared at me, and then the grin came again.

“I like you, Herman. And I like that we’re on the same side.”

I didn’t realize how profound what he’d just said was until nearly an hour later, in between making dozens of plaintive phone calls from a series of pay-phone booths.

Punisher and I are on the same side, in the sense that we’re on no side at all, in any practical sense. I always hated the meta-folks who’d try to portray themselves as “outsiders,” “rebels” or “renegades,” but I think Punisher and I might just fit the bill. And I think Punisher picked up on that, and for some reason it’s making him happy as hell.

The air-conditioning in this Coney Island branch of the Bar With No Name is up way too high; my nose keeps stuffing up, and I have to snort it back, clear my throat, and hack up great dark green globs into BWNN napkins, all while Felicia watches, smiling at me.

“Cut the purr, Garfield,” I say, looking at my most recent phlegm ball. “No one is going to show up.”

“They’ll show. Just wait, it’s early yet.” She rests a hand on top of mine. For some reason, God knows why, that actually helps a little.

Punisher scared away the bartender just by walking in, and we’ve cleared all the chairs and tables from the main floor, and arranged them into a kind of forum position. Aleksei had the decency, once he’d heard our plan on the Brooklyn Bridge, to smash his way through an Albertsons and get a couple of dozen fruit, cheese and cookie platters, along with about forty 2-liter bottles of soda.

He put them all around the bar, in sort of random positions; on top of a television here, under a table there. He was so happy doing it I didn’t even try to stop him; this whole thing has him overjoyed.

“We’re going to see Max, and Pete, and Mr. Toomes, and maybe even Dr. Otto!”

Sure, it’s only been three hours, but someone, anyone, should’ve shown by now.

And as though on cue, here comes Dan in through the door.

“Herman, what’s —” We all look up at him, and he freezes in place. He turns around and starts to run back outside, but crashes into Miss Peelo as she comes through the door, knocking them both down. Felicia leaps across the entire length of the room and tackles Dan as he starts to get up. He flips her off and kicks her in the face; BAM, and she drops onto her back.

“WAIT!” I scream. “DAN, JUST WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND!”

“Him!” Dan screams, and I finally realize what all the fuss is about.

Punisher almost looks offended.

“It’s okay. He’s with us.” I hold out a tray. “Cookie?”

So Dan sits, and Dan drinks, and we talk. Ronnie and Jack show up a couple of minutes later, looking nervous, but once they see Dan and me drinking with the Punisher, they calm down and just sort of accept that Hell has frozen over and the world has gone totally crazy.

“Beers with the Punisher,” Jack says, knocking back the brim of his cowboy hat in full aw-shucks-good-ole-boy mode. “If Kingpin could see us now, he’d have a goddamn aneurysm.”

Punisher laughs that cold, barking laugh of his; it catches the Enforcers off-guard, and they look to me. I just grin, as if to say, Hey guys, it turns out I’m Prozac for the Punisher, what can I tell ya?

So, so far we’ve got the entire classic Enforcers line-up.

We’re actually off to a pretty good start.

Miss Peelo is thrilled to see us again, like an old aunt visiting her favorite nieces and nephews; she actually hugs Aleksei for nearly a full minute. I have her lay down a psychic calming web over the whole bar, especially over Punisher. She makes it so that as soon as his presence is registered by a new arrival, the first thought they have is, Don’t panic, if he hasn’t shot anyone yet he’s not going to shoot at all.

Clever, she is, especially because this logic is particularly accurate when it comes to the well-known insane, homicidal style of the Punisher.

Aleksei breaks out the cards, and we start up with poker. Felicia wins the first three rounds, while Aleksei and the Punisher just watch. The rules are too complicated for Aleksei, and the Punisher playing, I would argue, would be completely unfair. The guy is the living definition of a Poker Face.

Next to arrive is Hubert Carpenter, better known in the “World’s Dumbest Criminals” books as the Walrus. He’s out of costume, which is a good thing; I requested that everyone wear casual clothes, and if the Walrus got the message, odds are everyone else did, too.

Then comes Frank Payne, “the Constrictor.” He joins right into the poker game almost without a word; Frank’s an old hand at cards, and I immediately back out of the game, opting instead to go hang out over by the bar with Miss Peelo, who smiles at me warmly.

“There are a lot of positive thoughts about you coming this way, Herman. More of them appear, and more get closer all the time.”

“Yeah?” I say gruffly. “Got an exact count for me?”

She just smiles, winking that third eye of hers at me.

“A lot.”

Time passes, and yes, a lot is about right; here’s Fred Myers, barking in that Aussie accent, here’s good old Hobie Brown, here’s Rob Farrell, giggling like a moron at the situation, and there’s Drake Shannon, thank Christ without that ridiculous Eyeball-helmet of his, and Terry Sorenson, looking maybe a little high but certainly happy to be here. Thomas Fireheart comes in; idiot didn’t wear a costume, but he stayed in Puma form, the jerk-off, couldn’t just be plain old Tommy for a single fucking night.

Everyone’s talking, getting along; Fireheart thinks of himself as hero, so he’s hanging back, but Felicia is chatting him up like a pro. Terry’s drinking and smiling, Hobie and Miss Peelo are drinking tea like losers; Hobie’s on the wagon again, probably for good this time.

Fred comes up and grins at me, and despite myself, I grin back. He’s got this infectious “that’s not a knife, this is a knife” energy about him that you just can’t resist. He glances over at Felicia, and then winks at me, and we both crack up.

“So, being a superhero working out well for you, then.”

“Not as good as it seems, Freddie.”

He speaks under his breath.

“She got the herpes, mate?”

I choke on my beer.

“No, Fred, I was referring to getting my ass kicked, week-in, week-out.”

We chat about life; Freddie just got out during the big breakout of the Raft. He had the right idea; didn’t bother trying to engage the heroes, just bolted straight the hell into the water and swam until he couldn’t swim any more. He ended up on the beach in Canada; he’d passed out, and some kind of undertow carried him up there. Within a few days he’d made it down to Jersey and gotten his boomerangs, but just looking at them put him into a near-suicidal depression.

My call was the first reason he’s left the house in over five months.

Antonio Rodriguez wobbles in, and waves to us with one of those giant clawed hands. His ridiculous armadillo suit, forever grafted to his skin, means he’s the one guy here other than Aleksei wearing a costume; they’re in the same boat, really, tricked by scumbags into super-humanity … if you can even call it humanity, any more.

I’m amazed he’s here; I mean, Antonio is in Vil-Anon, a kind of recovery group for ex-villains. I considered it once upon a time, but it turns out they only accept metas, and encourage trying to “live a normal life.”

“Live a normal life.”

Hah.

We’re there in the first place because we failed at living a normal life. Now a pep talk and a couple of support-group happy sunshine handjobs are going to turn us around?

Yeah.

Fucking.

Right.

At 11:00, the first of the heavies shows up.

Adrian Toomes has been my friend since I started this whole stupid superhero shit; an inventor of the highest caliber, Toomes is a thief like me. The one person he has killed he actually broke out of prison to apologize for.

Toomes’ “vulture suit” may look ridiculous, even after its recent overhaul, but the guy is one of the best fliers in the business; I once saw him out-maneuver Angel of the X-Men, and that’s no fucking joke, let me say that straight.

His left eye is missing; I ask him about it, but he gives me a warm “Don’t worry, boy, don’t worry.” and pats me on the head like I’m his pet Chihuahua or something.

And I accept it, because he’s Toomes, and Toomes likes me as much as anyone I know, except maybe Aleksei.

Normally I wouldn’t tell you this, but for the sake of explaining our relationship, I’ll go into a bit of detail. You know how you have that one friend, who it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen him (or her, you know, whatever), as soon as you see them again it’s like it’s only been ten minutes?

Adrian is that friend; a much older brother.

He’s to me what the Tinkerer wishes he was: a mentor, a man whose crotchety, bungling exterior hides a brilliant mind and a warm heart.

He’s also extremely greedy and materialistically selfish beyond all sane limits, but hey, we’re villains, remember?

Our flaws are what define us. You, the noble and heroic audience, don’t need to worry about our good qualities. You just need to pay attention to all the great things Spider-Man is doing; his flaws don’t define him, though. They just make him “complex.”

Fuck him. And fuck being complex.

“What is this, Herman?” Toomes whispers once he finally gets me alone over in a quiet corner. “What are you trying to do, here?”

“You got my call,” I say. “You came on your own volition.”

“Things haven’t been perfect for me lately, Herman.” He motions to the scars on his face, and the eyepatch over his left eye. “This is a difficult time for people like us. I came, lad, because you said you needed my help.” He sips his hard cider, and looks vaguely off into the distance.

Flint Marko, when he appears at the crust of eleven thirty, looks nervous as hell at first, but he loosens up once he sees Toomes; they’re old buddies. I actually get a big sandy hug, as does Aleksei.

“You, me, Adrian and Aleksei, Herman,” Flint says, smiling, that ridiculous green and black shirt of his a familiar and strangely comforting sight. “We’re the originals. We’ve got to stick together, yeah?”

Flint Marko. Probably another puppeteered creation of my father’s. So weird to see him, to know that through all the tumult in this poor, misguided man’s life, through the stints as both hero and villain … My father was there. Behind the scenes, working the lights, revising the scripts, making sure everything went according to plan.

“Yeah, man, for sure.” I raise my glass. “To the originals, may we remember that first little taste of victory forever.” Flint shakes his head and laughs.

“He never saw us coming.” We clink glasses, and just sit there smiling at each other; whenever Flint moves, there’s this odd grinding sound, always has been. It’s the sound of billions of individual grains of sand reasserting themselves. I raise a plate.

“You want some Rice-Krispie treats?”

Peter Petruski, who I still call “Paste Pot” even though it pisses him off a little, shows up at around eleven forty-five. Like an idiot he came wearing a shirt reading “SCHULTZ AVENGERS.” He must have ironed it up this afternoon; a real cheapie home-made deal. I have to admit though, it makes me smile; Marty cheers when he sees it, and Felicia runs her nails down his chest, causing Pete to jokingly fan himself with a napkin.

Pete’s hands-down one of my favorite people; I realize this as I’m talking to him, but, had he not shown, my feelings would’ve lain dormant.

That’s what’s getting to me most about tonight; I always said I didn’t have friends, and that Aleksei was the only one who’d talk to me. But now that I’ve gotten them all in one place, it’s getting harder and harder for me to deny that I really do enjoy a lot of these folks.

Herman Schultz: Social Butterfly? Main man, best bud?

Prom queen?

Maybe. I’d look great in the tiara.

Maguire Beck and Brian Jenks show up together; word is they’re dating, but lord only knows how she tolerates him after those meta-treatments; we’re talking nearly Aleksei-level intelligence, for shitsakes.

Maguire showing is a good sign; another reasonably big name, depending on who she’s halloweening as now, Mad Jack or Mysterio.

I’m hoping for Mad Jack; more offensive capabilities, while most of Mysterio’s gimmickry relies on him being able to draw you IN, not knock you OUT.

Felicia comes over to me, and brushes those plump lips against my cheek, dragging them up across my stubble to my ear.

“They’re all here for you, babe.”

“Please,” I say, trying to shrink further into the dark corner where I’ve made my current base-camp. “Don’t rub it in.”

“I had no idea this many people would show up,” she says.

“Oh, thanks for your confidence.”

“No, it’s just … when I was a villain, a straight-up villain, it wasn’t like people were crawling out of the woodwork to help me when things got rough.” She looks me up and down, and then smiles. “I’m glad you finally got rid of the eyepatch.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”

Blitz arrives ten minutes later, scaring the hell out of me. She silently goes over to the bar, looks around, and just sits quietly, staring at the lacquered wood; I plan to keep my distance, but Miss Peelo practically shoves me into Blitz’s massive back.

Out of costume, she seems even bigger than when in it, seven foot, easy. Not a particularly “pretty” woman, but with a strong, masculine quality I find instantly attractive. Her silence is explained without the costume, as well; usually her neck is covered by a plate of armor, but now I can see an enormous jagged slashing scar across her throat.

Her nose still has a little bandage on it from where I broke it, but the staple wounds seem to have healed up nicely.

“Hey,” I say to her emotionless stare. “What happened to your neck?”

She pulls a little white-board out of her pocket and writes on it with a dry erase marker.

RAPIST. 18 YRS. WAS Y I WENT 2 PWR BROKER

“No shit?” I say quietly, and she just nods.

Power Broker. Fucking YUCK.

“Let me guess; he gave you the strength on the condition that you work for him.”

She nods. I’m quiet for a moment.

“Look, about Eddie —”

She raises a hand to silence me, and then scribbles away on her board again.

EDE WANTD 2 FIND OUT WHAT WAS RLY GOIN ON. THEY DIDNT LIKE IT. TOOK ME. BT THEN WHEN U KILLED EDE THEY WERE WORRIED UD COME 4 ME

“I had Miss Peelo do a search for you; we couldn’t find you in New York state —”

The hand comes up again, and she writes.

I F’ING BOOKED OUT TO GULF OF MEX. JUST GOT BACK IN TOWN; HEARD BOUT R-CADE GET TAKE DOWN, FLEW RIGHT UP

“Why?” I say, genuinely boggled.

WANTED 2 C WAT CRAZY SHIT U DO NEXT

Felicia sees this over my shoulder, and laughs out loud. Five minutes later Felicia’s talking and Blitz is scribbling, and I think I see a friendship forming, as I manage to fade again into the background.

The door opens and closes, and suddenly, everyone starts clapping. I notice a fuzzy mop of sandy blonde hair through the crowd by the entrance, and rush towards it.

“Maxwell motherfucking Dillon!” I say, embracing him, ignoring the slight static shock.

It’s not like Max and I have ever been very good friends, but I’m happy as hell to see him here; I needed someone with electrical powers, and Max, in that respect, is the best there is.

He and I always sort of rubbed each other the wrong way, to be honest; we’re both usually pretty down on ourselves, but I don’t let it get in the way of my work. Max, on the other hand, is damaged goods. His parents were loving enough, they just would take these constant little shots at him, chipping away, and I think finally it must’ve just driven him bonkers; even when Max is about to win it big, he’s still certain of his imminent failure.

He also tries to cover it by being absurdly cocky and wearing a particularly garish costume, but it doesn’t work; he just ends up looking like an asshole wearing an absurd sun-flower-head costume in an effort to hide his own insecurity.

The applause he got when he came in, though, I must say, is entirely merited. Most of the guys here are fresh out of the Raft, a breakout that Max was an integral part in; he got caught and locked up almost immediately thereafter, but he’s out again now, and he’s here, and that sincerely kicks ass.

The entire Circus of Crime, everyone from Zelda to Iron Jack, shows up with Maynard leading the way at twelve thirty-six; that’s seventeen more people in under a minute. Considering I only called Zelda, that’s a pretty good sign; she must’ve run up her old buddies from the circus for back-up in case this turned out to be some sort of trap.

Maynard doesn’t look too happy when he sees the Punisher; the last time they met up, Punisher shot off one of his fingers.

Jesus. There are over forty people here, milling around, talking, laughing … Felicia has pressured Frank into dancing with her to Muse’s “Super Massive Black Hole” as it plays on the juke box, and a couple of other people are starting to dance, too; I notice Tanya Sealy in the crowd, and try to hide for a minute like a retard; things didn’t end too good between me and her.

They don’t make a Hallmark card that says Sorry I gave you gonorrhea.

I check around to make sure I didn’t miss anyone else; I didn’t.

Looking over them, I have a kind of scary thought; I mean, I didn’t expect nearly this many people to show up. I guess maybe Honor Amongst Thieves might not be such bullshit after all.

This isn’t a joke anymore. This is turning into an army.

Otto Octavius and Carolyn Trainer arrive together; weird practice for Otto, I thought they’d parted ways a long time ago. He must’ve brought her for back-up, just in case. That would at least explain why she’s wearing a trench coat; to hide those modified Doc Ock arms of hers.

It’s one AM, and “The First Single” by the Format is playing on the juke box.

If anybody else is going to come, I guess they’re going to have to start in the middle. I have Aleksei start herding everyone into their chairs; the whole time he’s shouting out, “Announcement time! Everybody sit down! Herman’s gonna make his announcement!” Marty turns off the juke.

Ten minutes later, once everybody’s finally seated, I edge out in front of the crowd. I’ve never been super-comfortable in front of people, but by now, that’s no big revelation to you. You’ve been inside my head for like three months now; my stage-fright ain’t quite a “shocker,” if you get the …

Oh, God, listen to me. I’m scared retarded.

Punisher and Aleksei stand at the back, big as life; my royal guard. The Enforcers have set themselves up at the doors, per my instruction; even though I’ve got this place under fifty different types of stealth technology, I want a back-up plan. Keeps my balls from shrinking up and falling off.

I look out into the crowd silently; the front row is Adrian, Pete, Flint, Otto and Fred.

Good. Friends all. I try to pretend I’m just talking to them, ignoring the many somewhat more questioning, even vaguely suspicious faces in the audience.

I decide to open with humor.

“We all know what happened last time this many meta-crims were in a BWNN together. So on that night, let me introduce you to our special guest speaker, the Scourge of the Underworld!”

DEAD.

FUCKING.

SILENCE.

And then, Otto laughs. He tries to stop himself, but he laughs, a shocked little sound; he can’t even believe I made the joke. None of them can. But once he lets out that little nerd-gasp laugh, the place fucking EXPLODES.

Everyone is choking on their beer, crying, stomping, slapping their thighs and smiling so hard it hurts their cheeks. It’s not often we all get to be together like this; not often we can make a dark joke about the Scourge and have people relate. It’s not often we can look around and realize that, in some small way, we are with our peers.

I didn’t invite any murderers tonight. Sure, some of the guys here have killed the odd cop or mobster, but for the most part, we’re dealing with crooks, cretins and costumed cuckoos.

Exactly what I was looking for.

Once the laughter dies down, I start talking; I leave out the whole bit about most of their lives being indirectly and sometimes directly controlled by a massive government conspiracy, but other than that I give them an unabridged account of my life so far as a superhero.

I tell them about Rampage. I tell them about Scorpion, the Grizzly and the mechanics of FPS. I tell them about everything. When I bring up Eddie’s death down in the Subway Tunnels, there are some sounds of shock; Eddie had some friends here. When I tell them about the kidnapping and torture of the Spot, there are some murmurs of outrage. There’s even a little round of applause after I tell them about what I did to Hammerhead after he mocked the super-villain trade.

But most of all, they gasp at the idea that my father is directly involved in a plot to, as I put it, “seize control of the entire metahuman population.”

Again, I leave out the part wherein he helped create said metahumans.

And, to my shock, everyone quietly listens. They listen to me talk up there in front of them for over an hour, eating fruit, cookies and cheese, sipping soda and beer, and just listening to me. It’s a feeling I’ve never had before.

A good feeling.

And unlike most good feelings, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. There’s something happening in this room that I don’t understand yet; why do all these guys seem to like me so much? Why are they listening to ME, of all people? I’m one of the least successful of all of them!

I finish up with the breakout from Stark Tower, and everyone is quiet. I shuffle my feet, and look down at my toes, unsure of myself again.

“If you’re here …” I say slowly. “That means you’re not currently associated with or in the employ of Advanced Idea Mechanics, Roxxon, the Maggia, Hydra, the Hellfire Club, Justin Hammer, and/or the Serpent Squad; I requested as much in my calls to you, so I take this to be the case.” I’m silent for a moment, giving time for anybody to say otherwise.

“I got this thing, I’ve got to voice it now,” Antonio says, raising an enormous paw.

“Go ahead, man,” I say, smiling, trying to keep it light.

“I’m here out of respect for you, Herman. Back when we were in Leavenworth together, before they transferred me out to the Vault, you let Hercules and the guards know that I wasn’t in on the Big June breakout, and that cut my sentence by a half after Cap put in a good word for me. You didn’t have to do that, and I owe you, but I’m on the level now. I’m Vil-Anon; I’m not gonna press it on you guys, but —”

“Whoa, whoa, hold up,” I say, raising a hand. “I’m not going to ask any of you to do anything illegal.”

This creates a hubbub, people quietly talking back and forth, but I see a couple of folks starting to look interested.

“How many of you are currently wanted by the police?”

All but one or two hands goes up.

“Okay, good. How many of you are wanted by SHIELD?”

Most of the same hands go up, but a few stay down.

I say the next part as a joke, and you need to understand that, because the reaction fucking BLOWS MY MIND.

“Right, how many of you feel like you owe me a favor?”

Almost every goddamn hand in the place goes up.

I stammer out a word like “ogh,” and then stop dead. I hear Felicia stifle a giggle.

“What … are you serious?” I say, specifically talking to Toomes, but there are plenty of nods and voices of affirmation. I look to Frank, confused. “Frank, I’ve never done anything for you, man —”

“Herman, are you fucking kidding me?” he says; he actually sounds a little pissed off. “When the Rose put that hit out on me, you hijacked a SHIELD Comsat to find me and let me know, then blew seven thousand of your own cash to get me deep into Canada.”

“Yeah, but —” I start, and then Hubert interrupts.

“And when me and the White Rabbit wuz on the run from Egghead, you let us stay in that … that subway place you had.”

“Well, sure, but I never —”

“Adrian laughs, interrupting me again. What about the time I fought Iron Fist over the East River?”

Oh, God, not this, don’t bring this up in front of people.

“Herman, you spent the better part of three days and two million dollars convincing Mr. Fish and the Abomination to help look for me, and when you found me, you not only repaired the suit and covered my medical bills, you made improvements on my original design.”

“Guys, come on, it’s not like I —”

“I OD’d on heroin,” Pete says abruptly, and stands up. “I OD’d, in costume, and the paramedics wouldn’t come within twenty fucking feet of me, and then Herman shows up out of costume and CARRIES my ass to the Kingpin’s doctors.”

This is embarrassing me, but the anger that usually comes with the embarrassment isn’t there. Instead there’s just sort of this growing warm feeling in my chest.

“What about when I got dissolved?” Flint says. “Do you guys know about this? Spider-Man threw me into a giant grater in a steel mill that split me up all over the city. When Herman heard, he takes it on himself to go around in his old piece of shit Honda collecting me all over Brooklyn, and then he makes this big funnel machine that vibrates me back together.”

Some part of me wants them to stop.

But they keep going.

They just keep going.

I nearly break down; I have to choke back tears a few times.

I sit down on the edge of a table as they finish up; everyone who’s had something to say has said it, and again, they’re all looking to me. Otto looks at me and gives me a half-condescending, half-friendly smile. Everything Otto does is half-condescending, so I take it to be a good thing.

“So, Herman. Do you actually have any idea how you’re going to stop your father from spotting us, or did you just bring us all here to massage your ego?”

“Actually Doctor Octavius,” I say (Otto loves when you call him by his full title, and the condescending part of the smile disappears), “I do have a plan.”

“You DO?” Aleksei says, baffled.

“Yes, Aleksei, I explained it to you like six hours ago.”

“Oh, that plan.”

“Yes.”

“I know that plan.”

“Yes, you do.”

“That’s a good plan.”

“Aleksei …”

“Are you going to tell them the plan?”

“Well, I was trying to —”

“You should, because they’re involved.”

“ALEKSEI.”

“… Sorry.”

I take a moment, just breathing, to compose myself.

“Well, Shocks,” Pete says. “Care to enlighten us?”

So I do. In short order I explain my plan to bring down my father, save Johnny Ohnn and Carl Creel, simultaneously incapacitate the New Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, enact the largest nonviolent super-villain act ever attempted, utterly and completely destroy the Control ghost-arm of the CSA, and bring New York City to an absolute motherfucking standstill.

“So,” I say, without pausing for even a second. “Who wants in?”

The applause, as they say, is deafening.

Bonus Round

Lucille,

Herman Schultz here. I know you’re probably wondering where Eddie is; it’s been about two months, and I doubt they’ve found his body yet. Eddie’s dead. I know this is possibly the worst way to break the news, but I’ve never been good with words.

Basically I bit Eddie’s throat out when he came to try to kill me; not the most dignified way to die, but I don’t think it’s that bad, considering how some of our type of guys have made their exit. At least his was by a friend, you know? At least it was for a cause.

Oh, and don’t think it wasn’t; your husband died saving the world. I know that might be a little bittersweet for you, considering that your husband was a sadistic bastard who beat the shit out of you and your three beautiful kids pretty regularly, but it’s the truth. The information your husband gave me, even in his, at the time, disoriented state, has allowed me to uncover an ongoing plot to seize control of the world’s metahumans, the perpetrators of which I am currently going about persecuting to the fullest extent.

As I’m sure you know, Eddie had his f–

I stop writing, and set the BWNN stationary down. It’s three AM. I shouldn’t be up this late; I’ve got a big day tomorrow. Most everyone’s gone home; Adrian is still here, but that’s only because he’s got to be the first one out in the morning. The whole plan depends on his old, craggy ass.

But he’ll do his part perfect, better than perfect.

Aleksei has lain down in the corner of the bar and, clutching his stuffed rhino, has fallen into a deep sleep. I’m lucky I figured out a vibrational solution to his post-nasal drip, because that snoring really was a nightmare.

The whole of the Enforcers, now including Blitz, have decided to spend the night as well. Dan was a little hesitant to let her on at first, citing the fact that “we’ve already got a strong guy,” but after some cajoling from Montana and Ronnie and a few long looks at Blitz’s breasts, he gave in. They’re taking turns sleeping, guarding the doors.

Granted, they won’t stand a chance against the Avengers or the FF if they show up. But the Level 5 vibe-bombs I have spread all over this place should make things very, very interesting should Stark or Richards try to make their presence felt. I always wondered what a level five would do to my bestest-pal Reed; ever seen the way a spring vibrates and whips around after you stretch it and let it snap back?

It’s a beautiful thing.

Marty’s face-down, out cold on a table in the corner, Corona still gripped tightly in his paw. I pray he’s not hung over tomorrow; he and Max are going to have to cut power to the entire state of New York, and I don’t want him pissing out on me due to a headache.

Felicia has put her head down between her arms on the bar, and is staring at me sleepily; those droopy eyelids, she really is like a cat.

“What’s up,” I say, more of a tired grunt than anything else.

“Just thinking,” she says, and stretches out her fingers, reaching them up onto my forearm.

“You should sleep.”

“Yeah, we all should. Big, long sleep.” She giggles, then abruptly makes a solemn, somewhat anxiety-ridden face that catches me off guard; it’s always a little strange when a woman as strong and capable as Felicia expresses any degree of vulnerability.

“Do you remember my father’s funeral?”

“Sure,” I say, and it’s true; it might as well have been yesterday, a pastel painting locked in my mind. I sort of think of Walter’s funeral as the last stand of the old guard of crime; the heist men, the safe-crackers, the con artists, the goombas …

Before everyone put on costumes and the justice system turned into a kind of lethal carnival act.

Felicia and I were barely twenty. I think that might’ve been the first time I thought of her in feline terms; her green eyes dominated her entire face, giving her a distinctly kittenish aesthetic.

“During the funeral I had this weird feeling, like … Like it wasn’t really happening.” She gazes into the glow of a neon-tube beer advertisement. “Like it was just a show, all put on to, to make everyone really sad, and then at the end, my father would … Shit, I don’t know, jump out of the box, ta-dah! I was just kidding. And I was so fucked up about it, so screwed up about the whole situation, I remember as they were lowering the coffin, thinking ‘Hurry, Dad! Jump out of the box!’ And they started piling on dirt, and …”

She goes quiet, and just stares at me. So I do the Hollywood thing, and it feels right, not stupid like it probably should. I cup her jaw in one hand and bring our faces together, her skin so soft on mine.

“I feel like … I feel like this is your last chance to jump out of the box, Herman. Like once we start out tomorrow, everything is going to be over, they’re just going to be piling on dirt.”

I start to say something; make a joke, anything, but she grabs me very abruptly by the cheeks and shoves her mouth onto mine. It’s not a good kiss, not romantic or sensual by any means, but the raw emotion in it actually sends a shiver down my spine.

She pulls away after what feels like a twisting eternity, and stares at me for a moment, before silently going around back of the bar, and lying down on a sleeping bag she set up earlier.

I sit staring at the floor, biting my knuckle. Miss Peelo touches me on the shoulder.

“I found him,” she says in a mourner’s whisper.

“Where?” The word literally drops out of my mouth.

“The Chrysler Building. The top three floors, in the tower.”

“You’re sure? It seems … flashy.”

Miss Peelo nods. “I’m sure; I searched for the largest Darkforce mass in the state, and then looked three beneath it, just like you said.”

“He’d never let his operation be the ‘Number One’ anything. Too conspicuous,” I sigh, and Miss Peelo nods.

“I searched the Chrysler and found a peculiar mind. Completely different from your own, in every possible way.”

“Another mask. He knows we’d be looking for a telepathic signature similar to mine, so —”

“He overcompensated. Just like you predicted he would.” She smiles. “You’ve got the advantage of him, Herman.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you figure?”

“In every way, my boy. In every single way. I’ll send out the note on the Chrysler to all the minds that were present tonight, but after that, I’m afraid I must be going.”

“Are you sure —” I start, and she just smiles. She’s sure.

The Punisher taps my arm as I go around the bar.

“Big day tomorrow,” he says.

“Yeah,” I reply, eyes still down.

“Gonna finally shoot those fellows …”

“Which fellows?”

He smiles that twisted smile. “The ones that need shooting.”

And on that note, I go around the bar, lie down next to Felicia, shut my eyes, and am asleep before I can dream.

When I wake up the next morning, though, there is a thought behind my eyes, lingering like a bloodstain.

I stand opposite a terrible black knight, up on the highest tower of a castle. The sky above us is an unearthly black, spreading out rapidly in all directions like an ink stain on a white page. The knight and I both have these ridiculous swords and we’re hacking away at each other, and then we both swing for one another’s heads and connect, WHACK!

Double decapitation. Not pretty.

See, you’re looking at me now and going “Herman, Herman baby, don’t you remember the dream with the gamma bomb? Don’t you know by now that maybe you’ve got some smidgen of brainfreak in there that can sorta kinda maybe sorta kinda tell the future? Maybe you should look out for a castle? Or a knight? Or, you know, just get up in the morning and blow your head off to avoid any further unpleasantness?”

Well, yeah, you’re right, and I was.

All the next morning, until what went down, went down (and I do mean down), I was watching like a fuckin’ hawk for castles, knights … any renaissance fair shit crept up onto me, man, it would be eating pavement.

But of course, because I’m a freakin’ dumb-ass, I didn’t figure on metaphors. And I should have, you know? Because in the last dream, that whole damn thing was a metaphor for how the gamma bomb led to the creation of superheroes. So why was I taking this so literally?

Why does anyone do anything while they’re on the way to the single most important confrontation in their lives, possibly in the history of the world, possibly in the history of the galaxy?

See what I’m getting at?

I know you do. So shut the fuck up.

The alarm rings at 7:05, and everyone in the bar groans almost simultaneously. Then there’s a gunshot, and everyone in the place jumps up ready to fight; well, almost everyone. The Punisher is still sitting drowsily in his chair, smoking Glock outstretched in his hand.

“It’s too early,” he groans. Marty was already up, somehow; he’s got the Crimson Dynamo suit half-on, clicking the arm panels into place.

I wipe the sleep out of my eyes, and marvel silently at how swiftly and smoothly, calmly and quietly, everyone is getting ready. There’s a knock at the door, and then Max comes in; he must’ve been up at six to get down here from where he’s staying in Yonkers, and he’s already brimming with juice, air crackling and popping around him like Rice Krispies.

Pulling on the suit feels awkward in front of people; I’m not used to putting it on under the gaze of prying eyes. I pull the ridiculous brown pants up, and then bring the tunic-piece of the shirt down, before I vacu-seal on the sleeves. Then it’s the over-all hooks of the pants up over my shoulder, forming the distinctive (so I’m told) Shocker-vest. I put on my gloves, and wiggled my fingers in the ruddy brown pseudo-leather. It feels good. Feels like a solid fit.

I raise the mask up to my face, but then Felicia stops me. She’s already in full Black Cat gear, with a bullet-proof vest strapped over that. She presses her face against mine, not kissing, but leaving our mouths less than an inch apart, just breathing.

“I love you, Herman,” she says, and then makes this weird little coughing sound that might be choking back tears.

“I —” I say to Felicia, but then Aleksei waves his massive arms, pointing to one of the televisions.

“Herman! Herman! Everybody look! It’s starting!”

It’s the news; some kind of emergency broadcast.

Excellent.

“We now go live to John Morris, on the scene on West 38th street. John?”

We cut down to West 38th. The camera is angled up so we can see both John the Reporter, and a group of three people who stand on a low rooftop, motionless, looking down on the street. A crowd is growing, but cops haven’t shown up yet.

“Yes,” John starts. “Up there on the roof, as you can see, are wanted meta-criminals Dr. Octopus, Princess Python and one more, unidentified man.”

The unidentified man is Jack Pulver, the Human Cannonball, of the Circus of Crime. I grouped everybody very carefully, and tried to stick to a pattern: one melee fighter, one projectile fighter, and a leader, someone C-or even B-list.

“What are they doing, John, can you see?” the reporter asks. John just shakes his head.

“We’ve got no idea what they’re doing, Sandra, but they’re popping up all over the city; super-villains, in groups of two or three, just standing there, doing nothing. We’ll have more on this story as it develops; I’ve just heard the Avengers and the Fantastic Four have both mobilized, and have asked Charles’ Xavier’s X-Men and the Thunderbolts for their assistance in …”

I grab the remote and click off the TV, turning to address my … shit, my team.

“All right people,” I say, and pull the Shocker mask down over my face. “Let’s go to work.”

The End

The taxi smells like red curry, spices and coconut milk.

I suppose it’s a little ridiculous, taking a Yellow Cab to the most important confrontation of my life. Aleksei is in the sewers, Felicia’s taking the subway, Adrian is flying, and Marty sits next to me, fidgeting under a spot-hologram of a little Japanese guy. The Punisher said he’d be there, and that’s good enough for me. Miss Peelo is taking her own car, a little VW Beetle, and Max is … shit, I don’t know, traveling through electrical currents.

The Chrysler Building stands huge on the horizon of a city gone mad. I keep hearing police sirens, seeing the red and blue flashing of patrol cars and the green and purple strobe of metahuman control units.

Good. This is going better than I could’ve hoped.

Then again, my capacity for hope is pretty easy to surpass these days, so I don’t know if that says too much.

I’m in full costume, mask down; if someone shoots a damn rocket through the window, I’m covered. Marty’s all Crimson Dynamo’d up under his hologram. He spent all night having Max supercharge him; Marty said the suit was “maxed out,” and then laughed. So Marty. The cab sagged under the suit’s weight when he got in, but the cabbie didn’t seem to notice. He’s near to hysterical as it stands, anyway.

“Whole damn town has gone bonkers! Super-villains are showing up all over the place and just, just standing there, tops of buildings, on the sidewalk, in their full costumes and everything, just … standing there. Whaddya make of that?”

I shift under my hologram of a petite Japanese woman, and speak into my vocoder.

“I don’t know. Is very strange.”

“They’re all going crazy due to that Shocker fellah, I bet. Him taking on the Avengers damn near started a riot in the underworld, ’s what I heard.”

“Schultz … eh, he not so great. I hear he masturbate to pictures of a horse.”

Thanks, Marty. The cabbie is silent, taking a moment to murmur something about “crazy fucking tourists.”

Marty turns, his little Japanese face grinning at me. I punch him and in the shoulder, he punches me back, and we go back and forth like that for a second before cracking up. It’s high-pitched, nervous laughter.

“I don’t wanna die, dude,” Marty says, rather plainly.

“Well …” I search my brain for words, but find none, realizing there is only one proper response. “You picked the wrong social circle, Mr. Blank.”

We both laugh, as we drive past Antonio, Carolyn Trainer and Pete standing out on the sidewalk, back-to-back-to-back, in full costume, fully armed, just standing there, staring straight ahead. The area around them has been heavily barricaded by police, SWAT teams, even a few low-level metas are there just kind of hanging out. The expression on the face of authority is universal: open, helpless bafflement.

We’re only two blocks away.

This first part of the plan is simple; I’m not smart enough to think of anything too complex. I had Miss Peelo put up switch-blocks in everyone’s brain last night, with their consent, of course. This means they can switch on and off their emotions; even a hothead like Flint is going to be able to stand there, doing nothing, staring straight ahead for hours on end.

Which is good, because that’s all I’m asking them to do. This complete disruption of New York is based around a kind of benign terrorism, a staring contest with the concept of order. Simply by standing there in the open, a triumvirate of super-villains can bring nearly five square blocks to a hushed, tense silence. Get enough of these trinities set up all over the boroughs, and things slow down and finally grind to a halt.

And the best part is, the reaction will only escalate. The longer Otto and Frank and the rest JUST STAND THERE, the bigger the authorities will think the blow-off will be.

They just said on the radio that the Avengers have split up and deployed to different sites all over the city. Some of the most powerful, hotheaded superheroes on Earth, all just waiting for the villains to make their first move, that ejaculatory climax of violence and bloodshed. The blow-off.

But that’s the best part. There is no blow-off, at least, not out here on the street. The blow-off is waiting on the highest levels of the Chrysler Building. The blow-off will decide more than any stupid street skirmish ever could.

And there it is …

Seeing it takes my breath away, if only because I know what, or rather, who, is inside it.

The Chrysler Building was a staple of my childhood; I always imagined turning it into a rocket ship, and somewhere out there are a hundred crayon drawings with HERMAN SCHULTZ, AGE 4 written on them, where this dream comes to fruition.

It makes sense he’d choose the second-biggest building in the city; my father never liked the spotlight of being number one. I’m amazed I hadn’t guessed it was him earlier, but I guess the mind is slow to make such esoteric connections. Still, standing in the background, playing with people like toys in a sandbox, manipulating the world to suit his view of the way things should be …

I should have known. I really should have.

It’s a clear, blue morning, and the Chrysler stands out like a sore thumb. The cab turns onto Lexington Avenue, and the cabbie pulls us over. I see Miss Peelo’s VW Bus park on the sidewalk further down the road, and she bustles out, pulling a bullet-proof vest down over her flower-pattern blouse. A few people glance at her, but most everyone is heading down the block to see what’s going on with the super-villains.

I throw a few hundreds at the cabbie, who looks back at both of us, baffled.

“Let’s get this over with,” I say, and flip off my hologram. The cabbie gasps. Marty flips off his, and kicks off the door of the cab, stepping out into the street. I get out after him, and we start calmly walking down Lexington, cool as Johnny Cash.

BOOM! Aleksei crashes up through the pavement behind us, crawls out and swiftly falls into line behind Marty and me. People are running and screaming now; they know that something’s up. High above us, Adrian starts tossing down smoke bombs; hundreds of them, the size of marbles, each of them spraying choke-free fog over hundred-foot radiuses for the next five hours. They rain down, bouncing like rubber balls.

One of them lands in Felicia’s cleavage as she drops down next to me, and she flicks it out. People are really getting crazy, shrieking and taking cover. Won’t be long until New York’s heroes stop buying the distraction and take action; they won’t dare leave the villains just standing there, but they can’t miss the big shindig going down at the Chrysler Building.

The Shocker suit feels like it’s glowing in the daylight.

Max is waiting for us out front, plain clothes, and we all just sort of stand there staring at each other as the smoke starts to build around us. Soon it will block out the sun between the buildings, and Lexington Street and the entirety of the Chrysler Building will be enshrouded in thick, smoky darkness.

Miss Peelo bustles up, and there, that’s everyone.

“Ready?”

Silent nods all around.

“Okay. Marty, signal two.”

Marty mumbles something into the speaker in his helmet, and, less than a second later, we can hear rumbling booms from all over the city. Harmless sight-and-sound concussive bursts, attached to every nearly every intersection. Cars swerve and crash, people duck and cover, and the streets are instantly and entirely clogged.

Add to this that the trifectas of super-villains that had been loitering around have now all mysteriously lain down on the ground in unison, and you’ve got a pretty mind-boggling situation on your hands.

And it’s about to get so much better.

“Max, signal three.”

Max appears to glow for a moment, and then drops down through the pavement, having converted to pure energy.

There’s a pause, and then all the electrical power in Manhattan, even battery-operated stuff like iPods, laptops and vibrators, dies. We hear all the elevators in all the buildings around us crank to a stop.

Max said he’d never tried absorbing this much before. Let’s hope he’s all right.

Cross your fingers.

We roll through the doors like the motherfucking Wild Bunch. People are running left and right, freaking out; we nearly get lost in the shuffle until someone screams, “It’s the Shocker!”

I’ll never get over how good that feels.

People part for us like the Red Sea, scattering in all directions; we’re like celebrities on the red carpet, except minus bodyguards, and plus an enormous man dressed as a rhinoceros.

There’s no security. That’s odd, but not shocking. Security draws attention. Attention is exactly what these people are trying to avoid. They’re working on minimal cash, even less courage. These are the same guys who hide behind multiple fronts, who creep around behind the faces of the lowest rent super-villain jerk-offs they could find.

My friends.

My friends were a fucking joke to them; a write-off. I still can’t get over that.

“I’ll just stay down here, if you don’t mind …” Miss Peelo says, plopping down in a plush chair. The lobby is huge, and rapidly emptying.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Felicia says it before I can.

“I’ll be fine.” She takes out a worn copy of Vanity Fair, and smiles. “See? I brought a book.”

“Haha!” Aleksei beams. “That’s funny, because we’re in such a dangerous situation it is funny that she’d be reading a book! Haha!”

We all stare at him for a moment.

“No thoughts get out. None. I want this place locked airtight.”

She smiles, and winks at me with that third eye. She’s got it.

Marty touches the button, and the elevator’s electrical systems spring to life, feeding off the juice from the Crimson Dynamo suit.

We get in the elevator; it’s a big, thirty-people-style outfit built for hauling tourists and white-collar wastes. This means it’s got enough pull to bring up Aleksei, which he doesn’t seem terribly happy about.

“I just don’t like elevators, Herman. They make me nauseous.”

I jus don’t like elvators, Hoiman. They make me nashus.

Aleksei complaining about the elevator strikes me kinda of funny, considering we’re most probably all going to die once we get up there.

The elevator starts to rise. Everyone’s silent. “Tempted By the Fruit of Another” plays softly.

“It’s kind of hard to keep that ‘let’s go kick some ass’ vibe in a elevator,” I say, and Punisher laughs. No one else does. We pass the fiftieth floor, and I feel Felicia’s hand slip into mine, and squeeze.

For the first time, I see myself from third person. I feel that tight, choked sensation, the world around us being so small. It’s funny, of course, because the idea of the world choking in on a single person is so ridiculous, so impossible. The world is so wide, and a person is so thin. Just a pile of chemicals, really.

And yet, here I am in this elevator. And the whole universe is wrapped around my throat.

The doors open on the seventieth floor, and we pile out. It’s a maintenance floor: empty, skeletal. An enormous, barren space around an elevator shaft, with those bizarre arch windows just starting on the sides. We can hear the electrical hum of large machines above us. Over in the corner, there’s an auxiliary lift; no walls, just an open platform.

We go to it in silence.

It’s got a pretty simple crank operating system; two turns and we’re lifted up into the actual spire; the top six floors of the building. It’s entirely hollowed out, with an enormous five-tiered scaffolding set-up that goes all the way to the ceiling. There are at least two hundred people in here; it’s ridiculous, after seeing the panic in the lobby, to enter this simple world of calm bureaucracy. They’re walking around, working at computers, talking hurriedly to each other …

And there, at a table less then thirty feet away, is my father.

He looks older, but not much. It’s added this weird dignity to his features, a thickness of character, or … And those green eyes, they’re paler now than before, but that just reveals more complex patterns, more intricacies. Same with the wrinkles in his face. He wears his General’s jacket over a loose fitting white T-Shirt, the centerpiece of which is a big yellow smiley-face.

He looks like … Well, like what I wish I was. He looks like a hero.

At the table are eight or so other general types, Haywerth and Slinkard presumably among them. Thaddeus Ross, the only one I stood a chance of recognizing, is conspicuously absent. They all look nervous, listening to my father speak.

“This is a distraction, can’t you see that? It isn’t a backfire from the programming, it isn’t some random act of insanity, it’s Herman! It’s Herman and his brain-dead wastoid friends trying to keep us off our toes, so … so …”

He stands there staring at us. He looks a very even mix of amused and annoyed; neither were the reactions I wanted.

“Herman.” He doesn’t actually say it, just mouths the word.

Punisher opens fire, and heads burst like balloons. He shoves past me, M-16 raised, gunning down the men at the table. Some of them stand, trying to raise guns, but within seconds their faces disappear into chunky red mist, blood splattering in every direction.

Looks like Punisher finally found the people he wanted to shoot.

My father, covered in the blood of his compatriots, rolls out of his chair and runs up the stairs into the scaffolding. He’s fast for a man his age, but he’s not Spider-Man fast. I’m on him by the time we reach the first level, covered in computers.

I grab his shoulder; he spins and I feel five thin strips tear up the center of my chest. Those fucking hooks! His hand passes over, and my mask is ripped in half up the side, blood beading out of thin slices in my face. He swipes one more time, going around me and across my back. The seals are broken, and I ain’t bullet-proof for shit, now.

He shoves me away, and runs across the level to the next set of stairs.

Why did I grab him? Why didn’t I just catch him with a level three in the back, goddamn it, I was close enough. Was I just that desperate? Did I really just want to touch my father, see if he was real after all these years? That he wasn’t just some kind of ghost fueled by my own twisted imagination …

I take off running, following him up two more flights of stairs; guys are running past me, screaming, and I hear Punisher gunning them down as soon as they hit the ground floor. Marty zips past me, blasting a technician as he raises a pistol at me.

“Herman, eyes up, you’re not bullet-proof any mo–”

An enormous computer terminal goes crashing down onto him, sending Marty spinning erratically out the side windows, out over the Manhattan sky-line.

My father winks down at me from the level above, and then ducks back into the stairwell. There’s more gunfire from below, now; they’re organizing, and trying to strike back at the Punisher.

Idiots.

I burst out onto the sixth level, gauntlets raised. It’s bigger than the others, and at the center …

Oh, God.

Johnny.

The device we saw earlier in White Rabbit’s house works just like we thought it would. Straight up his ass and into his spine, deep restraining bolts covered in electrical wiring implanted into his stark white flesh.

It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.

My father is talking frantically to some kid who can’t be over twenty-five, who’s hurriedly operating a machine that looks like a piano. My father pulls a weird visor over his head, and picks up some kind of weird video-game controller off the top of the piano.

I must be smart, because as my father jerks the joystick, I get it in time to duck.

Creel’s enormous wrecking ball swings just over my head, and I hear my father laugh hysterically.

He’s already had Creel absorb the steel of the platform; his skin reflects the fluorescents, and —

Ooh, here comes that damn ball again.

I duck behind a back of computers, and it smashes through them like they were made of Styrofoam. Felicia throws out a grappling hook that plinks off the side of Creel’s head, and his attention turns to her.

Rumblerumblerumble.

Aleksei, who must’ve climbed up the side of the scaffolding, smashes into Creel, sending him flipping out the side windows, out that nine-hundred-foot drop.

The big gray guy turns to me and gives me a thumbs-up. Looking at him, smiling there, I know: If there was one person I’d want by me for the end of the world, for all the shit I talk about him, it would be Aleksei.

And the wrecking ball whips up through the shattered windows, wraps around his throat and yanks him out.

My chest tightens so hard I feel like I’m gonna implode.

“Ale–” I start to scream, and then there are two gunshots, and Felicia crashes into my back, knocking us both over. I roll, and try to pick her up, but she’s dead-weight. Even her Kevlar couldn’t protect her from hollow-points. Her black costume bleeds out red.

My father stands there, holding his .45, smiling in an “Aw shucks” way.

Those shots were meant for me. Felicia saved my life.

Stupid … stupid … stupid … This is all happening too fast.

The Punisher appears in the stairwell, and my father turns and shoots him in the neck. He goes up and over the railing, out of sight. My father then turns and shoots the twentysomething kid in the chest, before turning and shooting the machine connected to Johnny Ohnn.

It sparks, and smoke floods out.

No.

Not smoke.

Darkforce.

I watch as it eats away at everything around it, expanding and expanding outward.

I grab up the kid; his badge reads “Hughes.” This is the same dumb fucking punk I heard in Aleksei’s memory.

He’s pale already from blood loss, coughing painfully. I slap the shit out of him.

“How do I stop it?” I scream in his face.

The Darkforce tear spreads out wider and wider, moving like dye in water, eating the level above us and casting us in darkness.

“Now he’s going to get away … use the teleporter and … Schultz shot me so I couldn’t …”

“What can stop it!?” I shriek at him, but he’s already dead.

I run to Johnny, pulling out the blue switchblade. I start hacking at the wires frantically; I’m freeing Johnny, but it’s not doing anything to stop the Darkforce. After I’ve severed a dozen wires, the thicker bolts and implants eject themselves; it must be some kind of fail-safe. I heave Johnny up and off the Anal-Spinal-Hell-Machine, the most stomach-churning thing I’ve ever done, and then we both collapse onto the floor.

Marty flies up and lands next me; he pops open the faceplate of the suit.

“Where is everyone!?” he screams over an immense structural groan from above us; the Darkforce is eating through the walls and the support structure.

“My father killed them. He killed everybody.”

“What!?” Marty yowls, eyes wide.

“You and me are the only ones left, Marty!” Marty’s monkey face looks horrified. I think he’s experiencing everything I’m blocking out. I turn to Johnny Ohnn. “Johnny, can you hear me?” I scream in his face.

“Yeah … yeah … hurts …”

“I need to know how to stop it, Johnny!”

There’s a rumble, an unbelievably loud ripping sound, and then the Chrysler Building’s spire, no longer connected to the building, drops off, falling past us outside the shattered windows, massive in the daylight.

“Need a … burst of energy …” Johnny moans.

“What?” I’m still a little dazed from watching the two people closest to me die; sorry.

“It’s just going to keep … expanding … It’ll absorb … everything.”

“You said a burst of energy, what did you mean? What did you —”

“The tear is already … too big … you’d need … massive … a bomb … you don’t happen … to have a nuke … do you …?”

My brain starts shaking.

I have a choice, here.

I have a choice.

I can go after my father, back down into the scaffolding, and teleport out after him. There’s nothing left for me here. Marty can fly out, and I can … I can leave New York with this issue. The Avengers or the Fantastic Four or someone will sort this out. What do I owe these fuckers anyway? What do I owe anyone? What have they ever done to deserve my help but hurt me, and mock me, and treat me like garbage?

The Darkforce gushes out, umbrella-ing out over the sides of the building. It’s going to pour down onto the street like a waterfall, eating everything.

This is what he is.

This is my father.

No.

No.

No.

“Marty,” I say, dead calm, grabbing my friend by the shoulder. “I know how we can fix this.”

“What? How?”

“You have to die.”

Marty stares at me, and I stare back, blank-faced. The plan only just now vibrated into place, and I still don’t have any kind of emotional reaction to it.

“What? Why!?”

“You’ve got four thousand megawatts in that suit, right?” Marty’s eyes say yes. “That’s twice as much as a goddamn nuclear power plant puts out, Marty. If you fly up into the rip, and you empty your batteries, there’s a damn good chance it’ll close this thing!”

“But … but, Herman, what if it doesn’t? I mean, you’re —”

“If it doesn’t it doesn’t, goddamn it, but if we don’t do anything, that leaves us with a massive dimension-ripping cloud of energy eating New York! Everyone we know, Marty! Everyone we know!”

Silence. Marty stares at me.

Above us, the cloud is mushrooming outward, rushing down over the side of the building.

“Who are we, Marty?” I say, not really knowing why. Marty looks around, and smiles a strange, gentle smile.

“We’re heroes, Herman.” He clicks down the faceplate of his armor, and says in that robotic voice: “Shit, I didn’t have any plans for this week anyway.”

Marty rockets off, up, up, into the cloud. I watch him go. I drop to my knees next to Johnny; he smiles at me, and I smile back.

And then something genuinely unexpected happens.

It feels like I got punched in the back, POW, and then I feel the bullet come out the front of my chest, BLAM.

I try to stand up, but my legs give out for a second, and I tip forward.

I turn and see him, standing there, the .45 in his hand, less than three feet away.

He shot me in the back.

My own father shot me in the back.

I pull myself to my feet, drawing out the snub-nose from where it sits in my boot. He doesn’t even flinch. We stand there, guns to each other’s faces, father and son.

“Dad,” I say, like a little fucking kid. “Why?”

“Herman … I’m sorry. I never expected you turn to turn into something like …” He waves around the tip of the pistol at my shredded suit, the bleeding bullet hole in my chest. “Something like this. I never wanted you to turn into such a disaster.”

“You did!” I scream at him, a little kid again. I’m crying, like an idiot, hot tears streaming down my face, the salt in them burning the open cuts on my face. I shake the snub-nose at him like a cave-man waving his club. “You did you did you did! You trained me! You wanted me to become —”

“I wanted you to become a super-villain,” my father says, clicking back the hammer on his .45. He’s getting tired of the talk; part of me knows that’s a bad thing, but it’s not screaming as loud as the part that just wants to know why. “You were meant to be a low-profile metacriminal who I could fall back on if Control ever went belly-up, intestines-out. You were supposed to be my fucking safety net, and now look, look at what you’ve done!”

My father actually takes the gun entirely off me, spinning in a circle in reference to the destroyed top levels of the Chrysler Building, the Darkforce energy rippling around and above us against the clear blue sky. “Look at you! Look at yourself!” he screams. “Your pretty yellow costume all torn to shreds, your stupid little inventions lying around you broken like the children’s toys they are, your friends dead at your hands, the entire planet, once you’ve shown what you know, primed for a metahuman civil war that could very well spread off-world … You’ve destroyed the universe! You’ve lit the goddamn fuse!”

“No!” I shriek at him, thumbing back the hammer on the revolver. “That’s not true!”

“Are you joking, Herman? Have you not been paying attention? Without Control, who’s going to keep superheroes safe and sanitary for public consumption? Who’ll be there to fund the clean-ups, hide away the corpses and tone down the body count? No one! Within months this planet will dissolve itself, metahumans will eat our world up like a flesh eating disease! You’ve murdered us all, idiot!”

Grandiose, sure. Melodramatic, certainly. But it strikes a chord in me, and for what seems like the thousandth time, I act without thinking.

I lurch forward, knocking his gun aside with my own, and tackle him out over the edge of the building, tumbling down into the Darkforce swirl.

And, very suddenly, we’re not on Earth anymore; we’re falling through a cold, infinite, horrifically empty darkness. There’s a shattering BANG, and I feel a bullet tear my skin as it scrapes along less than an inch to the left of my left eye.

My father didn’t let go of the .45.

My blood sprays out into the nothing, but glows against the darkness; our whole bodies glow, the only source of light in a duodecillion miles.

There’s an impossibly bright flash, and suddenly the Darkforce recedes around us, revealing the world, the air, the city, the —

WHAM!

We both hit the lowest outer tier of the spire. Three feet to the left and we would’ve gone the full nine hundred.

My left arm breaks violently, stopping my head from taking the brunt of the impact. I lift it up in front of my face, dazed; it bends at a sharp right angle a few inches after the elbow, flopping limply like a door on one hinge. My father slowly pulls himself up to his feet. He’s unharmed, and he’s smiling a weird, muted smile.

He raises the gun at my head and then stops, staring at me. The smile slowly fades. He’s got ammo in there, he’s just … Hesitating.

Hesitating.

And I realize, he can’t do it. Not like this. Not face to face.

His mistake.

I swing up the gun and shoot him straight in the heart.

“Herman …” he starts.

I cut him off with another shot, this one just under the left eye. His brains splatter out onto the ground behind him. He drops onto his knees, still staring at me.

Adrian Schultz, my father, drops forward onto his face, dead.

There’s a weird gargling noise when I breathe, and it’s getting harder and harder to take in new air. That shot in the back must’ve hit a lung.

That’s okay, though.

I did it.

It’s just like when I beat Spider-Man, but better. No guilt. No tension. No nothing. Just muted, inescapable calm.

Air is coming slower and slower now. The Darkforce ripple is shrinking, shrinking. The energy surge from Marty’s suit must’ve worked. Good.

That’s good.

Marty’s gone, now.

Gone like Aleksei.

Gone like Felicia.

It’s weird, how it fades around the edges of your vision. How darkness sort of encroaches, your eyes still open.

We’re free now, all of us.

I’m free.

And I can finally …

just …

relax …

Epilogue

I slip my board-shorts on, hop down off the porch and smile,

My name is Herman Schultz, and I am one of smartest men on Earth.

I hold thirty-three patents. I have financial and material backing from over ten separate governments. Only ten people know where I am in the world, and three of them only know because they’re here pretty regularly.

I was the Shocker, and recently numbers have stopped meaning anything to me; I just turned 36. I’ve done, in my entire life, only one truly important thing. But it was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty fucking important. And you know how many people know that I did it? In the neighborhood of fifty. And that’s okay. Over the years, that number will dwindle down and down until there’s nobody left, and you know what … that’s okay, too.

I know what I did. Reed Richards knows what I did. My father sure as hell knows what I did.

That’s all I need; the effects of the Shocker’s one good deed (albeit a protracted one) will have their silent, earthshaking effects on our world.

I have had ribs broken fifteen times. My left arm has been broken twice, and my right arm has been broken once. I have broken both legs multiple times, and my left eye is permanently damaged.

If you look at it, you can see the six little lightning bolt scars across the cornea.

Today is an important day for me. Today is the end of the first week on the beach.

I’m in a fairly steady relationship; I have a couple of close friends, but I only see one of them often.

Everybody used to call him the Rhino, but his name is Aleksei.

I can see him from where I stand right now. See, once I had some time to put my mind to it, I figured out a pretty quick vibro-chemical solution to getting that horrible gray suit off him.

He’s standing in the Caribbean surf, grinning at me, feeling the water and the sun on his skin for the first time in fifteen years.

My father used Creel to pull Aleksei out the window, but then disconnected to try to shoot me. His mistake. See, like I already said, Creel is a hell of a good guy. He used the wrecking ball as a safety line, and pulled Aleksei to safety. Then, as the building came down around them, they made their way to street level.

Felicia and I … That’s a hard pill to swallow. Apparently Mephisto or someone offered to save her life if she gave over her soul, and Felicia, impulsive goofus that she is, agreed.

So now she’s off doing demon stuff, somewhere. I got a letter from her. She said she’d visit, and I trust her. No sign of her yet, but I trust her. What we have is real, not that storybook bullshit. She’ll come around.

I wish I could say “AND MARTY IS A-OKAY TOO!” I love those endings, the big fake-outs where everyone gets iced and then suddenly, NOPE, THEY ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER-AFTER.

Granted, this isn’t quite that; Felicia did die, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. Aleksei, well, that just made sense, and I hadn’t properly thought the situation through.

Johnny’s up the beach in a different house; finally walking around again, looking handsome as a motherfucker. I never realized how much he and I had in common. You know, he tried to be a hero once, too?

It was only one night, and it’s not like he beat Bullseye or beat Spider-Man or Venom or fucked the Black Cat or uncovered a massive global conspiracy or …

You get the picture.

Johnny’s here, Aleksei’s here, Felicia’s around, maybe, so …

So you’d figure, “Marty’s probably about to pop out on this idyllic beach, too!”

But he’s not. He’s dead.

Martin Blank died saving my life, New York, and probably also the world.

But still, knowing the dumb-ass mixed-up universe we live in, he probably just bonded with the Darkforce dimension, and now he’ll end up being some kind of super-powerful all-being, like those fuckers who wanted to see whether or not I’d kill Spider-Man.

At least, that’s what I’d like to think.

When Reed first put forward the idea of a “pocket dimension,” I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Sure, it’s an idyllic island, from which I can instantly access New York, L.A., Atlantis, the Shi’Ar homeworld, and anywhere else my work might take me, but still, it seemed so distant.

Then Captain America reminded me that news travels sloooow in the world of super-villains. That bounty on my head is still going to be very real to a lot of people, years after those who would’ve paid it are long dead and buried, or, in my father’s case, dead and incinerated by the state.

They never found Punisher’s body.

I only got two letters while I was in the hospital. One was from him.

It read:

“Herman,

Bet those fuckers are sorry now, right? It was fun. I like you.

– Frank.”

The other letter was from Peter. He’s up and swinging again. He said he wanted to visit me. That he and I needed to have a talk. I actually agree; I don’t feel that burn anymore, that hatred. That rage. All I have now is curiosity. I want to know what made him what he is; I’m sick of guessing. I want to know him.

Killing my father was the single most gratifying thing I’ve ever done. If that makes me a sick man, then get me a doctor. On second thought, don’t. Get me a fuckin’ bottle of sunblock. I forgot one last time I was at the store.

Miss Peelo’s supposed to come down sometime next month, hopefully with a one-piece rather than a bikini. She told me her work with me and the gang got her excited about life again. She got hired by SHIELD to be one of their trackers, hunting down superhuman sexual predators and all that.

The word on the street is that Bullseye, Omega Red and Dragonfly have all vowed revenge, but Miss Peelo read their minds, and she says they’re scared of me. She knitted me this really cool yellow-and-brown sweater, and …

You know, I kind of like not being out there in the field, fighting for my meals.

Because I look at this sweater, and I think: Fun stuff.

So now, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna take a break. I’m gonna go let my toes sink into the wet sand. I’m gonna let my vibrations get in tune, and let the world mellow around me.

And then, later, we’re gonna hit San Francisco and try to get Aleksei laid.

A little change can shake the universe. One stray vibration can spread to reveal a network of deep cracks, of corruption and evil, to expose the world for something other than whatever you thought it might be.

And sometimes, that’s a good thing.

…

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I smell hellfire and brimstone, vanilla and cinnamon.

END

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Hello, My Name Is Herman

Chapter 2: Ravaged

Chapter 3: Prelude To: Devolution

Chapter 4: Devolution, Part One

Chapter 5: Devolution, Part Two

Chapter 6: Devolution, Part Three

Chapter 7: Devolution, Part Four

Chapter 8: Devolution, Part Five

Chapter 9: Devolution, Part Six

Chapter 10: Devolution, Part Seven

Chapter 11: Devolution, Part Eight

Chapter 12: Devolution Finale

Chapter 13: Prelude To: Avatars

Chapter 14: Avatars, Part One

Chapter 15: Avatars, Part Two

Chapter 16: Avatars, Part Three

Chapter 17: Avatars, Part Fantastic Four

Chapter 18: Avatars, Part Five

Chapter 19: Avatars, Part Six

Chapter 20: Avatars, Part Seven

Chapter 21: Avatars Finale

Chapter 22: Paranoid

Chapter 23: Prelude To: Everything Is Lies

Chapter 24: Everything Is Lies, Part One

Chapter 25: Everything Is Lies, Part Two

Chapter 26: Everything Is Lies, Part Three

Chapter 27: Everything Is Lies, Part Four

Chapter 28: Everything Is Lies, Part 5: the Siege

Chapter 29: Everything Is Lies, Part 6: the Siege 2

Chapter 30: Everything Is Lies, Part Seven

Chapter 31: Everything Is Lies, Part Eight

Chapter 32: Everything Is Lies, Finale

Chapter 33: Naked

Chapter 34: Avenged

Chapter 35: United We Skulk

Chapter 36: Bonus Round

Chapter 37: The End

Chapter 38: Epilogue